Remains

Leicestershire have had eight points of their 27-point County Championship deduction reinstated but their Division One status remains in limbo.

The original penalty for breaching pitch regulations, relating to their win against Glamorgan in August, was announced on 16 September.

Leicestershire took 19 points from the match against Glamorgan – 16 for winning and three bonus points – which were removed but remain the subject of appeal.

The Cricket Discipline Panel (CDP) had applied an additional eight-point deduction, a further eight-point penalty suspended for a year, plus a £5,000 fine.

The latter two sanctions remain part of the amended decision but the eight-point deduction for this season has been waived because the docking of the 19 points for winning the game in question is considered punishment enough.

Without the 27 points being docked, Leicestershire would have finished two points above the relegation zone.

With the 19-point penalty currently in place, the Foxes are 17 points behind Essex and will be relegated if their appeal is unsuccessful.

The amended punishment comes after the Cricket Regulator raised with the CDP whether the 19-point penalty imposed, after its initial hearing, under the County Championship’s playing conditions had been taken into account when making its original decision.

A section of the County Championship’s playing conditions state that teams charged with producing a pitch rated as poor or below average, and the Cricket Discipline Panel (CDP) upholding the charge, would receive zero points from the fixture in question.

Leicestershire had already stated their intention to appeal against the panel’s decision and a statement by chief executive Emma White said the club’s position is “unchanged” by the amended decision.

More to follow.

SACRAMENTO — As Californians prepare to elect a new governor in November, the concern they want to be his top priority is reducing the state’s entrenched high cost of living, according to a poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times.

Not too far behind that is strong voter support for fighting the policies of the Trump administration. That may be among the many reasons 58% of likely voters surveyed support Democrat Xavier Becerra in the governor’s race compared to the 33% who back Republican Steve Hilton, whom the president endorsed.

“These results suggest that Becerra is in a commanding position heading to November,” said IGS co-director Eric Schickler. “With 2026 shaping up to be a strong Democratic year nationally, the headwinds facing Hilton in Democratic-leaning California are even stronger than usual.”

The poll found that Becerra’s lead over Hilton had increased slightly since an August IGS poll, and the Democrat now holds a 25-percentage-point advantage.

Despite an effort to reach out to Democrats and independent voters and making California’s high housing costs, top-in-the-nation gasoline prices and other increasing daily living expenses a central focus of his campaign, Hilton is struggling to gain ground in the race to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom, the poll found.

“The difficult thing is that Steve Hilton’s a Republican in California,” said Tim Rosales, a Republican strategist who previously advised GOP gubernatorial candidate John Cox in the 2018 race against Newsom. “On the scale of what’s more important to voters, the cost of living certainly is there, but those Democrats really aren’t willing to cast a vote or cross party lines to vote for a Republican.”

Asked to name one or two of their top concerns heading into the Nov. 3 election, 44% of likely voters cited the cost of living, 37% said it was important to push back against policies from the Trump administration and 30% said they wanted to help their political party win or maintain control of Congress.

“The November elections are being held at a time when the economic backdrop is worsening not only in California but across the nation, as prices are rising on most major household purchases, including groceries, gasoline, electricity and healthcare,” said IGS poll director Mark DiCamillo. “Pocketbook issues have traditionally played a big role in election politics and this year is no exception.”

Democrats, who make up nearly half of California’s 23 million registered voters, “understand the cost of living, and they feel it. They just feel like they need a new Democrat to deal with it,” Rosales said.

“Independent voters are a little bit different. They aren’t partisan but they are ideological and there is some opportunity there.” But Hilton would “need a whole lot of them in California in order to have a chance on a statewide level,” he said.

More than half of likely voters not registered with either the Democratic or Republican parties — most of whom declare themselves as “no party preference” — said they supported Becerra in the governor’s race, while 30% favored Hilton. The remaining 14% were undecided.

Hilton has made a slew of campaign promises to lower the cost of living, including $3 gasoline, no taxes on income below $150,000 and lowering energy bills by slashing climate-friendly regulations imposed by Democrats.

Both Rosales and DiCamillo agreed that while voters list affordability as a top issue, Democrats in particular are more motivated by the opportunity to push back on President Trump in the midterm elections.

“When you look at the Becerra voters on the issues or concerns that are important to them, it’s really framed by fighting Trump administration policies. I think that’s an indication of what’s happening in this election cycle,” DiCamillo said. “You’re seeing it across the country as well.”

The poll showed that 59% of Becerra supporters said fighting the Trump administration was a top priority, while 62% of Hilton supporters said reducing taxes was their main concern. More than 60% of undecided voters listed the cost of living as a top item.

Trump, who remains extremely unpopular among most Californians, endorsed Hilton for governor in April. Though the president’s backing helped the former Fox News host consolidate enough Republican support to finish second in the June primary, allowing him to advance to the November election, it may hurt his chance in the general election. A recent Public Policy Institute of California poll showed Trump with a 27% approval rating in the state, a record low across both of his terms.

Hilton has tried to court voters, especially Latinos and independents, who dislike Trump but are also dissatisfied with California’s Democratic leadership and its failure to alleviate some of California’s most incessant problems. The British-born Republican has also declined to criticize the president on issues including immigration enforcement or the Iran war.

Becerra’s wide lead is also boosted by his favorability rating — 48% of likely voters have a favorable opinion of him while 40% view him unfavorably and 11% have no opinion. Hilton’s rating is underwater; 51% of likely voters have an unfavorable opinion compared to 35% favorable and 13% with no opinion.

The Republican has criticized his opponent for doing few public events since the primary election and challenged Becerra to accept debate invitations from roughly a half-dozen news outlets around the state.

The two are scheduled to meet in a Sept. 30 nationally televised debate in Burbank hosted by CNN.

The poll was conducted online in English and Spanish from Sept. 15 to 20. Responses for the governor’s race poll came from a weighted sample of 4,512 respondents considered likely to vote in the November election, from a larger group of 6,989 registered voters throughout California. It has a margin of error of 2 percentage points in either direction.

GAA President Jarlath Burns insists the process of integration between Gaelic games’ three bodies is not over but the key is to ensure the outcome is “sustainable and robust”.

Last week, former Irish president Dr Mary McAleese stepped down from the role as chairperson of the steering group to oversee the planned merger of the Gaelic Athletic Association, Camogie Association and Ladies Gaelic Football Association [LGFA] with the 2027 deadline for completion set to be missed.

Dr McAleese said she was “dubious” whether there was real desire from the GAA to make it happen but the current GAA president – speaking at the Hurling Development Committee’s starter pack launch for 2026 in Belcoo – denies the issue is dead in the water.

“There was an idea going around last week that integration had stopped – it hasn’t,” Burns told BBC Sport NI’s Mark Sidebottom.

“Integration is happening every day. We see examples here where boys and girls are playing hurling and camogie together. That’s going on in every club every day and every decision we make at the moment, we’re making it from an integrated perspective.

“The three organisations are still very committed to integration, but we want to achieve an integration that is sustainable and robust, and something we can be very proud of.”

Last week, GAA director general Tom Ryan said the initial timescale had proven to be “a little bit too ambitious” and Burns says the missed deadline is “disappointing”, it “doesn’t end the process”.

“We will get back up and running and we have already been in talks with Camogie [Association] and LGFA last week,” he confirmed.

“We will continue to do so until we get the integration where every boy and every girl has the equality of opportunity and can enjoy Gaelic games in the future.”

SINGAPORE: Commodity vessel ‌transits through the Strait of Hormuz fell to a single digit per day at the weekend, preliminary shiptracking data showed on Monday, well below a 10-day average of 14.

Over the weekend, four vessels exited the Gulf through the strait, including a Handysize vessel sailing in ballast, a Handy vessel carrying LPG, a Supramax carrying fertilizer and a Suezmax laden with crude or condensate.

Ten vessels entered the Gulf, ‌including a ‌mini-bulker carrying minor bulk commodities, a Handymax ‌carrying grain, a Panamax carrying metals and a Supramax carrying dry bulk cargo, the data showed.

The figures exclude any vessels that might have crossed the strait with their Automatic Identification System transponders turned off to avoid detection.

A vessel was struck by an unknown projectile while transiting the Strait of Hormuz, the United ‌Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations said ‌early on Sunday.

It said the crew’s status, damage assessment ‌and environmental impact were unknown.

Meanwhile, the vital East-West ‌oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia, which has helped relieve the logjam in the Strait of Hormuz, was temporarily shut down by a drone attack coming from Iraq, ‌Saudi officials said.

Before the Iran war started on February 28, the strait typically handled about 125 large, commercial vessels per day, including tankers, gas carriers, bulkers and container vessels, accounting for some 20% of the world’s daily crude oil and liquefied natural gas supply.

A US blockade of Iran-related shipping has halted Iranian crude oil exports since it was reimposed in mid-July. In the Bab el-Mandeb strait, 24 and 27 commodity vessels travelled through respectively on Saturday and Sunday, tracking data showed, compared with an average of around 27 ships over the last 10 days.

The reporter may have misheard the comment, or maybe the person being quoted actually said it, or something odd happened in the editing process.

Whatever: This is what appeared in the Feb. 20, 1985 edition of the Oakland Tribune, quoting a UC Berkeley professor about a protest against immigration sweeps in the Bay Area.

“This probably won’t stop the Iron Ass [federal government] from making raids in the Eastbay.”

“Iron Ass” is how someone might hear the acronym INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the forerunner to ICE.

And now, 40 years on, it fits right into the kind of angry, derisory language many Americans use for the present-day hammer-handed operations of federal immigration officers, around the country, especially here in California.

California has always been — and that’s a couple of centuries of “always” — at the fulcrum of the immigration-deportation seesaw in the U.S., with national policies yo-yoing between kicking workers out and inviting them in. Consider the foreign-born who joined the Gold Rush, the Chinese railroad workers, and still and always the Latino population along the long, wide international border.

That underlies the name of a new exhibition at the California Museum in Sacramento, “Help Wanted/Leave Now!” about the “revolving door” of programs and practices that have alternately enticed and expelled workers, legal and undocumented.

The U.S. border with Mexico represents a political borderline but it cannot sever many decades of complicated history and culture. And it’s left us with endless paradoxes and contradictions of who belongs where, with the U.S. government shifting to and fro on deciding and enforcing that, depending on the American economy, and American politics.

Sean Manwaring is curator of the exhibit. “We have historically recruited foreign workers who set down roots, become members of the community, and then, when there’s an economic downturn or it becomes politically expedient, it’s kind of a revolving door.”

The endless argument is that undocumented immigrants, who work for less because of their needs and their vulnerability, take jobs that Americans will, or that Americans won’t do. Something else Americans won’t do: pay higher prices for food, 90 years ago or now.

Last year, the Kansas City Federal Reserve bank, one of 12 regional Feds, noted on its website, “Historically, the supply of U.S.-born farm workers has not been sufficient to meet demand for farm jobs at the going wage rate, contributing to a largely foreign-born workforce.” Even the H-2A legal process for hiring seasonal foreign workers “would likely be more expensive than employing undocumented workers.”

A 1924 immigration law that created the Border Patrol also revealingly put it under the control of the federal labor department. Cheaper Mexican workers had been welcomed during World War I, and were still coming north more casually back then, even as a U.S. labor group was beginning to agitate for organizing American migrant farmworkers.

But when the 1929 market crash and the Depression knifed the American economy, the blame for unemployment in the southwest and California in particular fell on these Mexicans, and the government’s “Mexican Repatriation” program sent hundreds of thousands back to Mexico, some voluntarily, some not, and some numbers of them American citizens.

Once, border migration patterns resembled a loop: thousands of laborers, mostly men, commuted here once or twice a year from Mexico to jobs in the fields, then on to other jobs once harvests were over. Then they’d take their earnings home to Mexico as breadwinners and comparatively rich men, and stay until the next year’s season.

But as U.S. policies over decades squeezed the border shut on this back-and-forth commuting, some workers chose to stay on the side of the border where they could find work, and a number brought their families north to settle, legally or otherwise.

Oct. 15, 1963: Mexican workers in the bracero program work in pepper fields in the Firebaugh area in Fresno County. This image is from the Los Angeles Times Archive at UCLA.

(Bill Murphy / Los Angeles Times)

And then that pendulum swung again. In 1942, Americans by the millions left their peacetime jobs for the war and wartime industries, and the “Bracero” program — from “brazo,” the Spanish word for “arm” — filled in the gaps in the domestic workforce with contracts for employers of Mexican workers, usually in agriculture or on railroads.

Under the program, the U.S. screened Mexicans for aptitude for the work, and for attitude. Manwaring shared with me the notes of Henry P. Anderson, a historian and farm labor organizer, who took a guided tour of a Calexico bracero processing center in 1958:

“Those deemed expendable were described one at a time: this one is too tall, he is too ‘cocky,’ that one a ‘loafer,’ another ‘lazy and irresponsible,’ he’s a ‘smart aleck,’ this one a ‘ladykiller’ and not ‘peon’ enough. On the other hand the ‘right man,’ according to the guide, was ‘built right. He’s a farm worker, you can tell that … he hasn’t got any big ideas. He’s got the right attitude. He’s humble, not fresh and cocky. He’s an Indian type, probably from Jalisco or Guanajuato.’”

Feb. 1, 1954: Unpublished photo from the Mexicali border crossing during the bracero program. Not known if these men are entering or leaving United States.

(Frank Q. Brown / Los Angeles Times)

Through the bracero program’s 22-year span, as many as 4 million workers came in and presumably went home — though not always; a generation of families came here, or were born here, and stayed. About 15 years after it ended, a former Texas labor commissioner and ranking Labor Department official overseeing the program went public. He characterized wages for braceros as unconscionably low, the food substandard and the housing prison-like. “It was not altruistic at all. The bracero program was definitely created by the farmer who needed to make a dollar.”

And then America’s policy yo-yoed again: in 1953, even as the bracero program was still operating, the federal government launched “Operation Wetback,” to rid the country of undocumented immigrants.

With its heavy-handed “sweeps” of labor camps and factories, American citizens were indiscriminately caught up in the operations, just as ICE is doing now.

Consider the breezy tone of a 1931 story in the Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, reporting on 1,200 Mexicans deported from L.A. County in a day, with the casual note that “virtually none of them” was “an undesirable alien — many are American citizens.”

“L.A. was really ground zero for these raids during Operation Wetback and the Mexican deportation,” said Manwaring. Those 1,200 deportees were among at least 50,000 deported from LA County in five months of 1931 — as much as a third of the county’s Mexican and Mexican American population.

Emilia Castaneda was no more than 10 years old when her Boyle Heights family was deported in the 1930s. In an archival videotaped interview made when she was in her late 70s or 80s, and now part of the exhibition, she remembered being teased by the girls in the parochial school she ended up attending in Mexico. “You’re not one of us,” they mocked her. “Go home.”

Just like today, as agriculture and other food chain businesses were hard-hit by Trump’s aggressive deportations, some industries and regions in earlier “sweeps” also asked for carve-outs and exemptions.

“I wouldn’t say there was a backlash but it really impacted agricultural networks across California and Arizona,” said Manwaring. “We came across specific requests from county officials like in Yuma, Arizona, asking for exceptions because they needed these workers, they didn’t have enough help.”

What’s called the Texas Proviso was a wink-and-nudge agribusiness-friendly federal loophole crafted in the early 1950s that for more than 30 years made it a crime to harbor or transport undocumented immigrants — but not a crime to hire them. (Federal law criminalized that in 1986.)

From the Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1954 front page headline: 500 Nabbed by L.A. Wetback Raiders.

(Los Angeles Times)

The 1950s enforcement drive also put the word “wetback” into casual use. Official statements and news stories used it to mean anyone here without documentation. It was derived from the people who waded across Texas’ Rio Grande into the U.S., but it was sometimes used interchangeably with any Latino workers. Sometimes it just got clipped to “wets.”

In 1961, as astronaut Alan Shepard sat aboard his Redstone rocket waiting to become the first American launched in space, hours of delays forced him to urinate in his space suit. “Well,” he remarked nonchalantly, “I’m a wetback now.”

Not much has changed. Court records released this July confirmed that ICE agents had been referring to immigrants during raids with such slurs as “wet” and “tonk,” the last term reportedly derived from the sound an agent’s utility flashlight makes when hitting a migrant’s head.

A 1956 crime drama called “Wetbacks” was a B picture about a human smuggling ring victimizing the undocumented. The Los Angeles Examiner’s movie reviewer called it a “tedious, amateurishly made picture [that] supposedly deals with how illegal Mexican immigrants are smuggled into this country.”

One of the paradoxes of these periodic anti-undocumented worker campaigns is how they divided Latino communities: the “I did it the right way” people who managed to get visas, the people whose forebears may have come illegally but are now themselves established, and the paperless people who have just arrived, or who have lived here for years under the radar.

Cesar Chavez with Richard Ybarra during the 1973 Coachella Grape Strike.

(Richard Ybarra)

César Chávez lived that paradox. The co-founder of the United Farm Workers — along with Dolores Huerta, an advisor on this exhibition — was a U.S. citizen. In the 1960s and into the 1970s, he wanted immigration officials to keep out undocumented workers, believing they’d be exploited as strikebreakers for growers and erode his union’s bargaining power. By the 1980s, though, he was endorsing immigration reform and protections, especially in the face of President Reagan’s recession-era 1982 “Operation Jobs” sweeps.

A Los Angeles Times survey that same year found that within three months of those raids, 80% of the booted-out workers were back on the job. Many of the Americans hired to replace them soon quit. They didn’t like the wages or the working conditions.

The employment manager of B.P. John furniture maker, in Santa Ana, told The Times, 75 of the American-born workers soon quit on him. “They told me they found another job, that the work was too hard, that there wasn’t enough pay.”

In June 1954, The Times covered the Border Patrol’s plans for L.A. Herman Landon, the local immigration chief, described a “stockade” being built in Elysian Park to “imprison illegal Mexicans flushed out” of factories, hotels, and “skid row saloons” at the rate of a thousand or two per day.

Farmers had once requested immigrant workers from smugglers by the truckload, and counted by “the head,” like livestock. When the feds moved in, workers were deported south of the border, sometimes far south, by bus, by ship, by plane. The feds briefly charged each worker $10 each for the cost of being deported.

The caption of a June 1952 photo in the McAllen, Texas, Evening Monitor that showed men boarding a deportation plane read, “It’s a quick bite to eat then off into the wild blue yonder for these wetbacks.” The newspaper offered a $5 prize in a contest to name the airborne deportations. Not all readers were cheering. One acidly suggested calling it “Truman’s Gestapo Airlift.”

The human numbers for any of these programs, coming in or kicking out, are hardly ever confirmed, but over all this time we are talking about the movement of millions — and the deaths, still uncounted.

Trump said he always planned to model his deportations on the Eisenhower-era operation.

“We’re rounding them up in a very humane way, a very nice way,” Trump told “60 Minutes.”

In July 1954, under Eisenhower, 88 workers died of sunstroke in the desert below Calexico, where they’d been deported.

A poster size photo in San Pedro of Alex Pretti, a registered nurse who was fatally shot by ICE agents in Minneapolis.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

In the first 17 months of the second Trump administration, at least 52 people died in ICE custody. ICE agents have shot and killed at least six more people, some in their cars, and some right out in public, like Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, and Keith Porter Jr., shot last New Year’s Eve in front of his L.A. apartment building by an off-duty ICE agent.

The deaths recall a deportation sweep in 1948, when a plane carrying 28 workers back to Mexico, with a crew of four, caught fire and crashed near Coalinga. The press coverage then identified the crew but not the dead Mexican workers, whose individual stories were finally told 70 years later in Tim Z. Hernandez’s book “All They Will Call You.”

The grave marker for the Mexican nationals killed in a 1948 plane crash did not include their names.

(Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times)

The title is a line from Woody Guthrie’s celebrated song “Deportees,” about the crash, and what it signified in a nation that used and used up its foreign workers, and it ends like this:

“Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?/Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?/To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil/And be called by no name except ‘deportees’?”

Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison

Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is explaining how it works, its history and its culture.