By NICHOLAS RICCARDI and ALI SWENSON, Associated Press

Charlie Kirk, who rose from a teenage conservative campus activist to a top podcaster, culture warrior and ally of President Donald Trump, was shot and killed Wednesday during one of his trademark public appearances at a college in Utah. He was 31.

Kirk died doing what made him a potent political force — rallying the right on a college campus, this time Utah Valley University. His shooting is one of an escalating number of attacks on political figures, from the assassination of a Democratic state lawmaker and her husband in Minnesota to last summer’s shooting of Trump, that have roiled the nation.

Trump announced Kirk’s death on his social media site, Truth Social: “No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie,” Trump wrote.

FILE – Turning Point USA Founder Charlie Kirk arrives to speak before Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally at Thomas & Mack Center, Oct. 24, 2024, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

Kirk personified the pugnacious, populist conservatism that has taken over the Republican Party in the age of Trump. He launched his organization, Turning Point USA, in 2012, targeting younger people and venturing onto liberal-leaning college campuses where many GOP activists were nervous to tread.

A backer of Trump during the president’s initial 2016 run, Kirk took Turning Point from one of a constellation of well-funded conservative groups to the center of the right-of-center universe.

Turning Point’s political wing helped run get-out-the-vote for Trump’s 2024 campaign, trying to energize disaffected conservatives who rarely vote. Trump won Arizona, Turning Point’s home state, by five percentage points after narrowly losing it in 2020. The group is known for its flamboyant events that often feature strobe lighting and pyrotechnics. It claims more than 250,000 student members.

Trump on Wednesday praised Kirk, who started as an unofficial adviser during Trump’s 2016 campaign and more recently became a confidant. “He was a very, very good friend of mine and he was a tremendous person,” Trump told the New York Post.

FILE – Turning Point USA Founder Charlie Kirk speaks before Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump arrives at the Turning Point Believers’ Summit, July 26, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

Kirk showed off an apocalyptic style in his popular podcast, radio show and on the campaign trail. During an appearance with Trump in Georgia last fall, he said that Democrats “stand for everything God hates.” Kirk called the Trump vs. Kamala Harris choice “a spiritual battle.”

“This is a Christian state. I’d like to see it stay that way,” Kirk told the 10,000 or so Georgians, who at one point joined Kirk in a deafening chant of “Christ is King! Christ is King!”

Kirk had also remained a regular presence on college campuses. Last year, for the social media program “Surrounded,” he faced off against 20 liberal college students to defend his viewpoints, including that abortion is murder and should be illegal.

Kirk was married to podcaster Erika Frantzve. They have two young children.

Turning Point was founded in suburban Chicago in 2012 by a then 18-year-old Kirk and William Montgomery, a tea party activist, to proselytize on college campuses for low taxes and limited government. It was not an immediate success.

But Kirk’s zeal for confronting liberals in academia eventually won over an influential set of conservative financiers.

Despite early misgivings, Turning Point enthusiastically backed Trump after he clinched the GOP nomination in 2016. Kirk served as a personal aide to Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son, during the general election campaign.

Soon, Kirk was a regular presence on cable TV, where he leaned into the culture wars and heaped praise on the then-president. Trump and his son were equally effusive and often spoke at Turning Point conferences.

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As money poured in, Kirk bought a $4.75 million Spanish-style estate on a gated Arizona country club. Turning Point steered millions of dollars to contractors owned by Kirk and his associates, and some Republicans were skeptical when it announced it would spearhead an attempt to turn out infrequent voters during Trump’s 2024 campaign.

But as younger voters shifted right in 2024 and Trump ran up a five-point margin of victory in Arizona, Kirk and his allies claimed vindication of his view of a sharp-elbowed, culture-war-oriented conservatism.

Kirk’s evangelical Christian beliefs were intertwined with his political perspective, and he argued that there was no true separation of church and state.

He also referenced the Seven Mountain Mandate, which specifies seven areas where Christians are to lead — politics, religion, media, business, family, education and the arts, and entertainment.

Kirk argued for a new conservatism that advocated for freedom of speech, challenging Big Tech and the media, and centering working-class Americans beyond the nation’s capital.

“We have to ask ourselves a question as a conservative movement: Are we going to revert back to the party of the status quo ruling class?” he said in his speech opening the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2020.

“Or are we going to learn from what I call the MAGA doctrine? The MAGA doctrine, which is a doctrine of American renewal, revival, one that America is the greatest country in the history of the world.”

Who will the Lynx face in the first-round of the WNBA playoffs, which open this weekend?

In an odd twist, Minnesota has a major say in that answer.

The Lynx long ago clinched the No. 1 seed and home-court advantage throughout the postseason. But their first-round opponent will be determined … by Minnesota’s regular season finale.

Should the Lynx beat Golden State, they will meet the first-year expansion team again in Round 1. Should the Valkyries knock off Minnesota, Seattle will then be the No. 8 seed and come to Minneapolis this weekend.

Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve could’ve wanted to use the regular season finale as a chance to get others more minutes and allow her stars some rest just days before the postseason begins. But should the Lynx have a significant preference between Golden State and Seattle, any potential plan may change Thursday at Target Center.

So … who should the Lynx want to play in Round 1?

About Golden State: Minnesota is 3-0 this season against the Valkyries, who lack all-star level talent and lost their leading scorer, Kayla Thornton, to injury in the middle of the campaign.

But Golden State has won five of its last seven games and has been elevated by the ascension of rookie French forward Janelle Salaun,  who’s shooting 45% from deep since July 31.

About Seattle: The Storm are flush with established players like Skylar Diggins, Brittney Sykes, Ezi Magbegor, Gabby Williams and Nneka Ogwumike, who won’t shy away from a raucous arena such Target Center.

Seattle proved that two weeks ago, when they walked into Minneapolis and scored 93 points to secure the season series split.

The Storm endured a six-game losing skid in early August to put their playoff position in jeopardy, but won six of their final nine games to secure their spot.

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The July fatal shooting of a man on his birthday at a St. Paul homeless encampment was over a drug debt, according to a criminal complaint.

Francisco Diaz-Xique, 21, of Aitkin, Minn., is jailed and charged in Ramsey County District Court with second-degree murder in connection with the shooting of Steffon T. Jennings, 37, of St. Paul, on the city’s North End.

Francisco Diaz-Xique (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office)

Diaz-Xique was arrested Tuesday and made a first appearance on the charge Wednesday. He’s being held at the Ramsey County jail in lieu of $2 million bail ahead of his next hearing Oct. 2.

Court records show that Diaz-Xique was convicted of drug possession and negligent storage of a firearm in 2022 and selling narcotics in 2023.

According to the complaint, officers were sent to a reported shooting about 1:15 p.m. July 20 at the homeless encampment in the 1200 block of Jackson Street, north of Maryland Avenue. They were directed to a tent, where they found Jennings on the ground with gunshot wounds to his chest. He was declared dead at the scene, and an autopsy showed he had seven gunshot wounds.

Officers found a piece of paper in Jennings’ jacket with a telephone number written on it. Eight spent 9 mm shell casings were recovered outside the tent, and tests showed they were fired from the same gun.

Witnesses told police that two men and a woman arrived at the encampment shortly before the shooting.

Meanwhile, surveillance video from a nearby business showed Diaz-Xique, a man and a woman get out and walk toward the encampment. About 15 minutes later, Diaz-Xique returned to the car and drove it a short distance before getting out and walking away, the complaint says.

Police towed the car and found inside a wallet with Diaz-Xique’s ID, as well as paperwork for his Walgreen’s prescription. Officers also found 42 rounds of 9 mm ammunition and part of a drug ledger with “14.75g” and “8.7 left” and “$605” written on it.

Later that day, a man walked up to an officer who was at a gas station down the street from the killing. He handed the officer a piece of paper with a telephone number written on it and whispered that it was the number for the suspect who committed the murder. It was the same number on the piece of paper found in Jennings’ jacket and a law enforcement database showed it is tied to Diaz-Xique.

At the encampment, officers spoke to a man who said Jennings owed money to a group of three who had been selling fentanyl there for about a week. He said he saw the three running after the shooting.

A woman told officers she was in the same tent where Jennings was when he was shot. She said a man asked Jennings if he got his message. It wasn’t a long conversation between the two and there wasn’t an argument before Jennings was shot, she said.

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Another witness told police that he saw two men and a woman running from the shooting scene and that one had a gun sticking out of his pants pocket. He said Jennings was shot because the group fronted him a “ball” and that Jennings was not going to pay them back. He said a ball, which is around 3½ grams, sells for about $100 to $120 a gram.

When shown photos of the group getting out of the Lexus by the business, the witness recognized them as the three who ran from the scene. He pointed to Diaz-Xique as the one he saw with a gun, the complaint says.

A spokesman for the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office said Wednesday that Diaz-Xique is the “only person charged at this time, but the investigation is ongoing.”

By STEPHEN GROVES, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportations and other hardline immigration measures will result in roughly 320,000 people removed from the United States over the next ten years, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday in a report that also projected that the U.S. population will grow more slowly than it had previously projected.

Trump’s tax and spending law, passed by Congress and signed in July, included roughly $150 billion to ramp up his mass deportation agenda over the next four years. This includes funding for everything from an extension of the United States’ southern border wall to detention centers and thousands of additional law enforcement staff. The CBO found that 290,000 immigrants could be removed through those measures, and an additional 30,000 people could leave the U.S. voluntarily.

Coupled with a lower fertility rate in the U.S., the reduction in immigration means that the CBO’s projection of the U.S. population will be 4.5 million people lower by 2035 than the nonpartisan office had projected in January. It cautioned that its population projections are “highly uncertain,” but estimated that the U.S. will have 367 million people in 2055.

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Lower immigration to the U.S. could have implications for the nation’s economy and the government’s budget. The report did not directly address those issues, but it noted that the projected population would have “fewer people ages 25 to 54 — the age group that is most likely to participate in the labor force — than the agency previously projected.”

Democrats in Congress have been warning that mass deportations could harm the U.S. economy and lead to higher prices on groceries and other goods.

In the White House, Trump has said he wants to see a “baby boom” in the U.S. and his administration has bandied about ideas for encouraging Americans to have more children. But the CBO found no indication that would happen.

“Deaths are projected to exceed births in 2031, two years earlier than previously projected,” it noted.