NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump is asking the judge in his New York hush money criminal case to delay his sentencing until after the November presidential election.

In a letter made public Thursday, a lawyer for the former president and current Republican nominee suggested that sentencing Trump as scheduled on Sept. 18 — about seven weeks before Election Day — would amount to election interference.

Trump lawyer Todd Blanche wrote that a delay would also allow Trump time to weigh next steps after the trial judge, Juan M. Merchan, is expected to rule Sept. 16 on the defense’s request to overturn the verdict and dismiss the case because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s July presidential immunity ruling.

“There is no basis for continuing to rush,” Blanche wrote.

Blanche sent the letter to Merchan on Wednesday after the judge rejected the defense’s latest request that he step aside from the case.

In the letter, Blanche reiterated the defense argument that the judge has a conflict of interest because his daughter works as a Democratic political consultant, including for Kamala Harris when she sought the 2020 presidential nomination. Harris is now running against Trump.

By adjourning the sentencing until after that election, “the Court would reduce, even if not eliminate, issues regarding the integrity of any future proceedings,” Blanche wrote.

Election Day is Nov. 5, but many states allow voters to cast ballots early, with some set to start the process just a few days before or after Trump’s scheduled Sept. 18 sentencing date.

Merchan, who has said he is confident in his ability to remain fair and impartial, did not immediately rule on the delay request.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted Trump’s case, declined to comment.

Trump was convicted in May of falsifying his business’ records to conceal a 2016 deal to pay off porn actor Stormy Daniels to stay quiet about her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with him. Prosecutors cast the payout as part of a Trump-driven effort to keep voters from hearing salacious stories about him during his first campaign.

Trump says all the stories were false, the business records were not and the case was a political maneuver meant to damage his current campaign. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is a Democrat.

Trump’s defense argued that the payments were indeed for legal work and so were correctly categorized.

Falsifying business records is punishable by up to four years behind bars. Other potential sentences include probation, a fine or a conditional discharge which would require Trump to stay out of trouble to avoid additional punishment. Trump is the first ex-president convicted of a crime.

Trump has pledged to appeal, but that cannot happen until he is sentenced.

In a previous letter, Merchan set Sept. 18 for “the imposition of sentence or other proceedings as appropriate.”

Blanche argued in his letter seeking a delay that the quick turnaround from the scheduled immunity ruling on Sept. 16 to sentencing two days later is unfair to Trump.

To prepare for sentencing, Blanche argued, prosecutors will be submitting their punishment recommendation while Merchan is still weighing whether to dismiss the case on immunity grounds. If Merchan rules against Trump on the dismissal request, he will need “adequate time to assess and pursue state and federal appellate options,” Blanche said.

The Supreme Court’s immunity decision reins in prosecutions of ex-presidents for official acts and restricts prosecutors in pointing to official acts as evidence that a president’s unofficial actions were illegal. Trump’s lawyers argue that in light of the ruling, jurors in the hush money case should not have heard such evidence as former White House staffers describing how the then-president reacted to news coverage of the Daniels deal.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Authorities have arrested at least one person in connection with Matthew Perry’s death from an accidental ketamine overdose last year, a law enforcement official tells The Associated Press.

The official was not authorized to discuss details of the ongoing investigation and spoke to AP on condition of anonymity. Authorities have scheduled a news conference in Los Angeles to announce details in the case later Thursday morning.

Los Angeles police said in May that they were working with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service with a probe into why the 54-year-old had so much of the surgical anesthetic in his system.

An assistant found Perry face down in his hot tub on Oct. 28, and paramedics who were called immediately declared him dead.

His autopsy, released in December, found that the amount of ketamine in his blood was in the range used for general anesthesia during surgery.

The decades-old drug has seen a huge surge in use in recent years as a treatment for depression, anxiety and pain. People close to Perry told coroner’s investigators that he was undergoing ketamine infusion therapy.

But the medical examiner said Perry’s last treatment 1 1/2 weeks earlier wouldn’t explain the levels of ketamine in his blood. The drug is typically metabolized in a matter of hours. At least two doctors were treating Perry, a psychiatrist and an anesthesiologist who served as his primary care physician, the medical examiner’s report said. No illicit drugs or paraphernalia were found at his house.

Ketamine was listed as the primary cause of death, which was ruled an accident with no foul play suspected, the report said. Drowning and other medical issues were contributing factors, the coroner said.

Perry had years of struggles with addiction dating back to his time on “Friends,” when he became one of the biggest television stars of his generation as Chandler Bing alongside Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004 on NBC’s megahit sitcom.

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Balsamo reported from New York.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration said Thursday that drug price negotiations will knock hundreds of dollars — in some cases thousands — off the list prices of 10 of Medicare’s most popular and costliest drugs.

The discounts, agreed to after months of negotiations with drug manufacturers, range between 38% and 79%. That is the medication’s cost before any discounts or rebates are applied, but not what the price people actually pay when filling their prescriptions.

Medicare spent $50 billion covering the drugs last year and taxpayers are expected to save $6 billion on the new prices, which do not go into effect until 2026. Older adults could save as much as $1.5 billion in total on their medications in out-of-pocket costs. Administration officials released few details about how they arrived at those calculations.

The newly negotiated prices will impact the price of drugs used by millions of older Americans to help manage diabetes, blood cancers and prevent heart failure or blood clots. The drugs include the blood thinners Xarelto and Eliquis and diabetes drugs Jardiance and Januvia.

It’s a landmark deal for the Medicare program, which provides health care coverage for more than 67 million older and disabled Americans. For decades, the federal government had been barred from bartering with pharmaceutical companies over the price of their drugs, even though it’s a routine process for private insurers.

“This meant that drug companies could basically charge whatever they want for life-saving treatments people rely on, and all Americans paid the price,” White House adviser Neera Tanden told reporters in a Wednesday night call.

The drug deals will become a focal point for Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, especially since she cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the law. She will join President Joe Biden Thursday to announce the drug prices, their first joint speaking appearance since she replaced him at the top of the Democratic ticket, as they both struggle to convince voters that costs will trend down after years of above-normal inflation. Harris is set to unveil part of her economic agenda on Friday in North Carolina, where she was aiming to roll out other ways she plans to help cut costs and boost incomes for the middle class.

The pair last appeared publicly together to welcome back to the U.S. Americans detained in Russia who were freed as part of a massive prisoner swap earlier this month.

Powerful drug companies unsuccessfully tried to file lawsuits to stop the negotiations, which became law in 2022, when a Democratic-controlled Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), overhauling several Medicare prescription drug regulations. But executives of those companies have also hinted in recent weeks during earnings calls that they don’t expect the negotiations to impact their bottom line.

Pharmaceutical officials blasted the news from the White House, saying it will spread health care costs to taxpayers in other ways, including their Medicare premiums.

“The administration is using the IRA’s price-setting scheme to drive political headlines, but patients will be disappointed when they find out what it means for them,” Steve Ubl, the president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). “The ironically named Inflation Reduction Act is a bad deal being forced on American patients: higher costs, more frustrating insurance denials and fewer treatments and cures for our loved ones.”

Next year, the Department of Health and Human Services can select another 15 drugs for price negotiations.

Today in history:

On Aug. 15, 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair opened in upstate New York; more than 460,000 people attended the three-day festival, which would become a watershed event in American music and culture.

Also on this date:

In 1057, Macbeth, King of Scots, was killed in battle by Malcolm, the eldest son of King Duncan, whom Macbeth had slain.

In 1914, the Panama Canal officially opened as the SS Ancon crossed the just-completed waterway between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

In 1935, humorist Will Rogers and aviator Wiley Post were killed when their airplane crashed near Point Barrow in the Alaska Territory.

In 1947, India gained independence after nearly 200 years of British rule.

In 1961, as workers began constructing a Berlin Wall made of concrete, East German soldier Conrad Schumann leapt to freedom over a tangle of barbed wire.

In 1989, F.W. de Klerk was sworn in as acting president of South Africa, one day after P.W. Botha resigned as the result of a power struggle within the National Party.

In 1998, 29 people were killed by a car bomb that tore apart the center of Omagh (OH’-mah), Northern Ireland; a splinter group calling itself the Real IRA claimed responsibility.

In 2003, bouncing back from the largest blackout in U.S. history, cities from the Midwest to Manhattan restored power to tens of millions of people.

In 2017, President Donald Trump, who’d faced harsh criticism for initially blaming deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia on “many sides,” told reporters that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the confrontation and that groups protesting against the white supremacists were “also very violent.” (In between those statements, at the urging of aides, Trump had offered a more direct condemnation of white supremacists.)

In 2021, the Taliban regained control of the Afghan capital of Kabul after the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country.

Today’s Birthdays:

• Actor Jim Dale is 89.
• Retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is 86.
• U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., is 86.
• Author-journalist Linda Ellerbee is 80.
• Songwriter Jimmy Webb is 78.
• Actor Phyllis Smith is 75.
• Britain’s Princess Anne is 74.
• Actor Tess Harper is 74.
• Actor Zeljko Ivanek (ZEHL’-koh eh-VAHN’-ehk) is 67.
• Celebrity chef Tom Colicchio is 62.
• Film director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (ihn-YAH’-ee-tu) is 61.
• Philanthropist Melinda French Gates is 60.
• Actor Debra Messing is 56.
• Actor Anthony Anderson is 54.
• Actor Ben Affleck is 52.
• Olympic gold medal beach volleyball player Kerri Walsh Jennings is 46.
• Rock singer Joe Jonas (The Jonas Brothers) is 35.
• Actor Jennifer Lawrence is 34.

The plan includes large overlaps with efforts that the Biden administration has pursued for several years to target corporate consolidation and price gouging, including attempts to stoke more competition in the meat industry and the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit this year that seeks to block the merger of two large grocery retailers, Kroger and Albertsons.

It also follows through on what people familiar with Harris’ forthcoming economic agenda said this week would be a centerpiece of her plans: an aggressive rhetorical attempt to shift the blame for high inflation onto corporate America. Polls show that argument resonates strongly with voters, including independent voters who could decide the November election.

Progressive groups have urged President Joe Biden, and now Harris, to fully embrace that argument.

In a release announcing the policy, Harris campaign officials did not detail how a price-gouging ban would be enforced or what current corporate behaviors would be outlawed if it were enacted. They said Harris would work in her first 100 days to put in place a federal ban “setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries.”

The officials also said Harris would authorize the Federal Trade Commission to impose “harsh penalties” on corporations that fix prices. They said that she would direct more resources toward investigating price-gouging in the supply chain for meat and that she would push federal officials to closely scrutinize proposed grocery mergers.

They also said that Harris would unveil plans Friday related to housing costs and prescription drug prices. Many states ban price gouging, but the federal government does not.

Inflation and prices are an obstacle for Harris as she faces off with former President Donald Trump this fall. Price growth soared in the first two years of Biden’s administration. It is falling toward historically normal levels now, though prices remain elevated from where they were three years ago. On Wednesday, the annual inflation rate dipped under 3% for the first time since 2021.

Economists largely blame a mix of factors for the price surge, including snarls in global supply chains related to the pandemic recession and economic stimulus from the Federal Reserve and Congress — including increased federal spending and tax cuts approved first by Trump, then Biden.

Over the past year, as grocery prices in particular have dragged on Biden’s approval rating, progressive groups urged him to blame something else for high prices: powerful corporations, whose profits soared during the pandemic. Biden has partly complied. He has gone after meatpacking companies and oil companies over high prices. He admonished companies regarding so-called shrinkflation — reducing the size of a product, like a bag of chips or a candy bar, while keeping the price the same or even raising it.

An analysis this year by the White House Council of Economic Advisers found that corporate consolidation had contributed to recent elevated grocery prices but that corporate factors did not come close to accounting for the majority of the price increases.

Harris appears to be going further. People familiar with her plans said this week that she would seek to connect her price-gouging plans to her political biography, including her record of prosecuting corporate lawbreakers. The Wednesday release confirmed that strategy.

“In her remarks Friday,” it concluded, “Vice President Harris will discuss her lifelong commitment to fighting for the middle class and tackling powerful interests by invoking her time as California’s attorney general and going after corporate greed and price gouging — and winning.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

His effort has been unsuccessful. The news was first reported by The Washington Post.

“We’ve reached out repeatedly through the highest level intermediaries,” Kennedy wrote in a text message Wednesday night. “We’ve been told that they have no interest in talking with me.”

There was little chance the Harris campaign would engage with Kennedy. Public and private polling has found that as he spent the summer attacking President Joe Biden, he began to draw more support from voters otherwise predisposed to back former President Donald Trump. Now Harris does better in some surveys when Kennedy is included than when she is tested in a head-to-head matchup with Trump.

Kennedy, long seen as a potential spoiler in the race, has slipped in polls and struggled to raise money, and he has appeared to consider potential offramps as speculation has grown about whether he might drop out and, if so, whether he would endorse Harris or Trump.

On Wednesday night, Kennedy wrote: “I’ve always argued that we should be willing to talk with each other across party lines. I’m willing to meet with leaders of both parties to discuss the possibility of a unity government.”

The Post reported last month that Kennedy had held talks with Trump about a possible Cabinet job, proposing a role in public health leadership, in exchange for his support. And in a leaked video of a phone call between the two men, Trump tried to cajole Kennedy to exit the race and endorse him.

“I would love you to do something,” the former president said. “And I think it’ll be so good for you and so big for you. And we’re going to win.” Kennedy said little in response on the call. The two men also met in person in Milwaukee during the Republican National Convention.

Two people familiar with Kennedy’s campaign confirmed that advisers to Trump had raised the possibility of a Cabinet post with people close to Kennedy, but said the discussions were fluid and inconclusive. The political circumstances were also far different at the time, when Biden was still in the race and trailing well behind the former president.

A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kennedy has confronted a range of negative headlines and setbacks in recent weeks.

This month, he acknowledged he had left a dead bear cub in Central Park in Manhattan in 2014 because he thought it would be “amusing.”

That bizarre story overshadowed a more serious challenge: a court case in Albany that this week removed him from the ballot in New York. A judge said he had used a “sham” address to maintain his New York residency.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Trump will meet the press at 4:30 p.m. EDT as he steps up his criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris for not holding a news conference or sitting down for interviews since President Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign and endorsed her to replace him.

The vice president has barely engaged with reporters since becoming the Democratic nominee, though she travels with journalists aboard Air Force Two and sometimes answers shouted questions while boarding or leaving the plane for campaign stops.

In one brief interaction last week, she told reporters she wants “to get an interview together by the end of the month.”

Trump on Wednesday made little effort to stay on message at a rally in North Carolina that his campaign billed as a big economic address, mixing pledges to slash energy prices and “unleash economic abundance” with familiar off-script tangents.

He aired his frustration over the Democrats swapping the vice president in place of Biden at the top of their presidential ticket. He repeatedly denigrated San Francisco, where Harris was once the district attorney, as “unlivable” and went after his rival in deeply personal terms, questioning her intelligence, saying she has “the laugh of a crazy person” and musing that Democrats were being “politically correct” in trying to elevate the first Black woman and person of south Asian descent to serve as vice president.

A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that Americans are more likely to trust Trump over Harris when it comes to handling the economy and immigration, issues that he has put at the center of his case for returning to the White House.

In his news conference last week, Trump taunted his rival, boasted of his crowd on Jan. 6, 2021, and lashed out at questions about the enthusiasm Harris’ campaign has been generating. He spoke for more than an hour and made a number of false and misleading claims.

Thursday’s news conference will be livestreamed on apnews.com.

PIERSON, Fla. (AP) — Linda Beigel Schulman smiled as she watched 25 young campers from Fort Lauderdale and Miami spend an afternoon frolicking in a rural Florida spring. The scene brought back memories of her murdered son, Scott Beigel, who loved attending summer camp.

That’s why Beigel Schulman raises money in his name so they and children elsewhere can attend sleep-away camp. It’s something she and her husband, Michael Schulman, have done annually since the 2018 massacre at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left her son, two other staff members and 14 students dead.

The Scott J. Beigel Memorial Fund sent 264 children ages 9 to 16 to seven sleepaway camps this summer in Florida, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, most of them underprivileged or touched by gun violence.

“We want to take them out of their environment, send them to camp and let them just be kids,” Beigel Schulman said. “Let them leave their woes and their troubles and everything behind. Let them meet new friends. Let them learn how to trust.”

Scott Beigel became a geography teacher, in part, so he could keep attending camp and give children the same opportunities he had. He started at 7 as a camper, became a counselor in his teens, and, eventually, an administrator. He loved the sense of community such camps provided and how they helped younger generations appreciate the great outdoors.

He would have kept returning but he was fatally shot at age 35 on Feb. 14, 2018, after heroically herding 31 students to safety inside his classroom.

“Scott loved camp — that was Scott’s happy place,” his mother said. “I remember him saying, ‘I don’t quite know what I want to do, Mom.’ And I was like, ‘Scott, the writing’s on the wall. If you want to keep going back to camp, you have to go into teaching, because it’s the only profession that’s going to let you have summers off.’”

The program started with 54 children in 2018 and has grown steadily since. More than $360,000 was raised this year — all paying for the campers’ enrollment and transportation. Once in the program, children can return each summer if they maintain good grades and stay out of trouble. At 17 and 18, the fund pays for them to be counselor trainees.

Beigel Schulman is not alone in honoring a loved one lost at Stoneman Douglas. Most other victims’ families have also started foundations that award scholarships, promote school or gun safety, or fight disease.

It was almost 90 degrees (32 degrees Celsius) and muggy on a recent morning at one of the Florida Sheriffs Youth Ranches, this one cut into the woods an hour’s drive north of Orlando. Pushing through the heat, administrators and counselors got their 38 campers outside for archery, biking and working through an obstacle course as a team.

The Beigel fund financed 25 of the campers. The counselors are a mix of volunteer deputies and college students. It’s the one camp with a law enforcement theme the foundation sponsors.

“We are showing them who is behind the uniform in this atmosphere where you can feel like you belong and you’re out of your own comfort zone,” said Elisha Hoggard, the ranches’ programs vice president. “It’s giving the kids an opportunity to have a genuine positive interaction with a law enforcement officer.”

Hoggard said most children attending the ranches’ camps are recommended by an officer as needing a boost. Maybe the students are running with the wrong crowd or are new at school and not making friends. Or, perhaps, their parents are divorcing or they had a traumatic experience.

Broward County Deputy Al Hibbert, one of the counselors, said it’s important that city kids like those from South Florida get a chance to interact with nature.

“They don’t see this kind of life and to know that they can enjoy being away from their community,” Hibbert said.

The campers are required to make their beds, clean their cottages, share their food and treat each other with respect. Cursing is not allowed.

Esteban Martinez, 13, conceded he is often shy, so coming to camp for the first time gave him a chance to make new friends.

“Being here is fun, it really changed me. It’s good you get to be around other people,” Esteban said.

A.J. Kozak, 15, said camp gives him a chance to interact with the police in a way he doesn’t back home.

“It makes me think cops aren’t that bad. Because in the real world, cops are aggressive,” he said. “They are just humans at the end of the day.”

A highlight of the Florida camp is the high ropes — while cinched tight into a safety harness, willing campers walk across a 40-foot (12-meter) pole stretched horizontally that inclines from 15 feet (4.5 meters) to 25 feet (7.6 meters) above the ground. The courageous next climb to a thin cable stretching another 10 feet (3 meters) up, grabbing ropes strung from above to keep their balance as they walk across.

“This is a biggie — I am deathly afraid of heights,” screamed Isa Marti, 14, as she edged onto the pole. She felt some pressure after her friend, Hazel Stampler, crossed. A few years ago, an assailant drew a gun on Isa’s family during an argument at a park. No shots were fired, but she and her brother took cover.

As Isa inched forward, she repeatedly wanted to quit and be lowered to the ground. Still, she didn’t stop, encouraged by other campers. After letting out a mild obscenity, which drew a counselor’s admonishment, she made it across — and climbed to the cable above, one of few who did.

“I kinda love this,” she yelled as she worked her way across the wire, drawing other girls’ cheers.

After being lowered, Isa beamed as Hazel greeted her. They talked about how scared they were but pushed through.

The ropes exercise “helps you overcome your fears, which will help you grow,” Hazel said.

The next morning, the campers bused to nearby De Leon Springs State Park, donning life jackets before jumping into the water. Some socialized with kids from other camps or came with their families.

Beigel Schulman looked at the tableau of playing, splashing children and couldn’t help but wish her son could see it.

“Isn’t this great? All of these kids together — it doesn’t matter what ethnicity, what religion, what this, what that. They are all one. If they could only bring this back home, it would be amazing,” she said.

NEW YORK (AP) — Columbia University President Minouche Shafik resigned Wednesday after a brief, tumultuous tenure that saw the head of the prestigious New York university face heavy scrutiny for her handling of protests and campus divisions over the Israel-Hamas war.

The Ivy League school in upper Manhattan was roiled this year by student demonstrations, culminating in scenes of police officers carrying zip ties and riot shields storming a building that had been occupied by pro-Palestinian protesters. Similar protests swept college campuses nationwide, with many leading to violent clashes with police and thousands of arrests.

The announcement also comes just days after the school confirmed that three deans had resigned after officials said they exchanged disparaging texts during a campus discussion about Jewish life and antisemitism.

Shafik was also among the university leaders called for questioning before Congress earlier this year. She was heavily criticized by Republicans who accused her of not doing enough to combat concerns about antisemitism on Columbia’s campus.

Shafik, who began the role in July last year, announced her resignation in an emailed letter to the university community just weeks before the start of classes on Sept. 3. The university on Monday began restricting campus access to people with Columbia IDs and registered guests, saying it wanted to curb “potential disruptions” as the new semester nears.

In her letter, Shafik heralded “progress in a number of important areas” but lamented that during her tenure it was “difficult to overcome divergent views across our community.”

“This period has taken a considerable toll on my family, as it has for others in the community,” she wrote. “Over the summer, I have been able to reflect and have decided that my moving on at this point would best enable Columbia to traverse the challenges ahead.”

Columbia’s Board of Trustees meanwhile announced that Katrina Armstrong, the CEO of Columbia University Irving Medical Center, will serve as interim president.

“Challenging times present both the opportunity and the responsibility for serious leadership to emerge from every group and individual within a community,” said Armstrong, who is also the executive vice president for the university’s Health and Biomedical Sciences. “As I step into this role, I am acutely aware of the trials the University has faced over the past year.”

Pro-Palestinian protesters first set up tent encampments on Columbia’s campus during Shafik’s congressional testimony in mid-April, where she denounced antisemitism but faced criticism for how she’d responded to faculty and students accused of bias.

The school sent in police to clear the tents the following day, only for the students to return and inspire a wave of similar protests at campuses across the country, with students calling for schools to cut financial ties with Israel and the companies supporting the war.

As the protest rolled on for weeks, the school was thrust into the national spotlight. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson showed up to denounce the encampment, while Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came to support it.

Eventually, talks between the school and the protesters came to a standstill, and as the school set a deadline for the activists to clear out, a group instead took over Hamilton Hall.

Even after the protests were cleared, Columbia decided to cancel its university-wide commencement ceremony, instead opting for a series of smaller, school-based ceremonies.

The campus was mostly quiet this summer, but a conservative news outlet in June published images of what it said were text messages exchanged by administrators while attending the May 31 panel discussion “Jewish Life on Campus: Past, Present and Future.”

The officials were removed from their posts, with Shafik saying in a July 8 letter to the school community that the messages were unprofessional and “disturbingly touched on ancient antisemitic tropes.”

Shafik’s critics were quick to cheer the end of her tenure, which is one of the shortest in school history.

Johnson, the house speaker, said her resignation was “long overdue” and should serve as a cautionary example to other university administrators that “tolerating or protecting antisemites is unacceptable and will have consequences.”

The student group Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine wrote in a post on the social media platform X that Shafik “finally got the memo” after months of protests. The campus chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace wrote it will “not be placated by her removal as the university’s repression of the pro-Palestinian student movement continues.”

Other prominent Ivy League leaders have stepped down in recent months, in large part due to their response to the volatile protests on campus.

University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigned in December after less than two years on the job amid pressure from donors and criticism over testimony at a congressional hearing where she was unable to say under repeated questioning that calls on campus for the genocide of Jews would violate the school’s conduct policy.

And in January, Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigned amid plagiarism accusations and similar criticism over her testimony before Congress.

Shafik said she will return to the United Kingdom to lead an effort by the foreign secretary’s office to review the government’s approach to international development.

“I am very pleased and appreciative that this will afford me the opportunity to return to work on fighting global poverty and promoting sustainable development, areas of lifelong interest to me,” she wrote.

Shafik was the first woman to take on the role, joining several women newly appointed to take the reins at Ivy League institutions.

The Egyptian-born economist previously led the London School of Economics, but had made her mark largely outside academia with roles at the World Bank, the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of England.

At the time of Shafik’s appointment, Columbia Board of Trustees chair Jonathan Lavine had described her as a leader with an “unshakable confidence in the vital role institutions of higher education can and must play in solving the world’s most complex problems.”

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Associated Press reporter Jake Offenhartz in New York contributed to this story.

In a three-page decision dated Tuesday, the judge, Justice Juan Merchan, slammed Trump’s filing seeking his recusal as “rife with inaccuracies” and repetitive, and dismissed the idea that he had any conflict of interest.

Trump’s lawyers had argued that the judge’s daughter “has a long-standing relationship with Harris” — a claim her colleagues have disputed — and cited her “work for political campaigns” as a Democratic consultant. But prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which secured Trump’s conviction in May on felony charges of falsifying business records, called his request “a vexatious and frivolous attempt to relitigate” an issue that Merchan had already twice dismissed.

Merchan, a moderate Democrat who was once a registered Republican, rejected Trump’s initial bid to oust him last year and did so again in April, on the first day of trial. The judge, who has no direct ties to Harris, cited a state advisory committee on judicial ethics, which determined that his impartiality could not reasonably be questioned based on his daughter’s interests.

Trump, who has stoked right-wing furor against the judge’s daughter, Loren Merchan, renewed the recusal request once President Joe Biden abandoned his presidential campaign and Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee. She is now locked in a tight race with Trump, who has falsely portrayed his conviction as a Democratic plot to foil his campaign.

Juan Merchan’s decision, while anticipated, is consequential nonetheless: It enables him to soon decide two crucial matters that will shape Trump’s legal fate.

On Sept. 16, the judge is scheduled to determine whether to throw out Trump’s conviction following the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling granting him broad immunity for official actions as president. The former president’s long-shot request was vigorously opposed by prosecutors, who urged Merchan to uphold the jury’s verdict, noting that the case had nothing to do with Trump’s official acts in the White House.

If Merchan denies Trump’s immunity motion, as expected, Trump could mount an emergency appeal. If that fails, the judge will then proceed with Trump’s sentencing on Sept. 18. Trump faces up to four years in prison, but could receive a far shorter sentence, or even probation.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.