INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — A Ukrainian-born congresswoman who recently opposed sending aid to her war-torn country is defending her seat Tuesday against a fellow Republican who has outpaced her in spending and fundraising.

U.S. Rep. Victoria Spartz is the first and only Ukrainian-born House member and previously backed support for the country. But ahead of her primary contest, she reversed her position and voted against sending $61 billion in aid to Ukraine. She defended the switch, arguing her loyalty is to America first and that she wanted to see policy on the U.S.-Mexico border included in the aid package, a position largely shared by her Republican challengers.

The election in the northern suburbs of Indianapolis will determine whether Spartz’s maneuvers will pay off. More broadly, the race is a barometer of whether support for Ukraine is a powerful issue among GOP voters. The issue has become an increasingly divisive topic among Republicans in Washington, where many are pressing for a drawdown in aid.

If she’s defeated, Spartz would be the first House Republican to lose a primary this year in a race that wasn’t affected by redistricting.

The primary marks the latest twist in Spartz’s political career. She won a tight primary race in 2020 and wasn’t challenged for the GOP nomination in 2022. She initially planned to leave Congress last year, opting against reelection to her House seat and forgoing a chance to seek the Senate seat being vacated by Republican Mike Braun.

She later reversed course, deciding to seek another term in the House. But her shifting plans gave an opening to state Rep. Chuck Goodrich to outraise Spartz by millions of dollars and become her main competitor in the primary.

Statewide, presumptive presidential nominees former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden seek to pile up more delegates heading to their respective party conventions later this summer. Trump took Indiana by 16 points in 2020. The only question on the GOP side is how many votes will go to former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, who is still on the primary ballot after dropping out of the race in March.

Indiana voters do not have the option to vote “ uncommitted.” The protest-vote movement in some states against Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war has cast doubt on the president’s Democratic support in November.

The most watched and expensive contest within the state is the six-way race to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb. Braun is considered the race’s front-runner, bolstered by several advantages: name recognition, money and Trump’s endorsement. He spent more than $6 million in the first three months of 2024 alone.

Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch has campaigned to slash the state’s income tax. Also running are two former commerce secretaries, Brad Chambers — who has contributed $10 million to his campaign — and Eric Doden.

Once seen as a probable Hoosier State governor, former Attorney General Curtis Hill has struggled to compete. Political novice Jamie Reitenour is also on the ballot.

The Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jennifer McCormick is uncontested.

WASHINGTON (AP) — In April, Bernie Sanders repeatedly stood shoulder to shoulder with President Joe Biden, promoting their joint accomplishments on health care and climate at formal White House events while eviscerating Donald Trump in a widely viewed campaign TikTok video.

Then just last week, Sanders was bluntly warning that the crisis in Gaza could be Biden’s “Vietnam” and invoking President Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision not to run for reelection as the nation was in an uproar over his support of that war.

Such is the political dichotomy of Bernie Sanders when it comes to Joe Biden. They are two octogenarians who share a bond that was forged through a hard-fought primary in 2020 and fortified through policy achievements over the last three years.

Now, in this election year, Sanders will be Biden’s most powerful emissary to progressives and younger voters — a task that will test the senator’s pull with the sectors of the Democratic Party most disillusioned with the president and his policies, especially on Gaza.

Privately, Sanders has felt less enthusiastic in recent days about making the political case on Biden’s behalf as the Gaza crisis worsened, according to a person familiar with Sanders’ sentiments. Still, Sanders remains adamant that the specter of Trump’s return to the Oval Office is too grave a threat and stresses that “this election is not between Joe Biden and God. It is between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.”

“I understand that a lot of people in this country are less than enthusiastic about Biden for a number of reasons and I get that. And I strongly disagree with him, especially on what’s going on in Gaza,” Sanders said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

But Sanders continued: “You have to have a certain maturity when you deal with politics and that is yes, you can disagree with somebody. That doesn’t mean you can vote for somebody else who could be the most dangerous person in American history, or not vote and allow that other guy to win.”

That will be the thrust of the message that Sanders will carry through November, even as progressive furor over Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza continues to escalate, protests continue to fester and Sanders’ own critiques of the administration’s policy become more pointed.

“He’s not trimming the sails on Gaza, because of Biden,” said Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., who succeeded Sanders in the House and joined him in the Senate last year. “Bernie’s credibility is that he’s maintained his solid positions, and then he’s going to make the case why, Biden versus Trump.”

Few can doubt Sanders’ influence throughout the Biden presidency. Once rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, the two men later joined forces to assemble half a dozen policy task forces that underpinned the party’s policy platform later that year — an unusual endeavor that helped bring the Democratic socialist’s supporters into Biden’s fold.

That laid the groundwork for a burst of ambitious policymaking in the first two years of the Biden administration, from a sweeping $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package in early 2021 to legislation in the summer of 2022 that was a mishmash of longstanding Democratic priorities, including cheaper prescription drugs for Medicare beneficiaries. Sanders, who helped craft those blueprints as head of the Senate Budget Committee, had been directly encouraged by Biden to go big in those proposals, with the assurance that the president had his back.

“You and I have been fighting this for 25 years,” Biden told Sanders admiringly at their joint health care event in April. “Finally, finally we beat Big Pharma. Finally.”

Sanders, like many others who back Biden’s domestic achievements, believes the public is still too unaware of them. He was the one who approached White House officials about doing an event specifically to spotlight a drop in the cost of inhalers.

More than three years into Biden’s term, Sanders’ connections throughout the West Wing are deep. He chats regularly not only with the president, but his top aides, including White House chief of staff Jeff Zients, senior adviser Anita Dunn and national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

“He doesn’t mince words,” Dunn said. “He’s very direct with us, pretty blunt, and that’s a good thing.”

It took just hours for Sanders, who announced his own reelection bid Monday, to endorse Biden’s campaign once the president made it official last April. It was an unmistakable signal to his supporters that, despite any misgivings, it was imperative to back Biden without hesitation.

Yet some Democrats are worried that anger among progressives over Gaza is so deep that not even Sanders can persuade them to support Biden. A persistent bloc of voters in multiple primaries continues to choose “uncommitted” or a variant to protest Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, sometimes far surpassing Biden’s margin of victory in those same states in the 2020 general election.

For instance, more than 48,000 voted “uninstructed” in the Wisconsin Democratic primary in early April, which outpaced the roughly 20,700 votes by which Biden outpaced Trump in the battleground state four years ago. Wisconsin’s primaries this year came three weeks after Biden had already clinched the nomination.

“This campaign is in trouble. And Sen. Sanders will do everything — again, everything — that he can to try to pull this man over the finish line,” said Nina Turner, who was a national co-chair of Sanders’ 2020 campaign. “I’m not so sure it’s going to work this time.”

Mitch Landrieu, a national co-chair for the Biden campaign, told CNN that Sanders’ comparisons to the Vietnam War were an “over-exaggeration.” A March poll conducted by the Harvard Institute of Politics found that 18- to 29-year-olds were less likely to say the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the national issue that concerned them most, compared to issues like the economy, immigration and abortion.

But it isn’t just on Gaza that Sanders has been pushing Biden and his aides. He’s urging them to shift campaign strategy to not just contrast Biden with Trump but to lay out ambitious goals on health care, education, child care and workers’ rights.

Biden’s State of the Union address, which his advisers point to as a roadmap for his second term, was a “general start,” Sanders said, but he added that Biden has to do more to inspire voters.

“What I’ve said to the White House is, it’s not good enough simply to talk about Donald Trump,” Sanders said in the interview. “It’s not good enough to talk about your accomplishments, which I have. You got to have a bold agenda for the future.”

Biden’s aides point to specific proposals released around the State of the Union, such as an expansive housing plan that would build or preserve two million homes. Sanders is also now developing new health care legislation in tandem with the White House, which would extend to all Americans the $2,000 annual cap on prescription costs that the Inflation Reduction Act provided to seniors on Medicare.

Biden doesn’t hesitate to point out where he splits with Sanders when given the chance.

“I like him, but I’m not Bernie Sanders. I’m not a socialist,” Biden said in January 2022. “I’m a mainstream Democrat.”

Yet top advisers to the president, long a stalwart of the Democratic center-left, and Sanders, the undisputed leader of the party’s progressive wing, say the two men share more traits than their ideological stances would indicate.

For one, they both hold a core belief that government should be a force for good. Their political careers are anchored in small, sparsely populated states that exposed them to the most hyperlocal and grassroots of politics. They have a sense of pragmatism about working within the political system’s realities, even if Sanders works to push those boundaries and Biden governs inside of them.

Biden, as vice president, was the rare establishment Democrat who was warm to Sanders during the senator’s first presidential bid. He invited Sanders to the vice presidential residence at the Naval Observatory to discuss his campaign and policy ideas in 2015 — a time when tensions between Hillary Clinton’s coalition and the ascendant Sanders wing were increasingly embittered.

“I know he felt that while there was a lot of hostility within the Democratic Party and in the top ranks … he felt warmth and positivity from Joe Biden,” said Faiz Shakir, who served as campaign manager for Sanders’ 2020 campaign and remains a close political adviser.

Even as the 2020 debates were fiercely fought, Biden and Sanders never let the disputes turn personal. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., another national co-chair for Sanders in 2020, recalled that when some of his aides wanted to forcefully attack Biden in personal terms, the senator would respond, “Absolutely not.”

Now, Sanders is determined to ensure Trump doesn’t win again.

The Biden campaign has made it clear to Sanders’ political team that they want him engaged as much as possible, seeing his longstanding connections with key voting blocs as an asset. Because Sanders campaigned for Biden four years ago, the reelection team also knows well specifically how Sanders would be most helpful for Biden.

It wouldn’t be a surprise, for instance, if Sanders were again dispatched to Michigan, where he stumped for Biden in October 2020, or at union halls to energize working-class voters.

“He knows himself, his team knows him and we know what has worked,” said Carla Frank, the Biden campaign’s director of surrogate operations.

For his part, Sanders is still wrestling with precisely how he can be the most effective as a campaigner this fall and how he can best target the audiences that most need to hear his case for Biden, according to aides.

But “I intend to be aggressive,” Sanders said.

“I see this as an enormously important election that I for one will not sit out,” he added. “I’ll be active.”

___

Associated Press writer Lisa Rathke in Marshfield, Vermont, contributed to this report.

ATLANTA (AP) — A former Democratic congressman running for Georgia State Supreme Court filed a federal lawsuit Monday claiming a state agency is unconstitutionally trying to block him from talking about abortion.

John Barrow sued hours ahead of a deadline to reply to a complaint that he is violating state judicial ethics rules and that he must bring his campaign ads into compliance with state rules. Among the rules the Georgia Judicial Qualifications Commission complaint alleges Barrow is violating is one that bars candidates from making commitments about how they will rule on issues that are likely to come before the high court.

Early voting is ongoing in the nonpartisan May 21 election between Barrow and Justice Andrew Pinson, who was appointed to the nine-justice court in 2022 by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. Incumbent justices in Georgia almost never lose or face serious challenges. The three other justices seeking new six-year terms are unopposed.

Facing that uphill battle, Barrow has made abortion the centerpiece of his campaign, saying he believes Georgia’s state constitution guarantees a right to abortion that is at least as strong as Roe v. Wade was before it was overturned in 2022. The decision cleared the way for a 2019 Georgia law to take effect banning most abortions after fetal cardiac activity can be detected, usually in about the sixth week of pregnancy. That’s before many women know they are pregnant.

A challenge to Georgia’s law is pending in a lower state court and could come before the state Supreme Court. Barrow says that when Pinson was Georgia’s solicitor general, he was the lawyer most responsible for the state supporting the Mississippi case that led to the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.

Pinson has declined to talk about issues but warned in an April interview with The Associated Press that making judicial races conventionally political will destroy people’s belief that courts are fair and impartial.

“If Georgia goes down that road of politicizing these nonpartisan judicial races in that way, you lose that,” Pinson said. “I think it shatters people’s confidence in an impartial judiciary.”

Barrow says the attempt to muzzle him violates his First Amendment right to free speech and his 14th Amendment right to equal protection under a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision that found Minnesota couldn’t forbid candidates from announcing their views on legal and political issues.

“The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that I have the constitutional right to speak my mind on the issues. And that’s just what the Code of Judicial Conduct says,” Barrow said in a statement Monday. “That’s because the voters have the even more important constitutional right to know what they’re voting for.”

Courtney Veal, the Judicial Qualifications Commission executive director, did not respond to an email seeking comment.

The commission said in the letter to Barrow that its rules don’t violate the decision. Instead, the complaint alleges Barrow went too far, saying he failed to emphasize the duty of a judge to uphold the law, “mischaracterized the role of a jurist as someone who should ( or would, in your case) ‘protect’ selected rights,” made commitments on the issue, misrepresented current Georgia and gave the false impression that his vote alone could change abortion law in the state.

“Unfortunately, John Barrow has decided to ignore Georgia’s judicial ethics code,” Pinson spokesperson Heath Garrett said in a statement. “His lawsuit makes clear that his goal is to negatively politicize judicial races and destroy Georgians’ trust in fair and impartial courts.”

State supreme court races nationwide have become much more political in recent decades, creating contests like the one last year in Wisconsin, where a liberal judge backed by Democrats flipped the court after defeating a former justice supported by Republicans and anti-abortion groups in the most expensive state Supreme Court race.

Barrow’s campaign is the first sign that trend might be arriving in Georgia, which has become a battleground in partisan elections. Many members of the state legal establishment view Barrow’s tactics with distaste.

On Monday before Barrow announced his lawsuit, Pinson’s campaign released a statement from five former state Supreme Court Justices, 12 former state bar presidents and two former Judicial Qualifications Commission officials warning that voters must demand “that our judges be nonpartisan and refrain from making public commitments about how they will decide cases and issues.

“The alternative is a partisan judiciary that is emboldened to put campaign promises and personal preferences above the Constitution and the law,” the statement said. “The alternative would mean the end of the rule of law, and if our state starts down that path, we fear that it will be very difficult to turn back later.”

NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump is accusing Joe Biden of offering a weak response to antisemitism, wielding the clashes on colleges campuses over the war in Gaza as a campaign issue. But Trump’s attacks ignore his own long history of rhetoric that invokes the language of Nazi Germany and plays on stereotypes of Jews and politics.

The latest example came over the weekend, when Trump — accusing the White House of having a role in his multiple state and federal criminal prosecutions — told Republican donors gathered for a private retreat at his Florida resort that Biden is running a “Gestapo administration,” referring to the secret police force of Nazi Germany.

Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, called it a “deliberate tactic” to attack Biden and distract from his own track record.

“It’s wholly aligned with his long history of offensive and irresponsible comments when it comes to the Jewish community, including the normalization of antisemitism,” Spitalnick said.

Biden’s campaign called it “despicable” and an attack on law enforcement.

Trump’s attempts to claim a moral high ground against antisemitism come as the Democratic president is navigating the intense divisions of the Israel-Hamas war and the resulting unrest from demonstrations. Trump and other Republicans have seized on the disruptions on college campuses, which have at times been violent, as a sign of weakness from Biden and Democrats. It’s also the latest example of Trump’s timeworn tactic of repackaging a censure he’s received and stamping it on his opponents.

As pro-Palestinian demonstrations have broken out at college campuses, some people have reported antisemitic chants and messages at and around the protests and some Jewish students have said they have felt unsafe on campus. Trump’s campaign on Monday released a video on Yom Hashoah, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance day, that aimed to contrast the 2024 presidential candidates’ responses on antisemitism.

The video shows images of Trump visiting Israel and speeches he has given pledging to stand with Jewish people and confront antisemitism, while showing footage of the protests on campuses and clips of Biden responding to protesters upset with his administration’s support for Israel in its war against Hamas.

One of the clips shows Biden saying, “They have a point,” but does not include the next sentence in which Biden said, “We need to get a lot more care into Gaza.”

Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for Trump’s campaign, criticized Biden for taking “weeks to even talk about the Biden Campus Protests” and not condemning what she described as “pro-Hamas, pro-genocide mobs,” saying “the sad truth is that he needs their votes.”

“Jewish Americans and Jewish leaders around the world recognize that President Trump did more for them and the State of Israel than any President in history,” Leavitt also said Monday.

Trump also spoke about the protests as he arrived in court Monday for his trial in a felony hush money case. Noting Columbia University has canceled its main commencement ceremony following weeks of pro-Palestinian protests, Trump said “that shouldn’t happen.” He also claimed that many protesters were backed by Biden donors.

“Ok, are you listening Israel? I hope you’re listening, Israel. Hope you’re getting smart,” Trump said.

Biden has said he condemns “the antisemitic protests” and last week, he broke days of silence and called for “order” after some schools cleared demonstrators by force, leading to clashes.

James Singer, a spokesperson for Biden’s campaign, said Biden stands against antisemitism but Trump does not.

“Trump has praised neo-Nazis, dined with neo-Nazis, echoed the rhetoric of neo-Nazis, and reportedly praised the accomplishments of Adolf Hitler,” Singer said in a statement. “He cannot lead us, so he seeks to divide us with the oldest of ideas – hate, anger, revenge, and retribution.”

After white nationalists chanting “Jews will not replace us!” rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 and clashed with anti-racism protesters, Trump drew some of his fiercest backlash as president when he said that there “ were very fine people, on both sides. ”

Trump last week downplayed Charlottesville, saying the deadly rally was “nothing” compared to ongoing pro-Palestinian campus protests.

Not long after launching his third White House campaign in 2022, Trump drew widespread condemnation for having dinner at his Mar-a-Lago club with a Holocaust-denying white nationalist and the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, shortly after he made weeks of antisemitic comments.

He’s drawn criticism on his third White House campaign for using language echoing that used by Adolf Hitler to argue that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and labeled his opponents as “vermin.”

Trump has also been accused of promoting antisemitic tropes as he’s suggested that Jewish people who vote for Democrats “ hate Israel” and hate “their religion” are “very disloyal to Israel.” Critics have said the comments evoke the drop of dual loyalty, accusing Jews of being more loyal to their religion than their country.

After Trump’s reference to “Gestapo” over the weekend, Jonathan Sarna, an American Jewish history professor at Brandeis University, said there are “great dangers” in the Nazi comparisons.

“Not only it’s historically incorrect, it’s morally offensive,” Sarna said. “The problem is looking to associate whatever you don’t like with the most evil forces, ignoring all the crucial differences. At that point, we forget what the Holocaust really was.”

___

Associated Press writer Jill Colvin in New York contributed to this report.

By Alexandra Ulmer

(Reuters) – Former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, who testified at Donald Trump’s criminal trial last month, was targeted in a fake emergency the same day he took the stand in New York, according to police records seen by Reuters.

The previously unreported April 25 “swatting” incident, or filing of a false report to trigger a potentially dangerous response, is one in a wave of violent threats against U.S. officials and other public figures in recent years.

A person using the name “Jamal” claimed in an email to a local newspaper that he had tied up his wife in the basement and killed his wife’s lover. Jamal gave the address of the crime as Pecker’s home in Greenwich, Connecticut.

“I fucked up really bad,” Jamal wrote. “Please help me.”

The incident report by the Greenwich Police Department said when police were alerted to the email they were already aware of Pecker’s home address due to his “being involved in a highly publicized trial.”

“A check … revealed no emergency,” said the report, which was seen by Reuters through a records request. “The email was likely a swatting by proxy attempt.” Reuters was unable to confirm whether any arrests were made.

It appeared to be the first report of a swatting attempt against someone testifying in the Republican presidential candidate’s 12-day-old hush money trial.

On the day of the swatting attempt, Pecker testified that he wrangled with Trump and his former lawyer ahead of the 2016 presidential election over who should buy the silence of women who said they had sexual encounters with Trump.

It does not appear that Pecker was home at the time of the incident, which the police report put at 4:44 p.m. Another unnamed resident was home, according to the report.

Elkan Abramowitz, a lawyer for Pecker, declined to comment.

Reuters reviewed several emergency calls to authorities of hoax calls across the U.S. from a person identified only as “Jamal” who called police to say he had killed his wife.

The hoax email “Jamal” sent about Pecker’s home came from the address nobody@dizum.com, the Greenwich police report said, describing the email address as untraceable.

(Reporting by Alexandra Ulmer, Editing by Ross Colvin and Howard Goller)

Kentucky Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams, who worked to expand early voting in the Bluegrass State and has spoken out against election denialism in his own party, has been chosen to receive the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award this year.

In its announcement Monday, the JFK Library Foundation said Adams was recognized “for expanding voting rights and standing up for free and fair elections despite party opposition and death threats from election deniers.”

Adams — whose signature policy objective is to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat — was at the forefront of a bipartisan effort with Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear that led to the enactment of 2021 legislation allowing for three days of no-excuse, early in-person voting — including on a Saturday — before Election Day. Adams hailed it as Kentucky’s most significant election law update in more than a century. About one-fifth of the Kentuckians who voted in last year’s statewide election did so during those three days of early, in-person voting, Adams’ office said Monday.

As his state’s chief election officer, Adams has pushed back forcefully against false claims about rigged elections, referring to election skeptics as “cranks and kooks.”

“There’s a lot of irresponsible chatter out there and demagoguery about us having hacked elections,” Adams said in a 2022 interview on Spectrum News 1. “It’s all hogwash. Our elections have never been hacked and are not hacked now.”

First elected in 2019, Adams won reelection by a wide margin last year after dominating his party’s primary, which included a challenger who promoted debunked election claims.

Adams, a Kentucky native and graduate of Harvard Law School, said Monday that Kennedy’s “admonition to put country before self still resonates today, and rings true now more than ever.”

“I am honored to accept this award on behalf of election officials and poll workers across America who, inspired by his call, sacrifice to keep the American experiment in self-government alive,” he added.

Adams is part of an effort begun after the last presidential election that seeks to bring together Republican officials who are willing to defend the country’s election systems and the people who run them. They want officials to reinforce the message that elections are secure and accurate, which they say is especially important as the country heads toward another divisive presidential contest in November.

“It’s an obligation on Republicans’ part to stand up for the defense of our system because our party — there’s some blame for where we stand right now,” Adams said recently. “But it’s also strategically wise for Republicans to say, ‘Hey Republicans, you can trust this. Don’t stay at home.’”

During a recent campaign rally, former President Donald Trump — the presumptive Republican nominee for president this year — repeated his false claim that Democrats rigged the 2020 election.

Just 24% of Republicans said they had a great deal or quite a bit of confidence that votes will be counted accurately in the 2024 presidential election, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in December.

Adams is seen as a potential candidate for governor in 2027, when he and Beshear will be term-limited in their current jobs.

Honorary JFK Library Foundation President Caroline Kennedy and her son, Jack Schlossberg, will present the award to Adams on June 9 at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston.

President Kennedy’s book, “Profiles in Courage,” recounts the stories of eight U.S. senators who risked their careers by taking principled stands for unpopular positions. Past winners of the Profile in Courage Award include former U.S. presidents Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama.

By Brendan Pierson

(Reuters) -New York state’s top prosecutor on Monday sued Heartbeat International, an anti-abortion group, and 11 crisis pregnancy centers, accusing them of misleading and potentially endangering women by claiming that they can provide a treatment reversing the effect of the abortion pill mifepristone.

In the lawsuit, New York Attorney General Letitia James asked a state court in Manhattan to block Heartbeat International and the centers, located across New York state and whose mission is to discourage women from having abortions, from advertising abortion pill reversal on their websites or anywhere else and award an unspecified amount of money damages.

“Abortions cannot be reversed,” James said in a statement. “Any treatments that claim to do so are made without scientific evidence and could be unsafe.”

Heartbeat International in a statement called the lawsuit “a clear attempt to censor speech, leaving women who regret their chemical abortions in the dark, and ultimately forcing them to complete an abortion they no longer want.”

Mifepristone is the first part of a two-drug regimen used for medication abortion, which is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to terminate pregnancy in the first 10 weeks. Medication abortion accounted for more than 60% of U.S. abortions last year.

Proponents of medication abortion reversal say mifepristone’s effects can be blocked by a high dose of the hormone progesterone. There are no controlled clinical trials showing the procedure is safe or effective, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says that it is not supported by science.

New York’s lawsuit comes as the U.S. Supreme Court considers a case brought by abortion opponents seeking to restrict the availability of mifepristone nationwide. One of the plaintiffs in that case, George Delgado, sits on Heartbeat International’s medical advisory board and is credited with developing abortion pill reversal.

Heartbeat International is an international anti-abortion group affiliated with more than 2,000 crisis pregnancy centers around the country. Through its website, it offers to connect women to providers who will perform abortion pill reversal.

Crisis pregnancy centers provide services to pregnant women with the goal of preventing them from having abortions. All of the centers named in James’ lawsuit are listed in a directory maintained by HBI, and nine of them pay the organization an annual fee for affiliate status, according to the lawsuit.

Some of the centers’ websites appeared to offer abortion pill reversal themselves, while others direct visitors to HBI’s “Abortion Pill Rescue Network,” according to James’ complaint.

California’s attorney general filed a similar lawsuit against HBI and crisis pregnancy center affiliates last September.

Last October, a federal judge ruled that Colorado cannot ban abortion pill reversal treatment. Later that month, a judge in Kansas blocked a state law that would have required healthcare providers to tell patients that medication abortion can be reversed.

(Reporting By Brendan Pierson in New York; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Leslie Adler)

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Milwaukee’s election leader has been ousted by the mayor in a surprise move that comes just six months before Wisconsin’s largest city will be in the spotlight in the presidential swing state.

Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson announced Monday that he would be replacing Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Claire Woodall with her deputy, Paulina Gutierrez.

Milwaukee has been at the center of attention in Wisconsin, a state known for close elections and where four of the past six presidential contests have been decided by less than a percentage point.

In 2020, former President Donald Trump and others were quick to cry fraud after late-arriving results from Democratic-dominated Milwaukee helped Joe Biden narrowly carry the state by just under 21,000 votes. Recounts demanded by Trump confirmed Biden’s victory.

The change has nothing to do with how Woodall ran elections, but instead had to do with “other issues internal to the election commission office and to city government that raised concern,” said the mayor’s spokesperson Jeff Fleming. He declined to say what those issues were.

“People see one side on this side of the camera, but there are other things on the other side of the camera that I also have to deal with and that’s exactly what I did with my decision,” Johnson told WISN-TV. He declined to elaborate.

Woodall did not return messages seeking comment. Her replacement, Gutierrez, also did not return messages.

Woodall has been outspoken about the challenges she and other election officials have felt in recent years.

She has described being harassed and threatened after the 2020 election via email, phone calls and letters to her home — threats serious enough that she has an assigned FBI agent to forward them to.

The change came a week after Woodall’s former deputy, Kimberly Zapata, was sentenced to probation and fined $3,000 after being convicted of misconduct in office and fraud for obtaining fake absentee ballots. Zapata argued that she was acting as a whistleblower, exposing vulnerabilities in the state’s election system.

Johnson and others who work in elections stressed that the change would not affect how elections are run in Milwaukee.

“Paulina’s integrity and capabilities are ideally suited to this position,” Johnson said in a statement announcing the change. “She will lead the office at an important juncture when public scrutiny of the work of the department will be extremely high. I have confidence in her, and I will make certain the department has the resources it needs to fulfill its duties.”

Gutierrez has only been a staff member at the city election commission for a little over a year. Neil Albrecht, who led the office for 15 years before retiring in May 2020, has offered his assistance as a volunteer, Fleming said. Woodall took over for Albrecht in 2020 and had been leading the office until now.

Following his reelection in April, Johnson had to renominate all of his Cabinet-level positions for city council approval. That is why he decided to make the change at this time, Fleming said.

None of the city’s three election commissioners returned messages seeking comment. But Ann Jacobs, a Democratic member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission from Milwaukee, said she was surprised by the move.

“Changes like this are always challenging, but given how many elections Wisconsin has there’s no ‘good time’ for these sort of changes to happen,” Jacobs said. “I expect the office to be professional and to continue their work and that the election will be run smoothly and properly.”

Jacobs stressed that elections are run by teams of people.

“The administration of elections isn’t something that is dependent on one person,” she said. “It is dependent on the workflow, the task flows and the operations of an entire office.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont announced Monday he will run for reelection this year, squelching speculation that the 82-year-old progressive icon might retire at a time when the Democratic Party is anxious about the advancing age of its top leaders.

Hailing from a Democratic stronghold, Sanders’ decision virtually guarantees that he will return to Washington for a fourth Senate term. And his announcement comes at a critical moment for Democrats as the party navigates a growing divide over Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.

Sanders has criticized President Joe Biden’s handling of the U.S. relationship with Israel even as he’s hailed much of Biden’s domestic agenda ahead of what could be a tough reelection fight for Biden against presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Sanders said he wants the war in Gaza ended immediately, massive humanitarian aid to follow and no more money sent to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“We are living in a complicated and difficult political moment,” Sanders told The Associated Press on Monday. “I very strongly disagree with Biden in terms of the war in Gaza.”

At home, he said, the presidential election is between Biden and Trump, “and Donald Trump is in my view the most dangerous president, has been the most dangerous president in American history.”

With the prospect of Trump’s possible return to the White House, Sanders framed his bid to return to the Senate as being driven by concerns about the future of democracy in the U.S. In an announcement video, he said that in many ways the 2024 election “is the most consequential election in our lifetimes.”

“Will the United States continue to even function as a democracy, or will we move to an authoritarian form of government?” he said. He questioned whether the country will reverse what he called “the unprecedented level of income and wealth inequality” and if it can create a government that works for all, and not continue with a political system dominated by wealthy campaign contributors.

Known for his liberal politics and crusty demeanor, Sanders has been famously consistent over his 40 years in politics, championing better health care paid for by the government, higher taxes for the wealthy, less military intervention and major solutions for climate change. He has also spent his career trying to hold corporate executives to account, something that he’s had more power to do as chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Sanders is an independent. He was a Democratic congressman for 16 years and still caucuses with the Democrats.

He sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020. He said a year ago that he would forgo another presidential bid and endorse Biden’s reelection this year.

“I have been, and will be if re-elected, in a strong position to provide the kind of help that Vermonters need in these difficult times,” Sanders said in a review of his positions as chairman of the important Senate panel and a member of the chamber’s Democratic leadership team, as well as a senior member of various other committees.

___

AP writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed from Washington.