6!��'y����[�Fk�d��-�e��|���Ł}�C&���y�G��N.������uA,���Á^�@�EڧӉ�χ�3�I�<���e}����J���ژ �*�Ѷ������e��t��mlpP�d�נrv9��|7�5�_VX�n���������ޥ��#D[=�to�|Va}}��g���::}}PI��B�RJA�C ����P��������%�j�١�!����J��R(�KP�+id���Y��������7�M��H���Ǯ������\߻.f���6���U��.+�����dݼn��Pװ��Ve�fV�ǝ��ÜA=

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden kicked off his final holiday season at the White House on Monday by issuing the traditional reprieve to two turkeys who will bypass the Thanksgiving table to live out their days in southern Minnesota. Biden welcomed 2,500 guests to the South Lawn under sunny skies as he cracked jokes about the fates of “Peach” and “Blossom” and sounded wistful tones about the last weeks of his presidency after a half-century in Washington power circles. “It’s been the honor of my life. I’m forever grateful,” Biden said, taking note of his impending departure on Jan. 20, 2025. That's when power will transfer to Republican President-elect Donald Trump, the man Biden defeated four years ago and was battling again until he was pressured to bow out of the race amid concerns about his age and viability. Biden is 82. Until Inauguration Day, the president and first lady Jill Biden will continue a busy run of festivities that will double as their long goodbye. The White House schedule in December is replete with holiday parties for various constituencies, from West Wing staff to members of Congress and the White House press corps. Biden relished the brief ceremony with the pardoned turkeys, named for the official flower of the president's home state of Delaware. “The peach pie in my state is one of my favorites,” he said during remarks that were occasionally interrupted by Peach gobbling atop the table to Biden's right. “Peach is making a last-minute plea,” Biden said at one point, drawing laughter from an overflow crowd that included Cabinet members, White House staff and their families, and students from 4H programs and Future Farmers of America chapters. Biden introduced Peach as a bird who “lives by the motto, ‘Keep calm and gobble on.’” Blossom, the president said, has a different motto: “No fowl play. Just Minnesota nice.” Peach and Blossom came from the farm of John Zimmerman, near the southern Minnesota city of Northfield. Zimmerman, who has raised about 4 million turkeys, is president of the National Turkey Federation, the group that has gifted U.S. presidents Thanksgiving turkeys since the Truman administration after World War II. President Harry Truman, however, preferred to eat the birds. Official pardon ceremonies did not become an annual White House tradition until the administration of President George H.W. Bush in 1989. With their presidential reprieve, Peach and Blossom will live out their days at Farmamerica, an agriculture interpretative center near Waseca in southern Minnesota. The center's aim is to promote agriculture and educate future farmers and others about agriculture in America. Separately Monday, first lady Jill Biden received the official White House Christmas tree that will be decorated and put on display in the Blue Room. The 18.5 foot (5.64 meters) Fraser fir came from a farm in an area of western North Carolina that recently was devastated by Hurricane Helene . Cartner’s Christmas Tree Farm lost thousands of trees in the storm “but this one remained standing and they named it ‘Tremendous’ for the extraordinary hope that it represents,” Jill Biden said at the event. The Bidens also traveled to New York City on Monday for an evening “Friendsgiving” event at a Coast Guard station on Staten Island. Biden began his valedictory calendar Friday night with a gala for hundreds of his friends, supporters and staff members who gathered in a pavilion erected on the South Lawn, with a view out to the Lincoln Memorial. Cabinet secretaries, Democratic donors and his longest-serving staff members came together to hear from the president and pay tribute, with no evidence that Biden was effectively forced from the Democratic ticket this summer and watched Vice President Kamala Harris suffer defeat on Nov. 5. “I’m so proud that we’ve done all of this with a deep belief in the core values of America,” said Biden, sporting a tuxedo for the black-tie event. Setting aside his criticisms of Trump as a fundamental threat to democracy, Biden added his characteristic national cheerleading: “I fully believe that America is better positioned to lead the world today than at any point in my 50 years of public service.” The first lady toasted her husband with a nod to his 2020 campaign promise to “restore the soul of the nation,” in Trump’s aftermath. With the results on Election Day, however, Biden’s four years now become sandwiched in the middle of an era dominated by Trump's presence on the national stage and in the White House. Even as the first couple avoided the context surrounding the president's coming exit, those political realities were nonetheless apparent, as younger Democrats like Maryland Gov. Wes Moore , Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Biden's Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg not only raised their glasses to the president but held forth with many attendees who could remain in the party's power circles in the 2028 election cycle and beyond. ___ Associated Press writer Steve Karnowski in Minneapolis contributed to this report.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — An online spat between factions of Donald Trump's supporters over immigration and the tech industry has thrown internal divisions in his political movement into public display, previewing the fissures and contradictory views his coalition could bring to the White House. The rift laid bare the tensions between the newest flank of Trump's movement — wealthy members of the tech world including billionaire Elon Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and their call for more highly skilled workers in their industry — and people in Trump's Make America Great Again base who championed his hardline immigration policies. The debate touched off this week when Laura Loomer , a right-wing provocateur with a history of racist and conspiratorial comments, criticized Trump’s selection of Sriram Krishnan as an adviser on artificial intelligence policy in his coming administration. Krishnan favors the ability to bring more skilled immigrants into the U.S. Loomer declared the stance to be “not America First policy” and said the tech executives who have aligned themselves with Trump were doing so to enrich themselves. Much of the debate played out on the social media network X, which Musk owns. Loomer's comments sparked a back-and-forth with venture capitalist and former PayPal executive David Sacks , whom Trump has tapped to be the “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar." Musk and Ramaswamy, whom Trump has tasked with finding ways to cut the federal government , weighed in, defending the tech industry's need to bring in foreign workers. It bloomed into a larger debate with more figures from the hard-right weighing in about the need to hire U.S. workers, whether values in American culture can produce the best engineers, free speech on the internet, the newfound influence tech figures have in Trump's world and what his political movement stands for. Trump has not yet weighed in on the rift. His presidential transition team did not respond to questions about positions on visas for highly skilled workers or the debate between his supporters online. Instead, his team instead sent a link to a post on X by longtime adviser and immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller that was a transcript of a speech Trump gave in 2020 at Mount Rushmore in which he praised figures and moments from American history. Musk, the world's richest man who has grown remarkably close to the president-elect , was a central figure in the debate, not only for his stature in Trump's movement but his stance on the tech industry's hiring of foreign workers. Technology companies say H-1B visas for skilled workers, used by software engineers and others in the tech industry, are critical for hard-to-fill positions. But critics have said they undercut U.S. citizens who could take those jobs. Some on the right have called for the program to be eliminated, not expanded. Born in South Africa, Musk was once on an a H-1B visa himself and defended the industry's need to bring in foreign workers. “There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent," he said in a post. “It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.” Trump's own positions over the years have reflected the divide in his movement. His tough immigration policies, including his pledge for a mass deportation, were central to his winning presidential campaign. He has focused on immigrants who come into the U.S. illegally but he has also sought curbs on legal immigration , including family-based visas. As a presidential candidate in 2016, Trump called the H-1B visa program “very bad” and “unfair” for U.S. workers. After he became president, Trump in 2017 issued a “Buy American and Hire American” executive order , which directed Cabinet members to suggest changes to ensure H-1B visas were awarded to the highest-paid or most-skilled applicants to protect American workers. Trump's businesses, however, have hired foreign workers, including waiters and cooks at his Mar-a-Lago club , and his social media company behind his Truth Social app has used the the H-1B program for highly skilled workers. During his 2024 campaign for president, as he made immigration his signature issue, Trump said immigrants in the country illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country" and promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. But in a sharp departure from his usual alarmist message around immigration generally, Trump told a podcast this year that he wants to give automatic green cards to foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges. “I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country," he told the “All-In" podcast with people from the venture capital and technology world. Those comments came on the cusp of Trump's budding alliance with tech industry figures, but he did not make the idea a regular part of his campaign message or detail any plans to pursue such changes.The justices' decision, not expected for several months, could affect similar laws enacted by another 25 states and a range of other efforts to regulate the lives of transgender people, including which sports competitions they can join and which restrooms they can use. The case is being weighed by a conservative-dominated court after a presidential election in which Donald Trump and his allies promised to roll back protections for transgender people. The Biden administration's top Supreme Court lawyer warned a decision favorable to Tennessee also could be used to justify nationwide restrictions on transgender health care for minors. In arguments that lasted more than two hours, five of the six conservative justices voiced varying degrees of skepticism over arguments made by the administration and Chase Strangio, the ACLU lawyer for Tennessee families challenging the ban. Chief Justice John Roberts, who voted in the majority in a 2020 case in favor of transgender rights, questioned whether judges, rather than lawmakers, should weigh in on a question of regulating medical procedures, an area usually left to the states. "The Constitution leaves that question to the people's representatives, rather than to nine people, none of whom is a doctor," Roberts said in an exchange with Strangio. Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion in 2020, said nothing during the arguments. The court's three liberal justices seemed firmly on the side of the challengers, but it's not clear that any conservatives will go along. Justice Sonia Sotomayor pushed back against the assertion that the democratic process would be the best way to address objections to the law. She cited a history of laws discriminating against others, noting that transgender people make up less than 1% of the U.S. population, according to studies. There are an estimated 1.3 million adults and 300,000 adolescents ages 13 to 17 who identify as transgender, according the UCLA law school's Williams Institute. "Blacks were a much larger part of the population and it didn't protect them. It didn't protect women for whole centuries," Sotomayor said in an exchange with Tennessee Solicitor General Matt Rice. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she saw some troubling parallels between arguments made by Tennessee and those advanced by Virginia and rejected by a unanimous court, in the 1967 Loving decision that legalized interracial marriage nationwide. Quoting from that decision, Jackson noted that Virginia argued then that "the scientific evidence is substantially in doubt and, consequently, the court should defer to the wisdom of the state legislature." Justice Samuel Alito repeatedly pressed Strangio, the first openly transgender lawyer to argue at the nation's highest court, about whether transgender people should be legally designated as a group that's susceptible to discrimination. Strangio answered that being transgender does fit that legal definition, though he acknowledged under Alito's questioning there are a small number of people who de-transition. "So it's not an immutable characteristic, is it?" Alito said. Strangio did not retreat from his view, though he said the court did not have to decide the issue to resolve the case in his clients' favor. There were dueling rallies outside the court in the hours before the arguments. Speeches and music filled the air on the sidewalk below the court's marble steps. Advocates of the ban bore signs like "Champion God's Design" and "Kids Health Matters," while the other side proclaimed "Fight like a Mother for Trans Rights" and "Freedom to be Ourselves." Four years ago, the court ruled in favor of Aimee Stephens, who was fired by a Michigan funeral home after she informed its owner she was a transgender woman. The court held that transgender people, as well as gay and lesbian people, are protected by a landmark federal civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in the workplace. The Biden administration and the families and health care providers who challenged the Tennessee law urged the justices to apply the same sort of analysis that the majority, made up of liberal and conservative justices, embraced in the case four years ago when it found that "sex plays an unmistakable role" in employers' decisions to punish transgender people for traits and behavior they otherwise tolerate. The issue in the Tennessee case is whether the law violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which requires the government to treat similarly situated people the same. Tennessee's law bans puberty blockers and hormone treatments for transgender minors, but allows the same drugs to be used for other purposes. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, the administration's top Supreme Court lawyer, called the law sex-based line drawing to ban the use of drugs that have been safely prescribed for decades and said the state "decided to completely override the views of the patients, the parents, the doctors." She contrasted the Tennessee law with one enacted by West Virginia, which set conditions for the health care for transgender minors, but stopped short of an outright ban. Gender-affirming care for youth is supported by every major medical organization, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychiatric Association.

Kate Martin will be among the bigger names on the Golden State Valkyries' first roster. The Las Vegas Aces fan favorite will be among the selections in Friday's 2025 WNBA expansion draft, . The Valkyries are also reportedly selecting New York Liberty veteran Kayla Thornton. The allow each of the league's 12 teams to protect up to six players on their roster as of the final day of the 2024 regular season. Athletes with previous core player designations, such as DeWanna Bonner and Brittney Griner are also ineligible to be selected. The Valkyries are then allowed to choose one unprotected player from each team. Martin being selected means the Aces opted to not protect her, which isn't much of a surprise given how they used her toward the end of last season. The 18th overall pick of the 2024 WNBA Draft was a pleasant surprise early in the season when Vegas was struggling with injuries, but her playing time plummeted as the team got healthy. After seeing double-digit minutes in 16 of the Aces' first 21 games, Martin cracked that threshold only twice in her final 13, also missing a chunk of time in July and August with . She saw a grand total of three minutes in the postseason.NASA Accelerates Space Exploration, Earth Science for All in 2024

Memphis beats No. 2 UConn 99-97 in overtime to tip off Maui Invitational

What to know about Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Trump’s pick for labor secretaryThe chair of the Democratic National Committee ( DNC ) on Monday told party leaders that his successor will be chosen on February 1. The DNC election comes soon after President-elect Donald Trump 's inauguration on January 20, and the new chair will have an integral role in how Democrats respond to Trump's White House. How the DNC Picks a New Chair In a letter to the Democrats' Rules & Bylaws Committee, current DNC chair Jaime Harrison detailed the process of how the party will elect his successor. He that the committee will hold four candidate forums in January before the final election on February 1. That election will take place during a DNC meeting in National Harbor, Maryland. Prior to the election, members of the Rules & Bylaws Committee will meet in December to finalize other rules for the selection process, which will also include the steps for choosing other positions such as national finance chair, treasurer and vice chairs. "The DNC is committed to running a transparent, equitable, and impartial election for the next generation of leadership to guide the party forward," Harrison said in a statement. He continued, "Electing the Chair and DNC officers is one of the most important responsibilities of the DNC Membership, and our staff will run an inclusive and transparent process that gives members the opportunity to get to know the candidates as they prepare to cast their votes." Who Is Running for DNC Chair? Thus far, only two Democrats have declared themselves candidates to be the next DNC chair. On November 18, Martin O'Malley, the former Maryland governor and current commissioner of the Social Security Administration, was the first to announce he would seek the position. The following day, Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and a vice chair of the national party, also threw his hat into the ring. Other Democrats Reportedly Considering the Role Other Democrats are expected to vie for the position, including Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan and a former mayor of Chicago. While David Axelrod —a ex-strategist to former President President Barack Obama —has publicly endorsed Emanuel, he's been lambasted by New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , who said Emanuel was emblematic of a "disease in Washington of Democrats who spend more time listening to the donor class than working people." In addition to Emanuel, other Democrats who are reportedly considering the position or are favored by members of their party to seek the role include Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb; Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler; Minnesota Democratic Party Chair Ken Martin; Michael Blake, a former vice chair of the party; Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow; Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha; and former Texas Representative Beto O'Rourke . This article includes reporting from The Associated Press.

Donald Trump’s “best buddy,” South African-born Elon Musk, has endorsed a post on X slamming Americans as “re***ded” workers who can’t hold a candle to skilled foreign hires in Silicon Valley. Musk was responding to a post — using a word widely considered a slur — explaining the difference between the “right right” (whom Trump claims to back) and the “tech right.” The “right right” want everything in America, including jobs, for Americans, the poster explained. The “tech right,” however, want H-1B visas for “skilled” foreign workers because American workers “ are re***ed ,” and “you can’t out train” that, the poster added. Musk responded Thursday night: “ That pretty much sums it up . This was eye-opening.” Musk, an immigrant, then clarified that he wants exceptions to MAGA’s anti-immigrant posture for the top “0.1% of [foreign] engineering talent as ... essential for America to keep winning.” America is, after all, “ mostly Americans ,” he pointed out, apparently for the sake of Americans he considers “re***ded.” Vivek Ramaswamy — Musk’s DOGE partner, both tasked by Trump to carve up the federal government — also slighted American intelligence in an X post earlier Thursday. He blamed U.S. sitcoms for extolling the virtues of the dimmer characters over those with brains, necessitating the hiring (at least in the tech world) of smarter people from other countries. “If we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH: Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long,” Ramaswamy schooled. He then called for changes in American childrearing: “ More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers ... more creating, less chillin’.” Both men were attacked by MAGA Trump supporters on social media — notably including far-right activist Laura Loomer over the duo’s push for H-1B visas for foreign tech workers . Loomer then suddenly lost her blue check mark on X that had made her a “verified” user. Texas Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett pointed out on X that, unlike MAGA, she also believes immigrants are good for the economy (though without the class division Musk and Ramaswamy seem to embrace). “MAGA got played & is mad at who ?!” she asked. “The same 2 guys just yelling was looking out for them last week as the government was on the verge of a shutdown!”How to buy Kansas City Chiefs vs. Pittsburgh Steelers tickets