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Vance campaigns at the Ohio steel plant where his grandfather worked
MIDDLETOWN, Ohio (AP) -- Vice President JD Vance returned to his hometown on Friday to campaign for Republican candidates at the steel plant where his grandfather worked and portray the Democratic Party his Papaw once supported as unrecognizable today.
Vance has highlighted his Rust Belt roots while trying to boost GOP candidates ahead of the November midterm elections. He has focused on promoting the Trump administration's economic policies and efforts to try to expand U.S. manufacturing.
As he took the stage at the Cleveland-Cliffs Middletown Works facility, known as Armco Steel when his grandfather James Vance worked there for nearly 40 years, he remarked on sharing the space where the man whose name he shared once stood.
"Papaw was a welder in this place for 40 years, and today his grandson stands here as the vice president of these United States. It's an amazing thing," Vance said.
The Middletown event comes as Vance is expected to ramp up his travel schedule with more public events and fundraisers, according to a person familiar with the plans who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
As they've campaigned this year, Vance, more than President Donald Trump, has acknowledged Americans' cost-of-living concerns, seeking to assure voters that the administration is working to reverse high prices, though he didn't offer specifics.
The vice president said, "We've got a lot of work to do" and "I'm not saying it's going to be easy or it's all going to happen overnight," but he said Trump was trying to reverse "40 years of American decline." He pointed to Trump's immigration and trade policies, including his tariffs, as trying to protect jobs like those at the steel plant.
Trump's tariff policies, though, have contributed to the higher costs Americans are facing, as taxes on imports have raised the price of imported products as well as those made domestically, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
With an eye toward Ohio's competitive elections, Vance focused on portraying Democrats today as unrecognizable to the party his grandfather supported for its union associations, calling it the "party of graduate students."
Vance said his grandfather also thought "way too many politicians were just plain old corrupt."
"He hated the people who forgot about this town when they should have been fighting for this town," Vance said.
Vance blamed politicians of both major political parties, saying that for 40 years they espoused policies of free trade and open immigration that led to factory jobs being shipped overseas and an eventual scourge of opioids left behind, which he blamed on "a lot of cartels" and "the fentanyl trade," which he said came along with "some innocent people" across the border.
TikTok reaches $400 million settlement with US Justice Department over children's privacy
TikTok has reached a $400 million settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, ending a 2024 lawsuit alleging the company violated federal children's privacy laws.
The DOJ said Friday that TikTok will pay $300 million immediately and another $100 million after an order vacates an earlier consent decree against its predecessor company, Musical.ly.
"This settlement is a major victory for American children and parents," said U.S. Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr. in a statement. "The Department's priority is ensuring that children are protected online and that companies entrusted with their personal information meet their legal obligations. This resolution secures a substantial recovery while reinforcing the protections that families expect and deserve."
Since the DOJ's lawsuit in 2024, TikTok has undergone major changes, most notably in the ownership structure of its U.S. arm. In January, the social video platform company signed agreements with major investors including Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX to form the new TikTok U.S. joint venture.
Representatives for TikTok did not immediately respond to a message for comment Friday.
The latest lawsuit focused on allegations that TikTok and its China-based parent company ByteDance violated a federal law that requires kid-oriented apps and websites to get parental consent before collecting personal information of children under 13. It also says the companies failed to honor requests from parents who wanted their children's accounts deleted, and chose not to delete accounts even when the firms knew they belonged to kids under 13.
The settlement comes as social media companies face an avalanche of lawsuits over children's safety and privacy and a growing number of countries are banning young kids and teens from social media apps. Instagram's parent company, Meta Platforms, is currently on trial in federal court in Oakland, California, over allegations it violated the 1998 Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, along with various state statutes.
Supreme Court's chief justice allows work on Trump's $400M White House ballroom to continue for now
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Chief Justice John Roberts on Friday allowed the White House to continue construction on President Donald Trump's $400 million ballroom project for now, as the Supreme Court considers the Trump administration's emergency request to intervene in lawsuits over the project.
The temporary order came hours before lower-court rulings would have forced a halt to aboveground construction of the project because Trump didn't get congressional approval.
It will remain in place until the Supreme Court issues a more durable decision, though the one-page document does not detail Roberts' reasoning or indicate when another ruling will be handed down. Roberts signed the order because he oversees emergency appeals of cases filed in the capital.
Trump thanked the high court and the chief justice during his remarks later Friday during a political appearance in South Carolina.
"When they say proceed, I think that's a good thing. That's a good thing," Trump said.
The case is coming before the nation's highest court as Trump, a Republican, exercises unparalleled assertions of presidential power and increasingly seeks to mold the capital in his own image.
The administration has argued that the president has total authority to renovate the White House and other federal buildings as he sees fit and that the ballroom project must be completed due to national security concerns.
When Trump first announced the plans for a new ballroom, he did not emphasize national security. He said the project would be funded by private donations, including from himself.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation argues that Trump has no unilateral authority to undertake the work, which has included demolishing the East Wing. Lawyers for the preservation group accused the White House of trying to "outrun the courts" by accelerating construction.
A spokesperson for the trust said Friday that the order from Roberts is not a final decision and the group is awaiting further action. The full Supreme Court will likely weigh in next on whether construction can continue for the potentially long duration of the lawsuit.
Trump said his administration is grateful for Friday's decision, writing in a social media post that the project is "under budget and ahead of schedule."
The Trump administration says 65% of the work has already been completed on the planned 90,000-square-foot (8,400-square-meter) ballroom, where the East Wing stood before the president ordered its demolition.
Crews are working 20 hours a day, seven days a week, on the project, where about $200 million in private donations has been spent or committed, according to court documents filed by the Justice Department.
The work has proceeded against the backdrop of the litigation winding through the courts.
Charter boat hauls in 1,260-pound blue marlin believed to be East Coast's largest catch
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) -- Damon Sacco had never seen anything like the fish he and fellow anglers fought for hours in the waters off Massachusetts. As it rose from the depths, it looked like a glimmering blue spaceship.
Sacco, a longtime Massachusetts charter fishing boat captain, saw the giant fin break the surface, and at first he thought he was dealing with an enormous shark.
"Then I got a better look at it and thought, dang, that thing's pointed," he said. "But that's too big for a marlin."
He was wrong. Sacco and his client Walter Chapman landed what they and others believe is the largest Atlantic blue marlin ever caught off the U.S. East Coast on Wednesday. The massive billfish, more than 11 feet in length, weighed 1,260 pounds when they got it back to land in Falmouth, Massachusetts.
That was just 142 pounds shy of the world record for an Atlantic blue marlin, caught off Brazil in 1992, according to records kept by the International Game Fish Association.
To catch such a huge fish off New England might be even more remarkable, said Walt Golet, director of the University of Maine Pelagic Fisheries Lab and an associate professor at the university's marine sciences school. The water is too cold for them in the Northeast most of the year, making the window to catch a big one very narrow.
The fish's head was on its way to the UMaine lab to determine its age, said Golet, who speculated that it could be in the range of 25 to 30 years.
"I don't suspect there will be a whole lot of blue marlin caught in the Atlantic in general that are going to top 1,200 pounds for the next several years," he said.
On the day of the catch, Sacco's charter boat, Castafari, was fishing Atlantis Canyon, an underwater canyon on the edge of the continental shelf about 100 miles off Cape Cod. The highly migratory blue marlin is a seasonal visitor to the area, Golet said.
The battle with the marlin took about three hours and was fought on rod and reel by Chapman. Sacco said his role for most of the adventure was to "drive the bus around and yell at people." He added that the fish left a couple of holes in the boat's transom with its bill that he considers "war marks."
Data cards retrieved from plane and helicopter that collided in deadly Pennsylvania airport crash
CARLISLE, Pa. (AP) -- Federal investigators have pulled intact data cards from a state police helicopter and Cessna plane that collided at a small airport in central Pennsylvania, killing the plane's pilot.
Aaron McCarter, investigator-in-charge with the National Transportation Safety Board, called the recovery of the cards "very good news from a data standpoint" during a media briefing Friday morning. But neither aircraft was required to have the black boxes that airliners must have to record flight data and cockpit audio, McCarter said.
"We don't know exactly what kind of parameters are on these data cards, but in some cases we get fortunate" and the cards have robust flight data, McCarter said.
The data cards will be reviewed over the weekend as investigators try to determine why the Cessna clipped the helicopter during takeoff Wednesday night, McCarter said. The pilot of the plane was killed, and two people inside the helicopter were injured.
The crash at the small airport in Carlisle, about 110 miles northwest of Philadelphia, involved a Bell 407 helicopter and Cessna 150, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The Cessna was attempting to land when it veered to the side and collided with the rear of the police helicopter, which was hovering above a grassy area beside the runway as part of a training exercise.
The small plane struck the tail of the hovering helicopter, killing the Cessna pilot and sending both aircraft to the ground in pieces.
McCarter said Friday the helicopter was about 30 to 50 feet away from the runway. He said as the Cessna approached, it appeared to "be out of control."
Both pilots were flight instructors, and they have strong evidence the Cessna pilot was made aware of the helicopter nearby, McCarter said. The flight path of the plane was unusual and its pilot had been doing maintenance on the Cessna before the flight, he said.
Pentagon dismisses Stars and Stripes leadership after editor, reporter oppose military interference
The Pentagon on Friday fired the editor-in-chief of Stars and Stripes and a top reporter for insubordination after they spoke publicly against any interference by the Defense Department in the military news outlet that has a long history of editorial independence. It was the latest move by an administration that has grown increasingly aggressive toward the news media.
The newspaper's publisher, who announced his impending retirement days ago, was also dismissed.
Erik Slavin, editor-in-chief of the military newspaper that is partly funded by the Pentagon, told The Associated Press he was dismissed for insubordination after an interview he gave that objected to potential censorship by the U.S. military. He received a notice of separation, as did publisher Max Lederer -- who had just announced his upcoming retirement -- and Middle East reporter Lara Korte, Slavin said.
The moves come at a time when the Trump administration, in its second term, has been progressively combative toward the media -- including sharply curtailing Pentagon access for the press corps that covers the Defense Department. Trump or other parts of the executive branch have also, in policy and in the courts, grappled with The Wall Street Journal,The Associated Press and The New York Times -- in addition to using the FCC to target broadcast networks.
Slavin said he was being fired "for stating in a CBS interview that hypothetical censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line." Korte participated in the same interview.
"I stand by the principle that Stars and Stripes must remain editorially independent, as required by law and by the department's own policies," Slavin said.
National Press Club President Mark Schoeff Jr. called the firing of Slavin "another brazen attempt by the Pentagon to dictate coverage of the military" and said it should be immediately reversed.
"Firing a newspaper editor after he publicly defended his newsroom's editorial independence is deeply troubling, and it should concern every journalist and every member of the U.S. military who depends on independent reporting," Schoeff said.
Neither Lederer nor Korte immediately responded to emailed requests for comment. Korte said on X: "Today, I was informed that the Department of Defense is firing me for insubordination after I told a CBS reporter that I work for Stars and Stripes -- not the Pentagon, not the administration, and not any policy maker."