Rapper, singer and songwriter Doja Cat will return to Minneapolis’ Target Center on Oct. 4, 2026.

Tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. Oct. 10 through Ticketmaster. Fans who sign up at signup.ticketmaster.com/dojacat by 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 3, have access to a presale that starts at 10 a.m. Oct. 7.

The woman born Amala Dlamini adopted her stage name from her cat and her favorite strain of marijuana. After dropping out of high school, she taught herself to sing, rap and use GarageBand. Doja then spent the mid-’10s establishing herself as an extremely online star. After her 2018 major-label debut “Amala” largely flopped, Doja went ahead and recorded a novelty song “Mooo!” and released it via a homemade video that soon went viral.

The newfound attention all but forced Doja’s record label to take her seriously. Her 2019 single “Rules” broke through to a wider audience and was the first of a dozen of her songs — including “Say So” with her musical hero Nicki Minaj, “Streets,” “Kiss Me More” (with SZA), “Woman,” “Paint the Town Red” and “Angora” — to go multi-platinum.

Doja made her local arena debut in December 2023 in front of a near-capacity crowd at Target Center.

Last week, she released her fifth album, “Vie,” which sees her return to pop music after her hip hop-centric fourth record “Scarlet.” Earlier this month, Doja performed the single “Jealous Type” at the 2025 MTV Video Music Awards with help from legendary saxophonist Kenny G.

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By ED WHITE

DETROIT (AP) — The man who shot up a Michigan church and set a fire that killed four people was a former U.S. Marine who expressed animosity about the Mormon faith to a city council candidate knocking on doors just days before the attack.

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Thomas Sanford, who was known as Jake, drove a pickup truck with a deer skull and antlers strapped to the front and two large American flags flapping in the wind in the bed, according to friends and social media posts.

Sanford, 40, smashed that truck into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints chapel in Grand Blanc Township. He was killed by police officers who rushed to the scene Sunday, 60 miles (80 kilometers) northwest of Detroit. The building was destroyed.

Kris Johns, a council candidate in Burton, said he met Sanford while introducing himself to voters last week. He told MLive.com that Sanford was pleasant but became “unhinged” when he suddenly began talking about the Mormon church, as it is widely known.

It’s not known what ties, if any, Sanford had to the church. But Johns said Sanford indicated that some members wanted him to get rid of his tattoos. He also talked about “sealing,” the Mormon temple ceremony of joining a man, a woman and their children together for eternity.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, speaking on Fox News Channel’s “Fox and Friends,” said the FBI was learning that Sanford “hated people of the Mormon faith.”

Genesee County prosecutor David Leyton said his office wrote warrants to search Sanford’s vehicles, home and electronic devices to try to discover his motives.

“All this takes time,” he told The Associated Press.

Coincidentally, Sanford and his family lived next to a church, Eastgate Baptist, in Burton. Pastor Jerome Taylor said he mostly talked to Sanford about fallen trees on church property that his neighbor wanted to cut and sell as firewood.

“He had free rein,” said Taylor, who described Sanford as a “general blue-collar person in our neighborhood.”

“The knowledge that there was a threat, a danger, across our property line so heinous — it’s a little bit mind-warping,” he said, adding that Sanford never attended Eastgate Baptist.

A family friend, Kara Pattison, said she saw Sanford on Friday, two days before the shooting. She and her daughter were walking in the street at the Goodrich High School homecoming parade and became startled when the driver of a pickup truck hit the gas pedal hard.

When the window was rolled down, it was Sanford “laughing,” Pattison said.

“How do you mourn the death of someone who did something so terrible?” Pattison told WDIV-TV, referring to the church attack.

After high school, Sanford served in the Marines from 2004 to 2008, including seven months in Iraq, focusing on vehicle operations and maintenance, records show. He was discharged at the rank of sergeant.

Under Michigan law, police, family or health professionals can ask a judge to take guns away from someone for reasons that include mental health. There were no petitions filed against Sanford, court administrator Barbara Menear said.

In 2015, Sanford’s baby son received groundbreaking treatment at a Fort Worth, Texas, hospital for a condition called “hyperinsulinism,” or abnormally high levels of insulin. The boy’s stay at Cook Children’s Health Care System lasted for weeks and was promoted by the hospital in a news release.

Sanford told the hospital that a doctor’s willingness to help his son was a “sign from heaven.”

“We put our faith to the wind and it took us to Texas,” he said.

Google’s YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit by President Donald Trump over his 2021 account suspension following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

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According to documents filed in federal court in California, $22 million of the settlement will be contributed to the Trust for the National Mall and the rest will go to other plaintiffs, including the American Conservative Union.

Google is the latest big tech company to settle lawsuits brought by Trump. In January, Meta Platforms agreed to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit over his 2021 suspension from Facebook. Elon Musk’s X agreed to settle a similar lawsuit brought against the company then known as Twitter for $10 million.

The settlement does not constitute an admission of liability, the filing says. Google confirmed the settlement but declined to comment beyond it.

The disclosure of the settlement came a week before a scheduled Oct. 6 court hearing to discuss the case with U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers in Oakland, California.

By STEPHEN McGRATH

CHISINAU, Moldova (AP) — Moldovans gave the country’s pro-Western governing party a clear parliamentary majority in a weekend election, defeating pro-Russian groups in a vote widely viewed as a stark choice between East and West.

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European leaders Monday hailed Moldovans for re-affirming their commitment to a Western path and future membership in the European Union in the face of alleged Russian interference. The country is small in size and population but with outsized geopolitical importance.

“You made your choice clear: Europe. Democracy. Freedom,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a post on X. “No attempt to sow fear or division could break your resolve.”

Landlocked between war-torn Ukraine and EU and NATO member Romania, Moldova was a Soviet republic until it proclaimed independence in 1991. In recent years it has taken a clear Westward path, turning the country into a geopolitical battleground between Russia and Europe.

The outcome of Sunday’s high-stakes ballot was noteworthy considering Moldovan authorities’ repeated claims that Russia was conducting a vast “hybrid war” to try to sway the outcome. Moldova applied to join the EU in 2022 in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and was granted candidate status that year. Brussels agreed to open accession negotiations last year.

The election results

With nearly all polling station reports counted on Monday, electoral data showed the pro-EU Party of Action and Solidarity, or PAS, securing 50.1% of the vote, while the pro-Russian Patriotic Electoral Bloc won 24.2%. The Russia-friendly Alternativa Bloc came third, followed by the populist Our Party. The right-wing Democracy at Home party also won enough votes to enter parliament.

Electoral data indicate the PAS will hold a clear majority of about 55 of the 101 seats in the legislature.

At the PAS campaign headquarters on Monday morning in the capital Chisinau, party leader Igor Grosu described the election as another battle against “enemies of our country that once seemed impossible to defeat,” saying the race was a “final battle for the future.”

“It was not only PAS that won these elections, it was the people who won,” he said. “The Russian Federation threw into battle everything it had that was most vile — mountains of money, mountains of lies, mountains of illegalities. It used criminals to try to turn our entire country into a haven for crime. It filled everything with hatred.”

At the annual meeting of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, Moldova’s U.N. Ambassador Gheorghe Leucă told ministers and ambassadors Monday that “Despite unprecedented pressure, disinformation and interference from the Kremlin, the Moldovan people defended democracy through free and fair elections.”

The people of Moldova made the choice, he said, but the meaning of the election is global and showed that “democracy can prevail even under relentless pressure.” He also said democracies can’t stand alone and need “solidarity, resilience and support.”

Building a new government

After a legislative election, Moldova’s president nominates a prime minister, generally from the leading party or bloc, which can then try to form a new government. A proposed government then needs parliamentary approval.

It is considered likely that President Maia Sandu, who founded PAS in 2016, will opt for some continuity by once again nominating Prime Minister Dorin Recean, an economist who has steered Moldova’s government through multiple crises since 2023. Recean also previously served as Sandu’s defense and security adviser.

“The major task right now is to bring back the society together, because what Russia achieved, is to produce a lot of tension and division in society,” Recean told reporters.

Sandu said on Monday that the outcome proved Moldovans “can unite when our country’s future is at stake” but that the victory must benefit all citizens.

“Moldova is our common home,” she said. “We all share the same hopes: to live in peace and freedom, and to offer our children a safe future here, at home. The surest path to those goals is the European path. Yesterday’s vote is a strong mandate for Moldova’s EU accession.”

The alleged Russian schemes included orchestrating a large-scale vote-buying scheme, conducting more than 1,000 cyberattacks on critical government infrastructure so far this year, a plan to incite riots around Sunday’s election, and a sprawling disinformation campaign online to sway voters.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he had spoken to Sandu on the phone and congratulated her on what he called “a very important victory” for Moldova. “Russian subversion, constant disinformation — none of this worked,” he said.

Moscow had repeatedly denied meddling in Moldova.

Bomb threats and cyberattacks on election day

Election day was dogged by a string of incidents, ranging from bomb threats at multiple polling stations abroad to cyberattacks on electoral and government infrastructure, voters photographing their ballots and some being illegally transported to polling stations. Three people were also detained, suspected of plotting to cause unrest after the vote.

Igor Dodon, a former president and a member of the pro-Russian Patriotic Electoral Bloc, called for a protest in front of the Parliament building on Monday after alleging, without presenting any evidence, that the PAS meddled with the vote.

PAS campaigned on a pledge to continue Moldova’s path toward EU membership by signing an accession treaty to the 27-nation bloc by 2028, doubling incomes, modernizing infrastructure, and fighting corruption.

An unambiguous victory

Cristian Cantir, a Moldovan associate professor of international relations at Oakland University in Michigan, told The Associated Press that PAS’s victory means it will “be able to ensure continuity in the next few years in the pursuit of their ultimate goal of EU integration.”

“A PAS majority saves the party from having to form a coalition that would have most likely been unstable and would have slowed down the pace of reforms to join the EU,” he said but added: “Moldova will continue to be in a difficult geopolitical environment characterized by Russia’s attempts to pull it back into its sphere of influence.”

Some 1.6 million people, or about 52.1% of eligible voters, cast ballots, according to the Central Electoral Commission, with 280,000 of them coming from votes in polling stations set up abroad.

“I see progress in our government and in our evolution … how to be a part of Europe,” said 21-year-old student Nichita Prepelita. “PAS said Moldova will integrate into the European Union in 2028. For me, it’s a little bit hard to believe … but I hope it will be.”

“Now people are really choosing between … Europe and Russia,” he added.

The Kremlin on Monday said “hundreds of thousands” of Moldovans living in Russia were unable to vote in the election due to an alleged lack of polling stations set up in the country. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said it was “obviously insufficient and couldn’t give everyone the opportunity to vote,” without providing further details.

Katie Marie Davies in Manchester, U.K., and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.