NEW YORK (AP) — As former President Donald Trump remains stuck in the courtroom listening to salacious details of an affair he denies, another spectacle is playing out in the background as his vice presidential tryouts get underway.

The dynamic was on full display over the weekend at a closed-door fundraiser at his Mar-a-Lago club that doubled as an audition featuring a long list of potential running mates. Trump, at one point, invited many of the contenders on stage like contestants in one of his old beauty pageants. The next day several of them, including South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, South Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, Ohio Sen. Marco Rubio and New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, fanned out across Sunday news shows to sing his praises.

“This weekend, we had 15 people. … They’re all out there campaigning,” Trump told Spectrum News 1 Wisconsin on Tuesday. “It might actually be more effective this way because, you know, every one of them thinks they could be chosen, which I guess possibly is so.”

The comments demonstrate why Trump is in no rush to pick his potential second-in-command or publicly winnow his choices. For now, the presumptive GOP nominee is happy to revel in the attention as reporters parse his choices and prospective candidates jockey and woo him in an “Apprentice”-style competition.

Trump has said he intends to make an announcement shortly before July’s Republican National Convention, as he did when he picked then-Indiana Gov. Mike Pence in 2016.

“In the end, it’s up to him. He will intuitively decide who should be his vice president, and he’ll listen to everybody up until that moment and then he’ll decide,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, one of three finalists on Trump’s 2016 list.

For candidates, he said, if Trump calls and asks them to speak at a rally, “The correct answer’s ‘yes.’” But there are limits to their impact.

“Some of them try to audition,” Gingrich said, “but I never thought it worked that well.”

For now, according to several people familiar with his thinking, Trump continues to mull a long list of prospects: governors, senators and members of Congress, including some who ran against him and lost. The people spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the fundraiser and private conversations. As Trump mulls his decision, he is watching to see who can raise money, defend him effectively, and perform at political events. He’s especially interested in how they come across on television.

Part of what seems to have made the decision harder is that many of the candidates under serious consideration have knocks against them.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, one potential top contender, could help Trump win over Hispanic voters as well as establishment donors still leery of a second Trump term. But Rubio has a problem: He lives in Florida, the same state as Trump, which would violate the Constitution’s Twelfth Amendment.

Trump himself has raised the issue, including at Saturday’s fundraising luncheon, where he said he liked Rubio, according to one of several people present, but noted the issue with his residency, calling it a problem.

Ohio Sen. JD Vance, a friend of Trump’s eldest son who has become close with the former president, is also considered a top contender. He impressed Trump allies with a CNN interview last week.

But Trump continues to note that Vance was a critic before he became a supporter — something he mentioned again at the Saturday event before praising Vance as a great senator.

Scott, whom Trump has repeatedly joked is a far better surrogate than a candidate, also has drawbacks. Scott pushed Trump to back a 15-week national abortion ban during the GOP primaries and his selection would draw new attention to something Trump has tried to eliminate as a campaign issue by insisting it should be left to the states.

Those issues could help a candidate like Burgum, a billionaire who has traveled extensively with Trump since he dropped his own presidential bid.

Others have seemed to test the limits of what it takes to be disqualified.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has faced a media storm since reports emerged that she she wrote about shooting a family dog to death in a book released this week. Noem has also been caught in errors, including falsely claiming that she once met North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. She has continued to appear in interviews defending her actions, drawing the storyline out for days.

Trump, in his Tuesday interview, continued to praise Noem, who at one point had been considered a top contender, though he acknowledged that “she had a rough couple of days, I will say that.”

Noem’s star, in fact, had been tarnished before the revelation of her dog killing amid questions about her judgment, including her decision to appear in an infomercial-style video lavishing praise on a team of cosmetic dentists in Texas.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, meanwhile, has also been the subject of negative headlines. A recent audit suggested that her office may have broken the law when it purchased a $19,000 lectern — a scandal dubbed “lecterngate” by some.

Sanders, who served as Trump’s press secretary at the White House, responded with Trumpian defiance, posting a 20-second video on X featuring the blue and wood-paneled lectern. The opening lyrics of Jay-Z’s “Public Service Announcement” played in the background and the words “come and take it” appeared on the screen.

Sanders may still face more questions, with an audit of her travel and security records pending. But her unapologetic response reinforced her image as an acolyte of the Trump brand.

“In the Trump era, what used to be a scandal is no longer a scandal and what used to be seen as a liability is not really as much of a liability,” said Kevin Madden, who was a senior adviser to former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. “Trump has an ability to block out the sun.”

Provocative comments that could have been a liability in past election cycles could also be assets for candidates like Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, who has urged the public to “take matters into your own hands” if they encounter pro-Palestinian protesters blocking traffic.

“Anyone claiming to know who or when President Trump will choose his VP is lying, unless the person is named Donald J. Trump,” senior campaign advisor Brian Hughes said in an emailed statement.

Trump continues to maintain publicly and privately that the “most important thing” in a potential pick is whether they would be a good president if called upon — and that he doesn’t think the choice is likely to change the trajectory of the race.

“VPs have never really helped in the election process,” he said Tuesday. “It’s a one-day story, it’s a big story, and then it’s back to work. They want to really know who’s No. 1 on the ticket.” ___

Mascaro reported from Washington and DeMillo from Little Rock, Arkansas.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — The future of the Tampa Bay Rays is about to come into clearer focus as local officials begin public discussions over a planned $1.3 billion ballpark that would be the anchor of a much larger project to transform downtown St. Petersburg with affordable housing, a Black history museum, a hotel and office and retail space.

The St. Petersburg City Council will begin a detailed look Thursday at the plans by the Rays and the Hines development company for what the city calls the Historic Gas Plant Project. The name is a nod to the 86-acre (34-hectare) tract’s history as a once-thriving Black community demolished for the Rays’ current domed Tropicana Field and earlier for an interstate highway spur.

Mayor Ken Welch is St. Petersburg’s first Black mayor and his family has roots in the Gas Plant neighborhood when the city was racially segregated. He said it’s important to keep the Rays in the area and to restore promises of economic opportunity never met for minority residents after the businesses and families were forced out decades ago.

“I see it as a real opportunity to uplift the entire city,” Welch, a Democrat, said in an interview at City Hall. “This isn’t just a stadium. This is a stadium surrounded by the largest development in the state of Florida, if not the nation.”

The plan would cap years of uncertainty about the Rays’ future, including possible moves across the bay to Tampa; Nashville, Tennessee; and even an idea to split home games between St. Petersburg and Montreal. The Rays typically draw among the lowest attendance in MLB, even though the team has made the playoffs five years in a row.

The proposed 30,000-seat ballpark, which would open for the 2028 season, is a priority in the first phase of what ultimately is a $6.5 billion project. The City Council meeting Thursday will focus on other aspects of the plan, with a May 23 meeting set on the ballpark itself. Final votes are expected in either June or July; the Pinellas County Commission also must vote on the project.

According to the Rays, the first phase will break ground next spring with the ballpark and initially include 1,500 residential units, 500 hotel rooms, office and medical space, a new Woodson African American Museum of Florida, as well as entertainment, conference, ballroom and meeting spaces. The plan also calls for a tract of open space, particularly around a nearby creek, as well as work on an abandoned Black cemetery near the site.

The plan has drawn strong support from business and charity leaders across Tampa Bay, as well as organizations ranging from the NHL’s Lightning to St. Pete Pride, an LGBTQ+ group. Many local Black leaders also are in favor, according to support letters they have sent to the council.

Gwendolyn Reese, president of the African American Heritage Association, once lived in the Gas Plant neighborhood. She said people like her and descendants of the earlier residents feel “vindicated” by the inclusionary nature of the overall project. The local NAACP branch also endorsed it.

“People gave up their neighborhood for a better way of life, and none of that happened,” Reese said. “That has been like a stone in the hearts of many people in our community. This is a wonderful opportunity for the city to move ahead.”

The Rays’ ballpark is part of a wave of construction or renovation at sports venues across the country, including the Milwaukee Brewers, Buffalo Bills, Tennessee Titans and the Oakland Athletics, who are planning to relocate to Las Vegas. Like the Rays, all of the projects come with millions of dollars in public funding that usually draws opposition.

The Rays’ financing plan calls for the city to spend $417.5 million, including $287.5 million for the ballpark itself and $130 million in infrastructure for the larger redevelopment project that would include such things as sewage, traffic signals and roads. The city envisions no new or increased taxes.

Pinellas County, meanwhile, would spend about $312.5 million for its share of the ballpark costs. Officials say the county money will come from a bed tax largely funded by visitors that can be spent only on tourist-related and economic development expenses.

The Rays and Hines will be responsible for the remaining stadium costs — about $600 million — and any cost overruns during construction. The team would have naming rights to the ballpark, which could top $10 million a year.

Detractors in the Tampa Bay area, including a group called No Home Run, contend the Rays and Hines should pay rent to make up for potentially lost property tax dollars, split revenue with the city and county and be required to buy the prime downtown land at a fairer value.

“The only real goal in this project was for the Rays to get an incredible deal on a new stadium and to keep out all other lead developers so the Rays didn’t give up control,” wrote Alan Delisle, a former St. Petersburg city administrator, in a post on the No Home Run site. “They will always do what is in the best interest of the team and business. The City of St. Pete will always be secondary.”

Mayor Welch, however, said he and the project supporters are determined to see it through and that it has a real chance to transform the city, which has already changed dramatically from a sleepy retirement haven to a beacon for younger residents with a hip downtown not far from Gulf of Mexico beaches. After the ballpark opens, the rest is expected to be completed over about 20 years in several phases.

“I think we’re in a much stronger, competitive position than we have ever been,” Welch said. “There’s a tremendous amount of faith we’ll get it right this time.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — As President Joe Biden runs for reelection, he’s resurrecting proposals to reshape American life from the cradle to the grave by lowering the cost of child care, expanding preschool opportunities and making home aides more available to the elderly.

The initiatives were once part of Build Back Better, Biden’s gargantuan legislative agenda that stalled on Capitol Hill two years ago. Now they’re what Neera Tanden, the Democratic president’s top domestic policy adviser, describes as “unfinished business.”

Although the White House has tried to advance these ideas in a piecemeal fashion through regulations and executive orders, Biden hopes to have another opportunity to push more ambitious legislation through Congress in a second term.

As Biden faces blowback for inflation under his watch, his team sees an opportunity to promise lower costs for voters who are part of the “sandwich generation” — those responsible for young children and aging parents at the same time.

Proposals involving what’s collectively known as the care economy might prove particularly potent with women, who are more likely to hold low-paying jobs as caregivers or see their careers sidelined by the need to take care of family members. If successful, Biden would bring the United States more in line with other wealthy countries, where generous safety net programs are the norm.

“There are elements of our policies that tend to keep us back,” Tanden said in an interview with The Associated Press. “Families need to scrounge around for child care, and they make those hard decision about whether they can really have everyone working in the family or not.”

Biden wants to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into nationwide paid family leave, federal subsidies for child care, universal preschool access and home care for the elderly and disabled.

The challenge is convincing Americans — and their representatives on Capitol Hill — that caregiving is not a private issue but an economic one that could be foundational to higher employment and better opportunities. In 2022, more than 11% of parents had to turn down a job, leave a job or change their job because of child care issues.

“If we want the best economy in the world, we have to have the best caregiving economy in the world,” Biden said last month in a speech to care workers and others in Washington. “We really do. They are not inconsistent. They are consistent.”

His goals have proved elusive. Republicans have bristled at the high cost of Biden’s proposals and his plan to fund them by raising taxes on the wealthy. They’re also concerned that efforts to raise pay for child care workers could end up increasing costs for families who make too much money to qualify for a subsidy program.

Even a united front among Democrats is hard to achieve. Although Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., has been a supporter of preschool and child care programs, Biden was unable to get him on board with other parts of his Build Back Better agenda earlier in his term, a fatal stumbling block due to the party’s thin margins on Capitol Hill.

Because of Manchin’s resistance, several proposals involving the care economy were jettisoned to create the more limited Inflation Reduction Act, which focused on addressing climate change and the cost of prescription drugs.

Tanden said the White House was forced to find other ways to push forward Biden’s ideas.

“Our view is that we should make progress wherever we can,” she said. “So when the legislation wasn’t passed, we got to work on an executive order that really was forward-leaning across the government.”

The order, which was announced a little more than a year ago, raised pay for teachers in federally funded Head Start programs and lowered costs for families receiving federal child care subsidies. It also aimed to improve child care for parents in the military and provide better home care for veterans.

Biden announced it in a Rose Garden ceremony, where he described the care economy as “fundamental to who we are as a nation.”

The president talks about the issue in personal terms. Soon after he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972, his first wife and baby daughter were killed in a car accident, and his two sons — nearly 3 and 4 years old at the time — were badly injured.

“My sister and her husband gave up their home and moved into where I lived just to be there to help me with my kids,” he said. “Folks, you know, I couldn’t have done it without their help. I couldn’t have made it.”

Despite the legislative hurdles and divided control of Congress, Democrats succeeded in getting an additional $1 billion for Head Start preschool and child care subsidies for low-income families.

James Singer, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said that bolstering the care economy will be central to the president’s pitch to voters, drawing on his upbringing in a working-class area of Pennsylvania.

“President Biden sees the world from kitchen tables in Scranton, and will finish the job to give families more breathing room at the end of the month, including by tackling the high costs of child and elder care,” Singer said.

The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment, and Trump has not focused on care economy issues as he runs for another term.

Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, a group that promotes the rights of such workers in the U.S., said the administration is pulling “every lever that they can” to make progress.

“They’ve done the maximum, I think, of what can be done short of Congress actually putting more funding in the system,” she said.

Josh Bivens, the chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, singled out a new regulation increasing standards for staffing nursing homes.

“It was also a big political fight against a pretty powerful industry,” Bivens said, adding that the White House gets “some real credit for not watering the rule down to irrelevance or even just dropping it.”

However, he said, more progress would need to come through legislation because the central challenge is financial. Americans need help at points where they’re strapped for cash, such as when they have young children or are elderly and no longer working.

“The money has to come from somewhere and that somewhere to me is the public sector, financed by taxes,” Bivens said. Without legislation, “they are not going to move the dial a ton on this.”

The president’s latest budget request would provide generous child care subsidies for households that make less than $200,000 a year so that they would pay around $10 or less a day, with the poorest families paying nothing. It would also dedicate funding to creating more preschools. Biden has asked for nearly $15 billion for the programs, but it’s unlikely to even be considered by Congress, where Republicans control the House.

Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the libertarian Cato Institute, said Biden is approaching these issues from the wrong perspective.

By flooding these sectors with money, he said, “you’re actually going to end up with higher prices and not more access.”

The best approach is to reduce regulation, such as allowing child care workers to take care of another child, reducing overall costs, Lincicome said.

“There’s plenty of policy reforms to be had,” he said. “It’s just very rarely going to be D.C. creating another program.”

___

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Facing heat over its military support for Israel’s war, the Biden administration is due to deliver a first-of-its-kind formal verdict this week on whether the airstrikes on Gaza and restrictions on delivery of aid have violated international and U.S. laws designed to spare civilians from the worst horrors of war.

A decision against Israel would add to pressure on President Joe Biden to curb the flow of weapons and money to Israel’s military.

The administration agreed in February at the insistence of Democrats in Congress to look at whether Israel has used U.S.-provided weapons and other military assistance in a lawful manner.

Additionally, under the same agreement, it must tell Congress whether it deems that Israel has acted to “arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede, directly or indirectly,” delivery of any U.S.-supported humanitarian aid into Gaza for starving civilians there.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters Tuesday that the department was trying to meet the Wednesday deadline for completing the review but “it’s possible it slips just a little bit.”

The administration is compelled to make a decision at a time when tumult in internationally brokered cease-fire negotiations and a threatened Israeli offensive on the crowded southern Gaza city of Rafah — a move adamantly opposed by the U.S. — could change both the course of Israel’s war and Americans’ support for it.

Israel’s campaign to crush the Hamas militant group following its surprise October attack and the disaster that’s followed for Gaza’s civilians also have fueled debate within the Biden administration and Congress over broader questions.

Does the U.S. call grave human rights violations by one of its foreign recipients of military support when it sees them? Or only when it deems doing so serves broader U.S. strategic interests?

Democratic and Republican lawmakers openly frame the current decision in those terms.

“While human rights is an important component of the national interest, American priorities are much broader — particularly in an era of strategic competition,” Sen. Jim Risch, the ranking GOP member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Rep. Michael McCaul, Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote last week in urging to Biden to repeal his February directive, formally known as National Security Memorandum 20.

But Sen. Chris Van Hollen, the Democrat who spearheaded congressional negotiations with the White House to mandate the review, told reporters he feared the longstanding desire of American administrations to maintain the strong security partnership with Israel would shape the outcome.

Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. security assistance. Palestinian suffering in the war in Gaza has churned up protests and other challenges for Biden at home and abroad as he seeks reelection against Donald Trump.

The administration’s findings must be “seen to be based on facts and law, and not based on what they would wish it would be,” Van Hollen told reporters last week.

At the time the White House agreed to the review, it was working to head off moves from the Democratic lawmakers, and independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, to start restricting shipments of weapons to Israel.

Israel launched its offensive after attacks led by Hamas killed about 1,200 people on Oct. 7. Nearly 35,000 Palestinian civilians, two-thirds of them women and children, have been killed since then, according to local health officials. U.S. and U.N. officials say full-fledged famine has set in in northern Gaza, owing to Israeli restrictions on food shipments and to the fighting.

Human rights groups long have accused Israeli security forces of committing abuses against Palestinians, and accused Israeli leaders of failing to hold those responsible to account.

Israel says it is following all U.S. and international law, that it investigates allegations of abuse by its security forces, and that its campaign in Gaza is proportional to the existential threat that it says is posed by Hamas.

As the suffering of Palestinian civilians grew, Biden and his administration edged away from their initial unwavering public support of Israel and began to criticize its conduct of the war.

Biden in December said “indiscriminate bombing” was costing Israel international backing. After Israeli forces targeted and killed seven aid workers from the World Central Kitchen in April, the Biden administration for the first time signaled it might cut military aid to Israel if it didn’t change its handling of the war and humanitarian aid.

A senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the U.S. paused a shipment of bombs to Israel last week over concerns about Israel’s decision on Rafah.

Republican Ronald Reagan was the last president openly to suspend some U.S. support for Israel’s military as a way to pressure Israel over its offensives.

But critics say Biden and other recent presidents have looked the other way when Israel’s security forces are accused of extrajudicial killings and other abuses against Palestinians. They have accepted Israeli assurances over alleged grave abuses that would trigger suspension of military aid for any other foreign military partner, two former State Department officials who left the government last year said. The administration denies any double standard.

Now, though, Congress is compelling the administration to render its most public assessment in decades over whether Israel has used U.S. military support lawfully.

Under a 1997 congressional act known as the Leahy Laws, when the U.S. finds credible evidence that a unit of foreign security forces has committed gross human rights abuses, any U.S. aid to that unit is supposed to be automatically suspended.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote House Speaker Mike Johnson last week that the U.S. found the evidence of such abuses by one particular Israeli unit to be credible. Blinken added that Israel had yet to rectify the unit’s wrongdoing, something the Leahy laws say must happen for any suspension of military aid to be lifted. Blinken said rather than suspend the aid, the U.S. would work with Israel to “engage on identifying a path to effective remediation for this unit.”

Israeli officials have identified it as the Netzah Yehuda, which is accused in the death of a Palestinian American man and other abuses in the Israeli-occupied West Bank before the war in Gaza erupted.

Tim Rieser, a veteran Senate foreign policy staffer who helped now-retired Sen. Patrick Leahy craft the law, said if it had been applied to Israel, “maybe it would have been a deterrent.”

Instead, “what we’ve seen is that abuses against Palestinians are rarely punished,” Rieser told the AP.

While a finding against Israel under the national security memo wouldn’t obligate the administration to start cutting military support for Israel, it would increase pressure on Biden to do so.

A report to the administration by an unofficial, self-formed panel of military experts and former State Department officials, including Josh Paul and Charles Blaha, points to specific Israeli strikes on aid convoys, journalists, hospitals, schools and refugee centers and other targets broadly protected by law. The report argues the administration must find Israel’s conduct in Gaza has violated the law. Amnesty International has argued the same.

The high civilian death tolls in Israel’s strikes go far beyond the laws of proportionality, the U.S. critics and rights groups say. They point to an Oct. 31 strike on a six-story apartment building in Gaza that killed at least 106 civilians. Critics say Israel provided no immediate justification for that strike.

“They’re taking what we did in Mosul and Raqqa, and going tenfold beyond,” exceeding even what was allowed under U.S. rules of engagement at the time in the so-called war on terror, said Wes Bryant, a former Air Force targeting expert who led strike cells against the Islamic State and other extremist groups in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. He is among those urging the U.S. to condition military support to Israel.

“If this is the new bar for 21st-century warfare, we might as well go back to World War II,” Bryant said.

Israel and the Biden administration say Hamas’ presence in tunnels throughout Gaza, and alleged presence in hospitals and other protected sites, make it harder for Israeli forces to avoid high civilian casualties.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Italy’s president told the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine can’t be solved by rewarding its aggression and peace can only come when Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity are restored.

Sergio Mattarella said Italy, which now heads the G7 meetings, and many international partners have come to Ukraine’s defense to support the principle that solidarity must be given to nations attacked by acts that violate international law and the U.N. Charter.

“No state, no matter how powerful or how equipped it is with a menacing nuclear arsenal can think of violating principles, including the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence of another country without facing sanctions,” he said.

Mattarella said the end of two world wars and the collapse of the Soviet Union had brought new hope to Europe, and that “Russia has taken on the great historic responsibility of having brought war back to the heart of the European continent.”

The Italian president stressed that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine isn’t merely a regional conflict since Moscow wants to exercise global influence. Russia is a veto-wielding permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, which is charged with ensuring international peace and security.

The war in Ukraine, once one of the world’s main bread baskets, has created food and energy scarcities, especially in parts of Africa, he said.

Mattarella added that the peace dividends that incentivized the allocation of resources to development instead of arms after the end of the Cold War have been wasted as Russia turns back time and starts a new arms race.

With the war in Ukraine now in its third year, he said Italy, its international partners and people everywhere are committed to achieving a peaceful and long-lasting solution to the conflict.

“Not just any solution, though, let alone a solution which would reward the aggressor and humiliate those being attacked, setting a dangerous precedent for everyone,” Mattarella said.

“If peace is to be fair and long lasting, it must be based on the noble and inalienable principles of international law and the Charter of the United Nations,” he added.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. paused a shipment of bombs to Israel last week over concerns that Israel was approaching a decision on launching a full-scale assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah against the wishes of the U.S., a senior administration official said Tuesday.

The shipment was supposed to consist of 1,800 2,000-pound (900-kilogram) bombs and 1,700 500-pound (225-kilogram) bombs, according to the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter, with the focus of U.S. concern being the larger explosives and how they could be used in a dense urban setting. More than 1 million civilians are sheltering in Rafah after evacuating other parts of Gaza amid Israel’s war on Hamas, which came after the militant group’s deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7.

The U.S. has historically provided enormous amounts of military aid for Israel. That has only accelerated in the aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack that killed some 1,200 in Israel and led to about 250 being taken captive by militants. The pausing of the aid shipment is the most striking manifestation of the growing daylight between Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and the administration of President Joe Biden, which has called on Israel to do far more to protect the lives of innocent civilians in Gaza.

Biden’s administration in April began reviewing future transfers of military assistance as Netanyahu’s government appeared to move closer toward an invasion of Rafah, despite months of opposition from the White House. The official said the decision to pause the shipment was made last week and no final decision had been made yet on whether to proceed with the shipment at a later date.

U.S. officials had declined for days to comment on the halted transfer, word of which came as Biden on Tuesday described U.S. support for Israel as “ironclad, even when we disagree.”

Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to square the arms holdup with Biden’s rhetoric in support of Israel, saying only, “Two things could be true.”

Israeli troops on Tuesday seized control of Gaza’s vital Rafah border crossing in what the White House described as a limited operation that stopped short of the full-on Israeli invasion of the city that Biden has repeatedly warned against on humanitarian grounds, most recently in a Monday call with Netanyahu.

Israel has ordered the evacuation of 100,000 Palestinians from the city. Israeli forces have also carried out what it describes as “targeted strikes” on the eastern part of Rafah and captured the Rafah crossing, a critical conduit for the flow of humanitarian aid along the Gaza-Egypt border.

Privately, concern has mounted inside the White House about what’s unfolding in Rafah, but publicly administration officials have stressed that they did not think the operations had defied Biden’s warnings against a widescale operation in the city.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Israel described the operation along the Gaza-Egypt border in eastern Rafah as “an operation of limited scale and duration” aimed at cutting off Hamas arms smuggling, but also said the U.S. would monitor the fighting.

Just last month, Congress passed a $95 billion national security bill that included funding for Ukraine, Israel and other allies. The package included more than $14 billion in military aid for Israel, though the stalled transfer was not related to that measure.

The State Department is separately considering whether to approve the continued transfer of Joint Direct Attack Munition kits, which place precision guidance systems onto bombs, to Israel, but the review didn’t pertain to imminent shipments.

The U.S. dropped the 2,000-pound bomb sparingly in its long war against the Islamic State militant group. Israel, by contrast, has used the bomb frequently in the seven-month Gaza war. Experts say the use of the weapon, in part, has helped drive the enormous Palestinian casualty count that the Hamas-run health ministry puts at more than 34,000 dead, though it doesn’t distinguish between militants and civilians.

The U.S.-Israel relationship has been close through both Democratic and Republican administrations. But there have been other moments of deep tension since the founding in which U.S. leaders have threatened to hold up aid in attempt to sway Israeli leadership.

President Dwight Eisenhower pressured Israel with the threat of sanctions into withdrawing from the Sinai in 1957 in the midst of the Suez Crisis. Ronald Reagan delayed the delivery of F16 fighter jets to Israel at a time of escalating violence in the Middle East. President George H.W. Bush held up $10 billion in loan guarantees to force the cessation of Israeli settlement activity in the occupied territories.

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — A cruise ship worker from South Africa was arrested Tuesday in Alaska’s capital city, accused of attacking a woman and two security guards with scissors on board the vessel, according to authorities.

The U.S. attorney’s office says the man is charged with assault with a dangerous weapon within maritime and territorial jurisdiction. Online court records do not show an attorney for the 35-year-old man.

According to an affidavit from FBI Special Agent Matthew Judy, the man was recently hired by a cruise line and joined the ship, the Norwegian Encore, in Seattle on Sunday. The ship set off that day for a weeklong trip with scheduled stops in Alaska ports, including the capital of Juneau, and British Columbia.

The alleged incident happened west of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, as the ship was sailing to Alaska. According to the affidavit, during the ‘late evening” Sunday, ship personnel saw the man trying to deploy a lifeboat, and he was taken by security to a medical center for an evaluation.

While there, he “became irrational and attempted to leave,” and “physically attacked” a guard and a nurse, the affidavit states. He ran into another room, where he grabbed a pair of scissors and stabbed a woman who was being examined, as well as two guards who tried to intervene before being subdued and held in a “shipboard jail,” the affidavit says. None of the injuries were considered life-threatening.

The ship arrived in Juneau on Tuesday, when he was arrested by the FBI, the U.S. attorney’s office says.

NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump squirmed and scowled, shook his head and muttered as Stormy Daniels described the unexpected sex she says they had nearly two decades ago, saying she remembered “trying to think of anything other than what was happening.”

It was a story Daniels has told before. This time, Trump had no choice but to sit and listen.

Years in the making, the in-person showdown between the former president and the porn actor who has become one of his nemeses happened Tuesday in a New York courtroom that has become the plainspoken stage for the historic spectacle of Trump’s hush money trial, where the gravitas of the first-ever criminal trial of a former U.S. commander-in-chief butts up against a crass and splashy tale of sex, tabloids and payoffs.

It’s often said that actual trials are not like the TV drama versions, and in that way, this one is no exception — a methodical and sometimes static proceeding of questions, answers and rules. But if Tuesday’s testimony wasn’t an electric scene of outbursts and tears, it was no less stunning for its sheer improbability.

Daniels’ testimony had been speculated about for as long as Trump has been under indictment. But when it would happen was still a mystery until Tuesday morning, when her lawyer Clark Brewster confirmed in an email to an Associated Press reporter that it was “likely today.”

But even after the trial resumed, Daniels still had to wait.

The first witness of the day was a publishing executive who read passages from some of Trump’s business books.

Then, when the judge asked for the prosecution’s next witness, Assistant District Attorney Susan Hoffinger matter-of-factly declared, “The people call Stormy Daniels.”

Daniels strode briskly to the stand, not looking at Trump, her shoes clunking on the floor. The former president stared straight ahead until the moment she had passed his spot at the defense table, then tilted his head slightly in her direction.

As is standard in court proceedings, Daniels was asked if she saw Trump in the courtroom and to identify him. Before answering, Daniels, wearing eyeglasses, shuffled in her seat for a beat, looking around the courtroom. She then pointed toward him, describing his navy suit coat and gold tie, and said he was sitting at the defense table. Trump looked straight forward, lips pursed.

Dozens of reporters and a handful of public observers packed the courtroom gallery.

In one row alone: CNN anchor Erin Burnett, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell and Andrew Giuliani, the son of Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who wore a media credential from WABC Radio, where he and his dad host shows. Trump’s son Eric sat elsewhere in the courtroom.

As she testified, Daniels spoke confidently and at a rapid clip, the sound of reporters typing reaching a frenetic tempo.

She spoke so quickly, at least six times during her testimony she was asked to slow down so a court stenographer could keep pace.

Jurors seemed as attentive as they’ve been all trial as Daniels recounted her path from aspiring veterinary student to porn actor.

One juror smiled when Daniels mentioned one of the ways into the industry was by winning a contest, like “Ms. Nude North America.” Another juror’s eyes widened as he read along on the monitor displaying a Truth Social post in which Trump said he “did NOTHING wrong” and used an insulting nickname to disparage Daniels’ looks.

Trump denies her claims and has pleaded not guilty in the case, in which he’s charged with falsifying business records related to a $130,000 payment to Daniels to keep quiet.

Many of the jurors jotted notes throughout her testimony, peering up from notepads and alternating their gaze from Daniels in the witness box to the lawyers questioning her from a lectern.

Guided by prosecutors, Daniels drew a detailed scene of her alleged evening with Trump at a hotel suite in Lake Tahoe in 2006, delving frankly into details that Judge Juan M. Merchan would later concede “should probably have been left unsaid.”

She recalled entering the sprawling suite to find Trump in a pair of silk pajamas. She sheepishly admitted to snooping through his bathroom toiletries in the bathroom, finding a pair of golden tweezers. Daniels even acted out part of her interaction with Trump, reclining back in the witness box to demonstrate how she said he was positioned on the bed of his hotel suite when she emerged from the restroom.

Her willingness to provide extra details prompted an usual moment: Trump’s lawyers consented to allowing a prosecutor to meet with Daniels in a side room, during a break in testimony, to give her some instructions to — as Judge Merchan put it — “make sure the witness stays focused on the question, gives the answer and does not give any unnecessary narrative.”

Out of the earshot of the jury, or the reporters in the room, Merchan also asked Trump’s lawyers to stop him from cursing as Daniels spoke.

“I understand that your client is upset at this point, but he is cursing audibly, and he is shaking his head visually and that’s contemptuous. It has the potential to intimidate the witness and the jury can see that,” the judge said. “I am speaking to you here at the bench because I don’t want to embarrass him,” Merchan added.

“I will talk to him,” said one of Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche.

Peppy and loquacious when she was being questioned by prosecutors, Daniels was feistier on cross-examination, digging in when defense lawyer Susan Necheles questioned her credibility and motives.

Daniels forcefully denied Necheles’ suggestion that she had tried to extort Trump, answering the lawyer’s contention: “False.”

Daniels left the witness stand just before 4:30 p.m. She didn’t look at Trump as she trod past. He didn’t look at her, either, instead leaning over to whisper to Necheles.

Moments later, Merchan adjourned court until Thursday — with Wednesday the trial’s usual off day. Trump left the courtroom with his entourage of lawyers and aides.

“This was a very revealing day in court. Any honest reporter would say that,” Trump said to journalists in the hallway outside the courtroom. He is limited by court order from saying much more about Daniels to the media.

Inside the courtroom, the witnesses to history reconciled their thoughts, gathered their belongings and waited for Trump to leave the building, so they could, too.

BOULDER, Colo. (AP) — State experts have found the man charged with shooting and killing 10 people at a Colorado supermarket in 2021 had untreated mental illness but was legally sane at the time of the attack, lawyers said Tuesday.

The results of the sanity evaluation of Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa done at the state mental hospital are not public but were discussed during a court hearing as Alissa, dressed in a jail uniform and his wrists in shackles, and relatives of some of those killed listened.

According to the defense, the evaluators found that the attack would not have happened but for Alissa’s untreated mental illness, which attorney Sam Dunn said was schizophrenia that included “auditory hallucinations.” He also said the evaluators were “less confident” in their sanity conclusion than they would be in other cases but did not elaborate on why.

Prosecutors did not provide any details of their own about what the evaluators found during the hearing. District Attorney Michael Dougherty, who said he is limited to commenting on what has been made public about the evaluation, declined to comment on Dunn’s description of the evaluation’s findings.

“I look forward to the trial, and these are issues that are going to be litigated fully at trial,” Dougherty said after the hearing.

Alissa has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in the March 22, 2021, shooting at a King Soopers store in the college town of Boulder. The plea means his lawyers are claiming he did not understand the difference between right from wrong at the time of the shooting and therefor should not be convicted of a crime.

Investigators say he researched how to carry out a mass shooting before he launched his own attack and targeted moving people, killing most of the 10 victims in just over a minute using a gun with a high-capacity magazine.

Alissa’s mental health was raised as an issue by his lawyers right after the shooting, and the issue of whether he was mentally competent to stand trial — able to understand court proceedings and help his lawyers in his defense — put proceedings on hold for about two years. After Alissa was forcibly medicated and then deemed mentally competent to proceed, he entered the not guilty by reason of insanity plea in November.

On Tuesday, Judge Ingrid Bakke granted the defense’s request for Alissa’s sanity at the time of the shooting to be evaluated a second time by their own expert, but she rejected their proposal to delay the trial until March 2025 to give them time for that process. Instead, she delayed the trial by only about a month, scheduling it to start Sept. 2, after hearing strong objections from relatives of the victims and in letters submitted to the court.

As Alissa sat nearby with his lawyers, Erika Mahoney, whose father Kevin Mahoney was killed in the shooting, urged Bakke to allow the families to enter the fall with the trial behind them so they could go on to celebrate Christmas and Hanukkah with that chapter closed.

During a prolonged discussion among the lawyers and Bakke, Erika Mahoney was not feeling hopeful, but she was relieved when the judge only delayed the trial by a month.

“It’s funny the things you that become grateful for,” she said after the hearing, “but I am grateful to know that this is moving forward.”

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Transgender activists have flooded a Utah tip line created to alert state officials to possible violations of a new bathroom law with thousands of hoax reports in an effort to shield trans residents and their allies from any legitimate complaints that could lead to an investigation.

The onslaught has led the state official tasked by law with managing the tip line, Utah Auditor John Dougall, to bemoan getting stuck with the cumbersome task of filtering through fake complaints while also facing backlash for enforcing a law he had no role in passing.

“No auditor goes into auditing so they can be the bathroom monitors,” Dougall said Tuesday. “I think there were much better ways for the Legislature to go about addressing their concerns, rather than this ham-handed approach.”

In the week since it launched, the online tip line already has received more than 10,000 submissions, none of which seem legitimate, he said. The form asks people to report public school employees who knowingly allow someone to use a facility designated for the opposite sex.

Utah residents and visitors are required by law to use bathrooms and changing rooms in government-owned buildings that correspond with their birth sex. As of last Wednesday, schools and agencies found not enforcing the new restrictions can be fined up to $10,000 per day for each violation.

Although their advocacy efforts failed to stop Republican lawmakers in many states from passing restrictions for trans people, the community has found success in interfering with the often ill-conceived enforcement plans attached to those laws.

Within hours of its publication Wednesday night, trans activists and community members from across the U.S. already had spread the Utah tip line widely on social media. Many shared the spam they had submitted and encouraged others to follow suit.

Their efforts mark the latest attempt by advocates to shut down or render unusable a government tip line that they argue sows division by encouraging residents to snitch on each other. Similar portals in at least five other states also have been inundated with hoax reports, leading state officials to shut some down.

In Virginia, Indiana, Arizona and Louisiana, activists flooded tip lines created to field complaints about teachers, librarians and school administrators who may have spoken to students about race, LGBTQ+ identities or other topics lawmakers argued were inappropriate for children. The Virginia tip line was taken down within a year, as was a tip line introduced in Missouri to report gender-affirming health care clinics.

Erin Reed, a prominent trans activist and legislative researcher, said there is a collective understanding in the trans community that submitting these hoax reports is an effective way of protesting the laws and protecting trans people who might be targeted.

“There will be people who are trans that go into bathrooms that are potentially reported by these sorts of forms, and so the community is taking on a protective role,” Reed said. “If there are 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 form responses that are entered in, it’s going to be much harder for the auditor’s office to sift through every one of them and find the one legitimate trans person who was caught using a bathroom.”

The auditor’s office has encountered many reports that Dougall described as “total nonsense,” and others that he said appear credible at first glance and take much longer to filter out. His staff has spent the last week sorting through thousands of well-crafted complaints citing fake names or locations.

Despite efforts to clog the enforcement tool they had outlined in the bill, the sponsors, Rep. Kera Birkeland and Sen. Dan McCay, said they remain confident in the tip line and the auditor’s ability to filter out fake complaints.

“It’s not surprising that activists are taking the time to send false reports,” Birkeland said. “But that isn’t a distraction from the importance of the legislation and the protection it provides women across Utah.”

The Morgan Republican had pitched the policy as a safety measure to protect the privacy of women and girls without citing evidence of threats or assaults by trans people against them.

McCay said he hadn’t realized activists were responsible for flooding the tip line. The Riverton Republican said he does not plan to change how the law is being enforced.

LGBTQ+ rights advocates also have warned the law and the accompanying tip line give people license to question anyone’s gender in community spaces, which they argue could even affect people who are not trans.

Their warnings were amplified earlier this year when a Utah school board member came under fire — and later lost her reelection bid — for publicly questioning the gender of a high school basketball player she wrongly assumed was transgender.