politics

Paramount Skydance has notched a needed win as it continues to pursue its $111-billion deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery.

On Wednesday, the European Commission gave its consent, allowing tech scion David Ellison’s industry-reshaping merger to move forward in the countries that make up the European Union.

Europe joins 64 other regulatory entities that have either approved the deal or chosen not to challenge it, Paramount said in a statement.

“These clearances recognize that the combination of Paramount and WBD will enhance consumer choice and enable a creative-first company to invest in more projects and bring stories to audiences worldwide,” Paramount said. “It will create a scaled media and entertainment company capable of competing with the tech companies that have come to dominate the industry.”

European regulators added just one condition: Paramount must end a partnership with Universal Pictures to share distribution of movies in Europe. Beyond that, regulators concluded that even with the proposed Paramount-Warner consolidation there were enough producers to avoid competitive harms.

“The Commission found that, at film production level, enough film studios remain as competitors,” the European Commission said in a statement. “These include other major US studios like Disney, NBC Universal … and Sony, along with smaller US studios such as Amazon MGM, A24 and Lionsgate, as well as European studios.”

But the merger would result in a “high concentration” of film distribution, the commission said, so Paramount would have 13 months to end its joint venture, United International Pictures, which distributes Paramount and Universal films to cinema owners in Europe.

Paramount must not “directly or indirectly … enter into any agreement or understanding with Universal to jointly co-distribute films” in the European countries for 10 years, the commission said.

Despite early concerns about potential dominance in the children’s television market, Paramount will not be required to divest Cartoon Network, a Warner asset, because of its ownership of Nickelodeon.

“The Commission found that streaming platforms offering children’s content will continue to act as a competitive constraint on the merged entity’s TV channels,” the agency said.

The European Commission joins regulators in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Saudi Arabia, Serbia and South Africa that have found the deal would not crush competition in their respective markets. Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority is still investigating the merger’s impacts.

Paramount secured the approval of the U.S. Justice Department last month. The company was hoping to close its blockbuster acquisition of Warner Bros., which owns HBO, CNN and the Burbank studios behind such popular characters as Batman, Superman, Harry Potter, Scooby-Doo, by the end of September to avoid a larger payout to Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders.

The European Commission’s approval came two days after Ellison’s firm was dealt a substantial setback.

A federal judge in Oakland on Monday issued a temporary restraining order preventing Paramount from finalizing the acquisition for at least 14 days as that antitrust case heats up. The decision came after 12 state attorneys general, led by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, filed a lawsuit last week alleging the merger would violate U.S. antitrust rules.

District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín scheduled an Aug. 3 hearing to determine whether a longer-term pause is warranted. The states are expected to seek a preliminary injunction, which would tie up Paramount’s merger for months.

Paramount, in its statement, noted the European Commission’s conclusions “directly refute key assumptions that underpin the state AGs’ complaint seeking to block the transaction,” including whether big-budget or blockbuster films should be considered a market.

Wednesday’s approval “marks another significant milestone in bringing Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery together,” Makan Delrahim, Paramount’s chief legal officer said in the statement. “We appreciate the Commission’s constructive engagement and thorough analysis throughout its review.”

Deal critic Alvaro Bedoya, a former Federal Trade Commission member who is now a senior adviser at the American Economic Liberties Project, offered a conflicting view.

“This is not remotely over. The United States is not Europe,” Bedoya said in a statement.

The Writers Guild of America joined the legal fray last week by filing its own antitrust complaint against Paramount, alleging the proposed union of two of Hollywood’s biggest studios would lead to fewer jobs and lower pay for writers. The WGA is also seeking an injunction.

The 37-page lawsuit filed by the state attorneys general alleges that Paramount’s proposed takeover — the largest Hollywood deal in decades — would violate the U.S. Clayton Antitrust Act, a century-old law to prevent mergers that weaken competition and raise costs for consumers.

In her order granting the states’ request for a temporary restraining order, Martínez-Olguín wrote: “The Transaction would also be difficult, if not impossible, to unwind if permitted to proceed given the anticipated consolidation of operations, sharing of business-sensitive information, and potential termination or reassignment of employees.”

Paramount faces a potential $7 billion payment to Warner Bros. should the company fail to close the transaction by next summer.

July 22 (UPI) — The Glasgow School of Art Mackintosh building, damaged twice by fire, would cost too much for the school to fully rebuild on its own, the school’s board of governors said Wednesday.

Rebuilding the school in line with artist and architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s original design would cost about $355 million, the school said in a press release Wednesday.

That amount is “equivalent to five times the GSA’s annual turnover [revenue], an amount that is not affordable and which would compromise the financial sustainability of the institution.”

The Art Nouveau building, completed in 1909, was damaged by fire twice. Much of the building was destroyed in 2014 after a student’s art project was ignited by an overhead projector. In June 2018, when the rebuilding was nearly complete, another fire destroyed it. There was no cause found for the second fire, which ignited a dispute between the school and its insurance company that ended in arbitration that wrapped up this spring.

Neil Baxter, architectural historian and former lecturer in architectural history at the school, said the building is “of the greatest world importance,” and said, “The Scottish government should step up, and if it can’t, the British government should step up,” The New York Times reported.

The school released an 80-page analysis Wednesday that highlights the potential for the Mackintosh Building “to become an anchor project in a creative and cultural production innovation district, attracting investment to the city, driving the growth of its creative economy, and supporting new businesses and employment opportunities.”

Ann Priest, chair of the Glasgow School of Art’s board of governors, said early discussions with Scottish and British government officials ahead of the announcement “have been supportive and incredibly positive.”

Priest said the board believes the building should be a “heritage-led economic regeneration project, building on the existing creative and cultural production assets within this part of the city, to strengthen Glasgow’s creative eco-system and its position as one of the UK’s leading creative economies.

“The Mack will always have a special place at the heart of The Glasgow School of Art’s history, and we have further plans within the next phase of work to create museum standard interpretations of the building that will exist alongside its retained architectural elements and help tell the story of this remarkable place and the people who have worked and studied there for years to come,” Priest said.

Gordon Gibb, a former director of professional studies at the school’s architecture department, said that the school needs another organization to “take over” the restoration.

“This is a building that influenced world architecture and changed Victorian traditionalism into modernism,” Gibb told The Times. “We have detailed records of every part of it,” he added, “so it should be brought back.”

To understand political consultant Clinton Reilly–the hard-charging, number-crunching, message-honing, score-evening, candidate-firing, vitriol-spewing millionaire who is running Democrat Kathleen Brown’s campaign for governor–the autumn of 1993 is a good place to start.

One year before Election Day, Reilly was looking for work. Fresh from Los Angeles, where he had helped Richard Riordan beat the odds and become mayor, the San Francisco-based strategist had no major California clients. The problem was, in partisan races at least, he worked almost exclusively for Democrats, and the Democrats at the top of the ticket–Kathleen Brown and U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein–had already hired their campaign teams.

Shut out, Reilly then did what no other political player in California would dare to do–he met with Joe Shumate, a top adviser to Gov. Pete Wilson, and discussed if he could play a role in reelecting the state’s top Republican. Weeks later, he talked to Congressman Michael Huffington about managing his campaign for Feinstein’s seat. Reilly had consorted with the Republican enemy. In his business, that just isn’t done. “It’s like the Hatfields and McCoys,” says Wilson’s campaign manager, George Gorton. “You switch sides, and neither side trusts you.” Then, Reilly switched sides again. Last March, a few months after talking to Wilson’s forces, he stepped in to rescue Brown’s floundering campaign.

It was the kind of maneuver that has made Reilly one of California’s most feared and envied political consultants–and one of the most brilliant. If you don’t believe it, just ask him. To hear Reilly talk, he is to other consultants what L’Oreal is to Prell–the one candidates hire because they’re worth it. He’s the big gun, the closer, the one you call when money is no object. And Reilly lives up to his own hype just often enough to make it seem true.

In more than two decades, Reilly has run winning campaigns for some of California’s best-known politicians, including Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Tony Coehlo, Bill Honig, Robert Matsui, Nancy Pelosi and David Roberti. He has helped elect the current mayors of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Even his sharpest critics say Reilly knows the California electorate–where it lives, how it thinks, why it votes–as well as any political operative in the state. Reilly knows how to reach people, and that’s what politicians pay him handsomely to do. The 47-year-old son of a Bay Area milkman wears Italian suits, drives a lipstick-red Jaguar and lives just down the street from Robin Williams in a three-story Seacliff home that looks out at the Golden Gate Bridge.

More powerful than many candidates he’s helped elect, more influential than most Democratic party officials, Reilly epitomizes the modern campaign consultant. His loyalty lies not with his party but with himself, and his egotism is legendary. So is his paranoia. He is “Nixonian,” says one colleague. “Queeg-like,” says another. State Sen. Quentin Kopp, a former client, refers to him fondly as “Satan.”

In what is essentially an anonymous profession, Reilly has a knack for attracting attention, and not all of it flattering. In 1988, he managed–and lost–what remains the most expensive political campaign in state history, the insurance industry’s $63.8 million effort to beat back reform. (Reilly’s firm netted at least $6 million). In 1989, after working for months on Feinstein’s gubernatorial campaign, he noisily fired the candidate, faxing a press release to the media that claimed she lacked the gumption to become governor. (They haven’t spoken since.)

Last year, Reilly went to the San Francisco Examiner for a talk with Publisher William R. Hearst and Executive Editor Phil Bronstein. Reilly left on a stretcher with a broken ankle that required nine screws and a metal plate to fix. Though subsequent litigation never established whether Bronstein or Reilly was the aggressor, it did reveal that Reilly injects testosterone, a tidbit that only enhanced his fearsome reputation. (According to Reilly, his doctor prescribes the injections to correct a hormone imbalance.)

“When the opponent knows you have (him) on your side, a chill goes up their spine,” says San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan. “He’s certainly better to have inside the tent than outside.”

Now, Reilly faces his toughest test. Can he reinvigorate Kathleen Brown’s once promising campaign and propel her to victory? If he succeeds in electing the first woman governor of California, one thing is sure. Nothing will stand in the way of Clint Reilly. Except, perhaps, himself.

Reilly is holding court in the restored San Francisco warehouse that houses the Clinton Reilly Group. He sits in a conference room at one end of a long, sleek table. As always, he wears an expensive suit–today, it’s navy blue–a starched white shirt, a designer tie and patterned socks. The ovals of his wire-rimmed glasses are perched high on his pale, prominent nose. Unsmiling, he fiddles with an Evian bottle cap and crosses and uncrosses his legs.

Nine members of Kathleen Brown’s campaign staff sit around the table, and judging by the accumulation of empty coffee cups, they’ve been there for hours. The question at hand: how to energize the electorate–”to turn it on,” says Reilly, “so it votes.” The answer sounds simple: Demonize Pete Wilson. “Why is PW a bum?” asks the hand-scrawled heading atop a big sheet of paper. The answers are taped to the walls. “California in decline . . . . Never done what he’s said he’d do . . . . He’s a blank . . . . 12 years asleep at the wheel . . . . He’s a hypocrite.”

After half a day’s brainstorming, however, something is still missing. Reilly summons a female assistant who hurries off, returning a moment later with a folder stuffed with mailers from previous Reilly campaigns. He picks out a lustrous Riordan-for-mayor brochure. “The declining city,” he says, displaying a glossy four-color photograph of graffiti-scarred Los Angeles streets. “Everybody sees it. It’s not a core issue, it’s a symbolic issue. Then, you’ve got crime,” he says, pointing to another slick image: a gloved hand, aiming a revolver directly at the camera. What the Brown campaign lacks, Reilly says, are visual cues that show voters why California needs a change.

“That’s one of our problems. It’s the worst recession since the Great Depression. But how do you portray a middle-class Depression?” he asks, thinking aloud. “It’s not bread lines. It’s a whole new image for the ‘90s. And we need to capture that. We need to show people how four more years of Wilson will hurt them.” This is the Reilly trademark, distilling a race down to a few stark ideas. Political consultants like to boast of their ability to identify the themes that underlie a given election, but what sets Reilly apart is his capacity to condense those themes in evocative, elegantly produced television ads and mailers.

“The guy’s a genius,” Riordan says. “He’s weird. But he’s a genius.”

To bring home the threat of crime during the 1993 Los Angeles mayoral race, Reilly created a mailer about rape in Hollywood, the district that Riordan’s opponent, City Councilman Mike Woo, had represented for years. The text of the ad was mostly statistics. But its frightening series of photos caught the eye: a young woman, her face out of focus, with a spreading stain of red that looked alarmingly like blood. “Mike Woo,” said the punch line. “A Record on Crime That Could Kill You.”

Other consultants specialize–in mail, in television, in polling, in campaign management. Reilly prides himself on running a full-service firm, which he has deliberately modeled on a commercial advertising agency. He even went so far as to locate the Clinton Reilly Group in San Francisco’s ad district. It is, he says, a “real company” that makes a profit by meeting his clients’ every need, from speech writing to graphic design. Other consultants may ride the peaks and valleys of the campaign cycle by downsizing during the off-season. Reilly employs as many as 15 people regardless. Which, of course, costs money.

“He always talks about overhead,” says Dick Pabich, a Democratic political consultant. “We joke about his middle name: Clint ‘Overhead’ Reilly. You can’t have a 10-minute conversation without it coming up.” Not coincidentally, Reilly tends to work with deep-pocketed candidates. “His talent is he is able to convince his clients that they have to spend a lot of money,” says Ron Smith, a Republican political consultant. “I hope that comes off as a compliment.”

What do candidates get in return? His formidable ability to target key voters–a discipline known as “narrowcasting.” Using a computer-generated breakdown of the electorate, Reilly identifies groups of like-minded voters (white Democratic women who voted in five of the last six elections, for example). Then, he fills their mailboxes with custom-made Reilly brochures that dovetail with pointed Reilly television commercials. “(You don’t) talk vanilla to people who want chocolate or strawberry or rocky road,” he says.

Most important, Reilly’s clients get Reilly himself: a shrewd but unforgiving perfectionist, a relentless taskmaster who, during a campaign, rarely sleeps. “He is a nocturnal animal,” says Jack Davis, a San Francisco consultant. “He does his best work in the darkness.” There are many tales of his 3 a.m. telephone calls, and until about a year and one-half ago, he did not own a wrist watch. “He didn’t want to know what time it was,” says his younger brother, Kevin. “It was a way to extend his day and give it that little bit more that he could give it.”

When talking about the campaigns he has run, Reilly has a habit of referring to “the candidates I’ve elected,” speaking in a shorthand that strips the candidates themselves of any credit. The message is clear: Reilly is not merely an employee but a partner. Politicians aren’t the only ones with something to lose. Reilly’s reputation also is on the line.

“When it’s all over, you can’t give excuses for why you didn’t win,” says Reilly, sitting on an oversized couch in his cream-colored living room. Freshly cut roses sit in a vase, and the housekeeper has left a neat stack of logs in the fireplace, which Reilly has lit. “You basically have to live with the result for the rest of your career, for the rest of your life. So pretty soon, you start to say (to candidates), ‘Hey, look! If you don’t have the money, you’re not going to win, so get the money!’ You start saying to campaign workers, ‘Hey look, this isn’t a trial run here.’ ” He pauses. “They don’t like it sometimes. And they don’t like you.”

This take-no-prisoners behavior has taken its toll on Reilly. It has isolated him; few people call him a friend. “People either hate him and despise him or hate him and admire him,” says one former Reilly employee who puts himself in the latter group. “We used to refer to his mansion as Xanadu. The implication was that he was wandering around talking to the pictures.”

“ ‘Why do they walk away from me?’ ” Tony Coehlo, the former congressman from Merced, remembers Reilly lamenting. “ ‘I’ve helped them win and now they’re attacking me? Why?’ He gets hurt, really hurt, when people turn against him.”

Instead of dissuading clients, Reilly’s obsessiveness only adds to his allure. “You have to understand how much these people want to be elected. They’re people who want it so bad,” says one former Reilly employee. “They hire Clint because they know he has a monster in him, and that’s what they think they need to win.”

At Christmastime, 1969, Bess and Joe Reilly received a letter from the eldest of their 10 children. Clinton Thomas Reilly was 22 years old–the right age, he wrote, to tell his parents “thanks.” But the seven-page letter contained more than gratitude. It revealed the aspirations of a driven idealist who yearned to “drain myself in the service of others.”

“I am a restless man and cannot settle for least best,” Reilly wrote in careful script on lined notebook paper. “There is a strange will for perfection–not in detail but in vision–which threads my action during the day and often keeps me awake at night. . . .”

Reilly had recently left the seminary, ending nine years of study, and had decided to work in politics. “Where would I be now if your entire lives had been dedicated to the pursuit of money?” he asked his parents. “Would I be in a graduate school of business somewhere, waiting to become an executive trainee for a large corporation? What a dull–unexciting life that would be–and what a barren future that would hold.

“I am also aware that little can be done without money. Since I am primarily a doer, I plan to make enough of it to stay alive. My meager talents are worth plenty to someone! And I promise to make him pay!”

Reilly was born in Oakland in 1947, and he says he was drawn to politics even as a child. In the fifth grade, he was elected class president under the banner “Take a Hint, Vote for Clint”–a slogan crafted by his campaign manager and younger sister, Jill. Years older than their other siblings, Clint and Jill were inseparable, best friends, and when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor at the age of 11, “it was like a bullet that hit you and didn’t hit me. I had a feeling of a certain responsibility that came to me.”

Reilly’s mother, a recent convert to Catholicism, was raising her children in the Church. As Jill fought her illness, her faith became more intense. “She wanted to be a nun,” her mother says, and soon after Jill’s death, Clint announced his desire to enter the seminary. The Reilly family moved to a new home in the working-class city of San Leandro, and when Clint was 14, he went to live at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Mountain View. Pursuing the priesthood, he earned his college degree in philosophy and under the supervision of his favorite professor, the Rev. Eugene J. Boyle, he got his first taste of social activism.

In 1968, while in college, Reilly led a group of seminarians in producing a local version of the Kerner Commission report, the analysis of racial tensions that was written in the wake of the 1967 summer riots. The resulting 577-page “Little Kerner Report” concluded that white San Franciscans were “sleeping through a revolution.” (Mayor Joseph Alioto scoffed, calling the report “the product of 21-year-old students who have been secluded in their seminary and not in contact with the objective facts.”) A year later, Reilly left the seminary just three and one-half years shy of taking his vows. After a brief stint working for Planned Parenthood, he threw himself into politics.

“I think initially, intuitively, I wanted to get involved in politics because that was a place where you could improve people’s lives and make the biggest impact on the direction of the world,” says Reilly. “It was a pure motivation.”

In 1974, Reilly urged Father Boyle, well known as a liberal activist, to run for the state Assembly against another Democrat, John Francis Foran. “Loyal to the People,” was the slogan Reilly devised for Boyle, and the underdog candidate was gaining ground by the day. Then, at the last minute, Foran sent out a campaign mailer that showed a photograph of what was purported to be Boyle’s residence: a building that looked like a cross between the White House and “The Beverly Hillbillies” mansion. “Why doesn’t Father Boyle practice what he preaches?” the mailer asked. In truth, the building was the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. Nobody lived there. Still, the hit piece succeeded. Boyle lost by a few hundred votes, and Reilly’s days as a political ingenue were over.

“That was a real turning point for Clint,” says John Thiella, a State Board of Equalization staffer who worked with Reilly on several campaigns during the ‘70s and ‘80s. “(Afterward), he understood that it wasn’t just the right ideology and goodness that led to success. You had to do some harsh things to win.”

Reilly puts it differently: “I learned the power of money.”

He certainly wasn’t making any. For most of the ‘70s, Reilly estimates that his campaign work earned him only a few thousand dollars a year. To make a living, he opened a high-class junk shop that sold traffic lights, milk cans, apple crates, Mao buttons–anything that would bring in cash. Reilly’s break came in 1979 when he ran San Francisco Supervisor Quentin Kopp’s campaign for mayor, forcing heavily favored incumbent Dianne Feinstein into a runoff. Kopp lost, but Reilly was on the map.

By his own admission, Reilly was drinking heavily during this period. “He was a Remy Martin kind of guy,” says his friend Jack Davis. In the middle of the Kopp campaign, Reilly was arrested for drunk driving and resisting arrest, according to police records. Then, while he was running the 1980 reelection campaign of then-Van Nuys Congressman Jim Corman, a Democrat, something happened between him and a girlfriend that would haunt him for years.

“Did you ever hit (your girlfriend)? Did you ever grab (her) in anger? Did you cause injury to (her)?”–lawyers for the San Francisco Examiner would pepper Reilly with these questions 13 years later, in response to the lawsuit he filed after his ankle injury. During legal proceedings, Reilly’s lawyer advised him not to answer. Still, by the time the newspaper settled–paying Reilly somewhere between $400,000 and $900,000–the alleged incident with his former girlfriend had become part of the Reilly lore. As the San Jose Mercury News put it: “Is . . . Clint Reilly a testosterone-crazed, woman-beating bully . . . ?”

“I just don’t feel it’s fair to ask me to answer that question,” he says, grimacing as he paces his office at Kathleen Brown’s headquarters. “I have acknowledged that I had a drinking problem, and that I also had problems coping with the pressures of the work. I stopped drinking in 1981 and sought counseling and even continue today to see the counselor that I saw back then. A number of things I did were destructive. And I felt it was real important for me to sort of look at myself and my behavior and make significant changes.”

Reilly insists that he had gotten ahold of himself by the time he opened his firm in 1982. With more than 30 campaigns behind him, it was time to make money. “I began to say to myself, ‘Well, gee, somebody who gets a job for $125,000 as a result of what I do and who may have that job for life. Because of his own good efforts but also what I did for him, he’s earned a ton of money, he’s gotten a lot of personal psychic rewards, he’s gotten to be a famous person. Now why in the heck should I do this for 2,000 bucks a month?”

He started demanding more money and getting it–at least six figures a campaign. Still, some candidates flinched. In 1982, after Reilly orchestrated a decisive primary victory for Barbara Boxer in her first congressional race, Boxer fired him for exceeding her campaign budget and leaving her in debt. “It’s very expensive to have a manager like Clint,” she said at the time. It could also be maddening. In the midst of the campaign, Reilly demanded that Boxer mortgage her house to raise more cash. When she refused, he went to her husband, who told Reilly to get out of his office. (Boxer refused to comment on the incident, saying it was “personal.”)

But Reilly was getting to be known as a winner. In the early years, he had lost business because he was not part of the San Francisco political machines of then-Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy or Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. By the mid-’80s, though, Reilly’s nonalignment had become an asset. Plenty of candidates sought his services, and he was free to work for whomever he wished. Soon, his behavior made some wonder if there was anything he wouldn’t do.

There was the way he conducted the 1988 insurance initiative campaign, spending what many people think was an obscene amount of money–and making a fair bit himself. (Afterward, he says, “I basically didn’t have to work a day in my life for the rest of my life.”) There was the way he publicly ditched Feinstein in 1989. (“That was bad judgment, a humbling experience for an arrogant man. But I’ll tell you what it did. It got Dianne off her ass.”) And there was the way, in 1990, he sought to work on behalf of a pro-development ballot measure in San Francisco. When the developers hired a rival consultant, Reilly turned around and spent $150,000 of his own money to defeat it. (“I think the message was adequately communicated.”)

Reilly had come to understand that money was more than merely a way “to stay alive,” as he’d written his parents in 1969. Money was the enduring currency of power. Money bought freedom–to be generous, perhaps, or to even old scores. And money commanded one of the things Reilly most craved: respect. No longer the idealistic 22-year-old, compelled to serve others, Reilly wanted to be appreciated, and experience had shown him that people appreciated what they paid for. He had learned this lesson, but he resented those who had taught him.

“In many ways, I see him as a high-priced call girl,” says Calvin Welch, a community activist in San Francisco whom many describe as Reilly’s Father-confessor. “On the one hand he greatly luxuriates in charging people top dollar and spending an incredible amount of money and having that reputation, which means he will only go after certain kinds of candidates. On the other hand, he despises those people for thinking they can buy Clint Reilly.”

Kathleen Brown sat down with Clint Reilly for the first time last March. Attorney Bill Wardlaw, a Brown adviser who had worked closely with Reilly on the Riordan campaign, hosted the afternoon session in his West Los Angeles office. Immediately, Brown says, she was struck by Reilly’s sophisticated analysis of California politics. Although the meeting had been arranged less than 24 hours before, Reilly had sketched out a formula for victory–”He diagnosed my campaign better than anyone had in a year and a half,” she says.

As darkness fell, Brown saw something else. “After about 2 1/2 hours, the lights went out–the building had closed down,” Brown remembers. “He kept right on going–(talking about) the Inland Empire margin of victory. We continued our conversation in semi-darkness. It was unusual.” Impressed by his intensity, Brown offered Reilly the job of campaign chairman. “He is a warrior. A commando. There’s nothing that comes across the transom that unnerves him or distracts him from the focus of this campaign.”

Reilly’s arrival unnerved some of Brown’s campaign staff, however. Within days of Brown’s decision, campaign manager Teresa Vilmain, policy director Roy Behr and media consultant Jim Margolis all resigned–opting to “make the tough decision now,” Margolis said in a statement, “rather than face difficulties later.” Reilly got what he wanted: complete control.

Reilly appeared to be just what Brown needed. Known for little more than her lineage, she lacked the very thing Reilly’s candidates are known for–a sharply defined image. But along with his expertise, Reilly brought his reputation as a walking cluster bomb. One woman fund-raiser who had worked for Brown for three years quit the campaign without even meeting him because of what she had heard. Other staffers had heard the stories, too. There were so many, they were impossible to avoid.

Among the things people claim to have seen Reilly do over the years: comment on the size of a woman’s breasts in front of a roomful of male colleagues; inform a male employee that he wanted “to vomit” at the sight of him; reduce men and women staffers to tears; throw paper clips; punch a wall repeatedly next to an employee’s head; pound a chair up and down; break a glass ashtray by slamming it on a table; knock the telephone receiver out of a woman’s hand while she was talking; chase an employee down a street.

“That’s one that does have a kernel of truth to it,” Reilly says of the last example. According to two sources, in the midst of a 1986 supervisorial race, Reilly became so upset at mistakes made by a staffer named Laurie R. Glenn that he pursued her, shouting, out of his office and into the streets of San Francisco in the middle of the night. Reilly says that he can’t recall precisely what occurred. “I wasn’t chasing her down the street,” he says. “I think, actually, she was chasing me.” (Glenn declined to comment.)

Reilly hates the subject of his temper, even though he often brings it up himself. When asked to explain it, he is by turns irate, contemptuous and remorseful. He concedes that he can be out of control sometimes and unnecessarily hurtful, though “much, much less than legend would have it.” That kind of anger “there’s no excuse for,” he says. “I feel badly about it.” During a campaign, though, Reilly says he uses anger strategically. Candidates “are not hiring me because they want me to get along with everybody. They’re hiring me because they want to win. The campaign is a war, you know?” And rage is a tactical weapon.

“We human beings on many levels are motivated by our desire to look good in front of our colleagues, and (by) the fear of shame,” he says, explaining why he has humiliated staffers in the presence of others. “I want it to be a public experience (so) that you know that everyone in the whole organization is going to know that you f- – -ed up.”

Reilly isn’t entirely wrong. He may have trouble getting along with people, but in the most fundamental sense, he understands them. He has pondered their motivations for years–as a seminarian, as a philosophy student, as a campaigner, as a boss. He has made a fortune by identifying and appealing to voters’ hopes and fears. He is a professional manipulator. That, say several former colleagues, is what makes him so cruel.

“The man possesses a superhuman ability to zero in on your emotional or psychological vulnerability. Clint’s weapon is words, and I’ve never seen anybody who can hit you so on the mark,” says one former employee who echoed the descriptions of dozens of others. Reilly often seems “loopy” and “out there,” this person says, but when he cuts into you, he does so with surgical precision. “That Jesuit training was really something he paid attention to. That priestly kind of power over you is there. It’s not just about a boss telling you you didn’t get enough widgets done. It’s about a priest making a fundamental comment about (your) character.”

As Reilly excoriates others, Calvin Welch says, he also flays himself. “He is a guy at war with himself. There’s the seminarian. There’s the hard-boiled campaigner. And then there’s what you could call the friend. Sometimes they don’t fit together. He is basically troubled by doubts as to whether or not he made the right decisions in his life.”

In 1991, those doubts made Reilly quit campaigning. He was exhausted, he said, and disillusioned. “In my experience, most politicians are not up to the task,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in announcing his retirement. But few people thought he would stay out of the game for long. Politics had made him a man about town in San Francisco–a staple of Herb Caen’s column, he escorted beautiful women to expensive restaurants and hosted extravagant parties at his home. As many had predicted, he was back at work within months, joining Frank Jordan’s long-shot campaign for mayor. He had decided to reconcile himself, he now says, to “certain realities of the business that will never change: the wear and tear, the continuous, the seven days a week, 16 hours a day, day after day after day.”

There are obvious payoffs–his museum quality art collection, his private beach, his up-close view of the Golden Gate Bridge. But they come at a price. Reilly says he doesn’t have to justify his temper, his wealth, his work. Still, he never stops doing so. “Look, you know . . . I am who I am and I am what I am and I’m proud of what I am,” he says. “I enjoy what I do. It’s exciting. It’s exhilarating. It’s fun. But it’s also very difficult. It’s tiring. It’s emotionally draining. It’s sometimes frustrating. It’s full of tension. . . . Sometimes, one doesn’t have total serenity about everything that you do. But, in general, I, you know . . . I am not at peace. I’m at a relative state of happiness, with a lot of tension in there as well.”

The San Francisco fund-raiser was going marvelously. The ballroom of the St. Francis Hotel was packed with nearly 1,000 Kathleen Brown supporters who had paid at least $500 a plate. “Here Comes the Sun,” blared from the loudspeaker as Brown and Vice President Al Gore entered the room and began working their way through a crowd that included several other Reilly clients. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi was seated at the head table. State Sen. Milton Marks and former Supt. of Schools Bill Honig were a few tables away. Reilly’s girlfriend–a Riordan staffer named Janet Koewler–also was there, sitting at his side. But Reilly’s gaze rarely settled on anyone but Brown and her special guest.

Reilly is running the race of his life. If Brown ousts Gov. Pete Wilson, she will instantly become the most prominent woman in American politics, and Reilly could be catapulted into the national fray as well. “Clint wants to elect a President,” says one observer. Already, there is speculation that if Brown wins, Reilly’s old friend Tony Coehlo, now at the Democratic National Committee, may try to land him a job on President Clinton’s reelection campaign.

But that’s a big if. Reilly has yet to arrest Brown’s slide. Although he has brought discipline to the Brown campaign, her lead–which had hit a high of 23 points in May, 1993–is now a distant memory. The Los Angeles Times poll in mid-September had Brown behind by nine points among likely voters. With the election five weeks away, Kathleen Brown is still struggling with the problem that has vexed her from the start: explaining to voters why she is an alternative to Pete Wilson, why she should be California’s next leader.

Reilly insists that the 1994 election is about effectiveness. He says he’s convinced that if the campaign can connect Wilson to the decline of California, voters will turn to Brown. Thus, most of the 30 different television ads he has created for Brown do little more than attack Wilson. But you can’t beat something with nothing, and for all of Reilly’s efforts, Brown’s political identity remains almost as unfocused today as when she hired him.

Still, Brown remains optimistic, saying Reilly, whom she’s paid more than $690,000 in commissions and fees so far, is worth the price. “All the polls last year were not realistic assessments of what the race was going to be about. I knew that,” she said in late August. Because of Reilly, “we are right where I needed to be–in a neck-and-neck race with an incumbent governor who will be defeated in November.”

Not everyone is so sure. “(Reilly) is the best opener I’ve ever seen. He can handicap a race, he can analyze the electorate, figure out what votes are needed where. He’s almost worth his fee for that alone,” says longtime confidant, Calvin Welch. “He never gets crazy at the beginning because he has it all figured out. But when things don’t unfold the way they’re supposed to–the candidate wears the wrong dress, some bozo doesn’t get the third mailer out to the left-handed Lithuanians — But his great weakness is his end game. That’s when he loses it. .”

Clint Reilly hasn’t lost it so far. He hasn’t thrown anything, hasn’t reduced a staffer to tears. But he continues to flog himself. He hasn’t taken a day off since he joined the Brown campaign (he has been known to chide staffers who have). He sees his girlfriend infrequently. On their one-year anniversary in June, she gave him a frame to hold a picture of the two of them. Today, it sits empty–there’s been no time to pose for a photo.

“This is the most important race for governor anywhere in the country,” Vice President Gore told the audience at Brown’s fund-raiser. Reilly’s girlfriend gave his hand a squeeze. “This is a bus,” Gore continued, “we cannot and will not allow to stall.” Reilly probably couldn’t have said it any better himself.

THE CLIENTS

“He is a warrior. A commando. Nothing unnerves him.”

STATE TREASURER KATHLEEN BROWN

(1994 gubernatorial race)

“The guy’s a genius. He’s weird. But he’s a genius.”

LOS ANGELES MAYOR RICHARD RIORDAN

(1993 mayoral race)

“When opponents know you have (him), a chill goes up their spine.”

SAN FRANCISCO MAYOR FRANK JORDAN

(1991 mayoral race)

“It’s very expensive to have a manager like Clint.”

SENATOR BARBARA BOXER

(1982 congressional race)

“He gets hurt, really hurt, when people turn against him.”

FORMER CONGRESSMAN TONY COELHO

(1982, ‘84, ’86 congressional races)

She and Reilly have not spoken in five years.

SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN

(1983 mayoral race)

SANTIAGO, Chile, July 22 (UPI) — Chile’s Congress approved most of the economic and tax reforms promoted by President José Antonio Kast — one of the flagship initiatives of his government agenda.

The reforms include a gradual reduction in the corporate tax rate from to 23% from 27% to encourage investment and revive economic growth.

The Chamber of Deputies on Tuesday passed the National Reconstruction and Economic and Social Development bill, which also establishes tax incentives for the repatriation of capital, creates compensation mechanisms for companies when courts overturn projects that have already received Environmental Qualification Resolution approval and eliminates the tax on a first home for older adults.

Finance Minister Jorge Quiroz said the initiative seeks to “restore tax competitiveness” and provide greater certainty for investment.

“We have approved measures to restore certainty for investment in Chile, remove permitting barriers that have kept investment projects and economic activity stalled, and provide security for those who decide to invest,” he said.

The approval represents one of Kast’s main legislative victories since taking office in March, and allows him to advance one of the pillars of his economic agenda — reducing the tax burden to stimulate private investment and accelerate growth.

Jorge Berríos, academic director of the Graduate Diploma in Finance at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Chile, told UPI that the reform is intended to restore investor confidence and create conditions for the country to return to growth above 3%.

“A reduction of several percentage points in the corporate tax rate has positive effects on companies and the economy, although those results are generally seen over the long term,” he said.

Berrios said some effects could be felt sooner in the labor market because of the subsidies included in the initiative, as well as through an improved perception of Chile among domestic and foreign investors.

“The Chilean market is returning to a structure similar to that of the 1990s, with market-oriented reforms that allowed the country to achieve strong growth and stand out in Latin America,” he said.

Berríos said the Chilean economy experienced several years of uncertainty marked by increased regulation and higher taxes — factors that he believes damaged the country’s standing among investors.

The Confederation of Production and Commerce, the country’s leading business organization, welcomed approval of the bill. Its president, Susana Jiménez, said the initiative represents “an important step toward restoring the economy’s dynamism and returning to growth.”

The only provision still awaiting approval is the compensation mechanism for municipalities, which will lose part of the revenue generated by the tax on residential properties.

COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa — After breakfast on a recent Saturday, Robert Fraass crossed the river from Omaha to this southwest corner of Iowa to catch Bernie Sanders at the opening of his newest campaign office.

He sat in the fourth row, cheering and clapping with about 200 others as Vermont’s senator delivered his familiar tirade against the oligarchs and plutocrats and greedy corporations that he said are choking the life from America’s middle and working classes.

Fraass voted for Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary when the candidate ran as the left-leaning, fist-shaking alternative to establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. He’s still a fan. But this time, with more than two dozen presidential candidates to choose from, Fraass is shopping around.

He worries that Sanders, 77, is too old and too far left to win a general election. “Realpolitik,” said Fraass, 53, a project manager who works in the credit card industry. “I want someone who can beat Trump, and I wonder if Sanders can do it or if someone else would be better suited.”

Robert Fraass backed Bernie Sanders in 2016 but right now he’s shopping among Democratic candidates.

(Mark Z. Barabak)

By several measures — polling, fund raising, die-hard support — Sanders remains one of the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination. He has more cash on hand — nearly $27.5 million — than any other Democrat and commands strong on-the-ground organizations in the two most politically crucial primary states: Iowa, which he barely lost four years ago, and New Hampshire, which he won handily.

But he’s fallen behind former Vice President Joe Biden in most state and national polls, lagged several rivals in the latest fundraising quarter and is no longer the political and cultural phenom he was four years ago.

Rather, Sanders has become something considerably less buzz-worthy, just another candidate scrabbling to break from the pack of presidential hopefuls, many staking positions similar — if not identical — to his own. Most have the added benefit of seeming newer and fresher.

“He’s been consistent. I think he’s as honest as the day is long,” said Tom Stewart, 72, a semiretired educator who swung by to hear Sanders at a Sunday morning coffee-and-doughnuts stop at the United Auto Workers hall in Ottumwa. Stewart might even vote for him again. But first, he said, “I want to see other candidates.”

To some degree, Sanders has been a victim of his own success.

“Last time when I was campaigning here in Iowa, I had ideas that many people in the political establishment and the media establishment thought were really radical. Far out,” he said, with a bit of ’60s hippie intonation as a crowd of 100 or so sweltered inside his storefront campaign office in downtown Ottumwa. “Well, a lot has changed over the last four years.”

Much of what Sanders proposed then — a government-financed universal healthcare system, a $15 federal minimum wage, higher taxes on the rich, tuition-free college, nationwide decriminalization of marijuana — has, in fact, become standard orthodoxy for many of the Democrats running.

For all that has changed, however, a great deal remains the same; a person waking from a 2016 coma might not even realize time has passed.

Sanders burns with the same white-hot flame, spits out the same dramatic statistics on income inequality, gives unshirted hell to the pharmaceutical and fossil-fuel and military- and prison-industrial complexes, just as he did last time.

With a fluttery wave of his hands, like a conductor before an orchestra, he excoriates the corruption in Washington, the rotten influence of political cash, the overweening power of special interests, all heightened, he says, “by the worst president in the history of this country.”

He appears mindful, if unabashed, that he incessantly repeats himself.

“I don’t want to beat a dead horse here,” Sanders told a gathering of several dozen seniors in Council Bluffs, as he launched into his standard attack on the evils of the American healthcare system. The flogging then continued through another 20 minutes of questions and answers.

Not that his audience seemed to mind. They spent an hour recounting horror stories about insurance coverage heedlessly denied, families destroyed and lives shattered by various health crises.

To supporters, his repetition is reassuring, a sign of Sanders’ passion and dedication.

John Blasingame, who took part in a panel discussion on the candidate’s “Medicare for all” proposal, has looked over others in the Democratic field and was impressed by Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. (The two are cosponsors of Sanders’ universal healthcare legislation.) Blasingame would like to see more women elected to political office.

“But I support Bernie because he has come out continuously, year after year after year, in support of people like me,” said the 80-year-old retired construction worker. “He’s introduced bills again and again in both the House and Senate which go toward helping the mass of people, not the rich privileged few, and he’s done this forever.”

John Blasingame likes Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren but supports Sanders because of his longstanding consistency.

(Mark Z. Barabak)

Others remain to be convinced.

Sandra Cerveny, 69, a retired college administrator, likes Sanders and very much supports Medicare for all. But she also has good things to say about Harris and former Vice President Joe Biden, who has criticized Sanders’ healthcare plan and suggested expanding the Affordable Care Act instead. “Frankly, I’m for whoever can beat Donald Trump,” Cerveny said, suggesting any of several Democrats would do just fine.

Faiz Shakir, who manages Sanders’ campaign, concedes that the candidate may have lost his novelty.

“For sure, the fact is other candidates are fresher,” Shakir said. But he noted that there will be plenty of opportunities over the next several months for them to rise and, he believes, fall again. “There are going to be a lot of boomlets,” he said.

But in the end, Shakir continued, those moments “will evaporate” and the Democratic contest will come down to who can deliver fundamental change and which candidate is best poised to defeat President Trump. Sanders, with his appeal to working-class voters in key states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania and unwavering call for political revolution, is the candidate best suited to achieve both, Shakir asserted.

There have been some small adjustments.

Sanders, who struggled last time for support among African Americans, has spoken more about his early involvement in the civil rights movement, seeking to broaden his appeal to black voters. He’s increased his outreach to older Americans — his recent Iowa swing was almost entirely devoted to senior issues — another group that largely spurned his insurgent 2016 effort.

After filling stadiums to deliver his angry oratorio — he packed Santa Monica High School’s amphitheater at a Friday night rally — Sanders has begun staging smaller, more intimate events intended to offer the up-close experience that voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, especially, have come to expect. In two days zigzagging the breadth of Iowa, from the Missouri to Mississippi rivers, he never spoke to a crowd larger than 250 or so and sometimes spent more time answering questions than giving his standard stump speech.

He has even begun posing for selfies — by now a staple of the presidential campaign trail — a task Sanders conducts with the joyless precision of a worker manning an assembly line. Smile. Click. Next.

What Sanders can’t change is the fact he’s no longer quite so compelling. For some Democrats that’s a reason — for now, anyway — to look elsewhere.

Back in Council Bluffs, Fraass left Sanders’ campaign office happy with the scorching rhetoric he’d heard. “I really liked his energy,” Fraass said, toting a blue-and-white “Bernie 2020” poster as he stepped into the 96-degree heat.

But Fraass wasn’t through shopping. Sixty miles east, in Shenandoah, Iowa, he planned to catch an afternoon appearance by this year’s political phenom, South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Clint Reilly, a Bay Area milkman’s son who rose to manage the campaigns of California’s most influential political figures, has died at age 79.

A savvy political consultant, Reilly spearheaded early winning campaigns for some of the most recognizable names in California politics: former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Barbara Boxer and Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

Brandon Heist, Clint Reilly Organization’s head of business operations, said in a statement to The Times that Reilly died over the weekend in San Francisco. He died surrounded by family, which requested privacy. The San Francisco Examiner newspaper, which Reilly bought in 2020, earlier announced its owner’s death Sunday.

“I will always be grateful for Clint’s friendship and counsel over so many years,” Pelosi said in a statement. “As the manager of my first campaign for Congress in 1987, he brought his unmatched strategic mind to help create and amplify my slogan: A Voice That Will Be Heard.”

In a 1987 article, The Times attributed the success of Pelosi’s congressional bid to money — her campaign spent $1 million, more than her 13 opponents combined — and a sophisticated voter turnout program devised by Reilly. At the time, Pelosi was a 46-year-old mother of five children and a party activist known for raising large sums for Democratic candidates.

Reflecting on Pelosi’s rise last November, Reilly wrote in a San Francisco Examiner op-ed, “The mystery of being a political consultant is that you never know how your winning candidate’s career will turn out.”

Reilly’s legacy went beyond catapulting politicians into office.

He helped transform modern campaigning, said Oakland political consultant Jim Ross, who worked for Reilly throughout the ’90s, including on the election and reelection campaigns of San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan.

In the ‘80s, Reilly was among the first consultants to merge grassroots organizing with new technology: using voter roll data to segment and target pivotal voters for turnout and persuasion, Ross said.

“It was a way to make sure that he spent resources effectively,” Ross said.

Reilly’s data-driven voter targeting tactics helped Feinstein, then-San Francisco mayor, beat a recall effort in 1983. They later had a public falling-out in 1989 during Feinstein’s failed campaign for governor.

Reilly’s portfolio wasn’t strictly Democratic. In 1993, he coordinated businessman Richard Riordan’s successful campaign for Los Angeles mayor by targeting homeowners’ anxieties about unemployment, crime and other symptoms of urban decay. When elected, Riordan became the first Republican mayor of Los Angeles in 36 years — and no Republican has been elected to that office since.

Reilly also advised the California insurance industry.

In 1988, he led the insurance industry’s losing $60-million initiative campaigns for Propositions 104 and 106. The pair of insurance industry-sponsored measures was designed to compete with Propositions 100 and 103, initiatives backed by trial lawyers and consumer advocates who wanted to reform the industry.

Voters ultimately passed Proposition 103, which promised insurance rate roll-backs and created the elected state insurance commissioner role. But Ross said it was one example of how Reilly would search for creative ways to achieve his client’s goals.

“Clint really pioneered in that election the idea of running competing ballot measures,” Ross said. “The reform measure was extraordinarily popular, it was going to pass, so instead of going at it directly, he ran a competing measure.”

A 1994 profile in The Times, from when Reilly was running Democrat Kathleen Brown’s bid for governor, described him as “one of the most powerful–and feared–political operatives in California.”

“When the opponent knows you have (him) on your side, a chill goes up their spine,” former San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan told The Times. “He’s certainly better to have inside the tent than outside.”

Born in Oakland in 1947, Reilly was drawn to politics from an early age. He ran successfully for class president during fifth grade, with a campaign slogan his sister devised: “Take a Hint, Vote for Clint.”

Reilly’s relationship with Eugene Boyle, a Bay Area Catholic priest and liberal activist known for supporting the Civil Rights Movement, shaped his political views. He was passionate about supporting “the underdogs,” Ross said.

Reilly spent nine years in seminary before switching to pursue politics. His big break came in 1979, when he ran San Francisco Supervisor Quentin Kopp’s campaign for mayor. Kopp lost, but Reilly’s name stuck.

He soon developed a reputation for charging top dollar for his campaign strategy services and for his heavy campaign spending. In 1982, after Reilly brought Boxer to a decisive primary victory in her first congressional race, she fired him over excessive campaign spending, the Times reported in the 1994 profile.

As a boss, Reilly was “extraordinarily demanding,” Ross said, adding, “I reread pieces of direct mail five and six times now because of him.”

He also had a generous side, Ross said. Reilly spent time teaching young staffers the art of campaigning, a rarity in politics. Even after he left political consulting and shifted his focus to real estate, Reilly continued to help candidates with fundraising and messaging.

Reilly ran unsuccessfully for San Francisco mayor in 1999 and later turned his attention to local media and philanthropy, founding a nonprofit in 2008 to offer scholarships for low-income students to attend private college-preparatory high schools.

Reilly’s passing will not change the structure or current operations of the Clint Reilly Organization, Heist said. The organization’s media division includes the San Francisco Examiner — which Reilly acquired in 2020 alongside its now-defunct affiliate SF Weekly — and the Nob Hill Gazette, which he bought in 2016. The organization also has a hospitality company and real estate division.

“The organization’s commitment to its employees, partners, and the community remain firmly in place,” Heist said.

Condolences poured in from leaders across California on Monday.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and his wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom in a statement honored Reilly as a “San Francisco institution” with a brilliant mind and generous heart.

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie said on social media the city “lost a civic leader who left a lasting mark on our city.”

Reilly is survived by his wife Janet and two daughters, Jill and Ava. Memorial arrangements will be announced later.

July 22 (UPI) — The author prefers to use the lowercase “n” to challenge the Kim family regime’s legitimacy.

Northeast Asia has reached a strategic inflection point.

China, Russia, Iran and north Korea can no longer be treated as separate security problems managed through isolated policies, disconnected commands or narrow bilateral initiatives.

They increasingly operate as a loose, but consequential, CRInK axis. It is not a formal alliance. It is flexible, transactional, and opportunistic. That makes it more difficult to deter because its members can cooperate without a unified command or mutual-defense treaty.

Each regime pursues distinct interests. China seeks regional dominance and weaker U.S. alliances. Russia seeks resources for its war against Ukraine and leverage against the West. Iran seeks strategic depth, sanctions relief, and stronger military partnerships. The Kim family regime seeks survival, military modernization and acceptance as a nuclear-armed state.

Their interests differ, but they converge when cooperation weakens the United States, divides democratic allies, circumvents sanctions and protects authoritarian rule.

China provides north Korea economic support and diplomatic cover. Russia provides revenue, operational experience and possible military technology. Iran contributes weapons cooperation, sanctions-evasion expertise and pressure in the Middle East. north Korea provides ammunition, missiles, personnel, cyber capabilities and a persistent threat to the Republic of Korea, Japan and the United States.

A crisis in one theater creates opportunity in another. This is more than collusion. It is coordinated political warfare.

The democratic answer must be equally coordinated. The ROK, United States and Japan need a durable trilateral strategy that connects deterrence with diplomacy, intelligence, economic security, technology protection, law enforcement, information and the human domain.

Evolution of trilateral cooperation

Wednesday’s ministerial meeting in Manila showed that ROK-U.S.-Japan cooperation is expanding beyond coordination on north Korea. The ministers reaffirmed deterrence and denuclearization, but they also addressed maritime security, economic coercion, critical minerals, nuclear energy, emerging technologies, supply-chain resilience, advanced technology protection, transnational crime and disaster relief.

That wider agenda reflects strategic reality. north Korea’s military growth cannot be separated from Russian support or Chinese protection. China’s coercion cannot be separated from maritime security, critical technologies, energy, shipping or supply chains. Iran’s support to Russia and its military relationships with north Korea connect Northeast Asian security to conflicts beyond the region.

The threats are interconnected, so the response must be, as well.

The Manila meeting demonstrated political alignment. The test is whether that alignment produces shared intelligence, integrated planning, coordinated sanctions enforcement, resilient supply chains and combined responses to coercion. Statements matter. Institutions, capabilities and sustained action matter more.

Stop calling It the gray zone

The first requirement of strategy is to describe the threat accurately. The term “gray zone” suggests uncertainty about attribution, legality, responsibility or intent. The Philippines offers a clearer description: ICAD, or illegal, coercive, aggressive and deceptive activities.

The actions of the CRInK regimes are rarely purposeless or truly ambiguous. China combines maritime harassment, economic pressure, cyber operations, military intimidation, information warfare and lawfare.

Russia employs sabotage, proxies, espionage, disinformation, energy leverage and military threats. Iran uses proxies, covert action, missiles, drones and economic networks.

north Korea uses nuclear coercion, cyber theft, criminal finance, missile tests, maritime incursions, subversion and information control. These are integrated instruments of political warfare.

Calling them “gray” can create passivity. Democracies debate thresholds while authoritarian regimes consolidate gains. Shared terminology should identify hostile activity, attribute responsibility and connect each act to the larger campaign. Shared language is the beginning of shared strategy.

West Sea as a test of trilateral resolve

The West Sea, also known as the Yellow Sea, shows how political warfare can change the status quo without conventional war. The unresolved maritime boundary creates opportunities for Pyongyang to manufacture disputes, employ civilian-looking vessels, deploy drones, mobilize maritime forces and portray aggression as routine law enforcement.

Such a campaign would create a dilemma for Seoul. A forceful response could be portrayed as escalation. Restraint could permit a fait accompli. The decisive terrain would not be the water alone. It would be international perception. Who changed the status quo? Who controlled the narrative? Who convinced regional audiences that coercion was legitimate administration?

China has used similar methods across the Asia Pacific through coast guard vessels, maritime militia, legal claims, economic pressure and information operations. Pyongyang could adapt those methods with Chinese political protection and Russian technical assistance.

The ROK would remain the principal actor in a West Sea crisis, but Japan and the United States would contribute intelligence, maritime domain awareness, attribution, cyber defense, diplomatic coordination, sanctions enforcement and strategic communication. A maritime provocation could test whether trilateral cooperation can recognize coordinated coercion and act before it succeeds.

From consultation to integrated campaigning

Deterrence remains necessary. It is not sufficient. The three nations need integrated campaigning across military, diplomatic, economic, financial, intelligence, informational, cyber, technological, legal and law-enforcement domains.

They should begin with a recurring trilateral strategic estimate of the CRInK axis. It should assess China, Russia, Iran and north Korea as an interacting network, identify warning indicators and vulnerabilities, trace sanctions-evasion and technology-transfer networks, and examine how simultaneous crises could divide attention and resources. This estimate should guide policy and campaign planning.

Military cooperation should build on exercises such as Freedom Edge, but interoperability must serve clear political objectives. The three countries should deepen missile warning, maritime awareness, anti-submarine warfare, cyber defense, air and missile defense, logistics, space support and intelligence sharing.

Planning must also cover crises involving coast guards, fishing fleets, commercial shipping, criminal intermediaries, cyber actors, proxies, disguised military personnel and manipulated civilian incidents. The seam between military and civilian activity is where the CRInK regimes will seek advantage.

Economic security Is national security

The Manila ministerial meeting also recognized that economic resilience is part of deterrence. China can exploit dependencies in critical minerals, manufacturing, shipping, energy and advanced electronics. Russia uses energy and commodities for leverage. Iran and north Korea rely on illicit finance, cyber theft, front companies, arms networks, overseas labor and sanctions evasion.

The ROK, United States and Japan possess immense combined economic and technological power, but only if they coordinate. They should align export controls, protect advanced technologies, diversify supply chains, strengthen access to critical minerals, enforce sanctions and develop common responses to economic coercion.

Cooperation on small modular reactors, emerging technologies, and energy security can give vulnerable states alternatives to Chinese or Russian dependence. The objective is not economic isolation. It is reduced strategic vulnerability.

Political warfare and the human domain

The CRInK regimes understand that strategic competition is a contest of will, legitimacy and political endurance. The democracies must compete without abandoning their principles. A coordinated trilateral information strategy should expose military cooperation, sanctions evasion, corruption, maritime coercion, cyber theft, technology transfers and human rights abuses, while explaining how separate incidents form a larger campaign.

For north Korea, information and human rights are strategic. The regime survives by isolating the Korean people in the north and monopolizing information. Truth weakens that monopoly. Human rights pressure exposes the regime’s illegitimacy.

Support for the Korean people affirms that the Kim family regime does not permanently define Korea’s future. The ultimate objective should not be the endless management of division, but the peaceful resolution of the Korea question and a free and unified Korea.

Holistic imperative

The central danger is not only CRInK military strength. It is allied fragmentation. The adversaries integrate military power, economic leverage, proxies, cyber operations, lawfare and information. Democracies still divide those problems among separate ministries, commands and bilateral channels.

The Manila meeting suggests that this may be changing. Trilateral cooperation is becoming a framework for regional security, maritime law, economic resilience, energy, technology and resistance to coercion. That is necessary, but not yet sufficient. Diplomatic continuity matters. Deterrence becomes credible only when political alignment produces operational capability.

The essential question is not whether the ROK, United States and Japan can issue strong statements after the next provocation. It is whether they can anticipate, decide and act together before individual acts of coercion accumulate into a new strategic reality. The CRInK axis already thinks and acts holistically. The democracies must do the same.

David Maxwell, executive director of the Korea Regional Review, is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces colonel who has spent more than 30 years in the Asia-Indo-Pacific region. He specializes in Northeast Asian security affairs and irregular, unconventional and political warfare. He is vice president of the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy and a senior fellow at the Global Peace Foundation, where he works on a free and unified Korea. After he retired, he became associate director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. He is on the board of directors of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and the OSS Society and is the editor at large for the Small Wars Journal.

More than 16 congressional Democrats accused the Federal Communications Commission this week of running a license-review process “tainted by animus and ideology,” demanding the agency back off its early scrutiny of Disney stations, including Los Angeles’ KABC-TV and San Francisco’s KGO-TV — while alleging the FCC has politicized its power.

The lawmakers signed letters to FCC Secretary Marlene H. Dortch to register their dismay and question the legitimacy of the FCC’s review protocol.

The letter campaign is a response to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s decision in April to order an early review of Disney’s licenses for the eight ABC television stations that it owns. The review is entering its home stretch; public comments are due to the FCC by July 29.

Calling a station’s licenses for an early review is rare, and it’s been four decades since the FCC revoked a TV station license.

Carr’s move requiring Disney to submit to an early review came after President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump expressed outrage over a joke by ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel that referenced the first lady.

“This early renewal process is merely a smokescreen to pursue President Trump’s vindictive agenda to silence minority voices and punish companies that decline to do his bidding,” according to the letter signed by Reps. Laura Friedman (D-Glendale), Kevin Mullin (D-South San Francisco), Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), Ro Khanna (D-Fremont), Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) and others.

The FCC maintains the ABC station review sprung from concerns about Disney’s internal diversity, equity and inclusion programs, but the lawmakers said there was no evidence that Disney’s personnel policies violate any laws.

Instead, they said, Trump has made it clear that he sees TV license renewals as a means to squeeze media outlets whose coverage he dislikes.

The FCC separately has taken aim at ABC’s daytime discussion show, “The View,” which delves deeply into politics.

Disney has pushed back against the early evaluation of its TV station licenses, which were originally up for review between 2028 and 2031. The Burbank giant filed its renewal applications “under protest.”

“The Commission had not demanded early renewal in over five decades,” Disney’s WABC-TV station, based in New York, wrote in a May filing with the commission. “And it has never before demanded simultaneous license renewal applications from a group of stations commonly owned with a network as it has here. The order has no legitimate purpose.”

California congressional Democrats have strongly condemned Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr’s decision to mandate early, unprecedented license renewals for eight Disney-owned ABC stations, including KABC-TV in Los Angeles.

(Google street view)

The FCC maintains that Disney is the one politicizing the station review.

“Contrary to Disney’s claim that the FCC called in their broadcast licenses for early renewal for no reason, the record shows something very different,” Carr said in a May statement. “Broadcast licensees have a unique obligation to operate in the public interest. The FCC will follow the facts and law wherever they may lead.”

In the tussle over whether “The View” qualifies for an exemption to the so-called equal time rules for politicians, an FCC spokesperson said in a statement: “ABC should focus on complying with its public interest obligations, rather than misleading the public about them.”

The lawmakers, in the two letters, did not wade into the controversy over “The View.”

Instead, they stressed the importance of the two stations — KABC and KGO — to their local communities.

“KABC is an important local television station that millions of our constituents rely on for daily news, traffic, emergency weather alerts, and programming that serves our local community,” according to the letter spearheaded by Friedman, whose district includes Disney’s headquarters.

“Any refusal to renew this license would be strongly against the public interest,” the group wrote.

Congresswoman Laura Friedman is leading a letter campaign by Democrats in Congress to defend Disney’s KABC-TV.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

A second letter highlighted the importance of Disney’s San Francisco station, which serves nine counties in that region.

“For over 75 years, KGO has been operating in the public interest in our region, offering reliable journalism, indispensable emergency information, and steadfast community engagement that our constituents and viewers rely on,” according to the letter headed by Mullin.

The station also serves as a broadcast partner to the San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade, the city’s Pride parade, the Oakland Black Joy parade and the Bay to Breakers race. It also raises awareness for organizations including Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired and Bay Area Autism Collective, the lawmakers said.

“KGO’s operations reflects the television station’s deep investment and commitment to viewers in the Bay Area,” the lawmakers wrote. “KGO is a community partner. … We urge the FCC to reconsider its unlawful censorship campaign against ABC and all other political opponents of President Trump.”

July 21 (UPI) — The French parliament passed a new law to ban children younger than 15 from using social media.

The law was a pet project of President Emmanuel Macron, who is near the end of his term limits. He announced the ban on X immediately after it passed Wednesday.

“I had committed to it, and now it’s been voted on: social media will be banned for those under 15 starting back-to-school. Thanks to the parliamentarians. It’s up to the Constitutional Council to rule, then on to action to make this measure concrete and protect our children online,” Macron said.

The French Senate and National Assembly approved the ban, despite criticism from some on the left, which has said it prevents online anonymity.

The law will be implemented in two stages: Beginning in September, children under 15 can’t open accounts, and age verification will be required for all new accounts; and in January 2027, the age verification rule applies to all existing accounts.

The French privacy regulator would have to approve the age-verification tools used, and everyone in France would have to verify their age on social media. The law doesn’t create penalties against children or parents who don’t comply or for social media providers. Those would likely need to come from the European Union.

In December, Australia was the first country to ban children under 16 from using social media apps, though a June New York Times report showed it is largely failing to keep kids off social media. Britain and Canada are working on implementing similar bans, and Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain have all written laws. The EU is expected to create a bill this fall.

“France wants to push its own legislation to make the EU act, and the EU act fast,” Jessica Galissaire, a senior policy researcher at Interface, a Berlin-based think tank, told The Times. “I see it more as a political announcement.”

Macron, last year, argued for the ban.

“It is clear that before the age of 15 or 16, social media is not a good thing. This is because at that age, we have not yet sufficiently consolidated things on an affective, emotional and cognitive level,” he said.

He likened it to age restrictions on drinking alcohol.

“Sixty years ago, kids were served wine,” he said. “There may still be people who serve beer to infants, but in my opinion, they are not in a majority in the country today.”

EXPLAINER

Several Ukrainian and Russian generals have been fired from their militaries over the course of the war in Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has sacked his military chief Oleksandr Syrskii in the latest reshuffle in the country’s defence apparatus after days of protests following the ouster of the defence minister.

Here is a closer look at what happened in the latest instance, alongside all the top shakeups in Ukraine and Russia over their four-year war.

Who was Oleksandr Syrskii?

Syrskii, 60, was born in Soviet Russia, in July 1965 and studied at a Red Army academy in Moscow.

In the 1980s, he was deployed to Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. After this, he remained in Ukraine and studied at the National Defence University of Ukraine in Kyiv, joining the ranks of the newly independent Ukrainian army.

In 2014, he commanded Ukrainian troops fighting a Moscow-backed armed rebellion in the eastern Donetsk region.

In 2019, he became head of Ukraine’s land forces and led the country into war when Russia invaded in February 2022. In the early months of the war, he was named a “Hero of Ukraine”, the country’s highest honour, because of his successful defence of Kyiv.

Syrskii is credited with planning Ukraine’s counteroffensive around Kharkiv from July to September 2022, which became one of Kyiv’s biggest victories and led to the recapture of the strategically significant Kupiansk and Izyum cities.

What’s the context for Syrskii’s removal?

The removal came after six days of protests in the capital, Kyiv, caused by the removal of Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who had previously clashed with Syrskii.

Fedorov, who was seen by many as pivotal to the war effort, was removed from his post last week, leading to widespread anger across Ukraine. Before his dismissal, the former defence minister had accused Syrskii of blocking his reform efforts.

In place of Syrskii, Zelenskyy has appointed Mykhailo Drapatyi to lead the military.

“I am grateful to Oleksandr Syrskyi and to every one of our warriors for Ukraine’s strong front-line positions,” Zelenskyy said in a statement on social media. “I am grateful to Mykhailo Drapatyi for holding that same view.”

“Our shared wish is one – victory over the enemy and conditions at the front and in pressure on Russia that would force Russia toward peace,” he added.

Zelenskyy emphasised the need to address friction within the military leadership and resolve persistent issues concerning mobilisation and front-line management.

Zelenskyy said Tuesday’s decision to appoint Drapatyi was made to “reset” the ongoing defence against Russia’s invading troops.

Which other generals has Ukraine fired during the war?

More than 10 Ukrainian generals have been fired from their positions over the course of the war.

Here are some of the most major instances:

• In September 2023, Zelenskyy removed his Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov over corruption allegations.
• In February 2024, Zelenskyy dismissed Valerii Zaluzhnyi from his position as military commander-in-chief. Zelenskyy appointed Syrskii to take his place.
• In June 2024, Zelenskyy introduced Andrii Hnatov as the new commander of the Joint Forces Command, replacing Yuriy Sodol.

What about Russia?

Over the four-year war, which began in February 2022, Russia has had its fair share of reshuffling in its own military. Here are some major instances:

• In August 2022, Vice Admiral Igor Osipov, who commanded the Black Sea Fleet, was fired. He was first suspended after the fleet’s flagship Moskva was sunk in April 2022.
• In July 2023, Moscow’s military leadership dismissed Major-General Ivan Popov, commander-in-chief of Russia’s 58th Combined Arms Army stationed in southern Ukraine, over his concerns for troops fighting without rest and criticism of Russian battlefield strategy.
• In August 2023, Russia removed Sergey Surovikin, nicknamed “General Armageddon”, from his post as commander of Russia’s Aerospace Forces. Surovikin was linked to the Wagner mercenary group and was dismissed two months after its short‑lived mutiny against Russia’s military leadership.

Muzaffarabad, Pakistan-administered Kashmir: The traffic crawled beneath densely strung election bunting.

Overhead hung the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz’s (PMLN) green tigers. Further down, Pakistan Peoples Party’s (PPP) red and black flags bearing the party’s arrow encircled the clock tower at Lal Chowk, a square near Muzaffarabad’s main market, built to honour the original Lal Chowk across the Line of Control in Indian-administered Kashmir’s Srinagar.

Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, does not look like a city in the grip of a crisis. It looks like a city preparing for an election.

Both are true.

Since early June, the territory has witnessed weeks of protests and sit-ins that have killed dozens. The protests are tied to elections for the region’s provincial legislature that were scheduled for July 27, but that on Monday were divided into voting now to be held on three separate days. Voting in the region’s Mirpur division will continue as planned on July 27. Elections in Poonch division, which has been the hotbed of protests, will now be held on August 10.

Voting in Muzaffarabad and for 12 other seats reserved for refugees from Indian-administered Kashmir who now live elsewhere in Pakistan will be held on August 2, the region’s Chief Election Commissioner Justice (retired) Ghulam Mustafa Mughal told Al Jazeera, citing security concerns arising from the unrest as the reason for the changed schedule.

It is those reserved seats for refugees that are at the heart of the agitation, with protesters demanding that they be scrapped, arguing that only those living in Pakistan-administered Kashmir should now be eligible to contest in elections to the regional legislature.

And it is in the backdrop of those tensions that the region is now readying to vote.

“I have never joined them, I never participated in their protest,” a 60-year-old driver, bespectacled and bearded, said of the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JKJAAC), commonly known as JAAC, the movement whose protests have dominated the politics of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, particularly Poonch division, in recent months.

“But my only reason to support them is that all the people in this movement are poor people, my sympathies are with them. They are the ones fighting and demanding for my rights,” the driver, who requested anonymity, told Al Jazeera, as he finished his lunch at a roadside hotel in Muzaffarabad on July 20.

When it came to the election, however, he was unequivocal: he would not vote.

“We should be part of the democratic process, but the person you want to vote for isn’t allowed on the ballot,” he said, referring to the JAAC, which was banned in June. “A vote is a responsibility, and it should only be given to those who deserve it. Right now the candidates on offer are all corrupt, and I will not be giving my vote.”

An election amid unrest

The Kashmir region, a scenic but disputed Himalayan territory, has been at the centre of multiple wars between Pakistan and India since both gained independence from British rule in 1947.

While both countries claim the region in full, they administer separate parts of it.

Home to more than four million people, Pakistan-administered Kashmir, locally known as Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), has a semi-autonomous government with its own president, prime minister and Supreme Court.

The election was always going to be shaped by the latest crisis, JAAC’s fifth major mobilisation since the movement was founded in September 2023.

But Mughal, AJK’s chief election commissioner, said Poonch was the only division where, he said, “we have a bit of security-related concern”.

He is not the only official insisting the electoral process remains on track.

In Muzaffarabad, Deputy Commissioner Munir Qureshi pointed to bustling markets, heavy traffic and an active campaign trail as evidence that daily life continues largely uninterrupted.

“It is not our job to tell people to go and vote,” he said. “If they decide, for whatever reason, not to show up, it is their democratic right.”

The city, he added, has five constituencies and 890 polling stations, with additional security personnel requested ahead of polling day.

What neither official addressed directly, however, is the absent party hanging over the election.

The banned JAAC is absent from the ballot in any form. Some of its members who attempted to contest as independents had their nomination papers rejected.

The movement’s sit-ins have entered their second month across Rawalakot, Sudhnoti and other parts of Poonch division, closer to the Indian border, while its leadership has openly urged the public to boycott the vote.

How the region votes – or not – will tell whether the election carries legitimacy in the eyes of the people of AJK.

A movement outside the ballot box

The protests that have shaped this election began more than two years ago over prices.

JAAC was formed in 2023 around 10 demands, including subsidised wheat, cheaper electricity, and a government commitment to curb the perks and pensions enjoyed by AJK officials and elected representatives.

The Pakistani government intervened in May 2024, agreeing to provide subsidies, while a charter of demands signed by the AJK government in October that year was intended to resolve most of the movement’s concerns.

By this June, however, JAAC’s focus had shifted to the 12 assembly seats reserved for Kashmiri refugees settled in Pakistan, which it wants abolished.

The group argues the seats give outsiders influence over AJK’s governance and budget, while residents themselves have no say over who occupies them.

On June 5, the AJK government declared JAAC a proscribed organisation under anti-terrorism legislation ahead of a planned June 9 protest, just weeks before the election.

Within days, police had arrested dozens of JAAC members and supporters, including the movement’s leader and public face, Shaukat Nawaz Mir.

What followed was the deadliest period of unrest AJK has witnessed in years.

The death toll remains disputed by JAAC and the authorities, but even conservative estimates place it at nearly 30 people since early June, including protesters and law enforcement personnel.

Access to Pakistan-administered Kashmir was also restricted, with entry into Poonch division almost entirely blocked for weeks, disrupting supplies of flour and other essential goods to a region dependent on routes from Muzaffarabad and Mirpur.

Banks remained closed for two weeks, leaving residents without access to cash. Mobile and fibre internet services have also remained suspended across almost the entire territory, with exceptions only for banks and a handful of government offices, including district administrations and the Election Commission.

And the Election Commission itself has become an institution whose role faces questions from the JAAC.

Sardar Amanullah, a JAAC member from Sudhnoti district in Poonch division, more than 155km (96 miles) south of Muzaffarabad, said he had submitted nomination papers as an independent candidate, only for them to be rejected.

“I don’t think these are free and fair elections,” he said. “When you cannot let people’s representation out there, the government keeps finding ways to reject our papers,” he told Al Jazeera.

Chief Election Commissioner Mughal offered a different account.

“There were only two or three people who submitted their nomination papers, who claim to be affiliated with JAAC, and their papers were rejected by the returning officer since their names were mentioned in FIRs and the Fourth Schedule,” he said, referring to police reports and Pakistan’s anti-terrorism watchlist.

Abid Shaheen, a JAAC core committee member from Bagh district, was more blunt. With the group now proscribed, he described the vote as “a selection, not an election”.

A dozen seats, one dispute

Of the AJK Legislative Assembly’s 45 general seats, 12 are reserved for Kashmiri refugees who settled in Pakistan after 1947: six linked to Jammu and six to the Kashmir Valley.

The arrangement dates back to legislation introduced in the 1960s and was later entrenched in AJK’s 1974 Interim Constitution.

In June, the AJK Supreme Court, ruling on a presidential reference, held that the seats could only be abolished through a formal constitutional amendment passed by the assembly, not through public protest.

AJK’s electorate has grown from just over 3.2 million in 2021 to more than 3.8 million this year, according to Election Commission figures.

Within that, the 12 refugee constituencies alone have expanded from about 405,000 voters to nearly 439,000. JAAC argues that the increase has further amplified the influence of seats that were never intended to carry such political weight.

Since AJK adopted its current parliamentary system in 1975, all 10 general elections have produced governments aligned with the party in power in Islamabad.

Zulfiqar Ali, a Muzaffarabad-based political analyst, argued that the seats themselves have rarely determined who governs AJK.

“Across all the governments AJK has had, these 12 seats have played no significant role in actually making or breaking a government,” he said. “That role has always belonged to native AJK politicians, or whichever party holds federal power in Islamabad.”

Islamabad, meanwhile, has shown little interest in rethinking the refugee seats.

Defence Minister Khawaja Asif told the National Assembly last month that abolishing the seats under pressure from street protests would amount to “sabotaging the electoral process”.

The campaign that resumed late

For the parties actually on the ballot, the crisis all but wiped out campaigning in June.

“Frankly speaking, the campaigning was dead due to the protests all June,” said Iftikhar Gillani, a PMLN candidate contesting from Muzaffarabad.

“The campaign only picked up in the last few days,” Gillani told Al Jazeera after meeting supporters at a polling station on July 20, where government officials were casting advance ballots.

Dressed in a white shalwar kameez and repeatedly wiping his face with a tissue on a severely humid Monday afternoon, Gillani argued that many Kashmiris distinguish between supporting JAAC and participating in the election, even if some committed supporters may stay away from the polls.

“People here are cognisant of the importance of the election and understand that they don’t have to mix their support for JAAC with their responsibility to participate in the polls,” he said. “But there is obviously no denying that there is a chunk of the population which fully believes in JAAC, and they might not cast their votes.”

A 28-year-old PMLN activist, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said the internet shutdown had forced campaign workers to abandon social media in favour of door-to-door canvassing and loudspeakers mounted on vehicles to publicise the party’s manifesto.

But, he added, the election had also exposed social divisions unlike any he had witnessed before, fuelled by the JAAC-led protests.

“Families are divided over this,” he said. “Those who don’t support JAAC are being called supporters of our oppressors.”

The PPP, which currently governs Pakistan-administered Kashmir, has maintained the more visible street presence.

Its flags dominate Lal Chowk, and a Saturday night corner meeting near the square drew a crowd of supporters waving the party’s arrow banner close to midnight.

But Sardar Mukhtar, a PPP candidate in Muzaffarabad, acknowledged the changed mood.

“The campaign environment is not like previously. I personally feel that turnout might not be as strong as in the past,” he told Al Jazeera from his camp office, where party workers crowded in to catch a glimpse of the candidate.

The party’s clearest position has come from its chairman.

In a letter to JAAC’s negotiating committee last week, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari proposed establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to “examine the present situation, establish the relevant facts, consider the grievances and positions of all sides”.

He also urged JAAC to suspend its protest once such a commission was agreed, while calling on the state to halt further action pending its findings.

Bilawal is scheduled to address a public rally in Muzaffarabad on July 24.

AJK’s Prime Minister Faisal Mumtaz Rathore, the PPP’s most senior leader in the territory, has been more measured on the campaign trail, telling reporters after the revised election schedule was announced only that “the current environment is not suitable for the state” and that “problems can only be solved through dialogue”.

In the region’s legislature, he has previously said that the JAAC bears “the primary responsibility for this situation,” while conceding that “we have not absolved ourselves of responsibility as a government”.

What the election can’t fix

For Ali, the Muzaffarabad-based political analyst, the real issue lies not in the vote itself but in everything that has unfolded over the past few years.

He pointed to commitments the government made to JAAC in October 2024 that remain unfulfilled, including promises to devolve development budgets to local councillors and eliminate the perks and privileges enjoyed by politicians.

“However, people will vote,” he told Al Jazeera. “Because the entire system is designed in a certain way, tying government jobs and small favours to elected representatives. So turnout will be fine, but it will not resolve people’s fury and anger.”

Ershad Mahmud, a Canada-based researcher and author of Poonch: Identity, Politics and Resistance, sees the problem differently, arguing that the election is diminished by who is missing from the ballot.

“PTI did win last time, and they have significant following, as well as JAAC,” he said, referring to Imran Khan-founded Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, which ruled Pakistan from 2018 to 2022 before being ousted through a vote of no confidence.

PTI also formed the AJK government after the 2021 election, but since 2023 the territory has had four prime ministers.

Mahmud argued that with two major democratic forces absent from the contest, many voters will stay away as well.

“I don’t think this election will be seen as legitimate. The distance from Muzaffarabad to Islamabad is more than 120km [75 miles]. But the mental distance is now 1,000km [621 miles],” he told Al Jazeera.

An uncertain verdict

However, not everyone has reached the same conclusion.

Muhammad Ramzan, a property dealer from Mirpur division in the south of the territory, supported JAAC when its demands centred on subsidised wheat and lower electricity prices.

His support cooled once the movement shifted its focus to abolishing the 12 refugee seats, a campaign he considers disconnected from the concerns of residents and his own livelihood.

“Even I am curious,” he said. “Earlier they asked for roads or electricity or school, but now that they have changed their focus to 12 seats, I am flabbergasted why would they do that.”

He intends to vote, although he expects turnout to fall, with much of the boycott driven by younger voters aged between 18 and 35 who remain committed to JAAC.

“There are a lot of people like me,” he said, describing his gradual drift away from the movement.

But he remains doubtful that the election will resolve the crisis.

“I fear that things will go bad,” he said quietly.

A group claiming to represent California fire survivors began sending mailers and paying for social media ads this spring, calling on lawmakers to take action to reduce the rising cost of wildfires.

“Contact your legislator and tell them we need to fix our wildfire problem to make California more affordable,” said a mailer sent this month by the group called Wildfire Victims First.

“Stand with wildfire victims,” the group’s website states, urging people to join its cause.

The group was created with money from California’s three biggest for-profit electric utilities — Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric — which government investigators found ignited at least six of the state’s 20 most destructive wildfires.

The corporate campaign has angered wildfire survivors, including some of the thousands of families in Altadena who lost their homes in last year’s Eaton fire. The blaze, which killed 19 people, remains under investigation. Edison has said its century-old transmission line is the likely cause.

The utility-funded group is lobbying in Sacramento for proposals in a study that Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered to guide lawmakers in writing wildfire-related bills. The study largely ignored utilities’ responsibility for igniting fires.

Among its dozens of proposals is limiting amounts victims can get for pain and suffering, capping fees for attorneys representing survivors and requiring property insurers to bear more of the cost of utility-sparked fires.

”Each proposal would shift more of the cost of catastrophic fires away from the corporations responsible and onto survivors, policyholders, taxpayers, and the public,” wrote Joy Chen of Every Fire Survivor’s Network in a letter to Newsom this week.

Chen wrote that the industry-funded Wildfire Victims First campaign “created the appearance that wildfire survivors supported” the findings of the study. “We do not.”

The 15-page letter was signed by other organizations including Public Citizen, Consumer Watchdog and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

The coalition is urging Newsom and lawmakers to do more to hold utilities accountable for the fires they ignite, so they don’t happen again.

“The Eaton fire devastated Altadena, home to one of California’s most historic Black communities,” said Brandon Lamar, president of NAACP Pasadena, who signed the letter. “Now as survivors fight to rebuild, they should not be asked to bear the cost of protecting the corporations whose failures devastated their community.”

Edison told its shareholders in its annual report that it believes it acted as a “reasonable” utility operator before the fire. If state regulators agree it acted reasonably, Edison will be reimbursed for payments it makes to victims by a $21-billion wildfire fund, which Newsom created through legislation in 2019.

And if Eaton fire damages exceed the $21-billion fund, Edison’s customers will pay the rest through their electric rates under fine print embedded in last year’s Senate Bill 254 — amendments that Newsom and lawmakers added so late that the legislative session had to be extended.

State Sen. Sasha Renee Perez, a Democrat who represents Altadena, said she opposed any bill that would limit payments to victims for pain and suffering.

“I can’t think of a more offensive thing to propose when I have friends who lost family members in the fire,” she said.

Anthony Martinez, a spokesperson for Newsom, said the governor and lawmakers were talking about new legislation because the study “concluded that the current system is unsustainable and not working for fire survivors, utility customers or insurance policyholders.”

“It’s essential that we work to address the complex and interconnected challenges Californians face from the increasing risk of catastrophic wildfire,” Martinez said.

He didn’t disclose what specific measures the governor supports.

Nathan Click, who directs the corporate Wildfire Victims First campaign, said that the group launched after the study found that “payouts to financial middlemen — like trial attorneys, hedge funds and insurance companies — are often paid out before wildfire victims receive a single dollar.”

“Shockingly, trial attorneys can take up to 40% of wildfire victims’ settlement awards,” he said.

Click said the group was advocating for legislation that reduces wildfire risk, expands access to affordable property insurance and ensures quick compensation to victims.

The utility-paid campaign has been joined by electrical worker unions, a powerful force in Sacramento, as well as the California Building Industry Assn. and dozens of other groups.

The Eaton fire was the second most destructive wildfire in state history.

Pedro Pizarro, Edison International’s chief executive, said last year that a leading theory of the fire’s cause was that an idle transmission line in Eaton Canyon was briefly reenergized through a process called induction, sparking the fire. Induction happens when the magnetic field of a nearby live wire causes power to jump to inactive equipment.

Edison kept the idle transmission line in place despite not using it for 50 years. The state’s utilities had known about the risks of leaving unused equipment in place. In 2019, the Kincade fire in Sonoma County, which destroyed hundreds of homes, was ignited by an idle transmission line owned by PG&E.

Despite the billions of dollars in damages caused by the Eaton fire, Edison’s profits soared last year by more than 200% — from $1.3 billion in 2024 to $4.5 billion.

The company also paid its top executives more. Pizarro received $16.6 million in cash, stock and other compensation, up 20% from 2024.

“If the financial rewards for repeated catastrophic failure are record profits, record executive compensation, and record shareholder dividends,” Chen wrote in the letter to Newsom, “then catastrophic failure is exactly what this system will keep producing.”

In the latest salvo in the war between the Trump administration and California, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy jr. said Tuesday that his agency withheld $867.5 million in Medicaid payments to the state over concerns about fraud.

Kennedy also said his agency defered $199 million in Medicaid payments to Minnesota over similar concerns.

“If Gov. Gavin Newsom or Gov. Tim Walz wants this funding released, all they have to do is provide basic documentation showing that these services are legitimate and not fraudulent,” Kennedy said at a news conference.

Just under half of the funds withheld from California were in connection with in-home health services.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said California’s spending on in-home health services went up by more than double the national average over the last two fiscal years.

“That doesn’t make sense,” he said.

About a quarter of the funds withheld involved care provided to individuals with “unsatisfactory immigration status,” whose eligibility to be in the country and receive these services is in question, which Oz characterized as an “ongoing massive problem for California.”

The announcement by Kennedy and Oz on Tuesday comes two months after Vice President JD Vance announced that the administration would be deferring $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments over fraud concerns, largely connected to hospice services and in-home healthcare.

Newsom’s office, in a social media post, called the announcement a “recycled political stunt.”

“California isn’t being targeted because Trump has evidence of fraud,” the post said. “We are being targeted for political reasons — and because Dr. Oz doesn’t understand that we are *SAVING* taxpayers money by keeping seniors and people with disabilities out of far more expensive nursing homes!”

Newsom’s office also said that the state stands “ready to collaborate” with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services “in good faith efforts to combat fraud.”

The office of California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said it is reviewing the deferral of payments and allegations of fraud.

“We have not hesitated to challenge unlawful actions by the Trump administration, and we will continue to act whenever Californians’ rights or access to critical services are threatened,” Bonta’s office said.

Despite Newsom’s claims that the accusations are political, the California state auditor has repeatedly flagged Medi-Cal eligibility discrepancies that have exposed the state to billions of dollars in questionable payments.

California Department of Healthcare Services spokesperson Anthony Cava noted, however, that a 2020 state audit of in-home care found “no program integrity concerns” and encouraged expansion of the program to reduce spending on institutional care.

Cava also pointed out that the federal government had previously approved California’s approach to in-home care.

Newsom and Oz have clashed before.

Newsom filed a civil rights complaint in January against Oz, after Oz posted a video to social media from Van Nuys in which he accused the “Russian Armenian mafia” of being a leading driver of $3.5 billion in fraud in hospice and home-care services.

Newsom said that Oz’s claims were “baseless and racist.”

The announcement by Kennedy and Oz on Tuesday is the latest effort by the Trump administration to crack down on suspected Medicaid fraud in numerous states across the country.

After U.S. strikes on Iran’s largest nuclear facilities last year, both President Trump and the White House were adamant that the Middle East nation’s nuclear program had been destroyed.

“Monumental Damage was done to all Nuclear sites in Iran, as shown by satellite images. Obliteration is an accurate term!” Trump wrote on social media.

“Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated — and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News,” the White House wrote in a press release.

A year later, the U.S. and Iran are five months into a war Trump said would be over in weeks. Iran has gained leverage by seizing control of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital energy corridor, and the U.S. has been forced to the negotiating table as global gas prices have spiked — including again this week after a ceasefire agreement collapsed.

And Trump — facing mounting criticism that he has pushed the U.S. into another “forever war” despite campaigning on doing exactly the opposite — is leaning back into the notion that Iran presents an unacceptable nuclear threat and strikes are needed, namely at another Iranian nuclear facility known as Pickaxe Mountain.

“Pickaxe is a possible target for a nice big fat shot right near the front door,” the president recently said on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.” “We’re going to take out Pickaxe Mountain. Tell the Iranians to be ready.”

Pickaxe, a heavily fortified facility deep underground that would be difficult to penetrate even with powerful “bunker buster” bombs, was not targeted during last year’s 12 Day War between Iran and the U.S. and Israel, nor in the full-scale war of the last five months.

However, it is less than two miles from Natanz, one of Iran’s primary nuclear enrichment facilities, which was struck both last year and this year. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Israeli intelligence believes Iran moved thousands of uranium-enrichment centrifuges into Pickaxe last fall — bolstering its ability to reconstitute a nuclear program that threatens the U.S. and regional allies.

Trump’s sudden focus on Pickaxe as a suspected hub of Iranian nuclear activity, which comes as his administration is trying to justify its continued entanglement in its unpopular war there, is an acknowledgment that two prior military campaigns and years of attempted diplomacy by his administration have failed to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Few experts ever bought into the Trump administration’s claims that Iran’s nuclear program had been completely destroyed, and even Trump and his closest allies have walked some of those comments back — including in discussions about Iran’s ability to retrieve and repurpose enriched material buried at Natanz and other targeted sites.

Some experts have cited construction activity around Pickaxe as evidence Iran is continuing to develop the facility in violation of recent agreements with the U.S., but have said the exact nature of the work isn’t known. They’ve also wondered if the Trump administration intends to use the work there to lay the groundwork for a broader, boots-on-the-ground war effort that would be unpopular in the U.S. but necessary to truly accomplish Trump’s stated goal of ending Iran’s nuclear program for good.

The Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based think tank, said last week that it wasn’t clear “if Iran still plans on installing a large-scale assembly facility” at Pickaxe Mountain “given the destruction of Iran’s centrifuge program,” but “if Iran starts to rebuild its centrifuge manufacturing capability, it could plan to install a smaller centrifuge assembly facility in Pickaxe Mountain able to serve a nuclear weapons program.”

The space under the mountain, the institute said, may be “large enough to also hold a centrifuge enrichment plant capable of producing weapon-grade uranium” and is “likely large enough to also hold certain nuclear weaponization activities such as making weapon-grade uranium metal and shaping it into nuclear weapon components.”

Retired Army Gen. Joseph Votel, the former head of U.S. Central Command, told The Times that Iran has had a substantial amount of time to relocate equipment since the bombings of last year and has “demonstrated that they are savvy on these kinds of things,” and the U.S. “should be serious about it and try to confirm the intelligence.”

And “if there have been centrifuges that have been moved there and are underground and spinning and developing nuclear bomb grade materials,” he said, “we should be very, very concerned about that.”

Benjamin Radd, a political scientist and senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations, said it is true that Iran is continuing its enrichment program in clandestine ways that present an ongoing threat and that “the war is not going the way the president wanted.” He also said Iran’s activity around Pickaxe helps Trump justify the war — and its possible expansion.

Radd said Iran has used the war to block independent inspections of its nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency and reconstituted some of its nuclear capabilities in the process, including as talks with the U.S. shifted from its nuclear program to the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump and the U.S., meanwhile, have “vacillated” between trying to “manage” the Iranian nuclear program by reining in enrichment, to trying to “neutralize” the program with targeted attacks on its nuclear infrastructure. Radd said that “even though his rhetoric is there,” Trump hasn’t had “the resolve or the ability or the mandate” to move to fully eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, because that would require “much more forceful intervention” than the American public is willing to accept, such as U.S. troops on the ground in Iran.

He said he wonders now if the president’s talk about Pickaxe is part of a shift in that direction — or at least threatening it — after Trump and his advisors realized that the current cycle of war, negotiations and then more war is giving Iran the time it needs to reconstitute its nuclear program.

“I’m wondering if that is just a threat, or if it’s a genuine option that the president is actually considering,” Radd said.

Under Senate questioning Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declined to say whether American bombs were capable of destroying whatever is under Pickaxe Mountain.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration urged Congress on Tuesday to approve roughly $70 billion in emergency defense funding to sustain U.S. military capabilities amid its escalating war against Iran, warning that without it the Pentagon could face “critical shortfalls” disrupting its readiness.

The request comes as the United States and Iran have traded strikes for 10 consecutive days in a renewed conflict, deepening concerns in Washington over an expanding war that could inflame the global economy and trap the president in a quagmire.

The collapse of a ceasefire agreement and the sudden resumption of war have raised alarms within the Pentagon over its ability to protect U.S. forces and assets in the Middle East over a prolonged conflict, with defensive munitions in dangerously short supply, two Defense Department officials told The Times.

Yet the administration is facing bipartisan skepticism from lawmakers over the continuation of a war unpopular with a vast majority of Americans, over which they have had little oversight, and that in recent days has led to deaths of U.S. soldiers.

Those tensions became clear as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee to make their case for the tens of billions of dollars and offer their first in-depth public remarks about the war since May.

Hegseth told senators the United States is at a “moment where we cannot afford inaction,” while Caine argued the funding request is coming to Congress “while time is still on our side.”

“It is critical that we stay ahead of our adversaries and we must have the funds before we are out of time,” Caine said.

Hegseth said the war is now expected to cost Americans $37.5 billion, up from a $29-billion estimate from early May. The war, initially projected by President Trump to last four to five weeks, is now entering its fifth month.

With no end in sight, senators from both parties signaled frustrations with the administration’s plans.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said Democrats will not support more funding for the war.

“This administration’s refusal to explain what it is doing, or how this war is protecting Americans, its refusal to seek authorization from Congress, and its expectations that Americans will just pay for it all without any explanation or transparency is disrespectful,” she said.

Republican lawmakers also confronted Hegseth and Caine on several fronts.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told the Pentagon leaders that lawmakers “need some proper answers and some straight talk” about the administration’s plans to ensure Iran does not choke traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

Asked whether Iran would impose tolls on merchant vessels passing through the vital waterway, Caine said it was a “hypothetical” scenario — a response Kennedy rejected.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) also put pressure on Hegseth, as she asked him whether the administration was still taking the position that it needed no authorization from Congress to continue hostilities against Iran.

“Senator, I know there’s a long-standing legal debate on this particular topic, but we certainly at the department share the position with the White House that we have all the necessary authorities at this moment,” Hegseth said.

Murkowski’s remarks come just weeks after Republicans joined Democrats in both the House and Senate in voting to reassert Congress’ constitutional role over the war, underscoring the simmering tensions over Trump’s decision to sideline Congress in the matter.

Hours before the hearing, Trump downplayed concerns over the war’s effect on the midterm elections and further threats in the war, as Houthis, the Iran-backed militia in Yemen, declared a maritime blockade Monday on Saudi Arabia.

“So far, it hasn’t happened. It might happen but we take care of things, if something like that happens,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

Trump maintained that Iranian leaders are “desperately” trying to reach a deal to end the war but said he has no interest in meeting with them until he is convinced the talks will be “meaningful.”

“If we left right now, it would take Iran 20 to 25 years to rebuild. We are not finished at all,” Trump said. “We are not leaving right now.”

A protester interrupts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as he testifies at Tuesday’s hearing.

(Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)

Asked if he thought Iran was trying to have an effect on the midterm elections by threatening the Strait of Hormuz, Trump said, “probably.”

“It won’t have any impact on me,” he said. “The election, I can’t think about that having to do with this.”

An agreement reached in June between the United States and Iran proposed an end to a U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports and to U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil exports in exchange for Tehran allowing unfettered commercial shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. But the agreement fell apart, with Iran firing on commercial vessels and pursuing a toll system for transit that had not existed before the war started.

The deal was supposed to set up a structure for more detailed negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program, a prime target of the U.S. campaign launched in February in partnership with Israel.

Much of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure was degraded in a U.S. strike conducted last year that targeted three major facilities. But the fissile material required to build nuclear weapons remains in the country, under the watch of U.S. satellite surveillance. Iran has vowed to continue pursuing civilian nuclear work.

“How about these people? They’re in this because of nuclear weapons, and they’re trying to possibly reconstitute a site? We’ll hit that site. Any site where they’re even thinking about nuclear — we’ll be hitting it very, very powerfully,” Trump said.

As the war expands, there’s been heightened concern about the infrastructure that civilians in neighboring countries rely on for water and power.

Iranian officials said U.S. strikes hit the Bunji desalination plant on Iran’s southeastern coast, leaving 20 villages — where some 10,000 people reside — without water, according to reports from Iran’s semi-official news agency Tasnim.

Meanwhile, the Kuwaiti government said its power plants and desalination plants were struck by Iran on Monday — the fourth consecutive day of attacks on a key source of drinking water for the small desert nation.

The attacks spurred the Kuwaiti government over the weekend to launch an ad campaign calling on residents to reduce their water and power usage, especially during peak hours between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m.

A concerted campaign targeting desalination plants would be devastating both for Iran and the Persian Gulf nations it has peppered with drones and missiles since the start of the war.

Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the Emirates and Saudi Arabia are among the world’s eight most water-stressed countries. Israel ranks 9th, while Iran is 14th, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Water Resources Institute.

All of them suffer from “absolute water scarcity,” according to metrics used by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture organization.

Times staff writer Nabih Bulos in Beirut contributed to this report.

BUENOS AIRES, July 21 (UPI) — President Javier Milei’s government is backing a bill that would eliminate most of Argentina’s restrictions that have limited foreign ownership of rural land since 2011 in an effort to attract investment and strengthen legal certainty.

The plan also has reignited debate over sovereignty and control of a resource considered strategic.

The proposal is part of the Private Property Inviolability Act, and it would substantially amend the framework established a law enacted during the administration of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner that set limits on the amount of rural land that foreign individuals and companies could own.

Presidential spokesman Adrián Ravier said the initiative seeks to strengthen property rights protected under Argentina’s Constitution. Speaking at a news conference, he said the country had endured decades of legal uncertainty that discouraged investment and hindered opportunities for economic growth and job creation.

“What we are seeking is to remove the general restrictions on the acquisition of rural land by foreigners,” Ravier said.

He also argued that Argentina historically grew thanks to immigrants who invested and became landowners, and that maintaining broad restrictions on foreign investors no longer makes sense. He added that the bill instead strengthens oversight of foreign governments and their state-owned companies.

The initiative also removes one of the central principles of the current law, which states that purchasing rural land by foreigners does not constitute an investment because the land is a nonrenewable natural resource that belongs to the country.

Former Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries Minister Julián Domínguez, who promoted the law during Fernández de Kirchner’s administration, had rejected proposed reform.

He told UPI that when Congress approved the legislation, it established that “the acquisition of rural land shall not be considered an investment because it is a nonrenewable natural resource contributed by the recipient country.”

Domínguez contended the proposal contradicts the objective of protecting a strategic resource.

“It is paradoxical. The grandly titled ‘Private Property Inviolability Act’ ends up being, precisely, a violation of Argentines’ rights over their land,” he said.

The former minister also rejected the government’s argument that the current law discouraged foreign investment.

“Our producers are recognized around the world for their ability to adapt and innovate. So does the government believe a foreigner will do a better job than an Argentine producer? The debate is about something else,” he said.

The issue goes beyond economics. Domínguez said.

“In Congress, what is at stake is our identity as Argentines and our relationship with our territory. Every country is very careful about who can buy its land,” he said.

Attorney Enrique Viale, president of the Argentine Association of Environmental Lawyers, also criticized the bill, saying it should instead be called the “foreignization of land law.”

He told UPI that the proposal repeals the provisions that establish acreage limits, ownership caps and protected areas for foreign purchases of rural land.

“It repeals the provisions establishing acreage limits, ownership percentages and protected areas. It fully liberalizes land purchases, including in border areas and without ownership caps,” he said.

Viale said foreigners already own large portions of Argentine land, adding that without restrictions, the trend could accelerate.

He said reform would benefit large international investors who seek to develop artificial intelligence-related data centers, as well as foreign landowners who already hold extensive properties in Patagonia and Argentina’s Littoral region.

“I see no benefit in this bill. What it does is consolidate permanent control of land by foreign capital and increase the risk of losing sovereignty,” he said.

From the real estate sector, José Rozados, director of consultancy Reporte Inmobiliario, said easing restrictions could encourage large-scale investment.

“Anything that removes restrictions on the inflow of capital, especially for investments that require large amounts of money and long payback periods, is important,” he said.

Rozados said greater openness would facilitate productive projects that require large tracts of land and significant investment to develop economic activities.

“Whatever legislation is enacted regarding the permissibility and protection of those investments could allow foreign investors, or even local investors partnered with foreign capital, to be willing to invest in large areas of land,” he said.

The law, known as the National Protection Regime for the Ownership, Possession and Tenure of Rural Land, mandates that foreign individuals and companies may not own more than 15% of the country’s rural land — a limit that also applies within each province and municipality.

It also provides that citizens of the same nationality may not account for more than 30% of that quota, equivalent to 4.5% of the total rural land within a given territory.

The legislation also limits to 2,471 acres the amount of land that may be acquired by a single foreign owner in the country’s core agricultural zone, or its equivalent in other regions, and prohibits the sale of land located in border security zones or containing significant permanent bodies of water, such as rivers, lakes and glaciers.

The government’s bill amends several of those provisions to relax the current framework while maintaining restrictions on foreign governments and their state-owned companies.

The ruling coalition failed to secure enough support to move the initiative forward, and the bill will return to the Senate for debate in August.

New Delhi, India – Blood spots on the walls, overturned barricades, shattered mirrors and sandals strewn across the road. A scarf here, broken glasses and a torn shirt there lie as remnants of the chaos that took over the Indian capital.

The heart of New Delhi – Parliament Street and Connaught Place, a colonial-era square – bears the imprint of Monday’s police crackdown on thousands of protesters, most of them students, who had shut down the capital, demanding that Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resign.

A swarm of protesters reached parliament’s doorstep before retreating as the police tear-gassed them. More than 100 students were injured.

“I still cannot believe my eyes that I’m in Delhi,” said Anshul Dev, an 18-year-old who grew up in the capital. “Part of it is because tear gas still stings,” he added, bursting into laughter with his group of friends. One of them had both legs bandaged.

“This government, whom our elders voted to power, is treating us like terrorists and criminals,” Dev said. “This is our country, and we are reclaiming it from their hateful politics. We are here to break the spell.”

Anger among India’s youth, the world’s largest Gen Z cohort, has been simmering for the past two months over a string of compromised entrance exams that affected millions of students. In some cases, exam papers were leaked; in others, students who sought copies of their answer scripts found that they had been wrongly graded. More than 20 students died by suicide, many citing the paper leaks.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not addressed the protests, even as he appeared smiling on Monday in parliament, barely metres away from demonstrators at one point.

Analysts said the student protests face formidable obstacles before they can extract concessions from Modi’s government. Yet the protests, the government’s refusal to hold any of its own accountable and the crackdown have also embellished a charge that the prime minister has long faced from critics and opposition parties – that although he is elected democratically, he behaves like an autocrat.

‘Protests will continue’

After dark on Monday, Abhijeet Dipke – the leader of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a political pressure group that called the march – returned to a torn-down stage at the CJP’s main protest site near Jantar Mantar, an 18th-century observatory that is now an important location for protests.

“This barbaric Delhi police has beaten up our students and comrades. We are heartbroken,” he said, addressing about 2,000 protesters who stayed back after the crackdown. “We will continue to resist and demand accountability from the government. We will not back down until Dharmendra Pradhan resigns.”

Dipke told the protesters that the Delhi police “brutally cracked down to crush our hopes” that Pradhan would resign. “It was only our first call to march,” he said. “There will be more. Do not lose hope.”

Volunteers began to pick up rubbish, tie a tent together and sweep the road at the Jantar Mantar site. This is where more than 100 protesters from student unions have been sleeping for nearly a month to join Sonam Wangchuk, a prominent activist, on a hunger strike to seek the minister’s resignation.

The police also rampaged through these student unions’ tarpaulin tents and belongings on Monday.

The movement gained momentum last week after the police forcibly removed Wangchuk from the protest site and restricted him to a government-run hospital, where he remains. His family and the CJP have called it “illegal detention”, but the Delhi High Court has refused immediate relief.

Wangchuk, 59, broke his hunger strike before the march on Monday; however, later he said he would be at it again after “seeing the brutality” against “peacefully protesting students”.

The Delhi police have filed at least five criminal cases against protesters related to violence, stone-throwing and vandalism during the march.

Meeting with government a ‘waste of time’

Before the march, CJP leaders said the government reached out for talks.

As thousands of demonstrators assembled in New Delhi, two CJP spokespeople met JP Nadda, India’s health minister, to convey the movement’s three demands: Pradhan’s immediate resignation, Wangchuk’s discharge from hospital and compensation of nearly $105,000 for the families of those students who died by suicide.

However, they were disillusioned by sunset. “It was a waste of our time,” said Ashutosh Ranka, a CJP spokesperson. “We were made to wait for four hours, and the minister met us for 10 minutes.”

Nadda said he met with the spokespeople “in a cordial atmosphere”, adding that he “requested all the protesters to end their sit-in and assist the administration in restoring normalcy”.

Some students have been calling for the decentralisation of the protests, so they could move beyond the CJP to demand accountability from the government.

And political analysts who spoke with Al Jazeera said maintaining the credibility of the CJP’s leadership remains one of the biggest immediate hurdles for the movement in the face of an unprecedented crowd turnout for the march.

Confronting a ‘strong man’

Since the police forcibly removed Wangchuk from the protest site, the movement and demonstrators have called on Modi to resign. Slogans targeting the prime minister reverberated through central New Delhi on Monday.

The large number of protesters “is itself a big challenge to the prime minister”, said Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, an author and Modi biographer.

As of now, he told Al Jazeera, “Modi has decided to continue with his instinctive response of not giving any concessions to protesters and continuing to project himself as a strong man with completely unshakeable will.”

The biographer added that the prime minister, who has been in power since 2014, “does not care before crushing a protest or using brute force until it cuts through his voting constituencies”.

“They will go by their gut response of a crackdown. Modi would not want to emerge from this with a bloody nose,” he added, “despite a lot of anger among youth, which shows the undercurrent of anti-incumbency.”

The simmering anger found a vent as Gen Z rallied behind a joke, the Cockroach Janta Party, after India’s chief justice equated government critics and unemployed youth to “cockroaches” and “parasites”.

Memes, online rants and students taking photos in front of police have flooded the internet in India, where they expressed anguish and took digs at the police crackdown.

Meghnad S, a YouTuber, was among the crowd of thousands in front of the Indian Parliament on Monday.

“It was insanity, and the crowd was really riled up due to police actions. It was cruel,” he told Al Jazeera from the protest site on Monday night. “But movements are always messy. This is very difficult to control. We are all cockroaches, after all. And we are still swarming here.”

By Tuesday morning, the crowd had packed the site yet again. The cockroaches had returned.

South Korea’s proposed cooperation with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is aimed at enhancing their own respective contributions to global peace and stability, Seoul’s foreign ministry said Tuesday, in its first response to recent concerns by Russia over what it described as growing military cooperation between Seoul and NATO.

“Cooperation between South Korea and NATO is aimed at strengthening each side’s capabilities across various sectors, including defense industry, new technologies and cybersecurity, so as to reinforce each side’s role and contribution to international peace and stability,” the ministry told Yonhap News Agency in a written statement.

“In addition, our government continues to hold necessary communication with the Russian side to stably manage South Korea-Russia relations and protect our people and companies,” it added.

Russia’s foreign ministry has expressed displeasure over Seoul’s deepening military cooperation with NATO, according to Russia’s Tass news agency.

“The Russian side expressed serious concern over Seoul’s growing drift toward NATO, as demonstrated, among other things, by the Republic of Korea’s practical steps to deepen military and military-technical cooperation with NATO, the consequences of which pose a threat to Russia’s security,” the ministry said in a statement Thursday.

Moscow further argued that Seoul’s growing cooperation with NATO made it a “de facto participant in NATO’s qualitative and quantitative rearmament process, as the alliance has openly declared its preparations for war with Russia.”

The Russian statement came after South Korean President Lee Jae Myung attended the NATO summit in Ankara earlier this month as one of the alliance’s four Asia-Pacific partners, marking his first appearance at NATO’s annual top-level gathering.

At a NATO summit defense industry forum, Lee proposed elevating South Korea-NATO defense cooperation to a “Korea-NATO Defense Industry Partnership 2.0″ to expand cooperation beyond weapons system transactions to joint research, production and operation in the defense sector.

“Our government is pushing for cooperation with various countries and international organizations, including NATO, under its principle of pursuing practical diplomacy centered on national interests,” the foreign ministry said.

Still, it added, “The country will continue to closely work with the international community while closely monitoring the related developments, as the prolonged Russia-Ukraine war and the military cooperation between North Korea and Russia are issues that have a negative effect on international peace and security on the Korean Peninsula and the region.”

Pyongyang and Moscow have repeatedly and publicly reaffirmed their commitment to strengthening their bilateral cooperation since signing a comprehensive strategic partnership treaty two years ago.

North Korea has also sent around 15,000 combat troops and conventional weapons to Russia to support Moscow’s war against Ukraine, Seoul’s spy agency has said.

Copyright (c) Yonhap News Agency prohibits its content from being redistributed or reprinted without consent, and forbids the content from being learned and used by artificial intelligence systems.

Arizona voters head to the polls on Tuesday to choose party nominees in races that could help determine who controls the US House of Representatives and whether Republicans can flip one of the country’s most competitive Democratic governorships.

Once considered reliably Republican, Arizona has swung between the two parties in recent election cycles. Democrat Joe Biden narrowly won the state in 2020, while Donald Trump reclaimed it in the 2024 presidential election.

The biggest contest is the Republican primary for governor, where four candidates are competing to challenge Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs in November. The results will also set up key congressional races in one of the country’s most closely watched battleground states.

Here’s what to know.

When will polls open and close?

Polls will open at 6am (13:00 GMT) and most will close at 7pm (02:00 GMT on Wednesday). Anyone in line by 7pm may vote.

Who can vote?

Registered Democrats and Republicans can vote only in their own party’s primary, while independent voters can choose whether to vote in either the Democratic or Republican contest.

There are about 4.3m registered voters in Arizona, including roughly 1.5m Republicans, 1.2m Democrats and 1.5m independents or voters not affiliated with either major party.

What races are on the ballot?

Arizona voters will choose party nominees for governor, congressional seats, state offices, including secretary of state, attorney general, treasurer and state superintendent of public instruction, and all 30 seats in the state Senate and all 60 seats in the state House of Representatives.

Who is running for governor?

One of the most anticipated races is the Republican primary for governor, where four candidates are competing to challenge Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs in November. Hobbs, who is running for her second term, is one of only two Democratic governors seeking re-election this year in states Trump carried in 2024.

While four Republicans are on the ballot, the race has largely become a showdown between Andy Biggs and David Schweikert, two longtime congressmen who represent competing visions for the future of Arizona’s Republican Party.

Biggs, a former chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, is closely aligned with Trump and has built his campaign around the president’s agenda. He was among the Republicans who sought to block Congress from certifying Biden’s 2020 election victory and has long been associated with the party’s most conservative wing. Trump endorsed Biggs after previously backing another Republican candidate who later dropped out of the race.

Schweikert has also supported many of Trump’s priorities in Congress, but has cast himself as a more pragmatic conservative. Representing one of Arizona’s most competitive congressional districts, he argues Republicans have lost ground in the state by nominating candidates seen by voters as too extreme.

What are the congressional races to watch?

The primary will also decide who will compete for Arizona’s open 1st Congressional District, a seat left open after Representative David Schweikert decided to run for governor. Covering Scottsdale and northeastern Phoenix, it is expected to be one of the state’s most competitive races in November and could play a role in deciding which party controls the House.

Republicans are choosing between state Representative Joseph Chaplik, former NFL kicker and sportscaster Jay Feely, who has Trump’s endorsement, and technology executive John Trobough.

On the Democratic side, doctor and former state Representative Amish Shah, who narrowly lost to Schweikert in 2024, is competing against former news anchor Marlene Galan-Woods. The registered Republican until 2018 is the widow of former Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods, a prominent Republican who later became a vocal Trump critic.

She is being backed by the national party, which backed Shah in 2024. Publisher Rick McCartney and entrepreneur Jonathan Treble are also on the ballot. Another closely watched House race is in Arizona’s 6th Congressional District, where Republican Representative Juan Ciscomani is seeking a third term against Democrat JoAnna Mendoza, a Marine Corps veteran. Both are unopposed in Tuesday’s primaries and will face each other in November in what’s expected to be one of the Democrats’ best opportunities to flip a Republican-held seat as they try to regain control of the House.

How are Israel and Gaza shaping the Arizona primaries?

The Democratic Party’s growing divisions over Israel’s war in Gaza are becoming apparent in some of Arizona’s congressional primaries, where candidates have clashed over US support for Israel and the direction of the party’s foreign policy. Two races in particular illustrate those tensions.

In Arizona’s 4th Congressional District, which is considered reliably blue, Representative Greg Stanton faces a primary challenge from progressive candidate Kai Newkirk. He has made US support for Israel a central issue in his campaign, arguing that Stanton has been too supportive.

Stanton, a staunch supporter of Israel who has been endorsed by AIPAC, recently voted against a proposal to restrict US military aid to Israel. According to Track AIPAC, an advocacy group that monitors pro-Israel political spending, Stanton has received about $322,000 in donations linked to AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups.

In the neighbouring 3rd Congressional District, Representative Yassamin Ansari has dramatically changed her position on Israel since first running for Congress, reflecting the changing dynamics within the broader Democratic Party.

Ansari received support from Democratic Majority for Israel in her closely fought 2024 primary, but has since become a sharp critic of Israel’s war in Gaza and said she will no longer accept backing from the group or AIPAC.

When will the results be announced?

Polls close at 7pm on Tuesday (02:00 GMT on Wednesday) across most of Arizona, although no results can be released until 8pm local time (03:00 GMT on Wednesday). Because Arizona conducts most voting by mail or through early voting, counties typically report a large share of ballots shortly after polls close.

More than 755,000 ballots had already been cast before election day.

Most races are expected to become clearer during the first few hours of counting, although close contests could take longer if additional mail ballots need to be processed.

SACRAMENTO — California has spent millions of dollars to combat sex trafficking, and yet it can still be found in every city and town, hiding in plain sight.

Whether it’s online, on places such as Figueroa Street in L.A. or Stockton Boulevard in Sacramento, or even in the hotel rooms where our World Cup guests stayed, there are thousands of women and girls being sexually exploited in California right now, despite all that money and all the resources it has purchased.

“The reality is that few threats to a woman’s safety are as brutal or as overlooked as sex trafficking,” First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom said Monday, sitting with her husband, the governor, in a tiny second-floor dance studio built for survivors of trafficking.

Siebel Newsom was there to watch Newsom sign an executive order that was driven by her work as an advocate for survivors of trafficking. On its surface, the order may not sound like much and isn’t likely to make the news. It calls for most of the major state agencies to come up with a plan within 60 days to work together to curb trafficking and help survivors.

Hardly an earth-shattering demand. But believe it or not, one of the biggest barriers that our state faces, in this great age of technology and always-on connection, is that there is little collaboration between the folks fighting traffickers.

Yes, we have about 35 task forces statewide working on this issue and sometimes they run joint operations. But more often, those fighting trafficking live in their own silos, doing their own work, and often failing or refusing to share even scant details with other jurisdictions.

The same holds true for the many organizations that work with survivors, most of which have come on the scene only in the last few decades as sex trafficking morphed from a crime in which children were viewed as complicit to one in which we understand that they are victims.

Those organizations often do great work, but they too often do it alone. A survivor — or a girl being trafficked and looking for escape — has no easy way to find someone to help her. It’s largely luck, the right outreach person in the right place at the right time, or a cop who has taken the time and care to know what the resources are.

“We are so fragmented,” Sharmin Bock told the governor. She’s a former prosecutor in Alameda County who tried the first sex trafficking case in the U.S. Now, she’s advising the first partner on how California can do a better job fighting the predators — traffickers and buyers alike — who daily trade cash for the use of a human body, willing or not.

Bock points out that while those fighting against trafficking lack collaboration, the opposite is true of the criminals. Up and down the state, they are organized. A trafficker might pick up his victim in one city, only to transport her to another city to meet buyers. Victims are moved often, and even sold or traded to other traffickers.

Once a victim crosses a jurisdictional line, everything that happened on the other side of it too often gets lost in the nowhere land of bureaucracy and red tape. A move from Los Angeles to Riverside, and the girl might as well be in Taiwan, as Bock puts it.

“We need to stop asking whose case is this, and rather ask how do we solve this case together? How do we solve the problem together?” Bock said. “Collaboration recovers children sooner, links investigation, dismantles trafficking organizations and holds traffickers accountable. A trafficker should never escape accountability because critical information was sitting in another agency’s database.”

So while Newsom’s demand for a 60-day plan might not sound like much, it goes to the heart of what ails the system.

“Traffickers collaborate every day,” Bock said. “Traffickers have built networks to exploit children. We must build stronger networks to protect them.”

Newsom drew a parallel to the plague of retail theft that captivated the state not long ago, and which the state has successfully combated. Though careful to draw the obvious line that stealing a tube of toothpaste is a far cry from sexually exploiting a child, he pointed out similarities — online platforms that turned a blind eye, a lack of coordination between agencies, criminals that knew how to exploit not just victims, but systems.

Now he’s looking for that kind of “momentum,” to solve this most stubborn of abuses.

“For the last few years, I thought I could buy my way out of this,” Newsom said with a shocking bit of honesty, pointing to all that budget money that has been invested. But, he said, he’s clear now that it’s not a money problem. It’s a people problem.

“How is that possible? “ the governor wondered. The executive order, he said, is about saying “enough of just good intentions … we’re not delivering fundamental results.”

A report at the end of 60 days isn’t results. But it’s an acknowledgment that California needs to do better, and a road map to get there.

That’s crucial. Like Siebel Newsom and the governor, I’ve got two teenage daughters and I know just how vulnerable girls are, in the best of circumstances.

With all our resources and good intentions, California can’t continue to let predators win simply because they’re more organized.

Personal information of all South Korean diplomats was presumed to be leaked due to a data breach at an online education system run by an institution affiliated with the foreign ministry, officials said Tuesday.

The ministry disclosed Monday it had been notified by a relevant government agency in early February about suspicious access to the online education system of the Korea National Diplomatic Academy (KNDA). Upon the notification, the ministry shut down the system, which has remained offline since. An investigation is under way.

The data breach was presumed to affect all ministry personnel, including retirees, an official at the foreign ministry said, noting the system held approximately 10,000 records of personal data.

An unidentified hacker is believed to have gained access to the server sometime between April and May last year, and maintained that access until February.

The compromised server is believed to have stored educational videos and information on trainees, including their names, user IDs, positions, email addresses and encrypted passwords. Officials from other government agencies who had been deployed to South Korea’s overseas missions may also be among those affected, given that they occasionally use the system.

No “sensitive personal data,” such as identification numbers, mobile phone numbers or home addresses, appeared to be affected, the ministry official said, noting that there may be some overlap among the individuals whose information was compromised.

The official said the ministry could not yet confirm whether all the data stored in the system had been compromised, adding that the 10,000 figure represents the maximum possible number of cases affected.

The ministry currently lacks the technical analysis needed to identify the attacker, the official said.

“We do not rule out any possibility, including involvement by overseas hacker groups,” the official added. “We regard this as a situation with implications for national security.”

Copyright (c) Yonhap News Agency prohibits its content from being redistributed or reprinted without consent, and forbids the content from being learned and used by artificial intelligence systems.

Andy Burnham has officially begun his tenure as Britain’s prime minister with something few of his recent predecessors enjoyed: breathing room. After replacing Keir Starmer as Labour leader and becoming the United Kingdom’s seventh prime minister in just a decade, Burnham inherits an economy burdened by weak growth, strained public services and persistent cost-of-living pressures. Yet, unlike the turbulent starts experienced by previous leaders, financial markets have greeted his arrival with surprising calm.

That early confidence may prove one of Burnham’s greatest assets—or one of his greatest tests.

A Different Kind of Labour Leader

Burnham enters Downing Street with a political identity distinct from his predecessor. During his time as Mayor of Greater Manchester, he cultivated an image as a champion of regional development and public investment, earning the nickname “King of the North.”

Unlike Starmer’s cautious approach to fiscal management, Burnham has promised to “rewire Britain” through greater devolution, investment in public services, re-industrialisation and stronger local government.

Such promises normally raise concerns among investors wary of higher public spending. Yet markets have remained remarkably composed.

British government bond yields have stayed close to 5%, while sterling has strengthened against the euro since Burnham emerged as Labour’s preferred successor. Investors appear reassured by his commitment to maintaining Britain’s existing fiscal rules rather than pursuing aggressive borrowing.

Why Markets Are Staying Calm

Several factors explain why investors have not reacted negatively.

First, Burnham has avoided announcing sweeping fiscal changes during his first days in office. Instead, he has focused on politically popular issues such as healthcare, homelessness, defence and regional economic development.

Second, his appointment of former Defence Secretary John Healey as Chancellor suggests continuity rather than confrontation with financial markets.

More importantly, many economists believe economic policy will remain closely directed by Downing Street rather than being driven independently by the Treasury, reducing uncertainty over Britain’s fiscal direction.

This perception matters because markets today are extremely sensitive to fiscal credibility.

The Shadow of Liz Truss

Any discussion of British economic policy inevitably returns to September 2022.

Former Prime Minister Liz Truss’s unfunded tax-cutting budget triggered one of the worst government bond sell-offs in modern British history. Pension funds came under severe pressure, forcing the Bank of England to intervene to stabilise markets.

That episode fundamentally changed how investors assess UK fiscal policy.

The International Monetary Fund recently concluded that the crisis permanently increased the risk premium investors demand for holding British government debt. In other words, markets now react far more aggressively to any sign of fiscal irresponsibility.

Burnham understands this reality.

His repeated commitment to existing borrowing rules appears designed to reassure investors that Labour will not repeat past mistakes.

The Economic Tailwinds

Burnham also benefits from several favourable developments that could buy his government valuable time.

Inflation has moderated compared with previous years, reducing immediate pressure on the Bank of England to tighten monetary policy further.

Energy prices have also eased relative to their crisis peaks, while upcoming regulatory adjustments may further reduce household energy costs.

Another important advantage comes from the fiscal restraint maintained under former Chancellor Rachel Reeves.

Her adherence to strict borrowing limits has substantially reduced planned government debt issuance this year, giving Burnham more flexibility to adjust spending priorities without immediately alarming financial markets.

In effect, Burnham inherits a stronger fiscal starting position than many expected.

The Difficult Choices Ahead

Those advantages, however, are unlikely to last indefinitely.

Britain still faces sluggish productivity, weak investment, deteriorating public infrastructure and mounting demands for higher defence spending.

Burnham has also hinted at broader reforms that could eventually test investor confidence, including:

• Greater public control over utilities.
• Property tax reform.
• Increased defence spending.
• Adjustments to frozen income tax thresholds.
• Possible changes to National Insurance contributions.
• Expanded regional investment programmes.

Each proposal carries fiscal implications.

Delivering meaningful improvements in living standards while maintaining market confidence will require careful balancing.

The Reform UK Factor

Politics may ultimately shape economic policy more than economics itself.

Although Labour has changed leaders, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK continues to perform strongly in opinion polls.

If Burnham adopts an overly cautious approach that fails to improve public services or living standards, Reform could continue gaining political momentum.

That creates a dilemma.

Markets generally favour fiscal discipline, but voters increasingly demand visible economic change.

Burnham must therefore find a middle ground: ambitious enough to convince voters Labour can improve daily life, yet disciplined enough to convince investors Britain’s finances remain under control.

Why It Matters

Burnham’s premiership begins at a pivotal moment for Britain.

Economic growth remains weak, public confidence in government is fragile, and geopolitical uncertainty—from rising defence commitments to global trade disruptions—continues to weigh on the outlook.

Unlike many of his predecessors, Burnham enjoys a brief window of goodwill from financial markets. Whether he can convert that goodwill into lasting economic reform without unsettling investors may determine not only Labour’s electoral fortunes but also Britain’s broader economic trajectory.

Analysis

The first major test will come with Burnham’s autumn budget.

Investors will closely examine whether his government maintains fiscal discipline while introducing the reforms needed to revive growth and address Britain’s long-standing structural problems.

Markets will also monitor whether Labour can improve economic conditions quickly enough to halt the rise of Reform UK. If opinion polls continue shifting toward Nigel Farage’s party, investors may begin pricing in greater political uncertainty, reviving memories of the volatility seen during the Liz Truss government.

For now, Burnham has been handed two valuable gifts: investor patience and fiscal breathing space. Whether those advantages become the foundation of a successful premiership or simply a temporary reprieve will depend on the difficult choices his government makes over the coming months.

With information from Reuters.