Politics

Heidi Cruz, with her husband, Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, and their daughters, Caroline, 7, left, and Catherine, 4, during a campaign event in Waterloo, Iowa. (Andrew Harnik / Associated Press) Except for perhaps Bill Clinton, no candidate spouse in the 2016 presidential campaign has proved as productive and effective as Heidi … Read more

Direct-mailed campaign ads fill a Los Angeles mailbox. (Photo illustration by James Reed / Los Angeles Times) How can you tell it’s election season? When you can see your mail before you even reach into the mailbox. You know the sight. An oversized cardstock flier for a school board candidate props open the mailbox lid, … Read more

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, shown in January with her chief recovery officer Steve Soboroff, touted the opening of four new worker resource centers on Tuesday morning. (Carlin Stiehl / For The Times) On Tuesday morning, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass touted the opening of four new resource centers to assist Angelenos who have lost … Read more

President Trump has begun his second term with aggressive assertions of executive power, and his attorneys sound confident the Supreme Court will likely agree with them. (J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press) President Trump’s lawyers alerted the Supreme Court over the weekend to what they called “an unprecedented assault on the separation of powers that … Read more

Under the cloud of a criminal investigation and facing certain impeachment, Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush resigned Wednesday, one day before he was to testify under oath on his role in a widening political corruption scandal. Minutes later, state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer issued a statement signaling that the resignation will not end the commissioner’s troubles. … Read more

Brian Diers, associate director of the Soybean Innovation Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, waters plants on Thursday. The lab, which works with businesses to expand soybean usage in 31 countries, is set to close in April unless it gets a last-minute reprieve from USAID cuts. (Craig Pessman / Associated Press) There’s the executive … Read more

Frank Hilliker holds one of his 8,000 brown Leghorn and white Leghorn chickens in a cage-free barn at Hilliker’s Ranch Fresh Eggs in Lakeview. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) Nine years after California voters decided that egg-laying hens must be given more space, animal-rights activists on Tuesday filed papers for a new initiative … Read more

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Lomonosov Moscow State University last month. (Ramil Sitdikov / Associated Press) The United States formally brought Russia in from the cold Tuesday with high-level talks aimed at ending Moscow’s war with Ukraine and reestablishing long-frozen diplomatic and economic ties. A … Read more

House Speaker Mike Johnson and fellow Republicans met Tuesday to find agreement on a spending bill. (J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press) Republicans are weighing billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid, threatening healthcare coverage for some of the 80 million U.S. adults and children enrolled in the safety net program. Millions more Americans signed … Read more

President Clinton, who has sought to have every American classroom hooked up to the Internet by the end of next year, proposed on Sunday a vast increase in the developing world’s access to computers, cellular telephones and the World Wide Web to help jump-start struggling economies. Citing what he said is the need to eliminate … Read more