WASHINGTON (AP) — The House on Tuesday turned aside a resolution to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, halting an effort to remove the Pentagon chief for his conduct in office and his handling of the war in Iran.

The vote came as Republicans grapple with the fallout from sweeping midterm losses that some in the party have blamed on the war in Iran and the resulting surge in gas prices. But after President Donald Trump signaled strong support for Hegseth, GOP lawmakers largely stood by the secretary Tuesday, blocking the effort in a near party-line vote.

The effort was led by Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie and backed by Democrats. The vote Tuesday may only delay an impeachment push against Hegseth, with Democrats set to take control of the House and Senate in January.

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is expected to become the next speaker when Democrats take charge in January, stood firmly behind the push, saying Hegseth has “abused his power” and “undermined America’s national security.”

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer endorsed Hegseth’s impeachment as well.

Hegseth rebuked the effort Tuesday in his first news conference in months, portraying Massie as a rogue lawmaker and arguing he had committed none of the high crimes required in the Constitution for his removal. He framed the effort as an indictment against the nation’s service members and their successes and said it was undermining American forces “in real time.”

“This is not patriotism,” Hegseth said. “This is sabotage.”

Massie’s resolution included eight counts of impeachment. It largely focused on the war in Iran but also included references to Hegseth’s role in carrying out military actions in Yemen and Venezuela.

Massie, a Kentucky Republican leaving Congress in January after losing his primary to a Trump-backed opponent, says Hegseth has “knowingly executed and implemented unlawful orders.”

Hegseth holds rare press conference

Tuesday morning, Hegseth gave a defiant and politicized defense of his stewardship of the U.S. military in his first news conference at the Pentagon in six months. He chose to hit back at the rising bipartisan anger over battlefield strategy while offering few details about intermittent operations against Iran or fatal strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in Latin America.

Hegseth said the impeachment resolution “tells our enemies — Iran, the cartels, every adversary watching — the United States will actually punish its own warriors and its own civilian leadership for successfully executing lawful military operations.”

Trump praised Hegseth’s performance at the briefing in a social media post, while Vice President JD Vance said in his own post that the impeachment effort is “a ridiculous show that stands in for actual policymaking.”

Trump celebrated the House vote later Tuesday, saying on social media that it was the exoneration of “a Great American Patriot.”

Impeachment effort falls short

Massie filed the resolution in the House on Monday as lawmakers returned to Washington. Tuesday’s vote was a procedural attempt to stop the impeachment push outright by sending the matter back to committee. The motion succeeded 211-204, with a number of Democrats missing the vote.

Massie’s resolution had eight counts of impeachment that focused on U.S. military actions or changes on Hegseth’s watch. They include reported reductions in staff and resources at a Pentagon office focused on mitigating civilian harm, which preceded a U.S. missile striking an Iranian primary school during the war, killing up to 168 people.

“The law requires our military to withdraw from hostilities within 60 days if Congress does not authorize the activity,” Massie wrote on social media Tuesday. The Iran war “has been underway for 256 days. Congress has not authorized it. Hegseth is breaking the law.”

Another article of impeachment focused on Hegseth’s attempt to punish Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, a retired Navy pilot, for participating in a video that called on troops to resist unlawful orders. Massie also called out U.S. military strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in Latin America and the failure to rescue survivors, which Massie argued will encourage adversaries to treat American forces the same way.

What constitutes “high crimes and misdemeanors” is not spelled out in the Constitution, leaving it to lawmakers to decide what are impeachable acts.

Hegseth said Massie’s concerns are not impeachable, calling them “policy disagreements, not high crimes, not misdemeanors, not treason, not bribery, not the kinds of offenses the founders intended when they wrote the impeachment clause.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson called it a “political gambit for attention” and predicted Republicans would defeat it “one way or the other.”

Some Republicans were critical of Hegseth in the run-up to the vote, but said they didn’t believe he had committed impeachable offenses. Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon, a Republican who is retiring after this year, said he didn’t agree with the “merit” of the impeachment although he is “critical of the secretary.”

“I have a lot of other things I thought were failures by the secretary,” Bacon said. “We control the agenda. We should be doing hearings.”

This isn’t the first impeachment attempt in recent years

Hegseth cast Massie’s resolution in historic terms, arguing that no defense secretary has been impeached in the nation’s 250-year history “for carrying out lawful military operations.”

But more recently, a Cabinet official in President Joe Biden’s administration, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, was impeached by House Republicans over his handling of the U.S.-Mexico border. The Senate dismissed all impeachment charges, shutting down his trial before arguments even began.

Mayorkas, who did not appear to testify before the impeachment proceedings, put the border crisis squarely on Congress for failing to update immigration laws during a time of global migration. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had said then, in April 2024, that House Republicans’ charges failed to meet “the high standard of high crimes and misdemeanors” and could set a dangerous precedent.

Before Mayorkas, no sitting Cabinet secretary had ever been impeached. It was nearly 150 years ago that the House voted to impeach President Ulysses S. Grant’s war secretary, William Belknap, over a kickback scheme in government contracts. He resigned before the vote.

Trump offers support for Hegseth

Trump backed Hegseth in the wake of Massie’s impeachment resolution, pointing to the U.S. military raid to capture then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January as well as operations against Iran that he asserts have “obliterated” its navy and air force.

“Pete Hegseth gets an “A” PLUS, PLUS, PLUS for his defense against a disgruntled, angry, defeated, former Congressman, Thomas Massie, a TOTAL LOSER!” Trump wrote Tuesday on Truth Social.

Iran, however, has been able to keep striking U.S. military bases in the Middle East and has disrupted shipping in the Strait of Hormuz during the more than 8-month-old conflict, driving up global oil prices.

BURBANK (AP) — College football will expand its playoff to 24 teams beginning next year in a move that resets decades of tradition surrounding a once all-important regular season and dumps conference championship showdowns that used to be among the sport’s marquee events.

The announcement from the College Football Playoff and ESPN on Monday made official a deal that’s been in the works for months. The network reported it would pay an additional $1.7 billion over five years on top of the original $7.8 billion contract that runs through the 2031 season.

The new format will grant the Power Four conference champions automatic spots and give one more to the best team from the Group of Six. But that slot and the other 19 will be decided by a selection committee that will serve as the latest set of decision makers in college football’s long history of polls and opinions having lasting impacts on teams’ fates.

Beginning next year, around 30% of college football’s 68 power-conference schools will have a chance to play for the title, drawing the CFP closer to the NFL, which allows 43% of its teams into the playoffs. It leaves behind the last vestiges of yesteryear, when between four and eight teams entered December with a legitimate shot to win it all.

It’s a seismic shift that even ESPN conceded comes with some question marks. The network pays billions to televise regular-season games that might — or might not — have more meaning under the new system.

“In all honesty, it’s impossible to know for sure,” ESPN senior vice president Nick Dawson said in a conference call.

The revenue generated from the playoff expansion will presumably make up for the estimated $345 million the Power Four conferences generated in TV money for their title games. ESPN would then not be on the hook for $140 million of the extra money due to cancellation of the title games, the network reported.

How an expanded CFP will work

The top eight seeds will receive first-round byes in the new format and the playoff will start on the second weekend in December, with the first two rounds of games on campus. The traditional Army-Navy game will be played on the first weekend in December, which used to be reserved for conference title games.

Both the Southeastern and Big Ten conferences, whose approval was needed to adopt this change, and their Power Four brethren — the Big 12 and Atlantic Coast Conference — are banking that most of the additional spots will go to their members so their second-tier teams will have new motivation to keep spending big in an era of NIL payments and $50 million football rosters.

“I think it will be healthy for teams like our current situation, building to try to get to that point,” said coach Barry Odom, who is trying to rebuild at Purdue.

The first final for the 24-team playoff remains set for Jan. 24, 2028, in New Orleans. Traditional bowl games will still host the quarterfinal and semifinal rounds.

As for the rest of the bowls, most of them operated or televised by ESPN: “No decisions have been made at this time,” Dawson said.

As part of the expansion, the CFP is requiring Power Four teams to play at least 10 regular-season games against conference foes, other Power Four opponents and Notre Dame. Group of Six teams will have to play 10 games against conference opponents.

In theory, these requirements will keep everyone in the same ballpark when it comes to strength of schedule, which figures to play a huge role in the selection committee’s considerations.

Special treatment vanishes for Notre Dame

Notre Dame didn’t receive any guarantees, the way it did this year when, if it’s ranked in the top 12 by the CFP for what will be the last year of the 12-team postseason, it will get a spot.

Coach Marcus Freeman said he looks at the change as a net positive, in part because a team like his can now presumably afford more than one loss, and in part because of the new scheduling requirements. Notre Dame is one of only two independents left in major college football.

“I don’t want this to be like March Madness and have 60-something teams making the playoff,” he said. “But the more opportunities we have to make the playoff, it helps us.”

The new schedule also guarantees two off weeks during a regular season that will begin the week before Labor Day.

A bigger playoff changes the nature of the college regular season

The move to 24 teams marks the second expansion of the playoff since it began in 2014 as a four-team affair. Right after it moved to 12 in 2024, most thought it would eventually max out at 16, which was the SEC’s preference.

But the Big Ten wanted to go bigger, while the SEC balked at that, concerned about the league title game — a property it invented in 1992 and made billions from over the decades — along with the marketability of CFP games featuring third- and fourth-place finishers in power conferences.

ESPN took care of the money problem. Now, the question is whether fans will embrace an NFL-style free-for-all that could include about one-third of the Power Four’s 68 teams, depending on what happens with Group of Six schools whose role in these big-money power grabs seems to diminish with every move.

It’s the latest change for a sport that, for decades, built its distinct character and generated controversy by leaning on media and coaching polls to hand out national titles.

Like then, critics see a risk in giving more power to a selection committee that hasn’t really mastered four- or 12-team brackets. The exclusion of Florida State in 2023 and Notre Dame last season stand out as the best examples, and the first rankings this season left people scratching their heads again.

Skeptics also view the expanded playoff as another dilution of what is largely seen as one of the most important regular seasons in sports, replacing potential matchups between, say, Alabama and Georgia in an SEC title game with a 13 seed vs. 20 seed game that would pit, say, Kentucky and South Carolina.

Fan reaction “certainly weighed into the decision,” Dawson said.

“Ultimately, we just need to make a spectacular playoff,” he said. “The CFP has a responsibility to our fans, they’re the lifeblood of college football. We owe them to make this great. That really is our intent.”

As Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti argued from the beginning, a postseason that gives bubble teams hope and keeps others vying for home-field advantage or byes will bring more eyes — not fewer — to the end of a regular season that sometimes boils down to only three or four traditional rivalry games with meaning.

Of course, nobody can be certain how things will play out. The only sure thing is that college football will never look quite the same.

“If they think it’s a good thing for college football, then I’ve got to believe that this is the route we’re headed,” Wisconsin coach Luke Fickell said, “and we’re going to make it a great thing for college football.”

LONDON (AP) — Russell Brand faces a reckoning Monday for sexual abuse that occurred just offstage from a public life built around boasts of his erotic exploits.

Brand, 51, could receive a significant prison term after being convicted of raping one woman and sexually assaulting three others.

The British actor-comedian known for outrageous stand-up routines and battles with drugs and alcohol asserted that he was innocent and all his encounters were consensual.

But a jury of eight men and four women found him guilty of attacking four of six accusers on allegations dating back to 2004. He was cleared of two counts of rape and one count of attempted indecent assault.

Brand wore a gray suit and open collar shirt with loose white tie. His long, graying hair was pulled back and knotted in a man bun atop his head.

He had arrived at Southwark Crown Court in a prison van shortly after his wife, Laura, entered the courthouse without him. Brand had been free during the trial but was jailed following the verdict and did not go home Thursday with his wife.

A couple of Brand’s supporters who reflected his recent conversion to Christianity held a banner with crosses that said: “Russell Brand we stand with you. Christ was crucified for telling the truth. Russell is the truth.”

Brand was partly damned at trial by his own words about his obsession with sex and his well-documented life of promiscuity.

Prosecutor Riel Karmy-Jones called Brand a ruthless, calculating, manipulative “sexual predator” who treated women as a “disposable commodity.”

She quoted from his 2007 memoir “My Booky Wook” to illustrate how his insatiable sex drive led him to cross the line.

“If I want something — whether it’s a job or a woman — I will determinedly, resolutely, remove anything that’s in the way, until I possess the object of my desire,” he wrote.

The accusers came forward following a 2023 investigation by The Times and Channel 4 that aired accusations from women who said they had been sexually abused and degraded by Brand.

Brand was convicted of sexually assaulting a woman during a birthday party at a London bar in 2004, but cleared of orally raping her in a restroom.

He was also found guilty of kissing and groping another woman at a London radio station in 2004 or 2005 and of anally raping a fan at his home after meeting her backstage at one of his comedy shows in 2009.

The final conviction was for sexually assaulting a different woman who says the comedian demanded a massage and pressed his face into her groin during the recording of an advertisement in 2009.

Brand was acquitted of raping another woman in a hotel room during the Labour Party’s annual conference in the seaside town of Bournemouth in 1999, and of attempting to indecently assault a woman by dragging her into the men’s bathroom at the London office of music channel MTV.

The Associated Press doesn’t name victims of alleged sexual violence, and British law protects their identities from the media for life.

Brand, who was known for edgy stand-up routines and battles with drugs and alcohol, rose to prominence in the early 2000s hosting television programs and his own BBC radio show. He appeared in Hollywood films including “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “Get Him to the Greek” and was briefly married to pop star Katy Perry.

In recent years he has moved away from mainstream media, relocated to Florida and built a large online following with videos mixing wellness, conspiracy theories and discussions of his religious devotion.