politics

Venezuela has marked its 215th Independence Day as citizens continue to grapple with grief following a pair of deadly earthquakes on June 24.

On Sunday, interim President Delcy Rodriguez sought to project strength during a military service in honour of the annual holiday.

“There will be no social unrest here,” Rodriguez said. “What we have here is deep social solidarity.”

But Rodriguez’s government has faced backlash since the twin earthquakes struck, hitting Venezuela with magnitudes of 7.2 and 7.5, respectively.

On Sunday, Venezuela’s Ministry of Communication and Information announced that it had recorded 3,342 deaths as a result of the earthquakes, with more expected. Thousands of people remain missing.

In addition, some 16,470 people are injured, while 17,345 have been left without homes.

The powerful seismic activity levelled buildings along Venezuela’s northern coastline, damaging regions like La Guaira and the Caracas metropolitan area.

Critics have accused the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, which has led the country since 2007, of chronic mismanagement and corruption.

That, they say, has left Venezuela incapable of handling a crisis of the current scale. The June 24 earthquakes are the deadliest in a century for the country, and they represent the most catastrophic natural disaster Venezuela has weathered since the flash floods of 1999.

After the earthquakes, residents reported that government aid was slow to reach the most affected areas. Some accused the government of impeding the flow of foreign assistance.

In Sunday’s remarks, Rodriguez accused critics of seeking to stir “hatred” against the state.

“Attempts are being made today to attack Venezuelan institutions,” Rodriguez said. “There can be no room for any kind of conspiracy, internal or external, from whatever source it may come.”

The earthquakes are the first major disaster the Rodriguez government has had to contend with.

Rodriguez was sworn in as acting president in January, after serving as vice president under then-President Nicolas Maduro.

But on January 3, the United States launched a military operation to abduct and imprison Maduro on drug- and weapons-related charges. He is currently facing trial in New York.

Since taking power, Rodriguez has sought to work within the demands of US President Donald Trump. Her government has overseen reforms, for example, to its nationalised mining and fuel industries allowing more foreign investment.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has stood by Rodriguez, even amid the outpouring of criticism following the earthquakes.

Media reports have emerged that the US has repeatedly rejected requests from Venezuela’s main opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, to help her return to the country.

Machado had been living in hiding under Maduro for fear she would be arrested for her politics. In December, shortly before Maduro’s abduction, she secretly left Venezuela to collect a Nobel Peace Prize for promoting democracy.

But Machado has yet to return, though she has said she wants to be in the country to help with disaster relief efforts.

Her political coalition, Vente Venezuela, has been organising its own volunteer effort to collect donations and distribute supplies.

In a message to mark Venezuela’s Independence Day, Machado sought to draw a parallel between the US and her country.

“Yesterday, the people of the United States celebrated the 250th anniversary of their Declaration of Independence. Mere hours separate these commemorations, reflecting far more than a coincidence of history,” she wrote.

“They remind us that our nations are bound by the same republican ideals and by a shared commitment to the defense of the free world.”

In January, Machado presented Trump with her Nobel Peace Prize medal, in what was widely seen as an attempt to curry favour with the US president.

She has repeatedly pushed for new elections in Venezuela, claiming that her party has had a mandate to lead since the 2024 presidential race.

That election saw Maduro claim a third term as president, despite published vote tallies indicating he lost the race to the opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, an ally of Machado.

“We have built an unshakable democratic legitimacy, we have defeated the regime’s lies with the truth, and we have peacefully mobilized an entire nation that today is outraged and desperate for change,” Machado wrote in her Independence Day message.

“Enduring alliances are built on truth and trust. Now is the time to move forward with determination and to carry out, with unwavering resolve, the decisive chapter of our shared strategy.”

July 5 (UPI) — Mallory McMorrow, a state lawmaker who made in early splash in the race for the Democratic nod in Michigan’s key U.S. senate race, suspended her campaign on Sunday in a surprise move.

McMorrow, who positioned herself between the national party leadership favorite Rep. Haley Stevens and progressive challenger Abdul El-Sayed, said in a social media post she is pulling out of the race “with a deep, deep sense of gratitude.”

“For our thousands of volunteers, for everyone who donated what you could — building a campaign with zero corporate PAC dollars,” she said, adding that while she is suspending her campaign, “I am not leaving the fight.”

McMorrow reiterated her call for “new leadership and a better Democratic Party,” whose top voices, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, have endorsed Stevens to take on the Republican nominee, former Rep. Mike Rogers, in November’s general election.

Her withdrawal leaves Stevens and El-Sayed as the remaining candidates for the Aug. 4 primary, which is now shaping up to be a major test of whether El-Sayed can extend progressives’ winning streak against more establishment figures in Democratic primaries.

“Whoever wins this primary on August 4th will have my full support,” she declared.

The Michigan race is seen as a key in the Democrats’ hopes of capitalizing on the unpopularity of President Donald Trump and flipping the Senate from Republican control in November. To do so, they must keep it in the “blue” column as it is being vacated by Democrat Gary Peters.

McMorrow was an early front-runner in the race and had raised more than $8.6 million by the end of March but has since fallen behind El-Sayed and Stevens in the polls, the Detroit Free Press reported.

El-Sayed, a former Detroit public health official who has the backing of progressive stalwarts Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has seen a surge of support since May and last month won the endorsement of the United Auto Workers.

Four-term congresswoman Stevens, meanwhile, is picking up backing from some of McMorrow’s supporters, including Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who on Sunday called Stevens “a seasoned fighter for Michigan who knows how to work in a difficult environment to get essential policies across the finish line.”

SACRAMENTO — When attorney Janice Rogers Brown left her job as Gov. Pete Wilson’s legal adviser last year to become a justice on the state’s 3rd District Court of Appeal, she cashed out the vacation, personal leave and holiday time accumulated in her years in state service.

Her unused 138 days off were converted into a lump sum payment of $52,359 when she moved to the judiciary, according to payroll records obtained from the state controller’s office.

“When I was in the governor’s office, I didn’t get much time off,” said Brown, who had earlier worked for the state attorney general.

The jurist was one of thousands of state employees who accumulate their vacations–and eventually cash them out–rather than use them.

While there is no question that they are entitled to the money–courts have ruled that the time is a vested right–the vast accumulation of vacation and leave time represents a sizable liability for state government.

As of June 30, California taxpayers owed their government employees more than $1.1 billion in accumulated vacation time, according to a controller’s office estimate.

And the amount is growing.

“We have given leave time as a benefit when we didn’t have cash,” said Patricia Pavone, chief of benefits and training for the state Department of Personnel Administration. “Now it’s coming back to haunt us. It’s borrowing in the future. Instead of a liability in 1991, we have it in 2001 in higher dollars when people retire.”

State policies that put a cap on the amount of leave time that can be accrued and eventually cashed out are not observed uniformly. A department computer survey of 72,000 state employee records found that 6,665 had accumulated vacation and leave time in excess of their limits.

More than 100 employees have accrued the equivalent of half a year’s pay or more, according to the study, and one unidentified individual has saved up more than 2,000 hours–the equivalent of a year’s pay.

As Pavone and others point out, unused leave time is cashed out at a worker’s final salary, which in most cases has risen with cost of living adjustments and promotions.

“The system is far too generous,” said one former high-level executive branch appointee, who cashed out a sizable amount of accumulated time when he left government. He asked not to be identified. “If you added the state holidays, the floating holidays, the annual leave hours, you can accumulate enormous amounts of time. You can take a reasonable or small amount of vacation and leave state service and have an enormous accumulation.”

Official state policy and negotiated employee contracts set the maximum at 50 days of vacation time, or 80 days for employees who decide to forgo sick days in exchange for a more generous “annual leave” system.

In contrast, federal government policy allows workers to carry only 30 days of accrued leave time into the next year. And several states also have a 30-day limit, including Florida, Arizona, Nevada and Washington, according to a survey conducted by Workplace Economics Inc. of Washington, D.C.

Many private businesses along with the federal government take a “use it or lose it” approach to vacation time, limiting their future liability by putting a cap on the amount that an employee can carry over into the next year.

However, California is legally unable to enforce its relatively generous limits, officials say. To take away excess time that has not been used at the end of the year would require a change in state law and would be subject to labor negotiations, said Pavone’s boss, personnel administration director David J. Tirapelle.

Instead, supervisors are supposed to sit down with their employees and set up vacation schedules that will ensure that vacation time is used.

“We want employees to take their vacations,” said Department of Personnel Administration spokeswoman Shirley McCall. “It’s there to use, not to accumulate for financial purposes.”

Generally, the higher the employees’ rank in the bureaucracy, the more likely that they will exceed the cap, department statistics show.

The highest ranking employees, people such as the governor’s former legal adviser, Justice Brown, say they find it almost impossible to get away for more than a few days at a time because of the demands of their jobs.

And career employees in certain departments–Emergency Services, Caltrans and the California Highway Patrol–find it difficult to use up their time as fast as they accumulate it.

When four ranking Highway Patrol officers left their jobs last year–to retire or because of disability–they took with them lump sum payments totaling $245,800 in vacation and compensatory time.

For example, former chief deputy Harry T. Adair cashed out 46 weeks of accumulated time worth $82,894.

Lynn Newquist, commander of personnel services for the CHP, said her agency tries to comply with state policy. “The commanders review vacation and annual leave balance usually around June 1 of each year and usually encourage employees to plan on time off,” she said.

But a broad exception to the state leave policy is made to allow for natural emergencies and public calamities, she said. And the unused time can accumulate quickly.

New state employees start earning as much as 16.5 days off a year–10.5 days of vacation plus six additional days if they decide to trade sick days, which cannot be cashed out, for added “annual leave” days.

After the third year, they begin to earn 22.5 days of leave time annually. The amount of annual leave time continues to climb in increments to a maximum of 30 days after 25 years.

Few private employers have been quite so magnanimous with benefits, according to a 1993 survey conducted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Only one in 10 companies surveyed offered their workers more than 20 vacation days off each year–even after 20 years of service.

And in an effort to balance the state budget during California’s lean recession years, state workers in 1991 were given one additional day off a month in exchange for a 5% pay cut. For most workers, the additional days were given for a year and a half, until the pay cut was restored. For many of the governor’s appointees, however, the pay cut remains in place, and they continue to accumulate the added time. (This added leave time does not count toward the state’s 80-day limit.)

“The theory is since we couldn’t give them a pay raise, we should give them a day off instead,” said Wilson press secretary Paul Kranhold.

But large numbers of state workers simply banked the time, waiting for the day when they would leave government service and cash it out.

There are a number of reasons why state workers find it easy to accumulate leave time rather than use it.

For one, the state is generous with paid holidays–13 per year. Only six other states observe that many, according to the Workplace Economics survey.

And many have been able to accumulate large amounts of compensated time off–or “comp time”–for working extra hours or on weekends. This is time that they can use in place of leave time for their vacations.

The top salaried state employees, including the governor’s top appointees and attorneys, are generally not eligible for comp time, although exceptions can be made in recognition of several days of unusually arduous work, said Edmund Brehl, labor relations counsel for the Department of Personnel Administration.

But this year the state auditor reported that a number of supervisors, managers and attorneys working for the Department of Fish and Game and the legal division at the Department of Transportation had been banking sizable amounts of comp time, in violation of state policy. The employees were using the time instead of vacation leave. One unnamed Caltrans attorney had banked almost a half a year’s worth of comp time–the equivalent of $43,891, the auditor’s report said.

Other Caltrans employees have been allowed to accumulate vacation time far in excess of state limits.

When former Caltrans district director Jerry B. Baxter left his $85,900-a-year post in Los Angeles last year for a top-paying job at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, he cashed out his vacation time.

The 161 days of leave time that he had accumulated in his 35 years with the department entitled him to a lump sum payment of $56,730.

Caltrans spokesman Jim Drago said part of the problem has been downsizing the agency. “As we’ve been reducing the size of the department, the opportunity for other people to take vacation time gets reduced,” he said.

Top employees at other departments say they find they cannot break away for prolonged vacations. Charles S. Poochigian, the governor’s former appointments secretary, said he rarely was able to get away for a vacation for more than a few days at a time while working for Wilson or for Gov. George Deukmejian.

“I’m not claiming I was overworked and underpaid,” said Poochigian, who last year ran successfully for the Assembly from Fresno. “I think the compensation was quite good given the job opportunity and satisfaction. But there are few opportunities for time off when you work for the governor or the Speaker of the Assembly, people at that level.”

Last year, Poochigian said he used up leave time in his successful campaign for the Legislature. But he still had enough left over after seven years of government service to receive a lump sum of $26,770 for his unused time.

When James W. Robinson left his job as Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren’s communications director last year, he cashed out his remaining vacation time–118 days and six hours–for $45,384. He had accumulated the time over more than a decade in government, starting under Gov. Deukmejian.

In a recent interview, Robinson told a reporter: “If you’re suggesting that a person in a relatively high-level, high-pressure job can quickly accumulate a lot of time that can then be cashed out in what sounds like big amounts, that’s absolutely right. That’s the way the system is set up.”

Progressive Democratic politicians who refuse to take donations from pro-Israel groups have won several party primary elections across the United States.

Democratic Congressman Jim McGovern tells host Steve Clemons that the left is rising because Americans “want more from Democrats”.

“Right now, we’re doing a lot of bad things all around the world, and people need to protest,” McGovern says. On US policy ranging from Cuba to Israel, he argues that Congress has become “just a rubber stamp on whatever this president wants to do”.

“We need to fight for the soul of this country,” McGovern adds.

U.S. Navy sailor Chase Humes is moving back to his dad’s house in Texas.

Last month, the 25-year-old was notified that his “voluntary separation” from the Navy, which he’d applied for in May 2025, had been approved — he would be released from service. He and his wife must be out of their military housing in San Diego by mid-July.
Humes, a transgender man who’s been taking testosterone for seven years, was among at least 1,000 service members who chose to leave on their own terms rather than face involuntary separation following the military’s February 2025 ban on transgender service members. By choosing a voluntary separation, he’s been approved for an “honorable discharge,” which preserves access to benefits like Veterans Affairs healthcare that others worry they might not have access to.
Humes is one of about 4,200 transgender service members the Department of Defense estimates have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and could be subject to the policy. Advocates say the transgender service member population could exceed 15,000, according to a UCLA study from 2014.
A new California bill, Assembly Bill 1775, is intended to assist people who don’t have the certainty of Humes’s honorable discharge and worry about their future prospects if they were forced out of the military. Proponents say the bill, by San Diego Democratic Assemblymember Chris Ward, could help people who are given less than honorable discharge for hiding their transgender identity by helping them restore access to services.

In the meantime, service members like Humes are scouting their next move. The sailor and his wife have been searching for jobs near his dad’s house outside Houston. They can’t afford to start their life in San Diego, despite having fallen in love with the city’s accepting atmosphere.
“The whole reason I joined was for a better future for myself and my family, and it just got torn away,” Humes said of the separation.

Over a year in limbo

Among the flurry of executive orders President Trump issued at the start of his second term was the Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness order.

It rescinded President Biden’s policy permitting transgender people to openly serve in the forces, and asserted that gender dysphoria and using pronouns different than one’s biological sex at birth were inconsistent with the country’s “high standards for troop readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity, and integrity.”

What followed the Jan. 27, 2025 order was a series of legal challenges, some of which are still ongoing. Last month, a federal appeals court ruled that Trump’s ban on transgender people in the military was likely unconstitutional, allowing a group of 28 plaintiffs from across the country to continue serving while their case proceeds.
Transgender troops were faced last spring with the choice of either voluntarily leaving the military, and in some cases receiving separation pay, or saying nothing and hoping they were not found out and “involuntarily separated” from the forces.

Humes is choosing to voluntarily leave the Navy after the Trump administration announced a policy banning transgender troops.

(Adriana Heldiz / CalMatters)

Kat Koehlmoos, who was in active duty for eight years and is now in an inactive Army Reserve status, said the military chain of command does not know she is transgender.
“Anyone could use my testimony today to report me to the Army Reserves here, and they would be required to take action to involuntarily discharge me from the U.S. military,” she told lawmakers during a hearing on the legislation last month.
Koehlmoos is a board member for SPARTA Pride, which advocates for transgender service members and co-sponsored the legislation. She said the bill came about in part because supporters are concerned the federal government might replicate the actions it took during its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which allowed gay, lesbian and bisexual troops to serve if they concealed their sexual orientation. Some 2,000 troops were given less than honorable discharges in connection to the policy, and were shut out of some veterans’ benefits, according to a class-action lawsuit that was settled in 2025.

Koehlmoos said the group anticipates some people who are “involuntarily separated” under the 2025 transgender ban will be punished by the Department of Defense for not complying with the law.

“They may pursue other charges: accusing them of falsifying records or lying on federal documents, and attempt to get them a less than honorable discharge because of that,” she said, although SPARTA Pride does not know of any such cases so far.
If that happened in California, Ward’s bill would help those people qualify for expedited professional licensing in civilian careers like contracting and nursing and prioritize them for discharge upgrades as well as housing and support services.

Ward said he believes the benefits of all service members should be secured, whether they leave voluntarily or involuntarily.

“They have served honorably, and this was a separation that was involuntary, and they would deserve the full benefits that they otherwise would have been due had they been cisgender,” he said.

Unknown number affected

It’s unclear how many people could be affected by the legislation. Ward has repeatedly told fellow lawmakers that 2,900 of the federal government’s estimated 4,200 transgender troops — 69% — are either from California or are currently stationed in California. In an emailed statement in response to a question from CalMatters, Ward said the figures were mistakenly adopted after conversations with veterans’ advocates, and he would no longer use them to describe the number of affected California service members.
The bill would also require the state’s Department of Veterans Affairs to create a new housing and supportive services grant for veterans, which Ward said would fill a gap in existing housing support for veterans experiencing imminent homelessness. But the budget Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Monday does not include funding for that program.
Instead, it directs $2 million toward the state’s existing Veteran’s Military Discharge Upgrade Grant Program, which provides legal assistance for veterans fighting for a discharge upgrade.
As Humes prepares to leave San Diego, Ward’s bill is still pending in Sacramento. The legislation has cleared policy committees in both houses and awaits a hearing in the Senate appropriations committee.
Koehlmoos said the moment is stressful for most transgender troops — those being removed voluntarily, who have few options; the people who haven’t notified the chain of command, who may be living in fear; and the service members who will delay their transition, or never transition, because of the federal government’s ban on transgender troops.

“For me that’s heartbreaking, because that really is putting your life on hold,” she said.

Kate Wolffe writes for CalMatters.

July 5, 1811, is rightly remembered as one of the key dates in our republican history. It commemorates nothing less than the Declaration of Independence from the Spanish Monarchy, and is the central act of the political and legal process of independence that began on April 19, 1810, and led to the promulgation of Venezuela’s first Constitution on December 21, 1811.

On March 2, 1811, the General Congress of Venezuela was convened, becoming the first Parliament in our republican history. That General Congress, meeting in what was then the chapel of the Santa Rosa de Lima Seminary in Caracas, had as its fundamental mission the drafting of the 1811 Constitution. However, two months after beginning its sessions, the nascent Republic felt the need to issue a formal declaration of independence from the Spanish Crown, thus clarifying the political separation of the previous three hundred years. Once the Congress had decided to move towards a republican government—after refusing on April 1810 to obey the French regime that had invaded Spain—it was incompatible with that decision not to make an unrestricted declaration of independence from the Crown.

In the sessions of July 3, 4, and 5, the problem, which was certainly not insignificant, was openly addressed, among other reasons because it was necessary to convince those who were not entirely convinced of the legitimacy or timeliness of the process. Ultimately, the declaration of independence required to substantiate the reasons for declaring independence.

Therefore, the Act of Independence will be a very well-founded argument for the reasons why independence is being declared. The first paragraph will establish the context in which the declaration of independence will be justified:

“In the name of Almighty God, we, the representatives of the United Provinces of Caracas, Cumaná, Barinas, Margarita, Barcelona, ​​Mérida, and Trujillo, which form the American Confederation of Venezuela on the southern continent, assembled in Congress, and considering the full and absolute possession of our rights, which we justly and legitimately recovered on April 19, 1810, as a consequence of the events in Bayonne and the occupation of the Spanish throne by the conquest and succession of another new dynasty established without our consent, wish, before exercising the rights of which force had deprived us for more than three centuries, and which the political order of human events has restored to us, to make known to the world the reasons that have arisen from these same events and authorize the free exercise that we are about to make of our sovereignty.”

On July 5th, as the culmination of debates that had begun on July 3rd, independence was declared within the Congress. Later, in another session, the drafting of an Act to record the decision was decided. Therefore, although independence was declared by Congress on July 5th, the Act that justified it politically and legally was only read, approved, and signed on July 7th, having been drafted by Juan Germán Roscio and Francisco Isnardi.

The declaration of independence is a central element in our independence process, as it reflected the motivation behind the decision to sever political ties with the Monarchy under which these territories had lived for three centuries.

Indeed, the declaration of independence, from the perspective of the political and legal process that independence entailed, lies at the very heart, even temporally, of the first part of that process, which, at least in this initial and fundamental stage, was essentially civil. This stage begins with the events of April 19, 1810, and continues, among other events, with the establishment of the General Congress of Venezuela, and then proceeds, also among other events, with the Declaration of the Rights of the People of 1811 and the Constitution of 1811, of December 21.

Also from this perspective, it is worth noting that the Declaration of Independence occurred within the context of the first constituent process in our republican history. In fact, it can be pointed out that this constituent process, which began on April 19, 1810, and whose first stage culminated on December 21, 1811, is not only our first constituent process, but the only genuine constituent process that has existed in Venezuela. 

In the institutional history of Venezuela, only one truly constituent process can be identified, the constituent process of 1811. During this process, the most important political transformation of our history took place.

This paragraph from the Declaration of Independence summarizes the truly constituent decision:

“In consideration of all these solid, public, and irrefutable political reasons, which so strongly persuade us of the need to recover the natural dignity that the course of events has restored to us, and in the exercise of the imprescriptible rights that peoples possess to dissolve any pact, agreement, or association that does not fulfill the purposes for which governments were instituted, we believe that we cannot and should not maintain the ties that bound us to the government of Spain, and that, like all the peoples of the world, we are free and authorized to be independent of any authority other than our own, and to assume among the powers of the earth the equal place that the Supreme Being and nature assign to us and to which the succession of human events and our own good and utility call us.”

The Declaration of Independence is particularly clear in the final paragraph of the Act:

“We, therefore, in the name and with the will and authority vested in us by the virtuous people of Venezuela, solemnly declare to the world that its United Provinces are, and from this day forward, in fact and in law, free, sovereign, and independent States, and that they are absolved from all submission and dependence on the Crown of Spain or on those who claim or may claim to be its agents or representatives, and that as such a free and independent State, it has full power to adopt the form of government that is in accordance with the general will of its people, to declare war, to make peace, to form alliances, to arrange treaties of commerce, boundaries, and navigation, and to perform all other acts that free and independent nations perform.”

Thus, July 5th is a date to commemorate an essentially civil event, one of the few that has occurred since in our republican history: faced with the political situation resulting from the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, Venezuelans questioned the legitimacy of their submission to that Crown. The independence process was, therefore, in its origins, a question based on ideas and on the concern for the legitimate and correct path to follow as a nation.

For this reason, a military celebration on July 5th is actually a historical anachronism. The main celebration of July 5th should take place in the National Assembly, the successor to the General Congress of Venezuela, where independence was declared and the Act of Independence was signed.

Happy Birthday, America!

You turned 250 on Saturday and, honestly, you don’t look a day over 249. (Ha ha.)

Seriously, it’s perfectly understandable why there’s more gray on your scalp and deeper worry lines on your face. This last year has been another challenging one, to say the least. (And we thought the one cataloged 12 months ago in this space was rough.)

The country is caught up in an unpopular, on-again, off-again war with Iran that was recklessly launched by President Trump with far more swagger than foresight. In an utterly predictable move, Iran choked off the the Strait of Hormuz, a vital passageway for the world’s oil, sending gasoline prices skyrocketing. Though they’ve fallen since the announcement of a shaky ceasefire agreement, the cost of filling up is still significantly higher than a year ago.

Of course, costlier oil means virtually everything else has become more expensive. Trump was reelected in good part because he vowed to tame inflation on his very first day in office. Instead, it’s reached a three-year high.

The ground beef served up at many July 4 cookouts costs 75 cents a pound more than it did a year ago. A package of hamburger buns is up 15 cents. The price of hot dogs and other picnic staples have also increased, along with just about every other item at the grocery store.

Chew that over with your corn on the cob. (Up roughly 2.5% from July 2025.)

Meanwhile, Trump enriched himself to the tune of $2.2 billion during his first year in office alone. Treating the U.S. treasury like his personal cash cow, the president has lavished hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on vanity projects such as a personally kitted out Air Force One — a “gift” from Qatar that Trump plans to keep after retirement — and a gilded White House ballroom, rising where the demolished East Wing used to stand. Plans are underway for a grand, marble arch in Washington celebrating, well, you know who.

At the same time, Trump has squandered money and resources pursuing political vendettas, persecution of his enemies and fruitless investigations like the one probing “theft” of the 2020 election and “vandalism” at the algae-clogged Reflecting Pool he promised and failed to rehab.

All this while millions of Americans have lost healthcare coverage and/or federal food assistance, all thanks to the One Big Billionaire Bounty bill that Trump signed into law a year ago.

It’s all a bit unnerving isn’t it, America? You’re on edge in a way you haven’t been in at least a generation.

In Minnesota, in the dead of winter, two of your citizens were gunned down by federal officers as they engaged in that most American of exercises, registering dissent against the policies of their government. From sea to shining sea, innocent Americans have been arrested — and sometimes shipped abroad — and immigrant communities cower in fear of federal agents who often seem bent more on meeting deportation quotas than meting out justice.

You’re divided, America, in ways no one alive has ever seen.

It starts at the very top. Trump acts as though he’s president of a favored rump group — his political supporters — rather than the nation as a whole. He’s used your 250th birthday not to celebrate those many grand and glorious things that hold us together as Americans but to bask in the tanning-bed glow of his immeasurable self-regard.

But, heck, if it’s any consolation on this star-spangled holiday weekend, the country has been through worse. Much worse. And you, America, have not only survived but in many ways grown stronger by surmounting obstacles, facing down your flaws and overcoming some knee-buckling, soul-crushing challenges.

Slavery. Civil war. Racist exclusionary laws. Genocide against indigenous peoples. Two worldwide conflicts. Depression. Financial crises. And too many deadly natural disasters — fire, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes — to enumerate.

Your treatment of some Americans, it should be said, hasn’t always been fair and just. It still isn’t.

People are despairing over the Supreme Court and its genuflecting deference to the president. The justices of its conservative majority have done just about everything short of handing Trump a crown and scepter to reign as a virtually untouchable, imperial president.

But it’s worth noting that earlier court majorities held that Black Americans — “beings of an inferior order,” in the words of the wretched Dred Scott decision — could be denied citizenship, that racial segregation was constitutional and that compulsory sterilization based on eugenics was perfectly fine from a legal standpoint.

That ugly, sordid history won’t necessarily make anyone feel better about the current state of affairs, nor should it. But it does offer some perspective and, with it, hope.

This weekend is best celebrated honoring the country’s many good things and the bright, shining place that America aspires to be, with liberty and justice for all. So chin up! Have another slice of birthday cake, America, and don’t worry about the calories — you really do look terrific for 250!

Going forward it’s up to us, your citizens, to keep working toward that more perfect union mentioned in the preamble to the Constitution. Whatever ails you, America, the remedy resides with we the people and the power we hold, particularly at the ballot box.

Unhappy with the wrecking crew that’s heedlessly chain-sawed federal programs and allowed Trump to money-grub with both fists, defile the White House and undermine our rule of law? Send a message and vote ‘em out, starting in November’s midterm election. And bear in mind the damage that’s been wrought come the 2028 presidential race.

Don’t stop believing that, as dark and difficult as things may seem right now, better days lie ahead.

That undimmed and abiding faith is what makes America great.

July 4 (UPI) — Thousands of protesters on Saturday blocked roads in Erfurt, Germany, in an effort to prevent members of the far right Alternative fur Deutschland party from meeting.

The gathering of the party’s delegates to choose new leaders garnered the large protest at least partially because of the date of the conference, which coincides with the date that Adolf Hitler introduced the Hitler Youth, as well as the Hitler salute, The Guardian reported.

The AfD, which finished with roughly 20% of the vote in the most recent German federal election, has been regarded by many in Germany to be too extremist, with Politico reporting that other European far-right parties — including France’s National Rally — have cut ties with it.

“Who’s making headlines today? WE ARE,” the anti-AfD group Widersetzen, which organized the protests, said in a post on Instagram.

“Who’s hiding in glass halls?” the group said in its post. “The fascists of the AfD. 17,000 people in the blockades and the tens of thousands in the demonstrations are a powerful counterforce. We are ready to stand up for social justice and security.”

In a speech, AfD national leader Alice Weidel said that “troublemakers out there at the door: you won’t bring us down.”

The protesters, as well as many historians and politicians, in Germany said that AfD deliberately held its conference on the centennial of the Nazi conference in Weimar where Hitler introduced both the youth “movement” and salute.

The party previously has been accused of racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim policies, as well as downplaying Nazi actions during their rule in Germany and World War II.

On Thursday morning, a small group of advocates gathered outside the United States federal courthouse in San Diego, California.

One of them pointed to a poster of a young man in a US Navy uniform, three golden medals pinned to his chest.

“This is my brother, Benito Miranda Hernandez, US Navy veteran,” said James Smith, the founder of Black Deported Veterans of America.

Smith and the other advocates had organised the demonstration on behalf of Hernandez, who was miles away at that moment, stuck in an immigration detention facility.

Brought from Mexico to the US as a baby, Hernandez had completed three tours of duty with the US military during the Iraq war. His military service was meant to be his path to citizenship.

But now, Hernandez is among the immigrant veterans fighting deportation under US President Donald Trump.

“These men and women were promised that they were going to get their citizenship if they served,” Smith said. “Help this brother come home.”

Trump has pledged to prioritise immigrants with criminal records in his push for mass deportation.

But advocates for US military members argue that veterans are particularly vulnerable, given their over-representation in prisons and jails. The majority have reported suffering from mental health problems after their service.

Hernandez, for instance, said he struggled to reintegrate into civilian life after leaving the military. But on June 14, he had finally completed his years-long sentence for a drug conviction.

As he waited for his mother, Maria Miranda, to pick him up, agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained him.

Only afterwards did Miranda and her other son arrive. They spent hours that day looking for him, not knowing where he had gone.

“He was doing things right,” Miranda told Al Jazeera in Spanish. “He had so many hopes, so many dreams.”

Hernandez has since been transferred to the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego. He faces deportation, despite having received his green card for permanent residency earlier this year. He previously spoke to Al Jazeera about his experiences for an article published in April.

Hernandez’s detention is part of a trend under the Trump administration.

While the exact number of deported veterans is impossible to pin down – ICE has long failed to collect the veteran status of the people it detains, as is required – several advocates told Al Jazeera that they have been witnessing a rise in the deportations of US veterans during Trump’s second term.

The New York Times reported in March that at least 34 veterans have been placed in deportation proceedings in the last year.

Some cases have received media attention. But advocates say other immigrant veterans have avoided the spotlight, fearing it may have a negative impact on their immigration cases.

“As the ICE raids continue and revamp across the country, there’s going to be people that are veterans that have not become US citizens that unfortunately will end up falling through the cracks,” said Robert Vivar, cofounder of the Tijuana-based Unified US Deported Veterans Resource Center.

Veterans, like other immigrants across the country, have been detained while pursuing the mandatory steps in their immigration process, according to Danitza James, the president of Repatriate our Patriots, an advocacy group.

They are often flagged for having outstanding warrants or criminal convictions that have not been vacated. James said she is in contact with about six veterans who had been detained by ICE in 2026 alone.

“Our government, they don’t place any value in the service that our immigrants have,” James, who is herself a veteran and naturalised citizen, told Al Jazeera. “They honestly see us as disposable.”

For decades, the US military has recruited immigrants to enlist in its wars abroad to help address staffing shortages.

Recruiters often tell immigrant enlisters that military service offers a shortcut to naturalised citizenship.

In theory, it should. But while deployed, many immigrant soldiers, like Hernandez, have reported delays in the naturalisation process.

By the time Hernandez was called for his citizenship interview in 2006, two years had passed since he finished his last deployment. He had a criminal conviction by that point – and his citizenship case was denied.

The failure to protect immigrant veterans is representative of the government’s larger failures to reckon with its military policies, according to advocates like Smith.

“The United States government is failing to take accountability for what they’ve created,” Smith told Al Jazeera. “You bring us in and strip us of part of our humanity so that we can kill without repercussions.”

“Then, when you get out, there is no process that gets you ready to be in the civilian world.”

Several bills to protect immigrant veterans are currently under consideration in Congress. But recruiters continue to target immigrant communities with the promise of expedited citizenship.

The next steps for Hernandez are not yet clear. At Thursday’s rally, a lawyer with a local immigration nonprofit told Smith and other advocates that the group may be interested in helping with Hernandez’s case.

In the meantime, Hernandez’s mother has been trying to keep his spirits up.

Miranda takes his calls from the ICE detention centre and sees him during the facility’s visiting hours on Saturdays. But the two-hour drive from Anaheim to San Diego is difficult for her health.

“On Saturday, when I saw him, he was very, very depressed,” Miranda told Al Jazeera.

“He said, ‘I don’t want to cause you any more problems. I don’t want to upset you any more, Mom. I’m doing things right. I’m praying for myself,'” Miranda recalled, in tears.

“They clipped the wings of a bird, and all the hopes he had. They threw them in the trash.”

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s plans to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary of independence with a rally on the National Mall were complicated on Saturday by severe storms that gathered near Washington, forcing event organizers to order an evacuation.

“Freedom 250 will share updates on programming and doors reopening,” Freedom 250 spokesperson Danielle Alvarez said in a statement that encouraged participants to seek shelter at museums and federal buildings near the National Mall. Washington’s metro system also said several of its underground stations were available for shelter.

Plans for fireworks were still moving forward in other cities including Chicago and New York, where tall ships passed the Statue of Liberty earlier in the day, recalling the fanfare around America’s 200th anniversary in 1976.

Anticipation for the milestone holiday has been building for much of the year, serving as an opportunity for Americans to reflect on their complicated history as onetime colonists of an empire who became a superpower of their own. Organizers of celebrations months in the making had to adjust or cancel activities entirely as much of the East Coast sweltered under heat that approached and in many cases surpassed triple digits.

Heat is defining the big weekend in many places

The disruption was particularly acute in Washington, where signs at the Great American State Fair posted an alert shortly after 7 p.m. ET encouraging participants to leave the area. As the order to evacuate was played over loudspeakers on the National Mall, some people appeared to be standing in place, talking with those around them and not exiting the area, while others were walking toward exits. National Guard troops told people to leave.

The U.S. Secret Service announced it had temporarily closed checkpoints to screen attendees ahead of Trump’s speech, which was scheduled to begin around 10 p.m. ET.

Crowds were building in the area several hours before Trump’s speech. Tina Hale, 58, of Cohoes, New York, watched three of her grandchildren children dip their hands into a pool of water near a museum. Hale pointed toward the sky and urged them to look up as three military jets roared above the crowd.

“If that doesn’t make you proud to be an American,” she said.

David Koshko, 42, and his wife, Jennifer Koskho, of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, came to Washington for a baseball game but planned to stay for the city’s fireworks show. After baking in the heat for hours during the Pittsburgh Pirates’ win over the Washington Nationals, they took a break in the shade of an overpass near the National Mall to plot their next stop.

“Just to be a part of the 250 years (anniversary) is an amazing thing,” said David Koshko, a commercial driver and veteran of the Marine Corps reserves.

In Philadelphia, fireworks began to crack as early as midday in the birthplace of the nation near the site where the Declaration of Independence was adopted by delegates to the Second Continental Congress. Hundreds of visitors were gathering at Independence Hall in the sweltering heat to await the celebrations coinciding with the France-Paraguay World Cup knockout game at Philadelphia Stadium, which began with commemorations of the holiday.

“It’s one big party in here,” Carlos Alban, who traveled to Philadelphia from Chicago to watch the match, said as he arrived at the stadium, adding that he spotted a fan in the parking lot dressed as one of the Founding Fathers.

About 45 minutes before another World Cup match in Houston, a message from astronauts aboard the International Space Station noting the holiday was beamed into the stadium.

In New York, tall ships, with their masts, rigging and white sails outlined against a blue sky, made a procession around the Statue of Liberty and up the Hudson River.

The 43 ships were followed by a display of aerial might with a stealth bomber and the Navy’s Blue Angels. Patrouille de France, the French Air Force’s acrobatic teams, flew over New York Harbor with their red, white and blue trails, evoking images of the American flag.

“We got up early and just rode our bikes about a mile down here to come see the scene,” said Oona Moore, a Jersey City, New Jersey, resident who took in the New York festivities. “We saw the tall ships and we saw the planes, you know, all different manner of military aircraft. I’ve never seen it so close and in the sky at the same time.”

At George Washington’s Mount Vernon, people took the Oath of Allegiance to become U.S. citizens. They stood with eyes closed and hands over hearts for the national anthem.

An uneasy nation gets ready to celebrate

Trump spoke Saturday with world leaders including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who both congratulated the U.S. as they engage in a war. The president has also heard from Britain’s King Charles III and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in recent days.

Inside the U.S., The celebrations are unfolding against the backdrop of a deep divide this election year that has been expanding for years, visible in everything from political expression to cultural norms to age-old questions over race, class and immigration.

At Mount Rushmore on Friday, Trump spoke of communism as a “mortal threat to American liberty” with the Republican president saying it was more dangerous than either World War or 9/11.

Without naming Trump, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat who is also a democratic socialist and recently backed several successful congressional candidates in their primaries, appeared to reference Trump during a speech Friday.

“Those ideals upon which our nation was built — they are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them,” he said.

Vice President JD Vance said small but loud voices would speak on America’s birthday about its imperfections instead of its greatness.

“They will tell you that America is just another country, where the weak struggle against the strong,” Vance said speaking aboard the USS Kearsarge in New York Harbor.

Sloan writes for the Associated Press. Associated Press writers Emily Wang in New York, Luis Andres Henao in Philadelphia, Kristie Rieken in Houston, Sarah Rankin in Richmond, Va., Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, S.C., Safiyah Riddle in Los Angeles and Jesse Bedayn, Anna Johnson, Will Weissert and Michael Kunzelman contributed to this report.

Reporting from Sacramento — Proposition 10, a ballot measure to expand rent control in California, was decisively rejected by voters Tuesday in a victory for the state’s top landlords who spent millions to defeat it.

The campaign was one of the most expensive initiative battles in California history with more than $104 million in total fundraising. With Proposition 10’s failure, a statewide ban on most new forms of rent control remains in effect.

“The stunning margin of victory shows California voters clearly understood the negative impacts Prop. 10 would have on the availability of affordable and middle-class housing in our state,” Tom Bannon, CEO of the California Apartment Assn., said in a statement.

It’s expensive to be a tenant in California. Will Proposition 10’s rent control expansion help? »

The campaign to expand rent control was pitched to voters as housing has become less affordable in the state. About 9.5 million renters — more than half of California’s tenant population — are burdened by high rents, spending at least 30% of their income on housing costs, according to a UC Berkeley study.

To address the issue, tenant advocates decided to go after the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, a state law passed 23 years ago that blocks cities and counties from imposing rent control on single-family homes and apartments built after 1995, among other prohibitions. After a bill to repeal Costa-Hawkins failed in a legislative committee in January, groups turned in signatures for a ballot measure, Proposition 10, that would have done the same thing. Had the initiative passed, local governments would have been free to add new restrictions on rents, something Los Angeles, Berkeley and other cities were considering.

But polling showed Proposition 10 never really caught on with voters. A September survey from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California revealed just 36% of likely voters backed the initiative. A month later a poll from the same organization showed support had decreased to 25%.

That drop came amid a blitz of TV advertisements from opponents who, as of Friday, had raised nearly $80 million to defeat Proposition 10. They argued that expanding rent control would increase the state’s housing shortage, exacerbate overall affordability issues and hurt the investments of single-family homeowners. Much of the funding for the No on 10 campaign came from national real estate investors with large apartment portfolios in California.

The Proposition 10 campaign was watched beyond California’s borders. Market analysts have paid close attention to the campaign, which had the potential to spur similar rent control measures across the country. The National Multifamily Housing Council, an apartment industry group, called Proposition 10 an “existential threat to the industry.”

Supporters of Proposition 10 raised $24.6 million, 94% of it coming from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit. Backers contended that the initiative offered the quickest and cheapest way to provide housing cost relief for renters, and that cities and counties should be allowed to tailor rent stabilization rules to their communities.

Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, said the campaign revealed the influence that corporate landlords have over the state’s housing market.

“They may be enjoying their victory at the polls tonight,” Weinstein said. “But this campaign exposed who they are and what they represent.”

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which has argued that housing stability is crucial to its mission of serving low-income AIDS patients, now has lost four high-profile California and Los Angeles ballot measures it’s bankrolled since 2016. Voters have also rejected statewide efforts to limit prescription drug prices and mandate the use of condoms in adult films and a Los Angeles measure to slow growth in the city.

Despite Proposition 10’s defeat, rent control is likely to remain in the spotlight. Residents in Sacramento, the state’s sixth-largest city, have qualified a 2020 initiative that would implement rent controls on the city’s older apartment buildings. Democrat Gavin Newsom, who was elected governor on Tuesday, opposed Proposition 10, but he has said the state should have stronger protections for tenants.

AIDS Healthcare Foundation officials have said that if Proposition 10 didn’t pass they would immediately begin discussing whether to push a stronger rent control measure for the 2020 statewide ballot. After the results came in Tuesday night, Weinstein said he wanted to work with Newsom first.

“Gavin Newsom, who is the incoming governor of California, has said affirmatively that he intends to solve this problem. I take that at face value. It’s incumbent upon us to exhaust that opportunity before we go to the ballot again.”

Coverage of California politics »

liam.dillon@latimes.com

@dillonliam

UPDATES:

11:45 p.m.: This article was updated with quotes from an interview with Michael Weinstein, which replaced written statements from Proposition 10 supporters.

10:12 p.m.: This article was updated with a quote from Proposition 10 proponents.

This article was originally published at 9:45 p.m.

Reporting from Manila — The contrast was inescapable. At the top of a local newspaper’s front page here was a huge photo of the new Canadian prime minister, in a trim suit and wind blowing through his hair, captioned “ladies’ choice.” Next to him was a workmanlike headline over a separate story: “Obama to give PH two warships.”

President Obama, once a glamorous figure among world leaders, has been replaced as the “It Boy” of the summit circuit by Canada’s newly elected Justin Trudeau, as heads of state meet up this week in Turkey, the Philippines and Malaysia.

Though Obama came to Manila for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit with a new financial commitment to bolster the Philippine maritime fleet, the nation’s hearts and minds seemed won over by the 43-year-old Canadian, who lighted up Twitter with the designation #APECHottie.

NEWSLETTER: Get the day’s top headlines from Times Editor Davan Maharaj >>

If there was any resentment on the part of a president whose hair is more salt than pepper these days, it didn’t show as he and Trudeau sat down here for their first official meeting.

Obama warned him: “If you don’t want to gray like me, you need to start dyeing it soon.”

“So young and yet so cynical,” Trudeau joked in response.

Though Trudeau’s global image as a hip, next-generation leader mirrors Obama’s of seven years ago, Trudeau’s views on some of Obama’s biggest policy priorities provide a more sobering contrast.

Trudeau has been ambivalent on the massive Pacific trade deal Obama is pushing, and he reiterated to Obama on Thursday that he planned to follow through on his campaign pledge to end Canada’s part in the air campaign against Islamic State — though his nation will ramp up efforts to train local fighters in Iraq and Syria.

“Canada continues to be a strong player, doing its part – and more than its part,” Trudeau said.

Differences in viewpoint between two North American leaders is familiar. Canadian leaders have long tried to show independence from the United States in matters of foreign policy. Trudeau’s father, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, was one of the first Western leaders to embrace communist China and grew so close to Fidel Castro that the Cuban leader served as an honorary pallbearer at his funeral.

“Canada and the U.S. have not always seen eye-to-eye when there’s a Liberal government in power, something that stems from Trudeau’s own party and parentage,” said Antonia Maioni, a political science professor at McGill University in Montreal who researches and writes about the Canadian political process and social policy. “It stems from the Canadian attitude that emerged under Pierre Trudeau that was about Canada finding its own way in international relations and not just being part of the U.S. orbit.”

But in the budding relationship between Obama and the younger Trudeau, there may be potential for collaboration, given the youth-oriented campaign that Trudeau ran – Obama noted the similarity to his own “hope and change” message – and their shared affinity for progressive social policies, especially on climate change.

Given that common ground, said Maioni, Trudeau may eventually drift more closely toward Obama’s point of view on national security and trade, too.

“A lot of people in Trudeau’s inner circle were inspired by and have taken advice from people around Obama,” she said. “That may open a conversation that would allow for change.”

Obama and Trudeau on Thursday began to explore an area in which they may be able make progress together – the fight against climate change.

Obama’s recent announcement to reject a Canadian company’s request to build the controversial Keystone XL pipeline that would have carried crude oil from Alberta to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries was fortunate for Trudeau, said James Coleman, a legal scholar at the University of Calgary who studies environmental and energy regulation. Even though Trudeau was in favor of the pipeline, he is helped by the timing of the debate over it, which came during the tenure of his predecessor, the Conservative Party’s Stephen Harper.

“Given that President Obama was going to reject the pipeline, sooner was better for him,” said Coleman. “Because now it will be easier for him to pin it on Harper.”

Added Coleman: “It’s not hard to predict a little more friendliness between Obama and Trudeau than there was between Obama and Harper.”

Trudeau, whose graduate studies were in environmental science, emphasized the similarities in his and Obama’s climate doctrines. He noted that Canadians feel that their government hasn’t done enough to protect the environment, and he vowed to set and meet tough targets for carbon reduction.

Obama echoed the sentiment, arguing that transition from fossil fuels “does not happen overnight,” especially by nations that produce and consume a lot of oil and gas. Seated next to Trudeau, the father of three young children, Obama also made an argument about parenthood.

“If we want to preserve this planet for our kids and grandkids, then we’re going to have to shift increasingly away from carbon-emitting energy sources,” Obama said.

“This is going to be a messy, bumpy process worldwide,” he said, “but I am confident that we can get it done.”

michael.memoli@latimes.com

christi.parsons@latimes.com

Memoli reported from Manila and Parsons from Washington.

For more White House coverage, follow @mikememoli and @cparsons

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In many ways, Saturday was a typical July 4 holiday in the United States.

The country marked the anniversary of its Declaration of Independence with hotdog-eating contests, parades, fireworks and baseball games.

But this Independence Day was different, not least because it marked the country’s semiquincentennial: the 250th year since the US’s founding.

It also was one of the most politically charged Independence Day celebrations in recent memory.

President Donald Trump is expected to speak this evening from the National Mall in Washington, DC, right before what has been billed as the “world’s largest fireworks display”.

More than 850,000 fireworks are expected to launch from barges in the Potomac River, lighting up the sky above the capital.

But while Independence Day festivities have long been billed as non-partisan events, Trump has pledged to make the night’s celebration “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all”.

The event comes as Trump’s Republican Party seeks to defend its control of Congress in November’s midterm elections, with a heated primary season already under way.

Trump’s involvement in the semiquincentennial has long been controversial.

On January 29, 2025 — just nine days into his second term as president — Trump issued an executive order establishing a White House task force to oversee celebrations for the 250th anniversary. Trump named himself its chair.

That task force would eventually set the groundwork for Freedom 250, a public-private partnership that organised some of the biggest events of the semiquincentennial, including the Great American State Fair on the National Mall.

But Freedom 250 was accused of funnelling resources away from America250, a congressionally approved panel that had likewise been charged with planning semiquincentennial celebrations since its founding in 2016.

The existence of the two groups has also spurred confusion. In late May, for instance, a suite of performers dropped out of the Great American State Fair, alleging they had been misled about its affiliation with Trump.

Before Saturday’s events, Democrats in the House of Representatives released a report (PDF) accusing Trump of using Freedom 250 for political purposes, including by awarding contracts to Trump allies.

It also alleges that Freedom 250 has been “operating outside the transparency and accountability requirements” Congress imposes on such celebrations — and that it may even have committed wire fraud by redirecting “unsuspecting donors” away from America250 and towards its own programmes.

“Under President Donald Trump, this anniversary has been hijacked and perverted into a hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment,” the report reads.

But speaking at a naval parade in New York City on Saturday, Vice President JD Vance brushed aside the criticisms. He called on revellers to reject the “small but loud voices” that “speak obsessively” of the US’s “imperfections”.

“What I’d ask you to do, my fellow Americans, on our 250th birthday, is to reject the two-dimensional view of your fellow citizens and reject the two-dimensional view of your country,” he said.

“Reject that America is a place for zero-sum thinking because it is not. Our history is one of people carving a great civilisation out of the wilderness. Reject the view of your nation that sees only its sins but not its grace and its greatness.”

Rosie, say it’s not so! The news last week was surprising: Rosie O’Donnell’s bodyguards had applied for permits for concealed handguns. Few have declared their opposition to guns as strongly as O’Donnell. For someone who ambushed Tom Selleck on her television show last year on gun control, called for the abolition of the 2nd Amendment and emceed the so-called Million Mom March in Washington, the advice that O’Donnell has freely given others no longer seems to match what she thinks is best for her own family.

Earlier in May on ABC-TV’s “This Week,” Rosie was asked if she opposed concealed handgun laws. She declared: “Of course, I’m against them.” She has claimed that “I also think you should not buy a gun anywhere.”

O’Donnell previously has been accused of trying to generate attention for her flagging television show by attacking Selleck, despite her agreement with him not to discuss guns. Her credibility was tarnished by appearing in ads for Kmart, a major seller of guns.

Yet the current hypocrisy is more fundamental. A spokeswoman for O’Donnell justifies guns for the talk show host’s bodyguards because of threatened violence. Yet how does her concern differ from what motivates anyone who gets a gun for self-defense? Why does O’Donnell give others advice that she doesn’t find applicable to herself?

O’Donnell’s response that she still does not “personally own a gun” misses the whole point. Of course, she does not need her own gun when her bodyguards have their guns with them.

Unfortunately, O’Donnell joins a long list of people who demand that others disarm even while they keep their own armed bodyguards. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, for example, surrounds himself with armed guards even when he visits relatively low-crime areas, but he opposes issuing handgun licenses for people to keep a gun at home in even the most dangerous parts of the city. (Chicago has the highest murder rate of any large city in the U.S.)

For their own safety, people should not follow what O’Donnell preaches, but what she does: Get armed protection. As she apparently believes for her own safety, and as the statistics bear out, passive behavior is simply not the wisest course of action. The chance of serious injury from an attack is 2 1/2 times greater for women offering no resistance than for those resisting with a gun. Having a gun is by far the safest course of action, especially for people who are relatively weak physically–women and the elderly.

Concealed handgun permit holders not only protect themselves but often others, though this receives very little attention. Take the following two incidents occurring the same week as O’Donnell’s story hit the media:

In Florida, a robber at a Wal-Mart store slashed two employees with a knife, but before he could cause further injuries 53-year-old Sandra Suter pulled out a pistol and said, “I have a concealed weapons permit. Either drop the knife, or I’ll shoot you.” After repeating her threat, the robber dropped his knife.

In Indiana, 70-year-old George Smith stopped two armed robbers at a store because he had a gun. As one of the store clerks saw it, “I think George was the real hero. He saved my life.” He likely saved other lives as well, but probably no one outside of Indianapolis has heard of this story.

Unfortunately, no one like Suter or Smith was present at Wendy’s last week in Brooklyn when five workers were killed. If they had been, and been able to prevent the attack, would that have gotten the same attention? Despite the focus in the media, people use guns defensively about five times more frequently than guns are used to commit crime.

Greenwich, Conn., where O’Donnell lives, is one of the wealthiest and safest cities in the United States. Most people there can sleep well at night without a gun for protection. This is not true in many other places, particularly in poorer urban areas. As long as inexpensive guns have not been outlawed, many poor, vulnerable citizens will continue to rely on guns for self-protection.

McDonnell may be able to afford bodyguards and pride herself that she does not “personally own a gun.” Yet many other people have just as great a need for protection. Guns are the poor man’s bodyguard.

WASHINGTON — President Trump ushered in the 250th anniversary of American independence on Friday with soaring rhetoric about American exceptionalism before veering into a darkly political speech with warnings about a sinister threat of communism that evoked one of the country’s ugliest chapters.

“Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty,” he said from Mt. Rushmore. “It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.”

While the language was similar to several other speeches Trump has given in recent days, it was notable for being delivered in a national park that commemorates some of America’s most prominent presidents. And it swerved from the typically apolitical, unifying speeches past presidents like Gerald Ford or Ronald Reagan have delivered during earlier high-profile Independence Day celebrations.

Indeed, Trump’s language evoked the Red Scare of the 1950s, when purported communists were persecuted and blacklisted from jobs across America, from Washington to Hollywood.

In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, delivered his own address that cast America as a nation of contradictions “working each day towards the perfection in which it was conceived.”

The president’s speech capped an Independence Day eve that was otherwise most notable for a brutal heat wave that gripped much of the eastern portion of the country. Officials have warned those celebrating the holiday to stay hydrated and take air-conditioned breaks as needed.

Philadelphia canceled its Salute to Independence parade Friday. The Great American State Fair in Washington shut down in the early afternoon before reopening at 5 p.m. The Capitol Fourth concert, a mainstay of the holiday in Washington, opened its gates a little later than normal but ultimately moved forward with appearances from Patti LaBelle, Trace Adkins, members of the Artemis II space mission and fireworks over George Washington’s Mount Vernon. An Independence Day parade scheduled for Saturday in Washington was canceled.

Looking for a place to cool off

By early afternoon Friday in Washington, hundreds of people were roaming the grounds of the National Mall, home to the Great American State Fair. They snapped photos of the flyovers and tried to cool off inside tents that offered $9 lemonades and $23 turkey legs. Many were dressed in patriotic colors, their faces glistening with sweat.

Glenn Brooks, who was pardoned by Trump for his participation in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, said he was “thankful to be participating in this grand event.”

The activity culminates in the main event Saturday, when fireworks will erupt in communities across the U.S., along with backyard cookouts and block parties. Trump will deliver another speech at the National Mall in Washington before what is being billed as a historically massive fireworks show.

As the rest of the country struggled under stifling heat, the Pacific Northwest enjoyed temperatures in the 60s with even a few light showers.

World Cup soccer fans in Seattle were staying cool Friday as they got psyched up for Monday’s big game between the U.S. and Belgium. In the nearby suburb of Issaquah, Megan Kurowski, 31, brought her two dogs to the dog park so they could get some exercise before she went to work.

Kurowski said she was feeling positive about America’s 250th anniversary and was planning a possible paddleboard to watch the fireworks.

“Everyone’s just, from what it seems, been pretty excited about celebrating 250 years,” she said.

The holiday is unfolding at a unique time in the U.S. The anniversary has served as an opportunity for the country to reflect on its history while also reminding it of the political polarization of the moment.

On a holiday of unity, there is an undercurrent of division

In New York, Mamdani, a Democrat, did not mention Trump by name, but parts of his speech appeared aimed at the president’s divisive rhetoric.

“For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best,” Mamdani said in an apparent reference to a common criticism from Trump. “Those ideals upon which our nation was built — they are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them.”

Freedom 250, an organization aligned with the White House, has come to rival America250, a bipartisan group founded by Congress a decade ago. Freedom 250 has organized much of the activity in Washington, including the Great American State Fair. America250 is behind the ball drops unfolding in many cities, including New York, and will host a concert in Los Angeles on Saturday.

About 4 in 10 U.S. adults feel “proud” about the country’s 250th anniversary, according to an April survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Roughly 3 in 10 said “excited” describes their emotions.

Ahead of the holiday, auto technician Joe Fuqua-Bejarano in Topeka, Kansas, sized up “what makes us awesome” as a people. It is clearly not the politics, in his view, but rather resilience.

“We’ve just all got to find unity somewhere, whether that’s in laughter or perseverance, and keep everybody cool,” he said from the fireworks stand where he is doing a booming business as a side hustle.

Christina Zhou, a 25-year-old research assistant from Cambridge, Mass., said she would aim to “think about just things that are happening locally.”

“It feels a little bit more like within our own personal control,” she said.

Jerry Chin of Newcastle, Wash., said he wasn’t aware that the U.S. was celebrating its 250th anniversary and planned to stay low-key around the holiday. He and his wife generally skip the fireworks and instead stay home with their fearful dogs to keep them calm.

“America’s a great place, but there are some concerns,” he said. Chin, 55, and his wife worry about healthcare and issues around staying healthy, but they also stress about politics.

“We’re Democrats, so kind of given up hope,” he said. “Just feel that it is the way it is. I don’t know if there could be change.”

At the National Archives in Washington, visitors made their way through the Rotunda to look at the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights — and to escape the heat outside.

Michael Dresdner, 60, traveled from West Orange, N.J., with his wife, Cindi, 57, and about two dozen other people to be part of the America 250 celebrations. He said their group of travelers included people on both sides of the political aisle — and that is what gave him hope for the future of American democracy.

“We are all here, and we all love America,” he said.

Sloan, Peoples and Price write for the Associated Press. Peoples reported from New York. Associated Press writers Martha Bellisle in Seattle, Anthony Izaguirre in New York, John Hanna in Topeka, Kan., Michael Casey in Cambridge, Mass., and Calvin Woodward, Didi Tang, Gary Fields and Nathan Ellgren in Washington contributed to this report.

July 4 (UPI) — Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, spent his second Fourth of July as the pontiff at Lampedusa, Italy, an island at the forefront of the European migrant crisis, and appealed to Americans to treat immigrants with “compassion and generosity.”

Leo visited Lampedusa, an Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea between Tunisia and Malta, instead of celebrating the day in the United States.

Soon after his arrival, he released a letter to Americans about the 250th Anniversary of the country’s birth, reflecting on the principles that have shaped the United States for two and a half centuries, particularly religious freedom and human dignity.

In the letter Leo said that, “among the principles that have guided the development of this country is the God-given dignity of every human life, each person being endowed with an inherent worth that calls for reverence, protection and care … and of building a society in which the vulnerable, the suffering and the forgotten are always met with compassion, solidarity and love.

“Defending human life also includes welcoming, protecting and assisting immigrants, whose hopes, sacrifices and contribution have formed part of the history of this country from its very beginning. In every generation, those who have arrived seeking freedom, opportunity and a place to belong have helped to shape the nation’s character. To receive them with compassion and generosity is not only an act of charity, but also a recognition of the dignity that belongs to every human person,” Leo said.

He said he hopes Americans “honor the courage and vision of those who came before them by strengthening their communities, respecting their differences and working together toward a more perfect union.”

Upon landing at Lampedusa, the pope visited the “Door to Europe,” a piece of art that is a memorial to thousands of migrants who died or disappeared trying to cross the sea.

He also visited the Cemetery of the Nameless in Cala Pisana to pray over the graves of migrants who died at sea. The graves are marked with crosses made from the wood of boats that sank off the island’s coast, Euro News reported.

Leo then visited Molo Favaloro, a site where migrant boats are brought to shore. He unveiled and blessed a plaque dedicated to Pope Francis there. The quay there will now be named Molo Francisco. Francis visited the island in 2013.

The pope met and shook hands with 15 migrants brought from a migrant housing center run by the Red Cross. It now houses 138 people, including 51 unaccompanied minors. On Friday night, the Italian coast guard rescued 17 people aboard a small boat, Euro News said.

“By deciding to name Molo Favaloro after Pope Francis you are giving a sign of the bond my predecessor forged with your community and with migrant brothers and sisters: the Pope has stood by you in these very demanding times. And today I am here to tell you that the Pope continues to walk alongside you, to support you and encourage you,” Leo wrote in a letter to the mayor of Lampedusa.

On Friday, Leo gave a virtual speech to Philadelphia when he was awarded the Liberty Medal. The medal has been awarded since 1989 and was managed by the Philadelphia Foundation until 2006, when it became part of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s Noah Goldberg, David Zahniser and Melissa Gomez, giving you the latest on city and county government.

Los Angeles voters won’t get a chance to increase the size of the City Council. They won’t take up a plan to give noncitizens the right to vote, either.

These and other proposed ballot measures got put on the back burner, delayed for a future year as the council scrambled to finish its work before its summer break.

One proposal did survive the sometimes blunt vetting process: decreasing the number of council meetings.

On Tuesday, council members sent voters a measure for the Nov. 3 ballot that would only require a single council meeting per week. The City Charter currently mandates a minimum of three.

Councilmember Tim McOsker was among those pushing for the change, saying it will make the council more efficient and effective.

“It will also allow council members to take care of more business in their districts,” said McOsker, who represents neighborhoods stretching from Watts to the Port of Los Angeles.

The council, which voted 12-0 to place the measure on the ballot, has been thinking about cutting back on the number of meetings for a few years.

In 2024, McOsker and Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky tried to place a measure before voters that would have made the same change. But other council members were not prepared to put it on the ballot.

Yaroslavsky said at the time that much of the city’s public comment period was occupied by “15 people screaming racist, misogynistic, antisemitic epithets.”

Any change to the City Charter would not preclude the council from scheduling additional special meetings.

The proposal drew sharp criticism from Rob Quan, an organizer with Unrig LA, who spent much of the past year tracking the effort to rewrite the charter. He fears that a reduction in meetings will also lead to a decrease in opportunities for Angelenos to address their council representatives.

One of the reasons council members, who each make $244,727 a year, don’t get as much business done is that they frequently use their Friday meetings for ceremonial activities — honoring civic leaders, community groups, youth sports teams, Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani and beloved bands from the 80s.

“Do we really need that? Not necessarily,” Quan said.

Quan said the proposal to cut the number of meetings received zero vetting from the council. The 13-member Charter Reform Commission, which spent nearly a year examining various changes to city government, took up the idea and rejected it.

If voters approve the change, council meetings could end up resembling those of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, which meets most Tuesdays at 9:30 a.m. The supervisors frequently don’t finish their business until well after 5 p.m.

Former prosecutor will stay away from Lee case

We told you last week that Councilmember John Lee is suing the city Ethics Commission over a $138,000 fine he received for allegedly violating city gift laws — a case that stems largely from a notorious 2017 trip to Las Vegas. The council responded to that lawsuit by voting to retain the law firm Hecker Fink to defend the Ethics Commission, at a cost of $120,000.

As it turns out, at least one Hecker Fink lawyer knows plenty about that Vegas trip.

Mack Jenkins, who heads the firm’s L.A. office, was one of the federal prosecutors who brought the criminal case against Lee’s onetime boss, Councilmember Mitchell Englander, in 2020. That case stems from the duo’s trip to Sin City in 2017.

Federal prosecutors said Englander and Lee, listed in court filings as Staffer B, were plied with fancy meals, expensive alcohol and other freebies by people seeking to do business with the city. Englander went a step further, walking into a casino bathroom and picking up $10,000 cash in an envelope from a Los Angeles-area businessman. He later pleaded guilty to providing false information to investigators.

The city’s lawyers say they cannot represent the Ethics Commission because Lee is one of their clients. But does Jenkins’ history with the case create any type of conflict for Hecker Fink?

Nancy Jackson, a spokesperson for the Ethics Commission, says no. In an email, she said Jenkins will be walled off from Hecker Fink’s work on the matter.

“That former prosecutor is recused from the case and will have no involvement in the case,” she said.

What went wrong with the lighting assessment?

Property owners resoundingly rejected a recent request to pay more to fund streetlight repairs. One of the reasons might have been the wording on their ballot.

The city mailed letters asking if they would like to increase the yearly assessment, using language that didn’t offer a lot of explanation.

In the section where property owners had the option to vote yes, the ballot read: “Yes I am in favor of the proposed maximum assessment for Fiscal Year 2026/2017 and the proposed annual cost of living increases as described in the attached notice beginning Fiscal Year 2026/2027.”

Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who chairs the council’s Public Works Committee, said the phrasing could have been a lot more persuasive — and better explained the need for additional money.

“Some of the language that was put out was not written in a way for us to be clear about what we were doing, and instead used language that really turned people off,” she said.

The assessment, which has not changed since 1996, currently generates about $45 million a year. For the average single-family home, the current payment is $58 annually.

The increase would have brought the average annual bill to $117, generating an additional $80 million a year as the city faces a backlog of broken streetlights due to stagnant funding and a rise in vandalism and theft.

After the vote failed to pass, the council approved a motion directing city staff to identify $6.6 million for the Bureau of Street Lighting. Without that money, the city will face “an immediate threat to public safety and our infrastructure at large,” the motion said.

“There will be a 15% cut in field workforces by the end of July 2026, making the timeline for streetlight repair to reach 2 years when the City had previously been able to do this work within 7 days,” said the motion authored by Hernandez and Yaroslavsky.

Hernandez voiced frustration over the defeat of the assessment. She took aim at Proposition 218, the state law that restricts how local governments can raise money, saying it disenfranchises renters who have to “live with the conditions that property owners choose for them.”

She added that the ballot measure’s wording, which she said was crafted by the City Attorney’s Office, failed to capture the reason for the increase.

“People really think that the main reason our lights are out is copper wire theft,” she said. “But the fact is that over 60% of our street lights are out because of lack of maintenance, because we just do not have the money to do that work.”

Hernandez said that next time, she would push for more community engagement so voters understand why the increased funding is needed. She also raised the possibility of reforming Proposition 218.

“No matter what, I’m going to get these streetlights on, and if that’s figuring different things out until we can get a significant effort to do another assessment, then we will do that,” she said.

State of play

— COLD FEET: The L.A. City Council decided against putting two major measures on the Nov. 3 ballot. One measure would have provided a pathway for noncitizens to vote in local elections, while the other would have given the council more authority over the LAPD.

— COSTLY COLLISION: The city of Los Angeles will pay $20 million to settle a lawsuit brought on behalf of a teen who lost his leg in a 2023 hit-and-run in Boyle Heights. The lawsuit blamed the city for an intersection lacking signage, lighting and other traffic controls.

— LAHSuit: The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, also known as LAHSA, sued the Trump administration Monday to stop it from suspending the agency from receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. LAHSA argued that the decision would put thousands of people at risk of losing their government funded housing.

— FORWARDING ADDRESS: The only post office in Skid Row abruptly closed in January due to repeated break-ins and damage to employee property, according to the U.S. Postal Service. The closure has frustrated residents and business owners.

— BUILDING BLITZ: Senate Bill 79, the historic housing bill, took effect across the state on Wednesday. The law could bring townhomes, row houses and other developments to 57 neighborhoods across the city.

— AIRBORNE TOXIC EVENT: A preliminary analysis showed that the recent inferno at a Boyle Heights warehouse contaminated the air with high levels of smoke and soot, rivaling the pollution that filled the region during the 2025 wildfires.

— MORE MEGA PROJECTS: Two large scale developments grabbed the attention of downtown Los Angeles this week. One, approved by the council, is slated to add 1,500 residences to Skid Row. The second, proposed this week, would transform the World Trade Center building into a 512-unit affordable housing complex.

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program to combat homelesssness went to the area near Olympic Boulevard and Menlo Avenue in Pico Union on Friday in Hernandez’s district, bringing 24 people indoors.
• On the docket next week: The City Council will be on summer recess until Aug. 4.

Stay in touch

That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to LAontheRecord@latimes.com. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.

PITTSBURGH — If her husband is elected president, Teresa Heinz Kerry will be among America’s most recognizable figures. But she already is commander of a family empire that has been a familiar name to Americans for over a century — one whose history includes political activism and philanthropy, but also infighting and tragedy.

The Heinz family history is told all over this riverfront city — at a stylish museum named for Teresa’s late husband, Sen. H.J. “John” Heinz III, and in archives at Carnegie Mellon University. The name is stamped on parks, schools and a magnificent limestone chapel at the University of Pittsburgh.

The symbols of Heinz wealth, power and patronage in Pittsburgh tell the public story of a pioneering American industrial family almost as important to food as the Fords are to autos and the Rockefellers are to oil.

A closer look reveals a long record of conservative as well as liberal political activity and philanthropy, mixed with epic battles over money and personal turmoil such as divorces, suicides and alcoholism.

Within the family, there are painful memories of a schism in the 1930s that led to a 50-year legal battle and helped shape the modern Heinz family. To this day, it has left some of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of patriarch H.J. Heinz feeling cast out.

“Most of the time, people aren’t talking to each other,” said Nancy Heinz Russell, a granddaughter of H.J. Heinz. “That’s what happens when people have money.”

Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira joined the family in 1966, when she married John Heinz, future Republican senator from Pennsylvania and great-grandson of H.J. Heinz, the ketchup and pickle king.

She assumed control of the family empire in 1991 after Sen. Heinz died in a plane crash. Five years later, she married John F. Kerry, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts.

Even as she made a new life with Kerry, she remained loyal to the Pittsburgh branch of the family. She is addressed by her staff as Mrs. Heinz, and her legal residence is the Heinz family estate outside of town.

She has fought fiercely to protect the family image. Ten years ago, Heinz Kerry hired an archivist to research the family tree, but has kept the findings private, even within the family. She declined to be interviewed for this article.

After a lengthy genealogical investigation, The Times has identified the other descendants of H.J. Heinz, founder of the pioneering food company, who died in 1919 at age 74.

He left three wings of the family under daughter Irene and sons Howard and Clifford. Four generations later, there are more than three dozen descendants.

The family is spread far and wide, most having severed their Pennsylvania roots years ago. In several cases, The Times’ reporting led to members of the Heinz family getting in touch with each for the first time, including two distant cousins living a few streets apart near Monterey.

Except for Heinz Kerry and her three sons, most of the family lives in California. Heinz Kerry, worth at least $1 billion, controls the lion’s share of the family’s money, but there are other centers of wealth and sharply varied political views about how it should be used.

Separate Lives

Heinzes pioneered the industrialization of the U.S. food supply, pushed government reforms to improve food safety and advocated for military intervention to stop the Armenian genocide.

Heinz Kerry is the family’s largest philanthropist, but other Heinzes have opened their wallets for public causes from Orange County to New York. Family money has funded hospitals, assisted the poor and educated scientists and artists.

The family has also experienced tragedies, most notably the midair plane collision over a suburban Philadelphia schoolyard that killed Sen. Heinz and six others. Far less known is the alcoholism, suicide, eccentric behavior and marital instability that have plagued all three wings of the family.

Along the way, there were odd encounters with the rich and powerful. Rock star David Bowie wrote the song “Young Americans” for his good friend in the celebrity circuit, the late Sharon Heinz Tingle. Sarah Heinz Waller, whose husband was a maverick Chicago alderman in the 1920s, was personally threatened by mobster Al Capone, friends and family say.

Many Heinz family members today lead very private lives, tired of jokes about ketchup and requests for loans. Family members no longer manage H.J. Heinz Co., and they own less than 4% of the firm’s stock.

Some descendants have no real sense of heritage or kinship.

“I had no idea I had any relationship with this family until I was 12 years old,” said Wilda Northrop, a watercolor artist and a great-granddaughter of H.J. Heinz. “I was raised that this was a big secret.”

Northrop, president of the Carmel Art Assn., shook hands this year with Heinz Kerry at a fundraising event, but didn’t mention she was the second cousin of Heinz Kerry’s late husband.

Northrop’s son, Lowell, is supporting Sen. Kerry’s campaign, making videos for MoveOn.org, the liberal activist group. Lowell Northrop says he knows little about Heinz Kerry.

“It’s an interesting little story that I am a Heinz, but it is not something I have gone out of my way to tell anybody,” he said in a phone interview. “Money sometimes brings out the worst in people.”

‘Just Johnny Heinz’

The man Heinz Kerry married was the child of Joan Diehl Heinz and H.J. “Jack” Heinz II. The couple’s marriage did not last long, and they played very different roles in their son’s upbringing.

After their divorce, Joan moved to San Francisco with her young son in tow and, an aviation pioneer herself, married naval pilot Monty McCauley.

“No one in San Francisco knew where he came from,” said a family friend, Ted Stebbins, referring to the future senator. “He was just Johnny Heinz.”

Meanwhile, Jack Heinz, the father, was a consummate jet-setter. He owned a dozen homes and had two more wives after Joan. Suave and imperious, he hobnobbed with British royalty and Greek shipping tycoons while running the family company from Pittsburgh.

By most accounts, Jack Heinz had a distant relationship with his only son, and was none too happy when he learned that the main heir to the family fortune wanted to marry the daughter of a Mozambique doctor.

“His dad disapproved of his marriage…. The story was that his dad felt he had been hoodwinked by a fortune-seeking European woman,” recalls Cliff Shannon, who headed John Heinz’s Senate staff in the 1980s. “Eventually, he made his peace with Teresa.”

Jack Heinz underwrote the performance hall for the highly regarded Pittsburgh Symphony. Less well known is the philanthropy of his ex-wives.

Drue Heinz, the last of Jack Heinz’s wives, had bit parts in film, and still controls a foundation with assets of $32 million that supports some of the top fiction writers in America.

His first wife, Joan McCauley, who died in 1999, left the bulk of her $31-million estate in the Bay Area, contributing to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the ARCS Foundation, which supports the nation’s elite students in science and engineering.

Progressive Legacy

The progressive views of family patriarch H.J. Heinz were out of sync with early 20th century capitalism. He provided employees with medical care and adult education. Some of his factories had rooftop gardens where workers could relax.

It was in this era that armed guards for U.S. Steel killed 10 employees during the infamous 1892 Homestead strike at a plant in Pittsburgh. In a move laden with symbolism, Heinz Kerry would later purchase the abandoned U.S. Steel plant and turn it into a public park.

“He treated his workers better than anybody I have seen in the early 20th century,” Nancy Koehn, a historian at Harvard Business School, said of H.J. Heinz. “He was the real deal.”

H.J. Heinz was branded a traitor in some sectors of the food industry because he supported government intervention to ensure minimum safety standards. As food-processing scandals raged in the background, he pushed hard for the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which created the Food and Drug Administration.

His son Howard, also deeply involved in public service, was sent to the Middle East by the Wilson administration after World War I to head famine-relief efforts. On the day H.J. Heinz died, Howard was delivering 30,000 tons of food to the region, where he witnessed the unfolding genocide that took the lives of 1.5 million Armenians.

Howard tried to get Wilson to send troops to halt the slaughter in harsh, remote areas of eastern Turkey and Armenia. In a dispatch to the president, he wrote, “I do not believe America, when she knows the truth, will be satisfied to have all our ideals of humanity thrown to one side while these people are murdered.”

His pleas were ignored.

It was Howard’s grandson, John Heinz, who became a U.S. senator and came to personify a moderate Republicanism similar to his grandfather’s.

John Heinz tried working in the family business but left unsatisfied after five years. He became a college professor, and in 1971 was elected to Congress, six years after marrying Heinz Kerry.

Sen. Heinz drew an unusual mix of support. Steelworkers liked his protectionist policies, and he tirelessly promoted the coal industry. But he also backed environmentalists’ efforts to clean up the state’s air and water. On the campaign trail, he successfully masked his blue-blood pedigree.

“He had a common touch,” said Louis Pagnotti, whose family owns a Pennsylvania coal mine. “And Teresa was a big hit in the ethnic communities up here.”

Since the death of her husband, Heinz Kerry has kept tight control over family documents. About 10 years ago, she began collecting detailed personal information from distant relatives, recalled Robert Heinz, a great-grandson of H.J. Heinz.

After meeting the family archivist for lunch in San Francisco, Robert Heinz said, he repeatedly asked to see the family tree — with no success. “The archivist finally told me that Teresa has not authorized it,” Heinz said in a phone interview.

A Conservative Side

If Sen. John Heinz represented the family’s moderate politics and public policy, Clifford Heinz represents a different outlook.

A grandson of H.J. Heinz, Clifford has long — and quietly — underwritten conservative causes from his base in Orange County. He has acquired a wealth, celebrity and power separate and apart from the Pennsylvania wing of the family.

When the Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, he was awakened with the news at Clifford’s mansion in Newport Beach, where he was a guest.

Heinz has helped fund the Free Congress Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, and has underwritten the campaigns of various Republicans, including Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of Huntington Beach. He has long funded ethics programs and endowed a chair for peace studies at UC Irvine.

“Clifford is a very principled, conservative Republican,” Rohrabacher said.

Clifford Heinz, 85, declined to be interviewed. His attorney, Bernard I. Segal, said his client had no desire to be drawn into a public controversy with Heinz Kerry. To put it mildly, the two have little in common politically.

Clifford Heinz was a key financial supporter of Oliver North, contributing $25,000 to his unsuccessful Senate campaign in 1994 — the same year Teresa Heinz sharply attacked the former U.S. Marine colonel and his role in the Iran-Contra matter in a speech before the National Assn. of Christians and Jews.

“It is difficult to imagine anything more cynical than Oliver North running for Congress,” she said in her speech. “This is a man who used his moment in the public eye to spit not just on politicians, but on the institution of Congress itself.”

Geographic Schism

Not long after the death of patriarch H.J. Heinz in 1919, his descendants began migrating to California, and a Western branch of the family came to outnumber the Eastern branch. By the Depression, a full-blown schism had occurred, centered around who would get the family wealth held by the senior Clifford Heinz.

A director and vice president for labor relations, Clifford had always been second fiddle to his older brother, Howard. And by the Depression, Howard’s son Jack was playing an influential role in the family business.

The battle began in March 1935, when the senior Clifford Heinz died of pneumonia at a Palm Springs hotel. He had left Pittsburgh three months earlier, hoping the dry desert air could cure him. Clifford’s third wife, Vira Ingham, was by his side when he died.

But the three children from his second marriage — Clifford, Nancy and Dorothy — were never informed of their father’s illness, even though they lived only a few hours away in Beverly Hills. Their mother was socialite Sara Moliere Young, who had run afoul of the Pittsburgh family.

After their father’s death, the teenage children received a second jolt, discovering that in Clifford’s final will, they had been disinherited. They came to believe that decision was made on his deathbed under pressure from the elders of the Pittsburgh clan.

“They tried to cut us out of the will,” recalled Nancy Heinz Russell. “Dad was not a strong, forceful man … and the Heinz family hated my mother. The Eastern family hated the Western family.”

The resulting lawsuit dragged on for decades, ultimately resulting in the children getting a large share of key Heinz trust funds.

It wasn’t the only time the family played tough when it came to money.

Rust Heinz, grandson to the company founder, moved to Pasadena in the 1930s and married Helen Clay Goodloe, daughter of a prominent family from Kentucky that included a U.S. senator and an ambassador.

When Rust was killed in a 1939 car accident, Heinz family attorneys persuaded his wife to take $25,000 and forfeit any claim to the family money. The couple had separated, but they were still legally married.

The inside story of what had happened was detailed in a newspaper article 16 years later in the Pittsburgh Press. The headline: “Heinz widow traded fortune for $25,000.”

After a second unhappy marriage, Helen Heinz took her life, according to her daughter, Margot Pierrong, a convention planner who lives in Anaheim.

“She was so young,” Pierrong said. “I am not bitter, but what the Heinz family did to my mother will come around.”

Out of Public View

Irene Heinz, the eldest child of the company founder, married and moved to Manhattan, and her branch of the family virtually disappeared from public view.

Irene’s husband, John LaPorte Given, suffered a nervous breakdown — under the harsh treatment of the Heinz family, according to his granddaughter. He retired early to play golf, and gave away tens of millions of dollars to Harvard University and other schools.

A daughter, Sarah Given, came to distrust the family money, saying it destroyed personal character. She married twice, the second time to a firefighter.

Sarah’s younger brother, John Given, became estranged from the family and was known for eccentric behavior. New York City police arrested him in 1948 on allegations that he beat a man with his cane.

When police examined the cane, they found a 28-inch dagger in its shaft. Four years later, after he fired a pistol at a neighbor’s birthday party, he was ordered by a New Jersey magistrate to leave town.

Given, who never married and suffered from alcoholism, died in 1957. In his will, he instructed executors at Chase Manhattan Bank to find deserving beneficiaries for his estate.

They gave more than $4.5 million to charity.

It was a traumatic moment for much of Southern California, as federal immigration agents snatched undocumented workers from car washes, garment factories and Home Depot parking lots.

Angelica Salas, who heads one of Los Angeles’ most influential immigrant rights groups, met regularly last summer with City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez — himself the son of Mexican immigrants — as they formulated a response. The two kept circling back to a singular issue: the lack of political power wielded by noncitizens.

“A lot of this is happening because immigrants don’t have the right to vote,” said Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.

Those conversations helped fuel Soto-Martínez’s decision in late April to push for a ballot proposal aimed at giving noncitizens the right to vote in city and school district elections. The proposal quickly gained momentum, with two-thirds of the council voting in mid-June to draft a measure for the Nov. 3 ballot.

Los Angeles City Council member Hugo Soto-Martínez attends a City Council meeting following elections at City Hall June 3.

(Etienne Laurent / For the Times)

But the effort collapsed on Tuesday, with the council reversing course and sending the proposal to a committee for more study. Before the vote, Soto-Martínez acknowledged that he had not performed sufficient outreach, particularly to the city’s Black community leaders.

By then, critics were accusing the council of failing to do its homework, leaving voters to fill in the blanks on such questions as whether undocumented immigrants would be covered by the expanded franchise. Some worried the proposal would endanger the very people it was designed to help, making them a fresh target for the Trump administration.

Even community leaders who have worked on civil rights issues were urging the council to slow down.

Mobilizing Preachers and Communities, a national nonprofit that represents clergy and civil rights advocates, asked for a delay, citing concerns about President Trump. Rev. K.W. Tulloss, the group’s western regional director, said he was also hearing concerns from Black residents and their religious leaders about the potential for weakening Black voting representation.

That, in turn, could reduce the overall number of Black elected officials in Los Angeles, he said.

“That’s a major concern among our community,” Tulloss said. “And we can’t be afraid to have that dialogue.”

In L.A., Black residents make up about 8% of registered voters, according to the Sacramento-based firm Political Data, Inc. That figure has been gradually declining over the past few decades. An influx of noncitizen voters — Latinos, Asians and others — could cause it to shrink even more.

At the end of the year, L.A.’s 15-member City Council will have two Black representatives, down from three, all in South L.A.-based districts. Two Latinos are running in this year’s election to replace Councilmember Curren Price, who is Black and retiring after serving the maximum three terms.

The county’s five-member Board of Supervisors has one Black member. Voters have given the go-ahead to add four more members, which some fear could leave the board with one Black member out of nine.

Tulloss said his organization supports creating a pathway to citizenship for the city’s undocumented immigrants. At the same time, he worried that Soto-Martínez’s proposal could in the short term divide Black and brown residents, who share a common struggle on a wide range of issues.

“At the end of the day, we don’t want any type of deal that will be divisive in the community,” he said.

Soto-Martínez, who represents an Echo Park-to-Hollywood district, said in an interview Wednesday that noncitizen voting was part of his platform when he first ran for City Council in 2022. He said he first thought about the issue seriously a decade ago, when San Francisco voters passed a measure allowing noncitizen parents to cast ballots in school board elections.

Since its formation, the United States has repeatedly redefined the right to vote, broadening it to include women, Black people and other groups, he said.

“To me, it just seemed very natural to expand it,” he said. “It’s part of our history.”

The idea of noncitizen voting has been circulating in L.A. for years. School board member Kelly Gonez persuaded her colleagues to begin exploring it in 2019. But the effort was set aside after the onset of COVID-19, which caused massive disruptions across the Los Angeles Unified School District, said Michael Trujillo, a political strategist for Gonez.

Last summer, as the Trump administration was launching immigration raids across Southern California, the city was convening a 13-member citizens commission to come up with proposals for rewriting the City Charter, L.A.’s governing document.

The commission took up noncitizen voting in March, narrowly rejecting it. Several commissioners said they were worried about unintended consequences, like the Trump administration taking aim at newly registered voters, said Raymond Meza, who served as the commission’s chair.

“I thought those concerns were not fully addressed,” Meza said, “so I actually switched my vote” and opposed the proposal.

A month later, with the deadline for placing items on the Nov. 3 ballot fast approaching, Soto-Martínez introduced a motion calling for a two-step process for expanding voting rights. First, voters would be asked to give the City Council the authority to grant noncitizens the right to vote.

The council would then examine the details surrounding the change before passing an ordinance expanding those voting rights.

Soto-Martínez said his motion was based on a simple idea: Those who live in the city, raise their families there and pay taxes “deserve to have a voice” in local decision-making. He did not offer many specifics, saying those would be worked out at a later date.

Critics, and even some supporters, said Soto-Martínez was making his move at the wrong time. Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who voted against the proposal in mid-June, voiced fears that the list of noncitizen voters would immediately be seized by federal immigration authorities.

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said he opposes noncitizen voting in city elections. He does favor it for L.A. Unified — but only for parents of children attending those schools.

Villaraigosa, who led the city from 2005-13 and recently ran for governor, argued that this is not the right time to make even that change.

“With Trump ferreting through every record he can find looking for undocumented people, I just think it’s the wrong time,” he said. “I think these people would be exposing themselves to deportation, and the well-intentioned would be exposing them as well.”

Soto-Martínez portrayed such arguments as “fear mongering,” saying undocumented immigrants take risks every day in their quest to create a better future for their families.

Salas, the head of CHIRLA, echoed that idea.

“At end of day, we are already targets,” she said. “This is not going to make it worse. Don’t tell me voting against this was for the protection of immigrants.”

The Trump threat was not the only reason council members hesitated.

Rodriguez, who has expressed some interest in the proposal, said city leaders had not determined how county election officials would issue separate ballots for voters who would be barred from state and national contests. They also had not determined the cost of such a service, she said.

Twenty-two local jurisdictions across the country have approved and implemented noncitizen voting, according to Megan Dias, who is co-author of “Immigrant Voting and the Movement for Inclusion in San Francisco,” a report examining that city’s push to allow immigrants to vote in school board elections.

Dias said that backers of noncitizen voting need to build a broad coalition — grassroots organizations, election officials, lawyers for the city — before taking the proposal to voters.

Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson said he is confident that noncitizen voting will get a much more extensive review in the coming months, and make the ballot in 2028. First, he said, the council will need to provide voters with specifics on how the changes would work.

Harris-Dawson said he heard from people who wanted more time to understand the proposal, to “make sure that it was done in a way that protected Black voting districts in particular.”

During the deliberations on the proposal, it also was not clear whether the change would apply to green card holders, recipients of Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals or other categories of noncitizens.

“When something goes to the ballot, we need the details to be figured out — like how much something is going to cost, exactly how it’s going to work, and what the parameters are,” Harris-Dawson said. “All of that needs to be defined.”

At Mount Rushmore, Trump warns of ‘communist menace’, ties rhetoric to immigration ahead of November midterms.

United States President Donald Trump has used the opening weekend of the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations to praise the US military and critique democratic socialists, warning of a “communist menace” that he claims poses a major threat to the country.

Speaking beneath the granite monument at Mount Rushmore on the eve of Independence Day on July 4, Trump invoked national identity and ideology ahead of the November midterm elections.

“We created the strongest and most powerful military. We won two world wars,” he said, claiming that the Cold War had left the US’s enemies “in the depths of history”.

He also said the US “beat Venezuela in one day” and “knocked the hell out of Iran”.

The address comes amid voter concerns over persistent inflation and elevated energy prices driven by the ongoing US-Israel conflict with Iran.

Briefly addressing the Iran war, Trump said Tehran is “dying to settle” and that Washington had granted “a week off for a funeral because we’re nice”, in reference to the days-long state funeral being held for late Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a strike on the first day of the US-Israeli war.

‘Communist menace’

A larger chunk of Trump’s address was focused on what he considers ideological threats at home.

“There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life,” the president said, calling communism “the enemy of the Constitution”.

He pledged that “the citizens of the United States of America will vanquish communism quickly.”

Trump tied his anti-communist rhetoric to a hardline immigration stance, suggesting that left-wing political figures and certain undocumented arrivals should be removed from the country.

His remarks followed a string of recent progressive primary victories in US states including New York, Colorado and Texas.

He labelled the rise of democratic socialists the “greatest threat to our country since its founding”, comparing the movement’s potential impact with World War II and the September 11 attacks.

He closed the address by calling the anniversary “the beginning of the golden age of America.”

Trump’s ‘grip on America steadily slipping away’

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Republican strategist Eli Bremer said parts of the speech were unifying enough that they “could have been delivered by Ronald Reagan … 45 years ago,” but added that “the gap between the American left and the American right has really never been wider”.

However, Democratic strategist and former Obama campaign adviser, Ameshia Cross, told Al Jazeera that Trump wants to wipe out the country’s diverse history.

Trump “is upset that there is a younger crop of Democrats who are running and winning across this country,” she said, adding that the speech reflected “a president who sees his grip on America steadily slipping away”.

She noted that it also came “on the heels of him losing a Supreme Court decision just a couple of days ago to eradicate birthright citizenship“.

The address highlighted the contrasting visions framing the country’s milestone anniversary.

In New York, progressive Mayor Zohran Mamdani offered an alternative narrative during a naturalisation ceremony, using a desk once belonging to George Washington to praise immigrants’ contributions and frame civic dissent as patriotism.

Democrats have also criticised the administration’s handling of the anniversary, alleging a conservative group took control of 250th-anniversary planning from a previously bipartisan congressional commission.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have offered the clearest signal yet that they are considering the establishment of new Jewish settlements on what remains of the Gaza Strip after almost three years of their country’s genocidal war against Palestinians in the enclave.

Last Monday, Smotrich, who made his continued participation in the ruling coalition conditional on being granted increased control over Israel’s settlement enterprise, told reporters that his ministry had prepared plans for three settlements in northern Gaza, and that all that was needed to move forward was the green light from Netanyahu.

The following day, Netanyahu came close to providing it. Speaking on Israel’s staunchly right-wing Channel 14, he refused to rule out the prospect of settlements in Gaza.

“The question is whether you prefer to do or to talk,” the prime minister replied cryptically when asked whether the establishment of settlements was a possibility. “And yes, I prefer not to address it.”

Israel’s current settlements – in the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem – are illegal under international law.

In clearing the way for any future settlements in Gaza – and for what Netanyahu euphemistically told Channel 14 viewers was the “voluntary migration” of its remaining population, a process widely characterised by international jurists as ethnic cleansing – Israel has killed more than 73,000 of its occupants.

At the same time, Israel has been accused by United Nations-backed experts of deliberately imposing a famine on survivors in Gaza and, most recently, of furthering its genocide in Gaza through the deliberate targeting of children.

The degree to which preparations are under way for the physical establishment of any settlements in Gaza – which previously had 21 illegal settlements before the Israeli government decided to dismantle them in 2005 – is difficult to ascertain. The area north of Gaza City has been largely razed by Israel, with its deliberate campaign to demolish Palestinian homes and institutions, destroying almost everything not hit with bombs from the air.

Supporters of settlements in Gaza see that now empty land as a perfect opportunity to cement a buffer between Israel and Gaza.

With elections due in Israel, it is beneficial for politicians such as Smotrich and Netanyahu to insinuate that this is now the plan.

“The Israeli public has been subjected to almost endless incitements to genocide since October 7,” said Neve Gordon, an Israeli professor at Queen Mary University of London. “People who watch legacy media in Israel have no understanding of the level of destruction in Gaza, or the kind of suffering that has gone on there.

“There are even spots, tourist spots, where some people in Israel go to watch the bombing. This is the constituency that statements like Smotrich’s are designed to appeal to. These are the people who would like to see more settlements in Gaza, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take it seriously ” he said. “[But] this isn’t just rhetoric. There is a definite and consistent push from across much of Israel’s politics to resettle the Gaza Strip.”

A history of ethnic cleansing

A growing number of hardline religious Israelis have been seeking to resettle the Gaza Strip since the 2005 disengagement. Since then, analysts and historians have described concerted efforts by those supporting settlements to capture the institutions of Israeli public life, gaining dominant voices in the education system, the media and other areas of government.

Organisations such as the far-right settler group Nachala have openly championed the resettlement of the enclave. Months into Israel’s genocidal war, Nachala held a conference explicitly promoting Israel’s return to Gaza, entitled ”Settlement Brings Security and Victory”. It was attended by numerous government ministers, including Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Despite what critics describe as his success in establishing settlements on a scale unparalleled since the 1990s, Smotrich continues to struggle in the polls. His Religious Zionist party may not secure enough votes in the next election – which must be before the end of October – to meet the minimum threshold to get into parliament. That perhaps explains why Smotrich is eager to inflate the prospects of settlements in Gaza and attract more support from the Israeli right-wing.

Political advantage

The irony is curious for observers such as Orly Noy, the editor of the Hebrew-language Local Call magazine.

Smotrich “has been the most effective member of the cabinet in promoting the interests of the settlers in the West Bank”, she said. “He has really made a revolution in that sense,” referring to the judicial, economic, and infrastructure overhauls initiated under Smotrich’s watch, that he appears to be receiving little credit for among his base.

The stakes for Netanyahu are potentially more dramatic, analysts pointed out. Currently on trial on multiple corruption charges, the PM faces a jail sentence if found guilty.

Similarly, anger over his apparent determination not to hold an independent inquiry into his own government’s failings in the October 7 attack runs high, perhaps giving him a reason to suggest that he will move forward with building settlements and expelling Palestinians from Gaza.

“Look, if you want to distinguish yourself from the rest of the field ahead of the election, your time is now,” political analyst Ori Goldberg said. “This is your moment, and, if you want to propose imposing further hardship onto Palestinians, there is absolutely no Jewish member of [parliament] – apart from the [left-wing member of parliament] Ofer Cassif – who is going to oppose you.

“People don’t care anymore,” he said of the chances of the settlement of Gaza receiving any resistance from Israelis. “There’s just nothing [on the suffering in Gaza]. People have grown indifferent. There’s just a big black hole.”

Complicity

While the Israeli government may have no domestic qualms when it comes to building settlements in Gaza, it does have to contend with the international backlash – and that may be why the project does not move beyond the planning stage.

But would Israel face any real lasting consequences from building settlements in Gaza?

In the eyes of many, the Israeli government’s freedom to act comes from the unwavering diplomatic and military support of the US, as well as the financial support of Europe which, despite its occasional criticism, remains Israel’s foremost trading partner.

“In terms of international reaction,” author and fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, Hugh Lovatt said of the prospect of settlement in Gaza, “from 2023 onwards we’ve seen the greatest expansion of settlements since the [1990s] Oslo Accords, as well as plans to render the two-state solution obsolete”.

“And, while there’s been some criticism, there’s been very little action,” Lovatt said. “I don’t know if that would be any different were it to happen in Gaza. It’s true that Gaza has been the focus of a great deal of international – and specifically US – attention since the ceasefire that the West Bank has not.”

However, whether that attention would act as a check on Israel’s attempts to expand its settlements is unclear.

“Would Israel risk such a blatant move to block Trump’s Gaza plan? I’m not sure,” he said of the US president’s plan for Gaza, which while heavily criticised for allowing Israel to continue its presence in the Palestinian territory, makes no mention of Israeli settlements.

“And while Europe has a very poor track record so far, an expansion of Israeli settlements to Gaza could push European states to act,” he said.

NEW ORLEANS — Louisiana’s attorney general has been indicted over accusations she threatened the jobs of New Orleans leaders who fought a Republican-led overhaul of local courts in the heavily Democratic city.

The 16-count indictment against Republican Liz Murrill, handed up Thursday by a New Orleans grand jury, charges Louisiana’s first female attorney general with intimidation and malfeasance.

At the center of the case are deepening rifts between state leaders in Louisiana, which is heavily Republican, and Democrats who control the state’s most prominent city.

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry promised a swift pardon, saying Murrill would not have her reputation tarnished by an “Orleans kangaroo court.” Mayor Helena Moreno, a Democrat, was among those who had accused the state’s top law enforcement official in May of making threats against public officials.

Murrill called the case against her “retaliatory, meritless, and unconstitutional.” Late Thursday, Murrill said she had filed for an emergency stay with the Louisiana Supreme Court.

“I will not back down. I will continue enforcing the law, fighting corruption, and doing the job the people of Louisiana elected me to do,” she wrote on X.

For months, political tensions intensified between Louisiana Republicans and New Orleans officials over a new law that abolished a court clerk office won by an exoneree, Calvin Duncan, who spent nearly three decades in prison. The change consolidated that job with another clerk’s office, which Republican supporters said would make the local judicial system more efficient.

The change was staunchly opposed by New Orleans leaders, and in May, the City Council set a special election that would have given Duncan a chance to win the newly combined job. Murrill responded by warning local officials in letters that they could lose their offices for violating state “usurper” laws, which forbid support for an unauthorized officeholder.

“We’re very interested in elected officials in New Orleans not being intimidated or threatened by letter or any other way,” special prosecutor Laurie White told reporters.

Bond for Murrill was set at $400,000 on Thursday, according to court records.

Landry said he was ordering state police to investigate what he called “alleged improprieties” of the grand jury and those who ran it.

“The criminal justice system is a circus at its finest in Orleans and we will not have any of that!” he wrote on X.

The Republican Attorneys General Assn. said that making statements to local officials — in writing — was simply “issuing a legal opinion and warning public officials about the law” as part of her official duties. It called the indictment “as outrageous as it is dangerous.”

Moreno, who was elected in January and was defiant after Murrill sent the letters, on Thursday called it a “matter for the courts” and did not directly address the allegations.

“My focus, as always, remains on fulfilling the responsibilities the people of New Orleans elected me to carry out,” Moreno said.

Duncan has said he believes state officials were retaliating against him in eliminating the job he won with 68% of the vote. Murrill and Landry have long refused to acknowledge his innocence, though he’s listed on the National Registry of Exonerations.

Republicans have said the change was not personal and supporters have noted that the offices of criminal and civil clerks of courts are combined in other parishes.

Duncan was a jailhouse lawyer who later graduated from law school. He founded a nonprofit dedicated to expanding incarcerated people’s access to the court system and was the driving force behind a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court decision that ended nonunanimous jury convictions.

Duncan spent more than 28 years in prison over a fatal shooting during a robbery in 1981.

The night before a 2011 hearing to consider new evidence, prosecutors offered to reduce Duncan’s sentence to the time he’d already served in prison if he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and armed robbery. Duncan took the deal and was freed but didn’t give up on clearing his name.

In 2021, a judge agreed that Duncan had been unjustly convicted and vacated his sentence altogether. Landry and Murrill have pointed to the 2011 plea deal in objecting to Duncan calling himself exonerated.

Riddle and Hanna write for the Associated Press. Associated Press reporter Jack Brook in New Orleans contributed.