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A new report finds "high-intensity AI adopters” saw headcount increase 10.2%. Among those companies, entry-level headcount rose by 12%, countering the rhetoric that AI kills junior jobs. 

Wix-owned vibe coding platform Base44 has started rolling out its own AI model — with hopes that it will eventually outperform frontier models.

In 2025, the Reserve Bank of India created the .bank.in subdomain and required all local banks to start using it for their online presences. Indian is home to thousands of banks and the new rule meant all needed to register for and use a bankname.bank.in domain, a move designed to make life harder for phishers and fraudsters. Now a security researcher has alleged that the entity chosen as the sole registrar of the subdomains – the Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT) – botched the job and leaked sensitive data. The allegation came in a report [PDF] and post published yesterday by CashlessConsumer, a group that advocates for India to become a cashless society and which aims to represent citizens to digital payments players. “The IDRBT Domain Registration Portal (registrar.idrbt.ac.in) – the exclusive registrar for India’s .bank.in namespace – exposed its entire REST API via 33+ unauthenticated endpoints,” the post alleges. “Anyone with curl could retrieve the bcrypt password hashes, mobile numbers, email addresses, login IPs, and device fingerprints of all 5,576 bank employees trusted with managing India’s banking domains.” The researcher behind the exposé, “Srikanth L”, says he accessed info through the portal and found evidence that some India banks host websites on shared servers in the United States, Singapore, and Lithuania. He also found 80 percent of registered .bank.in domains don’t use DNSSEC, 40 percent don’t employ the DMARC email security protocol that verifies senders’ identity, and many domains are secured with free Let’s Encrypt certificates. The researcher’s post also alleges that the portal went live without a proper security audit and ran without secure APIs for 13 months. Srikanth L disclosed his findings in early June and says IDRBT has since fixed the gaping security flaws. The researcher also appears to have used a GitHub repo to list info found by accessing the portal’s APIs – so some of the info available over the previously-open API is now public – and claimed doing so will help security researchers by letting them understand the extent of Indian banking infrastructure. That knowledge may come in handy given the open API means attackers may have been able to access and use credentials of senior bank staff, information that can enable many forms of attack - even the DNS spoofing and phishing attacks the requirement to use .bank.in was designed to prevent. At the time of writing, the IDRBT, Reserve Bank, and India’s government appear not to have made a public comment on the matter. ®

⚡ Quick Take

• A new YouTube video shows the progression of Darth Vader’s costume.
• From the 70s to now, small changes have made him a recognizable villain.
• The video goes over design adjustments from film to film, and how he became the Vader we know and love (to hate).

The Star Wars franchise’s popularity is rivaled by very few. Since A New Hope came out in 1977, its characters have become cultural icons, and none have been more significant than Darth Vader, the franchise’s primary villain.

Darth Vader is immediately identifiable. His formidable all-black costume is made up of a curved helmet with a distinct face-covering, a long cloak, and almost cyborg-like electronic accents.

A YouTube video by Rocket Riley goes over the suit’s full history. The costume, as the video discusses, was the result of a lot of creative thinking and last-minute changes. It also changed a lot before even debuting onscreen, and has continued to be altered over time, as more Star Wars content has continued to come out.

Initial Conception/Episode IV: A New Hope

George Lucas’s first imagining of the character was far less… heavy and metallic than how we now imagine Darth Vader. He was robe-clad, covered in draping fabrics. Then, after a script read, Ralph McQuarrie, the movie’s concept artist, realized Vader would have to breathe in space, and created a mask/head covering.

The mask itself went through various iterations before obtaining the rounded yet aggressive features we all have come to know. The first sketches featured a much sharper snout and more narrowed eyes. George Lucas loved McQuarrie’s design and, with small tweaks, implemented it as a permanent fixture for the character.

The full suit was comprised of a motorcycle suit as the base, a robe over top, the belt holding it all together, and a dramatic cloak slung over his shoulders. The original mask was hand-sculpted and asymmetrical.

LucasFilm

Details like the buttons on the belt and his chest plate are also essential to the costume, and do serve a purpose. Within the Star Wars story, the suit also functions as a life-support device for a burned and broken Anakin. It is, unfortunately, as the video discusses, a painful experience to wear, with needles puncturing Anakin’s skull, allowing him to control his robotic limbs.

Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

A reportedly bigger budget for the franchise’s second movie allowed for an upgrade to the suit. The helmet was much glossier, and the lenses in his goggles changed from red to pure black. In addition, his upper-body armor was on full display with his robe tucked under instead of hanging over it.

501st Legion Costume Reference Library

YouTuber Rocket Riley noted even smaller changes, like the color of the buttons on Vader’s chest plate (the top right one changing from green to blue).

Episode VI: Return of the Jedi

The interior of the helmet was finally shown in the third movie, when Luke Skywalker removed it from Vader’s face. The helmet was designed with a locking system to allow this to happen onscreen.

501st Legion Costume Reference Library

All three of the original movies, despite updates to the paint, used the asymmetrical helmet. Not much changed between Episode V and Episode VI, but the glossiness of the helmet in both movies, compared to Episode IV, really made Vader feel more menacing and robotic. The gloves also get noticeably less chunky and cartoonish over the course of the three movies. It seems the costumers were continuously working towards making the character as menacing as possible.

In Return of the Jedi, the glossiness had also extended aggressively to the chest plate and the boots.

Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

The first two episodes followed Vader’s (Anakin Skywalker) background, and in Episode III, we finally see the suit for the “first” time, at least in the new trilogy. The helmet has been updated and is symmetrical, being perfected using computer graphics.

501st Legion Costume Reference Library

The original actor for Darth Vader was 6 feet and 6 inches tall, with the new actor (Hayden Christiansen) measuring 6 inches shorter. The suit was built specifically for him, with internal padding and lifts used in order to keep Vader at his original height.

There is also a clear internal shot of the helmet, showing Vader’s electronic display. The suit also utilizes more silver accents to make his chest plate stand out.

Rogue One/Kenobi

The sequels created a new hurdle: previous iterations of the suit were stiff and made it difficult for the actors to move around in. The script called for a suit in which Vader would be able to act out action sequences.

Vader’s suit for Kenobi was entirely rebuilt using flexible, modern fabric. It allowed him to fight in a menacing, aggressive way, which he had never done before.

LucasFilm

Rocket Riley showed the lightsaber fights of the original trilogy at 5:57 in the video, where he pointed out the stiff, stunted action of the battles. Then, he juxtaposed a fight from Episode VI of the Obi-Wan Kenobi series, where Vader has a full range of motion and is able to look like he is actually fighting.

In Rogue One, the designers had a different goal. They wanted Vader to look as 70s as possible, down to the asymmetrical helmet. They made him stiff again, with an exaggerated neck-piece, and brought back the red lenses in his helmet. His interior cloak was made out of a more structured fabric that allowed pleating, creating more detail on his torso.

501st Legion Costume Reference Library Infinity Comics

This costume never appeared on screen, but the video did describe it in length. In one Star Wars Infinity comic, a series which covers non-canon “what if” hypotheticals, Vader turns to the light side. To show this, he is portrayed wearing a fully white suit.

LucasFilm (Star Wars Infinity: Return of the Jedi)

He became “a symbol of hope” rather than “a symbol of fear.” Some people love this idea, and some people hate it.

Where He Stands Now…

Darth Vader’s costume upgrades have led to some seriously cool sequences, both visually and in terms of action. When Vader inevitably appears in live-action again, there has now been a flexible suit that allows him to both look as menacing as he always has while also letting him actually move.

One thing is for sure—every iteration has remained pretty loyal to the A New Hope version of Vader. Once designers found the sweet spot for his look, it became ingrained in the public memory as a representation of who he is. Darth Vader remains one of the most recognizable villains across pop culture, and his costume is the reason why.

The post Video Explores Darth Vader’s Costume History appeared first on Nerdist.

Researchers say that machine learning models cannot reliably distinguish between authorized and unauthorized input, ensuring that prompt injection will continue to present a threat until developers find new ways to have machine learning systems process inputs. AI models provide responses to user-supplied prompts. The problem is that AI models may receive adversarial prompts – directly from a user or indirectly from an ingested document – that tell the model to take action contrary to its built-in system prompt. Various techniques mitigate prompt injection, but defenders have not found ways to prevent such attacks. According to independent researchers Charles Ye and Jasmine Cui, and MIT associate professor Dylan Hadfield-Menell, no one is likely to do so under the current fragile LLM security model. As they observe in a paper titled "Prompt Injection as Role Confusion" in the proceedings of next week's ICML 2026 conference, LLMs have come to rely on a text tagging system that defines "roles" to separate system text from user text. And roles, they argue, do not guarantee security. "Role tags were a formatting trick that became the security architecture and the cognitive scaffolding of modern LLMs," the authors explain in a blog post. "We've shown that this architecture doesn't survive into the model's actual representations, and that such role confusion is linked to prompt injection." When OpenAI's ChatGPT arrived in 2022, it implemented the concept of roles – described by Anthropic a year earlier – as a way to tell the underlying model to behave in a certain way. The user role would make a request and the model, acting in the role of a helpful assistant, would respond to that request. "A formatting trick had become the mechanism that turned autocomplete into an assistant," the authors observe. Developers introduced other roles over time. In addition to and , there's , , and . These roles served to draw a line between different objectives so they could be individually optimized during the training process. Model makers want to balance conflicting objectives like being helpful and preventing harm, and this involves role distinctions. But roles, the researchers say, have become overloaded with responsibilities they cannot reliably carry out. They've become like a fuzzier version of permission levels, determining how prompts are trusted and treated. The problem, the authors contend, is that roles are determined in a fundamentally insecure way: writing style. "LLMs identify roles from an insecure feature (style)," they explain. "This is like identifying a stranger's profession from how they talk and dress rather than by checking their ID. Usually everything agrees, so this works fine. But when attackers intentionally create a mismatch, the LLM uses the insecure method (writing style) to identify its role instead of the secure method (tags)." The authors developed an attack called CoT (Chain of Thought) Forgery that involves using an LLM to spoof the terse style of OpenAI mode and add that to the prompt. The technique won the 2025 OpenAI Kaggle red-teaming contest. "We asked a bunch of LLMs how to synthesize cocaine, inserting fake reasoning that says it's fine because we're wearing a green shirt," the authors explain. "The LLMs comply. The rationale is transparently dumb, but the models don't evaluate it as an external claim to be scrutinized. They treat it as their already-reached conclusion, and simply act on it. We've stolen the trust given to the role." On a standard jailbreaking benchmark, they say, CoT Forgery took the attack success rate from near zero to about 60 percent on the models tested. And whereas most jailbreaks are fragile and work only for certain models, this one transferred because it exploits a structural flaw. It's not attempting to persuade the model but duping the model into treating the request as something that's already settled. The authors also note that while many models report near-perfect safety scores on prompt-injection benchmarks, human red-teamers achieve attack success rates close to 100 percent. "The discrepancy is straightforward: skilled humans test and adapt attacks until they work, benchmarks don't," they state. "Static benchmarks measure attacks models have already learned to catch." Roles, the authors argue, deserve more attention from the research community because they've become one of the most important abstractions in the AI stack. "Unless LLMs achieve genuine role perception, we think injection defense will remain a perpetual whack-a-mole game," they conclude. "And the continuous nature of role boundaries opens the threat of injections designed to subtly shift LLM states through seemingly innocuous text, legally and at scale." ®

Republicans face a brutal midterm election cycle. President Donald Trump is plumbing unprecedented lows. Their House majority is essentially gone. Even the Senate is far more competitive than it has any right to be. So pretend for a moment you’re a Republican strategist trying to find some reason for optimism, some way to stem the blue tide. You might push Congress to pass popular legislation…

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A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Thanks, GOP: Student borrowers face massive bills this week Can’t afford school, food, or housing. Is this the “American Dream”? The legality and inhumanity of 2 new Supreme Court rulings A look at the many ways the highest court has screwed us all.

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A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | The legality and inhumanity of 2 new Supreme Court rulings…

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Fourth of July weekend is typically one of the busiest times of the year in Santa Cruz County, and this year should be no different. Thousands are expected to flock to the city from around the Bay Area to tan on the beach, participate in the annual Sunrise Rotary Firecracker Run and watch the Fourth of July Parade in Seabright. 

However, those who plan to come to the city to watch fireworks or wave sparklers on the beach are flat out of luck. The county has among the strictest fireworks laws in the state, enforcing a total ban on all fireworks, including on all beaches.

Here is everything you need to know about the fireworks laws in the county to stay safe from fines and fires this Independence Day: 

Why are fireworks prohibited?

According to Chapter 7.92 of the Santa Cruz County Code, fireworks are prohibited because they can damage the environment, harm pets, cause fireworks-related injuries and spark wildfires. 

What areas of the county have to adhere to the ban?

All types of fireworks are prohibited on California State Parks beaches. All cities in the county must adhere to the fireworks ban, as do the unincorporated areas of Santa Cruz County such as Bonny Doon, Felton, Ben Lomond, Live Oak, Soquel, Aptos and Davenport, among others.

Capitola and Watsonville are the only cities in the county where any type of fireworks are allowed, in this case “safe and sane” fireworks. Watsonville will permit these fireworks from only July 1 through midnight on July 5, and according to the Capitola Police Department, Capitola will allow them only on private property.

A selection of “safe and sane” fireworks from a booth along Green Valley Road in Watsonville. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz What are “safe and sane” fireworks, and where can you purchase them? 

They are state-approved fireworks that do not explode or leave the ground. Some examples include fountains, sparklers and pinwheels. Starting Wednesday, July 1, TNT Fireworks stands and tents will pop up in Watsonville, selling only state fire marshal-approved safe and sane fireworks. Fireworks that do not have the state marshal’s seal of approval are illegal.

What are some ways to prevent injuries and fires while using “safe and sane” fireworks?

Never use fireworks near dry grass or other flammable materials, light one firework at a time, keep a bucket of water and a hose nearby and sweep up all debris afterward to help keep trash out of storm drains.

What fines could you get for fireworks violations?

Starting Friday, July 3, at 8 a.m., the Santa Cruz Police Department will enforce a citywide safety enhancement zone until 8 a.m. July 7. This means fines for violations of the city’s municipal code, including the illegal discharge of fireworks, will be tripled. This can add up to a ticket as expensive as $1,000, and a possible arrest.

If you witness the use of illegal fireworks, whom can you contact to report it?

The Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office non-emergency line is 831-471‐112; the Santa Cruz Police Department non-emergency line is 831-471-1131; Capitola PD non-emergency is 831-471-1141; Scotts Valley PD non-emergency is 831-440-5670, and Watsonville PD’s is 831-471-1151.

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.

The post Santa Cruz County has some of the strictest fireworks laws in California. Here’s what you need to know ahead of July Fourth appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

The White House’s July 4 celebration is about to blow the ceiling off of Washington—and not in a good way.

Government workers were spotted by independent journalist Amanda Moore on Monday using forklifts to move pallets full of fireworks around the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ahead of America’s semiquincentennial.

The location was not an oddity, as the federal government has traditionally chosen the Reflecting Pool as its primary launch site. What is exceptionally unusual is the amount of firepower behind the 250th celebration.

Donald Trump promised earlier this month that he would launch “the LARGEST FIREWORKS SHOW IN HISTORY” on Independence Day 2026. By the numbers, it’s not even close: A typical July 4 show in the nation’s capital uses roughly 17,000 to 20,000 shells for a 17-minute show, according to figures collected by The Washington Post.

This year, the Freedom 250 celebration has proposed a record-shattering 40-minute display beginning at 10:30 p.m. that will use more than 860,000 explosives. They’ll be set off along the Reflecting Pool, as well as in West Potomac Park and on eight barges on the Potomac River.

Pyrotecnico, the Pennsylvania-based vendor responsible for the show, told the Post that it would “not only” be a “once-in-a-generation patriotic spectacle but a landmark moment in fireworks history.”

The previous record was held by Manila in the Philippines, which earned the Guinness World Record title in 2016 for lighting 809,000 fireworks during a New Year’s Eve event.

But rules around Washington’s celebration are likely to make the spectacle an unpleasant evening for local spectators. The Department of Homeland Security has classified the ceremony as a National Special Security Event, the same security classification used for presidential inaugurations, since Trump is expected to deliver remarks in person ahead of the display.

That will forbid a long list of typical July 4 accoutrements, such as chairs, coolers, balls, frisbees, aerosols, metal or glass containers, lighters, vapes, and even spray sunscreen, reported WTOP News.

Beyond that, federal workers will also be fighting Mother Nature, which is expected to shatter weather records by bringing triple-digit temperatures to Washington amid a historic heat wave this weekend.

Four years into the Kremlin’s illegal invasion of its neighboring country, Russian influence operations have moved beyond their near-exclusive focus on Ukraine to their former favorite targets: the US and Europe, and especially covert cyber-ops intended to undermine political stability within these countries and the unity between them, according to Google Threat Intelligence. “This shift is significant because it likely signals increased focus outside of Ukraine, warning that pro-Russia influence activity targeting the European Union (EU), North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and other top targeting priorities may intensify,” Google threat hunters James Sadowski and Alden Wahlstrom said in a Monday report. The war in Ukraine helped Russian operatives refine their influence activities, and Moscow’s increasing use of AI for planning, reconnaissance, and content generation “marks a forward trend in pro-Russia IO,” the duo wrote. The primary objectives of these pro-Russia influence campaigns center around five key goals, all of which aim to advance the Kremlin’s military and political objectives via psychological manipulation – something Russia has been very, very good at throughout history. These key goals include: undermining democracy, dividing Western coalitions, promoting Russia’s image and regional interests, maintaining domestic stability, and repressing political dissent within the country. While the campaigns themselves typically involve fake news websites serving up phony political commentary or direct messages disseminating pro-Russian narratives, influence ops frequently coincide with data-wiping malware or other destructive cyberattacks, hack-and-leak campaigns, or direct cyber-espionage, according to the Googlers. This influence ecosystem spans multiple channels, from official government propaganda and covert intelligence operations to hacktivists and pro-Russian proxies. Oftentimes, the lines between these channels are blurred, making attribution more difficult and giving Moscow plausible deniability for cyber activities. Plus, Russian cybergroups – like everyone else – are increasingly using AI tools across their entire campaigns to make their cyber operations more efficient. Late last month, researchers at WithSecure documented Russia-linked cyber espionage crews using AI tools to help build malware, spin up infrastructure, and craft lures for attacks on Ukrainian targets. The group, tracked as GreyVibe, used OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Ideogram AI across almost every stage of its operations since at least August 2025, we’re told. “As Russia seeks to emerge from international isolation and reorients its influence ecosystem back toward global objectives, it is critical for defenders to understand how this ecosystem provides the Kremlin with a durable influence capability in order to better anticipate future Russian influence threats,” the Googlers noted. ®

President Donald Trump launched into a rant about communism as the biggest threat to the United States, after being triggered by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Speaking to reporters in the White House, Trump was asked whether he was concerned by Mamdani assenting to be made the “poster child” for socialism.

“I think it’s a big threat to our nation, actually, because it’s not socialism, it’s really communism,” Trump said.

“I think it’s the biggest threat to our nation there is, maybe since our founding. That includes World War I, World War II, September 11th. It includes the, uh, Pearl Harbor attack. I think this is the biggest threat,” Trump said. “People will smile when I say that, but the smart people are gonna say, ‘You know, he’s probably right.’ It’s basically introducing communism into the United States of America.”

Reporter: Mamdani said he was open to being the poster child for socialist candidates.

Trump: It's really communism. I think it's the biggest threat to our nation since our founding—that includes World War 1, World War 2, September 11th. It includes the Pearl Harbor attack . I… pic.twitter.com/NR3p3CZ9r0

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 29, 2026

Clearly, Trump needs a bit of a history lesson. “Who’s gonna tell him about World War Two?” historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote on X.

Does Trump honestly think communism is the biggest threat to the U.S.? The president is obviously rattled by all of Mamdani’s recent victories in New York City—and his growing popularity with voters.

Last week, Trump had a meltdown after a slate of democratic socialist candidates endorsed by Mamdani won their primary elections in New York.

The president also fumed after the city’s Rent Guidelines Board passed a rent freeze, enabling Mamdani to make good on one of his key campaign promises, help tenants living in the city’s nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments, and get under the skin of a former NYC slumlord.

ph @casanova_coffee_art
Padua

Remember when it seemed like the most monstrous, unprecedented corruption was that, during his first term, President Donald Trump stomped all over the Emoluments Clause by owning a hotel where eager oligarchs and hangers-on could pay to stay? Doesn’t that just seem quaint by comparison to the orgy of corruption that is Trump’s second term? In the latest bit of grift, we’ve got another…

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This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for its newsletters.

Following weeks of negotiations, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic legislative leaders have agreed on a $351.7 billion budget next year that raises some taxes, sets aside $6.4 billion for the year after and softens or delays billions of dollars in planned social service cuts.

The budget, Newsom’s last, will leave the California budget balanced for two consecutive years and reduce future year deficits significantly, state leaders say. Lawmakers were poised to adopt the deal on Monday.

“This budget demonstrates responsible choices that protect our fiscal strength while continuing to invest in what matters most,” Newsom said in a statement.

The state faced a steep funding cliff in January amid ballooning costs of Medi-Cal, the state’s healthcare program for low-income Californians, and the threat of losing tens of billions of federal dollars under President Donald Trump’s budget bill. 

But since then, tax revenue has grown faster than expected, thanks to the artificial intelligence-driven economic boom. The final budget agreement largely relies on that windfall and new taxes Newsom has championed, along with delayed healthcare cuts and suspended payments to K-12 schools and state reserves to balance the books and slash future deficits. 

The Newsom-backed tax measures, which the Legislature approved earlier this month, will apply a sales tax to everyday computer software, cap business tax credits and raise the tax rate on commercial healthcare providers. 

The budget deal also requires the next governor to consider penalizing big corporations for having employees on Medi-Cal — an idea from Senate Democrats — unless Congress repeals Trump’s Medi-Cal cuts before then. Sen. María Elena Durazo, a Los Angeles Democrat and a member of the legislative Latino caucus, said the plan does not go far enough to discipline companies that pay low wages.

“Another cycle of large corporations paying nothing while their underpaid workers stay on Medi-Cal, and we foot the bill as taxpayers,” Durazo said during a Monday hearing. 

“This is a budget that bought time. Medi-Cal delayed, not resolved, not restored.”

While Newsom proposed deeper cuts in May, the final budget softens the blow and includes new spending. It delays most cuts to Medi-Cal services and preserves funding for in-home care for low-income Californians. It gives counties $900 million in homelessness funding, almost double the $500 million Newsom wanted. It also adds 22,700 state-funded child care spaces to address the need to care for children three and under.

Newsom and lawmakers couldn’t settle on a full spending plan for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the state’s main source of cash for climate programs, punting negotiations to the summer. They did agree to tap the fund for electric vehicle incentives and to backfill the fire department budget.

The holdup is largely due to the new climate rules Newsom’s administration adopted in May, which could cut the fund in half, sparking a fight between Senate Democrats and Newsom over funding priorities.

Republicans blasted the budget deal, criticizing Democrats for passing policies through the budget process without much advance notice. The process allows state leaders to fast-track complicated policies instead of facing scrutiny in months of public hearings. 

“It’s an abuse of the process that we have unfortunately got all too accustomed with,” said Sen. Roger Niello, a Roseville Republican, on Monday.

Delaying most Medi-Cal cuts

The deal includes $300 million to subsidize private healthcare to lower costs for low- to middle-income Californians, a Newsom priority. The governor proposed it in May to erase premiums for lowest-income residents and reduce out-of-pocket costs for middle-class households. 

It also includes $250 million in grants to public hospitals and up to $140 million for those in “significant financial distress.” Several hospital advocates, including the California Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems, had advocated for $500 million in funding as hospitals risk scaling back services or closing altogether due to the lost federal funds.

The state also agreed to give counties $200 million to more frequently verify low-income people’s eligibility to receive health and food benefits, which the Trump administration requires. But the budget deal leaves out $125 million the Legislature wanted to give counties to set up an indigent care system to care for those falling off of Medi-Cal. 

Counties urged state leaders to pursue an alternative before the legislative session ends in September. Otherwise, “counties will be forced to cut core services — threatening public safety, slashing behavioral health and public health services, and driving up homelessness,” according to a joint statement from the California State Association of Counties and other county associations. 

Newsom agreed to scrap his proposed cuts to the In-Home Supportive Services program, which provides in-home care to roughly 900,000 low-income Californians, after the Legislature’s opposition. 

They also agreed on a less restrictive Medi-Cal asset test for seniors and those with disabilities than Newsom proposed: In addition to the income tests, starting July 2027, individuals must own $21,000 in assets or less ($31,000 for couples) to qualify for Medi-Cal. The current ceiling is $130,000 for individuals and $195,000 for couples.

While Newsom wanted to increase the monthly premium for undocumented adults enrolled in Medi-Cal from $30 to $50, the final deal leaves the decision to the next governor.

The deal preserves immigrant healthcare by delaying many cuts: By January, the state will start transitioning roughly 2 million Medi-Cal enrollees — most of whom are undocumented immigrants — to a fee-for-service system by Jan. 1, 2027. 

The change will allow the state to continue receiving funding for Medi-Cal and save $470 million next year, but those immigrants will lose access to benefits such as case management, housing assistance and medically tailored meals.

Starting July 2027, the state will limit state-funded healthcare coverage for some refugees, asylees and human trafficking survivors, to emergency and pregnancy care only. The budget plan also delays other cuts, including dental benefits for undocumented Medi-Cal enrollees and clinic reimbursements for Medi-Cal services, until July 2027.

“While we are relieved this agreement spares immigrant communities from losing access to doctors, dentists and trusted community providers this year, our work is far from over,” said Kiran Savage-Sangwan, executive director of the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network.

Newsom gets wins school chiefs overhaul

The deal largely preserves Newsom’s May spending plan for K-12 education.

It increases special education funding by $2.4 billion and gives school districts and community colleges higher cost-of-living increases to provide 14 weeks of pregnancy leave for their employees, something teachers unions have championed for years. 

But the latest spending plan also withholds $3.9 billion in constitutionally guaranteed funding from K-12 schools, an accounting mechanism Newsom wanted to use in case the state overcommits with a revenue forecast that is too optimistic. If the state collects more tax revenue in the next year than projected, the budget deal requires the state to use a portion of that to pay down what it owes the schools. 

Disappointed education advocates criticized state leaders for shortchanging school districts. The California Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers union, accused state leaders of violating the state Constitution and said it would consider suing. 

“At a time when both public schools and the voting rights of our communities face growing attacks from the federal government, California lawmakers should be standing up for our students and exercising the democratic principles that have made California the nation’s progressive leader,” CTA President David Goldberg said in a statement. 

The deal also allows Newsom to radically diminish the authority of the elected state superintendent of public instruction, shifting K-12 school governance to a new education commissioner appointed by the governor. Starting Jan. 15, 2027, the superintendent will become one of 13 members on the State Board of Education led by the commissioner.

Newsom proposed the idea in January to make education governance more coherent, gaining support from a wide array of education advocates. California is one of nine states that still elect a schools chief, whereas other states allow the governor to appoint them. 

The CTA, some senators and candidates running for superintendent were skeptical of the promised outcome and slammed Newsom for jamming the policy through the budget process, especially when voters in November are already set to vote for a superintendent whose duties will be significantly pared down.

California voters have rejected four ballot measures to abolish the superintendent role, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office. 

“To me, it feels very deeply democratically cynical,” said Sen. Chris Cabaldon, a Napa Democrat, during a May hearing of the proposal. “That the voters four times before have said no to making these reforms. That we’re just gonna try to do it without them and leave in place the shell of what the constitution requires, in order to get around that.”

New EV incentive

While state lawmakers punted most of the climate money negotiations, they agreed with Newsom to allocate $1.25 billion in the greenhouse gas fund for the state’s fire department.

They also agreed to set aside $356 million for zero-emission or hybrid vehicle incentives, with $115 million coming from the climate fund. That includes $85 million over the next five years to help low-income Californians replace old gas-powered vehicles with cleaner ones.

A line of electric vehicles at a Hyundai dealership in Fresno. Credit: Larry Valenzuela / CalMatters/CatchLight Local

Roughly $135 million is reserved for electric trucks and buses. Another $135 million will help first-time buyers of new light-duty electric vehicles priced at $50,000 or less and used ones at $25,000 or less.

The deal allows the California Air Resources Board, the state’s climate regulator, to set the incentive amount. 

Lawmakers also agreed with Newsom to fund the state’s community air protection program established in 2017 to reduce the harm of air pollution, most of it from the state general fund.

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.

The post Newsom’s parting gift: A budget that delays California’s deep cuts to 2027 appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

President Donald Trump took a little tour of his plethora of hideous pet projects around Washington, D.C., over the weekend. According to The Associated Press, he “surveyed several of his construction projects around the nation’s capital,” which is something we now pretend is totally normal for the president to do. After his field trip, Trump went on Truth Social to tout his little golf…

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A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | How the Supreme Court just made life tougher for tortured immigrants…

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VCs remain thirsty to fund AI coding startups. This one, founded by investor, Chamath Palihapitiya, is no exception.

There was good news and bad news from the Supreme Court on Monday. We’ll start with the former. In an extraordinary 5-4 ruling in Trump v. Cook, the court held that President Donald Trump cannot summarily fire a Federal Reserve governor without cause, thereby shielding the nation’s central bank from direct presidential control.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote for the court, held that Congress could lawfully shield Federal Reserve members from removal without cause because of the Fed’s unique role in American governance. In doing so, he and the other justices in the majority—Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal members—sidestepped some of the court’s normal procedural hurdles.

“We see no reason to leave the public in limbo, or to sow doubt as to the status of one of our nation’s (and the world’s) most important financial institutions,” he explained in his majority opinion, quoting from precedent. “Although we appreciate that others may see matters differently, we would not so quickly unsettle this ‘special arrangement sanctioned by history.’”

Unfortunately, the court’s deference to Congress on removal protections applies only to the Federal Reserve. The court’s conservative majority simultaneously held that Trump could fire Democratic appointees at the Federal Trade Commission in Trump v. Slaughter, clearing the path for him to wield much greater influence over other financial regulatory agencies.

The 6-3 decision is a generational victory for the conservative legal movement, which has spent the last few decades trying to bring independent federal agencies under the heel of Republican presidents. The high court also overturned a New Deal-era precedent that allowed Congress to protect the leaders of federal financial regulators from dismissal without cause in Slaughter. In doing so, it opened some of the nation’s most important governing institutions to the day-to-day whims of a corrupt president.

Taken together, Cook and Slaughter divided the Supreme Court into three camps. One of them, represented by the court’s three liberal justices, would have upheld the status quo for independent federal agencies. In their view, Congress can give certain federal agencies a measure of independence from the White House by only allowing the president to fire the agencies’ leaders for cause.

This also happened to be the status quo for at least the last century of American history. In 1935, the Supreme Court ruled in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States that the president could not lawfully remove a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Prior to Slaughter, no president had sought to dismiss a FTC commissioner, either for cause or without it.

While presidents have the power to remove executive-branch officers by default, the Humphrey’s Executor court reasoned, Congress could impose limits if the agency in question also exercised “quasi-legislative” or “quasi-judicial” power. Agency independence became particularly important with financial regulators as a check on corruption and safeguard of public confidence.

“Congress and more than a dozen Presidents have relied on Humphrey’s to construct a workable government, creating many other agencies in the FTC’s tradition,” Sotomayor explained in her Cook dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Today, this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong.”

Last year, Trump began to challenge Humphrey’s Executor by firing the heads of certain federal agencies without cause. The president had long sought to exercise more direct control over federal agencies, though he lacked the interest or drive to do so during his first term. After his return to power last year, Trump ended the Justice Department’s post-Watergate tradition of independence, staffed other agencies with personal loyalists, and sought to remove Democratic appointees of multi-member regulatory agencies.

The Supreme Court proved eager to help him wage this war against what conservatives had long derided as the “administrative state.” The justices effectively signaled that Humphrey’s Executor was a dead letter in a shadow-docket ruling in Wilcox v. Trump. (The court also addressed the Federal Reserve in that case, but we’ll come back to that later.)

Technically, however, that ruling remained the law of the land when Trump dismissed FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter last year. Slaughter challenged her dismissal in federal court, noting that Congress had insulated commissioners like herself from presidential removal without cause and that Humphrey’s Executor remained good law. The Trump administration argued that the Supreme Court had repeatedly narrowed Humphrey’s Executor, particularly in recent years, and that it was finally time to scrap it altogether.

“Although it is up to the Senate to decide whether to confirm those with whom the President would prefer to work, neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work,” Roberts wrote for the court. “Subordinates who exercise the President’s power are subject to removal by him. Then, and only then, can they remain accountable to the President, and the President to the people.”

To reach this conclusion, Roberts crystallized a rigid interpretation of the separation of powers. He spun a tale of the Constitutional Convention where early American luminaries reached “the Decision of 1789,” which gave the president a broad power to remove subordinate officers at will. Roberts pointed to the 1926 ruling Myers v. United States, in which then-Chief Justice William Howard Taft—a former president himself—asserted a broad removal power over congressional encroachments since Reconstruction.

Congress may establish independent agencies “to assist it with its functions,” Roberts claimed, but could not “foist those agencies upon the president, and thus deprive him of the ‘executive power vested [in him] by the Constitution.’” The president-as-victim framework is a defining trait of the unitary executive theory, which often paints the executive branch as an avatar of the popular will that is shackled by a burdensome legislature and a meddlesome court.

Indeed, in Roberts’ opinion in Slaughter, the legislative branch is framed as a disembodied, eldritch force that constantly tries to undermine the executive. “Since its creation in 1914, the FTC has accumulated vast rulemaking, enforcement, and adjudicatory powers under more than 80 statutes,” Roberts noted at one point. One might also describe that as the legislative process. To the conservative majority, however, Congress is treated as some kind of natural force to be endured and resisted, like rust or erosion.

What is actually being washed away is a century of American governance that brought individual prosperity and economic growth, even if Americans did not actively realize it. “Today, the majority replaces 90 years of proven, workable practice with a half-baked theory of executive power that is simultaneously all encompassing yet also subject to necessary but undefined exceptions,” Sotomayor wrote in her Slaughter dissent. “The one thing that does appear to be clear going forward is that chaos will follow.”

The second camp is Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who sided with their conservative colleagues in Slaughter but formed a majority with the liberal justices in Cook. They sought to harmonize a unitary executive with the practical necessity of the Federal Reserve’s independence.

Lisa Cook, the latter case’s titular plaintiff, became the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors when the Senate confirmed her appointment in 2022. As one of the board’s seven members, Cook is charged with overseeing the nation’s monetary system. She also automatically serves on the Federal Open Markets Committee, which is best known for setting interest rates.

Since its establishment in 1913, the Fed has served as the nation’s de facto central bank. Congress sought to protect its decision-making process from day-to-day political meddling by only allowing governors to be removed by the president for cause. Lawmakers hoped to avoid a scenario where a president would install pliant governors who would prioritize the White House’s short-term political interests over the long-term stability of the American financial system.

Past presidents have obeyed the law even when they sharply disagreed with the Fed’s decisions. That century-long status quo came to an end after Trump was elected to his first term in 2016. The president had long advocated for lower interest rates that would make it easier for businesses to borrow money. While lower interest rates can stimulate economic growth in the short term, the Federal Reserve is also charged by Congress with ensuring that inflation stays within a 2 percent growth rate.

Things came to a head in 2018 and 2019 when Trump openly criticized Jerome Powell, the then-Fed chairman, for supporting higher interest rates to cool what economic experts saw as excessive asset prices. Trump himself had appointed Powell to the chairmanship in 2018, only to sour on him as Trump’s trade war with China dragged on the economy. In one notable Twitter post in the summer of 2019, Trump publicly questioned whether “our bigger enemy” was Powell or Chinese President Xi Jinping. (It was unclear whether “our” referred to the United States or to Trump himself.)

Ironically, Powell turned out to be the most competent public servant appointed by the first Trump administration. He received widespread and bipartisan praise for stabilizing the American economy as the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged American businesses and workers. Powell is also credited with managing the “soft landing” by raising interest rates enough to cool inflation during the Biden administration but without short-circuiting economic growth.

While Trump had stopped criticizing Powell in 2020 and redirected his energies to other matters, the president returned to office in 2025 on a mission to bring the Fed to heel. The White House moved quickly to destroy the Justice Department’s traditional independence upon taking office by staffing it with Trump’s former personal lawyers; the Supreme Court also cleared the way for Trump to remove protected Democratic appointees at a wide range of federal agencies during Trump’s first year.

At the same time, the Supreme Court signaled that it would not brook an attack on the Fed’s independence. In Wilcox, the aforementioned shadow-docket case, one of the Democratic appointees on the National Labor Relations Board who had been removed by Trump warned that her ouster could pave the way for an attack on the Fed. Not so, said the justices. The Fed, they wrote, “is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”

Trump did not get the message. Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Financial Agency, spent the summer of 2025 accusing various Democrats and Trump political targets of mortgage fraud. Among them was Cook, though the allegations against her appear dubious at best. In August, Pulte referred her to the Justice Department for prosecution. Trump used the referral as a pretext for her dismissal.

At Trump’s behest, federal prosecutors in D.C. also opened a criminal investigation into Powell claiming that he had misled Congress about a renovation project at the Federal Reserve’s headquarters. Powell announced in a video message in January that he had been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury over the claims. Amid significant blowback on Capitol Hill, even among Republicans, the Justice Department dropped the spurious probe in April.

Roberts, this time in Cook, leaned heavily on the idea that the Fed was a true constitutional successor to the First and Second Banks of the United States. This is only somewhat true: The early republic’s central banks were structurally quite different than the Fed is, and they operated in substantially different economic contexts. No matter, the chief justice wrote, because the linkage is enough to give a “history and tradition” rationale for distinguishing the Fed from the FTC.

“It is true, of course, that this tradition has not stood still; as Justice [Clarence] Thomas notes, the Federal Reserve is more powerful than its predecessors, managing a vastly more complex economy in a vastly more complex world,” Roberts explained, referencing his colleagues’ dissent. “We see no reason, however, why our central bank ought to be ‘trapped in amber’ any more than any other aspect of our constitutional scheme.”

Roberts did not directly reference the court’s Slaughter ruling in his majority opinion and focused largely on Myers. Reconciling the two decisions instead fell to Kavanaugh in his concurring opinion. His reasoning is largely pragmatic: the Fed “occupies a unique role in the U.S. Government and maintains critical responsibility for the stability and success of the U.S. and world economies,” and it also “follows in a distinct historical tradition of central bank independence that has long coexisted with Article II.”

All of which brings us to the third camp. Neither Roberts nor Kavanaugh proved persuasive to the court’s other conservatives, who chose ideological purity over the nation’s financial stability. “Today’s decision is an unprecedented incursion on the executive branch,” Thomas complained in his dissent. “Neither the parties nor the court can point to a single time in American history that this court has upheld an injunction against the President’s removal of an executive officer. In the 237-year history of our Constitution, this court has, by all accounts, never done so.”

Other conservative justices were more cautious. Justice Samuel Alito, in a concurring opinion joined by Gorsuch, suggested that the court could have granted Trump’s request for a stay and left a host of constitutional questions for future briefing. This would have had the practical effect of removing Cook from office, which in turn would effectively decide the case. (Other officials who were denied interim relief often resigned rather than live without a paycheck indefinitely during litigation.)

Alito’s response to Roberts’s concerns about the stability of the American financial system was essentially one step short of denying them. “Granting a stay on the ground set out above would have had no such effect,” he speculated. “It would have simply returned the case to the courts below so that the litigation could continue in the normal course.” If the markets only responded to cold logic, this would be a stronger argument. Instead they would have likely drawn the easiest conclusion: the Fed’s independence, once rock-solid, was no longer indisputable.

It must be stressed that the outcome in Cook is, indeed, good news. The ruling does not represent the end of the road for Cook herself, who must continue to defend herself against allegations of mortgage fraud. But it does send a strong signal from the high court to the country—to markets, to banks and businesses, and  most importantly to presidents—that the Fed’s independence remains functionally intact. It is easy to scoff at this, but financial crises never limit their damage to the people responsible for them. It’s not hard to see Roberts’s invocations of the dangers of “leaving the public in limbo,” or otherwise “sowing doubt,” as a nod toward preventing panic in the marketplace.

At the same time, Slaughter represents a landmark victory for the conservative legal establishment. It will allow presidents to exert unchallenged control over major financial regulators like the FTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as a host of other independent agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Communications Commission. It enshrines a radical expansion of presidential power into the law of the land and further diminishes Congress’s central role in the American constitutional order. 

“Many do not share the court’s rosy appraisal of the past century,” Thomas complained towards the end of his Cook dissent. Rarely is the conservative legal movement described so succinctly. Both the American economy and Americans’ quality of life grew by leaps and bounds over that timespan, thanks at least in part to competent regulatory institutions that combined the executive branch’s flexibility with the legislative branch’s stability. The party is now over.

⚡ Quick Take

• Peter Safran, co-head of DC Studios, responded to Supergirl’s box office failure.
• He says he remains confident in his and James Gunn’s plan for the DCU.
• Maybe this will mean only the big names in DC will get their own movies going forward.

DC Studios’ Supergirl flew into theaters this past weekend, and the Girl of Steel was quickly grounded at the box office. Despite a budget of $170 million, the film only made $68 million globally. And with just middling reviews, it’s doubtful that the film will grow much beyond this. Like the original 1984 Supergirl, this looks to be another financial flop. And given that it’s DC Studios’ second film after last year’s well-received Superman, fans are wondering if this marks the end of the new DC Studios already. But DC Studios’ co-head, Peter Safran, is not so doom-and-gloomy. Here’s what he told the New York Times, via Deadline:

While Supergirl didn’t meet our box office expectations, it’s just one component of a broader, long-term strategy at DC Studios that we remain confident in.

DC Studios

Now, as co-head of the studio, he has to try to put a positive spin on things. But fans of James Gunn’s DCU shouldn’t start freaking out just yet. Don’t forget, the second MCU film after Iron Man was The Incredible Hulk, which was also a big disappointment. And that all worked out. Although, in fairness, it opened much better than Supergirl did. But we doubt Warner Bros. is going to fire Gunn and Safran after just one flop. Especially one that had such a tough uphill battle to fight as Supergirl did. Many things were stacked against it from the word go, and Supergirl just didn’t have the strength to fight back.

For starters, the character was barely in last year’s Superman. Milly Alcock’s appearance was just a few seconds. So audiences did not become endeared to her, because we didn’t really know Kara yet. Second, it opened a mere week after the box office juggernaut that is Toy Story 5, which was still cleaning up in theaters. Also, there’s the perception that Supergirl (like The Flash) is a TV property, after running on the CW for several seasons. Yes, it’s a different actress in the role, but to the general audience, it’s just another TV show becoming a movie. Even the Star Wars label couldn’t help The Mandalorian and Grogu from that perception.

DC Studios

And there’s also the elephant in the room, the organized hate campaign online from misogynist “fans” toward the film since day one. The same hate campaign organized against The Marvels, She-Hulk, even the well-reviewed Furiosa. There is just a segment of the male fandom who want to make sure female heroes never get the spotlight. Or if they do, they must have a certain cookie cutter look. It’s gross, but it sadly remains a factor. Although how big a factor is debatable. In the same New York Times interview, Safran said he believed “culture had grown,” claiming shock at the ferocity against Milly Alcock from certain men online. Clearly, he is not someone who has spent much time on social media in the past few years.

Milly Alcock will appear as Supergirl again, in next year’s Man of Tomorrow. And she’s probably under contract for more movies after that. So the character isn’t vanishing, or killed off, such as the last time a Supergirl film bombed. But sadly, don’t expect any more big-budget tentpoles from DC Studios based on B-list or C-list characters. This applies to Marvel Studios as well. The days of studios giving out big-budget movies to every superhero are behind us. From DC, expect the “Big Guns” only; Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Justice League (eventually). The rest will probably be relegated to streaming series and animation. And maybe, that’s ok.

The post DC Studios Remains Confident in Its Plan Post-SUPERGIRL appeared first on Nerdist.