By JIM MUSTIAN and MICHAEL BIESECKER

The assassination of Charlie Kirk offers the latest example of how ordinary security measures can be defeated in an era of escalating political violence, when anyone associated with the political process is a potential target, including influencers.

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Kirk was in a familiar setting Wednesday before a large crowd at a university in Utah, a red state where voting trends largely aligned with his pro-MAGA politics. The conservative firebrand appeared with his own security team, as he has at scores of events on other campuses.

In hindsight, those with experience protecting high-profile public officials and dignitaries say more could have been done to prevent the fatal shooting.

Security experts interviewed by The Associated Press questioned whether the event was sufficiently staffed but also acknowledged the limitations of both campus police forces and outdoor venues. They said only the inner ring closest to Kirk appeared to be secure, leaving the outer and middle rings exposed.

The killing, apparently carried out from a nearby rooftop, had eerie parallels to the assassination attempt last year against Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, where a 20-year-old gunman managed to climb on top of a nearby building and open fire during a campaign stop.

Law enforcement officials were still searching for the shooter Thursday. Authorities said the assassin used a high-powered, bolt-action rifle and jumped off that building as spectators fled the scene. The FBI released two photos of a “person of interest.”

This undated combination of images provided provided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation shows a person of interest in connection with the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University on Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2025, in Orem, Utah. (Federal Bureau of Investigation via AP)

Security seemed consistent with other engagements

Many details remained unclear, including what precise security measures were taken ahead of the debate hosted by Kirk’s nonprofit political organization, Turning Point USA. The event at Utah Valley University drew more than 3,000 people.

Hours after the attack, Jeff Long, the campus police chief, told reporters that six of his officers staffed the debate, and that his department had coordinated with Kirk’s own security team. He noted that Kirk had been speaking “in a lower area surrounded by buildings” but did not say whether officers had inspected nearby rooftops.

“This is a police chief’s nightmare,” Long said. “You try to get your bases covered, and unfortunately today we didn’t, and because of that we had this tragic incident.”

Students told AP they saw no metal detectors or bag checks, though the level of security appeared consistent with other speaking engagements on Kirk’s national tour. As Kirk was not an elected or government official, he or his organization likely would have had to pay for security beyond what the university provided.

“They probably didn’t have enough security personnel there,” said Ron Williams, a former U.S. Secret Service agent who now works as a private security consultant. “And the reason is because they really didn’t see the need, especially in Orem, Utah, which is a low-crime area.”

Videos posted to social media show Kirk speaking into a handheld microphone while sitting under a white tent. A single shot rings out, and Kirk can be seen reaching up with his right hand as a large volume of blood gushes from the side of his neck.

The debate had been met with divided opinions on campus. An online petition calling on university administrators to bar Kirk from appearing received nearly 1,000 signatures. Kirk, 31, had taken note of the rising temperature last week, posting on X images of news clips showing that his visit to Utah was sparking controversy. “What’s going on in Utah?” he wrote.

Still, it was unclear whether Kirk had received specific death threats or other indications he was in danger. Even if he had, experts said it can be difficult to provide airtight protection for a private individual without a presidential-level security detail.

An example is “The Satanic Verses” novelist Salman Rushdie, who drew death threats from Iranian leaders for decades before he was nearly stabbed to death in 2022 by an assailant who rushed the stage as he was about to give a lecture in western New York.

Donald Trump Jr. acknowledged the inherent security risks of political events in July as he spoke alongside Kirk at a Turning Point USA summit in Tampa, Florida. The younger Trump recalled a 2016 campus event in which he said he appeared with Kirk even after Michigan state police warned that they could not guarantee the two men’s safety.

“I literally said I’d rather get my ass kicked right here, right now, than capitulate to the woke mob,” Trump Jr. said.

The map above shows the site on the Utah Valley University campus where conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot. (AP Digital Embed)

High ground offers ‘direct line of fire’

Kirk was an ardent supporter of Second Amendment rights and had long argued that an armed populace makes everyone safer. Utah is one of 14 states that allow some level of concealed carry of firearms on public college and university campuses. In May, a law took effect allowing anyone at least 18 years old with a valid Utah concealed weapon permit to carry a weapon on campus.

Williams said a uniformed officer should have been posted atop the university’s Losee Center, about 142 yards (130 meters) from the tent where Kirk was shot. Authorities believe the gunman fired from that rooftop.

“If you have a high ground issue, you’ve got to take care of that first,” said Williams, who protected four presidents and visiting foreign dignitaries during 22 years with the Secret Service. High ground gives a shooter “a direct line of fire.”

Williams also questioned the decision to hold the event outdoors. An inside venue, he said, would have allowed for security checkpoints.

Another former Secret Service agent, Joseph LaSorsa, said it was impossible “to secure 3,000 people” with half a dozen officers. “They didn’t have perimeter security. They didn’t have counter-sniper. They were wide open,” said LaSorsa, who protected three presidents during a 20-year-career with the Secret Service.

Kirk’s security team was likely most concerned “with people rushing the stage” or bothering him as he returned to his vehicle, said Bobby McDonald, a former Secret Service supervisory agent who is now a criminal-justice lecturer at the University of New Haven. A longer-range shooting, he said, was likely not even on the radar.

“I’m not sure if there were 20 police officers there that this type of event wouldn’t happen at that college setting,” McDonald said. “This person knew what they were doing with that firearm.”

Campus security challenges

Events at colleges can be exceedingly difficult to secure, especially when they involve a controversial figure, said David B. Mitchell, the chief of the University of Maryland Police Department. Student groups like to showcase such speakers because they draw big crowds.

“This is going to send shock waves across college campuses,” Mitchell said, because there are many similar events “happening all the time.”

Mitchell’s 100-officer force helps secure events involving high-profile politicians and other figures due to the school’s proximity to Washington. Former President Barack Obama has attended at least two University of Maryland basketball games. Such events require extensive preparation.

“It’s the Charlie Kirks of the world who don’t have large security details like that — certainly not to the level of the president or other elected officials — and yet they can still be a target,” Mitchell said. “There is really only so much you can do, given the circumstances.”

Associated Press journalists Hannah Schoenbaum in Orem, Utah, Del Quentin Wilber in Washington and Christopher Keller in Albuquerque, New Mexico, contributed to this report.

By ANDREW DALTON and AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Many Americans still want to thank the academy, at least a little.

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About half of U.S. adults say they’ve watched all or most of an awards show on TV or streaming in the past year, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, while just over half say they’ve watched clips from an awards show. About 6 in 10 say they’ve watched an awards show, clips or both in the last year.

The results suggest that some vitality remains in the seemingly stodgy old tuxedo-and-gown world of the Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, Tonys and Golden Globes, whose makers have fought to make them relevant when Americans have more entertainment and engagement choices than ever.

And they come at a moment when the Oscars and the Emmys have seen a short-term uptick in viewers after cultural shifts that brought a huge long-term drop in people gathering around a television to watch an awards show together.

“These days, it’s more focused on the performances,” said Walter Hanley, 69, who used to work in the music industry and still watches most music awards shows. “Back in the ’70s and ’80s when I would attend regional Grammys in person, it was more about the awards — sound engineering and producers and that kind of thing.”

Hanley thinks the pivot has helped awards shows keep up with the times. “You have to cater to what the viewers want,” he said.

Some awards shows have rebounded

The Oscars, which remain the most viewed and most engaged-with awards show, are coming off a five-year high in viewers. Nearly 20 million people watched “Anora” win best picture and four other top trophies in March.

But that’s down from the more than 55 million who watched “Titanic” win 11 in 1998, when awards shows truly were the king of the world.

Some, like Christine Steingraber, 64, watch most of the awards shows that air on TV. The Oscars are her favorite, but she watches the Emmys and the Grammys, too, even when she’s not familiar with the shows or the artists up for awards.

“It opens up another perspective as to whether I want to see that show or hear that artist,” she said.

The biggest awards shows — like the Oscars, the Grammys and the Emmys — have streaming partners, but they generally don’t appear there until the following day. By that point, viral moments and winners’ reactions have already been plastered online in short clips.

The poll suggests that awards shows may be appealing to a new generation. People under the age of 45 are more likely to say they have watched both an awards show and clips in the past year, compared with people age 45 or older.

Clips help extend awards shows’ lives

Meme-able moments like the “La-La Land” fiasco or Will Smith’s slap at the Oscars or the hits and misses of Golden Globes monologues have shown the shows can still have life after social media took over for TV for many.

The survey found that the people who watched full awards shows largely overlap with clip viewers, although people are slightly more likely to say they’ve just watched clips rather than just watching shows. About 4 in 10 say they haven’t watched clips or shows.

Awards shows — whether they’re consumed through clips or live viewing – are more popular among Black and Hispanic adults than among white adults. About 7 in 10 Black and Hispanic adults say they’ve watched clips or at least most of a show in the past year, compared with just over half of white adults.

Shows including the BET Awards and the Latin Grammys have reached more targeted audiences, just as the MTV Video Music Awards became a way to bring young viewers into the awards audience starting in the mid-1980s.

Rose Lucas, 77, says she used to watch the BET Awards, because she enjoyed the R&B and hip-hop performances. She enjoys music awards shows, but she doesn’t typically watch the full show live. She’s more likely to watch short clips of performances the next day.

“I don’t watch any of them live anymore. I don’t tune in to them,” Lucas said. “(They are) too long. I’m not as interested anymore.”

Most people aren’t watching frequently

When the Emmys return on Sunday, all eyes will be on the winners — and the ratings. The last Emmys got a much bigger boost than its predecessor, held in January 2024 because of Hollywood’s strikes — one of several challenges including the coronavirus pandemic and this year’s wildfires that have thrown awards show norms out of whack.

Television has in some ways overtaken movies as a prestige screen art, but that hasn’t translated into similar awards prestige. The Emmys audience is less than half that of the Oscars.

The long-term awards ratings decline closely tracks with real-time broadcast and cable television viewing across the board for virtually everything in the U.S. but football.

And while there are dozens of awards shows each year, only a handful have a significant audience. The poll found that about 3 in 10 Americans said they had watched awards shows at least “several times” in the past year.

That could be a result of Americans having more options than ever in what to watch — and many being too busy to tune in.

Inez Parker, 88, said she watches awards shows on live TV, and she expects she’ll tune into the Emmys this weekend. But she doesn’t stream the show again or watch clips after the fact — she’s too busy for that.

“I usually watch all of it,” she said. “I’ll watch it live, and that’s it. I don’t watch it again.”

Thomson-DeVeaux reported from Washington. AP polling reporter Linley Sanders contributed to this report.

The AP-NORC poll of 1,182 adults was conducted Aug. 21-25, 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 3.8 percentage points.

By MARY CLARE JALONICK

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Republicans are taking the first steps to change the chamber’s rules on Thursday, making it easier to confirm groups of President Donald Trump’s nominees and overcome Democratic delays.

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Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s move is the latest salvo after a dozen years of gradual changes by both parties to weaken the filibuster and make the nominations process more partisan. He has said the Democrats’ obstruction is “unsustainable” as they have drawn out the confirmation process and infuriated Trump as many positions in his administration have remained unfilled.

Opening up the Senate, Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said that the delays have prevented the Senate from spending time on legislative business.

“We’re going to fix this today, and restore the longtime Senate precedent of expeditious confirmation, and the Senate’s role as first and foremost a legislative body,” Thune said.

Republicans are taking a series of procedural votes Thursday on a group of 48 of Trump’s nominees, and are expected to vote to “overturn the chair,” or change the rules, which takes a simple majority vote. If all goes according to their plan, the nominees — undersecretaries and staff positions for various agencies across the government as well as several ambassadors — could be confirmed by next week.

The rules change effort comes as both parties have obstructed the other’s nominees for years, and as both Republicans and Democrats have advocated speeding the process when they are in the majority. The Republican rules change stops short of speeding up votes on high-level Cabinet officials and lifetime judicial appointments, and it is loosely based on a proposal from Democrats under President Joe Biden.

Republicans have been pushing the rules change since early August, when the Senate left for a monthlong recess after a breakdown in bipartisan negotiations over the confirmation process and Trump told Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer to “GO TO HELL!” on social media.

Democrats have blocked more nominees than ever before as they have struggled to find ways to oppose Trump and the GOP-dominated Congress, and as their voters have pushed them to fight Republicans at every turn. It’s the first time in recent history that the minority party hasn’t allowed at least some quick confirmations.

Schumer has said Democrats are delaying the nominations because Trump’s nominees are “historically bad.”

“If you don’t debate nominees, if you don’t vote on individual nominees, if there’s not some degree of sunlight, what will stop Donald Trump from nominating even worse individuals than we’ve seen to date, knowing this chamber will rubber stamp anything he wishes?” Schumer said Monday.

Schumer told Republicans that they will “come to regret” their action — echoing a similar warning from GOP Leader Mitch McConnell to then-Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., in 2013, when Democrats changed Senate rules for executive branch and lower court judicial nominees to remove the 60-vote threshold for confirmations. At the time, Republicans were blocking President Barack Obama’s picks.

Republicans took the Senate majority a year later, and McConnell eventually did the same for Supreme Court nominees in 2017 as Democrats tried to block Trump’s nomination of Justice Neil Gorsuch.

“I say to my Republican colleagues, think carefully before taking this step,” Schumer said.

By MIKE SCHNEIDER, Associated Press

Income inequality dipped, more people had college degrees, fewer people moved to a different home and the share of Asian and Hispanic residents increased in the United States last year, according to figures released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

These year-to-year changes, big and small, from 2023 to 2024 were captured in the bureau’s data from the American Community Survey, the largest annual audit of American life. The survey of 3.5 million households asks about more than 40 topics, including income, housing costs, veterans status, computer use, commuting, and education.

Here’s a look at how the United States changed last year.

Income inequality dips

Income inequality — or the gap between the highest and lowest earners — in the United States fell nationwide by nearly a half percent from 2023 to 2024, as median household income rose slightly, from $80,002 to $81,604.

Five Midwestern states — Iowa, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin — had statistically significant dips, along with Georgia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon and Puerto Rico.

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North Carolina was the only state to see a statistically significant rise in inequality. North Carolina State economist Michael Walden said it reflected the state generating high-paying jobs in tech and other professional sectors, while the post-pandemic labor shortage which raised wages in lower-paying service jobs had ended.

In South Dakota, which had a leading 4% drop, the inequality dip “could reflect stronger growth in the household income among lower and middle income households (or smaller growth in the income of the highest brackets),” state demographer Weiwei Zhang said Wednesday in an email.

In Nebraska, it could be high employment rates across all demographic groups since “high employment leads to income, thus less income inequality,” said Josie Schafer, director of the Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Nebraska Omaha.

In Massachusetts, one of the traditional strengths of the state’s economy — high-paying jobs in life science, high tech and research — has been sluggish in the past two years, said Mark Melnik, director of economic and public policy research at a University of Massachusetts Amherst institute.

“The typical jobs in this industry are the kind of thing that helps Massachusetts have the highest per capita (income) in the country but also exacerbates some elements of income inequality,” Melnik said.

FILE – Dark storm clouds hang over TD Ameritrade Park and the Omaha skyline in Omaha, Neb., Friday, June 20, 2014, as the rain starts coming down. (AP Photo/Eric Francis, file)

Greater diversity and fewer people married

The United States became more demographically diverse, and fewer people were married from 2023 to 2024.

The non-Hispanic white population, who identify with only a single race, dropped from 57.1% to 56.3%, while the share of the nation’s Asian population rose from 6% to 6.3% and the Hispanic population rose from 19.4% to 20%. The rate of the Black population stayed the same at 12.1%, as did the American Indian Alaska Native alone population at 1%.

In the marriage department, the share of men who have never married increased from 37.2% to 37.6%, and it rose from 31.6% to 32.1% for women.

Fewer people moved, as costs of renting and owning homes rose

Last year, only 11% of U.S. residents moved to another home, compared to 11.3% in the previous year. The decline of people moving this decade has been part of a continuous slide as home prices have skyrocketed in some metros and interest rates have gone up. In 2019, by comparison, 13.7% of U.S. residents moved.

The monthly costs for U.S. homeowners with a mortgage rose to $2,035 from $1,960. Homeowners with a mortgage in California ($3,001), Hawaii ($2,937), New Jersey ($2,797), Massachusetts ($2,755), and the District of Columbia ($3,181) had the highest median monthly costs.

Costs for renters also increased as the median rent with utilities went from $1,448 to $1,487.