By DEE-ANN DURBIN

The Associated Press –  It’s the inflation you’re not supposed to see.

From toilet paper to yogurt and coffee to corn chips, manufacturers are quietly shrinking package sizes without lowering prices. It’s dubbed “shrinkflation,” and it’s accelerating worldwide.

In the U.S., a small box of Kleenex now has 60 tissues; a few months ago, it had 65. Chobani Flips yogurts have shrunk from 5.3 ounces to 4.5 ounces. In the U.K., Nestle slimmed down its Nescafe Azera Americano coffee tins from 100 grams to 90 grams. In India, a bar of Vim dish soap has shrunk from 155 grams to 135 grams.

Shrinkflation isn’t new, experts say. But it proliferates in times of high inflation as companies grapple with rising costs for ingredients, packaging, labor and transportation. Global consumer price inflation was up an estimated 7% in May, a pace that will likely continue through September, according to S&P Global.

“It comes in waves. We happen to be in a tidal wave at the moment because of inflation,” said Edgar Dworsky, a consumer advocate and former assistant attorney general in Massachusetts who has documented shrinkflation on his Consumer World website for decades.

Dworsky began noticing smaller boxes in the cereal aisle last fall, and shrinkflation has ballooned from there. He can cite dozens of examples, from Cottonelle Ultra Clean Care toilet paper, which has shrunk from 340 sheets per roll to 312, to Folgers coffee, which downsized its 51-ounce container to 43.5 ounces but still says it will make up to 400 cups. (Folgers says it’s using a new technology that results in lighter-weight beans.)

Dworsky said shrinkflation appeals to manufacturers because they know customers will notice price increases but won’t keep track of net weights or small details, like the number of sheets on a roll of toilet paper. Companies can also employ tricks to draw attention away from downsizing, like marking smaller packages with bright new labels that draw shoppers’ eyes.

That’s what Fritos did. Bags of Fritos Scoops marked “Party Size” used to be 18 ounces; some are still on sale at a grocery chain in Texas. But almost every other big chain is now advertising “Party Size” Fritos Scoops that are 15.5 ounces — and more expensive.

PepsiCo didn’t respond when asked about Fritos. But it did acknowledge the shrinking of Gatorade bottles. The company recently began phasing out 32-ounce bottles in favor of 28-ounce ones, which are tapered in the middle to make it easier to hold them. The changeover has been in the works for years and isn’t related to the current economic climate, PepsiCo said. But it didn’t respond when asked why the 28-ounce version is more expensive.

Likewise, Kimberly-Clark — which makes both Cottonelle and Kleenex — didn’t respond to requests for comment on the reduced package sizes. Proctor & Gamble Co. didn’t respond when asked about Pantene Pro-V Curl Perfection conditioner, which downsized from 12 fluid ounces to 10.4 fluid ounces but still costs $3.99.

Earth’s Best Organic Sunny Day Snack Bars went from eight bars per box to seven, but the price listed at multiple stores remains $3.69. Hain Celestial Group, the brand’s owner, didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.

Some companies are straightforward about the changes. In Japan, snack maker Calbee Inc. announced 10% weight reductions — and 10% price increases — for many of its products in May, including veggie chips and crispy edamame. The company blamed a sharp rise in the cost of raw materials.

Domino’s Pizza announced in January it was shrinking the size of its 10-piece chicken wings to eight pieces for the same $7.99 carryout price. Domino’s cited the rising cost of chicken.

In India, “down-switching” — another term for shrinkflation — is mostly done in rural areas, where people are poorer and more price sensitive, said Byas Anand, head of corporate communications for Dabur India, a consumer care and food business. In cities, companies simply jack up prices.

“My company has been doing it openly for ages,” Anand said.

Some customers who have noticed the downsizing are sharing examples on social media. Others say shrinkflation is causing them to change their shopping habits.

Alex Aspacher does a lot of the grocery shopping and meal planning for his family of four in Haskins, Ohio. He noticed when the one-pound package of sliced Swiss cheese he used to buy shrank to 12 ounces but kept its $9.99 price tag. Now, he hunts for deals or buys a block of cheese and slices it himself.

Aspacher said he knew prices would rise when he started reading about higher wages for grocery workers. But the speed of the change — and the shrinking packages — have surprised him.

“I was prepared for it to a degree, but there hasn’t been a limit to it so far,” Aspacher said. “I hope we find that ceiling pretty soon.”

Sometimes the trend can reverse. As inflation eases, competition might force manufacturers to lower their prices or reintroduce larger packages. But Dworsky says once a product has gotten smaller, it often stays that way.

“Upsizing is kind of rare,” he said.

Hitendra Chaturvedi, a professor of supply chain management at Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business, said he has no doubt many companies are struggling with labor shortages and higher raw material costs.

But in some cases, companies’ profits — or sales minus the cost of doing business — are also increasing exponentially, and Chaturvedi finds that troubling.

He points to Mondelez International, which took some heat this spring for shrinking the size of its Cadbury Dairy Milk bar in the U.K. without lowering the price. The company’s operating income climbed 21% in 2021, but fell 15% in the first quarter as cost pressures grew. By comparison, PepsiCo’s operating profit climbed 11% in 2021 and 128% in the first quarter.

“I’m not saying they’re profiteering, but it smells like it,” Chaturvedi said. “Are we using supply constraints as a weapon to make more money?”

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AP Writers Ashok Sharma in Delhi and Kelvin Chan in London contributed.

By ALANNA DURKIN RICHER

More than 800 people across the U.S. have been charged in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, which left officers bloodied and sent lawmakers into hiding, and federal authorities continue to make new arrests practically every week.

The charges against members of the angry pro-Trump mob range from low-level misdemeanors for those who only entered the Capitol to felony seditious conspiracy charges against far-right extremists.

It’s the largest prosecution in the history of the Justice Department, whose leader, Attorney General Merrick Garland, has vowed to hold accountable “all January 6th perpetrators, at any level.”

As the U.S. House committee investigating the attack prepares to hold a series of public hearings to detail its findings, here’s a look at where the criminal cases stand:

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WHO HAS BEEN CHARGED?

Authorities have arrested people in practically all 50 states in connection with the riot. They include former police officers and U.S. military veterans, a five-time Olympic swimming medalist and the son of a New York City judge.

Hundreds of people who went inside but didn’t take part in any destruction or violence are facing only misdemeanor crimes like picketing in the Capitol and disorderly conduct that call for up to six months behind bars.

More than 250 people have been charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement who were trying to protect the Capitol, including more than 85 accused of using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer. Others have been accused of assaulting members of the media — one an Associated Press photographer — or destroying media equipment.

The most serious cases have been brought against members of two far-right extremist groups, the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.

The leaders of both groups have been arrested and remain locked up while they await trial later this year for seditious conspiracy, which alleges a plot to forcibly oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power. The rarely used Civil War-era charge calls for up to 20 years in prison.

WHO HAS BEEN CONVICTED?

More than 300 people have pleaded guilty to a slew of crimes, including conspiracy and assault. Among them are three Oath Keepers who have admitted to seditious conspiracy, are cooperating with investigators and could testify against their fellow extremists at trial.

There have been seven trials so far in the District of Columbia’s federal court. The first five juries convicted the riot defendants of all charges.

The convicted include Thomas Webster, a 20-year New York Police Department veteran who attacked an officer during the riot. Webster claimed he was defending himself when he tackled the officer and grabbed his gas mask.

Jurors also rejected the defense of an Ohio man who claimed he was only “following presidential orders” from former President Donald Trump when he stormed the Capitol. Dustin Byron Thompson was convicted of obstructing Congress from certifying the electoral vote and other charges.

A judge decided two other cases without a jury, acquitting one of the defendants and partially acquitting the other.

U.S. District Court Judge Trevor McFadden, who was appointed by Trump, convicted Otero County, New Mexico, Commissioner Couy Griffin of illegally entering restricted Capitol grounds, but acquitted him of engaging in disorderly conduct.

In the other misdemeanor case, McFadden found Matthew Martin of New Mexico not guilty of charges that he illegally entered the Capitol and engaged in disorderly conduct, saying it was reasonable for Martin to believe that outnumbered police officers allowed him and others to enter through the Rotunda doors.

WHAT ABOUT THE PUNISHMENTS?

Nearly 200 people have been sentenced so far. The punishments have ranged from probation to more than five years behind bars. About 100 people who were charged with lower level crimes have avoided going to prison, although some of those received time in home detention.

The longest sentence — more than five years — was given to Robert Palmer of Largo, Florida, who threw a wooden plank and sprayed a fire extinguisher at officers before hurling the fire extinguisher at them.

Others who received lengthy sentences include Jacob Chansley, the spear-carrying rioter whose horned fur hat, bare chest and face paint made him one of the more recognizable figures in the attack. Chansley, who called himself “QAnon Shaman,” got about 31/2 years behind bars after admitting to entering the Senate chamber and writing a note to Vice President Mike Pence that said: “It’s only a matter of time, justice is coming.”

WHAT’S NEXT?

The two most high-profile trials — involving the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys — are expected to take place this summer and fall.

Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, who was once the Proud Boys’ top boss, and four others linked to the group were charged on Monday with seditious conspiracy after previously facing other conspiracy counts. They are scheduled to stand trial beginning Aug. 9.

Tarrio, who has since stepped down from his post as the group’s chairman, was arrested in a separate case two days before the riot and was not at the Capitol on Jan. 6. But he is accused of helping put into motion the violent attack.

The trial for the Oath Keepers leader, Stewart Rhodes, and four other members and associates the group is scheduled to start Sept. 26. Prosecutors say the Oath Keepers plotted for weeks to try to overturn the election results and prepared for a siege by purchasing weapons and setting up battle plans.

Authorities are still searching for many suspects, including the person who planted two pipe bombs outside the offices of the Republican and Democratic national committees the night before the melee.

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Follow Alanna Durkin Richer on Twitter at twitter.com/aedurkinricher

By CALVIN WOODWARD

WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans are processing the nightmare of the slaughter of children in Texas, the racist murders in Buffalo, New York, and the other numbingly repeated scenes of carnage in the United States.

They’re contending with what feels like highway robbery at the gas pump, they’re nagged by a virus that the world can’t shake, and they’re split into two hostile camps over politics and culture — the twin pillars of the nation’s foundation.

They’ve already been through two set-piece dramas of presidential impeachment — indeed, through the wringer on all things Donald Trump.

Now, beginning in prime time on Thursday, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol is setting out to establish the historical record of an event damaging not only to a community or individual families but to the collective idea of democracy itself.

After more than 100 subpoenas, 1,000 interviews and 100,000 documents, the committee has a story to tell in hearings that open this week. A story for the ages, it’s been said.

The open question: How much will the country care?

The committee’s examination of the actions of Trump and all the president’s men and women, more aggressive than any inquiry before it, has produced a multitude of plot lines that together will tell the tale of a violent uprising fueled by the venom and lies of a defeated president.

Many Republicans, even those who condemned Trump and the violence in the moment, have adopted a “nothing more to see here” posture since, even rejecting calls for an independent Sept. 11-style commission to investigate.

An entire disinformation ecosystem sprung up with utterly false claims about the nature and character of the attack. Rather than condemn the it, Trump continues to insist his defeat by 7 million votes should be overturned, in effect validating the rioters’ cause.

Dozens of the insurrectionists have been brought to justice, many of them being convicted or pleading guilty to serious crimes. But the committee’s goal is larger: Who in a position of power should also be held to account?

There are endless ribbons of inquiry.

Did Vice President Mike Pence refuse to leave the besieged Capitol because he suspected the Secret Service, at the behest of Trump, was trying to take him away to stop him from certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s victory? Did Trump flush incriminating papers down the White House toilet?

How to explain the gap of more than seven hours in White House telephone logs of Trump’s calls during the insurrection? Will it stand in history alongside the infamous 18 1/2-minute hole in President Richard Nixon’s secret White House recording system in 1972?

The Watergate affair, which exposed Nixon’s cover-up of politically motivated criminal acts and destroyed his presidency, centered on a question posed by a Republican senator, Howard Baker, in a Tennessee drawl: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”

For the Jan. 6 committee, the key question about Trump’s involvement in the insurrection is: What did the president do, and when did he do it?

One aim is to establish whether Trump’s acts are criminal, as one judge has mused they may be, and whether that would prompt a politically fraught Justice Department prosecution of an ex-president.

More broadly, the effort addresses who might be punished in the large circle of Trump enablers. Some of them are members of Congress who helped him plot how to try to overturn an honest election only to huddle in fear with everyone else in a Capitol hideout when the rioters — in service of that plot — swarmed the marbled corridors of power Jan. 6, 2021.

The prime-time setting for the committee hearing is a rarity and something of a throwback to an era when people gathered en masse at their televisions in the evening before video streaming atomized viewership.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat on the committee, set expectations that may be hard to live up to as the committee tries to renew the interest of this short-attention-span country in machinations that are nearly 18 months in the rearview mirror.

The hazards in that mirror are closer than they appear, as committee members see it.

“The hearings will tell a story that will really blow the roof off the House,” Raskin said in April. “Because it is a story of the most heinous and dastardly political offense ever organized by a president and his followers and his entourage in the history of the United States.”

That offense? In short, he told a Washington forum, “an inside coup” coupled with a violent attack by “neo-fascists.”

Trump is not expected at any of the hearings, but his words and actions will hang heavy over the proceedings as lawmakers look to place him at the center of the chaos. It seems highly plausible that he will find a way to rail against them that does not involve being under oath.

The committee almost certainly will look to draw a tight connection between Trump’s vociferous rejections of the election results and his Jan. 6 rally outside the White House sending the angry crowd off to Capitol Hill.

Free from the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, committee members are likely to try to show that the riot that ravaged the Capitol was not a spontaneous gathering but part of a broader conspiracy and a natural outgrowth of weeks of denunciations of democratic processes.

Biden framed Jan. 6 and its aftermath in existential terms about the threat posed to democracy. It’s a “battle for the soul of America,” he said. But a president can only have one No. 1 priority at a time, and this isn’t his. Time and again, he’s said it’s inflation.

Whatever revelations the hearings may produce, much is already known because the attack played out on screens large and small in real time, and Trump exhorted supporters to “fight like hell” in shouts for the world to hear.

“In quieter times, the hearings would have a stronger hold on public attention,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and an authority on political communications. “But, as is, they will be competing for attention with topics with greater immediate relevance in our lives.”

Hungry babies lacking formula. Soaring prices for gas and groceries. Rising COVID-19 hospitalization among the vaccinated. The scenes of destruction in Ukraine and the threat that the Russian invasion will escalate to include use of nuclear weapons. And there’s monkeypox.

“To say nothing of summer vacation,” Jamieson added.

“If the hearings are to do anything other than reinforce our existing political biases,” she said, “they will have to reveal previously covered-up goings-on that threatened something that Democrats, independents and most Republicans can agree should be sacrosanct.”

Some of the inquiry’s juicy bits are out already. Text messages and emails, thought to be private when sent, have become public, including from chief of staff Mark Meadows.

But the committee has been sitting on much more information and will have tens of thousands of exhibits and hundreds of witnesses, said Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the committee chairman.

Seven Democrats and two Republicans — both shunned by their party — make up the committee. Among them the stakes are surely highest for Rep. Liz Cheney, the deeply conservative but fiercely independent Wyoming lawmaker who is practically alone in the GOP in assailing Trump while also seeking reelection to Congress.

Daughter of a vice president and once an embodiment of the Republican establishment, she is now a renegade in a new order dominated by Trump, who wants her unseated in her primary in August.

That new order became ever clearer in February, when the Republican Party censured Cheney and the committee’s other Republican, Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who’s not seeking reelection, for taking part in the inquiry. The party adopted a resolution saying the witnesses summoned by the committee for their actions on and around Jan. 6 had only been engaging in “legitimate political discourse.”

Matthew Delmont, a Dartmouth College history professor specializing in Black history, said Jan. 6 cast such an ominous shadow that he expects people in the United States, for all of their other pressing preoccupations, to be drawn to the inquiry.

“I think people will watch the Jan. 6 hearings because they want to understand how our democracy reached this precipice,” he said. “I don’t know how many people will be willing to hear the evidence that will be presented, but I think it is important for the findings to be shared openly so people today and in the future can appreciate what happened.”

Jan. 6 shares certain distinctions with other past agonies. As with 9/11, you can shorthand the date, Jan. 6, and people know. Like Watergate, it speaks to corrupt acts in the highest office. As with the Challenger space shuttle explosion and 9/11 and more, the scene brought so much visceral shock that many people remember where they were and what they were doing when they saw it.

As far as the far right is concerned, the historical analogy is the Boston Tea Party, with liberals, Democrats and the Washington establishment as the redcoats.

Trump-friendly Republicans sanitized what happened that day, once the shock that nearly all felt on Jan. 6 subsided. In measurements of public opinion, Republican voters in the main said they believe the 2020 election was rigged, when by absolutely all measures — the courts, nonpartisan and even Republican state officials, and the Trump administration’s own election monitors, including his attorney general — the election was purely fair.

A year later, the patently violent uprising was remembered as very or extremely violent by fewer than 4 in 10 Republicans polled, compared with almost 9 in 10 Democrats.

Even so, there were signs in the latest Republican primaries for the 2022 midterms that Trump’s obsession about getting fired by the voters all those months ago is wearing thin even with them.

Trump won the 2016 election with a minority of voters, lost the House to the Democrats in 2018 and lost in 2020 by a decisive margin — not a glowing electoral record.

Still he holds sway over his party, thanks to supporters whose loyalty seems immovable. Unswayed by facts throughout the fight to discredit and upend Biden’s election, they won’t be easily dislodged by a congressional committee’s revelations.

Through Trump’s presidency, audacious falsehoods and elaborate exaggerations were the order of the day. But Trump, at times, had a knack for speaking a larger truth that penetrated his fog of hyperbole and misinformation.

So it was with his comment in Iowa in January 2016, en route to the Republican nomination. The comment foretells that even if the Jan. 6 committee manages to “blow the roof off the House,” Trump may remain golden with millions who love him.

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Trump said then. “It’s, like, incredible.”

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Associated Press writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.

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This story has been corrected to show Trump lost the House, not the House and the Senate, in 2018.