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Having air conditioning at home is a luxury that keeps people comfortable during the hottest months of the year, and it’s debated whether the AC should stay blasting or be turned off when people head to work during the day.

Some swear that turning off the AC when they’re gone for a few hours is the most energy-efficient, cost-saving method. Others say it’s better to leave it running continuously, preventing the system from straining to rapidly cool the house down after the home has gotten warmer throughout the day.

Three experts interviewed by The Associated Press agreed that setting the thermostat a few degrees higher than normal while you’re away is generally the best way to balance energy efficiency against comfort and humidity.

While turning an AC unit off for several hours and turning it back on can save money and energy compared to continuously running it, that approach can lead to mold problems in humid environments as well as wear and tear that can cause more frequent repairs. The equation can also vary depending on other factors including comfort level, AC unit type and building insulation.

Air conditioning strategies differ in humid or dry climates

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, adjusting your thermostat by 7-10 degrees Fahrenheit (4-6 degrees Celsius) for eight hours a day can save up to 10% a year on heating and cooling.

Experts say there are a lot of factors to consider when deciding what AC habits save the most energy and money.

“If you’re gone for like 15 minutes to go to the grocery store, you don’t get any gain” by turning off your AC, said Elizabeth Hewitt, professor and urban planning expert at Stony Brook University.

But as a general rule, “if you’re going for your work day, say for eight hours or so, you’ll almost always save more energy and money by turning things off,” she said.

In some climates, however, turning off the AC might not be feasible, so residents can set back their AC a few degrees instead of blasting cold air all day.

In dry places like Arizona, you can let the home warm up more by raising the thermostat a few degrees higher. But in humid climates like Florida, air inside the home can become damp and harder to cool, and turning the AC off for long periods can increase the risk of mold since the system helps control indoor moisture.

Bumping up the thermostat by 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) yields about a 3% savings in cooling costs, said Patrick Phelan, mechanical engineering professor at Arizona State University.

Phelan also said leaving your AC off for hours and then turning it back on could lead to wear that results in more frequent repairs. That is because it can take AC systems 15 to 30 minutes after they are turned on to perform most efficiently.

How much energy and money you can save depends on the kind of home you live in, said Gregor Henze, an architectural engineering professor at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Homes built with heavy materials like concrete or brick hold in cool air longer, while older, draftier houses heat up faster. In less insulated homes, Henze said, it makes sense to adjust the thermostat even if you’re stepping out for just a few hours, because the indoor temperature can rise quickly.

Some AC units save more energy than others

Whether you have a window unit, a smart thermometer or central air could influence your savings.

Window units are generally less efficient because they’re installed in an open window, making it difficult to seal out hot air completely, said Hewitt. She added that spraying “cheap foam spray insulation in open windows or areas that are drafty is a really low-hanging fruit that doesn’t cost a lot of money and really helps retain the indoor temperature in your home.”

Phelan says smart thermostats are a handy tool to remove the mental burden of tinkering with your manual thermostat multiple times a day. Smart thermostats “learn” by monitoring the occupancy with a sensor and raise the temperature when no one is home to conserve energy and lower it when people return.

“If you’re going from just an ordinary manual thermostat to installing a smart one like a Nest, then you can expect something like 10% savings,” said Phelan.

How to cool your home without air conditioning

Each expert said simple steps like blocking sunlight can go a long way in keeping homes cool.

Henze pointed to “time-honored strategies” such as opening windows at night when it’s cooler. In dry climates, that night air doesn’t add much moisture, but in humid regions it can bring in dampness the AC will later need to remove.

Hewitt added that closing your blinds can make a difference of several degrees.

Phelan also noted that some blinds are designed to reflect sunlight and said tinted window films are another option.

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O’Malley is a former Associated Press reporter.

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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court just wrapped up a term that yielded significant rulings in cases involving race and discrimination that could have lasting effects on U.S. politics and society.

Justices were at times bitterly divided — and critical of one another — in rulings that winnowed key provisions of a landmark voting rights law, allowed the government to revoke protections for some immigrants and even challenged the historic understanding of birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants.

The decisions come at a moment when long-standing debates over race and identity have turned toward immigration, increasing racial diversity and the fairness of policies meant to prevent and redress discrimination.

“This term, we saw a Supreme Court that is moving quickly to eradicate legal protections in ways that will leave vulnerable communities exposed to the harsh winds of discrimination and hatred that we continue to see across the country today,” Kristen Clarke, general counsel for the NAACP and the former head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division during the Biden administration, told The Associated Press.

Here is a breakdown of the latest decisions involving race and what they may mean going forward:

The temporary protected status case

The court allowed the government to end deportation protections for Haitians and Syrians in the U.S. who have fled violence and natural disaster. President Donald Trump’s administration revoked the temporary protected status last year.

With the president’s more than decadelong track record of denigrating developing nations and immigrants who come to the U.S. from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, attorneys for some affected migrants contended that the government could not cancel the designations, in part because Trump’s comments about immigrants were racist.

“The true reason for the termination is the president’s racial animus towards non-white immigrants and bare dislike of Haitians in particular,” Geoffrey Pipoly, an attorney for the Haitian nationals in the case, said during April oral arguments in the case, Mullin v. Doe. The attorneys noted that, during his second presidential campaign, Trump claimed immigrants “are poisoning the blood of our country” and suggested in another instance that migrants have “bad genes.”

Federal authorities denied prejudice played a role in the decision and argued that TPS was supposed to end but has lasted more than a decade in some cases.

In writing for the 6-3 conservative majority, Justice Samuel Alito said none of the cited statements was “overtly racial,” reasoning that any of Trump’s actions could have been taken without racial animus and attributing his anti-immigrant comments to “political discourse.”

That’s not how the court’s liberal minority saw the situation.

“The references — of filth, disease, and primitiveness — are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes. It is hard to imagine the statements being made today of any White community,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent.

The birthright citizenship case

In one of the highest-profile cases of the term, the court reaffirmed that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution means all people born in the U.S. are citizens.

On his first day in office last year, Trump signed an executive order seeking to restrict birthright citizenship to the children of U.S. citizens, a move that civil rights groups challenged as unconstitutional and racist.

In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts traced the arc of birthright citizenship — a principle that all people born on U.S. soil are citizens — from its origins in English common law to its codification in the 14th Amendment.

Roberts noted that race and citizenship had been fiercely debated in courts, speeches, Congress and battlefields because of Black Americans’ fight for freedom from slavery.

Freed Black Americans did not receive citizenship as a “reward,” Roberts wrote, but because “the Amendment recognized their rightful claim to birthright citizenship simply and solely by virtue of their having been born on American soil.”

The 6-3 ruling was a blow to the Trump administration, which has made restricting immigration its central goal.

“The clause does not extend citizenship to the children of temporary visa holders or illegal aliens,” U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer argued before the court in April.

Justice Clarence Thomas agreed and wrote in his dissent that African descendants of enslaved people in the U.S. are a unique case separate from the children of tourists or people in the country illegally.

“Blacks were entitled to citizenship because they were Americans. They had no other homeland, owed no allegiance to any foreign power, and were subject to no other authority,” Thomas wrote.

In a stark move, liberal Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor directly criticized Thomas’ claim in a joint opinion.

“The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery,” they wrote.

The voting rights case

The Supreme Court handed down a decision in April that gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act meant to remedy efforts to disenfranchise minority voters. Among the methods the law permitted to stop voting discrimination in states was the creation of majority-minority congressional districts.

In the majority opinion, Alito found that because race and partisan voting behavior were so intertwined, it was unfair to conclude that a partisan gerrymander of a state’s congressional districts could be racist, given there may be other reasons for the map’s results.

Alito reasoned that “in a state where both parties have substantial support and where race is often correlated with party preference,” partisan actors can “easily exploit” laws meant to protect minority political participation for disingenuous reasons.

The liberal justices balked at the logic and criticized the conservative majority for harming minority representation in politics and culture. They believed that the law’s provisions were still necessary to prevent discrimination by states and worried about the fallout from its removal.

“The consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave,” Kagan wrote in her dissent. “Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter. In the states where that law continues to matter — the states still marked by residential segregation and racially polarized voting — minority voters can now be cracked out of the electoral process.”

The decision has had profound impact on the political landscape, with nearly a dozen Southern states immediately taking steps to redistrict and eliminate majority-Black districts.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — California is finally nearing the end of the ballot counting from its June 2 primary, a tediously slow process that is largely the result of multiple changes over the years intended to boost turnout by making voting easier and more accessible.

State data and experts who study voting trends suggest those efforts have made no significant improvement in participation, even as California’s drawn-out tabulating has put it in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump and made it a target of those who promote unfounded election conspiracy theories.

Turnout hit 40.8% in the June primary, according to preliminary figures from the secretary of state’s office, with counties required to complete their counting by Thursday. While that was an increase over the previous two primary elections, it was below participation levels in several other primaries stretching back to 2000 and nowhere near participation in the 1970s, when primary turnout sometimes topped 70%.

Wide gaps also remain in participation by younger voters and voters of color, according to the Center for Inclusive Democracy, a nonpartisan research group. The state’s most consistent voters remain older, white, more affluent homeowners.

The state appears to have seen only incremental progress from its voting changes over the past decade or more, said the center’s director, Mindy Romero.

“We haven’t seen significant jumps in turnout,” she said. “We still have very significant disparity in turnout with race and ethnicity. The numbers don’t lie.”

Extensive changes have mostly led to longer vote counting

Over the years, heavily Democratic California has ushered in a series of changes aimed at driving up voter participation. Those changes have sometimes come with a price, lengthening the time it takes to count ballots.

Every voter receives a mail-in ballot that can arrive at an election office seven days late and still be counted, provided the envelope is postmarked by Election Day. Residents also can sign up to vote on Election Day if they missed the registration deadline or had not updated their voter registration information. Those ballots are counted once their registration is verified.

Each envelope containing a mail ballot must match the signature on file, and that takes time. If a signature does not match, election officials are required to give those voters a chance to come in and prove their identity so the ballot will count, further delaying a final tally.

In that sense, California’s unusually long vote tally is the result of its own doing. In a report released last month, the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation found that the percentage of California’s ballots counted within two days of Election Day has generally declined over time, from 81% in 2004 to 66% in 2024.

That period loosely tracked a steady expansion of mail voting in the state. In a special statewide election last year, nearly 9 of every 10 voters used a mail ballot.

Florida, Texas and other big states quickly wrap up vote counting. California is a national laggard, with the outcome in close races sometimes taking weeks to decide.

While election officials insist they are focused on accuracy, the extended tabulating period has opened the door for candidates who see their lead slip away to suggest something nefarious is at work. After the June primary, Trump seized on California’s reputation as the national slowpoke in vote counting to renew his long-standing criticism of the state’s elections, while the Republican’s Department of Justice launched an investigation into Los Angeles County’s elections.

Even Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office has lamented the glacial pace of counting. The state’s newly enacted budget includes $29 million to help speed up the state’s long count.

“We wish the votes were counted faster, too,” Newsom’s press office wrote on the social platform X last month.

Turnout hardly budged after California passed a major participation law

One of the most prominent changes came in 2016, with the passage of what was called the Voter’s Choice Act. It was intended to make voting more convenient and increase turnout, especially among younger voters of color.

The law set a path toward statewide vote-by-mail and, in some counties, replaced traditional neighborhood polling places with community voting centers and ballot drop boxes. The goal was to free voters from being tied to a single polling location or day.

It does not appear the law has had the intended impact.

Elections two decades apart give a stark illustration: Turnout for the 2024 presidential election in California was 71%, 5 percentage points lower than turnout for the 2004 presidential election. The 2022 midterms turnout was 51%, the same rate as the midterm election 20 years earlier.

A 2025 study by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California concluded that “turnout did not consistently improve or worsen for any racial or ethnic group.”

“The effects of the (act) have generally fallen short of the reform’s original goal of a larger and more representative electorate,” the study said.

In separate 2025 research, the institute found that whites make up 36% of California’s adult population but comprise 50% of the state’s likely voters. Latinos make up 38% of the adult population but 29% of likely voters. Black residents make up 5% of adults and 4% of likely voters.

“You can’t definitely, clearly say the (act) had an overall, positive impact on turnout,” said Romero, the voting researcher, who added that more study was needed.

Legislative changes can go only so far to boost turnout

There appears to be an emerging consensus that more needs to be done to connect with and motivate infrequent voters, many of them people of color who are often overlooked by campaigns.

U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, a Democrat who was the state’s chief elections officer when the Voter’s Choice Act was signed by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, said in a statement that while the state is a leader in voting access “candidates and political parties must do more to motivate voters to get out and vote.”

Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, said part of California’s challenge is simply contending with the scale of voting. California has 23 million-plus registered voters, more than any other state. That number has increased steadily over two decades, even as turnout has not jumped significantly.

The state has at least made gains registering new voters — nearly 85% of eligible voters are registered, compared with 70% two decades ago. That also means more votes to count, another challenge to the timeliness of results. The state has about 7.5 million more voters than it did in 2006.

Alexander said a voter’s decision to turn in a ballot can turn on multiple considerations. Primary elections can be seen as optional, with the general election coming in the fall. Misinformation and attacks on the reliability of elections are suppressing turnout. Even California’s notoriously complex ballots with dozens of races overlapping with state and local ballot initiatives can be a turnoff, she said, overwhelming some would-be voters.

Despite all the state’s changes, how people vote can be less important than what motivates them to vote.

“The public’s level of trust in government and institutions, who and what’s on the ballot and how well-financed their get-out-the-vote campaigns are, have a much greater impact on voter participation than the election model used,” said Bob Page, Orange County’s registrar of voters.

BRUSSELS (AP) — Judges at the European Union’s top court dismissed an appeal by Google over a landmark, 4.1 billion euro ($4.5 billion) antitrust fine imposed for throttling competition and reducing consumer choice through the dominance of its mobile Android operating system.

The case has been tangled up in courts since the European Commission announced the fine in 2018. But the European Court of Justice dismissal on Thursday marks the end of that process.

“The appeal brought by Google and its parent company Alphabet against the judgment of the General Court is dismissed, thereby confirming the penalty imposed for Google Search’s abuse of a dominant position in the context of the Android operating system,” the Luxembourg-based judges wrote in their ruling.

Google previously argued free and open-source Android has resulted in low-cost phones and driven competition with its chief rival, Apple. Android is the most popular mobile operating system, beating even Apple’s iOS.

The fine is one of three antitrust penalties totaling more than $8 billion that the European Commission slapped on Google between 2017 and 2019, putting the 27-nation bloc at the forefront of the global push to rein in tech giants.

Since then, the commission has widened its crackdown on digital giants with more antitrust investigations targeting Amazon, Apple and Facebook and sweeping new rules aimed at clamping down on the biggest digital companies.

Agustín Reyna, director general of the European Consumer Organization, welcomed the court’s ruling and said the EU needs more regulation akin to the Digital Markets Act to “nip unfair practices in the bud” and protect consumers.

“Today’s judgment sends a very clear message: dominant companies cannot use their power to shut out competition and limit consumer choice,” Reyna said. “Today is a big win for Europe.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. applications for jobless aid inched down last week as layoffs remain at historically healthy levels.

The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits in the week ending June 27 fell by 1,000 to 215,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That’s fewer than the 225,000 new applications forecast by analysts surveyed by the data firm FactSet.

Weekly filings for unemployment benefits are considered representative of U.S. layoffs and are close to a real-time indicator of the health of the job market.

The government also released its more comprehensive June jobs report on Thursday, a day earlier than usual due to the July 4 holiday.

That data showed that U.S. employers pulled back on hiring last month, adding only 57,000 jobs. That’s less than half the previous month’s total and a sign companies remain cautious. The unemployment rate dropped to 4.2% from 4.3% in May, though that decline is mostly due to the fact that many out-of-work people gave up looking for jobs and were no longer counted as unemployed.

June’s tepid hiring comes after a relative surge in job gains the previous three months, countering concerns that the war in Iran would trip up an already wobbly labor market.

Weekly jobless aid applications have stabilized in a range mostly between 200,000 and 250,000 since the U.S. economy emerged from the pandemic recession. However, hiring began slowing about two years ago and tapered further in 2025 due to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, his purge of the federal workforce and the lingering effects of high interest rates meant to control inflation.

Among the companies that have cut jobs recently are Verizon, UPS, Amazon, Disney, Starbucks and Walmart.

Thursday’s layoffs data showed that the four-week moving average of jobless claims, which quiets some of the week-to-week noise, fell by 2,500 to 222,000.

The total number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits for the previous week ending June 20 ticked up by 2,000 by to 1.81 million, also a historically low figure.