politics

ATLANTA — Not long ago, Georgia gubernatorial nominee Rick Jackson eagerly compared himself to his fellow billionaire in the Oval Office. He promised to be Donald Trump “with a Southern tone.” And sharing a summer rally stage, Jackson pointed at the president and declared, “I’m going to be this man’s favorite governor.”

On the debate stage this week with his Democratic opponent, however, Jackson discussed Trump only when Keisha Lance Bottoms brought him up. And he assured his audience that he’d “stand up to anybody.”

Jackson is not alone in his recalibration: Republican nominees for Senate, the U.S. House and governor’s offices across the country are sidestepping President Trump or openly distancing themselves as they debate before Election Day.

Those tactics, not unlike Republicans scrubbing Trump from their campaign websites, are the latest signs of how much Trump’s standing has fallen because of voters’ frustration with inflation, the Iran war and other matters. And the dynamics highlight the perilous options many Republicans face as they try to stitch together winning coalitions that go beyond Trump’s core supporters.

“Republicans right now are facing a voter turnout problem” in their own party, said GOP pollster Paul Shumaker, and must win “unaffiliated voters” who care most about the economy.

“You have to have something significant to change this narrative,” Shumaker said. But, he explained, that means “a significant victory in Iran” and seismic economic improvements — not something any Republican midterm candidate can force from behind a debate podium.

There’s a Trump tightrope on Iran, tariffs and rhetoric

Some Republicans are taking specific positions at odds with the president.

Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers said in his debate Thursday with Democrat Abdul El-Sayed that he’d urged the White House privately to reach a trade deal with Canada and end the president’s tariffs. Canada is Michigan’s largest trading partner, as it is for many Great Lakes and Midwestern states.

Days before, Rogers unveiled a new ad in which he said, “We know that Canada is not our enemy. We need to end the tariff war — now.”

That’s a noticeable departure from Rogers’ earlier, less specific statements praising Trump’s “America First” economic agenda while saying tariffs are not a “one-size-fits-all” solution.

Another Michigan Republican, Rep. Tom Barrett, already had bucked the president by voting for a war powers resolution intended to assert congressional authority over military actions in Iran. But debating Democrat Will Lawrence in their central Michigan district, Barrett added a criticism of Trump’s rhetoric Monday in Nebraska, where he floated the possibility of Iran attacking San Diego and Los Angeles.

The president mentioned those cities as part of his argument that higher gas prices because of his Iran war are a “small price to pay” to keep the country safe. But Democrats seized on the remarks, some insisting that Trump was calling for Iran to attack U.S. cities.

Barrett was asked whether Trump’s words were acceptable. Given the opportunity to echo the White House explanation that Trump was offhandedly mentioning a worst-case scenario he was trying to prevent, Barrett offered no defense.

“Nope,” he said flatly.

Many Republicans prefer a more generalized stiff arm

Reflecting the complex electoral balance, most Republicans have attempted to separate themselves without naming any firm difference with the president.

Running for a promotion to the Senate, Iowa U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson tried in her debate Wednesday against Democrat Josh Turek to reconcile her earlier promises to be a Trump ally in Congress’s upper chamber. She said it would be “really easy” to keep her word and still be bipartisan — a buzz word she’s already been featuring in her campaign.

“I’ll be President Donald Trump’s ally when it is important for Iowa, but I will push back on him — he knows this, because I talk to him regularly — on things that are wrong for our state,” she said. “That’s true no matter who’s in the White House. That’s true no matter who is governing and who has the gavel.”

That’s the same path Jackson took in Georgia, as he pivoted away from Trump by embracing outgoing Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who has clashed with the president, starting with Trump’s false claims that he won Georgia in the 2020 presidential election.

“I will stand up to anybody, just like Brian Kemp has done,” Jackson said.

Another Republican House member, Mike Lawler of New York, made a point of name-checking a Democratic colleague, New Jersey’s Josh Gottheimer, and discussing bills they’d work on together. It was part of his argument that he’s able to challenge Trump and the party line.

“When I agree with the president I say it. When I disagree with the president, I say it,” he said in his closing remarks.

Hinson, meanwhile, referenced bills she’s worked on in the House that have been signed into law by both President Joe Biden and Trump.

But she also avoided criticizing Trump when asked about the president sending Affordable Care Act rebate checks to some Americans and promising a $5,000 bonus after the midterm elections if Republicans retain control of the House and Senate.

She said she “cares very deeply” about making sure Congress maintains the power of the purse and thinks it’s important to “live better within our means.”

Democrats pounce on either approach

Regardless of the Republican efforts, Democrats have continued peppering them with attacks and retorts about Trump. The most heated moments came when Democrat Cait Conley repeatedly said Lawler always voted with Trump.

“No matter how many times you say 100% of the time,” the congressman answered, “it’s provably false.”

When Rogers conceded in his back-and-forth with El-Sayed that the administration “probably” made errors in its mass deportation strategy, the Democrat answered swiftly.

“He said it was probably not right. I mean, it’s definitely not right,” El-Sayed said. “They killed two people.”

And while Georgia’s Jackson seemed uncomfortable talking about Trump, Bottoms was more than happy to mention him.

“I’m not running to be his favorite governor,” she said. “I’m running to work on behalf of people like you.” ___ Associated Press reporters Joey Cappelletti in Washington; Hannah Fingerhut in Des Moines, Iowa; and Jill Colvin in New York contributed to this report.

Barrow writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The Arlington County Board in Virginia filed a lawsuit Thursday opposing the construction of the Triumphal Arch, becoming the first governmental body to take legal action against President Trump’s planned monument.

The lawsuit, filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, criticized the speed at which the project slated for Memorial Circle has moved without going through the full review process.

“The National Park Service, the agency responsible for projects on national park land such as Memorial Circle, is proceeding full-speed toward ground-disturbing construction,” the lawsuit said. “Although the agency has claimed that a final decision to construct the Arch has not yet been made and purports to be engaged in a routine decisional process, that rushed process appears to be a pretext designed to shore up justifications for building the Arch in accordance with the President’s repeated marching orders.”

The lawsuit asks that “the agency’s feverish pace toward construction of the arch” be halted to ensure that the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act be followed and proper analysis and testing be done.

“The Arlington County Board has filed this lawsuit because our community has the most to lose from this egregious and unlawful proposed project,” Arlington County Board Chair Matt de Ferranti said in a statement. He added that the county has acted in good faith in the review process, pointing out the “severe, unique, and wide-ranging negative impacts” the project will have on the county and its residents, only to see them ignored.

Memorial Circle sits on federal parkland west of the Potomac River across the Memorial Bridge and immediately adjacent to Arlington County.

The county is being represented in the lawsuit by legal advocacy group Democracy Forward.

White House spokesman Davis Ingle said the Trump administration and White House have been “fastidiously compliant with all procedural and legal requirements and are certain this meritless and dilatory lawsuit will be dismissed.”

The arch will become one of the world’s most iconic landmarks, he added. “It will enhance the visitor experience at Arlington National Cemetery for veterans, the families of the fallen, and all Americans alike.”

The lawsuit came a day after the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA President Sara Nelson expressed concerns that the 250-foot arch compounds multiple safety issues that she said have gone unaddressed since a deadly January 2025, crash over the Potomac River that killed 67 people. Nelson also criticized Trump’s plan to turn the arch into “a top grade military complex” able to host drones and snipers while storing ammunition.

Though the arch has received early approval from the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, whose members were all tapped by Trump, a group of three veterans and an architectural historian sued in federal court in Washington, D.C., saying the project needs to be approved by Congress. The judge in that lawsuit said the administration must give the court 48 hours before undertaking any activities related to or in preparation for construction of the arch.

The arch is one of several projects around Washington that Trump has undertaken as he remakes the city, from renovating one of its storied public golf courses to threatening to demolish the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Fields writes for the Associated Press.

The White House is expanding its campaign against international workers, targeting elite study and work visa holders with restrictions and a new investigation.

On Thursday, the Trump administration announced a probe into whether Stanford, Caltech, UC Davis and other universities across the country have been abusing a special visa used by international scholars and students to do research and work in the U.S. It is also suspending Microsoft, Adobe and six other tech companies from how they sponsor employees who are in the country under a highly skilled worker visa program.

The White House’s concern is that schools and companies are too quick to bring in people from outside the U.S. The moves rattled Silicon Valley executives and California educators who see easy access to the smartest, hardest-working people in the world as one of America’s greatest competitive advantages.

Vice President JD Vance said the universities being investigated are overusing J-1 visas to bring in students and researchers from abroad. The international scholars then take jobs and grants that could go to Americans.

“They are using these visas way too much,” he said. “They are using them to undercut the wages of American grad students and American researchers, and it simply has to stop.”

Harvard, Yale, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, Arizona State and MIT will also be investigated.

Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito said subpoenas have been served and “nobody will be getting a free pass because their name is carved into an expensive building.” Many universities have buildings named for foreign donors.

While most of the companies targeted for the tech visa restriction were Indian, Vance called out Microsoft.

“There’s been no company, unfortunately, in the United States that has abused this system more than Microsoft,” Vance told reporters at a White House news conference.

Vance said the company has abused the permanent labor certification program, which he argued has enabled Microsoft to hire international talent that is then paid less to replace American workers.

The new development suspends Microsoft from applying for green cards for workers who come to the U.S. on H-1B visas and later apply to become permanent residents.

American technology giants have relied on the H-1B visa program for decades to bring in thousands of skilled foreign workers they cannot find locally. Critics have accused the program of being riddled with fraud and abuse.

The administration’s power move came the same day President Trump awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to two prime examples of international talent who came to the U.S. on student and work visas: Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella and Tesla’s Elon Musk.

Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini were also on the list of companies that will no longer be able to apply for permanent residence status for their H-1B employees.

Microsoft defended the use of H-1B and said in a statement that it looked forward to sharing additional information with the administration. In a post, it said that of the thousands of H-1B visa applications it submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees.

“They equal only 1% of our U.S. workforce. They are not new arrivals to our country,” the company said. “Microsoft only files H-1B petitions for those who meet the rigorous standards of this visa category.”

There’s a limit of 85,000 H-1B visas issued in a fiscal year, and they are selected through a lottery system. Last year, Microsoft was the third-largest beneficiary of the program, with 6,258 H-1B visas, according to data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Amazon led the list, employing more than 13,000 H-1 B visa holders; Adobe had 777 approved applications.

The Thursday announcement has sparked confusion among technology workers and companies. Immigration lawyers point out that the action is not a blanket suspension of green card applications for all employers, but a targeted enforcement freeze on the Permanent Labor Certification program for the eight named corporations.

Proponents of H-1B note that Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies are founded or run by immigrants, and the efforts to thwart H-1B have already started stifling talent flow and startup creation.

“It’s only going to probably hurt some companies and hurt the best and the brightest that are coming here,” said Devashish Mitra, professor of economics at Syracuse University. “It’s like throwing the baby with the bathwater.”

The J-1 investigations follow other actions, making it more difficult for international students to come to U.S. campuses. This year, the Department of Homeland Security said it wanted to end a “duration of status” visa policy that lets students stay in the U.S. through the completion of their programs and limit stays to four years. A federal judge blocked the change, and the government is appealing.

The Trump administration has also proposed charging colleges $70,000 per student for Optional Practical Training, which lets international students work in their fields of study for a limited number of years after graduation. Students now pay about $500.

In a statement, a Stanford spokesperson said the campus “complies with all applicable visa laws, including those relating to J-1 visas. We will cooperate with the investigation.”

A UC Davis spokesperson said the university “carefully complies with all federal laws and regulations for visas and looks forward to working with our federal partners to confirm compliance.”

A Caltech spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

About 275,000 people started J-1 programs in 2025, down from 301,694 in 2024, according to State Department data. Trainees and temporary summer workers, such as au pairs and summer camp counselors, also use the visa to enter the U.S.

Most were not at universities, with a majority working summer jobs.

The Trump administration’s crackdown has started to dissuade students from coming to the U.S., with experts expecting a drop in their registration when data for 2025 are released next month.

New research scholars fell 27% from 2024 to 17,622, about half the 2015 total. Most new research scholars in 2025 came from China, followed by South Korea and India.

California drew the most research scholars, 3,211. It ranked second behind New York for all new J-1s in 2025, with 23,167.

The State Department vets applicants and approves sponsors. Research scholars can stay up to five years

Sarah Spreitzer, vice president and chief of staff for government relations at the American Council on Education, said she had found little information about what the new probes would cover. But she said the federal government already has tools “to identify fraud, both in the granting of the visa and then also tracking the person through the Department of Homeland Security.”

“I think that all of these things are focused on bringing fewer international students into the United States, and we have been seeing that impact,” she said, expecting “a huge drop in our international enrollment this year, given everything going on.”

Oct. 9, 2026 8:06 AM PT

WASHINGTON — President Trump opened another chapter in his effort to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook Friday by establishing a “committee of inquiry” to investigate allegations that she made false statements in mortgage applications.

The inquiry will include a hearing at the White House Nov. 5, Trump said in a written memo, that Cook “shall” attend to answer questions from the committee. The hearing wouldn’t be public but a transcript would be published, the memo said.

Trump’s extraordinary demand that Cook testify before the committee will likely renew concerns about threats to the Federal Reserve’s independence as the president demands the central bank cut its key interest rate. Just last month, the Fed raised its key rate instead, led by Chairman Kevin Warsh, whom Trump appointed earlier this year.

“As President, it is my job to ensure the laws are faithfully executed, including by firing subordinates who cannot be trusted to tell the truth and follow the law,” Trump wrote in the memorandum.

Trump and some of his economic advisers have blamed the Fed’s broader rate-setting committee, which includes 12 voting members and 19 officials in total, for the rate hike. Cook is one of the 12 participants on the committee that votes on interest-rate decisions. The vote to lift rates Sept. 16 was unanimous.

The move follows a Supreme Court ruling in June that Cook could keep her job after Trump sought to fire her last year. That ruling included a footnote that said nothing prevented Trump from “trying again” as long as she was given proper notice and an opportunity to respond to the charges.

Cook has denied any wrongdoing and has not been charged with a crime.

Rugaber writes for the Associated Press.

Eritrea denies backing TPLF as Ethiopia alleges collusion, further straining their already volatile relationship.

Ethiopia has accused Eritrea of an “all-out invasion” in a message to the United Nations Security Council, while Eritrea says it is facing a “war of aggression” from its neighbour.

“The all-out invasion of parts of northern Ethiopia by Eritrea is a matter of public record,” said a letter by Ethiopia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Gedion Timothewos, which was shared with news agencies on Friday.

“It is a blatant act of aggression that engages Ethiopia’s inherent right to self-defence,” added the letter dated Thursday and addressed to French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot.

Gedion said that Eritrean troops had advanced up to 60 kilometres (37 miles) into Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region and demanded their withdrawal, just days after the two nations cut diplomatic ties.

Eritrea’s Minister of Information Yemane Gebremeskel rejected Ethiopia’s claims.

“The Ethiopian regime has been pursuing, in effect, an unprovoked war of aggression against Eritrea for more than three years now,” he said on X.

Yemane said Asmara had shown restraint since landlocked Ethiopia had essentially declared a war against Eritrea when it stated in 2023 that it would gain access to the sea.

Citing statements made by Ethiopian officials, Yemane accused Addis Ababa of using the current conflict ⁠to take Assab, an Eritrean port, in order to restore access to the Red Sea.

Eritrea also denied Ethiopia’s claim that it is backing the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which is part of an alliance of seven armed groups that has been attempting to overthrow Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government since September.

Over the past week, Ethiopia’s army has pushed back the TPLF and seized the Tigrayan capital, Mekelle.

Witnesses also told the AFP news agency that rebels had lost the Tigrayan cities of Shire and Adigrat. Eritrean troops were reportedly seen in Adigrat before Ethiopian drone strikes hit them, according to several witnesses.

Tumultuous history

Ethiopia and Eritrea have traded accusations since the reported ⁠incursions by Eritrean troops this week raised fears of outright war in the region, where the two nations have fought previous conflicts.

The stakes have been raised this time around by conflicts in the Horn of Africa region and tensions across the Red Sea.

Diplomatic ties between the two have collapsed amid the escalation: Ethiopia closed its embassy in Asmara and ordered 10 Eritrean diplomats to leave the country last week. In response, Eritrea announced it was severing ties.

The neighbours have a tumultuous history, as Eritrea won independence from Ethiopia in 1993 and they fought a border war for two years in 1998.

Relations improved slightly in 2018 when Abiy took power in Addis Ababa, and Eritrea fought alongside Ethiopia against the TPLF in a civil war from 2020 to 2022.

Eritrea, however, was not part of the peace deal that ended the war, which soured ties soon afterwards.

Tensions are also fuelled by Abiy’s repeated claim that landlocked Ethiopia – which lost its access to the coast when Eritrea secured independence – has a right to sea access, which Eritrea sees as a threat to seize its Red Sea port of Assab.

Tech scion David Ellison spent three years doggedly pursuing his dream: acquiring Paramount, then Warner Bros. Discovery.

Ellison pulled off his bold feat this week by completing Paramount’s $111-billion takeover of Warner Bros., uniting two industry pioneers and a wealth of cherished properties — Batman, Bugs Bunny, Harry Potter and Maverick of “Top Gun,” as well as CBS, HBO, Comedy Central and CNN. All will be tucked under a corporate umbrella that Ellison is calling Skydance — the name of the studio he formed two decades ago.

The mogul and his lieutenants celebrated their victory in style, ringing the New York Stock Exchange opening bell on Thursday, capping a bruising battle to secure approval of a deal that had sparked protests across Hollywood over fears of looming job cuts.

Ellison and his team must braid together two huge film studios (housing nine film labels), four streaming services, three TV production studios, three animation units and more than 50 television networks, including two prominent news organizations. That could be a daunting task, particularly based on how previous Hollywood mergers have fared.

“Now, the real work begins,” David G. Fubini, a Harvard Business School senior lecturer, said in an interview.

Anxieties were evident Tuesday — the day the deal closed — when Ellison held a town hall meeting at Warner Bros., which drew nearly 500 employees.

During the session, CNN’s Anderson Cooper quizzed his new bosses, including about anticipated layoffs and news independence.

“Do you stand with CNN and our effort to completely restore access to covering President Trump?” Cooper asked, referring to CNN’s legal fight alongside MS Now and Politico to reverse the president’s ban on the three organizations.

“Of course,” Ellison replied.

CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper, pictured here in 2021, quizzed his bosses at a Burbank town hall.

(Evan Agostini / Invision / Associated Press)

Hours later, Ellison parried with reporters in Paramount’s darkened Stage 3, recently revamped with laser projection capabilities to simulate fantastical and far-flung settings for TV shows, such as the streets of New York.

“This was a turbulent process, and, at times, a really ugly process, to actually get this deal over the finish line,” Ellison acknowledged to reporters. “What I want to be able to do now is turn the page, and actually make sure that we are in the business of rebuilding trust.”

To do that, Ellison intends to make more movies and TV shows than rivals. He wants to ensure the Warner Bros. and Paramount studios, which will be kept separate for now, remain talent-friendly destinations.

Ellison has taken an opposing view from his predecessors who confronted crumbling industry economics by cutting expenditures to boost their corporate bottom lines.

The 43-year-old executive, son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, proudly views his family as “owner-operators,” unshackled by quarterly earnings expectations or the need to dole out dividends to keep investors happy. The Ellison family controls the company’s voting stock, allowing David Ellison to take a long-term view as he charts Skydance’s course.

The goal is to “win in storytelling,” Skydance said in an investor presentation. It intends to build the media industry’s most “technologically capable” firm, which uses artificial intelligence to speed work flows. Skydance plans to spend at least $30 billion a year on film, television and video game content.

Skydance co-CEO Ynon Kreiz, Sarah Ellison, CEO David Ellison and investor Gerry Cardinale of RedBird Capital Partners on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.

(Yuki Iwamura / Associated Press)

The realities of Ellison’s big swing will soon sink in as he and his team turn their focus to integrating the myriad operations and about 55,000 employees.

In some ways, Ellison is behind the curve.

Most major mergers are consummated after executives have dedicated months to quietly drafting detailed operational plans and organizational hierarchies. Ellison, in contrast, has spent the last nine months in a pitched battle for Warner Bros. — ultimately vanquishing Netflix, hundreds of vocal merger opponents, and California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and his coalition of 11 other state attorneys general who filed an antitrust lawsuit in July in an attempt to derail the deal.

Ellison and Bonta resolved their legal fight Sept. 21. A week later, a federal judge cleared the way for the merger to close.

The lawsuit settlement with Bonta requires that the combined company produce at least 30 movies a year for five years. It also must maintain the studio facilities in Los Angeles, making “reasonable efforts to operate the lots in a manner consistent with past practices,” according to the agreement.

Skydance has committed to maintaining operations on the Warner Bros. lot, pictured here, and at Paramount Pictures in Hollywood.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

Ynon Kreiz, former chief executive of Mattel toys in El Segundo, has been tasked with leading the integration. The 61-year-old executive joined Ellison at Skydance as his co-CEO earlier this week. Day One of the combined company marked Kreiz’s second day on the job.

“They have a whole new management team that will be expected to immediately lead this massive integration,” Fubini, a former partner at consulting firm McKinsey, said. “The clouds have cleared, and they are at the base camp of Mt. Everest facing this enormous undertaking.”

In a report this week, TD Cowen Global Research maintained its “hold” rating on the newly constituted Skydance, expressing some doubts about Ellison and his team’s ability to “avoid integration and execution problems that have bedeviled other major media mergers.”

Hollywood has had a history of failed mergers, including Discovery’s 2022 takeover of WarnerMedia from AT&T, which led to years of cost cuts that ultimately seeded the ground for Ellison’s takeover. AT&T’s purchase of the same assets in 2018 also quickly unraveled, some 20 years after the epic failure of AOL Time Warner.

Ellison now must grapple with the hefty acquisition costs for Warner Bros., which climbed as the deal was delayed. The company emerged from the transaction with $86.8 billion in total debt; with most of that going toward buying out Warner Bros. Discovery’s stockholders at $31.17 a share.

The debt burden also includes more than $18 billion in obligations leftover from past mergers. Skydance has nearly $7 billion in cash on hand.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison and executive producer David Ellison arrive at the L.A. premiere of “Star Trek Into Darkness” at the Dolby Theatre in 2013.

(Eric Charbonneau / Getty Images for the Hollywood Reporter)

The Ellison family brought in foreign investors, including royal families of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi as passive owners, to contribute equity to the deal. Gerald Cardinale’s RedBird Capital Partners, a longtime Skydance stakeholder, added $4 billion, bringing its total investment in Skydance deals to $6 billion.

The deal’s financial terms pose deep challenges, analysts said. Fitch Ratings this week downgraded Skydance credit, citing “materially higher leverage after the acquisition and significant execution and integration risks,” according to its report.

“Interest rate increases made financing this transaction far more expensive than anyone anticipated,” said Eric Talley, a professor at Columbia Law School. “Those lenders are going to start expecting their interest payments — Skydance executives won’t have the luxury of time.”

The company could struggle, Talley said, to “generate the cash flow needed to easily service that debt unless they can significantly cut costs.”

Skydance has promised investors that it will make $6 billion in cost cuts over three years. It anticipates $2 billion in reductions within a year, with the bulk of the rest occurring in the second year of the merger.

“They are going to be firing a lot of people,” TD Cowen Global Research media analyst Doug Creutz said.

During the press briefing, Kreiz sought to downplay the expected workforce toll, saying Skydance would achieve savings by combining technologies that support streaming services and marketing expenditures. It plans to save costs on real estate by locating employees at Skydance-owned properties in Santa Monica, Hollywood and Burbank.

HBO could move from Ivy Station in Culver City, its home for the last five years, to one of the studio lots.

Ellison and Kreiz said they would jointly manage the new colossus.

“Where David will focus on creative, technology, long-term strategy, including especially as it relates to the creative part of the business, I will focus more on the operations and the day-to-day management of the business,” Kreiz said.

Kreiz was named to Skydance‘s expanded board this week along with Laurene Powell Jobs, founder of the Emerson Collective; and Bobby Kotick, former CEO of Activision.

The new leaders expressed confidence they could expand and integrate their two major streaming services to drive growth. HBO Max and Paramount+ combined will reach more than 200 million subscribers.

The plan, they said, is to combine the two streamers within a couple of years, but the company may offer subscribers a bundle with the two offerings sooner.

Skydance, according to sources, also expects to bolster its free, ad-supported service Pluto TV, which offers more than 200 channels. The service hasn’t had much corporate attention in recent years amid the cuts and deal-making.

The executives have not disclosed which teams would soon be affected or how they will structure overlapping business units.

For example, the company’s three TV studios each have their own leader: Channing Dungey runs the largest, Warner Bros. Television; David Stapf has long managed CBS Studios; and Skydance executive Matt Thunell has been president of Paramount Television Studios since last year.

Integrating CNN and CBS

Anxiety over whether CNN and CBS News would be mashed together was quelled, at least for now.

Skydance announced that it was retaining CNN Worldwide Chairman Mark Thompson as head of the larger news organization. CNN journalists had worried that CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss, who has presided over a year of turmoil at the network, would be put in charge of both.

Any news consolidation could take years, in part, because CBS News is largely unionized while CNN is a non-union shop.

“We are going to spend the next several months basically getting under the hood,” Ellison said.

CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss, pictured here in 2023 in Los Angeles, has had a turbulent tenure at CBS.

(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

Another challenge will be stabilizing the Warner Bros. film unit, which has had a rough year at the box office. This month, the top two Warner Bros. film executives, Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy, exited abruptly, clearing the way for longtime Ellison lieutenants Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein to oversee both film studios. The co-heads of DC Comics, James Gunn and Peter Safran, segued to the new Skydance.

Skydance also will have to deal with the NFL, which could demand substantially higher fees for CBS to keep its Sunday games.

The current contract allows the league to reopen negotiations because of the ownership change. Skydance is hoping it can wait three years until the contracts of other broadcasters also are up for discussion.

Skydance will be a major player in sports. Last year, Paramount agreed to spend $7.7 billion for UFC fights. The combined company also has rights to professional golf, including the Masters tournament; National Hockey League; Major League Baseball and NCAA basketball, including March Madness, as well as European rights to televise the Olympics.

“Until you actually get inside the company, there are things you won’t know,” Creutz said. “But they are going to have to come up with answers pretty quick.”

In March 2025, when California ran out of Medicaid funds to pay doctors and hospitals, the state borrowed $3.4 billion to keep the program afloat. It was, as a spokesperson for Gov. Gavin Newsom insisted, nothing new. Indeed, a handful of times over the years, the state had taken out internal, short-term loans to sustain its healthcare program for poor and disabled people.

The unprecedented move came a few months later, when Newsom and Democratic state lawmakers agreed to pay down the loan — which grew to $4.4 billion — over 10 years instead of later in the year. California’s healthcare safety net, it seemed, was buckling.

Rising healthcare costs systemwide were partly to blame. But so were several state-led expansions that made California’s Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal, one of the nation’s most generous.

Now, with congressional Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act expected to reduce federal Medicaid spending by more than $900 billion over 10 years, California and dozens of other states must contemplate the limits of their generosity. The problem is particularly acute in the nation’s most populous state, which spends more on Medicaid than New York and Texas combined.

“We know we can’t afford to serve everybody we want to serve in the model that we have today,” said Mark Ghaly, the former top Newsom health official who now co-chairs the Future of Medi-Cal Commission, a 29-person panel with the goal of modernizing and sustaining California’s Medicaid program for those who need it. “What can we do differently? What can we do smarter?”

The 2025 law that Newsom, a Democrat, has dubbed President Trump’s “Big Ugly Bill” is expected to leave millions more Americans without health insurance, mostly because of new work requirements. It also curbs the use of healthcare provider taxes and other strategies states have deployed to maximize federal funds. Some state lawmakers and consumer advocates have argued the federal cuts, along with rising costs, present an opportunity for the next governor to overhaul a program plagued by long appointment wait times, low reimbursement rates for healthcare providers, and volatile financing.

“If we continue to just give millions and millions into the same system and expect something different — I’m sick and tired of that,” said Caroline Menjivar, a Democratic state senator representing a Los Angeles-area district where roughly half of constituents rely on Medi-Cal.

Democratic lawmakers, who have often clashed with Newsom on Medi-Cal rollbacks, succeeded in getting him to delay a number of painful cuts until 2027 in hope that a new governor might reverse them.

So far, neither of the gubernatorial candidates running in the November election to replace Newsom has offered substantive proposals for a program that covers 1 in 3 Californians — roughly 13.6 million people.

Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News commentator, wants to pare back Medi-Cal eligibility and has promised to end coverage for immigrants without legal status, citing that benefit as an example of “wildly unsustainable” state spending. Democrat Xavier Becerra, who has spent decades trying to expand government-funded healthcare, has promised to protect Californians from the massive federal cuts and find and cut billions in administrative waste.

Expanding coverage

President Johnson signed the law that established Medicaid and Medicare in 1965 to cover certain low-income groups, such as families with children, older people and those with disabilities. Over the last six decades, states have substantially widened that pool, most notably under the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion to childless adults.

Starting in 2024, California offered healthcare coverage to all low-income residents, regardless of age or immigration status, although lawmakers scaled that back this year. At the same time, the state opted to cover a slew of non-mandated benefits such as physical therapy, hospice care and housing assistance.

“California has always struggled with wanting to have as broad a program as possible but then having to figure out a way to pay,” said Jennifer Kent, who oversaw Medi-Cal under Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat. “There is no population that we have met that we don’t want to offer coverage to, and we’ve never met a benefit that we don’t like.”

Since 2010, California’s Medi-Cal enrollment has nearly doubled while spending has ballooned from $50 billion a year to $222 billion. It now makes up more than 40% of overall state spending, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Conservatives argue the program is bloated and rife with fraud. They say the federal changes will force states to refocus resources on the neediest.

“The role of the safety net programs was just that — to be a safety net,” Hilton said in an interview. “I don’t think it’s a particularly positive boast to say 40% of Californians should be on a program that was designed for people living in poverty.”

Becerra declined an interview request.

Nelly, a 59-year-old from Los Angeles County, was one of millions who have benefited from the state’s Medi-Cal expansion, but she was initially reluctant to sign up.

For years after she left her corporate job to care for her ailing mother, Nelly said, she didn’t consider applying. She remained uninsured until three years ago, when she woke up and couldn’t see out of her left eye.

She enrolled in Medi-Cal in the emergency room. It now covers her appointments with specialists and transportation to and from. While her condition may exempt her from the new Medicaid work requirements, Nelly said, she’s still worried about losing coverage after experiencing numerous paperwork hiccups simply trying to renew.

Nelly, who asked that her full name not be used because she hasn’t told her family about her condition, said she understands not everyone on the program may need it. But, she added, “it should be there for someone like me.”

Tough choices ahead

When Republican state lawmakers got wind of Newsom’s plan to stretch the debt repayment over a decade, they accused Democrats of trying to “paper over” the state’s structural deficit.

“This leaves future governors and legislatures to clean up the mess,” stated a July 2025 memo from GOP senators. The Legislative Analyst’s Office later called the maneuver “unusual.” That could leave Becerra, the favorite to succeed Newsom in the overwhelmingly liberal state, as the face of staggering changes to a program he spent his career defending.

More than 2 million Californians under age 65 could lose health coverage over the next four years as a result of the state and federal policy changes, according to recent estimates by the UC Berkeley Labor Center and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. At least 730,000 residents have already disenrolled since June 2025.

State agencies are scrambling to implement new federal work requirement rules for adult Medicaid enrollees under 65, hoping to automate as much verification as possible to blunt coverage losses. And in 2028, states will be required to charge some enrollees fees for many services, making it harder for them to maintain coverage.

Disability rights activists say new asset limits will prevent Californians from getting needed home care, which they say is more cost-effective and humane than nursing homes. Counties, deemed by state law to be healthcare providers of last resort, say they need immediate funding for the millions of uninsured patients they anticipate in the new year.

Hospital administrators have urged policymakers to help them keep their facilities stable, and the state’s most recent budget included some $390 million to assist public and distressed hospitals.

Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in Los Angeles treats five times the patients it was designed to serve, and 80% of patients are uninsured or on Medi-Cal. Demand is so high in the chronically underserved area, MLK Community Healthcare CEO Elaine Batchlor said, that the hospital has erected tents in the parking lot. Most emergency room patients are now treated there.

“We already have an extremely overcrowded, overburdened emergency department,” MLK Community Healthcare CEO Elaine Batchlor said. “Insured care will turn into uncompensated care, and the financial burden for that will fall on providers.”

Becerra has said he opposes the state’s recent freeze on enrollment for adult immigrants without legal status, as well as new monthly premiums set to take effect next year, saying such moves will only saddle taxpayers with higher bills for ER care.

If elected, Becerra will probably need to wade into the politically toxic debate over whether to raise more revenue, cut benefits further, or do both.

Aside from promising to find and eliminate billions in administrative waste from the industry, the nation’s former top health official has not explained how he would cobble together the tens of billions of dollars the state is likely to need just to maintain status quo.

The next governor must tread carefully, Kent warned. “When people come and say, ‘Well, you should just do this because it’s the right thing,’ ” she said, “all of those right things have fiscal consequences.”

Mai-Duc writes for KFF Health News, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — an independent source of health policy research, polling and journalism.

New Delhi, India – Stand-up comic Brijesh Jha posted a parody video on Instagram last week to protest the removal of his name, along with his father’s and sister’s, from a voter list in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal.

The video, which alleged that India’s Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar had disenfranchised millions of voters at the behest of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), garnered 1.7 million views after it was posted on September 29.

Two days later, Meta, the United States-based company that owns Instagram, took the video down, citing “local laws” without giving further explanation.

“I felt very helpless that day. I have only one thing in this country – that I can vote. If you take that away from me, then I have nothing left. So I didn’t know what to do. As an artist, I can just make art, or I can protest,” the Mumbai-based artist told Al Jazeera.

Jha said his parody song was removed because the Modi government is “scared” after an investigation by the Indian Express newspaper last month revealed that two of the election commission’s three members had raised serious concerns over a controversial revision of voter rolls being conducted by the poll panel across the country.

The exercise, known as the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), was launched in June last year to identify deceased, duplicate or dubious voters and remove them from the rolls. So far, the process has deleted more than 130 million voters – nearly 14 percent of India’s total voters, an overwhelming number of them Muslims who do not usually vote for Modi’s Hindu nationalist party.

The Indian Express investigation found that two of Kumar’s fellow election commissioners had formally objected at least 14 times to key decisions linked to the SIR exercise taken by their chief.

Opposition politicians and critics accused Kumar, a Modi government appointee, of acting at the behest of the BJP and demanded an independent inquiry into the decisions taken by the election commission during his tenure.

The revelations have led to street protests across India, demanding Kumar’s resignation.

On Tuesday, police in the capital New Delhi briefly detained the main opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, and other leaders of his Congress party as they tried to march to the election commission office.

“The country has been hijacked by Narendra Modi through vote theft,” Gandhi told reporters. “What has been done to our country is called treason. Nobody is going to escape.”

In response, the BJP accused the opposition parties of “making a concerted effort to change the government”.

“They are deliberately attacking India’s democracy and constitutional institutions,” a BJP spokesman told reporters on Tuesday.

The Congress protesters and their political allies were back on the streets on Wednesday. Their demonstrations followed a series of protests by the satirical Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) and a group of left-wing students in Mumbai and New Delhi since October 2. The CJP has planned another demonstration in New Delhi on October 10 if Kumar does not resign by then.

‘Question the people in power’

What stood out in these protests was an increasingly inventive language of dissent, driven by humour, art and music, with much of it existing online alongside the demonstrations on the streets.

But a crackdown on such memes and jokes has also been simultaneous.

According to the Indian Express newspaper, the government issued nearly 195,000 content-blocking orders to Instagram, Facebook and YouTube between March and July this year – an average of one blocking order every 68 seconds.

Rejecting the newspaper report, the government said in a statement, “With 600 million users in India posting up to 78,703 items every 68 seconds, it is reasonable to expect that on average, one of these items may not be lawful.”

The crackdown came after the Modi government tightened rules governing online content in February. According to the new rules, social media platforms must remove content that a government authority or court has declared “unlawful” within three hours of receiving the order, down from 36 hours previously.

Among those whose works were taken down was political cartoonist Satish Acharya.

Several of Acharya’s cartoons, some up to three years old, were removed and his Instagram account was blocked in India from September 28 until late on October 5, he told Al Jazeera.

“At different phases of history, people used cartoons as a tool to express their protest and question the people in power. With the advanced use of social media, cartoons appear in different forms now, sometimes memes and reels,” the 55-year-old said.

“I have a lot of hope in Gen Z. They are fearless, they are creative and they care for the country. Our politicians can learn a lot from them.”

Stand-up comic Jha, who attended the CJP’s protest in Mumbai, agrees. “The more cruel the power is, the softer, more humorous and more artistic the protest becomes,” he told Al Jazeera.

But Jha has refused to apply for a reinstatement of his name in the voters’ list.

“I think they will see this interview and probably I will be in some detention centre. I just want to see what will happen. I’ll not register my name again,” he said.

However, he had a satirical message for Modi as he urged the Indian leader to stop the crackdown on online content.

“Please give back my right to vote. You are a great leader with a 56-inch chest. You shouldn’t be scared of one video,” he said, invoking a long-held right-wing boast about Modi’s famous bust.

SACRAMENTO — Over the last week, gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton has created the exact kind of media kerfuffle he loves best by attacking his rival Xavier Becerra for Becerra’s description of his parents as “immigrants.”

Although Becerra’s mother, Maria, was born in Mexico, his father, Manuel, came into the world in Sacramento, in 1928. Soon after, Becerra’s grandparents moved their young family back to Mexico, where Manuel was raised until he returned to the U.S. as a young man to work.

As my colleague Gustavo Arellano said in a must-read column, this border back-and-forth has been more the norm than the exception for California’s Mexican American population for decades, if not centuries. Manuel Becerra’s luck at being born on U.S. soil may have given him an advantage, but it didn’t make him any less of an immigrant, Arellano explained, especially in an era when Sacramento’s Mexican population was below 2,500 and racism remained openly practiced and disturbingly accepted.

Hilton, however, has seized on Manuel Becerra’s U.S. citizenship to brand the younger Becerra a liar, allegedly falsely framing himself as the son of immigrants to gain identity-politics points in a state of immigrants. Whether one or both of Becerra’s parents qualifies as an immigrant might seem like minutiae to most voters, but Hilton’s accusation has thumped on the nerves on both the left and right — including my own, as the daughter of a South Asian immigrant.

Dog-whistle politics

Scratch the surface of Hilton’s attack and it becomes about something far more than Manuel Becerra’s citizenship — it’s a thinly veiled dog whistle about how a “good” immigrant behaves and how we should handle the “bad” ones. Here’s where all that gets messy for me: I agree with Hilton that being born in the U.S. is a big deal, and being a citizen is a point of pride. It does matter. I also agree with Arellano that Hilton’s attack is despicable.

Somewhere between those points are truths about immigration in America at this fraught and ugly moment, and just how different California is from the rest of the country when it comes to understanding the issue — and why that matters.

California’s Latinos, through numbers, history and hard work, have built political and social power on a scale that few, if any, other immigrant groups anywhere in the U.S. have managed. That unique position in the Golden State has allowed for what I call the magical realism of immigration myths to flourish, a wonderful gift to generations past and present that does not have the same widespread acceptance in other parts of this great country.

I firmly believe there is no such thing as a “true” immigration story.

Many, if not most, immigrants are leaving something painful behind — maybe it’s family, maybe it’s war or abuse. But carrying that burden forward with nothing more than hope to balance it, passing it on to future generations, explaining it to strangers, is too much. So immigration stories get softened over time, with trauma turning into adventure and hard facts blurred into entertaining myths.

That doesn’t make the tellers liars. It makes them human.

In the case of my father’s myth, he would have told you that his journey to America started with Humphrey Bogart. As a teen, he’d cut school to watch black-and-white movies like “Casablanca” in a theater in Ahmedabad in northern India, so long ago that there was an intermission to change the film reels. Enamored of white tuxedos and cool blondes, he started applying to scholarships for college in America — eventually winning a full-ride at a Utah school for his skiing acumen, a sport for which he claimed great skill but in reality had never tried.

My aunts and uncles variously dispute or embrace this tale, which my father loved to tell. I don’t know how true it is, but I do know this. My father’s journey to the U.S. did not begin with Bogart. It began in the city of Karachi, which was in India until the British drew a line on the map and created Pakistan. War broke out, with Hindus killing Muslims and Muslims killing Hindus. My father, a kid, got lost in a crowd with his grandfather. He watched as a mob killed his grandpa, then escaped by himself walking hundreds of miles to safety. He was eventually reunited with his family in a refugee camp, but his India was gone forever.

In its place, he dreamed of Bogart’s America. And when he finally got here, he buried his past under the Utah snow, became such a good skier he was on ski patrol, and didn’t mention his grandpa for nearly 35 years.

Like nearly every child of an immigrant, I love both the truth and the myth of my dad because combined they are the story of my family and of America. But my father was Indian and eventually settled in Ohio, much different than California. There was no larger Indian community back then (though it’s grown significantly, including dozens of family members who followed my father), and little tolerance for anything but assimilation. That was fine by my father. He wanted nothing more than to be American — though he would remain a green card holder for decades, until fear under the first Trump administration pushed him to get citizenship.

Hilton’s audience

Just like for Becerra’s dad, being an immigrant was a state of mind for mine, an experience, not an official status. Had my dad been in California, maybe he would have kept more of his Indian identity. Had Becerra’s dad been in Ohio, maybe he would have kept less of his past.

Neither viewpoint made either man more or less American — but the different myths these two men told about who they were define the difference between California and the rest of the country.

Hilton’s attack on Becerra’s dad was never meant for a California audience, where the Latino experience of fluidity in geography and identity holds center stage. It was always meant for places such as Ohio, and Fox News, where the expectation of assimilation still reigns supreme (just ask the Haitians of Springfield) and where Hilton’s media audience — and his future — resides after he loses in November, which he almost certainly will. Hilton, after all, was the host of his own conservative television show for years.

What seems like an out-of-touch attack by Hilton on brown immigrants in California is actually thoughtful pandering to his people — the right-wing Americans who prefer “good,” deferential, grateful immigrants (like Hilton himself) over the confident California Latinos who take pride in every part of their identity.

Sorry, California Latinos, but this MAGA moment in immigration has nothing to do with criminal records or even legal status. It’s all about attitude, and MAGA hates that you have so much of it. Hilton’s attack hits the target with his right-wing crowd because, to them, not centering his father’s U.S. citizenship is a rejection of the United States, a treachery they not-so-secretly fear all immigrants share.

And here’s the twist — MAGA is right, immigrants are complicated.

My dad may have been one of the “good” immigrants, embracing all things American and quiet about his past. But he always held deep pride in his family and his origins, and he passed that on — as do so many of the other “good” immigrants.

It’s possible, common even, to fully embrace being American while also valuing the myths and truths of immigration. It’s possible to to love this country while also keeping another one in your heart, loudly or quietly. There is no one immigrant experience, no one way to be a real American. Hilton, an immigrant and the son of immigrants, surely knows this.

But where immigrants see complexity, MAGA followers see only perfidy, disloyalty, and that makes them afraid and angry — and ripe for the exploitation of those emotions by someone who can sugarcoat it, twist it, just enough to seem reasonable.

And Hilton is excellent at seeming reasonable.

What else you should be reading:

The must-read: California wine glut sends premium bottles to Costco, Aldi and Kroger at bargain prices
The California angle: Denise Brown recalls her sister Nicole’s abuse by O.J. Simpson: ‘We were there’
The L.A. Times Special: The LAPD busted a secret network of brothels — but hasn’t arrested the owner
Stay Golden,
Anita Chabria

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The LAPD’s legal bills keep piling up.

The city of Los Angeles has shelled out nearly $480 million over the last five and a half years to end legal disputes involving the Police Department, including claims of excessive force, litigation over traffic accidents and cases filed by employees who allegedly faced retaliation after reporting misconduct.

The soaring legal costs have come under greater scrutiny in recent years as Los Angeles’ financial problems have gotten worse. The city faced a $1-billion budget shortfall in 2025 but, after various cost-cutting measures, managed to set aside funding for the LAPD to hire more than 500 new officers in the coming year.

The LAPD’s annual lawsuit costs more than doubled from 2019 to 2025. The payouts peaked in 2024, when the city spent $178.6 million to resolve more than 300 police-related lawsuits and civil claims, before dropping to just over $100 million in 2025, according to a Times analysis of city attorney’s data.

The Times reviewed hundreds of pages of court documents and analyzed data from the city attorney’s office released through a public records request showing nearly 2,000 payouts dating to January 2019.

Through the first six months of this year, the city has paid out $20.3 million in legal settlements and court judgments involving LAPD officers. Several recent big-dollar verdicts aren’t included in that tally because they hadn’t yet been approved by the City Council.

The surging cost of LAPD payouts depriving the cash-strapped city of money for pressing needs such as fixing roads and sidewalks, according to City Controller Kenneth Mejia.

“There’s a reason why your streetlights are out and they’re not fixed for a year, there’s a reason why your sidewalk won’t get fixed or your animal shelters are understaffed or underfunded,” said Mejia, whose office is conducting an audit of the city’s risk management strategies, the results of which will be released this year.

Experts are still untangling the reasons for the explosion of legal payouts involving police — which stretches far beyond L.A.

This year, a legal defense organization found that New York City has paid more than $796 million since 2019 to settle lawsuits involving accusations of police misconduct — including $117 million in 2025. In Chicago, the city is on track to blow past the $252 million spent last year to resolve police lawsuits, mostly involving plaintiffs who went to prison based on faulty evidence, according to local news reports.

In Los Angeles, the surge has come under the watch of City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto, who has blamed the rising costs on the way the office handled litigation of all kinds before her administration — as well as a national legal trend of so-called nuclear verdicts.

“The system is getting inflated in a way that is unhealthy and it creates, I think, incentives to sue and to do pie-in-the-sky settlements,” Feldstein Soto said in interview with The Times earlier this year. She said her office evaluates each claim case by case, deciding when it makes more sense to settle rather than go to trial, at which juries can issue decisions based on emotion or differing perceptions of what occurred. Feldstein Soto has lobbied for years to change state law to limit “non-economic” damages.

Feldstein Soto’s critics contend that she has pursued a hard-line approach in recent years, refusing to settle except in cases where it is clear the city is likely to lose in court.

That tough stance has led to mixed results. The city has lost some jury verdicts that could have been avoided if it had been willing to settle. It has also prevailed in several high-profile cases, including this year when a jury ruled that an officer was not liable for the 2021 death of a 14-year-old girl killed by a wayward bullet fired during a hasty confrontation with a suspect at a North Hollywood department store.

The city attorney’s office said in a statement to The Times that while it is proactively working to curb rising litigation costs “by every means possible,” it could not “control the number, timing or claimed damages of lawsuits filed against the City.”

“Nor does the Office have control over the alleged root causes of these liabilities: the City Attorney’s Office is not responsible for LAPD policies or personnel,” said the statement, adding that the number of lawsuits filed against the city has risen by roughly 20% in each of the last four budget years, straining the office’s resources.

Zachary Powell, an associate professor of criminal justice at Cal State San Bernardino, said that although data suggest that use of force by police has decreased since 2020, the public has become “much more aware of police abuses and conduct than they ever were before.”

“I think people also ask a lot more questions in a jury setting,” he said.

Other explanations, he says, are the passage of statewide police accountability measures and the fact that a backlog of cases from the pandemic years are finally coming due.

The Times’ analysis found that hundreds of legal battles involving officer-involved traffic incidents make up nearly a quarter of all payouts. Since 2019, the city has paid $125 million for the thousands of accident claims, just under a third of which stemmed from cases in which officers were found to have failed to stop or yield at crossings before crashing into another vehicle or a pedestrian. Pursuit-related claims and suits stemming from cases in which officers made improper left turns have also cost the city millions.

Other legal costs date back years — and in some cases decades.

The city is still paying $7,410 a month to Clarence Chance, who in the early 1990s was awarded a large payment over a wrongful arrest that led him to spend 17 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. Nearly $40 million has gone to people whose homes were damaged after the LAPD bomb squad botched the detonation of seized fireworks and leveled part of a city block in 2021.

One of the biggest payout categories was $104.6 million spent since 2019 on claims related to police shootings — more than three-fourths of which involved people who were reported to be under the influence of a substance or in the midst of a mental health crisis, according to The Times’ analysis. Roughly $38.4 million was paid out after police shot someone wielding an edged weapon, such as a knife, the analysis found. Shootings involving gang officers cost the city nearly $4 million in that span.

Dozens of lawsuits remain pending, including claims related to the handling of mass pro-immigration protests since last year, likely putting taxpayers on the hook for more large payouts in the future. Police use of hard foam projectiles, house-mounted officers and other tactics against crowds have already cost the city at least $22 million in the last seven and a half years — just over half of which stemmed from the department’s response to the 2020 mass protests over the murder of George Floyd.

Such totals may not always include lawyer fees that are negotiated after a settlement is reached — or if a case is appealed.

Jonathan Evans, a civil rights attorney who has sued the department, thinks the big payouts show that greater public awareness of mental health issues is a factor. Recognizing this, he said, municipalities are agreeing to higher settlements than in years past.

“The decision to use lethal force is being more heavily scrutinized,” he said.

Tens of millions of city dollars have in recent years gone to disgruntled police officers who sued over workplace injustices such as sexual harassment, racial discrimination and retaliation. Since 2019, at least 27 LAPD employees have won million-dollar-plus jury verdicts or settlements from the city; many more have seen five- or six-figure paydays.

To clamp down on future legal costs, the department last year brought back a former senior official, Arif Alikhan — at a monthly salary of $20,000, paid for by a private donation — to study how to reduce the number of costly lawsuits. Alikhan did not respond to a call requesting comment.

The department maintains an early intervention system that flags officers based on risk factors, such as a relatively high volume of civilian complaints, frequent use force, and involvement in preventable traffic collisions or pursuits. The system is used to determine whether they need additional training or should be reassigned or placed on a performance improvement plan.

Within the LAPD, some officers and the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the rank-and-file union, argue that the city should fight back harder against claims with no credibility, instead of settling. They say officers who are most often sued tend to come from specialized units that do the type of proactive policing that the department and most of of the public wants: targeting gangs, drugs and guns.

Attorneys who represent officers that have sued the department over whistleblower retaliation dismiss the claim by Chief Jim McDonnell and others that some cops are exaggerating their claims in pursuit of a big payday. If anything, they contend, the continued large payouts are a product of entrenched racial and gender bias and inconsistent discipline — and the LAPD’s unwillingness to learn its lessons from past lawsuits.

Greg Yacoubian, a labor attorney, said there is little incentive for the current system to change because the costs of lawsuits are passed on to taxpayers — not the officers involved in misconduct and their bosses.

“The person responsible for the error never feels the pinch,” Yacoubian said.

Times staff writer James Queally contributed to this report.

United States President Donald Trump has said that he does not intend to bomb Iran again until the November midterm elections, even though several US media outlets have reported that the Pentagon has drawn up plans to relaunch attacks before that vote.

Trump has been accused of misdirection on the issue in the past. The US launched its initial attacks on Iran on February 28, as talks with Iran were ongoing and despite Trump saying just the day before that he had not made any decision. One year previously, the US struck Iran towards the end of Israel’s June 2025 12-day war, despite Trump saying he would announce a decision about attacks “in two weeks”.

Still, striking Iran ahead of the midterm elections would be risky for the administration as the war remains deeply unpopular with Americans.

Resuming the war afterwards may have less of a negative impact on Trump, who is not eligible to run for another term as US president anyway.

Here’s what we know about Trump’s plans.

In the past two days, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and other publications have reported claims by unnamed officials that the Pentagon has drawn up plans to attack Iran before the midterms, if authorised to do so.

On Wednesday, US publication Axios cited US and Israeli officials saying the Pentagon has instructed US Central Command (CENTCOM) to prepare for imminent major combat operations. The Atlantic also reported along similar lines.

What has Trump said?

On Thursday, Trump posted on his Truth Social media platform that he will not order a resumption of strikes on Iran before November 3, when the US midterm elections will be held.

“I want to make it clear to everybody that, while Iran is in very bad condition…we will not be attacking Iran at any time prior to the Midterm Elections to be held in the United States on November 3rd,” he said.

The president added that the US is presently “having productive discussions” with the Iranian side. However, that was also the case on February 28, the day the US and Israel first struck Iran, triggering the war.

Trump did not make any reference to preparing for potential military operations, nor did he provide more details on the state of talks.

Why might Trump be hesitant about resuming bombing before the midterms?

Trump and Republicans are worried about a voter backlash against the war at the polls. The US war on Iran is intensely unpopular domestically as Americans have had to grapple with surging prices of gas, food and other basic commodities because of the crisis in the Middle East.

Since the start of the war, surveys have shown that large numbers of Americans did not approve of striking Iran.

Now, about 65 percent of Americans say they “disapprove” of the way in which Trump has handled the Iran war overall, according to a Pew Research Center poll released on Thursday. Trump stated at the start of the war that it would go on for just a few weeks, however, it is now into its eighth month.

According to Pew, most Americans now believe the war will continue for at least another year. Even Republican or more conservative-leaning voters are growing more negative about the war, its poll found.

The conflict has also severely affected Trump’s personal ratings and eroded support for Republicans. A Reuters/Ipsos poll on Thursday found that only 30 percent of his supporters were enthusiastic about voting in the midterms, compared with 48 percent of Democratic voters.

About 13 percent of those who voted for Trump in 2024 say they are not sure who to vote for in the congressional elections.

Delaying attacks until after the elections could potentially shield Republican candidates from voter backlash, analysts say.

While analysts say Trump will see a good performance at the polls as approval for renewed strikes, a Republican defeat at the polls could equally further incentivise him to hit Iran again as he will calculate that he has little to lose at that point.

While that could further affect Trump’s ratings, the president is not eligible to run in the next presidential election in any case.

Will the US restart the war after the midterms?

In recent weeks, the US president has threatened to “end” the war with force after the elections as talks with Iran have dragged on.

At a Republican convention in September, he accused Iran of trying to affect the outcome of the midterms and said that conflict “is going to end immediately after the elections”.

In an interview with Time magazine two weeks ago, he also said it would be “possible” to ramp up bombing in Iran after the elections, but declined to elaborate. Analysts say his comments were designed to calm voters, while at the same time warning Iran of potential aggression after the vote.

Last week, the US military dispatched about 7,000 sailors and 2,000 Marines aboard several ships now sailing to the Middle East amid threats of new attacks from Trump. The vessel formation included the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group.

The deployment increases the number of US troops in the region to 20,000, alongside hundreds of aircraft and at least three carrier strike groups.

In the past, US troop build-up in the Middle East and the Caribbean has subsequently resulted in military action.

In June, Washington and Iran signed a ceasefire agreement that quickly broke down over control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump has repeatedly said that the US has the upper hand in the strait, citing more oil exports and Iran’s weakened economy. He has also voiced aversion to a deal with Tehran over management of Hormuz, but said he might consider it because “they’re willing to offer us anything to stop”.

Washington rejected a recent proposal from Iran to reopen the strait based on certain conditions it wants the US to meet, including the lifting of sanctions, unfreezing Iranian assets and guaranteeing an end to attacks. Last week, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Iran was considering a counterproposal from the US.

If I ever need to humble myself — if my head inflates with grand visions of becoming the next Steve Lopez or Bill Plaschke — I pull up the transcript of the secret recording that upended Los Angeles politics after The Times broke the story exactly four years ago.

It’s like a modern-day version of “Ozymandias,” except far more vulgar, nowhere near as poetic and a better warning against hubris than anything Shelley could have penned.

“The thing for us is to exercise our power,” said then-City Councilmember Gil Cedillo, about halfway through an hourlong conversation he was having with three of the city’s most powerful political figures.

Oh, did they ever — and nowhere near the way they intended.

Nury Martinez and Ron Herrera, the president of the City Council and head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, respectively, quickly resigned for their roles in the racist, homophobic drivel on the recording. Cedillo — who was finishing out his term — and Councilmember Kevin de León refused to step down, besmirching their well-earned reputations as progressive lions.

The L.A. they sought to create — where Latinos ascend at the expense of the Black community, and anyone who gets in the way is crushed — never came to be. And the recording that exposed their machinations ultimately destroyed the type of ethnic politicking that made the careers of too many self-serving power grabbers, including this quartet.

The transcript of their back-and-forth now reads as prophecy — and we’re far better for it.

Much of the discussion, which happened in October 2021 at the headquarters of the L.A. County Federation of Labor, was devoted to whining that L.A.’s Latino-majority council districts, and some cities elsewhere in the county, were represented by Black leaders instead of Latinos, even as Latino residents far outnumbered Black ones.

“F—, the way I see it, all of the seats are Latino,” said Herrera, who hailed the rise of a “little Latino caucus of our … own” that he felt should reign permanently.

He and the others predicted a future in which vengeful Black politicians would try to sabotage future Latino leaders on their way out of office, creating “poor Latino districts with nothing,” as Martinez put it.

She was referring to redistricting proposals that would chop off assets like the Coliseum and Exposition Park from South L.A.’s District 9 — the most Latino district in the city, represented by a Black council member, Curren Price.

“So they f— a future Latino for CD 9,” De León whined. “That’s how arrogant, just how arrogant it is.”

That’s not what ended up happening.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Kevin de León at a council meeting in December 2022 after a two-month absence following his role in that year’s audio leak scandal.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

District 9 didn’t lose any assets. Black leaders saw the writing on the wall and didn’t run a serious Black candidate to replace the termed-out Price this year. That created space for two Latinos — Estuardo Mazariegos and Jose Ugarte — to make it to the general election. No matter which candidate wins in November, the City Council will have fewer than three Black members for the first time in 63 years.

Both Mazariegos and Ugarte say that the anti-Black scheming of the audio leak villains inspired them to run campaigns focusing on Black and Latino residents as one constituency, reflecting how life is actually lived in South L.A., not how Latinos from elsewhere in the city imagine it to be.

Mazariegos attended the first City Council meeting after The Times dropped the audio leak bombshell in October 2022. He remembers Cedillo peeking at the angry audience and temporarily returning to the council’s back room.

“No community should have to lose power for another to gain it,” said Mazariegos, who would become the first Central American immigrant to serve on the council if he were to win. “Our power grows when we build it together.”

Ugarte, formerly one of Price’s top aides, agreed. He argued that the best way to lead in South L.A. as a Latino council member is “with respect for those who came before us, the humility to listen to those doing the work today, and the understanding that District 9 is strongest when [Black and Latino residents] move forward together.”

Born in Oaxaca, Ugarte would become L.A.’s first Indigenous council member if he wins. That would be a rich coda to the audio leak, considering that Oaxacans received some of the nastiest insults. Martinez described them as “ little short dark people” who were feos — ugly. Cedillo joked that they were “little ones,” while Herrera cracked that they were “indios.”

Who’s laughing now?

The Feos Four also spent time kvetching about Nithya Raman, who was finishing her first year on the council. In 2020, she had upset an incumbent to become the first democratic socialist council member.

At the time of the recording, rivals were trying to diminish Raman’s power by drawing boundaries that would put her district “in the blender and chop [it] up, left and right,” as De León described it.

“She’s not our ally,” Cedillo said. “She’s not going to help us. Her district is not a district we can count on.”

Give credit to Cedillo and his pendejo pals: They were already seeing Raman and other democratic socialists as an emerging force, even while downplaying the DSA’s chances. De León said that Raman’s politics were “about just her as an individual.” Herrera dismissed Hugo Soto-Martínez, then a no-name union organizer aiming to unseat Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell, as a “kid.” Nury Martinez blithely mispronounced Eunisses Hernandez’s name while cackling about the first-time candidate’s challenge to Cedillo.

If Cedillo and De León weren’t so convinced of their own political immortality, they could have helped check the DSA’s rise that has so vexed L.A.’s liberal leaders. Instead, Hernandez beat Cedillo in a shocking upset in 2022, while Soto-Martínez won in the fall. And fellow democratic socialist Ysabel Jurado took out De León in 2024. Those triumphs paved the path for DSA-LA-backed candidate Marissa Roy to make a strong run for city attorney this year. Mazariegos is also endorsed by DSA-LA, which is backing Raman for mayor against incumbent Karen Bass.

Then-Councilmember Gil Cedillo at the Los Angeles City Council meeting on Oct. 11, 2022, two days after the release of explosive audio involving him led to protesters demanding his resignation.

(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

The group should send Cedillo and De León bouquets of red roses as gracias for assisting their ascendancy. All of us owe the foursome a thanks for hastening the demise of the old Latino political machines that birthed them and kept the city stuck in tribalism for too long.

Now, Latino politicians must run on their bona fides for all Angelenos, instead of just their latinidad. Soto-Martínez and Hernandez won reelection outright in the June primary because their constituents appreciated their sewer socialism approach, focusing on quality of life issues instead of ideological revolution. Meanwhile, Chicanosauruses are wheezing with diminished power as they urge Latinos to back Bass. The message doesn’t seem to be landing: A recent Berkeley IGS/Times poll found that 45% of Latino voters favored Raman to Bass’ 21%, with 34% undecided.

Gone are the days when Latino voters blindly believed Latino leaders. Why bother, after Martinez and her crew proved the folly of ethnic politics?

Near the start of the recording, Martinez complained that voters and the media always seemed to forgive Black politicians caught up in scandal, while Latinos didn’t get the same treatment.

“They’re never done,” she complained. “They never close a chapter on us.”

L.A. did close the chapter. Now, the Feos Four’s only legacy is “that colossal wreck” of their conversation, to quote the finale of “Ozymandias,” left to rot forever.

One of Israel’s top ultra-Orthodox rabbis, Dov Lando, has become the centre of controversy in Israel after comments emerged in which he denigrated Zionism.

In a recently released video recording, the 96-year-old rabbi is heard saying the ideology of Zionism caused the Jewish people to suffer “disasters”, and that Jewish Israelis may have been better off without a state.

The remarks have drawn rebukes from Israeli politicians weeks before landmark legislative elections, in which the role of the country’s growing ultra-Orthodox community – particularly over military service – is a major issue. The political alignment of ultra-Orthodox parties could also prove crucial to the formation of the next government.

So, who is Lando and why are his comments significant?

Who is Dov Lando?

Dov Lando is a 96-year-old rabbi regarded as the leader of Israel’s Lithuanian ultra-Orthodox community. Born in Poland and raised in the Lithuanian-style ultra-Orthodox tradition, Lando heads a yeshiva – a traditional Jewish academy – in the Israeli city of Bnei Brak.

He is a member of Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah, a council of senior ultra-Orthodox rabbis that offer religious guidance to the community, as well as the spiritual leader of Israel’s Degel HaTorah party. That party is part of the United Torah Judaism (UTJ) alliance, which is a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition.

What has Lando said about Zionism?

Earlier this week, Israeli media released a video of Lando making year-old comments that harshly criticise Zionism, military service and secular Israelis.

Lando, who has made similarly critical remarks before, is heard in the video saying that Zionism “caused the Arabs to hate us” and brought physical as well as spiritual “disasters” on the Jewish people.

“It is possible to live well with the Arabs without a state,” Lando said, adding that international or Palestinian rule would have been “the best situation” for Jews.

Lando went on to castigate soldiers who adhere to Religious Zionism – a strand of Orthodox Judaism that upholds Zionism – saying “they are killed because their rabbis teach them a distorted Torah.” Many military operations, he said, are carried out “not for saving lives, but for the honour of the state”.

The veteran rabbi also had harsh words for secular Israelis, who he said have “no connection to Judaism at all”. He described them as having built “a state of apostasy and heresy”.

What has been the reaction in Israel?

Lando’s remarks have drawn fierce criticism from numerous Israeli politicians, including all major figures that have joined an opposition alliance challenging Netanyahu.

Gadi Eisenkot, head of the Yashar party who is viewed as the opposition bloc’s most likely candidate for prime minister, said Lando’s “outrageous statements” were “the embodiment of anti-Zionism”.

Yair Lapid, the head of Israel’s opposition in the Knesset, called the comments “a disgrace to every Jew”.

Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who leads the Together alliance co-founded with Lapid, said Lando’s remarks are “anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist” and against the Israeli military.

Netanyahu has not commented on Lando’s latest reported remarks, but he publicly condemned earlier statements by the rabbi in July, when Lando accused the Religious Zionism movement of “incitement to murder” for its support for drafting religious seminary students into the military.

Could the controversy impact Israel’s upcoming elections?

Potentially.

Members of the anti-Netanyahu opposition bloc have called for the UTJ, which Lando’s party is part of, to be cast out of any future government, and criticised Netanyahu for staying aligned with the group.

Yair Golan, head of the Democrats party, said Netanyahu is “silent because without Rabbi Lando and his emissaries, he has no government”.

Netanyahu’s “political survival is more important to him than Zionism, more than equality in service, and more than the blood of our soldiers”, Golan said.

But breaking with the UTJ would come at a huge political cost to Netanyahu, whose coalition is already in for a tough election battle on October 27 and is polling well below the 61-seat threshold needed for a majority.

UTJ is projected to win 8 seats in parliament, according to an October 5 poll by Israel’s Channel 12.

“If Netanyahu attacks Lando forcefully, he pays a price with the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) he needs to form a government,” said Ehab Jabareen, a researcher on Israeli affairs. “If he stays silent, he hands his rivals material to tell right-wing voters that the man who speaks of Zionism and security depends on a religious leadership that doubts Zionism itself.”

Oil prices drop as Trump dismisses speculation of pre-midterm military action against Iran.

United States President Donald Trump has said the US will not attack Iran before the November 3 midterm elections.

The US president said late on Thursday: “we are having productive discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” in a post on Truth Social. “We will not be attacking Iran at any time prior to the midterm elections to be held in the United States on November 3rd.”

Oil prices fell early on Friday as Middle East supply concerns eased somewhat after tensions in the energy-rich Gulf region had mounted in recent weeks.

The possibility of renewed fighting had appeared to drive up oil prices in trading on Thursday. Some analysts believe Trump’s comments were an attempt to try and bring prices back down.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Tehran is reviewing the US response to its seven-day plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and that Iran will respond within the “next few days”.

He added that negotiations are continuing through mediators, Iran’s Tasnim news agency reported.

Hormuz explosions

Iranian media reported “massive explosions” in the southern Strait of Hormuz on Friday, with Fars citing unnamed military sources as saying tankers using “unauthorised” routes may have struck sea mines.

On Tuesday, US Vice President JD Vance said Iran must make a “meaningful” reduction in its uranium enrichment capacity as part of an agreement to end the war. Experts say this demand may signal a softening of Washington’s earlier insistence that Tehran abandon enrichment altogether.

On Monday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said negotiations with Washington were “futile”, accusing the US of using negotiations to attack Iran.

Russian President Vladimir Putin told Pezeshkian that Russia will “do everything” to help end the US-led war on Iran, Russian news agencies reported on Thursday.

Opposition unionists call for the prosecution of Sinn Fein lawmakers who participated in the protest.

Northern Irish police have contacted representatives of Sinn Fein in an investigation into a protest that blocked a Protestant parade from marching through a Catholic area, the party said.

The Sinn Fein party leads Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government alongside its main pro-British rival, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which has called for Sinn Fein lawmakers to be prosecuted.

In a statement posted to Facebook on Thursday, Sinn Fein confirmed “that a number of its representatives and party members received correspondence” from police.

“Sinn Fein will continue to stand with the Garvaghy Road residents who should be allowed to live in peace and free from sectarian intimidation,” the party said in the statement.

It added they have “stood with residents of the Garvaghy Road for the last two weeks in the face of provocation and the threat of an unwanted Orange march through their community”.

March permitted

Northern Ireland’s High Court permitted the Protestant Orange Order to march on the Catholic Garvaghy Road for the first time in 28 years.

Police opened an investigation into what they called the unlawful protest of the march, and said people reasonably suspected of committing offences will receive letters for interviews.

Sinn Fein First Minister Michelle O’Neill and Sinn Fein President Mary Lou McDonald participated in the protests.

The DUP called for O’Neill and other lawmakers to be prosecuted.

“A political title is not a shield, and no one is above the law,” the party said in a statement on Thursday.

Before the Good Friday Agreement was signed, annual attempts by the Orange Order to march through the area triggered unrest across the British-run region until the route was banned in 1998.

The standoff has become a political crisis in Northern Ireland, affecting the region’s power-sharing government.

The leading candidates in Michigan’s heated Senate race have faced off in their first televised debate, with less than a month remaining before the United States midterm elections.

Thursday’s hour-long debate was a microcosm of how tense the toss-up race has become.

Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed, formerly the health director for Wayne County, repeatedly sought to paint his Republican adversary Mike Rogers as a yacht-owning millionaire out of touch with ordinary voters.

For his part, Rogers, a former member of the US House of Representatives, lobbed accusations at El-Sayed that he was soft on “terrorism” and had foreign sympathies.

The Michigan-born El-Sayed has repeatedly faced Islamophobic attacks while on the campaign trail, with Republican President Donald Trump labelling him an “extremist, terrorist sympathizer” whose history “goes back to the days of the Jihad”. If elected, El-Sayed would be the first Muslim member of the US Senate.

The two candidates spent much of their hour onstage together speaking over one another, as they exchanged pointed barbs.

“He can’t condemn a terrorist act that happened on our soil in the state of Michigan. He can’t bring himself to condemn –,” Rogers began, referencing a March attack on a synagogue.

“I did condemn it,” El-Sayed said, jumping in. “No, you did not,” Rogers replied, with El-Sayed quickly responding, “You make stuff up. You make stuff up.”

The Senate race in Michigan is considered key to the battle for control of the US Senate. Democrats are seeking to flip both chambers of Congress, but shifting control of the Senate will be a tougher prospect, given that only a third of its 100 seats are on the November 3 ballot.

Host Rick Albin at times struggled to keep the debate on track, as tensions rose.

“We’ve got dozens of questions we want to get to. You can’t litigate all of these with 14 different rebuttals, so please work with me,” Albin told the two candidates at one point.

Here are the key takeaways from the evening’s debate.

Rogers insinuates El-Sayed family ties to ‘terrorism watch list’

The ferocity of the debate was underscored by the high volume of ad hominem attacks the candidates deployed against each other.

But Rogers repeatedly pushed a series of attacks that seemed to centre on El-Sayed’s identity as a Muslim.

In response to a question about healthcare, Rogers said that El-Sayed has “taken money from individuals on his campaign who openly support Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda”.

Later, when asked about his position on surveillance by Flock cameras, Rogers argued that such technology has helped catch people suspected of terrorism. He then implied that El-Sayed’s concerns about the cameras were suggestive.

“Why would that bother you?” Rogers asked El-Sayed. “Well, if you have somebody in your family that might be on the terrorism watch list …”

El-Sayed interjected, seeming to dare Rogers to continue his thought.

“Are you going to go ahead and say that I’m a – go ahead and say it,” El-Sayed said. “You’ve been tiptoeing about it the whole time. Just say it. Just say it. Go ahead and say it.”

Muslim and Arab candidates in the US have frequently been subjected to Islamophobic attacks on the campaign trail, accusing them of support for “terrorism” and Islamic fundamentalism.

Both sides agree on ending the Iran war

There were issues, however, on which both candidates found a measure of common ground.

Both Rogers and El-Sayed agreed the US-Israeli war against Iran should end, but they had opposite views on Washington’s relationship with Israel and its role in the conflict.

High gasoline prices and inflation, El-Sayed said, were directly caused by the Iran war, and he blamed the Trump administration for Iran’s decision to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a critical trade route.

“This is what happens when you start wars you never should be fighting,” El-Sayed said. “We literally taught the Iranian regime that they have a choke on the Strait of Hormuz, and now we’re living in that reality.”

Rogers agreed that “we need [the war] to come to an end”, but he also justified the conflict, saying that Iran’s uranium enrichment programme had been “set back twenty years”, echoing a frequent White House talking point.

The Trump administration has argued that the war was necessary to prevent Iran from creating a nuclear weapon, a goal Tehran has long denied.

Rogers’s position led El-Sayed to accuse him of “cheerleading” for the war and the Trump administration.

Rogers backs continued Israel aid, El-Sayed calls for end

As part of the debate about US foreign policy, the candidates were also pressed on their positions about the US alliance with Israel.

The country is considered the largest overall recipient of US aid since World War II. From the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023 through September 2025, experts estimate that Israel received nearly $21.7bn in military aid.

El-Sayed has openly called for ending aid to Israel, and he has repeatedly denounced the conflict in Gaza as a genocide, in line with evaluations from United Nations experts and human rights watchdogs.

During the debate, he indicated he preferred US taxpayer dollars to be spent on domestic concerns like education and healthcare, rather than Israeli aid.

“He wants unconditional support for a foreign government,” El-Sayed said of Rogers. “I want unconditional support for kids in our schools, unconditional support for our healthcare, childcare.”

He also blamed Israel for the US military action in Iran. “I don’t want to be pushed into war by Israel, and I don’t want to be in war with Iran,” El-Sayed said.

Rogers, meanwhile, has joined most of his fellow Republicans in continuing to support aid for Israel. He argued that the country had “the right to defend itself in a very difficult neighbourhood”.

“Is there anything Israel could do that would lose your support?” the debate host asked.

“Listen, if they’re talking about using nuclear weapons, they would definitely lose my support,” Rogers replied.

Rogers calls immigration crackdown ‘not appropriate’

Another hot-button issue during the debate was Trump’s crackdown on immigration.

The Republican leader has pledged to carry out the largest mass deportation effort in US history, and his campaign has spurred human rights concerns.

When asked how they would approach the crackdown, both Rogers and El-Sayed agreed on tempering the militarised nature of the campaign.

In several cities, including Minneapolis, Minnesota, immigration authorities have been accused of racial profiling and using excessive force against immigrants and protesters, as well as violating their rights to due process.

Multiple fatal shootings have occurred during immigration enforcement operations, including the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January.

Rogers indicated he would not have supported such confrontational operations, but he repeated a Trump claim that the raids were taking dangerous criminals off the streets.

“I think the public efforts in Minnesota were probably not appropriate,” Rogers said. “You always want to go in quiet, get the bad guy, get out of the neighbourhood for less problems. So that, to me, was something that they could have done differently.”

He later claimed that, under Trump, the country had seen “the largest decrease in murders ever recorded”.

El-Sayed, meanwhile, has previously voiced support for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a key agency in Trump’s deportation campaign. He defended that stance on the debate stage.

“ICE right now is not about immigration enforcement. ICE is about terrorising our streets,” he said.

Candidates debate Canada trade war and tariffs

Donald Trump’s trade war with Canada, felt acutely in neighbouring Michigan, was another key topic of conversation.

El-Sayed depicted Rogers as an uncritical backer of Trump and his tariffs and tied him to past free trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which paved the way for companies to shift manufacturing facilities out of the US – though Rogers did not enter Congress until 2001, eight years after NAFTA passed.

“You did that, man. That was your policy. NAFTA, that was your policy,” said El-Sayed.

Rogers sought to distance himself from the current trade war but expressed support for a deal with Canada that would loosen some of Ottawa’s tariffs on US goods.

“I would like to see the deal made,” said Rogers, adding that high Canadian tariffs for US goods “should be eliminated”.

Both candidates tried to strike a balance between criticism of the economic fallout of the trade war and qualifying their support for more selective tariffs, favoured by some industries and labour unions as a means of protecting domestic jobs.

Thousands of protestors honor Maricarmen Abascal’s life, while tributes within parliament spark debate.

Thousands of Spaniards protested outside Spain’s parliament after the death of Maria del Carmen Abascal, the 87-year-old woman whose eviction ignited nationwide protests and sparked a snap general election.

Meanwhile, tributes to Abascal were debated within the legislature as lawmakers accused each other of exploiting the case ahead of the election.

Maricarmen Abascal died on Wednesday after being hospitalised for severe anxiety and exhaustion since her eviction on a stretcher from her Madrid home on September 23.

While in the hospital, she reached a deal to return to her home but died before she could return. No cause of death has been announced.

‘Killing someone’

“They killed her through heartbreak,” Diana, a demonstrator, told Al Jazeera. “Taking an 87-year-old woman out of her home after she had lived in the same house for 70 years, that is killing someone.”

Diana joined thousands of protesters outside Spain’s parliament.

Outside Abascal’s building, mourners left flowers, candles, handwritten notes and children’s drawings.

“They’re not deaths; they’re murders,” protesters chanted as they walked from a protest camp in the central Puerta del Sol square to Abascal’s former home on Thursday.

Tributes in Spain’s legislature

Protests over home shortages and surging rents following her eviction prompted Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to call a snap general election for November 29 after parliament failed to pass emergency housing measures.

Tributes to Abascal in the Madrid region’s legislature caused arguments as lawmakers accused each other of exploiting the case ahead of the election.

Alberto Nunez Feijoo, leader of the conservative opposition People’s Party (PP), accused Sanchez and the Socialists of trying to exploit the housing crisis for political gain ahead of the election.

“We will not allow this attempt to manipulate the emotions of the Spanish people; all of this has happened during their eight years in government. It won’t fly,” Feijoo said.

The PP, which holds absolute majorities in the Madrid regional and local assemblies, refused to observe a minute of silence in her honour. Instead, hard-left deputies staged one outside City Hall and gave Abascal a 60-second standing ovation during a tense debate in the regional assembly, while PP lawmakers remained seated with folded arms.

Left-leaning parties criticised conservatives for rejecting legislation in parliament aimed at curbing soaring rental prices.

Support for housing intervention

A survey carried out in June and published by state pollster CIS on Thursday found that 76.3 percent of Spaniards supported intervention in the market to guarantee access to housing, while 79 percent believed the right to housing should take precedence over treating homes as a market commodity.

Ombudsman Angel Gabilondo said addressing the housing crisis would require greater commitment from all levels of government.

He said his office was preparing a housing report and reiterated proposals to expand public housing, restrict tourist rentals, increase rent assistance and strengthen protections against evictions for vulnerable households.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon says the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan will be livestreamed after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the execution would be “public.”

Hegseth, speaking to the conservative TV outlet Real America’s Voice News on Wednesday, said the execution of Hasan will take place at Fort Hood on Dec. 3. Hasan was convicted of killing 13 people and injuring 32 others in a shooting at the military base in 2009.

“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” Hegseth said.

Hegseth spoke to the outlet aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier while visiting the long-deployed crew, who supported the Iran war, before their arrival at their home port in San Diego.

When asked if Hasan had made any final requests or reached out to the Trump administration, Hegseth simply replied: “Don’t care. We’ll see him on December 3rd.”

Officials in the Pentagon clarified Thursday that the execution will be livestreamed and that more details would follow.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell had said Monday that President Trump had approved the execution of Hasan.

Trump has previously been critical of public executions in Iran, at times using the possibility of protesters being killed by the Iranian government as a possible rationale for military action. Those warnings preceded his ultimate choice to attack Iran at the end of February over its ballistic missiles and the risk of it developing nuclear weapons.

“We’ve been told that the killing in Iran is stopping,” Trump told reporters on Jan. 14 of this year. “It’s stopping and there’s no plan for executions.”

He repeated that claim on Jan. 20 at a White House press briefing, saying: “We let them know that if that happens, that will be a very bad day for them. And they decided not to do it. They didn’t hang the people.”

Slightly more than a month later in his State of the Union address, Trump said, “We stopped them from hanging a lot of them with the threat of serious violence.”

The White House on Thursday immediately referred questions about the plans for the livestreamed execution to the Pentagon.

However, experts on military law said Hasan could choose to resist execution and file a habeas petition in civilian court, which could significantly delay the execution.

“It frankly might outlast the current administration, and who knows if the next one will have the same penchant for executions,” said Eugene R. Fidell, a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School specializing in military law.

Hasan, an Army psychiatrist who held the rank of major, walked into a medical building where soldiers were waiting in long lines to receive immunizations and medical clearance for deployment. He shouted “Allahu akbar” — Arabic for “God is great!” — and opened fire with a laser-sighted handgun.

During the trial it was revealed that Hasan spent weeks planning the deadly attack, and his preparation included videotaping a sales clerk showing him how to change the magazine on the pistol that he purchased. He would later go to a gun range outside Austin and ask for advice on how to reload with speed and precision from an instructor.

Soldiers later testified that Hasan’s rapid reloading made it all but impossible to stop the shooting. Investigators recovered 146 shell casings inside the building and dozens more outside, where Hasan shot at the backs of soldiers fleeing toward the parking lot.

Hasan said it was an effort to stop them from going to Afghanistan and killing his fellow Muslims. A military judge barred him from presenting that as a defense during his trial. Hasan made almost no effort to defend himself in court, telling jurors when he acted as his own counsel that evidence would show he was the shooter and describing himself as a soldier who had “switched sides.”

Hegseth said the military hasn’t executed a servicemember by firing squad since World War II. The last military execution took place on April 13, 1961, when Army Pvt. John Bennett was executed by hanging.

Toropin writes for the Associated Press.

The Russian and Iranian presidents met in Turkmenistan ahead of regional summit.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has told Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian that Russia will “do everything” to help end the United States-led war on Iran, Russian news agencies reported.

The two leaders met in Turkmenistan on Thursday ahead of the summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a group of former Soviet nations.

“You know our position. On our part, we are ready to do everything we can to help you resolve this situation,” Interfax news agency said Putin told Pezeshkian.

“We know that Iran is making real efforts to end the conflict, which broke out through no fault of its own, no fault of Iran’s,” Putin said, according to Russian media.

Putin also noted what he called a “positive evolution” in Iran-Russia relations.

In a call on Wednesday, Putin told Pezeshkian that Moscow is prepared to mediate efforts to end the war in the Middle East, Iran’s IRNA news agency reported.

Putin and Pezeshkian also met on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Kyrgyzstan last month.

Strategic partnership

The two countries, which are under heavy Western sanctions, have reinforced diplomatic and military ties.

Last year, Moscow and Tehran signed a “comprehensive strategic partnership treaty” that covers areas from trade and military cooperation to science, culture and education.

Ukraine and Western countries have accused Iran of supplying Russia with Shahed drones and short-range missiles for use in the Ukraine war. Russia has also been accused of supplying data to Iran for its attacks on US targets in the Middle East.

The meeting came as Iran-US talks stand at an apparent impasse.

US President Donald Trump said on Thursday that the US will not launch an attack on Iran before the November 3 US midterm congressional elections, saying the two countries are ‌‌holding “productive” talks about ending the ongoing war.

Diplomatic efforts to resolve Russia’s offensive in Ukraine also appear deadlocked, even as both sides intensify attacks.

HARRISBURG, Pa. — When the U.S. Department of Homeland Security publicized the arrest of a Nigerian man for indecent exposure this week, it included a political attack that’s drawing complaints from Democrats and a nonpartisan government watchdog.

The department’s news release alleges that the man worked for a Democratic congressional candidate in a Pennsylvania battleground district, an unusual reference to a high-profile midterm contest.

“It’s unbelievable that Janelle Stelson would employ an illegal alien to work on a congressional campaign, let alone a pervert who exposed himself in public,” Charles Wall, deputy director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in the news release.

A police report said the man had fliers for Stelson in his vehicle. Stelson denied that the man was a campaign employee.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions about how it established the man worked for Stelson. Its news release cited a news report quoting a conservative activist who asserted the connection.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a complaint Thursday with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, calling the department’s attack on Stelson a blatant violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits government officials from using their official positions to influence elections.

Donald Sherman, who leads CREW, said he’d never seen anything like the department’s statement, where a law enforcement agency “goes out of its way” to reference a campaign affiliation in a news release that has nothing to do with election-related crimes.

The news release is “consistent with the message that the administration and that the president has sent from the top that ICE is to be involved in elections, regardless of what the law says,” Sherman said.

Stelson, a former local television personality, is running for the second time against Republican Rep. Scott Perry in Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District. It’s expected to be one of the races that determines control of the U.S. House in the November midterms.

“If he is an illegal immigrant who committed a crime he should be deported,” Stelson’s campaign said. “We never heard of him prior to the news of his arrest. We are grateful to law enforcement for acting swiftly to arrest him.”

President Trump’s administration is already under scrutiny for using federal resources for political purposes. The Department of Homeland Security has spent millions of taxpayer dollars on advertisements glorifying Trump and promoting his campaign messaging, drawing a pair of lawsuits and bipartisan backlash.

According to a police report obtained by the Associated Press, Chimaobim Adedayo Igbojekwe was arrested by an East Pennsboro Township police officer on Sept. 27 after a report of a suspicious vehicle parked next to a public park on a residential street in the Harrisburg suburb.

The officer wrote that, when Igbojekwe opened the door to talk to the officer, he noticed that Igbojekwe’s “genitals were exposed.”

Igbojekwe told the officer he was “in the neighborhood for work and that he was waiting to hand out [fliers] for Janelle Stelson’s political campaign,” according to the report. Igbojekwe produced a stack of fliers, the officer wrote.

It’s not clear whether the man was working as a paid canvasser for another organization.

Igbojekwe was charged with disorderly conduct and indecent exposure. He pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, courts records say, and later was arrested by ICE.

Homeland Security said Igbojekwe entered the country legally in 2017 but remained past his “authorized period.” He was granted deferred action in 2021.

Igbojekwe’s public defender did not return a call about the case.

Levy writes for the Associated Press.