Great Britain’s Ben Whittaker marked his American debut with an impressive second-round victory against Richard Rivera at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
The flamboyant Whittaker dropped the American at the end of the first round with a right hand, although Rivera pointed that the punch had caught him on the back of the head.
But Whittaker, nicknamed ‘The Surgeon’, clinically caught his rival with a left-hander at the start of the second and, although Rivera staggered to his feet, the referee stopped the light-heavyweight bout.
The win improved Whittaker’s record to 12 wins and a draw from his 13 professional fights, while Rivera suffered the third defeat of his 30 fight career.
“Brooklyn, that’s how you do it man,” said Midlands boxer Whittaker, who is renowned for his showboating and did a little dance at the end of the first round on the way back to his corner.
The fight took place on the undercard of Xander Zayas, who attempted to defend his WBA and WBO super-welterweight titles against Jaron Ennis.
But Zayas succumbed to a seventh-round stoppage, with the referee ending the contest after the Puerto Rican boxer had been knocked down for a third time in the fight.
It was the first defeat Zayas had suffered in his 24-fight career, while unbeaten American Ennis has 36 wins from as many fights.
This is widely seen as a throw-me-in-the-briar-patch gift from President Trump, coming as California’s governor edges ever closer toward a 2028 run for the White House. The presumed effort to cut down a political foe could instead boost Newsom’s chances of winning the Democratic nomination, or so it’s being suggested.
After all, look at how Trump’s verbal bludgeoning elevated former Rep. Adam Schiff. The House has typically been a dead end for lawmakers seeking statewide office in California. Today, the former Burbank congressman and Trump tormentor is a United States senator.
In truth, however, it’s far too early to say how the investigation of Newsom and his wife plays out politically, not least because it’s unclear whether there’s merit to the probe or if it’s merely a fruitless search-and-destroy mission by Trump’s Department of Retribution, Vengeance and Settling Old Scores
Beyond that, the first ballots of the 2028 campaign won’t be cast for roughly a year and a half. The Democratic National Convention, where the party will install its nominee, doesn’t begin for another 778 days.
Your friendly political columnist won’t resort to that hoariest of cliches about such-and-such duration being a lifetime in politics. But for some perspective, let’s go back 778 days.
President Joe Biden was running for reelection and about to challenge Trump to a pair of early debates. Trump was sequestered in a New York City courtroom being prosecuted on 34 felony counts.
A lot happened in the weeks and months that followed, including Biden’s self-immolation on the debate stage and Trump’s criminal conviction. A lot more will happen in the weeks and months to come. There’s no telling what. But it’s safe to say the fight for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination will not be decided by anything that’s taken place in June 2026.
With his exquisitely tuned political antennae, the governor jumped out front of the president by announcing last week the feds were targeting him and his wife. (Naturally, Newsom’s revelation was accompanied by a rage-bait email — subject line: “Because I am thinking of running for president” — that denounced the “political witch hunt” and asked for money.)
“After calling for my arrest last year, Donald Trump directed his Department of Justice to investigate me,” Newsom said in a 4 ½-minute, direct-to-camera video that framed the investigation before prosecutors had the chance. “And just in the last week, I’ve learned his campaign has reached my own home: To get me, he’s coming after my wife, Jen.”
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Newsom and his wife both adamantly denied any wrongdoing and, of course, they must be presumed innocent until and unless proven otherwise.
But there was something a bit disingenuous about the governor’s chivalrous defense. Siebel Newsom, a documentary filmmaker who calls herself California’s “First Partner,” is no mere housewife baking cookies and holding teas, in the famous words of Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Hold the outrage, folks, this is not some retrograde criticism of career-seeking women.)
Among her many public-facing activities, Siebel Newsom heads The Representation Project, a nonprofit focused on challenging gender stereotypes. The organization has faced criticism for accepting donations from companies that lobby the governor, so it’s not unreasonable to ask whether those interests have improperly sought to influence Newsom by giving money to Siebel Newsom’s causes.
My Times colleagues reported that an investigation related to Siebel Newsom has been underway for about a year and was launched by federal prosecutors in Sacramento based on whistle-blower information provided in California. It was not, their source said, the result of a directive out of Washington.
“This is a huge problem,” Randall Eliason, former chief of the Public Corruption Section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, told Politico. “In any political corruption prosecution, the defense almost always claims it is a ‘political witch hunt,’ that prosecutors are targeting him or her for some political reason.
“The best defense to that has always been [the Justice Department’s] tradition of independence from politics and long track record of pursuing corruption cases based only on the facts and law, without regard to political considerations,” Eliason said. “The Trump administration has abandoned that independence without even trying to hide it.”
The probe of Newsom and his wife presents more questions than answers.
It’s grody, but not criminal on its face, for lobbyists to curry favor with the governor by throwing cash at his wife’s endeavors — if, in fact, that’s been the case. Special interests spending money to gain access and influence is about as common in Sacramento and other capitals as statues, domed buildings and manicured lawns.
So why then are the feds investigating Newsom? Why now? Is there any fire, or is it all a lot of smoke?
Perhaps most important, where can you turn to get an impartial answer?
