press

With Bill Clinton scheduled to occupy the White House in January, the two Democrats newly elected to Congress from San Diego County said Wednesday they will press for federal dollars to replace the thousands of defense jobs that have been lost in the area with civilian jobs.

San Diego City Councilman Bob Filner and Port Commissioner Lynn Schenk, both Democrats, were still basking in their Election Day victories, but they had already plotted out a similar agenda for their first 100 days in Washington.

“Simply put, it’s jobs,” Filner said. “San Diego needs jobs. Lynn and I have good connections in the party, and we hope to use them to bring jobs and business investment to San Diego.”

Schenk is the first woman elected to Congress from San Diego County.

The election of Filner and Schenk means the county’s congressional delegation will now be made up of two Democrats and three Republicans. The Republicans, all incumbents, were returned to Washington on Tuesday.

GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter got a wake-up call of sorts from the voters in the 52nd District. The seven-term congressman beat his Democratic challenger Janet M. Gastil by 10 percentage points, 52% to 42%. But in his last two elections Hunter trounced his opponents by winning 73% and 74% of the vote in 1990 and 1988, respectively.

Gastil ran an aggressive campaign against Hunter, constantly hammering him with television and radio ads that criticized him for the 407 overdrafts totaling $129,225 that he wrote on his U.S. House bank account.

Schenk, who won in the 49th District, and Filner, who won in the 50th District, said they would work to make sure that San Diego is not left out of Clinton’s $50-billion reinvestment plan for America’s cities.

San Diego’s defense and aerospace industries have been hard-hit, both by the recession and the downsizing of the military. About 7,000 jobs have been lost in these industries over the past three years.

“The defense industry is very important to San Diego,” Schenk said. “We cannot allow the President and Congress to wipe out the industry here and not replace it with meaningful jobs in the civilian sector. . . . San Diego is an area where we can look to environmental technology as a future job-producing base.”

“Economic conversion to get the defense industry to move to domestic production is a top priority,” Filner said. “But the No. 1 priority for me will be to get our shipbuilding industry moving. I believe that if we can get Nassco (National Steel & Shipbuilding Co.) moving in the double-hull tanker market, we can turn the economy around in San Diego.”

The Nassco shipyard, which is in Filner’s district, is the only privately owned shipyard left on the West Coast. The company relies almost exclusively on Navy repair and shipbuilding contracts, but Nassco executives said they hope to capture some of the double-hull market.

A new federal law requires U.S. oil tankers to be converted to double hulls beginning next year.

Filner’s margin of victory was almost 2 to 1, 57% to 29%, over his Republican challenger, Tony Valencia. That is larger than the 16% registration edge that Democrats have in the district.

Schenk’s victory was not as certain. She won in a district where Republicans have a 4% registration edge, 43% to 39%. Schenk trailed during the early returns but rebounded and won the race by 10 percentage points over GOP challenger Judy Jarvis.

Hunter was unavailable for comment Wednesday. Campaign officials said he had decided to travel throughout the district to thank voters who returned him to office.

A bitter Gastil said she had not ruled out another challenge to the ultra-conservative Hunter in 1994. The former La Mesa school board member and orchard owner was still smarting from what she said were Hunter’s “sleazy campaign tactics.”

Gastil complained that Hunter misled voters when he alleged in his campaign literature that she supported a 10-cent-a-gallon gasoline tax and that she favored eliminating the military. Hunter’s ads also labeled her as a liberal who would eliminate jobs.

“He sent out a mailer saying that I wanted to eliminate the military,” Gastil said. “That was the first time it hit me like a ton of bricks that the man was telling outright lies. . . . I saw in the final days of the campaign a man desperately lying to save his job.”

“It’s too early to have definitive plans, but offhand, I would say that I will definitely challenge him again in 1994,” she added.

Jan. 15 (UPI) — For decades, Asia’s foreign correspondent clubs were the region’s off-duty newsrooms — the late-night debating halls where journalists compared notes on wars, coups, trade deals, democratic uprisings and China’s rise. Now those storied institutions, once synonymous with a freewheeling press culture, are confronting a slow sunset.

No club illustrates this more clearly than the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong. Long considered the spiritual home of Asia’s foreign press corps, the club is navigating a transformed political landscape, a radically shrinking media industry and a shifting geography of global news coverage.

Its evolution has become a case study in how Asia’s information order is changing — and what the future of foreign reporting may look like.

A club built for a Hong Kong that no longer exists

The clubhouse in a colonial-era icehouse on Lower Albert Road remains visually unchanged. Photographs of Vietnam War correspondents still line the walls. The bar still hums with conversation. The dining room still hosts diplomats, academics, business executives and the occasional visiting author.

But beneath that surface, the club’s role — and the city around it — have changed drastically.

“I remain a member and a regular at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club,” said Philip Bowring, 83, a former deputy editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review and co-founder of Asian Sentinel. He added that while the club still survives as a social club; it is necessarily very cautious about the topics discussed.

Since Beijing imposed the National Security Law in 2020, Hong Kong’s once-vaunted press freedoms have tightened. Apple Daily was shut, journalists have been arrested or moved abroad and prominent foreign correspondents have relocated to more predictable bases, such as Seoul or Taipei. Events once taken for granted — open forums with dissidents, academics or activists — now carry political sensitivities.

The club’s suspension of the Human Rights Press Awards in 2022 signaled the depth of this pressure. Membership has also shifted: Once dominated by working correspondents from the Asian Wall Street Journal, Far Eastern Economic Review, AP, Reuters, UPI and major American newspapers, the club now leans more heavily toward academics, non-governmental organization workers, corporate members and public relations professionals.

“The most profound impact of Article 23 has been on the climate in which journalists operate,” said Morgan Davis, president of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club. “Vague definitions and legal uncertainty have left reporters unsure about what can safely be covered. That uncertainty has not required direct enforcement to be effective — it has already fostered self-censorship.”

Collapse of publications that sustained the club

The foreign correspondent club model was born in a different era — one where well-funded international bureaus were standard practice. Asia’s clubs thrived because Asia’s foreign press corps thrived.

But over the last two decades, the scaffolding that supported them has steadily eroded.

Asia’s once dominant foreign press institutions have steadily receded. The Far Eastern Economic Review folded in 2009, the Asian Wall Street Journal, a training ground for generations of financial reporters, was absorbed through corporate restructuring, and the International Herald Tribune vanished after rebranding and consolidation.

Even large broadcasters and wire services have scaled back their regional footprints as advertising revenue collapsed and digital pressures stretched newsroom budgets.

These changes hollowed out the clubs themselves. Bars once filled with correspondents trading tales of scoops are now shared with a broader mix of public relations professionals. Conversations that once revolved around embargoed policy briefings now tilt toward networking and cultural programming.

Regional press freedoms under strain

The political environment across Asia has grown increasingly hostile to foreign media.

In Myanmar, foreign reporters have been jailed or expelled since the 2021 military coup. In Cambodia, independent news outlets were shuttered ahead of national elections, narrowing the space for critical coverage.

Thailand and Malaysia continue to apply sweeping national security and royal defamation laws that discourage investigative and political reporting.

In China, authorities tightly restrict visas, travel, and reporting access for correspondents examining sensitive topics such as elite politics, Xinjiang and corporate wrongdoing.

Hong Kong’s rapid shift, once unthinkable, has emerged as the most visible example. The prosecution of Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai and the recent guilty verdict of conspiring to collude with foreign forces under the Beijing-imposed national security law underscores the risks facing journalists operating in the city.

For an institution like the Foreign correspondents’ Club built on the premise of open discourse, the new environment has meant recalibrating — carefully.

Lai was found guilty on three charges — two counts of conspiring to collude with foreign forces and one count of conspiring to publish seditious material — in a case that has become a bellwether for the state of press freedom under Hong Kong’s national security law.

“This is a very different media environment than prior to the enactment of the National Security Law in 2020, but I would describe it as resilient and maintaining its core functions and the FCC is a reflection of that,” said Edith Terry, an author and former opinion page editor of the South China Morning Post, who has spent nearly four decades in Asia.

Forward-looking questions: reinvention or requiem?

While nostalgia shapes much of the conversation about foreign correspondent clubs, the more pressing question is whether they can reinvent themselves for an era when journalism, geopolitics and information flow are all being fundamentally reshaped.

Across Asia, clubs are confronting a moment of profound transition, but also an opportunity.

A major shift is already underway. With Beijing-based correspondents relocating to Taipei, Seoul and Singapore, the idea of Hong Kong as the singular headquarters for China-watching is over. Coverage of the world’s second-largest economy is now more dispersed, hybrid and remote. The centrality the Foreign Correspondents” Club enjoyed during the Cold War or China’s early reform era is unlikely to return.

With foreign bureaus shrinking, the infrastructure supporting journalism is shifting to nonprofit and academic institutions. Think tanks now publish investigative videos. Civil-society groups conduct data-driven environmental monitoring. Universities host China policy briefings once held at the club. These partnerships could be a lifeline, positioning clubs as conveners of evidence-based dialogue rather than relics of a journalistic past.

Foreign correspondents in Hong Kong still operate with a degree of privilege, but when the Foreign Correspondents’ Club press club fails to use it and falls silent, it leaves local reporters and their union in the firing line,” said Tom Gundry, co-founder of the Hong Kong Free Press. He believes that the club, which occupies government-owned premises, should speak up for press freedom as promised in its mission statement.

While local constraints have narrowed the scope of some public programming, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club’s international profile still gives it a platform few regional institutions can match — one capable of amplifying concerns about transparency, censorship and open debate beyond Hong Kong’s borders.

The club’s social and intellectual life remains intact. Jazz nights still draw packed rooms. Panel discussions are still well-attended, if less politically combustible than in years past. Foreign correspondents, scholars and regional analysts continue to gather there, keeping alive a tradition of debate that, in a more restrictive environment, has become quietly, but unmistakably, political.

But the club’s evolution mirrors the transformation of Hong Kong itself, from a city defined by openness and free exchange to one navigating political boundaries set in Beijing. As the foreign press corps disperses and the region’s political climate tightens, the club stands at a crossroads: reinvent or fade.

Across Asia, other foreign correspondent clubs face the same dilemma. Reinvention could preserve their influence, even if their identities shift. Failure to adapt may leave them as monuments to a media era that has already passed.

United States news agencies and press freedom groups have expressed concern after federal agents raided the home of a reporter for The Washington Post as part of a probe into the handling of classified material.

Wednesday’s raid focused on the residence of journalist Hannah Natanson, who has led the Post’s coverage of efforts under President Donald Trump to slash the federal workforce.

Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) seized her work and personal laptops, as well as other electronics like her phone and a Garmin watch.

“According to the government warrant, the raid was in connection with an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials. We are told Hannah, and the Post, are not a target,” said Washington Post executive editor Matt Murray.

“Nonetheless, this extraordinary, aggressive action is deeply concerning and raises profound questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work.”

Free press organisations echoed the Post’s concerns, arguing that the raid fit into a pattern of escalating pressure on journalists who report on information the government does not want made public.

Trump has frequently attacked the news media and threatened those he deems too critical with lawsuits and investigations.

Still, it is unusual for law enforcement to seize materials from a journalist, given the broad press freedom protections established under the US Constitution. Advocates warned that Wednesday’s actions could dampen any efforts journalists may take to report on whistleblower complaints.

According to the Post, the search warrant was part of an investigation into leaks of classified materials, another one of Trump’s pet peeves.

Prosecutors allege that a contractor named Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system engineer and information technology specialist, took screenshots of intelligence reports and printed them while working for a government contractor in Maryland.

Investigators also say they found classified documents in a lunchbox while searching his car and basement earlier this month.

The Trump administration accused Perez-Lugones of contacting Natanson to leak the information and said the search of her home came at the request of the Department of Defense.

“The Department of Justice and FBI executed a search warrant at the home of a Washington Post journalist who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a social media post.

She added that “the leaker” – an apparent reference to Perez-Lugones – had been arrested.

“The Trump Administration will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information that, when reported, pose a grave risk to our Nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country,” she said.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also weighed in, writing online that Trump had “zero tolerance” for leaks and would “aggressively crack down” on them.

But press advocates argue that working with whistleblowers is an essential component of reporting on secretive government agencies, especially in areas such as national security.

Raids like the one conducted at Natanson’s residence risk violating the understanding of anonymity that journalists build with their sources, particularly those in sensitive government positions.

Natanson had extensively covered the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the federal workforce and push for nonpartisan employees to align with his political agenda.

She has also reported on recent US actions in Venezuela, which culminated with the abduction of President Nicolas Maduro on January 3.

Groups like Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) were among those to speak out against the search warrant.

“This raid should disturb all Americans. The United States is at a critical juncture as the Trump administration continues to roll back civil liberties,” said Katherine Jacobsen, coordinator for the US, Canada and the Caribbean at the CPJ.

“Using the FBI – funded by American taxpayers – to seize a reporter’s electronic devices, including her official work laptop, is a blatant violation of journalistic protections and undermines the public’s right to know.”

MINNEAPOLIS — Already shaken by the fatal shooting of a woman by an immigration officer, Minnesota’s Twin Cities on Sunday braced for what many expect will be a new normal over the next few weeks as the Department of Homeland Security carries out what it called its largest enforcement operation ever.

In one Minneapolis neighborhood filled with single-family homes, protesters confronted federal agents and attempted to disrupt their operations by blowing car horns and whistles and banging on drums.

There was some pushing and several people were hit with chemical spray just before agents banged down the door of one home Sunday. They later took one person away in handcuffs.

“We’re seeing a lot of immigration enforcement across Minneapolis and across the state, federal agents just swarming around our neighborhoods,” said Jason Chavez, a Minneapolis City Council member. “They’ve definitely been out here.”

Chavez, the son of Mexican immigrants who represents an area with a growing immigrant population, said he is closely monitoring and gathering information from chat groups about where residents are seeing agents operating.

While the enforcement activity continues, two of the state’s leading Democrats said Sunday that the investigation into the shooting death of Renee Nicole Good shouldn’t be overseen solely by the federal government.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and U.S. Sen. Tina Smith said in separate interviews that state authorities should be included in the investigation because the federal government has already made clear what it believes happened.

“How can we trust the federal government to do an objective, unbiased investigation, without prejudice, when at the beginning of that investigation they have already announced exactly what they saw — what they think happened,” Smith said on ABC’s “This Week.”

The Trump administration has defended the officer who shot Good in her car, saying he was protecting himself and fellow agents and that Good had “weaponized” her vehicle.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during an interview with CNN dismissed complaints from Minnesota officials about local agencies being denied any participation in the investigation.

“We do work with locals when they work with us,” she said, criticizing the Minneapolis mayor and others for not assisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations.

Frey and Noem each pointed fingers at the other for their rhetoric after Good’s killing, and each pushed their own firm conclusions about what video of the incident shows. The mayor stood by his assertions that videos show “a federal agent recklessly abusing power that ended up in somebody dying.”

“Let’s have the investigation in the hands of someone that isn’t biased,” Frey said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

The killing of Good on Wednesday by an ICE officer and the shooting of two people by federal agents in Portland, Ore., led to dozens of protests across the country over the weekend, including thousands of people who rallied in Minneapolis.

Santana, Householder and Vancleave write for the Associated Press. AP journalists Thomas Strong in Washington, Bill Barrow in Atlanta and John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio, contributed to this report.

NEW YORK — By nearly any measure, 2025 has been a rough year for anyone concerned about freedom of the press.

It’s likely to be the deadliest year on record for journalists and media workers. The number of assaults on reporters in the U.S. nearly equals the last three years combined. The president of the United States berates many who ask him questions, calling one woman “piggy.” And the ranks of those doing the job continues to thin.

It’s hard to think of a darker time for journalists. So say many, including Timothy Richardson, a former Washington Post reporter and now program director for journalism and disinformation at PEN America. “It’s safe to say this assault on the press over the past year has probably been the most aggressive that we’ve seen in modern times.”

Tracking killings and assaults against journalists

Worldwide, the 126 media industry people killed in 2025 by early December matched the number of deaths in all of 2024, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, and last year was a record-setter. Israel’s bombing of Gaza accounted for 85 of those deaths, 82 of them Palestinians.

“It’s extremely concerning,” said Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “Unfortunately, it’s not just, of course, about the sheer numbers of journalists and media workers killed, it’s also about the failure to obtain justice or get accountability for those killings.

“What we know from decades of doing this work is that impunity breeds impunity,” she said. “So a failure to tackle journalists’ killings creates an environment where those killings continue.”

The committee estimates there are at least 323 journalists imprisoned worldwide.

None of those killed this year were from the United States. But the work on American soil has still been dangerous. There have been 170 reports of assaults on journalists in the United States this year, 160 of them at the hands of law enforcement, according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. Many of those reports came from coverage of immigration enforcement efforts.

It’s impossible to look past the influence of Trump, who frequently seethes with anger at the press while simultaneously interacting with journalists more than any president in memory — frequently answering their cell phone calls.

“Trump has always attacked the press,” Richardson said. “But during the second term, he’s turned that into government action to restrict and punish and intimidate journalists.”

Journalists learn quickly they have a fight on their hands

The Associated Press learned that quickly, when Trump limited the outlet’s access to cover him after it refused to follow his lead to rename the Gulf of Mexico. It launched a court fight that has remained unresolved. Trump has also extracted settlements from ABC and CBS News in lawsuits over stories that displeased him, and is suing the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

Long angry about a perceived bias against conservatives on PBS and NPR newscasts, Trump and his allies in Congress successfully cut funding for public broadcasting as a whole. The president has also moved to shut down government-run organizations that beam news to all parts of the world.

“The U.S. is a major investor in media development, in independent media outlets in countries that have little or no independent media, or as a source of information for people in countries where there is no free media,” Ginsberg said. “The evisceration of Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and the Voice of America is another blow to press freedom globally.”

Others in his administration take Trump’s lead, like when his press office chose the day after Thanksgiving to launch a web portal to complain about outlets or journalists being unfair.

“It’s part of this overall strategy that we’re seeing from certain governments, notably the United States, to paint all journalists who don’t simply [repeat] the narrative put out by the government as fake news, as dubious, as dodgy, as criminal,” Ginsberg said.

Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has portrayed journalists as dark figures skulking around Pentagon halls to uncover classified secrets as his rationale for enacting restrictive rules for coverage.

That’s led to the most notable example of journalists fighting back: most mainstream news outlets gave up their credentials to work in the Pentagon rather than agree to these rules, and are still breaking stories while working off-site. The New York Times has sued to overturn the rules. The newspaper also publicly defends itself when attacked by the president, such as when he complained about its coverage of his health.

Despite the more organized effort against the press, the public has taken little notice. The Pew Research Center said that 36% of Americans reported earlier this year hearing a lot about the Trump administration’s relationship with the press, compared to 72% who said that at the same point in his first term.

Pew’s polling shows that trust in news organizations has declined over the last decade, and journalists are likely to elicit little sympathy when their work becomes harder.

“Really, the harm falls on the public with so much of this because the public depends on this independent reporting to understand and scrutinize the decisions that are being made by the most powerful office in the world,” Richardson said.

Some reasons for optimism

The news industry as a whole is more than two decades in to a retrenchment caused largely by a collapse in the advertising market, and every year brings more reports of journalists laid off as a result. One of the year’s most sobering statistics came in a report by the organizations Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News: in 2002, there were 40 journalists for every 100,000 people in the United States; by this year, it was down to a little more than eight.

Asked if they could find reasons for optimism, both Ginsberg and Richardson pointed to the rise of some independent local news organizations, shoots of growth in a barren landscape, such as the Baltimore Banner, Charlottesville Tomorrow in Virginia and Outlier Media in Michigan.

As much as they are derided in Trump’s America, reporters at mainstream media outlets are still working hard and able to set the nation’s agenda with their reporting, noted influential Axios CEO Jim VandeHei in a recent column.

As he told the AP: “Over time, people will hopefully come to their senses and say, ‘Hey, the media like anything else is imperfect but, man, it’s a nice thing to have a free press.’”

Bauder writes for the Associated Press.