By COLLEEN BARRY and LUCA BRUNO

VENICE, Italy (AP) — Multi-billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez arrived in Venice on Wednesday ahead of their star-studded weekend wedding, an event that has galvanized a wide assortment of activist groups protesting it.

Bezos waved from a water taxi as he and Sanchez arrived at the dock of the Aman Hotel, a five-star hotel on the Grand Canal, with two security boats in tow.

The event has drawn protests by groups who view it as a sign of the growing disparity between the haves and have-nots, while residents complain it exemplifies the way their needs are disregarded in the era of mass tourism to the historic lagoon city.

About a dozen Venetian organizations — including housing advocates, anti-cruise ship campaigners and university groups — have united to protest the multi-day event under the banner “No Space for Bezos,” a play on words also referring to the bride’s recent space flight.

They have staged small-scale protests, unfurling anti-Bezos banners on iconic Venetian sites. They were joined Monday by Greenpeace and the British group “Everyone Hates Elon,” which has smashed Teslas to protest Elon Musk, to unfurl a giant banner in St. Mark’s Square protesting purported tax breaks for billionaires.

On Wednesday, other activists launched a float down the Grand Canal featuring a mannequin of Bezos clinging onto an Amazon box, his fists full of fake dollars. The British publicity firm that announced the stunt said it wasn’t a protest of the wedding “but against unchecked wealth, media control, and the growing privatisation of public spaces.”

There has been no comment from Bezos’ representatives on the protests.

The local activists had planned a more organized protest for Saturday, aiming to obstruct access to canals with boats to prevent guests from reaching a wedding venue. They modified the protest to a march from the train station after claiming a victory, asserting that their pressure forced organizers to change the venue to the Arsenale, a more easily secured site beyond Venice’s congested center.

“It will be a strong, decisive protest, but peaceful,’’ said Federica Toninello, an activist with the Social Housing Assembly network. “We want it to be like a party, with music, to make clear what we want our Venice to look like.”

Among the 200 guests confirmed to be attending the wedding are Mick Jagger, Ivanka Trump, Oprah Winfrey, Katy Perry and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Venice, renowned for its romantic canal vistas, hosts hundreds of weddings each year, not infrequently those of the rich and famous. Previous celebrity weddings, like that of George Clooney to human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin in 2014, were embraced by the public. Hundreds turned out to wish the couple well at City Hall.

Bezos has a different political and business profile, said Tommaso Cacciari, a prominent figure in the movement that successfully pushed for a ban on cruise ships over 25,000 tons traveling through the Giudecca Canal in central Venice.

“Bezos is not a Hollywood actor,’’ Cacciari said. “He is an ultra-billionaire who sat next to Donald Trump during the inauguration, who contributed to his re-election and is contributing in a direct and heavy way to this new global obscurantism.’’

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Critics cite Amazon’s labor practices, ongoing tax disputes with European governments and Bezos’ political associations as reasons for concern.

Activists also argue that the Bezos wedding exemplifies broader failures in municipal governance, particularly the prioritization of tourism over residents’ needs. They cite measures such as the day-tripper tax — which critics argue reinforces Venice’s image as a theme park — as ineffective. Chief among their concerns is the lack of investment in affordable housing and essential services.

City officials have defended the wedding. Mayor Luigi Brugnaro called the event an honor for Venice, and the city denied the wedding would cause disruptions.

“Venice once again reveals itself to be a global stage,’’ Brugnaro told The Associated Press, adding he hoped to meet Bezos while he was in town.

Meanwhile, a Venetian environmental research association, Corila, issued a statement saying Bezos’ Earth Fund was supporting its work with an “important donation.”

Corila, which unites university scholars and Italy’s main national research council in researching Venetian protection strategies, wouldn’t say how much Bezos was donating but said contact began in April, well before the protests started.

By FATIMA HUSSEIN

WASHINGTON (AP) — The budget bill championed by President Donald Trump could complicate next year’s tax filing season after the IRS lost one-quarter of its employees through staffing cuts, an independent watchdog reported Wednesday.

The IRS workforce has fallen from 102,113 workers to 75,702 over the past year, according to the latest National Taxpayer Advocate report to Congress. The report Wednesday offered the first official numbers on the IRS job losses associated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Most of the employees took the “fork in the road” resignation offer from DOGE rather than waiting to get laid off.

Some of the findings from the report:

Taxpayers will likely see effects of staffing reductions

The Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the size of the federal bureaucracy led to a mass exodus of probationary employees who had not yet gained civil service protections and were offered buyouts through a “deferred resignation program.” More than 17,500 IRS workers took that route. The biggest cuts were in taxpayer services, the small business/self-employed office and information technology.

The report noted that the Republican administration’s proposed budget includes a 20% reduction in IRS funding next year. That’s a 37% reduction when taking into account the supplemental funding in the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act that Republicans previously stripped away.

“A reduction of that magnitude is likely to impact taxpayers and potentially the revenue collected,” wrote Erin M. Collins, who leads the organization assigned to protect taxpayers’ rights.

The 2026 tax season could be precarious

Collins said the 2025 filing season was “one of the most successful filing seasons in recent memory,” though she warned that the 2026 season could be rocky.

“With the IRS workforce reduced by 26% and significant tax law changes on the horizon, there are risks to next year’s filing season,” Collins wrote. “It is critical that the IRS begin to take steps now to prepare.”

She said that, halfway through the year, there were concerns that the IRS had not yet undertaken key preparation steps, including hiring and training seasonal and permanent employees.

Trump’s package could add new layer of problems

The report warned about the possibility of understaffing to manage new provisions from Trump’s legislative package if it’s enacted.

“Several provisions will retroactively affect the 2025 tax year, thus impacting millions of taxpayers and requiring the IRS to quickly update tax year 2025 tax forms and programming for the 2026 filing season,” the report said.

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Specifically, the House bill retroactively prohibits the IRS from allowing or making payment of Employee Retention Credit claims filed after Jan. 31, 2024.

The report also said the IRS historically receives more calls in years following significant changes in tax law, so it may need additional employees and improved digital tools to maintain its level of service.

Identity theft cases are still piling up

The IRS is dealing with delays in resolving self-reported identity theft victim assistance cases — taking up to 20 months to resolve, the report said.

As of the end of the 2025 filing season, the IRS was handling about 387,000 of these cases.

That is a slight improvement from the more than 22 months it took to resolve identity theft cases, as noted in last year’s report, which outlined roughly 500,000 unresolved cases in its inventory.

“The cycle time remains unacceptably long,” Collins said. “I continue to urge the agency to focus on dramatically shortening the time it takes” to resolved identity theft cases, “so it does not force victims, particularly those dependent on their tax refunds, to wait nearly two years to receive their money.”

By TRAVIS LOLLER

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Kilmar Abrego Garcia is expected to be released from jail in Tennessee on Wednesday, only to be taken into immigration custody.

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The Salvadoran national whose mistaken deportation became a flashpoint in the fight over President Donald Trump’s immigration policies has been in jail since he was returned to the U.S. on June 7, facing two counts of human smuggling.

On Sunday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes ruled that Abrego Garcia does not have to remain in jail ahead of that trial. On Wednesday afternoon, she will set his conditions of release and allow him to go, according to her order. However, both his defense attorneys and prosecutors have said they expect him to be taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as soon as he is released on the criminal charges.

In addition, federal prosecutors are appealing Holmes’ release order. Among other things, they expressed concern in a motion filed on Sunday that Abrego Garcia could be deported before he faces trial. Holmes has said previously that she won’t step between the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. It is up to them to decide whether they want to deport Abrego Garcia or prosecute him.

Abrego Garcia pleaded not guilty on June 13 to smuggling charges that his attorneys have characterized as an attempt to justify his mistaken deportation in March to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

Those charges stem from a 2022 traffic stop for speeding in Tennessee during which Abrego Garcia was driving a vehicle with nine passengers. At his detention hearing, Homeland Security Special Agent Peter Joseph testified that he did not begin investigating Abrego Garcia until April of this year.

Holmes said in her Sunday ruling that federal prosecutors failed to show that Abrego Garcia was a flight risk or a danger to the community. He has lived for more than a decade in Maryland, where he and his American wife are raising three children.

However, Holmes referred to her own ruling as “little more than an academic exercise,” noting that ICE plans to detain him. It is less clear what will happen after that. Although he can’t be deported to El Salvador — where an immigration judge found he faces a credible threat from gangs — he is still deportable to a third country as long as that country agrees to not send him to El Salvador.

The number of adverse health events reported in Minnesota’s hospitals has increased slightly, the smallest increase since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Minnesota Department of Health’s 2025 report.

From Oct. 7, 2023, to Oct. 6, 2024, Minnesota’s hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers reported 624 adverse health events, or AHEs. That is up from the 610 reported in the previous year, though the report notes that the number of surgeries and procedures performed in the state also increased.

Minnesota has reported more adverse health events since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic; in report years 2015 through 2020, the state averaged between 300 and 400 events per year.

“We are glad to see the rate of increase in the number of adverse health events beginning to slow,” said Minnesota Commissioner of Health Dr. Brooke Cunningham. “Thankfully, these types of patient harms continue to be rare when viewed against overall volume. However, we believe many, if not most, of these events are preventable and we are committed to working with providers through education and analysis to advocate for patient safety.”

In Minnesota, hospitals (federal facilities excluded) and surgical centers are required to report 29 types of “often preventable errors that could lead to serious injury or death,” per MDH. Those events include medication errors, wrong-site surgery and physical assaults against patients or staff that result in serious injury or death.

Falls and pressure ulcers, also known as bed sores, are the two most common AHEs reported in Minnesota.

In this report year, the number of wrong-site and wrong-surgery events increased, while medication errors dropped by 44% over the previous year.

In Rochester, Mayo Clinic Hospital reported 84 AHEs during the report year, a 58.5% increase from the 53 events in last year’s report. No deaths occurred due to these events, but 28 resulted in serious injury. More than half (47) of Mayo Clinic Hospital’s AHEs were stage 3, 4 or unstageable pressure ulcers.

Additionally, there were 10 falls that resulted in serious injury, and 12 surgical AHEs: six wrong procedure events and six instances of “retention of a foreign object in a patient after surgery.”

In its press release, MDH said a “portion” of the AHEs recorded in 2024 could be attributed to patients’ longer stays in the hospital.

“The high level of lengths of stay can stem from things like increased patient complexity due to delayed care, Minnesota’s aging population, systemic issues with discharge delays and limited bed availability at the next level of care due to continued workforce challenges,” MDH said.

“We are seeing higher acuity patients that need longer lengths of stay to meet their needs,” added Jennifer Schoenecker, associate vice president of quality and safety at the Minnesota Hospital Association. “We’re also seeing that it can be challenging to find the appropriate discharge placement when our patients are ready to leave our hospitals and health systems.”

More acute medical needs could also be a factor in the 8.5% increase in procedures and surgeries performed year-over-year.

“It could be some catch-up from previous COVID years where some of those procedures may have been postponed,” Schoenecker said. “And it could be due to just the overall acuity and complexity of the patients we’re serving now.”

To bring the number of AHEs down to pre-pandemic levels, Schoenecker said an emphasis on patient safety needs to continue.

“There’s a lot we learn from the events that are reported,” Schoenecker said. “We want to continue to analyze those events, learn and then spread those learnings throughout the state. … Just continuing that commitment to a culture of safety.”

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