WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s administration on Friday formally began planning for a potential presidential transition, aiming to ensure continuity of government no matter the outcome of November’s general election.

Shalanda Young, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, sent memos to all executive departments and agencies, directing them to name a point person for transition planning by May 3. It’s the routine first step in congressionally mandated preparedness for presidential transitions.

Next week, White House chief of staff Jeff Zients — who also chaired Biden’s 2020 transition effort — will lead the first meeting of the White House Transition Coordinating Council, which consists of senior White House policy, national security and management officials, as required by the Presidential Transition Act.

The act provides federal support for major party candidates to prepare to govern so that they can have personnel in place to take policy actions on their first day in office. Making sure presidential candidates are ready to take charge of the federal government became a heightened priority after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the act has been updated several times since to provide additional resources to candidates and to require incumbents to plan for a handoff with even greater intensity.

Young’s letter is nearly identical to the one sent four years ago by Trump administration acting director Russell Vought, for a transition process that started out orderly, but derailed when then-President Donald Trump refused to concede his defeat to Biden. It took until Nov. 23, two weeks after the election was called, for Trump’s General Services Administration to name Biden as the “apparent winner” of the 2020 race — a required step for the transition to begin.

The law requires presidential candidates and the General Services Administration to reach a memorandum of understanding that governs everything from the provision of federal office space to access to sensitive documents by Sept. 1, though often it is reached sooner. Candidates must first formally secure their party’s nomination at their conventions before the memorandum of understanding can be signed.

Transition teams begin vetting candidates for jobs in a future administration, including beginning the time-consuming security clearance process for likely appointees who need to be ready to take their posts on Inauguration Day.

Biden in February launched a separate task force aimed at addressing the “systemic” problem of mishandling classified information during presidential transitions, days after a Justice Department special counsel’s sharply critical report said he and his aides had done just that when he left the vice presidency in 2016.

NEW YORK (AP) — The start date for the $15 toll most drivers will be charged to enter Manhattan’s central business district will be June 30, transit officials said Friday.

Under the so-called congestion pricing plan, the $15 fee will apply to most drivers who enter Manhattan south of 60th Street during daytime hours. Tolls will be higher for larger vehicles and lower for nighttime entries into the city as well as for motorcycles.

The program, which was approved by the New York state Legislature in 2019, is supposed to raise $1 billion per year to fund public transportation for the city’s 4 million daily riders.

“Ninety percent-plus of the people come to the congestion zone, the central business district, walking, biking and most of all taking mass transit,” Metropolitan Transportation Authority CEO Janno Lieber told WABC. “We are a mass transit city and we are going to make it even better to be in New York.”

Supporters say that in addition to raising money for buses and subways, congestion pricing will reduce pollution be disincentivizing driving into Manhattan. Opponents say the fees will be a burden for commuters and will increase the prices of staple goods that are driven to the city by truck.

The state of New Jersey has filed a lawsuit over the congestion pricing plan, will be the first such program in the United States.

Lieber said he is “pretty optimistic” about how the New Jersey lawsuit will be resolved.

Congestion pricing will start at 12:01 a.m. on June 30, Lieber said, so the first drivers will be charged the late-night fee of $3.75. The $15 toll will take effect at 9 a.m.

Low-income drivers can apply for a congestion toll discount on the MTA website, and disabled people can apply for exemptions.

DECATUR, Ga. (AP) — A judge upheld the disqualification of a candidate who had had planned to run against the judge presiding over former President Donald Trump’s 2020 Georgia election interference case.

Tiffani Johnson is one of two people who filed paperwork to challenge Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee. An administrative law judge earlier this month found that she was not qualified to run for the seat after she failed to appear at a hearing on a challenge to her eligibility, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger adopted that decision.

Johnson last week filed a petition for review of that decision in Fulton County Superior Court. After all of McAfee’s colleagues on the Fulton County bench were recused, a judge in neighboring DeKalb County took up the matter and held a hearing Thursday on Johnson’s petition.

At the end of the hearing, DeKalb Superior Court Judge Stacey Hydrick upheld the decision that said Johnson is not eligible, news outlets reported. A representative for Johnson’s campaign did not immediately respond to an email Friday seeking comment.

The ruling leaves McAfee with a single challenger, civil rights attorney Robert Patillo, in the nonpartisan race for his seat.

With early voting set to begin Monday for the May 21 election, it’s likely too late to remove Johnson’s name from the ballot. The law says that if a candidate is determined not to be qualified, that person’s name should be withheld from the ballot or stricken from any ballots. If there isn’t enough time to strike the candidate’s name, prominent notices are to be placed at polling places advising voters that the candidate is disqualified and that votes cast for her will not be counted.

Georgia law allows any person who is eligible to vote for a candidate to challenge the candidate’s qualifications by filing a complaint with the secretary of state’s office within two weeks of the qualification deadline. A lawyer for Sean Arnold, a Fulton County voter, filed the challenge on March 22.

Arnold’s complaint noted that the Georgia Constitution requires all judges to “reside in the geographical area in which they are elected to serve.” He noted that in Johnson’s qualification paperwork she listed her home address as being in DeKalb County and wrote that she had been a legal resident of neighboring Fulton County for “0 consecutive years.” The qualification paperwork Johnson signed includes a line that says the candidate is “an elector of the county of my residence eligible to vote in the election in which I am a candidate.”

Administrative Law Judge Ronit Walker on April 2 held a hearing on the matter but noted in her decision that Johnson did not appear.

Walker wrote that the burden of proof is on the candidate to “affirmatively establish eligibility for office” and that Johnson’s failure to appear at the hearing “rendered her incapable of meeting her burden of proof.”

Walker concluded that Johnson was unqualified to be a candidate for superior court judge in the Atlanta Judicial Circuit. Raffensperger adopted the judge’s findings and conclusions in reaching his decision to disqualify her.

A lawyer Johnson, who said in her petition that she has since moved to Fulton County, argued that Johnson failed to show up for the hearing because she did not receive the notice for it.

Without addressing the merits of the residency challenge, Hydrick found that Johnson had been given sufficient notice ahead of the hearing before the administrative law judge and concluded that the disqualification was proper.

NEW YORK (AP) — New York can move ahead with a law requiring internet service providers to offer heavily discounted rates to low-income residents, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

The decision from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan reverses a lower court ruling from 2021 that blocked the policy just days before it went into effect.

The law would force internet companies to give some low-income New Yorkers broadband service for as low as $15 a month, or face fines from the state.

Telecoms trade groups sued over the law, arguing it would cost them too much money and that it wrongly superseded a federal law that governs internet service.

On Friday, the industry groups said they were weighing their next legal move.

“We are disappointed by the court’s decision and New York state’s move for rate regulation in competitive industries. It not only discourages the needed investment in our nation’s infrastructure, but also potentially risks the sustainability of broadband operations in many areas,” a statement read.

New York state lawmakers approved the law in 2021 as part of the budget, with supporters arguing that the policy would give low-income residents a way to access the internet, which has become a vital utility.

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — As Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming opens for the busy summer season, wildlife advocates are leading a call for a boycott of the conservative ranching state over laws that give people wide leeway to kill gray wolves with little oversight.

The social media accounts of Wyoming’s tourism agency are being flooded with comments urging people to steer clear of the Cowboy State amid accusations that a man struck a wolf with a snowmobile, taped its mouth shut and showed off the injured animal at a Sublette County bar before killing it.

While critics contend that Wyoming has enabled such animal cruelty, a leader of the state’s stock growers association said it’s an isolated incident and unrelated to the state’s wolf management laws. The laws that have been in place for more than a decade are designed to prevent the predators from proliferating out of the mountainous Yellowstone region and into other areas where ranchers run cattle and sheep.

“This was an abusive action. None of us condone it. It never should never have been done,” said Jim Magagna, executive vice president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association and a Sublette County rancher who has lost sheep to wolves. “It’s gotten a lot of media attention but it’s not exemplary of how we manage wolves to deal with livestock issues or anything.”

Wolves are federally protected as an endangered or threatened species in most of the U.S. but not the Northern Rockies. Wyoming, Idaho and Montana allow wolves to be hunted and trapped, after their numbers rebounded following their reintroduction to Yellowstone and central Idaho almost 30 years ago. Before their reintroduction, wolves had been annihilated in the lower 48 states through government-sponsored poisoning, trapping and bounty hunting into the mid-1900s.

Today, Wyoming has the least restrictive policies for killing wolves. There are limits on hunting and trapping in the northwestern corner of the state and killing them is prohibited in Yellowstone and neighboring Grand Teton National Park, where they are a major attraction for millions of tourists. But outside the Yellowstone region, in the 85% of the state known as the “predator zone,” they can be freely killed.

The wolf allegedly was run down, shown off and killed within the predator zone.

Wolves roam hundreds of miles and often kill cattle and sheep. Gray wolves attacked livestock hundreds of times in 2022 across 10 states including Wyoming, according to an Associated Press review of depredation data from state and federal agencies, the most recent data available. Other times livestock succumb to other predators, disease or exposure or simply go missing.

Losses to wolves can be devastating to individual ranchers, yet wolves’ industry-wide impact is negligible: The number of cattle killed or injured in documented cases equals 0.002% of herds in the affected states, according to a comparison of depredation data with state livestock inventories.

The predator zone resulted from negotiations between U.S. and Wyoming officials who traded away federal compensation for livestock killed by wolves in exchange for allowing free killing of wolves in that area.

Saharai Salazar is among out-of-staters changing their travel plans based on what allegedly happened Feb. 29 near Daniel, a western Wyoming town of about 150 people.

The Santa Rosa, California, dog trainer posted on the state’s tourism Instagram account that she would not get married in Wyoming next year as planned. The post was among hundreds of similar comments, many with a #boycottwyoming hashtag on social media in recent weeks.

“We have to change the legislation, rewrite the laws so we can offer more protection, so they can’t be interpreted in ways that will allow for such atrocities,” Salazar said in an interview.

Wyoming’s rules have long invited controversy but are unlikely to harm the overall population because most of the animals in the state live in the Yellowstone region, said wolf expert and former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wolf biologist Ed Bangs.

Bangs said the incident of the wolf brought into the bar was a “sideshow” to the species’ successful recovery. The predator zone is made up largely of open landscapes that generally don’t support wolves, he said.

Wyoming’s rules, including the predator zone, have withstood multiple court challenges that have put wolves on and off the endangered species list since they were first delisted in 2008. Wolves haven’t been on the list in the region since a 2017 court order and their current Wyoming population of more than 300 is similar to their number in 2010.

Though state law doesn’t specify how wolves in the predator zone can be killed and doesn’t specifically prohibit running them over, the Humane Society and others argue the state’s animal cruelty law applies in this case.

Widely circulating photos show the man posing with the wolf with its mouth bound. Video clips show the same animal lying on a floor, alive but barely moving.

The Sublette County Sheriff’s Office said it has been investigating the anonymous reports of the man’s actions but has struggled to get witnesses to come forward.

“We’ve had the tip line open for two weeks hoping for witnesses or something helpful,” sheriff’s spokesperson Sgt. Travis Bingham said. “I know there’s some hesitation for people to come forward.”

The only punishment for the man so far is having to pay a $250 ticket for illegal possession of wildlife.

The suspect has not commented publicly and did not answer calls to his business. Calls to the bar went unanswered.

___

Matthew Brown in Billings, Montana, contributed to this report.

BALTIMORE (AP) — A Baltimore publishing company has filed a class action claim arguing the owner and manager of the massive container ship that took down the Francis Scott Key Bridge last month should have to pay damages to businesses adversely impacted by the collapse.

The claim, filed on behalf of American Publishing LLC, largely echoes an earlier filing by attorneys for Baltimore’s mayor and city council that called for the ship’s owner and manager to be held fully liable for the deadly disaster.

Singapore-based Grace Ocean Private Ltd. owns the Dali, the vessel that veered off course and slammed into the bridge. Synergy Marine Pte Ltd., also based in Singapore, is the ship’s manager.

The companies filed a petition soon after the March 26 collapse asking a court to cap their liability under a pre-Civil War provision of an 1851 maritime law — a routine but important procedure for such cases. A federal court in Maryland will decide who’s responsible and how much they owe in what could become one of the most expensive maritime disasters in history.

In their claim filed Thursday, attorneys for American Publishing accused the companies of negligence, arguing they should have realized the Dali was unfit for its voyage and staffed the ship with a competent crew, among other issues.

“Since the disastrous allision, commercial activities in and around Baltimore have virtually come to a standstill,” they wrote. “It could take several years for the area to recover fully.”

American Publishing saw its revenues plummet this month as local businesses halted advertising deals and other publishing requests following the collapse, the claim says.

A spokesperson for Synergy and Grace Ocean said Friday that it would be inappropriate to comment on the pending litigation at this time.

The ship was headed to Sri Lanka when it lost power shortly after leaving Baltimore and struck one of the bridge’s support columns, collapsing the span and sending six members of a roadwork crew plunging to their deaths.

FBI agents boarded the stalled ship last week amid a criminal investigation. A separate federal probe by the National Transportation Safety Board will include an inquiry into whether the ship experienced power issues before starting its voyage, officials have said. That investigation will focus generally on the Dali’s electrical system.

In their petition, Grace Ocean and Synergy sought to cap their liability at roughly $43.6 million. The petition estimates that the vessel itself is valued at up to $90 million and was owed over $1.1 million in income from freight. The estimate also deducts two major expenses: at least $28 million in repair costs and at least $19.5 million in salvage costs.

Baltimore leaders and business owners argue the ship’s owner and manager should be held responsible for their role in the disaster, which halted most maritime traffic through the Port of Baltimore and disrupted an important east coast trucking route.

Lawyers representing victims of the collapse and their families also have pledged to hold the companies accountable.

By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Homeland Security Department (DHS) on Friday announced a blue-ribbon board that includes the CEOs of OpenAI, Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet and Nvidia that will advise the government on the role of artificial intelligence on critical infrastructure.

The board will develop recommendations for the transportation sector, pipeline and power grid operators, internet service providers and others to “prevent and prepare for AI-related disruptions to critical services that impact national or economic security, public health, or safety.”

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters the board would help ensure the safe deployment of AI technology and how to address threats posed by this technology to vital services like energy, utilities, transportation, defense, information technology, food and agriculture, and financial services.

“It is not a board that will be focused on theory, but rather practical solutions for the implementation of AI in our nation’s daily life,” Mayorkas told reporters. “It was very important to bring key developers of this extraordinary powerful tool” to the board.

The 22-member board includes tech leaders OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky and Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su.

The board also includes Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian, Occidental Petroleum CEO Vicki Hollub and Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden, as well as Maryland Governor Wes Moore, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell and the head of White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The board will meet for the first time next month with quarterly planned future meetings.

DHS warned in its 2024 threat assessment that AI-assisted tools have the “potential to enable larger scale, faster, efficient, and more evasive cyber attacks—against targets, including pipelines, railways, and other US critical infrastructure.”

It also said China and others are developing “AI technologies that could undermine U.S. cyber defenses, including generative AI programs that support malicious activity such as malware attacks.”

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

By Julia Harte and Kia Johnson

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Columbia’s embattled president came under renewed pressure on Friday as a university oversight committee met to address her attempt two weeks ago to clamp down on protests that have roiled the Ivy League school and spread across the country and aboard.

President Nemat Minouche Shafik faced an outcry from many students, faculty and outside observers for summoning New York police to campus on April 18 to dismantle an encampment of tents set up by protesters against Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.

Police arrested more than 100 people that day and removed the tents from the main lawn of the school’s Manhattan campus, but the protesters quickly returned and set up the encampment again, narrowing Columbia’s options on shutting down the protest.

Since then hundreds of protesters have been arrested at schools from California to Boston as students set up encampments similar to the one at Columbia, demanding that their schools divest from companies involved in Israel’s military.

Like-minded protests against Israel’s actions have spread overseas, as well, with tensions flaring in front of Paris’ prestigious Sciences Po university on Friday as pro-Israeli protesters came to challenge pro-Palestinian students occupying the building. Police had to move in to keep the two sides apart.

At Columbia, the university senate will hold a hearing on Friday afternoon to vote on a resolution about the president’s actions that could range from an expression of displeasure to an outright censure.

The White House has defended free speech on campus, but Democratic President Joe Biden denounced “antisemitic protests” this week and stressed that campuses must be safe.

Some Republicans in Congress have accused Shafik and other university administrators of being too soft on protesters and allowing Jewish students to be harassed on their campuses.

After failing to squelch the protests two weeks ago, Columbia administrators have turned to negotiating with students, so far without success. The school has set two deadlines for an agreement this week – the latest at 4 a.m. on Friday – both of which came and went without a deal being struck.

“The talks have shown progress and are continuing as planned,” Shafik’s office wrote in a brief email to the university community late on Thursday night. “We have our demands; they have theirs. A formal process is under way and continues.”

TEXAS CLASH

The president of the University of Texas at Austin, Jay Hartzell, faced a similar backlash from faculty on Friday, two days after he joined with Republican Governor Greg Abbott in calling in police to break up a pro-Palestinian protest.

Dozens of protesters were arrested but charges against most were dropped the next day.

Nearly 200 members of the faculty at the university signed a letter dated April 25, saying they have no confidence in Hartzell after he “needlessly put students, staff and faculty in danger” when hundreds of officers clad in riot gear and on horseback swept away the protests.

Hartzell in a statement said he made the decision on grounds that protest organizers aimed to “severely disrupt” the campus for a long period.

The clash in Texas was one of many that broke out this week between demonstrators and police summoned by university leaders, who say encampments constitute unauthorized protests, jeopardize the safety of students, and at times, subject Jewish students to antisemitism and harassment.

Civil rights groups have condemned the arrests and urged authorities to respect free speech rights. The activists behind the protests say their aim is to pressure schools to divest from companies that contribute to Israeli military actions in Gaza, and blame any hostile behavior on outsiders seeking to hijack the movement.

While Columbia remains the epicenter of the student protest movement, the national spotlight has shifted to new campuses – from the University of Southern California (USC) to Atlanta’s Emory University to Boston’s Emerson College – nearly every day this week. USC this week canceled its main May 10 graduation ceremony, saying newly required security measures would have placed excessive delays on crowd control.

On Friday, about 200 protesters gathered at George Washington University, a few blocks from the White House, carrying “Free Palestine” posters, wearing black and white Palestinian keffiyehs and chanting slogans.

“We will pursue disciplinary actions against the GW students involved in these unauthorized demonstrations that continue to disrupt university operations,” the university said.

Authorities also began making arrests at a protest encampment at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, on Friday.

A livestream by the organizer showed dozens of demonstrators setting up tents on lawns on campus. Police moved in within half an hour, telling protesters they could not camp there but could stay if they didn’t have tents

California’s Cal Poly Humboldt, a public university in Arcata, said it had shut down its campus through the weekend and moved all classes online, as protesters continued a weeklong occupation of a school building.

(Reporting by Julia Harte in New York, Kia Johnson and Doina Chiacu in Washington, Andrew Hay in New Mexico; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

By Jarrett Renshaw

(Reuters) -The Biden administration on Friday delayed its plan to ban menthol cigarettes, a move that reflected the potential for a political backlash from Black voters in an election year.

For decades, menthol cigarettes have been in the crosshairs of anti-smoking groups who argue that they contribute to disproportionate health burdens on Black communities and play a role in luring young people into smoking.

About 81% of Black adults who smoked cigarettes used menthol varieties, compared with 34% of white adults, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

U.S. health secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement that the proposed ban had brought immense feedback including from parts of the civil rights and criminal justice movement.

“It’s clear that there are still more conversations to have, and that will take significantly more time,” he said in a statement that appeared to suggest it would not be sorted before the presidential election in November.

Shares of Altria Group and British American Tobacco were down marginally, while Imperial Brands was down about 1%. Shares in Philip Morris International, which does not sell cigarettes in the United States, fell 1%.

NAACP President Derrick Johnson said his organization was outraged and disgusted by the political move.

“In an election year, politicians should be prioritizing people, not profiteers. Today’s news from the Biden Administration is a blow to the Black community, who continue to be unfairly targeted and unjustly killed by Big Tobacco,” he said.

Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association, also expressed dismay over the delay. “Two full years after releasing proposed rules backed by extensive scientific evidence – and more than a decade since the FDA began examining menthol cigarettes – the administration has failed to take decisive action to remove these deadly, addictive products from the market.”

Menthol cigarettes account for a third of the industry’s overall market share in the United States.

The highly addictive products have been cited for their appeal to young smokers, as well as significant health impacts for Black communities.

Civil rights groups have contended for years that menthol cigarettes pose a disproportionately higher risk in Black communities, where they are heavily marketed.

Yolonda Richardson, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said last month that research showed eliminating menthol cigarettes would cut the number of young people who start smoking, increase the number of smokers who quit, and save up to 654,000 lives within 40 years, including 255,000 Black lives.

(Reporting by Jarrett Renshaw in Washington and Granth Vanaik in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Juveria Tabassum and Granth Vanaik in Bengaluru, Emma Rumney in London and Ahmed Aboulenein in Washington; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar, Sriraj Kalluvila and Bill Berkrot)