politics

Lawmakers scrapped presidential age limit last year, allowing incumbent Ismail Omar Guelleh to compete for another term.

Voters in Djibouti are heading to the polls to choose their next president, with incumbent leader Ismail Omar Guelleh expected to easily secure a sixth term after politicians last year scrapped presidential age limits.

Just over 256,000 voters are eligible to cast ballots in Friday’s election between Guelleh, 78, and his only opponent, Mohamed Farah Samatar, the leader of the Unified Democratic Centre (CDU), a party with no seats in parliament.

At city hall, where Guelleh is due to vote, only a handful of voters had turned up when the doors opened, with turnout remaining generally low in the early hours, AFP reported. In the capital, Djibouti City, some polling stations opened late, the news agency said.

Human rights groups have accused authorities of abuses and repressing freedom of political activity. The government has denied the allegations. Two of the main opposition parties have boycotted elections since 2016.

Polling stations will close at 6pm local time (15:00GMT). Provisional results are expected shortly after or by Saturday morning, according to electoral authorities, as reported by the state-run news agency.

Several international organisations are observing voting, including the African Union (AU), the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and the League of Arab States.

Guelleh has governed the small nation in the Horn of Africa since 1999, when he succeeded Hassan Gouled Aptidon, the founding president of the country with about a million people.

Guelleh won re-election in 2021 with 98 per cent of the vote.

‘We have preserved peace’

Though Guelleh was originally ineligible to stand in this election due to age limits, politicians removed the restriction last year, paving the way to extend his 27-year rule.

“The scrapping of term limits in Djibouti is less about electoral competition and more about preserving regime continuity in a highly strategic state,” Mohamed Husein Gaas of the Raad Peace Research Institute told the Associated Press news agency.

“While it raises concerns about democratic backsliding, external actors are likely to prioritise stability given Djibouti’s critical role in Red Sea security and global trade routes, especially amid ongoing tensions in the Middle East,” he said.

Stability was key in Guelleh’s election campaigning.

“Let us remember we have managed to maintain the stability of our country in an unstable region. We have preserved peace when others have descended into chaos,” he said last month.

Djibouti hosts important military bases for the United States, France, China and other powers, earning it a reputation as the country with the most foreign military bases. It is also an important port hub for landlocked neighbours such as Ethiopia.

Since 2023, several commercial ships damaged in attacks by Houthi fighters in Yemen have docked there.

Min Aung Hlaing seeks to ‘enhance’ international relations and ties with ASEAN after coup plunged Myanmar into chaos.

Myanmar’s coup leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing has been sworn in as the country’s new president, five years after he ousted an elected government and triggered a civil war.

In his inauguration address in the capital Naypyidaw on Friday, he said that “Myanmar has returned to the path of democracy and is heading towards a better future”, while acknowledging the country still has many “challenges to overcome”.

Min Aung Hlaing was voted to the top office last week in a landslide victory by the pro-military parliament, formalising his grip on power. He was among three candidates nominated for the post; the two runners-up became vice presidents.

The 69-year-old general seized power in 2021 from Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, placing her under arrest and causing violence, protests and demonstrations that sent Myanmar spiralling into chaos.

The coup prompted a mass civil disobedience movement and the formation of anti-coup armed groups, to which the military responded with brutal force. Myanmar was subsequently suspended from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

In his address on Friday, Min Aung Hlaing said they “will ‌enhance ‌international relations and strive to restore normal relations” with ASEAN.

Friday’s inauguration ceremony was attended by representatives from the neighbouring nations of China, India and Thailand as well as 20 other countries, according to the AFP news agency.

Lopsided parliamentary election

Min Aung Hlaing’s election has been decried as a farce by democracy watchdogs.

The new president’s pledge to “grant appropriate amnesties to support social reconciliation, justice and peace”, with political prisoners pardoned and civil servants who quit in protest invited back to their posts, has similarly been dismissed as cosmetic.

Min Aung Hlaing’s transition from top general to civilian president followed a lopsided parliamentary election in December and January, won in a landslide by an army-backed party and derided by critics and Western governments as a sham.

The pro-military Union Solidarity and Development Party won more than 80 percent of parliamentary seats contested, while serving members of the armed forces occupy unelected seats making up a quarter of the total.

Voting did not take place in swaths of the country, which have been seized by rebels battling the military and rejecting the vote, further undermining Min Aung Hlaing’s mandate, according to rights monitors.

Meanwhile, the civil war that has racked Myanmar for much of the last five years rages on, with anti-military groups, including remnants of Aung San Suu Kyi’s party and longstanding ethnic minority armies, forming a new combined front to take on the military.

But the human cost is staggering; the International Conflict Monitor (ACLED estimates more than 96,000 people have been killed, while the United Nations says at least 3.6 million have been displaced since the coup in 2021.

Pro-Iran groups have used artificial intelligence to create internet memes in English to try to shape the narrative during the war against the U.S. and Israel and foster opposition to it.

Analysts say the memes appear to be coming from groups linked to the government in Tehran and are part of a strategy of leveraging its limited resources to inflict damage on the U.S., even indirectly. That includes how Iran has used attacks and threats to control the flow of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and maintain a stranglehold on the world’s economy. A ceasefire raised hopes Wednesday of halting hostilities, but many issues remained unresolved.

“This is a propaganda war for them,” Neil Lavie-Driver, an AI researcher at the University of Cambridge, said, referring to Iran. “Their goal is to sow enough discontent with the conflict as to eventually force the West to cave in, so it is massively important to them.”

It’s not the first time memes have been used in a conflict, and they have evolved to include AI images in recent years. AI imagery bombarded Ukrainians after the Russian invasion in 2022. Last year, the term “AI slop” became widely used to describe the glut of imperfect images posted online during the Israel-Iran war to try to destroy the country’s nuclear program.

In the conflict that began Feb. 28 with joint U.S.-Israel strikes, the memes have used well-honed cartoons that lambast U.S. officials.

The memes are steeped in American culture

The memes are fluent not just in English but in American culture and trolling. Published on various social platforms, they are racking up millions of views — though it’s not clear how much influence they have had.

They have portrayed President Trump as old, out of step and internationally isolated. They have referenced bruising on the back of Trump’s right hand that prompted speculation about his health; infighting in Trump’s MAGA base; and U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s fiery confirmation hearing, among other things.

“They’re using popular culture against the No. 1 pop culture country, the United States,” said Nancy Snow, a scholar who has written more than a dozen books on propaganda.

The pro-Iran images circulating online include a series that uses the style of the “Lego” animated movies. In one, an Iranian military commander raps, “You thought you ran the globe, sitting on your throne. Now we turning every base into a bed of stone,” as Trump falls into a bullseye built of “Epstein files,” the U.S. government’s investigative records on disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Analysts believe groups making the memes are cooperating with the government

The animations show levels of sophistication and internet access that indicate ties to government offices, said Mahsa Alimardani, a director of Witness, a human rights group working on AI video evidence.

“If you’re able to have the bandwidth needed to generate content like that and upload it, you are officially or unofficially cooperating with the regime,” she said, pointing to severe restrictions Iran has imposed on the internet as part of a crackdown on nationwide protests earlier this year.

State media has reposted some of the memes, including some from the account behind the “Lego”-style videos, Akhbar Enfejari, which means Explosive News.

Akhbar Enfejari described itself as an independent group of Iranians with no connection to the government. “We don’t even receive any funding. We’re just a group of friends working voluntarily — paying for our own internet, using our own laptops and computers, and doing all of this ourselves,” the group told the Associated Press on the messaging app Telegram.

The group said it is producing and upload from within Iran to try to disrupt decades-long dominance of Western control of the airwaves.

“They’ve long dominated the media landscape and, through that power, imposed narratives on many nations,” Akhbar Enfejari said. “But this time, something feels different. This time, we’ve disrupted the game. This time, we’re doing it better.”

In addition to the memes coming from pro-Iran groups, Iranian government accounts have trolled the U.S., including in a post Wednesday from Iran’s Embassy in South Africa that said, “Say hello to the new world superpower,” with a picture of the Iranian flag. Both the U.S. and Iran declared victory after agreeing to a ceasefire.

Analysts say the deep grasp of U.S. politics and culture is the fruit of more old-school methods of propaganda: a decades-long Iranian government program to promote narratives against the U.S. and Israel.

“This meme war comes from institutions that are very aware what the American public is aware of and pop cultural references that can appeal to them,” Alimardani said.

Messaging from the U.S. and Israel

Analysts say the U.S. and Israel do not appear to be engaging in the same kind of campaign — and given the restrictions Iran has put on internet access in the country, getting such messages to ordinary Iranians would be difficult.

Early in the war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a video that used AI to make it seem like he was speaking in Farsi, in which he urged Iranians to overthrow their government. The White House has published a steady stream of memes, but those are aimed at a U.S. audience and feature clips from American TV shows and sports.

The U.S. government-run Voice of America, which for decades beamed news reports to many countries that had no tradition of a free press, does still broadcast in Farsi, though it is has been operating with a skeleton staff since Trump ordered it shut down.

“This world order is really changing overnight and the U.S. is not going to end up necessarily as the state that everybody listens to,” Snow said.

McNeil writes for the Associated Press.

The government of Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa has surged its tariffs on the neighbouring country of Colombia to 100 percent, effective May 1.

On Thursday, Ecuador’s Ministry of Production issued a statement blasting Colombia for failing to adequately address drug-trafficking and border security.

It was the latest salvo in an ongoing cross-border dispute between the right-wing Noboa and his left-wing counterpart in Colombia, Gustavo Petro, who have been feuding for months.

“After noting the lack of implementation of concrete and effective measures regarding border security on the part of Colombia, Ecuador is obliged to take sovereign actions,” the Ministry of Production wrote in its statement.

It justified the tariff hike as a necessary incentive to “confront the presence of drug trafficking on the border”.

“For Ecuador, security, as well as the fight against corruption and drug trafficking, are a non-negotiable priority,” the ministry said. “This measure reaffirms the country’s commitment to protecting its citizens and safeguarding the integrity of its territory.”

Already, Noboa had slapped Colombia with 50 percent tariffs on its exports to Ecuador as of March. That, in turn, was a spike from a 30 percent tariff rate announced in January and implemented in February.

Just over an hour after the new tariff rate was announced, Petro responded on social media that Ecuador’s actions were causing the collapse of the Andean Pact, a regional free-trade agreement whose origins stretch back to the 1960s.

“This is simply a monstrosity, but it signifies the end of the Andean Pact for Colombia. We have no business there anymore,” Petro wrote.

He called on Colombia to shift its focus away from its Andean trading partners and towards Mercosur, a trade alliance helmed by Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia.

“The Foreign Minister must initiate the process for us to become full members of Mercosur and steer us — with greater vigor — toward the Caribbean and Central America,” Petro added.

The escalating tensions between Ecuador and Colombia come within the final months of Petro’s presidency. Elected in 2022, Petro is Colombia’s first left-wing president and a former rebel involved in the country’s six-decade-long armed conflict.

But his government has faced stiff opposition from right-wing political movements both domestically and abroad.

Leaders like Noboa and United States President Donald Trump have repeatedly condemned him for not doing enough to tackle the illicit drug trade, despite historic drug seizures during Petro’s term in office.

Just last November, Petro’s government seized a shipment of cocaine worth roughly $388m, the largest drug bust in a decade.

But Petro has also championed a policy he calls “Total Peace”, which involves negotiations with rebel groups and criminal networks to put an end to the country’s internal conflict.

Trump and Petro have been at odds over multiple issues, including US immigration policies and its boat-bombing campaign in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean.

In September, however, the Trump administration took the extraordinary step of decertifying Colombia as an ally in its “war on drugs”, saying that it had “failed demonstrably” in its efforts.

Then, in October, Trump sanctioned Petro and his family, blaming the Colombian president for having “allowed drug cartels to flourish”.

Noboa has echoed Trump’s stance on several foreign policy issues, including its pressure campaign on another left-wing government, Cuba.

He was among the right-wing leaders in Latin America to join Trump’s “Shield of the Americas” coalition, designed to confront criminal networks and cartels in the region.

In announcing the initial volley of tariffs in January, Noboa claimed his country had shown a “genuine commitment” to combatting drug trafficking, while Colombia had not.

“We have made genuine efforts to cooperate with Colombia, even while facing a trade deficit exceeding $1bn annually,” Noboa wrote.

Colombia remains the world’s largest producer of cocaine, a persistent trend that has existed since before Petro’s presidency.

But other factors have aggravated tensions between the two neighbours.

On Wednesday, for instance, Ecuador recalled its ambassador from Colombia over statements Petro made about its imprisonment of left-wing politician Jorge Glas, calling the former vice president a “political prisoner”.

Noboa had warned earlier in the week that he considered such rhetoric an “assault on [Ecuador’s] sovereignty”. He had previously faced criticism for authorising a raid on Mexico’s embassy to arrest Glas, which prompted Mexico to sever its relations with Ecuador.

Petro, meanwhile, has accused Noboa of bombing close to the Colombian border, as part of joint military operations with the US. Colombian officials have said they recovered 27 charred bodies from the border region.

Since Ecuador first imposed its tariffs, Colombia has suspended cross-border energy sales, which have been vital in helping Ecuador’s government navigate electricity shortages prompted by recent droughts. It has also issued retaliatory tariffs on certain Ecuadorian products.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s threats to wipe out Iran, “a whole civilization,” ended the restraint that Democrats have mostly practiced when it comes to questions of removing him from office in his second term.

By the dozens, Democrats came out to say that Trump should no longer serve in the White House, either through the impeachment process or the 25th Amendment, which allows the vice president and the Cabinet to declare that a president is no longer able to perform the job.

While Trump eventually pulled back on his threat and agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran, the episode highlighted the growing demands for Democrats to oppose the Republican president in the strongest possible terms. Calls about Iran flooded into congressional offices, lawmakers said.

The breadth of the Democratic pushback underscored the gravity of Trump’s apocalyptic threat to a country of more than 91 million people. It also served to raise the domestic political stakes for a conflict that is far from over. The Trump administration faces mounting calls to testify about the war and justify its demands for hundreds of billions of dollars in new military spending.

“We cannot excuse what the president said as a negotiating tactic,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, a California Democrat, told reporters at the Capitol Thursday.

“It is important that even though we were able to get this ceasefire, which I pray holds, that we hold this president accountable for what he threatened because threatening genocide is not just against international law, it’s against our federal law, too,” she added.

Still, Democratic leaders and many moderates in the party have steered clear of endorsing impeachment, and any attempt to remove Trump from office is seemingly doomed to fail so long as Republicans control Congress.

In the near term, Democratic leaders in the House and Senate are instead pushing Republicans to join them and pass legislation that would force Trump to get congressional approval before carrying out any more attacks on Iran.

A few Democrats attempted during a brief session of the House on Thursday to pass what’s known as a war powers resolution on Iran, but Republicans, who control the chamber, did not acknowledge their request.

“We need Speaker Johnson to call us into session,” said Democratic Rep. Emily Randall of Washington. “The American people deserve that.”

At the White House, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has defended Trump’s rhetoric as effective.

“I think it was a very, very strong threat from the president of the United States that led the Iranian regime to cave to their knees and ask for a ceasefire and agree to reopening the Strait of Hormuz,” she said at a Wednesday White House press briefing.

Callers jam congressional phone lines

As they press their case against Trump, Democrats are responding to the worries of their own base and constituents. Congressional offices were bombarded with phone calls and emails this week, largely from people alarmed by the president’s rhetoric.

In the House, the office of Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) received a “ton” of calls and emails Monday and Tuesday, mostly about Iran but also about impeaching Trump or removing him by deploying the 25th Amendment, said one aide who was not authorized to discuss the internal office situation and requested anonymity.

When her district staffers in the state office took a break Tuesday, they returned to 75 voicemails on Iran an hour later, the aide said.

“My office phones have not stopped ringing,” said Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.) at a press conference in Portland, urging House colleagues to immediately return to Washington.

Dexter’s office received more calls on Tuesday, 257, more than it has ever received in a 24-hour period since the first-term lawmaker’s team began keeping track.

The groundswell appeared to be organic, rather than an orchestrated campaign to pressure lawmakers to act.

While outside groups have been circulating some discussion points, including the legal details around invoking the 25th Amendment, there has not been an organized effort to flood the congressional offices with a strategic message, said one Democratic strategist familiar with the situation who requested anonymity to discuss the private conversations.

It was simply the “horror” of what Trump was saying, the strategist said, and the scale of the president’s threats, that appeared to have sparked the mobilization.

On the political right, several prominent figures including former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, also suggested Trump should be removed from office through the 25th Amendment.

Will Democrats make an impeachment push?

Democrats twice impeached Trump for actions taken during his first term, but he was acquitted each time. They have tried to avoid such debates for the last 16 months as they tried to center their midterm message on kitchen table issues rather than opposing a president who narrowly won the popular vote.

Republicans also have the majority in the House and have easily fended off two previous efforts to impeach Trump in his second term. A significant number of Democrats have either joined with Republicans or voted “present” as the House blocked impeachment resolutions sponsored by Rep. Al Green (D-Texas).

Then came Trump’s threat on Tuesday morning to wipe out “an entire civilization.”

“Temporary ceasefire or not, Trump already committed an impeachable offense. Congress needs to get back to work and remove him from office before he does more damage to our country and the world,” said Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, a veteran of the war in Iraq.

It’s unclear how House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries will handle the demands for another impeachment push. But Democratic leaders are holding a call on Friday with members of the House Judiciary Committee that is focused on “Trump administration accountability and the 25th Amendment.”

Standing on the Capitol steps Thursday, Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) said she supports impeachment, but nevertheless hit the brakes on it for now, as the Democrats are in the minority. Instead, she called on Republicans to stand up to Trump’s threats, including by invoking the 25th Amendment.

She predicted the imperative to remove Trump from office could only grow as negotiators navigate a fragile framework for a peace deal. Dean and other Democrats criticized the plan as “chaotic” and unworkable.

Yet Dean said Trump’s threat to destroy Iranian civilization should have already been enough. “The president brought the entire globe to watch his madness,” she said.

Groves, Mascaro and Freking write for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — Pivotal negotiations in Pakistan this weekend between the United States and Iran could hinge on developments in Lebanon, where ongoing Israeli strikes Thursday risked derailing a wider regional ceasefire.

Tensions only deepened amid reports of limited Iranian drone attacks across the region, and as Arab states warned that the Strait of Hormuz — a vital global shipping route — had only partially reopened despite President Trump’s assurances that Tehran had guaranteed full access.

Yet tests of the ceasefire have not deterred Iranian and American officials from their plans to travel to Pakistan on Saturday for the highest-level talks between the two nations, aimed at a final agreement to end the war, now in its sixth week.

The stakes are high for Iran, which has been pummeled by U.S. attacks, and for Trump, whose pursuit of the war has been domestically unpopular. The plan appeared precarious early Thursday, amid ongoing disagreement over whether the ceasefire included Lebanon.

Iran warned that continued Israeli attacks targeting the militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon could jeopardize the two-day-old truce. Hours later, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his government would open direct negotiations with Lebanon — but subsequently declared he would not cease strikes there.

His move to negotiate with the Lebanese came the day after President Trump asked Netanyahu to slow operations in Lebanon ahead of the Pakistan talks, a source familiar with the matter told The Times. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Esmail Baghaei, told reporters Thursday that the talks starting would be “contingent” upon hostilities ceasing in Lebanon.

As Israel’s posture on Lebanon injected uncertainty into the situation Thursday, the Strait of Hormuz — which Iran agreed to reopen in the ceasefire deal — remained closed, according to Sultan Al Jaber, a government minister in the United Arab Emirates. Traffic through the strait was below 10% of its usual volume Thursday, with only seven ships passing through in a 24-hour period, Reuters reported.

Trump, however, projected optimism Thursday about the weekend negotiations in Islamabad — even as the U.S. position appeared to weaken.

“I spoke with Bibi and he’s going to low-key it. I just think we have to be sort of a little more low-key,” Trump said in an interview with NBC News. He said he was “very optimistic” that a deal with Iran was in reach.

A White House official said Vice President JD Vance will lead the U.S. delegation, which will also include special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. They would be the highest-level talks between the United States and Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

An Israeli official said the separate talks with Lebanon, to be conducted by the Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors to Washington, would start next week at the State Department. A State Department official confirmed the agency would host the talks.

Israel is not a direct party to the weekend negotiations in Pakistan between the U.S. and Iran. But “the United States knows our red lines in terms of nuclear disarmament, proxies, ballistic missile production,” the Israeli official said. “We believe we’re on the same page here.”

The Tuesday night ceasefire deal between the United States and Iran came after 39 days of conflict in the region, set off by Trump’s Feb. 28 attack on Iran. The full terms have not been publicly disclosed, and much remains uncertain about the agreement.

The agreement got off to a shaky start Wednesday: The strait remained restricted as the Iranians accused Americans of violating the agreement and it emerged that the U.S. and Israel were at odds with Iran over whether Lebanon was part of the ceasefire.

Trump threatened late Wednesday on his social media website that if Iran did not comply with the ceasefire, “then the ‘Shootin’ Starts,’ bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has ever seen before.”

The deal’s status became even more fragile as Thursday dawned and Iran said Israeli strikes in Lebanon overnight violated the agreement. European leaders and the prime minister of Pakistan, which is brokering U.S.-Iran talks, warned that the operations could be putting the truce at risk.

“This is a dangerous sign of deception and lack of commitment to potential agreements,” Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said Thursday. “The continuation of these actions will render negotiations meaningless.”

The speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, warned of “explicit costs” for any moves Iran views as violations of the ceasefire, saying Lebanon was an “inseparable part” of the deal.

Israel and the U.S. have said that Lebanon, where Israel says it is targeting Iran-backed Hezbollah militants, was not part of the ceasefire agreement. Netanyahu said in a Thursday evening statement that he was pursuing negotiations at the request of the Lebanese government.

“There is no ceasefire in Lebanon. We are continuing to strike Hezbollah with full force, and we will not stop until we restore your security,” he said.

Also Thursday, House Republicans rebuffed an attempt by Democrats to vote on restricting Trump’s war powers. Democratic leaders — who have raised concerns about Trump’s Easter Sunday threat to wipe out Iranian civilization and said his statement amounted to threatening war crimes — afterward called on Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to bring Congress back to session.

Meanwhile, Trump railed on his social media website against conservative figures who have criticized his approach to the war, including former Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, calling them “stupid people” and proclaiming that the United States “IS NOW THE ‘HOTTEST’ COUNTRY ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD!”

He also continued to attack NATO members for not living up to his expectations in helping him with the war in Iran. In a post earlier Thursday, the president said the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been “very disappointing” and suggested the United States needs to pressure allies in order for them to respond to its needs.

That followed a meeting Wednesday afternoon with NATO Secretary Mark Rutte at the White House, after which Trump asserted online that “NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN.”

In an interview with CNN, Rutte said Trump had made his disappointment with NATO allies clear. Rutte said he had emphasized to Trump that a large majority of European nations have given the U.S. some logistical military help, such as allowing American warplanes to land at their bases and fly over their territories.

Lebanon’s Health Ministry said Israel’s surprise barrage of airstrikes on Wednesday killed 303 people and wounded about 1,150 others, in a preliminary toll. It added that the numbers were likely to rise while search efforts for bodies and DNA testing continue.

If direct negotiations with Israel do take place, they would break a long-standing political taboo for Lebanon. Successive governments have dealt with Israeli diplomats only as far as allowing technical discussions with Lebanese military officials via the United Nations.

The prospect of direct negotiations is likely to kick up fierce opposition from Hezbollah and its political ally, the Lebanese Shiite party Amal.

Both parties — which together form the so-called Shiite Duo, are part of a voting bloc in parliament and hold important portfolios in Lebanon’s Cabinet — are already in a war of wills with the Lebanese government, which recently declared the Iranian ambassador-designate persona non grata and ordered his departure.

Amal and Hezbollah officials told the ambassador-designate to remain in Lebanon and exhorted the government to reverse its decision. He remains at the embassy in Beirut.

McDaniel and Wilner reported from Washington and Bulos from Amman, Jordan. Times staff writer Ana Ceballos in Washington contributed to this report.

RALEIGH, N.C. — An Army veteran has been charged with sharing classified information about an elite commando unit with a journalist, which one official said put the country, members of the U.S. military and the nation’s allies at risk.

Courtney Williams, 40, of Wagram, N.C., is accused of violating federal law, as well as multiple nondisclosure agreements, by sharing details of her work with a “special military unit” at Fort Bragg, N.C.

“Anyone divulging information they vowed to protect to a reporter for publication is reckless, self-serving and damages our nation’s security,” Reid Davis, the FBI special agent in charge in North Carolina, said in a U.S. Justice Department news release.

Williams “swore an oath to safeguard our nation’s secrets as an employee supporting a Special Military Unit of the Army, but she allegedly betrayed that oath by sharing classified information with a media outlet and putting our nation, our warfighters, and our allies at risk,” Roman Rozhavsky, an assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division, said in the statement.

Williams, who is specifically charged with violating a provision of the Espionage Act, appeared Wednesday in Raleigh federal court, where a magistrate judge unsealed the case against her, initially filed late last week, according to online court records. She was ordered held by the U.S. Marshals Service pending hearings set for early next week.

Court records didn’t immediately name Williams’ lawyer. A man who answered a phone and identified himself as a family member of Williams declined to comment on the charges Wednesday.

Although the reporter and unit are not named in the court filings, dates and details match an article and book about the Army’s secretive Delta Force written by Seth Harp.

Williams was the focus of a 2025 Politico article with the headline: “My Life Became a Living Hell: One Woman’s Career in Delta Force, the Army’s Most Elite Unit.” It coincided with the release of Harp’s book, “The Fort Bragg Cartel,” which alleges sexual harassment and discrimination.

In a statement published by WRAL-TV, Harp called Williams “a brave whistleblower and truth-teller.”

“Former Delta Force operators disclose `national defense information’ on podcasts and YouTube shows every day, but the government is going after Courtney for the sole reason that she exposed sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the unit,” Harp’s statement read. “This is a vindictive act of retaliation, plain and simple.”

According to an FBI affidavit attached to the complaint, Williams was cleared as a defense contractor in April 2010 and became a Department of Defense employee in November 2010.

She performed duties within the special military unit as an operational support technician responsible for “Tactics, Techniques and Procedures” used in preparation for and during “sensitive missions,” Special Agent Jocelyn Fox wrote in the affidavit.

According to Fox, Williams’ access to classified information was suspended “based on an internal investigation.” Fox said Williams was debriefed in September 2015 and signed a nondisclosure agreement.

The government alleges that Williams had been in contact with the unnamed journalist between 2022 and 2025.

“During this period, Williams and the Journalist had over 10 hours of telephone calls and exchanged more than 180 messages,” the news release said.

Fox cited a text between the two she said occurred on or about the day the book and article were published.

“Other than a few factual errors, I would definitely have been concerned with the amount of classified information being disclosed,” Williams’ text read, according to the affidavit. “I thought things I was telling you so you could have a better general understanding of how the (SMU) was set up or operated would not be published and it feels like an entire TTP (Tactics, Techniques and Procedures) was sent out in my name giving them a chance to legally persecute me.”

Fox also cited an alleged exchange between Williams and her mother.

”`I might actually get arrested, and I don’t even get a free copy of the book,’” the affidavit read. “When her mother asked why she may be arrested, Williams responded `for disclosing classified information.’”

Fox wrote that the investigation so far has identified at least 10 batches of documents gathered that Williams intended to provide to the journalist.

Breed and Robertson write for the Associated Press. AP writer Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this report.

U.S. abortion opponents are increasingly frustrated with the lack of action by President Trump’s administration to stem the flow of abortion pills prescribed online that they view as undermining state abortion bans.

A court ruling this week in a lawsuit the Louisiana attorney general brought against Trump’s Food and Drug Administration cast a spotlight on the simmering tension. The judge said the state has a strong case while declining to block telehealth prescriptions to the pill mifepristone for now.

Anti-abortion groups are pushing the FDA to move faster with a review that they hope will result in restrictions on the abortion pill, including blocking its prescribing via telehealth platforms. The administration says the work takes time.

The groups have focused mostly on the health agency and not the Republican president whose three U.S. Supreme Court appointees were instrumental in the 2022 ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed the state bans in the first place. But the administration’s requests in the Louisiana lawsuit and similar ones elsewhere to delay rulings until it finishes a review have sparked anger for some activists.

“The stall tactics are beyond frustrating,” Kristi Hamrick, a spokesperson for Students for Life of America, said in an interview. Hamrick said the administration could also block the pills from being mailed by changing its interpretation of a 19th century law and enforcing it.

A judge opened the door to pushing the administration

U.S. District Judge David Joseph, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, gave a mixed ruling Tuesday in a case brought by Louisiana Atty. Gen. Liz Murrill and a woman who says her boyfriend coerced her into taking mifepristone to end a pregnancy.

Their overall aim is to roll back FDA rules that have made the pills more accessible. Murrill, like officials in other states that have filed similar lawsuits, contends that the availability of the pills via online providers takes the teeth out of the bans in the 13 states that bar abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with limited exceptions.

Surveys of abortion providers have suggested that its availability through telehealth is a reason the number of abortions in the U.S. has not dropped since the overturn of Roe. While state abortion bans include prohibitions on abortion using the pills, some Democratic-controlled states have adopted laws that seek to protect medical providers who prescribe them over telehealth and mail the pills to states with bans. Those so-called shield laws are being tested through civil and criminal cases.

In the Louisiana case, Joseph declined to grant Murrill’s request to block telehealth prescriptions to the pills while the case moves through the courts. But he said he could do that eventually and the plaintiffs in the case are likely to succeed on the merits of their arguments because the state has demonstrated it’s suffered “irreparable harm.”

He also ordered the FDA to report to him within six months on the status of its review of the drug.

On Wednesday, Murrill filed a notice that she’s taking the case to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in hopes of forcing faster action.

The politics aren’t simple

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, an influential conservative voice who is also a former Louisiana lawmaker, applauded Murrill’s step.

He said people he meets are often shocked to learn that the number of abortions has not dropped since the 2022 Supreme Court ruling.

“Bewilderment sets in,” he said. “We’re already seeing an enthusiasm gap between the parties. What the Republicans do not need is a dampening of enthusiasm in their base.”

He’s hoping the administration will restrict abortion pills rather than risk losing support from conservative, anti-abortion voters in November’s midterm elections.

Other groups are being more cautions.

Madison LaClare, director of federal government affairs at National Right to Life, said her group trusts the administration to review mifepristone. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, avoided harsh words for the president: “The Trump-Vance administration has an important opportunity right now to prioritize women’s safety,” she said in a statement.

Still, recent electoral results suggest that voters seeking to keep abortion available have the political momentum. Since Roe was overturned, abortion has been on the ballot directly in 17 states. Voters have sided with the abortion-rights side in 14 of those questions.

“There seems to be an emerging consensus in the country that people don’t want to ban abortion,” said Rachel Rebouche, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law who studies abortion.

The FDA says it’s working on it

In a statement Wednesday in response to questions from the Associated Press, the FDA said it’s reviewing the safety of mifepristone, “including the collection of robust and timely data, evaluation of data integrity, and implementation of the analyses, validation, and peer-review.”

After that, the agency said, it will decide whether to make changes to the rules about how the drug can be prescribed.

It said this kind of study can take a year or more to complete by academics but the agency is trying to move faster than that. A spokesperson did not answer questions about when the work began.

Mifepristone has been a political priority for anti-abortion activists and their allies in Congress since Trump returned to office last year. In his January 2025 confirmation hearing, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was repeatedly asked about the drug by Republican lawmakers and said the president had requested a safety review.

Frustration over signs that the FDA isn’t prioritizing curbing abortions flared last fall when the FDA approved an additional generic version of mifepristone.

The drug is most often used for abortion in combination with another drug, misoprostol.

Mifepristone was approved in 2000 as a safe and effective way to end early pregnancies.

Because of rare cases of excessive bleeding, the FDA initially imposed strict limits on who could prescribe and distribute the pill — only specially certified physicians and only after an in-person appointment where the person would receive the pill.

Both those requirements were dropped during the COVID years. At the time, FDA officials said that after more than 20 years of monitoring mifepristone use, and reviewing dozens of studies involving thousands of women, it was clear that women could safely use the pill without direct supervision.

Mulvihill and Perrone write for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — First lady Melania Trump is denying ties to Jeffrey Epstein and knowledge of his crimes, saying Thursday that the “stories are completely false” and calling online accusations that she was somehow involved “smears about me.”

“The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today. The individuals lying about me are devoid of ethical standards, humility and respect. I do not object to their ignorance, but rather I reject their mean-spirited attempts to defame my reputation,” she said.

Reading an extraordinary statement at the White House, she denied any association with Epstein and said, “My attorneys and I have fought these unfounded and baseless lies with success.”

The first lady also called on Congress to hold a public hearing centered on survivors of Epstein’s crimes, with a chance to testify before lawmakers and have their stories entered into the congressional record.

“Each and every woman should have her day to tell her story in public if she wishes,” she said. “Then, and only then, we will have the truth.”

Her out-of-the-blue message came just as her husband, President Donald Trump, and his administration had finally appeared successful in moving beyond the Epstein controversy, which had sent shockwaves through the nation’s politics for months.

The case had begun to be overshadowed by the war in Iran and other major issues — but the first lady’s comments might push it back into the political spotlight.

The first lady said she was not friends with Epstein or Maxwell but was in overlapping social circles in New York and Florida. She described an email reply she sent to Maxwell as “casual correspondence” without elaborating.

“My polite reply to her email doesn’t amount to anything more than a trifle,” she said.

Binkley writes for the Associated Press.

April 9 (UPI) — Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum signaled a major shift in the country’s energy policy aimed at reducing its dependence on natural gas imports from the United States, including a possible reopening of hydraulic fracturing under stricter controls.

“Mexico must guarantee its sovereignty. And a fundamental part of sovereignty is energy sovereignty,” Sheinbaum said Thursday during a press conference.

The president said her administration is exploring new domestic production pathways, including using fracking, a technique she previously opposed due to environmental concerns.

Sheinbaum described the move as a “responsible decision” to be carried out under “strict scientific oversight” with the support of a specialized committee.

The proposal centers on creating a technical and scientific panel of experts from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the National Polytechnic Institute.

The group will have two months to develop a protocol for extracting unconventional reserves, while minimizing environmental impact and prioritizing using treated or non-potable water.

The initiative marks a departure from the policy of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who maintained a strict ban on fracking on environmental grounds.

Mexico currently imports about 75% of the natural gas it consumes, mostly from Texas, exposing the country to price volatility and geopolitical risks that could affect the National Electric System.

“We cannot achieve energy sovereignty if we depend on a valve that can be shut outside our borders,” Sheinbaum said.

Government projections estimate gas demand could rise by about 30% by the end of the administration, driven by new power plants, industrial expansion, petrochemicals and fertilizer production, according to local media reports.

Energy Secretary Luz Elena González Escobar outlined a plan Wednesday to strengthen energy security by increasing domestic gas production and reducing reliance on imports.

She also said the government will accelerate its energy transition plan, aiming for renewable sources to account for 38% of electricity generation by 2030 while reducing the share of fossil fuels.

The strategy envisions starting unconventional extraction by late 2027, with a goal of increasing production to more than 8 billion cubic feet per day by 2035 from about 2.3 billion cubic feet.

The administration has invited private sector participation in renewable energy projects and combined-cycle power plants under a mixed model in which the state, through the Federal Electricity Commission and Pemex, retains 54% of generation and strategic control, leaving 46% to private investment.

Officials say the model is designed to attract capital for storage and extraction infrastructure that the public sector cannot fully finance in the short term.

Energy analysts say the policy shift responds in part to nearshoring trends, as multinational companies relocating operations to Mexico require reliable and affordable electricity supply.

The proposal has drawn criticism from environmental groups, which called it a “green setback” and warned that fracking could threaten aquifers in regions already facing severe water stress.

Reporting from Sacramento — There are more voters in favor of a ballot measure that would repeal the death penalty in California than one that attempts to speed up executions, but neither proposition has attracted the majority of votes it needs to pass come Tuesday, a new poll finds.

Partly, it’s because some voters seemed confused about what each measure promises, pollsters and strategists said. Mainly, it’s because voters remain strongly divided on the issue of capital punishment, with a strong core of beliefs driving their decisions.

National debate over criminal justice reform and racial disparity in sentencing has not swayed those attitudes, they said, as it has with other crime and punishment measures on the ballot.

“The death penalty is much more controversial, in a sense,” said pollster Anna Greenberg of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, the Democratic half of the bipartisan team of polling firms that conducted the latest USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll. “People have strong religious or moral opposition on both sides of the issue. They have core values.”

Proposition 62, which would replace capital punishment with life in prison without parole, received 44% support and 45% opposition among the 1,382 likely voters polled in October across the state through telephone interviews. Ten percent said they did not know how they would vote or refused to answer.

The more clearly written measure of the two, pollsters said, it garnered a predictable demographic on both sides: 59% of Democratic voters were in support and 65% of Republican voters were in opposition.

The results also reflected national trends, which show public support for the death penalty has declined, though an almost even split of voters still favor the punishment. The latest Pew Research survey, released in September, found 49% of Americans favored the death penalty, the lowest in more than four decades.

More confusing to interpret, pollsters said, were the results of Proposition 66, which seeks to speed up the death penalty system through changes and limits on how and how often death row inmates can challenge their convictions and sentences.

Thirty-five percent of voters said they would support Proposition 66, 42% said they would oppose it, and 21% said they did not know how they would vote or refused to answer.

But only 45% of Democratic voters opposed the measure, while 31% said they would support it. Of Republican voters, 40% were in favor and 36% were against.

Interviews with poll participants illustrated the opposing values among California voters.

Alan Cheah, 67, a retired technology specialist in the Central Valley, said he strongly opposed the death penalty on moral grounds.

“A lot of people have been wrongly put to death,” he said. “The whole justice system is skewed toward disadvantaged people and people of color, and a lot of them have been accused of murder or wrongdoing but have been acquitted – some have not been acquitted in time.”

To Steven Lang, a 56-year-old self-described fine artist, it’s a sensitive, personal issue. His sister was killed in 1994. The killer was not sentenced to death.

“This guy has robbed me of memories of my sister,” Lang said. “You can’t take life and whitewash it in gray. Every life has a value, and I believe people who take that life, lose theirs.”

The ballot box guide to California’s propositions »

Yet even as the two death penalty propositions “are trying to achieve competing aims, opponents of one don’t necessarily support the other, mostly due to confusion about 66,” said pollster Ben Winston of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research.

Voters who supported repealing the death penalty and opposed the competing measure were 21% of the electorate, a mostly Democratic group which also supported Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Will ending the death penalty save California more money than speeding up executions? »

Voters who opposed repealing the death penalty and favored the measure intended to speed up the process formed 18% of the electorate, a group that leaned Republican and toward Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Another 15% of voters, mostly younger Democrats and Clinton supporters, said they would give their “Yes” vote to both propositions, while 21% of the electorate said they would oppose both measures.

The survey was conducted for USC Dornsife and the Los Angeles Times by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and American Viewpoint.

jazmine.ulloa@latimes.com

@jazmineulloa

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BEIRUT, Lebanon, April 9 (UPI) — Lebanese officials engaged Thursday in intensive diplomatic contacts to confirm the country’s inclusion in the Pakistan-mediated U.S.-Iran cease-fire and refusing to let Tehran negotiate on their behalf.

The initiative comes a day after Israel carried out large-scale air strikes on Beirut and across Lebanon.-

Prime Minister Nawaf Salam called on his Pakistani counterpart, Shehbaz Sharif, during a telephone call to emphasize that the cease-fire achieved between the United States and Iran on Wednesday “must include Lebanon to prevent a recurrence of the Israeli aggressions.”

Sharif condemned the recent Israeli attacks on Lebanon and affirmed that Pakistan “is working to ensure peace and stability” in the country.

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun urged Western and Arab officials he had contacted to give his country “an opportunity — just as was given to the United States and Iran — to reach a cease-fire and move toward negotiations.”

Speaking during a Cabinet meeting, Aoun, who last month proposed direct talks with Israel starting with a truce, also called for exerting the necessary pressure to ensure that “Lebanon becomes part of the cease-fire agreement, allowing us to proceed with negotiations.”

Israel has rejected the proposal for direct talks and inclusion of Lebanon in the two-week cease-fire, which is said to call for a cessation of hostilities across multiple fronts, Lebanon among them, while pledging to continue strikes against Hezbollah.

Aoun refused “anyone [who] negotiates on our behalf,” a clear reference to Iran, which threatened to withdraw from the temporary cease-fire with the United States if Israel continues to attack Lebanon.

“We have the ability and the means to negotiate ourselves, and therefore we do not want anyone to negotiate for us. This is something we do not accept,” Aoun said.

In separate comments, Aoun said the only solution is to achieve a cease-fire, followed by direct negotiations with Israel.

Ali Fayyad, A Hezbollah member in Parliament, called on the Lebanese government to “insist on a cease-fire as a prerequisite before moving to any subsequent step.”

Fayyad reiterated his group’s rejection of any direct negotiations with Israel, requesting Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon, cessation of Israeli attacks and return of the displaced to their villages and towns.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said in a post on X that his country “will never abandon its Lebanese brothers and sisters” after Israel’s Wednesday strikes on residential areas in Beirut and other Lebanese areas killed more than 200 people and injured over 1,000.

Pezeshkian said the Israeli attacks “blatantly violate the initial cease-fire” and that “such actions signal deception and non-compliance, rendering negotiations meaningless. Our hands remain on the trigger.”

While Pakistan has confirmed that Lebanon is included in the cease-fire it mediated, Israel and the United States have claimed otherwise.

The Lebanese Cabinet decided to file an urgent complaint to the U.N. Security Council regarding the “dangerous escalation” of Israeli attacks that resulted in a large number of civilian casualties and came “in defiance of all international and regional efforts to halt the war in the region.”

It also called on the Army and security forces to immediately take action to strengthen the state’s full authority over Beirut, ensuring that weapons are restricted to legitimate forces and the laws are strictly enforced.

The measure specifically targets Hezbollah, which has refused to fully disarm after its war with Israel that began Oct. 8, 2023, in support of Gaza — a conflict that was supposed to end with the Nov. 27, 2024, cease-fire, which Israel ignored, continuing its strikes against the militant group.

It also came after Israel hit buildings, apartments and hotel rooms in Beirut where Hezbollah and Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps allegedly were hiding, risking civilian lives.

While Hezbollah announced Thursday that it resumed firing missiles and rockets on settlements in northern Israel for its violation of the truce with Iran, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said the group was “desperate for a cease-fire.”

Katz was quoted by Israeli English-language websites as saying that 200 Hezbollah members were killed in Wednesday’s attacks, bringing the number of “those eliminated” during the new round of fighting since last March to 1,400.

“Hezbollah is stunned by the scale of the blow,” he said.

The Israeli Army said that among those targeted Wednesday in an air strike on a residential building in Beirut was Ali Youssef Harshi, the personal secretary and nephew of Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem.

It said that Maher Qasem Hamdan, whom it described as the commander of the Hezbollah-affiliated “Lebanese Resistance Brigades,” and seven others also died in a strike on the port city of Sidon in southern Lebanon.

Meanwhile, Israel sparked a new wave of panic by issuing evacuation orders for residents in Beirut’s southern suburbs and surrounding areas, forcing thousands, including already displaced people, to flee in haste.

Early Thursday, rescue teams continued searching in two targeted buildings, one of which collapsed, while many families tried to locate loved ones who have been unaccounted for since Wednesday.

According to medical sources at the government-run Rafik Hariri University Hospital, about 95 bodies, some mutilated, were brought to the hospital and were awaiting identification by their families.

While the health ministry reported Wednesday night 112 killed and 837 injured, the General Directorate of Civil Defense said 254 people were killed and 1,165 wounded, adding that the toll in Beirut reached 92 dead and 742 injured.

MADISON, Wis. — The bluntest assessment of Republican failures during this week’s elections in Wisconsin came from one of their own.

“We got our butts kicked,” said U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, who is running for governor.

He was referring to Democratic victories in campaigns for the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the mayor’s office in Waukesha, a conservative suburb outside Milwaukee. But some Republicans were also rattled by a special election in Georgia, where their candidate to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene in Congress won by a much slimmer margin than the party enjoyed in the past.

Taken together, the swings from red to blue added more data points to an increasingly clear picture of Democratic momentum heading into the November midterms, when control of the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate and state governments around the country are up for grabs.

“In rural, urban, red, blue, Democrats have overperformed everywhere,” said Jared Leopold, a Democratic consultant whose clients include Keisha Lance Bottoms, a candidate for Georgia governor. “That is a significant canary in the coal mine about what November of ’26 is going to look like.”

Some Republicans insisted there was no need to panic, and their fundraising remains stronger than Democrats’. Stephen Lawson, a Georgia strategist, said “the sky is not falling.”

But he also said his party is running behind where it has been in the past, and Republicans need to be “looking at these results carefully.”

‘A red alarm for Republicans’

Special elections can be notoriously unreliable as political benchmarks, but Democrats have consistently demonstrated surprising strength. They flipped a Texas state Senate district. They won a Florida state House seat in a district that includes President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach.

Then they gained ground on Tuesday in the race to replace Greene, who resigned from Congress in January after a falling out with Trump.

Clay Fuller, the Republican candidate, prevailed by 12 percentage points. Two years ago, Greene won by 29 percentage points and Trump carried the district by almost 37 percentage points.

“That’s a red alarm for Republicans,” said Democratic strategist Meredith Brasher.

Fuller defeated Shawn Harris, who plans to challenge him again in November.

Jackie Harling, the district’s Republican chairwoman, said she believed that Greene’s resignation energized Democrats while her party is suffering from “election fatigue.”

“Marjorie Taylor Greene was like a freight train that you couldn’t stop, and when she pulled out, it gave Democrats hope and it gave them a shot at winning something they believed was unwinnable,” Harling said.

‘Slightly bluer side of purple’

Georgia has key races this year, including an open contest for the governor’s office. Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, is trying to defend his seat as well.

There’s reason to think that simmering discontent could boomerang on Republicans just two years after Trump harnessed voters’ anger with his comeback presidential campaign.

In November, Democrats defeated two Republican incumbents in statewide races for seats on the Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities. Rising electricity rates have been a fault line in recent campaigns, especially as enormous data centers are built to power artificial intelligence.

But Georgia Democratic Party Chair Charlie Bailey is trying to maintain modest expectations.

“We could cement ourselves, put ourselves, on the slightly bluer side of purple,” he said. ”We’re not going to overnight turn into Colorado.”

‘A very clear sign of momentum’

Wisconsin holds statewide elections for Supreme Court seats, and liberals expanded their majority with a 20-percentage-point blowout victory on Tuesday.

Democrats saw gains in red, blue and purple counties when compared with another judicial race last year, which was also won by the liberal candidate.

“This to me was a very clear sign of momentum and enthusiasm for Democrats in the fall,” said Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Devin Remiker.

The state has its own open race for governor this year, and Democrats are hoping to take control of the state Legislature and oust Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden.

“It’s time for us to put this thing in overdrive,” said Mandela Barnes, a Democratic former lieutenant governor who is running for governor.

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, another Democratic candidate for governor, said it’s clear that “people are really upset with the Republican Party and their brand right now.”

“But that doesn’t mean that they’re automatically going to come over to the Democrats,” Crowley said. “And that’s why we have to continue to focus on the issues and speak to the values of all the voters here in the state of Wisconsin.”

‘A lot of anxiety’

Tiffany, the Republican candidate for governor in Wisconsin, cautioned against reading too much into Tuesday’s results.

He said “every election is unique,” and he wasn’t making any changes to his campaign. He said the key to winning will be to “paint that clear contrast of how we are going to help everyday Wisconsinites.”

But Democrats seemed to be making inroads, including in Waukesha. The city is located outside of Milwaukee in the Republican stronghold of Waukesha County.

Democrat Alicia Halvensleben, president of the city’s Common Council, defeated Republican Scott Allen, one of the most conservative members of the state Assembly.

She said Trump came up “a lot” when she was campaigning, although she thinks her victory came down to local issues and how the state legislature wasn’t addressing them.

“There’s so much uncertainty at the national level,” Halvensleben said. “I think that level of uncertainty is causing people a lot of anxiety, all the way down to the local level.”

Bauer, Amy and Cooper write for the Associated Press. Amy reported from Atlanta, and Cooper from Phoenix.

Survivors of the devastating Eaton fire called on state lawmakers on Wednesday to pass a bill requiring audits of spending by Southern California Edison and the state’s two other big for-profit electric companies on wildfire prevention.

The survivors pointed to an investigation by The Times that found that Edison had not spent hundreds of millions of dollars that it told regulators before the fire was needed to keep its transmission system safe. Edison had begun charging customers for the costs.

“Californians funded the wildfire prevention,” Joy Chen, executive director of Every Fire Survivor’s Network, told members of the Assembly Utilities and Energy Commission on Wednesday. ”And we survivors paid the price when that work was not done.”

While the government’s investigation into the fire has not yet been released, Edison has said it believes that a century-old transmission line, which had not carried power since 1971, may have briefly re-energized on the night of Jan. 7, 2025, to ignite the fire. The inferno killed 19 people and destroyed thousands of homes and other structures in Altadena.

Chen’s wildfire survivors group and Consumer Watchdog sponsored the bill, known as Assembly Bill 1744. It would require the wildfire safety spending by Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric to be audited by an independent accounting firm.

The state Public Utilities Commission would have to consider the audits’ findings before agreeing to raise customer rates to cover even more wildfire spending.

“Had Edison known it would be accountable for those funds, that wildfire may not have started,” Jamie Court of Consumer Watchdog told the committee, referring to the Eaton fire.

All three utilities said at the hearing they opposed the bill.

A lobbyist for San Diego Gas & Electric said he believed the audits were unnecessary because the commission was already reviewing the spending.

“We think it creates a duplicative process,” he said.

At the committee hearing, Edison’s lobbyist did not say why the company was opposed to the bill.

The company has previously said that safety is its top priority and that it does not believe maintenance on its transmission lines suffered before the Eaton fire.

Also voicing support for the bill at the hearing were survivors of other deadly wildfires in the state, including the 2018 Camp fire, which killed 85 people and destroyed much of the town of Paradise. Investigators found that the fire was ignited when equipment failed on a decades-old PG&E transmission line.

The bill’s author, Assemblywoman Tasha Boerner, an Encinitas Democrat, pointed to how independent audits of the three companies’ wildfire spending from 2019 to 2020 found that $2.5 billion could not be accounted for.

Those were the last independent audits of the three companies’ wildfire spending.

Despite the findings, the commission did not require the companies to return any of the questioned amounts to electric customers. Instead, the commission agreed the companies could spend billions of dollars more, Boerner said.

“This is frankly unacceptable,” she said.

Asked for a response to those audits, the lobbyist from San Diego Gas & Electric told the committee he wasn’t familiar with the findings.

California electric rates are the nation’s second highest after Hawaii.

In 2024, wildfire expenses amounted to 17% to 27% of the costs the three companies charge to consumers, according to a legislative analysis of Boerner’s bill. The average residential customer pays $250 to $490 a year for that spending.

The United States and Iran may have agreed to a ceasefire for now, but the world’s supply chains will continue to feel the effects.

Beyond oil and gas, Iran’s near closure of the Strait of Hormuz has blocked shipments of critical raw materials from the Gulf.

Petrochemicals, helium and aluminium are just some of the products that have not been able to reach manufacturing hubs around the world.

Many everyday items are affected, from plastic packaging to the advanced semiconductors in our smartphones.

How will our supply chains recover, and can they become more resilient to global shocks?

BRUSSELS — NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has weathered a fresh ordeal with President Trump, this time over the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, a conflict that does not even involve the world’s biggest military alliance and one it was never consulted about.

Since launching the war, Trump has derided U.S. allies as “cowards,” slammed NATO as “a paper tiger” and compared U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer to Neville Chamberlain, who is probably best remembered for a policy of appeasement toward Nazi Germany.

That comes on top of Trump’s repeated threats to seize control of Greenland, which have deeply strained relations with U.S. allies in NATO and raised fears that doing by force could spell the end of the organization.

In recent days, the man who is as good as chairman of the NATO board suggested that the U.S. might leave the trans-Atlantic alliance. Trump already threatened to walk out in 2018 during his first term. His complaint now is that some allies ignored his call to help as Iran effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz, a vital trade waterway.

After talks with Rutte on Wednesday, the alliance’s most powerful leader took to social media to show his annoyance. “NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN,” Trump posted.

Peppered with questions later on CNN about whether Trump intended to take America out of NATO, Rutte said: “He is clearly disappointed with many NATO allies, and I can see his point.”

Keeping America in

Rutte has earned a reputation as a “Trump whisperer,” notably helping to draw up a plan that has seen European allies and Canada buy U.S. weapons for Ukraine, and keep the administration involved in Europe’s biggest war in decades.

Indeed, one of his most demanding tasks since taking office in 2024 has been to keep the mercurial U.S. leader engaged in NATO, particularly as America has set its sights on security challenges elsewhere, in the Indo-Pacific, Venezuela, and most recently Iran.

Rutte has used flattery, praising Trump for forcing allies to spend more on defense. He has congratulated the U.S. leader over the war and refrained from criticizing Trump’s warning that “a whole civilization will die” should Iran not reopen the strait.

“This was a very frank, very open discussion but also a discussion between two good friends,” Rutte told CNN. He declined to confirm reports that Trump is considering moving U.S. troops out of European countries that do not support the war.

Asked whether the world is safer thanks to the U.S.-Israel war, Rutte said: “Absolutely.”

War launched by a NATO member, not at one

The striking thing about the war on Iran is that NATO has no role to play there. As a defensive alliance it has protected ally Turkey when Iranian missiles were fired in retaliation at its territory, but the war was launched by a NATO member, not at one.

Rutte himself has said that NATO would not join the war, and there is no public confirmation that the U.S. had even raised the issue at the organization’s Brussels headquarters, although it cannot be ruled out that the administration made a request on Wednesday for that to happen.

NATO declined to say whether security for the strait has been officially discussed and referred questions to the United Kingdom, which is leading an effort outside the alliance to make the trade route safe for shipping once the ceasefire is working.

Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said Thursday that his country is always ready to consider providing support through NATO to partners who request it there.

“If the U.S. or any other NATO ally is asking (for) our support, we are always read to discuss it,” he told broadcaster CNBC. “But for that, we need of course the official ask to discuss then what is the mission, what is the goal?”

If allies “need our support, then we need to plan together,” he said.

NATO trying to stay out

Rutte himself insists that the alliance will only defend itself, and not become involved in another conflict outside of NATO territory, which is considered to be much of Europe and North America.

“This is Iran, this is the Gulf, this is outside NATO territory,” he said.

NATO has operated outside of the Euro-Atlantic area in the past, notably in Libya and Afghanistan. But there is no appetite to do so again given its chaotic U.S.-led exit from Afghanistan in 2021, which former NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg described as a “defeat.”

Trump’s ire seems most directed at Spain and France, rather than NATO itself. Spain has closed its airspace to U.S. planes involved in the Iran war and has refused U.S. forces the use of jointly operated military bases.

After the two-week ceasefire was announced, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez posted on X that his government “will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket.”

“What’s needed now: diplomacy, international legality, and PEACE,” he added.

France has been critical, insisting that the war was launched without respecting international law and that Paris was never consulted about it. No blanket restrictions were placed on the use of joint bases or its airspace, but French authorities have said they’re making such decisions on a case by case basis.

Cook writes for the Associated Press.

If conservative commentator Steve Hilton is elected California’s next governor, as President Trump wants, it would mark a “political revolution” for the liberal state, the candidate said.

The state’s Democrat-controlled Legislature, “after all their years of lecturing us about democracy,” would be forced to work with him “to enact the changes that Californians just voted for,” and he would be willing to work with them too, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and former Fox News host said.

If firebrand Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco is elected governor, he will take a decidedly different approach, he said.

“You want to know how I’m gonna work with a Democrat Legislature? I’m not. I’m gonna get every single one of them unelected,” Bianco said. “Every single day, I’m gonna stand on the steps of the Capitol, and I’m gonna tell the California voting public about the idiots in Sacramento that are ruining their lives.”

For the first time in years, the state GOP is riding into its convention this weekend on a wave of optimism about the upcoming gubernatorial race.

According to recent polling, Hilton and Bianco both stand a chance of winning more votes in the June 2 primary than any of the many Democratic candidates, who have spread thin their party’s nearly 2-1 advantage in voter rolls. If the GOP candidates do that, they would advance to a head-to-head contest in November’s general election, and one would become the state’s first Republican governor since Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Much could change to prevent that scenario. More Democrats could drop out. Voters could coalesce around one or two of those left. Hilton, with Trump’s endorsement, could consolidate Republican support and push Bianco out of contention.

Still, the prospect of a Republican governing California, a stronghold of the anti-MAGA movement, has captivated political experts and spectators alike.

Gov. Gavin Newsom imposed a moratorium on the death penalty shortly after taking office, a policy the next governor could reverse. At San Quentin, an inmate is moved from his cell on death row.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Trump, in his recent endorsement, said he has “known and respected” Hilton for many years and would help him “turn it around” in California after an “absolutely horrendous job” by Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state Democrats.

“With Federal help, and a Great Governor, like Steve Hilton, California can be better than ever before!” Trump wrote.

Many Democrats predict the opposite: grandstanding and gridlock as either Hilton or Bianco’s MAGA-aligned agenda meets stiff resistance from powerful state Democrats repulsed by the president’s movement.

“If the new governor decided to go hard MAGA, they would face enormous pushback,” said state Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica), who considers it unlikely for both Republicans to advance.

“I don’t think there’s any question that the state would descend into chaos,” said Phil Angelides, a Democrat and former state treasurer who lost to Schwarzenegger in the 2006 gubernatorial race.

The limits of power

California governors hold substantial power.

They direct and appoint leaders to the state’s many executive agencies, boards and commissions, which oversee vast portfolios in vital areas, such as the environment, California’s university systems and the state parole board. They craft the state budget and have a line-item veto to eliminate legislative appropriations. They can make major unilateral decisions — such as welcoming federal troops into California cities — and command a bully pulpit to drive public opinion and policy, including through statewide ballot measures.

Demonstrators confront California National Guard troops and police outside a federal building during protests in Los Angeles in 2025 after the Trump administration sent in the National Guard. The Republican candidates for California governor said they would welcome similar orders by the Trump administration.

(David McNew / Getty Images)

California’s next governor would have the power to end Newsom’s moratorium on the death penalty, appoint state judges and grant state pardons. During emergencies the governor would be able to reshape state regulations, suspend laws and redirect funding, as Newsom did during the COVID-19 pandemic by banning price gouging, halting evictions and postponing the 2020 tax deadline.

But their power also has limits.

Many of the governor’s appointees are subject to state Senate confirmation. The Legislature can change and amend the governor’s proposed budget and pass a budget bill distinctly different from his proposal. Democrats, with their supermajority, can also override the governor’s vetoes.

The independently elected state attorney general can sue to defend state laws, regulations and residents, a power current officeholder Rob Bonta, a Democrat, has exercised more than 60 times to challenge the Trump administration. The California Supreme Court, which leans liberal, can rein in the executive branch if it determines it has violated the state Constitution or other statutes.

Trump has repeatedly pushed the limits of executive authority and benefited from having a Republican-controlled Congress and a conservative U.S. Supreme Court majority that holds an expansive view of executive power. Hilton or Bianco would face the opposite in California, where many legislators would refuse to acquiesce to a Republican governor, especially one almost certain to face a swift recall, political experts said.

Hilton or Bianco could “potentially build alliances” with Democrats on issues such as housing and affordability and drive change that way, said Kim Nalder, a political science professor and director of the Project for an Informed Electorate at Sacramento State. But “if the Democratic majority in the Legislature decides to dig in its heels, then they could oppose practically everything [the new governor] would do.”

Nalder said Hilton or Bianco could also “try to rule in a Trumpian way” by testing the boundaries of their authority. She expects Bianco would do so given his recent decision to “violate the norms of democracy” by seizing more than half a million 2025 ballots as part of an unusual local sheriff’s investigation into allegations of voter fraud that state and county officials say have no merit.

But he “wouldn’t have the public support or the hold on the other branches of government that Trump has,” she said, “so it would be much more difficult.”

Angelides said electing either Hilton or Bianco would put someone “deeply associated with the MAGA movement” atop a deeply blue state government in which many career employees hold opposing views, which would cause a cascade of disruptions.

“There’s no reason to believe it will be different than the chaos we’ve seen in the Trump administration: an evisceration of a number of state agencies, as well as the departure of a lot of talented people who will not stay and would not jeopardize their careers, their reputations, to work under a governor from the MAGA movement,” Angelides said.

State employees are protected by powerful unions with deep ties to Democratic leaders, which Hilton said he would sever.

A Bonta spokesperson said in a written statement that the attorney general “works in service of the people of California — not the Governor,” and would not hesitate to exercise his independent authority under the state Constitution.

“We hope to maintain a close working relationship with whomever California’s next Governor is, but our mission and our priorities will not change,” the spokesperson said. “Regardless of who is in that office, we will continue to enforce civil rights laws, investigate and prosecute complex crimes, protect public safety, stand up for consumers and the environment, and fulfill our duty to Californians.”

Senate President Pro Tempore Monique Limón (D-Goleta) also offered a diplomatic response, saying in a statement that “it is critical that whoever our next Governor may be helps advance the lives and goals of California and its communities.”

In their own words

Hilton and Bianco both said they would radically reshape state government, in part by dismantling regulations that are hampering development and making basic necessities — housing, food, gas, electricity — too expensive.

Hilton, a top advisor in British Prime Minister David Cameron’s coalition government more than a decade ago, would install agency leaders who would be hyper-focused on slashing costly regulations in order to “reduce the burden of cost and hassle on California families and businesses,” he said. “Elections have consequences, and so it would be irresponsible not to use maximum aggression to make the changes as quickly as possible.”

The top two Republican candidates running for California governor said they would have a much better relationship with President Trump than Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who challenged the president’s policies in court and mocked him on social media.

(Mark Schiefelbein / Associated Press)

Bianco said “every single regulation in this state is leaving” if he wins, with California becoming far more business friendly. “The environmental activism, the environmental activism terrorists who are controlling state government, are going to be put in their place, which is outside where nobody hears from them.”

Both Hilton and Bianco also sharply criticized California Democrats for challenging Trump at every turn, a practice they would end.

“I would be wanting to work with the administration to help Californians,” Hilton said.

“Why would you ever push back on a president unless they were seriously trying to destroy your state?” Bianco said. “California is failing because of its own policies.”

Hilton said he expects Bonta to lose to his Republican running mate for attorney general, Michael Gates. Bianco said that if Bonta remains in office, he would completely “defund” the state Justice Department.

Hilton and Bianco also shared similar thoughts on Trump’s immigration crackdown and deployment of the National Guard to Minneapolis and Los Angeles, the latter without Newsom’s approval.

Hilton said that he “certainly would never want to see, in California, the scenes that we saw in Minneapolis, nor would I want to see repeated the scenes that we saw in our state last summer,” but that those clashes were “provoked and instigated by Democrat sanctuary policy,” which he would end.

California’s sanctuary policies largely bar local police and corrections officials from conducting or assisting federal authorities in immigration enforcement, which state leaders say is not their responsibility and could undermine community trust in local police.

Bianco said that Trump sent in troops because Newsom “was derelict in his duties to protect the people of California,” and that it is more important to address “failed Democrat policies for the last 20 years.”

“President Trump has done not one single thing to harm California in the last year,” he said.

Matt Lesenyie, an assistant professor of political science at Cal State Long Beach, said that if Hilton or Bianco becomes governor, Sacramento will see “a lot of gridlock and grandstanding, and that’s from both parties.”

But he also said he does not expect that to happen, because undecided voters are going to “figure it out” and coalesce behind a Democrat — even if at the last moment.

“That last slice of the electorate,” he said, “doesn’t wake up until the last two weeks.”

Times staff writer Katie King contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Morning broke in the Middle East on Wednesday with a wave of attacks by Iran. Air defenses in Kuwait were overwhelmed. Three dozen drones and 17 ballistic missiles were shot down over the United Arab Emirates. The most important oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia suffered a hit. Sirens flared in Tel Aviv, and a devastating drumbeat of Israeli strikes targeting Iran’s allies in Lebanon killed scores in Beirut.

A day after President Trump hailed a ceasefire in his war with the Islamic Republic, reversing course on his threat to escalate, the only country spared from attack appeared to be Iran itself.

The “fragile truce,” as Vice President JD Vance called it, began with a calculated show of force from an Iran militarily weakened by six weeks of U.S.-Israeli strikes, yet strategically positioned to press for sweeping concessions from an American president eager to end the war.

Strait flush

A naval vessel sails on March 1 in the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway through which much of the world’s oil and gas passes.

(Sahar al Attar / AFP/Getty Images)

The president’s main conditions for a truce were the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and, through negotiations, a definitive end to Iran’s nuclear work. But Tehran offered no sign of relenting on its enrichment program, and by Wednesday afternoon, had warned that tanker traffic would halt through the strait until Israel paused its attacks in Lebanon.

It was the clearest demonstration yet of Iran’s emboldened position to use the strait — treated for decades as a free and open international waterway — as a bargaining tool, threatening its closure over any number of demands, or else implementing a toll system as reparations for its war damage.

By Friday, U.S. negotiators flying to Islamabad for talks can expect Iran’s hold on the strait to weigh against all other priorities, including American demands that Iran relinquish its right to enrich uranium, the source of decades of tortured diplomatic efforts.

The White House said that traffic had increased through the strait on Wednesday. But it also described reports of its closure, briefed to a displeased president, as “completely unacceptable,” serving as a stark reminder in the West Wing of the new world its war had brought.

James Acton, co-director of the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called the ceasefire framework “a foreign policy disaster” for the United States that revealed Iranian leverage long predicted by independent experts and intelligence analysts.

“Let’s assume the ceasefire actually takes hold — and as far as I can see, it hasn’t done so far,” Acton said. “Iran has the upper hand, and frankly, it’s not close.”

“The negotiations are likely to focus on opening the Strait of Hormuz, which is clearly Trump’s top goal, not Iran’s nuclear program,” he added. “Because Iran has demonstrated it can close the strait — and inflict large economic costs on the U.S. and large political costs on Trump — it now has plenty of leverage over the United States.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks during a news briefing in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room on Wednesday. Leavitt spoke to reporters on a range of topics including a two-week ceasefire deal between the U.S., Iran and Israel.

(Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)

Unclear terms

The Trump administration reportedly urged two allies of Tehran — China and Pakistan — to pressure the Iranians into a ceasefire ahead of a Tuesday evening deadline, self-imposed by Trump, to escalate the conflict. The resulting truce was described not in a shared statement among the warring parties, but in separate, differing social media posts that all but guaranteed misinterpretation between the two sides.

A statement from the Pakistanis, who have helped mediate the talks, said the ceasefire extended to hostilities in Lebanon. The Israeli statement said it did not; Trump’s post omitted any mention of Lebanon at all.

But the president’s statement did say that a 10-point plan from Iran could serve as the basis for negotiations over a long-term truce going forward. The White House was forced to walk that back Wednesday afternoon, claiming that Iran had presented its diplomats with another, secret 10-point plan substantially revised from those detailed in the press.

“They put forward a more reasonable and entirely different and condensed plan to the president and his team,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters. “The idea that President Trump would ever accept an Iranian wish list as a deal is completely absurd.”

In social media posts and interviews with select reporters on Wednesday, Trump appeared to suggest exactly that — floating sanctions relief for Tehran and proposing a plan to share revenue from a Strait of Hormuz toll system that could raise global oil prices while directly funding the Iranian government.

Limited achievements

Experts agree that the U.S.-Israeli campaign succeeded in significantly degrading Iran’s drone and ballistic missile infrastructure. But in a statement on Wednesday, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said any deal between Washington and Tehran had to include structural limits on those programs — suggesting concern in Israel that Iran could reconstitute its military within a matter of years.

Iran’s continued attacks on its neighbors Wednesday, its downing of American aircraft last week, and its retention of its nuclear material have raised doubts among U.S. allies about whether Washington’s military capabilities can deliver on its promises.

“There is less respect for what the United States — and Trump in particular — can accomplish, be it through military force or diplomacy, and for the strategic thinking that underlies U.S. policy,” said Patrick Clawson, director of the Iran program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “These attitudes are even stronger in Europe, Russia and China.”

Iran’s military weaknesses have been uncovered as well. Few of its missiles and drones inflicted physical damage throughout Israel and the Arab world.

Yet the psychological impact — on local populations, on the economy of metropolitan Dubai, on the commercial shipping sector and the oil market — has proven Iran is capable of exacting greater pain than its conventional military capabilities would suggest.

Whether the United States can return the Strait of Hormuz to its status before the war, as a free and open waterway, may depend on longstanding allies that Trump has ostracized over the course of the war.

“We launched a war that affected the rest of the world, with little consideration for its effects,” said Dennis Ross, a veteran diplomat on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict who served in the George H.W. Bush, Clinton and Obama administrations.

“When you berate allies and leave them out but expect them to be there when you need them, you discover that you don’t have them,” Ross added. “No one is going to assume that the U.S. is more reliable after this.”

What else you should be reading

The must-read:The new LACMA is divisive. It’s also ambitious, disorienting — and radically alive
The deep dive: Excitement over ‘affordable’ L.A. Olympics turns to angry sticker shock over high-priced tickets
The L.A. Times Special: Bruce Springsteen’s comeback at Kia Forum is no victory lap. It’s a battle against Trump

More to come,
Michael Wilner
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For scientists, measuring the water in a river or a lake is relatively straightforward. It’s much more complicated to figure out how much water lies underground.

After years of research, a team of scientists has finally mapped what remains of these hidden waters across the United States, and they’ve produced the most extensive estimate of the country’s groundwater to date.

Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Arizona took data from about 800,000 wells and applied a machine-learning model to estimate the depth of the water table nationwide.

“Groundwater is out of sight and out of mind for most people,” said Reed Maxwell, a hydrologist at Princeton and co-author of the recent study in the journal Nature. “Knowing how much we have will be helpful in knowing how to use it wisely.”

They incorporated data on the geology of aquifers and estimated down to nearly 1,300 feet, far deeper than most wells.

The scientists say their detailed map and data could help local decision-makers address overpumping from stressed aquifers, and help researchers estimate how much water has been depleted.

California has seriously depleted groundwater in the San Joaquin, Salinas and Cuyama valleys, Ventura County and other places, with some of the fastest rates of water decline in the world.

In parts of the Central Valley, where large farms draw heavily from wells, aquifer levels have plummeted. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates it has lost 128 million acre-feet, comparable to the volume of Lake Tahoe, since pumps started pulling it out in the early 20th century.

That was as of 2019, and water levels have continued to decline.

(Yueling Ma et al. / Princeton University)

In the desert Southwest, the groundwater is largely considered “fossil water” because it took millennia to accumulate. So once it is pumped out, it’s in effect gone for good.

Even depleting small amounts of water can be a problem, said co-author Laura Condon, a University of Arizona hydrologist. “We see this in Arizona and in Southern California too, where long before you run out of water, you start disappearing wetlands, disappearing small tributaries.”

The total quantity of water underground is still immense. The scientists found nationwide there is roughly 250 billion acre-feet, or 13 times the volume of the Great Lakes.

Data compiled by lead author Yueling Ma show the Colorado River watershed has about as much groundwater as the volume of the Great Lakes, while California has about 70% of that.

Those are vast quantities, but the researchers said that definitely doesn’t mean there is plenty of water to recklessly use up. Declines in groundwater levels have in recent years caused household wells to sputter and run dry, streams and wetlands to dry up, and land to sink, damaging canals and levees. California’s database of dry wells shows about 6,000 have run dry since 2013, but in the last year, only 13 dry wells were reported. So that problem has slowed down for now. It could soon worsen again.

The new map shows groundwater varies widely across the country. In some places, you have to drill down 300 feet to reach it. In others, it’s just a few feet below the soil.

The map can help scientists studying where slow-flowing aquifers are feeding nature, nourishing streams and wetlands.

Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist and professor at Arizona State University who wasn’t involved in the research, called the researchers’ map and estimates a “remarkable achievement for modeling and understanding groundwater” in the United States.

The scientists “convincingly show that it is now possible to simulate groundwater depths and availability at very high resolutions,” he said, and they have made their results “accessible and useful for water managers across the country.”

He said the research adds to satellite measurements that scientists now use to track shifts in water over time. What the country still needs, he said, is a “national-scale network of deep groundwater wells” to track the quantity and quality of water all the way down to bedrock.

More water news

Two years ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a strategy to save declining salmon. Now, as Rachel Becker reports for CalMatters, members of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe say the state is ending its support for an effort to reintroduce endangered winter-run Chinook to waters upstream of Shasta Lake reservoir, and they feel betrayed.

The Trump administration recently announced it will spend $40 million to begin a plan to raise the height of Shasta Dam, which would expand California’s largest reservoir. As Camille von Kaenel reported for E&E News by Politico, dozens of environmental, fishing and tribal groups sent a letter to Newsom urging him to oppose the Trump administration’s renewed effort to raise the dam.

I followed up to ask Newsom’s office about the idea of raising Shasta Dam. “We aren’t getting distracted by conceptual projects, years from viability,” Newsom spokesperson Tara Gallegos said. Instead, she said the governor is focusing on getting the planned Sites Reservoir built northwest of Sacramento, which “will benefit regions throughout California and is much farther along towards construction.” Gallegos added that the state already is “a significant investor in the project, and the federal government should join us in ensuring this project comes to fruition.”

In the San Joaquin Valley, the Delta-Mendota subbasin has become the fourth farming area to avoid being placed on groundwater probation by state regulators. The State Water Resources Control Board voted this week not to impose enforcement measures on the area, Monserrat Solis reported for SJV Water.

More climate and environment news

The Trump administration has a budget proposal that calls for increasing military spending while slashing funding for clean energy and federal science programs. My colleague Hayley Smith wrote about the proposed cuts, which are strongly opposed by Democrats and environmental groups.

A wolf that captured national attention when she ventured into L.A. County earlier this year continues to make history. As Lila Seidman reports for The Times, it’s the first time a wolf has ventured into Inyo County in the Eastern Sierra in more than a century.

Imperial County supervisors voted to combine several parcels of land to clear the way for construction of a massive data center, which has faced opposition from residents who worry about the complex’s environmental footprint, Kori Suzuki reports for KPBS.

California’s last remaining nuclear power plant has received federal approval to run through at least 2030. My L.A. Times colleague Blanca Begert reports that the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission has renewed Diablo Canyon Power Plant’s license to operate.

A couple more things

Los Angeles Climate Week started April 8, with a big lineup of community events running through April 15. Here is the full calendar of events, which include a day of activities along the L.A. River and an interfaith climate gathering.

PBS SoCal’s new season of its locally produced environmental series Earth Focus premieres April 22, Earth Day, at 7:30 p.m., with an episode focusing on how L.A. stadiums are taking steps to be more environmentally friendly.

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

For more water and climate news, follow Ian James @ianjames.bsky.social on Bluesky and @ByIanJames on X.

Michael Gates is basing his run for California attorney general on his decade-long reign as Huntington Beach’s top lawman.

When we met at a Starbucks a block away from City Hall, he rattled off his hometown’s bona fides: A drop in crime and homelessness. Tourists from across the world. A thriving Main Street. A small-town feel “almost like the Midwest.”

His biggest obstacle in trying to convince voters that he should replace Rob Bonta, besides his Republican Party membership? Um, Huntington Beach.

For years, Surf City conservatives like Gates have reveled in playing the burr in the saddle of deep blue California. From a torrent of lawsuits against Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration to protests against COVID restrictions to the City Council’s vote to place a plaque outside the public library spelling out “MAGA,” Huntington Beach’s GOP leadership has yet to meet an anti-liberal stunt they didn’t characterize as a stance against tyranny worthy of Bunker Hill.

Their antics made Huntington Beach a national laughingstock — but Gates and his pals so far have had the last giggle.

They ran as a slate in two elections that transformed the City Council from a narrow Democratic majority in 2022 to an all-Republican body in an era when Orange County is turning more and more purple. The takeover became a sensation among California conservatives looking for victories in a state where Democrats maintain a supermajority in both legislative chambers and have held every statewide office for 15 years.

“We’ve morphed into this epicenter of fighting back,” said Mayor Casey McKeon, a third-generation Huntington Beach resident who’s up for reelection this year. “We are the model every city can follow. If I were running for state office, I’d run it on that.”

That’s exactly what the architects of MAGA-by-the-Sea plan to do this November.

In addition to Gates’ bid, gadfly-turned-Councilmember Gracey Van Der Mark is seeking an Assembly seat. Her former council colleague Tony Strickland won his state Senate seat last spring and is the co-author of a proposed state ballot initiative that would require voter ID for all elections. Huntington Beach voters approved a similar initiative in 2024, which was later struck down by the California Supreme Court.

The Huntington Beach red revolution now includes conservative commentator Steve Hilton, who launched his campaign for governor last spring near the city’s world-famous pier — even though he lives in Silicon Valley.

Hilton told me he has long loved Huntington Beach because it reminds him of Brighton, the seaside British town where he grew up. His affection for Surf City deepened the more he talked to people like Gates and Strickland, who sold him on their vision to stick it to Sacramento.

“There’s such a joy about it — it’s a place where it’s well-run and clean and orderly,” said the candidate, who has consistently led in polls as his Democratic opponents cannibalize each other’s share of the vote. “When I was thinking where to launch my campaign, it made sense [in Huntington Beach], because it felt like home.”

Then-City Council candidates Tony Strickland, left, and Gracey Van Der Mark attend a “meet and greet” event in Huntington Beach in 2022.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Better not tell anyone in H.B. you’re an immigrant, Steve!

California Republican Party Chairwoman Corrin Rankin is confident the Huntington Beach crew can win.

“What happened there proves that conservative leadership works,” she said. “Currently, we have a former mayor of San Francisco who’s the governor. You look at the contrast of how each of those cities are.”

Strickland, who is Hilton’s campaign chair, swears that he and his former colleagues didn’t plan to take their crusade statewide, but “when you do a great job, other opportunities present themselves.”

“I think California is on the wrong track — most think that,” he added. If his team pulls off a November sweep — governor, attorney general, Assembly seat and the voter ID proposition — “it would be known as the major turnaround in the Golden State that made it golden again.”

Does drinking Surf City’s water grant you magical powers, too?

It’s easy to dismiss what Strickland, Gates and the others have created as a lucky local run that’s about to crash into the reality of running statewide as a Republican. Even in Huntington Beach, residents tired of perpetual culture wars rejected two ballot measures last year seeking to give the City Council more control over a municipal library system that Van Der Mark long claimed was essentially providing pornography to children.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned while tracking H.B.’s ever-aggrieved conservatives for a quarter century, it’s to never underestimate them — the more you do, the more they fume, the more they scheme. They plan with the discipline of a Dodgers World Series team and brawl like hometown hero and mixed martial arts legend Tito Ortiz, who was on the council for a few months in 2021 before stepping down because he said the job “wasn’t working for me.”

Gates, 51, is so Huntington Beach that he looks it: Bull-necked. Blue-eyed. Bro-y. No-nonsense haircut. An aw-shucks countenance barely hiding a righteous anger that seeks to pile-drive progressive California into submission.

“I know what it looks like to be from a working-class family, a hardworking family, and find it very difficult to make ends meet,” said Gates, noting that his Irish American parents sometimes had to grab food and diapers for their children from the St. Bonaventure Catholic Church pantry. “So frankly, let’s take control away from the government and give control back to the working-class people.”

Fullerton College political science professor Jodi Balma teaches her students about Huntington Beach as an example of how “the power of a slate can really work” in an era of polarization. But when I asked if she thought the Surf City insurgents could upend California politics, the professor quickly said, “No.”

A majority of California voters think the state is heading in the wrong direction, and the number of undecided voters in elections ranging from California governor to the L.A. mayor’s race is putting the fear of God into Democratic leaders. But how deluded can Strickland and company be to think that aligning themselves more with President Trump — who just endorsed Hilton — is a winning strategy in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly 2 to 1? And propping up Surf City — a wealthy beach town so full of itself that it makes Santa Monica seem as humble as Santa Ana — as the last, best hope to save California?

Hilton demurred when I asked if he agreed with everything his pals on the City Council have done over the years. “I’m not there, so I don’t see the day-to-day operation,” was his weak salsa reply.

Gates was more forthright.

“I think probably everybody in city leadership would admit the library thing got out of control,” he said. By then, Gates was working for the Department of Justice in Washington as a deputy assistant attorney general in the civil rights division, resigning after just 10 months because he said he missed home.

Sand art at Huntington City Beach in 2020.

(Raul Roa / Los Angeles Times)

Gates talked a good talk for most of our hourlong conversation. He and Hilton are pushing especially hard for Latino voters — they “can save California because they understand that new leadership can turn the state around.”

But for everything Gates said that might appeal to a frustrated Democrat like me, his Huntington Beach braggadocio continually won out.

He alternately hailed his own political astuteness (“You be patient, bide your time, be disciplined, keep your mouth shut. The long game will win.”), brought up transgender issues (“I want to protect our young girls. I want to stop all the mutilation surgeries happening in hospitals to our young people.”) and inveighed against out-of-control Democrats (“[Californians are] abused. And honestly, we’re pissed off. We’re getting really mad.”).

Most of all, Gates proclaimed time and time again just how darn special Huntington Beach is.

“We love our freedoms. We love flying our American flags,” he said. “We love our beach. I don’t know, it’s a different culture here.”

Good luck selling Californians on it.

Amid all the alarming and unhinged comments of the president of the United States in recent days threatening Iran with genocide — remarks beyond even the usual cray-cray blather from Donald Trump — it was a statement from his spokesperson on Tuesday that really put the madness in the White House in perspective.

“Only the President knows where things stand and what he will do,” Karoline Leavitt said.

She issued those words just hours before Trump’s 8 p.m. Tuesday deadline for Iran to either reopen the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping or face Armageddon — that is, war crimes by the United States. The statement from the White House press secretary was as clear a description as Americans could get of governance under Trump these days: A mad king reigns, virtually unchecked.

And as a practical matter, there is nothing under the Constitution, neither impeachment nor removal under the 25th Amendment, that can be done about him. There’s only voters’ opportunity to eject the complicit Republican majorities in the House and Senate in November’s midterm elections, to install a Democratic — and democratic — check on Trump for the remaining two years of his term.

By now we know that, just before Trump’s deadline to Iran warning “a whole civilization will die tonight,” he announced a fragile two-week ceasefire for negotiations. The commander in chief declared victory, natch. But so did Iran. And it had the better of the argument: Iran continued to control and monetize passage through the strait, unlike before Trump’s war began Feb. 28, and already on Wednesday it flexed that power by closing the route in retaliation for Israeli strikes. The ceasefire also lets Iran retain possession of its enriched, nearly bomb-grade uranium, and the nation won Trump’s offer of possible tariff and sanctions relief.

So much for the “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” he demanded in a post a month ago.

I’m writing these words on Wednesday. Who knows where things will stand by the time you’re reading this? “Only the president knows.”

Trump has fluctuated, reversed and contradicted himself repeatedly — even within a single social-media screed or chest-thumping performance for the press — since he ordered war against Iran nearly six weeks ago, without notice to Congress, let alone its authorization. Since Sunday, he’s variously called Iran’s leaders “crazy bastards” and “animals” and taken credit for “Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail.”

Presidential rule by fiat and whim would be wrong in any case under the Constitution’s checks and balances of power, and specifically of war power. But in Trump’s case, America has a president who lately has piled on the evidence that he is mentally unstable, unfit for the office.

And spare us the cheerleaders’ claims on Fox News about how he’s playing multidimensional chess. When even Alex Jones likens Trump to “crazy King Lear” and calls for invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from power — echoing former Trump promoters including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Candace Owens, among others — you know he’s crossed a line by his unilateral war-making and profane threats (on Easter Sunday!) of genocidal apocalypse.

The evidence of Trump’s dangerous instability has been there from his political genesis. In his first term, he warned he’d unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen” against nuclear-armed North Korea then declared that he “fell in love” with dictator Kim Jong-un (without achieving any diminution in Kim’s arsenal). He celebrates the deaths of political enemies and prosecutes those still living. He repeatedly interrupts himself on some policy question to bloviate about his ballroom plans.

He’s ordered armed agents into American neighborhoods on immigration raids, then expressed neither responsibility nor remorse when citizens died and legal residents got deported. The national security leaders of his first term let it be known that they’d prevented him from acting on his worst impulses, but there’s no chance of that from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Retired Gen. Mark Milley, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in 2021 described first-term Trump as being in mental decline and “fascist to the core.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks Trump has gotten better in the intervening five years.

The country “can’t be a therapy session for … a troubled man like this,” Trump’s first-term attorney general, William P. Barr, told CBS in 2023 as Trump campaigned to return to office.

If only the presidency were therapy for Trump. Instead he’s like a power addict in the world’s most powerful job, mainlining its intoxicants, and no one will stop him. Only people with extraordinary egos seek the White House in the first place, but when an actual egomaniac inhabits that warping bubble of butter-uppers, there’s danger. I remain haunted by the words of retired Gen. John F. Kelly, Trump’s first-term Homeland Security secretary and then White House chief of staff, who in 2023 said of Trump’s potential reelection: “God help us.”

Having failed twice to convict and remove Trump in his first term, Democrats have shied from a third attempt, until now. Scores in Congress have called for impeachment or invocation of the 25th Amendment to oust him. There’s some value in sending a message. But Democrats are offering supporters false hope. A Republican-led Congress and a Cabinet of clownish sycophants will not exercise the powers they have, even against a mad king.

The authors of the Constitution, having thrown off a king, debated at length how to guard against a power-crazed president. But they didn’t anticipate political parties that put tribal loyalty over the country. That partisanship has rendered the high bars to a president’s removal — a vote of two-thirds of the Senate for conviction after impeachment, or, under the 25th Amendment, action by the vice president and a Cabinet majority — all but insurmountable.

That leaves the voters, who in special and off-year elections as recently as Tuesday have shown their zeal to punish Trump’s party. We can hope that a new Congress will check him come January.

And we can pray.

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SACRAMENTO — Sharon Sharp, the embattled director of the California Lottery criticized for her handling of major contracts, resigned Monday, saying that months of controversy had made her “tired and angry.”

Insisting the resignation was her idea and not that of Gov. Pete Wilson, Sharp said she was stepping down so she could spend more time with her husband, who lives in Illinois. However, a source in the Administration said she was urged to resign.

“It’s just time for me to go home,” said Sharp, who is credited with adding several lottery games, including Keno, and of helping to turn around the agency’s downward revenue slide.

“I’m grateful to the governor . . . who I’m sure wished many times that the lottery would stay out of the news and most especially that I would stay out of the news.”

Sharp’s resignation came several weeks after it was disclosed that the former lobbyist for a company that received lucrative lottery contracts described Sharp in a secretly tape-recorded conversation as “our gal.” The conversation was played during a federal court trial of lobbyist Clayton R. Jackson, who has been charged with racketeering and money laundering.

On Monday, Sharp dismissed Jackson’s comments as the idle boasting of a lobbyist who wanted to impress others with his ability to gain access to public officials. Calling Jackson’s statement “ridiculous,” she maintained that her relationship with his former client, GTECH Corp. of Rhode Island, had always been professional and that there was no conflict of interest.

“I’m Don Sharp’s gal,” she quipped, referring to her husband of 34 years.

In a short statement, Wilson praised Sharp for “innovative leadership” at the lottery, especially improvements in customer services and the addition of new games–Keno, Fantasy 5, Daily 3 and multiple Scratchers, which helped boost sales. A spokesman for the governor said Wilson’s staff would conduct a nationwide search for her replacement.

“Her job is completed,” Wilson said. “She will give her successor a more efficient and more effective lottery to support education for California’s children.”

But the tense news conference announcing Sharp’s resignation contrasted starkly with the one two years ago in which the governor proudly announced her appointment.

At the time, Wilson said Sharp was his handpicked choice to revitalize a demoralized lottery and reverse a decline in sales that had caused deep reductions in the agency’s contributions to public schools.

Sharp, 53, left office Monday having accomplished the sales turnaround but also having created so much controversy over her handling of contracts that she became a political liability for the Wilson Administration.

Sharp was director of the Illinois lottery before coming to California. She commuted to her home in Chicago throughout her tenure and said Monday that she has no job lined up after leaving.

Although the governor’s office Monday had nothing but public praise for her work, staff members privately have been expressing concern about the appearance of favoritism in the awarding of lottery contracts.

Just days before Sharp’s resignation, Wilson’s chief of staff, Bob White, spoke generally of worries about the lottery’s contracting process.

“You want to make sure that the process and every contract let, on something as major as this, is above suspicion,” he said. “Our main goal was to make the things not sole sources; to make it as competitive as could be in a not very competitive world.”

White denied that Sharp was pressured to resign, but a source familiar with the lottery said an Administration official sent to review the lottery’s operation came away “concerned at the way they conducted business.” The source said the governor’s office urged Sharp to resign.

“I think it’s a welcome step,” said Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), one of Sharp’s most vocal critics. “I think it has just become a tainted and unmanageable mess over there. She would have nothing to look forward to but grief.”

Hayden said he will ask the governor and attorney general to investigate the lottery’s relationship to GTECH and to work with other states where the company’s contracts are being criticized.

As one of her final acts in office, Sharp said she had asked for a state audit of the lottery’s handling of a $400-million, five-year contract awarded GTECH to operate its computerized games. “For the sake of the future of the California Lottery, this issue must be put to rest,” she said.

During Sharp’s tenure, GTECH was awarded three lottery contracts totaling nearly $500 million and was recommended for a fourth–all without competitive bids.

Sharp had been in office only a few months in 1991 when she proposed a one-year extension of GTECH’s contract to operate the computerized games.

Her recommendation came just days after former state Sen. Alan Robbins pleaded guilty to a series of charges including accepting a $13,500 bribe allegedly from Jackson, to influence legislation of interest to GTECH.

Although the company was never implicated in the charges, an embarrassed governor’s staff asked the agency to delay awarding the contract for at least a month. Before the contract extension expired, Sharp again recommended–and the Lottery Commission approved–a $25-million amendment for the purchase of 2,000 additional terminals and upgrades to the computer system. Several staff members complained internally that the purchase should have been handled by competitive bids.

A year later, she did seek competitive bids, this time for a new computer contract, but GTECH was the only company to submit a proposal.

Rival companies complained that the specifications for the contract so favored GTECH that it was useless for them to bid. Sharp insisted that the specifications were standard for the industry and again recommended that GTECH get the contract. The commission agreed.

In September, she proposed that GTECH receive another contract without competitive bid to provide an automated system that would make it easier to cash lower-prize Scratchers. She later withdrew her recommendation after the governor’s office expressed displeasure at the lack of competition. That contract is still pending.

Asked at the conclusion of proceedings Monday in his corruption trial for his opinion on Sharp’s resignation, Jackson said: “That’s too bad. . . . If this (the trial) was all over, I’d say something.”

Times staff writer Mark Gladstone contributed to this story.

Out of the Game

California State Lottery Director Sharon Sharp announced her resignation Monday, two years after she was appointed to the job by Gov. Pete Wilson. Here is a snapshot of the performance of the lottery under her tenure.

NUMBER OF PLAYERS: 8 million a month

GAMES INTRODUCED

* Dec. 1991: SuperLotto

* Feb. 1992: Fantasy 5

* April, 1992: Daily 3

* Nov. 1992: Keno

ANNUAL LOTTERY REVENUE (In billions of dollars) ‘85-’86: $1.8 ‘86-’87: $1.4 ‘87-’88: $2.1 ‘88-’89: $2.6 ‘89-’90: $2.5 ‘90-’91: $2.1 Sharp’s term: (Sept. 1991 to Nov. 1993) ‘91-’92: $1.4 ‘92-’93: $1.8