Politics

HALIFAX, Canada — Several U.S. senators said Saturday that Secretary of State Marco Rubio told them that the Trump administration’s plan for ending the Russia-Ukraine war that it is pressing Kyiv to accept is a Russian “wish list” and not the actual plan.

A State Department spokesperson denied their account, calling it “blatantly false.”

The 28-point peace plan was crafted by the Trump administration and the Kremlin without Ukraine’s involvement. It acquiesces to many Russian demands that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has rejected on dozens of occasions, including giving up large pieces of territory. Trump says he wants Ukraine to accept the plan by late next week.

At a security conference in Canada, independent Sen. Angus King of Maine, Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota said they spoke to Rubio after he reached out to some of them while on his way to Geneva for talks on the plan.

King said Rubio told them the plan “was not the administration’s plan” but a “wish list of the Russians.”

“This administration was not responsible for this release in its current form,” Rounds said. “They want to utilize it as a starting point.”

Rounds said that “it looked more like it was written in Russian to begin with.”

Rubio, who serves as both national security advisor and secretary of State, was expected to attend a meeting in Geneva on Sunday to discuss Washington’s proposal as part of a U.S. delegation, according to an American official who was not authorized to publicly discuss the U.S. participants before the meeting and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesperson, denied the senators’ claim.

“As Secretary Rubio and the entire Administration has consistently maintained, this plan was authored by the United States, with input from both the Russians and Ukrainians,” Pigott wrote on X.

The senators earlier Saturday said the plan would only reward Moscow for its aggression and send a message to other leaders who have threatened their neighbors.

The senators’ opposition to the plan follows criticism from other U.S. lawmakers, including some Republicans, none of whom have the power to block it.

“It rewards aggression. This is pure and simple. There’s no ethical, legal, moral, political justification for Russia claiming eastern Ukraine,” King said during a panel discussion at the Halifax International Security Forum in Canada.

Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed the proposal late Friday, saying that it “could form the basis of a final peace settlement” if the U.S. can get Ukraine and its European allies to agree.

Zelensky, in an address, did not reject the plan outright, but insisted on fair treatment while pledging to “work calmly” with Washington and other partners in what he called “truly one of the most difficult moments in our history.”

In its 17th year, about 300 people gather annually at the Halifax International Security Forum held at Halifax’s Westin hotel. The forum attracts military officials, U.S. senators, diplomats and scholars, but this year the Trump administration suspended participation of U.S. defense officials in events by think tanks, including the Halifax event.

A large number of U.S. senators made the trip this year in part because of strained relations between Canada and the United States. Trump has alienated America’s neighbor with his trade war and claims that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state. Many Canadians now refuse to travel to the U.S., and border states like Shaheen’s are seeing a dramatic drop in tourism.

“There’s real concern about that strain. That’s one reason why there’s such a big delegation is here,” the New Hampshire Democrat said. “I will continue to object to what the president is doing in terms about tariffs and his comments because they are not only detrimental to Canada and our relationship, but I think they are detrimental globally. They show a lack of respect of sovereign nations.”

Gillies writes for the Associated Press.

There are heaps of fun theme parks and attractions in the UK to enjoy but there are a handful that would have been great yet unfortunately plans had to be abandoned

The UK is full of amazing attractions, both old and new, from historic palaces to theme parks and world-class museums. But not every idea manages to get off the ground.

There were many large-scale projects that could have potentially become major tourist landmarks, which sadly, either failed due to cost or logistics. We’re talking theme parks that were said to have the potential to rival Disneyland, weird and wonderful pyramids, and giant bridges that cost millions but never actually opened.

We look at some of the incredible attractions that could have been gamechangers, but sadly didn’t manage to see the light of day (even if we’re still hoping!).

Check out our top picks below…

WonderWorld theme park

In the 1980s, a £346m plan to turn an old quarry into the ‘British Disneyland’ was hatched. The site of this ambitious project was Corby, Northants, where the abandoned quarry was connected to the town’s closed steelworks. The collapse of the steelworks had led to 10,000 job losses, and with a third of the town out of work, the theme park was cited as a way to get locals back into employment.

WonderWorld is said to have been inspired by Disney’s Epcot, and was set to have 13 themed villages, the first six of which would have opened in 1992. The idea was to showcase the best of British design, with David Bellamy set to help devise a mock safari, while Sir Patrick Moore would have helped design an observatory.

There would be a mix of the educational and fun, high-tech rides, themed restaurants, shops, and much more, which it would estimate would bring in four million visitors a year through the park gates.

The ambitious plans also included a 10,000 seat stadium for sporting events, and a Disney-style family resort with seven hotels, which would eventually offer 6,000 rooms and 100 holiday villas.

Sadly, all that was ever built of WonderWorld was a sign and a wooden cabin. Planning delays and rising costs were blamed, with backers soon pulling out. The site which would have been WonderWorld is now a new build estate, with nothing to indicate that it could have been the site of a major British attraction.

Garden Bridge

While a failed project can waste a lot of time, London’s Garden Bridge project also managed to waste a lot of money along the way. £53.5m was spent on a bridge which never broke ground, after many years trying to turn the idea into reality.

London’s Garden Bridge would have been a pedestrian bridge set between Waterloo Bridge and Blackfriars Bridge. The idea was it would be covered in shrubbery and flowers, creating a sort of park area you could wander round, rather than just crossing from A to B.

The project was such a disaster that Transport for London (TfL) launched an inquiry, which concluded that £43m of the sunk costs came from the public’s pocket. The failed project’s spends included £21.4m in construction costs and £1.7m in executive salaries, according to BBC reports.

The Garden Bridge Trust also spent £161,000 on a website and £417,000 on a gala for the failed proposal. Had it been built, the project was projected to cost £175m overall.

The idea for the bridge dates back to 1998, when actor Joanna Lumley had the idea for a “floating paradise” that would be built in honour of Princess Diana. But it wasn’t until 2012, when Boris Johnson was Mayor of London, that the unusual project was picked up.

While they managed to secure planning permission in 2014, the project had a number of vocal critics who complained that it would have had an impact on sight lines of St Paul’s Cathedral and Monument.

When Sadiq Khan took over as mayor, he ordered a review as to whether the bridge would offer good value for money for Londoners, before withdrawing his support the next year. The cancellation of the project was officially announced on August 14, 2017.

Trafalgar Square Pyramid

Trafalgar Square could have looked very different if one MP and soldier had seen their plans come to fruition. After beating the French at the Battle of the Nile, Sir Frederick William Trench decided that what London really needed was a giant pyramid right in the middle of Trafalgar Square to really celebrate their military success.

The proposal, submitted in 1812, shows a 300ft pyramid with 22 steps, one for each year of the two Anglo-French wars. At the time, the tallest structure in London would have been the Dome at St Paul’s Cathedral which was 365ft, meaning the pyramid would have completely changed the London skyline.

One idea to turn the plan into reality was to use the labour of men who’d recently been discharged from the armed forces, giving them employment once the war was over. However, the only thing that was ever built was a scale model, which ended up in the home of the Duke of York. A few years later, the land was cleared and the version of Trafalgar Square that brings in millions of visitors a year was created. But there’s no doubt the giant pyramid would have brought in the tourists too.

London Paramount Entertainment Resort

A more recent attempt to build a giant theme park in the UK was the London Resort, which was announced in 2012. Its location in Swanscombe, Kent led to some dubbing it the ‘Dartford Disneyland’, and it was set to include Europe’s largest indoor water park, theatres, live music venues, attractions, cinemas, restaurants, event spaces and hotels.

The park would have had several worlds including a Spaceport, The Isles, The Kingdom, and High Street, all themed around the UK. Another planned attraction was a triple launched roller coaster that would reach speeds of 70mph.

READ MORE: Tiny country is cheapest place to visit in world — tourists spend just £11 a dayREAD MORE: Eurocamp is opening two huge new sites in Spain’s best beach spots next summer

The park’s troubles continued during the planning process, when Natural England decided to designate a large portion of the planned park area as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).

In 2022, it was reported that plans for the park were scaled back, and would be resubmitted the next year. Its company, London Resort Company Holdings (LRCH), then went into administration and faced a lawsuit from Paramount. Finally, in January 2025, it was reported that the High Court had ordered the company to be wound up, effectively killing off the dream of the £2.5b London Resort.

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The annual United Nations climate conference has ended with an agreement that urges action to address global warming, but falls short of endorsing a phase-out of fossil fuels.

After two weeks of heated debates, meetings and negotiations at the COP30 summit in the Brazilian city of Belem, world leaders on Saturday agreed to a deal that calls for countries to “significantly accelerate and scale up climate action worldwide”.

The text lays out a series of promises and measures – including a call for developed countries to triple their funding to help poorer nations respond to the crisis – but makes no mention of a fossil fuel phase-out.

Dozens of states had been calling forthe COP30 deal to lay out a framework to ease away from their reliance on oil, gas and coal – the major drivers of the climate crisis – but several countries that rely on fossil fuels had pushed back.

While observers say the deal marks a step forward in the world’s effort to address climate breakdown, several have argued that COP30 fell short of expectations.

Here’s a look at how some world leaders and climate advocates have reacted to the agreement.

COP30 President Andre Aranha Correa do Lago

“We know some of you had greater ambitions for some of the issues at hand. I know that you, civil society, will demand us to do more to fight climate change. I want to reaffirm that I will try not to disappoint you during my presidency,” he said during Saturday’s closing session.

“As [Brazilian] President [Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva] said at the opening of this COP, we need roadmaps so that humanity – in a just and planned manner – can overcome its dependence on fossil fuels, halt and reverse deforestation and mobilise resources for these purposes,” he said.

“I, as president of COP30, will therefore create two roadmaps: One on halting and reverting [reversing] deforestation and another to transitioning away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly and equitable manner.”

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres

“COP30 has delivered progress,” Guterres said in a statement, including the call to triple climate adaptation financing and recognition that the world is going to surpass the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) target for global warming set under the Paris Agreement.

“But COPs are consensus-based – and in a period of geopolitical divides, consensus is ever harder to reach. I cannot pretend that COP30 has delivered everything that is needed. The gap between where we are and what science demands remains dangerously wide,” the UN chief said.

“I understand many may feel dissapointed [sic] – especially young people, Indigenous Peoples and those living through climate chaos. The reality of overshoot is a stark warning: We are approaching dangerous and irreversible tipping points,” he added.

Wopke Hoekstra, European Union climate commissioner

“We’re not going to hide the fact that we would have preferred to have more, to have more ambition on everything,” Hoekstra told reporters.

“It is not perfect, but it is a hugely important step in the right direction.”

Colombian President Gustavo Petro

“I do not accept that the COP30 declaration does not clearly state, as science does, that the cause of the climate crisis is the fossil fuels used by capital. If that is not stated, everything else is hypocrisy,” Petro wrote on social media.

“Life on the planet, including our own, is only possible if we separate ourselves from oil, coal, and natural gas as energy sources; science has determined this, and I am not blind to science.

“Colombia opposes a COP30 declaration that does not tell the world the scientific truth.”

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla

“While the results fell short of expectations, the Belem COP strengthens and demonstrates the importance of multilateralism in addressing major global challenges such as combating #climatechange,” he wrote on X.

“Among its key outcomes are the call for developed countries to provide climate finance for adaptation in developing countries, at least tripling current levels by 2035; the establishment of a mechanism to support our countries in just transitions; and the commitment from developed countries to fulfill their obligations under the Paris Agreement.”

China

“I’m happy with the outcome,” Li Gao, head of China’s delegation at COP30, told the AFP news agency.

“We achieved this success in a very difficult situation, so it shows that the international community would like to show solidarity and make joint efforts to address climate change.”

Alliance of Small Island States

A group representing the interests of 39 small island and low-lying coastal states described the deal as “imperfect” but said it nevertheless was a step towards “progress”.

“Ultimately, this is the push and pull of multilateralism. The opportunity for all countries to be heard and to listen to each other’s perspectives, to collaborate, build bridges, and reach common ground,” the Alliance of Small Island States said in a statement.

Amnesty International

Ann Harrison, climate justice adviser at Amnesty International, noted that COP30 host Brazil had promised to make sure “every voice is heard and made strenuous efforts to broaden participation, which should be replicated”.

“Yet the lack of participatory, inclusive, and transparent negotiations left both civil society and Indigenous Peoples, who answered the global mutirao [working together] call in large numbers, out of the real decision making,” Harrison said in a statement.

Still, she said “people power” had helped achieve “a commitment to develop a Just Transition mechanism that will streamline and coordinate ongoing and future efforts to protect the rights of workers, other individuals and communities affected by fossil fuel phase out”.

Oxfam

Viviana Santiago, executive director of Oxfam Brasil, said COP30 “offered a spark of hope but far more heartbreak, as the ambition of global leaders continues to fall short of what is needed for a liveable planet”.

“A truly just transition requires those who built their fortunes on fossil fuels to move first and fastest – and provide finance in the form of grants, not loans, so front-line communities can do the same. Instead, the poorest countries already in debt are being told to transition faster, with fewer funds,” Santiago said.

“The spark of hope lies in the proposed Belem Action Mechanism, which puts workers’ rights and justice at the centre of the shift away from fossil fuels. But without financing from rich countries, the just energy transition risks becoming stalled in many countries.”

Reporting from Sacramento — Three quarters of California voters believe the state should restrain home building in areas at high risk of wildfires, a new survey has found.

The UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies Poll, prepared for the Times, shows bipartisan support for such restrictions after deadly fires wiped out tens of thousands of homes across the state in the last two years.

“The voters think there should be limits,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the Berkeley IGS Poll.

The survey revealed broad backing across party lines, demographic groups and all regions in California for restricting growth in wildfire zones. Nearly 85% of Democrats support doing so compared with 57% of Republicans and 72% of independent voters.

At least 66% of respondents in every region of the state back the idea, including the non-Bay Area northern section. This includes the area surrounding Paradise, which was almost entirely destroyed in last fall’s Camp fire and where many homeowners have said they hope to rebuild.

Overall, 37% of voters surveyed said they supported strongly limiting new home building in wildfire areas with an additional 38% saying they somewhat supported the idea.

Source: UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll

(Kyle Kim / Los Angeles Times Graphics)

Despite voters’ willingness to restrict growth in wildfire areas, Gov. Gavin Newsom and lawmakers have not openly discussed the idea among other options to prevent destructive infernos. State leaders have instead focused their discussions on utility companies’ financial responsibility for the blazes, how to pay for damages from wildfires and cutting back vegetation and other ways to manage the state’s forests.

Last year Ken Pimlott, the recently retired head of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said that government should consider stopping home building in threatened communities because of the substantial loss of property and lives.

But in an interview with the Associated Press this spring, Newsom rejected it.

“There’s something that is truly Californian about the wilderness and the wild and pioneering spirit,” Newsom said. “I’m not advocating for no” building.

Natural disaster is inevitable in California. And it can define a governor’s legacy »

Stanford University’s Michael Wara, who serves on a state wildfire commission, said the scale of recent fires is influencing how Californians think about development, even those whose property is safe.

“They wake up and go outside and they can’t breathe and there’s ash on their car,” said Wara, who directs the school’s climate and energy policy program. “It’s not something you read about in the newspaper. It’s something you experience.”

But Wara said any decision to limit growth in fire zones remains politically difficult. People who own land or might want to build in those areas strongly prefer to maintain the status quo.

“This is an issue where there’s concentrated very powerful interests that have a lot to lose by changing the rules,” he said.

It’s also possible that voters might support the idea for limiting growth but not the details of what a plan might look like, said DiCamillo, the pollster. A recent Cal Fire report said 1 in 4 Californians live in areas considered at high risk for wildfires, including in suburban Southern California and the Bay Area.

People who live in parts of Marin County may not realize they reside in one of these zones when answering that question, he said. “They’re probably thinking about all these rural areas.”

The Berkeley poll also examined other housing issues and found less consensus among voters than that of limiting growth in wildfire areas. The survey offered respondents three proposed solutions for making housing more affordable: offering more tax breaks or subsidies for lower and middle-income homebuyers; allowing more apartment or condominium construction along mass transit routes; or increasing the share of apartments with rent control.

Source: UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll

(Kyle Kim / Los Angeles Times Graphics)

None of the three answers achieved close to majority support. Additional tax breaks ranked highest with 34% backing. Nearly a quarter of those surveyed did not agree with any of the options.

Voters were evenly divided over whether the state should take a more aggressive role on housing issues and require cities and counties to build more homes in their communities. The poll found 51% in support of the idea.

The lack of agreement on how to address California’s housing problems, including the state government’s responsibility, could help explain why lawmakers recently turned away major housing legislation, DiCamillo said. Last month, legislators shelved Senate Bill 50, which would have boosted building near transit lines and in single-family home neighborhoods. They also blocked and weakened measures that aimed to add protections for renters.

Addressing the housing problem with a specific solution, DiCamillo said, is “the big dilemma for the Legislature. They might not have the public behind them when they do it.”

The survey did find a split among age and demographic groups on whether the state should take a larger role on expediting more housing. Nearly two-thirds of those ages 18 to 29 wanted more state intervention compared with 45% of those 65 and older. Similarly, more than 60% of Latinos, blacks and Asians backed a more expansive state role, compared with 45% of whites.

The online survey of 4,435 California voters took place June 4 to 10 and has an overall margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.5%.

[email protected]

@dillonliam

Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of slain President John F. Kennedy, is battling a rare form of leukemia and may have less than a year to live.

In an essay published Saturday in the New Yorker, the 35-year-old environmental journalist wrote her illness was discovered in May 2024 after she gave birth to her daughter. She was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation known as Inversion 3 and has undergone several treatments, including chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants.

Schlossberg is a daughter of former U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, the former president’s daughter, and Edwin Schlossberg. They live in New York.

In her essay, Schlossberg acknowledged that her terminal illness adds to a string of tragedies that has befallen the famous political family. Her grandfather was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. Nearly five years later, his brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, was fatally shot in Los Angeles after giving a victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel following his California presidential primary win. Her uncle, John F. Kennedy Jr., died in 1999 when his small plane crashed.

“For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry,” Schlossberg wrote.

“Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

She wrote her diagnosis was stunning. She had just turned 34, didn’t feel sick and was physically active, including swimming a mile one day before she gave birth to her second child at Columbia-Presbyterian hospital in New York.

After the delivery, her doctor became alarmed by her high white blood cell count.

At first, medical professionals figured the test result might be tied to her pregnancy. However, doctors soon concluded she had myeloid leukemia, a condition mostly observed in older patients. She ended up spending weeks in the hospital.

“Every doctor I saw asked me if I had spent a lot of time at Ground Zero, given how common blood cancers are among first responders,” Schlossberg wrote. “I was in New York on 9/11, in the sixth grade, but I didn’t visit the site until years later.”

She has endured various treatments. Her older sister, Rose, was one of her bone marrow donors.

In the article, Schlossberg mentioned the Kennedy family’s dilemma over controversial positions taken by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., her mother’s cousin. Schlossberg wrote that while she was in the hospital in mid-2024, Kennedy suspended his long-shot campaign for president to throw his weight behind then-Republican candidate President Trump.

Trump went on to name Kennedy to his Cabinet as secretary of the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In one of his early moves, Trump demanded a cut in government money to Columbia University, which employs her husband, George Moran.

“Doctors and scientists at Columbia, including George, didn’t know if they would be able to continue their research, or even have jobs,” she wrote. “Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky.”

On Saturday, her brother Jack Schlossberg, who recently announced his bid for Congress in a New York district, shared on Instagram a link to her New Yorker essay, “A Battle with My Blood.”

He added: “Life is short — let it rip.”

Nov. 22 (UPI) — The South Africa-hosted G20 summit began Saturday with some member states weighing a proposed peace plan to end the Russian-Ukraine war.

The two-day event is being held in Johannesburg amid a U.S. boycott due to South Africa’s policies toward Afrikaners.

The 28-point plan would require Ukrainian leaders to concede territorial gains by Russia, which they previously rejected, and limit the size of their military, The New York Times reported.

The proposed plan would give Russia some parts of the eastern Donbas region and force Ukraine to forego any possibility of joining NATO, according to The Guardian.

President Donald Trump presented the peace plan to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky earlier this week and advised him to decide whether to accept or reject it by next week.

European leaders attending the G-20 conference held a side meeting to review the plan and generally agreed that it needs to be revised to gain their support.

The plan “includes important elements that will be essential for a just and lasting peace,” they said afterward in a joint statement.

“But it is a basis that will require additional work,” they said, adding: “Borders must not be changed by force.”

Representatives from Britain, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and the European Union signed the joint statement.

The peace plan is not a final offer, though, Trump said on Saturday.

While several participating nations weighed the peace proposal, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa delivered the opening speech for the gathering of the world’s 20-largest economies, minus the United States.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi lauded the summit being held in South Africa and said it’s time for the world’s leading economies support sustainable development.

“With Africa hosting the G-20 summit for the first time, now is the right moment for us to revisit our development parameters and focus on growth that is inclusive and sustainable,” Modi said in a post on X.

“India’s civilizational values, especially the principle of integral humanism, offers a way forward,” he added.

Division marked the COP30 climate summit in Brazil as countries struggled to reach a consensus on several sticking points, including a push to phase out fossil fuels.

As the world seeks to address the climate crisis, experts say scientists, politicians, media and business all have a role to play in keeping the public engaged.

But are they succeeding?

Presenter: Neave Barker

Guests:

Professor John Sweeney – Contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Nobel Peace Prize-winning assessment report

Professor Allam Ahmed – Leading scholar in sustainable development and the knowledge economy

Michael Shank – Climate communication expert and former director of media strategy at Climate Nexus

Southern California lawmakers are demanding answers from U.S. Homeland Security officials following the deaths of two Orange County residents and nearly two dozen others while in federal immigration custody.

In a letter Friday to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, U.S. Reps. Dave Min (D-Irvine) and Judy Chu (D-Pasadena) pointed to the deaths of 25 people so far this year while being held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The number of in-custody deaths has reached an annual record since the agency began keeping track in 2018.

Two Mexican immigrants — who had long made their homes in Orange County and were sent to the Adelanto ICE Processing Center north of Hesperia — were among the deaths.

“These are not just numbers on a website, but real people — with families, jobs, and hopes and dreams — each of whom died in ICE custody,” the lawmakers wrote. “The following cases illustrate systemic patterns of delayed treatment, neglect, and failure to properly notify families.”

Ismael Ayala-Uribe, 39, died Sept. 22 about a month after being apprehended while working at the Fountain Valley Auto Wash, where he had worked for 15 years, according to a GoFundMe post by his family.

He had lived in Westminster since he was 4 years old, and had previously been protected from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA. The Times previously reported that his application for continued protection was not renewed in 2016.

Ayala-Uribe’s relatives and members of Congress have alleged that he was denied proper medical care after being taken into ICE custody in August. Adelanto detention staff members were aware of his medical crisis, according to internal emails obtained by The Times. But Ayala-Uribe initially was taken back to his Adelanto dorm room, where he waited for another three days before being moved to Victor Valley Global Medical Center in Victorville.

ICE officials acknowledged that Ayala-Uribe died at the Victorville hospital while waiting for surgery for an abscess on his buttock. The suspected cause of the sore was not disclosed.

Ayala-Uribe’s cause of death is under investigation, ICE has previously said.

A second man — Gabriel Garcia-Aviles, 56, who lived near Costa Mesa — died Oct. 23, about a week after being detained.

ICE said Garcia-Aviles was arrested Oct. 14 in Santa Ana by the U.S. Border Patrol for an outstanding warrant, and eventually sent to the Adelanto center. ICE said in a previous statement that he was only at the Adelanto facility for a few hours before he was taken to the Victorville hospital for “suspected alcohol withdrawal symptoms.”

His condition rapidly worsened.

The deaths have focused attention on the treatment of detained immigrants as well as long-standing concerns about medical care inside Adelanto, one of the largest federal immigration detention centers in California. The situation raises broader concerns about whether immigration detention centers throughout the country are equipped to care for the deluge of people rounded up since President Trump prioritized mass deportations as part of his second-term agenda.

“These deaths raise serious questions about ICE’s ability to comply with basic detention standards, medical care protocols, and notification requirements, and underscore a pattern of gross negligence that demands immediate accountability,” Min and Chu wrote in the letter to Noem and Todd M. Lyons, the acting director of ICE.

The letter was signed by 43 other lawmakers, including Reps. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), J. Luis Correa (D-Santa Ana), John Garamendi (D-Walnut Grove) and Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles).

An ICE representative did not immediately respond to an email Saturday seeking comment.

The lawmakers stressed the need to treat the immigrants with humanity.

The lawmakers said Garcia-Aviles had lived in the U.S. for three decades. His family did not learn of his dire medical condition until “he was on his deathbed.” Family members drove to the hospital to find him “unconscious, intubated, and . . . [with] dried blood on his forehead” as well as “a cut on his tongue … broken teeth and bruising on his body.”

“We never got the chance to speak to him anymore and [the family] never was called to let us know why he had been transferred to the hospital,” his daugher wrote on a GoFundMe page, seeking help to pay for his funeral costs. “His absence has left a hole in our hearts.”

BISMARCK, N.D. — Abortion is again illegal in North Dakota after the state’s Supreme Court on Friday couldn’t muster the required majority to uphold a judge’s ruling that struck down the state’s ban last year.

The law makes it a felony crime for anyone to perform an abortion, though it specifically protects patients from prosecution. Doctors could be prosecuted and penalized by as much as five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Three justices agreed that the ban is unconstitutionally vague. The other two justices said the law is not unconstitutional.

The North Dakota Constitution requires at least four of the five justices to agree for a law to be found unconstitutional, a high bar. Not enough members of the court joined together to affirm the lower court ruling.

In his opinion, Justice Jerod Tufte said the natural rights guaranteed by the state constitution in 1889 do not extend to abortion rights. He also said the law “provides adequate and fair warning to those attempting to comply.”

North Dakota Republican Atty. Gen. Drew Wrigley welcomed the ruling, saying, “The Supreme Court has upheld this important pro-life legislation, enacted by the people’s Legislature. The attorney general’s office has the solemn responsibility of defending the laws of North Dakota, and today those laws have been upheld.”

Republican state Sen. Janne Myrdal, who introduced the 2023 legislation that became the law banning abortion, said she was “thrilled and grateful that two justices that are highly respected saw the truth of the matter, that this is fully constitutional for the mother and for the unborn child and thereafter for that sake.”

The challengers called the decision “a devastating loss for pregnant North Dakotans.”

“As a majority of the Court found, this cruel and confusing ban is incomprehensible to physicians. The ban forces doctors to choose between providing care and going to prison,” Center for Reproductive Rights senior staff attorney Meetra Mehdizadeh said. “Abortion is healthcare, and North Dakotans deserve to be able to access this care without delay caused by confusion about what the law allows.”

The ruling means access to abortion in North Dakota will be outlawed. Even after a judge had struck down the ban last year, the only scenarios for a patient to obtain an abortion in North Dakota had been for life- or health-preserving reasons in a hospital.

The state’s only abortion provider relocated in 2022 from Fargo to nearby Moorhead, Minn.

Justice Daniel Crothers, one of the three judges to vote against the ban, wrote that the district court decision wasn’t wrong.

“The vagueness in the law relates to when an abortion can be performed to preserve the life and health of the mother,” Crothers wrote. “After striking this invalid provision, the remaining portions of the law would be inoperable.”

North Dakota’s newly confirmed ban prohibits the performance of an abortion and declares it a felony. The only exceptions are for rape or incest for an abortion in the first six weeks of pregnancy — before many women know they are pregnant — and to prevent the woman’s death or a “serious health risk” to her.

North Dakota joins 12 other states enforcing bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy. Four others bar it at or around six weeks of gestational age.

Judge Bruce Romanick had struck down the ban the GOP-led Legislature passed in 2023, less than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade and opened the door to the state-level bans, largely turning the abortion battle to state courts and legislatures.

The Red River Women’s Clinic — the formerly sole abortion clinic in North Dakota — and several physicians challenged the law. The state appealed the 2024 ruling that overturned the ban.

The judge and the Supreme Court each denied requests by the state to keep the abortion ban in effect during the appeal. Those decisions allowed patients with pregnancy complications to seek care without fear of delay because of the law, Mehdizadeh previously said.

Dura writes for the Associated Press.

President Trump’s pledge to terminate temporary legal protections for Somalis living in Minnesota is triggering fear in the state’s deeply rooted immigrant community, along with doubts about whether the White House has the legal authority to enact the directive as described.

In a social media post late Friday, Trump said he would “immediately” strip Somali residents in Minnesota of Temporary Protected Status, a legal safeguard against deportation for immigrants from certain countries.

The announcement was immediately challenged by some state leaders and immigration experts, who characterized Trump’s declaration as a legally dubious effort to sow fear and suspicion toward Minnesota’s Somali community, the largest in the nation.

“There’s no legal mechanism that allows the president to terminate protected status for a particular community or state that he has beef with,” said Heidi Altman, policy director at the National Immigrant Justice Center.

“This is Trump doing what he always does: demagoguing immigrants without justification or evidence and using that demagoguery in an attempt to take away important life-saving protections,” she added.

The protection has been extended 27 times for Somalis since 1991, with U.S. authorities determining that it was unsafe for people already in the United States to return to Somalia.

The Trump administration could, however, move to revoke the legal protection for Somalis nationally. But that move would affect only a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of Somalis living in Minnesota. A report produced for Congress in August put the number of Somalis covered by TPS at 705 nationwide.

“I am a citizen and so are [the] majority of Somalis in America,” Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat born in Somalia, said in a social media post Friday. “Good luck celebrating a policy change that really doesn’t have much impact on the Somalis you love to hate.”

Still, advocates warned the move could inflame hate against a community at a time of rising Islamophobia.

“This is not just a bureaucratic change,” said Jaylani Hussein, president of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “It is a political attack on the Somali and Muslim community driven by Islamophobic and hateful rhetoric.”

In his social media post, Trump claimed, without offering evidence, that Somali gangs had targeted Minnesota residents and referred to the state as a “hub of fraudulent money laundering activity.”

Federal prosecutors have in recent weeks brought charges against dozens of people in a social-services fraud scheme. Some of the defendants are from Somalia.

Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, has noted that Minnesota consistently ranks among the safest states in the country.

“It’s not surprising that the president has chosen to broadly target an entire community,” Walz said Friday. “This is what he does to change the subject.”

Community advocates say that the Somali diaspora in Minnesota has helped to revitalize downtown corridors in Minneapolis and plays a prominent role in the state’s politics.

“The truth is that the Somali community is beloved and long-woven into the fabric of many neighborhoods and communities in Minnesota,” Altman said. “Destabilizing families and communities makes all of us less safe and not more.”

As part of a broader push to adopt hard-line immigration policies, the Trump administration has moved to withdraw various protections that had allowed immigrants to remain in the United States and work legally.

That included ending TPS for 600,000 Venezuelans and 500,000 Haitians who were granted protection under former President Biden. The Trump administration has also sought to limit protections previously extended to migrants from Cuba and Syria, among other countries.

Offenhartz writes for the Associated Press.

Nov. 22 (UPI) — President Donald Trump on Saturday said his proposed peace plan to end the war raging between Ukraine and Russia since 2022 is not his final offer.

Trump has given Ukraine a deadline Thursday to accept the 28-point proposal.

When asked by reporters outside the White House whether it is the final offer, Trump responded, “No. We’d like to get to peace.”

“One way or another we’ll get it ended,” he said, adding his familiar refrain that “the Ukraine war with Russia should have never happened. If I were president, it never would have happened.”

Asked what would happen if Ukraine rejects the plan, Trump said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “can continue to fight his little heart out.”

Trump spoke to reporters before playing golf with Jack Nicklaus at the Joint Base Andrews golf course.

The president sent officials to Geneva, Switzerland, to meet Sunday with a Ukrainian delegation, including Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff, a top U.S. official told ABC News on Saturday.

National security advisers from Germany, France and Britain are also going to Geneva for talks, a diplomatic source told CNN Saturday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday posted on X about the talks.

“In the coming days, consultations with our partners will take place on the steps needed to end the war,” he said in a video.

“Our representatives know how to defend Ukraine’s national interests and exactly what must be done to prevent Russia from launching a third invasion, another strike against Ukraine — just as it has repeatedly committed crimes against our people and against other nations in the past,” Zelensky said.

His office said Friday noted that “Ukraine never wanted this war and will make every effort to end it with a dignified peace.

“Ukraine will never be an obstacle for peace, and the representatives of the Ukrainian state will defend legitimate interests of the Ukrainian people and the foundations of European security,” they said. “We are grateful for our European partners’ willingness to help.”

There are planned meetings with a Russian delegation.

Russia worked with the United States on the peace plan, which was presented to Ukraine last week. Russian President Vladimir Putin said “it could form the basis of a final peace settlement.”

But the plan includes what Ukraine has said are nonstarters, including giving up land not yet occupied by Russia and cutting its armed forces by more than half.

Ukraine also would be forbidden from possessing long-range weapons and Moscow would retain virtually all the territory it has occupied — notably, its 2014 seizure of Crimea.

Additionally, Ukraine would not be permitted join NATO, which has been a demand by Russia.

“Since the first days of the war, we have taken one, extremely simple position: Ukraine needs peace,” Zelenskyy said in an address on Friday. “And a real peace — one that will not be broken by a third invasion.”

Driscoll met with Zelensky on Thursday about a “collaborative plan to achieve peace in Ukraine,” according to a U.S. official.

Allies: Additional work needed

U.S. allies have been skeptical of the plan, including those attending the G-20 summit in South Africa.

The U.S. is absent because of “human rights violations” in the nation, Trump said on Nov. 8.

Twelve European Union leaders, joined by the Canadian and Japanese prime ministers, released a joint statement saying it welcomed “continued U.S. efforts to bring peace to Ukraine. The initial draft of the 28-point plan includes important elements that will be essential for a just and lasting peace.”

Bur it noted the draft proposal “will require additional work. We are ready to engage in order to ensure that a future peace is sustainable. We are clear on the principle that borders must not be changed by force. We are also concerned by the proposed limitations on Ukraine’s armed forces, which would leave Ukraine vulnerable to future attack.”

And these leaders said they must sign off on portions of the agreement that affect them.

“We reiterate that the implementation of elements relating to the European Union and relating to NATO would need the consent of EU and NATO members respectively,” the statement said.

Zelensky, in successive posts on X to leaders, wrote “thank you for your support!”

In a statement ahead of the meeting, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he expected friends and partners of Ukraine to “meet in the margins of the G-20 summit to discuss how we can secure a full ceasefire and create the space for meaningful peace negotiations.”

“We will discuss the current proposal on the table, and in support of President Trump’s push for peace, look at how we can strengthen this plan for the next phase of negotiations,” Starmer added.

Republicans unhappy with plan

The plan was also criticized by U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the former Republican majority leader, as a way to appease Putin.

“Putin has spent the entire year trying to play President Trump for a fool,” McConnell posted Friday on Facebook. “If Administration officials are more concerned with appeasing Putin than securing real peace, then the President ought to find new advisors.

“Rewarding Russian butchery would be disastrous to America’s interests. And a capitulation like Biden’s abandonment of Afghanistan would be catastrophic to a legacy of peace through strength,” he said.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a key Trump ally, called parts of the plan “problematic and can be made better” in a post on X.

“The goal of any peace deal is to end the war honorably and justly — and not create new conflict,” Graham said. “Finally, to the world: what about the fate of the almost 20,000 Ukrainian children kidnapped by Putin’s forces? This issue has to be addressed in any negotiated settlement.”

A bipartisan coalition of pro-Ukraine legislators will seek to force a House vote to impose crippling sanctions on Russia

Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania said in an X post Friday that he and his allies have “officially notified both the Clerk of the House and House leadership of our discharge petition to force a vote on crushing Russian sanctions immediately upon our return” from the Thanksgiving holiday recess.

SACRAMENTO — The day after the last out-of-town TV news bureau was shut down and state capital correspondent Ginger Rutland and her producer-husband Don Fields were fired, the couple got a panic call from their former employer, KRON-TV in San Francisco.

It was the first week of November and real news–not that stuffy, dull legislative dross that blows through the halls of the state Capitol–was happening in Sacramento.

“They wanted us to go out and cover the body search at the landlady’s house. You know the one who was accused of doing in all the old men?” said Fields. “Everyone wanted that story. Nobody wants to know about budgets or bills that might raise their taxes or ruin their water.”

Indeed, TV stations throughout the state–including KABC-TV Channel 7, KNBC Channel 4 and KCBS-TV Channel 2 in Los Angeles–dispatched correspondents to Sacramento that Friday afternoon in November to cover the Dorothy Puente “Arsenic and Old Lace” case, because not a single out-of-town TV station in California now has its own bureau here.

“It’s an absolute outrage,” said Harry Snider, West Coast director of Consumer’s Union. “We have a state that is supposed to have the 10th largest economy in the world and not a single TV station covering how it’s governed.”

With the shutdown of the KRON bureau, only TV reporters from Sacramento’s own stations cover legislative news on a regular basis.

“California is only one of three states in the country that don’t provide live coverage of debates in their state legislatures. Wyoming and Montana are the others,” said Tracy Westen, a USC professor who is writing a book on media coverage of state and local government in California (see accompanying article).

“Democracy is eroding in California,” Snider said. “Government does not work for the people, and the reason government doesn’t work is that public officials are able to escape the spotlight of public attention.

“All of them, from the governor on down, know that they can ride out a print story or a radio sound bite on the Michael Jackson show. But none of them want to be caught giving away the farm on the six o’clock news in Los Angeles or San Francisco.”

While TV stations have been pulling out, the state’s newspapers have been increasing capital coverage, according to a spokesman for Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco). Currently, 30 newspapers and wire services have bureaus here.

Both Gov. George Deukmejian’s office and state Senate President Pro Tem David Roberti’s office are disturbed by television’s departure from the scene.

“The shutdown of the KRON bureau really is the culmination of a very disturbing trend,” said Kevin Brett, Deukmejian’s press secretary.

“What will be missed will be the original reporting and investigative reporting,” said Bob Forsyte, Roberti’s press secretary. “That kind of reporting can only be done with sustained coverage from a bureau. The viewers will miss what will only come to them now through the print media.”

KNBC News Director Tom Capra said the decision to shut down its bureau six years ago was based on financial considerations–determining how limited resources should be allocated.

“The real crux of this is the expense,” he said. “It costs about $100,000 a year to have someone in Sacramento. I would rather spend that money covering the news in Southern California. I’d a helluva lot rather have a bureau in Orange County or even Riverside than in Sacramento.”

Capital veterans such as Rutland and Fields, who have been in Sacramento for 10 years, and KCRA-TV’s Steven Swatt, who has been reporting state government news for nearly 20 years, say the benign neglect of Sacramento can’t be blamed on rising costs.

“Logistically and economically, its’s easier and cheaper than ever before,” Rutland said. “We’ve got videotape. We’ve got satellites. The fact is stations don’t do it because they’d rather put crap on the air.”

“It’s greed,” Swatt said. “You’ll see them send up people for things like the body search or a plane crash, but why aren’t they here when the Legislature’s trying to raise taxes or the CHP wants to upgrade its radar or there are hearings being held on changing school textbooks or day care?”

When he headed the Sacramento bureau for KNBC a decade ago, Steve Mallory says, it used to cost about $250,000 a year for an out-of-town station to maintain a capital bureau.

“Most stations like to have their own person on the scene, but if they can’t, they’ll take anything they can get,” said Mallory.

That’s what Mallory is banking on, at any rate. Last summer he created the Northern California News Satellite service to fill the void left by the TV exodus from the state capital. So far he has 13 subscribers, including KNBC, and several other stations and networks that buy his daily satellite video feeds on a spot basis. Both KCBS and KABC have bought stories from him, he said.

“If they get it for one-tenth the price from us, they’ll take it,” said Mallory, who, like a newspaper wire service, spreads his costs over a number of clients. “Public service isn’t the prime concern of television news anymore. The bottom line is.”

That doesn’t mean he offers second-rate goods, Mallory maintains.

“We’re their bureau in the state capital,” he said. “Our stories are written for a general statewide audience unless we get a specific request from a subscriber to do something. But we give them what they want.”

A recent typical NCNS news day involved covering a press conference on a new drunk driving bill, comment from Gov. Deukmejian on the Armenian earthquake, dedication of the state Vietnam Memorial and a plan authored by the state Department of Social Services to pressure absentee parents to make their child support payments.

“When the story broke about the woman who planted the people in her back yard, we dropped everything else,” Mallory said “It was the only story we did for three or four days. It was the only one our clients wanted.”

Fields is not surprised.

“Why try to inform the public about issues that are going to affect their lives when life can be made so much easier dealing with a car accident or an unexplained shooting or some bizarre thing on ‘Entertainment Tonight’?” he asked.

KNBC’s Capra maintains that his station gets all the state legislative news it needs–from wire reports, selected satellite feeds from Mallory’s NCNS, its Sacramento sister station and elected officials downstate for a visit to their constituents.

If a bill is controversial or of particular interest to Los Angeles audiences, Capra does what his rivals at KCBS and KABC do: He sends a reporter to Sacramento upstate for a few days to get the story.

“There’s not much in Sacramento that we don’t know about,” he said. “I don’t have a problem with the way Sacramento is covered and I don’t think we’re doing a disservice to the public by not following a bunch of rich lobbyists around. How many times can you cover that story?”

Snider’s answer is fast and angry: every day.

“It is amazing to me that legislators spend $100 million every two years to seek legislative office and TV stations don’t think they’re important enough to cover,” he said.

The voters are the ultimate losers, according to Swatt and Rutland.

“All the surveys say that 66% of the population gets its news from the TV,” said Swatt. “If they don’t even know what’s going on up here, that’s frightening.”

“We live in a democracy where public opinion is far more important than ever before,” said Rutland. “The Field Poll and other polls influence legislators. And the initiative process puts more and more power directly into the hands of the public. But the public doesn’t know what’s going on.”

US President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani met in the Oval Office on Friday after weeks of trading barbs. Trump, who described their meetings as “productive,” gave Mamdani a warm welcome, and said he’ll be “cheering for” the 34-year-old incoming mayor.

Leaders welcome deal reached at UN climate summit as step forward but say ‘more ambition’ needed to tackle the crisis.

World leaders have put forward a draft text at the United Nations climate conference in Brazil that seeks to address the crisis, but the agreement does not include any mention of phasing out the fossil fuels driving climate change.

The text was published on Saturday after negotiations stretched through the night, well beyond the expected close of the two-week COP30 summit in the Brazilian city of Belem, amid deep divisions over the fossil fuel phase-out.

The draft, which must be approved by consensus by nearly 200 nations, pledges to review climate-related trade barriers and calls on developed nations to “at least triple” the money given to developing countries to help them withstand extreme weather events.

It also urges “all actors to work together to significantly accelerate and scale up climate action worldwide” with the aim of keeping the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) mark for global warming – an internationally agreed-upon target set under the Paris Agreement – “within reach”.

Wopke Hoekstra, the European Union’s climate commissioner, said the outcome was a step in the right direction, but the bloc would have liked more.

“We’re not going to hide the fact that we would have preferred to have more, to have more ambition on everything,” Hoekstra told reporters. “We should support it because at least it is going in the right direction,” he said.

France’s ecological transition minister, Monique Barbut, also said it was a “rather flat text” but Europeans would not oppose it because “there is nothing extraordinarily bad in it”.

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla also said in a social media post that while the outcome “fell short of expectations”, COP30 demonstrated the importance of multilateralism to tackle global challenges such as climate change.

‘Needed a giant leap’

Countries had been divided on a number of issues in Belem, including a push to phase out fossil fuels – the largest drivers of the climate crisis – that drew opposition from oil-producing countries and nations that depend on oil, gas and coal.

Questions of climate finance also sparked heated debates, with developing nations demanding that richer countries bear a greater share of the financial burden.

But COP30 host Brazil had pushed for a show of unity, as the annual conference is largely viewed as a test of the world’s resolve to address a deepening crisis.

“We need to show society that we want this without imposing anything on anyone, without setting deadlines for each country to decide what it can do within its own time, within its own possibilities,” Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said earlier this week.

Earlier on Saturday, COP30 President Andre Aranha Correa do Lago said the presidency would publish “roadmaps” on fossil fuels and forests as there had been no consensus on those issues at the talks.

Speaking to Al Jazeera before the draft text was released, Asad Rehman, chief executive director of Friends of the Earth, said richer countries “had to be dragged – really kicking and screaming – to the table” at COP30.

“They have tried to bully developing countries and have weakened the text … But I would say that, overall, from what we’re hearing, we will have taken a step forward,” Rehman said in an interview from Belem.

“This will be welcomed by the millions of people for whom these talks are a matter of life and death. However, in the scale of the crisis that we face, we of course needed a giant leap forward.”

L.A. County voters are fuming.

Two out of three think the county is headed in the wrong direction. Four out of five feel its leaders are closely connected to “big money interests, lobbyists, and developers,” and the same fraction felt county supervisors were effective “only some of the time” — or not at all.

How to turn things around? Seven out of ten agreed the county government needed “major reform.”

Those are the top-line findings from a new survey on local governance published this week by the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.

The survey, paid for by the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, took the pulse of just over 1,000 registered voters and found most were feeling quite glum about the local state of affairs.

“Voters and residents are in a state of distrust and think that the government is not working,” said Fernando Guerra, the center’s director.

But the survey was meant to show more than just a dejected electorate, Guerra said. He argued it made another point: Now is not the time for opponents to try and undo Measure G, a controversial measure that overhauled the county’s form of government.

“There are some people that are trying to relitigate Measure G, and I’m talking at the level of political elite,” said Guerra, who supported the overhaul. “What these numbers are suggesting, and what I’m suggesting, is if it were to be put up for an election again, it would pass again.”

It’s been almost exactly a year since voters approved Measure G, bringing something akin to a wrecking ball to the county’s governance structure and promising to replace it with something unprecedented in California: namely, nine supervisors instead of five and an elected county executive rather than an appointed one.

The measure was always controversial, with criticism lobbed at the position of chief executive, who opponents said would now hold far too much power over a $45-billion budget and the well-being of the county’s 10 million residents.

The measure barely passed, with a little more than half of voters agreeing to give it a shot. But the ultimate bureaucratic flub is giving some opponents of the overhaul new ammo to bring it back to voters.

Due to an error with how the county handles charter updates, voters inadvertently gave a 2028 expiration date to a different ballot measure that allocates funding for anti-incarceration efforts — known as Measure J — when they approved Measure G. (The head-scratching error is a wonky one — readers curious as to how it came about can find out here.)

Months after the error came to light, the county has still not said how it plans to fix the mistake. There are a few options, including putting either of the measures back on the ballot.

The survey of voters was not an election poll, and respondents were not given opposing arguments. Most voters did not seem to know much about the impending county government overhaul and the survey did not ask about the bureaucratic screw-up, which could be seized upon in a campaign. About half didn’t remember how they voted.

It’s not clear who exactly is pushing so hard for G’s demise currently. While the overhaul had its vocal opponents — including two supervisors — the effort would be extremely expensive and some may not relish the idea of a campaign that may come with an acute sense of déjà vu.

Some on the government reform task force who opposed Measure G said they didn’t think it was in the cards — though those who opposed the measure said they didn’t think it was such a bad idea.

“I have not heard that,” said John Fasana, a task force member who first noticed the error and voted against both Measure G and J. “I think that’s what they should do: if they’re going to do one, I would say it should be G.”

Instead, the county appears to be leaning toward a ballot measure involving Measure J for 2026.

On Nov. 3, Dawyn Harrison, the county’s top lawyer, laid out the possible options for the board to “reverse the error and honor the will of the voters.” That memo included language for various ways to enshrine Measure J through a ballot measure and make sure it doesn’t go poof in a few years.

Brian Kaneda, who is part of the coalition that got Measure J passed, said the group believes the county has multiple options to fix the blunder. But putting Measure J back on the ballot, they warn, should be the last thing the county considers.

“If evidence surfaces that a new ballot measure is legally required, we’re ready,” said Kaneda. “But we believe the county should rectify this internally, honoring the will of 2.1 million voters.”

State of play

— RUFF WEEK: One of the opponents of L.A. City Controller Kenneth Mejia accused the controller of misusing city resources by using images of his corgis and other graphics for both his office and his campaign. A campaign spokesperson suggested the opponent was “jealous of our cute corgi graphics.”

— BIN BONANZA: Los Angeles has left dozens of green bins on city blocks, so residents can dump their food waste and comply with a state composting law. Some residents say it’s overkill.

— ‘SMEAR’ STANCE: Newly appointed Fire Chief Jaime Moore says the media is trying to “smear” firefighters. The accusations appear to be in reference to a Times report that a battalion chief ordered firefighters to leave the burn area of the Jan. 1 Lachman fire, which would reignite into the deadly Palisades fire.

— FIRE FUND: The city’s firefighter union plans to propose a ballot measure that would increase the sales tax for Angelenos by half a cent in perpetuity, raising hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue annually for the department to build dozens of new stations, add rigs and increase the size of the department by more than 1,000 by 2050. “This is the most important thing for the LAFD really ever,” said Doug Coates, the acting president of UFLAC.

— FRAUD PROBE: Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman said his office will investigate claims that plaintiffs made up stories of sexual abuse in order to sue L.A. County. The announcement follows Times investigations that found nine people who said they were paid by recruiters to join the litigation.

— RESERVOIR QUESTIONS: State officials determined that even if the Santa Ynez Reservoir had been full during the Palisades fire, the water system still would have been overwhelmed and quickly lost pressure. Officials concluded the water supply in Southern California was “robust” at the time of the fire and that the water system isn’t designed to handle such large, intense wildfires.

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program to address homelessness went to Beverly Boulevard and Mountain View Avenue in Historic Filipinotown, an area represented by Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez. Outreach teams also returned to previous Inside Safe locations in Echo Park, Van Nuys, Mar Vista, Little Armenia, Sun Valley, Woodland Hills and the Figueroa Corridor, according to Bass’ team.
• On the docket next week: The county supes will consider deferring permit fees for some homeowners who are rebuilding single-family homes in areas of Malibu after the Palisades Fire.

Stay in touch

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

In a wild — but friendly — exchange between US President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, Trump said he didn’t “mind” Mamdani previously calling him a “fascist.” Trump, who once called Mamdani a “communist,” heaped praise on him at their Friday Oval Office meeting.

SACRAMENTO — With patients facing increasing threats from antibiotic-resistant “super bugs,” Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Thursday signed two measures requiring California hospitals to strengthen their efforts at preventing staph outbreaks and to reveal to the public their rates of infection.

The move was a reversal for the governor, who vetoed similar legislation four years ago. Since then, concerns about the growth of these bacteria — and state inspections finding that some hospitals were not preventing their spread — have made infections a top public health priority.

Hospitals have had an especially tough time combating strains like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. The bacteria can spread from patient to patient through unsterile clothing, ventilation systems, surgical equipment or room furnishings. If they get into a patient’s body, they can be fatal.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 2 million patients nationwide contract an infection each year, and about 100,000 die. State health officials estimate that between 5% and 10% of patients in California hospitals develop infections, often through catheters, IV lines and ventilators or during surgery. Treating those sicknesses costs about $3.1 billion a year.

One of the new laws requires high-risk patients to be tested for MRSA within 24 hours of admission. The bill, SB 1058 by Sen. Elaine Alquist (D-Santa Clara), also requires hospitals to beef up their infection control rules and report to the state their infection rates. Those will be put on the Department of Public Health website starting in 2011.

The second bill, SB 158 by Sen. Dean Florez (D-Shafter), bolsters the public health department’s surveillance efforts of hospitals and requires doctors and other medical professionals at hospitals to be trained in preventing the spread of infections.

Betsy Imholz, an advocate at Consumers Union, said the new laws will help public health officials get a handle on the extent of the spread of these bacteria.

“We don’t even know the extent of the problem in California,” she said.

In 2004, Schwarzenegger vetoed a similar bill, writing that state and industry efforts to scrutinize hospital infection programs were working. “This calls into question the need of a new program to address this issue,” he wrote, adding that the costs of compliance might be too onerous for some hospitals.

In his statement Thursday announcing his signature on the latest bills, Schwarzenegger wrote:

“These important measures will help save lives and healthcare dollars by reducing the number of infections that people are exposed to while staying in the hospital.”

Carole Moss, a Riverside County resident whose 15-year-old son, Nile, died in 2006 of an infection contracted in a hospital, said too many facilities and physicians have refused to recognize that infections can be avoided.

“There’s a few that have made it a priority, but the attitude across the board is that infections are in hospitals and that’s what happens,” said Moss, who pressed for the bills in Sacramento.

—

[email protected]

WASHINGTON — No one seems to know what happened to Vicente Ventura Aguilar.

A witness told his brother and attorneys that the 44-year-old Mexican immigrant, who doesn’t have lawful immigration status, was taken into custody by immigration authorities on Oct. 7 in SouthLos Angeles and suffered a medical emergency.

But it’s been more than six weeks since then, and Ventura Aguilar’s family still hasn’t heard from him.

The Department of Homeland Security said 73 people from Mexico were arrested in the Los Angeles area between Oct. 7 and 8.

“None of them were Ventura Aguilar,” said Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant Homeland Security public affairs secretary.

“For the record, illegal aliens in detention have access to phones to contact family members and attorneys,” she added.

McLaughlin did not answer questions about what the agency did to determine whether Ventura Aguilar had ever been in its custody, such as checking for anyone with the same date of birth, variations of his name, or identifying detainees who received medical attention near the California border around Oct. 8.

Lindsay Toczylowski, co-founder of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center who is representing Ventura Aguilar’s family, said DHS never responded to her inquiries about him.

The family of Vicente Ventura Aguilar, 44, says he has been missing since Oct. 7 when a friend saw him arrested by federal immigration agents in Los Angeles. Homeland Security officials say he was never in their custody.

(Family of Vicente Ventura Aguilar)

“There’s only one agency that has answers,” she said. “Their refusal to provide this family with answers, their refusal to provide his attorneys with answers, says something about the lack of care and the cruelty of the moment right now for DHS.”

His family and lawyers checked with local hospitals and the Mexican consulate without success. They enlisted help from the office of Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Los Angeles), whose staff called the Los Angeles and San Diego county medical examiner’s offices. Neither had someone matching his name or description.

The Los Angeles Police Department also told Kamlager-Dove’s office that he isn’t in their system. His brother, Felipe Aguilar, said the family filed a missing person’s report with LAPD on Nov. 7.

“We’re sad and worried,” Felipe Aguilar said. “He’s my brother and we miss him here at home. He’s a very good person. We only hope to God that he’s alive.”

Felipe Aguilar said his brother, who has lived in the U.S. for around 17 years, left home around 8:15 a.m. on Oct. 7 to catch the bus for an interview for a sanitation job when he ran into friends on the corner near a local liquor store. He had his phone but had left his wallet at home.

One of those friends told Felipe Aguilar and his lawyers that he and Ventura Aguilar were detained by immigration agents and then held at B-18, a temporary holding facility at the federal building in downtown Los Angeles.

The friend was deported the next day to Tijuana. He spoke to the family in a phone call from Mexico.

Detainees at B-18 have limited access to phones and lawyers. Immigrants don’t usually turn up in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement online locator system until they’ve arrived at a long-term detention facility.

According to Felipe Aguilar and Toczylowski, the friend said Ventura Aguilar began to shake, went unconscious and fell to the ground while shackled on Oct. 8 at a facility near the border. The impact caused his face to bleed.

The friend said that facility staff called for an ambulance and moved the other detainees to a different room. Toczylowski said that was the last time anyone saw Ventura Aguilar.

She said the rapid timeline between when Ventura Aguilar was arrested to when he disappeared is emblematic of what she views as a broad lack of due process for people in government custody under the Trump administration and shows that “we don’t know who’s being deported from the United States.”

Felipe Aguilar said he called his brother’s cell phone after hearing about the arrests but it went straight to voicemail.

Felipe Aguilar said that while his brother is generally healthy, he saw a cardiologist a couple years ago about chest pain. He was on prescribed medication and his condition had improved.

His family and lawyers said Ventura Aguilar might have given immigration agents a fake name when he was arrested. Some detained people offer up a wrong name or alias, and that would explain why he never showed up in Homeland Security records. Toczylowski said federal agents sometimes misspell the name of the person they are booking into custody.

Vicente Ventura Aguilar, who has been missing since Oct. 7, had lived in the United States for 17 years, his family said.

(Family of Vicente Ventura Aguilar)

But she said the agency should make a significant attempt to search for him, such as by using biometric data or his photo.

“To me, that’s another symptom of the chaos of the immigration enforcement system as it’s happening right now,” she said of the issues with accurately identifying detainees. “And it’s what happens when you are indiscriminately, racially profiling people and picking them up off the street and holding them in conditions that are substandard, and then deporting people without due process. Mistakes get made. Right now, what we want to know is what mistakes were made here, and where is Vicente now?”

Surveillance footage from a nearby business reviewed by MS NOW shows Ventura Aguilar on the sidewalk five minutes before masked agents begin making arrests in South Los Angeles. The footage doesn’t show him being arrested, but two witnesses told the outlet that they saw agents handcuff Ventura Aguilar and place him in a van.

In a letter sent to DHS leaders Friday, Kamlager-Dove asked what steps DHS has taken to determine whether anyone matching Ventura Aguilar’s identifiers was detained last month and whether the agency has documented any medical events or hospital transports involving people taken into custody around Oct. 7-8.

“Given the length of time since Mr. Ventura Aguilar’s disappearance and the credible concern that he may have been misidentified, injured, or otherwise unaccounted for during the enforcement action, I urgently request that DHS and ICE conduct an immediate and comprehensive review” by Nov. 29, Kamlager-Dove wrote in her letter.

Kamlager-Dove said her most common immigration requests from constituents are for help with visas and passports.

“Never in all the years did I expect to get a call about someone who has completely disappeared off the face of the earth, and also never did I think that I would find myself not just calling ICE and Border Patrol but checking hospitals, checking with LAPD and checking morgues to find a constituent,” she said. “It’s horrifying and it’s completely dystopian.”

She said families across Los Angeles deserve answers and need to know whether something similar could happen to them.

“Who else is missing?” she said.

As California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta ponders a run for governor, he faces scrutiny for his ties to people central to a federal corruption investigation in Oakland and payments to private attorneys.

Bonta has not been accused of impropriety, but the questions come at an inopportune time for Democrat, who says he is reassessing a gubernatorial bid after repeatedly dismissing a run earlier this year.

Bonta said the decisions by former Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. Alex Padilla not to seek the office altered the contours of the race.

“I had two horses in the governor’s race already,” Bonta said in an interview with The Times on Friday. “They decided not to get involved in the end. … The race is fundamentally different today, right?”

Bonta said he has received significant encouragement to join the crowded gubernatorial field and that he expects to make a decision “definitely sooner rather than later.” Political advisors to the 54-year-old Alameda politician have been reaching out to powerful Democrats across the state to gauge his possible support.

Historically, serving as California attorney general has been a launching pad to higher office or a top post in Washington. Harris, elected to two terms as the state attorney general, was later elected to the U.S. Senate and then as vice president. Jerry Brown served in the post before voters elected him for a second go-around as governor in 2010. Earl Warren later became the chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Bonta, the first Filipino American to serve as the state’s top law enforcement official, was appointed in March 2021 by Gov. Gavin Newsom after Xavier Becerra resigned to become U.S. Health and Human Services secretary. Bonta easily won election as attorney general in 2022.

Bonta was a deputy city attorney in San Francisco and vice mayor for the city of Alameda before being elected to the state Assembly in 2012. During his tenure representing the Alameda area, Bonta developed a reputation as a progressive willing to push policies to strengthen tenants’ rights and to reform the criminal justice system.

In his role as the state’s top law enforcement official, Bonta has aggressively fought President Trump’s policies and actions, filing 46 lawsuits against the administration.

Bonta also faced controversy this past week in what Bonta’s advisers say they suspect is an attempt to damage him as he considers a potential run.

“Political hacks understand it’s actually a badge of respect, almost an endorsement. Clearly others fear him,” said veteran Democratic strategist Dan Newman, a Bonta adviser.

On Monday, KCRA reported that Bonta had spent nearly $500,000 in campaign funds last year on personal lawyers to represent him in dealings with federal investigators working on a public corruption probe in Oakland.

On Thursday, the website East Bay Insider reported that as that probe was heating up in spring 2024, Bonta had received a letter from an Oakland businessman warning him that he might soon be subject to blackmail.

The letter writer, Mario Juarez, warned Bonta that another businessman, Andy Duong, possessed “a recording of you in a compromising situation.”

Duong was later indicted, along with his father David Duong and former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, on federal bribery charges. All have pleaded not guilty. An attorney for David Duong this week said that Juarez, who is widely believed to be an informant in the case against the Duongs and Thao, was not credible. Juarez could not be reached for comment.

Bonta said his legal expenditures came about after he began speaking with the U.S. Attorney’s office, who approached him because prosecutors thought he could be a victim of blackmail or extortion. Bonta said the outreach came after he already had turned over the letter he had received from Juarez to law enforcement.

Bonta said he hired lawyers to help him review information in his possession that could be helpful to federal investigators.

“I wanted to get them all the information that they wanted, that they needed, give it to him as fast as as I could, to assist, to help,” Bonta said. “Maybe I had a puzzle piece or two that could assist them in their investigation.”

He said he may have made “an audible gasp” when he saw the legal bill, but that it was necessary to quickly turn over all documents and communications that could be relevant to the federal investigation.

“The billing rate is high or not insignificant at private law firms,” Bonta said. “We were moving quickly to be as responsive as possible, to be as helpful as possible, to assist as as much as possible, and that meant multiple attorneys working a lot of hours.”

Bonta said the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission also has alerted him that it received a complaint against him. Bonta and his advisers believe is about the use of campaign funds to pay the legal expenses and suspect it was filed by the campaign of a current gubernatorial candidate.

“We’re not worried,” Bonta said. “That’s politics.”

Asked whether these news stories could create obstacles to a potential gubernatorial campaign, Bonta pushed back against any assertion that he may have “baggage.” He said he was assisting federal prosecutors with their investigation with the hopes of holding people accountable.

“That’s what I would expect anyone to do, certainly someone who is committed as I am to public safety.,” he said. “That’s my job, to assist, to support, to provide information, to help.”

In the weeks since federal investigators announced that the devastating Palisades fire was caused by a reignition of a smaller blaze, top Los Angeles Fire Department officials have insisted that they did everything they could to put out the earlier fire.

But The Times has obtained records that call into question the agency’s statements about how thoroughly firefighters mopped up the Jan. 1 Lachman fire in the days before it reignited.

In an interview last month, then-Interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva said that firefighters returned to the burn area on Jan. 3 — due to a report of smoke — and “cold-trailed” an additional time, meaning they used their hands to feel for heat and dug out hot spots.

“We went back over there again. We dug it all out again. We put ladders on it. We did everything that we could do — cold-trail again,” Villanueva told The Times on Oct. 8. “We did all of that.”

A dispatch log obtained by The Times, however, shows that firefighters arrived at the scene that day and quickly reported seeing no smoke. They then canceled the dispatch for another engine that was on the way, clearing the call within 34 minutes. The log does not mention cold trailing. It’s unclear if crews took any other actions during the call, because the LAFD has not answered questions about it.

The Times has made multiple requests for comment to LAFD spokesperson Capt. Erik Scott by email, text and in person, but the agency has refused to explain the discrepancy. Villanueva also did not respond to an emailed request for comment and an interview request.

The conflict between the LAFD’s statements and its own records is likely to intensify frustration and anger among Palisades fire victims over contradictory and incomplete information about what was done to protect their community. With the first anniversary approaching, gaps remain in what the LAFD has told the public about what it did to prepare for and respond to the fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes.

The LAFD’s after-action report on the Palisades fire makes only a cursory reference to the Lachman blaze. Missing from the 70-page document, released last month, are the report of smoke in the area on Jan. 3 and a battalion chief’s decision to pull firefighters out of the scene the day before, even though they warned him that there were signs of remaining hot spots.

The head of the board that oversees the LAFD has maintained that information about the firefighter warnings — or any examination of the Lachman fire — did not belong in the after-action report.

“The after-action review that was presented to the commission is exactly what we asked for,” Genethia Hudley Hayes, president of the Board of Fire Commissioners, said at the board’s meeting on Tuesday. She said the review was only supposed to cover the first 72 hours after the Palisades fire erupted.

“It is not an investigation,” she said. “It should not include things that the newspaper seems to feel like should be included.”

The after-action report detailed missteps in fire officials’ response to the Palisades fire, including major failures in deployment and communications, and made recommendations to prevent the issues from happening again.

Two former LAFD chief officers said the report also should have provided an examination of what might have gone wrong in the mop-up of the Lachman blaze, which investigators believe was deliberately set, as part of its “lessons learned” section.

“A good after-action report documents what happened before the incident,” said former LAFD Battalion Chief Rick Crawford, who retired from the agency last year and is now emergency and crisis management coordinator for the U.S. Capitol. “The after-action report should have gone back all the way to Dec. 31.”

Patrick Butler, a former assistant chief for the LAFD who has worked on several after-action teams, including for the federal government, agreed.

“If you limit an after-action to an artificial timeline, you’re not going to uncover everything you need to learn from,” said Butler, who is the Redondo Beach fire chief.

He noted that the reports shape training and operational improvements for the Fire Department.

“To exclude the Lachman fire from the report gives the appearance of a coverup of foundational facts,” Butler added. “It’s not a harmless oversight. The consequences can be significant and far-reaching.”

The Jan. 3 report of smoke at the Lachman burn area came in shortly before noon, according to a dispatch log of the incident. Firefighters from Fire Station 23 — one of two stations in the Palisades — arrived on the scene about 10 minutes after they were dispatched.

A couple minutes later, they reported “N/S,” or nothing showing, according to the log. A few minutes after that, they canceled the dispatch for an engine from Fire Station 69, the other Palisades station.

The last entry in the log was from 12:20 p.m., indicating that an L.A. County crew was working in the area.

The L.A. County Fire Department said in a statement that the crew was at the scene for less than 30 minutes conducting an “informal ‘lessons learned’ discussion of their actions from the night of the fire.”

“They did not gear up or perform any work while there and they did not see anything of note,” the statement said.

The L.A. County crew left the scene about 12:40 p.m.

The Times previously reported that firefighters were ordered to roll up their hoses and leave the burn area of the Lachman fire on Jan. 2, even though they had complained that the ground was still smoldering and rocks remained hot to the touch. The paper reviewed text messages among three firefighters and a third party, sent in the weeks and months after the fire, in which they discussed the handling of the blaze.

LAFD officials also opted not to use thermal imaging technology to detect lingering hot spots. Despite warnings of extreme winds leading up to Jan. 7, they failed to pre-deploy any engines or firefighters to the burn area — or anywhere in the Palisades.

At least one battalion chief assigned to the LAFD’s risk management section has known for months that crews had complained about hot spots after the Lachman fire. But the department kept that information hidden from the public.

At the Tuesday fire commission meeting, newly appointed Fire Chief Jaime Moore — in an apparent reference to The Times reporting — slammed what he called media efforts to “smear” firefighters who battled the worst fire in city history.

“Something that’s been very frustrating for me as fire chief, and through this process, is to watch my friends in the media smear our name and the work that our firefighters did to combat one of the most intense fires, the Palisades, the wind-driven monstrosity that it was,” Moore, a 30-year LAFD veteran, said on his second day on the job.

He added: “The audacity for people to make comments and say that there’s text messages out there that say that we did not put the fire out, that we did not extinguish the fire. Yet I have yet to see any of those text messages.”

Moore made those remarks despite having been tasked by Mayor Karen Bass with conducting an investigation into The Times report about the LAFD’s response to the Lachman fire.

Bass had requested that Villanueva investigate, saying that “a full understanding … is essential to an accurate accounting of what occurred during the January wildfires.”

Critics have said it would be improper for the LAFD to investigate itself and called for an independent review.

Before the City Council confirmed his appointment as chief, Moore also had called for an outside organization to conduct the inquiry, describing the reports of the firefighters’ warnings on Jan. 2 as alarming.

On Tuesday, he said he would review the LAFD’s response to the Lachman fire.

“I will do as Mayor [Karen] Bass asked, and I will look into the Lachman fire, and we will look at how that was handled, and we will learn from it, and we’ll be better from it,” he said.

A Bass spokesperson said Wednesday that the mayor “has made clear to Chief Moore” that the investigation into the Lachman fire should be conducted by an independent entity.

The LAFD has not responded to a question about who will conduct the probe.