By JILL LAWLESS and KWIYEON HA, Associated Press

TURNBERRY, Scotland (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump ’s trip to Scotland this week will be a homecoming of sorts, but he’s likely to get a mixed reception.

Trump has had a long and at times rocky relationship with the country where his mother grew up in a humble house on a windswept isle.

He will be met by both political leaders and protesters during the visit, which begins Friday and takes in his two Scottish golf resorts. It comes two months before King Charles III is due to welcome him on a formal state visit to the U.K.

“I’m not proud that he (has) Scottish heritage,” said Patricia Sloan, who says she stopped visiting the Turnberry resort on Scotland’s west coast after Trump bought it in 2014. “All countries have good and bad that come out of them, and if he’s going to kind of wave the flag of having Scottish heritage, that’s the bad part, I think.”

A daughter of Scotland

Trump’s mother was born Mary Anne MacLeod in 1912 near the town of Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, one of the Outer Hebrides off Scotland’s northwest coast.

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“My mother was born in Scotland — Stornoway, which is serious Scotland,” Trump said in 2017.

She was raised in a large Scots Gaelic-speaking family and left for New York in 1930, one of thousands of people from the islands to emigrate in the hardscrabble years after World War I.

MacLeod married the president’s father, Fred C. Trump, the son of German immigrants, in New York in 1936. She died in August 2000 at the age of 88.

Trump still has relatives on Lewis and visited in 2008, spending a few minutes in the plain gray house where his mother grew up.

A long golf course battle

Trump’s ties and troubles in Scotland are intertwined with golf.

He first proposed building a course on a wild and beautiful stretch of the North Sea coast north of Aberdeen in 2006.

The Trump International Scotland development was backed by the Scottish government. But it was fiercely opposed by some local residents and conservationists, who said the stretch of coastal sand dunes was home to some of the country’s rarest wildlife, including skylarks, kittiwakes, badgers and otters.

Local fisherman Michael Forbes became an international cause celebre after he refused the Trump Organization’s offer of $690,000 at the time to sell his family’s rundown farm in the center of the estate. Forbes still lives on his property, which Trump once called “a slum and a pigsty.”

“If it weren’t for my mother, would I have walked away from this site? I think probably I would have, yes,” Trump said in 2008 during the planning battle over the course. “Possibly, had my mother not been born in Scotland, I probably wouldn’t have started it.”

The golf course was eventually approved and opened in 2012. Some of the grander aspects of the planned development, including 500 houses and a 450-room hotel, have not been realized, and the site has never made a profit.

A second 18-hole course at the resort is scheduled to open this summer. It’s named the MacLeod Course in honor of Trump’s mother.

There has been less controversy about Turnberry on the other side of Scotland, a long-established course that Trump bought in 2014.

Golfers on the putting green at the Trump Turnberry golf course in Turnberry, Scotland, Wednesday, July 23, 2025, President Trump is expected to visit Scotland in the next few day. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

“He did bring employment to the area,” said local resident Louise Robertson. “I know that in terms of the hotel and the lighthouse, he spent a lot of money restoring it, so again, that was welcomed by the local people. But other than that, I can’t really say positive things about it.”

Trump has pushed for the British Open to be held at the course for the first time since 2009.

Turnberry is one of 10 courses on the rotation to host the Open. But organizers say there are logistical issues about “road, rail and accommodation infrastructure” that must be resolved before it can return.

Protests and politicians

Trump has had a rollercoaster relationship with Scottish and U.K. politicians.

More than a decade ago, the Scottish government enlisted Trump as an unpaid business adviser with the GlobalScot network, a group of business leaders, entrepreneurs and executives with a connection to Scotland. It dumped him in 2015 after he called for Muslims to be banned from the U.S. The remarks also prompted Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen to revoke an honorary doctorate in business administration it had awarded Trump in 2010.

This week Trump will meet left-leaning Scottish First Minister John Swinney, an erstwhile Trump critic who endorsed Kamala Harris before last year’s election — a move branded an “insult” by a spokesperson for Trump’s Scottish businesses.

Swinney said it’s “in Scotland’s interest” for him to meet the president.

Some Scots disagree, and a major police operation is being mounted during the visit in anticipation of protests. The Stop Trump Scotland group has encouraged demonstrators to come to Aberdeen and “show Trump exactly what we think of him in Scotland.”

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is also expected to travel to Scotland for talks with Trump. The British leader has forged a warm relationship with Trump, who said this month “I really like the prime minister a lot, even though he’s a liberal.” They are likely to talk trade, as Starmer seeks to nail down an exemption for U.K. steel from Trump’s tariffs.

There is no word on whether Trump and Starmer — not a golfer — will play a round at one of the courses.

Lawless reported from London

MOSCOW (AP) — A passenger plane carrying 49 people, including 5 children, crashed in Russia’s Far Eastern Amur region Thursday, local emergency services said. Russian news agencies said that an initial aerial inspection suggested there were no survivors.

Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry said that they had found the burning fuselage of the Soviet-designed twin turbo prop plane on a hillside south of its planned destination in the town of Tynda.

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Images of the reported crash site circulated by Russian state media show debris scattered among dense forest, surrounded by plumes of smoke.

Russia’s Interfax news agency said there were adverse weather conditions at the time of the crash, citing unnamed sources in the emergency services. Several Russian news outlets also reported that the aircraft was almost 50 years old, citing data taken from the plane’s tail number.

The transport prosecutor’s office in the Far East reported that the site of the crash was 15 kilometers (9 miles) south of Tynda. The office said in an online statement that the plane attempted a second approach while trying to land when contact with it was lost.

Forty-three passengers, including five children, as well as six crew members were on board the An-24 passenger plane as it traveled from the city of Blagoveshchensk on the Russian-Chinese border to the town of Tynda, regional Gov. Vasily Orlov said. The plane had initially departed from Khabarovsk before making its way to Blagoveshchensk on the Russian-Chinese border and onwards to Tynda.

Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry reported that 48 people were on board the flight, which was operated by Siberia-based Angara Airlines. The reason for the discrepancy was not immediately clear.

The authorities have launched a probe on the charge of flight safety violations that resulted in multiple deaths, a standard procedure in aviation accidents.

Aviation incidents have been frequent in Russia, especially in recent years as international sanctions have squeezed the country’s aviation sector.

By GEOFF MULVIHILL and AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX, Associated Press

Three years after the Supreme Court opened the door to state abortion bans, most U.S. adults continue to say abortion should be legal — views that look similar to before the landmark ruling.

The new findings from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll show that about two-thirds of U.S. adults think abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

FILE – Abortion-rights activists demonstrate against the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade that established a constitutional right to abortion, on Capitol Hill in Washington, June 30, 2022. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

About half believe abortion should be available in their state if someone does not want to be pregnant for any reason.

That level of support for abortion is down slightly from what an AP-NORC poll showed last year, when it seemed that support for legal abortion might be rising.

Laws and opinions changed when Roe was overturned

The June 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and opened the door to state bans on abortion led to major policy changes.

Most states have either moved to protect abortion access or restrict it. Twelve are now enforcing bans on abortion at every stage of pregnancy, and four more do so after about six weeks’ gestation, which is often before women realize they’re pregnant.

In the aftermath of the ruling, AP-NORC polling suggested that support for legal abortion access might be increasing.

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Last year, an AP-NORC poll conducted in June found that 7 in 10 U.S. adults said it should be available in all or most cases, up slightly from 65% in May 2022, just before the decision that overruled the constitutional right to abortion, and 57% in June 2021.

The new poll is closer to Americans’ views before the Supreme Court ruled. Now, 64% of adults support legal abortion in most or all cases. More than half the adults in states with the most stringent bans are in that group.

Similarly, about half now say abortion should be available in their state when someone doesn’t want to continue their pregnancy for any reason — about the same as in June 2021 but down from about 6 in 10 who said that in 2024.

Adults in the strictest states are just as likely as others to say abortion should be available in their state to women who want to end pregnancies for any reason.

Democrats support abortion access far more than Republicans do. Support for legal abortion has dropped slightly among members of both parties since June 2024, but nearly 9 in 10 Democrats and roughly 4 in 10 Republicans say abortion should be legal in at least most instances.

Fallout from state bans has influenced some people’s positions — but not others

Seeing what’s happened in the aftermath of the ruling has strengthened the abortion rights position of Wilaysha White, a 25-year-old Ohio mom.

She has some regrets about the abortion she had when she was homeless.

“I don’t think you should be able to get an abortion anytime,” said White, who calls herself a “semi-Republican.”

But she said that hearing about situations — including when a Georgia woman was arrested after a miscarriage and initially charged with concealing a death — is a bigger concern.

“Seeing women being sick and life or death, they’re not being put first — that’s just scary,” she said. “I’d rather have it be legal across the board than have that.”

Julie Reynolds’ strong anti-abortion stance has been cemented for decades and hasn’t shifted since Roe was overturned.

“It’s a moral issue,” said the 66-year-old Arizona woman, who works part time as a bank teller.

She said her view is shaped partly by having obtained an abortion herself when she was in her 20s. “I would not want a woman to go through that,” she said. “I live with that every day. I took a life.”

Support remains high for legal abortion in certain situations

The vast majority of U.S. adults — at least 8 in 10 — continue to say their state should allow legal abortion if a fetal abnormality would prevent the child from surviving outside the womb, if the patient’s health is seriously endangered by the pregnancy, or if the person became pregnant as a result of rape or incest.

Consistent with AP-NORC’s June 2024 poll, about 7 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favor protecting access to abortions for patients who are experiencing miscarriages or other pregnancy-related emergencies.

In states that have banned or restricted abortion, such medical exceptions have been sharply in focus.

This is a major concern for Nicole Jones, a 32-year-old Florida resident.

Jones and her husband would like to have children soon. But she said she’s worried about access to abortion if there’s a fetal abnormality or a condition that would threaten her life in pregnancy since they live in a state that bans most abortions after the first six weeks of gestation.

“What if we needed something?” she asked. “We’d have to travel out of state or risk my life because of this ban.”

Adults support protections for seeking abortions across state lines — but not as strongly

There’s less consensus on whether states that allow abortion should protect access for women who live in places with bans.

Just over half support protecting a patient’s right to obtain an abortion in another state and shielding those who provide abortions from fines or prison time. In both cases, relatively few adults — about 2 in 10 — oppose the measures and about 1 in 4 are neutral.

More Americans also favor than oppose legal protections for doctors who prescribe and mail abortion pills to patients in states with bans. About 4 in 10 “somewhat” or “strongly” favor those protections, and roughly 3 in 10 oppose them.

Such telehealth prescriptions are a key reason that the number of abortions nationally has risen even as travel for abortion has declined slightly.

The AP-NORC poll of 1,437 adults was conducted July 10-14, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.

In 1964, Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message,” arguing that the medium of communication is as, if not more, important than the message itself. A concept born from the television-obsessed 1960s, it rattles around the new Marvel movie, “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” which is set in a 1960s-esque retro-futuristic universe Earth 828, where TV is the most important means of mass communication.

Television is also how our heroes, the Fantastic Four, establish their public roles as a quartet of cosmically supercharged scientists and protectors of the planet. They’re not just superheroes, they’re public intellectuals who share their knowledge on educational science programs, and late-night talk shows beamed into every household, which is how we’re introduced to them and their origin story in “First Steps.”

Directed by Matt Shakman, “First Steps” is a total reset of the characters, arriving a decade after the disastrous 2015 “Fantastic Four” movie. Pedro Pascal now plays Reed Richards, the scientist who took a team to space that included his wife, Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), his brother-in-law, Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn), and his best friend, Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach).

After encountering a cosmic storm, they returned with special powers and acquired new nicknames: Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch and the Thing.

In the screenplay by Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan and Ian Springer, the focus is on the foursome as a family. The film is much more of a domestic drama with a little world-saving on the side. Early on, it’s revealed that Sue and Reed are expecting a child, after years of trying. Their happy news is interrupted by a herald, the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) who arrives on Earth 828 to announce that the planet has been marked for consumption by Galactus the Devourer (Ralph Ineson). A worldwide crisis ensues, which is exacerbated when Galactus says he’ll spare the planet in exchange for Reed and Sue’s baby, whom he believes to be a powerful space god. They refuse, and the planet turns on them.

Sue rejects this binary choice, believing there’s a way to defeat Galactus without sacrificing her child. As a mother and leader on Earth 828, Sue ultimately appeals to the world by appealing to them as a family, asking everyone to work together to defeat Galactus, and television broadcast is how she shares her message of unity.

While the 1960s style and Space Age Googie architecture sure is neat, this period setting is also necessary for telling a plausible story that combines mass communication and collective action. If the message in “First Steps” is an allegory for what’s needed to save our own world — unified action against climate change — what we need is a united media landscape, where every person is watching the same news broadcasts at the same time, where facts are agreed upon and not contested, the message consistent and uniform. Which is to say, it’s nothing like the world we inhabit now, which has already been fractured beyond belief.

For a film that engages so much with TV and its power to reach a mass audience, it’s logical to hire a veteran TV director. Shakman, who directed many episodes of the retro family Marvel sitcom “WandaVision,” shepherd this project. That he brings a distinctly televisual — and utterly bland — style to the film is not such a boon for a movie that will be shown in IMAX. The spectacle on display here is nothing to write home about.

Despite the midcentury flair, the film is dull as dishwater visually. Shakman and his “WandaVision” cinematographer Jess Hall favor flat, static, center-framed medium shots of the characters, who spend most of their time inside their skyscraper fortress where the lighting is the same no matter the time of day. The action is unremarkable, and the aesthetic all blends into a kind of bluish-gray blur.

The story itself is simple, and while deeply emotional, it’s still fairly silly. There are a few attempts at banter, but the funniest person in the movie is Paul Walter Hauser as the Mole Man/Harvey Elder, the leader of the underground Subterranea (and there’s not nearly enough of him). Of the four, Pascal delivers the best performance as the fussy, fastidious scientist Reed Richards.
So it’s the message that’s the most interesting element of “First Steps,” and while delivered in a movie medium, it’s ultimately a story about the power of television. Perhaps it would have been best relegated to the small screen then, because the biggest one isn’t doing this movie any favors. A message this urgent shouldn’t be rendered in such a forgettable fashion.

‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’

2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for action/violence and some language)

Running time: 1:55

How to watch: In theaters

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