By MIKE STOBBE and LAURAN NEERGAARD

ATLANTA (AP) — Access to COVID-19 shots is the big question as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new vaccine advisers meet again Friday, after putting off a controversial vote on a different vaccine for newborns.

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People in many states already are reporting frustration as they they try to determine, or prove, if they qualify for updated COVID-19 vaccines — even as infections have climbed over the past month.

The Food and Drug Administration recently put new restrictions on this year’s shots from Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax, reserving them for people over 65 or younger ones who are deemed at higher risk from the virus. Now advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have to take the next step, recommending who should seek them, a move that influences insurance coverage and how pharmacists in certain states can administer them.

Unclear is whether the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which Kennedy stocked with members critical of coronavirus vaccination, will urge additional curbs.

“We’re anxiously awaiting what’s going to happen,” said Dr. Phil Huang, a family physician who directs the Dallas County health and human services department. The panel’s decisions especially affect low-income families who receive shots through the federally funded health programs but, he added, “it’s causing just a lot of confusion” for the public.

The panel opened the second day of its meeting with continued confusion over a question it left hanging Thursday — whether to end a longstanding CDC recommendation that all newborns be vaccinated at birth against a liver virus, hepatitis B.

The panel had been considering whether to recommend delaying that initial vaccination — something doctors and parents already can choose to do. But amid criticism from independent pediatric and infectious disease specialists who say the vaccine is safe and has helped infant infections drop sharply, the advisers decided Friday to postpone that decision.

On Thursday, the panel recommended a new restriction on another childhood vaccine.

They recommended that for children under 4, their first dose of protection against MMR — measles, mumps and rubella — and chickenpox should be in separate shots, not a combination version known as MMRV. Since 2009, the CDC has said it prefers separate shots for initial doses of those vaccines and 85% of toddlers already do.

On Friday, the committee also recommended that the government’s Vaccines for Children program — which covers vaccine costs for about half of U.S. kids — align its guidance with that narrower MMRV usage.

The panel takes up COVID-19 vaccinations as the virus remains a public health threat. CDC data released in June shows the virus resulted in 32,000 to 51,000 U.S. deaths and more than 250,000 hospitalizations last fall and winter. Most at risk for hospitalization are seniors and young children — especially those who were unvaccinated.

Worried about access, leading medical groups including the American Academy of Pediatrics already have issued recommendations that the vaccines be available to anyone age 6 months and older who wants one — including pregnant women — just like in prior years.

Several states have announced policies to try to assure that access regardless of Friday’s ACIP decision. And a group representing most health insurers, America’s Health Insurance Plans, said earlier this week that its members will continuing covering the shots through 2026.

Neergaard reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Laura Ungar in Louisville, Kentucky, contributed to this report.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By KIRSTEN GRIESHABER

DAHME, Germany (AP) — Axel Kramer knows exactly where to find amber.

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He walks down the boardwalk of the village of Dahme on the German Baltic coast, checks the wind and the surf, looks at the different kinds of mussels and algae that have been washed up, and points to a small bulge on the beach.

Eagerly, a dozen people who have been following his every move, jump down to the waterline, pull up seagrass and kelp, and, indeed, after a few moments one of them triumphantly holds up a little piece of shiny, honey-colored amber.

“Unbelievable. I’m 57 now and grew up on the Baltic Sea, and I’ve never found it before,” says Frank Philipp. “I’m really excited about it. Now I’m digging around more and I’m hooked.”

Vollrath Wiese shows a piece of amber with insects trapped inside, at the “Nature House” museum in the village of Cismar near the Baltic Sea resort of Dahme, Germany, Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2025. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

People along the Baltic Sea have been collecting amber for centuries

Kramer, a 66-year-old nature guide, has been collecting amber since he was 6 years old. At some point he realized that he has talent — or just decades of experience — for discovering the coveted pieces and started offering amber collecting tours for locals and tourists alike.

People living along the Baltic Sea — from Denmark and Germany to Poland, the Baltic states, and up north to Sweden — have been collecting amber for thousands of years. They made beautiful jewelry out of it, used it in barter and placed it in graves.

Even today, amber stores line the Baltic coastal towns, and many tourists take necklaces, earrings and rings home with them as souvenirs.

The ‘gold of the ocean’ is not a stone

Contrary to what many believe, amber, which is has also dubbed the “gold of the ocean,” is not a gemstone or a jewel, but fossilized resin.

Participants hold a glass of salt water and a black light lamp in their hands to examine amber during a guided amber hunt for tourists on the beach of the Baltic Sea resort of Dahme, Germany, Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2025. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

While some kinds of amber are up to 400 million years old, Baltic amber is only around 45 million years old. It originates from the forests in Finland and Sweden and was brought to the Baltic coast by glaciers during the Ice Age. Because resin is sticky, one can sometimes find so-called inclusions of insects or plants inside amber — they were initially stuck to it when the resin dropped off the trees.

“There used to be 120 commercial grades of amber, all very different, from practically black to practically white,” said Vollrath Wiese, a biologist and expert on amber. ”Bony white forms with lots and lots of bubbles inside and beautiful, almost clear amber, honey-colored.”

“Whether amber is transparent or not actually depends on the number of microscopic (air) bubbles it contains,” said Wiese, as he showed some of the most valuable pieces of the amber collection at the House of Nature museum in Cismar, which he runs.

For many, amber collection is about more than its value

The value of amber, which is called Bernstein in German, depends on its quality and runs from a few euros per gram for regular pieces to up to more than 1,000 euros ($1,170) for especially beautiful, big pieces with rare inclusions such as scorpions, small lizards or spiders.

However, for Kramer, the nature guide, the real value of amber can’t really be measured in money.

Axel Kramer a tourist guide and amber expert poses for a photo during a guided amber hunt for tourists on the beach of the Baltic resort of Dahme, Germany, Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2025. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

“Collecting amber makes you happy,” Kramer said with a big smile. “Many people tell me that collecting amber is better than yoga. It’s pure therapy.”

He said that everyone, from children to older people, enjoys his amber collection tours tremendously and often comes back again and again.

“I’ve had CEOs who crawled around on all fours on the beach and were delighted when they found a small piece of amber,” Kramer said.

Is it really amber? Throw it into saltwater, rub it with wool, or shine black light on it

Once a newbie has found a piece, they come to Kramer and ask him to check it — to find out if it’s real amber or just an ordinary stone or piece of plastic. To find out, Kramer pulls out a small glass jar with highly concentrated saltwater inside and drops the piece inside. If it sinks, it’s a stone, if it swims, it’s amber.

Tourist couple Guenter Hildebrandt, left, and Giesela Hildebrandt search for amber during a guided amber hunt for tourists at the beach of the Baltic Sea resort of Dahme, Germany, Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2025. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

In addition to the water test, a wool cloth also does the job: dry amber becomes electrostatically charged when rubbed and attracts paper scraps.

In recent years, collectors have come up with another unique way of identifying amber. They go out at night, lighting up the beach with flashlights equipped with black light. When amber is exposed, it glows up in a bright yellow color. This way, collectors can also find tiny pieces hidden between stones and wood that they wouldn’t notice in daylight because they are too small.

Amber collecting tours are offered all along the German Baltic Sea

While many beach lovers collect amber on their own, organized collection tours, like the ones offered by Kramer, have sprung up in recent years in almost every resort town on the Baltic Sea in Germany. The walking tours cost around 10 euros to 20 euros ($11.70 to $23.50) and in addition to the amber hunt on the beach they often include lectures about folk customs surrounding amber.

In the Middle Ages, people attributed magical powers to amber and believed it protected them against witches and demons. Nowadays, many parents in Germany put amber necklaces on their babies because they are supposed to help with teething. And many jewelry stores on the Baltic Sea offer amber collars for dogs, which supposedly keep away ticks.

However, more than anything, collecting amber seems to be fulfilling, says Marion Ruprecht. The 54-year-old from the western city of Bochum, who works in the administration of a hospital, has been vacationing in Dahme for over 40 years.

“I find it absolutely thrilling, exciting, and also a lot of fun,” she said, as she proudly held up two pieces she had found during a night tour with Kramer. “I just think there’s nothing better to do in the evening — it is relaxing and slows me down.”

By JAKE COYLE

American society probably puts more pressure on producing a good quarterback than anything else, which makes it all the more confounding that the Jets can never have one.

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OK, OK. So that’s not necessarily the takeaway from “Him,” a new horror thriller about the religious fervor that goes with football. For some of us long-suffering fans, football inspires less Messianic zeal than an annual reminder that this is a dark and cruel world and any delusional preseason hope will be quickly and thoroughly snuffed out.

But Jets fan or not, “Him” has a decent point to make about QB hero worship. These are modern gladiators. But if the issue of some thrillers is that they have nothing to say, the problem with “Him” is that it has exactly one thing to say, which it does again and again and again.

“Him” does have some style, though. Directed by Justin Tipping (“Kicks”) and produced by Jordan Peele, “Him” was made with the potent premise of bringing the kind of dark, satirical perspective that characterizes a Monkeypaw production to our violent national pastime. But that promise gets fumbled in an allegorical chamber play that grows increasingly tedious.

Cameron “Cam” Cade grew up idolizing Saviors quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). As a boy, he watches White win a game on a highlight-reel play that also leaves the QB with a career-threatening injury. “That’s what real men do,” his father (Don Benjamin) tells him. “They make sacrifices.”

Fourteen years later, Cam (Tyriq Withers) is on the cusp of entering the pros as a top draft pick. Just before the combine, though, Cam, while practicing alone at night, is struck in the head by a strange pagan spirit-slash-mascot that emerges out of the shadows. The trauma to the head adds a new risk to Cam’s football playing. But if you’re expecting a horror version of 2015’s “Concussion,” that’s a small part of what “Him” aspires to be about.

The Saviors reach out to Cam’s agent (Tim Heidecker) and offer a unique opportunity: Come to Isaiah’s Texas desert compound to train with him for a week. Isaiah is still in the league and by now, despite the long-ago injury, has gone on to win a Tom Brady-like haul of championships. After a week, the Saviors will decided if they’ll draft Cam.

But what follows over seven days is less a boot camp than a disorienting psychodrama — a kind of football ayahuasca — in which the very intense Isaiah pushes Cam to extremes to test whether he has it in him to be the GOAT. The atmosphere is surreal and the editing hallucinatory. Cam is injected with unknown serums, blood gets transfused and pocket-passing drills turn grisly. This is not a game, Cam is told more than once. To paraphrase Dani Rojas, football is life (and maybe death, too).

By settling the movie into Isaiah’s Brutalist estate, “Him” take what could have been something grander and turns into effectively into a battle for QB1 — albeit one with more primal underpinnings than your average depth-chart contest.

But it’s probably a bad sign for your satire if you have to take reality completely out of it and instead hole up inside a haunted house. There are a few folks around, including Isaiah’s influencer wife (Julia Fox), but somewhere far outside of the frame of “Him” is an enormous football world of arenas, screaming fans and broadcasters — the world that a movie like “Any Given Sunday” rushed to capture, not evade. “Him” ends up feeling like a gladiator movie that forgot the Colosseum.

“Him,” a Universal Pictures release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong bloody violence, language throughout, sexual material, nudity and some drug use. Running time: 96 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.

By KEVIN FREKING, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House on Friday passed a short-term spending bill to extend government funding for seven weeks and avoid a partial government shutdown on Oct. 1, but prospects looked dimmer in the Senate, where the two parties show no signs of budging on the matter.

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The bill would generally continue existing funding levels through Nov. 21. Democratic leaders are adamantly opposed and are threatening a government shutdown if Republicans don’t let them have a say on the measure, as some Democratic support will be needed to get a bill to President Donald Trump’s desk for his signature.

The vote was 217-212.

House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana had few votes to spare as he sought to persuade fellow Republicans to vote for the funding patch, something many in his conference have routinely opposed in past budget fights. But this time, GOP members see a chance to portray the Democrats as responsible for a shutdown.

“We were very careful. We put no partisan measures in this. There’s no poison pills. None of that,” Johnson said leading up to the vote.

In a sign the vote could be close, Trump weighed in, urging House Republicans to pass the bill and put the burden on Democrats to oppose it. GOP leaders often need Trump’s help to win over holdouts on legislation.

“Every House Republican should UNIFY, and VOTE YES!” Trump said on his social media site.

Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said that in opposing the continuing resolution, Democrats were working to protect the health care of the American people. He said that with Republicans controlling the White House and both branches of Congress, “Republicans will own a government shutdown. Period. Full stop.”

The House vote now sends the bill to the Senate where Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said the Senate will vote on the measure along with a dueling Democratic proposal. But neither is expected to win the 60 votes necessary to advance.

Senators could then potentially leave town until Sept. 29 — one day before the shutdown deadline. The Senate has a scheduled recess next week because of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year.

The Democratic proposal would extend enhanced health insurance subsidies set to expire at the end of the year, plus reverse Medicaid cuts that were included in Republicans’ big tax breaks and spending cuts bill enacted earlier this year.

“The American people will look at what Republicans are doing, look at what Democrats are doing, and it will be clear that public sentiment will be on our side,” said Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, who has repeatedly threatened a shutdown if health care isn’t addressed.

Democrats on both sides of the Capitol are watching Schumer closely after his last-minute decision in March to vote with Republicans to keep the government open. Schumer argued then that a shutdown would be damaging and would give Trump and his White House freedom to make more government cuts. Many on the left revolted, with some advocates calling for his resignation.

The vote in the spring also caused a temporary schism with Jeffries, who opposed that particular GOP spending bill and said he would not be “complicit” with Schumer’s vote.

The two Democratic leaders now say they are united, and Schumer says things have changed since March. The public is more wary of Trump and Republicans, Schumer says, after the passage of Medicaid cuts.

Most Democrats appear to be backing Schumer’s demand that there be negotiations on the bill — and support his threats of a shutdown, even as it is unclear how they would get out of it.

“Look, the president said really boldly, don’t even talk to Democrats. Unless he’s forgotten that you need a supermajority to pass a budget in the Senate, that’s obviously his signal he wants a shutdown,” said Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis.

While the Democratic measure to fund the government has no chance of passage Friday, it does give Democrats a way to show voters their focus on cutting health care costs.

“There are some thing we have to address. The health insurance, ACA, is going to hammer millions of people in the country, including in red states,” said Sen. Angus King, I-Maine. “To me, that can’t be put off.”

Republicans say the blame would be clearly on the other side if they can’t pass a bill — and are using Schumer’s previous arguments against shutdowns against him.

Sen. John Barrasso, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, said: “Senator Schumer himself said that passing a clean CR will avert a harmful and unnecessary shutdown. Now he wants to cause a harmful and unnecessary shutdown.”

Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.