An Iceland volcano erupts again but spares the nearby town of Grindavik for now

GRINDAVIK, Iceland (AP) — Lava continued to spew from a volcano in southwestern Iceland on Friday — the sixth time since December the volcano has erupted on the Reykjanes Peninsula.

The eruption from a new fissure began shortly after 9 p.m. Thursday following a series of strong earthquakes and within the hour a 4-kilometer (2.4-mile) fissure cut through the Sundhnúkur crater.

Iceland authorities say the eruption’s effects remain localized with road closures but do not threaten the population.

Halldór Björnsson, head of weather and climate at the Norwegian Meteorological Agency, told the Icelandic news portal Vísir that unlike previous eruptions, the lava flow was not heading for the town of Grindavik that was largely evacuated in December when the volcano came to life after being dormant for 800 years.

“If this continues like this, Grindavík is not in danger,” geophysicist Magnús Tuma Guðmundsson told the website after flying over the eruption. "Of course, we don’t know what will happen in the near future, but it is likely that this has reached its peak and then it will start to subside like the other eruptions.”

As news of the eruption spread, hundreds of curious onlookers drove to nearby vantage points for a view of the stunning natural phenomenon that has become a key tourism attraction.

“We just thought that it was the northern lights," said Mahnoor Ali, visiting from Maryland in the U.S. "It’s like the coolest thing I’ve seen in my whole life, honestly.”

Friends Ameerul Awalludin from Malaysia and Shohei Miyamito from Japan were with an Icelandic friend when they heard the news and quickly rushed to the region of the eruption.

“We have like a volcano as well," said Miyamito, but “we cannot see lava like this.”

But for people living and working on the Reykjanes Peninsula, the regular eruptions and ensuing evacuation orders cause more frustration than excitement.

The repeated volcanic eruptions close to Grindavík, a town of 3,800 people about 50 kilometers (30 miles) southwest of the capital, Reykjavik, have damaged infrastructure and property and forced many residents to relocate to guarantee their safety.

The few who had returned were forced out once again Thursday night as strong winds blew plumes of toxic gas over the town.

The nearby Blue Lagoon geothermal spa — one of Iceland’s biggest tourist attractions — was also evacuated with social media videos showing sirens blasting around dusk.

The spa was closed Friday but staff was preparing to reopen it, Helga Árnadóttir, manager of sales, operations and services, told national broadcaster RUV.

Iceland, which sits above a volcanic hot spot in the North Atlantic, averages one eruption every four to five years. The most disruptive in recent times was the 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which spewed clouds of ash into the atmosphere and disrupted trans-Atlantic air travel for months.

The latest eruption is not expected to impact air travel.

Keyton reported from Berlin.

Tourists and visitors try to get a view of a volcanic eruption from a distance at the intersection between Reykjanesbraut, Iceland, and the road to Grindavik, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Marco di Marco)

View of the lava fountains pouring out from the new eruptive fissure opened at Svartsengi volcanic system, Iceland, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, in a similar location as the previous eruptions. The fissure is 3 km north of Grindavik. (AP Photo/Marco di Marco)

Tourists and visitors try to get a view of the eruption from a distance from the intersection between Reykjanesbraut, Iceland, and the road to Grindavik, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Marco di Marco)

Photographers and journalists on location filming and reporting on the new fissure north of Grindavik, Iceland, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, (AP Photo/Marco di Marco)

Tourists and visitors try to get a view of the eruption from a distance from the intersection between Reykjanesbraut, Iceland, and the road to Grindavik, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Marco di Marco)

View of the lava fountains pouring out from the new eruptive fissure opened at Svartsengi volcanic system, Iceland, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, in a similar location as the previous eruptions. The fissure is 3 km north of Grindavik. (AP Photo/Marco di Marco)

View of the lava fountains pouring out from the new eruptive fissure opened at Svartsengi volcanic system, Iceland, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, in a similar location as the previous eruptions. The fissure is 3 km north of Grindavik. (AP Photo/Marco di Marco)

Tourists and visitors try to get a view of the eruption from a distance from the intersection between Reykjanesbraut, Iceland, and the road to Grindavik, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Marco di Marco)

The sign with the direction to the blue lagoon with the new eruption in the background in Grindavik, Iceland, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, (AP Photo/Marco di Marco)

A volcano in southwestern Iceland erupted Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, for the sixth time since December, spewing red lava through a new fissure on the Reykjanes Peninsula. (Iceland Civil Defense via AP)

Tourists and visitors try to get a view of the eruption from a distance from the intersection between Reykjanesbraut, Iceland, and the road to Grindavik, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Marco di Marco)

Photographers and journalists on location filming and reporting on the new fissure north of Grindavik, Iceland, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, (AP Photo/Marco di Marco)

Tourists and visitors try to get a view of the eruption from a distance from the intersection between Reykjanesbraut, Iceland, and the road to Grindavik, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Marco di Marco)

View of the lava fountains pouring out from the new eruptive fissure opened at Svartsengi volcanic system, Iceland, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, in a similar location as the previous eruptions. The fissure is 3 km north of Grindavik. (AP Photo/Marco di Marco)

A volcano in southwestern Iceland erupted Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, for the sixth time since December, spewing red lava through a new fissure on the Reykjanes Peninsula.( Iceland Civil Defense via AP)

A new volcanic eruption is seen from the intersection between Reykjanesbraut, Iceland, and the road to Grindavik, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Marco di Marco)

A new volcanic eruption is seen from the intersection between Reykjanesbraut, Iceland, and the road to Grindavik, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Marco di Marco)

A new volcanic eruption is seen from the intersection between Reykjanesbraut, Iceland, and the road to Grindavik, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Marco di Marco)

CHARLOTTE (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump launched campaign blitzes Thursday with dramatically different approaches to attracting swing-state voters who will decide the presidential contest.

In North Carolina, Democratic nominee Harris used rallies in Charlotte and Greensboro to tout endorsements from Republicans who have crossed the aisle to back her. She also promised to protect access to health care and abortion, while delighting her partisan crowds with celebrations of her debate performance Tuesday, taking digs at Trump and cheerleading for her campaign and the country.

“We're having a good time, aren't we?” Harris declared, smiling as her boisterous crowd chanted: “USA! USA! USA!”

In the border state of Arizona, the Republican Trump pitched a tax exemption on all overtime wages, adding it to his previous proposals to not tax tip s or Social Security income. But the former president squeezed those proposals, along with a nonspecific pledge to lower housing costs, into a stemwinding speech marked by his most incendiary rhetoric on immigration and immigrants themselves, name-calling of Harris and others, and a dark, exaggerated portrait of a nation Trump insisted is in a freefall only he can reverse.

“I was angry at the debate,” Trump said, mocking commentators' description of his performance Tuesday. “And, yes, I am angry,” he said, because “everything is terrible” since Harris and President Joe Biden are “destroying our country.” Upon his repeated use of the word “angry,” Trump's crowd in Tucson answered with its own “USA! USA! USA!” chants.

The competing visions and narratives underscored the starkly different choices faced by voters in the battleground states that will decide the outcome. Harris is casting a wide net, depending on Democrats' diverse coalition and hoping to add moderate and even conservative Republicans repelled by the former president. Trump, while seeking a broad working-class coalition with his tax ideas, is digging in on arguments about the country — and his political opponents — that are aimed most squarely at his most strident supporters.

That could become a consistent frame for the closing stretch of the campaign after Trump shut the door on another debate. That potentially could have been another seminal moment during a year that already has boomeranged around milestones like Trump's criminal conviction by a New York jury, Trump surviving an assassination attempt, Biden ending his reelection bid amid questions about his age, and Harris consolidating Democratic support to become the first woman of color to lead a major-party ticket.

“There will be no third debate,” Trump said Thursday, counting his June matchup against Biden in the total, and insisting he had won his lone encounter with Harris on Tuesday in Philadelphia.

The post-debate blitz reflected the narrow path to 270 Electoral College votes for both candidates, with the campaign already having become concentrated on seven swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Harris’ itinerary Thursday put her in a state Trump won twice, but his margin of 1.3 percentage points in 2020 was his closest statewide victory. Arizona, meanwhile, was one of Trump’s narrowest losses four years ago. He won the state in 2016.

In North Carolina, Harris took her own post-debate victory lap, and her campaign already has cut key moments of the debate into ads. But Harris warned against overconfidence, calling herself an underdog and making plain the stakes.

“This is not 2016 or 2020,” she said in Charlotte. “Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”

She touted endorsements from Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Rep. Liz Cheney, both of whom have deemed Trump a fundamental threat to American values and democracy.

“Democrats, Republicans and independents are supporting our campaign," Harris said in Charlotte, praising the Cheneys and like-minded Republicans as citizens who recognize a need to “put country above party and defend our Constitution.”

Yet she also made a full-throated defense of the Affordable Care Act, the 2010 law commonly called “Obamacare” and passed over near-unanimous Republican opposition. She mocked Trump, who has spent years promising to scrap the law but said at their debate that he still has no specific replacement plan.

“He said, ‘concepts of a plan,’” Harris said. “Concepts. Concepts. No actual plan. Concepts. ... Forty-five million Americans are insured through the Affordable Care Act. And he’s going to end it based on a concept.”

She saddled Trump again with the Supreme Court’s decision to end a woman’s federal right to abortion, paving the way for Republican-led states to severely restrict and in some cases effectively ban the procedure.

“Women are being refused care during miscarriages. Some are only being treated when they develop sepsis,” Harris said of states with the harshest restrictions.

The vice president added her usual broadsides against Project 2025, a 900-page policy agenda written by conservatives for a second Trump administration. Trump has distanced himself from the document, though there is a notable overlap between it and his policies — and, for that matter, some of the policy aims of Republicans like the Cheneys.

Harris’ approach in Charlotte and Greensboro tracked perhaps her widest path to victory: exciting and organizing the diverse Democratic base, especially younger generations, nonwhite voters and women, while convincing moderate Republicans who dislike Trump that they should be comfortable with her in the Oval Office, some policy disagreements notwithstanding. That’s the same formula Biden used in defeating Trump four years ago, flipping traditionally GOP-leaning states like Arizona and Georgia and narrowing the gap in North Carolina.

Trump, meanwhile, appears to bet that his path back to the White House depends mostly on his core supporters, plus enough new support from working- and middle-class voters drawn to his promises of tax breaks.

A raucous crowd cheered his new pitch to end taxes on overtime wages. In a state where rising housing prices has been an acute issue since the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump's audience exulted in his pledge to reduce housing construction costs by “30 to 50 percent” — a staggering drop that he did not detail beyond pledging to cut regulations and ban mortgages “for illegal aliens."

“We are going to bring back the American dream bigger, better and stronger than ever before,” Trump said, beaming.

But he reserved most of 75 minutes at the podium for, in his words, being “angry.” Mostly about an influx of migrants across the U.S. Southern border, but also about the ABC debate moderators he said were unfair in the debate he insisted he won. He singled out Linsey Davis, calling her “nasty” — the same word he would use to describe his 2016 Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

Trump ticked through many of his usual immigration bromides, arguing that migrants in the U.S. illegally have “taken over” U.S. cities and suburbs. He again alluded to the debunked claims — fueled by right-wing actors on social media — that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating domesticated pets and fowl in public parks. Trump invoked the approval of Hungary's authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban, and he elicited roars when he promised “largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

And the former president repeatedly mispronounced Harris’ first name, while insisting she is both a Marxist and a fascist — political ideologies that rest on opposite ends of the left-right political spectrum.

Barrow reported from Atlanta. Cooper reported from Tucson, Arizona.

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event, Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024, in Greensboro, N.C. (AP Photo/Matt Kelley)

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump departs after speaking at a campaign event at the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall, Thursday, Sept.12, 2024, in Tucson, Ariz. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Supporters listen as Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event at the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall, Thursday, Sept.12, 2024, in Tucson, Ariz. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event, Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024, in Greensboro, N.C. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event at the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall, Thursday, Sept.12, 2024, in Tucson, Ariz. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris departs after speaking at a campaign event, Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024, in Greensboro, N.C. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event at the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall, Thursday, Sept.12, 2024, in Tucson, Ariz. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event, Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024, in Greensboro, N.C. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump visits the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Company in Shanksville, Pa., Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris boards Air Force Two at LaGuardia Airport in East Elmhurst, N.Y., Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)