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WASHINGTON (AP) — While inflation and immigration emerged as the dominant themes in this year's presidential race, another issue was prominent in the minds of voters for both major candidates: the stakes for democracy. Half of voters identified democracy as the single most important motivating factor for their vote. That was higher than the share of voters who answered the same way about inflation, the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, abortion policy or free speech, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters n...
WASHINGTON (AP) — On Election Day, some voting lines will likely be long and some precincts may run out of ballots. An election office website could go down temporarily and ballot-counting machines will jam. Or people who help run elections might just act like the humans they are, forgetting their key to a local polling place so it has to open later than scheduled. These kinds of glitches have occurred throughout the history of U.S. elections. Yet election workers across America have consistently pulled off presidential elections and a...
BETHLEHEM, Pa. (AP) — Just blocks from the shuttered Bethlehem Steel plant, the Hispanic Center Lehigh Valley was bustling on a recent day with scores of older people eating lunch. Downstairs, out of sight, a constant stream of visitors was shopping in its massive food pantry. Over the past seven months, the number visitors to the pantry has risen by more than a third. The center's executive director, Raymond Santiago, sees that as a stark sign of something he has felt over the past couple years: Many in the area's Latino community are s...
ALEXANDRIA, La. (AP) —Alfred King was lying in the parking lot of a small apartment building, mortally wounded when police in Alexandria, Louisiana, got to the intersection of 12th and Magnolia streets shortly before 1:30 a.m., Jan. 20. The 34-year-old was the first fatal shooting of the year in the small city where I grew up and a large portion of my family lives. Alfred's death was similar to some I have covered since my first in 1985, a 38-year period when hundreds of thousands of people of all races and ethnicities have died violently in t...
American voters are fractured politically and culturally ahead of Election Day, and they are anxious about where their country is heading — on inflation, abortion, immigration, crime, and much more. They also sense something more fundamental at stake at a time of rising mistrust of institutions and each other: the future of democracy. Some Americans remain hopeful, but a fretful outlook emerges from interviews with more than two dozen Democratic, Republican and unaffiliated voters before Tuesday's midterm elections — the first since fol...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Jury selection began Monday in the trial of Steve Bannon, a one-time top adviser to former President Donald Trump. He is facing criminal contempt of Congress charges after refusing for months to cooperate with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Bannon is charged in Washington's federal court with defying a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee that sought his records and testimony. He was indicted in November on two counts of criminal contempt of Congress, one month after the Justice D...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department settled a decades-old lawsuit on Tuesday filed by a group of men who were rounded up by the government in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and held in a federal jail in New York in conditions the department's own watchdog called abusive and harsh. The settlement announced Tuesday calls for a $98,000 payout to be paid out among the six men who filed the suit and were held without terrorism charges at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. The men — Ahmer Iqbal Abbasi, Anser Mehmood, Ben...
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court on Friday said a pause on evictions designed to curb the spread of the coronavirus can remain in place for now, setting up a battle before the nation's highest court. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected a bid by Alabama and Georgia landlords to block the eviction moratorium reinstated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this month. The landlords plan to immediately file an emergency motion to the Supreme Court, said National A...
LIBERTY, Missouri (AP) — Sikhs across the United States are holding toned-down Vaisakhi celebrations this week, joining people of other faiths in observing major holidays cautiously this spring as COVID-19 keeps an uneven hold on the country. Vaisakhi, which falls April 13 or 14 depending on which of two dueling calendars one follows, marks the day in 1699 when Sikhism took its current form. Communities typically celebrate by gathering at gurdwaras, or places of worship, for prayer and the reading of hymns, and there are often processions, p...
The church attended by the white man charged with killing eight people at three Atlanta-area massage businesses, most of them women of Asian descent, condemned the shootings Friday and said they run contrary to the gospel and the church's teachings. Crabapple First Baptist Church in Milton, Georgia, also announced in a statement that it plans to remove 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long from its membership because it "can no longer affirm that he is truly a regenerate believer in Jesus Christ." Previously the church had only issued a brief...
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Black police officers find themselves torn between two worlds: They feel the pain of seeing yet another black man killed at the hands of fellow officers, yet they must also try to keep the peace during angry protests fueled by that death. Those feelings, familiar to many blacks in law enforcement for years, have never been more intense than in the days since the death of George Floyd. The 46-year-old black man died in Minneapolis after a white officer pressed his knee into his neck for several minutes even after Floyd s...
MARION, Ala. (AP) — Della Simpson Maynor remembers the mounted police officer cracking her elbow with a baton. She recalls the panicked marchers unable to escape the onslaught, and the scuffle between officers and a young church deacon who was trying to protect his mother and grandfather. Most of all, she remembers the gunshot. Two weeks before Bloody Sunday — the clash in Selma on March 7, 1965, that helped propel passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — there was a march in this small town 30 miles away. What happened in Marion is now a...
