标签： North America

As vote counting stretches on across California, the nation’s most populous state, former Biden administration health secretary Xavier Becerra has emerged as the presumptive candidate advancing to the November general election for governor, with the race for the second spot on the ballot still too close to call.

U.S. political journalism outlets confirm that Becerra, a veteran California politician who previously led the state as attorney general, is set to claim one of the two top spots in Tuesday’s nonpartisan primary election, a requirement to move forward to the general contest. Two candidates remain locked in a tight battle for the second slot on the November ballot: Steve Hilton, a British-American former conservative television host running as a Republican, and Tom Steyer, a billionaire Democratic climate activist.

With roughly 23 million registered voters casting ballots across the state, final results are not expected for weeks. The delay stems from the large volume of mail-in ballots, a staple of California’s election system that often pushes final result confirmation well past election night. A total of more than 60 candidates appeared on the primary ballot, a majority of whom identify as Democrats, all vying to replace incumbent Governor Gavin Newsom, who is barred from running again by state term limits.

The winner of the November general election will take charge of one of the largest subnational governments in the world, overseeing a multibillion-dollar annual budget, a workforce of thousands of state employees, and hundreds of separate state agencies that touch every aspect of California life.

A native son of California, Becerra has built a decades-long career spanning both state and federal office, holding seats in Congress before serving as state attorney general and later U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Joe Biden. If he wins the general election in November, he will make history as California’s first Latino governor since 1875, a milestone for a state where Latino residents account for roughly 41% of the total population.

Becerra has centered his primary campaign on his long record of public service, highlighting his experience working across both state government in Sacramento and federal institutions in Washington, D.C. to deliver for California constituents. Key policy pledges from his campaign include a firm commitment to push back against any policy agenda put forward by former President and 2024 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, as well as a promise to freeze rising insurance and utility rates for working and middle-class Californians.

Becerra’s path to front-runner status was cleared earlier this year when Democratic U.S. Representative Eric Swalwell dropped out of the race in April. Swalwell, who also resigned his congressional seat amid public allegations of sexual assault and misconduct—allegations he has repeatedly and vehemently denied—had been widely seen as the clear frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for months leading up to his exit. His departure from the race left the Democratic field wide open, creating internal rifts within the party as no replacement frontrunner immediately emerged in the deep-blue state, which has been controlled by Democratic governors since 2011.

This cycle’s gubernatorial contest has already made history as the most expensive in California’s record, driven by massive independent advertising spending from Steyer and major backing from Silicon Valley donors for another Democratic contender, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan. As county election officials continue to process the remaining uncounted ballots, political observers across the state are watching closely to see which candidate will claim the second spot and set the stage for a high-stakes general election this fall.

In a surprising late-night vote that marked a major win for digital privacy protections, a Republican-led push to extend the controversial warrantless surveillance authority under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) failed to advance in the U.S. Senate Friday. Seven GOP senators broke with their party’s leadership to join all but one congressional Democrat in opposing the measure, delivering a critical setback to backers of the sprawling surveillance program just days before the existing authority is set to expire.

Section 702, first enacted in 2008 and renewed multiple times since, grants the federal government broad power to conduct warrantless surveillance of electronic communications belonging to noncitizens located outside the United States. For years, however, civil liberties and privacy advocates have sounded alarms over systemic abuse of the law, documenting repeated instances where U.S. intelligence agencies have improperly used the framework to spy on American citizens, bypassing traditional court oversight required for domestic surveillance.

The expiration of the current authorization is scheduled for next Friday, leaving congressional leaders and the White House with limited time to broker a new deal on the future of the program. Privacy campaigners immediately hailed the failed procedural vote as a landmark moment for civil liberties. Sean Vitka, executive director of the advocacy group Demand Progress, framed the result as a “resounding defeat for opponents of privacy,” emphasizing that the outcome makes clear no renewal of Section 702 can move forward without mandatory warrant requirements for accessing Americans’ data.

“Clear majorities of Americans across the nation, and in Congress, do not want the government bypassing the courts to hoover up our private, personal data,” Vitka said. “If the White House and congressional leadership want to renew FISA, they have to stop ignoring this obvious fact and allow votes on real privacy reforms.”

While privacy advocates celebrated the interim win, experts and observers noted the vote outcome was partially shaped by growing bipartisan backlash against former President Donald Trump’s recent nomination of Bill Pulte, a loyalist, to serve as acting director of national intelligence. Multiple senators who have previously supported extending Section 702 switched their positions to oppose advancing the bill in protest of the nomination.

Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, called the blocked vote “an interim victory” but warned of the risks tied to putting the surveillance program under the control of a politically aligned unconfirmed intelligence leader. Goitein pointed out that Pulte, who currently leads the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), is already under investigation by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office for allegations that he misused his position and access to government records to bring unsubstantiated mortgage fraud charges against people Trump views as political enemies.

“If Pulte can do that with the limited access to Americans’ information he has as head of the [FHFA], imagine what he could do with all the authorities and capabilities of the intelligence community—including, of course, Section 702,” Goitein added. “What wouldn’t make sense? Handing Section 702 to whomever Trump could nominate in Pulte’s place without ensuring that they can’t use it as a tool for domestic spying.”

Even prominent supporters of Section 702 came out against advancing the bill in the wake of the Pulte nomination. Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat who has long backed extending the surveillance authority, announced he would vote against moving the legislation forward, calling Pulte an “enormously bad choice” who is “grossly unqualified” for the top intelligence post.

The failed vote sets up a high-stakes showdown over the coming week, as Washington policymakers weigh whether to advance targeted reforms that address longstanding privacy concerns, allow the existing authority to lapse entirely, or negotiate a last-minute deal to salvage the program before the current authorization runs out.

As the United States prepares to mark its 250th year as an independent nation, a stark democratic contradiction lies at the heart of its identity: more than 3.6 million U.S. citizens born and residing in the nation’s overseas territories are shut out of full participation in the country’s federal democracy.

These residents, spread across five territories — Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands — lack any representation in the U.S. Senate, and hold only non-voting delegate seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. While they are eligible to cast ballots in U.S. presidential primary contests, they are barred from voting in the general election that determines the nation’s commander-in-chief, a exclusion rooted entirely in their place of residence.

This year also marks another pivotal, far less celebrated anniversary: 125 years since the Supreme Court issued the Insular Cases, a notorious series of landmark rulings that first cemented this unequal status into U.S. law in May 1901, and continues to shape the contours of American democracy to this day. As political scientists who study the legislative history of territorial rights, we trace how 19th and early 20th century lawmakers grappled with extending rights to newly acquired territorial populations, and how their racist, colonialist decisions continue to shape American governance today.

The context for the Insular Cases stretches back to the 1898 Spanish-American War, a four-month conflict that left the U.S. in control of vast new territorial holdings seized from Spain, including Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Overnight, the U.S. gained roughly 8 million new residents, all located thousands of miles from the continental mainland, pushing the nation into a long-unresolved constitutional crisis. What political status would these new populations hold? Would they be fully integrated into American democracy, or governed as colonial subjects with no elected representation in Congress?

To resolve this question, the Supreme Court created a new, unprecedented distinction between two classes of U.S. territories: “incorporated” territories, which were marked for eventual statehood, and “unincorporated” territories, which were never intended to become states — including all the territories the U.S. still holds today. The ruling emerged from a political compromise: Congress had imposed tariffs on goods imported from Puerto Rico, a move that would have been unconstitutional if Puerto Rico was officially considered part of the U.S. Lawmakers deliberately passed the tariff bill and left it to the Supreme Court to justify the unequal arrangement.

The court’s final ruling cemented a paradox: these new territories belonged to the United States, but were not formally part of it. This classification left 8 million new residents existing outside the full protection of the U.S. Constitution — a group nearly equal in size to the entire Black American population of the era. Even then, Chief Justice Melville Fuller warned in a dissenting opinion that this ruling would leave territorial residents stuck in “a disembodied shade, in an intermediate state of ambiguous existence for an indefinite period” — a prediction that has held true for 125 years.

The bias at the heart of the Insular Cases was explicitly racial. Justice Henry Billings Brown, writing for the court majority, openly argued that “if those possessions are inhabited by alien races, differing from us in religion, customs, laws, methods of taxation, and modes of thought, the administration of government and justice according to Anglo-Saxon principles may for a time be impossible.”

This racial exclusion was carried forward by Congress as it designed a system of unequal representation for the new territories. Before 1898, Congress had only allowed nonvoting delegates for territories that were on a clear path to statehood. But after the Spanish-American War, lawmakers overwhelmingly rejected statehood for the newly acquired territories, openly arguing that their majority non-white populations were racially and culturally inferior, and unfit for full democratic participation.

In a 1900 speech on the House floor, Republican Representative John Dalzell of Pennsylvania encapsulated this view, arguing that “the methods of government prescribed by the principles of Anglican liberty as practiced in the United States would be grotesque in the Philippine Islands and would bring to their people no advantage.”

For territories never intended for statehood, Congress created a new, second-tier position: the resident commissioner, a role originally modeled more after a foreign ambassador than an elected lawmaker, with no right to access the House floor or speak during legislative proceedings. Over time, the role was adjusted to match the position of territorial delegates, granting the right to serve on committees, introduce legislation, and speak on the floor — but still no right to vote on whether a bill becomes law. Today, Puerto Rico, which has a larger population than more than a dozen U.S. states, still has only this one nonvoting representative in Congress.

125 years after the Insular Cases were decided, criticism of the rulings has grown across the political spectrum. Even current Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch has rejected the decisions, writing that they “have no foundation in the constitution and rest instead on racial stereotypes. They deserve no place in our law.”

A growing body of legal scholarship and grassroots activism has echoed Gorsuch’s call for the Supreme Court to overrule the decisions, but so far no action has been taken. What has received far less attention is the enduring legacy of this 1898 colonial expansion in Congress itself. Today, the resident commissioner of Puerto Rico and delegates from Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and even Washington, D.C., all still serve with a voice, but no vote. On the U.S.’s 250th anniversary, this 125-year-old injustice remains a foundational flaw in American democracy.

A fierce diplomatic and political row has erupted after United States Vice President JD Vance injected inflammatory rhetoric into the highly charged case of a slain British teenager, drawing sharp rebuke from Downing Street for alleged interference in UK domestic affairs.

Eighteen-year-old Henry Nowak was fatally stabbed in December 2024 by Vickrum Digwa as he walked home alone following a night out with friends. Digwa, who claimed the 21cm blade used in the killing was carried for his Sikh faith, was later sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 21 years. Public outrage intensified this week after the release of police body camera footage, which showed officers handcuffing Nowak while he lay dying, after Digwa falsely told police he was the victim of a racist attack.

The release of the footage sparked violent unrest in the southern English city of Southampton on Tuesday. Protesters threw projectiles at police officers, leaving 11 officers and one police dog injured, and resulted in two arrests. The case has already fueled domestic political tension in the UK, with opposition parties including the Conservatives and right-wing Reform UK accusing the government of enabling so-called “two-tier policing”, a claim that different communities are treated unequally by law enforcement.

This domestic dispute escalated to an international level when Vance took to social media platform X to weigh in on the killing. In his post, Vance framed Nowak’s death as a direct consequence of what he called a “mass invasion of migrants”, arguing that the teenager would still be alive if European political leaders had “stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred”. He added that the killing was “tragic as it is enraging” and that the “only response is righteous anger”. Vance’s comments echoed a recent statement from the US State Department, which claimed that “ideological conditioning and two-tiered policing are glaring symptoms of civilizational decline” that must be rejected across Western nations.

Vance’s intervention is not the first high-profile foreign comment on the case. Earlier this week, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer already condemned tech billionaire Elon Musk, owner of X, for “trying to whip up division” after Musk shared a misleading post calling on followers to circulate the bodycam footage widely, claiming police had “kowtowed” to Digwa.

In an official statement responding to Vance’s remarks, a Downing Street spokesperson pushed back hard against the foreign interference. The spokesperson noted that the Nowak family themselves have explicitly stated they do not want Henry’s death to be exploited to fuel further division in the UK. “Our politics should bring people together even in the most terrible of circumstances. That is who we are as a country,” the spokesperson said, adding that Downing Street rejected “people trying to interfere in our democracy and seeking to stir up division”.

Ed Davey, leader of the UK’s centrist Liberal Democrats, echoed the condemnation, arguing that all political leaders must reject efforts to politicize Nowak’s death for partisan gain regardless of where they come from. “We all need to resist attempts like this to politicize Henry Nowak’s death and divide our country – whether they come from MAGA politicians like Vance or their cronies here in the UK,” Davey said.

A high-stakes federal court hearing in Virginia has ended with a ruling that a former senior Central Intelligence Agency official charged with public corruption will remain behind bars pending his trial, after prosecutors painted him as a calculating, untrustworthy master manipulator with the skills to evade law enforcement.

Forty-nine-year-old David Rush, who once held top-secret security clearance granting access to the US intelligence community’s most sensitive information, faces a single initial charge of criminal theft of public funds tied to allegedly fraudulent timesheets that netted him roughly $70,000. But the case has ballooned into a far larger scandal after federal investigators uncovered a stunning cache of undeclared assets at his residential property.

Court documents and official statements from prosecutors lay out extraordinary allegations: between November 2025 and March 2026, Rush was issued gold bars and foreign currency to cover work-related expenses, but failed to file any required documentation for how the assets were used, leaving CIA officials unable to locate the bulk of the stock. When the FBI executed a search warrant at his home last month, agents found more than 300 gold bars valued at approximately $40 million, alongside $2 million in untraceable cash and more than 30 high-end luxury watches. Prosecutors argue Rush deliberately converted stolen public funds into easily tradable commodities to hide the illicit proceeds, adding that hundreds of millions in allegedly stolen assets remain unaccounted for to date.

Beyond the missing assets, prosecutors have leveled a series of additional allegations against Rush: they claim he defrauded the government by continuing to collect paid military leave after he was honorably discharged from the US Navy, and lied about his professional background when applying for his government role, falsely claiming to have served as a Navy pilot to mislead neighbors and employers. Prosecutors told the court Friday that Rush leveraged his decades of experience in intelligence work and his access to senior agency networks to carry out his scheme, painting him as a skilled manipulator who cannot be trusted to comply with pre-trial release rules.

Rush’s legal defense has pushed back sharply against the government’s narrative, dismissing the core allegations as sensationalized and out of context. Defense attorney Jessica Carmichael argued that the bizarre, secretive framing of many claims is inherent to the nature of classified intelligence work, not evidence of criminal wrongdoing. She told the court that all gold bars in Rush’s home were fully accounted for: when FBI agents arrived to search the property, Rush voluntarily disclosed the locked basement storage holding the bars and provided agents with the access codes, never claiming ownership of the assets. Carmichael called the government’s public focus on the gold cache a misleading publicity stunt, and requested that Rush be moved from his current solitary confinement (where he is only allowed two hours of out-of-cell time daily) to home detention with a GPS ankle monitor.

However, US Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick sided fully with federal prosecutors in his ruling, concluding that Rush poses an extreme flight risk that cannot be mitigated with supervised release. “He’s in a different position than most people to flee and avoid detection by law enforcement,” Fitzpatrick wrote in his decision, noting that Rush’s intelligence training and professional connections give him unique ability to evade capture if released. The investigation into the missing assets and potential additional charges remains ongoing, after the CIA itself referred the original tip of misconduct to the FBI for investigation.