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    Katie Porter Will Run for California Governor

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    The former congresswoman is the most prominent candidate so far to start a campaign in the 2026 contest. But the race could be upended if former Vice President Kamala Harris decides to run.Katie Porter, the former Democratic congresswoman who rose to prominence by wielding a whiteboard while she grilled corporate executives on Capitol Hill, announced on Tuesday that she would enter the 2026 contest for California governor.Ms. Porter, 51, is the highest-profile Democrat to join the race. But a huge unknown remains: whether former Vice President Kamala Harris will jump in.Gov. Gavin Newsom cannot run for re-election because state law limits governors to two terms. Most of the Democrats who have entered the open race so far are current or former state officials who have experience in the statehouse but are little known to the public. Voters are much more familiar with Ms. Porter, a law professor who served six years in Congress representing Orange County, polls show.Ms. Porter announced her campaign on Tuesday by releasing a video that cast herself as someone who would fight to counter President Trump’s agenda and bring a fresh lens to the State Capitol, where she has never served in an elected office.After losing the presidential election in November, Ms. Harris returned home to Los Angeles and has contemplated a run for California governor. Ms. Porter will drop out of the race if Ms. Harris runs, a spokesman confirmed.Ms. Porter observed in December that Ms. Harris would have “a near field-clearing effect on the Democratic side” of the race.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Pulled $400 million From Columbia. Other Schools Could Be Next.

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      The administration has circulated a list that includes nine other campuses, accusing them of failure to address antisemitism.The Trump Administration’s abrupt withdrawal of $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University cast a pall over at least nine other campuses worried they could be next.The schools, a mix that includes both public universities and Ivy League institutions, have been placed on an official administration list of schools the Department of Justice said may have failed to protect Jewish students and faculty.Faculty leaders at many of the schools have pushed back strongly against claims that their campuses are hotbeds of antisemitism, noting that while some Jewish students complained that they felt unsafe, the vast majority of protesters were peaceful and many of the protest participants were themselves Jewish. The Trump administration has made targeting higher education a priority. This week, the president threatened in a social media post to punish any school that permits “illegal” protests. On Jan. 30, his 10th day in office, he signed an executive order on combating antisemitism, focusing on what he called anti-Jewish racism at “leftists” universities. Then, on Feb. 3, he announced the creation of a multiagency task force to carry out the mandate.The task force appeared to move into action quickly after a pro-Palestinian sit-in and protest at Barnard College, a partner school to Columbia, led to arrests on Feb. 26. Two days later, the administration released its list of 10 schools under scrutiny, including Columbia, the site of large pro-Palestinian encampments last year.It said it would be paying the schools a visit, part of a review process to consider “whether remedial action is warranted.” Then on Friday, it announced it would be canceling millions in grants and contracts with Columbia.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Newsom condemned for ‘throwing trans people under bus’ after sports comment

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      Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California believed to be eyeing a run for president in 2028, is facing fierce backlash from LGBTQ+ rights advocates after his suggestion that the participation of transgender women and girls in female sports was “deeply unfair”.In the inaugural episode of his podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom, the governor hosted conservative political activist and Maga darling Charlie Kirk. The co-founder and executive director of the rightwing Turning Point USA, a Phoenix-based organization that operates on school campuses, told Newsom: “You, right now, should come out and be like: ‘You know what? The young man who’s about to win the state championship in the long jump in female sports – that shouldn’t happen.’ You, as the governor, should step out and say: ‘No.’”The governor responded: “I think it’s an issue of fairness. I completely agree with you on that … it’s deeply unfair.”View image in fullscreenMembers of his own party in California quickly condemned the comments.“We woke up profoundly sickened and frustrated by these remarks,” assembly member Chris Ward and senator Caroline Menjivar, of the California legislative LGBTQ+ caucus, said in a statement. “All students deserve the academic and health benefits of sports activity, and until Donald Trump began obsessing about it, playing on a team consistent with one’s gender has not been a problem since the standard was passed in 2013.”California law has long protected trans youth’s rights to participate in school activities that match their gender.The governor’s remarks also earned him scorn from national LGBTQ+ rights leaders, with the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) president, Kelley Robinson, saying in a statement: “History doesn’t remember those who waver – it remembers those who refuse to back down.”Newsom’s comments saw him agreeing with one of the central anti-trans talking points of Republicans and rightwing activists, who have fueled moral panics about trans women in public spaces and trans youth healthcare in recent years. Out of more than 500,000 college athletes, there are fewer than 10 who are trans and out, officials recently said.Proponents of anti-trans restrictions for K-12 students have often struggled to find examples of trans girls playing in school sports.The few openly trans athletes who are in the public eye have faced intense harassment and scrutiny. Civil rights advocates argue that for youth, their ability to play sports that align with their gender is a matter of basic dignity and equal protection under the law.Izzy Gardon, the governor’s communications director, said in a statement on Thursday evening: “The governor rejects the right wing’s cynical attempt to weaponize this debate as an excuse to vilify individual kids.” His office earlier pointed out that in the podcast, the governor noted the high rates of suicide and anxiety among trans people, saying: “The way that people talk down to vulnerable communities is an issue that I have a hard time with. So, both things I can hold in my hand.”Bamby Salcedo, a longtime Los Angeles-based activist and president of the TransLatin@ Coalition, said it was devastating to hear Newsom fail to even correct Kirk when he appeared to be referring to trans women as men.“For someone who says he is supportive of our communities to come out and say these awful things, he’s using us as political pawns,” she said.“Denying the opportunity for young people to participate in sports is denying them the opportunity to be who they fully are. It is really damaging.”Scott Wiener, a state senator and proponent of trans rights, said in an interview that he considered Newsom a longtime ally of LGBTQ+ people and that it had been “brutal” to hear the governor’s comments. He noted there has been a “decades-long strategic plan by the right wing to demonize trans people”, adding: “They’ve done it very methodically. It’s disgusting, but it’s had some success.”Trans youth in the public eye have faced national ridicule, Wiener noted: “If they’re out as trans, they’re so courageous and they’re putting themselves at risk. It’s really important for people who know better to have their backs.”Wiener, who has introduced legislation to strengthen the state’s trans refuge law, said Newsom has had a good track record on trans civil rights bills, and he hoped that wouldn’t change.State assemblymember Alex Lee, another LGBTQ+ caucus member, said Newsom’s remarks were “shocking and offensive” and that it would hurt his future ambitions: “Throwing trans people under the bus will alienate lots of people who are LGBTQ+ and allies across the nation … If you’re running to be a Republican nominee, this is a great strategy. But if you want to run as a Democrat and someone who is pro-human rights, this is a terrible look.”Some California Republicans were dubious of Newsom, a longtime champion of LGBTQ+ rights who drew national attention when, as the mayor of San Francisco, he defied state law and began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is stunning,” the California assemblymember Bill Essayli wrote on X. “Talk is cheap @GavinNewsom. Why don’t you support my bill AB 844 to reverse CA’s law allowing boys to compete in girls sports? You’re the Governor, not a commentator!”Donald Trump made the issue of trans women in sports a central pillar of his campaign and as president has tried to erase trans and non-binary Americans from public life.He signed an executive order declaring that the federal government would only recognize two sexes, male and female, and another titled Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports, which threatens to withhold federal funds from schools that do not comply. Meanwhile, the US state department has ordered officials worldwide to deny visas to transgender athletes attempting to come to the US for sports competitions, including the Olympics, which Los Angeles will host in 2028.During his joint speech to Congress this week, the president spotlighted the story of a volleyball player who was injured by a trans athlete on the opposing team and threatened to pull federal funding from any school that defied his executive order.Earlier this week, Senate Democrats banded together to block a Republican bill that would have barred transgender women and girls from playing on female sports teams.“What Republicans are doing today is inventing a problem to stir up a culture war and divide people against each other and distract people from what they’re actually doing,” the senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat of Hawaii, said in a floor speech during debate over the bill on Monday. Instead of addressing the most pressing issues of the day, such as rising grocery costs and a growing measles outbreak, Schatz said, Republicans were instead focused on an issue that was “totally irrelevant to 99.9% of all people across the country”.Since Kamala Harris’s 2024 loss, Democrats have been embroiled in a debate over what went wrong, ostensibly the reason for the governor’s podcast in which he will “talk directly with people I disagree with”. Desperate for answers, some Democrats have pointed to the party’s support for trans rights as a reason for their defeat.In the interview, Newsom conceded Trump’s signature campaign ad – “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” – was both “brutal” and effective.“She didn’t even react to it, which was even more devastating,” the governor told Kirk.“It’s not just that this was like the Willie Horton ad of the 2024 [cycle]. It wasn’t just like Lee Atwater brilliance. It’s that it reflected truth that the voters felt,” Kirk said. “Yeah, I appreciate that,” Newsom interjected, as Kirk continued: “Because voters felt as if their country was slipping away.”As Democrats search for a way out of the political wilderness, and grapple with their position on the issue, LGBTQ+ rights advocates are warning the party not to play into Republicans’ hands.“Our message to [Governor] Newsom and all leaders across the country is simple,” Robinson, of the Human Rights Campaign said. “The path to 2028 isn’t paved with the betrayal of vulnerable communities – it’s built on the courage to stand up for what’s right and do the hard work to actually help the American people.” More

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      Nicole Shanahan Puts Money Into Effort to Recall Karen Bass

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      Nicole Shanahan, who pumped millions into Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign last year and joined him on the ticket, is now backing an effort to remove Mayor Bass of Los Angeles.The first serious effort to recall Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles after the city’s devastating fires is taking shape, with financial backing from Nicole Shanahan, who was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate in last year’s presidential election.Ms. Shanahan’s involvement in the push to remove the mayor was disclosed on the bottom of a website for the Recall Karen Bass Committee, which listed her as the sole donor providing “major funding.” Ms. Shanahan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Ms. Shanahan, a onetime Silicon Valley lawyer, could bring financial firepower to the effort: She has a fortune in the realm of $1 billion that stems largely from her divorce settlement with Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder. She has also demonstrated a willingness to pour her wealth into politics, spending more than $15 million to support Mr. Kennedy’s campaign.Ms. Bass has come under pressure for her handling of the enormous wildfires that struck Southern California in January, destroying thousands of homes as fire hydrants ran out of water. She has also faced criticism for being out of the country when the fires hit.Those hoping to recall Ms. Bass must first clear several hurdles, however. Once their campaign is approved, they must gather 330,282 valid signatures of Los Angeles voters to qualify the question for the ballot. Ms. Shanahan said last month that she believed it would cost $4 million to collect 400,000 signatures.And in recent years, several attempts to remove officials in Los Angeles have failed to gather enough signatures to make the ballot. In 2022, a high-profile effort to recall George Gascón, the district attorney at the time, did not collect enough valid signatures. Attempts to recall Los Angeles City Council members have also failed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Two leaders of group suspected of smuggling 20,000 immigrants arrested in LA

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      Two alleged leaders of a criminal organization suspected of smuggling 20,000 people without permanent legal residency into the US from Guatemala have been arrested in Los Angeles, federal prosecutors said on Monday.Eduardo Domingo Renoj-Matul, known as “Turko”, and his lieutenant, Cristobal Mejia-Chaj, were taken into custody Friday and have pleaded not guilty to multiple charges related to smuggling migrants across the border over five years, the US attorney’s office said. A federal judge ordered the men, who themselves are in the country illegally, jailed without bond until their trial in April.The indictment names Renoj-Matul as the head of a vast human smuggling ring operating for at least a dozen years that primarily transports people to the US from Guatemala.The criminal network was responsible for the deaths of seven immigrants without legal status – including a four-year-old child – who were killed in a November 2023 vehicle crash in Oklahoma, prosecutors said.A driver who has been in custody in Oklahoma since that crash, Jose Paxtor-Oxlaj, was also charged in the California indictment, according to the court documents. Another man, Helmer Obispo-Hernandez, a lieutenant in the organization and a supervisor of a team of drivers, faces charges as well. He is believed to be in Guatemala, officials said.Attorneys for the four men could not be located on Monday for comment.Renoj-Matual was assisted by associates in Guatemala who solicited people who each paid between $15,000 and $18,000 to be smuggled to the US through Mexico, prosecutors said.For an additional fee, the migrants were transported and moved to various destinations in the United States, including Los Angeles and Phoenix. Some of the migrants who were not able to pay the fees were held hostage in a stash house near downtown Los Angeles, according to prosecutors.“These smuggling organizations have no regard for human life and their conduct kills,” acting US attorney Joseph T McNally said in a statement. “The indictment and arrests here have dismantled one of the country’s largest and most dangerous smuggling organizations.”If convicted of all charges, the defendants could face a statutory maximum sentence of death or life imprisonment. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump and California don’t see eye to eye, but critique of high-speed train has many on board

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      Californians know their state is a punching bag for Donald Trump’s administration, a “paradise lost” that the president intends to wrest back from the “radical left lunatics”. But when Trump took aim at the state’s much-delayed high-speed rail project earlier this month, saying it was “the worst managed project” he’d ever seen, some of those leftwingers – and more moderate voters – found themselves in the unusual position of conceding he might have a point.California’s beautiful dream of a bullet train whisking passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than three hours has been more than 16 years in the making, approved by voters but dogged by so many delays, broken deadlines and cost overruns that it has only just reached the initial stages of laying down track.Originally the whole 494-mile route – stretching south beyond Los Angeles to Anaheim, home to Disneyland – was supposed to be finished by 2020, at a cost of around $30bn. Now, the state’s high-speed rail authority is refocusing its ambitions on a truncated 171-mile middle section in California’s Central valley, at a cost of more than $35bn and a tentative completion date of 2033. The budget for the entire line has ballooned to more than $100bn, with no end date in sight.“It’s impossible that something could cost that much,” Trump complained to reporters in the Oval Office in the midst of his slash-and-burn campaign to cut government spending across the board. He and his transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, have launched an investigation and are threatening to withhold more than $4bn in federal grants previously approved by the Biden administration.California officials from the governor, Gavin Newsom, down have made a show of defending the project, calling it a catalyst for economic development that, after more than $13bn of investment to date, has progressed too far to justify any change of plan. “We just have to accept the responsibility of where we are, and that’s exactly what we are doing,” Newsom said last month at a ground-breaking ceremony for a railhead outside Bakersfield, at the southern end of the truncated Central valley line.With or without federal funding, California will have to come up with the lion’s share of the budget and currently has no plan in place to do so, beyond a study proposed by the state legislature to explore public-private partnerships and the possibility of using revenue from new economic development along the track to keep financing more of it.That comes on top of what supporters and detractors alike describe as years of top-heavy bureaucracy, too much money spent on consultants, and endless negotiating with property owners and public utilities who have felt little pressure to respond to the rail authority’s requests.The inspector general responsible for overseeing the high speed rail authority just issued a pair of reports, one anticipating that the project will keep missing deadlines including the 2033 completion date for the Central valley stretch, and the other detailing long delays caused by the latest negotiations to move water, electricity and gas lines out of the way of the rail route.Republicans, many of them opposed in principle to high-speed rail, have taken to calling the project “the train to nowhere”. But they are not the only ones. David Lazarus, a liberal commentator for the Los Angeles television news station KTLA who is in favor of a bullet train built right, said the state was “in the middle of a boondoggle of bad decisions that is now light years from its original plan and seems to be getting worse”.Elected Democrats who feel similarly have been largely silent since Trump and his so-called “department of government efficiency”, led by Elon Musk, started voicing their criticisms in the wake of last November’s presidential election. In the past, though, many of those Democrats have voiced concern that a botched high-speed rail line in California might spell the death of climate-friendly mass transit in the future.View image in fullscreenFiona Ma, the Democratic state treasurer, told the Guardian in 2023 she thought the government should get out of rail-building and defer to private enterprise because “government is not in the business of being efficient”. That same year, a Democratic state assembly member, Corey Jackson, said: “I don’t think history’s going to judge us well from the decisions we’re making on the project right now.”Newsom, Ma and Jackson did not agree to an interview request or requests for comment.For now, the high-speed rail line retains modest public support. An opinion poll conducted earlier this month for KTLA showed that 54% of California voters still believed it was a good investment, slightly down from a similar survey published by the Los Angeles Times three years ago. Whether those numbers can hold for another decade remains an open question, however, and some Republicans are already smelling blood in the water.View image in fullscreen“This is not the project the voters approved,” Republican assembly member Bill Essayli said in December. “I believe it should go back to the voters to ask them if they want to continue this project and say what it’s actually going to cost and accomplish.”Another Republican assemblymember, Alexandra Macedo, has introduced long-shot legislation to redirect state funding for the rail project to wildfire prevention and water infrastructure projects – both hot topics in the wake of last month’s devastating fires that destroyed whole neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles.The high speed rail authority, meanwhile, remains sanguine about the risk of losing federal funding, saying it welcomes the Trump administration’s investigation. “We stand by the progress and impact of this project,” the chief executive Ian Choudri said in a statement.Asked how the authority planned to continue financing the project, with or without federal money, a spokesperson said they were looking at a variety of options including private investment and government loans. “We are building what we can where we can as other funding is identified,” spokesperson Kyle Simerly said. “It is common for major infrastructure projects to be built in phases to spread costs and manage complexity.”View image in fullscreenMany policy insiders, including Ma, favor the private rail-building approach taken by the Florida-based company Brightline, which is building a high-speed line from Las Vegas to the eastern Los Angeles suburbs. In fact, Brightline is considering a branch line to connect its route to the future high-speed LA-San Francisco line.The only problem? The connection point, in the desert town of Palmdale north of Los Angeles, is 95 miles short of the Central Valley high-speed segment and unlikely to be linked up to it for decades.The branch line would mainly serve as a roundabout way for Brightline passengers to reach downtown Los Angeles from Las Vegas, including a slow stretch of commuter rail over the final 60 miles. On the map, the route looks like a giant wiggle around the San Gabriel mountains instead of a much straighter line along the freeway system. Still, in January, the Biden administration awarded a last-minute $1m federal grant to prepare the Palmdale station for high-speed rail traffic – an act of faith the Trump administration looks unlikely to repeat. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Against everything this country stands for’: ex-NFL player Chris Kluwe takes his local anti-Maga protest national

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      Last week the former NFL player Chris Kluwe was arrested at a city council meeting in his home town of Huntington Beach, California, for approaching councilmembers after making an impassioned speech likening the Maga movement to nazism. This came after the council approved a plaque commemorating the city library’s 50th anniversary. Writ largest on the plaque are the words “Magical Alluring Galvanizing Adventurous” – an acrostic of Maga.Kluwe ranked among the NFL’s top punters while playing for the Minnesota Vikings in the early 2000s. During his career he was as well known for calling out NFL immorality and championing civil rights causes like same-sex marriage and racial justice as he was for pinning the opposition against their own goalline with his booming right leg.Retirement hasn’t dampened the 43-year-old’s impassioned rhetoric. “Maga stands for resegregation and racism,” he said in his council address. “Maga stands for censorship and book bans. … Maga is a profoundly corrupt, unmistakably anti-democracy and most importantly, Maga is explicitly a Nazi movement. You may have replaced a swastika with a red hat but that is what it is.”After dropping the mic to cheers from the gallery, Kluwe stepped forward from his public podium toward the city council dais and gave himself up as police swarmed to arrest him. He was eventually charged with a misdemeanor for disrupting an assembly.“I had seen at previous city council meetings that this city does not listen to its community,” Kluwe said in a phone interview two days after his arrest, with characteristic wryness. “They want attention so that they can get more power. But they don’t want to do the actual work of making the community better.”He assumed that his booking would be fairly straightforward, but the police held him for two and a half hours, “because they were waiting for something to charge me with”, he says. “Now I have a court date in April, so we’ll see what happens. There’s a possibility the ACLU might get involved. Some people have been telling me they’re looking to challenge this because they think it might not be legal.”View image in fullscreenKnown as “the surfing capital of the world”, Huntington Beach is 40 miles down the coast from Los Angeles in Orange county – California’s historically conservative heartland. Kluwe, who grew up in nearby Seal Beach and has called Huntington Beach home for the past 15 years, has seen the town’s political attitude shift with the tides. “Skinheads and ‘surf Nazis’ were a known part of Huntington Beach,” he says. “But the government wasn’t necessarily like that. They were conservative. But it was small-c, don’t want to pay taxes or build new houses conservatism. But then [in the past decade] you saw the community start shifting more leftwards. When I moved back here, this was a cool beach community, a good place to live.”But in the last few years, the community has been jerked back to the right as Maga Republicans have overtaken city politics. The former city attorney, Michael Gates, stepped down from that position this year to join Donald Trump’s justice department. Maga candidates swept last November’s elections to lock out all seven of Huntington Beach’s city council seats. After their victory they posed for pictures inside city hall wearing “Make Huntington Beach Great Again” red caps and dubbed themselves the “Maga-nificent 7”.“A lot of people thought that Maga would help them, and they trusted the city council to look out for their best interests. They didn’t realize that this council is only here to make themselves famous and try to move upwards in the political echelon,” Kluwe says.One of the new Maga cohort is Gracey Van Der Mark, the former mayor who won a city council seat in November. As mayor, she spearheaded a slew of initiatives including prohibitive voter ID laws, resisting California’s Covid mandates and eliminating references to hate crimes in the city’s declaration on human dignity. To regulate the city library, she pushed a resolution for a “parental advisory board” to pre-screen library books, and even considered privatizing the library’s operations. Both proposals were met with considerable backlash from the city’s liberal, independent and anti-Trump Republican residents. The library plaque includes an unattributed quote – “Through hope and change, our nation has built back better to the golden era of Making America Great Again” – which mashes up slogans from Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Trump’s presidential campaigns. But the overall tone of the tribute makes clear whose vision of America is most prized.“The library’s name is in the smallest font on the plaque,” Kluwe says. “So, to me, it’s like, what are you really celebrating?”Kluwe was bound to figure in the Huntington Beach resistance. During the 2011 NFL lockout, he called Peyton Manning, Drew Brees and other star members of his players union “greedy douchebags” for reportedly seeking individual carveouts from the league at the expense of a collectively bargained agreement. Two years later, Kluwe joined up with the Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo to file a supreme court amicus brief expressing their support of the challenge to California’s Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage. When the Vikings cut Kluwe in spring 2013, he wrote a Deadspin article attributing his release to his support of same-sex marriage and called his positions coach, whom he accused of repeatedly using homophobic language, a bigot. (After a months-long internal investigation, the Vikings settled with Kluwe by making a sizable donation to LGBTQ+-focused organizations.)After retiring from football, he advocated for NFL players’ right to protest during the social justice movement and vocally supported Colin Kaepernick. All the while, Kluwe made a smooth transition into a career as a memoirist and sci-fi author.But he says he’s finding the current administration stranger than fiction, particularly when he saw the photoshopped magazine cover of Trump wearing a crown that was posted on the White House’s official Instagram account. “I cannot think of anything more profoundly un-American than a picture of an American president with a crown,” he says. “That goes against everything this country stands for.”Kluwe hopes his protest will inspire other concerned citizens across the country to take a stand and motivate Democratic lawmakers in particular to fight harder. “Right now, the Democratic party is contributing nothing to trying to defend our nation,” says Kluwe, who had been on the phone with party operatives before clicking over to talk to me. I asked whether he was interested in running for office himself, but he said he was more interested in the power of civil disobedience.He hopes his stand against the Huntington Beach city council will be a reminder to the rest of the world of the many Americans who didn’t vote for Trump. “These countries have been our friends and allies for decades. It’s up to us to show the world that the 25% of people who cast their votes for him do not represent the American people, nor do they represent the American dream, which is one of inclusion, diversity and respect, both home and abroad. We may not always achieve it, but I think it is an ideal worth striving towards.” More

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      in Elections

      In Huntington Beach, Politics on a Plaque

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      MAGA references on a library plaque have divided the Southern California surf town and thrust it into the national spotlight.They call themselves the “MAGA-nificent 7.” They once posed for a picture inside City Hall wearing red caps with the slogan “Make Huntington Beach Great Again.”But the Huntington Beach City Council, in Southern California, had even more MAGA in store. The seven-member body, all of whom are Republicans, decided to turn a seemingly humdrum municipal task — commemorating the 50th anniversary of the city’s central public library — into a political statement, using their favorite acronym.The council-approved design of the plaque describes the library in this bold-letter fashion:Magical Alluring Galvanizing Adventurous“This is a historical moment,” said Councilwoman Gracey Van Der Mark, who came up with the idea for the plaque. “And if people do not think America is great and don’t want to make it great again, they’re in the wrong country — because millions of people risk their lives to come to this one country.”Gracey Van Der Mark, a member of the Huntington Beach City Council, voted with six other colleagues to approve the design of the library plaque.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesThe wording of the plaque has thrown Huntington Beach — an Orange County surf town with 192,000 residents that’s about 30 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles — into the national spotlight. But the dispute is part of a yearslong battle over the city’s political and cultural identity.Huntington Beach has become one of the reddest cities in one of the bluest states in America. Both before and after voters in November ousted the last three remaining Democratic members of the Council, city leaders have pushed a series of Trump-style policies and tangled in court with state officials.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      2025 Film Independent Spirit Awards: Complete Winners List

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      Here’s who went home a winner at the Indy Spirit Awards, held on the beach in Santa Monica, Calif., on Saturday.“Anora” won best feature at the 40th annual Film Independent Spirit Awards on Saturday. Its director, Sean Baker, and lead, Mikey Madison, won in their respective categories. “Shogun” won best new scripted series, while “Baby Reindeer” took home three acting awards.Best Feature“Anora”Best First Feature“Dìdi”John Cassavetes AwardGiven to the best feature made for under $1,000,000.“Girls Will Be Girls”Best DirectorSean Baker, “Anora”Best ScreenplayJesse Eisenberg, “A Real Pain”Best First ScreenplaySean Wang, “Dìdi”Best Lead PerformanceMikey Madison, “Anora”Best Supporting PerformanceKieran Culkin, “A Real Pain”Best Breakthrough PerformanceMaisy Stella, “My Old Ass”Best CinematographyJomo Fray, “Nickel Boys”Best EditingHansjörg Weissbrich, “September 5”Robert Altman AwardGiven to one film’s director, casting director and ensemble cast.“His Three Daughters”Best Documentary“No Other Land”Best International Film“Flow” (Latvia, France, Belgium)Producers AwardGiven to an emerging producer of quality independent films with limited resources.Sarah WinshallSomeone to Watch AwardGiven to a talented filmmaker who has not yet been widely recognized.Sarah Friedland, “Familiar Touch”Truer Than Fiction AwardGiven to an emerging director of nonfiction features who has not yet been widely recognized.Rachel Elizabeth Seed, “A Photographic Memory”Best New Non-Scripted or Documentary Series“Hollywood Black”Best New Scripted Series“Shogun”Best Lead Performance in a New Scripted SeriesRichard Gadd, “Baby Reindeer”Best Supporting Performance in a New Scripted SeriesNava Mau, “Baby Reindeer”Best Breakthrough Performance in a New Scripted SeriesJessica Gunning, “Baby Reindeer”Best Ensemble Cast in a New Scripted Series“How to Die Alone” More