Nithya Raman, a progressive Los Angeles city council member, has advanced to the November runoff for LA mayor, edging out former reality TV villain Spencer Pratt for the chance to face incumbent mayor Karen Bass.

Pratt, who decided to run for mayor after his Pacific Palisades home burned down in the 2025 wildfires, held a lead over Raman for days. But as ballot processing from last week’s election continued, the city councillor pulled ahead.

Bass, who is seeking another term leading America’s second largest city,learned on 2 June’s primary election night she had secured enough votes to make it to the November election, but the race for second remained close for nearly a week.

Bass’s campaign released a statement on Monday night after hearing of Raman advancing. “A campaign against Nithya Raman, who allows encampments near schools and cuts the police force, is one Mayor Bass looks forward to winning,” said Douglas Herman, a strategist.

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A federal judge on Monday threatened to sanction President Donald Trump's personal attorneys after they missed a court deadline in his sprawling $10 billion libel lawsuit against the BBC — and tried to cover their tracks with a pair of last-minute procedural filings.

U.S. District Judge Roy Altman, a Trump appointee, ordered the president's legal team to explain by June 10 why he shouldn't penalize them for what he called their "apparent disregard of court deadlines." Trump's lawyers had been due to respond to the BBC's motion to dismiss the case by June 5. Instead of filing that response, they submitted two eleventh-hour motions — one seeking leave to file excess pages, another seeking to file under seal — neither of which asked the court to extend the deadline.

Altman also asked whether the BBC's motion to dismiss should be considered unopposed.

The lawsuit, filed in December in the Southern District of Florida, accuses the BBC of defaming Trump by splicing together two portions of his Jan. 6, 2021, speech — made nearly 55 minutes apart — to make it appear he had urged supporters to march on the Capitol and "fight like hell." The BBC has apologized for the edit but is fighting the suit, arguing the Florida court lacks jurisdiction over a documentary that never aired in the United States.

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A federal judge over the weekend struck down a Trump administration effort to restrict tax credits for wind and solar energy.

While the ruling is a win for renewable energy supporters, it comes less than a month before a key deadline to phase out the credits entirely under Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill,” so it’s unclear how wide-reaching the decision will be.

Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act phased out tax credits for solar and wind energy, saying projects can only get them if they start construction before July 5, 2026 or are placed in service before 2028.

At issue in the case is the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) definition of starting construction. 

D.C. federal Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote that since 2013, the IRS has recognized two ways that projects can begin: by starting “physical work of a significant nature” or by incurring costs of five percent or more of a project’s total cost.

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A U.S. District Court judge on Monday, June 8, struck down President Donald Trump's policy imposing a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas, popular among the tech sector and universities to hire foreign skilled workers.

Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston issued the ruling in a lawsuit filed by nearly two dozen Democratic state attorneys general, finding it constituted an unlawful tax Congress never authorized.

The states' top prosecutors, 20 in all, had challenged the fee Trump announced in September that dramatically raised the cost of obtaining the specialized visas.

Trump’s fees were part of a broader strategy to favor U.S. citizens over foreign workers, USA TODAY previously reported. The higher visa costs came amid the Trump administration's central immigration reforms and deportation crackdown, which were also the centerpieces of the president's 2024 campaign.

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