politics

SACRAMENTO — A proposed initiative to require Californians to show identification every time they vote, and election officials to verify registered voters are U.S. citizens, appears to have enough support to qualify for the November ballot.

Proponents say they have collected more than 1.3 million voter signatures on petitions supporting the ballot measure, far more than required under California law, and plan to submit them to county elections officials Monday for verification.

The Republican-led push for the voter ID initiative comes at a time of growing distrust in the integrity of the electoral process nationwide, a wariness intensified by President Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him and false assertions that droves of undocumented immigrants are swaying elections with illegal votes.

Proponents of voter ID contend that such laws prevent election fraud and, along with proof of citizenship mandates, prevent noncitizens from voting. Opponents say ID mandates threaten the fundamental constitutional rights of Americans who do not have the mandated documentation readily available, and that the restrictions are unnecessary given that voting by noncitizens is rare and already outlawed in the U.S.

The partisan divide over whether voters must provide proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote, one of Trump’s top priorities, continues to consume Washington. House Republicans passed the mandate in early February but the legislation — known as the SAVE Act — has bogged down in the Senate.

Democrats say that under the SAVE Act, many state driver’s licenses would not be adequate documentation to prove U.S. citizenship, forcing people to produce a passport or birth certificate — which many voters do not have. According to a 2023 survey by the Brennan Center for Justice and others, 9% of U.S. adult citizens do not have proof of their citizenship that’s readily available. The survey found that 11% of adult citizens of color were unable to readily access those documents, compared with 8% for white American adults. They accused Republicans of trying to prevent millions of Americans from voting in the next election in order to keep Congress under GOP control.

UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said that both the SAVE Act and proposed ballot measure in California are not only unnecessary, but harmful to democracy.

“Both are aimed at solving problems that don’t exist,” Chemerinsky said. “There is no evidence of a problem of non-citizens voting. Nor is there evidence of significant fraud with voters casting votes under false names. But both would limit who can vote. As for the SAVE Act, many people don’t have a birth certificate or passport.”

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) speaks during a news conference on Feb. 11 at the U.S. Capitol. Johnson was joined by Republicans to speak about the passage of the SAVE America Act, an election bill backed by President Donald Trump that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and require photo identification at the ballot box.

(Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)

Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Corona), who supports and voted for the SAVE Act, said it is a simple way to restore voter confidence in elections. But he said the bill’s fate appears grim.

“I don’t think they have the votes,” Calvert said Friday.

Which is why, Calvert says, California must join other states and enact commonsense voter ID and citizenship requirements that can attract bipartisan support. The longtime Republican congressman said he does not believe there has been widespread voter fraud in the U.S., or a that a flood of noncitizens has been voting, but that does not mean those have not happened to some degree and would sway both tightly contested local elections and congressional races.

“I’ve always said it’s probably a small amount, but it’s enough to change an outcome of elections, and could change the numbers we have in Congress,” Calvert said.

The California ballot measure

The petitions being submitted for the California Voter ID Initiative will be reviewed by county election officials, who must verify that the people who signed are registered voters in the state and that the proponents collected at least the 874,641 valid signatures required to qualify for the November ballot.

The ballot measure will make significant changes to how Californians vote, and enact new mandates on county elections officials. Among the top changes being proposed:

• Every time a voter casts a ballot in person in any election in California, they must present government-issued identification.
• Californians voting by mail will be required to list on the ballot envelope the last four digits of a “unique identifying number from a government issued identification” — essentially a pin number like people use at an ATM — that matches the one the voter designated when they registered to vote.
• The California secretary of state and county election officials will be required to verify that registered voters are U.S. citizens by “using government data,” which according to supporters could include information in the federal Social Security Administration database, jury summons information and other government records.
• The secretary of state and county election officials must maintain accurate voter registration lists.
• If requested, the state would be required to a provide eligible voters with free voter identification cards for use during elections.

“We’re creating the legal obligation that in California, when we do voting, we want our election officers to actually give a damn about whether someone’s a citizen,” said Assemblymember Carl DeMaio (R-San Diego), one of the main forces behind the proposed ballot measure. “That’s what we’re asking. That’s why voters support this, because it’s not a burden on the voter. It really is a burden on the election officers to do their job.”

Republican Assemblymember Carl DeMaio of San Diego speaks at a press conference in July to announce a campaign to require voter identification in California.

(Tran Nguyen / Associated Press)

But Jenny Farrell, executive director of the League of Women Voters of California, called the proposed ballot measure an underhanded attempt by Trump and Republicans to make it even harder for people in the state to vote — which they see as a political advantage. The Californians who will suffer the most are “communities of color, people with disabilities, elderly folks, folks who move around a lot, folks who have recently experienced a name change.”

“California elections are already secure. This initiative isn’t really about election integrity. It’s part of this broader national playbook from President Trump and the current federal administration to make voting harder and to create doubts in the minds of the public and to really sow chaos on election day,” Farrell said. “The measure would create new strict barriers for eligible voters. It could wrongfully flag naturalized citizens, and it will create new ways to challenge results.”

Noncitizens who vote in California risk being charged with a felony and deported, she said.

Farrell’s organization has joined with the ACLU of Northern and Southern California, Common Cause, Disability Rights California and other groups to oppose the proposed measure.

The nonpartisan Legislative Analysts Office estimates the new requirements under the proposed ballot measure could potentially cost state and local governments “tens of millions of dollars to the low hundreds of millions of dollars” annually.

What’s the law now in California?

Currently, 36 states require or request that voters provide identification at the time they cast a ballot, and 10 states have strict laws requiring people to produce government-issued photo IDs, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Under current law, Californians are not required to show or provide identification when casting a ballot in person or by mail. They are required to provide identification when registering to vote, and must swear under penalty of perjury, a felony, that they are eligible to vote and a U.S. citizen.

To register to vote, Californians must provide their driver’s license number or state identification card number and the last four digits of their Social Security number, along with other information. The state is required to validate the information using relevant databases, including records at the state Department of Motor Vehicles and Social Security Administration.

Along with a driver’s license, U.S. passport or state identification card, acceptable identification also can include photo identification cards issued by a school, a credit card company, a gym, an insurance company, an employer or a public housing agency. Californians have the option of providing certain other documents, as long as they contain the person’s name and address, including: utility bills, bank statements, government checks, rental statements or government-issued bus passes.

First-time voters who did not present identification when they registered to vote must present ID the first time they cast a ballot in a federal election.

When ballots are sent by mail, election officials are required to verify a voter’s signature on the ballot by comparing it with the signature on the official voter registration records on file.

BERKELEY — University of California President James B. Milliken, in his first extensive interview since taking the helm of the nation’s premier public higher education system, defended UC’s diplomatic approach to President Trump’s fusillade of actions against the institution — contrasting it with the more aggressive fight Harvard is waging with the government.

UC has not repeatedly sued the federal government or publicly criticized Trump, while Harvard battles the administration in and outside court amid billions in White House funding freezes.

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“We could have said, ‘We’re going to sue tomorrow.’ We saw that movie with Harvard,” Milliken said of his first seven months on the job dominated by federal attacks. “Harvard is still in negotiations to settle the federal government’s actions, but they have had a series of devastating enforcement actions taken … Given our responsibility to the university and to the state of California, the better course for us was to engage.”

Yet days after the interview, the U.S. Department of Justice leveled another strike against UC in a lawsuit alleging UCLA “routinely ignored” and “failed to report” employee complaints of antisemitism since 2023.

In a statement after the interview, Milliken said UC has already committed to combating anti-Jewish hatred without court interference.

“Antisemitism has no place at UC and we have taken important actions to protect our Jewish students, faculty and staff … We will always have work to do, and our commitment to our community is unwavering,” the statement said. “In light of this — and our oft-cited willingness to work with the government in good faith — the new lawsuit is unfortunate and, in our view, unnecessary.”

In a wide-ranging interview at UC Berkeley’s Grimes Engineering Center, Milliken, 68, offered his assessment of Trump’s actions to overhaul higher education and declined to say whether UC would pay an amount smaller than the $1.2-billion proposed fine over UCLA’s alleged campus antisemitism.

On federal talks, Milliken said UC would “never compromise” on its independence, governance, values and academic freedom.

James B. Milliken.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

He touted UC’s accomplishments despite the challenges: Four faculty members received Nobel prizes last year — the largest ever number from one institution — and UC secured more patents for inventions last year than any university in the world.

Aside from Trump, UC faces internal pressures: multiple campuses, including UCLA, are in deficit. Labor unions are demanding better job conditions. Members of the UAW 4811 academic workers union have authorized a potential strike.

Milliken spoke in favor of diversity, celebrated immigrants and said he wanted to expand student access to the university. He said UC should lead on artificial intelligence.

Milliken started in August after more than six years as chancellor of the University of Texas system. He previously held top roles at the City University of New York, the University of Nebraska and the University of North Carolina. A news and history buff and former Wall Street lawyer who prefers reading paper over pixels, he often cites his study of “The Gold and the Blue,” a two-volume chronicle of UC’s ascent in the 1950s and struggles during the political turmoil of 1960s written by former UC Berkeley Chancellor turned UC President Clark Kerr.

He said his job is “to do everything we can to demonstrate the value that’s delivered by these amazing places … I don’t want to underestimate the difficulty in the current political environment,” but, he added, universities have been a national boon “over generations.”

Trump and higher education

Adjusting to the possibility of further retrenchment of Washington’s university research funding is among Milliken’s top concerns.

UC relies on $17.5 billion annually in federal monies, including research grants, Pell grants and hospital payments for Medicare and Medicaid. Last year, the government suspended $584 million in UCLA federal medical, science and energy research grants before a UC faculty-led lawsuit restored the money. But roughly $170 million in grants is still on hold systemwide.

Another independent faculty- and union-led federal suit has temporarily halted the $1.2-billion UCLA settlement demand seeking rightward ideological change on campus. But UC remains open to talks to quash federal probes on its own terms.

James B. Milliken.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Milliken was vague on the status of negotiations and whether UC would pay a fine — such as the $200 million Columbia University signed off on last year — to settle federal investigations.

“It would be foolhardy of me to speculate on what ultimately might be proposed to the University of California or what we might find acceptable,” he said.

He declined to specify how he would uphold his promises to protect UC’s independence, governance, values and academic freedom.

“I’m not going to go into detail on those because it gets pretty close to the line of what could be a discussion with the federal government,” Milliken said.

Educational access

Milliken was more verbose on the role of higher education and his big-picture visions for UC.

College “helps make sure that we have an educated citizenry that is prepared to actively participate in a democracy that understands our civic traditions, that understands our political system, that understands how our economic system works,” Milliken said.

“Talent is universal,” he said, “but opportunity often isn’t.” Universities “match this talent with the opportunity.”

But federal moves have threatened to change access to education. The Trump administration has sued California’s public universities and community colleges for allowing undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition. A Trump travel ban on dozens of countries has stalled student and faculty applications from Asian, African and South American nations, while a $100,000 fee for new H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign hires could hurt university and hospital recruitment.

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Milliken pledged to protect immigrants.

“I think we need to take a step back and recognize how fundamental the country’s embrace of people from around the world has been,” Milliken said. “It has been an enormous boon in terms of talent and culture and the kinds of things that make this country what it is today. I know people are worried, they’re anxious. In some cases, they’re afraid … One of the things that our university presidents and chancellors think about every day is keeping these communities safe.”

Lifelong learning

UC — home to several of the most selective and prestigious campuses in the nation — continues to grow in size and popularity. The system set a record enrollment of about 301,000 students in 2025. And 252,000 high school and transfer students have submitted applications for the coming fall, another record high. Yet, vast numbers of academically qualified students do not get in, especially to UCLA and UC Berkeley.

Campuses, including UCLA, have upped professional certificate programs and extension school offerings in recent years. Milliken said universities should further embrace learning programs outside of the undergraduate experience. UCLA is developing a plan called “UCLA for Life” to reimagine the Westwood campus’ role for professionals.

“A four-year baccalaureate experience is not enough to prepare you for 40 years or 50 years of a career. You’re going to need to retool, going to need to re-skill. And I look at universities. Students ought to turn to their alma maters. There’s a relationship that you ought to have for life,” Milliken said.

The university’s future and evolution

Milliken wants UC to take on a lead role in AI.

“The continued adaptation of AI is inevitable, and there are good things and not so good things about that. But UC is the most important, impactful university in the world, and it should not be following others in developing what is the ethical and responsible,” Milliken said. “… We’re in a place where I think leadership, whether we wanted it or not, is a responsibility.”

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More Californians should take stock of UC’s role outside of undergraduate education, he said.

“Two-thirds of our students are undergraduates. It’s a hugely important thing. But so is the research we do. So is the healthcare that we do across the state. So is the work we do at national laboratories which support incredible innovation and national security,” he said.

Milliken said he hoped the cuts to university research were a short-term “aberration.”

New research funding state bond bill

UC has put its weight behind a $23-billion bond proposal that will be on the November ballot to create a California Foundation for Science and Health Research, which would fund university and private institutions in ways similar to the National Institutes of Health.

If voters pass it, Milliken said the measure would “go an enormous way” toward making up for federal losses but that it was “impossible to speculate” on the extent as federal research funding, priorities and procedures fluctuate.

“I hope we never get to the question of whether California can replace federal funding,” he said. “Would I like to see it supplement, ensure that disruptions — even if shorter term — don’t derail the important science that’s going on here and the preparation of the next generation of scientists? Yes, I think that’s an incredibly worthwhile endeavor for the state.”

More from The Times’ interview with Milliken:

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After the fraudulent election of July 28, 2024, Nicolás Maduro announced he would deepen the “Communal State” as a model of popular participation. In his words, it was necessary to “accelerate the construction of popular power” and “transfer more powers to the communes.” The implicit promise: more communes, more consultations, and more participation should equal more solutions.

I put that promise to the test with data from Mérida, a state where public services (especially water and electricity) fail every day. In mid-2024, power outages were almost four hours a day, enough to ruin an entire family.

In May of that year, a professor at the University of the Andes, Israel José Ramirez, died in the building where I lived with my family. That day, the power went out as well. The professor was inside an elevator that became trapped between the first and second floors. When he forced the mechanical lock on the door to try to get out, he found himself facing a void: the elevator car wasn’t at the floor’s level. He tried to jump but couldn’t reach. He fell to the bottom of the elevator shaft, about three stories high. He died on impact.

Electricity in that part of the city usually took four to eight hours to return. That day, it only took half an hour. The desperation of a prolonged power outage led Professor Ramírez to open the elevator doors, and his life ended there. This tragedy was a partial motivation for conducting this research.

Between August and July 2025, I did an internship at the National Institute of Statistics. There, I was able to review the records of 198 projects from the Concrete Action Agendas (ACA in Spanish) in 64 communes in the state of Mérida. The ACAs are the central mechanism of the chavista Communal State for participatory planning: consultations in which the communes identify their priority problems (called “critical nodes”) and vote on the projects they want the State to implement. These 64 communes represented 82% of the 78 registered in the state. The remaining 14 were excluded from the analysis because the officials responsible for transcribing the community assessments into the databases made so many errors that the information was unusable.

The communes understand the workings of the State better than many public officials.

Official reports stated: “Project in progress” or “Project completed.” But something didn’t add up. Local communities kept voting on the same service problems year after year. Someone was lying.

I needed to separate the propaganda from reality. I did something simple: I took each problem that a commune voted on in 2022 and tracked it for four years. If it stopped appearing in subsequent consultations, the government could claim it had been resolved. If it continued to appear year after year, it meant that people had been shouting the same thing for four years. And if it disappeared without explanation (neither resolved nor voted on again), nobody knew what had happened. The State simply ignored it.

Using this detector, I audited 198 projects. The results are summarized in the following graphs:

These charts reveal three dimensions of failure.

First of all, who decides: of the 198 projects, 51.5% (102) were assigned to ministries and the national government for implementation, while another 25.8% (51) fell to the Mérida governorship. The communes diagnose the needs, but Caracas decides whether to open or close the tap of resources. Only 19.2% (38 projects) remained under municipal or communal control.

Second, what happened to them: almost half of the projects were not even considered. Only a quarter (50 projects, 25.3%) were completed after years of consultations. The State received the diagnosis, knew exactly what the people needed, and decided to do nothing. Third, participation wasn’t the problem: 76.8% of the communes (152 projects) participated in all four national consultations, from the first in 2022 to the last in 2025. The core chavista voter base mobilized, filled out forms, and voted. The system didn’t fail due to a lack of participation. The problem isn’t that the communities don’t know how to organize themselves. The problem is that when they do organize, the system ignores them.

Now, what problems are the communes identifying? These are summarized in the following chart:

This chart’s revelation is devastating: two out of every three communes in Mérida (43 out of 64, or 67%) identified water as their priority problem. This isn’t an isolated issue affecting just one or two communes. It’s a systemic crisis impacting the entire state. Four problems (water, roads, housing, and electricity) account for 60% of all project requests in Mérida.

Now, we can see how the ACA projects are distributed in Mérida in the following chart:

Of the 198 projects analyzed, 54 are related to water. More than a quarter (27%) of all projects. The first four categories (water, roads, housing, and electricity) account for 62.63% of all projects. The Pareto principle applied to poverty: 20% of the causes explain 80% of the problems. And how many of those 54 water projects were actually implemented?

Behind these figures are real families, of course. Take the example of the Doña Simona commune in Lagunillas, Mérida, which has a serious drinking water problem. In 2022, they voted for water in the first referendum. In 2023, they voted for water again. In 2024, the same. And in 2025, four years later, they were still voting for water. Four referendums. The same problem. Why? In a conversation with the Mérida’s INE office, where I did a summer internship, they revealed the number that explains everything: $10,000. That’s the budget per project. Always. It doesn’t matter if the community asks for an aqueduct or paint for a school.

With $10,000 you can’t build an aqueduct. It’s barely enough for 200 meters of pipe. You can’t dredge a river. You can’t pave a road. You can’t solve a water crisis that affects 43 of the state’s 64 communes. The communes learned this lesson. If you need water but it costs $50,000, you’re better off asking for paint. At least that’s something they will greenlight.

Four years of voting for water. And in the end, paint for the walls of a run-down public school.

So, what happened in Doña Simona? In the third and fourth consultations, the community changed its vote. They no longer asked for the aqueduct they needed. They voted for something “realistic”: participating in the Bricomiles, the program where soldiers paint school facades and repair sports field roofs. It’s not that the people of Doña Simona are unaware of what’s happening in their community, but rather that they’ve learned to play the system: the State only funds projects that cost less than $10,000. “Citizen participation” then revealed itself not as empowerment, but as an exercise in adjusting real needs to the ridiculously small budget the government is willing to provide. Four years of voting for water. And in the end, paint for the walls of a run-down public school.

However, one thing is certain: the communes of Mérida are always right. When the problem is electricity, they assign it to Corpoelec. When it’s water, to Aguas de Mérida. When it’s housing, to the Ministry of Housing. I reviewed 198 projects and didn’t find a single exception. The communes understand the workings of the State better than many public officials.

This accuracy remained consistent across all 64 communes, throughout the four consultations, and in all 198 projects. Then I thought: if the diagnosis is so precise, if the communes are doing their job, the system should be producing results. Water flowing through pipes. Paved streets. Stable electricity. I measured the relationship between the quality of the diagnosis and the effective resolution of problems. This graph shows the main conclusion of this research, which I call the Great Disconnect.

The dark blue cells confirm what we already saw: the communes diagnose with surgical precision. The system works like clockwork in the diagnostic phase. So I asked the obvious question: if the communities diagnose perfectly, does the State provide solutions?

The answer was once again devastating. There is no correlation. None. The gray cells say it all: a commune correctly identifying its problem predicts absolutely nothing about whether that problem will be solved. Neither the accuracy of the diagnosis, nor the urgency of the problem, nor how many times people have voted for the same thing matters. None of that matters.

The factors that determine whether a project is implemented operate completely outside the formal Commune Action Board (CAB) system. They are external, opaque, probably related to circumstantial political will, erratic budgets, or the constant turnover of officials.

This is the Great Disconnect: a system that diagnoses with surgical precision and does nothing.

My data shows what that means: more people shouting in empty rooms. The communes are just an authoritarian excuse to overrepresent their political power.

The success or failure of a project doesn’t depend on whether the commune identified its need, whether the responsible institution was selected correctly, how urgent the problem is, or how many times people have voted for the same thing. What determines whether a project is implemented operates entirely outside the formal CAB system. These are external, opaque factors, probably related to short-term political will, erratic budgets, or the constant turnover of officials. The communities do their part. The Venezuelan State does not.

The problem with the Communal State in Mérida isn’t one of scale, it’s structural. There’s no shortage of communes: 64 are already functioning. There’s no lack of participation: 76.8% of the communes participated in the four consultations. The system works exactly as it was designed, mobilizing the chavista base to diagnose problems, making them believe they are participating, and then systematically ignoring their demands. It’s not a failure. It’s the design.

My data shows what that means: more people shouting in empty rooms. The communes are just an authoritarian excuse to overrepresent their political power. The reality is that the wife of Professor Israel Ramírez found him dead in the elevator shaft because there was no electricity in the building that day. In some neighborhoods of Mérida, people probably voted for electricity in 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. And in 2026, if this policy continues, they will continue to vote for it.

Kathmandu, Nepal – Facing thousands of raucous supporters, 35-year-old Balendra Shah lifted his signature black rectangular sunglasses, asked his audience to look him in the eye, and said: “I love you.”

It is a sentiment that millions of young Nepalis appear to reciprocate.

Balen – as he is popularly known – was a nobody until 2013, when he almost overnight became a rap sensation. Nearly a decade later, in May 2022, he stunned Nepal’s deeply entrenched mainstream political parties by winning the post of mayor of Kathmandu, the country’s capital, while contesting as an independent.

When the Himalayan nation of 30 million people erupted in popular protests against the government of then-Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli in September 2025, Balen emerged as a high-profile backer of the protesters. He was the first choice of many Gen Z activists to take over as interim leader after Oli was forced to resign. But he instead supported former Supreme Court Chief Justice Sushila Karki for the post. It is now that this was a tactical move.

As Nepal heads to its first election since the protests last year, and Karki’s brief term ends, Balen is positioning himself as the future prime minister the country needs. And true to style, he is doing it with a bang: He is contesting the parliamentary elections from Jhapa-5, a seat about 300km (186 miles) southeast of Kathmandu, against Oli, the man protesters deposed just five months ago.

On the surface, the odds appear stacked against him. The region is a stronghold of Oli and the Communist Party of Nepal – Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML), which the former prime minister heads. Balen is contesting as a candidate of the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), a centrist party formed less than four years ago, which won 10 percent of the national vote in the last elections in 2022.

Balen’s volatile public communication – he has abused mainstream parties, India, China and the United States, and threatened to burn down symbols of power in Nepal – has sparked criticism and questions over whether he is ready for high office.

But Balen defied the pundits when he won the Kathmandu mayoralty. And observers and analysts say that for many Nepalis, he represents a breath of fresh air in a country where more than 40 percent of the population is under the age of 35, but where the leadership of all major parties is in its 70s.

“Young Nepalis see him as a decisive actor, who is not beholden to traditional political or business interests,” Pranaya Rana, a journalist who writes for the Kalam Weekly newsletter, told Al Jazeera. “Many admire his macho public persona and his willingness to take on entrenched political patronage networks.”

The craze

If young Nepal burned with anger in September, when protesters clashed with security forces and attacked senior politicians after a crackdown by authorities under Oli, Balen was still seething with rage two months later.

In a midnight post on Facebook in November, he lashed out: “F*** America, F*** India, F*** China, F*** UML, F*** Congress, F*** RSP, F*** RPP, F*** Maobaadi. You Guys all Combined can do nothing”, venting against the popular political parties and even nations that have close ties to Nepal. Being the Kathmandu mayor at the time, he deleted the post less than half an hour later.

Then in January, he quit as mayor and joined the RSP, one of the parties he cursed in the Facebook post. More recently, after Oli called on Facebook for a public debate among prime ministerial candidates of major parties, Balen rejected the suggestion and asked the ex-prime minister to take responsibility for the dozens of civilians killed during the Gen Z protests in September. He asked Oli to acknowledge that he was a “terrorist”.

Over the top? Not to many Nepalis.

The rapper-turned-politician’s confrontational style and rhetoric appear to have only endeared him to large sections of the youth. His beard and dandy, all-black clothing style – he occasionally wears the traditional Newari dress of the ethnic inhabitants of the Kathmandu valley – coupled with his trademark dark glasses, have become fashion symbols.

Kathmandu shops once ran out of the kind of black rectangular glasses he wears. Many online stores, including Daraz, the most popular seller in Nepal, still carry multiple choices of these shades, calling them “Balen Shah glasses”.

Unlike traditional politicians, Balen mainly stays away from mainstream media. Instead, he communicates with the wider public through podcasts, television shows where he is a judge, or through his favourite platform: social media. His 3.5 million followers on Facebook, 1 million on Instagram, 400,000 on X and nearly 1 million on YouTube give him an online audience unmatched in Nepal.

This is valuable capital with a generation constantly on their phones.

Yet Balen first made waves not as a politician, but as an upstart musician who shook Nepal.

Big cars, bigger songs

The youngest of four siblings, Balen was born in 1990 in Kathmandu. Balen’s father, Ram Narayan Shah – who passed away in December – was a government practitioner of ayurveda, the ancient Hindu healing system.

In an interview with Al Jazeera in September – three months before his death – Shah recalled Balen as a “bright and simple” child. The father’s work took him away from home frequently, but one clear memory from Balen’s childhood stuck out for Shah: “He wrote poems. I remember that, because I also wrote poems.”

Balen graduated with a civil engineering degree from Himalayan Whitehouse International College in Kathmandu and received a postgraduate degree in structural engineering from Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU) in Karnataka, India.

Then, in 2013, he engineered his first major career transition. The setting was a popular rap battle in Nepal, called Raw Barz, in which two contestants face-off live against each other. One of the organisers of the competition, who requested anonymity, told Al Jazeera that Yama Buddha, a popular rapper who has since passed away, recommended Balen to him.

Balen won the rap battle, gaining instant popularity. “More than a rapper, he was a poet. He was very good lyrically, and talked about suppressed [people],” the contest organiser recalled.

In 2021, Shah announced his candidature for the mayoral election and revealed that he had been plotting the run for at least two years. He swept the election, winning 61,767 votes, defeating candidates from the major political parties, the Nepali Congress and Communist Party of Nepal (UML), who received 38,341 and 38,117 votes, respectively.

As mayor, according to his aide and press coordinator, Surendra Bajgain, Shah would arrive at his office at the Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) at about 10am. He would first meet all the department heads, go through files, “seek clarity” on questions he had, and then sign files, Bajgain told Al Jazeera.

He would wear his trademark black jacket and pants, and black shades, every day to the office. He would remove his glasses inside the office, Bajgain said. “But you’ll see him in those glasses when taking pictures or in public,” he added.

As a mayor, he lived in government-provided accommodation in the heart of Kathmandu with his wife and an infant daughter. A gym regular, he preferred lunch at home, but would sip on endless cups of tea and coffee in the office.

To get away from the public gaze, Balen “loves to go on long rides outside the valley, because here, people surround him very often in public,” Bajgain said.

His passion for cars also landed him in controversy, widely circulated online, when he was seen driving an expensive Land Rover Defender worth 40 million Nepali rupees ($275,0000) in January, while campaigning in Jhapa 5, his electoral constituency, for the March 5 election.

Given his strong anticorruption image, the sight of him in a high-end luxury vehicle drew heightened scrutiny. Critics accused him of a lack of transparency over the vehicle’s ownership and use, while some pointed out that, despite promoting modesty in public office, he rarely used public transport as the mayor. The car, it turned out, had been given to him by a wealthy businessman for use during his campaign.

Balen is now also pursuing a PhD in traditional infrastructure at Kathmandu University. But he is far from a reluctant public figure, nor is he an ivory-tower researcher.

Balen’s songs, which mock political parties, criticise corruption and talk of the sacrifices of everyday Nepalis, have been the soundtrack to the efforts by Nepal’s Gen Z to reshape the country’s politics in recent months.

One song, Nepal Haseko (Nepal Smiling), became an anthem during last year’s protests, and already has more than 10 million views on YouTube. In the song, children sing in the chorus: “I want to see Nepal smiling; I want to see Nepalis living happily.”

Another song, Balidan (Sacrifice) has 14 million views on YouTube. It talks about impunity and corruption. On the Discord server “Youth Against Corruption”, where Gen Z protesters picked the country’s interim leader after Oli’s resignation in September, the name “Balen” was mentioned 16,328 times — far more than anyone else’s.

But Balen also has his critics.

‘Set on fire’

In 2023, when Balen was mayor, his wife was in his official vehicle when a traffic policeman stopped it. Balen was not in the car. The government-plated vehicle was being used on a public holiday, which gives traffic personnel the right to ask the purpose of the vehicle use and whether the driver has a permit for it.

On social media, Balen blew up about the incident: “If any of our KMC vehicles are stopped by the government from tomorrow, I will set the Singha Durbar on fire. Remember, you thief government”. Singha Durbar houses many administrative offices along with the Prime Minister’s Office.

The Oli government initially wanted to charge him for the incendiary statement, but backed off – Balen’s comment on social media had drawn support. It was a sign of things to come. During the Gen Z uprising in September, Singha Durbar was severely damaged after being set on fire.

In another instance, in 2023, after India installed a mural of “Akhand Bharat” (a Greater India) – encompassing many of its neighbours – Shah hung a “Greater Nepal” map in his office, including territories that once belonged to Nepal but now lie within India’s borders.

The move instantly escalated into a diplomatic hurdle. Shah was accused of going beyond his mandate as a municipal leader and stoking nationalist sentiment for political gains. His supporters, however, hailed his move as an assertive counter to foreign dominance.

In 2023, Balen also banned the screening of Indian films in Kathmandu, alleging that an Indian movie had suggested that Sita, one of Hinduism’s most revered goddesses, was born in India. In fact, she was born in present-day Nepal according to Hindu scriptures.

As Kathmandu mayor, Balen bulldozed illegal structures and ordered rubbish to be dumped outside government offices. He temporarily halted waste collection from Singha Durbar. The move was a riposte to what he argued was the central government’s failure to coordinate with the city to address Kathmandu’s chronic waste management crisis.

Yet to many belonging to the generation most hungry for change in Nepal, Balen has an allure no one else appears to have.

‘Shake up the status quo’

Aayal Sah, a 20-year-old first-time voter, is a resident of Janakpur – where Sita, the Hindu Goddess, is believed to have been born. He took three of his friends to see Balen’s first public appearance after joining the RSP. “I cannot directly vote for Balen as he is not contesting from our area, but I’ll surely vote for his party,” he told Al Jazeera.

Rana, the journalist at Kalam Weekly, said that for many, Balen “embodies the outsider spirit that many young Nepalis are looking for to shake up the status quo”.

Yet, Rana acknowledged, questions over Balen’s ability to lead Nepal linger as the country heads to elections. “A primary concern for most critics is Balen’s immaturity and his refusal to engage with the public. During his time as mayor, he gave no interviews to local media and did not answer any questions,” Rana told Al Jazeera.

After Oli quit office, when Gen Z protesters voted most for Balen to take over as interim leader on Discord, the then-mayor was not available on the phone when the youth movement’s leaders tried to reach him to see if he would take charge of the nation.

That, say analysts, was yet another example of Balen’s communication style: It is always one way, at his time and place of choosing.

But for many young Nepalis like Sah, the Janakpur resident, none of these chinks in Balen’s public life matter. “It’s the trust he has gained among the young people,” Sah said.

“He is the only one who can take the country forward.”

Despite its reputation as a leader of resistance, California saw more pro-Trump crowds than any other state during the president’s term in office.

That’s according to the Crowd Counting Consortium, a project from the University of Connecticut and Harvard University that documents political gatherings of all kinds. By combing news reports and social media, the group has cataloged some 4,500 pro-Trump gatherings nationwide since he took office in 2017. Of those, 417 events were in California. Florida was a distant second, with 253 events.

California is one of bluest states, but it’s also the most populous — 17.5 million people voted in the 2020 election. Though Joe Biden won the election here by a 2-1 margin, Trump claimed around 6 million votes, a higher raw total than in any other state.

After adjusting for size, California doesn’t look so exceptional in terms of Trump gatherings: It ranks 20th out of the 50 states and Washington, D.C., in protests per Trump voter. Washington was at the top, with 108 pro-Trump events in the past four years, despite having fewer than 19,000 people voting for the president.

The protests in California haven’t been limited to the red parts of the state. The top three counties are in Southern California: Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange counties combined had 174 events, about 40% of the pro-Trump protests in the state. Of the top 10 counties, the only one that went to Trump in the election was Kern, home of Bakersfield and a center of the oil and gas industry.

The researchers study the crowds and classify the political causes that motivate people to show up for each gathering. Many events provided only general support for the president, protesting officials who spoke against him or rallying in support of his campaign promises. Some protests were more specific, such as events opposing public health regulations related to the pandemic, supporting policing efforts or opposing the Black Lives Matter movement.

The data show a spike in pro-Trump protests after the 2020 election. After Biden was named the winner, there were a wave of protests supporting Trump’s disproved claims that the election had been stolen. On Jan. 6, the day the U.S. Capitol was raided, there were 15 protests of the election results in California, more than in any other state.

The number of gatherings in support of the president have been dwarfed by those opposing him. Over the last four years, there were nearly 38,000 anti-Trump events tracked by the consortium, eight times more than the number of pro-Trump gatherings. Again, California led the nation, hosting more anti-Trump rallies than any other state.

March 1 (UPI) — Three members of the U.S. military were killed and five were seriously wounded in the Iranian response to U.S. and Israeli strikes the day before.

President Donald Trump said in a video statement Sunday that the nation grieves “for the true American patriots who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation,” while repeating the warning he made Saturday in announcing the strikes that more U.S. troops may die.

“Sadly, there will likely be more before it ends,” he said. “Likely be more.”

The service members killed were part of an Army sustainment unit based in Kuwait, which is one of several American bases in the Middle East that Iran has targeted amid its response to Operation Epic Fury, which started early Saturday morning, NBC News and The New York Times reported.

“America will avenge their deaths and deliver the most punishing blow to the terrorists who have waged war against, basically, civilization,” Trump said.

U.S. Central Command announced in a post on X on Sunday morning that the troops had been killed in action and wounded as the military continued to hit targets, while also receiving counterattacks from Iran.

Several other troops also “sustained minor shrapnel injuries and concussions — and are in the process of being returned to duty,” CENTCOM said in the post. “Major combat operations continue and our response effort is ongoing.”

“The situation is fluid,” the post noted, adding that the names of the deceased troops would be withheld until 24 hours after their next of kin have been notified.

Iran has also targeted other countries nearby, including Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

CENTCOM on Saturday refuted Iranian claims that at least 50 U.S. service members had been killed, as well as other claims that a U.S. Navy ship had been struck by missiles and that severe damage was seen at “multiple U.S. bases.”

Through the first day-and-a-half of Operation Epic Fury, the United States and Israel have said that they hit dozens of military and government sites throughout Iran.

CENTCOM has specifically announced the sinking of Iranian naval vessels, sending B-2 stealth bombers to hit Iran’s ballistic missile facilities and various communication, air defense and command and control centers.

Trump early Saturday announced that Iranian spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was dead — along with other high-ranking leaders of Iran — in U.S. and Israeli airstrikes.

U.S. intelligence and military assets had been tracking Khamenei for months and opted for a rare daylight strike on the meeting because of the opportunity to hit multiple targets, including Defense Minister Gen. Aziz Nasirzadeh, Revolutionary Guard Corps head Gen. Mohammad Pakpour and Khamenei’s defense adviser, Ali Shamkhani.

WASHINGTON — PresidentTrump’s older sister, a former federal judge, is heard sharply criticizing her brother in a series of recordings released Saturday, at one point saying of the president, “He has no principles.”

Maryanne Trump Barry was secretly recorded by her niece, Mary Trump, who recently released a book denouncing the president, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” Mary Trump said Saturday she made the recordings in 2018 and 2019.

In one recording, Barry, 83, says she had heard a 2018 interview with her brother on Fox News in which he suggested that he would put her on the border to oversee cases of immigrant children separated from their parents.

“His base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this,” Barry says.

At another point she says: “His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God.” She adds: “I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy — .”

Barry can also be heard saying that she guesses that her brother has never read her opinions on immigration cases.

“What has he read?” Mary Trump asks her aunt.

Barry responds: “No. He doesn’t read.”

The recordings were first reported by the Washington Post. The Associated Press then obtained the recordings.

The recordings came to light just a day after the late Robert Trump, brother to Maryanne and the president, was memorialized in a service at the White House. Later, the president was dismissive of the recordings.

“Every day it’s something else, who cares. I miss my brother, and I’ll continue to work hard for the American people,” Trump said in a statement. “Not everyone agrees, but the results are obvious. Our country will soon be stronger than ever before.”

In the weeks since the release of Mary Trump’s tell-all book about her uncle, she has been questioned about the source of some of its information. Nowhere in the book does she say that she recorded conversations with her aunt. On Saturday, Mary Trump revealed that she had covertly taped 15 hours of face-to-face conversations with Barry.

“Mary realized members of her family had lied in prior depositions,” said Chris Bastardi, a spokesman for Mary Trump. He added: “Anticipating litigation, she felt it prudent to tape conversations in order to protect herself.”

The president has frequently spoken highly of his sister; the recordings are the first time a family member, outside of Mary Trump, has been critical of him.

The recordings appear to illuminate tension between the president and his sister. At one point Barry says to her niece: “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”

Mary Trump’s book was filled with attacks on her uncle, including the assertion — he denied it — that he paid someone to take the SATs for him as he sought to transfer into the University of Pennsylvania.

In one recording, Barry says that a Joe Shapiro took the test for Trump. The president was friends with a person at Penn named Joe Shapiro, who is deceased. Shapiro’s widow and sister told have said he never took a test for anybody.

Bastardi said of Mary Trump: “She never expected to learn much of what she heard, including the president’s sister, federal Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, state that Donald Trump had paid someone to take an SAT exam for him.”

WASHINGTON — President Trump, his Treasury secretary and his choice to lead the Federal Reserve believe they can coax the U.S. economy back to a boom reminiscent of the 1990s.

They are putting their faith in artificial intelligence to duplicate what happened when another technology arrived during the Clinton era: the internet. Back then, the American economy surged as businesses became more productive, unemployment tumbled and inflation remained in check.

Trump expresses confidence that his nominee to become Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, can unleash an economic bonanza by jettisoning what the president sees as the central bank’s hidebound reluctance to slash interest rates.

Many economists are skeptical.

The world looks a lot different today than it did when the Spice Girls ruled radio and “Titanic’’ dominated the box office. And the story the Trump team is telling — that a visionary Fed chair, Alan Greenspan, fueled the 1990s boom by keeping interest rates low — is incomplete at best.

“The administration is offering a rather distorted version of what actually happened in the 1990s,’’ economist Dario Perkins of TS Lombard said in a commentary.

Nonetheless, the Trump administration believes history can repeat itself. All that’s been missing, Trump says, is a Fed chair with Greenspan’s foresightedness.

AI’s influence over interest rates

Trump has repeatedly attacked current Fed chief Jerome H. Powell, whose term as chair ends in May, for his caution in lowering rates while inflation hovers above the central bank’s 2% target. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on social media in January that the president sought to replace Powell with someone with “an open, Greenspan-like mind.”

“Our nation can see productivity boom like we did in the ’90s when we are not encumbered by a Federal Reserve which throws the brakes on,’’ Bessent wrote.

On Jan. 30, Trump said he was picking Warsh.

In speeches and writings, Warsh has argued that AI-driven improvements in productivity could justify lower interest rates.

These views align with Trump’s desires for Fed rate cuts but mark a break with Warsh’s past as an inflation hawk.

In the aftermath of the 2007-09 Great Recession, Warsh — then a Fed governor — objected to some of the central bank’s efforts to help the struggling economy by pushing down rates even though unemployment exceeded 9%. He warned then, wrongly, that inflation would soon accelerate.

At issue now are gains in productivity and the possibility that AI will make them bigger — much bigger.

To economists, productivity improvements are almost magical. When companies roll out new machines or technology, their workers can become more efficient and produce more stuff per hour. That enables firms to earn more and to raise employees’ pay without raising prices. In short: Surging productivity can drive economic growth without spurring inflation.

Greenspan and the internet

In the mid-1990s, Greenspan was contending with a strange set of economic circumstances: Wages were rising but inflation wasn’t heating up.

Big productivity gains might have explained things, but government data showed no sign of them. Other Fed policymakers worried that surging wages and tame inflation couldn’t coexist and that higher prices were coming. They wanted to raise interest rates.

But Greenspan suspected that the official productivity numbers were missing something. For one thing, they didn’t jibe with the amazing tales of efficiency improvements the Fed was hearing from companies investing in computers and turning to the internet.

So he ordered his lieutenants to dig through decades of productivity numbers. The official statistics they assembled told an implausible story: Services firms — including retailers and legal practices — had supposedly seen productivity fall over the years, despite intense competitive pressure and massive investments in technology.

Greenspan didn’t believe it. He persuaded his Fed colleagues that the government’s numbers were wrong and were understating productivity. They agreed in September 1996 to hold off on raising rates.

The economy took flight.

Tardily, productivity advances began to show up in the official data. Overall, American economic growth surpassed 4% every year from 1997 through 2000, something it would do again only once in the next quarter century. The unemployment rate plunged to 3.8% in April 2000, the lowest in three decades. Inflation stayed in its cage, coming in below 2% — later the Fed’s official target — for 17 straight months in 1997-99.

History repeats itself … maybe?

American productivity looked strong in the second and third quarters of 2025, and some economists attribute the improvements to the early adoption of AI; they see bigger gains and stronger economic growth ahead.

Others aren’t so sure.

Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at consulting firm RSM, wrote that the 2025 productivity improvements “are not because of artificial intelligence’’ but reflect investments in automation that companies made when they couldn’t find enough workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Those investments are starting to pay off,’’ Brusuelas wrote.

Economist Martin Baily, senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution, believes it will take time for AI to have a big effect on the way companies do business and on the nation’s productivity.

“Companies don’t change that fast,” said Baily, chair of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors during the boom era. “It’s expensive to change. It’s risky to change. The managers don’t necessarily understand the new technology that well. So they have to learn how to use it. They have to train their staff. All that stuff takes a long time.’’

A productivity boom can raise the economy’s speed limit — how fast it can grow without pushing prices higher. But it might not justify lower interest rates, Fed Gov. Michael Barr said in a speech last month.

Businesses will borrow to invest in AI, putting upward pressure on interest rates. Likewise, American workers and their families probably would save less and borrow more in anticipation of higher wages, the payoff for being more productive; that would put still more pressure on rates to rise.

Bottom line, Barr said: “The AI boom is unlikely to be a reason for lowering policy rates.’’

Even Greenspan’s Fed eventually came to the same conclusion, reversing course and starting to raise its benchmark rate in mid-1999, taking it from 4.75% to 6.5% in less than a year. (The rate Trump complains about now is around 3.6%.)

“Warsh and Bessent talk only about the dovish 1995/96 version of Greenspan; they overlook the hawkish 1999/2000 variant,’’ Perkins wrote.

Then and now

Many of Warsh’s potential future colleagues on the Fed’s interest-rate setting committee see the late-1990s experience differently than he does, setting up what could be a clash at the central bank if the Senate confirms Warsh as chair.

Austan Goolsbee, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said last week that “the analogy to the late ‘90s is a little harder for me to understand.” Greenspan’s insight was that productivity gains meant the Fed could hold off on raising rates, not that it should slash them, Goolsbee noted.

“It wasn’t, ‘Should we cut rates because productivity growth is higher?’” he said.

The economic backdrop that awaits Warsh is also far less friendly than the one Greenspan enjoyed.

Greenspan was avoiding rate hikes at a time when the usually profligate U.S. government was running rare budget surpluses and didn’t need to borrow so desperately. Now, after a series of spending hikes and tax cuts, deficits are piling up year after year, and the Congressional Budget Office expects federal debt to hit a historic high of 120% of America’s gross domestic product by 2035.

Nor was productivity the only thing controlling inflation in the 1990s. Countries were lowering tariffs and dismantling trade barriers. Immigration was surging.

Now, due largely to Trump’s policies, notably his sweeping taxes on imports and his crackdown on immigration, the world is much different. “Trade barriers are going up,’’ Perkins wrote. “Globalization has given way to de-globalization.’’

“That benign era is clearly behind us,’’ said Michael Pearce, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics.

Wiseman writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this report.

Early in Michael McIndoe’s shift on Jan. 2, 2025, his crew got their marching orders: Pick up hoses left overnight at the scene of the Lachman fire.

McIndoe, a captain at Fire Station 69 in Pacific Palisades, didn’t think the plan was a good idea, he said in sworn testimony obtained by The Times. He had read the National Weather Service’s forecast for the day — temperatures were expected to be warmer — and handling any lingering hot spots would be easier with hoses in place.

While he was still at the station, he said, he relayed his concerns by phone to Battalion Chief Mario Garcia, who was in charge of the operation.

Garcia “said something along the lines of, ‘OK. Let me go check it out, and then I’ll get back to you,’ ” McIndoe testified last month.

Despite the warning, Garcia’s orders never changed, and McIndoe spent a couple hours or so that morning rolling up hose lines.

At one point, McIndoe said, he came across a smoldering ash pit. He retrieved a backpack with water from his engine, sprayed into the ground with a couple gallons of water and dug up the dirt with his hand tool until he was satisfied it was cool.

Days later, amid high winds, embers from the Lachman fire ignited into the Palisades fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes.

McIndoe was one of a dozen Los Angeles firefighters deposed in January in a lawsuit filed by Palisades fire victims against the city and the state. Transcripts and videos of the testimony were released Thursday and Friday, backing up earlier reporting by The Times that crews were ordered to pack up their hoses despite signs that the Lachman fire was not completely out.

One firefighter, Scott Pike, testified that he informed a captain of hot spots and ash pits in the area but that he never received orders to take care of the hazards.

Garcia testified that no one informed him of any concerns about picking up the hoses and that he believed the decision was made before his shift.

The testimony raises questions about why LAFD officials did not address concerns expressed to them about weather conditions and potentially dangerous hot spots that could flare up into another fire. With Pike and McIndoe saying they were following directions from above, and Garcia and the battalion chief from the prior shift appearing to pass the buck to others, it is unclear who made the decision to leave the Lachman fire.

LAFD spokesperson Stephanie Bishop declined to answer the question of who decided to pull the hoses, citing an ongoing investigation. She also would not answer whether officials had identified the captain whom Pike spoke with or determined what the captain did with his concerns.

Pike said he did not know the captain’s name but believed the captain was from Engine 69.

McIndoe testified that he was the captain on Engine 69 that day. In an email Saturday, McIndoe said he was not authorized to speak with the media but wanted to correct the record: “I did not speak to, nor do I recall seeing, Firefighter Pike the day that we picked up hose at the Lachman fire.”

Garcia did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Pike did not respond to a request for comment.

That day, McIndoe testified, he saw Garcia on the hill picking up hoses and brought up their earlier conversation.

“I just went up to him, and I said, ‘Hey, I hope you don’t think I’m just trying to get out of work,’ ” McIndoe said. “And he said, no, that’s — that’s fine. Something along those lines, and that that’s all I can really recall.”

He said he was trying to clarify with Garcia that he believed “that the hose should stay up a little bit longer.”

Garcia testified that when he got to the burn scar, no one raised any concerns about the hose pickup, nor did he see any need to leave the equipment at the site.

He said he thought the decision to pick up the hoses was made before his shift — though he was “not 100 percent sure” — and that it was a “collaborative decision, based off all the information that was received.”

By the time he got up to the burn area, Garcia testified, half the hose had already been picked up. He walked the perimeter to ensure there was a line cut around it and that it was cold, and did not see any smoke or any sign that the fire was not fully extinguished.

“Came across several members,” he said. “Nobody mentioned anything about there being any concerns of any sort.”

Battalion Chief Martin Mullen, who was on duty before Garcia, testified that he walked the perimeter four times and left the hose lines in place overnight as a precaution, keeping two assistant chiefs, Vinny Alvarado and Joseph Everett, in the loop. Mullen said they informed another top chief, Phillip Fligiel.

The hoses could be hooked up again quickly “if something were to happen,” Mullen testified.

Mullen testified that he also notified Garcia: “I told him I left him hose lines in place overnight, you need to walk that and make sure there’s nothing going on up there.”

Mullen, who said he was not involved in deciding when to pick up the hoses, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In an email Sunday, Everett said: “I was not present or assigned to that incident. As a result I made no command decisions nor do I have information as to anyones testimony.”

Text messages obtained by The Times through a public records request in December show that Fligiel, Alvarado and Everett were making plans to remove the equipment on Jan. 1. The Lachman fire, which federal prosecutors believe was deliberately set, flared up shortly after midnight on Jan. 1, 2025. A few hours later, at 4:46 a.m., the LAFD announced that it was fully contained at eight acres.

“I imagine it might take all day to get that hose off the hill,” Fligiel said in a group chat early the morning of Jan. 1. “Make sure that plan is coordinated.”

At 1:35 p.m. on Jan. 2, Garcia texted Fligiel and Everett: “All hose and equipment has been picked up.”

Earlier that day, Pike was making troubling observations that led him to think that the entire area needed to be re-investigated. He saw about five smoky areas and ash pits, including one he remembered vividly that was too hot to touch with his gloved hand.

“So I just kicked it with my boot to kind of expose it, and there was, like red hot, like, coals,” he testified. “And I even heard crackling.”

Pike, a 23-year LAFD veteran based at a station in Sunland, was working an overtime shift at Fire Station 23, the LAFD’s second outpost in the Palisades, that day. He relayed his observations to a captain and two firefighters.

“That’s how I approached him, is like, ‘Hey, Cap … We have hot spots in general. We have some ash pits,’ ” Pike testified about his conversation with the captain. “That’s an alert to double-check the whole area and maybe we need to switch our tactics.”

Pike testified that it was not his job “to overstep and tell him what to do. He earned that rank.”

The captain, he said, suggested possibly bringing hand tools or a backpack filled with water up the hill to extinguish any hot spots. Pike went back to picking up the hose while awaiting new orders, which never came.

Pike testified that he felt his colleagues — the captain and two firefighters — blew him off.

“It kind of sits heavy with me that nobody listened to me,” he said.

In his deposition, McIndoe did not recall details about other conversations he had that day.

He was asked by a plaintiffs’ attorney: “Any dialogue with anyone else that you haven’t told me about concerning any of the work that was being done up there at the Lachman fire site, in terms of checking for smokers? Making sure that you got all the hose? Anything like that?”

McIndoe responded: “I don’t recall specific conversations. I think I may have had a conversation with one or two of the other captains that were on scene before we left.”

McIndoe testified that he told that captain — whom he said was from Fire Station 37 — that he thought it would be a good idea to leave the hose out because the warm weather could preheat the ground and bring up smokers, “and it would be nice to have the hose lines in place to address those.”

The Times reported in October that crews were ordered to leave the Lachman fire, even though the ground was still smoldering and rocks were hot to the touch.

In a text message reviewed by The Times, a firefighter who was at the scene wrote that Garcia had been told it was a “bad idea” to leave because of the visible signs of smoking terrain, which crews feared could start a new fire if left unprotected.

“And the rest is history,” the firefighter wrote.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — To receive Medicaid health coverage, some adults will soon have to show they are working, volunteering or taking classes. But to gather that proof, many states first will have to spend millions of dollars improving their computer systems.

Across the nation, states face an immense task and high costs to prepare for the Jan. 1 kickoff of new Medicaid eligibility mandates affecting millions of lower-income adults in the government-funded healthcare program.

The first half of a $200-million federal allotment has already begun flowing to states to help implement the new requirements. But the tab for the needed technology improvements and additional staff is likely to exceed $1 billion, according to an Associated Press analysis of budget projections in more than 25 states. That extra cost will be borne by a mixture of federal and state tax dollars.

The task is not as simple as pushing through a software update on your smartphone or personal computer. That’s because each state has its own system for managing Medicaid, often requiring experts to make customized changes.

“Our current eligibility systems are pretty old, and the ability to change them is very, very difficult,” said Toi Wilde, chief information officer for the Missouri Department of Social Services.

As a consequence of states’ new financial burden, some eligible people may lose their healthcare coverage, officials warn.

New requirements affect millions, but not all

The Republican tax and spending law signed last year by President Trump is financed, in part, by sweeping Medicaid changes intended to cut government spending. Two of the most prominent will apply in four-fifths of the states, affecting Medicaid enrollees ages 19 through 64, without young children, whose incomes are above the typical eligibility cutoff.

Those Medicaid participants will have to work or do community service at least 80 hours a month, or enroll at least half-time as a student. They also will face eligibility reviews every six months, instead of annually, meaning they could lose coverage more quickly when their circumstances change.

The two provisions together are projected to save the federal government $388 billion over the next decade, resulting in 6 million fewer people with health insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

But states first must update their online portals used by Medicaid participants, their aging computer systems used by state workers and their methods of verifying information through various databases.

Most will have to turn to private contractors to meet the time crunch. At least 10 companies have agreed to offer discounted services, according to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Making those technology upgrades “is going to be a lift. It’s not something straightforward. It’s not easy,” said Jason Reilly, a partner at Guidehouse, a firm that is advising several states on the Medicaid requirements.

Most states don’t currently collect employment or education information about Medicaid participants. So states are looking to tap into outside sources to verify job and school data. But there’s no database of community volunteers.

And states are still waiting on federal rules — not due until June — to define some of the exceptions to the work requirements, such as how to determine who qualifies as “medically frail.”

States face extra pressure to get it right because the federal government will start penalizing states with too many Medicaid payment errors in October 2029.

Congress guaranteed all states a share of the $200 million allotted for Medicaid work and eligibility changes. But states must apply for additional federal money. The federal government covers up to 90% of states’ costs to develop systems for determining Medicaid eligibility, 75% of costs to maintain those systems and half of most other administrative costs.

Missouri won early approval for the 90% federal funding rate. State lawmakers now are fast-tracking a $32-million appropriation needed to solicit bids for vendors to start upgrading technology platforms and improving a chatbot for Medicaid participants. Over the next year, the state’s social services agency expects to need about 120 additional workers — at a cost of $12.5 million — to handle the extra administrative workload.

Other states also project large costs. Maryland expects to spend over $32 million in federal and state funds to implement the Medicaid changes, Kentucky more than $46 million, and Colorado over $51 million. Arizona estimates it could cost $65 million — and require 150 additional staffers — to implement the new federal requirements.

Some states surveyed by the AP reported even higher expected costs, though they didn’t always provide a breakdown for how much is due to new Medicaid mandates and how much pertains to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program changes also contained in Trump’s massive law.

Several states, including Arkansas, said they are still working on cost estimates for the Medicaid changes. Arkansas instituted a Medicaid work requirement in 2018-19, and thousands of people were dropped from the rolls before a federal court ended it. Many of the technology changes required by the new federal mandates could be covered under an existing vendor contract and have “a minimal financial impact on our Medicaid budget,” the Arkansas Department of Human Services said in an email.

Nebraska has said it plans to launch Medicaid work requirements in May, seven months ahead of the federal deadline. But the state has not detailed any associated costs and did not respond to inquiries from the AP.

Georgia’s work requirement prompts concerns

Georgia is currently the only state requiring some Medicaid recipients to work, after receiving special federal approval several years ago to expand coverage to some adults not otherwise eligible.

The Georgia Pathways to Coverage program racked up more than $54 million of administrative costs from 2021 through the first part of 2025 — twice the amount of medical assistance paid out over that same period, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Almost all of those costs came from technology changes to its eligibility and enrollment system.

Some Medicaid analysts point to Georgia’s costs and Arkansas’ enrollment losses as reasons for caution as work requirements roll out in other states.

“A huge amount of funding is going to go to vendors to construct these complicated red-tape systems that prevent people who need it from getting healthcare,” said Joan Alker, executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University.

“In my view, that is a big, big risk.”

Lieb writes for the Associated Press.

According to President Trump, the United States attacked Iran because the Iranian regime posed “imminent threats” to the U.S. and its allies, including through its use of terrorist proxies and continued pursuit of nuclear weapons.

“Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas and our allies throughout the world,” he said in a recorded statement Saturday.

According to leading Democrats in Congress, Trump’s justification is questionable, especially given his claims of having “completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities in separate U.S. bombings last year.

“Everything I have heard from the administration before and after these strikes on Iran confirms this is a war of choice with no strategic endgame,” said Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and part of a small group of congressional leaders — the Gang of Eight — who were briefed on the operation by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

That divide is bound to remain an issue politically heading into this year’s midterm elections, and could be a liability for Republicans — especially considering that some in the “America First” wing of the MAGA base were raising their own objections, citing Trump’s 2024 campaign pledges to extricate the U.S. from foreign wars, not start new ones.

The debate echoed a similar if less immediate one around President George W. Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, also based on claims that “weapons of mass destruction” posed an immediate threat. Those claims were later disproved by multiple findings that Iraq had no such arsenal, fueling recriminations from both political parties for years.

The latest divide also intensified unease over Congress ceding its wartime powers to the White House, which for years has assumed sweeping authority to attack foreign adversaries without direct congressional input in the name of addressing terrorism or preventing immediate harm to the nation or its troops.

Even prior to the weekend bombings, Democrats including Sen. Adam Schiff of California were pushing Congress to pass a resolution barring the Trump administration from attacking Iran without explicit congressional authorization.

“President Trump must come to Congress before using military force unless absolutely necessary to defend the United States from an imminent attack,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a member of the armed services and foreign relations committees, said in a statement Thursday.

In justifying the daylight strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei just two days later, Trump accused the Iranian government of having “waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder” for nearly half a century — including through attacks on U.S. military assets and commercial shipping vessels abroad — and of having “armed, trained and funded terrorist militias” in multiple countries, including Hezbollah and Hamas.

Trump said that after the U.S. bombed Iran last summer, it had warned Tehran “never to resume” its pursuit of nuclear weapons. “Instead, they attempted to rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing long-range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas, and could soon reach the American homeland,” he said.

Other Republican leaders largely backed the president.

“The United States did not start this conflict, but we will finish it. If you kill or threaten Americans anywhere in the world — as Iran has — then we will hunt you down, and we will kill you,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

“Every president has talked about the threat posed by the Iranian regime. President Trump is the one with the courage to take bold, decisive action,” said Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi.

While Iran’s coordination with and sponsorship of groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas are well known, Trump’s claims about its ongoing development of nuclear weapons systems are less established — and the administration has provided little evidence to back them up.

Democrats seized on that lack of fresh intelligence in their responses to the attacks, contrasting Trump’s latest claims about imminent threats with his assertion after the separate summer bombings that the U.S. had all but eliminated Iran’s nuclear aspirations.

“Let’s be clear: The Iranian regime is horrible. But I have seen no imminent threat to the United States that would justify putting American troops in harm’s way,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a member of the Gang of Eight. “What is the motivation here? Is it Iran’s nuclear program? Their missiles? Regime change?”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement that the Trump administration “has not provided Congress and the American people with critical details about the scope and immediacy of the threat,” and must do so.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said the Trump administration needs congressional authority to wage such attacks barring “exigent circumstances,” and didn’t have it.

“The Trump administration must explain itself to the American people and Congress immediately, provide an ironclad justification for this act of war, clearly define the national security objective and articulate a plan to avoid another costly, prolonged military quagmire in the Middle East,” he said.

After the U.S. military announced Sunday that three U.S. service personnel were killed and five others seriously wounded in the attacks, the demands for a clearer justification and new constraints on Trump only increased.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) said Sunday he is optimistic that Democrats will be unified in trying to pass the war powers resolution, and also that some Republicans will join them, given that the strikes have been unpopular among a portion of the MAGA base.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who partnered with Khanna to force the release of the Epstein files, has said he will work with him again to push a congressional vote on war with Iran, which he said was “not ‘America First.’”

Benjamin Radd, a political scientist and senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations, said that whether or not Iran represented an “imminent” threat to the U.S. depends not just on its nuclear capabilities, but on its broader desire and ability to inflict pain on the U.S. and its allies — as was made clear to both the U.S. and Israel after the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which Iran praised.

“If you are Israel or the United States, that’s imminent,” he said.

What happens next, Radd said, will largely depend on whether remaining Iranian leaders stick to Khamenei’s hard-line policies, or decide to negotiate anew with the U.S. He expects they might do the latter, because “it’s a fundamentalist regime, it’s not a suicidal regime,” and it’s now clear that the U.S. and Israel have the capabilities to take out Iranian leaders, Iran has little ability to defend itself, and China and Russia are not rushing to its aid.

How the strikes are viewed moving forward may also depend on what those leaders decide to do next, said Kevan Harris, an associate professor of sociology who teaches courses on Iran and Middle East politics at the UCLA International Institute.

If the conflict remains relatively contained, it could become a political win for Trump, with questions about the justification falling away. But if it spirals out of control, such questions are only likely to grow, as occurred in Iraq when things started to deteriorate there, he said.

Israel and the U.S. are currently betting that the conflict will remain manageable, which could turn out to be true, Harris said, but “the problem with war is you never really know what might happen.”

On Sunday, Iran launched retaliatory attacks on Israel and the wider Gulf region. Trump said the campaign against Iran continued “unabated,” though he may be willing to negotiate with the nation’s new leaders. It was unclear when Congress might take up the war powers measure.

March 1 (UPI) — Some 22 people were killed amid anti-U.S. protests in Pakistan Sunday, following the U.S.-Israeli offensive Saturday that left 200 people dead.

In Karachi, at least 10 people were killed as they attempted to storm the U.S. Consulate, while two were killed in Islamabad and another 10 killed in Gilgit-Baltistan, the New York Times reported.

“When Iran is attacked, we feel our faith, our identity and our very existence are being targeted,” a student protestor in Karachi said, The Times reported.

The country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was among the dead following the U.S. and Israeli attacks.

In response, protests are swelling across the region, including in Iraq and India.

“We must also ensure that those who are mourning in Jammu and Kashmir are allowed to grieve peacefully,” said the area’s chief minister Omar Abdullah, NDTV World reported. “The police and administration should exercise utmost restrain and refrain from using force or restrictive measures.”

Barron’s reported that protests against the U.S. are anticipated in North Africa, South Asia and across the Middle East.

The U.S.-Israeli airstrikes followed indirect negotiations between the United States and Iran regarding nuclear weapons on Thursday.

Iranian officials had said that additional talks were planned.

President Trump had previously increased military presence in the region and threatened escalation if no deal was reached.

As a Clinton supporter, I am very disappointed that the President fired Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders for speaking on masturbation (Dec. 10), while Ronald Reagan let Surgeon General C. Everett Koop speak his mind on AIDS, birth control and condom use–all positions with which Reagan disagreed–for both of the former President’s terms. Perhaps Reagan recognized that doctors speak of things, in clear, uncensored language, in a way that politicians cannot.

I have never seen such sore winners as the Republicans are this year. Their call for Elders’ head heralds some very dark days to come. Clinton needs to learn a lesson from this, a lesson he seems loath to learn: You cannot appease your enemies by sacrificing your friends. You will lose your friends and your enemies will call you a coward.

DAVID VAN CHANEY, West Hollywood

*

It is good to see Clinton moving to the right. He may not have, as yet, fully embraced “Three strikes and you’re out” but at least “Three faux pas and you’re out” is a start.

WARREN M. LENT, Los Angeles

*

“She Pulled No Punches” (editorial, Dec. 10) is surprisingly acute and on target, both as to the rationale for Elders’ dismissal as surgeon general and as to the lamentable restraint on public discourse in our country–suffered by those who do their homework well and let us know what they think.

I think it cheeky of you to offer kind words at all for one who frequently shoots from the lip. She is the Jesse Helms of the left, though with far kinder heart and broader perspective. I will miss her in the way one misses sitting on the edge of the chair when someone rises to speak, half-afraid yet hoping some truth will out.

On the masturbation comment that got her canned, the practice needs no encouragement from the classroom. Bravo, Dr. Elders, and keep talking straight. You are in the grand tradition of free speech.

VERNON STORY, Community United Methodist Church, Desert Hot Springs

*

Being outspoken is not a virtue worth defending when what you have to say is just plain dumb. Which is why I can’t believe you would write an editorial supporting Elders. This woman has embarrassed herself virtually every time she has opened her inarticulate mouth. Have you not been listening?

Whatever has kept Clinton from firing her before this is a mystery. The number of mind-numbing statements made by this surgeon general over the last two years is far too extensive to list here but to me, her most classic remark had to do with violence in America: “We need safer weapons and safer bullets,” said she. No further comment.

JUDIE GAUGENMAIER, Studio City

*

It fascinates me that we will accept political babble and allow ourselves to go into denial, and when we are confronted with the truth as given to us by Elders we rebuke the truth and the messenger.

BEN BOELMAN, Placentia

*

Dr. Jack Kevorkian would have been a better choice for surgeon general than Elders.

DWIGHT M. CATES, Ventura

SAN ANTONIO — A heated U.S. Senate race in Texas entered its final stretch Sunday with candidates from both parties making final pitches to voters ahead of Tuesday’s primary, the nation’s first big contest of the 2026 midterm elections.

Republican Sen. John Cornyn is trying to avoid being the first incumbent GOP senator from Texas to lose a primary, fighting challenges from Texas Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton and U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt.

Democrats, hungry to win a Senate race in the state for the first time since 1988, see an opening, but have their own knotty race to figure out.

U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a rhetorical brawler and regular antagonist to President Trump, is stressing her federal experience and was scheduled to meet voters in the Dallas area with Sen. Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland. Crockett was endorsed Friday by former Vice President Kamala Harris.

State Rep. James Talarico, a soft-spoken seminarian who emphasizes his crossover appeal to Republicans, was set to hold a rally in San Antonio as part of a final tour that he describes as a movement.

But Cornyn’s precarious stature as an incumbent vulnerable in his party’s primary has been the focus of a majority of the the massive sums spent by both sides in the run-up to Tuesday’s balloting.

“Complacency is a killer,” Cornyn told voters Saturday at a seafood restaurant in the Woodlands, a Houston suburb. “It kills relationships. It kills careers.”

Senate Republican leaders in Washington, working to hold their thin majority, have worried out loud for months that Democrats could have a shot at a long out-of-reach Texas seat if Republicans nominate Paxton, who is popular with Trump voters but has had years of legal problems, which led to his impeachment three years ago. He was acquitted.

Talarico, who has raised more money than Crockett, is part of the Texas primary’s record fundraising pace. His campaign has spent $13 million on television advertising since the start of the year, the most of any single entity in the crowded field of groups spending on either side, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.

Heading into Tuesday’s primary elections, the cost of advertising and reserved advertising time had topped $110 million, the most ever for a Senate primary. Most of it — more than $67 million — had been spent by Cornyn’s campaign and allied groups, much of it attacking Paxton, but also lately trying to keep Hunt from advancing.

If no candidate receives at least 50% of the vote Tuesday, the primary proceeds to a runoff between the top two vote recipients on May 26.

A late visit to Texas on Friday by Trump, who used the Port of Corpus Christi as a backdrop for a speech highlighting energy production, drew all of the top Republican candidates. And while the president said Friday he’s “pretty much” decided whom to endorse, he declined to name him.

“We have a great attorney general, Ken Paxton. Where’s Ken? Hi, Ken,” Trump said. He continued, “And we have a great senator, John Cornyn. Hi, John.”

Noting that they’re in a “little bit of a race,” Trump added: ’It’s going to be an interesting one, right? They’re both great people.”

Despite his long career in Texas politics, Paxton has painted himself as a Washington outsider and a staunch supporter of Trump.

“I’m not going up to Washington, D.C., to join the swamp club,” Paxton said at a campaign event in Fort Worth. “I will go up there and fight for you.”

Beaumont and Murphy write for the Associated Press and reported from San Antonio and Oklahoma City, respectively.

March 1 (UPI) — The Defense Department is ending its relationships with several Ivy League universities and think tanks that service members are permitted to attend.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ended graduate school fellowships at 22 institutions starting with the 2026-2027 academic years, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale, Princeton, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and The Brookings Institution, according to a memo released by the DOD.

The memo follows a Feb. 7 announcement that the DOD would end stop sending officers to Harvard as part of its Senior Service College Fellowship programs, which Hegseth said in the memo is being retooled and offered list of institutions that offer equivalent programs.

Like Harvard, the expanded list of institutions the department is removing from its SSC programs are alleged to be “woke” and no longer meet requirements for officers in the armed forces.

“Our Professional Military Education institutions are among our most sacred and essential means to restore and maintain the warrior ethos within the [DOD],” Hegseth said. “It is imperative that our war fighter education system forges strategic senior leaders who are trained to think critically, free of bias and influence.”

In a press release, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the “Aligning Senior Service College Opportunities with American Values” memo directs the DOD to focus SSC fellowships away from institutions that “diminish critical thinking, have significant adversary involvement or fail to deliver rigorous education grounded in realism.”

Universities that are replacing the Ivy League schools include three senior military colleges and three DOD or U.S. government programs, as well as 15 other universities, including Liberty, George Mason, Tennessee, Michigan, Iowa State and Hillsdale College.

Currently enrolled DOD personnel will be permitted to finish their courses of study, but the new policy and list of acceptable institutions applies to all personnel starting this fall, Hegseth said.

EXPLAINER

Until Khamenei’s successor is picked, the three-member leadership council, including Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, will lead Iran.

Iranian authorities have announced a three-member interim leadership council to run the government after the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Israeli-United States strikes.

Iran’s government pledged to avenge the killing on Saturday of Khamenei, who had been in power for nearly four decades. Tehran has since targeted Israeli and US assets located across Gulf countries in retaliatory strikes.

While US President Donald Trump has said he wants a change in Iran’s government, the religious leaders of Iran moved on Sunday to start the process of choosing Khamenei’s successor.

What is the interim leadership council?

Article 111 of Iran’s Constitution authorises a temporary leadership council to assume the supreme leader’s duties until a successor is elected.

That council will consist of President Masoud Pezeshkian; the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei; and a member of the Guardian Council, Ayatollah Alireza Arafi.

So who are these three figures who will temporarily run Iran as it reels from war?

Ayatollah Alireza Arafi

Arafi has been a member of the Guardian Council since 2019. Its members are appointed by the supreme leader. It is an Islamic legal authority that vets Iran’s laws and policies to make sure they conform to Islamic principles. It approves election candidates, has veto power over legislation passed by parliament and supervises elections.

Arafi also serves as the deputy chairman of the Assembly of Experts, the body responsible for overseeing the selection of the supreme leader. He leads Friday prayers in Qom, Iran’s most important religious centre, and heads the seminary system, overseeing education for religious leaders nationwide.

Masoud Pezeshkian

Pezeshkian, 71, is a reformist politician and heart surgeon who served in the army during the Iran-Iraq War. He was elected president in the 2024 elections.

He previously served as health minister under President Mohammad Khatami and, after 2005, as a member of parliament representing the northwestern city of Tabriz.

Pezeshkian ran unsuccessfully for president earlier but in 2024 won on a reform-oriented platform and has since navigated economic pressures and regional tensions.

He earlier campaigned on economic stabilisation, easing social restrictions and pursuing constructive engagement abroad while affirming loyalty to the Islamic Republic’s constitutional framework.

Reacting to Khamenei’s assassination, Pezeshkian said in a statement that Iran now considers “it its legitimate duty and right to avenge the perpetrators and masterminds of this historic crime”.

Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei

Mohseni-Ejei is a senior religious leader and has headed the judiciary since Khamenei appointed him to the post in July 2021.

He previously served as intelligence minister from 2005 to 2009 and later as prosecutor-general and first deputy chief justice. He is regarded as a hardline figure aligned with the conservative wing of the government.

In January, when the collapsing rial triggered protests across Iran, Mohseni-Ejei promised “no leniency” towards what he called “rioters”.

Mohseni-Ejei said the US and Israel “openly and explicitly supported the unrest” in the country after Trump called on Iranians to take to the streets.

After Khamenei’s killing, Trump again addressed the Iranian public on Saturday, calling for them to topple the government. “This will probably be your only chance for generations,” he said on Saturday after the US and Israeli attacks on Iran began.

BOSTON — Eight-year-old Martin Richard was a bright, sunny boy who loved to ride his bike and went “wild” when he played offense on his soccer team, scoring the winning goal in a championship game last year.

Krystle Campbell was the vivacious assistant manager of local steakhouse, the first to backstop fellow workers by running plates from the kitchen. She could instantly smooth over diners’ complaints with her smile.

They were both cheering on the sidelines of the Boston Marathon on Monday when two bombs went off with a thunderous boom and cloud of white smoke, claiming them as the first victims of the blast. Boston University officials confirmed the death of a third person Tuesday: a graduate student who has not been identified.

Friends and family members of the victims were still in shock after Monday’s chaos. Martin’s father, Bill Richard, who was tending to his wife and 6-year-old daughter, who were injured in the blast, released a statement thanking strangers for their prayers.

“We also ask for your patience and for privacy as we work to simultaneously grieve and recover,” he said.

Campbell’s mother, Patty, emerged briefly on the front steps of her family’s modest two-story home in Medford.

“We are heartbroken at the death of our daughter,” Campbell told reporters, her voice shaking between sobs. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

As federal investigators chased leads in the effort to find the perpetrators, doctors at Boston’s trauma centers tended to the more than 170 people wounded in the explosions, many of whom have been released. Dr. George Velmahos, the leader of the trauma team at Massachusetts General Hospital, said that although many of its surgeons trained on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, they were confounded by the severity of the injuries they confronted as waves of patients arrived at the emergency rooms Monday.

Some of the patients were in surgery for hours as doctors tried to remove metal fragments, spiky metal pieces that looked like nails without heads, and pellets that had shredded their limbs. But the positive outlook of many of them left Velmahos “moved and really amazed.”

“Some of them woke up today with no legs and told me they were just happy to be alive,” Velmahos said. “Some of them said they thought they were lucky.”

Among the relatives and friends who kept watch at Mass General was 39-year-old Corey Comeau, who was visiting his cousin and his cousin’s girlfriend Tuesday afternoon.
Comeau, a chef at Stephanie’s restaurant on Newbury Street, near what is now a crime scene, said his cousin was “still a little shellshocked” but that his cousin’s 24-year-old girlfriend suffered worse injuries.

“They say they can save her leg,” Comeau said as he stood outside the hospital after visiting.

“I can’t believe I’m even saying that. It’s not normal conversation.” Still, he said, the mood inside the hospital was “much calmer today than last night” with doctors going from patient to patient and conferring with families.

“These are some of the best hospitals in the world. The staff has been unbelievable,” he said.

At the same time, Monday’s chaos bred confusion, as in the case of Krystle Campbell.

Campbell had been watching the marathon alongside her friend Karen, her grandmother Lillian Campbell said, and the family at first believed that she had survived with serious injuries to her legs. But the family learned Tuesday morning that it was Karen who lived.

Lillian Campbell said her granddaughter stopped by her house for the last time last Thursday afternoon, when they drank tea and talked for several hours about work, friends and life.

“She loved being around people. She loved doing things for people,” said Lillian Campbell, 79, who noted that her granddaughter moved in to take care of her after she underwent surgery a few years ago. “She was hard worker. She was bubbly all the time.”

Nick Miminos, who had recently hired Campbell as an assistant manager at Jimmy’s Steer House in Arlington, Mass., said the 29-year-old “had one of those personalities that belongs in hospitality.”

“The wait staff loved working with her,” Miminos said. “She would run food for them, clear the tables for them. She wasn’t just a figurehead. She enjoyed getting her hands dirty.”

Not far away in the Ashmont section of Dorchester, neighbors and friends of the Richard family grieved at a candlelight vigil for young Martin. Bill Richard had been a force in restoring the historic neighborhood. His wife, Denise, who suffered critical injuries Monday, was a librarian at the Neighborhood House Charter School, where Martin and his 6-year-old sister, Jane, were enrolled.

Twins Andreas and Alejandro Calderon, 10, came by the Richard house to place a soccer ball, signed with their names, on the family’s porch. The boys recalled Martin hopping around the playground at recess and unleashing his energy on the soccer field.

“When we put him on defense and goalie he would do good, but he would save his energy so when we put him on offense he would go wild,” said Andreas, whose father coached the team.

Other friends posted their memories of Martin on Facebook and Twitter. Among the more searing images was a picture of Martin, with his gap-toothed smile, holding a blue sign he had made with magic markers.

“No more hurting people,” his sign said. “Peace.”

ALSO:

Boston Marathon bombs: Crude, unsophisticated but still deadly

Dad of 8-year-old Boston bombing victim: ‘Please pray for my family’

After Boston twin bombings, a nation offers its support and solidarity

alana.semuels@latimes.com

molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com

andrew.tangel@latimes.com

Also contributing were Times staff writers Maeve Reston and Alan Zarembo in Los Angeles.

Loud explosions have been heard in Doha, the capital of Qatar, as defence systems shot down incoming Iranian missiles. Falling debris ignited large fire that sent plumes of black smoke rising above the city. Iran has hit multiple Gulf states as it responds to US-Israeli attacks.

The assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 86, in the US-Israeli air attacks has thrust Tehran to a pivotal crossroads as the clergy looks to pick the late ayatollah’s successor.

With Iran on a war footing, several senior leaders close to Khamenei were killed in the attack as well, including his top security adviser Ali Shamkani and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander-in-chief Mohammad Pakpour.

Tehran has vowed to avenge the killing of Khamenei. The US President Donald Trump warned against the retaliatory attacks and suggested that the strikes on Iran would continue.

The US-Israeli attacks hit Iran on Saturday, when Tehran’s top diplomats were waiting for the next round of talks on upcoming Monday to lock a deal with Trump, including laying down nuclear ambitions, and avoiding an armed conflict.

After 36 years in power, the late ayatollah’s killing has left Iran’s top clerics to prepare for the transfer of power to the next Supreme Leader. That’s something that they have only done once before, four decades ago.

So, who will be the next Supreme Leader of Iran? And how will he be chosen?

How is the Supreme Leader selected?

Iran’s Supreme Leader is selected by the Assembly of Experts, an 88-member clerical body elected by the public every eight years.

Candidates who run for the Assembly must first be vetted and approved by the Guardian Council, a powerful oversight body whose members are partly appointed by the Supreme Leader himself.

When the position becomes vacant, due to death or resignation, the Assembly of Experts convenes to choose a successor. A simple majority is sufficient to appoint the new Supreme Leader.

As per Iran’s constitution, the candidate must be a senior jurist with deep knowledge of Shi’a jurisprudence, as well as qualities such as political judgment, courage, and administrative capability.

Earlier, there had been only one other transfer of power in the office of the Supreme Leader of Iran, when Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Revolution, died at age 86 in 1989.

What happens in Iran during a leadership vacuum?

Article 111 of Iran’s constitution mandates that a temporary council handle duties until a new supreme leader is elected.

That council will have: President Masoud Pezeshkian, Supreme Court Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, and a cleric from the Guardian Council, according to Iranian media.

They will lead the country until the assembly formally picks the new supreme leader.

Iran’s security chief and a close confidante of the late Khamenei, Ali Larijani, said on Sunday that the transition process is underway.

Luciano Zaccara, a research associate professor in Gulf Politics at Qatar University, told Al Jazeera that Iran’s political system has been prepared for the current situation, knowing that Khamenei’s assassination was a real possibility.

“Trump wants to get the best deal possible, but the method he’s using to get that deal is to annihilate or destroy as much as he can,” Zaccara said. “This is the way to impose conditions, not to negotiate anything. Trump wants a surrender of the regime, not a change.”

The late Ayatollah made sure to put in a structure, he added, to avoid a vacuum of power and kept replacements for all the officials eliminated in the last few months ready. “The structures remain, the line of power [and] the line of command remain in place,” Zaccara told Al Jazeera.

What is the Supreme Leader of Iran?

The Supreme Leader is the top position in the Islamic Republic’s political and religious hierarchy.

He is essentially the commander-in-chief of the armed forces and the final word in the country – and appoints key judicial, military, and media officials.

He also leads the mighty Revolutionary Guard, a paramilitary force that leads the so-called Axis of Resistance.

Here are the contenders for the top job in Tehran

Mojtaba Khamenei

Khamenei’s second son, Mojtaba Khamenei, is among the top contenders to succeed his father in Iran.

He is known to wield significant influence among the administrators and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the most powerful military body.

However, Khamenei’s lineage is also among the biggest barriers he faces.

Khamenei was reportedly opposed to the father-to-son succession. It is frowned upon in Iran, particularly after the US-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi monarchy was toppled in 1979.

Alireza Arafi

Arafi, a 67-year-old cleric, is an influential figure in the Islamic Republic’s religious establishment, but not a widely accepted political actor.

He serves as the deputy chairman of the Assembly of Experts, the body responsible for overseeing the selection of the Supreme Leader, and has been a member of the Guardian Council, which vets election candidates and laws passed by parliament.

Arafi was appointed as ⁠the jurist member of ⁠Iran’s Leadership Council, the body tasked with fulfilling the ‌Supreme Leader’s role until the Assembly of Experts elects a new leader, Iran’s state media reported on Sunday.

Arafi is also the Friday prayer leader of Qom — Iran’s most important religious center — and heads the country’s seminary system, overseeing clerical education nationwide.

Mohammad Mehdi Mirbagheri

Mirbagheri is an ultra-hardline clerical voice in the establishment and a member of the Assembly of Experts.

He is widely known for his unrelenting anti-Western worldview — and currently heads the Islamic Sciences Academy in the northern city of Qom.

Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei

Mohseni-Ejei is a senior Iranian cleric and currently heads the judiciary of the Islamic Republic, appointed to the role in July 2021 by the late Khamenei.

He previously served as Minister of Intelligence from 2005 to 2009 and later as Prosecutor-General and First Deputy Chief Justice. He is regarded as a hardline figure aligned with the conservative wing of the regime.

Hassan Khomeini

Khomeini, 54, is among the most discussed names in succession talks for the next Supreme Leader.

He is the grandson of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, and also the custodian of his grandfather’s mausoleum in Tehran.

While he has not held a public office, Khomeini is a reformist figure known for his rather moderate views on public life and policy. He attempted to run for the Assembly of Experts in 2016, but the vetting council disqualified him.

Donald Trump has never been one to play by the rules.

Whether it’s stiffing contractors as a real estate developer, defying court orders he doesn’t like as president or leveraging the Oval Office to vastly inflate his family’s fortune, Trump’s guiding principle can be distilled to a simple, unswerving calculation: What’s in it for me?

Trump is no student of history. He’s famously allergic to books. But he knows enough to know that midterm elections like the one in November have, with few exceptions, been ugly for the party holding the presidency.

With control of the House — and Trump’s virtually unchecked authority — dangling by a gossamer thread, he reckoned correctly that Republicans were all but certain to lose power this fall unless something unusual happened.

So he effectively broke the rules.

Normally, the redrawing of the country’s congressional districts takes place once every 10 years, following the census and accounting for population changes over the previous decade. Instead, Trump prevailed upon the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, to throw out the state’s political map and refashion congressional lines to wipe out Democrats and boost GOP chances of winning as many as five additional House seats.

The intention was to create a bit of breathing room, as Democrats need a gain of just three seats to seize control of the House.

In relatively short order, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, responded with his own partisan gerrymander. He rallied voters to pass a tit-for-tat ballot measure, Proposition 50, which revised the state’s political map to wipe out Republicans and boost Democratic prospects of winning as many as five additional seats.

Then came the deluge.

In more than a dozen states, lawmakers looked at ways to tinker with their congressional maps to lift their candidates, stick it to the other party and gain House seats in November.

Some of those efforts continue, including in Virginia where, as in California, voters are being asked to amend the state Constitution to let majority Democrats redraw political lines ahead of the midterm. A special election is set for April 21.

But as the first ballots of 2026 are cast on Tuesday — in Arkansas, North Carolina and Texas — the broad contours of the House map have become clearer, along with the result of all those partisan machinations. The likely upshot is a nationwide partisan shift of fewer than a handful of seats.

The independent, nonpartisan Cook Political Report, which has a sterling decades-long record of election forecasting, said the most probable outcome is a wash. “At the end of the day,” said Erin Covey, who analyzes House races for the Cook Report, “this doesn’t really benefit either party in a real way.”

Well.

That was a lot of wasted time and energy.

Let’s take a quick spin through the map and the math, knowing that, of course, there are no election guarantees.

In Texas, for instance, new House districts were drawn assuming Latinos would back Republican candidates by the same large percentage they supported Trump in 2024. But that’s become much less certain, given the backlash against his draconian immigration enforcement policies; numerous polls show a significant falloff in Latino support for the president, which could hurt GOP candidates up and down the ballot.

But suppose Texas Republicans gain five seats as hoped for and California Democrats pick up the five seats they’ve hand-crafted. The result would be no net change.

Elsewhere, under the best case for each party, a gain of four Democratic House seats in Virginia would be offset by a gain of four Republican House seats in Florida.

That leaves a smattering of partisan gains here and there. A combined pickup of four or so Republican seats in Ohio, North Carolina and Missouri could be mostly offset by Democratic gains of a seat apiece in New York, Maryland and Utah.

(The latter is not a result of legislative high jinks, but rather a judge throwing out the gerrymandered map passed by Utah Republicans, who ignored a voter-approved ballot measure intended to prevent such heavy-handed partisanship. A newly created district, contained entirely within Democratic-leaning Salt Lake County, seems certain to go Democrats’ way in November.)

In short, it’s easy to characterize the political exertions of Trump, Abbott, Newsom and others as so much sound and fury producing, at bottom, little to nothing.

But that’s not necessarily so.

The campaign surrounding Proposition 50 delivered a huge political boost to Newsom, shoring up his standing with Democrats, significantly raising his profile across the country and, not least for his 2028 presidential hopes, helping the governor build a significant nationwide fundraising base.

In crimson-colored Indiana, Republicans refused to buckle under tremendous pressure from Trump, Vice President JD Vance and other party leaders, rejecting an effort to redraw the state’s congressional map and give the GOP a hold on all nine House seats. That showed even Trump’s Svengali-like hold on his party has its limits.

But the biggest impact is also the most corrosive.

By redrawing political lines to predetermine the outcome of House races, politicians rendered many of their voters irrelevant and obsolete. Millions of Democrats in Texas, Republicans in California and partisans in other states have been effectively disenfranchised, their voices rendered mute. Their ballots spindled and nullified.

In short, the politicians — starting with Trump — extended a big middle finger to a large portion of the American electorate.

Is it any wonder, then, so many voters hold politicians and our political system in contempt?

The assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in joint US-Israeli air attacks has caused one of the most significant blows to the country’s leadership since the 1979 Islamic revolution, triggering protests by his supporters.

Khamenei assumed Iran’s supreme leadership in 1989 after the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had led the Islamic revolution against the pro-United States Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

On Sunday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said seeking revenge for the killing of Khamenei and other senior Iranian officials is the country’s “duty and legitimate right”.

President Donald Trump has framed the operation as a “liberation” moment, predicting that the removal of the “head” will lead to the swift collapse of the body. However, in Iran, the reality suggests a far more complex situation.

Interviews with insiders, military experts and political sociologists suggest that the decapitation of Iran’s top leadership may not go the way the West envisions. Instead, it risks birthing a “garrison state” – a paranoid, militarised system fighting for its existence with no political red lines left to cross.

The limits of ‘decapitation’

The central premise of the US operation is that Iran is too brittle to survive the death of its supreme leader. In a phone interview with CBS News, Trump claimed he “knows exactly” who is calling the shots in Tehran, adding that “there are some good candidates” to replace the supreme leader. He did not elaborate on his claims.

However, military analysts warn against the assumption that air strikes alone can trigger “regime change”. Michael Mulroy, a former US deputy assistant secretary of defence, told Al Jazeera Arabic that without “boots on the ground” or a fully armed organic uprising, the state’s deep security apparatus can survive simply by maintaining cohesion.

“You cannot facilitate regime change through air strikes alone,” Mulroy said. “If anyone is left alive to speak, the regime is still there.”

This resilience is rooted in Iran’s dual military structure. The government is protected not just by a regular army (Artesh), but also by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – a powerful parallel military force constitutionally tasked with protecting the velayat-e faqih system – the principle of the guardianship of the Islamic jurist.

Supporting them is the Basij, a vast paramilitary volunteer militia embedded in every neighbourhood, specifically trained to crush internal dissent and mobilise ideological loyalists.

That cohesion is already being tested.

Hossein Royvaran, a political analyst based in Tehran, confirmed that the strikes wiped out the country’s top security tier, including Khamenei’s adviser and secretary of the newly-formed Supreme Defence Council, Ali Shamkhani.

The secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, said the leadership transition will begin on Sunday.

“An interim leadership council will soon be formed. The president, the head of the judiciary and a jurist from the Guardian Council will assume responsibility until the election of the next leader,” said Larijani.

“This council will be established as soon as possible. We are working to form it as early as today,” he said in an interview broadcast by state TV.

The rapid formation of an interim leadership council – comprising the president, judiciary chief, and a Guardian Council religious leader – indicates that the system’s “survival protocols” have been activated.

According to Royvaran, the system is designed to be “institutional, not personal”, capable of functioning on “autopilot” even when the political leadership is severed.

But a Tehran-based analyst said direction of Iran is still unclear as officials try to ‘project stability’.

“Officials here are trying to project stability, emphasising that the situation is under control and that state institutions are functioning effectively,” Abas Aslani, senior research fellow at the Center for Middle East Strategic Studies, said.

“Today, [the US-Israeli] air strikes targeted security and military infrastructure in the capital [Tehran] and other cities. There are expectations that such strikes could continue – and possibly intensify – in the coming hours or days,” he told Al Jazeera.

“That prospect of escalation is not something many ordinary Iranians welcome. At the same time, Iranian officials are issuing strong warnings, suggesting they could respond with capabilities that have not previously been used against Israel or the United States.”

From theocracy to nationalist survival

Perhaps the most significant shift in the immediate aftermath is Iran’s pivot from religious legitimacy to survivalist nationalism.

Aware that the death of the supreme leader might sever the spiritual bond with parts of the population, surviving officials are reframing the war not as a defence of the clergy, but as a defence of Iran’s territorial integrity.

Larijani, a conservative heavyweight and key figure in the transition, issued a stark warning that Israel’s ultimate goal is the “partition” of Iran. By raising the spectre of Iran being broken into ethnic statelets, the leadership aims to rally secular Iranians and the opposition against a common external enemy.

This strategy complicates the US hope for a popular uprising.

Saleh al-Mutairi, a political sociologist, notes that the government’s declaration of 40 days of mourning creates a “funeral trap” for the opposition. The streets will likely be filled with millions of mourners, creating a human shield for the government and making it logistically and morally difficult for antigovernment protests to gain momentum in the short term.

The end of ‘strategic patience’

If Iran survives the initial shock, the nation that emerges will likely be fundamentally different: less calculated and probably more violent.

For years, Khamenei championed a doctrine of “strategic patience”, often absorbing blows to avoid all-out war.

Hassan Ahmadian, a professor at the University of Tehran, says the era died with the supreme leader.

“Iran learned a hard lesson from the June 2025 war: Restraint is interpreted as weakness,” Ahmadian told Al Jazeera Arabic. The new calculus in Tehran is likely to be a “scorched earth” policy.

“The decision has been made. If attacked, Iran will burn everything,” Ahmadian added, suggesting that the response will be broader and more painful than anything seen in previous escalations.”

This risks a scenario where field commanders, freed from the political caution of the clerical leadership, lash out with greater ferocity. The assassination has humiliated the security establishment, exposing what Liqaa Maki, a senior researcher at Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, calls a catastrophic intelligence failure.

“The believer is not bitten from the same hole twice, yet Iran has been bitten twice,” Maki said, referring to the pattern of US strikes. This “total exposure” is likely to drive the surviving leadership underground, turning Iran into a hyper-security state that views any internal dissent as foreign collaboration, he said.

While the “head” of Iran has been removed, the “body” – armed with one of the largest missile arsenals in the Middle East – remains, Maki said.

Santa Cruz tried out the surveillance company Flock Safety for a little over a year before deciding it was time to move on.

Cambridge, Mass., also had enough and tore up its contract in December. Now, some officials in San Diego have begun to have second thoughts of their own.

In recent months, dozens of cities have cut ties with Flock — the nation’s largest provider of automated digital license plate readers — over fears that data the company captures is helping power President Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

The same can’t be said in one particularly surprising place: Los Angeles. Here, Flock still has an eager customer base of local elected officials, police officers, homeowners associations and businesses.

Unlike some of its competitors, the Atlanta-based company has not only marketed its plate readers to law enforcement as a vital crime-fighting tool, but aggressively pitched its product to private citizens, experts say.

“They are tremendous investigative tools,” said LAPD spokesman Capt. Michael Bland.

But for critics, there’s an obvious downside: the potential tracking of law-abiding citizens without a warrant on a scale once thought unimaginable.

“These can be really powerful tools to find someone, and identity them. But when you don’t have a suspect, everyone can be a suspect,” said Hannah Bloch-Wehba, a professor of law at Texas A&M University.

A Flock spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.

Typically mounted on street poles or atop police cars, plate readers continuously monitor passing vehicles, recording their location at a specific date and time. But Flock’s AI-powered cameras go even further by also documenting other identifying vehicle details, such as make, model and color, as well as any distinctive markings like scratches or dents on a bumper.

From there, police can easily search for the location of specific vehicles in the company’s vast national database, allowing them not only to potentially retrace the whereabouts of someone suspected of a crime, but also receive predictions about future movements.

In a presentation to the Picfair Village Neighborhood Assn., Flock boasted that its plate readers had helped solve “10% of reported crime in the U.S.” In L.A., the company said, its technology had been deployed to nab porch pirates and car thieves, not to mention played a role in solving a “high-profile crime involving stolen weapons from a politician’s home.”

The problem, at least in the minds of a growing number of privacy and immigration advocates, is that the readers capture a vast amount of information not related to any specific criminal investigation. The ability of federal authorities to access Los Angeles Police Department surveillance data directly from companies like Flock or from regional intelligence hubs called fusion centers undermines the city’s promise as a haven for immigrants, critics say.

“License plate readers play a critical role in providing directions and a road map to ICE for going out to kidnap people,” said Hamid Khan, an organizer with the activist group Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which last spring wrote a letter to the Police Commission urging it to rewrite the LAPD’s policies to ensure information on law-abiding drivers isn’t shared with federal authorities.

The commission, the LAPD’s civilian oversight panel, ordered a study on the department’s license plate reader system that is expected to be completed this summer.

LAPD officials say records collected by the plate readers are accessible only to five smaller police agencies with which the department has data-sharing agreements. Furthermore, they say the use of the readers, like with other police technology, is restricted by state laws that limit information sharing with federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Plate-reading technology has been around for decades. But as the Trump administration’s deportation crackdown has ramped up, residents, privacy advocates and officials in some cities across the country have mounted campaigns urging their local governments to stop using the technology.

Much of the backlash has been aimed specifically at Flock — a heavyweight in the surveillance market that contracts with a reported 5,000 U.S. policing agencies. The company’s data-sharing with federal authorities and cybersecurity lapses have been documented by 404 Media and other outlets.

After previously denying it had federal contracts, Flock Chief Executive Garrett Langley admitted in interviews in recent months that the company has worked with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations. The company has since said that it has severed ties with both agencies, and responded to other concerns by giving communities more power to decide whom to grant access to state or nationwide lookup networks.

In Bloch-Wehba’s view, Flock’s meteoric rise is a triumph of marketing over results.

“There’s very little evidence on the actual impact of these technologies on violent crime rates at all,” said Bloch-Wehba, who noted an explosion of surveillance technology in 2020 to monitor protesters or enforce rules implemented to curb the spread of COVID-19 during the pandemic.

In the L.A. area, Flock has gone head to head with competitor Vigilant Solutions, which has for years supplied the majority of the LAPD’s plate readers. But today, cops tout Flock cameras at community meetings and some City Council members have paid to bring them to their districts.

Flock has also sought to flex its political might. City records show the company has stepped up its lobbying efforts at City Hall in recent years — hiring Ballard Partners, a powerful Florida-based firm whose employees now include former City Councilmember Joe Buscaino.

Many Flock plate readers, though, have been purchased by community groups. In most cases, residents band together to raise money to buy the devices, which they then either grant access to or donate to the LAPD via the Police Foundation, the department’s nonprofit charity. By donating the equipment, neighborhood groups may get to control what type of technology is installed and by whom.

“My real preference would be a fully staffed LAPD, and then we don’t have any cameras,” said Jim Fitzgerald, who lives in Venice and serves on its neighborhood council.

Roy Nwaisser, who chairs the Encino Neighborhood Council’s public safety committee, said that Flock often played up the shortage of police officers during its presentations to residents in his neighborhood.

“I personally have concerns with how Flock conducts their businesses, but they are the biggest player and if LAPD is working with them, they just have to make sure that there are those safeguards,” he said. “I don’t know that automated license plate readers are all that effective when owned by neighbors living on the street who decided to get together.”

Police executives have defended the practice, saying license plate data has helped solve untold numbers of crimes, from run-of-the-mill porch theft to high-profile cases like the 2024 attempted assassination of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump at a Florida golf course. The technology also came into play during an investigation into the fatal drive-by shooting of a 17-year-old boy at a North Hills intersection last month. According to a search warrant affidavit, detectives tracked a suspect vehicle to a home in Sun Valley after it was captured by several scanners near where the shooting occurred.

Because so many plate scanners are in private hands, it’s difficult to say how many of the devices are in operation citywide.

The L.A. Bureau of Street Lighting, which is responsible for installing the devices on city-owned property, said it has mounted 324 over five years — though that tally doesn’t include mobile plate readers.

Bland said the LAPD has 1,500 police vehicles equipped with the scanners. Police also have access to an additional 280 plate readers in fixed locations throughout the city, which are owned privately or by the department, he said. He estimated that about 120 of those readers belong to Flock.

The cameras are also integrated with the department’s new drones, which are being paid for by a $1.2-million donation from the Police Foundation.

The devices are also used for many other purposes outside of regular law enforcement. Big box retailers like Home Depot and Lowe’s have installed Flock cameras across hundreds of parking lots. Many border crossings have them. In East L.A., they are used as an emissions-reduction tool by tracking semi-trailers. USC uses them to enforce parking violations, and the L.A. Department of Transportation has deployed such cameras to nab motorists who park in bus lanes.

Since the beginning of 2025, a small-but-growing number of states and cities have enacted laws aimed at curbing the use of surveillance technology such as license plate readers.

Under California law, police agencies are required to adopt detailed usage and privacy policies governing license plate data, restrict access to authorized purposes, and regularly audit searches to prevent misuse. Gov. Gavin Newsom previously vetoed a bill that would have restricted use of such data, saying the regulations would impede criminal investigations, but the bill has been reintroduced this year.

Nearly 50 cities nationwide have opted to deactivate their scanners or cancel contracts with Flock, mostly in recent months, according to the website DeFlock.me, which has set out to map locations of the company’s cameras. Responding to public pressure, some places like Santa Cruz canceled their contracts after realizing that they had been sharing their data more broadly than they had known, including with federal authorities.

Other Flock customers, like Oakland, have dug in and decided to keep their cameras at the urging of local homeowners association representatives and small business owners — but over the objections of the city’s own Privacy Advisory Commission.

Among the places that have started to reconsider their relationship with Flock is San Diego. In December, city leaders split on the issue, but ultimately voted to keep using Flock’s scanners after a contentious public hearing meeting in which they heard from hundreds of residents opposed to the surveillance technology.

Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera said he voted against working with Flock based on what he saw as the company’s poor track record of “data retention” and “consumer protections.” Although the city has operated Flock plate readers and cameras for years, the stakes are far higher now, he said.

“We have a presidential regime that is not only flouting the law, but takes pride in ignoring due process, in violating rights of people they deem unworthy of the rights and protections,” said Elo-Rivera, who represents an ethnically diverse district in San Diego’s Mid-City area. “They have a by-any-means-necessary approach when it comes to immigration enforcement. And now they have a tool that makes it very easy for them to track people down.”

Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.