If this year’s Minnesota State Fair felt particularly busy to you, you’re right.

With total ticket sales of 1,925,904, this year’s Fair was the best-attended Get-Together since before the pandemic and the fifth-busiest of all time. Compared to last year, the Fairgrounds hosted an average of 7,500 more people per day this year.

Out of the Fair’s 12 days, five — including opening day — broke attendance records. Sunday, Sept. 1, was the second-busiest day in State Fair history, with 256,015 visitors showing up to the Fairgrounds. (The single-day record of 270,426 was set on the second Saturday of the 2018 Fair.)

Gov. Tim Walz, currently on the campaign trail as the Democratic vice presidential nominee, was one of Sunday’s fairgoers; he ate a pork chop on a stick and a milkshake during a short visit.

Massive lines were an unmissable sight at this year’s Fair, with significant wait times for new and popular foods including the buzzy deep-fried ranch dressing at LuLu’s Public House and the Amish doughnuts from Peachey’s Baking Company.

Despite record-smashing days, this year’s overall attendance was sunk by a pair of unusually sparse weekdays that were likely the result of unpleasant weather.

With high humidity and heat indexes in the triple digits Monday, Aug. 26, and rainstorms in the forecast Thursday, Aug. 29, attendance totals on both days barely topped 80,000. That was about half the average daily attendance for this year’s fair.

And a severe storm late Monday into Tuesday morning left vendors and grounds crews scrambling to clean up debris, and the Fair opened two hours late Tuesday — an unprecedented delay. The sun had come out by mid-morning Tuesday, though, and attendance for the day still reached a respectable 124,777.

“This year’s (State Fair) had its share of Minnesota weather, and the State Fair team responded by pulling together to keep people safe and to take care of the fairgrounds amidst episodes of extreme heat and humidity, rainstorms and high winds,” Fair CEO Renee Alexander said in a statement after the Fair concluded. “The Great Minnesota Get-Together is truly a special event where we can celebrate all that is great about Minnesota and each other.”

Few incidents of crime were reported on the Fairgrounds during this year’s Fair.

Late on Aug. 24, State Fair police responded to an altercation on the Fairgrounds and one person was checked for a possible head injury; separately that night, in response to a report of a stabbing, officers found one person with a non-critical leg injury from an undetermined cause, per the Fair.

About 10:20 p.m. on Labor Day, a 17-year-old was shot in the leg several blocks away from the Fairgrounds; that incident took place more than an hour after the Fair had closed for the year.

A 2022 incident in which a person was shot in the leg about 10 p.m. in the Midway area is the only Fairgrounds shooting that State Fair police chief Ron Knafla recalls in his 35 years of working at the Fair, he said last year. In response, security efforts were significantly amped up during last year’s and this year’s Fairs.

Minnesota State Fair by the numbers

The Fair’s creative activities and agricultural competitions, from livestock to flowers to canned fruits, drew more than 34,000 entries and awarded about $2 million in prize money, according to the Fair.

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Although no calves were born at the CHS Miracle of Birth Center due to disease concerns, the popular building still saw the births of 159 newborn animals.

And here are the daily attendance numbers, with comparisons to the 2023 Fair:

Thursday, Aug. 22: 138,875 (32,548 more than last year; a new record for the day)
Friday, Aug 23: 171,233 (6,492 more than last year; a new record for the day)
Saturday, Aug. 24: 184,564 (28,286 fewer than last year)
Sunday, Aug. 25: 134,644 (39,080 fewer than last year)
Monday, Aug. 26: 80,546 (53,600 fewer than last year)
Tuesday, Aug. 27: 124,777 (10175 fewer than last year)
Wednesday, Aug. 28: 145,531 (17,463 more than last year; a new record for the day)
Thursday, Aug. 29: 81,231 (48,270 fewer than last year)
Friday, Aug. 30: 225,521 (35,231 more than last year; a new record for the day)
Saturday, Aug. 31: 207,078 (6,908 more than last year)
Sunday, Sept. 1: 256,015 (114,689 more than last year; a new record for the day)
Monday, Sept. 2: 175,889 (56,158 more than last year)

By ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department announced criminal charges Tuesday against Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and several others in connection with the Oct. 7, 2023, rampage in Israel.

The criminal complaint filed in federal court in New York City includes charges of conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, resulting in death.

“The charges unsealed today are just one part of our effort to target every aspect of Hamas’ operations,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a video statement. “These actions will not be our last.”

Hamas has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada, and European Union.

Sinwar was appointed the overall head of Hamas after the killing of Ismail Haniyeh in Iran and sits atop Israel’s most-wanted list. He is believed to have spent most of the past 10 months living in tunnels under Gaza, and it is unclear how much contact he has with the outside world.

Other Hamas leaders charged include Haniyeh; Marwan Issa, the deputy leader of Hamas’ armed wing in Gaza who helped plan last year’s attack; Khaled Mashaal, another Haniyeh deputy and a former leader of the group; Mohammed al-Masri and Ali Baraka.

BY MELISSA GOLDIN, Associated Press

After a nationwide suspension of billionaire Elon Musk’s X platform in Brazil, social media users — including former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — are misrepresenting a years-old video of Vice President Kamala Harris to falsely claim that the Democratic presidential nominee has threatened to censor both X and Musk.

Here’s a closer look at the facts.

CLAIM: A video clip portrays Harris as saying that she will shut down X if she wins the 2024 presidential election and that Musk has “lost his privileges.”

THE FACTS: That’s false. Harris was referring to Trump long before Musk bought Twitter and rebranded it as X.

The clip is from 2019 and shows Harris speaking with CNN host Jake Tapper after a Democratic primary debate, discussing whether then-President Donald Trump’s profile should be removed from the platform, called Twitter at the time, and how there needs to be increased accountability for social media companies.

Kennedy, who on Aug. 23 suspended his presidential bid and endorsed Trump, used the clip in an X post as alleged proof that Harris was talking about Musk, stating: “Can someone please explain to her that freedom of speech is a RIGHT, not a ‘privilege’?” He also provided his own interpretation of Harris’ comments on social media sites in general as follows: “If they don’t police content to conform to government-approved narratives, they will be shut down.”

The post had been liked and shared approximately 200,300 times as of Tuesday.

Another popular X post that shared the video simply reads: “Kamala will shut down X if she wins.” It has been liked and shared approximately 105,000 times. Other social media users claimed that Harris was speaking in support of a Brazilian Supreme Court justice who made the decision last week to block X.

In extended footage of the interview, part of CNN’s post-debate analysis on Oct. 15, 2019, Tapper asked Harris: “So, one of the topics that you chose to talk a lot about, especially confronting Sen. Warren on, was your push, your call, for Twitter to suspend the account of President Trump. Why was that important?”

Tapper was referring to the moment in the debate when Harris criticized then-fellow Democratic candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren for not urging such a suspension. Twitter did eventually ban Trump’s account in January 2021, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence” after the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, with multiple other social media platforms kicking him off around the same time. Musk restored Trump’s account in November 2022 after he bought the platform.

Harris responded during the interview that Trump had “proven himself to be willing to obstruct justice” and that what he says on Twitter “impacts people’s perceptions about what they should and should not do.”

She continued: “And as far as I’m concerned, and I think most people would say, including members of Congress who he has threatened, that he has lost his privileges and it should be taken down.”

Harris did not call for the platform as a whole to be shut down. Rather, she advocated for increased accountability.

“The bottom line is that you can’t say that you have one rule for Facebook and you have a different rule for Twitter,” she stated. “The same rule has to apply, which is that there has to be a responsibility that is placed on these social media sites to understand their power. They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop.”

The exchange is reflected in CNN’s transcript of the coverage.

The Harris campaign directed an Associated Press inquiry about the false claims to a Democratic National Committee spokesperson, who declined to comment. Representatives for Trump and Kennedy did not respond to a request for comment.

Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered X blocked last Friday for refusing to name a local legal representative, as required by law. His decision was unanimously upheld by a court panel on Monday. X had removed its legal representative from Brazil on the grounds that de Moraes had threatened her with arrest. The platform will stay suspended until it complies with de Moraes’ order and pays outstanding fines.

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Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.