HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — The student protest movement disrupting university campuses, classes and graduation ceremonies over the war in Gaza is also roiling Senate contests across the nation as Democrats tread cautiously over an internal divide and Republicans play up their rivals’ disagreements.

The political impact of the protests on the White House campaign has drawn considerable attention, with opposition to President Joe Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war reverberating from Columbia to UCLA. The fast-evolving landscape of the demonstrations is shaping pivotal Senate races, too.

Tent encampments have popped up at universities in many states where Democrats this election year are defending seats essential to maintaining the party’s razor-thin Senate majority. At some schools, police crackdowns and arrests have followed.

The protests have sharpened the campaign rhetoric in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Ohio and Michigan, among other places. Republican candidates in California and Florida have stepped up their criticism of the Democratic president for the U.S. response to the war or for chaotic scenes on American campuses.

Some Republicans have shown up at encampments, including one at George Washington University, not far from the White House. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., who is facing reelection, said on social media that he went there to show solidarity with Jewish students. “We need to do all we can to protect them,” he said.

Republican candidate David McCormick, during a visit to the University of Pennsylvania, said protesters at the Ivy League school did not know the “difference between right and wrong, good and evil,” and were creating a hostile atmosphere for Jewish students.

McCormick has decried what he frames as a lack of leadership and moral clarity on the part of his Democratic opponent, Sen. Bob Casey, as well as by Biden and administrators at the school buffeted by accusations of harboring antisemitism.

“What’s happening on campuses is clearly a test of leadership and moral courage, both for the college presidents and for our leaders and for Sen. Casey and President Biden,” McCormick said in an interview.

Israel and its supporters say the protests are antisemitic, a charge that Israel’s critics say is sometimes used to silence legitimate opposition. Although some protesters have been caught on camera making antisemitic remarks or violent threats, protest organizers, some of whom are Jewish, say it is a peaceful movement aimed at trying to save the lives of Palestinians civilians.

Many Democrats, from Biden on down, avoided saying much about the situation until recently as universities began to crack down and comparisons were made to anti-war protests of the 1960s.

Even then, Democrats balanced their criticism of antisemitism and rule-breakers with the need to protect the right to free expression and peaceful protest. Some have tried to avoid taking sides in protests that have pitted pro-Israeli versus pro-Palestinian Democrats and divided important parts of the party’s base, including Jewish, Arab American and younger voters.

Republicans, meanwhile, have railed at what they characterized as equivocating or silence by Democrats. Republicans professed solidarity with Jews against antisemitism while condemning the protests as lawless.

Mike Rogers, a Republican seeking an open Senate seat in Michigan, said student protesters at Columbia were “Hamas sympathizers.” In California, GOP Senate candidate Steve Garvey called them “terrorists” practicing “terrorism disguised as free speech.”

In five states, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, is using the protests in digital ads about student loan forgiveness, saying Democrats want to pay off the loans of students “radicalized by the far left” who are “threatening Jews,” “attacking police” and “acting like terrorists.”

McCormick and others say universities that, in their view, tolerate antisemitism should lose federal subsidies and that visas should be revoked for any foreign student inciting violence or expressing pro-Hamas sentiments at the encampments.

Casey, long a staunch supporter of Israel, has criticized acts of antisemitism on campuses and pointed to legislation he sponsored as a way to make sure the Education Department takes action.

“Students of course have the right to peacefully protest, but when it crosses the line either into violence or discrimination, then we have an obligation to step in and stop that conduct,” Casey said Thursday as he urged colleagues to pass his bill.

Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada, who is Jewish and facing reelection, said she was “horrified” by displays of antisemitism on campuses and, like Casey, called for the department to hold schools accountable.

In California, U.S. Rep Adam Schiff, the Democratic nominee for an open Senate seat, took aim at the Columbia demonstration and said “antisemitic and hateful rhetoric is being loudly and proudly displayed.” Accused by Garvey of being “incredibly silent” on the protests, Schiff, who is Jewish, voted for a House bill similar to Casey’s and released a statement that condemned violence and the “explicit, repeated targeting and intimidation of Jewish students.”

Republicans elsewhere contended statements by Democrats were equivocating and inadequate.

Republicans called out Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, after he told an Axios reporter last week that he was “not going to talk about the politics of that. People always have the right to speak out and should.”

His Republican opponent, Bernie Moreno, charged that Brown had “wholeheartedly endorsed these vile and violent antisemitic demonstrations.”

Later, at a news conference, Brown gave more expansive comments. “Students want to make their voices heard, they need to do it in a way that’s nonviolent, they need to do it in a way that doesn’t spew hatred, and laws need to be enforced,” he said.

In Michigan, which has a relatively significant Muslim population, Biden’s handling of the war is expected to factor heavily into the presidential and Senate races.

Rogers, a favorite for the GOP nomination, thanked New York City police for confronting protesters and “standing up to protect Jewish students at Columbia from the visceral hatred we’ve witnessed from Hamas sympathizers on their campus.”

Republicans argued that U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin, the front-runner for the Democratic nominationfor Senate, had not spoken out strongly against protests at Columbia, her alma mater, and that she took five days after they began to say anything at all.

Slotkin, who is Jewish, said in an April 22 statement — the most recent wave of demonstrations began at Columbia on April 17 — that “the use of intimidation, antisemitic signs or slogans, or harassment, is unacceptable.”

It was, she suggested, a complicated topic.

“I would rather be thoughtful and take more time than have a knee-jerk answer for any issue,” Slotkin said in an interview. “But especially this one.”

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Associated Press reporters Adam Beam in Sacramento, California; Joey Cappalletti in Lansing, Michigan; Mike Catalini in Trenton, New Jersey; Tassanee Vejpongsa in Philadelphia; and Stephany Matat in West Palm Beach, Florida, contributed to this report.

GENEVA (AP) — The IOC suspended former Olympic power broker Sheikh Ahmad of Kuwait for 15 years on Saturday after his conviction for forgery was upheld on appeal this year at a Swiss criminal appeals court.

Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah’s sanction for “a betrayal of his IOC Member’s oath, as well as the seriousness of the damage to the IOC’s reputation” was approved by the Olympic body’s executive board on a recommendation from its ethics commission.

The 15-year suspension starts from the date of his previous ban for a separate issue of unethical conduct, in an Olympic Council of Asia election. That was a three-year sanction imposed on July 27 last year.

The sheikh, who turns 61 on the day after the Paris Games close in August, will be 74 when the latest punishment expires. The Olympic Charter also allows the annual meeting of IOC members to expel a colleague for betraying their oath.

“The IOC Ethics Commission notes that during this period of suspension, Sheikh Ahmad Al-Sabah will not fulfill the necessary ethical criteria to be proposed for re-election at the end of his current term,” the published ruling noted, suggesting his IOC career is effectively over.

Sheikh Ahmad led the Olympic Council of Asia, that was created by his father in Kuwait, before joining the IOC in 1992. He was a longtime close ally of current IOC president Thomas Bach, whose election in 2013 he campaigned for.

The Kuwaiti royal “self-suspended” as an IOC member after being indicted in Geneva in 2018. He also stepped aside as leader of the global group of national Olympic bodies, known as ANOC.

In January, Sheikh Ahmad, his English former lawyer, a Kuwaiti aide and a lawyer based in Geneva had their convictions from September 2021 upheld on charges linked to orchestrating a sham arbitration case a decade ago.

The appeal court judges in Geneva changed the sheikh’s prison sentence to a suspended sentence of two years deferred for a probationary period of three years.

In 2013, he presented video footage to Kuwaiti authorities alleging to show a former prime minister, Sheikh Nasser al-Mohammed al-Sabah, and a former speaker in parliament, Jassim al-Kharafi, discussing a coup. They could have faced the death penalty for treason.

Lawyers for Sheikh Nasser al-Mohammed and the al-Kharafi family filed a criminal complaint in Geneva relating to the arbitration case. The arbitration which was later judged to be fake had been presented to the High Court in London as part of a process that sought to verify the videos.

Sheikh Ahmad also was a senior FIFA official from 2015-17 until withdrawing his candidacy for re-election when implicated by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn in steering bribes to soccer officials in Asia. He denied wrongdoing and was not indicted.

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AP coverage of the Paris Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games

ATLANTA (AP) — It was Election Day last November, and one of Georgia’s top election officials saw that reports of a voting machine problem in an eastern Pennsylvania county were gaining traction online.

So Gabriel Sterling, a Republican who had defended the 2020 election in Georgia amid an onslaught of threats, posted a message to his nearly 71,000 followers on the social platform X explaining what had happened and saying that all votes would be counted correctly.

He faced immediate criticism from one commenter about why he was weighing in on another state’s election while other responses reiterated false claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

“It’s still the right thing to do,” Sterling told a gathering the following day, stressing the importance of Republican officials speaking up to defend elections. “We have to be prepared to say over and over again — other states are doing it different than us, but they are not cheating.”

Sterling, the chief operating officer for the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, is part of an effort begun after the last presidential election that seeks to bring together Republican officials who are willing to defend the country’s election systems and the people who run them. They want officials to reinforce the message that elections are secure and accurate, an approach they say is especially important as the country heads toward another divisive presidential contest.

The group has held meetings in several states, with more planned before the Nov. 5 election.

With six months to go before the likely rematch between Democratic President Joe Biden and former Republican President Donald Trump, concerns are running high among election officials that public distrust of voting and ballot counting persists, particularly among Republicans. Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, continues to sow doubts about the last presidential election and is warning his followers — without citing any evidence — that Democrats will try to cheat in the upcoming one.

This past week, during a campaign rally in Michigan, Trump repeated his false claim that Democrats rigged the 2020 election. “But we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election,” he said.

Just 22% of Republicans expressed high confidence that votes will be counted accurately in November, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll last year.

“It’s an obligation on Republicans’ part to stand up for the defense of our system because our party — there’s some blame for where we stand right now,” said Kentucky’s secretary of state, Michael Adams, who is part of the group and won reelection last year. “But it’s also strategically wise for Republicans to say, ‘Hey Republicans, you can trust this. Don’t stay at home.’”

The effort, which began about 18 months ago, is coordinated by the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the center-right think tank R Street Institute. The goal has been to start conversations about trust in elections, primarily among conservative officials, and to develop a set of principles to accomplish that.

“This has never been and will never be about Trump specifically,” said Matt Germer, director of governance for the R Street Institute and a lead organizer of the effort. “It’s about democratic principles at a higher level –- what does it mean to be a conservative who believes in democracy, the rule of law?”

He said an aim is to have a structure in place to support election officials who might find themselves in situations like that of Georgia’ secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger in 2020, when he supported Trump but rejected false claims that the election was stolen. Prosecutors in Georgia have since charged Trump and others, alleging a plot to overturn the results. Trump has pleaded not guilty.

“You can be a Republican and you can believe in all the Republican ideas without having to say the election was stolen,” Germer said.

A guiding principle for the group is that Republican officials should “publicly affirm the security and integrity of elections across the U.S. and avoid actively fueling doubt about elections in other jurisdictions.”

Kim Wyman, a Republican who previously served as Washington state’s top election official, said it’s imperative when officials are confronted with questions about an election somewhere else that they don’t avoid the question by promoting election procedures in their own state.

It’s OK to say you don’t know the various laws and procedures in another state, Wyman said, but she urged fellow Republicans to emphasize what states do have in common — “the security measures, the control measures to make sure the election is being conducted with integrity.”

Kansas’ secretary of state, Scott Schwab, a Republican who has participated in meetings organized by the group, said he believes there are certain aspects of elections that officials should feel comfortable talking about. But he said he would remain cautious of speaking directly about something specific happening in another state.

“If I start going beyond my realm and my role, then they don’t trust me. And if they don’t trust me, then they don’t trust the elections in Kansas, and that’s pretty important,” Schwab said in an interview.

Some election officials who have questioned election procedures outside their state have a different perspective.

Secretary of State Mac Warner of West Virginia, a Republican who has questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election, said the focus should be on improving policies, such as putting in place voter ID requirements across the country, not silencing those who have questions.

“Our primary job as election officials is to build confidence, and that comes from strengthening protocols and not weakening them,” he said.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican who has raised questions about the way elections are run in other states, criticized what he called “activist lawsuits” and state officials who seek to change voting rules previously set by legislators.

“The things that happen in other states that go wrong are not the result of some cloak and dagger, secretive cabal conspiracy,” he said in an interview. “That’s the far-fetched stuff that makes for great YouTube videos and what have you. But the real things that go wrong in other states, are out in the open, are in full public view.”

Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who is the state’s top election official and has been participating in the group’s discussions, said avoiding criticism of other states and vouching for the legitimacy of election procedures is important for another reason: It can help reduce the threats and harassment directed toward election workers.

A recent survey by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s Law School found that nearly 40% of local election officials had experienced such abuse. It’s caused many to leave their jobs. Of 29 clerks in Utah, Henderson said 20 are new since 2020 and nine have never overseen an election.

“It’s one thing to suggest that someone could do something better. It’s another thing to impugn their integrity, their character, accuse them of cheating, accuse them of nefarious things that don’t happen,” Henderson said. “It’s exhausting.”

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Associated Press writer Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

By Andrea Shalal and Bianca Flowers

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A deep generational divide, anti-war protests on college campuses and a looming Chicago Democratic convention invite comparisons between today’s protests against Israel’s attacks in Gaza and the movement against the Vietnam War.

The 54th anniversary of the Kent State University shooting on Saturday, marks the day when the Ohio National Guard troops sent to quell campus protests shot 13 students, killing four and unleashing a surge of unrest across the country.

The campus protests over the past two weeks differ in both scale and motivation. Student bodies have changed, as has the Democratic Party. But given the tight rematch incumbent President Joe Biden, a Democrat, faces with Republican Donald Trump, they could hold political sway.

DEATH TOLLS

By 1970, the Vietnam War had been raging for five years, and Republican President Richard Nixon had announced an expansion of the war into Cambodia. By the end of 1970, nearly 1.8 million young American men had been enlisted and nearly 30,000 had died.

There are no U.S. troops fighting in Israel’s war in Gaza, but many U.S. citizens have lost family members there.

Israel’s assault on Gaza was triggered by the Oct. 7 attack by Islamist Hamas militants, which by its tallies killed 1,200 with 253 taken hostage. The subsequent Israeli bombardment has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians according to Palestinian medics, and displaced the majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million people.

Students at dozens of schools across the U.S. have rallied or camped out to oppose Israel’s war in Gaza, demanding institutions stop doing business with companies that support the war. Police have arrested over 2,000 protesters.

SUPPORT FOR THE WAR SHIFTS

The growing death toll in Gaza and images of the widespread destruction there have swayed public opinion, with support for Israel’s military assault dropping from 50% in a November Gallup poll to 36% in late March.

Biden, who last month signed legislation to provide $14 billion more aid to Israel, has faced growing criticism over his handling of the crisis, with hundreds of thousands of voters casting “uncommitted ballots” in Democratic primaries in recent months to express their frustration and anger.

Senator Bernie Sanders also drew comparisons with Vietnam, noting former President Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run in 1968 amid growing anger over the war in Vietnam.

“I worry very much that President Biden is putting himself in a position where he has alienated, not just young people, but a lot of the Democratic base, in terms of his views on Israel and this war,” Sanders told CNN.

SIZE, SCOPE AND INTENSITY

By 1970, the protests had grown in size and intensity, with some rallies attracting tens and even hundreds of thousands of people, said Kevin Kruse, a professor at Princeton University. Many students were personally affected given the draft.

Some of those protests were also violent, unlike the largely peaceful demonstrations seen thus far in response to Israel’s war in Gaza, he said.

“The night before the shooting, they burned down the ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) building. This wasn’t a bunch of students sitting in tents on the lawn,” he said.

The shooting sparked fresh anti-war protests across the United States and as far away as Melbourne, Australia, where 100,000 gathered to protest. Nearly 100,000 people converged on Washington, DC a few days after the shooting.

On a much smaller scale, Columbia University’s initial response in April also triggered solidarity protests, Kruse said, adding that the Columbia protest might have petered out if administrators had opted to quietly ride it out until summer.

TONE-DEAFNESS AND HARD HATS

Biden’s first comments on the escalating protests have sparked fresh allegations that he’s tone deaf to the issues, just as Arab American and Muslim activists say the White House hasn’t listened to their concerns about support for Israel.

“There is a right to protest, but not a right to cause chaos,” Biden said.

Shortly after the Kent State shootings, Nixon invited to the White House a group of construction workers after the so-called Hard Hat Riot, when 400 construction workers and 800 office workers attacked some 1,000 demonstrators in New York City.

MORE RACIAL, GENDER DIVERSITY

In 1970, there were some 7.2 million students enrolled in college in the U.S. and women accounted for 41% of students, while Black students were just 7% of the total.

Now, the U.S. has over 15 million undergraduate students, with white students accounting for about 41%, Latino students 18%, Black students 11% and Asian students 6%, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Women outnumber men on college campuses.

While the women’s movement and the civil rights movements were also boiling over in the late 1960s, the groups were less integrated and more at odds than today, said Jim Zogby, a Vietnam era protester and founder of the Arab American Institute.

“This is an intersectional generation. It’s the same kids who were leading the Black Lives Matter movement or the women’s march or the protests against the Muslim ban or the gun safety rally,” he said.

DEMOCRAT DIVISIONS

Then, as now, there are sharp divides between generations, including in the Democratic Party.

Democratic strategist James Carville, 79, on Sunday warned protesters in a viral and profanity-laden video on X that they could help Trump win a second term by dividing the party.

A YouGov poll released Thursday showed that 53% of adults felt that college administrators’ decision to suspend and expel some pro-Palestinian protesters was “about right” or “not harsh enough.” That number jumps to 68% for those aged 65 and over.

Dilara Sayeed, president of the Muslim Civic Coalition, a Chicago-based non-profit, said the party is still out of touch with its electorate of young voters and people of color.

“The government had a policy that young people and Americans of color disagreed with – using our tax dollars and sending troops to go fight in a war we didn’t agree with,” Sayeed said. That’s where we are now.”

Abbas Alawieh, a former senior congressional aide and community organizer who helped lead Michigan’s “Uncommitted” campaign, said the party’s leadership was at grave risk of repeating the mistakes of the Vietnam era.

“In 1968, one of the great failures of the party establishment was that they ignored anti-war youth and continued the horrific war in Vietnam and alienated young voters, and I feel like they’re at risk of doing the same thing,” he said.

The Biden campaign is engaging actively with young voters, spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg said, noting that those efforts were launched months earlier than in the previous election cycle. Biden has also been endorsed by 15 youth vote groups, who will hire hundreds of organizers and mobilize hundreds of thousands of volunteers, the campaign said.

Matt Hill, spokesperson for the Democratic National Convention, underscored the importance of peaceful protest to American democracy, arguing that the convention would highlight what he called “the unity and excitement of Democrats … in stark contrast to the chaos and extremism stewing in the GOP.”

OFFLINE, ONLINE

Media coverage of the war in Vietnam, known as America’s first “television war” with daily images of dead soldiers returned to the United States (images now banned by the U.S. military) provided momentum for the anti-war movement.

Although students today aren’t facing the draft, they are watching the war unfolding in real-time on their phones, said Christianna Leahy, a former Amnesty International board member and professor at McDaniel College in Maryland.

“It is through Instagram, Tik Tok, social media that they’re just getting images every day,” she said. “This is on everyone’s phone 24 hours a day.”

ANOTHER RAUCOUS CONVENTION

The divisions may boil over during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August. But there will be fewer chances to challenge Biden inside the event than in 1968, Zogby said.

“The party no longer exists, as it did in ’68 when there was internal dissent in the party,” he said, noting that Biden had locked down the nomination and no other candidates had a chance to emerge during a fight on the convention floor.

Another key difference this year: the ’68 convention took place just months after the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King and leading Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, which roiled a nation already divided by the Vietnam War and social revolution.

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and local law enforcement agencies are girding for protests.

“There’s no place in these United States where the DNC was going to have a convention where they were not going to be met by their base and the frustration from their base and wanting to see their priorities reflected in the Democrats’ platform,” said Nsé Ufot, founder of the New South Super PAC.

“You can’t hide, baby.”

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Bianca Flowers, additional reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt and Jarrett Renshaw; editing by Heather Timmons and Diane Craft)

By Gram Slattery and Nathan Layne

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Donald Trump’s pledge to fight what he calls “anti-white feeling” in the U.S. will likely embolden allies who seek to dismantle government and corporate programs created to battle racism and boost diversity in American life.

Some high-profile supporters of the former president, now the 2024 Republican presidential candidate, say policies for safeguarding people of color in classrooms, workplaces and charities should be repurposed to protect the rights of white people as well.

“I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country,” Trump told Time in an interview published on Tuesday. “I don’t think it would be a very tough thing to address, frankly. But I think the laws are very unfair right now.”

Trump did not specify examples of anti-white bias nor policy prescriptions in the interview.

But Trump’s campaign website lays out several plans, and some of his allies are making detailed recommendations should Trump win back the White House from Democrat Joe Biden in a Nov. 5 election.

One Trump proposal would reverse Biden’s executive order requiring federal agencies to assess whether underserved communities – including people of color, LGBTQ Americans and rural Americans – can adequately access their programs.

At campaign rallies, Trump pledges to strip funds from schools teaching critical race theory, an academic concept – rarely taught in public schools – that rests on the premise that racial bias is baked into U.S. institutions.

One campaign adviser, Lynne Patton, told conservative activist and journalist Laura Loomer in an interview posted on Friday that she expected a second Trump White House would refuse federal money to any schools, companies or charities that enacted hiring practices under Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, widely known as DEI.

Rights advocates assail what they view as any efforts to deny communities of color equal footing. They say the programs Trump wants to dismantle exist to reverse centuries of documented inequities.

“There’s always been an ability to foment this kind of anxiety and frustration among many whites whenever an effort to level the playing field for non-whites has been successful in any way,” said Tricia Rose, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University.

One Trump ally, Gene Hamilton, told Reuters the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division must ensure that corporate programs meant to boost diversity in the workplace are not themselves discriminatory.

The department could derive its authority, he said, in part from Section VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Passed during a time when Black Americans campaigned aggressively for civil rights, the act prohibits hiring or compensation decisions based on “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

Hamilton, who served in the Justice Department under Trump, says the act should protect white people as well. For instance, a hiring program meant to boost the number of people of color in the workplace should not exclude other applicants.

Such a focus would depart dramatically from the Civil Rights Division’s historic role of protecting marginalized groups.

In recent years, it has led investigations into police departments for alleged racism against Black Americans and sued companies for discriminating against immigrants.

“Programs and policies … that deny benefits or employment to Americans solely because of their race or their sex or anything of the sort is violative of that central tenet that has held the country together,” said Hamilton, who laid out his views in a policy book published by a consortium of Trump-friendly think tanks known as Project 2025.

A POLICY BLUEPRINT FOR A SECOND TRUMP TERM

While the Trump campaign has distanced itself from the project, the consortium has drafted a policy blueprint for a potential Trump administration. Many of the former president’s allies are involved.

In practice, official race-based complaints of anti-white workplace discrimination appear to be rare.

For instance, only a fraction of race-based claims before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an independent government agency, are filed by white people, who make up the majority of the American workforce.

Still, a majority of self-identified Trump voters believe that white Americans face discrimination. Some 53% of self-identified Trump voters responding to a March Reuters/Ipsos poll said they believed that white people in the U.S. are discriminated against because of the color of their skin, compared with 14% of self-identified Biden voters.

One Project 2025 chapter, co-written by conservative economist and Trump adviser Stephen Moore, argues the Treasury Department should seek to fire employees who willingly take part in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs.

The chapter does not specify the programs it considers to be a form of DEI, but the term often suggests a desire to increase diversity and make people of color more comfortable in the workplace.

Asked about the Time magazine comments and the measures Trump would take to address anti-white bias, his campaign said in a statement that Black and Hispanic Americans were more interested in immigration, crime and pocketbook issues than matters of race.

About 85% of Black Americans said in a 2021 Gallup poll they were dissatisfied with how Black people are treated in America.

“In his second term, President Trump will uplift all Americans regardless of race or religion,” said Patton, the campaign adviser.

Asked about the Time interview, Biden’s campaign said Trump’s policies would make life harder for communities of color.

“Trump is making clear that if he wins in November, he’ll turn his racist record into official government policy, gutting programs that give communities of color economic opportunities,” said Kevin Munoz, a campaign spokesperson.

In practice, some of the more radical proposals may be tricky – though not impossible – to implement, according to legal scholars.

For instance, while Civil Rights Act protections apply to white people, the Justice Department often lacks the authority to sue private employers under Title VII.

There are, however, several situations in which the Justice Department could get involved, said Susan Carle, a professor at American University. One example could include situations where a company holds contracts with the government, she said.

Patrice Willoughby, senior vice president at the NAACP, said the civil rights organization would be prepared to organize boycotts of certain companies that acquiesced to attacks on equity programs.

“When necessary we will not hesitate to use our economic power,” she said.

(Reporting by Gram Slattery in Washington and Nathan Layne in Waukesha, Wisconsin; Additional reporting by Sarah N. Lynch in Washington; Editing by Ross Colvin, Kat Stafford and Howard Goller)

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy on Friday set a July primary and a September general election to fill the Newark-based U.S. House seat that opened after Rep. Donald Payne Jr.’s recent death.

Murphy signed a writ of election, required under state law. The July 16 primary will be about a month after the state’s regularly scheduled June 4 contest, followed by the general election Sept. 18.

The special election will determine who serves out the remainder of Payne’s term, which ends Jan. 3, 2025, while the regular election process held in parallel will be for who fills the seat after that.

It’s not yet clear who will be running in the heavily Democratic and majority-Black district, which is unlikely to flip as registered Republicans are outnumbered by more than 6 to 1.

Payne had already filed paperwork to run for reelection this year and is set to appear uncontested on the ballot for the regular June 4 primary. Should he win the nomination, Democratic Party committee members in his district could choose a replacement to run in the November general election.

Payne, who died April 24 of a heart attack connected to complications from diabetes, served in the House since 2012.

He succeeded his father, Donald Milford Payne, who held the seat for two decades and also died while he was a sitting congressman.

LAS VEGAS (AP) — The Republican National Committee on Friday filed a federal lawsuit seeking to prevent Nevada from counting mail ballots received after Election Day, as the state’s law currently permits.

The law, passed by Democrats in 2021, permits the tallying of mail ballots received up to four days after Election Day, provided the envelopes are postmarked before the end of the day. The lawsuit says the provision also assumes that envelopes received three days after Election Day that don’t have a postmark indicating otherwise were posted in time.

Republicans contend this violates the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that there be a single day for Election Day.

“Nevada’s ballot receipt deadline clearly violates federal law and undermines election integrity in the state,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said in a statement. “Ballots received days after Election Day should not be counted.”

The lawsuit comes after Republicans sued to overturn laws permitting the tallying of ballots received after Election Day in Mississippi and North Dakota, and it’s the 83rd election-related suit filed by the party six months before Election Day. That’s a sign of both the increased pace of election-related litigation and the party’s focus on fighting over election rules after former President Donald Trump installedloyalists who have parroted his false claims about the 2020 election being stolen from him.

Nineteen states, including Nevada, allow ballots to be tallied if they’re received after Election Day. Supporters of those rules say they make it easier to vote and ensure that those who cast ballots by mail have as much time to make up their minds as those who vote on Election Day. Opponents contend they slow election results, undermine trust in the system and can be exploited.

“I hope the RNC is putting as much time and energy into educating voters on how to participate in elections as they put into suing the state of Nevada,” the state’s Democratic secretary of state, Francisco Aguilar, said in a statement.

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — State lawmakers took the first steps Friday toward tightening absentee ballot laws since video last year captured people stuffing reams of ballots into collection boxes in one city, creating a “black eye” for Connecticut and fueling skepticism in some circles about U.S. election security.

Mandatory surveillance cameras at absentee drop-boxes and improved tracking of ballots, as well as new protections for poll workers, are among the proposed changes in a bill that easily cleared the House of Representatives.

Democrats and Republicans said Friday it was important to pass legislation that increases the public’s confidence in state elections, even though no one has been charged yet in connection with the alleged ballot irregularities in the September mayoral primary in Bridgeport – the results of which were tossed out by a judge.

“This episode was a black eye for the city, for the state, and for the vast, vast majority of election officials, candidates and campaign workers in this state who follow our laws with the utmost integrity and competence,” Democratic Rep. Matt Blumenthal said. “It did reveal to us some gaps in our current laws and measures that we can take to increase the security, transparency and overall integrity and public perception of integrity of our elections.”

Blumenthal noted there has been no proof so far that any voter was impersonated or their vote was manipulated in Bridgeport. Also, he said there has been no evidence to date that any fake or erroneous ballots were “stuffed” into the ballot boxes. Several investigations are underway.

While questions of election security have led to bitter partisan fights in other states this year, Connecticut’s bill passed the Democratic controlled House of Representatives unanimously. It now awaits final legislative action in the Democratic controlled Senate. The session ends May 8.

The bill would require cities and towns by July 1, 2025, to install a video camera for each absentee ballot drop box and make the footage available to the public. It also includes new measures for tracking where and when individual absentee ballots were collected and tighter procedures for obtaining an absentee ballot.

There are also provisions to address redundancies in voter rolls and speed up referrals of potential criminal violations of election law to the appropriate authorities.

The bill additionally allows poll workers to apply to have their home addresses not subject to open records requests for 90 days before and after an election — a measure aimed at protecting them from possible harassment. Anyone who reveals the worker’s address would face a misdemeanor charge under the legislation.

Republican Rep. Gale Mastrofrancesco criticized the bill for not going far enough, saying it should have included more measures to prevent election fraud, such as requiring signatures on absentee ballots be verified. But she said Friday’s bill was a welcome first step.

“This is good stuff for after the fact. It’s a step in the right direction,” she said. “I don’t think it goes far enough. But again, It doesn’t hurt our elections.”

After narrowly losing to incumbent Democratic Mayor Joe Ganim in September, primary opponent John Gomes made public surveillance videos he had received from city-owned security cameras showing a Ganim supporter making multiple early-morning trips to stuff absentee ballots into a drop box. An apparent blatant violation of state law, Gomes successfully challenged the results in court, and a new primary was ordered.

Ganim ultimately won reelection in late February as mayor of Connecticut’s most populous city following a messy race that included a do-over primary, a general election that didn’t count, and a new general election.

The scandal became a national talking point when the drop-box surveillance videos were first made public, fueling skepticism about the security of U.S. elections as well as conspiracy theories involving the 2020 presidential election, even as election experts contend what happened in Bridgeport is unique to the city and shouldn’t be seen as evidence of widespread problems.

WASHINGTON (AP) — “Star Wars” actor Mark Hamill dropped by the White House on Friday for a visit with President Joe Biden and walked away with a pair of the president’s aviator sunglasses and a greater respect for the office.

“I love the merch,” he said, taking off the glasses during a quick appearance at the White House daily press briefing following his visit with Biden. Hamill, 72, famous for playing Luke Skywalker, kidded with reporters that he’d take a few questions — as long as they weren’t about “Star Wars.”

“I was honored to be asked to come to the White House to meet the president,” he said. He’s been to the White House before, during the Carter and Obama administrations, but he’d never checked out the Oval Office, and that was quite something, he said. Biden showed off photographs and other Oval Office items, Hamill said.

Hamill said Biden told him to call him “Joe,” to which Hamill offered an alternative suggestion: “Can I call you Joe-bi-Wan Kenobi?”

“He liked that,” said Hamill, who also voiced the Joker in “Batman: The Animated Series.”

Both Hamill and the White House were vague about his reason for visiting. But Hamill, a Democrat and Biden supporter with a huge social media following, has been posting about the president’s reelection campaign this week.

“May The First Not Quench Your Thirst For Biden’s Re-election!” he wrote on May 1.

On Friday he posted, “May The Third Be Absurd That The Guy Who Tried To Steal A Fair Election Is Allowed To Run Again,” a reference to Donald Trump and his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

May 4th is unofficially “Star Wars” Day, in part because of the famous Jedi phrase “May the force be with you.” The pun goes, “May the fourth be with you.”

Hamill also lent his voice to “Air Alert” — a downloadable app linked to Ukraine’s air defense system. His voice urges people to take cover whenever Russia unleashes another aerial bombardment on Ukraine.

(Reuters) – U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar, a Democrat from Texas, was indicted on Friday on federal charges of conspiracy, bribery and money laundering, a complaint filed in federal court said.

Cuellar and his wife are accused of accepted approximately $600,000 in bribes from an oil and gas company owned by the government of Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank, prosecutors said.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago)