AP-Newswatch

Biden’s candidacy faces new peril, including first Senate Democrat saying he should exit race

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s imperiled reelection campaign is hitting new trouble. Rather than urging him to stay in, House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday “it’s up to the president to decide” if he should. Celebrity donor George Clooney said he should not run, and Democratic senators expressed fresh fear about his ability to beat Republican Donald Trump. Late Wednesday, Vermont Sen. Peter Welch called on Biden to withdraw, becoming the first Senate Democrat to do so. It all shows how unsettled the questions over Biden’s candidacy remain among Democrats, despite Biden’s insistence he is staying in the race. Pelosi has been widely watched for signals of how top Democrats are thinking about Biden’s candidacy.

Biden says pressure on him is driven by elites. Voters paint a more complicated picture

SAGINAW, Mich. (AP) — President Joe Biden says the pressure on him to end his reelection campaign is coming from Democratic Party “elites,” the same kind of people who have doubted him throughout his long journey in public life. The voters, he says, will still have his back in the end. But a sampling of voters and Democratic activists in several key swing states paints a far more complicated picture in the aftermath of Biden’s disastrous debate performance. Many are still with him, but they worry that a lack of enthusiasm for his candidacy could cause a lot of Democratic voters to stay home.

Israeli military orders the evacuation of Gaza City, an early target of its war with Hamas

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — The Israeli military has urged all Palestinians to leave Gaza City and head south. The evacuation orders issued Wednesday indicated that Israel was pressing ahead with a fresh offensive across the north, south and center of the embattled territory that has killed dozens of people over the past 48 hours. The stepped-up military activity came as U.S., Egyptian and Qatari mediators were meeting with Israeli officials in the Qatari capital, Doha, for talks seeking a long-elusive cease-fire deal with Gaza’s Hamas militant group. Israel informed people in Gaza of the evacuation order by dropping leaflets.

Russian missile attack on Ukraine’s largest hospital complicates treatment of kids with cancer

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia’s heaviest bombardment of Kyiv in four months has had severe consequences, paralyzing the operations of the country’s largest children’s hospital and severely affecting the young patients already battling life-threatening diseases. Some families now face a dilemma of where to continue the treatment of their children, who have been evacuated to other hospitals in the Ukrainian capital for now. Oksana Halak has already decided she wants her 2-year-old son, Dmytro, who has acute lymphoblastic leukemia, to get treatment in Germany. But another mom, Yuliia Vasylenko, says her 11-year-old son, Denys, will stay in Ukraine. Diagnosed with multiple spinal cord tumors, she fears he doesn’t have time to start cancer treatment again somewhere else.

Hungary’s nationalist leader to visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago following NATO summit

NEW YORK (AP) — Hungary’s nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is travelling to Floridato meet with former President Donald Trump following a NATO summit in Washington. It’s a move likely to aggravate frustrations among Orbán’s partners in the European Union over similar secretive trips he made to Russia and China in recent days. The Thursday meeting will take place at the former president’s beachside compound Mar-a-Lago, according to a person familiar with the plans. The Hungarian leader has openly endorsed Trump’s candidacy in this year’s presidential election, and pinned hopes on the Republican that he’ll be able to bring an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Wildfire risk rises as Western states dry out amid ongoing heat wave baking most of the US

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Authorities in Western states are warning of the rising risk of wildfires as hot conditions and low humidity dry out the landscape amid a protracted heat wave baking much of the U.S. California’s top fire official says so far this year the state has responded to more than 3,500 wildfires that have scorched nearly 325 square miles of vegetation. Blazes are also burning in Oregon, where the governor issued an emergency authorization allowing additional firefighting resources to be deployed. More than 142 million people around the U.S. were under heat alerts Wednesday, especially across the West, where dozens of locations tied or broke heat records.

Alec Baldwin cast as reckless flouter of rules at his trial in cinematographer’s shooting

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — Prosecutors sought to cast Alec Baldwin as someone who flouts rules and has little regard for safety at the first day of his New Mexico trial in the shooting of a cinematographer. Special prosecutor Erlinda Ocampo Johnson repeatedly referred to Baldwin playing “make-believe” with a revolver on the set of the film “Rust.” She says it led to very real danger and the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. Baldwin’s attorney, Alex Spiro, told jurors that the actor did only what actors always do — act like the characters they’re playing. He called the death an “unspeakable tragedy,” but said Baldwin had committed no crime.

People of diverse backgrounds in France welcome far right’s defeat, but fear a rise in hate speech

PARIS (AP) — For many French voters of diverse backgrounds, last Sunday’s parliamentary election results were a relief. They were seemingly an embrace of the country’s ethnic heterogeneity instead of a victory for xenophobic far-right forces. Loven Bensimon, a Black woman who works in communications, says the results were “a moment of joy, a light at the end of the tunnel.” But she and others say the campaign has exposed a rise in racist hate speech that is unlikely to vanish when the new parliament takes office. A recent report by France’s National Consultative Commission on Human Rights found a 32% spike in racist attacks in 2023, and an “unprecedented” surge in antisemitic acts, up 284% from 2022.

Demand for rare elements used in clean energy could help clean up abandoned coal mines in Appalachia

MOUNT STORM, W.Va. (AP) — In the hills of West Virginia, researchers are hoping to realize a long-term dream of cleaning up poisonous groundwaters that flow out of old coal mines. They’ve long wanted to do this to address pollution in waterways, but now there’s another reason: They have pioneered methods for extracting rare earth minerals and other valuable metals from the drainage, and every pound or ton is one that isn’t extracted from a new mine in the United States or bought from China. The Department of Energy is funding the project in West Virginia now, along with another one at lignite mines in North Dakota that it could expand to commercial scale enterprises.