Palestinians scramble for safety as Israel pounds sealed-off Gaza Strip to punish Hamas
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli warplanes hammered the Gaza Strip neighborhood by neighborhood Tuesday, reducing buildings to rubble and sending people scrambling to find safety in the tiny, sealed-off territory now suffering severe retaliation for the deadly weekend attack by Hamas militants.
Humanitarian groups pleaded for the creation of corridors to get aid into Gaza and warned that hospitals overwhelmed with wounded people were running out of supplies. Israel has stopped entry of food, fuel and medicines into Gaza, and the sole remaining access from Egypt shut down Tuesday after airstrikes hit near the border crossing.
The war, which has claimed at least 1,900 lives on both sides, is expected to escalate. The weekend attack that Hamas said was retribution for worsening conditions for Palestinians under Israeli occupation has inflamed Israel's determination to crush the group's hold in Gaza. New exchanges of fire over Israel's northern borders with militants in Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday pointed to the risk of an expanded regional conflict.
Hamas militants stormed into Israel on Saturday morning, slaying hundreds of residents in homes and streets near the Gaza border and bringing gunbattles to Israeli towns for the first time in decades. Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza hold about 150 soldiers and civilians hostage, according to Israel.
Israel stepped up its offensive on Tuesday, expanding the mobilization of reservists to 360,000. Israel’s military said it had regained effective control over areas Hamas attacked in its south and of the Gaza border.
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Rep. Santos faces new charges he stole donor IDs, made unauthorized charges to their credit cards
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. Rep. George Santos stole the identities of donors to his campaign and then used their credit cards to ring up tens of thousands of dollars in unauthorized charges, according to a new indictment filed Tuesday.
He then wired some of the money to his own personal bank account, prosecutors said, while using the rest to inflate his campaign coffers.
The 23-count indictment replaces one filed in May against the New York Republican charging him with embezzling money from his campaign and lying to Congress about his wealth, among other offenses.
In the updated indictment, prosecutors accuse Santos of charging more than $44,000 to his campaign over a period of months using cards belonging to contributors without their knowledge. In one case, he charged $12,000 to a contributor’s credit card and transferred the “vast majority” of that money into his personal bank account, prosecutors said.
Santos is also accused of falsely reporting to the Federal Elections Commission that he had loaned his campaign $500,000 when he actually hadn't given anything and had less than $8,000 in the bank. The fake loan was an attempt to convince Republican Party officials that he was a serious candidate, worth their financial support, the indictment said.
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After one week without a House speaker, Republicans appear no closer to choosing a new leader
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House Republican majority is stuck, one week after the ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy, with lawmakers unable to coalesce around a new leader in a stalemate that threatens to keep Congress partly shuttered indefinitely.
On Tuesday evening, two leading contenders for the gavel, Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, outlined their visions behind closed doors at a lengthy candidate forum. But they appeared to be splitting the vote among their Republican colleagues.
McCarthy, meanwhile, who had openly positioned himself to reclaim the gavel he just lost, told his colleagues during the private meeting not to nominate him this time. Instead, he read a poem from Mother Teresa and delivered a prayer.
“I don’t know how the hell you get to 218," Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, said afterward, referring to the majority vote typically needed to seize the gavel. “It could be a long week.”
House Republicans took the majority aspiring to operate as a team, and run government more like a business, but have drifted far from that goal. Just 10 months in power, the historic ouster of their House speaker — a first in the U.S. — and the prolonged infighting it has unleashed are undercutting the Republicans' ability to govern at a time of crisis at home and abroad.
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Lidia makes landfall as Category 4 hurricane with 140 mph winds near Mexico's Puerto Vallarta resort
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Hurricane Lidia made landfall as an “extremely dangerous” Category 4 storm Tuesday evening with winds of 140 mph (220 kph) near Mexico’s Pacific coast resort of Puerto Vallarta.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Lidia's eye appeared to have reached land near Las Penitas in the western state of Jalisco. The area is a sparsely populated peninsula. The storm was moving south of Puerto Vallarta, which could cushion the blow on the resort.
Jalisco Gov. Enrique Alfaro said via the platform X an hour and a half after Lidia made landfall that the storm had generated “extraordinary rain and high surf” in various places, but that so far there were no reports of injuries or deaths.
The state had 23 shelters open, he said.
In 2015, Hurricane Patricia, a Category 5 hurricane, also made landfall on the same sparsely-populated stretch of coastline between the resort of Puerto Vallarta and major port of Manzanillo.
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Olympic gymnastics champion Mary Lou Retton is in intensive care with pneumonia
Olympic gymnastics champion Mary Lou Retton has pneumonia and is in intensive care in a Texas hospital.
Retton's daughter, McKenna Kelley, shared Retton's condition in an Instagram post on Tuesday. Kelley said the 55-year-old Retton, who became the first American woman to win the Olympic all-around title, is “fighting for her life” and not able to breathe on her own.
Kelley started a fundraising campaign on Retton's behalf for medical expenses. Kelley wrote that Retton does not currently have medical insurance.
Retton was 16 years old when she became an icon of the U.S. Olympic movement during her gold medal-winning performance at the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles. Retton, who grew up in Fairmont, West Virginia, also won two silver and two bronze medals at those Olympics to help bring gymnastics — a sport long dominated by eastern European powers like Romania and the Soviet Union — into the mainstream in the U.S.
Retton, a mother of four, currently lives in Texas.
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Afghans still hope to find survivors from quake that killed over 2,000 in western Herat province
ZINDA JAN, Afghanistan (AP) — Clinging to hope that finding survivors was still possible, Afghan rescuers and villagers kept digging through rubble in western Herat province on Tuesday, three days after one of the deadliest earthquakes in the region left more than 2,000 dead.
Elsewhere in Herat, people were digging graves for loved ones killed in Saturday’s 6.3 magnitude quake. On a barren field in the district of Zinda Jan, a bulldozer removed mounds of earth to clear space for a long row of graves.
“It is very difficult to find a family member from a destroyed house and a few minutes to later bury him or her in a nearby grave, again under the ground,” said Mir Agha, from the city of Herat, who had joined hundreds of volunteers to help the locals.
Across kilometers (miles) of dusty hills, there was little left of villages besides rubble and funerals.
In Naib Rafi, a village that previously had about 2,500 residents, people said that almost no one was still alive besides men who were working outside when the quake struck. Survivors worked all day with excavators to dig long trenches for mass burials.
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How Trump's MAGA movement helped a 29-year-old activist become a millionaire
WASHINGTON (AP) — Charlie Kirk’s $4.75 million Spanish-style estate is tucked away in a gated Arizona country club that charges nearly a half-million dollars for a golf membership. It boasts a guest casita, a “resort-style” pool and striking views of the Sonoran Desert.
The Make America Great Again political movement has been lucrative for Kirk, the 29-year-old CEO and co-founder of the conservative youth organization Turning Point.
The nonprofit rocketed to prominence by latching on to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and has raised roughly a quarter-billion dollars since, much of it spent cultivating conservative influencers and hosting glitzy events. The organization also enriched Kirk and his allies, according to an Associated Press review of public records, which found top Turning Point officials collected pricey salaries, enjoyed lavish perks and steered at least $15.2 million to companies that they, their friends and associates are affiliated with.
But for all that money, the group has struggled to help Republicans win general elections. That’s particularly true in Turning Point’s adopted home of Arizona, where its slate of deeply conservative candidates in the longtime Republican stronghold lost statewide races last year, among them Kari Lake’s unsuccessful bid for governor.
Now, as its leaders age out of the youth movement, they are attempting to leverage Turning Point’s connections and fundraising might to branch out. Ahead of the 2024 election, they are pitching a $108 million get-out-the vote campaign that would expand beyond Arizona to the swing states of Georgia and Wisconsin.
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Star witness Caroline Ellison says FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried hoped to be US president someday
NEW YORK (AP) — Caroline Ellison, the tech executive who ran Sam Bankman-Fried ’s hedge fund while sometimes dating him, testified Tuesday that he directed her to commit crimes before his cryptocurrency empire collapsed last November. She also revealed that her former boss thought he might be U.S. president someday.
With Bankman-Fried watching from his courtroom seat, Ellison, 28, said at the New York City trial that she committed fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud and money laundering with Bankman-Fried and others as they stole from customers and investors in FTX, a company Bankman-Fried started, and lenders to his hedge fund, Alameda Research.
“He directed me to commit these crimes," she said of Bankman-Fried.
Repeatedly, Ellison made clear that Bankman-Fried was behind the biggest financial moves in his companies, to the point that bitcoins he created were sometimes called “Sam's coins.”
She described him as “very ambitious” and envisioning eventually leading huge companies and using his money influentially, especially in politics.
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The future of electric vehicles looms over negotiations in the US autoworkers strike
WAYNE, Mich. (AP) — On the picket lines at a Ford factory west of Detroit, many striking workers don't think the electric vehicle revolution is coming for their jobs — at least not in the near future.
But just in case, they're backing United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain's quest to unionize EV battery factories at Ford and Jeep maker Stellantis, matching a breakthrough concession made by General Motors last week.
So far, neither Ford nor Stellantis has agreed to the change, which would pull employees at all 10 U.S. battery factories proposed by Detroit automakers into national contracts with the UAW, all but assuring they'll be unionized.
Fain also wants workers at the plants to make top UAW assembly plant wages, which now are $32 per hour.
With the UAW strike now in its fourth week, EVs and their potential impact on job security have become central to union negotiations with the automakers. Contract talks are likely to determine whether those plants — mostly joint ventures with South Korean battery companies — are union, which may have long-lasting consequences as the auto industry transforms itself.
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'Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour' will be a blockbuster — and might shake up the movie business
NEW YORK (AP) — Greg Marcus has been in the movie business for years but he never expected to be urging moviegoers to take out their phones during a film — let alone to be crafting friendship bracelets in preparation for an opening weekend.
But there the chief executive and chair of the Marcus Corporation is in a promotion for his theater chain headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, stringing beads together while humming “Shake It Off.”
Movie theaters are readying for an onslaught like they’ve never seen before, beginning Friday when “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” debuts. The concert film, compiled from several Swift shows at Southern California’s SoFi Stadium, is expected to launch with $100 million, or possibly more. Advance ticket sales worldwide have already surpassed $100 million.
Swifties will descend. Dancing will be encouraged.
“This is different,” says Marcus. “Take your phone out. Take selfies. Dance, sing, get up, have a good time. We want to create an atmosphere.”
The Associated Press
