Politics

Nov. 25 (UPI) — A diplomatic controversy with the United States spilled into Chile’s presidential campaign after the new U.S. ambassador, Brandon Judd, used his first public appearance to level sharp criticism at President Gabriel Boric, prompting a formal protest from the government.

During his initial press conference, Judd directly accused the Chilean president of “damaging the bilateral relationship” and undermining investment and strategic cooperation with the United States.

He said he was “disappointed” by Boric’s criticism of President Donald Trump‘s environmental policy and argued that such remarks “harm the Chilean people.”

He also made an explicit reference to the election, saying that “with governments that are ideologically aligned, it will be easier to work,” a comment widely interpreted as support for far-right candidate José Antonio Kast.

The government of Gabriel Boric responded with a formal note of protest.

Foreign Minister Alberto van Klaveren called the ambassador’s remarks “inappropriate and unfortunate” and said his comments on the political process “amount to interference in our country’s internal affairs,” a message delivered to the U.S. Embassy’s chargé d’affaires.

Regarding the issue, left-wing candidate Jeannette Jara said, “Chile doesn’t need any granddaddy looking after it, and that goes for the Americans, as well as any other country,” Emol reported.

She added that her government would maintain good relations with everyone, but expects “Chile’s sovereignty to be respected, as well.”

Right-wing candidate Kast questioned Judd’s intervention, but focused his criticism on the Chilean government.

“Every time our president leaves Chile, he creates a conflict with some foreign country,” he said. He then directed a message at the administration.

“Spend your time solving problems with other governments instead of sending protest notes,” Kast said.

In the hours that followed, the issue moved into Congress.

Opposition lawmakers urged Boric to receive the new ambassador’s credentials before the end of the month, arguing that the ceremony signals seriousness, stability and a normalization of the bilateral relationship to investors and partners.

The president of the Communist Party, Lautaro Carmona, accused the ambassador of interfering in the election by “indicating that one candidate would be better than another for the United States.”

At the center of the dispute are Chile’s regulatory rules.

Judd has argued that Chilean bureaucracy is delaying U.S. projects ready to invest, linking the political climate to the business environment and the need for clear timelines.

That narrative has seeped into the campaign, where credentials, protocol and signals to investors have become points of dispute and tools for political positioning before the electorate.

Chile’s presidential runoff will be held Dec. 14. Polls show Kast with a wide lead.

\o7 WASHINGTON\f7 —  Here is a chronology of major events that led up to Wednesday’s resignation of House Speaker Jim Wright (D-Tex.). May 18, 1988–Common Cause, a citizens lobbying group, calls for a formal House ethics investigation of Wright, citing possible improprieties in the publication and sale of his 1986 book, “Reflections of a Public Man.”

May 26, 1988–Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) files a formal complaint with the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, or Ethics Committee as it is known, requesting a probe of the Speaker’s financial dealings.

June 9, 1988–The Ethics Committee, after an eight-hour session lasting late into the evening, votes unanimously to conduct a broad investigation of Wright.

Sept. 14, 1988–Wright testifies before the committee in closed session.

Feb. 22, 1989–After more than six months of investigation and statements from 73 witnesses, committee special counsel Richard J. Phelan submits a 279-page report to the panel on his findings.

April 13, 1989–Wright, in an impassioned House speech, denies that he wrongfully accepted gifts from a business associate or sought to evade House limits on outside income through sales of his book.

April 17, 1989–The Ethics Committee announces it has found “probable cause” to charge Wright with 69 violations of House rules, including acceptance of $145,000 in improper gifts from Ft. Worth developer George A. Mallick Jr. and attempts to evade House limits on honorariums by selling copies of his book to trade associations and other groups in lieu of accepting speaking fees.

May 2, 1989–Wright, denying he knowingly violated any rules, publicly appeals for an early hearing on misconduct charges to “present my side,” but committee members say they first must complete their investigation into other allegations.

May 9, 1989–Wright and a team of attorneys launch his defense against misconduct charges by criticizing the fairness of Phelan’s investigation, charging that it distorted the evidence to place Wright in the harshest light.

May 10, 1989–Ethics Committee votes to expand its inquiry to look into a Texas oil well deal that gave Wright a quick profit of $340,000 last year.

May 23, 1989–At a formal committee hearing, Wright’s attorney, Stephen D. Susman of Houston, asks panel members to drop the major charges against Wright on grounds his actions did not constitute violations of House rules of conduct.

May 24, 1989–Congressional supporters of Wright, working behind the scenes, fail to win agreement from committee members to reduce charges against the Speaker in return for his promise to resign office. Wright later disavows any interest in a “deal” on the charges.

May 31, 1989–In an impassioned one-hour address on the House floor, Wright offers to resign his House seat and his speakership and calls on his colleagues to halt the ethics attacks on opposing party members.

Nov. 25 (UPI) — The European Court of Justice ruled Thursday that European Union member nations must recognize the same-sex marriages of couples relocating from another EU state, even if same-sex unions are not permitted under their domestic law.

Judges in the court in Luxembourg, ruling in the case of two men lawfully married in Germany who were denied recognition of their union by authorities in Poland on their return to their home country, said it violated their fundamental right to a “normal family life,” the ECJ said in a news release.

The case was referred to the ECJ by Poland’s Supreme Court where the men were appealing against authorities’ refusal to transcribe their German marriage certificate into the civil register so that their marriage would be recognized, on grounds same-sex marriage is not legal in Poland.

Poland is a largely Catholic, socially conservative nation where LGBT rights are highly controversial import from permissive societies and LGBT-free zones are common.

The landmark decision said that while rules governing marriage fell under individual member states’ domestic law, they must comply with EU law in exercising that power.

Given EU citizens’ right to move and reside in any of the 27 member nations, couples who have built a family life in a host country “must have the certainty to be able to pursue that family life upon returning to their member state of origin,” the ruling said.

The judge said that where couples had opted to move, bans may cause serious inconvenience at administrative, professional and private levels, forcing spouses to “live as unmarried persons” in their own country.

“Such a refusal is contrary to EU law. It infringes not only the freedom to move and reside, but also the fundamental right to respect for private and family life,” the ruling states.

However, while the decision sets a precedent for recognition of same-sex marriage across the bloc it only mandates equal treatment of marriages conducted abroad, regardless of the sex of the couples.

It does not override national laws prohibiting same-sex marriage or require member states to provide for marriage between persons of the same sex.

The matter now returns to the Polish court, which must instruct authorities to officially recognize the couple’s marriage, but it can decide how that is done.

The case is an extension of a historic 2018 ECJ ruling that said married same-sex couples who were EU citizens had the legal right to live in any EU country, including nations that did not recognize same-sex unions.

Of the bloc’s 27 member states. at least two — Slovakia and Hungary — have legal or constitutional bans on same-sex marriage.

However, both allow same-sex couples a mechanism for their relationship to be legally recognized.

WASHINGTON — During a political career that spanned three decades, former Sen. John Tower, who died Friday in a plane crash at the age of 65, was a recognized leader on defense policy. Yet he surely will be remembered as a tragic figure–the man whose alleged preference for wine and women prevented him from becoming defense secretary.

It was just two years ago this week that the Senate, where Tower had served as the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, decided in a close but humiliating vote to deny him his life’s ambition to head up the Pentagon.

He recently got his revenge by writing an intensely bitter book, aptly titled “Consequences: A Personal Memoir,” which savaged his many political enemies. A spokesman for his office in Dallas said he was on his way to Sea Island, Ga., for a party to promote the book when he died.

Tower was no ordinary politician. He was a man of unquestioned intellect with an extraordinary grasp of national security issues–the man to whom President Ronald Reagan turned in 1985 to negotiate a nuclear arms agreement with the Soviet Union and in 1987 to conduct the initial investigation of the Iran-Contra affair.

But he was also a highly complex personality who often rubbed people the wrong way. Many people believed that his sensitivity about his 5-foot-5-inch stature led to his many affectations–fancy clothes, beautiful women and expensive liquor.

Tower, a Dallas Republican, had been a political science professor before being elected to the Senate in 1961 at age 35. He replaced then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, and his election represented a breakthrough for Republicans in the South at the time.

His mastery of defense issues and his ability to outsmart his political opponents made him a formidable force in the Senate. He initially was a staunch conservative but gradually moderated his views of government and later referred to himself as a “pragmatic.”

As a leading Republican and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, he was the primary proponent of Reagan’s military buildup. On Friday, Reagan issued a statement saying: “Though he will be remembered for many accomplishments, none will stand as tall as his commitment to a strong national defense.”

In California, President Bush called the death “a tragic loss.”

“I started with John Tower in politics in Texas 30 years ago,” Bush said, “and we became friends then, and we remain friends until this very moment. It’s very sad.”

From the day in 1984 that Tower resigned from the Senate after three terms, he let it be known that he aspired to serve as defense secretary. Instead, Reagan called on him first to serve as chief U.S. arms control negotiator in Geneva and later to head a commission that investigated the Iran-Contra affair.

Despite Tower’s loyalty to Reagan, the final report of the Tower Commission was by no means a whitewash of the Iran-Contra scandal. The panel’s findings were eventually corroborated by a lengthy congressional investigation. Moreover, the commission harshly criticized Reagan for paying too little attention to the policies of his Administration.

It was not until George Bush was elected President that Tower finally got his wish to be nominated as defense secretary. At first, he appeared to be a shoo-in. Never in the history of the Senate had it rejected a nominee who once had served in that body.

But, gradually, opposition grew as the Senate deliberated on the nomination for three months. Sordid stories of heavy drinking and womanizing were leaked to the press by senators who were given access to the findings of an FBI investigation into his background.

Tower denied most of the allegations and insisted that he did not have an alcohol problem. But he volunteered to quit drinking if confirmed.

Much of the derogatory information about Tower’s personal habits was derived from acrimonious divorce proceedings with his second wife, Lilla Burt Cummins.

“I went through a 90-day character assassination campaign,” Tower recently told the Washington Post, recalling his ordeal. “No public figure has been held up so much to scrutiny and has been so publicly pilloried as I have, without ever having been accused of anything very, very serious.”

The Senate was bitterly divided on the day it defeated the Tower nomination by a vote of 53 to 47, making him only the eighth Cabinet nominee in the history of the nation to be rejected by the Senate.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who was named to the job after Tower was rejected, said Friday, “Our victory in Operation Desert Shield was due in part to men like John Tower and their vision . . . .”

In retrospect, some analysts saw Tower as a victim of a changing morality standard in American politics–the arrival of a new era in which public men are held accountable for their private lives. Others said Tower was simply being repaid for the arrogance and contempt he had shown for some senators during his 23 years in the Senate.

But Tower himself blamed one person: Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), who as chairman of the Armed Services Committee lobbied hard against the nomination of his former colleague. In his book, Tower accused Nunn of blind ambition, arrogance and duplicity.

Since his defeat, Tower had been living in Dallas. At the time of his death, he was working as a consultant and as chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. In December, Dorothy Heyser, the woman whom he described as a “girlfriend” and who stayed by his side throughout the Senate confirmation hearings, married another man.

From his first marriage to Lou Bullington, Tower had three daughters, Penny, Marian and Jeanne. He remained close to them, and they frequently appeared with him during his confirmation hearings. Marian died with him in the plane crash.

WASHINGTON — The Texas redistricting case now before the Supreme Court turns on a question that often divides judges: Were the voting districts drawn based on politics, or race?

The answer, likely to come in a few days, could shift five congressional seats and tip political control of the House of Representatives after next year’s midterm elections.

Justice Samuel A. Alito, who oversees appeals from Texas, put a temporary hold on a judicial ruling that branded the newly drawn Texas voting map a “racial gerrymander.”

The state’s lawyers asked for a decision by Monday, noting that candidates have a Dec. 8 deadline to file for election.

They said the judges violated the so-called Purcell principle by making major changes in the election map “midway through the candidate filing period,” and that alone calls for blocking it.

Texas Republicans have reason to be confident the court’s conservative majority will side with them.

“We start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” Alito wrote for a 6-3 majority last year in a South Carolina case.

That state’s Republican lawmakers had moved tens of thousands of Black voters in or out of newly drawn congressional districts and said they did so not because of their race but because they were likely to vote as Democrats.

In 2019, the conservatives upheld partisan gerrymandering by a 5-4 vote, ruling that drawing election districts is a “political question” left to states and their lawmakers, not judges.

All the justices — conservative and liberal — say drawing districts based on the race of the voters violates the Constitution and its ban on racial discrimination. But the conservatives say it’s hard to separate race from politics.

They also looked poised to restrict the reach of the Voting Rights Act in a pending case from Louisiana.

For decades, the civil rights law has sometimes required states to draw one or more districts that would give Black or Latino voters a fair chance to “elect representatives of their choice.”

The Trump administration joined in support of Louisiana’s Republicans in October and claimed the voting rights law has been “deployed as a form of electoral race-based affirmative action” that should be ended.

If so, election law experts warned that Republican-led states across the South could erase the districts of more than a dozen Black Democrats who serve in Congress.

The Texas mid-decade redistricting case did not look to trigger a major legal clash because the partisan motives were so obvious.

In July, President Trump called for Texas Republicans to redraw the state map of 38 congressional districts in order to flip five seats to oust Democrats and replace them with Republicans.

At stake was control of the closely divided House after the 2026 midterm elections.

Gov. Greg Abbott agreed, and by the end of August, he signed into law a map with redrawn districts in and around Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio.

But last week federal judges, in a 2-1 decision, blocked the new map from taking effect, ruling that it appeared to be unconstitutional.

“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics,” wrote U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown in the opening of a 160-page opinion. “To be sure, politics played a role” but “substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map.”

He said the strongest evidence came from Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration’s top civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department. She had sent Abbott a letter on July 7 threatening legal action if the state did not dismantle four “coalition districts.”

This term, which was unfamiliar to many, referred to districts where no racial or ethnic group had a majority. In one Houston district that was targeted, 45% of the eligible voters were Black and 25% were Latino. In a nearby district, 38% of voters were Black and 30% were Latino.

She said the Trump administration views these as “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders,” citing a recent ruling by the conservative 5th Circuit Court.

The Texas governor then cited these “constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice” when he called for the special session of the Legislature to redraw the state map.

Voting rights advocates saw a violation.

“They said their aim was to get rid of the coalition districts. And to do so, they had to draw new districts along racial lines,” said Chad Dunn, a Texas attorney and legal director of UCLA’s Voting Rights Project.

Brown, a Trump appointee from Galveston, wrote that Dhillon was “clearly wrong” in believing these coalition districts were unconstitutional, and he said the state was wrong to rely on her advice as basis for redrawing its election map.

He was joined by a second district judge in putting the new map on hold and requiring the state to use the 2021 map that had been drawn by the same Texas Republicans.

The third judge on the panel was Jerry Smith, a Reagan appointee on the 5th Circuit Court, and he issued an angry 104-page dissent. Much of it was devoted to attacking Brown and liberals such as 95-year-old investor and philanthropist George Soros and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“In 37 years as a federal judge, I’ve served on hundreds of three-judge panels. This is the most blatant exercise of judicial activism that I have ever witnessed,” Smith wrote. “The main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are George Soros and Gavin Newsom. The obvious losers are the People of Texas.”

The “obvious reason for the 2025 redistricting, of course, is partisan gain,” Smith wrote, adding that “Judge Brown commits grave error in concluding that the Texas Legislature is more bigoted than political.”

Most federal cases go before a district judge, and they may be appealed first to a U.S. appeals court and then the Supreme Court.
Election-related cases are different. A three-judge panel weighs the facts and issues a ruling, which then goes directly to the Supreme Court to be affirmed or reversed.

Late Friday, Texas attorneys filed an emergency appeal and asked the justices to put on hold the decision by Brown.

The first paragraph of their 40-page appeal noted that Texas is not alone in pursuing a political advantage by redrawing its election maps.

“California is working to add more Democratic seats to its congressional delegation to offset the new Texas districts, despite Democrats already controlling 43 out of 52 of California’s congressional seats,” they said.

They argued that the “last-minute disruption to state election procedures — and resulting candidate and voter confusion —demonstrates” the need to block the lower court ruling.

Election law experts question that claim. “This is a problem of Texas’ own making,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

The state opted for a fast-track, mid-decade redistricting at the behest of Trump.

On Monday, Dunn, the Texas voting rights attorney, responded to the state’s appeal and told the justices they should deny it.

“The election is over a year away. No one will be confused by using the map that has governed Texas’ congressional elections for the past four years,” he said.

“The governor of Texas called a special session to dismantle districts on account of their racial composition,” he said, and the judges heard clear and detailed evidence that lawmakers did just that.

In recent election disputes, however, the court’s conservatives have frequently invoked the Purcell principle to free states from new judicial rulings that came too close to the election.

Granting a stay would allow Texas to use its new GOP friendly map for the 2026 election.

The justices may then choose to hear arguments on the legal questions early next year.

Pressure over antisemitism allegations against the Berkeley school system intensified Monday with the launch of what members of Congress called a “nationwide investigation of antisemitism in K-12 schools.”

The first three districts to fall under scrutiny of the House Committee on Education and Workforce are the Berkeley Unified School District, Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia and the School District of Philadelphia.

“The Committee is deeply concerned” that Berkeley Unified is “failing to uphold its obligations” to “end any harassment, eliminate any hostile environment and its effects and prevent any harassment from recurring.”

In a letter sent Monday to Berkeley Unified, the committee cited “numerous press and whistleblower reports” alleging that since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack against Israel, “Jewish and Israeli students have allegedly been regularly bullied and harassed.”

Letters to the three school districts were signed by Committee Chair Tim Walberg (R-Mich). The letter to Berkeley Unified also was signed by Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education Subcommittee Chair Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin).

In addition to recounting allegations, the letters seek information, including:

• A chart of all complaints made against students, faculty or staff related to potential antisemitic incidents.
• All documents relating to walkouts, demonstrations, toolkits, workshops, curricula, course materials, speakers and more referring to Jews, Judaism, Israel, Palestine, Zionism or antisemitism.
• All documents related to contracts or agreements that refer to Jews, Judaism, Israel, Palestine, Zionism or antisemitism.

In a statement the district characterized the allegations as past incidents that had been dealt with.

“Today’s letter from the U.S. House Committee on Education concerns allegations raised almost 18 months ago,” the statement said. “The information sought in the current letter from the Committee concerns those old allegations. The District will, of course, respond appropriately to the Committee’s letter. Our commitment to the safety and well-being of all students in BUSD is unwavering.”

In May 2024, Supt. Enikia Ford Morthel testified in Congress about allegations of antisemitism.

At the time, Ford Morthel said her district had received formal complaints of antisemitism stemming from nine incidents and stressed that district leaders responded quickly to the accusations and launched investigations.

“Our babies sometimes say hurtful things,” she said. “We are mindful that all kids make mistakes. We know that our staff are not immune to missteps either, and we don’t ignore them when they occur,” Ford Morthel said. “However, antisemitism is not pervasive in Berkeley Unified School District.”

It’s difficult to determine from the letter the extent to which the allegations take in new incidents.

One of the most stark allegations is that officials permitted a rally in which some students shouted, “Kill the Jews.” Published reports indicate that such an incident was alleged to have occurred Oct. 18, 2023, more than two years ago.

This week’s letter does not contain dates of incidents, while alluding to an alleged inadequate district response.

In February of 2024, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Anti-Defamation League filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education alleging that Berkeley public schools ignored reports of bullying and harassment of Jewish students on the basis of their ethnicity, shared ancestry and national origin. District leaders, it alleged, “knowingly allowed” classrooms and schoolyards to become a “viciously hostile” environment.

That investigation was opened under the Biden administration and it remains active under the Trump administration, which has made alleged antisemitism a highlighted target of the federal enforcement — accompanied by the threat of fines and withdrawal of federal funding.

Berkeley Unified also faces an active U.S. Education Department probe alleging “severe and pervasive anti-Palestinian racism” affecting Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students. This complaint was filed in 2024 by the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American–Islamic Relations and American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

The allegations included that Arab and Muslim students “were taunted as ‘terrorists’ after teachers in class taught lessons referencing ‘terrorism.’”

A Philadelphia school district spokesperson said Monday that it was district policy not to comment on an active investigation.

Officials in Virginia pledged cooperation with the congressional inquiry.

In a statement, Fairfax County school officials noted the request for “information about potential antisemitic incidents occurring … since 2022.” The school system “intends to fully cooperate with Congressman Walberg’s inquiry” and “continues to partner with all families to provide a safe, supportive, and inclusive school environment for all students and staff members.”

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Nov. 25 (UPI) — Almost a year after the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime, the fate of the tens of thousands of people who were arbitrarily arrested or forcibly disappeared since the civil war began in 2011 remains unknown.

For their families, it is a deep, unhealed wound — a continuing tragedy that leaves them with little hope of learning what truly happened, let alone whether they will ever find their loved ones, dead or alive.

This is the case for Lina Salameh and her only son, Hicham, who would have turned 32 this year. He vanished without a trace after being arrested at a checkpoint in a Damascus southern suburb in 2015.

When the peaceful anti-regime protests broke out and soon escalated into a bloody civil war, the Salameh family decided to seek refuge in neighboring Lebanon. Two years later, Hicham was forced to return to Syria to renew his travel documents.

He was stopped at the Syrian border crossing, prevented from returning to Lebanon and instructed to go back to Damascus to have his case reviewed at a Military Intelligence branch.

His mother refused to let him go to the branch, fearing he would be arrested, and she rented a new house — away from their original home in the southern suburb of Maadamiyeh — to keep him out of sight of the security services.

But he was soon arrested at a checkpoint, and “since that day, we have never heard anything about him or his fate,” she told UPI in a telephone interview from Damascus.

Hicham’s ordeal and his family’s agony was only just beginning. The only piece of information came two years later, when a prisoner released from Saydnaya Military Prison called them to confirm that Hicham had been held with him in the notorious jail.

Despite rushing to the prison and paying pro-regime lawyer, who had promised to find out whether their son was actually in Saydnaya, and paying him between $600 and $1,000, Hicham’s family was never able to see or even locate him.

Others, claiming to have good connections with security officials, demanded $25,000 to secure his release. But the family did not have that much money.

“Anyway, these were all lies,” Lina Salameh said. Like many other families, she was a victim of manipulation and financial extortion.

The U.K.-based Syrian Network for Human Rights documented more than 181,000 people who were arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned or who forcibly disappeared between March 2011 and August 2025

Its founder, Fadel Abdul Ghany, said that Syria continues to face an overwhelming crisis of missing and detained persons and “the fact that these individuals are still listed as missing does not imply they are alive.”

Abdul Ghany said his network’s analysis and statements by the new authorities suggest that surviving detainees held by the former regime have largely been released, and that no official acknowledgment has been made of remaining secret detention sites.

“In practice, this means that the vast majority of those still missing are presumed to have been killed in detention or extrajudicially executed,” he told UPI.

Abdul Ghany said Syria’s new authorities established the National Commission for Missing Persons and the Transitional Justice Commission with “broad formal mandates, but their operational performance is hampered by serious structural deficits.”

He cited key obstacles, including the failure to clearly define investigative powers and the lack of sustainable funding, which undermine their capacity to “deliver meaningful truth, accountability, or reparations.”

The commission’s independence and impartiality emerge as another issue, deepening concerns about “victor’s justice” with the focus so far heavily concentrated on the crimes committed by the former regime “with far less visible progress in addressing violations committed by armed opposition groups, extremist organizations and other non-state actors,” he added.

“Political sensitivities, fear of destabilizing the transition and the weakness of records related to non-state actors have slowed efforts to address their crimes,” he said. “As a result, databases on non-state perpetrators remain incomplete or contested, and many victims of these actors continue to be excluded from emerging accountability frameworks.”

Bissan Fakih, a Middle East campaigner with Amnesty International based in Beirut, called for “a justice process that is inclusive of everyone.”

While the Assad regime was responsible for a vast majority disappearing, it is important to recognize that armed groups in northwest Syria, including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and the Islamic State, also were responsible, Fakih said.

“Their families are not in less agony. They also deserve answers,” she told UPI.

Despite the chaos in the first days after Assad’s fall, with families storming prisons to search for their loved ones, Faqih said there was “much evidence” about the missing people in documents found in jails, hospitals and government institutions.

“To date, we haven’t seen actual practical steps to start the search for the disappeared,” she said, noting that DNA testing has not yet begun, despite the excavation of dozens of mass graves across Syria.

She emphasized the need to ensure that existing evidence is protected and analyzed correctly, adding that there are “dozens, even hundreds, of witnesses to these crimes,” including former prison guards who also hold important information.

This evidence would be crucial for Lina Salameh and for the thousands of families who have been unable to find any trace of their loved ones — not even their names or identification cards — in any of the prisons, hospitals or government records.

For many years, she tried to stop thinking about her son and whether he had been tortured or killed with acid. However, she clings to the small hope that “he will come one day, knock on my door and I will be able to see him.”

Khaled Arnous, several of whose relatives and hundreds of others disappeared in war-torn Maadamiyeh on the outskirts of Damascus, said they were now all convinced that 99% of the missing had been killed and “became martyrs,” although no burial place for them is known.

Arnous, whose son was killed in 2013 during clashes and is body recovered, said he used to comfort his wife by saying, “At least we know where he is buried and can go pray at his tomb.”

He added: “We mostly felt that Assad’s fall, the end of his suppression, and the victory of the revolution somehow eased our pain,.”

He recalled that most of the arrests and killings under the former regime were arbitrary, targeting people from specific regions, even though they had nothing to do with the revolution and did not carry arms.

The arrest of several former Saydnaya prison officials and guards accused of severe human rights abuses, torture and extrajudicial executions has raised families’ hopes for justice.

“They should be tried for sure…. They should pay the price for what they did to our children, and feel the same pain.” Lina Salameh said. “Only God knows how much they tortured them and how they killed them.”

To Fakih, justice is not just possible. She said it is the duty of the Syrian government to achieve it for all the victims of the Syrian conflict.

At 8 o’clock on a stormy weeknight in the chilly Chinatown offices of L.A. Taco, Memo Torres finally was worn out.

Since President Trump unleashed his deportation deluge on Los Angeles in June, the 45-year-old has chronicled nearly every immigration enforcement action in the region in three-minute “Daily Memo” videos for the online publication. He and his colleagues track down film footage and photos, reach out to officials to verify what they’ve found and hammer out a script for Torres to narrate.

The audio that played from Torres’ double-screen computer and smart phone as he reviewed the evidence on the day I visited contained snippets of the Southland’s sad soundtrack under what he continually calls the “siege” of ICE. Men pleading to la migra to stop hurting them. Activists cursing out agents. Whistles, screams, honks and sirens. Sobbing family members.

“If I wanted to cry, I don’t think that I could,” Torres said when I asked how he coped with seeing such videos ad nauseum.

“It’s not healthy, I know. It’s not mature. But what I go through is nothing like what the people I’m seeing are going through … Today was hard, though,” he continued, pounding his hand with his fist. “They went … extra hard today. They’re starting to get worse. Numbers that used to be a week’s worth of abductions are now a day.”

He sighed. His deep-set eyes were bleary. Reading glasses did nothing to help with 12 hours of staring at screens. Torres wiped his hands over his face as if washing off the horrors of the day and pressed the record button.

“Today, Border Patrol targeted Long Beach, swarming the streets again and taking gardeners, old men and a 12-pack of beer that they had,” he began. He talked over footage of masked men piling on top of a gardener at a Polly’s Pie in Long Beach as a police officer looked on with hands in pockets and a deer-in-headlights look.

In another clip, federal agents detained an elderly man sitting on the sidewalk near a liquor store, “making sure to put a handcuff on his hand as they helped him up.”

“Remember to stay safe and stay vigilant, folks,” Torres concluded.

He turned off the camera, blasted hardcore punk and began to splice his reel together.

“Daily Memo” has become the diary Los Angeles never asked for but which is now indispensable, documenting in real time one of the most terrifying chapters in the region’s history. Filling the camera frame with his broad shoulders, full beard and a baritone that alternates between wry, angry, calm and reassuring, Torres has been described by fans as the Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite of L.A.’s deportation days — legendary broadcasters he acknowledges never having heard of until recently.

L.A. Taco staffer Memo Torres, right, presents Victor Villa as L.A. Taco’s Taco Madness 2024 winner in an impromptu ceremony outside the Highland Park restaurant in 2024.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

“When you’re in the midst of everything, you forget someone has to keep an archive so we can go back to reference, and you think, ‘Damn is someone is doing that?’ Yeah, Memo is doing that,” Sherman Austin said. The Long Beach-based activist runs the Stop ICE Raids Alert Network, which sends out text alerts with the locations of raids to more than half a million people nationwide. “Memo puts a human face to what’s happening, and that resonates with people in a different way.”

“He’s a neighborhood hero,” said Rebecca Brown, supervising attorney for the Immigrants’ Rights Project of Public Counsel. The public interest law firm has filed or joined multiple lawsuits against the federal government this year over its deportation agenda. “A lot of these stories of people who are getting picked up can fall through the cracks. But their voices are getting captured by his recording.”

While “Daily Memo” is chronicling a city under attack, it’s also bringing comfort to an unexpected person: Torres.

The son of a Mexican immigrant from Zacatecas who came to this country without papers, Torres never had a full-time journalism job until this year, living a “Forrest Gump kind of life.” He estimates he has worked in at least 25 different trades, from butcher to taquero to sound engineer, social media manager and nonprofit worker, none really fitting his life’s goal to do something “meaningful.”

Nothing lasted longer than landscaping. A third-generation jardinero — his grandfather also worked in the U.S. — he at one point employed 28 workers and had contracts across the city, with Hollywood studios among his biggest clients.

Torres, who has two college-age children, sold the business in March to focus on journalism for good.

“My life has prepared me for this s—. There’s nothing that scares me anymore,” Torres said as he began to layer video clips over his “Daily Memo” narration. “So I bury my head into work. My escapism is the cruel reality of the city right now.”

Torres grew up in Culver City and Inglewood. At Loyola High he absorbed the Jesuit maxim of being a man for others. But after graduating from UC Berkeley with a sociology degree, Torres found himself back in the family business, unable to find a job that satisfied him.

“Relatives would make fun of me by saying, ‘There he goes with a degree and a lawnmower in the back of a truck,” he said. “I hated it, but I was good at it.”

His landscaping routes across Southern California inadvertently prepared him for journalism. He started an Instagram account, El Tragón de Los Angeles (The Glutton from Los Angeles), to share his eating adventures. That caught the attention of L.A. Taco in 2018, which was revamping at a time when the city’s indie publications were shuttering or faltering.

“Their mission of street-level reporting called to me,” Torres said. He volunteered to connect L.A. Taco to local restaurants so the publication’s members could score free food and discounts. He soon became director of partnerships, then took over L.A. Taco’s social media accounts, then started to write articles and shoot videos — mostly for free.

“I call him the Mexican Swiss Army knife — and not those small ones but the big ones with all the weird things,” L.A. Taco publisher Alex Blazedale said as he and Torres smoked outside during a short break. “Memo could literally do anything we asked him to, and he wanted to do it and followed through.”

L.A. Taco staffer Memo Torres edits video clips from daily ICE raids which he puts together with narration on an Instagram reel inside L.A. Taco’s studio in Chinatown.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

Torres’ taco knowledge earned him appearances on the Netflix show “The Taco Chronicles” and a regular slot on KCRW’s “Good Food with Evan Kleiman.” Blazedale suggested this year that he do a daily news recap under the “Daily Memo” banner. But Torres found the title “cheesy and didn’t know what it was for.”

Then came the raids.

“I grew up on the History Channel,” Torres said. “They would always have these documentaries where they said they were finding new footage that had been thought lost. That’s what’s happening right now. So much stuff is being put up that quickly goes down. We need to document it for history.”

L.A. Taco editor Javier Cabral credits “Daily Memo” with bringing in so many new members that the publication is now financially sustainable.

“He’s not your average aspirational journalist who is either a hobbyist who wants to write more or someone who just got out of [journalism] school,” Cabral said. “He’s just a real paisa” — a working-class guy.

While Cabral finds Torres’ lack of reporting experience “refreshing,” he sometimes has to remind Torres not to editorialize too much.

“It’s that ‘Show, don’t tell’ thing in journalism, you know? But then I had to just check in with myself — am I being jealous by power-tripping at him?” Cabral said. “It was a hard conversation to have, but Memo took it [on] the chin and raised it up.”

Blazedale and Cabral believe so much in Torres that they recently hired a part-time assistant for “Daily Memo” and plan to turn an office at their headquarters into a proper studio. They got Torres a video editor, but the person quit after five minutes of viewing deportation footage — so Torres continues to put together the final product.

“We just can’t have Memo burn out,” Cabral said. “He’s too important to have that happen.”

Torres is unfazed, for now.

“It’s just like when I mowed lawns — let’s seize the day and make it your routine,” he said.

Besides, swimming in the chaos of the times is how Torres has dealt with a tough personal year. He sold his landscaping company, not just because of his increased L.A. Taco duties — he’s officially the publication’s director of engagement — but because the Hollywood writer’s strike and Trump’s deportations decimated his business. Two of his former gardeners have since been deported.

Torres started smoking again “to deal with all this.” He recently broke off an engagement after a 10-year-relationship with a woman whose family members were avid Trump supporters. On Election Night, Torres said, one of them told him to go back to Mexico. The couple’s Glendale home recently sold for far less than they paid. Soon, Torres plans to declare bankruptcy.

L.A. Taco’s offices are filled with boxes of his mementos as he settles into a new apartment. One is a laminated La Opinión story about him trying to recruit more Latino students to Berkeley after affirmative action ended.

“I always envisioned I would be useful for something,” he said before mentioning a letter from his mother he unearthed during his move. She died of cancer in 2006.

“She said, ‘I’m so proud of you. You’re trying to fight for what’s right. Don’t forget it.’ She saw it in me way back then.”

Torres uploaded his finished reel to L.A. Taco’s social media accounts. It was 10 p.m. — early for him. Outside the rain was pouring down harder than ever.

“I hope I can go back to writing about tacos,” Torres said with a laugh that betrayed he knew it wouldn’t happen for a while. “Just give me a break from reporting on the trauma and tragedy. But who knows if the future needs me? Maybe I’m just good for this moment, and I’m good with that.”

He stepped into the storm. Eight hours later, he would be back.

Conflicting claims come before the release of official results by the country’s electoral commission.

The two leading candidates in Guinea-Bissau’s presidential election – incumbent Umaro Sissoco Embalo and main challenger Fernando Dias – have both declared victory before the release of official results.

Both campaigns had claimed on Monday that their contender exceeded the 50 percent threshold needed to win outright, eliminating the need for a run-off.

“We have won the presidential race. We will not have a second round,” Dias told supporters in the capital, Bissau, adding that people were “tired” and wanted change.

Hours later, Embalo’s campaign spokesperson Oscar Barbosa also claimed the president had won outright, insisting there would be no run-off and calling on rivals to avoid making claims that undermine the electoral process.

There was no immediate comment by the National Electoral Commission, which is expected to announce provisional results on Thursday, regarding the conflicting claims.

Twelve candidates competed in Sunday’s poll that saw a turnout of more than 65 percent.

The African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), the movement that led the fight against Portuguese colonial rule, was barred from fielding a candidate for the first time.

The party endorsed Dias, boosting his campaign, especially after former Prime Minister Domingos Simoes Pereira, the PAIGC leader, backed him. The 47-year-old is standing with the Party for Social Renewal.

Embalo, 53, is a former army general who served as prime minister from 2016 to 2018. He is seeking to become Guinea-Bissau’s first president in 30 years to win a second term.

Opposition parties argue that Embalo’s mandate should have ended earlier this year. The Supreme Court ruled that his term should run until early September, but the election was pushed back to November.

Embalo dissolved parliament, which was controlled by the opposition after the 2019 and 2023 legislative elections, and has not allowed it to sit since December 2023.

Guinea-Bissau has experienced repeated coups and attempted coups since its independence more than 50 years ago, and remains one of the world’s poorest countries, with half the population living in poverty, according to the World Bank.

More than 200 international observers were in the country to monitor the electoral process, including from the West African regional bloc ECOWAS, the African Union and the community of Portuguese-speaking countries.

I: Is he really saying that?

You don’t usually get congratulated on Tom Leykis’ syndicated radio show unless you’re, say, a caller describing the way you talked your unexpectedly pregnant girlfriend into having an abortion — and then dumped her. Or unless you’re a woman with a lascivious tale to share, like the law clerk who boasts about tripling her pay by engaging in masochistic sex with the partner of another firm. But on this Thursday, in the first seconds of his afternoon program, Leykis sounds so delighted he can scarcely wait for the heavy-metal bumper music to fade.

Praise be, he tells us in a stern, husky voice, for the Washington state Supreme Court, which hours before overturned the conviction of two men who secretly took pictures up women’s skirts in shopping malls. The justices regretfully concluded that the state’s anti-voyeurism law did not apply to acts in public places.

Success in talk radio requires the ability to glean insights from small events, and Leykis immediately offers this pair: First, we don’t need laws like that. Second, ladies, if you’re worried about protecting yourselves from other camera-toting creeps: “Buy some … panties and put them on, you sluts!” And we’re off and running with the commanding general in radio’s war for the male demographic. It is an angry, lurid battle in which social critics of all stripes can find moments of fulfillment or hopelessness. Spend a few days listening to Tom Leykis, heard in L.A. from 3 to 8 p.m. on KLSX-FM (97.1), and you may conclude that society has tilted in a manner resembling “Planet of the Apes”: that women have assumed the upper hand, forcing men to fight back grimly and mercilessly or perish. Or you may conclude that, in the interest of ratings, we are all getting our chains jerked by a host who laughs at us behind our backs.

In the control room of Westwood One’s Culver City studio, Leykis’ screener, Dino De Milio, is interrogating callers with the impatience of an air traffic controller and the lasciviousness of a strip club owner. (“How old are you, sweetie?” he asks a female caller. “That’s my favorite age for sex!”) Through a glass panel, De Milio can see Leykis, a gnomish 46-year-old man, standing in front of his mike, wearing shades despite the near darkness, pounding on his opening theme. “ You know what’s great?” Leykis asks sarcastically. “Women want the right to be exhibitionists, but if anybody looks….” “

Tom Leykis broadcasts from the intersection of Libertarian and Libertine. It’s a simple neighborhood with a simple philosophy that has occurred in the gut of just about every American man and, in some cases, made its way to his brain. The show is based on the premise that too many guys have been raised to be wimps in this feminist culture, that women are taking advantage of these men and that women are secretly wishing guys would reassert themselves. Leykis plays the hard-bitten, gender-wars-scarred uncle, hectoring the besieged male recruits: Don’t get them pregnant! Don’t marry them! Don’t date single mothers! Yet no matter how insistent or cranky he gets, the phone lines remained jammed with confessions of weakness and poor judgment:

“You are my religion, Professor,” comes the call another day, “but I have to tell you I’m one of those guys who knocked a girl up….”

“What kind of birth control were you using?” Leykis demands.

“She said she was on the pill….”

“And you believed her. I hope the boys out there are listening! This is the kind of stuff I warn you about!”

Men who in more reasonable times would have been considered normal single guys employing normal trial-and-error approaches to casual sex become, in the Leykis format, political prisoners, victims of a stacked deck in which calculating women get their way at men’s expense.

Leykis tries to break this momentum by offering more clinical tips: No coffee dates or lunch dates — they lead nowhere. “Successfully getting a woman into the sack involves some sort of chemical inducement,” he is fond of proclaiming on a “Leykis 101” segment he does each Thursday. “Alcohol is the preferred chemical inducement.”

Nor should men waste money on dinner dates, he advises; women will eat and run. Meet them after dinner for a drink. If you are roped into dinner, eat a full meal at home and order a salad in the restaurant (“because what woman would eat more than you?”).

Once Leykis’ listeners have scored, “we do not cuddle, we do not spoon, we do not hug, we do not stay late,” Leykis instructs. “We do not convince women we are in love with them. We do not say I love you — ever, ever, ever. Unless we do.” He pronounces that last word with grave disbelief.

Leykis — married four times, thrice-divorced and separated from wife No. 4 for the last two years — is honest enough to describe the show as an act that evolved into a point of view. And he occasionally makes serious feminist-backlash arguments on issues like parental leave, divorce or alimony that create a social edge. He’ll say proudly, in the name of personal responsibility, that he has no children, and that each of the four unplanned pregnancies he caused was terminated.

Yet the fact that so many of his frustrated male callers take him so literally gives the program a uniquely bitter, even mean, tone that makes it both appealing and appalling. The show has little of the self-deprecating comedic relief of Howard Stern’s equally explicit KLSX morning show, the gold standard of sleaze-talk radio. Stern’s shtick is sexual bantering and the embarrassed giggle; Leykis’ shtick is sexual politics and the evil, got-even-with-her snicker. In the same way Rush Limbaugh demonizes liberals, Leykis lays men’s woes at the feet of “chicks” or “broads” (or, more frequently, another B-word) — and of men’s failure to control them.

Hour No. 2 of today’s show is devoted to mocking the notion of female independence as a feminist invention (which will draw many angry female callers). Leykis is trying to explain that men are simply more driven to succeed than women, driven by the need for … chicks.

“We make money to get chicks,” he says, his sentences almost swallowing each other. “Those of us who are really ambitious want more chicks. Better chicks. Hotter chicks. A larger number of chicks. We work hard to get chicks. When I was 14, I got into radio because when I was in high school, I was a geek. Once I was at the radio station answering the request line, chicks would call in, ask me to play a song, and then they’d ask me to come over after the show. ‘I love your voice. Come on over.’ And I would. And then I realized if I got better radio gigs in bigger cities, I’d get better chicks, hotter chicks. And I did. And the more money I make, the better chicks I get.” (Leykis’ most recent “chick” is a 27-year-old Argentine, recently arrived in the U.S., whom he met at the station; she moved into his Hollywood Hills home two months ago.)

*

II: Am I really listening to this?

Confession: I have listened to this show for years and it bothers me because — well, it’s just not me, a stable, married guy with a teenage daughter. The last time I used the word “chick” was 1973: A female colleague and I wrote essays for our small newspaper on our competing favorites in the nationally televised Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs battle of the sexes. It was a tennis match — a stunt — that carried a level of gender tension impossible to imagine today. I defiantly used “chick” in my pro-Riggs essay because, as Frank Sinatra-passe as it sounded even then, I knew it infuriated my colleague, and it felt good to strike back at the upstart feminist movement, to grind it under my heel.

But I was young and stupid. If you’d told me that half a lifetime later, I’d be listening to a 40-something guy on the radio using the word “chick” for essentially the same denigrating purpose — and claiming to make a seven-figure income off it — I would have rolled my eyes. It’s so juvenile. Which is why I’m perplexed/fascinated that the grown-up me is helping to make Leykis the Arbitron-certified king of the male listener in L.A.

Why did I laugh so hard the other day when he spent an hour on how men should give women backhanded compliments (“Honey, you’re so pretty I don’t even notice the extra weight”) to keep their self-esteem low and their behavior compliant? Were darker forces drawing me to the show? I decided to confer with experts.

Perhaps, one of them got me thinking, I’m enticed by the sly way Leykis performs the kind of sexual harassment that government and workplace rules no longer allow. “Men say, ‘It’s not OK to [harass women] at work, but thank God I can turn on my radio … while I’m hammering a nail,” suggests Ann Simonton, a former fashion model from Northern California who started a media-literacy program two decades ago after she was raped at knifepoint and began thinking about the way the media portray women. Leykis’ popularity, Simonton says, is sad proof “that we live in a sexually repressed culture where sex is only for sale, talked about only as a taboo, rather than there being a healthy dialogue on sexual intimacy.”

Or maybe I listen because I enjoy reverting to the cartoonishly adolescent state that men are assigned in the popular culture. Janet McMullen, an associate professor in the University of North Alabama’s communications department who specializes in media ethics, notes that Hollywood responded to feminism by constructing legitimate roles for women but in the process made men the targets of ridicule. “You look at TV sitcoms and dramas, you listen to the educational community: It’s as though guys are broken in some way,” she said.

Or maybe, more nobly, I listen because Leykis’ dialogue fills a vacuum in so many men’s lives — the lack of intimate conversation with other men. “There’s no place we can go for support,” says Warren Farrell, a San Diego psychologist whose books include “Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say.”

Or maybe I listen because Leykis touches a powerful nerve when he tells men to stop being “nice” — to stand up and demand what we want (including that 60-inch TV). He “has tapped into something that’s very prominent,” says Robert Glover, a Seattle psychotherapist who wrote “No More Mr. Nice Guy” in an attempt to tell men that women are turned off by guys who are too timid to be candid about their sexual desires. Men who act this way ultimately wind up frustrated and angry, Glover says.

Or maybe I listen simply because I love a spectacle — the guys begging for Leykis’ wisdom, the women calling to alternately scream at him or ask him to autograph their breasts at an upcoming listener party. Maybe there’re no more cultural implications here than on Ricki Lake. Maybe, as screener Di Milio puts it, “some people make the mistake of forgetting the very last word; it’s ‘The Tom Leykis Show.’ ”

*

III: Oh, I get it — I think

Leykis has a restless intellect that makes it hard for him to stay in character. Over lunch (let him pick the wine, he has a 700-bottle cellar in his house), he can make a convincing defense for the cruel way men often talk about women on the show. Why, he demands, should he be forced to sprinkle a phony veneer of politeness on our angry culture? Why shouldn’t he express his gender’s most visceral feelings?

But a half hour later, he can be just as convincing making the case that the economics of radio demand offensive styles and stunts. Government deregulation of radio sent station prices soaring and meant owners had “to get results to-day. The way you get results to-day is [to say on the air]: ‘Hello, my penis is hanging out, and I don’t know what to do about it, and if somebody could come down to the station, if there’s a policeman within the sound of my voice….’ Then you get the cops down there and it becomes a story in the paper ‘cause the papers all fall for it and give you the free advertising — boom; that’s how things are done now.”

The object of talk radio is not to change minds; it is to stay on the air. You invent or copy a format and, if it works, you ride it until you fall off the horse. For all his male listeners’ deference to “The Professor,” Tom Leykis is first and foremost a radio guy obsessed with the art of drawing and holding a crowd, a guy whose success in a turbulent market is a testament to his wits and love of craft, says L.A. radio historian Don Barrett. “Tom knows everything about every radio station in this country…. This guy just bleeds radio.”

His five-year stint on KLSX is his third in L.A. He was first on KFI between 1988 and 1992 as a more conventional liberal talk-show counterpoint to Limbaugh. (After a dispute whose nature he won’t discuss, he was replaced by ex-Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates.) He worked fill-in shifts in several cities before landing an AM syndication deal in ’94 that brought him back to L.A. When KLSX offered him an afternoon show in 1997, he said, it meant creating a style that would be close to Stern’s young-man, breast-obsessed demographic without appearing to copy him.

“So we had to evolve the show in this new direction,” he said matter-of-factly, “which was grinding loud music, grinding production, and we stepped up the rudeness factor.”

He’s now in about 50 markets, including Seattle, San Francisco and Dallas, with a national base several times less than icons like Limbaugh, Laura Schlessinger and Stern. He has the largest afternoon male audience on L.A. radio in every age range except his target demographic — 18 to 44 — where he trails rock and hip-hop stations KPWR and KROQ, according to the latest Arbitron ratings.

Leykis boasts of other survey data that reflect an affluent audience and high-end advertisers. When you point out that his predominantly male callers sound far less successful or confident, he reminds you not to confuse the callers (who are his foils) with his listeners (who make him rich). “Anybody who takes this show really seriously doesn’t get it. The callers are 1% of the audience…. People who make a good living and have high intelligence usually don’t have 45 minutes to stay on hold.”

Ask Leykis if sexual politics is as intellectually satisfying as a show that covers more ground, and he suggests you’ve asked the wrong question. “I never forget I’m in this business to make money. I never had ratings this high. I never made as much money as I do. If I wanna talk politics, I’ll go to a park.” Evil snicker. “I’ll call up Warren Olney one day.”

Ask how he got on the air at 14 and he tells about being a gifted, bored child who was reading the New York Times in the first grade. About being a ninth-grader living in an isolated Long Island suburb, missing the bustling Bronx neighborhood where he’d grown up, sitting on the stoop with a portable radio, wishing he could jump inside. About winning a contest to be a DJ for an hour on the local radio station, then being asked back.

He tells about hosting a cable-TV public-access-station game show at 16, about trying to get on the air as a student at Fordham University but failing and dropping out after a year and half.

About working a series of day jobs, the most pitiful being telemarketing. About getting hired at a variety of low-paying jobs at small radio stations in places like Albany, N.Y., and Stanton, Va., and Miami, spinning records and engaging in chatter and groping for gimmicks to get noticed. About recognizing he’d embarked on a nomadic career that would subvert marriage or stable relationships.

He remembers inventing a male chauvinist character in 1979 who called in, voicing many opinions that riled listeners — opinions that a DJ could voice on the air in that gentler time but that were the first stirrings of Leykis’ KLSX voice.

He remembers discovering how the most audacious opinions could generate buzz. (“I would never serve in the military under any circumstances. I just missed the draft of the Vietnam War, and if we had another war I wouldn’t go. Let somebody else be cannon fodder. Now let’s go to the phones.”)

You had to take that extra step. “It wasn’t enough to have lesbian nuns on the show. You had to have them on Good Friday.”

He says he never thought he’d have this kind of success or longevity in L.A. And it sounds positively heartwarming until he mentions why he won’t be going to his 30th high school reunion, even though he’d figure to be a magnet for all the, uh, chicks who turned him down when he was a geek.

“I said this on the air: ‘I wouldn’t touch any of you women with a 10-foot pole,’ ” he says, “ ‘And you know why? Because I can now afford your daughters.’ ” Evil snicker.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

The role of women in society, according to the freewheeling Tom Leykis

Leykis on gender:

I am tired of being with women trying to prove they’re smarter than I am, telling me to make my own dinner, to do it myself, women so concerned about appearing independent that they have to have careers. I don’t want to be confused anymore when I go home about what my job is.

*

Leykis on when to marry:

Never marry somebody you knocked up unless you know you’re gonna be with them forever and you really love them and you really love that kid and you really want to be there. But if you can’t answer “yes” to all those, don’t marry these broads.

*

Leykis on prolonged adolescence:

I want my childhood to last as long as it can.

*

Leykis on how marriage changes a relationship:

She’ll do whatever you want until she gets you to sign on the dotted line and suddenly it’s like, “I don’t like having sex on any day that ends in ‘y.’ ”

*

Leykis on what he teaches male listeners:

I am the professor who teaches you how to get sex for the least amount of money and without having to listen to women go on and on: “Blah-bla-blah-bla-blah-bla-blah-bla-blah.” Broads never shut up.

*

Leykis on his looks:

If I were really attractive, I would be on TV making real money…. I wouldn’t be doing some dopey radio show.

With the symbolic passing of a golden bear pin, Democratic businessman Stephen Cloobeck announced Monday evening that he was bowing out of the governor’s race and throwing his support behind noted Trump critic and close friend Rep. Eric Swalwell.

Cloobeck shared this news while appearing alongside Swallwell on CNN, saying that the San Francisco Bay Area Democrat will be the “greatest leader of this great state California.”

“I’m happy to say tonight that I’m going to merge my campaign into his and give him all the hard work that I’ve worked on,” said Cloobeck.

The announcement puts an end to the entrepreneur and philanthropist’s first-ever political campaign, which he funded through a fortune amassed in the real estate industry. In a recent UC Berkeley poll co-sponsored by The Times, Cloobeck received less than half of 1% of the support of registered voters polled.

Cloobeck said he had launched his run because he could not find a single qualified candidate — that was until Swalwell tossed his hat into the ring last week, sending an infusion of energy into the relatively sleepy race.

Pin now affixed to the lapel of his navy blue suit, Swalwell thanked his pal for the support and said he was looking forward to drawing on Cloobeck’s expertise as he worked to bring more housing and small business to the Golden State.

Swalwell, a former Republican who unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, has said he is seeking the governorship to combat the threats President Trump poses to the state and to increase housing affordability and homeownership for Californians.

During his Monday evening interview, Swalwell doubled down on his proposal to implement a vote-by-phone system, despite the sharp criticism it invoked from the White House and two of his Republican challengers for governor, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and conservative political commentator Steve Hilton.

Swalwell said the proposal would make democracy more accessible, contending that if phones are secure enough to access finances and healthcare records, then they can be made secure enough to cast a ballot.

The backing of Cloobeck, a major Democratic donor, is good news for the congressman, who seeks to make a splash in an unusually wide open race to lead the world’s fourth-largest economy and the country’s most populous state.

About 44% of registered voters said in late October they did not have a preferred candidate for governor. The recent decisions of former Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. Alex Padilla to opt out of the running further solidified that the state’s top job is anyone’s to win.

Times staff writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.

Reporting from Tampa, Fla. — Mitt Romney won the Florida presidential primary Tuesday, taking a long stride toward capturing the GOP nomination and dealing a potentially mortal blow to the hopes of the once-resurgent Newt Gingrich.

The television networks called the race for the former Massachusetts governor soon after polls in the westernmost part of the state closed; by that time Romney already held a big lead in the votes already tabulated. The result ended what had become a suspenseless campaign over the last few days, as multiple opinion surveys showed Romney opening a commanding lead.

FOR THE RECORD:
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Mitt Romney the governor of Massachusetts. He is a former governor of that state.

His victory handed Romney Florida’s 50 delegates, the biggest cache yet, but more than that the win shows his ability to capture support in a big, costly and diverse state that will be a major battleground in the fall contest against President Obama.

Speaking to reporters before the polls closed, Romney said he learned a lesson from the double-digit loss he suffered at Gingrich’s hands 10 days ago in South Carolina.

“If we’re successful here, it’ll be pretty clear that when attacked you have to respond and you can’t let charges go unanswered,” Romney said after visiting campaign volunteers at a Tampa phone bank. “I needed to make sure that instead of being outgunned in terms of attacks that I responded aggressively. I think I have and hopefully that will serve me well here.”

For his part, Gingrich showed no signs of backing down, or leaving the race any time soon.

“This is a long way from being over,” the former House speaker said while shaking hands Tuesday morning at a church polling place in Orlando. “I’d say June or July, unless Romney drops out earlier.”

“The same people who said I was dead in June, or the people who said I was dead in Iowa, those people?” Gingrich said. “They’re about as accurate as they have been the last time they were wrong.”

Romney’s victory, while expected, marked a sharp turnabout in fortunes and could be a pivot point in the race for the Republican nomination.

From here, the contest heads Saturday to Nevada, a caucus state that will probably play to his organizational strength, then enters a relative lull. Just a few contests, all of them caucuses, are scheduled before the next big primaries Feb. 28 in Michigan — a Romney state, where his father served three terms as governor — and Arizona.

Gingrich came soaring into Florida after his landslide win in South Carolina and quickly surged to the top of some polls. But his momentum dwindled just as quickly after a pair of lackluster debate performances.

Romney, by contrast, revamped his approach in Florida to demonstrate a new, more pugnacious side onstage and undercut one of the major props of Gingrich’s candidacy: that he alone has the stuff to take it to Obama. Two-thirds of Florida voters said the debates were important in making up their minds, and Romney apparently helped himself with his well-received showings in Tampa and Jacksonville.

He also benefited from the diluted power of religious conservatives, a group that has been, at best, lukewarm to his candidacy. Fewer than 4 in 10 Florida voters described themselves as evangelicals or born-again Christians; in South Carolina, they made up nearly two-thirds of electorate.

The issues Romney raised in Florida were not new. For weeks, he has assailed Gingrich over his conduct in Congress, which resulted in a bipartisan reprimand and record $300,000 ethics fine, and his inside-the-Beltway consulting work after leaving office.

Romney focused in particular on the $1.6 million that Gingrich’s firm received from Freddie Mac, the federal mortgage guarantor, which many Republicans blame for the housing crisis that ravaged the nation’s economy and imposed outsized pain on Florida. He accused Gingrich of “selling influence in Washington at a time when we need people who will stand up for the truth.”

With the help of a new speaking coach, Romney pressed his assault without letup, something he had not done since Gingrich’s fifth-place finish in Iowa — a performance that many thought was the end of the former speaker’s campaign.

Romney’s attacks also took on an unusually personal tone. At one point, he scoffed that Gingrich should “look in the mirror” to understand why his campaign was struggling.

The former congressman responded in kind, calling Romney “totally dishonest” and saying it was impossible to debate someone with his casual relationship with the truth.

But Romney was able to pack far more punch in his attacks. While the two candidates were at rough parity on TV in South Carolina, Romney and his allies outspent Gingrich on the Florida race by nearly 5-to-1, or more than $15 million for Romney to Gingrich’s roughly $3 million.

For all of that, Gingrich may end up sticking around longer than Romney and many party leaders would prefer. Because most of the delegates over the next two months will be awarded on a proportional basis, Gingrich can keep adding to his total even if he loses to Romney. Contests in big states like Ohio, New York, Texas and California are weeks or even months away.

Also lurking in the presidential contest are Texas Rep. Ron Paul and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. Both gave up on Florida, showing up for the debates but not mounting a serious effort.

Paul, who has a small but devout band of followers, is targeting organizationally intensive caucus states in an effort to win delegates to influence the party platform at the Tampa convention.

Santorum, the victor in Iowa by a small margin, has already proved his ability to wage a subsistence campaign and signaled his intention to compete in Colorado and Minnesota, two of this month’s caucus states.

[email protected].

Times staff writers Seema Mehta in Orlando and Maeve Reston in Tampa contributed to this report.

When 32-year-old theoretical physicist Ron Unz decided to run for governor, even some friends tried to talk him out of it.

“Politics is not the kind of thing you expect geniuses to go into,” said Eric Reyburn, who attended Harvard University with Unz.

Rivko Knox, Unz’s aunt, worried that the race would be brutal. “I said: ‘Can you take criticism? What if you speak and people laugh at you?’ ”

David Horowitz, the conservative activist, was more blunt. Instead of a politician, Unz “looks like a person who reads science fiction novels at night and spends all the rest of his time on a computer talking to other people about science fiction,” said Horowitz, who has spent hours discussing politics with Unz. “I told him: ‘You’re an intellectual. . . . Your passion is ideas. You’ll be murdered.’ ”

But Unz, the soft-spoken owner of a small computer software company in Silicon Valley, calculated the odds and made up his mind. A month ago he formally challenged Gov. Pete Wilson for the Republican nomination, launching a statewide media blitz financed with more than $1 million of his own money.

Ever since, Unz has blistered Wilson, calling him a hypocrite, an opportunist–even a closet Democrat. The ultraconservative long shot has attacked the more moderate incumbent for raising taxes, bashing immigrants and supporting “the pathology of the social welfare state.” Although he has been short on specific solutions, Unz’s relentless debating style and his willingness to spend freely have won over some skeptics.

“I was afraid he would embarrass himself. But he hasn’t. I’m glad he’s out there pushing,” said Horowitz, who has dubbed Unz’s campaign “The Revenge of the Nerds.”

Arnold Steinberg, a Republican strategist, said his reservations have been replaced by enthusiasm. He tried to talk Unz out of running, he said–but ended up signing on as an adviser.

*

Few people believe Unz can beat Wilson–Unz admits that his campaign is an “uphill battle.” Still, some Republicans worry that the young challenger will wound Wilson, making it easier for a Democrat to replace him.

The Wilson campaign, which at first attempted to ignore Unz, recently began responding to him, labeling one TV ad in which he accused Wilson of letting Los Angeles burn during the 1992 riots “a new low” in the campaign. Though their recent tracking polls show only about 8% of Republicans would vote for Unz, Wilson’s camp has begun to take him more seriously, poking into his background–and informing reporters of the results.

Dan Schnur, Wilson’s spokesman, said one call to First Boston Bank, one of Unz’s former employers, yielded this tidbit: Unz is remembered as the only job applicant ever to list his IQ on his resume.

In fact, Unz may have one of the few IQs worth noting on a resume. It has been estimated at 214, a statistic that one intelligence expert describes as “one in a million.” Educated at Harvard, Cambridge and Stanford universities, he has mastered not only theoretical physics and computer programming, but also ancient Greek history. The author of several scholarly papers on the Spartan naval empire, he is probably the only gubernatorial candidate who warms to the subject of Plutarch.

“The history of the Greek city states really gives you a sense of how nations or states can decline,” said Unz, who claims that his many areas of expertise have each helped prepare him for executive office. “People told me that politics can be frustrating. But when you have sat month after month working on the same computer program, you get used to . . . incremental change.”

Braininess does not necessarily yield political savvy. Unz used the mathematical concept of “expected return” to assess whether he should enter the race. Multiplying the probability by the possible payoff, he concluded that if he had at least a one-in-five chance, running would be worth it. But most political experts say he drastically misjudged the odds.

If Unz’s intellect is unique among political candidates, Unz says that is not the reason to vote for him. Instead, he wants people to respond to his ideas–among them, smaller government, fewer regulations and traditional values. He claims he, not Wilson, is in the Republican mainstream.

He rails against bilingual education and affirmative action (policies that he says amount to “ethnic separatism”) and bad-mouths welfare programs that he says foster “irresponsibility, illegitimacy and a total sense of disconnection from the work ethic in American society.”

To hear Unz’s current ideology, one might never guess at his background.

Unz’s ads describe him as “the Republican for governor,” but he grew up a Democrat. He was born in the San Fernando Valley in 1961 and had his first involvement with politics at age 11 when he donned a McGovern T-shirt and accompanied his mother door to door, stumping for the Democratic presidential candidate.

The candidate who vows to “roll back” public assistance programs once relied on those programs for survival–when growing up in North Hollywood, he and his mother were on welfare. Unz, who today describes the culture of illegitimacy as a root cause of crime, was born out of wedlock–a fact that made the young Unz feel “very ashamed,” he said.

Some politicians might use such personal details to bolster their arguments. Unz, by contrast, prefers to keep them at a distance, discussing his childhood only at a reporter’s request.

“I really don’t think my personal background has had much of an impact on my views,” Unz said recently, moments after comparing his mother, Esther–a former high school teacher who he says “made some stupid mistakes”–to TV’s “Murphy Brown.” “The ‘Murphy Brown’ case works great on TV, but it’s not clear to me that it works in practice.”

In his case, Unz says, “the system worked.” Enrolled in public schools, he proved a top student–a math and debating whiz who as a senior in high school became the third Californian ever to win first place in the national Westinghouse talent search competition. Despite his own success story, he firmly believes that welfare does more harm than good.

“The truth is that the cost of living in America, if you’re talking about living relatively simply, is pretty low. The marginal cost of eating simple foods and not starving is minimal. And there . . . would be more charitable organizations in society if these (welfare) programs didn’t exist,” he said, adding that he does not believe that the assistance he and his mother received “was that much of a help.”

Esther Unz recalls things differently. To cut costs, she said, she and her young son lived with her parents. But when she fell ill and was unable to work, she applied for aid. The money she received from the government was essential, she said.

“Ron’s father was out of the picture very soon. . . . But my parents’ home was paid for. What saved us financially completely was there were no rent payments,” she said, adding that her son’s conservative views are something of a mystery to her. “For some reason he turned to the other side. I never tried to structure him as far as (political) party. He just kind of came out this way.”

Despite their differences, she is immensely proud of her son and believes his sincerity and industriousness would make him an effective governor. She has long worried, however, that his penchant for hard work has left him without a fully rounded life.

“Now all I can hope for is he will have time for some extracurricular life,” she said. “And get a girl. Because he has had very few in his life.”

Unz says he wants to marry and have children, eventually. But when he puts his mind to something, he says, he focuses completely. For several years his financial software company, which devises specialized “code” to help Wall Street firms manage their investments efficiently, has been his primary fascination. So far he has not given his personal life the same kind of attention.

A visit to Unz’s large Spanish-style home in Palo Alto reveals a life completely built around work. Three of the five bedrooms–which house his company, Wall Street Analytics Inc.–are filled with files and computer equipment. The rest of the house appears largely unoccupied. He sleeps on a mattress and box spring set on the floor. His spacious living room not only lacks furniture–it is utterly empty.

“I’ve only lived here a year,” he says, nodding toward a well-appointed kitchen he has never used. “Monomaniacal” is the word one friend says Unz uses to describe himself. Asked what he does for fun, he answers: “I’ve been very busy.”

When asked the same question, Unz’s best friends from Harvard do not hesitate. For fun, they said, Unz has always loved to talk politics. “Ron’s idea of a good time at a party is to have five or six people stand around and talk about the issues of the day,” said Reyburn, who fondly remembers a nightly college ritual: dinner, spiced with spirited political debate.

“He’s an intellectual, not a party animal,” recalled Robert Dujarric, another friend who remembers those dinners warmly. “He likes to talk to people. Even though he’s very much at home in the realm of computer software and numbers, he likes to socialize.”

Unz graduated in 1983 with a double major in theoretical physics and ancient history and headed to England. There on a Churchill Science Fellowship, he studied quantum gravitation under Stephen Hawking.

*

While continuing his studies at Stanford in 1986, Unz and two of his former junior high school teachers developed a plan to create a public academy for Los Angeles County’s high-ability students. Despite winning the support of some educators, the proposal was rejected by officials who worried that if an elite school drained off the best students, ordinary schools would become less challenging.

Unz describes this incident, his first deep involvement on a public policy issue, as an eye-opener. He came to believe that if he wanted to improve society, he would have to get rich enough to champion the causes important to him.

He took a summer job on Wall Street in 1987, working in mortgage finance at First Boston Bank. He taught himself computer programming and soon wrote “The Solver,” a program that used the computer to carve up mortgage loans into securities–a series of calculations that until then had been done by hand.

Unz’s work was outstanding, his colleagues recall, and he accepted a full-time job. But some who worked with him said he could be inflexible when he believed he was right. It was that single-mindedness that ultimately led to his departure, they said.

David Warren, a managing director at First Boston who was hired the same day as Unz, recalled: “He came from an academic background where if your professor told you to do x, and you did y because it was better than x, and then you explained your reasoning–your professor shook hands with you and said: ‘Congratulations, you were right.’ He felt that was the way he was going to behave.”

Unz’s bosses did not share this approach. A few months after taking the job, Unz left to start his own company. For the next six years, Unz worked seven days a week, up to 20 hours a day, writing computer code in his modest apartment in Queens.

New York City appalled him. The crime and the poverty proved to Unz that welfare programs not only were not working but were the cause of society’s decline. He began reading Commentary magazine, and was so impressed that he ordered 15 years of back issues. When his long hours started to pay off (his first sale, to a Wall Street investment firm, netted nearly $200,000), he used the money to fund conservative projects.

*

Unz will not say what he is worth, but says he gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to think tanks such as the Manhattan Institute in New York City and to Linda Chavez’s Center for the New American Community in Washington, D.C. Even before moving back to California two years ago, Unz sought out the Los Angeles-based Horowitz to see if he needed funding.

“I wanted to do this book ‘Surviving the PC University,’ ” recalled Horowitz, co-founder of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. “He said: ‘How much will it cost?’ I said $10,000, and he pulled out his checkbook and wrote me a check.”

“I don’t care much about money,” said Unz, who drives a compact car and has spent more on clothing while preparing to become a candidate than he had during the previous several years. “The whole reason I wanted to make money was to be able to influence policy.”

Late last year, when Unz realized that no other Republican was likely to challenge Wilson, that attitude made it easy for him to volunteer. To others, spending a hard-earned personal fortune to run what in all likelihood will be a losing race might seem crazy. To Unz, it was civic duty.

“The odds are, you lose. But if you don’t try it, you’re sure to lose,” he said, adding that he plans to spend a lot more of his money before the June 7 primary. “A lot of this is patriotism. . . . At some stage, individuals have to decide whether they’re going to make an effort.”

So far, Unz’s rhetoric has been dominated by criticism of Wilson. His lack of specific alternatives has hurt him even among some Republicans who dislike Wilson.

“He’s not for me,” Dieter Holberg, a retired engineer, said after hearing Unz speak at the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades. “You can say, ‘Cut things.’. . . But it would have been long done if it was easy to do.”

But at times he strikes a chord. The California Republican Assembly, a conservative grass-roots organization, has endorsed him. And recently, after hearing Unz blast programs such as prenatal care, drug rehabilitation and “New Age self-esteem counseling,” a few members of UC Berkeley’s College Republicans came away impressed.

“You get a strong sense that here is a fundamentally competent person who is intelligent enough to grasp everything–though that is not the same thing as being able to command or lead. But I don’t particularly think that Wilson leads,” said Gregory Sikorski, 27, a history major. “I will support him now and support the Republican (nominee) later.”

WASHINGTON — On Saturday, after 19 years of war, the United States and the Taliban began what both sides delicately called a seven-day “reduction of violence” in Afghanistan, a trial attempt at a partial truce. If the experiment works, they have set Feb. 29 for a ceremony to sign an agreement that would launch broader peace negotiations.

The Taliban has a good reason to keep its promise to pause offensive operations for a week: Under the proposed deal, the U.S. will withdraw about one-fourth of its roughly 12,000 troops from Afghanistan by this summer. It’s one goal the Taliban shares with President Trump, who wants to run for reelection claiming he is ending the United States’ longest war.

But the larger peace process that is supposed to follow will be far more difficult — and the Taliban is not the only complicating factor.

There’s also Trump’s impatience and his penchant for disrupting slow-moving diplomatic efforts at whim.

As early as 2012, Trump declared the U.S. war in Afghanistan “a complete waste” and said it was time to pull out. If something goes wrong in the Afghan peace process — and something surely will — will he check his impulse to declare victory and leave?

The plan negotiated by Trump’s special envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, has plenty of moving parts. Its text hasn’t been released, but officials and others say it is almost identical to a draft deal Khalilzad reached in September.

According to their accounts, the deal calls for the United States to trim its troop presence from about 12,000 to 8,600 by July — and later, if all goes well, to zero. Or as the Taliban put it in a statement Friday, the deal would lead to “the withdrawal of all foreign forces … so that our people can live a peaceful and prosperous life under the shade of an Islamic system.”

The Taliban must agree not to harbor Islamic State, Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups that seek to attack the West. The plan even provides for U.S. forces and the Taliban to cooperate on counterterrorism.

Peace negotiations among all Afghan factions are supposed to begin within 10 days after the plan is signed. But the government in Kabul led by President Ashraf Ghani is mired in an internal power struggle and could prove incapable of acting as an effective player.

Those talks could lead to a new constitution and give the Taliban a major role in a future Afghan government.

Keeping that complex process on track will require Washington to stay involved in Afghanistan with both diplomatic muscle and continued financial aid — which means Congress will have to buy in.

That hasn’t happened. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and other Republican hawks are already grumbling about trusting the Taliban and the folly, in their view, of reducing troops below 8,600.

One question is practical: U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to destroy Al Qaeda, which launched the 9/11 attacks from its sanctuary there, and to push the Taliban out of power. Can U.S. counterterrorism needs be met without troops in Afghanistan?

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, who helped run the war under two presidents, says the answer is yes.

“The threat is not what it was in 2001. Al Qaeda is much diminished,” he told me. “And we’re much better at counterterrorism than we were back when we were simply launching cruise missiles into the desert.”

Other questions could be difficult in a different way.

Most Americans have concluded that the U.S. war in Afghanistan turned into a tragic, expensive failure once it expanded beyond unseating Al Qaeda. The explicit U.S. recognition of the Taliban as a legitimate political force makes that verdict official.

And allowing the Taliban to win a share of power — or potentially dominate the government in Kabul — will diminish whatever hope remains of helping Afghanistan become a recognizable democracy.

Americans once congratulated themselves for freeing Afghanistan’s women from Islamic extremism. Taliban leaders have said they intend to protect women’s rights to education and employment, but their track record — closing schools, barring women from public life, and worse — inspires little confidence.

Many, including Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, are pessimistic.

“We encouraged women to step forward,” Crocker told me. “Now it appears they’re expendable.”

Trump has disrupted his own diplomacy more than once. When the U.S. and Taliban reached a tentative deal last September, Trump impulsively decided that he wanted Taliban leaders to fly to Camp David for a splashy ceremony three days before the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

The Taliban, which isn’t big on photo ops, refused. Republicans in Congress also denounced the idea of honoring the leaders of a guerrilla force who had killed 1,800 Americans by bringing them to the presidential retreat in Maryland. Trump announced that he was canceling the deal entirely, blamed the Taliban for an attack that killed a U.S. serviceman in Kabul, and pronounced the peace talks “dead.”

Khalilzad needed almost six months to bring the deal back to life.

If the Feb. 29 deal holds, Trump will claim credit for cutting U.S. troops in Afghanistan down to 8,600 — the same number deployed when President Obama left office.

But what Trump really wants is to announce —in an election year, no less — that those troops are on their way home, too.

Given the complexities of Afghan politics, that’s probably impossible. Diplomats warn that putting pressure on the Afghans to conclude a peace agreement could scuttle the process.

If Trump wants to withdraw troops as part of a comprehensive deal — one that avoids chaos, meets U.S. counterterrorism needs and gives Afghanistan a chance at peace — he’ll need to exercise unwonted self-restraint.

After three years as president, he doesn’t have many diplomatic achievements to his name. He’s staged disruptive events, including summit meetings with Kim Jong Un, trade wars and withdrawal from the nuclear deal with Iran, but produced few tangible accomplishments.

Launching a peace process for Afghanistan, if it succeeds, could be his most substantive achievement — but only if he gets out of his own way.

Roger Stone’s sentencing Thursday is shaping up as a test of judicial independence after President Trump inserted himself in the court’s deliberations over the fate of his longtime confidant.

If U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentences Stone in line with the Justice Department’s new and lower recommendation, partisans will see that as caving to Trump, former federal prosecutor Harry Sandick said. If she gives a jail term closer to the maximum, she’ll be seen as defying the pressure.

“Given how polarized the country is, some people will look to Jackson to be a hero and give him a long sentence, and others will look to her to be a hero and give him a short sentence, but she’ll likely come in somewhere in between,” Sandick said. “She doesn’t need to be a hero. She’s a federal judge.”

Jackson said Wednesday that she’ll allow Stone to remain free regardless while she considers his bid for a new trial and any other motions filed after the sentencing. Speculation that sending him straight to prison could prompt Trump to swiftly pardon him rose after the president issued a slate of high-profile clemencies Tuesday in cases often supported by conservatives.

The Stone case stems from the U.S. investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and was always politically charged. But it turned surreal last week when senior Justice Department officials overruled career prosecutors who had recommended a prison term as long as nine years. The rare step seemed a reaction to angry tweets by Trump. The prosecutors quit the case in response, and Trump mocked them afterward on Twitter.

The about-face over the sentencing recommendation prompted Democratic lawmakers to accuse Trump of using the Justice Department for his own bidding. It also set up a rare clash between the president and his attorney general, William P. Barr, who complained on television that Trump’s comments were harming the public perception of the Justice Department as impartial. Even the chief federal judge in Washington issued a statement affirming that public pressure wouldn’t affect sentencing decisions.

The four prosecutors who oversaw Stone’s case made a comprehensive argument about why he should be locked up for seven to nine years. It was based on sentencing guidelines and details of his case, including his combative and disruptive behavior during the court proceedings. Stone, 67, asked for no prison time at all.

The Justice Department said the line prosecutors didn’t calculate Stone’s offenses correctly and revised the sentencing recommendation to between three and four years. In his tweets, Trump called the original sentencing recommendation “a miscarriage of justice” and suggested the prosecutors behind it were minions of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, whose probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election he has often derided as a corrupt “witch hunt.”

However she rules, Jackson may use the hearing to grill Justice Department lawyers about the decision-making behind the scenes, given how quickly the prosecutors who were most familiar with Stone’s case were overruled.

Jackson is “entitled to ask DOJ to explain in some way why they changed their position within 24 hours,” said Mimi Rocah, a former federal prosecutor in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office who’s running as a Democrat for Manhattan district attorney. “Judges are in charge when it comes to sentencing, so none of this would be out of the ordinary.”

Sharon L. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who’s now in private practice in New York, said Jackson could go so far as to ask Barr himself to appear.

“I think what has happened calls for that sort of drastic order,” McCarthy said.

Judges frequently hand down sentences that are lower — sometimes much lower — than what prosecutors suggest, and it’s possible that Jackson would have done so in Stone’s case even if Trump hadn’t weighed in or the Justice Department hadn’t reversed course. The perceived interference from the White House may complicate such a decision in Stone’s case.

Indeed, Trump’s commentary on the case could blow back on Stone if Jackson — who has also been criticized by Trump on Twitter — feels the need to demonstrate her independence by giving Stone a longer sentence than she otherwise would have, said Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at Loyola Law School.

“If Judge Jackson were inclined to give a lower sentence, that actually makes it harder for her to do so now,” Levenson said.

Jacob S. Frenkel, a former federal prosecutor and Securities and Exchange Commission trial attorney, said that “the irony of the president’s tweet is that it could end up backfiring.” The judge may decide “that to protect the integrity and project the independence of the judiciary, she may end up imposing a longer sentence than she may have originally intended,” Frenkel said.

Randall Jackson, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan who prosecuted Bernard Madoff, says the judge isn’t likely to adjust her sentence in response to Trump. Even so, he said, the furor that erupted over suspected interference by Trump and Barr could hurt Stone in court.

“A reasonable observer could question whether this is the type of thing that is going to distract the judge from what most defense attorneys would want the judge to be focused on, which is the mitigating factors for their client that could lead to a lower sentence,” Jackson said.

DALLAS — Ross Perot, outlining how he would mend the U.S. economy, proposes a combination of tax cuts and loans for small business and tougher trade policy to create more jobs at home.

“We cannot be a superpower if we cannot manufacture here,” the Texas billionaire said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. He called for the United States to make almost everything it needs at home. “We have to manufacture here,” he said.

Perot, whose undeclared presidential candidacy has surged in opinion polls, described himself as a “fair and free trader” but believes that “agreements we’ve cut with countries around the world are not balanced at all.”

He said he would adjust the “tilted deck” of trade with Japan “in a very nice, diplomatic way. In this case (make) the Japanese say: ‘We’ll take the same deal on cars we’ve given you.’ ”

The effect, he said, would be to drastically reduce imports from Japan. “You are going to see the clock stop,” said Perot. “You could never unload the ships to this country; just could never unload the ships.”

In a similar vein, he opposes a free-trade agreement with Mexico, believing it would drain manufacturing jobs from a U.S. economy that cannot afford to lose them.

Perot said he is willing to have his mind changed. “This is a complicated, multi-piece equation that we need to think through very carefully. In carpenter’s terms, measure twice, cut once,” he said.

But in Mexico, “labor is a 25- year-old with little or no health-care expense working for a dollar an hour. You cannot compete with that in the U.S.A., period,” he said. “So you would have a surge in building factories down there but a long-term drought here at a time we cannot pay our budget deficits.”

The interview centered on Perot’s agenda on the issues of trade, taxes and the federal deficit. In Perot’s view, problems of the U.S. economy are interrelated, from trade to the national debt and the troubled public school system–which he calls “the least effective public education system in the industrialized world.”

“We’ve got a country $4 trillion in debt, adding $400 billion this year,” he said in his Dallas office–graced by portraits of his family and the painting “Spirit of ‘76” on a wall behind his desk.

“And we have a declining job base, which gives us a declining tax base at a time when we’ve run our debt through the ceiling. In business terms, that’s a ticket for disaster. Never forget that every time you lose a worker–who goes on welfare–the welfare check exceeds the tax payment that used to come to the IRS.”

Perot’s reference to a declining job base reflects his belief–disputed by some scholars–that jobs created in the 1980s were at lower wages than the jobs they replaced as manufacturing companies restructured. Most analysts and government data agree that wages for less educated, industrial workers have fallen over the last two decades. But there have been rising incomes at the same time for educated employees–especially those in new, computer-based information industries.

Perot, who will turn 62 this month, is a pioneer of the information-based industry. In 1962 he founded Electronic Data Systems, which innovated the business for organizing computer data for large companies and the government. It made Perot one of the nation’s wealthiest men. But Perot says that advanced industries alone cannot be the solution for the United States.

“Don’t bet the farm on high tech,” he said. “Information industry is all about intellectual acuity. And in a country with the least effective public education in the industrialized world, it kind of makes you grimace.

“What I’m saying is, right now, we can’t take people out of factories and send them to Microsoft (the leading computer software firm). If their children had a great education, we could. That’s generational change. But their children are not getting a great education.”

Perot made great efforts on behalf of educational reform in Texas in 1984, and has said he supports greatly expanded funding for education starting at preschool levels for all children. “It’s the best investment we can make,” he has said.

But education is for the future, and there is a need to create jobs now in the United States, not overseas, Perot declared.

“Do we need to make clothing in this country? Of course we do. Do we need to make shoes in this country? Of course we do. We have places in our country where people would be delighted to work in a shoe factory for reasonable wages.

“When I think of shoes, I think of Valley Forge (the winter encampment during the American Revolution where George Washington’s soldiers wrapped their feet in bandages and rags),” said Perot, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy.

“My mind bounces back and forth between the world I hope we have and the world that might be. We might be fighting barefooted.”

Perot contended that jobs can be created fastest in small companies.

“The quickest way to stimulate the economy and have a growing, dynamic job base is to stimulate small business. You’ll create more jobs faster by going through small business than through the huge industries,” said Perot, who started his business career as a salesman for IBM.

He said small-business people today are starved for credit and capital since banks are cautious of lending in the aftermath of the speculative 1980s, and small business doesn’t have access to big stock and bond markets.

But if he should become President, solving the credit problem will be “easy,” Perot said. “Change the regulations and the banks will loan the money,” he said, indicating that bank examiners should loosen their definitions about prudent loans and reduce the amount banks must reserve against potential losses.

Perot would attract investors to small business ventures by reducing the tax on capital gains. “I’ve got to give you a reason to take money out of Treasury bills to invest in a high-risk, wildcatting venture,” Perot explained.

“I can’t force you to take your money out of T-bills, so I have to create an environment where you want to take this risk.” That means a tax preference. “But I’m not changing capital gains for everybody. This is for the really high-risk start-up of a small company,” Perot said.

But “you will rarely hear me use the word ‘capital gains tax rate.’ I’ll be talking about money to create jobs,” he said.

Perot’s own considerable fortune, estimated by various business publications at $3.3 billion, is invested mostly in T-bills and corporate and high-rated municipal bonds. He has $200 million invested in Perot Systems, $350 million in real estate and about $40 million in funds for start-up companies, including a stake in Next Inc., the computer company headed by Apple co-founder Steven P. Jobs.

Perot also spoke of pushing for legislation to allow, and encourage, banks to make equity investments in start-up companies–a form of government-backed development bank.

“Or some other vehicle will emerge,” he said. “You find what seems to be the best way out–and then you adjust 1,000 times as you go. That’s the way you do anything, whether it’s cutting grass or making rockets.”

Perot’s views on big business are harsh. He believes a ruinous gap opened up between management and labor in large corporations, between executives who paid themselves handsomely while demanding reductions in the pay of ordinary workers. The result was a reduction in American competitiveness and hurt the U.S. economy, he says, repeating a theme he sounded often in two stormy years on General Motors’ board of directors.

Today, he is not surprised that the chief executives of more than a dozen major corporations, meeting last month at the Business Council in Hot Springs, Va., uniformly disapproved of him and his candidacy.

“They’re part of the Establishment,” Perot said. “The status quo works for them right now, and I’m talking about major, major change.”

Still, big companies should be enlisted in a drive to turn the U.S. economy to pursuits of peace, from what Perot terms “45 years of Cold War which drained us. The Cold War broke Russia, but it drained us.”

For all his distrust of foreign trade agreements, Perot admires the way Japanese companies do business–in particular Toyota, which he studied while a director of GM. “They work as a team and their products have quality,” Perot said. “Have you spent time in a Lexus dealership? All those guys selling Lexuses have to do is get you to drive it around the block.”

Perot himself drives an ’87 Oldsmobile. But he said U.S. industry should start doing things the way Japanese industry does, having senior business figures help small start-ups, “targeting industries of the future and making sure sacrifice in corporations starts at the top.”

Perot acknowledges that many things he admires in Japanese industry stem from that country’s different way of organizing society. “But my point is, you and I, our company is failing. And we have a competitor who’s winning. I would say, let’s go study him and figure out why he wins.”

To pay for his programs, Perot said, “We are not going to raise taxes unless we have to. But I ain’t stupid enough to say ‘Watch my lips.’ ”

He would “go to a new tax system because the one we have now is paper-laden, inefficient, not fair and so on.” But he claims to have no specific ideas yet on how to change taxes. “I would get people in, and in 60 days I’d have half a dozen new tax systems,” he said.

“My points on taxes are basically three: We’ve got to raise the revenues to make the country go.

“Two, we’ll get rid of the waste. The Department of Agriculture, with 2% of our people engaged in farming, is bigger than it was when a third of our people were farming. You’ve got to cut it down and you need a strong consensus to do that.”

He has been criticized for not being more specific on what other programs he would cut, and by how much. But as a third step, he said he would demand authority to selectively cut programs approved by Congress. “Give me the line-item veto, or don’t send me there,” said Perot, echoing a demand first raised by Ronald Reagan.

Perot has become linked with the idea that wealthy people might help reduce the federal deficit by giving up their rights to Social Security and Medicare. By one calculation, which Perot ascribes to Bush Administration chief economic adviser Michael J. Boskin, such a sacrifice by the wealthy could save the Treasury $100 billion a year–although Perot says that figure has proved dubious.

“I’d give up Social Security in a minute,” said the Texas billionaire. “And if a lot of people would give it up who did not need it, that’s worth looking at.”

Would that be subjecting the venerable Social Security program to a “means test,” which would adjust individual benefits based on income or assets.

“I never got down to what means testing is,” Perot said. “We’ve just got to go through and look at every single item. We have work to do.”

OKLAHOMA CITY — Speaking in measured tones in his cluttered ground-floor office, state Atty. Gen. William “Drew” Edmondson doesn’t sound like someone itching to take on the political establishment in Washington.

His background doesn’t suggest it, either. His grandfather was a county commissioner. His father was a congressman. His uncle was the youngest governor in Oklahoma history and later served in the U.S. Senate. Edmondson’s own career is a study in calculated political ascension, from the Oklahoma Legislature to Muskogee County district attorney to an unprecedented third term as the state’s highest law enforcement official.

This week, he took a radical turn for someone who has long followed political conventions, and hijacked a high-profile federal investigation into one of the country’s biggest corporate accounting scandals.

By filing the first criminal charges Wednesday against telecommunications giant WorldCom Inc. and its deposed chief executive, Bernard J. Ebbers, Edmondson single-handedly threw into doubt the work of Justice Department prosecutors who want to punish the people responsible for understating expenses by $11 billion.

He also garnered more media attention in a single day than he did during the two years he worked on the $200-billion settlement with U.S. tobacco firms.

The securities fraud charges are among the first by a state against Wall Street’s most wanted, the men who ran WorldCom, Enron Corp. and other firms felled by accounting scandals. New York has charged some former executives of Tyco International Ltd., and federal authorities filed a civil action against the company.

Ashburn, Va.-based WorldCom pledged to cooperate with Oklahoma authorities.

U.S. prosecutors, who have charged five of Ebbers’ underlings and won four guilty pleas, are furious that the Oklahoma case might jeopardize their prosecutions. In addition to Ebbers, Edmondson charged the four who are cooperating with the federal government, and they might be afraid to testify about their illegal activity in a federal trial, fearing they would bolster the state case against them.

Some financial commentators and political opponents portray Edmondson as an ambitious bumpkin — or worse, a public official doing the bidding of a campaign contributor, SBC Communications Inc., a phone company looking to keep rival WorldCom mired in bankruptcy.

Many others, including some of Edmondson’s courtroom foes, defend him as a fair, thoughtful and straightforward man who was simply unable to sit tight in the face of massive fraud at WorldCom and what he saw as the foot-dragging of federal investigators.

“He’s not a wild and crazy guy,” said Andy Coates, dean of the University of Oklahoma’s law school. “He’s very sound in his judgments.”

Edmondson, a 56-year-old Democrat with a teaching degree who has the look and demeanor of a high school guidance counselor, says he came to his decision gradually, after studying WorldCom with officials from California and other states who are now cheering his prosecution from the sidelines.

“He’s not your average elected official,” said Washington state Atty. Gen. Christine Gregoire, who led Edmondson and half a dozen other state attorneys general in the tobacco settlement talks. “He’s an individual who will always do what he considers to be the right things, no matter the personal or political consequences.”

Edmondson’s interest in public service goes back to his childhood, when he attended “political meetings and bean-dip dinners” with his father, he recalled in an interview.

“My brothers would go out of family obligation,” he said, “but I actually enjoyed it.”

His trust in government — especially the federal government — began to erode during the Vietnam War, when he served in the Navy and ferried secret messages to commanders on an air base. Reading that traffic, he said, “it became obvious we were in places where we said we weren’t.”

That “was one of a number of life circumstances that make me not trust immediately what we get told by the government.”

As attorney general, Edmondson has often argued against federal intervention into state matters. In 2000, he filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting New Jersey’s attempt to stop the Boy Scouts of America from discriminating against gay troop leaders — a position that didn’t endear him to his socially conservative constituents.

Edmondson has scored political points with his ardent and effective support of the death penalty, which is popular in the state. After the bombing of the city’s federal building that killed 168 people, he helped push a law through Congress that streamlined the lengthy appeals process in death row cases.

Oklahoma now executes more criminals per capita than any other state, according to the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington. Unlike his counterparts in some other states, however, Edmondson voluntarily authorizes DNA testing of convicts at state expense when there is a real question of guilt.

“Edmondson handles his position in a professional manner,” said Oklahoma County’s chief public defender, Bob Ravitz. “He’s not in any way vindictive.”

Nor, Edmondson said, does he use his position to protect his friends and allies. “I’m the guy who, as district attorney, raided my own Veterans of Foreign Wars lodge because it was engaged in illegal gambling.”

He said he put a mayor and district attorney — both friends and financial supporters — behind bars for corruption. He worked with the Federal Trade Commission to put two of his major campaign contributors out of business for making misrepresentations in violation of telemarketing rules.

“Friendship is one thing,” Edmondson said. “Breaking the law is something else.”

He and his wife, Linda, a medical social worker, have two adult children, one a lawyer and the other an anthropologist. A niece is serving a 35-year prison sentence for an infamous crime spree inspired by the movie “Natural Born Killers.” Edmondson said the personal trauma had not changed his view of the criminal justice system.

In the WorldCom case, Edmondson was initially troubled by the enormity of the misdeeds. For three years, the firm reported profit when it had none. Investors, including Oklahoma’s state pension fund, lost more than $200 billion when the company filed for the record bankruptcy protection it hopes to emerge from this fall.

Edmondson and officials from three other states complained when WorldCom’s bankruptcy plan showed the company wiping out most of its potential criminal penalties in its reorganization.

Then there was the headline-grabbing $750-million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission. By Edmondson’s calculations, $250 million of that amount will be paid in stock and $300 million comes from an IRS refund WorldCom received for paying taxes on nonexistent profit. At the same time, the company is collecting $772 million in federal contracts.

“That’s what drove me over the edge,” he said.

Edmondson feared that waiting for federal criminal charges would allow the company to escape punishment. In other cases, he said he had put his own investigations on hold at the Justice Department’s request, then learned that its cases fizzled only after Oklahoma’s statute of limitations had expired.

“The United States attorneys are not necessarily the speediest vehicles on the street,” Edmondson said. Why run the risk with Ebbers, he reasoned, when “we’re confident that we can convict him, and we’re confident that he’s guilty.”

Edmondson’s critics say there’s another factor at work: the attorney general’s friendship with SBC lobbyist Mike Turpen.

The two men go back more than 20 years, to when Turpen was district attorney in Muskogee County and Edmondson was one of his deputies. Outside of work, Edmondson directed Turpen in a local theater performance of “Arsenic and Old Lace.” Turpen, a former state attorney general, is one of Edmondson’s largest fund-raisers.

San Antonio-based SBC is among a handful of phone companies mounting an aggressive lobbying campaign to prevent WorldCom from emerging from bankruptcy protection with the competitive advantage of much less debt. Edmondson happens to agree, saying his sense of fair play is offended by the prospect that WorldCom could end up “stronger than other companies out there that have not broken the law.”

But he bristles when asked about Turpen. Yes, they discussed WorldCom’s bankruptcy advantage. But he insists his friend didn’t have any undue influence on his thinking.

Turpen told a Tulsa, Okla., radio station Friday that “when it comes to decisions like this … nobody tells Drew Edmondson what to do and how to do it,” according to Associated Press.

Personal connections to people with a stake in law enforcement are to some extent unavoidable in a state with just 3 million residents. In the Oklahoma capital, where the seat of government stands across from blanched grass under an oil well, passersby nod to strangers on the street.

But even small states can make a difference in white-collar prosecutions. If Edmondson wins criminal convictions against Ebbers and other WorldCom executives, other states may be emboldened to follow suit — with or without the blessing of the Justice Department.

For the time being, though, officials in other states will wait and see how Edmondson does.

“I hope that serious punishment is forthcoming” for WorldCom, California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer said.

Edmondson professes not to care about whether his actions this week will initiate a trend.

“It’s an interesting question,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter to me.”

ATLANTA — Sen. John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV (D-W. V.) traveled only 596 miles when he flew here from Miami last weekend seeking support for a possible presidential campaign. But it felt as though he had crossed the border between different countries.

On Saturday morning, Rockefeller toured a Miami shelter for abused and severely ill infants whose hopes were stunted before birth by mothers who used cocaine or could not afford medical care. By Saturday night he was raising money in the comfortable suburban home of an Atlanta attorney, a place of elegant antiques and long green lawns where anything seemed possible.

Candidates often veer between the extremes of society as they search alternately for exposure and money. But the contrast seems especially appropriate for Rockefeller–a politician who is defining himself on the national stage as an advocate for threatened children, yet who is indelibly stamped with the imprimatur of privilege.

Both elements of that combination are raising Rockefeller’s visibility in the nascent Democratic presidential race. Over the past month, he has received enormous publicity as chairman of the National Commission on Children, a federal panel whose late June report recommended a new $1,000 tax credit for every child, and the expansion of educational and health care programs for disadvantaged children.

But he may be attracting even more notice from activists intrigued with the prospect of a Democratic presidential bid from a man whose name is synonymous with wealth and more typically associated with the moderate Republicanism of his late uncle Nelson A. Rockefeller, the former governor of New York.

“Because of his name he does carry some star quality with him and that is helpful in the initial stages,” says one Democrat close to another potential candidate. “Whether he can sustain that is another question.”

Rockefeller, who is just entering his second term in the Senate after serving eight years as West Virginia’s governor, says he is still about three weeks away from a final decision on whether to seek the nomination. The key remaining concern, he says, is the disruption a race would cause for his family, particularly his wife, Sharon Percy Rockefeller, who is now president of the public television station in Washington, D.C.

“If you talk publicly about families and children, then you have to act responsibly privately in terms of families and children,” he says.

Despite those hesitations, Rockefeller, 54, is behaving like a man drawn toward the track. He has started raising money in several states–while holding open the possibility of using his personal fortune to finance a race–and has discussed the rigors of campaigning with Gary Hart, Walter F. Mondale and Jimmy Carter.

Last weekend, Rockefeller visited Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas–part of an extended tour that will take him to 17 cities this month promoting both his presidential prospects and the children’s commission recommendations. “I see no reason for anything but encouragement,” Rockefeller says of his reception so far.

Even so, Rockefeller still seems more accomplished selling the commission than himself. At the Jackson Hospital Infant/Toddler Shelter Center in Miami, for example, Rockefeller lifted a tiny premature baby to his shoulder and gently stroked the child’s back as he asked a doctor precise questions about the infant’s care. In New Orleans, he let a family lead him away from his tour to visit their disabled daughter who was recovering from a spinal operation. “God bless you both for your perseverance,” he said quietly as he left the bedside.

In his private meetings with political leaders and fund raisers across the South last weekend, Rockefeller was just as earnest and personable, but less focused. He introduced himself and talked about economics, children’s issues, health care and his case against President Bush, though without anything resembling a clear progression from subject to subject.

“This guy needs work,” said one prominent Democrat who has seen Rockefeller in several private meetings. “In some ways he projects well; in other ways, like getting bogged down in details, he loses it.”

Many of the potential contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination are already organizing their message around a central core. Former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas, the only announced candidate, is calling on the party to work more closely with business; Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin is delivering venerable Midwestern populism at a paint-peeling pitch; Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton is championing a drive to “reinvent government” with new approaches to social problems.

For Rockefeller, who left a State Department job to become a VISTA volunteer in West Virginia during the 1960s, the closest analogy appears to be a general call for the nation to pay more attention to domestic problems. His message is an unusual mosaic of ideas both liberal and conservative, old and new, assembled in a pattern that doesn’t always meet at right angles.

Rockefeller touches strong liberal notes, insisting that even costly programs to rescue disadvantaged children are essential to the nation’s future economic health. “The loss of productivity when kids don’t get training and education is a devastating price for America to pay . . . every kid has to be fought over,” he argues.

But Rockefeller also is comfortable with ideas that unsettle many liberals: He heartily endorses policies that demand greater personal responsibility from recipients of government aid, and repeatedly insists that the Democratic nominee must be able to say no to the leading party constituency groups. The fact that the children’s commission’s principal proposal for helping families was a large tax cut, rather than a new federal program, also represents a significant departure from recent Democratic tradition.

Rockefeller further spices this blend with an assertive economic nationalism that calls for tougher negotiations with European and Asian trading partners. “I think we are in a very serious, somewhat desperate struggle for national economic survival,” he says.

To some Democrats, the most surprising aspect of Rockefeller’s appearances over the past month is the fervor with which he criticizes President Bush. Despite what now appear long odds for any Democrat, Rockefeller seems genuinely eager to take on Bush–a man Rockefeller portrays as betraying a background not unlike his own with “cynical” political attacks on such issues as racial quotas.

“Whatever there was in what was a basically progressive Republican Teddy Roosevelt upbringing went down the tubes when he signed on with Ronald Reagan,” Rockefeller says. “Part of my disappointment in him is he simply ought to know better.”

As for his own gilded pedigree, Rockefeller says he doesn’t foresee it causing any difficulties if he decides to run–though it may take some time for Democrats to get used to the great-grandson of the founder of Standard Oil declaring “it’s time to stop worrying about the wealthy and well-connected.”

“I honestly don’t know if it would be a problem or not,” says Geoff Garin, who has done public polling for Rockefeller. “But remember, this is the party that is proudest of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy (both from wealthy families), so a Rockefeller would be more in character than out of it.”

California state Senate leader Kevin de León introduced Senate Bill 54 on what was an unusually acrimonious first day of the 2017 legislative session, as lawmakers in both chambers were locked in bitter debate over the still newly elected President Donald Trump.

State Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León discusses legislation that would prevent state and local law enforcement agencies from using resources for immigration enforcement. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)

The proposal, known as the “sanctuary state” bill, was sparked by the Trump administration’s broadened deportation orders. It would expand so-called sanctuary city policies, prohibiting state and local law enforcement agencies, including school police and security departments, from using resources to investigate, interrogate, detain, detect or arrest people for immigration enforcement purposes.

But as President Trump and U.S. Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions have threatened to slash federal funding from “sanctuary cities,” the state legislation is raising heated opposition from Republican lawmakers and sheriffs. They argue its provisions could strain the state’s finances and shield dangerous criminals.

Here’s what you should know about the bill.

1. It builds on an earlier law that provides protections to immigrants

De León has said his proposal builds on the California Trust Act, which Gov. Jerry Brown signed in October 2013. That state statute prevents law enforcement agencies from detaining immigrants longer than necessary for minor crimes, allowing federal immigration authorities to take them into custody.

Senate Bill 54 would prevent state and local agencies from complying with any “hold requests” to detain immigrants, for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It would also prohibit state and local agencies from using their facilities, property, equipment or personnel for immigration enforcement, and from spending money on it. The agencies would be barred from:

• Collecting information about a person’s immigration status
• Responding to notification or transfer requests from federal immigration agencies
• Responding to requests for personal information that is not publicly available for the purpose of enforcing immigration laws
• Arresting people based on civil immigration warrants
• Giving federal immigration officers access to interview someone in their custody for immigration enforcement purposes
• Helping federal immigration officers search a car without a warrant
• Performing the functions of an immigration officer

Hundreds of Sacramento residents protested, listened and shouted while acting ICE Director Thomas Homan, left, and Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones held a community forum. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)

(Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)

2. It would establish ‘safe zones’ for immigrants

Within three months of Senate Bill 54 becoming law, the state Department of Justice would have to publish policies outlining what state and local law enforcement agencies can and can’t do to assist federal officials.

It would also create “safe zones” for immigrants by requiring all public schools, public libraries, courthouses and health facilities run by state or local government to implement those policies or “equivalent” regulations, though they would not have to be approved by the state. All other government-run organizations and entities that offer physical or mental health and wellness services, or that provide access to education, legal aid and social services, including the University of California, would be encouraged but not required to adopt the state policies.

3. Law enforcement officers would be able to work with task forces — so long as they’re not dedicated to immigration enforcement

To address some concerns from law enforcement, De León has added new amendments to his bill that would allow local and state officers to participate in task forces — and work alongside federal immigration officers — as long as their main purpose is not immigration enforcement.

Agencies that participate in a joint law enforcement task force would have to submit a report every six months to the state Department of Justice describing the types and frequency of arrests made by the task force. Within 14 months of the bill going into effect and twice a year thereafter, the state attorney general would have to publish the reports online.

4. Federal immigration officials would be notified when felons who have violent or serious convictions are released

Other changes to the bill by De León have attempted to address concerns from Republican lawmakers and sheriffs over the release of violent felons.

Federal law requires that electronic fingerprint records for all offenders booked into state prisons and local jails be sent to the FBI and to the Department of Homeland Security. ICE receives an electronic notification when DHS has previously entered an inmate’s information into its databases and determines whether the person is a priority for deportation. If so, it can request the arresting agency to hold or notify ICE before the person is let go.

Under Senate Bill 54, communication between ICE and state and local law enforcement agencies would be limited to passing on information about inmates who have previously been deported for a violent felony, or are serving time on a misdemeanor or felony and have a prior serious or violent felony conviction. State and local agencies would only be able respond to requests from ICE for other information if it is already available to the public.

Other recent amendments to the bill would require the State Parole Board or the California Dept. of Corrections and Rehabilitation to give ICE 60-days advance notice of the release date of inmates who have been convicted of a serious or violent felony, or those who are serving time for a nonviolent crime but have a prior conviction for violent or serious crimes.

Law enforcement officers also would be allowed to contact and transfer people to ICE, with a judicial warrant, if they come into contact with someone who was previously deported for a violent felony.

5. It’s unclear how much of a financial burden the legislation will be for state and local law enforcement agencies

The Senate Appropriations Committee has determined it would take a one-time cost of $2.7 million and ongoing costs of $2.3 million per year for the state to develop compliance policies, provide training and outreach to state agencies and compile task force reports as required by Senate Bill 54.

But the costs for local law enforcement agencies to change their existing procedures — and to end contracts with federal immigration agencies, some of which generate millions of dollars in revenue from leased jail space — are unknown, as is how much it will cost state agencies including courts and schools to implement the new policies. The committee has not been able to measure the potential loss in funding from Washington should the state refuse to cooperate with federal authorities.

The state is unlikely to reimburse local law enforcement agencies for their financial losses because while the bill would impose restrictions, it would not require them to develop new policies, programs or services, according to an analysis by the Senate Public Safety Committee. But the state would probably have to foot the bill for expenses accrued by local government operations, including school districts and county health facilities, which would be asked to devise new policies that limit cooperation with immigration enforcement.

6. Many sheriffs are vehemently opposed to the bill

The bill has drawn fierce opposition from sheriffs across the state, including Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell and Sacramento Sheriff Scott Jones, who last month hosted a community forum on immigration enforcement with acting ICE Director Thomas Homan that drew a large crowd of protestors.

The sheriffs say the bill would severely limit communication and collaboration between local and federal agencies, forcing federal immigration officers to go into communities — instead of jails — when searching for immigrants who are a danger to public safety.

As the head of the nation’s largest sheriff’s department, McDonnell runs the largest jail system in the country, which houses approximately 18,000 inmates on any given day. Asst. Sheriff Kelly Harrington, who oversees the jail operation, has previously said federal immigration agents have access inside the county’s jail system every day. L.A. County jail officials last year handed over about 1,000 inmates to immigration agents — a small portion of the more than 300,000 people released from the county’s jails that year.

The sheriffs also argue the changes to the bill don’t address the potential loss of federal funding in counties that lease space to federal immigration agencies for detainees. An SB 54 opposition letter from Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Sandra Hutchens estimated that shortfall for her agency at roughly $22 million annually. Jones, who has said his department has $4.8 million in ICE contracts, insists his opposition stems from public safety concerns, not financial losses.

But no sheriff in California’s 58 counties is willing to hold inmates past their release dates for ICE, the Times has found. Several sheriffs said their defiance was not rooted in ethical or political opposition, but in concerns over federal court rulings, including a case in Oregon where a judge found that police violated a woman’s constitutional rights by keeping her in jail at the federal agency’s request.

7. Supporters argue the bill will protect vulnerable communities

Dubbed the California Values Act, Senate Bill 54 is at the center of a legislative package filed by Democrats in an attempt to protect more than 3 million people living in the state illegally. Other bills aim to protect immigrants’ religious affiliations and create a $12-million legal defense program for immigrants facing deportation who do not have a violent felony on their records.

The bill has drawn a long list of supporters, including Los Angeles County Supervisors Hilda Solis and Sheila Kuehl and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. Other supporters include city officials from sanctuary cities like Santa Ana and Berkeley, immigrant advocates and Democratic lawmakers. They are urging opponents of the bill to move away from embracing Trump’s rhetoric, which they say stereotypes immigrants as criminals, and are pointing to studies that reflect low crime rates in immigrant communities.

Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck has said he supports with the legislation’s “underlying tenets,” but wants to ensure it does not protect criminals.

Meanwhile, some university police chiefs have supported the bill from the beginning, saying fear can keep witnesses and victims to crimes from coming forward. A 2013 study conducted by the University of Illinois found 44% of Latinos are less likely to contact police if they have been a victim of crime because they fear that police officers will ask about their immigration status.

[email protected]

Twitter: @jazmineulloa

ALSO

Controversial ‘sanctuary state’ bill clears major hurdle after hours of debate

New amendments to ‘sanctuary state’ bill will allow police and sheriffs to contact ICE about violent felons

Here’s why law enforcement groups are divided on legislation to turn California into a ‘sanctuary state’

Protests erupt at Sacramento town hall meeting as ICE director answers questions about immigration enforcement

Updates on California politics

UPDATES:

12:01 p.m.: This article was updated to reflect that law enforcement agencies are allowed to notify immigration officials about inmates with prior violent felony convictions.

This article was originally published at 12:00 a.m.

Sinclair Broadcast Group has made an unsolicited bid to buy rival station owner E.W. Scripps just a week after disclosing it had acquired shares of the company’s stock.

Sinclair filed a statement Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission saying it will offer Scripps $7 per share, consisting of $2.72 in cash and $4.28 in combined company common stock. The price is a 200% premium over the 30-day average for Scripps shares as of Nov. 6.

Sinclair revealed on Nov. 17 that it gained a stake in Scripps through the acquisition of publicly traded shares. Scripps, which operates 61 TV stations and owns the ION network, is valued at around $393 million.

The Cincinnati-based Scripps said in a statement saying the company’s board of directors “will carefully review and evaluate any proposals, including the unsolicited Sinclair offer.”

The statement added that the board will “act in the business interest of the company, all of its shareholders as well as its employees and the many communities it serves across the United States.”

The company’s stock was up around 7.5% on the news of the Sinclair offer, closing at $4.43 a share Monday afternoon.

A takeover of Scripps would be culturally jarring for the local newsrooms at its stations. The company was founded in 1878 with a chain of daily newspapers that defined itself through journalistic independence. The company’s longtime motto is “Give light.”

The Baltimore-area Sinclair is known for the conservative politics of its owners, led by David D. Smith, who have had their views amplified through the company’s local TV news coverage over the years.

Sinclair most recently tried to flex its muscle when it pulled “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off its ABC-affiliated stations in September after the late-night host made comments about the political affiliation of the man accused of killing right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk.

Sinclair demanded that Kimmel make “a meaningful donation” to Kirk’s organization Turning Point USA in addition to an apology. None was offered, and after a week, Sinclair put the program back on its air with zero concessions from ABC.

Regardless of political leanings, all major TV station ownership groups have urged the Federal Communications Commission to lift the limit on how much of the country their outlets can cover.

TV station owners are limited to reaching 39% of the country, which companies say puts them at a disadvantage in competing against tech giants that have no such restriction in their media endeavors.

While consumer advocates believe consolidation will reduce the diversity of voices in communities, TV executives have argued that it’s no longer economically viable to have multiple station owners in a single market, often covering the same major stories.

Consolidation would also give TV station owners more clout in their negotiations for carriage fees they receive from cable and satellite providers. Such fees are vital as TV stations have struggled to maintain ad revenues due to a decline in ratings and more consumers turning to streaming video platforms.

Sinclair’s attempt to buy Scripps comes after its failed effort to acquire Tegna Inc., which agreed to a $6.2-billion deal to merge with Nexstar Media Group. The deal will require regulatory approval as it would give Nexstar’s stations the ability to reach 80% of the U.S.

Station owners calling for consolidation have been hopeful they had an ally in Trump-appointed FCC Chairman Brendan Carr.

But a social media post suggested that President Trump may be wary of consolidation, saying it could give greater influence to broadcast networks NBC and ABC. The president has been highly critical of the news coverage of both networks, even threatening to go after their TV station licenses.