LOS ANGELES (AP) — In her bid for Los Angeles mayor, Nithya Raman ran as an outsider. The democratic socialist didn’t win a single endorsement from her 14 colleagues on the city council. The police union opposed her, she had friction with the Jewish community and the Democratic establishment lined up squarely behind the incumbent, Karen Bass.
She now has to show she can lead.
As mayor-elect following a stunning upset, Raman will need to navigate political rifts in balkanized City Hall while taking on an array of problems that have defied her predecessors, including a long-running homeless crisis, an exodus of Hollywood jobs and boundless miles of crumbling streets and sidewalks — all with a strained budget.
Appearing before reporters Thursday for the first time as mayor-elect, Raman was succinct about her agenda.
“Homelessness, housing costs and public safety,” she said. “These will have to be the priorities that I take on in the city.”
Even after the campaign, the millennial, India-born Raman will be a new face to many Angelenos in a city that tends to shrug at local politics. But how she governs the nation's second most populous city will be closely watched nationally, especially as she prepares to welcome the world to LA for the 2028 Olympics.
When she takes office in mid-December, Raman will join the vanguard of democratic socialists in municipal government that includes Zohran Mamdani in New York and Katie Wilson in Seattle. Janeese Lewis George was elected Tuesday as mayor of Washington, D.C.
While she is expected to steer the city to the political left, she has been outspoken about her willingness to break from the Democratic Socialists of America when she believes their agenda conflicts with interests of the city. “My independence will always be paramount,” Raman said at a candidate forum in September.
At a time when the Democratic Party has been deeply divided over the war in Gaza and aid to Israel, Raman has faced questions about her interview with progressive commentator Hasan Piker last spring in which she responded “I do, yes,” when asked if she believed Israel had committed genocide. At a forum co-hosted by the Jewish Federation Los Angeles, she said she recognized genocide is “a deeply painful word” but said she was compelled to speak out after seeing images of “the targeting of hospitals, the deaths of children,” prompting murmurs in the audience.
At the same time, she faced pushback from within the DSA, where some believed her positions on Israel was not sufficiently tough.
After her surprise win, the federation called on Raman to “rebuild trust with Jewish Angelenos that was strained during the campaign.”
To Occidental College political scientist Caroline Heldman, Raman needs to propose concrete solutions to address the day-to-day headaches that frame life in LA, whether potholes or thousands of broken streetlights or clearing homeless encampments.
“She didn't win the election by positioning herself as being really ideologically distinct from Karen Bass,” Heldman said. “She positioned herself as the pothole politician, very similar to Zohran Mamdani. I see her taking a page out of his playbook.”
Raman, however, never had the star power known as a Mamdani trademark. The contest in LA was relatively low key and overshadowed by turmoil in Washington and the fight for control of Congress.
Mike Bonin, a former LA city council member and executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles, described Raman as philosophically progressive but temperamentally moderate.
“She got painted in this campaign as a crazy socialist idealogue or a flip-flopper with no core values,” said Bonin, who served with Raman from December 2020 to 2022. But, he said, "she wanted to work with people. She is very focused on results.”
She has not delivered a financially detailed plan on how she will take on some of the city's persistent maladies.
There are few issues in LA — birthplace of the car culture, where driving is part of everyday life for most residents — that prompt more grumbling than traffic and potholes. In 2013, former Mayor Eric Garcetti, campaigned on a “back to basics” platform to deal with street paving, yet little happened.
Under Bass, the city began focusing on filling potholes rather than resurfacing streets. Raman has said she will recast that policy, but how much money will go toward streets — and how quickly they can be repaved — is not yet known.
In remarks on election night, before she was declared the winner, Raman depicted a city in statis and broadly sketched her vision for what Los Angeles could be.
“LA stopped being a place where we could build things, where we could open things, where we could film things, where we could create things,” she said. Raman added that she wanted to revive “that ambitious Los Angeles, that joyful Los Angeles, that creative Los Angeles, that entrepreneurial Los Angeles.”
On the city council, the reaction to her election was somewhat muted. Council member Traci Park, who voted for Bass and said she had “concerns about the leadership and effectiveness” of both candidates, said in a statement she looked forward to working with Raman in a city with “great challenges.”
Raising 10-year-old twins with her TV writer and producer husband in the Silver Lake neighborhood, her unlikely rise to the mayoralty came at least in part because she was running against a wounded incumbent at a time when voters nationwide were eager for change. Bass was undone by the deadly Palisades Fire, which ignited when she was out of the country and caught the fire department unprepared.
An urban planner, educated at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Raman's background includes founding a homelessness outreach nonprofit in LA.
Mayors in LA don't have the clout of their counterparts in New York and Chicago — power is shared with the city council. Bonin described it as an accordion, which can expand or contract depending on who holds the office.
He said former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, known for his chatty personality and charm, “swung for the fences.” Bass, by nature a compromiser, was different. Raman will set her own course.
“I can’t think of a mayor who had to take office with so many problems,” Bonin said. “Everybody leaves unpopular. ... It's not a job that makes you well loved.”
Los Angeles Mayor-elect Nithya Raman speaks on Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026, in Los Angeles. (AP Jae C. Hong)
Los Angeles Mayor-elect Nithya Raman speaks on Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026, in Los Angeles. (AP Jae C. Hong)
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Drone and missile attacks struck across Ukraine on Saturday, wounding at least nine people, as Kyiv and Moscow prepared for new talks next week with the United States.
Negotiators from Russia, Ukraine and the U.S. are to meet on Tuesday in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, for talks aimed at ending the war. The new round of negotiations would be the fourth brokered by the Trump administration, the most recent having been in Geneva in February.
Western governments backing the peace initiative are seeking a new formula to break the impasse while acknowledging that territorial and security questions remain unresolved.
The Russian missiles that hit overnight across the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, damaged homes and commercial properties, triggering new power and water outages, national and city authorities said.
Kateryna Korniichuk, 64, was at home with her granddaughter when an attack hit.
“The first blast wave threw us against that wall and then against the other wall, because we were in the corridor. It’s very hard. No sleep, no peace — nothing. The children aren’t sleeping, and neither are we," she told The Associated Press. “I’m old, I can handle it, but what have the children done wrong?”
Strikes also prompted officials to close Kyiv's 816-meter-long (892-yard-long) Northern Bridge, a major route connecting the city with large residential areas on the east bank of the Dnipro River.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said that work was already underway to repair the city's Northern Bridge and that water pressure in Kyiv had been stabilized. Earlier Saturday, he had described the city's energy situation as "extremely difficult, affecting the city’s heating and water supply systems.”
In a statement Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia was preparing for trilateral talks by “launching ballistic missiles at Ukraine’s critical infrastructure.”
Later, he said that Moscow was stepping up strikes to build pressure on Ukraine ahead of the Abu Dhabi talks. “Russia perceives diplomacy in its own peculiar way – as a form of aggression,” he wrote in an online post.
The Ukrainian leader said that Russia fired 36 ballistic missiles at Kyiv and the surrounding region overnight, of which only four were shot down due to a lack of Patriot interceptors.
Zelenskyy also said that Russia had used North Korean-made ballistic missiles to strike energy facilities, citing preliminary findings from investigations at impact sites.
The barrage involved 172 drones over Kyiv and 12 other regions, wounding nine people, including a child, he said.
“When Russia tries to plunge Kyiv — a city of millions — and the entire country into a blackout, Ukraine must not be left to face this alone,” Zelenskyy said. He urged greater U.S. support and attention from Congress, calling for bipartisan backing for Ukraine and stronger sanctions on Russia.
Ukraine’s Energy Ministry said Saturday’s missile attacks damaged networks that carry electricity from nuclear power plants to Kyiv and central regions, as well as multiple other power facilities. It said outages were most widespread in the Kyiv and central Zhytomyr regions, as well as in the eastern regions of Kharkiv, Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk.
The outages were separate from scheduled rolling blackouts imposed to protect the grid, which remain in effect across much of Ukraine.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense confirmed Saturday that it had targeted the Northern Bridge, saying that it facilitated the transport of weaponry, military hardware and specialist equipment for Ukraine’s armed forces.
It also said that it had targeted an industrial facility in the capital producing Flamingo missiles, as well as a power station, an electrical substation, and a plant producing ammunition, explosives and gunpowder in the wider Kyiv region. It also confirmed striking an electrical substation in the Zhytomyr region.
Meanwhile, in southern Ukraine, a recovery operation continued into its sixth day in the village of Komyshuvakha, devastated on Monday when multiple Russian guided bombs slammed into a former school and nearby shelter as residents waited for humanitarian aid.
Emergency services said they had recovered nine more bodies in the previous 24 hours, bringing the death toll early Saturday morning to 55. Dozens of people remain missing.
Village resident Mykola Krasnov, 72, said he was still looking for his wife but had heard no word from rescuers.
“She went to get humanitarian aid, and a three-ton bomb was dropped there. Where is she?” he said. “She didn’t come home, and they didn’t find her body there. She isn’t in the morgue, and she isn’t here alive.”
The village of Komyshuvakha is located near the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region.
A Ukrainian attack killed one person in Russia’s Belgorod region when a drone hit a private home in the town of Grayvoron, local officials said Saturday.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense said its forces shot down 411 Ukrainian drones overnight over 10 Russian regions, including Belgorod. Drones were also destroyed over the annexed Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and the Black and Azov Seas, it said.
The head of Russia’s southwestern Saratov region, Gov. Roman Busargin, wrote on social media that a drone attack damaged “civilian infrastructure” and several residential buildings in the area. Russian media outlets later reported that the Saratov Oil Refinery had been hit and shared images of plumes of smoke over the city.
The head of Russia’s Oryol region, Gov. Andrey Klychkov, also said Saturday that a Ukrainian attack had damaged commercial warehouse and production sites in the regional capital, as cited by state media.
Russian media outlets reported that a Ukrainian attack sparked a blaze at Oryol’s Proton-Electrotex plant, which produces components for military equipment.
Vasilisa Stepanenko in Komyshuvakha, Ukraine, and Katie Marie Davies in Manchester, England, contributed to this report.
Follow the AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
A children's playground structure stands amid debris in front of a heavily damaged kindergarten building following a missile strike on a residential area in Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, Nov. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
An elderly man carrying a bag walks past a heavily damaged kindergarten building and a debris-strewn courtyard following a missile attack on a residential area in Kyiv, Saturday, Nov. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
Kindergarten personnel cleaning debris inside a heavily damaged class following a missile attack on a residential area in Kyiv, Saturday, Nov. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
Oleksander Haiovyi, 20, looks at his car which is buried in dirt and debris following a strike on a residential area in Kyiv, Saturday Nov 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
A view through the destroyed walls of a kindergarten shows a large bomb crater and a damaged residential apartment building following a missile attack in Kyiv, Saturday, Nov. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
Rescue workers clear rubble to recover bodies from an underground school destroyed in a Russian airstrike in Komyshuvakha, Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine, Friday, Nov. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
