Harris and Trump seek Arab American votes in Michigan in effort to shore up battleground states
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) — Kamala Harris insisted it was time to “end the suffering” in the Middle East while Donald Trump visited one of the nation's only Muslim-majority cities on Friday as the dueling presidential contenders fought for a small but pivotal bloc of Arab American voters in swing-state Michigan.
In a rare reference to Israel's fight against Hamas and Hezbollah, Harris said, “This year has been very difficult, given the scale of death and destruction in Gaza and given the civilian casualties and displacement in Lebanon.” She said the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar “can and must be a turning point.”
“Everyone must seize this opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza, bring the hostages home and end the suffering once and for all,” she said.
Trump, meanwhile, avoided any specifics about his plans for the Middle East, but he said he didn’t think the Arab American community would vote for Harris “because she doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
Later, he fought through technical glitches that silenced his microphone for almost 20 minutes at a rally in Detroit.
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North Carolina early voters, still recovering from Helene, exceed 2020 voter turnout
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — More North Carolina residents turned out to cast ballots on the first day of early voting this year than in 2020, even as residents from the mountainous western portion of the state continued to recover from the devastating effects of Hurricane Helene.
Preliminary data shows a record 353,166 people cast ballots at more than 400 early voting sites statewide on Thursday, compared to 348,599 on the first day in October 2020, the State Board of Elections said Friday.
As North Carolina's population and voter registration continues to grow, Thursday's total as a percentage of the current number of registered voters in the state was slightly lower compared to the percentage of the electorate four years ago, according to data provided by the board. Thursday's number was 4.54% of the state's 7.78 million voters, while the 2020 first-day figure was 4.78% of the 7.29 million registrants at the time.
The number of ballots that were cast and voters who were registered as of Thursday is expected to increase as county election boards continue to upload data, board spokesperson Pat Gannon said.
Lines and full parking lots were common on Thursday at voting sites in highly populated Piedmont counties and in the mountainous region where historic flooding three weeks ago destroyed homes, roads and bridges and knocked out power and water systems. The board said Friday it had received no reports of significant issues or voting problems.
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Israel and Hamas signal resistance to ending Gaza war after Sinwar's death
JERUSALEM (AP) — Hamas confirmed Friday that its leader, Yahya Sinwar, was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza and reiterated its stance that hostages the militant group took from Israel a year ago will not be released until there is a cease-fire in Gaza and a withdrawal of Israeli troops.
The group’s staunch position pushed back against a statement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin a day earlier that his country’s military will keep fighting until the hostages are released and will remain in Gaza to prevent a severely weakened Hamas from rearming.
The conflicting stands signal continued deep resistance on both sides to ending the war, even as President Joe Biden and other world leaders press the case that Sinwar’s death is a turning point that should be used to unlock stalled cease-fire negotiations.
The standoff comes as Israel's war with Lebanon's Hezbollah — a Hamas ally backed by Iran — has intensified in recent weeks. Hezbollah said Friday it planned to launch a new phase of fighting by sending more guided missiles and exploding drones into Israel. The militant group's longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed in an Israeli airstrike late last month, and Israel sent ground troops into Lebanon earlier this month.
Sinwar, the former lead of Hamas, died “confronting the occupation army until the last moment of his life,” said his Qatar-based deputy, Khalil al-Hayya, who represented Hamas during several rounds of cease-fire negotiations. Hamas will not return any of the hostages, al-Hayya said, "before the end of the aggression on Gaza and the withdrawal from Gaza.”
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What's next for Hamas after its leader Yahya Sinwar's death?
BEIRUT (AP) — The killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar by Israeli forces in Gaza this week leaves the Palestinian militant group considering new leadership for the second time in less than three months.
Will Hamas now turn away from its hard-line wing or will it double down, and what will it mean for the group’s future and for the revival of cease-fire and hostage exchange negotiations between Hamas and Israel?
Sinwar replaced Hamas' previous leader, Ismail Haniyeh, after Haniyeh was killed in July in a blast in Iran that was widely blamed on Israel.
As an architect of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in southern Israel that sparked the war in Gaza, Sinwar was a defiant choice at a time when some expected the militant group to take a more conciliatory approach and seek to end the conflict.
Sinwar’s killing appeared to be a chance front-line encounter with Israeli troops on Wednesday.
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Stock market today: Wall Street sets more records and closes a 6th straight winning week
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks closed their latest winning week with more records on Friday.
The S&P 500 rose 0.4% to squeak past the all-time high it had set early this week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 36 points, or 0.1%, to its own record set the day before, and the Nasdaq composite gained 0.6%.
Netflix helped drive the market with a leap of 11.1% after the streaming giant reported stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. That was despite a slowdown in subscriber growth.
It helped offset a 5.2% drop for CVS Health, which said it’s likely to report a profit for the latest quarter that’s well below what analysts had been expecting. The company also said David Joyner, an executive vice president, is taking over as president and CEO for Karen Lynch.
Trading overall on Wall Street remained relatively calm, as the S&P 500 closed its sixth straight winning week. That’s its longest such winning streak of 2024.
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A fast-moving brush fire in California burned 2 homes while others were damaged by smoke and water
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A fast-moving fire fed by strong winds burned two homes Friday and damaged several others in a hillside neighborhood in the city of Oakland, where roughly 500 people were ordered to evacuate, officials said.
Fire Chief Damon Covington said that at about 1:30 p.m., calls came in reporting a fire in front of a home in the Oakland hills. Crews arrived as the inferno quickly grew with winds ranging from calm breezes to 40 mph (64 kph) gusts during red flag conditions.
“Wind was whipping,” Covington said.
Michael Hunt, a spokesperson for the fire department, said one of the homes was significantly burned while the second suffered minor damage from the flames. Fewer than 10 other homes had smoke and water damage. Early reports had conflicting numbers of impacted structures.
The fire was near the 580 Freeway, which connects the San Francisco Bay Area to central California, causing traffic jams as people tried to leave the area and smoke wafted over the city of 440,000.
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Cuba’s grid goes offline with massive blackout after a major power plant fails
HAVANA (AP) — Cuba’s electrical grid went down Friday after one of the island’s major power plants failed, a day after a massive blackout swept across the Caribbean island and with no official estimate for when service will be restored.
The Cuban energy ministry announced that the grid had gone down hours after the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant had ceased operations, at about 11 a.m. local time Friday. It said state-owned power company UNE was using distributed generation to provide power to some areas and that a gas-fired thermoelectric plant was starting operations.
But as darkness started to fall, millions of Cubans remained without power.
Even in a country accustomed to frequent outages amid a deepening economic crisis, Friday’s supply collapse was unprecedented in modern times, aside from incidents involving intense hurricanes, like one in 2022. Various calls by The Associated Press seeking to clarify the extent of the blackout on Friday weren’t answered. In addition to the Antonio Guiteras plant, Cuba has several others and it wasn’t immediately clear whether or not they remained functional.
“The power went out at 8 in the morning and it is now 5 in the afternoon and there is no electricity anywhere,” said Luis González, a 73-year-old retiree in Havana.
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Russia flaunts its many doomsday weapons to keep the West from ramping up support for Ukraine
This year has seen President Vladimir Putin repeatedly brandish the nuclear sword, reminding everyone that Russia has the world’s largest atomic arsenal to try to deter the West from ramping up support for Ukraine.
He ordered his military to hold drills involving battlefield nuclear weapons with ally Belarus.
He announced Russia will start producing ground-based intermediate range missiles that were outlawed by a now-defunct U.S.-Soviet treaty in 1987.
And last month, he lowered the threshold for unleashing his arsenal by revising the country’s nuclear doctrine.
Putin is relying on those thousands of warheads and hundreds of missiles as an enormous doomsday machine to offset NATO's massive edge in conventional weapons to discourage what he sees as threats to Russia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
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What's a 'Jezebel spirit'? Some Christians use the term to paint Kamala Harris with a demonic brush
Christian nationalist leaders are telling followers that Vice President Kamala Harris is under the influence of a “Jezebel spirit,” using a term with deeply racist and misogynistic roots that is setting off alarm bells for religious and political scholars.
The concept is inspired by the biblical story of the evil Queen Jezebel, who persecuted prophets and was punished with a horrible death. The word “Jezebel” was used during slavery and throughout U.S. history to describe Black women, casting them as overtly sexual and untrustworthy.
In the context of “Jezebel spirit,” the term has sinister connotations, suggesting the person is under the influence of demons in a spiritual battle between good and evil. People who have studied the Jan. 6 insurrection warn that similar rhetoric on spiritual warfare drove many to the U.S. Capitol that day.
“People … are hearing this woman is possessed by a demonic spirit that is hardcore, terrible, hates men, hates authority, is going to do whatever she wants to do,” said Anthea Butler, professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book “White Evangelical Racism,” who has studied the New Apostolic Reformation.
The term, Butler said, is coded language to communicate that the person – a woman, usually a Democrat, Black or multiracial – is not an acceptable candidate. Harris is a Christian and a Baptist, but when faith leaders tie her to Jezebel, Butler said it suggests falsely that she is non-Christian.
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Video and an unused bullet prove man's guilt in Indiana girls' killings, prosecutor says
DELPHI, Ind. (AP) — A man charged with killing two teenage girls in a small Indiana community forced them off a hiking trail before cutting their throats, a prosecutor said Friday, telling jurors that the evidence includes an unused bullet and video recorded on the eldest girl’s phone.
“The last thing the girls saw was Richard Allen's face,” Carroll County prosecutor Nicholas McLeland said.
And they heard his “chilling words: ‘Girls, down the hill,’" while Allen was wielding a gun, McLeland said. “Out of fear the girls complied.”
Richard Allen, 52, is charged with two counts of murder as well as two additional counts of murder while committing or attempting to commit kidnapping. The trial is a spectacle in Delphi, a town of 3,000, with people lining up in the morning chill to secure a seat in the courtroom.
Allen, a pharmacy technician, was arrested in October 2022, more than five years after the deaths of 13-year-old Abigail Williams and 14-year-old Liberty German, a case that had vexed police and inspired much speculation by true-crime enthusiasts. The outsized media attention in the small community prompted a specially appointed judge to pick jurors in Fort Wayne, nearly 100 miles (160 kilometers) away.
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