politics

Arthur B. Laffer, professor, businessman and possible candidate for next year’s Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate from California, speeds down the freeway in his telephone-equipped BMW 733i, sipping a can of Diet Pepsi and reflecting on his life in the fast lane.

The impatient energizer of the nationwide tax-cut movement–a tenured professor at age 28, chief economist of the White House Office of Management and Budget at 29–has long prided himself on his ability to keep several balls in the air at once. But he acknowledges that his high-speed juggling act can sometimes get him in trouble.

“When you move very fast, you rustle the fields,” said Laffer, whose choirboy looks belie his 44 years. “You cause a commotion. Without meaning to, you create squalls.”

Controversial Figure

As a result, his life has been marked by controversy as well as achievement. Squalls spawned by Laffer’s frenetic pace have cost him a marriage and two college professorships.

Most recently, the designer of the Laffer Curve–which illustrates his disputed theory that cutting taxes can actually increase government revenues while a tax hike might reduce them–relinquished his post at USC’s School of Business Administration last September after a bitter dispute with the school’s dean. Toward the end, Laffer, who by all accounts is an excellent teacher, and the dean, Jack D. Steele, refused to even speak to each other.

USC blames Laffer’s schedule for the rupture. “With all his outside affairs, he was spreading himself too thin,” said Cornelius J. Pings, USC’s provost and senior vice president for academic affairs. “He just wasn’t meeting his obligations on campus.”

He Disputes View

Steele confirmed that Laffer’s extracurricular activities were a problem, although Laffer disputed that view.

As if to prove that he can run his $2.7-million-a-year economic consulting business and explore the possibility of seeking public office and advise President Reagan and teach, Laffer recently joined the faculty of Pepperdine University’s School of Business and Management. It was a step down in the academic world, though in many ways he and his new employer are well matched.

Pepperdine, founded in 1937 by a conservative auto-parts magnate, shares Laffer’s passion for the free enterprise system and his knack for self-promotion. Indeed, Pepperdine recently ran advertisements picturing “the renowned originator of the Laffer Curve” in the Wall Street Journal and The Times.

Although Laffer’s economic views mesh well with those of the Church of Christ-affiliated school, he is no fan of Pepperdine’s strait-laced social scene. Drinking is banned on campus and chapel attendance is mandatory.

Laffer, on the other hand, maintains an extensive cellar of German and California wines at his Rolling Hills Estates home. And, though raised as a Presbyterian, he doesn’t attend church–and says he won’t start should he decide to run for office.

About the only concession the plump professor has made to the image makers while testing the political waters has been to shed 15 pounds by substituting Very Vanilla Sego, a diet drink (“Yuk–I hate it!”), for his beloved sushi. Currently weighing in at 175, the 5-foot, 7-inch Laffer figures he has another 15 or 20 pounds to go.

Although considering a run for the Senate, Laffer is openly contemptuous of Congress. “If you look at congressmen and senators,” he tells audiences across the state, “you see a group who invariably prefer complex error over simple truth.” It is his biggest applause line. “If you ever saw what those guys actually did for a living, you’d recognize their banality and you’d throw them out of office.”

Six Children

Laffer’s personal life is as packed with activity as his professional one. Besides Traci, the 25-year-old second wife he fondly calls “my Valley girl” (she grew up in Ontario), the Laffer clan includes six children ranging in age from 6 months to 20 years, 15 rabbits, 10 parrots, 4 macaws, 3 tortoises, 2 horses, a Jack Russell terrier and a Norwegian blue fox. Laffer, an amateur biologist who once considered forsaking economics for a career in biology, manages to find time for all of them.

The menagerie used to be bigger. Fern, a pet weasel, drowned in the Laffers’ swimming pool, though her place in family folklore is secure. Laffer cackles when he remembers the time his daughter, Rachel, then 6, tossed the wriggling creature onto First Lady Nancy Reagan’s lap at a 1980 dinner party.

“I don’t think I’ve ever come so close to heart stoppage,” said Laffer, who at the time was trying to sell his supply-side theories to presidential candidate Ronald Reagan. “Everyone held their breath waiting to see how she’d react, but Mrs. Reagan was quite the lady about it.”

Unconventional Ideas

The economist revels in his new and unconventional ideas. He would reward elected officials and the head of the Federal Reserve Board with big bonuses when the economy booms and slash their salaries during recessions. He would wipe out the capital gains tax. He would amend the Constitution to provide for national referenda. And he would give $15,000, tax free, to the top 5% of scorers on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.

“Can you imagine if all of a sudden you could get out of the ghetto by studying instead of by playing basketball?” Laffer asked. “If you play basketball 16 hours a day, you become a great basketball player. If we could get these kids to study 16 hours a day, they’d become great students.”

Such schemes have won Laffer the friendship of “new ideas” Democrat Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado and the grudging admiration of some fellow economists. “Whatever you think of Laffer’s ideas, at least he thinks,” said Lester C. Thurow, a liberal professor of management and economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose views often differ from Laffer’s.

Some say Laffer’s boyish looks and small stature could prove a liability should he decide to seek office. Characteristically, Laffer employs humor to disarm the size issue. In speeches, he invariably mentions flat-tax advocate Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.), the former New York Knicks basketball star. Then, in his best Joan Rivers delivery, he adds: “It’s disgusting how tall he is.”

Penchant for One-Liners

Indeed, Laffer’s penchant for jokes and one-liners (sample: “The British pound is so weak that they’ve started calling it the ounce”) have led some to question his seriousness. Samuel Armacost, president and chief executive officer of BankAmerica Corp., recently quipped that a speech by Laffer “isn’t economics–it’s entertainment.” Laffer says he uses humor to make complex subjects palatable.

Although he is a polished speaker, Laffer appears to be reining in his glib, shoot-from-the-hip style. He disavows a 1981 comment embracing “the freedom to smoke pot if we want to.” Laffer acknowledged having made the remark, but said: “I think I was probably showing off at the time–trying to show you don’t have to be a conservative on all issues to favor tax cuts.”

Other Laffer views reflect his coming of age as an undergraduate at Yale and a graduate student at Stanford during the turbulent ‘60s. He staunchly opposes the draft, contending that Vietnam-era draft resisters were the spiritual ancestors of today’s anti-tax movement. “The draft is a specific tax on your body,” Laffer said.

Still, Laffer rarely wanders from economic matters in his speeches and articles. He strongly supports the concept of a flat tax, predicting that some sort of bill equalizing personal-income tax rates will emerge from Congress this year.

‘Enterprise Zones’

Another Laffer idea that has been picked up and championed by the Reagan Administration is the establishment of inner-city “enterprise zones.” Corporations locating factories in such zones would get big tax breaks and relief from minimum-wage and other regulations. The economist argues that setting up such zones would break the cycle of poverty and dependency in urban ghettos.

Despite Laffer’s emphasis on economics, mainstream economists and even conservative allies question the quality of his scholarship. “He really wasn’t interested in the life of a scholar,” said George Stigler, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, where Laffer held his first teaching job. “Doing painstaking, detailed work wasn’t his game. He went for quick and glamorous results.”

It was a trauma at Chicago, Laffer said, that turned him away from academia and pointed him toward the business and public policy arenas. In 1971, some colleagues at Chicago accused Laffer, who hadn’t yet earned his Ph.D. from Stanford, of misleading a faculty committee that had earlier promoted him to full professor.

Laffer quickly finished up his Stanford doctoral dissertation and got the degree. “It was just a question of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s,” Laffer said, explaining that he never finished in the first place because he got swept away by his other commitments. A university committee headed by Stigler investigated the matter and found Laffer guilty of nothing worse than “carelessness,” Stigler says.

Career at a Standstill

Nonetheless, as Laffer tells it, lingering suspicion from the incident “put a stop to my career.” For the next five years, he didn’t get a raise at Chicago and academic journals shunned his articles. Suddenly, the boy wonder was a pariah. “So what do you do?” Laffer asked, “sit there and commit suicide? No, you find new avenues of expression.”

It was during this period that Laffer in 1974 sketched his now-famous curve for former journalist Jude Wanniski and an aide to President Gerald R. Ford on a cocktail napkin in a Washington restaurant. “He just scribbled it out,” Wanniski recalled, “and I thought it was a useful device for getting the message across.” The message (see chart) was a simple one: that cutting taxes could actually result in an increase in government revenues by creating incentives for people to work harder and save and invest more.

The curve didn’t gain notoriety until 1978, when Wanniski included it in his book “The Way the World Works: How Economies Fail and Succeed.” “At first,” Wanniski said, “Art was embarrassed by the name Laffer Curve–until he started to make a lot of money off it.”

Indeed, Laffer has used his high visibility to build his consulting company, A. B. Laffer Associates, into a multimillion-dollar enterprise with 20 full-time and 15 part-time employees. The firm has about 300 corporate clients who pay between $6,000 and $8,000 a year for Laffer’s economic analyses; special contracts added another $200,000 to the firm’s 1984 revenues, and about 85 speaking engagements by Laffer himself yielded $433,000.

Two Homes

Business profits and Laffer’s Pepperdine salary afford the family a comfortable life style in their antique-filled Rolling Hills Estates home and a 17-acre mountaintop retreat in Rancho Santa Fe. Such wealth is nothing new for Laffer; his late father was chairman of the board of Gould Inc., the big electronics concern, and young Arthur attended private day school in a prosperous Cleveland suburb before going on to Yale.

Despite Laffer’s commercial success, the jury is still out on his celebrated curve. Donald W. Kiefer, an economist with the Congressional Research Service, calls it “an overly simplistic approach which ignores complex economic relationships.” Critics say that the huge budget deficits that followed the Laffer-supported Kemp-Roth bill that reduced personal income taxes by 25% underscore the shortcomings of Laffer’s theory.

Laffer, on the other hand, blames delays in the tax cuts and increased government spending for the deficits. Besides, he argues, this year’s $200-billion deficit is neither “a crisis” nor “a panic situation” given the U.S. economy’s underlying vigor. Like Reagan (and unlike most economists), he believes that economic growth eventually will take care of the problem. Laffer gets to promote his economic views at periodic meetings of the President’s Economic Policy Advisory Board, of which he is a member.

Moved to California

In 1976, with his academic career going nowhere, Laffer gave up on Chicago and moved to USC. In California, he became a key supporter of 1978’s landmark real-estate tax-cutting initiative, Proposition 13. A year later, his first marriage broke up, the victim of Laffer’s four-day-a-week travel schedule. “I came home from a business trip and the kids told me my wife had been gone for three days,” Laffer recalled.

He met Traci Laffer when she was a political science major at USC moonlighting as a secretary to Dean Steele. The pair hit it off when they realized they shared a love for exotic birds. Laffer proposed to her in Paris and they were married in 1982 in an elaborate Beverly Hills wedding attended by 800 friends.

“I got a package deal,” Traci Laffer said, referring to the four children from Laffer’s previous marriage and the large collection of animals.

Laffer still travels frequently, often sleeping on “red eye” flights to the East Coast, doing his business and flying home that day. “He has this idea that you can, in effect, live two lives by cramming as much as possible into your finite number of years on Earth,” said Wanniski, who now operates his own competing economics consulting firm.

None of Laffer’s friends expect him to slow down anytime soon.

Nick Bilton, the new executive producer of “60 Minutes,” received a hostile welcome Monday from the CBS News program’s most respected correspondent Scott Pelley as the staff is still reeling over last week’s firings.

In the first staff meeting since Bilton was named last week, Pelley accused CBS News Editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of “murdering” the country’s most-watched news program, which recently finished the TV season with a 9 percent ratings increase. Recordings of the meeting were circulated to journalists.

“She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” Pelley said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.” Pelley also attacked the credentials of Bilton, a former New York Times tech reporter and documentary filmmaker who like Weiss has no previous experience running a TV news operation.

Bilton was named to replace Tanya Simon on Thursday, an unexpected move that also came with the firing of correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. The moves were enacted by Weiss, who has targeted the prestigious program for changes since she arrived at the network last fall.

David Ellison, chief executive of CBS News parent Paramount, brought in Weiss — a skeptic of legacy media — with a mandate to move the division more to the political center. But many critics have seen the move as an attempt to placate the Trump administration while Ellison seeks regulatory approval for his deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery,

“60 Minutes,” has long been in Trump’s cross hairs. The president sued the program last year over the editing of an interview with his 2024 opponent former Vice President Kamala Harris. The suit was settled just ahead of the Federal Communications Commission clearing the way for Ellison’s Skydance Media takeover of Paramount.

One person close to “60 Minutes” said attendees at the meeting in the Manhattan West Side offices described it as something they had never witnessed in their careers. The confrontation — and the applause Pelley received from his colleagues during the meeting — also demonstrates how CBS News management may have underestimated the staff’s devotion to the program, now closing in on its sixth decade, that has long been considered the most powerful and respected platform in TV journalism.

A representative for CBS News declined comment on the meeting.

Pelley is held in especially high stature at the network due to his work over the years in dangerous war zones. When he was anchor at the “CBS Evening News,” he displayed photos of CBS News journalists who have died in the line of duty for the network going back to George Polk, who was killed during Greece’s civil war in 1948.

People close to CBS News management said both Bilton and Weiss reached out to Pelley last week to discuss the changes and their plans for the program’s future but he did not respond.

One CBS News veteran said the tense meeting “reads like Scott wants to be fired.”

Weiss has maintained she is committed to expanding the “60 Minutes” brand so it generates viewing and revenue outside of its Sunday night broadcast. But she has also clashed with producers and correspondents over the handling of stories such as Alfonsi’s report on the Trump administration’s use of harsh El Salvador prisons to hold undocumented Venezuelan migrants.

Alfonsi’s message to colleagues saying the segment was held for political reasons led to her dismissal from the program.

Vega posted a message last week claiming she had been facing pressure to insert political bias into her stories. “I very much fear what comes next for … the future of the legendary broadcast,” Vega said in a social media post on Thursday, referring to “60 Minutes.”

A CBS News representative said last week that Vega’s claims “are not based in reality.”

Bilton has tried to reassure veterans at the program that he remains committed to the program’s mandate to provide tough, investigative journalism. The words he’s used in several meetings are that next season will not be much different than the successful year the program just completed.

“He’s very much committed to continuing and extending the kind of journalism that ’60 Minutes’ has been known for.” said one person close to Bilton.

BOSTON — Former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell used one of his first major public appearances since leaving office to defend independent institutions while accepting an award Sunday honoring his efforts to preserve the central bank’s independence.

Speaking at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library overlooking Boston Harbor, Powell called universities, courts, Congress and the central bank “the foundation and the embodiment of our democracy” and argued that the Fed’s independence was a “priceless asset” that must be protected.

It was one of his most direct defenses of Fed independence, warning that a single administration’s decision to remove bank officials over policy differences would open the way for future elected officials to follow suit, ultimately undermining the credibility that the Fed has spent decades building.

Powell, who frequently clashed with President Trump during his eight years as chair, stepped down as his term expired in May. He was succeeded by Kevin Warsh, whom Trump selected to lead the central bank.

After stepping down as chair, Powell took the unusual step of keeping his seat on the Fed’s governing board, which he has until January 2028. By doing so, he has deprived the Trump administration of an opportunity to appoint another member of the board.

The Trump administration has also sought to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook, which would open an additional seat on the rate-setting committee the president could fill. Yet Cook sued and the courts have so far let her keep her seat.

While Powell never mentioned Trump by name Sunday, he repeatedly returned to the importance of protecting institutions from political pressure and preserving public trust in their independence.

“Like many other institutions, the Fed has been undergoing a stress test,” he said. “Congress wisely chose to insulate monetary policy decisions from political pressure. All other advanced economy nations have done the same.”

Since 1989, the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award has recognized public servants who make what the foundation describes as courageous decisions of conscience despite personal or professional consequences.

Previous recipients include former Presidents Barack Obama and George H. W. Bush, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and former Vice President Mike Pence.

In March, the foundation said it was awarding Powell for protecting the independence of the Federal Reserve “despite years of personal attacks and threats from the highest levels of government.”

Trump harshly criticized Powell throughout his tenure as chair, frequently attacking the Fed’s interest-rate decisions and urging the central bank to cut borrowing costs more aggressively.

Beyond the Federal Reserve, Powell defended U.S. universities and research institutions, the Constitution, Congress and the court system.

“The United States has long been the leader of the world’s freedom-seeking people — the indispensable nation. Other countries know us as a nation built on integrity, and that integrity must be maintained,” he said.

In his remarks, Powell indirectly acknowledged mistakes as chair. The Fed is legally required to seek stable prices, but inflation surged amid the pandemic’s supply chain crunch. Many economists believe the central bank should have raised interest rates more quickly in response.

“At the Fed, we are, of course, human and thus imperfect,” Powell said. “When we make mistakes, we acknowledge them and change course.”

Powell was honored alongside residents of Minnesota’s Twin Cities, who received the award for what the Kennedy Foundation described as acts of courage during a federal immigration crackdown that led to thousands of arrests and the deaths of Minneapolis mother Renée Good and nurse Alex Pretti, both of whom were killed while observing or documenting enforcement activity.

“It’s wonderful just to be invited, honoring Renée,” Good’s father, Tim Granger, said as he entered the library with family members.

Kennedy’s only surviving child, Caroline Kennedy, and her son, Jack Schlossberg, said in a statement that without people like Powell and those in Minnesota “willing to put their lives on the line to hold America to its promises, our democracy can’t survive.”

Attendee U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who is running for governor of Minnesota next year, reflected that the award was unusual because it recognized ordinary residents rather than elected officials.

“This didn’t go to an elected leader for a reason,” Klobuchar said. “It’s because the people stood up. They stood up by marching 50,000 strong. They stood by bringing kids they didn’t even know — strangers’ kids — to school, by bringing them groceries and they didn’t blink. And that’s what this award is about. It’s about courage.”

Willingham writes for the Associated Press. AP journalist Christopher Rugaber contributed to this report from Washington.

WASHINGTON — A Trump administration policy illegally banned transgender troops from military service, a divided panel of federal appeal court judges ruled on Monday.

The majority opinion by a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit largely upholds a March 2025 ruling by U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes in Washington, D.C. Reyes concluded that President Trump’s executive order to exclude transgender troops from military service likely violates their constitutional rights.

The administration appealed after Reyes issued a preliminary injunction requested by attorneys for six transgender people who are active-duty service members and two others seeking to join the military. The appeal court’s majority decided that the injunction should be narrowed to the plaintiffs currently serving in the military but not those seeking to join.

The ruling won’t immediately go into effect, allowing the administration time to ask the full appeals court to hear the case.

The U.S. Supreme Court allowed the transgender military ban to go into effect last year, as litigation continues to play out. Another lawsuit challenging the ban was filed in Washington state and led to a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs challenging the policy in that case.

In January 2025, Trump signed an executive order that claims the sexual identity of transgender service members “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life” and is harmful to military readiness.

In response to the order, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a policy that presumptively disqualifies people with gender dysphoria from military service. Gender dysphoria is the distress that a person feels because their assigned gender and gender identity don’t match. The medical condition has been linked to depression and suicidal thoughts.

The policy “appears to be driven by the bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group: persons who identify as transgender,” Judge Robert Wilkins wrote for the majority. Wilkins was nominated to the court by Democratic President Obama.

In a dissenting opinion, Judge Justin Walker said judges lack the power to second-guess the decision to exclude transgender troops.

“We have neither the expertise nor the authority to decide whether the military can exclude the plaintiffs from its ranks. The Constitution assigns that authority to Congress and the Commander in Chief,” wrote Walker, who was nominated by Trump, a Republican.

Judge Judith Rogers, who was nominated by Democratic President Clinton, joined Wilkins’ opinion but also partially dissented.

Kunzelman and Whitehurst write for the Associated Press.

The June 2026 election has been dominated by a down-to-the-wire governor’s race that has been filled with drama, scandal and much national attention.

A large group of Democrats are vying to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom in this very blue state. But the candidates have — until recently — struggled to generate wide excitement, and it’s far from clear who will win. On the Republican side, commentator Steve Hilton has benefited from the divided Democrats (and a Trump endorsement) to remain near the top of the pack in polls.

But the governor’s race is far from the only vital decision voters will make.

Los Angeles residents will vote for mayor in a race that is far from certain. And there are numerous state, county, local and judicial candidates to choose from.

Here is a breakdown:

When is the election?

The election is Tuesday, but early voting has already been already under way.

You can find your polling place here or by calling (800) 345-8683. All polling locations are open on election day from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Once it’s cast, you can track your ballot here.

(Photo illustration by Nicole Vas / Los Angeles Times; Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

What are the big statewide races?

Let’s start with the race for governor, of course. With Newsom term-limited, Democrats and Republicans are competing for California’s open gubernatorial seat in what could reshape the state’s political landscape. Democrats went in hoping for easy sailing, but a wide field and no superstar name has left the race something of a tossup, though Xavier Becerra has been rising in recent polls. On the Republican side, Hilton continues to poll strongly.

There is a possibility California could make history: The state has never has elected a woman as governor, and only once has a person of color held the office.

But there are many down-ballot statewide races as well,

(Photo illustration by Nicole Vas / Los Angeles Times; Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press)

What are the big L.A. races?

The L.A. mayor’s race is grabbing all the attention. Polls show the leading candidates are Mayor Karen Bass, City Councilmember Nithya Raman and community activist and former reality TV personality Spencer Pratt. Those same polls show Bass has struggled in the aftermath of the 2025 firestorms, a big issue for Pratt. Another major topic is affordability, which Raman has taken up.

But there are several other competitive races plus ballot measures.

What are the big L.A. County races?

These contests don’t get the attention of the mayor’s and governor’s races, but L.A. County voters have a lot of choices to make.

What’s left?

DENVER — Tina Peters, the former clerk convicted of participating in a scheme to chase election conspiracy theories promulgated by President Trump, was released from prison Monday after the president successfully pressured Colorado’s Democratic governor into commuting her sentence.

Peters’ release was confirmed by the Colorado Department of Corrections. The state agency said it would have no more information about the 70-year-old inmate. Her sentence was shortened by Gov. Jared Polis last month after Trump waged a lengthy pressure campaign against the governor and his state.

Peters served less than a quarter of her nine-year sentence.

Peters was the first local election official to be charged with breaching security after the 2020 election. She snuck in an outside computer expert affiliated with My Pillow Chief Executive Mike Lindell — who himself denied that Trump lost the White House in 2020 — and the person copied the county’s Dominion Voting Systems computer server as it was updated in 2021.

Peters then joined Lindell onstage at a “cybersymposium” that promised to reveal proof that the election was rigged. Video and photos of the computer system upgrade, including passwords, were posted online. The move stoked false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the election from Trump.

Peters was convicted in 2024 of attempting to influence a public servant, conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, violation of duty and other crimes by jurors in Mesa County, a Republican stronghold that supported Trump. An appeals court upheld her conviction in April, but ordered Peters to be resentenced because it said the judge who sent her to prison wrongly punished her for speaking out about election fraud.

Trump had championed Peters’ case, but because she was convicted under state law, he did not have the power to pardon her. Instead, the president pressured Polis to do so, lambasting him on social media and disinviting him to a White House meeting with other governors. The Trump administration also announced plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and relocated the U.S. Space Command to Alabama.

Polis commuted Peters’ sentence on May 15. In a letter, he wrote that although Peters was convicted of serious crimes and deserved to spend time in prison, the sentence was “extremely unusual and lengthy” for a first-time non-violent offender.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, called the move a “dark day for democracy” and said it amounted to ”selling out our state’s justice system for Trump.”

California’s decision to redraw its congressional map to flip as many as five House seats to Democrats in November is poised to play a big and potentially decisive role in the nation’s broader, bare-knuckle fight for control of Congress.

Tuesday’s primary races — where the top two candidates will advance to November runoffs — won’t determine which Republicans are ousted in most cases, but they will provide an important first look at voter sentiment and bring the fall’s most crucial head-to-head contests into focus.

“There will be some real cues and signals about what to expect,” said Christian Grose, a redistricting scholar and political science professor at USC. “We’re going to know how strong the Democrats’ chances are going to be based on who advances.”

As one example, Grose pointed to the redrawn 22nd Congressional District in the Central Valley, where incumbent Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford) is facing challenges from moderate Assemblymember Jasmeet Kaur Bains (D-Delano) and progressive college professor Randy Villegas.

Grose said Bains is probably a stronger challenger than Villegas in a district that’s still a reach for Democrats — even if “either one could probably beat Valadao if 2026 is a big Democratic wave.”

Grose will also be closely watching the race between incumbent Reps. Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills) and Ken Calvert (R-Corona) in the redrawn Congressional District 40, which covers a swath of inland Orange County and portions of San Bernardino and Riverside counties, including parts of Kim’s and Calvert’s current districts.

The district race wasn’t designed to deliver Democrats a seat, but will produce “one of the first casualties for Republicans from the new map” — months before other expected ousters — if Kim and Calvert don’t both advance.

The national picture

The redistricting war was prompted by President Trump’s unprecedented pressuring of Republican-controlled states to redraw their maps mid-decade for partisan advantage in order to retain control of Congress, given his sinking approval ratings and a history of midterm voters punishing the president’s party.

After Texas Republicans heeded Trump’s call to redraw five districts in their party’s favor, California Democrats responded with Proposition 50, a ballot measure passed by voters in November to sideline the state’s independent redistricting committee and allow Democrats to redraw five congressional districts in their favor.

The war ratcheted up — with more Republican states suddenly considering map changes — after a U.S. Supreme Court decision in April that weakened the 1965 Voting Rights Act and its long-standing protections for majority-Black districts in the South.

Republicans have now acted to redraw congressional maps in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Tennessee, with varying degrees of success, while a battle in Utah could add a single additional Democratic seat there. Attempts in other states have failed, including by the GOP in South Carolina and Democrats in Virginia.

Experts say the net result from the flurry of redistricting will probably be a gain of a handful or more seats for Republicans — but in a year when Democrats are expected to make gains more broadly, leaving control of the House up for grabs. California’s new map is “a huge deal” precisely because that math is so close, said David Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst for the independent, nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

“Democrats are modest favorites for House control based on the political environment, but also because of California,” Wasserman said in an interview with The Times. “Picking up these four or five seats is a prerequisite to Democrats getting the majority.”

California seats in play

California has 52 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, by far the most of any state. With their new map, California Democrats are hoping to increase their 43 House seats to 48. That would leave just four seats represented by members of the GOP despite Republicans accounting for a quarter of the state electorate.

But that outcome isn’t guaranteed.

Paul Mitchell, a Democratic redistricting expert who devised California’s new map, said the reconfigured congressional districts had to create a pathway for new Democrats to win additional seats without undermining incumbent Democrats’ reelection. And the result is a map with three pretty safe pickups for Democrats, and two districts that are “100% on the table, ready for Democrats to win,” but will nonetheless “require shoe-leather and grit.”

The redrawn congressional district boundaries enacted by Proposition 50 promise to shake up at least three seats, experts said.

Congressional District 1: Held by the late Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Richvale) for 13 years until his death in January, the district is currently rural and conservative, stretching from the Sacramento outskirts through Redding to the Oregon border and California’s northeastern corner. Under the state’s new congressional district map, it loses some of its rural reaches and picks up liberal coastal communities, and favors a Democrat such as state Sen. Mike McGuire, who is one of the leading candidates.

Congressional District 3: The seat is currently held by Rep. Kevin Kiley (I-Rocklin) and stretches from the Sacramento suburbs through Lake Tahoe and south along the Nevada border. Under the new map, it holds more tightly to the Sacramento suburbs, favoring a Democrat.

The changes were enough to convince an incumbent Democrat, Rep. Ami Bera (D-Elk Grove), to leave his current district — Congressional District 6, which includes the city of Sacramento and the suburbs of Roseville and Rocklin in Placer County — and run in District 3 instead.

Meanwhile, Kiley did the reverse. He quit the Republican Party, became an independent and announced he would be leaving District 3 and running instead in District 6 — the one Bera is leaving — against a slate of new Democratic challengers.

Congressional District 41. The seat is now held by Calvert, a 17-term incumbent, and currently stretches from Corona to the Coachella Valley. The new map made the district more liberal, losing voters in Riverside County and gaining them in Los Angeles County, and Calvert decided to run instead in Kim’s redrawn but still Republican-leaning Congressional District 40 that is just to the west.

The two toughest flips for Democrats, experts said, are Congressional District 22, Valadao’s heavily Latino district in the Central Valley, followed by Congressional District 48 in San Diego and Riverside counties, where Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall) decided to retire rather than run for reelection.

Valadao is viewed as especially vulnerable because of his recent support for Medicaid cuts, but he has proved resilient in the past. Meanwhile, his two leading Democratic challengers, Bains and Villegas, are in a bitter fight, with Bains receiving Democratic establishment support and Villegas winning endorsements from prominent progressives.

In Issa’s district, moderate Republican San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond is running against several infighting Democrats, including San Diego Councilwoman Marni von Wilpert and former Obama labor official Ammar Campa-Najjar.

Not new, or over

Jeff Wice, a New York Law School professor who was involved in California redistricting efforts in 2010, said the state “has long played hardball politics on redistricting,” including when then-Rep. Phil Burton, a powerful San Francisco Democrat, bragged more than 40 years ago that the complex congressional boundaries he’d crafted for Democrats were his “contribution to modern art.”

But in five decades studying redistricting, Wice said he has never seen such “politically driven, partisan politics” as are occurring now across the nation, which he said have “no root in law, reason or fairness” — and are only likely to continue.

“This state-by-state war is far from over, and may continue all the way through 2030,” he said. “A lot of it depends on the outcome of this November’s election.”

Wasserman said the country has “entered an era of no-holds-barred redistricting,” and he also sees redistricting efforts continuing — including in California, where they would present a distinct threat to the state’s few remaining Republicans.

Michael Li, senior counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, said California is a “big part of the story” this election cycle, thanks to Proposition 50. “Democrats in California proved to be very determined and resourceful and managed to get that done, and right now California is the big offset to Republican gerrymandering around the country,” he said.

But what will come of it all — in California and across the country — is still to be determined.

“When you’re gerrymandering, you’re making a bet that you know what the politics of the future will look like, and it’s hard to predict,” he said. “It’s a high-risk, high-reward venture.”

India says it will continue engaging with Myanmar after Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke with Min Aung Hlaing, the leader of the country’s military government, in New Delhi.

Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri told reporters on Monday that India’s policy is “not intended to be a commentary on the internal political arrangements” in Myanmar and that New Delhi believes engagement is the best way forward.

Western nations have sought to isolate Myanmar’s military rulers since they overthrew the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in a 2021 coup that triggered a crackdown on opponents and a brutal civil war.

The conflict began when the country’s army leader, Min Aung Hlaing, ousted the government and detained civilian leaders, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

Some critics and human rights groups have said Min Aung Hlaing’s visit to India risks lending legitimacy to the military-backed government.

“We have always proceeded on the principle that sustained dialogue is what is important,” Misri said, adding that isolating Myanmar would be counterproductive.

“History has shown that disengagement doesn’t give us any results that are better than engagement.”

The visit is Min Aung Hlaing’s first to India since he was sworn in as president in April following an election that critics say was designed to cement his hold on power. His last visit to India was in 2019, when he served as Myanmar’s military chief.

He arrived in India on Saturday, first in the eastern state of Bihar, with a visit to the Buddhist pilgrimage site of Bodh Gaya, where believers say that the Buddha attained enlightenment.

India shares a 1,643-kilometre (1,020-mile) border with Myanmar and a maritime boundary in the Bay of Bengal.

Strategic partnership

Myanmar is also strategically important to India’s security interests. The two countries have cooperated on border security and intelligence sharing to combat armed rebel groups.

Modi and Min Aung Hlaing did not address the media after their meeting, as usually occurs after most bilateral talks involving visiting heads of state or government in New Delhi.

But Misri said the two leaders discussed trade, defence and security cooperation, border management, and regional issues, with talks also focusing on expanding economic and technology ties. He said both sides agreed to deepen collaboration across sectors, including trade, energy and critical minerals, and to accelerate major connectivity projects.

Min Aung Hlaing is expected to hold talks with business representatives during his five-day visit, and will travel to the financial hub, Mumbai.

Bilateral trade was $1.95bn in 2025-2026, according to New Delhi.

The leaders also discussed cooperation against cybercrime and human trafficking, issues that have affected thousands of Indians lured to scam centres in the region.

Misri said India and Myanmar have worked together to rescue more than 2,400 Indian nationals over the past 18 months.

Resistance groups formed after the 2021 coup have captured swaths of Myanmar. Others sought out and fought under the leadership of ethnic armies in exchange for training and weapons with which to fight the military.

These resistance groups, known as the People’s Defence Force (PDF), nominally operate under the leadership of the National Unity Government (NUG), a shadow government formed by Myanmar lawmakers removed by the military coup.

Zin Mar Aung, the foreign minister of the NUG, wrote a letter to Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, the minister of external affairs for India, on May 28, expressing concern about the visit.

“Since the military coup of 2021, which overturned the democratic will of the people, Myanmar has endured prolonged conflict, instability, and immense humanitarian suffering,” she said.

“India has long championed democratic governance, the rule of law, and regional stability. We therefore urge the Government of India to weigh carefully the broader implications of formal engagement that may normalise or legitimise military rule in Myanmar.”

Xavier Becerra’s campaign for California governor appeared doomed just two months ago. Every major opinion poll showed the longtime Democratic politician mired near the bottom of the pack, overshadowed by his flashier or wealthier rivals.

Now Becerra tops them all, according to the most recent opinion polls, emerging as a surprise front-runner in a race that has confounded voters and political experts alike.

Both his loyal supporters and well-financed critics have a hard time explaining Becerra’s rapid ascent, with theories ranging from outright luck to a nefarious social media push. Others credit Becerra’s mild temperament, describing him as a steady figure — the Goldilocks candidate in a field of competitors who weren’t just right.

Becerra, when assessing his sudden rise, believes voters wanted experience, not “glitz and sizzle.”

“Folks put their faith in someone who’s done that kind of work and achieved results, someone who’s taken on real crises and been able to pull us out of them,” Becerra said in an interview Friday after a union rally in the Inland Empire. “Now it’s time to get things done. I think they’re looking for someone who could actually do that.”

Becerra’s team also points to the fortuitous timing of their seven-figure political ad campaign that launched shortly before explosive allegations of sexual assault and misconduct against the then-leading Democrat in the race, former Rep. Eric Swalwell. After Swalwell suspended his campaign on April 12, Becerra’s ascent began.

Becerra is backed by 25% of likely California voters, followed by Republican Steve Hilton at 21% and environmental activist Tom Steyer, a fellow Democrat, at 19%, according to a new UC Berkeley Institute for Governmental Studies poll co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times. Two months ago, before Swalwell dropped out of the race, support for Becerra registered at just 5%.

Whatever the outcome of Tuesday’s primary election, Becerra’s surge over the other Democrats in the final sprint of his campaign will be a defining moment of the 2026 governor’s contest.

“It’s almost too good to be true,” said Carrie Webster, a Becerra supporter and Long Beach hairdresser who interviews political candidates on social media using the name “Crowd Source Carrie.”

“He shot through the roof, but it feels like it’s all organic,” said Webster, 49, who said she isn’t paid for her political work.

A Sacramento resident, Becerra, 68, served one term in the state Legislature, more than two decades as a Los Angeles congressman and then as California attorney general, and most recently worked as the secretary of Health and Human Services in the Biden administration.

His only previous statewide race was his 2018 bid for attorney general. In that contest, which he won handily, he had the major advantage of incumbency after being appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown to fill the vacancy caused by then-Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris’ election to the U.S. Senate.

Running for governor has proved to be much more daunting. His top Democratic challengers not only include Steyer, a free-spending billionaire, but also former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, current San José Mayor Matt Mahan, former Orange County congresswoman Katie Porter and state Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond.

In early March, the chair of the California Democratic Party, Rusty Hicks, urged stuggling candidates to drop out of the race. He feared the crowded field of candidates would splinter the party’s voters and lead to a Republican being elected as the next governor of California.

Under the state’s top-two primary system, only the first- and second-place finishers in the primary advance to the November election, regardless of party. While Hicks did not mention Becerra by name, he was certainly among the struggling candidates at the time.

Until now, Becerra’s splashiest moment was in late March, when he launched a public pressure campaign to boycott a gubernatorial debate hosted by USC after he and other candidates of color were excluded from lineup. University officials based the invites on opinion polls and a controversial campaign fundraising formula. The debate was canceled less than 24 hours before it was scheduled to take place.

Then came the allegations against Swalwell, which prompted nationwide interest in the otherwise sleepy California governor’s race. Political data strategist Paul Mitchell compared the moment to a dramatic scene midway into a “Real Housewives” season.

“Finally, somebody flipped a table, threw wine on somebody else, and all the voters started paying attention,” he said.

Alf LaMont worked for Swalwell’s team as a digital communications expert until his firm quit on April 10 following news reports about the allegations against the East Bay Democratic congressman.

LaMont said he was “doomscrolling” that same night when he saw an “organic, random” push for Becerra on Threads and other social media sites. LaMont said he immediately called Becerra’s campaign team and signed up to work for him.

Webster, the Long Beach content creator, also noticed the online buzz about Becerra.

“People were saying, ‘Let’s print out yard signs, T-shirts,’” Webster said. “Or someone would say, ‘I’m going to start Gen X for Becerra,’ or ‘I’m going to start Millennials for Becerra.’”

The push was so noticeable that Steyer’s campaign hired an intelligence agency with ties to a major Israeli firm to study the trend.

The agency’s report found about 3,000 fake accounts that amplified Becerra across social media platforms X, Facebook and Instagram while also criticizing Steyer, according to Steyer’s team. In all, the fake accounts generated 1.3 million views and 42,000 engagements, the report stated.

Steyer spokesperson Kevin Liao alleged a coordinated network from Becerra’s team or his supporters. Becerra’s campaign denied any role and dismissed the influence of the fake accounts.

Earlier opinion polls also offer a possible explanation for Becerra’s rise.

Even as he remained stuck behind other candidates in support among voters, Becerra’s favorability ratings versus his unfavorability ratings were better than rivals, including Porter and Villaraigosa.

Swalwell also had high favorability ratings, and when he dropped out, Becerra was “seen as the least objectionable of the candidates that were remaining,” Mitchell said.

The UC Berkeley Institute poll released Thursday shows more likely voters viewed Becerra favorably (44%) than unfavorably (38%). By contrast, 39% of voters viewed Steyer favorably and 43% unfavorably.

Becerra’s campaign credits part of his April surge to good fortune. His team unleashed a large advertising buy — a major chunk of his remaining campaign funds — placing spots on cable TV and online beginning in late March.

The timing was opportune given the chaos caused by Swalwell.

Becerra’s ads depicted him as calm and experienced. One showed him speaking to a diverse group of young people about his record of challenging President Trump, suing his administration more than 100 times when he served as attorney general, and his plan to bring down the cost of living for “the next generation.”

At the same time, LaMont’s team — which also is behind Gov. Gavin Newsom’s political communications — created a more “earthy” and “grassroots” look to Becerra’s campaign ads and messaging. Words like “Tio” and “carne asada” emphasized the candidate’s Latino heritage.

Polls done in the wake of Swalwell’s exit showed Becerra gaining ground.

Special interest groups, including California Medical Assn., which had supported Swalwell, switched to Becerra. A well-financed, independent political committee campaigning against Steyer — an effort intended to benefit Swalwell — also moved over to Becerra. Major corporations, including Chevron, Meta and McDonald’s, lined up next.

Becerra appeared unprepared for the speed at which voters and others gravitated toward him. He stammered through hastily filmed videos asking for small-dollar donations as his campaign sought to convert the new interest around him into donors.

He appeared stiff during his first post-Swalwell debate appearance; he mistakenly referred to Trump’s “war in Iraq” instead of Iran during his first answer and fended off the first of many attacks to come during an April 22 debate. During a sit-down interview with a KTLA-TV reporter in Los Angeles in early May, Becerra went immediately on the defensive — questioning whether it was a “gotcha piece.”

Still, people flocked to town halls, including one in Oxnard in May, where he leaned into his “bad dad joke” persona. He greeted the large crowd with his corny, familiar line, “Did you think you were coming to a Bad Bunny concert?”

Oxnard audience member Rose Castren, 68, told The Times she liked Becerra’s “calm and reassuring” style. The retired nurse watched the CNN debate in early May, where the candidates piled on Becerra to try to undercut his momentum.

“The other candidates seemed to be coming unglued,” she said. “And he didn’t.”

Times staff writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.

SACRAMENTO — Regardless of the final vote count, Xavier Becerra’s pre-primary sprint to the front in the race for governor was remarkable and historic.

Here’s a low-key 68-year-old candidate who excited no one. And that apparently was a major strength. He was easygoing, non-threatening and a safe bet.

He also had an impressive resume — former U.S. health secretary, California attorney general, longtime congressman and state assemblyman. This seemed to attract voters.

People perpetually badmouth politicians. That’s in the American DNA. And in California, there’s always loud anti-Sacramento jabber. But voters tend to prefer politicians with Sacramento experience when electing governors — unless a celebrity entertainer is available.

Politics is cyclical, however. In the past six decades, Californians have gone from electing fascinating Govs. Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown to selecting uninspiring George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson and Gray Davis — then returning to headliners like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Brown again and Gavin Newsom.

Now we’re ready for boring Becerra?

The last pre-primary poll by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies found Democrat Becerra leading the pack. But he was closely trailed by Republican former Fox News commentator Steve Hilton and Democrat billionaire Tom Steyer, a hedge fund founder turned climate activist.

The large field of candidates wound up with those three leading — Becerra drawing 25% support, Hilton at 21% and Steyer with 19%.

A later Emerson College poll also found Becerra in front but Steyer and Hilton in a statistical dead heat: Becerra 28%, Steyer 22%, Hilton 21%.

The top two vote getters will qualify for the November general election.

In contrast to earlier hot speculation about two Republicans — Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco — finishing in the top two and locking out any Democrat from the November ballot, the final IGS and Emerson polls showed that an opposite scenario was possible. Two Democrats could conceivably advance to the November voting.

As campaigning neared an end, Becerra apparently tried to help Hilton attract more MAGA support to prevent Steyer from edging out the Republican. Becerra would be a shoo-in over any GOP opponent in November, but could face a tough fight facing Steyer with his bottomless checkbook.

The games-playing involved Becerra running a statewide digital ad subtly reminding Republican voters that Hilton was President Trump’s “favorite” candidate for governor. The spot asserted that Becerra is “Trump’s worst nightmare.”

Steyer would be Becerra’s worst nightmare in a general election brawl.

Another major poll completed a few days earlier by the Public Policy Institute of California found the same basic rankings as the IGS survey, but with Steyer a bit further back.

Becerra was leading with 23%, followed by Hilton at 20% and Steyer at 15%.

Every independent poll found Becerra surging from irrelevancy in March to leader of the pack by late May.

It’s “one of the most unusual gubernatorial election campaigns in modern California history,” IGS poll director Mark DiCamillo says.

Particularly unusual was the April frontrunner, then-Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin), abruptly withdrawing after multiple accusations of sexual misconduct and assault, which he denies.

Most of Swalwell’s voter support soon went to Becerra, which helped him attract campaign donors and endorsements by interest groups.

Becerra, who had been moseying along the race track, suddenly got a second wind. And voters sensed a breath of fresh air.

“Voters are exhausted by Trump. He makes it hard to sleep at night. ‘Cool and calm’ win,” says Chapman University political science professor Fred Smoller. “People want a candidate like a no-drama Becerra.

“The fact he has a charisma deficit may in fact be his political asset.”

But Becerra also has other assets, notes UC San Diego political science professor Thad Kousser — ”legislative and executive experience…. He was safe and predictable.

“And he’s second only to Gavin Newsom in opposing Donald Trump.”

Yes, a calm temperament appeals to voters fatigued by political fire and brimstone. But California Democrats also want someone who will fight back against Trump’s policies.

Becerra repeatedly points out that as state attorney general, he sued the first Trump administration more than 120 times and won the vast majority of cases.

“Becerra has caught the attention of Democratic voters who overwhelmingly disapprove of Trump,” says PPIC Poll Director Mark Baldassare.

How overwhelmingly? Ninety-five percent disapproval by Democrats in the latest PPIC survey, 70% among all likely voters.

Becerra “stood out from the rest of the candidates because of his background as attorney general,” Baldassare adds.

“And look at the other candidates. You can’t name one who has had experience in Sacramento.”

Longshot former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was once state Assembly speaker, but that was nearly three decades ago.

Among the last nine California governors, only Schwarzenegger and Reagan have been elected without serving prior Sacramento stints.

Becerra also has another asset: He’d be the first elected Latino governor in California history. He finished the primary campaign with a comfortable lead among Latino voters, as well as Asian American.

As Becerra’s political stock rose, Democratic rivals — especially Steyer — tried to portray him as incompetent, touched by scandal and a Chevron tool. But the mud didn’t seem to stick.

A natural Becerra strength is likability.

DiCamillo recalls what his mentor, the late legendary pollster Mervin Field, used to say about how voters choose between candidates for governor or president.

“It’s a highly personal choice,” DiCamillo says, quoting Field. “People put more mental energy into choosing a top-of-the-ticket candidate than any other.

“It’s like trying on a new suit. If it doesn’t fit well, you don’t buy it. You’ve got to be comfortable in the feel.”

Many California voters apparently feel that way about Becerra — nothing flashy, just plain but comfortable.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Becerra leads governor’s race, with Hilton and Steyer in tight contest for second spot, poll finds
Money honey: Record-setting outside money pouring into California governor’s race
The L.A. Times Special: Voter guide to the 2026 California primary election

Until next week,
George Skelton

—
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Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison has been circling the globe, meeting government regulators who will ultimately decide the fate of his controversial $111-billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Last week, Ellison spent two hours answering questions from U.S. Justice Department antitrust lawyers in a bid to secure a key government approval — one that few people believe is in doubt because of President Trump’s strong support of tech billionaire Larry Ellison and his son’s ambitions to amass more power.

Throughout his travels, David Ellison has been accompanied by a savvy wingman: Makan Delrahim.

Delrahim, Paramount’s chief legal officer, served as the nation’s top antitrust regulator in the Justice Department during Trump’s first term. The 56-year-old Iranian American, who grew up in Los Angeles, is the architect of shrewd moves that have brought Paramount within reach of its blockbuster merger that would redefine Hollywood.

Politics have permeated the process — even before Trump announced he would get involved. Opponents have been suspicious of the Ellisons, given the family’s ties to Trump and programming changes to redefine Paramount’s CBS, including last month’s departure of late-night comedian Stephen Colbert and a shakeup at “60 Minutes,” CBS’ newsmagazine.

Buying Warner Bros. Discovery would give the Ellisons control of both CBS News and CNN.

Paramount’s bid for Warner Bros. has sparked dread in Hollywood for another reason, too: Thousands of jobs already have vanished through a string of media mergers.

More than 5,000 artists and entertainment industry workers have signed an open letter, calling on California Atty. General Rob Bonta to try to block the deal on antitrust grounds.

In an interview with The Times, Delrahim responded to concerns and criticisms. This interview has been edited for length and clarity:

Where does the regulatory process stand?

We are still going through the regulatory approval process. We actually started planning for the regulatory approval filings last summer. We knew we were going to be pursuing this transaction but it took a few months longer to sign the transaction than we thought. There were some interveners [Netflix, Comcast], but we planned ahead.

Do you have a commitment from Trump or his administration that you’ll get a thumbs up?

There are no deals with the president. We have a deal with the Warner Bros. shareholders. We’ve submitted [applications] to the governments of Europe, Canada, U.K. and the U.S., and that’s where it is.

You got a head-start because you filed a regulatory approval in December — months before Paramount had a deal with Warner. Why so soon?

We were always very skeptical [the Netflix deal] would ever go through. The only way to really show the [Warner] board that our deal would get through — because it doesn’t have antitrust problems — was to move as fast as we could.

One of the benefits being a former [DOJ] enforcer and having a team of outside lawyers who are also former colleagues and enforcers was that we anticipated what the government would ask for. Those were questions that we would have asked, and so we provided those answers.

Your timeline is aggressive. Some suggest Paramount wants this deal done before the mid-term elections.

I don’t think it’s aggressive. It has nothing to do with the midterms. The midterms do not change the officials at the Justice Department or the FCC — we have that minor application there. The midterms have no effect on the European Commission or anybody else. We’ve been very transparent and proactive with members of Congress and with the state attorneys general and the federal authorities.

Are you preparing to defend a potential antitrust challenge from Atty. General Bonta?

Well, no matter what field you’re in, whether it’s antitrust or whether you’re preparing for a football game, you always prepare the best you can for the worst, and you hope it never gets there. So, we’re preparing for challenges from anybody and everybody. But I don’t think any serious antitrust enforcer who looks at the facts, the law, the economics of this transaction will see an antitrust violation.

Why are you so confident?

There’s no element of this merger that is anti-competitive. Once you look at it, it’s incredibly pro-competitive. It increases output, it increases jobs, and it lowers the cost to the consumers. If you actually try to block this deal, you’re going to harm consumers, you’re going to harm creative talent, because you’re going to harm the creative ecosystem — the vision that David [Ellison] is trying to deploy here. It’s transformative from the efficiencies that it creates.

David Ellison has promised to release 30 films a year. Was that commitment to show that this merger will not be a repeat of Walt Disney Co.’s 2019 purchase of Fox?

I’m quite familiar with that one because I was at the Justice Department and reviewed it. Disney-Fox was a transaction with a different thesis. Disney wanted to get into streaming and they wanted to get scripted series. It wasn’t about studios trying to increase output.

Our transaction, as David has described, is motivated to create more content to feed the theaters, then streaming. We have a natural economic incentive to create more content. We’ll still be in fourth place after this transaction on the streaming side — almost half the size of Netflix.

David Ellison hasn’t made any commitments on the television side or pledged pledge to keep the various TV studios intact. Why?

I don’t think there’s much of an overlap on the television studios. Look, you have incredible studios in HBO, Warner Bros. Television, certainly our own studio. We’re not paying money to limit supply. It’s the exact opposite.

There is overlap between CBS News and CNN. How are regulators looking at that issue?

We’re very proud of CBS News and hopefully CNN, post-transaction. There is very limited overlap. Why? Because CBS News only airs a few hours a week of programming whereas CNN is 24/7, and it has international reach.

Antitrust regulators are going to see that it’s going to create synergistic effects. You might be able to cross-program and more people will be exposed to the incredible programming of CBS News. They’ll benefit from each other’s independent strengths.

During the first Trump administration, you said merger conditions were problematic because it’s difficult for the government to enforce behavioral remedies. Has your thinking changed?

No, I’ve been quite consistent. If there’s an antitrust problem, you need a divestiture [selling assets]. I don’t think there’s a remedy needed in this transaction. But having said that, we’re happy to engage with regulators to discuss where they see a problem and a possible solution. We’re always wanting to engage in constructive dialogue.

Would Paramount spin off CNN?

I don’t see that. I can’t see any antitrust reason to do so. That would be a weaponization of the antitrust law, and that would not be appropriate.

Many people in Hollywood view the merger with trepidation because of the prospect of more job losses. Others see it through a political lens. How do you evaluate the politics?

Politics is part of life. It’s part of the beautiful process of democracy. Generally, we are very empathetic to the folks in Hollywood, but this transaction will actually create more and better and exciting jobs. David is an absolute lover of films; he’s a filmmaker himself. For the first time, you are getting an owner who comes from the creative side.

Let’s be honest. There’s a lot of fear-mongering, particularly from people in Washington, D.C. They are running a political campaign. Some of these people are trying to inflict harm on this transaction really because of their own antisemitic views. Regulators and law enforcement officials will see right through that.

Do regulators share others’ concerns about the merger debt — $79 billion — for the combined company?

Some regulators appropriately have asked about it. They say: ‘This is what we have heard, that you guys are not going to be around because of this debt,’ which is just silliness. David and his family are owner-operators. They’re not rented CEOs. They have over 50% ownership. They put their money at stake and my money is on them.

As Californians dawdle about casting ballots before Tuesday’s primary, the leading candidates hoping to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom crisscrossed the state making their closing arguments to voters.

With former Biden Cabinet secretary Xavier Becerra surging in recent polls, the two candidates battling to win the second spot in this week’s primary and advance to the November election highlighted the strategic reasons why they believe voters ought to support them.

Republican Steve Hilton — a former conservative commentator who rocketed past his main GOP rival, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, after President Trump endorsed him in April — urged voters to back him to avoid the possibility of two Democrats facing off in November.

“I want us to fight like we are third. We aren’t going to let this slip away,” Hilton told a few hundred people at the Santa Monica Hilton Hotel & Suites on Sunday morning.

Steve Hilton surged ahead of his GOP rival, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, after receiving an endorsement from the president.

(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)

The former British political strategist once led the polls, but has slipped slightly behind Becerra. Not too far behind Hilton is billionaire hedge fund founder turned climate change activist Tom Steyer, a Democrat.

During his hour and a half appearance, Hilton veered between his oft-repeated criticisms about 16 years of Democrat-led rule in California to jabs at the top Democrats in the race.

Steyer’s nonstop advertising blitz is “one reason alone to defeat him,” while Becerra is the “living embodiment of more of the same.”

“Our secret weapon? The Democrat candidates,” Hilton said to chuckles.

Asked why voters shouldn’t back Bianco, Hilton said it was simple math. Only the first- and second-place finishers in the June 2 primary will advance to the general election, regardless of party affiliation.

“Every vote for Chad Bianco is a vote for two Democrats in the top two,” he said.

If a GOP gubernatorial candidate fails to make the November ballot, it would depress the Republican vote, harming the party’s down-ballot candidates, as well as handicap a Republican-led ballot initiative that would require voters to show government-issued ID to cast ballots.

California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer takes a picture with a volunteer during a Get Out the Vote rally at Los Angeles Trade Technical College on Sunday.

(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)

Steyer, who has spent a record-breaking $216 million of his wealth on his gubernatorial bid, argued that he is the only candidate in the race who is not beholden to special interests. He hammered Becerra for the support he has received from corporations including Meta, Airbnb, Uber and Chevron. Steyer argued that Becerra, if elected governor, would be more responsive to special interests than financially strapped Californians.

“We’ve seen it in this race. Chevron cuts you a check and you look the other way when they hike prices at the pump. Meta gives you money and your AI plan starts sounding like ChatGPT,” Steyer, sporting a ball cap labeling himself a “class traitor,” told more than 500 supporters at a community college near downtown Los Angeles on Sunday afternoon. “That’s the story of Xavier Becerra.”

Corporations, along with labor unions and interest groups including the California Assn. of Realtors, have spent more than $18.7 million to boost Becerra as of Sunday, according to the election spending tracker California Target Book.

“These companies may be selfish, but they’re not stupid. They don’t give hundreds of thousands of dollars to get someone elected unless they know he’s going to be on their side,” Steyer said.

Though Steyer earned his fortune in part through past investments in private prisons, fossil fuels and private equity, his supporters described him as a reformed billionaire who stepped away from those industries more than a decade ago.

Francesca Fiorentini, a comedian and podcaster, compared Steyer to Charles Dickens’ fictional miser Ebenezer Scrooge.

“At the end of ‘A Christmas Carol,’ nobody turns to Ebenezer and is like, ‘No, I’m not gonna accept your gifts.’ No, they welcome him. They might clown him a little bit, but we need to welcome someone like Tom Steyer,” Fiorentini said. “Tom Steyer is actually listening, he actually cares, he’s actually changing his belief system and he’s acting accordingly.”

Though he mainly went after Becerra, Steyer also made sure to criticize Hilton.

“You are not voting for who’s on the ballot, you’re voting for the California that comes after,” Steyer said. “The California that Steve Hilton is running on sounds exactly like what Trump wants: higher prices, lower wages, and less freedom.”

His campaign underscored his attacks against Becerra by having a handful of supporters dressed as zombies speak outside of Becerra’s Sunday evening rally in Long Beach. Waving signs naming businesses that have supported Becerra, they wore lanyards describing “Big Oil,” “Big Tech” and other corporate sectors as Becerra’s “bestie.”

At a raucous rally, elected officials, labor leaders and reproductive rights advocates were among the speakers who introduced Becerra, who attacked Steyer and Hilton, though not by name.

“We are not going to let a billionaire or Trump’s handpicked candidate take over this state,” he told more than 1,000 people at the city’s convention center. “We are not going to let them gut Medicaid while Californians work hard to build a future. We are not going to let them buy an election…. Not here, not in this state, not on our watch.”

Becerra seemed in awe as he stood in front of the packed room.

“Look around this room. One of our opponents has a billion dollars in a checkbook,” he said. “We have something better… We don’t have the money, but we have the movement. We don’t have the money, but we’ve got the momentum. And in this state, if you’ve got the momentum, you run across the finish line, and you win, baby, you win.”

Becerra also released a new video that ostensibly attacks Hilton as “Trump’s favorite” — a thinly veiled effort to prop up Hilton among Republicans to ensure he finished ahead of Steyer in the primary. Given that Democratic voters outnumber Republicans by almost 2 to 1, Becerra would much rather face Hilton than Steyer in the general election.

Newsom’s campaign employed this strategy to boost GOP businessman John Cox in the 2018 gubernatorial election, as did then-Rep. Adam Schiff against Republican Steve Garvey in Schiff’s successful 2024 U.S. Senate race.

Billionaire Tom Steyer has argued that he is the only candidate not beholden to special interests.

(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)

Steyer launched an ad this weekend titled “Risky” that implies Becerra could face criminal charges related to the acts of two former advisors who have plead guilty to federal charges related to stealing campaign funds from a dormant Becerra campaign account.

Becerra’s campaign called the ad defamatory in a cease and desist letter sent to the Steyer campaign on Saturday.

Becerra, Hilton and Steyer, the front-runners in the race, barnstormed the state in the final days before the June 2 primary. They devoted much of their attention to voters in Southern California, which is home to many of the state’s 23.2 million registered voters. Lower-polling candidates also stumped in the Southland — San José Mayor Matt Mahan greeted diners at Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles, and former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter kicked off a union canvassing event in Orange on Saturday.

Unlike recent contests to lead the nation’s most populous state, this year’s gubernatorial contest failed to energize the electorate. Despite a crowded field of candidates with notable resumes, as well as record-breaking spending by Steyer and independent-expenditure committees. Californians only recently tuned in.

Political experts of both parties believe voters malaise was due to fatigue about the nation’s political polarization, as well as Trump administration policies such as federal tariffs that drove up prices everywhere and some that disproportionately affected California, such as immigration raids. Southern Californians were also reeling from the devastating wildfires in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena and last year’s special election to redraw the state’s congressional boundaries.

Earlier this year, Democratic leaders worried that their voters would splinter among their candidates, creating a scenario where two Republicans advanced to the general election. They controversially urged their party’s candidates to assess their viability, effectively urging several low-polling candidates to drop out of the race.

Democratic turnout also prompted concerns. As of May 22, mail ballots returned by Democrats were 9.2% lower compared with the 2022 gubernatorial primary, while ballots returned by Republicans were 11.6% higher, according to Political Data Intelligence. But the return rates are shifting — as of Friday, Democrats were 7% behind their 2022 return rate, while Republicans were 6.8% higher.

The most recent polls suggest that the prospect of two Republicans advancing to the general election is nonexistent, and there is now a slim chance that two Democrats win the top two spots in the June 2 primary.

One more day and it’ll all be over. I’m referring to the primary election, of course, and the unremitting campaign ads that have infiltrated every aspect of our being as Californians.

Authentic or paid influencers promoting candidates on TikTok and Instagram. Facebook ads vilifying or praising various measures. Incessant, repetitive TV campaigns that get nastier with every election, yet still manage to feel like an analogue remnant from 1982. The worst? Those sponsored leaflets and postcard mailers that end up as makeshift coasters, mosquito swatters or unread refuse that goes straight from the mailbox into the blue recycle bin.

The king of ad spending is Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer. He’s behind the most expensive political advertising campaign in the country this year. A former hedge fund manager, Steyer has reportedly spent more than $200 million on his campaign, with a major chunk of that for broadcast TV, cable and radio — 20 times the amount spent by fellow Democrat, former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services and California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra. And Steyer is still polling behind Becerra.

I never thought I’d write this but it’s not always about the money.

Xavier Becerra, front-runner in the race for California governor, speaks before a crowd at UFCW Local 1167 Union Hall.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Voters have more resources than ever should they choose to actually research and learn about who and what is poised to shape the future of their city, county and state.

There’s no shortage of broadcast, cable, digital and print reporting about former reality TV personality turned mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt. He uses AI!

The battle between incumbent Karen Bass and her closest Democratic competition, Los Angeles city council member Nithya Raman, dominates local newscasts. And there’s pundits from both sides arguing for and against these choices on every available platform.

Given the amount of information now at voter’s fingertips, we should be the most informed voting populace in the history of ballot casting. But are we?

A new poll by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies that was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times asked 8,578 registered voters across California what sources they rely on to get news and information about election-related issues. The poll, which was conducted online May 19-24 in English and Spanish, found that nearly half of the state’s electorate (47%) said they refer to the official voter information guide that is mailed to voters in advance of each election.

Discovering that a nonpartisan, non-sponsored source of data topped the list is a welcome surprise. Today’s media-verse is so fractured and bifurcated along political lines, I just assumed that confirmation bias would drive most folks toward friendly sources, i.e. what they want to hear.

Not as surprising is that 44% of those polled said they use Google or other search engines to seek out election-related information, and greater than 3 in 10 obtain election-related information from social media (39%). Traditional means of information weren’t far behind search engines. Those polled said they still rely on national or cable TV news (39%), newspapers, online or in print (37%), and local TV news (35%). One in three (33%) get information word-of-mouth from family, friends, neighbors or co-workers.

Gubernatorial candidate and billionaire Tom Steyer, right, meets with supporters at a campaign stop.

(Sara Nevis/For The Times)

“The substantial differences in news sources across generation, education and partisanship suggest that we are a considerable distance from the information environment that dominated most of the 20th century, where local newspapers, network news and local television stations dominated,” said Professor Eric Schickler, co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies. “This fragmentation means that voters may no longer share a common frame of reference when evaluating candidates and election issues.”

The increasingly splintered ways in which voters seek information, fueled by the rapid changes in technology and media, has kept political campaign strategists on their toes.

“Getting attention is the first barrier, and then once you have that attention, how do you convert that into support?” says Democratic campaign consultant and strategist Brian Brokaw. “You have to create a surround-sound effect in order to persuade the voter to go for your candidate or your issue, and they have to hear from multiple avenues. Voters are innately skeptical of advertising, especially when it’s a very direct sale from a candidate. That’s why you’re seeing the use of more influencers in campaigns, particularly paid influencers, who may or may not be disclosing that they are being paid. That’s been a prominent issue in the governor’s race.”

Age, or generational differences, are another deciding factor in where voters look for more intelligence on issues and candidates. The poll found that two-thirds of voters under the age of 30 (67%) and a majority of those ages 30-39 (52%) use social media such as Facebook, X, Instagram, or TikTok to get their information.

Getting to know a candidate, particularly via social media, isn’t necessarily part of a rigorous, fact finding mission. Laughing at Pratt’s Batman-themed video or Gov. Gavin Newsom’s satirical X posts are more about bonding with the person than unpacking their policies. Real or perceived, discovering a candidate via one’s Instagram feels more organic than seeing them on billboard or TV ad.

“One way that politics has changed is that people are craving authenticity. Someone like [Zohran] Mamdani, was very successful and promoted himself from the back of the pack to mayor of New York City. But what people are seeing doesn’t mean that’s the truth,” warns Republican consultant and campaign strategist Kevin Spillane. “I’ve been involved in politics for 40 years. A lot of people are not how they present themselves. But we still crave authenticity, we want to believe [in someone], we want that connection.”

We’ll soon see who Californians choose to represent them and their concerns — or which candidate waged the best campaign warfare, substantive political arguments be damned. But it may take a minute to count all the votes. California reached a record number of registered voters ahead of Tuesday’s primary election, according to the Secretary of State’s office. Officials say more than 23.1 million Californians are now registered to vote statewide.

West Coasters who want to understand what they’re voting for have infinite resources to turn to, some more useful than others. Sponsored mailers (the aforementioned mosquito swatters) only appealed to 9% of those polled as a useful source of information. But did you really need a poll to tell you that?

Election workers collecting ballots from a drop box in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday found multiple mail-in ballots that had been burned, officials say.

The vandalism was discovered Sunday morning outside the Department of Public Social Services building in the Civic Center area. According to county officials, election staff were conducting a routine ballot collection when they found the damaged ballots.

They “appeared to have sustained fire-related damage inside an Official Ballot Drop Box,” according to a news release from the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s Office.

Officials did not immediately provide further details.

A second incident of election-related vandalism was reported at a voting center in Long Beach. The incident occurred at the center at Cesar E. Chavez Park. No other details were provided.

News of the vandalism comes just days before election day on June 2.

In L.A. County, ballot drop boxes are collected on a regular schedule by two election workers, according to the county registrar-recorder’s website. Drop-off boxes are available to voters 29 days before election day. Boxes are typically bolted into concrete or chained in place.

“Our responsibility is to protect voters and ensure every eligible voter has the opportunity to cast a ballot,” said Dean Logan, registrar-recorder/county clerk. “Any attempt to interfere with voting or election operations is taken seriously. We will continue working closely with law enforcement and other partners to safeguard the voting process and ensure voters can participate with confidence.”

The registrar-recorder is “carefully reviewing both incidents and working to identify any voters who may have been affected,” according to the release. “Voters whose ballots may have been impacted by the Drop Box incident will be contacted directly and provided information about available options, including replacement ballots if necessary.”

In 2020, a ballot box caught on fire at the Baldwin Park Library, prompting an investigation of potential arson. Firefighters had to cut open the metal drop box to extinguish the fire, and numerous ballots inside were damaged, some charred beyond recognition.

The Los Angeles Police Department did not immediately provide details about Sunday’s incident. A police report was filed, according to the county registrar-recorder.

To check the status of your ballot, visit the county registrar-recorder’s website. Drop boxes close at 8 p.m. on election day.

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NEWARK, N.J. — The mayor of Newark imposed a curfew early Sunday around an immigration detention center in New Jersey after a series of intense clashes between protesters and police.

The curfew around Delaney Hall will be in place between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. until further notice, Mayor Ras Baraka said in a statement.

The move came after another night of standoffs between law enforcement and demonstrators at the facility, as protesters could be seen in photographs and videos fighting over barricades as police used riot shields to push them back. A video posted on social media showed police on horseback marching into crowds, attempting to break up groups of demonstrators.

The high-profile demonstrations at Delaney Hall began this month after advocates said detainees launched a hunger strike over poor living conditions at the 1,000-bed facility, the latest focus of opposition over the federal government’s immigration crackdown.

The private company GEO Group operates the lockup under the supervision of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The shuttered facility reopened for immigration detainees in February 2025.

New Jersey state police on Friday replaced federal immigration enforcement agents who had been facing off against protesters at the facility for days.

In a statement Sunday morning, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill said masked people attacked a barrier in a designated protest area set up by state police and were “throwing projectiles, utilizing the barriers as weapons, and lighting tires on fire in the street.”

“These actions put both peaceful protesters and law enforcement in danger,” Sherrill said, urging calm to focus on advocating for “better conditions for the detainees, for their families, and ultimately, for the closure of Delaney Hall.”

Sherrill also said that the federal government has reopened family visits at Delaney Hall starting Sunday.

Asked about visitations resuming, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in a statement, “To be clear: Visitation was only suspended because of violent riots. Now that we have a secure perimeter, visitation can resume.”

Far-right outsider Abelardo de la Espriella will face left-wing Senator Ivan Cepeda in the run-off for Colombia’s presidential election next month.

After polls closed on Sunday, the two candidates quickly surged ahead in the vote tally, extinguishing the hopes of right-wing Senator Paloma Valencia, a former frontrunner.

As of Sunday afternoon, with 99 percent of the votes tallied, de la Espriella took the lead, with 43 percent of the ballots cast in his favour.

Cepeda trailed him by more than 600,000 votes, earning 40 percent support.

Neither candidate breached the 50-percent threshold needed to avoid a head-to-head match-up on June 21. But the results are likely to buoy de la Espriella’s campaign going into the final round.

Cepeda had consistently topped public opinion polls in the final weeks before the vote. A May 24 poll from the National Consulting Centre (CNC) showed him with more than 33 percent support, ahead of de la Espriella’s 30.9 percent.

De la Espriella’s ‘outsider’ campaign

Questions about security were at the forefront of voters’ concerns going into Sunday’s election.

De la Espriella, a businessman and lawyer who has never held elected office, leaned heavily into fears of crime as he launched an outsider campaign, similar to the dark-horse bid of Argentinian President Javier Milei.

By contrast, Cepeda is a well-known quantity in Colombian politics. His father was a senator, too, before he was assassinated in 1994, in what was widely considered to be an act of political violence.

Cepeda himself has served as a senator since 2014. Before that, he served in the Chamber of Deputies, representing the capital, Bogota.

During his political career, he became embroiled in a long-running legal dispute with former right-wing President Alvaro Uribe, whom he accused of complicity with right-wing paramilitaries.

Uribe initially sued Cepeda for defamation, but in a dramatic twist, Colombia’s Supreme Court dismissed the charge and instead investigated Uribe for witness tampering.

While Uribe was initially found guilty and sentenced to 12 years of house arrest, an appeals court ultimately struck down the verdict, citing procedural errors, including insufficient evidence.

Security a top concern

Central to the rift in Colombia’s politics is the country’s six-decade-long internal conflict.

Since 1964, criminal networks, government forces, left-wing rebels and right-wing paramilitaries have all jockeyed against one another for power and territory.

Cepeda has been critical of right-wing efforts to solve the conflict through military might alone.

Instead, he has allied himself with Colombia’s outgoing president, Gustavo Petro, the first left-wing figure ever elected to the country’s highest office.

A former rebel fighter, Petro has championed a policy he calls “Total Peace”, which actively seeks negotiated solutions to the fighting.

While critics have questioned the efficacy of “Total Peace”, pointing to a recent uptick in violence, Cepeda has nevertheless pledged to carry it forward. He represents Petro’s left-wing Historic Pact party in this year’s election.

In an interview this month with CNN, Cepeda acknowledged the policy’s “immense challenges”, saying: “We cannot continue to develop conversations that do not yield clear results.”

But he rejected overly militaristic solutions, as well as the prospect of intervention by the United States. The US-led “war on drugs”, Cepeda said, has “failed spectacularly”.

De la Espriella, meanwhile, has embraced the kind of hardline security platform commonly associated with El Salvador’s leader, Nayib Bukele.

His platform includes a pledge to crack down on crime and build 10 megaprisons in Colombia.

Nicknamed “The Tiger”, he founded the Defenders of the Homeland political party and is known to rally with the slogan, “Stand firm for the nation”.

“The only peace process I believe in is one imposed by the force of arms and the laws of the republic,” de la Espriella told The Associated Press news agency this month.

Like US President Donald Trump, de la Espriella has also threatened to launch a bombing campaign to disrupt drug-trafficking, killing suspects by downing planes and shooting boats.

But such campaigns have been widely denounced as a form of extrajudicial killing, effectively denying suspects the chance of defending themselves in a court of law.

Narrowing odds for Colombia’s left

More than 23.6 million Colombians voted in Sunday’s election, though there was a high number of blank or nullified ballots.

Early estimates, with 99 percent of ballots tallied, indicate that 245,342 voting sheets were null, and another 406,830 were left blank.

The second round is likely to be an uphill battle for Cepeda. Colombia’s right-wing is expected to consolidate behind de la Espriella in the second round.

In Sunday’s vote count, more than 10.3 million ballots were cast for de la Espriella, compared with roughly 9.7 million for Cepeda.

A victory for the right would continue a regional trend in Latin America. Last year alone, left-wing governments in Chile, Honduras and Bolivia were all replaced by right-wing presidential contenders.

De la Espriella signalled his optimism about the second round in a social media post as the results rolled in.

“We are going to defeat tyranny and absolutism,” de la Espriella wrote. “We have advanced to the run-off thanks to the more than 10 million Colombians who answered the roar. In 21 days, we will make history!”

WASHINGTON — The congressman returned home last Fourth of July to startling stories in Southern California as immigration patrols swept through communities, and one constituent told him about starting to carry a passport as proof of the right to be in the country.

Rep. Mark Takano, whose American-born parents were both incarcerated as young children with their families during the forced relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II, could not help but see the parallels between that chapter of American history and this one.

“I do feel like there’s a similarity of circumstance of my own 2-year-old father and my 1-year-old mother being labeled as enemy aliens and they’re considered a danger to national security,” the Riverside Democrat told the Associated Press in a recent interview.

“They’re put into these incarceration camps,” he said. “Similar arguments have been made by this administration — that immigrants pose a grave danger to our country and it’s for the security of our country that we’re doing this.”

Echoes of history

President Trump’s campaign to achieve the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history is at an inflection point. Americans are seeing what it looks like to round up, detain and deport thousands of people, particularly in the aftermath of the deaths this year of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, U.S. citizens protesting the federal crackdown in Minneapolis.

The White House changed the leadership at the Department of Homeland Security as it reframes its approach. New Secretary Markwayne Mullin promised to keep the department off the front pages.

But Trump is also under mounting pressure from conservative groups not to let up on the goal of deporting 1 million people a year. The president’s Republican allies in Congress are fueling the immigration and deportation actions with billions of dollars in special funds.

Takano, the ranking Democrat on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, has drawn from his own family history — and the country’s eventual redress to Japanese Americans who were detained — to challenge Trump’s approach.

“We look back on that era of history as a shameful one, as a time when our political leaders failed the Constitution, failed the American people,” he said.

One family’s story among many

A high school history teacher before being elected to Congress in 2012, Takano grew up in Southern California and came to understand the family stories.

His grandfather Isao Takano arrived in the U.S. from Hiroshima and married Kazue Takahashi, a U.S.-born citizen. Together they settled in Bellevue, Wash., and started a business growing tomatoes, strawberries and chrysanthemums for the marketplace in Seattle.

When the U.S. entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they were among some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, immigrants and those born in the U.S., forcibly relocated.

His father, William, was 2 years old when his family was sent in 1942 to the incarceration camp at Tule Lake in Central California. His mother, Nancy Tsugiye Sakamoto, born in California to American-born parents, was a year old when she was relocated to the detention facility in Heart Mountain, Wyo.

Then, as now, he said, people are being swept up in the anti-immigrant detentions.

“Will Americans generations from now visit ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ and think to themselves, how could our government do this?” Takano said during a House floor speech, referring to the Trump administration’s immigration detention facility in Florida.

“These future generations of Americans will look to us, the Congress, to see what we did to try to stop it.”

A Reagan-era law seen as model

Takano remembers his father taking him to see the land the family once owned. He learned about his great-uncles who served in the Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team of Japanese American soldiers; one was killed in action in Italy. He recalls his own father later collected donations for the national redress campaign.

In 1988 Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, which sought to apologize for the “grave injustice” that had been done and provide $20,000 to each person detained. President Reagan signed it into law.

Takano’s parents were among those who received a letter of apology from the federal government, he said, and a payment.

Talks are underway among some in Congress, he said, for a similar redress to the people who have had their car windows smashed in, their homes raided and livelihoods upended as part of Trump’s immigration enforcement operations.

“Remarkably the country did come to realize the mistake,” he said. “I believe we’re living through one of those eras of mistakes, and I believe we can come out of this moment stronger.”

Mascaro writes for the Associated Press.

Yes, voting centers will be open across Los Angeles this week. And no, you don’t have to cast your ballot by mail.

With days left before the June 2 primary, President Trump made a round of misleading claims about the electoral process, this time falsely suggesting that the city was holding elections only by mail.

Trump’s comments came Saturday during an appearance on Fox News when he was asked by host Lara Trump — the president’s daughter-in-law — about his predictions for the upcoming primary.

“You know, they don’t have voting booths; everything’s by mail,” Trump responded. “I don’t think a Republican can win in California unless you pass the Save America Act — then they’re gonna have to show proof of citizenship, they’re going to have to get rid of mail-in voting.”

The L.A. County registrar-recorder moved to set the record straight in a tweet posted Sunday morning that read “MISINFORMATION ALERT.”

Noting that in-person voting was in fact allowed, the agency announced that it had 646 vote centers across the county — each with multiple voting booths. The centers will be open from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Monday and Tuesday, the agency said in the posting, while tagging Fox News and the White House.

A map of polling locations featured on the agency’s website shows that there are dozens of voter centers available countywide. Mobile vote centers also were made available at various sites in the county. Mobile voting runs for the 10 days before election day and will not be available on June 2, according to the county registrar-recorder.

As of Friday morning, 333,000 mail-in votes had been cast in the June 2 primary for Los Angeles mayor, city attorney, city controller and eight of the 15 City Council seats. This was up from 321,000 at the same time in 2022, according to registrar-recorder.

Registered voters already should have received a ballot in the mail. Those who choose to vote in person can take their mail-in ballot to a vote center and ask to vote in person instead. Residents who haven’t yet registered to vote can still do so by requesting a conditional voter registration application at any voter center and filling out their ballot as they normally would.

Recent polling suggests that, ahead of Tuesday’s primary, incumbent Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has what pollsters deem a statistically insignificant lead in her bid for reelection as the city’s top executive. Bass is locked in a tight race with councilmember and former ally Nithya Raman and Spencer Pratt.

Trump has signaled his support for Pratt but hasn’t formally endorsed the former reality TV star and registered Republican. Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon said the president hadn’t done so out of the fear it would hurt Pratt’s chances in Democrat-dominant Los Angeles.

In 2020, during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gov. Gavin Newsom took the unprecedented step of issuing a statewide order for voting by mail for that year’s election in what he described as a necessary step to limit the virus’ spread.

A handful of rural counties had no in-person voting locations that March.

In 1979, the state eliminated the need for an excuse to receive an absentee ballot, and an option to choose permanent absentee voting was created in 2002. In the decades since, Californians have embraced the flexibility that voting away from a polling place offers. In nearly every statewide election since 2008, the majority of votes have not been cast at a traditional polling place.

Fourteen more counties — including Orange, Sacramento and Santa Clara — have adopted the state Voter’s Choice Act, an optional state law that requires them to mail every voter a ballot and to replace traditional neighborhood polling places with multipurpose vote centers. Those in-person locations offer multiple election services for up to 10 days before election day.

Los Angeles, the 15th county to adopt the new state law, was initially given special permission by the Legislature to implement it without mailing every voter a ballot.

Trump has for years repeated baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen and that undocumented immigrants were swaying elections by voting illegally.

In light of these claims, Trump and some Republicans have pushed for new restrictions on voters. A federal proposal known as the Save America Act — which would require Americans to prove they are U.S. citizens before they register to vote and to show identification at the polls, among other things — cleared the U.S. House but stalled out in the Senate.

In November, California voters will weigh in on a similarly contentious ballot measure pushed by Republicans that would require all voters in future elections to show identification every time they vote in person or provide a special PIN when submitting mail-in ballots.

Under current state law, Californians 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 are U.S. citizens. They are not required to show or provide identification when casting a ballot in person or by mail.

If passed, the California ballot measure would require voters to present government-issued identification, such as a state driver’s license, every time they vote. Voters mailing ballots would be required to write a four-digit number, essentially a PIN, on their ballot envelopes matching the one generated when they registered to vote.

Critics of California’s voter ID initiative, including many legal scholars, say the ballot measure addresses a problem that does not exist.

In May, a federal judge handed Trump a victory by declining to halt the president’s executive order creating a federal list of eligible voters and then directed the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to those on the list. Observers say the decision opens the door for potential sweeping changes in how American elections are run shortly before this year’s midterm elections.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The leading candidates for mayor fanned out across Los Angeles this weekend to make their final cases to voters ahead of Tuesday’s hotly contested primary election.

An energized Mayor Karen Bass galvanized crowds of labor union workers sporting union merch Saturday. “Four more years!” crowds chanted as a slew of local and state Democratic heavyweights joined the incumbent.

City Councilmember Nithya Raman spent the day dashing between local restaurants and bars in an old-school yellow Scout convertible to meet with business owners and her supporters.

Meanwhile, former reality TV personality Spencer Pratt hosted a block party in Baldwin Village with barbecue food, free merch and American-flag lawn chairs — although he spent much of the event off to the side, listening to the concerns of Black residents.

Recent polls have placed Pratt and Raman within striking distance of Bass, who had enjoyed a comfortable lead for much of the campaign. A recent survey, co-sponsored by The Times, had Bass at 26%, Raman at 25% and Pratt at 22% — with a roughly 3% margin of error in either direction and 10% of voters undecided.

The top two candidates in Tuesday’s jungle primary will advance to a November runoff, unless one candidate manages to garner over 50% of the vote.

Mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt speaks with Diane Waterhouse, a caregiver and Westchester native, about homelessness and drug addiction at a campaign event Saturday in Baldwin Village. “We just talk about it like, ‘oh it’s Skid Row, that’s just where the drug addicts are.’ No, there’s communities, there’s kids, there’s people that work there, businesses,” Pratt said.

(Noah Haggerty / Los Angeles Times)

“I believe God moves mountains; I believe that you can get that 51% on that Tuesday,” Diane Waterhouse, a 60-year-old caregiver, told Pratt at his Baldwin Village event.

On the lawn of Jim Gilliam Park on Saturday, supporters from across the city chanted Pratt’s name, took selfies in front of black campaign vans with his hummingbird logo and ate cookies decorated with his face as kids raced around on scooters and played with the handful of dogs attending.

But Pratt — who had spent the morning at the West Los Angeles Animal Shelter speaking with animal welfare advocates — headed toward the nearby recreation center to talk with residents away from the cameras.

“Most people that come here and want our vote — we give y’all our vote; we’re still living like this. Nothing changes,” Erica Helon, a 40-year-old bus driver, told Pratt in one of the most tense moments of the event.

Pratt, wearing a beige suit and a hat with his name stylized like the L.A. Lakers logo, emphasized he was in South Los Angeles to listen and wasn’t even asking residents for their votes. He pulled Helon aside and gave her his personal phone number so they could talk more.

“I’m here because I want to be a voice for the community,” he said at one point. “I’m here because I don’t know what I don’t know.”

Helon, who is still undecided, left the event open-minded on Pratt.

“I would love to see what he’s going to do for this city,” she said.

Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman joins a group photograph during a campaign stop Sunday with SevaSphere volunteers after preparing meals for people experiencing homelessness at Oaks Kitchens.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

Raman, who has made publishing detailed policy plans a staple of her campaign, spent Saturday meeting with local restaurant owners after recently dropping a policy plan for small businesses.

Around sunset, the yellow convertible pulled up to Lowboy Bar, an Echo Park staple. Raman, sporting a Japanese Dodgers hat and a rainbow City Council fanny pack, joined campaign staff for drinks at tables covered in “Nithya Raman for Mayor” pins.

A few young Angelenos, starting out their nights in trendy getups, recognized Raman and stopped by to chat and take pictures.

“I’ve lived in L.A. for 12 years. It’s a very, very important city to me,” said Ryan Bergeron, a 35-year-old who works in marketing and does art on the side.

Bergeron, who is on the Echo Park neighborhood council, hopes Los Angeles can serve as a “beacon in an otherwise scary time in the country” as it tackles affordability, the housing crisis and sustainability issues.

As for Raman, “I’ve seen her as a councilmember and been really proud of that,” Bergeron said. When she announced her candidacy for mayor, “It felt like everything really clicked.”

Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Monica Rodriguez attend the Los Angeles Democratic Party and Avance Democratic Club Carne Asada Tour, a community event held Saturday at the Yosemite Recreation Center. Avanceis one of the country’s largest Latino Democratic clubs.

(Karla Gachet / For The Times)

Bass, conversely, wound down after a day of union rallies by eating tacos at the Yosemite Recreation Center’s picnic tables in Eagle Rock with several local politicians, including Councilmember Monica Rodriguez and county Democratic Party Chair Mark Ramos.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna had joined Bass earlier in the day. Although Luna missed out on the picnic, he still enjoyed several tacos in his car.

Come Sunday, Raman, wearing jeans and a chartreuse cardigan, was greeting bike riders at a Sawtelle coffee shop and speaking to a phone bank group at UCLA.

“It is absolutely essential to making sure that our little campaign, without all the political machine behind us, without MAGA millions behind us, that our vision of Los Angeles still manages to get out to the people, and your work today is an essential part of that,” Raman told a group of United Auto Workers-represented graduate students from multiple nearby universities.

She had several other appearances scheduled for the rest of the day, including lunch with a group of Korean American Democrats in Koreatown, Encinofest, a block party in Silver Lake and a visit to Boyle Heights.

“There seems to be increasing awareness about the race and excitement about the issues,” Raman told The Times. “It’s been really exciting to see people engaging and feeling positive about the city’s future.”

About two dozen students spoke to potential voters associated with UAW and urged them to mark Raman’s name on their ballots by Tuesday.

Stephanie Wert, a 30-year-old psychology graduate student at UCLA and head steward for UAW, said the phone bank could determine whether Raman’s campaign would survive the week.

“This vote is going to be decided on the margins, and so I think we could really make the difference that pushes her to the runoff,” Wert said.

Bass peeked around the back doors of a supporter’s Venice home Sunday afternoon to cheers from several dozen supporters at an intimate event. Speaking over small snack plates and beverages, many said they saw real improvements in the homeless populations around their neighborhood during Bass’ tenure as mayor.

Tatiana Barhar, a Venice resident for over 30 years, said she saw in real-time an “extreme” homelessness problem get better during Bass’ term, thanks to her Inside Safe program. “I want to support her,” she said. “I think there’s a lot more she can do.”

Bass spoke of 1960s-level crime rates, thousands of unhoused people pulled off the street into housing and efforts to build up Hollywood during her time as mayor. “We got a lot to do,” Bass said. “We have such a bright future in the nation’s second-largest city, and I hope that you will continue to be there with me as we win.”

Pratt’s moves on Sunday remained more elusive. His campaign emphasized he was hoping to have intimate moments with L.A. communities, instead of a media and influencer frenzy like some of his previous, more widely publicized events.

One of those more intimate moments was a community event in a Latino neighborhood near downtown L.A. on Sunday morning. Pratt had spent Thursday in New York for some national media interviews to “get the message to as many people as possible.”

Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark in New Jersey, has imposed a curfew on the area surrounding Delaney Hall, the immigration detention centre that has become a flashpoint in the debate over United States President Donald Trump’s mass deportation drive.

The Sunday morning announcement came amid a flare-up in tensions outside the detention centre, which is run by the private contractor GEO Group, as part of a 15-year deal with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“Due to the escalating situation at Delaney Hall and the increasing need for police intervention, immediate action is required to protect public safety,” Baraka wrote in a statement.

“Multiple individuals have already been arrested and found in possession of weapons, underscoring the seriousness of the threat.”

As part of the curfew, movement will be restricted within half a mile (0.8km) of the detention centre between the hours of 9pm and 6am US Eastern time (1:00 to 10:00 GMT).

A nearby road, Doremus Avenue, will also be closed to pedestrians and vehicles that cannot verify their need to be in the area.

Since the reopening of Delaney Hall as an immigration detention facility last year, it has been the site of confrontations between law enforcement and protesters, including Mayor Baraka himself.

The month of May has seen more than a week of daily protests outside Delaney Hall, after lawyers for the detainees at Delaney Hall announced a hunger strike was unfolding inside.

Detainees have denounced the living conditions to human rights groups, reporting expired food, a lack of medical care and abuse at the hands of authorities.

The Trump administration has justified its mass deportation campaign as an effort to rid the US of “the worst of the worst”, framing undocumented immigrants as a criminal threat.

But critics point out that many of those detained have no criminal record, and some who do have only been cited for minor offences.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data-tracking service from Syracuse University, found that, as of April, roughly 71 percent of those in ICE detention had no criminal conviction.

To show solidarity with the hunger strike, protesters have been gathering outside Delaney Hall, locking arms to form human chains and creating barricades to prevent access.

But that has led to tense confrontations with law enforcement, who have used batons and pepper spray to try to clear roads to the facility.

Governor Mikie Sherrill called for the establishment of designated protest zones, to mitigate the likelihood of conflict between officers and demonstrators.

But clashes have continued. Overnight on Wednesday, six protesters were arrested.

Politicians themselves have encountered tense interactions at Delaney Hall.

A year ago, one protest resulted in trespassing charges against Mayor Baraka and assault charges against US Representative LaMonica McIver, after a disagreement over which officials could enter the facility for an inspection.

While the charges against Baraka were dropped, McIver continues to face legal proceedings. She has denied the charges and called the prosecution politically motivated.

“One year ago, the Trump administration threw baseless charges against me for conducting oversight to protect immigrants at Delaney Hall,” McIver wrote on social media on Saturday.

“Have they tried to silence me? Yes. Have the stakes risen? Yes. Am I backing down from speaking up for you? Never.”

This past week, Governor Sherrill was also denied access to the facility. She has since issued a statement calling for Delaney Hall to be shut down.

At a news conference on Saturday, she blamed “national extremist groups” for arriving from out of state and escalating tensions. She added that the current precautions were designed to protect the safety of peaceful protesters.

“I urge those protesting outside of Delaney Hall to bring the temperature down, so we can focus on the detainees and their families,” Sherrill said.

She suggested that the actions of state and local officials would help head off any expanded ICE operations in New Jersey.

“I will not give ICE a pretext to expand operations at Delaney Hall or across our state. I will not put lives at risk,” she said. “I’m grateful to the vast majority of protesters who have assembled peacefully and raised their voices about Delaney Hall’s conditions.”

Millions of Ethiopians are heading to the polls for general elections on June 1.

The governing party of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who has consolidated power since he took office in 2018, says it is confident of victory.

Abiy’s government has faced years of turmoil and conflict. Despite that, it is portraying the vote as the next step on the path towards what it calls genuine democracy.

Critics and the opposition, however, argue that is unlikely because of Ethiopia’s ethnic and regional divisions. Some opposition parties have been excluded and violence is preventing voting in dozens of constituencies.

So, will the vote hold any significance?

Presenter: Mohammed Jamjoom

Guests:

Samuel Getachew – Journalist and commentator specialising in Ethiopian politics and security

Martin Plaut – Senior research fellow at King’s College London

Bizuneh Yimenu – Lecturer in comparative politics at Queen’s University Belfast who specialises in federalism.