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New York Post
3 hours ago
- Business
- New York Post
California closes $12B deficit by cutting back immigrants' access to health care
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed on Friday a budget that pares back a number of progressive priorities, including a landmark health care expansion for low-income adult illegal immigrants, to close a $12 billion deficit. It's the third year in a row the nation's most populous state has been forced to slash funding or stop some of the programs championed by Democratic leaders. Lawmakers passed the budget earlier in the day following an agreement of a $321 billion spending plan between Newsom and Democratic leaders. 7 California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a budget that pares back a number of progressive priorities, including a health care expansion for low-income adult illegal immigrants. AP But the whole budget will be void if lawmakers don't send him legislation to make it easier to build housing by Monday. The budget avoids some of the most devastating cuts to essential safety net programs, state leaders said. They mostly relied on using state savings, borrowing from special funds and delaying payments to plug the budget hole. 'It's balanced, it maintains substantial reserves, and it's focused on supporting Californians,' Newsom said in a statement about the budget. California also faces potential federal cuts to health care programs and broad economic uncertainty that could force even deeper cuts. Newsom in May estimated that federal policies — including on tariffs and immigration enforcement — could reduce state tax revenue by $16 billion. 7 California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks to reporters in San Francisco, Calif. in June 12, 2025. JOHN G MABANGLO/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock 7 Migrant farm laborers have their temperatures in King City, Calif. on April 28, 2020. Getty Images 'We've had to make some tough decisions,' Senate President Pro Tempore Mike McGuire said Friday. 'I know we're not going to please everyone, but we're doing this without any new taxes on everyday Californians.' Republican lawmakers said they were left out of budget negotiations. They also criticized Democrats for not doing enough to address future deficits, which could range between $17 billion to $24 billion annually. 7 Protesters hold up signs supporting healthcare for illegal immigrants during California's Immigrants Day of Action on May 20, 2019 in Sacramento, Calif. AP 'We're increasing borrowing, we're taking away from the rainy day fund, and we're not reducing our spending,' said Republican state Sen. Tony Strickland prior to the vote. 'And this budget also does nothing about affordability in California.' Here's a look at spending in key areas: Health care Under the budget deal, California will stop enrolling new adult patients without legal status in its state-funded health care program for low-income people starting 2026. The state will also implement a $30 monthly premium July 2027 for immigrants remaining on the program, including some with legal status. The premiums would apply to adults under 60 years old. The changes to the program, known as Medi-Cal, are a scaled-back version of Newsom's proposal in May. Still, it's a major blow to an ambitious program started last year to help the state inch closer to a goal of universal health care. Democratic state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo broke with her party and voted 'no' on the health care changes, calling them a betrayal of immigrant communities. The deal also removes $78 million in funding for mental health phone lines, including a program that served 100,000 people annually. It will eliminate funding that helps pay for dental services for low-income people in 2026 and delay implementation of legislation requiring health insurance to cover fertility services by six months to 2026. But lawmakers also successfully pushed back on several proposed cuts from Newsom that they called 'draconian.' The deal secures funding for a program providing in-home domestic and personal care services for some low-income residents and Californians with disabilities. It also avoids cuts to Planned Parenthood. 7 A family whose parens are illegal immigrants sign up for government assisted health care at the San Mateo Medical Center in San Mateo Calif. on Feb. 22, 2023. AP Environment Lawmakers agreed to let the state tap $1 billion from its cap-and-trade program to fund state firefighting efforts. The cap-and-trade program is a market-based system aimed at reducing carbon emissions. Companies have to buy credits to pollute, and that money goes into a fund lawmakers are supposed to tap for climate-related spending. Newsom wanted to reauthorize the program through 2045, with a guarantee that $1 billion would annually go to the state's long-delayed high-speed rail project. 7 The California State Capitol in Sacramento, Calif. on Aug. 5, 2024. AP The budget doesn't make that commitment, as lawmakers wanted to hash out spending plans outside of the budget process. The rail project currently receives 25% of the cap-and-trade proceeds, which is roughly $1 billion annually depending on the year. Legislative leaders also approved funding to help transition part-time firefighters into full-time positions. Many state firefighters only work nine months each year, which lawmakers said harms the state's ability to prevent and fight wildfires. The deal includes $10 million to increase the daily wage for incarcerated firefighters, who earn $5.80 to $10.24 a day currently. Public safety The budget agreement will provide $80 million to help implement a tough-on-crime initiative voters overwhelmingly approved last year. The measure makes shoplifting a felony for repeat offenders, increases penalties for some drug charges and gives judges the authority to order people with multiple drug charges into treatment. Most of the fund, $50 million, will help counties build more behavioral health beds. Probation officers will get $15 million for pre-trial services and courts will receive $20 million to support increased caseloads. Advocates of the measure — including sheriffs, district attorneys and probation officers — said that's not enough money. Some have estimated it would take around $400 million for the first year of the program. 7 A protester holds an American and Mexican flag outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles during a rally on June 6, 2025. AP Other priorities Newsom and lawmakers agreed to raise the state's film tax credit from $330 million to $750 million annually to boost Hollywood. The program, a priority for Newsom, will start this year and expire in 2030. The budget provides $10 million to help support immigration legal services, including deportation defense. But cities and counties won't see new funding to help them address homelessness next year, which local leaders said could lead to the loss of thousands of shelter beds. The budget also doesn't act on Newsom's proposal to streamline a project to create a massive underground tunnel to reroute a big part of the state's water supply.
UPI
16 hours ago
- UPI
Canadian national awaiting deportation dies in Miami detention center
A car passes the Krome Service Processing Center's front gate during the Congressional oversight fact-finding mission on detained immigrants at Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami, Fla., on Monday. Migrants also are housed at the Federal Detention Center in downtown Miami, where a Canadian national died Monday. Photo by Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich/EPA-EFE June 27 (UPI) -- Canadian officials are "urgently seeking more information" after one of their citizens died while in a detention center in Miami pending deporation after being convicted of a felony in 2023. Johnny Noviello, 49, was pronounced deceased by the Miami Fire Rescue Department at 1:36 p.m. Monday at the Federal Detention Center in downtown Miami, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Wednesday in a news release. The cause of death is still under investigation. The detention center, which houses individuals awaiting trial or serving sentences for federal crimes, in February was contracted to hold immigration detainees in four units. Daniel Leising, a lawyer who represented Noviello in the 2023 racketeering case, told the Miami Herald he was told by family members that Noviello had epilepsy and was on seizure medication. Noviello is the 10th person to die in ICE custody during fiscal year 2025, which runs from October, according to the agency's data. There have been four deaths in Florida since then. Medical staff administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation and automated external defibrillator shock. Noviello was pronounced dead by the Miami Fire Rescue Department about half an hour after he was found. "Canadian consular officials are urgently seeking more information from US officials," Foreign Minister Anita Anand posted Thursday on X. "I offer my sincere condolences to the family. In order to respect the family's privacy, further details will not be provided at this time." Noviello was 10 years old when he moved from Canada to Daytona Beach, Fla., and gained legal visa status on Jan. 2, 1988. He became a legal permanent resident on Ovt 24, 1991. In 2017, he and his father were arrested and charged with selling drugs out of their auto shop. On Oct. 23, 2023, he was convicted of the charges including racketeering and drug trafficking in Volusia County in Florida, ICE said. He was sentenced to 12 months in prison. He served about four months in county jail, was released on community control for a year and then placed on probation in February. Noviello had no prior charges and had not violated his probation. The federal government can revoke green cards and deport them for committing certain crimes, including drug trafficking and other serious felonies. On May 15, he was arrested at an ICE probation office, was issued a notice to appear and charged with "removability" because of the controlled substance-related conviction, according to ICE. The Canadian consulate was notified of the man's death, as was Congress, nongovernmental organization stakeholders and the media. "ICE remains committed to ensuring that all those in its custody reside in safe, secure, and humane environments," ICE said in a news release. "Comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment individuals arrive and throughout the entirety of their stay. "At no time during detention is a detained illegal alien denied emergent care." Leising said his client "was just working, nothing out of the ordinary, no violations, nothing else. There was nothing on my mind that would've created any circumstance where Johnny Noviello would have been a danger to anyone."
Straits Times
a day ago
- Politics
- Straits Times
China ousts top general from elite military body as purge grows
Chinese President Xi Jinping has unseated more than a dozen senior military figures. PHOTO: EPA-EFE BEIJING – China has removed a top general from the nation's apex military body led by President Xi Jinping, as the defence establishment is facing a wave of purges. Admiral Miao Hua, who oversees political loyalty in the armed forces, has been ousted from the national Central Military Commission, according to a statement from the National People's Congress Standing Committee. The six-man Central Military Commission is the armed force's premier decision-making body, and one of the most powerful institutions in China. Under Mr Xi, there are two vice-chairmen serving as military leaders and three other members that included Adm Miao, who is seen as a close ally of the country's top leader. Mr Xi's government has unseated more than a dozen senior military figures since launching a corruption investigation last summer into hardware purchases going back to 2017. That probe resulted in the removal of China's last two defence ministers from the Communist Party, as well as the ouster of several officials with ties to the secretive Rocket Force that oversees the nation's nuclear arsenal. Adm Miao was suspended from the CMC in 2024 as he was under investigation for 'serious violations of discipline'. For the ruling Communist Party, that language typically refers to a graft probe. In April, Adm Miao was expelled from Parliament without explanation. BLOOMBERG Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Straits Times
a day ago
- Science
- Straits Times
The world is warming up - and it's happening faster
A report published last week found that human-caused global warming is now increasing by 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade. PHOTO: EPA-EFE NEW YORK - Summer started barely a week ago, and already the United States has been smothered in a record-breaking 'heat dome'. Alaska saw its first-ever heat advisory this month. And all of this comes on the heels of 2024, the hottest calendar year in recorded history. The world is getting hotter, faster. A report published last week found that human-caused global warming is now increasing by 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade. That rate was recorded at 0.2 degrees in the 1970s, and has been growing since. This doesn't surprise scientists who have been crunching the numbers. For years, measurements have followed predictions that the rate of warming in the atmosphere would speed up. But now, patterns that have been evident in charts and graphs are starting to become a bigger part of people's daily lives. 'Each additional fractional degree of warming brings about a relatively larger increase in atmospheric extremes, like extreme downpours and severe droughts and wildfires,' said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California. While this aligns with scientific predictions of how climate change can intensify such events, the increase in severity may feel sudden to people who experience them. 'Back when we had lesser levels of warming, that relationship was a little bit less dramatic,' Dr Swain said. 'There is growing evidence that the most extreme extremes probably will increase faster and to a greater extent than we used to think was the case,' he added. Take rainfall, for example. Generally, extreme rainfall is intensifying at a rate of 7 per cent with each degree Celsius of atmospheric warming. But recent studies indicate that so-called record-shattering events are increasing at double that rate, Dr Swain said. 'There is no weather that's happening outside of climate,' said Dr Kate Marvel, a climate scientist and author of the book 'Human Nature'. 'This is stuff that's manifesting in the real world,' she said, citing catastrophes such as Hurricane Helene that hit Florida in 2024. According to Dr Swain, scientists have yet to come to a universal understanding of these events, in part because the infrequent nature of outliers makes them difficult to study. And as warming has intensified, so have the impacts on vulnerable regions of the planet such as the Arctic and Antarctic, making previously rare or hidden consequences more apparent. Scientists are fine-tuning their models to understand the behaviour of the vast ice sheets in such places to match the rapid changes they're observing. In March 2025, a NASA analysis found that sea levels had risen faster than expected in 2024, in part because of a combination of melting glaciers and heat penetrating deeper into oceans, causing them to expand thermodynamically. Sea surface temperatures are rising faster than previously predicted, too, according to a study published in April by researchers at the National Center for Earth Observation in Britain. Cecilia Bitz, a professor of climate science at the University of Washington, said that modeling the Earth is complex, and that there are an innumerable amount of small factors that could be taken into account. But even with these uncertainties, scientists have ways of building their models to identify trends that are largely accurate. 'Nothing is defying our big picture about the physics of the climate system,' Prof Bitz said. Overall atmospheric warming has consistently followed modeling predictions for decades. But recently, the fundamental imbalance responsible for this heat has been tilting – catching even scientists off guard. Global warming is a symptom of Earth's energy imbalance, which is a measure of the difference between the total amount of heat reaching Earth from the sun, and the amount radiating back into space. In May 2025, a paper analysing data from a NASA satellite found that this imbalance had grown faster than expected, more than doubling in the past two decades and becoming nearly twice as large as it was previously predicted to be. Dr Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, said climate scientists were still working to understand these findings. There are various theories, such as fewer emissions of aerosols, a type of air pollution that is harmful to human health and that increases the reflectivity of clouds, which bounce the sun's heat back into space. Historically, aerosol emissions have masked the warming effect of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. Over the past half-century or so, as nations reduced certain kinds of air pollution, aerosol emissions fell significantly. According to Dr Hausfather, this change is the primary reason atmospheric warming has accelerated in recent decades. But the most worrying possibility behind Earth's energy imbalance, he said, is how the general nature of clouds may be changing in response to climbing temperatures. It's a feedback loop that could potentially exacerbate warming and is 'one of the single biggest uncertainties in predicting future climate,' he said. As the world continues to emit planet-warming greenhouse gasses, and temperatures climb past what the human world was built to handle, Dr Marvel said, more people will experience climate change in damaging and frightening ways. 'It's always worse than expected when it happens to you,' Dr Marvel said. 'It is one thing to see something in a climate model, and it's a totally different thing to actually experience it in your own life.' NYTIMES Find out more about climate change and how it could affect you on the ST microsite here.
Straits Times
a day ago
- Business
- Straits Times
North Korea targets Russian tourists for new Wonsan beach resort: Seoul
The resort is set to open to domestic visitors on July 1, the state-run Korean Central News Agency said. PHOTO: EPA-EFE SEOUL - North Korea is expected to court Russian tourists following the official completion of its Wonsan-Kalma coastal tourist zone, which is set to open first to domestic travelers in July, South Korea's Unification Ministry said on June 26 . The ministry also noted that construction — which had been suspended for an extended period — resumed in 2024 , possibly with material support from Russia and the expectation of attracting Russian tourists. North Korean state media reported on June 26 on the completion ceremony of the Wonsan-Kalma beach resort, held on June 25 and attended by leader Kim Jong-un, his wife Ri Sol-ju, their daughter, widely believed to be Kim Ju-ae, and his sister Kim Yo-jong. Ms Ri made her first public appearance since attending a New Year's Day music concert in 2024. The resort is set to open to domestic visitors on July 1, the state-run Korean Central News Agency said. KCNA reported, 'The tourist zone equipped with hotels and inns capable of accommodating around 20,000 people, allowing domestic and international visitors to choose accommodations that suit their preferences' in a Korean language report. Russian Ambassador to North Korea Alexandr Matsegora and his embassy members were invited as special guests, according to the state media report. 'Operations are expected to gradually expand to include Russian tourists, beginning with domestic tourism on July 1,' a Unification Ministry official said on condition of anonymity during a closed-door briefing. 'The fact that the Russian ambassador was invited and highlighted (in the state media report) also appears to have been intended with Russian tourists in mind.' The official further explained, 'North Korea has regarded tourism as very important while recognizing it as a key means of earning foreign currency.' 'Tourism itself is not a violation of sanctions. However, tourism operations that involve bulk cash transfers or are conducted in the form of cooperative projects or joint ventures with North Korea could constitute a violation of sanctions,' the official said. 'On the other hand, individual tourists paying their own expenses on a cost-reimbursement basis would not be considered a sanctions violation.' A photo released by the official North Korean Central News Agency shows an aerial view of the Wonsan Kalma Coastal Tourist Zone in Wonsan, North Korea. PHOTO: EPA-EFE UN Security Council Resolution 2270 prohibits the transfer of bulk cash to North Korea, and Resolution 2375 bans all UN member states from creating any new joint ventures with North Korean entities or individuals. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his daughter Kim Ju Ae watch a person going down a slide during a ceremony to celebrate the completion of the Wonsan Kalma Coastal Tourist Zone. PHOTO: AFP North Korea's decision to resume years-long construction of the Wonsan-Kalma coastal tourist zone in 2024 could be related to a closer alignment with Russia during the country's grinding war against Ukraine. 'Since North Korea's involvement in the Ukraine war, it is believed that the country has received various forms of material support from Russia — support that may have contributed economically to the completion of the Wonsan-Kalma tourist zone,' the unnamed official said. 'Additionally, there is a possibility that North Korea will actively seek to attract Russian tourists, which could explain the renewed push to promote the project.' North Korea initially designated the area along the coast connecting Wonsan and Mount Kumgang a tourist zone in 2014. KCNA previously reported that the groundbreaking ceremony for the Wonsan region took place in May 2015, on Kalma Street in Wonsan city. North Korea originally set a goal of completing the tourist zone by April 15, 2019, to mark the birth anniversary of the country's late founder, Kim Il Sung. However, the project was repeatedly delayed due to difficulties in securing construction materials under international sanctions. Construction had been halted following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and remained suspended until 2024. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (second from right) and his daughter Kim Ju Ae (left), at the inaugural ceremony of the Wonsan Kalma coastal tourist area in Kangwon Province, North Korea. PHOTO: AFP The official, however, underscored that Seoul needs to watch how much tourism in the Wonsan-Kalma coastal zone can actually be realised 'due to various limitations in transportation infrastructure'. Based on the number of flights and the size of aircraft operating between Pyongyang and Vladivostok, the maximum number of people who could travel via Pyongyang to the Wonsan-Kalma coastal zone in a single day would be around 170, according to the official. The official also explained there has been no progress in resuming Chinese group tours, which have been suspended since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in January 2020. 'We are also monitoring the potential resumption of large-scale Chinese group tours to North Korea, but no concrete signs have emerged yet.' THE KOREA HERALD/ASIA NEWS NETWORK Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
