LOS ANGELES — British-born California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton — who said he was cheering for the United States while it was still in the mix — today said he wanted Americans to help England prevail.
“Maybe a small consolation would be for them to just let England win the World cup here on American soil 250 years later,” Hilton, a Republican, told an annual conference of the National Association of Latino Elected Officials. The remark was received with a mix of boos, groans and some laughter.
Pomegranates are notoriously messy to eat and juice. Here are the most effective ways to get a glass of pomegranate juice, plus how many aerils you’ll need.
A ballot and instructions for the 2024 Alaska primary election are seen on Monday, Aug. 5, 2024. (Photo by James Brooks/Alaska Beacon)
Alaska’s midterm election season is underway. Residents who lost the right to vote with a felony conviction may have their right restored once they are unconditionally discharged from the Alaska Department of Corrections’ supervision.
Restoration of voting rights after a felony conviction varies by state. Alaska is one of more than a dozen states that requires residents to complete their prison sentence and be unconditionally discharged from custody before their right to vote is restored.
That means Alaskans can vote again once they are no longer under DOC supervision, which includes halfway houses, sentenced electronic monitoring, probation or parole.
The Department of Corrections is required to issue a letter as proof of unconditional discharge, which residents must provide to the Alaska Division of Elections to re-register to vote if they otherwise meet eligibility requirements.
The deadline to register to vote is July 19 for Alaska’s primary elections, September 6 for local elections and October 4 for the midterm elections in November.
Alaskans lose the right to vote after a state or federal felony conviction involving crimes of moral turpitude, a list which includes murder, assault, drug-related felonies and others. That means they are ineligible to vote in all local, state and federal elections while in prison and under DOC supervision.
If convicted of a misdemeanor or a felony not involving a crime of moral turpitude, Alaskans are eligible to register and vote in elections.
The roughly 40% of Alaska’s incarcerated population who is pre-trial — even under felony charges — are also eligible to vote. That includes incarcerated Alaskans who are awaiting trial, plea agreements or sentencing.
This year, the deadline for eligible voters to apply for absentee by-mail voting is August 8 for the primary, and by October 24 for the general election.
An official with the Department of Corrections said probation officers at all correctional facilities will assist any inmate that requests help with voting, including registration, updating address information and applying for or casting an absentee ballot.
“Each facility has posted in all common areas an instructional notice from the Division of Elections and each facility has paper copies of the absentee ballot application,” said Betsy Holley, a public information officer for the department, by email on Wednesday.
Under Alaska statute, most inmate mail is scanned and copied before it is provided to inmates. Ballots are considered “privileged mail” and subject to monitoring under specific criteria, Holley said. Inmates fill out their ballots and cast their vote like any other eligible voter.
“Mailroom staff may not read or search outgoing privileged mail. Mailroom staff will verify, in the prisoner’s presence, that the intended recipient of the mail is the same person as the privileged addressee,” Holley said.
Holley said the numbers of Alaskans unconditionally discharged from DOC custody and eligible to vote each year was not immediately available.
The ACLU of Alaska has updated voter guidance and resources for formerly and currently incarcerated Alaskans. The organization, along with state nonprofit Partners for Progress, is hosting voter restoration information sessions this election season.
“Incarceration does not automatically disqualify Alaskans from voting,” said Meghan Barker, ACLU of Alaska communications director, by email on Tuesday. “It’s critical that people who have interacted with the criminal legal system know their rights and know how to either request an absentee ballot while incarcerated or, if eligible, take the steps to restore their voting rights after they’ve been incarcerated.”
Barker said that as of May there are nearly 1,750 Alaskans that are incarcerated and awaiting trial or sentencing that may be eligible to vote. She noted that Alaska Native people make up a disproportionate number of those incarcerated statewide. While Alaska Native people are less than 20% of the state’s population, they made up 40% of the prison population last year.
“As we continue to look at ways to combat the disenfranchisement of Alaska Native people, we must also consider the demographics of Alaska’s prisons and the people who are eligible to vote, even if they are incarcerated far from their home communities or districts where they would vote,” she said.
Tory Leader Kemi Badenoch was in a jovial mood during the usually combative PMQs by calling for all MPs to unite behind England against Argentina this evening.
Badenoch said that while Keir Starmer may be “disappointed that he won’t be emulating his hero Harold Wilson in winning multiple elections … we all hope that he may be about to emulate him in another way, by being the prime minister when England win the World Cup.” England’s only previous success came in 1966.
The Tory leader said that was something “every single one of us in this house should get behind, especially the SNP.” But the diminished rump of Scottish independence-supporting MPs, possibly still bruised from going out in the World Cup group stage, shook their heads.
Indeed, opposition to England’s success crossed party lines.
Scottish Labour MP Brian Leishman told POLITICO he’ll be watching “from behind the couch and the cracks in our fingers,” adding it will be “unbearable” if England makes the final.
Elle King is opening up about her recent autism diagnosis and she’s very excited about what’s to come. Continue reading…The Boot – Country Music News, Music Videos and Songs
Elle King is opening up about her recent autism diagnosis and she’s very excited about what’s to come. Continue reading…Country Music News – Taste of Country
And now, she’s revealing that she resorted to desperate measures to support her struggling husband early in their relationship.
Jelly Roll and Bunnie Xo attend the 68th GRAMMY Awards at Crypto.com Arena on February 01, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Brianna Bryson/WireImage)
Yes, before Jelly Roll became one of country music’s biggest success stories, he and Bunnie were simply trying to survive.
The podcast host is now opening up about the difficult years before her estranged husband’s career took off, revealing she worked as an escort to help keep them financially afloat while the aspiring musician chased his dreams.
“I was turning tricks to pay our bills,” Bunnie said on the latest episode of “Dumb Blonde.”
“I literally went on tour with him and was seeing clients just to fund our life at the time.”
Despite speculation that she entered the relationship with significant savings, Bunnie insisted that wasn’t the case.
“I had sugar daddies at the time that were paying for all of this,” she explained, adding that the couple “literally had nothing” when they got together in 2015.
“We were two kids who literally had nothing… We were still in the streets. We were making money as it came,” she said.
Long before Jelly Roll was selling out arenas and topping the charts, Bunnie said his concerts drew only a handful of fans.
She recalled attending some of his earliest performances, where crowds numbered around 20 people.
“And it was crazy because within the first three years of us being together, the crowd started doubling,” she remembered.
The singer — whose real name is Jason Bradley DeFord — would eventually become one of country music’s biggest crossover stars. But according to Bunnie, those early years were defined by financial uncertainty and doing whatever they could to get by.
The revelations come just months after Jelly Roll, 41, filed for divorce from Bunnie in May, citing irreconcilable differences.
The couple married in Las Vegas in 2016, but Bunnie said the relationship began to unravel over the past year and a half as she pursued IVF treatments in hopes of starting a family.
She described the experience as “one of the loneliest, darkest journeys,” revealing she suffered multiple miscarriages and lost several embryos.
“It completely wrecked me,” she said. “It wrecked me emotionally, spiritually, physically… I became a shell of the person I was because I’m doing [IVF].”
According to Bunnie, the emotional strain created distance between the couple.
During the IVF process, she said she and Jelly Roll “stopped communicating.”
She also made a heartbreaking admission about how she viewed their relationship.
“I think that it’s safe for me to say that I always loved my husband a little bit more than he loved me,” Bunnie said.
“I was like always protecting him and always making sure he was okay and like always chasing him, and I literally was the glue that held us together.”
Her candid comments offer a deeply personal look at both the sacrifices she says she made during Jelly Roll’s rise to fame and the struggles that ultimately preceded the end of their nearly decade-long marriage.
LONDON — Soccer fans in Atlanta may be exchanging chants about the Falklands — but there’s another British Overseas Territory making news today.
The 118-year-old border between Gibraltar and Spain will disappear on Wednesday. You can thank Brexit.
Today is the culmination of a decade of uncertainty for the British Mediterranean territory, which back in 2016 voted by 95.9 percent to stay in the EU — but was pulled out against its will.
Life immediately became harder for the thousands of people who cross the Gibraltar-Spain border every day, including 15,000 Spaniards who go to work in the territory.
Passport checks became more onerous and transporting goods became more complicated. As a result Brussels, London, Gibraltar and Madrid have spent the last 10 years negotiating an agreement to remove physical border controls from the frontier with Spain.
It’s an ironic move given it was triggered by Britain’s decision to leave the EU. While Gibraltar will remain fully British and sovereign, the border will become, for the most part, just a line on a map.
The agreement’s details will be familiar to anyone who has ever taken a Eurostar train under the English Channel. As at London St Pancras station, passengers arriving at Gibraltar’s airport will go through both Gibraltarian passport controls and EU passport controls in succession. Once through, they’ll be free to roam both Gibraltar and the Schengen area, provided they get the approval of both authorities.
As a result, Gibraltar and Spain will do away with border controls at the land border. Gibraltar will also align with various EU single market and customs rules to ease the flow of goods, which have sometimes become harder to source since Brexit.
Gibraltar is adamant it isn’t joining the EU passport-free Schengen area. Legally, it is right.
For many passengers, though, it will feel pretty similar, with no passport checks to walk into Spain. The difference will be that Gibraltar will still set its own visa policy.
The U.K’s Europe Minister Stephen Doughty is formally signing the agreement Tuesday in Brussels with the EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič.
The deal was a bipartisan effort on the British side, with former Foreign Secretary David Cameron working to get it over the line during his time in office. In spring 2024 the deal looked close to being done — only for Rishi Sunak to call an election. The resulting change in government delayed it by another year.
Some critics, notably Tory Euroskeptics, have said the agreement harms Gibraltar’s sovereignty, but the Rock’s government is very keen on the plan.
“Brexit was sold to the British people in a false prospectus,” Gibraltar’s Chief Minister Fabian Picardo told the Telegraph newspaper in the run-up to the dismantling of the border. “The United Kingdom needs to seriously reconsider its relationship with the European Union, whether that is to return to membership or a much closer relationship.”
There’s lots of talk in England about declaring a bank holiday should the Three Lions really bring football home.
Keir Starmer has refused to confirm whether England would get a bank holiday if it won the tournament for the first time in 60 years, saying: “I don’t want to jinx it, but ask me again if we get to the final.”
That chatter has piqued the interest of Welsh nationalists in Cardiff who have long sought a bank holiday marking St. David’s Day on March 1, matching the holidays already granted to Scotland and Northern Ireland for their equivalent days.
A spokesperson for the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru told POLITICO: “If England winning means a new bank holiday, would that mean we’re a step closer to getting one for St David’s Day in Wales? That’s something to support!”
