A group of Democratic state governors has launched a new alliance aimed at coordinating their public health efforts.
They’re framing it as a way to share data, messages about threats, emergency preparedness and public health policy — and as a rebuke to President Trump’s administration, which they say isn’t doing its job in public health.
“At a time when the federal government is telling the states, ‘you’re on your own,’ governors are banding together,” Maryland Governor Wes Moore said in a statement.
The formation of the group touches off a new chapter in a partisan battle over public health measures that has been heightened by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s advisers declining to recommend COVID-19 vaccinations, instead leaving the choice to the individual.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said in an email that Democratic governors who imposed school closures and mask mandates, including for toddlers, at the height of the pandemic, are the ones who “destroyed public trust in public health.”
“The Trump Administration and Secretary Kennedy are rebuilding that trust by grounding every policy in rigorous evidence and Gold Standard Science – not the failed politics of the pandemic,” Nixon said.
The initial members are all Democrats
The Governors Public Health Alliance bills itself as a “nonpartisan coordinating hub,” but the initial members are all Democrats — the governors of 14 states plus Guam.
Among them are governors of the most populous blue states, California and New York, and several governors who are considered possible 2028 presidential candidates, including California’s Gavin Newsom, Illinois’ JB Pritzker and Maryland’s Moore.
The idea of banding together for public health isn’t new for Democratic governors. They formed regional groups to address the pandemic during Trump’s first term and launched new ones in recent months amid uncertainty on federal vaccine policy. States have also taken steps to preserve access to COVID-19 vaccines.
The new alliance isn’t intended to supplant those efforts, or the coordination already done by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, its organizers say.
A former CDC director is among the advisers
Dr. Mandy Cohen, who was CDC director under former President Biden and before that the head of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, is part of a bipartisan group of advisers to the alliance.
“The CDC did provide an important backstop for expertise and support,” she said. “And I think now with some of that gone, it’s important for states to make sure that they are sharing best practices, and that they are coordinating, because the problems have not gone away. The health threats have not gone away.”
Other efforts have also sprung up to try to fill roles that the CDC performed before the ouster of a director, along with other restructuring and downsizing.
The Governors Public Health Alliance has support from GovAct, a nonprofit, nonpartisan donor-funded initiative that also has projects aimed at protecting democracy and another partisan hot-button issue, reproductive freedom.
Mulvihill and Stobbe write for the Associated Press.
It should matter little to the Chinese that American diplomats and a handful of their western allies will not be attending the Beijing Winter Olympics in February. What truly matters is that the Russians are coming.
The above is not an arbitrary statement. It is supported with facts. According to a survey conducted by China’s Global Times newspaper, the majority of the Chinese people value their country’s relations with Russia more than that of the EU and certainly more than that of the United States. The newspaper reported that such a finding makes it “the first time in 15 years that China-US ties did not top the list of the important bilateral relations in the Global Times annual survey.”
In fact, some kind of an alliance is already forming between China and Russia. The fact that the Chinese people are taking note of this and are supporting their government’s drive towards greater integration – political, economic and geostrategic – between Beijing and Moscow, indicates that the informal and potentially formal alliance is a long-term strategy for both nations.
American hostilities towards China, as seen by the Chinese, have become unbearable, and the Chinese people and government seem to have lost, not only any trust, however modest, of Washington, but of its own political system as well. 66 per cent of all Chinese either disapproved of the US democratic system – or whatever remains of it – or believe that US democracy has sharply declined. Ironically, the vast majority of Americans share such a bleak view of their own country, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Centre in 2019 and again by the Michigan Public Policy Survey in 2021.
This leads us to two possible conclusions: First, the Chinese people will not be pushing for an American-style democracy any time soon and, second, the Chinese trust in the US does not hinge on what political party controls the White House or Congress.
While the Chinese negative view of the US is unmistakably clear, Beijing remains hopeful that existing divisions with the European Union would allow it to expand economically in a region that is rife with financial and political opportunities, thus strategic growth. This fact offers China and Russia yet another area of potential cooperation, as Russia is also keen to expand into the European markets using its recently completed Nord Stream 2 gas project. Though Europe is already struggling with gas shortages, Europeans are divided on whether Russia should be allowed to claim a massive geostrategic influence by having such sway over the EU energy needs.
Germany, which already receives nearly a third of its gas supplies from Russia – through Nord Stream 1 – is worried that allowing Nord Stream 2 to operate would make it too dependent on Russian gas supplies. Under intense pressure from Washington, Germany is caught between a rock and a hard place: it needs Russian gas to keep its economy afloat, but is worried about American retaliation. To appease Washington, the German government threatened, on 16 December, to block the new pipeline if Russia invades Ukraine. But is Germany in a position that allows it to make such demands?
Meanwhile, Washington is keeping a close watch on Russia’s and China’s strategic expansion westward, and it views the ‘threat’ posed by both countries with great alarm. In his recent visit to Scotland to take part in the COP26, US President Joe Biden accused China and Russia of “walking away” on “a gigantic issue”, referring to climate change. China has “lost the ability to influence people around the world and here in COP. The same way I would argue with Russia,” Biden said on 3 November.
But will such rhetoric make any difference, or sway traditional US allies to boycott the lucrative deals and massive economic opportunities presented by the two emerging Asian giants?
According to Eurostat, in 2020, China overtook the US as Europe’s largest import and third-largest export partner. Moreover, according to Nature magazine, most European countries largely depend on Russian energy sources, with the European Union estimated to import nearly 40 per cent of its natural gas from Russia.
In the face of these vastly changing realities, the US seems to be running out of options. The Summit for Democracy, orchestrated by Washington last December, seemed like a desperate cry for attention as opposed to celebrating the supposed democratic countries. 111 countries participated in the conference. The participants were handpicked by Washington and included such countries as Israel, Albania and Ukraine. China and Russia were, of course, excluded, not because of their lack of democratic credentials – such notions are often of no relevance to the politicised US definition of ‘democracy’ – but because they, along with others, were meant to be left isolated in the latest US hegemonic move.
The conference, expectedly, turned out to be an exercise in futility. Needless to say, the US is in no position to give democracy lessons to anyone. The attempted coup in Washington by tens of thousands of angry US militants on 6 January, 2021 – coupled with various opinion polls attesting to Americans’ lack of faith in their elected institutions – places the US democracy brand at an all-time low.
As the US grows desperate in its tactics – aside from increasingly ineffectual sanctions, aggressive language and the relentless waving of the democracy card – China and Russia continue to draw closer to one another, on all fronts. In an essay entitled ‘Respecting People’s Democratic Rights’, written jointly by the ambassadors of Beijing and Moscow in Washington, Qin Gang and Anatoly Antonov wrote in the National Interest magazine that the democracy summit was “an evident product of (US’s) Cold-War mentality,” which “will stoke up ideological confrontation and a rift in the world, creating new ‘dividing lines’.”
But there is more than their mutual rejection of American hostilities that is bringing China and Russia closer. The two countries are not motivated by their fear of the American military or some NATO invasion. Russia’s and China’s militaries are moving from strength to strength and neither country is experiencing the anxiety often felt by smaller, weaker and relatively isolated countries that have faced direct or indirect US military threats.
To push back against possible NATO expansion, the Russian military is actively mobilising in various regions at its western borders. For its part, the Chinese military has made it clear that any US-led attempt aimed at altering the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait would provoke an immediate military retaliation. In a virtual meeting with the US President, Chinese President Xi Jinping warned Biden on 16 November that the US was “playing with fire”. “Whoever plays with fire will get burnt,” he threatened.
The Chinese-Russian alliance aims largely at defending the two countries’ regional and international interests, which are in constant expansion. In the case of China, the country is now a member of what is considered the world’s largest economic pact. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which was officiated on 1 January, covers a global market that caters to around 30 per cent of the world’s population.
Russia, too, operates based on multiple regional and international alliances. One of these military alliances is the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which is currently involved in ‘peacekeeping’ operations in Kazakhstan. From Syria in the Middle East, to Venezuela in South America to Mali in West Africa and beyond, Russia’s military influence has increased to the extent that, in September 2021, Moscow signed military cooperation agreements with Africa’s two most populous nations, Nigeria and Ethiopia, challenging the traditional dominance of the US and France on the African continent.
Informally, China and Russia are already operating according to a regional and global model that can be compared to that of the now-defunct Warsaw Treaty Organisation (1955-91), a political and military alliance between the Soviet Union and several Eastern European countries that aimed at counter-balancing the US-led NATO alliance. The Warsaw Pact pushed back against US-led western hegemony and laboured to protect the interests of the pact’s members throughout the world. History seems to be repeating itself, though under different designations.
Historically, the two countries have had a difficult and, at times, antagonistic relationship, dating back to the 19th century. During the Nikita Khrushchev era, Beijing and Moscow even broke their ties altogether. The Sino-Soviet split of 1960 was earth-shattering to the extent that it transformed the bipolarity of the Cold War, where China operated as an entirely independent party.
Though diplomatic relations between Beijing and Moscow were restored in 1989, it was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union that cooperation between both nations intensified. For example, the decision, in 1997, to coordinate their diplomatic positions in the United Nations gave birth to the Joint Declaration on a Multipolar World and the Establishment of a New International Order. That agreement between Russia and China laid the foundations for the actively evolving multi-polar world that is currently transpiring before our eyes.
Present reality – namely US, NATO, EU pressures – has compelled Russia and China to slowly, but surely cement their relationship, especially on the economic, diplomatic and military fronts. Writing in Carnegie Moscow Centre, Alexander Gabuev explained that, according to data provided by the Russian Federal Customs Service, “China’s share in Russian foreign trade grew from 10.5 per cent in 2013 (before the Ukraine crisis and sanctions) to 16.7 per cent in 2019 and 18.3 per cent in the pandemic-struck 2020.”
Moreover, the two countries are holding regular large-scale joint military exercises, aimed at strengthening their growing security and military cooperation.
This already close relation is likely to develop even further in the near future, especially as China finds itself compelled to diversify its energy sources. This became a pressing need following recent tensions between Australia, a NATO member, and China. Currently, Australia is the main natural gas supplier to Beijing.
On its own, Russia cannot conclusively defeat Western designs. China, too, despite its massive economic power, cannot play a geopolitical game of this calibre without solid alliances. Both countries greatly benefit from building an alternative to US-led political, economic and military alliances, starting with NATO. The need for a Russian-Chinese alliance becomes even more beneficial when seen through the various opportunities presenting themselves: growing weakness in the US’s own political system, cracks within US-EU relations and the faltering power of NATO itself. Turkey, for example, though a NATO member, has for years been exploring its own geopolitical alliances outside the NATO paradigm. Turkey is already cementing its ties with both Russia and China, and on various fronts. Other countries, for example Iran and various South American countries, that have been targeted by the US for refusing to toe Washington’s political line, are desperately seeking non-western alliances to protect their interests, their sovereignty and their heavily sanctioned economies.
While it is still too early to claim that China and Russia are anywhere near a full-blown alliance of the Warsaw nature, there is no reason to believe that the cooperation between both countries will be halted or even slow down anytime soon. The question is how far are Beijing and Moscow willing to go to protect their interests.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
Remember the vaunted Trump-Putin summit? It was just a month ago this week, but Americans could be excused for having forgotten. Nothing good has come of it. The cringy Alaska photo-op for the American and Russian presidents certainly didn’t yield President Trump’s long-promised deal to end Vladimir Putin’s criminal war on Ukraine.
In fact, as each day since has shown, worse than nothing has come from that failed bro-fest. Which begs renewed attention to it. Putin arrived to Trump’s literal red-carpet welcome and left with an apparent if unstated license — as then-candidate Trump said last year of the Russians — “to do whatever the hell they want.”
And they have.
On Tuesday last week, a Russian bomb hit a group of Ukrainian retirees collecting their pension checks, killing two dozen and injuring more — another day’s civilian toll in Putin’s ongoing offensive, the harshest in more than three years of war and one that’s struck U.S. and European installations. The next day, stunningly, about 20 Russian drones flew over next-door Poland, a NATO ally, forcing the alliance to scramble jets to shoot down threats over its territory for the first time in NATO history.
And mostly we’ve heard bupkis from Trump — except to keep blaming the war on his predecessor President Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, never Putin. Even servile Senate Republicans have roused themselves to press for punishing sanctions against Russia, but Trump withholds his blessing.
You’d think the self-proclaimed “president of peace” would at least be riled that Putin’s impunity since Alaska is a stick in the eye to Trump’s wife as well. Melania Trump wrote Putin a letter — which Trump delivered at their summit — urging him to protect children. “It was very well received,” Trump boasted later.
What a tragic irony that the president who promised he’d end the Ukraine war on “day one,” and who incessantly contends Russia never would have invaded had he, Putin’s friend, been president in 2022, now presides over Russia’s escalation of the war and its unprecedented incursion into NATO territory. And Trump acts all but impotent.
For three years until his return to power, Russia did not test the United States’ pledge to “defend every inch” of NATO territory. Now it has. And at the news of the Poland intrusion, Trump, the supposed leader of the free world, showed himself to be little more than an internet troll.
“What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!” was his online outburst long hours after the news last Wednesday. The next day he suggested the drones’ flight into Poland “could have been a mistake,” provoking rebuttals from Polish leaders and NATO allies. And when NATO’s European members last Friday reinforced the alliance’s eastern flank defenses against Russia, they announced no U.S. contributions.
Much was made last spring of Trump’s nickname among some Wall Street types for his on-again, off-again tariffs: “TACO,” for Trump Always Chickens Out. But that moniker better describes Trump’s Russia stance: He repeatedly sets up a face-off against Putin, and invariably face-plants.
For weeks ahead of the August summit, Trump threatened “extreme consequences” if Russia didn’t agree to a cease-fire. Then, as quickly as U.S. soldiers rolled out the red carpet for Putin, Trump rolled up his cease-fire talk. After hours under Putin’s sway, he came away talking not about what Russia would do for peace but what territorial concessions Ukraine would make. And a month later, he’s still resisting Congress’ proposed sanctions against Russia, even as he’s levied big tariffs on India and China in part as punishment for buying Russian oil.
Nothing Trump claimed would happen as a consequence of his summitry has come to pass. Not a meeting between Putin and Zelensky, nor a trilateral follow-up with the Nobel-coveting Trump joining as mediating peacemaker. Putin has had high-level meetings since the Alaska summit, but they’ve been with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un — all drawn closer in solidarity against the United States’ hegemony.
Trump’s embarrassingly weak response to Russia’s aggression, together with his passivity in the face of Israel’s defiance in renewing its offensive in starving Gaza, recently prompted a New York Times analysis declaring “the bystander phase of the Trump presidency.” A Wall Street Journal headline said Trump is “sidelining himself” in foreign policy. On Wednesday, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote that, just as Trump sought to rename the Department of Defense to be the Department of War, the White House should be called “Waffle House.” (Or Taco Bell?) The criticisms are international: Poland’s deputy prime minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, said in a video last week that Putin, by his hostilities, is “mocking” Trump’s peace talk.
There’s mockery indeed in Moscow, where politicians and state-run media continue to celebrate Putin as the summit winner. Russians weren’t quaking in their valenki when Trump told “Fox & Friends” hosts on Friday that his patience with Russia is “running out fast.” Alexei Zhuravlyov, a leader of the Russian State Duma, said Trump’s “normal state” is “either waiting to talk to Putin, talking to Putin or explaining how well he talked to Putin.” Pundit Mikhail Rostovsky dismissed Trump’s fussing and threats as “a new ‘Groundhog Day.’”
“The Kremlin believes that Russia is slowly but surely achieving its goals in Ukraine,” Rostovsky added. “Therefore Moscow does not intend to stop there.”
Putin has said as much himself. Only Trump doesn’t seem to hear him. Or doesn’t want to.
China, through its Belt and Road Initiative, is playing a role in promoting “global prosperity,” as this is the shared goal of the Global South. During the United Nations’ celebration of Global South Day on September 12, 2025, China calls on countries of the Global South to actively participate in and lead the reform of the global economic governance system, which will further unite developing countries and make them companions on the path to development and recovery. Under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, China also supports civilizational dialogue and harmony with diversity among various developing countries of the Global South under the umbrella of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, as this represents the true nature of the world pursued by the Global South. China proposed “enhancing communication and dialogue and supporting each other in taking a modernization path appropriate to national conditions.” China also announced that it would take the lead in establishing a “Think Tank Cooperation Alliance for the Global South,” which will inject new impetus into mutual learning among the world’s civilizations.
Chinese President Xi Jinping affirmed, while delivering a speech at the “BRICS Plus Leaders’ Dialogue” on October 24, 2024, that “China will take the lead in establishing a (collaborative alliance of think tanks in the Global South). In this context, the Chinese capital, Beijing, hosted the “Conference of Think Tanks of the Global South” on October 21, 2024. Representatives from more than 70 countries from the Global South participated in the conference, which was held under the theme of “Peace, Development, and Security.”
China positions the Belt and Road Initiative as a key platform for South-South cooperation. From an academic standpoint, I can classify the BRI as South-South cooperation, triangular cooperation, and a hybrid paradigm for many reasons. From my academic perspective, as an internationally renowned Egyptian expert on Chinese politics and the policies of the ruling Communist Party of China, I believe that China’s Belt and Road Initiative serves as a model for cooperation between China and developing countries in the Global South, as well as for trilateral cooperation. The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, under the slogan of “Working together for modernization and building a community with a shared future,” has led to increased political mutual trust between China, developing countries in the Global South, and all countries that have joined the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. This has been achieved through coordinating positions and policies to reach consensus on regional issues and global challenges, thus strengthening the power of countries in the Global South and raising the voice of developing countries, led by China.
Here, Chinese President Xi Jinping put forward new ideas and proposals for building a “high-level community with a shared future between China and developing countries of the Global South,” with China announcing new measures and procedures for practical cooperation with countries of the South, addressing new topics, such as “state governance, industrialization and agricultural modernization, peace and security, as well as high-quality cooperation within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative,” and others, to the mutual benefit of all, in accordance with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s well-known principle of “win-win and mutual benefits for all.”
China’s Belt and Road Initiative represents a new Chinese journey toward modernization, the advancement of a community with a shared future between China and the global South, and a new chapter in the friendship between the Chinese people and the people of developing countries, generating strong momentum for global modernization.
From my academic perspective, China’s Belt and Road Initiative is an attempt by China to propose an alternative global economic system in cooperation with developing countries of the Global South, in opposition to US hegemonic policies. China opposes the current global economic order dominated by the United States and its Western allies, which is based on protectionism, unilateralism, and hegemony. Therefore, Beijing is working to present an alternative vision for a global economic system based on cooperation, a point President “Xi” sought to emphasize at the forum, describing his initiative as a comprehensive alternative to the Washington-led global order.
Unsurprisingly, in the context of this vision, Chinese President Xi Jinping reiterated his criticism of what he called “unilateral sanctions, geopolitical competition, and bloc policies.” This was an implicit reference to recent US policies toward Beijing, which, in Washington’s view, are a means of mitigating risks, while Beijing views them as aimed at hindering its development and rise.This vision was also expressed in the “white paper,” in which Beijing described the Belt and Road Initiative as an alternative to the current global economic model, which is “dominated by a few countries.”
Based on the above analysis, we understand the reasons behind China’s support for developing countries in the Global South through its Belt and Road Initiative and its efforts to establish a think tank for an alliance of developing countries in the Global South. For years, China has made no secret of its dissatisfaction with the current US-dominated global order, which it describes as a system built on Western hegemony and treating other countries with duplicity and condescension. It asserts that this system has failed to resolve international crises, emphasizing the need for a new, more just, and effective system. China argues that the current global order is unfair and excludes the interests of developing countries, citing economic disparities, political interventions, and the imposition of Western standards on the majority of the world’s countries.
Background According to Reuters, U.S. President Donald Trump has maintained close ties with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite occasional disagreements. Israel has long acted independently in its security operations, even at times without informing Washington.
What Happened On Tuesday, Israel launched a surprise airstrike in Doha targeting Hamas political offices. The strike, ordered by Netanyahu, killed six people including a Qatari security officer but failed to eliminate Hamas leaders. The U.S. was not warned in advance, echoing Israel’s earlier unilateral strike on Hezbollah in 2024. Trump expressed anger, saying he was “very unhappy about every aspect” of the operation.
Why It Matters The strike has put strain on the Trump-Netanyahu partnership, testing the limits of U.S.-Israel coordination. It also threatens Trump’s efforts to expand Gulf participation in the Abraham Accords, while further complicating relations with Arab states already critical of Israel’s Gaza invasion.
Stakeholder Reactions
Trump, in a Truth Social post, said the bombings “did not advance U.S. or Israeli interests” but reiterated his support for weakening Hamas.
Qatar and Western allies condemned the attack.
Analysts such as Aaron David Miller noted Trump’s instinct still aligns with Netanyahu’s broader goal of eliminating Hamas.
Former U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross suggested Trump’s patience could wear thin if Netanyahu continues to act unilaterally.
What’s Next Analysts believe a full rupture in the Trump-Netanyahu relationship remains unlikely. However, repeated surprises by Israel could erode U.S. political cover, especially as humanitarian conditions in Gaza worsen and Arab allies increase pressure on Washington.
The world’s largest sports pirating site, Streameast, is no more.
The illegal streaming giant was terminated in Egypt after a sting operation, according to the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, one of the country’s largest antipiracy coalitions. Egyptian law enforcement and ACE shut down the service Aug. 24 following a yearlong investigation.
Streameast had 80 associated domains and amassed more than 1.6 billion visits during the past year. It offered access to sports’ biggest events, including Europe’s football championships, the NFL, NBA, MLB, pay-per-view boxing and F1 races. It garnered an average of 136 million monthly visitors, primarily based in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., the Philippines and Germany.
“With this landmark action, we have put more points on the board for sports leagues, entertainment companies, and fans worldwide — and our global alliance will stay on the field as long as it takes to identify and target the biggest piracy rings across the globe,” said Charles Rivkin, chairman of ACE and head of the Motion Picture Assn., in a press release.
Two men were arrested about 20 miles outside of Cairo under suspicion of copyright infringement. Authorities confiscated devices, including laptops and smartphones thought to be operating the site, cash and several credit cards. Investigators also identified a shell company possibly used to launder the advertising revenue, which totaled to around $6.2 million, and an investment of $200,000 in cryptocurrency. Several properties in Egypt were also allegedly purchased with these funds.
In addition to working with local Egyptian authorities, ACE’s investigation was aided by Europol, the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Centre, according to the Athletic’s reporting.
All sites previously associated with Streameast will be redirected to ACE’s “watch legally” page, which provides links to authorized streaming video providers. This announcement comes a day before the NFL’s regular season kicks off.
California, Oregon and Washington are joining forces to insulate vaccine guidance and other public health recommendations from political interference, a direct response to turmoil at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under President Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Govs. Gavin Newsom of California, Tina Kotek of Oregon and Bob Ferguson of Washington announced Wednesday the creation of the West Coast Health Alliance, a pact that aims to keep their states’ health policies unified and grounded in scientific expertise. The move comes as the nation’s top public health agency is being reshaped by Kennedy and his vaccine-skeptic allies, with key leadership fired and the agency in turmoil.
“President Trump’s mass firing of CDC doctors and scientists — and his blatant politicization of the agency — is a direct assault on the health and safety of the American people,” the three governors said in a joint statement. “The CDC has become a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science, ideology that will lead to severe health consequences. California, Oregon, and Washington will not allow the people of our states to be put at risk.”
In June, the three states issued a joint statement condemning Kennedy’s decision to remove all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Among the replacements named by Kennedy are appointees who spread vaccine misinformation and relayed conspiracy theories during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Associated Press.
Kennedy said the change would improve public trust by ensuring members of the committee didn’t have “any specific pro- or anti-vaccine agenda.”
Kennedy has warned that more turnover could be coming at the agency.
In the announcement for the newly formed West Coast Health Alliance, the states said the focus would be on providing evidence-based recommendations about who should receive immunizations while ensuring the public has access to credible information about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. The alliance will share immunization recommendations, but each state will also pursue independent strategies based on “unique laws, geographies, histories, and peoples.”
Dr. Erica Pan, director of the California Department of Public Health and the state health officer, said it’s imperative that California stand with medical professionals.
“The dismantling of public health and dismissal of experienced and respected health leaders and advisors, along with the lack of using science, data, and evidence to improve our nation’s health are placing lives at risk,” Pan said in a statement.
From NATO’s eastern frontier to the energy corridors of the Baltic, the partnership between Poland and the United States has become one of the most strategically consequential alliances of the 21st century. Forged through shared values and hardened by crisis, it’s a relationship that transcends party politics in both nations and speaks to a larger truth—namely, that while alliances can lead to instability and war, as shown by the interlocking obligations before World War I, alliances, whether bilateral or multilateral, can also promote international stability by deterring conflicts, enabling collective defense, and fostering cooperation and trade among member states.
Poland proves the point. Its journey from Soviet satellite to NATO membership in 1999 and European Union accession in 2004, following a decade-long process of integration and negotiation involving extensive political, economic, and legal preparations, is a story of determination and alignment with Western democratic principles. The drive toward NATO membership was reinforced by citizen advocacy and steady diplomacy, with the Polish-American community playing a quiet but influential role in building bridges between Warsaw and Washington. The U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey estimates there are nearly nine million Americans of Polish ancestry, making it one of the largest ethnic groups in the country.
From the outset, Poland understood that sovereignty in the modern era requires not only democratic governance but also a credible place within a collective security framework. Joining NATO was a strategic declaration that Poland’s future was bound to the transatlantic community. And it is precisely through NATO that the U.S.–Polish relationship contributes most visibly to international stability.
Response to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Poland responded with clarity and speed, welcoming millions of Ukrainian refugees, supplying critical military aid, and urging allies to strengthen NATO’s eastern flank. Due to its geographic location bordering Ukraine, Belarus, and the Russian exclave Kaliningrad, Poland took a proactive stance to bolster its defenses and NATO’s regional presence. Poland launched a $2.5 billion national defense initiative called the “East Shield” that was specifically aimed at strengthening the country’s roughly 418-kilometer border with Belarus and 232-kilometer border with Kaliningrad—representing some of the EU’s easternmost external boundaries—which serve as key frontlines for the bloc’s security and border control.
By shoring up NATO’s credibility and demonstrating readiness to act, Poland helped reduce the risk of wider escalation across Europe.
The U.S.–Poland defense relationship deepened accordingly. American troops are now a permanent presence on Polish soil. The U.S. Army’s V Corps forward command in Poznań, which operates from Camp Kościuszko—named for Tadeuscz Kościuszko, a national hero in both Poland and the U.S.—is responsible for coordinating and overseeing U.S. ground forces deployed in Europe. Missile defense systems such as Aegis Ashore strengthen NATO’s deterrent posture, and joint training exercises have become routine. These measures bind U.S. power to Poland’s geography, creating predictability in Europe’s most volatile region.
Poland’s overall defense spending speaks volumes. It’s approaching five percent of national GDP—more than double NATO’s longstanding benchmark of two percent of GDP for defense expenditures—and Poland’s procurement of Abrams tanks, “shoot-and-scoot” HIMARS rocket systems that are designed for rapid deployment relocation, and F-35 fighter jets ensures interoperability with U.S. forces. As U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth put it during a February 2025 press conference in Warsaw, Poland is a “model ally on the continent, willing to invest not just in their defense, but in our shared defense and defense of the continent.”
Transcending Party Politics
The relationship transcends party politics in both capitals, having remained robust under Republican and Democratic administrations in Washington—Trump, Biden, and now Trump’s second term—as well as across successive Polish governments of differing political orientations. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has reaffirmed that “Poland’s commitment to transatlantic relations and NATO must remain unquestionable,” regardless of political shifts in the U.S.
National security isn’t confined to the battlefield. Poland recognized early on that energy independence is a cornerstone of sovereignty, and it has acted decisively to cut reliance on Russian natural gas. The liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal at Świnoujście, which is named after Polish President Lech Kaczyński, who prioritized energy security, now receives regular LNG shipments from the U.S., while the Baltic Pipe project brings natural gas from Norway and strengthens regional supply diversity. Looking ahead, nuclear energy partnerships with American firms promise long-term stability and reduced dependence on fossil fuels.
This alignment in energy policy enhances Poland’s resilience while advancing broader U.S. goals of promoting secure, market-based energy in Europe. In strategic terms, an LNG tanker docking in Świnoujście is more than commerce. It’s a visible symbol of transatlantic solidarity.
Contrasting Russian Reactions
Russia’s reaction to Poland’s NATO membership stands in striking contrast to its view of Ukraine’s Western aspirations. When Poland joined NATO in 1999, Moscow voiced strong opposition, arguing that NATO’s eastward expansion threatened Russian security. Apart from diplomatic protests and some hostile rhetoric, however, Russia ultimately conceded Poland’s accession as a fait accompli. Moscow maintained cooperative channels with NATO and Poland, even as relations were strained. Poland, with its long history of independence struggles and clear Western orientation, was not seen as part of Russia’s cultural or political sphere. Moreover, by the time Central Europe was firmly integrated into NATO, Russia had little leverage to reverse the process.
Ukraine, however, occupies a different place in Moscow’s worldview. Russia regards Ukraine not only as a strategic buffer on its border but also as central to its own identity and history. Unlike Poland, Ukraine is portrayed in Russian narratives as a “brother nation” whose alignment with the West represents a profound geopolitical and cultural loss. For this reason, Russia tolerated NATO’s enlargement to Poland and the Baltics but drew the line at Ukraine, seeing its aspirations for NATO and EU membership as a direct existential threat, responding with annexation, proxy wars, and, ultimately, full-scale invasion. The contrast underscores the strategic weight of Poland’s alliance with the United States.
For Poland, it’s a relationship rooted in hard history: the loss of independence from 1795 to 1918, when the country was partitioned among Prussia, the Hapsburg monarchy, and Russia; the devastation of Nazi occupation; the long shadow of Soviet domination; and decades of Communist rule. That experience forged a national resolve that sovereignty can never be taken for granted and must be anchored in strong alliances. Today those alliances—most of all with the United States—are essential pillars of stability in Europe.
Los Angeles public schools are opening Thursday for the new academic year confronting an intense and historically unique moment: They will be operating in opposition to the federal government’s immigration raids and have set in motion aggressive moves to protect children and their immigrant parents.
School police and officers from several municipal forces will patrol near some 100 schools, setting up “safe zones” in heavily Latino neighborhoods, with a special concentration at high schools where older Latino students are walking to campus. Bus routes are being changed to better serve areas with immigrant families so children can get to school with less exposure to immigration agents.
Community volunteers will join district staff and contractors to serve as scouts — alerting campuses of nearby enforcement actions so schools can be locked down as warranted and parents and others in the school community can be quickly notified via email and text.
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass spoke about “how profound this moment is in U.S. history” during a Monday news conference with local officials.
“Here you have an entire array of elected officials, appointed officials, education leaders, people committed to our children, and we are gathered here today to talk about protecting our children from the federal government,” Bass said.
L.A. schools Supt. Alberto Carvalho said recently that the nation’s second-largest school system will oppose “any entity, at any level, that seeks to interfere with the educational process of our children. We are standing on the right side of the Constitution, and years from now, I guarantee you, we will have stood on the right side of history. We know that.”
High school boy mistakenly handcuffed
The worries among school officials and parents are not without cause.
On Monday federal agents reportedly drew their guns on a 15-year-old boy and handcuffed him outside Arleta High School. The confrontation ended with de-escalation. Family members persuaded federal agents that the boy — who is disabled — was not the person they were looking for, Carvalho said.
The situation was largely resolved by the time the school principal realized what was going on and rushed out to assist. School police also arrived and scooped up unspent bullets dropped on the ground by the agents, Carvalho said.
A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Tuesday that Arleta High was not being targeted. Instead agents were conducting “a targeted operation” on a “criminal illegal alien,” they described as “a Salvadoran national and suspected MS-13 pledge with prior criminal convictions in the broader vicinity of Arleta.”
At a Tuesday White House briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, responded to a question that referenced the L.A. Times reporting about the incident.
“I’ll have to look into the veracity of that report,” Leavitt said. “I read the L.A. Times almost every single day, and they are notorious for misleading the public… This administration wants to ensure that all school children across the country, in every city, from Los Angeles to D.C., can go to school safely.”
LAUSD will oppose “any entity, at any level, that seeks to interfere with the educational process of our children,” said Supt. Alberto Carvalho recently.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
School communities in fear
The incident outside Arleta High is among the ongoing confrontations across the region that have provoked public protests and prompted the Trump administration in June to deploy troops to Los Angeles. Enforcement actions have included masked agents arresting people at parking lots, in parks, on sidewalks and next to bus stops.
Trump administration policy is that no location — including a school — is off limits for enforcement actions in his drive to deport at least 1 million immigrants a year.
“A big part of it is to create the sense of fear so people will self-deport,” said Jimmy Gomez, a Trump critic and Democratic member of Congress representing Los Angeles.
The ripple effect is that school communities are experiencing fear and trauma, worried that agents will descend on or near campuses.
Most in the state’s public school systems, including in L.A. Unified have embraced a counter mission, protecting the right of children — regardless of immigration status — to a public education. That right to an education is, so far, protected by past U.S. Supreme Court rulings.
For most school officials up and down the state, a necessary corollary to that right is safeguarding students’ guardians and close relatives.
On Tuesday, 30 school board members from L.A. County — which has 80 school districts — convened in Hawthorne to emphasize their own focus on protecting immigrant families.
“We’re about to welcome students back to schools, but we’re very concerned that these fears and anxieties may potentially have an impact for students not wanting to come back,” said Lynwood Unified school board member Alma Castro, an organizer of the event.
She called her district a “safe haven.” Among other measures, her district has trained staff to “restrict the sharing of any student files, any student information, and there’s been some work with thinking about our facilities to ensure that we have campuses that are closed off, that people can’t just walk in.”
L.A. Unified, along with other school districts, has embraced a mission to protect the right of children — regardless of immigration status — to a public education.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Protecting immigrant families
L.A. Unified, with about 400,000 students, has been layering on protections for months, recently working to incorporate ideas advocated by the teachers union and immigrant-rights groups.
A major ongoing effort is building safe-passage networks one, two and three blocks out from a campus. Participants include paid outside groups, district employees and volunteer activists. School police — though diminished in numbers due to staffing cuts — are to patrol sensitive areas and are on call to move quickly to where situations arise. Some anti-police activists want the protective mission accomplished without any role for school police.
A safe-passage presence has expanded from 40 schools last year to at least 100 this year, among about 1,000 campuses total, Carvalho said.
“It is virtually impossible, considering the size of our community, to ensure that we have one caring, compassionate individual in every street corner in every street,” Carvalho said. “But we are deploying resources at a level never before seen in our district.”
Other various efforts include:
Starting a task force to coordinate safe passage zones with local cities
Setting up a donor-supported compassion fund to help families with legal and other costs
Coordinating food aid for families in hiding
Providing legal referrals
Contacting more than 10,000 families to encourage them to send children to schools
Providing information about online schooling options
Distributing a “family preparedness” guide
Carvalho and leaders of other school districts reiterated that K-12 campuses and anything related to schooling, such as a school bus or a graduation ceremony, will be off limits to immigration agents unless they have a valid judicial warrant for a specific individual — which has been rare.
“We do not know what the enrollment will be like,” Carvalho said. “We know many parents may have already left our community. They may have self-deported… We hope that through our communication efforts, our awareness efforts, information and the direct counseling with students and parents, that we’ll be able to provide stable attendance for kids in our community.”
Reason to be afraid
Mary, a Los Angeles mother of three without legal status, was terrified, but more or less knew what to do when immigration agents came to her door twice in May for a “wellness check” on her children: She did not let them in to her home. She did not step outside.
And, eventually, the agents — at least eight of them who arrived with at least three vehicles — left.
Mary had learned about what to do in this situation from her Los Angeles public school.
Mary, who requested that her full name not be used, has three children, one of whom attends an Alliance College-Ready charter school, a network of 26 privately operated public schools.
Like L.A. Unified, Alliance has trained staff on the legal rights of immigrants and also trained parents about how to handle encounters with immigration agents and where to go for help.
Alliance largely serves low-income, Latino communities and the immigration raids affected attendance in the school last year. Normally, attendance runs about 90% at the end of their school year. This June, average daily attendance at 14 Alliance high schools had dipped below 80%. Six fell below 70% and one dropped as low as 57.5%.
Alliance also attempted to gather deportation data. Nine families responded in a school network that enrolls about 13,000. In two cases, students were deported; three other students had family members deported; one student and a sibling were in a family that self-deported; one student was detained; two families reported facing deportation proceedings.
While these numbers are small, the reports are more than enough to heighten fear within the community. And some families may have declined to be candid about their circumstances.
“What’s happening now is that no one is safe anywhere, not even in your home, at work, outside, taking a stroll,” L.A. school board member Rocio Rivas said in an interview.
Still, Rivas is encouraging families to send children to school, which she considers safer than other places.
Alliance is focusing heavily on mental-health support and also arranging carpools to and from school — in which the driver is a U.S. citizen, said Omar Reyes, a superintendent of instruction at the Alliance charter group.
Carvalho, a onetime undocumented immigrant himself, said that students deserve a traditional and joyous first day followed by a school year without trauma.
Children, he said, “inherently deserve dignity, humanity, love, empathy, compassion and great education.
Times staff writer Andrea Castillo contributed to this report.
A high-profile law firm representing the city of Los Angeles in a sweeping homelessness case submitted an $1.8-million invoice for two weeks of work in May, according to records reviewed by The Times.
The invoice from Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP comes as the city is already under serious financial pressure, caused in part by rapidly growing legal payouts.
With at least 15 of Gibson Dunn’s lawyers billing at nearly $1,300 per hour, the price tag so far equates to just under $140,000 per day over a 13-day period.
Los Angeles officials retained the law firm in May, roughly a week before a seven-day evidentiary hearing to determine whether control over the city’s homelessness programs should be taken away from Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council and turned over to a third-party receiver.
A month later, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter issued a scathing ruling, saying the city failed to adhere to the terms of a three-year-old settlement agreement with the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, which calls for the creation of 12,915 homeless beds or other housing opportunities by June 2027.
Still, Carter also concluded that “this is not the time” to hand control of the city’s roughly $1 billion in homelessness programs to a third party.
Matthew Umhofer, an attorney representing the Alliance, said the city paid big money to Gibson Dunn in a failed attempt to wriggle out of its legal obligations.
“The city should be spending this money on complying with the agreement, and/or providing services to the people who need them,” he said. “Instead, they are paying a law firm to fight tooth and nail against obligations that are clear in the settlement agreement — and that a judge has affirmed they are in violation of.”
The invoice, which The Times obtained from the city attorney’s office, lists a billing period from May 19 to May 31, covering a week of preparations for the high-stakes federal hearing, as well as four of the seven trial days — each of which typically lasted eight or more hours.
Theane Evangelis, head of the Gibson Dunn team representing the city, referred questions about the invoice to the city attorney’s office.
Karen Richardson, a spokesperson for City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto, said in a statement that Gibson Dunn “did an outstanding job of stepping into a crucial matter that had been in litigation for nearly 5 years before they were hired,” compressing “what would normally be years worth of work into a very short time period.”
“We are grateful for their service and are in the process of reviewing the expenditures … to ensure that we go back to Council with a complete picture of what was done and charged,” she said in a statement.
The city retained Gibson Dunn just as council members were signing off on hundreds of employee layoffs, part of a larger strategy for closing a nearly $1-billion budget shortfall. The first batch of layoff notices was scheduled to go out this week.
The City Council initially appropriated $900,000 for Gibson Dunn, for a period not exceeding three years, according to the firm’s contract. Going over $900,000 required prior written approval from the city attorney, according to the contract.
The law firm quickly surpassed that threshold, eventually billing double the specified amount.
During the seven-day hearing, Gibson Dunn took a highly aggressive posture, voicing numerous objections to questions from attorneys representing the Alliance, as well as two organizations that intervened in the case.
Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who serves on the council’s homelessness committee, said the city attorney’s office did not advise him that Gibson Dunn’s legal costs had reached $1.8 million in such a short period. Blumenfield, who represents part of the San Fernando Valley, said he is “not happy” but is reserving further comment until he receives more specifics.
Three months ago, Blumenfield co-authored a motion with Councilmember Tim McOsker seeking regular updates on the Alliance litigation — both from Gibson Dunn and the city attorney’s office.
McOsker, who serves on the budget committee and spent several years running the city attorney’s office, also did not receive notification of the Gibson Dunn $1.8-million invoice from the city’s legal team, according to Sophie Gilchrist, his spokesperson.
Gilchrist said her boss had asked for regular updates to “prevent any surprises in billing” related to the Alliance case.
“That’s why the Councilmember is requesting that this matter be brought to City Council immediately, so the City Attorney can provide a full accounting and discuss all invoices related to the case,” she said.
Gibson Dunn has filed a notice of the city’s intent to appeal at least portions of Carter’s ruling, which ordered a third-party monitor to review and verify the data being produced by the city on its housing and encampment goals.
Carter signaled that he probably would order the city to pay the legal fees of the Alliance and homeless advocacy groups that have intervened in the case. So far, the Alliance has sought $1.3 million from the city to cover its legal expenses incurred since April 2024.
In a statement to The Times earlier this week, Evangelis, the Gibson Dunn lawyer, cited the judge’s “suggestion that the Alliance may recover attorneys’ fees” as one reason for the appeal.
“The City believes that its resources should be spent providing services to those in need, not redirected to the Alliance’s lawyers — particularly when the district court has rejected most of their arguments,” she said.
A MAJOR high street bank has become the latest British lender to quit the Net Zero Banking Alliance, the bank said on Friday.
Barclays argued that the departure of several global lenders has left it no longer fit to support the bank’s green transition.
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Barclays has become the latest British lender to quit the Net Zero Banking Alliance
Barclays’ decision to quit the foremost banking alliance focused on tackling climate change follows on from HSBC and several major US banks.
It also raises questions about the ability of the group to influence change in the sector going forward.
The bank said in a statement on its website: “After consideration, we have decided to withdraw from the Net Zero Banking Alliance.”
It added that its commitment to be net zero by 2050 remained unchanged and that it still saw a commercial opportunity for itself and its clients in the energy transition.
Earlier this week Barclays published the first update on its sustainability strategy in several years.
It said the bank made £500 million in revenue from sustainable and low-carbon transition finance in 2024.
Jeanne Martin, co-director of corporate engagement at responsible investment NGO ShareAction called the decision to leave the Net Zero Banking Alliance “incredibly disappointing and a step in the wrong direction at a time when the dangers of climate change are rapidly mounting.”
Barclays said the alliance was no longer fit for its purpose: “With the departure of most of the global banks, the organisation no longer has the membership to support our transition.”
The Net Zero Banking Alliance, a global initiative launched by the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative, lists more than 100 members on its website – including leading international financial institutions.
A spokesperson for the alliance said it remains focused on “supporting its members to lead on climate by addressing the barriers preventing their clients from investing in the net-zero transition.”
In February, the rate dropped to 4.87%, followed by another cut in April to 4.61%.
In February, the bank reduced the rate to 4.87%, followed by another cut in April to 4.61%.
Now, just months later, rates are set to drop again, leaving savers questioning whether to stick with the account or explore better options elsewhere.
How Barclay Card Changes Could Affect You
ANALYSIS by Consumer Reporter, James Flanders:
Barclaycard’s change to its credit card repayment structure sounds great if you don’t dig into the details.
After all, Barclaycard says it’s “making the changes to give you greater flexibility each month”.
In practice, it means that if you can’t afford to pay off your balance in full at the end of each statement period, you can repay much less under the minimum repayment option than you have done previously.
If you only pay the minimum amounts on occasion, this is super useful.
But if you rely on this type of repayment plan in the long term, it could will cost you hundreds of pounds extra in interest.
It could also negatively affect your credit file as it’ll take you much longer to clear your debt.
More interest will be applied to your outstanding balance, too, as less is paid down each month.
For example, if you have a balance of £5,000 on a Barclaycard at 24% interest, where you only make the minimum payments and don’t spend on the card.
Under the old “2.5% of the balance plus the interest charged” rule, it would take around 14 years to clear the balance.
In total, you’d expect to pay about £3,500 in interest.
But with the new “1% of the balance plus the interest charged” calculation, it will take over 30 years to clear the same balance.
You’d then end up paying a whopping £8,500 in interest.
Before taking out a new credit card or increasing the amount you borrow, it’s vital to consider the consequences.
You should only borrow money if you can afford to pay it back.
It’s always vital to ask yourself if you actually need to borrow before committing to a new credit card, personal loan or overdraft.
If you use a credit card, I’d recommend that you always pay off your balance in full at the end of each statement period.
Lenders have a responsibility to help customers who are in debt.
If you’re in a debt crisis, your first point of call should be your lender.
They might help you out by offering you a reduced interest rate or a temporary payment holiday – so check in with your lender if you’re struggling.
Japan’s ruling coalition is likely to lose its majority in the upper house, according to an exit poll by local media, potentially fuelling political instability in the world’s fourth largest economy.
Voters in Japan cast their ballots on Sunday in an upper house election which was seen as a test of the popularity of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and his ruling coalition.
Ishiba’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and coalition partner Komeito needed 50 seats to retain control of the 248-seat upper chamber in an election where half the seats are up for grabs.
They are forecast to secure 32 to 51 seats, the exit poll by public broadcaster NHK showed on Sunday.
Voters look at posters of candidates for the upper house election outside a polling station in Tokyo, Japan on Sunday [Manami Yamada/Reuters]
While the ballot does not directly determine whether Ishiba’s shaky minority government falls, it heaps pressure on the embattled leader who also lost control of the more-powerful lower house in October.
Ishiba’s poor performance does not immediately trigger a change of government because the upper house lacks the power to file a no-confidence motion against a leader. However, Ishiba could now face calls from within the LDP to resign or to find another coalition partner.
Polling stations opened nationwide at 7am on Sunday (22:00 GMT, Saturday) and voted continued until 8pm (11:00 GMT, Sunday) in most places, according to NHK.
The rising cost of living, especially for the staple food of rice, is a key issue for many voters, with population decline and foreign policy also on the agenda, NHK reported.
Opinion polls earlier also suggested smaller opposition parties pushing for tax cuts and increased public spending were set to gain.
These parties include right-wing Sanseito, which has promised to curb immigration, oppose foreign capital inflows and reverse gender equality moves. The exit poll projected the party has made strong gains.
“I am attending graduate school, but there are no Japanese [people] around me. All of them are foreigners,” said Yu Nagai, a 25-year-old student who said he voted for Sanseito.
“When I look at the way compensation and money are spent on foreigners, I think that Japanese people are a bit disrespected,” Nagai told the Reuters news agency.
Other voters, meanwhile, voiced concern about escalating xenophobia.
Yuko Tsuji, a 43-year-old consultant, who came to a polling station inside a downtown Tokyo gymnasium with her husband, said they support the LDP for stability and unity and voted “for candidates who won’t fuel division”.
“If the ruling party doesn’t govern properly, the conservative base will drift toward extremes. So I voted with the hope that the ruling party would tighten things up,” she told The Associated Press news agency.
Self-employed Daiichi Nasu, 57, said he hopes for a change towards a more inclusive and diverse society, with more open immigration and gender policies such as allowing married couples to keep separate surnames. “That’s why I voted for the CDPJ,” he said, referring to the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan. “I want to see progress on those fronts.”
More than 20 percent of registered voters, some 21 million people, voted early, significantly more than three years ago, NHK reported.
Ishiba, 68, a self-avowed defence “geek” and train enthusiast, became prime minister on his fifth attempt last September before immediately calling snap elections for late October.
Those polls marked a significant defeat for the new prime minister’s ruling coalition, which won just 209 seats in the lower house of parliament, down from the 279 it previously held.
In April, Ishiba announced emergency economic measures to alleviate any impact on industries and households affected by new tariffs imposed by the United States on Japanese exports.
The country is still frantically seeking to secure a reprieve from US President Donald Trump’s proposed 25 percent tariffs before a new August 1 deadline touted by Washington.
Ishiba’s centre-right LDP has governed Japan almost continuously since 1955, albeit with frequent changes of leader.
He is the third prime minister to lead the country since former leader Shinzo Abe resigned in September 2020.
Musician Dennis Henriquez woke up in a doorway in East Hollywood last month, hidden behind cardboard and sheltered by a tarp.
When he peered outside, half a dozen sanitation workers were standing nearby, waiting to carry out one of the more than 30 homeless encampment cleanups planned that day by the city of Los Angeles.
Henriquez eventually emerged, carried out a bicycle and deposited it on a grassy area 20 feet away. He also dragged over a backpack, a scooter, two guitars, a piece of luggage and a beach chair.
The city sanitation crew grabbed the tarp and the cardboard, tossing them into a trash truck. Then, the contingent of city workers, including two police officers, climbed into their vehicles and drove away, leaving behind Henriquez and his pile of belongings.
This type of operation, known as a CARE-plus cleanup, plays out hundreds of times each week in the city, with sanitation crews seizing and destroying tents, tarps, pallets, shopping carts and many other objects.
The cleanups have emerged as a huge source of conflict in a five-year-old legal dispute over the city’s handling of the homelessness crisis. Depending on how the cleanup issue is resolved, the city could face legal sanctions, millions of dollars in penalties or increased outside oversight of its homeless programs.
A construction loader plows through the remains of a homeless encampment on Wilshire Boulevard, just west of downtown.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
Sanitation crews grab a mattress during the cleanup. (Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
A notice about the cleanup is displayed on a utility pole on Wilshire Boulevard. (Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
In 2022, city leaders reached a legal settlement with the nonprofit L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, promising to create 12,915 homeless beds or other housing opportunities by June 2027. Eventually, they also agreed to remove 9,800 homeless encampments by June 2026 — with an encampment defined as an individual tent, makeshift structure, car or recreational vehicle.
To reach the latter goal, city leaders have been counting each encampment removed from streets, sidewalks and alleys during the Bureau of Sanitation’s CARE-plus cleanups — even in cases where the resident did not obtain housing or a shelter bed.
The alliance has strongly objected to the city’s methodology, arguing that destroying a tent, without housing its occupants, runs afoul of the 2022 settlement agreement. Any “encampment resolution” tallied by the city must be more permanent — and address the larger goal of reducing homelessness, said Elizabeth Mitchell, an attorney for the alliance.
“If the person insists on staying where they are and nothing else has happened, that’s not a resolution,” she said. “They can’t count that.”
City leaders have carried out CARE-plus cleanups for years, saying they are needed to protect public safety and restore sidewalk access for wheelchair users, the elderly and others. Some encampments are strewn with debris that spills across an entire walkway or out into the street, while others carry the smell of urine, fecal matter or decaying food waste.
The cleanups have a Sisyphean quality. Many seasoned residents drag their tents across the street, wait out the cleanup, then return to their original spots in the afternoon. The process frequently restarts a week or two later.
The alliance’s legal team, alarmed by the inclusion of CARE-plus cleanups in the encampment reduction count, recently spent several days trying to persuade a federal judge to seize control of the city’s homelessness initiatives from Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council and turn them over to a third-party receiver.
U.S. Dist. Judge David O. Carter, who presides over the case, declined to take that step, saying it went too far. But he has made clear that he, too, objects to the city’s approach to eliminating the 9,800 encampments.
In March, Carter issued a court order saying the city may not count CARE-plus cleanups toward its goal because, as the alliance had argued, they are “not permanent in nature.”
Last month, in a 62-page ruling, he found the city had “willfully disobeyed” that order — and had improperly reported its encampment reductions. Clarifying his position somewhat, the judge also said that the city cannot count an encampment reduction unless it is “accompanied by an offer of shelter or housing.”
“Individuals need not accept the offer, but an offer of available shelter or housing must be made,” he wrote.
Attorney Shayla Myers, who represents homeless advocacy groups that have intervened in the case, has opposed the 9,800 goal from the beginning, saying it creates a quota system that increases the likelihood that city workers will violate the property rights of unhoused residents.
“Throwing away tents doesn’t help the homelessness crisis,” she said. “Building housing does.”
Shayna, a person experiencing homelessness, moves things out of a tent during the June 24 encampment cleanup.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo, who helped negotiate the settlement, told the court last month that his office does not count the tents that homeless people move temporarily — around the corner or across the street — during city cleanups. However, the city does include those that are permanently removed because they block the sidewalk or pose a public health or safety threat, he said.
Szabo, during his testimony, said that when he negotiated the promise to remove 9,800 encampments, he did not expect that every tent removal would lead to someone moving inside.
The city is already working to fulfill the alliance agreement’s requirement of creating 12,915 homeless beds or other housing opportunities. On top of that, Szabo said, encampment residents have “free will” to refuse an offer of housing.
“I wouldn’t ever agree that the city would be obligated to somehow force people to accept [housing] if they did not want to accept it,” he said. “We never would have agreed to that. We didn’t agree to that.”
For an outside observer, it might be difficult to discern what the different types of city encampment operations are designed to accomplish.
Mary, a person experiencing homelessness, speaks with a police officer during the June 24 cleanup.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
Bass’ Inside Safe initiative moves homeless people into hotel and motel rooms, and at least in some cases, permanent housing. By contrast, CARE cleanups — shorthand for Cleanup and Rapid Engagement — are largely focused on trash removal, with crews hauling away debris from curbs and surrounding areas.
CARE-plus cleanups are more comprehensive. Every tent must be moved so workers can haul away debris and, in some instances, powerwash sidewalks.
Sanitation crews are supposed to give residents advance warning of a scheduled CARE-plus cleanup, posting notices on utility poles. If residents don’t relocate their tents and other belongings, they run the risk of having them taken away.
In some cases, cleanup crews take the possessions to a downtown storage facility. In many others, they are tossed.
A construction loader transports the remnants of the Westlake encampment to a city garbage truck.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
One of the largest CARE-plus cleanups in recent weeks took place in the Westlake district, where nearly three dozen tents and structures lined a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard. A construction loader drove back and forth on the sidewalk, scooping up tents and depositing them in a trash truck.
Ryan Cranford, 42, said he didn’t know the cleanup was scheduled until minutes beforehand. He wound up losing his tent, a bed and a canopy, but managed to keep his backpack, saying it contained “all that matters.”
Sitting on a nearby retaining wall, Cranford said he would have accepted a motel room had someone offered one.
“Hell, I’d even take a bus to get all the way back to Oklahoma if I could,” he said.
On the opposite side of the street, Tyson Lewis Angeles wheeled his belongings down the street in a shopping cart before sanitation workers descended on his spot. He said an outreach worker had given him a referral for a shelter bed the day before.
Tyson Lewis Angeles, a person experiencing homelessness, holds his dog, Nami, before city sanitation workers descended on his spot on Wilshire Boulevard.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
Angeles, 30, said he was not interested, in part because he deals with panic attacks, PTSD and other mental health issues. He also does not want a roommate, or the rules imposed by homeless shelters.
“Basically, it’s like volunteer jail,” he said.
While Angeles managed to safeguard his possessions, others are frequently less successful.
Nicholas Johnson, who is living in a box truck in Silver Lake, said city crews took the vast majority of his belongings during a CARE-plus cleanup in mid-June. Some were destroyed, while others were transported by sanitation workers to a downtown storage facility, he said.
Johnson, 56, said he does not know whether some of his most prized possessions, including letters written by his grandmother, went into that facility or were tossed. City crews also took books, tools, his Buddhist prayer bowls and a huge amount of clothes.
“All of my clothing — all of my clothing — the wearables and the sellables, all mixed in. Hats, scarves, socks, ties, a lot of accessories that I wear — you know, double breasted suits from the ’30s, the suit pants,” he said.
Nicholas Johnson, who lives with his dog, Popcorn, in a truck parked in Silver Lake, said the city took many of his prized possessions during a recent encampment cleanup.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Johnson said the city’s cleanup process is a “harassment ceremony” that only makes life more stressful for people on the street.
“They hit you in the kneecaps when they know you’re already down,” he said.
Earlier this year, city officials informed the court that they had removed about 6,100 tents, makeshift shelters and vehicles — nearly two-thirds of what the agreement with the alliance requires. Whether the city will challenge any portion of the judge’s ruling is still unclear.
In a statement, a lawyer for the city contends that the ruling “misconstrues the city’s obligations.”
“We are keeping open our options for next steps,” said the lawyer, Theane Evangelis.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has announced that the United States will no longer contribute to Gavi, a global health programme that has vaccinated more than one billion of the world’s poorest children.
In a video that aired at a Gavi fundraising event in Brussels on Wednesday, Kennedy said the group had made questionable recommendations around COVID-19 vaccines. He also raised concerns about the diphtheria-tetanus-whole cell pertussis vaccine, known by the acronym DTPw, though he provided no evidence to support those fears.
“I call on Gavi today to re-earn the public trust and to justify the $8bn that America has provided in funding since 2001,” Kennedy said in the video.
Kennedy added that Gavi should consider all available science before investing in vaccines. “Until that happens, the United States won’t contribute more,” he said.
The details of the video were first reported by the publication Politico and later by the news outlet Reuters.
Gavi said in a detailed statement that safety was one of its top priorities and that it acts in line with World Health Organization recommendations.
The statement also indicated that Gavi has full confidence in the DTPw vaccine, which it credits with having helped to cut child mortality in half in the countries it supports since 2000.
“The DTPw vaccine has been administered to millions of children around the world for decades, and is estimated to have saved more than 40 million lives over the past 50 years,” the statement notes.
The administration of US President Donald Trump has previously indicated that it planned to cut US funding for Gavi, representing around $300m annually, as part of a wider pullback from international aid.
Advocacy groups called on the US to reverse its decision.
“Kennedy claims that Gavi ignored science are entirely false,” nonprofit consumer advocacy organisation Public Citizen wrote in a statement.
“Gavi’s recommendations are grounded in global evidence and reviewed by independent experts. His suggestion otherwise fuels the same disinformation that has already led to deadly measles outbreaks and the resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases, including polio.”
A longtime vaccine sceptic, Kennedy has upended the US medical establishment since taking office in February. He has raised questions about possible ties between autism and vaccines, though numerous studies have shown there is no link.
Earlier this month, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the expert panel on vaccines at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
Created 60 years ago, the committee serves as an independent government body to review data and make recommendations about who should get vaccines. Those recommendations, in turn, can affect which vaccines health insurance plans may cover.
Of Kennedy’s initial eight replacement members, about half have advocated against vaccines.
Kennedy’s new vaccine advisers hold inaugural meeting
The newly revamped committee met for the first time on Wednesday, under intense scrutiny from medical experts worried about Americans’ access to lifesaving shots.
But already, conflicts are starting to simmer in and around the panel.
Ahead of the two-day gathering, government scientists prepared meeting materials calling vaccination “the best protection” during pregnancy — and said most children hospitalised for COVID-19 over the past year were unvaccinated.
That advice, however, conflicts with Kennedy’s. The health secretary already announced COVID-19 vaccines will no longer be recommended for healthy children or pregnant women, and his new advisers are not scheduled to vote this week on whether they agree.
COVID-19 remains a public health threat, resulting in 32,000 to 51,000 US deaths and more than 250,000 hospitalizations since last fall, according to the CDC.
Kennedy’s newly reconstituted panel also lost one of its eight members shortly before Wednesday’s meeting.
Michael Ross, a Virginia-based obstetrician and gynecologist, stepped down from the committee, bringing the panel’s number to just seven. The Trump administration said Ross withdrew during a customary review of members’ financial holdings.
The meeting opened as the American Academy of Pediatrics announced that it will continue publishing its own vaccine schedule for children, but now will do so independently of the ACIP, calling it “no longer a credible process”.
ACIP’s recommendations traditionally go to the director of the CDC. Historically, nearly all are accepted and then used by insurance companies in deciding what vaccines to cover.
But the CDC currently has no director, so the committee’s recommendations have been going to Kennedy, and he has yet to act on a couple of recommendations ACIP made in April.
Separately, on Wednesday, Senate hearings began for Trump’s nominee for CDC director, Susan Monarez.
During the hearings, she said she has not seen evidence linking vaccines and autism and said she would look into the decision to cut Gavi funding.
“I believe the global health security preparedness is a critical and vital activity for the United States,” she said.
“I think that we need to continue to support promotion of utilisation of vaccines.”
THE HAGUE — Days before NATO was set to convene in the Netherlands, one of its top commanders, Pierre Vandier, tasked with transforming the alliance for the next fight, put out a call: Britain will need to step up its intelligence contributions to the alliance going forward.
“The UK has this in its DNA,” Vandier said.
It was an acknowledgment that the United States, pivoting toward a far greater intelligence threat from China, may leave its European allies behind in their own existential fight with Russia. A lack of reliability on the world’s leading AI superpower, European officials say, will render the continent vulnerable in a race for intelligence superiority set to revolutionize global battlefields.
The rush toward artificial intelligence has been a strong undercurrent at the NATO Summit in the Hague this week, serving not only as a gathering for leaders of the alliance, but also as a defense industry forum for emerging power players in Silicon Valley, treated in Holland’s gilded halls as a new kind of royalty.
“AI is going to be an important part of warfare going forward, but it’s still very new, and NATO tends not to be at the tip of the spear of innovation — and there is some division within the alliance on how to develop AI, when it comes to AI regulation and safety,” said Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“Tech companies don’t hold the same pride of place in the European economic system, and they’re not consumed with the need to compete with China militarily — they are much more focused on Russia,” Bergmann added. “While the U.S. is about winning the AI race, Europeans are watching what’s happening in Ukraine and saying, ‘we just need to deter Russia.’”
So far, for European capitals, that has meant incorporating powerful data collection and processing systems into defense departments and improving the performance of automated surveillance systems and drones — skills well within Europe’s capabilities. Several German and French companies, such as Helsing, Azur and Quantum Systems, are already developing products based on what they are seeing in Ukraine.
But the next fight will require technologies that dwarf existing drone capabilities, experts said.
“We’ve been predicting for a while that there would be integration of AI into military research and development and defense systems, and I expect, for example, that advanced cyber capabilities will play an important role in the coming years,” said Jonas Vollmer, chief operating officer of the AI Futures Project. “Europe has influence, but it is grappling with the difficult reality that they don’t have access or strong domestic development of frontier AI systems, and they are pretty far behind.”
Last year, NATO allies agreed to speed up the adoption of artificial intelligence in its operations. There are signs the bloc senses urgency to do so, signing an agreement with Palantir, a U.S.-based technology company, to incorporate AI into its warfighting systems after just six months of negotiations.
The United States and China are far ahead of competitors in the race for AI superiority, measured in raw computing power and proximity to general artificial intelligence — AI that has human-level cognitive capabilities to learn and develop on its own – and ultimately to superintelligence, surpassing the human mind.
Still, the United Kingdom is a serious player in the field. The kingdom ranks third in government investment in AI research anywhere in the world and maintains strong partnerships with some of the most powerful U.S. players.
In its most recent defense strategy, also published shortly before the NATO summit, Britain committed to integrate artificial intelligence into its “NATO-first” national security approach. “Forecasts of when Artificial General Intelligence will occur are uncertain but shortening, with profound implications for Defence,” the document reads.
Europe’s race for intelligence capabilities is driven, in part, by lessons learned on the battlefields of Ukraine. But Russia is not seen as an AI powerhouse in and of itself. Moscow instead uses low-cost tests of drone incursions and cyberattacks to keep pressure on the alliance, Vandier told the Times of London in an interview. “The aim, I think, is to consume all our energy in purely defensive actions, which are very costly,” he said.
Whether Russia can enhance its own AI capabilities is an open question.
“The key ingredients of being at the frontier with AI are talent and data centers,” said Vollmer, of the AI Futures Project.
“Russia lags far behind on both,” he added, “but they can collaborate with China, of course.”
In the intricate and often contentious geopolitical landscape of South Asia, the counter-terrorism alliance between Pakistan and the United States has been a defining, albeit fraught, feature of the post-9/11 era. While periods of significant friction have punctuated the relationship, recent unequivocal commendations from senior US defence and intelligence officials serve as a stark reminder of Pakistan’s pivotal, costly, and phenomenally consequential contributions to the global fight against terrorism. This recognition, emerging from the crucible of shared threats and sacrifices, underscores a partnership whose strategic importance transcends transient diplomatic disagreements.
The most resonant affirmation came recently from General Michael Kurilla, Commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM), who explicitly lauded Pakistan as a “phenomenal counter-terrorism partner.” This is not mere diplomatic platitude; it reflects decades of operational collaboration forged in the face of grave mutual threats emanating from the region. The significance of this statement lies in its source, the commander directly responsible for US military operations across the Middle East and Central/South Asia, including the ongoing campaign against the ISIS and Al-Qaeda remnants. His praise signifies a concrete appreciation for actionable intelligence, coordinated operations, and shared strategic objectives on the ground. Further substantiating this, Kash Patel, a former senior US Defence Department official and key figure in counter-terrorism efforts, publicly confirmed Pakistan’s indispensable role in facilitating the extradition of an ISIS facilitator from Canada to the United States, demonstrating critical ongoing cooperation in disrupting transnational terror networks.
The historical depth of this collaboration is profound and irrevocably linked to watershed moments in global security. Pakistan’s intelligence and security agencies played an indispensable role in the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the principal architect of the September 11th attacks, alongside numerous other high-value Al-Qaeda operatives. These operations, often conducted under extreme peril and requiring unparalleled human intelligence penetration, dealt devastating blows to the core leadership of global jihadism. Beyond targeted captures, Pakistan provided critical, non-negotiable ground and air logistics that sustained the massive US and NATO military presence in landlocked Afghanistan for two decades. Pakistani airspace and ground lines of communication (GLOCs) were the vital arteries supplying the coalition war effort, a contribution without which the campaign’s scale would have been logistically untenable. Moreover, the efficacy of the much-debated US drone campaign in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) was fundamentally predicated on logistical access and crucial intelligence support facilitated by Pakistani agencies, enabling precision strikes against high-value targets.
Recognizing that passive cooperation was insufficient against an entrenched insurgency, Pakistan launched decisive, large-scale military offensives with significant regional and global implications. Operations like Zarb-e-Azb and Radd-ul-Fasaad represented massive, internally driven campaigns to dismantle terrorist sanctuaries within Pakistan’s own borders. These were not mere tactical skirmishes but comprehensive, corps-level operations involving tens of thousands of troops, resulting in the clearing of vast territories previously held by groups like the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), and various Al-Qaeda affiliates. The disruption caused by these offensives directly degraded the capabilities of groups plotting transnational attacks, thereby enhancing global security. This kinetic action was complemented by relentless joint intelligence operations with US agencies, consistently disrupting imminent ISIS and Al-Qaeda plots targeting Western interests and regional stability.
The partnership extends beyond kinetic action and intelligence sharing into the complex realms of countering terror financing (CTF) and managing cross-border threats. Pakistan continues to coordinate assiduously with US Treasury and intelligence entities to track and disrupt the financial lifelines of proscribed terrorist organizations. This ongoing collaboration addresses the persistent challenge of militants exploiting the porous Pak-Afghan border, a task demanding constant vigilance and real-time intelligence exchange. Reinforcing this multifaceted cooperation are regular military-to-military engagements and structured coordination mechanisms with CENTCOM, ensuring interoperability and strategic alignment for long-term counter-terrorism objectives. Furthermore, Pakistan has undertaken significant, albeit less heralded, efforts in regional de-radicalization and counter-extremism initiatives, aiming to dismantle the ideological underpinnings of terrorism within its society.
Washington consistently, and rightly, acknowledges the staggering human cost borne by Pakistan in this shared struggle. Estimates suggest over 80,000 Pakistani civilians and security personnel have lost their lives to terrorist violence since 2001, a sacrifice unparalleled by any other US partner in this conflict. Thousands more have been wounded, and millions displaced by military operations. This immense toll underscores the existential nature of the threat Pakistan faced and continues to confront, making its counter-terrorism efforts not merely an alliance obligation but a fundamental national survival imperative. The elimination of countless high-value targets along the volatile Pak-Afghan border stands as a testament to Pakistani resolve, achieved often through perilous joint or unilaterally coordinated actions.
The recent US praise is a significant diplomatic marker, reflecting a pragmatic recognition of Pakistan’s indispensable contributions. It signifies a mature understanding that despite differences on other strategic issues, notably Afghanistan’s political trajectory, counterterrorism remains a vital area of convergent interest demanding sustained collaboration. The fight against ISIS-Khorasan and other emerging regional affiliates necessitates this continued partnership. While challenges persist, particularly concerning cross-border militant havens and the evolving regional landscape, the operational history and recent affirmations highlight a resilient, if complex, counter-terrorism axis. Pakistan’s role, forged in sacrifice and sustained through operational necessity, remains phenomenally significant in the enduring global effort to counter transnational terrorism.
Following Recommendations
Enhance Real-Time Intelligence Fusion: Establish more robust, technologically advanced platforms for instantaneous sharing and joint analysis of HUMINT, SIGINT, and financial intelligence between Pakistani agencies (ISI, FIA, CTD) and US counterparts (CIA, FBI, DIA, NCTC), focusing on ISIS-K, TTP, and emerging threats.
Deepen Regional Security Coordination: Proactively foster structured intelligence and operational trilateral dialogues involving Pakistan, Afghanistan (de facto authorities), and the US/CENTCOM to address cross-border militant sanctuaries and movement, leveraging existing communication channels but seeking greater operational transparency.
Augment CTF & Border Security Capacity: Sustain and expand US technical assistance and training programs for Pakistan’s Financial Monitoring Unit (FMU), law enforcement agencies (CTDs), and border security forces (FC, PAK Rangers) to combat sophisticated terror financing networks and improve cross-border surveillance/control.
Strengthen De-Radicalization & CVE Infrastructure: Increase international support (technical expertise, funding) for Pakistan’s de-radicalization programs and community-based Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) initiatives, ensuring long-term sustainability and measurable impact assessment frameworks.
Maintain High-Level Strategic Dialogue: Institutionalize regular, high-level (Ministerial/Command Level) bilateral counter-terrorism consultations separate from broader political dialogues to ensure strategic alignment, swiftly address operational friction points, and adapt to evolving threat landscapes.
“The fight against terrorism is not just Pakistan’s war, it is the world’s war.” General Pervez Musharraf
New South Korean President Lee Jae Myung appears at a news conference at the presidential office in Seoul, South Korea, on Wednesday, his first remarks after being inaugurated earlier in the day. Photo by Ahn Young-joon/EPA-EFE/pool
June 7 (UPI) — South Korea’s President Lee Jae-myung spoke for the first time with U.S. President Donald Trump late Friday as both leaders agreed to further strengthen their nations’ alliance.
The White House has not confirmed the conversation, and the president, who is in New Jersey this weekend, hasn’t posted about the call on Truth Social.
The two presidents agreed to strive toward reaching a mutually acceptable trade agreement, including on tariffs.
Trump has imposed 10% baseline tariffs on most trading partners. On April 2, Trump said the Republic of Korea would face a 49% duty but one week later he paused it for three months along with the other worst offenders in the trade imbalance.
South Korea’s tariffs on imported agricultural goods average 54%.
Trump congratulated Lee on his election victory, and the new leader expressed his gratitude, according to the office.
Lee noted the importance of the alliance, which forms the foundation of Seoul’s diplomacy.
The phone call was “conducted in a friendly and candid atmosphere,” as they shared anecdotes and experiences from their election campaigns, according to South Korea’s presidential office.
They exchanged views on their assassination attempts last year and political challenges, in addition to discussing their their golf skills and agreed to play a round together.
Trump invited Lee to the White House and the Group of Seven summit in Alberta, Canada, from June 15-17.
South Korea is not a G7 member state, but the nation attended them group’s meetings in 2021 and 2023. Korea’s neighbor, Japan, is a member of the G7.
Yonhap reported the South Korea government is in consultations for Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and Chinese President Xi Jinping to speak to their leader.
It has not been decided whether Lee will attend the North Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders’ summit in the Netherlands on June 24 and 25, according to the presidential office.
Lee, the Democratic Party liberal candidate, won in a landslide over Kim Moon-soo of the conservative People Power Party. He was inaugurated the next day on Wednesday.
South Koreans turned out in record numbers in a snap election triggered by the impeachment and removal of Yoon Suk Yeol in April after a botched martial law decree.
Some 35.24 million voters cast a ballot, representing a turnout of 79.4% — the highest mark since an 80.7% turnout in 1997.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass won’t be called as a witness in a multiday federal court hearing that could determine whether the city’s homelessness programs are placed in receivership.
Matthew Umhofer, an attorney for the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, told U.S. District Judge David O. Carter on Tuesday that he and his legal team were withdrawing subpoenas issued in recent weeks to Bass and City Councilmembers Monica Rodriguez and Traci Park. Battling over the appearances, which were opposed by the city, would have delayed the proceedings for several months, he said.
The alliance, which sued the city in 2020 over its response to the homelessness crisis, originally sought testimony from the three politicians as part of an evidentiary hearing focused on whether the city failed to comply with the terms of a settlement agreement on homelessness programs.
The agreement, reached in 2022 between the city and the alliance, requires the city to provide 12,915 beds for its unhoused population by June 2027. The alliance contends that the city already is failing to meet the milestones of the agreement and has no clear path to that goal. City officials say they fully intend to comply by the deadline.
The possibility that Bass could testify in Carter’s courtroom provided a rare source of drama for the past week of hearings, which have focused on such granular issues as the definition of a homeless encampment.
Umhofer, in an interview, said he dropped Bass and the others because the city’s lawyers had threatened to pursue an appeal to block the three politicians from testifying, which would have triggered a delay of at least two to three months.
“I think it’s cowardly for the mayor to not testify,” he said. “She’s come in to court on multiple occasions and and shared talking points, but has never undergone cross-examination. For her to resist a subpoena is the definition of avoiding accountability and transparency.”
Umhofer argued that the testimony provided over the last week is already enough to show that the city’s homelessness programs should be overseen by a third-party receivership appointed by the court.
A Bass spokesperson did not immediately respond to Umhofer’s remarks. Theane Evangelis, an attorney for the city, said Umhofer’s description of Bass as cowardly — made in front of the judge during Tuesday’s hearing — was “uncalled for.”
“The Alliance lawyers apparently recognized that there was no legal basis for their subpoenas,” Evangelis said later in a statement. “They should never have issued them in the first place. The City is complying with the agreement settling a 2020 lawsuit, and it is indisputable that thousands of new housing units have been built and homelessness is down in LA for the first time in years.”
Bass declared a state of emergency on homelessness in 2022, on her first day in office, securing additional power to award contracts and sign off on lease agreements for interim housing and other facilities. That same year, she launched Inside Safe, which has been moving thousands of unhoused Angelenos into hotels, motels and other interim housing. She also created a program to accelerate the approval of certain types of affordable housing.
The alliance has portrayed the city’s homelessness response programs as irrevocably broken, arguing that the only recourse is for the judge to turn them over to a third-party receiver. During six days of testimony, lawyers for the alliance repeatedly highlighted the findings of a consulting firm that the programs lack adequate data systems and financial controls, leaving them vulnerable to fraud.
Lawyers for the alliance also pointed out that the city has repeatedly missed the quarterly milestones established in its settlement agreement.
Over the last week, lawyers for the city argued that their client has made “best efforts” to comply with the settlement agreement. They also contended that the milestones are not mandatory. And they said the alliance is the party that’s “flat-out ignoring” the terms of the agreement.
Evangelis said the agreement allows for the city’s obligations to be paused, and the terms to be renegotiated, if an emergency takes place. The Palisades fire broke out in January, destroying thousands of homes.
“Instead of recognizing the enormous stress that our city is under and honoring its promise to meet and confer … the alliance ran to court the month after those fires and sought sanctions against the city’s supposed breaches,” Evangelis told the court last week.
The alliance placed Bass on its witness list last month, saying she has “unique knowledge” of the facts — and had put herself at the center of the debate by promising to lead on homelessness.
Lawyers for the city argued that putting Bass and the two council members on the stand would place “an undue burden” on them as elected officials. They instead presented as witnesses City Administrative Officer Matthew Szabo, who is the city’s top budget official, and Deputy Mayor Etsemaye Agonafer, calling them the most knowledgeable about the settlement agreement.
Last week, Carter delayed ruling on whether Bass and the council members should testify, saying he first wanted to hear from Szabo and Agonafer, who handles homelessness issues for Bass.
Agonafer testified for about four hours Thursday. Szabo, who has overseen the city’s compliance with the settlement agreement, was questioned off and on during four hearing days. In multiple exchanges, he said he was confident the city would comply with the terms of the settlement by June 2027.
The two council members sought as witnesses by the alliance have been highly critical of the city’s homelessness programs.
Rodriguez, who represents the northeast San Fernando Valley, frequently uses the phrase “merry-go-round from hell” to describe the city’s struggle to get accurate data from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a city-county agency.
Park, who represents part of the Westside, said during the council’s budget deliberations last month that the city had wasted billions of dollars on homeless programs. Before casting her vote, she also said the city is “unable to manage” its own homeless affairs.
A coalition of airlines, hotels and concession companies at Los Angeles International Airport filed paperwork Thursday to force a citywide vote on a new ordinance hiking the minimum wage of hotel and airport workers to $30 per hour by 2028.
The group, known as the L.A. Alliance for Tourism, Jobs and Progress, is hoping to persuade voters to repeal the ordinance. But first, the alliance would need to gather about 93,000 signatures within 30 days to qualify the measure for the ballot in an upcoming election.
Phil Singer, a spokesperson for the alliance, said the wage increase “threatens revenue Los Angeles urgently needs” — and its standing as the host of the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
“Small businesses will be forced to shut down, workers will lose their jobs, and the economic fallout will stretch across the city,” Singer said in an email. “We’re fighting for all of it: the city’s future, the jobs that sustain our communities, and the millions of guests the tourism industry proudly serves year after year.”
The new ballot measure campaign comes just two days after Mayor Karen Bass signed the minimum wage legislation into law.
The wage ordinance has been hotly opposed by an array of L.A. business organizations, which argue that it increases wages in the tourism industry too much and too quickly. However, it was welcomed by unions representing hotel and airport employees, which have supported many of the politicians who backed the measure.
The alliance’s campaign committee has received major funding from Delta Airlines, United Airlines and the American Hotel & Lodging Assn., Singer said. The group’s petition, submitted to the city clerk’s office, was signed by five businesspeople, including Greg Plummer, operator of an LAX concession company; Mark Beccaria, a partner with the Hotel Angeleno on L.A.’s Westside; and Alec Mesropian, advocacy manager with the organization known as BizFed.
The alliance is targeting a law that’s slated to push the hourly minimum wage to $22.50 on July 1 for housekeepers, parking attendants and hotel restaurant workers, as well as LAX skycaps, baggage handlers and concession employees. The wage would jump to $25 in 2026 and $27.50 in 2027.
The wage increase was spearheaded by Unite Here Local 11, the hotel and restaurant worker union, and by Service Employees International Union United Service Workers West, which represents private-sector airport workers.
Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, called the business group’s proposal “shameful” and promised his union’s members would go “toe to toe out on the streets” with the alliance’s signature gatherers.
“The hotel industry’s greed is limitless,” Petersen said. “They would rather spend millions getting them to sign this petition than pay their workers enough to live in Los Angeles. It’s shameful, but we’re confident that Angelenos will see through their deceptions and stand with workers.”
Under the city’s laws, hotel and airport workers have minimum wages that are higher than those who are employed by other industries.
For nearly everyone else in L.A., the hourly minimum wage is $17.28, 78 cents higher than the state’s. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.
Backers of the airport and hotel minimum wage hikes say they will help some of the region’s lowest paid workers cover the rising cost of rent and food, while also giving them more disposable income to spend locally, delivering a boost to the region’s economy.
Detractors say it will undermine efforts by L.A.’s tourism industry to recover from the decline in business that was sparked by the outbreak of COVID-19 five years ago. They contend the ordinance will lead to layoffs, while also chilling development of new hotels.
The ordinance also requires airport and hotel businesses to provide an hourly healthcare payment — on top of the minimum wage — that starts at $7.65 in July and is expected to go up each year. (Hotels will be exempted from that requirement until 2026.)
Once the healthcare requirement is included, some businesses will be required to pay their workers an additional 60% over a three-year period, opponents of the wage increase say.
With the recent pivot in US foreign policy regarding Europe and NATO, it has become clear that NATO’s European members need to ramp up spending on defense, and the time of relying on the US for defense in Europe is over. Many would argue that it’s well overdue, with Trump saying that NATO members should boost their defense spending to 5% of their GDP versus the traditional 2% target set by NATO. This target for NATO members was first set at the 2006 Riga summit; however, that target was reaffirmed and made more concrete in the 2014 Defence Investment Pledge at their summit in Wales, with only four members hitting the target that year. In 2024, those numbers were up, with NATO estimating 22 out of 32 would hit the target that year, so it’s clear defense spending in Europe is on the up. The Secretary-General of NATO, Mark Rutte, said, “We will need more time to consult amongst Allies what exactly the new level should be. But it is considerably more than 2%,” when asked about higher spending targets.
Inevitably, it will come down to the middle powers of NATO—France, Germany, Poland, and the UK—to step up to the plate and take over the leadership roles. Ultimately, this shift in responsibility will largely shape the alliance and Europe for years to come. But is this realistic, and what hurdles will the middle powers overcome to get there?
The US is the glue that holds NATO together.
Since NATO’s inception, the US has acted as the glue that keeps the alliance together, and it is evident from recent events just how crucial that role is. And it’s significantly more than just manpower/firepower, as you may expect.
The middle powers of NATO face a series of challenges ahead in their effort to step up and take over that role from the US. One of these challenges is the fact that the US plays a monumental role in the hierarchy of NATO’s various operational commands, with the US holding a lot of key roles within that structure that NATO, without the US, would not be able to operate certainly anywhere near as efficiently as it is currently run.
The US also has an integral part to play in NATO’s capability for intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), with most of the capability that NATO has being US-supplied and run. An example of this occurred during Operation Unified Protector (Libya, 2011): the US provided an estimated 75% of ISR assets, enabling NATO to carry out precision strikes and monitor Gaddafi regime movements.
All of this is said without even touching the subject of the US’s missile defense and general man/firepower capabilities, with the European nations currently not having an equivalent.
Defense spending and capabilities
The only way the middle powers will be able to step into the US’s shoes and fill the role Washington has traditionally played is through an increase in defense spending, resulting in a significant boost to their military capabilities. However, this necessity presents several challenges of its own, so what does the current situation look like, and how will it develop?
France has consistently maintained a capable military and spent a good amount of their GDP on defense. Fluctuations in their defense budget have meant they’ve fallen short of the 2% goal set by NATO in previous years.
President Macron announced plans in early 2023 to vastly increase military spending, pledging to spend 413 billion euros on defense in 2024-2030, an increase of 118 billion euros compared to the previous period.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we have seen a vast increase in defense budgets across NATO, none perhaps more noticeable than in Germany, with Chancellor Olaf Scholz wanting to inject 100 billion euros into the German military (Bundeswehr) to increase military capability and readiness. With the German Federal Minister of Defence, Boris Pistorius, pledging to make the German military “the backbone of deterrence and collective defense in Europe.”
It would seem this shift in defense policy is here to stay, with both German parliaments recently voting in favor of another boost to military spending.
Nevertheless, it’s not all plain sailing for Germany. With recent recruitment numbers falling short of their targets, the Bundeswehr still faces personnel shortages. It’s clear that the intention is there, but there are still many practical challenges for them to overcome.
Poland has quickly become a key player within NATO, from having a humble military at the time of the 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russian forces to boasting the third-largest military within NATO, only behind that of the US and Turkey. Their armed forces have undergone a significant modernization program at this time, too.
This rapid modernization has meant Poland has fast become one of the leading defense powers within NATO, playing a crucial role in securing their eastern flank; they have also become one of NATO’s highest spenders on defense, spending an impressive 4.12% of their GDP.
The UK has consistently hit the 2% target set by NATO and, for the past four years, has even slightly exceeded this, with projects such as the Challenger 3 and the Boxer armored vehicle receiving around £5 billion in funding.
As with Germany, this isn’t without its challenges. The UK has faced significant setbacks in recruitment, with it being reported in November 2024 that the British armed forces had “consistently fallen short of recruitment targets over the past five years,” with some saying that the armed forces were losing 300 people a month more than they were recruiting.
It is also worth mentioning that France and the UK both possess nuclear capabilities, although the UK’s Trident missile system is US-supplied and maintained. Meanwhile, the French “Force de dissuasion” is fully independent.
Whilst it is undoubtable that the middle powers and Europe as a whole are taking defense spending a lot more seriously, and, for the first time since the Cold War, it is being seen as a priority, there is still a long way to go before NATO without the US taking a primary role could even be considered comparable to the NATO we have known up until now.
No natural leader
Other issues the middle powers face when trying to take over these roles are cooperation, coordination of efforts, and political and military leadership. To put it simply, NATO risks lacking unified leadership without the US. There is no obvious alternative to U.S. leadership within NATO. This means the alliance’s future leadership will depend entirely on the ability of European members to cooperate. Historically, however, that cooperation has been difficult. Europe is often divided by differing political ideologies, national interests, and unresolved disputes between member states. Countries frequently prioritize their own agendas, making it hard to reach collective decisions. A key example of this is the long-standing tension between Turkey and Greece—both NATO members, yet frequently at odds due to their history of conflict and territorial disputes. There is also the issue of the European Union and NATO often failing to cooperate, causing frequent internal strife on key issues such as the situation with Turkey and Cyprus.
Nevertheless, there are recent examples of political cohesion, such as the UK stating it would back the potential incoming German chancellor Friedrich Merz in sending Taurus missiles to Ukraine come across more as a patchwork than cohesive leadership. Most of the middle powers appear to focus on strengthening their own national capabilities rather than fostering cohesion and building multinational capacity. The result is a fragmented and disorganized approach—unsurprising, given that NATO is fundamentally an alliance of countries with a long history of rivalry and conflict. However, one should never underestimate the power of an external threat in uniting nations and giving them a common enemy, and Russia certainly seems to be doing just that.
NATO going forward
What does all this mean going forward? Across the board, especially amongst the middle powers of NATO, the intention to take a more active role in defense is there. Generally, NATO isn’t in a terrible position, and the desire for collective defense amongst member states has become paramount.
That said, the alliance still faces significant challenges ahead, especially when it comes to leadership; the US has long been the force that bridged the gap where the European members fell short. The US shifting its focus away from Europe has undoubtedly had a profound effect. It was perhaps not until this happened that it became clear just how much NATO relied on Washington for political direction, and whilst it is entirely possible for the middle powers to collectively take over that role, presently, that reality seems distant. Reaching that reality will be far from an overnight process. With Europe’s attention firmly focused on the war in Ukraine, many argue that the clock is already ticking, bringing the prospect of a conflict with Russia closer to reality.
