WASHINGTON — The narrow victory of progressive doctor Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s bitterly fought Democratic Senate primary sets up a defining test of the party’s progressive wing in one of the highest-stakes U.S. Senate contests of the midterms.
Whether El-Sayed, a former public health official, can carry swing voters in a battleground state could both determine the outcome of a Senate seat viewed as crucial to determining control of Congress and have broader ramifications on the Democratic Party’s struggle for its identity.
El-Sayed, a 41-year-old epidemiologist, defeated U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, a moderate Democrat, by a narrow margin Wednesday after a long and intense campaign that was seen as a proxy for the party’s fissures.
The race was far closer than some polls had indicated. El-Sayed was leading Stevens by 15,000 votes, about 1 percentage point, with 99% of votes counted Wednesday, according to the Associated Press.
El-Sayed will face former Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican, in the general election. The winner will succeed retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, whose seat Democrats see as critical to retain for the party to have a chance at flipping the Senate.
“We’ve got an opportunity to bring ourselves back together, to come together around a movement, to take our democracy back,” El-Sayed said Wednesday on MS NOW’s “Morning Joe.”
El-Sayed’s victory will put to the test in a swing state the broader strength of the progressive movement, which has found success in deep-blue places like New York City, where Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor last year, and Los Angeles, where City Councilmember Nithya Raman is locked in a tight race mayoral contest with incumbent Karen Bass. Both Mamdani and Raman are democratic socialists.
As Democrats struggle over the party’s post-2024 identity and grapple with how to win back voters, the divide between the party’s progressive and centrist wings has been on display in primary fights. Both camps have notched victories: Many of the leftist wins have come in intensely blue districts, such as in New York, while more moderate districts have chosen centrists, as in Iowa.
On Tuesday, two progressive congressional candidates in Michigan beat out establishment Democrats in House races — in one case, ousting an incumbent. But in Missouri, democratic socialist and former Rep. Cori Bush lost to incumbent Rep. Wesley Bell, a moderate, for a key House seat.
In California, a handful of progressive candidates are on the November ballot, including the challengers to Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Sacramento) and Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford). In the Aug. 18 runoff to fill the vacant seat of former Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, progressive state Sen. Aisha Wahab is battling it out with fellow Democrat and BART board president Melissa Hernandez.
Progressive leaders celebrated El-Sayed’s win on Wednesday. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who backed El-Sayed, argue that his working-class-centered politics are more likely to have mass appeal.
“If you’re a working-class Republican in Michigan, I think you’re going to listen to what El-Sayed says,” Sanders told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “I think many of them will end up voting for him, independents as well, of course.”
Throughout the campaign, Stevens argued that El-Sayed would not be able to defeat Rogers, a refrain some moderates repeated Wednesday. El-Sayed vowed to unite Democrats around defeating Rogers, who previously served seven terms in Congress, saying that he and Stevens would be focused on “bringing the party back together.”
Rogers on Wednesday portrayed El-Sayed as an “extremist,” saying in a statement that the election is “about deciding whether Michigan has a future built on common sense — or whether we hand the keys to the most fringe extremists in the nation.”
El-Sayed, a former city and county health official, focused on opposing money in politics and pushing for Medicare for All, among other issues. His opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza and Stevens’ support for Israel became a major issue in the campaign. AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group, spent millions in support of Stevens.
Early in the primary race, El-Sayed sought to temper some of the concerns around his progressive agenda by presenting himself as a Michigan-first, working-class-focused candidate, said John Barry Ryan, a University of Michigan professor of political science.
But as excitement over his campaign began to mount among progressives on a national level, Ryan said, El-Sayed’s public posture swung to a middle ground.
“The signal he’s trying to send is, I’m not a moderate, but I’m also not an extremist,” Ryan said.
Whether El-Sayed can effectively sell his message to undecided voters against Rogers now becomes a key question of the general election, said Corwin Smidt, a politics professor at Michigan State University.
“[Rogers] has experience. He has credentials,” Smidt said. “El-Sayed doesn’t have that. But I do think he’s got the skill and the right language to get him over.”
At least two key Michigan Democrats signaled a desire to move past the primary’s fights. Late Tuesday, Mallory McMorrow, a Michigan state senator who launched her own bid for the seat but suspended her campaign in early July, released an endorsement of El-Sayed.
“Whatever differences there were between the candidates in this race, those differences are nothing compared to the contrast in November,” McMorrow wrote on X. “The only way we get there is together.”
After conceding, Stevens sent a similar signal in a statement:
The more I think about Proposition 40, the billionaire tax that will go before California voters in November, the angrier I get.
I’m angry at President Trump. His cruel slashing of Medicaid threatens the health of millions of Californians, may lead to the loss of hundreds of thousands of medical jobs and is the stated reason behind Proposition 40, which would levy a one-time 5% tax on billionaires. Trump invoked government deficits, but this was really his latest attack against people he sees as losers and thus expendable — people of color, the undocumented and especially the poor. “Evil” isn’t mean enough a word to describe this.
I’m upset at what Proposition 40 proposes to do. It’s a temporary stopgap that doesn’t reverse Trump’s Medicaid cuts and won’t solve the fundamental problems facing healthcare, or all the other things that make life in California so expensive. Plus, since when has a tax happened just once?
Proposition 30 was supposed to be a temporary tax increase for Californians who earn more than $250,000 a year in the name of propping up K-12 schools and community colleges. Passed in 2012, it was supposed to expire in 2019. Instead, voters extended it to 2030 — and our public schools are in more dire need than ever.
If Proposition 40 succeeds, you know every advocacy group from Yreka to San Ysidro will propose one-time taxes in the name of rescuing something or other. But relying on new taxes, or strengthening old ones, only shows that people are out of ideas — a dangerous scenario for democracy.
I’m enraged at billionaires. In the past, California’s captains of industry — your Dohenys, Gettys, Huntingtons and so many more — at least pretended to care about the rest of society by funding charities, the arts and other things meant to better the masses. Not this generation. Their avarice, their gleeful supplication before a tyrant like Trump, their obsession with breaking things and not caring about the consequences and their indifference to how the rest of us live have made billionaires a deserved scapegoat, about as popular as a diaper rash.
I’m furious at Proposition 40’s supporters. For a generation, California’s left has treated the rich as a goose that keeps laying golden, taxable eggs, making the state budget too reliant on a sliver of the population. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget summary this year estimated that the top 1% of Californians paid about 45% of the state’s personal income taxes from 2002 through 2023. What Proposition 40 supporters don’t get is that you can only smack a goose so much to give more until it bites back, which is what California billionaires are increasingly doing by throwing their cash around to defeat any political candidate exuding a whiff of progressivism.
Mark Zuckerberg and Lauren Sanchez attend the inauguration of President Trump Jan. 20, 2025, in Washington.
(Kenny Holston-Pool / Getty Images)
I’m upset at Proposition 40’s opponents. Backing two other ballot initiatives that would neutralize Proposition 40 doesn’t amount to a convincing argument against it. A point they do argue — that picking on billionaires will alienate them, push them out of California and tank the state’s budget — is at least plausible. But it’s not a winning argument in this era of populism on both the left and right, where voters seem to approve of cutting off your nose to spite the man.
I’m disgusted by Proposition 40’s architect. Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West President Dave Regan represents everything wrong with the union movement in California. He has made a mockery out of the proposition system by continually trotting out initiatives in the name of bettering the lives of blue-collar Californians. But as my colleague Taryn Luna reported last month, Regan doesn’t even believe in what he sells: He uses the threat of ballot measures to cut deals for his members, and his members alone. Way to use the rest of us as a bargaining chip, Dave.
I’m done with Newsom. He opposes Proposition 40 in the most Newsom-esque way possible. One of his arguments is that it will scare away billionaires from California — there he goes, carrying water for oligarchs again. His other argument is even more ludicrous — that Proposition 40 isn’t enough because there should be a permanent national tax on billionaires via changes to the tax code instead of a one-off. So Californians shouldn’t go after billionaires because you want to do it? Good luck explaining that logic to voters across the country if you run for president in 2028.
I’m mad at California Democratic Party leaders. Its executive board recently endorsed Proposition 40 despite the many loyal soldiers and allies who are opposed, including gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra, the California Teachers Assn. and Planned Parenthood. Other unions are expected to oppose Proposition 40 or sit out the campaign, setting up the party’s latest civil war in an election year when state Democrats need the fewest distractions. But that’s the party’s leadership for you — they’ve never met an internal crisis they didn’t make worse.
I’m revolted by the California Republican Party. It entered the second Trump administration with tailwinds behind its sails after a generation of statewide failures, installing a record number of Latino GOP legislators in Sacramento and grabbing enough voters of color to imagine a future in which they once again mattered. Instead, the party’s blind devotion to Trump has left it with the moral authority of a dandruff flake.
California’s Republican congressional delegation unanimously voted for Trump’s Medicaid cuts, even though rural parts of the state, which also happen to be deep red, will be severely affected. State GOP leaders either stayed silent or cheered as Trump volleyed other financial missiles against California, including canceling billions of dollars in clean energy initiatives solely because we’re a blue state. Proposition 40 supporters just need to say that Republicans oppose the ballot measure and Californians will line up to vote “yes” like In-N-Out fans idling to grab a Double-Double.
Not me. I’m angry, for sure: The fight over Proposition 40 will add nothing but rage to this election and a redwood grove’s worth of political mailers. The Medicaid cuts will worsen life for too many people. As odious as Trump and his side have been, Proposition 40 solves too little for too short a time, while potentially making things permanently worse.
WASHINGTON — Acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche cleared a critical hurdle Tuesday in his bid to be confirmed to the post after swaying Republican holdouts on a Senate committee to advance his nomination for a floor vote.
The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 12-10 along party lines in support of the nomination of President Trump’s former personal attorney, who has aggressively pushed the Republican administration’s priorities since taking over from Pam Bondi in April.
The vote followed a deal struck late Sunday between Blanche and two Republican senators who had been threatening to block his confirmation over the settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service regarding the president’s leaked tax returns.
Republican Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina had said they were withholding their support unless the Justice Department confirmed in writing that it was not moving forward with a $1.8 billion fund to compensate Trump allies who believe they were prosecuted for political purposes, which the administration had announced as part of the settlement.
After days of negotiations, Blanche issued an order Sunday evening confirming “beyond any doubt, that there is no Fund.”
Since the settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS was announced, “No Members were appointed; no funds were transferred; no process for receiving claims was established; no claims were paid,” the order said.
Cornyn and Tillis had also pressed for clarification on a separate part of the settlement that would grant Trump and members of his family immunity from tax audits.
Democrats complain about the fund
Under the deal, the Justice Department clarified in writing that the tax audit immunity agreement applies only to claims open at the time of the settlement and does not protect Trump from examination of future tax filings. It also makes clear that only the parties that brought the lawsuit — Trump, two of his sons, and the Trump Organization — are covered by the tax agreement.
Democrats say Blanche’s order doesn’t go far enough to prevent the Trump administration from reviving the fund after the acting attorney general’s confirmation and have called for legislation to permanently bar it. The order also doesn’t stop the administration from compensating Trump allies — including people who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — through a previously established process that allows people to file claims for damages if they believed they were wronged by the government.
The fund “can easily be revived with a new order from the Department of Justice 15 minutes after Mr. Blanche is confirmed as attorney general,” said Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the committee.
Blanche’s independence has been called into question
Blanche has faced intense scrutiny regarding his ability to maintain independence from the White House, the Justice Department’s pursuit of the president’s political foes and the agency’s handling of files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking investigation.
But it was the settlement of Trump’s $10-billion lawsuit against the IRS that threatened to derail Blanche’s nomination, forcing a delay in the committee vote last week amid pressure from the two Republican senators, who are not returning to Capitol Hill after their terms end in January.
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, who chairs the committee, said Tillis and Cornyn’s demands were “common sense.” Grassley said the senators’ concerns about the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” and the IRS settlement were shared by many other lawmakers, including himself.
“I’m grateful that they as well as Mr. Blanche and the White House worked in good faith to solve them, formally rescinding the fund, clarifying the scope of the release of claims has put this issue to bed once and for all,” Grassley said.
Trump’s lawsuit has been sharply criticized because of the highly unusual way it was handled, with the president challenging an agency overseen by the executive branch he leads. A judge last month slammed the case as an improper exercise in self-dealing and referred one of Trump’s attorneys who filed it for potential disciplinary action.
Blanche was an important figure for Trump’s defense
Blanche, a former federal prosecutor and key member of Trump’s defense team as the Republican battled four indictments, arrived at the Justice Department last year as deputy attorney general. He was elevated to acting attorney general following Attorney General Pam Bondi’s failure to meet Trump’s demands to successfully prosecute his perceived political opponents.
While Blanche insisted he wasn’t auditioning for the permanent post, he moved swiftly to accelerate investigations into Trump foes and advance other White House priorities, drawing condemnation from critics who say he has not shed his title as Trump’s personal lawyer.
Shortly after Blanche took the top post, the Justice Department moved to indict longtime Trump adversary James Comey, the former FBI director, on charges of threatening the 47th president by posting a social media photograph of seashells in the numerical arrangement of “86 47.”
Comey’s lawyers have accused the Justice Department of misleading judges, submitting documents containing false statements and withholding key facts to bring what the defense described as a politically motivated prosecution.
Blanche separately appointed Joseph diGenova, an 81-year-old former Justice Department prosecutor from the Reagan administration, to oversee a Florida-based investigation into whether former law enforcement and intelligence officials conspired over the last decade to undermine Trump.
Richer and Jalonick write for the Associated Press.
Esther Kim Varet has gotten a lot of questions recently from “depressed” liberals wondering whom they should vote for in November to represent them in the redrawn 40th Congressional District, which covers a large swath of inland Orange County and portions of San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
The Democratic art gallery owner placed third in last month’s closely watched primary for the seat, behind Republican incumbent Reps. Ken Calvert of Corona and Young Kim of Anaheim Hills. Calvert and Kim were pushed into the same district by last year’s Proposition 50 and will be the only two candidates facing off for the seat in November.
Kim Varet said her supporters have “obviously put a lot of thought into” which of the incumbents to support, but they have had a hard time swallowing the idea of voting for either. So she tells them why, “if we’re playing a kind of longer game,” they should vote for Kim.
She says Calvert is favored to win, so supporting Kim will “force both sides to spend more on this race” and reduce Republican spending on other races where Democrats still have a shot at beating a GOP incumbent. She says Calvert is “much more senior” than Kim, so ousting him would be “more significant.” And Calvert, as chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, has funded Trump’s war in Iran and would be “morally the better target.”
In last month’s primary, Kim Varet and other Democratic candidates collectively won 42.9% of the district vote, compared with Calvert’s 34.9% and Kim’s 20.6%. If enough of those Democratic voters coalesced behind Kim, they could end Calvert’s 33-year run in Congress.
Whether they will, however, is unclear. Such “orphaned” voters — those left without a candidate of their party in a general election — are historically just as likely to abstain from voting or to vote based on far less strategic considerations. Californians created that dilemma more than a decade ago when they approved the top-two primary system that puts all candidates on the same ballot and only allows the top-two finishers to advance to the general election, regardless of their party affiliation.
Paul Mitchell, a Democratic redistricting expert who devised California’s new congressional map under Proposition 50, said the backers of California’s primary system sold it years ago as a moderating force, where those orphaned voters would be encouraged to select the least partisan general election candidate.
But in reality, Mitchell said, “it doesn’t work that way.”
Voter decisions
Mitchell said intraparty matchups in the past have shown 35% of orphaned voters or more simply abstain from voting in that race.
A recent analysis Mitchell conducted of races, including for seats in the state Legislature, showed such undervoting among orphaned voters in every intraparty race for a state Senate seat in 2024 — one clear example being the competitive and costly battle between two Democrats, Laura Richardson and Michelle Chambers, in South Los Angeles.
Many others vote based on “tertiary things,” he said, such as a candidate’s race or gender, or whether they seem local or a Washington insider.
“Traditionally, it isn’t so much about somebody being more moderate,” he said, in part because voters can’t always discern moderation among candidates of an opposing party. “Republicans might be able to tell the difference between a moderate Republican and a conservative Republican, but Democrats can’t tell the difference.”
Incumbency can also be a drag on a candidate if orphaned voters dislike their track record, even if their opponent is even further from those voters politically. As one example, Mitchell pointed to rural, more conservative parts of the state going for Kevin de León over Sen. Dianne Feinstein when he challenged her in 2018, despite his running to her left.
“You’re like, how in the hell did these rural counties vote for Kevin de León? And it was because there were a lot of Republicans who, if they were going to vote in the U.S. Senate race, just wanted to vote against Feinstein,” Mitchell said.
Katelyn Stauffer, an associate politics professor at University of Georgia who has studied voter behavior in top-two races in California, said people “like to make decisions that are easy,” and “for most people, the ultimate cue is, does this person share my party?”
When party doesn’t differentiate candidates, voters tend to rely on other “simple cues or heuristics,” Stauffer said.
For example, based on her research, she said, women regardless of party and Democrats regardless of gender are more likely to vote for a woman in such scenarios.
Candidate messaging
Candidates could consider moderating their message to attract orphaned voters, though that can be perilous.
In a statement to The Times, Calvert accused Kim of trying to woo orphaned voters with a more bipartisan message, as evidence she is untrustworthy.
“Young Kim has bragged to some voters that she’s a moderate who censured President Trump. She’s then claimed to others that she [is] a 100% Trump Republican. It’s obvious Young Kim will say anything to try and hold on to her job, which is why voters from every party just can’t trust her,” Calvert said.
He said he has “been a consistent conservative in Congress for many years and that’s not going to change.” He also claimed to be “one of the most effective members of Congress,” saying he has secured funding to reduce traffic congestion, fight fires and improve water infrastructure in his district — things “voters from all parties want.”
Chris Pack, a spokesman for Kim, denied that Kim is changing her tune depending on her audience, and dismissed Calvert’s claims of serving his constituents well, calling him a “do-nothing dinosaur” who has failed to improve his constituents’ lives for decades.
“The truth is he’s had more than enough time to deliver for the people of California, and he hasn’t,” Pack said.
Similar intraparty battles are playing out in other congressional races between Democrats.
In the 4th Congressional District, which stretches through the Napa and Sacramento valleys, Republican voters could help decide between incumbent Rep. Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena) and his challenger from the left, venture capitalist Eric Jones.
Thompson — who has been in Congress since 1999 and sits on the powerful Ways and Means Committee — won 41% of the vote in the primary, while Jones won 22.2%. A slate of six Republican candidates collectively won 36.1%.
Jones, who backs progressive measures to expand Medicare and cut working-class taxes, said he hopes voters of all stripes look beyond political labels and see that he is the only candidate in the race who will take on big utilities, healthcare lobbyists and other big-business interests who fund Thompson’s campaigns.
“I want voters to realize that there’s a real choice in front of them,” he said.
Thompson said he is focused on doing his job, introducing himself to voters in the new parts of his district, reconfigured under Proposition 50, and “figuring out how I can work with them” to address their concerns. He said there is “a lot of commonality” among voters of all parties who want “good roads, clean air, water, strong [agriculture], safe communities,” and that he’s been endorsed by local Republicans and Democrats alike.
Thompson also rejected Jones’ criticism of his fundraising, saying he has “done a lot of good work that’s not necessarily in the interests” of those who have contributed to his campaign. He also said fundraising is necessary in a race against a wealthy opponent like Jones, who donated millions of dollars to his own campaign.
In the 7th Congressional District, Republican voters will help decide between incumbent Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Sacramento) — who has been in Congress since replacing her late husband there in 2005 — and her challenger from the left, progressive Sacramento City Councilmember Mai Vang.
Vang won 31.2% of the primary vote. Matsui won 29.1%. Two Republican candidates together won 37%.
In a statement to The Times, Matsui said November’s general election “will be a significantly different race because there will be many more voters that didn’t vote in the primary,” and that she will “work harder to court voters by meeting them where they are and informing them how I’ve delivered on my promises,” including on healthcare, public safety and jobs.
Vang did not respond to a request for comment but has previously accused Matsui of not delivering on her promises for decades.
“After 20 years, families are living paycheck to paycheck, people of my generation are no closer to owning a home, and you still can’t afford a doctor visit,” Vang said last month.
Party involvement
Political parties have traditionally shunned meddling in races where they lack a candidate of their own, experts said. They sometimes endorse in races where two members of their own party are facing off against each other, but not always.
Nick Poche, a Republican National Committee spokesperson, said his organization is largely focused on three races in which Republicans are either looking to hold or win seats from Democrats: the 13th Congressional District, where Republican Kevin Lincoln is challenging Rep. Adam Gray (D-Merced); the 22nd Congressional District, where Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford) is trying to fend off Democrat Randy Villegas; and the 48th Congressional District, where Republican Jim Desmond is facing off against Democrat Marni von Wilpert for the seat of retiring Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall).
He called the Democrats in those races “radical socialists and emblematic of California’s far-left failures,” and said his party would be campaigning against them. But he declined to speak to the Calvert-Kim race, or the races in which two Democrats are facing off.
The California Republican Party did not respond to a request for comment.
Rusty Hicks, chair of the California Democratic Party, said his party is focused on “fulfilling the promise of Proposition 50” to flip five seats to help his party win control of the House, and is also focused on three competitive races: those for Valadao’s and Issa’s seats, and one in the 6th Congressional District, where Democrat Richard Pan is taking on Republican-turned-independent Rep. Kevin Kiley of Rocklin.
Hicks said the party will not endorse Calvert or Kim, whom he called “two rotten choices,” but has endorsed incumbents Matsui and Thompson in their races against fellow Democrats because they have “been leading” on issues of affordability and access to healthcare and “are best positioned to be reelected.”
Jones scoffed at his party endorsing his opponent. “Are we really excited that the Democratic machine keeps trying to choose our electeds for us?” he said.
Candidates for the ruling Democratic Party’s leadership race, (L-R) Kim Min-seok, Chung Cheong-rae and Song Young-gil, hold their hands up together to greet the crowd at a joint speech for the preliminary elections for party leader and Supreme Council members at CJB Media Center in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province, South Korea, 01 August 2026. Photo by YONHAP / EPA
Aug. 2 (Asia Today) — Chung Cheong-rae rebounded in the South Korean ruling Democratic Party’s leadership race Sunday, defeating Kim Min-seok in the southeastern region after narrowly losing the opening contest in central South Korea.
Chung and Kim have each won one of the first two regional rounds ahead of the party’s Aug. 17 national convention, leaving the race for party leader virtually even.
Chung received 25,189 votes, or 46.65%, from eligible party members in Busan, Ulsan and South Gyeongsang Province.
Kim finished second with 23,675 votes, or 43.84%, leaving Chung ahead by 1,514 votes, or 2.81 percentage points.
Former party leader Song Young-gil received 5,129 votes, or 9.49%. The officially reported percentages were rounded to 46.65% for Chung, 43.85% for Kim and 9.5% for Song.
Kim had narrowly won Saturday’s opening round in the Chungcheong region, which includes Daejeon, Sejong and North and South Chungcheong provinces.
Kim received 45.05%, compared with Chung’s 44.61%, a margin of 303 votes, or 0.44 percentage points. Song received 10.34%.
After the first two rounds, Chung held a narrow cumulative lead with about 45.5%, compared with Kim’s 44.5%.
The results announced during the regional contests represent only the first-choice votes of eligible party members. Delegate votes and the results of a public opinion survey will be announced at the national convention in Daejeon.
One-person, one-vote system raises importance of members
The Democratic Party finalized an electoral roll last week containing 17,667 delegates and more than 1.52 million dues-paying party members.
The leadership election is the first to apply a one-person, one-vote principle equally to delegates and eligible members, replacing a system in which individual delegate votes carried substantially more weight.
Combined votes from delegates and eligible party members will account for 70% of the final result, while a public opinion survey will make up the remaining 30%.
The large number of party members means their preferences are expected to play a decisive role.
The Chungcheong and southeastern electorates together represent less than 20% of the total party electorate, however, making it too early to predict the final outcome.
Chung told reporters after Sunday’s results that he had regained the lead.
“I have come from behind,” Chung said.
He compared his campaign with former President Roh Moo-hyun’s victory over Lee In-je during the 2002 presidential nomination race.
Chung said Roh defeated an opponent supported by an established political organization and numerous lawmakers despite having little comparable institutional backing.
“Just as Roh Moo-hyun defeated Lee In-je, who lined up organizations and lawmakers behind him, Chung Cheong-rae will defeat Kim Min-seok,” he said.
Chung also told party members during a speech at the BEXCO convention center in Busan that “organization cannot defeat a political wind.”
Candidates exchange accusations of factional betrayal
The close race has intensified a broader conflict over factions within the ruling party.
During a joint campaign speech in Ulsan, Kim called for an end to what he described as a damaging confrontation between factions aligned with President Lee Jae-myung and Chung.
“We must end the vicious cycle of the Lee-Chung conflict,” Kim said.
He said he would refer people responsible for improper factional activity during the campaign to the party’s ethics committee.
Chung responded by invoking Kim’s conduct during the 2002 presidential election.
Kim left Roh’s then-ruling party after joining lawmakers who pushed for Roh to form a unified presidential ticket with independent candidate Chung Mong-joon.
The group was widely criticized by Roh’s supporters as having abandoned the party’s presidential nominee.
“A person who betrays once will betray again,” Chung said, directing the remark at Kim.
The renewed dispute over the episode reflects the extent to which events from the 2002 presidential campaign continue to influence relationships and perceptions inside South Korea’s progressive political camp.
Song also criticized Chung’s attempt to return as party leader.
“The Democratic Party does not permit consecutive terms,” Song said. “Is there really a need to seek another term?”
Ranked-choice votes could determine winner
The Democratic Party is using a preferential voting system in the three-candidate leadership contest.
Voters rank the candidates by preference. Should no candidate receive a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate finishing last will be eliminated and that candidate’s second-choice votes will be redistributed to the remaining two contenders.
The redistribution process will continue until one candidate secures a majority.
The regional percentages released so far include only first-choice votes and do not show how Song’s supporters ranked Chung and Kim as their second choices.
With Chung and Kim each receiving less than 50%, Song’s redistributed votes could determine the winner if the close three-way pattern continues through the remaining regional contests.
The regional campaign will continue Saturday in Jeju and Incheon, followed by Gangwon Province, Daegu and North Gyeongsang Province on Aug. 9.
Voting in the Honam region, covering Gwangju and North and South Jeolla provinces, is scheduled for Aug. 15. The final regional events will take place in Gyeonggi Province and Seoul on Aug. 16.
A 5% strategic-region bonus will apply in the traditionally conservative Yeongnam and Gangwon regions.
The party leader candidates are also scheduled to participate in televised debates on KBS on Wednesday and SBS on Aug. 12.
The final result will be announced at the Democratic Party’s national convention in Daejeon on Aug. 17.
A controversial wealth tax won backing from the California Democratic Party on Sunday, the latest episode in the measure roiling the left and its allies.
The party’s executive board voted Sunday to endorse Proposition 40, which, if approved by voters this November, would impose a 5% one-time tax on billionaires’ assets to pay for healthcare.
The measure has proved divisive. While it has support from progressives including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont), others including Gov. Gavin Newsom, gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra, and a growing list of labor unions have come out against it, arguing the one-time nature of the tax and billionaire flight could cause more harm than good to California’s state budget.
“This endorsement puts to rest the idea that California Democrats are not united by the billionaire tax — they are,” said Dave Regan, President of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, the labor union that gathered enough signatures to put Proposition 40 on the ballot.
Regan cited an internal poll which found more than 80% of registered Democrats support the tax, “and now the Democratic Party of California has officially embraced that strong support through this endorsement.”
Public opinion polls have shown the measure with slim majority support. According to a May poll from the Public Policy Institute of California, 54% of likely voters and 76% of Democrats said they would vote for the tax.
Proposition 40 seeks to raise $100 billion over a five-year span to backfill cuts to Medicaid and food assistance programs included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by President Trump last year. Its supporters argue that the federal tax cuts benefit the wealthy at the expense of low-income people and that Proposition 40 would reverse the damage.
Its opponents, which include the California Teachers Assn. and tech founders spending millions to defeat the measure, argue it could destabilize the state budget — which already taxes wealthy earners at higher rates — by pushing billionaires to leave California for other states.
In a statement, the No on Prop. 40 campaign said Newsom, Becerra, and organizations including the California Professional Firefighters union and Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California oppose the tax “because it’s bad for our budget, bad for our economy, and bad for our future. We need smart, durable solutions to our biggest challenges, not unreliable, untested schemes that shortchange healthcare, education, and public safety.”
Democratic executive board members endorsed the measure Sunday during a meeting in San Diego. The party also voted to oppose two competing ballot measures that seek to undercut the billionaire’s tax, along with a voter ID measure and a proposal to weaken the California Environmental Quality Act for housing and infrastructure projects.
Democrats voted to endorse two housing bonds — a $11.25-billion bond to build affordable housing and a $25-billion down payment assistance program — and an $8.4-billion immunology research bond.
The party is also supporting a measure to make permanent an existing tax on high-income earners which funds education and health care.
“Every endorsement we make is earned, not given,” California Democratic Party chair Rusty Hicks said in a statement. “California Democrats take a deliberative approach to our endorsement process that puts our values first and ensures our members have a meaningful voice in shaping the future of our state.”
The five-star KOIA All-Suite Wellbeing Resort on Kos, Greece, is a world away from the party scene – and rooms start from £220 a night
Views from KOIA resort are magical(Image: KOIA)
Like countless Brits, my initial encounter with the Greek island came via an 18-30 holiday. I recall cheap cocktails, sticky dancefloors and a hotel where staff flat-out refused to hand out more than one deflated pillow per guest. It was enjoyable in that uniquely carefree way only your early twenties can deliver, but I’d mentally categorised Kos with the other party islands I’d ticked off and left behind.
So when the invitation arrived to return this summer, I’ll confess my expectations were modest. I certainly wasn’t anticipating discovering one of the most peaceful hotels I’ve ever stayed in.
Situated high above the Aegean Sea, KOIA All-Suite Wellbeing Resort feels like it exists on an entirely separate island. There’s no thumping music poolside, no inflatable flamingoes floating about and definitely no wristbands.
Instead, it offered supreme luxury through serene infinity pools, premium dining and wellness experiences – all at a sensible price point, reports OK!.
Stay in style
Launched in 2023, the five-star adults-only sanctuary boasts just 51 suites, meaning it never feels overcrowded, even at full capacity. Built into the hillside overlooking Agios Fokas, roughly a 12-minute drive from Kos Town, the resort draws inspiration from the ancient wisdom of Hippocrates, who was born on the island, with wellbeing woven into every aspect.
Suites span from pared-back Cave Suites to more generous Sea View Suites featuring private infinity pools or outdoor whirlpools, all styled in soothing neutral shades, natural stone and timber. The appeal of the hotel lies in the fact that every suite provides full or partial vistas across the Aegean, meaning there’s genuinely no disappointing room.
Thoughtful details such as a pillow menu, rainfall showers, smart-controlled blinds and room-service dining choices really reinforce the sense of ‘private luxury’. In terms of facilities, there are two pools – one indoors within the spa and a main pool – plus a gym.
The food
Despite there being just one restaurant, Thyme, I never found myself craving additional dining choices, which speaks volumes about how exceptional the food was. For breakfast, a generous buffet featuring local fruit, pastries and made-to-order dishes can be savoured with uninterrupted sea vistas.
Come evening, Thyme becomes an elegant à la carte restaurant showcasing Mediterranean cuisine with seasonal ingredients, fresh seafood and regional wines. I’m not exaggerating when I say I requested the shrimp linguine four times.
Lunch is also available there, but with a completely different menu from evenings, offering plenty of variety through fancy sandwiches and grilled options. Throughout the day, my book and I set up camp at the pool bar for iced coffees between dips, before relocating to the sophisticated Elixir Bar at sunset, where cocktails are served with a backdrop of one of the finest views on the island.
What’s on
If you need more than a pool and a good book to keep you occupied, the carefully curated range of activities on offer are well worth booking in advance. From open-air morning yoga overlooking the glittering sea to a traditional baking class with Thyme’s head chef, there’s plenty to keep you busy.
I headed to the hotel’s Ydor Spa (on the one overcast day we had) and relished the chance to privately hire the Himalayan salt room and sauna cabin before treating myself to a full body massage. I’d also highly recommend the floating breakfast experience. I’ve never consumed so much food in a single morning, and there truly is nothing more delightful than chasing your strawberries as they drift across your private pool.
Further afield
Reception can point you towards hiking trails leading to the medieval ruins of Palio Pyli or the summit of Mount Díkaios, where breathtaking sunset views from the island’s highest peak make the climb thoroughly worthwhile. Kos Town offers an entirely different tempo, boasting Roman landmarks such as the beautifully preserved Odeon of Kos and Casa Romana, alongside some superb tavernas to dine at. If you have a hire car, venture out to the island’s thermal springs, located at the northern tip of the island at Therma Beach, where the seawater bubbles.
Why I’ll be returning
It’s uncommon to experience a genuine sense of magic from a hotel, yet that’s precisely what I encountered here. A tranquil retreat, ideal for those seeking respite from the hustle and bustle.
Perhaps the greatest revelation was discovering it on an island I’d previously dismissed as a party destination. Its intimate size lends itself to a wonderfully personal level of service, and within just a few days, the staff already knew my preferred morning coffee and favourite sunbed spot. Worth noting too – from August 2026, guests can also look forward to a brand-new Greek restaurant, a second pool and newly added suites.
Book it
A Junior Suite with Sea View and Hot Tub starts from £220 per night, and a Sea View Suite with Private Pool starts from £256 with breakfast included. Book via koiaresort.com to make the most of offers like complimentary airport transfers. Half board and full board dining also available. Flights to Kos from major UK airports operate daily May-October with return pricing from around £60.
Bill (Spaceman) Lee, presidential candidate of the Rhinoceros Party, is turning his attention to the environment. According to USA Today, he’s telling people to imagine the Earth as a single-cell organism on its way to decay.
“For every smokestack in Gary, Ind., we need a Tums factory next door putting out antacid to absorb the pollution,” said Lee, a former pitcher for the Montreal Expos.
If elected, Lee said he would name writer Hunter S. Thompson as his vice president.
“Nobody knows more about vice than he does,” Lee said.
Kinerism-of-Week: The latest from New York Mets announcer Ralph Kiner: “We’ll be right back after this word from Manufacturer Hangovers.”
Said Chicago quarterback Jim McMahon, when asked about the heroics of former teammate Doug Flutie in New England’s win last Sunday: “Who? Oh, Bambi. It was great, wasn’t it? He’s America’s midget again. You guys send that quote out to New England for me.”
The Bears visit New England Oct. 30.
Boston Red Sox pitcher Mike Boddicker, on Game 3 mound opponent Bob Welch of Oakland: “He is hyper out there. He digs a hole in front of the rubber that you could hide a tiger in.”
New York Mets pitcher Ron Darling claims ABC’s Jim Palmer went too far in criticizing David Cone for writing the column that stirred up the Dodgers.
“He isn’t Mother Teresa,” Darling said of the former Baltimore pitcher.
Trivia Time: Who is the only catcher to win the Gold Glove in both the American and National leagues? (Answer below.)
80 Years Ago Today: On Oct. 8, 1908, the Chicago Cubs won the National League pennant when Mordecai (Three Finger) Brown beat Christy Mathewson, 4-2, in the playoff of the disputed game in which Fred Merkle made his memorable boner.
In the Sept. 23 game, with the score 1-1 in the ninth inning, Merkle failed to touch second base when a teammate delivered an apparent game-winning hit for the Giants. The Cubs retrieved the ball and touched second base, forcing Merkle and negating the run.
New York fans, thinking their team had won, swarmed the field, which led to the halting of the tie game. It was made up after the other teams had completed their seasons, with the Giants and the Cubs tied for first with 98-55 records.
From Baltimore outfielder Jim Traber, whose soft single broke up the second-straight no-hit bid by Toronto’s Dave Stieb: “A month from now, I’ll remember hitting .216, not breaking up a no-hitter.”
Add Forgettable Quotes: Said Lou Piniella when he was named manager of the New York Yankees June 23: “I expect to be here a good while.”
Trivia Answer: Bob Boone. He’s won Gold Gloves twice with the Philadelphia Phillies and three times with the Angels.
Quotebook
“Late Night’s” David Letterman: “Baseball was an exhibition sport in the Olympics this year–sort of like it was in Baltimore.”
WASHINGTON — The nation is set to have its least competitive congressional election cycle in years by some measures, with California partly driving the shift.
The redistricting carried out in California and nine other states since 2024 has left the nation with an unusually low number of truly competitive districts, narrowing the battle for U.S. House control in this year’s historically consequential midterms cycle to a few dozen races at best.
In California, that looks like a paradox: The state has both a shrinking number of political battlegrounds and a handful of critical races that could help decide which party controls the House. Both are a result of Proposition 50, the Democratic-led, voter-passed redistricting effort designed to offset new maps drawn by Republicans in Texas and other states.
Only three California races are rated as competitive by Cook Political Report, the nonpartisan analyst, compared with 12 races in 2024 and nine in 2022, according to a Times analysis of Cook data.
California was also the biggest driver in the nationwide decline of competitive seats, according to a separate Cook analysis released Wednesday. Six of the 14 U.S. House seats that dropped out of the swing-seat zone in 2026 were in the Golden State.
“There’s no question that we’re seeing the consequence” of the state’s redistricting, “of having fewer competitive districts,” said Michael Latner, a professor of political science at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
That doesn’t dilute the key role California is expected to play in Democrats’ effort to win the House majority, however. The new map made some blue seats safer and gave the party the chance to flip up to five red seats.
“The path to the House majority still runs through California,” said Anna Elsasser, spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who said the party is investing heavily to flip those seats.
‘Not backing off’
The fight for the majority at the halfway point of President Trump’s second term is fierce. Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress, face headwinds fueled by voters’ feelings on the economy and the war in Iran. Democrats have built their campaigns around Americans’ economic frustration in an attempt to win the House majority and regain some power in Trump’s Washington.
Having more safe seats positions California to have a greater effect on the election, said Thad Kousser, a political science professor at UC San Diego, and in Congress afterward, where the state is expected to have a large blue delegation.
The less-competitive map is a return to the 2000s for California, when the state’s two parties agreed on a congressional map that created safe districts for both, Kousser said.
That decade saw fewer competitive House races before new maps created more battleground areas in 2010 and 2020, the result of regular redistricting that occurs every decade after the U.S. census.
The shift in the state’s competitive seats caused by Proposition 50’s partisan redistricting was so acute because the existing 2020 map was relatively neutral, Cook senior editor David Wasserman said in the report. In Florida, Missouri and Texas, by contrast, the maps Republicans replaced were already partisan, making the shifts less extreme.
Three of the seats Democrats targeted with Proposition 50 are rated as solidly blue, while two present fights: the Central Valley seat held by Republican David Valadao, the state’s only toss-up race per Cook, and the seat being vacated by retiring Republican Darrell Issa in the San Diego area, where the redrawn district now slightly favors Democrats.
Just one seat Republicans hope to flip is rated competitively by Cook, that of Democrat Adam Gray in the Central Valley. Democrats are slightly more favored there under the new map, but it presents a challenge for both parties.
Both parties view California’s three most competitive races as key to win, and each is putting resources toward a few additional contests.
“We’re not backing off a single seat in California,” said Christian Martinez, spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “We’re on offense.”
Shrinking battlegrounds nationwide
This year’s push by Republicans to redo state maps ahead of the November election — and California’s move to respond in kind — was without precedent. Ten states approved new maps; before this year, only two states had voluntarily redrawn maps between censuses for partisan advantage since 1970, according to a Pew Research Centeranalysis.
It was partly enabled by a spring Supreme Court decision that cleared the way for states to redraw their election maps to eliminate voting districts that were drawn with race as a consideration.
The 10 new maps supercharged an ongoing national trend of polarization that has seen the number of competitive seats shrink over the last 30 years. The country used to see election cycles with as many as 50 seats rated as toss-ups, said Erin Covey, who leads the Cook Political Report’s U.S. House coverage, something that has not happened since 2010. As of this week, just 18 of 435 House districts are rated as toss-ups by Cook.
California is not alone in having fewer battlegrounds; no state has a high concentration of competitive seats this cycle. Michigan had four under Cook’s ratings, and Pennsylvania, Iowa, New York and Texas each had three as of this week.
That could be unhealthy for democracy, experts said. Voters can feel as though their votes matter less, and it may contribute to negative public opinion about how the electoral system functions, Latner said.
“The very premise of a free republic is that you are going to have differences in views,” Latner said. “The way those differences get resolved is through electoral competition.”
The erosion of “free and fair competition … is a threat to all voters, regardless of their partisanship,” he added.
Eyes on key races
In California’s most competitive race, Valadao is being challenged in the redrawn 22nd District by progressive college professor Randy Villegas. Republicans are bullish about their chances to retain the seat.
In the neighboring 13th District, which the new map aimed to make safer for Democrats, Gray faces former Stockton mayor and Marine veteran Kevin Lincoln. Also important for both parties is the battle for the 48th District, the seat vacated by Issa. Republican Jim Desmond, a San Diego County supervisor, faces Democrat Marni von Wilpert, a San Diego City Council member.
Republicans have also targeted Rep. Derek Tran’s Democratic seat in the 45th District, another former battleground that Proposition 50 made safer for Democrats, and three other seats that Cook rates as solidly Democratic.
Democrats’ safer flips target Northern California’s 1st and Sacramento County’s 6th districts. They also expect to gain a seat in the new 41st District, which now covers parts of Los Angeles and Orange counties. The new map gave Democrats a Democratic voter registration edge there and forced Republican incumbent Ken Calvert to run in the newly drawn 40th District against fellow Republican Rep. Young Kim.
Last things first: Eve Babitz is a major minor L.A. writer who died five years ago at age 78. She spent nearly a quarter-century as a recluse, having suffered in 1997 a shocking and disfiguring accident while striking a match to light her Tiparillo. Her thin Indian skirt caught fire searing her panty hose into her flesh, leaving her with third-degree burns over more than half her body. She never published again, though many championed her gifts, including me. At the time of her misfortune, I was book editor of the Los Angeles Times. I had long admired her, especially the rollicking and indispensable “Slow Days, Fast Company,” first published in 1977, a charming and insightful series of stories bursting with pluck and sass. I recommended to John Carroll, the then-editor of the paper, that he make her a columnist and urged Babitz to write him directly. She did, and that letter from October 2000 is the last included in “Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were),” a book of letters expertly edited and chosen by Lili Anolik. Babitz tells Carroll that “what the paper needs is some writers that cause such an uproar, people will have to read it in order to stay abreast of the edge.” Babitz knew what she was talking about. She’d been living on that edge since she was a teenager at Hollywood High in the late 1950s.
Book Review
Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent But Some Were
By Eve Babitz; edited by Lili Anolik New York Review of Books: 448 pages, $19
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
The posthumous resurrection of Babitz’s writings is most welcome. Yet there is a risk of overpraising her merits. She was an unabashed booster of the glossy L.A. that became synonymous with a rising creative elite whose élan and narcissism she found irresistible.
Lili Anolik makes the case in her perfervid introduction: “The letters are everything you could want” and often “profound” and “frequently brilliant, invariably amusing.” She says they deserve to be put on the short shelf next to Virginia Woolf’s imperishable “A Room of One’s Own” for they are “every bit as candid, every bit as lucid, every bit as brutal, every bit as delicate as Virginia Woolf’s celebrated manifesto.”
If only.
“Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were)” by Eve Babitz
(New York Review Books)
Regrettably, Anolik, who is almost singlehandedly responsible for Babitz’s literary exhumation, has so fallen in love with her subject as to almost blind her to Babitz’s defects, both with respect to her writing and to the life. With two previous books — “Hollywood’s Eve” (2019) and “Didion and Babitz” (2024) — prompted by Anolik’s riveting March 2014 Vanity Fair profile, Anolik has become Babitz’s greatest champion. Now with “Too L.A.,” a title taken from Babitz’s own over-oxygenated writing, she has gathered and edited a trove of letters. They brilliantly reveal Babitz’s eye for the deep shallow as well as explore the porous boundary between the largely self-inflicted injuries of her private life and the glittering sheen of her public persona. Babitz herself, on the strength of these 197 letters, only 30 of which she ever mailed, understood in a way Anolik doesn’t the limitations of her talents, even as she strives to slip the shackles of a mansplaining culture which at almost every turn tried to blunt her ambitions, both artistic and writerly, even as her editors and admirers sought (often with her ardent encouragement) to slip between her sheets.
Eve Babitz was born in 1943 to Hollywood neo-royalty. Her Brooklyn-born father, Sol, was first violinist for both the Los Angeles Philharmonic Symphony and then the 20th Century Fox Studio Orchestra. Sol would ultimately marry Lily Mae Laviolette, a beautiful Cajun Catholic shiksa willing to convert to Judaism. Eve’s godfather was Sol’s good friend Igor Stravinsky. When puberty burst upon her at age 14, Babitz’s blossoming made her a prime candidate for induction by the fast-track girls at Hollywood High who called themselves the Thunderbird Girls and cruised the Sunset Strip in their cool cars, looking for the main chance.
From left, Sol Babitz, Mae Babitz, Mirandi Babitz and author Eve Babitz gather at a launch party for her book “Slow Days, Fast Company” in 1977.
(Photograph by Paul Ruscha; courtesy of Mirandi Babitz / The Huntington Library)
At 20, Babitz posed nude playing chess with the fully clothed Marcel Duchamp to promote Duchamp’s retrospective exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum. At the time, Babitz was having an affair with the museum’s 32-year-old married director, Walter Hopps, which perhaps explains Babitz’s reluctance to have her face photographed so as not to give the game away to Mrs. Hopps, who attended the opening. A month later, Babitz confides in an (unsent) letter: “Everything’s so fabulous for me now I can’t believe it. There’s nothing like two boyfriends to do it for you every time. There are such fabulous boys around and they take you out on dates and to movies and I feel just like a teenager. (I’m recapturing my lost youth.) I get to get dressed up and I flirt outrageously and put people on and I do things like look soulfully out the window and man it’s just too hoozie for words. … If only all of this could last forever — not that it will, but I can.”
She spent the rest of her life torn between the excitements of everyday life — cruising the hangouts du jour (Barney’s Beanery in the early 1960s where she met many of L.A.’s up-and-coming artists — Ed Kienholz, Billy Al Bengston, Laddie Dill, Peter Alexander, and the Ruscha brothers, Ed and Paul, both of whom she’d bed, Paul becoming an on-again, off-again boyfriend whose bisexuality made for a sometimes tenuous connection; and after seducing Jim Morrison before he became famous and later the Troubadour in the late 1960s which was a happy hunting ground — Steve Martin, Glenn Frey, Don Henley, J.D. Souther, Country Joe Mcdonald, Jackson Browne, to name only a few, and then Ports restaurant where she anchored a corner table) — and the seductions of drugs — uppers, acid (which she seemed to ingest with an alarming frequency), pot, of course, and then by the mid-1970s, tragically, an Everest of cocaine. She had entered what she aptly called the era of “squalid overboogie.”
Eve Babitz and her frequent companion Paul Ruscha celebrate the 1977 release of Babitz’s seminal “Slow Days, Fast Company.”
(Photograph courtesy of Mirandi Babitz / The Huntington Library)
The name-dropping is relentless and if, like me, you have an insatiable appetite for hoovering them up, this volume will not disappoint. Still, there are many pages of vapid jottings — “I cleaned the house, did the laundry, and vowed to quit smoking” — that suggest why Babitz was a failure as a novelist (see her dud “Sex and Rage”) and a superb writer of short stories and essays that stylishly plumbed the depths of her own sensibility precisely in the degree to which she was uninterested in other people.
Nearly 30 years after she stripped to please her married lover and startle the unsuspecting Duchamp, the father of Dada, and eight years after she joined AA in 1982 — the year her beloved father died of Huntington’s disease at age 70 which ultimately would also kill her — and gave up drugs and alcohol and (almost entirely) writing as well, which had always been seen by her as enabled by dope of one kind or another, she boasted that, looking back, “Everybody wanted to be me — they looked at me with yearning faces, and said, ‘Boy, you sure had fun.’ ” She was not entirely wrong. She had struck many admirers both then and now, as the quintessential California girl, a daughter of Dionysus, whose devotion to pleasure was free of misgiving or regret. She detested the East Coast avatars of apocalypse, like Nathanael West, who saw only doom and gloom in sunny L.A. Babitz, by contrast, saw things sunny side up. If Joan Didion was unsettled and made anxious by the hot Santa Anas that regularly kicked up, Babitz luxuriated in them, recalling how she and her sister would as young girls rush to embrace them, spinning madly round and round. In a 1977 unsent letter to Joseph Heller, who had championed her work when she had sent him an unsolicited fan letter after having read “Catch-22” when it was first published and she was barely 20, she declares proudly: “I’m a gossip storyteller who likes L.A. rather than hates it.” She refers to her “shallow nature,” writing that “I feel like an upstream salmon, determined to reach the shallow water, no matter how fast the river is running the other way.”
Eve Babitz, the ultimate Hollywood reveler, on Sunset Boulevard in 1980.
(Los Angeles Times)
On the evidence of these letters, she had two great loves: Ahmet Ertegun, a principal founder of Atlantic Records, and Tom Dowd, renown recording engineer and producer who worked for Ertegun. Of the two, Ertegun had the edge, if for no other reason than he came with buckets of dough, making possible assignations at his regular bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel with limo pickup and dropoff services, and the best champagne and other assorted stimulants. Ertegun was effortlessly elegant and erudite, and there was no one he didn’t know and who wouldn’t return his calls. He was married, age 45, 20 years older than Babitz, when they fell for each other in 1969. She began sleeping with him even as she agreed to profile him for Jann Wenner’s newly launched Rolling Stone. The writing didn’t go well. Wenner wanted a tougher piece than she was willing to write. Ultimately, she abandoned the assignment, claiming (not unreasonably) that she didn’t see how she could write objectively about a man she loved.
Babitz courted danger with heedless bravado and exemplary recklessness. She once had the moxie to rid herself of a would-be rapist: When told not to scream, she said with unimaginable sangfroid: “Why not?” The man bolted. It might be said of Babitz, as Oscar Wilde said of his life, that she spent her talent on her writing and reserved her genius for her life. Sculpting her natural gifts of wit and brazenness into a living artwork dazzled all who came within her orbit. Her lust for life was palpable. The letters are proof. She came at people without fear. She left them without apology. She was the boss of herself. She was the girl who seemed to have it all. The only thing she lacked was inexperience.
President Trump’s $1.4-billion crypto windfall has become the biggest obstacle to passing his sweeping digital-asset legislation as Democrats demand tougher language to prevent the president from profiting off an industry his administration regulates.
Senate Republicans released a proposal this week intended to break a months-long impasse over the bill, known as the Clarity Act. But Democrats and consumer watchdog groups dismissed the terms almost immediately, complaining the bill would not stop Trump or his family from continuing to profit from his meme coin and other crypto ventures.
Trump needs the support of at least seven Senate Democrats to pass the legislation, which would set rules for digital assets. Ethics has emerged as the biggest, though not the only, sticking point.
“It’s the linchpin,” said Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, a Maryland Democrat and key negotiator who has been supportive of the crypto industry.
A spokesperson for the White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House has consistently asserted Trump is not involved in managing the family’s crypto ventures and has denied conflicts of interest.
Democrats have specifically taken issue with a provision that would leave Trump’s Justice Department as the primary enforcer of the new ethics regulations, preventing state attorneys general from acting as an independent check.
Another Democratic negotiator, Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona, and Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina said they’re working on a compromise ethics proposal to send to the White House but didn’t provide details.
Senators in both parties said they see the negotiations in the coming week as key to whether a bill reaches Trump’s desk this year. But after the chilly initial reception to the latest White House offer, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.C.) said he didn’t think the Clarity Act would pass the chamber before the month-long August recess.
“We’ll see where the votes are,” Thune said.
Alsobrooks, Gallego and other crypto-friendly Democrats are demanding changes to other pieces of the massive bill, including consumer protection and illicit finance measures.
The bill has other issues, including opposition from banks intent on tightening restrictions on stablecoin rewards. Tillis and several other Republicans said they are considering backing changes to reflect banks’ concerns that their deposits could shift to stablecoin accounts, crimping their profits and customers’ access to credit.
Tillis has floated adding “circuit-breaker” language empowering the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. or other regulators to step in if bank deposits drop — an idea opposed by GOP Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, the crypto industry’s biggest backer in the chamber.
Porous provisions
Critics said the draft’s ethics protections are porous. It would let Trump divest a large stake in his crypto venture or move it into a blind trust for the rest of his term, but stops short of requiring him to sell.
“It’s going to allow him to keep making money the way he has in the past,” said Scott Greytak, deputy executive director of Transparency International US, an anti-corruption advocacy group.
The restrictions also hinge on whether an official has a “direct interest” in a crypto asset — a threshold that may not apply to Trump.
The president is a significant owner of World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto venture, through an entity called DT Marks DEFI LLC, which holds about a 38% stake. Whether that counts as a direct interest “isn’t clear,” said Zach Everson, research director for Public Citizen’s Trump Accountability Project. “Does direct interest describe how he holds the crypto?”
Because the bill wouldn’t apply to the children of government officials, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump could continue their own crypto business interests. And much of the family’s fortune has already been made: Trump and his affiliates have earned a huge windfall from meme coin and token ventures, income the legislation would not claw back.
Critics also decried a provision that would sunset the ethics requirements on Jan. 20, 2029, the day Trump’s successor would be inaugurated. That could prevent the next administration from holding Trump accountable.
The White House and Republicans argued that Trump had gone further in backing ethics restrictions in law than any previous president.
“History will remember this as the moment a president chose a higher standard of ethics than the law required of him,” Lummis, a key architect of the bill, said on X.
Democrats were skeptical even before the language was released. “Any meaningful ethics provision would be shot down by the White House,” Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said.
The politics of crypto have long divided Democrats, and a bipartisan deal on the legislation risks provoking a backlash from progressives. Failure to reach a deal, however, could make the party the target of a torrent of crypto campaign cash.
Crypto group Fairshake and its two affiliated super PACs have raised $164 million for the midterm elections, Federal Election Commission filings show, and have spent $66.6 million so far.
It’s the kind of political arsenal that Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York can ill afford to have aimed at his candidates as the party seeks to regain Senate control.
But others, like Murphy, have warned that blessing Trump’s big crypto bill would undermine Democrats’ midterm message.
A potential presidential candidate, Murphy said Wednesday while addressing the left-leaning Center for American Progress that the bill is before the Senate “because the industry paid for it” and urged Democrats to instead turn fighting crypto corruption into a potent campaign issue this fall.
Markets have grown less convinced a deal gets done. On Polymarket, the odds of the Clarity Act passing this year fell to about 1 chance in 3 earlier this week after Republicans released the new draft.
That’s about half the odds the prediction market gave passage after the Senate Banking Committee backed an earlier version of the bill on May 14.
Dennis and Patterson write for Bloomberg. Bloomberg writers Yash Roy, Lydia Beyoud, Aidan Williams, Bill Allison and Olga Kharif contributed to this report.
Democratic Party leadership candidates Kim Min-seok, left, and Jung Chung-rae attend a youth and labor policy forum at the National Assembly in Seoul on Wednesday. Photo by Asia Today
July 22 (Asia Today) — South Korea’s ruling Democratic Party leadership race has descended into an increasingly bitter dispute over allegations that members of a controversial religious group may be attempting to influence the party’s Aug. 17 national convention.
The dispute began after former Prime Minister Kim Min-seok, a candidate for party leader, raised the possibility that the Shincheonji Church of Jesus was intervening in the election.
Shincheonji is a South Korean religious movement whose alleged political activities have become the subject of a national investigation. The church has denied allegations that it directed members to join political parties or interfere in elections.
Kim’s claims have revived questions about why proposed legislation authorizing a special counsel investigation into Shincheonji was abandoned while rival candidate Jung Chung-rae was serving as Democratic Party leader.
The controversy has escalated beyond the original allegations. Jung has denied wrongdoing and threatened legal action, while his allies have demanded that Kim produce evidence, apologize or withdraw from the race.
Party members have warned that the dispute could deepen factional divisions and make it difficult to reunify the party after the convention.
The conflict is increasingly being viewed as a proxy battle between supporters of President Lee Jae Myung and those aligned with Jung.
Kim is generally associated with the party faction loyal to Lee. Jung, a former party leader, has developed his own base among rank-and-file members, and several senior party figures have publicly rallied behind him.
“The essence of this convention is to defeat an alliance of anti-Lee forces, divisive elements and Shincheonji,” Kim said Tuesday. “We must also examine, one by one, why the Shincheonji special counsel investigation did not proceed.”
Kim did not identify Jung by name. His remarks, however, were widely interpreted as criticism of Jung because proposed special counsel investigations into Shincheonji and the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification were abandoned during Jung’s tenure as party leader.
Rep. Lee Geon-tae, an ally of President Lee, reinforced Kim’s allegation in a social media post.
“It appears difficult to dismiss Shincheonji’s alleged intervention in the party convention as mere speculation,” Lee said. “We need to determine why the special counsel legislation was halted.”
Jung denied the allegations and said he would take legal action against the dissemination of false information.
Rep. Moon Jeong-bok, a Supreme Council member aligned with Jung, challenged Kim during a party leadership meeting Wednesday.
“What evidence supports the claim of a secret alliance with Shincheonji, and why is this allegation being used to place the party in danger?” Moon said. “He said he has evidence, so he must disclose it and accept responsibility.”
Reps. Choi Min-hee, Lee Sung-yoon and Han Min-soo, who are running for seats on the party’s Supreme Council and are considered Jung allies, issued a similar demand at a news conference.
They said Kim should apologize and withdraw his candidacy if he could not substantiate the allegation.
“He is portraying the Democratic Party as though it were violating the constitutional separation of religion and politics to gain an advantage in the election,” they said.
Some party officials said Kim’s accusation could backfire because Jung’s supporters may interpret it as an attempt to associate all of them with Shincheonji.
“It could be understood as linking every party member who supports Jung to Shincheonji,” a Democratic Party official said. “That could provoke voters and create even greater barriers between groups of supporters.”
Party members said the larger concern was that the fight could undermine unity long after the leadership election ends.
The repeated allegations, threats of lawsuits and demands for candidates to withdraw have pushed debate over party policies and future priorities into the background, they said.
“A certain level of conflict was expected before the convention, but the candidates are now crossing lines that should not be crossed,” another Democratic Party official said.
“The candidates and party leadership must prevent further division so these wounds do not remain after the primary is over.”
Waving a Mexican flag with a vaquero sombrero on, El Malilla made history at Coachella last year as the first reggaeton Mexa act on the lineup.
To keep the momentum going, the rising Mexican star had planned for his first U.S. tour to take place last summer. After the Trump administration ramped up the ongoing ICE raids around the same time, El Malilla decided to put the safety of his fans first and postpone the tour.
“With what was happening with Mexicans and immigrants — the big problem being ICE — I decided to pause the tour, because I didn’t feel comfortable exposing my fans to that kind of situation,” El Malilla says over Zoom from his home in Valle de Chalco. “For me, it was important to bring this tour to the U.S., but in a safe way without putting anyone in harm’s way.”
After wrapping up the Mexican leg of his “Tu Maliante Bebé” Tour, El Malilla, who was born Fernando Hernández Flores, is now preparing to bring his show to the states. The 19-show trek will kick off July 24 in Palm Springs, followed by a concert at The Novo in Los Angeles the next day.
Mexican artist El Malilla.
(Joss Andreu)
“The Novo is very important for me because it’s going to be my biggest venue for this U.S. tour,” he admits. “To see how Los Angeles has adopted me, embraced me, and shown me love, I’m going to feel like I’m home.”
Following his Coachella debut, El Malilla has pushed reggaeton from Mexico into the mainstream. He imbues the genre with Mexican swagger, slang and sex appeal in his explosive hits such as “B de Bellako,” “Mami Tú” and “Balenciaga” featuring corrido singer Luis R. Conriquez.
Since then, El Malilla has expanded the scope of reggaeton Mexa following collaborations with Puerto Rican pioneers such as Jowell y Randy and Colombian superstar J Balvin. The perreo heartthrob is also tapping into new genres for his upcoming sophomore album. In an interview with The Times, El Malilla opened up about leading the reggaeton Mexa movement and what to expect from his tour.
How do you feel about representing Mexican culture and reggaeton Mexa with this tour in the U.S.? I feel very happy to bring a bit of our culture, our slang, our sound and our essence to the U.S. for my fans that haven’t had a chance to see a show of mine. Something that’s very crazy for me is when I performed in Chicago last year, there were people with signs that said they were from different places in Mexico like the State of Mexico. It made me very nostalgic to know that I’m also from the State of Mexico and we’re here. It’s important for me to represent our roots. Get ready, because I’m coming with perreo sucio. [Laughs.]
What do you think when you fans always ask for you to take off your shirt at your concerts? It makes me laugh because when I sing “Rodillas,” people start screaming for me to take off my shirt. My show lasts like two hours and that’s barely the first song. I enjoy it, because I consider El Malilla to be a showman. I love to be onstage and have fun with my fans. Though some people might see me as a sex symbol, I don’t see myself that way, but to each their own.
What does it mean for you to be breaking down barriers for reggaeton Mexa? It makes me very happy. I’ve been thinking about that recently. When would you think that an iconic pop star like Danna would collaborate with an iconic chacalón [Mexican slang for “bad boy”] like myself? That never crossed my mind before, but now in 2026, our reggaeton, our essence and our sound has become important in Mexico and even more so on a Latino level. Now everything is possible. There [are] no longer barriers for reggaeton Mexa, or for Mexican singers. Today, your biggest dream is possible.
Who else would you love to collaborate with in the future? Lately, I’ve spent more time in the U.S. and I’ve been soaking up more English music. I discovered that I really like The Weeknd. A collaboration with him would be crazy! I returned to Coachella this year to sing with Cachirula & Loojan … and to be able to see Justin Bieber live was incredible. I would love to collaborate with him. On the Latin side, I would love to collaborate with Nsqk, De La Ghetto, Ñengo Flow or a reggaeton pioneer like DJ Blass.
What’s the process been like working on your next album? I spent a year and a half working on this album. I enjoyed that process so much. Music has given me so much that this album is my way of repaying music for all the blessings it’s given me. You’ll be surprised at what I’m capable of. This is a Malilla that’s now 26 and a little more mature. It’s a more experimental and professional Malilla. I had never made a bolero song and I dared to do that this time. I did my research by listening to Luis Miguel, José José and singers and genres that I wasn’t used to listening to. I found love for those genres and singers. It was a very fun and cool way for me to explore different genres.
Wilfredo Engalla, a 51-year-old Filipino immigrant, alleged in a medical malpractice case that Kaiser doctors misdiagnosed him with colds and allergies for years before eventually informing him he had terminal lung cancer.
He died before his complaint could be heard by an arbitrator, which his Kaiser policy required. His case prompted a withering rebuke from the California Supreme Court, which said Kaiser’s system of arbitrating legal disputes was subject to long delays and unfair to its members. The year was 1997.
Nearly three decades after the landmark decision, the HMO giant — which made a series of sweeping reforms after the ruling — is once again facing questions over whether its arbitration system is stacked against the interests of its members.
Plaintiffs attorneys, legislators and patients say Kaiser’s private and confidential process for arbitrating legal disputes over medical care still has key flaws that favor Kaiser over patients bringing malpractice cases. The company insures about 25% of Californians, including some employees of the Los Angeles Times.
“Kaiser has really lost its way,” said Assemblyman Robert Garcia (D-Rancho Cucamonga). Garcia, who is a longtime Kaiser member, recently introduced a bill to require the California attorney general to oversee arbitrations mandated by any health plan.
Kaiser defended its arbitration system, saying in a statement that it was fair for both patients and the nonprofit.
Many companies and other organizations, including some hospitals, HMOs and physician groups, require their customers or patients to take their complaints to private arbitration rather than to court.
But unlike most other companies, which send claims to large arbitration firms, Kaiser created its own system back in 1971.
Under Kaiser’s system, once a neutral arbitrator is selected, either party can opt to disqualify that person without cause. There is no limit on the number of disqualifications.
Although the health plan designed the system to be fair, patients and their lawyers have alleged that in reality Kaiser’s greater knowledge of arbitrators’ past rulings and its ability to veto arbitrators give it an advantage to pick favorable judges.
Critics such as Arlan Cohen, a physician and attorney who has brought more than two dozen cases against the health plan, say the system also provides a financial incentive to arbitrators to rule in Kaiser’s favor in order to be selected for future cases.
While Kaiser has access to all the decisions made by arbitrators in its system, the patient’s family gets a more limited disclosure of an arbitrator’s history of cases, lawyers say, adding that it’s not easy to see which arbitrators have ruled frequently for Kaiser.
Kaiser said it disagreed that the system allowed it to select favored arbitrators.
“The appointment process is not influenced by whether the arbitrator has ruled for or against KP or has a record of ruling against Kaiser Permanente,” its statement said.
“As required by law, both parties receive information about potential arbitrators and can decline to move forward with any they are not comfortable,” the statement said.
One problem is what experts call the “repeat player effect,” in which a large company appearing repeatedly before the same panel of arbitrators allegedly gains an advantage over the individual bringing a single complaint.
David Allen Larson, past chair of the American Bar Assn.’s dispute resolution section, said the repeat player effect happens because the patient will likely be choosing an arbitrator on the health plan’s system just once, while “Kaiser is selecting them every single day.”
“They know the system. They know the rules,” Larson said of Kaiser. “The entire process gives them an advantage.”
Alan Kang, a lawyer, in a recent petition filed in L.A. County Superior Court, contends that the fees the arbitrators earn from hearing cases — as much as $2,000 an hour — give them an incentive to rule in Kaiser’s favor so they are chosen to hear more cases.
“When a judge’s future income is at stake, it is impossible to be impartial,” Kang wrote in the petition.
The petition seeks to void the December decision of an arbitrator who ruled against the family of Evangelina Aquino, a Kaiser employee who died of cancer at age 40.
Kang, the Aquino family and the medical experts they hired for the case say her cancer would have been treatable if Kaiser doctors had found it with a test they said her symptoms called for. Kaiser argued it was a different kind of cancer that was aggressive and untreatable. The arbitrator agreed with Kaiser in the December decision.
After the ruling, Kang began analyzing data from Kaiser’s system.
His review of dozens of cases in the last six years found that judges overseeing the most cases nearly always ruled for Kaiser.
“The message is clear: deliver wins for Kaiser and you will get additional business,” Kang wrote in his court petition.
The Oakland-based health plan declined to answer questions about its arbitration system and Kang’s claims, but said in a statement that its “arbitration process is designed to be fair, impartial, and accessible to all members. While some arbitrators may handle multiple Kaiser Permanente-related cases, they are not employed by Kaiser Permanente, and they are selected by both parties, in accordance with the law.”
“We recognize that arbitration cases often involve difficult and deeply personal experiences for patients and families,” the statement said, “and we take all concerns raised through these processes seriously.”
Kaiser’s unique arbitration system
Arbitration can have advantages over the court system, including allowing Kaiser to save on legal costs, which otherwise would raise the price of premiums it charges to families, employers and governments.
Kaiser offers to pay the arbitrators’ fees, which can save families tens of thousands of dollars.
Arbitration may also lead to faster outcomes, possibly avoiding years of litigation. Unlike civil litigation, arbitration decisions are especially difficult to appeal.
After the criticism by the state Supreme Court in 1997, Kaiser reformed the system by creating the Office of the Independent Administrator. The office is funded by a Kaiser trust and the $150 fee each patient filing a claim must pay, said Marcella Bell, who serves as the independent administrator.
Bell said the office works independently from Kaiser.
The office selected 195 retired judges and lawyers to serve on a panel that patients and Kaiser can choose from when selecting a neutral arbitrator to oversee and decide a malpractice case.
Rules written by the independent administrator, in consultation with the health plan and an advisory board, allow Kaiser and the family to cut an arbitrator they don’t like, at multiple steps in the process.
The administrator’s office randomly selects 12 members from its panel. Both sides can each remove any four of those arbitrators. The two sides then rank the remaining arbitrators in order of preference. The administrator selects the top-ranked arbitrator to hear the case.
The two parties then still have the ability to disqualify that selection without cause.
Members of the United Nurses Assns. of California and Union of Healthcare Professionals strike outside Kaiser Permanente in Oakland on Jan. 28.
(Jessica Christian / San Francisco Chronicle)
Last year, Kaiser’s arbitration system closed 529 arbitration cases.
The arbitrators threw out 14% of the cases, ruling in favor of Kaiser’s motion for summary judgment, and dismissed an additional 5% of cases on technical or procedural grounds.
Only 23 cases, or 4% of the total, went to a hearing. Among those, the arbitrator decided for Kaiser in 17, with the patient winning the remaining six.
Patients and their families withdrew their claim in 20% of the cases. About half of those patients did not have a lawyer and had tried to represent themselves.
The parties settled for an undisclosed sum in 57% of the cases. The settlements are confidential.
Patient safety questions
Those who have studied the use of arbitration by Kaiser and other HMOs for medical malpractice claims say the secrecy of the settlements and the closed hearings could keep safety problems from coming to light.
“The secrecy of arbitration proceedings may prevent publicity that could reveal poor doctors,” the California Research Bureau warned in a report in 2000 that analyzed Kaiser’s system. That compares with public court cases that could deter “bad behavior” in the future, the researchers wrote.
In December 2023, 53-year-old Francisco Delgadillo arrived at the Kaiser ER in Vallejo with severe chest pain. After an initial assessment, he waited eight hours for care, according to state regulators.
He died in the lobby. A state and federal investigation found multiple violations, including that Kaiser failed to have a licensed nurse monitoring the dozens of patients in the ER’s waiting room.
The Delgadillo family filed an arbitration claim. Their lawyer Jeff Mitchell said the case settled for a confidential sum and he could not discuss it.
Mitchell agreed that the secrecy raised patient safety concerns.
“They love the system, otherwise they would not be so hellbent to keep it,” Mitchell said of Kaiser’s repeated efforts to dispel criticism. “They don’t want these cases to get in front of juries.”
A licensed practical nurse attends to a patient at a Kaiser Permanente in Culver City in September.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Calls for reform
Despite the changes Kaiser made after the 1997 court decision, patients and their families have continued to complain.
According to the administrator’s 2025 annual report, the “most common” complaint the office heard last year was about the neutral arbitrator.
“Most complained that the arbitrator was biased, partisan, unjust, and in Kaiser’s favor,” the report said.
Stephen Martinez, a retired aerospace engineer from Bellflower, is leading the effort to pass the state bill introduced by Garcia.
At an April hearing in the state Assembly, Martinez spoke about how his wife had found a lump in her breast and asked for an appointment with her longtime caregiver at Kaiser to examine it. Instead she was sent to a physician assistant, who dismissed it, he said.
“The PA prescribed warm compresses, a sports bra, and limited chocolate,” Martinez testified. “We would later find that Lindalee did have breast cancer that had already spread.”
Martinez and his wife said they spent $175,000 on lawyers and medical experts to bring that arbitration case. A chief breast surgeon at Kaiser and another surgeon who had retired from that job both testified that the Kaiser physician assistant failed to follow the health system’s guidelines.
Kaiser’s expert argued that the physician assistant did an appropriate exam and that his low suspicion of breast cancer was reasonable. The neutral arbitrator concurred and ruled against the couple.
After passing the Assembly, Assembly Bill 1770 is now in the state Senate for consideration. The bill lets the attorney general decide what actions they will take to ensure health plan arbitrations are handled fairly and transparently. If the bill passes, the state would add four deputy attorneys general, a legal analyst and three legal secretaries to do that work, according to a legislative analyst’s report.
Kaiser says it has concerns about the bill, including that it would “create overlapping state oversight and duplicative reporting requirements.”
Kaiser Permanente’s corporate offices in downtown Oakland in January 2025.
(Jane Tyska / East Bay Times via Getty Images)
Questions of a missed diagnosis
When Janene Fowler was 22, her body seemed to turn against her. She grew weak, pain shot through her hands and feet, her heart raced. She soon required a wheelchair.
Fowler’s medical chart detailed what could have caused her disabling problems. A test eight years before had found a deficiency of vitamin B12, according to the chart. Over the years, Kaiser doctors noted problems such as depression, unexplained pain, shortness of breath, a sore tongue and an abnormal gait — all possible symptoms of vitamin B12 deficiency.
In February 2022, after her family complained about her not being able to see a neurologist, she got an appointment. The specialist noted her vitamin deficiency, telling the nurse to start her on a supplement at once. But the treatment did not begin because the paperwork was lost, her medical records show.
Two weeks later, Fowler left Kaiser to see a doctor at UCLA. A doctor there quickly started injections of B12.
Her symptoms gradually got better, but her new doctors say the years-long deficiency left permanent damage. She still can’t walk without help.
The arbitrator, a retired judge, sided with Kaiser’s doctors and experts, who questioned whether Fowler’s problems were caused by a deficiency of vitamin B12. While one test showed a deficiency, he noted that a second test failed to confirm it. He wrote that Fowler and her lawyers had failed to prove that Kaiser “breached its duty of care.”
Cohen, Fowler’s lawyer, asserted that the retired judge’s decision was contrary to UCLA medical records, which detail her deficiency and treatment.
Fowler now spends most of her time at home. She can’t drive. She often falls when she tries to get around with a cane. She loves to cook, but said she burns herself when she tries.
“My hands don’t really do what I tell them,” she said.
Kaiser declined to answer questions about her case, citing patients’ privacy rights.
Fowler said she’s angry about how the health plan’s doctors and its arbitration system treated her.
“I thought I was going to die, and no one at Kaiser seemed to care,” she said. “What justice can you have in a system that is run by those you are trying to sue?”
Spanish fans spent the night partying in Madrid after their team defeated Argentina 1-0 in the final of the World Cup. Al Jazeera’s Natacha Butler reports from the heart of the celebrations in Madrid.
Two weeks after suspending his bid for Wisconsin governor, David Crowley has reentered the state’s Democratic primary, with the Milwaukee County executive securing a last-minute endorsement from outgoing Gov. Tony Evers.
The moves appears to be a Democratic effort to best position the party for success in November.
Evers had initially declined to endorse in the race, but threw his weight behind Crowley and resuscitated his bid to lead the swing state known for razor-thin election margins, where appealing to moderate and independent voters is crucial.
It was the latest turn in a chaotic Democratic primary that has jeopardized the party’s chances this fall and comes after Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez said she was abandoning her campaign for the state’s top office after a campaign finance scandal.
Democrats are looking to November to secure full control of Wisconsin state government for the first time since 2010, and hope it will send a signal about where the country’s politics are headed by shaping a key political battleground that helps decide presidential elections.
In an event in Milwaukee on Saturday relaunching his campaign, Crowley referenced the stakes, saying that “winning this election will require building the broadest possible coalition,” and touting his ability to forge relationships across partisan divides. And Evers’ endorsement, he added, “reflects his confidence that I have the experience” to lead and to win.
Evers was on a trade visit to Africa and not in attendance at Crowley’s Saturday event, but acknowledged in a social media post that he was now “all in” for Crowley, touting his executive leadership on issues including job creation and balancing budgets.
“He’s not just a candidate who can win in November, but he’s the kind of person who cares about doing the job right,” Evers wrote.
Crowley, 40, is reemerging into a competitive primary for Wisconsin’s open governor’s race that was turned on its head Friday with the departure of Rodriguez, who earlier in the week fired her campaign manager after discovering her campaign had hundreds of thousands of dollars less on hand than expected.
Now, as they approach Wisconsin’s primary election Aug. 11, Democrats are hoping to hold on to the governor’s office as they also eye flipping majority control of the state Legislature, which Republicans have held since 2011.
The primary also comes after democratic socialists’ earlier victories in the liberal strongholds of New York City, Washington and Denver. Francesca Hong, a single mother who has worked as a dishwasher and line cook, is trying to do the same with her campaign for Wisconsin governor, with her candidacy turning the Democratic contest into a test of party voters’ growing embrace of leftist candidates heading in the November midterms.
Crowley, who would be the state’s first Black governor if elected, had ended his own bid two weeks ago to back Rodriguez. Now, he’s returning to a contest against Hong, former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, state Sen. Kelda Roys and Joel Brennan, a former top aide to Evers. The Democratic nominee is expected to face Republican U.S. Rep. Thomas P. Tiffany, who faces only token opposition and has the support of President Trump and other GOP leaders.
In an interview Saturday afternoon, Crowley told the Associated Press that voters would see “a much more aggressive campaign” from him in the primary’s closing weeks, buoyed in part by Evers’ backing and “a renewed, energized, volunteer base.”
“I wouldn’t have gotten into this race if I didn’t believe a pathway was there,” Crowley said. “We can not only get over the hump in winning on the Aug. 11 primary, but then we’ll be able to really focus on how we can make sure that Tom Tiffany doesn’t bring an extreme MAGA agenda to the state of Wisconsin,” Crowley said.
In the first iteration of his campaign, Crowley leaned into his background, highlighting how his family was once homeless in Milwaukee but he rose to become a community organizer and was elected to the state Assembly in 2016 at age 30. He served until the middle of 2020, when he was elected as executive of Milwaukee County, the state’s largest county. He was the first Black person to hold that job and also the youngest, at 33.
In a statement to AP, Tiffany portrayed Crowley as “asleep at the wheel” in his role as county executive and described his reemergence as Democrats’ “only shot at stopping the socialist who wants to abolish the police and prisons.”
In an email statement, the Republican Governors Assn. said that “watching Wisconsin Democrats is like watching a clown car crash into a parked semitruck.”
Kinnard writes for the Associated Press. AP reporter Scott Bauer in Madison, Wis., contributed to this report.
‘King [Messi] abdicates, but the prince [Lamine Yamal] takes the throne!’
Spain fans filled the streets of New York with chants and songs ahead of the World Cup final against defending champions Argentina. Spain’s supporters are confident a new generation can bring the trophy home.
A protest by India’s youth-led Cockroach Janta Party has intensified after activist Sonam Wangchuk was forcibly moved to a hospital on the 21st day of his hunger strike. Party founder Abhijeet Dipke was splashed with ink after beginning a fast in solidarity.
WASHINGTON — Democrats are making a growing effort to adopt a pragmatic focus as they campaign on affordability in the midterms, as some within the party push for moving away from ideological arguments.
Across the country, Democratic candidates are trying to win over voters by talking about real-life scenarios, framing other platform issues in economic terms and, strategists say, aiming to shift a perception that Democrats deal in the abstract.
They see an opening created by voters’ focus on the economy and their ability as the party not in power to leverage affordability as the key midterms issue as Trump’s economic approval remains low. Trump has dismissed the issue, calling affordability a “hoax” by Democrats while also promising economic improvements.
“There has been a learning process in being able to take what Trump and the Republicans are doing and make sure that [candidates] are coming back to the real-world economic implications of whatever that might be,” Democratic strategist Alex Jacquez, who served in the Biden White House. “That’s where maybe [Democrats] haven’t always, in the recent past, made the full connection all the way through.”
Now, “the moment is ripe,” he suggested, for the party to shift its image.
The Democrats’ concentration on affordability and the economy has defined their midterm messaging, playing off elevated inflation, the effects of Trump’s tariffs and high gas prices caused by the war in Iran. The party is attempting to capture enough swing voters to win a House majority in November, and some believe the Senate could also be within reach.
Polling shows pessimism about the economy has increased among all Americans and most believe the country is in an affordability crisis. Americans most frequently mention government leadership and economic issues as the country’s most important problems in Gallup polling.
Voters also increasingly disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, including working-class white voters who make up a key part of his base. In an NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll last month, Americans gave the president his lowest-ever approval rating on the economy at 33%.
Speaking in Pennsylvania on Thursday, Trump said of affordability: “That’s a fake word that they use. They caused the affordability problem. It’s called high prices.”
Rep. Adam Gray, a Democrat who represents a purple Central Valley district and is a member of the center-left Blue Dog Coalition in Congress, said he believes voters have grown frustrated by the failure of Washington lawmakers to pay attention to what the people want out from government.
He pointed to Central Valley growers whose business has been affected, he said, by the rising price of fuel and fertilizer, the squeeze on the labor market caused by immigration enforcement and changes to federal programs.
“How regular people experience politics, it’s not the kind of ideological debates we have in Washington,” Gray said. “It’s the experience of doing something, whether that’s shopping for groceries or going to the lake to go boating with your family and realizing the price of gas is through the roof or the road to the lake is in disrepair.”
At a time when Democrats have debated how to embrace a party identity beyond opposing Trump and intra-party fights between progressive and moderate candidates have drawn attention, some believe the “practical” tactic may offer one key to the party’s path forward.
In Texas, Democratic candidates are pointing to the impact of data centers on water supply or the consequences of the state’s abortion ban, said Matt Angle, director of Lone Star Project, a political research organization that works to help get Democrats elected.
“The fact that Corpus Christi is running out of water … [or] you have women who have died because they were denied abortion services,” Angle said. “It’s very important that those things not be talked about in ideological terms but in practical terms. I think Democrats are doing a better job of that than ever before.”
“Real life is happening on the ground,” Angle added. “I think Democrats see that.”
Republicans pursued a similar strategy successfully in 2024, and their attacks on Democrats for focusing on cultural issues may have been successful in pushing Democrats away from that messaging, said Republican strategist Brittany Martinez.
“They have made it clear that’s the direction in which they’re trying to go,” she said of Democrats. “I also think you have outliers of the party that sometimes suck all the oxygen out of the room and maybe derail that message.”
National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Christian Martinez said Democrats’ economic record, including in California under Gov. Gavin Newsom, demonstrates a failure to prioritize working families.
“It’s laughable that Democrats are trying to make kitchen-table issues their brand,” he said. “It only proves their political brand is broken, while Californians continue living every day with the receipts from Democrats’ failed agenda.”
Republican National Committee Chair Joe Gruters said Thursday at a summit convened by the Washington-based news outlet the Hill that he was confident the party would retain the House and Senate and projected optimism about the economy.
“He’s going to bat for the American worker every single day,” Gruters said of Trump. “He’s going to continue to do everything he can to get the nose of the economy in this country up and to get prices down.”
But as Trump appears to prioritize other issues, Martinez said, Republicans are facing their own uphill battle to win over swing voters.
“When the president has mocked affordability, said it’s not a crisis, I don’t think that helps [Republicans],” Martinez said. “Democrats have an opportunity to capitalize on that right now.”
Both moderate and progressive Democrats see the moment as a chance to define what the party stands for beyond opposing Trump, and both have seized on real-life arguments, though the approaches differ.
Progressives have long framed a spectrum of issues in economic terms, said Usamah Andrabi, spokesperson for the progressive caucus Justice Democrats.
“That has always been the progressive economic playbook, and I think it’s about time that the other wings of the Democratic Party catch up to us,” Andrabi said.
That also means, he said, not backing away from other issues, such as abortion, foreign wars and healthcare.
“It has always been the right that has sought to divide our communities on these so-called culture war issues,” Andrabi said. “Our vision forward should be one that includes everyone… That does not mean simply ignoring some people’s most urgent crises to focus on something else, because these are interconnected.”
Climate advocates, for instance, are “effectively connecting” climate to top midterm issues, including including gas and utility costs, AI data centers and the Iran war, said Jamie Henn, executive director of nonprofit communications lab Fossil Fuel Media, and have encouraged Democratic candidates to do the same.
“Climate, like many issues, doesn’t win itself on its own merits. It’s in the ways that you talk about it and connect it to kitchen-table issues,” Henn said. “Do it in the right way – it’s not a science lecture on global warming, it’s a story about how clean energy can reduce your bills.”
Still, getting more candidates to pick up those messages can be a steep climb, he said. Advocates in some spaces, including climate, have worried about their issues being sidelined.
“There are Democrats that could be threading this needle who aren’t,” Henn said. “We know the issues that climate needs to be connected to, but [politicians] need… to do a better job to clearly articulate the messages.”
Elizabeth Kobliha knows her one-eyed cat Likho has more friends than she does. So much so that on his 15th birthday last Saturday, the sidewalk outside her downtown Long Beach store where he spends most of his time transformed into a makeshift fair.
There were vendors selling peach cobbler, watches, hot dogs and offering tattoos and face paint. A DJ spun records in celebration.
“He’s a very good businessman. We’ve got stickers, T-shirts, keychains, and buttons [of him], and it all goes under his account, his name,” Kobliha said of the cat.
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Before Likho roamed the 7,000-square-foot Long Beach Vintage Etc, there was Apollo. The “big rag doll” came in with health problems but was the perfect shop cat. Apollo, a Maine coon who died at 13 following a seizure a year after his arrival in 2015, had curbed the shop’s mouse problem and brought “so much love and energy.”
Similarly, Likho, a one-eyed Russian Blue, also was ailing when Kobilha took him in at 8 years old, but she wanted him anyhow.
“I always wanted to open my own shop so I can have a shop cat,” Kobliha says, adding she was inspired by bookstores with cats “just chilling.”
Vendors line the sidewalk for Likho’s birthday party. The cat is a local celebrity.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
In 2016, Kobliha was swiping through Facebook when a video stopped her scroll. In it, a woman inside of a hoarder’s garage bobbed a feather toy in front of Likho, who jumped up to catch it.
The post was made by Sia Barbi in collaboration with animal rescue group Stray Cat Alliance after the cat had been abandoned at the Hancock Park home. During the early ‘90s, Sia and identical twin sister, Shane, made waves in the fashion and pop culture worlds, often modeling for Chanel, Thierry Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier. Their rise to fame began after the Los Angeles Timescovered a Sunset Boulevard billboard featuring the twins wearing little clothing that had been causing car accidents.
“Guys of a certain generation would get very hot and bothered over them,” Kobliha said of the Barbi twins. As they exited the modeling industry, they pivoted into animal activism and volunteering for rescue groups and trap, neuter and return programs for cats.
Elizabeth Kobliha holds her cat Likho. When she opened her vintage store, she knew she wanted a shop cat just like chill bookstore cats.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Kobliha wanted to adopt Likho, but first he’d need a $3,000 operation to remove an infected eye, paid for by the Stray Cat Alliance.
“They took care of everything, then we had to wait because he had to recuperate,” she recalls. “The whole time I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, what if it doesn’t work out? What if the cat gets here and is just absolutely bonkers?’”
That fear was for nothing. Likho, who lives at the shop full-time, acclimated within a day. “He has been a beautiful addition ever since then,” Kobliha says.
He’s since become the face of the shop, with a mural dedicated to him outside to welcome customers. That was done by local muralist LaJon Miller, who worked on another on the sidewalk during Likho’s party.
“I got adopted into it,” he says of the Likho fandom. “He’s been my muse on this street for a while. … He just roams around the store, chills, does his little nap thing, and hangs out with everybody, so he’s very social.”
Likho has never harmed the centuries-old objects in her shop, Kobliha says, but he has spooked suspected ghosts.
LaJon Miller, who calls Likho his muse, paints a portrait of the cat on the sidewalk outside of Long Beach Vintage Etc.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Kobliha believes ghosts once connected to shops at the 1922 building — a former patron of a grocery store shamed for his obesity and a former furniture shop owner who died by suicide — still roam her store’s stalls.
“We see shadow figures … there’s a certain area where they pass back and forth. They don’t do anything, but they’re scary as hell,” Kobliha says of unusual sightings. “Likho is very protective, and we do feel really safe when he’s around.”
“It is a little weird, though, when he’s sleeping, and then suddenly he will jump up and look around,” she adds.
Likho’s biggest fan may be a man named Dom Gomez. He lives within walking distance of the shop, and tends to visit after long shifts at a restaurant aboard the Queen Mary. He stopped by the birthday party wearing his work uniform: a white, button-down shirt and black slacks. His hair slicked; his hands behind his back.
Likho’s face graces merchandise at Long Beach Vintage Etc like this fan.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
When he speaks of Likho, he speaks with a tender cadence and dignified countenance, as if he were his own.
“Time flies, you know?” he says, smiling, of visiting Likho over the years. “He gets a lot of love from all the ladies that work here and myself … he has a lot of fans. I don’t know who’s more famous, Muhammad Ali or Likho the Cat.”
On a previous birthday, Gomez wanted to get Likho a gift. He settled on a kid’s denim jacket he modified for a cat with a patch for the Cure on the back but, regrettably, it was a “little too big.” Next year, he’ll give it another shot with a sweater.
“That’s my little buddy right there,” he says. “Today is a special day. I didn’t know a cat could live that long, but I think he’s still got a lot of energy to live … maybe another 100 years, I hope.”
Argentina fans responded with gestures of their own, with one punching the bus windows.
“Henry’s full of character,” Borthwick said. “We want character in our game and we want character in our squad.
“This squad really embraces what he brings. It takes all kinds of different personalities and we’ve got some players who wouldn’t do that and then you’ve got Henry who would go and do that.
“We embrace it. I think it was done in good nature and it came from a very good place.”
England have won nine of their past 10 meetings with the Pumas, including both Tests while on tour without their British and Irish Lions last summer.
After their most recent meeting – a 27-23 win for England at Twickenham’s Allianz Stadium – Argentina coach Felipe Contepomi was involved in a confrontation with England flanker Tom Curry in the tunnel.
England have named the same starting XV that beat Fiji 73-8 last weekend while Argentina’s team contains a clutch of players based in England, including Bath full-back Santiago Carreras, Bristol centre Matias Moroni and Harlequins second row Guido Petti.
Argentina; S Carreras; Delguy, Moroni, Piccardo, M Carreras; Albornoz, Garcia; Vivas, Montoya (capt), Rapetti, Petti, Alemanno, Grondona, Kremer, Oviedo.
