By TRÂN NGUYỄN, Associated Press

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Two California Republican state lawmakers launched a campaign Wednesday to place a measure on the 2026 ballot that would require voter identification and proof of citizenship at the polls.

The proposal would require the state to verify proof of citizenship when a person registers to vote, and voters would have to provide identifications at the polls. Those who vote through mail-in ballots would have to give the last four digits of a government-issued ID such as a Social Security number.

“We do not want to make it harder to vote. In fact, our initiative makes it easier to vote because it streamlines the process to verify someone’s identity,” Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, who’s leading the effort, said at a Wednesday news conference.

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The Republican lawmakers said the measure would help restore trust in elections where they said people have complained about outdated voter rolls and an inadequate signature review process, with some also casting doubt on election results.

While voting by noncitizens has occurred, research and reviews of state cases have shown it to be rare and typically a mistake rather than an intentional effort to sway an election. Voter fraud is also rare.

California is among 14 states and the District of Columbia that do not require voters to show some form of identification at the polls or to register to voter.

The California campaign came as congressional Republicans were working to advance their own legislation to overhaul the nation’s voting procedures at the urging of President Donald Trump. Across the country, lawmakers in 17 states have introduced legislation this year to require proof of citizenship for voters, according to National Conference of State legislatures.

Opponents argued that the requirements make it more difficult for people to vote, especially the elderly, those with disabilities and those without driver’s licenses. The NAACP and other civil rights groups have argued that it disproportionately harms Black and Latino voters. Democrats in the California Legislature, who hold supermajorities in both chambers, in April rejected a bill by DeMaio aiming to enact similar voting rule changes.

The statewide proposal also came as the state continued to challenge a local measure passed by voters in the city of Huntington Beach to require voter identification at the polls. The state last year sued the city over the new rule, and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law to prohibit local governments in California from establishing and enforcing laws that require residents provide identification to vote in elections.

Sen. Tony Strickland, who helped pass the Huntington Beach measure as a city councilmember last year, said he expects a similar fight from state Democrats over the issue.

“The courts would be on our side because we carefully drafted this initiative. It’s constitutional,” he said.

True to its name, Pop and Son Grill — tucked in the back of Cheers Pub on the East Side — consists of two people: owner and chef Roscoe Woulard and his father, Kirk Munson.

For Woulard, Pop and Son, which opened in November, is both a return home and a chance to branch out.

Woulard grew up in St. Paul and attended Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts Minneapolis/St. Paul in Mendota Heights in 2009. A few years ago, he opened his first restaurant, called The Salad Bar, at Southdale Mall in Edina. His parents also owned the former Munsons Potato Shack in the Maplewood Mall. But some mall food courts impose menu restrictions to avoid restaurants stepping on each other’s toes, he said.

“I wanted to bring something back to the community where I was raised,” he said. “I took a bit of the Salad Bar menu and the Potato Shack, things I couldn’t do there, and mixed them with things I wanted to do. Here, I’m just a bit more free.”

The Pop and Son menu is expansive, from wings to shrimp to mac and cheese to classic bar appetizers, with specials that rotate daily. One of the menu’s biggest sections — a nod to Munsons Potato Shack — consists of 14 varieties of loaded baked potatoes and fries. Other top sellers include catfish (breaded, blackened or buffalo) and jerk pasta, which has proved so overwhelmingly popular that it’s now only offered Wednesdays and Sundays, Woulard said.

“The experience has been great, and I’m very grateful to the owner (of Cheers Pub) for giving me the opportunity to step in here and let me flourish,” he said. “To be honest with you, I went in a little scared, like ‘What the heck is going to happen,’ but I get a lot of support from the community.”

The restaurant’s hours differ from the bar: Pop and Son Grill is open 3 p.m. to midnight Tuesdays through Saturdays and 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sunday with a special “Soul Food Sunday” menu.

“Hey Roscoe,” a bar patron called out to Woulard on a recent Tuesday afternoon. “Whatever you did to this potato, it should be illegal. It’s so good.”

Pop and Son Grill: 1067 Hudson Rd.; instagram.com/popandson_grill

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Attorneys for Robert Roberson and for the State of Texas went toe-to-toe in a Palestine courtroom Wednesday, arguing over the fate of the man whose 2024 execution date was halted in a dramatic eleventh-hour intervention by state legislators—and whose appeals have raised the question of whether a crime occurred at all.

After hearing arguments, Smith County Judge Austin Reeve Jackson, who is new to the case and is described in campaign literature as “a grassroots conservative,” ruled that there was no legal reason not to sign the execution order, which sets a date of October 16, almost exactly a year after Roberson’s last scheduled date. He noted that the Court of Criminal Appeals has had the matter pending for five months and hasn’t ruled.

“It doesn’t seem like anything is going to get resolved without a date,” Jackson said at the close of the hearing, calling it “unfortunate.” 

Roberson attended the hearing wearing jail-issued black and white stripes and a bullet-proof vest. As he was escorted out after the judge’s ruling, someone said; “We love you Robert.” Otherwise, the courtroom was quiet.

Robert Roberson in family pictures including his daughter (Courtesy/Roberson Family, Innocence Project, Gretchen Sween)

The hearing had been scheduled after Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office took over the case from Anderson County District Attorney Allyson Mitchell and swiftly called for a new execution date for Roberson. 

In court, Roberson’s attorney, Gretchen Sween, objected to resetting a date, noting that an appeal is still making its way through Texas courts arguing his actual innocence. This was the crux of the argument she made Wednesday, calling it “unusual” for the state to seek an execution date while an appeal was pending. 

Roberson was convicted in 2003 of causing the death of his young daughter, Nikki Curtis, who died in 2002 of what medical professionals at the time deemed to be Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) based on a now-discredited diagnostic method. Several experts tapped by the defense have helped uncover another possibility: that Nikki died of a constellation of natural causes including double pneumonia and sepsis. 

“There’s no legal or practical or moral reason to be setting a date at this time,” Sween told the Observer in an interview earlier this week.

Roberson had only recently gotten custody of his two-year-old daughter Nikki in January 2002, when he rushed her to the Palestine Regional Emergency Room. She had been sick for a week—with symptoms including diarrhea, vomiting, and a fever of up to 104.5 degrees—and that morning, Roberson had awoken to find she had fallen out of the bed they were sharing. After he checked her for injuries, they went back to sleep. Four hours later, when Roberson awoke to his alarm, Nikki was unresponsive.

A CT scan at the hospital showed bleeding and brain swelling, but Nikki didn’t have any skull fractures to explain her injuries. She was transferred to Dallas Children’s Medical Center, where a pediatrician who specialized in child abuse recognized what was believed to be a tell-tale set of symptoms. For decades, the scientific consensus stated that if children had subdural bleeding, brain swelling, and retinal hemorrhages—all of which Nikki had—doctors could presume they were victims of SBS. Today, the consensus has shifted, and doctors only diagnose what is now called Abusive Head Trauma if all other possibilities—like short falls, accidents, or illness—have been excluded and doctors have reviewed the child’s medical records. 

In Nikki’s case, the medical examiner who performed her autopsy didn’t look at her medical records, which showed a two-year-old with a history of infections and breathing problems. After Nikki was taken off life support without her father’s consent, police arrested Roberson. He was charged and convicted of capital murder. An Anderson County jury sentenced him to death. 

But in appeals since 2016, the most recent filed in February, his lawyers have presented new testimony from experts that clarify how dire Nikki’s health was before she died and how the short fall off of the bed could have led to the head injuries doctors saw that day at the ER. Even the original lead police investigator on the case has reversed his opinion and now says he believes Nikki’s death was accidental. 

Since 1989, challenges to SBS diagnoses have resulted in the exonerations of 41 people across the United States, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. If executed, Roberson would be the first in the country put to death based on the controversial diagnostic method. 

Last fall, Roberson earned a groundswell of bipartisan support from legislators who either believed he was innocent or that the state’s laws related to changing scientific consensus failed him. 

“We as a legislature actually created a way for people like Mr. Roberson to challenge convictions based on science that later turns out to be wrong,” said Democratic state Representative Joe Moody at a press conference last September, when attention around Roberson’s case was growing. “As far as we can tell, though, the courts simply aren’t engaging in that process. So convictions are being allowed to stand on junk science.”

The Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence issued a subpoena for Roberson to testify in a hearing on October 21—four days after he was set to be executed by lethal injection. What followed was a fiery debate about the separation of powers among the state’s officials. In any case, the subpoena helped stop the clock: The state Supreme Court halted the execution the night it was supposed to take place.

Paxton’s office responded with a public statement to “set the record straight” on the facts of the case. The statement attacked legislators by name and repeated a flawed argument that prosecutors made in appeals: that Roberson hadn’t actually been convicted based on SBS in the first place. This is despite the fact that SBS was mentioned numerous times during his trial, including in the testimony of the child abuse expert who originally suggested that Nikki exhibited the signs.

“I’m very alarmed by some of the misinformation about the case that has been intentionally peddled in certain circles, and I think it’s emanating from elected officials. … It has to do with politics, which should have no place in this,” Sween told the Observer. 

During the latest legislative session, lawmakers in the House of Representatives attempted to push forward reforms to the state’s “junk science” law, which is meant to give people another avenue to contest their convictions based on newly discredited forensic methods.

After receiving overwhelming support in the House, the legislation failed in the Senate. Legislators have argued that Roberson was denied the chance to use that existing process in his case. 

The post Robert Roberson Faces New Execution Date in Controversial ‘Shaken Baby Syndrome’ Case appeared first on The Texas Observer.

By JILL LAWLESS

LONDON (AP) — British governments past and present face allegations of avoiding scrutiny and undermining democracy after the revelation that thousands of Afghans have been resettled in the U.K under a program that was hidden from the media, the public and lawmakers in Parliament.

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Key information was also kept from the Afghans themselves, who had assisted U.K. forces and whose personal details had been disclosed in a huge data leak. Many plan to sue the British government for putting them in danger from the Taliban. Some are left in Afghanistan as the current British government says the resettlement program will end.

Here’s what happened in an extraordinary chain of events.

An email error with huge consequences

The saga was triggered by the chaotic Western exit from Afghanistan in August 2021 as the Taliban, ousted from power 20 years earlier, swept across the country, seized Kabul and reimposed their strict version of Islamic law.

Afghans who had worked with Western forces — as fixers, translators and in other roles — or who had served in the internationally backed Afghan army were at risk of retribution. Britain set up a program, known as the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy, or ARAP, to bring some to the U.K.

In February 2022, a defense official emailed a spreadsheet containing the personal information of nearly 19,000 ARAP applicants to someone outside the Ministry of Defense. The government says the individual thought they were sending a list of about 150 names, not the whole set.

The British government only became aware of the leak when a portion of the data was posted on Facebook 18 months later by someone who threatened to publish the whole list.

The government sought secrecy

The leak sparked alarm among British officials who feared as many as 100,000 people were in danger when family numbers of the named individuals were added. The then-Conservative government sought a court order barring publication of the list.

Britain’s Defence Secretary John Healey attends Britain’s Prime Minister’s press conference during the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, Wednesday, June 25, 2025. (Ben Stansall/Pool Photo via AP)

A judge granted a sweeping order known as a super injunction, which barred anyone from revealing not only information about the leak but the existence of the injunction itself.

Super injunctions are relatively rare and their use is controversial. Most of the handful of cases in which they have come to light involved celebrities trying to prevent disclosures about their private lives. This is the first known case of a super injunction being granted to the government.

Former Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said Wednesday that he sought the legal order to gain “time and space to deal with this leak, find out whether the Taliban had it” and protect those at risk.

Wallace said he asked for an ordinary injunction — not a super injunction — for a period of four months. The gag order remained in place for almost two years.

A secret program sparked a legal battle

The government began bringing to Britain the Afghans on the leaked list who were judged to be most at risk. To date, some 4,500 people — 900 applicants and approximately 3,600 family members — have been brought to Britain under the program. About 6,900 people are expected to be relocated by the time it closes, at a cost of 850 million pounds ($1.1 billion).

In all, about 36,000 Afghans have been resettled in the U.K. since 2021.

Meanwhile, several news organizations had learned of the leaked list but were barred from publishing stories about it. They challenged the super injunction in court, and a judge ordered it lifted in May 2024 — but it remained in place after the government appealed.

The government finally came clean

Britain held an election in July 2024 that brought the center-left Labour Party to power. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Cabinet learned of the injunction soon after taking office and grappled with how to proceed.

In January, the government ordered a review by a former senior civil servant. They found little evidence that the leaked data would expose Afghans to a greater risk of retribution from the Taliban. The review said the Taliban had other sources of information on those who had worked with the previous Afghan government and international forces and is more concerned with current threats to its authority.

Given those findings, the government dropped its support for the super injunction. The injunction was lifted in court Tuesday, and minutes later Defense Secretary John Healey stood in the House of Commons to make the saga public for the first time.

Many questions remain unanswered

Healey said the secret settlement route was being closed, but acknowledged Wednesday that “the story is just beginning,” and many questions remain unanswered.

Immigration critics including Reform UK leader Nigel Farage are demanding to know what screening was done on the people who came under the secret program.

Lawyers for Afghans on the leaked list want to know why the information was kept from them. Adnan Malik, head of data privacy at U.K. legal firm Barings Law, said he was assembling a class-action lawsuit by hundreds of former translators, soldiers and others.

FILE – Demonstrators hold placards, during a protest in Parliament Square, London, Aug. 18, 2021. (AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali, file)

Lawmakers and free speech advocates say the use of a super injunction is deeply worrying. They ask how Parliament and the media can hold the government to account if there is such stringent secrecy.

Judge Martin Chamberlain, who ruled that the injunction should be lifted, said Tuesday at the High Court that the super injunction “had the effect of completely shutting down the ordinary mechanisms of accountability.”

Healey acknowledged that “you cannot have democracy with super injunctions in place,” and said the government had acted as quickly and safely as it could.

“Accountability starts now,” he told the BBC.