politics

WASHINGTON — The Republican-led Senate voted Tuesday to kill new rules that established the first federal standard for ergonomics in the workplace, and President Bush signaled he would support the regulatory rollback.

The unusually rapid Senate action, following a brief and fiery partisan debate, elated business and enraged labor. The vote to nullify the rules was 56-44. The Republican-led House could follow suit as early as today.

The rules in question, issued in the final weeks of the Clinton administration, are meant to require employers to adopt the principle of ergonomics–namely, fitting work conditions to the physical capacity of workers.

Nearly 2 million workers each year suffer from work-related conditions known as musculoskeletal disorders, caused by repetitive, awkward or stressful motions, according to estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that some experts call conservative. Examples are carpal tunnel syndrome, tendinitis and herniated spinal discs–but not injuries caused by slips, trips or accidents.

While most Democrats have championed the federal ergonomics rules, the idea of federal intervention was first raised in 1990 by a Republican labor secretary, Elizabeth Hanford Dole, who served under the current president’s father.

But the new Bush administration has embraced the arguments of business interests, which view the final rules produced by Clinton’s Labor Department as unworkable and unreliable.

“These regulations would cost employers, large and small, billions of dollars annually while providing uncertain benefits,” the White House said.

“If implemented, they would require employers to establish burdensome and costly new systems intended to track, prevent and provide compensation for an extremely broad class of injuries whose cause is subject to considerable dispute.”

The administration statement confirmed what congressional Republicans have said privately for several days–that Bush would support a congressional resolution to nullify the new rules.

Tuesday’s developments gave fresh evidence of the effect of the realignment of power in Washington, with Republicans controlling Congress and the White House for the first time since the 1950s.

Former President Clinton, a Democrat, repeatedly fended off attempts by the Republican-led Congress to stop action on ergonomics.

Now, participants on both sides acknowledge that the fate of the rules, along with the resolution of many other business-labor disputes, may have been sealed when Bush was declared the victor last year over Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore.

Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.), the assistant majority leader, mocked the rules as “the most expensive, intrusive regulations ever promulgated, certainly by the Department of Labor and maybe by any department in history.”

Nickles said the rules would allow “federal bureaucrats” to tell moving companies, grocers or bottlers, for example, how many workers they would need to unload goods. “There is no way in the world that a lot of companies could comply with this rule,” he said.

But Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) ripped Republicans for rushing the nullification through Congress using special parliamentary tactics that allowed little debate.

“It’s a major weakening in terms of the protections for American workers,” Kennedy said. “If we are not going to protect them now, there is no one that is going to protect them. . . . We know the people that are going to be constantly hurt–working families hurt, day in, day out.”

Six of 50 Democrats, mainly Southerners, broke party ranks to vote with all 50 Republicans for the resolution repealing the rule. They were Sens. Zell Miller of Georgia, Blanche Lambert Lincoln of Arkansas, Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina, Max Baucus of Montana and John B. Breaux and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, irate at the six, said: “The votes of Democratic senators who gave cover to this assault on worker safety are especially dishonorable.”

Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California opposed the repeal.

Labor and business lobbyists worked the issue in full force.

Union officials, campaigning with the slogan “Stop the Pain: Start the Healing,” made a frantic, final push to save what they consider one of the most important accomplishments of the Clinton years. The AFL-CIO, noting that women suffer repetitive-motion injuries disproportionately, held news conferences that featured women who had suffered crippling disorders in a poultry plant, a public school and an Internet company.

Business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Assn. of Manufacturers countered that the rules would overwhelm employers, forcing them to comply with vaguely worded standards at untold billions of dollars in expense. Employers circulated on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to tell senators and reporters how the rules would hurt them; one Virginia restaurant owner with 300 employees said it would cost him at least $53,000 a year.

The rules, issued by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration on Nov. 14, took effect on Jan. 16, four days before Clinton left office. With exceptions for maritime, agricultural, construction and railroad industries and some other employers, most businesses in America–including those in California covered by the state’s own, less-detailed ergonomics standard–are required to comply by Oct. 16.

As a first step, employers are required to tell employees about the risks and symptoms of common musculoskeletal disorders and set up a system to receive reports of such injuries. The government has estimated that the ailments force at least 600,000 workers each year to take time off.

When employers receive verified reports of work-related musculoskeletal disorders, the rules require further steps. Some problems, according to the rules, can be solved by “quick fixes”–presumably inexpensive–such as adjusting the height of a desk or work platform.

But other problems might require more extensive response–an ergonomics safety program including, according to the rules, “management leadership,” “employee participation,” “job hazard analysis” and “hazard reduction and control measures.”

Critics were irate over a provision that would allow employees to claim that a preexisting condition is work-related if the condition is “significantly aggravated” by the workplace.

Businesses also complained about a provision that would require employers to offer light-duty work to employees with covered disorders for at least three months with full pay and benefits, or, failing that, three months off with at least 90% of their regular pay.

The Clinton administration estimated that the regulations would cost employers $4.5 billion a year to implement but would save them billions of dollars more on workers’ compensation. Business groups scoffed at those figures and said the cost could be as much as $100 billion annually.

Normally, Democrats in the evenly divided Senate are able to threaten a filibuster to block legislation they oppose. It takes 60 votes to end such a maneuver.

But Republicans, in their action Tuesday, relied on a little-known 1996 law that enables Congress to repeal major new regulations with the approval of the president. Under its terms, debate was limited to 10 hours and Democrats were unable to filibuster.

The 1996 law, known as the Congressional Review Act, has until now never been successfully invoked. One effort to nullify a health regulation failed in the Senate in September of that year.

If, as expected, Republicans prevail on ergonomics, their use of the review act may have broader implications. For one, Democrats said Republicans could be emboldened to use the act to wipe out other rules that businesses oppose. “It can be brought to bear on agriculture regulations, on energy regulations,” said Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). “This is not just an isolated instance.”

Democrats also charge that the language of the act would prevent future efforts to make meaningful ergonomics rules unless Congress gives permission.

But Republicans said that was not so.

Labor Secretary Elaine Chao said in a letter Tuesday to Sen. James M. Jeffords (R-Vt.) that she would continue to pursue “a comprehensive approach to ergonomics” even if the current rule is killed. Chao said she remained open to crafting a new rule that would “provide employers with achievable measures that protect their employees before injuries occur.”

WASHINGTON — Sens. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called for the Department of Homeland Security to return a California woman with DACA who was recently deported a day after her green card interview.

DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is the Obama-era program that since 2012 has shielded certain immigrants brought to the U.S. as children from deportation and allowed them to work legally.

Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez lived in California for 27 years before being detained at her green card interview last month and deported within 24 hours, despite having active DACA protection and no criminal history. Her story was first reported by the Sacramento Bee.

On a call from Mexico on Thursday with reporters, Estrada Juarez, 42, said DACA was supposed to protect people like her who work hard and follow the rules.

“I did everything I could to build a stable life and give my daughter the opportunities that I never had,” she said. “But about two weeks ago, everything changed. I was wrongfully deported. In a single moment, nearly 30 years of my life were taken away from me — my home, my work, my community.”

Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment about Estrada’s case.

The detention and deportation of DACA recipients is in stark contrast to previous administrations, including the first Trump administration, and years of bipartisan support for immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. For admission into the program, they must pass background checks and meet certain educational or work requirements.

Trump has given mixed signals on DACA recipients, known as “Dreamers.” In his first term, he tried unsuccessfully to shut down the program. In December 2024 on “Meet the Press” he said that “I want to be able to work something out” on their behalf, but offered no specifics and the administration has done nothing to offer them extra protection.

The program’s fate has since remained embroiled in litigation.

Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas) said Homeland Security provided conflicting data to members of Congress about how many DACA recipients have been detained and deported since Trump returned to the White House.

In a Jan. 12 letter to Garcia, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that between Jan. 1 and Sept. 28 of 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrested 270 DACA recipients. The letter did not say how many of those 270 were deported.

Of those, 130 had criminal convictions, 120 had pending criminal charges and 14 were in violation of immigration law, she wrote. That adds up to 264, not 270.

“Please note DACA is a form of prosecutorial discretion that does not confer lawful status,” wrote Noem, who was fired Thursday.

But in a letter to Durbin and other senators last month, Noem provided smaller numbers, though she addressed a longer time period, Jan. 1 to Nov. 19, 2025. She said the agency had arrested 261 DACA recipients and deported 86.

She said that of those arrested, 241 had criminal histories, though she did not specify if that meant convictions or pending charges.

On Wednesday, Garcia wrote back to Noem, saying, “The discrepancies between your two responses demonstrate gross incompetency or intentional misdirection.”

The conflicting data from Noem came after 95 members of Congress in September demanded answers about the targeting of DACA recipients. They wrote that letter after Tricia McLaughlin, the former Homeland Security public affairs secretary, said DACA recipients “are not automatically protected from deportation.”

The lawmakers cited the case of a deaf and non-verbal DACA recipient with no criminal history who was detained last year amid the immigration raids in Los Angeles. He was later released.

As of June 2025, there were more than 515,000 DACA recipients in the U.S., a decrease since the program’s peak of nearly 800,000. With 144,000, California has the most of any state, according to federal data.

Estrada Juarez did not take questions during the call Thurday with reporters, but Ivonne Rodriguez, press director for immigration reform at the advocacy group FWD.us, explained to The Times what happened.

Around 11 a.m. on Feb. 18, Estrada Juarez arrived with her daughter Damaris Bello, a 22-year-old U.S. citizen, at the John E. Moss Federal Building in Sacramento for an interview as part of the process to obtain legal permanent residency, or a green card.

At the courthouse, immigration agents took Estrada Juarez’s fingerprints and asked her to apply a fingerprint to a form saying she had agreed to be deported, Rodriguez said. She refused.

An officer told Estrada Juarez “If you don’t sign, I will make you sign.” The officer grabbed her hand and forced her to sign using her fingerprint, Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez said federal agents cited a deportation order from 1998 during Estrada Juarez’s detention last month at the courthouse. But being a DACA recipient should mean that such orders are not acted upon while the protected status is active, so long as the person stays out of criminal trouble.

“She kept stating she had active DACA throughout the entire time and they did not care,” Rodriguez said.

By 8 a.m. the next morning, Estrada Juarez had been dropped off by bus in Tijuana, Rodriguez said.

Estrada Juarez is among many immigrants arrested for deportation at courthouses since last year, a practice that breaks from longstanding former procedure.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday on oversight of Homeland Security, Durbin asked Noem about Estrada Juarez and the other deported DACA recipients.

“Madam secretary, why have you deported dozens of DACA holders who had to comply with a criminal background check to be eligible for DACA?” Durbin asked.

“Sir, we follow all laws as applicable to the Department of Homeland Security,” Noem replied before Durbin cut her off.

“Why did you deport them?” he repeated.

Noem said she wasn’t familiar with the details of Estrada Juarez’s case but would look into it.

On the call Thursday with Estrada Juarez, Sen. Padilla (D-Calif.) said he met her daughter this week. He and other Democrats called for Congress to pass legislation that would permanently protect DACA recipients from deportation.

“DACA recipients did everything right and followed all the instructions laid out in the program,” he said. “They took the United States government at its word, and they’ve kept their end of the deal. But now we know that Donald Trump and Kristi Noem are breaking the government’s promise.”

Estrada Juarez said justice in her case would mean being allowed to return to the U.S.

“I’m not asking for a special treatment,” she said. “I’m asking for what is right. My deportation was wrong, and my family should not have to be torn apart. I just want to change to go home and hold my daughter again.”

If Democrats expect to flip a U.S. Senate seat in Texas, they’ll need all the stars to align. This almost never happens, because politics has a way of scrambling the constellations. But on Tuesday, the first star blinked on.

I’m referring to state Rep. James Talarico’s victory over Rep. Jasmine Crockett in the Democratic primary. Most political prognosticators agree that Talarico, an eloquent young Democrat who speaks openly about his Christian faith, is their best hope in a red state that Donald Trump won by 14 points.

The second star was Crockett’s conciliatory concession — far from a foregone conclusion after a nasty primary — in which she pledged to “do my part,” adding that “Texas is primed to turn blue, and we must remain united because this is bigger than any one person.”

The third star — a vulnerable Republican opponent — has not yet appeared over the Texas sky, although forecasters say it might.

Most observers agree that scandal-plagued Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton would be beatable in the general election, while incumbent Sen. John Cornyn would present a much tougher challenge. Cornyn is the kind of steady, conventional politician who tends to win elections, and so, of course, modern voters are extremely suspicious of him.

In the GOP primary on Tuesday, Cornyn’s 42% share of the vote edged out Paxton by about a point. Unfortunately for Republicans, neither candidate garnered enough votes to avoid a May 26 runoff election.

Conventional wisdom suggests that when a majority of Republican voters choose someone other than the incumbent in the first round of voting, an even greater majority will inevitably break toward the challenger in the runoff. If that happens, Paxton would become the nominee, and Democrats would get their third star to align.

Even better for Democrats — a fourth star, so to speak — would be for this protracted runoff to become a “knife fight,” as one Texas Republican predicted, in which Paxton staggers out of the fight as the battered GOP nominee.

The only problem is that Republicans can see these stars aligning, too.

And while the Texas Senate seat matters a lot on its own, it matters even more in the context of nationwide midterm elections, in which a Texas win would help Democrats take back the Senate.

Enter the cavalry — or, more accurately, President Trump, who is now entering a second war in the span of a week, this one a civil war in the Lone Star State.

The day after the primary, Trump announced that he would be “making my Endorsement soon, and will be asking the candidate that I don’t Endorse to immediately DROP OUT OF THE RACE!”

Reports suggest Trump may endorse Cornyn in order to save the seat for Republicans. But who knows? Trump is famously unpredictable. And it’s likely he admires Paxton’s ability to survive scandals that would have caused most normal politicians to curl up in the fetal position. As they say, “game recognizes game.”

Whomever he backs, conventional wisdom also says Trump should make his endorsement “soon,” as he promised. That would save Republicans a lot of time and money. But Trump currently has enormous leverage. Right now, people are coming to him, pleading for his support.

Do you think he wants to resolve that situation quickly?

Me neither.

With Trump, you never know what you’re going to get. In 2021, he helped torpedo Republican Senate candidates David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in Georgia, handing Democrats control of the Senate. The following year he backed football legend Herschel Walker in another Georgia Senate race, which did not exactly work out great. Democrat Raphael Warnock won and holds that seat, though Walker is now ambassador to the Bahamas so that’s something.

This is to say: Trump’s political assistance does not always assist.

It’s unclear whether Trump’s endorsement would be dispositive — and whether he could muscle the other Republican out of the primary race.

Paxton, for example, initially vowed to stay in the race, no matter what. (He later suggested he would “consider” dropping out if the Senate passes the SAVE America Act, a bill to require proof of citizenship to vote.)

There’s also this: Trump’s endorsements tend to either be made out of vengeance or to pad the totals of an already inevitable winner, so his track record is probably overrated.

Case in point: While most of his endorsed candidates won their Texas elections, his endorsed candidate for agriculture commissioner lost reelection. And according to the Texas Tribune, “at least three Trump-endorsed candidates for Congress were headed to runoffs, one of them in a distant second place.”

Another issue is that Cornyn needs more than a perfunctory endorsement: He needs a clear, full-throated endorsement.

In a 2022 Missouri Senate race, Trump endorsed “ERIC,” which was awkward because two candidates named Eric were running.

More recently, he endorsed two rival candidates in the same 2026 Arizona gubernatorial race — like betting on both teams in the Super Bowl.

This is all to say that the only thing standing between Texas Democrats and a rare celestial alignment may be the whims of the Republican Party’s one and only star.

Sure, establishment Republicans can beg Trump to quickly step in and settle the race, and maybe he will. But it’s entirely possible the president will find a way to blow up his party’s chances for holding the U.S. Senate — and there’s nothing they can do to stop him.

When you’re a star, they let you do it.

Matt K. Lewis is the author of “Filthy Rich Politicians” and “Too Dumb to Fail.”

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom plans to spend $19 million promoting California and dispelling “myths driven by misinformation and political rhetoric” in a marketing campaign that would run through the final months of his administration as he weighs a potential run for president.

The new contract, which is in the bidding process, comes as Newsom’s political future and national standing are closely tied to how voters view California’s economy, crime and quality of life — issues that have become central to attacks from President Trump and conservative media outlets.

The Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development is seeking a contractor to design a statewide taxpayer-funded “California Brand Campaign,” with two-thirds of spending under the proposal to be used for paid advertising and media placements. Bidding on the contract opened Feb. 24 and is expected to end March 13.

The solicitation frames the campaign as an effort to push back on what Newsom has often described as misleading narratives about California. The campaign would launch during a period of financial uncertainty for the state, with Newsom’s January budget projecting a $3-billion deficit next fiscal year.

“California and its business climate have been falsely and maliciously maligned for years, and the state has a right to tell the true story — California is a great place to do live, work, invest and visit,” said Newsom spokesperson Tara Gallegos. “Setting the record straight will benefit every business, worker and resident of this state.”

Newsom is contemplating a run for president in 2028 and says he remains undecided about whether he will pursue the Oval Office.

State Sen. Roger Niello (R-Fair Oaks), who is vice chair of the Senate budget committee, said the language of the proposal request is concerning. He said it would make it easier to stifle criticisms of policies that he says make it difficult to do business in California.

“This is clearly part of the Gavin Newsom for President campaign, but what is most troubling to me is that this is a program to be developed by some private-sector contractor to define what is acceptable speech in the state of California,” Niello said. “That scares the stuffing out of me.”

The negative image of California — homeless encampments lining the streets, smash-and-grab robberies at malls and an exodus of residents and businesses fleeing high taxes and nanny-state governance — could be a liability for Newsom if he runs for president.

Newsom has seen his popularity surge in the last year after his fight-fire-with-fire approach to countering Trump’s rhetoric. The two-term governor has used his expanding platform, including a podcast and nationwide book tour for his recently released memoir, to repeatedly push back on Trump’s criticisms of California. He argues that California remains one of the world’s largest and most dynamic economies and the envy of other states.

The tone of the marketing campaign bid request itself echoes that message, with its introductory paragraph pulled directly from Newsom’s State of the State speech in January.

“California has never been about perfection,” it reads. “It’s about persistence. The courage of our convictions and the strength to embody them. That’s the California Way.”

Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who runs the research nonprofit Latino Working Class Project, said scrutiny of the campaign will depend on whether the ads veer into politics or overtly promote Newsom in the way federal border security ads showcased the now ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

“You have to ask why now?” Madrid said of Newsom’s timing for the California ad campaign. “He’s in the eighth inning of a nine-inning baseball game. Timing and tone are everything when considering the appropriateness.”

The use of taxpayer dollars to combat negative publicity about the state and the governor isn’t new under the Newsom administration.

Newsom tapped an employee in his communications office to serve as his “deputy director of rapid response” in 2024. Staff member Brandon Richards, who made $136,000 last year, is tasked with quickly dispatching responses to information the governor’s team deems inaccurate or misleading that is spread on social media and in the media.

When right-wing accounts claimed in February that Newsom allows dogs to vote in California, Richards responded with a CBS News article reporting that a woman was charged with five felonies for registering her canine. Richards and the governor’s office pushed back on false assertions that Newsom and his wife, First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom, were stealing money from the state through her office that same day.

Newsom’s frustration reached a boiling point over claims about the state’s response to the Los Angeles wildfires last year. President Trump publicly blamed Newsom and “his Los Angeles crew” for the disaster, though the Republican’s claims that a lack of water in Southern California led to a shortage for firefighters were widely debunked.

Newsom’s political team launched a website in January 2025 to fight misinformation about the L.A. fires, which he said at the time would “ensure the public has access to fact-based data.” The site, www.californiafirefacts.com, no longer appears to exist.

At one point, however, it redirected viewers to the redistricting campaign website for Proposition 50, according to internet archives. Newsom championed the successful redistricting ballot measure to add more Democrats to California’s congressional delegation, a direct response to Trump urging Texas and other Republican states to reconfigure their congressional boundaries to elect more Republicans to Congress.

Newsom adopted an even more aggressive social media strategy last summer after Trump deployed the National Guard and U.S. Marines to California during federal immigration sweeps. The governor directed his team to match the brash communication tactics emanating from the White House. His aides continue to shoot down criticism and launch their own snarky assaults on Trump and his allies.

The new ad campaign appears to be an extension of his work to refute the anti-California narrative.

The request for bids says “some look at this state and try to tear down our progress. They attack our values and caricature our culture. They distort the data to diminish our accomplishments.”

The head of US Central Command says B-2 bombers have dropped dozens of 2,000-pound bombs on buried Iranian ballistic missile launchers, contributing to a 90% drop in missile attacks. The commander added an Iranian “drone carrier ship” is currently on fire after being hit.

March 5 (UPI) — The United States and Venezuela will re-establish diplomatic and consular relations just over two months after former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was deposed from power.

The U.S. Department of State made the announcement on Thursday evening after high-ranking U.S. officials met with their counterparts in Venezuela to negotiate greater access to oil, critical minerals and gold.

“This step will facilitate our joint efforts to promote stability, support economic recovery and advance political reconciliation in Venezuela,” the State Department said in a statement.

“Our engagement is focused on helping the Venezuelan people move forward through a phased process that creates the conditions for a peaceful transition to a democratically elected government,” officials said in the statement.

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum met with interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez, who was installed as the country’s leader after the U.S. military captured Maduro and brought him to the United States to face charges that include narco-trafficking.

Burgum and Rodriguez were discussing oil and critical mineral opportunities, in addition to finalizing an American-brokered deal with a Singapore-based company to mine and buy $100 million in gold, The New York Times reported.

Rodriguez said after Burgum’s two-day visit that her government has “full willingness to build a joint work agenda based on respect and mutual benefits,” specifically with regard to energy and other business cooperation, Axios reported.

New Delhi, India — Dressed in a blue Navy uniform and sleek sunglasses, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in late October, addressed a gathering of the country’s sea warriors.

He listed out the strategic significance of the Indian Ocean — the massive volumes of trade and oil that pass through it. “The Indian Navy is the guardian of the Indian Ocean,” he then said, to loud, proud chants of “Long Live Mother India” from his audience.

Less than five months later, India has been shown up as a “guardian”, unable to protect its own guest.

On Wednesday, the Iranian warship, IRIS Dena, was torpedoed by a US submarine just 44 nautical miles off (81km) southern Sri Lanka, as it was returning home from naval drills hosted by India. During the “Milan” biennial multilateral naval exercise, Indian President Droupadi Murmu had posed with sailors from the Dena.

Yet it took the Indian Navy more than a day after the Iranian warship was struck to respond formally to the attack, which US officials made clear was a sign of how the Donald Trump administration was willing and ready to expand its war against Iran.

“An American submarine sank an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters,” US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at the Pentagon on Wednesday. “Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo. Quiet death.”

Tehran is furious over the attack on its warship hundreds of miles away from home. And Iran made sure to note that the IRIS Dena warship was  “a guest of India’s navy”, returning after completing the exercise it joined upon New Delhi’s invitation.

“The US has perpetrated an atrocity at sea, 2,000 miles [3,218km] away from Iran’s shores,” Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said, referring to the sinking of the frigate. “Mark my words: The US will come to bitterly regret [the] precedent it has set.”

Now, the IRIS Dena is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, and more than 80 Iranian sailors, who marched during joint parades and posed for selfies with Indian naval officers during their two-week visit, are dead.

What has also fallen, said retired Indian naval officers and analysts, is India’s self-image as a net security provider in the Indian Ocean. Instead, they said, the US attack on the Dena has exposed the limits of India’s power and influence in its own maritime back yard.

‘War reaches India’s backyard’

After participating in the naval exercises, IRIS Dena left Visakhapatnam on India’s eastern coast on February 26. It was hit in international waters, just south of Sri Lanka’s territorial waters, in the early hours of March 4, local time.

In response, Sri Lankan Navy rescuers recovered more than 80 bodies and picked up 32 survivors, reportedly including the commander and some senior officers from the warship. More than 100 men are still missing.

In a tweet welcoming the Dena to the naval drills, the Indian Navy’s Eastern Command had posted: “Her arrival … [reflects] long-standing cultural links between the two nations [Iran and India]”.

Vice Admiral Shekhar Sinha, the former vice chief of India’s naval staff, told Al Jazeera that he attended the Iranian parade at the function.

“I met and really liked them, especially their march for sailors travelling thousands of miles,” Sinha said. “It is always sad to see a ship sinking. But in a war, emotions don’t work. There’s nothing ethical in a war.”

Sinha said that the Indian Ocean — central to the strategic and energy security of the nation with the world’s largest population — was thought to be a fairly safe zone earlier. “But that is not the case, as we are learning now,” he told Al Jazeera.

“The unfolding battle [between the US and Israel on the one hand, and Iran on the other] has reached India’s back yard.
New Delhi has to be concerned,” Sinha, who served in the Indian Navy for four decades, added. “The liberty we enjoyed in the Indian Ocean has apparently shrunk.”

India’s Catch-22 situation

Only on Thursday evening did the Indian Navy issue any formal statement on the attack — more than 24 hours after the Dena was hit by a torpedo.

The Navy said that it received distress signals from the Iranian ship and had decided on deploying resources to help with rescuing sailors. But by then, it said, the Sri Lankan Navy had already stepped to lead the rescue effort.

Neither New Delhi nor the Navy has criticised — even mildly — the decision by the US to sink the Iranian warship.

Military analysts and former Indian naval officers say India is caught in a classic catch-22: Was India aware of the incoming US attack in the Indian Ocean on an Iranian warship, or was it blindsided by a nuclear-submarine in its backyard?

Admiral Arun Prakash, the former chief of India’s naval staff, told Al Jazeera that if New Delhi was blindsided, “it reflects on the US-India relationship directly.”

“If it is a surprise, then that’s a great concern since we have a so-called strategic partnership with the USA.”

And if India knew about the attacks, it would be seen by many as strategically siding with the US and Israel over their war on Iran.

C Uday Bhaskar, a retired Indian Navy officer and currently the director of the Society for Policy Studies, an independent think tank based in New Delhi, said that the US sinking an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean muddies the Indian perception of itself as a “net security provider” in the region.

Bhaskar said the incident is a “strategic embarrassment” for India and weakens New Delhi’s credibility in the Indian Ocean, while its moral standing “takes a beating” because of the Indian government’s near-silence.

‘India on aggressor’s side’

In the post-colonial world order, India was a leader of the non-alignment movement, the Cold War-era neutrality posture adopted by several developing nations.

India now no longer calls its approach non-alignment, instead referring to it as “strategic autonomy”. But, in reality, it has inched closer to the United States and its allies, most importantly, Israel.

Merely two days before the US and Israel bombed Iran, Modi was in Israel, addressing the Knesset and warmly hugging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called his Indian counterpart a brother.

But Iran, under the late Supreme Leader Khamenei, was a friend of India as well, with New Delhi making strategic, business, and humanitarian investments in the country.

However, Modi has not said a word in condolence after Khamenei’s assassination. On Thursday, Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri visited the Iranian embassy in New Delhi to sign a memorial book. Indian governments normally deploy ministers — not bureaucrats or diplomats — for such sombre occasions.

It is against that backdrop that India’s response to the attack on the Dena has come under scrutiny.

Because the frigate was hit when it was in international waters, India had “no formal responsibility”, said Srinath Raghavan, an Indian military historian and strategic analyst.

“But the US Navy’s actions underline both the spreading geography of this war and the sharp limits of India’s ability to manage, let alone control, its fallout,” Raghavan told Al Jazeera.

Diplomatically, India has “objectively positioned itself on the side of the aggressors in this war,” he said, by “acts of commission — visit to Israel on the eve of war — and of omission, with not even [an] official condolence, let alone condemnation, of the assassination of the Iranian head of state.” Modi visited Israel on February 25-26.

Mallikarjun Kharge, the president of India’s opposition Congress party, said the Modi government had recklessly abdicated “India’s strategic and national interests”. And the government’s silence “demeans India’s core national interests and destroys our foreign policy, carefully and painstakingly built and followed by successive governments over the years.”

In addition, Raghavan highlighted that Modi has only criticised Iran’s retaliation, which threatens to drag the Gulf region to the brink of war.

“It is difficult not to conclude that India has drastically downgraded its interests in the relationship with Iran,” he said.

“All of this detracts from India’s credibility as a player in the region and will have short and long-term consequences for the equities in West Asia [as the Middle East is referred to in India],” Raghavan told Al Jazeera.

SACRAMENTO — Despite a plea from the head of the California Democratic Party for underperforming candidates to drop out of the governor’s race, all but one of the party’s top hopefuls spurned the request.

Party leaders fear the growing possibility that the crowded field will split the Democratic electorate in the state’s June top-two primary election and result in two Republicans advancing to the November ballot, ensuring a Republican governor being elected for the first time since 2006.

His advice largely unheeded, state party Chairman Rusty Hicks on Thursday said the fate of a Democratic victory now rests squarely on the gubernatorial candidates who flouted him.

“The candidates for Governor now have a chance to showcase a viable path to win,” Hicks said in a statement Thursday.

Eight top Democratic candidates filed the official paperwork to appear on the June ballot after Hicks released a letter on Tuesday urging those “who cannot show meaningful progress towards winning” to drop out. Friday is the deadline to file to appear on the primary election ballot. On March 21, the secretary of state’s office will formally announce who will appear on the June ballot.

“It sounded like someone who has his head in the sand,” former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said of Hicks’ open letter. “[Most] of us filed within 24 hours of getting that letter. It created some press but not much else. It didn’t impact [most] of the candidates and it certainly didn’t impact my candidacy.”

Democratic strategist Elizabeth Ashford said it was appropriate for Hicks and other Democratic leaders to make a public plea as opposed to keeping such discussions solely behind closed doors.

But the response showed the limited power of the modern-day party bosses.

“It’s definitely not Tammany Hall,” said Ashford, referring to the storied Democratic political machine that had a grip on New York City politics for nearly a century. “The party and Rusty are influential and they are helpful and that is their role. I don’t think anyone would be comfortable with outright public strong-arming of specific candidates.”

Ashford, who worked for former Govs. Jerry Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger, along with former Vice President Kamala Harris when she served as state attorney general, added that the minimal power of the state GOP is likely a factor in the dynamics of Democrats’ decision to stay in the race. Democratic registered voters outnumber Republicans by almost a 2-to-1 margin in the state, and Democrats control every statewide elected office and hold supermajorities in both chambers of the California Legislature.

“If there were a strong viable opposition that existed, if the Republican Party was actually relevant in California, I think that would sort of force greater unity amongst Democrats,” she said.

Just one of the nine major Democrats did heed the party chair’s message. Ian Calderon, a former Los Angeles-area Assemblyman who consistently polled near the bottom of the field, withdrew from the race and endorsed Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin) on Thursday.

Candidates cannot withdraw their name from the ballot once they officially file to run for office, leading to some fears that even if other candidates drop out of the race, a crowded primary ballot could still split California’s liberal votes.

“I’m disappointed most of them will be on the ballot,” said Lorena Gonzalez, the head of the California Federation of Labor Unions, which will announce whether it endorses in the governor’s race on March 16. But “I do still think you can have people drop out of the race or become viable. I think that there are candidates who know viability is a real thing they have to show in coming weeks” before ballots start being mailed to voters.

Jodi Hicks, chief executive and president of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, said she is “still worried” about the prospect of two Republicans winning the top two spots in the June primary, shutting Democrats out of any chance of winning the governor’s office in November.

“I didn’t have any specifics of who I wanted to do what,” she said. “I’m just very, very concerned and the stakes are really high right now and seem to be getting worse by the day.”

Republican candidate Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host, said he is “confident that I’ll be in the top two” along with a Democratic candidate. “I find it very difficult to believe that the Democratic Party will just surrender California and allow two Republicans to be in the top two.”

Hilton made the comments Thursday after a gubernatorial forum in Sacramento hosted by the California Assn. of Realtors focused on housing and homeownership. Villaraigosa, former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan and former Rep. Katie Porter also attended. Swalwell, who is currently in Washington, joined the panel virtually.

During the panel, candidates were in broad agreement about the need to reduce barriers and costs in order to build more housing in California, where the median single-family home costs more than $820,000. Many also endorsed proposals to disincentivize private investment firms from buying up homes as well as a $25-billion bond proposed by former Sen. Bob Hertzberg to help first-time homebuyers afford a down payment.

“This really isn’t a debate because we’re agreeing so much with each other,” Hilton said at one point during the event.

That political alignment on one of the most pressing issues facing California may explain why voters are having such a difficult time deciding who to support.

A recent poll of the Public Policy Institute of California found that the five candidates topping the crowded field were within 4 percentage points of one another: Porter, Swalwell, Hilton, Democratic hedge fund founder Tom Steyer and Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco. Earlier polls had Hilton and Bianco leading the field, though many voters remained undecided.

Some candidates took issue with Hicks’ push to cull the field, noting that most of the lower-polling candidates he asked to drop out are people of color.

“Our political system is rigged, corrupted by the political elites, the wealthy and well connected,” state Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, who is Black and Latino, said in a video posted on social media in response to the open letter. “The California Democratic Party is essentially telling every person of color in the race for Governor to drop out.”

Villaraigosa argued that enough voters remain undecided that it was too early for quality candidates to call it quits.

“Most people don’t even know who’s in the race,” said Villaraigosa. “It’s premature to be thinking about getting out of the race. I certainly am not considering it and I feel no pressure.”

Aside from the opinion polls, other indicators on who may emerge from the pack a candidates are slowly emerging.

Though it wasn’t enough to win the party’s endorsement, Swalwell won support from 24% of delegates at the state Democratic convention last month, the most of any party candidate.

While spending is no guarantee of success, Steyer has donated $47.4 million of his own wealth to his campaign. Mahan, who recently entered the race and is supported by Silicon Valley leaders, has quickly raised millions of dollars, as have two independent expenditures committees backing his bid.

Ashford said part of candidates’ decisions to remain in the race could have been driven by their lengthy political careers, as well as Democrats’ crushing November redistricting victory.

“In several cases, these are people who have won statewide office,” she said. “It’s tough to feel like there may not be a sequel to that.”

Nixon reported from Sacramento and Mehta from Los Angeles.

March 5 (UPI) — Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced on Thursday that the department will be pushing for increased nutrition education in medicine.

Kennedy made the announcement after having communicated with dozens of medical schools in the last couple of months to increase what doctors learn about human nutrition.

Fifty-three medical schools have agreed to start requiring that every medical student complete 40 hours of comprehensive nutrition education or an equivalent this fall, the HHS chief said at a presentation of the initiative.

The push for increased nutrition education follows Kennedy’s announcement in January of new dietary guidelines and a new food pyramid aimed improving Americans’ diets.

Kennedy called the initiative a “transformative program that will reshape the way that we train doctors in this country.”

“Chronic disease is bankrupting our health system and poor nutrition sits at the center of that crisis,” Kennedy said in a news release.

Surveys have found that medical students receive as little as 1.2 hours of formal nutrition education per year, three-fourths of U.S. medical schools do not require education courses and about 14% of residency programs require nutrition courses, according to HHS.

The 53 medicals, across 31 states, that have made agreements with the Trump administration will also be eligible for federal funding to

The administration also will now require U.S. Public Health Service officers to take a minimum number of continuing nutrition education hours as part of their overall continuing education requirements, HHS said.

Since the late 1960s, doctors and health experts have noted that nutrition education does not rank high enough in medical education, NBC News reported.

Among the topics that Kennedy and HHS have suggested be considered for school curricula — a list of 71 has been circulated as the department works with medical schools to join the initiative — include nutrient deficiencies, food allergies, dietary supplements, wearable devices, composting and food safety, The New York Times reported.

WASHINGTON — In a major shakeup of the agency at the center of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, President Trump announced Thursday that he was replacing embattled Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who will step down at the end of the month.

Trump said on Truth Social that he will nominate Sen. Markwayne Millin (R-Okla.) to take over the job, two days after Noem was grilled on Capitol Hill by Democrats and some Republicans.

Trump said Noem will become a “Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas,” a new security initiative that he said would focus on the Western Hemisphere.

Noem, the former South Dakota governor, is the first Cabinet secretary to leave during Trump’s second term as president. Her departure comes amid intense scrutiny over immigration enforcement tactics since last year that intensified after the shooting deaths of two protesters in Minneapolis by immigration agents.

Those killings led to demands for more accountability within the agency, and disagreement over how to rein in the tactics deployed by federal immigration agents, have led to a weeks-long standoff over the agency’s funding.

Since the shutdown, lawmakers from both parties have used a series of contentious oversight hearings to question Noem’s management of the agency. During a hearing Tuesday, the criticism from Republicans was particularly blunt.

“We are an exceptional nation, and one of the reasons we are exceptional is because we expect exceptional leadership, and you’ve demonstrated anything but that,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told Noem.

When Trump announced the shakeup on social media, Noem was speaking at a conference in Nashville. She answered questions from local law enforcement organizations, and did not offer hints that she knew her departure was imminent. She was not asked about her firing during the event.

After the conference ended, Noem thanked Trump for her special envoy appointment, a diplomatic position she said will have her working to curb drugs from coming into the United States.

“I am super excited about this opportunity. It came at not a complete surprise, but it came at a little bit of a surprise,” Mullin told reporters outside the Capitol.

Mullin said he was not expecting the call Thursday, but that he is “ready to get started” and will work to “earn everybody’s vote,” regardless of party affiliation.

“When I go into this position, yes, I am a Republican, yes I am conservative, but the Department of Homeland Security is to keep everybody — regardless of whether you support me , if you don’t support me, regardless of what your thoughts are — I am here to enforce the policies that Congress passed,” Mullin said.

Mullin would need to be confirmed by the Senate, but under federal law is allowed to serve as acting Homeland Security secretary while his nomination is pending.

When the news broke, Republican senators appeared to be congratulating Mullin on the Senate floor as the chamber was conducting business. Meanwhile, Democratic senators applauded the decision to fire Noem but lamented that she will continue to serve in public office.

“The atrocities she oversaw, the falsehoods she peddled, & the corruption she committed — all richly deserve her discharge,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote on X. “President Trump should have made it explicit, rather than disguising it with another position of public trust.”

Noem was also criticized over how her department spent billions of dollars allocated by Congress.

In the congressional hearings this week, lawmakers questioned her on a $200-million ad campaign she oversaw that urged anyone in the U.S. illegally to deport voluntarily.

Noem told the Senate panel on Tuesday that the president approved the campaign, which the White House denied to NBC News.

Early criticism of Noem came last June, as DHS was scaling up raids throughout Los Angeles. During a news conference at the Westwood federal building, Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) was forced to the ground and handcuffed by federal agents after he interrupted Noem to ask her a question.

“If this is how the Department of Homeland Security responds to a senator with a question,” Padilla said later. “I can only imagine what they’re doing to cooks, to day laborers out in the Los Angeles community and throughout California and throughout the country.”

Padilla reacted to Noem’s ouster as evidence of public pressure working to hold her to account.

“This is why we don’t give up,” he said.

Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles, said Noem’s departure was long overdue.

“Her tenure, as two congressional hearings this week clearly showed, was defined by chaos, cruelty, corruption, and a refusal to take responsibility for the abuses carried out by federal agents under her watch,” she said. “For immigrant communities across the country, her leadership represented a dangerous escalation of policies that treated families and workers as targets rather than as human beings who contribute to and strengthen this nation.”

Salas said the new Homeland Security secretary must ensure transparency, respect the Constitution and treat immigrants with dignity.

March 5 (UPI) — President Donald Trump has removed Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and appointed Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., Thursday after she was aggressively grilled by a Senate committee the day before.

Trump announced the change on Truth Social, along with a new job for Noem, naming her “Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas, our new Security Initiative in the Western Hemisphere we are announcing on Saturday in Doral, Florida. I thank Kristi for her service at ‘Homeland.'”

He praised Noem for her “numerous and spectacular results” in the announcement.

“I am pleased to announce that the Highly Respected United States Senator from the Great State of Oklahoma, Markwayne Mullin, will become the United States Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS), effective March 31, 2026,” he said.

Mullin has been a Senator since 2023 and served in the House from 2013-2023. He is a member of the Cherokee Nation.

Noem faced a combative Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, as they pressed her for answers on several issues the department has been plagued with in the past year.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., called her leadership a “disaster” and told her she should resign.

“What we’ve seen is innocent people getting detained that turn out are American citizens,” Tillis said in a heated exchange.

“The fact that you can’t admit to a mistake, which looks like, under investigation, is gonna prove that Ms. [Renee] Good and Mr. [Alex] Pretti probably should not have been shot in the face and in the back. Law enforcement needs to learn from that. You don’t protect them by not looking after the facts.”

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., pressed Noem about DHS ads that she starred in, spending $200 million.

The ads were made by a Republican consulting firm that was allegedly created just before submitting bids for the work.

The company is reportedly connected to the husband of Noem’s former spokesperson, though she denied any part in choosing the firm and called the ads “extremely effective.”

“Well they were effective in your name recognition,” Kennedy said. “It troubles me. A fifth to a quarter of a billion dollars of taxpayer money when we’re scratching over every penny and we’re fighting over rescission packages. I just can’t agree.”

Noem told the Senate panel that Trump had authorized the ads.

Kennedy told reporters Thursday that he got a call from the president about her testimony, The New York Times reported.

“Put it this way: His recollection and her recollection are different.”

Mullin told The Times that he has not had time to call Noem, whom he said is a friend.

“She was tasked with a very difficult job,” he said. “I think she has done the best that she could do under the circumstances.”

But he said he believed that there are opportunities to “build off things that didn’t quite go as planned.”

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said he would wait and see if Mullin will be an improvement at DHS but told The Times, “It will be hard to be a downgrade.”

The Department of Homeland Security is in its third week of a shutdown, with Congress expected to vote later Thursday on a funding package.

United States President Donald Trump has announced that he will replace Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem with Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin.

In a social media post on Thursday, Trump explained that he had reassigned Noem to be a special envoy for a new security initiative focused on the Western Hemisphere, dubbed the “Shield of the Americas”.

The staffing change, he added, will take effect starting March 31. It marks the first major cabinet-level shake-up of Trump’s second term so far.

Trump praised Noem upon her departure from the cabinet-level post, writing that she “has served us well, and has had numerous and spectacular results (especially on the Border!)”

But Noem has played a prominent role in some of the administration’s most controversial immigration policies, and her tenure at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has spurred questions about government spending and conflicts of interest.

The announcement that she would be leaving her post comes a day after she faced a grilling from Democrats during congressional hearings this week, with several politicians called for her resignation.

“DHS is supposed to be protecting our residents and upholding constitutional protections. But you’ve turned that on the head. You have actually turned the United States government against its own residents,” Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat, said during Wednesday’s hearing.

“Yours is a case of failed leadership. Secretary, you need to resign, be fired or be impeached because you don’t have the right to lead this agency.”

The announcement of Noem’s removal also comes as DHS continues to weather a partial government shutdown.

Democrats have opposed approving new funding for the department in response to deadly shootings involving immigration agents under Noem’s leadership.

Those shootings were brought up again this week during Noem’s appearances before judiciary committees in the Senate and House of Representatives.

Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, for instance, repeatedly accused Noem of launching a “smear campaign” against two US citizens shot dead during interactions with immigration agents: Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

“There have been three homicides in Minneapolis in 2026, and your agents committed two of them,” Raskin told Noem.

He also highlighted comments Noem made calling Good and Pretti “domestic terrorists“, despite evidence undercutting the administration’s depiction of the events leading to their deaths.

“Rather than work with state and local authorities to solve these homicides, you barred Minnesota’s investigators from the crime scenes,” Raskin said.

“It smells like a coverup, and it makes me wonder who the real domestic terrorists are.”

Noem, formerly the Republican governor of South Dakota, has also been scrutinised for a $220m advertising campaign promoting border security.

The advertising campaign shows Noem riding a horse near Mount Rushmore, a well-known national memorial in her home state.

The news outlet ProPublica previously reported that a government contract for the campaign went to a Republican consulting firm with ties to senior DHS officials.

Noem has denied any wrongdoing, stating that the bidding process was “competitive” and that the contract was “all done correctly, all done legally”.

On Thursday, before announcing the staffing change, Trump denied any connection to the advertising campaign, telling the news service Reuters that he “never knew anything about it”.

Noem played a key role in the administration’s mass deportation push, and she has frequently used rhetoric that vilified immigrants as dangerous and violent.

Though DHS’s mandate focuses on domestic security, Noem has made several international trips over the last year, including visits to Ecuador in July and November.

Trump has called a “Shield of the Americas” summit at his Mar-a-Lago estate this weekend, inviting world leaders from multiple countries to discuss regional security and combatting Chinese influence in Latin America.

Noem’s replacement as DHS head, Mullin, has served as a US senator since 2023. He was a representative in the House for a decade before that, representing Oklahoma.

Trump highlighted his membership in the Cherokee Nation, writing that Mullin would be a “fantastic advocate for our incredible Tribal Communities” as DHS leader.

“Markwayne will work tirelessly to Keep our Border Secure, Stop Migrant Crime, Murderers, and other Criminals from illegally entering our Country, End the Scourge of Illegal Drugs and, MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN,” Trump said on Thursday.

WASHINGTON — A federal panel reviewing President Trump’s plans to build a ballroom at the White House has set April 2 for a final vote on the project, the chairman said as the agency prepared to give additional consideration to the construction plans.

Will Scharf, chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission and a top aide to the Republican president, made the announcement Thursday at the start of the panel’s March meeting.

The panel will hear additional details about the project from the White House as well as its own staff, and had been expected to vote on Thursday.

But Scharf announced that the vote was switched to April to give every member of the public who wants to comment a chance to do so. More than 100 people had signed up to comment at Thursday’s meeting, which was being conducted online as a result.

The panel has also been flooded with scores of written comments about Trump’s plans to build a 90,000-square-foot addition where the East Wing of the White House once stood. Trump has said it will cost about $400 million and be paid for with private money. Trump had the East Wing demolished in October.

Scharf said the meeting was being conducted online to ease the public testimony portion, which he said was likely to extend into Friday given the number of people who had signed up to speak.

“They are taking time out of what I presume are busy schedules to join us,” he said. “One way or the other, we are going to make sure that members of the public have the opportunity to be heard on this project.”

Critics of the project have argued that Trump should not have demolished the East Wing until the National Capital Planning Commission and a separate panel, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, had reviewed and voted on his plans. The fine arts panel approved the project last month.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a private, nonprofit group, asked a federal judge to temporarily halt construction until the White House submitted the plans both to federal panels and to Congress for approval, and allowed the public to comment.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon rejected the request last week, and the trust has said it plans to file an amended lawsuit.

Superville writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — New signs of a widening regional conflict emerged Thursday as the war with Iran entered its sixth day, with European allies pledging warships and access to military bases for the U.S. campaign, Israel intensifying strikes in Lebanon against Hezbollah militants, and Kurdish forces preparing for a potential incursion into northern Iran.

Iran continued retaliatory missile and drone attacks against Israel and U.S. military sites across the region. The strikes hit at least “10 countries that did not attack [Iran],” British Prime Minister Kier Starmer said at a news conference Thursday.

Starmer announced new military deployments and confirmed the U.K. will allow American forces to use British bases for defensive operations against Iran. The move was a reversal of Starmer’s initial cautious approach, which drew criticism from President Trump, who said, “He’s no Winston Churchill.”

“I took the decision that the U.K. would not join the initial strikes on Iran by the U.S. and Israel,” Starmer said. “That decision was deliberate. It was in the national interest. And I stand by it. But when Iran started attacking countries around the Gulf and the wider region, the situation changed.”

The United Kingdom will send four additional RAF Typhoon jets to reinforce its squadron in Qatar, deploy Wildcat helicopters with anti-drone capabilities to Cyprus and dispatch the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Dragon to the eastern Mediterranean.

The moves place Britain among the most active European partners supporting the U.S. war effort, as Starmer warned that the conflict will likely “continue for some time,” he said. It comes after an Iranian drone struck a British military base in Cyprus on Monday, which has led to a mounting of European naval resources.

Located just 150 miles from Israel in the eastern Mediterranean, the island of Cyprus has emerged as a strategic — and exposed — nerve center in the U.S. offensive against Iran. It hosts vital British military bases and acts as an intelligence, surveillance, and logistics hub in countering Iranian influence and proxy attacks.

On Thursday, Italy’s defense minister, Guido Crosetto, said Thursday that his country would follow the lead of France, Spain and the Netherlands to aid in the defense of Cyprus.

“Within the EU it made sense to send a message of support to Cyprus,” he said.

Smoke plumes billow following Israeli bombardment on Beirut’s southern suburbs on Monday.

(Ibrahim Amro/AFP via Getty Images)

Spain announced Thursday it would dispatch its advanced frigate Cristóbal Colón to Cyprus, after initially maintaining a “no to war” stance.

France also authorized temporary access to U.S. aircraft on bases located on French soil, a French army general staff official told Reuters.

And Germany, a country that has explicitly ruled out military participation in war with Iran and has criticized the legality of the initial U.S.–Israeli strikes, said Western powers must prepare for further escalation.

“Europe must remain united in the face of this crisis,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said during an emergency meeting of European leaders. “We will not allow ourselves to be divided while regional stability is threatened.”

Meanwhile, conflict has reached a fever pitch between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based Iranian proxy and key pillar of what Iran has called the “Axis of Resistance.” Overnight, Israel launched heavy airstrikes across southern Lebanon and issued urgent evacuation warnings for the southern suburbs of the capital, Beirut.

The outbreak of hostilities in Lebanon marks the end of a Israeli-Hezbollah truce and the opening of a major second front in the war with Iran. The fighting erupted after Hezbollah launched a barrage of drones and rockets at Israeli military sites—a retaliation for the joint U.S.-Israeli assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Lebanon’s health ministry reported that at least 102 people have been killed by the Israeli strikes so far. In the Beirut suburbs, the Israeli military ordered residents of the Hezbollah-dominated Dahieh district to “save your lives and evacuate your homes immediately.”

“Dahieh? There’s not going to be a Dahieh any more,” one young man said as he talked to a family member on the phone at a media vantage point in the nearby hills.

The widening conflict has also drawn in Ukraine, which has some of the world’s most extensive experience in defending against Iranian-made Shahed drones. Such drones have been deployed by Russia in its war on Ukraine.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky said late Wednesday that the United States and other allies in Europe and the Middle East have sought Kyiv’s “expertise and practical support” to help them stop Iranian drones.

“Of course, any assistance we provide is only on the condition that it does not weaken our own defense in Ukraine and that it serves as an investment in our diplomatic capabilities,” Zelensky said in a social media post. “We help protect against war those who help us — Ukraine — bring the war to a dignified conclusion.”

While the aerial and naval battle intensifies across the Middle East, a ground war may also be on the horizon.

People arrive to sign a condolence book in memory of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the Embassy of Iran in New Delhi, India, on Thursday.

(Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

The United States and Israel have increased coordination with Kurdish armed groups along Iran’s western frontier, hoping to exploit longstanding tensions between Tehran and Kurdish factions opposed to the Iranian government, Kurdish officials told the Associated Press.

Iranian forces have already launched missile and drone strikes against Kurdish-controlled areas in northern Iraq following the initial U.S.–Israeli assault on Iranian targets.

Those strikes targeted areas around the city of Erbil and on Kurdish opposition groups operating near the Iranian border, locations where U.S. military forces and diplomatic facilities are also present.

Officials have not publicly confirmed whether Kurdish groups will mount cross-border operations, but security analysts say an incursion into Iranian territory could open a new front in the conflict.

U.S. Central Command, meanwhile, is asking the Pentagon to send more military intelligence officers to its headquarters in Tampa, Florida, to support operations against Iran for at least 100 days, but likely through September, according to a notification obtained by Politico.

The moves come as the House prepares to vote Thursday on a war powers resolution that would withdraw U.S. forces from hostilities in Iran, and limit the president’s power to wage war in the region. A similar measure failed Wednesday in the Senate, mostly along party lines.

Quinton reported from Washington and Bulos from Beirut.

Two months after January 3, the country has found itself at an unprecedented crossroads with three main political actors: the chavista regime, the government of the United States, and the Venezuelan opposition.

Chavismo now faces a historically unique situation after 27 years of political (as well as social and economic) control. It is under pressure from the US to move toward a transition, while at the same time trying to contain the tensions that exist within its own internal structures.

For its part, Washington is trying to steer a transition in Venezuela that is acceptable for both its domestic and foreign policy, leveraging the influence it gained from the capture of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores over both the regime and the opposition.

And the opposition has entered a situation of undeclared conflict. In just a few days, the opposition landscape has shifted in unimaginable ways, with the perception of inaction from María Corina Machado, the sudden emergence of Enrique Márquez during the State of the Union address, and the rest of the opposition reassessing its options.

The inevitable amid uncertainty

The path toward a transition at this moment is uncertain. The regime is seeking a balance between satisfying US demands while avoiding, as much as possible, the deterioration of its own internal political and economic arrangements. At the same time, it continues to move quickly to consolidate control over the process, and more and more details are emerging about how it is setting the guidelines for the Rodríguez siblings. For instance, the visit this week by Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum.

The opposition universe appears to be an earthquake, above all amid the practical disappearance of María Corina Machado from public debate and, more recently, the “Márquez effect,” whose medium or long-term impact remains uncertain. Where there is consensus, however, is on the need for a new election. Marco Rubio, María Corina Machado, and now Enrique Márquez are on the same page: there must be new elections that legitimize the political transition. As for the Rodrigato, we can imagine what it thinks about that.

A new election to choose the opposition’s presidential candidate would be a way to confront several elephants in the room.

Until just a few days ago, it would have been easy to argue that the opposition’s presidential candidate should be Machado. After all, the results of July 28, 2024 were fundamentally the result of her leadership, and she would have been the presidential candidate if the Maduro regime had allowed it.

But Márquez’s appearance in Washington DC and his subsequent press conference suggested that this Zuliano “black swan” could be acting with the acquiescence of both the Rodrigato and the Trump administration. Evidence of this includes Márquez being invited to Trump’s address, as well as his comments about a figure as close to the Rodríguez siblings as José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

For that reason, it now seems that there will be an election sooner or later. It also seems that, as things stand today, we could head into that election with at least two candidates on the opposition side.

That would be a good scenario for the Rodrigato.

New primaries

In times of legitimacy crisis, the proper course is to look to the sovereign. Given everything that has happened, it seems necessary to call a new primary vote to choose an opposition candidate—whoever the Rodrigato’s candidate may be—in the presidential election that must take place given Maduro’s absolute absence.

A new election to choose the opposition’s presidential candidate would be a way to confront several elephants in the room. The first is the need to present the other two actors (the regime and the United States) with an electoral calendar that should not be unnecessarily delayed. The second is the convenience of unifying and strengthening party structures. If the process is well managed, it could encourage a reunion of the different opposition forces around a common and higher objective.

Another elephant shaking Venezuela’s narrow public space is the urgency of restarting citizen mobilization around a concrete political initiative. Finally, those primaries could once again make it possible to go into a presidential election with a single candidate, preventing the regime from promoting multiple “opposition” candidacies to divide the electorate.

The primaries that chose Henrique Capriles as the candidate for the 2012 presidential election, and the primaries that selected María Corina Machado as the candidate for the 2024 presidential election, were good precedents for successfully resolving several political problems. Considering the sovereign is a good idea, or at least most of the time.

March 5 (UPI) — Argentina’s main business organizations issued an unusual public warning to President Javier Milei’s government, calling for “respect” for the private sector and warning about the difficult situation facing the country’s industrial base.

The statements followed remarks by Milei during the opening of the legislative year in Congress, when the president sharply criticized industrial business leaders and accused them of benefiting for years from a protectionist and corrupt economic system.

The reactions came mainly from the Argentine Industrial Union, known by its Spanish acronym UIA, and the Argentine Business Association, or AEA, two of the most influential groups representing the country’s private sector.

Under the premise that “without industry there is no nation,” the UIA defended the productive sector in a statement responding to the president’s comments and expressed concern about the situation of factories across several provinces.

“In this stage of transformation, we want to be clear: respect is a basic condition for development. Respect for those who produce, invest and create jobs across the country. Respect is the starting point to rebuild the confidence Argentina needs, both domestically and internationally,” the organization said, according to a report by Argentine newspaper Perfil.

The UIA also said business leaders should not be blamed for economic distortions accumulated over decades and called for clear rules to guide the transition toward a more open economic model.

Industrial representatives warned that many companies, especially small and medium-sized firms, are facing a difficult period marked by falling consumer demand, heavy tax pressure and financial constraints.

The group said Argentina’s industrial sector produces about 19% of the country’s gross domestic product and contributes 27% of national tax revenue. It also generates 19% of formal employment, with about 1.2 million workers, and supports another 2.4 million indirect formal jobs throughout the production chain.

The AEA, which represents owners of some of the country’s largest companies, adopted a more moderate tone.

The organization acknowledged progress by Milei’s administration in stabilizing the economy, but said relations between the state and the private sector must be based on respect and cooperation to facilitate new investment.

Despite the critical tone, the business statements avoided a direct confrontation with the government and stressed the need for cooperation, digital outlet Infobae reported. Both organizations said economic stabilization must be accompanied by policies that encourage productive investment and support the industrial sector.

Although much of Argentina’s business community initially supported Milei’s economic reforms, the episode marks one of the first public criticisms by major companies since he took office.

A growing number of factory closures and a slowdown in industrial activity have begun to trigger concerns within the private sector.

On its own, the phrase “Christ is king” sums up a core tenet of the Christian faith, that Jesus is the divine ruler of the universe. Catholics and many Protestants celebrate a Christ the King Sunday each year.

But the ancient proclamation can morph into something political, controversial or even sinister, depending on who says it and how it’s said.

In recent years, “Christ is king” and similar phrases have been chanted at political rallies, posted on social media and proclaimed in speeches by voices on the right.

At times the phrase is used to support the notion of America as a Christian nation or as one that owes its allegiance specifically to the Christian God. Some current Cabinet officials and recent members of Congress have used the phrase in speeches and on social media.

But other times, political activists have paired “Christ is king” with anti-Zionist statements or negative Jewish stereotypes.

The phrase has gained popularity among far-right figures and their followers. Conservative influencer Candace Owens, who shares antisemitic conspiracies, sells branded “Christ is King” coffee mugs and T-shirts.

The controversy connects to a larger schism on the right, with some conservatives pushing back against an increasingly vocal faction whose denunciations of Israel, critics say, often combine with blatant antisemitism. Some of the latter group insist they’re not antisemitic, just anti-Zionist. That itself is a sharp break from what was once a near-consensus of pro-Israel sentiment among Republicans.

But there are times when the use of the phrase “Christ is king” is unquestionably hostile toward Jews, said a 2025 report by the Rutgers University-affiliated Network Contagion Research Institute.

Analyzing social media postings between 2021 and 2024, the institute reported a dramatic increase of the phrase “Christ is king,” often used as a hate meme targeting Jews. The report lamented this deviation from its historical use as a hopeful, sacred affirmation with biblical roots.

“The weaponization or hijacking of ‘Christ is King’ represents a disturbing inversion of its original intent. Rather than sacralizing shared values, extremists have exploited this religious expression to justify hatred,” the report said.

Controversy spotlighted at religious liberty hearing

A recent meeting of the Religious Liberty Commission, a group President Trump created and appointed, put the phrase and related controversies in the spotlight.

At a Feb. 9 hearing focused on antisemitism, a witness, Seth Dillon, spoke of often hearing people use the phrase “Christ is king” followed immediately by a highly contemptuous slur toward Jews.

“This should offend every Christian,” said Dillon, the CEO of the conservative satirical site The Babylon Bee.

Commission member Carrie Prejean Boller repeatedly grilled witnesses about whether opposing Zionism could be construed as anti-Jewish. She said that as a Catholic she opposes Zionism but that this is not antisemitic. She asked Dillon if he thought “saying ‘Christ is king’ is antisemitic.”

Dillon said no and that, as a Christian, he regularly declares that “Christ is my king” — but context matters.

He testified that the phrase has been co-opted by Groypers, alluding to the followers of far-right influencer Nick Fuentes, who has spread antisemitic views.

It’s “using the Lord’s name in an abusive manner,” Dillon said.

Fuentes’ supporters chanted “Christ is king” at the Million MAGA March, a November 2020 rally denying the Republican Trump’s defeat to Democrat Joe Biden in that year’s presidential election.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican who chairs the Religious Liberty Commission, announced Prejean Boller’s removal from the panel after the meeting. He asserted that she tried to “hijack” the hearing for her own agenda.

Following the commission meeting, Prejean Boller has posted prolifically on X, denouncing “Zionist supremacists” and repeatedly using the phrase “Christ is King.” She also has denounced the war launched by the U.S. and Israel against Iran.

A recent Catholic convert, she said she opposes a popular evangelical view that modern-day Israel exists in fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

A religious phrase ‘co-opted by extremist figures’

The commission hearing was hardly the first forum to air controversy over “Christ is king.”

The Network Contagion Research Institute’s 2025 report noted that while many “Christ is king” references on social media are strictly religious, the phrase has been “systematically co-opted by extremist figures.”

The report said Fuentes and other extremists use the phrase as a “white supremacist mantra publicizing their antisemitic beliefs.”

Fuentes has said the Holocaust was exaggerated, and he has denounced “organized Jewry in America.” He has claimed to be in battle with “satanic, globalist elites,” an antisemitic trope.

The religious phrase “Christ is king” is not inherently political, said Brian Kaylor, president and editor-in-chief of Word&Way, a progressive site covering faith and politics.

But that fact provides a “deniability” to those politicizing it, he said.

“We’re at a dangerous point with the phrase ‘Christ is king’ because of the heavy activity and use of it on the far right in very fascist, antisemitic ways,” said Kaylor, a Baptist minister and author of several books on religion and politics. “We’re at the danger of that phrase losing its meaning to where this new antisemitic use is the dominant definition.”

The phrase has also gained popularity in political settings with some on the Catholic and evangelical right who are strongly pro-Israel and have repeatedly denounced antisemitism, such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Kaylor said the phrase is often used as “a declaration of Christian nationalism ” asserting that “the nation should be brought under the dictates of Christ.”

A dispute over politics and religion

The controversy has highlighted both religious and political fissures.

The Vatican has diplomatic relations with Israel and has also recognized a state of Palestine. Pope Leo XIV has called for a two-state solution while denouncing antisemitism. During the Israel-Hamas war, popes Francis and Leo denounced the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas and Israel’s massive military response, with Leo demanding a halt to Israel’s “collective punishment” of Gaza’s population.

Other Catholics on the Religious Liberty Commission noted that Jesus and his followers were Jews and that a seminal 1965 Vatican document rejects antisemitism and the blaming of all Jews, including those alive today, for Jesus’ crucifixion.

Patrick, the commission chairman, said the dispute with Prejean Boller reflects “a real problem with a very small group in our Republican Party.” Antisemitism needs to be repudiated or “this is going to destroy our party,” he said on “The Mark Levin Show,” a podcast.

But Prejean Boller has galvanized supporters from a staunchly conservative group called Catholics for Catholics, a lay-led, self-described “militant organization dedicated to the evangelization of this great country.”

It plans to honor Prejean Boller at a March 19 event with a Catholic Champion Award in Washington featuring speakers such as Owens.

Prejean Boller has reposted announcements of the event on X, including one post that shared a Spanish-language statement that translates to “We will not rest until we convert the USA into a Catholic nation.” The post concluded in English with “Christ is King!”

Smith writes for the Associated Press.

“Covert action should not be confused with missionary work,” former United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger declared after the sudden abandonment of Iraqi Kurds to their fate against the Iraqi government in 1975.

Half a century later, this doctrine of geopolitical expediency echoes across the Middle East. As the US and Israel encourage Kurdish militias to serve as a ground force against Iran’s central government, knowing their aspiration for “regime change” needs a ground force, history offers a severe warning.

From the mountains of Iraq in 1991 to the plains of Syria just weeks ago, Washington’s track record of using Kurdish fighters as disposable proxies suggests the current push for an Iranian Kurdish rebellion is fraught with risk.

Amid a rapidly escalating military confrontation that has seen US-Israeli air strikes assassinate top Iranian leaders, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Washington is seeking to open a new front.

Some US media reports claimed that thousands of Iranian Kurds have crossed from Iraq to launch a ground operation in northwestern Iran. That has not been verified. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has reportedly supplied these forces with light weapons as part of a covert programme to destabilise the country.

To facilitate this, US President Donald Trump reportedly held calls with Iraqi Kurdish leaders Masoud Barzani and Bafel Talabani as well as Iranian Kurdish leader Mustafa Hijri. While the White House and Kurdish officials in Erbil denied these reports, regional analysts remained wary.

The government of northern Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region on Thursday denied involvement in any plans to arm Kurdish groups and send them into Iran.

Its president, Nechirvan Barzani, said it “must not become part of any conflict or military escalation that harms the lives and security of our fellow citizens”.

“Protecting the territorial integrity of the Kurdistan Region and our constitutional achievements can only be achieved through the unity, cohesion and shared national responsibility of all political forces and components in Kurdistan,” he added.

Mahmoud Allouch, a regional affairs expert, told Al Jazeera that the current strategy is aimed not simply at an immediate government overthrow but at “dismantling Iran” by inciting separatist movements as a prelude to its collapse. “The US and Israel want to produce a separatist armed Kurdish case in Iran similar to the Kurdish case that America imposed in Syria,” Allouch warned.

Added to this volatile mix is Turkiye and how it would react to any Kurdish uprising in the region. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) began steps towards disarmament last summer, closing a chapter on a four-decade armed campaign against the Turkish state in a conflict that has killed more than 40,000 people. Any armed advances by Iranian Kurds could rankle Ankara.

A legacy of betrayal and unintended gains

For the Kurds, acting as the tip of the American spear has historically ended in disaster. In the 1970s, the US and Iran heavily armed Iraqi Kurdish rebels to bleed the government in Baghdad. Yet, once the shah of Iran secured a territorial concession from Iraq in 1975, he cut off the Kurds overnight with Washington’s approval. He himself was deposed in a revolution four years later.

This scenario repeated itself with devastating consequences in 1991. After then-US President George HW Bush encouraged Iraqis – both the Kurdish and Shia communities persecuted under Saddam Hussein – to rise up, the US military stood by as loyalist forces regrouped and used helicopter gunships to indiscriminately slaughter tens of thousands of civilians and rebels.

However, David Romano, a Middle East politics expert at Missouri State University, countered in a statement on his Facebook page that the aftermath of the 1991 catastrophe eventually forced the US to launch Operation Provide Comfort and a no-fly zone, which laid the groundwork for the semiautonomous Kurdish region in Iraq. “At important junctures, the Kurds have done exceedingly well as a result of cooperation with the US,” Romano wrote although he noted the opposite was true in 1975.

The Syrian quagmire

The dark irony of Washington asking Iranian Kurds to take up arms today is compounded by the recent collapse of Kurdish autonomy in neighbouring Syria. For years, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) served as the primary US proxy against ISIL (ISIS) and led the way to vanquishing the armed group in 2019 after years of fighting and suffering.

Yet in January, a little more than a year after the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, the Trump administration backed Syria’s new central government in Damascus, essentially ending support for the SDF and Kurdish autonomy.

The US envoy to Syria, Thomas Barrack, declared that the original purpose of the SDF had largely expired. Within weeks, the SDF lost 80 percent of the territory it had bled for. For the Kurds across the region watching these events unfold, the implications were profound: The US is no longer perceived as a reliable partner or supporter of minorities.

Allouch highlighted this as a primary reason for Kurdish hesitation concerning Iran today, noting that Kurdish leaders are “bleeding from yesterday’s stab” in Syria.

Calculated rejections and the Iranian gamble

The US and Israel are seeking “boots on the ground” to avoid deploying their own forces. But in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, the leadership understands the severe blowback. Barzani recently emphasised to the Iranian foreign minister that the region “will not be a party to the conflicts”.

Analysts suggested that Barzani remains angered by the US dismissal of a 2017 independence referendum for the region. Romano noted that because Baghdad vociferously rejected attacking Iran, Erbil has a perfect justification to decline Washington’s requests after decades of being told by the US to remain integrated within Iraq.

The calculus is different for Iranian Kurds, known as Rojhelati. Betrayed by the Soviet Union in 1946, they have acutely suffered under successive Iranian governments and may view this as their “first and only opportunity” to change their status.

However, Allouch warned that without a solid US military commitment, which Trump has shown no desire to provide, this move could be “suicidal” against a fierce Iranian military response.

The regional veto

Pushing Iranian Kurds into an open conflict remains a highly volatile endeavour that has triggered an immediate reaction from Turkiye. Allouch told Al Jazeera that Ankara will coordinate with the Iranian government to crush any uprising.

“The US and the international powers realise that they cannot, in the end, impose a reality that contradicts the interests of the ‘Regional Quartet’ – Turkiye, Syria, Iran and Iraq,” Allouch said. He argued that this regional bloc applies far more pressure regarding the Kurdish issue than shifts in international policies.

Ultimately, the Kurds have consistently paid the price of changing geopolitics. As Washington seeks a cost-free rebellion with no ground deployment or losses of its own soldiers in Iran, the Kurds will weigh seductive American promises against the blood-soaked lessons of 1975, 1991 and 2026.

When a Los Angeles County judge ordered a notorious Watts scrap metal yard to permanently halt its operations last year, many residents and environmental advocates thought it might finally bring an end to the facility’s dangerous pollution. Instead, the shutdown may have only marked the beginning of what could be a lengthy process to erase decades of environmental degradation.

For nearly 75 years, S&W Atlas Iron & Metal had crushed car parts, shredded aluminum cans and processed an assortment of recyclable metals. Over that time, the facility and its owners racked up dozens of environmental violations and were eventually criminally convicted of crimes that endangered students next door at Jordan High School and residents of Watts.

Since Atlas’ court-ordered closure, the towering piles of scrap metal have largely disappeared from the 3-acre recycling facility. Jordan High’s campus hasn’t been rocked by explosions, pelted with shrapnel or blanketed in layers of toxic, metallic dust.

But one of the most serious, and remaining, threats has gone unnoticed until recently.

A contractor hired by Atlas recently measured a witch’s brew of toxic chemicals percolating in the soil and groundwater beneath the site at orders of magnitude above California’s standards, according to court documents. Around five feet underground, a soil probe detected the highest reading of vinyl chloride — just one of the several carcinogens at the site — more than 1.3 million times higher than the state benchmark.

“What they found were astronomical levels of these contaminants,” said Danielle Hoague, director of research for the Better Watts Initiative.

“I think it’s definitely a hidden danger. I don’t think that the community has been informed of what underlies Atlas. But I would assume that people are experiencing the health effects of this.”

State regulators are still hashing out the scope of the cleanup at the shuttered industrial site. But, more concerning, Watts residents and school district officials fear these contaminants may be migrating with groundwater, posing a risk to neighboring Jordan High School and Jordan Downs housing complex. If that is the case, the question is who will foot the bill to clean up this pollution?

“The cleanup of the Atlas site has been slow, and Atlas is proceeding with a lack of executed urgency,” an L.A. Unified School District spokesperson said in a statement.

Atlas “has failed to advise Los Angeles Unified promptly of contamination found just feet away from the school campus and the adjacent Jordan Downs Housing Development,” the spokesperson added.

Shutting down a source of pollution is only the first step in campaigns for cleaner air. It’s often equally burdensome, time-consuming and expensive to hold polluters accountable for cleaning up the legacy contamination at their own property. And it’s even more difficult to compel companies to decontaminate nearby properties that may have been affected by their operations.

In Lincoln Heights, decades passed after the closure of a massive dry-cleaning operation before residents learned of underground contamination spreading off-site, potentially threatening nearby homes and an elementary school. In Newport Beach, a sprawling aerospace and defense hub was converted into luxury homes three decades ago, and homeowners were only recently informed about residual toxic pollution. In Jurupa Valley, residents were alarmed to learn about toxic vapors seeping into their homes after contaminated groundwater migrated several miles from a former hazardous waste dump uphill.

In Watts, many residents were already aware of the danger posed by toxic metals produced by Atlas’ operations. At times, metallic dust left parts of Jordan High’s campus covered in an iridescent sheen, and the school district has in the past removed contaminated soil from the campus.

But it was far more difficult to predict that pollution could be spreading underground. Many of the chemicals found beneath Atlas evaporate at room temperature and sneak into buildings through cracks in foundations, floor drains or other gaps — a process known as vapor intrusion.

Over the past year, an LAUSD consultant conducted two rounds of air sampling at Jordan High. The levels of airborne chemicals the detected in gym’s basement suggest toxic vapors are infiltrating the building. However, the consultant has said more air sampling is necessary to determine whether it constitutes an unacceptable health risk.

So far, the district says the concentrations have not warranted closing school buildings yet.

In the meantime, the school district is pleading with the state regulators to get Atlas to commit to cleaning up the toxic fallout.

A Los Angeles County judge recently ordered an audit of Atlas’ finances, raising doubts about the company’s ability to pay potential damages.

But community leaders, like Timothy Watkins, president of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee, won’t be satisfied until the case moves from courtroom to cleanup.

“There’s no champion for us. So we have to find a way — with very, very limited resources — to get our story out in a way that begins to raise some kind of alarm and awareness of the danger here.”

More recent air news

New research suggests some air pollutants can significantly alter insect behavior, science journalist Gennaro Tomma writes in National Geographic. Smog-forming emissions can interfere with insect communication by breaking down pheromones, causing ant colonies to exhibit aggression toward their own members and neglect their larvae.

The Trump administration reversed a Biden-era rule limiting brain-damaging mercury emissions from coal plants, arguing compliance costs threatened energy reliability, Guardian environmental reporter Oliver Milman writes. The rollback allows some of the coal plants to avoid expensive upgrades, sparking debate over the trade-off between economic concerns and public health risks.

The California Air Resources Board set an Aug. 10 deadline for some of the nation’s largest companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Sacramento Bee’s climate reporter Chaewon Chung. A pair of state laws enacted in 2023 required companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue to adhere to the reporting requirements.

In other climate news

As Western states brace for deep cuts to their allotments of Colorado River water, one California water agency may be in a position to help. San Diego County Water Authority’s board recently voted to consider selling a portion of its water to Arizona and Nevada, reports Ian James for the LA. Times. The San Diego area is home to the nation’s largest desalination plant, allowing the agency to rely less on unpredictable reservoirs.

The escalating war in the Middle East has triggered the biggest oil and gas market disruption since 2022, driving a surge in energy prices and forcing a re-evaluation of energy security, Bloomberg reports. While high prices could bolster the case for deploying renewable energy, experts warn that worsening inflation — from higher energy costs — could ironically hamper the shift to clean energy.

A Southern California architect is challenging the notion that wildfire-resistant designs can’t also be visually stunning. L.A. Times wildfire reporter Noah Haggerty interviewed a Palisades fire survivor who is so confident about the design of his newly constructed Spanish-revival home, he asked the fire department if he could spark a controlled fire on his property.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.

For more air quality news, follow Tony Briscoe on X and LinkedIn.

Paramount’s $111-billion deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery will put two of the most storied journalism brands — CNN and CBS News — under one roof.

The combination has been proposed before with the aim of consolidating news-gathering costs. Those plans fell apart largely over who would be in control.

But if the Paramount-WBD transaction is approved by regulators, CNN and CBS News will be forced into potentially rocky marriage where they will have to sort out leadership roles, personnel and editorial direction.

It’s still too early to determine what those moves will be and how widely they will be felt.

Last week CNN Chief Executive Mark Thompson told his troops to avoid “jumping to conclusions about the future.”

But what is certain is that every permutation will be scrutinized closely due to the fraught relationships both CNN and CBS News have with the Trump administration.

“There have been many conversations over the years about combining CBS News and CNN,” said Jon Klein, a digital media entrepreneur who previously held leadership roles at both organizations. “But this time, it’s different. The business case always made sense — but today you’ve got the overlay of the political agenda.”

Before Paramount prevailed in its bid for CNN’s parent, Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison’s father Larry Ellison reportedly discussed changes to the network with Trump. For years, Trump has made CNN the poster child of his “fake news” claims and impugned many of its journalists.

“What has David Ellison and Larry Ellison promised Donald Trump with regard to what they’re going to do with CNN?” said one former executive. “Before you even get through the hurdles of doing this, that’s the overriding question. Are they going to fire anchors Trump doesn’t like?”

There is also apprehension at CBS News, where David Ellison installed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief in October, with a mandate to have network’s coverage appeal to the political center.

CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss with Turning Point USA’s Erika Kirk at a town hall that aired Dec. 20.

(CBS Photo Archive / CBS via Getty Images)

Weiss — founder of the independent media company The Free Press — came into the role with no experience running a TV news organization, building her reputation as an opinion writer with contrarian views and a disdain for woke ideology.

The former New York Times opinion writer, who is staunchly pro-Israel, drew criticism over the weekend for putting a fire emoji over a comment criticizing New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s condemnation of the U.S. military action in Iran — an unusual public reaction for the head of a major news organization.

Weiss wasted no time taking on the prestigious CBS news magazine “60 Minutes,” which has long been a stubbornly independent operation. She delayed a story on the harsh El Salvador prison used by the U.S. to house undocumented migrants saying it needed more reporting. The story’s correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi accused CBS News management of placating the White House, turning the decision into a public relations fiasco for the network.

Significant changes are coming to “60 Minutes” later this spring, with one or more of its correspondents possibly being replaced, according to people familiar with Weiss’ plans who were not authorized to comment. Weiss has also expressed interest in hiring right-leaning on-air talent for CBS News.

Weiss arrived after Paramount settled a Trump lawsuit with the dubious claim that a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris was deceptively edited to aid her 2024 presidential election campaign against him.

The willingness to settle the suit was largely seen as Paramount capitulating to Trump in order to get government approval of its merger with Skydance Media. The Ellisons’ tight relationship with Trump was also seen as an asset in their successful pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery.

The stew of issues bubbling through the transactions is why most of the rank and file at CNN rooted for Netflix to prevail in its bidding for Warner Bros. Discovery. The Netflix bid for WBD did not include CNN or the company’s cable networks, which in the words of one insider would have made it “a stay of execution.”

Now CNN staffers, speaking on the condition of anonymity, are bracing for upheaval. When they look at CBS News navigating the changes under Weiss, they are reminded what they went through after Warner Bros. Discovery took over their network and tried to push the coverage to the center.

After a declaration by WBD Chief Executive David Zaslav that the network needed to be more accommodating to conservative voices — and the telecast of a rowdy Trump town hall — CNN experienced an exodus of viewers.

But the biggest fear that the merger brings is consolidation and the loss of jobs. CNN has 3,400 employees while CBS News is at around 1,000. Cost-cutting is expected to be aggressive across the combined Paramount-WBD, which will have a mountain of debt to service.

The parent companies of CBS and CNN have discussed merging or sharing news-gathering operations and on-air talent numerous times over several decades. In 2019, Viacom, the CBS News parent at the time, had a deal in place to pay CNN an annual license fee to provide international coverage.

Under that plan, CBS would have maintained a few of its signature overseas correspondents, while shuttering its bureaus around the world. But Viacom backed out of the deal.

CNN’s international coverage has long been its calling card and its likely the network will handle that reporting for CBS News once Paramount takes ownership.

Combining the news-gathering operation stateside will be trickier, as CBS News has employees and vendors that operate under contracts with the Writers Guild of America East, SAG-AFTRA and other unions. CNN is a non-union shop.

Resolving the union issue has been a snag in every previous discussion to combine CBS News and CNN over the years, according to several former executives at both outlets.

CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper in New York in 2016.

(Associated Press)

Another development worth watching is what role Anderson Cooper will play in the merged operation. Cooper signed a new deal with CNN last year, but turned down an offer to remain as a “60 Minutes” correspondent, a role he’s had since 2007.

CBS News has pursued Cooper several times over the years to be its evening news anchor. There was even a proposal in 2018 for him to helm “CBS Evening News” while keeping his nightly prime time program on CNN. That idea was shot down at CNN, where leadership believed he was unique to the network’s brand.

In a statement, Cooper cited a desire to spend more time with his two children as the reason for passing on another “60 Minutes” deal. However, associates have said his wariness over the direction of CBS News under Weiss made his decision easier.

Now Cooper is likely headed into the CNN-CBS News tent, which may make him feel a bit like Michael Corleone in “Godfather III” when he said “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”

“I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”
— Donald Trump, in his victory speech Nov. 6, 2024

It’s bad enough that President Trump has broken that oft-repeated pledge and unilaterally started a war, without engaging either Congress or the American public. And that, by his war of choice against Iran, he has in the most perilous way to date betrayed his signature “America First” standard, at least as longtime proponents Marjorie Taylor Greene, Megyn Kelly, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson and others mean it, and as many people thought he did too.

What’s even worse than Trump’s mendacity about stopping foreign wars is the broader truth that his war on Iran underscores: In the major theaters of U.S. foreign policy — the Mideast, Europe and Asia — he is essentially letting foreigners set his course, America’s course. And to state the obvious: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping do not have America’s interests at heart.

It has long been a defining contradiction of Trump that the wannabe strongman repeatedly shows himself to be in thrall to the world’s actual strongmen. His affinity for them has for years puzzled observers in this country and abroad. Trump strikes a pose — say, on negotiating with Iran about its nukes program, promising peace in Ukraine, hitting China with tariffs — only to crumple after a phone call, a meeting or a slap back from his opposite number.

It’s always hard for a person without a strong core to maintain a stand.

Obviously different factors are at play in Trump’s relationships with Israel, a U.S. ally, with longtime adversaries Russia and China and, more specifically, with each nation’s leaders. But all three cases reflect a personalization of foreign policy that is dangerously unique to Trump. For him, it’s less “what’s good for my country” than “what’s good for me” and “who likes me.” Time and again, he’s been explicit about that.

For all Trump’s cosplaying as a strongman, he shows his weakness as a national leader when he lets foreign counterparts share the wheel with him. As a consequence, he’s driving America erratically at best. At worst, he’s steering into another costly, bloody “forever war” of the sort he railed against for decades.

He’s gone in a direction in the Middle East that, polls show, pluralities or even majorities of Americans didn’t want to go. Trump has received none of the initial rally ’round support that past presidents enjoyed after initiating military operations. That’s a hazardous place to be domestically. Most Republicans are behind Trump on the war, but not by the usual high numbers. After all, it was disgust with forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that sent many people flocking to Trump’s “America First” banner to begin with.

For years he warned that other presidents and presidential candidates would start a war in Iran, World War III even. Yet here we are. And after days of what Kelly derided on air as the “10,000 different explanations” that Trump has given for attacking Iran and killing its top political and military leaders, on Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphatically provided just one: Because Israel was going to strike Iran first, the United States had to join the attack to protect U.S. personnel and assets in the region from Iran’s retaliation.

Cue the blowback in MAGA world: “He’s flat out telling us that we’re in a war with Iran because Israel forced our hand,” MAGA pundit Matt Walsh lashed out online. And then Trump contradicted his secretary of State on the rationale for the attacks. Yet Rubio wasn’t the only one citing Israel’s plans as the war’s predicate. So did House Speaker “MAGA Mike” Johnson. On Tuesday, Trump himself said he had to act fast because the Iranians “were getting ready to attack Israel.”

As Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, responded, “If we equate a threat to Israel as the equivalent of an imminent threat to the United States, then we are in uncharted territory.”

Similarly, in June, Trump ordered a devastating one-off strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities to support Israel’s 12-day war against Iran. For months after, Netanyahu hounded Trump to stop the subsequent peace talks with Iran and go back on offense with Israel. So now Trump has complied, striking even as negotiations with Iran were ongoing. Sen. Lindsey Graham, the once respected Republican from South Carolina, offered his sycophantic spin: “Bibi and Trump are the modern Roosevelt-Churchill combination.”

The latters’ grave sites surely trembled.

As for Asia, Trump talks a good game against China, and, yes, he’s imposed big tariffs. But just as often he’s backtracked, often after talking with Xi. Trump’s admiration of the Chinese autocrat and his eagerness to please him is palpable. In fact, in dealing with Xi, Trump in both of his terms has violated his own words in “The Art of the Deal”: “The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it. That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you’re dead.”

No one is more worried about Trump’s regard for Xi than the Taiwanese, living under threat from China. Just recently Trump delayed arms sales to Taiwan approved by Congress lest he upset Xi ahead of their Beijing meeting in April.

In Europe, meanwhile, Trump continues to be played by Putin at the “peace” table to end Russia’s war in Ukraine — the war that candidate Trump said he’d settle in a day. More than a year later, he continues to harangue Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky to make concessions to the invader, never demanding anything from Putin.

Most heinously, Trump’s 28-point “peace” plan last November incorporated everything that Putin/Russia dreamed of extracting from Ukraine, and for good reason: The proposal came from Moscow, passed from Putin’s flunky to Trump’s. That followed Trump’s humiliating summit with Putin last August in Alaska, giving the globally reviled Russian an American stage and pageantry and serving no purpose for the United States, only for Trump the showman. All the while, Russia continued ravaging Ukraine.

So much for Trump’s election promise. He doesn’t stop wars (his repeated claims to the contrary). But he does start them.

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March 5 (UPI) — This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Arctic Council, once a hallmark of post-Cold War cooperation in the far north.

For decades, the Arctic Ocean remained at the margins of global power politics — a remote, ice-locked expanse governed largely through scientific collaboration and consensus-based frameworks.

That balance is now shifting. Rapid ice loss is opening seasonal sea lanes, exposing fragile ecosystems and drawing new commercial and strategic interest, even as the suspension of routine cooperation with Russia has strained the council’s role.

The Arctic is emerging as a maritime crossroads where environmental risk, economic ambition and intensifying geopolitical competition increasingly converge.

Established by the 1996 Ottawa Declaration, the Arctic Council — bringing together eight Arctic states from Canada, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Russia, Sweden the United States, Indigenous permanent participants and observers including China — remains the region’s central forum for coordinating science, environmental policy and cooperative governance. Despite mounting geopolitical strain, it continues to provide an institutional platform that could support future U.S.-China maritime cooperation in the Arctic.

Recent diplomacy suggests that even as tensions rise across trade, technology and security, cooperation is still possible when interests align.

The 2018 Agreement to Prevent Unregulated High Seas Fisheries in the Central Arctic Ocean, in force since 2021, offers a case in point. By imposing a 16-year moratorium on commercial fishing while joint scientific research assesses the ecosystem, the pact places precaution ahead of competition and provides a model for managing emerging Arctic risks.

The significance of the fisheries decision should not be understated. The agreement brought together Arctic coastal states and distant-water fishing powers, including Washington and Beijing, to manage a region where no fisheries regime previously existed.

In doing so, it transformed an ungoverned expanse of high seas into a shared space of stewardship — governed not by territorial claims, but by science, restraint and a shared recognition of ecological risk.

“The Arctic Council is a dedicated body creating a platform for collaboration built on consensus. It is far from perfect, but it has produced a number of highly influential assessments and created an international community devoted to cooperation and shared stewardship,” said Henry P. Huntington, arctic science director of the Ocean Conservancy.

Science diplomacy as a foundation

For the United States, the Arctic is a strategic frontier and an environmental priority, tied to maritime access, national defense, Indigenous livelihoods and ecological protection.

For China, it is an emerging arena of economic opportunity and global governance engagement. Beijing’s self-description as a “near-Arctic state,” combined with its investments in polar research, ice-capable vessels and Arctic shipping studies, reflects a broader ambition to participate in shaping the rules that will govern the region’s future.

International law scholar Michael Byers said China’s Arctic posture differs sharply from its behavior in the South China Sea. While Beijing has strategic interests in the region through its “Polar Silk Road,” it has no territorial claims in the Arctic and has largely operated within the existing legal framework.

In contrast to its role as a resident power in the South China Sea, Byers notes that China presents itself in the Arctic as a “near-Arctic state,” focused on resource access and emerging shipping routes — a presence that Arctic nations are watching more closely as its footprint grows.

Despite competing strategic interests, both countries share a clear objective: preventing a governance vacuum in the Arctic. The fisheries accord underscores that even amid rivalry, Washington and Moscow recognize the dangers of unregulated exploitation in fragile waters and the need for baseline rules. As such, the agreement serves not only as a conservation tool, but as a diplomatic signal that pragmatic cooperation in the Arctic remains possible.

At its center is a commitment to joint scientific research. Participating states will collaborate to monitor fish stocks, map Arctic ecosystems and assess climate impacts, generating the shared data needed to determine whether any future fishing can be conducted sustainably.

“The Arctic Council’s 30th anniversary finds its consensus-based structure severely tested. Western states suspended cooperation with Russia in 2022, effectively paralyzing what was once exemplary post-Cold War diplomacy,” said Pavel Devyatkin, a senior associate at the Arctic Institute. He said the council’s experience offers practical lessons for managing contested waters elsewhere, including the South China Sea.

Arctic marine science has long bridged geopolitical divides, including cooperation with China, showing how shared environmental risks can transcend political tension. As Devyatkin noted, the region offers a clear lesson: ecological disruption can outweigh traditional security concerns. When U.S.-Russia fisheries monitoring was suspended, key data gaps emerged just as warming waters pushed fish stocks northward — a cautionary signal for any contested maritime region facing climate-driven change.

China’s Arctic engagement is anchored in scientific diplomacy. Unlike more securitized theaters such as the South China Sea, Beijing has framed its Arctic role around cooperation, climate research and environmental stewardship. Its Yellow River Station in Svalbard has supported long-term research since 2004, while icebreakers such as Xue Long and Xue Long 2, along with polar-capable satellites, have expanded China’s research reach and technological presence in the region.

At the same time, Western policymakers remain cautious about the potential dual-use nature of these activities. Concerns focus on whether data gathered from satellites, seabed mapping or subsea systems could support military applications. U.S. and NATO officials have questioned how China might use its growing Arctic data capabilities.

The model reflects a broader principle of science diplomacy — one that has long shaped cooperation in contested maritime regions. Scientific collaboration provides a low-politics entry point for engagement, allowing rival states to build trust, exchange data and establish working relationships even when political tensions remain high.

“Marine science is an area that can promote international cooperation. That is true in many contexts, including in relation to the next International Polar Year collaborations currently being planned, that will include China,” claimed Evan T. Bloom, polar governance chair at the Ted Stevens Center for Arctic Security Studies.

Collaborative mapping of sensitive habitats could inform conservation planning and risk management. Even the design of Arctic marine protected areas, an issue gaining attention as part of global “30 by 30” conservation goals, could become a platform for coordinated policy development.

From fisheries to shipping and conservation

Shipping governance is emerging as the next test of whether U.S.-China scientific cooperation can translate into operational rules in the Arctic. As sea ice recedes, a transpolar route linking Asia, Europe and North America could reshape global trade, but the region remains poorly charted, remote and environmentally fragile, with high risks of accidents and long-term damage.

Analysts say a cooperative framework on Arctic shipping, covering safety standards, environmental protections, data sharing and emergency response, could reduce those risks. Joint monitoring of ice and vessel traffic, coordinated search-and-rescue protocols and agreed-upon environmental rules for polar operations would form the backbone of such an approach.

Marine conservation offers another pathway for cooperation. The precautionary logic underpinning the fisheries agreement aligns with broader global efforts to expand ocean protection and safeguard biodiversity.

The United States and China have expanded marine protected areas domestically and have endorsed international conservation targets. Extending that logic to the Arctic through coordinated conservation zones or networks of protected areas would reinforce ecological resilience while creating a stabilizing framework for governance.

Such initiatives also would resonate with a wider global trend: the recognition that environmental security and geopolitical stability are increasingly intertwined. As climate change accelerates, the management of shared ecosystems is becoming a central component of international relations. The Arctic, like the South China Sea or the Mediterranean, is emerging as a test case for how science-based stewardship can mitigate strategic rivalry.

The obstacles to deeper cooperation, however, remain substantial. The broader U.S.-China relationship is marked by strategic distrust, trade disputes and military competition. Arctic policy cannot be entirely insulated from tensions in other theaters, including the Indo-Pacific. Russia’s war in Ukraine has also disrupted Arctic diplomacy, limiting the functioning of multilateral bodies such as the Arctic Council and injecting new security concerns into the region.

Trust remains a central obstacle.

Washington remains wary of Beijing’s long-term strategic intentions in the Arctic, particularly the dual-use potential of infrastructure and emerging shipping routes.

Beijing casts itself as a legitimate stakeholder in global commons governance and is pressing for a greater role in shaping the rules of the evolving Arctic order.

At the same time, Russia’s continued isolation from Arctic Council processes since 2022 has pushed Moscow to seek new partners, further complicating the diplomatic landscape and slowing meaningful progress on joint conservation efforts for Arctic flora and fauna.

Against that backdrop, any expansion of cooperation will need to be incremental, transparent and anchored in verifiable scientific collaboration. The fisheries agreement provides a template: begin with a shared risk, rely on joint science, build institutional mechanisms and create habits of cooperation over time. That process is gradual, but it can be durable.

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