President Joe Biden has won enough delegates to clinch the 2024 Democratic nomination

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden, who took office aiming to steady a nation convulsed by the coronavirus pandemic and the Jan. 6 insurrection, clinched a second straight Democratic nomination Tuesday and set up an all-but-certain rematch with the predecessor he blames for destabilizing the country.

Biden became his party's presumptive nominee when he won enough delegates in Georgia. That pushed Biden's count past 1,968 for a majority of delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this August, where his nomination will be made official. Former President Donald Trump is expected to clinch the Republican nomination shortly.

Biden, who mounted his first bid for president 37 years ago, did not face any serious Democratic challengers to his run for reelection at age 81. That’s despite facing low approval ratings and a lack of voter enthusiasm for his presidency — driven in part by his age.

Just 38% of U.S. adults approve of how Biden is handling his job as president while 61% disapprove, according to a recent survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Biden and his allies are betting that over a bruising seven-and-a-half-month general election, his Democratic base and independent voters fearful of a second Trump presidency will stand with him despite their misgivings. Their strategy to constantly highlight Trump's perceived shortcomings — combined with Trump's plan to attack Biden in brutally personal terms — sets up an spiritless campaign that many Americans said they didn't want but will have to decide in November anyway.

___

How Trump could secure the Republican presidential nomination in Tuesday's contests

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump stands on the brink of unofficially securing the Republican presidential nomination for a third time after winning primaries Tuesday in Georgia and Mississippi and with additional votes being cast in Washington and Hawaii. He’ll need about eight out of every 10 delegates available across all four states to cross the delegate threshold. Otherwise, he’ll have to wait up to a week before he can once again claim the title of presumptive nominee.

The former president’s near-clean sweep of last week's Super Tuesday contests, as well as his win in American Samoa’s caucuses, put him just 126 delegates shy of the 1,215 needed to clinch the nomination heading into Tuesday's contests.

Trump needs about 78% of the 161 delegates in Tuesday’s elections, a reasonable goal considering he won 93% of last week’s massive Super Tuesday delegate haul.

With former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley out of the race, there’s little doubt Trump will win most or possibly all the delegates up for grabs on Tuesday. But the exact timing of when he reaches that milestone and which state puts him over the top would depend on how dominant Trump is in Tuesday’s contests and possibly how quickly elections officials and caucuses organizers provide vote result updates.

One possible source of delay in awarding delegates to candidates may be in determining vote results at the congressional district level.

___

Biden clinches nomination and Trump is getting closer, ushering in general election

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Bidenclinched the Democratic presidential nomination with decisive victories in Georgia and Mississippi on Tuesday, overcoming concerns about his leadership from within his own party as the 2024 presidential contest shifts to a general election rematch that many voters do not want.

Donald Trump, too, was on pace to secure his party’s nomination despite serious political and practical liabilities of his own. The Republican former president, a defendant in four felony cases, also won Georgia and Mississippi but was just shy of the threshold needed to clinch the GOP nomination with votes still being collected across Washington state and Hawaii.

Overall, Tuesday marked a crystalizing moment for a nation uneasy with its choices in 2024.

There is no longer any doubt that the fall general election will feature a rematch between two flawed and unpopular presidents. And that rematch — the first featuring two U.S. presidents since 1912 — will almost certainly deepen the nation’s searing political and cultural divides over the eight-month grind that lies ahead.

In a statement, Biden celebrated the nomination while casting Trump as a serious threat to democracy.

___

Why AP is calling Biden 'presumptive nominee' and Trump is closing in on the title

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden won enough delegates on Tuesday to be called Democrats' “presumptive nominee,” while former President Donald Trump was closing in on the GOP title.

While Biden and Trump have been the last remaining major candidates for their parties' 2024 presidential nominations, The Associated Press only uses the designation “presumptive nominee” once a candidate has captured the number of delegates needed to win a majority vote at the national party conventions this summer.

Biden reached that point on Tuesday, after he won the Georgia primary and enough of the state's delegates to put him above the 1,968 needed to lock up the nomination.

Trump was getting close to reaching the 1,215 delegates needed for the Republican presidential nomination, with contests being held in Georgia, Mississippi, Washington and Hawaii on Tuesday.

A presidential candidate doesn’t officially become the Republican or Democratic nominee until winning the vote on the convention floor. It hasn’t always been this way. Decades ago, presidential candidates might have run in primaries and caucuses, but the contests were mostly ornamental in nature, and the eventual nominees weren’t known until delegates and party bosses hashed things out themselves at the conventions.

___

Standout moments from the hearing on the Biden classified documents probe by special counsel Hur

WASHINGTON (AP) — It's a now-familiar ritual in Washington: a federal prosecutor being summoned to Capitol Hill to discuss the findings of a politically explosive investigation.

Tuesday's hearing with special counsel Robert Hur, who investigated President Joe Biden's handling of classified information, broke little new legal or political ground. But it delivered plenty of talk about the president's memory — faulty, in Hur's assessment — about the laws surrounding classified material and, of course, lots of discussion about Donald Trump.

Here are a half dozen notable moments from Hur's testimony, the questioning surrounding it and the newly released transcript of Biden's fall interview with the investigator:

____

Democrats sought to use Hur’s Republican bona fides to paint him as a political partisan who set out to smear Biden to hurt the president's reelection campaign.

___

In Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, the lure of moving to the city grows even stronger amid climate shocks

CAN THO, Vietnam (AP) — Dao Bao Tran and her brother Do Hoang Trung, 11-year-old twins growing up on a rickety houseboat in the Mekong Delta, have dreams. Tran loves K-pop, watches videos at night to learn Korean and would love to visit Seoul. Trung wants to be a singer.

But their hopes are “unrealistic,” said Trung: “I know I’ll end up going to the city to try and make a living."

Such dreams have a way of dissipating in southern Vietnam's Mekong, one of the most climate-vulnerable regions in the world.

For the poor, the future is especially uncertain. A U.N. climate change report in 2022 warned there will be more floods in the wet season and drought in the dry season. Unsustainable extraction of groundwater and sand for construction have made matters worse. And with rising seas gnawing away at its southern edge and dams hemming the Mekong River upstream, farming in the fertile delta is getting harder. Its contribution to Vietnam’s GDP has dropped from 27% in 1990 to less than 18% in 2019, according to a 2020 report by the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

The call of the city, where factory jobs promise better salaries, is often too hard to resist for the region’s 17 million inhabitants.

___

AP PHOTOS: Muslims around the world observe holy month of Ramadan with prayer, fasting

Muslims around the world are observing the holy month of Ramadan, with worship, charity, dawn-to-dusk fasting and nightly feasts.

Muslims gather for prayers inside mosques in Indonesia, Kashmir, Pakistan and Turkey. They gather outside at New York's Times Square and in the Gaza Strip.

Messages recognizing Ramadan light the sky in Turkey and Germany.

Volunteers distribute food to people breaking their fast in Pakistan. In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Muslims eat a sunset meal at a mosque.

In Rafah in southern Gaza, Palestinians buy food for a pre-dawn meal. Ramadan this year comes as the Middle East remains inflamed by the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, and many in the enclave are going hungry. Even where food is available, there is little beyond canned goods, and prices are high.

___

Haiti is preparing itself for new leadership. Gangs want a seat at the table

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Politicians across Haiti are scrambling for power after Prime Minister Ariel Henry announced Tuesday that he would resign once a transitional presidential council is created.

But elbowing their way into the race are powerful gangs that control 80% of Haiti’s capital and demand a say in the future of the troubled country under siege.

No one mentioned the armed groups as Caribbean leaders congratulated themselves late Monday for setting Haiti on a new political path, and experts warned that nothing will change unless gangs become part of the conversation.

“Even if you have a different kind of government, the reality is that you need to talk to the gangs,” said Robert Fatton, a Haitian politics expert at the University of Virginia, noting that gangs largely control the capital. “If they have that supremacy, and there is no countervailing force, it’s no longer a question if you want them at the table. They may just take the table.”

Gangs have deep ties to Haiti’s political and economic elite, but they have become more independent, financing their operations with kidnapping ransoms to buy smuggled weapons, including belt-fed machine guns and .50-caliber sniper rifles that allow them to overpower underfunded police.

___

An aid ship is sailing to Gaza, where hundreds of thousands face starvation 5 months into war

RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — An aid ship loaded with some 200 tons of food set sail for Gaza on Tuesday in a pilot program for the opening of a sea corridor to the territory, where the 5-month Israel-Hamas war has driven hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to the brink of starvation.

The push to get food in by sea — along with a recent campaign of airdrops into isolated northern Gaza — highlighted the international community's frustration with the growing humanitarian crisis and its inability to get aid in by road.

The food on the aid ship was collected by World Central Kitchen, the charity founded by celebrity chef José Andrés, and is being transported by the Spanish aid group Open Arms. The ship departed from the eastern Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus and is expected to arrive in Gaza in two to three days.

The United States separately plans to construct a sea bridge near Gaza in order to deliver aid, but it will likely be several weeks before it is operational. President Joe Biden's administration has provided crucial military aid for Israel while urging it to facilitate more humanitarian access.

The war, triggered by Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Israel, has killed over 31,000 Palestinians and driven most of Gaza's 2.3 million people from their homes. A quarter of Gaza's population is starving, according to the United Nations, because they cannot find enough food or afford it at vastly inflated prices.

___

Delete a background? Easy. Smooth out a face? Seamless. Digital photo manipulation is now mainstream

NEW YORK (AP) — It's been a common refrain when seeking proof that someone's story or some event actually took place: “Pics, or it didn't happen.”

But in a world where the spread of technology makes photo manipulation as easy as a tap on your phone, the idea that a visual image is an absolute truth is as outdated as the daguerreotype. And a photo can sometimes raise as many questions as it was meant to answer.

That was seen in recent days when controversy descended upon an image of Kate, Princess of Wales, and her three children. News agencies including The Associated Press published, then retracted, the image given out by Kensington Palace over concerns it had been manipulated, leading to Kate saying on social media that she occasionally “experimented” with photo editing.

In that, she's hardly alone.

From something that was time-consuming and required a great deal of technical expertise in the days of actual film and darkrooms, digital editing has become something practically anyone can do, from adding filters to cropping images and much more. Apps abound, offering the easiest of experiences in creating and retouching photos and videos which can then be easily transmitted online and through social media.

News from © The Associated Press, 2024