The new conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court is weighing whether to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that banned states from outlawing abortion. If they do, at least 26 states are likely to either ban abortion outright or severely limit access, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization that supports abortion rights.

That would force lots of women to travel to other states to get abortions, prompting Democratic-led states like California to propose and pass new laws to prepare for them. Last week, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed a law aimed at banning legal action against people who aid or receive an abortion, a measure responding to a law in Texas that lets people sue abortion providers or those who assist them.

Oregon lawmakers included $15 million in their state budget to help pay for people to travel to the state to get abortions. California has a similar bill, one of 14 proposals aimed at expanding and protecting access to abortion in the nation’s most populous state. The bills were inspired by a report from the Future of Abortion Council, a group Newsom convened last year to advise him on how to respond should Roe v. Wade be overturned.

“We’re looking at 26 states that will introduce some sort of ban and restriction on abortion, so you have the other half of the country that will need to prepare for how we take care of those patients,” said Jodi Hicks, CEO and President of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California. “We’re all imagining and trying to prepare correctly for what that impact will be.”

California already requires health insurance companies to cover abortions. But insurers often charge things like co-pays and deductibles that can add an average of $543 to the cost of a medication abortion and $887 to the cost of a procedural abortion, according to an analysis by the California Health Benefits Review Program.

The law Newsom signed on Tuesday eliminates those fees. While the law will make abortions cheaper, it will also slightly increase monthly premiums for patients and their employers. But the savings from eliminating the fees will be greater than the increased premiums, according to an analysis by the California Health Benefits Review Program.

“As states across the country attempt to move us backwards by restricting fundamental reproductive rights, California continues to protect and advance reproductive freedom for all,” Newsom said.

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide this summer whether to uphold a law in Mississippi that bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. During a public hearing on the case last year, a majority of justices indicated they were willing to uphold the law and even overturn Roe v. Wade.

That case has prompted swift action in state Legislatures across the country. Last week, lawmakers in Idaho sent a bill to the governor that would ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. In Missouri, lawmakers introduced a bill that would make it illegal for the state’s residents to get abortions in other states.

States like California, however, are drafting proposals to counter those measures. They include bills to ban disclosing abortion medical records to police or other out-of-state entities and protect patients and providers from civil liability. They would expand California’s abortion workforce, allowing some nurse practitioners to perform the procedure without the supervision of a doctor and setting up a scholarship program for people studying reproductive health who agree to work in underserved areas.

And they would set up funds that would help pay for people to get abortions, including compensating providers who provide free care to low-income patients and assisting with things like travel, lodging and child care for women seeking the procedure in California.

“This legislative package is robust, it’s bold, it’s responsive and it’s innovative, and that’s exactly what we need right now,” said Amy Moy, chief external affairs officer for Essential Access Health and a member of the steering committee for the Future of Abortion Council. “We have a unique opportunity and a pressing responsibility to make sure that anyone seeking time sensitive and potentially life changing abortion care within our state’s boarders can do so with dignity and respect and safety.”

AP News | Contributed

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Wiener said the bill Newsom signed is important particularly for those suffering from drug addiction. “Our prisons and jails are filled with people — particularly from communities of color — who have committed low-level, nonviolent drug offenses and who would be much better served by non-carceral options like probation, rehabilitation and treatment,” he said in a statement. “It’s an important measure that will help end California’s system of mass incarceration.”

But the California Association of Highway Patrolmen said the penalties “work as a deterrent or a reason for individuals to get the treatment they need to turn their lives around.” It predicted that allowing probation will increase the selling and use of drugs and other crimes.

Current law bars probation or suspended sentences for first-time offenders convicted of certain drug offenses including selling or possessing for sale more than a half-ounce (14 grams) of heroin or the hallucinogenic drug commonly known as PCP or angel dust.

It also bars probation for repeat offenders convicted of crimes including possessing or agreeing to sell or transport opiates or cannabis or forging prescriptions.

The mandatory sentences can range from two to seven or more years, depending on the offense. The California Police Chiefs Association said Wiener’s bill “sets a dangerous precedent … and would jeopardize the health and safety of the communities we are sworn to protect.”

Newsom also signed legislation expanding on a 2019 law that limited the use of the felony murder rule, which previously allowed accomplices in felonies to be convicted of murder if someone died. Two years ago, California restricted its application only to people who intended to kill, directly participated or acted with “reckless indifference to human life.”

The new law explicitly also includes voluntary manslaughter and attempted murder convictions as eligible for resentencing. The California Public Defenders Association said it could affect hundreds of inmates who were excluded by an appeals court decision as well as thousands of others who hadn’t applied because of the court’s narrow interpretation.

The bill that takes affect in January “closes an unjust loophole and brings greater fairness to our criminal justice system,” Democratic Sen. Josh Becker said.

A third law signed by the governor creates the presumption that those arrested on allegations of violating their probation be freed on their own recognizance pending a hearing, unless a judge deems them to be a public safety or flight risk.

DON THOMPSON | AP News

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The outcome of the infrastructure bargaining, which for weeks has encountered one snag after another, will impact what could be the crown jewel of his legacy. That would be his hopes for a subsequent $3.5 trillion federal infusion for families’ education and health care costs, a Medicare expansion and efforts to curb climate change.

Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., will need support from every Democratic moderate and progressive to push the $3.5 trillion bill through the 50-50 Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote. If the infrastructure talks implode, it may be harder for moderates — who rank its projects as their top priority — to back the follow-up $3.5 trillion plan, which is already making them wince because of its price tag and likely tax boosts on the wealthy and corporations.

“I would say that if the bipartisan infrastructure bill falls apart, everything falls apart,” West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, one of his chamber’s most conservative Democrats, warned reporters this week.

That could well prove an overstatement, since moderates like him will face enormous pressure from Biden, Schumer and others to back the $3.5 trillion package, whatever the bipartisan plan’s fate. But it illustrates a balancing act between centrists and progressives that top Democrats must confront.

“If infrastructure collapses, which I hope it does not, you’d have the difficulty of holding some of the Democrats” to back the $3.5 trillion bill, No. 2 House leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said Tuesday in a brief interview. Party leaders will be able to lose no more than three Democrats to prevail in the 435-member House.

Both sides in the talks were expressing renewed optimism Tuesday about prospects for a deal, a view they’ve expressed before without producing results. The uncertainty underscored that Democrats were at a promising yet precarious point for their agenda, with stakes that seem too big for them to fail yet failure still possible.

Biden met at the White House on Tuesday with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, a leader of moderate Democrats who’ve been laboring to strike an infrastructure deal with GOP senators. The president also used several tweets to prod lawmakers, including one saying, “There are no Democratic roads or Republican bridges — infrastructure impacts us all and I believe we’ve got to come together to find solutions.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden and Sinema “are very much aligned on the path forward” and expressed optimism, but also said the president was “not setting new deadlines” for a deal. Several target dates for reaching an agreement have come and gone, though Schumer wants a Senate vote on a package before sending lawmakers home for an August recess.

Sinema is a centrist who’s alienated some Democrats who consider her unpredictable.

Illustrating that, Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., told House Democrats privately Tuesday that the infrastructure accord senators are trying to complete is “crap,” according to two people who attended the session and described it on condition of anonymity. He also said the measure was being crafted by “three Republicans,” pointedly naming Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Sinema, they said.

Moderate Democrats have long made an infrastructure deal their top priority. The bipartisanship such an accord would display plus the meat-and-potatoes spending it would bring back home have made that their goal over the separate $3.5 trillion measure for family and environmental programs.

If the infrastructure talks fail, it would deprive moderates of a victory that if reached might leave them more open to making concessions on the $3.5 trillion measure. A collapse could also trigger fresh internal Democratic fighting over how much of the infrastructure spending would be transferred to the huge domestic spending plan, and how that would affect its overall price tag.

Even Republicans are divided over the infrastructure measure and what a failure of the bipartisan talks would mean as both parties eye 2022 elections in which House and Senate control are fully in play.

Some Republicans worry that approval of a bipartisan infrastructure plan would help Democrats pass their $3.5 trillion measure by making moderate Democrats more prone to cooperate with their colleagues on that subsequent, costlier legislation.

They also say supporting the infrastructure measure would let Democrats rope the GOP into sharing the blame if inflation or other economic problems take hold amid massive federal spending programs.

But others say that since Republicans won’t be able to stop Democrats from passing their $3.5 trillion bill, the GOP might as well back an infrastructure agreement. That would let Republicans haul a share of its $1 trillion in popular projects back to their home states.

Democrats plan to use special budget rules that would prevent Republicans from using a filibuster — a delay that takes 60 Senate votes to halt — to derail the $3.5 trillion measure.

These Republicans also say passage of the infrastructure measure would make it harder for Manchin and Sinema — and moderate Democrats facing reelection in swing states, like New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan and Arizona’s Mark Kelly — to vote for an even larger $3.5 trillion plan.

“I think it puts their members more on the defensive and having to defend very, in my view, indefensible spending and taxing,” said No. 2 Senate GOP leader John Thune of South Dakota.

ALAN FRAM | AP NEWS

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — John Cox, a Republican candidate for California governor, said Monday that he would force homeless people into mental health or addiction treatment before providing them with housing as part of his effort to cut homelessness in half in five years.

In his second bid for governor, Cox also said he would step up enforcement against people living on the streets and work to speed housing construction. If elected, he would likely face resistance to many of his proposals in the Democratic-controlled state Legislature.

“If someone is just insisting that they can live on the street, they either have to be arrested and put in jail or they have to be arrested and put into a place where they can get the treatment they need,” he said in an interview. “If they don’t want either of those, they can certainly leave California.”

Cox is running in the expected recall election of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. He ran against Newsom in 2018 and lost badly. He’s never won political office despite numerous attempts and built a career in business, including housing development in Indiana. This time, he’s one of several Republicans running, including former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, who will release a homelessness plan Tuesday.

California is home to about 12% of the nation’s population but more than a quarter of its homeless people, according to the most recent federal data. On the day of a federal count in January 2020, California had roughly 161,000 people experiencing homelessness. In 2019, about 23% of the state’s homeless people were experiencing severe mental illness, according to a report by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Newsom has made tackling homelessness one of his top priorities, dedicating his 2020 State of the State address to the topic and pledging to appoint a homelessness czar, which he has not done. While the pandemic changed the state’s focus, Newsom has launched a program to convert hotel and motel rooms into permanent housing for the homeless.

Cox would take an opposite tack, requiring people who need it to get treatment for addiction or mental illness before they can get housing. He said if pop star Britney Spears can be placed under a conservatorship, it should be possible to place people living on the streets who need help into such an arrangement, which is generally done when a person is deemed unable to control their life.

In 2018, former Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation allowing San Diego, San Francisco and Los Angeles counties to place chronically homeless people into such arrangements if they have a serious mental health or substance use disorder. San Francisco moved ahead with a narrowly tailored pilot program in 2019, though it’s barely been used.

Cox, who is prone to campaigning with props, is bringing an 8-foot ball of trash on his statewide bus tour to tout his homelessness plan. In a news release, he said it’s supposed to symbolize “the blight the homeless — and current homeless policies — have inflicted on California neighborhoods.” He said in an interview that he blames the problem on government failures, not people who are homeless.

Barbara DiPietro, senior director of policy for the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, called Cox’s plan “terrible” and said his use of a ball of trash “specifically conveys that he believes that these people are trash.”

Broadly, she said Cox’s plan “reflects a candidate for public office who does not understand the fundamental structural issues that produce homelessness faster than we can end it.”

Research shows putting people in treatment without housing does not work and that counties do not have enough beds in the behavioral health system to treat everyone anyway, DiPietro said. The plan also has an overreliance on law enforcement, she said. She supports efforts to lower the cost of housing construction, which is part of Cox’s plan.

Cox also said he would challenge a court decision that blocks Los Angeles from enforcing a sidewalk camping ban until enough housing is available and that he would seek to roll back parts of a voter-backed initiative that reduced some criminal penalties.

A date has not yet been set for the recall election.

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In response? Biden “just sort of stared at me,” Jones said, describing an “awkward silence” that passed between the two.

For Jones, the moment was emblematic of what he and a growing number of Democratic activists describe as a lackluster engagement from Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on an issue they consider urgent and necessary for the health of the democracy.

Although the White House has characterized the issue as “the fight of his presidency,” Biden has prioritized his economic initiatives, measures more likely to win Republican support in the Senate. And he’s shown little interest thus far in diving into a messy debate over changing Senate rules to pass the legislation on Democratic votes alone.

But as Democrats’ massive election legislation was blocked by Republicans on Tuesday, progressives argued Biden could not avoid that fight much longer and must use all his leverage to find a path forward. The criticism suggested the voting debate may prove to be among Biden’s first major, public rifts with the left of his presidency.

“President Obama, for his part, has been doing more to salvage our ailing democracy than the current president of the United States of America,” Mondaire said, referring to a recent interview in which the former president pushed for the legislation.

The White House argues that both Biden and Harris have been in frequent touch with Democratic leadership and key advocacy groups as the legislation — dubbed the For the People Act — moved through Congress. Biden spoke out forcefully at times, declaring a new Georgia law backed by Republicans is an “atrocity” and using a speech in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to say he was going to “fight like heck” for Democrats’ federal answer, but he left negotiations on the proposal to Hill leaders.

On Monday, in advance of the vote, Biden met with Sen. Joe Manchin, D.W.Va., at the White House to discuss both voting rights and infrastructure.

But Biden didn’t use his clout to work Republicans, who have expressed staunch and unified opposition to any voting legislation, arguing Democrats are pushing an unnecessary federal takeover of elections now run by state and county officials.

Biden spent much of the month focused on foreign policy during a trip to Europe, encouraging Americans to get vaccinated and selling his infrastructure plan to the American public. He tasked Harris with taking the lead on the issue, and she spent last week largely engaged in private meetings with voting rights advocates as she traveled for a vaccination tour around the nation.

Those efforts haven’t appeased some activists, who argue that state laws tightening election laws are designed to make it harder for Black, young and infrequent voters to cast ballots. The best way to counter the state laws is with federal legislation, they say, and Biden ought to come out for a change in the Senate filibuster rules that require 60 votes to advance most legislation.

“Progressives are losing patience, and I think particularly African American Democrats are losing patience,” said Democratic strategist Joel Payne, a longtime aide to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “They feel like they have done the kind of good Democrat thing over the last year-plus, going back to when Biden got the nomination, unifying support around Biden, turning out, showing up on Election Day.”

“Progressives feel like, ’Hey, we did our part.’ And now when it’s time for the bill to be paid, so to speak, I think some progressives feel like, ’OK, well, how long do we have to wait?’”

Still, there could be a silver lining for Democrats in the ongoing battle over voting rights: The issue is a major motivator for progressives and may serve to drive enthusiasm among Black voters as well, potentially driving engagement in a midterm year where Democrats are certain to face a tough political climate.

Harris is expected to continue to meet with voting rights activists, business leaders and groups working on the issue in the states, and will speak out publicly on the issue aiming to raise awareness of new voting laws and to pressure Republicans to get on board with federal legislation.

She watched the legislation fail to advance to debate on Tuesday, in her role as president of the Senate, and coming off the floor told reporters that she and Biden still support voting legislation and “the fight is not over.” Ezra Levin, co-executive director of Indivisible, a progressive grassroots group, said it’s been nowhere near the level of advocacy the public has seen on the infrastructure bill.

“The president has been on the sidelines. He has issued statements of support, he’s maybe included a line or two in a speech here or there, but there has been nothing on the scale of his public advocacy for recovery for COVID relief, for roads and bridges,” Levin said.

“We think this is a crisis at the same level as crumbling roads and bridges, and if we agree on that, the question is, why is the president on the sidelines?”

White House aides push back against any suggestion the president and vice president haven’t been engaged on the issue, and say his laissez-faire approach to the negotiations is based partly on his experience as a senator and his belief that his involvement risks undermining a deal before it’s cut.

But in private, White House advisers see infrastructure as the bigger political winner for Biden because it’s widely popular among voters of both parties, a White House official said. Passing a major infrastructure bill is seen within the White House as going further towards helping Democrats win in the 2022 midterms and beyond than taking on massive voting overhaul that had a slim chance of passage without a debate over filibuster rules, said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss internal talks.

Embracing filibuster changes, in particular, risks undermining Biden’s profile as a bipartisan dealmaker and could poison the delicate negotiations around infrastructure, where the White House insists it still sees opportunity for bipartisan compromise.

“He does have to preserve some negotiating power, and his brand probably does not compute with being at the tip of the spear on reforming the filibuster,” Payne acknowledged.

Still, other Democrats say it’s time for Biden to get out front on the issue. Rep. Colin Allred, D-Texas, said the proposals Republicans are looking to pass in his home state are “more explicit and more dangerous than anything I’ve ever come across.”

Allred said that the voting fight increases pressure on Biden to take the leadership on the filibuster fight. “We do need President Biden to make that a priority, because if you’re going to talk about supporting the underlying legislation, it really doesn’t matter if we don’t have way to get past the filibuster,” he said.

ALEXANDRA JAFFE | AP NEWS

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is announcing new efforts Wednesday to stem a rising national tide of violent crime but questions persist about how effective the federal efforts will be in calming what could be a turbulent summer.

Biden’s plan focuses on addressing gun violence, providing money to cities that need more police and offering community support. Crime rates have risen after plummeting during the initial months of the coronavirus pandemic, creating economic hardship and anxiety.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden believes the rise in crime was “unacceptable” and that there would be a specific focus on measures “to stem the flow of firearms used to commit violence.”

But there are also tricky politics at play, and Biden’s plan shows how few options the Democratic president has on the issue.

The steps he is taking are aimed at cracking down on gun dealers who break federal law and establishing strike forces in several cities to help stop weapons trafficking. He also is seeking more money for the agency that tracks the nation’s guns.

But the rest of his new strategy is largely suggestions for beleaguered localities. He’s encouraging cities to invest some of their COVID-19 relief funds into policing and pushing alternative crime reduction steps such as increased community support and summer jobs for teenagers. If city officials listen to the White House, it could make an impact. But it’s all voluntary.

White House aides believe that Biden, with his long legislative record on fighting crime as a senator, is not easy to paint as soft on the issue, and the president has been clear that he is opposed to the “defund the police” movement, which has been effectively used against other Democrats to cast them as anti-law enforcement.

But he’s also is trying to boost progressives’ efforts to reform policing, following a year of mass demonstrations and public anguish sparked by the killing by police of George Floyd and other Black people across the country. While combating crime and overhauling the police don’t have to be at odds with each other, the two efforts are increasingly billed that way.

Biden will try to do both at once, according to senior administration officials who detailed his upcoming address on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about it.

Republicans quickly tried to portray the measures as government overreach and linked it to efforts to rein in policing.

“I think a lot of it ties back to this whole ‘defund the police’ movement and some of the disruption we had in civil society last year,” said Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts said on Fox News. “And I think that’s part of, when you start undermining that basic foundation, you start breaking apart the bonds that hold us together and that’s why you see an increase in crime.”

Biden will announce a “zero tolerance” policy — not to be confused with the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy on immigration that separated thousands of children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. This one gives no leeway to gun dealers who fail to comply with federal law — their license to sell will be revoked on the first offense.

The president has already announced a half-dozen executive actions on gun control, including cracking down on “ghost guns,” homemade firearms that lack serial numbers used to trace them and that are often purchased without a background check.

A number of anti-crime and gun safety groups, including the Brady Campaign and Everytown for Gun Safety, applauded the administration’s efforts.

“The president is helping start a much-needed conversation about reducing violent crime. A greater investment in community interventions will help take a bite out of violent crime,” said Paul DelPonte, head of the National Crime Prevention Council. “Strategies that increase public engagement in public safety are proven crime stoppers. Putting more police officers who are trained and certified in crime prevention on the streets of our communities makes sense.”

The House passed two bills requiring background checks on all firearm sales and transfers and allowing an expanded 10-day review for gun purchases. But it’s not likely to pass the Senate, where some Republican support would be needed for passage.

Biden will also seek increased transparency on gun data and better coordination among states, and he will push Congress for more money for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the agency responsible for enforcing federal gun laws and regulating gun dealers. The Justice Department is also launching strike forces in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., to help take down illegal gun traffickers.

Police officials have said they are struggling with increasing crime and continued tensions between police and communities; some say their calls for support aren’t answered as they take the blame for the spike.

“Many of us — if not most of us — are seeing a rise in crime, while at the same time, we’re hearing calls for reform,” Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison said of cities in remarks Tuesday at a forum on policing. “And some of those calls are to the extreme of dismantle and defund … while all of the same time we’re sworn to protect the people.”

Biden planned to discuss how $350 billion of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package can be used by cities to hire law enforcement officers, pay overtime, prosecute gun traffickers and invest in technology to make law enforcement more efficient. The officials said the Biden administration hoped cities would choose to use the money for alternatives to policing, too, and to invest in community policing models.

While crime is rising — homicides and shootings are up from the same period last year in Chicago; Los Angeles; Minneapolis; Portland, Oregon; Baltimore; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Houston — violent crime overall remains lower than it was a decade ago or even five years ago. Most violent crimes plummeted during the first six months of the coronavirus pandemic, as people stayed indoors and away from others.

Crime started creeping up last summer, a trend that experts say is hard to define and is likely due to a variety of factors such as historic unemployment, fear over the virus and mass anger over stay-at-home orders.

The rise in violence comes against the backdrop of the national debate on policing and racism in policing — and as a police reform bill is being crafted in Congress.

As a senator, Biden wrote several major anti-crime packages, including a 1994 bill that contained provisions now viewed by some as an overreaction to the crime spikes in the 1980s and 1990s. Critics say those bills helped lead to mass incarceration of Black Americans, and Biden’s involvement became a flashpoint in his 2020 campaign.

Biden has expressed second thoughts about some aspects of the legislation, and he has acknowledged its harmful impact on many Black Americans. But he and his allies still hold out the law’s provisions to address domestic violence, ban assault weapons and finance community policing.

The president is expected to push cities to use $122 billion to help keep schoolchildren busy this summer — they’re often both targets and perpetrators of violence — and to expand summer hiring programs for teenagers, officials said.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is expected to announce he is nominating former senior State Department official Nicholas Burns to serve as his ambassador to China and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti to be his ambassador to India, according to a person familiar with the matter.

With the selections, Biden is turning to a seasoned diplomat and a longtime political ally to serve in two of the country’s highest-profile diplomatic postings.

It was not clear when either nomination would be announced, according to the person familiar with the matter, who was not authorized to publicly comment on the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity. The White House declined to comment on either Burns or Garcetti and noted that “no one is final until they’re announced.”

The Associated Press has previously reported that Biden has settled on former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to serve as his ambassador to Japan and former Deputy Secretary of State Tom Nides to be ambassador to Israel. Neither of those selections has been publicly announced.

Prominent Democratic fundraisers Denise Bauer, Jane Hartley and David Cohen have also emerged as leading contenders for postings in France, Italy and Canada, respectively, according to people familiar with the White House deliberations but also not authorized to publicly comment on the matter. During the Obama administration, Bauer served as ambassador to Belgium, and Hartley was ambassador to France and Monaco. Cohen is a top executive at the cable company Comcast.

Burns and Garcetti, if confirmed by the Senate, would come to their postings at high-pressure moments in the U.S. relationships with China and India.

Biden on Wednesday asked U.S. intelligence officials to “redouble” their efforts to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, including any possibility the trail might lead to a Chinese lab.

The president has also pressed China’s Xi Jinping on his government crackdown of democracy activists in Hong Kong, human rights abuses against Uighur and ethnic minorities in the western Xinjiang province, and what the U.S. sees as unfair and coercive trade practices.

Burns previously served as undersecretary of state under President George W. Bush and as U.S. envoy to Greece and NATO. Burns is now the executive director of the Aspen Strategy Group and Aspen Security Forum. He’s also a professor of the practice of diplomacy and international relations at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Garcetti, if confirmed, would be dispatched to India as it has been overwhelmed by a surge in coronavirus infections and deaths. India’s death toll is the third highest reported in the world after the U.S. and Brazil, and true numbers are thought to be significantly greater.

Alex Comisar, a spokesperson in Garcetti’s mayoral office, declined to comment.

The 50-year-old Democrat would leave behind a city where his tenure has been defined by the coronavirus pandemic and an out-of-control homeless crisis that saw filthy encampments spread into nearly every neighborhood.

Garcetti, who considered a 2020 White House bid and later became part of Biden’s inner circle, emerged as a widely discussed possibility to join Biden’s Cabinet last year. But he took himself out of the running, saying the raging coronavirus crisis made it impossible for him to step away.

The two-term mayor would leave LA with an uneven record. He has been credited with continuing a transit buildup in a city choked with traffic, establishing tougher earthquake safety standards for thousands of buildings and steering the city though the deadly pandemic as it became a hot spot for infections. Cases have fallen steeply in the city and some restrictions have been rolled back, consistent with the trajectory in the state.

But Garcetti was overmatched by a crisis of homelessness that became a national embarrassment despite the massive jump in government spending to fight it. Many streets and sidewalks remain cratered and crumbling, despite his early pledge to make fixing them a cornerstone of his administration.

A lawsuit alleges that a former top staffer sexually harassed one of the mayor’s police bodyguards while Garcetti ignored it or laughed it off. The mayor denies the claims. One of his former deputy mayors was also indicted on corruption charges in an ongoing federal investigation at City Hall. And as is the case in many large cities, the crime rate in LA is spiking.

In picking Garcetti, the president would be rewarding a loyalist who was one of his national campaign co-chairs, who served on the committee that vetted his pool of vice presidential contenders and who served as one of several co-chairs for Biden’s inaugural committee.

The India post would allow the politically ambitious Garcetti to burnish his foreign policy credentials ahead of a possible future White House run. That’s a conspicuous gap on his resume — the Ivy League graduate and Rhodes scholar has spent two decades in city government, either as mayor or a city councilman.

Garcetti’s popularity has slipped in recent years, and Black Lives Matter protesters had banged drums outside his official residence earlier this year to urge Biden not to choose Garcetti for a Cabinet position.

Axios first reported that Biden was ready to nominate Garcetti as ambassador to India and that Burns was the president’s likely choice for ambassador to China.

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — It’s common practice for police around the U.S. to place combative suspects face down and press down on their backs with hands, elbows or knees to gain control.

They aren’t supposed to do it for an “extended period” because that can lead to injuries or death. But what length of time is appropriate?

That question and the face-down method are in the spotlight after police video released last week showed officers in Northern California struggling with a man for more than five minutes as he lay face down.

He died. Two days after the video became public, a jury in Southern California awarded more than $2 million to the family of a homeless man who died in 2018 after officers in Anaheim used a similar technique to restrain him.

Now, a Los Angeles-area lawmaker who is a former police officer is trying to outlaw techniques that create a substantial risk of what’s known as “positional asphyxia” — legislation police oppose as either vague or unnecessary given that most departments already restrict the practice.

“This does not mean that a police officer can no longer restrain anyone when they need to for public safety, but it would mean that they cannot keep anyone from breathing/losing oxygen when restraining them,” Democratic Assemblyman Mike Gipson said in a statement.

He cited George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis last year, who was face down as an officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, and another California death before Christmas involving police in the San Francisco Bay Area community of Antioch.

The legislation is getting more attention after 26-year-old Mario Gonzalez died on April 19. Body camera video released last week showed he was pinned down by four Alameda Police Department employees. Officers confronted him after receiving 911 calls that he seemed disoriented or drunk and appeared to be breaking the security tags off bottles of alcohol he had in shopping baskets.

The department’s policy manual says a suspect “shall not be placed on his/her stomach for an extended period, as this could reduce the person’s ability to breathe.”

“Every department has policies on this,” said Ed Obayashi, a use-of-force consultant to law enforcement agencies and a deputy sheriff and legal adviser for the Plumas County, California, sheriff’s office. “Every law enforcement agency trains their officers, advises them, cautions them on this very restraint issue — positional asphyxia.”

Timothy T. Williams Jr., a police tactics expert who spent nearly 30 years with the Los Angeles Police Department, said the policy should be clearer.

“The policy needs to be more specific and directed: Once he or she is handcuffed, they are to be immediately removed from the prone position, put on their side and if possible set up,” Williams said. Otherwise, “you leave everything to subjective interpretation: What may be short to you may be long to me.”

That’s not new: A 1995 bulletin from the U.S. Department of Justice advised agencies that “as soon as the suspect is handcuffed, get him off his stomach.”

Williams and Obayashi agree that the officers in Alameda should have known that they needed to get Gonzalez onto his side more quickly. In fact, the video captures an officer suggesting they do so about 15 seconds before Gonzalez loses consciousness. Another officer refused, apparently fearing he would lose his grip.

The video shows one officer putting an elbow on Gonzalez’s neck and a knee on his shoulder, while another appears to put a knee on his back and leaves it there for about four minutes, even as Gonzalez gasps for air. Officers handcuffed him about two minutes after they pinned him to the ground but didn’t turn him on his back until three minutes later, when he had lost consciousness.

From a medical standpoint, any restriction of oxygen or blood flow is too long, said University of California, San Francisco, neurologist Nicole Rosendale.

“There are no kind of safe, defined ways to have someone in a position like this and reduce oxygen,” she said. “There’s no way to predict who might be at higher risk or lower risk of complications from this positioning.”

That’s the premise of the proposed California ban, which would outlaw applying pressure or body weight to a restrained person’s neck, torso or back or laying them face up or face down without proper monitoring.

The California State Sheriffs’ Association said the language is too broad, violations would be too difficult to judge and a ban would leave officers fewer options against violent suspects and more likely to use batons or stun guns.

The National Conference of State Legislatures said Nevada enacted a similar ban last year as part of broader legislation.

After Floyd’s death, California last year barred police from using arm-based grips, including chokeholds that apply pressure to a person’s windpipe and carotid holds that slow the flow of blood to the brain.

It was similarly once common to hog-tie, or hobble, combative suspects by binding their ankles to their wrists behind their backs, though the Los Angeles and New York police departments were among those that abandoned that practice nearly a quarter-century ago after it was blamed for too many deaths.

An attorney for the Alameda officers, Alison Berry Wilkinson, said they “used the lowest degree of force possible given the intensity of Mr. Gonzalez’s efforts to evade their grasp.” She said officers never pressed down hard enough to stop his breathing.

Eugene O’Donnell, a former New York City police officer and professor of police studies at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the body camera footage of Gonzalez’s arrest “is a training video for anybody who’s reasonably fair to see how hard it is if a situation becomes physical.”

“What you have now in many police departments is prohibitions that make physical arrests very hard — avoiding the chest, avoiding putting somebody on their stomach, avoiding their neck,” O’Donnell said. “And there’s always the possibility somebody can die in an arrest situation.”

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The first batch of once-every-decade data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows a United States that is growing less quickly but still seeing its population shift to the South and the West.

The data released Monday was relatively basic — containing national and state-level population figures and details of how they affect states’ representation in Congress. Still, it contained some surprises and pointed to some consequential trends.

Five takeaways from the new census data:

MORE SLUGGISH GROWTH AHEAD?

The U.S. population grew to 331 million, a 7.4% growth rate from the last time the Census Bureau counted every person in the country, in 2010. Those may sound like big numbers, but it’s actually the second slowest rate of population growth the census has ever recorded, just behind the 7.3% growth in the 1930s.

That decade’s slowed growth was rooted in the Great Depression. Our past decade’s sluggish rate had similar beginnings in the long shadow of the Great Recession. The drawn-out recovery saw many young adults struggling to enter the job market, delaying marriage and starting a family. That dealt a blow to the nation’s birthrate. Then the pandemic hit last year and made matters worse.

But while U.S. population growth recovered after the Great Depression, demographers are not optimistic it will pick up anytime soon. Most forecast even slower population growth in the decades to come. Americans are getting older — the median age in the U.S. is 38, up one year from 37 in 2010. Immigration had been dropping even before the pandemic effectively shut it down. And many Republicans have largely turned against the idea of immigration, legal or illegal, a new political barrier to the country adding more population quickly.

“Unlike the Great Depression, it’s part of a process where we’re likely to keep having slow growth,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

That has potentially grim consequences for the nation’s future. “The big demographic advantage the U.S. once enjoyed over other rich nations has evaporated,” John Lettieri, president of the Economic Innovation Group, tweeted after the census data release. “Now there are more Americans 80 and older than 2 or younger.”

THE GREAT MIGRATION CONTINUES

The U.S. population may be growing more slowly, but it continued its 80-year-long trend of shifting to the South and the West.

Florida, Montana and North Carolina each saw enough growth to add a congressional seat, while booming Texas gained two. Colorado and Oregon also gained new seats, while Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania lost seats.

The snapshot tells a familiar story: Americans have moved out of the industrial Midwest and Northeast, chasing jobs, more affordable housing, growing new suburbs and vibrant cities.

But, strikingly, the longtime symbol of Americans’ search for the new and the next wasn’t part of that story. California’s growth rate wasn’t enough to retain its 53-seat delegation in the House. The nation’s most populous state lost a congressional seat for the first time in its history, a fact that is already forcing debate over whether Democrats’ control of state government is to blame.

GOOD NEWS FOR THE GOP — FOR NOW

Those population changes will be quickly translated into political shifts. The census data officially kicked off the redistricting process, in which states will redraw congressional and statehouse districts to adjust for the new headcounts.

The news Monday was generally good for Republicans. They control the redistricting process in Florida, North Carolina and Texas, which account for four of the seven new seats.

The two Democratic states that gain seats — Colorado and Oregon — won’t give that power to their Democratically controlled legislatures. In Oregon, Democrats have agreed to give GOP lawmakers equal say in exchange for a pledge not to hold up other legislation. And Colorado’s voters took the drawing of district lines away from state lawmakers and gave it to a nonpartisan commission.

The new seats are only part of the often cutthroat redistricting fight. As soon as August, the Census Bureau is expected to release detailed information showing, down to the block, where almost every person lives. New legislative maps will be redrawn in each state to ensure equal representation. But one party can gain advantage by packing rivals into a single district, or spreading them out so that they can never win an election.

Right now, the GOP controls more statehouses overall and has an edge in growing states. Republicans only need to net a handful of seats to win control of the U.S. House.

“I think Republicans, when all this is done, will be in great shape to retake the House majority in 2022,” said Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, which is coordinating the GOP redistricting push.

But there will be limits. Many of the new residents of those states are young and voters of color, groups that lean strongly Democratic. It may be hard for Republicans to maintain their edge for much of the decade, regardless of how they draw their lines.

TROUBLE COUNTING LATINOS?

In fact, the process was expected to go even better for the GOP. Texas had been predicted to gain three seats, Florida two and Arizona one. Those shortfalls were a shocker for demographers, and there were so few details in the data it was hard to understand what happened.

One possibility is that Latinos weren’t properly counted. Latinos make up a large segment of the population in the three states that didn’t gain expected seats. Trump unsuccessfully pushed to add a citizenship question to the census, sparking allegations that he hoped to intimidate immigrants or people in the country illegally from participating in the process. The actual count started during the coronavirus pandemic when it was especially hard to reach certain populations.

It may be that the gap between expected gains and actual ones is the first sign of a Hispanic undercount. But it’s too soon to tell without the more detailed data due out in the fall.

“The initial results are surprising enough that once more details are released, we will be able to better determine to what extent the Latino population was fairly and accurately counted,” said Arturo Vargas, president of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

Thomas Saenz, president of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said he wasn’t ready to “sound the alarm” about an undercount yet, noting that growth among Latinos may have helped New York avoid losing a second House seat.

A GAME OF INCHES

This census count was a tough one for New York. Growth has been slowing for years and there’s been a particular exodus of people from its upstate region north and west of New York City. But, during a Monday news conference, Census Bureau officials revealed the state was 89 people short of dodging the demographic bullet of losing a congressional seat.

Congressional reapportionment is a zero-sum game, with states divvying up the 435 House seats based on population. Minnesota barely edged out New York to avoid being the last state to lose a seat. If New York had counted 89 more residents, and all other states stayed the same, the state would have kept its seat and Minnesota would have lost one.

Minnesota, which had the nation’s highest self-response rate, also secured the last House seat in 2010.

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He will deliver a speech on the Affordable Care Act on Tuesday, the same day the high court will hear arguments on its merits. It ruled eight years ago to leave the essential components of the law known as Obamacare intact, but is now controlled 6-3 by a conservative majority after President Donald Trump’s appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

The speech reflects the importance Biden is putting on health care as he prepares to take office in January amid the worst pandemic in more than a century. He’s launching his transition process this week as the virus surges across the country. The U.S. surpassed 10 million cases Monday.

Biden also focused on health care Monday as he pleaded with Americans to put aside their political differences and wear masks to protect themselves and their neighbors from the virus.

“We could save tens of thousands of lives if everyone would just wear a mask for the next few months. Not Democratic or Republican lives, American lives,” Biden said. “Please, I implore you, wear a mask.”

The suit challenging the health care law was brought in America’s largest conservative state, Texas, and is backed by Trump and top Republicans. It asks the Supreme Court to declare the law’s mandate to buy health insurance unconstitutional because Congress had previously repealed the penalties for noncompliance.

After serving as President Barack Obama’s vice president for eight years, Biden has pledged to build on the Affordable Care Act while championing a “public option” that would allow more people to opt into government-sponsored health insurance even as millions of others could stick with their current, usually employer-based coverage.

But such changes could be difficult to enact if Democrats fail to win a majority in the Senate. Control of the chamber hinges on two runoff races in Georgia that will be decided in January.

Biden, meanwhile, is moving forward with planning a presidential transition even as Trump refuses to concede the race and falsely argues it was stolen from him.

The president-elect is expected to quickly name a chief of staff and start considering Cabinet appointments, though those likely won’t be finalized for weeks.

But he’s running into hurdles from the General Services Administration, which is tasked with formally recognizing Biden as president-elect. That designation eases cooperation between the outgoing and incoming administrations. The agency’s Trump-appointed administrator, Emily Murphy, has not started the process and has given no guidance on when she will.

That lack of clarity is fueling questions about whether Trump will spend as much of his remaining time in office as possible hindering Biden from building out his government. Biden has so far largely ignored Trump and instead called for bipartisanship — but he may not be able to keep doing so for much longer.

“This election is over,” Biden said during his speech Monday. “It’s time to put aside the partisanship, and the rhetoric that is designed to demonize one another.”

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