AP News in Brief at 12:04 a.m. EDT

Biden says during news conference he’s going to ‘complete the job’ despite calls to bow out

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden used his closely watched news conference Thursday to deliver a forceful defense of his foreign and domestic policies and batted away questions about his ability to serve another four years, declaring: “I’m not in this for my legacy. I’m in this to complete the job.”

Early on, he made one notable flub when he bobbled a reference to Vice President Kamala Harris. But for an hour, he largely held his own under intense questioning, eschewing any suggestion that he was in decline, no longer capable of leading the nation and too old to serve another term.

It was unclear whether the performance was enough to change the dynamic that has set in: A growing number of Democratic lawmakers, donors and celebrities are calling on him to step aside — not to mention the majority of voters expressing doubts that he is up to the job — and Biden is digging in, insisting he’s staying in the race and will win come November. And the longer the infighting continues, the less the Democrats are presenting a united front against Republican Donald Trump.

“If I slow down and I can’t get the job done, that’s a sign that I shouldn’t be doing it,” Biden said. “But there’s no indication of that yet — none.”

Yet even as he wrapped his news conference, the 81-year-old leader was confronting calls to step aside. In a statement released shortly after he walked offstage, Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Biden should end his candidacy, considering his “remarkable legacy in American history.” Fifteen other House Democrats have called on him to make way for a new candidate.

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Biden’s challenge: Will he ever satisfy the media’s appetite for questions about his ability?

NEW YORK (AP) — Toward the end of his closely watched news conference Thursday night on the sidelines of the NATO summit, President Joe Biden was talking about being examined by doctors for his mental acuity. Suddenly, a little frustration slipped through.

“No matter what I did,” he said, “no one’s going to be satisfied.”

That’s the challenge Biden faced during his meeting with American and international reporters, two weeks after a poor debate performance ignited calls for him to step aside and let another candidate take up the Democratic campaign against former president Donald Trump.

Biden was animated at times, particularly during an opening statement when he spoke about the importance of the NATO alliance and delivered a defense of his presidency on issues of the economy and the border with Mexico. He relished an opportunity to talk about the nation’s relations with China and where that might go.

But on the very first question put to him, he also rewarded viewers, opponents and journalists who were looking for gaffes: He referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as Donald Trump. He rambled at times, dropping in stray facts inexplicably, and came across as tired, particularly as the hour drifted past 8 p.m. Eastern. His voice was gravelly and, at times, tentative.

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Trump lawyers press judge to overturn hush money conviction after Supreme Court immunity ruling

NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump’s lawyers are imploring a New York judge to overturn his hush money conviction and dismiss the case, arguing his historic trial was “tainted” by evidence that shouldn’t have been allowed because of the Supreme Court’s recent presidential immunity ruling.

In a court filing made public Thursday, the former president’s lawyers expanded on their view that Manhattan prosecutors had rashly and wrongly hurried to try Trump while the high court was still considering his immunity claims.

“Rather than wait for the Supreme Court’s guidance, the prosecutors scoffed with hubris at President Trump’s immunity motions and insisted on rushing to trial,” Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove wrote. They urged Judge Juan M. Merchan “to address these injustices,” saying he was “duty-bound to do so in light of the Supreme Court’s decision.”

Trump became the first ex-president convicted of a crime when a jury found him guilty in May of falsifying records to cover up a potential sex scandal.

Trump’s lawyers urged Merchan to toss out not only the jury’s verdict but the indictment, which would prevent prosecutors from retrying the case.

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The Latest | Israel will send cease-fire negotiators to Cairo for more talks, Netanyahu says

Israel will send a delegation to Cairo for further talks with mediators on a proposed deal with Hamas for a cease-fire and hostage release, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Thursday.

Israel has been pressing ahead with a fresh offensive across the north, south and center of the Gaza Strip in recent days, which could be aimed at increasing pressure on Gaza’s Hamas militant group during cease-fire negotiations.

Palestinians returned to breathtaking scenes of destruction in the Gaza City district of Shijaiyah after Israeli troops withdrew following a two-week offensive there. Civil defense workers said that so far they had found the bodies of 60 people in the rubble.

Israel launched the war in Gaza after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in which militants stormed into southern Israel, killed some 1,200 people — mostly civilians — and abducted about 250. Since then, Israeli ground offensives and bombardments have killed more than 38,300 people in Gaza, according to the territory’s Health Ministry. It does not distinguish between combatants and civilians in its count.

Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are crammed into squalid tent camps in central and southern Gaza. Israeli restrictions, fighting and the breakdown of law and order have limited humanitarian aid efforts, causing widespread hunger and sparking fears of famine. The top United Nations court has ordered Israel to take steps to protect Palestinians as it examines genocide allegations against Israeli leaders. Israel denies the charge.

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‘We have nothing’: Palestinians return to utter destruction in Gaza City after Israeli withdrawal

SHIJAIYAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Palestinians returned to breathtaking scenes of destruction in the Gaza City district of Shijaiyah after Israeli troops withdrew, ending a two-week offensive there. Civil defense workers said Thursday that so far, they had found the bodies of 60 people in the rubble.

Families who fled the assault ventured back into Shijaiyah to see the condition of their homes or salvage whatever they could.

Nearly every building was flattened to rubble for block after block, leaving giant piles of concrete and twisted rebar. Here and there, grey gutted concrete frames still stood a few stories high. The ever-present buzzing sound of Israeli military drones hung in the hot summer air as people on bicycles or horse-drawn carts made their way over dirt paths where the streets had apparently been bulldozed away.

Sharif Abu Shanab found his family’s four-story building collapsed. “I can’t enter it. I can’t take anything out of it, not even a can of tuna. We have nothing, no food or drink,” he said.

Since fleeing the district, his family sleeps in the streets, he said. “Where do we go and to whom? … We have no home or anything,” he said in despair. “There’s only one solution, hit us with a nuclear bomb and relieve us of this life.”

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Zelenskyy says to win the war, US needs to lift limits on striking military targets inside Russia

WASHINGTON (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Thursday embraced the support of allies who have provided substantial new military aid and a path to joining NATO, even as he emphatically pushed for the help to arrive faster and for restrictions to be lifted on the use of U.S. weapons to attack military targets inside Russia.

“If we want to win, if we want to prevail, if we want to save our country and to defend it, we need to lift all the limitations,” Zelenskyy said alongside NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in the final hours of a summit that saw Ukraine receive fresh commitments of weapons and other support to firm up its defense against Russia.

The summit unfolded against the backdrop of a tumultuous American political cycle, with mounting angst among Democrats about President Joe Biden’s ability to serve another four years following a shocking debate flop two weeks ago that threw the future of his presidency into doubt.

An untimely verbal flub Thursday evening did little to soothe concerns, when Biden at an event for the unveiling of an agreement called the Ukraine Compact mistakenly introduced Zelenskyy as Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Some in the room gasped at Biden’s gaffe, which the U.S. president quickly sought to clean up by saying, “President Putin? You’re going to beat President Putin,” Biden said to Zelenskyy. “I’m so focused on beating Putin, we got to worry about it.”

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US would keep more hydropower under agreement with Canada on treaty governing Columbia River

SEATTLE (AP) — The U.S. and Canada said Thursday they have agreed to update a six-decade-old treaty that governs the use of one of North America’s largest rivers, the Columbia, with provisions that officials said would provide for effective flood control, irrigation, and hydropower generation and sharing between the countries.

The “agreement in principle,” reached after six years of talks, provides a framework for updating the Columbia River Treaty. It calls for the U.S. to keep more of the power generated by its dams while improving cooperation between the Bonneville Power Administration, which markets power from dams in the northwestern U.S., and Canadian utilities, to help avoid blackouts.

The U.S. would pay Canada for reservoir capacity to hold back water during flood seasons, protecting downstream communities, at a rate that would begin at $37.6 million per year and increase with inflation. And the agreement would provide Canada with more flexibility in using the water stored in its reservoirs.

“After 60 years, the Treaty needs updating to reflect our changing climate and the changing needs of the communities that depend on this vital waterway,” U.S. President Joe Biden said in a written statement Thursday.

But environmental groups lamented the deal as a missed opportunity to provide more water for imperiled salmon and steelhead runs that have been decimated by dam operations in the Columbia River basin over the past century. While the original treaty ratified in 1964 was designed to cover flood control and hydropower generation, conservationists and Indigenous tribes have long argued that it should be updated to include river health and salmon restoration as a third principle.

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Alec Baldwin’s lawyer grills crime scene tech over search for live ammo at his shooting trial

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — Alec Baldwin ‘s defense attorney questioned a crime scene technician over what he suggested were shoddy and subpar searches for the live ammunition that ended up in the actor’s revolver and killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.

On the second day of Baldwin’s New Mexico involuntary manslaughter trial, Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer sided with the prosecution on Thursday in letting in key statements from the actor that demonstrate his knowledge of guns and the impact of blanks.

Earlier, Alex Spiro grilled Santa Fe County sheriff’s technician Marissa Poppell in particular over search warrants served on a prop truck a week after the death of Hutchins on the set of the movie “Rust,” and on a prop warehouse more than a month after her shooting.

The questions eventually led to Spiro asking Poppell whether police and prosecutors “were just trying to get this over with so that prosecutors could focus on Alec Baldwin?”

“No,” she answered.

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World population is projected to grow from 8.2 billion to a peak of 10.3 billion in 2080s, UN says

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The world’s population is expected to grow by more than 2 billion people in the next decades and peak in the 2080s at around 10.3 billion, a major shift from a decade ago, a new report by the United Nations said Thursday.

The report — released on World Population Day — says the global population is then expected to decline to around 10.2 billion by the end of the century.

John Wilmoth, head of the U.N. Population Division which prepared the report, said the probability that the world’s population will peak within the current century is quite high – about 80%.

“This is a major change compared to the United Nations projections from a decade earlier when the estimated probability the global population would reach a maximum, and thus the growth would come to an end during the 21st century, was around 30%,” he said.

Bucknell University mathematics orofessor Tom Cassidy told AP that newly published research in the journal Demography that he co-authored also calculates that population is likely to peak before the end of the century.

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On stage, one of Japan’s biggest Kabuki stars changes roles in an instant. Offstage, it took decades

TOKYO (AP) — Onstage, Danjuro Ichikawa, one of the biggest stars of Japan’s Kabuki theater, is a virtuoso in switching roles.

In his latest production, he plays 13 parts, including a princess, a sushi chef and a fox. He hobbles offstage as a feeble old man, then dashes back on moments later as a fierce warrior. He gets in a few sword fights, dies tragically more than once, and takes flight on wires.

Offstage, he’s wondering if it’s time for the often rigid role of a Kabuki star to change.

The 13th man to bear the name Danjuro Ichikawa — which has been passed down between generations of Kabuki stars for over 300 years — he’s a household name in Japan, showing up in ads, movies and TV shows.

Kabuki, an all-male theatrical tradition that combines music, dance and acrobatics, remains popular, but Danjuro grants that it can be out of step with modern tastes. Audiences accustomed to TikTok videos and streaming don’t always have the patience for four-hour performances in archaic formal Japanese. Social distancing restrictions during the pandemic hit theaters hard, and audiences are still coming back.

The Associated Press