NEW YORK (AP) — New York City Police Commissioner Edward Caban said he would resign Thursday, one week after it emerged that his phone was seized as part of a federal investigation that touched several members of Mayor Eric Adams’ inner circle.

Caban said he made the decision to resign after the “news around recent developments” had “created a distraction for our department,” according to an email to the police department obtained by The Associated Press.

“I am unwilling to let my attention be on anything other than our important work, or the safety of the men and women of the NYPD,” he added.

It was not immediately clear who will replace Caban as police commissioner. Inquiries to the police department were not returned.

Caban was one of several high-ranking city officials whose electronic devices were seized last week by federal investigators, according to people familiar with the matter. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation.

The subject of the investigation, which is being led by U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan, remains unclear. It was not immediately clear whether federal authorities were seeking information linked to one investigation or several.

Federal authorities are also investigating Caban’s twin brother, James Caban, who runs a nightclub security business, according to a person familiar with the matter. The person could not publicly discuss details of the ongoing investigation and spoke to AP on condition of anonymity.

Edward Caban, 57, had been in charge of the nation’s largest police department for about 15 months. Of Puerto Rican heritage, he was the first Latino to lead the 179-year-old NYPD.

Other officials whose devices were recently seized include First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright; Philip Banks, the deputy mayor for public safety; his brother David Banks, the city’s schools chancellor; and Timothy Pearson, a mayoral adviser and former high-ranking NYPD official.

The searches added to a flurry of investigative activity around Adams’ administration and his campaign. Adams, a first-term Democrat, was subpoenaed and his electronics were seized. Federal authorities haven’t publicly accused him or any officials of any crimes, and Adams has denied any wrongdoing.

The investigation that led to Caban’s devices being seized is not believed to be tied to a probe that led federal investigators to seize Adams’ devices last November, according to two people familiar with the matter. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

On Tuesday, Adams acknowledged that the sudden increase in federal scrutiny had “raised a lot of questions and a lot of concerns.”

Caban joined the department as a patrol officer in 1991 in the Bronx, where he grew up. His father, retired Detective Juan Caban, had served with Adams, a former police captain, when they were both on the city’s transit police force. Three of Caban’s brothers were also police officers.

Caban worked in precincts across the city, rising to sergeant, lieutenant, captain, executive officer, commanding officer, deputy inspector and inspector. He was the department’s first deputy commissioner, second-in-command, before being named commissioner last year.

Caban replaced Keechant Sewell, the first woman to lead the force. She resigned 18 months into a tenure clouded by speculation that she was not truly in control of the department after Adams appointed ex-NYPD chief Philip Banks as his deputy mayor of public safety. She is now the senior vice president of security and guest experience for the New York Mets.

“There is nothing in the world like public service,” Caban said in an interview with his alma mater, St. John’s University, after his appointment. “My father taught me that every day on the job is an opportunity to change lives, and in the NYPD we get to do that every single day.”

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NEW YORK (AP) — Disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein has been indicted on additional sex crimes charges ahead of his retrial in New York, Manhattan prosecutors said at a hearing Thursday.

The indictment will remain under seal until Weinstein’s arraignment, which is scheduled for Sept. 18.

Weinstein, 72, is recovering from emergency heart surgery Monday at a Manhattan hospital and was not at Thursday’s hearing.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office disclosed at a recent court hearing that prosecutors had begun presenting to a grand jury evidence of up to three additional allegations against Weinstein, dating as far back as the mid-2000s.

Prosecutors had been seeking to retry Weinstein after his 2020 conviction on rape and sexual assault charges was tossed by an appeals court earlier this year. It remains to be seen whether the new charges will be included in the retrial, as prosecutors hope, or handled as a separate case by the court.

The new charges come after prosecutors in Britain announced last week that they would no longer pursue charges of indecent assault against Weinstein, who was the most prominent villain of the #MeToo movement in 2017 when women began going public with accounts of his behavior.

The 72-year-old co-founder of the film and television production company Miramax has long maintained that any sexual activity was consensual.

He is next expected to appear in Manhattan court for a hearing in the case on Sept. 12. His retrial is tentatively slated for November.

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JENIN, West Bank (AP) — In the web of battered, sun-baked streets winding up the hillside, bloodshed is as unrelenting as the heat. So it is not hard to see why, when raid sirens and gunfire erupted yet again on a morning in late May, 15-year-old Mahmoud Hamadneh turned his bike down an alley that held out the promise of refuge.

The narrow lane, a few hundred yards from his school, looks like an urban oasis, shaded by olive branches that reach across walls on either side. On a recent afternoon the cooing of doves and whine of cicadas amplified its stillness. Only the faded stain of Mahmoud’s blood in the pavement and a stone, hand-lettered with his name, betrayed the illusion.

“He didn’t do anything. He didn’t make a single mistake,” says Amjad Hamadneh, whose son, a buzz-cut devotee of computer games, was one of two teens killed that morning in the opening minutes of a raid by Israeli forces.

“If he’d been a freedom fighter or was carrying a weapon, I would not be so emotional,” says his father, an unemployed construction worker. “But he was taken just as easily as water going down your throat. He only had his books and a pencil case.”

Jenin’s refugee camp has long been notorious as a hotbed of Palestinian militancy, raided repeatedly by Israeli forces who have occupied the West Bank since seizing control in their 1967 war with neighboring Arab states. During the two-day raid that began the morning of May 21, Israeli troops traded fire with Palestinian gunmen. Militant groups said eight of the 12 Palestinians killed were their fighters.

But the casualties that day, and many others in recent months, went beyond armed men engaged in the region’s seemingly endless conflict. As the world’s attention focuses on the far more deadly war in Gaza less than 80 miles away, scores of Palestinian teens have been killed, shot and arrested in the West Bank, where the Israeli military has waged a months-long crackdown.

More than 150 teens and children 17 or younger have been killed in the embattled territory since Hamas’ brutal attack on communities in southern Israel set off the war last October. Most died in nearly daily raids by the Israeli army that Amnesty International says have used disproportionate and unlawful force.

Youths represent almost a quarter of the nearly 700 Palestinians slain in the West Bank since the war began, the most since the violent uprising known as the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. More than 20 Israeli civilians and soldiers have been killed in the territory since October.

At the same time, Israel, which has long jailed Palestinians from the West Bank without charge, has extended that practice to many more teens. After October, food deprivation, overcrowding of cells and other mistreatment escalated sharply, the recently released and advocates say.

It is clear from statements by the Israeli military, insurgents and families in the West Bank that a number of the Palestinian teens killed in recent months were members of militant groups.

Many others were killed during protests or when they or someone nearby threw rocks or home-made explosives at military vehicles. Still others appear to have been random targets. Taken together, the killings raise troubling questions about the devaluation of young lives in pursuit of security and autonomy.

Grief over those deaths has been shadowed by trepidation. Israeli raids won’t eliminate militant groups, survivors say. Instead, some fear, the pain of losing so many youths risks the opposite – pulling siblings, friends and classmates left behind into the region’s vortex of vengeance.

An intense crackdown

After Hamas killed 1,200 people in Israel last October and took 250 others hostage, long-smoldering tensions exploded.

Israel responded with a sweeping military campaign in Gaza that Palestinian authorities say has killed more than 40,000 people. That has fueled anger and insurgency in the West Bank, where Israeli forces police about 3 million Palestinians while assigned to protect 500,000 Jewish settlers.

The embattled territory was already seeing deadly clashes before the war began. But Israel’s military has significantly stepped up raids in the months since, characterized by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as part of the larger battle in Gaza and along the border with Lebanon to permanently disable militant groups that have long threatened his country’s security.

“I can assure you one thing: What has been is not what will be,” he told commanders during a June meeting in the West Bank. “We will change this reality.”

A military spokesman said the Israeli army makes great efforts to avoid harming civilians during raids and “does not target civilians, period.” He said human rights group focus on a few outlier cases.

Military operations in the West Bank are fraught because forces are pursuing militants, many in their teens, who often hide among the civilian population, said the spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani.

“In many cases many of them are 15, 16 years old who are not wearing uniforms and might surprise you with a gun, with a knife,” he said.

But critics say the crackdown is shaped by retribution, not only military strategy.

“The pressure is similar to post-Second Intifada, but there’s something different. And that something different is Oct. 7th,” says Nadav Weiman, a former Israeli army sniper who leads Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation veterans’ group that gathers testimony from soldiers assigned to the West Bank and Gaza.

Throughout the military ranks “there is a feeling of revenge,” he says. Many soldiers view Palestinians “as an entity. They are not individuals. So you unleash your anger everywhere.”

The crackdown extends to the military’s treatment of jailed teens, says Ayed Abu Eqtaish of Defense for Children International-Palestine, an advocacy group. Israeli authorities have declared it a terrorist organization, alleging ties to a Palestinian nationalist faction.

With the military holding more teens without charge in grim conditions, while restricting communication, families are increasingly uncertain of their wellbeing, Eqtaish says.

“After Oct. 7,” he says, “everything deteriorated.”

War in an instant

Even before Israel launched a major military operation in the West Bank in late August, its troops had raided Jenin dozens of times since the war began.

Yet throughout the city’s urbanized refugee camp, where concrete homes wedge against one another on streets ripped up by military bulldozers, there are many indicators that militants remain entrenched.

Signs at the perimeter of the camp, opened in 1953 to house Palestinians who fled or were driven from what is now Israel in the war following its establishment, mark the territory of the Jenin Brigades, an umbrella organization of militant groups.

Guards stop cars they don’t recognize, especially those with Israeli plates. Posters of smiling young men armed with assault rifles – tributes to militants killed in clashes – decorate walls and utility poles.

For years, Amjad Hamadneh and wife Kholoud planned for the day they would take their children away from all this. In the meantime, their home in the uppermost reaches of the camp – with a grandfather clock presiding over the living room and bedrooms filled with children’s toys and son Mahmoud’s beloved computer -- kept them on the fringes of conflict.

Most days Amjad, 46, left home around 3:30 a.m. to reach a construction job in northern Israel. That income was lost when Israel suspended work permits for Palestinians last October. By then, though, he’d begun building a home on a plot near the city of Nablus.

The couple envisioned a place that would last for decades, with apartments for their twin sons and daughter when they eventually married. To help pay for it, they moved the boys from a private academy to the public Al Karamah school at the base of the hill.

“All of my work, all of my life was for them,” Amjad says.

On the morning of May 21, a Tuesday, the Hamadneh brothers rushed off to make a scheduled final exam. Down the hillside, Osama Hajir, a former classmate who had dropped out of school to work, left home on his motorcycle to begin a day of deliveries. It was just after 7:30 a.m.

In Jenin, though, any hour can see the camp morph into a war zone.

It might start like it did one recent afternoon, when a guard outside the camp’s Ottoman Era train depot mentioned that unmarked military vehicles had been spotted on the outskirts.

A minute or two later sirens began screaming, warning that special forces were already in the camp. Shopkeepers yanked down their gates. Fleeing residents drove against one-way traffic. Many were still seeking shelter when the sound of gunfire sliced through the summer air.

When the sirens erupted that morning in May, Amjad Hamadneh says, he called Mahmoud on his cell phone and was relieved to hear that the brothers had reached their school, behind walls painted with student murals.

Then son Ahmed called back to say that the principal had dismissed classes. As students poured into the street, the brothers were separated in the chaos.

Rushing for their electric bikes, classmate Karam Miazneh saw Mahmoud ahead of him. Both were still within a few hundred yards of the school when witnesses say a sniper in an upper floor window of a recently completed apartment building began firing at people and cars below.

Karam veered into an alley, raising a textbook overhead to show he was a student, as four bullets ripped past him. Then a fifth exploded into his shoulder and he dropped to the ground.

At the mouth of the next block, four bullets hit Mahmoud as he raced toward the alley walls, before another pierced his skull. He was the third student from his school killed in a raid since the war began.

A few blocks away, his former classmate, Osama, lay fatally wounded on the pavement. The dead that morning also included a teacher from the primary school next to Mahmoud’s and a doctor from the hospital down the street.

“Now when I hear the sound of sirens I go to my room and stay there,” says Karam, showing the shrapnel and bone fragments doctors removed from his shoulder. “I’m still in fear that they will come to shoot me and kill me.”

The Israeli army said in a statement to the AP that it has stepped up raids since Oct. 7 to apprehend militants suspected of carrying out attacks in the West Bank and that “the absolute majority of those killed during this period were armed or involved in terrorist activities at the time of the incident.”

Immediately after the May raid, a spokesman for the army said it had carried out the operation with Israeli border police and the country’s internal security agency, destroying an explosive device laboratory and other structures used by militants. But police recently declined to comment, and three weeks after the AP asked the military to answer questions about the May raid, an army spokesman said he was unable to comment until he could confer with police.

When Amjad Hamadneh heard his son had been wounded, he sped through Jenin’s twisting streets, drawing gunfire as he neared the hospital. But Mahmoud was already gone. The grief was so intense, his father says, that he couldn’t bear to remain in the building.

“God has given and God has taken away,” he told his wife as he ushered her away.

Nearby, Osama’s father, Muhamad, broke down as he leaned over his son’s body. Months earlier he’d snapped a photo of the smiling teen beside graffiti touting Jenin as “the factory of men,” tirelessly cranking out fighters in the resistance against Israel. Now, he pressed that same, still-smooth face between his hands.

“Oh, my son. Oh, my son,” he sobbed. “My beautiful son.”

Punishing conditions

In a village a half-hour’s drive from Jenin, Qasam Masarweh recounts an odyssey that began months before the war. On that night, he lost his right hand to an Israeli stun grenade. But in the weeks after Oct. 7, the soft-spoken teen says, his encounter with the military turned even more punishing.

“Before Oct. 7 there were six of us in the cell. Afterwards, there were 12,” says Masarweh, who was held for months without charge in Israel’s Megiddo Prison. “There were beatings. There was no food. Our clothes were taken from us. There were so many ways of humiliation.”

Since its war with Hamas began, Israel has more than doubled the number of Palestinians jailed without charge, known as administrative detention. The vast majority are men.

But the number of teens in administrative detention has also increased sharply. Of more than 200 Palestinian youths 17 or younger in military prisons in June, 75 were in administrative detention, the most since watchdog groups began collecting figures. Last year at the same time, 18 youths were being held without charge.

Like their adult counterparts, teens released recently report severe mistreatment following the October attack.

“The big change is definitely in detention conditions. The gloves have really come off,” said Gerard Horton, co-founder of Military Court Watch, which gathers testimony from Palestinian prisoners.

“We never used to document that much violence in relation to children. There was some, but it wasn’t commonplace,” he says.

Israeli officials have acknowledged toughening treatment of Palestinian prisoners since October, while still abiding by international law. A spokesperson for far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose ministry oversees prisons, said that policy, intended to deter terrorism, does not provide any special conditions for prisoners 17 and under.

“They are terrorists just like any other terrorists, there’s no difference,” said the spokesman, Yedidya Grossman.

Masarweh, who turned 18 late last year, says his odyssey began in June 2023, the night before his last high school exam. As he walked home from meeting friends, military vehicles entered his village of Rumannah, firing an object that landed at his feet. Assuming it contained tear gas, he reached down to throw it away.

When the grenade exploded, it blew off most of his right hand. Discharged after nine days in a Jenin hospital, he stopped to visit an aunt in the refugee camp. When a raid began, soldiers stormed the house, beating the teen before taking him into custody.

Masarweh, who says he hoped to become a veterinarian before losing his hand, was ordered held for four months without charge. After Oct. 7, treatment turned even harsher. Authorities immediately reduced food and took away blankets and soap. They packed his cell with prisoners, all 17 or younger, requiring half to sleep on the floor.

A 17-year-old arrested in a raid on the Qalquilya refugee camp told Horton’s group that after Oct. 7 guards confiscated all personal belongings from prisoners, denying them time outside or showers.

Another said guards removed window panels, making cells uncomfortably chilly for prisoners left only with what they’d been wearing at the time of their arrest.

The mistreatment, Masarweh says, continued until late November when guards cuffed his remaining hand and took him from the cell for questioning. After telling an investigator he did not know why he had been arrested, he was transferred to another prison without explanation.

Finally, after midnight, Red Cross officials entered to tell him he would be released in a deal trading Palestinian prisoners for Israeli hostages.

Back at home, Masarweh says he still worries about the new arrivals that more seasoned prisoners called “cubs,” who he left behind. With the stump at the base of his arm wrapped in gauze, he is uncertain about how he will earn a living.

“It’s already hard enough to take care of yourself with two hands,” he says. “Imagine doing it with one.”

Boys of war

On the June afternoon that 17-year-old Issa Jallad was killed, video from a neighbor’s security camera shows, he was on a friend’s motorbike with an Israeli armored vehicle in close pursuit.

Was the teen – declared a holy warrior on a poster outside his family’s Jenin home showing him cradling an assault rifle – armed that day? Exactly what happened in the moments before he was shot?

The grainy tape, reviewed by The Associated Press days after the June 6 raid, and others from nearby cameras, raise but do not fully answer difficult questions about where he fit in a conflict with no clear boundaries.

“We were going to have one celebration and now we will have two,” says his sister, Rania, 24, whose marriage had long been planned for three days after the raid. “My wedding and the martyrdom of my brother.”

It’s clear that a number of Palestinian youths killed in recent months belonged to militant groups. Many others died in countless scenarios where lines between civilian and combatant are blurred. Some threw rocks or home-made explosives at military vehicles. Others served as lookouts. Some hung near militants, aspiring to one day join their ranks.

“All of this generation, not only my son, if you ask them what they want to be, they will say ‘I want to be a militant and defend my country’,” says Mawaheb Morei, the mother of a 15-year-old killed in an October drone attack. The family says he was hanging out in a cemetery where several militants were present.

Two years before her son was killed, Morei says, she confiscated and dismantled a plastic rifle he used to play fighter. But that did nothing to dissuade him.

The Israeli army, responding to questions from the AP about the killing of Jallad in the June raid, said that its soldiers had spotted two militants handling a powerful explosive device. When the pair tried to flee, troops opened fire and “neutralized them.” It said the circumstances of the incident are under review.

But an Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, says its review of multiple security camera videos showed Jallad and his friend were well-removed from where troops and militants clashed, and that the pair posed no threat.

Jallad’s brother, Mousa, says the teen had gone out to move a car so it wouldn’t be hit by a military vehicle. His sister said the family is proud of him and that when she has children they will carry on the resistance.

“We all expected to be in this situation,” Mousa Jallad said as neighbors came to pay condolences. “I knew this could happen. It could happen to any of us.”

Burying the young

The old cemetery, with a water dispenser under shade trees for weary mourners, had run out of space. So last year residents cleared a lot across the road from an elementary school, turning it into a graveyard for Jenin’s most recent casualties.

It is filling fast.

A row back from where the Hamadnehs buried their son in May rests a 14-year-old classmate who died in a November raid. Two graves over, a stone plastered with the photo of a smiling boy in a bowtie memorializes an 8-year-old killed days later while accompanying youths who threw rocks at military vehicles.

Just beyond, banners picturing dead men and boys, many holding assault rifles, line a wall. One honors a 17-year-old militant. Another mourns 15-year-old Eid Morei, who told his mother he wanted to become one.

Since Mahmoud Hamadneh was killed, his siblings ask frequently to visit his grave. His younger sister now sleeps in his bed so her surviving brother, Ahmed, will not be in the room alone. But there is no filling the emptiness of Mahmoud’s absence.

“I feel like I cannot breathe. We used to do everything together,” Ahmed says. His father listens closely, despairing later that such grief could drive the teen into militancy. If the risk is so clear to a Palestinian father, he says, why don’t Israeli soldiers see it?

“They think that if they kill us that people will be afraid and not do anything,” he says. “But when the Israelis kill someone, 10 fighters will be created in his place.”

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Associated Press reporters Josef Federman and Melanie Lidman in Jerusalem and Thalia Beaty in New York contributed to this story.

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ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia’s state House speaker says lawmakers in 2025 will consider new policies to foster student mental health, detect guns and encourage people to safely store guns after a school shooting killed four at a high school northeast of Atlanta.

But Republican Jon Burns of Newington is stopping short of Democratic demands that include universal background checks, a mandate to safely lock up guns and a “red flag” law letting the state temporarily take guns from someone in crisis.

The proposals made Thursday by Burns are the first policy response to the Sept. 4 shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder.

The gambit by the Republican leader comes as he tries to protect his party’s 102-78 majority in the state House in November’s elections. Arguments over gun policy could influence a handful of competitive seats in Atlanta’s northern suburbs, including three held by Republican incumbents.

“While House Republicans have already made significant investments to strengthen security in our schools, increase access to mental healthcare, and keep our students safe, I am committed to not only continuing this work but pursuing additional policies that help ensure a tragedy like this never happens in our state again,” Burns wrote.

It’s unclear what response other top Republicans including Gov. Brian Kemp and Lt. Gov Burt Jones will desire. Kemp called the shooting “our worst nightmare” hours after the deaths of teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53, and students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14. Nine others were injured — seven of them shot.

Democrats have been slamming Republicans, arguing the shooting is an outgrowth of the GOP loosening Georgia’s gun laws.

“What makes this more devastating than it already is is knowing that we had the policy tools to prevent this tragedy from ever happening in the first place,” Rep. Saira Draper of Atlanta said Friday as she and fellow Democrats demanded a special legislative session on gun violence. “And that we did not use them because my Republican colleagues chose to gamble with our children’s lives rather than face the wrath of the gun lobby.”

Investigators say the shooting was carried out by 14-year-old Colt Gray, charged as an adult with four counts of murder. Authorities charged his 54-year-old father, Colin Gray, with second degree murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children. Investigators allege Colin Gray gave his son access to a semiautomatic AR-15-style rifle when he knew the teen was a danger to himself and others.

Burns said he wants to consider information sharing among police, schools and mental health workers, a nod to the fact that Colt and Colin Gray were questioned in 2023 by a Jackson County sheriff’s deputy over an online post threatening a school shooting. Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum has said her office didn’t find enough evidence to bring charges. It’s unclear if Colt Gray’s earlier schools were notified about the threats.

“We are aware that a breakdown in communication between school systems and law enforcement officials allowed the shooter’s prior history to slip through the cracks upon his transfer to Apalachee High School,” Burns wrote.

The speaker also said he wants to expand mental health care for students. The state’s voluntary Apex program steers students toward counseling. The program covered 540,000 of Georgia’s 1.75 million students in 2022-2023, about 31%.

Burns also wants to examine ways to catch guns before they enter schools. Some schools are using camera systems and artificial intelligence to try to detect guns instead of metal detectors.

The speaker proposes increasing penalties for threats against schools, saying he wants to crack down on copycat threats seen since the shooting. Criminal penalties would apply only to those charged as adults, and most threat makers have been arrested as juveniles.

Finally, Burns said House Republicans would again promote safe firearm storage. The House passed legislation this year to create a state income tax credit of up to $300 for the purchase of gun safes, trigger locks, other security devices or the costs of courses on safe firearms handling. The Senate preferred a bill exempting gun safes and other safety devices from state sales tax. Both bills failed after the chambers couldn’t agree.

Democrats gained little traction on legislation that would have created a misdemeanor crime for negligently failing to secure firearms accessed by children. Rep. Michelle Au, a Johns Creek Democrat, has promised to bring back that measure.

The speaker said he’s open to other proposals, saying the House will “examine every reasonable idea and solution to protect and defend the most vulnerable among us — our children — while also protecting the right and privilege of our citizens to protect their families and property.”

Burns argued that previous school safety efforts reduced the toll at Apalachee, helping pay for wearable panic buttons that alerted authorities and school resource officers who responded.

State lawmakers and Kemp earlier approved multiple rounds of one-time security grants, totaling $184 million.

The budget that began July 1 includes more than $100 million in ongoing funding, enough to provide $47,000 a year to each public school for safety. Schools can use that for chosen security purposes, though Kemp has said he wanted it to help underwrite a security officer for each school.

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Coco loved being the life of the party — cracking jokes, doing pranks and making people laugh, her mom, Julianna Arnold, recalled recently.

“Her favorite pastime was fashion,” Arnold said. “She didn’t like looking at magazines or going to fancy stores, but preferred to make her own creations from used clothing she would find at thrift stores.... And they always looked fabulous on her.”

In 2022, two weeks after she turned 17, Coco left home just outside New York City to meet with a dealer she’d messaged through Instagram who promised to sell her Percocet. She never made it home. She was found dead the next day, two blocks from the address that the guy had provided her.

Whatever the dealer gave Coco, her mother said, was not Percocet. It was a fake pill laced with fentanyl, which can be lethal in a dose as small as the tip of a pencil.

Fentanyl overdoses have become a leading cause of death for minors in the last five years or so, even as overall drug use has dropped slightly. In a 2022 analysis of fentanyl-laced prescription pills, the DEA found that six out of 10 contained a potentially lethal dose of the drug.

And social media, where tainted, fake prescription drugs can be obtained with just a few clicks, is a big part of the problem. Experts, law enforcement and children’s advocates say companies like Snap, TikTok, Telegram and Meta Platforms, which owns Instagram, are not doing enough to keep children safe.

A few taps away

The stories of these victims often play out similarly: The kids hear you can get pills on social media. A few taps later and then a package arrives. They retreat to the sanctity of their bedroom and take a pill. Fifteen minutes later, they’re dead. No one even knows until the next morning.

Paul DelPonte, executive director and CEO of the National Crime Prevention Council, likened this crisis to a Johnson & Johnson incident in 1982 when seven people died due to Tylenol bottles that had been tampered with. In that case, J&J recalled all bottles and stopped production until they discovered the source of the problem.

“As a result, we now have tamper-resistant caps on over-the-counter medicines and in other products. That’s corporate responsibility,” he said. “For years, social media companies have known this has been happening, yet they continue to operate their platforms without any significant changes.”

While data on the prevalence of drug sales on social platforms is hard to come by, the National Crime Prevention Council estimates 80% of teen and young adult fentanyl poisoning deaths can be traced to some social media contact.

In a sweeping 2023 report on the problem, Colorado’s attorney general called the availability of fentanyl and other illicit substances online “staggering.”

“Due to their ubiquity, convenience, and lack of regulation, social media platforms have become a major venue for drug distribution,” the report said. “Where once a teen might have had to seek out a street dealer, hassle friends, or learn to navigate the dark web to access illicit drugs, young people can now locate drug dealers using their smartphones — with the relative ease of ordering food delivery or calling a ride-share service.”

Accidental overdoses in the U.S. have decreased slightly each year since 2021 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. DelPonte attributes this in part to more education and awareness about the issue. Among young people ages 0 to 19, there were 1,622 overdose deaths in 2021, then 1,590 in 2022, and 1,511 last year.

The decline, DelPonte said, is “very small.”

A decade ago, people looking to buy illicit drugs online would visit the dark web. But this was quickly eclipsed by social media and messaging platforms’ rise. Using popular social media sites, encrypted chats, legitimate payment and shipping services, dealers moved into the light. Social platforms say they are constantly working to address the issue, while law enforcement has made some inroads.

Last May, for instance, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s “Operation Last Mile,” targeting Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco Cartels, led to 3,337 arrests and the seizure of nearly 44 million fentanyl pills and other deadly drugs. More than 1,100 associated cases involved social media apps and encrypted communications platforms, the DEA said.

On Instagram, as recently as this summer, a simple hashtag search for popular prescription drugs brought up numerous results with accounts offering to sell illicit pills to anyone looking. Many accounts directed users to Snapchat or Telegram, where experts say encryption and alleged lax moderation make it even easier to engage in illegal activity. Money is sent through payment platforms and the drugs can be delivered by mail, DelPonte said.

Meta, for its part, has made it more difficult to search for drugs on its platform in recent weeks.

‘Never in a million years’

Mikayla Brown lost her son Elijah, who went by Eli, to a suspected fentanyl overdose in 2023, two weeks after his 15th birthday. Eli loved skateboarding, video games and cooking. His favorite was spicy Cajun pasta his mom made and he just started to get into cooking himself.

Eli began experimenting with marijuana in high school and he was going through what seemed like a phase many teenagers go through, his mom said. The family decided he’d go live with his biological father about three hours away in Woodland Hills in Los Angeles, to try to get a handle on what Brown called Eli’s “rebellion era.”

Brown said the family “never in a million years” would have thought he was getting into anything more dangerous than that. There was one exception, about a year before he passed away, his mom found him acting funny and he admitted to having taken Xanax, a prescription anti-anxiety drug.

On a September evening last year, Eli arrived home from a friend’s house, had dinner with his dad and stayed up late to watch a movie.

His father sent him to bed around “2 a.m., I guess,” Brown said. “And then when his alarm went off in the morning to wake up Eli for school he found him in his room...”

Eli was unresponsive. His cause of death was accidental fentanyl overdose. But he wasn’t trying to buy fentanyl, he was looking for Xanax, and, like Coco, ended up with tainted pills that killed him.

Until recently, a search for #Xanax on Instagram led to a warning page specifying that “This may be associated with the sale of drugs” and that the “sale, purchase of trade of illicit drugs can cause harm to yourself and others and is illegal in most countries.” A blue “Get help” link directed users to federal substance abuse resources. Underneath that link, users could click to “see results anyway.” After it was pointed out by the AP, the company quickly removed the ability to “see results anyway” for location-specific hashtags such as #xanaxdallas or #xanaxchicago. Later, it also removed the “see results” option for other drugs such as cocaine and Adderall, among others.

Meta also said it investigated accounts shared by The Associated Press and concluded they were not drug dealers, but financial scam artists based in Africa pretending to sell drugs locally.

Meta says it blocks and filters “hundreds” of terms associated with illicit drug sales and links to recovery and substance abuse resources when possible. But drug dealers and other bad actors constantly shift their strategies, coming up with fresh ways to avoid detection.

David Decary-Hetu, a professor at the School of Criminology at the University of Montreal, said Meta, in particular, has been “quite effective” in targeting people who sell drugs on its social platforms. But, he added, “it doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen.”

In a statement, Meta said drug dealers “are criminals who stop at nothing to sell their dangerous products. This is a challenge that spans across platforms, industries, and communities, and it requires all of us working together to address it.”

The company added that it works with law enforcement and proactively took down 2 million pieces of content, 99.7% before they were reported in the first three months of 2024.

“Our hearts go out to the families suffering at the hands of these criminals and we are committed to working with others to prevent these tragedies,” Meta added.

A persistent problem

Coco’s mother had many discussions with her daughter about being careful online.

The teen was in therapy — social media really affected her and she developed anxiety and depression, Arnold said. She frequently checked Coco’s social media and limited her time on Snapchat to 15 minutes per day.

“She knew about a lot of this stuff. We had talked about it. But then when this came up on Instagram, you know, I wasn’t checking and I couldn’t check all of her direct messages. It’s hard to know as a parent, no matter how on top of it you are,” she said.

Coco’s death is still under investigation, Arnold said.

Arnold said it took five months to remove the dealer’s profile from Instagram. Occasionally, she checks to see if he’s there under another name.

“I typed in something that I thought maybe could work, you know, based on what his previous handle had been. And there he was. He was back up under a different a different handle,” she said. “But I recognized his photo and I reported it to the police. And now again, it’s taking months to get it taken down.”

Experts often single out Snapchat as a particularly dangerous platform, something the company vehemently disagrees with. In October 2022, a group of parents who say their children bought fentanyl from drug dealers they met through Snapchat sued the company for wrongful death and negligence, calling it a “haven for drug trafficking.”

“Despite Snap promoting and portraying Snapchat as a ‘goofy’ app for kids to use to send each other silly pictures, its known common use is as an ‘open-air drug market,’” the lawsuit claims. Snapchat’s role in illicit drug sales to teens, it continues, “was the foreseeable result of the designs, structures, and policies Snap chose to implement to increase its revenues.”

The vast majority of fentanyl deaths among young people, the lawsuit says, involve kids who don’t know they are ingesting fentanyl. Rather, they are buying what they believe is marijuana, MDMA or prescription drugs like OxyContin. In January, a judge ruled that the lawsuit could move to trial.

It’ll be yet another test for Section 230, a 1996 law that generally exempts internet companies from liability for material users post on their networks.

In a statement, Snap said it is “heartbroken by the fentanyl epidemic and are deeply committed to the fight against it.”

“We’ve invested in advanced technology to detect and remove illicit drug-related content, work extensively with law enforcement helping to bring dealers to justice, and continue to raise awareness and evolve our service to help keep our community safe. Criminals have no place on Snapchat,” said Jacqueline Beauchere, Global Head of Platform Safety at the company.

While Snap wouldn’t comment on the lawsuit itself, the company argues its design actually makes it more difficult for bad actors to operate. For instance, the company says, it doesn’t allow people to get messages from people they haven’t added as friends or have a phone contact, and location sharing is off by default.

Regulatory remedies?

Advocates are hoping that regulation of tech companies could help address the problem, as it might help with other dangers kids face on social media. In July, the Senate passed the Kids Online Safety Act, legislation designed to protect children from dangerous online content. It still awaits a vote in the House. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., meanwhile, introduced a bill that would require social media companies to report illicit fentanyl, methamphetamine and fake pill activity occurring on their platforms to law enforcement.

“We must do more at the federal level to combat the flow of fentanyl into our communities, and it starts by holding social media companies accountable for their part in facilitating illicit drug sales,” Shaheen said.

But for parents like Arnold, Brown and others who already lost their children to overdoses, it is too late.

“Social media companies have the ability to make their platforms drug-free zones,” DelPonte said. “Instead, they keep evading the meaningful changes to keep the public safe.”

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SEATTLE (AP) — For her 26th birthday in July, human rights activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi gathered friends for a bonfire at one of her favorite places, a sandy beach in Seattle where green-and-white ferries cruise across the dark, flat water and osprey fish overhead.

On Wednesday night, hundreds of people traveled to the same beach in grief, love and anger to mourn her. Eygi was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers last Friday in the occupied West Bank, where she had gone to protest and bear witness to Palestinian suffering.

“I can’t imagine what she felt like in her last moments, lying alone under the olive trees,” one of her friends, Kelsie Nabass, told the crowd at the vigil. “What did she think of? And did she know all of us would show up here tonight, for her?”

Eygi, who also held Turkish citizenship, was killed while demonstrating against settlements in the West Bank. A witness who was there, Israeli protester Jonathan Pollak, said she posed no threat to Israeli forces and that the shooting came during a moment of calm, following clashes between stone-throwing protesters and Israeli troops firing tear gas and bullets.

The Israeli military said Eygi was likely shot “indirectly and unintentionally” by its soldiers, drawing criticism from American officials, including President Joe Biden, who said he was “outraged and deeply saddened” her killing.

“There must be full accountability,” Biden said in a statement released Wednesday. “And Israel must do more to ensure that incidents like this never happen again.”

The deaths of American citizens in the West Bank have drawn international attention, such as the fatal shooting of a prominent Palestinian-American journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, in 2022 in the Jenin refugee camp. The deaths of Palestinians who do not have dual nationality rarely receive the same scrutiny.

Eygi’s family has demanded an independent investigation.

As the sun set, turning the sky on the horizon a pale orange, friends recalled Eygi as open, engaging, funny and devoted. The crowd spilled beyond a large rectangle of small black, red, green and white Palestinian flags staked in the sand to mark the venue for the vigil.

Many attendees wore traditional checked scarves — keffiyehs — in support of the Palestinian cause and carried photographs of Eygi in her graduation cap. They laid roses, sunflowers or carnations at a memorial where battery-operated candles spelled out her name in the sand.

Several described becoming fast friends with her last spring during the occupied “Liberated Zone” protest against the Israel-Hamas war at the University of Washington. Yoseph Ghazal said she introduced herself as “Baklava,” a name she sometimes used on messaging apps, reflective of her love of the sweet Mediterranean dessert.

Eygi, who attended Seattle schools and graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in psychology this year, helped negotiate with the administration on behalf of the protesters at the encampment, which was part of a broader campus movement against the Gaza war.

“She felt so strongly and loved humanity, loved people, loved life so much that she just wanted to help as many as she could,” Juliette Majid, 26, now a doctoral student at North Carolina State University, said in an interview. “She had such a drive for justice.”

Eygi’s uncle told a Turkish television station that she had kept her trip a secret from at least some of her family, blocking relatives from her social media posts. Turkish officials have said they are working to repatriate her body for burial, per the family’s wishes.

Sue Han, a 26-year-old law student at the University of Washington, only knew Eygi for a few months after meeting her at the university encampment, but they quickly became close, laughing and blasting music in Eygi’s beat-up green Subaru. Eygi would pick Han up at the airport after her travels. Most recently, Eygi greeted her with a plastic baggie full of sliced apples and perfectly ripe strawberries.

Han saw Eygi before she left. Eygi was feeling scared and selfish for leaving her loved ones to go to the West Bank with the activist group International Solidarity Movement; Han said she couldn’t imagine anyone more selfless.

Eygi loved to connect people, bringing disparate friends together for coffee to see how they mixed, Han said. The same was true when she would bring people together on the beach, and it was true of the vigil, too.

“I was looking around at everybody sharing stories about Aysenur, sharing tears and hugs, and this is exactly what she would have wanted,” Han said. “These new relationships all sharing Aysenur as the starting seed — it’s the legacy she would have wanted.”

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A billionaire will have to wait a little longer to perform the first private spacewalk after SpaceX delayed Thursday’s spacewalk by a few hours.

Tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman and his crew began preparing for the endeavor soon after blasting into orbit on Tuesday for a five-day flight. SpaceX announced the postponement an hour ahead of the planned start of the spacewalk.

No explanation was immediately given, but the company said via X “all systems are looking good.”

Isaacman and a SpaceX engineer will take turns emerging from their capsule hundreds of miles above Earth, sticking close to the hatch. Two other crew members will remain strapped in their seats.

Isaacman teamed up with SpaceX for the first commercial spacewalk to test out new spacesuits.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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MORGAN CITY, La. (AP) — Francine weakened to a tropical storm late Wednesday after striking Louisiana as a Category 2 hurricane that blacked out more than 275,000 homes and businesses, sent storm surge rushing into coastal communities and raised flood fears in New Orleans and beyond as drenching rains spread over the northern Gulf Coast.

The storm was forecast to be downgraded to a tropical depression Thursday as it churned northward over Mississippi, the National Hurricane Center said. Some 4 to 6 inches (10 to 15 centimeters) of rain were possible in portions of Mississippi and neighboring states, forecasters said, warning of the potential threat of scattered flash flooding as farflung as Jackson, Mississippi; Birmingham, Alabama; Memphis, Tennessee; and Atlanta.

Francine slammed the Louisiana coast Wednesday evening with 100 mph (155 kph) winds in coastal Terrebonne Parish. battering a fragile coastal region that hasn’t fully recovered from a series of devastating hurricanes in 2020 and 2021. It then moved at a fast clip of 17 mph (26 kph) toward New Orleans, pounding the city with torrential rains overnight.

There were no immediate reports of deaths or injuries. TV news broadcasts from coastal communities showed waves from nearby lakes, rivers and Gulf waters thrashing sea walls. Water poured into city streets amid blinding downpours. Oak and cypress trees leaned in the high winds, and some utility poles swayed back and forth.

“It’s a little bit worse than what I expected to be honest with you,” said Alvin Cockerham, fire chief of Morgan City about 30 miles (50 kilometers) from where the storm’s center made landfall. “I pulled all my trucks back to the station. It’s too dangerous to be out there in this.”

Power outages in Louisiana topped 362,546 a few hours after landfall, spread out widely across southeast Louisiana, according to the tracking site poweroutage.us.

Sheltering at her mother’s home just outside Morgan City, Laura Leftwich said blasts of wind had swept away two large birdhouses outside. She had a generator powering an internet connection so she could video chat with friends, holding her computer to a window to show them water overflowing in the street.

If the storm had been any more intense, “I wouldn’t have the guts to look outside,” said Leftwich, 40. “It’s a little scary.”

The sixth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, Francine drew fuel from exceedingly warm Gulf of Mexico waters, strengthening to a Category 2 storm before landfall.

In addition to torrential rains, there was a lingering threat of spin-off tornadoes from the storm Thursday.

Much of Louisiana and Mississippi could get 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters) of rain, with the possibility of 12 inches (30 centimeters) in some spots, said Brad Reinhart, a senior hurricane specialist at the hurricane center.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said the National Guard would fan out to parishes impacted by Francine. They have food, water, nearly 400 high-water vehicles, about 100 boats and 50 helicopters to respond to the storm, including for possible search-and-rescue operations.

Since the mid-19th century, some 57 hurricanes have tracked over or made landfall in Louisiana, according to The Weather Channel. Among them are some of the strongest, costliest and deadliest storms in U.S. history.

Morgan City, home to around 11,500 people, sits on the banks of the Atchafalaya River in south Louisiana and is surrounded by lakes and marsh. It’s described on the city’s website as “gateway to the Gulf of Mexico for the shrimping and oilfield industries.”

President Joe Biden granted an emergency declaration to help Louisiana secure expedited federal money and assistance. Landry and Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves also declared states of emergency.

The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency said it distributed more than 100,000 sandbags to the southern part of the state and the Department of Education reported a number of school district closures for Wednesday and Thursday.

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Cline reported from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Associated Press writers Kevin McGill in New Orleans, Curt Anderson in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia, contributed to this story.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate has the potential for history-making this fall, with not one, but two, Black women possibly elected to the chamber, a situation never seen in America since Congress was created more than 200 years ago.

Delaware’s Lisa Blunt Rochester marks the milestone by saying that the reason she does this work is not about making history, “but to make a difference, an impact, on people’s lives.”

Maryland’s Angela Alsobrooks said that people like her, and stories like hers, don’t usually make it to the U.S. Senate, “but they should.”

If the two Democratic candidates prevail in their elections this November, their arrival would double the number of Black women — from two to four — who have ever been elected to the U.S. Senate, whose 100 members have historically been, and continue to be, mostly white men.

Never in the Senate have two Black women served together at the same time.

“I have to pause and think, How is that possible?” asked Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

“It’s not that white male attorneys’ perspective shouldn’t be at the table,” said Walsh, but “they shouldn’t be the only thing at the table.”

To be sure, there are a many stairs to climb before Senate history would be made this election, where not only the White House, but control of Congress is being fiercely contested, and essentially a toss-up. The Senate races, in particular, are heated, grueling and costly.

Blunt Rochester is almost assured to defeat the Republican candidate after Tuesday’s uncontested primary for the seat held by retiring Democratic Sen. Tom Carper in the small state that is home to President Joe Biden and where she is the at-large representative to the House. But the race in Maryland between Alsobrooks and Republican Larry Hogan, the popular former governor, is expected to be tight to the finish — and it could determine which party takes majority control in the Senate.

Alsobrooks upended conventional wisdom to beat back wealthy David Trone in the primary to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin by amassing deep grass roots and party support, showcased in a notable campaign ad with hundreds of backers. She is the former State’s Attorney for sprawling Prince George’s County and is now its top County Executive.

On their private text chain Blunt Rochester says they call themselves “sister senator to be,” as they run down-ballot from Vice President Kamala Harris — a friend and colleague who became the second Black woman ever elected to the Senate when she won in 2016 — in her own historic run for the White House.

The first Black woman elected to the Senate, Democratic Sen. Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois in 1992, served a single term. Harris was the second. And a third Black woman, Sen. Laphonza Butler, was appointed to fill out the term of long-serving California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who died in 2023.

“People are anxious and excited at the same time,” said Glynda C. Carr, the president and CEO of Higher Heights for America, an organization that works to elect Black women to office.

What’s striking about their campaigns is the way the two women embrace their own backgrounds but also, like Harris, don’t dwell on the historic firsts they would bring to the job, leaving it to the voter to see their Blackness and hear their voices as women.

“The vast majority of us know that we have so much more in common than what separates us,” Harris said on the debate stage this week, brushing past Trump as he revived questions about her race.

On the campaign trail Blunt Rochester has shared the story of the Reconstruction Era documents showing her great, great, great-grandfather, who had been enslaved in Georgia, as now having the right to vote.

As she reminisces on that history, “what we’ve come through as a country,” she said she also thinks of what she will pass on to her own new baby granddaughter.

“There isn’t a cookie cutter way to run” for office, Blunt Rochester told AP.

Blunt Rochester and Harris are close, both entering Congress the same year and often sitting together at Congressional Black Caucus events. “The most important thing is that we show up as our authentic selves,” she said, adding “because it requires all of our different and diverse lived and work experiences.”

Alsobrooks launched her campaign for the Senate in a video telling her family’s story of leaving South Carolina for Maryland after her great-grandfather was shot and killed by a sheriff’s deputy after a traffic stop.

As a young prosecutor she first met Harris, then attorney general in California, a friendship that formed more than a decade ago.

But unlike 2016, when Hillary Clinton ran for president in a white suit symbolic of the suffragettes, the 2024 Senate candidates are positioning themselves more broadly in a way that may appeal to a wider electorate but also signals the cultural shift as the country becomes more diverse and Congress becomes more reflective of the electorate.

“We learned from 2016, we’re not going to lead with identity in the same way that Hillary Clinton did,” said Aimee Allison, founder of She the People, an organization that supports women of color in American leadership.

Allison said a new generation of candidates is showing you can be “holding multiple identities” at once. “It’s demonstrating you have a heart for people who you’re not like ... but deserve to be served by government and deserve representation.”

The challenges Black women face to get to this point in the campaign are steep, rooted in a two-party political system that has often been slow to support Black women candidates and quick to doubt their ability to win statewide office, despite the qualifications.

Over the years, the parties have not always shared ample resources with Black women candidates who strategists said proved they could have had more success in several close races, creating a Catch-22 loop that reinforces biased attitudes against their electability.

In fact, the Senate may have been poised to swear in another Black woman, Rep. Barbara Lee, who ran for the open seat from California after Feinstein’s death but fell short during a multi-candidate primary. Rep. Adam Schiff ran a strong campaign to become the Democratic front-runner with wide party support and is expected to handily win the seat that is now filled temporarily by Butler.

With the Senate heading toward a 50-50 split, tens of millions of dollars are being spent in Maryland, where the popular Hogan was recruited by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell to help the GOP win back the majority.

Hogan and Alsobrooks appear to generally appreciate one another. Alsobrooks said Hogan was a good governor, but warns that in the Senate he would be a decisive GOP vote.

Hogan’s campaign said he greatly respects Alsobrooks, and is proud of the work they did together during his administration.

“Our campaign has been laser-focused on Maryland and Marylanders — their local concerns and priorities, and the opportunity to elect an independent swing vote who will put the best interests of the state above party-line politics,” said Hogan campaign spokeswoman Blake Kernen.

During the Democratic National Convention the two women candidates held an event at a historic Black history museum in Chicago with Moseley Braun delivering remarks and Butler introducing them.

Blunt Rochester, noting her own powder blue power suit with its padded foundation, said she’s standing on the shoulders of those who came before her and has strong shoulders ready for those who come next.

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NEW YORK (AP) — It’s a practice that’s about as American as apple pie — accusing immigrant and minority communities of engaging in bizarre or disgusting behaviors when it comes to what and how they eat and drink, a kind of shorthand for saying they don’t belong.

The latest iteration came at Tuesday’s presidential debate, when former President Donald Trump spotlighted a false online tempest around the Haitian immigrant community of Springfield, Ohio. He repeated the groundless claim previously spread by his running mate, JD Vance, that the immigrants were stealing dogs and cats, the precious pets belonging to their American neighbors, and eating them. The furor got enough attention that officials had to step in to refute it, saying there was no credible evidence of any such thing.

But while it might be enough to turn your stomach, such food-based accusations are not new. Far from it.

Food-related scorn and insults were hurled at immigrant Chinese communities on the West Coast in the late 1800s as they started coming to the United States in larger numbers, and in later decades spread to other Asian and Pacific Islander communities like Thai or Vietnamese. As recently as last year, a Thai restaurant in California was hit with the stereotype, which caused such an outpouring of undeserved vitriol that the owner had to close and move to another location.

Behind it is the idea that “you’re engaging in something that is not just a matter of taste, but a violation of what it is to be human,” says Paul Freedman, a professor of history at Yale University. By tarring Chinese immigrants as those who would eat things Americans would refuse to, it made them the “other.”

In the US, foods can be flashpoints

Other communities, while not being accused of eating pets, have been criticized for the perceived strangeness of what they were cooking when they were new arrivals, such as Italians using too much garlic or Indians too much curry powder. Minority groups with a longer presence in the country were and are still not exempt from racist stereotypes — think derogatory references to Mexicans and beans or insulting African Americans with remarks about fried chicken and watermelon.

“There’s a slur for every almost every ethnicity based on some kind of food that they eat,” says Amy Bentley, professor of nutrition and food Studies at New York University. “And so that’s a very good way of disparaging people.”

That’s because food isn’t just sustenance. Embedded in human eating habits are some of the very building blocks of culture — things that make different peoples distinct and can be commandeered as fodder for ethnic hatred or political polemics.

“We need it to survive, but it’s also highly ritualized and highly symbolic. So the birthday cake, the anniversary, the things are commemorated and celebrated with food and drink,” Bentley says. “It’s just so highly integrated in all parts of our lives.”

And because “there’s specific variations of how humans do those rituals, how they eat, how they have shaped their cuisines, how they eat their food,” she adds, “It can be as a theme of commonality ... or it can be a form of distinct division.”

It’s not just the what. Insults can come from the how as well — eating with hands or chopsticks instead of forks and knives, for example. It can be seen in class-based bias against poorer people who didn’t have the same access to elaborate table settings or couldn’t afford to eat the same way the rich did — and used different, perhaps unfamiliar ingredients out of necessity.

Such disparagement can extend directly into current events. During the Second Gulf War, for example, Americans angry at France’s opposition of the U.S. invasion of Iraq started calling french fries “freedom fries.” And a much-used insulting term in the United States for Germans during the first two world wars was “krauts” — a slam on a culture where sauerkraut was a traditional food.

“Just what was wrong with the way urban immigrants ate?” Donna R. Gabaccia wrote in her 1998 book, “We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans.” In reviewing attitudes of the early 20th century and its demands for “100% Americanism,” she noted that “sauerkraut became ‘victory cabbage’” and one account complained of an Italian family “still eating spaghetti, not yet assimilated.”

The expanding food culture provides continuing fodder

Such stereotypes have persisted despite the fact that the American palate has significantly expanded in recent decades, thanks in part to the influx of those immigrant communities, with grocery stories carrying a wealth of ingredients that would baffle previous generations. The rise of restaurant culture has introduced many diners to authentic examples of cuisines they might have needed a passport to access in other eras.

After all, Bentley says, “when immigrants migrate to a different country, they bring their foodways with them and maintain them as they can. ... It’s so reminiscent of family, community, home. They’re just really material, multisensory manifestations of who we are.”

Haitian food is just one example of that. Communities like those found in New York City have added to the culinary landscape, using ingredients like goat, plantains and cassava.

So when Trump said that immigrants in Springfield — whom he called “the people that came in” — were eating dogs and cats and “the pets of the people that live there,” the echoes of his remarks played into not just food but culture itself.

And even though the American palate has broadened in recent decades, the persistence of food stereotypes — and outright insults, whether based in fact or completely made up — shows that just because Americans eat more broadly, it doesn’t mean that carries over into tolerance or nuance about other groups.

“It’s a fallacy to think that,” Freedman says. “It’s like the tourism fallacy that travel makes us more understanding of diversity. The best example right now is Mexican food. Lots and lots of people like Mexican food AND think that immigration needs to be stopped. There’s no link between enjoyment of a foreigner’s cuisine and that openness.”

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BRISTOL, Pa. (AP) — The presidential debate this week was the final affront to Rosie Torres’ lifelong Republicanism. She said her allegiance to Donald Trump, already strained by his stand on abortion, snapped in the former president’s “eye opener” encounter with Kamala Harris.

It’s time to put “country before party,” Torres, 60, said Wednesday in Bristol, a riverfront town in suburban Philadelphia. Trump left her frustrated after his appearance recently at Arlington National Cemetery when a member of his staff pushed a cemetery official, she said.

“I still was willing to vote for Donald Trump,” Torres said. “But you know, I think that what he did at the cemetery for the veterans — that was very disrespectful. I feel like our country is being disrespected.”

In Bucks County, a critical area in a vital swing state, the debate is producing a lot of hard thinking about what to do in November. Millions of Americans elsewhere have made up their minds but in purple Pennsylvania, plenty of voting choices are still in play.

In interviews in Bristol and Langhorne, another longtime Republican came away from the debate intrigued but not sold on Harris, a young first-time voter is going for Trump, and a Democrat is still trying to shake the image in his head of people eating pets after Trump’s “moronic” talking point on that subject Tuesday night.

A closer look at what voters in a key part of the country are thinking after what could be the only presidential debate:

She’s still shopping

There’s Mary Nolan, 70, of Bensalem, a registered Republican for 50 years who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Trump in 2020. She has more thinking to do after a debate in which Harris both impressed and frustrated her.

“I wasn’t happy with Biden-Trump,” she said of the options before President Joe Biden abandoned his reelection campaign. “I didn’t feel we had any good choices. And I’m still not sure we do. We might. But I still want to see more about Kamala Harris.”

She said she and her husband, who’s registered as a Democrat, split their party registrations so they could have a say as a family in primary elections. Immigration, the economy (she said she had just paid $6 for a pound of butter) and the infrastructure bill that Biden signed into law were her top issues.

“I like that Kamala Harris does say I am going to be the president for everyone,” Nolan said. “I don’t think our politicians say that often.”

She figures she’ll make her voting decision by the end of October, just days before the election. Meantime, she’s aggressive about collecting information.

“I take different opinions from all over. I don’t do any blogs. It’s simply news. Different interest groups like AARP.”

Her political ideology? “I think the world is changing fast, and I’m still in my values from 1960,” Nolan said.

What values?

“Family, home, morals. You know, our kids don’t have the upbringing that you did or I did because the streets are different now. I think if someone would say, you know, this is what I’m going to do to improve life in the United States, I definitely would vote for them.”

She said she thought Harris had a good debate, but dodged some things.

“I did not like that she avoided questions. She talked around them when they asked her direct questions about abortion. There was one about abortion. There was another about immigration. And there were a couple that said, hey, you’ve been here three and a half years, but you haven’t done those things that you’re saying are so important. Why not? She ran off into her talking points and never gave a direct answer.”

But Harris gave her a good impression. Trump did not.

“I think yesterday, definitely Kamala Harris presented herself very well. She’s dignified. ... She would be a good representative of our country.”

Trump? “I think his policies are good. I just want a more stable, dignified president.” She wants “someone that doesn’t yell and scream and call people names.”

This Democrat saw history unfold

Terry Culleton, 68, of Langhorne, Pennsylvania, is a retired high school English literature teacher and was reading “Autocracy, Inc.” by Anne Applebaum at a cafe Wednesday morning. His support for labor, then for civil rights and human rights, made him a Democrat.

He thought Harris held her own against Trump and articulated her plans well.

But what really stuck with him was Trump’s false comments about immigrants in Ohio eating pets.

“So moronic a thing to say and to repeat that I just can’t get it out of my head that somebody would go on national TV and state that,” he said.

He said he got a sense of history unfolding watching the debate last night.

“I think it’s democracy versus something close to totalitarianism. I think it’s a matter of supporting democratic governments as opposed to supporting the kind of governments that (Russian President Vladimir) Putin is trying to export, which Trump has no problem with, as far as I can tell.”

Inflation led her to Trump

Kelli Surline of Langhorne was at a café with her fiancé and young daughter who wore an Eagles kelly green T-shirt. She described herself as politically unengaged until the pinch of higher prices got to her. She didn’t watch the debate, in part, because she’s made up her mind.

“I’m 28 years old and I’ve never seen the country this bad ever,” she said. “So I made the choice to get my voter’s registration, and I’m definitely voting for Trump.”

She talked about how difficult it has been to get ahead.

“We wanted to get a place together,” Surline said, motioning to Geoffrey Trush, 40, her fiancé. “We’re not able to do that.” Instead, she’s living with her mom. Unaffordable prices make it “a struggle every week.”

He was once a Democrat

Ron Soto, 86, of Levittown, Pennsylvania, is a longtime Trump supporter and retired tractor-trailer driver and Army veteran who left the Democratic Party in the 1990s for the GOP after coming to realize he disagreed with Bill and Hillary Clinton’s positions.

He said he tuned into the debate Tuesday, his hound dog, Sam, by his side, after watching the Phillies game.

Illegal immigration is a major issue for him and Harris didn’t win him over.

“The biggest issue is I don’t like her, and I don’t like Joe Biden.”

Saying he served in the Army from 1955 to 1963, Soto asked: “What the hell did I stick my neck out for? Why? So you can give it away? The Democrats can open the gates, the floodgates, and tell the whole world. You’re welcome. Come on in.” He added: “These people have ruined this country.”

She had her fill of politics

Christine Desumma, 50, a former Trump voter and the owner of a salon on Bristol’s quaint shop-lined street, expressed frustration with both parties and said she won’t be voting at all in November. She said her taxes were lower when Trump was in office and recalled the sting of COVID-19 shutdowns.

She got fed up, particularly with social media and Facebook. Online debates, she said, were driving a wedge within her own family, and she’s washing her hands of it.

“I just made the decision that I’m not going to vote and I don’t want to hear it,” she said. “Now I choose to not watch, not pay attention.” She’s found another pursuit.

“I’m studying yoga,” she said. “I got myself back.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are making a beeline for swing states that they hope to flip in their favor this year, both of them trying to expand their narrow paths to victory in a closely fought presidential campaign.

Harris has her sights set on North Carolina, where she’s scheduled to hold rallies in Charlotte and Greensboro on Thursday, her first political event after she buoyed supporters with her commanding performance in Tuesday’s debate.

Trump is heading west to Tucson, Arizona, as he looks to stabilize his campaign, which continues to struggle to recalibrate nearly two months after Harris replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket. Although Harris’ team said she’s willing to do another debate, the Republican candidate has waffled.

“Are we going to do a rematch?” Trump said Wednesday. “I just don’t know.”

The candidates are barnstorming one day after they marked the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a somber occasion that provided little respite from partisan politics in a high-speed campaign season.

At a fire station in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, close to where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed after passengers fought back against their hijackers, Trump posed for photos with children who wore campaign shirts. One of the shirts proclaimed former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Biden and Harris were “dumb and dumber and dumbest.”

Biden and Harris visited the same fire station earlier in the day. Someone there offered Biden a red-white-and-blue baseball hat that said “Trump 2024,” and suggested the president put it on to demonstrate his commitment to bipartisan unity. Biden briefly put it on and flashed a wide grin.

Only a handful of battleground states will decide the outcome of the election.

Democrats haven’t won North Carolina’s electoral votes since 2008, when President Barack Obama was elected for the first time. However, Trump’s 2020 margin of victory of 1.3 percentage points was his narrowest win of any state that year, and Democrats hope that North Carolina’s growing and diversifying population will give them an edge this time.

Harris’s campaign said Thursday’s trip will be her ninth to the state this year, and recent polls show a tight race. More than two dozen combined campaign offices — supporting Harris and the rest of the party’s candidates — have been opened, and popular Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is one of her top surrogates.

Republicans have been confident about Trump’s chances in the state, and the former president held rallies there in August.

Registered independents — known in North Carolina as unaffiliated — are the state’s largest voting bloc and are usually key to determining outcomes in statewide elections. A state Supreme Court ruling this week affirming that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. must be removed from North Carolina ballots could bring additional votes Trump’s way given Kennedy’s endorsement.

The state’s Republican Party has dismissed concerns that a poor showing by its gubernatorial nominee, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, could harm the electoral chances of other party candidates, including Trump.

Democratic nominee Josh Stein and his allies have hammered Robinson for months on the airwaves and social media for his past harsh comments on abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. Stein, the state attorney general, had a lead over Robinson in several recent polls of North Carolina voters.

Arizona is another state where the presidential race could be shaped, at least in part, by down-ballot races. Kari Lake, a prominent Republican election denier who lost her campaign for governor in 2020, is running for the U.S. Senate seat that’s being vacated by Kyrsten Sinema.

Lake exemplifies the rightward shift of the state party in the Trump era. She’s opposed by Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who was leading in several recent polls, although the race was close in another.

Republicans have won Arizona in nearly every presidential election since World War II, but Biden eked out a narrow victory in 2020.

The rise of Arizona Democrats has been driven by the arrival of transplants from blue states and a political realignment that has seen suburban voters — particularly college-educated women — shift away from Republicans.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, held a rally in the state on Tuesday ahead of the debate, and the Democratic ticket campaigned together there last month.

Republicans still outnumber Democrats in Arizona, but a third of voters are independent. Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, appeared last week in a heavily Republican area of metro Phoenix with Charlie Kirk, the founder of an influential conservative youth group.

Trump was last in Arizona two weeks ago for a news conference along the U.S.-Mexico border, where he drove one of his most effective attacks on Harris over the number of people crossing the border to seek asylum, followed by a rally at a former hockey arena in the Phoenix area.

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Cooper reported from Phoenix and Robertson from Raleigh, North Carolina.

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ATHENS, Ga. (AP) — The Postal Service’s new delivery vehicles aren’t going to win a beauty contest. They’re tall and ungainly. The windshields are vast. Their hoods resemble a duck bill. Their bumpers are enormous.

“You can tell that (the designers) didn’t have appearance in mind,” postal worker Avis Stonum said.

Odd appearance aside, the first handful of Next Generation Delivery Vehicles that rolled onto postal routes in August in Athens are getting rave reviews from letter carriers accustomed to cantankerous older vehicles that lack modern safety features and are prone to breaking down — and even catching fire.

Within a few years of the initial rollout, the fleet will have expanded to 60,000, most of them electric models, serving as the Postal Service’s primary delivery truck from Maine to Hawaii.

Once fully deployed, they’ll represent one of the most visible signs of the agency’s 10-year, $40 billion transformation led by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who’s also renovating aging facilities, overhauling the processing and transportation network, and instituting other changes.

The current postal vehicles — the Grumman Long Life Vehicle, dating to 1987 — have made good on their name, outlasting their projected 25-year lifespan. But they’re well overdue for replacement.

Noisy and fuel-inefficient (9 mpg), the Grummans are costly to maintain. They’re scalding hot in the summer, with only an old-school electric fan to circulate air. They’re have mirrors mounted on them that when perfectly aligned allow the driver to see around the vehicle, but the mirrors constantly get knocked out of alignment. Alarmingly, nearly 100 of the vehicles caught fire last year, imperiling carriers and mail alike.

The new trucks are being built with comfort, safety and utility in mind, by Oshkosh Defense in South Carolina.

Even tall postal carriers can stand up without bonking their heads and walk from front to back to retrieve packages. For safety, they have airbags, 360-degree cameras, blind-spot monitoring, collision sensors and anti-lock brakes — all of which are missing on the Grummans.

The new trucks also have a feature that became common in most cars more than six decades ago — air conditioning. And that’s key for drivers in the Deep South, the desert Southwest and other areas with scorching summers.

“I promise you, it felt like heaven blowing in my face,” Stonum said of her first experience working in an air-conditioned truck.

Richard Burton, another driver, said he appreciates the larger payload area, which can accommodate bigger packages, and the fact that he can stand up and doesn’t have to crouch, helping him avoid back pain. The old trucks also had a habit of breaking down in traffic, he added.

Brian Renfroe, president of the National Letter Carriers Association, said union members are enthusiastic about the new vehicles, just as they were when the Grummans marked a leap forward from the previous vehicles, old-school Jeeps. He credited DeJoy with bringing a sense of urgency to get them into production.

“We’re excited now to be at the point where they’re starting to hit the streets,” Renfroe said.

The process got off to a rocky start.

Environmentalists were outraged when DeJoy announced that 90% of the next-gen vehicles in the first order would be gas-powered. Lawsuits were filed demanding that the Postal Service further electrify its fleet of more than 200,000 vehicles to reduce tailpipe emissions.

“Everybody went nuts,” DeJoy said.

The problem, Dejoy said, wasn’t that he didn’t want electric vehicles. Rather, the expense of the vehicles, compounded by the costs of installing thousands of charging stations and upgrading electrical service, made them unaffordable at a time when the agency was reporting big operating deficits every quarter.

He found a way to further boost the number of electric vehicles when he met with President Joe Biden’s top environmental adviser, John Podesta. That led to a deal in which the government provided $3 billion to the Postal Service, with part of it earmarked for electric charging stations.

In December 2022, DeJoy announced that the Postal Service was buying 106,000 vehicles through 2028. That included 60,000 next-gen vehicles, 45,000 of them electric models, along with 21,000 other electric vehicles. He pledged to go all-electric for new purchases starting in 2026.

“With the climate crisis at our doorsteps, electrifying the U.S. government’s largest fleet will deliver the progress we’ve been waiting for,” said Katherine García of the Sierra Club, which sued the Postal Service before its decision to boost the volume of electric vehicle purchases.

Between the electric vehicles, reduced tailpipe emissions from optimized mail routes and other changes, the agency anticipates cutting carbon emissions by 40% by 2030, DeJoy said. The route revisions will also save money.

This summer the Postal Service’s environmental battles came full circle as the White House honored it with a Presidential Federal Sustainability Award, marking the end of “an interesting journey,” DeJoy said.

The honor is a signal of the agency’s ability to work through complex problems, be they operational, financial, technical, political or of a public policy nature, he said.

“It comes from forging forward,” he said. “Keep moving.”

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Sharp reported from Portland, Maine.

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HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — Nearly 200 people have died in Vietnam in the aftermath of Typhoon Yagi and more than 125 are missing as flash floods and landslides take their toll, state media reported Thursday.

Vietnam’s VNExpress newspaper reported that 197 people have died and 128 are still missing, while more than 800 have been injured.

The death toll spiked earlier in the week as a flash flood swept away the entire hamlet of Lang Nu in northern Vietnam’s Lao Cai province Tuesday. Hundreds of rescue personnel worked tirelessly Wednesday to search for survivors, but as of Thursday morning 53 villagers remained missing, VNExpress reported, while seven more bodies were found, bringing the death toll there to 42.

Yagi was the strongest typhoon to hit the Southeast Asian country in decades. It made landfall Saturday with winds of up to 149 kph (92 mph). Despite weakening on Sunday, downpours continued and rivers remain dangerously high.

The heavy rains also damaged factories in export-focused northern Vietnam’s industrial hubs.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump emerged Wednesday from a rocky debate against Kamala Harris looking to regain his footing with 54 days until Election Day, the first ballots already going out in Alabama and other states on the cusp of early voting.

Not even three months ago, Trump stepped off the debate stage in Atlanta having watched President Joe Biden deliver a disjointed, whispery performance that eventually led the 81-year-old Democrat to end his reelection bid and endorse Harris, his vice president. By the end of Tuesday night, it was the 78-year-old Trump on the defensive after the 59-year-old Harris controlled much of the debate, repeatedly baiting the Republican former president into agitated answers replete with exaggerations and mistruths.

“We’ll see what the polls say going forward, but I don’t know how anybody can spin this other than a pretty decisive defeat for Trump,” former Rep. Charlie Dent, a Pennsylvania Republican who has long been critical of Trump, said Wednesday on CNN.

Trump and Harris were together briefly Wednesday in New York, where they joined President Biden and other dignitaries to mark the 23rd anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. They shook hands for a second time the morning after Harris approached Trump on the debate stage to introduce herself, the first sign of the aggressive approach she would take during the event.

The former president, who flouted convention with a surprise appearance late Tuesday in the post-debate spin room, continued Wednesday morning to insist he had won the night, though he also blasted ABC moderators as unfair – a tacit acknowledgement that he did not accomplish what he wanted against Harris.

Trump and some of his allies in online posts speculated about punishing ABC by taking away its broadcast license — the network doesn’t need a license to operate but individual stations do — or denying access to its reporters in the future.

“We had a great night. We won the debate. We had a terrible, a terrible network,” Trump said Wednesday on Fox News. “They should be embarrassed. I mean they kept correcting me and what I said was largely right or I hope it was right.”

Trump’s framing of the debate results does not square with the broad consensus of political commentators, strategists on both sides of the political aisle and some immediate assessments by voters who watched Tuesday night. But there is also evidence that the debate did not immediately yield broad shifts among people who watched.

About 6 in 10 debate-watchers said that Harris outperformed Trump, while about 4 in 10 said that Trump did a better job, according to a flash poll conducted by CNN. Before the debate, the same voters were evenly split on whether Trump or Harris would win.

The vast majority of debate-watchers — who, importantly, do not reflect the views of the full voting public — also said that the event wouldn’t affect their votes in the election. Perceptions of the two candidates remain largely unchanged.

Harris was jubilant late Tuesday, telling late-night rallygoers in Philadelphia that it was a “great night,” even as she repeated that she sees Democrats as “underdogs” against Trump. She garnered the endorsement of music and cultural icon Taylor Swift, an intensely popular figure.

Harris’ campaign immediately pitched the idea of a second debate. Fox News has proposed an October matchup but with moderators that Trump has indicated he does not prefer.

Republican Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire was more charitable to Trump than some, allowing that Harris won by traditional debate standards but fell short in convincing swing voters focused on their economic conditions.

“The majority of those swing voters are still results driven,” Sununu said on CNN, adding that Trump still has opportunities to sway voters on the economy, immigration and, especially, foreign policy.

Perhaps Sununu’s most revealing assessment, though, came not when he talked about Trump but about another Republican the governor originally supported in the 2024 primaries: former Ambassador Nikki Haley, who was the last GOP candidate standing against Trump and continued garnering support in primaries weeks after she dropped out of the race.

“Imagine what Nikki would have done in that debate,” Sununu said. “It would have been great.”

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Barrow reported from Atlanta. AP Polling Editor Amelia Thomson-Deveaux in Washington contributed to this report.

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DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israeli airstrikes across Gaza overnight and Wednesday hit a U.N. school sheltering displaced Palestinian families as well as two homes, killing at least 34 people, including 19 women and children, hospital officials said.

The deadliest strike came Wednesday afternoon, targeting the U.N.’s Al-Jaouni Preparatory Boys School in central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp. The Israeli military said it was targeting Hamas militants planning attacks from inside the school. The claim could not be independently confirmed.

At least 14 dead from the strike, including two children and a woman, were brought to Awda and al-Aqsa Martyrs hospitals nearby, officials from the facilities said. At least 18 people were wounded in the strike, they said.

One of the children killed was the daughter of Momin Selmi, a member of Gaza’s civil defense agency, which works rescuing wounded and bodies after strikes, the agency said in a statement. Selmi hadn’t seen his daughter for 10 months, since he remained in north Gaza to keep working while his family fled south, the agency said.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians driven from their homes by Israeli offensives and evacuation orders are living in Gaza’s schools. The al-Jaouni school, one of many in Gaza run by the U.N. agency for Palestinians UNWRA, has been hit by multiple strikes over the course of the war.

Israel frequently bombs schools, saying they are being used by Hamas militants. It blames Hamas for civilian casualties from its strikes, saying its fighters base themselves and operate within dense residential neighborhoods.

More than 90% of Gaza’s school buildings have been severely or partially damaged in strikes, and more than half the schools housing displaced people have been hit, according to a survey in July by the Education Cluster, a collection of aid groups led by UNICEF and Save the Children.

Israel’s 11-month-old campaign in Gaza has killed at least 41,084 Palestinians and wounded another 95,029, the territory’s Health Ministry said Wednesday. Israel launched its campaign vowing to destroy Hamas after the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, in which militants killed some 1,200 people and abducted 250 others.

Earlier Wednesday, a strike hit a home near the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, killing 11 people, including six brothers and sisters from the same family ranging in age from 21 months to 21 years old, according to the European Hospital, which received the casualties.

A strike late Tuesday on a home in the urban Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza killed nine people, including six women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and the civil defense. The civil defense said the home belonged to Akram al-Najjar, a professor at the al-Quds Open University, who survived the strike.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Inflation in the United States may have hit a three-year low in August, underscoring that the rate of price increases is falling back to pre-pandemic levels and clearing the way for the Federal Reserve to start cutting its key interest rate next week.

Year-over-year inflation is thought to have slowed to 2.6% last month, according to a survey of economists by the data provider FactSet. That would be the lowest such rate since March 2021. And excluding volatile food and energy prices, core inflation is believed to have remained unchanged at 3.2%.

Inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 — a four-decade high — as the economy rebounded from the pandemic recession with unexpected speed and strength. The Fed responded with 11 rate hikes in 2022 and 2023, raising its key rate to a 23-year high and making loans much more expensive across the economy.

The latest inflation figures could inject themselves into the presidential race in its final weeks. Former President Donald Trump has heaped blame on Vice President Kamala Harris for the jump in inflation, which erupted in early 2021 as global supply chains seized up, causing severe shortages of parts and labor. Harris has proposed subsidies for home buyers and builders in an effort to ease housing costs and supports a federal ban on price-gouging for groceries. Trump has said he would boost energy production to try to reduce overall inflation.

Fed officials have signaled that they’re increasingly confident that inflation is steadily falling back to their 2% target and are now shifting their focus to supporting the job market, which is rapidly cooling. The Fed’s mandate is to seek stable prices and maximum employment.

Reductions in the Fed’s benchmark rate should, over time, reduce the cost of consumer and business borrowing, including for mortgages, auto loans and credit cards.

“Overall, I see significant and ongoing progress toward the (Fed’s) inflation goal that I expect will continue over the remainder of this year,” Christopher Waller, a key policymaker on the Fed’s Board of Governors, said last week.

Waller noted that for more than half the goods and services that the government tracks, annual inflation has fallen below 2.5%, a sign that price increases are broadly slowing.

A big reason why inflation likely fell last month is that gas prices tumbled by about 10 cents a gallon in August, according to the Energy Inflation Administration, to a national average of about $3.29.

Economists also expect the government’s measures of grocery prices and rents to rise more slowly. Though food prices are roughly 20% more expensive than before the pandemic, they are up just 1.1% from a year ago.

Another potential driver of slower inflation is that the cost of new apartment leases has started to cool as a stream of newly built apartments have been completed.

According to the real estate brokerage Redfin, the median rent for a new lease rose just 0.9% in August from a year earlier, to $1,645 a month. But the government’s measure includes all rents, including those for people who have been in their apartments for months or years. It takes time for the slowdown in new rents to show up in the government’s data. In July, rental costs rose 5.1% from a year ago, according to the government’s consumer price index.

Americans’ paychecks are also growing more slowly — an average of about 3.5% annually, still a solid pace — which reduces inflationary pressures. Two years ago, wage growth was topping 5%, a level that can force businesses to sharply raise prices to cover their higher labor costs.

In a high-profile speech last month, Fed Chair Jerome Powell noted that inflation was coming under control and suggested that the job market was unlikely to be a source of inflationary pressure.

As a result, the Fed is poised to begin cutting its key rate when it meets next week in hopes of bolstering growth and hiring. Consumers have propelled the economy for the past three years. But they are increasingly turning to debt to maintain their spending and credit card, and auto delinquencies are rising, raising concerns that they may have to rein in their spending soon. Reduced consumer spending could lead more employers to freeze their hiring or even cut jobs.

“We do not seek or welcome further cooling in labor market conditions,” Powell said.

The Fed is widely expected to cut its benchmark rate by a modest quarter-point next week, though it’s possible that its policymakers could instead decide that a half-point reduction is needed. Wall Street traders envision a half-point rate cut at the Fed’s subsequent meeting in November, according to futures prices.

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TRABUCO CANYON, Calif. (AP) — Alex Luna, a 20-year-old missionary, saw the sky turn from a cherry red to black in about 90 minutes as an explosive wildfire raced toward the Southern California mountain community of Wrightwood and authorities implored residents to leave their belongings behind and get out of town.

“It was very, I would say, hellish-like,” Luna said Tuesday night. “It was very just dark. Not a good place to be at that moment. ... Ash was falling from the sky like if it was snowing.”

Luna was among those who heeded the evacuation order that was issued for the community of about 4,500 in the San Gabriel Mountains east of Los Angeles. The Bridge Fire is one of three major wildfires burning in Southern California and endangering tens of thousands of homes and other structures.

The fires sprung to life during a triple-digit heat wave that finally broke Wednesday. The cooler temperatures brought the prospect of firefighters finally making headway against the flames.

Other major fires were burning across the West, including in Idaho, Oregon and Nevada, where about 20,000 people had to flee a blaze outside Reno.

In Northern California, a fire that started Sunday burned at least 30 homes and commercial buildings and destroyed 40 to 50 vehicles in Clearlake City, 110 miles (117 kilometers) north of San Francisco. Roughly 4,000 people were forced to evacuate.

California is only now heading into the teeth of the wildfire season but already has seen nearly three times as much acreage burn than during all of 2023.

Evacuation orders were expanded Tuesday night in Southern California as the fires grew and included parts of the popular ski town of Big Bear. Some 65,600 homes and buildings were under threat by the Line Fire, including those under mandatory evacuations and those under evacuation warnings, nearly double the number from the previous day.

Residents along the southern edge of Big Bear Lake were told to leave the area, which is a popular destination for anglers, bikers and hikers. The blaze had charred more than 51 square miles (132 square kilometers) of grass and brush and blanketed the area with a thick cloud of dark smoke .

The acrid air prompted several districts in the area to close schools through the end of the week because of safety concerns. Three firefighters have been injured since the blaze was reported Thursday, state fire managers said.

For Wrightwood, a picturesque town 60 miles (97 kilometers) east of Los Angeles known for its 1930s cabins. threatening wildfires have become a regular part of life. Authorities expressed frustration in 2016 when only half the residents heeded orders to leave.

Janice Quick, the president of the Wrightwood Chamber of Commerce, lives a few miles outside town. Late Tuesday afternoon she was eating lunch outside with friends and they were rained on by embers the size of her thumbnail that hit the table and made a clinking sound.

A friend texted to tell her that the friend’s home had been consumed by fire, while another friend was watching through her ring camera as embers rained down on her home.

“I’ve never seen anything like this and I’ve been through fires before,” said Quick, who has lived in Wrightwood for 45 years.

In neighboring Orange County, firefighters used bulldozers, helicopters and planes to control a rapidly spreading blaze called the Airport Fire that started Monday and spread to about 3 square miles (8 square kilometers) in only a few hours. The blaze was ignited by a spark from heavy equipment being used by public workers, officials said.

By Tuesday night, it had charred more than 30 square miles (78 square kilometers) and was heading over mountainous terrain into neighboring Riverside County with no containment, said Orange County Fire Authority Capt. Steve Concialdi. It burned some communications towers on top of a peak, though so far officials said they did not have reports of the damage disrupting police or fire communication signals in the area.

Concialdi said the fire was burning away from homes in Orange County, but there are 36 recreational cabins in the area. He said authorities don’t yet know if the cabins were damaged or destroyed by the blaze.

Two firefighters who suffered heat-related injuries and a resident who suffered from smoke inhalation were treated at a hospital and released.

Sherri Fankhauser, her husband and her daughter set up lawn chairs and were watching helicopters make water drops on a flaming hillside a few hundred yards away from their Trabuco Canyon home on Tuesday.

They didn’t evacuate even though their street had been under a mandatory evacuation order since Monday. A neighbor did help Fankhauser’s 89-year-old mother-in-law evacuate, Fankhauser said. The flames died down last night but flared up again in the morning.

“You can see fire coming over the ridge now,” Fankhauser said Tuesday afternoon. “It’s getting a little scarier now.”

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Peipert reported from Denver

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The ABC News moderators were great. No, actually they were a “disgraceful failure,” They cut off Kamala Harris too much. No, actually they corrected Donald Trump unfairly.

Such is the contentious tenor of the times in 2024’s campaign season. And so it went Tuesday night at Trump’s and Harris’ first — and quite possibly only — debate.

In an illustration of how difficult it is to conduct a presidential debate in a polarized country, ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis fact-checked and corrected Trump four times Tuesday and were attacked angrily by the former president and his supporters.

Trump, shortly after he left the stage in Philadelphia, sent out a message on his social media platform: “I thought that was my best debate, EVER, especially since it was THREE ON ONE!”

Muir and Davis moderated what is expected to be the only debate between the former president and the sitting vice president. They asked about economic policy, the war in Ukraine, abortion, the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection and changes in Harris’ stances since her 2020 presidential run.

In the end, Trump logged 43 minutes and 3 seconds of time talking, while Harris had 37 minutes and 41 seconds, according to a count by The New York Times.

Opinions on the coverage were a political litmus test

The debate’s stakes were high to begin with, not only because of the impending election itself but because the last presidential debate in June — between Trump and sitting President Joe Biden, whose performance was roundly panned — uncorked a series of events that ended several weeks later with Biden’s withdrawal from the race and Harris stepping in.

Opinions on how ABC handled the latest debate Tuesday were, in a large sense, a Rorschach test on how supporters of both sides felt about how it went. MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes sent a message on X that the ABC moderators were doing an “excellent” job — only to be answered by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who said, “this is how you know they’re complete s—-.”

While CNN chose not to correct any misstatements by the candidates during Trump’s debate with Biden in June, ABC instead challenged statements that Trump made about abortion, immigration, the 2020 election and violent crime.

During a discussion of abortion, Trump made his oft-repeated claim that Democrats supported killing babies after they were born. Said Davis: “There is no state in the country where it is legal to kill a baby after it was born.”

Muir pointed out that Trump, after years of publicly not admitting to his defeat to Biden in the 2020 election, had recently on three separate occasions conceded he had lost. Trump replied that he had been sarcastic in making those recent statements.

“I didn’t detect the sarcasm,” Muir said.

After suggesting that crime had gone up during the Biden administration, Muir pointed out that violent crime had gone down during that period, prompting an argument with the former president. ABC also noted, after Trump had repeated a debunked report that immigrants were killing and eating pets in Ohio, that there had been no evidence that had happened.

ABC moderators did not correct any statements made by Harris.

“Could they have done more? Yes,” said Angie Drodnic Holan, director of the international fact-checking network at the Poynter Institute, said in an interview. “Did they do enough? I would say yes. The alternative was none.”

Toward the end of the debate, CNN fact checker Daniel Dale said on social media that “Trump has been staggeringly dishonest and Harris has been overwhelmingly (though not entirely) factual.”

Both candidates didn’t answer some questions

As is often the case in debates, the moderators often saw specific questions go unanswered. Harris, for example, was asked to address Trump’s criticism that the U.S. Justice Department has been weaponized against him. She did not. She also skirted questions about changes to some of her past positions on issues. Muir twice asked Trump whether he wanted Ukraine to win its war against Russia, and he didn’t answer.

The split screen views of both candidates onscreen told different stories. Trump often looked angry or smiled at some of Harris’ statements, while avoiding eye contact with his opponent. Harris looked over at her opponents several times, often in bemusement, sometimes in open amusement, sometimes shaking her head.

Online anger toward how ABC handled the evening began while the debate was ongoing, and quickly became a talking point.

“These moderators are a disgraceful failure, and this is one of the most biased, unfair debates I have ever seen,” conservative commentator Megyn Kelly posted on X. “Shame on ABC.”

Answering online critics who complained ABC stacked the deck in Harris’ favor, Atlantic writer James Surowiecki wrote that “the way they ‘rigged’ the debate is by letting (Trump) hang himself with his own stream of consciousness rambles.”

“It was like a 4Chan post come to life,” CNN’s Jake Tapper said.

On Fox News Channel, anchor Martha MacCallum said after the debate that Harris “was never really held to the fire.” Commentator Brit Hume agreed with her, but said something else was at play.

“Make no mistake about it,” Hume said. “Trump had a bad night.”

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David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder.

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BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Hurricane Francine barreled early Wednesday toward Louisiana and is expected to make landfall in coming hours as forecasters raised threats of potentially deadly storm surge, widespread flooding and destructive winds on the northern U.S. Gulf coast.

Francine drew fuel from exceedingly warm Gulf of Mexico waters to jump from a tropical storm to a Category 1 hurricane on Tuesday night. The National Hurricane Center said Francine might even reach Category 2 strength with winds of 96 to 110 mph (155 to 175 kph) before crashing into a fragile coastal region that still hasn’t fully recovered from a series of devastating hurricanes since 2020.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry warned at midday Tuesday — when Francine was still a tropical storm — that residents around south Louisiana and in the heavily populated state capital of Baton Rouge and nearby New Orleans — should “batten down all the hatches” and finish last preparations before a 24-hour window to do so closed.

Once Francine makes landfall, Landry said, residents should stay in place rather than venture out into waterlogged roads and risk blocking first responders or utility crews working to repair power lines.

The governor said the Louisiana National Guard is being deployed to parishes that could be impacted by Francine. They are equipped with food, water, nearly 400 high-water vehicles, about 100 boats and 50 helicopters to respond to the storm, including possible search-and-rescue operations.

Francine was centered Tuesday evening about 295 miles (475 kilometers) southwest of Morgan City, Louisiana, and was moving northeast at 10 mph (17 kph), the Miami-based hurricane center said.

A hurricane warning was in effect along the Louisiana coast from Cameron eastward to Grand Isle, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of New Orleans, according to the center. A storm surge warning stretched from the Mississippi-Alabama border to the Alabama-Florida border Such a warning means there’s a chance of life-threatening flooding.

In downtown New Orleans, cars and trucks were lined up for blocks on Tuesday to collect sandbags from the parking lot of a local YMCA. CEO Erika Mann said Tuesday that 1,000 bags of sand had already been distributed by volunteers later in the day to people hoping to protect homes from possible flooding.

One resident picking up sandbags was Wayne Grant, 33, who moved to New Orleans last year and was nervous for his first potential hurricane in the city. The low-lying rental apartment he shares with his partner had already flooded out in a storm the year before and he was not taking any chances this time around.

“It was like a kick in the face, we’ve been trying to stay up on the weather ever since,” Grant said. “We’re super invested in the place, even though it’s not ours.”

Francine is the sixth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season. There’s a danger of life-threatening storm surge as well as damaging hurricane-force winds, said Brad Reinhart, a senior hurricane specialist at the hurricane center.

There’s also the potential for 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters) of rain with the possibility of 12 inches (30 centimeters) locally across much of Louisiana and Mississippi through Friday morning, Reinhart said.

The hurricane center said parts of Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle were at risk of “considerable” flash and urban flooding starting Wednesday, followed by a threat of possible flooding later in the week into the lower Mississippi Valley and lower Tennessee Valley as the soggy remnants of Francine sweep inland.

Francine is taking aim at a Louisiana coastline that has yet to fully recover since hurricanes Laura and Delta decimated Lake Charles in 2020, followed a year later by Hurricane Ida.

A little over three years after Ida trashed his home in the Dulac community of coastal Louisiana’s Terrebonne Parish – and about a month after he finished rebuilding – Coy Verdin was preparing for another hurricane.

“We had to gut the whole house,” he recalled in a telephone interview, rattling off a memorized inventory of the work, including a new roof and new windows.

Verdin, 55, strongly considered moving farther inland, away from the home where he makes his living on nearby Bayou Grand Caillou. After rebuilding, he said he’s there to stay.

“As long as I can. It’s getting rough, though,” he said.

Francine’s storm surge on the Louisiana coast could reach as much as 10 feet (3 meters) from Cameron to Port Fourchon and into Vermilion Bay, forecasters said. They said landfall was likely somewhere between Sabine Pass — on the Texas-Louisiana line — and Morgan City, Louisiana, about 220 miles (350 kilometers) to the east.

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Associated Press writers Curt Anderson in St. Petersburg, Florida, Kevin McGill and Jack Brook in New Orleans contributed to this story.

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NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. is remembering the lives taken and those reshaped by 9/11, marking an anniversary laced this year with presidential campaign politics.

Sept. 11 — the date when hijacked plane attacks killed nearly 3,000 people in 2001 — falls in the thick of the presidential election season every four years, and it comes at an especially pointed moment this time.

Fresh off their first-ever debate Tuesday night, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are both expected to attend 9/11 observances at the World Trade Center in New York and the Flight 93 National Memorial in Pennsylvania.

Then-senators and presidential campaign rivals John McCain and Barack Obama made a visible effort to put politics aside on the 2008 anniversary. They visited ground zero together to pay their respects and lay flowers in a reflecting pool at what was then still a pit.

It’s not yet clear whether Harris and Trump even will cross paths. If they do, it would be an extraordinary encounter at a somber ceremony hours after they faced off on the debate stage.

Regardless of the campaign calendar, organizers of anniversary ceremonies have long taken pains to try to keep the focus on victims. For years, politicians have been only observers at ground zero observances, with the microphone going instead to relatives who read victims’ names aloud.

“You’re around the people that are feeling the grief, feeling proud or sad — what it’s all about that day, and what these loved ones meant to you. It’s not political,” said Melissa Tarasiewicz, who lost her father, New York City firefighter Allan Tarasiewicz.

President Joe Biden, on the last Sept. 11 of his term and likely his half-century political career, is headed with Harris to the ceremonies in New York, in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon, the three sites where commercial jets crashed after al-Qaida operatives took them over on Sept. 11, 2001.

Officials later concluded that the aircraft that crashed near rural Shanksville, Pennsylvania, was headed toward Washington. It went down after crew members and passengers tried to wrest control from the hijackers.

The attacks killed 2,977 people and left thousands of bereaved relatives and scarred survivors. The planes carved a gash in the Pentagon, the U.S. military headquarters, and brought down the trade center’s twin towers, which were among the world’s tallest buildings.

The catastrophe also altered U.S. foreign policy, domestic security practices and the mindset of many Americans who had not previously felt vulnerable to attacks by foreign extremists.

Effects rippled around the world and through generations as the U.S. responded by leading a “ Global War on Terrorism,” which included invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Those operations killed hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis and thousands of American troops, and Afghanistan became the site of the United States’ longest war.

As the complex legacy of 9/11 continues to evolve, communities around the country have developed remembrance traditions that range from laying wreaths to displaying flags, from marches to police radio messages. Volunteer projects also mark the anniversary, which Congress has titled both Patriot Day and a National Day of Service and Remembrance.

At ground zero, presidents and other officeholders read poems, parts of the Declaration of Independence and other texts during the first several anniversaries.

But that ended after the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum decided in 2012 to limit the ceremony to relatives reading victims’ names. Then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg was board chairman at the time and still is.

Politicians and candidates still have been able to attend the event. Many do, especially New Yorkers who held office during the attacks, such as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was then a U.S. senator.

She and Trump overlapped at the ground zero 9/11 remembrance in 2016, and it became a fraught chapter in the narrative of that year’s presidential campaign.

Clinton, then the Democratic nominee, abruptly left the ceremony, stumbled while awaiting her motorcade and later disclosed that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia a couple of days earlier. The episode stirred fresh attention to her health, which Trump had been questioning for months.

To be sure, victims’ family members occasionally send their own political messages at the ceremony, where readers generally make brief remarks after finishing their assigned set of names.

Some relatives have used the forum to bemoan Americans’ divisions, exhort leaders to prioritize national security, acknowledge the casualties of the war on terror, complain that officials are politicizing 9/11 and even criticize individual officeholders.

But most readers stick to tributes and personal reflections. Increasingly they come from children and young adults who were born after the attacks killed a parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle.

“Even though I never got to meet you, I feel like I’ve known you forever,” Annabella Sanchez said last year of her grandfather, Edward Joseph Papa. “We will always remember and honor you, every day.

“We love you, Grandpa Eddie.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Taylor Swift, one of the music industry’s biggest stars, endorsed Kamala Harris for president shortly after the debate ended on Tuesday night.

“I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos,” Swift wrote in an Instagram post.

She included a picture of herself holding a cat and signed the message “Childless Cat Lady,” a reference to comments made by JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate.

Swift has a dedicated following among young women, a key demographic in the November election.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump and Kamala Harris faced each other on the debate stage Tuesday night for the first and possibly the last time.

Harris, the Democratic vice president who is a former courtroom prosecutor, was eager to prosecute Trump’s glaring liabilities. But she also was tasked with re-reintroducing herself to voters, who are still getting to know her as the party’s presidential nominee.

Trump, a Republican now in his third presidential election, was set on painting Harris as an out-of-touch liberal. He also tried to win over skeptical suburban voters — many of them women — turned off by Trump’s brash leadership style and his penchant for personal insults.

The 90-minute debate played out inside Philadelphia’s National Constitutional Center. In accordance with rules negotiated by both campaigns, there was no live audience and the candidates’ microphones were muted when it was not their turn to speak.

Some takeaways on a historic night:

From the opening handshake, Harris took the fight to Trump in a way that Biden could not

The vice president walked across the stage and introduced herself, “Kamala Harris,” before reaching out and grabbing Trump’s hand in the opening moments.

In her first answer, Harris said Trump’s trade tariffs would effectively create a sales tax on the middle class. She soon accused Trump of presiding over the worst attack on American democracy since the Civil War — the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. And she charged the former president with telling women what they could do with their bodies.

But Harris may have got under Trump’s skin the most when she went after his performance at his rallies, noting that many people often leave early.

Trump was largely calm when he defended himself against each charge, but he showed annoyance with her comment about his rallies. He insisted his events were larger than hers and he seemed to grow angrier at times as the debate continued.

Harris frequently shifted her message from Trump back to the American people.

“You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams and your needs and your desires,” Harris said of Trump’s rallies. “And I’ll tell you, I believe you deserve a president who actually puts you first.”

An early skirmish on the economy

The debate opened with an unexpectedly wonky exchange on the economy: Harris took on Trump for his plan to put in place sweeping tariffs and for the trade deficit he ran as president; Trump slammed Harris for inflation that he incorrectly said was the worst in the country’s history.

The exchange ended up with some of Trump’s traditional bombast. He said Harris was a “Marxist” even though she had just cited positive reviews of her economic plans from Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. But it was particularly notable for Harris’ effort to turn the tables on Trump.

Trump noted that people look back on his presidency’s economy fondly. “I created one of the greatest economies in the history of our country,” he said. Harris flatly told viewers: “Donald Trump has no plan for you.”

Americans are slightly more likely to trust Trump over Harris when it comes to handling the economy, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs poll from August.

Both candidates dig in on abortion

Harris came out swinging in defense of abortion rights, perhaps the strongest issue for Democrats since Trump’s nominees created a Supreme Court majority to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion. Her sharp arguments provided a vivid contrast to President Joe Biden’s rambling comments on the issue during his June debate with Trump.

“The government, and Donald Trump, certainly should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,” Harris said. She painted a vivid picture of women facing medical complications, gut-wrenching decisions and having travel out of state for an abortion.

Trump was just as fierce in defense, saying he returned the issue to the states, an outcome he said many Americans wanted. He struggled with accuracy, however, repeating the false claim that Democrats support abortion even after babies are born. He stuck to that even after he was corrected by moderator Lynsey Davis.

“I did a great service in doing that. It took courage to do it,” Trump said of the overturning of Roe v. Wade and its constitutional protections for abortion. “And the Supreme Court had great courage in doing it. And I give tremendous credit to those six justices.”

Polls has shown significant opposition to overturning Roe and voters have punished Republicans in recent elections for it.

Trump refused to say whether he would veto a bill banning abortion nationwide, saying such legislation would never clear Congress and reach the president. He also broke with his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, suggesting Vance spoke out of turn when he said Trump would veto a national abortion ban.

“I didn’t discuss it with JD,” Trump said.

Who’s talking now?

Trump objected when Harris interrupted him — an interjection that he could hear but viewers could not because her microphone was muted according to the rules of the debate.

“Wait a minute, I’m talking now,” Trump said. He was putting his spin on a line she used famously against Mike Pence in the 2020 vice presidential debate.

“Sound familiar?” Trump added.

Four years ago, Harris rebuked Pence for interrupting, saying: “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking.”

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Riccardi reported from Denver.

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MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. (AP) — Tyreek Hill’s teammates and coaches used words like “triggering” and a “shame” to describe body camera footage showing a police officer yanking the Miami Dolphins receiver out of his sports car and forcing him face-first onto the ground during a traffic stop.

The incident outside the Dolphins’ stadium has drawn national attention. It has also led to conversations in the locker room among Hill’s teammates, some of whom privately shared their own personal experiences with police, quarterback Tua Tagovailoa said.

“It was a little emotional for me, hearing Tyreek’s voice in the footage,” Tagovailoa said Tuesday.

The video released by the Miami-Dade Police Department on Monday evening showed that the traffic stop hours before Miami’s season opener escalated quickly after Hill put up the window of his car.

Hill rolled down the driver’s side window and handed his license to an officer who had been knocking on the window. Hill then told the officer repeatedly to stop knocking before rolling the darkly tinted window back up.

After a back and forth about the window, the body camera video shows an officer pull Hill out of his car by his arm and head and then force him face-first onto the ground. Officers handcuffed Hill and one put a knee in the middle of his back.

“It’s a shame that had to happen that way,” said Dolphins offensive coordinator Frank Smith. “When you spend all your time with these guys, you want to be there for them all the time to help. For me, like many guys, you wish you were there to help as well.”

Hill said in a CNN interview that he was embarrassed and “shell-shocked” by what happened, and that he thought he followed the officers’ directions.

The video shows that officers stood Hill up and walked him handcuffed to the sidewalk. One officer told him to sit on the curb. Hill told the officer he just had surgery on his knee. An officer then jumped behind him and put a bar hold around Hill’s upper chest or neck and pulled Hill into a seating position.

Police Director Stephanie Daniels launched an internal affairs investigation the same day, and one officer was transferred to administrative duties. The South Florida police union’s president, Steadman Stahl, released a statement saying Hill was not “immediately cooperative” with officers and that the officers followed their policy in handcuffing Hill.

The altercation shown on six officers’ body camera videos has brought to the forefront conversations surrounding the experience of Black people with police.

“It’s been hard for me not to find myself more upset the more I think about it,” said Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel, speaking Monday before the footage was released. “I think the thing that (messes) me up, honestly, to be quite frank, is knowing that I don’t know exactly ... know what that feels like.”

McDaniel, who is biracial, said his life experience has left him “aware” of conversations about race, while never having been in a similar situation to Hill’s.

Many players were confused after seeing Hill’s teammate, Calais Campbell, get handcuffed. Campbell, a widely respected defensive tackle who just began his 17th NFL season, stopped to help when he saw Hill in handcuffs, but ended up briefly handcuffed as well. Hill and Campbell were eventually released and allowed to go into the stadium. Hill received citations for careless driving and failing to wear a seatbelt,

“If I’m Calais Campbell and I’m 38 years old and you’re going to work, whatever personal innocence that you have relative to — you’re a gigantic, strong, just a miraculous man that has done right in all ways, shapes and forms. There’s just elements to that that is very triggering,” McDaniel said.

Dolphins defensive coordinator Anthony Weaver, who is Black, also referred to the video footage as triggering and reflected on his own life.

“It’s unfortunate in this day and time,” Weaver said, “when I have two boys — my wife is Mexican-American — and both the times that they were born and they were light-skinned, there was almost a sense of relief in that they were going to avoid some of the same issues that I’ve had to deal with throughout my life.”

Tagovailoa said Hill gathered some of his teammates together to turn the situation into something that could benefit the community.

With a pivotal game coming up Thursday against division rival Buffalo, the Dolphins will have to push past the week’s distraction, while also not losing perspective, Tagovailoa said.

“We don’t avoid the obvious. It’s a thing. Let it be what it is. Let it take its course,” Tagovailoa said. “I think when we start to brush that away and think that this football thing is the most important thing to us, when this isn’t just something that Tyreek (has) gone through.

“This is something that people in general go through. That’s a life thing. Football, we’re blessed to do this. We’re blessed to be able to play this sport. We’re blessed to make all this money to do what we love and it’s for fun. But that’s really life. No games in that.”

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AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl

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WASHINGTON (AP) — House Speaker Mike Johnson vowed Tuesday to press ahead with requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration as part of a bill to avoid a partial government shutdown when the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1, though the measure appeared likely to be voted down.

Democrats overwhelmingly oppose the measure. Enough Republicans were also coming out against the bill, though for different reasons, that its prospects of passing the House appeared dim. Even if it does pass the House on Wednesday, the bill would go nowhere in the Senate.

Johnson said the issue of election security is too critical to ignore, though research has shown that voting by non-citizens is extremely rare. It’s also clear that Republicans see value in making House Democrats take another vote on the issue. The House approved a bill with the proof of citizenship mandate back in July

“If you have a few thousand illegals participate in the election in the wrong place, you can change the makeup of Congress and you can affect the presidential election,” Johnson said. “The American people understand that.”

The first test for the stopgap spending bill will take place with a procedural vote on Tuesday. If it clears that hurdle, a final House vote would occur Wednesday.

The measure includes a six-month extension of federal funding to keep agencies and programs operating through March 28.

But Democrats want a shorter-term extension so that the current Congress will set full-year spending levels for fiscal year 2025 rather than the next president and Congress. They also want the proof of citizenship mandate stripped out of the bill, saying it’s unnecessary because states already have effective safeguards in place to verify voters’ eligibility and maintain accurate voter rolls.

“Is it any surprise that the speaker’s purely partisan CR seems to be running into trouble?” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said, using Washington parlance for the short-term continuing resolution needed to prevent a shutdown. “The answer is very simple. The House should stop wasting time on a CR proposal that cannot become law.”

Schumer called on Johnson to consult with Democratic leaders and the White House on a bipartisan package that can pass both chambers.

A few House Republicans have also come out against the bill. Some won’t vote for any continuing resolution. They want Congress to return to passing the dozen annual appropriations bills individually. Others say the continuing resolution funds programs at levels they consider inappropriate at a time of nearly $2 trillion annual deficits.

“We need to stop spending at a level that is untenable for the American people,” said Rep. Cory Mills, R-Fla., who predicted the bill would not have the votes to pass.

Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., said Republican leadership was asking him to vote for what he called “a Nancy Pelosi-Schumer budget.”

“I just think that’s a bad idea,” Burchett said.

House Republicans met behind closed doors Tuesday morning to discuss the path forward. Rep. Jim Jordan, a co-founder of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, told colleagues “this is the best fight we’ve ever had,” said Rep. Kevin Hern, R-Okla.

By holding another vote on the proof of citizenship requirement for voter registration, House Republicans are seeking to make Democrats in competitive swing districts take another vote on the issue ahead of the election. Last time, five Democrats sided with Republicans in support of the requirement. And their vote this time will be highly scrutinized.

Lawmakers said no plan B was discussed for government funding and that Johnson was determined to hold a vote regardless of the likely outcome.

“This is important to him,” said Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C. “This is the hill to die on.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — A top U.S. government codebreaker who decrypted secret Soviet communications during the Cold War concluded that Ethel Rosenberg knew about her husband’s activities but “did not engage in the work herself,” according to a recently declassified memo that her sons say proves their mother was not a spy and should lead to her exoneration in the sensational 1950s atomic espionage case.

The previously unreported assessment written days after Rosenberg’s arrest and shown to The Associated Press adds to the questions about the criminal case against Rosenberg, who along with her husband, Julius, was put to death in 1953 after being convicted of conspiring to steal secrets about the atomic bomb for the Soviet Union.

The couple maintained their innocence until the end, and their sons, Robert and Michael Meeropol, have worked for decades to establish that their mother was falsely implicated in spying. The brothers consider the memo a smoking gun and are urging President Joe Biden to issue a formal proclamation saying she was wrongly convicted and executed.

Historians have long regarded Julius Rosenberg as a Soviet spy. But questions about Ethel Rosenberg’s role have simmered for years, dividing those who side with the Meeropols and say she had zero role in espionage from some historians who contend there’s evidence she supported her husband’s activities.

The handwritten memo from Meredith Gardner, a linguist and codebreaker for what later became known as the National Security Agency, cites decrypted Soviet communications in concluding that Ethel Rosenberg knew about Julius’ espionage work “but that due to illness she did not engage in the work herself.”

Ethel Rosenberg went on trial with her husband months after the memo was written despite Gardner’s assessment, which the Meeropols believe would have been available to FBI and Justice Department officials investigating and prosecuting the case.

“This puts it on both sides of the Atlantic — in other words, both the KGB and the NSA ended up agreeing that Ethel was not a spy,” Robert Meeropol said in an interview. “And so we have a situation in which a mother of two young children was executed as a master atomic spy when she wasn’t a spy at all.”

The Meeropols recently obtained the Aug. 22, 1950, memo from the NSA through a Freedom of Information Act request and provided it to the AP.

“This piece of documentation, juxtaposing my father’s work with her not doing the work, it seems to me nails it,” Michael Meeropol said.

Secretive findings

The document was written more than a week after Ethel Rosenberg’s arrest — her husband was arrested a month earlier — presumably to summarize what was known about a Soviet spy ring operating in the U.S. at the height of the Cold War and associated with the development of the atomic bomb.

It refers to Julius Rosenberg, who worked as a civil engineer, by his Soviet code names — first “Antenna” and later “Liberal” — and characterizes him as a recruiting agent for Soviet intelligence.

In a separate paragraph titled, “Mrs. Julius Rosenberg,” Gardner describes a decoded message as saying Ethel Rosenberg was a “party member” and “devoted wife” who knew of her husband’s work but didn’t engage in it.

Harvey Klehr, a now-retired Emory University historian, said this week that the memo notwithstanding, his position is that Ethel Rosenberg conspired to commit espionage even if she did not spy herself or access classified information.

“Ethel may not have been a spy — that is, she might not have actually passed on classified information — but she was an active participant in her husband’s spy network, not just someone who happened to agree with her husband about politics,” Klehr wrote in a 2021 piece for Mosaic Magazine.

Another historian, Mark Kramer of Harvard University, said this week that the interpretation of the Russian communication was debatable and that in any event other documents contain “damning evidence” of Ethel Rosenberg’s involvement in spying and her participation in tasks even “if she was not directly participating in the way Julius Rosenberg was.”

The Meeropols adamantly dispute that, insisting the evidence is clear that the Soviets never considered their mother an asset and that she had no role in recruiting spies or assisting her husband’s espionage.

A brother’s account

The memo is the latest information that Ethel Rosenberg’s supporters say casts doubt on her criminal conviction and the public view of her. For instance, previously deciphered Soviet cables showed that she, unlike her husband, was not given a code name, and a separate memo from Gardner stated that Ethel Rosenberg did “not work.”

In a 2001 television interview, Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass, acknowledged that he lied on the stand about his sister to assure leniency for himself and keep his wife out of prison so she could care for their two children. A fellow communist sympathizer, he was indicted as a co-conspirator and served 10 years in prison.

In 2015, secret grand jury testimony from Greenglass was unsealed that contradicted damaging statements he made during the Rosenbergs’ trial that helped secure their convictions.

Greenglass claimed at trial that he had given the Rosenbergs research data he obtained while working as an Army machinist at the Los Alamos, New Mexico, headquarters of the Manhattan Project, where the first atomic weapons were produced. He also said he recalled seeing his sister using a portable typewriter at the Rosenbergs’ apartment to type up handwritten notes to give to the Soviets.

But in his grand jury testimony, which a judge unsealed after Greenglass’ 2014 death in response to a request from historians and archivists, he never implicated his sister.

Greenglass told the grand jury that Julius Rosenberg was adamant he should stick with his Army service so Greenglass could “continue giving him information.” But when Greenglass was asked whether his sister was similarly insistent, he replied, “I said before, and say it again, honestly, this is a fact: I never spoke to my sister about this at all.”

Sons feel relief

The Meeropols believe the newly released memo would almost certainly have reached high levels of the FBI given that Gardner, its author, worked closely with an FBI agent known to pass along information uncovered by the NSA analyst. They say the information may have influenced then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s recommendation that Ethel Rosenberg not receive the death penalty, though she ultimately did.

Robert Meeropol, 77, said the memo’s release is a capstone of decades of work to clear his mother’s name. As young boys, the brothers visited the White House in 1953 in a failed bid to get President Dwight Eisenhower to prevent their parents’ executions. They were later adopted.

In 2016, they cited the newly released grand jury testimony to try to persuade President Barack Obama to exonerate their mother.

“I’m incredibly relieved to have this out while I’m still alive, because for a lot of time, I didn’t think I was going to survive to see it,” he said.

Michael Meeropol said he recalled his brother saying in 1973 that in a few years they were going to “blow the lid off the case.”

“Well, 1973 to 2024 is a little bit more than a few years, but it’s just happened as far as I’m concerned. This memo being released, thank God, blows the lid off it in terms of our mother,” Michael Meeropol said.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The inflation-adjusted median income of U.S. households rebounded last year to roughly its 2019 level, overcoming the biggest price spike in four decades to restore most Americans’ purchasing power.

The proportion of Americans living in poverty also fell slightly last year, to 11.1%, from 11.5% in 2022. But the ratio of women’s median earnings to men’s widened for the first time in more than two decades as men’s income rose more than women’s in 2023.

The latest data came Tuesday in an annual report from the Census Bureau, which said the median household income, adjusted for inflation, rose 4% to $80,610 in 2023, up from $77,450 in 2022. It was the first increase since 2019, and is essentially unchanged from that year’s figure of $81,210, officials said. (The median income figure is the point at which half the population is above and half below and is less distorted by extreme incomes than the average.)

“We are back to that pre-COVID peak that we experienced,” said Liana Fox, assistant division chief in the Social, Economic and Housing Statistics Division at the Census Bureau.

The figures could become a talking point in the presidential campaign if Vice President Kamala Harris were to point to them as evidence that Americans’ financial health has largely recovered after inflation peaked at 9.1% in 2022. Former President Donald Trump might counter that household income grew much faster in his first three years in office than in the first three years of the Biden-Harris administration, though income fell during his administration after the pandemic struck in 2020.

The report showed that the typical American household, though having regained its 2019 purchasing power, essentially experienced no increase in living standards from 2019 to 2023. That is a sharp difference from the preceding four years, when inflation adjusted median incomes rose 14% from 2015 through 2019.

The data is based on pre-tax incomes, including Social Security and other benefit programs, though it excludes noncash benefits such as food stamps and Medicaid.

By racial groups, median household income rose 5.4% for whites to $84,630, increased 2.8% for Black Americans to $56,490 and was unchanged for Hispanics at $65,540. Asian incomes were also largely unchanged at $112,800.

Census also calculated that 92% of Americans had health care in 2023, largely unchanged from the previous year, though the proportion of uninsured children ticked up a half-point to 5.8%.

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Cancer patients can ward off waves of vomiting after treatment with a relatively cheap anti-nausea pill, but some are running into coverage limits.

Doctors say restrictions on the number of tablets patients receive can hurt care. Pharmacy benefit managers say their limits guard against overuse, and they offer workarounds to get more tablets.

In between sit patients, who might ration pills or opt for less effective help for a dreaded side effect of radiation or chemotherapy.

The conflict shows how an array of coverages and poor communication can complicate even simple acts of care in the fragmented U.S. health care system.

“This is sort of the dirty underbelly of the current health care environment,” said oncologist Dr. Fumiko Chino. “Insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers are somehow weirdly ending up in my exam room, standing between me and my patients.”

Steven Manetta takes at least a half dozen pills daily to help keep a form of leukemia in remission. For more than a year, he rationed his go-to anti-nausea pill, ondansetron, known by the brand-name Zofran.

Manetta’s coverage through CVS Caremark paid for 18 ondansetron pills every 21 days. That forced him to sometimes use alternatives that make him extremely drowsy in order to stretch his supply. He only recently got approval for a 90-day supply.

“It’s just like an extra thing to think about all the time,” the 33-year-old Lemont, Illinois, resident said. “When you’re on so many medications, the ones with the least side effects are the ones you always want to reach for.”

Ondansetron hit the U.S. market more than 30 years ago. It was the first in a series of drugs that gave doctors a better way to control nausea and vomiting, said Dr. Alexi Wright, an oncologist who teaches at Harvard Medical School.

Wright and other cancer specialists call ondansetron a cornerstone treatment because of its relative safety, effectiveness and limited side effects.

The price doesn’t hurt either: Thirty tablets of ondansetron can cost under $12 through prescription discount websites.

Pharmacists and doctors say they’ve dealt with restrictions on anti-nausea drugs like ondansetron for years. Wright says she finds the limits “infuriating” in part because the drug is affordable.

More than half the plans sold on the U.S. individual insurance marketplace limit the number of ondansetron tablets that patients can get, according to preliminary results from a study by Chino and Michael Anne Kyle, a University of Pennsylvania researcher.

Pharmacist Yen Nguyen frequently sees these restrictions, including the limits from CVS Caremark that Manetta encountered.

“Over four or five months of chemotherapy, you’re fighting for dimes and nickels here,” said Nguyen, executive director of pharmacy for the Houston-area practice Oncology Consultants.

Jennette Murphy paid cash for ondansetron when her cancer treatment started earlier this year because she couldn’t get coverage for the amount her doctor requested. Then she got a letter telling her the drug wouldn’t be covered.

“It freaked me out,” the Tehachapi, California, resident said. “I’m like, ‘Really? Have you ever been through chemo?’”

Pharmacy benefit managers say they set limits based partly on the treatment and offer several ways for doctors to request more.

Prime Therapeutics limits 4- and 8-milligram prescriptions of ondansetron to 21 tablets over 30 days. That helps provide “maximum dosing” for seven days of treatment a month, chief clinical officer David Lassen said in an email.

He said quantity limits are approved by independent doctors and pharmacists. They help prevent waste and excessive use that may not be safe.

CVS Caremark spokesman Mike DeAngelis said his company bases limits on Food and Drug Administration guidelines. He added that the company can make a decision on requests for more tablets in less than 24 hours.

Doctors say they don’t always know when patients will need more.

Coverage limits vary, and some patients may not tell their doctor that they got a smaller-than-desired amount. Also, nausea intensity can be hard to gauge with newer treatments.

Chino says she wants patients to start with 90 tablets of ondansetron, enough to take the drug three times a day for a month if needed. But she often sees limits of 21 or 30 tablets.

“The fact that there’s still restrictive patterns on this very useful medication is insane,” said Chino, who recently moved from Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York to MD Anderson in Houston.

Limits can hurt patients who have big copayments for each refill or trouble getting to the drugstore, noted Dr. Ramy Sedhom, an oncologist and palliative care specialist with Penn Medicine Princeton Health.

“I have a lot of patients who only go to the pharmacy once a month when their niece or nephew is in town to pick up the (prescriptions),” he said.

If patients run out of ondansetron, even for a few days, uncontrolled vomiting can send them to emergency rooms or force a treatment pause, doctors say.

Murphy, the cancer patient, has avoided all of that. She said coverage started for ondansetron after her City of Hope cancer center doctor requested it.

She faces a stretch of chemotherapy cycles that will extend well into the fall. The treatments leave her bedridden for days with nausea even while taking ondansetron.

“I would hate to not have it,” she said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Over 140 Ukrainian drones overnight targeted multiple Russian regions, including the capital Moscow and the surrounding areas, Russian officials reported Tuesday, in one of the biggest Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian soil in the 2 1/2-year war.

In the town of Ramenskoye just outside Moscow, drones hit two multistory residential buildings and started fires, Moscow region Gov. Andrei Vorobyov said. A woman was killed and three more people sustained injuries. Five residential buildings near one of those damaged have been evacuated as emergency services were handling drone debris, Vorobyov said.

The attack also prompted the authorities to temporarily shut down three airports just outside Moscow — Vnukovo, Domodedovo and Zhukovsky. A total of 48 flights were diverted to other airports, according to Russia’s civil aviation authority Rosaviatsia.

In Moscow, drone debris fell on a private house on the outskirts of the city, but no one was hurt, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said. He counted over a dozen drones heading toward Moscow that were shot down by air defenses as they were approaching the city.

Overall, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it “intercepted and destroyed” 144 Ukrainian drones over nine Russian regions, including those on the border with Ukraine and those deeper inside Russia.

It is the second massive Ukrainian drone attack on Russia this month. On Sept. 1, the Russian military said it intercepted 158 Ukrainian drones over a dozen Russian regions in what Russian media described as the biggest Ukrainian drone barrage since the start of the war.

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BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Tropical Storm Francine churned in the Gulf of Mexico with increasing strength and was expected to reach hurricane status on Tuesday before reaching landfall in Louisiana.

A storm surge warning was in effect for an area stretching from just east of Houston to the mouth of the Mississippi River south of New Orleans, according to the National Hurricane Center. Such a warning means there’s a chance of life-threatening flooding.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry urged residents “not to panic, but be prepared” and heed evacuation warnings. Forecasters said Francine’s landfall in south Louisiana was expected Wednesday afternoon as a Category 2 hurricane with winds of 96 to 110 mph (155-175 kph).

“We do not want people to wait to the last minute to get on the road and then run out of fuel,” Landry said. “We put a lot of information throughout the summer, throughout hurricane season, so that people can be prepared. The more prepared we are, the easier it is for us.”

Francine is taking aim at a Louisiana coastline that has yet to fully recover since hurricanes Laura and Delta decimated Lake Charles in 2020, followed a year later by Hurricane Ida. Over the weekend, a 22-story building in Lake Charles that had become a symbol of storm destruction was imploded after sitting vacant for nearly four years, its windows shattered and covered in shredded tarps.

Francine’s storm surge on the Louisiana coast could reach as much as 10 feet (3 meters) from Cameron to Port Fourchon and into Vermilion Bay, forecasters said.

“It’s a potential for significantly dangerous, life-threatening inundation,” said Michael Brennan, director of the hurricane center, adding it could also send “dangerous, damaging winds quite far inland.”

He said landfall was likely somewhere between Sabine Pass — on the Texas-Louisiana line — and Morgan City, Louisiana, about 220 miles (350 kilometers) to the east.

Louisiana officials urged residents to immediately prepare while “conditions still allow,” said Mike Steele, spokesperson for the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.

“We always talk about how anytime something gets into the Gulf, things can change quickly, and this is a perfect example of that,” Steele said.

Residents of Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s capital, began forming long lines as people filled gas tanks and stocked up on groceries. Others filled sandbags at city-operated locations to protect homes from possible flooding.

“It’s crucial that all of us take this storm very seriously and begin our preparations immediately,” Baton Rouge Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome said, urging residents to stock up on three days of food, water and essentials.

A mandatory evacuation was ordered for seven remote coastal communities by the Cameron Parish Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Preparedness. They include Holly Beach, a laid-back stretch dubbed Louisiana’s “Cajun Riviera,” where many homes sit on stilts. The storm-battered town has been a low-cost paradise for oil industry workers, families and retirees, rebuilt multiple times after past hurricanes.

In Grand Isle, Louisiana’s last inhabited barrier island, Mayor David Camardelle recommended residents evacuate and ordered a mandatory evacuation for those in recreational vehicles. Hurricane Ida decimated the city three years ago, destroying 700 homes.

Officials warn that flooding, along with high winds and power outages, is likely in the area beginning Tuesday afternoon through Thursday.

In New Orleans, Mayor LaToya Cantrell urged residents to prepare to shelter in place. “Now is the time to finalize your storm plans and prepare, not only for your families but looking out for your neighbors,” she said.

City officials said they were expecting up to 6 inches (15 centimeters) inches of rain, gusty winds and “isolated tornado activity” with the most intense weather likely to reach New Orleans on Wednesday and Thursday.

The hurricane center said Francine was last about 125 miles (205 kilometers) south-southeast of the mouth of the Rio Grande, and about 425 miles (690 kilometers) south-southwest of Cameron, with top sustained winds of about 65 miles per hour (100 kilometers per hour). It was moving north-northwest at 5 mph (7 kph).

As rain fell Monday in northern Mexico, more than a dozen neighborhoods in Matamoros — across the border from Brownsville, Texas — flooded, forcing schools to close Monday and Tuesday. Marco Antonio Hernandez Acosta, manager of the Matamoros Water and Drainage Board, said they were waiting for Mexico’s federal government to provide pumps to drain affected areas.

The storm was expected to move in north-northeast motion through Monday evening and then accelerate to the northeast beginning Tuesday before nearing the upper Texas and Louisiana coastlines Wednesday.

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Stengle contributed to this report from Dallas and Alfredo Peña from Ciudad Victoria, Mexico.

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CUPERTINO, Calif. (AP) — Apple squarely shifted its focus toward artificial intelligence with the unveiling of its hotly anticipated iPhone 16 along with a slew of new features coming with the next update to the device’s operating system. While the new phone lineup headlined Monday’s showcase, the tech giant also shared updates to its smartwatch and AirPod lineups.

Here are all the biggest announcements from Apple’s “Glowtime” event.

Apple Intelligence

Apple’s core artificial intelligence offerings are being packaged and billed as Apple Intelligence — first revealed at the company’s developers conference in June.

These features include the ability to search for images in your library by describing them, creating custom emojis, summarizing emails and prioritizing notifications. Apple Intelligence will also upgrade Apple’s virtual assistant Siri to get it to better understand requests and give it some awareness of on-screen actions taking place on the phone, hopefully making it more useful.

What sets Apple apart from what’s being offered by rivals Samsung and Google? It is trying to preserve its longtime commitment to privacy by tailoring its AI so that most of its functions are processed on the device itself instead of at remote data centers. When a task requires a connection to a data center, Apple promises it will be done in a tightly controlled way that ensures no personal data is stored remotely.

Most of Apple’s AI functions will roll out as part of a free software update to iOS 18, the operating system that will power the iPhone 16 rolling out from October through December. U.S. English will be the featured language at launch but an update enabling other languages will come out next year, according to Apple.

iPhone 16 and the camera button

The iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max will offer slightly bigger displays and feature variants of the powerful A18 chip, which gives Apple the computing power its devices need to run AI functions on its devices.

The iPhone 16 “has been designed for Apple Intelligence from the ground up,” CEO Tim Cook said during Monday’s event.

On the other end of the spectrum, the biggest physical change to the iPhone 16 lineup comes in the form of a dedicated camera-control button. The button responds to clicks and gestures, allowing users to quickly snap pictures, preview a shot or start video recording.

The button also allows owners to use something called Visual Intelligence, which will tell the iPhone 16 to automatically search on things you take photos of.

The phones will start shipping Sept. 20. The iPhone 16 will retail for $799, with the Plus model going for $899. The iPhone 16 Pro will cost $999, while the Pro Max will sell for $1,199.

Apple Watch upgrades

The Apple Watch Series 10 features a larger, and brighter, wide-angle OLED display that will allow users to better view the watch at an angle. But Apple focused much of its presentation on the device’s ability to detect signs of sleep apnea.

The new device is also being offered in a titanium finish for the first time, joining a longtime trend in the watch industry of offering a tougher, more lightweight, and perceived higher-quality, alternative to traditional materials.

The Series 10 watch starts at $399 and will be available on Sept. 20.

Airpods lean toward being a listening device

The new AirPods 4 series will come with an upgraded chip for better audio quality, and will feature more active noise cancellation.

If you frequently lose your ear buds, the new AirPods will also play a sound when you locate them through the Find My app.

In a medically focused update to the AirPods Pro 2, Apple said it will upgrade the devices so they can act as an over-the-counter hearing aid. A free software update will provide the upgrade and also include options to help protect hearing and the ability to administer a clinical-grade hearing test.

The AirPod 4 model costs $129, while the version with active noise cancelling will cost $179. They both ship on Sept. 20.

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RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Rio de Janeiro’s main beaches bustle with commotion on sunny weekends. But activity ground to a near standstill on one stretch of sand. People held up their phones to record athletic feats they’d never before witnessed, or even imagined.

The game? Footvolley, a combination of soccer and beach volleyball. The athlete? A 3-year-old border collie named Floki.

Floki sparks wonder among bystanders, because he hangs tough in a game that even humans struggle to get a handle on. Footvolley rules are essentially the same as beach volleyball, but with a slightly lower net and, like soccer, players are forbidden from using hands and arms. Floki springs up from the sand to drive the ball with his mouth. He has become something of an internet sensation in Brazil, with hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram and TikTok.

Floki’s owner, Gustavo Rodrigues, is a footvolley coach, but swears he didn’t plan this. He had wanted an American Bully, a decidedly less sprightly breed. Floki came into Rodrigues’ life instead and quickly revealed his potential when, at just 2 months old, he started jumping after birthday balloons.

Rodrigues started Floki out on what’s called “altinha,” where a group standing in a circle juggles a soccer ball for as long as possible. Last year, Floki made his debut in the much more complex, competitive game of footvolley — a hobby enjoyed by some Brazilian soccer stars after they retire, including World Cup winners Ronaldinho and Romário.

Footvolley players need poise, agility, coordination, timing, finesse. Covering one side of the court between just two people means quick sprints back and forth on soft sand under the baking sun. It’s no mean feat, but Floki was a natural. A star was born.

“He does things that even some professionals don’t — like positioning on the court,” said Rodrigues, 26. “Sometimes the ball goes from one side (of the court) to the other, and he doesn’t keep his back turned to it. He turns toward the ball to always hit it straight on.”

It’s clear this high-energy pup lives for this game. Even resting under the shade of the beach’s caipirinha bar, he was laser-focused on the action of the adjacent court’s match.

When playing, he barks at Rodrigues to pass him the ball and seems to at least understand the basic rules. At times, rather than passing back to Rodrigues for the third and final touch their opponents expect, he sneaks the ball over the net himself to score a point. Then he jumps into Rodrigues’ arms to celebrate.

One of the awestruck onlookers Sunday was Luiza Chioli, who had traveled to Rio from Sao Paulo. She already knew the famous Floki from TikTok, but hadn’t expected front-row seats to watch him while sipping her gin and tonic.

“Seeing social media, we had thought it was just cuts, that they used the best takes,” said Chioli, 21. “But we saw he played, performed the whole time, did really well. It’s really cool.”

As Floki’s follower count has grown, partnerships and endorsement deals have come rolling in. Rodrigues and Floki live in the inland capital Brasilia, but often travel to Rio — footvolley’s mecca — and other Brazilian states to show off his skills, do marketing appearances and create monetized social media content.

His Sunday began with almost an hour playing beside former footvolley champion Natalia Guitler, who’s been called Queen of the Beach. Between attempts to film her doing a trick pass to him, he scampered for drinks of water or to dip in the ocean. By the end, both she and Floki were scrambling for shade.

“We’re dead,” she said as she collapsed onto the sand next to a panting Floki. Someone passed her a phone to check out the best clips for her Instagram, where she has almost 3 million followers.

“Me and my bestie @dog_altinha playing footvolley,” she wrote in a later post showing their long rally, and which included her bicycle kicking the ball over the net.

After a rest and another footvolley session, Floki headed to a more remote beach to do a marketing shoot for Farm, a fashion designer that’s become the paragon of Rio’s breezy tropical style, both in Brazil and abroad.

Then Floki was on Instagram hyping a brand of dog popsicles, gnawing a banana-flavored one himself, and giving an altinha demonstration to mall shoppers. His evening stroll along Copacabana’s beachside promenade showed him straining against his leash, still evidently bursting with his boundless energy.

With their weekend marketing blitz in Rio over, Rodrigues and Floki would head back to Brasilia, where their influencer hustle takes a back seat to the hustle of playing competitive matches. They win about one in every three, Rodrigues said, and their opponents are always desperate to avoid being beaten by a dog.

“It generates talk, and people make fun,” he said. “No one likes to lose a point to him, so people play their hearts out against us.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Calling it “unserious and unacceptable,” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries rejected on Monday a proposal from Speaker Mike Johnson that links continued government funding for six months with a measure to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote.

The response frames the spending battle to come over the next weeks as lawmakers work to reach consensus on a short-term spending bill that would prevent a partial government shutdown when the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1. Lawmakers hope to avoid a shutdown just weeks before voters go to the polls.

Johnson is punting the final decisions on full-year spending into next year when a new president and Congress take over. He’s doing so at the urging of members within his conference who believe that Republicans will be in a better position next year to secure the funding and policy priorities they want.

But Jeffries said the appropriations process should be wrapped up before the end of the current calendar year, and the short-term measure should reflect that. It also needs to be free of “partisan policy changes,” Jeffries said.

“There is no other viable path forward that protects the health, safety and economic well-being of hardworking American taxpayers,” Jeffries wrote in a letter to House Democrats released Monday.

Lawmakers are returning to Washington this week following a traditional August recess spent mostly in their home states and districts. They are not close to completing work on the dozen annual appropriations bills that will fund the agencies during the next fiscal year, so they’ll need to approve a stopgap measure.

The House bill including the proof of citizenship mandate for voter registration complicates the effort. The voter registration measure is popular with House Republicans. The House Freedom Caucus, which generally includes the chamber’s most conservative members, called for it to be attached to the spending bill.

Republicans say that requiring proof of citizenship would ensure that U.S. elections are only for American citizens, improving confidence in the nation’s federal election system, something that former President Donald Trump has sought to undermine over the years.

When the House Republican proposal was unveiled on Friday, Johnson called it a critically important step to keep the federal government funded and secure the federal election process.

“Congress has a responsibility to do both, and we must ensure that only American citizens can decide American elections,” Johnson said.

Opponents say it is already against the law for noncitizens to vote in federal elections and that the document requirements would disenfranchise millions of people who do not have the necessary documents readily available when they get a chance to register.

Trump and other Republicans have revved up their complaints about the issue of noncitizens voting with the influx of migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border under President Joe Biden’s administration. They are contending Democrats let them in to add them to the voter rolls. But the available evidence shows that noncitizen voting in federal elections is incredibly rare.

Senate Democrats have also come out against Johnson’s proposal. And Biden administration officials have also weighed in against the bill. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned that long-term continuing resolutions, such as the current one to be voted on in the House this week, harm military readiness.

Austin said in a letter to the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees that, if passed, the bill would mark the second year in a row and the seventh time in the past 15 years that the department is delayed in moving forward with some critical priorities.

“These actions subject Service members and their families to unnecessary stress, empower our adversaries, misalign billions of dollars, damage our readiness, and impede our ability to react to emergent events,” Austin wrote.

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MIAMI (AP) — Tropical Storm Francine formed Monday off the coast of Mexico and was expected to drench the Texas coast with up to a foot (30 centimeters) of rain before coming ashore in Louisiana Wednesday night as a hurricane.

“We’re going to have a very dangerous situation developing by the time we get into Wednesday for portions of the north-central Gulf Coast, primarily along the coast of Louisiana, where we’re going to see the potential for life threatening storm surge inundation and hurricane force winds,” said Michael Brennan, director of the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami.

Francine is taking aim at a stretch of coastline that has yet to fully recover since hurricanes Laura and Delta decimated Lake Charles, Louisiana, four years ago.

The hurricane center said Francine is located about 245 miles (395 kilometers) southeast of the mouth of the Rio Grande, and about 480 miles (770 kilometers) south-southeast of Cameron, Louisiana. Francine’s top winds Monday morning were about 50 miles per hour (85 kilometers per hour). A tropical storm is defined by sustained winds between 39 mph and 73 mph (62 kph and 117 kph).

Francine should be a hurricane as it approaches the northwestern Gulf Coast on Wednesday, pushing a storm surge of up to 10 feet (3 meters), forecasters said.

“Francine is expected to bring heavy rainfall and the risk of considerable flash flooding along the coast of far northeast Mexico, portions of the southernmost Texas coast, the Upper Texas Coast, southern Louisiana, and southern Mississippi into Thursday morning. A risk of flash and urban flooding exists across portions of the Mid-South from Wednesday into Friday morning,” the hurricane center warned.

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NABLUS, West Bank (AP) — The Western-backed Palestinian Authority held a funeral procession Monday for a U.S.-Turkish dual national activist who a witness says was shot and killed by Israeli forces while demonstrating against settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Dozens of mourners — including several leading PA officials — attended the procession. Security forces carried the body of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi which was draped in a Palestinian flag while a traditional black-and-white checkered scarf covered her face. The 26-year-old’s body was then placed into the back of a Palestinian ambulance.

Turkish Foreign Ministry Spokesman Oncu Keceli said Turkey was working on repatriating Eygi’s remains for burial in the Aegean coastal town of Didim as per her family’s wishes, but “because the land crossing from the Palestinian territories to Jordan was closed as of Sunday, the ministry was trying to have the body flown directly to Turkey.”

U.S. officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Jonathan Pollak, an Israeli peace activist who participated in Friday’s protest, said Israeli forces shot her on Friday in the city of Nablus while posing no threat, adding that the killing happened during a period of calm after clashes between soldiers and Palestinian protesters. Pollak said he then saw two Israeli soldiers mount the roof of a nearby home, train a gun in the group’s direction and fired, with one of the bullets striking Eygi in the head.

The Israeli military said it was looking into reports that troops had killed a foreign national while firing at an “instigator of violent activity” in the area of the protest.

The West Bank has seen a surge of violence since the Israel-Hamas wa r began in October, with increasing Israeli raids, attacks by Palestinian militants on Israelis, and attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians.

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AURORA, Colo. (AP) — She was eight months pregnant when she was forced to leave her Denver homeless shelter. It was November.

Ivanni Herrera took her 4-year-old son Dylan by the hand and led him into the chilly night, dragging a suitcase containing donated clothes and blankets she’d taken from the Microtel Inn & Suites. It was one of 10 hotels where Denver has housed more than 30,000 migrants, many of them Venezuelan, over the last two years.

First they walked to Walmart. There, with money she and her husband had collected from begging on the street, they bought a tent.

They waited until dark to construct their new home. They chose a grassy median along a busy thoroughfare in Aurora, the next town over, a suburb known for its immigrant population.

“We wanted to go somewhere where there were people,” Herrera, 28, said in Spanish. “It feels safer.”

That night, temperatures dipped to 32 degrees. And as she wrapped her body around her son’s to keep him warm enough that he could sleep, Ivanni Herrera cried.

Seeking better lives, finding something else

Over the past two years, a record number of families from Venezuela have come to the United States seeking a better life for themselves and their children. Instead, they’ve found themselves in communities roiling with conflict about how much to help the newcomers — or whether to help at all.

Unable to legally work without filing expensive and complicated paperwork, some are homeless and gambling on the kindness of strangers to survive. Some have found themselves sleeping on the streets — even those who are pregnant.

Like many in her generation, regardless of nationality, Herrera found inspiration for her life’s ambitions on social media. Back in Ecuador, where she had fled years earlier to escape the economic collapse in her native Venezuela, Herrera and her husband were emboldened by images of families like theirs hiking across the infamous Darién Gap from Colombia into Panama. If all those people could do it, they thought, so can we.

They didn’t know many people who had moved to the United States, but pictures and videos of Venezuelans on Facebook and TikTok showed young, smiling families in nice clothes standing in front of new cars boasting of beautiful new lives. U.S. Border Patrol reports show Herrera and the people who inspired her were part of an unprecedented mass migration of Venezuelans to America. Some 320,000 Venezuelans have tried to cross the southern border since October 2022 — more than in the previous nine years combined.

Just weeks after arriving in Denver, Herrera began to wonder if the success she had seen was real. She and her friends had developed another theory: The hype around the U.S. was part of some red de engaño, or network of deception.

After several days of camping on the street and relieving herself outside, Herrera began to itch uncontrollably with an infection. She worried: Would it imperil her baby?

She was seeing doctors and social workers at a Denver hospital where she planned to give birth because they served everyone, even those without insurance. They were alarmed their pregnant patient was now sleeping outside in the cold.

Days after she was forced to leave the Microtel, Denver paused its policy and allowed homeless immigrants to stay in its shelters through the winter. Denver officials say they visited encampments to urge homeless migrants to come back inside. But they didn’t venture outside the city limits to Aurora.

As Colorado’s third-largest city, Aurora, on Denver’s eastern edge, is a place where officials have turned down requests to help migrants. In February, the Aurora City Council passed a resolution telling other cities and nonprofits not to bring migrants into the community because it “does not currently have the financial capacity to fund new services related to this crisis.” Yet still they come, because of its lower cost of living and Spanish-speaking community.

In fact, former President Donald Trump last week called attention to the city, suggesting a Venezuelan gang had taken over an apartment complex. Authorities say that hasn’t happened.

The doctors treated Herrera’s yeast infection and urged her to sleep at the hospital. It wouldn’t cost anything, they assured her, just as her birth would be covered by emergency Medicaid, a program that extends the health care benefits for poor American families to unauthorized immigrants for labor and delivery.

Herrera refused.

“How,” she asked, “could I sleep in a warm place when my son is cold on the street?”

Another family, cast out into the night

It was March when David Jaimez, his pregnant wife and their two daughters were evicted from their Aurora apartment. Desperate for help, they dragged their possessions into Thursday evening Bible study at Jesus on Colfax, a church and food pantry inside an old motel. Its namesake and location, Colfax Avenue, has long been a destination for the drug-addicted, homeless veterans and new immigrants.

When the Jaimez family arrived, the prayers paused. The manager addressed the family in elementary Spanish, supplementing with Google Translate on her phone.

After arriving from Venezuela in August and staying in a Denver-sponsored hotel room, they’d moved into an apartment in Aurora. Housing is cheaper in that eastern suburb, but they never found enough work to pay their rent. “I owe $8,000,” Jaimez said, his eyes wide. “Supposedly there’s work here. I don’t believe it.”

Jaimez and his wife are eligible to apply for asylum or for “ Temporary Protected Status ” and, with that, work permits. But doing so would require an attorney or advisor, months of waiting and $500 in fees each.

At the prayer group, Jaimez’s daughters drank sodas and ate tangerines from one participant, a middle-aged woman and Aurora native. She stroked the ponytail of the family’s 8-year-old daughter as the young girl smiled.

When the leader couldn’t find anywhere for the family to stay, they headed out into the evening, pushing their year-old daughter in her stroller and lugging a suitcase behind them. After they left, the middle-aged woman leaned forward in her folding chair and said: “It’s kind of crazy that our city lets them in but does not help our veterans.” Nearby, a man nodded in agreement.

That night, Jaimez and his family found an encampment for migrants run by a Denver nonprofit called All Souls and moved into tent number 28. Volunteers and staff brought in water, meals and other resources. Weeks later, the family was on the move again: Camping without a permit is illegal in Denver, and the city closed down the encampment. All Souls re-established it in six different locations but closed it permanently in May.

At its peak, nearly 100 people were living in the encampment. About half had been evicted from apartments hastily arranged before their shelter time expired, said founder Candice Marley. Twenty-two residents were children and five women were pregnant, including Jaimez’s wife. Marley is trying to get a permit for another encampment, but the permit would only allow people over 18.

“Even though there are lots of kids living on the street, they don’t want them all together in a camp,” Marley said. “That’s not a good public image for them.”

A city’s efforts, not enough

Denver officials say they won’t tolerate children sleeping on the street. “Did you really walk from Venezuela to be homeless in the U.S.? I don’t think so,” said Jon Ewing, spokesman for Denver’s health and human services department. “We can do better than that.”

Still, Denver struggled to keep up with the rush of migrants, many arriving on buses chartered by Texas to draw attention to the impact of immigration. All told, Denver officials say they have helped some 42,700 migrants since last year, either by giving them shelter or a bus fare to another city.

Initially, the city offered migrants with families six weeks in a hotel. But in May, on pace to spend $180 million this year helping newcomers, the city scaled back its offer to future migrants while deepening its investment in people already getting help.

Denver paid for longer shelter stays for 800 migrants already in hotels and offered them English classes and help applying for asylum and work permits. But any migrants arriving since May have received only three days in a hotel. After that, some have found transportation to other cities, scrounged for a place to sleep or wandered into nearby towns like Aurora.

Today, fewer migrants are coming to the Denver area, but Marley still receives dozens of outreaches per week from social service agencies looking to help homeless migrants. “It’s so frustrating that we can’t help them,” she said. “That leaves families camping on their own, unsupported, living in their cars. Kids can’t get into school. There’s no stability.”

After the encampment closed, Jaimez and his family moved into a hotel. He paid by holding a cardboard sign at an intersection and begging for money. Their daughter only attended school for one month last year, since they never felt confident that they were settled anywhere more than a few weeks. The family recently moved to a farm outside of the Denver area, where they’ve been told they can live in exchange for working.

On the front lines of begging

When Herrera started feeling labor pains in early December, she was sitting on the grass, resting after a long day asking strangers for money. She waited until she couldn’t bear the pain anymore and could feel the baby getting close. She called an ambulance.

The paramedics didn’t speak Spanish but called an interpreter. They told Herrera they had to take her to the closest hospital, instead of the one in Denver, since her contractions were so close together.

Her son was born healthy at 7 pounds, 8 ounces. She brought him to the tent the next day. A few days later the whole family, including the baby, had contracted chicken pox. “The baby was in a bad state,” said Emily Rodriguez, a close friend living with her family in a tent next to Herrera’s.

Herrera took him to the hospital, then returned to the tent before being offered a way out. An Aurora woman originally from Mexico invited the family to live with her — at first, for free. After a couple weeks, the family moved to a small room in the garage for $800 a month.

To earn rent and pay expenses, Herrera and Rodriguez have cleaned homes, painted houses and shoveled snow while their children waited in a car by themselves. Finding regular work and actually getting paid for it has been difficult. While their husbands can get semi-regular work in construction, the women’s most consistent income comes from something else: standing outside with their children and begging.

Herrera and her husband recently became eligible to apply for work permits and legal residency for Venezuelans who arrived in the United States last year. But it will cost $800 each for a lawyer to file the paperwork, along with hundreds of dollars in government fees. They don’t have the money.

One spring weekday, Herrera and Rodriguez stand by the shopping carts at the entrance to a Mexican grocery store. While their sons crawl along a chain of red shopping carts stacked together and baby Milan sleeps in his stroller, they try to make eye contact with shoppers.

Some ignore them. Others stuff bills in their hands. On a good day, each earns about $50.

It comes easier for Rodriguez, who’s naturally boisterous. “One day a man came up and gave me this iPhone. It’s new,” she says, waving the device in the air.

“Check out this body,” she says as she spins around, laughing and showing off her ample bottom. “I think he likes me.”

Herrera grimaces. She won’t flirt like her friend does. She picks up Milan and notices his diaper is soaked, then returns him to the stroller. She has run out of diapers.

Milan was sick, but Herrera has been afraid to take him to the doctor. Despite what the hospital had said when she was pregnant, she was never signed up for emergency Medicaid. She says she owes $18,000 for the ambulance ride and delivery of her baby. Now, she avoids going to the doctor or taking her children because she’s afraid her large debt will jeopardize her chances of staying in the U.S. “I’m afraid they’re going to deport me,” she says.

But some days, when she’s feeling overwhelmed, she wants to be deported — as long as she can take her children along. Like the day in May when the security guard at the Mexican grocery store chased off the women and told them they couldn’t beg there anymore. “He insulted us and called us awful names,” Rodriguez says.

The two women now hold cardboard signs along a busy street in Denver and then knock on the doors of private homes, never returning to the same address. They type up their request for clothes, food or money on their phones and translate it to English using Google. They hand their phones to whoever answers the door.

The American Dream, still out of reach

In the garage where Herrera and her family live, the walls are lined with stuffed animals people have given her and her son. Baby Milan, on the floor, pushes himself up to look around. Dylan sleeps in bed.

Herrera recently sent $500 to her sister to make the months-long trip from Venezuela to Aurora with Herrera’s 8-year-old daughter. “I’ll have my family back together,” she says. And she believes her sister will be able to watch her kids so Herrera can look for work.

“I don’t feel equipped to handle all of this on my own,” she says.

The problem is, Herrera hasn’t told her family back in Venezuela how she spends her time. “They think I’m fixing up homes and selling chocolate and flowers,” she says. “I’m living a lie.”

When her daughter calls in the middle of the day, she’s sure not to answer and only picks up after 6 p.m. “They think I’m doing so well, they expect me to send money,” she says. And Herrera has complied, sending $100 a week to help her sister pay rent and buy food for her daughter.

Finally, her sister and daughter are waiting across the border in Mexico. When we come to the U.S., her sister asks, could we fly to Denver? The tickets are $600.

She has to come clean. She doesn’t have the money. She lives day to day. The American Dream hasn’t happened for Ivanni Herrera — at least, not yet. Life is far more difficult than she has let on.

She texts back:

No.

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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.

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LONDON, Ky. (AP) — As a grueling manhunt stretched into a third day Monday for a suspect in an interstate shooting that struck 12 vehicles and wounded five people, authorities vowed to keep up a relentless search as the stress level remained high for a rural area where some schools canceled classes.

Authorities have been searching a rugged, hilly area of southeastern Kentucky since Saturday evening, when a gunman began shooting at drivers on Interstate 75 near London, a small city of about 8,000 people located about 75 miles (120 kilometers) south of Lexington.

The search was temporarily suspended once darkness fell Sunday night, but was set to resume Monday morning.

“We’re not going to quit until we do lay hands on him,” Laurel County Sheriff John Root said Sunday night.

Joseph A. Couch, 32, was named first as a person of interest and later as a suspect in the shooting after authorities said they recovered his SUV on a service road near the crime scene. They later found a semi-automatic weapon nearby that they believe was used in the shooting, said Deputy Gilbert Acciardo, a spokesperson for the local sheriff’s office.

On Sunday, as another day of searching was ending without any sign of the suspect, Acciardo acknowledged the frustration that law enforcement officers and people who live near the search area are feeling.

“As this continues, it becomes more stressful for the community, it becomes more stressful for the officers that are there because we’re looking ... and we’re trying to find him, and we haven’t found him,” he said.

State police Master Trooper Scottie Pennington, a spokesman for the London state police post, said troopers are being brought in from around the state to aid the manhunt. He described the extensive search area as “walking in a jungle” with machetes needed to cut through thickets of woods.

Acciardo said it appears that the attacker planned the shooting for that location because it is very remote and the terrain is hilly, rocky and hard to navigate.

With the gunman still at large, numerous area school districts canceled classes for Monday. Pennington urged area residents to lock doors, keep porch lights on and monitor security cameras. The search was focused on a remote area about eight miles north of London.

Authorities sought to reassure residents that they believe the suspect will be found.

“We’re doing everything that we can do,” Root said, adding, ”Just be confident.”

Authorities said Couch purchased the weapon and about 1,000 rounds of ammunition Saturday morning in London. Couch has a military background, having served in the National Guard for at least four years, said Capt. Richard Dalrymple of the Laurel County Sheriff’s Office.

Authorities initially said nine vehicles were struck by gunfire, but later increased that number to 12, saying some people did not realize their cars had been hit by bullets until they arrived home. They said the gunman fired a total of 20 to 30 rounds.

Couch most recently lived in Woodbine, a small community about 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of the shooting scene. Acciardo said authorities found his abandoned vehicle Saturday and then an AR-15 rifle on Sunday in a wooded area near a highway where “he could have shot down upon the interstate.” A phone believed to be Couch’s was also found by law enforcement, but the battery had been taken out.

Some residents of Laurel County were on edge as authorities searched with a drone, helicopter and on foot in a remote and sparsely populated wooded area near the busy interstate.

Cody Shepherd, sipping a bloody mary outdoors while waiting to watch a football game at the Pour Boyz Sports Lounge in London on Sunday, said locals were abuzz with speculation. A resident of London, he was at a party Saturday at a friend’s house about 10 miles (16 kilometers) south of where the shooting occurred.

“We were listening to the police scanners all night,” he said, adding they heard sirens and saw a helicopter overhead.

On Sunday, several local churches canceled services. But Rodney Goodlett, pastor of Faith Assembly of God in London, was helping direct traffic as parishioners gathered for a morning service. He expected the search would hold down attendance.

“This is tragic, obviously, that somebody would randomly do violent acts,” he said. “You hear media things taking place all around our country, but then when it hits home, it’s a little bit of a wake-up call.”

Acciardo said authorities are being inundated with tips from the public and are following up on each one in case it could help them find the shooter. When the search has been suspended at night, specially trained officers have been deployed in strategic locations in the woods to prevent the gunman from slipping out of the area.

“We’ve got to get him,” Acciardo said.

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ATLANTA (AP) — From her earliest campaigns in California to her serving as President Joe Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris has honed an aggressive but calibrated approach to debates.

She tries to blend punch lines with details that build toward a broader narrative. She might shake her head to signal her disapproval while her opponent is speaking, counting on viewers to see her reaction on a split screen. And she has a go-to tactic to pivot debates back in her favor: saying she’s glad to answer a question as she gathers her thoughts to explain an evolving position or defend a past one.

Tuesday’s presidential debate will put the vice president’s skills to a test unlike any she’s faced. Harris faces former President Donald Trump, who will participate in his seventh general election debate since 2016, for an event that will be seen by tens of millions of viewers just as early voting in November’s election starts around the country.

People who have competed against Harris and prepared her rivals say she brings a series of advantages to the matchup, even as they warn that Trump can be a challenging and unpredictable opponent who veers between policy critiques, personal attacks, and falsehoods or conspiracy theories.

“She can meet the moment,” said Marc Short, who led Republican Vice President Mike Pence’s debate preparation against Harris in the fall of 2020. “She has shown that in different environments. I would not underestimate that in any way.”

Julian Castro, a Democrat who ran for president against Harris in the 2020 primary, said Harris blended “knowledge, poise and the ability to explain things well” to stand out during crowded primary debates.

“Some candidates get too caught up with trying to be catchy, trying to go viral,” Castro said. “She’s found a very good balance.”

Balancing narrative and detail

A former Harris aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to talk about her approach, said the vice president views the events like a jury trial or querying a judicial nominee on Capitol Hill when she was a U.S. senator. The idea, the former aide said, has always been to win the debate on merit while leaving more casual or piecemeal viewers with key takeaways.

“She understands that debates are about the individual interactions themselves but also about a larger strategy of offering a vision for what your leadership and style looks like,” said Tim Hogan, who led Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s 2020 primary debate preparation.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a political communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said Harris makes deductive arguments but folds them into a broader narrative — the same way she would talk to a jury.

“She states a thesis and then follows with fact, fact, fact,” she said.

Jamieson pointed to the 2020 vice presidential debate in which Harris hammered Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economy, and to her most memorable 2019 primary debate when she skewered Biden for how he had talked about race and institutional racism. She weaved her critique of Biden’s record with her own biography as a young, biracial student in the early era of school integration.

“That little girl was me,” Harris said in a widely circulated quip that punctuated her story about court-ordered busing that helped non-white students attend integrated schools.

“Most people who are good at the deductive argument aren’t good at wrapping that with an effective narrative,” Jamieson said. “She’s good at both.”

Landing memorable punches

Castro said Harris has a good feel for when to strike, a quality he traced to her trial experience. In 2019, as multiple Democratic candidates talked over one another, Harris sat back before getting moderators to recognize her.

“Hey, guys, you know what? America does not want to witness a food fight. They want to know how we’re going to put food on their table,” she said, taking control of the conversation and drawing applause.

When Harris faced Pence in 2020, it was a mostly civil, substantive debate. But she got in digs that framed Pence as a serial interrupter, as Trump had been in his first debate with Biden.

“Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking,” she said at one point, with a stern look. At another: “If you don’t mind letting me finish, we can have a conversation.”

Finding traps in policy

Debates have sometimes put Harris on the defensive.

In the 2020 primary matches, Tulsi Gabbard, who this year has endorsed Trump, blitzed Harris over how aggressively she prosecuted nonviolent drug offenders as a district attorney.

That fall, Pence made Harris sometimes struggle to defend Biden’s positions. Now, her task will be to defend not just Biden’s record, but her own role in that record and what policies she would pursue as president.

Short, one of Pence’s top aides, noted that Republicans and the media have raised questions about more liberal positions Harris took in her 2020 primary campaign, especially on fracking, universal healthcare, reparations for slavery and how to treat migrants who cross the U.S. border illegally.

“We were surprised that she missed some opportunities (against Pence) when the conversation was centered around policy,” Short said.

Timing, silence and nonverbal communication

One of Harris’ earliest debate triumphs came in 2010 as she ran for California attorney general. Her opponent was asked about his plans to accept his public pension while still being paid a salary for a current public post.

“I earned it,” Republican Steve Cooley said of the so-called “double-dipping” practice.

Harris looked on silently, with a slightly amused look as Cooley explained himself. When moderators recognized her, she said just seven words – “Go for it, Steve. You earned it!” — in a serious tone but with a look that communicated her sarcasm. The exchange landed in her television ads within days.

“Kamala Harris is quite effective at nonverbal communication and knowing when not to speak,” Jamieson said.

The professor said Harris often will shake her head and, with other looks, telegraph her disapproval while her opponent is speaking. Then she smiles before retorting, or attacking, in a conversational tone.

“She defuses some of the argument that Trump makes that she is ‘a nasty woman,’ that she’s engaging in egregiously unfair behavior, because her nonverbal presentation is actually undercutting that line of attack,” Jamieson said.

Meeting a new challenge with Trump

For all of Harris’ debate experience, Tuesday is still a new and massive stage. Democrats who ordinarily tear into Trump instead appeared on Sunday’s news shows to make clear that Harris faced a big task ahead.

“It will take almost superhuman focus and discipline to deal with Donald Trump in a debate,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, yet another of Harris’ 2020 opponents, on CNN. “It’s no ordinary proposition, not because Donald Trump is a master of explaining policy ideas and how they’re going to make people better off. It’s because he’s a master of taking any form or format that is on television and turning it into a show that is all about him.”

Castro noted that Trump is “a nasty and crafty stage presence” who makes preparation difficult. And with ABC keeping the candidates’ microphones off when they are not speaking, Harris may not find it as easy to produce another viral moment that hinges on viewers having seen or heard Trump at his most outlandish.

“The best thing she can do,” Castro said, “is not get distracted by his antics.”

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CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — For millions of Venezuelans and dozens of foreign governments, Edmundo González was the undisputed winner of the country’s July 28 presidential election.

But on Sunday, he joined the swelling ranks of once-prominent government opponents who have fled into exile, leaving his political future uncertain and tightening Nicolás Maduro’s grip on power.

The former presidential candidate arrived at a military airport outside Madrid after being granted safe passage by Maduro’s government so he could take up asylum in Spain. His surprise departure came just days after Maduro’s government ordered his arrest.

González, 75, burst onto Venezuela’s political scene less than five months ago. His candidacy was as accidental as it gets after opposition powerhouse María Corina Machado was barred from running and a handpicked substitute was also blocked.

In April, a coalition of more than 10 parties settled on González, who overnight went from being a virtually unknown retired diplomat and grandfather to a household name in whom millions placed their hopes for an end to more than two decades of single-party rule.

Accompanied by Machado, he crisscrossed the country in the final weeks of the campaign, energizing massive crowds of Venezuelans who blamed Maduro for one of the worst ever economic collapses outside a war zone.

“Let’s imagine for a moment the country that is coming,” he told a crowd of cheering supporters at a rally in La Victoria, a once-thriving industrial city. “A country in which the president does not insult or see his adversaries as enemies. A country where when you get home from work, you know that your money has value, that when you turn on the switch, there will be electricity, that when you turn on the faucet, there will be water.”

The yin-yang strategy proved more popular than even many Maduro opponents had imagined.

Election was quickly disputed

Although the National Electoral Council declared Maduro the winner, the opposition’s superior ground game allowed it to collect evidence showing that it was actually González who prevailed by a more than a 2-to-1 margin. Foreign governments condemned the official results as lacking credibility. Even some leftist allies of Maduro withheld recognition, demanding that authorities release a breakdown of results at all 30,000 voting machines nationwide, as it has in the past.

In the weeks since the disputed vote, both opposition figures went into hiding amid a brutal crackdown that led to more than 2,000 arrests and the deaths of at least 24 people at the hands of security forces. González stayed out of public view while Machado appeared at sporadic rallies seeking to keep the pressure on Maduro.

Machado tried to put a positive spin on González’s departure late Saturday, assuring Venezuelans he would be back on Jan. 10 for a swearing-in ceremony marking the start of the next presidential term.

“His life was in danger, and the increasing threats, summons, arrest warrants and even attempts at blackmail and coercion to which he has been subjected, demonstrate that the regime has no scruples,” Machado said on X. “Let this be very clear to everyone: Edmundo will fight from outside alongside our diaspora.”

Candidacy came after career as a diplomat

González began his professional career as an aide to Venezuela’s ambassador in the U.S. He had postings in Belgium and El Salvador and served as Caracas’ ambassador to Algeria.

His last post was as Venezuela’s ambassador to Argentina during the first years of the government of Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s predecessor and mentor. More recently, he worked as an international relations consultant, writing about recent political developments in Argentina and authoring a historical work on Venezuela’s foreign minister during World War II.

His years in El Salvador and Algeria coincided with periods of armed conflicts in both countries. For a time, his whereabouts were tracked by locals in El Salvador, and he would get calls at home meant to intimidate him, with the callers saying they were aware that González had just arrived home.

Maduro on the campaign trail claimed — without evidence — that González was recruited as a CIA asset during that Cold War, which coincided with heavy U.S. military involvement in Central American country.

González had just returned to Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, from a trip to Spain to visit a daughter and grandchildren when opposition leaders presented him with the idea of becoming a candidate.

The subdued tone and poker face he forged as a diplomat cut a sharp contrast with boisterous, ego-driven politicians to which Venezuelans have long been accustomed. Maduro and his allies have taken his conciliatory tones as a sign of weakness. But that kind of language was among his many selling points to Venezuelans fed up with winner-takes-all politics.

“Enough shouting, enough insults,” González told supporters. “It’s time to reunite.”

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Goodman reported from Miami.

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Huddling for safety in classrooms as gunfire rang out, students at Apalachee High School texted or called their parents to let them know what was happening and send what they thought could be their final messages. One student texted her mother to say she loved her, adding, “I’m sorry I’m not the best daughter.”

The Georgia school shooting that left four dead and nine injured last week was every parent’s worst nightmare, and one that highlights potential downsides to efforts among states, school districts and federal lawmakers to ban or restrict access to cellphones in classrooms.

The moves to restrict phone use in schools have been driven by concerns about the impact screentime has on children’s mental health and complaints from teachers that cellphones have become a constant distraction in the classroom. But those opposed to the bans say they cut off a lifeline parents have to make sure their children are safe during school shootings or other emergencies.

“The fact of the matter is parents and families cannot rely on schools to effectively communicate with us in times of emergency, and this has happened time and again,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, an education advocacy group. “There’s a whole host of reasons why parents are deeply concerned about whether or not they’re going to get timely information about whether or not their kids are safe.”

Nationally, 77% of U.S. schools say they prohibit cellphones at school for non-academic use, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. But that number is misleading. It does not mean students are following those bans or all those schools are enforcing them.

The restrictions have been trumpeted by both Republican and Democratic governors who rarely agree on other issues.

In Arkansas, GOP Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders launched a program for school districts to apply for grants to purchase pouches for students to keep their phones in during the school day. In California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has urged school districts to restrict cellphone use and is weighing whether to sign legislation that would require schools to enact restrictions.

“I’d hate to see another school shooting be the reason that we bring TVs into the classroom and then disrupt our children’s education,” Newsom said Friday. “Because, in essence, that’s what a cellphone is equivalent to — bringing a TV into the classroom and disrupting the ability to get quality academic time.”

But for many students caught in the Apalachee shooting, having access to their phones was the only way they could communicate with loved ones during moments they feared could be their last.

“I love you. I love you so much. Ma I love you,” Junior Julie Sandoval texted her mother. “I’m sorry I’m not the best daughter. I love you.”

Nearby, Sandoval said, another student was on the phone telling their mother, “They’re shooting up the school! They’re shooting up the school!”

But advocates of school phone restrictions warn that allowing access to phones during shootings or other emergencies could put students in even more danger.

“What’s even more important to me is their safety,” said Kim Whitman, co-founder of the Phone-Free Schools Movement, a group that advocates for schools to adopt policies keeping cellphones off and away from students. “If my child was on the phone with me and they missed guidance from the teacher because they were distracted by their phone and they weren’t safe, that’s a worse scenario in my mind.”

Whitman said she understands the concerns about keeping parents informed and that’s why a key part for any phone-free school is being proactive in communicating about emergencies.

Balancing safety and parents’ concerns guided a cellphone ban at Grand Island Senior High, the largest high school in Nebraska, which rolled out a new policy in January that requires students to keep phones out of sight and in their bags or pockets, silenced or off during school hours.

“One of the essential questions that parents asked us was, ‘What if Sally or Johnny doesn’t have their phone if, God forbid, an active shooting happens or there is some sort of crisis in the building?’” said Jeff Gilbertson, the school’s then-principal who now runs leadership training at the state Board of Education.

But the school does lockdown training to remind students of the dangers that phones can cause during emergencies.

“We coach our kids to keep phones silenced. You don’t want to be talking on the phone when we’re in lockdown, because that would reveal your location to an active shooter,” he said.

Students in other school shootings have used cellphones to alert authorities or their parents. During the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 21 people, a fourth-grader begged for help in a series of 911 calls. Students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, sent parents and posted chilling videos during the 2018 shooting that killed 17 people.

The Apalachee school shooting was a painful reminder for Brandi Scire of why she got a cellphone for her daughter, now a high school sophomore in Broward County, Florida. Both her children went to schools nearby Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School during that mass shooting.

Scire’s son’s school was on lockdown and thought it was a drill until she texted him on his phone. Scire purchased a cellphone for her daughter the following year because of that.

Broward County schools now require students to keep their phones stored away and in airplane mode, but Scire has told her daughter to keep her phone on and with her.

“It’s not about me texting my daughter during regular school or anything like that,” Scire said. “It’s a safety measure and I’m sorry, I cannot let that go.”

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This story was updated to correct that the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, happened in 2022, not 2020.

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Associated Press writers Jeff Amy in Winder, Georgia, Sophie Austin in Sacramento, California, and Jocelyn Gecker in San Francisco contributed to this report.

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HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — At least 14 people have died and 176 others injured in Vietnam after Typhoon Yagi slammed the country’s north, state media said Sunday, as officials warned of heavy downpours despite its waning power.

Described by Vietnamese officials as one of the most powerful typhoons to hit the region over the last decade, Yagi left more than 3 million people without electricity in northern Vietnam. It also damaged vital agricultural land, nearly 116,192 hectares where rice and fruits are mostly grown. Hundreds of flights were canceled after four airports were closed.

The typhoon made landfall in Vietnam’s northern coastal provinces of Quang Ninh and Haiphong with wind speeds of up to 149 kilometers per hour (92 miles per hour) on Saturday afternoon. It raged for roughly 15 hours before gradually weakening into a tropical depression early Sunday morning. Vietnam’s meteorological department predicted heavy rain in northern and central provinces and warned of floods in low-lying areas, flash floods in streams and landslides on steep slopes.

Municipal workers along with army and police forces were busy in the capital, Hanoi, clearing uprooted trees, fallen billboards, toppled electricity poles and rooftops that were swept away, while assessing damaged buildings.

Yagi was still a storm when it blew out of the northwestern Philippines into the South China Sea on Wednesday, leaving at least 20 people dead and 26 others missing mostly in landslides and widespread flooding in the acrchipelago nation. It then made its way to China, killing three people and injuring nearly a hundred others, before landing in Vietnam.

Storms like Typhoon Yagi were “getting stronger due to climate change, primarily because warmer ocean waters provide more energy to fuel the storms, leading to increased wind speeds and heavier rainfall,” said Benjamin Horton, director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore.

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JERUSALEM (AP) — Three people were shot and killed Sunday at the border crossing between the West Bank and Jordan, Israeli officials said, in what appeared to be an attack linked to the 11-month-old war in Gaza.

The military said the gunman approached the Allenby Bridge Crossing from the Jordanian side in a truck and opened fire at Israeli security forces, who killed the assailant in a shootout. It said the three people killed were Israeli civilians. Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service said they were all men in their 50s.

Jordan is investigating the shooting, its state-run Petra News Agency reported. The Western-allied Arab country made peace with Israel in 1994 but is deeply critical of its policies toward the Palestinians. Jordan has a large Palestinian population and has seen mass protests against Israel over the war in Gaza.

The Allenby crossing over the Jordan River is mainly used by Israelis, Palestinians and international tourists.

The Israeli-occupied West Bank has seen a surge of violence since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack out of Gaza triggered the war there. Israel has launched near-daily military arrest raids into dense Palestinian residential areas, and there has also been a rise in settler violence and Palestinian attacks on Israelis.

In Gaza, meanwhile, an Israeli airstrike early Sunday killed five people, including two women, two children and a senior official in the Civil Defense — first responders who operate under the Hamas-run government.

The Civil Defense said the strike targeted the home of its deputy director for north Gaza, Mohammed Morsi, in the urban Jabaliya refugee camp.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military. The army says it tries to avoid harming civilians and only targets militants.

Gaza’s Health Ministry says over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the war began. It does not differentiate between fighters and civilians in its count. The war has caused vast destruction and displaced around 90% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million, often multiple times.

Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in their Oct. 7 attack into southern Israel. They abducted another 250, and are still holding around 100 of them after releasing most of the rest in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel during a weeklong cease-fire last November. Around a third of the remaining hostages inside Gaza are believed to be dead.

The United States, Qatar and Egypt have spent months trying to broker a cease-fire and the return of the hostages, but the negotiations have repeatedly bogged down.

Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem — territories the Palestinians want for a future state — in the 1967 Mideast war. Israel withdrew soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005 but maintained control over its airspace, coastline and most of its land crossings. Along with Egypt, it imposed a blockade on Gaza after Hamas seized power from rival Palestinian forces in 2007.

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Follow AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war

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IMI N’TALA, Morocco (AP) — The rescue crews and bystanders are long gone but the remnants of homes still sit in piles off to the side of the jagged roads.

A year after nearly 3,000 people died when a record earthquake shook communities throughout Morocco’s High Atlas, it still looks like a bomb just went off in villages like Imi N’tala, where dozens of residents died when a chunk of mountainside cracked off and flattened the majority of buildings.

Broken bricks, bent rods of rebar and pieces of kitchen floors remain but have been swept into neater piles alongside plastic tents where the displaced now live. Some await funds to reconstruct their homes. Others await approval of their blueprints.

The region shook by the earthquake is full of impoverished agricultural villages like Imi N’tala accessible only via bumpy, unmaintained roads. Associated Press reporters revisited half a dozen of them last week ahead of the one-year anniversary.

In some places, residents awaiting governmental permission have begun reconstructing homes on an ad hoc basis. Elsewhere, people tired of the stuffiness of plastic tents have moved back into their cracked homes or decamped to larger cities, abandoning their old lives.

Streets have been neatly swept in towns like Amizmiz and Moulay Brahim, although cracked buildings and piles of rubble remain, much as they were in the days after the quake.

The rhythms of normal life have somewhat resumed in some of the province’s larger towns, where rebuilding efforts on roads, homes, schools and businesses are underway and some residents have been provided metal container homes. But the majority of those displaced from the 55,000 homes destroyed by the temblor remain vulnerable to summer’s heat and winter’s cold, living in plastic tents, impatient to return.

Mohamed Soumer, a 69-year-old retiree who lost his son in last year’s earthquake, is angry because local authorities have forbidden him from rebuilding his home on the same steep mountainside due to safety concerns. He now spends his days with his wife in a plastic tent near his now-rubbled home and fears moving elsewhere and restarting his life in a larger, more expensive area.

“Residents want to stay here because they have land where they grow vegetables to make a living,” he said. “If they go somewhere else and abandon this place, they will not be able to live there.”

The government said it would provide households monthly stipends in the aftermath of the earthquake and additional funds for seismically safe reconstruction. But its disbursal has been uneven, residents say, with many still waiting for funds or for reconstruction to commence.

Anger has mounted against local authorities in towns like Amizmiz and villages like Talat N’Yaqoub, where residents have protested against their living conditions. They have criticized the slow pace of reconstruction and demanded more investment in social services and infrastructure, which has long gone neglected in contrast with Morocco’s urban centers and coastline.

Officials have said rebuilding will cost 120 billion dirhams ($12 billion) and take about five years. The government has rebuilt some stretches of rural roads, health centers and schools but last week the commission tasked with reconstruction acknowledged the need to speed up some home rebuilding.

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