Human beings invented States to protect themselves from catastrophe. You understand this in Lewis Mumford’s books on the first cities or in Jared Diamond’s on civilizational collapse: we went from nomadic tribal groups to organized societies of thousands of people because we learned to organize governments that, besides making some richer and more powerful than others, reduced the chances of dying from hunger, cold, disease, or enemy attack.
Until the mid-20th century, Venezuela did not have a State that significantly reduced the primitive precarity of its population, that defended it from catastrophe. As in so many other places on Earth, it was then that Venezuelans began to benefit from technology and institutions that saved them from dying of starvation or influenza. There had been previous efforts, from Páez’s first economic reconstruction programs and Guzmán Blanco’s compulsory education to Gómez’s road construction.
But it was with the López Contreras administration in 1936 that we began to see institutions functioning on a truly national scale, vaccination and literacy campaigns, a systematic effort to transform a dispersed, sparsely populated society with a very low life expectancy, where the vast majority of people were sick and malnourished, into a functional and productive one. During those decades, the governments of López Contreras, Medina Angarita, the 1945-1948 junta, Gallegos, and Pérez Jiménez took advantage of oil revenues to implement measures that benefited the people. With democracy, in 1958, came more public works and institutional innovations, such as the expansion of political rights.
With Chávez, the decadent welfare state we had not only ceased to protect society from catastrophe, but became the cause of the catastrophe. It was like teaching a loyal guard dog to kill the children in the house.
Until that promise of development for all was broken, inequality began to grow, vulnerability began to regain ground, and a frustrated and confused society chose Hugo Chávez as its answer, precisely in the year, 1998, that marked five centuries since the first contact with Spain. It had taken us half a millennium to have a State that provided health, education, justice, and order. That year, that history of progress halted, and the long road traveled began to unravel.
Reversal and investment
As Paula Vásquez Lezama described it, since the Vargas tragedy in 1999, when chavismo appropriated the bodies of the survivors, everything the State gave demanded in return helping that State grow and maintain itself. As Mirtha Rivero recounts in La oscuridad no llegó sola, chavismo used every crisis to seize control of the entire State. Once it had it in its hands, it turned it upside down. The State that should have served society now only had to serve power, against society.
With Chávez, the decadent welfare state we had not only ceased to protect society from catastrophe, but became the cause of the catastrophe. It was like teaching a loyal guard dog to kill the children in the house.
Chavismo deepened all the vices of those previous governments to reverse the complicated history of our development and invert the role of the State. The long-standing culture of police and military violence expanded to turn the entire country into a checkpoint, where the armed forces behave like an army of occupation that treats all natives as enemies, on a scale that covers the entire territory, not just the slums riddled with bullets during the Caracazo. The perennial culture of corruption among civil servants was perfected to privatize the public administration, which does nothing unless its staff is paid personally, and to transform the bureaucracy into an industry for extracting wealth from citizens and the land, far more voracious than under any dictatorial or democratic government prior to 1999.
As long as this perpetrator State exists, we will not have any transition to democracy in Venezuela.
The elephantine State erected by Chávez had lost much of its muscle mass by 2020, but it remained, and remains, capable of subjugating a nation diminished by the miniaturization of its economy and mass migration. Maduro redesigned repression to maximize the yield of his limited resources. And so he reached the point where he discovered, especially after the 2024 electoral fraud, the efficiency of kidnapping a minor, because that means imprisoning an entire family and the community network to which the family turns to.
The method of subjugating society by harming entire families is evident in the Víctor Quero case. It wasn’t administrative chaos that prevented his family from knowing whether he was alive or dead, nor was it that the clerks couldn’t find the file with his name on it. It was terror, a set of practices that a regime, illegitimate and rejected by the majority of the population, implemented to minimize the chances of losing power. That State, which for decades attempted to be a welfare state, providing public goods to millions of citizens, now focuses on managing harm to those millions in order to provide private goods to the few thousand who control it.
Beyond the anger we feel over the story of Carmen Navas asking about her son from the cruel giant who killed him, the Víctor Quero case is causing such a stir because of how it exposes the way the Venezuelan State has become the very opposite of what it should be. Instead of saving people from misfortune, it inflicts misfortune to govern through fear. Instead of being accountable, it lies and sows confusion for months as a form of torture. Instead of being the state of law and justice promised by the Constitution that frames it, it is a criminal State where justice does not exist.
The great work of chavismo
This is the State that killed Víctor Quero and that forced an elderly woman, for more than nine months, to undertake the economic and logistical challenge of visiting courts and prisons, even outside Caracas, driven by the hope of seeing her son again before he died.
And this State is the main achievement of chavismo.
Previous governments, whose main task was to govern for better or for worse, left behind a legacy of buildings and institutions, from banks and State-owned enterprises to schools, museums, and universities, which were a mix of successes and failures. Chavismo will leave some buildings and infrastructure projects, far too few considering the revenue it received during almost three decades in power. But the main creation of chavismo is this gigantic state that serves only to subjugate society.
And as long as this perpetrator State exists, we will not have any transition to democracy in Venezuela. We will not be able to return to the path of democracy and development from which chavismo diverted us.
Senator Hawley plans legislative action supporting President Trump’s bid to waive the petrol tax amid rising consumer costs.
United States President Donald Trump said he will cut the 18-cent federal tax on petrol to offset surging prices that have continued to soar after his comments that the US ceasefire with Iran is on “life support”.
On Monday, Trump said he would suspend the petrol tax, but did not specify an end date.
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“Yup, we’re going to take off the gas tax for a period of time, and when gas goes down, we’ll let it phase back in,” Trump told CBS News.
Trump later told reporters that he would waive the tax, which generates $2.5bn in funds used for US roadway infrastructure, “till it’s appropriate”.
The US administration hinted at the idea on Sunday, when US Energy Secretary Chris Wright told the NBC News programme Meet the Press that the White House was considering suspending the tax.
While the Republican president claimed he would waive the tax, that is not within the White House’s authority. Suspending a federal tax requires an act of the US Congress.
However, key Trump ally Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, said on the social media platform X that he would introduce legislation on Monday to do that.
In March, Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat from Arizona, proposed suspending the tax until October.
“I anticipate it would pass, but there could be a procedural delay. It also suggests that President Trump doesn’t see a quick end to the reduced volumes and is trying to cushion the American consumer,” Rachel Ziemba, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told Al Jazeera.
“The impact could be greater in states that have also reduced their own petrol taxes and could reinforce differentiation between petrol prices by region.”
US states also tax petrol, with Indiana, Kentucky and Georgia moving to make cuts to give consumers some relief at the pump.
Petrol prices have continued to climb since the initial strikes of the US-Israel war on Iran on February 28. The average price for a gallon (3.78 litres) of regular petrol is $4.52, according to the American Automobile Association, which tracks daily petrol prices, compared with $2.98 when the strikes first began.
However, news of the stumbling ceasefire has sent oil prices surging. Brent crude futures were up $3.17, or 3.13 percent, at $104.46 a barrel, while US West Texas Intermediate crude was at $98.32 a barrel, up $2.90, or 3.04 percent. Brent reached a session high of $105.99 and WTI hit a peak of $100.37.
On Wall Street, stocks for oil and gas giants are trending upward. Shell was up 1.6 percent in midday trading, Exxon rose 3.1 percent, BP gained 2 percent, and Chevron climbed 1.7 percent.
Airline bailout?
Trump was also asked by CBS on Monday whether a bailout was planned for the airline industry, which has taken a hit since the war on Iran began.
The president told the outlet that a bailout had not “really been presented” and that “the airlines are doing not badly”.
However, earlier this month, budget carrier Spirit Airlines ceased operations after 34 years. Court documents said the airline shut down because of “recent geopolitical events resulting in a massive and sustained increase in fuel prices”.
That comes as other major US carriers raise prices. In April, United Airlines said it would raise fares by 20 percent amid a surge in jet fuel costs.
THE HAGUE — Venezuela ’s acting President Delcy Rodríguez told journalists Monday that her country had no plans to become the 51st U.S. state after President Trump said he was “seriously considering” the move.
Rodríguez was speaking at the International Court of Justice in The Hague on the final day of hearings in a dispute between her country and neighboring Guyana over the massive mineral- and oil-rich Essequibo region.
“We will continue to defend our integrity, our sovereignty, our independence, our history,” said Rodríguez, who assumed power in January following a U.S. military operation that ousted then-President Nicolás Maduro. Venezuela is “not a colony, but a free country,” she added.
Rodríguez went on to say that Venezuelan and U.S. officials have been in touch and are working on “cooperation and understanding.”
Before addressing Trump’s comments, Rodríguez defended her country’s claim to Essequibo at the United Nations’ highest court, telling judges that political negotiations — not a judicial ruling — will resolve the century-old territorial dispute.
The 62,000-square-mile territory, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana, is rich in gold, diamonds, timber and other natural resources. It also sits near massive offshore oil deposits currently producing an average 900,000 barrels a day.
That output is close to Venezuela’s daily production of about 1 million barrels a day and has transformed one of the smallest countries in South America into a significant energy producer.
Venezuela has considered Essequibo its own since the Spanish colonial period, when the jungle region fell within its boundaries. But an 1899 decision by arbitrators from Britain, Russia and the United States drew the border along the Essequibo River largely in favor of Guyana.
Venezuela has argued that a 1966 agreement sealed in Geneva to resolve the dispute effectively nullified the 19th-century arbitration. In 2018, however, three years after ExxonMobil announced a significant oil discovery off the Essequibo coast, Guyana’s government went to the International Court of Justice and asked judges to uphold the 1899 ruling.
Tensions between the countries further flared in 2023, when Rodríguez’s predecessor, Maduro, threatened to annex the region by force after holding a referendum asking voters if Essequibo should be turned into a Venezuelan state. Maduro was captured Jan. 3 during a U.S. military operation in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, and taken to New York to face drug trafficking charges. He has pleaded not guilty.
Rodríguez did not address the referendum in her remarks, but she told the court that the 1966 agreement is designed to allow negotiations between Venezuela and Guyana to resolve the territorial dispute. And she accused Guyana’s government of undermining the agreement with the “opportunistic” decision to ask the court to address the dispute.
“At a time when the mechanisms established in the Geneva agreement were still fully in force, Guyana unilaterally chose to shift the dispute from the negotiating arena to a judicial resolution,” she said. “This change was not accidental; it coincided with the discovery in 2015 of the oil field that would become world-renowned.”
When hearings opened last week, Guyana’s foreign minister, Hugh Hilton Todd, told the panel of international judges that the dispute “has been a blight on our existence as a sovereign state from the very beginning.” He said that 70% of Guyana’s territory is at stake.
The court is likely to take months to issue a final and legally binding ruling in the case.
Venezuela has warned that its participation in the hearings does not mean either consent to, or recognition of, the court’s jurisdiction.
Quell and Cano write for the Associated Press. Garcia Cano reported from Mexico City.
BATON ROUGE, La. — Thousands of Louisiana voters have already cast early ballots for congressional candidates in what soon could be the wrong districts. Alabama’s primaries are a week away, but the state could force a do-over for voting on U.S. House races. A new congressional map in Tennessee upended races that had been underway for months.
Republicans’ rush to gerrymander congressional districts across several Southern states after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling hollowed out the Voting Rights Act is confusing voters and creating logistical headaches for local election officials. The changes are hitting while primary season is in progress.
The chaotic upheaval to an election season that could determine which party controls the U.S. House is the latest fallout from an intensely partisan gerrymandering battle initiated by President Trump last year to protect Republicans’ slim majority.
The Supreme Court’s decision last month severely weakening the Voting Rights Act required Louisiana to reconsider a map drawn in 2024 with two majority minority congressional districts that elected Black representatives. The GOP-controlled Legislature could eliminate one or both in a state where roughly 30% of the population is Black.
The ruling also encouraged Republicans in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee to consider eliminating four Democratic districts among them, three represented by Black lawmakers. Florida has a new map meant to cost Democrats four of their eight seats, out of 28.
In Louisiana, 66-year-old New Orleans resident Sallie Davis voted early last week. Her ballot allowed her to vote for Democratic U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, but a sign at her polling booth showed his race crossed off with a ballpoint pen. She was confused and frustrated — especially when a poll worker told her to go with what the sign seemed to convey. She’s now worried that her entire ballot will not be counted.
“I was supposed to believe a piece of paper with an X on it marking out the person I wanted to vote for,” she said, her voice breaking as she recounted her experience later. “I think I have been disenfranchised. I think my vote, that I just voted on, it’s not going to count or something. I think it’s illegal.”
Primaries postponed, deadlines compressed
Louisiana’s primary is on Saturday, and a week of early voting there began May 2, two days after the Republican governor declared an emergency and suspended congressional primaries to give lawmakers a chance to draw a new map.
Republican Secretary of State Nancy Landry’s office said nearly 179,000 primary ballots had been cast as of Friday, including about 53,000 absentee ballots returned by mail. She said the ballots included U.S. House races, but votes in those contests won’t be counted.
In Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee, Republicans justified pursuing new maps by saying that electing more Republicans would better reflect their states’ conservative values. Alabama lawmakers passed legislation Friday allowing a do-over of congressional primaries.
Alabama’s primary is May 19, and voting in congressional races will occur then as planned, but with the old districts. Those votes would end up not counting if a court allows the switch to different districts.
Mississippi held its primaries in March, but a federal court has ordered it to redraw its state Supreme Court districts, and Trump is pushing Republicans to redraw the state’s four congressional districts.
A special session of its Legislature is set for May 20. Renovations of the House chamber will force members to meet at the Old State Capitol, where, decades ago, Mississippi lawmakers passed Jim Crow laws suppressing Black voting.
“Modern-day voter suppression relies on election administration errors and chaos, and that’s what we’re going to see play out in all of these states,” said Amir Badat, a Jackson, Mississippi, voting rights attorney and activist.
Tennessee continues yearlong fight
Tennessee was the first state to enact a new map since the U.S. Supreme Court decision, but Trump’s push for redistricting started in Texas last year. Democrats countered in California and tried but ran afoul of the courts in Virginia.
Before Tennessee’s GOP-controlled Legislature passed a new map last week, the state’s elections coordinator told county officials in a memo what that would mean: reprogramming election systems, retraining poll workers and possibly adjusting precinct boundaries, meaning some voters’ polling places could change.
Tennessee’s congressional primaries still will be held Aug. 6 as planned, and candidates have until Friday to qualify for the ballot. Those who qualified previously will get a pass if they can run in a new district with the same number.
In South Carolina, lawmakers could move all the state’s June 9 primaries to August, or just the congressional races. While mail balloting is limited because the state requires an excuse to do it, more than 6,800 mail ballots already had been sent to voters — with 260 returned — as of Friday, according to the state Elections Commission.
Holding a separate election for congressional primaries would cost $3 million and the time for preparations would be compressed, Conway Belangia, the commission’s executive director, told lawmakers Friday.
“It will be difficult, but it will be possible,” he said.
Activists see problems ahead for voters
Michael McClanahan, president of the NAACP’s Louisiana State Conference, is hearing “total confusion” as voters call him and ask, “Is there an election?”
“People say, ’I ain’t going to vote because the governor’s suspended the election,’” he said. “But he didn’t, he only suspended one aspect of it.”
In Alabama, Senate Democratic leader Bobby Singleton said he has been fielding calls from public officials who also are confused.
“These are the people who are the head of elections,” he said. “They don’t know what to do.“
Voting rights activists see problems that arose in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2022, when Republican legislators divided the state’s capital city into three congressional districts to take a seat from Democrats, as a harbinger of what Memphis voters could face this year. A state report said more than 3,000 Nashville-area voters were assigned to incorrect districts and more than 430 cast ballots in the wrong races in the November 2022 election.
“It’s going to be really hard for the election commissions to be able to keep up with this short timeline,” Matia Powell, executive director of the voting rights nonprofit Civic TN, said during a conference call Friday with other voting rights activists in the South.
Some fear confusion will lead to distrust and apathy
Anneshia Hardy, executive director of Alabama Values, which provides support to voting and civil rights groups, said people will lose trust in elections if they believe the rules can change every two years.
“Once people stop believing that the process is stable and fair, disengagement is going to increase, and that’s one of the biggest dangers here,” she said. “Democracy doesn’t just depend on voting systems existing but really on people believing that their participation matters.”
At least a few Democratic voters who went to the Louisiana Capitol on Friday to protest the gerrymandering expressed doubt about whether they still have a political voice.
Davis came to the State Capitol in Baton Rouge and had a bullhorn with her for a protest in which she yelled, “Whose vote? Our vote!”
David Victorian, a 79-year-old Vietnam veteran from Baton Rouge, said: “I’m concerned for the survival of the democracy that we’re supposed to be living in.”
Hanna and Brook write for the Associated Press. Hanna reported from Topeka, Kan. AP writers Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, S.C., and Kim Chandler, in Montgomery, Ala., contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — A man accused of storming the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner while armed with guns and knives pleaded not guilty on Monday to charges that he attempted to kill President Trump and fired a shotgun at a Secret Service officer who tried to stop the attack.
Cole Tomas Allen was handcuffed and shackled and wearing an orange jail uniform when he appeared in federal court for his arraignment. Allen didn’t speak during the brief hearing. One of his attorneys entered the plea on his behalf.
Allen’s lawyers are asking U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden to disqualify at least two top Justice Department officials from direct involvement in prosecuting him because they could be considered victims or witnesses in the case, creating a potential conflict of interest.
Acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche and U.S. Atty. Jeanine Pirro were attending the event when Allen ran through a security checkpoint and fired a shotgun at a Secret Service officer, authorities said. In a court filing last week, Allen’s attorneys argued that it creates at least the appearance of a conflict of interest for Blanche and Pirro to be making any prosecutorial decisions in the case.
McFadden, a Trump nominee, didn’t rule from the bench on that question but asked Allen’s attorneys to elaborate on the possible scope of their recusal request. Defense attorney Eugene Ohm said the defense likely would seek to disqualify Pirro’s entire office from involvement in the case. Ohm acknowledged that a bid to disqualify the entire Justice Department would be unlikely.
“That would be quite a request,” the judge said.
McFadden gave prosecutors until May 22 to respond in writing to the defense’s request. The judge asked the government to specify whether it believes Pirro and Blanche could be considered victims in the case.
“That might add some clarity here,” McFadden said.
In their filing, Allen’s attorneys suggested that the appointment of a special prosecutor might be warranted.
Allen is scheduled to return to court on June 29.
A Secret Service officer was shot once in a bullet-resistant vest during the April 25 attack at the Washington Hilton hotel, which disrupted and ultimately prompted an early end to one of the highest-profile annual events in the nation’s capital. The officer fired five shots but didn’t hit anybody, authorities said.
Allen, 31, of Torrance, was injured but was not shot.
Besides the attempted-assassination count, Allen also is charged with assaulting a federal officer with a deadly weapon and two additional firearms counts. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted of the attempted assassination charge alone.
Allen was placed on suicide watch after his arrest, but jail officials removed him from that status after several days. Allen’s attorneys complained that he had been unnecessarily confined in a padded room with constant lighting, repeatedly strip searched and placed in restraints outside his cell.
Allen told FBI agents that he didn’t expect to survive the attack, which could help explain why he was deemed to be a possible suicide risk, a Justice Department prosecutor has said.
Allen was outfitted with an ammunition bag, a shoulder gun holster and a sheathed knife when he took a photo of himself in his room at the hotel just minutes before the attack, according to prosecutors. In a message that authorities say sheds light on his motive, Allen referred to himself as a “Friendly Federal Assassin” and alluded obliquely to grievances over a range of actions by Trump’s Republican administration.
Authorities have alleged that Allen on April 6 reserved a room for himself at the Hilton where the event would be held weeks later under its typical tight security. He traveled by train cross-country from California, checking himself into the hotel a day before the dinner with a room reserved for the weekend.
Trump was rushed off the stage by his security team at the Saturday night event and appeared at the White House two hours later, still in his tuxedo, to talk about the attack and the suspect.
“When you’re impactful, they go after you. When you’re not impactful, they leave you alone,” the president said. “They seem to think he was a lone wolf.”
Termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democratic-controlled Legislature have dug the state into a deep financial hole, and it faces severe deficit spending through the next governor’s first term.
The only honest solution is an unpopular mix of program cuts and tax increases, plus a focused, earnest and unlikely effort at making government more cost-effective and efficient.
The worst option would be the easy one that got Sacramento into its current mess: gimmicky budgeting that includes excessive borrowing, program delays rather than outright eliminations and fudged numbers.
Nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Gabriel Petek recently estimated “the state faces structural deficits running from $20 billion to $35 billion annually.”
He warned the state’s financial commitments funded by its revenue “[are] not sustainable” and added that mopping up the red ink “will likely require at least some — if not significant — spending reductions.”
The analyst pointed out that since 2019, under Newsom, state general fund spending has risen by $100 billion to $248 billion in the governor’s latest budget proposal in January. About 70% of the growth went to maintaining existing services and 30% was for expanding or creating new programs.
“In retrospect,” Petek continued, “the state could not afford to sustain its existing services while funding … expansions and new programs.”
Last week, the analyst reported some good news coupled with bad. He estimated a $25-billion boost in unanticipated revenue, driven by artificial intelligence enthusiasm and “the related stock market boom.” But, he added, “these surging revenues likely are not sustainable.”
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The analyst said the stock market appears to be “in a speculative bubble, rivaled only by the dot-com boom” (that led to the Great Recession) “and the Roaring ‘20s” (that ushered in the Great Depression).
“The state should be prepared for revenues to be tens of billions lower within one or two years.”
Newsom will get another crack at legitimately balancing a budget on Thursday when he revises his spending proposal for the next fiscal year.
You can’t really blame the governor’s wannabe Democratic successors for dodging this fiscal thicket. Program cuts and higher taxes don’t attract voters. Moreover, the subject is weedy and boring. For that reason, I suspect, moderators didn’t even delve into it during three recent televised gubernatorial debates.
Regardless, budget-crafting is a governor’s most sacred duty and the source of much of their power. It would help voters to know where the candidates stand. Right now, they’re in hiding.
Former state Senate leader Don Perata, a Democrat, posted this last week about the chronic deficits:
“Apparently, candidates find this untroubling or maybe someone else’s worry. None … even mentioned it during those juvenile television ‘debates’ and the hundreds of millions spent on campaign commercials.”
Instead, various contenders have been promising voters a Santa’s sleigh of goodies: state-run single-payer healthcare, free childcare, partial no-tuition college, suspension of the gas tax, no state income tax for people earning under $100,000 and generous subsidies for Hollywood filmmaking.
But this concept seems far beyond the state’s financial reach and operational capability. Its cost could exceed twice the current state budget. And I shudder to think of our state bureaucracy trying to handle healthcare for 39 million people. First, get the DMV working right and the botched bullet train rolling.
Centrist San José Mayor Matt Mahan chimed in, asserting: “The candidates who are fighting for single-payer don’t know how to pay for it, and they’re not being honest about it.”
Practically everyone jumped on new Democratic frontrunner Xavier Becerra — former state attorney general and U.S. health secretary — for seemingly being unable to specify whether he’s for or against single-payer.
“I’ve been consistent for over 30 years,” he said, trying to explain that he favors Medicare-for-all as “the most efficient way that we can do healthcare.”
It was a silly waste of debate time. They were arguing over oranges and lemons — both citrus, but different. Becerra should have just made clear that he’s opposed to single-payer and supports a separate version of universal healthcare: Medicare-type coverage with a supplemental private insurance option for all Californians. If that’s indeed what he favors.
Mahan bragged that he’s “the only candidate in this race who is calling for a suspension of the gas tax.” It’s a highlighted Republican talking point. But no other Democratic candidate advocates suspending the tax because it’s a screwy idea.
The roughly 60-cent-per-gallon state gas tax pays for filling potholes and more serious road repairs and improvements. Moreover, the next governor won’t take office until January. Suspending the tax then — even if the Legislature approved — wouldn’t reduce today’s soaring pump prices.
My take on the debates:
Becerra survived. He’s refreshingly calm but needs to be more crisp.
Steyer was articulate and may have attracted Bernie Sanders fans.
Porter is a talented debater, but seemed overly defensive about her past hot temper.
Mahan was fine, but he just got off the bench and it’s late in the game.
Villaraigosa was straightforward as usual, and finally had a broad audience.
All should bone up on budget-balancing and tell us their thinking.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer pledged a bigger, bolder more optimistic vision for the future with much closer ties to the EU as he fought for his job Monday after his Labour Party took a severe beating in ‘mid-term’ elections on Thursday. File photo by Betty Laura Zapata/EPA
May 11 (UPI) — British Prime Minister Keir Starmer pledged a bigger, bolder, more optimistic direction for Britain, with a much closer relationship with the European Union at its heart, as he fought to hold onto his job on Monday following a disastrous showing by his party in elections.
In a speech in London, Starmer acknowledged making mistakes, but said he would prove wrong those who doubt his ability to deliver solutions to the country’s problems, saying Labour needed to bring “a bigger response” than they had believed was necessary when they came into office.
“Incremental change won’t cut it on growth, defense, Europe, energy. We need a bigger response than we anticipated in 2024 because these are not ordinary times, and this is a political challenge, just as much as it’s a party challenge,” he said.
While insisting his government had got “the big political choices right” on issues such as not getting involved in the Iran war and “investment in public services,” Starmer promised to do much more on apprenticeships, technical excellence colleges and special educational needs to guarantee a job, training or internship to every young unemployed Briton.
He also promised the most significant overhaul of ties with the EU since Britain officially left the bloc in 2021.
“This Labour government will be defined by rebuilding our relationship with Europe, by having Britain at the heart of Europe, standing shoulder to shoulder with the countries that most share our interests, our values and our enemies. That is the right choice for Britain,” he said.
Taking questions from reporters afterward, he kicked the question of rejoining the EU single market or customs union down the road to beyond the next election — but did not rule either out.
Starmer vowed he would see off any attempt to topple him after Nigel Farage’s Reform UK made historic gains in English council elections and parliamentary elections in Wales and Scotland, at Labour’s expense, and warned those who wanted him out that it could clear the way for Farage.
“We are not just facing dangerous times, but dangerous opponents, very dangerous opponents,” he said, saying Labour was the only thing preventing the country from going down a very dark path.”
“This is nothing less than a battle for the soul of our nation, and I want to be crystal clear about how we will win, because we cannot win as a weaker version of Reform or the Greens. We can only win as a stronger version of Labour, a mainstream party of power, not protest,” Starmer said.
Starmer had faced possible internal party challenges from senior party figures seeking to replace him and wider calls to set a timetable for his departure after the party’s disastrous performance.
However, the BBC said Starmer’s speech appeared to have defused the immediate threat to Starmer of a contest for the leadership of the party — and therefore the prime ministership — with backbench MP Catherine West criticizing his speech as “too little, too late” but backing down from her threat to force a leadership election today.
However, she said she still wanted him gone by September.
“The results last Thursday show that the PM has failed to inspire hope. What is best for the party and country now is for an orderly transition. I am hereby giving notice to No. 10 that I am collecting names of Labour MPs to call on the Prime Minister to set a timetable for the election of a new leader in September,” she wrote in a post on X.
West said she had the backing of 10 of the 81 MPs required under party rules to formally kick off a challenge by an MP. If and once a nomination receives sufficient backing, that would likely trigger a full-blown race for the leadership.
Assuming he does not resign, as sitting prime minister, Starmer is an automatic candidate in any leadership election if he so wishes. Former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn fought and won a contest to remove him in 2016, consolidating his authority, although he was leader of the opposition only and not prime minister.
While Labour leaders have resigned under pressure from the party, the cabinet or the public, none has been removed in a formal leadership challenge in post-war Britain.
West is not seeking to replace Starmer herself.
Wreathes are seen amongst the statues at the Korean War Veterans Memorial during Memorial Day weekend in Washington on May 27, 2023. Memorial Day, which honors U.S. military personnel who died while in service, is held on the last Monday of May. Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI | License Photo
CHONGQING, China — Three years ago, in the idyllic town of Woodside south of San Francisco, the United States and China held their first high-level talks on the dangers posed by artificial intelligence. President Xi Jinping and his longtime foreign minister appeared serious in their conviction that a channel should be a established between Beijing and Washington — a red phone for AI in case of emergencies.
They authorized a diplomatic effort that would begin in 2024 in Switzerland, only months before the U.S. presidential election. A large U.S. delegation arrived with high hopes that were abruptly dashed, according to four sources who attended the talks. The Chinese contingent dismissed American concerns over runaway AI as academic, almost theoretical, quickly turning the conversation to export controls seen in Beijing as yet another U.S. effort to hold China back.
“They naturally view any American diplomatic initiative involving limitations or restrictions of one flavor or another on a capability as being a trap,” Jake Sullivan, U.S. national security advisor under President Biden, said in an interview.
Despite the distrust — and Democrats losing the White House to Donald Trump — an accord was struck in November of that year in Peru, where both sides agreed to keep AI out of the command and control of nuclear weapons.
“It was a breaking of the seal that we could actually do something on AI,” Sullivan said. “In the transition, I told the incoming Trump team that they should really pick up that dialogue. But the Trump administration’s view was just far more laissez-faire, and they didn’t seem particularly interested in it.”
“That’s all changed in the past few weeks,” he added.
A Trump administration once eager to gun for technological supremacy is now, for the first time, reckoning with the power AI could unleash if left unchecked.
In a surprise reversal, quiet discussions have taken place ahead of President Trump’s state visit to China this week to explore reviving talks on an emergency channel, officials told The Times, prompted by shared alarm in Beijing and Washington over the debut of Mythos, Anthropic’s powerful new model.
One senior administration official told reporters Sunday that the White House was looking to create a channel of communication for AI like others that they have “in many areas that have intense focus with the U.S. and China.”
“I think what that channel of communication looks like, its formality and what that looks like, is yet to be determined,” the official said, “but we want to take this opportunity with the leaders meeting to open up a conversation. We should establish a channel of communication on that matter.”
Mythos’ capabilities are seen across the industry and government as those of an unprecedented cyberweapon, able to infiltrate and exploit digital communication systems — including government databases, financial institutions and healthcare programs — with untold consequences.
Whether an announcement will come to fruition this week is not yet clear. Any talks between the United States and China over AI regulations — designing some kind of arms control agreement governing the use of a technology that neither side fully understands or controls — will be fraught with suspicion, misunderstandings and risk, experts say.
“Right now, there is almost no support from U.S. policymakers to engage in formal discussions on AI governance with China,” said Aalok Mehta, director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“The logic is that this is a winner-takes-all race,” Mehta said, “and that it’s imperative to accelerate AI progress to ensure that the United States wins that race.”
America in the lead
China would enter those discussions with a powerful argument, that U.S. leadership in AI — and the prevailing strategy of American AI companies — is propelling the world to a fraught frontier.
Every major U.S. player in the arena — OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft and Meta Platforms — is racing to be the first to build a model capable of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a threshold without a common definition, but that most agree will require a model to perform any intellectual human task.
The prevailing theory is that the first to achieve AGI will secure a prize that multiplies itself: a self-training, recursively improving intelligence, growing exponentially and leaving all competitors in its wake.
Chinese companies, by contrast, are following a state-sanctioned strategy focused on integrating AI into siloed industries and systems, training models to improve individual tasks and accelerate growth in a more tailored approach.
“The Chinese believe there is no single race, but multiple races,” said Scott Kennedy, senior advisor on Chinese business and economics at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. “The U.S. is focused on achieving AGI, while China is focused on diffusion and applications of AI into the rest of their economy — manufacturing, humanoid robotics, all aspects of the internet of things.”
China scholars, AI industry insiders and successive administrations have questioned Beijing’s strategic thinking and forthrightness.
“It’s so baked into the community here that AGI will have this transformative potential that people can’t believe China isn’t focused on this, as well,” said Matt Sheehan, a scholar of global technology issues at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace with a focus on China. “It says it’s focused on applications, but is that a fake out for an AGI program hidden in the mountains somewhere?”
But most insiders believe that Beijing’s guidance to Chinese companies reveals its true intentions.
“They are not as AGI-pilled as the United States is, and I think that remains the case today,” Sullivan said, “so they regarded a lot of the conversation in the U.S. around extreme frontier risk — misalignment and loss of control — as a bit abstract, and not really as relevant to how they saw AI diffusing in China.”
President Biden greets Chinese President Xi Jinping in Woodside, Calif., in 2023.
(Doug Mills / Pool Photo)
Although China’s progress has exceeded U.S. expectations — especially since DeepSeek released its model over a year ago — the state has focused computer power on specific applications rather than the broad strategy needed to develop more powerful models capable of advancing toward AGI.
“It’s not just chips. It’s money,” Sheehan added. “China’s leading companies are much more financially constrained than U.S. companies. There’s concern over a bubble here, but OpenAI is valued at something near $800 billion. Leading Chinese companies that have gone public are valued at $20 billion. There’s just an orders-of-magnitude gap in available financing.”
Still, some in the U.S. government fear China won’t need comparable computing power if it simply steals the technology wholesale.
Doing so isn’t simple. But last month, in a memo, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy accused Chinese actors of “industrial-scale campaigns to distill U.S. frontier AI systems,” in effect replicating the performance of the most advanced existing models “at a fraction of the cost.” The memo did not accuse Beijing of endorsing the activity.
In the process, the memo added, carefully constructed security protocols are deliberately stripped away.
China’s negotiating advantage
Whatever its strategic calculus may be, China would enter talks with the Trump administration trailing in the race — while disagreeing on the nature of the finish line.
AGI, in theory, could reach a stage of recursive self-improvement that results in a loss of human understanding or control. But if it is only the Americans, and not the Chinese, seeking to reach that threshold, then who is responsible to stop it?
Daniel Remler, who led AI policy at the State Department during the Biden administration and took part in the Geneva talks, cast doubt on Chinese claims of disinterest in AGI and ignorance of its risks. China falling behind in the race is no strategic design, he said.
“Chinese technologists are close observers of the U.S. AI ecosystem, and sometimes they say what they think,” Remler said. “Many were impressed by the [Mythos] model to the point of despair. Leaders in China’s top AI labs have been vocal in recent months, even before Mythos, about how compute-constrained they are at the frontier. Some have said they may never catch their American competitors.”
Talks at this point in the race could follow a familiar pattern in the recent history of U.S.-China diplomacy, in which Beijing claims it is behind the United States in development, ultimately securing a handicap and greater concessions at the negotiating table.
In other competitive domains — such as with China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and in cybersecurity negotiations between Beijing and the Obama administration — agreements were ultimately reached that Washington believes in hindsight disadvantaged American companies.
The Trump administration, Remler added, “needs to approach AI diplomacy with China with clear-eyed expectations anchored to our own national interests.”
Silicon Valley itself is divided over regulating AI. Anthropic, which was founded on concerns that other AI companies were failing to take safety and alignment concerns seriously, raised alarms over Mythos, its own model, to the Trump administration, a moment that has prompted reflection at the White House on the best path forward.
Spooked after meeting with leaders from America’s top banks over their vulnerabilities, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent internally advised U.S. government reviews of future model releases — a practice already underway in China, where the training parameters for models, known as “weights,” have been publicly released.
Even the suggestion of government oversight sparked backlash from Silicon Valley. Last week, the White House sent out a memo to reassure industry allies that submitting new models for federal review would be strictly voluntary.
If talks ultimately resume between Washington and Beijing on AI, experts believe the negotiations would be far more complex than those that resulted in arms control agreements governing nuclear weapons in the Cold War.
The superpowers would not only be discussing threats of instability to the global financial system, but also fears of proliferation — advanced AI tools getting into the hands of bad actors interested in using bio- or cyberweapons that could target both countries.
And they ultimately would have to decide whether to discuss regulating the integration of AI into the Chinese and U.S. militaries, an almost unfathomable goal between the world’s biggest adversaries, where trust is lowest and verification would be hardest.
Those in the industry who most fear what artificial superintelligence could bring have told the Trump administration that talks with China are an existential necessity.
Dario Amodei, the chief executive and co-founder of Anthropic, speaks at an event in New York in 2025.
(Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)
But even within Anthropic, which has championed diplomacy, there are concerns that Beijing could exploit its current disadvantage to entangle American industry at the cusp of its crowning achievement.
Rather than pushing for a single sweeping agreement, industry insiders are advising the administration to pursue targeted deals with Beijing to mitigate specific risks, like the pact on nuclear command and control, two industry sources said.
In private, both Xi and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi seemed to understand that the gravity of the emerging technology before them required some form of cooperation, Sullivan said.
“At a conceptual level, I believe they had a conviction on that and authorized it,” Sullivan said, “but I believe their level of urgency was considerably lower than ours, and saw this as a longer-term process that would play out over time.”
“Their level of urgency and their stake in it has gone up,” he added.
Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei says Iran’s latest response to the US had asked for an end to the war, removal of the naval blockade, and release of assets.
The US had dismissed the Iranian response, Baqaei said, as it clings to its ‘unreasonable demands’.
It’s a showdown that — regardless of the outcome in the June 2 primary election — probably won’t have Republicans in a celebratory mood.
The battle for the 40th Congressional District representing a swath of inland Orange County and portions of San Bernardino and Riverside counties is happening in one of Southern California’s only remaining solidly red districts. But that doesn’t provide much solace, experts say.
The shuffling of districts following the passage of Proposition 50, which gave Democrats in Sacramento the authority to redraw the state’s congressional districts in favor of Democratic candidates, is pitting two current members of Congress — Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills) and Ken Calvert (R-Corona) — against each other in a bid to keep their seat.
The two are also fending off challenges from a host of Democrats and an independent candidate who says she hopes to win votes from those disenchanted by deeply partisan politics felt across the country.
But even if a Republican keeps the seat, California’s Republican congressional delegation is still down by another member.
“It was all part of the Prop. 50 effort,” said Jon Fleischman, a conservative strategist. “Not only did they reduce the number of seats that Republicans have, they got to shove a couple of incumbents into one seat and eat popcorn and watch the food fight.”
And the gloves are already off.
Kim launched a $3.7-million ad blitz last month with a video boasting her support of President Trump, saying that she’s a “trusted Trump conservative.”
Calvert’s campaign responded in an attack ad that referred to Kim as a RINO, or Republican in name only, a pejorative term frequently used by Trump and others in the GOP to describe conservatives perceived as being disloyal to the party and a “Trump traitor.”
The television advertisement, which began airing last month, called attention to Kim co-sponsoring legislation with other Republicans to censure Trump in 2022 after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Democrats widely criticized the move as a slap on the wrist.
“I believe censuring the president after his actions helps hold him accountable and could garner wide bipartisan support, allowing the House to remain united during some of our nation’s darkest days,” Kim said at the time.
The nonpartisan Cook Political Report lists the 40th District, which extends from Villa Park south to Mission Viejo in Orange County and into Corona, Murrieta and Menifee in the Inland Empire, as being solidly Republican.
It’s the only House seat that was competitive under the old congressional district map that is now fairly safe for the GOP. Trump would have won the district by 12 points in 2024.
As the two incumbents trade jabs, Democrats Esther Kim Varet, an art gallery owner; Lisa Ramirez, an immigration attorney; Joe Kerr, a retired fire captain; and Claude Keissieh, an electrical engineer; are hoping to garner enough support among the progressives in the district to advance to the November election.
Nina Linh, who entered the race early on as a Democrat but has since identified as an independent, is hoping to make inroads with voters disenchanted by both parties.
“When I look at our political climate, I have never in my adult life witnessed or experienced anything so polarized,” she said in a recent interview. “And people, including myself, are just exhausted from this back-and-forth rhetoric for over a decade that has gotten us into a culture of just hyper-divisiveness and extreme partisanship that is prioritized over what everyday people are concerned about.”
Dan Schnur, who teaches political communications at USC, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine, called the race in the 40th District a “classic matchup between the two Republican parties — the pro-Trump party and the pre-Trump party.”
Kim, who in 2020 was one of the first Korean American women elected to Congress, does vote to advance Trump policies, but her biography is more consistent with an earlier era of conservatism. Calvert, the longest-serving Republican in California’s congressional delegation, has much more aggressively positioned himself in line with Trump, Schnur said.
The district is representative in a lot of ways of the two types of Republicans that make up much of the party’s base — MAGA supporters and traditional Republicans who have either come to accept Trump or quietly resent him.
“Not only is this district reflective of the challenge that the party is facing around the country this year, it could be an early precursor of what Republicans will face in the 2028 presidential primary,” Schnur said.
In Congress, Katie Porter’s blunt, combative style helped rocket her to progressive stardom. It has also become her biggest vulnerability as she campaigns to be California’s next governor.
Her brusque approach, prosecutorial instincts and suburban mom appeal fueled Porter’s rise during her three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, where she rattled CEOs and Trump administration leaders and batted away GOP challengers in a competitive Orange County district.
Her tack, however, made her a polarizing force within her own party, where fidelity remains an essential currency of success and power. In Congress, Porter clashed with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and L.A.’s Rep. Maxine Waters.
The same rough edges that endeared Porter to many voters have also alienated some Democratic insiders and interest groups whose support could prove critical in the race to replace outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Then-Rep. Katie Porter meets with parents, doctors and diabetic patients in her Irvine office in 2019.
(Mark Boster / For The Times)
“She came in [to the governor’s race] as an outsider, as a mom, as a fighter. She wasn’t pulled into the establishment,” said Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions. “I think that’s why she’s popular with voters, because they want somebody who’s going to fight, and sometimes that ruffles feathers.”
In the campaign for governor, Porter, a single mother of three, has struggled to convert grassroots popularity into broader institutional support. Even after former Rep. Eric Swalwell dropped out of the race amid allegations of sexual assault, she has yet to see a major surge in support or endorsements from Democratic power brokers.
A pair of embarrassing videos continue to hang over her campaign. The videos, which surfaced in October, showed Porter yelling at a staff member and threatening to walk out of a television reporter’s interview.
As former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra has ascended and she remained stagnant in polls following Swalwell’s exit, Porter has increasingly sought to redeem her image. She poked fun at the incident with her staffer in an ad, smilingly asking a group of whiteboard-wielding supporters behind her to “please get out of my shot.”
In recent debates, Porter has sought to play up the qualities that made her a standout among resistance-era progressives, needling former hedge fund executive Tom Steyer over his past investments in private prisons and the pressing Becerra for a “yes” or “no” on statewide single-payer healthcare. Porter emphasizes her support for single-payer healthcare, providing free child care and college tuition and making wealthy corporations pay their “fair share” in taxes.
Porter said she wants to increase taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents but doesn’t support the proposed billionaire’s tax ballot measure because it is a “one-time tax” that won’t solve the state’s underlying budget issues.
“I can’t believe, with [the] interrupting and name-calling and shouting and disrespect for everyone up here who’s stepping into public service that anyone wants to talk about my temperament,” she said during the May 5 debate on CNN.
Though she acknowledged she mishandled both caught-on-tape situations and said she apologized to the staffer, the videos hindered her early momentum and have undercut her efforts to make inroads with potential allies in the race.
Porter speaks at a gubernatorial candidates forum on Sept. 28, 2025, in Los Angeles.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
Influential lawmakers, labor groups and party insiders have coalesced behind Becerra and Steyer, her top Democratic rivals.
Porter has scored some key endorsements. She is one of three candidates backed by the California Federation of Labor Unions, along with Steyer and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. She also has support from Teamsters California, the National Union of Healthcare Workers and progressive groups such as Emilys List and California Environmental Voters, which dual-endorsed her and Steyer.
Union support is pivotal for Democratic candidates in California, sending a clear signal that they support the priorities of working-class voters. For Porter, who has proudly refused to accept corporate donations throughout her political career, the labor endorsements also help her attract the small-dollar donations that are essential to her campaign.
While in Congress, Porter proved to be a prodigious fundraiser. In her last reelection campaign for the House of Representatives in 2022, she raised more than $25.6 million in contributions — the second-most in Congress, behind only Bakersfield’s Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who was then the House Republican leader.
Still, her backing from elected Democrats remains comparatively thin. Along with her mentor, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), just three members of Congress have endorsed her gubernatorial bid: Reps. Robert Garcia of Long Beach, Dave Min of Irvine and Derek Tran of Huntington Beach. She also picked up an endorsement from Assemblywoman Cottie Petrie-Norris (D-Irvine) after Swalwell dropped out.
Though none would speak publicly, multiple sources who work in and around the state Capitol expressed concerns about Porter’s temperament and her willingness to work collaboratively with people she disagrees with.
“Katie Porter hurt herself big time because she needs anger management and she doesn’t have the temperament” to be governor, Democratic former Sen. Barbara Boxer said during a recent interview with NewsNation’s Leland Vittert.
Through her campaign spokesperson, Porter’s declined to be interviewed for for this story.
Porter questions Tim Sloan, president and chief executive officer of Wells Fargo, during a House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington in 2019.
(Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg)
Defenders argue the backlash reflects a double standard for women in politics — a salient point in a state that, despite its liberal reputation, has never elected a woman as governor.
“Sacramento sizes up every gubernatorial candidate the same way: Can they win, and is this someone I actually want to work with?” said Elizabeth Ashford, a Democratic consultant who is not working with any of the candidates running for governor. “The videos showed an angry woman, and for a lot of people that translated to ‘I don’t want her as my boss.’
“It’s a double standard that dogs women in politics. Jerry Brown was famous for his loud, unfiltered outbursts and nobody questioned whether he was up to the job,” said Ashford, who served as the former governor’s deputy press secretary.
Gonzalez agreed, arguing that women who stand up for themselves “are often labeled as ‘difficult.’ Probably a lot of people think I’m difficult,” the labor leader added with a laugh.
Born in Iowa, Porter often connects her politics to her family’s financial struggles after losing their farm during the 1980s farm crisis. She earned degrees from Yale and Harvard, where she studied bankruptcy law under Warren. In 2012, while working as a law professor at UC Irvine, Porter was appointed by then-Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris to oversee California’s $18-billion mortgage settlement.
After defeating Republican incumbent Rep. Mimi Walters in 2018, Porter quickly emerged as one of the Democratic Party’s most recognizable progressives. Armed with a whiteboard and other visual aids in congressional hearings, she confronted banking and pharmaceutical executives over drug prices, consumer debt and corporate profits.
The props, theatrical at times, seemed to aggravate Waters, then the Democratic chairwoman of the Financial Services Committee. On several occasions, Waters sided with Republicans who challenged Porter’s use of visual and audio aids during hearings.
“Please do not raise your board. We’ve talked about this before,” the chairwoman scolded when Porter tried to hold up a “Financial Services Bingo” card during a 2019 hearing on debt collection. (She later got to show the board on “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”)
Eager to force change they campaigned on, Porter and other freshmen, including members of “The Squad,” at times clashed with Pelosi and other Democratic leaders.
Porter speaks to volunteers while campaigning in Mission Viejo in 2018.
(Victoria Kim / Los Angeles Times )
Porter has slammed lawmakers, including Democrats, for stock trading and funneling earmark funding to their home districts, arguing that such practices breed corruption and mistrust in Congress. The critiques irked Pelosi, a powerful force in California politics.
In her second term, the Orange County Democrat lost her coveted spot on the Financial Services Committee after she listed it as her third choice and requested a waiver to stay on it. Typically, members prioritize such high-profile committees and request waivers to serve on lesser ones in addition. The move was seen as a risk, the result a check on Porter’s ambition.
“So many of us, regardless of ideology, run on ‘shaking up Washington.’ But then when you actually come here, there’s a lot of consequences for doing that,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told The Times after Porter lost the committee position.
Porter’s willingness to buck party norms also raised eyebrows during her Senate campaign, when she entered the race for Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat before Feinstein had announced retirement plans in early 2023. Although then-Rep. Adam Schiff also launched an early campaign, he did so only after privately seeking Feinstein’s blessing. She ultimately finished third in the primary.
Her decision to run for Senate did not ingratiate her with Washington’s Democratic leadership. The party was forced to spend millions to ensure another Democrat was elected to her contested Orange County congressional seat, and Schiff, her top rival in the race, was a close ally of Pelosi — who endorsed him — and helped lead the first impeachment effort against President Trump.
Controversy surrounding Porter’s personal relationships have also surfaced during previous campaigns. In 2024, she obtained a five-year restraining order against a former boyfriend who she said bombarded her and her children with threatening messages.
When a whisper campaign about the end of her marriage threatened her first House run, Porter shared details of her 2013 divorce with the Huffington Post, including that her ex-husband, Matthew Hoffman, physically intimidated and verbally abused her. Hoffman also claimed to be the victim of abuse, including an incident in which Porter allegedly threw hot mashed potatoes at him. Both filed for restraining orders and sought anger management during the divorce.
Former employees have also rallied to her defense. In an open letter last month, 30 former staffers described Porter as a “workhorse” who “asked of us what she expected of herself.”
“She demanded a lot, but she also fought for us, mentored us, and stood by us when life got hard,” the former aides wrote. “We believe the public should understand the full person we know, not a caricature built from a few clips on a bad day.”
Porter has argued that voters are looking for someone willing to challenge powerful interests rather than accommodate them.
Katie Porter is interviewed after the California Gubernatorial debate at Skirball Cultural Center on Wednesday.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
“It’s on me to keep campaigning and keep demonstrating that,” she told reporters after a recent gubernatorial debate in San Francisco. “It’s also not lost on me that the last time the Democratic Party had a woman nominee for governor was 1994, when I was in college.”
The affordability crisis is at the forefront of the race to replace term-limited Newsom. As a single parent, Porter argues she is acutely aware of gas and grocery prices — as well as higher-stakes consequences.
She described feeling shocked when, during a recent conversation with her 17-year-old son, he asked if she would visit him if he moved to another state.
“I said, ‘Paul, you love California, why would you leave California?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m thinking I might want to have a family and I might want to have a house, and I know that means I’ll have to leave California,’” Porter recounted at a March forum hosted by the California Assn. of Realtors. “We need to be a state that doesn’t just retain people like my son … but welcomes new families.”
The centerpiece of her proposed “affordability solutions” are free child care, free tuition at UC and CSU schools for students who complete two years of community college, and ending income taxes for those who earn less than $100,000 — an idea she acknowledges she “stole” from Republican candidate Steve Hilton. “I will take a good idea anywhere I can get it,” she said at a recent forum.
To pay for it, Porter would impose a progressive corporate tax, meaning more profitable businesses and corporations would pay a higher rate. A less than 1% tax hike on businesses that earn hundreds of millions in profit would bring in around $8 billion, according to her website.
“I think she deeply and personally understands the everyday struggles that so many Californians are grappling with right now,” said Petrie-Norris, who last month became the first state legislator to endorse Porter.
While Petrie-Norris describes herself as more politically moderate than Porter, the Irvine assemblywoman praised her as a “pragmatic problem-solver” and “proven fighter” who has taken on corporate interests and the Trump administration.
For a while, Porter was one of four women among the major candidates running for governor. One by one they have dropped out of the race, citing difficulties raising money and support.
After sharing the debate stage with five men recently, Porter was asked whether California is ready for a female governor.
Voters in California may get a chance to remake the state’s open primary system in two years.
Political consultant Steve Maviglio filed an application Friday with state officials that seeks to alter California’s voting system by reverting to a traditional primary. Under the proposal, the top candidates from each party would advance to the general election in November.
The current system allows the top two candidates, regardless of party, to move on to the runoff. That has led to instances in which two Democrats or two Republicans have faced off in the general election.
The state’s gubernatorial election, for example, has prompted concern that two Republicans could shut out the Democratic candidates. Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and former Fox News commentator Steve Hilton have polled high in various surveys and are facing a large field of Democrats.
Democratic voters vastly outnumber Republicans in California, yet some political consultants said they feared there were so many Democrats running that voters wouldn’t coalesce around one candidate and the field would be split. Those fears have eased somewhat in recent months as some Democratic candidates advance from the pack.
The state’s top-two primary system has been in place since California voters passed Proposition 14 in 2010. The goal was to help end partisan gridlock in Sacramento and force candidates in primaries to appeal to a wider range of voters, rather than just those in their own party.
Proposition 14, as well as the state’s once-a-decade redistricting process, has led to some dramatic races, including the 2012 face-off between Democratic Reps. Brad Sherman and Howard Berman for a congressional seat in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. Amid aspersions and attack ads, the pair nearly came to blows at a community debate.
Maviglio described the ballot measure as a simple repeal of Proposition 14, and said he was inspired by the governor’s race.
“It was extremely scary to envision the November ballot for governor with Republicans on it,” Maviglio said.
The New York Times first reported on the ballot measure proposal.
A news release from Maviglio states that the proposed repeal of Prop. 14 “is fueled by concerns that California’s primaries are disenfranchising a majority of California voters by limiting choice to candidates from one party.”
A website for the effort includes criticisms of the current primary system by Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks and Ron Nehring, former chairman of the California Republican Party.
Maviglio’s ballot initiative proposes to appear on the 2028 ballot and take effect in 2030.
Talk of changing Proposition 14 has been swirling in Sacramento for months.
Secretary of State Shirley Weber told reporters at an unrelated news conference last week that she had voted years ago against Proposition 14. She questioned whether it had actually succeeded in creating more diversity.
“I did not like the open primary,” Weber said. “I didn’t think it would solve any problems. They had a list of problems it would solve, and none of those have been solved.”
May 10 (UPI) — British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s job was hanging in the balance Sunday in the aftermath of the worst local council election results for his Labor Party in its long history, analysts said.
Political rivals were circling around the prime minister after the ruling party’s support on councils in England and in devolved Parliaments in Scotland and Wales collapsed in Thursday’s voting, leave the right-wing Reform UK and left-wing Green Party as the biggest electoral winners.
In what was termed a “total bloodbath,” a “calamity” and a “wipe-out,” Labor was voted out of power in 40 local councils, losing about 1,500 councilors along the way, with the vast majority of the seats being seized by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
Starmer’s party also lost the Welsh Senedd to Plaid Cymru, surrendering its control of the body for the first time since the Welsh parliament was created in 1999.
The results came during what is essentially the mid-point of the Starmer government’s five-year term following Labor’s lopsided victory over the Conservative Party in 2024, and he vowed on Friday that he would not stand aside.
Labor, he said, was elected to meet the challenges faced by everyday Britons “and I’m not going to walk away from those challenges and plunge the country into chaos.
“I led our party to that victory, that is a five-year mandate to change the country. It was a five-year term I was elected to do, I intend to see that through.”
But the scale of last week’s losses have prompted calls for the prime minister’s resignation. As of Sunday, more than 40 Labor members of Parliament have publicly called on him stand aside.
“It is clear that Keir has fought his last election as Labor leader and, deep down, he will know it,” Labor MP Richard Burgon said in a statement. “The party should now work towards a timetable for an orderly transition to a new leader by the end of this year.”
“When you’re the leader, the buck stops with you,” Labor MP David Baines told the BBC. “There’s no doubt his popularity has plummeted and we’ve heard it on the doorstep.”
Starmer’s main party rivals spent Sunday voicing warnings that he rethink his determination to hang on to power ahead of what will likely be a “make-or-break” speech on Monday in which the prime minister is expected to outline sweeping changes to his government’s direction.
Angela Rayner, Starmer’s former deputy prime minister, issued what amounted to an ultimatum that he avoid mere “policy tweaks” and instead implement a sharp progressive turn to win back voters who are deserting Labor for the Green Party.
“The prime minister must now meet the moment and set out the change our country needs,” she said. “Change our economic agenda to prioritize making people better off, change how we run our party so that all voices are listened to, and change how we do politics.
“Labor exists to make working people better off. That is not happening fast enough, and it needs to change — now.”
Meanwhile, Health Secretary Wes Streeting has told Starmer he is preparing to make a bid for the top job should the prime minister resign or be forced from office, The Telegraph reported Sunday.
The favorite candidate of the “soft left,” Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, has been blocked by Labor’s National Executive Committee from standing as a parliamentary candidate in a move engineered by Starmer in January.
But Rayner on Sunday called for Starmer to lift Burnham’s ban in the greater interests of the party and the country.
The National Science Foundation suspended at least 18 research grants to UC Berkeley last month despite a court injunction restricting such suspensions, according to an attorney representing university scientists in a class-action lawsuit.
The NSF declined to comment on the suspensions.
The grants include at least one that the NSF had previously canceled and was compelled by a federal court order to restore, for a series of mixed-reality exhibits at the Lawrence Hall of Science showcasing Indigenous Ohlone knowledge about the natural world, said one of the project’s leaders, Jedda Foreman.
Foreman, an associate director at the Lawrence Hall of Science, said another researcher on her team received an email from UC Berkeley’s vice chancellor of research, Katherine Yelick, notifying them that the National Science Foundation had suspended the $1.4-million grant. Foreman said she viewed the email, which said the university had received a letter from the NSF raising concerns about “foreign funding.” The email did not provide a copy of the letter or explain further, she said.
Foreman said the Lawrence Hall of Science had not received any foreign funding for the project.
“The grantees were given near-zero information about what was problematic in the execution of their grant,” said Claudia Polsky, a professor at UC Berkeley School of Law who is representing Foreman and other researchers in a suit they filed last year contesting a previous round of grant cancellations by the Trump administration.
Polsky said her legal team was seeking more information about the 18 suspensions, but was concerned that the freezing of Foreman’s grant may violate a court order a federal judge issued in that case restoring the defunded projects.
UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof said in a statement that the university “is engaged with the government on matters pertaining to research grants, and remains committed to compliance with all federal laws, rules and regulations.”
He declined to comment on the types of grants affected, the amount of funds at stake, or the potential effect on the campus.
One of the Lawrence Hall of Science exhibits, which were co-designed with Ohlone youth, is scheduled to open Sunday, with another set for the fall of 2028. Researchers also are studying whether participating in creating exhibits sparks more interest in science among Indigenous young people and makes them more likely to pursue STEM careers.
“We’re doing a lot of hoping and finger-crossing that something works out,” Foreman said. “It was such a powerful project and we really want to be able to share what we’ve learned.”
National Science Foundation turmoil
The University of California received $525 million in National Science Foundation grants in the 2024-25 budget year. But that funding source has become increasingly volatile under the Trump administration as the federal agency has terminated nearly 2,000 grants nationwide that it said did not align with its priorities — including those focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion — and has been slower to approve and disburse new awards.
Other federal agencies also terminated research grants en masse last year. Some of the cancellations have been reversed by the courts.
UC researchers are contesting grant reversals by the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, Department of Transportation, Department of Defense, Environmental Protection Agency and National Endowment for the Humanities in the class-action lawsuit, filed last year. The University of California is not a party to the suit.
Last June, the researchers won a key legal victory when U.S. District Judge Rita Lin issued a preliminary injunction restoring grants canceled by the NSF, EPA and NEH — including for the Ohlone-focused exhibits co-led by Foreman, one of six named plaintiffs in the case. The judge barred the agencies from revoking funds using form letters that didn’t include an explanation specific to the grant at stake, or because of Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders.
Judge Lin stepped in again after the NSF froze hundreds of grants to UCLA in August, amid attempts by the Trump administration to secure a $1-billion settlement from the university over allegations of campus antisemitism. Indefinitely suspending a grant was the same as terminating it, Lin said in a ruling requiring the agency to reinstate the funds.
Polsky said last month’s suspension of Foreman’s grant raised concerns that the Trump administration was seeking a way around those orders. “It seems to us like something that should not have been canceled on the merits and raises suspicion that this was just a different way to cancel the grant,” she said.
UC looks to state for alternative funding
The University of California is ramping up efforts to find alternative funding for its multibillion-dollar research enterprise as federal support becomes less reliable. On Monday, UC President James Milliken spoke alongside state Sen. Scott Wiener and United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain at a Sacramento rally in support of state legislation to create a $23-billion fund for scientific research.
If successful, the bill will place a bond measure on the November ballot. Money from the bond would go toward research in wildfire and pandemic preparedness, new medical treatments and other areas, with revenue from inventions shared with the state. The state Assembly’s appropriations committee is set to consider the bill Thursday.
“If the federal government is going to continue to attempt to reduce funding for the research that has been so important to UC — that saves lives, that drives the economy — then the state of California, I hope, will be able to step up,” Milliken said at a meeting of the university’s Board of Regents on Wednesday.
UC Provost Katherine Newman told the regents she has been meeting with leaders of the Russell Group, a consortium of the United Kingdom’s top universities, to discuss collaborating on research in climate change, clean energy and public health — all areas that have seen federal funding threatened under the current administration.
Mello writes for Berkeleyside, which originally published this story. It wasdistributed through a partnership with the Associated Press.
No, on top of all that voters have been subjected to — the horror! — a dull and drab gubernatorial campaign, burdened by a surfeit of C- and D-list candidates with all the electricity and elan of a tepid bath.
That, anyway, is the perspective one gets reading a certain genre of campaign dispatch, written from the perspective that all of California, Land of Reagan and Schwarzenegger, home to Hollywood and Silicon Valley, incubator of the Next Big Thing, is a stage. Woe unto those who fail to entertain, animate or amuse.
With no glitz, no glamour, what’s a star-seeking, celebrity-hungry voter to do? If you believe the stereotype, Californians take their political cues more from Variety and In Touch magazine than, say, their voter guide or the flood of TV ads and campaign mailers that inundate the state every two years.
In truth, the Hollywood stars elevated to the governorship, Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, have been the exception — spaced nearly four decades apart — and far from the norm. Both political insurgents were elected under extraordinary circumstances. Reagan amid the tumult and tectonic fracturing of the 1960s Civil Rights and Free Speech movements. Schwarzenegger in an unprecedented, rapid-fire recall of an enormously unpopular governor.
The three were, to use Newton’s description, “mainstream, politically tested, not flashy.” Which also happens to describe several of those currently aspiring to be governor.
Drab, but true.
Boring as it may seem, most Californians want someone who’ll focus on their workaday concerns, not jollification. For all the talk of the “attention economy” — the hearts and minds won by jokey memes, viral videos and other snackable morsels on social media — voters are much more focused on the real economy, which is to say putting food on their table, maintaining a roof over their head and keeping their car fueled and home at a bearable temperature.
“That may not be interesting to the punditry and the East Coast,” Madrid went on, “but it still matters. Reality still matters. The performative nature that has dominated our discourse for 10 years in the Trump era is fading away.”
Imagine, for a moment, if former Vice President Kamala Harris had jumped into the governor’s race, as contemplated. The contest, for all intents, would have ended then and there, save for months of airy speculation on which Democrat or Republican would make the November runoff en route to eventual defeat. That would have been boring.
In Harris’ absence,the sprawling field of candidates has been a good and healthy thing, yielding the most competitive California gubernatorial contest in a quarter century. Fears of a Democratic shutout in June’s top-two primary and a fluky Republican being elected — which were always overwrought — have faded dramatically. Even if they hadn’t, would it really be better for politicians in Sacramento and Washington to anoint the Democratic favorite and cut voters out of the equation?
TAIPEI, Taiwan — A resolute Secretary of State Marco Rubio took to the White House lectern Tuesday and declared the United States, under President Trump’s leadership, had launched a bold new operation to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, based on the principle that international waterways must remain free.
An hour later, Trump walked it all back, ending the complex military endeavor after less than a day.
It was just the latest evidence to America’s allies that the word of the U.S. government is subject entirely to the president’s whims. And such is the worry fueling concerns in Taipei ahead of Trump’s state visit to China this week.
Privately, senior administration officials have assured Taiwanese leadership ahead of the trip that Trump has no intention of changing long-standing U.S. policy on the island, two sources familiar with the discussions said — a stance of “strategic ambiguity” that has avoided any declarative statements on Taiwanese independence since it was coined by Henry Kissinger 55 years ago.
A White House official was definitive that U.S. policy toward Taiwan “remains the same as the first Trump administration.”
“The U.S. One China policy, as our cross-strait policies are collectively known, is based on the Taiwan Relations Act, the three U.S.-PRC Joint Communiques and the Six Assurances to Taiwan,” the official said. “There is no change to our policy with respect to Taiwan.”
But Chinese officials told The Times that their president, Xi Jinping, intends to raise the matter as a top priority, knowing that only one person — Trump himself — speaks for the administration today.
Whether Xi can leverage the intimacy of a private audience to shift Trump’s stance, potentially linking it to other U.S. objectives, is the source of significant concern here.
Taiwanese officials fear even the most subtle rhetorical change in policy from Trump could imperil a delicate status quo that has held, to its benefit, for decades. They have similarly sought assurances that the administration will follow through on a pending U.S. arms sale worth over $10 billion, which received approval from Taiwan’s legislature on Friday.
“The most serious scenario would be if President Trump were to make an impromptu statement, such as, ‘I oppose Taiwanese independence,’ particularly if he were to link this to trade, the Iran issue, or a summit agreement,” said Chienyu Shih, of the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taiwan. “This would constitute a rhetorical concession of substantial significance to Beijing.”
Rubio told reporters at his news conference Tuesday — with a similar confidence he expressed on the Iran file — that China understands Washington’s long-standing position on the island.
“I’m sure Taiwan will be a topic of conversation. It always is. The Chinese understand our position on that topic — we understand theirs,” Rubio said.
“I think both countries understand that it is in neither one of our interests to see anything destabilizing happen in that part of the world,” he added. “We don’t need any destabilizing events to occur with regards to Taiwan, or anywhere in the Indo-Pacific. And that’s to the mutual benefit of both the United States and the Chinese.”
Trump has suggested a willingness to shift U.S. policy on Taiwan before.
During his initial campaign for the presidency in 2016, Trump openly questioned the One China policy, drawing ire from Beijing for suggesting he might endorse Taiwanese independence. He accepted a call from Taiwan’s president after his victory and would later support significant arms sales to Taipei.
And yet, at a 2017 meeting with Xi, Trump vacillated, telling the Chinese leader he could “deal with” the Taiwan issue in “a matter of months,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The Chinese were reportedly so flabbergasted by the comment that they dismissed it as rhetorical flourish.
“There is concern that the conversation between the two leaders could veer into sensitive territory on the topic of Taiwan,” said Brian Hart, deputy director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “but there are many in the administration who would still appreciate the importance of general continuity in U.S. policy.”
U.S. support for Taiwan’s democratic movement used to be a matter of principle. Today, Washington sees it as a matter of national security. Over 60% of semiconductors are produced in Taiwan, including 90% of the world’s most advanced chips. And it is viewed as the clasp of the first island chain guarding against Chinese maritime expansion.
A robust debate between Taiwan’s Cabinet and the opposition in parliament ended Friday not over whether to accept U.S. defense equipment, but over how much to spend. The Legislative Yuan approved $24 billion in purchases — including a defense package passed by Congress in December and the pending arms sale — falling short of Taipei’s $40-billion proposal.
Anticipation for the president’s state visit is high here in the capital city, where local news is filled with questions over the influence Trump’s war in Iran might have on his appetite for supporting Taiwan.
Chinese defense analysts have seen the war as a sign of U.S. weakness. But Taiwanese defense experts have taken away a different lesson: cheap equipment from a lesser military, such as dumb mines thrown in a strait, may just be enough to paralyze a superpower.
The latest U.S. National Security Strategy, released by the Trump administration in December, emphasized the importance of support for Taiwan and the status quo.
But the Taiwanese took note that the strategy also called for an end to forever wars in the Middle East, offering little preview of the president’s sudden strategic pivot on Iran in February, launching a war few saw coming.
What Trump chooses to say in China “might be difficult to predict,” said Jyh-Shyang Sheu, a scholar of Chinese politics and military capabilities based in Taiwan.
But “in Taipei, we are still focusing on the U.S. policy,” he added, “more focusing on what he does instead of what he says.”
TUCSON — Tucson migrant advocates have designed a new tool to help track immigration-related enforcement in and around the city as arrests surge under President Trump’s mass deportation initiative.
Tucson Migra Map allows people to document and visualize enforcement activities by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies. While revealing patterns, the tool also raises questions about safety, transparency and the limits of public tracking tools.
“It indicates the level of chaos and how disruptive it is to our community,” activist Lucia Vindiola said in a statement. Vindiola launched the mutual aid group La Bodega to provide groceries and other help to people affected by increased enforcement.
“We are seeing firsthand the impact on families, limiting them from shopping for groceries and supplies,” Vindiola said.
Since Trump took office, immigration-related detentions have more than tripled in fiscal year 2025 — surging from fewer than 200 in late 2024 to more than 800 by June 2025. The response in communities nationwide has been swift, with groups such as the Tucson Rapid Response network organizing to monitor and track federal immigration action on the street.
Geographer Dugan Meyer, one of the map’s creators, is a PhD student at the University of Arizona who volunteers with Tucson Rapid Response and related organizations.
“This project came out of the documentation work that Rapid Response is doing, but also around the city,” Meyer said. “It is a community research project, community mapping project.”
The data are pulled from spreadsheets maintained since January 2025 that tracks and documents federal enforcement actions in greater Tucson such as raids, vehicle stops and aerial surveillance.
Incidents on the map are vetted and classified as “confirmed” or “credible but unconfirmed” based on the level of evidence.
“If we have photographs of, say, an agent wearing a tactical vest that says ‘ICE,’ that’s confirmed,” Meyer said. “Credible unconfirmed, we’re very confident something happened.”
Meyer said a trained Rapid Response observer witnessing an event, even if they had not photographed it, would be an example of a credible unconfirmed event.
“Their testimony about that would be enough for us,” he said.
Hundreds of people, including noncitizens, have contributed their eyewitness accounts of immigration enforcement to the map and the database it draws from, according to the Tucson Migrant Map website. Information from the local news is included, along with reports collected by Rapid Response and other neighborhood networks such as Migra Watch, and information shared on social media and in WhatsApp groups.
Rapid Response member Steven Davis has documented five incidents, including one in which he was pepper-sprayed by law enforcement. He says having these incidents recorded and published furthers his efforts to better show people what ICE is doing in their community.
“The value of the observation is that we take this out of the shadows and get it out into the public,” Davis said. “The Migra Map is a public-facing map that makes visible this activity that is mostly behind the scenes.”
Davis said knowing the data he collects will be used for Migra Map makes it more important for him to document diligently.
“There’s the saying, garbage in, garbage out. I want to make sure that the information that I’m providing is the most accurate information that I can possibly provide,” Davis said.
Meyer said that as of late April, the team had reviewed around 562 incidents, with about 300 meeting the threshold to be included. The goal is to review reported incidents within a week, then add qualifying cases.
“We know that the map is an undercount by any estimation,” Meyer said.
The map also includes police facilities and immigration detention facilities, along with flight paths of various federal agencies’ surveillance flights.
The accuracy of the reporting has been confirmed as more data is gathered, said Meyer. For example, repeated vehicle reports often confirm instances of surveillance.
Meyer said he hopes that the map will ultimately become a platform for information accessible to the public.
He said he thinks the map “can show in a way that people may know intuitively already.”
“It really helps us think about directly when we can see these things in relation to each other,” he added.
Meyer said that makes it easier to identify trends and point out hotspots like El Super grocery store on Tucson’s south side, which is frequented by mostly Latino customers and has seen a high concentration of enforcement.
“It’s used as a hunting ground for that, but there are others as well,” Meyer said, such as specific apartment complexes targeted by ICE or other agencies.
The Tucson Migra Map was not the first of its kind.
Last year, an initiative called People over Papers was used nationally to track immigration enforcement before being shut down by its host site, Padlet, for violations of its content policy.
Federal officials have said such tracking puts officers at risk, and other tracking sites, including ICEBlock, were previously taken offline after the Trump administration called for their removal.
Meyer said that he hopes the Constitution’s protection of free speech will protect Migra Map from a similar fate, and that people in other places will be encouraged to launch their own initiatives.
Davis, the observer, said that unlike the earlier trackers, the Migra Map doesn’t attempt to alert people to events occurring in real time, but reports enforcement actions after the fact.
“It doesn’t tell you where ICE is active right now. It tells you where ICE has been active in the last months,” Davis said. “You could file a Freedom of Information Act for the Tucson District Office and get the exact same information that we’re providing on the map.”
Meyer also noted that he and the other developers have been public about the project.
“It’s not a crime to collect this information and share this information,” said Meyer.
Nonetheless, some contributors opt to report anonymously out of fear.
“I think that anyone paying attention is at the very least concerned” about the current administration, Meyer said. He said he feels privileged he can publicly associate with the project.
But he allowed that Migra Map is far from perfect.
“The important thing is that it doesn’t tell us a lot,” Meyer said. “While many people would like it to be a real-time alert system, this map can’t be that.”
Cuellar writes for Arizona Luminaria, where this story was originally published. It was distributed through a partnership with the Associated Press.
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — For 21 years, Steve Fowler and Sam Wilson have performed together in a band on Memphis’ renowned Beale Street. And for the last decade, the men have been neighbors on a quiet, leafy avenue.
But as of Thursday, they will no longer cast the same ballot despite living across the street from each other.
That’s because Tennessee’s Republican-controlled Legislature redrew the congressional district of Memphis, which has long enjoyed its own Democratic-leaning U.S. House seat. Now, the city is split into three Republican-leaning districts, its majority-Black population sliced up and bound to mostly white, rural and conservative communities along lines that branch away from Fowler and Wilson’s East Memphis neighborhood.
A line runs down the middle of the street, placing Fowler in the 8th Congressional District, which runs hundreds of miles to central Tennessee across a dozen counties. Wilson is zoned for the 9th District, which extends across most of the state’s southern border before curving up to encompass the largely white and affluent Nashville suburbs.
“I think it’s horrible,” said Fowler, who is white. “This isn’t just going to be bad for Black folks in Memphis, but poor whites in these new districts also aren’t going to get services. How are any of these congressmen going to serve all these different counties?”
A national competition
The redraw was sparked by a ruling from the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court that may be a death knell for congressional representation of majority-Black Southern communities such as Memphis.
For 60 years, a provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act required mapmakers to prove they were not discriminating against racial minorities in how they drew districts, often leading to political boundaries that allowed some minority communities to vote for their preferred representative rather than having their vote diluted by white majorities surrounding them.
The rule had the greatest effect in Southern states, where neighboring Black and white communities remain highly polarized in partisan politics.
On April 29, the justices severely weakened that requirement, ruling that the way courts had handled it improperly injected racial matters into redistricting in violation of the Constitution. Republicans across the South immediately leaped at the chance to redraw their maps before the November elections to eliminate as many Democratic-held, majority-minority congressional seats as possible.
Tennessee’s Legislature was the first in a GOP-controlled state to finalize a new map. But it is one of several Southern states — Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina among them — engaged in a broader partisan redistricting competition sweeping the country.
Republicans have long complained that the Voting Rights Act prevented them from doing to Democratic, majority-Black districts what Democrats in states they control do to conservative-leaning, white and rural areas — scatter their voters for partisan gain.
That is what Tennessee Republicans did in their initial congressional map in 2021 to the state’s other large reservoir of Democrats in Nashville, where they did not have to step gingerly because that city is majority white.
“Tennessee is a conservative state and our congressional delegation should reflect that,” said Republican state Sen. John Stevens, who shepherded the bill for a new map that made all nine congressional districts solidly Republican.
The nationwide gerrymandering wars began after President Trump pressured Texas to redraw its map to favor Republicans. Some Democratic states, including California, countered by redrawing their congressional maps for partisan advantage. With the U.S. Supreme Court ruling reining in the Voting Rights Act and the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision to toss out voter-approved maps that favored Democrats in that state, the GOP has gained the upper hand.
A ‘central place’ in pursuit of racial justice
Wilson, the Memphis musician who is Black, was less distraught by the carving up of his neighborhood for partisan purposes. He saw the move as just another trial facing the city after a surge of federal agents sent by Trump to combat crime and amid narratives about Memphis’ safety from neighboring suburbs and Republican state lawmakers.
“It’s a hustling community. We’re going to make ends meet for our families,” Wilson said. “The legacy of Memphis is music and our civil rights history,” he said, adding the two were intertwined. “Hard times mean you’re going to try and find your gift. That’s what we do here; music in Memphis is a way of life.”
The Memphis district predates the Voting Rights Act. For at least a century, well before Congress acted to protect minority voting rights, Tennessee has believed it made sense for its metropolis on the Mississippi River to have its own U.S. House district. But since that law was passed in 1965, anyone who tried to split up the district for partisan gain could be sued and have the maps thrown out. Now, legal experts say that is not much of a risk.
Nonetheless, Democrats and civil rights groups are suing to block the map. The symbolism is especially sharp as the city is home to the National Civil Rights Museum, built around the motel where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. When the Legislature passed the new maps, Democrats and protesters shouted, “Hands off Memphis!” and waved signs accusing Republicans of bringing back Jim Crow.
“Memphis is not just any city; it holds a central place in the national story of our quest for racial justice in this country and how, over time, we have increasingly achieved civil, voting, and economic rights for all Americans,” said Eric Holder, a former U.S. attorney general who chairs the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “Black citizens protested, marched and died there for the right to vote.”
A city-state divide
Memphis has faced dual stories in recent years. Billions of dollars in private investment and federal dollars have flooded into the area in recent years, but many local businesses still express concerns about a lagging regional economy.
Residents who spoke with the Associated Press expressed concerns about safety and public services but bristled at stereotypes about rampant crime. The twin stories are often on display in the river city, where pothole-filled streets run from empty storefronts to ornate mansion-filled neighborhoods and leafy college campuses only blocks away.
The city has long had a contentious relationship with the rest of the state, which voted for Trump in 2024 by a roughly 2-1 margin.
The conservative Legislature in Nashville has clashed repeatedly with Memphis and accused its leaders of broad mismanagement. Legislators passed a law blocking many police overhaul efforts in Memphis that were put in place after the death of Tyre Nichols, an unarmed Black man, at the hands of city police officers in 2023. It passed another measure seizing control of Memphis’ airport board and those of other cities across the state, and gave the state attorney general, also a Republican, the power to remove Memphis’ elected district attorney.
“The state Legislature is trying to take it over,” said U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, the white Democrat who still represents the city in Congress until the new lines kick in after the midterms. “And that’s absurd. It was all partially because it’s a majority Black city.”
Lack of representation seen
Thomas Goodman, a politics and law professor at Rhodes College in Memphis, says the new congressional districts may lead to greater friction over who receives attention — and funding — from lawmakers. Memphis residents will soon share districts with Republican towns with starkly different economies, geographies and demographics. Whoever holds those congressional seats will have an incentive to pay attention to those voters and not to Memphis’ population.
“It would not only deprive Black Tennesseans of proper representation,” Goodman said. “These changes also break up the city of Memphis as an entity into multiple districts, thereby removing a dedicated agent in government who knows the people, who understands their concerns and can speak for them and deliver on behalf of their interests and desires.”
Chris Wiley’s house sits in what was, before last week, a quiet street in Midtown Memphis dotted with duplexes, tidy lawns and sports fields. Now his neighborhood will be carved apart at the intersection of three congressional districts. That is not surprising, he said, because “Tennessee is all about the dollar” rather than residents.
“Memphis is majority Black, so if you mess with that, what’s the point of even voting in Tennessee?” said Wiley, a 29-year-old sports stadium worker who is Black. “Whatever the congressional numbers, whatever that is, we don’t count on the scale as high, anyway.”
Brown writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Nicholas Riccardi in Denver and videojournalist Sophie Bates contributed to this report.
San Francisco, United States – Greer Dove’s days are packed with studying business and finance, as well as doing administrative work at college, along with caring for her eight-year-old daughter with special needs. But once a week, Dove, a single mother, makes sure to drop in at the food bank in California’s Marin County to pick up vegetables, fruit and other food. Along with the federal government’s food benefits, they keep her housing running.
“We need this so we can keep functioning at a high level,” she says. “She loves fruit, so I make sure to get it,” she says of her daughter.
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Dove, who is also looking for a full-time job, has worked in restaurants, event management, retail, television shows, office administration and payroll over the years. But she has been on the federal government’s Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) for six years, and with the food bank, for more than three years. Before she got food benefits, Dove fed her daughter all she had and skipped meals or looked around for snacks in the offices she worked at to get her through the day.
United States President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), passed in June, cut SNAP benefits by more than $186bn over the next 10 years to make up for extending cuts to income tax. This could lead to more than 3 million people nationwide, and 665,000 recipients in California, losing such food benefits, according to estimates.
“This will bring a series of cuts that collectively present an existential threat to food benefits,” says Andrew Cheyne, managing director of government relations and public affairs at the County Welfare Directors Association of California.
California’s proposed billionaire tax, which seeks to impose a one-time 5 percent tax on the assets of the state’s more than 200 billionaires to make up for the funding gap created by the OBBBA, got more than 1.5 million signatures in April. It is likely to be on the ballot for the November midterm election.
While most of the nearly $100bn expected to be raised through the tax will go towards filling the gap in health insurance created by the OBBBA, 10 percent will be used to make up for the retrenchment in food benefits.
In California, where more than 5.3 million people, more than any other state, receive food benefits, the impacts of the cuts began to be felt in April when 72,000 immigrants started losing benefits. June onwards, nearly 600,000 recipients will be screened for work eligibility. Recipients, including those who are homeless, seniors, foster youth and veterans, will have to work, study or volunteer to receive food benefits. Failing the screening to meet work requirements for three months will lead to their food benefits being cut.
Brian Galle, professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley and one of the tax measure’s authors, says that in California, the state that introduced gig work, “jobs are increasingly precarious. You may find enough work or not. You may get tips or not. But nutrition needs are steady.”
Making impossible choices
On a recent Friday morning, new members lined up to enrol at a whitewashed, bunting-festooned La Ofrenda food bank in San Francisco’s Mission district. The food bank doles out fresh vegetables, fruit and bread that have been donated by large grocery stores once those products neared expiration date.
Gladys Lee had taken a 45-minute train ride after a friend told her about it. Lee worked at downtown San Francisco’s Hyatt hotel as a room cleaner for three decades until a back injury meant she could not push the heavy cleaning carts any more and had to leave. After seven years of struggling to find work, food was getting scarce, and Lee found her way to La Ofrenda. She packed what she could into a carton and held it in her arms for the train ride back.
Volunteers gathered at the La Ofrenda food bank in San Francisco’s Mission District [Saumya Roy/Al Jazeera]
Food benefit rolls have shrunk by more than 3.3 million nationally in the six months from July 2025, when the OBBBA was enacted, to January 2026.
In California, the rolls of Calfresh, as food benefits are known in the state, shrank by 288,000 or 6 percent from July 2025 to February 2026, according to analysis by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington, DC-based think tank. This reduction in rolls happened even before the OBBBA cuts began.
Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, wrote in a recent essay that the shrinking of SNAP rolls reflected an ebullient economy and buoyant job growth.
“The drop in SNAP recipients affirms that many Americans are moving from welfare to work,” she wrote. “It is no secret that Trump’s massive tax cuts and deregulation efforts are unleashing robust, private sector-led economic growth, which are fueling trillions in investments, booming wage growth”.
But unemployment remained stable at about 4.4 percent since July 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, while SNAP rolls shrank.
“This last time we saw such a steep, quick decline, other than during natural disasters, is three decades ago when welfare reform was enacted,” says Dottie Rosenbaum, senior fellow and director of Federal SNAP Policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
Nationally, SNAP rolls shrank by 8 percent, while in California, they shrank by 5.5 percent, in part because the work eligibility requirements were delayed until June, while some other states have already implemented them.
At La Ofrenda, Roberto Alfaro, executive director of the nonprofit Homey, says he started the food bank when food costs went up during the pandemic. They have stayed high, he says. Now he sees people doing day jobs and night jobs and coming for food when they have paid rent.
“People are making impossible choices,” says Keely O’Brien, a policy advocate at the Western Center for Law and Poverty.
While California is the world’s fourth-largest economy, growth has come with a soaring cost-of-living crisis.
“With rising housing and utility costs, few households can dedicate that much of their income towards food,” O’Brien says.
The OBBA has also shifted the administrative cost of meeting work eligibility requirements to states, and beginning next year, part of the cost of SNAP will also fall on states.
“To make requirements more stringent, you are creating more government, more bureaucratic logjam,” says Jaren Sorkow, state director for the Children’s Defence Fund.
This has already led to a 51 percent drop in SNAP rolls in Arizona, which has begun implementing the OBBBA cuts, according to data by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
Food being given out at the La Ofrenda food bank in San Francisco’s Mission District [Saumya Roy/Al Jazeera[
Making something from nothing
Several measures to counter the $100bn gap in funding for health insurance and food benefits created by the OBBBA have been floated in California. The biggest of these is the one-time 5 percent tax on those with assets of more than a billion dollars. The tax will raise $100bn, its authors estimate.
As it seems set to be voted on in the November election, it faces mounting opposition from the state’s tech entrepreneurs who have funded measures to undercut the tax.
Tech entrepreneurs have called it an economic 9/11, saying taxing their assets, including shareholding in startups, will lead to a flight of capital and innovation from the state. Sergey Brin, a cofounder of Google Inc, now spends a week in Nevada and a week in his Bay Area offices and has spent more than $57m on opposing the billionaire tax. He has backed two measures that undercut the billion tax, which have also received 1.4 million and 1.5 million signatures and are also set to be on the ballot for the November election.
One of these measures prohibits future taxes on personal property, including financial assets, savings and retirement accounts, as well as intellectual property. The other would increase audits of taxpayer-funded programmes, and includes language that would essentially invalidate the billionaire tax.
In a recent statement to The New York Times, Brin said, “I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union. I don’t want California to end up in the same place.”
The coalition of unions backing the billionaire tax is bracing for the fight ahead. “We expect to be outspent,” says Kris Cuaresma-Primm, director of partnerships for the coalition that is backing the billionaire tax. “We will keep communicating to people that there is a tidal wave of pain coming from the cuts, and we want to reclaim the losses from the OBBBA.”
Giulia Varaschin, senior tax policy adviser at the International Tax Observatory, who recently coauthored a study on wealth taxes, says there is little academic evidence that such taxes cause the wealthy to leave at a notable scale. “There is only a marginal flight with very little, if any, economic impact,” she says.
The study, coauthored with the economist Gabriel Zucman, who supports the California billionaire tax, did find that wealth taxes had not raised as much revenue as estimated in several European countries and became less popular as a result.
Varaschin says this was because these taxes were levied on a larger set of the wealthy, which included homeowners or small businesses, rather than the ultra-rich or billionaires. The taxpayers could hardly afford to pay it, and the government made exemptions instead. These taxes also did not touch assets, where much of the wealth of the ultra-rich lies, Varaschin says.
The California tax remedies this by taxing only billionaires and taxing assets, including shares in companies.
Daniel Shaviro, Wayne Perry professor of taxation at New York University, says, “Traditionally, these taxes can be hard to enforce because tax administration don’t want to go after these people.”
Even if it passes, “The governor could just say this is not a high priority for him and not enforce it,” Shaviro says, referring to Governor Gavin Newsom, who has opposed the tax.
But Primm says, “The governor is out of touch with Californians on this”.
Newsom is in the last year of his last term as governor. However, nearly all the candidates running for the June 2 primary for governor, except billionaire Tom Steyer, who is running as a progressive Democrat, also oppose this measure. While some have said this will lead to a flight of capital, others say the spending plan does not include expenses for education, which was not cut in the OBBBA.
Greer Dove, who gets food through Calfresh and the San Francisco Marin Food Bank for herself and her daughter, says the looming food benefit cuts are worrying. “The anxiety of it all is adding up. I could be next.”
Greg Davies has been called up to host the BAFTA TV Awards for the first time1
16:18, 10 May 2026Updated 16:19, 10 May 2026
Greg Davies said he’s looking for a wife(Image: Rex)
Greg Davies is back on our screens tonight as he hosts the BAFTA TV Awards for the very first time.
The 57-year old, known for co-hosting the hit comedy gameshow Taskmaster, follows in the footsteps of Graham Norton, Lenny Henry and Michael Parkinson in his MC role and said it was an opportunity he could not turn down.
“I used to watch Stephen Fry at the Baftas and marvel at his cool, intellectual charm. I won’t be bringing that,” laughed Greg ahead of the show.
The 6ft 8in funnyman shot to fame after starring as headteacher Mr Gilbert in The Inbetweeners and has since become a regular fixture on our screens, thanks to his TV roles in The Cleaner, Brassic, Cuckoo and Man Down.
Speaking as a guest at the BAFTAs last year, Greg gave a rare update on his personal life as he said he was ‘ready for a wife’.
The Taskmaster star and his co-host Alex Horne were nominated in the Entertainment category for their Channel 4 programme alongside The 1% Club, Michael McIntyre’s Big Show and Would I Lie to You?
Speaking on the red carpet, Alex said: “We’re an unlikely couple,” with Greg piping up: “That’s why we’re a good team.”
Alex then added: “And I would like to thank my wife for getting us here tonight,” before Greg joked: “I don’t have a wife so maybe I can thank Alex’s wife.”
Tom insisted he could meet his wife at the star-studded event, with Greg responding: “Maybe I will, I’m open to it. It would be so lovely, it’s been too long and I’m ready now.”
Alex simply quipped: “Lonely”,” as Greg added: “Oh god, the horrible hot lonely tears.”
The Cleaner star was in a relationship with Labour Party politician Liz Kendall between 2007 and 2015, but usually keeps his love life under wraps.
Liz told previously The Mirror about their romance: “I am not going to be the sort of politician who does all that stuff about their private life because it’s very precious to me and really important to me that I have that space that’s personal and just to me. We are not together any more but we remain really good friends.”
In the past Greg has made jokes about his disastrous single life and previously said he ‘gave up’ on romance while on The Graham Norton Show.
Greg said his grandfather once caught him in an embrace with his first girlfriend and the experience left him mortified. “It’s not for me, romance… that was the day I gave up on romance,” he explained. However, Greg counts one ex-girlfriend of changing the course of his life. His former partner, who he has not named, convinced him to switch from his teaching career to one in comedy. Speaking to The Times, he said: “I’ve been doing comedy for about 15 years now. I always wanted to do it, I just never had thick enough skin.
“A girlfriend I had while teaching was a pragmatist and always told me that if you want to do something, then go for it. So eventually I made the switch. Comedy is definitely where I’m happiest.”
Mortified Greg recalled: “I met Janet Ellis once in a fish and chip shop. I used to have a terrible crush on her, all throughout my childhood. Then I finally met her and said something humiliating, I think chips-based, that guaranteed I would never end up in the relationship I craved.” He added: “I met her daughter Sophie on a show once and told her I fancied her mum and she rolled her eyes and said ‘everyone does’.”
While he was known for playing doting dad Ken in the sitcom Cuckoo, the actor himself does not have any children. He does, however, have lots of experience looking after kids as he was a secondary school drama and English teacher for 13 years before moving into comedy.
That’s not Greg’s only transformation. In recent years the funnyman has admitted to using Ozempic to lose weight after receiving concerning health news from his doctor.
The host claimed to have lost three stone – and named the diabetic medication in an interview. Ozempic is not designed as a weight loss drug and is used instead as a treatment for type 2 diabetes in adults – however, many patients have experienced weight loss as a side effect.
He told The Times: “[I] lost three stone on the old Ozempic, in about four months, before putting most of it back on.” The interview also notes that his doctor warned him that if he was shorter, he would “look obese” – and that he is now considering turning to fasting in an attempt to maintain his weight.
Noting that he is not concerned about ageing, he added: “I think that’s probably good in my game, isn’t it?”
Addressing reporters on a recent flight to Algeria, Pope Leo XIV invoked the Gospel, called himself a peacemaker and pledged to keep speaking out on behalf of the downtrodden.
“Too many people are suffering in the world today,” he said. “Too many innocent people are being killed, and I think someone has to stand up.”
Pontiffs have a tradition of weighing in on global strife, and Leo’s words were in keeping with long-standing church teaching. Appearing in front of reporters in this fashion was also not new: Pope John Paul II began taking questions from journalists on the papal plane in the 1970s.
But the first American pope was in fact wading into an unprecedented political tempest — responding to a series of broadsides from President Trump that drew Leo into debates over the war with Iran, immigration policies and more, all while Catholics in the U.S. and around the world looked on.
Missionaries from Austin, Texas, gather for prayer in St. Peter’s Square on May 11, 2025.
(Marco Di Lauro / Getty Images)
With no permanent peace deal in sight to end the war, two of Trump’s top lieutenants — Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, both Catholics and potential 2028 presidential candidates — have also been pulled into the fray. On Thursday, Rubio met Pope Leo at the Vatican in what he said was a long-planned diplomatic visit. Next month, Vance will release a memoir, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” detailing his 2019 conversion to Catholicism.
Trump’s invective has not abated, even in the week his chief diplomat met the pontiff. Ahead of Rubio’s visit, Trump repeated his claim that Leo was “just fine” with Iran developing a nuclear weapon. In response, Leo said that his critics should go after him “truthfully,” noting that the Catholic Church has spoken out against all nuclear weapons.
Against the backdrop of this sparring, Rubio sought to downplay the drama after his official visit to the Holy See, which lasted about two hours. On X, he said the meeting with Leo focused on their “shared commitment to promoting peace and human dignity.”
The episode has revealed the unique power Leo holds on the U.S. stage, with his inherent understanding of the country’s politics and an ability to deliver his message in an accent that at times reveals his Chicago roots.
“He’s speaking in English and he’s American,” said Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author, most recently of the memoir “Work in Progress.” “People can’t dismiss him as not understanding the United States.”
For weeks, Leo has been asked to respond to a cascade of insults from Trump, including accusations that he is “weak on crime,” that he was chosen as pope because of Trump, and that the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics should “get his act together.”
In measured tones, Leo has repeatedly said he does not want to fight with the president. He counters that he is merely preaching the Gospel. On that flight in April, the pope told journalists: “I do not look at my role as being political, a politician. I don’t want to get into a debate with him.”
He added: “I will continue to speak out loudly, looking to promote peace, promoting dialogue and multilateral relationships.”
He may not be a politician, but Leo’s preaching, ranging from Iran to immigration and global warming, has touched a nerve with Trump. In the U.S., Catholics often serve as a powerful swing vote and hold a wide range of views on those issues. But even in a time of deep division and political malaise, enthusiasm for the pontiff, born and raised in the Chicago area, is hard to dismiss.
Leo’s ascendancy comes as engagement with the Catholic Church appears to be growing in the United States. Though comprehensive data are hard to come by, parishes are reporting renewed interest.
Mark Gray, a senior research associate at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, said there was evidence of an increase in baptisms, a trend that appeared to predate Leo’s election as pope last May.
Some of the new American converts lean more conservative, experts said, part of a broader rise in traditionalism. Amid tensions over whether the church should focus more on traditional issues of morality, such as abortion and marriage, or global concerns like war and migration, Leo has stressed that all are welcome and that he wants the church to function as a big tent.
Making history
U.S. presidents have long sought to court the pope, mindful of the country’s sizable Catholic population and its potential as a swing vote in elections. Woodrow Wilson was the first president to meet with the pope, in 1919, during talks after the end of World War I. Since Dwight Eisenhower made a trip to Rome in 1959, every president has traveled to meet the pope, some more than once.
That includes Trump, who traveled to see Pope Francis in 2017, accompanied by First Lady Melania Trump and his daughter Ivanka Trump. He also attended Francis’ funeral in 2025.
Asked if there was any precedent for Trump’s clash with the pope, Steven Millies, a professor of public theology at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, invoked an English king who changed the course of church history: “Henry VIII invites a comparison,” he said. Henry rejected Catholicism in the 1500s and founded a new church in order to ratify a divorce rejected by the pope.
Though Trump — who is not Catholic — has not suggested any such schism, he certainly appears to have discarded most niceties. The president has not apologized for any of his comments, though he did, after widespread backlash, take down a social media post that appeared to depict him as Christ.
Trump is constitutionally blocked from seeking another term, so picking a fight with Pope Leo may not have lasting political implications for him. But it’s a different story for Vance and Rubio, both of whom may need to appeal to the country’s Catholic voters to further their ambitions.
In the 2024 election, the Catholic vote tilted more decisively to the right, with 55% supporting Trump compared with 43% for Kamala Harris, according to the Pew Research Center. Four years earlier, Catholics were evenly divided, with 50% supporting Joe Biden, a practicing Catholic, and 49% backing Trump.
Rubio noted as he headed to Rome that “obviously we had some stuff that happened” between the White House and the Vatican. Vance, who has frequently expressed his support for the pope but is also known for his often-punchy defense of the president’s positions, drew some derision in April when he was asked at a conference about Trump’s comments and suggested that Leo should “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”
Pope Leo XIV exchanges gifts with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in the pope’s private library at the Vatican on Thursday.
(Vatican Media via Associated Press)
He later modified his tone, posting on X: “Pope Leo preaches the gospel, as he should, and that will inevitably mean he offers his opinions on the moral issues of the day. The President — and the entire administration — work to apply those moral principles in a messy world. He will be in our prayers, and I hope that we’ll be in his.”
Still, the rift could cloud the upcoming release of Vance’s memoir, overshadowing a book meant to burnish a potential 2028 bid with questions about Trump’s antagonism toward the pontiff.
Two Catholics have served as president — Biden and John F. Kennedy. During an era of stronger anti-Catholic sentiment, Kennedy famously gave a speech as a candidate emphasizing the separation of church and state. Biden was more openly devout, attending Mass every weekend and quoting Catholic hymns in his speeches. Vance is the second Catholic vice president, following Biden’s two terms as President Obama’s deputy.
In a statement, White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said Trump’s social policies were a boon for U.S. Catholics and alluded to electoral politics without mentioning the pope. “President Trump has great respect for the more than one billion Catholics around the world, especially the Catholic Americans who helped power his landslide election victory in 2024,” she said.
The Midwestern pontiff
It’s been a year since the man born Robert Prevost in 1955 stepped out onto the Vatican balcony as pope, a role that predates the United States by nearly 2,000 years. The first American pope’s compatriots quickly seized on his Midwestern upbringing (he’s a White Sox fan) and relatable family dynamics (one of his two brothers supports Trump). In a nod to his Chicago roots, an Iowa-based clothing store, Raygun, began selling a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Da Pope.”
Leo also served for years as Bishop of Chiclayo in Peru, building a global profile that helped propel him to the papacy. It hasn’t stopped Chicagoans from claiming him as one of their own — even showing up at the Vatican with Chicago-style deep-dish pizza.
Known as “Bob” before becoming Pope Leo, the new pontiff chose a name that clearly signaled his intentions as a leader, invoking memories of Leo XIII, an intellectual considered a pioneer of modern Catholic social teaching and an advocate for workers. Millies said the choice signaled that Leo wants to refocus on justice and care for others as well as the rising threats around the globe. Leo has cited artificial intelligence as one of those challenges.
With a more low-key presence than his predecessor, Pope Francis, some observers have labeled Leo as quiet. But as his tug of war with Trump shows, his messages are frequently not subtle. In fact, his reserved style may be a reflection of his Midwestern roots.
Pope Leo XIV presides over the Prayer Vigil for Peace at St. Peter’s Basilica, on April 11.
(Antonio Masiello / Getty Images)
This mild manner comes across in public statements that nonetheless make a lasting impact.
Last fall, Leo questioned Trump’s decision to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War. “Let us hope it is just a way of speaking,” he said. More recently, he took aim at the president’s preferred method of communication, his social media site Truth Social. Asked about Trump’s vitriol on the platform, Leo said: “It’s ironic — the name of the site itself. Say no more.”
Perhaps no message has been clearer than the pope’s decision on how to spend the Fourth of July this year. For the nation’s 250th birthday, as Trump hosts a giant celebration, the pope will be an ocean away. His plans? Visiting Lampedusa, an Italian island that serves as a stop for migrants traveling to Europe.
One member calls for a Presidential Medal of Freedom for a baker who refused to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.
Another calls for court interventions by the Department of Justice on behalf of Amish parents fighting New York vaccine requirements and Catholic nuns challenging that state’s requirement that they accommodate hospice patients’ gender identities.
And the chair of the Religious Liberty Commission is calling for a federal hotline with this automated recording: “There is no separation of church and state.”
These are just some of the recommendations that members of the advisory panel formed by President Trump last year want to see included in the commission’s final report.
That report is still in the works, but commissioners had an opportunity to describe their wish lists during their most recent meeting in April. There was little dissent as the commissioners, most drawn from Trump’s base of conservative Christian supporters, covered the items they want in the report.
Their ideas reflect the prevailing perspectives on the definition of religious liberty among many conservative Catholic and evangelical activists: increasing avenues for religious expression in public schools, expanding opportunities for faith-based organizations to receive public money, and allowing for religious-based exemptions in areas ranging from labor law to classroom lessons to healthcare mandates.
Such views have also been reflected in Supreme Court decisions issued in recent years by its conservative majority.
Commission’s views criticized
Critics of the commission say it embodies a one-sided perspective of Trump’s supporters and is threatening a well-established constitutional separation of church and state.
A lawsuit by a progressive interreligious coalition argues that the commission fails to comply with federal law requiring advisory panels to feature diverse members and viewpoints.
The lawsuit echoes criticism that most commissioners are conservative Christian clerics and commentators; one is an Orthodox Jewish rabbi. The coalition says members have asserted that America is specifically a Judeo-Christian or Christian nation and notes that most commission meetings took place at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, an institution with Christian leadership.
The Republican administration is asking a federal court to dismiss the lawsuit. The government is citing legal technicalities and contending that the law does not define how a commission should be fairly balanced or whose viewpoints should be represented.
Another entity created by Trump — the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias — issued a report saying Christians faced discrimination under the administration of President Biden in areas such as education, tax law and prosecution of antiabortion protesters. Progressive groups said that report failed to document systemic discrimination, focused on causes favored by conservative Christians and amounted to advocacy rather than an investigation.
In a further interlocking of Trump-related initiatives, several members of the Religious Liberty Commission are scheduled to take part in a May 17 prayer event marking the country’s upcoming 250th birthday. Several also participated in a recent Bible-reading marathon staged largely at the Museum of the Bible.
Harmony and tension
The commission has mostly featured agreement among members, with one dramatic exception. One commissioner, Carrie Prejean Boller, was ousted in February after a contentious hearing on antisemitism.
Commission Chair Dan Patrick said Prejean Boller sought to “hijack” the hearing, in which she had sharp exchanges with witnesses about the definition of antisemitism and defended commentator Candace Owens, denying her record of antisemitic statements. Prejean Boller, a Catholic, contended that she was wrongly ousted for expressing her beliefs.
In other hearings, witnesses described how they defied workplace regulations that they said conflicted with their conservative religious values on gender, abortion, COVID-19 vaccines and more. Some said they were prevented, at least temporarily, from displaying a religious symbol at work or trying to sing a Christian song at a school talent show.
At the hearing devoted to antisemitism, Jewish witnesses spoke of being harassed and threatened at campus pro-Palestinian protests against Israel. The commission has also heard from Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and other witnesses.
Even so, critics said the commission mostly focused on conservative Christian and right-leaning political grievances.
The Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, president of the progressive Interfaith Alliance, one of the groups suing over the commission’s composition, said the panel’s omissions are as significant as what it focuses on.
He said the commission has failed adequately to address such issues as anti-Muslim efforts in Texas and elsewhere, and also the rise of antisemitism on the right, not just the left.
Separation of church and state
Raushenbush said he is especially worried about the commission chair’s challenging the very notion of church-state separation.
Patrick, a Republican who is the Texas lieutenant governor, repeatedly denounced a concept that is embedded in Supreme Court precedent.
“We need to say there is no separation of church and state,” Patrick said at the April meeting. “That’s a lie.” He suggested printing “a million bumper stickers” to that effect.
No one at the commission meeting disagreed.
Trump made similar comments at a prayer event at the White House in 2025. “They say separation between church and state,” he said. “I said, all right, let’s forget about that for one time.”
While the phrase “separation of church and state” does not appear in the Constitution, 20th century decisions by the Supreme Court cited Thomas Jefferson’s description of the 1st Amendment as creating “a wall of separation between church and state.” The court applied the 1st Amendment’s prohibition of any church “establishment” to the states in addition to the federal government, citing the 14th Amendment’s ban on states denying citizens’ rights.
Courts have since wrestled with how to balance freedom of religion and freedom from government-sponsored religion.
Schools, vaccines and workplaces
Patrick has advocated for prayer and Ten Commandments postings in public schools.
“I don’t have any malice towards anyone that doesn’t believe in any type of faith,” Patrick told fellow commissioners. “That’s fine. That’s what America is about. But these organizations that are pushed by some ideology and pushed by someone’s bank account who wants to remove God from our country? We need to push back.”
On other issues, various commissioners called for requiring schools and workplaces to post notices of the rights of religious expression and exemptions.
Some called for restoring full pay and pension benefits for military service members who were discharged for refusing COVID-19 vaccines.
Bishop Robert Barron of the Catholic Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minn., called for allowing religious groups such as Catholic Charities to receive federal money without compromising on traditional church teachings about the family.
He also said Catholic immigrants in detention should have humane treatment and access to sacraments and that immigration agents should not disrupt worship services in enforcement actions. The administration last year eliminated a policy against immigration enforcement in sanctuaries, which other religious leaders said should not occur at any time.
Kelly Shackelford, president and chief executive officer of the legal organization First Liberty Institute, called for new requirements that governments pay all legal bills if they lose a religious liberty case. He said many individuals lack the money to challenge the government in court.
“That would be a huge shifting of power in favor of citizens,” he said.
