Trump and Sen. Dave McCormick team up to promote energy investments in Pennsylvania

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By SEUNG MIN KIM and MARC LEVY, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump and Sen. David McCormick of Pennsylvania will jointly announce roughly $70 billion of energy investments in the state Tuesday as the president travels to Pittsburgh for a conference with dozens of top executives to promote his energy and technology agenda.

FILE – Republican Pennsylvania Senate candidate David McCormick, left, walks on stage to greet Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump, at a rally in Harrisburg, Pa., July 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

The Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit will be held at Carnegie Mellon University, and it comes as the state’s political and business leaders are working to forge the city into a hub for robotics, artificial intelligence and energy.

Trump has repeatedly pledged U.S. “energy dominance” in the global market, and Pennsylvania — a swing state critical to his wins in 2016 and 2024 — is at the forefront of that agenda, in large part due to its coal industry that the Republican administration has taken several steps to bolster.

Neither the White House nor McCormick’s office gave breakdowns of the $70 billion or what the investments entail.

McCormick, a Republican first-term senator who is organizing the inaugural event, says the summit is meant to bring together top energy companies and AI leaders, global investors and labor behind Trump’s energy policies and priorities. He says the investments will spur tens of thousands of jobs in Pennsylvania.

“Pennsylvania is uniquely positioned because of abundant energy, of incredible skilled workers, technology,” McCormick said in a Fox News interview Monday promoting the summit. “We need to win the battle for AI innovation in America, and Pennsylvania is at the center of it.”

The list of participating CEOs includes leaders from global behemoths like Blackstone, SoftBank, Amazon Web Services, BlackRock and ExxonMobil and local companies such as the Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics, which deploys AI to bolster energy capacity. Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, will also attend.

Administration officials speaking at the summit include White House crypto czar David Sacks, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

In the Fox News interview, McCormick credited his wife, Dina Powell McCormick, with the idea for a summit. Powell McCormick served as Trump’s deputy national security adviser in his first term and is a former Goldman Sachs executive who is now at BDT & MSD Partners, a merchant bank.

Pittsburgh is home to Carnegie Mellon University, a prestigious engineering school, plus a growing industry of small robotics firms and a so-called “AI Avenue” that’s home to offices for Google and other AI firms. It also sits in the middle of the prolific Marcellus Shale natural gas reservoir.

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Pennsylvania has scored several big investment wins in recent months, some of it driven by federal manufacturing policy and others by the ravenous need for electricity from the fast-growing AI business.

Nippon Steel just bought U.S. Steel for almost $15 billion, getting Trump’s approval after pledging to invest billions alone in U.S. Steel’s Pittsburgh-area plants.

Amazon will spend $20 billion on two data center complexes in Pennsylvania, with more to come, while a one-time coal-fired power plant is being turned into the nation’s largest gas-fired power plant to fuel a data center campus. Meanwhile, Microsoft says it is spending $1.6 billion to reopen the lone functional nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island under a long-term power supply agreement for its data centers.

Shapiro, elected in 2022, has been pushing for the state to land a big multibillion-dollar industrial project, like a semiconductor factory or an electric vehicle plant.

In his first budget speech, Shapiro — who is viewed as a potential White House contender in 2028 — told lawmakers that Pennsylvania needs to “get in the game” and warned that it would take money.

He didn’t land a mega project, but he instead has worked to play up big investments by Amazon and Microsoft, as well as Nippon Steel, as he prepares to seek a second term.

Levy reported from Harrisburg, Pa.

The Emmy nominations are here. ‘Severance,’ ‘The White Lotus’ and ‘Adolescence’ could have a big day

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By ANDREW DALTON, Associated Press Entertainment Writer

LOS ANGELES (AP) — “Severance” could separate itself from the competition and reach the upper echelons of the Emmy Awards when nominations are announced Tuesday morning.

The dystopian workplace drama from Apple TV+ achieved a convergence of acclaim and audience buzz for its second season that often leads to the kind of Emmy dominance enjoyed in recent years by “Succession” and “Shogun.”

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But a flowering of Emmys tends to follow HBO’s “The White Lotus” wherever it goes, and HBO Max’s newcomer “The Pitt” could challenge for nominations and for wins when the trophies are handed out in September.

All will benefit from the absence of “Shogun,” which last year led all Emmy nominees with 25 and set a record for wins in a season with 18. Its second season is still in the early stages of production and it shouldn’t be around for next year’s Emmys either.

“Severance” has become a signature show for Apple TV+. The streamer has gotten plenty of Emmy nominations for dramas including “The Morning Show” and “Slow Horses,” and “Ted Lasso” was downright dominant on the comedy side.

But Apple has lacked the kind of breakaway prestige drama that HBO seems to produce perennially.

Adam Scott and Britt Lower are virtual locks for lead acting nominations for what amounted to dual roles as their characters’ “innie” work selves and “outie” home selves. Tramell Tillman is just as likely to get a nod for playing their tone-shifting, pineapple-wielding supervisor, and Ben Stiller is bound to get a directing nomination.

“Severance” got 14 nominations for its first season in 2023, but won just two, for its music and its title sequence.

Nominations will be streamed live beginning at 11:30 a.m. Eastern at Emmys.com/nominations. The reality competition series and talk series nominees will be announced earlier on “CBS Mornings” at around 7:45 a.m. Eastern.

What else may get 2025 Emmy nomination

Apple TV+’s Hollywood satire “The Studio” could draw a host of comedy nominations for its first season as it takes on previously dominant Emmy veterans like “Hacks” and “The Bear.”

“The Studio” star and co-creator Seth Rogen could get nods for acting, writing and directing, and the show’s all-star guest stars, including Zoë Kravitz, Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard, may also add some novelty to the nominations.

“Hacks” star Jean Smart has won best lead actress in a comedy for all three previous seasons of the HBO Max series, and is the favorite for the fourth. The show won best comedy series last year too.

“The Bear” set a record for comedy nominations with 23 last year for its acclaimed second season. This year, its third season is up for Emmys (even though its fourth has already aired). It got a more lukewarm reception, leaving its status coming into the nominations murky.

“The White Lotus,” HBO’s darkly comic resort drama, submits all the members of its big ensemble cast in supporting categories, which they tend to dominate. Its Thailand-set third season included ballyhooed performances from Walton Goggins, Carrie Coon, Parker Posey and Sam Rockwell among several others.

“The Pitt,” HBO Max’s prestige medical procedural starring “ER” veteran Noah Wyle, had reached the top tier of most prognosticators’ Emmy prediction lists by the time its first season ended in April. Wyle, who was nominated five times without a win for “ER,” could join Scott to make best actor in a drama a two-man race. And the show’s other doctors and nurses, played by lesser known actors, could draw nominations if “The White Lotus” cast leaves them any room.

Last year, the British Netflix production “Baby Reindeer” was surprisingly dominant in the limited series categories. This year, it will surprise no one if the Netflix British crime drama “Adolescence” does the same in the same categories. It was probably the most acclaimed show of the year. Fifteen-year-old Owen Cooper, who plays the 13-year-old accused of a killing at the center of the story, is likely to get one of several acting nominations.

How streaming has changed TV and the Emmys

All the shows are living in the splintered world of the streaming era, and the like the Oscars its most acclaimed nominees rarely have the huge audience they once did. While an impressive average of 10 million people per episode watched Wyle on “The Pitt” at some point on HBO Max, according to Warner Bros. Discovery, 30 years ago an average of 30 million sat down on the same night and watched him on “ER” on NBC.

The broadcast networks have largely become Emmy non-entities, with a few shining exceptions. ABC’s “Abbott Elementary” has annually drawn plenty of comedy nominations and should get its share this year. And Oscar-winner Kathy Bates is a front-runner for the best actress in a comedy Emmy for her role on CBS’s “Matlock.” She would be the first person nominated in the category from a network show since 2019, and the first to win it since 2015.

CBS will air the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards from the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on Sept. 14. Nate Bargatze is slated to host.

Private spaceflight ends with a Pacific splashdown for astronauts from India, Poland and Hungary

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By MARCIA DUNN, Associated Press Aerospace Writer

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A private spaceflight featuring the first astronauts in more than 40 years from India, Poland and Hungary came to a close Tuesday with a Pacific splashdown.

Their SpaceX capsule undocked from the International Space Station on Monday and parachuted into the ocean off the Southern California coast, less than 24 hours later.

The crew of four launched nearly three weeks ago on a flight chartered by the Houston company Axiom Space.

Axiom’s Peggy Whitson, the most experienced U.S. astronaut, served as commander. Joining her were India’s Shubhanshu Shukla, Poland’s Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski and Hungary’s Tibor Kapu, whose countries paid more than $65 million apiece for the mission.

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“Thanks for the great ride and safe trip,” Whitson radioed moments after splashdown. Her record now stands at 695 days in space over five missions, longer than any other American or woman.

The visiting astronauts conducted dozens of experiments in orbit while celebrating their heritage. The last time India, Poland and Hungary put anyone in space was during the late 1970s and 1980s, launching with the Soviets. They waved and smiled as they emerged from the capsule, one by one, into the early morning darkness.

It was Axiom’s fourth mission to the orbiting outpost since 2022, part of NASA’s ongoing effort to open up space to more businesses and people. The company is one of several developing their own space stations to replace the current one. NASA plans to abandon the outpost in 2030, after more than 30 years of operation.

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.

Noah Feldman: No, the government can’t just take away your citizenship

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In a memo last month listing its law enforcement priorities, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice prioritized stripping citizenship from naturalized citizens who pose threats to the U.S., including national security dangers, terrorism, gang affiliations and fraud. Given the administration’s aggressive — and sometimes lawless — efforts to deport noncitizens, including those exercising their First Amendment rights, it’s not surprising that the document has drawn both concern and criticism.

However, the legal reality is that once you’ve obtained citizenship, you have a constitutional right to keep it — a principle affirmed by a Supreme Court decision nearly 60 years ago. Citizenship can only be revoked if it was obtained illegally in the first place or if the individual lied about or concealed a material fact during the naturalization process. Even then, revocation can only happen after a proceeding before a federal district court judge.

What’s more, this isn’t the first time Trump has expressed plans to denaturalize citizens. During his first term, he went so far as to announce a new Justice Department office focused on the task. Yet only 102 such cases were brought, according to a current administration official with every reason to maximize the numbers. And although no publicly available source indicates the number of denaturalizations that actually occurred, the answer seems likely to be very few, as the administration has been unwilling to disclose the number of cases it won.

The upshot is that like many Trump initiatives, this one should be understood more as a publicity stunt than a genuine policy undertaking. The goal is certainly to frighten naturalized citizens into refraining from criticizing the administration — in other words, to chill their free speech rights. Pointing out the legal limitations of this threat is therefore an important part of standing up for the First Amendment.

The legal background here starts with Afroyim v. Rusk, a 1967 decision written by Justice Hugo Black. Black, one of the great liberal justices of all time, was appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937 and served until 1971 — the fifth-longest tenure in the history of the Supreme Court. Until the Afroyim case, Congress had used legal means to revoke citizenship, including a law that barred voting in other countries’ elections. Afroyim, a naturalized American born in Poland, moved to Israel in 1949 and voted in the 1951 Israeli Knesset election. When he tried to return to the U.S. in 1960, he was denied a passport and told he was no longer a citizen. (Afroyim had strongly leftist views and may have been a Communist, which might be why the government enforced the law against him.)

The Supreme Court struck down the law. Black wrote in resounding terms that: “The very nature of our free government makes it completely incongruous to have a rule of law under which a group of citizens temporarily in office can deprive another group of citizens of their citizenship. We hold that the Fourteenth Amendment (protects) every citizen of this Nation against a congressional forcible destruction of his citizenship, whatever his creed, color, or race.”

The decision recognized a naturalized citizen’s “constitutional right to remain a citizen in a free country unless he voluntarily relinquishes that citizenship.”

Even with that decision, federal law still allows an individual’s citizenship to be stripped if it was “illegally procured” or procured “by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.” However, the government must go to court and convince a federal district judge to strip the citizenship under the terms of the law before that can occur.

The “illegally procured” provision of the law is the worrisome part. It does not technically require lying. Rather, the inquiry is whether the individual fulfilled all the requirements of citizenship in the first place. These include lawful permanent residency for the relevant period, “good moral character,” attachment to “the principles of the Constitution of the United States,” and being “well-disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States.”

The “good moral character” criterion is partly explained by statute. Among other things, the law says an individual lacks good moral character if they’ve committed certain crimes. Yet as part of the initial application process, the immigration officer in charge of a case ordinarily has considerable discretion to determine whether the person indeed does have good moral character. That makes the revocation of citizenship on that ground legally tricky.

The Trump administration might conceivably try to use this provision to claim there were facts not known at the time of naturalization that suggest a given person lacked good moral character and therefore procured citizenship illegally. But that would require the courts to answer the subtle legal question of what conduct, unknown at the time of naturalization, would have counted as evidence the individual lacked good moral character to the extent they would originally have been denied citizenship.

“Attachment to the principles of the Constitution” and “being well-disposed to the good order of the United States” are also very broad terms. Again, if the Trump administration sought to strip someone’s citizenship on these bases, it would have to show that there were facts unknown at the time of naturalization that would have answered these questions in the negative.

The federal courts are likely to be skeptical of efforts to use these provisions to strip citizenship from people Trump simply dislikes. The administration would have to convince a judge that citizenship had been illegally obtained. And by its terms, the law doesn’t apply to any political beliefs or values or affiliations held by naturalized citizens after they become citizens. Those are fully protected by the First Amendment.

The bottom line is that the significant legal barriers to stripping citizenship are likely to restrict the administration’s ability to make use of the existing provisions of the law. That’s almost certainly why the president’s objective seems to have had little meaningful success during his first term.

As written, the law is not as precise as it should be regarding which subsequently discovered facts might count as evidence of a lack of good moral character. If Trump actually tries to exploit this provision, the law should be changed to make it more precise. For now, the law appears adequate to fulfill its purpose, which, as Justice Black put it, is to protect citizens against “forcible destruction of citizenship” regardless of identity or the exercise of First Amendment rights.

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People.”

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