Five alleged drug dealers are facing felony charges for their involvement in the death of Leandro De Niro-Rodriguez, the grandson of acting legend Robert De Niro.
A federal grand jury in New York indicted the quintet on Tuesday, each on a single felony count of conspiracy to distribute controlled substances resulting in death, according to court documents filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Prosecutors allege the men were “members of a criminal network that distributed thousands of counterfeit prescription pills laced with fentanyl, among other drugs” to young adults and teenagers living in New York City.
The men arrested by New York officials this week — identified as Grant McIver, Bruce Epperson, Eddie Barreto, John Nicolas and Roy Nicolas — allegedly used social media to sell the drugs. Prosecutors underscored that the men’s “drug dealing had deadly consequences: over a three-month span in the summer of 2023,” alleging their drugs led to the deaths of three 19-year-olds.
Though the indictment did not disclose the victims’ identities, law enforcement confirmed the deaths include De Niro-Rodriguez’s in July 2023, according to severalreports. At the time of her son’s death, actor-producer Drena De Niro — the Oscar winner’s eldest daughter with ex-wife Diahnne Abbott — said “someone sold [Leandro] fentanyl-laced pills that they knew were laced yet still sold them to him.”
A month after the young “A Star Is Born” actor’s death, the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner confirmed De Niro-Rodriguez died of an accidental drug overdose, noting he succumbed to the toxic effects of fentanyl, bromazolam, alprazolam, 7-aminoclonazepam, ketamine and cocaine.
Akira Stein, daughter of Blondie co-founder Chris Stein, was also an alleged victim. Stein announced his daughter’s death in July 2023, months after she died “at the end of May to an overdose.”
“The DEA and US Attorney folks from the NYC Southern District have been really very sympathetic and respectful all through this process and I can’t thank them enough for this hope of some justice for her,” Stein wrote in reaction to news of the arrests Thursday. “Please be careful.”
Shortly after De Niro-Rodriguez’s death, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York confirmed that law enforcement had arrested a woman, an alleged drug dealer known as the “Percocet Princess,” for her suspected connection with his death. She was arrested on charges of selling drugs to De Niro-Rodriguez.
In a July 2023 statement, “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “Raging Bull” star De Niro said, “I’m deeply distressed by the passing of my beloved grandson Leo.”
“We’re greatly appreciative of the condolences from everyone,” he said. “We ask that we please be given privacy to grieve our loss of Leo.”
WASHINGTON — The White House started tearing down part of the East Wing, the traditional base of operations for the first lady, to build President Trump’s $250-million ballroom despite lacking approval for construction from the federal agency that oversees such projects.
Dramatic photos of the demolition work that began Monday showed construction equipment tearing into the East Wing façade and windows and other building parts in tatters on the ground. Some reporters watched from a park near the Treasury Department, which is next to the East Wing.
On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that the plan now called for the demolition of the entire East Wing and that the tear-down should be completed by Sunday. Citing a source, The Times said it marks an escalation over earlier plans for the ballroom.
Trump announced the start of construction in a social media post and referenced the work while hosting 2025 college baseball champs Louisiana State University and LSU-Shreveport in the East Room. He noted the work was happening “right behind us.”
“We have a lot of construction going on, which you might hear periodically,” he said, adding, “It just started today.”
The White House has moved ahead with the massive construction project despite not yet having sign-off from the National Capital Planning Commission, which approves construction work and major renovations to government buildings in the Washington area.
Its chairman, Will Scharf, who is also the White House staff secretary and one of Trump’s top aides, said at the commission’s September meeting that the agency does not have jurisdiction over demolition or site preparation work for buildings on federal property.
“What we deal with is essentially construction, vertical build,” Scharf said last month.
It was unclear whether the White House had submitted the ballroom plans for the agency’s review and approval. The White House did not respond to a request for comment and the commission’s offices are closed because of the government shutdown.
The Republican president had said in July when the project was announced that the ballroom would not interfere with the mansion itself.
“It’ll be near it but not touching it and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of,” he said of the White House.
The East Wing houses several offices, including those of the first lady. It was built in 1902 and and has been renovated over the years, with a second story added in 1942, according to the White House.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said those East Wing offices will be temporarily relocated during construction and that wing of the building will be modernized and renovated.
“Nothing will be torn down,” Leavitt said when she announced the project in July.
Trump insists that presidents have desired such a ballroom for 150 years and that he’s adding the massive 90,000-square-foot, glass-walled space because the East Room, which is the largest room in the White House with an approximately 200-person capacity, is too small. He also has said he does not like the idea of hosting kings, queens, presidents and prime ministers in pavilions on the South Lawn.
Trump said in the social media announcement that the project would be completed “with zero cost to the American Taxpayer! The White House Ballroom is being privately funded by many generous Patriots, Great American Companies, and, yours truly.”
The ballroom will be the biggest structural change to the Executive Mansion since the addition in 1948 of the Truman Balcony overlooking the South Lawn, even dwarfing the residence itself.
At a dinner he hosted last week for some of the wealthy business executives who are donating money toward the construction cost, Trump said the project had grown in size and now will accommodate 999 people. The capacity was 650 seated people at the July announcement.
The White House has said it will disclose information on who has contributed money to build the ballroom, but has yet to do so.
Trump also said at last week’s event that the head of Carrier Global Corp., a leading manufacturer of heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems, had offered to donate the air-conditioning system for the ballroom.
Carrier confirmed to the Associated Press on Monday that it had done so. A cost estimate was not immediately available.
“Carrier is honored to provide the new iconic ballroom at the White House with a world-class, energy-efficient HVAC system, bringing comfort to distinguished guests and dignitaries in this historic setting for years to come,” the company said in an emailed statement.
The clearing of trees on the south grounds and other site preparation work for the construction started in September. Plans call for the ballroom to be ready before Trump’s term ends in January 2029.
Reporting from Sacramento — California is poised to charge the highest taxes and fees on gas in the country when an increase kicks in July 1, but officials say the state is still billions of dollars short of what’s needed to properly fix the roads and are considering additional charges.
The gasoline tax is set to climb by 5.6 cents per gallon, the second in a wave of increases approved by state leaders two years ago to raise billions of dollars for road and bridge repairs and mass transit.
Combined with a 12-cent increase that took effect in November 2017, the taxes and vehicle fees approved in a bill known as SB 1 are projected to add $5.4 billion in the coming year to transportation funding.
But officials estimate $130 billion is needed to bring the state’s roads and bridges into a state of good repair. The gas tax increases of 2017 will raise some $52 billion during the first 10 years but that will leave a road repair shortfall of approximately $78 billion.
The tax does not expire after 10 years and will continue to grow with the cost of living in future decades.
“The current funding is not sufficient, it is not enough,” said Tony Akel, a Fresno engineer who is a leader of the American Society of Civil Engineers. “We know that there is a big gap that is a result of years of underfunding.”
The group just released a study that gives California’s roads a “D” grade, saying they are among the worst in the country. State Sen. Jim Beall (D-San Jose), who authored the gas tax measure, said the evaluation appears accurate, but argued it is not a failure of the tax measure, just too early an assessment.
“You won’t see the impact of SB 1 for another couple of years,” Beall said. “The grades are based on actual conditions, and the SB 1 projects are underway but they are not finished. Road conditions will improve.”
The state has completed about 100 transportation projects and 400 more are in the works, according to the administration of Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Projects funded so far include $135.9 million to improve 104 lane miles of Interstate 605 and $54.9 million for 99 lane miles of State Route 1 in Los Angeles County. Projects completed so far include repaving a stretch of Interstate 5 between the 605 and Washington Boulevard in Los Angeles County.
“SB 1 was never expected to completely fund all backlog work, but it has given us a great start to making up for years of underfunding,” said Jeff Burdick, a spokesman for Caltrans.
The increase taking effect next month means the total state taxes and fees on gasoline will be 57.8 cents per gallon, based on the current average price of gas across California.
That will just edge out the 57.6 cents-per-gallon charged by Pennsylvania. Washington state will remain in third place, charging motorists 49.4 cents per gallon.
(Some of the California tax is based on a percentage of the cost of a gallon of gas, so a significant drop in prices could cause the overall tax to drop — at least temporarily — below Pennsylvania’s.)
Alaska and Missouri have the lowest gas taxes in the country, with per-gallon charges of 14.34 and 17.35 cents respectively, according to the American Petroleum Institute. Motorists in all states also pay 18.4 cents per gallon in federal fuel taxes.
“California will be number one in another category that it shouldn’t be number one in,” said state Sen. John Moorlach (R-Costa Mesa), who opposed SB 1 as it made its way through the Legislature. “These incremental increases drive people nuts. They are trying to meet their budgets, and we keep pounding away at it.”
Assembly Democrats, in a 49-17 vote, on Monday blocked an attempt by Republicans to postpone the July tax hike. “Democrats reaffirmed their support for a regressive gas tax increase that punishes every Californian who can’t afford a Tesla,” said Assemblyman Devon Mathis (R-Visalia). “So much for being the party of working people.”
SB 1 calls for additional annual increases to California’s gas tax based on inflation starting July 1, 2020.
Beall, the chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee, agreed with the assessment of the engineers’ group that current revenue is insufficient.
“Money went to local [agencies] from the gas tax, but they still need more,” Beall said, adding that the federal government needs to increase its funding for roads, while counties also can go to their voters for local sales tax increases for transportation projects.
Voters in Riverside County are among those who may be asked next year to raise taxes to fill a funding shortfall to fix the roads.
The Riverside County Transportation Commission has launched a study to determine how to make up a $12.6-billion gap between its transportation needs and expected funding over the next 20 years, according to Cheryl Donahue, a manager at the agency.
“As part of its review, the commission will determine whether asking county voters to consider a sales tax measure to fund transportation improvements is part of the best overall approach to reducing congestion and improving mobility,” Donahue said.
The San Diego Metropolitan Transit System also is considering whether to ask voters to increase the sales tax by up to one-half cent next year to pay for transit, highway and road improvements, spokesman Rob Schupp said. The San Diego Assn. of Governments released a poll in March that found strong voter support for such a tax, with 70% of those surveyed saying “improving roads to support transit services” is important.
Voters in San Mateo and San Benito counties approved sales tax increases in November for road projects.
Moorlach said Orange County, where he lives, has approved two local tax measures to fund its transportation needs in recent years, and he does not have a problem with other counties following suit.
The group Move L.A. has proposed a grander plan, suggesting that raising local sales taxes by a half-cent in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties could bring in about $1.5 billion per year for public projects.
Much of the money would go to South Coast Air Quality Management District efforts to increase non-polluting transportation, including electric cars and trucks. But some could be spent on infrastructure including bike and pedestrian lanes, which SB 1 finances.
The air district has sponsored a bill, SB 732, that would allow it to ask voters to raise the sales tax by up to 1% in the four counties. The legislation is expected to be taken up next year.
State law requires a two-thirds vote to approve a local tax increase for transportation, but a pair of other pending bills could make approval easier. A bill in the Legislature would put a measure on the November 2020 statewide ballot that would allow cities, counties and special districts to impose taxes if 55% of local voters approve. The measure would benefit projects involving affordable housing and infrastructure, including improvements to transit and streets and highways.
Another bill, AB 1413, would allow local transportation agencies like San Diego’s to seek voter approval of tax increases in any portion of the county, so if some areas want better roads they can vote on them. The measure would allow communities to pay for “improving roads, transit, highways, or other transportation infrastructure as they see fit,” said Assemblyman Todd Gloria (D-San Diego).
But the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. argued agencies “shouldn’t be able to pick and choose among their tax base to make it easier to increase regressive sales taxes.”
State lawmakers also are considering a bill that would charge a 10% tax on every barrel of oil pumped from the ground in California to bring in some $900 million annually. That, critics say, would mean motorists will pay more at the pump. Backers of the bill deny there would be a significant impact on drivers.
Money raised by the bill would go to the general fund but could help with transportation, said Sen. Bob Wieckowski (D-Fremont), the legislation’s author.
“While other states have brought in billions of dollars for their constituents through an oil severance tax, California has had to dip into its own pockets to cover extensive clean-up costs brought about by the oil industry’s irresponsible actions,” Wieckowski said. “Californians deserve better.”
Fesia Davenport, L.A. County’s chief executive officer, received a $2 million settlement this summer due to professional fallout from Measure G, a voter-approved ballot measure that will soon make her job obsolete, according to a letter she wrote to the county’s top lawyer.
Davenport wrote in the July 8 letter, which was released through a public record request Tuesday, that she had been seeking $2 million for “reputational harm, embarrassment, and physical, emotional and mental distress caused by the Measure G.”
“Measure G is an unprecedented event, and has had, and will continue to have, an unprecedented impact on my professional reputation, health, career, income, and retirement,” Davenport wrote to County Counsel Dawyn Harrison. “My hope is that after setting aside the amount of my ask, that there can be a true focus on what the real issues are here – measure G has irrevocably changed my life, my professional career, economic outlook, and plans for the future.”
The existence of the $2 million settlement, finalized in mid-August, was first reported Tuesday by the LAist. It was unclear what the settlement was for.
Davenport began a medical leave last week. She told staff she expects to be back early next year.
Supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Janice Hahn first announced Measure G in July 2024, branding it as a long overdue overhaul to the county’s sluggish bureaucracy. Under the charter amendment, which voters approved this November, the number of supervisors increased to nine and the county chief executive, who manages the county government and oversees its budget, will be now be elected by voters instead of appointed by the board starting in 2028.
In August 2024, a few weeks after the announcement, Davenport wrote a letter to Horvath saying the measure had impugned her “professional reputation” and would end her career at least two years earlier than she expected, according to another letter released through a public records request.
“This has been a tough six weeks for me,” Davenport wrote in her letter. “It has created uncomfortable, awkward interactions between me and my CEO team (they are concerned), me and other departments heads (they are apologetic), and even County outsiders (they think I am being fired).”
ORLANDO, Fla. — U.S. government lawyers say that detainees at the immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades known as “Alligator Alcatraz” probably include people who have never been in removal proceedings, which is a direct contradiction of what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been saying since it opened in July.
Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice made that admission Thursday in a court filing arguing that the detainees at the facility in the Everglades wilderness don’t have enough in common to be certified as a class in a lawsuit over whether they’re getting proper access to attorneys.
A removal proceeding is a legal process initiated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to determine if someone should be deported from the United States.
The Justice Department attorneys wrote that the detainees at the Everglades facility have too many immigration statuses to be considered a class.
“The proposed class includes all detainees at Alligator Alcatraz, a facility that houses detainees in all stages of immigration processing — presumably including those who have never been in removal proceedings, those who will be placed into removal proceedings, those who are already subject to final orders of removal, those subject to expedited removal, and those detained for the purpose of facilitation removal from the United States pursuant to a final order of removal,” they wrote.
Since the facility opened, DeSantis has been saying publicly that each detainee has gone through the process of determining that they can’t legally be in the United States.
During a July 25 news conference outside the detention center, DeSantis said, “Everybody here is already on a final removal order.”
“They have been ordered to be removed from the country,” he added.
At a July 29 speech before a conference of the Florida Sheriffs Assn., the Republican governor said, “The people that are going to the Alligator Alcatraz are illegally in the country. They’ve all already been given a final order of removal.”
He added, “So, if you have an order to be removed, what is the possible objection to the federal government enforcing that removal order?”
DeSantis’ press office didn’t respond Monday morning to an email seeking comment.
The court filing by the Justice Department attorneys was made in a lawsuit in which civil rights groups allege the facility’s detainees have been denied proper access to attorneys in violation of their constitutional rights. The civil rights groups on Thursday asked a federal judge in Fort Myers, Fla., for a preliminary injunction that would establish stronger protections for detainees to meet with attorneys privately and share documents confidentially.
The court case is one of three lawsuits filed by environmental and civil rights groups over the detention center, which was hastily built this summer by the state of Florida and operated by private contractors and state agencies.
A federal judge in Miami ordered in August that the facility must wind down operations within two months, agreeing with environmental groups that the remote airstrip site wasn’t given a proper environmental review before it was converted into an immigration detention center. But operations continued after the judge’s preliminary injunction was put on hold in early September by an appellate court panel. At one point, the facility held more than 900 detainees, but most of them were transferred after the initial injunction. It wasn’t clear on Monday how many detainees were at the center, which was built to hold 3,000 people.
President Trump toured the facility in July and suggested it could be a model for future lockups nationwide as his administration pushes to expand the infrastructure needed to increase deportations. Federal officials on Friday confirmed that Florida has been approved for a $608-million reimbursement for the costs of building and running the immigration detention center.
The acting U.S. attorney in Sacramento has said she was fired after telling the Border Patrol chief in charge of immigration raids in California that his agents were not allowed to arrest people without probable cause in the Central Valley.
Michele Beckwith, a career prosecutor who was made the acting U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of California earlier this year, told the New York Times that she was let go after she warned Gregory Bovino, chief of the Border Patrol’s El Centro Sector, that a court injunction blocked him from carrying out indiscriminate immigration raids in Sacramento.
Beckwith did not respond to a request for comment from the L.A. Times, but told the New York Times that “we have to stand up and insist the laws be followed.”
The U.S. attorney’s office in Sacramento declined to comment. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment Friday evening.
Bovino presided over a series of raids in Los Angeles starting in June in which agents spent weeks pursuing Latino-looking workers outside of Home Depots, car washes, bus stops and other areas. The agents often wore masks and used unmarked vehicles.
But such indiscriminate tactics were not allowed in California’s Eastern District after the American Civil Liberties Union and United Farm Workers filed suit against the Border Patrol earlier in the year and won an injunction.
The suit followed a January operation in Kern County called “Operation Return to Sender,” in which agents swarmed a Home Depot and Latino market, among other areas frequented by laborers. In April, a federal district court judge ruled that the Border Patrol likely violated the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
As Beckwith described it to New York Times reporters, she received a phone call from Bovino on July 14 in which he said he was bringing agents to Sacramento.
She said she told him that the injunction filed after the Kern County raid meant he could not stop people indiscriminately in the Eastern District. The next day, she wrote him an email in which, as quoted in the New York Times, she stressed the need for “compliance with court orders and the Constitution.”
Shortly thereafter her work cell phone and her work computer stopped working. A bit before 5 p.m. she received an email informing her that her employment was being terminated effective immediately.
It was the end of a 15-year career in in the Department of Justice in which she had served as the office’s Criminal Division Chief and First Assistant and prosecuted members of the Aryan Brotherhood, suspected terrorists, and fentanyl traffickers.
In an interview with Fox News that day, Bovino said the raids were targeted and based on intelligence. “Everything we do is targeted,” he said. “We did have prior intelligence that there were targets that we were interested in and around that Home Depot, as well as other targeted enforcement packages in and around the Sacramento area.”
He also said that his operations would not slow down. “There is no sanctuary anywhere,” he said. “We’re here to stay. We’re not going anywhere. We’re going to affect this mission and secure the homeland.”
Beckwith is one of a number of top prosecutors who have quit or been fired as the Trump administration pushes the Department of Justice to aggressively carry out his policies, including investigating people who have been the president’s political targets.
In March, a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles was fired after lawyers for a fast-food executive he was prosecuting pushed officials in Washington to drop all charges against him, according to multiple sources.
In July, Maurene Comey, a federal prosecutor in Manhattan and the daughter of former FBI director James Comey, was fired by the Trump administration, according to the New York Times.
And just last week, a U. S. attorney in Virginia was pushed out after he had determined there was insufficient evidence to prosecute James B. Comey. A new prosecutor this week won a grand jury indictment against Comey on one count of making a false statement and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding.
SAN DIEGO — The San Diego Padres are headed back to the playoffs for the fourth time in six seasons.
The Padres clinched a playoff berth with a 5-4, 11-inning win against the three-time NL-Central champion Milwaukee Brewers on Monday night.
Freddy Fermin, acquired from Kansas City at the trade deadline on July 31, singled in automatic runner Bryce Johnson with one out in the 11th to set off a wild celebration in front of a sellout crowd of 42,371 at Petco Park.
The Padres pulled within 2½ games of the idle Dodgers in the NL West race and 2½ games behind the idle Chicago Cubs in the race for the National League’s first of three wild-card spots.
Manny Machado, shirtless, wearing sunglasses and drenched with beer and Champagne, says he feels good about the team’s chances in the playoffs.
“Everything is different. But we’ve got heart,” Machado said. “Everybody wants it. It’s always a challenge. Baseball’s a challenge. It’s hard.”
Fermin was being interviewed when Machado stopped by and poured a shot of tequila into his mouth.
“I believe with this staff we have, we are going to the World Series,” said Fermin, the catcher. “It is very special, this moment. I don’t have words for this moment. Very special. First step, we’ve got to keep rolling this.”
The Padres’ road appears to be tougher than last year, when they swept the Atlanta Braves in a home wild-card series to earn a shot at the rival Dodgers. San Diego led 2-1 before their bats went so cold that they didn’t score in the last 24 innings as they lost the series in five games. The Dodgers went on to win the World Series.
“What this group has done this year, and even last year, to put this into place, and for us to go to the postseason two years in a row for the first time since 2005-06, is truly special,” second baseman Jake Cronenworth said.
If the current standings hold, the Padres would visit the Cubs for a best-of-three wild-card series. The winner would move into the division series against the Brewers, who clinched their third straight division title on Sunday and are in the postseason for the seventh time in eight seasons.
It’s been an interesting season for the Padres, who led the division for much of April before slipping back as they played .500 ball in May and sub-.500 ball in June. The Dodgers never could open a big lead, but the Padres never could regain the lead, except for brief stretches in August.
General manager A.J. Preller pulled off a major overhaul at the trade deadline, acquiring reliever Mason Miller from the Athletics, Fermin from the Royals and outfielders Ryan O’Hearn and Ramon Laureano from the Orioles.
The Padres became the first big league team to send three relievers to the All-Star Game when Jason Adam, closer Robert Suarez and left-hander Adrián Morejón were selected for the Midsummer Classic. Adam went down with a season-ending quadriceps injury on Sept. 1.
The Padres were prone to offensive slumps, particularly on the road.
But there were some defensive highlights, including several home run robberies by right fielder Fernando Tatis Jr.
Tatis missed the clincher with an undisclosed illness, but Machado included his teammate in the postgame celebration via FaceTime on his phone.
PRIMM, Nevada — As the sun set just before 8 p.m., the bison-headed neon marquee welcoming visitors to Primm flickered faintly. The animal’s face was dark, though the words “Buffalo Bill’s” remained alight — for now — for the down-on-its-luck resort and casino.
Inland Empire residents Marcy Glenn and Kristina Gula parked in a mostly vacant lot and ran to pose for a selfie in front of the sign. One last snapshot.
“I’ve been coming here since I was a kid, when I was handed a bag of quarters to play all day at the arcade,” Gula said. “I just can’t believe it’s closing.”
Primm was once one of Nevada’s more popular gambling resorts, a less expensive, less flashy, slightly more kitschy alternative to Las Vegas that benefited from being a good 45 minutes closer than Sin City.
It was the place where you could stop and ride the iconic freeway-adjacent roller coaster, ogle the Bonnie and Clyde “Death Car” or shop at the premium outlet mall.
But a series of factors has contributed to Primm’s slow decline, including the COVID pandemic and increased competition from casinos popping up on tribal lands in California.
Those newer casinos are easier to get to than Primm from key Southern California population centers, reducing the value proposition.
Lights still glow on the Buffalo Bill’s Resort and Casino sign in July.
The Western-themed Buffalo Bill’s resort in Primm concluded a 31-year run of regular business on July 6. Its owner, Affinity Gaming, ended its “24/7 operations,” not a positive sign in an area acclaimed for nonstop action. Buffalo Bill’s partial shuttering follows Affinity’s recent closure of its nearby Whiskey Pete’s resort, leaving the Primm Valley Casino Resorts as the lone survivor.
Rancho Cucamonga friends Glenn and Gula often visited the town — which includes a popular lotto store where Nevadans can buy California lottery tickets, chain fast-food spots, a pair of gas stations and a virtually abandoned mall that once welcomed crowds of daily visitors.
On this weekend, however, the duo stayed at a Sin City short-term rental.
“There’s no easy answer as to why Primm is in its current state,” said Amanda Belarmino, associate professor of hospitality management at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “They’ve had a slow decline expedited by COVID-19, and they’ve been unable to respond to competition in California and southern Nevada.”
The Desperado roller coaster at Buffalo Bill’s Resort and Casino, once one of the tallest and fastest coasters in the world, has long been closed to the public.
A screaming coaster and a $7 prime rib dinner
In American mystery writer Dolores Hitchens’ 1955 classic, “Sleep With Strangers,” the novel’s hero, private investigator Jim Sader, drives from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, noting his trip includes only “empty valley” and the “shimmering mist of heat.”
When he finally pulls over at a state-line roadside diner, he finds a barn-like restaurant split into halves: one side for slot machines and cards and the other for a soda fountain and lunch counter. Customers “who couldn’t wait for Las Vegas” are pulling the levers at the slots.
That vision of dining, playing and staying just across the state line was one that called to Ernest Primm. It was in the ’50s that he installed a motel and coffee shop at a spot in the road called State Line. Primm was the poker czar of the South Bay. Starting in the 1930s, he ran card rooms in Gardena, places where patrons might be lured in with a 25-cent steak.
He eventually relinquished control of six poker houses in Gardena to build Whiskey Pete’s in Primm. The area was renamed from State Line to Primm in 1996 after his death.
“When Primm was first developed, it was really a destination resort area for Southern Californians, people from the Los Angeles and Mojave areas,” Scott Butera, Affinity’s chief executive and president, said at a February meeting of the Nevada Gaming Commission.
The castle-shaped Whiskey Pete’s, which shuttered in December, opened in 1977, followed by Primm Valley in 1990 and Buffalo Bill’s in 1994.
Each hosted the famed Bonnie & Clyde “Death Car,” the V-8 Ford riddled with more than 100 bullets in 1934. Whiskey Pete’s offered a 24-hour IHOP, and Californians and Nevadans visited Primm Valley’s 100-store outlet mall supported by shoppers bused into the mall for free or at discounted prices as a part of tours.
There was also Buffalo Bill’s Desperado, the tallest, fastest roller coaster in the world when it opened in 1994; it sent visitors screaming 209 feet above the freeway right outside the resort. A tram, now dusty and shuttered, connected all three resorts.
Buffalo Bill’s and its sister resorts closed in March 2020 when the pandemic hit, reopening between December 2022 and 2023. But they struggled to attract customers.
The Desperado roller coaster at Buffalo Bill’s Resort and Casino made its final run in Feburary 2020. (Bridget Bennett/For The Times)
A sign blocks an entrance to the Primm Mall in July. Once a popular shopping stop for travelers between Las Vegas and Southern California, the mall has seen a steep decline in recent years.
Affinity Gaming announced Buffalo Bill’s full-time closure in July, saying the resort would still host concerts and special events at its arena, with the casino, food and beverage services, and the hotel open during those times. Whiskey Pete’s was closed — at least temporarily — on Dec. 18. Affinity personnel asked the board on March 4 to approve an extended closure until Dec. 18, 2026, with the possibility of two six-month extensions.
The approved closure allows the resort to maintain its county gaming license while Whiskey Pete’s operates up to 40 slot machines at its adjacent gas station.
The company, which operates the casinos via a lease agreement with the Primm family, turned down requests to speak about its resorts or the future of Primm.
Gamblers inside Primm Valley Casino Resorts, the last casino standing, in July.
Not enough gamblers to go around
While other casinos in Nevada’s Clark County have cleaned up financially over the last 10 years, Primm’s have been — as UNLV’s Belarmino noted — on a slow slide.
In a letter to the Clark County Board of Commissioners, Erin Barnett, Affinity’s vice president and general counsel, wrote in October “that traffic at the state line has proved to be heavily weighted towards weekend activity and is insufficient to support three full-time casino properties.”
The story of Primm’s decline is directly tied to the rise of Southern California’s tribal casinos, according to Belarmino.
Yaamava’ Resort & Casino, run by the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, sits in Highland, about 200 miles from Primm but less than half that distance from downtown L.A.
The 7,000 slot machines at Yaamava’ make the casino the West Coast’s largest, with 4,000 more slots than any Vegas peers.
Once, Yaamava’ was much humbler than the Primm resorts, opening in 1986 as a bingo hall. But by 1994, the location expanded into a 100,000-square-foot casino. Yaamava’ completed its most recent $760-million expansion in 2021, adding a 17-floor hotel tower, three bars and about 1,700 new slots.
Shortly after, Yaamava’ was one of several tribal casinos in San Bernardino and Riverside counties that declared an arms race with Nevada.
The tribal casinos are a pull for Southern Californians who might otherwise head to Primm, Affinity’s Butera acknowledged at February’s Gaming Commission meeting. “Now they have their own casinos,” he said, “quite large, nice casinos there.”
Still, Affinity is hoping a new airport planned for just north of Primm in the late 2030s and adjacent supporting businesses will spur a resurgence. Butera said at the February meeting that Primm was “in the process of doing a major repositioning.”
Primm 2.0 would have Primm Valley Hotel as its main resort, with national brands and new restaurant concepts and an improved truck stop travel center. There would also be a new $4-million marquee.
The vision is to restore Primm to a destination that Southern Californians traveling to Nevada would stop at, “get gas or recharge their car but also [have] something nice to eat, have a little fun at a casino and then move on.”
Signs alert any remaining passersby that this entrance at Primm Mall is closed. In July, the lone store in business was a thrift store.
Clothing time
It’s unclear if that would resuscitate Primm Valley’s 100-store outlet mall, an attraction that once extended Primm’s deals beyond cheap buffets and cocktails.
The Las Vegas Entertainment Guide wrote in December 2013 that Primm’s Prizm Outlets were “one of the top places to visit if you are visiting the Sin City and shopping is on your agenda.”
The 371,000-square-foot outlet mall, built in 1998, is attached to the Primm Valley Resort. Its retailers at one time included Neiman Marcus, Coach, American Eagle Outfitters, Fendi, Michael Kors and Kate Spade.
Las Vegas resident Lindsay Myer said the mall was a lure in its heyday.
“They had a jeans outlet and some good shopping,” said the 23-year-old as she stopped in Buffalo Bill’s before its closing in July. “Then the outlets closer to Vegas were built.”
Las Vegas North Premium Outlets, three miles from the Strip’s northern end, was built in 2003, with expansions completed in 2015. The South mall, near Harry Reid Airport, completed construction in 2011. They combined for more than 300 shops.
Meanwhile, more Primm storefronts became vacant.
By 2018, only 58 stores out of 111 total spots were operating. As of July, a thrift store was the only shop that remained.
Anna Barker and Chad Asindraza, both from Las Vegas, pose for a photo in front of the Buffalo Bill’s Resort and Casino sign.
For some, Primm just didn’t make sense
Scott Banks, a retired slot machine mechanic and salesman, said he never understood how Primm existed in the first place.
“I understand this is the first stop on your way through the desert to Las Vegas, but Vegas is only like 35 miles away,” said Banks, 65, a Sin City native. “The fact that people made that stop is something.”
Banks said he helped refurbish and update slot machines at Whiskey Pete’s in the mid-1980s, when it was undergoing one of its first expansions.
He was also a frequent visitor to Primm for its $1 hot dogs, the outlet mall and the roller coaster. When those amenities dropped away, so did he.
“Whiskey Pete’s, Primm, was an incredible gamble by the Primm family, and it worked, it worked for years,” he said. “That’s the way to look at it.”
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Monday for the Trump administration and agreed U.S. immigration agents may stop and detain anyone they suspect is in the U.S. illegally based on little more than their working at a car wash, speaking Spanish or having brown skin.
In a 6-3 vote, the justices granted an emergency appeal and lifted a Los Angeles judge’s order that barred “roving patrols” from snatching people off Southern California streets based on how they look, what language they speak, what work they do or where they happen to be.
The decision is a significant victory for President Trump, clearing the way for his oft-promised “largest Mass Deportation Operation” in American history.
The court’s conservatives issued a brief, unsigned order that freezes the district judge’s restraining order indefinitely and frees immigration agents from it. As a practical matter, it gives immigration agents broad authority to stop people who they think may be here illegally.
Although Monday’s order is not a final ruling, it strongly signals the Supreme Court will not uphold strict limits on the authority of immigration agents to stop people for questioning.
The Supreme Court has been sharply criticized in recent weeks for handing down orders with no explanation. Perhaps for that reason, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote a 10-page opinion to explain the decision.
He said federal law says “immigration officers ‘may briefly detain’ an individual ‘for questioning’ if they have ‘a reasonable suspicion, based on specific articulable facts, that the person being questioned … is an alien illegally in the United States.’”
He said such stops are reasonable and legal based on the “totality of the circumstances. Here, those circumstances include: that there is an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area; that those individuals tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work; that those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction, that do not require paperwork and are therefore especially attractive to illegal immigrants; and that many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English.”
Those were exactly the factors that the district judge and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said agents may not use as a basis for stopping someone for questioning.
The three liberal justices dissented.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the decision “yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket. We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”
“The Government … has all but declared that all Latinos, U.S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction,” she wrote.
Sotomayor also disagreed with Kavanaugh’s assertions.
“Immigration agents are not conducting ‘brief stops for questioning,’ as the concurrence would like to believe. They are seizing people using firearms, physical violence, and warehouse detentions,” she wrote. “Nor are undocumented immigrants the only ones harmed by the Government’s conduct. United States citizens are also being seized, taken from their jobs, and prevented from working to support themselves and their families.”
In response, Kavanaugh said he agreed agents may not use “excessive force” in making stops or arrests. But the judge’s order dealt only with the legal grounds for making stops, he said.
Kavanaugh stressed the court has a limited role when it comes to immigration enforcement.
“The Judiciary does not set immigration policy or decide enforcement priorities. It should come as no surprise that some Administrations may be more laissez-faire in enforcing immigration law, and other Administrations more strict,” he wrote.
He noted the court had ruled for the Biden administration and against Texas, which had sought stricter enforcement against those who crossed the border or had a criminal record.
The case decided Monday began in early June when Trump appointees targeted Los Angeles with aggressive street sweeps that ensnared longtime residents, legal immigrants and even U.S. citizens.
A coalition of civil rights groups and local attorneys challenged the cases of three immigrants and two U.S. citizens caught up in the chaotic arrests, claiming they had been grabbed without reasonable suspicion — a violation of the 4th Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.
The lead plaintiffs — Pedro Vasquez Perdomo and two other Pasadena residents — were arrested at a bus stop when they were waiting to be picked up for a job.
On July 11, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong issued a temporary restraining order barring stops based solely on race or ethnicity, language, location or employment, either alone or in combination.
The case remains in its early phases, with hearings set for a preliminary injunction this month. But the Department of Justice argued even a brief limit on mass arrests constituted a “irreparable injury” to the government.
A few days later, Trump’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court to set aside Frimpong’s order. They said agents should be allowed to act on the assumption that Spanish-speaking Latinos who work as day laborers, at car washes or in landscaping and agriculture are likely to lack legal status.
“Reasonable suspicion is a low bar — well below probable cause,” Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer wrote in his appeal. Agents can consider “the totality of the circumstances” when making stops, he said, including that “illegal presence is widespread in the Central District [of California], where 1 in every 10 people is an illegal alien.”
Both sides said the region’s diverse demographics support their view of the law. In an application to join the suit, Los Angeles and 20 other Southern California municipalities argued that “half the population of the Central District” now meet the government’s criteria for reasonable suspicion.
Roughly 10 million Latinos live in the seven counties covered by the order, and almost as many speak a language other than English at home.
Sauer also questioned whether the plaintiffs who sued had standing because they were unlikely to be arrested again. That argument was the subject of sharp and extended questioning in the 9th Circuit, where a three-judge panel ultimately rejected it.
“Agents have conducted many stops in the Los Angeles area within a matter of weeks, not years, some repeatedly in the same location,” the panel wrote in its July 28 opinion denying the stay.
One plaintiff was stopped twice in the span of 10 days, evidence of a “real and immediate threat” that he or any of the others could be stopped again, the 9th Circuit said.
Days after that decision, heavily armed Border Patrol agents sprang from the back of a Penske movers truck, snatching workers from the parking lot of a Westlake Home Depot in apparent defiance of the courts.
Immigrants rights advocates had urged the justices to not intervene.
“The raids have followed an unconstitutional pattern that officials have vowed to continue,” they said. Ruling for Trump would authorize “an extraordinarily expansive dragnet, placing millions of law-abiding people at imminent risk of detention by federal agents.”
The judge’s order had applied in an area that included Los Angeles and Orange counties as well as Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.
“Every Latino should be concerned, every immigrant should be concerned, every person should be concerned,” Alfonso Barragan, a 62-year-old U.S. citizen, said Monday on his way into one of the L.A. Home Depots repeatedly hit by the controversial sweeps. “They’re allowing the [federal immigration agents] to break the law.”
Savage reported from Washington and Sharp from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Ruben Vives in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
Jack Osbourne fired back this week at the insults that Roger Waters hurled last month at his late father Ozzy Osbourne, who died in July at the age of 76.
During an interview with the Independent Ink, Waters had expressed his feelings about the “Prince of Darkness” and his music.
“Ozzy Osbourne, who just died, bless him in his whatever that state that he was in his whole life,” the 81-year-old rocker told host Dwayne Booth. “We’ll never know. The music, I have no idea, I couldn’t give a f—.”
He added: “I don’t care about Black Sabbath, I never did. Have no interest in biting the heads of chickens or whatever they do. I couldn’t care less, you know.”
Osbourne’s son, Jack, caught wind of Waters’ words and turned on the war machine. He took to his Instagram on Tuesday to defend his dad.
“Hey Roger Waters F— You,” Jack posted on his page, using white lettering on a red background. “How pathetic and out of touch you’ve become.”
Waters, who co-founded the band Pink Floyd in 1965 and has toured as a solo act since 1999, typically posts politically driven messages in a similar style on his account.
“The only way you seem to get attention these days is by vomiting out b— in the press. My father always thought you were a c— thanks for proving him right,” he added. He ended the post with a clown emoji.
The youngest of the Osbourne clan appeared alongside his father in the MTV reality series “The Osbournes” from 2002 through 2005 and the History Channel’s “Ozzy & Jack’s World Detour” from 2016 through 2018.
The Black Sabbath frontman revealed to David Letterman in an episode of “Late Night” in 1982 that he had beheaded a bat onstage by accident, a feat that had added to the considerable lore built around the heavy metal legend.
Ozzy Osbourne made his last public appearance during the band’s farewell concert, “Back to the Beginning,” on July 5 at their hometown of Birmingham, England. He died on July 22 of a heart attack.
McALLEN, Texas — President Trump’s administration has started requiring parents looking to reunite with their children who crossed into the U.S. alone to show up for interviews where immigration officers may question them, according to a policy memo obtained by The Associated Press.
Legal advocacy groups say the shift has led to the arrest of some parents, while their children remain in U.S. custody. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not confirm that or answer questions about the July 9 directive, instead referring in a statement to the Biden administration’s struggles to properly vet and monitor homes where children were placed.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is part of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department and which takes custody of children who cross the border without a parent or legal guardian, issued the directive. The agency said the goal is to ensure that sponsors — usually a parent or guardian — are properly vetted.
The memo is among several steps the Trump administration has taken involving children who came to the U.S. alone. Over the Labor Day weekend it attempted to remove Guatemalan children who were living in shelters or with foster care families.
The July 9 memo regarding sponsors said they must now appear in person for identification verification. Previously, sponsors could submit identity documents online. The directive also says “federal law enforcement agencies may be present to meet their own mission objectives, which may include interviewing sponsors.”
Neha Desai, managing director of human rights at the National Center for Youth Law, said the change provides U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement a “built-in opportunity” to arrest parents — something she said has already happened.
Mary Miller Flowers, director of policy and legislative affairs for the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, said she knew of a case in which immigration officers arrested the father of a child under the age of 12 who had shown up for an identification check. “As a result, mom is terrified of coming forward. And so, this child is stuck,” Miller Flowers said.
Desai also said the interviews are unlikely to produce information authorities don’t already have. Vetting already included home studies and background checks done by Office of Refugee Resettlement staff, not immigration enforcement.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement said it communicates “clearly and proactively” with parents, telling them they may be interviewed by ICE or other law enforcement officials. It said parents can decline to be interviewed by ICE and that refusal won’t influence decisions about whether their children will be released to them.
“The goal is to ensure that every child is released to a stable and safe environment and fully vetted sponsors by ensuring the potential sponsor is the same individual submitting supporting documentation, including valid ID,” it said in a statement.
However, Desai is aware of a situation in which a sponsor was not notified and only able to decline after pushing back.
“We know of sponsors who are deeply, deeply fearful because of this interview, but some are still willing to go forward given their determination to get their children out of custody,” she said.
Trump administration points to Biden
Tricia McLaughlin, a Homeland Security spokesperson, issued a statement that did not address any arrests or mention the specific changes. Instead, she said the department is looking to protect children who were released under President Joe Biden’s administration.
A federal watchdog report released last year addressed the Biden’s administration struggles during an increase in migrant children arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2021. The Trump administration has dispatched Homeland Security and FBI agents to visit the children.
Another recent change allows ICE to interview children while they are at government-run shelters. That took effect July 2, according to a separate directive that the Office of Refugee Resettlement sent to shelters, also obtained by the AP.
The agency said it provides legal counsel to children and that its staff does not participate in interviews with law enforcement. Child legal advocates say they get as little as one-hour notice of the interviews, and that the children often don’t understand the purpose of the interview or are misled by officers.
“If we don’t understand what the interview is for or where the information is going, are we really consenting to this process?” said Miller Flowers, with the Young Center.
Jennifer Podkul, chief of global policy at Kids in Need of Defense, said some officers lack language skills, trauma-informed interviewing techniques and knowledge of the reunification process.
“It seems like it’s designed just to cast the net wider on immigration enforcement against adults,” she said.
String of policy changes adding hurdles to reunification process
The July changes are among the steps the Trump administration has taken to ramp up vetting of parents seeking to reunite with children.
The administration has required fingerprinting from sponsors and any adults living in the home where children are released. It has also required identification or proof of income that only those legally present in the U.S. could acquire, as well as introducing DNA testing and home visits by immigration officers.
Children have been spending more time in government-run shelters under increased vetting. The average length of stay for those released was 171 days in July, down from a peak of 217 days in April but well above 37 days in January, when Trump took office.
About 2,000 unaccompanied children were in government custody in July.
Shaina Aber, an executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice analyzing child custody data, attributes the longer custody times to the policy changes.
“The agency’s mission has been conflated and entangled,” she added. “It seems ORR’s mission has been somewhat compromised in that they are now doing more on the immigration enforcement side, and they’re not an immigration enforcement entity.”
Aug. 29 (UPI) — Inflation rose in July, according to the Personal Income and Outlays report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Fed’s preferred measure.
Core inflation, which excludes food and energy costs, was at a 2.9% seasonally adjusted annual rate, according to the personal consumption expenditures price index. That showed a rise of 0.1% from June and the highest annual rate since February.
The core PCE index increased 0.3% monthly, which is in line with expectations, CNBC reported.
Personal outlays, which is the sum of PCE, personal interest payments, and personal current transfer payments, increased $110.9 billion in July. Personal saving was $985.6 billion in July, and the personal saving rate — personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income — was 4.4%.
The increase in current-dollar personal income in July primarily reflected an increase in compensation. Personal income increased $112.3 billion, 0.4% at a monthly rate, in July. Disposable personal income — income less personal current taxes — increased $93.9 billion or 0.4%.
Many policy-makers consider core inflation to be a better indicator of trends because it excludes the gas and groceries figures, which are volatile, CNBC said. Central bankers prefer inflation at 2%. Friday’s report shows the economy isn’t near where the Fed wants it.
“The Fed opened the door to rate cuts, but the size of that opening is going to depend on whether labor-market weakness continues to look like a bigger risk than rising inflation,” said Ellen Zentner, chief economic strategist at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, to CNBC. “Today’s in-line PCE Price Index will keep the focus on the jobs market. For now, the odds still favor a September cut.”
V from BTS got to be the devoted fanboy for once Monday night at Dodger Stadium, where he was lucky enough to share an embrace with Shohei Ohtani and give a deep bow on the field to Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
The K-pop heartthrob posed for photos in the dugout with three-time MVP Ohtani, who returned to the mound this season in addition to continuing as the Dodgers’ designated hitter, and more pics on the field with pitching ace Yamamoto, who helped the team beat the Padres in San Diego on Sunday. Dude even spent a few minutes chatting up the legendary Clayton Kershaw.
Seems V — real name Kim Taehyung — might be a fan of pitching in general?
That’s a good thing, if true, because the K-pop star was at Chavez Ravine to deliver the ceremonial first pitch before the Dodgers shut out the Cincinnati Reds 7-0. BTS fans were definitely there in the crowd to support him.
The seven members of BTS — Jin, Suga, J-Hope, RM, Jimin, Jung Kook and V — surfaced on social media in July after a long hiatus to announce that a new album would be coming in spring 2026, now that they all completed their mandatory 18-month South Korean military service.
Announcer Todd Leitz referenced the band’s “highly anticipated” reunion over the stadium PA system Monday. “NO more waiting now, V. The mound is yours!” he said.
Taking the mound, V delivered a strike to Yamamoto, who was crouched down as the honorary catcher. The pop star earned a “wow, what a pitch” from Leitz and screams from the fans in the stands.
“He’s been on the field for 30 minutes. We finally hit the crescendo with the first pitch tonight for V from BTS,” a voice is heard saying in a video chronicling the moment.
“Yeah, and he dotted up a strike, man,” another voice adds. “Good for him. He’s been out here practicing every 13 seconds. We got the crowd going nuts, we don’t know why. He’s over there playing catch, throwing halfway down the left field line. And you put the guy on the mound, turns into a pretty good strike thrower.”
After the pitch, V also got to speak the five legendary words that open every home game for the boys in blue: “It’s time for Dodger baseball.”
“Starting in July, all seven of us will begin working closely together on new music,” the band said in a statement July 1. “Since it will be a group album, it will reflect each member’s thoughts and ideas. We’re approaching the album with the same mindset we had when we first started.”
BTS last released an album, “Proof,” in June 2022 and performed live together later that year in their home country. Each member has released solo material since then, including Jung Kook’s song “Seven,” which topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 2023, and RM’s “Right Place, Wrong Person,” which reached No. 5 on Billboard’s album chart last year.
Times pop music critic Mikael Wood contributed to this report.
WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. — A federal judge ruled Thursday that President Trump’s former lawyer, Alina Habba, has been unlawfully serving as the the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey.
The court, saying the administration used “a novel series of legal and personnel moves,” held that Habba’s term as the interim U.S. attorney ended in July, and the Trump administration’s maneuvers to keep her in the role without getting confirmation from the U.S. Senate didn’t follow procedures required by federal law.
“Faced with the question of whether Ms. Habba is lawfully performing the functions and duties of the office of the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey, I conclude that she is not,” Chief U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann wrote.
The opinion says that Habba’s actions since July “may be declared void.”
Brann, a President Obama appointee, said he’s putting his order on hold pending an appeal. It wasn’t immediately clear if that meant Habba would remain in charge of the U.S. attorney’s office.
A message seeking comment was sent to Habba’s office Thursday. The Justice Department said it intends to appeal the ruling.
Brann’s decision comes in response to a filing on behalf of New Jersey defendants challenging Habba’s tenure and the charges she was prosecuting against them. They sought to block the charges against them, arguing that Habba didn’t have the authority to prosecute the case after her 120-day term as interim U.S. attorney expired in July.
The defendants’ motion to block Habba, a onetime White House advisor to President Trump and his former personal defense attorney, is another high-profile chapter in her short tenure.
She made headlines when Trump named her U.S. attorney for New Jersey in March. She said the state could “turn red,” a rare, overt political expression from a prosecutor, and said she planned to investigate the state’s Democratic governor and attorney general.
She then brought a trespassing charge, which was eventually dropped, against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka stemming from his visit to a federal immigration detention center. Habba later charged Democratic Rep. LaMonica McIver with assault stemming from the same incident, a rare federal criminal case against a sitting member of Congress other than for corruption. She denies the charges and has pleaded not guilty.
Volatility over her tenure unfolded in late July when the four-month temporary appointment was coming to a close and it became clear that she would not get support from home state Sens. Cory Booker and Andy Kim, both Democrats, effectively torpedoing her chances of Senate approval.
The president withdrew her nomination. Around the same time, federal judges in New Jersey exercised their power under the law to replace Habba with a career prosecutor when Habba’s temporary appointment lapsed, but Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi fired that prosecutor and renamed Habba as acting U.S. attorney.
In his opinion, Brann questioned the legal moves the administration conducted to keep Habba in place.
“Taken to the extreme, the President could use this method to staff the United States Attorney’s office with individuals of his personal choice for an entire term without seeking the Senate’s advice and consent,” he wrote.
The Justice Department has said in filings that the judges acted prematurely and that the executive has the authority to appoint his preferred candidate to enforce federal laws in the state.
Trump had formally nominated Habba as his pick for U.S. attorney on July 1, but Booker and Kim’s opposition meant that under long-standing Senate practice known as senatorial courtesy, the nomination would stall out.
A handful of other Trump picks for U.S. attorney are facing a similar circumstance.
1 of 5 | Leader of Alliance Fleuve Congo Corneille Nangaa, center, and M23 President Bertrand Bisimwa, center-right, arrived to participate in a cleanup exercise in Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo, in February. M23 (March 23 Movement) rebel group has killed 140 civillians in DRC in July, Human Rights Watch said. File Photo by EPA
Aug. 20 (UPI) — Rebels from M23, a rebel group backed by Rwanda, killed at least 140 people in July in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Human Rights Watch said.
The resurgence of killings of mostly Hutu civilians in at least 14 villages and farming areas near Virunga National Park in eastern DRC comes as the United States and Qatar have been working to broker peace in the region.
Human Rights Watch called the killings “executions.”
Between July 10 and 30, “M23 fighters summarily executed local residents and farmers, including women and children, in their villages, fields, and near the Rutshuru River,” Human Rights Watch said.
“Credible reports indicate the number of people killed in Rutshuru territory since July may exceed 300, among the worst atrocities by the M23 since its resurgence in late 2021,” it added.
The rebels have denied any role in these killings, calling the charges a “blatant misrepresentation of the facts,” BBC reported.
“The M23 armed group, which has Rwandan government backing, attacked over a dozen villages and farming areas in July and committed dozens of summary executions of primarily Hutu civilians,” said Clémentine de Montjoye, senior Great Lakes researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Unless those responsible for these war crimes, including at the highest levels, are appropriately investigated and punished, these atrocities will only intensify.”
Witnesses said that M23 fighters told them to immediately bury the bodies in the fields or leave them unburied, preventing families from having funerals. M23 fighters also threw bodies, including of women and children, into the Rutshuru River, Human Rights Watch said.
The mass killings appear to be part of a military campaign against opposing armed groups, especially the Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda, a largely Rwandan Hutu armed group created by participants in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
In the killings reported to Human Rights Watch, most victims were ethnic Hutu and some were ethnic Nande.
Rwanda has not responded to the HRW claim, but it has denied the U.N. accusations, calling them “gratuitous” and “sensational allegations.” It claims that an armed group opposed to M23 committed the killings.
Rwanda denies allegations that it provides military support to M23, which is largely made up of the Tutsi ethnic group that was targeted by Hutu militias in the genocide.
Human Rights Watch reported first-person accounts of witnesses. In one, a woman saw her husband killed by M23 fighters with a machete. The same day, “We were forced to walk toward the place where our lives were going to end,” she said. The group included about 70 women and girls. After walking all day, they were forced to sit on a riverbank to be shot at. She was only able to escape because she fell into the river without being shot.
Fighting between DRC government troops and M23 escalated in January, when the rebels captured large parts of the mineral-rich east, including the regional capital Goma.
Thousands have been killed and hundreds of thousands of civilians forced from their homes in the ongoing conflict, the United Nations says.
On June 27, DRC and Rwanda signed a peace agreement in Washington, D.C., after 30 years of conflict between the two nations.
Then on July 19, DRC and M23 rebels backed by Rwanda signed a declaration of peace after nearly four years of fighting. The rebels were not involved in the agreement in Washington but the declaration must follow the Washington Accord brokered by the United States.
As negotiations were set to resume last week, M23 walked away from the peace talks. It said Kinshasa had failed to meet commitments outlined in the deal.
Around 7 million people have been displaced in Congo, which has a population of 106 million. Rwanda also borders Uganda to the south.
The Congolese army has also accused the M23 of violating the cease-fire.
MEXICO CITY — Julio César Chávez Jr., whose high-profile boxing career was marred by substance abuse and other struggles and never approached the heights of his legendary father, was in Mexican custody Tuesday after being deported from the United States.
His expulsion had been expected since July, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested him outside his Studio City home and accused him of making “fraudulent statements” on his application to become a U.S. permanent resident.
In Mexico, Chávez, 39, faces charges of organized crime affiliation and arms trafficking, Mexican authorities say.
He is the son of Julio César Chávez — widely regarded as Mexico’s greatest boxer — and spent his career in the shadow of his fabled father.
Boxers Julio César Chávez, right, and his son Julio César Chávez Jr., during a news conference in Los Angeles in May.
(Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)
His father both supported his troubled son and chastised his namesake, whose struggles included substance abuse, legal troubles and challenges in making weight for his bouts.
Despite his highly publicized problems, Chávez won the World Boxing Council middleweight title in 2011 before losing the belt the following year.
Chávez was turned over to Mexican law enforcement authorities at the Arizona border and was being held Tuesday in a federal lockup in Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora state, authorities here said.
During her regular morning news conference, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum confirmed that the boxer was in Mexican custody.
Days before his July arrest in Studio City, Chávez faced off in Anaheim for his last bout — against Jake Paul, the influencer-turned-pugilist. Chávez lost the fight.
When he was arrested in July, U.S. authorities labeled Chávez an “affiliate” of the Sinaloa cartel, which is one of Mexico’s largest — and most lethal — drug-trafficking syndicates.
Jake Paul, right, and Julio César Chávez Jr., left, exchange punches during their cruiserweight bout in Anaheim on June 28.
(Anadolu / Anadolu via Getty Images)
Chávez has faced criticism over alleged associations with cartel figures, including Ovidio Guzmán, a son of infamous drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, now serving a life sentence in a U.S prison for his leadership role in the Sinaloa cartel. Ovidio Guzmán recently pleaded guilty to drug-trafficking and other charges in federal court in Chicago and is reported to be cooperating with U.S. prosecutors.
Controversies have long overshadowed the career of Chávez.
Chávez served 13 days in jail for a 2012 drunk-driving conviction in Los Angeles County and was arrested by Los Angeles police in January 2024 on gun charges. According to his attorney, Michael Goldstein, a court adjudicating the gun case granted Chávez a “mental health diversion,” which, in some cases, can lead to dismissal of criminal charges.
“I’m confident that the issues in Mexico will be cleared up, and he’ll be able to continue with his mental health diversion” in California, Goldstein said.
A lingering question in the case is why Chávez was apparently allowed to travel freely between the United States and Mexico on several occasions despite a Mexican arrest warrant issued against him in March 2023.
On Jan. 4, 2025, according to the Department of Homeland Security, Chávez reentered the United States from Tijuana into San Diego via the San Ysidro port of entry. He was permitted in despite the pending Mexican arrest warrant and a U.S. determination just a few weeks earlier that Chávez represented “an egregious public safety threat,” the DHS stated in a July 3 news release revealing the boxer’s detention.
Homeland Security said that the Biden administration — which was still in charge at the time of Chávez’s January entry — had determined that the boxer “was not an immigration enforcement priority.”
While in training for the Paul match, Chávez spoke out publicly against President Trump’s ramped-up deportation agenda, which has sparked protests and denunciations across California. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he accused the administration of “attacking” Latinos.
Chávez told The Times: “I wouldn’t want to be deported.”
McDonnell reported from Mexico City and El Reda from Los Angeles. Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City contributed to this report.
Ridership across Metro’s transit system plunged in June after federal immigration authorities conducted dramatic raids across Los Angeles County, sowing fear among many rail and bus riders.
Last month, the transit agency’s passenger numbers on buses continued to dip, although the reasons are not fully clear.
Ridership on rail crept up roughly 6.5% in July after a decrease of more than 3.7 million boardings across the rail and bus system the month before. Bus ridership accounted for the bulk of the June hit, with a ridership drop of more than 3.1 million from May. In July, bus boardings continued to decrease slightly by nearly 2%.
While it’s possible that concerns over safety have persisted as immigration raids continued to play out in the Los Angeles region, a drop in bus ridership from June to July in years past has not been uncommon, according to Metro data. A review of the number of boardings from 2018 shows routine dips in bus ridership during the summer months.
The agency said “there is a seasonal pattern to ridership and historically bus ridership is lower in July than June when schools and colleges are not in regular session and people are more likely to take time off from work.”
June saw a roughly 13.5% decline from the month before — the lowest June on record since 2022, when boardings had begun to climb again after the pandemic.
The reduction in passengers was not felt along every rail line and bus route. Metro chief executive Stephanie Wiggins noted during a board of directors meeting last month that the K Line saw a 140% surge in weekday ridership in June and a roughly 200% increase in weekend ridership after the opening of the LAX/Metro Transit Center.
Metro has struggled with ridership in recent years, first when the pandemic shuttered transit and then when a spate of violence on rail and buses shook trust in the system. Those numbers started to rebound this year and before June’s drop, had reached 90% of pre-pandemic counts.
But financial challenges have continued. Metro, which recently approved a $9.4 billion budget, faces a deficit of more than $2.3 billion through 2030. And federal funding for its major Olympics and Paralympics transportation plan to lease thousands of buses remains in flux. Maintaining ridership growth is critical for the the agency.
More than 60% of Metro bus riders and roughly 50% of its rail riders are Latino, according to a 2023 Metro survey. The decline in June’s ridership was due in part to growing concerns that transit riders would be swept up in immigration raids. Those fears were magnified when a widely shared video showed several residents apprehended at a bus stop in Pasadena.
Three of the men who were arrested at the stop by federal agents are plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Trump administration. They spoke earlier this month at a news conference in favor of the 9th U.S. Court of Appeals decision to uphold a temporary restraining order against the immigration stops and arrests.
Pedro Vasquez Perdomo, a day laborer, said he was taken by unidentified men while waiting at the bus stop to go to work like he did every day. He said that he was placed in a small space without access to a bathroom or adequate food, water and medicine. Vasquez Perdomo said the experience “changed my life forever” and called for “justice.”
Closures at stations during the raids and D Line construction beneath Wilshire Boulevard also affected June’s numbers, according to Metro officials.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a clear mind about the value of Social Security on Aug. 14, 1935, the day he signed it into law.
“The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure,” he said in the Oval Office. “We can never insure 100 per cent of the population against 100 per cent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against … poverty-ridden old age.”
He called it a “cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete.” FDR envisioned further programs to bring relief to the needy and healthcare for all Americans. Some of that happened during the following nine decades, but the structure is still incomplete. And now, as Social Security observes the 90th anniversary of that day, the program faces a crisis.
This is about whether we redefine a relationship between individuals and government that we’ve had since 1935. We say that what was done was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.
— Cato’s Michael Tanner sets forth the rationale for killing Social Security (in 2005)
If there are doubts about whether Social Security will survive long enough to observe its centennial, those have less to do with its fiscal challenges, the solutions of which are certainly within the economic reach of the richest nation on Earth. They have more to do with partisan politics, specifically the culmination of a decades-long GOP project to dismantle the most successful, and the most popular, government assistance program in American history.
From a distance, the raids on the program’s customer service infrastructure and the security of its data mounted by Elon Musk’s DOGE earlier this year looked somewhat random.
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Fueled by abject ignorance about how the program worked and what its data meant, DOGE set in place plans to cut the program’s staff by 7,000, or 12 percent, and to close dozens of field offices serving Social Security applicants and beneficiaries. This at a time when the Social Security case load is higher than ever and staffing had already approached a 50-year low.
That has been conservatives’ long-term plan — make interactions with Social Security more involved, more difficult and more time-consuming in order to make it seem ever less relevant to average Americans’ lives. Once that happened, the public would be softened up to accept a privatized retirement system.
Get the inefficient government off the backs of the people, the idea goes, so Wall Street can saddle up. George W. Bush’s privatization plan, indeed, was conceived and promoted by Wall Street bankers, who thirsted for access to the trillions of dollars passing through the system’s hands.
This was never much of a secret, but it simmered beneath the surface. But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, speaking at a July 30 event sponsored by Breitbart News, said the quiet part out loud. Referring to a private savings account program enacted as part of the GOP budget reconciliation bill Trump signed July 4, Bessent said, “In a way, it is a back door for privatizing Social Security.”
The private accounts are to be jump-started with $1,000 deposits for children born this year through 2028, to be invested in stock index mutual funds; families can add up to $5,000 annually in after-tax income, with withdrawals beginning when the child reaches 18, though in some cases incurring a stiff penalty.
I asked the Treasury Department for a clarification of Bessent’s remark, but didn’t receive a reply. Bessent, however, did try to walk the statement back via a post on X in which he stated that the Trump accounts are “an additive benefit for future generations, which will supplement the sanctity of Social Security’s guaranteed payments.”
Sorry, Mr. Secretary, no sale. You’re the one who talked about “privatizing Social Security” at the Breitbart event. You’re stuck with it.
Plainly, an “additive” benefit would have nothing to do with Social Security. How it would “supplement the sanctity” of Social Security benefits isn’t apparent from Bessent’s statement, or the law. Still, we can parse out the implications based on the long history of conservative attacks on the program.
In 1983, the libertarian Cato Journal published a paper by Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis, two policy analysts at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, titled “Achieving a ‘Leninist’ Strategy—i.e., for privatizing Social Security. From Lenin they drew the idea of mobilizing the working class to undermine existing capitalist structures.
Cato’s “Leninist” strategy paper explicitly advocated encouraging workers to opt out of Social Security by promising them a payroll tax reduction if they put the money in a private account.
IRAs, the authors asserted, would acclimate Americans to entrusting their retirements to a privatized system. They advocated an increase in the maximum annual contribution and its tax deductibility.
“The public would gradually become more familiar with the private option,” they wrote. “If that did happen, it would be far easier than it is now to adopt the private plan as their principal source of old-age insurance and retirement income.” In other words, it would provide a backdoor for privatizing Social Security.
(Germanis has since emerged as a cogent critic of conservative economics. Butler served at Heritage until 2014 and is currently a scholar in residence at the Brookings Institution; he told me in March that he still believes in parallel systems of private retirement savings as we have today, but as “add on” savings rather than a substitute for Social Security.)
Cato, a think tank co-founded by Charles Koch, has never relinquished its quest to privatize Social Security; the notion still occupies pride of place on the institution’s web page devoted to the program.
In 2005, when I attended a two-day conference on the topic at Cato’s Washington headquarters, Michael D. Tanner, then the chair of Cato’s Social Security task force, explained that Cato wasn’t concerned so much with the system’s fiscal and economic issues as with its politics. Its goal, he stated frankly, was to unmake FDR’s New Deal.
“This is about whether we redefine a relationship between individuals and government that we’ve had since 1935,” he told me. “We say that what was done was wrong then, and it’s wrong now. Our position is that people need to be responsible for their own lives.”
Yet forcing dramatic change on a program so widely trusted and appreciated is a heavy lift. That’s why Republicans have tried to downplay their intentions. Back in 2019, for instance, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) talked about the need to hold discussions about Social Security’s future “behind closed doors.”
Secrecy was essential, Ernst said, “so we’re not being scrutinized by this group or the other, and just have an open and honest conversation about what are some of the ideas that we have for maintaining Social Security in the future.”
As I observed at the time, that was a giveaway: The only time politicians take actions behind closed doors is when they know the results will be massively unpopular. Raising taxes on the rich to pay for Social Security benefits? That discussion can be held in the open, because the option is decisively favored in opinion polls. Cut benefits? That needs to be done in secret, because Americans overwhelmingly oppose it.
Curiously, Trump and his fellow Republicans seem to think that attacking Social Security is an electoral winner. Possibly they’ve lost sight of the program’s importance to the average American.
Among Social Security beneficiaries age 65 and older, 39% of men and 44% of women receive half their income or more from Social Security. In the same cohort, 12% of men and 15% of women rely on Social Security for 90% or more of their income.
Notwithstanding that reality, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently asserted that delays in sending out Social Security checks or bank deposits would be no big deal.
“Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month,” Lutnick said. “My mother-in-law, who’s 94 — she wouldn’t call and complain…. She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month.” He claimed that only “fraudsters” would complain.
I had a different take. Mine was that even a 24-hour delay in benefit payments would have a cataclysmic fallout for the Republican Party. It would be front-page news coast to coast. There would be nowhere for them to hide.
While bringing misery to millions of Americans, a delay — which would be unprecedented since the first checks went out in 1940 — would be a gift for Democrats, if they knew how to use it.
Where will we go from here? The current administration has already done damage to this critically-important program. An acting commissioner Trump installed briefly interfered with the enrollment process for infants born in Maine—an important procedure to ensure that government benefits continue to flow to their families—because the state’s governor had pushed back against Trump in public.
In July, the newly-appointed Social Security commissioner, Frank Bisignano, allowed a false and flagrantly political email to go out to beneficiaries and to be posted on the program’s website implying that the budget reconciliation bill relieved most seniors of federal income taxes on their benefits. It did nothing of the kind.
To the extent that Social Security may face a fiscal reckoning in the next decade, the most effective fix is well-understood by those familiar with the program’s structure. It’s removing the income cap on the payroll tax, which tops out this year at $176,100 in wage income.
Up to that point, wages are taxed at 12.4%, split evenly between workers and their employers. Above the ceiling, the tax is zero. Remove the cap, and make capital gains, dividends and interest income subject to the tax, and Social Security will remain fully solvent into the foreseeable future.
Trump and his fellow Republicans don’t seem to understand how most Americans view Social Security: as an “entitlement,” not because they think they’re getting something for nothing, but because they know they’ve paid for it all their working lives.
As much as the system’s foes would like it to go away, as long as the rest of us remain vigilant against efforts to “redefine a relationship between individuals and government” established in 1935, we will be able to celebrate its 100th anniversary 10 years from now, in 2035.
Aug. 12 (UPI) — The Consumer Price Index rose slightly less than expected in July annually as tariffs showed only a minimal influence on prices.
The CPI increased a seasonally adjusted 0.2% for the month and 2.7% on a 12-month basis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday. The Dow Jones estimates were 0.2% and 2.8%.
Excluding food and energy, core CPI increased 0.3% for the month and 3.1% from a year ago, compared with the forecasts for 0.3% and 3%. Federal Reserve officials generally consider core inflation to be a better reading for longer-term trends, CNBC reported.
The 2% increase in shelter costs was the main uptick in the index, while food prices were flat and energy fell 1.1%.
New vehicle prices, which are tariffed, were also unchanged, but used cars and trucks saw a 0.5% bump. Transportation and medical services both rose 0.8%.
Stock market futures showed gains after the report, while Treasury yields were mostly lower.
Tariffs did affect some areas. Household furnishings and supplies showed a 0.7% increase after rising 1% in June. But apparel prices rose just 0.1%, and core commodity prices increased just 0.2%. Canned fruits and vegetables, which are usually imported and also sensitive to tariffs, were flat.
“The tariffs are in the numbers, but they’re certainly not jumping out hair on fire at this point,” former White House economist Jared Bernstein said on CNBC. Bernstein served under former President Joe Biden.
The report comes in the middle of a political shake-up in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which releases the CPI.
President Donald Trump on Monday nominated economist E.J. Antoni as commissioner of the BLS, a non-partisan agency he has criticized.
If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, the chief economist with the conservative Heritage Foundation would replace Erika McEntarfer, who was fired by Trump on Aug. 1, alleging that she had manipulated the jobs reports for three months.
He worked for the Texas Public Policy Commission before the Heritage Foundation. He has master’s and doctorate degrees in economics from Northern Illinois University.
Last week, Antoni posted on X: “There are better ways to collect, process, and disseminate data — that is the task for the next BLS commissioner, and only consistent delivery of accurate data in a timely manner will rebuild the trust that has been lost over the last several years.”
On Nov. 13, one week after Trump was elected again, he wrote on X: “DOGE needs to take a chainsaw to the BLS.”
Rashawn Slater, the Chargers’ star left tackle who became the highest-paid offensive lineman in NFL history last month, sustained a torn patellar tendon in practice and will undergo season-ending surgery, the team announced Thursday.
Slater went down in team drills after going up against edge rusher Tuli Tuipulotu. As Slater planted his left foot, he collapsed to the ground and immediately grabbed his leg.
A quiet hush fell over the Chargers’ facility while Slater stayed down for several minutes before trainers and teammates helped him onto a cart. Slater appeared visibly distraught — throwing his helmet, slamming his hand on the cart and burying his face in his hands. Several teammates walked over to console him before he left the field.
Two trainers supported him as he entered the team facility. He was unable to put any weight on his left leg.
“I didn’t really see anything — I kind of just turned around and boom,” Tuipulotu said of the play. “We’re praying for him.”
The injury is a significant setback for a Chargers team that was hoping to have Slater anchor an offensive line that was hampered by injuries and struggled, at times, to create opportunities for the running game last season. The injury comes as the Chargers are already dealing with depth concerns along the line, with Mekhi Becton being sidelined since July 28 because of an undisclosed injury.
Slater played a valuable role in helping the Chargers set a franchise record for the fewest offensive turnovers (eight) in a season. He also finished 2024 with the second-best overall grade and the third-best pass-blocking grade at offensive tackle, per Pro Football Focus.
Joe Alt slid over to left tackle for the remainder of practice Thursday. Trey Pipkins III subbed in at right tackle — where he started in 2022 and 2023 — before spending most of last season at right guard, starting 15 games. With Slater out, Alt likely will be Justin Herbert’s blindside protector this season.
Keenan Allen always envisioned a return to the Chargers. Once his brief stint with the Chicago Bears ended, he saw himself coming back to the franchise that drafted him.
“It was close to home and family,” Allen said. “This is what I’m used to. The organization, the people around the building — it just feels like home.”
Thursday marked Allen’s first day back in powder blue and gold — a welcome sight for fans who watched his climb over 11 seasons.
On his first snap of full-team drills, Allen hauled in a strike over the middle from Justin Herbert, reigniting a familiar connection that lasted four seasons.
The two began rebuilding their chemistry last Friday, when Herbert threw to Allen during a private workout. Allen said they stayed in touch throughout the process leading up to his return.
Allen said he missed being on the receiving end of Herbert’s throws and is “just happy to be back.”
“This is where I’m supposed to be,” Allen said.
He is the veteran leader of a receiving room that looks much different than the one he left, with Quentin Johnston and Derius Davis the only holdovers from two seasons ago.
“[It’s] much better than what I’m used to seeing in a training camp this early,” Allen said of his first impressions. “The technique, the way they’re getting downfield, the way they’re pressing coverages — I think it looks great.”
Allen shared how impressed he’s been with Ladd McConkey, who broke his franchise rookie receiving records, joking, “He had a few more games.”
“You’ve got two guys who love to play football and compete,” said Allen, on sharing the field with McConkey. “You can put us anywhere. … And obviously, he showed that last year.”
Throughout the offseason, Allen felt teams “downplayed” his value. Entering his 13th season, he’s out to prove he can still perform at a high level at 33.
“Still got a little hunger, little chip on my shoulder and still want to go out there and play ball,” Allen said.
