WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Thursday rejected calls from student protesters to …

A federal judge in Los Angeles has sentenced a scuba dive boat captain to four years in prison and three years supervised release for criminal negligence after 34 people died in a fire aboard the vessel in 2019. The tragedy was the deadliest maritime disaster in recent U.S. history. Captain Jerry Boylan was sentenced on Thursday. He was found guilty of one count of misconduct or neglect of ship officer last year. The charge is a pre-Civil War statute colloquially known as seaman’s manslaughter. It was designed to hold steamboat captains and crew responsible for maritime disasters. Boylan’s appeal is ongoing.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders says her state won't comply with a federal regulation that seeks to protect the rights of transgender students in the nation's schools. Sanders on Thursday signed an executive order stating that Arkansas will continue to enforce restrictions on which bathrooms and pronouns transgender students can use. The state is the latest to challenge and defy the new Title IX regulation that could invalidate such restrictions. The regulations finalized last month spell out that Title IX bars discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The order follows moves in recent years by Arkansas to restrict the rights of transgender youth.

Gamers’ appetites for immersive sports video games have not changed much since the heyday of EA Sports' college football. Society, however, has. Video-game developer EA Sports is breaking back into the college football world 11 years after lawsuits over using players’ likeness without compensation froze the franchise. EA Sports announced in 2021 it would be rebooting the game with college athletes receiving the go-ahead to profit from their brand. The developer will seek to differentiate its game from other offerings in the market — sports franchises that have had the advantage of time to evolve.

The Federal Reserve emphasized that inflation has remained stubbornly high and said it doesn’t plan to cut interest rates until it has “greater confidence” that price increases are slowing sustainably to its 2% target. The Fed kept its key rate at a two-decade high of roughly 5.3%. Several hotter-than-expected reports have recently undercut the Fed’s belief that inflation was steadily easing. The combination of high rates and persistent inflation has also emerged as a potential threat to President Joe Biden’s re-election bid. “In recent months,” Chair Jerome Powell said, “inflation has shown a lack of further progress toward our 2% objective," adding, "It is likely that gaining greater confidence will take longer than previously expected.”

The Arizona Legislature has approved a repeal of a long-dormant ban on nearly all abortions. The vote to undo the 19th century law sent the bill to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs. Two Republicans joined with 14 Democrats in the Arizona Senate on Wednesday to give final legislative approval to the repeal, which narrowly won approval a week ago from the Arizona House and is expected to be signed by Hobbs on Thursday. The near-total ban permits abortions only to save the patient’s life and provides no exceptions for survivors of rape or incest.

Returning briefly to the campaign trail, Donald Trump has called the judge presiding over his hush money trial “crooked” a day after being held in contempt of court and threatened with jail time for violating a gag order. The order bars him from making public statements about witnesses, jurors and some others connected to his trial, but he is still free to criticize the judge. The former president is visiting the swing states of Wisconsin and Michigan on Wednesday during his one-day break from court. Trump is trying to achieve a balancing act unprecedented in American history by running for a second term while also fighting felony charges in New York.