The Brief

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is leaving her post amid an internal investigation brought on by complaints about misconduct.

White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung announced the departure on X, writing "she has done a phenomenal job in her role by protecting American workers, enacting fair labor practices, and helping Americans gain additional skills to improve their lives." Cheung said Chavez-DeRemer was taking a position in the private sector.

A senior official at the Labor Department not authorized to speak publicly about the departure said the secretary had resigned.

Chavez-DeRemer is the third cabinet member to leave during President Donald Trump's second term.

In early March, Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem shortly after lawmakers on Capitol Hill berated her over her agency's handling of immigration enforcement — as well as its $220 million ad campaign featuring the secretary on horseback.

A month later, Attorney General Pam Bondi left amid simmering frustration over her leadership of the Justice Department and her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

While Chavez-DeRemer has played a far less visible role than Bondi or Noem in Trump's second term, her tenure has also been marked by controversy.

In January, the New York Post first reported that the Labor Department's inspector general was looking into complaints that Chavez-DeRemer was having an affair with a subordinate, drinking alcohol on the job and using taxpayer-funded travel to visit with friends and family members.

NPR has not independently verified the contents of the investigation.

While in office, Chavez-DeRemer spent much of her time away from Washington. A year ago, she launched her "America at Work" listening tour, an initiative that took her to all 50 states.

Chavez-DeRemer's chief of staff and deputy chief of staff, who had been on leave since January, resigned in early March. A third senior member of her staff, Melissa Robey, said in a statement issued March 26 that she had been fired a couple days earlier, after giving a four-hour interview to the Office of the Inspector General.

Meanwhile, the New York Times was first to report that Chavez-DeRemer's husband, Shawn DeRemer, an anesthesiologist in Portland, Ore., had been barred from Labor Department headquarters in Washington, D.C., after at least two staffers reported he had touched them inappropriately. Washington, D.C. police and federal prosecutors closed the investigations without bringing charges.

An unconventional choice

Trump's selection of Chavez-DeRemer to lead the Labor Department was seen by many as a concession to Teamsters President Sean O'Brien. O'Brien had been friendly with Trump through the presidential campaign, taking a prime-time speaking slot at the 2024 Republican National Convention and later declining to endorse Trump's opponent, then-Vice President Kamala Harris.

O'Brien had pushed for Chavez-DeRemer's selection, noting that she was one of only a few Republicans in Congress to have supported the PRO Act. That bill aimed to make it easier for workers to organize unions, including by overturning state Right to Work laws, which weaken unions.

At the time, Trump wrote, "Lori's strong support from both the Business and Labor communities will ensure that the Labor Department can unite Americans of all backgrounds."

Deputy Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, who has already been running much of the day-to-day operations of the Labor Department, has been named acting secretary, according to Cheung's post on X.

Sonderling previously served at the Labor Department during the first Trump administration and at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under the Biden administration, having been nominated by Trump during his first term to fill a Republican seat.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Before he became an Orange County Superior Court Judge, Ebrahim Baytieh was fired as a prosecutor by District Attorney Todd Spitzer for allegedly cheating to win convictions. And Baytieh was accused by a San Diego judge last year of lying under oath. But an O.C. nonprofit that teaches youth about constitutional rights awarded Baytieh “Judge of the Year” at its annual reception last week.

The group, the Constitutional Rights Foundation, Orange County, said in a statement that they honored Baytieh because he was the top volunteer for the group’s high school mock trial competition. The statement said the group had “received positive feedback from coaches and students over whose trials [Baytieh] presided.”

Some questioned whether the award was appropriate.

“It’s disgusting,” said Scott Sanders, the former public defender who uncovered the so-called “snitch scandal,” in which Baytieh was a major player. “If you’re going to have a group that’s dedicated to constitutional rights, it is not a good look to make your ‘Judge of the Year’ a guy who has been found to violate constitutional rights.”

What’s come to be known as the O.C. snitch scandal refers to the systematic use of jailhouse informants to coax confessions from defendants without their lawyers present, and then hide that evidence from defendants — both of which are illegal. The misconduct took place under former District Attorney Tony Rackauckas. Spitzer, the current DA, has vowed to never let such misconduct happen again. But he has been left to deal with the fallout, including past wrongful convictions that continue to come to light.

Baytieh, who held a top position in Rackauckas’s office, repeatedly denied the allegations of misconduct.

Nevertheless, a federal civil rights investigation ultimately concluded that O.C. law enforcement “systematically violated criminal defendants’ right to counsel."

Baytieh’s prominent role in those violations has come into focus in recent years, most recently when the District Attorney’s Office was forced to drop murder charges in a decades-old case that Baytieh had initially prosecuted. The judge in that case concluded that Baytieh and his prosecution team had withheld evidence, and then lied on the stand about it in 2024. The judge called the prosecution’s behavior "reprehensible."

Orange County Asst. Public Defender Scott Sanders questions former prosecutor Ebrahim Baytieh, now an O.C. Superior Court judge, about the use of jailhouse informants in a San Diego courtoom on June 10, 2024.

(

Nick Gerda

/

LAist

)

Previously, Baytieh had been fired by Spitzer after an internal investigation found Baytieh had illegally withheld evidence in the same murder case. Baytieh would go on to win election to the O.C. Superior Court a few months later, with endorsements from dozens of current and former judges and law enforcement leaders.

LAist reached out to Baytieh for this story but has not received a response. Paul Meyer, a defense attorney who has represented Baytieh in recent years, declined to comment.

One-man protest from an unlikely critic

As high school students and their parents arrived at Calvary Church in Santa Ana last Thursday for the mock trial awards ceremony, Paul Wilson walked through the parking lot, handing out copies of a six-page letter, penned by Sanders, the former public defender, highlighting Baytieh’s unethical behavior and urging the Constitutional Rights Foundation not to honor the judge.

The event went on as planned.

Wilson and Sanders have become unlikely allies in a quest to root out past misconduct by O.C. law enforcement and seek justice for defendants who didn't get a fair trial.

More than a decade ago, Sanders and Wilson were on opposite sides of the courtroom. Sanders was defending Scott Dekraai, the man accused of killing Wilson’s wife, Christy, and seven others in the county’s worst mass shooting in modern history, at a salon in Seal Beach.

Dekraai was arrested in what appeared to be a slam dunk legal case. But then, while preparing for trial, Sanders discovered a secret law enforcement program that offered money and perks to jailed informants to surreptitiously question defendants, including Dekraai. Questioning a defendant without giving them the opportunity to have a lawyer present runs afoul of the Constitution. Prosecutors were also hiding evidence about informants from defendants, another constitutional violation.

As a result of Sanders’s discovery, the Dekraai case dragged on for years. In a humiliating defeat, the DA’s office was removed from prosecuting the case because of the misconduct. And in a blow to the victims’ families, a judge ruled that the death penalty would be off the table.

An investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice followed, during which Baytieh, then a top prosecutor, denied having any knowledge of the misconduct.

Paul Wilson hands copies of a letter detailing Judge Baytieh's role in the snitch scandal to attendees of an awards ceremony sponsored by the Constitutional Rights Foundation of Orange County.

(

Courtesy: Paul Wilson

/

LAist

)

After the ordeal, Wilson began crusading to reform O.C. law enforcement. “We haven’t gotten the justice we deserve,” Wilson said of himself and other victims’ family members.

That’s what led him to make copies of Sanders’s denouncement of Baytieh’s “Judge of the Year” award, and to bring them to the Constitutional Rights Foundation’s celebratory event last week, he told LAist.

“ I felt a great need to go down and let some of these students that Baytieh has been mentoring … know who this guy was and what he's all about and what he continues to be,” Wilson said.

“For years and years, those guys operated behind this shield that nobody was going to catch them,” Wilson said of Baytieh and other former O.C. prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies who were found by judges and the U.S. Department of Justice to have participated in the misconduct.

Wilson told LAist he passed out about 45 copies of Sanders’s letter before someone from the Constitutional Rights Foundation asked him to leave.

Read the letter:

Pending justice

Sanders retired last year from the O.C. Public Defender’s office after 32 years. Before he left, around 60 convictions tainted by the misuse of informants had been lessened or overturned. In one, a 69-year-old man was freed from prison after the DA's Office admitted that prosecutors withheld evidence decades ago that mitigated his guilt. The man had already spent 41 years in prison.

Sanders said there’s much more work to do — in court filings, he has detailed dozens of convictions that he argues should be revisited because of law enforcement misconduct.

Baytieh prosecuted many of those cases.

“Every one of his cases should be torn apart,” Sanders said.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down from the job that he inherited from the late Steve Jobs, ending a nearly 15-year reign that saw the company's market value soar by more than $3.6 trillion during an iPhone-fueled era of prosperity.

Cook, 65, will turn the CEO duties over to Apple's head of hardware engineering, John Ternus, on Sept. 1 while remaining involved with the Cupertino, California, company as executive chairman. That's similar to the transitions made by Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Netflix's Reed Hastings after they ended their highly successful tenures as CEO.

"It has been the greatest privilege of my life to be the CEO of Apple and to have been trusted to lead such an extraordinary company," Cook said in a statement. "I love Apple with all of my being, and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with a team of such ingenious, innovative, creative, and deeply caring people."

Ternus, 50, has been with Apple for the past quarter century, including the past five years overseeing the engineering underlying the iPhone, iPad and Mac — a role that made him a prime candidate to succeed Cook.

"I am profoundly grateful for this opportunity to carry Apple's mission forward," Ternus said in a statement.

The transition to a new CEO comes at a pivotal time for Apple. Artificial intelligence has unleashed the most upheaval within the industry since Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in 2007. Apple has gotten off to a rough start in AI after stumbling in its efforts to deliver new features built on the technology, as promised nearly two years ago.

Earlier this year, Apple finally turned to Google — an early leader in the AI race — for help making the iPhone's virtual assistant Siri into a more conversational and versatile helper.

Although he never shook the perception that he lacked Jobs' vision, Cook leveraged the popularity of the iPhone and other breakthroughs orchestrated by his predecessor to lift Apple to heights that seemed unfathomable when it was on the brink of bankruptcy during the mid-1990s.
Copyright 2026 NPR

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Singer D4vd has been charged with murder in the death of a 14-year-old girl who was last known to be alive nearly a year ago and whose dismembered and decomposed body was found in September in his apparently abandoned Tesla, prosecutors said Monday.

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said the 21-year-old D4vd, whose legal name is David Burke, was charged with first-degree murder in the killing of Celeste Rivas Hernandez. She was reported missing by her family in 2024, when she was 13. Authorities, who described her Monday as a “runaway,” said she was 14 when she was killed.

A criminal complaint says he had engaged in continuous sexual abuse of Rivas Hernandez from September 2023 to September 2024.

Prosecutors allege he killed her using a sharp object on or around April 23, 2025 — the date she was last known to be alive and was headed to the singer’s house in the Hollywood Hills — and mutilated her body about two weeks later.

The murder charges included special circumstances — lying in wait, committing crime for financial gain and murdering the witness in an investigation — that could carry the death penalty. Prosecutors haven’t announced whether they will seek it. Burke is also charged with lewd and lascivious acts with a person under 14 and mutilating a body.

Attorneys for the Houston-born alt-pop singer said he was innocent in a statement released after homicide detectives arrested him on Thursday at a home in Hollywood.

“Let us be clear — the actual evidence in this case will show that David Burke did not murder Celeste Rivas Hernandez and he was not the cause of her death,” the lawyers said. A new request for comment to Burke’s lawyers on the charges was not immediately answered.

Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman called the case “a parent’s nightmare.”

“Celeste, a 14-year-old at that time, went to Mr. Burke’s house in the Hollywood Hills. She was never heard from again,” Hochman said at Monday’s press conference.

The long-dead body of Rivas Hernandez was found inside a Tesla that was towed from the Hollywood Hills on Sept. 8, a day after she would have turned 15. Her family had reported her missing from her hometown of Lake Elsinore, about 70 miles (112 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles.

Authorities did not publicly name Burke as a suspect until his arrest. And his lawyers’ statement last week, in which said they “will vigorously defend David’s innocence,” was the first time they weighed in publicly.

The singer had been under investigation by an LA County grand jury looking into the death. The probe was officially secret, but its existence — and his designation as its target — was revealed in February when his mother, father and brother objected in a Texas court to subpoenas demanding they testify.

The 2023 Tesla Model Y was registered in the singer’s name at the Texas address of his subpoenaed family members, according to court filings from prosecutors. It had been towed from an upscale Hollywood Hills neighborhood where it had been sitting as though it was abandoned.

Police investigators searching the Tesla in a tow yard found a cadaver bag “covered with insects and a strong odor of decay,” court documents said. Detectives partially unzipped a bag and found a head and torso.

Investigators from the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office removed the bag and “discovered the arms and legs had been severed from the body,” according to court documents. A second black bag was found under the first, and dismembered body parts were inside it. No cause of death has been publicly revealed, and police got a judge to block the release details of the autopsy. On Friday, the medical examiner told The Associated Press the court order remained in place after Burke’s arrest, and suggested to ask the police whether they would ask to lift it. Hochman said Monday that the coroner’s report would be released “shortly.”

The family of Rivas Hernandez has remained private and has not made any public statements on her death or the case.

“I had the chance to meet with some of the family members of Celeste and their grief in incalculable as to what happened to their daughter,” Hochman said.

D4vd, pronounced “David,” gained popularity among Gen Z for his blend of indie rock, R&B and lo-fi pop. He went viral on TikTok in 2022 with the hit “Romantic Homicide,” which peaked at No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart. He then signed with Darkroom and Interscope Records and released his debut EP “Petals to Thorns” and a follow-up, “The Lost Petals,” in 2023.

The Associated Press confirmed that D4vd was dropped by Interscope last year.

When the body was discovered, the singer continued his North American tour, but when reports of his possible involvement spread widely, he canceled the final two shows and a European tour that was to follow.

—

AP Music Writer Maria Sherman contributed reporting from New York.

The post Singer D4vd charged with murder of 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez, found dismembered in his car appeared first on LA Local.