By SARAH RAZA and ERIC TUCKER

The FBI has identified a 25-year-old California man as the person they say is responsible for the explosion of a Palm Springs fertility clinic.

Authorities say the suspect, Guy Edward Bartkus of Twentynine Palms, is the same person who was found near a charred-out vehicle by the clinic.

Akil Davis, the head of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, said during a Sunday news conference that investigators were reviewing writings left behind by Bartkus that could shed light on his state of mind. His writings were “anti pro-life” in nature, according to a social media post Sunday from Bilal Essayli, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles. The Associated Press reported Saturday night that those writings communicated a belief that the world should not be populated.

“The subject had nihilistic ideations and this was a targeted attack against the IVF facility,” Davis said. “Make no mistake: we are treating this, as I said yesterday, as an intentional act of terrorism.”

The bombing injured four other people in addition to killing Bartkus, though Davis said all embryos at the facility were saved.

“Good guys one, bad guys zero,” he said.

Saturday’s explosion is “probably the largest bombing scene that we’ve had in Southern California,” Davis added. Authorities were executing a search warrant in Twentynine Palms as part of the investigation.

The suspect posted writings online and attempted to record the explosion, though authorities said the video failed to upload. An official who was not authorized to discuss details of the attack spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press.

The blast gutted the single-story American Reproductive Centers clinic in upscale Palm Springs, though a doctor told the Associated Press its staff members were safe.

“Thank God today happened to be a day that we have no patients,” Dr. Maher Abdallah, who leads the clinic, told the AP in a phone interview.

Edward Lotterman

The 119th Congress now deliberating in Washington is rewriting history. Having sat for only 135 days, but already over seven months into fiscal year 2025, it will grab the prize as most fiscally irresponsible Congress ever.

The 12th Congress, 1811-1813, held that status for two centuries. It declared war on England in June 1812 and adjourned without appropriating any money with which to fight. This was after refusing to recharter the First Bank of the United States, the best vehicle by which we might have borrowed the money.

We are not in a declared war now, thank God, yet there are conflicts at multiple points around the world. Our armed forces conduct combat operations daily. More importantly, the world economy is in peril amidst a trade war of our own making.

So what has this Congress done? Seven months and two weeks into the current fiscal year, Congress should be well into the task of writing the budget for FY 2026. That starts in 136 days. But it cannot quite finish a 2025 budget that will pass both houses and be signed by our president.

The general outline is clear, however. Total outlays will be up from FY 2024. Elon Musk’s delusional promises to reduce spending by $2 trillion have actually cut less than $100 billion. And some cuts were from necessary programs like air traffic control and income tax administration that will be restored. And in any case, DOGE’s cuts will be overwhelmed by higher outlays from the number of Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries ratcheting up by 1.5 million. Everyone knew this would happen.

Yet Congress proposes to cut taxes by about $90 billion a year compared to what they would be with no change in current policy. All this is madness.

The root cause of the trade deficits that trouble those in the administration is that Americans consume more than we produce. The fiscal deficit — our government paying out more than it takes in — is one underlying cause of perennial trade deficits that some see as evidence of our being cheated.

But that is a broader matter. What about details of what Congress is poised to do?

First, the 2017 tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefited high income people will be made permanent. This is obscene in its lack of fairness.

University of Chicago economist Raghuram G. Rajan pointed out 15 years ago that “The top 1 percent of households accounted for only 8.9 percent of income in 1976, but this share grew to 23.5 percent of the total income generated in the United States in 2007. Put differently, of every dollar of real income growth that was generated between 1976 and 2007, 58 cents went to the top 1 percent of households.”

Those trends have continued. Forty years ago, our nation was in the fifth of nations with the most equal income distribution. Now we are in the fifth with the most unequal. Yes, high income households do pay a large fraction of total personal income taxes. But that is because they get such a large and growing fraction of total income. Yet the cuts they got eight years ago will continue.

So will the “carried interest” treatment for much of the compensation of hedge fund managers that results in their facing lower marginal tax rates than most school teachers or many truck drivers. This injustice has begged for correction for 30 years, but donations to inaugural balls and purchases of Donald and Melania’s crypto coins along with PAC contributions to key congressional races were investments that paid off handsomely to put it mildly.

Also, no one will pay income taxes on any Social Security benefits. That upends a bi-partisan consensus carefully crafted in 1984 to eliminate an unfair disparity between the taxation of public and private pension plans on one side with zero taxation of the fraction of Social Security paid for by employers’ share of FICA. It also served to keep Social Security funding solvent longer without further increases in FICA rates.

But responsible bi-partisan crafting when Congress still functioned cannot resist demagogues. And so, a fraction of us who are relatively well off will pay less in taxes. Our children and grandchildren will pay more.

The elimination of taxes on tip income will help some of them, although fewer than 2% of U.S. workers get tips and considerable fudging remains on the fraction still paid in cash. I

Hourly workers will not be taxed on overtime. The Fair Labor Standards Act, passed late in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1938, requires wages at least one and a half times as high for any hours over 40 a week. All this was ordinary income subject to the individual income tax. But now only pay for the first 40 hours a week will get hit.

There is some apparent fairness in these two measures. If you’re giving many billions to millionaires, give at least a couple of billions to wait staff, truck drivers and assembly-line and warehouse workers.

The problem is that in doing so, you introduce other incentives that skew efficient use of resources as people try to milk the new tax preference for all they can.

Lower tax rates on capital gains than on salaries created the sham of hedge fund managers being compensated with “carried interest.” Decades earlier, a lower tax rate on sales of “livestock held for breeding purposes,” meant that female pigs raised for slaughter would be bred to give one litter of baby pigs before being sent to packing plants, while these sows’ male littermates were sent as soon as fat for slaughter.

Such tax-reducing fiddling wastes resources. They only make sense to people doing them because of the tax code quirks. This year’s tax changes create large incentives for more of the shame — er, same.

Hospitality owners already try to shift compensation from wages toward “tips.” One can already read how that might get extended to other sectors.

Brazil once had a similar experiment with tax-free overtime. Workers who regularly had been working 40 hours a week started to clock 32 one week, 48 the next and so on. Total hours worked didn’t change, but fiddled timecards meant 10% to15% of pay was not taxed.

Could major employers here get away with this? Probably not. What about small construction, office cleaning, independent retail and similar firms? Don’t bet against it. Yet over-the-road truckers earning by the mile or others on piecework won’t benefit a cent.

Public finance economists evaluate the “burden” of taxes. This includes the total cost to society of the taxes actually paid to the government plus the administrative costs of complying with the tax. It also includes the losses in national output caused by inefficient use of resources motivated only by tax avoidance. Breeding young sows to have one litter of pigs to lower income tax liability took more real resources of feed, labor and facilities per pound of pork available to households.

Congress’s 2025 actions make our economy less efficient, less fair, and less sustainable than it was on Jan. 1. It already was shot through with problems then. Why do we accept going backwards?

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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.

NEW YORK (AP) — A Mexican navy sailing ship on a global goodwill tour struck the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, snapping its three masts, killing two crew members and leaving some sailors dangling from harnesses high in the air waiting for help. Mayor Eric Adams says at least 19 people aboard the ship needed medical treatment Saturday night. But he says the 142-year-old bridge has been spared major damage. The cause of the collision is under investigation. The Mexican navy says in a post on the social media platform X that the incident involves the Cuauhtemoc, an academy training vessel.

By Tim Henderson, Stateline.org

Local sheriffs are on the front lines in deciding whether to participate in the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans. But states increasingly are making the choice for them.

More and more, sheriffs’ hands are tied no matter whether they do — or don’t — want to help with deportations, though they often get the blame when conservatives draw up lists of sanctuary cities.

“‘Naughty lists,’ as we call them, are not super helpful here,” said Patrick Royal, a spokesperson for the National Sheriffs’ Association. “We all know there are places like Colorado where you can’t [help with deportations], and places like North Carolina where you have to.”

Cooperation between sheriffs and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement lies at the heart of the Trump administration’s immigration detention policy. The administration plans to punish noncooperative jurisdictions with funding cuts— though many legal experts agree that cooperation is voluntary unless state or local laws say otherwise.

Sheriffs, who typically run local jails, must decide what to do when faced with immigration detainers— requests from ICE to hold onto incarcerated people up to two extra days so ICE officers can show up and arrest them. ICE issues those detainers when the agency reviews fingerprints sent electronically for background checks as part of the jail booking process.

Otherwise, arrested suspects who post bond or are otherwise released by a judge might go free despite their immigration status, prompting ICE in some cases to pursue them in the community.

In North Carolina, Sheriff Garry McFadden ran on a platform of limiting cooperation with ICE when he was elected in Mecklenburg County, home to Charlotte, in 2018. But today, McFadden must comply with detainers because of a state law passed last year.

In a now-retracted Facebook post, U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis in late April accused Mecklenburg and several other North Carolina counties of “shielding criminal illegal immigrants” as sanctuary jurisdictions. Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, said in the post he was writing federal legislation to prosecute sanctuary jurisdictions.

“You can’t say we’re a sanctuary county and have state laws that say we have to work with ICE. You can’t have both,” McFadden said. He added that he’d like more choice about whether to comply with detainers. A federal funding cutoff would endanger important jail programs such as rape counseling, he said.

“Everybody’s focused on immigration like that’s the biggest fire, and nobody wants to address the other things. The losers will be the prisoners who need all these services we provide,” McFadden said.

Conservative sheriffs in Democratic-controlled states also can be frustrated by state policy on detainers. Sheriff Lew Evangelidis of Worcester County, Massachusetts, said he’s been criticized for releasing prisoners wanted by ICE but sometimes has no choice: A 2017 state Supreme Court ruling prohibits holding prisoners based on detainers.

“If they [ICE] want this person and consider them a threat to public safety, then I want that person out of my community. I want to keep my community safe,” said Evangelidis. He supported a Republican-sponsored effort in the state legislature to allow 12-hour holds for ICE if a judge determines the prisoner is a threat to public safety, but the amendment was voted down in April.

States act on detainers

Many experts agree that ICE detainers can be legally ignored if states allow sheriffs to do that.

“That detainer request is just that, a request, it’s not a requirement,” said Cassandra Charles, a staff attorney at the National Immigration Law Center, which is opposing Louisiana’s lawsuit to reverse a court-ordered ban on cooperation between Orleans Parish and ICE.

The general counsel for the North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association, Eddie Caldwell, agreed that the detainers are voluntary under federal law.

The association supports a state bill now under consideration that would require not only the 48-hour detention but also a notice sent 48 hours before release to let ICE know the clock is running. The proposal has passed the House.

The notification matters, Caldwell said, because there can be criminal proceedings that take weeks or months, so ICE in many cases doesn’t realize the 48-hour window has started.

Tillis’ office said the senator’s disagreement with McFadden, a Democrat, and other sheriffs is about that notification.

“It’s not necessarily that [sheriffs] are breaking the law, but rather making it as difficult as possible for ICE to take prisoners into custody by refusing to do some basic things. Notification is important,” said Daniel Keylin, a senior adviser to Tillis.

States including California, Colorado and Massachusetts ban compliance with the ICE detainers, on the general principle that it’s not enough reason to hold people in jails when they’re otherwise free to go because of bail or an end to their criminal cases. Those three states have made recent moves to defend or fine-tune their rules.

California’s attorney general also has issued guidance to local jurisdictions based on a 2017 state law limiting cooperation with immigration authorities. That law withstood a court challenge under the first Trump administration.

Colorado has a law against holding prisoners more than six hours longer than required, and a new bill sent to Democratic Gov. Jared Polis last week would specify that even those six hours can’t be for the purpose of an immigration detainer.

Iowa, Tennessee and Texas are among the states requiring cooperation with detainers.

And Florida has gone further, requiring sheriffs to actively help ICE write detainers though official agreements in which local agencies sign up to help enforce immigration laws.

Cooperation boosts arrests

Such cooperation makes a big difference, experts say — jails are the easiest place to pick up immigrants for deportation, and when local sheriffs and police help out, there are more arrests.

“A larger share of ICE arrests and deportations are happening in places where local law enforcement is cooperative with ICE,” said Julia Gelatt, associate director for the Migration Policy Institute’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program, speaking at a recent webinar.

“A declining share of arrests and deportations are happening from places like California, where there are really strict limitations on local law enforcement’s cooperation with ICE,” she added.

ICE is making about 600 immigration arrests daily, twice the rate as during the last year of the Biden administration, said Muzaffar Chishti, an attorney and policy expert at the Migration Policy Institute, speaking at the same event.

Reports on deportations are incomplete, Chishti said, but he estimated the current administration is on track to deport half a million people this year and is trying to get that number higher.

“The Trump administration has not been able to change the laws that are on the books, because only Congress can do that,” Chishti said. “It’s going to take congressional action for the Trump administration to achieve its aim of higher [arrest and deportation] numbers.”

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President Donald Trump has added more pressure, last month requesting a list from Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of sanctuary cities, which he says would face funding cuts. The administration also has sued some states, including Colorado, Illinois and New York, over their policies.

Asked for comment on the legality of funding cutoffs for sanctuary policies, Bondi’s office referred to a February memo in which she promised to “end funding to state and local jurisdictions that unlawfully interfere with federal law enforcement operations.” The memo cites a federal law saying local officials “may not prohibit, or in any way restrict” communication about immigration status.

Local jurisdictions in Connecticut, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington joined a February lawsuit led by the city and county of San Francisco and Santa Clara County in California against a Trump administration executive order calling for defunding cities with sanctuary policies, calling the order “illegal and authoritarian.”

In April, a U.S. district court in California issued a preliminary injunction in that case preventing any funding cutoff over sanctuary policies to the cities and counties in the lawsuit. And on Friday, the federal judge, William Orrick, ruled that the injunction applies to any list of sanctuary jurisdictions the administration may target for funding cuts.

Trump’s new executive order seeking the list cannot be used as “an end run” around Orrick’s injunction, the judge wrote, while he decides the legality of detainer policies and other issues.

“The litigation may not proceed with the coercive threat to end all federal funding hanging over the Cities and Counties’ heads like the sword of Damocles,” Orrick wrote.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.