Politics
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Commentary: Sam Altman's terrible reason for letting ChatGPT talk to teens about suicide
Last month, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held a hearing on what many consider to be an unfolding mental health crisis among teens.
Two of the witnesses were parents of children who’d committed suicide in the last year, and both believed that AI chatbots played a significant role in abetting their children�...Read more

Michael Hiltzik: With a subtle tweak to Social Security, Trump would renew the GOP war on disability recipients
Republicans' hostility to Social Security in general has been well-documented over the years. Less widely recognized is their antagonism for one component of the program: disability coverage.
As a target, disability had ebbed as disability rolls declined, along with unemployment, during the economic recovery of the last few years. But it's back...Read more

Commentary: My daughter is the face of Operation Midway Blitz. I am reclaiming her legacy
Katie Abraham is my daughter. I tragically lost her to a drunken driver on Jan. 19, when she was 20 years old. She loved — and was loved — by so many people. With her magnetic energy, Katie was the person people wanted to be around. She was the friend people turned to and the teammate who made every practice fun and inspiring.
Losing a ...Read more

Mark Z. Barabak: She was highly qualified to be California governor. Why did her campaign fizzle?
Among the small army of prospects who've eyed the California governorship, none seemed more qualified than Toni Atkins.
After serving on the San Diego City Council, she moved on to Sacramento, where Atkins led both the Assembly and state Senate, one of just three people in history — and the first in 147 years — to head both houses of ...Read more

Editorial: Trump's Santos commutation is typically contemptuous of 'law and order'
The pantheon of problematic presidential pardons has always cut across partisan lines.
Former President Joe Biden’s pre-emptive pardon of his son, Hunter Biden, was among the most brazen examples ever of a president putting family loyalty above presidential duty. Barack Obama’s commutation of the prison sentence of Army private and document...Read more

Lionel Laurent: Louvre robbery gang used a brazen new criminal blueprint
A ladder truck, an angle-grinder, a maxi-scooter, and seven minutes. That appears to be all it took for thieves to nab priceless jewelry from the Louvre, the world’s most-visited museum. The vulnerability of this cornerstone of French soft power adds to the country’s sense of malaise, and fingers are being pointed over apparent security ...Read more

POINT: Trump to universities -- Olive branch compact or prosecution and defunding
American universities are at a crossroads.
Their business model, which is overwhelmingly dependent on the twin pillars of federal grants and taxpayer-backed student loans, is failing in the face of declining public trust, financial malfeasance, a looming demographic cliff, and their publicly acknowledged discrimination, contrary to civil rights...Read more

Editorial: There's a better way to help Argentina
The White House is lining up $40 billion to help Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, stabilize his country’s finances ahead of midterm elections on Oct. 26. There’s a plausible case for intervention. Collapsing confidence and a familiar combination of peso crisis and inflation don’t just threaten Milei’s fiscal reforms: If the economy...Read more

COUNTERPOINT: Trump's compact would cripple universities
Among the many dangerous actions President Donald Trump has taken, his push to force some of the country’s best universities into signing a sweeping federal “compact” ranks just behind his pardons for the January 6 insurrectionists.
The 10-part compact is a bizarre mix of bombast, authoritarianism, and a few unremarkable ideas buried like...Read more

Commentary: Justice rekindled -- From California's 2017 infernos to the Palisades fire, accountability is the real resilience
When I landed in Northern California in October 2017 as a senior FEMA official, the sky was orange at noon. Entire neighborhoods in Santa Rosa and Napa were gone. Firefighters were still working on one ridge while evacuees filled shelters miles away. It was clear that California had entered a new era of fire behavior — faster, hotter, and far ...Read more

Commentary: Trump gives up the fight against hunger
Consider a hunger policy director at a state Department of Social Services studying food insecurity data across the state. For years, she has relied on the USDA’s annual Household Food Security Report to identify where hunger is rising, how many families are skipping meals, and how many children go to bed hungry. Those numbers help her target ...Read more

Commentary: Zohran Mamdani's campaign echoes a forgotten chapter of California history
New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s victory in June’s Democratic primary for New York City mayor wasn’t just a political upset — it’s a historic echo.
Nearly 70 years ago, in a vast California district spanning Palm Springs to the Mexico border, a naturalized Sikh American named Dalip Singh Saund stunned the political ...Read more

Editorial: Trump pressure helps kill UN shipping tax -- for now
The United States earned its independence by fighting a war to protest various indignities imposed by the crown, including levies that prompted the colonist slogan “taxation without representation.” Those at the United Nations seeking to implement a global money grab through shipping taxes might be wise to re-examine history.
Last week, the...Read more

Editorial: Turn on the cameras, ICE. What's taking you so long?
Thanks to U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis, we’ve finally learned something about what Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Border Patrol are doing in the Chicago area from the perspective of ICE and the U.S. Border Patrol, which is helpful even if you don’t like what’s going on.
Todd Lyons, acting director, U.S. ...Read more

Patricia Lopez: Food prices could go even higher after these ICE raids
The U.S. Labor Department is sounding a stark warning that the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has devastated the ranks of agricultural workers and now may threaten the food supply.
It’s bad news for farmers, who have already been buffeted by this administration’s tariffs, as well as for U.S. consumers, who sent President ...Read more

Editorial: The danger of not deporting criminal illegal aliens
It’s a lot harder for a would-be rapist to harm women when he’s not in the United States.
Clark County prosecutors believe Carlos Nava is a serial rapist who has victimized more than a dozen women and underage girls. His crime spree began more than a decade ago. Prosecutors believe he frequently targeted prostitutes and assaulted his ...Read more

Commentary: Warrantless home abductions by ICE are a recipe for Wild West shootouts
Since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second administration, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has significantly increased its enforcement actions nationwide. This shift has seen the use of more aggressive and combative tactics by ICE, including entering dwellings by force and without judicial warrants— as instructed by the ...Read more

Anita Chabria: Trump's AI poop post caps a week of MAGA indifference to Hitler jokes
An estimated 7 million Americans turned out Saturday to peacefully protest against the breakdown of our checks-and-balances democracy into a Trump-driven autocracy, rife with grift but light on civil rights.
Trump's response? An AI video of himself wearing a crown inside a fighter plane, dumping what appears to be feces on these very ...Read more

Commentary: What's in a name? The weight of the world
When our son, Naser, was 6 years old, he wanted to be called Kevin, a perfectly reasonable Midwestern name. This seems to be a rite of passage with children, to name and rename themselves.
But our son was not to know the agonies we went through to name him, honoring our respective South Asian and South American cultures and balancing the ...Read more

F.D. Flam: TikTok diets are helping people when medicine can't
As a species, humans possess a kind of superpower: the ability to survive on a remarkably wide variety of foods, allowing us to thrive everywhere from the Amazon rainforest to the Arctic tundra.
Now, thanks to social media, our dietary range is being tested again. TikTok and YouTube have made stars of influencers who tout — often with the ...Read more