By ROD McGUIRK

MEBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Australians vote Saturday in general elections being dominated by the soaring cost of living, the economy, energy and China.

Related Articles

What to know about May Day and how it has grown over the years

Africans say a Black pope would be nice to have. But they are not too hopeful

Brazilian nun who was the world’s oldest person has died at 116

Rubio calls India and Pakistan in effort to defuse crisis over Kashmir attack

Weekend round of nuclear talks between US and Iran are postponed, Oman says

Affordable housing is in short supply, interest rates remain high and the major political parties are starkly divided on how to wean the nation off fossil fuel-generated electricity.

The major parties also differ on how to deal with China, which is both Australia’s largest trading partner and its greatest strategic threat.

Here’s what to know about the main issues:

Surging inflation

Australians have endured one of the sharpest rises in the cost of living in recent history and the current government has been at the helm through the worst of it.

Prices of eggs surged 11% last year and beer rose 4%, according to government figures. Average rents rose 4.8% last year after a 8.1% spike in 2023, property analyst CoreLogic said.

The central bank’s benchmark interest rate rose from a record low 0.1% to 0.35% two weeks before Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s center-left Labor Party came to power in 2022’s elections.

The rate has been raised a dozen times since then, peaking at 4.35% in November 2023. Annual inflation peaked that year at 7.8%.

The central bank reduced the inflation rate by a quarter percentage point in February to 4.1% in an indication that the worst of the cost of living crisis had passed. The rate is widely expected to be cut again at the bank’s next board meeting on May 20 due to international economic uncertainty generated by U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs policies.

Scarce and expensive housing

Inflation has put some builders out of business, exacerbating a shortage of housing, which in turn has inflated rents.

The government has provided tax cuts and assistance for some rent and energy bills, but critics argue government spending has contributed to maintaining elevated inflation.

Albanese promised in 2023 to build 1.2 million homes through incentives over five years starting in the middle of last year, an ambitious target in a country of 27 million people. Early building approval figures suggest his government would miss that target.

Labor has vowed to reduce the deposit first time home buyers will be required to pay from 20% to 5% with the government becoming guarantor for the difference.

The conservative opposition Liberal Party has promised to reduce competition for housing by reducing immigration. It’s also promised to allow Australians to spend money held in their compulsory workplace pension funds, known as superannuation, on down payments to buy a home.

The opposition has also pledged to make mortgage interest payments tax deductible for many first home buyers.

Many economists argue the rival policies would both inflate home prices while achieving little to increase the supply of housing.

Different paths to net zero

Both parties agree on one goal: to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

Albanese’s government was elected in 2022 with a promise to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 43% below 2005 levels by the end of the decade and achieve net zero by 2050.

The opposition has promised to build seven government-funded nuclear power plants across Australia, the first providing electricity in 2035.

The government argues Australia‘s existing coal and gas-fired generators won’t last long enough to meet the nation’s needs until nuclear power arrives. It plans to have 82% of Australia’s energy grid powered by renewables by 2030.

The opposition argues the government’s policy of replacing coal and gas with renewable energy sources including wind turbines and solar cells is unachievable, and would reduce investment in clean energy technologies.

Leader of the Australian opposition Liberal party Peter Dutton, center, assists fueling a car in Melbourne on Wednesday, April 30, 2025. (Mick Tsikas/AAP Image via AP)

The opposition would rely on more gas to generate electricity until atomic power was established. It would not set a new target for 2030 before the election.

Ties with China

Trade and diplomatic relations between Australia and China plunged to new depths in 2020 after the previous conservative Australian government demanded an international inquiry into the origins of and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Beijing barred minister-to-minister contacts with Australia and imposed a series of official and unofficial bans on commodities including coal, wine, barley, wood and lobsters that cost Australian exporters up to 20 billion Australian dollars ($13 billion) a year.

The thaw started almost immediately with the election of the Labor Party in 2022. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang wrote to congratulate Albanese on his election victory within days.

All the trade barriers were gradually lifted and Albanese met President Xi Jinping during a state visit to Beijing in 2023.

Albanese often says about China: “We will cooperate where we can, disagree where we must and engage in the national interest.”

Opposition leader Peter Dutton, a longtime critic of China, has claimed that bilateral relations would improve even further with a tough and uncompromising approach. He has accused Albanese of self-censorship to avoid offending Beijing.

“Australia must be willing to criticize any nation whose behavior imperils stability in the region, and that’s what a coalition government I lead will do confidently and in concert with like-minded countries,” Dutton told the Lowy Institute international policy think tank in Sydney in March.

By TOM MURPHY, Associated Press

Eli Lilly’s stock wobbled Thursday after a looming coverage hit was detailed for its blockbuster weight-loss drug Zepbound.

CVS Health said the drugs Wegovy and Saxenda from rival drugmaker Novo Nordisk will become the preferred options on its standard formulary, or list of covered drugs, as of July 1. Zepbound will be excluded.

This could complicate access to a drug that many patients cannot afford to pay for on their own.

The formulary is maintained by CVS Health’s pharmacy benefits management business, which runs prescription drug coverage for millions of people. Employers and insurers — who pay most of the prescription bill — use the formulary to decide which drugs get coverage.

They can customize their coverage plans to include Zepbound. But CVS Health spokesman David Whitrap said most employers wind up using the standard formulary because of the discounts negotiated for them.

Patients taking Zepbound will be able to switch to Wegovy if the Lilly drug is excluded from their coverage, Whitrap said.

CVS Health also said Thursday that it will start selling Wegovy at a discounted price of about $500 monthly at thousands of drugstores for people without coverage. Novo had announced its new lower price last month.

Wegovy and Zepbound are part of a wave of obesity medications known as GLP-1 receptor agonists that have soared in popularity due to the amount of weight people lose while taking the injections. Coverage of these drugs has been patchy due to in part to their cost and the wide swath of patients who could take them.

Shortages of the drugs also have made access challenging, but those have eased recently. That allows pharmacy benefit managers to pit the products against each other to negotiate lower prices in exchange for inclusion on a formulary.

Lilly may have to make some price cuts to restore formulary access, said Daniel Barasa, who follows the company for Gabelli Funds. But he said he thinks big employers will still include both treatments on their lists of covered drugs, leaving the choice on what to use up to patients and doctors.

Lilly said late last year that a head-to-head study of the two drugs showed that Zepbound helped patients drop more pounds.

Zepbound has emerged as one of Lilly’s top sellers. Its sales jumped to $2.3 billion in the recently completed first quarter. That’s up from $517 million a year ago, during the drug’s first full quarter on the market.

Lilly shares shed more than $90 in value, falling nearly 11% to $804.06 Thursday afternoon. Broader indexes, meanwhile, rose slightly.

By TIM REYNOLDS

MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. (AP) — For the Miami Grand Prix, someone is in charge of all the strategic planning and the budget. Someone else oversees the construction of 163 temporary buildings needed for a Formula 1 race weekend. Someone else designs the seating areas and keeps track of food and beverage needs. Someone else makes sure that the rich and famous have everything they need and want, from the right drink to the right kind of throw pillow.

Related Articles

For Wolves to win it all, Rudy Gobert must be the Kingslayer’s dragon

When and where does the Timberwolves’ second-round playoff series start?

Five reasons the Timberwolves beat the Lakers in five games

Narrative-busting Timberwolves knock out Lakers, advance to West semifinals

Frost avoid elimination from playoff race by beating Ottawa on the road

These jobs make the race happen.

And in Miami, they’re all being done by women.

It’s something that the Miami Grand Prix believes sets its race apart. In a sport and a circuit still dominated by males — there hasn’t been a woman behind the wheel for a Formula 1 race since 1992 — it will be difficult this weekend to find an element of the event that isn’t overseen by a woman.

“I’m so proud,” said Katharina Nowak, the Miami race’s vice president of business operations. “The amount of talent, whether male or female, that we have in that room, it just makes you want to be better. Every day, we push ourselves to just continue to maintain the standard at which we all expect to be working at, which just pushes everybody to be better for each other because no one wants to let anyone down.”

The women leading the way

There are men on the masthead for the race’s local overseers: Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross owns the race, Tom Garfinkel is the managing partner and Tyler Epp is president of the race that takes place at the Dolphins’ Hard Rock Stadium campus. From there, many other top Miami roles are held by women, including:

— Nowak — only 28 years old — reports to Epp as the race’s second-in-command and oversees all strategic plans, the budget and 17 internal departments. She also speaks four languages.

— Natalie Clark is the senior director of event operations, overseeing the process of building, loading in and loading out, which means she tracks what every truck is bringing onto the campus and where it goes.

— Sydney McClain is the senior director of events and food and beverage, meaning she creates virtually the entire fan experience on the 250-acre campus.

— Melanie Cabassol is vice president of hospitality and curated experiences, meaning she creates the atmosphere for premium clients — a list that in past years has included the likes of LeBron James, Patrick Mahomes, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

“I’ve worked at other places before, and it hasn’t been that I’m sitting around a conference table and a majority of women are driving different initiatives within this business,” McClain said. “So, it is very unique. It’s very exciting. And I think that we owe a lot of that to the female leaders that have been here, been in our shoes before, and that have helped pave the way for us.”

The race’s impact on Miami

The race, now in its fourth year, is part of a diverse series of events at the Hard Rock campus. It’s primarily the home of the Dolphins, who have their training facility adjacent to the stadium. It also plays host to Miami Hurricanes football, concerts, soccer — the Club World Cup later this year and the FIFA World Cup next year will hold some matches there — and the Miami Open tennis tournament. The F1 race alone has generated more than $1 billion in economic impact in its first three years.

FILE – Drivers get ready for the start of the sprint shootout ahead of the Formula One Grand Prix at the Spa-Francorchamps racetrack in Spa, Belgium, Saturday, July 29, 2023. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert, File)

The women leading the Miami race aren’t alone in their fields. At F1, the chief commercial officer is Emily Prazer and, until late last year, Sacha Woodward Hill had been there for nearly 30 years as the chief legal officer.

But Miami stands out, said Susie Wolff, the managing director of F1 Academy — an all-female developmental racing series.

“I think it’s something which we can all take quite an amount of pride in, that the sport has shifted in such a way that it’s now the case that it is not regarded as something unusual,” Wolff said. “I don’t see it as unusual. I think is a testament to the progress we’ve made.”

How it happens in Miami

This week in Miami takes the other 51 weeks on the calendar to prepare for. Eight months of planning, three months of executing the plan and then one month of it all actually happening.

Part of Clark’s job, along with overseeing 245 tent structures and 110 generators and 35 miles of plumbing infrastructure — all of it temporary and hidden — also is to work with architects and construction companies who execute what she draws up for a plan.

“I think when I was younger in my career, I got a little bit of, ‘Who is she? Why is she in the meeting? Why does she have these construction plans?’” Clark said. “And what happens over time is they hear you speak, your confidence, and once people understand that you are a master at your craft, there’s less questions being asked.”

Cabassol leaves nothing to chance in her job. She’s in charge of the most luxurious spaces on the campus, the Palm Club, the Casa Tua Trackside Club and the 72 Club. The original blueprints for those spaces were her vision. Every glass, every bottle of Champagne, every element of those spaces gets her approval.

They call her group a “white glove team,” VIP service for VIP guests. She even manages a secret road of sorts on the campus — Palm Alley, they call it, a palm tree-lined path that drops off some of the world’s richest people 10 feet from the entrance. Inside the club, there are the strictest of rules: no entourages, no private security, the VIP and one guest only. No cameras, no media.

Cabassol and her group know the likes and dislikes, what kind of food, what kind of drink, every guest will want ahead of time by dealing with the VIPs’ own teams. If there is a Palm Club guest who doesn’t like another Palm Club guest, they even have a plan to keep those people away from each other. Everybody must enjoy themselves, no matter what.

She makes it work. So do Nowak, Clark, McClain and many others.

“What has happened here is they’ve brought the right people together to create, the right team to execute the vision,” Cabassol said. “I guess I would say I’m proud to represent women in this space, but I’m even more proud to be a part of the team that recognizes and elevates talent that collaboratively work together in this environment.”

AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing

By COLLIN BINKLEY, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — When the Justice Department lifted a school desegregation order in Louisiana this week, officials called its continued existence a “historical wrong” and suggested that others dating to the Civil Rights Movement should be reconsidered.

The end of the 1966 legal agreement with Plaquemines Parish schools announced Tuesday shows the Trump administration is “getting America refocused on our bright future,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said.

Inside the Justice Department, officials appointed by President Donald Trump have expressed desire to withdraw from other desegregation orders they see as an unnecessary burden on schools, according to a person familiar with the issue who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

FILE – A man plants a sign outside Woodlawn High School in Pointe a la Hache, Louisiana on Sept. 1, 1966 where five African Americans applied for registration for the first time in parish history. (AP Photo/Jack Thornell, file)

Dozens of school districts across the South remain under court-enforced agreements dictating steps to work toward integration, decades after the Supreme Court struck down racial segregation in education. Some see the court orders’ endurance as a sign the government never eradicated segregation, while officials in Louisiana and at some schools see the orders as bygone relics that should be wiped away.

The Justice Department opened a wave of cases in the 1960s, after Congress unleashed the department to go after schools that resisted desegregation. Known as consent decrees, the orders can be lifted when districts prove they have eliminated segregation and its legacy.

The small Louisiana district has a long-running integration case

The Trump administration called the Plaquemines case an example of administrative neglect. The district in the Mississippi River Delta Basin in southeast Louisiana was found to have integrated in 1975, but the case was to stay under the court’s watch for another year. The judge died the same year, and the court record “appears to be lost to time,” according to a court filing.

“Given that this case has been stayed for a half-century with zero action by the court, the parties or any third-party, the parties are satisfied that the United States’ claims have been fully resolved,” according to a joint filing from the Justice Department and the office of Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill.

FILE – White and Black children mix freely on the playground outside a school in a racially mixed neighborhood, Oct. 18, 1957, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Alvan Quinn, File)

Plaquemines Superintendent Shelley Ritz said Justice Department officials still visited every year as recently as 2023 and requested data on topics including hiring and discipline. She said the paperwork was a burden for her district of fewer than 4,000 students.

“It was hours of compiling the data,” she said.

Louisiana “got its act together decades ago,” said Leo Terrell, senior counsel to the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department, in a statement. He said the dismissal corrects a historical wrong, adding it’s “past time to acknowledge how far we have come.”

Murrill asked the Justice Department to close other school orders in her state. In a statement, she vowed to work with Louisiana schools to help them “put the past in the past.”

FILE – Students from Charlotte High School in Charlotte, N.C., ride a bus together, May 15, 1972. (AP Photo/Harold L. Valentine, File)

Civil rights activists say that’s the wrong move. Many orders have been only loosely enforced in recent decades, but that doesn’t mean problems are solved, said Johnathan Smith, who worked in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during President Joe Biden’s administration.

“It probably means the opposite — that the school district remains segregated. And in fact, most of these districts are now more segregated today than they were in 1954,” said Smith, who is now chief of staff and general counsel for the National Center for Youth Law.

Desegregation orders involve a range of instructions

More than 130 school systems are under Justice Department desegregation orders, according to records in a court filing this year. The vast majority are in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, with smaller numbers in states like Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina. Some other districts remain under separate desegregation agreements with the Education Department.

FILE – A white mother walks with her son past a group of African American students arriving for classes at formerly all-white Boothville Venice High School on Monday, Sept. 12, 1966 as racial barriers fell in Plaquemines Parish. (AP Photo/Jack Thornell, file)

The orders can include a range of remedies, from busing requirements to district policies allowing students in predominately Black schools to transfer to predominately white ones. The agreements are between the school district and the U.S. government, but other parties can ask the court to intervene when signs of segregation resurface.

In 2020, the NAACP invoked a consent decree in Alabama’s Leeds school district when it stopped offering school meals during the COVID-19 pandemic. The civil rights group said it disproportionately hurt Black students, in violation of the desegregation order. The district agreed to resume meals.

Last year, a Louisiana school board closed a predominately Black elementary school near a petrochemical facility after the NAACP said it disproportionately exposed Black students to health risks. The board made the decision after the NAACP filed a motion invoking a decades-old desegregation order at St. John the Baptist Parish.

Closing cases could lead to legal challenges

The dismissal has raised alarms among some who fear it could undo decades of progress. Research on districts released from orders has found that many saw greater increases in racial segregation compared with those under court orders.

“In very many cases, schools quite rapidly resegregate, and there are new civil rights concerns for students,” said Halley Potter, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation who studies educational inequity.

FILE – Children smile from window of a school bus in Springfield, Mass., as court-ordered busing brought Black children and white children together in elementary grades without incident, Sept. 16, 1974. (AP Photo/Peter Bregg, File)

Ending the orders would send a signal that desegregation is no longer a priority, said Robert Westley, a professor of antidiscrimination law at Tulane University Law School in New Orleans.

“It’s really just signaling that the backsliding that has started some time ago is complete,” Westley said. “The United States government doesn’t really care anymore of dealing with problems of racial discrimination in the schools. It’s over.”

Related Articles

Musk defends his work as he prepares to wind down at DOGE but gives hazy answers on future

Trump national security adviser Waltz is out following Signal chat blunder in major staff shakeup

Rubio calls India and Pakistan in effort to defuse crisis over Kashmir attack

Weekend round of nuclear talks between US and Iran are postponed, Oman says

Trump will address graduating students at the University of Alabama

Any attempt to drop further cases would face heavy opposition in court, said Raymond Pierce, president and CEO of the Southern Education Foundation.

“It represents a disregard for education opportunities for a large section of America. It represents a disregard for America’s need to have an educated workforce,” he said. “And it represents a disregard for the rule of law.”

Associated Press writer Sharon Lurye contributed from New Orleans.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.