secretary

SAN FRANCISCO — Longtime civic leader Thelma Shelley — widow of a San Francisco mayor and mother of Secretary of State Kevin Shelley — died Friday in a San Francisco hospital after a brief illness, a spokesman for Kevin Shelley announced. She was 84.

Thelma Shelley, who helped run some of the city’s most important cultural institutions for two decades, had been hospitalized with pneumonia since Feb. 2.

Two days after that, her son announced his resignation, saying investigations into his personal conduct and official duties made it impossible to properly run California’s elections office. Friends of the elections chief said his mother’s illness figured in his decision to step down. His resignation is effective March 1.

As matriarch of a prominent San Francisco political family, Thelma Shelley had a career in government service and cultural institutions that spanned 45 years, and she was active in Democratic Party and women’s organizations.

Shelley was born in Fredonia, Kan., on Oct. 31, 1920. After her graduation from Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, she worked for the state Legislature, the California Judicial Council and Phil S. Gibson when he was chief justice of California.

In the early 1950s, she served as chief of staff to Rep. John F. Shelley (D-San Francisco), whom she eventually married. Her husband went on to become mayor of San Francisco, from 1964 until 1968, and they raised Kevin and his sisters in the city.

After she was widowed in 1974, Shelley held management posts in the mayor’s office, the San Francisco Convention and Visitor’s Bureau and the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center. In 1982, the county board of supervisors named her managing director of the center, which was home to the opera, symphony and modern art museum. She retired in 1998.

In addition to her son, she is survived by daughters Kate and Joan Marie, and two grandchildren.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who is taking a tour of U.S. defense contractors, on Friday visited a Long Beach rocket maker, where he told workers they are key to President Trump’s vision of military supremacy.

Hegseth stopped by a manufacturing plant operated by Rocket Lab, an emerging company that builds satellites and provides small-satellite launch services for commercial and government customers.

Last month, the company was awarded an $805-million military contract, its largest to date, to build satellites for a network being developed for communications and detection of new threats, such as hypersonic missles.

“This company, you right here, are front and center, as part of ensuring that we build an arsenal of freedom that America needs,” Hegseth told several hundred cheering workers. “The future of the battlefield starts right here with dominance of space.”

Founded in 2006 in New Zealand, the company makes a small rocket called Electron — which lay on its side near Hegseth — and is developing a larger one called Neutron. It moved to the U.S. a decade ago and opened its Long Beach headquaters in 2020.

Rocket Lab is among a new wave of companies that have revitalized Southern California’s aerospace and defense industry, which shed hundreds of thousands of jobs in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War. Large defense contractors such as Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin moved their headquarters to the East Coast.

Many of the new companies were founded by former employees of SpaceX, which was started by Elon Musk in 2002 and was based in the South Bay before moving to Texas in 2024. However, it retains major operations in Hawthorne.

Hegseth kicked off his tour Monday with a visit to a Newport News, Va., shipyard. The tour is described as “a call to action to revitalize America’s manufacturing might and re-energize the nation’s workforce.”

Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson, a Democrat who said he was not told of the event, said Hegseth’s visit shows how the city has flourished despite such setbacks as the closure of Boeing’s C-17 Globemaster III transport plant.

“Rocket Lab has really been a superstar in terms of our fast, growing and emerging space economy in Long Beach,” Richardson said. “This emergence of space is really the next stage of almost a century of innovation that’s really taking place here.”

Prior stops in the region included visits to Divergent, an advanced manufacturing company in aerospace and other industries, and Castelion, a hypersonic missile startup founded by former SpaceX employees. Both are based in Torrance.

The tour follows an overhaul of the Department of Defense’s procurement policy Hegseth announced in November. The policy seeks to speed up weapons development and acquisition by first finding capabilities in the commercial market before the government attempts to develop new systems.

Trump also issued an executive order Wednesday that aims to limit shareholder profits of defense contractors that do not meet production and budget goals by restricting stock buybacks and dividends.

Hegseth told the workers that the administration is trying to prod old-line defense contractors to be more innovative and spend more on development — touting Rocket Lab as the kind of company that will succeed, adding it had one of the “coolest factory floors” he had ever seen.

“I just want the best, and I want to ensure that the competition that exists is fair,” he said.

Hegseth’s visit comes as Trump has flexed the nation’s military muscles with the Jan. 3 abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who is now facing drug trafficking charges to which he has pleaded not guilty.

Hegseth in his speech cited Maduro’s capture as an example of the country’s newfound “deterrence in action.” Though Trump’s allies supported the action, legal experts and other critics have argued that the operation violated international and U.S. law.

Trump this week said he wants to radically boost U.S. military spending to $1.5 trillion in 2027 from $900 billion this year so he can build the “Dream Military.”

Hegseth told the workers it would be a “historic investment” that would ensure the U.S. is never challenged militarily.

Trump also posted on social media this week that executive salaries of defense companies should be capped at $5 million unless they speed up development and production of advanced weapons — in a dig at existing prime contractors.

However, the text of his Wednesday order caps salaries at current levels and ties future executive incentive compensation to delivery and production metrics.

Anduril Industries in Costa Mesa is one of the leading new defense companies in Southern California. The privately held maker of autonomous weapons systems closed a $2.5-billion funding round last year.

Founder Palmer Luckey told Bloomberg News he supported Trump’s moves to limit executive compensation in the defense sector, saying, “I pay myself $100,000 a year.” However, Luckey has a stake in Anduril, last valued by investors at $30.5 billion.

Peter Beck, the founder and chief executive of Rocket Lab, took a base salary of $575,000 in 2024 but with bonus and stock awards his total compensation reached $20.1 million, according to a securities filing. He also has a stake in the company, which has a market capitalization of about $45 billion.

Beck introduced Hegseth saying he was seeking to “reinvigorate the national industrial base and create a leaner, more effective Department of War, one that goes faster and leans on commercial companies just like ours.”

Rocket Lab boasts that its Electron rocket, which first launched in 2017, is the world’s leading small rocket and the second most frequently launched U.S. rocket behind SpaceX.

It has carried payloads for NASA, the U.S. Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office, aside from commercial customers.

The company employs 2,500 people across facilities in New Zealand, Canada and the U.S., including in Virginia, Colorado and Mississippi.

Rocket Lab shares closed at $84.84 on Friday, up 2%.

Washington, DC – United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio has not been shy about his desire to see the toppling of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Infamously, the former Florida senator even posted a series of photos of slain deposed leaders, including a bloodied former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, as tensions with the US and Maduro’s government spiked in 2019.

But it wasn’t until the second administration of US President Donald Trump that Rubio’s vision of a hardline approach to Latin America and his longtime pressure campaign against leftist leaders was realised – culminating on Saturday with the illegal abduction of longtime Venezuelan leader Maduro.

Experts say Rubio has relied on an ability to capitalise on the overlapping interests of competing actors within the Trump administration to achieve this, even as his broader ideological goals, including the ousting of Cuba’s communist government, will likely remain constrained by the administration’s competing ambitions.

“It took a tremendous amount of political skill on his part to marginalise other voices in the administration and elsewhere who were saying: ‘This is not our conflict. This is not what we stand for. This is going to upset our base,’” Alejandro Velasco, an associate professor of history at New York University, told Al Jazeera.

Those agendas included US President Donald Trump’s preoccupation with opening Venezuela’s nationalised oil industry, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s desire for a more pugilistic military approach abroad, and adviser Stephen Miller’s fixation on migration and mass deportation.

“So that’s the way that Rubio was able to bring into line not quite competing, but really divergent agendas, all of them to focus on Venezuela as a way to advance a particular end,” Velasco said.

A hawk in ‘America First’

A traditionalist hawk who has regularly supported US military intervention in the name of spreading Western democracy and human rights abroad, Rubio initially appeared to be an awkward fit to be Trump’s top diplomat in his second term.

His selection followed a campaign season defined by Trump’s vow to end foreign wars, eschew US-backed regime change, and pursue a wider “America First” pivot.

But the actual shape of Trump’s foreign policy has borne little resemblance to that vision, with the administration adopting a so-called “Peace Through Strength” doctrine that observers say has resulted in more room for military adventurism. That has, to date, seen the Trump administration launch bombing campaigns against Yemen and Iran, strike armed groups in Nigeria and Somalia, and attack alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean.

The approach of Trump 2.0 has more closely aligned with Rubio’s vision of Washington’s role abroad, which has long supported maximum-pressure sanctions campaigns and various forms of US intervention to topple governments.

The US secretary of state’s personal ideology traces to his South Florida roots, where his family settled in the 1960s after leaving Cuba three years before the rise of Fidel Castro, in what Velasco described as an “acerbically anti-communist” political environment.

“I think for him, it started as a question of finally making real the hopes and dreams of Cubans in Florida and elsewhere to return to their homeland under a capitalist government,” Velasco explained.

“It went from that to what this could represent, if we think about it more hemispherically – a bigger shift that would not only increase, but in fact ensure, US hegemony in the region for the 21st century.”

‘Vacuum was his to fill’

After tangling with Trump in the 2016 presidential election, in which the future president deridingly dubbed his opponent “Little Marco” while Rubio decried him as a “con man”, the pair forged a pragmatic working relationship.

Rubio eventually endorsed Trump ahead of the 2016 vote, helping to deliver Florida. In Trump’s first term, Rubio came to be seen as the president’s “shadow secretary” on Latin America, an atypical role that saw the lawmaker influence Trump’s eventual recognition of Juan Guaido as interim president in opposition to Maduro.

Analysts note Rubio’s approach to Venezuela has always been directly aimed at undermining the economic support it provides to Cuba, with the end goal of toppling the island’s 67-year-old Communist government. Following Maduro’s abduction on Saturday, Rubio quickly pivoted to the island nation, telling reporters: “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned”.

Still, in the early months of Trump’s second term, Rubio appeared largely sidelined, with the president instead favouring close friends and family members to spearhead marquee negotiations on ceasefires in Gaza and Ukraine.

During this time, Rubio was slowly amassing a sizeable portfolio. Beyond serving as secretary of state, Rubio became the acting administrator of the Trump-dismantled US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the acting archivist of the US National Archives. Most notably, he became the acting director of National Security, making him the first top US diplomat to also occupy the impactful White House role since Henry Kissinger.

Rubio eventually found himself in a White House power vacuum, according to Adam Isacson, the director of defence oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

“Rubio’s somebody who understands Washington better than the Grenells and Witkoffs of the world,” Isacson told Al Jazeera, referring to Trump’s special envoys Richard Grenell and Steve Witkoff.

“At the same time, other powerful figures inside the White House, like Stephen Miller and [Director of the Office of Management and Budget] Russ Vought haven’t cared as much about foreign policy,” he said, “so the vacuum was his to fill.”

Meanwhile, Rubio showed his ability to be an “ideological weather vane”, pivoting regularly to stay in Trump’s good graces, Isacson said. The National Security Strategy released by the White House in December exemplified that approach.

The document, which is drafted by the National Security adviser with final approval from the president, offered little in tough language towards Russia, despite Rubio’s previous hard lines on the war in Ukraine. It supported the gutting of US foreign aid, despite Rubio’s years-long support for the system. It offered little of the human-rights language with which Rubio had earlier in his career styled himself as a champion.

It did, however, include a “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which dovetailed with Rubio’s worldview by calling for the restoration of US “preeminence” over the Western Hemisphere.

A pyrrhic victory?

To be sure, the toppling of Maduro has so far proved a partial, if not pyrrhic victory for Rubio, far short of the comprehensive change he has long supported.

In a news conference immediately following Maduro’s abduction, Trump doused support for exiled opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who has hewed close to Rubio’s vision for a future Venezuela. Several news agencies have since reported that US intelligence assessed that installing an opposition figure would lead to widespread chaos in the country.

Rubio has so far been the point man in dealing with Maduro’s former deputy and replacement, Delcy Rodriguez, who has been a staunch supporter of the Hugo Chavez-founded Chavismo movement that Rubio has long railed against. Elections remain a far-off prospect, with Trump emphasising working with the government to open the oil industry to the US.

The secretary of state has not been officially given a role connected to the country, but has earned the less-than-sincere title in some US media of “viceroy of Venezuela”.

On news shows, Rubio has been tasked with walking back Trump’s claim that the US would “run” the South American country, while selling the administration’s oft-contradicted message that the abduction of Maduro was a law enforcement action, not regime change, an act of war, or a bid for the country’s oil.

“I think he’s sort of lying through his teeth,” Lee Schlenker, a research associate at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told Al Jazeera.

“Even he doesn’t seem to believe a lot of the sort of rhetorical and discursive pretexts that have been deployed about drugs, about narco-terrorism, about a law enforcement-only operation, about just sort of enforcing a Department of Justice indictment,” he said.

Having to work with Rodriguez, and reportedly, Venezuela’s security czar and Minister of Interior Diosdado Cabello, has been a “bucket of cold water on Rubio’s broader illusions”, Schlenker added, noting that Rubio’s end goal still remains “the end of the Chavista project”.

Rubio is also likely to face further reality checks when it comes to his expected attempts to pitch the overthrow of what he will likely argue is a weakened Cuba.

The island, without the economic resources of Venezuela and no known drug trade, is seen as far less appealing to Trump and many of his allies.

“Compared to Venezuela,” Schlenker said, “there are a lot more reasons why Trump would have less interest in going after Cuba.”

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joe Biden has turned to one of his most trusted and long-serving foreign policy advisors as his choice for secretary of State.

Biden is expected to nominate Antony Blinken, 58, a veteran diplomat and former senior official at the State Department and National Security Council, perhaps on Tuesday, according to a source familiar with the Biden transition planning.

The Democratic president-elect has said he could announce his choices for several positions this week, as he moves to form a Cabinet and his administration more broadly despite President Trump’s refusal to concede his election defeat.

Blinken is seen as someone who could easily win Senate confirmation even if Republicans still control the chamber in the next Congress. Given the depth of his experience, he could hit the ground running, current and former diplomats said.

Blinken was a deputy national security advisor and deputy secretary of State in the Obama administration as well as national security advisor to Vice President Biden from 2009 to 2013.

The stepson of a Holocaust survivor, Blinken has leaned more toward intervention in world crises than some of his colleagues, but is also facile in readjusting his position to match that of the administration he serves. He is known as fiercely loyal to Biden.

Blinken has also advised Biden during his presidential campaigns, serving during the just-concluded campaign as Biden’s principal foreign policy advisor and spokesman.

“Joe Biden will benefit just by not being President Trump,” Blinken said in an interview with The Times during the summer. “That is the opening opportunity.”

Bloomberg, which first reported the likely Blinken nomination, also said Jake Sullivan, 43, formerly one of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides as well as an advisor to Biden, is likely to be named national security advisor, a White House staff position that does not require Senate confirmation.

Ron Klain, Biden’s incoming White House chief of staff, said Sunday that the president-elect would be making his initial cabinet announcements on Tuesday, but declined to specify which positions would be filled first. The people familiar with Biden’s selections asked not to be identified because he hasn’t yet made the announcements.

State is regarded as one of the most prestigious Cabinet posts. The secretary of State is the nation’s top diplomat, conducting meetings with foreign leaders across the globe.

The president’s national security advisor is one of the most important and powerful jobs in the White House, leading a staff of dozens of experts drawn from the government’s military, diplomatic and intelligence agencies who develop U.S. foreign and military policy.

Blinken and Sullivan didn’t respond to requests for comment. A Biden spokesman declined to comment.

When Biden was a senator and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Blinken served as his staff director before leaving to work on Biden’s short-lived 2008 presidential campaign. Blinken graduated from Harvard and from Columbia Law School.

After serving in the Obama administration, Blinken co-founded WestExec Advisors, a political strategy firm, with a top Obama-era Pentagon official, Michele Flournoy. She is a top candidate to be Biden’s Defense secretary; if named and confirmed, she would be the first woman to hold the job.

Biden met on Nov. 17 with defense and intelligence experts, including Blinken and others who worked for Obama when Biden was vice president. He gathered them together because the Trump administration has blocked him from getting the intelligence briefings traditionally granted the president-elect.

“We’ve been through a lot of damage done over the last four years, in my view. We need to rebuild our institutions and my workforce to reflect the full strength and diversity of our country,” Biden said at the briefing. “We need to focus on readiness for whatever may come.”

Times staff writer Evan Halper and Bloomberg News contributed to this report.