NEW YORK (AP) — Rooting for Donald Trump to fail has rarely been this profitable.

Just ask a hardy band of mostly amateur Wall Street investors who have collectively made tens of millions of dollars over the past month by betting that the stock price of his social media business — Truth Social — will keep dropping despite massive buying by Trump loyalists and wild swings that often mirror the candidate’s latest polls, court trials and outbursts on Trump Social itself.

Several of these investors interviewed by The Associated Press say their bearish gambles using “put” options and other trading tools are driven less by their personal feelings about the former president (most don’t like him) than their faith in the woeful underlying financials of a company that made less money last year than the average Wendy’s hamburger franchise.

“This company makes no money. … It makes no sense,” said Boise, Idaho, ad executive Elle Stange, who estimates she’s made $1,300 betting against Trump Media & Technology stock. “He’s not as great a businessman as he thinks. A lot of his businesses go belly up, quickly.”

Says Seattle IT security specialist Jeff Cheung, “This is guaranteed to go to zero.”

As of Friday morning, a month since Trump Media’s initial public offering sent its stock to $66.22, it has plunged to $38.49. An AP analysis of data from research firms FactSet and S3 Partners shows that investors using puts and “short selling” have paper profits so far of at least $200 million, not including the costs of puts, which vary from trade to trade.

Still, amateur traders, mostly risking no more than a few thousand dollars each, say the stock is too volatile to declare victory yet. So they are cashing in a bit now, letting other bets ride and stealing a glance at the latest stock movements in the office cubicle, at the kitchen table or even on the toilet.

There have been plenty of scary moments, including last week when DJT, the ex-president’s initials and stock ticker, jumped nearly 40% in two days.

“I don’t know which direction the stock is going,” says Schenectady, N.Y., day trader Richard Persaud while checking his iPhone amid the surge. “It’s so unbelievably overvalued.”

Many who spoke to the AP say knowing their bets have helped slash the value of Trump’s 65% stake in half is an added political benefit. If some of their predictions are right, they may able to someday push it to zero, making it impossible for him to tap it to pay his hefty legal bills or finance his GOP presidential campaign.

They have a long way to go. Trump’s stake is still worth $4 billion.

Normally, investors betting a stock will fall, especially a gutsy breed of hedge fund traders called “short sellers,” will do plenty of homework. They’ll pore over financial statements, develop expertise in an industry, talk to competitors, and even turn to “forensic accountants” to find hidden weaknesses in the books.

No need in Trump Media’s case. It’s all there in the Sarasota, Florida-based company’s 100-page financial report: A firehose of losses, $58 million last year, on minuscule revenue of $4 million from advertising and other sources.

The losses are so big, as Trump Media’s auditor wrote in the report, they “raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”

A short seller’s dream? Or is it a nightmare?

Amateur trader Manny Marotta has two computer screens at home, one for work, the other showing DJT stock’s movements where he can gauge how much he’s up or down.

It wasn’t looking so good earlier this week.

The legal writer from suburban Cleveland had been up about $4,000 on “put” options purchased over the past few weeks. But the screen that morning was showing investors, presumably rich ones, buying large volumes of DJT shares, pushing up the stock once again.

“My options are worth less with every passing minute,” says Marotta, adding about DJT: “It’s being manipulated. It’s insane.”

Waiting for the stock to drop is especially painful to “short sellers,” who pay a fee to borrow shares owned by others. The idea is to quickly sell them on a hunch then they will be able to buy the same number of them later for much cheaper before having to return them to the lender. That allows short sellers to pocket the difference, minus the fee, which is usually nominal.

In DJT’s case, the fee is anything but nominal.

It was costing 565% a year at one point earlier this month, meaning short sellers had only two months before any possible profits would be eaten up in fees, even if the stock went to zero. It’s a rate so off the charts, that only three other stocks in recent memory have exceeded it, according to data from Boston University’s Karl Diether and Wharton’s Itamar Drechsler, who have studied short selling back two decades.

Add in massive buying by Trump supporters who see it as a way to support their candidate, and losses could multiply fast.

“It’s scary,” says Drechsler, who likens buyers of Trump’s stock to unwavering sports fans. “It is everything that you hope that the stock market is not.”

Trump Media spokeswoman Shannon Devine said the company is in a “strong financial position” with $200 million in cash and no debt, and said the AP was “selecting admitted Trump antagonists.”

Another danger to the stock is a “short squeeze.” If the price rises sharply, it could set off a rush by short sellers who fear they’ve bet wrongly to return their borrowed shares right away and limit their losses. And so they start buying shares to replace the ones they borrowed and sold, and that very buying tends to work against them, sending the price higher, which in turn scares other short sellers, who then also buy, setting off a vicious cycle of price hikes.

“If DJT starts rallying, you’re going to see the mother of all squeezes,” says S3 Partners short-selling expert Ihor Dusaniwsky, who spent three decades at Morgan Stanley helping investors borrow shares. “This is not for the faint of heart.”

And if that wasn’t enough, there is a final oddball feature of DJT stock that could trigger an explosion in prices, up or down.

“Lock up” agreements prohibit Trump and other DJT executives from selling their shares until September. That leaves the float, or the number of shares that can be traded each day by others, at a dangerously tiny 29% of total shares that will someday flood the market. That means a big purchase or sale on any day that would barely move a typical stock can send DJT flying or crashing.

The float is smaller than that of most other notoriously volatile stocks. At their smallest levels, AMC, GameStock and Shake Shack each had more than double the float.

Seattle trader Cheung sees DJT’s freak characteristics as a reason to bet against the stock, not shy away. When the lock-up period ends, he predicts, the ex-president will indeed sell his shares, spooking the market and sending the price down sharply. And even if he doesn’t, other insiders whose lock-ups expire will fear he will do so and will move fast to get a good price before it falls.

“The first one to sell out is going make to most, ” Cheung says. “Everyone is going to sell.”

Still, he doesn’t want to lose money in the interim, so Cheung is offsetting some of his “put” bets with the purchase of “calls.” The latter are also derivatives, but they do the opposite, paying off when the stock rises. Cheung hopes that whichever makes money, the puts or the calls, he will make enough with one to more than make up for the loss of the other.

If all of this seems too complicated, there is a far simpler way to make money betting against Trump.

Offshore, casino-style betting sites are taking wagers on the 2024 election, and some have even made President Joe Biden the favorite.

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Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/

WASHINGTON (AP) — There have been lawsuits, short-selling and rampant speculation. Now, as Trump Media & Technology Group approaches its first month as a publicly traded company, it’s clear that — like the man it’s named after — there’s nothing typical about the stock.

“If I woke up tomorrow and shares were zero dollars, or $100, I would not be surprised,” said Matthew Tuttle, a professional investor who bought $800 in Trump Media stock last week when it was at an all-time low. A day later, it had spiked in value.

“This is not going to move on fundamentals, earnings, or anything I was taught in business school about how a stock is supposed to move,” he said.

With Trump facing dozens of federal felony charges and hundreds of millions in legal expenses, Trump Media went public on March 26 on the Nasdaq exchange. Unlike many other stocks, it has been hard for traditional analysts and investors to figure out where it’s heading.

Here are some key takeaways from experts and regulator filings that help explain why Trump Media’s stock — ticker symbol DJT — has gone up and down, and why its performance continues to confound Wall Street expectations:

The stock’s volatility, experts say, is tied to Trump Media’s prime asset: Trump himself. Trump Media runs the social media platform Truth Social, which Trump created after he was banned from Twitter and Facebook following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. The former Republican president, who is his party’s presumptive nominee for the White House this year, is a prolific poster to Truth Social and has a legion of diehard supporters.

“I LOVE TRUTH SOCIAL, I LOVE THE TRUTH!” Trump posted the day his company went public.

Most large investors have balked at buying the company’s stock. Based in Sarasota, Florida, Trump Media has been losing loads of money and struggling to raise revenue, according to regulatory filings. That doesn’t appear to have dissuaded Trump’s supporters from embracing a chance to invest in a piece of him.

“It’s everything out of the ordinary,” said Julian Klymochko, CEO of Calgary-based Accelerate Financial Technologies Inc.

“I call it the mother of all meme stocks,” he said, using a phrase oft-repeated about Trump Media. It’s the nickname given to stocks that get caught up in buzz online and shoot way beyond what traditional analysis says they’re worth.

Day 1 looked like a windfall for Trump, who controls about 65% of the stock, and other early investors: Shares surged 59% to $79.38. Trump’s wealth immediately grew to $8 billion on paper. But he couldn’t cash out because of a “lock-up” provision that generally prevents company insiders from selling newly issued shares for six months.

The stock started to trend down, but not without near-daily rises and falls on heavy trading volume. The trading has largely been driven by individual investors whom Trump Media’s CEO Devin Nunes described as believing “in our mission to create a free-speech beachhead against Big Tech.”

Such retail investors are typically less sophisticated day traders. Some banded together to become a powerful force during COVID-19 lockdowns when they mobilized online to pour money into stocks of struggling companies such as video game retailer GameStop and movie theater operator AMC Entertainment. Those investors drove the companies’ stock to new heights while big investors ate large losses because they had been betting against the stocks.

Recent postings in a Truth Social group dedicated to chatting about the stock have often referred to buying it as not just an investment but a movement of “MAGA patriots putting our money where our mouth is,” referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.

Truth Social launched in 2022, and the former president uses the platform like he often used Twitter, now known as X: to spread misinformation, praise supporters and attack his political rivals.

Trump was reinstated in November 2022 to X, though he has only posted to that site once since then. He has otherwise stuck to Truth Social, which had 18 million visits in the first three months of 2024, compared with 18 billion on X, according to research firm Similarweb.

Trump Media’s prospects are unclear, despite optimistic statements from Trump and its executives. Nunes said last week that the company’s “financial position is very strong, particularly for a start-up tech firm at this initial stage of growth.”

The company, however, lost nearly $58.2 million last year while generating only $4.1 million in revenue, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. The company has $200 million in the bank and no debt.

Trump’s retail investors appear to be ignoring the company’s fundamentals and placing a bet that the former president will ensure it succeeds, according to analysts and other experts.

They “are thinking he’ll figure something out, he’s always done that,” said John Rekenthaler, vice president of research for Morningstar Research Services. “And it’s true, he always lands on his feet. But the people who invest with him, they don’t always land on their feet.”

Financial advisers and experts are less sanguine about its prospects. They noted that Trump Media’s financial filings have provided no indication it has the kind of strategy that will lead to profits. They also pointed out that the company’s leadership has little experience running a social media outfit.

The company’s executives and board members include Nunes, a former congressman and Trump ally, and one of the former president’s sons, Donald Trump Jr. Among the others are Kash Patel, who was a top national security adviser and official in the Trump administration, and Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative under Trump.

It is a recipe for a corporate crash, experts said.

“Sooner or later it’s going to get messy,” said University of Michigan law professor Albert Choi. He said it is most likely that Trump Media will run out of cash and be forced to liquidate or file for bankruptcy.

The company has a unique risk, experts said: Trump is not known for being disciplined, especially on social media. Because he is a controlling shareholder, he could be fined or penalized for making false statements about the company. This happened to Elon Musk, who was charged with securities fraud in 2018 after he hinted he would be taking Twitter private. Musk settled with the SEC for a $40 million fine and was forced to step down as Tesla’s chairman.

SEC filings also warn that Trump is facing legal trouble that could jeopardize the company’s stability. A New York judge issued a $454 million civil fraud judgment against Trump after concluding that he and others had deceived banks and insurers by exaggerating their wealth on financial statements.

Trump has appealed the fine and posted a $175 million bond while the case is considered.

Trump, meanwhile, is on trial in New York on charges of falsifying business records as part of a scheme to squelch negative stories about him during his 2016 presidential campaign. He has been indicted twice in federal court — once on charges of trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election and the other on accusations he kept classified documents after leaving the White House. He has also been indicted in Georgia on charges of racketeering and conspiracy with the aim of potential 2020 election interference.

Trump Media has also been targeted in lawsuits. In February, Trump Media co-founders Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss, who met Trump when they were on his reality show “The Apprentice,” sued the company to prevent Trump from diluting their 8.6% stake by increasing authorized shares from 120 million to 1 billion. Trump sued right back, arguing that they should forfeit their stock in the company because they set it up improperly.

This is not the first time Trump has led a publicly traded company. In 1995, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the same ticker symbol of DJT. The company lost money for the next nine years and declared bankruptcy.

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Associated Press writers Brian Slodysko and Alan Suderman contributed to this report.

An Arizona grand jury’s indictment of 18 people who either posed as or helped organize a slate of electors falsely claiming that former President Donald Trump won the state in 2020 could help shape the landscape of challenges to the 2024 election.

The indictment issued Wednesday is part of a campaign to deter a repeat of 2020, when Trump and his allies falsely claimed he won swing states, filed dozens of lawsuits unsuccessfully challenging Biden’s victory and tried to get Congress to let Trump stay in power. That campaign culminated with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The penalties piling up for that push include lawyers who helped Trump being disbarred, censured and sanctioned. Added to that are multimillion-dollar libelpenalties and now criminal charges in four states for spreading lies about the 2020 election. That effort included submitting so-called fake electors contending that Trump had actually won the states and that Congress should recognize them rather than the electors won by President Joe Biden.

“People are going to have to think twice about doing things to undermine the election,” said David Becker, founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and coauthor of “The Big Truth,” about the danger of 2020 election deniers. “The deterrent effect is real.”

Trump himself faces federal charges for his effort to overturn the election as well as a separate indictment out of Fulton County, Georgia. On Thursday, the Supreme Court heard arguments over Trump’s contention that he should be immune from prosecution for his acts while serving as president. Though justices seemed poised to reject that contention, several signaled reservations over the federal charges that could delay the case until after the November election.

Justin Levitt, a former Department of Justice official who also worked in the Biden White House, noted the differing pace of consequences for Trump and for those whom he called the former president’s “lieutenants” in the challenges to the 2020 election results.

“One of the things that fosters deterrence most is swiftness and severity,” Levitt said. “Though the wheels of justice are turning slow, they are turning, and we are seeing consequences for the lieutenants in this conspiracy.”

Some of the broadest consequences may have come in the indictments of so-called fake electors in Arizona, Michigan and Nevada, all states with Democratic attorneys general. Several people targeted in the wide-ranging Georgia indictment also were charged relating to a fake elector scheme.

The 18 people indicted in Arizona include Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Christina Bobb, a lawyer who was recently appointed the Republican National Committee’s head of “Election Integrity.” Trump was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator.

“This is not some kind of a game. This is not some sort of fantasy football league,” Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic Secretary of State, said in an interview Thursday. “This is real life, and bad acts have real potential bad consequences.”

The breadth of the Arizona indictment, announced by state Attorney General Kris Mayes, led to sharp criticism from some out-of-state defendants.

“The phenomenon of partisan ‘lawfare’ grows more troubling by the day,” said Charles Burnham, an attorney for attorney John Eastman, who advised Trump on his 2020 legal fight and faces possible disbarment in California and more criminal charges in Georgia.

It comes after indictments of the 16 alleged Trump electors who claimed their candidate won Michigan, the six in Nevada and three in the Fulton County case in Georgia.

In a speech in Georgia earlier this year, Eastman noted how the phony Trump electors in Wisconsin had to agree that Biden won the state and promise not to serve as electors in 2024 as a condition of settling a civil lawsuit brought by two Democrats. He portrayed it as part of a sweeping effort to squelch dissent over the 2020 election — even though reviews, recounts and audits in all the swing states where Trump disputed his loss all affirmed Biden’s win.

“The government has spoken, so if you don’t bend the knee we’re going to destroy you,” Eastman said.

Prosecutors have a different take on their cases.

“As we prepare for the 2024 presidential election, today’s charges are the first in an ongoing effort to not just seek justice for the wrongs of the past, but to ensure they do not happen again,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said in a statement last year when her office filed its charges.

Beyond the indictments, Congress took a significant step in cutting off further avenues for electoral mischief. A bipartisan bill signed by Biden in 2022 makes it harder to submit rival slates of electors, requiring that only ones certified by a state’s governor go to Congress for certification.

“The possibility of alternate electors has narrowed incredibly,” said Edward B. Foley, a law professor at The Ohio State University.

The 65 Project is an organization formed to pursue legal discipline against lawyers involved in filing the dozens of unsuccessful lawsuits challenging Trump’s 2020 loss. Michael Teter, the group’s managing director, said the threat already has had an impact by lessening enthusiasm among election deniers for litigation challenging their many losses at the polls in 2022.

“I don’t think we’ll see the same sort of effort to use the legal system in 2024,” Teter said, adding that he expects Trump to challenge the results should he lose at the polls. “But I don’t think they’ll use the court system in the same way and I don’t think they’ll use a scheme like the false elector one.

“I don’t think a lot of people will want to sign up for that again.”

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Associated Press writers Joey Cappelletti in Lansing, Michigan, and Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix contributed to this report.

NEW YORK (AP) — After prosecutors’ lead witness painted a tawdry portrait of “catch and kill” tabloid schemes, defense lawyers in Donald Trump’s hush money trial are poised Friday to dig into an account of the former publisher of the National Enquirer and his efforts to protect Trump from negative stories during the 2016 election.

David Pecker will return to the witness stand for the fourth day as defense attorneys try to poke holes in the testimony of the former National Enquirer publisher, who has described helping bury embarrassing stories Trump feared could hurt his campaign.

It will cap a consequential week in the criminal cases the former president is facing as he vies to reclaim the White House in November.

At the same time jurors listened to testimony in Manhattan, the Supreme Court on Thursday signaled it was likely to reject Trump’s sweeping claims that he is immune from prosecution in his 2020 election interference case in Washington. But the conservative-majority high court seemed inclined to limit when former presidents could be prosecuted — a ruling that could benefit Trump by delaying that trial, potentially until after the November election.

In New York — the first of Trump’s four criminal cases to go to trial — the presumptive Republican presidential nominee faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with hush money payments meant to stifle negative stories from surfacing in the final days of the 2016 campaign.

Prosecutors allege that Trump sought to illegally influence the 2016 race through a practice known in the tabloid industry as “catch-and-kill” — catching a potentially damaging story by buying the rights to it and then killing it through agreements that prevent the paid person from telling the story to anyone else.

Over several days on the witness stand, Pecker has described how he and the tabloid parlayed rumor-mongering into splashy stories that smeared Trump’s opponents and, just as crucially, leveraged his connections to suppress seamy stories about Trump.

The charges center on $130,000 in payments that Trump’s company made to his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen. He paid that sum on Trump’s behalf to keep porn actor Stormy Daniels from going public with her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier. Trump has denied the encounter ever happened.

During the cross-examination that began Thursday, defense attorney Emil Bove grilled Pecker on his recollection of specific dates and meanings. He appeared to be laying further groundwork for the defense’s argument that any dealings Trump had Pecker were intended to protect himself, his reputation and his family — not his campaign.

Pecker recalled how an editor told him that Daniels’ representative was trying to sell her story and that the tabloid could acquire it for $120,000. Pecker said he put his foot down, noting that the tabloid was already $180,000 in the hole for Trump-related catch-and-kill transactions. But, Pecker said, he told Cohen to buy the story himself to prevent Daniels from going public with her claim.

“I said to Michael, ‘My suggestion to you is that you should buy the story, and you should take it off the market because if you don’t and it gets out, I believe the boss will be very angry with you.’”

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Richer reported from Washington.

“Divest from death” read the bubble letters written in chalk on the sidewalk on Tuesday outside of The New School in New York City.

The slogan articulates one of the demands of the antiwar protests on campuses which call on colleges or universities to divest their endowments from companies profiting from the Israel-Hamas war.

Campaigns to pressure universities to divest for political or ethical reasons go back decades, at least to the 1970s when students pressured schools to withdraw from investments that benefited South Africa under apartheid rule. More recently, in the early aughts, schools made rules barring investments in things like alcohol, tobacco and gambling, according to a report from the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) and Commonfund.

By the beginning of the next decade, a sizeable minority of endowments were including some environmental, social and governance criteria in their portfolios, which expands the factors considered in weighing the value of an investment beyond profits and losses.

College and university endowments hold hundreds of billions of dollars in assets, for example, with Columbia University’s reaching $13.6 billion in 2023. Now, campus protests are bringing attention to who controls university endowments and how decisions about those investments get made.

Endowments are the holdings and investments that institutions of higher education, foundations and some nonprofits manage as a kind of perpetual savings account. Many use the financial returns generated by those assets each year to help fund the institution’s ongoing work. Donors often give to institution’s endowments to ensure it will have resources well into the future.

Many schools from the largest to the smallest work with outside investment managers, like investment banks or hedge funds or specialized firms that have access to investing vehicles that aren’t available to retail investors, said Todd Ely, associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver.

“Colleges and universities have fairly limited discretion in the actual specific investments that their endowment funds are going towards because they’ve hired these external experts to make those decisions. And sometimes those decisions are even proprietary,” Ely said, meaning the investors do not publicly share what’s in their portfolio.

Endowments usually are managed by a board of trustees at the university and the purpose of any endowment is agreed upon by the donors, usually to benefit the institution. They don’t “belong” to current students, faculty or alumni but rather to the organization itself.

Georges Dyer, executive director and cofounder of the Intentional Endowments Network, said it can take time and be difficult to identify what exposure a school’s endowment might have to a specific company.

“It’s not as simple as some people think — maybe it’s just selling some stocks at a certain company. That said, I think anything is possible in today’s financial services industry,” Dyer said.

His network helps connect organizations with endowments to learn from each other about how to align their endowments with their mission and to make their investments sustainable and responsible, for example, in the context of climate change. The network also recommends that transparency be one principle of sustainable and mission-driven investing.

The calls for divestment from fossil fuel companies, which started in 2011, make a moral argument but also a financial one, he said, which helps gain the support of the trustees and boards that direct university investments.

“The tie back to the investment, and the financial performance and the investment performance case, is not always very clear,” Dyer said of calls for divestment based on geopolitical issues.

The protesters’ demands also raise questions about what a university’s priorities and responsibilities are, Ely said.

“Are you trying to maximize returns or promote a social or political agenda?” Ely asked. “And for those actually managing the endowments on a day-to-day basis, they are focused on risk and returns until they’re directed otherwise by those with governance authority for the college or university.”

Despite the pressure that student protestors from California to Columbia University in New York City are putting on the leadership of their schools, Dyer of the Intentional Endowments Network, said he has not heard that much from their member schools and institutions about divestment in this context.

Fierce disagreement about support or opposition to the war within campus communities is another reason that schools have likely not taken action. Many on campuses hear calls for divestment from Israel or an end to the war as an attack on Jewish people more broadly or as glossing over the deaths and pain caused by Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, which killed 1,200 people.

Jennie C. Stephens, a professor at Northeastern University, has written a forthcoming book about the movement for climate justice at universities, including calls for divestment from fossil fuels. She said the initial reaction from universities when called on to divest from fossil fuels was also to say that their funds were comingled with other investors, managed by third parties or that they didn’t know what they were invested in. Eventually, though, those schools that committed to divesting from fossil fuels figured out how to do it.

“These elite institutions with big endowments have a lot of power and they concentrate wealth and power through their endowments,” Stephens said. “And they do have control over how that money is invested.”

No. But divestment campaigns have succeeded by using a variety of tactics.

At Pomona College, students voted in February to approve a referendum that included calls for the school to disclose any investments in weapons manufacturers or companies that benefit from what it called the “apartheid” system in Israel and then to divest from those companies. Kouross Esmaeli, a visiting assistant professor of media studies at Pomona College, said school leaders and trustees have told students and professors that they can’t disclose all of their investments.

“’Oh, we can’t disclose this. This is difficult to do. This is impossible to parse out where our investment is,’” Esmaeli said. “All these kinds of excuses about why we can’t have control over our own money as an institution, and no one’s buying it.”

Pomona College spokesperson Mark Kendall said the administration has offered to meet with protestors and provide information about their investment policies and will continue to do so.

“Endowment investing supports our educational mission, including academic excellence and generous financial aid, over the long term,” Kendall said in an emailed statement.

Esmaeli acknowledged that divestment may take time and that the endowment may be complex, but he said the first demand of student protesters and faculty is for the university to commit to divesting from companies that are profiting off of the war. He said the university can start with the ones identified by the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement.

“Different choices can be made and rules can be changed in order to allow us to have an open endowment, where we know where our endowment is going,” he said.

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Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

BEIJING (AP) — The United States and China butted heads over a number of contentious bilateral, regional and global issues as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Friday with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and both men warned of the dangers of misunderstandings and miscalculations.

The meeting, on the final day of Blinken’s second visit to China in the past year, came as talks between the countries have expanded in recent months even as differences have grown and become more serious, raising concerns about the potential for conflict between the world’s two largest economies.

Blinken and Wang each underscored the importance of keeping lines of communication open but they also lamented persistent and deepening divisions that threaten global security. Those divisions were highlighted earlier this week when U.S. President Joe Biden signed a massive foreign aid bill that contains several elements that the Chinese see as problematic.

“Overall, the China-U.S. relationship is beginning to stabilize,” Wang told Blinken. “But at the same time, the negative factors in the relationship are still increasing and building and the relationship is facing all kinds of disruptions.”

“Should China and the United States keep to the right direction of moving forward with stability or return to a downward spiral?” he asked. “This is a major question before our two countries and tests our sincerity and ability.”

Wang also outlined, without being specific, well-known Chinese complaints about U.S. policies and positions on the South China Sea, Taiwan, human rights and China’s right to conduct relations with countries it deems fit.

“China’s legitimate development rights have been unreasonably suppressed and our core interests are facing challenges,” he said, demanding the U.S. refrain from interfering in China’s internal affairs.

Blinken responded by saying that the Biden administration places a premium on U.S.-China dialogue even on issues of dispute. He noted there had been some progress in the past year but suggested that talks would continue to be difficult.

“I look forward to these discussions being very clear, very direct about the areas where we have differences and where the United States stands, and I have no doubt you will do the same on behalf of China,” Blinken told Wang.

“There is no substitute in our judgement for face-to-face diplomacy in order to try to move forward, but also to make sure we’re as clear as possible about the areas where we have differences at the very least to avoid misunderstandings, to avoid miscalculations,” he said.

Blinken arrived in China on Wednesday, visiting Shanghai shortly before Biden signed the $95 billion foreign aid package that has several elements likely to anger Beijing, including $8 billion to counter China’s growing aggressiveness toward Taiwan and in the South China Sea. It also seeks to force TikTok’s China-based parent company to sell the social media platform.

China and the United States are the major players in the Indo-Pacific. Washington has become increasingly alarmed by Beijing’s growing aggressiveness in recent years toward Taiwan and its smaller Southeast Asian neighbors with which it has significant territorial and maritime disputes in the South China Sea.

China has railed against U.S. assistance to Taiwan and immediately condemned the aid as a dangerous provocation. It also strongly opposes efforts to force TikTok’s sale.

The bill also allots $61 billion for Ukraine to defend itself from Russia’s invasion. The Biden administration has complained loudly that Chinese support for Russia’s military-industrial sector has allowed Moscow to subvert western sanctions and ramp up attacks on Ukraine.

U.S. officials have said China’s ties with Russia would be a primary topic of conversation during Blinken’s visit, and just before Friday’s meetings began, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced he would visit China in May.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The University of Southern California’s decision Thursday to cancel its main graduation ceremony, a move that came 10 days after administrators said the student valedictorian who had expressed support for Palestinians would not be allowed to speak, left students and alumni stunned as protests over the Israel-Hamas war continue to spread on campuses nationwide.

“It seems like USC isn’t really listening to their student body,” said Olivia Lee, a 2023 business administration graduate who said she is rethinking whether to recommend the private university to potential students.

Videos of police officers in riot gear facing off, and ultimately arresting, dozens of protesters on campus left her worried about suggesting her alma mater to teenagers who may join similar demonstrations.

“Could that happen to them?” she said.

The protests over the Israel-Hamas conflict pose a tough test for colleges across the country as administrators seek to balance free speech and open debate against pressures over campus safety.

The USC controversy ignited April 15 when officials said the 2024 valedictorian, who has publicly supported Palestinians, could not make a commencement speech, citing nonspecific security concerns for their rare decision. Days later, USC scrapped the keynote speech by filmmaker Jon M. Chu — a 2003 graduate of the university — and said it would not confer honorary degrees.

By this week, the student protests ignited at Columbia University inspired similar on the Los Angeles campus, with students calling on the university to divest from companies that do business with Israel or support its ongoing military action in Gaza. Ninety demonstrators were arrested Wednesday night. Less than a day later, the university announced it would cancel the May 10 main graduation event — a ceremony that typically draws 65,000 people to the Los Angeles campus — would not happen this year.

University officials said in a statement they would not be able to process tens of thousands of guests “with the new safety measures in place this year.”

“We understand that this is disappointing; however, we are adding many new activities and celebrations to make this commencement academically meaningful, memorable, and uniquely USC,” the statement said.

Taylor Contarino, a senior who will graduate with a journalism undergraduate degree next month, said there was “disheartening energy” on campus Thursday morning even before the university made its announcement. The school limited campus access to people with USC identification in the wake of Wednesday’s protests.

“I couldn’t help but feel like there was an elephant in the room,” she said. “We’re all walking past each other, showing our IDs to security guards.”

Contarino has wanted to attend USC since she was 13 or 14 years old, and she had planned to attend the main graduation event. But she said her work to cover the protests for Annenberg Media, a student-led news outlet, has reminded her of the importance of her major to witness and record history. She plans to return to USC in the fall for her master’s degree in journalism.

Lee, the 2023 graduate, said she initially didn’t want to wake up early for the main commencement event last year, but her friends convinced her to go. While students walk across the stage for their diplomas at the smaller school ceremonies — which are still scheduled to occur — she said the big ceremony was worth attending.

“It just made the day of graduation that much more special,” she said. “If I was to graduate college again, I would go.”

Lee agrees with the protesters’ call for USC to stop investing money in businesses that support Israel.

“We pay so much to be there,” she said. “I think that students have a right to know where their tuition money goes and is invested in.”

Joshua Adams planned to return to USC’s campus next year with his family to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of receiving his master’s degree in journalism. He called the university’s recent decisions to limit free speech “upsetting” and said he hoped alumni voices would help sway administrators.

Colleges and universities nationwide, including USC, tout themselves as champions of free speech, he said, but at the same time often shy away from defending pro-Palestinian views.

“We’re at an inflection point where students won’t accept that,” Adams said.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — The execution date for a man convicted in the 1998 fatal shooting of a delivery driver who had stopped at an ATM has been set for July 18, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey announced Thursday.

Keith Edmund Gavin, 64, will be put to death by lethal injection, which is the state’s primary execution method.

The announcement came a week after the Alabama Supreme Court authorized the execution to go forward.

Gavin was convicted of capital murder for the shooting death of William Clinton Clayton, Jr. in Cherokee County in northeast Alabama. Clayton, a delivery driver, was shot when he stopped at an ATM to get money to take his wife to dinner, prosecutors said. A jury voted 10-2 in favor of the death penalty for Gavin. The trial court accepted the jury’s recommendation and sentenced him to death.

Gavin’s attorney had asked the court not to authorize the execution, arguing the state was moving Gavin to the “front of the line” ahead of other inmates who had exhausted their appeals.

The state is also scheduled to execute Jamie Mills by lethal injection on May 30. Mills was convicted for the 2004 slaying of a couple during a robbery.

Alabama in January carried out the nation’s first execution using nitrogen gas, but lethal injection remains the state’s primary execution method.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. is expected to announce Friday that it will provide about $6 billion in long-term military aid to Ukraine, U.S. officials said, adding that it will include much sought after munitions for Patriot air defense systems.

The officials said the aid package will be funded through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which pays for longer-term contracts with the defense industry and means that it could take many months or years for the weapons to arrive. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details not yet made public.

The new funding — the largest tranche of USAI aid sent to date – will include a wide array of munitions for air defense, such as the National Advanced Surface to Air Missile System (NASAM) and the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), as well as the Patriot munitions, Switchblade and Puma drones, counter drone systems and artillery.

The announcement is expected to come as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin convenes a virtual meeting on Friday of defense officials from Europe and around the world to discuss international aid for Ukraine. The gathering — created by Austin and known as the Ukraine Defense Contact Group — has been meeting about monthly for the past two years, and is the primary forum for weapons contributions to Kyiv for the war.

It follows the White House decision earlier this week to approve the delivery of $1 billion in weapons and equipment to Ukraine. Those weapons include a variety of ammunition, including air defense munitions and large amounts of artillery rounds that are much in demand by Ukrainian forces, as well as armored vehicles and other weapons.

That aid, however, will get to Ukraine quickly because it is being pulled off Pentagon shelves, including in warehouses in Europe.

The large back-to-back packages are the result of the new infusion of about $61 billion in funding for Ukraine that was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden on Wednesday. And they provide weapons Kyiv desperately needs to stall gains being made by Russian forces in the war.

Bitterly divided members of Congress deadlocked over the funding for months, forcing House Speaker Mike Johnson to cobble together a bipartisan coalition to pass the bill. The $95 billion foreign aid package, which also included billions for Israel and Taiwan, passed the House on Saturday, and the Senate approved it Tuesday.

Senior U.S. officials have described dire battlefield conditions in Ukraine, as troops run low on munitions and Russian forces make gains.

Since Russia’s February 2022 invasion, the U.S. has sent more than $44 billion worth of weapons, maintenance, training and spare parts to Ukraine.

Among the weapons provided to Ukraine were Abrams M1A1 battle tanks. But Ukraine has now sidelined them in part because Russian drone warfare has made it too difficult for them to operate without detection or coming under attack, two U.S. military officials told The Associated Press.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Ukraine has sidelined U.S.-provided Abrams M1A1 battle tanks for now in its fight against Russia, in part because Russian drone warfare has made it too difficult for them to operate without detection or coming under attack, two U.S. military officials told The Associated Press.

The U.S. agreed to send 31 Abrams to Ukraine in January 2023 after an aggressive monthslong campaign by Kyiv arguing that the tanks, which cost about $10 million apiece, were vital to its ability to breach Russian lines.

But the battlefield has changed substantially since then, notably by the ubiquitous use of Russian surveillance drones and hunter-killer drones. Those weapons have made it more difficult for Ukraine to protect the tanks when they are quickly detected and hunted by Russian drones or rounds.

Five of the 31 tanks have already been lost to Russian attacks.

The proliferation of drones on the Ukrainian battlefield means “there isn’t open ground that you can just drive across without fear of detection,” a senior defense official told reporters Thursday.

The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide an update on U.S. weapons support for Ukraine before Friday’s Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting.

For now, the tanks have been moved from the front lines, and the U.S. will work with the Ukrainians to reset tactics, said Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman Adm. Christopher Grady and a third defense official who confirmed the move on the condition of anonymity.

“When you think about the way the fight has evolved, massed armor in an environment where unmanned aerial systems are ubiquitous can be at risk,” Grady told the AP in an interview this week, adding that tanks are still important.

“Now, there is a way to do it,” he said. “We’ll work with our Ukrainian partners, and other partners on the ground, to help them think through how they might use that, in that kind of changed environment now, where everything is seen immediately.”

News of the sidelined tanks comes as the U.S. marks the two-year anniversary of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a coalition of about 50 countries that meets monthly to assess Ukraine’s battlefield needs and identify where to find needed ammunition, weapons or maintenance to keep Ukraine’s troops equipped.

Recent aid packages, including the $1 billion military assistance package signed by President Joe Biden on Wednesday, also reflect a wider reset for Ukrainian forces in the evolving fight.

The U.S. is expected to announce Friday that it also will provide about $6 billion in long-term military aid to Ukraine, U.S. officials said, adding that it will include much sought after munitions for Patriot air defense systems. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details not yet made public.

The $1 billion package emphasized counter-drone capabilities, including .50-caliber rounds specifically modified to counter drone systems; additional air defenses and ammunition; and a host of alternative, and cheaper, vehicles, including Humvees, Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles and Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles.

The U.S. also confirmed for the first time that it is providing long-range ballistic missiles known as ATACMs, which allow Ukraine to strike deep into Russian-occupied areas without having to advance and be further exposed to either drone detection or fortified Russian defenses.

While drones are a significant threat, the Ukrainians also have not adopted tactics that could have made the tanks more effective, one of the U.S. defense officials said.

After announcing it would provide Ukraine the Abrams tanks in January 2023, the U.S. began training Ukrainians at Grafenwoehr Army base in Germany that spring on how to maintain and operate them. They also taught the Ukrainians how to use them in combined arms warfare — where the tanks operate as part of a system of advancing armored forces, coordinating movements with overhead offensive fires, infantry troops and air assets.

As the spring progressed and Ukraine’s highly anticipated counteroffensive stalled, shifting from tank training in Germany to getting Abrams on the battlefield was seen as an imperative to breach fortified Russian lines. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced on his Telegram channel in September that the Abrams had arrived in Ukraine.

Since then, however, Ukraine has only employed them in a limited fashion and has not made combined arms warfare part of its operations, the defense official said.

During its recent withdrawal from Avdiivka, a city in eastern Ukraine that was the focus of intense fighting for months, several tanks were lost to Russian attacks, the official said.

A long delay by Congress in passing new funding for Ukraine meant its forces had to ration ammunition, and in some cases they were only able to shoot back once for every five or more times they were targeted by Russian forces.

In Avdiivka, Ukrainian forces were badly outgunned and fighting back against Russian glide bombs and hunter-killer drones with whatever ammunition they had left.