WASHINGTON — President Trump on Thursday signed a proclamation that he said will prevent future changes to the Oval Office and Cabinet Room as he has redesigned them.
“We’re making it a national monument and it will not be allowed to be touched by anybody,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
Trump’s proclamation signing comes two days after voters, dissatisfied with his economic policies, threw dozens of Republicans out of office, delivering control of Congress to Democrats.
It’s also the third day this week in which the president, a real estate mogul, delivered remarks fixated on his pet projects in Washington, D.C., including an opulent ballroom and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has overseen numerous design changes to various rooms, including the Oval Office, where he has filled the wall space with portraits, a copy of the Declaration of Independence and numerous golden accents.
Richard Barrera will be the next state superintendent of public instruction, with opponent Sonja Shaw conceding the race on Wednesday.
Barrera, the school board president of San Diego Unified, was ahead by double digits in ongoing tallies and already had declared victory. He was the heavy favorite as the Democrat in the race, even though the office is listed as nonpartisan.
Barrera, 59, described his campaign message as “a positive vision for our public schools. We’ve got so many examples of great work happening in our public schools that deserve to be elevated.”
He also campaigned on increasing school funding and “a message that our public schools need to be healthy, safe communities for all of our students. I think that was a clear contrast to a message that our public schools are failing.”
Barrera benefited from more than $9 million in independent campaign spending in support of his election by the California Teachers Assn., or CTA, which he said was instrumental in helping him get his message out.
In a social media post conceding the race Wednesday night, Shaw said she ran “because I believe California’s children deserve better.”
“The problem is that for decades, the same people have had their hands on our education system, while our children have continued to fall behind,” she said in the post. “I believed we had an opportunity to change that. I still believe in the movement we created. They want us to give up, we are not going to!”
The superintendent’s office has an uncertain future. In June, the Legislature signed off on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to reshape the position, transferring oversight of schools and management of the state Education Department to an appointee of the governor. By nearly all accounts, the state superintendent’s power has been dramatically reduced. Many of the new duties of the elected office have yet to be worked out.
Barrera hopes to move quickly as an education advocate, laying out specific budget proposals and policy priorities in setting an agenda for Gov.-elect Xavier Becerra to respond to.
Although Barrera prevailed by a comfortable margin, Shaw outperformed other statewide Republican candidates in Tuesday’s blue wave election for Democrats.
A centerpiece of Shaw’s campaign was her opposition to allowing transgender athletes to compete in girls’ and women’s sports — a position that had strong support in recent polling.
Barrera supports California law on this matter, which allows transgender participation. He has noted that the number of transgender athletes is exceedingly small.
Shaw, 44, broadly characterized the public education system as failing because of liberal Democratic policies, although she praised the quality of the public schools where she lives, Chino, which is in San Bernardino County.
On the November ballot, Barrera supported tax measures that benefit education. He also has consistently opposed Trump administration policies. He has sought to offer support for families affected by immigration enforcement as a senior official in the state’s second-largest school system.
Shaw’s views correspond closely with those of the Trump administration’s Education Department, although during the campaign, she repeatedly separated her policy positions from those of Trump, asserting, for example, in a campaign forum, that she “never even met with the dude.”
As a school board president, Shaw led efforts to ban unsanctioned flags on campuses and in classrooms. Some conservative activists have promulgated such bans with the aim of targeting gay pride flags. Shaw’s board majority also approved mandatory parent notification of their child’s gender-identity expression at school and a policy that allowed parents to challenge school library books with content they deemed sexually explicit. The parent notification policy is tied up in litigation, and advocates have filed a challenge to the library book policy with the state Education Department.
CTA’s campaigning for Barrera was embedded in the union’s hard push for Proposition 3, an initiative that would establish as permanent the current higher tax rates on state residents with the highest taxable income — about the top 2%.
Shaw opposed Proposition 3, which was well ahead Thursday morning.
Leading up to this race, CTA had backed the last eight winners for the state schools office, going back 32 years.
With a crowded field of Democrats in the June primary, Shaw had an opening as a Republican and finished first with 22.6% of the vote, compared with Barrera’s 20.3%.
Analysts, however, expected Barrera to consolidate the votes of Democrats and predicted that the support of CTA, and other unions to a lesser extent, would make a difference for him.
Leaving the office is two-term incumbent Tony Thurmond, who was barred by term limits from serving again and ran unsuccessfully for governor.
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For more than a year, Marissa Roy has vowed to turn the Los Angeles city attorney’s office into a massive “public interest law firm.”
Now, she has a sweeping mandate to put that plan into action.
As of Wednesday morning, Roy had nearly double the vote tally of her opponent, L.A. County Deputy Dist. Atty. John McKinney, all but assuring the 34-year-old progressive will walk into City Hall in one of her jewel-toned blazers next year as Los Angeles’ chief lawyer. While the contest has not officially been called, McKinney effectively conceded the race in an interview with The Times on Wednesday.
For decades, the L.A. city attorney’s office has focused almost exclusively on prosecuting minor crimes and defending the city from increasingly expensive litigation. In an interview in May, outgoing City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto scowled when a reporter mentioned Roy’s campaign line about running the office as a “public interest law firm.”
But in Roy, an enthusiastic and tenacious California deputy attorney general, the city will have a proactive top litigator who’s ready to play offense. Roy has promised to take her experience from a years-long legal battle with Meta to aggressively pursue litigation against corporations and landlords for alleged misconduct that harms the average Angeleno.
Long before she announced her candidacy, Roy had begun courting public servants inside the sprawling city attorney’s office to ensure her plan passed muster.
What began as a series of informal coffees at Pitchoun! Bakery downtown quickly evolved into a network of trusted advisors, who helped shape her campaign promises and fine-tune policy proposals so they could be executed on Day One.
“There’s not a single word on my website that they haven’t reviewed first to make sure that we can implement it,” Roy said in an October interview. “It’s why sometimes I won’t take a hard line on something, because I talk to the deputies involved and they say they need discretion.”
Despite attack ads saying otherwise, Roy hasn’t vowed to block prosecution of certain misdemeanor crimes — even though she prefers diversion programs as a way to aid homeless defendants.
She’s been more direct about her plans to protect the city’s immigrant communities from potential future raids and aggressively fight the Trump administration in court when it targets Los Angeles. Given her affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America, Roy’s stances on litigation involving the Los Angeles Police Department could also depart from her predecessors’.
The union representing rank-and-file LAPD officers spent millions against Roy. Feldstein Soto also steadfastly defended the LAPD’s widely criticized uses of force on protesters and journalists during immigration raids last year.
Roy also benefits from a deep bench of elected allies across the state, including her current boss, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, and fellow progressive city attorneys in San Diego, San Francisco and Oakland. Many local supporters showed up to toast her presumptive win Tuesday night, already riding high on the blue wave that crashed across the U.S. when the first Los Angeles returns dropped around 8:20 p.m.
The event at Audio Graph Brewery in downtown L.A. had all the energy of a wedding reception, with DSA acolytes munching cookies emblazoned with Roy’s face in icing and union organizers bopping up and down to the viral Slayyyter track “Dance…” as results rolled in.
Roy is an evangelist for affirmative litigation, proactive suits of the type that forced President Trump to cede control of the California National Guard late last year after he deployed thousands of soldiers to quell protests and aid immigration enforcement across the state.
“We need someone who knows how to sue the Trump administration, who also has the relationships and can pick up the phone and call the San Francisco and San Diego city attorney,” Roy said. “We’re all part of this very tiny niche of municipalities suing the federal government. We all became experts [in those methods] together.”
Despite at times amplifying inaccurate claims that McKinney was a conservative, Roy and her opponent shared some policy planks. Both were highly critical of ballooning legal costs under Feldstein Soto, as well as her penchant for hiring outside law firms to fight the city’s battles. Both also said they wanted to revive internal programs the outgoing city attorney had scuttled, such as neighborhood prosecutors and specialized units for handing child abuse and domestic violence.
“This election is gonna go her way, and I’m just really truly grateful for the opportunity to be part of this over the last nine months,” McKinney said Wednesday morning. “I met a remarkable group of people. I learned a lot about the city, the City Attorney’s office, about city politics and I’m a better person for it. I congratulate Marissa on her victory, I wish her well.”
McKinney said he hopes Roy can “uplift that office to be the finest municipal law office in the country,” but also suggested she spend her energy on more than legal combat with business leaders or the White House.
“She’s gonna have to broaden her focus to issues related to public safety, homelessness. Obviously, we both agree that city liabilities need aggressive proactive risk management,” he said.
Meanwhile, Roy could scarcely contain her excitement as she laid out her plan to supporters chanting her name.
“I’m much more comfortable when people chant things like ‘Let’s sue it’, because that’s the work that we’re going to do,” she said.
Xavier Becerra, who grew up in a 685-square-foot house with his parents and three sisters in working-class Sacramento before ascending to Stanford University, Congress and the White House Cabinet, will become California’s first directly elected Latino governor.
The historic victory thrusts the unassuming Democrat into the forefront of California’s scathing fight with the Trump administration over immigration enforcement, healthcare funding, environmental protections and social issues.
“I didn’t run to make history,” Becerra told supporters at his election night party in West Sacramento. “I ran to make a difference for anyone and everyone who calls California home — whether you voted for me or not.”
He paid tribute to his parents and late labor icon Dolores Huerta before stating his “straightforward” mission: “Deliver a California we can afford and defend a California we can’t afford to lose.”
The Associated Press declared Becerra the winner at 8 p.m. Tuesday. He beat Republican Steve Hilton, a conservative commentator and former British political strategist backed by President Trump. Hilton conceded defeat a little before 9:15 p.m.
“We have a new governor of California,” he told about 800 supporters at his election night party in Garden Grove. “I know it’s not the one you wished for but I do wish Xavier Becerra well.”
Though the mood at his event was mostly one of defeat, Hilton stirred the crowd with a promise to help Republicans break the Democratic supermajority in the state Legislature in 2028.
“We love California and we’re going to fight for California,” he said. “The fight goes on. We have a plan.”
Becerra, 68, will take the helm with a slate of potential economic opportunity: luring back Hollywood production, drawing international visitors to the 2028 Olympic Games and responsibly growing the artificial intelligence industry.
But there are also a long list of challenges: grappling with worst-in-the-nation unemployment, solving the housing crisis, and preparing for and responding to seemingly endless natural disasters.
Becerra spent more than 25 years in Congress before he was appointed California attorney general and, later, secretary of Health and Human Services in the Biden administration. His long resume, as he often argued during the campaign, positions him to enter the governor’s office without “training wheels.”
“It’s groundbreaking,” Anna Sampaio, a professor of ethnic studies and political science at Santa Clara University, said of Becerra’s win. “It’s particularly important in this moment when Latinos are under siege, when they’re targeted by the federal government, and you have a Latino not only being elected, but a Latino who is consistently delivering this message that he is going to stand in opposition to a Trump agenda.”
Despite his long-standing presence in California politics, the modest Becerra initially struggled to energize support for his gubernatorial campaign. When explosive sexual assault allegations pushed a front-running Democrat out of the race, Becerra, a staid and experienced candidate with a clean reputation, leaped to the top of the crowded field and finished first in the top-two June primary.
The state has had one Latino governor, Romualdo Pacheco, who assumed office in 1875 when Gov. Newton Booth stepped down after winning a U.S. Senate seat.
Becoming the first Latino directly elected to California’s highest office is a distinction Becerra was reluctant to promote on the campaign trail, preferring instead to focus on his humble roots. His father, born in Sacramento and raised in Mexico, labored on farms and construction sites; his Mexico-born mother was a clerical worker.
The largest ethnic group in California, Latinos make up more than 40% of the state’s population and roughly a third of its voters.
Though noteworthy, polling suggests Latino voters care more about results than his history-making win.
“We’re moving from an era that has defined Xavier Becerra’s career as focused almost entirely on representation to one where the voters are demanding results far more,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who studies Latino voters. “When the housing situation for Latinos is getting worse, when affordability is getting worse, when school performance measures are not getting better, what difference does it make who’s holding office when we should be focused on results?”
Though he offered few specifics, Becerra discussed his priorities throughout the campaign. He plans to declare a housing emergency and speed up construction.
He will take Gov. Gavin Newsom’s baton on the thorny question of who should pay when megafires burn. And he wants to ensure there are no disruptions to Medi-Cal coverage, even for undocumented workers — a herculean task with as much as $30 billion in federal cuts looming.
“Hopefully he uses an overwhelming victory to achieve what he wants to get done in 100 days,” said Steven Maviglio, who served as a spokesman for former Gov. Gray Davis. “That’s when you’re most powerful: when you assume office with an agenda, so hopefully he’ll detail that within days of being elected.”
Becerra’s victory ushers in a new era of Latino political power in California. For the first time, all members of the “big three” who negotiate the state’s behemoth budget — the governor, Assembly speaker and state Senate president — come from working-class, immigrant backgrounds.
“When you’ve watched your parents and grandparents struggle to make ends meet, you bring a different perspective,” said Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister). “If we do this right, history won’t remember us simply because we were the first. History is going to remember us because we made a difference. We want California to work for everybody.”
Times staff writer Andrew Campa contributed to this report.
The Dodgers are adding former Padres chief operating officer Caroline Perry to their leadership team, the organization announced Monday afternoon.
Effective Nov. 30, Perry will serve as executive vice president and COO, filling a position vacated by retiring longtime Dodgers executive Bob Wolfe, who is transitioning to an advisory role.
In addition, the Dodgers announced they promoted Royce Cohen to EVP and chief business officer, after he most recently served as Senior VP of Business Strategy. Cohen has worked for the Dodgers since 2014 and was a key figure in the formation of the Professional Women’s Hockey League, another one of Dodgers owner Mark Walter’s sports business endeavors.
“Caroline comes to the Dodgers with an exceptional record of service in baseball, and Royce has repeatedly proven his ability to be a step ahead in the sports business world,” Dodgers president and CEO Stan Kasten said in a statement. “They both offer a level of knowledge and expertise that is truly enviable.”
Perry spent 16 seasons with the Padres, working her way up from associate general counsel. She became the highest-ranking female employee in Padres history when she was promoted to COO in 2023. She is also one of just three female COOs in Major League Baseball.
“It is a tremendous honor to join the Dodgers,” Perry said in a statement. “On the field, they have set an unparalleled standard of excellence in baseball under the current leadership. Off the field, their historic legacy, passionate fan base and service to the community speak for themselves. While I am incredibly grateful for my time with the Padres and for the colleagues who made those years so meaningful, I am excited to take my place with the Dodgers and to contribute to their continued success.”
WASHINGTON — Sen. Chris Murphy is in the hospital after having a stroke, according to the Connecticut Democrat’s office.
In a statement Sunday, Murphy’s chief of staff, Allison Herwitt, said the senator “started experiencing numbness in his arm while at his son’s hockey game” on Saturday.
“He was taken to a local hospital, where it was discovered he had experienced a stroke,” she said. “He was transferred to Johns Hopkins for further monitoring and is responding well to treatment. The doctors are encouraged by his progress, he is awake and alert, and we are optimistic he will make a full recovery.”
The 53-year-old Murphy was elected to the House in 2006 and the Senate in 2012. He is not on the ballot Tuesday.
In the Senate, he serves on the Appropriations Committee and is a leading voice on immigration and restrictions on guns. He’s considered a contender for more senior leadership positions in the Senate and is also a potential 2028 presidential candidate.
Three other Senate Democrats have had strokes in recent years.
Sens. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland had strokes in 2022 and have since recovered. Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman had a stroke while campaigning for his seat that year and now uses adaptive technology in the Senate, including live captioning on a phone or tablet that transcribes words as people speak to him and helps him process the conversation.
Fetterman said on social media Sunday that his family “is rooting for Chris and his family for a full and speedy recovery.”
Several Republican senators, including Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, also offered prayers for Murphy.
Sloan writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.
Two experienced leaders of the largest law enforcement agency in the country face off, four years after their first showdown, to once again helm the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
Here’s what you need to know about:
The candidates
Incumbent Robert Luna is a former Long Beach police chief who came out of retirement to run for sheriff in 2021 and unseated Alex Villanueva in the November 2022 election. Luna has presided over declines in homicides and violent crime as well as establishing a period of relative calm after Villanueva’s tenure, which was marked by controversy and scandal. Luna’s office, however, has come under scrutiny, including when a grenade accidentally exploded in a department parking lot, killing three deputies.
Villanueva switched his party registration from Democrat to Republican in the first two years of his leadership and was a regular on Fox News vilifying “woke” culture and criticizing Democrats. Villanueva launched, then walked back, a criminal-leak investigation of a Los Angeles Times reporter, and he was ordered to testify after sheriff’s deputies took and shared pictures at the site of Kobe Bryant’s helicopter crash.
State of the race
In the primary election, Luna received 44.2% of the vote versus Villanueva’s 21.7%. Luna also has raised more money for his campaign. From Jan. 1 to Sept. 19, he had raised more than $1.3 million; Villanueva had raised a little more than $320,000.
Former Sheriff Alex Villanueva speaks to constituents Sept. 12 at a campaign stop at the Burbank Assn. of Realtors.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Issues
Staffing and retention
Under Luna, the number of new deputies who graduated from the sheriff’s academy rose by nearly a third from 2024 to 2025, with more than 400 graduates last year, the department said. Recent data also show that retention rates have risen under Luna after a steep decline toward the end of Villanueva’s tenure.
Villanueva claims that he keeps up with the department he once ran, and that deputies frequently complain to him about understaffing and low morale.
Crime trends
Under Luna, violent crime has fallen every year since he took office. Between 2023, his first full year in office, and 2025, homicides fell by more than 25%. Data show that property crimes were broadly down from 2022.
Villanueva again maintains that deputies he has stayed in touch with feel that crime has run rampant since he left office.
2028 Olympics
Villanueva argues that Luna is ill-prepared to handle the next four years, including assisting with the Olympics.
Luna refuted the claim by pointing to the role his department played in the multi-agency law enforcement effort to maintain public safety during the World Cup this year.
Proposition 40 would impose a one-time 5% tax on California billionaires’ assets. The tax applies to people with a net worth of at least $1 billion who resided in California on Jan. 1.
Impact
Ninety percent of the tax would fund healthcare, and 10% would go toward education and food assistance.
The tax would affect hundreds of billionaires whose net worth includes assets such as their businesses, stocks and other investments. Real property, pensions and retirement accounts generally would be excluded.
Proposition 41
It’s called the Improving Transparency, Effectiveness and Efficiency in California Government Act. But it is deeply connected to Proposition 40 and is funded by foes of the billionaire tax.
The basics
Proposition 41 requires the state auditor to review programs funded by proposed special taxes before they appear on the ballot. More importantly, it also prohibits new state taxes from being exempted from a voter-approved state spending limit.
Impact
The Legislative Analyst’s Office says passage of Proposition 41 could prevent Proposition 40, the proposed billionaire tax, from becoming law even if voters approve it. This could happen if Proposition 41 receives more “yes” votes than Proposition 40.
Proposition 42
Proposition 42 would limit the state’s ability to impose certain new taxes. But it’s more complicated and far-reaching than that description might sound. And, yes, it’s also backed by opponents of Proposition 40.
The basics
Proposition 42 would prohibit new taxes on “retirement holdings, individually owned assets, and other forms of personal savings” that take effect after Jan. 1, 2026. It also would bar retroactive taxes on past earnings unless the state is using revenue from the tax to respond to emergencies such as a fire or a flood.
Impact
The Legislative Analyst’s Office says Proposition 42 could nullify Proposition 40 because the two measures conflict with each other. If voters approve both, the one with the most “yes” votes generally would become law, the office says.
Dig deeper
The billionaire tax was pushed by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West and has some labor and progressive support, including from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and the state Democratic Party. They say the tax is needed to help the less fortunate and that the super-rich can afford it. But key Democrats and some key unions are not supporting it.
Critics include some of California’s richest people, and they are spending a fortune to defeat it. They say it will hurt innovation and drive the wealthy out of the state, hurting the treasury.
Voters decide four runoff contests for Superior Court seats on Nov. 3, choosing who will preside over criminal and civil cases across the region.
Seat 131
The candidates
Donna Tryfman, a deputy public defender, serves in the major cases unit, where she handles homicide and other high-profile defendants. She also has extensive experience in juvenile cases.
David Ross is an alternate in the Torrance branch of the public defender’s office and also works in Bellflower and Long Beach. He claims to have represented more than 10,000 clients at hearings and in trials.
Dive deeper
The Los Angeles County Bar Assn. rates both attorneys as “qualified” for office. Ross said his mix of legal and life experience and his time as a journalist, when he “listened to real people, gathered the facts and told objective stories,” provide a unique perspective. Tryfman has served as a Superior Court judge pro tem, handling traffic and small claims cases. She has proctored teen courts at Dorsey and Hamilton high schools.
Seat 64
The candidates
Maria Ghobadi is an L.A. County deputy district attorney. As a child, Ghobadi fled Iran with her family during the Islamic Revolution and settled in Southern California. She joined the L.A. County district attorney’s office in 2015 and has handled misdemeanors, felonies and domestic violence cases. She’s spent seven years in the gang homicide division.
Rhonda Haymon is an L.A. County deputy public defender. She grew up in Southern California and became an attorney in 2001. She started in the Orange County public defender’s office before moving to L.A. County, where she’s spent 23 years as a deputy public defender. She has been assigned to a restorative justice drug court and consulted on police misconduct cases.
Dive deeper
The Los Angeles County Bar Assn. ranked Ghobadi as “well qualified” and Haymon as “qualified.”
Seat 87
The candidates
David DeJute, who defended President Obama against the so-called birther claims, spent a decade as vice president of litigation at Sony Pictures Entertainment. He now works in litigation at a private firm. An adjunct professor at Pepperdine’s Caruso School of Law, he’s taught ethics, antitrust, copyright and patent law. After last year’s wildfires, he returned as director of the disaster relief clinic, where he instructed students who provided pro bono legal services to victims of the Palisades and Eaton fires.
Anthony “A.J.” Bayne’s background includes nearly two decades serving in the Compton Courthouse, where he for a time served as deputy in charge. He’s now handling serious felony cases at the Torrance branch. Bayne is an inventor, with patent-pending applications for artificial intelligence tools that automate legal workflows. One helps with closing arguments; another uses court reporter transcripts to generate cross-examination questions.
Dive deeper
DeJute is rated “qualified” to serve by the Los Angeles County Bar Assn. Bayne is rated a notch higher, “well qualified.”
Seat 65
The candidates
Justin Allen Clayton is in charge of the Inglewood branch of the public defender’s office and has defended three cases with life sentences. Clayton said a priority is improving court efficiency through pretrial preparation and “firm but fair enforcement of deadlines.” Clayton said running a public defender branch office gives him a “comprehensive understanding” of the courtroom.
Anna Slotky Reitano represented juvenile and adult clients, many of them accused of felonies, before joining the county counsel’s office. Reitano focused on mental health diversion and treatment, aiming to support rehabilitation when possible. A former child actor, she volunteers with local schools and, according to her website, mentors “future lawyers” through moot court competitions.
Dive deeper
The Los Angeles County Bar Assn. considers both qualified to serve.
There has been much debate about efforts in California to tax the rich. But almost all of it centers around Proposition 40, the heavily contested billionaire tax, and two countermeasures, Propositions 41 and 42.
But there is another ballot measure that also would tax California’s wealthiest citizens that is getting far less attention — and has even garnered support from some billionaires who oppose Proposition 40.
The basics
Proposition 3 would make an expiring state income tax on high earners permanent.
The impact
Tax rates for the top 2% of earners would remain as they are. Income brackets rise with inflation, but last year the top 2% of taxpayers earned at least $371,000 for single filers and $743,000 for joint filers. Money generated by Proposition 3, like the current tax, would flow to education, with 89% going to K-12 schools and 11% to community colleges.
Dig deeper
In 2012, California voters approved a temporary increase in the income tax rate for the top 2% of California earners. In 2016, voters approved another extension through 2030. Proposition 3 would make the additional levy permanent.
Backers say the measure is crucial to maintain education funding levels and predict there would be grave problems if the measure is not approved. The state could expect to lose $5 billion to $15 billion annually in tax revenue starting in 2031, according to estimates from the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
Opponents say taxes are already too high and the state should focus on cutting waste.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has updated its travel advice for 13 countries, including Turkey and Egypt, amid ‘regional tensions’ in the Middle East
10:21, 28 Oct 2026Updated 11:23, 28 Oct 2026
(Image: Getty Images)
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has updated its travel advice for 13 countries, including Turkey and Egypt, due to ‘regional tensions’ across the Middle East. ‘Do not travel’ warnings remain in force for various areas as the situation ‘remains deeply unpredictable’.
In the update issued on Tuesday, 27 October, under ‘regional tensions’, the FCDO warned: “The context in the Middle East remains deeply unpredictable, and the risk of sudden escalation is high. Since conflict began in early 2026, Iran has stated its intention to target locations associated with the US and Israel, including, but not limited to, organisations, businesses, facilities, and institutions. There have been strikes and retaliatory attacks by Iran and others across the region against civilian and US military infrastructure.”
The Foreign Office went on to caution that British nationals planning to travel through the Middle East or who are currently in the region “should be prepared for possible flight cancellations, airspace closures, and travel disruptions”. They advised doing the following:
Read If you’re affected by a crisis abroad – GOV.UK. This includes guidance on “how to prepare for a crisis” with suggestions on what you might include in your emergency supplies and “what to do in a crisis”
Monitor local and international media for the latest information, including updates relating to airports and airspace, which could close at short notice
Stay away from areas around security or military facilities
Keep your departure plans under review, and ensure your travel documents are up to date
If advised to take shelter, stay indoors or find the nearest safe building or designated shelter. An interior stairwell or a room with as few external walls or windows as possible may provide additional protection. The greatest risk is from falling debris caused by intercepts, and you are safest inside a secure structure. Do not approach or touch any drone or missile fragments or unusual objects.
While the most recent travel guidance for the 13 nations concerned ‘regional tensions’, it’s crucial to consult the FCDO directly for any additional warnings or advice for your chosen destination, as there may be additional or differing advice, and updates can be issued at extremely short notice. There are also critical ‘do not travel’ warnings in effect for various locations, alongside guidance ‘against all but essential travel’ to other areas, reports the Daily Star.
Currently, the Foreign Office has advised ‘against all travel to parts’ of the following nations: Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Additionally, the FCDO has advised ‘against all travel’ to Iran, Yemen and Syria. It’s worth noting that some of these warnings were in place before the events in the Middle East and are unrelated to the tensions.
For example in Yemen, the FCDO states: “Since July 2026, the Houthis have launched air strikes against Saudi territory and Saudi shipping vessels in the Red Sea. There is an ongoing risk of further military escalation, including in Yemen and the Red Sea, which could occur at short notice.”
Full list of 13 countries with updated travel advice
Egypt
Turkey
Qatar
Iran
Israel
Kuwait
Palestine
Bahrain
Jordan
Yemen
Syria
Pakistan
Saudi Arabia
For more information, or to check travel advice for a specific country, visit the Foreign Office website.
Do you have a travel story to share? Email webtravel@reachplc.com
This article was updated to reflect that the Foreign Office’s advice ‘against all travel to parts’ of certain countries are not all linked to the events in the Middle East.
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — A 37-year-old Illinois man is charged with sending threatening letters to members of Congress containing a white powder, including one with a note reading “HAH enjoy the gift,” according to federal court records.
The criminal complaint unsealed Monday claims Matthew Ungelsbee sent at least four plain white envelopes with a powdery substance to elected officials in Chicago. They were postmarked in Springfield, Illinois, on Oct. 19 and had Unglesbee’s name handwritten in the return address section.
Unglesbee, of Quincy in southwestern Illinois, is charged with mailing threatening communications and perpetrating a hoax. He was scheduled to appear in court Monday afternoon. Court records did not list a defense attorney, and a phone number for Unglesbee could not be found. A Facebook message to a Matthew Unglesbee in Quincy was not immediately returned.
FBI agents interviewed Unglesbee at his home on Sunday and he told them all the letters contained salt, court records show. He claimed he’d sent the letters after hearing someone talk about similar mailings in the news earlier this month.
Testing confirmed the white substance was not dangerous. The records did not identify the substance.
A motive was unclear. But Unglesbee said he knew the congress members would “take it serious” because the powder might be perceived as anthrax, which he knew was dangerous and could prompt a response by hazmat teams, according to the complaint.
“Unglesbee claimed he was joking but recognized the recipients would not know he was joking and could perceive it as a threat,” the complaint stated.
Investigators said none of the recipients opened the letters. The most recent envelope was received Oct. 23 at the office of a U.S. senator, records show. It contained a white powdery substance and a handwritten note reading “HAH enjoy the gift,” according to the documents.
The investigation began after an anonymous tipster reported overhearing Unglesbee in a restaurant talking about mailing a suspicious substance to members of Congress. The tip was received Oct. 16, and the FBI tracked Ungelsbee down after the envelopes arrived at the congressional offices days later.
The recipients of the mailings were not named. Authorities searched Unglesbee’s home and found a fifth envelope addressed to another congress member’s Washington, D.C., office, the records show.
Earlier this month, federal authorities said they were investigating letters with “suspicious substances” that had been mailed to congressional and election offices nationwide. That investigation by the FBI, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and U.S. Capitol Police was first disclosed in a message from the Senate Sergeant at Arms obtained Oct. 15 by the Associated Press.
Audiences for animated movies are proving to be more diverse than the industry expected.
Over the weekend, Laika, the Oscar-nominated studio behind movies like “Coraline” and “ParaNorman,” released its newest feature film “Wildwood.” The original animated feature, which received a rare PG-13 rating, landed in third place at the domestic box office, earning an estimated $11.6 million, according to its distributor Fathom Entertainment.
DC Studio’s body horror “Clayface” topped the box office, with a haul of $24 million. “You Can See Everything,” the experimental Elizabeth Holmes documentary, came in second and added $19.5 million to its total $45 million haul, according to the data-analytics company Rentrak.
Distributed by Fathom Entertainment — the joint venture of AMC Entertainment Holdings, Regal Cinemas, and Cinemark Holdings — “Wildwood” opened in just over 2,900 North American theatres. The distributor said this box office haul is a rare achievement for independently produced and distributed PG-13 animation, as very few films of this nature have received such a wide theatrical release and opened above $10 million.
“While the major studios rely heavily on established animated franchises like ‘Super Mario,’ ‘Minions’ and ‘Toy Story,’ Laika has carved out a really unique place in the animation world,” Paul Dergarabedian, the head of marketplace trends at Rentrak, said in a statement.
The film is Laika’s first in seven years and has been in the works since 2011. Based on the novel by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis, it follows Prue, a young girl who ventures into an enchanted forest to save her little brother. The Oregon-based studio was founded in 2005 by Nike co-founder Phil Knight. His son, Travis Knight, is the owner, chief executive and director of “Wildwood.”
The handcrafted stop-motion film runs just over two hours and more than a thousand people worked on it. The studio did not disclose its production budget. Laika films can cost between $60 million and $100 million to make, according to Forbes.
“‘Wildwood’ embodies everything LAIKA believes animation can be: a handmade film that is emotionally resonant, visually ambitious, and created by artists, craftspeople and technical innovators working at the highest level,” David Burke, the film’s executive producer, said in a statement.
Opening weekend was just a starting point for Laika. The studio’s films have historically demonstrated strong theatrical staying power, with its five previous features averaging around 3.6 times their opening weekend domestically, according to Fathom. The film is also expected to hit dozens of international markets in the coming weeks, which is expected to boost its box office revenue.
Dergarabedian said the film’s opening is “encouraging, particularly for a film that doesn’t fit the traditional animated blockbuster mold. Its performance is another example of why originality and creative risk-taking are so important to the theatrical marketplace.”
“At Laika, we have always taken the long view,” Burke said in a statement. “Laika makes timeless films that resonate with audiences around the world and across generations. ‘Wildwood’ carries that tradition forward.”
The landmark Casa Vega Mexican restaurant in Sherman Oaks was honored in May with a sign proclaiming its corner of Ventura Boulevard as “Casa Vega Square.”
Mayor Karen Bass was there, and so was City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, whose district is on the other side of the San Fernando Valley. The event was perhaps more notable for who wasn’t there: Nithya Raman, the mayoral candidate whose City Council district includes Casa Vega.
To Raman’s critics, the episode represents what they say is one of her biggest flaws as an elected official: not tending to the parochial needs of her district. Bass has sounded that theme repeatedly during the mayoral election campaign, including calling Raman “contemptuous of her constituents” during their televised debate on NBC4 and Telemundo 52 Oct. 13.
Raman called that “a lie.” Some of Raman’s constituents beg to differ, saying her office has seemed unwilling to help with a broad array of city services, including fixing broken sidewalks and removing homeless encampments.
“She’s just been MIA,” said Jessica Lewis, who owns Dragonfly Cycle and Train, a fitness studio in Sherman Oaks. “I would send photos of what I was experiencing, like human feces at my front door, encampments at the back door … all those emails just fell on deaf ears.”
Raman spokesperson Stella Stahl disputed that contention, saying the council office has “a proactive constituent service team.”
“Our approach is to listen to those who live and work in a neighborhood, then use every tool the city has to fix what they’ve told us is broken,” Stahl said.
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, left, and challenger Nithya Raman during their debate before the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn.
(David Butow / For The Times)
Raman co-presented the motion to designate Vega Square, along with Councilmember Rodriguez, according to documents filed in March. Raman was unable to attend the ceremony because of scheduling conflicts, Stahl said, but other Raman staffers were present.
Councilmember Rodriguez said her staff spearheaded the designation, part of her broader work to “enshrining the many positive contributions that Latino families have made throughout our city.”
To be sure, Raman has constituents who are big fans. Marissa Rodriguez said she wasn’t aware of the web of licenses and city permits she would have to obtain before she could open her wine shop in Studio City, Dia Natural Wine. The process felt monumental, she said, and nearly impossible to complete on her own.
She reached out to Raman’s team, and said the council office’s help was integral to Dia Natural Wine making its debut in 2022.
“I thought I could do this myself, and at a certain point, I hit a ton of roadblocks at the city,” Marissa Rodriguez said. “They were extremely helpful in just sort of helping me navigate who I needed to talk to.”
Tyler Simmons, who owns a coffee wine bar, Reunion & Co., on Hyperion Avenue in the Franklin Hills neighborhood of Los Feliz, said Raman and her team have always been receptive to his community’s needs.
In response to complaints of speeding, he said, Raman’s office helped get four speed tables — a flatter, wider version of speed bumps — installed in the intersection near his business last year.
“She’s done her best,” Simmons said. “I think there’s larger systemic issues at play within the city … it’s bigger than a councilperson, unfortunately. I’m hoping, if she wins, she’ll help change all that.”
Sidewalks in disrepair along the 1300 block of Ventura Blvd on Friday, Oct. 16, 2026, in Sherman Oaks, California. Christy Vega, owner of Casa Vega, claims that Nithya Raman, Councilmember, Fourth District, has been unhelpful and ignored her requests to get certain city services, including street sidewalk repairs and addressing homelessness in her parking lot. (Gary Coronado/For The Times)
A street in disrepair along the 1300 block of Ventura Blvd on Friday, Oct. 16, 2026, in Sherman Oaks, California. Christy Vega, owner of Casa Vega, claims that Nithya Raman, Councilmember, Fourth District, has been unhelpful and ignored her requests to get certain city services, including street sidewalk repairs and addressing homelessness in her parking lot. (Gary Coronado/For The Times)
On the other hand, Casa Vega owner Christy Vega rattles off a long list of complaints when discussing Raman and her office. She said she’s spent years seeking help from Raman’s staff, including to make repairs on sidewalks and pavement outside the restaurant, and to remove a homeless encampment that sprang up during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“With Raman’s office, they viewed me as a nuisance rather than someone who’s trying to keep her employees safe,” Vega said.
Vega is supporting Bass in the Nov. 3 election, and she sits on on the board of Thrive LA, an advocacy group backed by business and community leaders that is running ads against Raman in the mayoral race and also ran anti-Raman ads during her 2024 City Council reelection campaign.
Vega says she’s not supporting Raman because of her experience seeking help from Raman’s council office for problems her business encountered, including cars being broken into in the restaurant’s parking lot and muggings on the street out front. One employee was stabbed at a nearby bus stop, and another fell because of the potholes in the alley behind her restaurant, she said.
At one point, Vega said, she called Raman’s office to ask for help in fixing the curb near her restaurant that was damaged during a street racing incident.
Vega said she was told by Raman’s office that she would need to fix the curb herself, meaning she’d have to pull permits, hire a contractor and pay out of pocket for the repairs Vega said she pushed back, and a staff member suggested she move to another district.
Raman’s office didn’t comment on that assertion, but Stahl said that the Bureau of Street Services isn’t funded to repair damaged sidewalks, and the responsibility falls to the adjacent property owners.
“Every constituent who contacts our office deserves a response, and we take Ms. Vega’s concerns seriously. People often reach out to us on their hardest days,” Stahl said. “Unfortunately, we weren’t able to accommodate it at that time. Telling constituents no to basic service requests is frustrating for residents and for us, and it’s part of why the council member ran for office.”
Councilmember Rodriguez, who represents the northeast San Fernando Valley, said she’s stepped in to help business owners in Raman’s district over the years. Most recently, she helped Vega with permitting issues on the restaurant’s outdoor patio.
A sign for L.A. Councilmember Nithya Raman’s district office on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley.
(Gary Coronado / For The Times)
“I’ve heard some of the same frustrations and stories from many people. … It reflects a pattern,” said Rodriguez, who is backing Bass for mayor. “If this is your audition [for mayor] based on your performance in your own district, I think it’s an example of the responsiveness of what people can expect.”
Sophia Brodetsky, who owns the Valley Inn restaurant with her husband in Sherman Oaks, isn’t happy with either mayoral candidate, but said Bass’ office has been more receptive to her needs.
Brodetsky has endured robberies, property damage and homeless encampments that have disrupted her restaurant that dates back to 1947, she said.
“They’re running for office right now. They promise you an arm and a leg, but they don’t deliver,” Brodetsky said.
According to Vega and Lewis, owner of the Dragonfly gym, a number of Sherman Oaks business owners reached out to Bass after she was elected mayor in 2022 to voice their concerns about Raman’s stewardship of the district.
The mayor met with a group of business owners in the area in 2023 and she convened weekly safety meetings between business owners, district leaders and local law enforcement to address their concerns, Vega said.
Vega said it was Bass and Rodriguez who helped her navigate the permit process when she sought to open an outdoor patio for her restaurant last year.
“I wasn’t a supporter of hers. I wasn’t someone that she owed any favors to,” Vega said of Bass. “She answered the phone immediately, and she heard the panic of my voice and my tears, and she said, ‘I’m on it.’”
Lewis, however, said she and others felt betrayed by Bass when she endorsed Raman for reelection in 2024.
“That just felt like a huge slap in the face,” Lewis said.
Lewis said she plans to vote for Bass, but reluctantly. Keeping her business afloat has felt nearly impossible at times, she said, but getting help from both the council and the mayor’s office has been an even tougher hurdle.
“The council office would blame the mayor’s office. The mayor’s office would blame the county,” Lewis said. “It was like everyone was just pointing fingers at someone else, and no one was actually doing anything about it.”
It was less than a month before the Nov. 3 election when Los Angeles city attorney front-runner Marissa Roy realized she’d missed her lucky manicure.
A deputy attorney general in the California Department of Justice, she had scarcely slept since her team clinched its historic $17-billion settlement with Meta in August. She’d been canvassing hundreds of voters and sounding out scores of deputy city attorneys in her bid to transform the troubled office where she’d launched her career in 2017 into the “largest public interest law firm” in L.A.
Between filming TikTok spots and prepping for formal debates, Roy has been fine-tuning her plans to avenge exploited tenants and claw back stolen wages, tame runaway civil liability, protect victims of child abuse and domestic violence, and join other elected attorneys in lawsuits against the Trump administration.
Nails didn’t make the cut.
“There’s just been too much to do,” Roy said of the chrome gel ritual she inaugurated as a volunteer for Eunisses Hernandez in 2022.
Marissa Roy outside L.A. City Hall. “I wanted the slogan ‘let’s sue it’ — that was violently nixed,” she said of her campaign.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Seen one way, Roy’s talismanic manicure is an object lesson for her fiercest critics: all flash and no substance, evidence the 34-year-old lacks the “gravitas” to be among the state’s most powerful elected lawyers.
But like the iridescentglitter in her campaign-matched chrome polish, the meaning shifts with the viewer’s perspective.
To supporters on the city’s restive left and the clique of California city attorneys eager to add Roy to their group chat, it’s a winking show of solidarity burnished through years of knocking on doors for fellow up-and-coming progressives. It was metallic blue for Hernandez, silver for Ysabel Jurado and ultraviolet for her own historic primary upset in June. Her backers see fierce loyalty reflected in the polish, a ritual she started while hunting salon wage thieves to sue.
“I wanted the slogan ‘let’s sue it’ — that was violently nixed,” Roy said of her campaign.
With her Democratic Socialists of America sass, bright amethyst blazers and Bollywood needle drops on Instagram, the lifelong Angeleno cuts a stark contrast to her rival, Deputy Dist. Atty. John McKinney, 58, who leapfrogged to a second-place finish in the primaries amid a stoic, law-and-order campaign that sometimes slipped into Spencer Pratt-style dystopian imagery.
McKinney’s boosters point to his extraordinary biography — from penniless orphan to director of special prosecutions in the country’s largest district attorney’s office — and celebrated courtroom prowess as evidence he is better suited to handle the 120,000 violations referred to the city attorney for potential charges every year.
“John has the experience, stature, reputation, and gravitas to do the job and will be both effective and respected,” said former Los Angeles City Atty. Burt Pines. “I do not have the same confidence in her.”
Campaign materials for the Los Angeles city attorney candidate at a canvassing event in Silverlake.
(Gary Coronado / For The Times)
Roy’s allies counter that prosecuting misdemeanors is only a third of the city attorney’s job — and typically the less complex part. Whereas McKinney has never worked a civil case, Roy has managed multicity litigation and shares the credit for legal victories no attorney could secure alone. In the Meta case, Roy and her team had argued that the social media giant had intentionally designed its products to hook young children and repeatedly misled the public about known risks.
“She was one of the original four team members in California that stayed up until 2 a.m. filing the [Meta] complaint,” said California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta. “She helped develop our legal strategy, particularly our deception theory, which was our core theory of legal liability for the case.”
Similarly, while McKinney’s camp paints a lawman of singular personal ability, Roy supporters describe her as brilliant, driven, and eager to lift the best and brightest around her.
“She is tenacious and works around the clock,” said San Francisco City Atty. David Chiu.
She’s also infamously bubbly: When a canvasser door-knocked 9th Circuit Judge Richard Paez, for whom Roy had clerked, he reportedly asked the volunteer to give her a hug.
“She has a natural enthusiasm about her that is infectious,” said Mark Ramos, chair of Los Angeles County Democratic Party. “She’s [always] shown up, and showing up matters.”
Which matters more — individual virtue or collaborative ingenuity — now in effect divides the race for the most abstruse job in local politics: Four of L.A’s former city attorneys have endorsed McKinney, while California’s current top elected lawyers have largely lined up behind Roy.
A head-to-head match with McKinney was not what Roy envisioned last year when she launched her campaign to unseat the incumbent city attorney, Hydee Feldstein Soto. After charming L.A.’s major power brokers, she had hoped to win the primary outright and avoid a runoff so she could focus exclusively on the Meta trial in August.
“I had been planning for things to end in June,” she said.
Feldstein Soto was bogged down by scandal and soaring civil liability costs for the city. She also faced criticism for ducking challenges to President Trump’s policies, including the deployment of military troops to Los Angeles last year, a fight the city joined but did not lead.
By early spring, Roy had racked up endorsements from the state’s legal elites and leftist kingmaker Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). She earned the imprimatur of the city’s powerful Democratic clubs and its influential labor unions, while enjoying widespread support from a democratic socialist base.
Marissa Roy, left, candidate for Los Angeles city attorney, and Alyssa Acevedo, with Service Employees International Union canvass in Silverlake.
(Gary Coronado / For The Times)
L.A. voters want “the transformational leadership that they’re seeing in [New York Mayor Zohran] Mamdani, and also in Mayor [Daniel] Lurie in San Francisco,” said L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, a longtime friend of Roy’s and among her earliest endorsers. “Angelenos are increasingly impatient in wanting to see that change come to their city, too.”
Then, in April, Feldstein Soto slipped from unpopular to politically radioactive after hackers stole thousands of LAPD files from her office. That inspired a late-breaking police union endorsement and a surge of corporate cash for McKinney, boosting him to a second-place finish and knocking out Feldstein Soto in a historic rout.
McKinney touts the city attorney’s prosecutor role as a means to stem quality-of-life crimes and curb homelessness. Roy has promised to keep more Angelenos housed and protect their livelihoods through “affirmative litigation” — suits brought against slumlords and exploitative corporations under the state’s Unfair Competition Law.
“When you file these suits, you have complete discretion,” said Pines, the former city attorney who successfully lobbied the state to extend Los Angeles that power in 1977 and watched in dismay as Feldstein Soto left it to whither.
In recent years, affirmative litigation has become an essential tool for defending against punitive federal policy and recovering public funds, Pines and others said.
Seeing the San Francisco city attorney’s office sue to overturn California’s ban on gay marriage — a law that would have stymied her gay younger brother — inspired Roy to give up her elementary school dream of decoding ancient texts to pursue the law.
“Childhood Marissa spent recesses in the library buried in books about ancient Egypt,” Roy said. “It was San Francisco suing — that was when I began to become aware of the power of lawyers.”
Unlike her opponent, Roy grew up comfortably in Monrovia, largely shielded from the sacrifices her family made to afford her an elite education. The daughter of an Indian immigrant mother and a white American father, she graduated from Flintridge Prep and attended University of Southern California on scholarship.
While studying law at Yale, she interned in the affirmative litigation department in the San Francisco city attorney’s office — a program Chiu lauded as “an essential training ground for the next generation of government lawyers” in a recent law review article.
Roy and her supporters say those early experiences cemented her commitment to teamwork, which is central to the less glamorous, more costly side of the city attorney’s job: serving as general counsel for myriad city agencies and legal advisor to City Hall.
“There’s absolutely more collaboration and it’s more significant given the things we’re up against,” said San Diego City Atty. Heather Ferbert, a close ally of Roy’s.
John McKinney, a Los Angeles County prosecutor running against Marissa Roy to become L.A. city attorney, speaks during a news conference on May 5, 2026.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Ferbert and others pointed to a surge in lawsuits against municipalities over everything from sidewalk trip-and-falls to police misconduct — cases that can lead to seven- or eight-figure payouts.
“If it’s not extremely unusual, it doesn’t make it to the city attorney’s desk,” said Oakland City Atty. Ryan Richardson, who endorsed Roy.
As a deputy city attorney, Roy spearheaded a trio of major wage-theft suits just a month after she was admitted to the bar. Independent expenditure groups supporting McKinney spent more than $350,000 trying to strip her of that title because she was paid by a nonprofit — an common arrangement employed by government law offices across the U.S. — while the city attorney’s office itself gave her permission to use it, and lists her as such in its court filings.
McKinney has since sought to paint Roy as the second coming of George Gascón, the polarizing district attorney who was drubbed in 2024 — a move that assumes most voters are still thinking about Gascón, or are likely to see the graying “godfather of progressive prosecutors” in a raven-haired deputy attorney general.
“The only way you disprove that is by putting your head down and doing the work 10 times harder,” Roy said. “Voters are smarter than that. People in the coalition see these tactics and are tired of them too.”
The U.S. Justice Department expanded its efforts to intervene in California’s ongoing election Friday, sending letters to more than a dozen county elections offices statewide with demands that they segregate ballots from voters the Trump administration believes are noncitizens.
The letters — which give officials 48 hours to act and threaten them with criminal punishments if they refuse — follow similar correspondence the Justice Department sent last week to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County registrar’s office, calling for some 20,000 ballots statewide be set aside and left uncounted until state and local officials can prove that the voters are citizens.
When Weber and Logan balked, the Justice Department promptly sued them and the state in a case currently pending in federal court. The California officials have contended the Justice Department’s efforts are illegal.
The new letters, first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, follow previous threats from Justice Department officials and President Trump warning that local California elections officials could face criminal prosecution for being “aiders and abettors to a federal crime” if they tabulate votes from the “likely noncitizens” the administration has flagged.
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles said 57 of California’s 58 counties were served the letters, with the exception of Los Angeles, which had already received a notice.
“The letters speak for themselves. Any election official who knowingly processes the ballot of a noncitizen is opening themselves to legal jeopardy,” First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, said in a statement.
Essayli wrote Friday evening on X that “California does not verify citizenship status. We did the work for them. We obtained the registered voter list and told them who we believe are noncitizens on their rolls.”
Essayli wrote that “knowingly processing noncitizen ballots is a federal crime,” and said authorities “will hold election officials accountable. No one is above the law.”
The Justice Department did not respond to an inquiry from The Times. California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office declined to comment.
Santa Cruz County Clerk Tricia Webber, who is president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials, said, “From what I’ve been able to gather, most counties if not all of the counties are doing what I’m doing: Sat down with our counsel, went over everything,” Webber said.
Webber said two people with Justice Department credentials showed up at her office Friday and handed her a manila envelope with the letter inside demanding she comply within 48 hours to determine the citizenship of 81 people in her county.
“I can’t tell you anything other than I’m looking at it and doing my due diligence,” she said. “This is not normal protocol for us.”
Kristin Connelly, head of the Contra Costa County registrar’s office, said she was also among those who received a letter. She said she had not yet responded as of late Friday, but was in contact with her county counsel and “colleagues around the state who received similar letters today.”
“The non-partisan Contra Costa County Elections Division administers elections according to all state and federal election laws, as well as the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California. Our work is observable,” Connelly said. “This threat is not helpful and is intended to intimidate.”
The letter she received, from U.S. Atty. Craig Missakian, was full of threats of criminal punishment for tabulating votes from individuals whom the county is “on actual notice” may not be U.S. citizens.
Missakian, the top federal prosecutor in the Northern District of California, wrote that he was providing Connelly with a “subset” of “407 likely aliens” from the broader statewide list of 20,000 voters, and demanded that Connelly commit within 48 hours to working with Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security officials to identify who among those 407 “is a citizen and who is not.”
“That means sending us the nonpublic information associated with each suspected alien’s registration, which includes everything in your possession from the following: a social security number, a copy of a state ID or driver’s license or the information that appears on it, a copy of the voter registration application supporting the registration, and a copy or list of documents that were presented by the registrant at the time the person registered to vote or obtained their driver’s license if registered as part of motor voter,” Missakian wrote.
He also wrote that he was reaching out by letter “to make unmistakably clear the legal implications of continuing to send vote-by-mail ballots to those people on the list or tabulating ballots cast by them until citizenship can be verified.”
The Justice Department previously sued California for its voter records. A federal judge rejected the lawsuit, calling the demands a threat to democracy. The Justice Department has also lost similar cases demanding voter rolls in dozens of other states.
California Sen. Alex Padilla said in a statement Friday that, “Donald Trump and Todd Blanche are trying to interfere in California elections.”
Padilla, the ranking Democrat on the U.S. Senate Rules and Administration Committee, which has oversight over federal elections, added: No matter how many lawsuits they file or how many election officials they threaten, they do not have the authority to interfere.”
Padilla told local election officials, “We have your back.”
“The Trump administration is afraid and desperate,” he said. “Their attempts to take over our elections will fail.”
The letters were a topic of discussion among members of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials Friday, with officials working on how to respond.
Logan, L.A. County’s top elections official, sent an email to fellow association members saying he had seen a copy of the letter to some counties — which he condemned as misrepresenting facts and threatening elections officials “twelve days before the election” through a “posture of intimidation.”
Logan called the 48-hour deadline for responses “unenforceable,” and noted that the Justice Department was “demanding individual level data from the named counties similar to what it has previously only obtained through subpoenas.”
Logan’s office has also said that an initial review it conducted of a subset of the 20,000 voters the Justice Department initially flagged found many were born in the U.S., many weren’t actually registered and many had never voted.
Growing up without “two nickels to rub together,” John McKinney never thought he’d be a lawyer.
At the beginning of 2026, sitting in his office as one of the highest-ranking prosecutors in Los Angeles County, McKinney had no designs on trying to become L.A.’s city attorney.
But if he can beat progressive darling Marissa Roy next month and finish off an upstart campaign that barely had a pulse six months ago, McKinney would complete a lifelong underdog story that saw him go from working as a house painter and substitute teacher to pay for college to serving as the top lawyer for the second-largest city in America.
A highly regarded trial lawyer, McKinney, 58, claims an undefeated record in homicide trials and has won convictions in some of the region’s most infamous crimes, including the murder of beloved L.A. hip-hop star Nipsey Hussle. He reached his longtime perch in the district attorney’s office’s major crimes unit after a lifetime of struggle. Both of McKinney’s parents died before he was 5, and he was raised by his oldest sister in a cramped household with half a dozen other children in Passaic, N.J.
John McKinney speaks at a news conference at the Los Angeles Police Protective League in May.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
McKinney beams with pride while discussing his hardscrabble East Coast upbringing — whether praising his sister’s hustle for working “six days a week,” or refusing to turn in his Yankees hat in a Dodger blue city. In interviews, he’ll sneak in a verbal jab at Roy, then finish the insult with a wry smirk. McKinney notes he’s been a prosecutor almost as long as his 34-year-old opponent has been alive.
“She’s never tried a case,” McKinney said. “When you’re running for city attorney overseeing trial lawyers and having to make high-impact decisions on whether to settle a case for $20 million or not, you should at least know what it’s like to go through a jury trial.”
Roy was part of the team that secured a $17-billion settlement from Meta in a landmark case this year, and has tried many cases decided by judges, rather than jury panels. She’s pushed back on McKinney’s barbs, noting he has no experience handling civil cases, a core component of the job.
McKinney has focused his campaign on lessening the city’s homelessness crisis by leveraging people into treatment, tackling quality-of-life crimes, and reducing the city’s out-of-control legal costs.
But he faces an uphill battle. Roy, a deputy state attorney general, has been campaigning for more than a year and raised more than twice as much money as McKinney. With the backing of both the county’s Democratic Party and the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter, Roy won June’s primary easily, outpacing McKinney by 15 percentage points. Both finished far ahead of City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto.
Marissa Roy, a deputy attorney general with the California Department of Justice, is running against John McKinney to become L.A.’s next city attorney.
(Gary Coronado/For The Times)
Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman leads a strong coalition of law enforcement support for McKinney, who has also been endorsed by four former city attorneys, two prior district attorneys and several City Council members, including Traci Park.
McKinney has emphasized the word “Democrat” in his ads, a nod to Roy’s attempts to cast him as the preferred choice of Republicans who won’t stand up to the Trump administration if elected. Although McKinney rubbed elbows with Republicans during efforts to recall then-Dist. Atty. George Gascón and employed fundraisers who worked with Trump, he says he “despises” the president and was disgusted by immigration raids in the city last year.
McKinney thinks Roy’s emphasis on fighting Trump speaks to a misunderstanding of the job. Across the country, it has been state attorneys general, not city attorneys, who have spearhead litigation against the White House, said McKinney, who dismissed the partisan attacks as a “misleading smear campaign.”
“Her lack of management experience and jury trial experience has not gone unnoticed by voters and her platform of wanting to turn the city attorney’s office into the country’s largest public interest law firm is out of alignment with the issues important to voters: public safety, homelessness and protecting taxpayer dollars,” he said.
Long before he was concerned about winning an elected office, McKinney was simply worried about survival.
The youngest of seven children, McKinney lost his mother to cancer when he was only 2. His father passed away unexpectedly three years later. His oldest sister, Ora, was recently divorced with three kids of her own but took in McKinney and his sister. He remained especially close to Ora — whom he described as his “mother, father and best friend” — until she passed away last year.
With his caretaker working nearly round the clock, McKinney said, he easily could have run in the streets with friends caught up in the crack cocaine boom of the 1980s. But McKinney said his sister’s determination inspired him to choose a better path.
“My sister made me believe there was really no limit to what I could do in life if I worked hard enough for it,” he said.
McKinney isn’t seeking sympathy, but believes sharing his backstory shows he’s “lived a life that mirrors a lot of the adversity Angelenos face every day.”
For much of his career in L.A., McKinney was seen as one of the district attorney’s office’s premier trial lawyers. He said he had no interest in management or politics until Gascón was elected in 2020. McKinney was one of several prosecutors to publicly criticize and sue Gascón. His involvement in the failed bid to recall Gascón put him in a political spotlight for the first time. He frequently spoke at recall events — which sometimes overlapped with rallies against Gov. Gavin Newsom and promoted conservative causes — and later joined the crowded field vying to replace Gascón in 2024.
Colleagues said McKinney has a history of being able to reach across ideological and cultural aisles. Bobby Grace, a veteran prosecutor who has worked with McKinney for decades, said he had a knack for getting people to take risks to take the stand in important cases.
“I think that’s where he made his reputation as a good trial lawyer,” Grace said. “To be successful, particularly in gangs, you’ve got to be able to convince witnesses who don’t want to come forward, and I think that was really his strength.”
Although he failed to gain traction in the race to unseat Gascón, finishing far behind Hochman, he caught the future district attorney’s eye and the two became allies. When Hochman took office, he put McKinney in charge of specialized prosecutions, giving him oversight of a wide range of cases, including cop killings, juvenile crimes, gang homicides and child abuse.
McKinney said he wasn’t even thinking about getting into the city attorney race until the middle of January, when a number of people approached him about entering.
City attorney candidate John McKinney, left, walks through Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles on July 1.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
By March, McKinney was scrambling to get a campaign together, and Hochman was quick to lend the fundraisers and managers who helped him oust Gascón.
He soon ascended from nonfactor to legitimate contender. Frustrated with ballooning legal costs and her handling of a department data breach, the city’s powerful police union abandoned Feldstein Soto and backed McKinney. Independent expenditures — political interest groups that can spend unlimited amounts in campaigns if they don’t coordinate with candidates — doled out $3 million to support McKinney.
In total, records show those groups have spent nearly $5 million on McKinney. More than half of that money has come from a venture capitalist who has publicly praised Elon Musk and a political action committee run by Airbnb, the rental giant currently facing a lawsuit from the city for price gouging during the wildfires.
McKinney insists campaign support won’t influence his decision-making in office. He has vowed to sue Airbnb if it engages in price gouging, and he knows the Los Angeles Police Department is a major factor in the city’s rising litigation costs. Given his law enforcement background, he argues he’s better positioned to influence police than Roy.
“I think because they know I’m not coming at them from a vindictive point of view, trying to underfund them or undermine them, that my criticism will be taken for what it’s worth, which is to make them stronger, to make them more trusted and more effective,” he said.
Whereas Hochman often compared L.A. to crime-plagued “Gotham City,” McKinney acknowledges the city’s more recent struggles are not with violence, but with quality-of-life crimes: unchecked homeless encampments, street racing, animal abuse on Skid Row.
Walking around Skid Row this summer, McKinney spoke with several people who approached from tents and other jerry-rigged structures. He listened closely as they explained their struggles and pleaded for help in a part of the city few residents ever set foot in. He describes his approach to the city’s homeless crisis as one of “compassionate accountability.”
“Every person who is living on the street has had some tragic circumstance in their life,” he said that day.
McKinney acknowledged he can’t do anything about a lack of housing as city attorney, but he can better manage the way L.A. throws resources at the problem. That includes more sophisticated audits of community-based organizations that have contracts with the city to aid unhoused people, he said.
Ultimately, he does not want to punish people who are suffering, but thinks the city attorney’s office can use its power of prosecution to pressure homeless defendants suffering from addiction or mental health issues into treatment. The mission is a personal one for McKinney, who grew up with a schizophrenic nephew whose slow decline he watched for years.
“When I talk about compassionate accountability, it’s not just a campaign slogan for me,” he said. “It’s real. These are real people.”
HM Passport Office has issued an alert to anyone applying for a new or replacement child passport in the UK
Children need a valid passport to travel abroad, just like adults do(Image: Images By Tang Ming Tung via Getty Images)
All you need to know as HM Passport Office issues alert over children’s passports:
HM Passport Office has issued a new alert for parents applying for a new or replacement passport for a child.
All children must hold their own passport to travel internationally – a rule that has been in place since October 1998. The sole issuer of UK passports shared the alert on X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday.
It stated: “A child’s application must be completed by a person with parental responsibility. You’ll also need to provide documentation to confirm this.”
Parental responsibility is automatically granted to those who give birth to the child. Fathers or second female parents may also have automatic parental responsibility depending on their circumstances.
For example, parental responsibility is also automatically granted if you are married to or in a civil partnership with the birth mother at the time of the child’s birth.
Should the biological father wed or enter into a civil partnership with the child’s birth mother following the birth, he will automatically obtain parental responsibility.
A standard child’s passport costs £66.50 online or £80 by paper form, rising to £80.50 or £94 for a 54-page frequent-traveller passport.
The mayor of the small Central Valley farm town of Kerman pulled up to a bakery, her cellphone camera recording, and confronted federal immigration agents conducting an early-morning operation in which multiple people were detained.
“You’re not welcome in my city,” Maria Pacheco told the masked agents, identifying herself as the mayor. “You’ve taken enough people yesterday. We don’t want you here. You need to leave.”
As the men wearing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement vests drove away, she shouted: “How can you make a living kidnapping people? How can you sleep at night doing what you’re doing? … You are a sorry piece of sh—!”
Pacheco, who is running for a seat on the Fresno County Board of Supervisors, posted video of the Oct. 8 confrontation in Kerman — a mostly Latino city of 17,000 west of Fresno — on social media, labeling it: “Mayor Maria Pacheco Stands Up to ICE.”
The footage went viral. TikTok commentators praised her bravery. Comedian and actor George Lopez posted about it on Facebook — writing, “We need more politicians like Maria Pacheco!” — and she shared her campaign fundraising link in the comments.
A few days later, Pacheco allegedly drove through Fresno, closely following a vehicle driven by a man she assumed was an ICE agent.
Except, he wasn’t one.
Eric Bridges, a Fresno hairdresser, has accused Pacheco of closely trailing him in an orange Nissan Altima for more than 20 minutes on Oct. 14 and taking photos of his vehicles as she followed him to his sister’s house.
“I’m looking for ICE, and you look like ICE,” Pacheco told him, according to a signed statement submitted to the Fresno County District Attorney’s Office this week in which Bridges wrote that he wanted “to press charges to the fullest extent of the law.”
Bridges’ attorney, Roger Bonakdar, told The Times that Pacheco used his client “as a political trampoline so she could create social media clickbait” to benefit her political campaign.
“There are real concerns as to whether or not she is acting as some sort of vigilante law enforcement person, that she’s wrongfully abusing her position as an elected official,” Bonakdar said.
Bonakdar added that he filed complaints about the incident with the Fresno Police Department and county prosecutor.
Taylor Long, a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office, said in an email that the information provided by Bonakdar had been referred to its Public Integrity Unit, which investigates public officials for potential crimes related to their office, but that “the receipt and review of information” does not mean a crime had occurred or that charges were warranted.
No charges had been filed by the district attorney’s office in connection with the incident as of Wednesday, Long wrote.
In an email to The Times, Pacheco wrote: “Regarding recent allegations, my only comment is this: If he wants to go to court, we will go to court.”
“Meanwhile, the Kerman Food Bank and other local organizations are experiencing food shortages as families face fear and uncertainty caused by recent immigration enforcement actions,” Pacheco wrote. “Parents are afraid to go to work or leave home, even to buy groceries, leaving more families struggling to put food on the table. … That is where our attention belongs, and where my time, energy and heart will remain.”
The encounter comes at a tense time in the Central Valley, where a surge this month in federal immigration operations and detentions has rattled agricultural communities, causing workers to stop showing up to farm fields and construction sites and families to keep their children home from school.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for information about the Oct. 8 operation outside La Princesa Real Bakery in Kerman, where Pacheco filmed her interaction with agents. Pacheco told the Fresno Bee that four of the bakery’s customers had been detained and that one was eventually released because he had lawful immigration status.
In his signed statement, Bridges wrote that he was driving near Kearney Park just west of Fresno on the afternoon of Oct. 14 when he noticed an orange car “pull behind me quickly and follow me into the park.” Bridges said he stopped his vehicle and was on the phone with his sister, telling her that he was being followed and that the driver was taking photos of him.
As he sat in the parking lot, he wrote, the car circled him for five minutes, and he could overhear the driver on the phone through her vehicle’s speaker system.
He then drove to his sister’s neighborhood, where the car tailed him into a cul-de-sac and stopped beside his white Mercedes sport utility vehicle — an encounter recorded by a home security camera.
When the female driver rolled down her car window, Bridges wrote, she asked who he was and he did the same. According to Bridges’ statement, the driver told him he was “in [her] ‘hood driving an unmarked car.”
Bridges wrote that he had a California Department of Motor Vehicles print-out affixed to the back of his vehicle and asked if she was a police officer or DMV employee.
She replied, “Don’t worry about who I am; I’m someone important” then accused him of being an ICE agent, Bridges wrote. Outraged, he began filming her.
In the home security footage, Bridges can be heard from a distance saying, “I didn’t know you owned the neighborhood,” and shouting in apparent surprise: “I look like I’m ICE?” after the woman speaks to him.
A close-up video that Bridges recorded shows a woman in sunglasses smiling as she drives away, with him saying, “Don’t you ever in your … life follow me, you weird-ass b—.”
Bridges wrote that she flipped him off as she left and that he learned she was the mayor of Kerman after reviewing the video footage.
Bonakdar, his attorney, said Bridges is a grandfather and hair stylist who has never worked for ICE or the Department of Homeland Security. When the driver of the orange vehicle saw him, Bonakdar said, Bridges was not wearing a face covering, as immigration agents often do, or a badge or tactical vest.
Pacheco “claims to be an advocate for minority groups, or to somehow have an interest in helping those people,” Bonakdar said. “I mean, she just victimized somebody who is a member of two minority groups. [Bridges] is a thin-framed, middle-aged Black gay man.”
Bonakdar said Bridges had received threats from people accusing him of being an undercover ICE agent and that some had told him he was not welcome in certain places.
On Oct. 15, the day after the alleged encounter with Bridges, Pacheco wrote a Facebook post about a street corner near agricultural fields just west of Fresno city limits: “I have spotted ICE on Shaw and Dickenson. White SUV. No plates. Driver is masked and hooded.”
Two days later, she took to Facebook again, writing: “I never imagined we’d live in a time when communities would fear masked men in unmarked vehicles. It’s exhausting living on constant high alert, watching for out-of-state or missing license plates, never knowing who’s next.”
A political advertisement released this summer claimed former L.A. County Dist. Atty. George Gascón “almost destroyed Los Angeles” and warned that, if elected as L.A.’s next city attorney, Marissa Roy will “do the same.”
Earlier this month, a seemingly out-of-nowhere rumor spread through City Hall and among rank-and-file cops that City Councilwoman Nithya Raman plans to name Gascón the city’s next police chief if she ousts Karen Bass in the mayoral contest.
Gascón told The Times last week he has no interest in the job and hasn’t spoken to Raman or her team. Raman has dismissed the rumor as a politically motivated lie started by the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the police union that supports Bass.
A spokesperson for the union said Raman’s allegation was “untrue”; Bass’ campaign also said it had nothing to do with the Gascón rumor.
Gascón declined to comment for this article, other than to shoot down the rumor that he could become LAPD chief.
After suffering a crushing defeat in his bid for reelection in 2024, Gascón all but disappeared from public life. He routinely declines interview requests and has receded from the leading role he once held in the nationwide progressive prosecutor movement.
But in the homestretch of the two most important contests on most Angelenos’ ballots this year, Gascón has been conjured as a bogeyman by opponents of progressive candidates. With polls showing Roy and Raman favored to win their respective races, political observers say the attempt to make Gascón relevant again may be a sign of panic from their opponents.
“At one point in time, Gascón clearly was box office poison and he may still be,” said Roy Behr, a Democratic consultant who isn’t involved in either race. “But this feels a lot like [President] Trump and the Republicans invoking Joe Biden’s name whenever they’re in trouble. In both cases, they’re clearly signs of desperation and not invoking any particular realistic possibilities.”
On Tuesday, billionaire developer and onetime mayoral candidate Rick Caruso said if Raman hired Gascón it would “take the city into a very dark place.”
“If you’re going to fire [Chief McDonnell], who are you going to appoint? Is it going to look like somebody like a Gascón?” Caruso asked. “Because I don’t think we need LAPD being a lab experiment for the [Democratic Socialists of L.A.] It’s going to take L.A. in the wrong direction.”
Caruso, who lost to Bass by nearly 10 points in the 2022 mayoral contest, has yet to offer an endorsement in this year’s race. But he has been publicly critical of Raman and invoked the Gascón police chief rumor at an event launching a new L.A. Department of Water and Power initiative. Bass was standing right next to him.
Gascón surged into office in 2020 amid nationwide demands for criminal justice reform after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. The former San Francisco district attorney and assistant LAPD chief promised to reduce mass incarceration and hold police accountable while also reducing crime. But his lone term in office was beset by turmoil.
In the city attorney’s race, L.A. County Deputy Dist. Atty. John McKinney has tried to draw a straight line between Gascón and Roy, insisting in one advertisement that she won’t prosecute misdemeanor crimes, including trespassing, theft and drug possession. The claim echoes Gascón’s blanket ban on prosecuting loitering, public intoxication and other minor drug offenses he believed played a role in criminalizing homelessness.
During the primary, text messages sent out in support of McKinney’s campaign also referred to City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto, a moderate, as a “Gascón-style” Democrat. Feldstein Soto never supported Gascón and endorsed one of his challengers in the 2024 primary.
Roy’s campaign declined to comment. She prefers using diversion programs to handle defendants suffering from mental illness or addiction issues, according to her campaign website, but hasn’t specifically said she’d ban deputy city attorneys from filing any particular case. She supported Gascón’s 2024 reelection bid and attended some of his rallies.
McKinney, whose shift from trial prosecutor to politician began when he became an outspoken critic of Gascón, also favors diversion for mentally ill and addicted defendants for nonviolent offenses and has referred to his platform as one of “compassionate accountability” toward unhoused defendants.
But, he stands by the comparison between Roy and Gascón.
“I think that when she talks about not prosecuting certain misdemeanors, it’s a blanket policy,” he said. “That’s very reminiscent of George Gascón.”
The invocation of the former district attorney in the mayor’s race is more complicated.
Bass and Gascón were known to have a frosty relationship. She didn’t support efforts to recall him in 2022, but she didn’t endorse her fellow Democrat’s reelection bid in 2024 either.
Raman never endorsed Gascón and the pair had “no relationship” while in office, according to two people with direct knowledge of their thinking who requested anonymity to discuss the matter candidly. In a tweet last week, she called the rumor about naming Gascón police chief a “bizarre lie.”
“This rumor was created by the Police Union Super PAC, which is spending millions of dollars to re-elect Mayor Bass,” Raman wrote.
In a statement, Raman said she would seek to remove McDonnell before his term ends in 2030, but did not mention any potential candidates for his replacement. She is seeking to remove McDonnell, in part, over the LAPD’s heavily criticized response to protests against the Trump administration’s immigration raids in L.A. last year, which saw officers trample people on horseback and deploy tear gas on citizens for the first time in decades. McDonnell, she says, has lost the trust of immigrant communities.
Tom Saggau, a spokesman for the police union, said the organization had nothing to do with the Gascón rumor. While the union is no friend to Roy, Raman or Gascón and has spent millions against all three candidates, Saggau said he first heard about the potential new police chief from a California Post reporter. None of the union’s members or directors had raised the issue beforehand, he said.
Still, in Saggau’s mind, perception trumps reality. He said there’s a reason people might believe Raman would pick a police chief who is considered persona non grata in law enforcement circles.
“Certainly they share some similar values when it comes to policing, especially on the prosecutorial side. Gascón was, I think it’s fair to say, lenient with some of his prosecutorial decisions,” Saggau said. “I think it’s her bouncing around on public safety items that has fed this rumor. … I think she’s just got a credibility issue when it comes to public safety.”
Times staff writers Itzel Luna and David Zahniser contributed to this report.
HM Passport Office (HMPO) has issued an alert to parents and caregivers
Families may want to take note(Image: Images By Tang Ming Tung via Getty Images)
HM Passport Office (HMPO) has issued an alert to anyone planning to apply for a new or replacement passport for a child.
A valid passport is needed for anyone, including children, to travel abroad. Prior to October 5, 1998, children under 16 years old could be included on a parent or family member’s passport. But since this date, all children – regardless of age – are required to hold their own individual passports to travel internationally. The sole issuer of UK passports, HMRC, shared a message on X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday.
It reads: “A child’s application must be completed by a person with parental responsibility. You’ll also need to provide documentation to confirm this.”
Parental responsibility is automatically granted if you give birth to the child. If you are a father or second female parent, you may have automatic parental responsibility depending on your personal circumstances.
You will also typically have automatic parental responsibility if you are married to or in a civil partnership with the birth mother at the time of the child’s birth. The child’s biological father will automatically acquire parental responsibility if they marry or enter into a civil partnership with the child’s birth mother after the child is born.
Content cannot be displayed without consent
If your child was conceived via fertility treatment, you will automatically have parental responsibility provided you consented to the treatment and are married to or in a civil partnership with the birth mother. Should you not be married to or in a civil partnership with the birth mother, parental responsibility can be obtained by jointly registering the birth alongside the mother.
Separate rules apply when registering a birth for same-sex couples. Should the birth not be registered together, an application for parental responsibility can be made.
How much is a passport for a child?
At present, a new or replacement passport for a child costs £66.50 when applying online, or £80 when submitting a paper form. This is the price for a standard 34-page document.
Should you require a “frequent traveller” 54-page child’s passport, this will cost £80.50 or £94 when applying online or via the paper form, respectively.
This runoff election for an open seat features two veteran attorneys with extensive experience as public defenders: Justin Allen Clayton and Anna Slotky Reitano.
Clayton is in charge of the Inglewood branch of the public defenders office and has defended three cases with life sentences.
Reitano represented juvenile and adult clients, many of them accused of felonies, before joining the county counsel’s office.
The Los Angeles County Bar Assn. considers both qualified to serve. Here’s more of what you need to know about the candidates.
Justin Allen Clayton, L.A. County deputy public defender
Bar rating: Qualified
Clayton is a Los Angeles native who attended public schools, earned a bachelor’s degree in criminology and passed the bar in 2012. He joined the public defender’s office two years later and since 2023 has served as deputy in charge of the Inglewood branch.
Clayton describes himself as a “working supervisor” who conducts arraignments and represents clients at preliminary and other hearings. He has completed dozens of trials, including three with life sentences, according to his website.
The position involves overseeing and training attorneys, as well as law clerks and summer interns, on misdemeanor and felony case preparation and trial strategy.
Clayton said a priority is improving court efficiency through pretrial preparation and “firm but fair enforcement of deadlines.”
Time as a candidate, he said, has shown him the importance of effective communication within the court system in bridging language and cultural differences. He called that a guiding principle, particularly for clients who lack counsel.
“Sometimes, one additional question, or one additional statement, can make all the difference in resolving an issue,” he said.
Clayton said running a public defender branch office, which brings him in contact with judges, sheriffs, court clerks, interpreters and others, combined with 14 years as a trial attorney, gives him a “comprehensive understanding” of the courtroom.
“That combination of courtroom experience, leadership and daily interaction with the many people who make our justice system work has uniquely prepared me to serve as a Superior Court judge,” he said.
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Anna Slotky Reitano, L.A. County deputy county counsel
Bar rating: Qualified
Reitano spent the early part of her career in criminal defense, contract law and other sectors. In 2014, she joined the L.A. County public defender’s office. A decade there included three years in juvenile court, where she primarily handled felony cases, and five years at the San Fernando Courthouse, where she represented indigent clients facing felony charges.
Reitano focused on mental health diversion and treatment, aiming to support rehabilitation when possible. Having a brother with schizophrenia and witnessing how families navigate the legal system when dealing with mental illness has informed her approach.
“This has given me a deeper understanding of both the challenges individuals and families face and the ways in which the system can fall short in addressing those needs,” she said.
This is not her first bid for office. She lost a campaign for a judgeship in 2022 and two years later assumed her position in the county counsel’s justice and safety division, where she supervises litigation and advises county departments.
Reitano, a former child actor, volunteers with local schools and, according to her website, mentors “future lawyers” through moot court competitions.
Campaigning, Reitano said, has shown her that constituents, no matter how different, uniformly want “a judge who is experienced, prepared, fair and willing to listen.”
“My experience across criminal, juvenile, civil, administrative and government law has uniquely prepared me to serve wherever the court needs me,” she said.
