NEW YORK — Chelsea Gray is out at least for Game 4 of the WNBA Finals after suffering an injury to her left foot Sunday.

The Las Vegas Aces star guard was wearing a boot on her foot and had it propped up on a scooter she used to get into practice Tuesday. She was injured in Game 3 on Sunday midway through the fourth quarter.

“It’s painful. I’m waiting for more information, it’s not good,” said Gray, who was going to wait until she got back to Las Vegas for further evaluation.

Las Vegas also will be missing forward Kiah Stokes, who had a boot on her right foot.

“I don’t know exactly, I woke up and my foot was hurting and we’re trying to figure it out from there,” Stokes said.

Game 4 is Wednesday night in New York and Las Vegas leads the best-of-five series 2-1. Game 5 would be on Friday if the Liberty even the series.

“You get to the Finals and you don’t get this time back. So it sucks in that way,” Gray said. “But I’m excited still to win a championship. We do it by committee. We haven’t been whole for a long time. Candace (Parker) has been out … so we’re kind of built for this moment.”

Gray said that she injured the foot in the fourth quarter of Las Vegas’ 87-73 loss to New York. She tried to shake it off but knew something was wrong when she couldn’t get up and down the court on the next few possessions.

“Obviously the timing (stinks),” Gray said. “There’s only a couple games left in our season.”

Gray, who is averaging 15.6 points and 6.8 assists in the playoffs this year, has been durable throughout her time with Las Vegas since joining the team as a free agent in 2021, missing only one game.

“We lost our general,” coach Becky Hammon said. “I don’t think there’s any one person that’s going to step up and fill her shoes.”

With Gray and Stokes out, the Aces will need to rely on reserves Sydney Colson and Cayla George to fill their void.

The Aces depth was one of the teams major questions coming into the season. Coming off the championship last year, Las Vegas hoped to increase its depth, but because of an injury to Candace Parker that has sidelined her since late July and Riquna Williams’ legal issues, the team hasn’t been able to do that.

The Aces have had to rely heavily on their four stars — Gray, A’ja Wilson, Jackie Young and Kelsey Plum — this season. The four have combined to average 75 of the team’s 88 points a game in the playoffs.

Gray’s injury is the latest in a long line of distractions that the defending champion Aces have had to overcome this season. Before the WNBA’s 27th season began, the league investigated the team after former Aces player Dearica Hamby said she had been bullied and manipulated for being pregnant.

The WNBA suspended Hammon for two games and also rescinded the Aces’ first-round pick in the 2025 draft for a different issue — a violation of league rules regarding impermissible player benefits.

Q: I got into it with a guy at a bar and we both were arrested. There are two witnesses who are clear this other person was wasted and started it, and that I was defending myself. But the police confiscated my cell phone. I want to know can they just go through it for any reason?

M.O., Tustin Ranch

A: The United States Supreme Court has ruled that the police may only search your cellphone when they have your consent or a valid search warrant. As to your consent, it has to be provided freely and voluntarily (not coerced). As to a search warrant, the police are to only search the phone identified and to focus on the evidence described in the warrant.

There may, however, be exigent circumstances that permit a search without warrant or consent: If the police have to search a phone quickly to prevent bodily harm or imminent danger to someone; to prevent the destruction of evidence of a crime; or to prevent the escape of a fleeing suspect. The exigent circumstances are to be carefully assessed to make sure they are legitimate.

Q: A friend of mine was driving. He had a bit to drink, got pulled over and by the time it was done, was arrested. Among other things, they took his cell phone. That’s legal?

G.N., Inglewood

A: Research indicates that the police generally can seize a cell phone, if a person is legally arrested. They can do so without a warrant. This does not mean they can search the phone, absent exigent circumstances as discussed above. The police could apply for a search warrant, if they have probable cause to believe the cell phone holds evidence of a crime.

Q: If I am pulled over by the police and asked for my cell phone, am I required to turn it over?

B.V., Long Beach

A: I think this question is best answered by a criminal law specialist who can talk out with you the circumstances involved. For example: Why were you pulled over? Was there some dialog with the officer that led him or her to ask for your cell phone?

The House on Tuesday failed to elect Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan as its next speaker, extending the uncertainty that followed the historic ouster of Rep. Kevin McCarthy earlier this month.

Jordan, a Republican, fell short of the majority he needed to secure the top post, with 20 members of his own party voting against him.

The entire Democratic caucus voted for their nominee, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York.

Another vote is possible Tuesday. It is unclear if the tally will remain the same.

California Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Richvale), who voted against Jordan, said afterward that he would support Jordan the next time around. He told reporters his first vote against Jordan was to protest McCarthy’s ouster. “What happened to him was wrong,” LaMalfa said.

In the meantime, House votes on other legislative matters remains stalled. Ahead of the floor vote, Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), who is currently serving as speaker pro tempore, told reporters he opposes expanding his powers, signaling he would not work with Democrats to get the House running again.

The failed Jordan vote comes less than a week after Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise fell short in his own bid to become speaker. Scalise pulled out as nominee after it became clear he would not have enough votes to get the gavel in a floor vote.

Most of those Republicans voting against Jordan were GOP centrists or those who viewed Jordan as too far right to lead the House. Most voted either for McCarthy or Scalise, or a handful of other establishment Republicans like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.).

Conversely, those who voted against Scalise last week believed he was too establishment or not conservative enough for their tastes.

Because the GOP House majority is so narrow, even a handful of votes can make all the difference.

Jordan, who has never served in party leadership, is a darling on the right and was endorsed by former President Trump.

He is a fixture on conservative talk shows, frequently blasting Democrats and liberals in power. The rhetoric earned him notice from party leaders, who in 2019 named him the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee and in 2020 to the House Judiciary Committee. Both committees tend to be a space for rabble-rousers, not for deal-makers. So is the far-right House Freedom Caucus, which Jordan co-founded in 2015, serving as the inaugural chair.

During a Friday news conference, Democratic leader Jeffries noted that Jordan during his 16-year tenure in Congress “hasn’t passed a single bill… because his focus has not been on the American people.”

The Ohioan has been a vocal critic of President Biden, frequently declining to vote on Biden-backed legislation.

Jordan cemented his loyalty to Trump in the wake of the 2020 presidential election when he cast doubt on the results. He “was a significant player” in Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, the House select committee’s Jan. 6 report noted.

When Jordan won the GOP nomination for speaker on Friday, a wave of Republicans indicated they would not back him. Over the weekend, however, he and others worked behind the scenes and on social media to pressure them to back him for the speakership.

Their lobbying campaign initially angered a faction of moderates, who said they planned to challenge Jordan in a floor vote.

The GOP struggle to agree on a leader has crippled the House.

Though McCarthy managed in January to secure the support he needed to become speaker after an unprecedented 15 votes, conservatives in his party grew frustrated in recent months after he reached deals with Democrats to avoid a debt default and government shutdown.

As speaker, Jordan would have to contend with this deep fracture as he confronts an array of issues, including another government shutdown deadline next month.

He would also need to confront the escalating conflict in and around the Gaza Strip. The assault launched by Hamas militants earlier this month prompted calls for additional military aid for Israel. The House, lacking a permanent speaker, has been unable to approve new aid or declare its position on the conflict.

The Biden administration would also be reliant on Jordan as speaker to call a floor vote to get legislation for additional military assistance to help Ukraine fend off Russian invaders. Though additional funding for the war-torn nation remains bipartisan lawmakers, an increasing number of rank-and-file Republicans have grown skeptical of continuing American investment and expressed an unwillingness to send more military aid.

The Pentagon has pressed House Republicans to approve further funding, warning that Russia could win the war if U.S. support for Ukraine dries up.

It’s getting harder and harder to pretend that the U.S. Supreme Court is much more than an instrument to protect the wealth of America’s corporations and its richest citizens.

The latest signal is the court’s decision to take a once-obscure tax case known as Moore vs. United States. On its face, the case involves the objection by Charles and Kathleen Moore, Washington state residents who have objected to a $15,000 tax bill they received as investors in a small Indian corporation.

But there’s much more at stake. The conservative anti-tax advocates backing the Moores are hoping to use the case to stifle the nascent movement in favor of a wealth tax on the richest Americans.

They’re explicit about that goal.

“As efforts to design new federal tax systems with potentially troubling constitutional infirmities continue to pick up steam,” the conservative Manhattan Institute warned in one of two friend-of-the-court briefs it has filed to support the Moores, it’s up to the court to “clarify the limits of Congress’ taxing power before the train has begun rolling unstoppably down the hill.”

The anti-tax gang’s targets are proposals — by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), among others — to levy taxes on assets with accumulated value but undistributed gains, such as art, collectibles, real estate and stock and bond holdings that haven’t been sold.

Warren’s proposal, which she aired in 2019 during a brief campaign for the presidential nomination, would have imposed a 2% tax on household net worth above $50 million and an additional 1% on fortunes of more than $1 billion. She estimated that it would bring in $2.75 trillion in revenue over 10 years.

“The Moore litigation … may be a stalking horse to block billionaire and wealth taxes, which have been proposed, but not yet enacted,” wrote tax experts Reuven S. Avi-Yonah and Steven M. Rosenthal for the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution.

The lawsuit doesn’t turn so much on whether income can be taxed, but on how to define “income.” The specific issue is whether it must be “realized” to become taxable. In other words, whether the definition applies only to income that has been paid out to recipients as something akin to cash.

The plaintiffs and their supporters maintain that this was the understanding implicit in the 16th Amendment, which was ratified in 1913 and cleared the way for the income tax.

The government disputes that interpretation. In its filings, it points out that nowhere in the 16th Amendment is the concept of “realization” mentioned. Indeed, the amendment refers to “incomes, from whatever source derived.” Previous rulings by the Supreme Court and appellate courts have held that income doesn’t have to land in a recipient’s pockets to be taxed.

In an oft-cited 1940 Supreme Court opinion, for example, Justice Harlan F. Stone described the concept of realization as an “administrative convenience,” and didn’t mean that a taxpayer could “escape taxation because he did not actually receive the money.” Any other interpretation, Stone implied, would invite large-scale tax evasion by allowing taxpayers to give away their right to a taxable payout by giving it away before pocketing it.

Indeed, that has long been seen as a flaw in our capital gains tax law. As the late tax expert Ed Kleinbard was fond of observing, the capital gains tax is our only genuinely voluntary tax because it’s levied only when capital assets such as stocks, bonds and real estate are sold — and a taxpayer can defer that occurrence indefinitely, even beyond death, while taking advantage of the asset by means such as borrowing against it.

Under current rules, a capital asset bequeathed to an heir is revalued to its price at the time of the original owner’s death, extinguishing all tax liability incurred up to that point, forever. That tax break has helped create dynastic fortunes worth billions of dollars and is what motivates wealth tax advocates such as Sanders and Warren to capture the owed tax now, not later or even never.

Curiously, the immediate target of the Moore lawsuit is a Republican tax law — the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed by the GOP congress and signed by President Trump in 2017. In general, the act delivered tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy estimated to be worth more than $1.5 trillion over 10 years.

One provision wiped out all taxes on dividends taxpayers received from foreign companies controlled by Americans. The idea was to encourage Americans to bring home investment gains they had parked overseas — “stateless income” that Kleinbard estimated to be worth $1 trillion.

As a transitional step, the act imposed a one-time tax on those foreign earnings, albeit at a gratifying cut rate of only 9%, well below the top income tax rate of 39.6%. The Moores reported a gain of $132,512 from their investment in the Indian company, KisanKraft, paid $14,729, and filed their lawsuit, with the assistance of the Koch-affiliated Competitive Enterprise Institute, to obtain a refund.

Their argument is that the one-time tax, known as the Mandatory Repatriation Tax, is unconstitutional. They say that’s because it’s not an income tax permitted by the 16th Amendment, since the taxpayers received no actual income. That’s the claim that the Supreme Court will consider after oral arguments scheduled for Dec. 5.

If the court overturns only the repatriation levy, that would cost the Treasury an estimated $340 billion — the sum it expects to collect over the 10-year period from 2018 to 2027. The court could also move more broadly to invalidate a host of provisions on unrealized income in the corporate and business tax systems, which could cost trillions of dollars.

To even casual observers, it looks as if the fix is in for the Moores among the Supreme Court’s conservative majority. Start with Justice Samuel Alito. He was interviewed twice by one of the lead lawyers for the Moores, David B. Rivkin Jr., for two Wall Street Journal op-eds, including one that amounted to an unapologetic tongue-bath for the justice.

That article’s headline called Alito “the Supreme Court’s plain-spoken defender”; its text praised him for “a candor that is refreshing and can be startling” and essentially gave him 2,500 words to defend his rulings and ethics. Alito rebuffed demands from Democratic senators, among others, that he recuse himself in the Moore case, writing that Rivkin conducted the interviews “as a journalist, not an advocate.”

Then there are Paul Singer and Harlan Crow, billionaires who notoriously have been vacation pals of Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas and “have their fingerprints all over this case,” as former Democratic congressional aide Alex Aronson and Bob Lord, a tax advisor to Patriotic Millionaires, an organization representing philanthropy-oriented plutocrats, commented in Slate.

Singer and Crow are major supporters of the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank that has filed two friend-of-the-court briefs with the Supreme Court on the Moores’ side. Singer is the institute’s chairman, and Crow’s wife, Kathy, is a member of its board of trustees.

The Moores’ lawyers depict them as small investors who were “inspired” by KisanKraft’s effort to “empower subsistence farmers in India” by providing them with tools. “They never sought or expected a penny of income” from their $40,000 investment in 2006, according to the Manhattan Institute brief. Sure, the company made a profit, but “that was never the point” for the Moores. They “had no say in its operations,” the brief says.

Is that so? Moore is listed as a member of the company’s board of directors, so he has had at least a putative say in its operations. Nor is he a random plaintiff. He’s the son of Thomas Gale Moore, an economist connected with the Competitive Enterprise Institute and emeritus fellow of the conservative Hoover Institution, who is known for (among other things) the 1998 Cato Institute-published book “Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn’t Worry About Global Warming.”

As for whether the Moores actually realized any income from their investment, public accounts of KisanKraft document that Moore sold shares in three tranches in 2019 to reduce his stockholdings to about 9.9% of the company from 12.9%. It isn’t clear from the accounts whether these stock sales were made at higher share values than his investments.

The Supreme Court’s critics are steeling themselves for what could be a far-reaching decision presumptively invalidating any wealth tax. The Constitution restricts the court to ruling only on actual “cases” and “controversies” — that is, on concrete harms affecting real people, not conjectural issues that might occur in the future.

Unfortunately, this Supreme Court has been regularly crossing that line. That happened this summer when the court issued a landmark ruling establishing the right of a Christian website designer in Colorado to refuse to work on same-sex wedding websites. As the New Republic reported, the plaintiff had not actually received an order from a same-sex couple — there was no actual controversy, but simply her concern that if she refused such an order, she would be violating state law.

The same flaw was present in the court’s ruling striking down the Biden administration’s student loan relief program in June. The red states that brought that case cited the harm suffered by a Missouri student loan agency from the debt relief. That agency, however, had refused to join the lawsuit, and in fact its financial situation would have been improved by the student loan relief.

Then there’s the abortion drug case that the court has ruled on, at least on an intermediate basis. The plaintiffs who brought the case to a federal court in Texas and to the spectacularly conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals are classic straw men — they’re antiabortion organizations and antiabortion doctors who haven’t shown that they have suffered concrete harms because patients, not their own, have used the pill.

The wealth taxes that anti-tax crusaders want the court to invalidate don’t actually exist in the federal tax system. That means that the Supreme Court, if it chooses to rule on the concept of a wealth tax as the groups backing the Moores hope, would actually be legislating, which the Constitution forbids. That hasn’t stopped the court in the recent past, however, and it may not stop it now.

INGLEWOOD — Revenge is a dish served cold. But the Chargers misunderstood the assignment.

Because they froze up on the big stage. Monday night’s showcase game became an exercise in futility for the Chargers’ new offensive coordinator Kellen Moore against the Dallas Cowboys, the team whom he’d coached the previous eight seasons before they parted ways in January.

It was a Monday Night Flunk.

The Chargers lost, 20-17, at SoFi Stadium, replicating the score of a loss to Moore and his old crew two seasons ago in L.A.

That time, Dak Prescott drove Dallas down the field for a game-winning field goal. This time, Justin Herbert, under pressure all night, finally succumbed on the Chargers’ last drive.

He was sacked for the first time on second down and then intercepted a play later, a whimper in tune with the Chargers’ offensive output for most of the contest.

After scoring a touchdown on their opening drive, the Chargers (2-3) passed on a field-goal gimme opportunity, going for it on fourth-and-1 at the 7-yard line with 7:47 to play in the third quarter – and coming up empty when Herbert couldn’t connect with Joshua Palmer in the end zone.

The Bolts scored only one more touchdown after that, a nifty play call freeing up tight end Gerald Everett for a 1-yard touchdown catch with 7:15 to play.

Otherwise, it was Monday Night funk for a stagnant offense that had, at times, shown signs of forward progress in Moore’s first season in L.A.

For one, Herbert had turned over the ball just once before Monday. And coming in, the Chargers’ red zone touchdown percentage was much improved: 68.8% (fifth in the NFL), while Dallas’ was 36.8% (28th).

The Bolts also showed up for work Monday ranked fifth in the league in total offense (388.8 yards per game) and sixth in passing (269.0).

But against the Cowboys (4-2), Moore wasn’t exactly living up to the allegations about him, not quite cutting that swashbuckling figure that Dallas coach Mike McCarthy claimed him to be after the split in January, when the coach said in an interview that his former offensive coordinator was focused on wanting to “light the scoreboard up.”

“I want him to run the damn ball so I can rest my defense,” McCarthy went on. “I think when you’re a coordinator, you know but you’re in charge of the offense. Being a head coach and being a play caller, you’re a little more in tune with (everything). I don’t desire to be the No. 1 offense in the league. I want to be the No. 1 team in the league with the number of wins and a championship.”

On Monday, the Chargers ran the damn ball almost as often as Dallas (23 carries vs. 26) – but to little avail, even with Austin Ekeler healthy and back on the field. The Bolts gained only 53 rushing yards.

Meanwhile, Herbert never could get comfortable, completing 22 of 37 pass attempts for 227 yards, the two TDs and the deciding interception with 1:29 to play.

And Moore – under whom the Chargers were averaging five more offensive points per game than last year, while the Cowboys had been scoring an average of 5.2 fewer – wasn’t able to derive a benefit from any insider knowledge of his former team.

The Chargers scored their fewest points of the season, as Herbert failed to complete even 60% of his passes for the second consecutive game.

“I missed a couple receivers, I threw some bad passes,” said Herbert, the fourth-year signal caller who signed a five-year, $262.5 million contract extension before the season.

Herbert blamed himself and embattled head coach Brandon Staley credited Dallas: “It was a high-level game between two teams that are really, really good.”

By DAN GELSTON AP Sports Writer

PHILADELPHIA — Bryce Harper smashed the first pitch he saw on his 31st birthday into the seats, Kyle Schwarber hit his first homer of the postseason and Nick Castellanos also went deep again to power the Philadelphia Phillies past the Arizona Diamondbacks, 5-3, in Game 1 of the National League Championship Series on Monday night.

Harper held up three fingers on his left hand and one on his right and pretended to blow them out like candles on a cake as he crossed the plate. Harper, who also walked, scored twice and knocked in two runs, hit his 10th homer in two postseasons with the Phillies.

“I’ve always wanted to play on my birthday,” he said before the game.

Zack Wheeler struck out eight in six innings to help the defending NL champions win their seventh Game 1 of the last two postseasons. Wheeler sawed two bats in half during the first two innings, leaving the Diamondbacks with more pieces of busted lumber than hits through five.

José Alvarado got four big outs on 15 pitches and Craig Kimbrel worked a scoreless ninth for the save.

Arizona was stuck with its first loss of the postseason after ripping off five straight wins against the Brewers and Dodgers.

The Diamondbacks were simply the latest team to unravel under the red storm of 45,396 towel-waving, deliriously cheering fans at Citizens Bank Park. The Phillies never gave fans a reason to stop – or a chance for Arizona to catch its breath until it was too late.

Schwarber started the home run derby when he launched Zac Gallen’s first pitch 420 feet into the right-field seats. There was some minor consternation that Schwarber – with 47 homers this season and 93 over the last two – had yet to go deep through six playoff games. How easy it was to forget that Schwarber didn’t hit any in the Wild Card Series or NLDS last season before he launched six in the NLCS and World Series. So those Schwarbombs might just be getting started.

“We know what type of guy Schwarber’s going to be for us. He’s huge in that 1 spot,” Harper said. “There’s never a doubt on how good he’s going to be. We’re excited to see what he can do in the NLCS and as we go.”

Four pitches later, Harper homered – the first time in 127 postseason games that Philadelphia went deep twice in the first inning.

When Castellanos lined his fifth homer of the playoffs in the third – all in the past three games – it gave the Phillies 32 home runs in 13 postseason games at Citizens Bank Park over the last two years.

The Kelce Bros approved. Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce – minus celebrity friend Taylor Swift – and Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce went wild. Travis pointed to his brother as Jason pounded a beer in their suite.

Gallen, a South Jersey native, had his name derisively drawn out to “Galll-ennnn” by Phillies fans each time the 17-game winner got into a jam. Too many times, for Arizona.

Trea Turner hit a one-double in the third, leaving first base open. Gallen pitched to Harper instead of walking him and got burned by an RBI single for a 4-0 lead.

J.T. Realmuto added an RBI single in the fifth.

“Gallen, he’s been throwing the ball well all year. Just tried to get on top of him as much as we could, score early,” Harper said. “Schwarber starting the game off right there was huge for us.”

Those runs proved crucial for the Phillies. Geraldo Perdomo hit a two-run homer off Wheeler in the sixth that made it 5-2.

Seranthony Domínguez opened the door in the seventh for the Diamondbacks when his throwing error on a comebacker led to an unearned run. Alvarado retired pinch-hitter Emmanuel Rivera on a groundout to keep it 5-3 and tossed a scoreless eighth.

SNAKE EYES

The Diamondbacks, who at 84-78 squeezed into the playoffs as the final NL wild card, were held to four hits.

GOING DEEP

Schwarber’s fourth leadoff homer in the postseason moved him past Jimmy Rollins and Derek Jeter for most in baseball history.

Harper joined St. Louis’ Kolten Wong, Tampa Bay’s Evan Longoria and Kansas City’s Willie Aikens as the only players in postseason history to homer on his birthday.

Castellanos’ five homers in his last three postseason games – he hit two in consecutive games against Atlanta — made him the second player to hit those marks. New York Yankees slugger Reggie Jackson did it in the 1977 World Series.

UP NEXT

Arizona sends right-hander Merrill Kelly (1-0 postseason, 0.00 ERA) to the mound for Game 2. Right-hander Aaron Nola (2-0 postseason, 1.42 ERA) will start for the Phillies.

Nola is eligible for free agency after the World Series after he tabled contract extension talks with the team in spring training. Nola made $16 million this year on the club option that was part of the $45 million, four-year deal he signed ahead of the 2019 season. Nola said he wanted to stay in Philadelphia.

“I hope so. I really do,” Nola said before the game. “I love it here. Obviously, it’s the only place I’ve been. I came up through some special times in the rebuilding era ask and getting to witness and be a part of a lot of different type of teams.”

In normal times domestic political fights over foreign policy break down more or less along a conventional left-right divide. These are not normal times.

The right is largely united around the need to support Israel in its war with Hamas, but increasingly divided about backing Ukraine in its war with Russia. The left is largely united around the need to help Ukraine, but more divided about siding with Israel.

It’s not perfectly symmetrical. Democrats are more unified on Israel, in part because of President Biden’s unequivocal support. But it’s early. After all, the history of the Democratic Party resisting campus radicals and the “antiwar” left is not a tale of heroic resolve. And that the response on campuses to a terrorist pogrom was to immediately express support for Palestinians does not suggest the left-wing fringe will come around to a more nuanced stance.

Meanwhile, even though the GOP is unified in its support for Israel — to the point where even many America-firsters have abandoned all foreign policy consistency to show solidarity with Israel — on the fringes, especially on social media, skepticism over support for Israel is already growing.

In some of the swampier quarters, outright antisemitism is breaking into the open. And Donald Trump, who has long boasted of doing more for Israel than anyone since Moses, is suddenly celebrating how “very smart” Hezbollah is and berating Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (which is not to say he doesn’t deserve criticism, though not from Trump).

Given the hothouse of a presidential election, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to imagine support for Israel melting away on the new right and the “anti-Zionist” left as Biden becomes more identified with support for Israel.

In short, inside the water’s edge of domestic politics, it’s a two-front war. What I think a lot of people are missing is that it’s a two-front war outside the water’s edge too.

There’s been an intense and bizarre debate over Iran’s complicity in Hamas’ attack. Iran has supported Hamas for decades. Whether it officially ordered, or approved, the invasion beforehand hardly erases its culpability. If you keep assassins who vow to kill Israelis on a retainer, it’s hardly an outrageous slander to say you have some responsibility when they do.

The more vital question is of Russia’s involvement. Russia’s disastrous war on Ukraine has drawn it ever closer to Iran, which supplies it with drones and other weapons. Both of these heavily sanctioned pariah-states depend on oil revenue to stay afloat. Global instability keeps the petrodollars flowing. There’s no evidence that Russia greenlighted the attack, but it’s clear that Putin benefits from a Middle East war that diverts Western attention and resources.

Why give him the win he wants?

Ukraine, which has expressed its support for Israel, certainly sees the stakes clearly. President Volodymyr Zelensky even wants to visit Israel as a show of solidarity.

Opponents of aiding Ukraine dismiss any linkage — legislatively, strategically or morally — between Israel and Ukraine. Forty-eight hours after the Hamas attack, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) insisted: “Israel is facing existential threat. Any funding for Ukraine should be redirected to Israel immediately.” The populist Heritage Foundation declared: “Lawmakers need to resist attempts to link emergency military support for Israel with additional funding for Ukraine. These conflicts are separate and distinct.”

Not really.

Seeing both conflicts through a partisan lens just demonstrates how domestic partisanship can blind you to the bigger picture. These are two fronts in broadly the same fight. Israel and Ukraine alike are flawed but decent democracies facing enemies who seek to erase them from the map. Israel may be more of a historic ally than Ukraine, but their enemies are allies with shared interests.

Putting all other obvious moral and strategic considerations aside, America simply has a vital interest in maintaining its credibility to keep its commitments not just to Ukraine and Israel, but to our broader coalition of allies.

After 9/11, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization got our back. Now NATO needs us to help deal with the threat on its doorstep. And we may need NATO if Iran opts to join the fray in Israel. Lord knows China is watching to see if we buckle.

None of this requires American boots on the ground in Israel or Ukraine. Both countries are willing to do the fighting and dying. What they want is help in what amounts to the same war on two fronts.

@JonahDispatch

Indie music hub Bandcamp has laid off half of its employees, less than a month after the announcement that music licensing company Songtradr had purchased the platform from video game publisher Epic Games.

Founded in 2008, Bandcamp is beloved by musicians for its artist-friendly revenue sharing and active fan community. In March 2020, the company launched Bandcamp Friday, which gives artists 100% of profits for sales occurring on the first Friday of every month. Bandcamp Daily, the company’s music blog, spotlighted curated new releases and offered features on emerging, independent artists. A number of the site’s writers and editors shared news of their dismissal on X (formerly known as Twitter).

“I had 3 years of having my dream job helping artists make records and making vinyl more accessible,” said Ava Mirzadegan, a former Bandcamp vinyl representative, in a post. “I’m proud of myself for getting here even if all ended like this.”

“Unsurprisingly there has been no humanity extended in this process. Our union will prosper though,” wrote Atoosa Moinzadeh.

Bandcamp had operated as an independent company until Epic Games acquired it in 2022. On Sept. 28, Epic Games laid off about 830 employees, or 16% of its staff, and announced it had sold Bandcamp to Songtradr. In an internal email announcing the sale, Epic Games said Songtradr would offer positions to some, but not all, Bandcamp employees.

Jordan Opre, 27, a Bandcamp support specialist based in Seal Beach, said when he and other workers received the internal announcement of the sale, they were caught off guard.

“I think overall the collective reaction has been surprised,” Opre said in an interview a few days after the sale was announced. “There’s just a lot of uncertainty. There hasn’t been clear or definite communication in terms of who’s getting laid off.”

The Bandcamp staff reductions were part of the September layoffs initiated by Epic Games. A representative for Songtradr told The Times that 60 of Bandcamp’s 118 employees were offered the opportunity to retain their position, and that 58 workers had accepted.

Additionally, the representative told The Times 50% of the core editorial staff would remain on board.

“Over the past few years the operating costs of Bandcamp have significantly increased,” said the Songtradr representative. “It required some adjustments to ensure a sustainable and healthy company that can serve its community of artists and fans.”

Bandcamp United, a union represented by the Office and Professional Employees International Union, formed soon after the sale to Epic Games, as the acquisition sparked internal worries around Bandcamp’s future.

The union was recognized in May 2023 and had begun negotiating its first collective bargaining agreement with Epic in August.

“[Bargaining with Epic Games] was actually going all right, compared to some other places we’ve been bargaining with,” said Sandy Pope, OPEIU bargaining director. “It makes you wonder if they knew something was coming and decided it wasn’t worth putting up a big fight. You can’t sell a company overnight.”

Songtradr has not officially recognized the Bandcamp United union, which had been demanding Songtradr extend an offer to all employees and provide severance packages to those who declined to stay on board. Because the transaction was an asset sale, Songtradr had no legal requirement to retain employees or recognize the union.

After initial messaging from Songtradr stressed that it would remain “business as usual” in the wake of the sale, however, Pope expressed a feeling of betrayal.

“We got the email from [Songtradr CEO] Paul Wiltshire, saying they intended to keep everything the same, but then you get rid of the people who do the creative and who started it?” she said. “People loved working for Bandcamp. They were gutted by the news today.”

Interference and fidelity have been the bane of AM radio broadcasters and listeners since the medium was developed in the early 1900s. In fact, what drove Edwin Armstrong to invent FM radio was that he hated the sound of AM, which he also helped develop.

Over the years, technical improvements have helped make AM sound better, but the erosion of listeners from the band has continued. One potential solution was digital HD radio, but the hybrid HD system introduced its own problems by increasing overall interference on the band, leading many stations to abandon it.

But what about all-digital AM? Does it have the potential to fix all that ails the band? In 2018, WWFD/Frederick, Maryland decided to find out. The station went all-digital under temporary authorization by the FCC (later approved for permanent full-time use).

That’s a huge risk. All-digital broadcasting means that only those with HD radios can hear your station. All-digital renders the vast majority of AM radios obsolete, as all they would “hear” is static (before eventually tuning out, you’d imagine). Having no listeners tends to hurt stations that rely on an active listener base to sell advertising.

Yet the idea is not unprecedented. Indeed, there were few radios available at the genesis of AM itself in 1922, and FM stations languished for years due to a lack of receivers.

Likewise, the payoffs are huge. For a station that is already losing money, it begs the question – why not take the chance? Of course, one could say that regarding programming itself, so there are multiple ways to take risks that might pay off big in the future.

In the case of WWFD, the management felt the risk was worth it. After five years of testing, the station has announced that it will remain all-digital, playing a wide-variety music format called The Gamut.

“It was my intention all the way back then that this would be permanent,” station programmer and engineer Dave Kolesar told radio engineering newspaper Radio World. “We have learned that all-digital AM broadcasting is much more robust than the hybrid mode of HD AM, and in fact has many advantages over analog broadcasting in terms of sound quality and metadata.”

Metadata is the capability of sending song information, album artwork, and even secondary audio channels over the air. “It makes AM look and sound like every other broadcast service in the dashboard, and that’s essential to the future of the band,” he said, adding “it even works well in electric vehicles.”

Another advantage of all-digital? The reception is almost instantaneous, much like analog. The hybrid mode on both AM and FM takes a second or two for digital to kick in. Likewise, interference between stations is reduced, as the signal is centered more tightly on the assigned frequency; hybrid mode puts the digital stream on the sides of the analog signal.

You can hear samples of the station online at meduci.com/airchecks.html. One of the included files demonstrates the fast reception capability, and I have to admit, I was surprised how fast it clicks in.

Obviously, digital is not for everyone, and programming trumps sound quality … it makes no difference what you sound like if no one wants to hear what you broadcast. While a station like KFI (640 AM) has too much to lose as one of the top-rated stations in town, a station like KABC (790 AM) might well consider it. There are rumblings that KMZT (1260 AM) will try testing all-digital at least temporarily at certain times of the day, and I think it would be a great idea. I’d like to know just how far the all-digital signal can travel, and if it can do so at night. It could indeed be a game-changer.

Kolesar agrees, telling Radio World that all-digital is something every AM broadcaster needs to move toward, sooner rather than later. “Analog AM listenership is declining, and we need to stop worrying about obsoleting analog-only radios … because fewer people are even bothering to turn them on.”

Modern Music

Alt 98.7 FM’s Woody Show announced the artists scheduled to perform at the annual Alter Ego concert to be held January 13, 2024 at the Honda Center in Anaheim. The venue is a change from the past … the Forum is being used this year by The Eagles, necessitating the move South.

As if to make my point that there is a lot of good new (or at least new-ish) music available … you just can’t hear it everywhere … the concert features some amazing talent that isn’t really alternative in my mind – it’s just good.

Paramore, The 1975, The Black Keys, Thirty Seconds to Mars, BUSH, Sum 41, Yellowcard, lovelytheband and The Last Dinner Party will perform all on one stage, making for a tremendous concert. It is sponsored by station owner iHeart Media and hosted by Woody and his crew.

Presale begins October 24th, general sales on October 27th. The concert will also be broadcast on iHeart alternative stations nationwide. Get more information at alt987fm.iheart.com.

By KRISTIE RIEKEN (AP Sports Writer)

HOUSTON — Jordan Montgomery outdueled Justin Verlander and the Texas Rangers received a big boost from their youngest player to open the AL Championship Series with a 2-0 win over the Houston Astros on Sunday night.

Montgomery pitched five-hit ball over 6 1/3 innings, Leody Taveras provided a two-run lead with his solo homer in the fifth and the Rangers remained perfect in the postseason at 6-0.

Evan Carter, a rookie who just turned 21 on Aug. 29, doubled and scored in the second and made two nifty defensive plays in left field. He’s shined this postseason after not making his major league debut until Sept. 8.

“He just has so much confidence,” Texas manager Bruce Bochy said. “He’s got the youthful enthusiasm and he’s just excited to be here. He’s not in awe of anything, just no fear in this kid since he’s come up.”

In the ALCS for the first time since back-to-back appearances in 2010-11, the Rangers swept the Rays in the Wild Card Series and the Orioles in the Division Series. The winning streak followed losses in their previous six playoff games against Toronto in the ALDS in 2015 and 2016.

“We just found a way to get a couple of runs across the board,” Bochy said. “That was the difference in the game, obviously. But our guy was really good, Monty, terrific job he did. And he got in a couple of jams there and found a way to get out of it.”

Game 2 of the best-of-seven series is Monday in Houston.

The defending champion Astros, in the ALCS for a seventh straight year, had a tough time getting anything going against Montgomery. The top four batters in Houston’s lineup were 2 for 12 with five strikeouts against the left-hander. Slugger Yordan Alvarez struck out against him three times.

“Overall, just didn’t do enough tonight, offensively,” Houston third baseman Alex Bregman said. “I thought J.V. threw the ball tremendously, but we need to string together some better at-bats.”

Houston’s offensive woes came after it hit 16 homers and outscored the Rangers 39-10 in a three-game sweep in September. Things were much different in the first postseason meeting between these in-state rivals as they managed just five singles.

“Sometime you’ve got to say: ‘Hey, the guy threw a great game tonight against us, excellent game,’ manager Dusty Baker said. “And they say good pitching beats good hitting, but when you don’t hit, everybody wants to know what’s wrong. There’s not a whole bunch to say. He threw a real good game against us.”

Montgomery has been great in the last month, allowing just two earned runs over 27 innings in his last four starts of regular season, and posting a 2.08 ERA in three postseason starts.

Verlander allowed two runs and six hits in 6 2/3 innings to mark the first time this postseason that both starters pitched into the seventh. It was the 36th postseason start for Verlander and the MLB-record 14th time he’s started a playoff series opener.

The three-time Cy Young Award winner threw 47 fastballs, getting 27 swings without a single swing and miss.

Verlander said the defending champs aren’t concerned after falling into an early hole in the series.

“We lost Game 1 in the World Series last year,” he said. “We’ve lost Game 1 of some playoff series before. And that’s the great thing about this team. Obviously nobody is sitting in the locker room right now happy. But it’s very matter of fact, okay. We just got punched, how do you answer?”

Alvarez stranded two in the third with an inning ending strikeout and Martín Maldonado left the bases loaded when he struck out in the fourth.

Josh Sborz walked Jose Altuve starting the eighth and was replaced by Aroldis Chapman. The Rangers turned a double play when Carter made a great grab on the track on a ball hit by Bregman and Altuve was called out for not retouching second base when he retreated to first after Carter’s catch.

Altuve initially called safe, but the Rangers challenged the ruling and it was overturned in a video review. Alvarez following with an inning-ending groundout.

Carter had robbed Bregman of a hit with one out in the first. He sprinted before leaping to make the catch and crashing into the scoreboard wall in left field and knocking out one of the squares.

“Oh, my gosh. This is so much fun,” Carter said. “That’s just all I think about. Where else would I want to be. This is awesome. I’m just trying to keep my feet grounded and just keep rolling with this team. It’s been a lot of fun.”

Jose Leclerc struck out one in a perfect ninth for the save and the Rangers’ second shutout of the playoff. Texas’ bullpen has a 1.86 ERA in the playoffs after ranking 24th at 4.77 during the regular season.

Carter got things going for Texas with a hustle double on a grounder with one out in the second before scoring on a single by Jonah Heim. John Jung singled with two outs, Taveras walked to load the bases and Verlander limited the damage by retiring Marcus Semien on a fly ball.

Verlander had retired eight in a row when Taveras drove a hanging slider 398 feet into the seats in right field with one out in the fifth.

“Every one of their guys has the opportunity to beat you,” Verlander said. “You’ve got to be on your game one through nine. And if you’re not, they’ll make you pay.”

UP NEXT

Houston LHP Framber Valdez (0-1, 10.38 ERA) opposes RHP Nathan Eovaldi (2-0, 1.32) in Game 2. Eovaldi grew up in suburban Houston and attended Alvin High School, which is also the alma mater of Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan.

“It’s awesome,” Eovaldi said. “I’m going to have a lot of friends and family here for the game. Anytime we’re in this stage in this moment right here, being this close to the World Series, it’s a big deal. Doesn’t matter where we’re playing at, it’s a big honor for us to be here.”

It was Tuesday, three days after Hamas militants launched the deadliest attack on Israel in over 50 years, slaughtering hundreds of civilians and sparking a ferocious Israeli response, that Nabil Al Shurafa realized that helping his mother leave Gaza was going to be a difficult task.

Until that morning, the American-born Al Shurafa, a 39-year-old medical researcher in Chicago, thought his 66-year-old mother, Naela, naturalized in the late 1990s and a 20-year resident of Camarillo, would be able to leave the enclave, despite the relentless Israeli bombing campaign.

“She’s a U.S. citizen,” he said. “Everyone was saying, ‘No way would they keep U.S. citizens here.’”

Hours earlier, his mother, who had been visiting Al Shurafa’s sick grandmother in Gaza since the beginning of the month, had made her way to the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. There, she and dozens of other dual passport holders hoped to escape before Israel’s anticipated ground incursion.

Smoke rises after Israeli airstrikes in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, on Thursday.

(Hatem Ali / Associated Press)

She received an exit stamp on the Palestinian side and was about to depart when four missiles landed in the no-man’s land between Gaza and Egypt, severing the last feasible escape route from the 25-mile-long strip which has long been under a strict blockade by both Egypt and Israel.

“She needed 10 minutes, that’s all, and she would have been out,” Al Shurafa said. For an agonizing hour, he thought his mother was dead. But then she was able to call family members and she told them she was returning to her family’s house in Gaza.

“She kept telling me, ‘Nabil, call your representatives, call everyone. I have to get out,’” he said. “I knew then my work was cut out for me.”

Al Shurafa’s mother is one of reportedly hundreds of Palestinian Americans stranded in Gaza, frantically seeking ways to leave amid an Israeli counteroffensive and siege that has left Gazans with no fuel or electricity and little water. Meanwhile, the death toll from Israel’s air attacks increases. On Sunday, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza reported 2,670 dead and 9,600 wounded.

For Al Shurafa, it’s been a series of days and nights with little sleep, dialing embassies and consulates in the Middle East during his nighttime hours, and a frenetic series of daytime calls to the offices of senators, congressmen and anyone else who might be able to help.

“It’s getting to the point where I have to ask her if she has enough food,” Al Shurafa said.

Israeli Americans too have found themselves stranded in Israel because of canceled flights and disruptions to travel from the ongoing conflict. But while the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem has facilitated charter flights to European destinations and a ship transfer from the Israeli port of Haifa to Cyprus, Palestinian Americans say they have received little guidance, even as the threat of an all-out invasion in Gaza appears imminent.

“My brother, he’s now in Gaza, and he’s called the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, in Cairo, everywhere,” said Mohammad Yaghi, a 60-year-old IT engineer and business owner in North Carolina. “They barely answer, and if they do they tell him no one knows anything, or to wait, or they just hang up.”

Yaghi once had a similar experience himself. In 2006, when Israel launched its offensive to retrieve Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas, it took 11 days to be evacuated from Gaza, he said.

“We suffered back then with the embassy,” he said. “In general, they always handle Palestinian Americans like we’re third-class citizens; not even second class.”

When Hamas militants on Oct. 7 crossed the border into Israel and massacred civilians or abducted them in kibbutzes, towns and at an outdoor music festival, the casualty and kidnapping list included U.S. citizens. With Israel seeking to retaliate and the U.S. calling for the return of American citizens held captive, officials have now also begun stepping up their public mention of the dangers facing Palestinian Americans.

In remarks to the press after meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sissi on Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken reiterated what he called Israel’s right to defend itself, but also said, “The way that Israel does this matters.”

“It needs to do it in a way that affirms the shared values that we have for human life and human dignity,” he said, “taking every possible precaution to avoid harming civilians.”

Palestinians with foreign passports wait at the Rafah gate hoping to cross into Egypt as Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip continued on Saturday.

(SAID KHATIB / AFP via Getty Images)

Egypt was the sixth country Blinken has traveled to in the last three days as he has urgently sought to enlist Arab support to contain the war and secure the freedom of hostages. He has also added the escalating humanitarian crisis in Gaza to the agenda.

Reaching Palestinian Americans in the besieged Gaza Strip, though, is far more complicated than helping out Americans and Israeli Americans seeking to leave Israel.

In his talks, Blinken has urged the opening of humanitarian corridors to help Palestinians who have been ordered by Israel to flee the northern half of the Gaza Strip. Because of the Israeli siege, the only available route out of Gaza is through Rafah in the south. The corridors could also be used to funnel humanitarian aid into Gaza after Israel cut off supplies from the region of 2.3 million Palestinians. Those safe passages, however, have yet to materialize.

U.S. officials have told Palestinian Americans in Gaza to attempt to reach the Rafah border crossing. But that crossing so far has not been opened. Egypt, which usually keeps it sealed, claimed it did open it from its side but that the other side was being blocked by Hamas and as the result of Israel’s air campaign.

Egypt is generally reluctant to permit the entry of Palestinians because it fears a refugee crisis and also doesn’t want to be seen as an accomplice to Israel’s forced displacement. But Sissi is under U.S. pressure to allow Palestinian Americans and other foreign nationals through.

U.S. officials have repeatedly insisted American citizens, many stranded when U.S. air carriers canceled flights, should sign up through a State Department internet portal to indicate their desire to leave the region. U.S. citizens are also routinely encouraged to sign up with a government website ahead of travel so that they can be contacted in case of emergency.

But it was only a few days ago that the option to register as a citizen in Gaza on crisis intake forms was even offered, Al Shurafa said.

“You’re the U.S. government. We’re supposed to be allies with Israel. You can’t tell them to just stop bombing for few hours and get our citizens out?” Al Shurafa said. “Our own people are running from our allies.”

Such feelings of neglect have fed into a complicated attitude many Palestinian Americans have toward their adopted home and its Middle East policy. Many feel shunned because of the U.S. government’s ongoing support for Israel, including some who immigrated to America before Israel was founded in 1948.

That feeling has only increased in the last eight days, said Jenan Kawash, a 32-year-old event producer and public relations specialist in New York City whose cousin is a U.S. green card holder visiting Gaza and who also has two other relatives who are U.S. citizens.

“There will never be a collective American effort to help Americans with hyphenated Arab identity, specifically a hyphenated Palestinian identity. That’s pretty clear,” she said. She and other Palestinian Americans have taken to social media, she added, to raise awareness of what is happening in Gaza.

Though she appreciated the freedoms afforded to her by being in the U.S., she nevertheless said that it could never feel like home.

“I know that I have the ability to say these things, that my parents stayed quiet so as to assimilate,” she said. “But now we realize that the sense of safety is an illusion, so we have the willpower to be vocal about it. “

Bulos reported from Jerusalem and Wilkinson from Washington.

Waymo‘s self-driving cars are taking a tour around Los Angeles.

Its first stop? Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade.

After months of testing, the Silicon Valley-based driverless car company began offering Waymo One — its 24/7 robotaxi service — to the public Wednesday. Those interested can get an activation code that will allow them to ride free for one week at an in-person pop-up event or by signing up online.

In November, Waymo One will move on to Century City, then West Hollywood, Mid-City, Koreatown and downtown L.A.

Autonomous vehicle enthusiasts, many of whom received emails about the event ahead of time, lined up at the Waymo stand in Santa Monica on Wednesday morning before it opened at 8 a.m., said Waymo product marketing manager Julianne McGoldrick.

Waymo launched its driverless taxi vehicles in Santa Monica on Wednesday with a promotional campaign on the Third Street Promenade.

(Jaimie Ding)

They collected their “ticket to ride” with an activation code and snagged T-shirts and tote bags. Some even wrote on Waymo-branded postcards to mail to friends and family.

Though some were apprehensive, most had seen Waymo cars around Santa Monica already and were excited to finally go on a ride.

“It’s the future,” many repeated.

Waymo, owned by Google parent company Alphabet, began mapping Los Angeles with human drivers in 2019. It began testing self-driving vehicles with safety drivers in Santa Monica last fall, and a Times reporter rode in one in early 2023.

Waymo already offers fully driverless rides to the public in San Francisco and Phoenix. Both Waymo and Cruise, a competitor owned by General Motors, recently received approval from the California Public Utilities Commission to charge for rides in San Francisco and offer 24/7 service.

Emily Watts, an animator who lives in Santa Monica, dreams of the day she can put her two daughters in a Waymo and send them off to soccer and swim practice.

They’re a little young — 6 and 7 — but “in the future, it’ll be awesome,” Watts said.

Watts, 42, said she’s not nervous to ride in one after doing a little testing of her own over the last few months. She’s driven past several Waymo vehicles and has tried swerving into their lane “just a little bit” or stepping into the street with her dog when she sees one coming.

“I’ll try to trick them,” Watts said, laughing. “They’ve been very good.”

Leigh Holmes of Venice brought his parents, who were visiting from New Zealand.

His father, Tony, began losing his vision at age 35 and is now fully blind at 82.

“I want one of these things for myself,” the elder Holmes said.

Mid-morning, a group of about 30 protesters from Teamsters Union Local 630 arrived, waving signs that read “Waymo = no go” and “Driverless is dangerous.”

The union represents truck drivers and workers from various industries including clerical, warehouse and food service. The Teamsters union has been a strong supporter of Assembly Bill 316, which would have required the presence of a human driver for self-driving vehicles that weigh more than 10,000 pounds. Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill in September.

“We urge all local elected leaders in L.A. County to hold companies like Waymo accountable by ensuring that this technology is thoroughly tested and regulated before more damage is done to our communities, as we have seen in other regions of the country,” Chris Griswold, president of Teamsters Joint Council 42, said in a statement Wednesday.

Critics of self-driving vehicles have been fueled in recent months by several accidents in San Francisco. Protesters passed out fliers noting incidents in which cars have caused major traffic jams, reportedly blocked an ambulance and killed a dog. Another incident involved Cruise cars that ran over a pedestrian who had been struck by a human driver.

An analysis of Waymo collisions found that a majority of them were caused by other vehicles colliding into the driverless vehicles. Waymo vehicles also sometimes struggle to steer clear of irregularly shaped inanimate objects. Waymo has said that its driverless cars have reduced injuries and fatalities on the road and that its collision numbers may be higher because it reports even minor accidents, whereas human drivers may not always report similar incidents.

Despite the commotion, several people continued passing through the pop-up, seemingly undeterred by the megaphones behind them.

Juan Matute, deputy director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, said he believes self-driving vehicles are safer than human drivers after experiencing it himself. He’s a safe streets advocate in his spare time and has taken three rides with Waymo already.

Vehicle automation can “help with some of the issues we have with distracted driving because an autonomous vehicle is never distracted,” Matute said.

SACRAMENTO — California is the first state to ban doctors and medical examiners from attributing deaths to the controversial diagnosis known as “excited delirium,” which a human rights activist hailed as a “watershed moment” that could make it harder for police to justify excessive force.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill Oct. 8 to prohibit coroners, medical examiners, physicians, or physician assistants from listing excited delirium on a person’s death certificate or in an autopsy report. Law enforcement won’t be allowed to use the term to describe a person’s behavior in any incident report, and testimony that refers to excited delirium won’t be allowed in civil court. The law takes effect in January.

The term excited delirium has been around for decades but has been used increasingly over the past 15 years to explain how a person experiencing severe agitation can die suddenly through no fault of the police. It was cited as a legal defense in the 2020 deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis; Daniel Prude in Rochester, New York; and Angelo Quinto in Antioch, California, among others.

Related: Police blame some deaths on ‘excited delirium.’ ER docs consider pulling the plug on the term

“This is a watershed moment in California and nationwide,” said Joanna Naples-Mitchell, a lawyer with the New York-based Physicians for Human Rights, who co-authored a 2022 report on the use of the diagnosis.

“In a wrongful death lawsuit, if excited delirium comes up, it’s a big hurdle for a family getting justice if their family member was actually killed by police,” Naples-Mitchell said. “So, now it will be basically impossible for them to offer testimony on excited delirium in California.”

Even though the new law makes California the first state to no longer recognize excited delirium as a medical diagnosis, several national medical associations already discredited it. Since 2020, the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have rejected excited delirium as a medical condition, noting the term has disproportionately applied to Black men in law enforcement custody. This year, the National Association of Medical Examiners rejected excited delirium as a cause of death, and the American College of Emergency Physicians is expected to vote this month on whether to formally disavow its 2009 position paper supporting excited delirium as a diagnosis. That white paper proposed individuals in a mental health crisis, often under the influence of drugs or alcohol, can exhibit superhuman strength as police try to control them, and then die from the condition.

Related: Officer Chauvin was justified in kneeling on Floyd, expert says

In the case of Quinto, his mother, Cassandra Quinto-Collins, had called Antioch police two days before Christmas because her son was experiencing a mental health crisis. She had subdued him by the time they arrived, she said, but officers held her 30-year-old son to the ground until he passed out.

In a harrowing home video taken by Quinto-Collins, which was broadcast nationally after his death, she asked police what happened as her son lay on the floor unconscious, hands behind his back in handcuffs. He died three days later in the hospital.

The Contra Costa County coroner’s office, part of the sheriff’s department, blamed Quinto’s death on excited delirium. The Quinto family has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the county and is seeking to change the cause of death on his death certificate.

Quinto-Collins also testified in favor of the bill, AB 360, introduced by state Assemblymember Mike Gipson, a Democrat. It sailed through the legislature with bipartisan support. No organization formally opposed the measure, including the California Police Chiefs Association, whose executive director declined to comment this week.

“There’s a lot more work to be done, but it is a unique window into some of the corruption, some of the things that we’ve allowed to happen under our noses,” said Robert Collins, Quinto’s stepfather. “I think it’s really telling that California is ending it.”

Part of the problem with an excited delirium diagnosis is that delirium is a symptom of an underlying condition, medical professionals say. For example, delirium can be caused by old age, hospitalization, a major surgery, substance use, medication, or infections, said Sarah Slocum, a psychiatrist in Exeter, New Hampshire, who co-authored a review of excited delirium published in 2022.

“You wouldn’t just put ‘fever’ on someone’s death certificate,” Slocum said. “So, it’s difficult to then just put ‘excited delirium’ on there as a cause of death when there is something that’s underlying and driving it.”

So wise up!

With terrorism, as with all asymmetric political action, “the action is in the reaction of the opposition,” as Saul Alinsky, the leftist activist, put it in his book Rules for Radicals.

This isn’t conspiracy stuff, nor impossible “4th dimensional chess” – it’s just plain, old 2-dimensional chess. That’s all:

Hamas, al Qaeda, and similar groups slaughter civilians – beheaded babies or not, they certainly murdered hundreds and hundreds of innocent, civilian Israeli non-combatants in this one (including an extended family member of mine) just as they slaughtered thousands on September 11 – for a reason, not simply because they are angry or devils. It’s a tactic. They are trying to provoke a reaction.

They are trying to make you angry, to make you hate, even drive you crazy. Yes – yes – for the purpose of making the more powerful force (i.e. the United States, Israel) do even worse to their own people, such as getting the U.S. to invade Afghanistan and getting Israel to bomb the Gaza strip. Not that al Qaeda was from Afghanistan, but that’s where they were and that’s who they knew were gonna get it. (Also, by the way, U.S. support for Israel’s crimes in Palestine and Lebanon was a huge part of the motive for al Qaeda’s war against the United States in the first place, including for some of the most important pilot hijackers and organizers of the plot.)

This is then meant to provoke still further counter-reactions. It “heightens the contradictions” as the commies used to say. It forces leaders of Muslim states and armed groups everywhere to take a stand. It destroys stability and negotiations and progress, radicalizes new groups and forces everyone back into the fight on one side or the other. It makes every sock-puppet princeling of the Gulf take a stand in support like the Ayatollah or sell out in silence in the most embarrassing way, like Crown Prince bin Salman, etc.

It’s the same reason Bosnian Muslim forces butchered Serbs and Chechen Muslim forces butchered Russians and ISIS slaughtered Shi’ites: to provoke a worse crisis for everyone in the hopes that the overall situation changes to their advantage.

I would note that terrorism is usually as stupid as it is evil; see Bosnia, where they got less and less; Chechnya, Syria and Iraq Wars II and III where they lost outright. Osama’s nemesis, the Saudi monarchy, still stands, and with as degenerate a self-worshiper in the Crown Prince position as he could have ever feared. Hamas may very well not survive this.

But for Israel to completely destroy them would require a level of violence that the civilian population of the Gaza strip, one half of them under 18 years old – all of them trapped with no where to go—simply cannot withstand. Hundreds have already been killed.

Ramzy Baroud argues that a land invasion of the strip will be a catastrophe for Israel too.

The longer this goes on, the greater the danger to the Israeli hostages as well.

By widening the war into a full-scale invasion of Gaza, the Israelis risk spreading the war to a full-scale uprising on the West Bank, a fight with Hezbollah in Lebanon or even northern Israel, which could then lead to things going sideways in Iraq – where George W. Bush installed a very Iran – and Hezbollah-friendly Shi’ite theocracy in power – and who-knows what.

Powerful Muslim states who are friendly to Israel, such as Turkey and Egypt, must be allowed to step in and play a negotiating role here. Stop reacting. And stop posturing like a bunch of little girls on TikTok. Pull the brakes before it’s too late.

I know calling your congressmen feels like pissing in the wind. But do what you can to make your voice heard and call for cease-fire and talks as soon as possible.

Ultimately the Palestinians must have independence or citizenship. Otherwise, as Ariel Sharon’s man, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, they’re left with an untenable apartheid state.

And the United States should stop sharing in the responsibility for this shame immediately by ending all aid and military support for the occupation—and for that matter in all cases, everywhere.

Also, USS Gerald Ford: watch your six.

Scott Horton is director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, host of Antiwar Radio on Pacifica, 90.7 FM KPFK in Los Angeles, California and podcasts the Scott Horton Show from ScottHorton.org. He’s the author of the 2021 book Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, the 2017 book, Fool’s Errand:Time to End the War in Afghanistan, editor of the 2019 book The Great Ron Paul: The Scott Horton Show Interviews 2004–2019 and the 2022 book Hotter Than The Sun: Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. He’s conducted more than 5,800 interviews since 2003. Scott lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, Larisa Alexandrovna Horton. This column was originally published on Antiwar.com

Ever since Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, Israel has waged an intermittent but limited military campaign to keep a lid on the violent Palestinian faction. Hamas fired missiles at Israeli cities, Israel bombed Gaza from the air or attacked on the ground, then negotiated a cease-fire.

The goal was never to remove Hamas; that appeared too costly. It was merely to keep it under control. Israeli military officers gave their recurring Gaza offensives a sad, cynical name: “mowing the grass.”

Last week, mowing the grass came to an end.

Hamas’ murderous rampage through Israeli towns and villages, which deliberately targeted civilians, led Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to adopt a far more ambitious goal: regime change.

“We will destroy Hamas,” Netanyahu said Friday.

“We are crushing Hamas’ ability to function as sovereign,” Daniel Hagari, a spokesman for Israel’s armed forces, told reporters. “We cannot continue to live with this rule.”

To remove Hamas from its hold on Gaza, Israel appears to be preparing a massive ground invasion. It has imposed a blockade, launched punishing airstrikes and urged more than a million Palestinian civilians to evacuate the northern third of the Gaza Strip.

Such an offensive would be difficult and costly. Hamas presumably knew its terrorist onslaught would provoke massive retaliation.

The group has spent years building fortified tunnels, preparing booby traps and training for house-to-house fighting. Former Israeli officers have estimated that dismantling Hamas’ military power could take between two and six months of fighting.

The campaign could cost the lives of thousands of combatants and thousands of civilians as well. Last week’s Israeli airstrikes killed an estimated 1,900 even before a ground offensive began. The United Nations warned that a massive, chaotic evacuation would have “devastating humanitarian consequences.”

But even if Israel succeeds in toppling Hamas, it will face a conundrum that Americans will recognize from the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq: Who will administer Gaza? Who will police the streets and ensure Hamas doesn’t rise again in an impoverished territory of people who have lost family and homes? The answer isn’t clear.

The problem with Gaza is that nobody seems to want it except Hamas.

Israel doesn’t want to occupy the territory; that’s why it left in 2005.

Egypt, which abuts the Gaza Strip to the south, doesn’t want it either.

Even the Palestinian Authority, which administers the Israeli-occupied West Bank and is led by longtime opponents of Hamas, may not want to take over — at least not right away, aboard Israeli tanks.

The PA is “the most natural address,” former Prime Minister Ehud Barak said last week in an appearance at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It doesn’t make sense to give [Gaza] back to Hamas.”

In a poll conducted in July for the Washington Institute on Near East Policy, 70% of Gaza residents said they would prefer to live under the PA than under Hamas.

But it’s not clear that the PA is up to the job. On the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority is widely regarded as inefficient and corrupt. Its leader, 87-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, hasn’t allowed elections for 17 years.

Critics of Netanyahu say the prime minister has deliberately weakened the PA by allowing Israeli settlements on the West Bank to expand, even as he quietly maintained a modus vivendi with Hamas in Gaza.

Barak and others have suggested that a post-Hamas order in Gaza might begin with an interim peacekeeping force provided by Egypt and other Arab countries.

“It would be a great blessing,” Barak said.

But that will require Israel to ask those countries, plus the United States and Saudi Arabia, for help brokering such an arrangement.

Some or all of the Arab countries involved would likely demand that Israel halt settlement expansion on the West Bank or make other concessions to the Palestinians as the price of their participation in a difficult and unrewarding mission.

All of which brings the issue back to where it started: the Israeli-Palestinian standoff, which has been gradually deteriorating for 15 years.

Israel’s strategy of mowing the lawn in Gaza didn’t just fail because Hamas is committed to the destruction of the Jewish state. It also failed because Hamas had a seemingly endless supply of potential recruits among young Gazans who saw no viable future.

When Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken met with Netanyahu last week, he reaffirmed the United States’ strong support for Israel’s right to self-defense. But he also reminded the prime minister that President Biden still believes Israel can achieve long-term security only if it seeks a viable peace with the Palestinians.

“We must provide an alternative to the vision of violence and fear, nihilism and terror presented by Hamas,” Blinken said.

Netanyahu didn’t respond. Israel’s focus, understandably, is on recovering from the trauma of the past week and preparing the military offensive to come. It’s far too soon to talk about a return to peace talks.

But it won’t be forever, especially if the alternative is endlessly mowing the grass.

Every few months over the last two years, a sea of California carpenters has clogged the state Capitol to voice their support of high-profile housing legislation, their yellow and orange vests, hard hats and work boots in stark contrast to the suits, dresses and fancy shoes more customary in the hallways and hearing rooms of Sacramento.

Their grassroots lobbying has paid off with major legislative wins, including a pair of housing construction bills that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law Wednesday.

The laws represent more than the possibility of desperately needed new homes in a state with a 2.5-million-unit housing shortage. They also signal a shift in power dynamics among unions in California, and which ones have the greatest influence over labor standards at residential construction sites.

“The carpenters’ engagement on housing policy has been an absolute game changer,” said state Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat who chairs his chamber’s housing committee and is the author of both laws, Senate Bills 4 and 423.

The first bill, SB 4, will make it easier for nonprofit colleges and faith organizations to build affordable homes on their land, while SB 423 will expand current law that lets developers expedite construction of multifamily projects in cities that have fallen behind on their state-mandated housing goals. The measures build on Assembly Bill 2011, a law that went into effect in July to convert buildings traditionally zoned for commercial retail and office space into affordable housing.

The new laws come after years of gridlock on housing proposals, leading to a rift between the California Conference of Carpenters, which is gaining newfound clout in the state Capitol, and the State Building and Construction Trades Council, one of the most influential players in Sacramento over the last decade.

Divisions bubbled up last year when the carpenters broke with the council and other influential unions and sponsored AB 2011, legislation the broader labor movement opposed because it lacked more rigorous job standards.

AB 2011 still mandates developers pay union-approved, or “prevailing,” wages and provide some healthcare benefits to workers, whether they’re union members or not. But it lacks the work standard the building trades union prefers, known as “skilled and trained,” a mandate that generally means laborers on job sites are unionized.

In the Democratic-controlled Legislature, where labor has an outsize influence, last year’s union infighting put many lawmakers in the uncomfortable position of having to choose a side.

Opponents of the skilled and trained standard argue it’s unachievable for housing developers because there aren’t enough union workers to meet the threshold. The trades union contend it’s a model that protects workers against exploitation and inadequate job safety protections.

“I think that prevailing wage in legislation for housing is a positive step,” said Chris Hannan, who was selected president of the State Building and Construction Trades Council this summer. “We don’t believe that that’s enough.”

Hannan succeeded Andrew Meredith, who resigned as president this year as the fight over labor standards raged in the Capitol.

Leadership at the carpenters union say they had no choice but to move forward with their own plan after discussions with the council fell apart.

Jay Bradshaw, executive secretary-treasurer of the Northern California Carpenters Union, said the new standards will help dismantle the underground construction economy and create job opportunities for union members, while safeguarding all workers against wage theft and other unfair labor practices currently happening on residential job sites.

The carpenters’ approach with the new standards is to organize members on job sites, but the trades council historically preferred requiring a unionized workforce to begin with.

“The labor standards we developed will significantly help our current membership. … And it will also pull wages out of competition for those that are not represented,” Bradshaw said. “And then it’s our job to go organize those folks, not the government’s.”

Todd David, a political advisor to Wiener who served as executive director of the Housing Action Coalition in 2022, said the increased influence of the carpenters helped clear a path for new housing legislation.

“There were lots of quiet conversations between legislators with people who knew the carpenters very well, like, can they really do this?” David said.

They did.

So began a new era for the carpenters — and their Democratic allies eager to pass more sweeping housing bills into law using the same labor language.

“They showed up, and they really planted a flag in AB 2011,” said Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, the Oakland Democrat who wrote the legislation and chairs the Assembly committee on housing. “It was a breakout moment, I think, for the carpenters, where they decided enough is enough, we’re going to build housing, we’re going to do strong labor standards, we’re going to break the juggernaut that has been preventing us from actually accomplishing stuff in California in housing policy, with regards to labor standards. And they did it.”

The building trades council and its allies see the fight as far from over.

Hannan and others still consider the dispute over the labor language an easy choice between protecting workers or leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and job safety issues that may result from a lack of training.

“Our members … are the very best at what they do. And they deserve us to fight as hard as we can for them,” Hannan said. “And we believe we are going to be the strongest, loudest voice for the construction worker.”

But the council lost its second battle this year after Wiener introduced his two bills, which largely include the same labor standards as last year’s deal.

Considered this year’s most consequential housing measure, SB 423 will extend by another decade current policy that lets developers streamline multifamily development in cities that have failed to plan for enough housing, which was set to expire in 2026. The original law passed in 2017 and has led to more than 18,000 proposed units, the majority for low-income families.

Last year’s coalition included the California Housing Consortium and other affordable housing groups and two other major unions — the California School Employees Assn. and the Service Employees International Union. This year, Wiener and the carpenters expanded support for the labor changes to add more construction unions.

“We just hung tough, and I think the nature of the crisis sort of forced people to do what they were not comfortable doing in terms of the labor issues,” said Danny Curtin, director of the carpenters conference. “Breaking ranks, or however you want to put it, is never simple or easy. And you don’t want to do it unless you really think there’s no real alternative. But it was unassailable, our bill was unassailable.”

Others don’t see it that way.

Scott Wetch, a lobbyist who represented several unions in the negotiations, described SB 423 as an undemocratic law that would come back to haunt every legislator who voted for it, a “political aneurysm” that “one day will burst.”

He criticized how housing might get built in a streamlined capacity that edges out community input, and questioned whether the healthcare requirements will withstand future legal challenges.

And while some unions were going to bat for their members fighting for more rigorous job rules, Wetch said, others, like the carpenters, “sold their members down the river.”

“The carpenters went to a handful of developers, and said to them, ‘Hey, we want to get some work, we want to work with you, and we will be the Judases that remove these worker protections that you don’t like, because we want to get some work out of you,’” Wetch said.

The carpenters have shrugged off those criticisms. They see the issue as a done deal, the new labor standards now the blueprint for housing legislation in California.

“The carpenters would rather be problem solvers than just problem fighters,” Bradshaw said.

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Tony Williams Jr. ran for 174 yards on 29 carries and scored a touchdown as the University of Redlands football team defeated visiting Cal Lutheran 20-10 in a Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference game Saturday at Ted Runner Stadium.

Redlands (4-2, 3-1 in conference) retained the Smudge Pot Trophy and has now won 10 straight games in the rivalry series.

After a scoreless first quarter, Vicente Garcia got Redlands on the board with a 40-yard field goal. The Bulldogs added to their lead later in the second quarter on a 3-yard run by Williams and a 44-yard touchdown pass from Jack Wilson tp Logan Sperline.

Cal Lutheran cut the deficit to 17-10 early in the fourth period, but Garcia later sealed Redlands’ win with a 33-yard field goal.

Scott Tinsley led the defensive effort for the Bulldogs with seven tackles and an interception.

Redlands heads to Claremont-Mudd-Scripps for a SCIAC game Oct. 21.

MSJC PICKS UP FIRST VICTORY

Zach Zella completed 22 of 29 passes for 305 yards and five touchdowns as Mt. San Jacinto College cruised to a 48-16 victory over Southwestern in a nonconference game at HCN Bank Stadium in Menifee.

The victory snapped the Eagles’ six-game losing streak dating back to last season.

MSJC (1-5 overall) was clinging to an 18-13 lead in the second period, but the Eagles added to that advantage when Zella threw a 2-yard touchdown pass to Tevita Hailalilo with 12 seconds remaining in the half. Zella then tossed touchdowns to Elijah Smiley (22 yards) and  Christian Kretz (27 yards) in the third quarter to help the Eagles increase their lead to 38-13.

Kretz and Smiley each caught two touchdowns passes Saturday. Matthew Caldera finished with 252 all-purpose yards for MSJC

Carsten Mamaril and Tyler Martin each had an interception to lead the defensive effort for the Eagles.

MSJC will play its homecoming game against San Diego Mesa on Oct. 21.

EDWARDS LEADS CMS PAST LA VERNE

Justin Edwards rushed for 227 yards on 29 carries and scored three touchdowns as Claremont-Mudd-Scripps pulled away for a 30-17 road win over La Verne in a Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference game at Ortmayer Stadium.

Walter Kuhlenkamp threw a touchdown pass to Anderson Cynkar in the first quarter, and CMS (5-1, 3-1) held a 17-10 at halftime. Edwards scored on runs of 14 and 2 yards in the second half to help the Stags put the game away.

Joey Asta led the defensive effort for CMS, as he registered eight tackles and 2 1/2 of the unit’s eight sacks Saturday afternoon.

Nicolas Garcia completed 25 of 35 passes for 182 yards and a touchdown for La Verne (1-5, 0-4). Jimmy Rumsey had 10 catches for 107 yards, while Makena Ramos-Kamaka added eight receptions for 100 yards for the Leopards.

CMS hosts Redlands in a conference game Oct. 21, while La Verne hosts Pomona-Pitzer.

PITZER BLANKED BY CHAPMAN

Nick Kim completed 27 of 41 passes for 250 yards, but Pomona-Pitzer failed to reach the end zone in a 21-0 loss to visiting Chapman in a Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference game at Merritt Field.

Chapman scored twice in the final 3 minutes of the opening quarter to gain a double-digit lead.

Quinten Wimmer caught four passes for 83 yards, and Kenric Jameison had nine receptions for 53 yards for the Sagehens.

Pomona-Pitzer (3-3, 2-2) heads to La Verne for a conference game Oct. 21

SBVC FALLS TO CITRUS

Kohl Meisman and Kealon Jackson connected on a 97-yard touchdown in the opening quarter, but that was the only touchdown San Bernardino Valley College could muster during a 42-7 loss to Citrus in an American-Central Conference game in Glendora.

That Meisman-to-Jackson strike helped SBVC level the score at 7 midway through the opening quarter, but Citrus outscored the Wolverines 28-0 in the second quarter to take control.

SBVC (1-5, 0-3) hosts Golden West in a conference game Oct. 21.