South Koreans' Support for Liberal Lee Rises Ahead of Election
Support for South Korea's presidential race frontrunner Lee Jae-myung has risen to a three-month high as he extends his lead over conservative candidates, in a sign the opposition Democratic Party could grab power in nationwide polls on June 3.
The latest Gallup Poll released Friday showed that the left-leaning Lee's support has risen to 37%, up 3 percentage points from last week's survey. It was the first poll conducted since former President Yoon Suk Yeol was removed from office over his martial law gamble and showed that support for Lee's party rose to 41% while that of the ruling People Power Party slipped to 30%.
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Fox News
21 minutes ago
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Moody rolls out bill to allow states to assist in immigration enforcement amid violent LA anti-ICE riots
FIRST ON FOX: Sen. Ashley Moody introduced a measure that would enable states to assist in immigration enforcement by allowing non-federal law enforcement officers to act as a "force multiplier" for federal immigration officers. The bill, called "The Reimbursement Immigration Partnerships with Police to Allow Local Law Enforcement Act," or the "RIPPLE Act," is an expansion of the 287 (g) program that enables states to assist in immigration enforcement. The bill would expand eligible reimbursable expenses to state and local law enforcement agencies participating in the 287 (g) program. A Moody aide said the bill would also enable non-federal law enforcement agencies to commit already sworn officers to immigration enforcement so that they can act as a "force multiplier" for federal immigration enforcement in the short term, while hiring, training, and on-boarding new federal officers is underway. The aide said that is a "more time-intense process." "Expanding the 287(g) program will provide resources to state law enforcement to more efficiently get dangerous criminals out of our communities," Moody, R-Fla., told Fox News Digital. "Right now, we are watching disorder and chaos spread through California. This bill will ensure that our local, state and federal law enforcement have the resources they need to hold those who break the law accountable." She added: "This lawlessness will not be tolerated." Moody said that as a U.S. Senator, she will "continue to work with President Trump to not only reverse the failures of the Biden administration but ensure that it can never happen again—the RIPPLE Act and The Stop Government Abandonment and Placement Scandals (Stop GAPS) Act are critical steps." Rep. Laurel Lee, R-Fla., introduced the companion legislation in the House of Representatives. "Amid the escalating civil unrest in Los Angeles, our law enforcement officers, with unwavering courage, face life-threatening situations while upholding the rule of law and protecting communities from the chaos of riots," Lee told Fox News Digital. "Their actions demonstrate a selfless dedication to preserving our nation's security and values." Lee said the bill "ensures that local law enforcement officers have the support they need to help enforce immigration laws." "By covering overtime pay and key personnel costs, this bill ensures that local, state, and federal law enforcement officers can work together to stop the chaos and lawlessness in California, and to ensure our immigration laws are followed across America," Lee said. The introduction of the legislation comes amid violent riots in Los Angeles, Calif., with demonstrators violently protesting Trump administration immigration enforcement efforts. The president has deployed thousands of National Guardsmen and women to the streets of Los Angeles. The president also authorized 700 Marine officers to help protect federal buildings and federal law enforcement. Meanwhile, Moody also introduced a bill that would strike existing law that allows the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) to place unaccompanied children with any adult or entity seeking custody. The bill, called the "Stop Government Abandonment and Placement Scandals Act," or the "Stop GAPS" Act, would require ORR to work with states to help find homes and proper placements for minors. It would also require ORR to track these children for the duration of their stay in the U.S. while immigration proceedings are ongoing. ORR is a division of the Department of Health and Human Services that is responsible for coordinating the care and placement of refugees—including unaccompanied children who arrive in the United States. According to Moody's office, when children arrive in the United States without a parent or legal guardian, they are initially processed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) or U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They are then transferred to the custody of the ORR, which is then responsible for their care and placement. A Moody aide told Fox News Digital that the Biden administration "infamously lost track of tens of thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children, many of whom were placed into dangerous situations." "The Biden administration did historic damage to our country's immigration and national security structures, putting our nation and unaccompanied children at risk, and turning federal agencies into middlemen for mass human trafficking operations," Moody told Fox News Digital. "As Florida's Attorney General I fought constantly in court to stop the intentional destruction of our border and trafficking of minors."
Yahoo
26 minutes ago
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South Korea's Ruling Party Wants to Allow Companies to Issue Stablecoins: Bloomberg
South Korean President Lee Jae-myung's Democratic Party submitted a bill to parliament that would allow qualifying companies to issue stablecoins, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. The Digital Asset Basic Act is aimed at improving transparency and encouraging competition in cryptocurrency, Bloomberg said. Companies would be able to issue their own stablecoins provided they have at least 500 million won ($368,000) in equity capital and can guarantee refunds through reserves as well as receiving approval from the Financial Services Commission. Lee, voted in as president last week, made a number of promises to South Korea's crypto industry during his election campaign, appealing to the nation's 15 million crypto investors. Among them, he said the country should support a won-based stablecoin market "to prevent national wealth from leaking overseas," the Korea Herald reported. Stablecoins are tokens pegged to the value of a traditional financial asset, such as a fiat currency, with the U.S. dollar being comfortably the most prevalent. Their stability provides a counterweight to the volatility of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin BTC and ether ETH, allowing users to hold capital in digital assets without having to worry about wild swings in price. The sector, which is dominated by Tether's USDT, has experienced a surge in interest this year thanks to, among other factors, progress toward regulation of the sector in the U.S. The strength of the stablecoin sector has been highlighted in the last week by the strong performance of USDC issuer Circle's stock (CRCL) following its initial public offering (IPO). The shares more than quadrupled during the first three days of trading. In addition, market cap of the sector reached $250 billion for the first time.
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2 hours ago
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Why California Became Trump's Favorite Target — and Why the State Isn't Backing Down
President Donald Trump and his supporters are right about one thing in this explosive clash between California and the federal government: It is a fight not just over position or even over public safety. It's about values. And it's been a long time building. For Trump, it's a battle of his choosing, giving him the opportunity to escalate conflict on a signature issue, immigration, in a city and state governed by political adversaries. For California, it is the logical result of a long and profound transformation — from the days of Republican Party dominance to Democratic Party control — one I've watched and chronicled for more than 30 years and that I now see culminating in literal fighting in the streets. Californians are turning out against forces sent here by guardians of a value system that the state has rejected. It was within the living memory of many Californians that this state was a solid center of the Republican Party. Most of its greatest governors — Hiram Johnson, Earl Warren, Ronald Reagan — were stalwarts of the GOP, and the state's officeholders were almost universally Republican. Warren was a colossus of the California Republican Party, the first person ever to win three terms as governor and, in 1946 and in an era of cross-filing, the first and only person ever to be nominated for the governorship not just by his own party, the GOP, but also by the Democrats. A few years later, when Pat Brown was re-elected to his second term, in 1962, he was the first Democrat ever to win the governorship twice. That changed. Today's California is as staunchly Democratic as yesterday's was Republican, a flip in orientation that helps to explain the resolve of Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass in the current showdown with Washington. No statewide officeholder in California is a Republican. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the last Republican to hold the governorship, and he was an anomaly — a celebrity elected in a recall and one who governed as a centrist. No Republican has served as mayor of Los Angeles since 2001, when the moderate Richard Riordan left the stage, only to be wiped out in his campaign for governor. So far has the spectrum swung that in 2022, when Bass ran for mayor, her opponent, a developer named Rick Caruso, registered as a Democrat just in time for the campaign, realizing that the city would not, under any imaginable circumstance, elect another Republican to lead it. The county's current district attorney made the same calculation in time for last year's race. Many forces have propelled that shift, of course, but chief among them are the parties' divergent approaches to the environment and immigration and the shifting demographics of California, which, like so many things emanating from this state, are just now beginning to wash over the rest of the country as well. The environment is the easiest of those three developments to track. Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, both parties could boast of environmental successes. Democrats were more closely associated with efforts to clean air and water, but it was California's Richard Nixon who founded the Environmental Protection Agency. And though Lyndon Johnson signed the first Clean Air Act, Nixon extended and improved it. In California, reverence for the coastline, redwoods and interior forests was a bipartisan commitment in those years. But as Republicans increasingly came to represent business over stewardship and corporations over consumers, Californians who identified with environmental concerns gravitated to the Democratic Party. By 2020, Trump and other Republicans were calling climate change a hoax, and California rejected them. In that race, 78 percent of all Californians said the environment mattered greatly to them in selecting a president; 91 percent of Democrats ranked the environment as key to their support, and so did 58 percent of Republicans. Joe Biden beat Trump here by almost 30 points. Meanwhile, the state's demographics were changing. Once a part of Mexico, California has always been closely connected to its southern neighbor, with whom it shares ties of culture, trade and family. The percentage of the state whose residents are of Mexican or Latino origin has steadily grown since the 1950s, to the point that Latinos are now the state's largest ethnic group, having surpassed whites. In theory, that could cut both ways politically, and there was a time when Latino loyalties in California were divided between Democrats and Republicans. That ended in 1994, when a ballot initiative known as Prop. 187 sought to deny state benefits — vaccines, education, social services — to those who were in the state illegally. Then-Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, endorsed Prop. 187, helping secure his re-election but driving Latinos en masse away from his party. Although California voters approved Prop. 187, it turned out to be the high-water mark for anti-immigration enthusiasm in the state. In its aftermath, most of the measure was thrown out by the courts, and an invigorated electorate turned to candidates friendly to immigrants, no matter how they arrived in the state. But the Prop. 187 debate was three decades ago, and memories fade. Latinos in California and elsewhere favored Kamala Harris in 2024, but Trump outperformed expectations among Latino voters, perhaps signaling a softening of old antipathies. If so, the events of this week may rekindle recollections. As an old saw of California politics goes, it's hard to debate issues when you're busy deporting someone's grandmother. At the core of the separation between California and the national Republican Party, especially in its thrall to Trump, is what that history has produced. Taken together, the shifts of demographics and heightened sensitivity to immigration and the environment, along with a few other issues — police accountability, progressive income taxes, education reform — have produced in California a new and strongly felt agenda. How far has California come? Where Pat Brown was the first Democrat ever re-elected as governor, his son, Jerry Brown was elected twice, in 1974 and 1978. And then, after a 28-year hiatus, twice more, in 2010 and 2014. (Term limits imposed in 1990 constrained governors to two terms in office, but they were not retrospective, so Brown was free to run, and win, again.) Brown is arguably the most respected living person in California politics. If a place as big and diverse as California can be said to have a coherent set of values, those today would include respect for the environment, benevolence toward immigrants, support for living wages and insistence on civilian control over police. And if those values prevail, they do so at the expense of Trump, who is on the opposite side of every one of them. That tension has flared time and again in the Trump era, as the president has bashed California over its struggles with homelessness, its permissive voting rules and its determination to limit auto emissions, all manifestations of those values. Although California is a powerful donor state to the federal government — taxpayers here pay about $80 billion a year more than the state receives in federal services — Trump withheld support for homeowners devastated by January wildfires, demanding that federal aid be contingent on the state adopting Voter ID laws to curb fictional voter abuse that Trump believes cost him the state in his losing campaigns here. That was an attempt at bribery. It failed. Now comes force. From Trump's perspective, California is thumbing its nose at his program for America. He's right about that. What seems to confound him and his allies is that it's not California's political leadership that's behind that contempt — it's not Newsom or Bass or the state legislature — it's the people of the state, in overwhelming numbers and relying on deeply held beliefs. Those leaders are merely reflecting back what their constituents demand. Again, Trump lost to Biden here by almost 30 points — more than 5 million votes —- despite all the state's struggles and all the former president's flaws. In fact, Trump's attacks on Newsom and Bass — including his empty threat to arrest Newsom — may be the best thing that's happened to either in some time. Before all this, Bass was seen as having foundered in the face of the wildfire, which erupted while she was out of town; now, she's the mayor standing up to a deeply unpopular and dangerous president. That helps explain why Trump picked this fight in California, not just to be a bully but to force a showdown of values, to bring California to heel, or least to score points by trying. He authorized aggressive immigration raids in Los Angeles. Predictably, those neighborhoods where the raids occurred were shocked and frightened, and in many cases angry. Residents protested, legally and peacefully at first, then with mounting fury. LAPD dispersed the crowd on Friday night. It was akin to a championship celebration that got out of hand. On Saturday morning, the same streets that had been tense the night before woke to calm. Diners lined up at the Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles for breakfast. The March of Dimes held a rally across from City Hall. LAPD officers had a booth; one joined the line dancing. Children played cornhole and munched on crushed ice. That felt like life returning to normal. But Trump could not allow Los Angeles and California to right itself, because to allow California to persevere is to risk allowing its values to prevail. Instead, Trump railed at Newsom and Bass and directed the National Guard to deploy in the city. That gave protesters another reason to be angry, and by Sunday afternoon, a much-larger demonstration erupted and then cascaded into the night, with scattered acts of violence. Still not satisfied, Trump sent active-duty Marines. And so, this government-induced unrest continues. If the goal is to calm Los Angeles, the solution would be simple: Withdraw federal forces and let the LAPD and Sheriff's Department do their jobs. But that's not the goal. The unrest goes on because Trump needs it to. He's not just fighting for deportations. He's fighting for his values in a state that rejects them.
