By JAIMIE DING

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Trump administration filed a lawsuit Monday over California’s new laws banning federal agents from wearing masks and requiring them to have identification while conducting operations in the state.

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The federal government has argued the laws threaten the safety of officers who are facing “unprecedented” harassment, doxing, and violence and said it will not comply with them.

California became the first state to ban most law enforcement officers, including federal immigration agents, from covering their faces while conducting official business under a bill that was signed in September by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The law prohibits neck gaiters, ski masks and other facial coverings for local and federal officers, including immigration enforcement agents, while they conduct official business. It makes exceptions for undercover agents, protective equipment like N95 respirators or tactical gear, and it does not apply to state police.

Newsom also signed legislation requiring law enforcement to wear clear identification showing their agency and badge number while on the job. The laws require federal law enforcement agencies to issue a mask policy by July 1, 2026, and a visible identification policy by Jan. 1, 2026.

“California’s anti-law enforcement policies discriminate against the federal government and are designed to create risk for our agents. These laws cannot stand,” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a press release.

The lawsuit said there have been multiple incidents where Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were followed and their families threatened. It cites a case of three women in Los Angeles who are being accused of livestreaming while following an ICE agent home and posting the address on Instagram.

“Given the personal threats and violence that agents face, federal law enforcement agencies allow their officers to choose whether to wear masks to protect their identities and provide an extra layer of security,” the lawsuit said.

Newsom has called the practice of masked federal agents arresting people across the state “dystopian.”

Critics have raised concerns about the increased role of federal agents in local policing and often unidentified agents conducting immigration enforcement activities.

FILE – A woman stands off with a law enforcement officer wearing a Houston Field Office Special Response Team patch outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs building during a protest in Portland, Ore., June 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane, File)

“If the Trump administration cared half as much about public safety as it does about pardoning cop-beaters, violating people’s rights, and detaining U.S. citizens and their kids, our communities would be much safer,” a spokesperson for Newsom’s office said in a statement.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a memo in October to law enforcement agencies across the country advising officers to clearly identify themselves in the field. It cited several incidents where masked criminals posed as immigration officers robbed and kidnapped victims.

The federal government also said in its lawsuit that the laws violate the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits states from regulating the federal government. It said the law banning federal officers from wearing masks discriminates against the federal government because it exempts state police.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office said it was reviewing the complaint.

“It’s problematic when Californians can’t tell the difference between a law enforcement officer who is charged with protecting them and a criminal who is attempting to cause them harm,” Bonta’s office said in a statement. “The FBI itself has warned that the practice of ICE agents obscuring their identity has led to a rise in copycats committing crimes, threatening public safety and eroding trust in law enforcement.”

Photos of Jackson Dallas Forster were shown in a Ramsey County courtroom Monday before his father was sentenced to prison for causing head injuries to the 8-week-old, who died less than two months later.

One photo showed Jackson in a romper that read, “Mommy’s Little Baby.” It was taken five days before he was injured at the hands of his father, who told police he could not remember what had happened because he was “blackout drunk.”

Mark Russell Forster (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office)

Last month, Mark Russell Forster, 40, of White Bear Lake, entered a Norgaard plea to second-degree unintentional murder for his son’s March 2024 death, which an autopsy determined was from complications due to blunt force head trauma. Under a Norgaard plea, a defendant says they are unable to remember what happened due to drug use or mental health impairment at the time, but acknowledges there is enough evidence for a jury to convict beyond a reasonable doubt.

Forster received 128 months in prison, more than 10 years, a sentence that was negotiated between the defense and prosecution as part of a plea agreement. He received credit for 460 days he served after his arrest.

Assistant Ramsey County Attorney Saraswati Singh noted in court the term fell at the low end of state sentencing guidelines. “The state believes that this is a reasonable offer, because Mr. Forster pleaded guilty before trial, sparing the witnesses and family members from testifying,” Singh told Judge Sophia Vuelo.

Singh said Jackson’s mother provided the photos of her baby and was planning to be at the sentencing hearing, but “she ultimately decided to stay at home.” The mother attended the Oct. 9 plea hearing, Singh said, but stepped out twice and ultimately left “because it was very difficult for her to hear about the injuries that baby Jackson sustained.”

‘Abusive head trauma’

Jackson’s mother brought him to the hospital on Jan. 31, 2024. He remained hospitalized and died on March 22, 2024, at M Health Fairview Masonic Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis from complications of bleeding between his brain and skull, according to the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Child abuse specialists reported that Jackson’s injuries “were highly consistent with abusive head trauma,” according to the June 2024 criminal complaint.

Forster told police he arrived home from work on Jan. 31, 2024, about 1 a.m. and “kinda delved into liquor a little bit,” the complaint said.

He said he remembered putting the baby to bed, but not how or when he went to bed. He remembered waking up at 6 a.m. to feed Jackson, after which he said he put the baby in his swing. He said at some point they moved to the bed because that’s where they were when he woke up.

Forster later admitted to police that he had smoked marijuana when he got home from work and “drank more than typical that morning,” the complaint continued.

The baby’s mother told police she woke at 6 a.m. to prepare herself and her daughter for work and school, and she returned home about 1:30 p.m. She said Jackson was sleeping in a chair with Forster.

She noticed Jackson was napping longer than usual and then cried “a different cry,” the complaint said. He wouldn’t take a bottle, one of his arms was flailing, his face twitched and he had a spasm in one leg. She contacted Forster, who came home, and they called a nurse line and were told to bring Jackson to an emergency room.

Jackson’s mother told investigators that she confronted Forster about their baby’s injuries and he said “he may have done something to their son but he did not remember because he had been drinking,” according to the complaint.

Forster told investigators that the baby’s mother wasn’t responsible for their child’s severe injuries. He said “he could not rule himself out as the cause,” the complaint said.

Investigators found a text message that Forster sent to the baby’s mother, which said, “Yea. I’m just really upset with myself because I got so blackout drunk last night I don’t remember anything. This is all my fault,” according to the complaint.

‘We held him and rocked him’

Prosecutor Singh noted in court Monday that Forster had two DWI convictions in his prior home state of North Carolina. Singh said she was surprised to read in this month’s presentence investigation report that Forster stated he “borderline has an alcohol issue.”

“He crossed that line ages ago,” Singh said. “He has a serious issue, and it resulted in the death of baby Jackson.”

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Jackson was “showered with love” at the hospital, his mother’s aunt said in a victim impact statement read by Singh. “We held him and rocked him and baptized him,” the statement read.

For much of the hearing, Forster looked down while holding his head in his right hand. He wiped his eyes with tissues.

When given the chance to address the court, he read a statement. Through tears, he said he prays to God and has found repentance, “and I apologize with all my heart for the pain and sadness and the betrayal that I’ve caused.”

He said Jackson has been in his dreams, sometimes older with “dark hair, a terrific smile, (his mother’s) eyes and a sweet face.”

If nothing else, J.J. McCarthy has learned to hold himself accountable, and that’s a character trait that can’t necessarily be taught.

There are veteran NFL quarterbacks out there that still have a propensity to deflect following a rough performance, but McCarthy is at least comfortable owning up to his mistakes, as he did Sunday after spraying the ball all over the place in the Vikings’ 19-17 loss to the Chicago Bears.

McCarthy was his own harshest critic while recalling some of the incompletions that he wished he could have back. It wasn’t lost on him that he had completed 16 of 32 passes for 150 yards a touchdown with a pair of interceptions. He emphasized that his accuracy simply wasn’t good enough, and followed that up by vowing to do everything in his power to improve.

“I have to deliver,” he said. “I put that completely on me.”

It can’t be denied that McCarthy keeps saying the right things. His problem is that he keeps doing the wrong things.

Though there have certainly been flashes of brilliance along the way — a beautifully executed back shoulder fade here, a perfectly placed deep ball there — he has more often looked overwhelmed while trying to make the basic throws required to succeed at the highest level.

Channeling his inner Tim Tebow at the podium won’t mean much if he doesn’t also start to show steady growth in the very near future. You can only talk the talk so long. You also have to walk to walk at some point.

The biggest issue with McCarthy’s accuracy seems to be his footwork. When faced with pressure, he has shown a tendency to revert back to some bad habits in his lower half. Kevin O’Connell has worked at length with McCarthy to make sure that doesn’t happen in the heat of battle, but some of those intricacies have yet to become habit.

“There are some plays where he’s making it hard on himself,” O’Connell said. “I think that’s probably the most frustrating part for him.”

Whether it’s occasionally putting himself in a bad spot by stepping up too far in the pocket, or consistently getting himself out of rhythm by neglecting some mechanics, McCarthy’s shortcomings have made him the least accurate quarterback in the NFL this season with a 52.9% completion rate.

Is it fixable? The only way for the Vikings to find out is to continue to putting him out there and see if the instruction starts to take.

“You’re just trying to get him to understand that every single snap, his detail in his job is of the utmost importance,” O’Connell said. “Sometimes it’s not even reads and progressions; it’s simply just the fundamental foundation. We need to start seeing the concrete kind of dry a little bit on the work that’s put in.”

Now that the playoffs seem to be out of reach, the Vikings should use the rest of this season to determine how they want to move forward next season. Is this a small bump in the road for McCarthy, or larger hurdle that will be hard for him to overcome? That question needs to be answered over the next couple of months — starting Sunday in Green Bay.

The good news from McCarthy is he still seems to have the confidence of his teammates.

“He’s only going to get better and better,” veteran receiver Adam Thielen said. “He’s not lacking the skill set. He’s not lacking the competitiveness. He’s not lacking the confidence.”

Thielen’s faith is rooted in McCarthy’s intangibles as a leader. They have have shown up on a number of occasions this season, including on the 10-play, 85-yard drive that McCarthy led to give the Vikings a fleeting lead over the Bears with 50 seconds left.

“He’s made of the right stuff,” O’Connell said. “He’s going to keep working at it.”

Will it be hard to maintain that level of focus with so much going on around him?

“I don’t think it’s too hard for me,” McCarthy said. “Because I’m obsessed with the process.”

That’s another case of McCarty saying the right things. If he doesn’t start doing the right things, people will stop listening.

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By MARC LEVY

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — The forecasts are eye-popping: utilities saying they’ll need two or three times more electricity within a few years to power massive new data centers that are feeding a fast-growing AI economy.

But the challenges — some say the impossibility — of building new power plants to meet that demand so quickly has set off alarm bells for lawmakers, policymakers and regulators who wonder if those utility forecasts can be trusted.

One burning question is whether the forecasts are based on data center projects that may never get built — eliciting concern that regular ratepayers could be stuck with the bill to build unnecessary power plants and grid infrastructure at a cost of billions of dollars.

The scrutiny comes as analysts warn of the risk of an artificial intelligence investment bubble that’s ballooned tech stock prices and could burst.

Meanwhile, consumer advocates are finding that ratepayers in some areas — such as the mid-Atlantic electricity grid, which encompasses all or parts of 13 states stretching from New Jersey to Illinois, as well as Washington, D.C. — are already underwriting the cost to supply power to data centers, some of them built, some not.

“There’s speculation in there,” said Joe Bowring, who heads Monitoring Analytics, the independent market watchdog in the mid-Atlantic grid territory. “Nobody really knows. Nobody has been looking carefully enough at the forecast to know what’s speculative, what’s double-counting, what’s real, what’s not.”

Suspicions about skyrocketing demand

There is no standard practice across grids or for utilities to vet such massive projects, and figuring out a solution has become a hot topic, utilities and grid operators say.

Uncertainty around forecasts is typically traced to a couple of things.

One concerns developers seeking a grid connection, but whose plans aren’t set in stone or lack the heft — clients, financing or otherwise — to bring the project to completion, industry and regulatory officials say.

Another is data center developers submitting grid connection requests in various separate utility territories, PJM Interconnection, which operates the mid-Atlantic grid, and Texas lawmakers have found.

FILE- An entrance to the Stargate artificial intelligence data center complex in Abilene, Texas on Monday, Sept. 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt O’Brien, File)

Often, developers, for competitive reasons, won’t tell utilities if or where they’ve submitted other requests for electricity, PJM said. That means a single project could inflate the energy forecasts of multiple utilities.

The effort to improve forecasts got a high-profile boost in September, when a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission member asked the nation’s grid operators for information on how they determine that a project is not only viable, but will use the electricity it says it needs.

“Better data, better decision-making, better and faster decisions mean we can get all these projects, all this infrastructure built,” the commissioner, David Rosner, said in an interview.

The Edison Electric Institute, a trade association of for-profit electric utilities, said it welcomed efforts to improve demand forecasting.

Real, speculative, or ‘somewhere in between’

The Data Center Coalition, which represents tech giants like Google and Meta and data center developers, has urged regulators to request more information from utilities on their forecasts and to develop a set of best practices to determine the commercial viability of a data center project.

The coalition’s vice president of energy, Aaron Tinjum, said improving the accuracy and transparency of forecasts is a “fundamental first step of really meeting this moment” of energy growth.

“Wherever we go, the question is, ‘Is the (energy) growth real? How can we be so sure?’” Tinjum said. “And we really view commercial readiness verification as one of those important kind of low-hanging opportunities for us to be adopting at this moment.”

Igal Feibush, the CEO of Pennsylvania Data Center Partners, a data center developer, said utilities are in a “fire drill” as they try to vet a deluge of data center projects all seeking electricity.

The vast majority, he said, will fall off because many project backers are new to the concept and don’t know what it takes to get a data center built.

States also are trying to do more to find out what’s in utility forecasts and weed out speculative or duplicative projects.

In Texas, which is attracting large data center projects, lawmakers still haunted by a blackout during a deadly 2021 winter storm were shocked when told in 2024 by the grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, that its peak demand could nearly double by 2030.

They found that state utility regulators lacked the tools to determine whether that was realistic.

Texas state Sen. Phil King told a hearing earlier this year that the grid operator, utility regulators and utilities weren’t sure if the power requests “are real or just speculative or somewhere in between.”

Lawmakers passed legislation sponsored by King, now law, that requires data center developers to disclose whether they have requests for electricity elsewhere in Texas and to set standards for developers to show that they have a substantial financial commitment to a site.

Electricity bills are rising, too

PPL Electric Utilities, which delivers power to 1.5 million customers across central and eastern Pennsylvania, projects that data centers will more than triple its peak electricity demand by 2030.

Vincent Sorgi, president and CEO of PPL Corp., told analysts on an earnings call this month that the data center projects “are real, they are coming fast and furious” and that the “near-term risk of overbuilding generation simply does not exist.”

The data center projects counted in the forecast are backed by contracts with financial commitments often reaching tens of millions of dollars, PPL said.

Still, PPL’s projections helped spur a state lawmaker, Rep. Danilo Burgos, to introduce a bill to bolster the authority of state utility regulators to inspect how utilities assemble their energy demand forecasts.

Ratepayers in Burgos’ Philadelphia district just absorbed an increase in their electricity bills — attributed by the utility, PECO, to the rising cost of wholesale electricity in the mid-Atlantic grid driven primarily by data center demand.

That’s why ratepayers need more protection to ensure they are benefiting from the higher cost, Burgos said.

“Once they make their buck, whatever company,” Burgos said, “you don’t see no empathy towards the ratepayers.”

Follow Marc Levy at http://twitter.com/timelywriter.