By CHARLOTTE KRAMON and JEFF MARTIN Associated Press
ATLANTA (AP) — The man who fired more than 180 shots with a long gun at the headquarters of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention broke into a locked safe to get his father’s weapons and wanted to send a message against COVID-19 vaccines, authorities said Tuesday.
Documents found in a search of the home where Patrick Joseph White lived with his parents “expressed the shooter’s discontent with the COVID-19 vaccinations,” Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said.
White, 30, had written about wanting to make “the public aware of his discontent with the vaccine,” Hosey said.
White also had recently verbalized thoughts of suicide, which led to law enforcement being contacted several weeks before the shooting, Hosey said. He died at the scene Friday of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after killing a police officer.
Asked about threats based on misinformation regarding the CDC and its vaccine work, FBI Special Agent Paul Brown said Tuesday: “We’ve not seen an uptick, although any rhetoric that suggests or leads to violence is something we take very seriously.”
“Although we are tracking it, we are sensitive to it, we have not seen that uptick,” said Brown, who leads the FBI’s Atlanta division.
The suspect’s family was fully cooperating with the investigation, authorities said at the Tuesday news briefing. White had no known criminal history, Hosey said.
Executing a search warrant at the family’s home in the Atlanta suburb of Kennesaw, authorities recovered written documents that are being analyzed, and seized electronic devices that are undergoing a forensic examination, the agency said.
Investigators also recovered a total of five firearms, including a gun that belonged to his father that he used in the attack, Hosey said.
Hosey said the suspect did not have a key to the gun safe: “He broke into it,” he said.
White had been stopped by CDC security guards before driving to a pharmacy across the street, where he opened fire from a sidewalk, authorities said. The bullets pierced “blast-resistant” windows across the campus, pinning employees down during the barrage. More than 500 shell casings have been recovered from the crime scene, the GBI said.
In the aftermath, officials at the CDC are assessing the security of the campus and making sure they notify officials of any new threats.
“No one should face violence while working to protect the health of others,” Kennedy said in a statement Saturday. It said top federal health officials are “actively supporting CDC staff.”
Kennedy also visited the DeKalb County Police Department, and later met privately with the slain officer’s wife.
A photo of the suspect will be released later Tuesday, Hosey said, but he encouraged the public to remember the face of the officer instead.
Kennedy was a leader in a national anti-vaccine movement before President Donald Trump selected him to oversee federal health agencies, and has made false and misleading statements about the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 shots and other vaccines.
Years of false rhetoric about vaccines and public health was bound to “take a toll on people’s mental health,” and “leads to violence,” said Tim Young, a CDC employee who retired in April.
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. inflation was unchanged in July as rising prices for some imported goods were balanced by falling gas and grocery prices, leaving overall prices modestly higher than a year ago.
Consumer prices rose 2.7% in July from a year earlier, the Labor Department said Tuesday, the same as the previous month and up from a post-pandemic low of 2.3% in April. Excluding the volatile food and energy categories, core prices rose 3.1%, up from 2.9% in June. Both figures are above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.
The figures suggest that slowing rent increases and cheaper gas are offsetting some impacts of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs. Many businesses are also absorbing much of the cost of the duties. Tuesday’s figures likely include some impact from the 10% universal tariff Trump imposed in April, as well as higher duties on countries such as China and Canada.
The figures still leave the Federal Reserve in a difficult spot: Hiring slowed sharply in the spring, after Trump announced tariffs in April. The stalling out of job gains has boosted financial market expectations for an interest rate cut by the central bank, and some Fed officials have raised concerns about the health of the job market. A rate cut by the Fed often, but not always, lowers borrowing costs for mortgages, car loans, and business loans.
Economists are divided over how Fed officials will read the data in the coming months. Some argued that the worsening jobs picture will outweigh lingering inflation concerns and lead the Fed to cut at its next meeting in September. Yet some say that with core inflation notably above 2% and rising, the Fed will hold off on reducing borrowing costs.
Chair Jerome Powell has warned that worsening inflation could keep the Fed on the sidelines — a stance that has enraged Trump, who has defied traditional norms of central bank independence and demanded lower borrowing costs.
On Tuesday, Trump attacked Powell again for not cutting rates and suggested he would allow a lawsuit against the Fed to proceed because of the rising costs of its extensive building renovation. It wasn’t clear what lawsuit he was referring to.
On a monthly basis, prices rose 0.2% in July, down from 0.3% the previous month, while core prices ticked up 0.3%, a bit faster than the 0.2% in June.
Many economists expect the impact of tariffs will continue to push inflation higher in the coming months, even as the impact of the duties has so far not been as large as many feared.
Brian Bethune, an economist at Boston College, said that overall U.S. tariffs — calculated as the amount of duties paid by U.S. companies divided by overall imports — has reached 10%, the highest in decades, and will likely keep rising for months.
“Those cost increases will be passed on to the consumer in some way, shape, or form,” Bethune said. Some companies could return to “shrinkflation,” he noted, in which they reduce the package size of a good while keeping the price the same.
And companies that are absorbing tariff costs, which reduces their profit margins, are less likely to hire new employees, he said. Job gains have slowed to a crawl since April.
Gas prices fell 2.2% from June to July and have plunged 9.5% from a year earlier, the government’s report said. Grocery prices slipped 0.1% last month, though they are still 2.2% higher than a year ago. Restaurant meals continued to get more expensive, however, rising 0.3% in July and 3.9% from a year earlier.
Tariffs appeared to raise the cost of some imported items: Shoe prices jumped 1.4% from June to July, though they are still just 0.9% more expensive than a year ago. The cost of furniture leapt 0.9% in July and is 3.2% higher than a year earlier. Clothing prices ticked up 0.1% in July, after a larger rise in June, though they are still slightly cheaper than a year ago.
Tuesday’s data arrives at a highly-charged moment for the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, which collects and publishes the inflation data. Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, then the head of BLS, after the Aug. 1 jobs report also showed sharply lower hiring for May and June than had previously been reported.
The president posted on social media Monday that he has picked E.J. Antoni, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a frequent critic of the jobs report, to replace McEntarfer.
Adding to the BLS’s turmoil is a government-wide hiring freeze that has forced it to cut back on the amount of data it collects for each inflation report, the agency has said. UBS economist Alan Detmeister estimates that BLS is now collecting about 18% fewer price quotes for the inflation report than it did a few months ago. He thinks the report will produce more volatile results, though averaged out over time, still reliable.
Trump has insisted that overseas manufacturers will pay the tariffs by reducing their prices to offset the duties. Yet the pre-tariff prices of imports haven’t fallen much since the levies were put in place.
Economists at Goldman Sachs estimate that foreign manufacturers have absorbed just 14% of the duties through June, while 22% has been paid by consumers and 64% by U.S. companies. Based on previous patterns, however — such as Trump’s 2018 duties on washing machines — the economists expect that by this fall consumers will bear 67% of the burden, while foreign exporters pay 25% and U.S. companies handle just 8%.
Many large U.S. companies are raising prices in response to the tariffs, including apparel makers Ralph Lauren and Under Armour, and eyewear company Warby Parker.
Consumer products giant Procter & Gamble, maker of Crest toothpaste, Tide detergent and Charmin toilet paper, said late last month that it would lift prices on about a quarter of its products by mid-single-digit percentages.
And cosmetics maker e.l.f. Beauty, which makes a majority of its products in China, said on Wednesday that it had raised prices by a dollar on its entire product assortment as of Aug. 1 because of tariff costs, the third price hike in its 21-year history.
“We tend to lead and then we will see how many more kind of follow us,” CEO Tarang Amin said on an earnings call Wednesday.
Matt Pavich, senior director of strategy and innovation at Revionics, a company that provides AI tools to large retailers to help them evaluate pricing decisions, says many companies are raising prices selectively to offset tariffs, rather than across the board.
“Up until now we haven’t seen a massive hit to consumers in retail prices,” Pavich said. “Now, they are going up, we’ve seen that.”
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Associated Press Retail Writer Anne D’Innocenzio in New York contributed to this report.
YouTube on Wednesday will begin testing a new age-verification system in the U.S. that relies on artificial intelligence to differentiate between adults and minors, based on the kinds of videos that they have been watching.
The tests initially will only affect a sliver of YouTube’s audience in the U.S., but it will likely become more pervasive if the system works as well at guessing viewers’ ages as it does in other parts of the world. The system will only work when viewers are logged into their accounts, and it will make its age assessments regardless of the birth date a user might have entered upon signing up.
If the system flags a logged-in viewer as being under 18, YouTube will impose the normal controls and restrictions that the site already uses as a way to prevent minors from watching videos and engaging in other behavior deemed inappropriate for that age.
The safeguards include reminders to take a break from the screen, privacy warnings and restrictions on video recommendations. YouTube, which has been owned by Google for nearly 20 years, also doesn’t show ads tailored to individual tastes if a viewer is under 18.
If the system has inaccurately called out a viewer as a minor, the mistake can be corrected by showing YouTube a government-issued identification card, a credit card or a selfie.
“YouTube was one of the first platforms to offer experiences designed specifically for young people, and we’re proud to again be at the forefront of introducing technology that allows us to deliver safety protections while preserving teen privacy,” James Beser, the video service’s director of product management, wrote in a blog post about the age-verification system.
People still will be able to watch YouTube videos without logging into an account, but viewing that way triggers an automatic block on some content without proof of age.
The political pressure has been building on websites to do a better job of verifying ages to shield children from inappropriate content since late June when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Texas law aimed at preventing minors from watching pornography online.
While some services, such as YouTube, have been stepping up their efforts to verify users’ ages, others have contended that the responsibility should primarily fall upon the two main smartphone app stores run by Apple and Google — a position that those two technology powerhouses have resisted.
Some digital rights groups, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy & Technology, have raised concerns that age verification could infringe on personal privacy and violate First Amendment protections on free speech.
This recipe is a classic! It’s the perfect mix of sweet and salty flavors, and makes for a great summer dessert.
Ingredients
2 cups pretzels, crushed
3/4 cup butter, melted
1 cup + 3 tbsp. granulated sugar
1, 8 oz. pkg cream cheese, room temp
1, 8oz. container whipped topping
2, 3oz. pkgs strawberry gelatin
2 cups water
~10 oz. frozen strawberries
Instructions
1. Preheat oven Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Create crust In a bowl, stir together crushed pretzels, melted butter and 3 tbsp. of sugar until combined. Press the mixture into the bottom of a 9×13 inch baking dish. Bake the crust for 8-10 minutes and set aside to cool.
3. Create first layer In a separate bowl, beat cream cheese and 1 cup of sugar until smooth. Then, fold in whipped topping. Spread the mixture onto the crust when it has cooled completely.
4. Create top layer Boil the water and pour into gelatin powder in a bowl. Stir in frozen strawberries and pour mixture over the first 2 layers. Allow the salad to cool in the refrigerator until the top layer sets, about 2 hours.
The Longhorns hardly have a mandate in the poll released Monday: They edged out Penn State by just five points in the closest preseason vote since 1998.
Texas received 25 first-place votes and 1,552 points to give the Southeastern Conference the preseason No. 1 team for a record fifth straight year. The Nittany Lions got 23 first-place votes and 1,547 points for their highest preseason ranking since they were No. 1 to open the 1997 season.
The Longhorns face a major test right away. Their Aug. 30 opener at defending champion and third-ranked Ohio State is a rematch of last season’s College Football Playoff semifinal, a 28-14 Buckeyes win in the Cotton Bowl.
The Buckeyes received 11 first-place votes from the panel of 65 media members who cover college football. No. 4 Clemson got four first-place votes and No. 5 Georgia got one.
Notre Dame, Oregon (which got the final first-place vote), Alabama, LSU and Miami round out the top 10.
The SEC leads all conferences with 10 teams in the preseason Top 25, most ever by a conference and one more than a year ago. The SEC has four teams in the top 10 for the second straight year.
The Big Ten, which has won the last two national championships, has two of the top three teams in the poll for the third straight year and six in the Top 25 for the third year in a row.
Four Big 12 teams are ranked, with defending conference champion Arizona State the highest at No. 11. The Atlantic Coast Conference has three, led by Clemson.
Top-ranked Texas
“Arch Mania” is at a fever pitch in Texas with Arch Manning now the undisputed starting quarterback.
The Longhorns have been on an upward trajectory since they were 5-7 in 2021, Steve Sarkisian’s first season. They have won 25 of their last 30 games and reached two straight CFP semifinals. Last year, they were ranked No. 1 four of five weeks from mid-September to mid-October, and they reached the SEC championship game in their first season in the conference.
“But this is a new year, new faces, new team, and obviously expectations are high for our program,” Sarkisian said at SEC media days. “I’m not naive to that. I don’t put my head in the sand, and expectations are very high. But I also say we’re the University of Texas, and the standard is the standard here, and that’s competing for championships year in and year out.”
Twelve Texas players were taken in the NFL draft, including three-first-round picks, but elite recruiting and additions from the transfer portal should alleviate concerns about losses on the offensive line and at receiver. The defense brings back plenty of talent.
Still, Texas received just 38.5% of the first-place votes (25 of 65), the smallest share for a No. 1 team in the preseason poll since Georgia got 33.9% (22 of 65) in 2008.
The Longhorns have ended a season No. 1 in the AP poll three times (1963, 1969, 2005) but until now had never started a season higher than No. 2 (1962, 1965, 1970, 2005, 2009).
Big Ten lurking
The second-ranked Nittany Lions are not only six points from being No. 1, they are 75 points ahead of the Buckeyes in what might be considered a slight to the national champs.
Penn State will have Drew Allar back under center for what many consider a light schedule ahead of a late September visit from Oregon before a Nov. 1 showdown at Ohio State.
The Buckeyes, in the preseason top five for the ninth straight year and 12th of the last 13, will have a new look with only five starters back on offense and three on defense.
“This team has its own identity,” coach Ryan Day said. “It wants to have its own identity, but it also wants to be the first Ohio State team to win back-to-back national championships.”
The opener against Texas will give the Buckeyes a good measure of themselves. Julian Sayin or Lincoln Kienholz will be the third new starting quarterback in three years. Whoever gets the job will throw to one of the nation’s top players in Jeremiah Smith.
Day will also have another chance to figure out archrival and preseason No. 14 Michigan, which has beaten the Buckeyes four straight years.
Poll nuggets
— Texas will try to become the 12th team to start and finish No. 1 since the AP preseason poll debuted in 1950. The last team to do it was Alabama in 2017.
— Notre Dame is in the preseason top 10 for the third time in four years. The Fighting Irish will have a new quarterback, CJ Carr or Kenny Minchey. The two played a combined eight snaps last season as Notre Dame went all the way to the CFP title game won by Ohio State.
— With Boise State at No. 25, all 12 teams in the 2024 College Football Playoff are ranked in the preseason. The Mountain West’s Broncos are the first team from a Group of Five conference to crack the preseason Top 25 since Tulane was No. 24 in 2023.
— No. 16 SMU, which returns quarterback Kevin Jennings from its CFP team, is in the preseason Top 25 for the first time in 40 years. The 1985 team was No. 3 and finished 6-5 and unranked.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Monday that he expected to determine mere moments into his meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin this week whether it would be possible to work out a deal to halt the war in Ukraine.
“At the end of that meeting, probably the first two minutes, I’ll know exactly whether or not a deal can be made,” Trump said at a White House press conference that he called to announce plans for a federal takeover of Washington’s police force to help combat crime.
President Donald Trump appeared to lower expectations for his upcoming meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska Friday, telling reporters it’s “really a feel-out meeting,” and he may “leave and say, ‘good luck,’ and that’ll be the end.” (AP Video)
He said he thought Friday’s sitdown with Putin in Alaska would be “really a feel-out meeting.” Trump added that “it’ll be good, but it might be bad” and predicted he may say, “lots of luck, keep fighting. Or I may say, we can make a deal.”
Putin wants to lock in Russia’s gains since invading Ukraine in February 2022 as Trump presses for a ceasefire that has remained out of reach. Trump’s eagerness to reach a deal has raised fears in Ukraine and Europe about such an agreement favoring Russia, without sufficient input from Ukraine. Trump has alternately harshly criticized both leaders after promising — and so far failing — to swiftly end the conflict.
The Trump-Putin meeting so far isn’t going to include Zelenskyy
Trump on Monday ducked repeated chances to say that he would push for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to take part in his discussions with Putin, and was especially dismissive of Zelenskyy and his need to be part of an effort to seek peace.
He said the Ukrainian president had been to “a lot of meetings” without managing to halt a war that Russia started. Trump also noted that Zelenskyy had been in power for the duration of the war and said “nothing happened” during that time. He contrasted that with Putin, who has wielded power in Russia for decades.
Trump said that, after his meeting with Putin, “The next meeting will be with Zelenskyy and Putin” but it could also be a meeting with “Putin and Zelenskyy and me.”
To that point, Trump said he would call Zelenskyy and European leaders after his discussion with Putin to “tell them what kind of a deal — I’m not going to make a deal. It’s not up to me to make a deal.”
Trump spent the early part of his administration decrying Zelenskyy, even suggesting he was a dictator because his country has not held elections during the war. Zelenskyy was hounded out of the Oval Office in February after Trump and Vice President JD Vance suggested he hadn’t been grateful enough for U.S. support.
Trump’s up and down relations with Putin
More recently, Trump has expressed frustration with Putin that Russia hasn’t appeared to take a push for a ceasefire more seriously, and softened his tone toward Zelenskyy. His comments Monday suggested he might have had another change of heart.
“President Putin invited me to get involved,” Trump said. He noted that he thought it was “very respectful” that Putin is coming to the U.S. for Friday’s meeting, instead of insisting that Trump go to Russia.
“I’d like to see a ceasefire. I’d like to see the best deal that can be made for both parties,” Trump said.
The president repeated that any major agreement could involve land swaps, without elaborating. He had threatened Moscow with more economic sanctions if more isn’t done to work toward a ceasefire, but suggested Monday that, should Friday’s meeting be successful, he could see a day when the U.S. and Russia normalize trade relations.
Putin is expected to be unwavering in his demands to keep all the territory his forces now occupy and to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, with the long-term aim of returning it to Moscow’s sphere of influence.
Zelenskyy insists he will never consent to any formal Russian annexation of Ukrainian territory or give up a bid for NATO membership.
Putin believes he has the advantage on the ground as Ukrainian forces struggle to hold back Russian advances along the 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front. On the front lines, few Ukrainian soldiers believe there’s an end in sight to the war.
Europeans will prepare with a virtual meeting on Ukraine this week
With the Europeans and Ukrainians so far not invited to the summit, Germany sought to prepare by inviting Trump, Zelenskyy, the NATO chief and several other European leaders for a virtual meeting on Wednesday.
The German chancellery said the talks would seek additional ways to pressure Russia and prepare for peace negotiations and “related issues of territorial claims and security.”
Steffen Meyer, spokesperson for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, said the German government “has always emphasized that borders must not be shifted by force” and that Ukraine should decide its own fate “independently and autonomously.”
Earlier, a Ukrainian drone attack killed one person and wounded two others in a region some 260 miles (418 kilometers) east of Moscow.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said its air defenses intercepted and destroyed a total of 39 Ukrainian drones overnight and Monday morning over several Russian regions as well as over the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump extended a trade truce with China for another 90 days Monday, at least delaying once again a dangerous showdown between the world’s two biggest economies.
Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he signed the executive order for the extension, and that “all other elements of the Agreement will remain the same.” Beijing at the same time also announced the extension of the tariff pause, according to the Ministry of Commerce.
The previous deadline was set to expire at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday. Had that happened the U.S. could have ratcheted up taxes on Chinese imports from an already high 30%, and Beijing could have responded by raising retaliatory levies on U.S. exports to China.
The pause buys time for the two countries to work out some of their differences, perhaps clearing the way for a summit later this year between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, and it has been welcomed by the U.S. companies doing business with China.
Sean Stein, president of the U.S.-China Business Council, said the extension is “critical” to give the two governments time to negotiate a trade agreement that U.S. businesses hope would improve their market access in China and provide the certainty needed for companies to make medium- and long-term plans.
“Securing an agreement on fentanyl that leads to a reduction in U.S. tariffs and a rollback of China’s retaliatory measures is acutely needed to restart U.S. agriculture and energy exports,” Stein said.
China said Tuesday it would extend relief to American companies who were placed on an export control list and an unreliable entities list. After Trump initially announced tariffs in April, China restricted exports of dual-use goods to some American companies, while banning others from trading or investing in China. The Ministry of Commerce said it would stop those restrictions for some companies, while giving others another 90-day extension.
Reaching a pact with China remains unfinished business for Trump, who has already upended the global trading system by slapping double-digit taxes – tariffs – on almost every country on earth.
The European Union, Japan and other trading partners agreed to lopsided trade deals with Trump, accepting once unthinkably U.S. high tariffs (15% on Japanese and EU imports, for instance) to ward off something worse.
Trump’s trade policies have turned the United States from one of the most open economies in the world into a protectionist fortress. The average U.S. tariff has gone from around 2.5% at the start of the year to 18.6%, highest since 1933, according to the Budget Lab at Yale University.
But China tested the limits of a U.S. trade policy built around using tariffs as a cudgel to beat concessions out of trading partners. Beijing had a cudgel of its own: cutting off or slowing access to its rare earths minerals and magnets – used in everything from electric vehicles to jet engines.
In June, the two countries reached an agreement to ease tensions. The United States said it would pull back export restrictions on computer chip technology and ethane, a feedstock in petrochemical production. And China agreed to make it easier for U.S. firms to get access to rare earths.
“The U.S. has realized it does not have the upper hand,’’ said Claire Reade, senior counsel at Arnold & Porter and former assistant U.S. trade representative for China affairs.
Those triple-digit tariffs threatened to effectively end trade between the United States and China and caused a frightening sell-off in financial markets. In a May meeting in Geneva they agreed to back off and keep talking: America’s tariffs went back down to a still-high 30% and China’s to 10%.
Having demonstrated their ability to hurt each other, they’ve been talking ever since.
“By overestimating the ability of steep tariffs to induce economic concessions from China, the Trump administration has not only underscored the limits of unilateral U.S. leverage, but also given Beijing grounds for believing that it can indefinitely enjoy the upper hand in subsequent talks with Washington by threatening to curtail rare earth exports,” said Ali Wyne, a specialist in U.S.-China relations at the International Crisis Group. “The administration’s desire for a trade détente stems from the self-inflicted consequences of its earlier hubris.”
It’s unclear whether Washington and Beijing can reach a grand bargain over America’s biggest grievances. Among these are lax Chinese protection of intellectual property rights and Beijing’s subsidies and other industrial policies that, the Americans say, give Chinese firms an unfair advantage in world markets and have contributed to a massive U.S. trade deficit with China of $262 billion last year.
Reade doesn’t expect much beyond limited agreements such as the Chinese saying they will buy more American soybeans and promising to do more to stop the flow of chemicals used to make fentanyl and to allow the continued flow of rare-earth magnets.
But the tougher issues will likely linger, and “the trade war will continue grinding ahead for years into the future,’’ said Jeff Moon, a former U.S. diplomat and trade official who now runs the China Moon Strategies consultancy.
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Associated Press Staff Writers Josh Boak and Huizhong Wu contributed to this story.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Monday he’s taking over Washington’s police department and activating 800 members of the National Guard in the hopes of reducing crime, even as city officials stressed crime is already falling in the nation’s capital.
The president, flanked by his attorney general, his defense secretary and the FBI director, said he was declaring a public safety emergency and his administration would be removing homeless encampments.
“We’re going to take our capital back,” Trump declared, adding he’d also be “getting rid of the slums.”
The White House has announced an increased federal law enforcement presence in Washington, D.C., for at least the next week to combat crime. (AP Video)
For Trump, the effort to take over public safety in Washington reflects an escalation of his aggressive approach to law enforcement. The District of Columbia’s status as a congressionally established federal district gives him a unique opportunity to push his tough-on-crime agenda, though he has not proposed solutions to the root causes of homelessness or crime.
Attorney General Pam Bondi will assume responsibility for Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, Trump said, as he also railed against potholes and graffiti in the city and called them “embarrassing.” The president did not provide a timeline for the control of the police department, but he’s limited to 30 days under statute unless he gets approval from Congress.
As Trump spoke, demonstrators gathered outside the White House to protest his moves. And local officials rejected the Republican president’s depiction of the district as crime-ridden and called his actions illegal.
“The administration’s actions are unprecedented, unnecessary, and unlawful,” District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb said. “There is no crime emergency in the District of Columbia.”
Schwalb, a Democrat, said violent crime in the district reached historic 30-year lows last year and is down an additional 26% this year.
Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser said she would follow the law regarding the “so-called emergency” even as she indicated that Trump’s actions were a reason why the District of Columbia should be a state with legal protections from such actions.
“While this action today is unsettling and unprecedented, I can’t say that given some of the rhetoric of the past, that we’re totally surprised,” Bowser said.
Combating crime
The president dismissed the idea Washington needed to enlarge its 3,500-officer police force, even as he seeks to have more armed personnel going through the city with the goal of reducing crime.
“What you need is rules and regulations, and you need the right people to implement them,” he said.
Trump invoked Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act in an executive order to declare a “crime emergency” so his administration could take over the city’s police force. He signed a directive for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to activate the National Guard.
While Trump has portrayed himself as a friend to law enforcement and enjoyed the political backing from many of their groups, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of the 1,500-plus people charged with crimes in the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, including people convicted of assaulting police officers.
About 500 federal law enforcement officers are being tasked with deploying throughout the nation’s capital as part of Trump’s effort to combat crime, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.
More than 100 FBI agents and about 40 agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are among federal personnel being assigned to patrols in Washington, the person briefed on the plans said. The Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Marshals Service are contributing officers.
The person was not authorized to publicly discuss personnel matters and spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity. The Justice Department didn’t immediately have a comment Monday morning.
The National Guard
Bowser, a Democrat, has previously questioned the effectiveness of using the National Guard to enforce city laws and said the federal government could be far more helpful by funding more prosecutors or filling the 15 vacancies on the D.C. Superior Court, some of which have been open for years.
Bowser cannot activate the National Guard herself, but she can submit a request to the Pentagon.
“I just think that’s not the most efficient use of our Guard,” she said Sunday on MSNBC’s “The Weekend,” acknowledging it is “the president’s call about how to deploy the Guard.”
Bowser noted that violent crime in Washington has decreased since a rise in 2023. She stressed during a Monday news conference that she believed Trump’s views of the city were shaped by the “challenging times” of the coronavirus pandemic, when he faced protests and crime spiked as the country began to recover from the outbreak.
Focusing on homelessness
Trump has emphasized the removal of Washington’s homeless population, though it was unclear where the thousands of people would go, and he did not give details at his news conference Monday.
“The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote Sunday in a social media post. “We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital. The Criminals, you don’t have to move out. We’re going to put you in jail where you belong.”
Jesse Rabinowitz, a advocate for homeless people, called Trump’s plan “fascist” and a “waste” of resources. He said the move wasn’t about safety.
“It is about power, and it is about fascism and authoritarianism,” said Rabinowitz, the campaign and communication director for the National Homelessness Law Center. “If Donald Trump wanted to keep D.C. safe, he would fund housing and support. Instead, the Republicans just gutted health care, and they’re passing through a budget that will make homelessness worse. They do not care about helping people.”
Crime statistics
Police statistics show homicides, robberies and burglaries are down this year when compared with this time in 2024. Overall, violent crime is down 26% compared with this time a year ago.
The president has criticized the district as full of “tents, squalor, filth, and Crime,” and he seems to have been set off by the attack on Edward Coristine, among the most visible figures of the bureaucracy-cutting effort known as the Department of Government Efficiency. Police arrested two 15-year-olds in the attempted carjacking and said they were looking for others.
“This has to be the best run place in the country, not the worst run place in the country,” Trump said Wednesday.
He called Bowser “a good person who has tried, but she has been given many chances.”
Trump has repeatedly suggested the rule of Washington could be returned to federal authorities. Doing so would require a repeal of the Home Rule Act of 1973 in Congress, a step Trump said lawyers are examining.
Bowser acknowledged the law allows the president to take more control over the city’s police, but only if certain conditions are met.
“None of those conditions exist in our city right now,” she said. “We are not experiencing a spike in crime. In fact, we’re watching our crime numbers go down.”
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Associated Press writers Ashraf Khalil, Alanna Durkin Richer, Nathan Ellgren, Darlene Superville and Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks edged back from their record heights on Monday in Wall Street’s final moves before an upcoming update on inflation.
The S&P 500 dipped 0.3% after flirting with its all-time high, which was set two weeks ago, earlier in the day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 200 points, or 0.5%, while the Nasdaq composite shaved 0.3% off its own record.
The highlight of this week for Wall Street will likely arrive on Tuesday, when the government will report how bad inflation was across the country in July. Economists expect it to show U.S. consumers had to pay prices for groceries, gasoline and other costs of living that were 2.8% higher from a year earlier, a slight acceleration from June’s 2.7% inflation.
Inflation has remained above 2%, even if it has improved substantially from its peak above 9% three years ago. And the worry is that President Donald Trump’s tariffs could push inflation higher.
That in turn is raising fears about a potential, worst-case scenario called “stagflation” where the economy stagnates but inflation remains high. The Federal Reserve has no good tool to fix both at once, and it would need to concentrate on either the job market or inflation first. But helping one of those areas by moving interest rates would likely hurt the other.
A top Fed official, Michelle Bowman, said on Saturday that she believes the job market is the bigger concern. She is still backing three cuts to interest rates by the Fed this year following this month’s stunning, weaker-than-expected report on the U.S. job market. Trump has also been angrily calling for cuts to interest rates to support the economy.
Other Fed officials, led by Chair Jerome Powell, have been more hesitant. Powell has said he wants to wait for more data about how Trump’s tariffs are affecting inflation before the Fed makes its next move, and Tuesday’s update on the consumer price index may offer a big clue about that.
Strategists at Stifel are warning that stagflation may already be on the way, with spending by U.S. consumers slowing. That in turn could create a reckoning for investors after they sent stock prices soaring to records from their low point in April.
“Rate cuts cannot save an overvalued S&P 500,” according to the strategists, led by Thomas Carroll and Barry Bannister.
One way companies can make their stock prices appear less expensive is to deliver bigger profits.
Micron Technology climbed 4.1% after raising its forecasts for profit and revenue in the current quarter, which will end later this month. The maker of memory for computers said it’s benefiting from higher prices for its products.
AMC Entertainment rose 3.4% to trim its loss for the year so far, which came into the day at 26.4%, after reporting better results for the spring than analysts expected. The theater chain said moviegoers paid more for tickets, while also spending more on food and drinks.
Also on the losing side of Wall Street was C3.ai after the AI application software company warned it may report an operating loss as large as $124.9 million for its first quarter. CEO Thomas Siebel called the first-quarter sales results “completely unacceptable,” and its stock tumbled 25.6%.
All told, the S&P 500 fell 16.00 points to 6,373.45. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 200.52 to 43,975.09, and the Nasdaq composite slipped 64.62 to 21,385.40.
The price of gold, meanwhile, eased after Trump said he would not place tariffs on the metal. That followed Friday’s brouhaha in the gold market after the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol seemed to rule that some kinds of gold bars coming from Switzerland would face a tariff. That in turn caused a disconnect between the prices of gold trading in New York versus in London, but the market has since calmed.
Gold for December delivery settled at $3,404.70 per ounce in New York, down 2.5%.
In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed amid mostly modest movements across Europe and Asia.
In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury held at 4.27%, where it was late Friday.
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AP Business Writers Wyatte Grantham-Philips and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.
