By PHILIP MARCELO, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Disgraced former U.S. Rep. George Santos is expected to begin serving a seven-year prison sentence on Friday for the fraud charges that got him ousted from Congress.

The New York Republican pleaded guilty last summer to federal wire fraud and aggravated identity theft charges for deceiving donors and stealing people’s identities in order to fund his congressional campaign.

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He must report to federal prison before 2 p.m. It’s unclear where he’ll serve his time, though a federal judge has recommended that Santos be housed in a facility in the Northeast.

Santos and his lawyers declined to comment to The Associated Press ahead of him reporting to prison. The federal Bureau of Prisons, meanwhile, said it doesn’t discuss the status of inmates until they’re officially in custody.

As Friday approached, though, the loquacious former lawmaker, who turned 37 on Tuesday, wasn’t shy about sharing his morbid fears about life behind bars.

“I’m not trying to be overdramatic here. I’m just being honest with you. I look at this as practically a death sentence,” Santos told Tucker Carlson during an interview. “I’m not built for this.”

In a Thursday interview with Al Arabiya, a Saudi state-owned news organization, he said he’ll serve his sentence in a minimum-security prison “camp” that he described as a “big upgrade” from the medium-security lockup he was initially assigned to.

On X this week, Santos posted a video clip of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”

“And now, the end is near. And so I face the final curtain,” the singer aptly croons.

Other posts took a darker tone.

“I’m heading to prison, folks and I need you to hear this loud and clear: I’m not suicidal. I’m not depressed. I have no intentions of harming myself, and I will not willingly engage in any sexual activity while I’m in there,” he said on X. “If anything comes out suggesting otherwise, consider it a lie … full stop.”

In April, a federal judge declined to give Santos a lighter two-year sentence that he sought, saying she was unconvinced he was truly remorseful. In the weeks before his sentencing, Santos said he was “profoundly sorry” for his crimes, but he also complained frequently that he was a victim of a political witch hunt and prosecutorial overreach.

Santos was elected in 2022, flipping a wealthy district representing parts of Queens and Long Island for the GOP. But he served for less than a year and became just the sixth member of the House to be ousted by colleagues after it was revealed he had fabricated much of his life story.

During his winning campaign, Santos painted himself as a successful business owner who worked at prestigious Wall Street firms when, in reality, he was struggling financially.

He also falsely claimed to have been a volleyball star at a college he never attended and referred to himself as “a proud American Jew” before insisting he meant that he was “Jew-ish” because his Brazilian mother’s family had a Jewish background.

The cascade of lies eventually led to congressional and criminal inquiries into how Santos funded his campaign and, ultimately, his political downfall.

Since his ouster from Congress, Santos has been making a living hosting a podcast called “Pants on Fire with George Santos” and hawking personalized video messages on Cameo.

He has also been holding out hope that his unwavering support for President Donald Trump might help him win a last-minute reprieve, though the White House said this week that it “will not comment on the existence or nonexistence” of any clemency request.

Today is Friday, July 25, the 206th day of 2025. There are 159 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On July 25, 1972, the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment came to light as The Associated Press reported that for the previous four decades, the U.S. Public Health Service, in conjunction with the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had been allowing poor, rural Black male patients with syphilis to go without treatment, even allowing more than 100 of them to die, as a way of studying the disease.

Also on this date:

In 1866, Ulysses S. Grant was named General of the Army of the United States, the first officer to hold the rank.

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In 1943, Benito Mussolini was dismissed as premier of Italy by King Victor Emmanuel III, and placed under arrest. (He was later rescued by the Nazis and re-asserted his authority.)

In 1946, the United States detonated an atomic bomb near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in the first underwater test of the device.

In 1956, the Italian liner SS Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish passenger ship Stockholm off the New England coast late at night and began sinking; 51 people — 46 from the Andrea Doria, five from the Stockholm — were killed. (The Andrea Doria capsized and sank the following morning.)

In 1960, a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina, that had been the scene of nearly six months of sit-in protests against its whites-only lunch counter dropped its segregation policy.

In 1978, Louise Joy Brown, the first “test tube baby,” was born in Oldham, England; she’d been conceived through the technique of in vitro fertilization.

In 1994, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Jordan’s King Hussein signed a declaration at the White House ending their countries’ 46-year-old formal state of war.

In 2000, a New York-bound Air France Concorde crashed outside Paris shortly after takeoff, killing all 109 people on board and four people on the ground; it was the first-ever crash of the supersonic jet.

In 2010, the online whistleblower Wikileaks posted some 90,000 leaked U.S. military records that amounted to a blow-by-blow account of the Afghanistan war, including unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings as well as covert operations against Taliban figures.

In 2019, President Donald Trump had a second phone call with the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, during which he solicited Zelenskyy’s help in gathering potentially damaging information about former Vice President Joe Biden; that night, a staff member at the White House Office of Management and Budget signed a document that officially put military aid for Ukraine on hold.

In 2022, on a visit to Canada, Pope Francis issued a historic apology for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with the country’s “catastrophic” policy of Indigenous residential schools, saying the forced assimilation of Native peoples into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families and marginalized generations.

Today’s Birthdays:

Folk-pop singer-musician Bruce Woodley (The Seekers) is 83.
Rock musician Jim McCarty (The Yardbirds) is 82.
Reggae singer Rita Marley is 79.
Musician Verdine White (Earth, Wind & Fire) is 74.
Model-actor Iman is 70.
Rock musician Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth) is 67.
Celebrity chef/TV personality Geoffrey Zakarian is 66.
Actor Matt LeBlanc is 58.
Actor Wendy Raquel Robinson is 58.
Actor David Denman is 52.
Actor Jay R. Ferguson is 51.
Actor James Lafferty (TV: “One Tree Hill”) is 40.
Actor Meg Donnelly (TV: “American Housewife”) is 25.

BROWNSVILLE, Minn. — A missing 22-year-old graduate student from La Crosse, Wis., was found dead in the Mississippi River near Brownsville, Minn., on Wednesday, authorities said.

The Houston County Sheriff’s Office reported finding the body of Eliotte Heinz around 10:30 a.m. Wednesday. Heinz, a graduate student at  Viterbo University, was last seen in downtown La Crosse around 3:30 a.m. Sunday, according to the La Crosse Police Department.

Brownsville is about 7 miles downriver from La Crosse.

“La Crosse Police are continuing to investigate and will await the results of an autopsy for an official cause of death. The entire department sends their condolences,” the department said in a statement.

Police had previously asked La Crosse downtown businesses and residents to check their properties and cameras in the effort to locate Heinz.

“This was not the outcome we had hoped for throughout this search. Our thoughts are with Eliotte’s family, friends and all those who knew Eliotte. We are grateful for the outpouring of support from so many within the La Crosse community, the State of Wisconsin and nationally to locate Eliotte,” La Crosse Police Chief Shawn Kudron said in the statement.

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When the professional golf tournament in Blaine made the shift from hosting the PGA Tour Champions to the PGA Tour — the top pro men’s golf tour in the world — in 2019, there was a question hanging over the event: How would TPC Twin Cities hold up to some of the best the game has to offer?

The 50-plus-year-old legends ripped up the course over three days each summer. Now, players who could hit it infinitely harder were set to take it on? It couldn’t happen as the course stood.

So, Tom Lehman guided an overhaul that lengthened holes and bodies of water, among other things, to make the course more PGA Tour tough. Not that the 3M Open didn’t want to see scoring. Tournament executive director Hollis Cavner’s consistent moniker has been the pursuit of “birdies and trainwrecks.”

And, for the most part, there’s been a good balance of both over the tournament’s first six years, as the course has held up remarkably well. In three of the past four editions, the winning score was no better than 17-under par — the same tally Scottie Scheffler posted to win The Open last week.

Adam Svensson got 65% of the way to that score on Thursday. The Canadian tied the course record — previously set in the 3M Championship — and set a new tournament record Thursday as he fired an 11-under round of 60. And his lead is just two strokes over Sam Stevens and Thorbjørn Olesen, with a hoard of others following closely behind.

Three golfers shot 8-under rounds of 63, including the red-hot Chris Gotterup, who tallied a win and a third-place finish in two weeks played across the pond.

Thirty-four players shot rounds of 66 or better. Seventy-two percent of the field is under par through one round. Svensson surmised Thursday marked the best he’s ever putted, and he did lead the field with nearly five strokes gained on the greens.

But Thursday marked the rare day on the PGA Tour where it was possible to score even while not rolling the rock well. Emiliano Grillo shot a 65, despite losing nearly 1.5 strokes to the field putting, as he stuck his approaches near the cup on nearly every hole. Only three of the 18 holes played over par in Round 1.

Cumulatively, the 156-player field shot 335-under par Thursday.

“This course, it’s a great course, but it’s pretty straightforward,” Stevens said. “Not a whole lot of adjustments, just sort of point and shoot, and make as many birdies as you can.”

TPC Twin Cities’ primary defense is frequently the wind, of which there was little to none on Thursday. That issue was compounded by the massive allotment of rainfall that came Wednesday, which wiped out three-quarters of the scheduled pro-am and severely softened the course.

The wet conditions forced the PGA Tour to instill a “lift, clean and place” protocol in which players can pick up their ball anytime it lands in a shortly mown area — such as the fairway — clean it and set it up however they’d like. That erases the opportunity for mud balls and guarantees a perfect lie, which is generally thought to shave a stroke or two off a pro’s score for a round.

Friday’s second round could potentially bring more of the same. The forecast suggests the morning wave of golfers will play its first nine holes in 2-3 mph winds, with the wind “maxing out” at 6 mph in the afternoon.

Again, benign.

If Thursday’s results are replicated in Round 2, 6-under will be required simply to play the weekend. It’s not unimaginable that Svensson, or someone else, will have the lead pushed out to 17-under by the end of Round 2.

“Still tomorrow, it’s going to be fairly soft,” surmised Rickie Fowler, who fired a 65 on Thursday.

Things will level out over the weekend with no more projected rain in the coming days and winds expected to reach double digits in miles per hour over the weekend.

Don’t expect TPC Twin Cities to surrender a score like the 31-under par Scheffler won the Byron Nelson with earlier this year at TPC Craig Ranch.

More trainwrecks are likely to come on Saturday and Sunday. Thankfully, there is enough past evidence to know the course can provide a legitimate test, even if it got embarrassed on Thursday.

“This course is still pretty challenging,” said Matti Schmid, who fired a 63 Thursday. “I think you get some crosswinds and there are some tee shots with water. You still have to drive it pretty well, and also some of the par 3s, like 17 you have to hit a really good shot.”

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