Stocks rallied for a second straight day on Wall Street to soften what’s been a rough April. The S&P 500 jumped 1.2% Tuesday and pulled further out of the hole created by a six-day losing streak. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 0.7%, and the Nasdaq composite rose 1.6%. A weaker-than-expected report on U.S. business activity helped support the market, keeping hopes alive for cuts to interest rates by the Federal Reserve this year. A flood of earnings reports also dictated much of trading, highlighted by a slew of companies that topped analysts’ expectations. GE Aerospace, Danaher and Kimberly-Clark all jumped to big gains.

The Alabama Senate has voted for legislation meant to ensure President Joe Biden will appear on the state’s November ballot. The legislation approved Tuesday mirrors accommodations made four years ago for then-President Donald Trump. The legislation now moves to the Alabama House of Representatives. The state has one of the earliest candidate certification deadlines in the country, which has caused difficulties for whichever political party has the later convention date that year. The legislation would push back the state’s certification deadline from 82 days before the general election to 74 days, in order to accommodate the date of Democrats’ nominating convention.

What began last week when students at a New York Ivy League school refused to end their protest against Israel’s war with Hamas has turned into a much larger movement. Students across the nation set up encampments, occupied buildings and ignored demands to leave Tuesday. Protests against Israel’s war with Hamas had been bubbling for months but kicked into a higher gear after more than 100 pro-Palestinian demonstrators who had camped out on Columbia University’s upper Manhattan campus were arrested last week. Dozens more protesters have been arrested at other campuses since, and many now face charges of trespassing or disorderly conduct.

A veteran tabloid publisher has testified that he pledged to be Donald Trump’s “eyes and ears” during his 2016 presidential campaign, recounting for a jury how he promised the then-candidate that he would help suppress harmful stories and had even arranged to purchase a doorman’s silence. The testimony from David Pecker was designed to bolster prosecutors’ assertions of a decades-long friendship between Trump and the former publisher of the National Enquirer that culminated in an agreement to give the candidate’s lawyer a heads-up on negative tips and stories so they could be quashed.