By DAVID BAUDER

The New York Times, attacked by President Donald Trump for reporting about his physical condition, said on Wednesday that it wouldn’t be deterred by “false and inflammatory language” that distorts the role of a free press.

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The president had posted on his Truth Social platform that he believed it was “seditious, perhaps even treasonous” for the Times and other media outlets to do “FAKE” reports on his health.

“They are true Enemies of the People, and we should do something about it,” Trump wrote.

The 79-year-old president wouldn’t specify, but the newspaper has posted a handful of reports about his health in recent weeks. In a Nov. 25 story headlined “Shorter Days, Signs of Fatigue: Trump Faces Realities of Aging in Office,” reporters examined Trump’s public and travel schedules to conclude Americans were seeing less of him than they were used to.

A story on Dec. 2, accompanied by a video, said that Trump “appeared to be fighting sleep” during a Cabinet meeting that day.

Trump says he hasn’t slowed down

Columnist Frank Bruni discussed these reports in a Dec. 8 opinion piece headlined “Trump’s Approval Ratings Have Declined. So Has His Vigor.” Bruni wrote that Americans “might want to brace ourselves for some presidential deja vu. He’s starting to give President Joe Biden vibes.” Biden, who was in his early 80s, dropped out of the 2024 race for the White House after a disastrous debate with Trump that raised doubts about the then-incumbent’s fitness for office.

Trump, in his post, said he was history’s hardest-working president with a lengthy list of accomplishments. He said he went out of his way to do “long, thorough and very boring” medical examinations, including three cognitive tests that he “ACED.”

“The New York Times, and some others, like to pretend that I am ‘slowing up,’ and maybe not as sharp as I once was, or am in poor physical health, knowing that it is not true,” the Republican president said.

The health of American presidents has long been a delicate and sometimes thorny issue between the White House and the press that covers it — from Grover Cleveland’s secret tumor surgery to Woodrow Wilson’s debilitating stroke to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s polio to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s heart attack. Trump has frequently critiqued the cognitive fitness of his predecessor, Biden.

Trump has fought back against some reports

Trump already has a $15 billion defamation lawsuit pending against the Times. In the suit, filed in September, Trump targeted four Times journalists about three articles that discussed his finances. He has also been involved in legal cases involving The Associated Press and CBS News, among others.

Nicole Taylor, a spokeswoman for The New York Times, said the outlet’s reporting on Trump’s health is heavily sourced, based on interviews with people close to the president and with medical experts.

“Americans deserve in-depth reporting and regular updates about the health of the leaders they elect,” Taylor said. “Mr. Trump welcomed our reporting on the age and fitness of his predecessors; we’re applying the same journalistic scrutiny to his vitality.”

Taylor said that “we won’t be deterred by false and inflammatory language that distorts the role of a free press.”

David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) — A parent of a Kentucky State University student has been charged with murder in an on campus shooting that killed one student and critically injured another.

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Jacob Lee Bard was at the school’s campus in Frankfort on Tuesday and fired shots at the victims at a residence hall, police said in a statement.

Investigators said the shooting was isolated, but they have not publicly shared details of the circumstances or a possible motive. The shooting killed 19-year-old De’Jon Fox of Indianapolis. A second student who was shot remains in critical condition, but his name has not been released, police said.

Bard, 48, was booked into jail on murder and first-degree assault charges. Police said Bard is from Evansville, Indiana, which is about 150 miles (241 kilometers) west of Frankfort.

Bard is being represented by a public defender at the Franklin County Department of Public Advocacy, which declined to talk about his case Wednesday.

University police officers were near the scene of the altercation that ended with the shooting and immediately arrested Bard, police said.

Investigators have watched video taken by others at the scene and surveillance footage.

Asked by reporters about alleged videos showing a fight involving Bard’s sons preceded the shooting or whether Bard might have come to campus to talk to administrators about his sons’ safety, Frankfort Assistant Police Chief Scott Tracy refused to say what may have led to the shooting.

“It’s really too early in the investigation right now to really give any details that led up to it. A lot of it would be speculation,” Tracy said Wednesday.

The shooting happened at Whitney M. Young Jr. Hall. It was the second shooting in four months near the student residence.

Someone fired multiple shots from a vehicle on Aug. 17, striking two people that the university said weren’t students. Frankfort police said one victim was treated for minor injuries and a second sustained serious injuries. The dorm and at least one vehicle were damaged by gunfire.

University President Koffi C. Akakpo said the school brought in more police officers after the first shooting and will evaluate whether more needs to be done to keep students safe once the investigation into the latest shooting is complete,

“The campus is a safe place,” Akakpo said at the news conference.

Kentucky State is a public historically Black university with about 2,200 students. Lawmakers authorized the school’s creation in 1886.

The school sits about 2 miles east of the Capitol building in Frankfort.

A 55-year-old woman was fatally shot at a Maplewood apartment complex Wednesday morning by a suspect who then shot and wounded himself, police said.

Officers about 10:45 a.m. were called to a report of gunshots and someone lying on the ground at Pondview Apartments in the 2500 block of Ivy Avenue, north of Maryland Avenue and west of Century Avenue.

The woman was found in a hallway with gunshot wounds and taken to Regions Hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Officers learned the suspect, a 56-year-old man, was possibly inside the woman’s apartment and armed.

A perimeter was set up, and neighboring apartment units were evacuated. A shelter-in-place order was issued.

The Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office SWAT team responded and made entry into the apartment, where they found the man with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said. His condition was not released by police.

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is assisting Maplewood police in the investigation.

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By MIKE SCHNEIDER

The ranks of U.S. government statisticians have been gutted in the past year due to layoffs and buyouts. That along with diminished funding and attacks on their independence have put at risk the data used to make informed decisions about everything from the nation’s economy to its demographics, according to a new report from outside experts released Wednesday.

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One agency lost 95% of its staff, while others dropped by about quarter to more than a third, due to government downsizing this year during President Donald Trump’s first months in office, according to the report released by the American Statistical Association. Besides veteran employees with deep institutional knowledge, some of the cuts hit new hires meant to infuse new blood into the agencies, said the annual report.

“Things are getting a lot worse,” Nancy Potok, a former U.S. chief statistician during the first Trump administration who was on the team that produced the report, said Wednesday. “It’s kind of dropping off the cliff there and in a really dire situation.”

The administration’s Office of Management and Budget, home to the U.S. chief statistician who coordinates the system of gathering data, didn’t respond Wednesday morning to an e-mailed inquiry about the report.

However, when asked last month about concerns that the statistical agencies were getting politicized, Mark Calabria, who was appointed in July as the U.S. chief statistician, said: “Everything in government is embedded in politics and is embedded in accountability.”

“So these kinds of debates about independence and accountability, they’re oranges and apples to some extent,” Calabria said during a forum at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. “What you have is wanting to make sure that the data gives you the right answer.”

In the first months of the second Trump administration, thousands of federal government workers were shown the door as part of efforts by the White House and its Department of Government Efficiency. The White House also offered a “deferred resignation” proposal in exchange for financial incentives, like months of paid leave, to almost all federal employees who opted to leave their jobs. It also moved to lay off probationary employees — those generally on the job for less than a year and who have yet to gain civil service protection.

“The statistical system is still functioning, but the threats are very serious,” said Beth Jarosz, vice president of the Association of Public Data Users, who was not involved in the report. “There are staffing reductions, contracted services that have been reduced. We’re seeing that showing up in the cancellation of data products, the reduction in data collection on things like consumer prices.”

The team behind the report noted that they had a “sparsity of information” about the detailed impacts of the cuts since the agencies wouldn’t provide them “perhaps out of caution or because they are not allowed to communicate with outside entities.”

The hardest hit agency was the National Center for Education Statistics, a part of the U.S. Department of Education, which lost 95% of its staff. The agency tracks educational trends with the goal of improving outcomes, and the staff losses halted most of its data collection earlier in the year, according to the report. Many outside contracts have since been restored but with a reduced scope, the report said.

The Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics’ workforce in the Social Security Administration was almost halved. The cuts eliminated retirement and disability research, among other things, the report said.

The Energy Information Administration, the Economic Research Service in the Department of Agriculture and the National Agricultural Statistics Service each lost between 25% and 40% of their staff. The cuts have resulted in discontinued or delayed reports about the energy industry and the cancellation of a survey about farmworkers and some state-specific agricultural reports.

The nation’s largest statistical agency, the U.S. Census Bureau, lost at least 15% of its staff this year, according to the report.

Besides the staff cuts, some barriers to the statistical agencies’ political independence were removed this year. The Trump administration made unsubstantiated claims of biased data; removed the heads of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics; failed to fill key leadership vacancies; and named political appointees who hold other jobs to fill in leadership positions that had been held by career civil servants, according to the report.

“These actions undermine public trust in federal statistics,” the report said.

Follow Mike Schneider on Bluesky: @mikeysid.bsky.social