By JOHN HANNA, AP Political Writer

Candidates and political groups are pouring money into Texas’ hotly contested U.S. Senate race at a record pace, partly fueled by Democrat James Talarico’s fundraising and allies of Republican Sen. John Cornyn trying to save his long career.

Heading into Tuesday’s primary elections, the cost of advertising and reserved advertising time had topped $110 million, the most ever for a Senate primary, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact. The heavy spending in Texas is a preview of the money that is expected to flood this year’s midterm elections across the U.S. with control of Congress at stake.

Talarico faces U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett for the Democratic nomination and on Wednesday launched his final television ad before the primary. It attacks the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement tactics, describing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as “secret police.”

Talarico reported raising more than $21 million through last week. Crockett has raised nearly $8.6 million, though the majority was transferred from her House campaign account after she entered the race in December, three months after Talarico.

Crockett has positioned herself as the bigger fighter, and the tone of Talarico’s last ad contrasts with appeals he’s made to disaffected Republicans by discussing his Christian faith.

“We can transform this broken political system,” Talarico said during a rally Tuesday in Tyler in northeastern Texas, an area President Donald Trump carried by a wide margin in 2024.

Democrats haven’t won a Senate race in Texas since 1988, but Cornyn is facing the race of his career in the primary against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt.

The bulk of the spending in Texas, more than $75 million, has come from groups not tied to the candidates, according to AdImpact.

The vast majority of that is on the Republican side, with the spending by groups helping Cornyn’s bid for a fifth term approaching $57 million so far. The pro-Cornyn Texans for a Conservative Majority has dropped more than $22 million on anti-Hunt ads.

Cornyn’s official campaign committee has raised more than $11 million and two other groups bearing his name have spent another $10 million helping him.

Republicans expect Paxton to at least make a May 26 runoff, despite a low-key campaign until recently and years of legal problems.

Cornyn and the Senate’s GOP leaders worry that Republicans will have to spend tens of millions of additional dollars to keep the Texas seat if Paxton is the nominee.

“It is a strong possibility we cannot hold Texas if John Cornyn is not our nominee,” GOP Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said Wednesday on “Fox & Friends.”

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Other Republicans disagree. Paxton was in Washington on Tuesday, attending President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address as the guest of Texas Republican Rep. Troy Nehls.

Paxton so far has raised about $6 million for his campaign, and Hunt, about $2 million, though he had about $3 million in his House campaign account when he entered the Senate race in October, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.

But the Republican candidates’ collective campaign fundraising of $19 million doesn’t match what Talarico’s campaign has raised on its own, suggesting that outside groups will be crucial to helping the GOP retain the seat.

Talarico got a financial boost this month when his campaign said it raised $2.5 million in the 24 hours after late-night host Stephen Colbert pulled an interview with him for his nightly Feb. 16 broadcast, citing the demands of CBS lawyers. Contributions of less than $1,000 at that point don’t have to be reported until after the primary.

Crockett recently told supporters during a campaign stop that when she ran for the Texas House in 2020 — two years before winning her Dallas-area seat in Congress — she was outspent 5-to-1.

“People said, ‘There’s no way she’s going to win,’” Crockett said, tearing up. “I show up, authentically me. That makes some people cringe, but the people are tired of politics as usual.”

Associated Press journalist Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.

By DEE-ANN DURBIN, AP Business Writer

DoorDash said Wednesday that it’s ending operations in Qatar, Singapore, Japan and Uzbekistan.

The San Francisco-based delivery company said the decision comes after a monthslong review of country-specific conditions. DoorDash said it wants to focus its investments on places were it can build sustainable scale and long-term market leadership.

“Our priority is supporting our teams and partners through an orderly transition as we focus on the geographies where we can offer the best products and build for long-term success,” said Miki Kuusi, the head of DoorDash’s international division, in a statement.

DoorDash was a latecomer to some of the affected markets. The company began operations in Japan in 2021, five years after its rival Uber Eats. Deliveroo, a U.K. delivery company that was acquired by DoorDash last year, has only been operating in Qatar since 2022. That’s almost a decade after Dubai-based Talabat began making deliveries in Qatar.

DoorDash also faces stiff competition from entrenched rivals like GrabFood and Foodpanda in Singapore and Russia-based Yandex Eats in Uzbekistan.

DoorDash said it doesn’t expect the actions to impact its financial guidance. The company’s shares rose 5% in midday trading.

DoorDash is the dominant delivery provider in the U.S., but it has been playing catch-up to Uber Eats internationally. In addition to its purchase of Deliveroo, DoorDash acquired Finnish delivery service Wolt in 2021 to help it expand into Europe.

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By ADITHI RAMAKRISHNAN

NEW YORK (AP) — As he watched the Boston Celtics play from the stands of TD Garden, one noise kept catching Adel Djellouli’s ear.

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“This squeaking sound when players are sliding on the floor is omnipresent,” he said. “It’s always there, right?”

Squeaky shoes are part of the symphony of a basketball game, when rubber soles rasp against the hardwood floors as players jab step, cut and pivot and defenders move their feet to stay in front of their assignment.

Returning home from the game, Djellouli wondered how that sound was produced. And as a materials scientist at Harvard University, he had a way to find out.

Djellouli and colleagues slid a sneaker against a smooth glass plate over and over. They recorded the squeaks with a microphone and filmed the whole thing with a high speed camera to see what was happening under the shoe.

In a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, they described what they found. As the shoe works hard to keep its grip, tiny sections of the sole change shape as they momentarily lose then regain contact with the floor thousands of times per second — at a frequency that matches the pitch of the loud squeak we hear.

“That squeaking is basically your shoe rippling, or creating wrinkles that travel super fast. They repeat at a high frequency, and this is why you get that squeaky noise,” Djellouli said.

The grip patterns on the soles may also play a role. When researchers slid blocks of flat, featureless rubber against the glass, they saw a series of chaotic, disorganized ripples but didn’t hear squeaks.

The ridge-like designs on the bottom of your shoes may organize the bursts to produce a clear, high-pitched sound.

FILE – Los Angeles Clippers guard Chris Paul’s shoes are seen during the second half of an NBA basketball game in New Orleans, Wednesday, March 26, 2014. (AP Photo/Jonathan Bachman, File)

Other researchers have studied these kinds of bursts before, but this sneaker study examines friction happening at much faster speeds. And for the first time, it links the speedy pulses with the squeaking sound they produce.

These insights don’t just serve to satisfy the curiosity of a basketball fan. They could also help answer important practical questions. “Friction is one of the oldest and most intricate problems in physics,” wrote physicist Bart Weber in an editorial accompanying the new research. Yet, despite its practical importance, he wrote, “it is difficult to predict and control.”

Understanding friction better could help scientists better understand how the Earth’s tectonic plates slide and grind during earthquakes, for example, or to save energy by reducing friction and wear.

FILE – Nike sneakers are seen during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game between Florida and Alabama in the semifinals of the Southeastern Conference tournament, Saturday, March 16, 2013, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)

It could also help eliminate moments off the court when squeaky shoes can be a little awkward or embarrassing, such as in a quiet office hallway.

This research doesn’t offer a fix, though the internet has plenty of advice that may be risky, including rubbing soap or a dryer sheet on the soles. But some of the insights from the study could help to design squeak-free shoes in the future.

For example, one additional experiment found that changing the thickness of the rubber could make the squeak sound lower or higher in pitch. In the future, could we fine-tune our shoes to squeak in a pitch so high we can’t even hear it?

FILE – United States’ LeBron James (6) wears shiny shoes while warming up during a men’s gold medal basketball game against France at Bercy Arena at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Saturday, Aug. 10, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)

“We can now start designing for it,” said Weber, who is with the Advanced Research Center for Nanolithography and the University of Amsterdam, in an interview. “We can start making interfaces that either do it if we want to hear this sound, or don’t do it if we don’t want to hear it.”

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 FATIMA HUSSEIN

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration on Wednesday imposed another tranche of sanctions on people and companies accused of enabling Iran’s ballistic missile program, drone production and illicit oil sales as the U.S. presses Tehran to make a deal ahead of nuclear talks this week.

The sanctions against 30 people, companies and ships come as President Donald Trump has massed the largest U.S. buildup of warships and aircraft in the region in decades and has threatened to use military action in a bid to get Iran to constrain its nuclear program.

The latest round of talks between U.S. officials, including envoy Steve Witkoff, and Iranian negotiators via mediator Oman are scheduled for Thursday in Geneva.

The new sanctions imposed by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control include a list of ships accused of being part of Iran’s “shadow fleet,” which refers to rusting oil tankers that smuggle oil for countries facing stiff sanctions.

Also targeted are drone manufacturing firms, including Qods Aviation Industries, which has supplied drones “to all branches of the Iranian military and buyers in Africa and Latin America,” the Treasury Department said.

Among other things, sanctions deny the people and firms access to any property or financial assets held in the U.S. and prevent American companies and citizens from doing business with them. However, they are largely symbolic because many of them do not hold funds with U.S. institutions.

“Treasury will continue to put maximum pressure on Iran to target the regime’s weapons capabilities and support for terrorism, which it has prioritized over the lives of the Iranian people,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.

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Trump and other top administration officials insist that Iran cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon and ramped up pressure months after U.S. strikes in June on three Iranian nuclear sites.

Iran long has maintained its nuclear program is peaceful. It had been enriching uranium up to 60% purity before the June attack — a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%.

“We wiped it out and they want to start all over again. And they’re at this moment again pursuing their sinister ambitions,” Trump said during his State of the Union speech Tuesday night. “We are in negotiations with them. They want to make a deal, but we haven’t heard those secret words: We will never have a nuclear weapon.”