LAREDO, Texas — A month after ICE agents sent the young Ecuadorian mother and her 7-year-old daughter to a sprawling detention center 1,300 miles from their Minnesota home, they were finally free.

But when the bus pulled up to a migrant shelter in the border city of Laredo, dropping off a half-dozen families lugging bags stuffed with belongings, the stress of recent weeks tracked mother and daughter like the long shadows on that mid-February afternoon.

Night after night inside south Texas’ Dilley Immigration Processing Center with hundreds of other families, the grade-schooler wept and pleaded to know why they were being held.

“She would tell me, ‘Mom, what crime did I commit to be a prisoner?’ I didn’t know what to tell her,” said the 29-year-old, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear being identified could negatively affect their immigration case. Her husband was deported to Ecuador soon after they were taken into custody.

Many Americans were alarmed last month when photos circulated showing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis detaining a 5-year-old boy wearing a bunny hat and carrying a Spiderman backpack. The concern followed Liam Conejo Ramos and his father when they were sent to Dilley, surrounded by chain-link fences on a dusty plain about 75 miles south of San Antonio.

But Liam was hardly an outlier. ICE has been holding hundreds of children at Dilley — many for months.

“We are all Liam,” Christian Hinojosa, an immigrant from Mexico, said by phone from Dilley, where she and her 13-year-old son were held for more than four months. They were released this month and allowed to return home to San Antonio where she works as a health aide.

She noted that Liam and his father were released from Dilley after 10 days, when members of Congress and a judge intervened.

“My son says, ‘That’s unfair, Mama. What’s the difference between him and us?’”

When the Obama administration opened Dilley in 2014, nearly all families detained there had recently crossed the border from Mexico. Detentions at the facility were scaled back by the Biden administration in 2021, before it was closed three years later.

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EDITOR’S NOTE — This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.

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Since being reopened by President Donald Trump’s administration last spring, life inside Dilley — a compound of trailers and other prefabricated buildings — has been shaped by three decisive changes.

The number of detained families has risen sharply since last fall. The government is holding many children well beyond the 20-day limit set by longstanding court order. And many detainees have lived in the U.S. for several years, with roots in neighborhoods, workplaces and schools, according to lawyers and other observers.

“Just imagine that you’re a child and you’re taken out of your surroundings,” said Philip Schrag, a Georgetown University law professor and author of “Baby Jails: The Fight to End the Incarceration of Refugee Children in America.”

Suddenly you’re in “a completely strange environment with the doors locked and guards in uniform roaming around,” said Schrag, who counseled Dilley detainees as a volunteer lawyer during the Obama administration.

ICE booked more than 3,800 children into detention during the first nine months of the new Trump administration, according to an Associated Press analysis of data from the University of California, Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project. On an average day more than 220 children were held, with most of those detained longer than 24 hours sent to Dilley. More than half of Dilley detainees during that period were children.

Nearly two-thirds of children detained by ICE were eventually deported and almost 1 in 10 left the country when their parents accepted voluntary departure, according to an AP analysis of the latest comprehensive data. About a quarter were released in the U.S., requiring their parents to check in regularly with ICE as their legal cases proceed.

The number of detainees at Dilley has risen sharply since the period covered by the data, nearly tripling between last fall and late January to more than 1,300, according to Relevant Research, which analyzes immigration enforcement data.

“We’ve started to use 100 days as a benchmark because so many children are exceeding 20 days,” said Leecia Welch, the chief legal director at Children’s Rights, who visits Dilley regularly to ensure compliance. In a visit this month, Welch said she counted more than 30 children who had been held for over 100 days.

The increased detention of children comes as the Trump administration has gutted a Department of Homeland Security office responsible for oversight of conditions inside Dilley and other facilities.

“It’s a particular concern that family detention is being increased,” said Dr. Pamela McPherson, a child and adolescent psychiatrist contracted by DHS from 2014 until last year to inspect and investigate conditions at Dilley and other ICE facilities holding children.

“Just who’s providing that check-and-balance now?”

Rep. Tony Gonzales, who represents the congressional district where Dilley is located, said multiple visits have convinced him criticism of the center is unfair.

He said he’d been impressed by Dilley’s facilities and the professionalism and dedication of staff. “They’re not doing policy. They’re just fulfilling a duty,” said Gonzales, a Republican.

DHS did not respond to detailed questions about Dilley submitted by the AP. But both DHS and ICE sharply refuted allegations of poor care and conditions there.

“The Dilley facility is a family residential center designed specifically to house family units in a safe, structured and appropriate environment,” ICE Director Todd M. Lyons said in a statement this week. Services include medical screenings, infant care packages as well as classrooms and recreational spaces.

But concerns about Dilley are personal for Kheilin Valero Marcano, a Venezuelan immigrant detained with her husband and 1-year-old daughter, Amalia, in December and held for nearly two months.

When the child got a high fever, Valero Marcano said Dilley staff told her it was just a virus. Two weeks later, Amalia started vomiting, then losing weight. Valero Marcano said she took her to the Dilley doctor’s office at least eight times but was offered Tylenol and ibuprofen.

The baby was eventually sent to two hospitals, where doctors diagnosed COVID, bronchitis, pneumonia and stomach virus, she said.

ICE disputed Valero Marcano’s account, saying in a statement the baby “immediately received proper medical care” at Dilley before being sent to the hospital. Back in Dilley, “she was in the medical unit and received proper treatment and prescribed medicines,” it said.

The family’s return to Dilley coincided with a measles outbreak there. They were released earlier this month after their lawyers petitioned the court.

“I’m so worried for all the families who are still inside,” Valero Marcano said.

After more than two months in a cramped room at Dilley with three other families, the 13-year-old girl’s depression turned increasingly dark.

The eighth grader stopped eating after finding a worm in her food, family members said. Staff sometimes withheld medications she’d long been prescribed to keep her anxiety in check and help her sleep.

When a total lockdown was imposed, a guard blocked the teen from leaving the crowded room to join her mother and sister in the bathroom. She spiraled into crisis, and used a plastic knife from the cafeteria to cut her wrist.

“She said she didn’t want to live anymore because she preferred to die rather than having to keep living in confinement,” her mother, Andrea Armero, told the AP in a video call from Colombia, where the family was deported this month. The AP generally avoids identifying people who attempt or die by suicide.

The girl’s struggles began before she arrived at Dilley. Soon after starting middle school in Colombia, she learned a family member had sexually abused her younger sister. Armero said she saw no option but to leave and in early 2024 she and her daughters traveled to the U.S. border with Mexico, applying for asylum.

Living with family in Florida, the 13-year-old was doing well in school but sometimes experienced panic attacks about being sent back to Colombia. Under a psychiatrist’s care, she was prescribed anti-anxiety and anti-depression medications and regularly saw a therapist. Then, in December, ICE agents detained Armero and her daughters during a routine check-in.

At Dilley, the 13-year-old calmed herself by drawing, producing haunting pictures of a girl locked inside gates. But when she and other detainees took part in a protest after 5-year-old Liam and his father got to Dilley, guards took away drawing materials and ordered everyone to stay inside.

The teen’s mental health collapsed. She tried to harm herself with the plastic knife, Armero said, and repeatedly hit her head. The family was put into isolation without seeing a doctor, then deported to Colombia on Feb. 11 after a judge ordered them removed, she said.

Dilley discharge documents described “active problems,” including a “suicide attempt by cutting of wrist” and “self-harm,” in addition to a “history of post-traumatic stress disorder” and “history of anxiety.” AP also spoke with detainees and attorneys who independently described the girl’s suicide attempt.

Responding to questions from AP, a DHS official acknowledged there had been “a case of self-harm” inside the facility, but did not specify what had happened, or how staff handled the incident. When AP asked for details, DHS did not respond to follow-up questions.

“No child at Dilley … has been denied medical treatment or experienced a delayed medical assessment,” said Ryan Gustin, a spokesman for CoreCivic, the for-profit prison company that operates the facility under contract with ICE. Gustin declined to answer specific question about the 13-year-old girl, citing privacy rules.

On a phone call from inside Dilley, 13-year-old Gustavo Santino-Josa introduced himself to a reporter by name and the 9-digit identification number ICE assigned him when he was taken into custody with his mother.

“Until today I don’t know what we did wrong to get detained,” Gustavo said. “I’ve seen my mom cry almost daily and I ask God that we can go out and go home soon.”

He worried they might never be released.

“My mom says that as long as there is hope it is worth fighting for,” Gustavo said before handing the phone to his mother, Christian Hinojosa, the health care aide originally from Mexico.

“All his friends have left already,” his mother said. “Some were deported. Some got released recently. And it hurts. It hurts to see people leaving and you’re staying here.”

Dilley was built to hold 2,400 people, housed in clusters ICE calls “neighborhoods.” Bunk beds are arranged side-by-side for up to four families, frequently putting parents with young children in close quarters.

Once in full operation, Dilley is expected to generate about $180 million in annual revenue for CoreCivic, according to the company’s recent filing with securities regulators.

In a video on its website, CoreCivic says Dilley’s “open campus layout allows residents to move freely and unescorted throughout the day.”

It does not mention that parents and their children are locked inside.

In response to questions from the AP, CoreCivic’s Gustin said the staff at Dilley includes a pediatrician, pediatric nurse practitioner, other trained medical professionals, as well as mental health services to “meet the needs of children and families in our care.”

In talks with parents of children held at Dilley, however, the same problems come up repeatedly, said Welch, the children’s rights lawyer.

Kids cry often and don’t get enough sleep, in part because lights are on around the clock, she said. The water tastes terrible and causes stomachaches and rashes, so some families stick to what they can buy in the commissary.

Their children don’t eat enough and have lost weight, Welch said. There are classrooms, but instruction is limited to an hour daily, mostly filling out worksheets.

A 14-year-old girl, identified in court papers by the initials NVSM, reported there were tensions with up to 12 people sharing their room. At night when she and her mother tried to sleep, others insisted on turning up the TV.

“I feel very sad and stressed to be here,” the teen said in an account filed with the court that oversees a binding settlement governing detention and release of children. “My nerves are so high. I don’t know what is happening. My muscles will twitch because I’m so nervous and on edge.”

As the government’s detention of parents and their children came under scrutiny in 2014, an ICE official insisted that family detention centers, equipped with basketball courts and medical clinics, were “more like a summer camp.”

The characterization irritated McPherson, the child psychiatrist who, along with another physician, was retained in 2014 by DHS to inspect family detention centers. Their contracts were not renewed by the Trump administration last year after DHS announced sweeping staff reductions.

“Having a clean place to sleep, having food, that’s not the same thing as having family and community,” McPherson said.

The doctors’ investigations of family detention centers exposed consistently inadequate staffing and disregard by administrators for the trauma caused by detention, concerns they reported in 2018 to a Senate caucus set up to hear from whistleblowers.

At Dilley, the doctors noted a persistent shortage of pediatricians and the inability to hire a child psychiatrist from the time they began their inspections until they alerted senators.

Employees unsure how to deal with 2-year-olds biting and hitting each other placed the children and their parents in medical isolation for days, McPherson and her colleague told senators. Without supervision, a nurse at Dilley gave adult-strength hepatitis A shots to about 250 children in 2015, the American Immigration Lawyers Association reported.

DHS responded to many of the findings by making changes before a special committee recommended in late 2016 that the government discontinue family detention except in rare cases. The first Trump administration increased family detention before the Biden administration began phasing it out in 2021.

That the Trump administration is again holding families at Dilley after so many warnings feels “dystopian,” McPherson said.

“The decision to knowingly traumatize children and subject them to chronic stress, I just have no words for it,” she said.

Huddled around picnic tables at the Laredo migrant shelter, parents released from Dilley searched anxiously for flights back to the homes they left behind. They called relatives, friends, teachers, anyone who might help with money to get there.

The young Ecuadorian mom talked of returning to Minneapolis, where her 2-year-old daughter, born in the U.S., was staying with a friend. With her husband deported, parenting will be entirely her responsibility.

That means getting her 7-year-old back in school. Then the woman, who had a work permit and a job in a Minneapolis restaurant before being detained, needs to keep her children fed.

“Let’s go home, Mom, but don’t go back to work because ICE is going to pick you up again,” the little girl said. Her mother tried to reassure her.

That won’t happen, she said, because now they have a special paper telling ICE to leave them alone.

She hopes that’s a promise she can keep.

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AP Data Reporter Aaron Kessler contributed from Washington.

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Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/

NASA said Friday it’s adding an extra moon mission by Artemis astronauts before attempting a high-risk lunar landing with a crew.

The shake-up in the flight lineup and push for a faster pace came just two days after NASA’s new moon rocket returned to its hangar for more repairs and a safety panel warned the space agency to scale back its overly ambitious goals for humanity’s first lunar landing in more than half a century.

Artemis II — a lunar fly-around by four astronauts — is off until at least April because of rocket problems.

The follow-up mission — Artemis III — had been targeting a landing near the moon’s south pole by another pair of astronauts a year or two later. But with long gaps between flights and concern growing over the readiness of a lunar lander and moonwalking suits, NASA’s new administrator Jared Isaacman announced that mission would instead focus on launching a lunar lander into orbit around Earth for docking practice by Orion capsule astronauts in 2027.

The new plan calls for a moon landing — potentially even two moon landings — by astronauts in 2028.

“This is going to be our pathway back to the moon,” Isaacman said.

The first Artemis test flight was plagued by hydrogen fuel leaks and helium flow problems before liftoff without a crew in 2022, the same things that struck the Space Launch System rocket on the pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center earlier this month.

Isaacman stressed that “it should be incredibly obvious” that three years between flights is unacceptable and that he’d like to get it down to one year or even less.

During NASA’s storied Apollo program, he said, astronauts’ first flight to the moon was followed by two more missions before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. What’s more, he said, the Apollo moonshots followed one another in quick succession, just as the earlier Projects Mercury and Gemini had rapid flight rates, sometimes coming just a few months apart.

“No one here at NASA forgot their history books,” Issacman said. “We shouldn’t be comfortable with the current cadence. We should be getting back to basics and doing what we know works.”

To pick up the pace and reduce risk, NASA will standardize Space Launch System moon rockets moving forward, Isaacman said.

The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel recommended this week that NASA revise its objectives for Artemis III “given the demanding mission goals.” It’s urgent the space agency do that, the panel said, if the United States hopes to safely return astronauts to the moon. Isaacman said the revised Artemis flight plan addresses the panel’s concerns and is supported by industry and the Trump administration.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

LOS ANGELES — A Los Angeles firefighter testified in a newly released deposition that he told colleagues the ground was still smoldering from a brush fire days before authorities say it reignited into the most destructive blaze in city history.

Scott Pike, a firefighter with the Los Angeles Fire Department, said he told colleagues the ground was still hot when he was sent in to help clean up a New Year’s Day brush in the hillsides near the scenic Pacific Palisades neighborhood. Pike’s comments came in a sworn deposition taken in a lawsuit that was filed by fire victims. The deposition and those of other fire officials were made public this week after city attorneys had moved to keep it confidential for a month.

“I could feel the heat coming off of it, and I didn’t even want to use my gloved hand because it was hot, so I just kicked it with my boot to kind of expose it. And there was like red hot, like coals,” Pike said in the deposition. “I even heard crackling.”

Pike said he was working an overtime shift and mentioned it to other firefighters who were out in the field, but they didn’t seem to think much of it. He said he told a supervisor there were still hot spots, but it wasn’t his job to challenge orders.

“I felt like I got kind of blown off a little bit,” Pike said. “I saw something, I said something.”

Alexander Robertson, an attorney for the fire victims, said he obtained a court order to depose a dozen firefighters tasked with mopping up the Jan. 1 fire. Pike was the only one who indicated fire officials had been warned the blaze had not been fully extinguished when they packed up and left the scene, Robertson said.

The fire, which left 12 dead in the hillside neighborhoods across Pacific Palisades and Malibu, was one of two blazes that broke out on Jan. 7, 2025, killing more than 30 people in all and destroying over 17,000 homes and buildings while burning for days in Los Angeles County.

Authorities have said the blaze was a reignition of the New Year’s Day fire, which federal prosecutors say was started by a man who lived in the area. They charged Jonathan Rinderknecht in October with starting the Palisades fire. Rinderknecht has pleaded not guilty, and his attorney says he’s being used as a scapegoat for the Los Angeles Fire Department’s failure to fully extinguish the earlier blaze.

Alleged fire department failures are at the center of the lawsuit by Palisades fire victims against the city. The lawsuit also alleges the city’s water department failed to provide adequate water resources for firefighting.

An interim LA fire chief previously said such fires linger in root systems and can reach depths of 15 to 20 feet (4.6 to 6.1 meters), making them undetectable by thermal imaging cameras.

Pike’s testimony was offset by the account of Los Angeles Battalion Chief Martin Mullen, who said in his deposition that he personally walked the perimeter of the Jan. 1 fire’s burn area four times throughout the day with different assistant chiefs in a process called “cold-trailing,” where firefighters look for hot spots, ember cast and smoke or heat emanating from the ground.

Earlier in the day, he identified a hot spot that he reported to the captain. When he returned later, it was fully extinguished, he said. He said he did not find any hot spots or issues during any of his other walks and by the time he left the scene the fire was “absolutely” extinguished.

“It was a great mop up they did because if they didn’t, I’d still be there,” he said.

Robertson, the plaintiff’s attorney, said the fire department and Mayor Karen Bass’s office have engaged in a “cover-up to conceal and suppress the truth about the Palisades Fire.”

“We will hold them accountable,” he said.

Yusef Robb, an adviser to Bass, said these revelations are alarming. Bass has directed the fire department to commission an independent report on the handling of the New Year’s Day fire.

“For more than a year, Mayor Bass has been extremely public about her demand for transparency and accountability to inform ongoing Fire Department reforms, and because those affected deserve nothing less,” Robb said in an email.

Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Jaime Moore, who was appointed in October, is concerned about the differences in the firefighters’ testimonies, the department said in an email.

“That concern underscores why the ongoing independent investigation is so important, and why the Chief is fully committed to providing complete cooperation on behalf of himself and the Department,” the email said.

CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y. — A New York businesswoman was sentenced Friday to nine years in federal prison over a financial scheme that ripped off more than $30 million from foreign investors and funneled some of the stolen money into U.S. political campaigns, including a fundraiser for President Donald Trump.

Sherry Xue Li was also ordered to forfeit $31.5 million, as well as property at three locations, and to make restitution to her victims.

The 54-year-old Oyster Bay resident, who has been detained since her arrest in 2022, pleaded guilty last year to money laundering conspiracy and conspiracy to defraud the U.S. by obstructing the Federal Election Commission’s administration of campaign finance laws.

Her co-defendant, Lianbo Wang, also pleaded guilty to similar charges and was sentenced to five years in prison.

Li’s lawyer didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment Friday, but U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella said she “faces justice for her cynical schemes.”

“She peddled false promises and outright lies to her many investors and stuffed her pockets while they suffered devastating losses,” he said in a statement.

Prosecutors say Li and Wang for years convinced investors, many of them from China, into contributing $500,000 each to a fictitious development project, with a false promise that it would guarantee them lawful permanent resident status in the U.S.

Instead, the two, who are naturalized U.S. citizens, used millions of dollars from those investments for personal expenses, including clothing, jewelry, housing, vacation travel and upscale dining, according to prosecutors.

They say Li and Wang also sold investors access to U.S. politicians and used the proceeds to make illegal contributions to U.S. political campaigns and committees.

In one instance, the two charged investors $93,000 each for admission to a 2017 Trump fundraiser, then used the money to make illegal donations totaling $600,000 to the committee hosting the event.

Li even took a photograph with Trump and his wife, Melania, at the event, and used the image to solicit donations to the fake development project, prosecutors said.

The campaigns and committees were unaware of the scheme, and no allegations of criminal wrongdoing were lodged against them, prosecutors said.

HARRISBURG, Pa. — Sofia Tepichin was about 30 minutes into her club soccer team practice in October when she spotted a fast-approaching defender. She tapped the ball away and hopped over the defender’s outstretched foot, came down awkwardly, and heard a “pop.”

She immediately fell to the ground, pain shooting through her left knee and knew it wasn’t good. It was, she said, “heartbreaking.”

“And I knew personally that I tore my ACL,” Tepichin said.

Tepichin joined the growing ranks of female high school athletes tearing their anterior cruciate ligament, a devastating knee injury that researchers are pressing the sports world to take more seriously.

Decades of research on prevention methods is available, but parents, researchers and trainers say that teams, coaches and leagues aren’t doing enough to protect the girls and educate parents.

Sports fans hear often about high-profile athletes like U.S. Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn tearing their ACLs, and many ACL injuries are chalked up to bad luck or a part of sports that will continue to happen at all competitive levels.

Still, high school-age female athletes suffer these injuries at much higher rates than their male counterparts — up to eight times more likely, one study says — and adults, most often in noncontact situations in sports that require fast changes in direction, researchers say.

Biomechanics researchers, trainers and physical therapists say there are pre-workout warm ups and strengthening routines — such as FIFA 11+ or PEP — that can at least reduce the risk of an injury that takes such a high physical and mental toll on young athletes.

But, they say, most coaches lack training or expert help, and high school girls compete in settings with far fewer resources than the professional and collegiate levels. As a result, risk-reduction routines are rarely included in day-to-day coaching curricula and practices.

“The real crime in this is that the data has been out there for 25 years,” said Holly Silvers-Granelli, a physical therapist and biomechanics researcher who advises athletes, professional teams and major sports leagues on injury prevention. “People are clamoring for answers, and the answers are largely there.”

The trendline of ACL injuries isn’t entirely clear, but the National ACL Injury Coalition — formed by the Aspen Institute and the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York — said its analysis of data from high school athletic trainers showed that the average annual ACL injury rate for high school athletes grew almost 26% from 2007 to 2022.

The rate for girls grew more than 32%, compared to 14.5% for boys, it said.

When they get injured, high school athletes and their parents often find themselves on their own to deal with it. ACL injuries can require surgery and a year of rehab, physical therapy and strength training, which insurance may not fully cover.

Recovery changes their routine and identity: They miss out on the camaraderie of the team and stand on the sidelines, which can be as hard as the physical trauma, parents say.

Many high school athletes who tear their ACL never perform again at the same level, if they even return to the sport, the National ACL Injury Coalition says. And once injured, they carry a heightened risk of another ACL injury and long-term complications like degenerative joint disease, researchers say.

The coalition has urged the sports world to treat ACL injuries like brain injuries, now that professional and youth sports have tried to improve training, rules and equipment standards to prevent and detect concussions.

Sophia Gerardi, a sophomore at Pennsylvania’s Apollo Ridge High School who tore her ACL during a basketball game in December, was told by her doctors that she’ll forever have to wear a knee brace to play sports. She had surgery in January, will miss volleyball season and hopes to be back for next winter’s basketball season.

Like many girls who tore their ACL, she didn’t recall getting any ACL injury-prevention training.

Surveys of coaches show that many don’t know about risk-reduction programs, aren’t trained to do them or aren’t encouraged to learn about them, said Vince Minjares, who leads the Aspen Institute’s ACL injury prevention project. Some coaches tell Minjares that it takes too much time.

He hopes that’s changing.

This spring, the American Youth Soccer Organization — one of major national organizations in U.S. youth soccer — will roll out new age- and stage-based neuromuscular training programs aimed at preventing ACL injuries through warm-ups.

Coaches will get a regimen of exercises in bite-sized chunks, with video instructions. The goal is to build good habits before preteens age into more physical and demanding competition.

“My biggest shock was that this didn’t already exist,” said Scott Snyder, AYSO’s senior director of programs and education. “Everyone I talk to says, ‘Yeah, that makes perfect sense,’ but nobody’s done it yet.”

Last year, biomechanical researchers at the Scottish Rite for Children hospital in metropolitan Dallas began providing high school teams with resources typically only available or affordable at the professional and collegiate levels.

They created pre-season injury-prevention trainings, tailored for female athletes, to improve strength and movement quality. At the start of the eight-week program, each athlete gets a free motion-capture 3D-level assessment to identify weaknesses in strength, movement or balance. Another assessment at the end determines if the program reduced risk.

Future trainings could include nutrition and sleep, said Sophia Ulman, who directs the hospital’s Movement Science Laboratory.

“My team and I got tired of studying ‘why, why, why’ when there’s so many different possibilities to answer that question. And we wanted to move into the ‘what is the solution,’” said Ulman. Other biomechanics labs in the U.S. are trying similar outreach, she said.

One of the teams that participated was Plano East High School in Texas, where players — including Tepichin — had suffered a rash of ACL tears the past couple years.

Cristy Cooley, Plano East’s coach, said that getting a hands-on demonstration from trained professionals in proper exercises and movement patterns makes a big difference.

“It’s one thing talking about it,” Cooley said. “But it’s a totally different thing to show us.”

Like other parents, Tiffany Jacob said she learned a lot about preventing ACL injuries that she wished she had known before her daughter — East Plano sophomore Aliya Jacob — tore her ACL last February. For instance, the surgeon told them three days a week of strength training is an absolute must for soccer players.

“Something’s got to change,” Tiffany Jacob said. “Coaches, clubs, something. They have to do something to prevent this because it’s just such a horrible injury.”

Aliya — who knows at least seven other female soccer players who tore an ACL, her mother said — is back playing for East Plano now. She endured twice-a-week physical therapy, the isolation of rehabilitation and, her mother said, “figuring out who you are when you’re not playing soccer.”

Tepichin, a high school senior, recalls her surgeon telling her to take a couple days to get all her sadness and anger out — and then devote herself to her recovery.

She’ll miss her last year of playing high school and club team soccer. Her next time on a field could be for Saint Vincent College in Pennsylvania, where she committed to the NCAA Division III team.

Tepichin has seen a sports psychologist, gotten comfort from others who underwent the surgery — her sister, her father and her friend — and found a new routine after having been constantly busy with two soccer teams and a job.

“There’s not a day that I go that I’m not working out or doing something,” she said, “or getting better for my health and my recovery.”

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Follow Marc Levy at http://twitter.com/timelywriter

NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Humans and Neanderthals cozied up from time to time when they lived in the same areas tens of thousands of years ago. But we don’t know much about who got with whom, or why.

A new genetic analysis offers some ancient gossip: The pairings were more often female humans with male Neanderthals.

How exactly this happened remains a huge question mark. Did human women venture into Neanderthal populations, or were the Neanderthal males drawn to larger human enclaves? Were these interactions peaceful, confusing, secretive or even violent?

“I don’t know if we’ll ever get a definitive answer to how this happened, since we can’t travel back in time,” said population genetics expert Xinjun Zhang with the University of Michigan, commenting on the new analysis.

But the study, published Thursday in the journal Science, shows “that whenever Neanderthals and modern humans have mated, there has been a preference for male Neanderthals and female modern humans, as opposed to the other way around,” said author Alexander Platt, who studies genetics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Scientists know that Neanderthals and humans mated because there is a small but important percentage of Neanderthal DNA in most modern humans outside of sub-Saharan Africa — including genes that can help us fight some diseases and make us more susceptible to others.

But they have also known that the Neanderthal DNA is not distributed evenly throughout the human genome.

In particular, there is a surprising lack of Neanderthal DNA in the human X chromosome, one of the bundles of genes in each cell known as a sex chromosome, compared with the amount of Neanderthal DNA in the other, non-sex chromosomes in the cell.

Scientists thought that maybe the genes in those locations were simply not beneficial – or even harmful. Perhaps people with those gene patterns didn’t survive as well so those genes were filtered out by evolution over time.

Or, they thought, maybe the difference could be explained by how the two species intermingled.

To try to solve the riddle, Platt and colleagues looked instead at the Neanderthal genome and the human DNA that got interspersed during a “mating event” 250,000 years ago.

When comparing these genes, they found more of a human fingerprint on the Neanderthal X chromosome – the same chromosome that, in humans, has less Neanderthal DNA than would be expected.

The most likely explanation for this mirror image pattern is mating behavior. That’s because of the way sex chromosomes are passed from parents to children, explained Platt. Because genetic females have two X chromosomes and genetic males have one X and one Y chromosomes, two out of every three X chromosomes in a population, on average, are inherited from people’s mothers.

If more human females mated with Neanderthal males than the other way around, over thousands of years you would expect to see just what they found: more human DNA in Neanderthal X chromosomes and less Neanderthal DNA in human X chromosomes.

“I think that they’ve taken some really important steps in filling missing pieces to the puzzle,” said Joshua Akey, who studies evolutionary genomics at Princeton University and wasn’t involved with the new study.

The study can’t totally rule out other explanations. For example, Zhang said, it’s possible that the offspring of human males and Neanderthal females just didn’t survive as well.

But the simplest and most likely, explanation, the study found, is also the most interesting: “It’s not the result of a strictly Darwinian survival of the fittest,” Platt said. “It’s really the result of how we interact with each other, and what our culture and society and behavior is like.”

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

NEW YORK — The lawyer for deposed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro asked a judge on Thursday to toss out the indictment against his client on the grounds that the United States has unconstitutionally violated his rights to defend himself by blocking Venezuelan funds to pay his legal costs.

Attorney Barry Pollack filed papers in Manhattan federal court, saying the U.S. government has violated his client’s due process rights by blocking funds to defend him that should come from the Venezuelan government.

“Mr. Maduro, as Venezuela’s head of state, has both a right and an expectation to have legal fees associated with these charges funded by the government of Venezuela,” Pollack wrote.

The court submission included a declaration from Maduro in which he said he understood that under the laws and practices of Venezuela, “I am entitled to have the government of Venezuela pay for my legal defense.”

“I have relied on this expectation and cannot afford to pay for my own legal defense,” he said.

Maduro added that he has “been working” with Pollack on his legal defense and that he “is my counsel of choice.” The declaration was signed “President Nicolas Maduro Moros.”

Maduro and his wife have been in custody in New York since they were seized from their Venezuelan home in early January in a stealth nighttime U.S. military operation. They’ve pleaded not guilty.

A 25-page indictment against Maduro accused him and others of working with drug cartels and members of the military to facilitate the shipment of thousands of tons of cocaine into the U.S. If convicted, both he and his wife face life in prison.

As part of the purported conspiracy, Maduro and his wife allegedly ordering kidnappings, beatings and murders of those who owed them drug money, according to the indictment. It said that included the killing of a local drug boss in Caracas.

Pollack told a Manhattan judge in an email last week that the U.S. Treasury Department had blocked the authorization of legal fees that the government of Venezuela is required to pay for Maduro, though it has allowed fees to be paid for the defense of first lady Cilia Flores.

Pollack said that the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which administers sanctions against Venezuela, had granted permission on Jan. 9 approving the payment of legal fees by the Venezuelan government. He said the department rescinded the authorization “without explanation” less than three hours later.

“The conduct of the United States government not only undermines Mr. Maduro’s rights but also this Court’s mandate to provide a fair trial to all defendants who come before it in accordance with the protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution,” Pollack wrote in court papers submitted Thursday.

“The United States government, even while authorizing myriad commercial transactions with Venezuela, is prohibiting counsel from receiving untainted funds from the government of Venezuela, despite Venezuela’s obligation to fund Mr. Maduro’s defense. Any trial that proceeds under these circumstances will be constitutionally defective and cannot result in a verdict that will withstand later challenge,” he added.

If the judge leaves the charges against Maduro in place, Pollack said he wants to resign so the court can appoint other counsel to represent Maduro.

The dispute over Maduro’s legal fees is intimately linked to U.S. foreign policy. The first Trump administration cut ties with Maduro in 2019, recognizing the then- opposition head of the National Assembly as Venezuela’s legitimate leader. The Biden administration hewed closely to the same policy.

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Goodman reported from Miami.

KINSHASA, Congo — The United States and Congo signed a $1.2 billion health partnership Thursday, the two countries’ governments said in a joint statement.

The Department of State said it will provide up to $900 million over the next five years to support the Central African country to fight HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, maternal and child mortality, and other infectious diseases. Congo’s government will commit to increasing its own domestic health expenditures by $300 million over the same period, according to the statement.

It is the latest agreement the U.S. has entered with more than a dozen African countries, many of them hit by U.S. aid cuts, including Congo.

U.S. aid cuts have crippled health systems across the developing world, including in Africa, where many countries relied on the funding for crucial programs, including those responding to outbreaks of disease.

The State Department has signed 19 bilateral global health partnerships with African countries as of Thursday.

The Trump administration says the new “America First” global health funding agreements are meant to increase self-sufficiency and eliminate what it calls ideological priorities and waste in international assistance. The deals replace a patchwork of previous health agreements under the now-dismantled United States Agency for International Development.

Analysts say the new approach to global health aligns with U.S. President Donald Trump’s pattern of dealing with other nations transactionally, using direct talks with foreign governments to promote his agenda abroad.

The announcement of the partnership between the U.S. and Congo comes on the same day the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention raised concerns about provisions in some agreements that require countries to share data with Washington on viruses that could trigger outbreaks within their borders as a condition for receiving funding.

“There are huge concerns regarding data, regarding pathogen sharing,” Africa CDC director-general Dr. Jean Kaseya told reporters.

On Wednesday, negotiations on a health funding deal between the U.S. and Zimbabwe collapsed after the African nation rejected a requirement to share sensitive health data.

It is unclear whether such a requirement is also part of the health partnership between the U.S. and Congo.

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Banchereau reported from Dakar, Senegal. Associated Press reporter Justin Kabumba in Goma, Congo contributed to this report.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Suno CEO Mikey Shulman pulls up a chair to the recording studio desk where a research scientist at his artificial intelligence company is creating a new song.

The flute line sounds promising.

The percussion needs work.

Neither of them is playing an instrument. They type some descriptive words – Afrobeat, flute, drums, 90 beats per minute – and out comes an infectious rhythm that livens up the 19th century office building where Suno is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They toggle some editing tools to refine the new track.

Much like early experiences with ChatGPT or AI text-to-image generators, trying to make an AI-generated song on platforms like Suno or its rival, Udio, can seem a little like magic. It takes no musical skills, practice or emotional wellspring to conjure up a new tune inspired by almost any of the world’s musical traditions.

But the process of training AI on beloved musicians of the past and present to produce synthetic approximations of their work has angered the music industry and brought much of its legal power against the two startups.

Now, after their users have flooded the internet with millions of AI-generated songs, some of which have found themselves on streaming services like Spotify, the leaders of Suno and New York-based Udio are trying to negotiate with record labels to secure a foothold in an industry that shunned them.

“We have always thought that working together with the music industry instead of against the music industry is the only way that this works,” said Shulman, who co-founded Suno in 2022. “Music is so culturally important that it doesn’t make sense to have an AI world and a non-AI world of music.”

Sony Music, Universal Music and Warner Records sued the two startups for copyright infringement in 2024, alleging that they were exploiting the recorded works of their artists.

Since then, the pair have strived to make peace with the industry. Suno, now valued at $2.45 billion, last year struck a settlement with Warner, and Udio has signed licensing agreements with Warner, Universal and independent label Merlin. Only one major label, Sony, has not settled with either startup as the lawsuits move forward in Boston and New York federal courts.

The first of the settlement deals, between Udio and Universal, led to an exodus of frustrated Udio users who were blocked from downloading their own AI-generated tracks. But Udio CEO Andrew Sanchez said he’s optimistic about what the future will bring as his company adapts its business model to let fans of willing artists use AI to play with and potentially alter their works.

“Having a close relationship with the music industry is elemental to us,” Sanchez said in an interview. “Users really want to have an anchor to their favorite artists. They want to have an anchor to their favorite songs.”

Many professional musicians are skeptical. Singer-songwriter Tift Merritt, co-chair of the Artists Rights Alliance, recently helped organize a “Stealing Isn’t Innovation” campaign by artists — including Cyndi Lauper and Bonnie Raitt — to urge AI companies to pursue licensing deals and partnerships rather than build platforms without regard for copyright law.

“The economy of AI music is built totally on the intellectual property, globally, of musicians everywhere without transparency, consent, or payment. So, I know they value their intellectual property, but ours has been consumed in order to replace us,” Merritt said in an interview in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Shulman contends technology “evolves very often faster than the law,” and his company tries to be thoughtful about “not breaking the law” but also “deliver products that the world really wants.”

When the music industry first confronted Suno over alleged copyright infringement, the company’s antagonistic response alienated professionals like Merritt.

Symbolizing the divide was a clip last year in which Shulman was quoted as saying, “it’s not really enjoyable” to make music most of the time. Shulman started learning piano at age 4 but later dropped it. He took up bass guitar at 12, playing in rock bands in high school and college. He said that experience gave him some of the best moments of his life.

“You need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software,” Shulman said on the “The Twenty Minute VC” podcast. “I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”

“Clearly, I wish I had said different words,” Shulman told the AP. The context, he added, was that “to produce perfect music takes a lot of repetitions and not all of those minutes are the most enjoyable bits of making music. On the whole, obviously, music is amazing. I play music every day for fun.”

Sanchez, the Udio CEO, also would like people to know he loves making music. He’s an opera-loving tenor who’s sung in choirs and grew up crooning Luciano Pavarotti in his family’s home in Buffalo, New York.

Founded in 2023 by a group that included several AI researchers from Google, the startup now employs about 25 people. It has fewer users and raised less capital than Suno, reducing its leverage in its negotiations with record labels.

But like ride-hailing company Lyft, which pitched itself as the friendly alternative to Uber’s aggressive expansion tactics more than a decade ago, Udio embraces its underdog status.

“So many tech companies actively cultivate this I-am-a-tech-company-crusader and that’s part of their identity,” Sanchez said. “That alienates people who are creative and I am uniformly opposed to that.”

Sanchez said he knows not every artist is going to embrace AI, but he hopes those who leave the room after talking with him realize he’s not imposing a kind of “AI bravado.”

“If you took what we’re doing and pretended that the word AI wasn’t a part of it, people would be like, ‘Oh my gosh. This is so cool.’”

In the basement office of his Philadelphia, Mississippi home, Christopher “Topher” Townsend is a one-man band, making and marketing Billboard-chart-topping gospel music — none of which he sings himself — and doing it in record time.

The rapper, whose lyrics reflect his political conservatism, downloaded Suno in October and, within days, created Solomon Ray, a fictional singer that Townsend calls an extension of himself.

Townsend uses ChatGPT to write lyrics, Suno to generate songs and other AI tools to create cover art and promotional videos under the Solomon Ray name.

“I can see why artists would be afraid,” Townsend said. ”(Solomon Ray) has an immaculate voice. He doesn’t get sick. You know, he doesn’t have to take leave, he doesn’t get injured and he can work faster than I can work.”

Trying to dispel that fear for aspiring artists is Jonathan Wyner, a professor of music production and engineering at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, who sees generative AI as just another tool.

“To the creative musician, AI represents both enormous potential benefits in terms of streamlining things and frankly making kinds of music-making possible that weren’t possible before, and making it more accessible to people who want to make music,” he said.

Such a vision remains a tough sell for artists who feel their work has already been exploited. Merritt says she’s particularly concerned about labels making deals with AI companies that leave out independent artists.

Neither Sanchez nor Shulman was invited to the Grammy Awards in February, but both spent time schmoozing at the sidelines of the event.

“I think AI music is still officially not allowed, and my hope is that some of these rules change over the next year, and then maybe the 2027 Grammys, I’ll get an invite,” Shulman said.

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O’Brien reported from Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York. Ngowi reported from Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts. AP journalists Sophie Bates in Philadelphia, Mississippi and Allen G. Breed in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed to this report.

HONG KONG — U.S. futures fell while Asian shares mostly advanced on Thursday after strong-than-expected earnings from chipmaker Nvidia helped ease some investor worries over the artificial intelligence boom.

Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 crossed the 59,000 mark for the first time, although it later gave up some gains, rising 0.2% to 58,715.33. Shares of SoftBank Group, which has a focus on AI technology, were up 3.5%. Chipmaker Tokyo Electron lost 2.8%.

Share prices also pushed higher after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi appointed two economists viewed as favoring keeping interest rates low to the board of the central bank.

South Korea’s Kospi surged 2.3% to 6,222.29, driven by gains for tech-related stocks. The index surpassed the 6,000 level for the first time on Wednesday. It has gained 44% since the beginning of this year after enduring a year of political upheavals that ended with former President Yoon Suk Yeol being sentenced to life in prison.

Shares of Samsung Electronics, the country’s biggest listed company, jumped 5.5%. Chipmaker SK Hynix gained 2.5%.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng lost 0.4% to 26,656.29. The Shanghai Composite index edged 0.1% lower to 4,144.08.

In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 added 0.5% to 9,174.50.

Taiwan’s Taiex picked up 0.2%, while India’s Sensex traded 0.3% higher.

Nvidia’s earnings influence global financial markets both because it is the world’s most valuable company and the biggest S&P 500 constituent and because it is benefiting from advances in AI-related technologies.

Its latest quarterly revenue jumped 73% from a year earlier to $68 billion. The California-based company also gave a forecast of $78 billion for revenue in the current quarter, which exceeded analysts’ expectations.

Its CEO, Jensen Huang, said demand for Nvidia chips is still “skyrocketing.”

“AI is here, AI is not going to go back,” Huang said during a conference call.

Nvidia rose 0.2% in afterhours trading following its earnings announcement, which came after markets closed on Wednesday.

Its robust earnings helped alleviate some concerns over whether the AI craze is real and whether huge investments will pay off. But many investors remain cautious.

Thomas Mathews, head of markets for Asia Pacific at Capital Economics, however argued in a research note on Thursday that “strong profit growth, as emphasized by recent earnings reports”, including Nvidia’s, is a key reason to think the S&P 500 will do well in 2026. He forecast the S&P 500 at 8,000 by the year’s end.

On Wednesday, the S&P 500 rose 0.8% to 6,946.13. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 0.6% to 49,482.15, and the Nasdaq composite gained 1.3% to 23,152.08.

In other dealings early Thursday, U.S. benchmark crude oil gained 16 cents to $65.58 per barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, rose 21 cents to $71.90 a barrel.

Gold and silver prices fell on Thursday. The price of gold lost 0.3% and the price of silver fell 2%.

The U.S. dollar fell to 155.89 Japanese yen from 156.39 yen. The euro was trading at $1.1817, up from $1.1812.

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AP writers Stan Choe and Michael Liedtke contributed.

WASHINGTON — A prominent Supreme Court litigator who also published a popular blog about the nation’s highest court was convicted Wednesday of tax evasion and related charges stemming from his secretive lifestyle as an ultra-high-stakes poker player.

A federal jury found SCOTUSblog co-founder Thomas Goldstein guilty of 12 of 16 counts after a six-week trial in Greenbelt, Maryland. Jurors deliberated for approximately two days before convicting Goldstein of one count of tax evasion, four of eight counts of aiding and assisting in the preparation of false tax returns, four counts of willful failure to timely pay taxes, and three counts of false statements on loan applications.

Goldstein was charged with failing to pay taxes on millions of dollars in gambling income. Justice Department prosecutors also accused him of diverting money from his law firm to pay gambling debts and falsely deducting gambling debts as business expenses.

Goldstein argued more than 40 cases before the Supreme Court before retiring in 2023. He was part of the legal team that represented Democrat Al Gore in the Supreme Court litigation over the 2000 election ultimately won by Republican President George W. Bush.

Goldstein’s indictment a year ago sent shockwaves through the legal community in Washington, D.C. Many friends and colleagues didn’t know the extent of his gambling.

“He lied to everyone around him,” Justice Department prosecutor Sean Beaty said during the trial’s closing arguments.

Defense attorney Jonathan Kravis said the government rushed to judgment and failed to adequately investigate the case. Goldstein made “innocent mistakes” on his tax returns but didn’t cheat on his taxes or knowingly make false statements on his tax returns, Kravis told jurors.

“A mistake is not a crime,” he said.

Beaty described Goldstein as a “willful tax cheat.” Goldstein raked in approximately $50 million in poker winnings in 2016, including roughly $22 million that he won playing in Asia, according to Beaty. The prosecutor said the tax evasion scheme “fell apart” when another gambler, feeling cheated by Goldstein, notified the IRS about a 2016 debt owed to the attorney.

“It was a textbook tax-evasion scheme,” Beaty said. “And Mr. Goldstein executed that nearly flawlessly.”

The trial, which started Jan. 12, included testimony by “Spider-Man” star Tobey Maguire, an avid poker player who enlisted Goldstein’s help in recovering a gambling debt from a billionaire.

Goldstein, who testified in his own defense, denied any wrongdoing. He has said he repeatedly instructed his law firm’s staff and accountants to correctly characterize his personal expenses. In a 2014 email, he told a firm employee that “we always play completely by the rules.”

Goldstein also was accused of lying to IRS agents and hiding his gambling debts from his accountants, employees and mortgage lenders. He omitted a $15 million gambling debt from mortgage loan applications while looking for a new home in Washington, D.C., with his wife in 2021, his indictment alleges.

“He was thinking only of his wife when he left off the gambling debts,” Kravis said.

Researchers say seven seal pups have tested positive for an avian flu virus at California’s Año Nuevo State Park and several more are showing signs of the illness. The outbreak has prompted park officials to cancel the park’s popular seal-watching tours for the remainder of the seal breeding season.

Researchers with University of California-Santa Cruz and University of California-Davis made the announcement Wednesday, calling it the first detected outbreak of the virus among marine mammals in California.

The worldwide bird flu outbreak that began in 2020 has led to the deaths of millions of domesticated birds and spread to wildlife around the world, and seals and sea lions appear to be particularly vulnerable to the disease. The virus has led to the deaths of thousands of sea lions in Chile and Peru, thousands of elephant seals in Argentina, and hundreds of seals in New England in recent years.

The virus is considered to be a low risk to humans, but officials said people should avoid approaching the seals and keep pets away from the animals.

Thousands of elephant seals come to Año Nuevo State Park, about 90 minutes south of San Francisco, every winter to fight, mate and give birth. The annual spectacle draws tourists and wildlife watchers eager to see the largest seals on the planet, some watching from public viewing areas and others signing up for docent-led guided walks through the breeding grounds, known as rookeries.

But for now, the viewing area is closed, and tours at Año Nuevo have been canceled “out of an abundance of caution,” said Jordan Burgess, the deputy district superintendent of the California Department of Parks and Recreation. Officials hope the move will help prevent any spread of the disease that might be caused by people tracking through the areas where the elephant seals are living, she said.

“We’re definitely not panicking about human exposure at this point,” but rather trying to ensure the health of the seals and people in general, Burgess said.

Christine Johnson, the director of the Institute for Pandemic Insights at UC Davis’ Weill School of Veterinary Medicine, said the outbreak was spotted quickly because researchers have been on high alert in recent years, watching for any sign of the arrival of the disease. After sick and dead animals were spotted on Feb. 19 and 20, researchers collected samples for testing at the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory System. The screening showed the animals were infected with HPAI H5N1 virus.

Tests on samples from about 30 more animals are still pending, Johnson said.

The university researchers are working with state and federal wildlife managers and The West Coast Marine Mammal Stranding Network to monitor the animals.

NEW YORK — Light snow moved through parts of the Northeast on Wednesday as people heading to work and school were trying to navigate their way out of a massive storm that dropped piles of powder on streets and sidewalks from Maryland to Maine.

One to 3 inches (2.5 to 7.6 centimeters) of snow was expected — a far cry from the last storm — but any snow that melted likely froze overnight, resulting in patchy black ice to make for some slippery roads, the National Weather Service said.

The gigantic snowstorm this week left cities scrambling to clear towering heaps that were not showing signs of melting anytime soon.

By Tuesday evening, New York City had spread 143 million pounds (65 million kilograms) of salt, according to Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and signed up at least 3,500 people as emergency shovelers. The $30-per-hour shifts involve clearing snow across public streets and bus stops.

But there was plenty more work left to do, especially for the many people with disabilities.

Jeff Peters, spokesperson for the Center for Independence of the Disabled, New York, described parts of the city as impassable islands.

“You’ll find a portion of a sidewalk that is clear, and then there’s maybe a 6-inch (15-centimeter) pathway that can only be walked with one foot in front of the other and no room for a stroller, rollator, walker or crutches,” Peters said. “Then you get to the corner and not only is it unshoveled, but you have basically a glacier at the end of it.”

Tina Guenette, who uses a motorized wheelchair, had to shovel out her yard this week after more than 33 inches (84 centimeters) fell in Harrisville, Rhode Island, a town about 17 miles (27 kilometers) northwest of Providence.

“I really have no choice if my service dog wants to go outside,” Guenette said Tuesday. Harrisville has a volunteer snow-shoveling program, but it hasn’t had volunteers for the last few years, she said.

Monday’s storm blanketed the region with snow, canceled flights, disrupted transit, downed power lines and killed at least one person. More than 3 feet (0.9 meters) fell in Rhode Island — surpassing snow totals from the historic Blizzard of 1978 that struck the Northeast, the weather service said.

Meteorologist Ryan Maue, former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said if all of the snow that fell from Maryland to Maine fell just on Manhattan, the snow would tower over a mile high.

In Newport, Rhode Island, Joseph Boutros, 21, was found unconscious inside a vehicle covered in snow Monday night, the city’s police department said in a statement. The Salve Regina University student was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead due to carbon monoxide poisoning, police said.

In New York City, workers will use massive basins of warm water where large amounts of snow and ice will be dumped, acting Sanitation Commissioner Javier Lojan said. They helped melt 23 million pounds (11.5 metric tons) of snow during last month’s storm.

In snowbound Providence, Rhode Island, the city is taking snow to five locations, according to Josh Estrella, communications director for the city government. The challenge is so great that additional dumping grounds may be added, Estrella said.

Some large school districts moved back to in-person classes on Wednesday, including Philadelphia, which had switched to online learning during the first two days of the week. Schools reopened in Boston. They had been closed since last week for the winter vacation break.

In New York City, more than 900,000 students in the nation’s largest public school system had a regular day Tuesday. Many students and their caregivers scrambled over mountainous snow banks and dodged salt spreaders during the morning drop-off.

Power had returned for many of the hundreds of thousands who had lost electricity in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware and Rhode Island. But nearly 160,000 customers in Massachusetts were still without power early Wednesday.

Thousands of flights in and out of the U.S. have been canceled in recent days. By Wednesday, the disruptions seemed to be subsiding, with nearly 200 grounded, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware. Rhode Island’s T.F. Green International Airport reopened Tuesday. Some flights departed Wednesday, while others were canceled.

When Jamie Meyers’ flight landed in New York from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Tuesday evening, the cabin full of relieved passengers burst into applause. The Manhattan resident was supposed to arrive home Sunday but faced a cancellation and significant delay.

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Golden reported from Seattle and Boone reported from Boise, Idaho. Associated Press writers Jennifer Peltz, Michael R. Sisak and Philip Marcelo in New York; Mike Catalini in Morrisville, Pennsylvania; Mark Scolforo in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire; and Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu contributed.

For some young children in Columbus, Ohio, reading assessments don’t start in the kindergarten classroom — they happen first in the doctor’s office.

With concerns rising about lagging childhood literacy rates across the country, Nationwide Children’s Hospital has begun screening children’s literacy skills starting at age 3 during pediatrician visits. The idea is to catch reading struggles early on and guide parents on how to help their kids.

“They are all doing developmental screenings, they’re all talking to parents repeatedly,” said Sara Bode, the hospital’s medical director of school-based health. “So this is an opportunity.”

The pediatric hospital chose clinics to provide the literacy screenings largely based on their proximity to schools with lower performance scores on kindergarten readiness assessments. Across Columbus City Schools, more than 63% of kindergarteners were behind on language and literacy skills during the 2024-2025 school year, according to state kindergarten readiness assessment, or KRA, data.

Concerns about childhood literacy extend far beyond Columbus. Nationally, the percentage of fourth graders considered proficient in reading sits just above 30%, according to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card. Reading proficiency has dipped 4 percentage points since 2019 as schools have struggled to make up for pandemic learning losses.

Literacy screenings are not typically conducted in medical settings, but several prominent pediatric care centers, including Boston Children’s Hospital, promote early literacy resources to families in recognition of reading’s importance for a child’s development.

Kids who enter kindergarten with lower reading ability often struggle to catch up in later grades. Almost three-fourths of kindergarteners who test in the bottom 20% of students for readiness exams remain in the bottom 20% of their class by fifth grade, according to The Children’s Reading Foundation, a nonprofit organization.

Physicians’ assessments of childhood development have often focused more on other milestones, such as walking or talking on time. But a child could ace a standard pediatric screening and still be behind in other areas needed to be ready for kindergarten, Bode said.

To address that dilemma, the pediatric hospital implemented literacy screenings in about half of its 13 clinics, assigning a literacy coordinator to each. The program launched in 2022 and has since conducted more than 2,400 screenings. Many of the children come from high-needs populations, as Nationwide serves families that are uninsured or on Medicaid.

Screeners aren’t meant to diagnose learning disabilities like dyslexia, but rather identify areas where kids could use additional support.

Having support outside the education system to flag early reading difficulties is a step in the right direction, but choosing the right screening tool is key, said Devin Kearns, an early literacy professor at North Carolina State University.

Coordinators at Nationwide use a tool that assesses kids as they read through a book during primary care visits — either in English or Spanish. It took some practice to refine the timing — avoiding moments after vaccinations when children were upset, for example — but the reading assessments take only about 10 minutes.

After a child completes a screening, the coordinator can create a personalized literacy plan that highlights the areas that need more practice.

The visit is also an opportunity to model activities that parents can do at home with their kids, such as reading a book aloud, said Carneshia Edwards, who leads the hospital’s kindergarten readiness team.

“When we’re doing the screenings, families are kind of concerned that their kids don’t know certain things and it’s not necessarily about that piece of it,” Edwards said. “It’s just more so exposing them more than anything.”

Before Juri Sleet completed her literacy screening at age 3, her grandmother, Quintina Davis, worried Juri didn’t have enough opportunities for early learning. But meeting with the literacy coordinator at her clinic opened Davis’ eyes to all the activities she could do at home with Juri.

“She didn’t know as much, but our coordinator was very patient with her,” Davis said.

After each screening, coordinators put together literacy kits, a medley of tools and activities for at-home practice. Those materials are also influenced by Columbus City Schools teachers’ feedback on what students need help with when they enter kindergarten.

The kits’ contents largely depend on donations the program receives. There are often items such as dry-erase boards for writing letters and books to practice reading. But the kits can also have safety scissors or pencils with rubbery grippers to improve motor skills.

“Parents are the first teachers, so we really try to encourage them to sit down with their child and just kind of work with them before going into kindergarten,” Edwards said.

Coordinators stay in touch with the families they met with in the clinic, sometimes referring children to early education programs such as the federally-funded preschool program Head Start or the SPARK program, which does educational home visits.

Then, when a child returns to the clinic a year later, the coordinator meets with them again. For Juri, now 4, the follow-up visit put into perspective how much she had progressed in a year, her grandmother said.

Over the course of a year, Juri had made strides in recognizing letters, sounds and sight words. Juri also enrolled in preschool at a local YMCA with the help of her literacy coordinator, Davis said. She’s been doing “awesome” there, Davis said, and she can’t wait to watch her grow even more.

“The goal is to make sure by the time she starts kindergarten, that she’s absolutely ready without having a lot of challenges,” Davis said. “So right now, I think she is heading towards that way.”

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Patrick Aftoora-Orsagos in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

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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.

Waymo will begin dispatching its robotaxis in four more cities in Texas and Florida, expanding the territory covered by its fleet of self-driving cars to 10 major U.S. metropolitan markets.

The move into Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Orlando, Florida, announced Tuesday, widens Waymo’s early lead in autonomous driving while rival services from Tesla and the Amazon-owned Zoox are still testing their vehicles in only a few U.S. cities.

In contrast, Waymo’s robotaxis already provide more than 400,000 weekly trips in the six metropolitan areas where they have been transporting passengers: Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Miami, Atlanta, and Austin, Texas.

Waymo operates its ride-hailing service through its own app in all the U.S. cities except Atlanta and Austin, where its robotaxis can only be summoned through Uber’s ride-hailing service.

The expansion into four more markets marks a significant step toward Waymo’s goal to surpass 1 million weekly paid trips by the end of 2026. Without identifying where its robotaxis will be available next, Waymo is targeting a list of eight other cities that include Las Vegas, Washington, Detroit and Boston while signaling its first overseas availability is likely to be London.

To help pay for more robotaxis, Waymo recently raised $16 billion as part of the financial infusion that puts the value of the company at $126 billion. The valuation fueled speculation that Waymo may eventually be spun off from its corporate parent Alphabet, where it began as a secret project within Google in 2009.

Although Waymo is opening up in four more cities, its robotaxis initially will only be made available to a limited number of people with its ride-hailing app in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Orlando before the service will be available to all comers in those markets.

Federal workplace safety regulators have issued citations and fines against three businesses for violations in the deaths of six people last year at a Colorado dairy.

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration on Tuesday announced fines including penalties for failing to protect workers against hazardous gases against the dairy owner and a dairy service provider. The deaths of five men and a teenager on Aug. 20, 2025, sent shockwaves through the rural communities in and around Keenesburg, 35 miles (55 kilometers) northeast of Denver.

Previously, the Weld County coroner’s office determined from autopsies and toxicology tests that all the people who died were exposed to hydrogen sulfide gas.

Those autopsy reports gave little indication of the circumstances of the deaths, describing only an industrial accident in a confined space at a dairy farm.

In August 2025, federal regulators opened initial investigations of the dairy, owned by Prospect Ranch as well as Johnstown, Colorado-based Fiske Inc, whose subsidiary High Plains Robotics services dairy equipment and employed some of those who died.

The hazards of confined spaces on farms and dairies are a well-known and persistent cause of death in agriculture across the U.S. — often from exposure to odorless and colorless noxious gases, or due to asphyxiation in closed spaces where oxygen has been depleted.

First responders from a rural fire district in Weld County were dispatched around 6 p.m. on Aug. 20 to Prospect Ranch and took their own safety precautions as they entered a confined space.

All those who died in Colorado were Latino, ranging in age from 17 to 50. Four of them, including the teenage high school student, were from the same extended family.

Alejandro Espinoza Cruz, of Nunn, was found dead along with his 17-year-old son Oscar Espinoza Leos and a second son, 29-year-old Carlos Espinoza Prado.

The Espinozas are related by marriage to a 36-year-old from Greeley who died — Jorge Sanchez Pena, according to the Weld County coroner’s office.

The other two men — Ricardo Gomez Galvan, 40, and Noe Montañez Casañas, 32 — lived in Keenesburg.

The remains of Montañez Casañas, a veterinarian who was employed under a U.S. visa, were repatriated to the central Mexican state of Hidalgo, according to the Mexican consulate in Denver.

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Lee reported from Santa Fe, New Mexico.

KEY PENINSULA, Wash. — A suspect and four other people were dead Tuesday after a sheriff’s deputy responded to reports that a man was stabbing people outside a home near Tacoma, Washington.

The Pierce County Sheriff’s Office said deputies initially responded to reports made at around 8:40 a.m. Tuesday that a 32-year-old man was violating a no-contact order. They obtained a copy of the order, learned it was not valid because it had not been served on the suspect and headed to the scene to provide it to him.

While en route, additional reports came in that the man was stabbing people, the sheriff’s office said. The first deputy arrived within about three minutes and shots were fired. The suspect and three other people were dead at the scene, while another died while being taken to a hospital.

The stabbings occurred on the Key Peninsula, west of Tacoma.

BANGKOK — U.S. futures dropped and Asian shares were mostly higher on Monday after the Supreme Court struck down most of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs.

Bitcoin tumbled as much as 5% early Monday, dropping below $65,000. The sell-off has been driven by investors pulling out of speculative assets and concerns about future cryptocurrency regulation.

The original cryptocurrency, pitched as “digital gold,” has lost nearly half of its value since Oct. 6, when it hit a record high of $126,210.50,

Markets in Japan and mainland China were closed for holidays.

Hong Kong led regional gains as its Hang Seng index surged 2.2% to 26,980.22.

In South Korea, the Kospi gave back early gains, edging 0.1% lower to 5,809.53.

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 shed 0.6% to 9,024.40.

Taiwan’s Taiex added 0.5% and the Sensex in India was up 0.4%. The SET in Bangkok jumped 1.1%.

The mixed reactions are “highlighting the winners-and-losers effect of shifts in tariff policy that has just delivered a boost to countries who previously had a comparatively bad deal,” Benjamin Picton of Rabobank said in a commentary.

“U.S. tariff policy will continue to be a source of uncertainty for markets as traders attempt to price in the implications of what is still a movable feast,” he wrote.

The future for the S&P 500 lost 0.8% and that for the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 0.7%. The future for the Nasdaq composite index was down 1%.

On Friday, Wall Street kept calm after the Supreme Court’s ruling against Trump’s sweeping tariffs, which triggered panic in financial markets when they were announced last year.

The S&P 500 rose 0.7% to 6,909.51. It had been flipping between small gains and losses before the court’s ruling, following discouraging reports showing slowing growth for the U.S. economy and faster inflation.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.5% to 49,625.97. The Nasdaq composite rose 0.9% to 22,886.07.

Tariffs aren’t going away, even with the Supreme Court’s ruling. Trump said Friday he would use other avenues to put taxes on imports from other countries after calling the court’s decision terrible.

Trump said he would sign an executive order to impose a 10% global tariff under a law that could limit it to 150 days. He later raised that to 15%. He said he’s exploring other tariffs through other avenues, ones that would require Commerce Department investigations.

The reaction has been tentative given persisting uncertainties over what he will do.

On Wall Street, Akamai Technologies dropped 14.1% for one of the market’s sharpest losses. The cybersecurity and cloud computing company reported stronger results for the end of 2025 than analysts expected, but it gave a profit forecast for the upcoming year that fell short of estimates.

Akamai plans to spend a bigger percentage of its revenue this upcoming year on equipment and other investments. It’s the latest potential indicator of how shortages of computer memory created by the AI boom are affecting customers throughout the economy.

Discouraging reports showing slowing U.S. economic growth and accelerating inflation drew a relatively muted response.

The reports highlight the Federal Reserve’s dilemma over interest rates, but did not change traders’ expectations much for what the Fed will ultimately do. Traders are still betting that the Fed will lower rates at least twice this year, according to data from CME Group.

Lower interest rates would give the economy and investment prices a boost, but they also risk worsening inflation. Fed officials said at their last meeting that they want to see inflation fall further before they would support cutting rates further.

In other dealings early Monday, U.S. benchmark crude oil lost 77 cents to $65.71 per barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, gave up 74 cents to $70.56 per barrel.

The U.S. dollar slipped to 154.40 Japanese yen f rom 154.94 yen. The euro rose to $1.1820 from $1.1797.

The price of gold rose 1.9%, while the price of silver was up 5.4%.

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — Interested in starting a business, learning about artificial intelligence or exploring a new hobby? There’s a class for that.

Millions of U.S. adults enroll in credit and non-credit college courses to earn professional certificates, learn new skills or to pursue academic degrees. Some older students are seeking career advancement, higher pay and job security, while others want to explore their personal interests or try new things.

“They might have kids, they might be working full-time, they might be older non-traditional students,” said Eric Deschamps, the director of continuing education at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. But returning to school “opens doors to education for students that might not have those doors open to them otherwise.”

Older students, many of whom bring years of work and life experience to their studies, often are juggling courses with full-time jobs, caregiving and other family responsibilities. It is a challenging balancing act but can also sharpen priorities and provide a sense of fulfillment.

Here’s what experts have to say about returning to school, what to consider beforehand and how to balance coursework with work and personal commitments.

UCLA Extension, the continuing education division of the University of California, Los Angeles, offers more than 90 certificate and specialization programs, from interior design, early childhood education and accounting to photography, paralegal studies and music production. Individual courses cover a wide range of topics, including retirement planning, writing novels, the business of athletes and artists, and the ancient Japanese art of ikebana, or flower arranging.

About 33,500 students — nearly half of them older than 35 — were enrolled during the last academic year. UCLA reported a full-time enrollment of about 32,600 degree-seeking undergraduate students during the same period.

“I prefer calling our (adult) learners not only continuous, but the new majority student. These are learners who tend to already be employed, often supporting a family, looking for up-skilling or sometimes a career change,” Traci Fordham, UCLA’s interim associate dean for academic programs and learning innovation, said.

Higher education experts say some adults take classes for professional development as economic concerns, technological advances and other workforce changes create a sense of job insecurity.

“A great example of that is artificial intelligence. These new technologies are coming out pretty quickly and for folks that got a degree, even just 5 or 10 years ago, their knowledge might be a little bit outdated,” Deschamps said.

Adults interested in becoming students again may want to assess their time and budgets, and weigh the potential benefits and consequences, including the financial impact, the potential for burnout and rewards of education that may take a while materialize, academic advisors say.

Deschamps suggests asking where you want to be in 5 or 10 years and how the training and knowledge received through an additional class or certificate can help get you there. For example, if you want to start a microbrewery, learning to brew your own beer or launching a business will help. If a promotion or career change is the goal, training for a new job, refreshing skills or understanding a different industry may help show you are qualified.

Schools like UCLA and Northern Arizona University are working to make continuing education courses accessible by keeping the cost low in comparison to degree-track classes and offering financial assistance. A variety of learning environments usually are offered — in-person and online classes, accelerated and self-paced instruction — to help adults integrate schoolwork with their home and work lives.

Katie Swavely, assistant director for academic advising and student success at UCLA, started at community college before transferring to UCLA to study anthropology. She said it took her 10 years after graduating to go back for her master’s degree in counseling with a focus on academic advising. Swavely completed that degree in 2020 and credits access to the program through employer-sponsored tuition assistance from her job at the time.

“I felt like in so many ways I didn’t really know who I was or what I wanted to do other than just pay the bills and survive,” said Swavely, who is married and has two children. “It was hard. And I thought about quitting many times. We had to budget to the extreme and find additional ways to make it work.”

She added: “There are questions of how are we going to make it work and do we have the money. As a parent, sacrifices are there all the time. You make those judgment calls every day. But making sure that you’re investing in yourself. There’s always gonna be reasons why it’s not today, not this month, not this year, but it’s also OK to just jump in and go for it and see how it works out.”

As an avid book lover, Swavely now wants to take a book editing course and hopes to continue her education and enroll in that through the university soon.

Some experts say one of the main barriers to returning to school is psychological. There might be concerns that their writing skills are rusty and that they don’t know enough math or technology, bringing up feelings of uncertainty or failure.

“I think this is tied to access. Many of our learners, not all of them, haven’t imagined themselves in any kind of higher education, post-secondary education environment,” Fordham said.

Swavely said it was important for her to build a support network and take advantage of the counseling and advising options that were available to her as a student.

She encourages adults who are furthering their educations to spend time “finding your community.” Having people around who helped build up her confidence at home and during classes got her through graduate school, Swavely said. She also suggests setting boundaries and giving yourself grace when you need need help.

“The biggest piece of advice is for people to realize you’re never too old to learn,” she said.

Authorities in Ohio have arrested and charged a former contestant on “American Idol” with shooting and killing his wife and staging the crime scene to mislead investigators.

Caleb Flynn, 39, pleaded not guilty Friday to charges of murder, assault and tampering with evidence.

“I just want to take care of my daughters. I’m not a risk,” he told Judge Samuel Huffman in a video of his arraignment from jail.

The judge set his bond at $2 million.

Ashley Flynn, 37, was found dead Monday after officers received a report of a burglary and shooting at a Tipp City home, according to a news release by Tipp City Police. Her husband and two children were inside the home when officers arrived.

In a 911 call released by authorities, a frantic Caleb Flynn tells a dispatcher someone broke into his home and killed his wife. He says she was shot multiple times in the head and he doesn’t know whether the intruder was still there.

“There’s blood everywhere, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” he says.

His attorney, Patrick Mulligan, said in a statement on Saturday he and Flynn were “disappointed and concerned about the short timeline and seeming rush to judgment in this case.” Police arrested Flynn on Thursday.

“When the government runs out of leads or can’t develop leads and looks at a surviving spouse in cases such as these, the chance of a wrongful conviction increases,” the statement said.

Tipp City Police Chief Greg Adkins defended the investigation, saying in an email on Saturday that it had “not moved fast.”

“Rather, it has progressed at a pace dictated by a thorough and deliberate investigative process,” he said.

Ashley Flynn was a middle school volleyball coach and substitute teacher, Tipp City Schools said on its Facebook page.

“She was known for her beautiful smile, warmth, kindness, and the positive impact she had on so many—both in and out of the classroom and on the court,” the post said.

The ability of federal safety regulators to oversee airplane maintenance at United Airlines has been hindered by inadequate staffing, high employee turnover and the improper use of virtual inspections instead of on-site reviews in some cases, according to a government watchdog audit released Friday.

The U.S. Transportation Department’s inspector general said the Federal Aviation Administration lacks sufficient staffing and workforce planning to effectively monitor United’s large fleet. Past audits by the government watchdog also highlighted FAA challenges overseeing other airline maintenance programs, including at American Airlines, Southwest Airlines and Allegiant Air.

The FAA declined to comment on the findings but referred The Associated Press to a letter it sent the inspector general’s office that was included in the audit report. In it, the FAA said it agreed with most of the recommendations and was taking steps to address them by the end of the year.

“FAA will implement a more systemic approach to strengthen inspector capacity and will take other measures to ensure that staffing levels remain sufficient to meet surveillance requirements,” the letter said.

The recommendations included a reevaluation of staffing rules, an independent workplace survey of inspector workloads and office culture, and improved training on accessing and using United’s safety data — a current gap that the report said currently keeps inspectors from fully evaluating maintenance issues and safety risk trends.

In a statement to AP, United said it works closely with the FAA on a daily basis in addition to employing its own internal safety management system.

“United has long advocated in favor of providing the FAA with the resources it needs for its important work,” the carrier said.

The inspector general’s office said the audit was conducted between May 2024 and December 2025, amid a series of maintenance-linked incidents at United.

It found that the FAA sometimes had its personnel conduct inspections “virtually” when it lacked staffing or funding for travel even though agency policy requires postponing reviews that can’t be done on site. Doing the work remotely can create safety risks because inspectors may miss or misidentify maintenance problems, the reported stated.

“Inspectors we spoke with stated that their front-line managers instructed them to perform inspections virtually rather than postponing inspections,” the report said.

The audit also found that ongoing staffing shortages at the FAA inspection offices tasked with United’s oversight have resulted in fewer inspections being conducted, limited surveillance of the carrier’s maintenance operations and an “overall loss of institutional knowledge.”

In March 2024, passengers had to be evacuated from a United plane that rolled off a runway after landing in Houston. The next day, a United jetliner bound for Japan lost a tire while taking off from San Francisco but later landed safely in Los Angeles.

In December 2025, a United flight experienced an engine failure during takeoff from Dulles International Airport before safely returning to the airport.

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Associated Press writer Josh Funk contributed.

A U.S. appeals court has cleared the way for a Louisiana law requiring poster-sized displays of the Ten Commandments in public classrooms to take effect.

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals voted 12-6 to lift a block that a lower court first placed on the law in 2024. In the opinion released Friday, the court said it was too early to make a judgment call on the constitutionality of the law.

That’s partly because it’s not yet clear how prominently schools may display the religious text, if teachers will refer to the Ten Commandments during classes, or if other things like the Mayflower Compact or Declaration of Independence will also be displayed, the majority opinion said.

Without those sorts of details, the panel decided it didn’t have enough information to weigh any First Amendment issues that might arise from the law. In other words, there aren’t enough facts available to “permit judicial judgment rather than speculation,” the majority wrote in the opinion.

But the six judges who voted against the decision wrote a series of dissents, some arguing that the case was ripe for judicial review and others saying that the law exposes children to government-endorsed religion in a place they are required to be, presenting a clear constitutional burden.

Circuit Judge James L. Dennis wrote that the law “is precisely the kind of establishment the Framers anticipated and sought to prevent.”

The ruling comes after the full court heard arguments in the cases in January 2026 following a ruling by a three-judge panel of the court that Louisiana’s law was unconstitutional. Arkansas also has a similar law that has been challenged in federal court.

Texas law’ took effect on Sept. 1, marking the largest attempt in the nation to hang the Ten Commandments in public schools. Multiple school districts were barred from posting them after federal judges issued injunctions in two cases against the law, but they have already gone up in many classrooms across the state as districts paid to have the posters printed themselves or accepted donations.

The laws are among the pushes by Republicans, including President Donald Trump, to incorporate religion into public school classrooms. Critics say it violates the separation of church and state while backers argue that the Ten Commandments are historical and part of the foundation of U.S. law.

The laws have been challenged by families representing a variety of religions, including Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism, and clergy, in addition to nonreligious families.

In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a similar Kentucky law violated the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says Congress can “make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The court found that the law had no secular purpose but served a plainly religious purpose.

And in 2005, the Supreme Court held that such displays in a pair of Kentucky courthouses violated the Constitution. At the same time, the court upheld a Ten Commandments marker on the grounds of the Texas state Capitol in Austin.

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This story has been updated to correct the day of the week the ruling was issued to Friday, not Tuesday.

For years, social media companies have disputed allegations that they harm children’s mental health through deliberate design choices that addict kids to their platforms and fail to protect them from sexual predators and dangerous content. Now, these tech giants are getting a chance to make their case in courtrooms around the country, including before a jury for the first time.

Some of the biggest players from Meta to TikTok are facing federal and state trials that seek to hold them responsible for harming children’s mental health. The lawsuits have come from school districts, local, state and the federal government as well as thousands of families.

Two trials are now underway in Los Angeles and in New Mexico, with more to come. The courtroom showdowns are the culmination of years of scrutiny of the platforms over child safety, and whether deliberate design choices make them addictive and serve up content that leads to depression, eating disorders or suicide.

Experts see the reckoning as reminiscent of cases against tobacco and opioid markets, and the plaintiffs hope that social media platforms will see similar outcomes as cigarette makers and drug companies, pharmacies and distributors.

The outcomes could challenge the companies’ First Amendment shield and Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which protects tech companies from liability for material posted on their platforms. They could also be costly in the form of legal fees and settlements. And they could force the companies to change how they operate, potentially losing users and advertising dollars.

Here’s a look at the major social media harms cases in the United States.

Jurors in a landmark social media case that seeks to hold tech companies responsible for harms to children got their first glimpse into what will be a lengthy trial characterized by dueling narratives from the plaintiffs and the two remaining defendants, Meta and YouTube.

At the core of the Los Angeles case is a 20-year-old identified only by the initials “KGM,” whose case could determine how thousands of similar lawsuits will play out. KGM and the cases of two other plaintiffs have been selected to be bellwether trials — essentially test cases for both sides to see how their arguments play out before a jury.

“This is a monumental inflection point in social media,” said Matthew Bergman of the Seattle-based Social Media Victims Law Center, which represents more than 1,000 plaintiffs in lawsuits against social media companies. “When we started doing this four years ago no one said we’d ever get to trial. And here we are trying our case in front of a fair and impartial jury.”

On Wednesday Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified, mostly sticking to past talking points, including a lengthy back-and-forth about age verification where he said ““I don’t see why this is so complicated,” reiterating that the company’s policy restricts users under the age of 13 and that it works to detect users who have lied about their ages to bypass restrictions..

At one point, the plaintiff’s attorney, Mark Lanier, asked Zuckerberg if people tend to use something more if it’s addictive.

“I’m not sure what to say to that,” Zuckerberg said. “I don’t think that applies here.”

A team led by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who sued Meta in 2023, built their case by posing as children on social media, then documenting sexual solicitations they received as well as Meta’s response.

Torrez wants Meta to implement more effective age verification and do more to remove bad actors from its platform.

He also is seeking changes to algorithms that can serve up harmful material, and has criticized the end-to-end encryption that can prevent the monitoring of communications with children for safety. Meta has noted that encrypted messaging is encouraged in general as a privacy and security measure by some state and federal authorities.

The trial kicked off in early February. In his opening statement, prosecuting attorney Donald Migliori said Meta has misrepresented the safety of its platforms, choosing to engineer its algorithms to keep young people online while knowing that children are at risk of sexual exploitation.

“Meta clearly knew that youth safety was not its corporate priority … that youth safety was less important than growth and engagement,” Migliori told the jury.

Meta attorney Kevin Huff pushed back on those assertions in his opening statement, highlighting an array of efforts by the company to weed out harmful content from its platforms while warning users that some dangerous content still gets past its safety net.

A trial scheduled for this summer pits school districts against social media companies before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California. Called a multidistrict litigation, it names six public school districts from around the country as the bellwethers.

Jayne Conroy, a lawyer on plaintiffs’ trial team, was also an attorney for plaintiffs seeking to hold pharmaceutical companies responsible for the opioid epidemic. She said the cornerstone of both cases is the same: addiction.

“With the social media case, we’re focused primarily on children and their developing brains and how addiction is such a threat to their wellbeing and … the harms that are caused to children — how much they’re watching and what kind of targeting is being done,” she said.

The medical science, she added, “is not really all that different, surprisingly, from an opioid or a heroin addiction. We are all talking about the dopamine reaction.”

Both the social media and the opioid cases claim negligence on the part of the defendants.

“What we were able to prove in the opioid cases is the manufacturers, the distributors, the pharmacies, they knew about the risks, they downplayed them, they oversupplied, and people died,” Conroy said. “Here, it is very much the same thing. These companies knew about the risks, they have disregarded the risks, they doubled down to get profits from advertisers over the safety of kids. And kids were harmed and kids died.”

Social media companies have disputed that their products are addictive. During questioning Wednesday by the plaintiff’s lawyer during the Los Angeles trial, Zuckerberg said he still agrees with a previous statement he made that the existing body of scientific work has not proven that social media causes mental health harms.

Some researchers do indeed question whether addiction is the appropriate term to describe heavy use of social media. Social media addiction is not recognized as an official disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the authority within the psychiatric community.

But the companies face increasing pushback on the issue of social media’s effects on children’s mental health, not only among academics but also parents, schools and lawmakers.

“While Meta has doubled down in this area to address mounting concerns by rolling out safety features, several recent reports suggest that the company continues to aggressively prioritize teens as a user base and doesn’t always adhere to its own rules,” said Emarketer analyst Minda Smiley.

With appeals and any settlement discussions, the cases against social media companies could take years to resolve. And unlike in Europe and Australia, tech regulation in the U.S. is moving at a glacial pace.

“Parents, education, and other stakeholders are increasingly hoping lawmakers will do more,” Smiley said. “While there is momentum at the state and federal level, Big Tech lobbying, enforcement challenges, and lawmaker disagreements over how to best regular social media have slowed meaningful progress.”

—

AP Technology Writer Kaitlyn Huamani contributed to this story.

The recovery of skiers killed in the deadliest U.S. avalanche in almost 45 years is dragging out because of what experts say is a prime rule for rescuers: Don’t make yourself a victim.

A storm that continued lashing California’s remote Sierra Nevada wilderness Thursday meant more avalanches were possible in the backcountry area where authorities said eight people died and one was still missing two days after their group was caught in the deadly slide. Six people survived.

Rescuers faced the same potential perils that killed the backcountry skiers and professional guides, as they pursued a sport with inherent risks that were compounded by several feet of new snow. Recovery efforts were set to resume Friday.

Backcountry winter travelers from skiers and snowboarders to snowmobilers and mountaineers lean on avalanche forecasts to help them gauge the danger. Yet conditions quickly shift because of turbulent mountain weather.

To supplement forecasts or if none is available, experienced skiers and guides will dig a pit in the snow to test how stable it is. They can also search out less-hazardous terrain, such as slopes that are not as steep or that are sheltered from known avalanche routes.

As the snow from the storm system hitting the Sierras this week piled up, the group of 15 skiers caught in Tuesday’s avalanche were on the last day of a multiday trip and heading for the trailhead.

“It was, quite likely, very necessary for them to leave the backcountry so their hazard wasn’t increased further,” said Anthony Pavlantos of Utah-based Prival USA, who makes avalanche safety equipment and runs mountain safety programs.

“What’s really hard to say is like ‘why were they moving?’ You can’t ever start placing blame on events like this because we can all be there.”

It’s not uncommon for people to venture into the backcountry to ski or snowboard during times of heightened danger: A dangerous storm also means lots of fresh snow that many skiers crave.

And because fatal accidents are rare, the risk takers most often survive, said Dale Atkins, who has been involved in mountain rescues and avalanche forecasting and research in Colorado for five decades.

“It’s not about not going; it’s about where and when you go,” Atkins said.

But Atkins added that coming out of the backcountry unscathed can create a false sense of security in a pursuit where luck – or not enough of it – also plays a role.

“It’s really easy to be fooled by the snow and avalanches,” he said. “We keep going out even in the worst of storms because that’s what we did last time, and then our luck runs out.”

Typically the best hope for someone to survive burial in an avalanche is to dig themselves out or be rescued by a companion. That is because slides often occur in remote areas.

It took rescuers six hours to reach the victims of Tuesday’s avalanche after the first report came in. By comparison, the chances of survival for someone buried for an hour is only about one in 10, Atkins said.

The surviving skiers in California found three of the victims while they awaited rescue. Authorities haven’t given a detailed account about how they located the other victims.

A debris field from a major avalanche like the fatal one in California will stretch over a huge area, making it difficult to figure out where someone ends up if they are caught and dragged beneath the surface.

The first thing to look for is clues such as a glove or ski pole that could reveal a victim’s location, said Anthony Stevens, chief adviser for the search and rescue team in Teton County, Wyoming, home to Grand Teton National Park.

Skiers in guided groups typically carry transceivers, known as avalanche beacons, that send out signals showing where they are. The devices can also receive other signals, displaying the direction and approximate distance to a victim.

If that doesn’t work, rescuers can line up and use long, slender poles to probe into the snow in hopes of finding someone, said Ethan Greene, director of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center.

Time is of the essence throughout a rescue, and once someone is found they have to be dug out. The average depth of burial is roughly a meter, or just over 3 feet, Atkins said. And because snow and ice in an avalanche get heavily compacted, digging out someone from that depth requires moving at least a ton of material, he said.

Rarely will people survive being buried for long. Atkins said he knew of two people who survived being buried 22 and 24 hours respectively following an avalanche in the 1990s in Washington state. A third member of their party did not survive.

“It’s very unusual for a rescue team to find a buried person alive. But it happens, and that gives us hope,” he said.

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Associated Press writer Corey Williams in Detroit contributed to this report.

In a stretch of Louisiana with about 170 fossil fuel and petrochemical plants, premature death is a fact of life for people living nearby. The air is so polluted and the cancer rates so high it is known as Cancer Alley.

“Most adults in the area are attending two to three funerals per month,” said Gary C. Watson Jr., who was born and raised in St. John the Baptist Parish, a majority Black community in Cancer Alley about 30 miles outside of New Orleans. His father survived cancer, but in recent years, at least five relatives have died from it.

Cancer Alley is one of many patches of America — mostly minority and poor — that suffer higher levels of air pollution from fossil fuel facilities that emit tiny particles connected to higher death rates. When the federal government in 2009 targeted carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as a public health danger because of climate change, it led to tighter regulation of pollution and cleaner air in some communities. But this month, the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency overturned that “endangerment finding.”

Public health experts say the change will likely mean more illness and death for Americans, with communities like Watson’s hit hardest. On Wednesday, a coalition of health and environmental groups sued the EPA over the revocation, calling it unlawful and harmful.

“Not having these protections, it’s only going to make things worse,” said Watson, with the environmental justice group Rise St. James Louisiana. He also worries that revoking the endangerment finding will increase emissions that will worsen the state’s hurricanes.

The Trump administration said the finding — a cornerstone for many regulations aimed at fighting climate change — hurts industry and the economy. President Donald Trump has called the idea “a scam” despite repeated studies showing the opposite.

Growing evidence shows that poor and Black, Latino and other racial and ethnic groups are typically more vulnerable than white people to pollution and climate-driven floods, hurricanes, extreme heat and more because they tend to have less resources to protect against and recover from them. The EPA, in a 2021 report no longer on its website, concluded the same.

The finding’s reversal will affect everyone, but “overburdened communities, which are typically communities of color, Indigenous communities and low-income communities, they will, again, suffer most from these actions,” said Matthew Tejada, senior vice president for environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council and a former deputy with the EPA’s office for environmental justice.

Hilda Berganza, climate program manager with the Hispanic Access Foundation, said: “Communities that are the front lines are going to feel it the most. And we can see that the Latino population is one of those communities that is going feel it even more than others because of where we live, where we work.”

A study published in November found more than 46 million people in the U.S. live within a mile of at least one type of energy supply infrastructure, such as an oil well, a power plant or an oil refinery. But the study found that “persistently marginalized” racial and ethnic groups were more likely to live near multiple such sites. Latinos had the highest exposure.

The EPA, in that 2021 report, estimated that with a 2-degree Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) rise in global warming, Black people were 40% more likely to live in places with the highest projected rise in deaths because of extreme heat. Latinos, who are overrepresented in outdoor industries such as agriculture and construction, were 43% more likely to live where labor hour losses were expected to be the highest because of heat.

Julia Silver, a senior research analyst at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Latino Policy and Politics Institute, found in her own research that California Latino communities had 23 more days of extreme heat annually than non-Latino white neighborhoods. Her team also found those areas have poor air quality at about double the rate, with twice as many asthma-related emergency room visits. Other research shows that Latino children are 40% more likely to die from asthma than white children in part because many lack consistent health care access.

“What we’re risking with a rollback like this at the federal level is really human health and well-being in these marginalized groups,” Silver said.

Armando Carpio, a longtime pastor in Los Angeles, has seen firsthand how vulnerable his mostly Latino parishioners are. Many are construction workers and gardeners who work outside, often in extreme heat. Others live and work near polluting freeways. He sees children with asthma and elders with dementia, both linked to exposure to air pollution.

“We’re regressing,” he said. “I don’t know how many years back, but all of this really affects us.”

It is difficult to quantify how much more communities of color could be impacted by the finding’s revocation, but experts who spoke with The Associated Press all said it would be significant.

“You will see statistically significant increases in excess morbidity and mortality when it comes to climate impacts and health impacts associated with co-pollutants” in communities of color, said Sacoby Wilson, a University of Maryland professor and executive director of the nonprofit Center for Engagement, Environmental Justice and Health INpowering Communities.

Beverly Wright, founding director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice in New Orleans, said at least four Black communities in Cancer Alley no longer exist because of the expansion of industrial facilities. The repeal will bring more pollution, higher cancer rates, more extreme weather and the disappearance of more historic communities, she said.

“It has us going in the wrong direction, and our communities are now at greater risk,” she said.

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The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA took another crack at fueling its giant moon rocket Thursday after leaks halted the initial dress rehearsal and delayed the first lunar trip by astronauts in more than half a century.

For the second time this month, launch teams began pumping more than 700,000 gallons (2.6 million liters) of supercold fuel into the rocket atop its launch pad.

It’s the most critical and challenging part of the two-day practice countdown. The outcome will determine whether a March launch is possible for the Artemis II moon mission with four astronauts.

During the rehearsal two weeks ago, dangerous amounts of supercold liquid hydrogen escaped from the connections between the pad and the 322-foot (98-meter) Space Launch System rocket. Engineers replaced a pair of seals and a clogged filter in hopes of getting through the repeat test at Kennedy Space Center.

NASA won’t set a launch date for the Artemis II mission until it passes the fueling demonstration. Like last time, the crew — three Americans and one Canadian — watched the test from afar.

The soonest astronauts could soar is March 6. They will become the first people to fly to the moon — making a 10-day out-and-back trip with no stops — since Apollo 17 in 1972. They won’t orbit or land.

NASA has been battling hydrogen fuel leaks ever since the space shuttle era, which provided many of the SLS engines. The first Artemis test flight without anyone on board was grounded for months by leaking hydrogen before finally blasting off in November 2022.

Going years between flights exacerbates the problem, according to NASA’s new administrator Jared Isaacman, a tech entrepreneur who financed his own trips to orbit through SpaceX.

Just two months into the job, Isaacman already is promising to redesign the fuel connections between the rocket and pad before the next Artemis III launch. Still a few years away, that mission will attempt to land two astronauts near the moon’s south pole.

“We will not launch unless we are ready and the safety of our astronauts will remain the highest priority,” he said last week on X.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. trade deficit slipped modestly in 2025, a year in which President Donald Trump upended global commerce by slapping double digit tariffs on imports from most countries.

The gap the between the goods and services the U.S. sells other countries and what it buys from them narrowed to just over $901 billion from $904 billion in 2024, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.

Exports rose 6% last year, and imports rose nearly 5%.

Still, the U.S. deficit in the trade of goods such as machinery and aircraft — the main focus of Trump’s protectionist policies — widened 2% to $1.24 trillion last year, partly because American companies raised computer chip and other tech imports from Taiwan to support their investment in artificial intelligence.

Amid continuing tensions with Bejing, the deficit in the goods trade with China plunged nearly 32% to $202 billion in 2025 on a sharp drop in both exports to and imports from the world’s second-biggest economy. But trade was diverted away from China. The goods gap with Taiwan doubled to $147 billion and shot up 44% to $178 billion with Vietnam.

Economist Chad Bown, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the widening gaps with Taiwan and Vietnam might put a “bulls eye” on them this year if Trump focuses more on the lopsided trade numbers and less on the U.S. rivalry with China.

In 2025, U.S. goods imports to Mexico outpaced exports by nearly $197 billion, up from a 2024 gap of $172 billion. But the goods deficit with Canada shrank by 26% to $46 billion. The United States this year is negotiating a renewal of a pact Trump reached with those two countries in his first term.

The U.S. ran a bigger surplus in the trade of services such as banking and tourism last year — $339 billion, up from $312 billion in 2024.

The trade gap surged from January-March as U.S. companies tried to import foreign goods ahead of Trump’s taxes, then narrowed most of the rest of the year.

Trump’s tariffs are a tax paid by U.S. importers and often passed along to their customers as higher prices. But they haven’t had as much impact on inflation as economists originally expected. Trump argues that the tariffs will protect U.S. industries, bringing manufacturing back to America and raise money for the U.S. Treasury.

LOS ANGELES — As national Democrats search for a unifying theme ahead of the fall’s midterm elections, a California proposal to levy a hefty tax on billionaires is turning some of the party’s leading figures into adversaries just when Democrats can least afford division from within.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders traveled to Los Angeles on Wednesday to campaign for the tax proposal, which has Silicon Valley in an uproar, with tech titans threatening to leave the state. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is among its outspoken opponents, warning that it could leave government finances in crisis and put the state at a competitive disadvantage nationally.

At an evening rally near downtown, Sanders told cheering supporters that the nation has reached a crisis point in which “massive income and wealth inequality” has concentrated power over business, technology, government and the media within the “billionaire class,” while millions of working-class Americans struggle to pay household bills.

He said enactment of the proposed tax would show “we are still living in a democratic society where the people have some power.”

“Enough is enough,” Sanders said to a pulse of applause. “The billionaire class cannot have it all. This nation belongs to all of us.”

The senator, a democratic socialist, is popular in California — he won the 2020 Democratic presidential primary in the state in a runaway. He’s been railing for decades against what he characterizes as wealthy elites and the growing gap between rich and poor.

A large health care union is attempting to place a proposal before voters in November that would impose a one-time 5% tax on the assets of billionaires — including stocks, art, businesses, collectibles and intellectual property — to backfill federal funding cuts to health services for lower-income people that were signed by President Donald Trump last year.

Debate on the proposal is unfolding at a time when voters in both parties express unease with economic conditions and what the future will bring in a politically divided nation. Distrust of government — and its ability to get things done — is widespread.

The proposal has created a rift between Newsom and prominent members of his party’s progressive wing, including Sanders, who has said the tax should be a template for other states.

“The issues that are really going to be motivating Democrats this year, affordability and the cost of health care and cuts to schools, none of these would be fixed by this proposal. If fact, they would be made worse,” said Brian Brokaw, a longtime Newsom adviser who is leading a political committee opposing the tax.

Midterm elections typically punish the party in control of the White House, and Democrats are hoping to gain enough U.S. House seats to overturn the chamber’s slim Republican majority. In California, rejiggered House districts approved by voters last year are expected to help the party pick up as many as five additional seats, which would leave Republicans in control of just a handful of districts.

“It is always better for a party to have the political debate focused on issues where you are united and the other party is divided,” said Eric Schickler, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. “Having an issue like this where Newsom and Sanders — among others — are on different sides is not ideal.”

With the idea of taxing billionaires popular among many voters “this can be a good way for Democratic candidates to rally that side and break through from the pack,” Schickler added in an email.

It’s already trickled into the race for governor and contests down the ballot. Republicans Chad Bianco and Steve Hilton, both candidates for governor, have warned the tax would erase jobs. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, a Democratic candidate for governor, has said inequality starts at the federal level, where the tax code is riddled with loopholes.

Sanders did not mention Newsom in his nearly 30-minute speech but name-checked a handful of billionaires, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, as examples of a wealthy elite that in many respects “no longer sees itself as part of American society.”

Citing protests against federal immigration raids in Minnesota, he urged the crowd to support the tax, saying Californians can show that “when we stand together, we can take on the oligarchs and the billionaires.”

Coinciding with the Sanders visit and an upcoming state Democratic convention this weekend, opponents are sending out targeted emails and social media ads intended to sway party insiders.

It’s not clear if the proposal will make the ballot — supporters must gather more than 870,000 petition signatures to place it before voters.

The nascent contest already has drawn out a tangle of competing interests, with millions of dollars flowing into political committees.

Newsom has long opposed state-level wealth taxes, believing such levies would be disadvantageous for the world’s fourth-largest economy. At a time when California is strapped for cash and he is considering a 2028 presidential run, he is trying to block the proposal before it reaches the ballot.

Analysts say an exodus of billionaires could mean a loss of hundreds of millions of tax dollars for the nation’s most populous state. But supporters say the funding is needed to offset federal cuts that could leave many Californians without vital services.

NEW YORK — Walmart delivered another standout quarter as the promise of lower prices drew in a broader spectrum of Americans during the critical holiday shopping period, including wealthier households.

The outlook from the Bentonville, Arkansas, company, however, hinted at a volatile economic environment ahead on Thursday.

Shares dipped almost 3% before the opening bell.

Walmart reported fourth quarter earnings of $4.24 billion, or 53 cents per share for the quarter ended Jan. 31. Adjusted per-share results were 74 cents, a penny better than Wall Street expected, according to FactSet.

Last year, the company reported net income of $5.25 billion, or 65 cents per share.

Sales rose 5.6% to $190.7 billion, from $180.6 billion, also edging out expectations.

Comparable sales at Walmart stores, including online sales, rose 4.6% after a 4.5% increase in the previous quarter.

Global e-commerce sales rose 24%.

It is the first quarter time in more than a decade that the retail giant is reporting quarterly earning under a new chief executive.

John Furner, 51, who headed the company’s U.S. operations, took over for Doug McMillon this month. McMillon had turned America’s largest retailer into a tech-powered giant and spearheaded an era of robust sales growth after being named Walmart’s CEO in 2014.

Walmart’s shares rose more than 25% since its last quarterly earnings report and earlier this month it became the first non-tech company to reach a valuation of more than a $1 trillion.

It has done so with many Americans carefully considering where they spend money because of inflation and how the company performs is considered a barometer of consumer spending given its vast customer base. More than 150 million customers are on its website or in its stores every week, according to Walmart.

While inflation has cooled, consumer prices have soared about 25% over the past five years. Many economists expect more companies will begin passing on higher costs from higher U.S. tariffs to their customers in coming months.

Walmart’s promise of lower prices has broadened its base to include wealthier shoppers in that environment, with the biggest gains in market share coming from households with annual income over $100,000.

Walmart has managed higher costs both by shifting what it offers on store shelves while absorbing some higher costs.

The company said that for the current quarter, it expects sales to increase anywhere from 3.5% to 4.5% and earnings per share to be in the range of 63 cents to 65 cents. For the year, it expects sales to reach $706.4 billion and earnings per share to be $2.64.

That is a little cooler than Wall Street had been projecting. Analysts polled by FactSet had been expecting per-share earnings of 68 cents in the first quarter. For the year, they have been projecting earnings of $2.64 per share on sales of $712.6 billion

WASHINGTON — Many Federal Reserve officials want to see inflation fall further before they would support additional interest rate cuts this year, particularly if the job market continues to stabilize, minutes of last month’s meeting show.

The “vast majority” of the 19 participants on the Fed’s rate-setting committee said that there were signs the job market has stabilized, after the unemployment rate rose in late 2025, the minutes said. And most of the officials agreed that the Fed’s key rate is close to a level that neither stimulates nor restrains the economy. The minutes were released Wednesday, three weeks after the central bank’s Jan. 27-28 meeting.

Fed officials at that meeting agreed to keep its key rate steady at about 3.6%, after cutting it three times late last year. Two officials — Fed governors Stephen Miran and Christopher Waller — voted instead to cut another quarter-point.

The minutes underscored the deeply divided nature of the committee, with several camps emerging: “Several” officials said additional cuts will “likely be appropriate” if inflation continues to decline. But “some” officials favored keeping rates unchanged “for some time,” suggesting a longer pause. And several other officials said they could have supported language in the statement issued after the meeting that would signal the next move by the Fed could be either a cut or a rate hike, if inflation remains above their 2% target.

The support for signaling an openness to a potential rate hike appears to be a significant shift from previous meetings. Chair Jerome Powell said after meetings last year that the idea of a rate hike wasn’t on the table.

Powell signaled after January’s meeting that the Fed could wait for a few months before cutting rates again. He said at a news conference that the economy and hiring had improved since the central bank had previously met in December, and added that the Fed was “well positioned” to evaluate how the economy evolves in the coming months before making any further moves.

The decision to keep rates unchanged defied a stream of demands from President Donald Trump for the Fed to reduce its key rate to as low as 1%, a level few economists endorse. When the Fed cuts its key rate, it can over time lower borrowing costs for mortgages, auto loans, and business loans, though those rates are also influenced by financial markets.

The minutes said that the “vast majority” of the 19-person committee agreed that the risks of job losses and a worsening labor market had diminished, likely a key reason that they voted to keep rates unchanged. The Fed typically cuts rates to boost spending, growth, and hiring.

Figures released last week suggest the Fed will be unlikely to cut anytime soon. Inflation remains elevated, according to the Fed’s preferred measure, and January’s jobs report showed that hiring picked up last month. Those trends support those Fed officials who argue that the economy doesn’t need further rate cuts.

Consumer prices grew 2.4% in January compared with a year earlier, the government said last week, not too far from the Fed’s 2% target.

But the Fed focuses on a different measure of inflation, which is running higher. When the latest figure is released Friday, it is expected to have increased roughly 3% from a year earlier. The Fed’s preferred measure puts much less weight on housing and apartment rental costs, which have cooled considerably, and as a result it is running above the better-known consumer price index.

Also last week, the government said that hiring improved in January, with employers adding 130,000 jobs, the biggest gain in just over a year, while the unemployment rate slipped to a low 4.3%, down from 4.4%.

Fed Governor Michael Barr on Tuesday pointed to the jobs report as evidence that the labor market is “stabilizing,” while inflation remains above 2%.

“Based on current conditions and the data in hand, it will likely be appropriate to hold rates steady for some time,” Barr said.

Separately, Austan Goolsbee, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, told CNBC Tuesday that the Fed could reduce rates “several more” times this year, if there is evidence that inflation was moving closer to 2%.

A new artificial intelligence video generator from Beijing-based ByteDance, the creator of TikTok, is drawing the ire of Hollywood organizations

A new artificial intelligence video generator from Beijing-based ByteDance, the creator of TikTok, is drawing the ire of Hollywood organizations that say Seedance 2.0 “blatantly” violates copyright and uses the likeness of actors and others without permission.

Seedance 2.0, which is only available in China for now, lets users generate high-quality AI videos using simple text prompts. The tool quickly gained condemnation from the movie and TV industry.

The Motion Picture Association said Seedance 2.0 “has engaged in unauthorized use of U.S. copyrighted works on a massive scale.”

“By launching a service that operates without meaningful safeguards against infringement, ByteDance is disregarding well-established copyright law that protects the rights of creators and underpins millions of American jobs. ByteDance should immediately cease its infringing activity,” Charles Rivkin, chairman and CEO of the MPA, said in a statement Tuesday.

Screenwriter Rhett Rheese, who wrote the “Deadpool” movies, said on X last week that “I hate to say it. It’s likely over for us.” His post was in response to Irish director Ruairí Robinson’s post of a Seedance 2.0 video that shows AI versions Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Actors union SAG-AFTRA said Friday it “stands with the studios in condemning the blatant infringement” enabled by Seedance 2.0.

“The infringement includes the unauthorized use of our members’ voices and likenesses. This is unacceptable and undercuts the ability of human talent to earn a livelihood,” SAG-AFTRA said in a statement. “Seedance 2.0 disregards law, ethics, industry standards and basic principles of consent. Responsible AI development demands responsibility, and that is nonexistent here.”

ByteDance said in a statement Sunday that it respects intellectual property rights.

“(We) have heard the concerns regarding Seedance 2.0. We are taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent the unauthorized use of intellectual property and likeness by users,” the company said.

NEW ORLEANS, La. — As people head back to work Tuesday after the long holiday weekend, beads will be flying, crawfish boiling and parades rolling in New Orleans as the city celebrates Mardi Gras.

Mardi Gras, also known as Fat Tuesday, marks the climax and end of the weekslong Carnival season and a final chance for indulgence, feasting and revelry before the Christian Lent period of sacrifice and reflection. The joyous goodbye to Carnival always falls the day before Ash Wednesday.

Among the final parades in Louisiana’s most populous city, which is world-famous for its Mardi Gras bash, is one hosted by the Zulu Social Aide & Pleasure Club.

Marchers and float riders in the Zulu parade wear African-inspired garb and toss “throws” — trinkets that include plastic beads, candy, doubloons, stuffed animals, cups and toys. This parade’s signature “throw” is hand-decorated coconuts, coveted items that many revelers hope for.

Later in the day Rex, the King of Carnival parade will roll along St. Charles Avenue, lined by paradegoers and stately oak trees covered in Spanish moss and beads.

Carnival events are popular for their spectacular and enormous floats, and also the intricately crafted outfits worn, such as Black masking Indians, whose beaded and bejeweled costumes are topped with feathered headdresses, or paradegoers walking the French Quarter in homemade costumes that capture the unique spirit of the Big Easy.

The good times will roll not just in New Orleans but all across the state, from exclusive balls to the Cajun French tradition of the Courir de Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday Run — a rural event in Central Louisiana featuring costumed participants performing, begging for ingredients and chasing after live chickens to be cooked in a communal gumbo.

Parades are also held in other Gulf Coast cities such as Mobile, Alabama, and Pensacola, Florida, and there are other world-renowned celebrations in Brazil and Europe.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The federal agency that provides health care to Native Americans and Alaska Natives has announced it will phase out the use of dental fillings containing mercury.

The Indian Health Service has used fillings, known as dental amalgams, that contain elemental mercury to treat decayed and otherwise damaged teeth for decades. Native American rights and industry advocates have called for an end to the practice, arguing it exposes patients who may not have access to private dentistry to a harmful neurotoxin.

The use of mercury-containing amalgams, also known as “silver fillings” due to their appearance, has declined sharply since 2009 when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration reclassified the devices from low to moderate risk. The industry has largely abandoned them in favor of plastic resin alternatives, which are also preferred for aesthetic reasons.

The Indian Health Service says it will fully implement the move to mercury-free alternatives by 2027. Already, the percentage of the Indian Health Service’s roughly 2.8 million patient user population receiving them has declined from 12% in 2005 to 2% in 2023, the latest year of available data, agency documents show.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees IHS, said growing environmental and health concerns about mercury exposure, and global efforts to reduce materials containing the hazardous heavy metal prompted the change announced this month.

“This is a commonsense step that protects patients and prevents harm before it starts,” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said in a statement.

The agency’s switch to mercury-free alternatives also upholds legal responsibilities the U.S. government has to the 575 federally recognized tribes, he said.

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, dental amalgam fillings can release small amounts of mercury vapor during placement, removal, teeth grinding and gum chewing. It recommends that certain people at high risk for adverse effects of mercury exposure, including pregnant women, children under 6, and those with existing neurological conditions avoid the fillings. But the administration, along with the American Dental Association, says available evidence does not link mercury-containing fillings to long-term negative health outcomes.

The World Health Organization has created a plan to encourage countries around the world to phase out the use of dental amalgams, citing potential for mercury exposure. In 2013 several countries, including the U.S., signed onto the Minamata Convention, a global agreement targeting the adverse health and the environment effects of mercury. In November, signatories to the convention agreed to phase out the use of mercury-containing dental amalgams by the year 2034.

While Kennedy’s decision to stop its use within the IHS by 2027 puts the U.S. ahead of the global schedule, the country is still behind many other developed nations that have already banned the practice.

“The rest of the world is light years ahead of us,” said Rochelle Diver, the U.N. environmental treaties coordinator for the International Indian Treaty Council, adding that IHS patients should not receive treatment that is considered antiquated by many dentists.

In a statement, the American Dental Association acknowledged declining use of mercury-containing fillings, but said they remain a “safe, durable and affordable material.”

The use of mercury in other medical devices, including thermometers and blood pressure devices, has also declined sharply in recent decades. While mercury-containing amalgams have fallen out of favor in the U.S. private dental sector, patients relying on government services may not have a say, according to Charles G. Brown, president of the World Alliance for Mercury-Free Dentistry.

Many state-administered Medicaid programs continue to cover mercury-containing fillings as a treatment for tooth decay, Brown said.

“If you’re on Medicaid, if you are stuck in the Indian Health Service, if you were stuck in a prison or other institution, you just don’t have any choice,” Brown said.

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Brewer reported from Oklahoma City.

NEW ORLEANS — It is Carnival season in New Orleans. That means gazillions of green, gold and purple Mardi Gras beads.

Once made of glass and cherished by parade spectators who were lucky enough to catch them, today cheap plastic beaded necklaces from overseas are tossed from floats by the handful. Spectators sometimes pile dozens around their necks, but many are trashed or left on the ground. A few years ago after heavy flooding, the city found more than 46 tons of them clogging its storm drains.

The beads are increasingly viewed as a problem, but a Mardi Gras without beads also seems unfathomable. That is why it was a radical step when the Krewe of Freret made the decision last year to ban plastic beads from their parade.

“Our riders loved it because the spectators don’t value this anymore,” Freret co-founder Greg Rhoades said. “It’s become so prolific that they dodge out of the way when they see cheap plastic beads coming at them.”

This year, beads are back, but not the cheap plastic ones. Freret is one of three krewes throwing biodegradable beads developed at Louisiana State University.

The “PlantMe Beads” are 3D-printed from a starch-based, commercially available material called polylactic acid, or PLA, graduate student Alexis Strain said. The individual beads are large hollow spheres containing okra seeds. That is because the necklaces can actually be planted, and the okra attracts bacteria that help them decompose.

Kristi Trail, executive director of the Pontchartrain Conservancy, said plastic beads are a twofold problem. First, they clog the storm drains, leading to flooding. Then those that aren’t caught in the drains are washed directly into Lake Pontchartrain, where they can harm marine life. The group is currently preparing to study microplastics in the lake.

The trend toward a more sustainable Mardi Gras has been growing for years and includes a small but growing variety of more thoughtful throws like food, soaps and sunglasses. Trail said there is no good data right now to say if those efforts are having an impact, but the group recently got a grant that should help them answer the question in the future.

“Beads are obviously a problem, but we generate about 2.5 million pounds of trash from Mardi Gras,” Trail said.

Strain works in the lab of Professor Naohiro Kato, an associate professor of biology at LSU. He first got the idea to develop biodegradable beads in 2013 after talking to people concerned about the celebration’s environmental impact. As a plant biologist, Kato knew that bioplastics could be made from plants and got curious about the possibilities.

The first iteration of the lab’s biodegradable beads came in 2018, when they produced beads made from a bioplastic derived from microalgae. However, production costs were too high for the algae-based beads to offer a practical alternative to petroleum-based beads. Then Strain started experimenting with 3D printing, and the PlantMe Bead was born.

For the 2026 Carnival season, LSU students have produced 3,000 PlantMe Bead necklaces that they are giving to three krewes in exchange for feedback on the design and on how well they are received by spectators.

One funny thing, Kato said, is that people have told him they love how unique the PlantMe Beads are and want to keep them.

“So wait a minute, if you want to keep it, the petroleum-plastic Mardi Gras bead is the best, because this won’t last,” he said.

The lab is still working on ideas for a more sustainable Mardi Gras. Strain is experimenting with a different 3D printer material that biodegrades quickly without needing to be planted. Kato is talking with local schools about turning Mardi Gras bead-making into a community project. He envisions students 3D printing necklaces while learning about bioplastics and plant biology. And he is still exploring ways to make algae-based bioplastic commercially viable.

Ultimately, however, Kato said, the goal should not be to replace one plastic bead with a less harmful one. He hopes Mardi Gras embraces the idea of less waste.

Rhoades said Freret is moving in the same direction.

“In 2025, we were the first krewe — major parading organization — to say, ‘No more. No more cheap beads. Let’s throw things that people value, that people appreciate, that can be used year-round,’ ” Rhoades said.

One of the most coveted items they throw is baseball hats with the Freret logo. He sees people wearing the hats around the city, and he says other krewes have noticed.

“I really believe that we, and other krewes, are able to inspire your larger krewes,” he said. “They want people to like their stuff. They want people take their stuff home, and use it, and talk about it, and post it on social media, and say, ‘Look what I just caught!’ ”

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Loller reported from Nashville, Tennessee.

Former U.S. President Barack Obama said he did not see evidence that aliens “have made contact with us,” after sending social media abuzz by saying aliens were real on a podcast over the weekend.

During a lightning round of questions with podcast host Brian Tylor Cohen, Obama was asked, “Are aliens real?”

“They’re real,” he answered, continuing: “But I haven’t seen them. And, they’re not being kept in Area 51.”

On Sunday night, the former president released a statement on Instagram, appearing to clarify what he meant by his comments that have since gone viral.

“I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it’s gotten attention let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there. But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”

Secrecy around Area 51, a top-secret Cold War test site in the Nevada desert, has long fueled conspiracy theories among UFO enthusiasts.

In 2013, the CIA acknowledged the existence of the site, but not UFO crashes, black-eyed extraterrestrials or staged moon landings.

Declassified documents referred to the 8,000-square-mile (20,700-square-kilometer) installation by name after decades of U.S. government officials refusing to acknowledge it.

The base has been a testing ground for a host of top-secret aircraft, including the U-2 in the 1950s and later the B-2 stealth bomber.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A new crew rocketed toward the International Space Station on Friday to replace the astronauts who returned to Earth early in NASA’s first medical evacuation.

SpaceX launched the replacements as soon as possible at NASA’s request, sending the U.S., French and Russian astronauts on an expected eight- to nine-month mission stretching until fall. The four should arrive at the orbiting lab Saturday, filling the vacancies left by their evacuated colleagues last month and bringing the space station back to full staff.

“It turns out Friday the 13th is a very lucky day,” SpaceX Launch Control radioed once the astronauts reached orbit. “That was quite a ride,” replied the crew’s commander, Jessica Meir.

NASA had to put spacewalks on hold and deferred other duties while awaiting the arrival of Americans Meir and Jack Hathaway, France’s Sophie Adenot and Russia’s Andrei Fedyaev. They’ll join three other astronauts — one American and two Russians — who kept the space station running the past month.

Satisfied with medical procedures already in place, NASA ordered no extra checkups for the crew ahead of liftoff and no new diagnostic equipment was packed. An ultrasound machine already up there for research went into overdrive Jan. 7 when used on the ailing crew member. NASA has not revealed the ill astronaut’s identity or health issue. All four returning astronauts went straight to the hospital after splashing down in the Pacific near San Diego.

It was the first time in 65 years of human spaceflight that NASA cut short a mission for medical reasons.

With missions becoming longer, NASA is constantly looking at upgrades to the space station’s medical gear, said deputy program manager Dina Contella. “But there are a lot of things that are just not practical and so that’s when you need to bring astronauts home from space,” she said earlier this week.

In preparation for moon and Mars trips where health care will be even more challenging, the new arrivals will test a filter designed to turn drinking water into emergency IV fluid, try out an ultrasound system that relies on artificial intelligence and augmented reality instead of experts on the ground, and perform ultrasound scans on their jugular veins in a blood clot study.

They also will demonstrate their moon-landing skills in a simulated test drawing extra attention because of the impending launch of four astronauts to the moon on Artemis II, humanity’s first lunar voyage in more than half a century.

Adenot is only the second French woman to launch to space. She was 14 when Claudie Haignere flew to Russia’s space station Mir in 1996, inspiring her to become an astronaut. Haignere cheered her on from the Florida launch site, wishing her “Bon vol,” French for “Have a good flight,” and “Ad astra,” Latin for “To the stars.”

Hathaway, like Adenot, is new to space, while Meir and Fedyaev are making their second station trip. On her first mission in 2019, Meir took part in the first all-female spacewalk. The other half of that spacewalk, Christina Koch, is among the four Artemis II astronauts waiting to fly around the moon as early as March. A ship-to-ship radio linkup is planned between the two crews.

Meir wasn’t sure astronauts would return to the moon during her career. “Now we’re right here on the precipice of the Artemis II mission,” she said ahead of liftoff. “The fact that they will be in space at the same time as us … it’s so cool to be an astronaut now, it’s so exciting.”

SpaceX launched the latest crew from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Elon Musk’s company is preparing its neighboring Kennedy Space Center launch pad for the supersized Starships, which NASA needs to land astronauts on the moon.

NASA’s new administrator Jared Isaacman said following Friday’s liftoff that testing continues at the Artemis pad, where the Space Launch System moon rocket awaits liftoff. A practice fueling last week unleashed hydrogen fuel leaks. Two seals have since been replaced and a mini fueling conducted.

Isaacman stressed that no launch date will be set until additional fueling tests — potentially a series of them — are completed. The earliest that Artemis II could launch is March 3, he noted.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The International Space Station returned to full strength with Saturday’s arrival of four new astronauts to replace colleagues who bailed early because of health concerns.

SpaceX delivered the U.S., French and Russian astronauts a day after launching them from Cape Canaveral.

Last month’s medical evacuation was NASA’s first in 65 years of human spaceflight. One of four astronauts launched by SpaceX last summer suffered what officials described as a serious health issue, prompting their hasty return. That left only three crew members to keep the place running — one American and two Russians — prompting NASA to pause spacewalks and trim research.

Moving in for eight to nine months are NASA’s Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, France’s Sophie Adenot and Russia’s Andrei Fedyaev. Meir, a marine biologist, and Fedyaev, a former military pilot, have lived up there before. During her first station visit in 2019, Meir took part in the first all-female spacewalk.

Adenot, a military helicopter pilot, is only the second French woman to fly in space. Hathaway is a captain in the U.S. Navy.

NASA has refused to divulge the identity of the astronaut who fell ill in orbit on Jan. 7 or explain what happened, citing medical privacy. The ailing astronaut and three others returned to Earth more than a month sooner than planned. They spent their first night back on Earth at the hospital before returning to Houston.

The space agency said it did not alter its preflight medical checks for their replacements.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

PORTLAND, Maine — The U.S.’s ocean regulator plans to make industry-friendly changes to a longstanding rule designed to protect vanishing whales, prompting criticism from environmental groups who cite the recent death of an endangered whale.

The rules protect the North Atlantic right whale, which numbers less than 400 and lives off the East Coast. The giant animals are protected by a vessel speed rule that requires large ships to slow down at certain times to avoid collisions, which is a leading cause of death for the whales.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a Thursday statement to The Associated Press that it plans to soon announce proposed new rules designed to “modernize” the whale protections. The proposal will be a “deregulatory-focused action” that will seek to “reduce unnecessary regulatory and economic burdens while ensuring responsible conservation practices for endangered North Atlantic right whales,” the statement said.

A notice of rulemaking about the right whale rules is listed on the U.S. Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs website, but it does not include any details about the proposal. NOAA said in its statement that more information about the rules was forthcoming and that the agency was focused on “implementing new technologies, engineering approaches, and other advanced tools” to protect the whales.

Several environmental groups criticized the move away from vessel speed rules. Some cited the Feb. 10 confirmation of the death of a 3-year-old female whale off Virginia. The cause of the animal’s death was not yet determined, but it died at a far younger age than typical.

“Another female right whale — the future of this species — has lost her life. We urgently need more right whale protections, not fewer. The Trump administration’s apparent determination to weaken the vessel speed rule could not come at a worse time,” said Jane Davenport, senior attorney at conservation group Defenders of Wildlife.

Right whales migrate every year from calving grounds off Florida and Georgia to feeding grounds off New England and Canada. Along the way, they are vulnerable to collisions with ships and entanglement in commercial fishing gear. They were once numerous off the East Coast but were decimated during the commercial whaling era and have been federally protected for decades.

The Biden administration planned to expand slow zones off the East Coast to protect the whales. It also planned to expand the classes of boats required to slow down. However, the federal government withdrew the proposal in the final days of the administration, with officials saying it didn’t have time to finalize the regulations due to the scope and volume of public comments.

Some shipping businesses and other marine industries have long pushed back at vessel speed rules. The National Marine Manufacturers Association has described speed restrictions as “archaic” and advocated for solutions that rely on technology.

NEW YORK — For years, it was a daily McDonald’s trip for a cup of coffee with 10 sugars and five creams. Later, it was Starbucks caramel macchiatos with almond milk and two pumps of syrup.

Coffee has been a morning ritual for Chandra Donelson since she was old enough to drink it. But, dismayed by rising prices, the 35-year-old from Washington, D.C., did the unthinkable: She gave it up.

“I did that daily for years. I loved it. That was just my routine,” she says. “And now it’s not.”

Years of steadily climbing coffee prices have some in this country of coffee lovers upending their habits by nixing café visits, switching to cheaper brews or foregoing it altogether.

Coffee prices in the U.S. were up 18.3% in January from a year ago, according to the latest Consumer Price Index released on Friday. Over five years, the government reported, coffee prices rose 47%.

That extraordinary rise has brought some to take extraordinary measures.

“Before, I thought, ‘There’s no way I could make it through my day without coffee,’” says Liz Sweeney, 50, of Boise, Idaho, a former “coffee addict” who has cut her consumption. “Now my car’s not on automatic pilot.”

Sweeney used to have three cups of coffee at home each day and stop at a café whenever she left the house. As prices climbed last year, though, she nixed coffee shop visits and cut her intake to a cup a day at home. To make up for the caffeine, she pops open a can of Diet Coke at home or rolls through McDonald’s for one.

Dan DeBaun, 34, of Minnetonka, Minnesota, has likewise trimmed back on coffee shop visits, conscious of the increasing expense as he and his wife save up for a house.

“What used to be a $2 coffee, it’s now $5, $6,” says DeBaun, who now buys ground coffee at Trader Joe’s and fills up a travel mug to bring to the office.

Data from Toast, a payment platform used by more than 150,000 restaurants, found the median price of a regular hot coffee in the U.S. had climbed to $3.61 in December, with wide variation by location. The median price of cold brews was $5.55.

Virtually all coffee consumed in the U.S. is imported. Though tariffs affected some imports of coffee in 2025, they ultimately were removed. Climate issues — drought in Vietnam, heavy rain in Indonesia, and hot, dry weather in Brazil — are blamed for reducing yields of coffee crops and driving up global prices.

Two-thirds of Americans drink coffee daily, according to the National Coffee Association. For many, it is such an indispensable part of their routine, the soaring price has led to nothing more than grumbling.

The coffee association says its surveys show coffee consumption is broadly holding steady despite price hikes. But, squeezed by the cost of everything from rent to beef, others are shaking up their habit.

Sharon Cooksey, 55, of Greensboro, North Carolina, was visiting her local Starbucks most weekday mornings for a caramel latte until scaling back last year. First, she switched to brewing Starbucks at home. Then, she discovered Lavazza coffee was about 40% cheaper and switched to it.

“I can buy a bag of coffee for $6?” she said to herself. “It was like I had just discovered another world. The multiverse opened up to me in the coffee aisle of Publix.”

She has noticed her home-brewed costs tick upward, too, but it’s nothing compared to her café habit. A bag of beans that lasts weeks costs her about the same as one latte.

Cooksey misses the social aspect of visiting the café, where baristas greeted her by name. But she’s been surprised to find she actually prefers the way her homemade coffees taste.

“I’ll be damned if it didn’t taste so good,” she says.

Growing up, Donelson watched enviously as her mother made a daily coffee jaunt (also to McDonald’s, also 10 sugars and five creams), and she duplicated the habit. She went from college to the Air Force to a government job as a data and artificial intelligence strategist, but through it all, coffee was there.

She noticed the growing expense of her routine, but kept it up until a government shutdown halted her paychecks last fall and she needed to trim her spending. Looking for a morning substitute, she landed on a Republic of Tea blend with a healthy squeeze of honey.

“Twenty cents a cup compared to $7 or $8 a cup,” she says. “The math just makes sense.”

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Matt Sedensky can be reached at msedensky@ap.org and https://x.com/sedensky

Wendy’s is closing several hundred U.S. restaurants and increasing its focus on value after a weaker-than-expected fourth quarter.

The Dublin, Ohio-based company said Friday that its global same-store sales, or sales at locations open at least a year, fell 10% in the October-December period. That was worse than the 8.5% drop expected by analysts polled by FactSet.

U.S. same-store sales fell even further in the fourth quarter. Wendy’s said late last year that it planned to close underperforming U.S. restaurants, but it gave more details about those closures Friday.

Wendy’s said it already closed 28 restaurants in the fourth quarter and ended 2025 with 5,969 U.S. locations. It expects to close between 5% and 6% of its U.S. restaurants – or 298 to 358 locations – in the first half of this year.

Those actions come on top of the closure of 240 U.S. Wendy’s locations in 2024. At the time, the 57-year-old chain said many of its locations are simply out of date.

Like McDonald’s, Taco Bell and other rivals, Wendy’s also plans to emphasize value as it tries to win back inflation-weary customers.

“One learning from 2025 around value, we swung the pendulum too far towards limited-time price promotions instead of everyday value,” said Ken Cook, Wendy’s interim CEO and chief financial officer, in a conference call with investors.

In January, Wendy’s introduced a permanent “Biggie Deals” value menu with three price tiers: $4 Biggie Bites, $6 Biggie Bags and an $8 Biggie Bundle. Cook said Wendy’s also has new products coming this year, including a new chicken sandwich.

Wendy’s said its revenue fell 5.5% in the fourth quarter to $543 million. That was higher than the $537 million analysts had forecast.

Wendy’s expressed confidence that its U.S. turnaround plans and international growth will help arrest its sales slide this year. The company said it expects global systemwide sales — which includes sales at both company-owned and franchised restaurants — will be flat this year. Systemwide sales fell 3.5% last year.

Wendy’s shares rose nearly 5% in mid-day trading Friday.

Two golfers in Washington, D.C., sued the federal government on Friday to try to prevent the Trump administration from overhauling a more than 100-year-old public golf course, accusing the administration of violating environmental laws and polluting a park that is on the National Register of Historic Places.

The suit is the latest in a series of legal battles challenging President Donald Trump’s extraordinary efforts to put his mark on public spaces in the nation’s capitol, including shuttering the Kennedy Center.

At the end of last year, a group of preservationists filed a similar lawsuit seeking to prevent the administration from demolishing the East Wing of the White House in order to build a ballroom — a project slated to cost $400.

Trump, who is an avid golfer himself, also plans on renovating a military golf course just outside of Washington that has been used by past presidents going back decades.

The complaint filed against the Department of the Interior on Friday says that the Trump administration’s reconstruction of East Potomac Park — which includes the East Potomac Golf Course — would violate the congressional act that created the park in 1897. The roughly 130-year-old act established the park for the “recreation and the pleasure of the people.”

The golf course, which has since been recognized on the National Register of Historic Places in part for its efforts to racially integrate in the 1940s. Municipal golf courses make up only 18% of courses in America.

“East Potomac Golf Links is a testament to what’s possible with public land and why public spaces matter,” said Washington resident and plaintiff Dave Roberts. “It deserves better than becoming a dumping ground for waste and yet another private playground for the privileged and powerful.”

The lawsuit came after the Trump administration in December ended a lease agreement the nonprofit National Links Trust held for East Potomac and two other golf courses in Washington. The Interior Department said it did so because the nonprofit hadn’t implemented required capital improvements and failed to meet the terms of the lease.

The Interior Department press office said in an email Friday that it doesn’t comment on pending litigation.

However, it said it would “ensure these courses are safe, beautiful, open, affordable, enjoyable and accessible for people visiting the greatest capital city in the world which is in line with President Trump’s agenda.”

The White House also didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment on Friday evening.

Construction on the East Potomac course has already begun, according to the lawsuit. In October, the National Parks Service began dumping debris from the demolition of the East Wing of the White House onto the golf course, the complaint said, raising concerns that the materials could contain contaminants that could pollute the air.

As a result, the plaintiffs argued, the administration of also violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to consider the harmful environmental impacts of the project.

The National Links Trust said in December they were “devastated” by the decision to terminate the lease and defended their management of the courses.

They said $8.5 million had gone toward capital improvements at the courses and that rounds played and revenue had more than doubled in their tenure managing the courses. They also added that the termination of the lease jeopardized hundreds of local jobs.

The nonprofit has agreed to keep managing the courses for the time being, but long-term renovations will stop.

The first 18 holes of the East Potomac Park Golf Course were built from 1918 to 1923.

___ Associated Press writer Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu contributed to this report.

SEATTLE — The city of Seattle has reached a $29 million settlement with the family of a 23-year-old graduate student from India who was struck by a speeding police officer as she crossed a street in 2023.

Jaahnavi Kandula was hit by Officer Kevin Dave, who was driving as fast as 74 mph (119 kph) in a 25-mph (40-kph) zone as he responded to a drug overdose call. He had his emergency lights on and had been using his siren at intersections.

“Jaahnavi Kandula’s death was heartbreaking, and the city hopes this financial settlement brings some sense of closure to the Kandula family,” City Attorney Erika Evans said in a statement Wednesday. “Jaahnavi Kandula’s life mattered. It mattered to her family, her friends and to our community.”

Kandula had been working toward a master’s degree in information systems at the Seattle campus of Northeastern University.

Attorneys for Kandula’s family did not immediately respond to emails or phone calls seeking comment. The parties filed a notice of settlement in King County Superior Court last Friday. The local news website PubliCola first reported about the agreement.

Kandula’s death ignited outrage and demonstrations, particularly after a recording from another officer’s body camera surfaced in which the officer laughed and suggested Kandula’s life had “limited value” and the city should “just write a check.”

Diplomats from India sought an investigation. The city’s civilian watchdog found the comments by Officer Daniel Auderer, who was a union leader, damaged the department’s reputation and undermined public trust. Auderer was later fired and has sued the city for wrongful termination. He said his remarks were intended to criticize how attorneys were likely to respond to the death.

The police department also fired the driving officer, who was cited for negligent driving and ordered to pay a $5,000 fine. King County prosecutors declined to file felony charges against him, saying they could not prove he was deliberately disregarding safety when he struck Kandula.

About $20 million of the settlement is expected to be covered by the city’s insurance.

CLAIRTON, Pa. — The sale of United States Steel was always going to be a global affair. Reporters from across the world descended into the Monongahela River Valley, south of Pittsburgh, to cover President Donald Trump’s celebration of the next chapter of an industrial icon.

The question in the cradle of American metalmaking: Would a new Japanese owner break the doldrums of postindustrial decay?

“I have faith. I know Nippon Steel is going to pull us through here, get us back up and moving,” says lifelong resident Dorcas Rumble.

Beset with illnesses and caring for a granddaughter with severe asthma, Carla Beard-Owens has all but lost hope. “I had confidence years ago that they would change, get better air and help clean it up,” she says. “And it’s still the same as it was when I was growing up.”

On whether Nippon will usher in change, “at this point, I’d rather see it than believe it.”

An August explosion at the U.S. Steel Clairton Coke Works that killed two people heightened the stakes, and a new mayor is raising that city’s hopes. But many who live and work in Clairton are wondering if they can hope for a sustained departure from decades of disinvestment and persistent pollution.

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This story is a collaboration between Pittsburgh’s Public Source and The Associated Press.

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Blocked by one American president, approved by the next, Japan’s Nippon Steel bought the American industrial icon for $15 billion last June, and pledged $11 billion in upgrades to domestic steelmaking. Nippon said $2.4 billion of that might reinvigorate Southwestern Pennsylvania’s Mon Valley, where a half century of deindustrialization has left long strands of scarred riverside steel towns.

Nippon hasn’t said whether any money would go to the Clairton Coke Works, the largest facility of its kind in the Western Hemisphere. The sprawling plant, completed in 1916, has sputtered but survived — as has Clairton. For generations, residents have endured community violence, poverty and chronic air pollution consistently ranked among the worst in the nation.

The Aug. 11 explosion, though, shook the coke works and sent shockwaves through the city, spurring renewed calls for greater oversight for the coke works that contributes roughly two-thirds of Allegheny County’s industrial particulate air pollution and is often out of compliance with environmental law.

In November, Clairtonians rejected 16-year incumbent Rich Lattanzi and his campaign slogan — “If it ain’t broke, don’t try and fix it” — in favor of former U.S. Steel foreman Jim Cerqua. The new mayor’s mantra: “It is broke! We are going to fix it!”

Pittsburgh’s Public Source and The Associated Press spent the past six months reporting from Clairton, long known as the City of Prayer, listening to a often-conflicted relationship to an industry that’s provided jobs and collective identity for generations, but also illness and economic collapse. At a crossroads, some see the biggest chance for change in decades.

Rumble peers out of the windshield across the rows of shuttered storefronts on St. Clair Avenue.

“When I was growing up here, we had three movie theaters, four grocery stores,” she says. “We had three banks, we had a jewelry store, clothing stores, a bakery.” Now, Rumble says, there’s nothing.

Rumble, 61, steers her car up a hill and through rows of crumbling housing originally built for steelworkers in the 1940s. “There used to be so many families up here, and now not so much.”

She recalls her father as one of the first to be laid off from his job at the Clairton Coke Works in 1981, as offshoring swept American steelmaking and downsizing gripped the Mon Valley.

A community health worker and part-time jitney driver, Rumble organizes monthly food and clothing drives and a free health clinic for residents who need care. She helps people in the community with housing and rent assistance. She says of her neighbors: “They need everything.”

“Us having this new mayor, we have hopes,” Rumble says. “He gives us promises, and I’m gonna hold him to them.”

Rumble knows that no mayor can do it alone.

“It’s all tied to the mill,” Rumble says, looking around. “Everything’s tied to the mill. Everything. … That’s our only resource. It’s the mill, it’s always been the mill. … Hopefully now with Nippon coming, it’ll start booming again.”

Rumble’s sister, Miriam Maletta, opened her salon on St. Clair Avenue in 1984 when she was 21 and Clairton was bustling. “Business was great, because that mill was thriving.” At times, she worked until 2 a.m., sometimes bringing in $4,000 in a week.

“Now I’m one of the only ones left,” she says, her business one of the few along Clairton’s main street, and she struggles. “I need help bad.”

In a city dominated by a pollution-emitting plant, and a district long known for football, school administrators tap community partners to build a culture of collaboration and practical skills six months after the mill explosion.

In 2016, Maletta was diagnosed with stage 4 lymphoma. After six rounds of chemotherapy and 17 radiation treatments, she is in remission. “Whatever went on in my body,” she says, she believes the mill was a part of it. “I think it was all from me living here.”

“My dad worked in the mill. Never drank, never smoked. He was a professional boxer. Hall of Famer. He came down with stage four gastric cancer. … This is stuff that we have endured.”

U.S. Steel says its safety is “our core value and shapes our culture.”

For as much as Rumble thinks the mill contributes to disease in her family, she says it’s a worthwhile tradeoff to keep the city’s economy afloat. “If they can do better in keeping the air clean, I mean, what else is there? How are we supposed to get any kind of revenue?”

U.S. Steel should do more, Maletta says, to contribute to businesses like hers, and build Clairton back up. ”You’re a multibillion dollar industry. Why not help the people of this community?”

A Clairton future with a thriving mill can also have rooftop gardens, a place to buy fresh food and something for the children to do on the weekends, she says. Workers could once again roam the streets and stop in at an eatery for a bite to eat. Their spouses could go to Miriam’s for a hair cut — echoes of how it used to be, but not a return to the past, she says. “I see it being new and different, but the mill is a common denominator.”

Regulation, she says, “has to be better. … I don’t want you here if you’re not going to help the community, if you aren’t going to care about our health.”

“People voted for change,” Cerqua tells a full room of residents and supporters moments after being sworn in as mayor, replacing Lattanzi. “We’re gonna work on bringing change.”

Later, over a plate of Italian sweet sausage at the American Legion, the former coke works employee describes his vision. First he needs to balance the budget and spend Clairton’s scant resources wisely.

He plans for an advisory council of youth who might inform veteran leaders like him, and he pledges to demolish crumbling buildings and infrastructure, and to push for redevelopment “starting anywhere, just pick a spot.”

The new mayor also puts forth a vision of a mental health and recreation center, maybe with a basketball court, a walking track for seniors and a “little coffee spot” to relax. He envisions a space in the back where kids might learn welding, carpentry and plumbing.

U.S. Steel, he says, must be a big part of making that vision a reality. “They have to be.” Running Clairton without the plant — and the roughly one-third of city taxes it pays — is hard to imagine. “If U.S. Steel would have not done the merger and pulled out, my town would be in trouble.”

Cerqua says he met with the company and will do so routinely to discuss a vision for Clairton. “I want to see more Clairtonians employed, and they do, too.”

At the bar, steelworker Brian Pavlack points to an image hanging on the wall of him on stage with President Donald Trump. A lifelong Democrat, Pavlack switched parties and voted for Trump hoping to extend the lifespan of steelmaking, but supported Cerqua, a Democrat, to help bring Clairton back.

Pavlack says he met with U.S. Steel representatives before the acquisition. “They even told us if Nippon don’t take over, we’re gonna leave the Mon Valley and go down south.”

In November, the newly merged Nippon and U.S. Steel announced they would invest at least $2.4 billion in the Mon Valley Works, with $1.1 billion already slated for a new hot strip mill and slag recycler several miles up the Monongahela River at Andrew Carnegie’s earliest mill, the Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock.

In a statement, a spokesperson said U.S. Steel has already contributed more than $5 million over five years to organizations focused on health and safety, workforce development, environmental stewardship and community resilience in and around Clairton. That includes $500,000 for a new stadium for the Clairton Bears high school football team. The company said it also has active community advisory panels with community leaders “to hear about their concerns and needs.”

At the same time, U.S. Steel has made substantial investments in Arkansas, where labor is not unionized and where the company is building modern steelmaking facilities and recently committed another $3 billion. Nothing, so far, has been publicly earmarked for the Clairton Coke Works.

Pavlack praises Trump for slashing regulations on emissions, a move he thought best for the industry and his job, but he concedes, “a new president comes in, you can reverse all that.”

For now, though, he says, “The future is looking pretty bright in the Mon Valley.”

Nippon’s acquisition and investment is likely to extend the lifespan of Mon Valley steelmaking, and in doing so, lengthen a longstanding legacy of industrial pollution.

In November, Beard-Owens stood before Allegheny County Council. She didn’t want the mill to close, she said, noting it still provides jobs, but it has to be held accountable. She told the council about her granddaughter, Nasyiah, who struggles with asthma and lead poisoning and tries her best to stay indoors to limit exposure, and about her parents, who died of cancer.

“I lost a lot of loved ones and seen other ones pass because of this mill. Because they don’t want to do nothing. Because they want to brush it under the rug and feed their pockets and not help the kids and the environment and the city. I’m tired,” she said at the council meeting.

Beard-Owens and some of her neighbors in Clairton took a bus Downtown to ask the council to increase the permitting fees for U.S. Steel and other industrial polluters, a move that would bring more money and capacity to the chronically underfunded Allegheny County Health Department, which regulates U.S. Steel.

“I should still be able to go up steps, take a breath. I can’t,” said Beard-Owens, 56, to council members. “I had surgery to cut my throat open to remove a mass that was huge that was connected to my vocal chords. I couldn’t speak.”

The airborne byproducts of coke production — PM2.5, sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide and benzene, among others — have been scientifically linked by government and private research to an array of health conditions, many of which Beard-Owens and her family have experienced.

Beard-Owens has been diagnosed with thyroid and cervical cancers, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, and heart disease.

At night, she connects to a breathing machine, and takes a steroid inhaler each morning. “I take medicine all day long, every day,” she says, seated in her apartment in Clairton.

Until last year, her granddaughter spent afternoons at cheerleading practice on the fields across State Street from the coke works.

“I had to keep bringing my inhaler every day to cheer practice because I could barely breathe,” 9-year-old Nasyiah Mason says.

“We don’t walk to school no more,” Beard-Owens says. “She don’t barely go outside.”

“Why is it that we got to keep dealing with this, generation after generation after generation?”

The childhood asthma rate in Clairton is 22.4%, roughly triple the national average. Of Clairton’s children with asthma, researcher Dr. Deborah Gentile explains, 60% have poor control. “That means they’re having trouble sleeping at night, they’re missing school because they’re sick, they’re running to the emergency room or the doctors, they’re not participating in activities.”

Coke oven emissions are classified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as a known human carcinogen. Clairton’s lifetime cancer risk is 2.3 times the EPA’s acceptable limit, and the coke works contributes about 98.7% of the estimated excess risk, according to analysis by ProPublica.

The Clairton Coke Works “has a tremendous impact” on human health, and asthma is just part of the picture, Gentile says. Cardiovascular problems like high blood pressure and congestive heart failure have been proven to be caused by exposure to air pollution, she says, and there’s links between neurologic conditions and endocrine disease like diabetes, premature birth, low birth weight and premature death.

That evening in November, County Council voted to approve a fee increase. It was a small blip in a long legacy of industrial pollution, but Beard-Owens felt victorious.

On the bus ride back from County Council’s meeting to Clairton, Jackie Wade cheers. “We won!” She dances in her seat, singing in the dark.

Wade moved to Clairton as a teenager in 1969 and experienced decades of industrial decline. Clairton’s slow slump “was like death row,” she says, and community violence and poverty became normal. When the battery exploded, she started to see that inertia break. “It got people thinking, we could’ve been gone right there.”

“We’re in that black hole in space,” she says. “We’re wanting out so bad to show our city can be just like everywhere else.”

She wishes the community had more opportunity to talk with Nippon before the deal. “What are some of the things that will change in our community and is it going to be based on that area down there where the mill sits or are they willing to look at some things that we need in our community or that people in the Mon Valley need?” And who will pay to meet those needs?

Her son, Wayne Wade, was named coach of the year by the Pittsburgh Steelers after leading the Clairton Bears football team to a state championship. Football, Jackie Wade says, “is the only light we have.”

She never wanted her son to stay to coach in Clairton.

“Anybody that has good sense,” she says, “they move.”

At the fields along State Street one evening in October, young football players huddle with their coaches at the end of practice. By the bleachers, Ronald Mitchell waits for his 10-year-old son, Ramir, who soon jogs over. “I’m the hardest hitter in the league!” he exclaims.

The team didn’t practice near the mill the week after the explosion, Ronald says. They were back in a week. Across the street, the company was preparing to reopen one of the batteries that exploded.

“I don’t like it, but there’s nothing we can do about it,” Ronald says. “We’re getting out of here.”

Ronald, his wife, Shandrea and Ramir are planning to move to North Carolina, seeking better opportunity and relief from health worries.

The air filters and fans the family bought helped “a little bit,” but Ramir’s asthma was persistent. The practice fields near the mill didn’t help.

The family was offered money in a settlement of a class-action lawsuit claiming the pollution from the coke works harmed property values and was a persistent nuisance. The family refused the several hundred dollars, which they understand would have come in return for agreeing not to sue the company.

“Not enough money if something’s going to happen to us down the line,” says Ronald, a former worker at the mill.

“Our lives don’t have a price,” Shandrea says.

On New Year’s Eve, Clairton’s clergy gathers to pray inside the municipal building on the hill, overlooking the mill.

They take turns preaching, praying for the community, for families and children, the sick and homeless. They pray for jobs, for the schools and for the city and the nation.

The Rev. Deryck Tines prays for change.

“Now it’s time for what’s coming next. And it’s not a slight to what was. It’s called change. And without change we will be stuck in sin and trespasses,” he preaches, asking God to bless the mayor and the city, and thanking him for the miracles of the future.

“I pray, God, that our city begins to rebound,” he continues. “God, I pray for new businesses and new ideas and new vision. … I pray that we cross this threshold, God, that we step into a new portal, that we step into new life. New word, new conversation. Hallelujah!”

The clergy bow their heads and pray into the night.

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Quinn Glabicki is the environment and climate reporter at Pittsburgh’s Public Source and can be reached at quinn@publicsource.org. This story is a collaboration between Pittsburgh’s Public Source and The Associated Press. This story was fact-checked by Jamese Platt.

PORT WASHINGTON, N.Y. — When thousands of New York City nurses walked off the job last month in the city’s largest strike of its kind in decades, 9-year-old Logan Coyle was a patient in the cancer unit at NewYork-Presbyterian’s children’s hospital in Manhattan.

Logan was recovering from his latest setback in a two-year battle with advanced liver cancer that has already included chemotherapy and a complex triple transplant of a liver, pancreas and small intestine.

But as the nurses formed their picket outside the hospital, he walked to his window and held up a handmade sign: “Proud of My Primaries.”

Morgan Bieler, one of Logan’s longtime, primary nurses, said the sight was a jolt of encouragement in those early, uncertain hours of the walkout, which, at the outset, involved roughly 15,000 nurses across some of the city’s most prestigious hospitals.

“In that moment, it kind of reinforced like, ‘This is why we’re doing this’,” she said recently. “If he can fight for as long as he has and as hard as he has, then we could fight this.”

But nearly a month on, more than 4,000 nurses in the NewYork-Presbyterian system are the last on the picket line.

Jeff Coyle, Logan’s father, says it’s “infuriating” that some of the city’s most vulnerable patients are caught in the middle of the bitter dispute over salaries, staffing levels, workplace safety, health care and other contractual issues.

“Every single day that this drags on is a severe impact to us,” he said. “We are the collateral damage of this strike.”

On Monday, the nurses’ union reached tentative deals with two other major systems, Mount Sinai and Montefiore. Those proposals, if approved in membership votes this week, would see unionized nurses at those hospitals return to work by Saturday.

Negotiations at NewYork-Presbyterian, though, have been bumpier.

Late Tuesday, the nurses’ union said it was calling on its NewYork-Presbyterian members to vote on a proposal accepted by hospital administrators but rejected by the union’s bargaining committee.

The union said the deal “delivers the same contract priorities” its negotiators reached with the other hospital systems, including a 12% pay raise over three years.

“The simple fact is, we’ve reached the end of negotiations,” Pat Kane, the union’s executive director, said in a video message sent to NewYork-Presbyterian nurses that was provided to The Associated Press.

“You deserve to vote on it. You have fought so hard to get to this point,” Nancy Hagans, the union’s president, added in the video.

Logan returned home Saturday after having a tumor removed near his spine. But he said he noticed the difference between his regular nurses and the temporary replacements almost immediately.

Routine things like blood draws and lab tests took longer than normal for the replacement nurses. Gone also were the steady rounds of familiar faces dropping by, oftentimes just for a chat or to read a book.

“I like that they come in and color with you so I’m not spending my whole day on the screen in my iPad world,” he said Tuesday in the family’s home in Port Washington, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) from Manhattan in suburban Long Island.

“I wouldn’t want to be back there for another month without them,” added Logan, who also has a twin sister, Riley. “I would feel more safer if they were all back.”

Logan’s mom, Rebecca, says she spent more sleepless nights at her son’s bedside than previous hospital stays because the temporary nurses cycling in and out every few days came with varying levels of experience.

“I was just constantly up, checking to make sure that something was running appropriately or waiting for a medicine to arrive or waiting for fluids to arrive or a blood product,” she said. “I felt like I had to be so vigilant.”

Bieler says she worries daily about her long-term patients still at the hospital.

She said bone marrow transplants and chemotherapy treatments have been delayed or canceled entirely for some because of the staffing challenges.

“We’re not the only pawns in this, is my point,” Bieler said. “They’re playing with children’s lives, and I can’t imagine how frustrating that is for our community.”

Spokespersons for NewYork-Presbyterian didn’t immediately comment Tuesday, but the hospital systems have insisted their operations are running smoothly, with organ transplants and other complex procedures largely uninterrupted.

As for Logan, Bieler says caring for the upbeat, endlessly positive boy changed her outlook on life.

“He’s always the best version of himself, and he faces everything with a smile,” she said. “I don’t think I would be the nurse, let alone the person I am today, without him and his family.”

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Follow Philip Marcelo at https://x.com/philmarcelo

More than two dozen privacy and advocacy organizations are calling on California Gov. Gavin Newsom to remove a network of covert license plate readers deployed across Southern California that the groups believe feed data into a controversial U.S. Border Patrol predictive domestic intelligence program that scans the country’s roadways for suspicious travel patterns.

“We ask that your administration investigate and release the relevant permits, revoke them, and initiate the removal of these devices,” read the letter sent Tuesday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Imperial Valley Equity and Justice and other nonprofits.

An Associated Press investigation published in November revealed that the U.S. Border Patrol, an agency under U.S. Customs and Border Protection, had hidden license plate readers in ordinary traffic safety equipment. The data collected by the Border Patrol plate readers was then fed into a predictive intelligence program monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious.

AP obtained land use permits from Arizona showing that the Border Patrol went to great lengths to conceal its surveillance equipment in that state, camouflaging it by placing it inside orange and yellow construction barrels dotting highways.

The letter said the groups’ researchers have identified a similar network of devices in California, finding about 40 license plate readers in San Diego and Imperial counties, both of which border Mexico. More than two dozen of the plate readers identified by the groups were hidden in construction barrels.

They could not determine of the ownership of every device, but the groups said in the letter that they obtained some permits from the California Department of Transportation, showing both the Border Patrol and Drug Enforcement Administration had applied for permission to place readers along state highways. DEA shares its license plate reader data with Border Patrol, documents show.

The letter cited the AP’s reporting, which found that Border Patrol uses a network of cameras to scan and record vehicle license plate information. An algorithm flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on where they came from, where they were going and which route they took. Agents appeared to be looking for vehicles making short trips to the border region, claiming that such travel is indicative of potential drug or human smuggling.

Federal agents in turn sometimes refer drivers they deem suspicious to local law enforcement who make a traffic stop citing a reason like speeding or lane change violations. Drivers often have no idea they have been caught up in a predictive intelligence program being run by a federal agency.

The AP identified at least two cases in which California residents appeared to have been caught up in the Border Patrol’s surveillance of domestic travel patterns. In one 2024 incident described in court documents, a Border Patrol agent pulled over the driver of a Nissan Altima based in part on vehicle travel data showing that it took the driver six hours to travel the approximately 50 miles between the U.S.-Mexican border and Oceanside, California, where the agent had been on patrol.

“This type of delay in travel after crossing the International Border from Mexico is a common tactic used by persons involved in illicit smuggling,” the agent wrote in a court document.

In another case, Border Patrol agents said in a court document in 2023 they detained a woman at an internal checkpoint because she had traveled a circuitous route between Los Angeles and Phoenix. In both cases, law enforcement accused the drivers of smuggling immigrants in the country unlawfully and were seeking to seize their property or charge them with a crime.

The intelligence program, which has existed under administrations of both parties, has drawn scrutiny from lawmakers since the AP revealed its existence last year.

The California Department of Transportation and the office of Newsom, a Democrat, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Courts have generally upheld license plate reader collection on public roads but have curtailed warrantless government access to other kinds of persistent tracking data that might reveal sensitive details about people’s movements, such as GPS devices or cellphone location data. Some scholars and civil libertarians argues that large-scale collection systems like plate readers might be unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.

“Increasingly, courts have recognized that the use of surveillance technologies can violate the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Although this area of law is still developing, the use of LPRs and predictive algorithms to track and flag individuals’ movements represents the type of sweeping surveillance that should raise constitutional concerns,” the organizations wrote.

CBP did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but previously said the agency uses plate readers to help identify threats and disrupt criminal networks and their use of the technology is “governed by a stringent, multi-layered policy framework, as well as federal law and constitutional protections, to ensure the technology is applied responsibly and for clearly defined security purposes.”

DEA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Burke reported from San Francisco. Tau reported from Washington.

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Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The nation’s largest public utility says it now would prefer to keep operating two coal-fired power plants it had planned to shutter, changing course before a meeting of its board, which has a majority of members picked by the coal-friendly Trump administration.

In new filings, the Tennessee Valley Authority’s signaled that it wants to ditch closure dates for the Kingston Fossil Plant and Cumberland Fossil Plant in Tennessee, which would require further action from its board. The new plan would still include introducing natural gas-fired plants at both locations.

TVA had intended to shutter its remaining, aging coal plants by 2035 in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that spur climate change. But the utility, which partners with local power companies to serve roughly 10 million people in seven states, said it is rethinking the coal plant closures because of regulatory changes and increasing demand for electricity.

“As power demand grows, TVA is looking at every option to bolster our generating fleet to continue providing affordable, reliable electricity to our 10 million customers, create jobs and help communities thrive,” Brooks said in a statement Tuesday.

But several clean energy groups said extending the coal plants would raise serious questions about TVA’s decision-making process, since the utility has said more natural gas plants were needed to retire polluting coal plants.

“Without even a public meeting, TVA is telling the people who live near these coal plants that they will breathe in toxic pollution from not one, but two major power plants for the foreseeable future,” Gabi Lichtenstein, Tennessee Program Coordinator for Appalachian Voices, said in a news release. “This decision is salt in the wound after ignoring widespread calls for cleaner, cheaper replacements for the Kingston and Cumberland coal plants.”

President Donald Trump fired enough TVA board members picked by his predecessor to leave the utility without a quorum. Without one, the board could only take actions needed for ongoing operations, not to jump into new areas of activity, start new programs or change the utility’s existing direction.

Trump then signed executive orders aimed at helping the coal industry. Last May, TVA’s president and CEO, Don Moul, told investors that the utility would reevaluate the lifespan of its coal plants, saying officials were evaluating Trump’s executive orders.

The U.S. Senate confirmed four Trump board nominees in December. With the quorum restored, TVA’s board is scheduled to meet Wednesday in Kentucky.

TVA had already faced advocates’ criticisms for planning to open more natural gas plants as the utility was winding down its fleet of coal plants, instead of more quickly moving away from fossil fuels and into solar and other renewables.

TVA’s goal for years has been an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2035 over 2005 levels, and net-zero emissions by 2050, with a heavy emphasis on nuclear power and hopes for next-generation reactors. Biden had gone further, calling for a carbon-pollution-free energy sector by 2035.

Clean energy groups have noted that the rapid building of data centers that support artificial intelligence is partly to blame for growing power demand. In an investors call last week, TVA President and CEO Don Moul said data center demand grew to 18% of its industrial load in 2025, and by 2030, the utility expects it to double across the service region. Moul said the fairness of new data center pay rates is a priority for TVA.

Under a 2024 final decision, TVA planned for a 1,500-megawatt natural gas facility with 4 megawatts of solar and 100 megawatts of battery storage at the Kingston Fossil Plant, a 2,470-megawatt coal plant finished in 1955, and the site of a massive 2008 coal ash spill. The coal plant was slated to close and the gas plant to come online by the end of 2027.

The new proposal would keep the coal, gas and battery, but drop the solar.

In a 2023 decision, TVA planned to mothball its two-unit Cumberland coal plant in two stages — one, by the end of 2026, to be replaced this year by the 1,450-megawatt natural gas plant; and the second, shuttered by the end of 2028, with options open on its replacement. The 2,470-megawatt Cumberland coal plant, completed in 1973, is the largest generating asset in TVA’s fleet.

Trump tussled with TVA during his first term, including when he opposed a coal plant closure. Ultimately, in 2019 the board still voted to close the Paradise Fossil Plant in Kentucky. Its last towers were demolished in 2024.

In 2020, Trump fired the former TVA board chairman and another board member and drove TVA to reverse course on hiring foreign labor for information technology jobs. He also criticized the pay scale for the CEO at the time, which was $7.3 million for the 2020 budget year and topped $10.5 million for 2024. TVA stressed that it doesn’t receive federal taxpayer money and instead is funded by electricity customers, and that the CEO pay fell in the bottom quartile of the power industry.

EDINBURG, Texas — The first center for dispersing sterile screwworm flies from U.S. soil in decades opened Monday in Texas, part of a larger effort to keep the flesh-eating parasite they spawn from crossing the Mexican border and wreaking havoc on the American cattle industry.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott unveiled the new facility on a former Air Force base near Edinburg, Texas. It will allow the U.S. to disperse millions of sterile male New World screwworm flies bred in Mexico or Panama on both sides of the border.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is building a new $750 million factory nearby for breeding sterile flies, but Rollins said construction on the fly factory won’t be done until the end of 2027. The USDA also is spending $21 million to convert a fruit fly breeding facility in far southern Mexico into one for breeding screwworm flies starting this summer.

The sterile male flies would mate with wild females, who mate only once in their weekslong adult lives. Their eggs, laid in open wounds or on mucous membranes, would then not hatch into the flesh-eating maggots that can infest livestock, wild mammals, household pets and even humans.

“It’s a real testament to the all hands on deck — federal state and local — the fact that we do not have the pest in our country yet,” Rollins said.

In November, the USDA opened a facility in Tampico in central Mexico for dispersing Panama-bred flies. However, it is about 330 miles (530 kilometers) south of the U.S.-Mexico border.

“We knew we needed a short-term, gap-filling solution, which is exactly what we are cutting a ribbon on today,” Abbott said.

The Mexican cattle industry has been hit hard by New World screwworm fly larvae infestations, and the U.S. has closed the border since July to imports of cattle, bison and horses.

A similar program breeding sterile male flies had largely eradicated the pest from American soil by the early 1970s, except for a limited, short-lived outbreak in the Florida Keys in 2017 and its appearance recently when officials blocked a horse being imported from Argentina into Florida until the animal was fully treated, Rollins said.

The U.S. shut down its fly factories after eliminating the pest from its soil, and sterile males have been bred since in the Western Hemisphere only at a single facility in Panama, which can produce about 117 million a week. The new fly factory in Texas would be designed to produce 300 million a week.

The USDA also announced last month that it is offering up to $100 million in grants for projects designed to improve fly breeding, create new fly traps and lures, and produce treatments for infestations.

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Hanna reported from Topeka, Kansas.

ATLANTA — Seven months after the collapse of an alleged $140 million Ponzi scheme that touched the top ranks of Republican politics in Georgia and Alabama, some investors are impatient to get their money back.

“We feel like we’re never going to see it, as old as we are,” Thomas Todd, a 77-year-old retired business owner, told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a meeting Monday.

Raffensperger says his office is stepping up efforts even as Republican state lawmakers want to transfer securities regulation to the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance, faulting the secretary of state’s securities division for not detecting wrongdoing at First Liberty Building & Loan before it went bust.

Federal investigators said the company defrauded at least 300 investors of at least $140 million.

Raffensperger is running for governor, and his office’s anti-fraud efforts could become an issue in May’s Republican primary.

Brant Frost IV, who led First Liberty, had decades of involvement in conservative politics. His company said it was a lender making high-interest short-term loans to businesses, paying investors up to 16% annual interest. Touting “Wall Street returns for Main Street investors,” a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit claims Frost stole $17 million for himself, his relatives and affiliated companies, and loaned millions more that borrowers never repaid.

Among those who lost money were a company run by former Georgia GOP Chairman David Shafer, Alabama state Auditor Andrew Sorrell, and a political action committee controlled by the Republican Sorrell. Party activists have said many grassroots Republicans lost money, while others were lured by ads on shows hosted by conservatives including Erick Erickson, Hugh Hewitt and Charlie Kirk.

A federal court has appointed a receiver to recover money for investors. Receiver Gregory Hays wrote Jan. 30 that he’s still piecing together 48,000 financial transactions and that some borrowers are fighting to retain real estate and other collateral that the receiver says was pledged to secure loans.

Hays reported $3.59 million in assets on hand as of Dec. 31. Since then, an auctioneer has sold five luxury vehicles that the Frost family handed over, netting almost $139,000. The receiver is also selling the First Liberty office in the Atlanta suburb of Newnan for $581,000, but first has to settle a $160,000 lien on the property. He also sold Frost’s Patek Phillipe watch for $10,000.

Hays said he’s also received more than $300,000 back from more than 1,000 political donations that the Frost family made using more than $1 million in investor funds. Those funds often backed far-right Republican insurgents.

But Hays says he’s spent $412,000 so far that will come from investor money. Hays wrote that asset recovery “will be an expensive and protracted process.”

Todd and other investors on Monday bemoaned their choices to Raffensperger. Todd said he lost $750,000 and that First Liberty collapsed just before he invested more. Todd said he was using the income to fund Christian missions. calling it “God’s money.”

“They were stealing it,” Todd said. “They knew they were stealing it. And they were working at stealing it, because they knew they were in trouble.”

Raffensperger’s office recently announced lawyer Jason Doss as an investigative agent. Raffensperger proposes a new state law letting his office order fraudsters to directly repay investors. For now, his office is limited to civil actions against wrongdoers and passing information to the receiver and state and federal prosecutors.

It’s unclear whether federal prosecutors will seek charges. A spokesperson for Atlanta U.S. Attorney Theodore Hertzberg declined to comment Monday.

Georgia House lawmakers who have gotten an earful from defrauded Republicans are pushing to give securities regulation to banking regulators.

Assistant Commissioner of Securities Noula Zaharis told the House Banks and Banking Committee on Thursday that shifting employees and responsibilities away from Raffensperger’s office on July 1, as House Bill 934 proposes, could disrupt regulation. She also said Ponzi schemes are hard to detect.

“Schemes like this are set up to create an illusion and they are schemes that pay,” Zaharis said.

But Republicans faulted her staff for not catching First Liberty.

“I just don’t really see a system or plan in place to preemptively identify these things and eliminate these bad actors before they get too far gone,” said Republican state Rep. Carter Barrett of Cumming.

LOS ANGELES — The world’s biggest social media companies face several landmark trials this year that seek to hold them responsible for harms to children who use their platforms. Opening arguments for the first, in Los Angeles County Superior Court, begin this week.

Instagram’s parent company Meta and Google’s YouTube will face claims that their platforms deliberately addict and harm children. TikTok and Snap, which were originally named in the lawsuit, settled for undisclosed sums.

“This was only the first case — there are hundreds of parents and school districts in the social media addiction trials that start today, and sadly, new families every day who are speaking out and bringing Big Tech to court for its deliberately harmful products,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the nonprofit Tech Oversight Project.

At the core of the case is a 19-year-old identified only by the initials “KGM,” whose case could determine how thousands of other, similar lawsuits against social media companies will play out. She and two other plaintiffs have been selected for bellwether trials — essentially test cases for both sides to see how their arguments play out before a jury and what damages, if any, may be awarded, said Clay Calvert, a nonresident senior fellow of technology policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

It’s the first time the companies will argue their case before a jury, and the outcome could have profound effects on their businesses and how they will handle children using their platforms.

KGM claims that her use of social media from an early age addicted her to the technology and exacerbated depression and suicidal thoughts. Importantly, the lawsuit claims that this was done through deliberate design choices made by companies that sought to make their platforms more addictive to children to boost profits. This argument, if successful, could sidestep the companies’ First Amendment shield and Section 230, which protects tech companies from liability for material posted on their platforms.

“Borrowing heavily from the behavioral and neurobiological techniques used by slot machines and exploited by the cigarette industry, Defendants deliberately embedded in their products an array of design features aimed at maximizing youth engagement to drive advertising revenue,” the lawsuit says.

Executives, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, are expected to testify at the trial, which will last six to eight weeks. Experts have drawn similarities to the Big Tobacco trials that led to a 1998 settlement requiring cigarette companies to pay billions in health care costs and restrict marketing targeting minors.

“Plaintiffs are not merely the collateral damage of Defendants’ products,” the lawsuit says. “They are the direct victims of the intentional product design choices made by each Defendant. They are the intended targets of the harmful features that pushed them into self-destructive feedback loops.”

The tech companies dispute the claims that their products deliberately harm children, citing a bevy of safeguards they have added over the years and arguing that they are not liable for content posted on their sites by third parties.

“Recently, a number of lawsuits have attempted to place the blame for teen mental health struggles squarely on social media companies,” Meta said in a recent blog post. “But this oversimplifies a serious issue. Clinicians and researchers find that mental health is a deeply complex and multifaceted issue, and trends regarding teens’ well-being aren’t clear-cut or universal. Narrowing the challenges faced by teens to a single factor ignores the scientific research and the many stressors impacting young people today, like academic pressure, school safety, socio-economic challenges and substance abuse.”

A Meta spokesperson said in a recent statement that the company strongly disagrees with the allegations outlined in the lawsuit and that it’s “confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people.”

José Castañeda, a Google Spokesperson, said that the allegations against YouTube are “simply not true.” In a statement, he said, “Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work.”

The case will be the first in a slew of cases beginning this year that seek to hold social media companies responsible for harming children’s mental well-being. A federal bellwether trial beginning in June in Oakland, California, will be the first to represent school districts that have sued social media platforms over harms to children.

In addition, more than 40 state attorneys general have filed lawsuits against Meta, claiming it is harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms. The majority of cases filed their lawsuits in federal court, but some sued in their respective states.

TikTok also faces similar lawsuits in more than a dozen states.

In New Mexico, meanwhile, opening arguments begin Monday for trial on allegations that Meta and its social media platforms have failed to protect young users from sexual exploitation, following an undercover online investigation. Attorney General Raúl Torrez in late 2023 sued Meta and Zuckerberg, who was later dropped from the suit.

Prosecutors have said that New Mexico is not seeking to hold Meta accountable for its content but rather its role in pushing out that content through complex algorithms that proliferate material that can be harmful, saying they uncovered internal documents in which Meta employees estimate that about 100,000 children every day are subjected to sexual harassment on the company’s platforms.

Meta denies the civil charges while accusing Torrez of cherry-picking select documents and making “sensationalist” arguments. The company says it has consulted with parents and law enforcement to introduce built-in protections to social media accounts, along with settings and tools for parents.

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Ortutay reported from Oakland, California. Associated Press Writer Morgan Lee in Santa Fe, New Mexico, contributed to this story.

SANTA FE, N.M. — A trial focused on the dangers of child sexual exploitation on social media and whether Meta misrepresented the safety of its platforms is set to start in New Mexico with opening statements Monday.

It’s the first stand-alone trial from state prosecutors in a stream of lawsuits against major social media companies, including Meta, over harm to children, and one that is likely to highlight explicit online content and its effects.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Meta in 2023. His team built the case by posing as kids through social media accounts, then documenting the arrival of sexual solicitations as well as the response by Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Prosecutors say they’ll provide evidence and testimony that Meta’s algorithms and account features enticed and addicted young people to social media, while also creating a “breeding ground” for predators who target children for sexual exploitation. Prosecutors allege Meta failed to disclose what it knew about those harmful effects, in violation of state consumer protection laws. Meta also is accused of creating a public nuisance.

“Meta knowingly exposes children to the twin dangers of sexual exploitation and mental health harm,” the lawsuit states. “Meta’s motive for doing so is profit.”

Meta denies any legal violations and says prosecutors are cherry-picking evidence to make sensationalist arguments. On Sunday, Meta called the state’s investigation “ethically compromised” in its use of child photos on proxy accounts, delays in reporting child sexual abuse material and the disposal of data from devices used in the investigation, in social media posts on X by company spokesperson Andy Stone.

The company says lawsuits are attempting to place the blame for teen mental health struggles on social media companies in a way that oversimplifies matters. Meta says it has a longstanding commitment to supporting young people, highlighting a steady addition of account settings and tools — including safety features that give teens more information about the person they’re chatting with and content restrictions based on PG-13 movie ratings.

“For over a decade, we’ve listened to parents, worked with experts and law enforcement, and conducted in-depth research to understand the issues that matter most,” the company said in a statement. “We’re proud of the progress we’ve made.”

It’s unclear whether Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify at trial. New Mexico limits the ability to compel out-of-state witnesses to testify in person, while prosecutors can present testimony by Zuckerberg from a deposition.

Personal opinions of Zuckerberg and evolving attitudes toward social media loomed over jury selection from a pool of more than 200 residents of Santa Fe County, including several educators, young adults who grew up with social media and others who never signed up.

“Quite frankly, he’s the tech bro making money off of all of us,” one person said of Zuckerberg.

An attorney for the state warned that there would be “very sensitive and very explicit material discussed in terms of safety to children” during the trial.

More than 40 state attorneys general have filed lawsuits against Meta, claiming it is deliberately designing features that addict children to its platforms. The majority filed their lawsuits in federal court, and New Mexico’s case against Meta is the first to reach trial.

Opening statements have been postponed in a bellwether trial underway in California against social video companies, including Meta’s Instagram and Google’s YouTube, that focuses on a 19-year-old who claims her use of social media from an early age addicted her to technology and exacerbated depression and suicidal thoughts. TikTok and Snapchat parent company Snap Inc. settled claims in the case.

Torrez, a Democrat seeking reelection this year to a second term, has urged Meta to implement more effective age verification and remove bad actors from its platform. He’s also seeking changes to algorithms that can serve up harmful material and criticizing end-to-end privacy encryption that can prevent the monitoring of communications with children for safety.