Lawmakers, activists and union leaders across the US remember the co-founder of United Farm Workers union
Following the news that Dolores Huerta – the civil rights icon who popularized the rallying cry “Sí, se puede! – had died at the age of 96 on Wednesday, activists, lawmakers and civil rights leaders paid tribute to Hureta’s long and lasting legacy.
In California – where Huerta helped found the United Farm Workers (UFW) union – her death was deeply felt. It was in California’s central valley that she laid the foundations for the United Farm Workers, and helped organize the 1965 Delano grape strike – a national boycott of table grapes that resulted in better wages and working conditions for grape pickers. Several schools in California bear her name, and murals across the state depict her likeness. And in 2018, California declared 10 April – her birthday – Dolores Huerta Day.
Keaton Denlay says agents handed him ‘poorly formatted Excel spreadsheet’ and threatened to criminally prosecute him
A California county elections official is speaking out about the Department of Justice’s campaign against purported “voter fraud”, saying federal officials provided him a disorganized list of names filled with inaccuracies – and threatened to criminally prosecute him if he didn’t take action.
Keaton Denlay, the county clerk-recorder for Butte county, a region north of Sacramento, said a federal agent on Friday hand-delivered what appeared to be a printout of a “poorly formatted Excel spreadsheet with missing and jumbled information”. The DoJ claimed the list was of 47 “likely” noncitizens who were unlawfully registered to vote and demanded the county set aside their ballots. But Denlay said the document was riddled with errors and lacking crucial details, and he declined to act on it.
“We assume that our enemies, like the Chinese or the Iranians, want to undermine our elections,” says investigative journalist Peter Schweizer. “But a lot of the resistance has actually come from some of the states.”
Dolores Huerta, a celebrated 1960s labor union leader and civil rights activist, died on Wednesday in California at the age of 96, her family said.
Huerta was co-founder with Cesar Chavez, another veteran unionist and political activist, of the United Farm Workers union (UFW), which was credited with improving pay and conditions for agricultural workers through a series of strikes, boycotts and protests in the 1960s and 1970s.
Californians facing not one but two wealth-tax initiatives on next week's ballot may well be asking themselves how all these tens of billions of forcibly extracted dollars will be spent.
The answer, based on new studies and weary observation: horribly.
Take the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the country's second largest. In July, L.A. County Superintendent of Schools Debra Duardo designated the LAUSD as a "lack of going concern," due to its ongoing operating deficits, exacerbated by fresh salary increases for unionized workers. The state's longstanding school Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCAMT) then issued a damning report in September, placing the district at a "high risk" for fiscal insolvency. Why? Because payroll was expanding while enrollment was collapsing.
"From 2019-20 through 2024-25," the report found, "noncharter school enrollment declined from 440,365 to 369,830 students, a decrease of approximately 16.0%. Over the same period, total [full-time equivalent jobs] increased from 60,344 to 64,148, or approximately 6.3%. As a result, the number of students per total FTE declined from 7.3 to 5.8."
This incongruent math is a feature, not a bug, of Californian education spending.
"From 2002 to 2023," Reason Foundation Managing Director of Education Reform Aaron Garth Smith and Managing Director of Government Finance Jordan Campbell wrote in a study this June, "California led the nation in K-12 spending growth." And when exactly did K-12 enrollment peak in the LAUSD? 2002!
Between fiscal years 2013 and 2023, Smith and Campbell found, LAUSD enrollment fell by 34.7%, yet "inflation-adjusted expenditure on employee compensation—including salaries, benefits, and other wages—grew by…27%." In a city, county, and state dominated by public sector unions (the California Teachers Association has already spent more than $65.5 million this election cycle), collective bargainers sit across the table from the politicians they helped elect, leaving only taxpayers and public-school families on the outside looking in.
United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), one of the most radical teachers unions in the country, reacted to the FCAMT "high risk" report with an innumerate defiance redolent of President Donald Trump.
"This fake independent analysis disparages the school board for rightfully addressing the needs of working people who face some of the worst housing and childcare costs in the country," UTLA Vice President Julie Van Winkle told the Los Angeles Times. The union's website called the report "a so-called 'analysis'" that used "a rigged scoring system with a predetermined outcome."
The UTLA broke with the statewide California Teachers Association in backing Proposition 40, the retroactive 5 percent tax on billionaires' paper wealth that would send 90 percent of the proceeds toward healthcare spending. ("California's schools, hospitals, and clinics need funding. Billionaires do not," Van Winkle explained.) But while the controversial Prop. 40 is looking wobbly at the polls, amid caterwauls over big money in politics, the much less ballyhooed Prop. 3, which makes permanent some wealth taxes that were sold as temporary in 2012, looks set to sail through without much resistance. Literally.
Spending on Prop. 3, L.A. Times education reporter Howard Blume concluded this week, "adds up to more than $81 million for and about $5,500 against." For those keeping score at home, that's a ratio of more than 14,700 to 1, brought to you primarily by teachers unions, who incidentally are lying about the initiative.
"Strict accountability [will] ensure every dollar gets to classrooms, not Sacramento politicians," vows the Yes on 3 website. Nonsense: The higher income-tax brackets, which begin at $371,479 for individuals and $742,958 for couples filing jointly, just feed into California's general fund, of which 40 percent goes to transitional kindergarten through community college.
Californians who routinely support such tax hikes and spending increases may flatter themselves that they're taking the side of children over rapacious billionaires, as well as the odd hundred-thousandaire. But the results produced by these massive money transfers have stubbornly failed to adhere to the alleged beneficiaries.
In 2024–25, the California Policy Center noted in July, "approximately 54 percent of tested LAUSD students did not meet or exceed the state standard in English language arts, 63 percent did not meet it in mathematics, and 73 percent did not meet it in science." With results deflation has come grade inflation, meaning that Los Angeles public schools are increasingly passing students who don't meet grade-level standards.
Far from acting as a bulwark against heartless spending cuts, California's never-ending won't-you-think-of-the-children tax-and-spend cycles are blunting economic growth and creating hollowed-out monuments to the folly of central planning. Just as the LAUSD was beginning its dizzying enrollment descent, the district launched a $20 billion, eminent domain–abusing school-construction program that was routinely characterized as "the largest public works project in the western United States."
More than a thousand homes, plus such landmarks as the Ambassador Hotel and Hollywood Star Lanes (from The Big Lebowski) were plowed over, only to create an overall building stock that now stands half-empty, incurring massive sunk costs.
As Blume detailed this week in the L.A. Times, "A modern, vacant and vandalized $34-million public school sits next to Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters — a campus paid for with taxpayer-financed bond money, but so burdened with debt and damage that it's not clear that anyone can afford to move in. The compact, aesthetically striking campus is marred by widespread graffiti. Vandals have punched holes in floors, walls and ceilings over the last five years. Recent photos of the inside appear to show puddles and stains from water damage and char marks from fire. The district is paying at least $20,000 a month in security and maintenance, and last year calculated having spent more than $1 million to secure and maintain the building."
A federal appeals court refused to order California to set aside roughly 20,000 mail ballots tied to voters the Trump administration says are noncitizens.
That ’70s Show actor was sentenced to 30 years in prison for two counts of rape against two women, who were also Scientologists
Danny Masterson has lost the appeal of his rape conviction, meaning his 30-year prison sentence has been upheld.
The actor, best known for his role on That ’70s Show, was convicted in 2023 of two counts of rape against two women in 2003, while a third charge relating to a third plaintiff, who alleged she was raped by Masterson in 2001, was quashed.
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
Hazardous storm conditions delayed recovery efforts on mountain that has proved to be a perilous hiking spot
The body of a missing California hiker, blanketed in a layer of snow, was recovered on Mount Whitney on Sunday after a blustery storm delayed retrieval operations for five days.
The Inyo county sheriff’s office extended its condolences to the loved ones and family of the hiker, who has not been publicly identified, in a Monday statement.
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