For many tax filers, state and federal income taxes are due Tuesday.

If you are done working on your 2024 taxes, congratulations.

If you have not, the last-minute tax filing tips below, from one San Diego finance professional and the Internal Revenue Service, could make the coming days a little bit less of a drag.

Insights from a finance pro

Levi Anderson, a financial planning manager with the San Diego office EP Wealth Advisors, a fee-only, fiduciary firm, shared some insights and reminders for anyone still working on their taxes, whether alone or with a tax professional.

If you’re filing an extension, you still have to pay your tax balance by Tuesday’s tax deadline, Anderson said. “If you are filing an extension, be aware that taxes are due on the original tax deadline although you are filing an extension,” he said. “Although the penalty for ‘Failure-to-Pay’ is less than the ‘Failure-to-File’ penalty, the penalty and interest can add up if you wait until later to pay your taxes you owe.”
It’s not too late to contribute to your 2024 retirement accounts — even though we are four months into 2025. Those contributions could reduce your taxable income. “Making a last-minute contribution to these accounts still can count for the 2024 tax year until April 15th. Just be sure you note it as a 2024 contribution when you make it,” Anderson said.

IRS resources for last-minute filers

For last-minute filers looking for free filing resources, qualified taxpayers can still use IRS Direct File and IRS Free File. “Additionally, anyone can use IRS Free File to submit an extension of time to file regardless of their income,” the agency says on its website. Link: irs.gov/filing/file-an-extension-through-irs-free-file

The IRS has a searchable FAQ page with links to almost 60 questions and answers, including “Should I file an amended return?” and “How do I correct an excess salary deferral to my 401(k)?” and a series of questions about payments and distributions dubbed “Is it taxable?” Link: irs.gov/help/ita

A free tax preparation program in Orange County (SCNG)

The IRS’s last-minute tips page also has information for people who are eligible for automatic extensions and who have trouble paying their tax bills. Link: irs.gov/newsroom/last-minute-filing-tips-resources-available-to-help-taxpayers-who-still-need-to-file

Avoiding errors

The IRS also shared pointers to minimize the chance that your return will have an error.

Triple check that your filing status, names, Social Security numbers and birthdates are correct. Same goes for bank account and routing numbers, for a refund via direct deposit.
Answer the digital asset question on Form 1040 and several other forms: “At any time during the tax year, did you: (a) receive (as a reward, award or payment for property or services); or (b) sell, exchange, or otherwise dispose of a digital asset (or a financial interest in a digital asset)?” Examples of digital assets include convertible virtual currencies and cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Income from these assets is taxable.
The agency also recommends using electronic filing over paper filing, as a tool to boost accuracy. “Electronic filing decreases mathematical errors … and prompts taxpayers for missing information. Opting for electronic filing and selecting direct deposit is the fastest and safest way to receive a refund,” the agency says.

Filing taxes electronically helps reduce errors and speed up refunds, the IRS says. (iStockphoto)

Planning ahead

Anderson, the San Diego finance professional, said now is a great time to start getting in shape for next year’s filing season.

“While reviewing your tax return, ask your preparer if they would recommend you consider doing something different in order to be in a better tax position next year,” he said. “While you may not be able to have a lengthy strategy session on the spot, your tax situation will be fresh in your preparer’s mind, and they may have very helpful pointers for you to consider between now and the end of the year.”

Don’t just put your tax return in a drawer, Anderson added. “The biggest issue we see is that people don’t think about taxes until this time next year. Most of the tax-savvy moves need to be done by Dec. 31.”

By JOHN LEICESTER

PARIS (AP) — After his arrest, the boy’s mother was stunned to discover that her 12-year-old had been learning how to kill and gorging on videos of decapitation and torture so gruesome they made even case-hardened French court officials look away. The mother told criminal investigators that she’d thought her son had been playing video games and doing homework during the hours he spent in his room.

The child’s descent into the internet’s darkest recesses started innocently enough, with online searches about Islam after an aunt gave him a Quran as a gift, says the boy’s lawyer. From there, more searching, automated algorithms that steer users’ online experiences and the boy’s curiosity ultimately led him to encrypted chats and ultraviolent propaganda pumped out by Islamic State militants and other extremist groups that are worming their way via apps, video gaming and social media into the minds of the very young.

Paul-Edouard Lallois, the French prosecutor who secured the boy’s conviction on two terror-related charges last August, says the thousands of images and other extreme content that the child viewed so warped his understanding of the world and of right and wrong that “it will take years and years of work to enable this kid to recover normal bearings.”

The prosecutor believes that left unstopped, the boy was on a trajectory to possibly becoming a “completely dehumanized soldier” who risked joining the ranks of digitally radicalized teenagers in France and beyond who are hatching terror plots and expressing support for extremism. The huge library of violent content, several terabytes of data, that the boy amassed included video tutorials on bomb-making, the prosecutor said.

“It is possible to completely upend the mental bearings of such a young child,” he said. “Do that for a few years and, even before he has turned 18, he’s already capable of, yes, committing an attack and the worst things with just a knife.”

An emerging global threat

Across Europe and further afield, the picture is similar: Counterterrorism agencies are grappling with a new generation of attackers, plotters and acolytes of extremism who are younger than ever and have fed on ultraviolent and potentially radicalizing content largely behind their screens. Some are appearing on police radars only when it’s already too late — with knife in hand, as they’re carrying out an attack.

Olivier Christen, France’s national anti-terrorism prosecutor who handles the country’s most serious terror investigations, has a firsthand view of the surging threat. His unit handed terror-related preliminary charges to just two minors in 2022. That number leapt to 15 in 2023 and again last year, to 19.

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Some are “really very, very young, around 15 years old, which was something that was almost unheard of no more than two years ago,” Christen said in an interview with The Associated Press. It “demonstrates the strong effectiveness of the propaganda disseminated by terrorist organizations, which are quite good at targeting this age group.”

The so-called “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing network that usually shuns the limelight, comprising U.S., U.K., Canadian, Australian and New Zealand security agencies, is so alarmed that it took the unusual step in December of calling publicly for collective action, saying: “Radicalized minors can pose the same credible terrorist threat as adults.”

In Germany, an Interior Ministry task force launched after deadly mass stabbings last year is focusing on teenagers’ social networks, aiming to counter their growing role in radicalization. In France, the domestic DGSI security agency says 70% of suspects detained for involvement in alleged terror plots are under the age of 21.

In Austria, security services say a 19-year-old suspect arrested in August, with an 18-year-old and a 17-year-old, for an alleged ISIS-inspired plot to slaughter Taylor Swift concertgoers, was radicalized online. So, too, was a suspected ISIS supporter, aged 14, detained this February for an alleged plan to attack a Vienna train station, Austrian authorities say.

The VSSE intelligence agency in Belgium says almost a third of suspects detained there for plotting attacks from 2022 to 2024 were minors — the youngest only 13. Extremist propaganda “is just a click away for young people in search of an identity or a purpose,” it said in a report in January, with radicalization occurring at speeds that are “nothing short of meteoric.”

A path from porn to jihadi propaganda

Counterterror investigators say the online radicalization of a child can sometimes take just months. Digitally nimble, kids are adept at covering their tracks and skirting parental controls. The 12-year-old’s mother had no inkling that her boy was consulting extremist content, the family’s lawyer, Kamel Aissaoui, told The AP.

And unlike previous generations of militants who were easier for police to track and monitor because they interacted in the real world, their successors are often interacting only in digital spaces, including on encrypted chats to mask their identities and activities, investigators say.

“They live on their phones, their tablets, their computers, in contact with people they don’t know,” said a senior official from a European intelligence agency who spoke to The AP on condition of anonymity to discuss its work combatting illegal extremist activity.

Some start “to imagine who they would attack, how they would go about it, doing actual reconnaissance, hunting for a weapon, consulting tutorials on how to make explosives,” the official said.

For some kids, the process starts with violent pornography or a fascination for gory images, counterterrorism investigators say. From there, more clicks can lead to grisly murder videos from Mexican drug cartels and ultimately to jihadi decapitations, throat-slitting and torture, in videos that are sometimes slickly produced with music and are shared on chat groups.

“Often they’re heavy consumers of everything that is broadcast on the Web and especially things that are forbidden,” said Christen, the French national anti-terror prosecutor. “It’s something of a chain reaction that gets them to the ultra-violence disseminated by jihadi movements.”

Kids from all backgrounds

Aissaoui, the child’s lawyer, said the trial was so tough on the 12-year-old that the hearing had to be paused twice because he was so distraught. He says the boy isn’t violent and was simply a victim of apps and other digital tools that expose kids to extremist content.

“He was directed from site to site, and so on and so forth, until he came across things he should never have seen,” the lawyer said.

The boy is now in residential care without access to social networks, with specialized educators and regular visitation rights for his parents, the prosecutor told AP.

Counterterrorism investigators say they’re dealing with kids from an array of backgrounds. Some have behavioral difficulties and some tend to be loners whose social interactions are largely virtual, but others raise no concerns with their behavior before it draws police attention.

Police analysis of the 12-year-old boy’s computer and phone found 1,739 jihadi videos, “a phenomenal quantity of scenes of decapitation, throat-slitting, shootings,” the prosecutor said. He also had how-to videos on bomb-making and killing, including one that appeared to show the real-life death of a tied-down man being methodically chopped into pieces.

“I have seen some horrible things in my career,” he said. “But this goes beyond all comprehension.”

By STEPHEN GROVES

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate, once again, was working into the early morning hours Friday with its new majority leader, Republican John Thune, setting the pace.

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It wasn’t until just after 2 a.m. that the last of the senators had straggled into the chamber to cast their vote on the confirmation of retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The vote capped a grinding start to the year for the Senate that included several all-night floor sessions and — importantly for Thune — the quickest top-level Cabinet confirmation process in the past 20 years.

At the outset, however, such an outcome was far from assured. President Donald Trump was making demands that the new Senate leader be ready to put the chamber into recess so he could skip over the Senate confirmation process altogether. Faced with that prospect, Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said his message in conversations with the president was, “Let us do this the old-fashioned way and just use the clock and grind it out, and then we’ll see where we go from there.”

That approach has been successful at allowing Thune to show Trump the Senate’s worth while also preserving its constitutional role in installing a president’s Cabinet. But the decision to push forward on even Trump’s most unconventional Cabinet nominees has also come at a cost.

Several Cabinet officials have been intimately involved in the early controversies of Trump’s second term, from discussing military plans on an unclassified Signal app chat to encouraging the Republican president to follow through with steep tariffs on trading partners.

GOP senators, many of whom still hold traditional Republican ideas, have often had to mount a response. The Republican chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, last month initiated an investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general into whether classified information was shared on Signal by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. And GOP senators more recently made a concerted effort to encourage Trump to negotiate trade deals with other nations rather than listen to advisers like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who was adamant that tariffs were there to stay.

In an interview with The Associated Press shortly after Trump announced a pause on tariffs to most nations, Thune said the announcement showed the president is “responding to the feedback he’s given.”

“I think everybody wants to see him succeed with this, wants to see the country succeed and wants to make sure that we’re gauging and calibrating — as some of these major policy shifts are being made — the impacts that they have,” Thune added.

That balance — Thune’s supportive yet still cautious approach — has marked his early months working with a president with whom, until last year, he had a fraught relationship. So far, Trump and Thune have stayed on upbeat terms, but the stakes will only rise for Republicans in the coming months as they try to lift through Congress a massive package of tax breaks and spending cuts on party-line votes.

During Trump’s first term, it took barely a year — and some setbacks in Congress — before Trump began openly feuding with then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Discussing the reconciliation package as he sat in McConnell’s old leadership office, Thune stressed that for the GOP’s marquee legislation to work, “Everybody’s got to be rolling in the same direction. It takes a lot of teamwork.”

A check and balance

As Trump has entered office with practically total command of the Republican Party and an agenda to upend the federal government and its role in society, Thune acknowledged that Trump has been aggressive in his use of executive power. But he argued that it was no different from how previous presidents wanted to “take as much power as they possibly can,” pointing to President Joe Biden’s moves to cancel student debt and boost government food assistance.

“Our job is to do what we can to support the president and his agenda,” Thune said. “But, you know, be that important check and balance, too, that the Founders intended.”

Still, as Trump has blazed through constitutional norms with sweeping orders that endanger civil rights, government programs, the federal workforce and America’s relationship with allies, Republicans in Congress have stood by.

“We need Republicans to get off the sidelines, including the majority leader, and say, ’This is unacceptable behavior by any president,’” said Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat.

Kelly cited Trump’s disparagement of NATO and comments about taking over countries like Canada and Greenland and the Panama Canal. “The damage that Donald Trump is doing to our international reputation is not something we easily recover from,” he said.

Still, Kelly added that Thune “deserves some credit” for making the “mechanics of the Senate function well.”

Thune has been aggressive in trying to get the Senate to move faster through its votes. He noted that he had allowed one recent vote session to close before he had even had a chance to cast his vote because he was at the White House for a meeting.

It’s an incremental change in the Senate’s timing, but one that Thune, a former runner, hopes will contribute to the chamber becoming more active and deliberative in shaping the law. He won the leadership contest in part by pledging to allow individual senators to have more of a say in crafting and amending legislation.

So far, the Senate has also gained bipartisan support to pass bills that will increase prison penalties for fentanyl traffickers as well as mandate the detainment of immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally and are accused of theft and violent crimes.

Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican who has been vocal about changes to the way legislation advances, said Thune has “done a great job,” although the Senate hasn’t had much of a chance to work on legislation.

“The truth of the matter,” he added, “is we’ve been consumed by confirmations.”

By NICHOLAS RICCARDI

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — Like many in the tech industry, Jeremy Lyons used to think of himself as a relatively apolitical guy.

The only time he had participated in a demonstration before now was in the opening days of Donald Trump’s first presidential term, when he joined fellow Google workers walking out of the company’s Silicon Valley campus to protest immigration restrictions. Google’s co-founder and its chief executive officer joined them.

Last weekend was Lyons’ second, also against Trump, but it had a very different feel.

The man directing thousands of marchers with a bullhorn in downtown San Jose on April 5 was another tech worker who would not give his full name for fear of being identified by Trump backers. Marchers were urged not to harass drivers of Tesla vehicles, which have gone from a symbol of Silicon Valley’s environmental futurism to a pro-Trump icon. And no tech executives were anywhere to be seen, only months after several had joined Trump at his January inauguration.

To Lyons, 54, the change says as much about what’s happened to Silicon Valley over the past quarter-century as it does about the atmosphere of fear surrounding many Trump critics nowadays.

“One of the things I’ve seen over that time is a shift from a nerdy utopia to a money first, move fast and break things,” Lyons said.

Political gap seen between tech leaders and their workforce

The tech industry’s political allegiances remain divided. But as some in the upper echelons of Silicon Valley began shifting to the right politically, many of the tech industry’s everyday workers have remained liberal — but also increasingly nervous and disillusioned. Their mood is in stark contrast to the prominent tech leaders who have embraced a conservative populist ideology.

“I think you’re seeing a real gap between the leadership elite here in Silicon Valley and their workforce,” said Ann Skeet, senior director of leadership ethics at an ethics institute at Santa Clara University and a longtime observer of the industry.

“The shift hasn’t been for a lot of people,” said Lenny Siegel, a former mayor of Mountain View and longtime liberal activist in the valley. “It’s a handful of people who’ve gotten the attention.”

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The biggest example of that is Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and CEO of the world’s best-known electric car company who has taken on a prominent role slashing federal agencies in Trump’s administration. Musk has been joined by several tech billionaires, including investor David Sacks, who helped fundraise for Trump’s campaign and became the White House’s artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency czar, and venture capitalist Marc Andreesen. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also attended Trump’s inauguration in Washington.

Zuckerberg began praising Trump after the then-candidate, angered over money Zuckerberg steered toward local election offices in some states in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic, threatened last summer to imprison him. Zuckerberg also donated $1 million to the president’s inauguration fund and co-hosted an inauguration reception for billionaire Republican donors.

Trump has filled a number of his administration’s posts with billionaires and his support from wealthy tech leaders led Democratic President Joe Biden to warn that the United States risked becoming an oligarchy ruled by elites. During Trump’s first term, the valley and its leaders were a bulwark of resistance to the Republican, especially over immigration, given that the industry draws its workforce from around the globe.

It’s against that backdrop that thousands of people attended the recent rally at a downtown San Jose park to protest the actions of Trump and Musk.

Even as tech industry has changed, Silicon Valley has leaned Democratic

Santa Clara County, which comprises most of Silicon Valley, swung 8 percentage points toward Trump in November election against Democrat Kamala Harris, matching the shift across California. Even with that swing, the county voted 68% to 28% for the then-vice president and remains a Democratic stronghold.

“We’re still in the belly of the beast,” said Dave Johnson, the new executive director of the Santa Clara GOP, who said the party has gained some new members in the county but few from the tech industry. “If the lake was frozen, there’s a little glimmer on top. I would not say there are cracks in the ice.”

The valley has long leaned Democratic, but with an unusual political mix: a general dislike of getting too involved in Washington’s business coupled with an at-times contradictory mix of libertarian individualism, Bay Area activism and belief in the ability of science to solve the world’s problems.

That has persisted even as the tech industry has changed.

The tech boom was fueled by scrappy startups that catered to their workers’ dreams of changing the world for the better. Google’s motto was “don’t be evil,” a phrase it removed from its code of conduct by 2018, when it and other companies such as Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, had grown into multinational behemoths. The companies have had layoffs in recent years, a shock to an industry that not long ago seemed poised for unlimited growth.

Entrepreneurs once dreamed of building startups that would change the world, said Jan English-Lueck, a San Jose State University professor who has been studying Silicon Valley culture for more than 20 years.

“Now,” she said, “if you’re part of a startup, you’re hoping you’ll be absorbed in a way that’s profitable.”

Discontent among some in the tech industry about where it’s headed

Even before some prominent tech leaders shifted toward Trump, there was mounting discontent among some in the industry over its direction. IdaRose Sylvester runs a business promoting a Silicon Valley-style approach to entrepreneurs in other countries.

“I feel sick to my stomach now,” she said.

Sylvester was already disenchanted with the growing inequality in the valley and the environmental cost of all the energy needed to power crypto, AI and data centers. She took part in protests against Trump in 2017, but felt that energy fade once he lost the 2020 election to Biden.

“I saw a lot of people get out of politics once Biden won. There was a feeling it was all OK,” Sylvester said. “It was not all OK.”

It is worse now, she said. She helped organize one of several demonstrations across the valley last weekend during a national day of protests against the new administration.

At first glance, the one in downtown San Jose could have been a typical anti-Trump protest anywhere. A large crowd of largely middle-age and older people carried signs against the president and Musk while chanting against oligarchs.

But it was clearly a Silicon Valley crowd, one still reeling not only from Trump’s challenges to the country’s system of checks and balances but also from the actions of the valley’s top executives.

“The money is all shifting to the wealthiest, and that terrifies me,” said Dianne Wood, who works at a startup. “Unfortunately, you’ve got the Zuckerbergs and Elon Musks of the world who are taking that over.”

“Just coming here, everyone’s saying turn off the facial recognition on your phone,” Wood added. “We’re all scared.”

Kamal Ali, who works in AI, said he felt betrayed by that shift.

“The trust is broken. A lot of employees are very upset by what’s going on,” he said. “It’s going to be different forever.”

Associated Press writer Sarah Parvini in Los Angeles and video journalist Haven Daley contributed to this report.