Discussion

At 500 PM CVT (1800 UTC), the center of Tropical Storm Gonzalo was located near latitude 15.7 North, longitude 22.7 West. Gonzalo is moving toward the north near 10 mph (17 km/h). A northward to north-northwestward motion is expected through tonight, followed by a slower north-northwestward motion over the weekend. On the forecast track, the center will pass near or over the eastern portions of the Cabo Verde Islands later today and tonight.

Maximum sustained winds are near 50 mph (85 km/h) with higher gusts. Little change in strength is expected today. A gradual weakening trend is forecast to begin tonight and continue through the weekend.

Tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 205 miles (335 km) primary to the northeast of the center. The official observing station on Sal in the Cabo Verde Islands recently reported a sustained wind of 35 mph (56 km/h) with a gust to 48 mph (78 km/h).

The estimated minimum central pressure is 1000 mb (29.53 inches).

Watches and Warnings

CHANGES WITH THIS ADVISORY:

None.

SUMMARY OF WATCHES AND WARNINGS IN EFFECT:

A Tropical Storm Warning is in effect for, * The Cabo Verde Islands

A Tropical Storm Warning means that tropical storm conditions are expected somewhere within the warning area.

For storm information specific to your area, please monitor products issued by your national meteorological service.

Land Hazards

Key messages for Gonzalo can be found in the Tropical Cyclone Discussion under AWIPS header MIATCDAT2 and WMO header WTNT42 KNHC.

WIND: Tropical storm conditions will continue over portions of the Cabo Verde Islands through tonight.

RAINFALL: Tropical Storm Gonzalo is expected to produce rainfall totals of 1 to 3 inches (25 to 75 mm) across the eastern portions of the islands of Cabo Verde on Friday and Saturday with less than 1 inch anticipated for the western side of the island chain. Heavy rain along the coastal areas of Guinea-Bissau, Gambia, and Senegal will produce totals between 2 to 4 inches (50 to 100 mm) with isolated higher amounts along the immediate coast.

SURF: Swells generated by the storm are expected to affect the Cabo Verde Islands through Saturday. These swells are likely to cause life-threatening surf and rip current conditions. Please consult products from your local weather office.

Discussion

At 300 PM GMT (1500 UTC), the center of Tropical Storm Fay was located near latitude 30.1 North, longitude 42.5 West. Fay is moving toward the west near 3 mph (6 km/h). A gradual turn to the west-southwest then southwest at a slower forward speed is expected over the next few of days.

Maximum sustained winds have increased to near 60 mph (95 km/h) with higher gusts. Some slight strengthening is possible over the next few hours. Gradual weakening, however, is still expected through the weekend.

Tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 80 miles (130 km) from the center.

The estimated minimum central pressure is 1002 mb (29.59 inches).

Watches and Warnings

There are no coastal watches or warnings in effect.

Land Hazards

None.

The S&P 500 added 0.5% to break a three-day losing streak marked by big swings due to rising yields in the bond market. Despite the week’s uneasiness, the main measure of the U.S. stock market’s health pulled back within 0.7% of its all-time high set last month.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 478 points, or 0.9%, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 0.5%.

Stocks got a boost after the price for a barrel of Brent oil dropped 2.8% to $97.44 per barrel. It’s been yo-yoing on uncertainty about when the war with Iran will allow oil to flow freely again from the Middle East. Prices go down when hopes rise for a possible deal to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz to oil tankers, and they go up when doubts resurface.

But trading was shaky again on Wall Street Friday, particularly after a report on U.S. consumer sentiment sent Treasury yields higher in the morning.

The report from the University of Michigan said U.S. consumers are bracing for inflation of 4.6% in the coming year, up from their forecast of 4% the month before. It also said that overall sentiment among consumers was not as bad as economists expected, even if it was the lowest in four months.

The rising expectations for high inflation are potentially dangerous for the economy because they could encourage behavior that leads to a vicious cycle that makes the cost of living spiral even higher.

Some consumers told the survey that buying some kinds of products now would help them avoid higher prices in the future. If many rush to make such purchases at the same time, it could encourage sellers to raise prices further.

Following the report on consumer sentiment, the yield on the 10-year Treasury briefly jumped to 5.22%, up from 5.18% late Thursday, and was near its highest level since 2007.

High yields slow the economy by making it more expensive for everyone to borrow money, while undercutting prices for stocks and other investments. The 10-year yield has been jumping since the start of the war with Iran, when it was at 3.97%.

Higher yields worldwide are rattling all kinds of financial markets. They’re on the rise because of worries about inflation, expensive oil, big government debt loads, signs of continued economic strength and other factors.

But yields eased later in trading on Friday as the price of oil pulled lower, and the 10-year yield fell back to 5.15%. That helped stocks on Wall Street regain strength.

Helping to drive the market higher was Akamai Technologies. The cloud company’s stock rose 3.2% after it announced an $11.6 billion, multiyear agreement with Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI chatbot.

Costco Wholesale climbed 2.9% after the retailer reported a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. Such strong profit reports from U.S. companies have helped the stock market remain resilient despite all the worries about high inflation and oil prices.

All told, the S&P 500 rose 39.28 points to 7,743.41. The Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped 478.64 to 51,828.62, and the Nasdaq composite gained 129.34 to 27,068.72.

In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed in Europe following bigger moves in Asia. Japan’s Nikkei 225 climbed 1.3%, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dropped 1%.

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AP Business Writers Chan Ho-him and Michelle Chapman contributed to this report.

Those were among the key findings in an after-action report released Friday by Utah Valley University. The external, independent review found that the university failed to conduct a formal security assessment, did not create a written event action plan and deferred critical decision making for the conservative activist’s talk to Turning Point USA.

Kirk, 31, was killed on Sept. 10, 2025, by a sniper perched on a rooftop more than 400 feet (122 meters) away, authorities said. He had been debating students in an outdoor courtyard on the Orem, Utah, campus surrounded by tall buildings and elevated walkways, and with several thousand people in attendance.

The report makes nearly 150 recommendations, including hiring a police sergeant to focus on campus events and creating clear criteria for when events must be moved indoors or to more controllable venues because of crowd size and line-of-sight concerns.

In a statement, Utah Valley President Jon Anderson said the university has a responsibility to “learn from the findings of this review, and follow through on its recommendations.”

“This requires humility, an honest examination of our policies and practices, and a commitment to act on what we learn,” said Anderson, who took over as president last month. He added that the university has made “meaningful progress in strengthening campus safety over the past year.”

That includes hiring a chief public safety officer to coordinate with campus police and other emergency response agencies and hiring more campus police officers. At the time of the shooting, the university had just 13 sworn officers, which the report said was not sufficient for Utah Valley's size and the types of events and activities held on its campus. Utah Valley is the state's largest university, with about 50,000 students on a sprawling campus beneath the Wasatch Mountains.

Tyler Robinson has pleaded not guilty to aggravated murder in the shooting, a charge that could make him eligible for the death penalty if convicted. Prosecutors say he told his romantic partner that he “had enough of his (Kirk’s) hatred.” No trial date has been set.

Last week, Kirk’s family sent a wrongful death notice — a precursor to a possible lawsuit — accusing Utah Valley officials of hastening his death with a string of “reckless decisions.” They included failing to conduct an adequate risk assessment, failing to establish a secure perimeter and failing to have first responders immediately available, which led to Kirk being taken to a hospital in a private vehicle instead of an ambulance.

The family’s lawyer, Brett Parkinson, said in a statement that the report reaffirms those allegations. By hosting the event, he said, Utah Valley assumed responsibility for the safety of all in attendance, including Kirk.

“The buck stopped with UVU leadership and law enforcement,” Parkinson said. “Justice for Charlie and his family requires true accountability for UVU’s fatal shortcomings that day.”

According to the after-action report, a Turning Point representative insisted at an August 2025 planning meeting that Kirk speak at a courtyard on campus because he had been there previously and the organization was familiar with the location. Some Utah Valley officials expressed reservations about holding the event in an outdoor space with tall buildings around, but ultimately allowed the event to proceed.

“In our assessment, those decisions were consequential,” the report said.

The location “created significant protective operations considerations,” the report said, but the planning process failed to include a documented line-of-sight assessment, pre-event briefing or walk-through with security stakeholders. Nor was there clear coordination with the speaker’s private security team and external law enforcement partners, the report said.

An Associated Press review found that the campus did not use several public safety practices that have become standard at events around the country. Among other things, campus police did not fly a drone to monitor rooftops or coordinate with local law enforcement to secure the event attended by about 3,000 people. Nor were there bag checks or metal detectors.

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Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City contributed to this report.

Gov. Mikie Sherrill had given Lt. Gov. Dale Caldwell until Friday to resign, seeking to end a scandal that threatened to be a drag on her fledgling administration.

Republicans have hammered Sherrill for weeks on the investigation into Caldwell, who serves as acting governor in her absence. He also oversees elections as New Jersey’s secretary of state, and his resignation comes weeks ahead of midterm elections that will decide who controls Congress.

At a news conference announcing the resignation, Sherrill said she was committed to changing what she called a longstanding problem in state government of people turning a blind eye to sexual harassment.

“There has been a culture in Trenton, probably since the birth of our nation, to sweep this under the rug,” she said.

“That is not the kind of government I’m running,” she added. “When I say there is a culture change taking place, I mean it.”

Sherrill picked Caldwell, a Methodist pastor and former president of Centenary University, as her running mate last year. They took office in January, but within four months, Caldwell had become the subject of an anonymous complaint about his behavior with women.

She called for him to resign on Thursday after a law firm she hired concluded he behaved inappropriately around women.

Caldwell has disputed the allegations and initially showed no signs he would leave office willingly. In a statement, his attorney Thomas Calcagni said Caldwell stepped down in order to end a “campaign to discredit his character,” and said they are exploring legal options to challenge the report.

In New Jersey, a governor can’t fire the lieutenant governor because the post is independently elected. But the state's second-in-command can be impeached and removed from office by the Legislature. A governor can strip a lieutenant governor of nearly all duties and responsibilities, effectively sidelining them from the administration.

Sherrill said she spoke and texted with Caldwell in recent days and that he chose to resign because he cared about their agenda and the challenges facing the state. But she declined to say whether he expressed any remorse.

The law firm’s report released Thursday said Caldwell committed several violations of state policy. It said Caldwell, 66, made an advance toward a staff member’s friend and when he was rebuffed told the staffer, “you young women are looking for young sperm.”

The report said Caldwell had tried to get a promotion for a state employee he was dating and brought personal guests to the opera and other ticketed events without paying for them, as required by ethics rules.

In a letter included in the report, Caldwell said he suspected his relationships with women were being subjected to extra scrutiny because he was a single Black man.

Caldwell’s lawyer previously said his client “categorically denies” making the sperm statement but acknowledged that Caldwell had recommended the woman for a promotion, although he denied ordering anyone to promote her. Caldwell denied other claims, including that he gave out his business cards to women for inappropriate reasons.

Until a new lieutenant governor is named, state Senate President Nicholas Scutari will step in as acting governor if Sherrill is away or unable to perform her duties.

In neighboring New York, a similar impasse has played out over the past year between Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and her estranged Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado, who launched a caustic primary challenge to unseat her only to withdraw from the race as the election neared.

Hochul is now running for reelection in November with Adrienne Adams, the former speaker of the New York City Council, as her replacement lieutenant governor nominee.

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Marcelo reported from New York.

The Aug. 3 discovery of the body — Fortune was Black — stoked fear and drew widespread attention because the scene recalled actual lynchings in the Southern state, which has a long and troubled history of racial violence.

Authorities haven’t disclosed the exact cause of Fortune’s death, but they did rule it a homicide and have arrested two men, both of them Black, on murder charges. They also issued an arrest warrant for a third, unnamed, person.

During a hearing Friday to establish whether there is sufficient evidence to warrant sending a grand jury the case against the first man arrested, Jarques Ratliff, Jackson police Detective Samuel Dukes testified that the hanging was “staged,” citing the medical examiner's opinion.

Dukes said the motive for the killing appears to have been a drug dispute, and that interviews with others revealed that Fortune fought hard before she was killed.

Ratliff, 51, who was arrested in mid-September, has pleaded not guilty and remains jailed without bond. Police arrested a second defendant, 25-year-old Earnest Lloyd Jr., this week.

During Friday's hearing, which will resume Sept. 30, Ratliff blurted out in court that he and Fortune were friends.

“He didn’t do it, and I’m behind him,” Ratliff's stepdaughter, Lashuna Jones, said outside of court.

Fortune's mother, Christy Spivey, has said her daughter, who had four children, struggled with homelessness in recent years, and that she wasn’t sure where Fortune was living at the time of her death. She said Fortune had talked about starting a cleaning business and was trying to get her life in order.

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White reported from Detroit.

Leo raised existential concerns about scientific progress, life and human rights during his opening speech to President Emmanuel Macron and authorities at the Élysée Palace and then to diplomats and United Nations employees at the headquarters of UNESCO, the U.N. culture and education organization.

With wars plaguing Europe and the Middle East, he reaffirmed the Vatican’s opposition to nuclear weapons and said the nuclear deterrence doctrine was “mistaken” since it was just fueling a new arms race.

“Peace is not a balance of power; rather, it is built day by day through dialogue and justice,” he said.

Leo has an intense four days in France, where the Catholic Church has lost ground in influencing ethical issues given the strict approach to secularism that is enshrined in the French Constitution.

Yet thousands of people lined his motorcade route, waving French and Holy See flags, with some braving hours of the unseasonable heat to catch a glimpse of him. The turnout underscored the surprising level of interest in Leo’s visit, the first official state visit by a pope to France in 18 years.

"To see him, praying with us, it comforts us in our faith and on our path,” said Senegalese Sister Antonia Faye, who was glowing after her first-ever event with a pope, an evening prayer service at Notre Dame that featured angelic choirs and the cathedral’s booming organ.

“Being with the pope is different to being alone or praying alone. We felt the benediction that came down on us,” she said.

A capstone visit as Macron’s term ends

For Macron, who is barred from seeking a third term in May elections, hosting the American pope is something of a capstone. Pope Francis had refused repeatedly to make a proper state visit to France during his 12-year pontificate and pointedly refused to join the inauguration of the rebuilt Notre Dame cathedral in 2024 that Macron had championed.

“For a president of the republic as Macron, who is at the end of his mandate, it can be important to be aside the pope and to capture a part of his popularity,” said Charles Mercier, director of history and sociology of Catholicism studies at Paris EPHE university.

With seven months left in his term, Macron’s approval ratings are near record lows, driven by anger over the rising cost of living and criticism of France’s growing debt and deficit and deteriorating public services.

Smiling broadly as Leo spoke French, Macron thanked the pope for visiting, saying: “You are here with us for an extended visit, giving us your time, and that is moving.”

Leo calls for the French to mull lofty questions about life

Unlike Francis, who liked to travel to small Catholic communities far from Rome, Leo has been keen to emphasize and reawaken Europe’s Christian roots. He is seeking to push the church’s message about the value and dignity of human life in a country where the right to abortion was enshrined in the constitution in 2024, and where lawmakers recently gave final approval to a bill allowing adults with incurable illnesses to receive lethal medication.

The French Catholic hierarchy strongly opposed the measures, in keeping with Catholic teaching that human life must be protected and defended from conception until natural death.

In his speech to Macron and other government and diplomatic authorities, Leo reminded France of its “deep Christian roots” and called for the French to remember that the right to life is the “indispensable foundation of every other human right.”

His concern about the dignity of human life and humanity as a whole extended to the threats posed by artificial intelligence.

“The paradox has become increasingly evident: while ‘intelligence’ is attributed to computational systems, we struggle to recognize the inalienable dignity of human persons, whose lives are judged according to the criterion of efficiency and, when deemed no longer productive, are rejected and discarded,” he said.

From the very start of his pontificate, Leo has identified AI as one of the greatest challenges facing humanity. He dedicated his first encyclical to the topic, “Magnificent Humanity,” calling for robust regulation and for AI developers to work for the common good rather than profit.

Leo also appealed to AI developers and political leaders responsible for regulating them to slow down, an appeal that several top AI companies seem to have taken to heart recently.

“If we are to avoid losing our humanity amid a ‘paradise of machines’ invading and conditioning our daily lives, there is an urgent need for education in ethical discernment and the capacity to acknowledge the moral good,” he said.

Leo earlier told reporters that he was pleased his message was being heard and said he hoped the dialogue that the Vatican initiated with tech companies would continue.

“And I think from their perspective, many of them, they’re very much open to looking for ways of making sure that AI does not displace or ultimately destroy humanity, but rather is a tool for human beings,” he said.

A visit to Notre Dame that Francis declined

Later on Friday, Leo presided over evening prayers in Paris' soaring Notre Dame cathedral, the first pope to celebrate there since the devastating 2019 fire that consumed the cathedral’s roof and toppled its spire.

After being mobbed by a crowd of eager nuns outside, Leo walked down the central aisle to the combined thundering of the organ above and cheers from the pews below. As bells tolled, he knelt in silent prayer in the same spot where, in 2019, flames brought down scorched roof beams.

Leo marveled at the brilliance of the stained-glass windows and restored cream columns and praised the artisans who repaired them. He urged the priests and nuns gathered in the pews to be inspired by the combined effort to bring the Gothic masterpiece back to life.

Francis had refused to visit France on a proper state visit, and explicitly refused Macron’s invitation to come for the 2024 reopening of the cathedral that drew dozens of world leaders.

He did make three short trips to French cities, however, including Strasbourg in 2014 and Marseille and Corsica in 2024, a one-day visit that became his last foreign trip.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

"As of right now, surgery is not on the table, and we haven’t discussed IR,” Peters said on 106.7 The Fan. “So it’s just a matter of how we’re going to get him back on the field. That’s still to be determined.”

Peters said Daniels returned late Thursday night and was meeting with the Commanders on Friday. Team officials have talked with medical officials around the country, and Peters called it a medical decision that Washington is working through.

Being placed on injured reserve would mean Daniels would miss a minimum of four games.

Daniels was hurt during Sunday’s loss at Dallas on a broken play at the end of the first half. He took a snap under center, and left guard Chris Paul stepped on Daniels' foot as he backed away from the line. Daniels braced himself with his non-throwing arm, which bent awkwardly under the pressure.

A similar thing happened last November, when Daniels used his left arm to brace himself and dislocated his elbow against Seattle. He returned just over a month later, only to aggravate the problem and miss the rest of the season.

Marcus Mariota is set to start Sunday’s home opener against Seattle.

Coach Dan Quinn said Friday that he'll have updates later on the guidelines for Daniels' return once he gets to that stage. For now, he is considered week-to-week.

Asked about his initial reaction to the injury, Quinn said sometimes the scenarios that play out in someone's mind “are worse than the actual news.”

"But you just wait to get all the information you can, and then, spoke with him (Daniels) on the phone and again we had a chance to visit this morning. So, I thought just what a great bit of news for him and for us,” Quinn said.

The coach said the team has a lot of confidence in Mariota.

“In fact, so much — I thought this was such a cool thing — the captains huddled up with me earlier in the week and said, ‘Hey, we’d like to make Marcus our sixth captain.’ And I thought what a great tribute of brotherhood of those guys asking,” Quinn said. “Of course, they were all like as on board, as you can imagine. I thought it was awesome, too, but what a great example of teammate and leadership.”

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See AP’s full NFL coverage here

The band ripped through a seven-song set including an encore of “With or Without You” for hundreds of students in the schoolyard of Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin and a crowd of others who got word of the gig or — like a construction crew several floors up a nearby building — were lucky to be within earshot and have a bird's eye view.

“We escaped the lab — how’s the experiment going for you?” Bono said as he pointed to the science classrooms.

The band got its start at the school 50 years ago when a 14-year-old Larry Mullen posted a note on a message board reading: “Drummer seeks musicians to form band.”

Originally known as Feedback, the group consisted of singer Paul Hewson, now Bono, guitarist David Evans, known as The Edge, and Adam Clayton on bass.

The rest, as they say, is history, though it would be a couple of years before they settled on the name U2 and not until 1980 that their first album, “Boy,” dropped, featuring “I Will Follow,” the first tune they played for the enthusiastic children.

The 30-minute gig was not quite as secret as it may have seemed. A camera crew was rolling, international news media were gathered and a group of 32 students accompanied the band on stringed instruments for the hit, "One.”

It was part of a promotional push for their new album, “Carnaval De Luz,” which features a duet between Bono and Dolly Parton, who died of cancer last month.

They later performed from a balcony to a crowd of fans on popular Grafton Street in central Dublin.

Students, some sticking their heads out of classroom windows, screamed and cheered. They captured the moment on their phones and sang along to the familiar tunes. Some yelled, “I love you Bono!”

Bono thanked his captive audience but noted they had “nowhere else to go.”

As he counted down the signature start of “Vertigo,” with “uno, dos, tres, catorce” (one, two, three, 14), he quipped: “If you’re taking Spanish lessons, don’t take them from me."

In a tribute to teachers, he became philosophical about his time at the school, saying it was where the band began the “humblest and hardest lesson” of learning how much they needed to be taught.

“Part of that started here and the sense was that maybe all we needed was around us, just under our feet — if we could see it in our mates, our wider community that was going to help us get through the next 50 years," he said. "So we want to thank them — and the wider community around this rock ‘n’ roll high school.”

In New York, where the wars in Iran and Gaza have dominated the U.N. agenda, the leaders of Iraq, Lebanon and Egypt were scheduled to address world leaders later Friday.

Here is a look at the latest news from the Middle East. More coverage of the U.N. General Assembly is available here.

Proposal to reopen strait, resume nuclear talks on the table

Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and resume talks on its nuclear program in seven days if the U.S. lifts its naval blockade, waives oil sanctions and observes a ceasefire that includes Lebanon, under a proposal discussed by the Iranian foreign minister at a private gathering on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly.

Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute think tank, who attended the event, said Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi detailed the plan to those gathered Thursday. Iranian officials haven't commented.

The proposal resembles an agreement reached in June that later collapsed.

U.S. President Donald Trump has said he’s in no rush to reach a deal, though the White House said Friday that U.S. officials are having positive and constructive conversations with mediators. Still, on the Iranian side, some question whether hard-liners who dominate the security forces will accept compromises championed by relative moderates like President Masoud Pezeshkian.

Top religious figure urges Saudi troops to be ready to defend the kingdom

With Saudi oil facilities, cities and ships off its coast coming under escalating attacks, the kingdom's top religious authority has called on soldiers to be prepared to defend the country from Iran-backed Houthis.

Grand Mufti Sheikh Saleh al-Fawzan, who traditionally avoids weighing in on politics in a country that holds enormous influence among Muslims worldwide, issued the strongly worded statement. Al-Fawzan addressed his message to soldiers defending the kingdom's borders and members of the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthis in Yemen, peppering it with Quranic verses and religious edicts.

“Protecting this great nation, guarding its borders, defending against aggression and punishing those who want to harm any inch of it is one of the greatest duties,” he said.

The head of Yemen's internationally recognized government, Rashad al-Alimi, likewise urged Yemenis to rally behind Saudi-backed armed forces and allied groups in their fight with the Houthis.

Al-Alimi, who chairs the country’s Presidential Leadership Council, also called on Yemenis fighting alongside the Houthis to defect, announcing a general amnesty.

Al-Alimi says goal is to retake capital Sanaa from Houthis

Al-Alimi said the aim of the fighting is to restore his government’s control over Sanaa, the capital, which the Houthis seized in 2014.

His call to arms came during his first speech since his Saudi-backed forces were routed from the western Red Sea coast by the Houthis’ lightning advance on the city of Mokha and islands in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, where 12% of the world's trade passes.

The swift Houthi advances raised questions about the effectiveness of the Saudi-backed forces in the face of the disciplined, well-armed Houthis. The Houthi assault exploited divisions among the Saudi-backed forces and distrust among its leaders, leading to a chaotic troop withdrawal before the fall of Mokha.

Al-Alimi’s speech came on the 64th anniversary of the military coup that ousted the monarchy ruling northern Yemen, rooted in the Zaydi Shiite sect to which the Houthis also belong. The Houthis battled Yemen’s central government for years before sweeping down from their northern stronghold and seizing Sanaa.

UN Security Council demands halt to attacks by Houthi rebels

In a statement approved by its 15 members, the U.N.’s most powerful body condemned Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia and against commercial shipping in the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

The council called for “practical cooperation,” including with Yemen’s internationally recognized government, to prevent the Houthis from obtaining weapons, military material and training enabling them to carry out attacks.

It reminded all countries of their obligation to implement the U.N. arms embargo against the Houthis.

2 Israeli soldiers are killed in Gaza

Israel’s military said two of its soldiers were killed in northern Gaza on Thursday while inspecting an unexploded Israeli drone near a military post. They were the first Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza in months.

Five other Israeli soldiers have been killed since last October’s ceasefire that attempted to halt a more than two-year war between Israel and the militant Hamas group.

While the heaviest fighting has subsided, almost daily Israeli fire has continued. Israeli forces have carried out repeated airstrikes and frequently fire on Palestinians near military-held zones and have killed 1,408 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials.

Hospitals in Yemen struggle as the country's civil war reignites

The human toll of renewed hostilities in Yemen has stretched beyond the battlefield, overwhelming a health system already battered by years of war.

More than 130,000 people have fled their homes as fighting escalates between the Houthis and Saudi-backed government forces. Fewer than 10% of health centers in affected areas are equipped to provide the care that wounded people need, according to the World Health Organization. Years of war have left hospitals with little capacity.

UNICEF says at least 15 children have been killed and another 14 wounded in the past three weeks. The agency’s representative in Yemen, Akhil Iyer, said Friday the conflict is also causing more children to go hungry in Yemen, where at least 2.2 million children under five were already projected to suffer from acute malnutrition before the escalation of violence.

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This report will be updated throughout the day as new developments emerge.

The White House maintains the ads are “public service announcements” like those used by past presidents, but multiple lawmakers of both parties on Thursday criticized the first one, questioning its legality and appropriateness given its political nature, proximity to November's midterms and the use of taxpayer funds.

The new, minute-long ad features scenic videos of Mount Rushmore at night with quotes and clips from Trump’s Fourth of July weekend speech there honoring the country’s 250th anniversary.

“We know that this is not an ending,” Trump says in the ad. “This is only the beginning of the golden age of America.”

At the end, text appears onscreen that reads, “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”

The ad's costs weren't immediately clear but it was airing Friday on Newsmax, with a spot on at least two programs, “Carl Higbie Frontline” and "Greg Kelly Reports," according to AdImpact, which tracks media spending.

The first ad, a 30-second spot that began airing Wednesday, features clips of Trump talking about defeating communism interspersed with onscreen text promoting the “largest tax cuts in history,” “reigniting American manufacturing” and a call to “defend law and order and police.” The ad’s soundtrack includes a chorus singing “love me” repeatedly and ends with a message disclosing it was paid for by the U.S. government.

The White House on Friday defended its ads as “very clearly not campaign ads,” saying Trump isn't on the ballot and the ads don't include a call to action. It provided examples of past administrations from both parties that bought network time for public service announcements, including George W. Bush's administration airing a campaign about a Medicare law and the Biden administration running one about COVID-19 vaccinations.

“Patriotism isn’t partisan. These public service announcements are unapologetically American, clearly disclosed, and aimed at the country — not a line on the ballot,” the White House said.

It didn’t answer an inquiry about what part of the government supplied the funds.

Politicians of both parties on Thursday criticized the ads, with some noting that laws prohibit taxpayer funds from being used for “publicity or propaganda” and limit the partisan political activities of government employees. Republicans running to defend their majorities in Congress in the upcoming midterm elections have created ads with similar messaging about communism, the economy and crime.

Several House Democrats with senior committee roles on Thursday demanded that the first ad be taken off the air, calling it “the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea.”

North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican who is not running for reelection, called the ad “inappropriate” and likened it to something he would expect from the former right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Millions of people were under warnings associated with the storm, which has already canceled concerts and prompted people on islands near Cape Cod to head to the mainland in the days ahead of the nor’easter’s arrival. Dangerous flooding was expected along the Mid-Atlantic coast, particularly near New Jersey and Delaware, according to the National Weather Service.

Peak wind gusts could approach 60 to 65 mph (97 to 105 kph) on the Cape, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket on Friday night and Saturday, compared with about 50 to 55 mph (80 to 89 kph) around Boston and 35 to 40 mph (56 to 64 kph) farther inland, according to Matthew Belk, a meteorologist with NWS in Norton, Massachusetts.

“It’s definitely going to be a case of the closer to the coast you are, the more impacts from the storm you’re likely to see,” Belk said.

Belk said nor'easters are not unusual as New England moves into fall, but one concern this early in the season is that leaves remain on the trees, creating more wind resistance. That could increase the risk of downed limbs, which in turn can cause power outages and leave debris in roads, he said.

As residents braced for the storm Friday, the Red Sox announced their weekend series against the Chicago Cubs would be adjusted. The team moved the Sunday afternoon game to Friday to create a split doubleheader. Separately, Ed Sheeran announced that his high-profile Friday and Saturday shows at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, would be canceled due to the storm.

Meanwhile, the public ferry service connecting Cape Cod with the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard was experiencing widespread cancellations Friday due to strong winds and choppy water. Over in Rhode Island, ferries were also canceled for Block Island. The disrupted ferry service was expected to also spill into Saturday.

For people who regularly travel to and from the islands, the possibility of getting stuck on one side or the other is “part of life,” said Sean Driscoll, a spokesperson for the Woods Hole, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket Steamship Authority. Most people have backup plans in place for when boats are canceled.

“It’s a nuisance, but you know, we know what to do with this kind of stuff at this point,” he said. “This is not out of the realm of ordinary. Part of living in this region is just kind of knowing how to deal with this stuff.”

___

Willingham reported from Boston.

Nolo's maximum sustained winds have increased to 105 mph (165 kph), making it a Category 2 hurricane. The storm's center was located about 185 miles (300 kilometers) south of South Point, Hawaii and about 380 miles (610 kilometers) south-southeast of Honolulu. It was moving north-northeast at about 5 mph (7 kph).

Tropical storm conditions expected to begin on land in the evening, with hurricane conditions possible by early Saturday, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. It was expected to take a turn west Saturday and avoid directly hitting the islands.

Forecasters warned eastern and southern areas of the island could see rainfall totals of 10 to 15 inches (25 to 38 centimeters), with a maximum of 25 inches (64 centimeters). That was down from an earlier forecast of 15 to 30 inches (38 to 76 centimeters), with a maximum of 35 inches (89 centimeters). Wind gusts on land could hit 50 mph (80 kph).

Nolo was expected to strengthen to a major hurricane on Saturday.

“People are going to want to kind of shelter in place on the Big Island, be in their safe place, certainly by later today, tonight, well into Saturday," Michael Brennan, director of the National Hurricane Center, said Friday. “Don’t venture out if you don’t have to into the dangerous flooding environment, but also high winds. We can have trees and power lines down.”

Heavy rainfall also was possible on Hawaii's other islands, the hurricane center said. Maui also could see heavy rainfall and potential life-threatening flooding and mudslides, forecasters said.

Crews on the Big Island spent hours Friday trying to build berms to guide water and move large debris ahead of the worst of the rain, said Erika Kapu, Hawaii program manager for the humanitarian nonprofit CORE.

CORE and other nonprofit partners spent the week packing and shipping supplies like camp stoves and hygiene products by air cargo from Oahu to the Big Island for a community relief hub that has been active since Lala. Wheelbarrows and tarps were ordered from big-box stores.

Hawaii prepares as northern edge of Nolo is expected to barrel through

Hawaii officials told residents to put together emergency kits and the governor issued an emergency proclamation, activating more than 230 Hawaii National Guard members. Schools were closed in some areas.

Hawaii County officials on the Big Island were urging residents in flood-prone areas to consider taking refuge at shelters being set up or other locations. Authorities said sand for sandbags was publicly available at several locations.

“We encourage everyone to complete their preparations, stay connected to official alerts and weather updates, and secure safe shelter before flooding strikes,” Mayor Kimo Alameda said in a statement.

The heaviest rain from Nolo is likely to fall over the same southeastern region of the Big Island that was hit in August by Hurricane Lala and where grounds are still wet from additional precipitation. The storm surge could hit 1 to 3 feet (30 to 91 centimeters), creating large and dangerous waves and coastal flooding, the hurricane center said.

Hawaiian Electric, the state’s primary utility, said crews that had been helping restore power in Kauai after this month’s Hurricane Lowell would return to Oahu, Maui and the Big Island in preparation for the coming storm.

Residents and tourists on the Big Island were busy preparing.

“I guess that’d be my concern — whether we’re getting out of here or not, but, you know, as far as the weather goes, it is what it is," said Daniel Compton, who was visiting from Seattle.

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green has requested an emergency disaster declaration for four Hawaii counties.

Polo is strengthening after returning to Category 5 intensity

The hurricane center said Polo gained significant force overnight into Friday morning and doused parts of Mexico's Pacific coast. No major damage or flooding was reported along the coast overnight into Friday.

By midday Friday, attention turned to the Baja California Peninsula, where the hurricane was slated to arch back and hit between Monday and Tuesday. Local authorities were preparing shelters. Mexico’s government announced Friday afternoon that they were closing ports in the region as dark clouds swirled overhead.

The latest estimated sustained winds were 180 mph (290 kph).

Residents stacked sandbags to fortify beachfront shops and evacuated their homes in some coastal areas on Thursday. Mexican authorities opened shelters and cleared people from beaches, and 15,000 security personnel were deployed across the coast. Schools were closed.

In the port city of Lázaro Cárdenas in Michoacán, seawater swept through homes and left wooden planks and furniture strewn on the streets. Locals and government officials were clearing debris and shoveling thick mud coating much of the town.

Alicia Contreras said the walls and roof of her restaurant had been severely damaged by 15-foot (4.5-meter) waves. As officers and family helped pick through the damage, Contreras worried about how she would recover economically.

“This is huge because we have no other source of income. Now we’re just surviving,” Contreras said.

Brennan said some moisture associated with Polo will be pushed into parts of the southwestern U.S. by Monday, possibly producing scattered flash flooding in the Four Corners region, particularly portions of Arizona and New Mexico.

Biologists on Friday relocated eggs from two olive ridley sea turtle nests on Southern California beaches to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach over concern about high tides and hazardous surf as officials monitor Hurricane Polo.

Powerful storms come during the weather phenomenon El Nino

El Niño is prompting major environmental shifts across the world, fueling drought in some areas and flooding in others. It traditionally dampens the Atlantic hurricane season, while it tends to rev up tropical cyclone activity in the Pacific with moist air and little wind shear.

A third storm in the Pacific, Hurricane Odalys, was at Category 4 status and was still far from land, roughly 955 miles (1,537 kilometers) west-southwest of the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula.

Two other powerful storms were churning in the Atlantic Ocean, but were not near land.

In the northern Atlantic, Tropical Storm Fay re-formed early Thursday. As of Friday, it was about 1,040 miles (1,674 kilometers) west-southwest of the Azores, the hurricane center said. Off Africa's western coast, Tropical Storm Gonzalo strengthened early Friday as it approached the Cabo Verde Islands.

___

Associated Press writers Dave Collins in Hartford, Connecticut; Gabriela Aoun Angueira in San Diego; and Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire, contributed to this report.

The jury found over 43 million violations of state consumer protection law and it is now up to the judge to determine how much the company would pay, with attorneys representing the state asking for the maximum $5,000 penalty per violation.

“The verdict marks a significant victory for New Mexico consumers and holds one of the world’s largest technology companies accountable for its conduct,” the New Mexico Department of Justice said in a statement.

The two-week trial in Santa Fe centered on accusations that Facebook deceived users about a data breach stemming from a third-party personality quiz that harvested data from roughly 87 million profiles and sold it to a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, to generate targeted ads. The now-defunct firm’s clients included the 2016 campaign for Donald Trump.

Jurors sided with prosecutors, finding Facebook made deceptive statements about protecting users’ data that affected New Mexico’s entire population of more than two million people. The jury also found Facebook misled the public about investigations into third-party app developers that harvest user data following the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Facebook claims state's evidence was ‘outdated’

“We disagree with the verdict and will continue to defend ourselves against efforts to distort our record,” said Alex Burgos, a spokesperson for Meta in an email.

During closing arguments, lawyers for Facebook claimed the state’s evidence was outdated and that despite having five years to gather material, New Mexico found only one other instance of a data breach.

The trial also addressed Facebook's policies for removing harmful content. The state claimed the company favored certain accounts and allowed for violent, or inaccurate, content to proliferate. Facebook denied the claims, arguing the company has adapted its policies since the state's lawsuit was filed in 2021 and that it removes 99% of content that violates standards.

The jury reviewed 34 statements made by the company about data protections and content policies, finding the company deceived users about its practices in almost every case.

In one of the few wins for the defense, jurors found the state didn't prove that Facebook made false claims about removing harmful content, including misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Attorney for state said Facebook profited off harmful content

In a deposition played for jurors, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company had robust systems to determine whether content should be taken down. During closing arguments, Randi McGinn, an attorney representing the state, argued that Facebook profited off harmful content, which lawyers for the company denied.

“Meta’s platforms are forums for free expression. We have a First Amendment right to manage those platforms in a way we believe best serves the interests of our community. This means prioritizing free speech, protecting our users’ information and giving them control over their data,” said Burgos.

Judge will decide penalties at later date

The judge will decide on penalties at a later date, but that hearing hasn’t been set yet. It will be up to the state to decide where the money will go. The state is also seeking an injunction to stop similar practices in the future.

In August, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion to settle a multistate lawsuit involving child safety issues. Buried in the 130-page settlement was an agreement to release Meta from future liability related to the Cambridge Analytica privacy breach, making New Mexico the only state to decide to pursue a case on its own. Florida was the only other state that did not sign the settlement, saying it was not tough enough on Meta, leaving the door open for future litigation.

Also this year, New Mexico won judgments totaling $942 million from Meta in a two-phase trial about the company’s safety protections for minors. The court ordered Meta to implement new safeguards, including age-verification technology and time limits on its platforms.

—

Schuettler reported from Phoenix.

— Schuettler is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

The promise of more meetings to come capped off a three-day state visit that has been criticized by some in the U.S. for being heavy on pomp and light on substance, though Trump said they discussed the war in Iran. The two leaders have made a show of working to preserve harmony, but there were no major breakthroughs this week on issues such as trade or the safety of artificial intelligence.

Some trade analysts were struck by how few tangible accomplishments seemed to come from the meeting. Little was announced outside of the promise of more meetings and Washington and Beijing agreeing as Xi landed in the U.S. to extend their trade truce only a few months until January.

“A lot of pomp and circumstance or sound and fury but signifying nothing. There’s just not a lot there,” said Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute.

“Another summit without tangible results merely allows China to run out the clock on Trump’s second term without significant concessions,” said Jeff Moon, a former U.S. trade official and diplomat in President Barack Obama's administration who runs the China Moon Strategies consultancy.

The leaders discussed the Iran war behind closed doors

The two leaders met behind closed doors for 90 minutes on Thursday, when they discussed issues such as the Middle East, Ukraine and the Korean Peninsula, according to the official Chinese government readout of the meeting. Trump told reporters on Friday that he and Xi discussed the Iran war, but did not offer additional details.

“We had a great meeting. We had a really great meeting. Great for the farmers. Great for everybody,” he said.

Though Trump administration officials have played down the impact of any assistance that China may be providing to Iran as the war stretches to nearly seven months, U.S. Ambassador to China David Perdue said Friday that Trump asked Xi to avoid providing help to Tehran.

“We made it very clear to them weeks ago that, you know, any help that they would give Iran — whether it be direct or indirect, whether it be intelligence or parts or military equipment — was totally unacceptable,” Perdue told CNBC in an interview Friday. “President Trump made that very clear again yesterday.”

Xi is hosting the APEC summit in China in November

Xi extended an invitation for Trump and first lady Melania Trump to go to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen, China, in November and noted that they could meet again a month later at the G20 summit at the Trump National Doral Miami golf club in Florida.

“We do welcome Mr. President and the first lady to visit China,” Xi said.

Trump responded, “We will, and we’ll be speaking a lot.” He later confirmed the two meetings in a post on social media.

Trump takes Xi to the National Archives

Trump on Friday took Xi to visit the National Archives, showing off the sacred texts of U.S. democracy to the leader of the world’s most powerful communist country.

Trump, a Republican, has been seeking to demonize Democrats as communists during the run-up to the November midterm elections, a message that has been muddied by the red-carpet treatment he has given Xi this week.

Inside the nation’s vault of records, where the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are kept, Xi peered at the documents behind protective glass as a guide spoke about them.

After viewing the Constitution, Trump told reporters waiting nearby that the two leaders discussed how old their nations are.

“We’re just comparing,” Trump said. “Ours goes 250 years, which is great, and we’re proud of it. But theirs goes 6,000 years.”

He added: “There’s a little difference between 6,000 and 250, but we’re very proud of our 250.”

The leaders and their spouses had tea in the Red Room

The Trumps feted their guests Thursday night with a black-tie state dinner attended by technology industry titans. Earlier in the day, Trump gave Xi a personal tour of his White House flourishes, including a gallery wall of presidents and a new 100-foot-long (30-meter-long) granite helicopter landing pad — and pointed out his ballroom, still under construction. Melania Trump and Peng Liyuan toured the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art.

On Friday, Xi's day began at the White House, where Trump and the first lady hosted the Chinese leader and his wife, Peng Liyuan, for tea in the White House’s Red Room.

Their visit fell during China’s Mid-Autumn Festival, a national holiday when families traditionally gather to celebrate the end of harvest, sharing mooncakes, round pastries filled with a sweet paste, over tea.

Xi thanked the Trumps for the visit. "The highest courtesies, the most meticulous arrangements,” Xi said in Chinese. “This visit is very successful, and we also feel very satisfied.”

Trump grinned when an interpreter relayed what Xi had said.

“We’ve had a tremendous visit from two spectacular people, and we really enjoyed it, and I think we’ve made tremendous strides,” Trump said.

___

AP writers Ken Moritsugu in Beijing and Didi Tang, Josh Boak and Paul Wiseman in Washington contributed to this report.

Two decades later, the Mohegans have sold the Sun to the Houston Rockets and the Sun is relocating.

“I remember the energy in the arena,” Meehan said. “I knew it was Mohegan’s team we were cheering for.”

Now 29, Meehan is among a loyal group of Mohegan fans preparing to say goodbye to a team that became a point of community pride.

The Mohegan Tribe purchased its WNBA franchise for $10 million in 2003, becoming the first Native American tribe to own a professional sports team. Over 24 seasons, the Connecticut Sun connected generations of tribal members and gave Mohegan people a platform to share their language, culture and values with the league and its fast growing fan base.

But in May, the tribe’s business arm closed a $300 million deal with Houston Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta to sell the Sun and relocate the team, with proceeds going to help strengthen the tribe's balance sheet as it digs out from substantial debt.

Beth Regan, chairwoman of the Mohegan Tribe’s Council of Elders and a self-proclaimed “Day 1” Connecticut Sun fan, said the team’s last game on Mohegan land on Thursday night will be emotional.

“Family and community mean everything to us,” Regan said. “The Connecticut Sun are part of our cháhshayooô, our family.”

Tribal members embraced the team

Basketball is not a particular passion for Meehan. Their loyalty and enthusiasm for the Sun is an exception.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s not a good year and they’re not winning or whatever,” Meehan said. “The team is special and the fan base is special.”

Meehan remembers wearing their hair in space buns like their favorite Sun player, Nykesha Sales, and flocking to the tunnel with other tribal members to ask for players’ autographs.

Players visited tribal youth camps and the annual Mohegan Wigwam Festival. The Sun’s fiery, free-spirited mascot, Blaze, made appearances at social dances.

Generations of Heather Landry's Mohegan family connect over their love of the Sun. Landry bought season tickets this year, giving her 10-year-old daughter Emersyn an opportunity to meet favorite players and even score a selfie with Brittany Griner and Saniya Rivers.

But Landry said her favorite memory of the team came when her family stopped by the Mohegan government center, happened upon a Sun practice session in the community gym and got invited to watch from the bleachers.

“I’m sure my daughter will cry when we walk out of the arena on Thursday,” Landry said of the team's last game in Connecticut.

The Sun “Moheganized” the WNBA

In April, when WNBA guard Charlisse Leger-Walker learned she had been drafted by an Indigenous-owned team, she felt it was “meant to be.”

Leger-Walker, who is Māori and Samoan, said Mohegan elders often visited Sun practices to welcome new players and offer blessings and prayers for the team’s success.

“It was cool for me to come to that realization, that a lot of my values that I carry with me from home are the exact same here,” Leger-Walker said.

From halftime performances featuring tribal singers and dancers to a team logo styled after a traditional Mohegan symbol, the Connecticut Sun brought Mohegan culture to the WNBA and to a national stage.

Regan has smudged the team with sage during losing streaks, a cleansing practice meant to help the players let go of poor performances. She has also gifted injured players sweetgrass braids and laughed when she remembered athletes including 6’6” center Jonquel Jones hugging their knees to squeeze into the community’s sweat lodge.

In 2021, when the WNBA and Nike gave team uniforms an upgrade, Regan said it was the perfect opportunity to “Moheganize” their uniforms with imagery like the “trail of life” motif, which is traditionally painted on woven baskets, and alternating purple and white trim styled after a wampum collar. One of the team’s alternate jerseys displays the word “Keesusk,” the Mohegan word for “Sun.”

“Our languages were taken from us in colonization,” Regan said. “So to see ‘Keesusk’ on those uniforms is so joyous, so validating for our tribe.”

The tribe took an early bet on the WNBA

The Mohegan Tribe purchased the WNBA’s Orlando Miracle in 2003 amid a financial crisis for the league with no clear path forward. That's when the team relocated to Uncasville, Connecticut and became the Sun.

By 2010, the Sun had made deep playoff runs, ranked near the top of the league in game attendance and became the first WNBA team to turn a profit despite playing in the league's smallest market.

Following the Mohegans' lead, other tribes have since invested in professional sports to diversify their economies. Wilton Rancheria is now majority owner of Major League Soccer's Sacramento Republic FC. The Seneca Nation recently purchased the National Lacrosse League’s Rochester Knighthawks. And the Pechanga Band of Indians' business arm is a founding partner of the LA Clippers' Intuit Dome arena.

Regan said the “writing's been on the wall” since the WNBA exploded in popularity and players negotiated a new collective bargaining agreement that requires teams to provide state-of-the-art practice facilities among other expensive upgrades that the tribe would have struggled to afford.

The Mohegan Tribal Council declined an emailed interview request Wednesday. In selling the team, Meehan trusts that the council made the right business decision. But they called the WNBA's move to effectively block a deal that would have sent the Sun to Boston, a much closer venue, a “betrayal" of the tribe that they say rescued the franchise.

Ahead of Thursday's final game, Meehan is gathering 24 years of Connecticut Sun mementos — ticket stubs, their original 2003 team jersey — to keep in a framed shadow box signed by the 2026 team's players.

Regan fought tears while explaining what Mohegan people will lose when the team relocates. She said her people should be proud of the role they played in shaping the WNBA's success story.

“Before all the attention, when the WNBA needed investment, who stepped up?” Regan said. “Mohegan did.” ___ This story is published through the Global Indigenous Reporting Network at The Associated Press.

Meanwhile, Trump took Chinese President Xi Jinping to visit the National Archives on Friday, showing off the sacred texts of U.S. democracy to the leader of the world’s most powerful communist country to cap off a three-day state visit criticized for being heavy on pomp and light on substance.

Here's the latest:

Idaho’s elections chief says a federal database has been useful for checking voter rolls

Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican, said Friday all 1 million-plus Idaho voter registrations have been checked against a controversial federal database that the U.S. Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to use ahead of November’s election.

Idaho began checks in 2024, even before Trump’s second term began. Officials there ultimately referred 15 cases of potential noncitizen registrations or voting to federal prosecutors, McGrane said.

He said there are additional checks before officials move to cancel registrations, and voters have 20 days to prove their citizenship first.

“It being known publicly that we’re doing this work also has a deterrent effect,” he said.

Lawmakers from both parties question Trump inviting Putin to G20 in Florida

A bipartisan group of 14 senators is urging Trump to rescind the invitation to Russian President Vladimir Putin to attend the G20 summit to be held in Florida in December.

“President Putin bears sole responsibility for launching Russia’s full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine. Allowing him to participate in a G20 Summit in the United States raises serious concerns about legitimizing and normalizing a government that continues to attack Ukrainian civilian targets every day,” the senators wrote in a letter.

Among those who signed the letter are Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Chris Coons, D-Del.

Putin says Moscow ‘welcomes’ US-China talks

The reason is they are the world’s two largest economies, the Russian president told reporters in St. Petersburg.

“Depending on what they agree on regarding contentious issues, regarding those problematic issues that arise from the illegitimate sanctions imposed by the U.S., depending on how and what agreements are reached, this will affect the entire global economy, and our economy as well,” Putin said.

He noted that Russia’s ties and trade with the U.S. “are down to zero” but that Moscow’s trade with China amounts to $240 billion, with opportunities for further development.

“We welcome any positive agreements between China and the United States,” Putin said on the sidelines of a culture forum.

Asked if he would attend the APEC summit in China in November, Putin said he was “determined to take part” but noted that it “will depend on the situation in Russia.”

Schumer slams Supreme Court’s SAVE ruling as ‘putting its thumb on the scale’ for Trump

In a post on X, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer accused the Supreme Court of bending to “Trump’s election-rigging agenda” with its Friday ruling on a revamped federal voter eligibility database.

“Elon Musk’s DOGE-overhauled SAVE database is ridden with errors,” Schumer wrote. “With this decision, thousands of American voters could be wrongly stripped from voter rolls and prevented from voting this election season.”

SAVE can be valuable if used as one of many tools, election experts say

Former election officials and other experts reacting to the Supreme Court’s SAVE ruling said the federal database is useful for election administrators — as long as it’s not abused.

Critics have pointed out the tool can wrongly flag eligible voters as potential noncitizens. But Stephen Richer, the Republican former top election official in Arizona’s largest county, said it can be a “win for the nation’s voter rolls if used responsibly.”

The SAVE program is the only “widely-encompassing nationwide tool” for election officials to confirm voter citizenship, he said on social media, adding that because it’s imperfect, administrators should “only use it as a starting point.”

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, agreed, noting the tool is voluntary.

“States may find this to be a useful tool used along with other tools to keep their lists up-to-date,” he said.

A wrongly suspended Texas voter is disappointed by the US Supreme Court’s latest election decision

Anthony Nels, of Denton, said Friday that a controversial federal voter database “harms people’s constitutional right to vote.” The Supreme Court said the Trump administration could use the database ahead of the November election.

When Texas ran its voter rolls through the database last year, Nels was flagged as a potential noncitizen, even though the South Africa became a citizen more than a decade ago. His registration was temporarily canceled while he replaced an expired passport.

“This just seems like another illegitimate way to affect upcoming and future elections,” he said in a text to The Associated Press.

There is no change in policy on Taiwan, U.S. ambassador to China says

David Perdue, the U.S. ambassador to China, said “nothing has changed” when it comes to the U.S. policy on Taiwan.

“Of course, China has tried to coerce change in that regard,” Perdue said when speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Friday. “We’re not changing the language; we’re not changing our position.”

“We want peace across the strait. We don’t want coercion,” he said. “We don’t support independence.”

Chinese leader Xi Jinping in private talks with President Donald Trump on Thursday urged the U.S. side to take one step further and “oppose” Taiwan independence, according to a Chinese official statement.

Taiwan is a self-governed island that Beijing considers as its own territory.

Gabrielle Giffords’ PAC pumps $700K into California US House battleground

A PAC founded by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is pumping $700,000 in ads into a central California U.S. House battleground where Democrats hope to oust Republican Rep. David Valadao.

The dairyman Valadao has frustrated Democrats for years, beating back challengers in his farm belt district despite its heavy Democratic tilt in voter registration. Democrats see an opening this year as the party looks to retake control of the chamber, with President Donald Trump’s popularity sagging and voters vexed by high gas and grocery prices.

Giffords PAC says it’s making the investment as part of its national push to elect gun safety advocates. Valadao is facing progressive Democrat Randy Villegas, who is backed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The race is among the mostly costly House contests in the nation in terms of advertising. According to data from AdImpact, Republicans have spent or booked more than $15 million of airtime and digital messaging through Election Day, while Democrats are at about $13 million.

Trump hails Xi’s state visit as a success

“The meeting was one of Friendship, Strength, and Success, for both China and the U.S.A.,” Trump offered on social media shortly after Xi departed Washington.

Trump also confirmed he’ll meet two more times this year with Xi.

The two are slated to meet during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen, China, in November and again in December at the Group of 20 summit in Florida.

Trump asked Xi not to provide help to Iran, US diplomat says

U.S. Ambassador to China David Perdue says Trump asked Xi during their visit to avoid providing help to Iran as the war stretches to nearly seven months.

“We made it very clear to them weeks ago that, you know, any help that they would give Iran — whether it be direct or indirect, whether it be intelligence or parts or military equipment — was totally unacceptable,” Perdue told CNBC on Friday. “President Trump made that very clear again yesterday.”

Perdue was asked whether China has helped Iran constrain traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the crucial waterway for global energy shipments.

“There’s been indirect support we think, but there’s no direct evidence,” Perdue said. “We’re very concerned about this indirect work, and we’ve made that very clear.”

Trump administration officials have played down the impact of any assistance that China may be providing to Iran.

Almost 40 million barrels of oil have made it through Strait of Hormuz in past 48 hours, White House says

The White House said Friday that U.S. officials are having positive and constructive conversations with mediators on the Iran war.

But the Trump administration does not feel like it faces a rush to resolve the war. The White House said in response to questions from The Associated Press that America is in a very strong position with control of the Strait of Hormuz, saying that nearly 40 million barrels of oil have gone through the waterway in the last 48 hours.

Trade analysts question Trump-Xi summit accomplishments

“I can’t recall a U.S.-China summit that produced fewer deliverables,’’ said Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute. “Normally, there’s Boeing purchases and soybean targets ... So far, it seems much lighter than that. A lot of pomp and circumstance or sound and fury but signifying nothing. There’s just not a lot there.’’

Trump’s tariffs drew retaliation from China, forcing the world’s two biggest economies into an uneasy truce. “It’s pretty clear at this point that China has fought the U.S. to a draw, that U.S. tariffs have not been successful in slowing China’s export machine and reversing Chinese industrial policy,’’ Lincicome said.

“Another summit without tangible results merely allows China to run out the clock on Trump’s second term without significant concessions,” said Jeff Moon, a former U.S. trade official and diplomat who runs the China Moon Strategies consultancy.

Protesters near Xi and Trump visit tear up Chinese flag

People carrying signs opposing China’s ruling Communist Party and Chinese President Xi Jinping protested at a plaza next to the National Archives.

Inside, President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump showed the U.S. Constitution to Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, during their state visit to Washington.

Two men tore a Chinese national flag, and one of them sat down and used part of it to wipe his shoe.

The protesters held signs calling on Xi and the Chinese Communist Party to step down. They also displayed black-and-white photographs of Xi with large red Xs over his face.

Cattle industry groups protest immigration enforcement in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas

The Texas Cattle Feeders Association, Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association and Kansas Livestock Association say U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations have delayed shipment of thousands of cattle, resulting in millions of dollars in lost revenue.

The industry groups say ICE operations have disrupted operations at feedyards, dairy processors, feed and grain companies, and transportation hubs. They say they are frustrated that business is likely to be affected for weeks.

Their joint statement says operations have had “a massive chilling effect on the legal, documented, skilled workers that put beef on the table and keep the cattle supply chain moving.” They anticipate higher beef prices will result.

ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Compared to China, Trump says US still a young country at 250 years old

Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping looked at a copy of the U.S. Constitution at the National Archives and discussed how old their nations are.

“We’re just comparing,” Trump told reporters. “Ours goes 250 years, which is great, and we’re proud of it. But theirs goes 6,000 years.”

By Trump’s math, China is 24 times older than the U.S.

“There’s a little difference between 6,000 and 250, but we’re very proud of our 250,” Trump said.

Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson to meet with tech CEOs on AI next week

The White House meeting set for Tuesday is something the House speaker has encouraged the president to do, suggesting the leaders should go behind closed doors to hash out a strategy as voices sound alarms about AI technology.

Johnson has dismissed concerns about AI as overhyped but the political leaders are under growing pressure from constituents and the tech executives themselves to chart a path forward. The meeting was first reported by Axios.

Xi calls the visit ‘very successful’ and says they are ‘very satisfied’

He expressed his thanks for the treatment he and his wife, Peng Liyuan, have received so far.

Xi thanked Trump and the first lady for “everything” they did for him and his wife.

“The highest courtesies, the most meticulous arrangements,” Xi said in Chinese. “This visit is very successful, and we also feel very satisfied.”

Supreme Court lets Trump administration use revamped federal voter eligibility database for now

The Supreme Court on Friday lifted restrictions on a controversial federal voter database before November’s elections, granting President Trump a temporary win in his aggressive campaign against noncitizen voting.

The emergency order allows states, for now, to use the Department of Homeland Security program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, in their efforts to verify the eligibility of voters on their rolls. But because existing law blocks most states from systematically purging voters from their rolls within 90 days of an election, the immediate impact on the upcoming midterms is likely limited.

States’ use of the SAVE program is voluntary.

The court’s order puts on hold a federal judge’s June ruling that had deemed the Republican administration’s recently revamped version of SAVE illegal.

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After days of tirades against the press, Trump offers thanks for fair coverage

Speaking to reporters alongside Xi on Friday, Trump made a point of thanking the press.

“Thank you very much and we appreciate the fair coverage,” Trump told reporters. “It’s been very fair. We appreciate it.”

It was a hard turn from other comments Trump made throughout the week, attacking the U.S. press for what he sees as unfair coverage and attempting to ban CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House.

Xi and Trump have two more opportunities to meet this year

Chinese leader Xi Jinping said he expects to meet President Trump two more times this year as he wrapped up his state visit to Washington on Friday.

Xi extended an invite for Trump and his wife, Melania, to come to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen, China, in November. He noted that they could meet again a month later at the G20 summit at the Trump National Doral Miami golf club in Florida.

“I do welcome Mr. President and the first lady to visit China,” Xi said.

Trump responded, “We will, and we’ll be speaking a lot.”

White House TV pool appears to be back in operation, but CNN’s media analyst calls situation ‘fluid’

The U.S. network video pool for the White House appeared to be back in operation Friday, although the situation “remains fluid,” according to the media analyst for CNN, one of three outlets that were banned for three days.

A judge temporarily struck down the ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico on Thursday, but his ruling didn’t directly address the pool, which consists of five major U.S. broadcast outlets that take turns shooting and sharing video. In a show of solidarity, the other four had declined to participate in the video pool until CNN was reinstated.

CNN wasn’t commenting directly, referring instead to its editorial coverage. But Brian Stelter, the network’s media analyst, posted on X that the major networks plan to resume TV pool coverage of Trump events on Friday.

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Xi arrives at the White House for more time with Trump

The U.S. president ignored a series of questions from reporters as Chinese leader Xi Jinping came to the White House.

Trump was asked if he’d told Xi to stop buying Iranian oil. He was asked why he had chosen to try to ban some news outlets from the White House and if U.S. taxpayers should be paying for pro-Trump ads.

“Thank you very much,” was all Trump said.

Xi arrived with his wife, Peng Liyuan, and was met by Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, before entering the White House.

Iran has suggested a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz in 7 days

Iran has offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and resume talks on its nuclear program in seven days if the United States lifts its naval blockade, waives sanctions on Iranian oil sales and observes a ceasefire that would include Lebanon.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi detailed the proposal in a private gathering Thursday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York, according to one attendee.

Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute think tank, who attended, said Araghchi suggested that a speedy agreement would help President Trump ahead of November’s midterm elections.

There was no immediate comment from Iran’s U.N. mission or other Iranian officials.

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Ukraine’s Zelenskyy says he urged Trump to enlist China’s help in ending Russia’s invasion

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters Friday he hasn’t yet received feedback from the White House about Trump’s talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping but expects to learn the outcome.

Zelenskyy, who’s keen to muster more international support for Ukraine’s defense, was in the United States this week on a trip coinciding with the U.N. General Assembly. He met with Trump on Tuesday.

NATO countries have called China a “decisive enabler” of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

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Xi’s day will begin at the White House

There, President Trump and first lady Melania Trump will host the Chinese leader and his wife, Peng Liyuan, for tea.

Macron says a U.S. diesel ban would inflict economic damage across the world

On Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview with French broadcasters that the diesel ban would damage economies across the world, including the U.S.

“This decision would be bad, not just for the rest of the world, but for the American economy, too,” Macron said. “I can tell you one thing: it wouldn’t be a good decision for his country and its economy.”

The European Union has increasingly turned to the U.S. for diesel since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the outbreak of the Iran war in February. The support Trump expressed this week for banning diesel exports to drive down U.S. prices worries the bloc, which would have to find alternative sources of the fuel.

Japan’s Takaichi says her country and the U.S. are allies

Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, asked about Trump’s remark during his talks with China’s Xi Jinping that their countries were “allies” during World War II, said Japan and the United States are close allies of mutual trust today.

“Japan and the United States waged war but we have since firmly reconciled, deepened our relationship and now we trust each other as strongly bonded allies,” Takaichi said.

Japan worries about closer U.S.-China ties at a time Tokyo struggles to mend worsening ties with Beijing. Takaichi’s comment last year that a potential Chinese military action against Taiwan could justify Japanese involvement outraged Beijing, spilling over to trade.

Protesters of Xi’s policies push for change in earshot of White House visit with Trump

Trump warmly welcomed Chinese leader Xi Jinping with a personal airport greeting, a tour of his new helipad and a candlelit dinner. But outside the White House, protests against Xi continued almost nonstop Thursday during his state visit.

The demonstrators represented a range of causes, from calls for religious autonomy and greater freedoms in Tibet, Hong Kong and the ethnic region of Xinjiang to demands to keep China out of self-governed Taiwan.

Protests against visiting Chinese leaders are nothing new — in 2006, a woman heckled Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao at a White House welcome ceremony — but Xi has become the focus of attacks for his tough approach to tightening control over Xinjiang, Hong Kong and other regions and the Chinese military’s growing threats to Taiwan, which he says must come under Chinese rule.

Crowds gathered behind a fence along Lafayette Park, waving flags and holding signs. Loudspeakers carried their voices across the park to the White House’s North Portico, where an honor guard and a red carpet awaited guests attending the state dinner.

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Xi is wrapping his visit to Washington with a peek at the Constitution and Bill of Rights

Trump is taking Chinese President Xi Jinping to visit the National Archives on Friday, showing off the sacred texts of U.S. democracy to the leader of the world’s most powerful communist country to cap off a three-day state visit criticized for being heavy on pomp and light on substance.

Xi is expected to depart Washington after touring the nation’s vault of records, where the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are held. The two leaders have made a show of working to preserve harmony between the world’s two largest economies, though there were no major breakthroughs on issues such as trade or the safety of artificial intelligence.

The visit comes as the U.S. celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, and Trump said Thursday that he wanted to show Xi “some of the greatest treasures of that proud history.”

The U.S. president also said he wanted to show Xi artifacts about the relationship between the two countries.

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“We would have never thought about that,” Pulido said at the Texas Tribune Festival. “You got them on a Friday night or Saturday night, they’re a little tipsy, and they’re happy, took a selfie with you, and everybody’s got their cellphones, and they’re streaming, and you’re like, ‘Oh, this algorithm’s going really good.’”

Pulido, who said he has performed in at least 75 quinceañeras while running for office, is challenging U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz, R-Edinburg, for the 15th Congressional District, which spans Hidalgo County and runs north to rural San Antonio. De La Cruz in March criticized Pulido for performing at such events, saying the race “isn’t about who you want performing at your niece’s quinceañera.”

Pulido turned the dig into a campaign strategy, arguing the events are a means to reach Hispanic voters too busy to keep up with the election.

On Friday, the Cook Political Report categorized the race as a toss-up in a district De La Cruz has represented since 2022.

The region has undergone a political shift. In 2025, Texas Republicans redrew the state’s congressional maps to bolster the party’s majority in the U.S. House. The new congressional maps redrew two South Texas districts to favor Republicans, complicating Democrats’ chances to retain control in the region. President Donald Trump won Congressional District 15 by 18 points in 2024.

Pulido said Democrats have long taken the region for granted, particularly in the northern portion of the district.

“Candidates that used to go in these districts didn’t go to northern counties because they didn’t have to,” Pulido said, adding that candidates relied on voters further south in the border towns of the Rio Grande Valley. “We were spending resources in Republican counties … for a primary because none of their elected officials were Democrats. But that’s not the point. The point is to show up early; that way you gain their trust, and not a caricature of what they think a Democrat is.”

Pulido also said both parties have misunderstood the region’s Hispanic population, arguing that their political views transcend labels.

“The Hispanic vote is the most difficult to figure out for both parties, and as the Hispanic vote goes, so goes the country,” Pulido said. “We’re a bellwether for everything across the nation, and especially in the Mexican diaspora, which is what we are.”

If elected to Congress, Pulido said his two priorities would be reforming immigration, which he called a humanitarian and economic issue, and healthcare.

A weekend nor'easter bound for New England has prompted the cancellation of the English pop singer's concerts Friday and Saturday in Foxborough, Massachusetts, about 22 miles (37 kilometers) southwest of Boston. Refunds will be provided.

“Due to the severe weather warnings in place in Boston and New England throughout the weekend and following consultation with local officials, we have made the difficult decision to cancel the Ed Sheeran concerts at Gillette Stadium,” concert promoter Messina Touring said in a statement Friday.

The decision “was made with the safety of fans, staff and everyone involved in the shows as the top priority,” the company said.

The storm is expected to sock much of the East Coast with strong winds, coastal flooding and heavy rain. The National Weather Service said gusts could hit 60 to 65 mph (97 to 105 kph) on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket on Friday night, and about 50 to 55 mph (80 to 89 kph) around Boston.

The storm also led organizers of the Global Citizen, CBGB and All Things Go festivals to cancel performances in New York set for this weekend. Global Citizen, which had already raised nearly $210 million this year for its antipoverty efforts, was going to be headlined this year by Ms. Lauryn Hill and her Fugees’ bandmate Wyclef Jean.

All Things Go in New York was going to include performances by Zara Larsson, Lola Young, Brandi Carlile, Carly Rae Jepsen and others, while CBCB headliners included Morrissey and Patti Smith.

A tumultuous two weeks for Sheeran's Loop Tour

The cancellations are the latest disruption to Sheeran’s Loop Tour after Macklemore was dropped from the lineup for making pro-Palestinian comments onstage during a Sept. 5 show in New Jersey and supporting acts withdrew in solidarity.

Sheeran said at a concert Saturday in Philadelphia that he wants his music and shows to be about unity and humanity, not politics. But he said the attacks in Israel of Oct. 7, 2023, were horrific and called what is happening in Gaza “catastrophic and unjustifiable.”

The decision to drop Macklemore came at the urging of Robert Kraft, the owner of the NFL's New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium, who said in a statement that it was the result of the rapper’s recent comments “and a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery.”

Sheeran has said he was not responsible for cutting Macklemore from the tour, blaming the tour promoter.

Macklemore said last week that he was donating $1 million to support Palestinian relief efforts and called on Kraft to match the gift. A spokesperson for Kraft said the billionaire and Sheeran each agreed to donate $2 million, but they haven't specified where the money will be directed.

As of last year, the Grammy-winning “Shape of You” singer was the No. 3 top-earning concert act of the millennium, according to industry magazine Pollstar.

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This story has been updated to correct that Sheeran’s Philadelphia concert was on Saturday, not Sunday.

“While we're in grave danger, but I think there is a possibility that 2026 will be looked back upon in the history books as the beginning of a positive tipping point,” Gore said in a sit down interview with The Associated Press during New York Climate Week. He sees a good chance the world is peaking its use of coal, oil and gas, which cause global warming, as solar and other renewable power is overtaking dirtier fossil fuels.

History makes the former U.S. vice president hopeful. He compared the effort to make a cleaner world to the U.S. civil rights movement, Nelson Mandela's anti-apartheid movement and women's equality efforts as “the other great morally based challenges that humanity has confronted in the past.

“And in all of those prior movements,” he said, "there were times when the advocates felt despair but they kept going because courage is not the absence of fear, it's the determination to go forward in spite of it."

Nature makes him nervous because Earth's warming is accelerating and with it extreme weather, such as heat waves and the deadly glacier collapse and flooding that killed 1,300 people in Nepal.

“I’m temperamentally optimistic, but the dangers are extremely grave, getting more so all the time,” said, Gore, often accused of being a doomsayer by nonscientist political opponents. “We’re seeing these extreme events come fast and furious. They’re worse as well as more frequent. ... It’s like a nature hike through the book of Revelation.”

A race between old and new power

“This is a close race between the unfathomable risk we are taking, the unacceptable damages we are enduring on one hand, and the incredibly exciting advance of all the clean, cheap, job-producing alternatives that people not under the sway of the fossil fuel industry are adopting in droves,” Gore said.

He ticked off factoids such as Africa installing 100,000 solar panels per day, that 91% of the new U.S. electricity generation was renewable and that 30% of all new car s sold globally this year will be electric. And, he said, in Pakistan the common dowry now includes three solar panels.

Who will win the race? “The answer is in our hands,” Gore said. “The last chapter of this story won’t come for a while, but I think we really are at a turning point."

Ten years ago, 55% of the world's investment was in fossil fuels and 45% in renewables. Now it's 65% renewables, Gore said. He said society changes when a new technology becomes cheaper than the old one, much like cellphones supplanting, then replacing landlines.

Experts say Gore is right to be optimistic

Three climate scientists basically agreed with Gore's assessments of both increasing dangers, but also still had an optimistic outlook.

"I agree with Al Gore that we have incredible progress on exponential rise in adoption and decline in price for renewable electric green solutions," said Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany. “But the dilemma, so far, is that they largely meet growing energy demand. We are not yet bending the curve on oil, gas and coal.”

Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare of Australia said he's generally optimistic like Gore “about what we can achieve particularly with the rapid development of clean technology." But, he said, "I am the at the same time fearful that this is not fast enough and is being held back by the fossil fuel industry.”

Even though change isn't fast enough, the University of Pennsylvania's Michael Mann said Gore's tone is crucial: “Doomism, despair and disengagement is the greatest threat at this point. We must not fall victim to it.”

Gore is having none of that. At 78, he thinks he'll see meaningful bends in the carbon pollution curve in his lifetime. But even if it takes longer, that's OK, Gore said, paraphrasing the Jewish Talmud:

“You are not required to finish the work, but you are required to undertake it.”

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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Instead, he will begin October by stumping in Alabama and Oklahoma, two of the most Republican states in the nation. His events are sure to draw enthusiastic crowds of fans, but his choice of destinations is a reminder of his deep unpopularity in much of the country during a campaign season he's sought to make all about himself.

Trump will hold rallies next week in Durant, Oklahoma, and Mobile, Alabama, where he is sure to draw crowds, but has also raised eyebrows.

While organizers insist the rallies are in locations with media markets that span state lines and they will help bolster broader turnout, Trump's itinerary is yet another sign of the uphill fight that his party faces. Republicans have already been pouring money into red states once considered safe as they try to shore up candidates facing an unhappy electorate that has soured on Trump and his polices.

Some Republicans have also been distancing themselves from the president in recent weeks as they as they try to appeal to voters beyond Trump's “Make America Great Again” base. They're removed or downplayed references to the president on their websites and increasingly voiced opposition to his unpopular war with Iran.

But Trump's events — Thursday in Durant and Friday in Mobile — are also likely to deliver something else he craves: adoring crowds. He is almost guaranteed to fill the venues with the kind of die-hard supporters who fueled his political rise, projecting excitement as he tries to bolster enthusiasm and rally Republicans.

“The President’s ability to engage with and activate low-propensity voters is unmatched. That’s why he’ll be barnstorming the country to activate the voters we need to win in November,” said Republican National Committee spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre, promising more October rallies to come.

Democrats, meanwhile, celebrated the announcement. “The political floor is falling out from underneath Trump and Congressional Republicans, forcing them to scramble to spend and campaign in deep red territory in the final weeks,” said Viet Shelton, spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The RNC noted that Durant, Oklahoma is on the Texas border and next to the Dallas-Fort Worth media market, and will draw Republicans in Texas, which has emerged as one of the most critical states on the map. Scandal-plagued Attorney General Ken Paxton, whom Trump backed over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, is locked in a tight race against Democrat James Talarico. Gov. Greg Abbott is also facing a stronger-than-expected challenger in Democrat Gina Hinojosa.

Mobile is next to Florida’s panhandle, a Republican stronghold where high turnout can help bolster Trump-backed candidates running for Senate and governor. However, Florida Republican Sen. Ashley Moody is not expected to attend.

In Oklahoma, Trump will be stumping for Mike Mazzei, whom he backed as the Republican nominee for governor during a competitive primary. Mazzei is running against Oklahoma's Democratic House Minority Leader Cyndi Munson.

“This race continues to get more competitive – and national Republicans are right to be worried about Mazzei,” Democratic Governors Association spokesperson Kevin Donohoe said in a statement.

Alabama, meanwhile, holds deep nostalgia for Trump and his early supporters. He held his first mega-rally in Mobile more a decade ago, drawing some 30,000 people to a college football stadium. The crowd made clear to skeptics of his campaign that he was more than a celebrity novelty.

“I think it’s very natural that he would host a rally here as he is gearing up for the midterm elections,” said John Wahl, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor and former chair of the Alabama Republican Party.

Although Republicans remain the heavy favorites in Alabama's statewide campaigns, they face a more challenging political landscape this year.

Former Democratic Sen. Doug Jones is mounting a vigorous campaign for Alabama governor against one of Trump’s most vocal allies, Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who said he welcomed the president's visit.

Republican Rep. Barry Moore, running to replace Tuberville in the Senate with Trump's backing, said the president's rally “will be the jet fuel we need to win big in Alabama.”

Mobile is also near Alabama's 2nd Congressional District which leans red after its lines were redrawn but is not a slam dunk for Republicans as they try to dislodge Democratic Rep Shomari Figures.

Figures has been criticizing president's plan to lower import tariffs on foreign beef in an appeal to cattle ranchers as he tries to fend off a challenge from his Trump-backed opponent, State Rep. Rhett Marques.

Trump has promised to ramp up his campaigning in the election's final stretch and had said he would visit all of the most competitive districts .

“It’s all about 35 races,” he said at a recent Rose Garden dinner attended by Republican lawmakers. “I’m going to go to every one of those 35 places and we’re going to see if we can get everyone elected."

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Colvin reported from New York. Associated Press reporter Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.

Some told The Associated Press that internet service was disrupted across parts of northern Ethiopia, and roads connecting the northernmost region of Tigray with the neighboring region of Afar had been closed to civilian traffic.

“There is an atmosphere of fear,” said Selam Fantay, who sells garlic in the market in the Tigrayan capital of Mekelle. “People are deeply concerned that the suspension of transport services signals the outbreak of renewed conflict.”

U.N. rights official decries suffering faced by civilians

A top United Nations rights official described the suffering that civilians face as federal troops battle fighters loyal to the Tigray People's Liberation Front, or TPLF.

Airstrikes by the Ethiopian military, some carried out using drones, reportedly hit five schools in Tigray on Tuesday, resulting in an unknown number of casualties. A mortar strike on Wednesday in Kobo, a town in the Amhara region, killed civilians, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said in a statement on Friday.

“I am deeply alarmed by the recent escalation in hostilities between Ethiopian Government forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front and its allies, and the harmful impacts it is already having on civilians," he said.

Türk also raised concern over an “ongoing campaign of forced mass recruitment of civilians, including children, by the TPLF across Tigray,” and violence targeting those who resist recruitment.

Some in Mekelle who spoke to the AP said that they were concerned about displacement and disruptions to their lives.

“As long as this conflict persists, it will continue to drive up the prices of basic commodities,” said businessman Hailay Meles.

Valerie Browning, a co-founder of the Afar Pastoralist Development Association, a humanitarian group, said many people were fleeing Tigray into Afar.

She said that “too many people are being displaced. Our vehicles, including our ambulances, are being taken from us by the government for use (in) the war.”

Federal troops and opposition fighters trade blame

The renewed fighting has shattered a 2022 peace agreement that ended a devastating two-year war in Tigray, the epicenter of renewed hostilities between federal troops and fighters loyal to the TPLF.

The TPLF is an armed political group based in Tigray, and for years it was the dominant party in a coalition that ruled Ethiopia between 1991 and 2018. It has been outlawed by Abiy's government.

After the November 2022 peace agreement between the TPLF and federal authorities, a caretaker administration reporting to Abiy took charge in Mekelle. But tensions remained, and caretaker leader Tadesse Werede was removed in May and replaced with a TPLF leader who led Tigrayans in the 2020-2022 war.

Both sides accuse each other of violating the peace agreement. In recent months, Ethiopian federal authorities accused the TPLF of seeking to build an alliance with neighboring Eritrea to destabilize Ethiopia. The TPLF accused Ethiopian authorities of conducting drone attacks in Tigray.

Neighboring Eritrea, whose soldiers fought alongside Ethiopian troops in the previous Tigray conflict, said it was alarmed by Abiy’s repeated assertions of his wish for sovereign access to the Red Sea via Eritrea.

Ethiopia’s military said Thursday that dozens of TPLF fighters had been killed in ongoing operations. It said other fighters were detained and that federal forces have seized weapons.

Opposition joins forces to try to remove prime minister

Air travel into the region was suspended this week after fighters loyal to the TPLF seized Mekelle’s airport from federal police. Ethiopian Airlines canceled flights to and from the region.

Fighting erupted days after seven opposition groups said they were banding together in a coalition in a bid to remove the recently reelected Prosperity Party government of Abiy.

Magnus Taylor, an analyst with International Crisis Group, said that the new alliance combines political opposition to Abiy with military coordination among armed groups operating in different parts of Ethiopia.

The alliance “is a combination of a political alliance based around mutual antipathy to Abiy Ahmed’s government and also a kind of opportunistic military alliance intended to threaten the Ethiopian military in the areas where the groups operate,” Taylor said.

In addition to the TPLF, the coalition’s other prominent members include the Amhara Fano National Movement and the Oromo Liberation Army.

Taylor pointed out that coordinated campaigns could open several fronts against the federal government.

“I think there is a real risk that the fighting could spread around the country,” he said, adding that the opposition alliance meant different armed groups can coordinate to “develop campaigns against the federal government in parallel to each other.”

___ Desmond Tiro in Nairobi, Kenya, and Rodney Muhumuza in Kampala, Uganda, contributed to this report.

The court's three liberal-leaning justices publicly dissented from the decision.

The emergency order allows states, for now, to use the Trump administration's revamped version of a Department of Homeland Security program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, in their efforts to verify the eligibility of voters on their rolls. It's a program that has drawn scrutiny for its use of voters' sensitive personal data and its tendency to wrongly flag some eligible voters as noncitizens.

States' use of the SAVE program is voluntary, limiting the ruling's impact on the midterm elections. Existing law also blocks most states from systematically purging voters from their rolls within 90 days of an election, said David Becker, an election law expert who leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research. He said DHS itself has admitted the data is not perfect.

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who has refused to participate in the SAVE program, said the ruling will have no effect in her state because it “does not force states to change the way we run our elections.”

The plaintiffs and their lawyers in the case called the ruling “profoundly disappointing” and said it puts “millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database” before the midterms.

On X, James Percival, the general counsel for DHS, responded to a post about the decision with, “Yes, you read that right. We had to file an emergency petition in the Supreme Court just so we could use government data to help states stop noncitizens from illegally voting.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

Ruling pauses a lower court's ban on the tool

The court’s order puts on hold a federal judge’s June ruling that had deemed the Republican administration’s recently revamped version of SAVE illegal. U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan had blocked the use of the tool, saying it violated Americans’ privacy rights and could result in voters being wrongly removed from the rolls.

A federal appeals court let her order stand.

But the Supreme Court majority found that a 1996 law explicitly allows DHS to get information about citizenship and immigration from other federal agencies. The federal government also has “an obligation to respond” to states seeking to verify citizenship.

“The order below prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task,” the majority wrote in the unsigned order.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. The database has long been seen to fall under federal privacy laws, she wrote, and there are real risks that legitimate voter registrations could be mistakenly revoked.

“The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” Jackson wrote.

The plaintiffs pledged to do “everything in our power” to ensure the district court decision stands.

Trump administration tool has wrongly flagged some legal registrants

The SAVE program was created under an immigration law mandating that DHS help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens. The Trump administration last year moved to significantly expand its search abilities. Since then, at least 67 million registrations have been scanned through the program, but critics worry it could end up purging valid voters from the rolls.

Some registrants have already been wrongly flagged. In Travis County, Texas, for example, officials said they investigated 97 voters flagged by SAVE as apparent noncitizens and found that at least 10% of them — and likely up to 21% — were U.S. citizens. The county urged the Supreme Court to reject the administration’s appeal, while the state of Texas submitted its own brief defending the database.

In Denton, Texas, north of Dallas, voter Anthony Nels was disappointed that the Supreme Court allowed the continued use “of a system that harms people’s constitutional right to vote.”

Last year, after Texas ran its voter registrations through the SAVE system, Nels, 29, was flagged as a potential noncitizen, even though the South Africa native had become a U.S. citizen more than a decade ago. His local election office temporarily canceled his registration while he obtained a new passport to replace an expired one.

“This just seems like another illegitimate way to affect upcoming and future elections,” he said in a text to The Associated Press.

Stephen Richer, the Republican former top election official in Arizona's largest county, said the Supreme Court's ruling could be a positive step “if used responsibly.”

“That being said, the SAVE program has been shown time after time to be a highly-imperfect tool, so election administrators should only use it as a starting point, not as a definitive indicator of citizenship,” he wrote on social media.

SAVE is one piece of the administration's crusade against noncitizen voting

Even though the use of the SAVE program was blocked for months ahead of Friday's ruling, the administration has said in court filings that it has continued using Social Security Administration data "in certain cases to verify information and help determine whether illegal voting may have occurred."

DHS in August launched its own investigation to find noncitizen voters on state rolls, according to a federal whistleblower statement that said the effort is rushed, filled with errors and potentially violates state laws. DHS has defended that investigation as being conducted “diligently and professionally.”

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin also suggested over the summer that there could be as many as 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote across four states, an unsubstantiated claim that puzzled state election officials who said the numbers dramatically exceeded their own findings.

The effort to create a national voter list is among numerous steps Trump has taken during his second term to try to overhaul the way elections are run. Most of those steps have been blocked by various courts, in part because the Constitution gives states and Congress the authority to set election rules, but provides no such power to the president. In mid-September, the Supreme Court rejected a bid from Trump to restrict mail ballot procedures before the midterms.

Trump has remained fixated on the idea that massive numbers of noncitizens are voting in U.S. races, but all evidence says otherwise.

Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Georgia’s secretary of state found that 20 of the state’s 8.2 million registered voters were not U.S. citizens. In Ohio, prosecutors secured indictments against nine people for voting as noncitizens over the span of 10 years. The state has some 8 million registered voters. Even with the Trump administration laser-focused on the issue in his second term, DHS said its investigations into potential noncitizens on voter rolls nationwide had led to 160 arrests.

Those numbers are supported by a mountain of research at the national and state level that has found the percentage of noncitizens on voter rolls is a tiny fraction of the nation's nearly 228 million registered voters.

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Hanna reported from Topeka, Kansas, and Whitehurst reported from Washington.

Across the world, communities are dedicating Friday to honoring the beloved country singer. The day is falling on Sept. 25, a wink at Parton’s hit song “9 to 5.”

Parton, who died of cancer last month at age 80, built an impressive legacy over the decades as a singer-songwriter, actor, philanthropist and entrepreneur — leaving big and small ways to honor the icon.

So whether it’s dusting off your rhinestones, donating a book or throwing back a pink-themed cocktail, here’s how you can celebrate Dolly Parton Day.

Join a celebration

In the U.S., a growing number of state and local leaders are establishing Sept. 25 as an annual Dolly Parton Day from California to the borough of Manhattan in New York City. The proclamations highlight Parton’s successful career and stress her lifelong commitment to promoting literacy.

In Nashville — where Parton had lived since she was 18 — the city will honor the singer with pink lights and posters and give away stickers, buttons and bookmarks. Meanwhile, Southwest Airlines announced that it would hold a Parton-inspired karaoke Friday for travelers and employees. Tennessee state and local officials are currently in the process of renaming the airport after Parton.

“Dolly Parton’s impact on Nashville will be felt for generations, through the music she has given us, the people she has helped and the example she continues to set,” said Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell in a statement. “She has shown us that caring for a community means showing up for one another.”

Over in New Orleans, the marching group Krewe of Dolly will lead a parade through the city’s French Quarter to honor Parton.

And in San Francisco, organizers are planning a public event in the heart of the city, called “Dolly Day,” designed to be a celebration of life that will include “singing loud, dressing up, and being a little kinder than usual in her honor.”

Donate a book to Imagination Library

For those chained to their actual 9 to 5 job on Friday, sneaking away for an event may be challenging. Instead, you can channel Parton’s giving spirit.

Parton made it her mission to improve literacy through her Imagination Library book giveaway program. The program has quickly expanded, resulting in more than a million books sent out each month to children in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia.

The Imagination Library is encouraging the public to give directly to their local Imagination Library Partner on Dolly Parton Day, or help establish a new program in their community.

Don’t know where to start? The Dollywood Foundation is directing people to ImaginationLibrary.com, where a ZIP code search can find nearby programs.

“For Dolly, giving was always personal and from her heart,” said Jeff Conyers, president of The Dollywood Foundation, in a statement. “She believed deeply in helping people, especially children, and she always felt if you are in a position to help, you should help.”

Get inspired by Parton's style and songs

The Queen of Country was known for her over-the-top style, proudly wearing sequins with big hair and plenty of fringe in her signature color pink.

Parton especially adored butterflies, singing that “love is like a butterfly, as soft and gentle as a sigh.”

Dig into your closet and throw on something extra flashy, shiny or sparkly. Feeling adventurous? Some tattoo artists are offering Dolly-inspired tattoos on Friday, but a butterfly clip will also work.

Of course, there's no easier way to celebrate Parton than by playing one of her many, many albums throughout the day.

Known for her hits “9 to 5,” “Jolene,” and “I Will Always Love You,” Parton's catalog runs deep, and there's room to discover new favorites.

It was Parton’s wish that her songs would have a lasting impact, and that in turn, she would be remembered for trying to make the world a better place.

“I hope that a lot of my songs may last that long. And I hope I’ll be remembered as somebody that tried to do some good in the world and left, you know, a few good things,” she told The Associated Press in 2024.

The decision allows the Pentagon to continue to remove Anthropic’s Claude models from its systems and bar the use of its products for Defense Department work. Judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled 2-1 in the Pentagon's favor.

“Today’s DC Circuit Court ruling completely validates the Department’s position,” the Pentagon’s top spokesman, Sean Parnell, wrote in a social media post.

The dispute between the AI company and the government broke out in February when President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accused Anthropic of endangering national security and designated the company a supply chain risk. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused to back down over concerns the company’s products could be used for mass surveillance or autonomous armed drones.

The ruling is separate from one this summer in California, where a federal judge found the Pentagon acted illegally by punishing the AI company for its criticism of the Pentagon’s views on AI use. This case, which was filed earlier this year in Washington, D.C., focused on a different rule the Pentagon was using to try to declare Anthropic a supply chain risk.

The majority opinion states the Pentagon had “ample support” for its actions. It notes that by Anthropic's own admission, “the company encodes restrictions into Claude that prevent the model from performing tasks that Anthropic wishes to prevent.”

“The Department reasonably feared that Anthropic might manipulate Claude’s design to prevent it from performing national-security functions that the Department deems contractually authorized and necessary,” Judge Gregory G. Katsas wrote in the majority opinion. Both Katsas and Judge Neomi Rao, who formed the majority, were nominated by Trump. The sole dissenter, Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, was nominated by Republican President George H. W. Bush.

The judges said that they have "no reason to doubt" that Anthropic acts with “noble intentions” in restricting Claude, specifically with respect to its concerns around privacy and AI safety. But they said the definition of a supply chain risk in this context hinges “on what Anthropic does, not why Anthropic does it.”

An Anthropic spokesperson said in a written statement the company “respectfully disagrees” with the court’s decision. “Another federal court has already held the government’s parallel designation unlawful,” the statement continued. "We remain confident in our position and are considering all options, including further review.”

The judges who ruled against Anthropic said they had “no quarrel” with the conclusions of the the separate case that was filed in San Francisco, but they found that a “bad motive” on Anthropic’s part is not required to support a supply chain risk designation.

The Department of Defense began removing Claude from its workflows earlier this year, and the ruling upholds its ability to do so, including prohibiting contractors from using Anthropic products in their work for the department. Anthropic’s products are not barred from the federal government as a whole under this ruling.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A statement co-signed with the top leagues from Spain, Italy and Germany said soccer had “suffered one of the biggest abuses of power in FIFA’s history.”

It accused FIFA's president of actively promoting “exploitative ideas rather than safeguarding against them.”

The Premier League is soccer's richest and most popular league. Its collaboration with Europe's other leading leagues adds to the growing pressure on Infantino, who is facing the biggest crisis in his 10 years as FIFA’s leader.

While the leagues did not follow UEFA by specifically calling for Infantino to step down, their statement was highly critical, hitting out at FIFA's “relentless expansionism.”

“Football’s longstanding foundations have, in recent years, been threatened by a fundamental governance problem,” it said. “Now is the moment to decide not only who will lead FIFA, but also how FIFA should be led.”

It is the latest rift between leagues and Infantino, whose biggest projects have been seen as attacks on domestic soccer and were successfully resisted by a backlash from European officials.

The big four leagues also are members of the European Leagues network, which filed a formal complaint against “abusive” FIFA governance standards in 2023 at the European Commission in Brussels.

Despite the backlash over his controversial plan to sell profits in the World Cup through a commercial subsidiary, and losing the support of many national federations, FIFA says Infantino plans to stand again in next year’s elections for a final term in office through 2031.

The leagues in England, Spain, Italy and Germany said they wanted presidential candidates to stand on a manifesto of fundamental reform.

“FIFA’s governance problem goes far beyond the role of one individual. The wider question is whether FIFA’s president should simultaneously wield such regulatory, commercial and political power without effective checks and balances," they said.

Infantino's now ditched proposal to create a $20 billion company called the FIFA Forward Enterprise to run the World Cup with private investors including the Kushner family, caught the soccer world by surprise when it emerged in July.

The backlash came from both within world soccer's governing body and from other federations, with some declaring they had lost faith in Infantino as a result.

While he has tried to quell anger, with FIFA apologizing for errors and committing to “ensure they do not happen again,” criticism has not gone away.

The group of four leagues provide another critical voice, just days before the influential European Football Clubs group meets in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Nov. 18 is the deadline for candidates to enter the next presidential contest, exactly four months ahead of the vote in Morocco.

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James Robson is at https://x.com/jamesalanrobson

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See AP’s full soccer coverage here

The U.S. president delighted in the personal rapport he says he's built with Xi, while the Chinese leader emphasized the two sides “must hold the line” to ensure there is “no conflict and no confrontation between us.”

The two leaders discussed the wars in Iran and Ukraine as well as artificial intelligence and Taiwan. The biggest policy announcement of the visit was modest: an agreement to extend by two months a trade truce that had been set to expire in November.

Here are seven key takeaways from the visit:

Trump shows deference to Xi after trade tussle

Trump's red-carpet treatment for Xi is remarkable considering less than a year ago the two were locked in a tariff battle that threatened to send the global economy into a recession.

The warmth sharply contrasts with the hostility Trump shows for America’s northern neighbor and biggest export market, Canada, and Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Only China and Canada fought back against Trump’s tariffs last year with retaliatory tariffs of their own.

But Trump has been deferential to Xi while raging against Ottawa, announcing 50% tariffs on some Canadian imports and a ban on some Canadian products, including motorcycles and alcohol. The ban takes effect Tuesday. Trump even posted an image of himself in a U.S. hockey uniform, looming over Carney cowering on the ice.

Former U.S. trade official Jeff Moon said the explanation is simple.

“Trump is a bully who enjoys punching down when he can but will stop when he can’t,” said Moon, noting Canada sends about 70% of its exports to the U.S.

Trump eased up on China last year when Beijing cut off supplies of critical minerals needed for advanced manufacturing. “Punching down was no longer possible,’’ said Moon, the founder of China Moon Strategies.

No breakthroughs on the thorniest global issues

The leaders are facing calls to collaborate on guardrails for artificial intelligence even as they compete to dominate the rapidly developing technology.

Xi acknowledged that the U.S. and China have the “responsibility to develop and manage AI for good” while ensuring it remains under human control. But Trump appears more focused on his push to rebrand artificial intelligence to “super intelligence,” claiming on social media Friday that Xi “seems to like” the term without divulging the substance of their discussions.

Trump, a Republican, has repeatedly said that he doesn’t want to impede the industry and that the U.S. must ensure an edge over China.

The leaders also delved into the Iran war, which Trump is struggling to wind down. China urged Washington and Tehran to return to talks and an interim deal, but Iran’s largest trading partner has played no major public role in pushing for peace despite its outsize influence.

The costs of the war -- including higher gasoline prices and dwindling stockpiles of advanced weapons -- are hurting Republicans ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Xi’s push on Taiwan with Trump alarms Taipei

In their private talks, Xi told Trump he hoped the U.S. will “adhere to the correct position of opposing” the independence of Taiwan, a self-governed island, according to an official Chinese statement.

Trump hasn’t said much yet about his private conversations with Xi. But Taiwan’s foreign ministry said the Chinese statement was “distorting” the facts, while underscoring that Taiwan’s sovereignty belongs to its people.

The Chinese government’s choice of the word “adhere” is revealing, because it implies Beijing believes Washington is already behaving in ways it wants, says Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“Beijing’s objective is to get Trump to absorb Chinese red lines into his own definition of a stable relationship,” Singleton added.

Anxiety was already heightened about Trump’s position on Taiwan. Following his May visit to Beijing, Trump paused a $14 billion arms sale to Taiwan.

Xi challenged Trump’s zero sum worldview. Trump didn't push back

Xi seemed to subtly reject Trump’s framing of global competition as zero sum with nations either winning or losing.

The Chinese leader said any competition with the U.S. should be limited and “within bounds” and suggested that Trump need not worry about trying to contain China.

To be sure, Xi couched his remarks in history and diplomatic nuance. But Trump did not offer a counterargument.

U.S. policies have tried to contain Chinese manufacturing through tariffs and export controls. Those have achieved mixed results. China continues to innovate with electric vehicles, match AI breakthroughs and expand its global trade surplus.

“It should be a race of catching up with one another, not a wrestle in which one either wins or loses,” said Xi, openly contesting Trump’s claims that the front-runner in AI automatically “wins.”

Trump takes his military rival into his helicopter

The U.S. president took pains to show Xi around and spent time looking at a new helicopter landing pad he had rushed to finish ahead of the state visit. But it was surprising when Trump invited Xi -- the head of a communist country that is a key military rival -- to step on board the chopper, which is one of the most secure and well-protected aircraft on earth.

Trump has had other issues with airborne security recently. A luxury jet gifted to him by Qatar for use as Air Force One lacked the advanced defense systems of the traditional presidential aircraft — a problem acute enough that Trump in July was concealed in a catering truck before secretly flying out of Turkey on a different plane in the face of credible threats from Iran.

Trump also showed off the construction site for his new White House ballroom, a project he has partially justified because it will house military and security operations. At Xi's state dinner, Trump invited Chinese officials and all his guests to walk over for a firsthand look at the project. It’s unclear whether anyone took him up on that invitation.

Trump's ongoing media battle created an awkward dynamic

Trump last week barred CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, sparking a legal fight that overshadowed Xi's visit.

The White House’s five-network television pool rotation refused to cover Trump’s events in response to the action against CNN, and Trump grumbled on social media that TV networks “refused to cover one of the Biggest and Most Beautiful Events to take place in many years.”

His fight with the press created an extraordinary split screen as he welcomed the world’s most powerful autocrat with a lavish state visit all while battling in court to keep prominent American media outlets out of the People’s House.

It’s all to be continued …

After Xi’s trip to Washington, the two leaders are still on track to meet two more times this year.

That means their exchanges are part of an ongoing dialogue, rather than a set of finalized agreements. It also creates opportunities for the trade truce that was extended for two months through Jan. 10, 2027, to get another extension.

In November, Xi will host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen, China, and in December, the Group of 20 summit will be held at the Trump National Doral Miami golf club in Florida.

Xi confirmed before leaving Washington on Friday that he expected to see Trump again soon.

Zelenskyy told reporters he has not yet received feedback from the White House about Trump’s talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping but expects to learn the outcome.

Zelenskyy, who is keen to muster more international support for Ukraine’s defense, was in the United States this week on a trip coinciding with the U.N. General Assembly. He met with Trump on Tuesday.

NATO countries have called China a “decisive enabler” of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

Zelenskyy shared more details of his U.S. trip in voice messages to a group of journalists.

Here’s what Zelenskyy also said:

Zelenskyy says the US wants initial technical talks

Washington is pushing for a three-way meeting involving delegations from the U.S., Ukraine and Russia, with officials holding technical talks in that format without the countries' leaders, Zelenskyy said.

Ukraine is waiting for the U.S. to propose a date for those meetings, he said, adding that American officials suggested the United Arab Emirates as the location for these talks.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday that Putin and Trump during their call earlier this month discussed holding such a meeting in the near future. “As of now, I can’t give you any specifics,” Peskov said.

Representatives from the three countries held three rounds of trilateral negotiations early this year, twice in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE, and once in Geneva, but the talks achieved no significant breakthroughs.

Speaking to reporters in St. Petersburg on Friday night, Putin decried recent Ukrainian attacks deep inside Russia and on Russian-held areas of Ukraine and said that while “proposals to resume the talks are all on the table,” Moscow “will think carefully about what we need to do in response.”

The Kremlin will make its decisions, “including on the possible resumption of the negotiation process, based on the interests of the Russian Federation,” Putin stressed.

US passed hefty sanctions on Russia

Zelenskyy met with U.S. senators and Congress members during his U.S. trip and said he thanked them for their bipartisan support in passing a powerful sanctions bill aimed at Moscow last month. Trump signed the bill into law last week but hasn’t enacted the measures yet.

Sanctions are key in forcing Putin to the negotiating table, Zelenskyy said, adding that he hoped Trump would implement the measures.

“The sanctions are indeed strong ... all of this is now in the hands of the president of the United States. He can use this tool to pressure the Russian Federation,” Zelenskyy said.

Zelenskyy says he got Trump's OK for Patriot licenses

The Ukrainian leader said Trump confirmed he had made a final decision that Kyiv would get licenses to produce Patriot air defense systems.

Ukraine is desperate for more of the American-made air defense systems that are needed to stop Russia’s ballistic missiles, but they have been in short supply since the war in Iran started on Feb. 28.

Trump had said in July that he would allow Ukraine to make its own Patriots but later appeared to be reconsidering the move.

Countries urge free flow of food through Black Sea

Ukraine and Russia are both major global suppliers of wheat, barley, sunflower oil and other food that developing nations rely on. However, wartime attacks on cargo vessels in the Black Sea have choked that supply route, raising fears of shortages.

Zelenskyy said he held separate talks in the U.S. with the leaders of India, Turkey, Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries that want unimpeded Black Sea shipping routes. He added that these leaders were also due to speak to Russian officials.

Kyiv wants Moscow to accept a Black Sea ceasefire that would allow full deliveries to resume, Zelenskyy said.

Ukraine needs more money

Zelenskyy said he also spoke in the U.S. with the heads of the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission about plugging Ukraine’s budget deficit as its finances are strained by wartime expenses and drops in production. Russia's economy is also hurting.

The European Union will extend its financial aid for Ukraine, and the IMF will continue its financial support programs, he said.

Most of the funding gap relates specifically to weapons purchases, Zelenskyy said, and future financing for Ukraine could come in the form of deals for sharing technology and joint drone production. Ukraine is a world leader in military drones.

A boy is killed in a Kyiv strike as Russia also reports civilian casualties

Russian aerial attacks on Ukraine overnight and into Friday killed five people and wounded 11, officials said, while Russian authorities reported one dead and 21 wounded in Ukrainian long-range strikes.

Zelenskyy said eight Ukrainian regions came under attack. Russia kept up its relentless round-the-clock attacks on the Ukrainian capital, hitting an office block where four people were killed, Zelenskyy said. A 14-year-old boy was also killed in a Kyiv apartment building strike and at least seven residents were injured, according to officials.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces hit a missile engine depot near Kyiv, among other targets.

Ukraine hit two refineries as part of its sustained campaign to damage Russia’s economy, Zelenskyy said.

Unconfirmed Russian media reports said Ukrainian drones also struck a Russian military electronics plant and a synthetic rubber producer.

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Hatton reported from Lisbon, Portugal.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

Reports Friday said an independent panel had upheld nearly all of the 100-plus financial charges against the club in a case that was initiated more than three years ago.

City did not confirm the decision, saying its case with the Premier League was “ongoing” and yet to be completed.

City, however, would appeal a guilty decision and the process would take several months, a person with knowledge of the situation told The Associated Press.

The person spoke on condition of anonymity to respect confidentiality elements of the process.

The Athletic first reported that City has been found guilty of all but one of more than 100 charges laid by the Premier League, which accused the club in February 2023 of providing misleading information about its finances over a nine-year period from 2009-18. The report said the sanctions have not been decided and all possibilities remain open.

The BBC also reported the story.

In response, City said in a statement: “The Premier League process remains ongoing, with significant elements to be completed, and subject to strict confidentiality.”

City added that its position “remains consistent” with previous comments about the case. The club has always denied the charges.

“The club has diligently respected due process for eight years,” City said, “on the basis that the Premier League board and executive would behave as an independent, impartial and fair-minded regulator, free from partisan influence.”

City’s punishment could be a huge points deduction, and as extreme as expulsion from the Premier League.

When contacted by The Associated Press on Friday, the Premier League said it couldn’t comment on the reports.

City has always protested its innocence after supposed leaked emails and documents, likely hacked, were published starting in 2018 by German magazine Der Spiegel. The documents allegedly showed City tried to mask the source of revenue from deals tied to Abu Dhabi, whose ruling family bought the club in 2008 and has overseen the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars on some of the world’s best players over the following two decades.

City has been the most dominant team in England over the last 15 years, winning eight Premier League titles since 2012 as well as the Champions League in 2023. Over the period in question — 2009-18 — City won the league three times, in 2012, 2014 and 2018.

Friday's news comes after Pep Guardiola stood down as City manager at the end of last season following an unprecedented period of success.

Guardiola always maintained the club's innocence.

“What people accuse us of we do not agree with what they say,” he said in 2023.

On Friday, former Manchester United and England player Rio Ferdinand suggested City's titles should be expunged and awarded to the runner-up for each season in question.

“Another premier league medal to be added to the cabinet,” he posted on X in reference to City’s 2012 title win over United.

The Premier League competition has had financial fair play rules designed to ensure clubs essentially spend what they earn from deals that are assessed to determine if they are at legitimate market value. City had previously been accused by UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, of overstating sponsorship revenue to comply with Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations.

In 2020, UEFA ruled City had committed “serious breaches” of FFP regulations from 2012-16. But a two-year ban was later overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport because allegations were either rejected or found to have happened too long ago to be investigated.

The Premier League charges came subsequently, after a four-year investigation. City was accused of more than 100 breaches including providing misleading information about its finances and failure to co-operate with the investigation.

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Douglas reported from Sundsvall, Sweden

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James Robson is at https://x.com/jamesalanrobson

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See AP’s full soccer coverage here

Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi detailed the proposal in a private gathering on Thursday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York, according to one attendee.

Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute think tank, said Araghchi suggested that a speedy agreement would help U.S. President Donald Trump ahead of November's midterm elections. The arrangement would also relieve enormous economic pressure on Tehran as the U.S. piles on additional sanctions.

Iran's disruption of the strait — through which a fifth of the world's traded oil and gas transited before the war — has emerged as its main point of leverage. The effects have been felt far beyond the Middle East.

There was no immediate comment from Iran's U.N. mission or other Iranian officials. A person familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations, told The Associated Press that Saudi Arabia was skeptical of the latest push for a deal.

The White House said Friday that U.S. officials are having positive and constructive conversations with mediators on the Iran war. In response to questions from The Associated Press, it said the U.S. is facilitating significant oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz.

The proposal resembles a June deal that quickly crumbled

The proposal, conveyed to the U.S. by mediators, strongly resembles the so-called Memorandum of Understanding reached in June, but with an accelerated timetable. The earlier agreement, which called for a 60-day interim period, quickly collapsed as Iran resumed attacks on shipping in the strait.

Trump has said he is in no rush to reach a deal, even as high oil prices fuel inflation. On the Iranian side, there are questions as to whether the hard-liners who dominate the security forces would accept compromises championed by moderates like President Masoud Pezeshkian.

“If Trump calculates this arrangement is worthwhile and can bring political benefit before the midterms and reduce gas prices, perhaps we'll see flexibility not seen in previous weeks,” Parsi said. But he noted “deep suspicion,” especially around the prospect of Iran merely buying time to ship out more of its oil and ease its economic pain.

There are other signs of renewed diplomacy

In the latest sign of diplomatic movement, Pezeshkian hosted the prime minister of Qatar early Friday. Qatar has been a key mediator, including during hours of indirect Iran-U.S. talks at the U.N. this week.

It was not clear how long Pezeshkian and Araghchi would stay in the U.S. after Pezeshkian addressed the annual U.N. gathering of world leaders on Wednesday, ending his speech by saying Iran remained open to diplomacy.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on the same day, said “if there’s an opportunity to exchange ideas and messages, we will.”

After multiple failed attempts at a deal, however, suspicion is high on both sides. The U.S. and Israel have attacked Iran twice while it was engaged in nuclear talks, and the U.S. and Iran accuse each other of having swiftly violated the June agreement.

“The Iranians already know that the chances of this not being accepted by Trump are much higher than the opposite,” Hamidreza Azizi, senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group think tank, wrote on X.

“They want to show that they were ready for diplomacy and that it was the United States that, for the third time, decided to attack in the middle of a diplomatic track — something that people within (Iran’s) strategic community have been anticipating over the past few days.”

It's unclear if the proposal would include the Yemen conflict

The proposal would include Lebanon, where Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah have been mostly observing a ceasefire. It's not clear, however, if it would include the revived conflict between Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels and Saudi Arabia, which has put even more pressure on global markets.

Iran appears to think the Houthis' newly enhanced ability to threaten the Bab el-Mandeb strait on the Red Sea — another trade chokepoint on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula — could push Trump to make a deal.

Maj. Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi, a military adviser to Iran's new supreme leader, told state television that the Americans “face a new problem called the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.”

He added: “I think the process that is unfolding is in our favor, and the Americans will be forced to accept Iran’s conditions.”

With the Houthis' latest surge in attacks, Saudi Arabia was skeptical of Araghchi’s latest push for a deal with the U.S., according to the person familiar with the matter.

The kingdom, along with other Gulf states, had advocated over the summer for a return to negotiations, saying they could live with an agreement that gave Iran a temporary role in managing the Strait of Hormuz, the person said.

But the Saudi calculations changed as the Houthis seized Yemen’s strategic Red Sea coast from pro-government forces and a vital Saudi pipeline came under attack.

Earlier this month, Gulf leaders planned to gather in Oman to discuss an emerging agreement between Oman and Iran on the Strait of Hormuz, which runs between the two countries. But the meeting was canceled after Saudi Arabia called for amendments, only some of which were accepted by Iran, the person said.

Iran's leadership has shown signs of divisions

Iran's leaders have sought to project unity, but some hard-liners want to continue or escalate the war to secure bigger U.S. concessions and have criticized Pezeshkian and Araghchi's diplomatic steps this week.

Firebrand lawmaker Ebrahim Rezaei wrote on X that merely meeting with “the aggressor enemy” showed weakness. Iran’s Assembly of Experts, a panel of Shiite clerics who appoint the supreme leader, said “there is no path other than resistance.”

The head of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard, Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, highlighted the U.N. speech by “the esteemed president” while focusing on Pezeshkian’s comments that Iran doesn’t fear war.

Iran's parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, who served as chief negotiator in earlier talks with the United States, provided a rare public acknowledgment of the internal divide.

“There is a view that speaks of war but offers no prospect or mechanism for bringing it to a powerful conclusion,” he wrote on social media. “At the opposite end is a current that makes the error of underestimating national capabilities.”

He added: “The first error keeps the country in a state of permanent crisis, while the second hands national resources and dignity over to the enemy.”

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Associated Press reporter Josh Boak contributed.

The two candidates are seeking one of three seats on the Railroad Commission of Texas — which oversees a constellation of energy infrastructure across the state, including gas and oil. The agency does not actually oversee railroads.

Rosenthal, a state representative from Cypress, posted on social media that he and French have agreed to a debate at 5 p.m. on Oct. 22 at the Dallas Press Club, which will be live streamed.

“If you can see this, Bo — I’m still ready, — any time, any place — any moderator,” Rosenthal wrote in a statement on his X account.

Rosenthal’s campaign manager, Fawaz Anwar, said the debate will be at the studio of Jeff Crilley at 5400 LBJ Freeway, Suite 800, in Dallas.

French has not publicly confirmed his participation. He did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The debate appears to be the first to be announced between any two statewide candidates this election cycle, as Democrats at the top of the ticket are pressuring their counterparts to participate.

French came under fire by fellow Republicans earlier this month for sharing a post on X showing a photo of the student section cheering a Texas Longhorn victory against Ohio State, referring to the students as “foreigners” who displaced Americans, without having any information about their status. French has stood by his remark since but has also started speaking publicly about his potential policies on gas and energy. French last week also deleted several old posts making other offensive statements.

French is a high-ranking Republican operative who last served as chair of the Tarrant County Republican Party and who has made culture wars the centerpiece of his campaign — such as questioning whether Jewish people or Muslims posed a bigger threat to the United States. In March, French said the U.S. should deport 100 million people — roughly a third of the country’s population.

French has pledged to end Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives, funding and practices at the Texas Railroad Commission and has called to end Chinese government influence in the oil industry.

Rosenthal, is a career oil field engineer and four-term House member, who has said that if he wins he would like to hire community liaisons for the Texas Railroad Commission in every region, and expand language access to include Spanish and Vietnamese, among others. He has also said that he will work for affordable gas rates by scrutinizing utility companies.

An embassy spokesperson in Harare confirmed the decision and released remarks delivered this week by U.S. Ambassador Pamela Tremont at an event titled “Beyond assistance."

Tremont said the end of U.S.-supported health programs followed “Zimbabwe’s decision to decline a bilateral health MOU." She added that the U.S. will now shift its relations with Zimbabwe “from one largely focused on health and humanitarian assistance, to one built on broader economic, trade and investment opportunities.”

Zimbabwe is among the first countries to face the consequences of Washington’s new approach of tying health aid to bilateral country-to-country agreements.

The withdrawal casts uncertainty over programs to combat HIV and other diseases in a country where shortages often force patients to bring basic supplies such as bandages to clinics and buy their own medicines.

For decades, the U.S. has been Zimbabwe’s largest health donor, supporting HIV prevention and treatment, tuberculosis and malaria programs, clinical care, laboratory systems, health workers, medical supplies and community-based programs.

Zimbabwean officials have raised concerns over diminishing international aid, saying the country would prioritize raising funds domestically as assistance from the U.S. and other Western countries dries up. Some health advocates, however, question whether Zimbabwe’s financially troubled government can absorb the costs.

“Zimbabweans have already been suffering gravely as a result of abrupt disruptions to lifesaving malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV programs caused by the U.S. stop work orders and USAID award terminations in 2025," said Asia Russell, executive director of Health GAP, an international advocacy group. “This deadly decision will trigger a public health catastrophe,” she added.

The dispute dates to February, when both countries announced the collapse of talks on a bilateral deal proposed under U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” approach to foreign aid.

Zimbabwe government spokesperson Nick Mangwana said the proposal contained conditions the country could not accept, citing concerns over data sharing, fairness, sovereignty and Washington’s shift away from global health institutions.

According to Mangwana, the proposal was tied to “comprehensive access to Zimbabwe’s sensitive health data, including virus samples and epidemiological information from our citizens.”

Namibia also rejected a bilateral agreement with the U.S. because of concerns about provisions for sharing health data and biological specimens, local media reported. In early September, the U.S. said it would start phasing out its financial support for Namibia’s HIV response programs. The U.S. will provide Namibia with $45 million for its HIV response in fiscal 2027 before shifting to “technical cooperation,” the two governments said in September, but did not cite the health data fallout as the reason for the development.

African governments have in recent months increasingly called for “health sovereignty,” reflecting efforts to finance and manage their health systems with less reliance on foreign aid.

Africa CDC has described the continent as facing “an unprecedented financing crisis,” saying official development assistance to Africa has halved over the last five years.

Under the Trump administration’s new approach, Washington has been negotiating country-by-country health agreements that it says will reduce donor dependency and increase domestic financing. So far, 35 countries have signed such agreements, the majority in Africa, according to KFF, a U.S. health-policy research organization tracking the deals.

At least four African countries — Ghana, Zambia, South Africa and Zimbabwe — have publicly resisted or failed to conclude new U.S. bilateral health agreements, while Kenya’s agreement has faced a legal challenge.

Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama said Friday the U.S. wanted information about endemic diseases and the country's medical records and that Ghana would have no right to inspect medications or medical products brought into the country.

Mahama was in New York for high-level meetings and the general debate of the United Nations General Assembly. Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations, he said the U.S. proposal was taken to the Cabinet and “thrown out in record time.”

“I've never seen anything thrown out as fast as that,” he said.

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AP Writer Jennifer McDermott contributed to this report from New York.

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For more on Africa and development: https://apnews.com/hub/africa-pulse

___

The Associated Press receives financial support for global health and development coverage in Africa from the Gates Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

• HOT & DRY TODAY: Mostly sunny, with highs in the upper-90s
• SMALL RAIN CHANCE SUNDAY: A few storms possible late in the day
• AN UPDATE ON NEXT WEEK: Questions linger, rainfall still in forecast

FORECAST

STILL HOT THROUGH THE WEEKEND

Tired of the heat yet? Unfortunately, we won’t get any relief this weekend. Temperatures today through at least Monday will hold steady in the mid to upper-90s. We continue to top the list as the hottest September on record in San Antonio.

SUNDAY EVENING STORM

As our heat high shifts into Mexico, a few storms may show up late Sunday in the Hill Country. It’s possible a few of these could drift toward San Antonio. Rain chances sit at 20% Sunday evening.

NEXT WEEK

Next week remains complicated. A storm system will swing toward Texas by midweek, however, the models have slowed the timing a bit. It is forecast to pull up moisture from what will be left of Hurricane Polo into Texas. Rain chances show up in the forecast Wednesday and Thursday, however, as we’ve been saying -- this is not a slam dunk forecast. A front will near the area on Wednesday. Slightly cooler weather is expected for Wednesday and Thursday. Make sure to keep checking back in as clearer details will unravel in the days ahead.

QUICK WEATHER LINKS

• WATCH LIVE: Doppler Radar
• Hourly and 10-Day Forecast
• Download FREE KSAT Weather Authority App: Up-to-date forecast information and livestreams from trusted local meteorologists.
• KSAT Connect: Share your weather photos.

United Russia, the main Kremlin party, will get more than three-fourths of the seats in the State Duma, a record high, according to returns released by the Central Election Commission.

Virtually any genuine opposition parties or candidates were excluded from running in the Sept. 18-20 election. A massive state media campaign and tight control over the voting process allowed the Kremlin to strengthen its political dominance despite Russia's economic troubles and long-range Ukrainian drone attacks.

Nearly 60% of the 111 million eligible voters turned out in the three-day balloting, the most for a parliamentary election in more than a decade. Authorities had spread the voting over three days and allowed online voting in some regions to boost participation.

The parliamentary election was the first since President Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the first to include residents of four regions of that country that were seized and illegally annexed by Moscow later that year.

Voting also was held in Crimea, which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014. Kyiv denounced the voting in those regions as illegal.

Russia didn’t invite election observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Election commission chief Ella Pamfilova said United Russia got 349 out of 450 seats in the State Duma, the lower chamber. It polled 58% of the ballot for the 225 seats apportioned by parties and also won 209 single-seat races that fill the other half of the chamber.

On Wednesday, Putin declared that the election results were a show of public support for his policies.

Several smaller parties representing the “systemic opposition” that vote in line with the Kremlin on all key issues won 97 seats, and the remaining four seats were filled by regional officials who ran without a party affiliation.

Pamfilova said 46 Ukraine war veterans were elected, including 41 from United Russia.

“The experience of our heroes is in demand; the voting results have clearly confirmed this,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “They will make a maximum contribution to the shaping of various initiatives.”

The liberal Yabloko party, the only registered political entity that dared to publicly criticize the war, was removed from the ballot last month by Russia’s Supreme Court. It only had a few dozen candidates in the single-seat races and none of them won a seat.

Ahead of the campaign, some anti-war politicians were imprisoned or forced to flee abroad.

As the election commission announced the full results, Russian media reports said independent political analyst Alexander Kynev, who closely followed the campaign, had been arrested on drug charges, which he denied. He could face from 10 to 20 years in prison if convicted.

Earlier this year, Kynev has been designated as “foreign agent” by the Justice Ministry, a label that carries strong pejorative connotations in the country and brings additional government scrutiny.

The election took place against the backdrop of incessant Ukrainian drone attacks. Officials said air defenses downed over 1,100 Ukrainian drones, including 450 drones heading for Moscow on the final day of voting in what Mayor Sergei Sobyanin described as “the largest ever” attack on the capital. The attack, which damaged an oil refinery and a residential building, killed three people and injured 38 in the wider Moscow region, officials said.

Pamfilova said six poll workers were killed in Ukrainian attacks and 75 polling stations were damaged or destroyed by shelling.

The first session of the newly elected lower house has been set for Wednesday. Russian media reports said its speaker, Vyacheslav Volodin, is expected to retain his position.

At noon on CNN, viewers could see Trump and President Xi Jinping touring the National Archives, along with Melania Trump and Peng Liyuan, Xi's wife. The banner along the bottom of the screen read: “Trump and China’s Xi Visit National Archives.” It was a routine report from a state visit — but for the fact that CNN had not aired live video of Trump in several days.

“As of now, all systems are go,” said a person familiar with the pool, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the fluidity of the situation.

The pool consists of five major U.S. broadcast outlets that take turns shooting and sharing video. When the White House banned CNN — which belongs to the pool — from White House grounds, along with MS NOW and Politico, the other four pool providers declined to participate in a show of solidarity.

A judge temporarily struck down the ban in an overnight ruling early Thursday, but his ruling didn't directly address the pool. The networks continued to refrain from covering Trump as part of the pool, even as reporters from all three outlets were allowed back in the White House.

CNN was not commenting directly on Friday, referring instead to its editorial coverage. But Brian Stelter, the network’s media analyst, posted on X that CNN had a pool assignment at the National Archives event and that the White House had approved the network’s credentials.

The festival honors the traditions of Día de los Muertos through art, live music and more than 80 altars created by community members.

The event is designed as a space for families and visitors to remember loved ones while experiencing cultural traditions tied to the holiday.

Jim Mendiola, artistic director of Galaxy Productions, joined GMSA at 9 on Friday, Sept. 25, to talk about how Muertos Fest has grown over the years and what visitors can expect at this year’s event.

The festival begins Friday, Oct. 23, with “¡Presente! A Night to Remember” from 5-11 p.m.

A sensory-friendly altar viewing will take place from 5-7 p.m.

Events continue Saturday, Oct. 24, from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m., with a Día de los Muertos procession scheduled for 7 p.m.

The festival wraps up Sunday, Oct. 25, from noon to 9 p.m.

A second Día de los Muertos procession is scheduled for 3 p.m.

Muertos Fest will take place at Hemisfair, where visitors can view community altars, listen to live music and take part in a celebration centered on remembrance and tradition.

This financial move does not affect Brightline's sister company Brightline West, which is working to build a high-speed railroad between Las Vegas and a stop outside Los Angeles in Southern California.

The deal that Brightline worked out with its creditors will allow the railroad to borrow $490 million more as it works to attract enough riders to pay all of its bills. Assured Guaranty said on Friday that the financing commitments include $350 million of new junior debt and $140 million of additional senior debt.

Assured said that Brightline Trains Florida LLC, which runs the railroad, has not filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, but that certain other Brightline Florida entities did file for such protection.

“Brightline is a critical part of Florida’s transportation network that has changed the way people move around the state,” Brightline Florida CEO Patrick Goddard said in a statement. “Today’s agreement brings $490 million in new long-term capital to Brightline from the stakeholders who know this business, and it comes at a time of real momentum.”

Brightline earned the worst safety record of any railroad in the nation with more than 200 deaths along its tracks since it was founded, but Goddard said at a news conference earlier this month that the railroad has been working to improve safety with better safety measures around rail crossings.

The company has seen its ridership grow 14% for the year-to-date through August, with revenue up 17% for the same period when compared with last year.

But Tim Hynes, who is head of Global Credit Research at Debtwire, said Brightline's current ridership of about 3.5 million people a year that generates about $240 million of revenue is less than half the number of riders and one-third of the revenue the railroad predicted in 2024. He said that's why Brightline needed to rework its debt and obtain additional financing.

“The broader lesson is that intercity rail financed mainly with private high-yield debt is very hard to make work, so expect future projects to lean more on public money,” said Hynes, who also thinks investors will demand more conservative ridership forecasts.

Brightline first began running its trains between Miami and Orlando in 2023. The company began operating between Miami and West Palm Beach in 2018. But it is only able to run at its maximum speed of 125 mph (202 kph) on the stretch between the Orlando airport and Cocoa, Florida, because that section is totally fenced off and doesn't have any public grade crossings.

Brightline hopes to eventually extend its service to Tampa.

Madison police said some of the men, who they described as pledges to the fraternity, had signs of being physically assaulted.

Police went to the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity house Wednesday night after receiving an anonymous tip. Two fraternity members, both 20, were arrested on tentative misdemeanor charges of hazing and disorderly conduct, police said. No formal charges had been filed against them as of Friday morning.

The university said it was taking the incident seriously and launching its own investigation.

“UW–Madison is fully committed to preventing and addressing hazing and takes all incidents involving our community seriously,” the university said in a Thursday statement.

Any student found to have broken the law or university policy could be subject to sanctions ranging from a written reprimand to expulsion, the university said.

Police released a photo that shows about two dozen men, all shirtless, in the basement of the fraternity with trash and other debris littered on the ground. The faces of the people in the photo are blurred out.

Police said the thermostat was set to 81 degrees, causing hot and humid conditions in the basement where the walls appeared to be painted black. A majority of those in the basement were 18 years old, police said.

The fraternity’s status as a recognized student organization on the Madison campus was terminated in 2015 for holding events while suspended. It had been suspended in 2013 for hosting a party in which a 17-year-old and another person were taken to detox after being served alcohol at a party hosted by the fraternity, according to university records.

The termination came after a fourth incident involving either events, alcohol or both, the university said.

Since 2016, there were seven additional allegations involving the fraternity related to intramural sports, disrespectful behavior, drinking and hazing, the university said.

Because the fraternity is still recognized by its national organization, it is able to operate as a fraternity chapter unaffiliated with the university, UW-Madison said.

Jon Pierce, spokesperson for the national fraternity, said it is taking the allegations “very seriously” and will cooperate fully with investigations. Any member found to have participated will be expelled from the fraternity, he said.

“Hazing is a betrayal of everything our fraternity stands for,” Pierce said. “There is no place for it in AEPi. No exceptions. No excuses.”

The fraternity house is located just blocks from the heart of the UW-Madison campus, which is home to about 52,000 students.

Police said their investigation is also ongoing. The university's Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards is also investigating in accordance with its nonacademic misconduct process, UW-Madison said.

Notably, Talarico has enjoyed larger leads in recent polling than Democrat Beto O’Rourke ever did in 2018 when he nearly beat U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz. Talarico is dominating Paxton in fundraising.

How to read a poll

The quality of polls and pollsters can be measured by several metrics, including how well their polls have performed in the past and how transparent they are about their methodology.  Here are a few things to pay attention to when navigating different polls.

Partisan sponsors: Polls sponsored by a candidate or party should be taken with a grain of salt, according to the American Association for Public Opinion Research. While nonpartisan polling organizations typically release all of their polling results regardless of who is ahead, candidate-sponsored or party-affiliated surveys can choose to only release results that benefit their campaigns.

Sample size: In general, the more people an election poll surveys the more reliable its results are. As sample sizes increase, the results of a survey are more likely to reflect the real attitudes of those who will vote in an election.

Sample type: Election polls usually survey three kinds of populations: adults, registered voters and those they deem to be “likely voters,” based on their voting history and gauged interest.

Polls that survey adults are able to increase their sample sizes, but can be less reflective of the opinions of those who will actually make it to the polls to vote on Election Day. During an election year, polls using samples of registered voters are common as they are a concrete group and more likely to vote than unregistered adults.

Closer to election day, polls with “likely voter” samples are often considered more representative of those who will actually vote. Different pollsters use different methodologies to determine who is a likely voter, using factors such as past voting behavior and interest in the election.

Sampling method: The methods by which pollsters select who participates in their surveys usually fall into two categories: probability and non-probability samples.

In a probability-based sample, every person of the full population has a chance of being selected for the survey, whereas in a non-probability based sample, such as an internet panel or a self-selected sample, the chance of any one person being selected is unknown. As a result, the samples can be skewed toward characteristics that may not be as reflective of the whole population. 

Although probability based sampling has been the preferred method for many decades, its rising cost has led researchers to turn to non-probability based sampling. The results of some non-probability based surveys have been shown to be comparable to and sometimes more accurate than probability based surveys.

Margin of error: While polls conducted with probability samples allow for the calculation of the margin of error, non-probability polls have no simple way of calculating the same error metric. They must instead use statistical models to produce estimates of their sampling error.

Methodology for our tracker

Where the polls come from

The New York Times collects polls and manages a database of election polling. This tracker pulls data from their collection, and estimates the average of every poll conducted since Paxton won his  Republican runoff election in May. 

Which polls we include

We included every public poll of the Texas U.S. Senate that asked voters to choose who they would vote for if the election occurred that day and included James Talarico and Ken Paxton as options. Polls that ended before the May runoff election are not included in the average, but are listed in the table. 

How the average works

The average is calculated by weighting every poll by three factors: recency, sample size and whether the poll’s sponsor has a partisan affiliation. We then averaged them. 

• Recent polls count more than older ones as they are more reflective of current sentiment. 
• Polls with larger sample sizes count more than those with smaller samples. 
• Polls sponsored by a political party count half as much as ones without a partisan sponsor.

Limits

The average is not a forecast of the election and who will eventually win. Additionally, early in the race, the number of polls that have been released can be relatively low, meaning the average can shift meaningfully when a single new poll is added. As a result, individual outlier polls carry more weight early on.

Apurva Mahajan contributed to this report.

Disclosure: The New York Times has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in The Texas Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

The women are among the thousands of federal workers and contract employees in the Washington region whose lives were upended when the Trump administration and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency overhauled the federal workforce last year, cutting jobs and grants.

A new survey released Thursday by Gallup and the Greater Washington Community Foundation shows the far-reaching impact on the nation's capital.

Despite living in one of the most affluent parts of the country, many in the greater D.C. area — which includes parts of Maryland and Virginia and is referred to as the DMV — now see a bleak local job market and rising costs. Some are even considering leaving the region.

“It wasn’t just about our jobs being gone. It was really this awful ripple effect of all these lives and destinies really disrupted," Nataro said.

The District of Columbia, which official figures show accounted for a fifth of the roughly 100,000 job losses in the region and is host to an ongoing deployment of the National Guard, has been particularly impacted. According to the survey, about two-thirds of D.C. residents said their household had been directly affected by the job cuts, one of the highest percentages in the region.

Federal job cuts impacted higher-income households

More affluent households were hit especially hard by the cuts, the survey found. A majority — 58% — of those in households with an annual income of $90,000 or more said they were impacted by the reductions, compared to 48% of lower-income households.

Trumbull earned over $130,000 annually at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. After DOGE came for her job, she took a deferred resignation in the second-round offering, under threat of a forthcoming USDA reorganization that wasn’t really a decent option. She only secured new, part-time employment a year later.

During that time, she had to take a forbearance on her mortgage. She applied for public assistance. She and her husband took home just $2,000 a month, she said, while amassing debt from their home ownership.

When jobs didn’t come through, she did some contract work and taught to “cobble together enough money to make sure my kids were supplied — cause you don’t get to stop buying diapers.”

“I don’t see a future where I can go back to not worrying about moving money around constantly” to cover bills, she said.

Even though lower-income residents were less likely to report any impacts, the survey suggests that hardship was still acute among this group. About 1 in 10, 14%, DMV residents say that they or someone in their household accessed social services like food banks or job placement support for the first time in the past year, which rose to about one-quarter of those in households earning less than $90,000 per year.

Many residents worry about housing payments and healthcare

About one-third of DMV residents say they are “very” or “somewhat” worried about being able to pay their rent or mortgage, down from about half in 2023 following the economic troubles of the COVID pandemic. Renters, Black and Hispanic adults, and lower-income residents are particularly worried about housing payments.

Nataro, 42, and a single mom of two young children, asked her landlord for a rent reduction after she lost her job at USAID, one of DOGE's first targets. She signed up for food stamps and unemployment assistance. She found work in academia quickly but took a substantial pay cut.

“It’s very humbling, because you know before that you’re paying all your bills and struggling but you’ve got enough to cover everything,” she said. Now, she has had to ask for help.

Roughly 2 in 10 DMV residents say there were times in the past year when they couldn't pay for healthcare, according to the survey. Nataro said she has had to make tough choices on her personal healthcare needs to cut costs.

Danielle Yates, the managing director of marketing and communications at the Greater Washington Community Foundation, said the survey found that a significant number of people in the region had trouble taking care of their basic needs.

About 1 in 10 DMV residents say they couldn't provide adequate shelter or housing for their family the past year, according to the survey, and roughly 2 in 10 say there were times when they couldn't pay for food.

A Capital Area Food Bank survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago last year also found broad food insecurity. “Thirty-eight percent of our area’s residents said that they needed some support in putting food on their tables so that they could lead an active and healthy lifestyle,” said Radha Muthiah, executive director of the CAFB.

Views of the local job market have dimmed

Residents' perceptions of the local job market are much less optimistic than just a few years ago. Only about half of DMV residents rate the availability of good jobs where they live as “excellent” or “good," down from 65% in 2023.

Those who have found work say they've been left with the scars of DOGE's ruthlessness.

A job Nataro loved and felt made a difference in the world was taken away, leaving her “traumatized.”

"I haven’t taken any real personal effects to the office. We haven’t really unboxed things.”

Some consider leaving the region

Rising costs and housing also influence how DMV residents think about the region, in addition to the job cuts.

About one-third of DMV residents expect that living conditions in the Washington area will be “worse” in the next five years, while about half think they will be “about the same.” Only about 2 in 10 expect things will get better.

About 1 in 10 D.C. residents, 14%, say they are considering leaving the DMV region in the next year, with most who are thinking about departing pointing to rising costs and housing expenses.

Barbera and her husband both worked at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a place where the staff was fired twice because of court decisions. A year and a half after they were fired in March 2025, the couple are considering leaving the area because of rising costs, especially childcare for their three children. Although both have full-time jobs and do consulting work part time, they are earning half of what they did, said Barbera.

The two had worked a collective 30 years for the peace-focused organization when they were let go. She said she feels lucky because they have family support and jobs but are being forced into considering a different future.

“This is the only place they’ve lived,” Barbera said of her children. “We don’t want to leave. But we have to have the conversation.”

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This story was first published on Sept. 24, 2026. It was published again on Sept. 25, 2026, to correct Nicoletta Barbera said that she and her husband have full-time jobs and do consulting work part time, not that she and her husband have full-time jobs doing consulting work.

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The VoicesDMV analysis is based on a mail survey of U.S. adults aged 18 and older living in the Greater Washington Region using random address-based sampling. The survey of 2,801 residents was conducted Feb. 9 to April 6, 2026. The margin of sampling error for the full sample is plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.

The zoo said the quintuplets — four males and one female — that were born on June 18 had faced a tough time from the start.

Their mother, Daenerys, opted to give birth in an outdoor enclosure with a period of strong storms hitting Prague soon after.

Despite her inexperience, Daenerys took “exemplary” good care of her first cubs under such weather conditions.

Daenerys protected the five from torrential rains, licking water from their fluffy fur to keep them dry, curator Pavel Brandl said.

In the wild, the cheetah’s infant mortality is high because of predators, and cheetah cubs also are vulnerable to diseases such as pneumonia.

To make things worse, Daenerys suffered from an intestinal infection in August.

But despite all odds, the five looked lively and healthy on Friday.

“At this moment, everything seems fine, but it’s still a long run,” Brandl said. He said that it might take a year before it’s clear that they will survive the crucial period after their birth.

Scientists say every cub is critical to saving the species, which is threatened with extinction.

Cheetahs are the fastest animals on land that can reach maximum speeds of between 70 and 75 mph (112 kph and 120 kph). It’s estimated that fewer than 7,000 of them remain in the wild.

Ahead of his confirmation vote last year, Kennedy told lawmakers that he would not collect fees related to litigation he pursued before becoming a government official against the drugmakers of a cervical cancer vaccine, saying he would transfer his financial interests to his adult son.

The lawmakers say they recently learned, however, that shortly after his confirmation hearings, Kennedy quietly changed his ethics disclosures and transferred his stake to his former employer, the personal injury law firm Wisner Baum, apparently contradicting his sworn commitments to members of Congress.

In a letter sent to Kennedy on Thursday, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Ron Wyden of Oregon, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland said the health secretary has provided no explanation for the change.

“Your decision to withhold this information from Congress and apparent failure to report this change to agency ethics officials is deeply alarming,” the senators wrote. “These troubling findings call into question the veracity of your public ethics commitments, your transparency with Congress and the public, and potentially, your compliance with federal ethics disclosure laws and regulations.”

Emily G. Hilliard, an HHS spokeswoman, told The Associated Press that HHS had confirmed Kennedy's compliance with his ethics agreement in May 2025. “Any claim that Secretary Kennedy maintained a financial interest in this litigation after taking office is false,” she said.

Kennedy's testimony to lawmakers during his confirmation hearing has come under scrutiny before.

During the arduous confirmation process in which he needed the support of some skeptical Republican lawmakers to advance, Kennedy pledged to maintain vaccine policies that, once in office, he moved to change. He also said a 2019 trip to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines,” an account refuted by documents recently obtained by the AP. The Department of Health and Human Services has denied Kennedy lied over the Samoa trip.

Kennedy's initial ethics disclosure, filed in January 2025, allowed him to retain a 10% contingency fee in cases that he had referred to Wisner Baum. After warnings from lawmakers about the conflict of interest, Kennedy agreed to amend his ethics agreement to divest his interest to his son.

But in an Aug. 25 letter to Warren, HHS revealed Kennedy transferred those fees to Wisner Baum. Kennedy’s son Conor Kennedy is employed at the firm.

“At the time, Secretary Kennedy intended to assign those interests to a non-dependent adult family member,” said the letter. “After further consideration, Secretary Kennedy irrevocably assigned his outstanding contingency-fee interests in the Gardasil cases directly to Wisner Baum.”

The senators are now pushing Kennedy for answers on what his agreement with Wisner Baum entails, noting that if it involves any agreement about future payments, it could amount to a conflict of interest.

“If you made any kind of implicit or explicit agreement for future payment or other future rewards with Wisner Baum in exchange for assigning them this stake, it would mean that you have an ongoing conflict of interest that calls into question your integrity and the motivations for your decisions as HHS Secretary," the lawmakers' letter to Kennedy said.

The Dodgers are once again among the best teams in the big leagues, and they'll have several challengers in October, including the Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays. Los Angeles is rolling into the postseason and four-time MVP Shohei Ohtani returned to the lineup on Wednesday after a stint on the injured list. He appears ready for playoff baseball.

It was a busy Thursday in the playoff race, with the San Diego Padres, Chicago Cubs, Chicago White Sox and Cleveland Guardians all clinching invites to the postseason.

The New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox and Atlanta Braves have also previously clinched. Yankees slugger Aaron Judge, a three-time AL MVP, is dealing with a right calf strain that could keep him out through at least the Wild Card Series.

While the 12-team playoff field is mostly set, the final NL wild card and AL West winner are still up for grabs.

Here's some of what to watch as the season comes to a close.

Here's who can clinch a playoff spot Friday

The Philadelphia Phillies can lock up the final NL wild card with a win over the Rays and a D-backs loss to the Padres.

AL Central and West are tight, other division winners are set

There's quite a bit of mediocrity in the AL Central and West divisions this season, which has led to some fascinating pennant races and could lead to a sub-.500 team making the postseason.

The Guardians (83-76) have a narrow advantage over the White Sox (82-77) in the AL Central, but Chicago owns the head-to-head tiebreaker. Cleveland plays at Kansas City this weekend, while the White Sox host Colorado. Both teams have already clinched at least a wild card, but the division winner will get a bye into the Division Series.

The Rangers (79-80) and Astros (79-80) are fighting for the AL West, and Houston has the tiebreaker if the season ends in a tie. Texas is playing at Minnesota this weekend, and the Astros are playing in Sacramento against the A's.

In the National League, the Padres (89-70), Cubs (88-71) and Phillies (87-72) are jockeying for position in the wild-card race. The Diamondbacks (85-74) are a longshot to sneak past the Phillies into the bracket, but they've won five straight games and are still lurking two games back. Chicago holds the head-to-head tiebreaker for home field over Philadelphia and San Diego, and the Phillies own the tiebreaker over the Padres after sweeping that season series 6-0.

Chicago's series at Boston has already been impacted by a nor'easter hitting New England this weekend. The Cubs' Sunday finale was rescheduled as part of a doubleheader Friday, and they are now scheduled to conclude their season Saturday.

MVP races, stats to watch

MLB's major awards probably won't have much drama this season.

Both MVP races have strong favorites with Chicago's Pete Crow-Armstrong running away with the NL honor while Houston's Yordan Alvarez is the probable choice in the AL, though Tampa Bay's Junior Caminero has also had a fantastic season. Alvarez still has an outside shot at a Triple Crown. He leads the AL in batting average at .315 and his 41 homers are tied with Caminero, New York's Ben Rice and Baltimore's Pete Alonso. His 102 RBIs are eight back of Alonso.

For the Cy Young Award, Milwaukee flame thrower Jacob Misiorowski and New York ace Cam Schlittler are the favorites in the NL and AL, respectively.

The Rookie of the Year races also look set with Cincinnati's Sal Stewart and his 110-RBI season the leader in the NL and Detroit's Kevin McGonigle the favorite in the AL.

What is the MLB playoff format?

There are 12 teams that qualify for MLB’s postseason, including six teams from both the AL and NL. The three division winners in each league get seeds No. 1 through No. 3, ranked by win-loss record. Then the three wild-card teams get seeds No. 4 through No. 6, also ranked by win-loss record.

The top two teams with the best record in both the AL and NL automatically advance to the Division Series. The other eight teams play in the Wild Card Series, which is a best-of-three format beginning on Tuesday, Sept. 29. In both the AL and NL, the No. 6 seed will travel to face the No. 3 seed while the No. 5 seed goes to No. 4. The higher seed hosts all three games.

The winners then advance to the best-of-five Division Series, followed by the best-of-seven League Championship Series and a best-of-seven World Series between the winners of the AL and NL.

What is the MLB postseason schedule?

Wild Card Series: Sept. 29-Oct. 1 (NBC/Peacock)

Division Series: Oct. 3-10 (AL on TBS, NL on FOX/FS1)

Championship Series: Oct. 11-20 (AL on TBS, NL on FOX/FS1)

World Series: Oct. 23-31 (FOX)

Who are the favorites to win the World Series?

The Dodgers (+200) are the favorites to capture a third straight World Series title while the Brewers (+550), Rays (+800) and Yankees (+850) are viewed as the top contenders.

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See AP’s full MLB coverage here

The European Commission fined X late last year for breaches of the bloc’s landmark digital regulations, stoking tensions with Washington.

The U.S. Justice Department said Thursday that it had filed an application to support X's bid to have the case annulled at the European Union's General Court. It was the second time in three months that the Justice Department has intervened to defend a company owned by Musk.

In July, the Justice Department filed a motion to intervene in a civil rights lawsuit that alleges Musk’s xAI is illegally running dozens of natural gas turbines to power a $20 billion AI data center in Mississippi.

In that case, the NAACP and other groups said xAI failed to get a permit for its power plant — which is located near homes, schools and churches — creating health risks for families in North Mississippi and nearby Memphis and violating the federal Clean Air Act.

Trump and the world's richest businessman appeared to dial down a war of words that stunned Washington and Wall Street alike last year after Musk called Trump's tax breaks and spending cuts a “disgusting abomination.”

Musk on Thursday evening attended a state dinner held by Trump honoring China’s leader Xi Jinping, along with other tech titans.

The EU fine against X, which followed a two-year investigation, was the first penalty issued under the bloc's digital regulations governing online content. Regulators said X’s blue checkmarks broke the rules because they involved“deceptive design practices” and could expose users to scams and manipulation.

European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said Friday that it is the EU’s “sovereign right” to draft legislation aimed at protecting its citizens.

“We are enforcing our legislation objectively, transparently and with a solid case,” he told reporters. “We are ready to defend our position in court. We have a lot of evidence at our disposal, and it will be for the court to decide as always.”

The commission is the top enforcer of the 27-nation EU's Digital Services Act, which requires tech companies to clean up their online platforms under threat of hefty financial penalties.

But the rulebook has become a flashpoint with the Trump administration, and U.S. officials have criticized it as amounting to online censorship.

The Justice Department warned that the fine, if upheld, “may have significant implications” for U.S. online platforms and other companies providing digital services in the EU.

Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division said in Thursday's statement that the "European Commission inappropriately attempted to expand its regulatory authority to reach American companies not present or operating within its jurisdiction,”

“We will not tolerate the European Commission engaging in regulatory overreach to try and control American engines of innovation and economic growth,” he said.

When asked whether the Justice Department had informed the commission that it intended to back Musk, Regnier said: “We do not need to be informed about anything.”

He said the commission doesn't expect the case to hurt broader relations between Brussels and Washington, notably in talks to mitigate the damage of Trump administration tariffs.

“From our perspective, nothing will change because of a DSA case,” he said.

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AP Business Writer Kelvin Chan contributed to this report from London.

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This version corrects the day Regnier spoke to Friday instead of Thursday.

This is the message behind the San Antonio Food Bank’s Hunger Action Month campaign called “Nourishing in Numbers.”

Throughout September, the campaign is calling on the community to help neighbors facing hunger by donating food or money, volunteering or speaking up about food insecurity.

The need is significant. The San Antonio Food Bank provides food and other resources to more than 100,000 people each week across 29 counties in Southwest Texas. Rising grocery and energy costs are putting additional pressure on families, making community support more important than ever.

“Together, we can fight hunger, and together, we can feed hope,” said Eric Cooper, president and CEO of the San Antonio Food Bank.

Cooper said the campaign is about neighbors showing up for one another during a difficult time. Every contribution — whether it is food, time, money or advocacy — can help strengthen the community and move San Antonio closer to becoming hunger-free.

According to the latest data from Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap study, Texas had the highest level of food insecurity in the nation in 2024. In the San Antonio Food Bank’s service area, one in five people and one in four children are considered food insecure.

This month, the call to action is simple: nourish in numbers. When individuals come together, small acts of support can create a powerful response to hunger.

Ways we can fight hunger together

There are lots of ways to help people in our community, donate, sign up for a volunteer shift, or try one of the 30 Ways in 30 Days activities. You can also grab the San Antonio Food Bank’s Hunger Action Month toolkit.

Together, We Can Nourish San Antonio: Join KSAT Community and the San Antonio Food Bank

KSAT Community phone bank

This September, turn one phone call, one donation, into a powerful step toward a hunger-free San Antonio ... pick up the phone and take action.

KSAT Community will host a phone bank benefiting the San Antonio Food Bank from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. Every contribution made through the effort will directly support the Food Bank’s work to feed neighbors across the region.

A bag of groceries. An hour of volunteer time. A financial gift. A conversation that leads someone else to help. When San Antonio shows up together, those individual acts add up to something much bigger.

The San Antonio Food Bank is a nonprofit that provides food to more than 600 local groups across Southwest Texas. They also offer programs to help families not just get through a tough time but become more secure and independent in the long run.

KSAT Community operates in partnership with University Health and Randolph-Brooks Federal Credit Union. Click here to read about other KSAT Community efforts.

Interested in partnering with KSAT Community? Get in touch by filling out this form.

According to CNN, the ad-free standalone plans for Disney+ and Hulu will now cost $21.49 a month. That is an increase of $2.50 per month.

The ad-free Disney+ and Hulu bundle is also going up by $2; that plan will now cost $21.99 a month.

Subscribers who use ad-supported plans will see a smaller increase. Disney’s ad-supported standalone plans are rising by 50 cents per month.

There is no price change for customers who subscribe to the ad-supported Disney+ and Hulu bundle. That plan will remain the same.

The new prices take effect immediately for new subscribers. Existing subscribers will see the higher rates on their bills next month.

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• Attending top Alamodome concerts is about to get even more expensive
• New documentary explores Texas rivers, wildlife and water challenges

Leo spoke to reporters Friday on his way to France for a four-day visit. Asked by a CNN reporter about the Trump administration’s attempt to bar CNN and other reporters, Leo said the media was welcome on his plane.

“I am very happy that here, you are all welcome,” he said. Good media coverage is important, he said, and equally important "that we have it all the way around, for everyone”

CNN, MS NOW and Politico were back at the White House on Thursday after a judge handed them a reprieve from President Donald Trump's ban, but the extraordinary showdown between him and outlets whose coverage he dislikes continued.

On a high-profile day when Chinese leader Xi Jinping was visiting Washington and attending a state dinner, no major American network was airing live coverage, and both CNN and MS NOW said their journalists were denied access to Xi’s state dinner arrival.

The American pope has long affirmed the need for free and independent press, a point he made in one of his first audiences as pope. Speaking to journalists who covered the 2025 conclave that elected him, Leo called for the release of imprisoned journalists and affirmed the “precious gift of free speech and the press.”

That said, since the COVID-19 pandemic, independent media have been prevented from covering photo opportunities inside the pope's private studio when heads of state visit. Additionally, many of the pope's private audiences with other groups and individuals are closed to non-Vatican press.

Leo had opposed Trump on the war

Leo's airborne comments about Trump followed his April back-and-forth over the American president's criticism of his opposition to the Iran war. Leo's position won him points with some Parisans opposed to Trump's policies who came out in droves to celebrate the first official state visit by a pope in 18 years.

“He dared, at his level, to oppose the American president,” said retiree Thierry Marien, who lined up hours early to grab a spot on the popemobile route to Notre Dame cathedral, where Leo was to celebrate vespers later Friday. “Not because he is opposed to the American president but because he’s opposed to countries where we can see there’s a risk of their political systems becoming a bit more dictatorial and there are already enough of those in the world.”

“I appreciated that he did that. He could quite easily have said to himself, ‘In my situation, I won’t criticize any heads of state,'” he said.

Leo took further distance from the Trump administration policies later Friday by making a lengthy visit to UNESCO, the U.N. cultural and educational agency, from which the U.S. has withdrawn as part of its retreat from the international organization.

Leo, who has championed multilateral diplomacy, toured the UNESCO grounds inside and out, greeted its employees and received a guided tour of some of its art collections. He then delivered a speech on the values UNESCO espouses to promote peace through culture and education.

Leo apologizes to reporters

Also on the flight Friday, Leo also apologized for missing an opportunity to speak with the press the last time he traveled internationally, when his Iberia charter broke down in Spain's Canary Islands and he returned home solo on the king's private jet, skipping his traditional airborne press conference.

More than 70 reporters and the Vatican delegation waited for several hours at the airport for a replacement plane to arrive. Leo addressed the media's disappointment when he came to the back of the plane to greet reporters.

“A special mention I would like to make for those of you who were traveling with me when we returned to Rome from Spain,” he said. “I want to apologize personally for an incident, that I had nothing to do with, but which I know left a number of you unhappy with the fact that we couldn’t have the flight back together back to Rome.”

In other comments to reporters, Leo said he believed his alma mater Villanova would be the fan favorite when the Augustinian university plays the Catholic University of Notre Dame's basketball team in Rome on Nov. 1.

“They tell me that the people coming to the match, 90% are Villanova and 10% Notre Dame, so the voice of the people of God will be very strong on the Villanova side,” Leo said.

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Associated Press writer John Leicester in Paris contributed to this report.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

With his teammate Antonelli out of the running, Russell showed why Mercedes is such a big favorite at the Baku track as he went nearly a second faster than anyone else.

“When I crossed the line and I saw the gap. I was shocked. I knew the lap was was great,” Russell said.

Still, he added “you can't discount Kimi” for Saturday's race after Antonelli won from 19th on the grid at his home Italian Grand Prix this month. The 20-year-old Antonelli leads Russell by 81 points.

Ferrari's Charles Leclerc was .837 of a second off the pace in second and Oscar Piastri was third-fastest for McLaren, .001 further back. That was a big turnaround for Piastri after McLaren even resorted to using cable ties to hold together parts of the car's bodywork in a chaotic Friday practice.

“It’s been a little bit of a tricky one for us, but it’s not the first time this year," the Australian said. "I feel like we get to qualifying, we take all the fuel out and the car just comes alive more.”

Isack Hadjar was fourth for Red Bull on his return from injury and no one else got within a second of Russell on a disappointing day for McLaren's Lando Norris in fifth, Ferrari's Lewis Hamilton in sixth and Red Bull's Max Verstappen in eighth.

It's the first pole for Russell since the Austrian Grand Prix in June, which was also his last win. The long straight at Baku favors Mercedes' engine and car design.

Antonelli is set to start Saturday's race in 16th place on the grid after he clipped the wall and damaged a wheel and suspension in the first part of qualifying. He tried to get back to the pits but the team told him to stop because there was too much damage.

The Mercedes driver's previous lap time was enough to reach the second part of qualifying but he was unable to continue.

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See AP’s full auto racing coverage here

The nine-city iHeartRadio Jingle Ball Tour will visit: Dallas/Fort Worth; Los Angeles; Chicago; Detroit; New York; Boston; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia; and, for the first time, Nashville, Tennessee. The lineup will change depending on the city.

The tour will kick off at the Dickies Arena in Fort Worth, Texas, on Dec. 1 with Katseye, Raye, Ludacris, Myles Smith, Tove Lo, Kylie Cantrall, The Beaches and JYT.

Los Angeles is next with Rodrigo's only appearance on this tour Dec. 4; then Chicago led by Raye on Dec. 7; Detroit led by Warren on Dec. 8; Boston with Duff and Sombr on Dec. 13; Washington, D.C., with Jonas Brothers and Sombr on Dec. 14; Philadelphia with Puth and Sombr on Dec. 15; and Nashville with Duff and Warren on Dec. 17.

The Jingle Ball concert was first introduced in 1996 at Madison Square Garden by New York radio station Z100 and has since become a multicity tour and an annual tradition.

This year, the Dec. 11 Madison Square Garden concert will feature Duff, Sombr, Warren, Puth, Swims, Spiro, Tomorrow X Together & Yeonjun, Stella Lefty and Freya Skye with special guest performances from Bella Kay and The Beaches.

A presale for Capital One cardholders will begin Sept. 29 at 10 a.m. local time and end Oct. 1 or while supplies last. Tickets for the general public from Ticketmaster will go on sale Oct. 2.

The iHeartRadio Jingle Ball tour stops will be part of a nationwide television special as well, airing on ABC in December. It will be available on Hulu and Disney+ the next day.

Even if people think they’re registered, state officials are asking them to double-check.

This message comes after local county election boards received hundreds to tens of thousands of DPS voter registration applications that were backlogged, some dating back to October of last year.

>> How to make sure you’re registered to vote in the Nov. 3 election

Election offices across the region are rushing to process a backlog of voter registration applications after a “technological error” kept some submissions from reaching local counties for much of the past year.

The issue affects people who registered to vote while renewing a driver’s license or changing their address through DPS.

Those applications are normally sent daily to county election offices for processing.

According to a statement from DPS, a third-party vendor updated its software in October of last year. DPS officials said they identified the upload issue last month.

But Kendall County elections administrator Staci Decker told KSAT her office noticed the drop much earlier and immediately reported it to the state.

“What we normally got from DPS was about 40 applications a day,” Decker said. “Then that went down to under 20 applications a day.”

Decker said state officials acknowledged that multiple counties reported similar problems, but DPS said it had been sending all of the applications it received.

That changed Wednesday evening, when Kendall County and other election offices received hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of applications from DPS around 5 p.m.

“These are still valid applications,” Decker informed KSAT.

Election officials in 10 surrounding counties said the sudden influx means staff will need to work extra hours, including possible weekend shifts, to process the applications before the Oct. 5 voter registration deadline.

The delayed applications are adding pressure on county offices during an already busy election season.

“I don’t want voters in the state of Texas to be worried that there’s anything fraudulent or anything like that that’s happening,” Decker shared. “This is just an error that happened.”

Voters who recently registered through DPS and want to confirm their status before the November election can check their registration at VoteTexas.gov or contact their county voter registrar.

County election offices will continue processing the applications ahead of the Oct. 5 deadline.

Read also:

• Election officials say voters won’t see changes to mail-in ballots amid Supreme Court ruling

Israel wants the agency known as UNRWA out of Gaza and has repeatedly accused it of being infiltrated by Hamas militants, allegations the International Court of Justice says have not been substantiated. And yet UNRWA remains the territory’s largest aid provider, playing a key role in health and education.

Philippe Lazzarini, who led UNRWA until earlier this year, told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview — his first since stepping down — that members of the Palestinian technocratic committee want to work with the agency. Another U.N. official shared minutes from meetings where UNRWA and the committee discussed collaborating on plans for Gaza.

A Board of Peace official confirmed that board members had met multiple times with UNRWA officials.

And while the agency’s days are over, its programs “may persist if they are serving Gazans well,” the official added, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

Israel's Foreign Ministry did not comment.

UNRWA has more workers in Gaza than anyone else

There’s been no reconstruction in Gaza, almost a year since the ceasefire. Israel still prevents the entry of the Palestinian committee chosen by the Board of Peace to eventually govern the strip, saying Hamas must first disarm. The committee says it needs to be inside the strip to activate Gaza plans.

That's left UNRWA on the ground in Gaza, with far more workers than any other U.N. agency or nongovernmental organization. While Israel’s attacks on the agency neutered its role coordinating aid entry and distribution in Gaza, UNRWA’s core programs have remained.

“They want to get rid of the agency, but on the other hand they know that if you get completely rid of the agency today, it might have a further ... devastating impact on the population,” Lazzarini said.

UNRWA props up about half of Gaza’s public health system, said Lazzarini, whose last working day was March 31.

It still has around 11,000 Palestinian employees in Gaza. They conduct about 14,000 medical appointments daily, maintain water and waste management systems for over a million Palestinians, run digital literacy and math programs for over 280,000 children and staff temporary learning spaces for 60,000 more, UNRWA says.

UNRWA makes sure aid reaches people, Lazzarini said. “If you want the vaccine to end up in the mouths of the children, you still need the workforce, the presence of an agency like ours.”

UNRWA was told it's vital in planning Gaza's future

Publicly, the agency has not been included in the Board of Peace’s planning for Gaza. At the board's briefing to the U.N. General Assembly Wednesday, officials named various U.N. agencies as partners, but not UNRWA.

However, behind the scenes, the Palestinian committee that will eventually govern Gaza acknowledged that UNRWA is necessary for planning, Lazzarini said.

Two senior U.N. officials and the board official told the AP the board had met multiple times with UNRWA since the ceasefire was signed.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media, confirmed at least three meetings between UNRWA officials and the Palestinian committee this year, most recently this month. Two took place during Lazzarini’s tenure.

Shortly before the end of his tenure, Lazzarini said, he spoke to Ali Shaath, who leads the Palestinian committee.

“Basically, he said, ‘I don’t know how I can succeed without you’,” Lazzarini said. Shaath and a spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

An internal U.N. description of a Jan. 26 meeting in Cairo, held without UNRWA, said Shaath praised the agency, showed a clear intention to see it back on track and said the Palestinian committee's system would largely build on its work.

The Tony Blair Institute, a Board of Peace partner, also asked for UNRWA’s help and spoke to UNRWA personnel, one senior U.N. official said. In response, the institute said it works with multiple U.N. agencies and NGOs in Gaza "to understand the situation on the ground, the needs of the population and the practical requirements for improving conditions.”

At a pledging conference for UNRWA on June 30, the agency's current acting chief, Christian Saunders, called it “vital” to efforts by the board to move forward with the ceasefire.

But the Board of Peace official painted a different picture, saying the meetings focused on determining how UNRWA’s operations work in order to develop programs that are “far more efficient and accountable.”

“UNRWA’s days are over,” the official said. Still, its employees ”will remain if they pass vetting and are delivering on their mandate and not advancing ideology or Hamas interests.”

Lazzarini said it's an “absurd contradiction" — the Board of Peace says UNRWA is not wanted while U.N. member countries “expect it to deliver.”

“We continue to emphasize that UNRWA is indispensable,” Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi told journalists Thursday, after over 50 countries attended a ministerial meeting on the agency at U.N. headquarters.

Lazzarini says he has faced personal attacks

UNRWA was established to help Palestinians who fled or were driven out of what is now Israel during the 1948 war surrounding its creation.

In January 2024, Israel claimed, without providing evidence, that hundreds of Palestinian militants worked for the agency and over a dozen employees took part in the Oct. 7 attack.

Lazzarini said that he was never given written evidence to back up the allegations despite asking Israel and UN member states, but that he doesn't regret his decision to fire the employees accused of taking part in the attack.

“I did because it was in the best interest of the agency and the population we were helping," Lazzarini said, adding that he has faced “extraordinary vicious, heinous attacks on social media” as well as being accosted in the streets, "in Geneva and in New York” and shouted at by "pro-Israeli groups.”

In his two-hour interview with the AP, he shared recollections from the Gaza war.

He remembered how Palestinians released from Israeli detention told his staff they'd worn diapers in detention and had spent days sitting in their own excrement. He remembered how a displaced father — staying in a school courtyard with four kids — slept with shoes at his head, in case they needed to evacuate from bombardment.

His book, “A Witness to Gaza: What Cannot Be Erased,” will be published in French in October, with an English version to follow.

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Associated Press writer Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s inaction on the mFlusiva vaccine marks a break in longstanding practice. It’s also an example of how the agency’s vaccine review-and-recommendation process has been blown up in the past year, grinding decision-making to a halt.

Efforts by vaccine-wary officials in President Donald Trump's administration to scale back shot recommendations have been put on hold. Federal guidance on new vaccines has stopped. And public discussion of vaccine policy questions that might cross political divides — including whether there’s solid evidence to justify giving fewer shots to kids — has diminished.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crusade to upend vaccine policy and the legal action opposing it have disrupted longstanding systems that deliver crucial health guidance to Americans, affecting whether people are getting the best available protection against vaccine-preventable diseases.

“We find ourselves at a point where even if credible evidence (for a new vaccine policy) has reached a tipping point, we don’t have an obvious mechanism that can formalize that change,” said Jason Schwartz, a Yale University health policy researcher who studies government health agencies.

Many in the medical field praised a court ruling that halted Kennedy’s changes

For 60 years, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices guided the CDC’s vaccine recommendations. The committee met publicly, reviewed vaccine data and sought input from various health groups. The panel voted on recommendations that went to the CDC director, who almost always adopted them as the government’s guidance, leading public and private insurers to pay for the shots.

Trump, a Republican, appointed Kennedy to oversee federal health agencies, including the CDC. Kennedy last year dismissed the committee and replaced it with a group that included several anti-vaccine voices. Controversial decisions followed, leading to a lawsuit from the American Academy of Pediatrics and some other medical groups.

In March, a federal judge said Kennedy likely violated federal procedures, stopped Kennedy’s panel from holding further meetings and suspended Kennedy’s decision to reduce the number of vaccines recommended for children.

Many in the medical and public health communities celebrated the decision and took the order as a respite from what they saw as the Trump administration’s assault on vaccines.

Dr. Jason Goldman, president of the American College of Physicians, said he hoped “it will mean a return to a transparent and evidence-driven process that safeguards the health of all communities and the best interests of our patients.”

In reality, the process stalled and splintered

With Kennedy’s committee shut down by the court order, doctors’ groups that used to collaborate with the ACIP have gone their own way. Working with a University of Minnesota researcher, they have debated — not publicly — the kind of medical evidence formerly presented at ACIP meetings and issued their own recommendations.

The trade association for private health insurers decided to heed the medical societies’ choices, and the insurers have continued to pay for shots recommended by those organizations.

Many of the groups’ recommendations match prior ones made by ACIP and the CDC before Kennedy’s arrival. But they also made their own updates.

For example, ACIP previously recommended that a new shot be given to women late in pregnancy: a vaccine against respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, which can be dangerous to newborns. The government panel recommended that the vaccine be given between September and January in most of the U.S., to coincide with the time of year when RSV infections are most common.

But RSV season sometimes remains active longer. For that reason, the medical groups recently said the shot should be offered to those women through the beginning of March.

“We all recognized this needs to evolve,” Chris Regal, director of clinical innovation at America’s Health Insurance Plans, the health insurance trade association, said in a recent webinar.

The official CDC guidance remains unchanged.

Unanswered vaccine issues are piling up

The mFlusiva flu shot is another example of the unusual way vaccine policy updates have stalled.

The shot is the first flu vaccine made with the mRNA technology that was key to ending the COVID-19 pandemic. Kennedy has criticized mRNA vaccines and last year canceled contracts for the development of new ones. The shots also took a tortuous path through the FDA, which finally granted full approval in people ages 50 to 64.

But the CDC this month quietly posted that it has decided to maintain its flu vaccine endorsements from last year due to “legal uncertainties and inquiries.” That means mFlusiva is not among the listed flu vaccines recommended to the public this fall.

The medical societies are recommending it as an option, however.

Another ACIP function was to vote on whether certain vaccines should be covered by Vaccines for Children, a government program that pays for shots for children who have no health insurance.

The FDA approved updated COVID-19 vaccines, but as the summer dragged on — and fall vaccination campaigns got underway — the government would not say if the VFC program will pay for those shots. It was only this week that officials confirmed orders could be placed through that program.

HPV vaccine reassessment is derailed

Another question concerns the HPV vaccine, given to preteens to prevent certain cancers.

Two HPV shots are recommended, but some recent research has suggested that perhaps one shot could be enough — at least for girls. Indeed, in 2024 the ACIP formed a working group to begin a reassessment of the recommendations.

That work was derailed when Kennedy fired the entire committee. In January, he decided on his own to order that the number of recommended doses be reduced to one as part of a dramatic contraction of the childhood vaccination schedule. His decision was suspended by the judge’s order.

Experts are trying to better understand the timing and the duration of protection from just one dose, particularly in boys. The American Academy of Pediatrics is weighing a change to its HPV vaccination recommendations and could reach a conclusion later this year, said the AAP’s Dr. James Campbell.

It’s possible that the medical societies will end up agreeing with Kennedy on just how many HPV shots make sense. But that might not necessarily clear up the current mess, Schwartz said.

“The credibility of the Trump administration, when it comes to vaccine recommendations, is so compromised in the eyes of the mainstream medical and public health communities,” he said, “that even recommendations that might align with where the public health community was trending are likely to be viewed with skepticism or distrust.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is considering changing the federal government's categories for vaccine recommendations, although a specific proposal has not been released and a Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson did not respond to questions about what is being contemplated. Public comments were due earlier this week.

An alliance of 15 Democratic state governors said the proposed changes are likely to increase confusion and administrative complexity.

“It’s Governors and their residents who bear the brunt of any increased disease outbreaks due to confusion related to hastily made federal changes,” Angela Botticella, managing director of the Governors Public Health Alliance, said in a statement.

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The Associated Press’ health and science coverage receives financial support from the AP Fund for Journalism and private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find the AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Trump’s rare welcome of Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, at the airport, as well as the bilateral and cultural events the leaders attended were closely covered — and praised — by Chinese state media. Those who watched at home saw a China elevated in status.

“I read the news that the U.S. reception standards for President Xi are very high,” Xiang Ziyu, a postgraduate student in Beijing, told The Associated Press. “I’m quite impressed because it shows that our country has become really powerful.”

That takeaway was shared by several people interviewed by the AP as well as in comments on Chinese social media, which praised China's cooperation with the United States.

The official People’s Daily newspaper allocated the entire front page to the trip, featuring six photos of the Xi-Trump meetings.

Meanwhile, on the Chinese search engine Baidu, the three most popular search topics on Friday were the talks between Trump and Xi; the state dinner attended by Xi and Peng; and greetings extended by Xi to Chinese people on the occasion of the Mid-Autumn Festival being celebrated on Friday.

Shen Zuohang, a Beijing resident, felt reassured by the coverage and by Trump and Xi’s seeming agreeability on topics like trade, artificial intelligence and security.

“We have no trade war and no military conflict. Even on the issue of Taiwan we are moving in a good direction instead of having heated confrontation,” Shen said.

“The two sides are handling issues in a more acquiescent way.”

According to China’s Foreign Ministry, Xi called on Trump to oppose the independence of Taiwan, an island democracy China claims as its own territory, and to handle the issue with caution. Trump did not immediately make comments on Taiwan, but had previously described U.S. arms sales to the island as open to negotiations with China.

Xiang, the student, said the summit overall sent a positive signal and will help improve the Chinese public’s opinion of the relations between the two countries.

“It is better than not communicating,” he said.

___

Associated Press video producer Wayne Zhang in Beijing and writer Simina Mistreanu in Taipei, Taiwan, contributed to this report.

As the war with Iran has dragged on, Trump and Netanyahu have split over how to prosecute it, straining a relationship between the two allies. Netanyahu has also faced global criticism both for Israel’s war in Gaza and settler violence in the occupied West Bank. Instead of a packed itinerary, Netanyahu, who arrived in New York on Thursday, was to meet only a handful of leaders before giving his speech.

The apparent snub underscored how badly the relationship between Trump and the prime minister has fractured. Many in Washington associate Netanyahu with the increasingly unpopular fight with Iran and Trump has labored to avoid the appearance that the Israeli leader forced him into a war that Trump said would be a “little excursion” lasting only weeks.

Netanyahu's brief visit also demonstrated how isolated he is globally, three years after launching a punishing war in Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. He faces reelection next month in polls widely seen as a referendum on his responsibility for the security failures surrounding the attacks and his ability to defend Israel's reputation on the world stage.

Still, Netanyahu was unfazed when scores of diplomats marched out when he took the stage on Thursday.

“If there are any other moral cowards who have not yet left this hall, please do so now,” Netanyahu said and delivered a defiant speech lashing out at critics who accuse Israel of genocide and war crimes in Gaza.

He also accused New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who had called for Netanyahu's arrest, of spreading lies about Israel and endangering Jewish New Yorkers.

Netanyahu is a master showman

Still, the prime minister is a master showman, often turning to props and visual aids during speeches in flawless English to drive home his message. His speech, ahead of next month's elections, appeared aimed at Israeli voters, and was repeatedly interrupted by cheers from supporters he had brought into the hall.

“He times his speech so that it is broadcast here in primetime,” said Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. who served under Netanyahu and lives in Israel.

But experts say without the usual high-profile meetings, the trip could hurt Netanyahu’s image at home.

“I think the trip is a mistake, because it exposes his weaknesses,” said Eytan Gilboa, an expert on U.S.-Israel relations and professor at Israel’s Bar-Ilan and Reichman universities.

While many Israelis view the U.N. as hostile toward Israel, he added, the fact that he could not secure a meeting with Trump only highlights how poorly Netanyahu has managed the relationship with his nation's strongest ally.

In 2023, U.S. President Joe Biden was reluctant to host Netanyahu at the White House but still made time to sit down with him on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly.

“Israel cannot survive without the United States,” Gilboa said.

Meanwhile, Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel and a longtime supporter of Israeli settlements, has sharply criticized settlers attacking Palestinian communities in the West Bank. In unusual remarks for an ambassador, he referred to the attackers as “terrorists."

“It’s significant of a deeper rift,” Oren said of Netanyahu's slim itinerary.

When Trump was in New York on Tuesday, he met with an array of leaders from Arab nations, as well as from Denmark, Japan, Greenland, Ukraine and Venezuela, among others. He then quickly returned to Washington to roll out the red carpet for Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Netanyahu has met with Trump seven times since the U.S. president's return to office in January 2025, though only once since the war with Iran began.

Not meeting the president was a “big, big miss for him at a time where he can’t afford misses,” said Natan Sachs, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

On other past trips, Netanyahu met with a slate of high-profile leaders, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and then-German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

This year, though, the prime minister's office said “many world leaders” asked to meet with Netanyahu during his brief visit, but that he was on a “tight schedule” and needed to return to Israel before the start of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, which begins at sundown on Friday.

On his schedule, the statement said, were leaders from Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Panama, Ethiopia, Greece, Slovenia, and Papua New Guinea.

The order affects the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality as questions grow over how data centers use electricity, water and other infrastructure. The facilities support much of what people do online every day, including phone notifications, text messages, online banking, streaming video and social media posts.

Demand for data centers has surged as artificial intelligence and other digital technologies expand.

Ali Mehrizi-Sani, a professor with the Virginia Tech College of Engineering, said a recent Google report found a typical AI prompt uses about .24 watt-hours of electricity and five or six drops of water. While that may seem small, Mehrizi-Sani said the impact grows when multiplied by billions of daily uses.

One study projects AI data centers could consume 12% of U.S. electricity by 2030.

He noted, however, that some existing technologies, including air conditioning and cooling systems, already use comparable amounts of power.

Mehrizi-Sani said communities should ask questions about proposed data centers but should also weigh both the benefits and drawbacks.

“We can’t really assume that data center is necessarily a negative development or a positive development,” he said. “It really depends on the way that data centers are implemented, the types of investments that they are going to require and what changes in the infrastructure they would necessitate.”

Some advocates are pushing Abbott to call a special session so lawmakers can consider new regulations for data centers.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also said he is investigating hundreds of Texas data centers over water-use reporting. That investigation is expected to continue at least through the end of the year.

Read also:

• ‘We don’t really know the answers’: San Antonio realtors say it’s too early to tell how data centers affect home values
• San Antonio city council leans toward data center regulation, but a moratorium seems less likely

During a meeting on Thursday night, the exchange began when Street questioned City Manager Brian Rowland about numbers in the proposed budget.

Street said she had previously sent questions to Rowland but did not receive the information she was seeking until she arrived at the meeting.

“I’m not voting for a budget where I can’t get answers prior to the meeting or even in the meeting,” Street said. “I don’t know why you expect me to just roll over and say yes when we have not had any discussion over these items.”

Street also raised concerns about pay for firefighters. She said firefighters should be making at least $20 an hour, similar to police officers, and said the department had been waiting more than four years for a pay increase.

Street said she would not support a budget unless that raise was included.

Mayor Janeshia Grider and Rowland said a pay raise for fire department staff is included in the proposed budget.

Rowland later responded, “As an elected official, you shouldn’t be here cherry-picking (what) departments should get: this department gets 50 cents, this department gets $4. It should be across the board.”

As the discussion continued, Grider warned Street to stop interrupting. The proposed budget was not passed.

Tensions continued later when the council discussed an administration fee. Street questioned how the fee could affect businesses.

“Why are we going to be able to get businesses in here when they have to pay extra money?” Street asked Rowland, while another councilmember said he had already answered her questions.

A motion was then made to remove Street from the meeting.

Grider said Street had received multiple warnings before the council voted 4-2 to remove her. Street was then escorted out.

Street was elected to the Kirby City Council last year. She was also removed from a meeting in July after questioning city officials.

Read more:

• Kirby mayor defends vote to remove council member from meeting by police

“She said, ‘When I come back home, we will drink the tea made from Chinese flowers,’” said Oles Visich, Kalynychenko’s partner. He has now been waiting for news about her for a month, after she and thousands of others disappeared in catastrophic flooding along the Nepal-China border.

Her last known location was exiting China at a border post at 10:22 a.m. local time, 15 minutes before the flood.

Kalynychenko, 36, was part of a group of 56 people, mostly Ukrainians, who had traveled to Mount Kailash in Tibet for a spiritual retreat.

Their families' situation is a sign of how complex and time-consuming the process is of rescuing, recovering and identifying victims lost to the disaster. Given the number of missing, the process will likely take months.

They disappeared while heading from China to Nepal on their way home. Some relatives say they have received no information from authorities. The Chinese government has told at least two families that their relatives left Chinese territory before the flood struck, but they haven't been able to confirm whether they entered Nepal as Nepal's immigration complex and its records were destroyed in the floods.

Little information is reaching families

The floods killed more than 1,400 people and left more than 6,000 missing, most of them on the Nepali side of the border. Nepal has said that 636 foreign nationals remain missing, including 54 Ukrainians. China has reported 261 foreign nationals among the missing on its side, including one Ukrainian.

Families in Ukraine say most of them have not received any answers since realizing their relatives were among the missing.

“We only have the statistics that are being posted online — how many people have been found, how many are alive, how many are dead, and how many are still missing,” said Stanislav Solohub, whose brother and sister-in-law went missing on Aug. 25.

Nepal says it has recovered 1,451 bodies, but only 112 have been handed over to families so far.

The government said it has collected DNA samples from 2,035 relatives so far, but it has not disclosed how many victims have been identified.

Last messages were sent minutes before the floods began

The group, led by Irina Blonskaya, a spiritual teacher who often organized retreats, was returning from its journey home in China when the flood struck Aug. 26. Their plan was to travel by bus from the Tibet region to Kathmandu, where its members would board flights to their respective countries. The group’s last message was sent at 8:27 a.m. Nepal time, about 10 minutes before the mountain slope collapsed.

Many had not checked in with their loved ones that morning, owing to the time difference.

Authorities have said the floods were triggered when a section of ice and rock broke away from a Himalayan mountain slope, creating a fast-moving torrent of water, ice, mud and debris. It destroyed communities and Gyirong Port, a border crossing used by some pilgrims traveling to or returning from Mount Kailash.

‘Who is looking for them?’

Vladsylava Horlova’s mother, Elena, was traveling in the group as well. She initially found her mother’s name on the list of the missing from the Nepali government, but hasn't received any further information from the Nepali side. Later, the Chinese embassy confirmed her mother had left the country, and was not counted in China's list of missing people.

Horlova, a college student who is a refugee in Norway, worries that her mother was not recorded as being in either country, and that neither side is looking for her. There’s a stretch of road between the Nepali immigration building and the Chinese one along the border, videos from travelers show.

“You think about what if someone appeared to be in a no man’s land or that they left China, but not physically, who’s looking for them?” she asked.

Horlova has attempted to contact organizations ranging from the Ukrainian embassy in China, to Norwegian police, and even the Red Cross. She, like the others, has submitted her DNA samples to police to help the search.

On the other side of the border, China has said that when the remains of foreigners are identified, it will notify their respective embassies, but the authorities have not given any details about how many identities have been confirmed so far.

People still have hope

Though it has been a month since the original disaster, some families are still holding on to hope.

Just days before Kalynychenko left for her travels, she organized a retreat for women in Ukraine whose partners were fighting on the front lines of the war, some of whom had not heard from their partners for two years.

Visich, her partner, sees the irony of his situation, but like others in the group, has chosen to stay positive. Visich, also a psychologist, wrote a support guide for others like himself, offering tips on mental health.

“Because for my Olenka, for example, the most important thing in our connection is that each other … needs to be happy,” Visich said.

___

Associated Press writer Binaj Gurubacharya in Kathmandu, Nepal and senior video producer Volodymr Yurchuk in Kyiv, Ukraine contributed to this report.

Tarek's father carried him on foot from the southwestern city of Mokha as Iran-backed rebels swept in this month, bringing a return to civil war. The boy reached a hospital two days later in the government-held city of Aden, 270 kilometers (170 miles) away but it said it had no beds. Like others, it was overwhelmed by the wounded. They finally found a therapeutic feeding center.

The boy arrived in “acute crisis” after the delay in care, according to the center's director, Dr. Arwa Atef, and he only began walking again on Wednesday, over a week later.

“I swear to God, when I look at him, my heart breaks,” said his father, Mohammed al-Salami. “He looks almost lifeless.”

This is how the already fragile health system in the Arab world’s poorest nation is collapsing, caught in a new front of the Iran war. The Associated Press spoke with patients, medical workers and aid groups in Yemen as medicines run short and some workers flee. A few facilities have been overtaken by the fighting.

Some health centers are turning pregnant women and others in need away to focus on trauma patients. Vulnerable children are filling incubators and sharing beds. Millions of people are affected by the fighting backed by two of the Middle East’s biggest powers as Iran-backed Houthis advance against government forces supported by Saudi Arabia. Over 130,000 have fled their homes.

The feeding center where Tarek and other children are recovering is struggling to cope with a rise in patients in a country where many already were hungry, Atef said.

“We can’t keep up with the situation,” she said.

Overwhelmed hospitals focus on the wounded

Most hospitals and primary health centers affected by the escalation in fighting closed for the first 48 hours before resuming services, the United Nations said. But the Houthis have seized the Red Sea coast, including key ports for aid.

“The areas with some of the highest health needs are increasingly difficult to reach,” the World Health Organization said Friday.

Less than 10% of the affected health centers are fully equipped with the trauma services that wounded people need, WHO has said. With resources thin, a painful triage is underway.

Fewer facilities are handling the pregnancy-related emergencies that were killing three Yemeni women every day even before the escalation, said Francesco Galtieri with the United Nations Population Fund. That's one of the highest rates in the Arab world.

"Around 2,000 pregnant women are on the move,” with over 200 expected to deliver in the next week or so, he said.

Maternity wards have been converted into emergency rooms in some hospitals close to the fighting, said Hashem Osseiran, an International Committee of the Red Cross spokesperson, adding that many lack enough anesthesia drugs, oxygen supplies and sterile surgical gloves.

At a hospital treating mothers and children in the government-held city of Marib, Dr. Ahmed Modhesh said they are seeing more emergency maternity cases as other city hospitals focus on the wounded.

But his facility, Martyr Mohamed Hayel hospital, lacks intensive care specialists and doesn’t have enough generators to keep all departments running if the power goes out.

A midwife said the number of childbirths the hospital is handling has basically doubled to about 80. One woman with an ectopic pregnancy arrived bleeding heavily, yet the under-resourced staff were still able to perform an emergency procedure to save her life, the midwife said. She spoke on condition of anonymity because she wasn’t authorized to speak with the media.

Yemen’s healthcare was in trouble before the fighting

Even before the escalation, hospitals in Yemen relied on limited government support and citizen donations. Some were not able to fully pay staff.

Now, “we are in a very dangerous situation,” said Fahd al-Nazari, manager of the health office in Taiz province, which has received most of the newly displaced. “Within a day or two, or a week at most, we might have to close down (some facilities). In fact, some hospitals are already closed.”

Three of the province’s 17 hospitals are no longer under government control. Hospitals across Taiz had received around 635 casualties, including 112 bodies, as of Thursday after the Houthis captured Mokha, al-Nazari said. They included civilians and combatants.

“We’re exhausted receiving wounded people under these circumstances,” al-Nazari said.

Medical supplies and fuel are running short after key supply routes between Mokha and Taiz were largely cut off, forcing convoys onto mountainous roads unsuitable for large trucks. Even before the escalation, public hospitals in the province had just one MRI machine available.

At the Yemeni-Swedish Maternity and Children's Hospital in Taiz, incubators were full and two or three children were sharing beds in the emergency room, general manager Sami al-Sharabi said.

“I’m scared that the conflict would reach the hospital,” he said. “Any explosive that could hit us would destroy the hospital, as some parts of the building are already weak.”

Even hospitals in Aden, where Yemen’s government is based, struggle to cope. Doctors Without Borders said more than 60 wounded people had been admitted to Al-Gamhouria hospital in a week. Many needed urgent surgery or blood transfusions.

Fighters are also seeking emergency treatment

At a private hospital treating rebels in the Houthi-held city of Sanaa, two medical officials last week said it was overwhelmed with hundreds of wounded. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns.

It was not clear how many Houthi fighters have been killed or wounded overall. Few aid agencies operate in rebel-controlled areas, as the group has detained and harassed dozens of humanitarian workers. Experts say the Houthis have struggled to pay salaries to civil servants, including public sector doctors and diverted most tax revenues to their military wing.

The ICRC, one of the few global agencies still able to operate in Sanaa, last week said it delivered 22 tons of badly needed medical supplies to support “overwhelmed” hospitals.

There is also little information about casualties among government forces, though one government-allied group has said over 1,500 of its fighters were wounded.

Some medical workers have fled the conflict, making it harder to find care.

In Mokha, Doctors Without Borders said its small team was still working “despite the severe shortage of health professionals.” The charity’s deputy coordinator of operations in Yemen, Emmanuel Massart, said three other hospitals there had closed for days before resuming services.

Resupplying remains a major challenge because of closed roads, Massart said.

“We should not forget about Yemen," he said. It “remains one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.”

___

Khaled reported from Cairo and Anna from Jerusalem. Associated Press writers Abdulnasser Alseddik in Aden and Toqa Ezzidin in Cairo contributed to this report.

But the policy has remained in force for the past 18 months, and Poland is now urging the 27-nation bloc to allow temporary suspensions of asylum applications during episodes of “instrumentalized” mass migration elsewhere — a move that rights advocates warn could violate international law.

The border between Poland and Belarus, a non-EU country that is aligned with Russia, runs for about 400 kilometers (250 miles).

Since 2021, EU authorities have accused authoritarian Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of weaponizing migration by luring people to his country to find an easier entry point into the bloc than the more dangerous routes across the Mediterranean Sea.

European Commission announces new emergency framework

The prospect of an EU-wide approach appeared to move closer on Sept. 16, when European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that the EU executive branch would soon propose a new “European emergency response framework” for cases of “engineered and weaponized” mass migration.

The new emergency framework would allow for “flexibility” in applying standard migration procedures under specific circumstances and for a limited period of time, she said.

Von der Leyen didn't specify what procedures would be made flexible. It's unclear what form this proposed framework would take, whether it would need approval from the EU Parliament and EU leaders, and how soon it might come into practice. The European Commission didn't respond to requests from The Associated Press to list those procedures.

But Poland’s deputy interior minister in charge of migration, Maciej Duszczyk, celebrated the announcement as a sign that Europe was becoming interested in what he calls “the Polish solution.”

“We are happy that what we’ve been saying for a year, or a year and a half, is now becoming mainstream in the EU,” Duszczyk told the AP in an interview.

He said that the July border crisis in Ceuta, when more than 70,000 people suddenly crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave in North Africa, “made the EU realize” that other countries can be affected by similar border crises as Poland.

Tineke Strik, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, told the AP that she fears von der Leyen’s new emergency framework is indeed poised to take the Polish model EU-wide and legitimize the curtailing of asylum.

“If you normalize it, if you make it the default policy of all EU member states, you (the Poles) are not falling outside of the framework,” Strik said. “It simply has been legalized.”

“That would of course really undermine the core of the European and international asylum law — namely that people always must have the possibility to ask for asylum before they can be returned because otherwise you don’t know what will happen to them,” she said.

Michael O’Flaherty — the human rights commissioner for the Council of Europe, which is unrelated to the EU — said that the fact that the suspension of the right to asylum now appears in discussions at the EU level “worries” him because “it can very easily cross the line into a violation of international law.”

Critics say legalizing the suspension of asylum would constitute a major blow to fundamental human rights, particularly the principle of non-refoulement, which bars countries from returning people to places where they may face persecution. The principle was enshrined in the postwar refugee protection system after Jews and others fleeing Nazi persecution were refused safe haven during World War II.

‘Polish solution’ contrary to international law, rights groups say

Duszczyk said that the suspension of the right to asylum in Poland is fully compatible with international law and that people in the most vulnerable categories — pregnant women, children or those facing persecution in Belarus — can still apply for asylum even under the current system.

“Each person who appears on the border has the right to speak to the Polish border guards and explain their situation,” Duszczyk said.

But the Polish ombudsman and nongovernmental organizations assisting migrants on the border contradict the minister.

“Visibly pregnant women might stand a chance, but in the case of sick people or teenagers who are minors, their arguments are typically undermined,” said Karolina Czerwinska from the Association for Legal Intervention, a Polish NGO offering legal aid to migrants.

Duszczyk said that the world today has changed since the 1950s, when countries recovering from the traumas of World War II created a system of international law, including refugee rights, meant to protect individuals from state violence.

Czerwinska said that “we Poles located on the front lines of the war in Ukraine should really make sure human rights are respected. We may need to make use of them ourselves.”

EU's new migration pact already outdated, Poland says

Human rights groups said that von der Leyen's announcement came as a surprise, because the EU’s new Pact on Migration and Asylum, which took effect three months ago, already allowed countries faced with border crises to deviate from standard asylum procedures by extending deadlines for processing applications and holding migrants in detention for longer periods of time.

But Duszczyk said that von der Leyen's announcement meant that the European Commission recognized the new pact was “not enough” and that “we need a new instrument in EU law which guarantees that sometimes we can suspend normal procedures and have a sort of state of emergency.”

According to the Polish minister, the European Commission is expected to give more details about the framework during a summit of interior ministers on Oct. 1, and discussions would continue during a European Council summit later that month.

___

Sam McNeil contributed to this report from Brussels.

It is the second big round of store closures under Starbucks Chairman and CEO Brian Niccol, who joined the company in 2024. Last September, Starbucks closed 627 stores in North America and Europe.

In a letter to employees, Starbucks Chief Operating Officer Mike Grams said the locations targeted either aren’t delivering acceptable financial results or can’t provide the kind of experience that Starbucks wants for customers and employees.

The company didn’t say Thursday which coffeehouses will close or how many are located in the U.S.

Starbucks Workers United, which represents workers at the 700 company-owned U.S. Starbucks stores that have voted to unionize, said 20 unionized stores are among the 250 that are closing, or 8% of the total. Starbucks stores have been voting to unionize since late 2021, but the union and the company have yet to reach a labor agreement.

Grams said Starbucks is continuing to retrofit its North American coffeehouses to make them cozier and more inviting. The company expects 1,500 stores will be retrofitted by Sept. 30, which is the end of Starbucks’ fiscal year.

“This progress has given us a clearer view of the performance of every coffeehouse,” Grams said in his letter. “While most are benefiting from this overall momentum, some coffeehouses continue to underperform despite the hard work and commitment of all of you.”

Grams said Starbucks is still committed to growing its store count in North America. At the end of June, the company had 18,371 stores in the region.

Starbucks said it will transfer employees to other stores if possible or provide severance support if it’s not able to place an employee in another location. Starbucks Workers United said Thursday it’s sending a formal request for information to Starbucks about the planned closures and will engage in bargaining at every unionized store.

Starbucks has also been cutting its corporate ranks. The company laid off 900 nonretail employees when it closed stores last September. In May, Starbucks laid off an additional 300 corporate employees and closed some underused U.S. offices.

The company said it will incur $300 million in restructuring charges with this round of closures, including $200 million in cash charges as it exits leases and pays employee separation benefits and $100 million in non-cash charges due to the disposal and impairment of coffeehouse assets.

Starbucks shares fell less than 1% Thursday in afternoon trading.

The South Texas Coastal Initiative collects oyster shells from restaurants and events, including San Antonio’s Fiesta Oyster Bake, and sends them to the Sink Your Shucks oyster recycling program, operated by Texas A&M University and the Harte Research Institute in Corpus Christi.

The shells are used to restore oyster reefs, which provide habitat for marine life and help filter water in the Gulf of Mexico.

“One single oyster can filter 50 gallons of water, which is huge and very important for the ecosystem,” Jorge Rodriguez, a supporter of the initiative and STCI member, said.

San Antonio residents consume about 100,000 oysters during Fiesta Oyster Bake weekend alone, according to organizers of the event. STCI says recycling those shells is critical as more oysters are harvested and eaten than are left in the water to reproduce and strengthen reefs.

“We actually pick up all the shells at the Oyster Bake,” said Ernest Brown with South Texas Coastal Initiative. “We give them to the Sink Your Shucks program ... and they use them to rebuild oyster reefs.”

Oyster reefs also support fish, shrimp, crabs and other marine life.

“First and foremost, (the goal is) to clean the water, get rid of the pollution, because that helps all the other fish and animals and shrimp and crabs,” Brown said. “They’re a real key species because of what they do to keep the environment clean. They’re like trees cleaning the air.”

A company that STCI contracts collects shells from San Antonio restaurants two to three times a week. The shells must then be cleaned and prepared before they can be returned to the coast.

Brown said the work requires fundraising of about $150,000 a year. The organization raises money through fundraisers and online donations.

H-E-B donated $50,000 to support the effort.

“We were really compelled by their passion behind what they do, which is ultimately to restore the oyster population in the Texas bays,” said Lainey Riebesehl with H-E-B Environmental Affairs.

The South Texas Coastal Initiative still hopes to raise additional funds. Organizers said cities including Schertz and New Braunfels have expressed interest in starting similar oyster shell recycling programs.

The mayor of Selma was also at the fundraising event Thursday evening and told KSAT he hopes the oyster recycling initiative spreads across South Texas.

The initiative hopes to raise $150,000 per year to help rebuild oyster reefs and support oyster restoration. Organizers also plan to collect oyster shells at the 2027 Fiesta Oyster Bake.

Read also:

• 100,000 Oyster Bake shells weren’t trashed after Fiesta. They’re being used for reef rehab in Texas gulf.

The August disaster “was not just a local tragedy. It was a warning to the world. And I ask you today: Have you really heard that warning?” Nepali Prime Minister Balendra Shah said at the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday night. “Nearly three years ago, standing in the shadow of our Mount Everest, the secretary-general of the United Nations warned about humanity about the madness and impending climate disaster.”

“That cry from the rooftop of the world was not heard enough,” Shah said. “We in Nepal heard it. Our communities heard it. Scientists around the world heard it. They repeated it with evidence. But we, the political leaders, have been negligent to translate those warnings in action at the speed and scale that the vulnerable people require.”

International scientists have connected melting permafrost from climate — caused by burning coal, oil and gas — to the instability of the glacier, which partly collapsed and triggered a massive flood that has killed at least 1,400 people with even more still missing.

Shah said that Nepal contributed less than one-tenth of 1% of the heat-trapping gases behind climate change. About 99% of Nepal's electricity comes from hydropower, and many workers were trapped in tunnels by the flooding.

“We did not create this crisis, yet we are paying a colossal price for it,” said Shah, 36, a former rapper and engineer who is the youngest head of government to address the General Assembly this year. “Our glaciers are retreating, our mountain slopes are becoming unstable, our rivers are becoming less predictable, and every major disaster threatens to erase years of development.”

He said climate change ‘does not recognize borders’

In a black Dhaka topi, a traditional brimless Nepali hat, Shah spoke while wearing his signature dark sunglasses, which he uses for medical reasons. He said “the tragic consequences of a warming climate” tells the world that “climate change does not recognize borders. Glaciers and floods do not travel with stamps and passports.”

Subeksha Khadka, a humanitarian and former Miss Nepal International, in an online interview, praised Shah's speech and echoed the warning: "This time Nepal has been on the target, but it could be anyone. This is our story right now, and it can be anybody else’s tomorrow. So it’s time to act.”

Shah didn't ask for a specific amount in aid, but he called the international financial aid system inadequate and too bureaucratic. This included a loss and damage fund agreed upon a few years ago for poor nations hit by climate disasters not of their own making.

“Climate finance must not become another bureaucratic maze through which vulnerable countries spend years” maneuvering through when they need help. “When the house is burning, we do not ask a family to complete 50 forms. We act. This is what climate justice means.”

He exhorted the General Assembly to act on relief, rehabilitation, reconstruction — which are traditional international help concepts — but also “responsibility, reparation, resilience.” Reparation is a word and an issue that rankles industrial western nations like the United States, which is historically the world's biggest carbon emitter.

He says it's ‘not an isolated disaster’

Over the past 75 years, the United States has spewed about 1,500 times more carbon into the air than Nepal has, according to the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists that track greenhouse gas emissions by countries. Historical emissions matter because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for more than a century trapping heat.

The U.S. this week announced $31 million in aid to Nepal for flood recovery, which bring America's total financial help up to $36 million. It's less than 1% of what they need.

“Preliminary assessments indicate that from recent disaster alone, Nepal has suffered loss of over $5 billion, nearly 15% of our GDP and a third of our annual budget," Shisir Khanal, Nepal's foreign minister, said Wednesday at the UN climate summit. "Thus for Nepal, this catastrophe is not merely a humanitarian emergency. It is a development emergency dismantling years of progress. It is a justice crisis exposing the inequities of global climate action and it is an existential crisis striking at the very survival of our communities and our future.”

“What happened in Nepal is not an isolated disaster but a preview of what awaits many vulnerable nations,” Khanal said.

Former United States Vice President Al Gore said in an interview that Nepal's disaster shows that the climate crisis “was getting worse much faster” than people can handle and foreshadows problems with melting glaciers that feed all of the great rivers of Asia, putting the water supply of 2 billion people at risk.

___

Delgado reported from New York. Associated Press writer Jennifer McDermott contributed to this report.

___

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Bijan Robinson rushed for 194 yards and two touchdowns as the Falcons capitalized on the return of quarterback Michael Penix Jr. and trounced the punchless Green Bay Packers 35-14 on Thursday night.

Atlanta (1-2) erased an early 7-0 deficit by scoring 27 straight points to take control amid a chorus of boos at Lambeau Field. The Falcons outrushed the Packers 242 yards to 17.

It was a stunning turn of events for an Atlanta offense that hadn't run a single play inside an opponent's 20-yard line during the first two weeks of the season.

“That was the weight off the shoulders — just getting back to the red zone,” Robinson said. “And we knew we had to punch it in every opportunity we get when we get down there. That was the main focus — to get the ball down there and let's put the ball in the end zone. When we scored, it was definitely something we enjoyed, and we kept on doing it.”

Penix went 18 of 25 for 256 yards with one touchdown and an interception in his first action since tearing the ACL in his left knee during a loss to Carolina on Nov. 16.

“I'm proud of him,” Falcons coach Kevin Stefanski said. “It's not easy to rehab from injuries. That's a tough thing to do, that he's put himself through — the extra workouts in the weight room, the extra treatments in the training room, all those times that he's out in the field and he's running when no one's watching.”

Atlanta had struggled to produce any offense whatsoever in two games with Cooper Rush at quarterback. The Falcons became the first team since the 2008 Rams not to run any plays in the red zone through the first two weeks of a season.

That wasn’t a problem Thursday.

Robinson and Drake London became the first teammates to each compile at least 190 yards from scrimmage in a road game since Lawrence McCutcheon and Ron Jessie did it for the Rams at Miami on Oct. 3, 1976. London caught nine passes for a career-high 194 yards.

“Me and Drake, that's my real-life brother," Robinson said. "I call him my blood brother. We do everything together.”

Green Bay (1-2) lost a home opener for the first time since falling 30-22 to the San Francisco 49ers in 2012. The Packers had won 13 straight home openers from 2013-25 to share the NFL record with the Miami Dolphins, who also won 13 in a row from 1976-88.

“We’ve got a couple extra days here, and everybody’s got to take a long, hard look at themselves,” Packers coach Matt LaFleur said. “We’ve got to find solutions and just come back ready to work.”

Green Bay's Jordan Love went 28 of 53 for 312 yards with two touchdowns — one to Christian Watson and another to Matthew Golden — and an interception. MarShawn Lloyd and Kaleb Johnson combined for 17 yards on eight carries.

Love was working behind an offensive line missing left guard Aaron Banks and right tackle Zach Bako-Bewele, who tore his patellar tendon Sunday and will miss the rest of the season. Banks was dealing with a toe injury.

Jager Burton, a rookie fifth-round pick from Kentucky, made his first career start at left guard, and 2025 second-round selection Anthony Belton started at right tackle.

The lack of discipline that hindered Green Bay in its first two games cropped up again Thursday.

Green Bay led 7-0 and had forced an apparent third-and-11 incompletion late in the first quarter when Brenton Cox Jr. was called for roughing the passer. Robinson delivered a 55-yard carry on the next play to set up his own 3-yard touchdown run.

The Packers had committed an NFL-high 26 penalties through the first two weeks of the season.

Atlanta dominated the rest of the first half and led 17-7 at the break.

Nick Folk put Atlanta ahead by hitting a 44-yard field goal with 4:48 left in the second quarter. After Atlanta’s Zach Harrison blocked Trey Smack’s 47-yard field-goal attempt, Penix threw a 5-yard touchdown pass to Austin Hooper on third-and-goal with 59 seconds left in the half.

Green Bay wasted a red-zone opportunity on its first drive of the second half when Love couldn’t connect with Watson in the end zone on fourth-and-1 from the 7. Atlanta poured it on from there.

“It felt great to get a win. It felt great to come out of there healthy. Just blessed, just blessed,” Penix said.

Injuries

Falcons: CB A.J. Terrell (groin) didn't play after getting placed on injured reserve this week.

Packers: LB Edgerrin Cooper was evaluated for a concussion in the second half. G Jacob Monk hurt his quadriceps late in the fourth quarter.

Up next

Falcons: At New Orleans on Monday, Oct. 5.

Packers: At Tampa Bay on Oct. 4.

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See AP’s full NFL coverage here

The event featured a cavalcade of billionaires, Washington powerbrokers, business leaders and the type of festivities that most excite Trump, who has a reputation for reveling in hosting parties.

“President Xi and I both understand we represent different systems, but the ties between our people endure, and we’ve never gotten along better,” Trump said during his toast, adding that “together, we can continue to build a relationship that promotes prosperity and security for future generations.”

Trump has done his best to impress Xi during China's leader's during Xi's three-day visit to Washington, and praised their close personal relationship — even as he has decried top Democratic candidates as “communists” ahead of the November midterm elections.

Xi and Trump discussed tensions over Taiwan, trade and artificial intelligence during business hours — even as an ongoing First Amendment fight over press access at the White House has unfolded. But Trump publicly chose to focus on showing Xi his White House updates on Thursday afternoon, including letting him tour his Marine One presidential helicopter and a new helipad he built for it — before attention quickly turned to the flashy details of the swanky meal.

Xi noted in his own toast that “President Trump has pledged to make America great again” and that “China is committed to achieving great national rejuvenation.”

“These two goals are both ambitious and can surely be mutually reinforcing,” Xi said.

Trump wore a tuxedo, and her office said first lady Melania Trump opted for a tuxedo-style outfit: a white Saint Laurent cotton poplin blouse, a black silk cummerbund and black brocade pants — both from Dolce & Gabbana — with a peony motif.

Xi chose a black suit and his wife, Peng Liyuan, wore a red gown. The East Room, where the dinner was held, featured low lighting and place settings with elegant red and gold decor.

Those in attendance included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who signed autographs upon arriving at the White House. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang opted for a tuxedo over his trademark black leather jacket. Bernard Arnault, the CEO of French luxury goods company LVMH, walked through black security fencing to enter the event.

Trump says he can't help but talk up the ballroom being built

The president toasted his strong relationship with Xi and the bond between the U.S. and China, but then added, “If I could go off script just for a second, I just want to say I had to do it,” as those assembled laughed.

“I’d like to invite everyone in the room to visit through that beautiful curtain in the back,” Trump said, referring to the construction site of his White House ballroom on the South Lawn, which he said, “you've heard so much about.”

Trump said the project was a year from completion, and said he thought attendees “will see something that I think you will really love.”

The president said that after the dinner attendees could go see the worksite and be “the first people to step foot” on it.

“We’ll do that. Maybe after we’ve finished with the entertainment tonight,” Trump said, asking, “Anybody wants to walk into a construction site that’s nice and sparkling, it’s our honor to have you do so.”

Trump has called the ballroom he’s building the “Great Hall of the United States,” and suggested it could rival the Great Hall of the People, where he dined during a state visit to Beijing in May.

The president also presented Xi with an eagle statue that he said was designed “in personal collaboration with Melania and myself.” Xi did not present Trump a public gift in return during the dinner.

Guests dined on squash and sea bass

The first lady helped craft the evening's menu, which was served on the red china from Ronald Reagan’s presidency. It featured a first course of yellow squash velouté with wild mushrooms, fresh herbs, crispy pancetta and drizzled scallion oil.

After that, guests got sesame-crusted sea bass with braised baby bok choy, roasted garden eggplant and a sauce verte. Dessert was vanilla crémeux with sour cherry confit and walnut frangipane, as well as ice cream with honey from the White House.

Trump has sought to one-up Xi after Beijing

The dinner came after the president took the unusual step of personally greeting Xi and his wife on Wednesday as they arrived at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington. Normally, presidents wait for their state visit guests to arrive at the White House itself before offering a formal welcome.

Thursday's dinner was packed with technology industry titans like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI President and co-founder Greg Brockman, and Dell Technologies chairman and CEO Michael Dell.

During his own visit to Beijing in May, Xi hosted Trump for a state dinner that unfolded beneath grand chandeliers in the Great Hall of the People. That event also included many tech luminaries, such as Tim Cook, formerly Apple's CEO, and Musk.

It was all a stark departure from 2015, when then-President Barack Obama was preparing to host Xi for a state visit and Trump — in the midst of his first presidential run — criticized all the hubbub.

“Just take them to McDonald’s and go back to the negotiating table,” Trump said then, during a rally in South Carolina. He later conceded on Fox News Channel that Xi might at least be worthy of getting “probably a double-size Big Mac.”

The Houthis — who have controlled Yemen's capital, Sanaa, and much of the country's north for over a decade — stormed down Yemen's coast this month and seized the crucial port city of Mokha and key Red Sea islands. That gives them better surveillance of ships passing through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, at the sea's southern end. About 12% of the world’s trade usually passes through the waterway.

The rebels have declared a blockade on Saudi shipping. While asserting there's no other threat to commercial shipping on the Red Sea, they have warned other nations not to get involved.

But the vice president of the internationally recognized government council urged world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly not to trust the Houthis' assurances — and to see a bigger picture in the strife around the strait.

“The Houthi militias' use of the safety of navigation as a tool for blackmail threatens not only Yemen. It is taking hostage the entire global economy,” said the vice president, Abdullah Abdulkader al Alimi-Bawzer.

Yemeni VP says weapons, technology should be kept from rebels' hands

Arguing that protecting the strait “is the responsibility of every economy that depends on secure supply chains, energy security and freedom of navigation,” he urged the international community to keep weapons and technology from getting into the rebels' hands.

For years, the U.N. Security Council has imposed an arms embargo on the Houthis and an asset freeze and travel ban on their leaders and top officials.

Iran denies arming the Houthis, but smuggled Iranian weapons and parts have been seized from numerous shipments bound for Yemen, and a report by U.N. experts in 2024 documented extensive military ties between the Houthis, Iran and its other allies. Al Alimi-Bawzer contended Thursday that the rebels wouldn't have been able to maintain their position for a dozen years without Iranian weapons, expertise and military technologies.

The Houthis claimed Thursday to have fired dozens of ballistic missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia’s southwestern Jazan province. A Saudi military spokesperson, Maj. Gen. Turki al-Malki, said the kingdom intercepted six ballistic missiles targeting its Red Sea port of Yanbu and the southwestern city of Taif, blaming the Houthis.

His statement followed alerts by Saudi civil defense authorities, who later noted the danger had passed.

Fighting risks full-scale return to civil war

In Yemen, the latest fighting risks a full-scale return to the civil war that killed more than 150,000 people and forced millions from their homes. Already, nearly 130,000 people have been newly displaced and hundreds killed, and a humanitarian crisis is deepening in the Arab world’s poorest country.

The fighting near the crucial Red Sea shipping corridor and the Houthis' pursuit of a blockade of Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, also have worried global markets. The Bab el-Mandeb Strait has become all the more crucial since Iran has asserted control over the even busier Strait of Hormuz, off its coast, since the U.S. and Israel attacked the Islamic Republic in February.

After the Houthis overran Sanaa and northern parts of Yemen in 2014, Saudi Arabia formed a military coalition to intervene on behalf of the Yemeni government. But the fighting wore on, and the Houthis endured.

A truce took hold in 2022. But after the Israel-Hamas war began the next year, the Houthis began attacking Red Sea shipping. The attacks continued until a U.S. bombing campaign in 2025.

Yemeni official thanks Saudis and US

On Thursday, Al Alimi-Bawzer thanked the Saudis and hailed the U.S. for having shown a “decisive approach.”

The Saudis have recently again sought military support from allies, but the U.S. hasn't renewed military involvement. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said repeatedly that the U.S. will fulfill its defense commitments to Saudi Arabia but has not specified how.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan told reporters at the U.N. on Thursday that his country was “continuing to work with our partners in the U.S. to address the issue of this conflict.”

Despite the Houthis’ latest advances, he suggested his country wasn’t worried about a Houthi takeover in Yemen's south. The Yemeni government, he said, “is very capable of defending the territory it controls."

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Anna reported from Jerusalem and Khaled from Cairo. Associated Press writer Farnoush Amiri contributed from the United Nations.

Netanyahu addressed the plenum after days of speeches by world leaders condemning Israel's war in Gaza and accusing him of orchestrating a genocide against the Palestinian people. At times, the Israeli leader, facing a tough race for re-election next month, became emotional and indignant as he lectured his critics, among them New York's mayor.

Netanyahu, his voice rising in emphasis, said attacking Iran “was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to make” and denounced as “moral cowards” a mass of delegates who walked out of the hall when he took the podium to speak.

“In defending itself, Israel is also defending many of the countries whose delegates just left this hall,” Netanyahu said. “In fact, I want you to know that many of their leaders even thank us privately for taking out Iran’s nukes.”

When Netanyahu walked to the rostrum, a mix of cheers, boos and mass walkouts erupted. Scores of delegates marched out and a majority of visible seats sat empty afterward. “Order in the hall, please,” General Assembly President Khalilur Rahman said repeatedly.

“If there are any other moral cowards who have not yet left this hall, please do so now,” Netanyahu said.

A speech aimed at a domestic audience

Netanyahu's remarks — which at times sounded like a stump speech — were aimed largely at the audience at home as the country prepares for elections on Oct. 27. It was delivered during the evening prime time in Israel and filled with standard talking points used to defend policies in the occupied West Bank and treatment of the Palestinians.

Netanyahu reminded the assembly of the scale of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in which Hamas militants killed about 1,200 people.

“This is equal to 40,000 innocent Americans slaughtered in less than 24 hours,” he said, or 16 times the death count of the 9/11 attacks that left nearly 3,000 people dead in New York and more in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon.

Netanyahu said the attack left Israel with no choice but to hit Hamas hard. Many governments have accused Israel of committing war crimes, and Netanyahu himself faces an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court accusing him of crimes against humanity.

He predicted the fall of Iran's government

While the war in Iran has been inconclusive and caused havoc on the global economy, Netanyahu insisted he had made the right decision.

He thanked U.S. President Donald Trump for taking decisive action against Iran, and predicted Iran’s theocratic government would fall. Trump made a similar assertion at the outset of the war that began nearly seven months ago, but the Iranian government appears to remain firmly in charge.

Netanyahu, known for using visual aids during his General Assembly speeches, at one point held up a pager while reminding the audience of the Sept. 17, 2024, attack in which Israel remotely detonatedthousands of pagers that had been distributed to the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon. The pager attack wounded more than 3,000 people and killed 12, including two children.

He says reports of settler violence in the West Bank are distorted

Netanyahu dismissed incidents of Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank as a “handful of young juvenile delinquents” throwing stones, chopping down olive trees and lighting fires.

“I can’t stand that. I won’t stand for vigilantism,” the prime minister said before accusing foreign leaders and the international press of distorting the scale of violence in the West Bank.

Netanyahu’s government is dominated by settlers and their allies, and has made few arrests in the wave of settler violence.

Israel captured the West Bank and east Jerusalem in the 1967 war, and the Palestinians want both as part of their future state. The Palestinians and most of the international community view the settlements as illegal and as an obstacle to creating a viable, contiguous Palestinian state.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has reported more than 1,600 settler attacks this year.

At least 104 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli settlers or soldiers this year, according to the Ramallah-based Palestinian Health Ministry. Four Israelis have been killed by Palestinians over the same period. This week, a settler was killed and the son of Israel's ambassador to the U.S. badly wounded in separate Palestinian attacks.

Israel is increasingly isolated on the world stage

Netanyahu also accused New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani of spreading lies about Israel and endangering Jewish New Yorkers with his criticism of the country's military actions in Gaza.

Before the prime minister arrived in New York, Mamdani called him a “war criminal” and pushed for his arrest. The mayor has acknowledged that New York does not have the authority to execute an International Criminal Court warrant but urged federal authorities to do so.

In past years, Netanyahu has used his General Assembly speech to both denounce the United Nations as biased and make Israel's case to world leaders. His address is the cornerstone of an abbreviated trip to the United States as Israel has grown increasingly isolated throughout the war in Gaza.

The war in Gaza began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas-led militants attacked Israel, killing around 1,200 people and kidnapping 251. At least 73,922 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's subsequent offensive, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, part of the Hamas-run government whose numbers are generally considered reliable by the international community.

A ceasefire agreed to by Israel and Hamas last October halted the heaviest of the fighting and led to the release of the remaining hostages yet further steps have since stalled. Israel maintains control of most of Gaza and continues to carry out airstrikes on Palestinians near military-held zones. Hamas not disarmed or relinquished power and there has been no progress toward reconstruction in the mostly destroyed territory.

Netanyahu has said no Palestinian state will be established while he is Israel’s leader and has argued that the Palestinian Authority is not a partner for peace.

Netanyahu followed the Palestinian president’s remote speech

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas also addressed the U.N. General Assembly earlier Thursday, delivering prerecorded remarks from his office in Ramallah after the United States denied him a visa to attend the gathering for the second year in a row.

Though world leaders have repeatedly invoked the plight of Palestinians in speeches throughout the week, Abbas urged the international community to take more tangible action against Israel.

“How long will some countries continue to remain silent about Israel, or continue supplying it with weapons that it uses against our people?" Abbas said. “What, then, is the international community waiting for before it acts to protect the Palestinian people?”

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Associated Press reporters Jennifer Peltz and Edith M. Lederer contributed.

Nolo became a hurricane in the Pacific Ocean on Thursday night and was expected to strengthen while turning toward the Big Island, the National Hurricane Center said. Forecasters warned that the Big Island could see rainfall totals of 15 to 30 inches (38 to 76 centimeters), with higher amounts possible through Saturday. The island of Maui also could be hit with life-threatening floods, the hurricane center said.

Meanwhile, heavy rains from powerful Hurricane Polo could cause torrential flooding and landslides in Mexico, according to the U.S. hurricane center. In the port city of Lázaro Cárdenas, seawater already swept through homes Thursday and left wooden planks and furniture strewn on the streets.

Polo has fluctuated between Category 4 and 5, both major-hurricane strength. It was expected to regain Category 5 status on Friday, then gradually weaken Friday night and Saturday, the hurricane center said.

After skirting Mexico's coast, Polo was expected to move farther out to sea Thursday night and Friday before hooking back toward land to the north on Saturday.

The series of powerful storms comes as the weather phenomenon El Niño prompts major environmental shifts across the world, fueling drought in some areas and flooding in others. El Niño traditionally dampens the Atlantic hurricane season, while it tends to rev up tropical cyclone activity in the Pacific with moist air and little wind shear.

Hawaii has been battered this year by major flooding in the spring, an earthquake and two other hurricanes since mid-August.

“In my 20 years of experience here, I’ve never seen three hurricane watches for the islands in the same year,” said John Bravender of the National Weather Service in Honolulu.

Polo could trigger flooding and mudslides in Mexico

Mexican authorities were opening shelters and clearing people from beaches, while coastal residents tried to protect businesses from getting swept away. People in high-risk areas were being evacuated, though authorities didn’t immediately say how many.

Much of the worry from locals comes from hurricanes in past years that devastated cities along the Pacific coast. Hurricane Otis in 2023 unexpectedly plunged Acapulco into turmoil for weeks.

“So many people said it wouldn’t happen and then it did. After that, you’re left on edge,” said Gonzalo Ramírez, a bartender in the city.

Polo posed the biggest threat to Guerrero and Michoacán, neighboring states in southwest Mexico that share a long coastline scattered with small ports, tourist towns and fishing villages. Much of the area is marked by poverty, and residents routinely complain they are left to fend for themselves during natural disasters.

Mexican authorities have deployed 15,000 security personnel across the coast and suspended schools.

In Lázaro Cárdenas, a port city in Michoacán that was hit with high surf, locals and government officials were clearing out piles of wooden planks from a number of destroyed ramadas and shoveling thick mud coating much of the town.

Alicia Contreras said the walls and roof of her restaurant had been severely damaged by 15-foot (4.5-meter) waves. As officers and family helped pick through the damaged house, Contreras worried how she would economically recover.

“This is huge because we have no other source of income. Now we’re just surviving,” Contreras said.

Nolo could flood parts of Hawaii still recovering from other storms

While the Big Island is expected to bear the brunt of Nolo, its full path remains uncertain, according to Bravender, the weather service's warning coordination meteorologist in Hawaii.

Most concerning, he said Thursday, is that the heaviest rain is likely to fall over the same southeastern region of the Big Island hit in August by Hurricane Lala and where grounds are still wet from additional precipitation.

“There are several communities that were isolated, flooded, roads that were washed out,” he said. “It’s that same area that is most under threat,” Bravender said.

Hawaii officials told residents to put together emergency kits and the governor issued an emergency proclamation, activating more than 230 Hawaii National Guard members. Schools were closed for the rest of the week.

Hawaiian Electric, the state’s primary utility, said crews that had been helping restore power in Kauai after this month’s Hurricane Lowell would return to Oahu, Maui and the Big Island in preparation for the coming storm.

Odalys and Fay are not near land

A third storm in the Pacific, Hurricane Odalys, was centered far from land, roughly 1,110 miles (1,785 kilometers) west-southwest of the southern tip of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula.

In the northern Atlantic Ocean, Tropical Storm Fay re-formed early Thursday, the U.S. hurricane center said. It was nearly 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) west-southwest of the Azores.

Tropical Storm Gonzalo formed in the Atlantic Ocean late Thursday, about 190 miles (306 kilometers) southeast of the Cape Verde islands off the coast of West Africa. The U.S. hurricane center said that if it stays on its current track, the storm will pass near or over portions of the islands Friday.

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Aoun Angueira reported from San Diego. Associated Press journalists John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio, Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City and Jeriel Vargas Ambriz in Lázaro Cárdena, Mexico, contributed to this report.

Tropical storms have spawned in what seems like assembly-line fashion in recent weeks, as El Nino conditions that emerged in June have caused waters to grow warmer than normal, setting off a chain of unusual weather around much of the world.

“It’s ramping up to be perhaps the strongest El Nino on record,” University of Miami hurricane expert Brian McNoldy said.

The number of hurricanes in the eastern Pacific has already surpassed what occurs in a typical season. This week alone, Hurricane Polo drenched Mexico’s Pacific coast as it seesaws between Category 4 and 5. And in storm-weary Hawaii, there’s the potential for catastrophic flooding from a growing Hurricane Nolo.

During El Nino, low-level surface winds blowing from east to west across the Pacific are weakened or sometimes reversed. It causes a shift in the jet stream and drives record global heat, severe droughts, wildfires and shrinking water supplies.

El Ninos don’t follow a regular schedule, occurring every two to seven years on average. Some can be mild. Others can pack a punch. McNoldy predicted that the current El Nino will peak during the coming winter but linger into 2027.

“It doesn’t turn off right away,” he said.

While the focus is on the increased number of Pacific storms, El Ninos conversely curtail hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean: Tropical weather activity in the Atlantic has been virtually silent this year.

A turbocharged hurricane year in the Pacific

Thanks to El Nino, both the eastern Pacific and the central Pacific have seen four more tropical storms than is normal to date with more than two months left in the hurricane season, said Matthew Rosencrans, lead hurricane season forecaster with NOAA’s National Weather Service.

From 1991 to 2020, there was an average of 15 named storms in the eastern Pacific per season, which runs from May 15 to Nov. 30.

But surpassing the yearly average in September? “That's a different story,” Rosencrans said.

What also sets this year’s El Nino-fueled storms apart is that three Pacific hurricanes have reached Category 5 strength, tying a record set in 2002, also during an El Nino, he said.

The most active season on record in the eastern Pacific was 1992, when there were 25 named storms, Rosencrans said. For the central Pacific, it was 14 in 2015.

In 2015 there were nine major hurricanes, of Category 3 or higher, in the eastern Pacific, but no reported deaths. Due to El Nino, forecasters said the eastern Pacific storms formed farther west and tracked more westward, remaining over the open ocean throughout their cycle.

During another strong El Nino in 1997, hundreds of people died when Hurricane Pauline tore across Mexico’s Pacific coast. That same year Tropical Storm Nora gave landlocked southwestern Arizona an unusual soaking. And a December storm in Southern California caused flooding that swept cars into a storm channel and prompted evacuations of some mobile home parks.

In 1998, El Nino was blamed for flooding in China that killed 4,150 people, most along the Yangtze River.

Hawaii finds itself in the crosshairs again

Hawaii has felt the wrath of two hurricanes over the past month. Lala in August and Lowell in early September combined to destroy or damage more than 510 homes and cause $168 million in damage to public infrastructure. Lala also caused $21.5 million in damage to 38 schools.

Nolo, which strengthened to a hurricane Thursday night, is expected to make it three. Forecasters say the storm could drop rainfall amounts on Hawaii that are measured in feet, not inches.

On top of that, heavy rains in March caused the worst flooding to hit Hawaii in two decades. That was followed in May by a magnitude-6.0 earthquake, prompting Gov. Josh Green to remark that this year has been “unlike anything I can recall.”

Two hurricanes came within 200 miles (320 kilometers) of Hawaii in 1957, but that did not happen again for more than a half century. Then it occurred in 2014, 2016 and 2018 before this year's predicted trifecta.

Meteorologists often worry about “preparedness fatigue,” when communities gear up for storms that never arrive or fall short of their potential strength. But John Bravender, a weather service warning coordination meteorologist, said 2026 has yielded a different type of weariness in Hawaii.

“The fact that we’ve had these damaging impacts that keep happening, and as we’re recovering from them, we have to get ready for the next event — that’s a new one that really drains the resources and leads to this overall sense that this is a very busy hurricane season for us,” he said.

Residents understand the risks and are getting more accustomed to preparing.

“I think community members realize how dangerous the weather can be, how important it is for them to be self-sufficient, have food, water and also look out for their neighbors,” Bravender said.

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Associated Press writer Gabriela Aoun Angueira contributed to this report.

Even if a school policy was written without overt racial bias, it might unfairly hurt one group of students over another, the understanding went. The concept is known as systemic racism, and Republican and Democratic administrations agreed: Schools and universities that received federal funding had an obligation to address it.

Under President Donald Trump's administration, that's no longer the case. One by one, the administration has limited the remedies schools can use to address systemic racial injustice.

This summer, the Education Department rescinded a regulation that allowed schools to gauge potential discrimination by comparing outcomes across races, such as the racial breakdown of students in advanced classes. Then, it issued a letter to American schools, emphasizing it's illegal to consider race when crafting discipline policies — even if one particular racial group ends up suspended or expelled more often.

At the same time, Trump's Justice Department has stepped away from many school desegregation cases. In a news release Thursday, the department boasted of successfully working through the courts to close more than 50 desegregation cases since Trump took office, with motions to dismiss in the works in many other cases. Previous administrations had used these federal court cases to hold schools accountable when students of color had worse outcomes than white students — high rates of discipline, worse school facilities or reduced access to extracurriculars and advanced coursework.

While Trump's first administration deprioritized enforcing racial justice, his current administration has gone further — threatening to punish schools for any consideration of race in their policies and practices.

To the administration, the practice of examining different outcomes for particular groups of students, sometimes known as “disparate impact,” was itself a form of racial discrimination.

“The Obama and Biden Administrations weaponized disparate impact by effectively coercing schools to discipline students differently based on race in order to engineer equitable disciplinary outcomes across racial groups,” Education Department spokesperson Sabin Sidney said. "These practices unfortunately led to unsafe classrooms and undermined student learning."

Critics worry the administration's actions will make it easier to get away with racial discrimination.

“When they talk about returning it to the states and making America great again, they’re talking about returning to how it was before 1954,” when school segregation was legal, said U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va.

School discipline data had offered insights on discrimination

Since Trump's return to office, the administration has set its sights on school discipline.

In May 2025, the president signed an executive order directing federal agencies to stop looking for “ disparate impact," or policies that appear neutral but result in outsized impact to one group over another. Those policies had been examined for possible discrimination, regardless of their intent.

In education, that analysis had most often been applied to school discipline — especially to removing students from the classroom, such as through suspensions, expulsions and referrals to law enforcement.

Federal and state data have long shown students of color, particularly Black students, are more likely than their peers to be pulled from the classroom for similar infractions. Research shows that students who are suspended are more likely to become disengaged from school and to have worse academic outcomes.

In 2021, the Education Department began investigating a complaint alleging Black male students with disabilities in Denver Public Schools were being disproportionately pushed out of the classroom. Progress on the case halted after Trump took office in 2025.

Advocates had also filed the complaint with state authorities, who found violations of civil rights laws and ordered the district to mandate new training. Meanwhile, families have heard nothing from the federal Education Department.

The silence gives school districts permission to continue with business as usual, said Pam Bisceglia, executive director of Advocacy Denver, which filed the complaints.

“I’d like to say that we have overcome and that marginalized communities are enjoying equal protections. We see that, in fact, that isn’t true,” she said.

Trump's administration has changed which cases are investigated

Under Trump's first administration, the Education Department continued to investigate and resolve cases of racial discrimination against minority students.

In 2018, the Education Department reached a settlement agreement with Durham Public Schools in North Carolina, after examining whether the district's discipline policies, or their effects, were racially discriminatory. The investigation found Black students were disproportionately given out-of-school suspension — especially in instances involving subjective decisions on matters like disobedience.

For a time, Jovonia Lewis, a parent and former Durham school board member, constantly received calls about her son being kicked out of the classroom. She was told he couldn’t sit still. But the federal settlement agreement helped Black parents see their children's experiences were not occurring in isolation, Lewis said.

“We knew our kids were being treated differently, but this data gave us leverage,” she said.

The investigation had a significant impact in Durham, Lewis recalled. The district adopted a new student code of conduct and created an equity affairs office.

Under the Trump administration's new guidance, federal authorities are unlikely to take up similar cases.

“The federal government has chosen to close its eyes to that way of understanding discrimination,” said Catherine Lhamon, who oversaw education civil rights under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, both Democrats.

The impact of the administration's changes will outlast Trump's presidency, said Johnathan Smith, a former attorney in the civil rights division at the Justice Department and a managing director at the National Center for Youth Law. Once the administration changes rules and regulations, future efforts to investigate civil rights could be held up in court.

“They're building an infrastructure that says, ‘Not only are we taking down these structures, but we are building in roadblocks to make it very difficult for any future administration to change course,’” Smith said.

Decades-old school desegregation cases are being closed

Across the South, the Justice Department has taken an interest in closing cases of court-mandated school desegregation, arguing the decades-old orders are outdated. But civil rights attorneys say the impact of segregation continues to be felt today.

Courts have long maintained the passage of time is not enough to rule that discrimination has passed, said Kelly Gardner, deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. To be released from a desegregation order, schools have had to show that they have removed the lingering effects of segregation to the extent possible. That can involve assessing extracurricular offerings, funding levels and the state of school facilities.

Now, the Justice Department is intervening to close cases, often without taking account of those considerations, Gardner said.

In January, a federal court granted a request from the Justice Department and the DeSoto Parish School Board in Louisiana to release the small district from its desegregation order. In the order, the district had allowed students to transfer out of racially isolated schools, with transportation provided. As recently as 2024, the order was used to ensure those students had equal access to extracurriculars in their new schools.

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, a Republican, praised the court decision for freeing the district from federal oversight.

“After 60 years of litigation and federal control, the elected members of the DeSoto Parish School Board now have the full powers of their office, as our Constitution has always intended,” Murrill wrote in a social media post at the time.

A few months after the order was lifted, the school district amended its policies. The district would no longer accept new applications for transfers, and students in the transfer program would have to return to their zoned schools once they finished the highest grade at their current school.

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The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

The Laredo City Council voted 7-2 Monday night to set a nonbinding referendum for May — delaying a decision that is coming due for cities, counties and law enforcement agencies that face a financial reckoning after Gov. Greg Abbott blocked state money from being spent on the roadside cameras.

“In my opinion as the head of this local government, with state funding paused, the circumstances have changed,” Laredo Mayor Victor Treviño said before the vote. “If continuing these Flock systems will require the local taxpayer to fund their entire system, I believe that 272,000 residents should have an opportunity to express their opinion.”

At least 14 cities and counties have shut off more than 900 Flock cameras since state funding was rescinded in late August, and more are scheduled to decide their next steps in the coming weeks. Larger cities like Houston and Dallas shuttered grant-funded cameras while leaving much of their networks in operation, while Plano, Robinson and Kendall County were among those that ended their Flock contracts entirely.

Complicating those decisions is a lack of information from the governor’s office about the duration of the funding pause and a desire from local law enforcement to keep the cameras they attribute to reductions in crime. In addition to the funding block, Abbott recently directed the Texas Department of Transportation to pause installation of license plate readers along state roads.

Flock cameras and other AI-enhanced automated license plate readers have come under fire from privacy advocates over their ability to scan all passing vehicles to build a database that can be accessed by law enforcement agencies from across the country. The cameras compile license plate numbers and other identifying information, including make, model, paint color, dents and bumper stickers.

Police say the information provides unprecedented ability to identify suspects, pinpoint stolen vehicles and locate missing persons. Critics fear the creation of a surveillance state and say the databases have been repeatedly abused by police conducting improper searches.

“You can’t afford the number of cops it would take to do what this system is doing,” said Billy Couch, the City of College Station’s police chief, during a tense Thursday night City Council meeting about its two Flock contracts totaling almost $300,000.

As of late August, there were an estimated 13,000 Flock cameras across Texas, according to DeFlock, an anti-surveillance watchdog that uses verified crowdsourcing to map the locations of Flock cameras.

Abbott’s office did not respond to a request for comment about guidance provided to local governments about how to proceed without state funding.

Schertz Assistant Police Chief Phillip Waller said the lack of information about the freeze is causing “major havoc” in smaller departments as local elected officials mull the long-term implications.

“I mean, depending on how big or how small the government entity is, having tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars of [automated license plate readers] not being reimbursed like we thought they were is a major hit to the budget,” Waller said.

Without information about when or if Abbott’s funding freeze will end, some local leaders have been hesitant to make decisions regarding the cameras while their current contract terms are still active.

In Addison, City Council members on Tuesday debated whether Abbott’s funding freeze was temporary or indefinite as they began weighing the loss of state support on the city’s $260,000 Flock contract. In Laredo, City Council member Tyler King cast doubt on the permanence of the funding block in Monday’s meeting.

“I personally believe it’s political, and I think on Nov. 4, if [Abbott is] reelected, that’ll come back, and the money will start flowing in again,” King said. “So if we make a decision based on that, then we’re going to be back in the same situation come Nov. 4 — the money’s back, what do we do now?”

Abbott withdrew state funds for the cameras in August as The Texas Tribune prepared to publish an investigation exploring how a small state agency had directed at least $30 million to help cities, counties and law enforcement agencies pay for more than 3,200 Flock cameras across Texas.

That support from the Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority had been set to continue into 2027, with $10.9 million earmarked to help local agencies afford subscriptions for more than 2,600 Flock cameras, a Tribune review of approved grants found.

The vehicle authority, overseen by a governor-appointed board that includes Laredo’s police chief, Miguel Rodriguez, had completely covered Laredo’s installation costs for its 165 cameras, according to a police department spokesperson. Rodriguez has been a vocal advocate for placing the cameras across Texas and has commended their use in Laredo and elsewhere for allowing a new approach to detecting crime.

Like Laredo, League City southeast of Houston also will hold a nonbinding referendum on Flock cameras — a decision made mid-August, prior to Abbott’s funding freeze.

In addition to grappling with the loss of state money for Flock cameras, some local officials face a financial hit because vehicle authority grants are given as reimbursements.

Kyle, a small city south of Austin, has not received its 2026 grant for $205,000, $80,000 of which would help pay for 32 Flock cameras. Even so, the City Council voted 6-1 at a Sept. 5 meeting to continue Kyle’s Flock contract.

Mayor Yvonne Flores-Cale said they’ve had no issues with the devices.

“When we’re asked to remove something like Flock, it’s difficult, because what do we use instead of it?” Flores-Cale said. “It can’t just be like, ‘take it away and then we’re going to be a safer city,’ because we’ve never had a problem or a complaint or a misuse in our city.”

Like Kyle, College Station, Conroe and Carrollton have rejected calls to end their partnerships with Flock.

College Station’s City Council voted 4-2 to continue their two Flock contracts for another year after hours of emotional public testimony from supporters and critics. The city was awarded a $300,000 grant from the vehicle authority to cover most of the cost of its cameras in fiscal year 2026, none of which has been reimbursed, according to the agency’s records.

Even in cities and counties that are not immediately shifting their approach to Flock, the governor’s actions and widespread scrutiny have prompted police to provide presentations and explanations for how they use their cameras.

During the Schertz City Council meeting on Sept. 15, council members accepted the city’s latest $309,000 vehicle authority grant, with roughly $100,000 intended to be used for 41 Flock cameras before the funding freeze. Waller, the assistant police chief, also detailed how police were — and weren’t — using their cameras, including clarifying that vehicles, not people, are tracked.

Waller said in an interview after the presentation that misinformation about the cameras is rampant online, and he called automated license plate readers a helpful and natural improvement in policing.

“Technology advances and so does police work, and LPRs are just the next step in that advancement,” he said.

Some conversations prompted by the funding pause are the first time local elected officials have publicly discussed whether the cameras should be used. In 2024, when the Laredo City Council approved its first million-dollar installment for Flock cameras, it did so without public discussion — and did the same in January when it approved a $5 million, five-year contract.

Other cities that canceled their contracts, such as Leander and El Paso, had their police enter Flock agreements without city council involvement. The El Paso City Council responded with an ordinance requiring future contracts for license plate readers to be approved by the council.

Not all of the recent cancellations stemmed from funding concerns.

In Pflugerville and Hutto, political leaders ended Flock agreements after learning the extent to which other agencies could access their camera data. A records request from a Pflugerville resident found that hundreds of agencies across the United States had been using the city’s Flock data.

Several law enforcement agencies have begun cracking down on who can access vehicle data collected by their cameras after audits found that unauthorized departments — sometimes hundreds or thousands of them — had used their data. The Texas Department of Public Safety reined in its access significantly after a Tribune analysis found more than 2,800 agencies had repeatedly tapped into their network of more than 900 cameras without signing agreements the department said were mandatory.

The demonstrators represented a range of causes, from calls for religious autonomy and greater freedoms in Tibet, Hong Kong and the ethnic region of Xinjiang to demands to keep China out of self-governed Taiwan.

Protests against visiting Chinese leaders are nothing new — in 2006, a woman heckled Xi's predecessor Hu Jintao at a White House welcome ceremony — but Xi has become the focus of attacks for his tough approach to tightening control over Xinjiang, Hong Kong and other regions and the Chinese military's growing threats to Taiwan, which he says must come under Chinese rule.

Crowds gathered behind a fence along Lafayette Park, waving flags and holding signs. Loudspeakers carried their voices across the park to the White House’s North Portico, where an honor guard and a red carpet awaited guests attending the state dinner.

The crowd chanted, “Xi Jinping has got to go” and “Shame! Shame on Xi Jinping!” The chants grew louder throughout the ceremony.

Pro-China demonstrators also turned out in Washington. Around 200 supporters of Xi gathered outside the hotel where he was staying, waving Chinese and American flags and chanting, “Welcome, welcome, a warm welcome.” They had banners reading, “A warm welcome to Chairman Xi on his visit to the U.S.” and “Hello, Uncle Xi.”

Meanwhile, protesters of the Xi's government gathered outside the Chinese Embassy in the morning before marching through the city. By late afternoon, a few hundred people gathered at a park near the White House to “unwelcome” Xi.

Many waved Tibetan flags and called for a “Free Tibet.” Others carried flags bearing the Chinese words for “freedom” and “democracy,” along with signs reading, “Keep Taiwan Free” and “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times,” a slogan associated with Hong Kong’s mass protests in 2019.

Anjali Tenzin Sonn, 17, joined a mostly Tibetan group calling for a free Tibet outside the U.S. Capitol. She said she felt compelled to participate after growing up hearing stories about her mother fleeing Tibet on foot and her grandfather suffering as a political prisoner. She described the protest as “inspirational.”

“I hope Emperor Xi won’t remain in power. I hope he can give Chinese people real freedom — freedom of speech and religion,” said Zhang Na, a 31-year-old warehouse worker in Los Angeles who traveled to the same protest.

Zhang said she became weary of China’s prolonged COVID-19 lockdowns and flew to Ecuador three years ago before walking to the United States through the southern border.

Yang Fan, a 39-year-old Christian, attended with his wife and daughter and held a handwritten sign calling for “freedom of religion” and an “end to dictatorship.” He said he wanted to stand up for Christians in China and hoped Xi would release those imprisoned for their religious beliefs.

“I would like to see the liberation of Hong Kong and the complete restoration of its freedoms,” said Melody Calkins, 30, who spent much of her childhood in Hong Kong.

On KSAT Sports Now, we brought you Monica Gonzales’ story.

She’s the head volleyball coach at Harlan High School and was born and raised in San Antonio. She’s held the position for about a decade, and Gonzales broke down where she gets her strength.

“I went to Jefferson High School, so I tell people I grew up inside 410,” Gonzales said. “I might live outside of 1604 now, but I grew up inside of 410. You know, we have a running joke. A lot of us that actually opened the school are from around that area. Went there, went to Incarnate Word. I’ve never lived anywhere else.”

She attributes much of her success to her parents, especially her late father and the strength of her mother during his final moments.

“I had an agreement between my dad, me and God that if I got him home from hospice, I was going to go coach, and I knew that’s where my dad wanted me to be. So I actually got my 300th win on that night,” she said.

Gonzales surpassed her 400th career win in September 2026.

She couldn’t have done it alone.

“I have a lot of faith. You know, I truly believe I’m where I’m supposed to be. I’m surrounded by the people I need to be around,” Gonzales said. “And now we’re reaping the rewards of being surrounded by people we love.”

Gonzales has led the Harlan Hawks volleyball team to the playoffs and the state tournament many times. That’s the standard at Harlan volleyball.

The Hawks currently lead District 29-6A and remain undefeated in district play. They have seven more district games before the playoffs begin.

Read also:

• Texas A&M University-San Antonio’s Christi Cano continues to shatter glass ceilings

There are more than 73,000 streetlights in San Antonio’s residential areas, but under a 5-year-old program, the city has been trying to close a projected 4,275-light gap to brighten up darkened neighborhoods.

With the $13.9 million allocated over that time nearly exhausted, just over 1,500 streetlights have been installed —about 35% of the original, projected gap —and staff say they have enough money for maybe about 100 more.

“I mean, at this point again we are utilizing every penny we have, and I know this budget we did not get any additional money at this point,” Development Services Director Amin Tohmaz told members of the City Council’s Public Safety Committee at a Wednesday briefing.

Tohmaz said when the program started, the purpose was to address illumination gaps and improve traffic and pedestrian safety.

Staff looked at neighborhood and residential streets built prior to current streetlight requirements or annexed into the city and then compared it to modern code requirements.

“So we need additional lights to fill those gaps to make sure the illumination is appropriate, again, for pedestrians and for traffic. The focus was mainly on hotspot areas where we have more crime,” Tohmaz told committee members. “If there is an area where the visibility is very low, those were areas that we put as top of the priority to make, that’s the areas we need to address first for safety reasons.”

Some residents, like Nora Hernandez in the Sunrise neighborhood on the Northeast Side, have been waiting a long time for the streetlights.

The city promised residents they would get them when the area was annexed back in the mid-90’s, she said, but that “never happened up until about the last two years.”

There were some lights beforehand, she said, but very few of them.

“You have problems with crime, people breaking into cars, not being able to see coming into the neighborhood other than the lights on your car,” she told KSAT.

Now, the city’s dashboard shows a few dozen newly installed streetlights, and Hernandez believes crime is down and says drivers can see the road better.

The city’s dashboard for the program still shows a chicken pox rash of a few thousand red dots, indicating “proposed” spots for streetlights. However, not every site works, and not everyone wants one.

According to the city dashboard, there have been more than 300 streetlights canceled, which a spokeswoman said could have been for a variety of reasons.

It’s possible the number is even higher, though. The website shows numerous red “proposed” sites in the Terrell Heights neighborhood but no “cancelled” ones. That’s despite one longtime resident telling KSAT he and at least one other neighbor he’d spoken to had received notices from the city asking for easements to install lights.

“Fortunately, as far as I know, everybody’s turned it down,” he said. “We’d rather not have the light pollution — or I would rather not have the light pollution.”

After Wednesday’s briefing and discussion, Councilwoman Sukh Kaur (D1) asked city staff to return in early 2027 with an idea for a “revamped program,” possibly with recommended code changes around schools and busy public spaces, how the city confirms new lights are warranted, or using the 311 program.

“So like a revamped version of what you might think the program could look like, that we could then go try to find magic money to install some of them,” she chuckled.

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Officials responded Sept. 18 to the 100 block of East Lincoln Street near the last public exit of the Comal River.

The 63-year-old man from Hallettsville was pulled from the water after he suffered a medical emergency, the city said.

Life-saving measures were attempted, but the man was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the city. His identity has not been released, and next of kin has been notified.

The incident remains under investigation by the New Braunfels Police Department.

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• Man hospitalized after motorcycle crash on Northwest Side, SAPD says

Behind the Kitchen Door is an ongoing series where KSAT investigates health inspections of restaurants in San Antonio.

Chas Kitchen

Chas Kitchen, located at 1431 North Pine, received an 88 on its Sept. 8 inspection.

KSAT visited the restaurant this week and spoke with a manager about the 7 violations listed in the report.

“We already fixed everything and don’t have any problems right now,” he said.

Metro Health told KSAT the kitchen was closed for three days because of the pest issue. The report said there were live roaches in the kitchen.

The report also noted a bottle labeled “roach medicine” inside the restaurant. “We’ve changed everything here,” the man said. “Sorry about that.”

The inspector also noted that the temperature of sausage, shredded cheese, and refried beans were in the 60s while in a walk in cooler for more than four hours. The report said food stored in the walk-in cooler needs to be at or below 41 degrees.

Umiya Sushi

KSAT also visited the new Umiya Sushi on 911 North Hunt Lane.

The restaurant received a 78 during a Sept. 11 inspection, records show.

The report cited several violations, including unheated tempuras and a fly issue. Inspectors also found employees using their phones, washing their hands and eating while wearing gloves, without changing them afterward.

“That’s not sanitary,” said KSAT reporter Daniela Ibarra.

“That’s some employees’ first day that work here,” said the manager. “So we already have a policy.”

The manager allowed KSAT cameras behind the kitchen door to give customers a glimpse of the conditions.

“Even if they cannot see, we want to make sure everything is clean and good,” the manager said.

He also said kitchen staff members were fired after the inspection report, and added that the restaurant is working to correct mistakes during its soft opening phase.

“I appreciate you guys coming,” he told KSAT.

Other scores from the week of Sept. 6 -12:

Mexico Taco, 100

203 General McMullen’s

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Super Donut, 100

8106 Tezel Road

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Amigos Snacks And More, 100

107 Rigsby Avenue

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Crumble Cookies, 100

7511 South New Braunfels Avenue

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Whataburger, 100

23522 Wilderness Oak, Suite 115

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Fat Tummy Empanadas, 100

2922 Commerce Street West

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Hai’s, 100

9390 Huebner Road

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Kung Fu BaoBao, 100

9429 Fredericksburg Road

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Saritas Mexican Restaurant #2, 100

8224 Fredericksburg Road

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Chuzz! Burgers, 100

23503 Hardy Oak Boulevard

Score Guide

100-90 = A (Very Good to Acceptable)

89-80 = B (Acceptable to Marginal)

79 or lower = C (Marginal to Poor)

• RELATED: What do Metro Health inspectors look for when inspecting a restaurant?

You can catch Daniela’s BKD reports on Thursdays on the Nightbeat.

ALSO ON KSAT.COM

Watch other Behind the Kitchen Door stories here

Attorneys representing the 18-year-old Black college student's family have called for transparency, asking that the grand jury investigative materials and the official autopsy report be publicly released. Crump and his team discussed the contents of the cellphone analysis, but they did not release a full report of all the messages sent and received in the days leading up to and the day of Wells' death.

The grand jury had access to that information, including 282 pages of Snapchat conversations, when it convened last week, according to the panel's report and Crump. Crump said the forensic examiner was able to track messages received and sent and tie them to the location of Wells' phone from the day before he went missing all the way up to when his family got the phone back.

“The messaging, as I said, was very telling … some of his own friends were concerned about (how) people on Horn Island can be racist,” Crump said Thursday.

Wells' family and their legal team have slammed the grand jury report and have been working to keep the investigation open and active. They've asked for federal authorities to look into the events surrounding Wells' death. His body was found two days after he went with a group of mostly white friends on a boat trip to a barrier island for a July 4 party.

The high-profile death in a Deep South state with a history of racial tension has sparked rampant speculation and suspicion. State and local officials and several of Wells' white friends who had become the target of that speculation had hoped that the grand jury report would quell critics.

Wells' parents and lawyers express suspicions

Wells’ parents and their lawyers voiced suspicions after Wells’ friends left the island without him, saying he wanted to stay behind and talk to a girl. Wells’ phone was on the boat that took him to the island, and his family and their attorneys have expressed doubt that he would choose to stay behind without his phone.

Crump said the last text message sent by Wells was July 3 around 8:30 p.m., but that was not unusual given that he and many teenagers communicate primarily on social media, including Snapchat and Instagram.

Andrew Garrett, the forensic examiner who extracted the contents of Wells' phone, said the GPS and other phone data showed that Wells had opened it with his face while it was on the boat around 2:17 p.m. It was then locked and continued to receive messages as it traveled on the boat, then by car and eventually was picked up by his family.

Garrett also said at the news conference Thursday that some snap messages had been deleted. He did not specify whether the senders deleted those messages on their own phones, but he made clear that he could not ascribe intent to those deletions. There was no evidence presented that suggested someone had unlocked Wells' phone after it left the island and before the family got it back.

The Associated Press sent a message to Crump's team seeking clarification Thursday.

A lawyer who represents some of Wells’ friends who have been the subject of speculation and online hate said it was unclear what new information the cellphone report revealed, reiterating that none of his clients were on the boat carrying Wells’ phone.

“They never had the phone,” attorney Edward Paltzik said of his clients.

The grand jury findings attempt to explicitly clear the friends who left the island without Wells from any wrongdoing, including trying to squash several online rumors.

In a statement released after Crump's Thursday news conference, District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath stood by the investigation and said: “Again, if the Crump team genuinely has new information or evidence that Nolan Wells was murdered they should stop playing games and immediately provide it to me.”

Lawyers question drowning determination

The grand jury report said the panel found Wells' death to be “consistent with drowning” and found that he had not been in a fight or altercation while on the island.

Crump and Wells' parents questioned how the panel could determine Wells likely drowned, when both the official and independent autopsies said the cause of death could not be determined.

The state's official autopsy report, which Crump's team received late Wednesday, also said Wells' airways and stomach were empty, which they said raised questions about the grand jury's finding.

“What this means is that there is no water in the stomach, there is no water in the lungs and there is no water in the throat,” Wells' family attorney Liza Park said.

Both the official and independent autopsies noted fresh bruising on Wells' head. A witness testified to the grand jury that he saw Wells slip awkwardly off the side of a boat around 3:30 p.m. on July 4, but that Wells continued to socialize after the fall and didn’t appear injured, the report said. The panel said it couldn’t determine whether the fall caused the bruising, but noted it was not a fatal injury.

Texas will be the third stop for the franchise. The team moved to Connecticut in 2003 from Orlando. The Sun made four trips to the WNBA Finals and hosted a record four All-Star Games, and Connecticut was the first team to turn a profit in the league's history. The team, which was purchased for $10 million, was sold for $300 million.

“It’s been an emotional week,” team president Jen Rizzotti told The Associated Press. “The silver lining of the chapter closing is it forces you to look at what this franchise has meant for over two decades and make sure the story is told and the legacy lasts forever.”

The franchise is moving to the home of the former Comets, who won the first four WNBA titles. Its time in Connecticut ended Thursday against Toronto in the regular-season finale. The Sun went out a winner, beating the Tempo 95-81.

Rizzotti will move to Houston with the team as president of basketball operations. She said that 75-80% of the front office staff will also make the move.

“It’s exciting to celebrate the past while also being emotional that it’s ending,” she said. “Thursday is a celebration of our fans with fan appreciation night. One game isn’t enough to show the appreciation of how much they poured into the franchise for 24 years.”

Why are the Sun moving?

The WNBA seems to have outgrown the Sun, with the new collective bargaining agreement demanding standard amenities for all teams that include state-of-the-art practice facilities.

The Mohegan Tribe, which owns the franchise, sold the team to Houston Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta for $300 million.

The Sun had an offer for $325 million from a group led by Celtics minority owner Steve Pagliuca that would have moved the franchise to Boston. The WNBA basically blocked that deal by saying that “relocation decisions are made by the WNBA Board of Governors and not by individual teams.”

Now the franchise is becoming the first to relocate since San Antonio moved to Las Vegas in 2017.

“It’s sad,” former Sun CEO Mitchell Etess said in a phone interview. “I put a lot into it and to see it go is sad. It did confirm that it was a good business decision to bring it there in the first place. If I was still CEO I’d recommend we sell it for that much profit.”

Being in the smallest market in the WNBA led to difficulties for the franchise to attract top free agents. Over the past two years the team has gone from being a WNBA Finals contender to rebuilding mode.

Sun honored their past this season

Throughout the season, Connecticut honored some of the franchise's iconic players, including Jonquel Jones, Jasmine Thomas, Alyssa Thomas, Tina Charles along with coaches Curt Miller and Mike Thibault. The group joined other Connecticut standouts — Margo Dydek, Katie Douglas, Nykesha Sales, Taj McWilliams-Franklin, Lindsay Whalen and Asjha Jones — in the rafters at the arena.

Thibault was the last of the group to be honored as Connecticut hosted the event after last Sunday's game against Minnesota. Whalen, Charles and McWilliams-Franklin were in attendance for that contest as well as dozens of other former employees and front office staffers.

They told stories and stayed well after the game reminiscing about the franchise. Rizzotti expected a similar celebration after Thursday's finale.

“I know we’re going really blow the game out,” she said. “Lot of things we’re giving away, postgame mingles and autograph opportunities. When everybody leaves we’ll just pop Champagne on the court for the last time. I'm proud of what we built.”

Connecticut was ‘icebreaker’ with gambling partnership

Etess remembers trying to sell NBA Commissioner David Stern on moving a franchise to the Mohegan Sun. The late commissioner was concerned about putting a team in a casino, but as it turns out, he was ahead of his time.

“There was a lot of excitement at the beginning, still a casino and a professional sports team being together wasn’t well received everywhere,” Etess recalled in a phone conversation. “David Stern took a lot of the hard questions when that was happening. In retrospect, it was an icebreaker for a lot of the gambling stuff that happened since. The tribe was proud of having the team as it was great to bring national attention to the state and casino.”

The Mohegan Tribe bought the team for $10 million and with the WNBA in CBA negotiations the franchise had a few months to get everything ready to start in 2003. Thibault remembers when he was hired as the coach in January, the franchise had literally nothing.

Thibault said he had to order basketballs, uniforms and even sports bras for his players. The franchise quickly turned into contenders, reaching the WNBA Finals in 2004 and 2005.

Building a faithful fan base

Thibault joked that when the team first started fans came to games to cheer on former UConn players when they came to town, but soon they became fans of the franchise.

“The first year, we didn’t have as good attendance as we had hoped, but that changed quickly,” Etess said. “We didn't give tickets away. After the second year we were always up there in total attendance for many, many years.”

The Sun became the first team in WNBA history to make a profit when they made it happen in 2010.

“It meant a lot to us,” Etess said. “We really focused on doing everything right, trying to run the team professionally.”

Etess is sad to see the state lose its last professional team in an area that has been a women's basketball hotbed for so long.

“It's odd that the league didn’t want the team to stay in Connecticut,” he said. “Connecticut is such a crucial part of women’s basketball. The state that loves women’s basketball isn’t going to have a pro team, doesn’t feel right to me.”

___

See AP’s full WNBA coverage here

Even as a sizable Cuban delegation was approved to come to the U.N. General Assembly this week, the State Department is now weighing “strict controls” on the officials who plan to return next month for an annual U.N. vote on the decadeslong U.S. economic embargo on Cuba.

That is according to U.S. officials and an internal document obtained by The Associated Press. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because a decision on the details of what the restrictions will entail has not yet been finalized.

Potential plans to further restrict officials in New York for diplomatic work come as Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez bemoaned the “lack of progress” in negotiations between Havana and Washington. He also blasted the oil blockade that the Trump administration imposed on the Caribbean island nation in January.

“What defines the present status of the Cuba-U.S. relations is the brutal tightening of the economic and financial blockade and the total oil siege imposed on our country, which is equivalent to a naval blockade,” Rodríguez said in Spanish during an AP interview on the sidelines of the annual U.N. General Assembly gathering of world leaders.

His comments, made through a translator, follow President Donald Trump's wide-ranging U.N. address Tuesday, when he again called Cuba a “failed state" and said he was “seeking a fundamental ⁠change in the situation in Cuba.”

His administration has been trying to force changes to Cuba’s political system by cutting off fuel to the island, leading to massive power outages that affect basic activities such as cooking, water supply, and internet and telephone service.

“Communism will never be coming to America, but freedom ​will be coming to Cuba," Trump said at the U.N.

US-Cuba negotiations once again reach an impasse

Rodríguez, who has served as foreign minister since 2009, said that while no meetings now are scheduled with U.S. officials, “Cuba remains willing to keep these channel of contacts open.”

He refused to say when the last talks took place, noting that while past conversations have been “respectful,” the public statements and policy decisions made by U.S. officials afterward have been “extremely aggressive."

Millions of people have lost access to electricity as Cuba’s power grid has collapsed at least six times since the U.S. energy blockade began at the start of the year. The restrictions prevent Cuba from importing fuel needed to operate its thermoelectric power plants or replacement parts to maintain infrastructure that in many cases has become obsolete.

Other U.S. measures have included imposing more economic penalties on industries in the already heavily sanctioned country and broadening enforcement of laws that bar Americans who visit the island from dealings with government-owned or -affiliated businesses.

"These measures hamper some processes that could lead to discussion of things in the common interests of both nations," Rodríguez said.

Havana has recently integrated historic economic reforms, opening up the island to the private sector. Officials, including Rodríguez, have said these are not concessions to the U.S., but they are moving in the direction the Trump administration wants.

Cuban delegation could face new obstacles to visit United Nations

Rodríguez and other members of his government are planning to return to New York next month for the annual U.N. General Assembly vote on the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba — a vote that has historically condemned American policy toward the island by overwhelming margins.

Cuban officials already face heavy restrictions in New York and Washington due to their U.S. designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, with travel and commuting limited to a 25-mile radius of the U.N. headquarters in Manhattan.

But any new U.S. travel restrictions could make it more difficult or impossible for Cuban officials to attend the vote, which has been taking place for more than three decades.

Last year, Washington’s isolation on the issue was softened as countries like Argentina, Ukraine and Hungary — all closely allied with the Trump administration — rejected the Cuban-backed effort even as friction has grown in the region around American military actions there.

While General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding, they reflect world opinion.

Rodríguez told the AP last year that the U.S. had mounted a pressure campaign to influence the vote. He said then that Havana had heard from other countries, mainly in Europe, that the State Department was encouraging them to vote against the resolution.

In response, a State Department spokesperson said last year that “the Cuban regime does not deserve the backing of America’s democratic allies.”

Veteran-owned businesses make up nearly 7% to 8% of all employer firms in the San Antonio metro area, according to data compiled by the San Antonio Business Journal from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Annual Business Survey — almost double the national average of 4.65%.

Texas is home to roughly 213,000 veteran-owned businesses, and San Antonio consistently ranks as a top-20 U.S. city for veteran entrepreneurs.

Kelsey Waters is one of them.

Waters served as a Marine Corps communications officer from 2009 to 2012, responsible for keeping networks running in the field — sometimes out of the back of a Humvee.

“The joke in my community is — if it plugs in, you’re responsible for it,” she said.

After leaving the Corps, Waters spent years working in the tech sector before co-founding Openlane in August 2024. The San Antonio-based startup is an AI-powered platform that helps small businesses pass security audits and compliance certifications — essentially helping them prove to potential customers that they can be trusted.

The idea came from years of frustration with the way that work was being done.

“After most of my career running these systems manually — using a spreadsheet to track every piece of evidence — I just said, ‘Wow, this is kind of insanely inefficient,’” Waters said. “My two co-founders and I sat down and said, ‘I think we could build something that is materially better.’”

She says the instinct to go solve that problem didn’t come from the tech world. It came from the Marine Corps.

“I really think that’s actually a very military skill set — to take the initiative, have the bias for action, and say, ‘Hey, what is out there does not meet people’s needs,’” she said. “I think I can build something that does.”

Waters has been a Geekdom member since 2020 and recently received a $30,000 investment through the Geekdom Community Fund. Brian Sierakowski, entrepreneur in residence at Geekdom, says the support system matters — because starting a business is harder than most people expect.

“When you’re building a business, nothing’s fixed,” Sierakowski said. “There’s basically an infinite number of permutations of how you can get to success — and that’s the most challenging thing.”

For veterans specifically, Waters says the skills are already there. The missing piece is usually community.

“You already know deeply about responsibility, about bias for action,” she said. “Surround yourself with good mentors, find a good community. We actually have a good cohort of current military, veteran, and reservist founders operating right here in San Antonio today.”

As for the hurdles that come with starting any business — Waters isn’t fazed.

“Founders are going to be founders,” she said. “Especially veterans — we’re not easily dissuaded from much of anything.”

SA Startup and Tech Week is underway next week, with more than 40 free sessions across three downtown locations — Geekdom, Central Library, and Texas Public Radio. Register and find the full schedule here.

Read also:

• Thinking about starting a business in San Antonio? Here’s what it actually takes

The administration said the ruling by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals came Wednesday just minutes before midnight, forcing the cancellation of a flight with 70 people that was headed to three countries. It said justices needed to step in to “halt that chaos” and said the flight cancellation “required a new round of diplomatic engagement with each of the three countries,” which it did not name.

Plaintiffs for immigrants sought emergency relief from the appeals court Wednesday night, saying they heard from “multiple sources” that a deportation flight was scheduled the next day from Alexandria, Louisiana, to Burundi, Rwanda and the Central African Republic.

Within hours of that request, the appeals court said it was clarifying a ruling against the policy last week and said a previous order allowing flights to continue while legal challenges play out was no longer in effect.

Administration officials reacted furiously. Attorney General Todd Blanche said the order “in the dark of night” robbed authorities of “an entirely legal and valuable tool to stem the tide of illegal immigration.”

The justices previously allowed the deportation flights to temporarily continue when the case came before them last year.

The vast majority of people deported to countries other than their own have been sent to Mexico, but under a series of often-secret agreements, the administration has deported thousands of others to more than two dozen countries, from Liberia to Guyana.

Some have found themselves in countries they’d never heard of before their arrivals and held there against their will. Some also face serious safety risks, and are left with little choice except to return to the home countries they were fleeing.

This month, lawyers for two men deported to Equatorial Guinea said they were beaten and held at gunpoint in a hotel-turned-detention center by police who covered their heads with bags.

Trump's Republican administration has said that it sends people with final deportation orders to third countries when their homelands won’t accept them or they can’t be returned there. Those governments provide assurances that people won’t be persecuted or tortured, attorneys said.

James Percival, the Department of Homeland Security’s general counsel, said Wednesday on X that 25,000 people in the U.S. illegally have been deported to third countries, calling those deportations “an essential public safety tool.”

The lower court order doesn't completely prohibit third-country deportations, but it requires the government give people a meaningful chance to object.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to halt that decision, arguing it would force unreasonable delays and the reworking of agreements with foreign countries.

“The order below would again obstruct DHS from efficiently removing aliens ... by inordinately delaying third-country removal for any alien who voices a fear of persecution or torture in that country, no matter how frivolous or belated the claim,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote.

The appeal comes amid a sweeping immigration crackdown by the Trump administration, which has pledged to deport millions of people who are living in the United States illegally.

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Tim Sullivan contributed to this report from Minneapolis. Follow the AP's coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.

Pettit's alma mater, LSU, announced Thursday that he died a day earlier. The university did not provide a cause of death.

Pettit was an All-American at LSU before going on to the NBA, where he was an All-Star for each of his 11 seasons, all with the Hawks. He led them to the 1958 championship over the mighty Boston Celtics, the Hawks’ lone title.

He was also the NBA MVP in 1959 and was the MVP of the All-Star game four times, an achievement matched only by Los Angeles Lakers great Kobe Bryant.

Pettit was a force at a time when the NBA featured the likes of Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson and Elgin Baylor. But it was also before a time when the NBA was widely seen on television, and Pettit — playing in a smaller market — was denied a larger audience.

At 6-foot-9 and 205 pounds and with a deeply receding hairline, Pettit was a physical presence at power forward, before such a position became part of basketball’s vocabulary. He rarely missed a game. He also played center and was one of the first big men who did not play solely with his back to the basket.

Pettit was the Rookie of the Year in 1955, the last year the Hawks played in Milwaukee before moving to St. Louis.

He captured the MVP the next season, leading the league in scoring at 25.7 points a game. He also was the NBA’s scoring leader in 1959 at 29.2 points.

He retired after the 1964-65 season with career averages of 26.4 points and 16.2 rebounds. At that time, he was the NBA’s career leader in points (20,880) and second in rebounds (12,849).

He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1970.

“Lean, graceful, and always well-conditioned, Bob Pettit's physical build made him one of the first big men to play facing the basket,” reads Pettit’s biographical profile at the Hall of Fame. “But Pettit's resolve set him apart from his peers; he simply would not be outworked.”

Robert Lee Pettit Jr. was born on Dec. 12, 1932, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His father worked in law enforcement and served as East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff. Pettit was a late bloomer in basketball, not making the Baton Rouge High School varsity until his junior season.

As a senior, he led Baton Rouge to a state championship and wound up with more than a dozen college offers. He chose to stay home and starred at LSU as a sophomore, an era when players could not join the varsity until then.

He led the Southeastern Conference in scoring all three of his seasons, with averages of 25.5 points as a sophomore, 24.9 as a junior and 31.4 as a senior.

Pettit is one of only three LSU players — Pete Maravich and Shaquille O’Neal the others — to earn a place in the Hall of Fame. Bronze statues of Pettit and O’Neal stand outside LSU’s home arena, the Pete Maravich Assembly Center. His No. 50 is retired by LSU, his No. 9 by the Atlanta Hawks.

“We are grateful for his contributions to our franchise and to basketball history,” the Hawks said in a statement. “His retired No. 9 jersey continues to hang proudly at State Farm Arena as a lasting reminder of the impact he made on our organization. We extend our deepest condolences to Bob’s family, friends and loved ones during this difficult time. We also join those across the basketball world in celebrating a remarkable life and legacy that will never be forgotten.”

Pettit’s misfortune was that most of his career coincided with a run of Celtics championships that remains one of the most dominant runs in American pro sports history.

Pettit was two victories short of being a three-time NBA champion. Pettit’s Hawks advanced to the finals four times, all against Boston, twice losing in seven games.

The first meeting, won by Boston in 1957, came down to double overtime of Game 7. The second ended with a championship for the Hawks, interrupting Boston’s run of nine titles in 10 seasons. The Hawks also dropped NBA Finals matchups with the Celtics in 1960 (in seven games) and 1961 (in five).

Pettit retired to his native Baton Rouge after leaving basketball and worked in banking and financial consulting. He was a regular at LSU and New Orleans Pelicans games in recent years.

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See AP’s full NBA coverage here

James Fulton Engstrom carried an ornate vessel containing the relics of his namesake, the man whom the Catholic Church credits with his miraculous survival as a newborn — Archbishop Fulton Sheen, who died in 1979.

It was a highlight of a lengthy ceremony of beatification for the famed 20th century TV prelate, who will now be known as Blessed Fulton Sheen — one step away from sainthood.

Catholic devotees converged on St. Louis for the afternoon ceremony, taking place at the Dome at America’s Center after years of delays. The indoor stadium was chosen because there wasn’t a venue large enough in his home Diocese of Peoria, Illinois, to accommodate the anticipated crowd.

The ceremony comes 16 years to the month since James was born at home without a pulse and was rushed to the hospital, even as his parents and others prayed earnestly and asked Sheen to add his heavenly prayers, following the Catholic tradition of seeking the intercessions of departed holy people.

After a formal inquiry, the Catholic Church determined that James' resuscitation — when medical workers were about to declare him dead — was a miracle attributable to Sheen's prayers. To qualify for beatification, the Vatican typically requires one miracle attributed to the candidate.

James' mother, Bonnie Engstrom, said before the ceremony that she expected it would feel like a “foretaste of heaven.”

She said she’d been praying to Sheen throughout her pregnancy, and “it was just a very natural thing in the hardest hour of our life” to seek his help.

The presentation of the relics, placed on a pedestal by the altar, was a highlight of a lengthy service that began with a formal procession of hundreds of priests and scores of bishops, lasting more than half an hour and accompanied by robust organ, choral and orchestral music.

A 20th century bishop draws a new audience

About 50,000 tickets were distributed, according to organizers. The halls and exhibit areas were thronged in the morning by pilgrims — priests in cassocks, nuns in habits, families with young children in tow, elderly worshippers who recalled watching Sheen on TV. Scores of bishops, a thousand priests and hundreds of religious order members, seminarians and deacons participated.

Many thronged exhibit booths or stood in long lines to give confession. Others quietly meditated throughout the morning in a makeshift chapel in front of a Eucharist displayed on an altar, including some who knelt on the concrete floor. Bishops have been seeking to promote this traditional devotion, which Sheen practiced regularly.

The Vatican’s top evangelization official, Filipino Cardinal Luis Tagle, the lead celebrant for the Mass, brought greetings from Pope Leo XIV, calling him Sheen’s “fellow Illinoisan.” Tagle called Sheen a model for evangelization, or sharing the faith.

Sheen was once a regular presence in the living rooms of millions of Americans — including that of the future pontiff, who says he watched Sheen's broadcasts while growing up in Chicago.

Attendees, many too young to have seen Sheen's broadcasts, said they’ve taken inspiration from his books and online videos.

“There’s just a revival in the American church as a whole,” said Joseph Punswick, a seminarian from the Diocese of Kansas City, Kansas. “To have an American pope, to have an American beatified man, is amazing to see. Look around. You see kids, you see young families, you see college kids.”

Other attendees, such as Mary Chalupsky of Milford, Connecticut, recalled watching Sheen’s original TV programs. “He brought so many to the faith,” she said.

The service reflected the modern media era, with a livestreamed liturgy and electrical signs urging attendees to use the social media hashtag #celebratesheen.

Sheen's journey from Peoria to primetime

Sheen was a pioneering radio priest who quickly adopted the burgeoning medium of television in the 1950s, when he began hosting the Emmy-winning program, “Life is Worth Living.” Dressed in a cassock, cape and skullcap, he stood at a chalkboard and delivered moral and religious lessons without a narrow Catholic focus.

Sheen was born in 1895 in the small town of El Paso, Illinois, and raised in Peoria. After becoming a priest and earning a doctorate in philosophy, he became a professor at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

He became known for his academic lectures and his plainspoken addresses from the pulpit and the broadcast studio. He often signed off with the benediction, “God love you.”

Sheen appeared in a Time magazine cover article, and he guided celebrities and others converting to Catholicism.

He met with popes and spoke at the reformist Second Vatican Council. He railed against communism, though he opposed the Vietnam War.

Sheen raised funds and traveled the world on behalf of Catholic missions. He served as a bishop in New York State, retiring as an archbishop. After his death at 84, he was buried at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York until his niece won a court battle in 2019 to move his body to Peoria’s Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception, which now draws pilgrims to his tomb.

The Illinois teen tied to Sheen's path to sainthood

The late Pope Francis approved the beatification, attributing to Sheen the miracle of James' resuscitation.

James was born at home without a pulse in September 2010 and rushed to the hospital. Medical workers attempted to resuscitate him but were about to declare him deceased when his heart began beating normally, Engstrom and other witnesses said.

Bonnie Engstrom said she and her husband chose Sheen for James' patron after discovering the prelate's old videos, adding that Sheen's Midwestern-accented voice reminded her of her grandfather and great-grandfather. “He’s like a local boy,” she said at a news conference.

James, who just turned 16, has a devotion to Sheen, but he's largely avoiding the media spotlight. “He’s a delightful young man, but he’s still just a teenage boy, and he needs to be given the space and the grace to have his own journey of life,” his mother said.

Sheen's beatification backstory

The beatification was originally scheduled for 2019, but the Vatican delayed the ceremony. The Diocese of Rochester, which Sheen briefly led in the 1960s, requested the delay out of caution, due to legal investigations taking place then into the oversight of priests accused of sexual abuse across New York State.

Church officials later concluded that Sheen’s record gave no cause for further delay, and plans for the ceremony resumed. Pope Leo approved the beatification earlier this year.

Monsignor Jason Gray, executive director of the Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen Foundation, said church investigators review records and interview witnesses before determining whether a healing qualifies as a miracle. He said there are now six more cases under investigation; a second miracle would qualify Sheen for sainthood under Vatican rules.

Peoria Bishop Louis Tylka said he believes the wait for canonization will be shorter than for the beatification, especially with an Illinois-born pope who's “very much aware of who Sheen is and how he influenced his own life.”

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

But media coverage of Trump’s White House was hardly normal. On a high-profile day when Chinese leader Xi Jinping was visiting Washington and attending a state dinner, no major American network was airing live coverage.

After the White House banned CNN from a rotation of five major U.S. broadcast outlets who take turns shooting and sharing video, the other four — in a show of solidarity — were still declining to participate in the so-called video pool.

Though CNN and MS NOW were back on the White House grounds Thursday, both news outlets said their journalists were denied access to Xi's state dinner arrival. CNN wrote in a blog post that the White House said it would only allow a photojournalist and an audio technician to the event, and refused to allow a reporter and a producer entry.

MS NOW reported that journalist Laura Barrón-López was also denied entry to the arrival ceremony on the portico ahead of the state dinner. Barrón-López was one of the journalists whose press credentials were reinstated under the judge's order.

Reporters and producers from other networks were allowed in, CNN wrote.

The president posted online that TV networks “refused to cover one of the Biggest and Most Beautiful Events to take place in many years ... because they knew how good it would be, they didn’t want credit to be given to “TRUMP.”

It was a chaotic day for the media at the White House and in court.

Initially, in the morning, CNN, MS NOW and Politico journalists were denied entry. A Secret Service agent had confiscated their credentials as part of the ban. After the ruling for the outlets in the early hours Thursday, White House operations officials were notified to restore access to the affected reporters, but said they needed time to find, reactivate and deliver their entry badges. The process took over two hours, according to an administration court filing.

In his decision to provisionally lift the ban, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly ordered the White House to “immediately return, reinstate, and restore” the three outlets’ access. He said they had met the legal thresholds to obtain a temporary restraining order and were likely to succeed in showing that their press passes were revoked without due process.

The ruling did not address CNN's removal from the White House video pool. The White House did not respond to an email seeking comment.

The judge's ruling issued a temporary order

Kelly — whom Trump nominated in 2017 and who ordered a CNN journalist’s access restored in a similar case in 2018 — said the government must have clear standards for conduct that would lead to revoking a press pass. He called the standard of objectionable reporting outlined in letters that the White House sent the outlets “so vague it hardly does the trick.”

The judge also made clear he did not buy the administration’s argument that the news outlets’ reporting endangered national security — and noted that Trump himself had not used that argument in the beginning, focusing solely on what he called negative coverage.

Theodore Boutrous Jr., the news outlets' attorney, said the judge’s quick ruling vindicated the freedom of the press, due process and the rule of law.

“I think we’re going to end up stronger because of this, and this tactic of just attacking the press, attacking individual journalists, is going to be discredited,” Boutrous said in an interview on MS NOW Thursday afternoon. “The law is just clearly on our side here,” he said.

The temporary restraining order — typically designed to preserve the status quo pending a closer review of the case by the court — expires in two weeks. The judge gave both sides until Oct. 5 to file their arguments over whether he should consider issuing a longer-lasting ruling called a preliminary injunction. Kelly said he “intends to rule expeditiously” on the preliminary injunction request.

Attorneys debated access to the White House and any risk to national security

Boutrous argued in the hearing that there was an urgent need for renewed access, saying that the ban caused irreparable harm to the outlets at a time of momentous news events. “We’re at war," he told the judge. "We have world leaders coming to Washington.”

Justice Department attorney Michael Velchik, in his argument, reiterated the administration’s point that the president has the right to choose who gets into the White House.

“Access to the White House is a privilege, not a right,” Velchik said.

In arguing that Trump was not engaging in viewpoint discrimination — the government singling out specific media outlets for the content of what they say or publish — Velchik said the president had criticized other news organizations, but not banned them. He noted, for example, that Trump had called ABC “the worst."

Major networks refrained from covering Trump for the media pool

On Wednesday, after the hearing, the major networks refused to air footage of Trump without assurances that CNN would be permitted back into the video pool.

At Joint Base Andrews, where the president formally welcomed Xi, journalists from Fox News, CBS and NBC were present but not shooting video. The major networks also declined to participate in the video pool for the state dinner.

The chair of the TV press pool, Fox News Washington bureau chief Bryan Boughton, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday afternoon. Earlier this week, Boughton sent an email seen by The Associated Press that advised the TV pool would not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the president after the White House prevented CNN from taking part in the pool.

Other television outlets whose crews were present for some or both events, according to signs on their tripods and cameras, were NewsNation, Newsmax, Right Side Broadcasting Network, One America News and LindellTV.

The Associated Press said it provided video coverage of Trump greeting Xi to its customers, so they could decide whether to broadcast. “We did not stream the coverage on our own platforms, including APNews.com or our YouTube channel,” said an AP spokesman, Patrick Maks.

In an advisory to customers, AP said it would not have independent video coverage of meetings between Trump and Xi. It noted that a U.S. government handout live feed could be accessed on the White House website.

The AP was one of some 50 groups filing an amicus brief ahead of Wednesday’s hearing, urging the court to immediately restore the three outlets’ White House access.

Some network personalities were invited guests at the state dinner

Paramount CEO David Ellison, who is several days away from closing a multibillion-dollar merger that will give him control of CBS, CNN and various streaming platforms, was a guest at the state dinner along with his wife.

So were some Fox News employees, including anchor Bret Baier and commentators Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters.

___

Golden reported from Seattle, and Kellman from London. AP reporter Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, contributed.

Reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico returned to the White House Thursday afternoon, hours after a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s ban of three news outlets. Despite the ruling, the journalists were initially denied access Thursday morning. The back-and-forth was the latest in an extraordinary showdown between Trump and media outlets whose coverage he dislikes.

Trump’s pick to lead the Food and Drug Administration voiced support for the safety of long-established vaccines at a hearing Thursday, even as senators questioned her about the White House’s efforts to upend childhood immunizations.

Here's the latest:

Senate Democrats criticize the pomp of the summit

In a statement, 19 Senate Democrats criticized the pageantry of the Trump-Xi summit for failing to deliver for the American people.

“Rather than confronting China’s unfair trade practices, technology theft, complicity in attacks against our troops or economic and military aggression against our allies, President Trump opted for pageantry over purpose—trading tough diplomacy for a ballroom tour and a lavish dinner with his billionaire friends,” read the statement by the senators, including all Democratic members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The Democratic senators criticized Trump for trading away the U.S. technological dominance for commercial gains, decimating the U.S. education and research and alienating its allies.

Trump’s MAGA and China’s rejuvenation goals can help each other, Xi says at state dinner

In his toast at the state dinner, Xi said Trump’s pledge to “Make America Great Again” and his call for China to achieve great national rejuvenation are both ambitious and can “help each other achieve” their respective goal.

“China and the United States must act as responsible major countries, meet the expectations of our peoples,” Xi said.

Trump says the White House new ballroom is a military complex — and he wants Chinese officials to check it out

The U.S. president invited Xi and other government officials to tour his under-construction White House ballroom.

That could be a national security problem.

Trump has described the building as more than a place for entertainment. He has said that “the military is building a big complex under the ballroom” — and he has now invited Chinese officials to tour an incomplete site that Trump has described as essential for national security. The ballroom, once completed, is also slated to have drone ports to fend off attacks.

No Chinese CEOs on state dinner guest list

The White House list of more than 130 invited guests for the state dinner includes plenty of American tech giants, but Chinese CEOs are conspicuously missing.

U.S. and Chinese planners did discuss including several executives from some notable Chinese companies, according to a person familiar with the planning for the state visit who was not authorized to comment publicly.

One obstacle that came up during the negotiations for the state visits was that the U.S. side was slow to suggest protocols and clarify what roles the Chinese CEOs would have in the state visit, the person said.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

—Aamer Madhani

Hundreds of protesters gather in downtown Washington to protest Xi’s visit

A few hundred protesters gathered at a park near the White House on Thursday afternoon to “unwelcome” Xi during his state visit to the U.S.

Many waved Tibetan flags and called for a “Free Tibet.” Some carried flags bearing words for “freedom” and “democracy” in Chinese, along with signs reading “Keep Taiwan Free” and “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times,” the slogan from Hong Kong’s massive 2019 protests.

“I hope Emperor Xi won’t remain in power. I hope he can give Chinese people real freedom — freedom of speech and religion,” said Zhang Na, dressed as Winnie the Pooh, a character often used to mock Xi in China.

Yang Fan, a 39-year-old Christian, held a handwritten sign calling for “freedom of religion” and an “end to dictatorship.” He said he wanted to stand up for Christians in China and hoped Xi would release those jailed for their religious beliefs

As Republicans court working-class voters, Trump hosts billionaires at White House dinner

At tonight’s state dinner, Trump is surrounding Xi with the one group in which America leads the world — billionaires.

The tuxedoed soiree is a far cry from the Republican candidates attempting to brand themselves as being a party for workers.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and LVMH’s Bernard Arnault are roughly worth a combined $680 billion.

Add in OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and the financiers Jamie Dimon and Larry Fink and that number keeps going up.

Of course, Trump is worth about $7 billion, helped out in large by gains in crypto tied to his political resurgence.

Xi arrives at state dinner

Trump, clad in a tuxedo, and first lady Melania Trump, in a tuxedo-style jumpsuit with a large necktie bow, greeted Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan in front of the White House.

Xi, in a black suit, and Peng, in a red gown, emerged from their limousine onto a red carpet at the North Portico, where they shook hands with the Trumps.

The four then posed for pictures before going inside.

Loud protest near White House can be heard as guests arrive at dinner

The crowd standing behind a fence along Lafayette Park held flags and signs and appeared to have speakers that carried their voices across the park and all the way to the North Portico of the White House, where an honor guard and red carpet were laid out for guests attending the state dinner.

The protesters could be heard chanting “Xi Jinping has got to go” and “Shame! Shame Xi Jinping!” as their chants grew louder.

It’s prime day for Amazon founder at state dinner for Chinese leader

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez Bezos, arrived at the White House for the state dinner.

Trump has bragged about the wealth gathering in the East Room for the meal, and Bezos brings with him a net worth of $369.3 billion, according to Forbes.

Here’s what’s on the state dinner menu

First lady Melania Trump has ordered a three-course meal that will be served on the red china dishes from Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

The meal will open with a starter of yellow squash velouté and wild mushroom fricassee with crispy pancetta beneath a drizzle of scallion oil.

It will be followed by an entrée of sesame-crusted sea bass with braised baby bok choy, roasted eggplant and herb sauce.

The meal will be capped by a vanilla crémeux with a sour cherry confit center on top of a walnut frangipane and a serving of ice cream made using honey from bee houses at the White House.

Billionaires behind AI join state dinner

Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, famous for wearing black leather jackets at public events worldwide, came to the White House with his wife, Lori, looking far more formal in a well-tailored tuxedo.

The chipmaker whose products power AI is worth an estimated $192.7 billion, according to Forbes.

Open AI CEO Sam Altman autographed baseballs and other items as he arrived at the White House. Altman has warned about AI models creating major risks for the world, but he’s coming to the state dinner as something of a celebrity.

The buildout of AI has been powering U.S. economic growth, and Altman is worth $3.3 billion, according to Forbes.

Democratic senator blasts Trump for deferential treatment of Chinese leader

Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, lambasted Trump’s deferential treatment of Xi and said Trump hadn’t pressed China hard enough to keep its commitments on trade.

“In return for China breaking nearly every trade promise it has made, Trump is rolling out the red carpet for President Xi,’’ Wyden said in a statement. “Trump has not even succeeded in forcing China to live up to the weak deal that he struck.”

Wyden referred to unfulfilled promises made by China to buy more U.S. farm goods and release rare earth minerals, which he said is “harming our manufacturers and American jobs.”

“There is no evidence that Trump is using this opportunity to push back on the Chinese government policies that hurt our workers and businesses, from forced labor to state subsidies,” Wyden said.

More pomp than substance, former US diplomat says

Danny Russel, a former U.S diplomat serving in the Obama administration, expressed concern that the two leaders spent more time on social and ceremonial events than the actual talk, which was about 90 minutes.

“Pageantry and protocol don’t add up to progress. Pandas are cute, but what America needs are rare earths,” said Russel, now a distinguished fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

“What we’re seeing isn’t diplomacy so much as ‘diplotainment,’ which won’t do much to solve the serious problems in the U.S.-China relationship,” Russel said. “No amount of flattery and pomp translates into leverage over China.”

Trump fumes about networks not covering Xi’s White House welcome ceremony

The president posted online that TV networks “refused to cover one of the Biggest and Most Beautiful Events to take place in many years.”

He added, “The event was magnificent — Actually made for Television” but no network covered it “because they knew how good it would be, they didn’t want credit to be given to “TRUMP.”

The event actually wasn’t covered because the White House’s five-network television pool rotation has refused to cover Trump’s events after he moved to ban one of its members, CNN, along with MS Now and Politico, from the White House grounds.

A judge issued a temporary order on Thursday allowing the three outlets back at the White House. But the network pool has continued not to cover Trump because CNN hasn’t yet had its place in the pool rotation covering presidential events restored.

Xi and Trump talk about Iran, Russia-Ukraine and North Korea, China says

The two leaders exchanged views on global and regional issues such as the Middle East, Ukraine and the Korean Peninsula, according to the official Chinese government readout of the meeting at the White House.

Xi and Trump also confirmed their mutual support for hosting regional meetings in the coming weeks, the statement said.

China is to host the annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation grouping in November, and the U.S. is holding this year’s G20 summit in Florida. The statement didn’t say if the leaders will attend each other’s summit.

Xi also said the two leaders decided to build a “constructive strategic and stable China-U.S. relationship.” Such a relationship benefits not only the Chinese and American people, but the people of the world, the statement said.

Chinese state media: Xi urges talks over Iran and supports a comprehensive deal

In meeting with Trump, Xi said China supports the U.S. and Iran returning to an interim deal that was signed in June in an effort to wind down the war, according to the Chinese state broadcaster China Central Television.

Xi said China hopes the two sides can return to dialogue and negotiations as soon as possible for an eventual, comprehensive deal, including on Iran’s nuclear program.

The interim deal broke down soon after it was signed as the sides traded renewed fire over control of the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial waterway for energy shipments. China is Iran’s biggest oil buyer and its largest trading partner.

The Chinese state broadcaster is authorized to release official statements.

International body says it wasn’t invited to observe US election in break from tradition

An international body known for monitoring elections in 57 countries says it has not been invited to observe the U.S. midterm elections, as it has for every federal election there since 2002.

The United States is a founding member of the group, the Organization for Security and Cooperation and Europe, which was created during the Cold War to help ease East-West tensions.

Maria Telalian, the director of OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, said the office had built a constructive relationship with U.S. authorities and electoral stakeholders over the years. She said the organization regrets not being able to continue that work.

The State Department said: “The United States is one of the world’s oldest constitutional democracies. ODIHR should focus its limited resources on elections where it can have the greatest impact.”

Committee vote for surgeon general nominee delayed

A key Senate committee has delayed a vote on the nomination of Trump’s choice for surgeon general, Dr. Nicole Saphier, a radiologist and former Fox News Channel contributor.

Saphier’s nomination, which is Trump’s third pick for the role, was expected to move this week out of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

However, a committee statement says her nomination vote has been postponed and will not take place this week. A new date has not yet been set.

Meanwhile, the nomination of Chris Klomp to serve as deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services has advanced out of the Senate Finance Committee — on a 14 to 13 vote. It’s unclear, however, when a full Senate vote will take place on that nomination.

Energy Department to spend $2B to squeeze more electricity from aging power grid

The Energy Department said Thursday that it will spend almost $2 billion to try to squeeze more electricity out of the nation’s aging and stressed power grid.

That announcement comes as the Trump administration steps up efforts to avoid blackouts amid skyrocketing energy demand spurred by artificial intelligence.

Officials say the money will go toward 31 projects across 26 states that are expected to produce enough additional electricity to power 16 million homes. The projects are to use new technologies such as sensors to ensure safe transmission or direct power away from congested or overloaded paths.

The Energy Department says the upgrades could improve power reliability and lower electricity costs for about 100 million Americans. It comes as electricity bills rise faster than inflation in many parts of the U.S.

Israel’s Netanyahu: Attacking Iran was ‘one of the easiest decisions’ he’s ever made

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told world leaders at the United Nations that attacking Iran “was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to make.”

He denounced as “moral cowards” a mass of delegates who walked out of the U.N. General Assembly when he took the podium to speak. When Netanyahu walked to the rostrum, a mix of cheers, boos and mass walkouts erupted.

The Palestinian delegation had called for a mass walkout.

Netanyahu also thanked Trump for taking decisive action against Iran, and he insisted Israel would prevail: “We will continue to win because we have no other choice.”

Xi departs the White House

The Chinese leader left from the North Portico of the White House around 1:30 p.m.

Before he climbed into his limo, Xi shook hands with Trump and the men briefly spoke about the meeting they had.

Xi will return later Thursday evening for the state dinner.

Xi says there can be more direct flights between US and China

In his remarks at the White House, Xi said the two countries “may also increase direct flights to facilitate two-way travel and trade.”

The number of direct flights between the U.S. and China fell during the COVID-19 pandemic and has yet to recover to the pre-pandemic level.

Xi also said China is willing to strengthen cooperation with the U.S. on counternarcotics and law enforcement and that the two militaries “should maintain regular dialogue, and improve mechanisms for crisis communication and prevention.”

Trump FDA nominee Heidi Overton voices support for vaccines

The president’s nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration faced questions Thursday from senators who will vote on her nomination to lead the federal agency.

A physician and top White House adviser, Dr. Heidi Overton has worked on administration health efforts. That included a plan from Trump announced last month to break up longtime combination vaccines for children over safety concerns.

Overton said Thursday that FDA-approved vaccines remain safe and effective. She also responded to questions about FDA’s oversight of the abortion pill and vaping products.

The committee with vote on her nomination later.

In her current role as a domestic policy adviser, Overton also worked on White House health initiatives including the revamped food pyramid. Previously she was an executive at the America First Policy Institute, authoring papers critical of abortion and transgender care.

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US cybersecurity agency releases its report for the midterms

The agency is laying out potential threats to election systems and listing services it can offer to election officials to protect the vote.

Its report comes just 40 days before Election Day in the midterms and after state election officials have complained that they’ve not been getting the level of cooperation from the agency they’ve had in previous elections.

The Trump administration gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s election work last year. It cut some 1,000 employees and slashed $10 million from two cybersecurity initiatives. That forced state and local election officials to pay for private services to ensure they were prepared for this year’s midterms.

CISA, as the agency is known, is housed under the Department of Homeland Security. Since its founding in 2018, it has helped warn state and local election officials about potential threats from foreign governments.

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US farmers are watching China’s promises to buy more soybeans

After the previous U.S.-China summit in May, the White House announced that China agreed to buy $17 billion annually in American agricultural products. That was atop China’s earlier commitment in October 2025 to purchase soybeans.

The deal restored an export market for farmers struggling with high fuel and fertilizer prices. But while soybean purchases have doubled since last year, China had only bought $3.9 billion worth of other U.S. agricultural products in the first seven months of 2026, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

That rate is only slightly higher than during the trade war in 2025, and it’s unclear if China will reach the committed level by the end of the year. The USDA forecasts that China will purchase $21.5 billion worth of U.S. agricultural products in the fiscal year starting in October.

CNN, MS NOW and Politico reporters back at White House after judge intervenes

Reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico have returned to the White House, hours after a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s ban of three news outlets.

The judge said early Thursday that CNN, MS NOW and Politico must have their access restored.

Early Thursday afternoon, CNN and MS NOW journalists were back at the White House after the latest back-and-forth in an extraordinary showdown between Trump and media outlets whose coverage he dislikes.

The president announced Friday he was banning the outlets, assailing what he called “fake news.” The outlets argued they were singled out over the content of their coverage.

White House Press Operations Director Micah Stopperich wrote in a court filing that officials were notified at 7:10 a.m. Thursday to restore access, and the reporters got their badges back shortly after 10 a.m. once the Secret Service located and reactivated them.

Senate to vote on resolution to halt the Iran war as gas prices upend midterms

Increasingly anxious about the Iran war, senators are set to vote Thursday on a war powers resolution seeking to halt Trump’s military action, which has been largely blamed for the spike in fuel prices and become a flashpoint in the midterm election.

The Senate vote, days after Trump’s bombastic address to the United Nations in which he threatened to “annihilate” Iran, is likely to be the last chance for lawmakers to go on record about the war ahead of November. More Republicans are peeling way from the president as the war drags on, a rare slap back to Trump, as they campaign for control of Congress.

“They have been carrying water for this ridiculous and illegal war for months and months and months and not listening to their constituents,” said Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, who pushed the war powers resolution forward. “And now they finally are.”

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Trump and Xi do a military review

In the late morning, Trump and Xi participated in a military review in the Rose Garden that was smaller in scale compared to the troop review Xi prepared for Trump in May.

With military band members positioned on the roof of the West Wing, the two leaders and their spouses watched as other musicians played, dressed in colonial wear and white wigs in homage to America's 250th anniversary. Twelve Marines later performed rifling tossing and formations. The military review concluded with a flyover of a B-2 bomber and four fighter jets soaring over the White House.

Xi confirms 2 pandas will come to Zoo Atlanta in the coming days

The Chinese president announced that as a measure of good faith, China would send two pandas to Zoo Atlanta after Beijing reclaimed four pandas in 2024 as diplomatic tensions between China and the U.S. intensified.

China and the zoo first announced in April that two pandas, male Ping Ping and female Fu Shuang, would be coming to the U.S. as part of a giant panda conservation agreement with the China Wildlife Conservation Association.

He called the panda loan programs with the U.S. “an envoy of friendship.”

China and the US must ensure AI is under human control, Xi says

Xi touched on artificial intelligence in his opening remarks, saying the two superpowers have a responsibility to ensure that humans always operate AI.

“We have both the capability and responsibility to develop and manage AI for good and ensure that a development of AI is always under human control and serves the well being of the people,” the Chinese leader said.

The two countries’ finance ministers earlier this week met, with the U.S. proposing a new “notification mechanism” for AI incidents between the two nations.

This is the first Trump-Xi meeting at the White House

The U.S. president noted that he and the Chinese leader have met all over the world, including in China and in Palm Beach, Florida, at the president’s club.

But this is actually the first time the two are meeting at the White House proper, Trump noted.

“We have spent time together all over the world,” he said.

During those visits, Xi and Trump have “forged a friendship, a truly great friendship, actually,” the U.S. president said.

Trump noted that a lot has changed at the White House since Xi was last there for an Obama-hosted state visit — a nod to his renovation projects.

Xi state visit underway at the White House

Just after 10 a.m. ET, the official state visit by China’s Xi Jinping was underway.

To the blare of trumpets, Trump and first lady Melania Trump walked out of the White House residence onto the South Lawn, where they were to greet Xi and Madame Peng.

China’s leader and his spouse then walked out of a black vehicle, where they warmly shook hands with the Trumps. Then the four posed for the cameras.

Trump-Xi schedule does not include a joint news conference

The presidents of the U.S. and China are scheduled to deliver remarks Thursday morning at the White House and again in the evening as part of a state dinner.

The schedule does not include a news conference, and it’s unclear whether Trump and Xi will take questions from either American or Chinese reporters.

In a 2015 meeting, Xi and President Barack Obama held a joint news conference as part of a White House summit. In the Rose Garden, which Trump has since turned into a patio, each president made opening remarks. Then they each answered one question from a U.S. reporter and another from a Chinese reporter before taking additional, nation-specific questions.

The Trump-Xi summit comes as U.S. networks are boycotting White House pool coverage in protest of Trump stripping credentials from MS Now, Politico and CNN.

The money will go toward 31 projects across 26 states that are expected to produce more than 23 gigawatts of additional electricity capacity — enough to power 16 million homes. The projects will use new technologies such as sensors to measure real-time weather conditions to ensure safe transmission or direct power away from congested paths, the department said.

The upgrades could improve power reliability and lower electricity costs for about 100 million Americans, officials said.

“This is a quick way to lower electricity prices and increase reliability: using fibers that are already in the transmission lines to analyze what’s the temperature out, what’s the wind out, how can we use this transmission line to distribute more power, but safely and only in the right conditions," Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a news conference promoting the grants Thursday at a PPL Corp. facility in Allentown.

The eastern Pennsylvania electric utility says two data centers in its territory came online this year and six more are under construction, with enough other data centers in the advanced planning stages that its peak electric demand could quintuple by 2032.

PPL said it is receiving $71.5 million to modernize an existing high-voltage transmission line across roughly 30 miles in northern Pennsylvania.

The announcement comes amid warnings that AI’s voracious demand for power is threatening to overwhelm U.S. power supplies, as massive new data centers come online faster than new power plants can be built. It also comes as electricity bills rise faster than inflation in many parts of the U.S., blamed in some areas on demand from data centers.

The snowballing opposition to data centers in communities across the country has thrown a wrench into the plans of the world’s richest companies and transformed the midterm election landscape.

Trump continues to stick up for data centers, even as politicians from both major political parties criticize them and many communities try to block them.

In the meantime, Congress and some states are trying to push utilities to expand their use of new technologies to make grids more efficient and to lessen the need to build new power plants.

Julia Selker, the executive director of the WATT Coalition, a trade association for grid-enhancing technologies, said both the projects and the scale of the investment are significant. Utilities in the U.S. are lagging places like Europe in adopting the technologies, despite federal investment in the past to develop and test them, Selker said.

Still, Drew Maloney, CEO of the Edison Electric Institute, a trade association of for-profit utilities, said America's electric utilities are making a “significant investment” every year in new technologies to strengthen the grid and reduce outages.

Wright said that work on the projects should begin right away and that he hoped some efficiencies are in place before this winter to tamp down price spikes when extreme weather sends demand skyrocketing.

Wright said he didn't know whether the projects would have gotten done without federal funding. Many, he said, had been under consideration before the grants were offered, but the grant recipients hadn't “quite pulled the trigger” on them.

Projects being announced Thursday will involve component enhancements on more than 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) of transmission lines and technological enhancements across nearly 21,000 miles (34,000 kilometers), the department said.

Projects were prioritized based on those that can be put into operation quickly, officials said. Money for the grants comes from the bipartisan infrastructure law enacted by Congress under then-President Joe Biden, a Democrat. The government's $1.9 billion in funding will be matched by $3.35 billion from the recipients, the department said.

Recipients include utilities, cooperatives and four state agencies. The state agencies — in Colorado, Indiana, Ohio and Oklahoma — were the biggest recipients, collectively drawing $810 million, with the Colorado and Oklahoma projects promising improvements to regional grids.

Trump has vowed to “unleash” the nation's energy sector in his second term, aiming to drive up record-setting domestic oil and gas production, strip away pollution restrictions on power plants and keep expensive coal-fired power plants operating past their retirement dates.

The administration also has pledged nearly $4 billion to buy back offshore wind leases as Trump seeks to discourage the expansion of wind energy in favor of fossil fuels.

His administration meanwhile has pushed to help tech giants build and connect data centers to power plants and high-voltage power lines and convert Cold War-era uranium enrichment plants into data center and power plant complexes.

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Daly reported from Washington.

The subpoenas require the former FBI employees to testify in Fort Pierce, Florida, as the Justice Department pursues an ill-defined theory of a “deep state” conspiracy to deprive Trump of his civil rights and keep him from power.

The investigation so far has been focused largely on former government officials who examined ties between Russia and Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, but the subpoenas disclosed Thursday hint at the far-reaching nature of an investigation that is also scrutinizing the FBI's 2022 search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida for classified documents. That search formed the basis of one of four criminal cases Trump faced between his first and second terms.

Justice Department officials are pressing ahead with what's commonly known as the “grand conspiracy” investigation after the resignation this month of Joseph diGenova, a Trump ally who had been brought in to help lead the probe that has animated right-wing commentators who have long alleged former law enforcement and intelligence officials conspired against the Republican president.

The filing on behalf of the subpoenaed employees tees up a fresh legal question for U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointed judge who not only dismissed the classified documents prosecution of Trump but also sits in the Fort Pierce courthouse where the Justice Department has centered its yearlong conspiracy probe of Trump's perceived foes.

Cannon last February issued an order blocking the release of a report on the classified documents investigation prepared by special counsel Jack Smith, whose team in 2023 brought dozens of felony charges against the then-Republican candidate, and barring the release of non-public information about the case to people outside the Justice Department.

Lawyers say their clients are willing to testify

Now, lawyers for the subpoenaed former employees are asking Cannon to clarify whether that order precludes their clients from being able to testify before the grand jury since they'll be asked detailed questions about the investigation.

Without that clarification, they say, they may be forced to decide between being in contempt of the order if they testify, “not providing full, unconstrained testimony" in order to comply with the order or invoking their constitutional rights against self-incrimination — an option they say “creates unnecessary negative options for innocent former civil servants.”

“Specifically, clients seek to confirm that they can freely discuss non-public information related to their work on the investigation with individuals outside the DOJ, including but not limited to the grand jury and client's own counsel, without running afoul of the terms of the order,” the lawyers wrote.

The attorneys observed that the Justice Department has already taken the position that testimony about the Mar-a-Lago investigation would violate Cannon's order, noting that government lawyers emailed attorneys for Smith before he testified before Congress that he was not permitted to reveal non-public information. But they say officials in the current conspiracy investigation in Florida have declined to articulate a position or seek clarity from the court about its order.

The lawyers say their clients are happy to testify about the investigation if legally cleared to do so.

“If allowed by the court to testify unconstrained by the order, clients will readily provide to the grand jury a detailed account of the investigation, reasoning, decision-making, and other ‘non-public’ information spanning from the time the classified documents investigation was first referred to the FBI up through and including the execution of the warrant," the filing says. “Clients will each detail their firsthand memories of investigating a properly predicated allegation that then-citizen Trump had unlawfully retained hundreds of highly classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence.”

The filing reveals new details about the scope of the investigations and negotiations with the government.

Submitted on behalf of a group of current and former agents and analysts who participated in the Mar-a-Lago investigation, the filing says that the FBI in July and August reached out to request voluntary interviews and told the attorneys that grand jury testimony would follow those interviews.

The lawyers say two clients received subpoenas on Monday. One individual was subpoenaed to testify next week and two others, including one represented by separate lawyers, have been subpoenaed to appear the following week, according to the filing.

They say the Justice Department has broached the possibility of giving immunity to the witnesses but has not formally offered that yet. But they say immunity wouldn't resolve the issues, in part because their clients don't believe they or anyone else involved in the Mar-a-Lago investigation broke any laws.

Lucio has spent 18 years on death row, but questions about her possible innocence have focused on whether daughter Mariah Alvarez’s fatal head trauma was caused by abuse or an accidental fall. 

Paramedics called to Lucio’s Harlingen home, where she lived with her nine children, found a badly injured and unresponsive Mariah, who Lucio said had fallen down a flight of stairs. Hospital staff found multiple bruises on Mariah’s body and ruled she had died from blunt force trauma to the head.

The appeals court stayed Lucio’s execution in 2022 and directed a lower court to review claims that new scientific evidence contradicted testimony that Mariah’s injuries could only have been caused by abuse. Defense lawyers also argued that prosecutors suppressed favorable evidence during her trial. 

In separate 2024 rulings, District Judge Arturo Nelson — who had presided over Lucio’s original trial — recommended that the state’s highest criminal court overturn her sentence and declare Lucio “actually innocent.”

Instead, the Court of Criminal Appeals cast doubt on her claims and said Nelson’s rulings relied too heavily on Lucio’s interpretation of events and not the prosecution’s case.

“We decline to adopt any of the habeas court’s findings and conclusions, which exclusively reflect Applicant’s interpretation of the evidence and are often unsupported,” the court said in an unsigned opinion from which four of the nine judges dissented.

Three judges — David Newell, Lee Finley and David Schenck — filed dissenting opinions and a fourth, Scott Walker, dissented from the ruling without filing an opinion.

Newell noted that prosecutors conceded during Lucio’s appeal that they had withheld material evidence during her trial, and admonished the court for ignoring their concession.

“The facts in this case are devastating. This makes the State’s failure to disclose material exculpatory evidence all the more tragic,” Newell wrote.

Two judges, Bert Richardson and Gina Parker, filed concurring opinions. Parker’s opinion was one page followed by eight photos of Mariah’s body that showed a significant number of bruises, scratches and what prosecutors at trial claimed was a bite mark on her back. Parker wrote that she included the images “because a picture can be worth a thousand words.”

Part of Lucio’s appeal included new evidence that Mariah had a blood coagulation disorder her family was unaware of. Defense lawyers argued the disorder accounted for the bruising, but Richardson’s 132-page opinion said the bruising could not explained  by the clotting disorder alone.

Richardson also described “significant inexplicable dissonances” in Nelson’s rulings.  

“Even when viewed for any cumulative effect, the evidence [Lucio] presents undermines and contradicts other evidence that might otherwise offer a modicum of support for her case,” Richardson wrote.

Lucio’s lawyer, Vanessa Potkin, said she will appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Between Judge Nelson’s detailed findings of innocence, and District Attorney [Luis] Saenz’s concession of error, we are confident that the courts will clear Melissa Lucio and allow her to return home to her children and grandchildren,” Potkin said. 

If exonerated, Lucio would be the first woman declared innocent from Texas death row, joining 18 exonerated men since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976

Lucio’s conviction has received significant public attention and criticism, including from state lawmakers. Before the appeals court granted a stay of execution for Lucio in 2022, a bipartisan group of lawmakers urged the state parole board to consider Lucio’s innocence.

With their countries in a generational contest for economic and technological dominance, the two appear to be betting that a combination of personal rapport and mutual interest can prevent the competition from boiling over into open conflict.

“From the time of my first election in 2016, President Xi and I have forged a friendship, a truly great friendship, actually, built on mutual respect and the vital interests of our people,” Trump said as he welcomed Xi to the White House for a pomp-filled state visit.

Xi was more pointed than Trump, saying Chinese and American interests are “deeply intertwined” and that the “competition should be a healthy one and should be kept within bounds.”

He also reiterated his warning that the U.S. and China must avoid the “ Thucydides trap,” referring to the idea that when a rising power threatens to displace an established one, the result is often war. Xi offered a similar warning when Trump visited Beijing in May.

“It should be a race of catching up with one another, not a wrestle in which one either wins or loses,” Xi added.

China has resisted the Trump administration's urgings — and economic threats — to use its considerable leverage to prod Iran to agree to U.S. terms to end the nearly seven-month war. Xi wants to see Trump permanently halt arms sales to Taiwan and loosen export restrictions on cutting-edge advanced chips. The two sides on Wednesday agreed to extend by two months a one-year trade truce that was set to expire Nov. 10 as they work to find a more durable agreement.

Xi presses Trump on Taiwan

During their private conversation on Thursday, Xi told Trump he hopes the U.S. can adhere to opposing Taiwan independence and urged him to “prudently handle the Taiwan issue,” according to the Chinese state media outlet Xinhua. The White House did not immediately release any readout of the talks and Trump, who frequently offers his own take of his interactions with foreign leaders on his social media platform, has yet to weigh in on the substance of his conversations with Xi.

Trump, who is in the midst of a legal fight after trying to bar CNN, MSNOW, and Politico from the White House, did complain that TV networks “refused to cover one of the Biggest and Most Beautiful Events to take place in many years.” The White House’s five-network television pool rotation refused to cover Trump’s events in response to the action against CNN.

China has made clear it views Taiwan as the most sensitive issue in the U.S.-China relationship. Beijing considers Taiwan to be Chinese territory and vows to annex the island by force if necessary. The United States is obligated by law to provide Taiwan with sufficient hardware to deter any armed attack from the mainland. The U.S. has said it opposes any unilateral changes to the status quo by either side.

China has repeatedly pressed Washington to permanently halt the arms sales, including when Trump and Xi met in Beijing in May.

After that meeting, Trump said he was holding off on final approval for a record $14 billion arms package that was in the pipeline. He also described arms sales to Taiwan as a “very good negotiating chip” with China.

Xi says China and US should make sure AI is ‘always under human control’

Trump said in a social media post earlier Thursday that artificial intelligence — “superintelligence” as he is trying to rebrand it — was high on the agenda. The president has been dismissive of calls for greater regulation amid growing global anxiety that the technology will kill jobs or potentially even wipe out humanity.

“I want to leave it exactly where it is,” Trump wrote. “That is China’s position also.”

But Xi, in his opening comments, said that the two countries had “the capability and responsibility to develop and manage AI for good and ensure that the development of AI is always under human control and serves the well-being of the people.”

The two countries’ finance ministers met earlier this week, with the U.S. proposing a new “notification mechanism” for AI incidents between the two nations.

Trump rolls out the red carpet for Xi

Trump had made clear he wanted to impress Xi with the visit. The Republican president made sure construction of a new helicopter landing pad on the White House's South Lawn was completed before the visit and he met Xi and his wife on Wednesday evening when they flew into Joint Base Andrews outside Washington.

The White House also arranged an elaborate military review, which the leaders and their spouses observed before the Oval Office talks.

After about 90 minutes of talks, the leaders stepped out to the South Lawn so Trump could show off the new White House helipad and give Xi a tour of Marine One, the presidential helicopter. Trump and Xi also appeared to peer at the ballroom construction site from afar. Xi left the White House shortly after the quick tour and returned in the evening for the state dinner.

No Chinese CEOs at state dinner

Tech titans, including Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Nvidia's Jensen Huang, and Tesla and SpaceX's Elon Musk, were among the 130 guests invited to the black-tie dinner, but Chinese CEOs were conspicuously absent.

U.S. and Chinese planners did discuss including several executives from some notable Chinese companies, according to a person familiar with the planning for the state visit who was not authorized to comment publicly.

One obstacle that came up during the negotiations for the state visits was that the U.S. side was slow to propose protocols and clarify the roles the Chinese CEOs would have during the state visit, the person said. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the absence of Chinese business leaders.

While Trump has offered plenty of glitz, some China analysts observed that the talks seemed light on substance.

Danny Russel, a former senior State Department official who served in former President Barack Obama's administration, observed that the two leaders spent more time in social and ceremonial events than in formal talks about the core issues facing the two nations.

“What we’re seeing isn’t diplomacy so much as ‘diplotainment,’ which won’t do much to solve the serious problems in the US-China relationship,” said Russel, who is now a distinguished fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute..

Xi urges US and Iran to return to interim agreement

The two sides discussed the ongoing conflict in Iran, according to Chinese state broadcaster China Central Television.

Trump has argued to little effect that China, which is far more dependent on Gulf oil than the U.S., has plenty of incentive to use its sway with Tehran to help force an end to the conflict.

But Trump's war of choice has unnerved Beijing, with the government condemning the U.S. and Israeli military action and Xi previously expressing concerns that the conflict signaled a return to what he called the “law of the jungle.” The U.S. administration has warned China, Tehran's biggest trading partner, not to aid Iran’s military effort.

Xi, during Thursday's talks, said China supports the U.S. and Iran returning to a short-lived interim deal from the summer to wind down the war, according to CCTV. That agreement broke down soon after it was signed in June as the countries traded renewed fire over control of the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial waterway for energy shipments.

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Associated Press writers Bill Barrow, Collin Binkley, Josh Boak, Kevin Freking, Seung Min Kim, Darlene Superville and Will Weissert and AP photographer Jacquelyn Martin contributed to this report.

Juszczyk was fined $14,926 after he imitated drinking a beverage following a catch in the third quarter of San Francisco's win over the Miami Dolphins on Sunday.

“Your imitation of chugging a beer constituted an offensive demonstration and could reasonably be construed as being in poor taste,” the league wrote in the fine letter to Juszczyk, which was obtained by The Associated Press. “Players are expected to conduct themselves in a manner that reflects positively on the game and is consistent with NFL standards of sportsmanship.”

Juszczyk, whose nickname is “Juice,” has been doing a version of that celebration throughout his career in San Francisco in response to 49ers fans chanting his nickname after catches or other big plays.

“I don't know how else to say it. I wasn’t drinking beer in my celebration,” Juszczyk said Thursday. “I think you guys all know my nickname is Juice. I have Juice on my pads. The stadium yells ‘Juice’ when I catch the ball. When I celebrate, I celebrate by drinking juice, and it’s been that way for years. So I was surprised as anybody when I got a fine this week.”

The fine was first reported by ESPN.

Juszczyk said he initially thought coach Kyle Shanahan was joking when he told him about the fine and hopes it gets removed after his appeal next week.

The NFL has vowed to crack down on celebrations this season and Juszczyk wasn't the only player to get fined this week. Juszczyk said he was told about six other players got fined. That includes Cincinnati receivers Ja'Marr Chase and Tee Higgins with Chase saying the two were docked for their new “people’s elbow” celebration.

Chase insisted the “people’s elbow” celebration, which involves grabbing his right elbow with his left hand and flopping the right arm forward, isn’t the sort of off-color humor others have made it out to be on social media, and they are simply creating a new way to signal a first down.

Juszczyk said he doesn't remember what the players were told about the crackdown during preseason but he never would have thought it would have applied to his longtime celebration.

Juszczyk's teammates are amused by the situation, with tight end George Kittle saying that his new nickname will be “Beer” instead of “Juice.”

Juszczyk himself had fun with it. Before talking to the media, he put a container on his locker shelf wrapped in white paper and “NOT BEER” written on it. He also had a picture of a juice box with his uniform number 44 displayed.

“That’s the other side of it, is I don’t even drink beer,” Juszczyk said. “I maybe drink like five times a year in the offseason. It’s usually with George because he peer pressures me.”

Juszczyk has been the 49ers' nominee for the Art Rooney Award for sportsmanship for the past six seasons. The only fines he has had previously are for illegal use of the helmet and low blocks. Juszczyk was fined $20,033 for illegal use of helmet in Week 1 and will be appealing that as well next week.

Juszczyk is in his 14th season in the NFL and 10th with San Francisco. He has made the Pro Bowl 10 times and was an All-Pro in 2023 and '25.

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AP Pro Football Writer Rob Maaddi and AP freelancer Jay Morrison contributed to this report.

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See AP’s full NFL coverage here

During this episode of “Pickup Lines,” Rush told KSAT’s Ernie Zuniga that her mother left Oklahoma for Alaska looking for something different, and her father followed.

“My dad decided he couldn’t live without her, followed her up there, which is a really sweet story,” Rush said.

While living in Anchorage as a small child, Rush said former Pope St. John Paul II even blessed her during a visit.

Rush’s family later settled in Norman, Oklahoma, where she grew up with two English professors.

“We debated, we read books like crazy, we had great dinner time conversations,” Rush said.

Rush attended Austin College in Sherman and studied abroad in Costa Rica, Chile and Spain. After college, she moved to Dallas and took an administrative assistant position with the Dallas Chamber after initially applying for a director-level job. She was recruited to San Antonio and arrived in 2022.

Today, Rush leads greater:SATX, which works to attract employers and investment to the 10-county San Antonio region while also expanding workforce opportunities.

“Our job is to sell the San Antonio region ... to try to bring more employers here, create more job opportunities,” Rush said.

Rush believes the region has plenty of room to grow.

“San Antonio is so well positioned, and we have nothing but runway,” she said.

She also predicts San Antonio and Austin will become increasingly connected and could eventually be classified as a “mega region” sometime between 2040 and 2050.

Watch the full Pickup Lines with Sarah Carabias Rush in the video player above.

More Pickup Lines episodes:

• Pickup Lines: Tejano legend Ram Herrera reflects on childhood, Selena, and his Stage 4 cancer battle
• Pickup Lines: Dolores Huerta reflects on a lifetime of activism, organizing and empowering others
• Pickup Lines: Little Joe reflects on hardship, family and the experiences that shaped his career

Ernie Zuniga started Pickup Lines, a digital talk show, straight from his vehicle. The segments feature a diverse range of guests, including executives, small business owners, and everyday individuals, as they share personal journeys, news, and stories.

Min Woo Lee and Sungjae Im had the advantage on four straight holes along the back nine and finally converted for a 1-up lead. And then the Americans took over at just the right time. Burns hit an 8-iron to 2 feet on the 14th. Scheffler closed out the International side with a superb bunker shot on the 18th to secure par for a 1-up victory.

The lead fourballs match was the swing match as the Americans took a 3-2 lead.

“We certainly haven’t had the results that we’ve hoped for,” Burns said. “I feel like at times in the past we’ve played pretty well and just gotten beat. So it probably just was a little bit of a sigh of relief to finally get a point and just kind of let that out.”

It was the ninth time in the last 10 Presidents Cup the Americans won the opening session in a competition they have turned into an exhibition with 10 straight victories and only one loss since these matches began in 1994.

The Internationals showed plenty of fighting spirit, right down to the last hole in the lead match. Both captains came away pleased.

“A session win is a session win. We’re going to take it any way we can get it,” Snedeker said.

“We would have loved to have won the session,” International captain Geoff Ogilvy said. “But 2-3, we had a chat when we got back to the room, and I’m proud of the boys and I’m proud of how they played today. They’re all pretty excited to get out there tomorrow.”

Five matches of foursomes are scheduled for Friday at Medinah Country Club. Burns and Scheffler are out first against Canadians Corey Conners and Nick Taylor.

Jackson Koivun also wasted little time getting a point on the board. The 21-year-old Koivun, who turned pro just over three months ago, teamed with Justin Thomas in a 4-and-3 victory over Conners and Nico Echavarria, who managed only three birdies in the easier better-ball format.

Burns already delivered one big moment by making an 18-foot birdie putt on the par-3 ninth with Lee in tight for a sure birdie. But his 8-iron from 172 yards on the 14th swung momentum so much that Scheffler called it the “shot of the match.”

“I was basically out of the hole after my second shot. Sam was essentially was playing two-on-one there,” Scheffler said. “So for him to step up there and hit a really nice shot, I think you can definitely feel the momentum. He was put in a tough spot there, and he responded the way he knows how.”

The Internationals picked up two wins behind Hideki Matsuyama and Ryo Hisatsune — the first time for two Japanese players in the Presidents Cup since 1998 — and Tom Kim and Si Woo Kim in the anchor match.

“It’s been a long time. I’ve been waiting for another guy from Japan to come play with me, and I was really happy today,” Matsuyama said.

The Americans got their other win behind Wyndham Clark and Collin Morikawa, who never trailed against Adam Scott and Ryan Fox in a 3-and-2 win.

For so much of a cloudy afternoon at Medinah, two wins apiece looked certain for the Americans and the Internationals. Up for grabs was the opening match, which was tight the entire way.

Scheffler and Burns, 0-3-1 as partners in the Presidents Cup and Ryder Cup, birdied the opening four holes. The Internationals ran off four straight birdies of their own to square the match through five holes. It was clear for so much of the day this would decide who had the lead.

Im and Lee, whose putting hurt them along the back nine, each missed par putts on the 17th to fall behind. Lee went long of the green, and Im gassed his 40-foot birdie putt some 15 feet by the hole. They couldn't catch up on the closing hole.

Koivun is the first player to win a Walker Cup point and a Presidents Cup point just over a year apart. He was part of Auburn's NCAA title team in June. He won his first PGA Tour title in the 3M Open in his third start. And now he's part of a dominant American team.

He said he told Thomas that “once I get my first tee shot out of the way, I’m going to be good.” His second tee shot went out-of-bounds, though Thomas saved it with a beautiful bunker shot to halve the hole. Koivun's wedge to 7 feet for birdie on the par-5 sixth gave them a 3-up lead, and the Internationals never seriously threatened the rest of the way.

Thomas improved to 7-0 in fourballs at the Presidents Cup.

“First two holes, definitely a little shaky,” Koivun said. “But after that kind of found a groove. Me and J.T., we played really well out there. He picked me up when I didn’t play too hot, so thankful for that, but we had a fun time.”

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See AP’s full golf coverage here

Leaving their husbands behind at the White House, the first ladies visited the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art in a display of soft power that united two figures known for fusing style and diplomacy. It was the first public meeting in nearly a decade between the spouses, one a former fashion model and the other a famed soprano.

The first ladies arrived to crowds gathered on sidewalks across from the museum, many waving Chinese and American flags.

Inside the museum, the first ladies toured the Peacock Room, a gilded green, blue and gold dining room that was once housed in a London mansion before opening to the public in Washington in 1923. The room was created by American artist James McNeill Whistler.

They also paused to look at a stone disk from ancient China, along with “Princess from the Land of Porcelain,” an oil painting by Whistler hanging in the Peacock Room and featuring a kimono-clad woman standing and holding a fan. Later, youngsters from Hope Chinese School serenaded the women with renditions of famous Chinese folk songs, “Song and Smile” and “Jasmine Flower.”

First ladies last met in 2017 in Beijing

The meeting drew global attention, featuring two powerful and glamorous women from the world's two biggest economies.

“They definitely add to the grandiosity and the symbolic significance of this trip,” said Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank.

Every interaction between the first ladies was scrutinized for clues about the standing between their countries, Sun said. Also closely watched were their style choices, which are followed in fashion circles. Melania Trump wore a black tweed jacket and skirt from Alexander McQueen, while Peng wore a qipao-style dress with a traditional collar adorned with a silver flower.

Their last public meeting was in 2017, when President Donald Trump stopped in Beijing during a tour of Asia in his first term. During that trip, the first ladies shared tea at the Palace Museum and visited a school where students performed songs and dances. Melania Trump did not attend her husband’s visit to Beijing earlier this year.

Trump and Peng approach their roles differently

Peng, 63, has embraced a more public role than her predecessors, who rarely attended state visits and usually stayed in the background. Melania Trump, who is 56, keeps a lower profile, often preferring to work behind the scenes.

They split off from the White House on Thursday while Donald Trump and Xi Jinping held private talks, touring the museum after a White House welcome ceremony and before a lavish state dinner.

Peng’s last trip to the White House was in 2015, when President Barack Obama hosted Xi. A noted star before her husband's rise, Peng ascended to national fame in the 1980s as a military singer, performing patriotic songs in full dress uniform.

As the children's choir sang on Thursday, Peng quietly mouthed some of the lyrics and later clapped along with the boys and girls. At one point, she turned and shared a laugh with Melania Trump.

Peng is also a public welfare advocate, taking on roles that have little precedent for her position in China. She has been an official antismoking ambassador in China, and in 2011 she was appointed as the World Health Organization goodwill ambassador for tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS.

She has been appearing more in public recently following a period in which she was less visible on the global stage because of the COVID-19 pandemic and a cutback in diplomatic trips by her husband.

Asian art museum houses thousands of objects

During the visit, Peng expressed appreciation for the return of Chinese cultural relics from the U.S. in recent years, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. Last week, U.S. authorities handed over 64 cultural relics and fossils that had been seized by law enforcement agencies, according to an earlier report from the agency.

The Smithsonian has been part of an effort to return stolen or unethically obtained objects to their home countries. Last year, the Asian art museum returned fragments of a silk manuscript from China that dated to more than 2,000 years ago and had been looted from a tomb.

Located along the National Mall, the museum has also been a target of the Trump administration’s attempt to eliminate what it sees as liberal ideology from the institution's museums.

The White House last year ordered a review of Smithsonian museums to make sure exhibits “celebrate American exceptionalism” and “remove divisive or partisan narratives.”

In a Fox News Channel interview on Wednesday, Melania Trump said she was taking Peng to the museum to show the “connection with the culture, with us and China.”

When Peng visited the White House in 2015, she joined first lady Michelle Obama at a naming ceremony for a giant panda at the National Zoo. The ceremony also featured songs sung by preschoolers at a local Chinese immersion school. The panda, Bei Bei, was later returned to China in 2019 to enter a breeding program.

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Associated Press writers Seung Min Kim, Didi Tang and Fu Ting in Washington and Ken Moritsugu in Beijing contributed to this report.

• LESS RAIN TODAY: Odds are lower today (10%)
• HOT WEEKND: Mid to Upper 90s
• NEXT WEEK: Rain possible, not as hot

FORECAST

TODAY

Not as much rain on the radar today, but we still have the opportunity for development through about 9pm.

WEEKEND UPDATE

Quiet and remaining unseasonably warm this weekend, but the “heat high” breaks down next week, which opens the door for any available disturbances. And it just so happens that the ingredients for drought-denting rain should come together over the southwestern U.S., giving San Antonio some hope for rain.

CHANGES NEXT WEEK?

Computer model guidance is notoriously bad in these situations and there are many moving parts. One thing we do know is that Pacific moisture and rainmaking energy will likely stream into parts of Texas by midweek. This could combine with a cold front Wednesday, although this is still not a guarantee. Should that happen, rain chances would rise and temps could potentially fall by late week. More updates to come!

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Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco in February seized approximately 650,000 ballots from a November 2025 special election on statewide congressional redistricting favorable to Democrats and pushed by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The measure easily passed statewide, and won in Bianco's county by roughly 80,000 votes.

The court called the ballots’ seizure “unlawful,” saying California law requires ballots to remain in the custody and control of election officials, even during a criminal investigation.

Bianco said in an email message to his supporters that he will comply with the court’s order.

“We are very disappointed and wholeheartedly disagree with the court’s ruling,” Bianco said in a statement shared later Thursday with The Associated Press.

Election officials watched the case with an eye to the November midterms

Bianco’s ballot investigation came as President Donald Trump repeatedly disputed the results of the 2020 election, citing unsubstantiated instances of fraud. Trump’s administration in January seized ballots and other documents from an election office in Georgia. Some Republicans have mirrored Trump’s rhetoric on voting in their states.

Election officials and civil rights groups have been following the Bianco case carefully as they brace for the possibility that Trump or his allies may try to seize ballots in November.

Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta immediately launched a legal challenge after the seizure, arguing the sheriff had no authority over election materials and warning his action was designed to sow distrust in elections. He ordered Bianco to return the ballots, but Bianco did not.

“The Court has now made clear that this kind of defiance cannot stand, that the Attorney General has the authority to intervene when sheriffs take improper action, and that voted ballots belong in the custody of elections officials,” Bonta said Thursday.

Sheriff seized the ballots after receiving a complaint about the vote count

Bianco said he confiscated the election materials after receiving a complaint from a local citizens group that the count was off. The group said it found a gap between the number of ballots cast and the number of ballots received in the election for the measure, sparked by a nationwide redistricting fight.

The group said it found a roughly 45,000-vote gap between the number of ballots cast and the number of ballots received by Riverside County in the special election for Proposition 50, the measure that redrew California’s congressional districts to favor Democrats.

Riverside County Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco said the group misread ballot data and that the actual gap was 103, well within the margin of error set by California’s secretary of state.

At the time, Bianco was one of two prominent Republicans running for governor in a crowded June primary. He did not advance to the general election and later announced plans to seek reelection as sheriff in 2028.

The University of California, Los Angeles Voting Rights Project also sued the sheriff and the Riverside County Registrar of Voters on behalf of several voters. Xavier Becerra, a former state attorney general and Democrat running for governor, was part of the UCLA lawsuit.

The state Supreme Court heard arguments in both cases last month.

Bianco began his own recount

Bianco began recounting the vote shortly after seizing the ballots, using sheriff’s officials under the supervision of a special master appointed by a court. But he suspended it days later, citing mounting legal challenges. He stopped the count after the California Supreme Court ordered him to do so.

Attorney Bradley Hertz, representing Bianco, argued before the court that the sheriff had a legal duty to open the investigation after receiving the complaint and followed the penal code to carry out that investigation, first issuing search warrants in February, but the court disagreed.

“If election misconduct is suspected, the Elections Code provides several mechanisms for law enforcement to review and examine ballots without compromising their integrity,” the court wrote.

The court ruled Thursday that a search warrant does not override the state’s electoral law.

“These are the voters’ ballots. They must be protected through the processes the Legislature has established. This ruling provides important clarity for election officials, law enforcement, and voters across California,” said Chad Dunn, legal director and co-founder of the UCLA Voting Rights Project.

On Saturday, Newsom signed a bill that would prevent anyone from seizing ballots.

Court finds state attorney general orders are binding

The court also settled whether the state's attorney general has authority over county sheriffs, saying the attorney general's orders are binding. Bianco had argued that an attorney general's role is that of an adviser.

Bianco said in an email message to his supporters that while he will comply with the court's rulings, he “will not obey the message behind them — that local law enforcement works for Sacramento, not for the people who elected us.”

Copenhaver was in the bleachers during the event in Butler, Pennsylvania, when a 20-year-old gunman opened fire from a nearby rooftop, grazing Trump’s right ear with one bullet. Copenhaver was struck in the arm and in the abdomen, wounds that left him with lingering injuries and walking with a cane.

Two other attendees were also shot — David Dutch, who survived, and Corey Comperatore, who shielded his family from gunfire and was killed.

Copenhaver died Wednesday at Allegheny Health Network’s West Penn Hospital in Pittsburgh, according to a statement from the Allegheny County medical examiner cited in local media accounts.

Copenhaver’s lawyer, Joseph Feldman, said in a statement issued on behalf of the family that he died surrounded by loved ones. The statement did not specify if his death was directly related to the injuries he suffered at the rally.

Copenhaver and his wife, Marianne Copenhaver, sued the federal government in June, alleging that the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security had “utterly failed” to provide appropriate security at the rally. Copenhaver’s injuries required multiple surgeries, including a transection of his colon, and he had lingering kidney and other damage, including a loss of feeling in his leg. The lawsuit described the wounds as “debilitating, grievous, permanent and life altering.”

The family's statement Thursday called Copenhaver above all else a devoted husband, father and grandfather who instilled the values of hard work, integrity and the service to others in his children.

“James’s dedication to this great country was a defining part of his life,” it said. “As a veteran, he proudly served our nation in the armed forces, and his love of country never wavered. James was a true American patriot who believed deeply in the freedoms and ideals upon which this nation was founded, and he embodied the very best traits of our great nation.”

In a statement posted to social media, Trump on Thursday called Copenhaver “a true American Patriot.”

“Jim showed tremendous bravery, courageously continuing to FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT, and maintaining a positive spirit despite unimaginable hardships,” Trump wrote.

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Johnson reported from Seattle and Smyth from Columbus, Ohio.

Bexar County has purchased about 1.5 acres near Davis Ranch to extend Bent Canyon Road to Farm-to-Market Road 1560. Right now, the road dead-ends on two sides. County leaders say the project to connect the roads could give drivers another route and ease congestion.

The Beverly Hills neighborhood was once quiet, but traffic increased after Davis Ranch was built, Bexar County Commissioner Justin Rodriguez said.

“As mobility becomes more and more of an issue, people look for shortcuts naturally,” Rodriguez said. “They start cutting through different areas.”

The City of Helotes worked to prevent drivers from using one of those cut-through routes with “no-thru traffic” signs. Drivers who do not live in the neighborhood can be ticketed for using it.

Rodriguez said he has heard complaints from homeowners on the other side of the city boundary.

He tried to work to change the ordinance, but efforts were unsuccessful, and Rodriguez said leaders worked to find another solution.

“We want to be good neighbors, but we also want to advance policies that make quality of life better for folks,” he said.

The county approved about $4.25 million for the project in its 2024 budget. The land purchase is now complete, and the county is working toward extending Bent Canyon Road.

Construction is expected to start in early 2027 and will take around 6 months. A spokesperson with Rodriguez’s office says the goal is to have the road finished by fall 2027.

Rodriguez said the county cannot control where new subdivisions are built in the same way San Antonio can through land-use and zoning authority.

“What the state enacts, that’s what we’re able to do,” he said. “They don’t give us land-use or zoning authority. I think the smartest thing we can do is just stay on top of planning.”

As more homes are built in the area, county leaders hope the new road connection will provide a solution they can control.

Read also:

• Remuda Ranch residents say cut-through traffic has brought road rage, blocked emergency vehicles

The $40 million infrastructure project aims to reduce congestion on Interstate 37 near Southeast Military Drive and make the corridor safer. It is expected to be complete in 2029.

A diverging diamond interchange shifts traffic to the opposite side of a roadway while moving through an intersection, so that left turns can be made without waiting for oncoming traffic to stop.

Traffic experts say the design significantly reduces the number of possible points where a crash can occur, while moving higher volumes of traffic more efficiently.

State traffic models project a 90% reduction in travel times for those exiting southbound I-37 onto Southeast Military Street.

While construction will require temporary lane closures, state transportation officials said most closures will occur overnight between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. on weekdays to minimize disruptions. TxDOT said daytime and weekend work may also occur to keep the project on schedule.

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• Drivers adjust to ‘confusing’ TxDOT interchange at Loop 1604 and Blanco Road
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The Greehey Children’s Cancer Research Institute, part of the Long School of Medicine at UT Health San Antonio, received the grant during a ceremony that brought together researchers, pediatric cancer patients and their families.

The Greehey Institute is one of two research groups focused solely on pediatric cancer research in the nation.

Institute leaders said grants like this help support scientists working in laboratories in San Antonio while also benefiting children and families across the country.

“The more funds that are able to be raised really helps our researchers continue their work,” Dr. Shafqat Shah said. “Science that will lead to cures is happening right now in places like the laboratories in this center, and it’s wonderful to be able to have local people support our work here.”

The institute said the grants will also help find treatments that could improve outcomes for children with cancer and avoid long-term side effects associated with cancer treatments.

As part of the ceremony, children undergoing cancer treatment and their families took part in arts and crafts, decorating a car and researchers’ lab coats with handprints.

Read also:

• The Big Give kicks off across South Central Texas