{"text": "# Israel faces new calls for truce after killing of hostages raises alarm about its conduct in Gaza\nBy **WAFAA SHURAFA** and **SAMY MAGDY**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 7:21 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP)** - Israel's government faced calls for a cease-fire from some of its closest European allies on Sunday after a series of shootings, including the mistaken killing of three Israeli hostages, fueled global concerns about the conduct of the 10-week-old war in Gaza.\n\nIsraeli protesters are urging their government to renew negotiations with Gaza's Hamas rulers, whom Israel has vowed to destroy. Israel is also expected to face pressure to scale back major combat operations when U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visits Monday. Washington is expressing growing unease with civilian casualties even as it provides vital military and diplomatic support.\n\nThe war has flattened large parts of northern Gaza, killed thousands of civilians and driven most of the population to the southern part of the besieged territory, where many are in crowded shelters and tent camps. Some 1.9 million Palestinians - about 90% of Gaza's population - have fled their homes.\n\nThey survive off a trickle of humanitarian aid. Dozens of desperate Palestinians surrounded aid trucks after they drove in through the Rafah crossing with Egypt, forcing some to stop before climbing aboard, pulling down boxes and carrying them off. Other trucks appeared to be guarded by masked people carrying sticks.\n\nIsrael said aid passed directly from Israel into Gaza for the first time Sunday, with 79 trucks entering from Kerem Shalom, where around 500 trucks entered daily before the war. Another 120 trucks entered via Rafah along with six trucks carrying fuel or cooking gas, said Wael Abu Omar, Palestinian Crossings Authority spokesman.\n\nAid workers say it's still far from enough. \"You cannot deliver aid under a sky full of airstrikes,\" a spokesperson with the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, Juliette Touma, said on social media, while the agency estimated that more than 60% of Gaza's infrastructure had been destroyed in the war.\n\nTelecom services in Gaza gradually resumed after a four-day communications blackout, the longest of several outages during the war that groups say complicate rescue and delivery efforts.\n\nPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel \"will continue to fight until the end,\" with the goal of eliminating Hamas, which triggered the war with its Oct. 7 attack into southern Israel. Palestinian militants killed some 1,200 people that day, mostly civilians, and captured scores of hostages.\n\nNetanyahu has vowed to bring back the estimated 129 hostages still in captivity. Anger over the mistaken killing of hostages is likely to increase pressure on him to renew Qatar-mediated negotiations with Hamas over swapping more of the remaining captives for Palestinians imprisoned in Israel.\n\nMeanwhile, Israel has been defensively striking Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, said Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, an Israel Defense Forces spokesperson. The group has ramped up attacks against Israel, he added, killing civilians and soldiers and displacing more than 80,000 Israelis from their homes.\n\n\"Hezbollah - a proxy of Iran - is dragging Lebanon into an unnecessary war that would have devastating consequences for the people of Lebanon,\" Hagari said in a statement. \"This is a war that they do not deserve.\"\n\nHagari said Israel will continue to protect its borders \"until and unless a diplomatic solution is found and implemented.\"\n\n## CALLS FOR A NEW CEASE-FIRE\nIn Israel on Sunday, French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna called for an \"immediate truce\" aimed at releasing more hostages, getting larger amounts of aid into Gaza and moving toward \"the beginning of a political solution.\"\n\nFrance's Foreign Ministry earlier said an employee was killed in an Israeli strike on a home in Rafah on Wednesday. It condemned the strike, which it said killed several civilians, and demanded clarification from Israeli authorities.\n\nThe foreign ministers of the U.K. and Germany, meanwhile, called for a \"sustainable\" cease-fire, saying too many civilians have been killed.\n\n\"Israel will not win this war if its operations destroy the prospect of peaceful co-existence with Palestinians,\" British Foreign Secretary David Cameron and German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock wrote in the U.K.'s Sunday Times.\n\nThe U.S. defense secretary is set to travel to Israel to continue discussions on a timetable for ending the war's most intense phase. Israeli and U.S. officials have spoken of a transition to more targeted strikes aimed at killing Hamas leaders and rescuing hostages, without saying when it would occur.\n\nHamas has said no more hostages will be released until the war ends, and that in exchange it will demand the release of large numbers of Palestinian prisoners, including high-profile militants.\n\nHamas released over 100 of more than 240 hostages captured on Oct. 7 in exchange for the release of scores of Palestinian prisoners during a brief cease-fire in November. Nearly all freed on both sides were women and minors. Israel has rescued one hostage.\n\nThe Israeli military said Sunday it had discovered a large tunnel in Gaza close to what was once a busy crossing into Israel, raising new questions about how Israeli surveillance missed such conspicuous attack preparations by Hamas.\n\n## SHOOTINGS DRAW SCRUTINY\nMilitary officials said Saturday that the three hostages who were mistakenly shot by Israeli troops had tried to signal that they posed no harm. It was Israel's first such acknowledgement of harming hostages in the war.\n\nThe hostages, all in their 20s, were killed Friday in the Gaza City area of Shijaiyah, where troops are engaged in fierce fighting with Hamas. An Israeli military official said the shootings were against the army's rules of engagement and were being investigated at the highest level.\n\nIsrael says it makes every effort to avoid harming civilians and accuses Hamas of using them as human shields. But Palestinians and rights groups have repeatedly accused Israeli forces of recklessly endangering civilians and firing on those who do not threaten them, both in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, which has seen a surge of violence since the war began.\n\nA shell struck the pediatric ward of a hospital in the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza late Sunday, killing a girl, said Dr. Mohammed Abu Lihia, who works in the emergency department.\n\nFootage shared by Gaza's Health Ministry showed a burst ceiling and wall in the Mubarak Hospital for Children and Maternity in the Nasser Hospital complex with bloodstains near children's cots and cribs on the third floor.\n\nThe doctor said he helped three others, two older adults and a child, escape the hospital. A videographer filming for The Associated Press said at least 5 people, including children, were wounded. The Israeli military didn't immediately comment.\n\nIsrael continues to strike positions across Khan Younis. Palestinians from the north fled there in the early weeks of the conflict.\n\nAlso Sunday, five people were killed and many injured after a reported Israeli airstrike hit near a U.N.-run school in Khan Younis where displaced Palestinians were sheltering. A cameraman with AP counted five bodies delivered to a hospital.\n\nThe Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem said two Christian women at a church compound in Gaza were killed by Israeli sniper fire.\n\nPope Francis called Sunday for peace, saying \"unarmed civilians are being bombed and shot at, and this has even happened inside the Holy Family parish complex, where there are no terrorists but families, children and sick people with disabilities, nuns.\"\n\nIn discussions Saturday between the Israeli military and representatives of the church community, no one reported a strike on the church or civilians being wounded or killed, the military said. It said a review of its initial investigation had supported that.\n\nThe offensive has killed more than 18,700 Palestinians, the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory said Thursday in its last update before the communications blackout. It has said that thousands more casualties are buried under the rubble. The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths, but has said that most of those killed were women and children.\n\nThe plight of Palestinian civilians has gotten little attention inside Israel, where many are still deeply traumatized by the Oct. 7 attack and where support for the war remains strong.\n\nIsrael's military says 121 of its soldiers have been killed in the Gaza offensive. It says it has killed thousands of militants, without providing evidence."}
{"text": "# Senate border security talks grind on as Trump invokes Nazi-era 'blood' rhetoric against immigrants\nBy **LISA MASCARO** and **STEPHEN GROVES**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 8:20 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Time slipping, White House and Senate negotiators struggled Sunday to reach a U.S. border security deal that would unlock President Joe Biden's request for billions of dollars worth of military aid for Ukraine and other national security needs before senators leave town for the holiday recess.\n\nThe Biden administration, which is becoming more deeply involved in the talks, is facing pressure from all sides over any deal. Negotiators insist they are making progress, but a hoped-for framework did not emerge. Republican leaders signaled that without bill text, an upcoming procedural would likely fail.\n\nThe talks come as Donald Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner in 2024, delivered alarming anti-immigrant remarks about \"blood\" purity over the weekend, echoing Nazi slogans of World War II at a political rally.\n\n\"They're poisoning the blood of our country,\" Trump said about the record numbers of immigrants coming to the U.S. without immediate legal status.\n\nSpeaking in the early-voting state of New Hampshire, Trump, drew on words similar to Adolf Hitler's \"Mein Kempf\" as the former U.S. president berated Biden's team over the flow of migrants. \"All over the world they're pouring into our country,\" Trump said.\n\nThroughout the weekend, senators and top Biden officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, have been working intently behind closed doors at the Capitol to strike a border deal, which Republicans in Congress are demanding in exchange for any help for Ukraine, Israel and other national security needs. Mayorkas arrived for more talks late Sunday afternoon.\n\n\"Everyday we get closer, not farther away,\" said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., as talks wrapped up in the evening.\n\nTheir holiday recess postponed, Murphy and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona independent, acknowledged the difficulty of drafting, and securing support, for deeply complicated legislation on an issue that has vexed Congress for years. Ahead of more talks Monday, it is becoming apparent any action is unlikely before year's end.\n\nRepublican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said senators don't want to be \"jammed\" by a last-minute compromise reached by negotiators.\n\n\"We're not anywhere close to a deal,\" Graham, whose staff has joined the talks, said Sunday on NBC's \"Meet the Press.\"\n\nGraham predicted the deliberations will go into next year. He was among 15 Republican senators who wrote to GOP leadership urging them to wait until the House returns Jan. 8 to discuss the issue.\n\nTop GOP negotiator Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell also signaled in their own letter Sunday that talks still had a ways to go. Lankford said later that the January timeline was \"realistic.\"\n\nThe Biden administration faces an increasingly difficult political situation as global migration is on a historic rise, and many migrants are fleeing persecution or leaving war-torn countries for the United States, with smugglers capitalizing on the situation.\n\nThe president is being berated daily by Republicans, led by Trump, as border crossings have risen to levels that make even some in Biden's own Democratic Party concerned.\n\nBut the Biden administration, in considering revival of Trump-like policies, is drawing outrage from Democrats and immigrant advocates who say the ideas would gut the U.S. asylum system and spark fears of deportations from immigrants already living in the U.S.\n\nThe White House's failure to fully engage Latino lawmakers in the talks until recently, or ensure a seat at the negotiating table, has led to a near revolt from leaders of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.\n\n\"It's unacceptable,\" said Rep. Nanette Barragan, D-Calif., chair of the Hispanic Caucus, on social media. \"We represent border districts & immigrant communities that will be severely impacted by extreme changes to border policy.\"\n\nProgressives in Congress are also warning the Biden administration off any severe policies that would bar immigrants a legal path to enter the country. \"No backroom deal on the border without the involvement of the House, the House Hispanic Caucus, Latino senators is going to pass,\" said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., on Fox News.\n\nWhite House chief of staff Jeff Zients, along with Mayorkas, heard from leading Latino lawmakers during a conference call with the Hispanic Caucus on Saturday afternoon.\n\nThe senators and the White House appear to be focused on ways to limit the numbers of migrants who are eligible for asylum at the border, primarily by toughening the requirements to qualify for their cases to go forward.\n\nThe talks have also focused removing some migrants who have already been living in the U.S. without full legal status, and on ways to temporarily close the U.S.-Mexico border to some crossings if they hit a certain metric, or threshold. Arrests of migrants have topped 10,000 on some days.\n\nThere has also been discussion about limiting existing programs that have allowed groups of arrivals from certain countries to temporarily enter the U.S. while they await proceedings about their claims. Decades ago, those programs welcomed Vietnamese arrivals and others, and have since been opened to Ukrainians, Afghans and a group that includes Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans and Haitians.\n\nMeanwhile, Biden's massive $110 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other security needs is hanging in the balance.\n\nUkrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a dramatic, if disappointing, visit to Washington last week to plead with Congress and the White House for access to U.S. weaponry as his country fights against Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion.\n\nMany, but not all, Republicans have soured on helping Ukraine fight Russia, taking their cues from Trump. The former president praised Putin, quoting the Russian leader during Saturday's rally while slamming the multiple investigations against him as politically motivated - including the federal indictment against Trump for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election that resulted in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.\n\nUkraine's ambassador to the United States said Sunday she believes in \"Christmas miracles\" and won't give up hope.\n\nOf Biden's package, some $61 billion would go toward Ukraine, about half of the money for the U.S. Defense Department to buy and replenish tanks, artillery and other weaponry sent to the war effort.\n\n\"All the eyes are on Congress now,\" the envoy, Oksana Markarova, said on CBS' \"Face the Nation.\"\n\n\"We can just only pray and hope that there will be resolve there, and that the deal that they will be able to reach will allow the fast decisions also on the support to Ukraine,\" she said.\n\nThe House already left for the holiday recess, but Republican Speaker Mike Johnson is being kept aware of the negotiations in the Senate."}
{"text": "# A gloomy mood hangs over Ukraine's soldiers as war with Russia grinds on\nBy **SAMYA KULLAB**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 12:03 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**KYIV, Ukraine (AP)** - A gloomy mood hangs over Ukraine's soldiers nearly two years after Russia invaded their country.\n\nDespite a disappointing counteroffensive this summer and signs of wavering financial support from allies, Ukrainian soldiers say they remain fiercely determined to win. But as winter approaches, they worry that Russia is better equipped for battle and are frustrated about being on the defensive again in a grueling war. Some doubt the judgment of their leaders.\n\nDiscontent among Ukrainian soldiers - once extremely rare and expressed only in private - is now more common and out in the open.\n\nIn the southern city of Kherson, where Ukraine is staging attacks against well-armed Russian troops on the other side of the Dnieper River, soldiers are asking why these difficult amphibious operations were not launched months ago in warmer weather.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" said a commander of the 11th National Guard Brigade's anti-drone unit who is known on the battlefield as Boxer. \"Now it's harder and colder.\"\n\n\"It's not just my feeling, many units share it,\" said Boxer, who spoke on condition that only his battlefield name would be used.\n\nRussia, which illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, controls about one-fifth of Ukraine. After 22 months of war the two countries are essentially in a stalemate along the 1,000 kilometer-long (620 mile-long) front line.\n\nRussian forces aim to push deeper into eastern Ukraine this winter, analysts say, so that Russian President Vladimir Putin can cite this momentum as he campaigns for reelection, an outcome that is all but certain. Emboldened by recent gains on the battlefield, Putin said last week that he remains fully committed to the war and criticized Ukraine for \"sacrificing\" troops to demonstrate success to Western sponsors.\n\nIn the United States, which has already spent some $111 billion defending Ukraine, President Joe Biden is advocating for an additional $50 billion in aid. But Republican lawmakers are balking at more support - just as some lawmakers in Europe are on the fence about providing another $50 billion to Ukraine, after failing to deliver on promised ammunition.\n\n\"The reason the Ukrainians are gloomy is that, they now sense, not only have they not done well this year ... they know that the Russians' game is improving,\" said Richard Barrons, a former British army general. \"They see what's happening in Congress, and they see what happened in the EU.\"\n\nUkraine may be on the defensive this winter, but its military leaders say they have no intention of letting up the fight.\n\n\"If we won't have a single bullet, we will kill them with shovels,\" said Serhii, a commander in the 59th Brigade that is active in the eastern city of Avdiivka and who spoke on condition that only his first name be used. \"Surely, everyone is tired of war, physically and mentally. But imagine if we stop - what happens next?\"\n\n## BLEAK MOOD\nThe fatigue and frustration on the battlefield are mirrored in Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, where disagreements among leaders have recently spilled out into the open.\n\nPresident Volodymyr Zelenskyy last month publicly disputed the assessment by Ukraine's military chief, Valery Zaluzhny, that the war had reached a stalemate. And the mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, has repeatedly lashed out at Zelenskyy, saying he holds too much power.\n\nDisquiet in the halls of power appears to have filtered down to the military's rank and file, who increasingly have misgivings about inefficiency and faulty decision-making within the bureaucracy they depend on to keep them well-armed for the fight.\n\nIn the southern Ukrainian region of Zaporizhzhia, where momentum has slowed since the summertime counteroffensive, drones have become a crucial tool of war. They enable soldiers to keep an eye on - and hold back - Russian forces while they conduct dangerous and painstaking operations to clear minefields and consolidate territorial gains. But fighters there complain that the military has been too slow in training drone operators.\n\nIt took seven months to obtain the paperwork needed from multiple government agencies to train 75 men, said Konstantin Denisov, a Ukrainian soldier.\n\n\"We wasted time for nothing,\" he said. Commanders elsewhere complain of not enough troops, or delays in getting drones repaired, disrupting combat missions.\n\nDefense Minister Rustem Umerov insists Ukraine has enough soldiers and weaponry to power the next phase of the fight.\n\n\"We are capable and able to protect our people and we will be doing it,\" he told the Associated Press. \"We have a plan and we are sticking to that plan.\"\n\n## DEFENSIVE SHIFT\nThe limited momentum Ukraine's forces had during their summertime counteroffensive has slowed - from the forests in the northeast, to the urban centers in the east, to the slushy farmland in the south.\n\nWith Russia hoping to take the initiative this winter, Ukraine is mainly focused on standing its ground, according to interviews with a half dozen military commanders along the vast front line.\n\nDespite wet, muddy ground that makes it harder to move tanks and other heavy weaponry around, the Russian army has bolstered its forces in the eastern Donetsk region, where it has recently stepped up offensive maneuvers.\n\n\"The main goal for the winter is to lose as few people as possible,\" said Parker, the Ukrainian commander of a mechanized battalion near Bakhmut who asked to go by his battlefield name to speak freely. Bakhmut is a city in eastern Ukraine that Russian forces took after months of heavy fighting.\n\n\"We have to be clear,\" Parker said. \"It's not possible in the winter to liberate Donetsk or Bakhmut, because they have too many (fighters).\"\n\nAnalysts say Ukraine may even be forced to cede patches of previously reclaimed territory this winter, though Russia is likely to pay a heavy price.\n\n\"If Russia keeps on attacking, the most likely outcome is that they'll make some very marginal territorial gains, but suffer enormous casualties in doing so,\" said Ben Barry, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.\n\n## DRONES AND MEN\nSome Ukrainian commanders across the front line say they lack the fighters and firepower needed to keep Russia's seemingly endless waves of infantrymen at arm's length as they fortify defenses to protect soldiers. That places ever more importance on attack drones - a weapon, they say, that Russia is currently better equipped with.\n\nIndeed, while Ukrainian soldiers have proven to be resourceful and innovative on the battlefield, Moscow has dramatically scaled up its defense industry in the past year, manufacturing armored vehicles and artillery rounds at a pace Ukraine cannot match.\n\n\"Yes they're ahead of us in terms of supply,\" said Boxer, the commander in Kherson, who credited Russian drones with having longer range and more advanced software. \"It allows the drone to go up 2,000 meters, avoid jammers,\" he said, whereas Ukrainian drones \"can fly only 500 meters.\"\n\nThis is poses a problem for his troops, who have been limited in their ability to strike Russian targets on the other side of the Dnieper River. To eventually deploy heavy weaponry, such as tanks, Ukraine first needs to push Russian forces back to erect pontoon bridges. Until they get more drones, this won't be possible, said Boxer.\n\n\"We wait for weapons we were supposed to receive months ago,\" he said.\n\nTo sustain the fight, Ukraine will also have to mobilize more men.\n\nIn the northeastern cities of Kupiansk and Lyman, Russian forces have deployed a large force with the goal of recapturing lost territory.\n\n\"They are simply weakening our positions and strongholds, injuring our soldiers, thereby forcing them to leave the battlefield,\" said Dolphin, a commander in the northeast who would only be quoted using his battlefield name.\n\nDolphin says he has been unable to sufficiently re-staff. \"I can say for my unit, we are prepared 60%,\" he said."}
{"text": "# Serbia's populists claim a sweeping victory in the country's parliamentary election\nBy **DUSAN STOJANOVIC**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 6:17 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BELGRADE, Serbia (AP)** - Serbia's governing populists claimed a sweeping victory Sunday in the country's parliamentary election, which was marred by reports of major irregularities both during a tense campaign and on voting day.\n\nActing Prime Minister Ana Brnabic said that with half the ballots counted, the governing Serbian Progressive Party's projections showed it won 47% percent of the vote and expected to hold around 130 seats in the 250-member assembly. The main opposition Serbia Against Violence group won around 23%, Brnabic said.\n\nThe main contest in the parliamentary and local elections was between President Aleksandar Vucic's Serbian Progressives and the centrist coalition that sought to undermine the populists who have ruled the troubled Balkan state since 2012.\n\nThe Serbia Against Violence opposition coalition was expected to mount its biggest challenge for the city council in Belgrade, with analysts saying an opposition victory in the capital would seriously dent Vucic's hardline rule in the country.\n\nVucic, however, said his party was also leading in the vote in the capital, though he added that post-election coalition negotiations would determine who governs in Belgrade.\n\n\"This is an absolute victory which makes me extremely happy,\" a jubilant Vucic said at his party's headquarters in Belgrade. \"We know what we have achieved in the previous period and how tough a period lies ahead.\"\n\nThe main opposition group disputed the election projections from the governing party, claiming there was vote-rigging and saying it would dispute the vote count \"by all democratic means.\"\n\n\"People who do not live in Belgrade were brought in buses, vans and cars to vote as if they were citizens of Belgrade,\" opposition leader Miroslav Aleksic said, also charging that 40,000 identity documents were issued for people who do not live in the capital.\n\n\"We will use all available democratic means against the vote rigging in Belgrade and Serbia,\" he said. \"What happened today cannot be something we can accept as the result of a democratic and fair election.\"\n\nTurnout one hour before the polls closed was around 55%, about the same as during the last election in 2022 when Vucic scored a landslide victory. First official results are expected Monday.\n\nIrregularities were reported by election monitors and independent media. One report alleged ethnic Serbs from neighboring Bosnia gathered to vote at a sports hall in Belgrade that wasn't an official polling station. Another report said a monitoring team was attacked and their car was bashed with baseball bats in a town in northern Serbia.\n\nObservers from the independent Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability expressed \"the highest concern\" over cases of the organized transfer of illegal voters from other countries to Belgrade, the group said in a statement.\n\n\"The concentration of buses, minivans and cars was observed on several spots in Belgrade, transferring voters to polling stations across the city to vote,\" the group said.\n\nCRTA also reported cases of voters being given money to vote for the governing party and the presence of unauthorized people at polling stations.\n\nAuthorities disputed that there was any wrongdoing. Brnabic, the premier, called the accusations \"lies that are intended to spread panic.\"\n\nSeveral right-wing groups, including pro-Russia parties and Socialists allied with Vucic, ran candidates for parliament and local councils in around 60 cities and towns as well as regional authorities in the northern Vojvodina province.\n\nThe election didn't include the presidency, but governing authorities backed by dominant pro-government media ran the campaign as a referendum on Vucic.\n\nAlthough he wasn't formally on the ballot, the Serbian president campaigned relentlessly for the SNS, which appeared on the ballot under the name \"Aleksandar Vucic - Serbia must not stop!\"\n\nSerbia Against Violence, a pro-European Union bloc, includes parties that were behind months of street protests this year triggered by two back-to-back mass shootings in May.\n\nThe Serbian president toured the country and attended his party's rallies, promising new roads, hospitals, one-off cash bonuses and higher salaries and pensions. Vucic's image was on billboards all over the country, though he had stepped down as SNS party leader.\n\nSerbia, a Balkan country that has maintained warm relations with Russia and President Vladimir Putin, has been a candidate for European Union membership since 2014, but has faced allegations of steadily eroding democratic freedoms and rules over the past years.\n\nBoth Vucic and the SNS denied allegations of campaign abuse and attempted vote-rigging as well as charges that Vucic as president violated the constitution by campaigning for one party.\n\nVucic called the Dec. 17 early vote only a year and a half after a previous parliamentary and presidential election, although his party holds a comfortable majority in parliament.\n\nAnalysts said Vucic is seeking to consolidate power after the two back-to-back shootings triggered months of anti-government protests, and as high inflation and rampant corruption fuel public discontent. Vucic has also faced criticism over his handling of a crisis in Kosovo, a former Serbian province that declared independence in 2008, a move that Belgrade doesn't recognize.\n\nHis supporters view Vucic as the only leader who can maintain stability and lead the country into a better future.\n\n\"I think it's time that Serbia goes forward with full steam,\" retiree Lazar Mitrovic said after he voted. \"That means that it should focus on its youth, on young people, education and of course discipline.\""}
{"text": "# Chilean voters reject conservative constitution, after defeating leftist charter last year\nBy **MARÍA VERZA** and **PATRICIA LUNA**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 10:47 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SANTIAGO, Chile (AP)** - Voters rejected on Sunday a proposed conservative constitution to replace Chile's dictatorship-era charter, showing both the deep division in the South American country and the inability of political sectors to address people's demands for change made four years ago.\n\nWith nearly all votes counted late Sunday, about 55.8% had voted \"no\" to the new charter, with about 44.2% in favor.\n\nThe vote came more than a year after Chileans resoundingly rejected a proposed constitution written by a left-leaning convention and one that many characterized as one of the world's most progressive charters.\n\nThe new document, largely written by conservative councilors, was more conservative than the one it had sought to replace, because it would have deepened free-market principles, reduced state intervention and might have limited some women's rights.\n\nThe process to write a new constitution began after 2019 street protests, when thousands of people complained about inequality in one of Latin America's most politically stable and economically strongest countries.\n\nChilean President Gabriel Boric said Sunday night that his government won't try a third attempt to change the constitution, saying there are other priorities.\n\nHe admitted he wasn't able to \"channel the hopes of having a new constitution written for everyone.\" On the contrary, he said, after two referendums, \"the country became polarized, it was divided.\"\n\nJavier Macaya, the leader of the conservative Independent Democratic Union party, recognized the defeat and urged the government not to raise the issue again.\n\n\"From a perspective of coherence and respect for democracy, we recognize the results,\" Macaya said.\n\nNow, the constitution adopted during the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet - which was amended over the years - will remain in effect.\n\nThat is what former President Michelle Bachelet had hoped for when she voted early Sunday.\n\n\"I prefer something bad to something worse,\" said Bachelet, who campaigned to reject the latest charter proposal.\n\nOne of the most controversial articles in the draft said that \"the law protects the life of the unborn,\" with a slight change in wording from the current document that some warned could make abortion fully illegal. Chilean law currently allows abortions for three reasons: rape, an unviable fetus and risk to the life of the mother.\n\nAnother article in the proposed document that sparked controversy said prisoners who suffer a terminal illness and aren't deemed to be a danger to society at large can be granted house arrest. Members of the left-wing opposition said the measure could end up benefiting those who have been convicted of crimes against humanity during the Pinochet's 1973-1990 dictatorship.\n\nThe charter would have characterized Chile as a social and democratic state that \"promotes the progressive development of social rights\" through state and private institutions. It was opposed by many local leaders who said it would scrap a tax on houses that are primary residences, a vital source of state revenue that is paid by the wealthiest.\n\nIt also would have established new law enforcement institutions and said irregular immigrants should be expelled \"as soon as possible.\"\n\nCésar Campos, a 70-year-old taxi driver, turned out early to support the new constitution. He viewed it as a vote against the left, whose ideas largely dominated the first, rejected draft.\n\n\"Boric wants everybody to be equal,\" Campos said of the president. \"Why should anyone who studies or works their entire life have to share that?\"\n\nIn 2022, 62% of voters rejected the proposed constitution that would have characterized Chile as a plurinational state, established autonomous Indigenous territories and prioritized the environment and gender parity.\n\nIn Santiago, the capital, talk before Sunday's vote often turned to security rather than the proposed charter. State statistics show an uptick in robberies and other violent crimes, a development that tends to benefit conservative forces.\n\n\"This whole process has been a waste of government money ... it's a joke,\" said government employee Johanna Anríquez, who voted against the new constitution, calling \"it is very extremist.\"\n\n\"Let's keep the one we have and, please, let's get on with the work of providing public safety,\" Anríquez said.\n\nThere appeared to be little enthusiasm for Sunday's vote. Most citizens are exhausted after 10 elections of various types in less than 2½ years, but voting is compulsory in Chile.\n\nMalen Riveros, 19, a law student at the University of Chile, said the fervor that was ignited by the 2019 street protests has been lost and for her, the choice on Sunday was between the bad or the worse.\n\n\"The hopes were lost with the passing of time,\" Riveros said. \"People have already forgotten why we went into the streets.\""}
{"text": "# Russia and Ukraine launch numerous drone attacks targeting a Russian air base and Black Sea coast\nBy **KARL RITTER**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 12:22 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**KYIV, Ukraine (AP)** - Russia and Ukraine reportedly launched mass drone attacks at each other's territories for a second straight day Sunday, one of which apparently targeted a Russian military airport.\n\nAt least 35 Ukrainian drones were shot down overnight over three regions in southwestern Russia, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a post on the messaging app Telegram.\n\nA Russian air base hosting bomber aircraft used in the war in Ukraine was among the targets, according to a Russian Telegram channel critical of the Kremlin. The channel posted short videos of drones flying over low-rise housing in what it said was the Russian town of Morozovsk, whose air base is home to Russia's 559th Bomber Aviation Regiment.\n\nVasily Golubev, the governor of Russia's Rostov province, separately reported \"mass drone strikes\" near Morozovsk and another town farther west, but didn't mention the air base. Golubev said most the drones were shot down and and there were no casualties. He didn't comment on damage.\n\nAs of Sunday evening, Kyiv didn't formally acknowledge or claim responsibility for the drone attacks. A major Ukrainian newspaper, Ukrainska Pravda, cited an anonymous source in the security services as saying that Ukraine's army and intelligence services successfully struck the Morozovsk air base, inflicting \"significant damage\" to military equipment. It wasn't immediately possible to verify this claim.\n\nAlso Sunday morning, Ukraine's air force said it shot down 20 Iranian-made Shahed drones launched overnight by Russian troops in southern and western Ukraine, as well as one X-59 cruise missile launched from the country's occupied south.\n\nA civilian was killed overnight near Odesa, a key port on Ukraine's southern Black Sea coast, after the remnants of a destroyed drone fell on his house, Ukraine's military said.\n\nStepped-up drone attacks over the past month come as both sides are keen to show they aren't deadlocked as the war approaches the two-year mark. Neither side has gained much ground despite a Ukrainian counteroffensive that began in June.\n\nRussian shelling on Sunday also killed an 81-year-old man in central Kherson, the southern Ukrainian city that was recaptured by Kyiv's forces last fall, according to the head of its municipal military administration.\n\nUkrainian and Russian forces exchanged fire outside Terebreno, a Russian village just kilometers (miles) from the Ukrainian border, according to Telegram posts by Gov. Vasily Gladkov. He did not provide details, but insisted Russian authorities had the situation \"under control.\"\n\nAccording to Baza, a Telegram news channel set up by Russian journalists critical of the Kremlin, fighting between Russian troops and a \"Ukrainian diversionary group\" began around 11 a.m. near Terebreno, home to some 200 people, forcing residents to hide in shelters.\n\nUkraine's military security agency, the GUR, said on Sunday evening that Russia-based \"armed opponents of the Kremlin regime\" were responsible for what it called \"armed clashes\" near Terebreno. The online statement didn't say whether the GUR or other Ukrainian bodies had any involvement in or prior knowledge of the fighting.\n\nHours later, a 69-year-old woman was reported killed in a Ukrainian border village in the northern Sumy region, about 25 kilometers (15 miles) west of Terebreno. According to the Ukrainian regional prosecutor's office, the woman died after a Russian shell flew into her home. It wasn't immediately clear whether her death was linked to the reported clashes.\n\nLate on Sunday afternoon, a Ukrainian border force official reported in a video statement that multiple Russian \"sabotage and reconnaissance\" operatives had crossed into Ukraine's northern Sumy and Kharkiv regions. Andriy Demchenko said that Ukrainian border guards and territorial defense units succeeded in pushing them back into Russia.\n\nWhile cross-border raids on Russian territory from Ukraine are rare, the Russian military said in May that it had killed more than 70 attackers, describing them as Ukrainian military saboteurs, in a 24-hour battle. Kyiv portrayed the fighting as an uprising against the Kremlin by Russian partisans.\n\nUkraine's foreign minister, meanwhile, welcomed what he called a sea change in Germany's approach toward Kyiv's European Union membership bid.\n\nIn an interview with Germany's Bild newspaper, Dmytro Kuleba said that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has won \"sincere and well-deserved admiration\" among Ukrainians for his role in the EU's recent decision to open membership talks for Kyiv.\n\nUkraine has long faced strong opposition in its attempts to join the 27-member bloc from Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has repeatedly spoken of his desire to maintain close ties with Russia.\n\nScholz said that at an EU summit last week he proposed that Orbán leave the room to enable the summit to launch accession talks with Ukraine, something that the Hungarian leader agreed to do.\n\n\"What German Chancellor Olaf Scholz did at the summit to remove the threatened Hungarian veto will go down in history as an act of German leadership in the interests of Europe. The chancellor has this week won a lot of sincere and well-deserved admiration in the hearts of Ukrainians,\" Kuleba told Bild.\n\nHe also voiced hope that Scholz' actions would mark a \"broader and irreversible shift\" in Berlin's approach towards EU negotiations with Kyiv.\n\n\"When I campaigned in Berlin last May to grant Ukraine EU candidate status, my appeals to Germany to take the lead in this process mostly fell on deaf ears. 'Germany doesn't want to lead,' experts and politicians in Berlin told me. I am glad that German political decisions have changed since then,\" Kuleba said.\n\nThe Ukrainian government has long cast EU and NATO membership as key foreign policy goals, and the EU's decision to start accelerated negotiations gave Kyiv a major boost - although it could be years before it's able to join. NATO leaders, meanwhile, haven't set any clear timeline so far for Kyiv's membership bid, even as Moscow's all-out invasion of Ukraine led another of Russia's neighbors, Finland, to be accepted into the military alliance in April.\n\nRussian President Vladimir Putin vowed to build up military units near the Russian-Finnish border. The Kremlin leader declared, without giving details, that Helsinki's NATO accession would create \"problems\" for the Nordic country.\n\n\"There were no problems (between Russia and Finland). Now, there will be. Because we will create (a new) military district and concentrate certain military units there,\" he told Russian state television on Sunday morning."}
{"text": "# Ukrainian drone video provides a grim look at casualties as Russian troops advance toward Avdiivka\nBy **EVGENIY MALOLETKA**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 4:38 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**KYIV, Ukraine (AP)** - As Russian forces press forward with an attempt to capture the town of Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine, The Associated Press obtained aerial footage that gives an indication of their staggering losses.\n\nA Ukrainian military drone unit near Stepove, a village just north of Avdiivka, where some of the most intense battles have taken place, shot the video this month.\n\nIt's an apocalyptic scene: In two separate clips, the bodies of about 150 soldiers - most wearing Russian uniforms - lie scattered along tree lines where they sought cover. The village itself has been reduced to rubble. Rows of trees that used to separate farm fields are burned and disfigured. The fields are pocked by artillery shells and grenades dropped from drones. The drone unit said it's possible that some of the dead were Ukrainians.\n\nThe footage was provided to the AP by Ukraine's BUAR unit of the 110th Mechanized Brigade, involved in the fighting in the area. The unit said that the footage was shot on Dec. 6 over two separate treelines between Stepove and nearby railroad tracks and that many of the bodies had been left there for weeks.\n\nThe AP verified the location by comparing the video with maps and other drone footage of the same area shot six days later by the 47th Mechanized Brigade.\n\nRussian forces launched an offensive in Avdiivka in October. Though they have made some incremental gains, Western analysts say the push has resulted in thousands of casualties.\n\nRussia launched Europe's biggest war since WWII, invading Ukraine in February 2022."}
{"text": "# Russia's ruling party backs Putin's reelection bid while a pro-peace candidate clears first hurdle\nDecember 17, 2023. 11:47 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**MOSCOW (AP)** - Delegates from Russia's ruling party unanimously backed President Vladimir Putin 's bid for reelection at a party conference in Moscow on Sunday, state agencies reported, just a day after the Kremlin leader's supporters formally nominated him to run in the 2024 presidential election as an independent.\n\nA little-known Russian presidential hopeful who calls for peace in Ukraine also inched closer towards formally registering as a candidate, securing a nomination from a group of more than 500 supporters in the Russian capital.\n\nDmitry Medvedev, United Russia's chairman and a former Russian president and prime minister, called on fellow party members to \"mobilize all activists and supporters\" in support of Putin before the vote, scheduled for March 15-17, according to reports by Russian state agencies.\n\nIn a speech at the conference, Medvedev referred to Putin as \"our candidate,\" and asserted that his reelection for a fifth term as head of state \"should be absolutely logical, legitimate and absolutely indisputable.\"\n\n\"We must mobilize all activists, all supporters in order to prevent any disruptions during the election campaign, stop any attempts to influence the course of the campaign from the outside, arrange provocations, disseminate false, harmful information or violate public order,\" Medvedev said.\n\nAnalysts have described Putin's reelection as all but assured, given the tight control he has established over Russia's political system during his 24 years in power. Prominent critics who could challenge him on the ballot are either in jail or living abroad, and most independent media have been banned within Russia.\n\nOn Saturday, a group including top officials from the United Russia party, prominent Russian actors, singers, athletes and other public figures formally nominated Putin to run as an independent.\n\nThe nomination by a group of at least 500 supporters is mandatory under Russian election law for those not running on a party ticket. Independent candidates also need to gather signatures from at least 300,000 supporters in 40 or more Russian regions.\n\nHours before United Russia delegates announced their endorsement of Putin on Sunday, a former journalist and mom-of-three from a small town in western Russia cleared the initial hurdle, according to Telegram updates by Sota, a Russian news publication covering the opposition, protests and human rights issues. Yekaterina Duntsova's candidacy was formally backed by a group of 521 supporters at a meeting in Moscow, Sota reported.\n\nA former local legislator who calls for peace in Ukraine and the release of imprisoned Kremlin critics, Duntsova has spoken of being \"afraid\" following the launch of her bid for the presidency, and fears that Russian authorities might break up the supporters' meeting set to advance it.\n\nAccording to Sota, electricity briefly went out at the venue where Duntsova's supporters were gathered, and building security initially refused to let some supporters into the venue, but the meeting was otherwise unimpeded.\n\nThe Kremlin leader has used different election tactics over the years. He ran as an independent in 2018 and his campaign gathered signatures. In 2012, he ran as a United Russia nominee instead.\n\nAt least one party - A Just Russia, which has 27 seats in the 450-seat State Duma - was willing to nominate Putin as its candidate this year. But its leader, Sergei Mironov, was quoted by the state news agency RIA Novosti on Saturday as saying that Putin will be running as an independent and will be gathering signatures.\n\nUnder constitutional reforms he orchestrated, the 71-year-old Putin is eligible to seek two more six-year terms after his current term expires next year, potentially allowing him to remain in power until 2036."}
{"text": "# Pope Francis' 87th birthday closes out a big year of efforts to reform the church, cement his legacy\nBy **NICOLE WINFIELD**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 12:35 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ROME (AP)** - Pope Francis turned 87 on Sunday, closing out a year that saw big milestones in his efforts to reform the Catholic Church as well as health scares that raise questions about his future as pope.\n\nFrancis celebrated his birthday with cake during a festive audience with children Sunday morning, and there were \"Happy Birthday\" banners in St. Peter's Square during his weekly noon blessing.\n\nOne early present came Saturday, when a Vatican tribunal handed down a mix of guilty verdicts and acquittals in a complicated trial that Francis had supported as evidence of his financial reforms. The biggest-name defendant, Cardinal Angelo Becciu, was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to 5½ years in prison.\n\n\"It was quite a year for a pope who's obviously thinking about legacy and finishing up,\" said Christopher Bellitto, professor of history at Kean University in New Jersey.\n\nOnly seven popes are known to have been older than Francis at the time of their deaths, according to the online resource Catholic Hierarchy. Francis is fast closing in on one of them, Pope Gregory XII, perhaps best known for having been the most recent pope to resign until Pope Benedict XVI stepped down in 2013.\n\nGregory was 88½ when he voluntarily stepped down in 1415 in a bid to end the Western Schism, in which there were three rival claimants to the papacy. Francis has said he, too, would consider resigning if his health made him unable to carry on, but more recently he said the job of pope is for life.\n\nTwice this year, however, Francis' less-than-robust respiratory health forced him to cancel big events: In spring, a bout of acute bronchitis landed him in the hospital for three days and made him miss the Good Friday procession at the Colosseum.\n\nMore recently, a new case of bronchitis forced him to cancel a planned trip to Dubai to participate in the U.N. climate conference. Francis had part of one lung removed as a young man and seems to be increasingly prone to respiratory problems that make breathing difficult and speaking even more so.\n\nIn between those events, he was hospitalized again in June for nine days for surgeons to repair an abdominal hernia and remove scar tissue from previous intestinal surgeries.\n\nThe hospitalizations have raised questions about Francis' ability to continue the globetrotting rigors of the modern-day papacy, which is increasingly dependent on the person of the pope, said David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University.\n\n\"It's a great improvement from the time when the pope was just a king in his throne surrounded by a royal court,\" he said. \"But with such expectations can any pope govern into his 80s and even 90s and be effective?\"\n\nWhile Francis' health scares punctuated his 87th year, perhaps the biggest milestone of all, and one that is likely to shape the remainder of Francis' pontificate, was Benedict's Dec. 31 death.\n\nBenedict largely stuck to his promise to live \"hidden to the world\" and allow Francis to govern unimpeded. But his death after 10 years of retirement removed the shadow of a more conservative pope looking over Francis' shoulder from the other side of the Vatican gardens.\n\nHis death has seemingly freed up Francis to accelerate his reform agenda and crack down on his right-wing opponents.\n\nFor starters, Francis presided over the first stage of his legacy-making meeting on the future of the Catholic Church. The synod aims to make the church more inclusive and reflective of and responsive to the needs of rank-and-file Catholics. The first session ended with \"urgent\" calls to include women in decision-making roles in the church. The next phase is scheduled for October 2024.\n\n\"The effort to change the rigidly top-down nature of governance in Catholicism is the main reform project of the Francis papacy and its success or failure will likely be his chief legacy,\" said Fordham's Gibson. He said the jury was still out on whether it would succeed, since the transition period is \"messy and absolutely exhausting.\"\n\n\"Will the sense of exhaustion overcome the inspiration that invigorates so many?\" he asked.\n\nAlongside the synod, Francis this year appointed an unusually progressive theologian as the Vatican's chief doctrine watchdog, and he has already begun setting a very new tone for the church's teachings that could have big effects on the church going forward.\n\nCardinal Victor Fernandez has issued decrees on everything from how to care for cremated ashes (in a defined and sacred place) to membership in Masonic lodges (forbidden) and whether transgender people can be godparents (they can).\n\nAt the same time, Francis has begun hitting back at his conservative critics, for whom Benedict was a point of reference for the past 10 years.\n\nFrancis exiled Benedict's longtime secretary, Archbishop Georg Gaenswein, to his native Germany after a series of infractions culminating with a tell-all memoir published in the days after Benedict's death that was highly critical of Francis.\n\nThen, he forcibly removed the bishop of Tyler, Texas, Bishop Joseph Strickland, whose social media posts were highly critical of the pope. And most recently, he cut off the former Vatican high court judge, Cardinal Raymond Burke, after he warned that Francis' reform-minded synod risked dividing the faithful.\n\nNatalia Imperatori-Lee, professor of religious studies at Manhattan College, said the pushback against Burke was less of a \"smackdown\" and would have little tangible effect, since he has plenty of wealthy backers in the U.S.\n\nBut she said it was part of an important year that had as its high point the synod, the conclusion of which will drive Francis at least for another year.\n\n\"I think the Pope is thinking about his legacy in a way he hasn't done before. Perhaps that has to do with Benedict's death, maybe it's more a matter of his own mortality becoming more real given his recent illnesses,\" she said. \"The synod is a huge part of that legacy, obviously, and you can see his investment in having it succeed. I'm willing to bet that seeing part 2 of the synod to fruition is a huge motivator for him right now.\""}
{"text": "# European diplomacy steps up calls for Gaza cease-fire\nDecember 17, 2023. 9:48 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**JERUSALEM (AP)** - Some of Israel's closest European allies pressed for a cease-fire in the war with Hamas on Sunday, underscoring growing international unease with the devastating impact of the conflict on Gaza's civilian population.\n\nThe concerted push by top European diplomats comes before a visit to Israel on Monday by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who is also expected to put pressure on Israeli leaders to end the war's most intense phase and transition to a more targeted strategy against Hamas.\n\nWestern allies of Israel have increasingly expressed concern with civilian casualties and the mass displacement of 1.9 million Palestinians - nearly 85% of Gaza's population - though the U.S. has continued to provide vital military and diplomatic support to its close ally.\n\nIn a joint article in British newspaper The Sunday Times, U.K. Foreign Secretary David Cameron and German Foreign Affairs Minister Annalena Baerbock called for a cease-fire and said \"too many civilians have been killed. The Israeli government should do more to discriminate sufficiently between terrorists and civilians, ensuring its campaign targets Hamas leaders and operatives.\"\n\n\"Israel will not win this war if its operations destroy the prospect of peaceful coexistence with Palestinians,\" they said. They said the cease-fire should take place as soon as possible, but also said it must be \"sustainable.\"\n\nAt a news conference with her Israeli counterpart in Tel Aviv on Sunday, French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna also pushed for a cease-fire.\n\n\"An immediate truce is necessary, allowing progress to be made toward a cease-fire to obtain the release of the hostages, to allow access and the delivery of more humanitarian aid to the suffering civilian population of Gaza, and in fact to move toward a humanitarian cease-fire and the beginning of a political solution,\" she said.\n\nBritain has previously called for \"humanitarian pauses\" in the conflict but stopped short of urging an immediate cease-fire. It abstained last week when the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly voted for a cease-fire.\n\nFrance and Germany both supported the call for a cease-fire at the U.N., and French President Emmanuel Macron said at the beginning of November that Israel couldn't fight terrorism by killing innocent people.\n\nThe increase in diplomatic pressure comes as domestic calls are also likely to grow for renewed negotiations with Hamas, following the killing of three Israeli hostages by the military on Friday.\n\nThe air and ground war has flattened vast swaths of northern Gaza and driven most of the population to the southern part of the besieged territory, where many are packed into crowded shelters and tent camps. The offensive has killed more than 18,700 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory. The ministry doesn't differentiate between civilians and combatants.\n\nIsrael has continued to strike what it says are militant targets in all parts of Gaza. It has vowed to continue operations until it dismantles Hamas, which triggered the war with its Oct. 7 attack into southern Israel, in which militants killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Israel has also vowed to return the estimated 129 hostages still held in Gaza.\n\nA group of European lawmakers also called for a cease-fire in Gaza following their trip to the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt over the weekend to see how European aid is helping Palestinians in Gaza. The four are centrist members of the European Parliament from Sweden, France, and Ireland.\n\nAbir Al Sahlani of Sweden that said a cease-fire is urgently needed to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza.\n\n\"We found out that no matter how much we are going to send, it doesn't matter, because there is no cease-fire and there is no security as long as there are bombs - Israeli bombs falling on the Palestinian people,\" Al Sahlani said.\n\n\"The only way is political pressure on both sides,\" she added, urging international players \"to pressure, first and foremost, the (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu government and (his) Likud (party) and his right-wing government to stop the bombing of civilians and respect and follow international humanitarian law.\""}
{"text": "# Finland seeks jailing, probe of Russian man wanted in Ukraine over alleged war crimes in 2014-2015\nDecember 17, 2023. 12:21 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**HELSINKI (AP)** - Finnish police on Sunday sought a court order to imprison a Russian man who had been living under an alias in the Nordic country and is accused of committing war crimes against wounded or surrendered soldiers in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and 2015.\n\nYan Petrovsky, who had been living in Finland under the name Voislav Torden, is already in Finnish custody but authorities are asking that he be formally jailed while they conduct an investigation into his alleged crimes against Ukrainian soldiers. A court ruling on his imprisonment is expected on Monday.\n\nFinland's Supreme Court has ruled that Petrovsky cannot be extradited to Ukraine, where he faces an arrest warrant, due to the risk of inhumane prison conditions there. Sunday's decision indicates Finnish authorities plan to investigate and possibly try the Russian in Finland, which has signed treaties allowing it to try international crimes.\n\nPetrovsky is currently on the European Union's sanctions list against Russia for allegedly being a founding member of the far-right group Rusich that is suspected of terrorism crimes in Ukraine and is connected with Russia's mercenary Wagner Group, the Finnish news agency STT reported.\n\nPetrovsky, who earlier resided in Norway, was taken into custody by Finnish authorities after he was caught at Helsinki Airport in July shortly before he was fly to Nice, France together with his family.\n\nMedia reports said he managed to enter Finland despite a EU-wide entry ban with the help of a new identity and his wife's student status in the Nordic country.\n\nThe National Bureau of Investigation - a unit of the Finnish police - provided the imprisonment request for Petrovsky, aged 36, to the Helsinki District Court on Sunday, STT said.\n\nCiting his Finnish lawyer, STT said Petrovsky has denied all war crimes charges against him.\n\nFinland's National Prosecution Authority on Friday said Petrovsky is suspected of war crimes \"committed against wounded or surrendered Ukrainian soldiers during the armed conflict in Ukraine\" in 2014-2015 before the start of Moscow's ongoing assault on Ukraine in February 2022.\n\n\"The crimes will be investigated by Finnish authorities, because the suspect cannot be extradited to Ukraine, and the case, as an international crime, falls under the jurisdiction of Finland,\" the Finnish prosecutors said in a statement."}
{"text": "# A candidate for a far-right party is elected as the mayor of an eastern German town\nDecember 17, 2023. 3:27 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BERLIN (AP)** - A candidate for the far-right Alternative for Germany was elected Sunday as the mayor of the eastern town of Pirna, marking another milestone for the party.\n\nOfficial results showed that Tim Lochner - who isn't a member of Alternative for Germany, or AfD, but ran on its ticket - won 38.5% of the vote in a three-way runoff. Candidates for the center-right Christian Democratic Union, Germany's main opposition party, and the conservative Free Voters took 31.4% and 30.1%, respectively.\n\nLochner's win in Pirna, which has about 40,000 inhabitants and is located between Saxony's state capital, Dresden, and the Czech border, marks the first time that an AfD candidate has been elected as an \"Oberbuergermeister,\" the mayor of a significantly sized town or city.\n\nAfD's first mayor anywhere in Germany was elected in August in the municipality of Raguhn-Jessnitz, in the neighboring eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. That came after the party's first head of a county administration, Robert Sesselmann, was elected in June in Sonneberg county, in another neighboring state, Thuringia.\n\nThe successes come before state elections next September in Saxony, Thuringia and a third eastern state, Brandenburg, in which AfD is hoping to emerge as the strongest party for the first time.\n\nRecent national polls have shown the party in second place at 20% or more as discontent with Chancellor Olaf Scholz's three-party government is running high. While it is strongest in the formerly communist east, it also performed well in regional elections in October in the western states of Hesse and Bavaria.\n\nPirna is located in a constituency that has elected AfD candidates in Germany's last two national elections."}
{"text": "# UK parliamentarian admits lying about lucrative pandemic contracts but says she's done nothing wrong\nBy **JILL LAWLESS**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 8:36 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - A member of Britain's House of Lords has acknowledged that she repeatedly lied about her links to a company that was awarded lucrative government contracts to supply protective masks and gowns during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nUnderwear tycoon Michelle Mone said that she had made an \"error\" in denying connections to the company PPE Medpro, and regretted threatening to sue journalists who alleged she had ties to the firm. Her husband, Doug Barrowman, has acknowledged he led the consortium that owns the company.\n\n\"I did make an error in saying to the press that I wasn't involved,\" Mone said in a BBC interview broadcast Sunday. \"Hindsight is a wonderful thing. I wasn't trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes, and I regret and I'm sorry for not saying straight out, 'Yes, I am involved.'\"\n\nMone admitted that she is a beneficiary of her husband's financial trusts, which hold about 60 million pounds ($76 million) in profits from the deal.\n\nBut she argued that the couple were being made \"scapegoats\" in a wider scandal about U.K. government spending during the pandemic.\n\n\"We've done one thing, which was lie to the press to say we weren't involved,\" she said, adding: \"I can't see what we've done wrong.\"\n\nThe case has come to symbolize the hundreds of millions of pounds wasted through hastily awarded contracts for protective equipment. The U.K. government has come under heavy criticism for its so-called VIP lanes during the pandemic - where preferential treatment for public contracts was given to companies recommended by politicians.\n\nMone, founder of the Ultimo lingerie firm, was appointed to Parliament's unelected upper house in 2015 by then Prime Minister David Cameron, who is now the U.K. foreign minister. A year ago, she said that she was taking a leave of absence from Parliament to \"clear her name\" over the scandal.\n\nShe repeatedly denied reports that she used her political connections to recommend PPE Medpro to senior government officials. The newly established firm won contracts worth more than 200 million pounds ($250 million) during the height of the first COVID-19 wave in 2020.\n\nMillions of surgical gowns that it supplied to U.K. hospitals were never used, after officials decided they weren't fit for use, and the government has since issued breach of contract proceedings. The National Crime Agency also is investigating allegations of fraud and bribery.\n\nDeputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden defended the so-called VIP lanes - reserved for referrals from lawmakers and senior officials - and insisted there had been \"no favors or special treatment\" for government cronies.\n\n\"With any large allocation of government funds for large-scale procurement, there are going to be issues that arise subsequently,\" he told the BBC.\n\n\"You can see there is civil litigation happening, you can see there is a criminal investigation happening. So, if there is fraud, the government will crack down.\""}
{"text": "# Ex-Jesuit's religious community in Slovenia ordered to dissolve in one year over widespread abuse\nDecember 17, 2023. 7:37 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**ROME (AP)** - The Vatican has decided to shut down a Slovenian-based female religious community founded by a controversial ex-Jesuit artist accused by some women of spiritual, psychological and sexual abuses.\n\nThe archdiocese of Ljubljana, Slovenia said in a statement Friday that the Loyola Community would have one year to implement the Oct.20 decree ordering its dissolution. The reason given was because of \"serious problems concerning the exercise of authority and the way of living together.\"\n\nThe dissolution of the community was the latest chapter in the saga of the Rev. Marko Rupnik, a once-famous Jesuit artist and preacher whose mosaics decorate churches and basilicas around the world.\n\nHe had founded the Loyola Community in the 1980s with a nun. But recently, former members of the community came forward to say he had spiritually, sexually and psychologically abused them. In 2020, he was declared excommunicated by the Vatican for committing one of the gravest crimes in the church's canon law; using the confessional to absolve a woman with whom he had engaged in sexual activity.\n\nPope Francis recently reopened a canonical investigation into their claims, reversing the Vatican's previous decision to shelve the case because the statute of limitations had expired. Earlier this year, the Jesuits kicked him out of the order because he refused to enter into a process of reparations with the victims."}
{"text": "# Church of England blesses same-sex couples for the first time, but they still can't wed in church\nBy **JILL LAWLESS**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 9:35 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - Church of England priests offered officially sanctioned blessings of same-sex partnerships for the first time on Sunday, though a ban on church weddings for gay couples remains in place amid deep divisions within global Anglicanism over marriage and sexuality.\n\nIn one of the first ceremonies, the Rev. Catherine Bond and the Rev. Jane Pearce had their union blessed at St John the Baptist church, in Felixstowe, eastern England, where both are associate priests.\n\nThe couple knelt in front of Canon Andrew Dotchin, who held their heads as he gave \"thanks for Catherine and Jane, to the love and friendship they share, and their commitment to one another as they come before you on this day.\"\n\nThe church's national assembly voted in February to allow clergy to bless the unions of same-sex couples who have had civil weddings or partnerships. The words used for the blessings, known as prayers of love and faith, were approved by the church's House of Bishops on Tuesday and used for the first time on Sunday.\n\nThe compromise was struck following five years of discussions about the church's position on sexuality. Church leaders offered an apology for the church's failure to welcome LGBTQ people, but also endorsed the doctrine that marriage is the union of one man and one woman. Clergy won't be required to perform same-sex blessings if they disagree with them.\n\nThe blessings can be used in regular church services. The church's governing body has also drawn up a plan for separate \"services of prayer and dedication\" for same-sex couples that would resemble weddings, but it has not yet been formally approved.\n\nPublic opinion surveys consistently show that a majority of people in England support same-sex marriage, which has been legal since 2013. The church didn't alter its teaching on marriage when the law changed.\n\nArchbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has said he won't personally bless any same-sex couples because it's his job to unify the world's 85 million Anglicans. Welby is the spiritual leader of both the Church of England and the global Anglican Communion of which it is a member.\n\nSeveral Anglican bishops from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific said after the February decision that they no longer recognize Welby as their leader."}
{"text": "# Over 60 people have drowned in the capsizing of a migrant vessel off Libya, the UN says\nBy **SAMY MAGDY**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 7:38 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAIRO (AP)** - A boat carrying dozens of migrants trying to reach Europe capsized off the coast of Libya, leaving more than 60 people dead, including women and children, the U.N. migration agency said.\n\nThe shipwreck, which took place overnight between Thursday and Friday, was the latest tragedy in this part of the Mediterranean Sea, a key but dangerous route for migrants seeking a better life in Europe. Thousands have died, according to officials.\n\nThe U.N.'s International Organization for Migration said in a statement late Saturday that the boat was carrying 86 migrants when strong waves swamped it off the town of Zuwara on Libya's western coast and that 61 migrants drowned, according to survivors.\n\n\"The central Mediterranean continues to be one of the world's most dangerous migration routes,\" the agency wrote on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.\n\nThe European Union's border agency said in a statement Sunday that its plane located the partially deflated rubber boat Thursday evening in Libya's search and rescue zone.\n\n\"The people were in severe danger because of adverse weather conditions, with waves reaching heights of 2.5 meters (8.2 feet),\" the agency, known as Frontex, said.\n\nAlarm Phone - a hotline for migrants in distress - said in a tweet that some migrants onboard reached out to the volunteer group who in turn alerted authorities including the Libyan coastguard, \"who stated that they would not search for them.\"\n\nA spokesman for the Libyan coast guard was not immediately available for comment.\n\nLibya has in recent years emerged as the dominant transit point for migrants fleeing war and poverty in Africa and the Middle East, even though the North African nation has plunged into chaos following a NATO-backed uprising that toppled and killed longtime autocrat Moammar Gadhafi in 2011.\n\nMore than 2,250 people died on the central European route this year, according to Flavio Di Giacomo, an IOM spokesperson.\n\nIt's \"a dramatic figure which demonstrates that unfortunately not enough is being done to save lives at sea,\" Di Giacomo wrote on X.\n\nAccording to the IOM's missing migrants project, at least 940 migrants were reported dead and 1,248 missing off Libya between Jan. 1 and Nov. 18.\n\nThe project, which tracks migration movements, said about 14,900 migrants, including over 1,000 women and more than 530 children, were intercepted and returned to Libya this year.\n\nIn 2022, the project reported 529 dead and 848 missing off Libya. Over 24,600 were intercepted and returned to Libya.\n\nHuman traffickers in recent years have benefited from the chaos in Libya, smuggling in migrants across the country's lengthy borders, which it shares with six nations. The migrants are crowded onto ill-equipped vessels, including rubber boats, and set off on risky sea voyages.\n\nThose who are intercepted and returned to Libya are held in government-run detention centers rife with abuses, including forced labor, beatings, rapes and torture - practices that amount to crimes against humanity, according to U.N.-commissioned investigators.\n\nThe abuse often accompanies attempts to extort money from the families of the imprisoned migrants before allowing them to leave Libya on traffickers' boats to Europe."}
{"text": "# The jungle between Colombia and Panama becomes a highway for migrants from around the world\nBy **CHRISTOPHER SHERMAN**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 9:22 AM EST\n\n**MEXICO CITY (AP)** - Once nearly impenetrable for migrants heading north from Latin America, the jungle between Colombia and Panama this year became a speedy but still treacherous highway for hundreds of thousands of people from around the world.\n\nDriven by economic crises, government repression and violence, migrants from China to Haiti decided to risk three days of deep mud, rushing rivers and bandits. Enterprising locals offered guides and porters, set up campsites and sold supplies to migrants, using color-coded wristbands to track who had paid for what.\n\nEnabled by social media and Colombian organized crime, more than 506,000 migrants - nearly two-thirds Venezuelans - had crossed the Darien jungle by mid-December, double the 248,000 who set a record the previous year. Before last year, the record was barely 30,000 in 2016.\n\nDana Graber Ladek, the Mexico chief for the United Nation's International Organization for Migration, said migration flows through the region this year were \"historic numbers that we have never seen.\"\n\nIt wasn't only in Latin America.\n\nThe number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean or the Atlantic on small boats to reach Europe this year has surged. More than 250,000 irregular arrivals were registered in 2023, according to the European Commission.\n\nA significant increase from recent years, the number remains well below levels seen in the 2015 refugee crisis, when more than 1 million people landed in Europe, most fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. Still, the rise has fed anti-migrant sentiment and laid the groundwork for tougher legislation.\n\nEarlier this month, the British government announced tough new immigration rules aimed at reducing the number of people able to move to the U.K. each year by hundreds of thousands. Authorized immigration to the U.K. set a record in 2022 with nearly 750,000.\n\nA week later, French opposition lawmakers rejected an immigration bill from President Emmanuel Macron without even debating it. It had been intended to make it easier for France to expel foreigners considered undesirable. Far-right politicians alleged the bill would have increased the number of migrants coming to the country, while migrant advocates said it threatened the rights of asylum-seekers.\n\nIn Washington, the debate has shifted from efforts early in the year to open new legal pathways largely toward measures to keep migrants out as Republicans try to take advantage of the Biden administration's push for more aid to Ukraine to tighten the U.S. southern border.\n\nThe U.S. started the year opening limited spaces to Venezuelans - as well as Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians - in January to enter legally for two years with a sponsor, while expelling those who didn't qualify to Mexico. Their numbers dropped somewhat for a time before climbing again with renewed vigor.\n\nVenezuelan Alexander Mercado had only been back in his country for a month after losing his job in Peru before he and his partner decided to set off for the United States with their infant son.\n\nVenezuela's minimum wage was the equivalent of about $4 a month then, while 2.2 pounds (a kilogram) of beef was about $5, said Angelis Flores, his 28-year-old wife.\n\n\"Imagine how someone with a salary of $4 a month survives,\" she said.\n\nMercado, 27, and Flores were already on their way when in September the U.S. announced it was granting temporary legal status to more than 470,000 Venezuelans already in the country. Weeks later, the Biden administration said it was resuming deportation flights to the South American nation.\n\nMercado and Flores hiked the well-trod trail through the jungle, managing to push through in three days. Flores and their son, in particular, got very sick. She believes they were infected by the contaminated water they drank along the way.\n\n\"There was a body in the middle of river and the 'zamuros', those black birds, were eating it and picking it apart ... all of that was running in the river,\" she said.\n\nFor Mercado and Flores, the journey accelerated once they left the jungle. In October, Panama and Costa Rica announced a deal to speed migrants across their countries. Panama bused migrants to a center in Costa Rica where they were held until they could buy a bus ticket to Nicaragua.\n\nNicaragua also seemed to opt for speeding migrants through its territory. Mercado said they crossed on buses in a day.\n\nAfter discovering that Nicaragua had lax visa requirements, Cubans and Haitians poured into Nicaragua on charter flights, purchasing roundtrip tickets they never intended. Citizens of African nations made circuitous series of connecting flights through Africa, Europe and Latin America to arrive in Managua to start travelling overland toward the United States, avoiding the Darien.\n\nIn Honduras, Mercado and Flores were given a pass from authorities allowing them five days to transit the country.\n\nAdam Isacson, an analyst tracking migration at the Washington Office on Latin America, said that Panama, Costa Rica and Honduras grant migrants legal status while they're transiting the countries, which have limited resources, and by letting migrants pass legally the countries make them less vulnerable to extortion from authorities and smugglers.\n\nThen there are Guatemala and Mexico, which Isacson called the \"we're-going-to-make-a-show-of-blocking-you countries\" attempting to score points with the U.S. government.\n\nFor many that has meant spending money to hire smugglers to cross Guatemala and Mexico, or exposing themselves to repeated extortion attempts.\n\nMercado didn't hire a smuggler and paid the price. It was \"very difficult to get through Guatemala,\" he said. \"The police kept taking money.\"\n\nBut that was just a taste of what was to come.\n\nStanding outside a Mexico City shelter with their son on a recent afternoon, Flores recounted all of the countries they had traversed.\n\n\"But they don't rob you as much, extort you as much, send you back like when you arrive here to Mexico,\" she said. \"Here the real nightmare starts, because as soon as you enter they start taking a lot of your money.\"\n\nMexico's immigration system was thrown into chaos on March 27, when migrants held in a detention center in the border city Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, set mattresses on fire inside their cell in apparent protest. The highly flammable foam mattresses filled the cell with thick smoke in an instant. Guards did not open the cell and 40 migrants died.\n\nThe immigration agency's director was among several officials charged with crimes ranging from negligence to homicide. The agency closed 33 of its smaller detention centers while it conducted a review.\n\nUnable to detain many migrants, Mexico instead circulated them around the country, using brief, repeat detentions, each an opportunity for extortion, said Gretchen Kuhner, director of IMUMI, a nongovernmental legal services organization. Advocates called it the \"politica de desgaste\" or wearing down policy.\n\nMercado and Flores made it all the way to Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, where they were detained, held for a night in an immigration facility in the border city of Reynosa and then flown the next morning 650 miles (1046 kilometers) south to Villahermosa.\n\nThere they were released, but without their cell phones, shoelaces and money. Mercado had to wait for his brother to send $100 so they could start trying to make their way back to Mexico City through an indirect route that required them to travel by truck, motorbike and even horse.\n\nIn late November, they had just made it back to Mexico City again. This time Mercado was unequivocal: They would not leave Mexico City until the U.S. government gave them an appointment to request asylum at a border port of entry.\n\n\"It is really hard to make it back here again,\" he said. \"If they manage to send me back again I don't know what I would do.\""}
{"text": "# Teenager Alex Batty returns to Britain after being missing for 6 years and then turning up in France\nBy **JILL LAWLESS**  \nDecember 16, 2023. 5:26 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - British teenager Alex Batty flew back to the U.K. on Saturday, six years after he left home on what was meant to be a two-week family vacation in Spain.\n\nBatty never returned from that holiday to his grandmother and guardian in Oldham, near Manchester. Her frantic appeals found no trace of him - until he turned up this week, walking along a road in southern France in the middle of the night.\n\nAssistant Chief Constable Matt Boyle of Greater Manchester Police said Batty had arrived in England on a flight from Toulouse.\n\nHe said police \"are yet to fully establish the circumstances surrounding his disappearance\" and whether there should be a criminal investigation.\n\nNow, 17, Alex told French officials he had been living a nomadic lifestyle in Spain, Morocco and France with his mother and grandfather as part of a \"spiritual community.\" He said the family moved from place to place, grew their own food, meditated and contemplated reincarnation and other esoteric subjects.\n\nWhen his mother said she wanted to move the family to Finland, Alex decided to leave, French prosecutor Antoine Leroy told reporters on Friday.\n\nHe was spotted by a delivery driver walking alone in the rain and dark with a flashlight, a rucksack and his skateboard. The driver, Fabien Accidini, offered him a lift, and Alex told him about his life and how he had walked for four days, traveling by night, through the remote and rugged Pyrenees.\n\nAccidini said the boy told him \"that he had been kidnapped by his mother\" years ago. He added \"that he'd been in France for the past two years in a spiritual community that was a bit strange with his mother who is also a bit strange.\"\n\n\"He'd had enough. He said, 'I am 17. I need a future.' He didn't see a future for him there.\"\n\nAlex's mother Melanie Batty is wanted by British police in connection with the boy's disappearance. French officials say she may be in Finland, and Alex's grandfather, David Batty, is believed to have died about six months ago.\n\nThe tale has generated intense interest in Britain, with a photo of a blond, 11-year-old Alex splashed across newspapers and news websites. The teenager's grandmother, Susan Caruana, appealed for the family to be given time and space.\n\n\"I cannot begin to express my relief and happiness that Alex has been found safe and well,\" she said in a statement issued through British police.\n\n\"The main thing is that he's safe, after what would be an overwhelming experience for anyone, not least a child. I would ask that our family are given privacy as we welcome Alex back, so we can make this process as comforting as possible.\"\n\nBoyle, the British police officer, said detectives would be speaking to Alex \"at a pace that feels comfortable to him.\"\n\n\"No matter what, we understand that this may be an overwhelming process,\" he said. \"He may now be six years older than when he went missing, but he is still a young person.\""}
{"text": "# British man pleads not guilty in alleged $99 million wine fraud conspiracy\nDecember 16, 2023. 4:31 PM EST\n\n---\n\nNEW YORK (AP) - A British man pleaded not guilty in a New York courtroom Saturday in connection with an alleged $99 million, Ponzi-like fraud involving high-priced fine wine and duped investors.\n\nStephen Burton, 58, was extradited Friday to New York from Morocco, where he was arrested in 2022 after using a bogus Zimbabwean passport to enter that country, U.S. Attorney Breon Peace's office said.\n\nBurton was arraigned in Brooklyn federal court on Saturday and pleaded not guilty to charges of wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy. He is detained without bail pending his next court hearing on Jan. 22.\n\n\"These are all allegations, and we will defend them vigorously,\" Burton's lawyer, John Wallenstein, said. \"We're going to wait for the discovery and examine the evidence very carefully.\"\n\nProsecutors said Burton and another British man, James Wellesley, 56, ran a company called Bordeaux Cellars, which they said brokered loans between investors and wealthy wine collectors that were secured by their wine collections. They solicited $99 million in investments from residents of New York and other areas from 2017 to 2019, telling them they would profit from interest on the loans, authorities said.\n\nBut prosecutors alleged the operation was a scam. They said the wealthy wine collectors did not exist, no loans were made, and Bordeaux Cellars did not have custody of the wine securing the loans. Instead, officials said, Burton and Wellesley used loan money provided by investors for themselves and to make fraudulent interest payments to other investors.\n\n\"With the successful extradition of Burton to the Eastern District of New York, he will now taste justice for the fine wines scheme alleged in the indictment,\" Peace said in a statement. \"This prosecution sends a message to all perpetrators of global fraud that you can run from law enforcement, but not forever.\"\n\nWellesley is in the United Kingdom facing extradition proceedings, officials said. It was not immediately clear if he has a lawyer who could respond to the allegations."}
{"text": "# Author receives German prize in scaled-down format after comparing Gaza to Nazi-era ghettos\nDecember 16, 2023. 4:22 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BERLIN (AP)** - The Russian-American writer Masha Gessen received a German literary prize Saturday in a ceremony that was delayed and scaled down in reaction to an article comparing Gaza to Nazi German ghettos.\n\nThe comparison in a recent New Yorker article was viewed as controversial in Germany, where government authorities strongly support Israel as a form of remorse and responsibility after Adolf Hitler's Germany murdered up to 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.\n\nGessen, who was born Jewish in the Soviet Union, is critical of Israel's treatment of Palestinians.\n\nReaction to the article comes as German society grapples with the fallout from the Israel-Hamas war, with both pro-Palestinian protests and pro-Israel demonstrations taking place in past weeks. German leaders have repeatedly stressed their support for the country's Jews and for Israel as they have denounced antisemitic incidents.\n\nGessen was originally due to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought on Friday in the city hall of Bremen, in northwest Germany, but the sponsoring organization, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and the Senate of the city of Bremen withdrew from the ceremony.\n\nIt took place instead in a different location Saturday with about 50 guests crowded into a small event room and with police security, the German news agency dpa reported.\n\nIn Gessen's article, titled \"In the Shadow of the Holocaust,\" the author explores German Holocaust memory, arguing that Germany today stifles free and open debate on Israel.\n\nGessen also is critical of Israel's relationship with Palestinians, writing that Gaza is \"like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.\"\n\n\"The ghetto is being liquidated,\" the article added.\n\nThe ghettos in German-occupied countries during World War II were open-air prisons where Jews were killed, starved and died from diseases. Those who didn't perish there were rounded up and transported to death camps where they were murdered, a process called \"liquidation.\"\n\nThe Böll Foundation, affiliated with Germany's Green party, called the comparison \"unacceptable.\" A jury decided in the summer to award Gessen, an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the foundation said it wasn't canceling the award itself.\n\nGessen was not available for comment, a New Yorker spokesperson said, but the writer defended the article in an interview with Politico.\n\n\"I think it is possible to be very upset about that comparison,\" Gessen told Politico. \"I also think that in this circumstance, it is morally necessary and politically necessary to make this very, very upsetting comparison.\"\n\nThe award is to honor people who contribute to public political thought in the tradition of Hannah Arendt, the German-born American political theorist who explored totalitarianism."}
{"text": "# In pivotal moment, Notre Dame Cathedral spire gets golden rooster weathervane, a symbol of a phoenix\nBy **THOMAS ADAMSON**  \nDecember 16, 2023. 1:28 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PARIS (AP)** - Notre Dame Cathedral got its rooster back Saturday, in a pivotal moment for the Paris landmark's restoration.\n\nThe installation by a crane of a new golden rooster, reimagined as a dramatic phoenix with licking, flamed feathers, goes beyond being just a weathervane atop the cathedral spire. It symbolizes resilience amid destruction after the devastating April 2019 fire - as restoration officials also revealed an anti-fire misting system is being kitted out under the cathedral's roof.\n\nChief architect Philippe Villeneuve, who designed this new rooster, stated that the original rooster's survival signified a ray of light in the catastrophe.\n\n\"That there was hope, that not everything was lost. The beauty of the (old) battered rooster... expressed the cry of the cathedral suffering in flames,\" Villeneuve said. He described the new work of art, approximately half a meter long and gleaming in the December sun behind Notre Dame Cathedral, as his \"phoenix.\"\n\nVilleneuve elaborated on the new rooster's significance, saying: \"Since (the fire) we have worked on this rooster (the) successor, which sees the flame carried to the top of the cathedral as it was before, more than 96 meters from the ground... It is a fire of resurrection.\"\n\nIn lighthearted comments, the architect said that the process of design was so intense he might have to speak to his \"therapist\" about it.\n\nBefore ascending to its perch, the rooster - a French emblem of vigilance and Christ's resurrection - was blessed by Paris Archbishop Laurent Ulrich in a square behind the monument. The rooster - or \"coq\" in French - is a emotive national emblem for the French because of the word's semantics - the Latin gallus meaning Gaul and gallus simultaneously meaning rooster.\n\nUlrich placed sacred relics in a hole inside the rooster's breast, including fragments of Christ's Crown of Thorns and remains of St. Denis and St. Genevieve, infusing the sculpture with religious importance.\n\nThe Crown of Thorns, regarded as Notre Dame's most sacred relic, was among the treasures quickly removed after the fire broke out. Brought to Paris by King Louis IX in the 13th century, it is purported to have been pressed onto Christ's head during the crucifixion. A sealed tube was also placed in the sculpture containing a list the names of nearly 2,000 individuals who contributed to the cathedral's reconstruction, underscoring the collective effort behind the works.\n\nAmid the rooster benediction ceremony, Notre Dame's new restoration chief, Philippe Jost, also detailed pioneering measures taken to safeguard the iconic cathedral against future fires - in rare comments to the press.\n\n\"We have deployed a range of fire protection devices, some of which are very innovative in a cathedral, including a misting system in the attics, where the oak frame and in the spire are located,\" Jost said. \"And this is a first for a cathedral in France.\"\n\nFrench President Emmanuel Macron, who last week visited the site to mark a one-year countdown to its re-opening, announced that the original rooster will be displayed in a new museum at the Hôtel-Dieu. This move, along with plans to invite Pope Francis for the cathedral's reopening next year, highlights Notre Dame's significance in French history and culture.\n\nThe rooster's installation, crowning a spire reconstructed from Eugène Viollet-le-Duc's 19th-century design, is a poignant reminder of its medieval origins as a symbol of hope and faith.\n\nIts longstanding association with the French nation since the Renaissance further adds to its historical and cultural significance, marking a new chapter of renewal and hope for Notre Dame and the French people."}
{"text": "# Russia and Ukraine exchange drone attacks after European Union funding stalled\nBy **KARL RITTER** and **ELISE MORTON**  \nDecember 16, 2023. 1:56 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**KYIV, Ukraine (AP)** - Russia and Ukraine each reported dozens of attempted drone attacks in the past day, just hours after Hungary vetoed 50 billion euros ($54.5 billion) of European Union funding to Ukraine.\n\nUkraine's air force said Saturday that Ukrainian air defense had shot down 30 out of 31 drones launched overnight against 11 regions of the country.\n\nRussia also said Friday evening that it had thwarted a series of Ukrainian drone attacks.\n\nRussian anti-aircraft units destroyed 32 Ukrainian drones over the Crimean Peninsula, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Telegram. Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, a move that most of the world considered illegal, and has used it as a staging and supply point during the war.\n\nEarlier, Russia's Defense Ministry said that six drones had been shot down in the Kursk region, which borders Ukraine.\n\nIn Ukraine's partially occupied southern Kherson region, the Russia-installed governor, Vladimir Saldo, reported on Telegram that Russian anti-aircraft units had downed at least 15 aerial targets near the town of Henichesk. Saldo said later Saturday that a Ukrainian missile attack on a village in the Russia-held part of the region had killed two people.\n\nMeanwhile, shelling wounded two people in Ukrainian-held parts of the Kherson region, regional Gov. Oleksandr Prokudin said Saturday.\n\nStepped-up drone attacks over the past month come as both sides are keen to show they aren't deadlocked as the war approaches the two-year mark. Neither side has gained much ground despite a Ukrainian counteroffensive that began in June, and analysts predict the war will be a long one.\n\nOn Friday, EU leaders sought to paper over their inability to boost Ukraine's coffers with a promised 50 billion euros ($54.5 billion) over the next four years, saying the funds will likely arrive next month after some more haggling between the bloc's other 26 leaders and the longtime holdout, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.\n\nInstead, they wanted Ukraine to revel in getting the nod to start membership talks that could mark a sea change in its fortunes - although the process could last well over a decade and be strewn with obstacles placed by any single member state.\n\nAlso on Saturday, Russia returned three Ukrainian children to their families as part of a deal brokered by Qatar, according to the head of Ukraine's presidential office, Andriy Yermak, and Ukrainian human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets.\n\nLubinets voiced hope last week that a coalition of countries formed to facilitate the return of Ukrainian children illegally deported by Russia - the National Coalition of Countries for the Return of Ukrainian Children - will be able to come up with a faster mechanism to repatriate them. More than 19,000 children are still believed to be in Russia or in occupied regions of Ukraine."}
{"text": "# Cambodia welcomes the Metropolitan Museum of Art's plan to return looted antiquities\nBy **MAYSOON KHAN** and **SOPHENG CHEANG**  \nDecember 16, 2023. 12:55 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP)** - Cambodia has welcomed the announcement that New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art will return more than a dozen pieces of ancient artwork to Cambodia and Thailand that were tied to an art dealer and collector accused of running a huge antiquities trafficking network out of Southeast Asia.\n\nThis most recent repatriation of artwork comes as many museums in the United States and Europe reckon with collections that contain objects looted from Asia, Africa and other places during centuries of colonialism or in times of upheaval.\n\nFourteen Khmer sculptures will be returned to Cambodia and two will be returned to Thailand, the Manhattan museum announced Friday, though no specific timeline was given.\n\n\"We appreciate this first step in the right direction,\" said a statement issued by Cambodia's Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts. \"We look forward to further returns and acknowledgements of the truth regarding our lost national treasures, taken from Cambodia in the time of war and genocide.\"\n\nCambodia suffered from war and the brutal rule of the communist Khmer Rouge in the 1970s and 1980s, causing disorder that opened the opportunity for its archaeological treasures to be looted.\n\nThe repatriation of the ancient pieces was linked to well-known art dealer Douglas Latchford, who was indicted in 2019 for allegedly orchestrating a multiyear scheme to sell looted Cambodian antiquities on the international art market. Latchford, who died the following year, had denied any involvement in smuggling.\n\nThe museum initially cooperated with the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan and the New York office of Homeland Security Investigations on the return of 13 sculptures tied to Latchford before determining there were three more that should be repatriated.\n\n\"As demonstrated with today's announcement, pieces linked to the investigation of Douglas Latchford continue to reveal themselves,\" HSI Acting Special Agent in Charge Erin Keegan said in a statement Friday. \"The Metropolitan Museum of Art has not only recognized the significance of these 13 Khmer artifacts, which were shamelessly stolen, but has also volunteered to return them, as part of their ongoing cooperation, to their rightful owners: the People of Cambodia.\"\n\nThis isn't the first time the museum has repatriated art linked to Latchford. In 2013, it returned two objects to Cambodia.\n\nThe Latchford family also had a load of centuries-old Cambodian jewelry in their possession that they later returned to Cambodia. In February, 77 pieces of jewelry made of gold and other precious metal pieces - including items such as crowns, necklaces and earrings - were returned to their homeland. Other stone and bronze artifacts were returned in September 2021.\n\nPieces being returned include a bronze sculpture called The Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara Seated in Royal Ease, made sometime between the late 10th century and early 11th century. Another piece of art, made of stone in the seventh century and named Head of Buddha, will also be returned. Those pieces are part of 10 that can still be viewed in the museum's galleries while arrangements are made for their return.\n\n\"These returns contribute to the reconciliation and healing of the Cambodian people who went through decades of civil war and suffered tremendously from the tragedy of the Khmer Rouge genocide, and to a greater strengthening of our relationship with the United States,\" Cambodia's Minister of Culture and Fine Arts, Phoeurng Sackona, said in her agency's statement.\n\nResearch efforts were already underway by the museum to examine the ownership history of its objects, focusing on how ancient art and cultural property changed hands, as well as the provenance of Nazi-looted artwork."}
{"text": "# The West supports Ukraine against Russia's aggression. So why is funding its defense in question?\nBy **LAURIE KELLMAN**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 2:02 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelenskyy issued a warning to allies as he hopscotched continents urging them to support his war-scarred country as it defends itself against the Russian invasion.\n\nMoscow's \"real target,\" he said in Washington, \"is freedom.\"\n\nThat idea functioned as a rallying cry as the West lined up behind Ukraine at the start of the war. But 21 months later, support for Ukraine has become complicated, especially when it comes to spending government money. Zelenskyy headed home Friday without billions in aid proposed in the U.S. and the EU, with those plans pushed into limbo.\n\nHere's how it all unfolded:\n\n## THE ASK\nZelenskyy received a hero's welcome around the world from the start of the war, but now he's having to make in-person appeals for aid as his country fights, he said this week, \"for our freedom and yours.\"\n\n\"It's very important,\" he said in Washington, \"that by the end of this year we can send very strong signal of our unity to the aggressor and the unity of Ukraine, America, Europe, the entire free world.\"\n\nThe risk of inaction, he says: emboldening Russian President Vladimir Putin.\n\n\"If there's anyone inspired by unresolved issues on Capitol Hill, it's just Putin and his sick clique,\" Zelenskyy told an audience of military leaders and students at the National Defense University in Washington.\n\nHe underscored the urgency in an interview with The Associated Press earlier this month, saying the winter posed additional challenges after a summer counteroffensive affected by enduring shortages of weapons and ground forces.\n\n\"Winter as a whole is a new phase of war,\" Zelenskyy said in an exclusive interview this month in Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine.\n\n## TANGLED SUPPORT IN THE U.S.\nClose to half of the U.S. public thinks the country is spending too much on aid to Ukraine, according to polling from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.\n\nThose sentiments, driven primarily by Republicans, help explain the hardening opposition among conservative GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill who are rebuffing efforts from President Joe Biden to approve more aid for Ukraine.\n\nRepublicans have linked Ukraine's military assistance to U.S. border security, injecting one of the most divisive domestic political issues - immigration and border crossings - into the middle of an intensifying debate over wartime foreign policy.\n\nZelensky's visit to Washington this week - where he appeared at a news conference with Biden and was squired around Capitol Hill by leading lawmakers - did nothing to change that. Congress left town for the holidays on Thursday without a deal to send some $61 billion to Ukraine.\n\n## A HOLDOUT IN EUROPE\nThere were two questions before the EU on Friday: Whether to advance Ukraine's future membership in to the bloc, and whether to approve a 50 billion-euro ($54 billion) financial aid package that Ukraine urgently needs to stay afloat.\n\nHungary's Viktor Orban left the room, effectively abstaining on the first question. Zelenskyy led a round of celebration for his war-ravaged country, tweeting thanks to \"everyone who helped\" the EU take the step.\n\nBut Orban wasn't done.\n\nHe reappeared hours later to veto the proposal for wartime aid to Ukraine to prop up its war-weakened economy. He was the only member to vote against the package.\n\n\"Summary of the nightshift: veto for the extra money to Ukraine,\" Orban wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. He also suggested that he had plenty of time to block Ukraine's drive to join the EU down the road.\n\n## WHAT'S NEXT?\nIn the U.S., Senate negotiators and the Biden administration were still racing to strike a compromise before the end of the year. The Democratic-led Senate planned to come back next week in hopes of passing the package. But the Republican-led House showed no such inclination.\n\nU.S. aid to Ukraine hasn't dried up, but it's complicated. The Pentagon and State Department on Dec. 6 said the U.S. is sending a $175 million package of military aid to Ukraine, including guided missiles for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), anti-armor systems and high-speed anti-radiation missiles, the Pentagon and State Department said.\n\nThe EU hasn't given up either. French President Emmanuel Macron said later that there were other ways the EU could send aid to Ukraine. But he urged Orban to \"act like a European\" and support Zelenskyy's country,\n\nEuropean Council President Charles Michel said leaders would reconvene in January to try to break the deadlock."}
{"text": "# Village council member in Ukraine sets off hand grenades during a meeting and injures 26\nDecember 15, 2023. 3:16 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**KYIV, Ukraine (AP)** - A village council member in western Ukraine detonated three hand grenades during a meeting Friday, critically injuring himself and at least two dozen other people, authorities said.\n\nA video posted on social media showed a man entering a room where the village council of Keretsky was meeting to discuss and approve the community's budget.\n\nThe man, who was preliminary identified as Serhii Batryn, a council member who belongs to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's Servant of the People party, took three grenades from his pockets, removed the pins and threw the weapons on the floor in front of him.\n\nTranscarpathian region police said in an official statement that 26 people were injured, six of them critically. The man who set off the grenades suffered grave injuries and medics worked to save his life, police said.\n\nThere was no immediate word on a possible motive or if the attack was somehow connected to Russia's war in Ukraine."}
{"text": "# The EU's drip-feed of aid frustrates Ukraine, despite the promise of membership talks\nBy **RAF CASERT**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 12:11 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BRUSSELS (AP)** - Drop by drop, Ukraine is being supplied with aid and arms from its European allies, at a time when it becomes ever clearer it would take a deluge to turn its war against Russia around.\n\nOn Friday, EU leaders sought to paper over their inability to boost Ukraine's coffers with a promised 50 billion euros ($54.5 billion) over the next four years, saying the check will likely arrive next month after some more haggling between 26 leaders and the longtime holdout, Viktor Orban of Hungary.\n\nInstead, they wanted Ukraine to revel in getting the nod to start membership talks that could mark a sea change in its fortunes - never mind that the process could last well over a decade and be strewn with obstacles from any single member state.\n\n\"Today, we are celebrating,\" said Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda.\n\nUkrainian government bookkeepers are unlikely to join in. Kyiv is struggling to make ends meet from one month to the next and to make sure enough is left to bolster defenses and even attempt a counterattack to kick the Russians out of the country.\n\nPresident Volodymyr Zelenskyy is traveling the world - Argentina, United States, Norway and Germany in just the past week - to make sure the money keeps flowing.\n\nAfter the close of the summit on Friday, the most the EU could guarantee was that funds would continue to arrive in Kyiv in monthly drips of 1.5 billion euros at least until early next year.\n\nOrban, the lone EU leader with continuing close links to Russian President Vladimir Putin, claims war funding for Ukraine is like throwing money out of the window since victory on the battlefield is a pipe dream.\n\n\"We shouldn't send more money to finance the war. Instead, we should stop the war and have a cease-fire and peace talks,\" he said Friday, words that are anathema in most other EU nations.\n\nSince the start of the war in February 2022, the EU and its 27 member states have sent $91 billion in financial, military, humanitarian, and refugee assistance.\n\nAll the other leaders except Hungary, however, said they would work together over the next weeks to get a package ready that would either get approval from Orban or be approved by sidestepping him in a complicated institutional procedure.\n\n\"I can assure you that Ukraine will not be left without support. There was a strong will of 26 to provide this support. And there were different ways how we can do this,\" said Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas. A new summit to address that is set for late January or early February.\n\nIn the meantime, Ukraine will have to warm itself by the glow from the promise of opening membership talks, announced on Thursday.\n\n\"It will lift hearts,\" said Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, \"where there are people tonight in bomb shelters and tomorrow morning defending their homes, this will give them a lot of hope.\""}
{"text": "# Albania returns 20 stolen icons to neighboring North Macedonia\nBy **LLAZAR SEMINI**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 4:06 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**TIRANA, Albania (AP)** - Albania on Friday returned 20 icons to neighboring North Macedonia that were stolen a decade ago, Albania's Culture Ministry said.\n\nThe return marked the final stretch on a long, 10-year road with \"much inter-institutional and international cooperation,\" said Albania's Culture Minister Elva Margariti. It also showed Albania's commitment to \"the fight against trafficking of the cultural inheritance objects,\" she said.\n\nA handover ceremony was held at the National Historic Museum in the Albanian capital of Tirana. No further details were provided about the icons.\n\nLater, the cargo arrived at the National Museum in North Macedonia's capital, Skopje, where they were unpacked and briefly presented to the public. They will be kept for up to 45 days in a special chamber to avoid damage from atmospheric pressure changes, after which experts will start their restoration.\n\nNorth Macedonia's Prime Minister Dimitar Kovachevski and head of the Orthodox Church, Archbishop Stefan joined the ceremony.\n\nIn 2013, Albanian authorities in Tirana seized more than 1,000 stolen religious and secular pieces of art dating from the 15th to the mid-20th century and arrested two men suspected of planning to sell them abroad.\n\nThe icons, frescoes and other pieces were taken from churches and cultural centers in southeastern Albania and in the neighboring North Macedonia.\n\nNorth Macedonian Culture Minister Bisera Kostadinovska thanked Albanian authorities.\n\nIn 2013, North Macedonian experts recognized the icons when Albanian television stations broadcast Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama inspecting icons seized by police. Skopje officially put in a request for their return in 2018.\n\nIn 2022, the two governments signed the agreement for their return during a joint Cabinets' meeting in Skopje, the first of its kind in the region.\n\nMany icons and other artworks in Albania are believed to have been looted from churches and other places, especially during the anarchy of 1997 in Albania, when many in the country - among some of the continent's poorest people - lost their life savings in failed pyramid schemes.\n\nOver the past two decades, more than 10,000 religious artifacts have been stolen from North Macedonia's churches, including precious icons painted in the stylized Byzantine tradition. Thieves removed sections of altar screens, crosses, lamps and Bibles.\n\nIcons recovered from Albania are the first to be returned so far.\n\nBoth Albania and North Macedonia have launched full membership negotiations with the European Union."}
{"text": "# 'I didn't change my number': Macron still open to dialogue with Putin if it helps to bring peace\nBy **SAMUEL PETREQUIN**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 11:15 AM EST\n\n---\n\nBRUSSELS (AP) - French President Emmanuel Macron said Friday he would still consider talking with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin if it helps creating a sustainable peace between Ukraine and Russia.\n\nMacron and Putin enjoyed a good working relationship before Russia invaded its neighbor in February 2022. In weeks preceding the start of hostilities, Macron's diplomatic efforts failed to stop the war but he then kept open a line of communication with the Russian president for months.\n\nTheir diplomatic and personal links deteriorated badly as the war dragged on. Earlier this year, Macron weighed the possibility of stripping Putin of France's highest medal of honor.\n\nPutin was asked Thursday during his year-end news conference by a journalist from the French channel TF1 about his views on France and Macron.\n\nPutin said: \"At some point the French president stopped the relationship with us. We didn't do it, I didn't. He did. If there's interest, we're ready. If not, we'll cope.\"\n\nSpeaking in Brussels at the end of a summit where EU leaders decided to open membership negotiations with war-torn Ukraine, Macron said he remained open to dialogue with Putin on finding a peaceful solution if the Russian leader reaches out to him.\n\n\"I didn't start the war unilaterally, breaking the treaties I'd agreed to. And it wasn't France that decided to commit war crimes in the north of Ukraine, making discussions virtually impossible,\" Macron said. \"Well, we have to be serious, so I have a very simple position. I haven't changed my number.\"\n\nMacron added that if Putin shows a will to kick-start a dialogue that can build a lasting peace, France is ready to help.\n\n\"If President Putin has a willingness to engage in dialogue and serious proposals to move forward and emerge from the conflict and build a lasting peace, that is to say one that respects international law and therefore Ukrainian interests and sovereignty, I'll take the call,\" Macron said.\n\nPutin said this week there would be no peace until Russia achieves its goals, which he says remain unchanged after nearly two years of fighting."}
{"text": "# Moldova and Georgia celebrate as their aspirations for EU membership take crucial steps forward\nBy **EMMA BURROWS**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 12:49 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - Moldova and Georgia celebrated after European Union leaders buoyed their aspirations to join the 27 member nation bloc by removing key hurdles on their long path toward membership.\n\nLawmakers in both the Moldovan and Georgian parliaments waved EU flags and played the bloc's anthem at Friday's opening of their parliamentary sessions, following Thursday's surprise announcement to open membership negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova and to grant candidacy status to Georgia. The announcement came despite strong opposition from Hungary and the fact that Ukraine and Georgia are partially occupied by Russia which also has troops deployed in Moldova's Transnistria region.\n\nThousands of Georgians gathered in the country's capital Tbilisi to celebrate.\n\n\"The EU and integration with Europe is important for us. Not only will it be a security guarantee for us and enable the country to get stronger economically, but it is important for other values too including sports and culture, among others,\" said Erekle Sarishvili, a student who took part in the rally. \"We, the young generation, have fought for this result but we also need to remember the older generations that have brought Georgia here.\"\n\nMoldova's President Maia Sandu invited citizens to a pro-European gathering scheduled for Sunday in the capital Chisinau to herald what she described as a \"historic step for the destiny of our country.\"\n\nMoldova's pro-Western Prime Minister Dorin Recean echoed Sandu, saying \"Moldova is European\" and \"our future is in the EU.\"\n\nGeorgia's Prime Minister Irakli Gharibashvili congratulated the nation, saying that \"this historic victory belongs to you, to our undefeated, unbroken, freedom loving Georgian people.\"\n\nBy opening membership talks with Ukraine and Moldova and by offering Georgia candidate status, the EU has sent \"a very important message to Russia,\" Natia Seskuria, director of the Regional Institute of Security Studies in the Georgian capital Tbilisi said.\n\nAlthough the path to full membership could take decades, the move \"has a lot of symbolism,\" she said, because if the countries had been rejected \"it would be another sign for Russia that they can basically do whatever they want.\"\n\nBoth Moldova and Georgia were part of the Soviet Union for decades and both have struggled to emerge from Moscow's shadow. On Friday, the Kremlin responded with irritation to the news.\n\nKremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the move was \"absolutely politicized\" and that it was driven by the bloc's \"desire to annoy Russia further and antagonize these countries towards Russia.\"\n\nPeskov said membership talks could take \"years and decades,\" adding \"such new members could destabilize the EU.\"\n\nSince Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moldova has faced a long string of crises, including a severe energy shortage after Moscow dramatically reduced gas supplies last winter, skyrocketing inflation, and anti-government protests by a Russia-friendly political party.\n\nIn February, Moldovan President Maia Sandu also accused Moscow of plotting to overthrow the government to put the nation \"at the disposal of Russia,\" and to derail it from its course toward EU membership. Russia denied the accusations.\n\nDebris from rocket fire has also landed several times in Moldova as a result of fighting in neighboring Ukraine. Tensions also soared in the country in April last year after a string of explosions in Transnistria - a Russia-backed separatist region of Moldova where Russia bases about 1,500 troops.\n\nRussia also has forces in Georgia after the two countries fought a short war in 2008 that ended with Georgia losing control of two Russia-friendly separatist regions. In November, Russian troops shot and killed a Georgian civilian in South Ossetia, one of the breakaway regions, prompting condemnation from Georgian authorities.\n\nSeskuria, from the Regional Institute of Security Studies, said EU membership has been a \"generational dream for Georgians.\" Although it's Georgia's \"biggest success\" so far toward EU membership, Seskuria cautioned that there's still a \"long way ahead\" and warned Georgia needs to deliver on the kind of progress the EU is seeking for the country to fulfill strict membership criteria.\n\nThat applies for all three countries which need to tackle corruption and organized crime while strengthening the rule of law.\n\nMembership talks could also heighten tensions in Georgia where Salome Zourabichvili, Georgia's pro-EU president, has long been a vocal supporter of joining the bloc, putting her at odds with the ruling Georgian Dream party which is widely seen as being pro-Russian by the Georgian opposition.\n\nSpeaking shortly after the EU leaders' meeting, Zourabichvili said \"Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova are the examples of what it means to fight for freedom, to fight for Europe, for those common values that we share with Europe and stay true to them.\"\n\nZourabichvili has criticized a foreign agent registration bill which protesters in Tbilisi earlier this year said was inspired by a similar law in Russia used to silence critics of the Kremlin.\n\nOpponents of Georgian Dream say the party's founder, former Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, a billionaire who amassed a fortune in Russia, has continued calling the shots in the former Soviet republic of 3.7 million people even though he currently doesn't hold a government job.\n\nGeorgian Dream has repeatedly denied any links to Russia or that it leans toward Moscow."}
{"text": "# Shops in 2 Dutch cities start selling legally grown cannabis in an experiment to regulate pot trade\nBy **MIKE CORDER**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 10:54 AM EST\n\n**BREDA, Netherlands (AP)** - A paradox at the heart of the Netherlands' permissive pot policy went up in smoke Friday in two Dutch cities as \"coffeeshops\" began selling the country's first legally cultivated cannabis as part of an experiment to regulate the trade.\n\nThe experiment could mark the beginning of the end for a long-standing legal anomaly - you can buy and sell small amounts of weed without fear of prosecution in the Netherlands, but growing it commercially remains illegal.\n\n\"This is really a very, very big step in the right direction,\" Derrick Bergman, chairman of the Union for the Abolition of Cannabis Prohibition, said as he sat in the De Baron cannabis cafe in the southern Dutch city of Breda.\n\nDutch Health Minister Ernst Kuipers visited earlier to launch the new policy. The plan for the experiment dates back to 2017 and is seen as as a way of providing \"quality-controlled\" weed to coffeeshops - places that are allowed to sell marijuana - and shutting out illegal growers.\n\n\"By regulating the sale of cannabis, we have a better insight into the origin of the products and the quality,\" Kuipers said. \"In addition, we can better inform consumers about the effects and health risks of cannabis use.\"\n\nBart Vollenberg, who grows cannabis for the experiment, called it a \"happy day for the Netherlands.\"\n\n\"The most significant advantage is that it is not criminal activity, and it becomes transparent,\" he said. \"You can test the weed in the laboratory. With all the knowledge and skills of Dutch horticulture, we can start improving the quality of the weed now. No longer need to make all kinds of twists and turns in illegality.\"\n\nA trailblazer in decriminalizing pot since the 1970s, the Netherlands has grown more conservative. Amsterdam, long a magnet for marijuana smokers from around the world, has been closing coffeeshops in recent years and has banned smoking weed on some of the cobbled streets that make up its historic center.\n\nAcross the nation, there are 565 coffeeshops. That is down from around 2,000 \"in the real heyday,\" Bergman said.\n\nMeanwhile, other countries around the world and some U.S. states have taken steps to legalize the recreational use of cannabis.\n\n\"We are finally taking a small place on the international stage back again,\" Bergman said. \"It's not like we're back full on. It's a small experiment.\"\n\nFriday marked the first day of what the government calls the \"closed coffeeshop chain experiment.\" The initial phase is scheduled to last a maximum of six months and could then be rolled out to 11 municipalities across the Netherlands.\n\n\"During the startup phase, growers, coffeeshop owners, transporters and supervisors will gain experience with the supply and sale of regulated cannabis and its supervision, secure transport and the use of the track and trace system,\" the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport said in a statement.\n\nCoffeeshops in Breda and nearby Tilburg are allowed to have a maximum of 500 grams (17.64 ounces) of weed from legal growers in stock at a time.\n\nBreda Mayor Paul Depla said the initial experiment in his city and Tilburg would help detect any \"growing pains\" in the system.\n\n\"It is also a great opportunity to see how cooperation within the closed chain between legal growers, coffeeshop owners and all other authorities involved works,\" he said.\n\nThe Trimbos Institute, a Dutch organization that raises awareness about mental health and the use of drugs, alcohol and tobacco, is involved in the experiment and promoting measures to prevent cannabis use.\n\n\"We think it's important that people who use cannabis are well informed about the risks and options for help,\" spokeswoman Harriëtte Koop said in an email.\n\nFor longtime campaigner Bergman, an upside of the new policy is that smokers can now easily see who grew the cannabis they are using and let friends know whether it's any good.\n\n\"It's a relief that the weed is quite good,\" he said, smiling as he lit his marijuana cigarette in a small puff of thick white smoke.\n\nThere is a downside, Bergman added. He looked at a plastic beaker in a plastic bag holding the new legally grown weed and a much smaller plastic container for illegal pot.\n\n\"The new system produces much more plastic waste,\" he noted."}
{"text": "# The EU struggles to unify around a Gaza cease-fire call but work on peace moves continues\nBy **LORNE COOK**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 8:52 AM EST\n\n**BRUSSELS (AP)** - As the civilian death toll in Gaza continues to mount, a number of European Union leaders sought on Friday to use growing concern about Israel's military offensive against Hamas to convince their partners to rally around a united call for a ceasefire.\n\n\"The killing of innocent civilians really needs to stop,\" Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said. He said the EU must unite \"if we want to play a serious role in that conflict, and I think we have to because we will be wearing the consequences if things go further in a bad direction.\"\n\nMore than 18,700 Palestinians have now been killed, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-controlled territory, which does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths, since Hamas rampaged through southern Israel on Oct. 7.\n\nHamas killed about 1,200 people - mostly civilians - and took about 240 hostages.\n\nThe EU is the world's biggest provider of aid to the Palestinians and has been trying to use its diplomatic leverage as a 27-nation bloc to encourage peace moves. But despite being Israel's largest trading partner, the EU has mostly been ignored by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.\n\nBeyond this, the members have long-been divided over Israel and the Palestinians. Austria and Germany are among Israel's most vocal supporters. Their leaders went to Israel to show solidarity after the assault. Spain and Ireland often focus on the plight of the Palestinian people.\n\nHamas, for its part, is on the EU's list of terrorist groups.\n\nSince its attack, the bloc has struggled to strike a balance between condemning the Hamas attacks, supporting Israel's right to defend itself and ensuring that the rights of civilians on both sides are protected under international law.\n\nAt the United Nations on Tuesday, an increasing number of EU members voted for a resolution calling for a ceasefire - a total of 17 - and fewer abstained. Still, Austria and the Czech Republic voted against.\n\n\"We now have a clear majority of countries here in the European Union calling for a cease fire. I think that's the view of the people of Europe as well,\" Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said. \"There's no possible justification or excuse for what's happening there.\"\n\nBut Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas was less categorical. \"In (the) U.N. we were not united as a European Union. But we will hear the worries and like we always do try to work out the compromises,\" she told reporters at the EU's summit in Brussels.\n\nThe EU is more united around what should happen once the fighting stops for good.\n\nMindful that resentment and conflict in the wider Middle East and Gulf regions have been fueled by decades of Israeli-Palestinian tensions, the bloc is exploring ways to realize a long-held EU ideal - two states living peacefully side by side.\n\nThe EU has for years tried to promote the idea of an Israeli and a Palestinian state with borders set mostly as they were in 1967 - before Israel captured and occupied the West Bank and Gaza - with some land swaps agreed between them. Both would have Jerusalem as their shared capital.\n\nTop EU officials concede that their international peace efforts so far haven't been effective. This is the fifth war between Israel and Hamas, and the number of deaths in Gaza far exceeds the combined tally of those killed in the previous four, which is estimated to be around 4,000.\n\nAn internal discussion paper on the way ahead - a text seen by The Associated Press - insists that the EU must develop a \"comprehensive approach.\" Officials believe a \"whole of Palestine\" approach that has Gaza as part of a future Palestinian state remains the most viable option.\n\nThe capability of the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank but not Gaza, is \"of key importance for the viability and legitimacy\" of a two-state solution. It noted that Arab states will only get involved if their efforts lead to \"a genuine peace process that results in the two-state solution.\"\n\nEU efforts, the document said, should focus on support for an international conference, only \"not as a singular event but as part of a peace process plan.\" Israeli and Palestinian foreign ministers should be separately invited to EU meetings \"to maintain the dialogue with both.\"\n\nBut in the region, talk of a two-state solution conjures up images of years of diplomatic failures, and for many in mourning it's simply too early to talk about peace."}
{"text": "# EU releasing 5 billion euros to Poland by year's end as new government works to restore rule of law\nDecember 15, 2023. 6:34 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BRUSSELS (AP)** - The European Union will by year's end transfer to Poland the first 5 billion euros in funding that was frozen over democratic backsliding under the previous government, the new Polish prime minister and the European Commission president said Friday.\n\nThe money is part of a larger tranche that was held up due to laws passed by the previous national conservative government that eroded the independence of judges - something that the EU deemed to be a violation of the democratic separation of powers.\n\nPolish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the 5 billion euros ($5.5 billion) was arriving symbolically in time for Christmas. The money is aimed at helping EU nations recover from the energy crisis that followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year, and reduce their dependence on Russian fossil fuels.\n\n\"This is not just a gift. This is serious money earmarked for our energy sovereignty and we will try to spend this money very quickly and wisely,\" he said at a news conference alongside EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on the sidelines of a summit of the 27 member states.\n\nThe money will start to flow due to pledges by Tusk's government to restore the rule of law but more steps have to be taken before it is all released. Tusk and his coalition partners won Poland's national election pledging to restore rule of law and democratic values.\n\n\"We know that the rule of law is very important. It is about our place in Europe. It is about our common values,\" Tusk said.\n\nHe added that Polish lawyers, prosecutors, judges and citizens \"never agreed to Poland without the rule of law. And everyone in their capacity was trying to address this issue.\"\n\nVon der Leyen expressed her satisfaction.\n\n\"I welcome your commitment to put the rule of law at the top of your government agenda and your determination to address all the concerns that have been expressed over the last years by the European Court and by the Commission,\" she said."}
{"text": "# Prince Harry claims vindication in court victory as judge finds British tabloid hacked his phone\nBy **BRIAN MELLEY**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 2:19 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - Prince Harry's phone was hacked by journalists and private investigators working for the Daily Mirror who invaded his privacy by snooping on him unlawfully, a judge ruled Friday, delivering an historic victory for the estranged royal who broke from family tradition to take on the British press.\n\nPhone hacking was \"widespread and habitual\" at Mirror Group Newspapers, and executives at the papers covered it up, Justice Timothy Fancourt said in his 386-page ruling handed down in the High Court.\n\nThe newspapers were ordered to pay the Duke of Sussex 140,000 pounds ($180,000) for using unlawful information gathering in 15 of the 33 newspaper articles examined at trial.\n\nHarry said the ruling was \"vindicating and affirming\" and should serve as a warning to other news media that used similar practices, an overt reference to two tabloid publishers that face upcoming trials in lawsuits that make nearly identical allegations.\n\n\"Today is a great day for truth, as well as accountability,\" Harry said in a statement read by his lawyer outside court. \"I've been told that slaying dragons will get you burned. But in light of today's victory and the importance of doing what is needed for a free and honest press, it is a worthwhile price to pay. The mission continues.\"\n\nFancourt awarded the duke damages for the distress he suffered and a further sum to \"reflect the particular hurt and sense of outrage\" because two directors at Trinity Mirror knew about the activity and didn't stop it.\n\n\"They turned a blind eye to what was going on and positively concealed it,\" Fancourt said. \"Had the illegal conduct been stopped, the misuse of the duke's private information would have ended much sooner.\"\n\nHarry, 39, the alienated younger son of King Charles III, had sought 440,000 pounds ($560,000) as part of a crusade against the British media that bucked his family's longstanding aversion to litigation and made him the first senior member of the royal family to testify in court in over a century.\n\nHis appearance in the witness box over two days in June created a spectacle as he lobbed allegations that Mirror Group had employed journalists who eavesdropped on voicemails and hired private investigators to use deception and unlawful means to learn about him, other family members and associates.\n\n\"I believe that phone hacking was at an industrial scale across at least three of the papers at the time,\" Harry asserted in the High Court. \"That is beyond any doubt.\"\n\nBut Harry had little proof of his own to back his allegations.\n\nThe Mirror's lawyer showed him examples of stories that mirrored those published previously in competing papers and even stories that had come from Buckingham Palace and, in one instance, a story from an interview the prince himself had given to mark his 18th birthday.\n\nHarry repeatedly insisted there was no way the papers could have landed their scoops legitimately.\n\nThe judge said Harry had a tendency in his testimony \"to assume that everything published was the product of voicemail interception because phone hacking was rife within Mirror Group at the time.\"\n\nFancourt said Mirror Group was \"not responsible for all of the unlawful activity directed at the duke\" by the press, but found it had eavesdropped on his messages as early as 2003 and when hacking was \"extensive\" at the newspapers from 2006 to 2011.\n\nMirror Group welcomed the judgment for providing the \"necessary clarity to move forward from events that took place many years ago,\" Chief Executive Jim Mullen said.\n\n\"Where historical wrongdoing took place, we apologize unreservedly, have taken full responsibility and paid appropriate compensation,\" Mullen said in statement.\n\nAttorney Philippa Dempster, who wasn't involved in the case, said hundreds of people who had articles written about them decades ago that contained private information from questionable sources may now be inspired to bring a claim against the newspapers.\n\n\"This is a landmark victory for the privacy rights of individuals and marks another clear line in the sand for press standards,\" Dempster said. \"It shows that the courts are willing to reach back into the past, sift through evidence and hold those who practiced the so-called 'dark arts' of the press to account.\"\n\nThe case is the first of three lawsuits Harry has filed against the tabloids over allegations of phone hacking or some form of unlawful information gathering. They form the front line of attack in what he says is his life's mission to reform the media.\n\nHarry's beef with the news media runs deep and is cited throughout his memoir, \"Spare.\" He blames paparazzi for causing the car crash that killed his mother, Princess Diana, and he said intrusions by journalists led him and his wife, Meghan, to leave royal life for the U.S. in 2020.\n\nHarry alleged that Mirror Group used unlawful means to produce nearly 150 stories on his early life between 1996 and 2010, including his romances, injuries and alleged drug use. The reporting caused great distress, he said in sometimes emotional testimony, but was hard to prove because the newspapers destroyed records.\n\nOf the 33 articles at the center of the trial, Mirror denied using unlawful reporting methods for 28 and made no admissions concerning the remaining five.\n\nFancourt previously tossed out Harry's hacking claims against the publisher of The Sun. He is allowing Harry and actor Hugh Grant, who has made similar claims, to proceed to trial on allegations that News Group Newspapers journalists used other unlawful methods to snoop on them.\n\nAnother judge recently gave Harry the go-ahead to take a similar case to trial against the publisher of the Daily Mail, rejecting the newspaper's efforts to throw out the lawsuit. Harry is joined in that litigation by Elton John, actors Elizabeth Hurley, Sadie Frost and others.\n\nAttorney Michael Gardner, who was not involved in the case, said the judgment will get the attention of other publishers facing trial, particularly after the judge called out higher-ups who were aware of the unlawful activity.\n\n\"Overall, the media organizations that Harry is still suing will be worried that this will give him a lift and strengthen his determination to pursue them,\" Gardner said. \"To the extent that Harry's other cases could implicate individuals at other media groups, then clearly there will be concerns there.\"\n\nPhone hacking by British newspapers dates back more than two decades to a time when unethical journalists used an unsophisticated method of phoning the numbers of royals, celebrities, politicians and sports stars and, when prompted to leave a message, punched in default passcodes to eavesdrop on voicemails.\n\nThe practice erupted into a full-blown scandal in 2011 when Rupert Murdoch's News of the World was revealed to have intercepted messages of a murdered girl, relatives of deceased British soldiers and victims of a bombing. Murdoch closed the paper.\n\nNewspapers were later found to have used more intrusive means such as phone tapping, home bugging and obtaining flight information and medical records.\n\nMirror Group Newspapers said it has paid more than 100 million pounds ($128 million) in other phone hacking lawsuits over the years, but denied wrongdoing in Harry's case. It said it used legitimate reporting methods to get information on the prince.\n\nAt the start of the trial, Mirror Group apologized \"unreservedly\" for one instance when it admitted to hiring a private investigator for a story about Harry partying at a nightclub in February 2004. Although the article, headlined \"Sex on the beach with Harry,\" wasn't among those at issue in the trial, Mirror Group said he should be compensated 500 pounds ($637).\n\nHarry brought the case along with three other claimants, including two members of Britain's longest-running TV soap opera, \"Coronation Street.\"\n\nThe judge found all had legitimate claims but he tossed out cases brought by actor Nikki Sanderson and Fiona Wightman, the former wife of comedian Paul Whitehouse, because they were filed too late. He awarded actor Michael Turner 31,000 pounds ($40,000).\n\nThe trial was a test case against Mirror Group and the verdict could influence the outcome of hacking claims made by the estate of the late singer George Michael, former Girls Aloud member Cheryl and former soccer player Ian Wright.\n\nHarry's case is also not resolved. He could receive additional compensation over the remaining 115 articles that were not examined at trial.\n\nThe judge told the parties to work out an agreement on those or they would have to go to trial again."}
{"text": "# Denmark widens terror investigation that coincides with arrests of alleged Hamas members in Germany\nBy **JAN M. OLSEN**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 10:17 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP)** - Denmark is holding two people in custody and four others are the target of a terrorism investigation, a prosecutor said Friday, in a case that coincided with an arrest in the Netherlands and several in Germany of alleged Hamas members.\n\nAuthorities in Germany said three people arrested there were suspected of preparing for attacks on Jewish institutions in Europe. Danish authorities said that one person was arrested in the Netherlands, but it wasn't clear if there were any ties to the Hamas investigation in Germany.\n\nDenmark hasn't cited an alleged Hamas link in its investigation. The two people being held in Denmark were ordered to remain in pretrial detention until Jan. 9. Danish media identified them as a man in his 50s and a 19-year-old woman.\n\nDanish intelligence agency PET on Thursday announced the arrests of three people on suspicion of plotting to carry out \"an act of terror.\" One of them, identified by Danish media as a 29-year-old man, was released, prosecutor Anders Larsson said early Friday after a night-long custody hearing at a Copenhagen court.\n\nLarsson also said that four other people were held in \"pretrial custody in absentia,\" but he didn't say whether authorities knew their whereabouts or if an active search for them was underway. Without elaborating, he said there was \"still someone at large.\"\n\nNone of the suspects can be identified because of a court order, and the custody hearing was held behind \"double closed doors\" - meaning no details were available about the case, which is shrouded in secrecy.\n\nGerman prosecutors allege that the three men detained in Germany on Thursday were tasked with finding a previously set-up underground Hamas weapons cache in Europe. \"The weapons were due to be taken to Berlin and kept in a state of readiness in view of potential terrorist attacks against Jewish institutions in Europe,\" they said.\n\nOn Friday, a judge ordered the three men detained in Berlin to be held in custody pending a possible indictment for being members of a foreign terrorist organization, prosecutors said. A fourth suspect in the German case was taken into custody on Thursday in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam.\n\nGerman prosecutors alleged the suspects \"have been longstanding members of Hamas and have participated in Hamas operations abroad.\" They said the suspects were closely linked to the leadership of Hamas' military wing, which is considered a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union.\n\nEarlier this month, the EU's home affairs commissioner, Ylva Johansson, warned that Europe faced a \"huge risk of terrorist attacks\" over the Christmas holiday period amid the Israel-Hamas war.\n\nIn Brussels, where she attended a European Union summit, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen mentioned the Danish, German and Dutch cases but declined to tie them together. She said the wider picture for security in Europe was worrying.\n\n\"We have seen how ships are attacked in the Red Sea off Yemen,\" she told a press conference in reference to a ballistic missile fired by Yemen's Houthi rebels that slammed into a cargo ship Friday in the Red Sea, following another attack only hours earlier that struck a separate vessel.\n\n\"Individually, these incidents are serious and worrying, but together they paint a picture of something bigger. That we are facing a more serious and complex threat picture,\" she said. \"It is very, very serious.\""}
{"text": "# Hungary's Orbán says he won't hesitate to slam the brakes on Ukraine's EU membership\nBy **JUSTIN SPIKE**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 1:42 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP)** - Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said Friday his country will have plenty of opportunities in the future to interrupt Ukraine's process of joining the European Union, a day after the right-wing leader's stunning turnaround allowed an EU summit to move forward on bringing the war-torn country into the bloc.\n\nOrbán had spent weeks vigorously declaring that his country would not consent to the EU beginning talks with Ukraine on its eventual membership, arguing such a decision would be catastrophic and that Kyiv was unprepared to begin the process.\n\nBut in a dramatic reversal in Brussels on Thursday, Orbán left the room where the leaders of the EU's 27 member nations were debating the measure and allowed a unanimous vote of 26 to approve the start of accession talks for Kyiv.\n\nIn an interview Friday with Hungarian state radio, Orbán said that EU leaders told him he would \"lose nothing\" by dropping his veto since he'd have chances in the future to block Ukraine's accession if he chose to - something he vowed to do if it appeared Hungary's interests were at risk.\n\n\"Their decisive argument was that Hungary loses nothing, given that the final word on Ukraine's membership has to be given by the national parliaments, 27 parliaments, including the Hungarian one,\" Orbán said.\n\n\"I made it clear that we will not hesitate for a moment if the financial and economic consequences of this bad decision will be paid by the Hungarians. Those who made this decision should be the ones who pay,\" he said. \"If necessary, we will slam the brakes.\"\n\nThe decision by EU leaders to move forward on Ukraine's membership - a process that could take many years - was met with jubilation in Kyiv, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy welcoming the agreement as \"a victory for Ukraine. A victory for all of Europe.\"\n\nBut the results of Thursday's summit were mixed as Orbán blocked a 50-billion-euro ($54-billion) package of financial aid that Ukraine desperately needs to stay afloat, a major blow to Zelenskyy after he failed this week to persuade U.S. lawmakers to approve an additional $61 billion for his war effort.\n\nCharles Michel, the president of the European Council, said EU leaders would reconvene in January in an effort to break the deadlock.\n\nIt was not the first time Orbán had derailed EU plans to provide funding to Ukraine. The nationalist leader is widely considered to be Russian President Vladimir Putin's closest ally in the EU, and has been accused by his critics of promoting Moscow's interests over those of his EU and NATO allies.\n\nOrbán has advocated for an immediate end to the fighting and pushed for peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv, though he has not detailed what such a step would entail for Ukraine's territorial integrity.\n\nOn Friday, Orbán accused his EU partners of seeking to prolong the war, and said providing more money for Kyiv was \"an immediate violation of (Hungary's) interests.\"\n\n\"The situation in Ukraine is bad, so no more money should be sent to the war,\" he said. \"The war should be stopped and there should be a cease-fire and peace talks. Instead, now they want to give money to keep the war going.\""}
{"text": "# Hague court rejects bid to ban transfer to Israel of F-35 fighter jet parts from Dutch warehouse\nDecember 15, 2023. 9:48 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP)** - A Dutch court on Friday rejected a request by a group of human rights and humanitarian organizations to order a halt to the transfer to Israel of parts for F-35 fighter jets.\n\nThe organizations went to court Dec. 4 arguing that delivery of parts for the aircraft makes the Netherlands complicit in possible war crimes being committed by Israel in its war with Hamas. The parts are stored in a warehouse in the Dutch town of Woensdrecht.\n\nIn a written statement, the Hague District Court said the judge who heard the civil case concluded that the government of the Netherlands \"weighed the relevant interests\" before agreeing to the delivery of parts.\n\nLawyer Liesbeth Zegveld told the court that the Dutch government decided to continue transferring F-35 parts to Israel even after the deadly Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas triggered the Israel-Hamas war.\n\n\"The warning that the fighter jets can contribute to serious breaches of the laws of war does not, for the (Dutch) state, outweigh its economic interests and diplomatic reputation,\" Zegveld said.\n\nGovernment lawyer Reimer Veldhuis told the judge hearing the civil case that a ban on transfers from the Netherlands would effectively be meaningless as \"the United States would deliver these parts to Israel from another place.\"\n\nZegveld said she would appeal the decision.\n\nShe said \"human rights are put behind or after or lower than political foreign policy interests. That is amazing given what's happening in Gaza.\""}
{"text": "# Declared missing as a child, British teenager lives off-grid for 6 years, then pops up in France\nBy **JILL LAWLESS** and **JOHN LEICESTER**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 2:50 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LE PECQ, France (AP)** - The vehicle's headlights silhouetted the exhausted teenager walking alone in the rain in deepest rural France, with a skateboard tucked under his arm.\n\n\"I said to myself, 'That's strange. It's 3 am in the morning, it's raining, he's all by himself on the road between two villages,\" delivery driver Fabien Accidini recounted.\n\nFrom there, the story gets stranger still. The youngster, it turned out, was Alex Batty, a 17-year-old from Britain who had been missing since 2017.\n\nBritish and French authorities confirmed on Friday that the teenager found by Accidini this week was the boy who vanished at age 11, when his mother and grandfather took him on what was meant to be a two-week family holiday in Spain.\n\nInstead, it turned out to be a six-year odyssey through Morocco, Spain and southwest France, living an off-the-grid life.\n\nUntil this week. Batty suddenly popped back up on the radar on Wednesday. That's when Accidini found him alone on the remote French road and delivered him to the safe keeping of French police.\n\nThe youngster told French investigators that he, his mother and her father had moved from house to house, carrying their own solar panels, growing their own food, living with other families, meditating and contemplating reincarnation and other esoteric subjects.\n\n\"It was a nomadic life,\" said police officer Lea Chambonnière. \"The only constants, the only things they carried with them, were the solar panels and their vegetable plants.\"\n\nThe teenager decided to put an end to his roaming, parting ways with his mother after she told him she wanted them to move again - to Finland, said French prosecutor Antoine Leroy. He and Chambonnière, a commander in the gendarmerie, spoke at a news conference in the southwestern French city of Toulouse.\n\n\"When his mother indicated that she intended to leave for Finland with him, this young man understood that this journey had to stop,\" the prosecutor said.\n\nHe said he couldn't employ the term 'sect' to describe how the mother, grandfather and Batty lived. \"The term he uses himself is 'spiritual community,'\" he said.\n\n\"He was never locked up,\" he added. \"But he was always obliged to live in these conditions.\"\n\nUntil he decided to go his own way. Batty walked for four nights - resting during the days - and fed himself with \"different things that he found in fields or gardens\" before the delivery driver picked him up, the prosecutor said. Batty told police he'd been aiming for Toulouse, hoping authorities there would return him to the United Kingdom to be reunited with his grandmother, who had custody of him before he vanished as a child.\n\nThe prosecutor said they'll be reunited in the U.K. this weekend.\n\n\"I cannot begin to express my relief and happiness that Alex has been found safe and well,\" the grandmother, Susan Caruana, said in a statement released by British police.\n\nShe said they spoke by video call and \"it was so good to hear his voice and see his face again. I can't wait to see him.\"\n\nThe mother, Melanie Batty, has probably left for Finland, the prosecutor said. The grandfather, David Batty, is thought to have died about six months ago, he said. Both are sought by British police in connection with the youngster's disappearance.\n\nAfter failing to return to the U.K. from the 2017 trip to Spain, the trio spent about two years in Morocco before traveling back via Spain to southwestern France, where they appear to have spent the last two years roaming in the region of the Pyrenees mountains.\n\nBut Batty \"does not know exactly where he was, which is very surprising,\" the prosecutor said. \"We will dig a bit.\"\n\nThe delivery driver who found him spotted the teen alone in the rain and dark with a flashlight, a rucksack and his skateboard. He stopped \"and asked if he was OK, what he was doing there, if he needed help and if he wanted me to drop him in a village,\" Accidini told French broadcaster BFMTV.\n\nInitially, Batty was suspicious, giving a false name, Zac, but he was also \"very, very tired,\" Accidini said. So he climbed aboard and they got chatting while Accidini finished his deliveries.\n\n\"Once he felt reassured, he gave me his real name and told me that he had been kidnapped by his mother five years ago,\" Accidini said. The teen added \"that he'd been in France for the past two years in a spiritual community that was a bit strange with his mother who is also a bit strange, a bit loopy.\"\n\n\"He'd had enough. He said, 'I am 17. I need a future.' He didn't see a future for him there.\"\n\nBatty used Accidini's mobile phone to send a message to his grandmother. Accidini showed it to BFM.\n\nIt read: \"Hello grandma it is me Alex i am in France Toulouse i really hope that you receive this message i love you i want to come home.\""}
{"text": "# Migrant dies and another is in critical condition after boat partially deflates in English Channel\nBy **PAN PYLAS**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 8:06 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - A boat carrying more than 60 migrants encountered difficulty Friday as it attempted to make the dangerous crossing across the English Channel from France, and authorities said one person died and another was hospitalized in critical condition after a rescue operation.\n\nFrench maritime authorities said in a statement that the boat carrying the migrants had partially deflated and that the individual who died was unconscious when rescue ships arrived. They said another person was in critical condition and flown by helicopter to a hospital in the French port of Calais.\n\nRescue vessels picked up 66 people in all, including the person who died, after the boat in distress was spotted around five miles (8 kilometers) off the coast of Grand-Fort-Philippe at around 12:30 a.m. local time. The U.K. coastguard said it sent a helicopter to assist the French authorities coordinating the operation.\n\nThe French coast around Calais has long been a jumping-off point for people fleeing conflict and poverty around the world seeking to reach Britain, often via dangerous and sometimes deadly sea journeys across one of the world's busiest shipping channels.\n\nMore than 29,000 migrants have arrived in the U.K. this year after crossing the Channel, the second highest annual total to date since records began in 2018.\n\nThough sharply down from last year's 46,000, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has pledged to \"stop the boats\" and is currently trying to win approval from lawmakers for a controversial plan to send some asylum-seekers to Rwanda.\n\nFollowing confirmation of the latest death in the Channel, Britain's interior minister, James Cleverly, said the government \"must and will do more.\"\n\n\"The incident in the Channel last night is a horrific reminder of the people-smugglers' brutality,\" he said on X, formerly known as Twitter.\n\nA bill that Cleverly is steering through Parliament seeks to overcome a ruling by the U.K. Supreme Court that the plan to send migrants who arrive from across the English Channel to Rwanda - where they would stay permanently - is illegal.\n\nThe Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill faces criticism both from centrists in the governing Conservative Party who think it skirts with breaking international law, and from lawmakers on the party's right, who say it doesn't go far enough to ensure migrants who arrive in the U.K. without permission can be deported.\n\nThe main opposition Labour Party which is far ahead in opinion polls ahead of a general election next year, has promised to ditch the plan that it has derided as a \"gimmick.\" The party says the British government's priority should be breaking up the smuggling gangs that facilitate migrant boat crossings and promoting greater cooperation across Europe.\n\nEnver Solomon, chief executive of the U.K. based Refugee Council, said these \"appalling deaths\" were all to common and added urgency to the need to \"put in place safe routes so people don't have to take dangerous journeys across the world's busiest shipping lane.\"\n\n\"Instead, the government is pushing ahead with its unworkable and unprincipled Rwanda plan as well as shutting down existing safe ways to get to the U.K.,\" he said."}
{"text": "# The Vatican's 'trial of the century,' a Pandora's box of unintended revelations, explained\nBy **NICOLE WINFIELD**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 12:10 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**VATICAN CITY (AP)** - Verdicts are expected Saturday for a cardinal and nine other defendants in the most complicated financial trial in the Vatican's modern history: a case featuring a Hollywood-worthy cast of characters, unseemly revelations about the Holy See and questions about Pope Francis ' own role in the deals.\n\nThe trial had initially been seen as a showcase for Francis' reforms and his willingness to crack down on alleged financial misdeeds in the Vatican, which long had a reputation as an offshore tax haven.\n\nBut after 2 1/2 years of hearings, no real smoking gun emerged to support the prosecution's hypothesis of a grand conspiracy to defraud the pope of millions of euros (dollars) in charitable donations.\n\nEven if some convictions are handed down, the overall impression is that the \"trial of the century\" turned into something of a Pandora's box of unintended revelations about Vatican vendettas, incompetence and even ransom payments that ultimately cost the Holy See reputational harm.\n\n## WHAT WAS THE TRIAL ABOUT?\nAfter a two-year investigation that featured unprecedented police raids in the Apostolic Palace, Vatican prosecutors in 2021 issued a 487-page indictment accusing 10 people of numerous financial crimes, including fraud, embezzlement, extortion, corruption, money laundering and abuse of office.\n\nThe main focus involved the Holy See's 350 million euro investment in a luxury London property. Prosecutors allege brokers and Vatican monsignors fleeced the Holy See of tens of millions of euros in fees and commissions, and then extorted the Holy See for 15 million euros ($16.5 million) to cede control of the property.\n\nThe original London investigation spawned two tangents that involved the star defendant, Cardinal Angelo Becciu, once one of Francis' top advisers and a onetime papal contender.\n\nChief prosecutor Alessandro Diddi is seeking prison sentences from three to 13 years for each of the 10 defendants, as well as the confiscation of some 415 million euros ($460 million) in damages and restitution.\n\n## HOW DOES THE CARDINAL FIT IN?\nBecciu wasn't originally under investigation in the London deal since he had been transferred from the Vatican secretariat of state to the saint-making office before the key London transactions occurred.\n\nBut he became enmeshed after prosecutors began looking into other deals, including 125,000 euros in Vatican money that he sent to a diocesan charity in his native Sardinia.\n\nProsecutors alleged embezzlement, since the charity was run by his brother. Becciu argued that the local bishop requested the money for a bakery to employ at-risk youths, and that the money remained in the diocesan coffers.\n\nBecciu is also accused of paying a Sardinian woman, Cecilia Marogna, for her intelligence services. Prosecutors traced some 575,000 euros in transfers from the Vatican to her Slovenian front company.\n\nBecciu said he thought the money was going to be used to pay a British security firm to negotiate the release of a Colombian nun who had been taken hostage by Islamic militants in Mali in 2017. Marogna, who is also on trial, denied wrongdoing.\n\n## THE MYSTERIOUS MONSIGNOR PERLASCA\nNo figure in the trial was as intriguing as Monsignor Alberto Perlasca, who ran the office that managed the Vatican's sovereign wealth fund, with estimated assets of 600 million euros (around $630 million).\n\nIt was Perlasca who signed the contracts in late 2018 giving operative control of the London property to London broker Gianluigi Torzi, another defendant who is accused of then extorting the Vatican for 15 million euros to get the property back.\n\nBecause of his intimate involvement in the deal, Perlasca was initially a prime suspect. But after his first round of questioning, he fired his lawyer, changed his story and began cooperating with prosecutors.\n\nPerlasca escaped indictment and was even allowed to be listed as an injured party, enabling him to possibly recover damages.\n\nOnly during the course of the trial did it emerge that Perlasca had been manipulated into changing his story to turn on Becciu, his former boss.\n\n## THE MYSTERIOUS WOMEN WHO COACHED HIM\nIn a trial that had plenty of surreal twists, perhaps none was as jaw-dropping as when a controversial figure from the Vatican's past emerged as having had a starring role in coaching Perlasca to change his testimony.\n\nPublic relations specialist Francesca Chaouqui had previously served on a papal commission tasked with investigating the Vatican's murky finances. She is known in Vatican circles for her role in the \"Vatileaks\" scandal of 2015-2016, when she was convicted by the same tribunal of conspiring to leak confidential Vatican documents to journalists and received a 10-month suspended sentence.\n\nChaouqui openly nurtured a grudge against Becciu because she blamed him for supporting her Vatileaks prosecution. She apparently saw the investigation into the London property as a chance to settle scores.\n\nAnd so it emerged in late 2022, when Perlasca was being questioned on the stand, that Chaouqui had engaged in an elaborate plot with a Perlasca family friend to persuade the prelate to turn on Becciu.\n\n\"I knew that sooner or later the moment would come and I would send you this message,\" Chaouqui wrote Perlasca in a text message that was entered into evidence. \"Because the Lord doesn't allow the good to be humiliated without repair. I pardon you Perlasca, but remember, you owe me a favor.\"\n\nDiddi, the prosecutor, hasn't said what, if any, charges are pending for anyone involved in the Perlasca testimony saga.\n\n## THE POPE'S OWN ROLE\nFrancis made clear early on that he strongly supported prosecutors in their investigation. But the trial produced evidence that his involvement went far beyond mere encouragement.\n\nDefense lawyers discovered that the pope had secretly issued four decrees during the investigation to benefit prosecutors, allowing them to conduct intercepts and detain suspects without a judge's warrant.\n\nLawyers cried foul, arguing such interference by an absolute monarch in a legal system where the pope exercises supreme legislative, executive and judicial power violated their clients' fundamental rights and robbed them of a fair trial.\n\nDiddi argued the decrees served as a \"guarantee\" for the suspects.\n\nIn addition, witnesses testified that Francis was very much aware of key aspects of the deals in question, and in some cases explicitly authorized them:\n\n- The former head of the financial intelligence agency who is on trial said Francis explicitly asked him to help the secretariat of state negotiate the exit deal with Torzi;\n\n- Becciu testified Francis had approved spending up to 1 million euros to negotiate the nun's freedom;\n\n- Becciu's onetime secretary, who is on trial, said Francis was so pleased with the outcome of the Torzi negotiation that he paid for a celebratory group dinner at a fancy Roman fish restaurant.\n\nIn a religious hierarchy where obedience to superiors is a foundational element of a vocation, defense lawyers argued their underling clients merely obeyed orders from the pope on down. That included negotiating the exit strategy with Torzi, who was previously unknown to the Vatican but was brought into the deal by a friend of Francis.\n\n\"Torzi was introduced by Giuseppe Milanese, who was a friend of the pope's, so why wouldn't we trust him?\" said Massimo Bassi, a lawyer for another of the defendants.\n\nMilanese wasn't charged. Torzi denied wrongdoing."}
{"text": "# Ukraine's a step closer to joining the EU. Here's what it means, and why it matters\nBy **ANGELA CHARLTON**  \nDecember 14, 2023. 9:43 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BRUSSELS (AP)** - Ukraine got a green light Thursday to start sped-up talks on joining the European Union. That's a big boost for war-ravaged Ukraine and a loud message to Vladimir Putin - but it could be years before the country actually becomes a member of the EU.\n\nHere's a look at what Thursday's decision means, and why joining the EU is especially important, and especially hard, for Ukraine.\n\n## WHAT IS THE EU AND HOW DO YOU JOIN?\nThe European Union was born after World War II as a trading bloc with a bold ambition: to prevent another war between Germany and France. The six founding members were Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.\n\nSince then, the EU has steadily expanded to contain 27 democratic nations, many from the former communist bloc in Eastern Europe, inspired by the idea that economic and political integration among nations is the best way to promote prosperity and peace.\n\nThis notably led to the creation of the shared euro currency in 1999, the continent's open borders, and trailblazing rules to reduce carbon emissions and regulate tech giants.\n\nTo join the EU, candidate countries must go through a lengthy process to align their laws and standards with those of the bloc and show that their institutions and economies meet democratic norms. Launching accession talks requires approval by consensus from the current member nations.\n\n## WHY JOINING IS IMPORTANT TO UKRAINE\nUkraine is one of several countries that have long wanted to join the EU, seeing it as a path to wealth and stability. While the EU is not a military alliance like NATO, membership in the bloc is seen by some as a rampart against Russian influence.\n\nUkraine officially applied for EU accession less than a week after Russia invaded in February 2022. Its capital, Kyiv, faced the threat of capture, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's government faced the threat of collapse.\n\nThe start of membership talks less than two years later is only one step in a long journey. But it sends a strong signal of solidarity with Ukraine just as U.S. support for Ukraine's military is faltering and a Ukrainian counteroffensive is stalled - and as Putin appears increasingly emboldened.\n\nAnd it offers a ray of hope for Ukraine even as EU members failed Thursday to agree on a more immediate boost in the form of 50 billion euros ($55 billion) in aid to keep the Ukrainian economy afloat.\n\n## WHY UKRAINE'S MEMBERSHIP JOURNEY IS ROCKY\nEU officials had said talks couldn't officially begin until Ukraine addresses multiple issues including corruption, lobbying concerns and restrictions that might prevent national minorities from studying and reading in their own language. While EU officials say Ukraine has made progress on these issues in recent months, it still has a long way to go.\n\nEvery EU country has gradually agreed to support Ukraine's bid - except Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Putin's greatest ally within the EU. Orban maintains that Ukraine isn't ready to even start talking about EU membership. In a surprise move, Orban stepped aside Thursday and abstained from the vote to allow Ukraine's membership talks to begin.\n\nIt is just a beginning, and many steps remain.\n\nDebt crises, waves of migration and Brexit had all contributed to the bloc's skittishness toward expanding its ranks in recent years. So, too, did the growth of Euro-skeptic political forces in many member countries.\n\nBut the urgency created by Russia's invasion and Ukraine's request for expedited consideration upended the EU's go-slow approach to adding new members and reversed years of \"enlargement fatigue.\"\n\nThursday's decision also has an impact on other would-be members, who feel the EU is showing favoritism.\n\n## WHO ARE THE OTHER CANDIDATES?\nTurkey applied for membership in 1987, received candidate status in 1999, and had to wait until 2005 to start talks for actual entry. Only one of more than 30 negotiating \"chapters\" has been completed in the years since, and the whole process is at a standstill as a result of various disputes.\n\nSeveral countries in the Balkans, meanwhile, have become discouraged by the bloc's failure to live up to its lofty membership promises.\n\nNorth Macedonia submitted its entry bid in 2004. Even after subsequently changing its name to settle a longstanding dispute with EU member Greece, the country is still waiting for membership talks to begin because Bulgaria threw up a hurdle related to ethnicity and language.\n\nBosnia remains plagued by ethnic divisions that make reform an almost impossible challenge. The commission said last month that it should only start membership talks after more progress is made. It expressed concern about the justice system and other rights failures in the Bosnian Serb part of the country.\n\nSerbia and Kosovo refuse to normalize their relations and stand last in the EU's line."}
{"text": "# Rights expert blasts Italy's handling of gender-based violence and discrimination against women\nDecember 14, 2023. 1:42 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ROME (AP)** - Violence and discrimination against women in Italy is a \"prevailing and urgent concern,\" a European expert on human rights said Thursday in a scathing report that comes amid a national outcry over a gruesome murder of a young woman allegedly by her ex-boyfriend.\n\nDunja Mijatovic, commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe, faulted Italy across multiple areas, lamenting that Italian courts and police sometimes revictimize the victims of gender-based violence and that women have increasingly less access to abortion services. She also noted Italy's last-place in the EU ranking for gender equality in the workplace.\n\nThe report followed a visit by Mijatovic to Italy in June and focused also on the country's handling of migrants and press freedom. But the section of her report on women comes amid a national reckoning on gender-based violence following the latest case that has grabbed headlines for a month.\n\nGiulia Cecchettin, a 22-year-old who was about to graduate with a bioengineering degree, was found dead, her throat slit, in a ditch in a remote area of the Alpine foothills on Nov. 18. She had disappeared along with her ex-boyfriend a week earlier after meeting him for a burger.\n\nFilippo Turetta, 21, was later arrested in Germany, and is being held in an Italian jail pending an investigation to bring charges. Turetta's lawyer has said he admitted to the crime under prosecutors' questioning.\n\nCecchetin was among 102 women murdered through mid-November this year in Italy, more than half by current or former intimate partners, according to the Interior Ministry.\n\nWhile Italy has made some progress and passed notable legislation to punish perpetrators of violence against women, courts interpret sex crimes differently and there are uneven, regional disparities in access and funding to shelters and other services for victims of domestic violence, the report said.\n\n\"There is an urgent need to combat sexism and prejudice against women among law enforcement, prosecution and judicial authorities, which contribute toward the low prosecution and conviction rates in cases of violence against women and impunity for perpetrators,\" the report said.\n\nIt called for better training of personnel to improve treatment of victims and prevent them from being revictimized.\n\nIn it's official response, the Italian government said the report was incomplete and in some cases incorrect, stressing that new prevention initiatives and funding are under way. It also noted provisions of its five-year strategic plan to address gender equality.\n\nItaly ranks 13th in the European Union's Gender Equality Index, under the EU average and the worst score for any major European economy. The index ranks EU countries on certain benchmarks in economic, political, education and health-based criteria. In the criteria of gender equality in the workplace, Italy ranks last altogether.\n\nMotherhood in general and the COVID-19 pandemic in particular have exacerbated the gender gap in the workplace, with 38% of women changing their employment status for family reasons, compared to 12% of men, the report said.\n\nThe gender pay gap is also widening, particularly in the private sector where women earn up to 20% and in some cases 24% less than their male counterparts, the report said.\n\nMijatovic blamed a deeply rooted culture of \"entrenched stereotypes\" about women, their negative portrayal in media and \"sexist hate speech\" in public debate as part of the problem. In its response, the Italian government strongly protested the assertion, noting above all the number of women in public office, starting with Premier Giorgia Meloni, Italy's first female head of government.\n\nOn sexual and reproductive health, the commissioner lamented that women in Italy have uneven access to abortion, which has been legal since 1978. She cited bureaucratic obstacles, regional disparities and widespread conscientious objection by doctors who refuse to terminate pregnancies."}
{"text": "# Finland to close again entire border with Russia as reopening of 2 crossing points lures migrants\nBy **JARI TANNER**  \nDecember 14, 2023. 12:53 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**HELSINKI (AP)** - Finland's government has decided to seal again, effective Friday, the Nordic country's entire eastern frontier due to a continuing influx of migrants at the two crossing points on the border with Russia that were reopened on a temporary basis early Thursday.\n\nInterior Minister Mari Rantanen told reporters that a decision by Prime Minister Petteri Orpo's Cabinet earlier this week to temporarily reopen the southeastern Vaalimaa and Niirala crossing points today was meant as a trial to see whether the migrant \"phenomenon\" still exists at the border.\n\nThe Finnish Border Guard reported that dozens of migrants without proper documentation or visas had arrived at the two checkpoints by late Thursday. The number of migrants was predicted to increase rapidly at Vaalimaa and Niirala checkpoints, prompting the Finnish government's to react quickly and close them as of 8 p.m. Friday until Jan. 14, Rantanen said.\n\nAt the end of November, Orpo's government opted to close the entire 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) border for at least two weeks over concerns that Moscow was using migrants to destabilize Finland in an alleged act of \"hybrid warfare.\"\n\nFinnish authorities say that nearly 1,000 migrants without proper visas or valid documentation had arrived at the border since August until end-November, with more than 900 of them in November alone. The numbers are much higher than usual.\n\nFinland accuses Russia of deliberately ushering migrants - most of whom are seeking asylum in Finland - to the border zone, which is normally heavily controlled by Russia's Federal Security Service, or FSB, on the Russian side. The Kremlin has denied that Russia is encouraging migrants to enter Finland and has said that it regrets the Finnish border closures.\n\nThere are eight crossing points for passenger and vehicle traffic on the Finland-Russia land border, and one rail checkpoint for cargo trains. As of Friday evening, only the rail checkpoint will remain open between the two countries.\n\nEarlier December, Finnish authorities said the vast majority of the migrants who arrived in November hailed from three countries: Syria, Somalia and Yemen.\n\nFinland, a nation of 5.6 million people, makes up a significant part of NATO's northeastern flank and acts as the European Union's external border in the north."}
{"text": "# Storm drenches Florida and causes floods in South Carolina as it moves up East Coast\nDecember 17, 2023. 7:27 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**GEORGETOWN, S.C. (AP)** - An intense late-year storm barreled up the East Coast on Sunday with heavy rains and strong winds that shattered rainfall records, forced water rescues from flooded streets and washed out holiday celebrations.\n\nAuthorities rescued dozens of motorists stranded by floodwaters in South Carolina's waterfront community of Georgetown, Georgetown County spokesperson Jackie Broach said. More than 9 inches (22.9 centimeters) of rain fell in the area situated between Charleston and Myrtle Beach since late Saturday.\n\n\"It's not just the areas that we normally see flooding, that are flood-prone,\" Broach said. \"It's areas that we're not really expecting to have flooding issues... It's like a tropical storm, it just happens to be in December.\"\n\nThe tide in Charleston Harbor hit its fourth highest level on record and was \"well above the highest tide for a non-tropical system,\" according to the National Weather Service.\n\nRising sea levels driven by human-caused climate change mean even relatively weak weather systems can now produce storm surges previously associated with hurricanes, said Meteorologist Jeff Masters, co-founder of the Weather Underground. In South Carolina that's worsened by natural subsidence along the coast.\n\nBy 2050, Charleston is expected to see another 14 inches (35.6 centimeters) of sea level rise, Masters said.\n\n\"In Charleston, this is the sixth time this year already that they've had a major coastal flood. Most of those would not have been major flooding 100 years ago, because the sea level has risen that much,\" he said.\n\nThe storm was forecast to gain strength as it tracked along the Georgia and Carolina coasts, producing heavy rain and gusty winds before sweeping into New England by Monday morning, the weather service said. Wind gusts of 35 mph to 45 mph (56 kph to 72 kph) could bring down trees, especially on saturated ground.\n\nThere were numerous road closures in Charleston and across South Carolina's Lowcountry, while stranded cars littered streets.\n\nThere were no reports of injuries or deaths in Georgetown County, Broach said. Gusty winds were strong enough to topple some signs and trees. Outdoor holiday decorations were tossed about, she said.\n\nWater rescues also took place on Kiawah and Seabrook islands, according to media outlets.\n\nCharleston International Airport had more than 3 inches (8 centimeters) of rain in 24 hours - almost five times the prior record set in 1975, according to the National Weather Service.\n\nFarther up the coast, minor to moderate coastal flooding was expected Sunday, according to the National Weather Service office in Wilmington, North Carolina.\n\nThere were more than 31,000 power outages in South Carolina, according to PowerOutage.us, along with over 14,000 in North Carolina and more than 11,000 in Florida.\n\nNew York Gov. Kathy Hochul warned of a possible 2 to 4 inches (5.1 to 10.2 centimeters) of rain, powerful winds and potential flooding in parts of the state. Flood watches were in effect in many locations in New York City, and high wind warnings were activated around the city and Long Island.\n\n\"We will get through this storm, but preparation is the key,\" New York Mayor Eric Adams said. City officials told residents to expect several hours of rain and possible delays during Monday morning's commute.\n\nColder air behind the storm will trigger lake-effect snow across the Great Lakes toward the Appalachians and upstate New York into Tuesday, the weather service said.\n\nThe storm dumped up to 5 inches (12.7 centimeters) of rain across Florida, inundating streets and forcing the cancellation of boat parades and other holiday celebrations.\n\nThe National Weather Service issued flood warnings and minor flooding advisories for a wide swath of the state, from the southwest Gulf Coast to Jacksonville. Major airports remained open, however, at the start of the busy holiday travel season.\n\n\"Today is not the day to go swimming or boating!\" Sheriff Carmine Marceno of Lee County, on Florida's southwestern coast, said on X, formerly known as Twitter.\n\nCoastal advisories were issued for much of Florida as strong winds churned waters in the Gulf and along the north Atlantic coast.\n\nThe storm could be good news for residents in southwest Florida who have been facing water restrictions and drought conditions heading into what normally is the region's dry season.\n\nThe weather service also warned of 2 to 4 inches (5.1 to 10.2 centimeters) of rain in parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, with the heaviest expected late Sunday night, and possible urban and small stream flooding and at least minor flooding to some rivers through Monday.\n\nForecasters also warned of strong winds in coastal areas, gale-force winds offshore, and moderate coastal flooding along Delaware Bay and widespread minor coastal flooding elsewhere.\n\nThe weather service said there is a slight risk of excessive rainfall over parts of New England through Monday morning, with the potential for flash flooding. Northern New England is expected to get the heaviest rain Monday through Tuesday morning."}
{"text": "# How much gerrymandering is too much? In New York, the answer could make or break Dems' House hopes\nBy **ANTHONY IZAGUIRRE**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 10:37 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**ALBANY, N.Y. (AP)** - New York's highest court last week gave Democrats a chance to redraw the state's congressional districts, a major victory as the party tries to win control of the U.S. House next year.\n\nNow the question is how far the state's Democrat-dominated Legislature will try to push the boundaries in crucial battleground districts to give their party an advantage, and how far the courts will let them.\n\nThe process will be closely watched for any sign of partisan gerrymandering - drawing lines that give one party an unfair advantage - which is forbidden by state law. And Republicans are expected to challenge the results in court as they try to retain their slim House majority.\n\nBut experts say it's unclear where the state's highest court will land on determining what's too partisan.\n\n\"There's no hard and fast definition or bright line to define partisan gerrymandering,\" said New York Law School professor Jeffrey Wice, who focuses on redistricting. \"There really is no bright line to know when a plan becomes too much of a partisan gerrymander. That's often based on a panel of experts and the decision of judges.\"\n\nPart of the uncertainty in New York comes from a decision by the state's highest court last year, when it threw out congressional maps drawn by Democrats that were criticized for oddly shaped lines that crammed the state's Republican voters into a few super districts.\n\nIn that ruling, the court focused more on questions over the procedural steps Democrats took to draw the lines and spent only a few paragraphs on whether the districts violated the state's gerrymandering prohibition.\n\nIt instead upheld lower court rulings that found \"clear evidence and beyond a reasonable doubt that the congressional map was unconstitutionally drawn with political bias\" and that \"the 2022 congressional map was drawn to discourage competition and favor democrats,\" based on testimony and analysis of previous maps.\n\nThe court then appointed a special master to draw a new set of congressional lines for the last election, which along with strong GOP turnout and dissatisfaction with Democratic policies, led to Republicans flipping seats in the New York City suburbs and winning control of the House.\n\nAfter the election, Democrats sued to toss the court-drawn maps, arguing that the state's bipartisan redistricting commission should get another chance to draft congressional lines. The court agreed in a decision last week.\n\nThe new maps will be first left to the commission, before the Legislature has a chance to approve or alter the lines.\n\nRichard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor with an extensive background on redistricting and government, said he thinks Democrats might err on the side of caution to avoid another long legal fight before the election.\n\n\"My guess is they're going to be more careful,\" Briffault said. \"They certainly would be wise to be more careful and not be too aggressive because they will surely be sued.\"\n\nDemocrats had already targeted the state as a battleground for the House next year. The party has set its sights on six seats it wants to flip in New York, with those potential pickups reversing or even exceeding the expected loss of at least three districts in North Carolina after a Republican gerrymander there.\n\nAt the same time, redistricting litigation is ongoing in several other states, including Florida, Georgia and Louisiana, where Democrats are hoping to make gains. Democrats also are expected to gain a seat in Alabama, where districts were revised after federal judges ruled that the original map enacted by Republican state officials had illegally diluted the voting power of Black residents.\n\n\"The parties are fighting these battles district by district in courtrooms across the country that are aimed at giving Democrats a better chance at the starting gate,\" said Wice. \"Each court victory counts in a major way.\"\n\nThe New York redistricting commission has been tasked with submitting a map to the state Legislature by Feb 28. But Republicans are already crying foul.\n\n\"For all their rhetoric about defending democracy, we see what occurred here in New York,\" said John Faso, a former congressman who is advising other Republicans on redistricting. \"The Democrats don't want to win districts at the polls. They want to win them in the backrooms of Albany.\""}
{"text": "# Florida Republican Party suspends chairman and demands his resignation amid rape investigation\nBy **BRENDAN FARRINGTON**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 4:02 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP)** - The Republican Party of Florida suspended Chairman Christian Ziegler and demanded his resignation during an emergency meeting Sunday, adding to calls by Gov. Ron DeSantis and other top officials for him to step down as police investigate a rape accusation against him.\n\nZiegler is accused of raping a woman with whom he and his wife, Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, had a prior consensual sexual relationship, according to police records.\n\n\"Christian Ziegler has engaged in conduct that renders him unfit for the office,\" the party's motion to censure Ziegler said, according to a document posted on the social media platform X by Lee County GOP Chairman Michael Thomason.\n\nZiegler tried to defend himself during the closed-door meeting, but the party board quickly took the action against him, Thompson said.\n\n\"Ziegler on soap box trying to defend himself, not working,\" Thompson posted before confirming the votes.\n\nThe party's executive committee will hold another vote in the future on whether to remove Ziegler.\n\nThe Sarasota Police Department is investigating the woman's accusation that Ziegler raped her at her apartment in October. Police documents say the Zieglers and the woman had planned a sexual threesome that day, but Bridget Ziegler was unable to make it. The accuser says Christian Ziegler arrived anyway and assaulted her.\n\nChristian Ziegler has not been charged with a crime and says he is innocent, contending the encounter was consensual.\n\nThe accusation also has caused turmoil for Bridget Ziegler, an elected member of the Sarasota School Board, though she is not accused of any crime. On Tuesday the board voted to ask her to resign. She refused.\n\nThe couple have been outspoken opponents of LGBTQ+ rights, and their relationship with another woman has sparked criticism and accusations of hypocrisy.\n\nIn addition to DeSantis, Republican Sens. Rick Scott and Marco Rubio, U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz and Florida's Republican House and Senate leaders have all called for Christian Ziegler's resignation."}
{"text": "# An order blocking enforcement of Ohio's abortion ban stands after the high court dismissed an appeal\nDecember 16, 2023. 1:19 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP)** - The Ohio Supreme Court has dismissed the state's challenge to a judge's order that has blocked enforcement of Ohio's near-ban on abortions for the past 14 months.\n\nThe ruling moves action in the case back to Hamilton County Common Pleas, where abortion clinics asked Judge Christian Jenkins this week to throw out the law following voters' decision to approve enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution.\n\nThe high court on Friday said the appeal was \" dismissed due to a change in the law.\"\n\nThe justices in March agreed to review a county judge's order that blocked enforcement of the abortion restriction and to consider whether clinics had legal standing to challenge the law. They ultimately denied Republican Attorney General Dave Yost's request that they launch their own review of the constitutional right to abortion, leaving such arguments for a lower court.\n\nThe clinics asked Jenkins on Thursday to block the abortion ban permanently on the heels of the amendment Ohio voters approved last month that ensures access to abortion and other reproductive health care.\n\nA law signed by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine in April 2019 prohibited most abortions after the first detectable \"fetal heartbeat.\" Cardiac activity can be detected as early as six weeks into pregnancy, before many women know they are pregnant.\n\nThe ban, initially blocked through a federal legal challenge, briefly went into effect when the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision was overturned last year. It was then placed back on hold in county court, as part of a subsequent lawsuit challenging it as unconstitutional under the state constitution.\n\nYost's office referred to a statement from Dec. 7 that \"the state is prepared to acknowledge the will of the people on the issue, but also to carefully review each part of the law for an orderly resolution of the case.\"\n\nThe abortion providers asked the lower court that initially blocked the ban to permanently strike it down. They cited Yost's own legal analysis, circulated before the vote, that stated that passage of the amendment would invalidate the state's six-week ban, stating, \"Ohio would no longer have the ability to limit abortions at any time before a fetus is viable.\""}
{"text": "# A Black woman was criminally charged after a miscarriage. It shows the perils of pregnancy post-Roe\nBy **JULIE CARR SMYTH**  \nDecember 16, 2023. 1:01 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP)** - Ohio was in the throes of a bitter debate over abortion rights this fall when Brittany Watts, 21 weeks and 5 days pregnant, began passing thick blood clots.\n\nThe 33-year-old Watts, who had not shared the news of her pregnancy even with her family, made her first prenatal visit to a doctor's office behind Mercy Health-St. Joseph's Hospital in Warren, a working-class city about 60 miles (100 kilometers) southeast of Cleveland.\n\nThe doctor said that, while a fetal heartbeat was still present, Watts' water had broken prematurely and the fetus she was carrying would not survive. He advised heading to the hospital to have her labor induced, so she could have what amounted to an abortion to deliver the nonviable fetus. Otherwise, she would face \"significant risk\" of death, according to records of her case.\n\nThat was a Tuesday in September. What followed was a harrowing three days entailing: multiple trips to the hospital; Watts miscarrying into, and then flushing and plunging, a toilet at her home; a police investigation of those actions; and Watts, who is Black, being charged with abuse of a corpse. That's a fifth-degree felony punishable by up to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine.\n\nHer case was sent last month to a grand jury. It has touched off a national firestorm over the treatment of pregnant women, and especially Black women, in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump elevated Watts' plight in a post to X, formerly Twitter, and supporters have donated more than $100,000 through GoFundMe for her legal defense, medical bills and trauma counseling.\n\nWhether abortion-seekers should face criminal charges is a matter of debate within the anti-abortion community, but, post-Dobbs, pregnant women like Watts, who was not even trying to get an abortion, have increasingly found themselves charged with \"crimes against their own pregnancies,\" said Grace Howard, assistant justice studies professor at San José State University.\n\n\"Roe was a clear legal roadblock to charging felonies for unintentionally harming pregnancies, when women were legally allowed to end their pregnancies through abortion,\" she said. \"Now that Roe is gone, that roadblock is entirely gone.\"\n\nMichele Goodwin, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of \"Policing The Womb,\" said those efforts have long overwhelmingly targeted Black and brown women.\n\nEven before Roe was overturned, studies show that Black women who visited hospitals for prenatal care were 10 times more likely than white women to have child protective services and law enforcement called on them, even when their cases were similar, she said.\n\n\"Post-Dobbs, what we see is kind of a wild, wild West,\" said Goodwin. \"You see this kind of muscle-flexing by district attorneys and prosecutors wanting to show that they are going to be vigilant, they're going to take down women who violate the ethos coming out of the state's legislature.\" She called Black women \"canaries in the coal mine\" for the \"hyper-vigilant type of policing\" women of all races might expect from the nation's network of health-care providers, law enforcers and courts now that abortion isn't federally protected.\n\nIn Texas, for example, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton mounted an aggressive and successful defense against a white Texas mother, Kate Cox, who sued for permission to skirt the state's restrictive abortion law because her fetus had a fatal condition.\n\nAt the time of Watts' miscarriage, abortion was legal in Ohio through 21 weeks, six days of pregnancy. Her lawyer, Traci Timko, said Watts left the hospital on the Wednesday when, coincidentally, her pregnancy arrived at that date - after sitting for eight hours awaiting care.\n\nIt turned out the delay was because hospital officials were deliberating over the legalities, Timko said. \"It was the fear of, is this going to constitute an abortion and are we able to do that,\" she said.\n\nAt the time, vigorous campaigning was taking place across Ohio over Issue 1, a proposed amendment to enshrine a right to abortion in Ohio's constitution. Some of the ads were harshly attacking abortions later in pregnancy, with opponents arguing the issue would allow the return of so-called \"partial-birth abortions\" and pregnancy terminations \"until birth.\"\n\nThe hospital did not return calls seeking confirmation and comment, but B. Jessie Hill, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland, said Mercy Health-St. Joseph's was in a bind.\n\n\"These are the razor's edge decisions that health care providers are being forced to make,\" she said. \"And all the incentives are pushing hospitals to be conservative, because on the other side of this is criminal liability. That's the impact of Dobbs.\"\n\nWatts had been admitted to the Catholic hospital twice that week with vaginal bleeding, but she left without being treated. A nurse told the 911 dispatcher that Watts returned no longer pregnant on that Friday. She said Watts told her, \"the baby's in her backyard in a bucket,\" and that she didn't want to have a child.\n\nTimko said Watts insists she doesn't recall saying the pregnancy was unwanted; it was unintended, but she had always wanted to give her mother a grandchild. Her lawyer believes Watts may have meant that she didn't want to fish what she knew was a dead fetus from the bucket of blood, tissue and feces that she'd scooped from her overflowing toilet.\n\n\"This 33-year-old girl with no criminal record is demonized for something that goes on every day,\" she told Warren Municipal Court Judge Terry Ivanchak during Watts' recent preliminary hearing.\n\nWarren Assistant Prosecutor Lewis Guarnieri told Ivanchak that Watts left home for a hair appointment after miscarrying, leaving the toilet clogged. Police would later find the fetus wedged in the pipes.\n\n\"The issue isn't how the child died, when the child died,\" Guarnieri told the judge, according to TV station WKBN. \"It's the fact the baby was put into a toilet, was large enough to clog up the toilet, left in that toilet, and she went on (with) her day.\"\n\nIn court, Timko bristled at Guarnieri's suggestion.\n\n\"You cannot be broadcasting any clearer that you just don't get it,\" she said in an interview, suggesting Watts was scared, anxious and traumatized by the experience. \"She's trying to protect Mama. She doesn't want to get her hair done. She wants to stop bleeding like crazy and start grieving her fetus, what she's just been through.\"\n\nAs chief counsel to the county's child assault protection unit, Assistant Trumbull County Prosecutor Diane Barber is the lead prosecutor on Watts' case.\n\nBarber said she couldn't speak specifically about the case other than to note that the county was compelled to move forward with it once it was bound over from municipal court. She said she doesn't expect a grand jury finding this month.\n\n\"About 20% of the cases get no-billed, (as in) they do not get indicted and the case does not proceed,\" she said.\n\nThe size and stage of development of Watts' fetus - precisely the point when abortion crossed from legal to illegal in most cases - became an issue during her preliminary hearing.\n\nA county forensic investigator reported feeling \"what appeared to be a small foot with toes\" inside Watts' toilet. Police seized the toilet and broke it apart to retrieve the intact fetus as evidence.\n\nTestimony and an autopsy confirmed that the fetus died in utero before passing through the birth canal. In regard to abuse, the examination identified \"no recent injuries.\"\n\nIvanchak acknowledged the case's complexities.\n\n\"There are better scholars than I am to determine the exact legal status of this fetus, corpse, body, birthing tissue, whatever it is,\" he said from the bench. \"Matter of fact, I'm assuming that's what ... Issue 1's all about: at what point something becomes viable.\"\n\nTimko, a former prosecutor, said Ohio's abuse-of-corpse statute is vague. It prohibits treating \"a human corpse\" in a way that would \"outrage\" reasonable family or community sensibilities.\n\n\"From a legal perspective, there's no definition of 'corpse,'\" she said. \"Can you be a corpse if you never took a breath?\"\n\nHoward said clarity on what about Watts' behavior constituted a crime is essential.\n\n\"For rights of people with the capacity for pregnancy, this is huge,\" she said. \"Her miscarriage was entirely ordinary. So I just want to know what (the prosecutor) thinks she should have done. If we are going to require people to collect and bring used menstrual products to hospitals so that they can make sure it is indeed a miscarriage, it's as ridiculous and invasive as it is cruel.\""}
{"text": "# Hypothetical situations or real-life medical tragedies? A judge weighs an Idaho abortion ban lawsuit\nBy **REBECCA BOONE**  \nDecember 14, 2023. 8:10 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BOISE, Idaho (AP)** - An attorney for Idaho asked a judge on Thursday to throw out a lawsuit seeking clarity about the medical exemptions to the state's broad abortion bans, saying it was based on hypothetical situations rather than current facts.\n\nBut an attorney for the four women and several physicians who sued says their claims aren't hypothetical at all, but real-life tragedies happening in doctors' offices and homes across the state.\n\nSimilar lawsuits are playing out around the nation, with some of them, like Idaho's, brought by the Center for Reproductive Rights on behalf of doctors and pregnant people who were denied access to abortions while facing serious pregnancy complications.\n\n\"The physicians go to work every day not knowing if they will be able to provide the necessary care to their patients,\" Marc Hearron, an attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights, told 4th District Judge Jason Scott.\n\nThe women and doctors suing aren't asking the court to recognize a right to abortion in the state constitution, Hearron said. Instead, they want the judge to find that pregnant people are entitled to the fundamental rights that are specifically listed in the Idaho Constitution - including the right to enjoy and defend their own life and the right to secure their own safety.\n\nJames Craig, a division chief with the Idaho Attorney General's office, told the judge that the Idaho Supreme Court has already upheld the state's abortion bans. That should make the ruling in this case easy, Craig said, urging the judge to dismiss the lawsuit.\n\nThe four women named in the case were all denied abortions in Idaho after learning they were pregnant with fetuses that were unlikely to go to term or survive birth, and that the pregnancies also put them at risk of serious medical complications. All four traveled to Oregon or Washington for the procedures.\n\nCraig suggested that since they were no longer facing the pregnancy complications, they should be challenging the state's law in the Legislature, not the courts. The possibility of similar problems happening again is hypothetical, he said, and hypothetical situations don't meet the legal standard needed for this kind of lawsuit.\n\n\"They're representing hypothetical fact - hypothetical future scenarios - and asking the court to rule,\" Craig said. \"In that respect, no, they don't have the right to a declaratory judgement.\"\n\nThe judge said he would likely rule on the motion to dismiss next month.\n\nJennifer Adkins, one of the plaintiffs, said afterward it was infuriating to be dismissed as a \"hypothetical.\"\n\n\"It's easier for them to pretend that we don't exist, to ignore the trauma and tragedy that we have been through as a family,\" she said of the state's attorneys and officials.\n\nThe hypothetical became real for Adkins in April. She and her husband John were thrilled to welcome a second baby when she found out she was pregnant just after Valentine's Day. But during a routine 12-week ultrasound, their joy came crashing down. Their baby had a rare condition called Turner syndrome, making survival until birth highly unlikely.\n\nAdkins' doctors also told her the pregnancy put her at risk of developing mirror syndrome, a rare and potentially life-threatening obstetric disorder.\n\n\"I remember thinking, 'The other shoe has dropped. Here we are, and it's happening to me of all people,'\" Adkins said.\n\nThe couple decided an abortion was necessary to protect Adkins' health and their family. The next several days were spent securing an appointment in Portland, Oregon, and trying to figure out how to cover the cost of flights, a hotel and the procedure itself - knowing covering the full price tag would mean they couldn't pay their mortgage.\n\n\"I'm a sixth generation Idahoan. I want to stay here,\" said her husband John Adkins. \"But it makes you question whether or not the state will allow you to, because we had to flee in order to be safe. When we left for Oregon, we felt like we were criminals.\"\n\nAdkins and the other three women suing the state have become the public faces of what some medical professionals say is an increasingly common tragedy in Idaho: Patients with high-risk pregnancies and fetuses that are dying or severely ill, forced to choose between carrying to term or leaving the state for an abortion.\n\n\"We find joy every day in raising our son, but we still have this tragedy in our family and this loss of a baby that we really wanted,\" she said. \"We should be preparing to have Christmas with our newborn baby right now, and we're not.\"\n\nJohn Adkins is angry at the lawmakers and state leaders who passed the abortion bans, and said he believes they all knew the laws were putting some families at risk.\n\n\"We are casualties that they're comfortable with,\" he said. \"To allow them to have this fig leaf of hypotheticals and all that nonsense? They know what they're doing.\"\n\nLawmakers passed one of the abortion bans as a trigger law in March of 2020, when most of the physicians in the state were focused on the pandemic that had just begun sweeping through Idaho. At the time, any suggestion that the ban could harm pregnant people was quickly brushed off by the bill's sponsor, Republican Sen. Todd Lakey, who said during one debate that the health of the mother \"weighs less, yes, than the life of the child.\"\n\nThe trigger ban took effect in 2022 shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Since then, Idaho's roster of obstetricians and other pregnancy-related specialists has been shrinking.\n\nOf the nine maternal fetal medicine specialists practicing in Idaho before the bans, four have already left the state and another intends to retire at the end of 2023, according to the lawsuit. Two rural Idaho hospitals have closed their labor-and-delivery centers, with one directly attributing the closure to physicians' resignations over Idaho's restrictive abortion bans.\n\n\"The health care system is being quite disrupted,\" said Dr. Julie Lyons, a family physician and one of the doctors bringing the lawsuit. \"It happens in my clinic, where there is fear among the nurses I work with about treating an ectopic pregnancy even though treating an ectopic is legal. But nobody believes that.\"\n\nNow it takes longer for patients to get treated, Lyons said, and medical costs are increasing because everyone is worried about being prosecuted.\n\n\"We're over-ordering tests, over-ordering ultrasounds to try to protect ourselves,\" Lyons said. \"We don't want to have any possible way that a doctor could be scrutinized and sent to jail.\""}
{"text": "# Why have thousands of United Methodist churches in the US quit the denomination?\nBy **Associated Press**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 8:02 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThe United Methodist Church has been undergoing a major upheaval as more than 7,000 congregations across the country, one quarter of the total, decided whether to leave the denomination or remain United Methodist. This splintering resulted from a long-simmering debate over theological differences and the role of LGBTQ people in the church.\n\n## WHY IS THE UNITED METHODIST CHURCH SPLINTERING?\nFor decades, the denomination has been mired in intractable debates over theology and the role of LGBTQ people in the church. The UMC bans same-sex marriage and openly LGBTQ clergy.\n\nBut amid increased defiance of those bans in many U.S. churches, several conservatives decided to launch the separate Global Methodist Church. Progressives who remain in the UMC are expected to advocate for removing the bans at the denomination's next General Conference, in the spring of 2024.\n\n## WHEN DID CONGREGATIONS START LEAVING?\nThe departures began in 2019 but ramped up during this year's just-completed round of regular and special meetings of the denomination's annual conferences, or regional governing bodies.\n\n## WHAT TRIGGERED THE START OF THE CHURCH DEPARTURES?\nIn 2019, a special legislative General Conference voted to tighten United Methodist rules banning same-sex marriage and ordaining LGBTQ clergy. It also gave a five-year window for churches to leave with their property after making some payments. Conservative churches ended up departing in large numbers because they saw the UMC as not enforcing its own rules.\n\n## WHICH CHURCHES ARE LEAVING?\nSome regional conferences have lost hundreds of churches, including large ones. The issue isn't only dividing conferences. In some cases, the divisions go right through the pews of individual churches, separating Methodists who have long worshipped together.\n\n## WHERE ARE THEY GOING?\nMany departing congregations are joining the Global Methodist Church, a conservative denomination that launched more than a year ago. Others are joining smaller denominations, going independent or weighing their options. Other churches in Europe and Africa are also joining the GMC."}
{"text": "# One fourth of United Methodist churches in US have left in schism over LGBTQ ban. What happens now?\nBy **PETER SMITH**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 5:55 PM EST\n\n---\n\nA quarter of U.S. congregations in the United Methodist Church have received permission to leave the denomination during a five-year window, closing this month, that authorized departures for congregations over disputes involving the church's LGBTQ-related policies.\n\nThis year alone, 5,641 congregations received permission from their regional conferences to leave the denomination as of Thursday, according to an unofficial tally by United Methodist News. In total, 7,658 have received permission since 2019. Thursday marked the last scheduled regional vote, according to the news service, when the Texas Annual Conference authorized four congregations' departures.\n\nThe vast major are conservative-leaning churches responding to what they see as the United Methodists' failure to enforce bans on same-sex marriage and the ordaining of openly LGBTQ persons.\n\nThe new year is expected to bring more changes.\n\nThe first denomination-wide legislative gathering in eight years, slated for spring 2024, will consider calls to liberalize policies on marriage and ordination. It will also debate rival proposals, either to decentralize the international church - which has at least as many members outside the United States as in - or provide overseas congregations with the same exit option their U.S. counterparts had.\n\nThe schism marks a historic shift in a denomination that was until recently the third largest in the United States, and perhaps the closest to the mainstream of American religious culture - its steeples prominent in rural crossroads and urban squares, scenes of countless potluck suppers, earnest social outreach, and warm yet decorous worship.\n\nMany departing congregations have joined the more conservative Global Methodist Church, with others joining smaller denominations, going independent or still considering their options.\n\nUnited Methodist rules forbid same-sex marriage rites and the ordination of \"self-avowed practicing homosexuals,\" but progressive Methodist churches and regional governing bodies in the U.S. have increasingly been defying these rules.\n\nConservatives have mobilized like-minded congregations to exit. The Global Methodist Church has declared its intention to enforce such rules.\n\n\"We are sad about losing anybody,\" said New York Area Bishop Thomas Bickerton, president of the United Methodists' Council of Bishops. \"There's also - at the end of the year - grief and trauma, parishioners that have said goodbye to friends, pastors who have had relationships over the years that have ended.\"\n\nHe depicted the debates in the church as difficult, and said some who urged churches to disaffiliate used \"falsehoods.\"\n\n\"This whole disaffiliation process has in large measure not been about human sexuality, it's been about power, control and money. That's surprising and disappointing,\" Bickerton said. \"It's time for this denomination to pivot\" to focusing on mission rather than disaffiliation votes.\n\nThe United Methodists reported having 30,543 U.S. churches as of 2019 and 6 million U.S. members as of 2021. It had at least one church in 95% of U.S. counties, more than any other religious group, according to the 2020 Religion Census, produced by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies.\n\nThere's no immediate estimate on how many individual members are leaving the UMC, since some members of departing congregations are joining other UMC churches, but the departing churches include some of the largest in their states. UMC officials are already preparing historic budget cuts to denominational agencies in anticipation of lower revenue from fewer churches.\n\nThe UMC also reports having 7 million members overseas as of 2019, the majority in Africa, where more conservative sexual mores are common.\n\nIn 2019, a special legislative gathering of Methodists voted to strengthen longstanding bans on same-sex marriage and LGBTQ ordination. The votes came from a coalition of conservatives in the U.S. and overseas, particularly from fast-growing African churches. At the same time, that conference offered a five-year window for U.S. churches to leave under somewhat favorable terms, such as being able to keep their properties while compensating the denomination for certain costs.\n\nThat measure was expected to be used by progressive congregations dissenting with the letter of the church law, and a handful did take the church up on its offer. But in the end, the vast majority of departing congregations reflect conservative dismay over what they saw as the denomination's failure to discipline those defying church law, as well as other liberal trends.\n\nIn the legislative General Conference, scheduled for April and May in Charlotte, North Carolina, efforts to lift bans on same-sex marriage and LGBTQ ordination are expected to have a strong chance, given the departure of many conservative votes.\n\nThe delegates will also consider a decentralization plan favored by progressives - which, among other things, would enable U.S. and overseas churches to set separate standards for ordination and marriage - and another sought by conservatives enabling overseas churches to leave under the same provisions that U.S. churches had.\n\nThe Rev. Keith Boyette, who is the Global Methodist Church's top executive, said it has registered about 4,100 U.S. churches so far - former UMC churches as well as new ones organized by former United Methodists whose congregations voted to stay in the UMC. It has been organizing in other countries where United Methodist churches or individuals left that denomination, he said, such as Bulgaria, Slovakia, Kenya, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.\n\nIt's unclear how many U.S. churches are going independent, but \"the fact that so many churches have aligned indicates their commitment to wanting to be part of a connectional system,\" Boyette said.\n\nThe Rev. Scott Field, president of the conservative Wesleyan Covenant Association, which has advocated for churches leaving the UMC, said congregations' experiences varied in regional conferences, depending on what financial and other conditions they have required of churches. \"It's been punitive in some and it's worked seamlessly in others,\" he said.\n\nUnder the slogan, \"Fair for some, fair for all,\" the group will be advocating for overseas churches to have the same option to leave.\n\nField predicted \"an African wave\" of churches seeking to leave.\n\nSeveral African bishops, however, issued a statement in 2022 denouncing efforts to get churches to leave as false and destructive.\n\nField also predicted many U.S. churches, despite missing the 2023 deadline, may try to exit under other church law provisions.\n\n\"We'd like every congregation, whether it's a liberationist church or a solidly evangelical church, to end up where they'd like to be,\" Field said. \"It makes no sense for our United Methodist Church to attempt locking the gate.\"\n\nJan Lawrence, executive director of the Reconciling Ministries Network, said the personal toll of the schism is deep.\n\nShe knew members of a church that had an acrimonious break after it chose to disaffiliate. \"It really broke relationships,\" she said.\n\nShe expressed hope that the 2024 General Conference will open ordination and marriage rites to LGBTQ persons - realizing a decades-long goal for the network.\n\n\"Those churches that are disaffiliating and joining the Global Methodist Church, I hope they find what they're looking for and they're able to thrive as a new denomination,\" she said. \"I don't know anyone that doesn't want everybody to live into what they believe God is calling them to do.\"\n\nBickerton said he particularly laments the departure of many churches that are longtime, rural-area fixtures.\n\n\"When Methodism came to the United States, it went to where the people were. It was carried in the saddlebags of the circuit riders,\" he said.\n\nA return to informal ministry may be needed to maintain a presence in many regions, he said.\n\n\"The hallmarks of United Methodism is a theology based on grace, hope, joy, love and justice,\" he said. \"Where do we send people strategically so that message can be heard?\""}
{"text": "# Ohio Senate clears ban on gender-affirming care for minors, transgender athletes in girls sports\nBy **SAMANTHA HENDRICKSON**  \nDecember 13, 2023. 6:51 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP)** - A Republican-backed proposal that would drastically affect how LGBTQ youth in Ohio live their everyday lives cleared the state Senate on Wednesday, despite adamant opposition from parents, medical providers and education professionals who call it cruel and potentially life threatening.\n\nState senators, by a vote of 24-8, approved a multifaceted bill that would ban gender-affirming care for minors and block transgender student athletes from participating in girls and women's sports. A lone Republican, Sen. Nathan Manning of Northeast Ohio, joined Democrats in a \"no\" vote.\n\nThe GOP-dominated House agreed to some Senate-made changes to the bill Wednesday evening and sent the measure to Republican Gov. Mike DeWine's desk for final approval. DeWine has not said whether he will sign it. He previously had expressed doubts about the sports restrictions, saying such decisions were best made by individual sports organizations.\n\nDeWine's spokesperson, Dan Tierney, said the governor's office would not comment on the legislation until it has thoroughly reviewed it.\n\nUnder the legislation, minors in Ohio would be prohibited from taking puberty blockers and undergoing other hormone therapies or receiving gender reassignment surgery that would further align them with their gender identity.\n\nAn amendment added this week changes a provision that would have forced children receiving gender affirming care to stop treatment or leave the state to obtain it. The latest version of the bill allows for any minor who is an Ohio resident currently receiving care to see that care through.\n\nSince 2021, more than 20 states have enacted laws restricting or banning such treatments, despite the fact that they have been available in the United States for more than a decade and are endorsed by major medical associations. Most of these states face lawsuits, but courts have issued mixed rulings.\n\nThe nation's first law, in Arkansas, was struck down by a federal judge who said the ban on care violated the due process rights of transgender youth and their families. Courts have blocked enforcement in three states while such legislation is currently allowed or set to go into effect soon in seven other states.\n\nThe proposal also would require public K-12 schools and universities to designate separate teams for male and female sexes, and would explicitly ban transgender girls and women from participating in girls and women's sports.\n\nAt least 20 states have passed some version of a ban on transgender athletes playing on K-12 and collegiate sports teams statewide. Those bans would be upended by a regulation proposed by President Joe Biden's administration that is set to be finalized early next year. The rule, announced in April, states that blanket bans violateTitle IX, the landmark federal gender-equity legislation enacted in 1972.\n\nThe proposal would make it more difficult for schools to ban, for example, a transgender girl in elementary school from playing on a girls basketball team. But it would also leave room for schools to develop policies that prohibit trans athletes from playing on more competitive teams if those policies are designed to ensure fairness or prevent sports-related injuries.\n\nSupporters say Ohio's transgender care measure is about protecting children because they cannot provide \"informed consent\" for gender-affirming care and could be pushed into making choices that they regret later in life. They say banning transgender athletes from girls and women's sports maintains the integrity of those sports and ensures fairness.\n\nHundreds of opponents have testified against the bill, including medical and mental health providers, education professionals, faith leaders, parents of transgender children and transgender individuals themselves. They decry the legislation as cruel, life threatening to transgender youth and based on fearmongering rather than scientific fact.\n\nParents also say the bill obliterates their rights and ability to make informed health care decisions for their transgender children.\n\nBut Senate President Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican, said Wednesday that passing the law would be akin to backing measures that prevent parents from giving their children illicit drugs or physically abusing them.\n\n\"Certainly the parents are the most important decision-maker in a child's life. But there are things where it's important for the state to step in and protect the child,\" Huffman said.\n\nBut Sen. Paula Hicks-Hudson, a Toledo Democrat, argued that the measure will only hurt transgender youth.\n\n\"We understand that our young people have so many different types of trials and trauma that they have to deal with. And unfortunately, this legislature is going to add an additional trauma to that,\" Hicks-Hudson said in a committee hearing earlier Wednesday."}
{"text": "# The Supreme Court rejects an appeal over bans on conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ children\nDecember 11, 2023. 10:24 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - The Supreme Court on Monday refused to take up a case about whether state and local governments can enforce laws banning conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ children.\n\nOver the dissent of three conservative justices, the court turned away an appeal from Washington, where the law has been upheld. An appellate panel struck down local bans in Florida as an unconstitutional restriction on counselors' speech.\n\nThe high court often steps in when appellate courts disagree, and in separate opinions Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas said that standard was easily met in the controversy over conversion therapy bans.\n\nThomas wrote that his colleague should have taken up the Washington case because \"licensed counselors cannot voice anything other than the state-approved opinion on minors with gender dysphoria without facing punishment.\"\n\nJustice Brett Kavanaugh also voted to hear the case. It takes four of the nine justices to set a case for arguments.\n\nThe court's decision to avoid the case from Washington comes as efforts to limit the rights of LGBTQ+ kids have spread across the country.\n\nAbout half the states prohibit the practice of trying to change a person's sexual orientation or gender identity through counseling.\n\nA family counselor in Washington, Brian Tingley, sued over a 2018 state law that threatens therapists who engage in conversion therapy with a loss of their license. Tingley claims the law violates his speech rights. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld it in a split decision.\n\nThe Supreme Court had previously turned away several challenges to state bans, but those cases reached the court before a 5-4 decision in 2018 in which the justices ruled that California could not force state-licensed anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers to provide information about abortion.\n\nSince the 2018 ruling, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta has voided the local Florida bans."}
{"text": "# Alex Jones offers to pay Newtown families at least $55 million over school shooting hoax conspiracy\nBy **DAVE COLLINS**  \nDecember 16, 2023. 11:26 AM EST\n\n---\n\nConspiracy theorist Alex Jones' latest bankruptcy plan would pay Sandy Hook families a minimum total of $55 million over 10 years, a fraction of the $1.5 billion awarded to the relatives in lawsuits against Jones for calling the 2012 Newtown school shooting a hoax.\n\nThe families, meanwhile, have filed their own proposal seeking to liquidate nearly all of Jones' assets, including his media company Free Speech Systems, and give the proceeds to them and other creditors.\n\nThe dueling plans, filed late Friday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston, will be debated and challenged over the next two months, with hearings scheduled for February that will result in a final order saying how much Jones will have to pay out.\n\nJones and Free Speech Systems, based in Austin, Texas, both filed for bankruptcy last year as the families were awarded more than $1.4 billion in a Connecticut lawsuit and another $50 million in a Texas lawsuit. A third trial is pending in Texas in a similar lawsuit over Jones' hoax conspiracy filed by the parents of another child killed in the school shooting.\n\nThe new bankruptcy filings came a day after the 11th anniversary of a gunman's killing of 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on Dec. 14, 2012.\n\nRelatives of some of the victims sued Jones in Connecticut for defamation and infliction of emotional distress for claiming the school shooting never happened and was staged by \"crisis actors\" in a plot to increase gun control.\n\nEight victims' relatives and an FBI agent testified during a monthlong trial in late 2022 about being threatened and harassed for years by people who deny the shooting happened. Strangers showed up at some of their homes and confronted some of them in public. People hurled abusive comments at them on social media and in emails. Some received death and rape threats.\n\nJones' lawyers did not immediately respond to email messages Saturday.\n\nChristopher Mattei, a Connecticut attorney for the Sandy Hook families, said Jones' proposal \"falls woefully short\" of providing everything the families are entitled to under bankruptcy laws.\n\n\"The families' plan is the only feasible path for ensuring that Jones' assets are quickly distributed to those he has harassed for more than a decade,\" Mattei said in a statement Saturday.\n\nJones' new proposal to settle with the families for at least $5.5 million a year for 10 years doesn't appear to offer much more than what Free Speech Systems offered them in its bankruptcy case last month. He also would give them percentages of his income streams.\n\nFree Speech Systems, the parent company of Jones' Infowars show, proposed to pay creditors about $4 million a year, down from an estimate earlier this year of $7 million to $10 million annually.\n\nThe company said it expected to make about $19.2 million next year from selling the dietary supplements, clothing and other merchandise Jones promotes on his shows, while operating expenses including salaries would total about $14.3 million.\n\nPersonally, Jones listed about $13 million in total assets in recent financial statements filed with the bankruptcy court, including about $856,000 in various bank accounts. A judge recently gave Jones approval to sell some of his assets, including guns, vehicles and jewelry to raise money for creditors.\n\nThe families' plan would set up a trust that would liquidate nearly all of Jones' assets, except his primary home and other holdings considered exempt from sale under bankruptcy laws. The trust would have sweeping powers, including authority to recoup money that Jones has paid and given others if those transfers were not allowed by law.\n\nThe families have been complaining about Jones' personal spending, which topped $90,000 a month this year. They also have another pending lawsuit claiming Jones hid millions of dollars in an attempt to protect his wealth. One of Jones' lawyers has called the allegations \"ridiculous.\"\n\nJones is appealing the $1.5 billion in lawsuit awards to the families and has insisted his comments about the shooting were protected by free speech rights."}
{"text": "# A review defends police action before the Maine mass shooting. Legal experts say questions persist\nBy **PATRICK WHITTLE** and **DAVID SHARP**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 7:42 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PORTLAND, Maine (AP)** - An independent report conducted for a police agency clears the agency's response to growing concerns about the mental health of a man who later went on to commit the deadliest mass shooting in Maine history, but it does reveal missed opportunities to intervene to prevent the tragedy, legal experts said Friday.\n\nDespite receiving warnings about the man's deteriorating mental health, drunken threats and possession of guns, the Sagadahoc County Sheriff's Office avoided confronting Robert Card, the 40-year-old Army reservist who later killed 18 people at a bowling alley and a bar on Oct. 25 in Lewiston, the experts said of the report released late Thursday by Sheriff Joel Merry.\n\nCard's body was found - with a self-inflicted gunshot wound - two days after the shootings. Reports soon began to emerge that he had spent two weeks in a psychiatric hospital months before the attacks and had amassed weapons.\n\nThe legal experts told The Associated Press that the report - prepared for the sheriff's office by a lawyer who's a retired federal drug agent- leaves unresolved questions about police's potential ability to have removed guns from Card before the shootings happened.\n\nThe report delved into mental health concerns raised about Card. It states that the response to those concerns by the department's officers \"was reasonable under the totality of the circumstances\" at the time. In a statement, Merry said the review \"found that responding deputies followed the law and their training with the information available at the time.\"\n\nDemocratic Gov. Janet Mills has appointed an independent commission led by a former state chief justice to review all aspects of the tragedy. And Maine's congressional delegation said Friday there will be an independent Army inspector general's investigation to review the Army's actions, alongside an ongoing administrative Army investigation.\n\nThe Sagadahoc report makes clear that local law enforcement knew Card's mental health was deteriorating, with reports that he was paranoid, hearing voices, experiencing psychotic episodes and possibly dealing with schizophrenia.\n\nIn May, Card's ex-wife and his son reached out to a school resource officer about what they called Card's erratic behavior. A deputy worked with the family to get help and heeded its suggestion not to confront Card directly for fear that it could cause an unnecessary escalation, the report states.\n\nIn September, police were alerted by officials with the Army Reserves about Card, who was hospitalized in July after exhibiting erratic behavior while training. The officials warned that Card still had access to weapons and that he had threatened to \"shoot up\" an Army Reserve center in Saco, the report said.\n\nThat caught the full attention of police, who responded by briefly staking out the Saco facility and going to Card's home in Bowdoin, Maine, even as an Army Reserve leader suggested that all that was needed was a \"welfare check.\"\n\nA visit to Card's home by Sagadahoc Sgt. Aaron Skolfield on Sept. 16 represented the best opportunity for police to assess Card face-to-face - something that could have been necessary to take him into protective custody, a step needed to trigger Maine's \"yellow flag\" law, which allows a judge to temporarily remove someone's guns during a psychiatric health crisis.\n\nSkolfield called for backup, knowing Card was considered armed and dangerous, and knocked on Card's door. The deputy saw curtains move and heard noises suggesting Card was inside. But Card did not answer the door, and Skolfield correctly concluded he lacked the legal authority to force the issue during a wellness check, the report said.\n\nWorried for his own safety, Skolfield went back to his cruiser, visited the nearby home of Card's father and then returned to stake out Card's home before leaving to respond to a domestic assault, the report said.\n\nAll that day, Skolfield was in contact with other law officers, Army officials and family members about Card's mental health and to ensure that family members were trying to prevent Card's access to guns.\n\nThe report concluded that Skolfield \"did not have sufficient grounds to take Mr. Card into protective custody, which also foreclosed his discretion to initiate the process for confiscation of Mr. Card's firearms.\"\n\nNo family member or reservist contacted the sheriff's office after Sept. 17, and a sheriff's advisory bulletin asking agencies to locate Card was lifted on Oct. 18.\n\nThe report's conclusion that the officers' actions were reasonable is subject to interpretation, said Adanté Pointer, a civil rights attorney based in Oakland, California, who reviewed the report. What it makes clear is that local law enforcement had numerous opportunities to intercede in \"this growing, escalating and ultimately deadly situation\" and did not, Pointer said.\n\nThe report paints a picture of officers who were \"scared\" to deal with Card, Pointer said.\n\nThere was already enough evidence back in May to begin the process of seizing Card's weapons under the yellow flag law, said Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor and current president of the West Coast Trial Lawyers in Los Angeles who reviewed the report.\n\n\"A different approach to policing, or a different set of laws, might have saved a lot of lives,\" Rahmani said.\n\nPrepared by Michael Cunniff, a Portland attorney who is a former supervisory special agent for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the report also addressed protective custody of those in crisis, the yellow flag law and the temporary seizure of guns.\n\nCunniff declined comment Friday. Sheriff Merry didn't immediately respond to questions, including how the report was commissioned and who funded it.\n\nMerry did say his office is cooperating with all investigations."}
{"text": "# Michigan State reaches settlements with families of students slain in mass shooting\nDecember 15, 2023. 1:12 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**EAST LANSING, Mich. (AP)* - Michigan State University trustees have approved settlements with the families of three students slain during a mass shooting earlier this year on the school's campus.\n\nTrustees voted unanimously Friday to approve separate claims with the families of Brian Fraser, Arielle Anderson and Alexandria Verner.\n\nThe school did not release the amounts of the settlements, but an attorney for Verner's family told reporters the family will receive $5 million from Michigan State.\n\n\"While no amount of compensation can ever replace the loss of a life, we do hope this brings some closure, support and relief to these impacted families,\" Trustee David Kelly said. \"The university gives its deepest condolences to each of the three families, and we are committed to ensuring the memory of their child in not forgotten in the Spartan community.\"\n\nAnderson, Verner and Fraser were fatally shot and five other students were wounded Feb. 13 when Anthony McRae opened fire at Berkey Hall and the MSU Union.\n\nMcRae had no connection to the victims or the university, investigators have said. He killed himself the night of the shootings after police confronted him. Investigators said in April they were unable to determine any conclusive motive for the campus shootings.\n\n\"The Verner family did not seek to blame MSU for the death of their daughter,\" family attorney David Femminineo said in a statement. \"Instead, the Verner family has sought answers as to how this could be prevented in the future.\"\n\nKelly said Michigan State \"remains committed to enhancing safety on campus and providing mental health support to our community as we continue to heal.\""}
{"text": "# Mother of 6-year-old who shot teacher in Virginia gets 2 years in prison for child neglect\nBy **BEN FINLEY** and **DENISE LAVOIE**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 6:12 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (AP)** - The mother of a 6-year-old boy who shot his teacher in a Virginia classroom was sentenced Friday to two years in prison for felony child neglect by a judge who chastised her for abdicating her responsibilities as a parent.\n\nDeja Taylor's sentence was much harsher than the maximum six months prosecutors had agreed to recommend as part of a plea deal and also surpassed the high end of advisory state sentencing guidelines. Taylor, 26, pleaded guilty to a single count of felony neglect in August. As part of the plea agreement, prosecutors agreed to drop a misdemeanor count of recklessly storing a firearm.\n\nCircuit Court Judge Christopher Papile said the sentencing guidelines did not take into account the shooting's physical and psychological toll on first-grade teacher Abigail Zwerner or the emotional trauma it has wrought on other students and staff at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News.\n\nZwerner was critically injured when the boy fired a single shot at her, striking her hand and chest, breaking bones and puncturing a lung. She spent weeks in the hospital, had five surgeries, and says she is so mentally scarred by the shooting that she does not plan to return to teaching.\n\nPapile noted that \"we are lucky\" someone wasn't killed at the elementary school. In admonishing Taylor, the judge said a parent's ultimately responsibility is to \"protect the child, to keep them from bad influences, to keep them from dangerous situations, to keep them healthy and nurtured. Ms. Taylor has abdicated most, if not all, of those responsibilities.\"\n\nThe state sentence handed down Friday was the second time Taylor was held to account for the classroom shooting in January, which stunned the nation and shook this military shipbuilding city.\n\nTaylor was sentenced in November to 21 months in federal prison for using marijuana while owning a gun, which is illegal under U.S. law. Her state sentence will be served consecutively, making a combined state and federal sentence of nearly four years behind bars.\n\nTaylor's son told authorities he got his mother's 9 mm handgun by climbing onto a drawer to reach the top of a dresser, where the firearm was in his mom's purse. He concealed the weapon in his backpack and then his pocket before shooting Zwerner in front of her first-grade class.\n\nMoments later, the boy told a reading specialist who restrained him, \"I shot that (expletive) dead,\" and \"I got my mom's gun last night,\" according to search warrants.\n\nTaylor initially told police she had secured her gun with a trigger lock, but investigators said they never found one.\n\nFollowing the shooting, the boy was removed from his mother's custody and spent 227 days in inpatient treatment, during which he was attended to by a team of physicians, psychiatrists and other clinicians, prosecutor Travis White told the judge. The boy, now 7, had problems with \"basic socialization\" and suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome and insomnia, among other disorders.\n\n\"That is the depths of neglect that Deja Taylor inflicted on her child,\" the prosecutor said, calling the shooting \"a consequence and manifestation of that neglect.\"\n\nThe boy now lives with his great-grandfather, Calvin Taylor, who told reporters after the hearing that he believes the sentence handed down by Papile is \"excessive.\" He said Deja Taylor tried to get help for her son before the shooting but child protective services did not follow through on her request.\n\nThe elder Taylor said the boy is now doing well in a structured environment. The child told him that he wanted \"Santa to bring his mom home for Christmas.\"\n\nDeja Taylor did not speak during Friday's hearing. Her attorney, James Ellenson, said Taylor struggled with addiction and domestic violence. He said Taylor, 26, smoked marijuana \"all day, every day\" since age 15.\n\n\"Who knows what the effects were on that teenage brain?\" he said.\n\nEllenson said earlier this year there were \" mitigating circumstances,\" including Taylor's miscarriages and postpartum depression. She also has been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, a condition sharing symptoms with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, according to court documents.\n\nTaylor told ABC's \"Good Morning America\" in May that she feels responsible and apologized to Zwerner.\n\n\"That is my son, so I am, as a parent, obviously willing to take responsibility for him because he can't take responsibility for himself,\" Taylor said.\n\nDuring her sentencing in federal court last month, one of Taylor's attorneys read aloud a brief statement in which Taylor said she would feel remorse \"for the rest of my life.\"\n\nZwerner is suing Newport News Public Schools for $40 million, alleging administrators ignored multiple warnings the boy had a gun at school the day of the shooting.\n\nDuring the sentencing hearing Friday, Zwerner recounted the shooting, telling the judge: \"I was not sure whether it would be my final moment on earth.\"\n\nShe said she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression, and has difficulty sleeping.\n\n\"The shooting has instilled many fears in me that will remain forever,\" she said.\n\nShe said she will not return to teaching because she's now afraid to work with children.\n\n\"Now, at 26 years old, what am I supposed to do?\" she said. \"My life will never be close to the same again.\""}
{"text": "# Latino Democrats shift from quiet concern to open opposition to Biden's concessions in border talks\nBy **STEPHEN GROVES**, **LISA MASCARO**, and **REBECCA SANTANA**  \nDecember 16, 2023. 6:38 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Prominent Latinos in Congress looked on quietly, at first, privately raising concerns with the Biden administration over the direction of border security talks.\n\nDemocratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California was on the phone constantly with administration officials questioning why the Senate negotiations did not include any meaningful consideration of providing pathways to citizenship for longtime immigrants lacking the proper legal documents.\n\nNew Mexico Democrat Sen. Ben Ray Luján made similar arguments as he tried to get meetings with top-level White House officials.\n\nBut when the talks didn't seem to make enough difference, the influential lawmakers started leading the open opposition.\n\n\"A return to Trump-era policies is not the fix,\" Padilla said. \"In fact, it will make the problem worse.\"\n\nPadilla even pulled President Joe Biden aside at a fundraiser last weekend in California to warn him \"to be careful\" of being dragged into \"harmful policy.\"\n\nThe Latino senators have found themselves on shifting ground in the debate over immigration as the Democratic president, who is reaching for a border deal as part of his $110 billion package for Ukraine, Israel and other national security needs, has tried to reduce the historic numbers of people arriving at the U.S. border with Mexico.\n\nThe negotiations, which intensified Saturday at the Capitol as bargainers race to draft a framework by this weekend, come as the Biden administration has increasingly endured criticism over its handling of border and immigration issues - not just from Republicans, but from members of the president's own party as well. Democratic cities and states have been vocal about the financial toll that they say migrants have been taking on their resources.\n\nBut left off the table in the talks are pro-immigration changes, such as granting permanent legal status to thousands of immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, often referred to as \"Dreamers,\" based on the DREAM Act that would have provided similar protections for young immigrants but was never approved.\n\nA few days after his conversation with the president, Padilla, Luján and Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., aired their concerns prominently at a Congressional Hispanic Caucus news conference in front of the Capitol.\n\nThey slammed Senate Republicans for demanding the border policy changes in exchange for Ukraine aid, and they criticized Biden for making concessions that they say ultimately undermine the United States' standing as a country that welcomes immigrants.\n\nPadilla said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has promised him and several other senators to allow them to see proposals before there is a final agreement. But Latino lawmakers have largely been left outside the core negotiating group.\n\nOn Saturday, White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients spoke on a call with the Hispanic Caucus, and several lawmakers raised concerns, according to two people granted anonymity to discuss the situation.\n\nHomeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who had been engaged in talks at the Capitol, also joined the call.\n\nBiden is facing pressure from all sides. He has been criticized about the record numbers of migrants at the border and he is also trying to address the political weakness before a potential campaign rematch next year with Donald Trump, the former Republican president, who has promised to enact far-right immigration measures.\n\nAnd the issue is now tied to a top Biden foreign policy goal: providing robust support for Ukraine's defense against Russia.\n\nThe White House and Senate leaders are pushing for a framework of the border deal by Sunday, in preparation for possible votes in the week ahead.\n\n\"We'll need to have some kind of framework by the end of the weekend,\" Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, the key Republican negotiator, said Saturday during a break in talks.\n\nRecently during the negotiations, the White House has pushed to include provisions that would legalize young immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children, according to two people with knowledge of the closed-door talks. But others said that was quickly taken off the table by Republicans.\n\nSenators said they are running into the complex nature of U.S. immigration law. \"Byzantine,\" said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn..\n\n\"We're not at an agreement, but as we get closer into an agreement, the details really matter,\" Murphy said. \"The drafting of the text is really hard and difficult.\"\n\nThe bipartisan group negotiating the package has acknowledged that it expects to lose votes from both the left and right wings of either party.\n\n\"Regardless of people's political persuasions, this is a crisis,\" said Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona independent who is part of the core negotiating group. \"There is nothing that is humane about having thousands of individuals sitting in the desert without access to restrooms or food or water, no shade, just waiting for days to interact with a Border Patrol agent. That's what's happening in southern Arizona.\"\n\nBut immigration advocates have been rallying opposition to the proposed changes - often comparing them to Trump-era measures.\n\nUsing words like \"draconian\" and \"betrayal,\" advocates argued during a Friday call with reporters that the proposals would undermine U.S. commitments to accepting people fleeing persecution and do little to stop people from making the long, dangerous journey to the border.\n\nOne of the policies under consideration would allow border officials to easily send migrants back to Mexico without letting them seek asylum in America, but advocates argue it could just place them into the hands of dangerous cartels that prey on migrants in northern Mexico.\n\nAdvocates also say that when the Trump and Biden administrations previously used the expulsion authority on public health grounds during the pandemic, migrants sent back to Mexico didn't return home. Instead they tried over and over again to enter the U.S. because there were no repercussions.\n\nGreg Chen, senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said it would just make the border region \"more chaotic, more dangerous.\"\n\nThe policies under consideration would also be difficult to implement. Detaining migrants or families would lead to hundreds of thousands of people in custody - at a huge cost.\n\n\"These are all things that are extremely, extremely worrying,\" said Jason Houser, the former chief of staff at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.\n\nProminent House Democrats are raising concerns. Reps. Nanette Barragán of California, the chair of the Hispanic Caucus, and Pramila Jayapal of Washington state, chair of the Progressive Caucus, along with Veronica Escobar of Texas, who is a co-chair of Biden's reelection campaign, and Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, all joined the news conference.\n\nPadilla warned that Biden's concessions on border restrictions could have lasting impact on his support from Latino voters.\n\n\"To think that concessions are going to be made without benefiting a single Dreamer, a single farm worker, a single undocumented essential worker is unconscionable,\" he said."}
{"text": "# Congress departs without a deal on Ukraine aid and border security, but Senate will work next week\nBy **STEPHEN GROVES**, **LISA MASCARO**, and **SEUNG MIN KIM**  \nDecember 14, 2023. 7:26 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Congress was departing Washington on Thursday without a deal to pass wartime support for Ukraine, but Senate negotiators and President Joe Biden's administration were still racing to wrap up a border security compromise to unlock the stalemate before the end of the year.\n\nThe Senate planned to come back next week in hopes of passing the $110 billion package of aid for Ukraine, Israel and other national security and finalizing a deal to place new restrictions on asylum claims at the U.S. border. But the House showed no sign of returning to push the legislation through the full Congress.\n\n\"We're working really hard,\" Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said at the end of the day. \"It's not easy, but we're working hard.\"\n\nLawmakers leaving the impasse unresolved through the holidays would mean the Biden administration would have to rely on a dwindling supply of funds for Ukraine. The wartime aid has so far been vital to Ukraine's defending against Russia's invasion, but an emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier Thursday recommitted to his goals in the war.\n\nRepelling Russia has been one of Biden's chief foreign policy goals. But the Democratic president is facing stiff opposition from Republicans in Congress - both from populist conservatives who no longer want to fund the nearly two-year-old conflict and GOP senators who have been traditional allies to Ukraine's defense but insist that the U.S. also enact policies aimed at cutting the historic number of migrants who are arriving at the U.S. border with Mexico.\n\nTop administration officials, including White House chief of staff Jeff Zients and Biden's legislative affairs director Shuwanza Goff, met with Senate negotiators Thursday evening. Zients had been meeting with Schumer and dropped by to emphasize the president's call to find policy and funding solutions on the border, according to a White House official. And for a third day Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas holed up with negotiators at the Capitol.\n\n\"We'll all be back tomorrow,\" said one negotiator, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, as the meeting broke for the evening. \"A lot to do tomorrow.\"\n\nSchumer, a Democrat, rescheduled the Senate to return to Washington on Monday to give negotiators more time to reach the framework of a deal, and he said he would push for a Senate vote on the funding package next week even if an agreement is not in place.\n\nIn an earlier speech on the Senate floor, Schumer said that the deadlock in Congress has left \"Putin mocking our resolve.\" He cast the decisions facing lawmakers as a potential turning point of history: \"There is too much on the line for Ukraine, for America, for Western democracy, to throw in the towel right now.\"\n\nBut the House ended work and departed for the holidays, with Republican Speaker Mike Johnson showing no sign he will have members return until the second week of January.\n\nIn fact, Johnson's office sent around a clip from a Zelenskyy interview suggesting aid could wait until the new year.\n\nSenate Republicans also expressed doubt there was time left this year to both reach an agreement and work through writing the text of legislation, with Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio saying there would be a \"revolt\" by Republicans if they were forced into a quick vote.\n\nA core group of Senate negotiators and Biden administration officials were expected to work through the weekend narrowing a list of priorities aimed at curtailing the number of migrants applying for asylum at the U.S. border.\n\n\"We are making progress, I feel more confident today than I did yesterday,\" Sinema, an Arizona independent who has often been central to Senate deal-making, told The Associated Press.\n\nFaced with historic numbers of migrants at the U.S. border with Mexico, the White House has negotiated a change to the law that would allow Homeland Security officials to stop migrants from applying for asylum if the number of total crossings exceeded a certain capacity.\n\nNegotiators have also considered several other policies that resemble those pursued under former President Donald Trump's administration, including detaining people who claim asylum at the border and granting nationwide authority to quickly remove migrants who have been in the U.S. for less than two years.\n\nSinema declined to discuss details of the talks but said her aim was to craft a package that has both the policy and funding to \"create an orderly, safe, secure and humane process\" for seeking asylum or immigrating for \"other legal reasons.\" She added that negotiators understand they will lose support from wings of both conservatives and progressives, but were aiming to pass the package in the Senate with majorities of both parties.\n\n\"There will probably be folks on the edges of the political spectrum who are not happy with a solution that secures our border, brings order and is humane,\" Sinema said.\n\nIn one friction point in talks, the White House has resisted Republican demands to curtail a humanitarian parole program that has allowed tens of thousands of migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to enter the U.S., often at ports of entry other than the border, according to several people familiar with the talks who discussed them only on the condition of anonymity.\n\nStill, immigration advocates have been dismayed at the White House's concessions in the talks.\n\nSen. Alex Padilla, the California Democrat who has spearheaded Senate resistance to the plans, said he has told Biden \"to be careful because Republicans are hellbent on dragging us into harmful policy territory.\"\n\nCongress has struggled for decades to find any agreement on border and immigration policy, yet Republicans argue that the Biden administration opened the door for a policy negotiation both by including border-related funding in the national security package and openly calling for Congress to take up reforms.\n\nBut the complicated and contentious nature of the issue prompted many GOP senators to conclude that there would be no deal for Ukraine aid this year, even as they pledged to prove Putin wrong for doubting U.S. support for Ukraine.\n\n\"Sometimes democracies take a little more time, but the resolve is real,\" said Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D.\n\nSome Democrats fretted that leaving the funding deadlock hanging for weeks could precipitate the deal's collapse.\n\n\"Actions speak louder than words,\" said Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado."}
{"text": "# Ravens beat mistake-prone Jaguars 23-7 for 4th consecutive victory and clinch AFC playoff spot\nBy **MARK LONG**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 12:37 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP)** - Lamar Jackson was sacked, or so it seemed.\n\nJacksonville Jaguars pass rusher Dawuane Smoot had Jackson in his grasp - until he didn't. The Baltimore Ravens star quarterback spun away from Smoot, rolled right and lofted a pass toward the goal line. Tight end Isaiah Likely outmaneuvered two defenders to bring down the ball - and bring home a win.\n\nThe play of the game propelled the Ravens to a 23-7 victory at Jacksonville that clinched a postseason berth Sunday night.\n\n\"I just had to make a play, make something happen,\" Jackson said. \"I just made something happen.\"\n\nGus Edwards scored two plays later to put the Ravens (11-3) up 17-7. That was plenty against the mistake-prone Jaguars (8-6).\n\n\"It's pretty unique,\" Ravens linebacker Roquan Smith said of Jackson. \"Some of the things he's doing, he's the only one doing it.\"\n\nBaltimore won its fourth in a row and moved a step closer to securing the No. 1 seed and home-field advantage throughout the AFC playoffs.\n\nThe Jaguars lost their third straight - all against AFC North teams - and fell into a tie with Houston and Indianapolis atop the AFC South. Self-inflicted woes have been a common thread in Jacksonville's skid.\n\n\"That's the head-scratcher,\" Jaguars coach Doug Pederson said. \"That's the frustrating part. We can't get out of our own way and that's the frustrating part.\"\n\nTrevor Lawrence fumbled twice in the latest letdown, including one in the fourth quarter that essentially sealed Baltimore's eighth victory in its last nine games. He was placed in the NFL's concussion protocol after the game and not allowed to speak to the media.\n\nThis one may have been costly for the Ravens.\n\nPromising rookie running back Keaton Mitchell suffered a season-ending left knee injury early in the fourth quarter. He flashed a thumbs-up sign as he left the sideline on a cart.\n\n\"It's heartbreaking,\" Ravens coach John Harbaugh said. \"He's just got a great attitude and demeanor about him.\"\n\nAdded Jackson: \"He was just starting to get started. That was a crazy injury.\"\n\nThe Ravens also lost starting left tackle Ronnie Staley (concussion) and free safety Marcus Williams (groin).\n\nJackson, Edwards, Likely and an elite defense did enough to overcome to the injuries.\n\nJackson threw for 171 yards - 70 of those to Likely - and ran for 97 more. Edwards added 58 on the ground, and Mitchell had 73 before his injury.\n\nLawrence threw for 264 yards, including a 65-yard touchdown to Jamal Agnew that gave the Jaguars life after a scoreless first half. But the Ravens answered with an unlikely play.\n\nThe Jaguars had four scoring chances in the first half but failed to cash in on any of them. They managed 181 yards, which was the most by a team in an opening half this season that did not score.\n\nBrandon McManus missed two field goals from beyond 50 yards, and Lawrence inexplicably fumbled at the Baltimore 18-yard line. Lawrence simply lost the ball while scrambling on a third-and-17 play. He wasn't going to pick up the first down, but Jacksonville surely was in makeable range for McManus.\n\nLawrence's second mistake was even more of a head-scratcher. After connecting with Zay Jones for 36 yards and putting the Jaguars at the 5 with 15 seconds remaining in the half, Lawrence probably should have spiked the ball and stopped the clock. Instead, he threw a short out to rookie Parker Washington, who couldn't get out of bounds and helplessly watched the clock run out.\n\n\"It's a great learning experience for us,\" Pederson said.\n\nAdd it all up, and the Jaguars could have been up 16-10 at intermission. Instead, they trailed 10-0.\n\n## QUESTIONABLE NO-CALL\nMcManus' first of two errant field goals was a 50-yarder that clanged off the right upright in the first quarter. He probably should have gotten a do-over.\n\nOfficials failed to throw a flag on Mitchell after he ran into McManus while he was finishing his follow-through. Holder Logan Cooke vehemently argued with officials, who later came to the sideline to explain themselves to Cooke and Pederson. Retired NFL referee and current NBC rules analyst Terry McAulay said the Ravens should have been penalized 5 yards on the fourth-and-7 play.\n\n## SACK STREAK\nRavens defensive tackle Justin Madubuike tied an NFL record by recording at least a half-sack in 11 consecutive games. Madubuike sacked Lawrence in the fourth to tie the record held by Jared Allen, Chris Jones, Trey Hendrickson and Shaun Ellis.\n\n## KEY INJURIES\nJaguars WR Zay Jones, who recently returned from a knee injury, strained a hamstring in the fourth. Ravens S Kyle Hamilton played through a knee injury that had him listed as questionable. He finished with seven tackles.\n\n## UP NEXT\nBaltimore: Plays at San Francisco on Christmas, another prime-time matchup between division leaders on the opposite coast.\n\nJacksonville: Plays at Tampa Bay on Dec. 24, also a game featuring division leaders."}
{"text": "# Trump says Nevada fake electors treated 'unfairly' during rally in Reno\nBy **JONATHAN J. COOPER** and **GABE STERN**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 8:55 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**RENO, Nev. (AP)** - Former President Donald Trump called out three of Nevada's fake electors Sunday, saying they're being treated unfairly less than 24 hours before they are scheduled to be arraigned for signing certificates falsely stating Trump won the state in 2020.\n\nTrump did not directly mention the charges nor the upcoming court date during a rally in Reno, but he cast the fake electors as victims in a brief portion of a speech that spanned more than an hour.\n\n\"A tremendous man, tremendous guy, gets treated so unfairly and he loves this country and he loves this state,\" Trump said of Nevada GOP Chairman Michael McDonald, who was one of six Republicans indicted earlier this month by a Nevada grand jury.\n\nTrump's sympathy for the fake electors who tried to help him cling to power after his 2020 defeat comes amid growing alarm about his authoritarian rhetoric as he looks to return to the White House.\n\nNevada is the fourth state to choose delegates for the Republican presidential nomination, the first in the West and the first with a sizeable Latino population. But it's gotten little attention from the GOP contenders, who have focused their time in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.\n\nTrump, who is overwhelmingly favored in polls, is looking to sweep up all of Nevada's delegates by winning the caucuses with more than 50% as part of his quest to sew up the GOP nomination early and turn his attention to a general election rematch against President Joe Biden. If he falls short of a majority in Nevada's caucuses, he'll have to split the delegates with his rivals.\n\nTrump drew attention to the fake electors as they prepare for a court hearing in Las Vegas on Monday morning.\n\nIn December 2020, six Republicans signed certificates falsely stating that Trump won Nevada and sent them to Congress and the National Archives, where they were ultimately ignored. The scheme, which involved several battleground states, was an attempt to create a pretext for Trump to remain president despite his loss.\n\nTrump and his attorneys had a direct hand in the planning and execution of the fake elector scheme, including a conference call with McDonald, transcripts released last year show.\n\nTrump said Clark County GOP Chairman Jesse Law is a \"fantastic man\" who is \"treated very unfairly.\" He also thanked another fake elector, Jim Hindle, the Storey County clerk and vice chairman of the Nevada GOP, at the rally.\n\nThe six fake electors have been charged with offering a false instrument for filing and uttering a forged instrument. Those two categories of felonies have penalties that range from one year up to either four or five years in prison.\n\nMcDonald and Law took the rally stage before Trump but both kept their remarks short and did not mention the charges against them. McDonald, the state party chair, spoke for two minutes about the party-run caucus, promising strong turnout would equal a Trump Republican nomination. Law, the Clark County GOP chair, sang the national anthem.\n\nUnder McDonald's leadership, the Nevada GOP pushed to hold a caucus despite a state law requiring a primary, which has caused concern among many Republicans - including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis - that the caucus rules would tilt the nominating process in Trump's favor. The dueling contests have split the GOP field, with former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley competing in the primary and the other Republicans competing in the caucus. Only the caucus will result in delegates to the Republican National Convention, which will ultimately choose the party's presidential nominee.\n\nSome Nevada Republicans and Trump rivals argue the setup, with a state-run primary on Feb. 6 and a party-run caucus on Feb. 8, will unnecessarily confuse and anger voters.\n\nIn Reno, Trump repeated his pledge to deport immigrants living in the country illegally in record numbers but did not echo his claim from a day earlier that immigrants are \"poisoning the blood of our country.\" The remark, which echoes Adolf Hitler's language in his own political manifesto, was widely condemned."}
{"text": "# Car plows into parked vehicle in Biden's motorcade outside Delaware campaign headquarters\nBy **COLLEEN LONG**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 9:42 PM EST\n\n---\n\nWILMINGTON, Del. (AP) - A car plowed into a parked SUV that was guarding President Joe Biden 's motorcade Sunday night while the president was leaving a visit to his campaign headquarters. The president and first lady Jill Biden were unharmed.\n\nWhile Biden was walking from the campaign office to his waiting armored SUV, a sedan hit a U.S. Secret Service vehicle that was being used to close off intersections near the headquarters for the president's departure. The sedan then tried to continue into a closed-off intersection, before Secret Service personnel surrounded the vehicle with weapons drawn and instructed the driver to put his hands up.\n\nBiden paused and looked over toward the sound, surprised, before he was ushered into the vehicle, where his wife was already seated, before being driven swiftly back to their home. His schedule was otherwise unaffected by the incident.\n\nThe Secret Service did not immediately comment on the incident."}
{"text": "# James Cook leads dominant rushing attack as Bills trample Cowboys 31-10\nBy **JOHN WAWROW**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 9:24 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. (AP)** - The Bills' offense has found its legs in time to make a playoff push.\n\nJosh Allen played the role of happy spectator by standing back and watching James Cook run left, right and up the middle as Buffalo ran away with a 31-10 win over the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday.\n\n\"I felt like the kid that didn't do anything in a class project but got an A,\" Allen said after he threw for just 94 yards, with a touchdown passing and one rushing. \"But I'll do this 10 times out of 10 times, man. Like, keep going.\"\n\nA matchup of two of the NFL's top-scoring quarterbacks - Allen entered the week with 35 total touchdowns, and Dak Prescott was first in passing TDs with 28 - turned into a Bills stampede. Cook finished with 179 yards rushing and 221 yards from scrimmage, both career bests, while scoring on an 18-yard catch and a 24-yard run as the Cowboys' five-game winning streak was snapped.\n\n\"I just let it rip when I get my opportunity,\" said Cook, a second-year player who is the younger brother of New York Jets running back Dalvin Cook. \"My O-linemen, they were opening it up and I was hitting it. Finding that rhythm.\"\n\nThe Bills (8-6) won consecutive games for the first time since a three-game winning streak ended on Oct. 1 and gained ground in the AFC playoff race, moving one game ahead of Denver and Pittsburgh.\n\nThe Cowboys (10-4) clinched their third straight playoff berth before kickoff thanks to losses by Green Bay and Atlanta on Sunday and Detroit beating Denver on Saturday. But nothing else went right for Dallas, which fell a game behind NFC-best San Francisco.\n\nBuffalo rushed for 266 yards, held the ball for 10 minutes longer than Dallas and had 28 first downs to the Cowboys' 14.\n\nThe NFL's top-scoring offense was limited to a field goal through 57 minutes. Dallas is 7-0 at home, where it has outscored opponents 279-108, but fell to 3-4 on the road, where it has been outscored 156-152.\n\n\"It's a gap. That's part of my message. We play so well at home, and there's just too big of a gap in our road games,\" coach Mike McCarthy said. \"We are conscious of it. We have a long flight home to continue to talk about, think about (it).\"\n\nDallas, coming off a 33-13 win over Philadelphia, plays two of its last three on the road.\n\nThe Bills played keep-away by running the ball in a persistent rain, tripping up a Cowboys offense that finished with a season-low 195 yards.\n\n\"They got up on us and continued to control the ball, control the possession, kill the clock. And we didn't convert on our third downs, which is something we have been great on all year,\" Prescott said.\n\n\"That's been our way of winning the games. So they beat us in the formula.\"\n\nBuffalo's injury-depleted defense, missing two more regulars in edge rusher A.J. Epenesa and safety Micah Hyde, had three sacks and limited Prescott to 21 of 34 passing for 134 yards with an interception. And a Cowboys offense that's scored 40 or more points five times this season punted five times and was limited to eight first downs before gaining six on its final drive.\n\nFour of the Bills' first five possessions lasted more than 4 minutes, 40 seconds.\n\nLatavius Murray capped Buffalo's 12-play, 75-yard opening drive with a 2-yard run. The Bills went up 14-0 on Cook's 18-yard touchdown catch on their third drive, which was extended after Sam Williams was flagged for roughing Bills punter Sam Martin.\n\nThe game was essentially over after the Bills' opening drive of the third quarter, which ate up 8:22 of the clock and ended with Tyle Bass hitting a a 23-yard field goal to put Buffalo up 24-3.\n\nBuffalo's 20 first downs rushing were tied for the second most in team history, and most since 1996. Cook's rushing total was the highest for a Bills player since Fred Jackson had 212 yards in a 2009 season-ending win over Indianapolis.\n\nThe Bills, coming off a 20-17 victory at Kansas City, are trying to secure their fifth straight playoff berth and stay in contention for a fourth consecutive AFC East title.\n\n\"It was kind of all systems go today,\" center Mitch Morse said. \"We still have an uphill battle, but this is a great first step.\"\n\n## INJURIES\nCowboys: RG Zack Martin did not return after hurting his quadriceps in the first quarter. McCarthy said Martin told him he's going to be OK.\n\nBills: DT Jordan Phillips did not return after hurting his wrist.\n\n## UP NEXT\nCowboys: At Miami next Sunday.\n\nBills: At the Los Angeles Chargers on Saturday night."}
{"text": "# Arkansas sheriff facing obstruction, concealment charges ordered to give up law enforcement duties\nDecember 17, 2023. 5:35 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MALVERN, Ark. (AP)** - A federal judge has ordered an indicted southwest Arkansas sheriff to give up all his law enforcement duties and stay away from the sheriff's office.\n\nThe order by U.S. Magistrate Judge Barry Bryant says Hot Spring County Sheriff Scott Finkbeiner's only remaining authority is over payroll. Finkbeiner was indicted Nov. 15 on charges of obstruction of justice and concealing a crime, after first being arrested on Nov. 2.\n\nThe indictment and an earlier sworn statement by an FBI agent say Finkbeiner tried to get federal agents to stop investigating a drug dealer who had provided the sheriff with methamphetamine.\n\nFinkbeiner has pleaded not guilty. In a Nov. 6 post of the sheriff's office Facebook page, he denied wrongdoing.\n\n\"I do want to emphatically say I DID NOT OBSTRUCT JUSTICE in any way!\" he wrote. \"In fact it is the contrary. Thank you for the huge outpouring of support!! It's my hope that you can all come to the trial and see the truth!\"\n\nBy agreeing to give up his duties as sheriff, Finkbeiner appears to have avoided a renewed push by federal prosecutors to jail him before trial. He's currently free on $5,000 bail.\n\nThe order was earlier reported by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.\n\nProsecutors said in an earlier court filing that Finkbeiner had said he would fire or lay off potential witnesses who worked for the sheriff's department, asked two elected constables to investigate the case for him in what could be interpreted as witness intimidation, and claimed he would release a Hot Spring County jail inmate if the inmate gave Finkbeiner information about his own case.\n\nThey also say Finkbeiner complained to Malvern police officers and state prosecutors that the FBI was interfering in his own investigation, threatening to arrest FBI agents.\n\nFederal agents say audio recordings by a confidential informant show Finkbeiner arriving at a house in Perla after 2 a.m. on May 21, smoking meth and repeatedly asking the informant for sex.\n\nAfter Finkbeiner found a surveillance camera outside the house, FBI agents say, he called them Aug. 21 to say that the alleged drug dealer agents were investigating was an informant for the sheriff on a theft of government funds investigation and a drug arrest.\n\n\"I assure you, he ain't moving a bunch of drug weight,\" Finkbeiner said in the conversation, according to an Oct. 30 sworn statement by FBI Special Agent Brian Ambrose."}
{"text": "# Authorities: 5 people including 3 young children die in house fire in northwestern Arizona\nDecember 17, 2023. 5:03 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BULLHEAD CITY, Ariz. (AP)** - Five people, including three young children, have died in a house fire in northwestern Arizona, authorities said Sunday, adding it appeared no adults were home at the time.\n\nBullhead City police said the fire broke out around 5 p.m. Saturday and the victims did not make it out of the two-story duplex in that community near the Colorado River.\n\nA city fire department spokeswoman said the five victims were ages 2, 4, 5, 11 and 13. Their names weren't immediately released Sunday.\n\nAuthorities said the cause of the fire isn't known yet.\n\nPolice said there reportedly were no adults home at the time, but officials gave few other details.\n\nThe fire is being investigated by the city's police and fire departments and other agencies including the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives."}
{"text": "# Auburn controls USC 91-75 in Bronny James' first road game\nBy **JOHN ZENOR**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 4:47 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**AUBURN, Ala. (AP)** - A dominant performance by Auburn served as a reminder that neither USC nor Bronny James are a finished product.\n\nAden Holloway scored 15 points with six assists and Jaylin Williams had 14 points to help Auburn beat USC 91-75 on Sunday as the Trojans' James continued to work his way back to form after suffering cardiac arrest in July.\n\nThe Tigers (8-2) controlled the game most of the way in the first road appearance for James in a packed Auburn Arena with dozens of NBA scouts watching. The Trojans (5-5) dropped their third straight game.\n\n\"He's improved, but it's a little unfair to him to be judging him every possession right now,\" Trojans coach Andy Enfield said. \"He's come back and he gave us good minutes. He plays very hard.\n\n\"He's just a freshman and he's been out five months. It's very, very challenging for him but we anticipate he'll be a much better player by the middle of the season than he is now.\"\n\nBronny James, who remains on restricted minutes just two games into his comeback, didn't speak to reporters after the game.\n\nThe son of NBA superstar LeBron James, Bronny James scored five points in 14 minutes, making 3 of 4 free throws late. He couldn't corral the ball on an alley-oop chance in the final two minutes, prompting a chant of \"overrated.\" But Auburn fans mostly didn't react to his presence on the court.\n\nAuburn had five scorers in double figures. Denver Jones had 12 points while Johni Broome and Dylan Cardwell each had 11.\n\nBoogie Ellis led USC with 22 points. Isaiah Collier and Oziyah Sellers each had 13. Collier fouled out.\n\nHolloway, himself a highly recruited freshman guard, figured it had to be a challenge for James to get back into rhythm on the court.\n\n\"I was just happy to be able to see him out on the court and playing again,\" Holloway said. \"It's always good to just play and do what you love to do. Being able to compete out there is the best thing, really.\"\n\nJames had made his college debut at home a week earlier in an overtime loss to Long Beach State with his father on hand. LeBron James, whose Los Angeles Lakers host the New York Knicks on Monday night, wasn't in Auburn Arena for this one.\n\nBronny James' mother, Savannah, watched from right behind the USC bench.\n\nJames entered the game with 16:28 left to a moderate buzz from the fans and played mostly short stints, but he wasn't able to spark a rally. In fact, the Trojans were outscored by 17 with him on the court in the first half and trailed 49-35 at halftime.\n\nJames suffered cardiac arrest during a workout at Galen Center. He was found to have a congenital heart defect that was treatable.\n\n## BIG PICTURE\nUSC started a four-game road stretch. The Trojans have lost three consecutive regular-season games for the first time since losing to Colorado, Arizona and Arizona State from Feb. 1-8, 2020.\n\nAuburn has won 49 consecutive home nonconference games and is creeping closer to the Top 25.\n\n## UP NEXT\nUSC: Visits Alabama State on Tuesday night.\n\nAuburn: Hosts Alabama State on Friday night."}
{"text": "# 1 person dead after Nebraska home exploded, sparking an investigation into 'destructive devices'\n4:19 PM EST, December 17, 2023\n\n---\n\n**HASTINGS, Neb. (AP)** - A body was found early Sunday after a Nebraska house explosion that authorities say was likely caused by \"destructive devices.\"\n\nPolice in Hastings said in a news release that emergency crews rushed to the home around 3:15 a.m. after a 911 caller reported the explosion. Police and firefighters encountered secondary explosions upon arriving.\n\nWithin the debris of the destroyed home, they found the victim, the release said. The person's name wasn't immediately released.\n\nThe release said crews have been working to locate additional explosives, and the Nebraska State Patrol Bomb Squad is helping with testing.\n\nHastings is a town of about 25,000 people located about 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of Lincoln."}
{"text": "# Judge overturns Mississippi death penalty case, says racial bias in picking jury wasn't fully argued\nDecember 17, 2023. 4:16 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**GREENVILLE, Miss. (AP)** - A federal judge has overturned the death penalty conviction of a Mississippi man, finding a trial judge didn't give the man's lawyer enough chance to argue that the prosecution was dismissing Black jurors for discriminatory reasons.\n\nU.S. District Judge Michael P. Mills ruled Tuesday that the state of Mississippi must give Terry Pitchford a new trial on capital murder charges.\n\nMills wrote that his ruling is partially motivated by what he called former District Attorney Doug Evans ' history of discriminating against Black jurors.\n\nA spokesperson for Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch said Sunday that the state intends to appeal. Online prison records show Pitchford remained on death row Sunday at Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.\n\nMills ordered the state to retry the 37-year-old man within six months, and said he must be released from custody if he is not retried by then.\n\nPitchford was indicted on a murder charge in the fatal 2004 robbery of the Crossroads Grocery, a store just outside Grenada, in northern Mississippi. Pitchford and friend, Eric Bullins, went to the store to rob it. Bullins shot store owner Reuben Britt three times, fatally wounding him, while Pitchford said he fired shots into the floor, court documents state.\n\nPolice found Britt's gun in a car at Pitchford's house. Pitchford, then 18, confessed to his role, saying he had also tried to rob the store 10 days earlier.\n\nBut Mills said that jury selection before the 2006 trial was critically flawed because the trial judge didn't give Pitchford's defense lawyer enough of a chance to challenge the state's reasons for striking Black jurors.\n\nTo argue that jurors were being improperly excluded, a defendant must show that discriminatory intent motivated the strikes. In Pitchford's case, judges and lawyers whittled down the original jury pool of 61 white and 35 Black members to a pool with 36 white and five Black members, in part because so many Black jurors objected to sentencing Pitchford to death. Then prosecutors struck four more Black jurors, leaving only one Black person on the final jury.\n\nProsecutors can strike Black jurors for race-neutral reasons, and prosecutors at the trial gave reasons for removing all four. But Mills found that the judge never gave the defense a chance to properly rebut the state's justification.\n\n\"This court cannot ignore the notion that Pitchford was seemingly given no chance to rebut the state's explanations and prove purposeful discrimination,\" Mills wrote.\n\nOn appeal, Pitchford's lawyers argued that some of the reasons for rejecting the jurors were flimsy and that the state didn't make similar objections to white jurors with similar issues.\n\nMills also wrote that his decision was influenced by the prosecution of another Black man by Evans, who is white. Curtis Flowers was tried six times in the shooting deaths of four people. The U.S. Supreme Court found Evans had improperly excluded Black people from Flowers' juries, overturning the man's conviction and death sentence.\n\nSupreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh called it a \"relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of Black individuals.\"\n\nIn reporting on the Flowers case, American Public Media's \"In the Dark\" found what it described as a long history of racial bias in jury selection by Evans.\n\nMississippi dropped charges against Flowers in September 2020, after Flowers was released from custody and Evans turned the case over to the state attorney general.\n\nMills wrote that, on its own, the Flowers case doesn't prove anything. But he said that the Mississippi Supreme Court should have examined that history in considering Pitchford's appeal.\n\n\"The court merely believes that it should have been included in a 'totality of the circumstances' analysis of the issue,\" Mills wrote."}
{"text": "# Officials open tuberculosis probe involving dozens of schools in Nevada's most populous county\nDecember 17, 2023. 3:45 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LAS VEGAS (AP)** - A tuberculosis investigation is underway involving a person with an active infection who was on dozens of elementary and high school campuses in Nevada's most populous county, according to authorities.\n\nThe person, who has not been publicly identified, was on 26 Clark County School District campuses and one training site before learning of the TB diagnosis, the Las Vegas Review Journal reported.\n\nAccording to the newspaper, the Southern Nevada Health District released a list of affected schools Friday and people identified as close contacts of the person were being notified.\n\nThe district said individual notifications were happening at 17 campuses for possible exposures, but no exposures had been identified at eight campuses so far.\n\nHealth district officials said not all who were exposed will be infected and not everyone who is infected has the active disease, which is caused by bacteria and most often affects the lungs.\n\nTuberculosis spreads easily where people gather in crowds or live in crowded conditions.\n\nSymptoms can include coughing that lasts at least two weeks, chest pain, coughing up blood or phlegm, weakness or fatigue, weight loss, chills, fever, night sweats and loss of appetite.\n\nThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said more than 8,300 TB cases were reported nationwide last year."}
{"text": "# 2 men charged in Pennsylvania school van crash that killed teenage girl, injured 5\nDecember 17, 2023. 2:59 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PITTSBURGH (AP)** - Two men accused of racing on a public highway in western Pennsylvania are facing charges in a crash involving a school van that left a teenage girl dead.\n\nThe crash also sent three other juveniles and two critically injured adults - including one of the defendants - to hospitals.\n\nAllegheny County police said the Serra Catholic High School van was trying to make a left turn when it was struck by a northbound sedan on Sept. 20 in Dravosburg. The medical examiner's office said 15-year-old Samantha Lee Kalkbrenner died at the scene. Authorities said three of the four students in the van, including Kalkbrenner, were ejected and the van driver also was seriously injured.\n\nWilliam Soliday II, 43, of Irwin, whose car struck the van, is charged with criminal homicide, vehicular homicide, and multiple counts of aggravated assault and reckless endangering, authorities said. Andrew Voigt, 37, of Pittsburgh, whose vehicle entered the intersection moments after the crash, is charged with accidents involving death or injury and reckless endangering, authorities said. Both men, who worked at the same place nearby, are charged with racing on highways.\n\nAllegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala said authorities believe the two drivers were racing and that the vehicle had been turned \"into a deadly weapon.\" Investigators said the first car is believed to have been traveling more than 100 mph (160 kph) just before the crash and the second vehicle was about two seconds behind.\n\nSoliday's attorney, Casey White, told reporters his client sustained some head trauma and has no memory of the crash or even leaving home that day. He said the crash was an accident and there was no malicious intent on his client's part, and \"words can't describe the remorse he has, his family has.\"\n\n\"It was a very shocking situation,\" Voigt's attorney David Shrager told WPXI-TV, adding how many \"have passed by terrible accidents and not stopped?\""}
{"text": "# AP's Lawrence Knutson, who covered Washington's transcendent events for nearly 4 decades, has died\nBy **CALVIN WOODWARD**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 6:06 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Lawrence L. Knutson, a longtime Associated Press writer whose deep knowledge of the presidency, Congress and American history made him an institution in his own right, has died. He was 87.\n\nKnutson, who had prostate cancer and other health problems, died Saturday night in hospice care at a memory care facility in Washington, said his cousin, Katherine Knutson Garrett, who had recently been managing his affairs.\n\nKnutson's AP career spanned 37 years and the terms of eight presidents before his retirement in 2003.\n\nIn that time, he established himself as an expert on Washington - \"a city of inspiration and spite, of spring bloom and eternal ambition, a low-rise marble capital that tourists honor and critics malign,\" he wrote. He seemed to carry the soul of the place with him, as soulless as that place could seem to be to some.\n\nBorn in Chicago, Lawrence Lauder Knutson was raised in Milwaukee and rural Wisconsin before he interrupted his university studies to enlist in the Army. He was sent to a U.S. base outside Bordeaux, France, where he produced the base newspaper and wondered \"what journalism would be like if you did it for real.\"\n\nHe worked for the City News Bureau of Chicago after the Army and university, then the Chicago Tribune before the AP hired him in 1965. The next year, he was mere feet away, covering an open-housing march led by Martin Luther King Jr., when a rock hurled from hostile bystanders struck King on the head, knocking him to one knee.\n\n\"He recovered, and surrounded by aides, led about 700 people through hostile crowds numbering in the thousands,\" Knutson recalled. Knutson transferred to Washington in 1967.\n\nColleagues remember Knutson as an elegant writer on the transcendent events of his time. He was always quick to give acquaintances tours of Congress more intimate than the official tour guides put on. He also had his eccentricities.\n\n\"Sitting beside Larry in the Senate Press Gallery for many years, I always admired his quick grasp of a story, his writing and his love of Congress as an institution,\" said former AP writer Jim Luther. \"And who doesn't take notes on a checkbook or use a paper clip to hold his glasses together?\"\n\nThe story is legion of Knutson sleeping in late when in New York to cover a 1976 whistle-stop train tour by Jimmy Carter and presidential running mate Walter Mondale to New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Missing the train, Knutson took a succession of cabs from city to city, racking up a substantial bill only to find the train gone when he got to each stop.\n\nIn a line of work that is relentlessly focused on the moment, Knutson was also one to look back, reaching for lessons of history that informed the present.\n\n\"Larry was indeed deeply knowledgeable about Congress and Washington politics,\" said Sandy Johnson, a former AP Washington bureau chief. \"But what I remember most vividly is his interest in history, which translated into a column we called Washington Yesterday. His insightful and delightful writing about Washington history was an antidote to the gravity and infighting of the usual capital news - and his columns always made me smile.\"\n\nThere was his story about presidential portraits: \"George Washington came to the presidency under siege by artists who saw his character and their fortunes in the contours of his face. The American Revolution's commander in chief found persistent artists more irritating than the crack of British muskets; the lengthy sittings portrait painters required were, he said, mind-numbing wastes of fleeting time.\"\n\nAnd this, in the age of Bill (\"Slick Willie\") Clinton: \"A nickname, says the proverb, is 'the heaviest stone the devil can throw at a man.' Some wound and leave scars. Some stick like burrs. Others fall away and are forgotten.\n\n\"American presidents have attracted and endured nicknames ever since George Washington was called the 'Sword of the Revolution,' Father of His Country,' the 'Sage of Mount Vernon' and, interestingly, 'The Old Fox.'\"\n\nAfter his retirement, Knutson wrote a book about presidential vacations and retreats, \"Away from the White House,\" published by the White House Historical Association.\n\nKnutson will be buried in a small cemetery in City Point, Wisconsin, where many family members are interred, his cousin said. No details were immediately released on a memorial service or his survivors."}
{"text": "# 79-year-old Alabama woman arrested after city worker presses charges over dispute at council meeting\n2:44 PM EST, December 17, 2023\n\n---\n\n**TARRANT, Ala. (AP)** - Discord in an Alabama suburb that has seen years of political turmoil has led to the arrest of a 79-year-old woman after a city employee pressed misdemeanor charges alleging disorderly conduct and harassment.\n\nNovilee Williams was arrested at her home in Tarrant and taken to jail Dec. 5, the day after Williams and a city accountant exchanged words during the public comment portion of a Tarrant City Council meeting, AL.com reports.\n\nVideo on the city's Facebook page shows Williams, a frequent critic of Mayor Wayman Newton, arguing with Shayla Myricks, a city accountant. Williams pushed Myricks' hand away and told the accountant to \"turn around honey,\" the video shows.\n\nMyricks filed misdemeanor charges against Williams, according to the police report, which accuses her of \"fighting and threatening behavior in a public place.\"\n\nCouncil Member Veronica Bandy Freeman said she believes the arrest was politically motivated.\n\n\"There are some rules for some and then there are rules for others,\" Freeman said. \"I can only go by my experience. When a certain person gets attacked, it is a problem. They went overboard in doing that to Ms. Williams.\"\n\nNewton, who wasn't in the room, said he had nothing to do with the arrest.\n\n\"But you can't go putting your hands on people,\" he said. \"I wasn't there, and she was arrested when she put her hands on the city accountant. It was the city accountant who wanted to press charges against her. I didn't even know that it had happened until people started calling me.\"\n\nIt's the latest upset in the 6,000-resident town just north of Birmingham. Last month Newton tried to suspend the police, only to have the council reinstate him. The mayor sued, asking a judge to block the council from reversing the suspension. Newton is also jousting with council members over their hiring of a city manager to take over many of his duties.\n\nTommy Bryant, a council member, punched the mayor outside city hall in 2022. Police arrested Bryant, but he was acquitted because a judge determined Newton had used \"fighting words\" in sexually insulting Bryant's wife. Bryant, who is white, refused calls to resign in 2021 after using a racial slur to describe Freeman. Bryant said he was publicizing words that Newton, who is the city's first Black mayor, used to describe Freeman.\n\nWilliams criticized Newton during public comment in the Dec. 4 meeting, as she frequently does.\n\n\"I believe the mayor is being corrupt,\" Williams told the council. \"I believe the mayor needs to be charged for something. Something's got to be done with this man.\"\n\nSitting in front of Williams in the audience, Myricks turned around to speak in defense of the mayor.\n\n\"Turn around honey,\" Williams shot back.\n\n\"If we can't beat him one way we'll beat him at the ballot box,\" Williams added.\n\nWhen Myricks again turned in her seat to face Williams, the video shows, Williams touched the accountant's arm and told her to turn around.\n\n\"Don't put your hands on me,\" Myricks said.\n\n\"Honey, go on,\" Williams responded. \"I'm a citizen of Tarrant, lady, and I have a right to speak, even though you are in the mayor's corner, I can see that. I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to the city council.\"\n\nA few minutes later, the city video shows, a Tarrant police officer approached Williams and asked for her driver's license.\n\nWilliams said she has hired a lawyer.\n\n\"Everything is well, and I don't have a grudge against Wayman and that young lady,\" Williams told AL.com after her arrest. \"I pray for them.\"\n\nMyricks did not respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment."}
{"text": "# Fire destroys a Los Angeles-area church just before Christmas\nDecember 17, 2023. 2:42 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**POMOMA, Calif. (AP)** - A Los Angeles-area church was destroyed in a massive fire early Sunday, just hours before a celebration that was set to include a Christmas play and a toy giveaway.\n\nFirefighters arrived at Victory Outreach church in Pomona at about 2:45 a.m., the Los Angeles County Fire Department said on X, formerly known as Twitter.\n\nA fire department spokeswoman told television station KABC that firefighters went into an aggressive interior attack when they arrived, but after about 20 minutes the roof started to collapse and the fire expanded so they went into a defensive mode.\n\nNo injuries were reported. The cause of the fire remains under investigation.\n\nThe Rev. Robert Garcia told television station KTLA that 500 people had registered for the church's planned celebration.\n\n\"It's a tough morning for us, because today we were getting ready to have our outreach for the whole community,\" he said."}
{"text": "# Police say a Minnesota officer shot and killed a man who was stabbing a woman\nDecember 17, 2023. 1:51 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MARSHALL, Minn. (AP)** - Police in Minnesota say an officer shot and killed a man early Sunday after spotting him stabbing a woman.\n\nMarshall police said in a news release that the officer responded around 2:40 a.m. to a domestic disturbance. Authorities said the officer used a Taser on the man after seeing the woman was being stabbed. Ultimately, shots were fired, although the news release provided few details.\n\nThe news release said the suspect died at the scene and that the woman was flown to a hospital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in critical condition. Neither of their names were immediately released.\n\nPolice asked the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to investigate. The agency confirmed in a message posted on X, formerly Twitter, that it is looking into what it described as a \"use-of-deadly-force incident.\" It provided no other details."}
{"text": "# Federal judge rules school board districts illegal in Georgia school system, calls for new map\nBy **JEFF AMY**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 6:50 PM EST\n\n---\n\nATLANTA (AP) - A federal judge has ruled that school board districts in Georgia's second-largest school system appear to be unconstitutionally discriminatory and must be quickly redrawn ahead of 2024's elections.\n\nU.S. District Judge Eleanor Ross on Thursday forbade the Cobb County school district from using a map supported by the current board's four Republican members, finding in an preliminary injunction that the map is \"substantially likely to be an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.\"\n\nThe Cobb County district on Friday asked the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to step in immediately and set the order aside, saying the district has been unfairly excluded from the litigation. The district warns that if the appeals court doesn't act quickly, the \"plaintiffs' scheme to use the courts to overthrow the will of Cobb County voters and replace the duly enacted redistricting map with one that advances their own political goals - without opposition - therefore will succeed exactly as plaintiffs envisioned.\"\n\nRoss ordered state lawmakers to draw a new map by Jan. 10, which will be unlikely unless Gov. Brian Kemp orders a special session. Lawmakers don't convene until Jan. 8 and normal legislative rules don't allow a bill to pass in three days. The district called the deadline \"impossible,\" saying it takes away the legislature's rightful chance to fix the problems.\n\nThat means Ross could draw a new map, or could accept a map proposed by the plaintiffs, a group of Cobb County residents and liberal-leaning political groups.\n\nFour board seats are up for election in 2024.\n\nAny new map could upset the 4-3 Republican majority on the board. The 106,000-student district has been riven by political conflict in recent years, with the GOP majority often imposing its will over the protests of the three Democratic members.\n\n\"The court's decision is a resounding victory for voting rights,\" said Poy Winchakul, senior staff attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which represented the plaintiffs. \"Fair maps are essential to the democracy process and ensure Cobb County voters of color have an equal voice in schools.\"\n\nBut the district alleges the plaintiffs are pursuing a Democratic takeover of the board through the lawsuit.\n\n\"This scheme is destined to facilitate plaintiffs' political seizure of the board as the overriding goal in this litigation,\" the board wrote in its appeal.\n\nThe lawsuit alleges that Republicans illegally crammed Black and Hispanic voters into three districts in the southern part of the suburban Atlanta county, solidifying Republicans' hold on the remaining four districts.\n\nRoss agreed, finding the people who drew the map relied too much on race.\n\nThe lawsuit is unusual because the school district was dismissed earlier, leaving only the Cobb County Board of Elections and Registration as a defendant. That body, like the county commission, is controlled by Democrats, and decided to settle the lawsuit. The decision to settle, which set the stage for Ross' order, prompted the school board in October to accuse the elections board of colluding with \"leftist political activists,\" giving them \"considerable and inappropriate influence to interfere with the lawfully established\" maps.\n\nThe district calls the elections board and its director \"sham defendants\" and wants the appeals court to put the district back in the case. It's also asking the appeals court to overturn all the recent orders, including the preliminary injunction and re-open discovery \"giving the district a fair opportunity\" to oppose the plaintiffs. It says Ross \"completely ignored\" its recent arguments.\n\nThe plaintiffs on Dec. 6 asked the appeals court to dismiss an earlier version of the appeal, saying the school district wasn't a party to the case and there was no final order ripe for appeal.\n\nOral argument in the appeal is set for Jan. 30, but the district is seeking a quicker decision, saying Ross may impose a map by then.\n\nThe school board has spent more than $1 million defending the lawsuit, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has found."}
{"text": "# 4 teenagers killed in single-vehicle accident in Montana\nBy **Associated Press**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 1:30 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BILLINGS, Mont. (AP)** - Four teenagers were killed in a single-vehicle crash in an industrial area of Montana's largest city, authorities said.\n\nPolice say speed, no seatbelts and possibly alcohol contributed to the accident just before 2 a.m. Saturday morning in Billings. The vehicle went off the roadway, causing the driver to lose control and strike a large metal pole supporting a business sign, Billings police said.\n\nTwo victims died on scene. Two had critical injuries and were transported to a hospital where they were pronounced dead.\n\nThe victims were two 14-year-old girls, a 17-year-old male and an 18-year-old male. No further details were immediately available."}
{"text": "# 'Wonka' waltzes to $39 million opening, propelled by Chalamet's starring role\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 2:45 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - \"Wonka\" debuted with $39 million in box office sales in U.S. and Canadian theaters over the weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday. That made it a strong start for the Timothée Chalamet -starring Willy Wonka musical that underscored the young star's draw.\n\nMusicals have been tough sells in theaters in recent years, so much so that Warner Bros. downplayed the song and dance elements of \"Wonka\" in trailers. Instead, the studio emphasized Chalamet, the 27-year-old actor who, with \"Wonka,\" notched his second No. 1 movie following 2021's \"Dune.\" The earlier film recorded a $41 million opening.\n\nWhile \"Dune\" was a sprawling and star-studded sci-fi adventure, \"Wonka\" relies chiefly on Chalamet's charisma.\n\n\"Wonka,\" which cost about $125 million to produce and played at 4,203 locations, was also the first big Hollywood release to launch following the end of the SAG-AFTRA actors' strike. Chalamet hosted \"Saturday Night Live\" just days after the strike ended. In his opening monologue, he sang to the tune of \"Pure Imagination\" about \"returning to this magical world where actors can promote their projects.\"\n\n\"It shows you the power of a star, and it also shows you the power of a star going out and working a movie,\" said Jeffrey Goldstein, distribution chief for Warner Bros. \"Having him out there after the strikes were over was a win for him and a win for the movie.\"\n\nGoldstein expects \"Wonka\" to be the go-to choice from families over the holidays. Its main competition for kids will be Universal Pictures' animated \"Migration.\"\n\n\"Wonka,\" directed by Paul King of \"Paddington\" and \"Paddington 2,\" is a prequel to 1971's \"Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,\" with Chalamet starring as a young Wonka trying to open a candy store. Its ensemble cast includes Hugh Grant, Olivia Colman and Keegan-Michael Key.\n\nWarner Bros. last revived Roald Dahl's classic with the 2005 Tim Burton-directed \"Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,\" starring Johnny Depp. It debuted with $56.2 million and ultimately grossed $475 million worldwide.\n\nTo reach those numbers, \"Wonka\" will need strong legs through the lucrative holiday moviegoing period. On its side are mostly good reviews (84% \"fresh\" on Rotten Tomatoes) and positive audience reaction (an \"A-\" CinemaScore).\n\nChalamet is also drawing younger ticket-buyers. Moviegoers under the age of 25 accounted for 36% of the audience, which was split evenly between 51% females and 49% males. \"Wonka\" added $53.6 million in overseas ticket sales.\n\n\"Chalamet is a true movie star who's been developing his craft and his reputation over many years,\" says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore. \"Everybody's looking for who's the next big movie star. Is it all about the old-school leading men? Chalamet is definitely that.\"\n\nFor Warner Bros., it's the first in a trio of high-profile holiday releases, to be followed by \"Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom\" on Dec. 22 and another musical, \"The Color Purple\" on Dec. 25.\n\nThe only other new wide release in theaters was \"Christmas With the Chosen: Holy Night,\" from Christian-theme distributor Angel Studios. It debuted with $2.9 million in sales through 2,094 theaters.\n\n\"The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes\" again ranked second this week with $5.8 million in its fifth week of release. The Lionsgate \"Hunger Games\" prequel, now up to $145.2 million domestically and more than $300 million globally, has held strong week after week.\n\nLast week's top film, Hayao Miyazaki's \"The Boy and the Heron,\" dipped to third with $5.1 million in its second week of release. The latest film from the 82-year-old Japanese anime master has already set records for Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli and its North American distributor GKids.\n\nWith holdovers making up most of the top 10 movies in theaters, the weekend's other most notable business was a group of award contenders trying to make their mark following Monday's Golden Globes nominations.\n\nYorgos Lanthimos' \"Poor Things,\" a surreal Frankenstein-esque fairy tale starring Emma Stone, expanded into 82 theaters and grossed $1.3 million for Searchlight Pictures. The film, which will expand further in the coming weeks, is nominated for seven Golden Globes, including best comedy or musical.\n\nCord Jefferson's \"American Fiction,\" starring Jeffrey Wright as a sardonic novelist, debuted in seven theaters in three cities with a $32,411 per-screen average. MGM's \"American Fiction,\" nominated for two Globes, will expand to 40 theaters next week. It won the audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.\n\nJonathan Glazer's \"The Zone of Interest,\" a chilling Holocaust drama about a Nazi commandant and his family living next to Auschwitz, opened in four theaters with a $31,198 per-screen average. Nominated for three Globes, it will play in limited release before expanding in January.\n\nEstimated ticket sales are for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.\n\n1. \"Wonka,\" $39 million.\n\n2. \"The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,\" $5.8 million.\n\n3. \"The Boy and the Heron,\" $5.2 million.\n\n4. \"Godzilla Minus One,\" $4.9 million.\n\n5. \"Trolls Band Together,\" $4 million.\n\n6. \"Wish,\" $3.2 million.\n\n7. \"Christmas With the Chosen: Holy Night,\" $2.9 million.\n\n8. \"Napoleon,\" $2.2 million.\n\n9. \"Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,\" $2 million.\n\n10. \"Poor Things,\" $1.3 million."}
{"text": "# Federal agency quashes Georgia's plan to let pharmacies sell medical marijuana\nDecember 17, 2023. 12:34 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ATLANTA (AP)** - Federal drug officials are warning Georgia to shelve its plans to be the first state to allow pharmacies to dispense medical marijuana products.\n\nNews outlets report that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration on Nov. 27 warned pharmacies that dispensing medical marijuana violates federal law.\n\nThe Georgia Board of Pharmacy began accepting applications to dispense the products in October. Licenses have already been issued to 23 Georgia independent pharmacies, the board said.\n\nThe Georgia Access to Medical Cannabis Commission, which oversees Georgia's fledgling medical marijuana industry, said it can't override the federal directive, even though pharmacies are allowed to dispense the products under state law.\n\nAndrew Turnage, the commission's executive director, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution the state would love to see pharmacists be allowed to continue providing consultations for medical cannabis products as they do with other medication.\n\nIn a memo to pharmacies, the DEA said none of them can lawfully possess, handle or dispense marijuana or related products containing more than 0.3% tetrahydrocannabinol - the psychoactive chemical known as THC that gives users a high.\n\nGeorgia lets patients with medical needs buy medical marijuana products with up to 5% THC. Marijuana sold for recreational use typically has a higher level.\n\nThe DEA said it considers products derived from the cannabis plant with a THC content above 0.3% to be marijuana, making it illegal under federal drug law.\n\nGeorgia has allowed patients with certain illnesses and physician approval to possess and consume low-THC medical cannabis products since 2015. But until April, there was no legal way for them to buy the product in Georgia.\n\nNationwide, 24 states have legalized marijuana for recreational use, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Another 23 allow some form of medical cannabis.\n\nThe recent DEA notice was published online by the group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, which generally opposes marijuana legalization.\n\nIra Katz of Little Five Points Pharmacy in Atlanta told WXIA-TV that he thought pharmacies like his should able to dispense the products in the same way marijuana dispensaries do.\n\n\"It just doesn't make any sense to me that people can go to a dispensary and not to a pharmacy,\" he said. \"We would be buying it from the same growers.\"\n\nMahlon Davidson, interim CEO of the Georgia Pharmacy Association, said he doubted independent pharmacists would risk imperiling their businesses by flouting the DEA.\n\n\"The current conflict between state and federal law puts Georgia's pharmacies in a difficult position,\" the Georgia Pharmacy Association wrote in a letter to pharmacists, adding that the association is \"putting forth the maximum effort to help provide timely information and assist in navigating this issue.\"\n\nThose who oppose rapid legalization of marijuana said the DEA's stance will protect consumers and allow time for more research.\n\nMichael Mumper, the executive director of the nonprofit Georgians for Responsible Marijuana Policy, said consumers trust that drugs dispensed from pharmacies are fully tested, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and federally legal. Mumper said that's not the case with medical marijuana.\n\nBut the federal stance could change if a recent proposal to loosen restrictions on marijuana goes through. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in August proposed taking marijuana off the banned list of Schedule I substances and reclassifying it as a lower-risk Schedule III drug."}
{"text": "# 3 bystanders were injured as police fatally shot a man who pointed his gun at a Texas bar\nDecember 17, 2023. 12:31 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**AUSTIN, Texas (AP)** - Police in Texas are trying to determine who injured three bystanders as officers shot and killed a man who pointed a firearm at them at a bar in an Austin entertainment district.\n\nPolice said three officers fired at the suspect, who was shot multiple times late Saturday night. Interim Police Chief Robin Henderson said they were still trying to determine who shot the bystanders. She said there were indications that the suspect also fired his gun.\n\nHenderson said an employee at the bar along Sixth Street had alerted police to a man with a firearm in the bar. Henderson said that when police approached him, he pulled out the firearm and pointed it at officers and bar patrons.\n\nThe suspect has not yet been identified.\n\nHenderson said that one of the bystanders had critical injuries while the other two had injuries that were not life threatening.\n\nPer department protocol, the three officers involved in the shooting will be placed on administrative duty. Henderson said that video from their body cameras will be released within 10 business days."}
{"text": "# Prolific Chicago sculptor whose public works explored civil rights, Richard Hunt dies at 88\nBy **SOPHIA TAREEN**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 12:19 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CHICAGO (AP)** - Richard Hunt, a prolific Chicago artist who was the first Black sculptor to receive a solo retrospective at New York City's Museum of Modern Art and whose public works drew praise from presidents, has died at age 88.\n\nHunt \"passed away peacefully\" Saturday at his home, according to a statement posted on his website. No cause of death was given.\n\nDuring his career, Hunt created more than 160 commissioned pieces of public art that are displayed nationwide, including at libraries and college campuses. In Chicago, his 35-foot high stainless steel \"Flight Forms\" is at Midway International Airport. In 2021, his monument with bronze columns honoring the late civil rights icon Ida B. Wells was dedicated in the city's Bronzeville neighborhood.\n\n\"Richard's legacy will live on for generations to come,\" Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said in a Saturday evening statement. \"A lifelong Chicagoan, his extraordinary career spanning 70 years leaves an indelible impact on our city and our world.\"\n\nMore than 100 of Hunt's pieces are displayed in museums worldwide. That includes the 1,500-pound bronze monument called \"Swing Low\" at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. The sculpture, an ode to the spiritual by the same name, is suspended from the ceiling on the first floor.\n\nBorn on the city's South Side, Hunt was 19 when he went to the open-casket funeral of Emmett Till, a Black teenage lynching victim. Hunt later said the experience influenced his artistic work and a commitment to civil rights. A piece Hunt recently completed to honor Till, called \"Hero Ascending,\" is expected to be installed at Till's childhood home in Chicago next year.\n\nHunt was a graduate of the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the National Council on the Arts. Three years later, he was the first Black sculptor to have a solo retrospective exhibit at MoMa.\n\nHis commissioned work, \"Book Bird,\" will be placed outside a planned Chicago Public Library branch at the Obama Presidential Center, which is under construction. The sculpture shows a bird taking flight from a book.\n\n\"It will be an inspiration for visitors from around the world, and an enduring reminder of a remarkable man,\" former President Barack Obama said in a Saturday statement. \"Richard Hunt was an acclaimed sculptor and one of the finest artists ever to come out of Chicago.\"\n\nHunt described the sculpture as something that shows the progress one can make through reading and study.\n\n\"There are a range of possibilities for art on public buildings or in public places to commemorate, to inspire,\" Hunt said in a presidential center video last year about the commission. \"Art can enliven and set certain standards for what's going on in and around it and within the community.\"\n\nHunt is survived by his daughter, Cecilia, and his sister Marian.\n\nA private funeral service is planned for Chicago. A public celebration of his life and art will be held next year, according to his website."}
{"text": "# Pilot and 2 passengers identified as victims of small plane crash in Oregon\nDecember 18, 2023. 1:39 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**INDEPENDENCE, Ore. (AP)** - A small plane crashed into power lines in Oregon late Saturday afternoon and killed the pilot and two passengers, police said.\n\nPolk County emergency services received the report of the single engine plane crash in Independence around 4:55 p.m., the Independence Police Department said in a statement posted Saturday on social media.\n\nAuthorities on Sunday identified the deceased as the pilot, 35-year-old Mohammad Hussain Musawi of Independence, and two passengers, Mohammad Bashir Safdari, 35, of Independence and Ali Jan Ferdawsi, 29, of Salem, Oregon.\n\nThe airplane's owner was not on board and there were no other passengers, police said.\n\n\"My heart goes out to the deceased and the pain their families are experiencing,\" Independence Chief Robert Mason said in a statement. \"Our entire department mourns with you during this time.\"\n\nThe plane was traveling in heavy fog from McMinnville, Oregon, to the Independence State Airport, police said in an updated statement on Sunday.\n\nPolice said the initial investigation found the collision with electrical power lines resulted in a small brush fire and a power outage in the community about 12 miles (19.3 kilometers) southwest of Salem.\n\nPacific Power said at least 375 customers in Independence lost power on Saturday after the crash, the Statesman Journal reported.\n\nThe Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating with assistance from the Independence police.\n\nA possible cause was not immediately released."}
{"text": "# Families say autism therapy helped their kids. Indiana's Medicaid cuts could put it out of reach\nBy **ISABELLA VOLMERT**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 12:08 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**INDIANAPOLIS (AP)** - Shaunna Thompson was running out of childcare options. Her daughter Abbie was expelled from daycare in 2022 because of \"all over the place\" behavior. Thompson found an in-home provider for the toddler, but was told Abbie was \"too much\" to watch every day of the week.\n\nThe experiences motivated Thompson to seek assistance for her daughter, who also was missing developmental milestones. Abbie, now 3, was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in October of last year.\n\nBy March, Thompson enrolled her in applied behavior analysis - a therapy based on learning and behavior focused on improving communicative, social and motor skills - at a local facility in northern Indiana for 40 hours a week. Abbie, nonverbal most of her life, has since said her first word: \"Mom.\"\n\n\"It brought tears to my eyes\" Thompson said.\n\nBut Thompson and other families reliant on Medicaid worry changes coming in January will limit access to the therapy as Indiana attempts to limit the cost and, along with other states, cut the size of the low-income health care program.\n\nIndiana's Family and Social Services Administration said the cost of Medicaid reimbursement for the behavioral therapy, commonly referred to as ABA, has ballooned in recent years because of the growing number of children seeking the services and the amount that providers have billed the state. The state plans a universal, hourly reimbursement rate for the therapy, but the planned amount is lower than what providers have previously received on average.\n\nAdvocates and centers worry this will mean accepting fewer patients or even closing, as has happened in other states such as Colorado this year.\n\n\"Companies just kept leaving and it just kind of turned into a crisis situation,\" said J.J. Tomash, who leads an ABA provider in Colorado called BehaviorSpan. He blamed Medicaid reimbursement rates that have not kept up with the cost of living.\n\nMedicaid began covering the services in 2016, and providers in Indiana set their own rates until now. But centers say the new rates are still not enough to keep them running and are far below the previous statewide average of $97 per hour.\n\nIndiana Act for Families, a coalition opposing the new rates, said the proposal is 10% below providers' operating costs. Although Indiana has said the new rates are aligned with pay in other states, the coalition argued the state used outdated data in their comparison.\n\nMiles Hodge, owner and co-founder of Shine Pediatric Therapy in Indianapolis, said the effects of the new rates will take their toll over time. The state said the rates will be up for review every four years, a time frame Hodge said does not keep up with inflation.\n\n\"It could leave a lot of people underwater,\" he said.\n\nAbout 6,200 children and young adults received the services under Medicaid in 2022, the state said.\n\nWith a standard patient to therapist ratio of 1-to-1, ABA is an \"extremely staff intensive model,\" Hodge said. Across the state, he expects staff pay and benefits to be hit, which he said could lead to high turnover and inconsistent care for patients.\n\nHodge predicted his center will have to take fewer patients who are on Medicaid because of the changes.\n\nThe Indiana agency overseeing Medicaid said the therapy is the only major service category that did not have a uniform reimbursement rate, and the rising cost of the services was unsustainable. ABA expenditures increased more than 50% per year for the last three years, according to the agency.\n\nIn 2022, ABA claims represented $420 million in Medicaid spending, the state said. Total Medicaid expenditures in state fiscal year 2022 totaled more than $16 billion.\n\nThe move comes at the same time as states unwind pandemic-era protections that kept millions of people covered by Medicaid. In Indiana, the number of people enrolled in Medicaid steadily grew every month from March 2020 until May 23, when the federal budget law ended the protections.\n\nIndiana's total enrollment has fallen every month since then.\n\nStates setting universal rates is common, but low reimbursement endangers access to key services for individuals with disabilities, said Jennifer Lav, senior attorney with the National Health Law Program.\n\nLower rates in a time of high inflation can lead to staff turnover and shortages, issues that can compound in rural areas, she said.\n\nABA is not without critics. Zoe Gross, advocacy director at the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, said ABA's goal is to eliminate behaviors considered autistic and teaches children to conform with neurotypical behaviors.\n\n\"It teaches you that the way you naturally behave is not OK,\" she said.\n\nBut families who have found it helpful find it hard to imagine a future without access.\n\nIn Westfield, a suburb of Indianapolis, 29-year-old Natasha Virgil said her family's ability to participate in activities outside their home markedly improved once 6-year-old Elijah Hill began ABA therapy.\n\n\"My biggest thing is making sure that he has a fighting chance to be able to live in this world and have the skills to survive,\" Virgil said, holding her 4-month-old daughter and watching Elijah play with soap bubbles near the family's Christmas tree.\n\nIt's difficult already for parents of children with disabilities to hold jobs between numerous therapy sessions and doctor's appointments, Virgil said.\n\n\"I don't think I would ever be able to be where we are if we didn't pursue ABA,\" she said\n\nChanel McClure, mother of 2-year-old King, said she has lost sleep over the pending change. She interviewed multiple centers before finding the ABA therapy she wanted for King. He was on a waiting list for another 11 months.\n\nNow almost 3, King is nonverbal and attends speech, occupational and developmental therapy. Since beginning ABA, McClure said he has learned new ways to communicate and is comfortable playing with other children. His therapists are working to address elopement or wandering that can be common in children with autism.\n\n\"King just bloomed like a flower,\" McClure said."}
{"text": "# Can a state count all its votes by hand? A North Dakota proposal aims to be the first to try\nBy **JACK DURA**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 12:07 AM EST\n\n---\n\nBISMARCK, N.D. (AP) - All election ballots would be counted by hand under a proposal that could go to North Dakota voters, potentially achieving a goal of activists across the country who distrust modern vote counting but dismaying election officials who say the change would needlessly delay vote tallies and lead to more errors.\n\nBackers of the proposed ballot measure are far from gathering enough signatures, but if the plan makes the June 2024 ballot and voters pass it, North Dakota would have to replace ballot scanners with hundreds of workers across the state who would carefully count and recount ballots.\n\nIt's a change other Republican-led states have attempted unsuccessfully in the years since former President Donald Trump began criticizing the nation's vote-counting system, falsely claiming it was rigged against him.\n\n\"We've always done hand counting before we got these machines,\" said Lydia Gessele, a farmer who is leading the effort to get the measure on the ballot. \"They can find the people to do the job, because there are people that are willing to come in and do the hand counting.\"\n\nGessele said supporters were motivated by issues they claim occurred in 2022, including inaccurate ballot scanners and an electrical outage that prevented people in Bismarck from voting.\n\nFormer Secretary of State Al Jaeger, a Republican who oversaw North Dakota's elections for 30 years through 2022, rejected Gessele's claims, saying, \"There was nothing that took place that would have changed the outcome of a vote. Nothing at all.\"\n\nThe North Dakota effort is aligned with a move ment among Trump allies who since 2020 have railed against voting machines. Without evidence, they cast the machines as suspicious and fraudulent. In some cases, they even breached voting systems' software in their efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.\n\nEarlier this year, Fox News reached a settlement with Dominion Voting Systems to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought over statements broadcast by the network that Dominion machines were rigged against Trump.\n\nThe North Dakota ballot measure proposes all voting \"shall be done by paper ballots and counted by hand starting on the day of the election and continuing uninterrupted until hand counting is completed.\"\n\nThe move would make North Dakota the first state to mandate hand counts, shifting from the paper ballots and scanners used for most elections, according to Voting Rights Lab, a nonpartisan organization that tracks states' voting legislation.\n\nThe measure doesn't specify a process or funding for hand counts. The state pays for election equipment, but North Dakota's 53 counties are each responsible for poll workers and polling locations.\n\nNorth Dakota Republican Secretary of State Michael Howe said he opposes the proposed measure because hand counts are less standardized than using scanners. He likened it to having a computer rather than a human umpire a baseball game.\n\n\"When you hand-count, you bring in the human element of umpiring. You could have a wide strike zone, you could have a narrow strike zone,\" Howe said. \"What you get with a machine is one consistent strike zone every single time.\"\n\nOfficials elsewhere in the country have struggled to implement hand-counting requirements. In Nye County, Nevada, officials in 2022 proceeded with a hand count, but only after polls closed and along with a machine count. In California's Shasta County, a state law prevented officials from forcing a hand count for a Nov. 7 election.\n\nLast year, 317 ballots took more than seven hours to count by hand in Nevada's least populated county.\n\nLegislators in at least eight states also proposed prohibitions, in some way, on ballot tabulators.\n\nIn April, Arizona Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed a bill that effectively would have mandated hand counts \"by prohibiting the use of any known type of electronic tabulator.\" Arizona's Republican-controlled Legislature passed a similar resolution, but it was deemed non-binding.\n\nElection officials in some of North Dakota's largest counties questioned the proposal.\n\nHand counting \"seems to be extremely error-prone,\" said Craig Steingaard, the election administrator for Cass County, the state's largest county.\n\n\"It would definitely be more difficult for us to administer these elections correctly and then efficiently, too,\" he said.\n\nGrand Forks County Finance and Tax Director Debbie Nelson said hand counts must be done \"repeatedly to get the correct number. You can't do it once, and it takes you a very long time to do what the computer can do instantly.\"\n\nThe measure would allow any U.S. citizen to verify or audit North Dakota elections. The initiative also would mandate that \"all voting will be completed only on Election Day,\" with allowance for absentee ballots mailed only for voters \"who request one for a specific election in writing within a reasonable time period prior to Election Day.\" Mail-in ballots would be \"otherwise prohibited.\"\n\nNearly 44% of voters participated by early voting or by mail in North Dakota's November 2022 election."}
{"text": "# During the 2023 holiday season, face masks have settled in as an occasional feature of American life\nBy **DEEPTI HAJELA**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 2:13 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - The scene: A crowded shopping center in the weeks before Christmas. Or a warehouse store. Or maybe a packed airport terminal or a commuter train station or another place where large groups gather.\n\nThere are people - lots of people. But look around, and it's clear one thing is largely absent these days: face masks.\n\nYes, there's the odd one here and there, but nothing like it was three years ago at the dawn of the COVID pandemic's first winter holidays - an American moment of contentiousness, accusation and scorn on both sides of the mask debate.\n\nAs 2023 draws to an end, with promises of holiday parties and crowds and lots of inadvertent exchanges of shared air, mask-wearing is much more off than on around the country even as COVID's long tail lingers. The days of anything approaching a widespread mask mandate would be like the Ghost of Christmas Past, a glimpse into what was.\n\nLook at it a different way, though: These days, mask-wearing has become just another thing that simply happens in America. In a country where the mention of a mask prior to the pandemic usually meant Halloween or a costume party, it's a new way of being that hasn't gone away even if most people aren't doing it regularly.\n\n\"That's an interesting part of the pandemic,\" says Brooke Tully, a strategist who works on how to change people's behaviors.\n\n\"Home delivery of food and all of those kind of services, they existed before COVID and actually were gaining some momentum,\" she says. \"But something like mask-wearing in the U.S. didn't really have an existing baseline. It was something entirely new in COVID. So it's one of those new introductions of behaviors and norms.\"\n\n## THE SITUATION NOW IS ... SITUATIONAL\nIt tends to be situational, like the recent decision from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center hospital system to reinstate a mask mandate at its facilities starting Dec. 20 because it's seeing an increase in respiratory viruses. And for people like Sally Kiser, 60, of Mooresville, North Carolina, who manages a home health care agency.\n\n\"I always carry one with me,\" she says, \"'cause I never know.\"\n\nShe doesn't always wear it, depending on the environment she's in, but she will if she thinks it's prudent. \"It's kind of like a new paradigm for the world we live in,\" she says.\n\nIt wasn't that long ago that fear over catching COVID-19 sent demand for masks into overdrive, with terms like \"N95\" coming into our vocabularies alongside concepts like mask mandates - and the subsequent, and vehement, backlash from those who felt it was government overreach.\n\nOnce the mandates started dropping, the masks started coming off and the demand fell. It fell so much so that Project N95, a nonprofit launched during the pandemic to help people find quality masks, announced earlier this month that it would stop sales Monday because there wasn't enough interest.\n\nAnne Miller, the organization's executive director, acknowledges she thought widespread mask usage would become the rule, not the exception.\n\n\"I thought the new normal would be like we see in other cultures and other parts of the world - where people just wear a mask out of an abundance of caution for other people,\" she says.\n\nBut that's not how norms work, public safety or otherwise, says Markus Kemmelmeier, a professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Reno.\n\nIn 2020, Kemmelmeier authored a study about mask-wearing around the country that showed mask usage and mandate resistance varied by region based on conditions including pre-existing cultural divisions and political orientation.\n\nHe points to the outcry after the introduction of seatbelts and seatbelt laws more than four decades ago as an example of how practices, particularly those required in certain parts of society, do or don't take hold.\n\n\"When they first were instituted with all the sense that they make and all the effectiveness, there was a lot of resistance,\" Kemmelmeier says. \"The argument was basically lots of complaints about individual freedoms being curtailed and so forth, and you can't tell me what to do and so forth.\"\n\n## FIGURING OUT THE BALANCE\nIn New York City's Brooklyn borough, members of the Park Slope Co-op recently decided there was a need at the longstanding, membership-required grocery. Last month, the co-op instituted mask-required Wednesdays and Thursdays; the other five days continue to have no requirement.\n\nThe people who proposed it weren't focused on COVID rates. They were thinking about immune-compromised people, a population that has always existed but came to mainstream awareness during the pandemic, says co-op general manager Joe Holtz.\n\nProponents of the mask push at the co-op emphasized that immunocompromised people are more at risk from other people's respiratory ailments like colds and flu. Implementing a window of required mask usage allows them to be more protected, Holtz says.\n\nIt was up to the store's administrators to pick the days, and they went with two of the slowest instead of the busy weekend days on purpose, Holtz says, a nod to the reality that mask requirements get different responses from people.\n\n\"From management's point of view,\" he says, \"if we were going to try and if there's going to be a negative financial impact from this decision that was made, we want to minimize it.\"\n\nThose shopping there on a recent Thursday didn't seem fazed.\n\nAron Halberstam, 77, says he doesn't usually mask much these days but wasn't put off by the requirement. He wears a mask on the days it's required, even if he doesn't otherwise - a middle ground reflecting what is happening in so many parts of the country more than three years after the mask became a part of daily conversation and daily life.\n\n\"Any place which asks you to do it, I just do it,\" Halberstam says. \"I have no resistance to it.\"\n\nWhatever the level of resistance, says Kemmelmeier, the culture has shifted. People are still wearing masks in places like crowded stores or while traveling. They do so because they choose to for their own reasons and not because the government is requiring it. And new reasons can come up as well, like when wildfires over the summer made air quality poor and people used masks to deal with the haze and smoke.\n\n\"It always will find a niche to fit in with,\" he says. \"And as long as there are needs somewhere, it will survive.\""}
{"text": "# Jared Goff throws 5 TD passes as NFC North-leading Lions bounce back, beat Broncos 42-17\nBy **LARRY LAGE**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 12:30 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**DETROIT (AP)** - Jared Goff and the Detroit Lions bounced back and took a step toward ending a six-season playoff drought.\n\nGoff matched a career high with five touchdown passes, three to rookie tight end Sam LaPorta, and Detroit routed the Denver Broncos 42-17 on Saturday night.\n\n\"Our superpower is how we respond as a team,\" Goff said.\n\nThe NFC North-leading Lions (10-4) could clinch a spot in the postseason for the first time since the 2016 season if other results go their way the rest of Week 15. The simplest scenario would be a loss or tie by Seattle to Philadelphia on Monday night.\n\nIf Detroit wins a division title for the first time since 1993, it would host a playoff game. The Lions have only one playoff victory since the franchise won the NFL title in 1957.\n\n\"It would be fun, but we've got work to do,\" Goff said.\n\nThe Broncos' hopes of making the playoffs for the first time since the 2015 season took a hit. Denver (7-7) had won six of its previous seven games to pull within a game of AFC West-leading Kansas City.\n\n\"We've got to keep believing,\" quarterback Russell Wilson said. \"We've done it before.\"\n\nGoff and the the Lions had lost two of three, but they put that behind them with a dominant second quarter.\n\n\"We've been through a lot of adversity as a group and a three-game lull is not the worst thing we've been through,\" Goff said.\n\nThe veteran quarterback, who turned the ball over eight times in the previous four games, threw touchdown passes in the second quarter to LaPorta, rookie running back Jahmyr Gibbs and Amon-Ra St. Brown to give Detroit a 21-0 halftime lead.\n\nDenver, meanwhile, was 1 of 6 on third down and had just 75 yards in the first half.\n\n\"It was the ultimate team win. The defense started it out for us,\" coach Dan Campbell said.\n\nThe Broncos had a touchdown on fourth down negated late in the third when offensive lineman Quinn Meinerz was flagged for being offside.\n\nBroncos coach Sean Payton proceeded to scream at Wilson on the sideline and Denver settled for a field goal to cut its deficit to 28-10.\n\n\"I was upset about the call,\" Payton said. \"That's all. Simple. That's it.\"\n\nSo, why was he yelling at Wilson?\n\n\"Listen, what I talk to Russell about is none of your business,\" he said curtly to a reporter.\n\nWilson, who lost a fumble on his first possession, finished 18 of 32 for 223 yards with a touchdown pass and a rushing TD. He was relieved by backup Jarrett Stidham on a meaningless final series.\n\nGoff was 24 of 34 for 278 yards, throwing five touchdown passes for the first time since 2018 when he played for the Rams, and didn't have a turnover. He joined Houston's C.J. Stroud as the only QBs to throw for five TDs in a game this season. The Broncos had given up just four touchdown passes over the previous six games.\n\nLaPorta, a second-round pick from Iowa, became the first rookie tight end to have at least 70 receptions, 700 yards and nine touchdowns.\n\nSt. Brown had seven catches for 112 yards and a score after totaling five receptions in the previous two games.\n\nThe Lions leaned on a strong running game with Gibbs and David Montgomery combining for 185 yards and 27 carries. Gibbs' 12-yard touchdown run early in the fourth quarter put them ahead 35-10.\n\n## PRIME-TIME PLAYERS\nDetroit is 4-0 at night this season with wins over Kanas City, Green Bay, Las Vegas and Denver.\n\n## ADDITIONAL SCENARIOS\nDetroit could secure a playoff spot on Sunday if the Los Angeles Rams lose or tie along with a Tampa Bay loss or an Atlanta loss or tie.\n\n## INJURIES\nBroncos: OLB Nik Bonitto was inactive after leaving last week's game with a knee injury.\n\nLions: CB Jerry Jacobs (hamstring) and TE Brock Wright (groin) were hurt during the game.\n\n## UP NEXT\nBroncos: Host New England on Sunday, Dec. 24.\n\nLions: At Minnesota on Dec. 24."}
{"text": "# Maury Povich receives lifetime achievement award from wife Connie Chung at Daytime Emmys\nDecember 16, 2023. 10:48 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LOS ANGELES (AP)** - Maury Povich received the Daytime Emmys Lifetime Achievement Honor on Saturday from his wife, journalist Connie Chung.\n\nThe 84-year-old talk show host, who retired last year, was honored during the creative arts ceremony at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.\n\n\"I know that you think he's been determining the paternity of every child in America all his life,\" Chung said in her introduction. \"But no, in his 67 freaking years in television, he's been a news reporter and a news anchor and old fashion talk show host interviewing world leaders, politicians, members of Congress, authors, movie stars and even Julia Child.\"\n\nAmong those paying tribute in videos were Whoopi Goldberg, Kelly Clarkson, Lewis Black, Karamo Brown and sports broadcasters Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser.\n\nPovich took the stage to chants of \"Maury, Maury, Maury!\" He ended his tabloid-style show last year, which began in 1991. He hosted \"A Current Affair\" from 1986-90 for then-Fox Television owner Rupert Murdoch.\n\nPovich recalled when \"A Current Affair\" was nominated for awards during its run.\n\n\"Rupert Murdoch used to tell me all that time, 'Don't particularly think about that, Maury, we're more interested in winning viewers than awards,'\" Povich said.\n\nRaising his Emmy award in the air, Povich said, \"Rupert, the hell with that.\""}
{"text": "# Gardner Minshew, Colts bolster playoff chances, beat fading Steelers 30-13\nBy **MICHAEL MAROT**  \nDecember 16, 2023. 9:15 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**INDIANAPOLIS (AP)** - Gardner Minshew got the most out of his depleted supporting cast.\n\nThe Colts' quarterback, himself a backup, made big plays with backup receivers. He got Indianapolis' reserve running backs into play calls that would succeed. It was some of Minshew's finest work of the season - perhaps of his entire career.\n\nMinshew matched his career high with three touchdown passes, Indianapolis rushed for 170 yards and the Colts improved their playoff prospects with a 30-13 win over the sagging Pittsburgh Steelers on Saturday.\n\n\"We've needed to win these games and we've done a great job down the stretch,\" Minshew said. \"I think everybody was locked in, the urgency was there, the attention to details. At this point it's all about winning games, however, you've got to get it done.\"\n\nMinshew and the Colts (8-6) have won five of six to move from the bottom of the AFC South into playoff contention. They currently hold the No. 7 position in the AFC, and they will remain there when this weekend's games conclude because of tiebreakers.\n\nThey wouldn't be in that spot without Minshew, who replaced injured rookie Anthony Richardson in Week 5. On Saturday, Minshew went 18 of 28 with 215 yards despite losing top receiver Michael Pittman Jr. to a concussion and top rusher Zack Moss to an injured right arm. Jonathan Taylor (right thumb), the 2021 NFL rushing champ, didn't play, either.\n\nThe Steelers (7-7) dropped their third straight and fell into last place in the rugged AFC North, putting coach Mike Tomlin's run of 16 straight seasons at .500 or better in jeopardy.\n\nPittsburgh took an early 13-0 lead behind backup quarterback Mitch Trubisky, who made his second start in place of the injured Kenny Pickett. But by late in the fourth quarter, the Colts had scored 30 consecutive points and third-stringer Mason Rudolph was slinging passes for the Steelers.\n\n\"Let's be honest, we're a fundamentally poor football team right now,\" Tomlin said. \"We're playing losing football and I own that. I don't necessarily have the answers today. If I did, we'd have played differently today. But I will acknowledge things will not continue the way that they are.\"\n\nTrubisky was 16 of 23 for 169 yards with one TD pass and two interceptions. Pittsburgh rushed for 74 yards and finished with 216 total yards.\n\nThe Steelers got off to a promising start when a replay review changed a fumble by Trubisky into a 1-yard TD run. Chris Boswell missed the extra-point attempt. Six plays later, Pittsburgh capitalized on a blocked punt when Trubisky threw a 4-yard TD pass to Diontae Johnson early in the second quarter.\n\nBut Indy's defense stiffened from there, and the Colts took control when Minshew and Moss hooked up on a 16-yard TD pass and D.J. Montgomery caught a 14-yard TD pass with 22 seconds left in the first half for a 14-13 lead. Montgomery was promoted from the practice squad this week.\n\n\"He's just worked his tail off on the scout team all year, he's just made play after play,\" Colts coach Shane Steichen said. \"It's like, we've got to get this guy up on the active roster.\"\n\nPittsburgh's downward spiral continued when Najee Harris fumbled on the first Steelers play of the second half. On the next snap, Minshew threw an 18-yard scoring pass to Mo Alie-Cox to make it 21-13. The Colts sealed the win with three field goals by Matt Gay.\n\nTrey Sermon ran 17 times for 88 yards to lead the Colts after logging only 11 runs this season.\n\n\"I think any time you lose really good players like that, nobody's going to just step in and replace them,\" Minshew said. \"I think everybody has to kind of pick up their level of play and I think we got that from a lot of different areas today.\"\n\n## SCARY MOMENT\nLucas Oil Stadium fell silent when Steelers safety Damontae Kazee launched his shoulder into Pittman as the receiver tried to make a diving catch. The Colts later said Pittman had a concussion. Kazee was ejected for the hit, which also drew a penalty.\n\nColts players immediately rushed to see if Pittman was OK and some players from both teams took a knee as trainers worked on Pittman. Fans covered their eyes and had concerned looks before Pittman got up and walked off the field.\n\n## INJURY REPORT\nSteelers: S Minkah Fitzpatrick did not return after hurting his left knee in the second quarter.\n\nColts: Moss did not return after getting hurt on his scoring play. He broke the same arm during the preseason. DT Eric Johnson II left in the second half with what appeared to be a lower-body injury.\n\n## BY THE NUMBERS\nSteelers: Lost for the first time at Lucas Oil Stadium as their eight-game winning streak in the series ended. ... Johnson led the Steelers with four catches for 67 yards. George Pickens caught three balls for 47 yards.\n\nColts: Tyler Goodson had 11 carries for 69 yards. Indy had 14 consecutive rushes during one second-half series. ... The Colts had three sacks, giving them 45 this season - two short of a new single-season franchise record.\n\n## UP NEXT\nSteelers: Host division rival Cincinnati next Saturday.\n\nColts: At Atlanta on Sunday, Dec. 24."}
{"text": "# Large fire burns 2nd residential construction site in 3 days in Denver suburb\nDecember 16, 2023. 9:21 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DENVER (AP)** - Firefighters in the Denver metro area responded to the second large fire at an Aurora construction site in three days on Saturday.\n\nOfficials have not yet determined the cause for either fire and have not suggested that they were related, but both are under investigation.\n\nSaturday's five-alarm fire was reported shortly before 1 p.m., said Aurora Fire Rescue spokesperson Andrew Logan, at a large apartment building that was still under construction. Responding crews went to the top floor of the five-story building where the blaze was reported to have started, but the dangerous conditions soon forced crews from several different agencies to focus on fighting the flames from outside the structure.\n\nOne firefighter suffered minor injuries but was not taken to a hospital and is recovering, according to a department statement.\n\nNo other buildings were damaged in the fire, Logan said, and firefighters were expected to remain on the scene through Saturday evening.\n\nAnother fire early Thursday morning engulfed several residential buildings that were under construction in a different Aurora neighborhood. Aurora Fire Rescue wrote in a statement that Thursday's fire \"was a very volatile, highly dangerous scene\" and that responding crews used a hose line to keep nearby propane tanks from exploding. No one was injured in Thursday's fire.\n\n\"I believe the only thing those two have in common as of right now is that they both were under construction,\" Aurora Fire deputy Chief Caine Hills said in a news conference Saturday afternoon."}
{"text": "# Prosecutors say Washington state man charged in 4 murders lured victims with promise of buried gold\nDecember 16, 2023. 5:20 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SEATTLE (AP)** - A Washington state man in jail awaiting trial in one murder case has been charged with three more killings, and prosecutors say he lured all four victims by asking them to help dig up buried gold.\n\nRichard Bradley Jr., 40, was charged in May 2021 with first-degree murder in the death of 44-year-old Brandi Blake, whose body was found buried in a sprawling park in the town of Auburn, Washington. In the last two weeks, prosecutors have filed three more murder charges against Bradley, The Seattle Times reports, in the shooting deaths of a father and adult son in May 2021 and in the 2019 death of a man whose remains were found near Blake's grave.\n\nBradley's defense attorney, Peter Geisness, did not immediately return voice and email messages on Saturday. Bradley is scheduled to stand trial next month in Blake's death. He has not yet had the opportunity to enter a plea on the other murder charges, according to online court records.\n\nSenior Deputy Prosecutor Thomas O'Ban II wrote in court documents that Bradley is accused of using the same scheme in each of the deaths - allegedly telling the victims he needed their help digging up a stash of stolen gold, taking them to a wooded area and killing them before stealing their vehicles and whatever possessions were inside.\n\nCharging documents say Emilio Maturin was 36 when he was last seen alive in July 2019. His girlfriend reported him missing two weeks later.\n\nAccording to court documents, she told detectives that she overheard Bradley telling Maturin that \"he needed help digging up some buried gold in Auburn.\" Maturin initially was skeptical, she told detectives, but allegedly went along anyway. Maturin was in the habit of taking large amounts of money with him whenever he left the house, according to the court documents, and he had roughly $15,000 in cash when he left that day in his recently purchased BMW.\n\nThe girlfriend tracked Maturin's cellphone to Game Farm Park in Auburn and went to look for him but got scared and left, according to charging documents.\n\nSeveral hours later, Auburn police found an unregistered BMW parked near a large field at the park and waited for the driver to return. When they attempted to stop the driver, the car took off. Bradley was arrested after a car and foot chase and charged with eluding police, according to charging documents.\n\nMichael Goeman, 59, and his son Vance Lakey, 31, were shot to death in March 2021, and their bodies were found on an unmaintained road not far from the park. Goeman received a large inheritance just before he and his son were killed, according to court documents.\n\nBradley was considered a person of interest in the deaths at the time. He was charged that May with second-degree arson after prosecutors said he offered a man $1,000 to set fire to the father and son's impounded SUV. On Thursday, prosecutors added two counts of second-degree murder.\n\nBlake went missing in early May 2021. She had won $20,000 at a casino and, like Maturin, was known to carry large amounts of cash, according to court documents. Investigators found her body in a shallow grave at the park later that month - as well as three human ribs about 30 feet (9 meters) away.\n\nBradley was charged that same month with killing Blake, who died of blunt force injuries. The ribs were later matched by DNA to Maturin, and Bradley was charged with murder in Maturin's death on Dec. 5 of this year."}
{"text": "# How the White House got involved in the border talks on Capitol Hill - with Ukraine aid at stake\nBy **SEUNG MIN KIM**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 12:04 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - White House chief of staff Jeff Zients recently heard from a powerful Democratic senator that steep levels of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border had become, in a word, untenable.\n\nIllinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat, had signed onto a statement denouncing \"reports of harmful changes to our asylum system\" that were being proposed as part of a border deal on Capitol Hill. Yet Durbin, a veteran of numerous immigration battles, had also received concerning briefings from border officials and seen firsthand how the rising number of asylum-seekers had overwhelmed resources in his Midwestern state.\n\nSo when Zients dialed Durbin one weekend this month for a temperature check on the ongoing border talks, the senator was candid.\n\n\"I told him I thought the current situation is unsustainable, and the Democrats need to be part of the solution,\" Durbin said. President Joe Biden's top aide signaled the White House felt the same way, stressing to Durbin that \"we have to engage with the Republicans and see if there's some middle ground,\" according to the senator's retelling.\n\nThat conversation between Zients and Durbin is just one of the several calls that the White House chief of staff has been making to key lawmakers in recent days, underscoring how top Biden administration officials have considerably ramped up their involvement with Capitol Hill as the fate of Biden's emergency spending request for Ukraine remains in the balance.\n\nHomeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, along with senior officials from the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, have spent hours behind closed doors haggling over the intricacies of immigration policy alongside senators trying to reach a border deal. Zients himself dropped by one of those meetings at the Capitol last week, reiterating to the negotiators Biden's plea to find a solution.\n\nAnd the White House chief of staff has been talking regularly with Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, the chief GOP negotiator. It's a level of engagement that has heartened Republicans who had pushed for Biden to get more involved.\n\nRepublicans, who control the House and can block legislation in the Senate, say a deal is not possible without significant White House buy-in. Having Biden's senior aides actively participate in the talks sends a message - particularly to wary Democratic lawmakers - that the president is willing to cut a border deal that could make some in his own party uncomfortable.\n\nAnd any deal that is reached on the border could also help address one major political liability for Biden as he gears up for his reelection, particularly if the increased involvement by the White House helps the public see the president as someone seeking a solution to the rising border numbers.\n\n\"I think an important change is that we now have all the entities at the table,\" said Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., one of the lawmakers who for weeks has been negotiating a border deal. \"The White House is involved in these negotiations as a full partner, and that's important. It shows a level of seriousness and intention to solve this crisis.\"\n\nAnother major reason why the White House and senior administration officials have gotten so directly involved is the sheer complexity of immigration law and the Department of Homeland Security's central role in implementing any restrictions that Congress will write.\n\nStill, this wasn't the White House's strategy from the start.\n\nOnce it became clear congressional Republicans would demand policy extractions in exchange for releasing billions in additional aid for Ukraine, the White House intentionally hung back from the negotiations - replicating its past strategy of letting the legislators legislate, which had led to several of Biden's priorities becoming law. Though administration officials had been aware of what was being discussed, they deferred to the senators leading the talks - Lankford, Sinema and Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn.\n\nThat dynamic changed this month. Mayorkas has been a consistent presence in the negotiations, along with White House legislative affairs director Shuwanza Goff and Natalie Quillian, a White House deputy chief of staff who has taken immigration under her portfolio. They, along with the senators and a coterie of other senior aides, have negotiated for hours daily, and continued to do so on Capitol Hill throughout the weekend.\n\nOutside of the negotiating room, Zients has talked regularly with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and the other negotiators. When the chief of staff has spoken to Lankford, he has urged him and other Republicans to stick with the border negotiations because aid for Ukraine is so vital, according to an administration official.\n\n\"We can't finalize any kind of agreement until the White House is actually engaged,\" said Lankford, who stressed that having Biden's aides in the room has been helpful. \"There's a lot of Senate Democrats that are wondering, 'What's the White House think about this?' That's a reasonable thing for them to ask. Can't answer until they're actually there.\"\n\nThe stakes of the negotiations - being held in a room on the second floor of the Capitol, near Schumer's suite of offices - are enormous for the White House and for Biden's foreign policy legacy. Entangled with the border talks are not only additional funds for Ukraine but also for Israel, which has engaged in a violent combat in Gaza since an Oct. 7 assault by Hamas militants killed more than 1,200 Israelis.\n\nBiden and White House aides have repeatedly warned, in dire terms, about the consequences of letting Ukraine funding run dry. The president said earlier this month that \"any disruption in our ability to supply Ukraine clearly strengthens Putin's position,\" and administration officials have stressed that the money to aid Kyiv will run out by the end of the year.\n\nYet other Democrats and immigrant-rights advocates have been concerned that Biden's desperation for Ukraine aid would cause the White House to accept hardline policies restricting avenues for asylum that it would otherwise not support. And it has fallen to senior White House aides to take incoming fury from upset lawmakers. Zients and Mayorkas spoke with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus on Saturday, during which several Democrats raised concerns about the ongoing border talks.\n\n\"I think there's this view sometimes because a lot of senators become president, that you could just have the White House and the Senate come up with a deal and somehow jam the House,\" said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., a leading progressive, on \"Fox News Sunday.\" \"But the House is still the people's house, and we're going to have our say. We need to be involved.\""}
{"text": "# What about Bob? Some NJ Democrats want Menendez to move on so they can fight for his Senate seat\nBy **MIKE CATALINI**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 12:11 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**TRENTON, N.J. (AP)** - For years in New Jersey, any Democrat weighing a run for statewide office had to grapple with an important question: What about Bob?\n\nIt wasn't a reference to the 1991 Bill Murray flick but to Bob Menendez, the incumbent U.S. senator whose political influence placed him atop the state Democratic Party food chain. He kept allies in line, helped anoint rising stars and had an important voice in determining the fate of both candidates and policy proposals. Even after a federal corruption indictment ended in a hung jury in 2017, Menendez continued to wield considerable power.\n\nThe \"What about Bob?\" question is no less relevant now, though it has taken on new meaning. It still bears no connection to the movie, though it has cinematic qualities of its own. Menendez is facing federal charges that he secretly aided Egypt's authoritarian government and tried to thwart a friend's criminal prosecution in exchange for gold bars and cash. He and his wife, who was also charged, and other co-defendants in the alleged scheme have all pleaded not guilty.\n\nSo if New Jersey Democrats ask the question these days, they're more likely to be wondering when he'll get out of the way and let them get on with the business of trying to keep a crucial U.S. Senate seat in Democratic hands.\n\nMenendez, for his part, hasn't said whether he'll seek another term but vows that he's \"not going anywhere.\" Jason Tuber, Menendez's chief of staff, said in an email that the \"people of New Jersey will determine who their Senator will be.\" He didn't specify Menendez's plans.\n\n\"Senator Menendez has been powerful, effective, and indispensable in delivering for New Jersey and the Senator is prepared to put his record up against anyone who enters the race,\" he said.\n\nStill, many in the party he once held considerable sway over already are looking beyond him.\n\n\"Anybody looking at that indictment has no choice but to move on,\" said former state Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg. \"It was horrendous.\"\n\nParty leaders, from Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy to local officials, have called on Menendez to resign, his home county party has dropped its endorsement, and with the Democrats' U.S. Senate majority hanging in the balance, a field of robust primary challengers has begun to emerge.\n\nU.S. Rep. Andy Kim entered the race a day after the indictment, and the state's first lady, Tammy Murphy, has jumped into the campaign and begun to win significant support from county party officials. Establishment support is typically a key factor to winning primaries in New Jersey because county parties can award the \"line\" or favored positioning on the ballot. Other prominent Democrats could join the race, too.\n\n\"They're already assuming he's toast,\" said Daniel Cassino, executive director of the Fairleigh Dickinson University poll. \"He doesn't have the pull he had before.\"\n\nThat's due to a couple of factors, according to Cassino and other experts. Menendez's previous indictment unfolded with a Republican governor in office, who would have been likely to tap a GOP senator if the seat opened up. That case also erupted years before Menendez faced reelection, so Democrats had some incentive to see how things would wind up before deciding how they should proceed politically.\n\nNow, rather than back him again amid a second federal corruption case, the party seems poised to move on.\n\nA reliably blue-leaning state with nearly 1 million more Democratic registered voters than Republicans, New Jersey hasn't elected a GOP senator since 1972. The possibility of a rematch between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden has Democrats optimistic about their chances of keeping the seat, even if Menendez mounts a reelection effort.\n\nThe Republican field at the moment includes Mendham Mayor Christine Serrano Glassner. A handful of others are also considering running. The GOP has struggled to win statewide elections, and typically performs better in gubernatorial races, which happen in odd-numbered years, than in Senate races. GOP state party chairman Bob Hugin spent millions of his own cash to try to unseat Menendez in 2018 and came up short.\n\nMenendez has taken a defiant stance in the face of charges brought earlier this year by the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. Mounting a reelection effort while battling the case against him could be too much of a challenge, according to Brigid Harrison, political science professor at Montclair State University.\n\n\"It's going to be hard for Bob Menendez to raise money with the scandal overhead. That is a serious impediment,\" she said.\n\nBen Dworkin, who heads the Rowan Institute for Public Policy & Citizenship, acknowledged that some Democrats are looking to nudge Menendez off the political stage and that public polls have shown support declining for him. Still, he added, Menendez has survived politically before.\n\n\"You can't ever count Menendez out,\" he said."}
{"text": "# Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, to lie in repose\nBy **LINDSAY WHITEHURST**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 12:22 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - The late Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court and an unwavering voice of moderate conservatism for more than two decades, will lie in repose in the court's Great Hall on Monday.\n\nO'Connor, an Arizona native, died Dec. 1 at age 93.\n\nHer casket will be carried up the steps in front of the court, passing under the iconic words engraved on the pediment, \"Equal Justice Under Law,\" and placed in the court's Great Hall. C-SPAN will broadcast a private ceremony held before the hall is open to the public, allowing people to pay their respects afterward, from 10:30 a.m. to 8 p.m.\n\nThe last justice who lay in repose at the court was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second female justice. After her death in 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic, mourners passed by her casket outside the building, on the portico at the top of the steps.\n\nFuneral services for O'Connor are set for Tuesday at Washington National Cathedral, where President Joe Biden and Chief Justice John Roberts are scheduled to speak.\n\nO'Connor was nominated in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan and subsequently confirmed by the Senate, ending 191 years of male exclusivity on the high court. A rancher's daughter who was largely unknown on the national scene until her appointment, she received more letters than any one member in the court's history in her first year and would come to be referred to as the nation's most powerful woman.\n\nShe wielded considerable sway on the nine-member court, generally favoring states in disputes with the federal government and often siding with police when they faced claims of violating people's rights. Her influence could perhaps best be seen, though, on the court's rulings on abortion. She twice joined the majority in decisions that upheld and reaffirmed Roe v. Wade, the decision that said women have a constitutional right to abortion.\n\nThirty years after that decision, a more conservative court overturned Roe, and the opinion was written by the man who took her place, Justice Samuel Alito.\n\nO'Connor grew up riding horses, rounding up cattle and driving trucks and tractors on the family's sprawling Arizona ranch and developed a tenacious, independent spirit.\n\nShe was a top-ranked graduate of Stanford's law school in 1952, but quickly discovered that most large law firms at the time did not hire women. One Los Angeles firm offered her a job as a secretary.\n\nShe built a career that included service as a member of the Arizona Legislature and state judge before her appointment to the Supreme Court at age 51. When she first arrived, she didn't even have a place anywhere near the courtroom to go to the bathroom. That was soon rectified, but she remained the court's only woman until 1993.\n\nShe retired at age 75, citing her husband's struggle with Alzheimer's disease as her primary reason for leaving the court. John O'Connor died three years later, in 2009.\n\nAfter her retirement, O'Connor remained active, sitting as a judge on several federal appeals courts, advocating for judicial independence and serving on the Iraq Study Group. President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.\n\nShe expressed regret that a woman had not been chosen to replace her, but lived to see a record four women now serving at the same time on the Supreme Court.\n\nShe died in Phoenix, of complications related to advanced dementia and a respiratory illness. Her survivors include her three sons, Scott, Brian and Jay, six grandchildren and a brother.\n\nThe family has asked that donations be made to iCivics, the group she founded to promote civics education."}
{"text": "# Some Trump fake electors from 2020 haven't faded away. They have roles in how the 2024 race is run\nBy **GABE STERN**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 8:07 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**VIRGINIA CITY, Nev. (AP)** - Nearly two years after he signed documents attempting to overturn Donald Trump's 2020 loss in Nevada, Jim Hindle thanked everyone gathered in a historic Nevada boomtown's commission chambers and asked them to bear with him while he learned how to oversee elections in rural Storey County.\n\nHindle was another replacement in what was a revolving door of county election officials across Nevada as the 2022 midterms approached. He had just unseated the interim clerk, who had stepped in after the prior clerk resigned.\n\nBut Hindle's tenure in the heavily Republican county is part of a trend across battleground states where fake electors have retained influence over elections heading into 2024.\n\nHe is among six Republicans who were indicted this month by Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford for their alleged roles in attempting to overturn the election outcome in the swing state, which Democrat Joe Biden carried by more than 33,000 votes over the GOP president.\n\nHindle and the others, who are scheduled to be arraigned Monday, coordinated with Trump's team directly, according to transcripts of testimony before the U.S. House committee that investigated the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.\n\nHindle told The Associated Press he will continue running local elections despite the charges. He declined to comment further.\n\nWisconsin, Arizona and Pennsylvania also have fake electors who are involved in the 2024 election.\n\nThe list includes Bob Spindell, who remains on Wisconsin's bipartisan election commission despite calls from Democrats for him to be removed. A Republican legislative leader who appointed Spindell said last week that he will not rescind the appointment, calling the fake elector scheme a \"failed legal strategy\" and \"not a sinister plot to overturn an election.\"\n\nSpindell and the fake electors in Wisconsin agreed to a settlement this month conceding that their actions were \"part of an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential election results.\"\n\nIn Arizona, fake electors Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern are Republican legislators with powerful roles. Hoffman is chairman of the Senate Elections Committee, and Kern leads the Judiciary Committee. The Arizona attorney general is investigating the role of fake electors; no one has been charged.\n\nHoffman's position makes him a gatekeeper for virtually all election-related legislation under consideration. That has become especially contentious in the Western swing state where Republicans have been aggressive in trying to overturn or cast doubt on Democratic victories.\n\nThe FBI in 2022 interviewed Sam DeMarco, a member of the three-member election board in Pennsylvania's Allegheny County. Despite the subpoenas served to DeMarco and that state's other GOP electors, they have faced no legal consequences after qualifying their electoral votes as \"conditional\" in case Trump had prevailed in court. DeMarco has often been critical of Trump's influence on the state party.\n\nMichigan is a rare example where a fake elector has lost influence due to charges. In July, the Michigan Bureau of Elections barred Shelby Township Clerk Stan Grot from running any elections as the state attorney general brought criminal charges against him and 15 other Republicans for their roles as fake electors.\n\nIn Nevada, Storey County's 3,750 active registered voters represent a speck of the state's electorate. Even while Hindle and others remain in their roles as elections officials and legislators, state election officials and state and federal courts can provide checks on their authority, said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.\n\nNevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar's office, which runs elections across the state, did not respond to questions about whether the indictment could affect Hindle's elections role.\n\nBut Hindle's influence does not stop at the county line. He is one of three fake electors involved in the state GOP's organization of a party-run caucus in early February that is scheduled just days after the state-run presidential primary. The Nevada GOP has come under intense scrutiny for confusing voters with the dueling elections and for adopting rules that many say benefit Trump over other Republican candidates.\n\nThe Nevada GOP did not respond to a request for comment on whether the indictment affects members' abilities to organize the caucus.\n\nThe Nevada Republican chairman, Michael McDonald, one of the indicted fake electors, has said the state party is bypassing the primary because the Democratic-controlled Legislature did not consider the Republican governor's proposals for a voter ID requirement and other measures.\n\nOn Sunday, several of Nevada's fake electors attended a Trump rally in Reno, where the former president thanked three of them personally, including Hindle and McDonald, while saying they were treated unfairly. He did not mention the specific charges.\n\nMcDonald introduced Trump at the rally, while encouraging the crowd to advocate and vote for Trump at the party-run caucus. He ended the speech with the same pledge he made at an October rally, before his indictment.\n\n\"You give us a fair election, I'll give you the next president of the United States - Donald J. Trump,\" he said."}
{"text": "# Trump wants New Hampshire to put him on a path to the nomination before rivals find their footing\nBy **HOLLY RAMER** and **BILL BARROW**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 11:02 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**DURHAM, N.H. (AP)** - Donald Trump wants New Hampshire to help him pocket the Republican presidential nomination before any rivals find their footing with the 2024 campaign's opening contest just weeks away.\n\nHis appearance Saturday in Durham was part of a swing taking the former president through early nominating states as he cites his wide polling lead over a dwindling field of GOP hopefuls. They are trying to block his political comeback as Trump navigates multiple indictments and looks ahead to a potential rematch with President Joe Biden, the Democrat he lost to in 2020.\n\n\"We are going to win the New Hampshire primary, then we are going to crush crooked Joe Biden next November,\" Trump said, reminding supporters that he ensured their state would continue to host the nation's first primary after Iowa's kickoff caucuses.\n\n\"New Hampshire is going to weed out the insincere RINOs ... Republicans in name only,\" Trump said, referring to rivals Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who was endorsed by Trump in 2018, and Nikki Haley, Trump's former U.N. ambassador. Trump warned that his allies-turned-opponents \"will betray you just like they betrayed me.\"\n\nThe New Hampshire primary is Jan. 23, eight days after Iowa begins the nominating process on Jan. 15. Nevada and South Carolina come next in the early stages, before Super Tuesday on March 5, when the highest cumulative number of delegates are up for grabs on any single day on the election calendar. The Trump campaign sees a path for him to secure the nomination before the Super Tuesday polls open.\n\n\"What's really important from our standpoint is being able to win the early states,\" senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita told Right Side Broadcasting minutes before Trump stepped on stage. \"Winning Iowa, winning New Hampshire, winning Nevada, winning South Carolina - it's over. That's our goal.\"\n\nTrump, who has pledged to \"immediately stop the invasion of our southern border\" and wants to reimpose his first-term travel ban that originally targeted seven Muslim-majority countries, used harsh rhetoric in saying \"we got a lot of work to do\" about the rising number of migrants entering the United States. \"They're poisoning the blood of our country,\" he said once more on the campaign trail, echoing Adolf Hitler's language in his own political manifesto.\n\nOne of Trump's most prominent critics in the 2024 race, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, told CNN's \"State of the Union\" on Sunday that Trump was \"dog-whistling to Americans who feel absolutely under stress and strain from the economy and from the conflicts around the world. And he's dog-whistling to blame it on people from areas that don't look like us.\"\n\nThe focus on immigration comes as the Biden administration and Congress are trying to negotiate a border security deal demanded by Republicans as part of the president's request for wartime aid for Ukraine and Israel. Biden has been criticized about the record numbers of migrants at the border and is trying address a political weakness before a potential rematch with Trump.\n\nBefore the rally, Trump's campaign announced an endorsement from former state Senate President Chuck Morse, who is now running for governor. Morse, who ran for U.S. Senate last year but lost the primary to a candidate more closely aligned with Trump, told the crowd it's time for Republicans to \"rally around a candidate who can not only win but get the job done for our country.\"\n\n\"He's done it once, and he'll do it again,\" Morse said.\n\nGov. Chris Sununu on Tuesday endorsed Haley, who is battling DeSantis to become a plausible alternative to Trump. Sununu, a frequent Trump critic who passed on the 2024 White House race, has argued that Republicans with \"no path to victory must have the courage to get out\" of their party's primary in order to stop Trump.\n\nTrump called Sununu a selfish \"spoiled brat\" who passed up a chance to win a U.S. Senate seat in 2022, then indulged his presidential aspirations but found no traction.\n\nA New Hampshire poll conducted in November by CNN and the University of New Hampshire found that Haley was in second place, well behind Trump, but slightly ahead of fellow candidates DeSantis and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.\n\nTrump has won New Hampshire's GOP primary twice but lost the state in both of his general elections. He is confident enough in his domination of the Republican Party that he spent more time Saturday angling against Biden.\n\n\"Under the Trump administration, you were better off, your family was better off, your neighbors were better off, your communities were better off, and our country was better off. America was stronger, richer, safer, and more confident than ever when you had me behind that desk in the Oval Office,\" Trump said.\n\nDeSantis, meanwhile, didn't shy away from mentioning Trump during stops in Iowa Saturday, criticizing him for not finishing the southern border wall and adding trillions of dollars to the national debt.\n\nTrump's argument in New Hampshire resonated with voters like Brandon Sevey, 25, who was attending his first Trump event from nearby Dover. Sevey said he has worked a variety of retail and fast-food jobs and found it easier to find work when Trump was president. Plus, he likes Trump's brashness.\n\n\"He's loud and obnoxious and annoys people,\" Sevey said. \"But that's what I like about him.\""}
{"text": "# As Trump threatens to repeal Obamacare, these 'insurance godmothers' are signing Florida Latinos up\nBy **ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON**  \nDecember 16, 2023. 10:48 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**MIAMI (AP)** - Salsa music blares from the food court in a rundown Miami shopping center as Latinos head to a kiosk and an office showing signs for \" Obamacare,\" where they hope to renew their health coverage plans before the year ends.\n\nIt's areas near this mall where former Democratic President Barack Obama's health care overhaul is more popular than anywhere in the country, according to federal data. The region has also shifted away from Democrats to Republicans in recent years, with Donald Trump hosting several rallies here as part of his outreach to Latino voters.\n\nTrump, the current front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, has pledged to renew efforts to repeal and replace the 2010 law - something that would be felt heavily in the region and could possibly reverse some of the GOP shift among South Florida's Latinos, experts say.\n\nPresident Joe Biden's reelection campaign has already seized on Trump's statements about \"Obamacare,\" which was enacted when Biden was vice president, as part of its broader efforts to shape the widely expected rematch with Trump next year.\n\n\"Health insurance is something that is extremely needed for everyone,\" said Odalys Arevalo, one of the managing partners of a health insurance agency serving Spanish-speaking clients in Miami. \"And I know that everybody that supports the Republican Party that has health insurance through Obamacare would not support the fact that it would be taken away from one day to another. That is a fact.\"\n\nArevalo and her business partner, Mercy Cabrera, started enrollment centers to help people navigate the Affordable Care Act's insurance marketplaces and remember how some Cubans would walk away uttering \"no, no, no,\" after seeing the name \"Obamacare,\" which was coined by Republicans opposing the overhaul as an expensive government takeover of health insurance.\n\nInsurers could no longer deny coverage based on preexisting medical conditions, and that drew many Latinos to consider it, Arevalo says. In the following years, the women started enrolling tens of thousands, earning the nickname of \"Madrinas del Obamacare,\" or \"Obamacare\" godmothers, evoking the crucial role godparents play in Latino culture.\n\nThey have since renamed themselves \"Las Madrinas de los Seguros,\" or \"insurance godmothers,\" because they offer other plans. But they continue to feature the word \"Obamacare\" on their office walls and in their ads.\n\n\"Obamacare\" is seen throughout Miami in advertising flags, businesses and bus signs. Federal data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services indicates how widely used it is here.\n\nAbout 3.4 million Hispanics are signed up with insurance through the health law. Florida leads enrollment with more than 3.2 million consumers selecting a plan during last year's enrollment period from November 2022 to January. Miami-Dade is the county with the most people enrolled, with about 750,000 consumers, or more than one-fourth of the total population.\n\nFlorida is also one of 10 states that has resisted expanding Medicaid coverage under a provision of the health law.\n\nThe two Zip codes with the most sign-ups last year and this year are in Doral and Hialeah, hubs for the Venezuelan and Cuban communities that are just north of Miami and are common stops for Trump's visits and rallies.\n\nLast month, Trump posted on his Truth Social social media site that \"the cost of Obamacare is out of control, plus, it's not good Healthcare.\" While he said he is looking at alternatives, he has not shared any plans. But Trump said he would not give up on terminating it - recalling when the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., blocked the then-president's effort to repeal the law in July 2017.\n\nDuring Trump's administration, Republicans managed to pass a provision that reduced the penalty for not having health insurance to zero, the most unpopular part of the law and something that people in South Florida say made them feel more at ease with the plans.\n\nThe Miami Herald, in a recent editorial, called the plans by Trump - also echoed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, another 2024 GOP presidential candidate - \"exceedingly out of touch with voters.\"\n\nBiden's campaign quickly mobilized a response and the chair of the Florida Democratic Party, Nikki Fried, specifically mentioned an area where \"Obamacare\" is popular.\n\n\"Miami-Dade County would be hardest hit by Trump's anti-health care agenda,\" Fried said.\n\nAccording to a KFF poll conducted in May 2023, 59% of Americans say they have a favorable opinion of the Affordable Care Act. The same poll by the nonprofit organization focused on health policy found that 66% of Hispanics say they have a favorable opinion of the law.\n\nAccording to APVoteCast, a wide-ranging survey of U.S. voters, 62% of 2022 midterm voters in Florida said it should be the responsibility of the federal government to make sure that all people in the country have health care coverage. About one-third of Florida voters in the 2022 midterm elections said that shouldn't be the government's job. Among Latino or Hispanic midterm voters in Florida, 77% said ensuring health care coverage for all should be the responsibility of the federal government, while 1 in 5 said it should not be.\n\nZulina Ruiz, a 72-year-old retired lawyer from Venezuela, said she found out about the Affordable Care Act options quickly after arriving in the U.S. in 2017. She said she is particularly grateful for having access to drugs to treat her high blood pressure. Green-card holders, refugees and other migrants who have been granted temporary protected status or who have come recently with humanitarian parole also qualify for coverage under the law.\n\n\"This is very important for me. I don't think a candidate can just make this program disappear,\" she said. \"They would leave millions of low-income people without insurance.\"\n\nRuiz became a U.S. citizen in May, but has not registered with any party. She does not know whom she will vote for next year.\n\n\"I am still not decided, and we don't have official candidates yet,\" Ruiz said, adding that she still feels more connected politically to Venezuela. Much of the growing support for Republicans in Miami is owed to Trump's record opposing socialist leaders across Latin America, including imposing White House sanctions on Venezuelan officials.\n\n\"But health policy is a top priority for me,\" Ruiz said.\n\nThe Biden campaign has run advertising in battleground states contrasting his efforts to lower drug costs with Trump's renewed promise to repeal the health overhaul. The ad campaign did not include markets in Florida.\n\nArevalo, one of the \"Obamacare godmothers,\" thinks voters in Miami may not necessarily approve of all the positions of the candidates they ultimately back.\n\nBut as far as a local verdict on \"Obamacare,\" and despite initial hesitations about it, the program grew on people in Miami once they understood it, she said.\n\n\"When Trump was elected, some people came and said they wanted nothing to do with Obamacare. We said 'Obamacare, Trumpcare, whatever,'\" she said of what they told people. \"The important thing is that everybody has access to health insurance and that they can take care of their health.\""}
{"text": "# Americans agree that the 2024 election will be pivotal for democracy, but for different reasons\nBy **GARY FIELDS** and **LINLEY SANDERS**\nDecember 15, 2023. 2:09 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - In a politically polarized nation, Americans seem to agree on one issue underlying the 2024 elections - a worry over the state of democracy and how the outcome of the presidential contest will affect its future.\n\nThey just disagree over who poses the threat.\n\nA poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 62% of adults say democracy in the U.S. could be at risk depending on who wins next fall. Majorities of Democrats (72%) and Republicans (55%) feel the same way, but for different reasons.\n\nPresident Joe Biden has attempted to paint a dystopian future if GOP front-runner and former President Donald Trump returns to the White House after promising to seek retribution against opponents and declining to rule out that he would abuse the powers of the office. The former president has tried to flip the narrative lately, saying the election subversion and documents cases against him show Biden has weaponized the federal government to prosecute a political opponent. He has called Biden the \"destroyer of American democracy.\"\n\n\"I think from the side of the left, it's pretty obvious that they're concerned about electing a president who is avowedly authoritarian, someone who clearly wants to reduce checks and balances within the government to strengthen the presidency and to do so in ways that give the executive branch kind of an unprecedented reach across the population and sectors of the government,\" said Michael Albertus, political science professor at the University of Chicago.\n\n\"From the right, the Republicans think about government overreach, big government, threats to freedom and mandates to act in a certain way or adopt certain policies,\" he said.\n\nAgainst that backdrop, the poll found that about half of U.S. adults, 51%, say democracy is working \"not too well\" or \"not well at all.\"\n\nThe poll asked about the importance of the coming presidential election for 12 issues and found that the percentage who said the outcome will be very or extremely important to the future of democracy in the U.S. (67%) ranked behind only the economy (75%). It was about equal to the percentage who said that about government spending (67%) and immigration (66%).\n\nTony Motes, a retired firefighter who lives in Monroe, Georgia, cited a number of reasons he believes \"we're not living in a complete democracy.\" That includes what he sees as a deterioration of rights, including parental rights, thieves and other criminals not being held accountable, and a lack of secure borders.\n\nThe 59-year-old Republican also said the various criminal cases being brought against Trump undermine the country's democratic traditions.\n\n\"They're trying to keep him from running because they know he's going to win,\" he said.\n\nThe poll's findings continue a trend of Americans' lackluster views about how democracy is functioning. They also believe the country's governing system is not working well to reflect their interests on issues ranging from immigration to abortion to the economy.\n\nRobert Lieberman, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, has studied the fall of democracies elsewhere and the common elements that feed their demise.\n\nThe factors include polarization, growing ethnic or racial antagonism, rising economic inequality and a concentration of power under a country's executive officeholder.\n\n\"For a number of years now, the United States has had all four of these conditions, really for the first time in history,\" he said. \"So we're in a period that's ripe for challenges to democracy.\"\n\nTrump is not the cause of the pattern, Lieberman said, but \"seems to have an unerring instinct to make things worse, and he certainly has authoritarian impulses and a lot of followers who seem to validate or applaud him.\"\n\nThe AP-NORC poll found that 87% of Democrats and 54% of independents believe a second Trump term would negatively affect U.S. democracy. For Republicans, 82% believe democracy would be weakened by another Biden win, with 56% of independents agreeing.\n\nAbout 2 in 10 U.S. adults (19%) say democracy in the U.S. is \"already so seriously broken that it doesn't matter who wins the 2024 presidential election.\" Republicans (23%) are more likely than Democrats (10%) to say this, but relatively few in either party think U.S. democracy is resilient enough to withstand the outcome.\n\nSocial media platforms and news sites that reinforce biases accelerate the polarization that leads people from different political perspectives to believe the other side is the one representing the gravest threat to the nation's democracy, said Lilliana Mason, an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins.\n\n\"I don't think that people are exaggerating. I think it's that they actually are living in information environments in which it is true for them that democracy is under threat,\" she said.\n\nMason said one side fears what Trump has said he will do if he wins, while the other is responding to the fear created in a media ecosystem that says the Democrats want to destroy America and turn it into a socialist or communist society.\n\nFor some, the danger is more than Trump's statements and concern over how he might turn toward authoritarianism. It also is what's happening in the states and courts, where political gerrymandering and threats to voting rights are continuing, as are measures that limit people's ability to vote easily, such as reducing drop box locations for mail-in ballots and tightening voter identification requirements.\n\n\"Look at all the roadblocks that have been put up to keep people, especially people of color, from being able to vote,\" said Pamela Williams, 75, of New York City, who identifies as a Democrat. \"That isn't democracy.\"\n\nDouglas Kucmerowski, 67, an independent who lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York, is concerned over those state-level actions and the continued use of the Electoral College, which can allow someone to be president even if they lose the popular vote.\n\nHe also questions the state of the nation's democracy when a large proportion of the country supports a candidate facing multiple criminal charges who has spoken about pursuing retribution and using the military domestically, among other things.\n\nTrump also has lied about the outcome of the 2020 election, which has been affirmed by multiple reviews in the battleground states where he disputed his loss, and called his supporters to a Washington rally before they stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a violent attempt to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden's win.\n\n\"That candidate, in any other age, probably would have been ruled out. But for some reason, in this society, he's one of the best choices,\" Kucmerowski said. \"If this country is that confused that they can't tell the difference between right and wrong and ex-presidents making statements that on day one he will be a dictator, doesn't anybody care about day two or three or four when he's still a dictator?\""}
{"text": "# Sports fan Trump hits UFC fights and big games to try to put his 2024 nomination in a headlock\nBy **JILL COLVIN**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 9:56 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - After Donald Trump attended South Carolina's annual Palmetto Bowl, video of the crowd chanting \"We want Trump!\" as the former president arrived at Williams-Brice Stadium spread across conservative social media.\n\nIt was much the same two weeks earlier when the GOP front-runner attended an Ultimate Fighting Championship event in New York, fist-bumping and waving to the crowd as he entered Madison Square Garden like he was one of the fighters, with an entourage that included the musician Kid Rock, UFC president Dana White and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.\n\nWhile Trump has spent less time campaigning in early-voting states than many of his Republican primary rivals, his campaign has been filling his schedule with appearances at major sporting events including Saturday's UFC fight in Las Vegas. Videos of his appearances routinely rack up hundreds of thousands of views across social media, particularly on non-political outlets, including popular online sports channels and fan sites. And they are far easier and cheaper to produce than campaign rallies.\n\nIt's a strategy that, aides say, puts him in front of potential voters who may not closely follow politics or engage with traditional news sources. And it is part of a broader effort to expand Trump's appeal with young people and minority voters, particularly Latino and Black men, that the campaign hopes to win over in greater numbers after gains in 2020. UFC's fanbase in particular is overwhelmingly male.\n\nAides stress Trump is a genuine sports fan who frequented fights and games long before he ran for the White House and would be attending even if he weren't running. He is a particular aficionado of boxing and other combat sports. During a summer appearance on the \"UFC Unfiltered\" podcast, Trump recalled his favorite fights from decades ago, blow by blow.\n\nIn the 1980s, he befriended boxing legends like Mike Tyson and promoter Don King as he hosted high-profile fights at his Atlantic City casinos and became so involved with professional wrestling that he starred in WrestleMania 23's \"Battle of the Billionaires.\" And for a time, he owned the New Jersey Generals, a professional football team that played in the NFL-rival United States Football League.\n\nIn recent years, he has become particularly tied to mixed martial arts and its machismo. He is close personal friends with White, UFC's founder, who spoke at the Republican National Conventions in 2016 and 2020 and credits Trump for saving the sport by hosting fights when others shunned it as too violent.\n\nCampaign staff often tune into fights late at night aboard Trump's private plane as he returns to Palm Beach, Florida, following events, streaming fights on ESPN+ or DAZN.\n\nTrump has also drawn support from the sport's stars, including Colby Covington, who will be fighting Leon Edwards Saturday night for UFC's welterweight title. Covington said this week that organizers overruled his request to have Trump walk him out to the octagon. But Trump may still get a role if he wins.\n\n\"He's going to wrap that belt around me,\" Covington told reporters on Thursday, wearing a suit jacket signed by Trump that featured the former president's mug shot on the back. \"It's going to be a spectacle.\"\n\nThere is of course a long history of sports in presidential politics. Candidates have used them to project an image of strength and vigor, endear themselves to voters and seem more accessible.\n\nPresidential historian Michael Beschloss wrote about how Theodore Roosevelt was frequently pictured boxing, horseback riding and hiking, while John Kennedy swam, sailed and played touch football despite serious injuries sustained during the war. Richard Nixon \"went to great lengths\" to emphasize his football and baseball fandom as he tried to court working-class voters, while George W. Bush famously threw out the ceremonial first pitch of the first World Series game in New York after 9/11, trying to signal to nervous Americans that life would go on after the terror attack.\n\nTrump's team sees the appearances as a way to connect with sports fans, signaling he shares their interests, and a way to showcase a different side of the combative politician, who has been indicted four times and is usually shown on the news railing from behind a rally lectern. They also hope to capitalize on his history as a celebrity and his relationships with business and entertainment figures.\n\nWhen Trump attends an event like Saturday's fight, \"The audience gets to see him through an unvarnished filter that isn't tainted by news media and political biases,\" said his spokesman Steven Cheung, who previously worked for UFC himself. \"It gives us the great opportunity to connect with voters who are, quite frankly, turned off by many traditional news outlets.\"\n\nJeffrey Montez de Oca, a professor of sociology and the founding director of the Center for Critical Sport Studies at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, said politicians \"use sports all the time and they're used to connect with regular people,\" as well as to \"project strength and power.\"\n\nSports, he said, generate \"powerful emotions\" that take hold of fans and \"make you feel like you're a part of something much larger than yourself\" - emotions that politicians try to harness.\n\n\"For Trump to walk into that space, he's able to participate in the general feeling going on in that room. The love, the enthusiasm, the feeling of connection with the sport, with the athletes, then attaches to him as well,\" he said.\n\nKyle Kusz, a University of Rhode Island professor who studies the connection between sports and the far right, recalled how Trump aligned himself with sports figures during his 2016 campaign, appearing with basketball coach Bobby Knight, who was fired for abusive behavior, and invoking Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, who was fired in connection with the child sex abuse scandal involving his former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, among others facing scandal. He noted all were white men whose diehard fans saw them as unfairly victimized.\n\nSports stars in 2016 were among the few celebrities willing to campaign with Trump, who was shunned by the Hollywood establishment.\n\nThis time, Trump's appearances are part of a broader effort by the former president's team to engage with non-traditional media outlets, including YouTube shows and podcasts like \"UFC Unfiltered\" that can drive millions of views. The appearances allow Trump to reach listeners who may be turned off by the mainstream media and politics, and get their news from alternative sources.\n\nThey have also tried to harness the power of social media by creating their own viral moments. His team realized early on that video of Trump interacting with supporters had particular traction, and now often organizes stops where he has passed out Blizzards at Dairy Queen or tossed autographed footballs into the crowd at a frat house in Iowa.\n\nThe scenes have also provided a contrast, first with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, once seen as Trump's leading primary rival, who is often criticized for seeming wooden and awkward at public events, and now with President Joe Biden as both men gear up for a widely expected general election rematch. Biden has largely eschewed campaign events, holding just a single rally, his campaign launch event."}
{"text": "# 'Uniquely horrible choice:' Few US adults want a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024, an AP-NORC poll shows\nBy **SEUNG MIN KIM** and **LINLEY SANDERS**  \nDecember 14, 2023. 12:27 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - It's the presidential election no one is really jazzed about.\n\nRelatively few Americans are excited about a potential rematch of the 2020 election between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, although more Republicans would be satisfied to have Trump as their nominee than Democrats would be with Biden as their standard-bearer, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.\n\nThat palpable apathy from voters comes even as both Biden and Trump are facing relatively few obstacles in their paths to lock down their respective parties' nominations next year. Biden has amassed broad support from Democratic officials as a handful of mostly token primary challengers have struggled to spark momentum. And despite 91 indictments across four criminal cases - including some centered on his attempts to overturn his electoral loss to Biden in 2020 - Trump's grip on GOP primary voters shows no signs of loosening a month before the first nominating contest in Iowa.\n\n\"Probably the best way to put it is, I find it sad for our country that that's our best choices,\" said Randy Johnson, 64, from Monett, Missouri. Johnson, who is a Republican, said he wishes there were a third legitimate option for president but that the political system does not make that viable and added: \"We're down to the lesser of two evils.\"\n\nAndrew Collins, 35, an independent from Windham, Maine, said: \"This is probably the most uniquely horrible choice I've had in my life.\"\n\nAbout half of Democrats say they would be very or somewhat satisfied if Biden becomes the party's 2024 nominee. About one-third of Democrats would be dissatisfied, and about 1 in 5 would be \"neither satisfied nor dissatisfied.\" When it comes to the Republican Party nomination, enthusiasm is higher for GOP front-runner Donald Trump. Two-thirds of Republicans would be satisfied with Trump as the Republican nominee for 2024. About one-quarter would be dissatisfied, and 9% would be neutral.\n\nLooking at U.S. adults broadly - setting aside party affiliations - there's still not much enthusiasm for a Biden-Trump rematch.\n\nMost U.S. adults overall (56%) would be \"very\" or \"somewhat\" dissatisfied with Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024, and a similar majority (58%) would be very or somewhat dissatisfied with Trump as the GOP's pick. Nearly 3 in 10 U.S. adults, or 28%, say they would be dissatisfied with both Trump and Biden becoming their party's respective nominees - with independents (43%) being more likely than Democrats (28%) or Republicans (20%) to express their displeasure with both men gaining party nominations.\n\nDeborah Brophy is an independent who says she supported Biden in the 2020 presidential election. But now, the 67-year-old has soured on the president, saying she felt Biden is too focused on dealing with conflicts abroad rather than \"what's going on under his own nose,\" such as homelessness, gun violence and the economy.\n\n\"What's going on with Biden right now?\" said Brophy, of North Reading, Massachusetts. \"I don't think he's, health-wise, able to continue another four years in office. I think his mind is a little bit going the wrong way in the way of not being able to think.\"\n\nYet she is turned off by Trump's attitude and said he \"seems a little racist,\" even while praising his business acumen.\n\n\"So I don't know what I'm going to do,\" Brophy added.\n\nAmong Democrats and Republicans alike, having a candidate who can win is given slightly more importance than having a candidate whose views represent most people in the party or even themselves, according to the AP-NORC poll.\n\nOnly about 3 in 10 Democrats are \"extremely\" or \"very\" confident that the Democratic Party's process will result in nominating a candidate who can win the general election in November. About half are somewhat confident, and 18% are not very confident or not at all confident. While relatively few are highly confident they'll get a winning nominee out of the process, three-quarters of Democrats say it's \"extremely\" or \"very\" important that the party's process for nominating a presidential candidate does result in a candidate who can win the general election.\n\nMeanwhile, one-third of Republicans are extremely or very confident that the Republican Party's process for nominating a presidential candidate will result in someone who can win the general election. Slightly fewer than half, or 46%, are somewhat confident, and 2 in 10 are not very or not at all confident. Seven in 10 Republicans say it's extremely or very important that their process results in a nominee who can win in 2024.\n\n\"I've voted for Trump twice. I'll vote for him again if I had to. I certainly would not vote for Biden,\" said Joe Hill, 70, a Republican from West Point, Georgia. \"But I would welcome someone new and quite frankly, I'm not confident he can win against Biden.\"\n\nHill said he was concerned that Trump could be too polarizing with a wide swath of voters.\n\n\"I want a Republican to be elected, so I'm in favor of any Republican that would be on the ballot,\" Hill said. \"I would more so, if it wasn't him.\"\n\nThe poll shows neither man is viewed favorably by a majority of the U.S. public, with only 42% saying they have a favorable view of Biden and 36% saying the same of Trump.\n\nBoth are generally viewed favorably within their own party: About three-quarters of Democrats have a favorable view of Biden and about 7 in 10 Republicans have a favorable view of Trump. But Republicans are more likely to say their view of Trump is strongly favorable than Democrats are to say the same of Biden, 46% vs 34%. Democrats are more likely than Republicans are to say they have only a somewhat favorable view of their party's 2024 frontrunner, 44% vs 24%.\n\nJosh Reed, of Pittsburg, California, said he prefers alternatives to Trump in the Republican field such as South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, or South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who withdrew from the race last month.\n\nBut if the choice in front of voters next fall is Biden and Trump, \"it's between those two,\" said Reed, 39, a registered Republican, though he says he holds more libertarian views. \"There's no third party that's going to make a dent in anything. Sometimes it is what it is. You got to pick between those two.\"\n\nHe will definitely vote next year, Reed said. But, he added: \"I'm not really excited for either one of these guys.\"\n\nThe poll of 1,074 adults was conducted Nov. 30 - Dec. 4, 2023, using a sample drawn from NORC's probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, designed to represent the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points."}
{"text": "# Top strategist resigns from DeSantis-backing super PAC\nBy **JILL COLVIN**  \nDecember 17, 2023. 12:12 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - The top strategist for the embattled super PAC backing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ' campaign for the White House resigned Saturday night in the latest sign of trouble for the GOP hopeful less than one month before voting begins with Iowa's kickoff caucuses.\n\nJeff Roe, the top adviser to Never Back Down, is the latest senior staffer to exit Never Back Down, which has been the largest outside group supporting DeSantis' candidacy.\n\nHe announced his departure on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, hours after The Washington Post published a story focused on internal disputes and suspicions between Never Back Down, the campaign, and other DeSantis allies that included accusations of \"mismanagement and conduct issues, including numerous unauthorized leaks containing false information.\"\n\n\"I can't believe it ended this way,\" Roe wrote on X, sharing a statement in which he said he \"cannot in good conscience stay affiliated with Never Back Down given the statements\" in the story, which he said were false.\n\nNumerous senior members of Never Back Down have been fired or resigned in recent weeks, including two chief executives, the group's chairman and its communications director. At the same time, DeSantis' Florida allies have created a new super PAC, Fight Right, which had earned the public blessing of the DeSantis campaign.\n\nThe Associated Press reported earlier this week on growing concern among some within DeSantis' operation that interactions between his campaign and his network of outside groups were blurring the lines of what's legally permissible.\n\nSuper PACs are legally barred from directly coordinating with campaigns. But multiple people familiar with DeSantis' political network said that he and his wife had expressed concerns about Never Back Down's messaging as his Iowa poll numbers stagnated - concerns DeSantis' team then shared with members of Never Back Down's board, according to multiple people briefed on the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal discussions.\n\nSome of the board members then relayed the DeSantis team's wishes to super PAC staff, which was responsible for executing strategy, the people said. DeSantis' campaign has denied any wrongdoing.\n\nNever Back Down had taken an unprecedented role in the election, overseeing functions normally handled by campaigns. The group was charged with organizing voters through a massive door-knocking and get-out-the-vote operation, organizing campaign, as well as advertising, and has spent tens of millions of dollars on commercials this year.\n\nRoe, one of the Republican Party's most prominent strategists, ran Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's 2016 presidential campaign, which beat former President Donald Trump in that year's Iowa caucuses, and also worked as an adviser on Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin's winning run. But he had little preexisting relationship before this year with DeSantis, who has long struggled to maintain close relationships with political consultants.\n\nWeighing in on his social media site from Las Vegas, where he is watching a UFC fight, Trump late Saturday cheered the news. \"Jeff Roe is out-GAME OVER for DeSanctimonious!\" he wrote.\n\nDeSantis has staked his campaign on Iowa, where Trump is leading by wide margins in recent polls.\n\nThe super PAC was seeded with more than $80 million from DeSantis' political accounts this spring."}
{"text": "# Scores of candidates to seek high-profile open political positions in North Carolina as filing ends\nBy **GARY D. ROBERTSON**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 6:49 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**RALEIGH, N.C. (AP)** - Scores of candidates filed for nearly a dozen high-profile elected positions in North Carolina where the incumbents aren't running in 2024 because of redistricting, retirements or term limits.\n\nThe two-week candidate filing period for next year's elections ended at noon Friday at the State Board of Elections and at all 100 county boards. Primaries will be held March 5 to whittle down the field where multiple candidates are running for their party's nominations.\n\nSix of the 10 statewide elected officials making up the Council of State - with Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper heading the list - and five of the 14 members of the U.S. House delegation aren't running again or are seeking new positions.\n\nThe state constitution prevents Cooper from running for a third consecutive term. Nearly a dozen people across four parties filed candidacy papers to succeed him, according to a state elections board list. They include Democrats Attorney General Josh Stein and former Supreme Court Justice Mike Morgan and Republicans Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, State Treasurer Dale Folwell and attorney Bill Graham.\n\nMissing from the elections board list was former state GOP Sen. Andy Wells, who had announced his candidacy for governor months ago. He didn't immediately respond to a text message seeking comment.\n\nState Auditor Beth Wood and Labor Commissioner Josh Dobson also aren't seeking reelection. Wood prepared to resign on Friday from the auditor's position that she has held in 2009. Cooper's choice to finish out her term, Jessica Holmes, is an auditor candidate next year.\n\nFor lieutenant governor, 15 people signed up to succeed Robinson, including four current or former state legislators. Filing for the post minutes before the noon deadline was Mark H. Robinson, a Sampson County Democrat who has been running for several months.\n\nMark H. Robinson, a former Navy officer, said Friday that his campaign isn't designed to cause voter confusion with the other Mark Robinson, saying he has believed for decades that he would run for statewide office.\n\nWhile the two names won't appear on the same primary ballot, they could if both advance to the general election, albeit for different positions.\n\n\"I'm not trying to confuse anyone,\" Mark H. Robinson, 62, told reporters. \"I think this is what my calling is, and that is to help as many people in the state of North Carolina before I die.\"\n\nA leading candidate must get more than 30% of the primary vote to win the nomination outright. Otherwise runoffs are possible later in the spring.\n\nThree of the five members of Congress who aren't running are Democratic Reps. Jeff Jackson, Kathy Manning and Wiley Nickel. Each of them said it was futile to seek reelection given that the redrawing of the congressional map by the Republican-controlled General Assembly this fall makes their districts lean strongly Republican. Jackson is now running for attorney general.\n\nFourteen Republicans alone are seeking the GOP nomination in Nickel's now-reconfigured 13th District, which includes part of Raleigh but stretches north to rural counties on the Virginia border and points south.\n\nThe Republicans not running again for Congress are Rep. Dan Bishop, who is also running for state attorney general, and Rep. Patrick McHenry.\n\nSix Republicans are running for the 6th District seat currently held by Manning. The GOP field includes former Rep. Mark Walker, 2022 congressional candidate Bo Hines and Addison McDowell, a recent entry who received former President Donald Trump's endorsement.\n\nSix GOP candidates also are seeking the nomination in the south-central 8th District that Bishop is leaving and five are running for the nomination in McHenry's reconfigured 10th District, which now ranges from Winston-Salem to counties north and west of Charlotte.\n\nState House Speaker Tim Moore is one of three Republicans seeking the GOP nomination in the 14th District that will stretch from Charlotte west to foothills counties. Jackson is the current 14th District representative.\n\nRepublicans appeared all but assured to win the 6th District and 3rd District seats because Democrats failed to field candidates in either race. GOP Rep. Greg Murphy, the 3rd District incumbent, currently only faces a Libertarian challenger.\n\nOne state Supreme Court and three Court of Appeals seats, and all 170 General Assembly seats also will be on ballots. Republicans currently hold narrow veto-proof majorities in both the House and Senate.\n\nSeveral legislators had already announced that they wouldn't seek reelection. Late additions to that list on Friday were Senate Majority Whip Jim Perry of Lenoir County and first-term Democratic Sen. Mary Wills Bode of Granville County.\n\nPerry, who joined the Senate in 2019 and is a Senate Finance Committee chairman, said Friday in a statement that he reached the conclusion he couldn't \"make the time commitment necessary to be an effective Senator if I served an additional term.\"\n\n\"I am entering a season of life where I will need more time to support those closest to me,\" he said.\n\nBode cited family considerations in a social media post explaining her decision."}
{"text": "# With Iowa's caucuses a month away, Trump urges voters to hand him not just a victory, but a blowout\nBy **THOMAS BEAUMONT** and **HANNAH FINGERHUT**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 8:44 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CORALVILLE, Iowa (AP)** - Donald Trump was uncharacteristically serious when he implored an audience in eastern Iowa to carry him to a blowout in next month's Republican caucuses.\n\n\"The margin of victory is very important, it's just very important,\" Trump told about 1,000 people attending a Wednesday rally aimed at organizing campaign volunteers. \"It's time for the Republican Party to unite, to come together and focus our energy and resources on beating Crooked Joe Biden and taking back our country. Very simple.\"\n\nFor the blustery former president, it was both caution against complacency and a sign that he and his team believe the first contest on Jan. 15 can be not just the start of the nominating campaign, but the beginning of the end.\n\nTrump is the overwhelming favorite to win Iowa, one month away from the caucuses. A myriad of well-qualified GOP challengers and anti-Trump groups haven't changed that dynamic after crisscrossing the state over the last year and spending more than $70 million in Iowa on advertising, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact. And unlike his first time in the caucuses, which he narrowly lost in 2016, Trump's campaign is now run by Iowa veterans who are not just locking in caucus commitments but building a formidable organization to try to lock in his lead.\n\nAmong rival campaigns, most question not whether Trump will win, but by how much - and whether a second-place finisher can claim momentum for the rest of the race.\n\n\"For me, it looked like for a long time there was a narrow lane, but there was a lane, for a not-Trump candidate,\" said Gentry Collins, a veteran Republican strategist and former state GOP executive director who ran Mitt Romney's 2008 GOP caucus campaign. \"But there isn't really a single alternative people can rally around.\"\n\nTrump was the first choice of 51% of likely Iowa caucus participants in a Des Moines Register-NBC News-Mediacom Iowa Poll published Monday. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has vowed that he will win Iowa, had the support of 19%. Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, who has suggested she can beat DeSantis in the state and go head to head with Trump in later primaries, was at 16%.\n\nNext year's GOP nomination is officially an open race. But many primary voters believe Trump was cheated in 2020 when he lost his reelection bid to Democrat Joe Biden. Multiple government and outside investigations have not found evidence of any voter fraud, despite Trump's frequent and repeated false claims that are often repeated by many of his supporters.\n\nTrump remains popular with Republicans, both in Iowa and nationally, who credit him for his handling of the economy, the U.S.-Mexico border, and his appointment of three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn a federally guaranteed right to abortion.\n\n\"You've got basically a quasi-incumbent president,\" said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster and senior adviser to Marco Rubio's 2016 campaign. \"Of course, he's got the overwhelming advantage.\"\n\nBeyond Trump's built-in advantages, a massive and ongoing effort on his behalf in Iowa reflects the campaign's realization - especially compared to his seat-of-the-pants 2016 effort - that turning out many thousands of Iowans to caucus on a cold January night requires intense organizing.\n\nState Republican Party officials who run the contests and strategists with the various campaigns suggest January's caucuses will break the record of nearly 187,000 people in 2016.\n\nTrump's team says it has collected and processed tens of thousands of commitment cards, most of them coming from his 11 visits to Iowa in the past three months. Aides say the cards are entered into a database within three days before a campaign volunteer replies by phone.\n\nThough Trump has visited far less often than DeSantis, Haley and others, he has drawn more than 20,000 to events since early September, thousands of whom say they are first-time caucus participants.\n\nWhen asked if they were first-timers, hundreds of people raised their hands at Wednesday's event in Coralville. The audience sat before a stage flanked by large video screens with a QR code and text code that guided them to the campaign's digital portal.\n\nVolunteers circulated around the Hyatt Regency hosting the event, identifiable with their white ball caps emblazoned in gold lettering with \"Trump Caucus Captain.\"\n\nOne volunteer, a University of Iowa student, approached Ginger Marolf as she was waiting in a line of hundreds of people snaking around the hotel. The student asked Marolf to fill out a caucus pledge card and give it back so they could get \"an accurate count of how many people support Trump in Iowa.\"\n\nAfter signing her card, Marolf called Trump a fighter for \"us, the people\" and suggested that she isn't considering any of the other Republican candidates.\n\n\"Trump needs to be back in office, like now,\" she said, blaming Biden for high prices, an unprotected southern border and global instability.\n\nCaucus captains are given a list of 25 neighbors and responsible for delivering at least 10 to a caucus. Key between now and the caucuses is \"grinding away at recruiting caucus captains and training them,\" said Alex Latcham, the campaign's early state director whose background is in Iowa politics.\n\nOther candidates also claim to have the backing of strong organizations.\n\nDeSantis entered the race to the national fanfare of a big-state governor who had won a crushing 2022 reelection victory and is pushing through conservative priorities in a traditional swing state. But he faltered during the summer and fall, with several shake-ups in his campaign and overall strategy.\n\nStill, the main super PAC backing him, Never Back Down, is the largest political operation on the ground in Iowa and claims to have tens of thousands of signed support cards for DeSantis, who has said he plans to win the caucuses.\n\nHaley won a second look from some in Iowa after early fall debate performances. Her candidacy had little apparent support on the ground in Iowa but is now supported by Americans for Prosperity Action, the political arm of the well-heeled conservative Koch Brothers network. AFP Action backed Haley in late November and began knocking on doors for her this month.\n\nIn a sign that she's still trying to reintroduce herself to Iowans, Haley began a recent event by retelling her early life's story to an audience of about 400 in suburban Des Moines near word for word as she did on her first Iowa trip as a candidate 10 months ago.\n\nDeSantis remains the primary focus of the Trump campaign's attacks. Trump, who continually has accused DeSantis of disloyalty for running against him despite the president's 2018 endorsement of him in Florida, has long sought to bury the governor in Iowa. Despite Trump's markedly different to DeSantis' traditional county-by-county effort and fewer overall visits, the president's Iowa push appears to have kept him well ahead.\n\nSondra Michels said she had long avoided politics before this year. She plans not only to caucus for the first time but to be a caucus leader in her precinct in Walcott, an eastern Iowa town known for being the home of the world's largest truck stop.\n\n\"We've got to see him win here and keep going,\" said Michels, 49. \"He had the prices lower and we were safer.\""}
{"text": "# Michigan court rejects challenges to Trump's spot on 2024 primary ballot\nDecember 14, 2023. 7:06 PM EST\n\n---\n\nLANSING, Mich. (AP) - The Michigan Court of Appeals said Thursday it won't stop former President Donald Trump from appearing on the state's 2024 Republican primary ballot, turning aside challenges from critics who argue that his role in the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol disqualifies him.\n\nThe court affirmed two lower court rulings without determining whether Trump falls under the insurrection clause in the Constitution's 14th Amendment.\n\n\"Who to place on the primary ballot is determined by the political parties and the individual candidates,\" the appeals court said in a 3-0 opinion, citing Michigan law.\n\nThe court further said Trump's possible spot on a general election ballot was not ripe for consideration.\n\nThe two-sentence clause in the 14th Amendment has been used only a handful of times since the years after the Civil War. It's likely that one of the lawsuits challenging Trump eventually will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has never ruled on the insurrection clause.\n\nThe Michigan court decision was similar to one from the Minnesota Supreme Court, which said Trump could stay on that state's primary ballot there because the election is a party-run contest.\n\nIn one of the Michigan lawsuits, the anti-Trump plaintiffs included Bob LaBrant, a longtime Republican who was a lawyer and political strategist for decades at the state Chamber of Commerce.\n\nIn a statement, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said, \"The Soros-funded Democrats have once again failed in their desperate attempt to interfere in the election via a bad-faith interpretation of the 14th Amendment.\""}
{"text": "# Man accused of making death threats to Ramaswamy released, can't have contact with any candidate\nDecember 14, 2023. 2:23 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CONCORD, N.H. (AP)** - A judge on Thursday released from jail a New Hampshire man accused of sending text messages threatening to kill a presidential candidate.\n\nTyler Anderson, 30, of Dover, was arrested Saturday and charged with sending a threat using interstate commerce. He waived his right to a preliminary hearing Thursday.\n\nA federal prosecutor argued to keep Anderson in detention pending his trial, saying \"very violent, concerning language\" was used. But both the prosecution and defense lawyers said Anderson acknowledged that he had no intent to follow through on his texts.\n\nAnderson also has no criminal record.\n\nThe judge set forth several conditions for his release, including that he avoid contact with any presidential candidate and their political campaigns. Anderson, who is receiving mental health treatment, must also take all of his prescribed medications. Guns in his home, belonging to a roommate, must be removed.\n\nThe U.S. Attorney's office did not name the candidate. However, a spokesperson for Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said Monday that the texts were directed at his campaign.\n\nAccording to court documents, Anderson received a text message from the candidate's campaign notifying him of a breakfast event in Portsmouth on Monday. The campaign staff received two text messages in response, according to an FBI agent affidavit. One threatened to shoot the candidate in the head, the other threatened to kill everyone at the event and desecrate their corpses."}
{"text": "# Israeli military veteran tapped as GOP candidate in special election to replace George Santos\nBy **ANTHONY IZAGUIRRE**  \nDecember 14, 2023. 5:47 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ALBANY, N.Y. (AP)** - Republicans have picked a little-known county lawmaker who once served in the Israeli military as their candidate in a special election to replace ousted New York congressman George Santos, party officials said Thursday.\n\nNassau County legislator and former Israeli paratrooper Mazi Pilip will face off against Democratic former congressman Tom Suozzi in a Feb. 13 special election for the seat, which includes northern parts of Queens and Long Island.\n\nThe selection pits Pilip, a relatively unknown local lawmaker originally from Ethiopia, against a political veteran in Suozzi, who previously represented the district for six years during a lengthy career in Long Island politics.\n\nIn a statement, Republicans in Queens and Nassau County loosely outlined some of her potential policy positions and said she would bring a new perspective to the House.\n\n\"Pilip is an effective tax fighter who will prioritize public safety, economic recovery, border security and tax relief in Congress,\" the statement read. \"She will bring a fresh new perspective to Washington, starkly contrasting her from the candidate for the other major political party.\"\n\nThe party will hold a formal announcement ceremony for Pilip on Friday. She did not immediately return a message left at her office.\n\nThe election is expected to draw significant attention as both parties zero in on New York as a potential battleground for control of the House.\n\nRepublicans picked Pilip after vetting a number of potential candidates following the expulsion of Santos from Congress earlier this month for fabricating much of his life story and being criminally charged with defrauding donors.\n\nThe selection process appeared to be slowed after media began digging into the personal and professional histories of potential candidates, revealing damaging information that could become public during a campaign.\n\nPolitico reported last week that Pilip is a registered Democrat, though she holds her current position as a Republican and has been backed by Republicans when she was running for county office. The arrangement is not entirely uncommon in states that have closed primaries, where so-called crossover voters who identify with one party register under another so they can vote in primary elections.\n\nSuozzi was tapped by Democrats last week after emerging as the party's frontrunner for the nomination. His extensive political experience could be a major advantage when it comes to name recognition and fundraising for the special election.\n\nSuozzi, a centrist Democrat, was elected to the House in 2016 and won reelection in 2020, before leaving to launch the unsuccessful campaign for governor. He also served as the mayor of Glen Cove from 1994 to 2001, and as Nassau County's elected executive from 2002 to 2009."}
{"text": "# North Carolina Rep. Nickel won't seek reelection due to remapping, points to 2026 Senate bid\nBy **GARY D. ROBERTSON**  \nDecember 14, 2023. 5:17 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**RALEIGH, N.C. (AP)** - Democratic U.S. Rep. Wiley Nickel said Thursday he won't seek reelection to Congress next year, the result of congressional redistricting by Republican state legislators this fall that's likely to shift North Carolina's delegation to the right. And Nickel said he is interested in a U.S. Senate bid in an election that is almost three years away.\n\nThe decision by the first-term congressman on the day before candidate filing ends for the March primary means three incumbent House Democrats from North Carolina won't run in 2024. Each of them blamed the reconfigured lines by GOP lawmakers - now the subject of litigation - that they say make it futile for them to run.\n\nDemocratic Reps. Jeff Jackson of Charlotte and Kathy Manning of Greensboro already said they wouldn't seek reelection. Nickel's decision should benefit national Republicans in their efforts to retain a U.S. House majority in 2025.\n\n\"Here in North Carolina, Republicans have rigged the system to favor themselves, and I do not have a path for re-election in the 13th District. But I'm not giving up and neither should you,\" Nickel told supporters at an event in Cary.\n\nNickel, a lawyer and state senator from Cary before his 2022 victory, said he would now work next year to help get Democrats elected up and down the ballot and talk about what he considers illegal gerrymandering.\n\n\"Then for me, in January 2025, I'm going to look to flip our U.S. Senate seat blue,\" Nickel said to cheers from supporters, adding that legislative Repubilcans \"can't gerrymander a statewide election.\"\n\n2026 is the next time a Senate seat is scheduled for North Carolina ballots. GOP Sen. Thom Tillis currently holds that seat.\n\nIn a text before his speech, Nickel said he planned to file paperwork soon with the Federal Election Commission to shift his House campaign committee to a Senate committee. But he declined to say that he had already decided to run in 2026. A Nickel news release said that he would \"explore a path forward\" in the Senate.\n\nThe 2022 elections were conducted under a map for the state's 14 congressional seats drawn by state judges that resulted in Democrats and Republicans winning seven seats each. One of the seven belongs to Nickel, who narrowly won in the closely competitive Raleigh-area 13th District.\n\nBut the Republican-dominated General Assembly, emboldened by a state Supreme Court ruling that tossed out previous partisan gerrymandering claims as outside the courts' purview, enacted a map that made it likely for the GOP to win at least 10 of the 14 seats, according to election data.\n\nThe recalibrated 13th Congressional District is now considered a strongly leaning Republican district and two other districts adjoining the 13th are heavily Democratic and where Democratic incumbents Deborah Ross and Valerie Foushee are seeking reelection.\n\nAt least 10 Republicans have filed as candidates for the new 13th District, which, while still including parts of Raleigh, wraps around Wake County and stretches north to the Virginia border and south into several rural counties.\n\nJackson, the 14th District incumbent, is running instead for state attorney general. Manning, who currently represents the 6th District, said last week that she would change her mind and run again for Congress should litigation alleging the retooled 6th District is an illegal racial gerrymander succeeds.\n\nNickel has been particularly vocal about the congressional map, declaring that litigation was needed to strike it down.\n\nMore than 20 Black and Latino voters sued over the 6th and three other congressional districts earlier this month, but it appears unlikely that any resolution of the lawsuit will occur in time to delay the congressional primary elections. Absentee ballots for the primary start getting mailed to requesters on Jan. 19.\n\nRepublicans backing U.S. House candidates were pleased with Nickel's departure.\n\n\"Wiley Nickel just gave Republicans an early Christmas gift with another pickup in the battle for the House majority,\" Delanie Bomar, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said in a news release."}
{"text": "# US Rep. Drew Ferguson, a Georgia Republican, says he won't seek reelection in 2024\nBy **JEFF AMY** and **RUSS BYNUM**  \nDecember 14, 2023. 6:42 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ATLANTA (AP)** - Republican Rep. Drew Ferguson said Thursday he won't seek reelection to his Georgia seat in 2024.\n\n\"Julie and I look forward to spending more time with our children and grandchildren while continuing to work to keep Georgia the best state in America to live and do business,\" Ferguson said in a statement.\n\nHe said he plans to serve the remainder of his fourth term representing western Georgia's 3rd District, which expires at the end of next year.\n\nThe announcement comes two months after Ferguson said his family had received death threats amid the inner turmoil Republicans faced in electing a new House speaker following the ouster of Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California.\n\nThe threats came after Ferguson publicly withdrew his support for GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, a favorite of hard-right conservatives. Ferguson said he refused to support \"a bully\" for speaker and that the threats were \"unacceptable, unforgivable, and will never be tolerated.\"\n\nA former mayor of West Point, Ferguson was elected to Congress in 2016 in a district west of Atlanta that hugs the Georgia-Alabama state line. Ferguson later moved from his hometown to a house in Pike County, south of Atlanta, near the rural town of The Rock.\n\nHe served in the House GOP leadership as the chief deputy whip from 2018 through 2022 and holds a seat on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. But his attempts to rise in the House leadership were spurned by fellow Republicans. He lost a three-way race for whip to Minnesota Representative Tom Emmer in 2022.\n\nFerguson's retirement is likely to set off a scramble among ambitious Republicans who would like to go to Congress. Ferguson was already being challenged by Jim Bennett, a Republican activist from Carroll County who had criticized Ferguson as insufficiently conservative.\n\nOther Republicans who said they were considering bids Thursday include state Sen. Matt Brass of Newnan, state Rep. David Jenkins of Grantville and former state Rep. Philip Singleton, who wrote on Facebook that \"We are very open to a run.\" Singleton lost a challenge to Ferguson in the 2018 Republican primary before serving two terms in the state House and being redistricted out of office by a GOP leadership who didn't like his hard-right politics and confrontational style.\n\nRepublican state senators who represent other parts of the district, including Mike Dugan of Carrollton and Randy Robertson of Cataula, could also be contenders. Neither immediately responded to text messages Thursday asking about their interest.\n\nOthers could include Brian Jack, a former White House political director for President Donald Trump and former aide to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and Chris West, a Republican who lost a bid for southwest Georgia's 2nd Congressional District in 2022 to longtime Democratic incumbent Sanford Bishop. West recently moved from Thomasville to Newnan.\n\nWest called Ferguson \"a great friend and fighter for the 3rd District of Georgia\" on Facebook Thursday, but didn't say anything about his own plans.\n\nFerguson's 3rd District seat leans solidly Republican. He easily fended off a GOP primary challenger last year before winning reelection to a fourth term with 69% of the vote.\n\nState lawmakers in recent weeks redrew Georgia's congressional map under a federal judge's order to add a majority-Black district. But the Legislature's Republican majority produced a map that didn't change the boundaries of the 3rd District, which runs from Carrollton south to Columbus along the Alabama state line and skirts the southwestern edge of Atlanta's suburbs, stretching to Griffin and Barnesville. The map overall would maintain the GOP's 9-5 hold on the state U.S. House delegation and protect Republican incumbents.\n\nHowever, those who successfully sued to overturn Georgia's congressional districts have asked a federal judge to reject the plan and draw his own. Those challengers have suggested changes that could bring big changes to the 3rd District, injecting uncertainty into the decisions of possible candidates."}
{"text": "# Janet Yellen says the Trump administration's China policies left the US more vulnerable\nBy **FATIMA HUSSEIN**  \nDecember 14, 2023. 8:33 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said former President Donald Trump 's policies toward China left America \"more vulnerable and more isolated\" in the global economy, a rare jab by her at the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination.\n\nYellen, at a U.S.-China Business Council event Thursday night, said the Trump administration \"failed to make investments at home in critical areas like infrastructure and advanced technology, while also neglecting relationships with our partners and allies that had been forged and strengthened over decades.\"\n\nHer comments come as the U.S. rebuilds its relationship with the Asian superpower, including a November meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco. The two nations agreed to curb the production of illicit fentanyl, a deadly component of drugs sold in the United States, and agreed to resume military-to-military communications.\n\n\"Proceeding purposefully and carefully to responsibly manage our economic relationship\" is the Biden administration approach on China, she said.\n\nYellen, who rarely comments on the previous administration's approach on trade, said Trump-era policies on China \"left America more vulnerable and more isolated in a competitive global economy that demands that nations take exactly the opposite approach.\"\n\n\"It damaged our global standing and meant significant missed economic opportunities for American firms and workers,\" she says.\n\nIn her speech, Yellen highlighted the Biden administration's strategy of strengthening relationships with like-minded nations through \"friend shoring\" with nations like South Korea, Vietnam, Japan, India and Indonesia. And establishing economic working groups between China and the U.S. that meet regularly to exchange information is an achievement, she said.\n\n\"Over the past three years, the Biden administration has course-corrected,\" she said. \"We're investing at home through President Biden's Investing in America agenda,\" she noted, citing new laws on infrastructure, climate and semiconductors, among others.\n\nThe Biden administration has, however, kept in place some major Trump-era policies that are punishing to China, including tariffs on select Chinese goods imported into the United States.\n\nIn an interview with The Wall Street Journal in May, Yellen said the U.S. wouldn't likely lower the tariffs.\n\n\"I can imagine some adjustments taking place to rationalize the tariff structure, but my sense is the general feeling in the administration is that it's not appropriate to lower the tariffs,\" she said.\n\nIn addition, Biden signed an executive order over the summer designed to regulate and block high-tech U.S.-based investments going toward China, a move his Democratic administration said is based on protecting national security. And in 2022, the U.S. moved to block exports of advanced computer chips to China.\n\nEswar Prasad, a Cornell trade policy professor, said there are major differences between the way the two administrations have approached the U.S,-China economic relationship.\n\n\"The Biden administration has maintained a tough but constructive approach toward China, prioritizing national security considerations but also seeking avenues of cooperation and progress in areas with mutual benefits,\" Prasad said. \"The Trump administration took a more hostile and aggressive approach that was not tempered by a recognition of shared interests between the two countries.\"\n\nGoods and services traded between the two nations totaled a massive $758.4 billion in 2022, according to the U.S. Trade Representative. However, Chinese investment in the U.S. is decreasing, to $28.7 billion in 2022, down 7.2% from the prior year.\n\nYellen said that in 2024, the U.S. \"will aim to continue to responsibly manage the U.S.-China bilateral economic relationship\" but the \"relationship will face continued challenges.\" She said China still deploys unfair economic practices and is too slow in resolving relief plans for debt-distressed countries.\n\n\"We seek not to resolve all our disagreements nor avoid all shocks,\" she said. \"This is in no way realistic. But we aim to make our communication resilient so that when we disagree, when shocks occur, we prevent misunderstanding from leading to escalation and causing harm.\""}
{"text": "# Ex-President Trump endorses new candidate McDowell for central North Carolina congressional seat\nDecember 13, 2023. 10:41 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**RALEIGH, N.C. (AP)** - Former President Donald Trump endorsed a health insurance industry lobbyist for a central North Carolina congressional seat on Wednesday, choosing him before the candidate had publicly unveiled his bid.\n\nTrump said on his Truth Social account that he was backing Republican Addison McDowell in the 6th Congressional District, writing that if elected McDowell will \"work hard to Secure the Border, Defend the Second Amendment, Lower your Taxes, Grow our Economy, and Strengthen the Military.\"\n\nMcDowell, a registered lobbyist for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, previously worked for GOP Rep. Richard Hudson's campaign and as a district staffer for then-Rep. Ted Budd, who is now a U.S. senator.\n\nTrump chose McDowell over other Republican candidates, at least four of whom have already filed candidacy papers to get on the March 5 primary ballot, including Bo Hines, whom Trump had endorsed for the 13th District seat in 2022. Hines narrowly lost in the general election to Democrat Wiley Nickel. Also in the 6th District GOP field is former Rep. Mark Walker, who represented a Greensboro-area district for six years through 2020. Walker ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in 2022, losing to the Trump-endorsed Budd.\n\nDemocratic Rep. Kathy Manning, who represents the current 6th District, said last week she wouldn't seek reelection in 2024 because she said redistricting enacted by the state legislature this fall is slanted toward Republicans and prevents her from winning. As of mid-Wednesday, no Democrat had filed for the nomination in the reconfigured district, which includes parts of Greensboro, Salisbury and Concord, among other communities.\n\nMcDowell highlighted the endorsement when he put out his own release to announce that he was running for the seat minutes after Trump's message. McDowell visited Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida to meet with the ex-president on Tuesday, campaign adviser Jonathan Felts said.\n\nMcDowell, a native of Davidson County - one of the six counties that comprise the reconfigured 6th District - had not filed as a candidate as of late Wednesday. Felts said that McDowell would turn his candidacy papers at the State Board of Elections before the candidacy filing period ends at noon Friday. McDowell filed other paperwork with federal election officials on Tuesday."}
{"text": "# Some 2024 GOP hopefuls call for 'compassion' in Texas abortion case but don't say law should change\nBy **MEG KINNARD**, **CHRISTINE FERNANDO**, and **MICHELLE L. PRICE**  \nDecember 13, 2023. 4:08 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Some of the Republicans seeking their party's 2024 presidential nomination have said the case of a Texas woman whose health deteriorated as she unsuccessfully sought an abortion should be handled with \"compassion,\" but they did not criticize the state's law.\n\nIt's the latest indication that the candidates see the politics surrounding abortion as a delicate - and fraught - issue for the GOP after the Supreme Court's reversal of constitutional protections for the procedure helped power Democrats to unexpectedly strong performances in the 2022 midterms.\n\nWhile campaigning Tuesday, both former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis expressed sympathy for Kate Cox, a mother of two who sought an abortion after learning the baby she was carrying had a fatal genetic condition and suffering health complications of her own. Her request for an exemption from Texas' ban - one of the most restrictive in the U.S. - was ultimately denied by the state Supreme Court, and Cox left the state to seek an abortion elsewhere.\n\nAsked about Cox's case at a CNN town hall, DeSantis, who signed a six-week ban in his state earlier this year, said that \"these are very difficult issues\" and pointed to Florida's exceptions allowing abortions when the mother's life is in danger or for a \"fatal fetal abnormality.\"\n\n\"We have to approach these issues with compassion,\" said DeSantis, though there have been reports in Florida of women who have not been able to obtain abortions under the exception because their doctors, facing steep penalties if they are wrong, were unwilling to perform the procedure. The window of time for women to make the wrenching choice is also limited.\n\nHaley also spoke of compassion and suggested Texas' medical board review the case. But she notably did not call for the law to be changed.\n\n\"You know I'm pro-life. I welcome the states that have become pro-life. But this is exactly why I've said you have to show compassion and humanize the situation,\" said Haley, who signed abortion restrictions after about 20 weeks into law as South Carolina governor in 2016. \"We don't want any women to sit there and deal with a rare situation and have to deliver a baby in that sort of circumstance, any more than we want women getting an abortion at 37, 38, 39 weeks\" - a rare occurrence generally due to grave medical complications.\n\nPresident Joe Biden has called the Texas ruling \"simply outrageous\" and said what happened to Cox \"should never happen in America, period.\"\n\nMany Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, have been reluctant to stake out clear positions on what restrictions they support, including bans on abortion even when doctors determine a pregnancy is not viable and a baby will not survive outside the womb.\n\nMuch of that reluctance may be due to public sentiment, which favors abortion rights. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll this past summer found that about two-thirds of Americans said abortion should generally be legal. Voters have either affirmed abortion access or turned back attempts to undermine it in all seven states where the question has been on the ballot since Roe v. Wade's reversal.\n\nFormer New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was alone among the 2024 Republican candidates in declaring that the Texas Supreme Court erred in denying the abortion. He said Texas legislators should change their law.\n\n\"I think the Texas Supreme Court was wrong. And I think that, in a situation like this, you're not protecting any life because the child clearly has been diagnosed with having a fatal illness,\" Christie told The Associated Press on Wednesday. \"So all you're doing is putting the life of the mother at risk by making her carry it to term.\"\n\nFormer President Donald Trump, who has taken credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn national abortion protections, has not issued any statement on the Texas case, and his campaign did not respond to messages Wednesday inquiring about his stance.\n\nAnother GOP presidential candidate, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, has not spoken out about Cox's case. He said in a video on X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday night that the Supreme Court was correct to overturn Roe, that states should decide their own abortion restrictions and that Republicans should campaign on the idea of \"sexual responsibility for men\" by allowing any woman who carries a pregnancy to term to legally make the father solely responsible for caring for the child.\n\nCox's case and others like hers \"prove exceptions don't exist in reality,\" said Angela Vasquez-Giroux, vice president of communications and research for the national group Reproductive Freedom for All.\n\n\"If politicians like DeSantis and Haley really believed in exceptions and in compassion, they would have been fighting to find ways to work with doctors to clarify these laws and to help people facing these nightmarish situations in their own states to access care,\" she said. \"They threw compassion out the window the moment they signed these bans.\"\n\nMarjorie Dannenfelser, president of the national anti-abortion group SBA Pro-Life America, also called for \"compassion and care and dignity\" for the mother and child but said Texas' law gives doctors the ability to perform an abortion if they determine a woman has a life-threatening condition or is in risk of impairment of a major bodily function.\n\nThe Texas law, however, is vague on how close to death a patient must be to get the procedure, and lawmakers have refused to clarify and amend the measure.\n\nChristie, who is anti-abortion, nonetheless believes regulations on the procedure should be left to the states, not the federal government.\n\nHe said the Texas case demonstrates \"why so many people don't trust certain members of my party with this issue, because either they are completely unmovable on it, no matter what the facts are, or they say nice words but are unwilling to take a position.\""}
{"text": "# Trump rails against opponents while urging Iowans to 'put big numbers up' in caucuses next month\nBy **THOMAS BEAUMONT** and **MICHELLE L. PRICE**  \nDecember 13, 2023. 9:09 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CORALVILLE, Iowa (AP)** - Donald Trump on Wednesday made his third trip to Iowa this month and urged his supporters to turn out in \"big numbers\" when Republicans cast the first presidential nomination votes in 33 days.\n\nThe former president, who has remained far ahead of his rivals in national polls and those of likely Iowa caucusgoers, pressed his supporters not to be complacent despite his frontrunner status.\n\n\"We have to put big numbers up, really big numbers,\" Trump said. Addressing Iowa voters directly, he said: \"We are leading by a lot but you have to go out and vote. That margin of victory is so, so powerful.\"\n\nHe also insulted his GOP rivals and President Joe Biden and boasted about everything from keeping Iowa at the forefront of the Republican nominating process to bringing back the phrase \"Merry Christmas,\" though he didn't offer details explaining when he thought it had gone missing.\n\nHe vowed that if he won the November 2024 election, the economy would be thriving again by Christmas of that year.\n\nThough he has faced a bevy of legal problems, including four criminal cases, Trump campaigned regularly in the Iowa throughout the autumn, far more than in any other early-voting state for the 2024 Republican nomination. Wednesday marks his 11th visit since September.\n\nHis \"Commit to Caucus\" event in the eastern city of Coralville near Iowa City was part rally, part \"caucus 101.\" Besides Trump's address, it featured an explanatory video featuring an animated character and panel of local organizers instructing Iowa Republicans on how and where to participate in the in-person meetings.\n\nBefore Trump arrived, hundreds wound around the hotel, waiting to enter the ballroom where he was to speak.\n\nAbout a quarter of the crowd of more than 1,000 people raised their hands to indicate that it was their first time participating in a caucus.\n\n\"That is an expansion of the electorate only President Trump can do,\" Republican state Rep. Bobby Kaufmann, an Iowa adviser for Trump's campaign, said onstage.\n\nTrump closed out his remarks with a performance he has been frequently tacking onto his speeches, where he speaks in a soft, lilting voice over an instrumental song that adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory have claimed as their anthem.\n\nSpeaking over the music rising and falling, Trump described America as a country in ruin, \"where free speech is no longer allowed and where crime is rampant\" and where \"once revered airports, those beautiful, beautiful airports, are dirty.\"\n\n\"And now they sit and wait for hours and then are notified that the plane won't leave. And they have no idea when they will.\"\n\n\"With you at my side, we will demolish the 'deep state.' We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists. We will throw off the sick political class. We will rout the fake news media. We will drain the swamp and we will liberate our country from the tyrants and villains once and for all,\" he said, drawing whoops and cheers.\n\nThough Trump has increasingly embraced fringe elements and authoritarian and violent rhetoric, his campaign organization is more disciplined in the mechanics of the process as he seeks the nomination a third time. When he first ran in 2016, the businessman and reality television star was unfamiliar with a caucus, and the need for intense organization to turn out supporters at hundreds of local meetings around the state.\n\nTrump lost Iowa in 2016. In a foreshadowing of the false claims of fraud he still relentlessly makes about the 2020 presidential election, he claimed rival Ted Cruz stole the caucus based on \"fraud\" and demanded a do-over. He didn't provide proof of fraud in the caucus results but pointed to a mailer sent by Cruz's campaign that aimed to drive voters to the polls by showing their voting history and a false rumor spread by a Cruz surrogate warning that another candidate was dropping out.\n\nTrump's campaign has already started reviving the fraud claims in 2024's Iowa race, with his campaign firing off a statement over the weekend that said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his wife had a \"plot to rig the Caucus through fraud.\"\n\nIn an interview on Fox News on Friday, Casey DeSantis issued a call for supportive \"moms and grandmoms\" to come to Iowa, saying that people \"do not have to be a resident of Iowa to be able to participate in the caucus.\"\n\nThe Iowa Republican Party limits the selection process to residents. Casey DeSantis posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, attempting to clarify her remarks by noting that while voting was limited to Iowa residents, others can volunteer.\n\nRon DeSantis echoed that rationale when speaking to reporters, but the Trump campaign on Saturday condemned the comments.\n\nDeSantis has wagered his candidacy's future on Iowa, and has predicted he will win there.\n\nA Des Moines Register NBC News Mediacom Iowa Poll taken last week showed the Florida governor running a distant second with support from 19 percent of likely GOP caucusgoers, the same support he had in the Register's August survey, and trailing Trump by 32 percentage points. DeSantis and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley are battling for second place."}
{"text": "# DeSantis goes after Trump on abortion, COVID-19 and the border wall in an Iowa town hall\nBy **JONATHAN J. COOPER**  \nDecember 12, 2023. 10:56 PM EST\n\n---\n\nDonald Trump \"flip-flipped\" on abortion, overreached in response to COVID-19 and failed to uphold his campaign pledge to get Mexico to pay for a wall on the southern U.S. border, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Tuesday in Iowa.\n\nDeSantis, who is in a distant second place behind Trump in most national polls in the battle for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, stepped up his case against the former president during a CNN town hall in Des Moines five weeks before the state's first-in-the-nation caucuses.\n\nHe zeroed in on abortion in a state where evangelical voters form the backbone of the GOP, contrasting Trump's recent skepticism about strict anti-abortion laws with his earlier comments about protecting the sanctity of life.\n\n\"You should be consistent in your beliefs, especially on something that's very fundamental, and he has not been consistent,\" DeSantis said. \"And there's a lot of voters in Iowa who really care about this, who need to know how he's changed his position.\"\n\nDeSantis last month picked up the endorsement of Bob Vander Plaats, a prominent Iowa evangelical leader who has also questioned Trump's commitment to the anti-abortion movement. Trump has responded by emphasizing his support from more than 150 pastors around the state.\n\nAbortion has become a flashpoint in U.S. politics since a Supreme Court majority shaped by Trump's three appointments eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, helping to power unexpectedly strong Democratic performances in the 2022 midterms. Trump has not backed a national abortion ban and has criticized the way many Republican politicians talk about the issue. He has implied that a Florida law DeSantis signed, which outlaws abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, is \" too harsh.\"\n\nAsked about the case of Kate Cox, a Texas woman who sought an abortion when her health deteriorated as she carried a fetus with a fatal condition, DeSantis was vague. He said \"these are very difficult issues\" and pointed to the Florida law's exceptions allowing abortions when the mother's life is in danger, though in Cox's case, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that her pregnancy complications did not constitute the kind of medical emergency under which abortions are allowed.\n\nDeSantis has staked his campaign on a strong showing in Iowa's leadoff caucuses on Jan. 15, but he's struggled to break out of a distant second place. Like most of his rivals, he has largely treated the front-runner gingerly, avoiding direct criticism of Trump, who remains popular with GOP primary voters.\n\nBut sprinkled through the CNN town hall was a case to Trump-supporting voters that it's time to move on. Trump, he said, is no longer the colorful \"America First\" advocate whom Republicans embraced in 2016.\n\n\"Now a lot of it's about him,\" DeSantis said.\n\nAnd he worked to pierce rosy memories of Trump's tenure in the White House. He said Trump erred in his response to COVID-19, an issue that helped catapult DeSantis to GOP prominence when he refused to go along with strict lockdowns that most other governors imposed early in the pandemic.\n\n\"The first three years of the Trump administration, the economy's better than it has been, but that last year with COVID, I think was mishandled dramatically,\" DeSantis said. \"Shutting down the country was a huge mistake. Printing trillions and trillions of dollars was a huge mistake.\"\n\nDeSantis also took aim at one of the defining themes of Trump's first run for the White House: his promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and have the Mexican government pay for it.\n\n\"That didn't happen,\" DeSantis said. \"And why didn't it happen? Well, one, I think he got distracted, and he didn't do it on day one. But, two, he didn't utilize the levers of power that he had.\""}
{"text": "# Congressional candidate's voter outreach tool is latest AI experiment ahead of 2024 elections\nBy **ALI SWENSON**  \nDecember 12, 2023. 6:57 PM EST\n\n---\n\nA phone-banking tool powered entirely by artificial intelligence is getting its first real-world test in a Pennsylvania Democrat's congressional campaign.\n\nThe chatbot, named Ashley, calls voters and engages in two-way, interactive conversations about candidate Shamaine Daniels, one of seven Democrats running so far in next year's primary. The voice tool from the startup Civox represents one of many ways AI technology is breaking into politics ahead of the 2024 campaigns, but experts say its direct contact with voters could threaten data security and has the potential to undermine voter trust.\n\nDaniels announced the partnership with Civox on Tuesday, saying the the first-of-its-kind political campaign tool had already completed more than 1,000 calls with likely Democratic primary voters in Pennsylvania's 10th House district, which includes the state capital, Harrisburg.\n\nUnlike other robocallers, Ashley doesn't use canned responses or give call recipients a menu of options. Instead, it uses generative AI technology to devise immediate humanlike responses to voter questions.\n\nThe tool was created by Civox in partnership with another new company, Conversation Labs. Civox CEO Ilya Mouzykantskii and co-founder Adam Reis, who also founded Conversation Labs, said they tested it rigorously to ensure it could accurately answer questions about Daniels' policies and what differentiates her from other candidates in the race.\n\nThe founders said they decided to give the tool a machine-like voice because in internal testing, call recipients preferred that to other, more realistic voices.\n\n\"It's often not the voice itself that influences how natural or human-feeling the conversation is,\" Reis said. \"It's often the nuances of interactions and how quickly it responds and the language it uses.\"\n\nIn a demonstration with Ashley on Tuesday, the tool disclosed that it was powered by AI and that the call was being recorded. When prompted, it clearly and accurately shared Daniels' positions on affordable health care and education reform.\n\nIt tactfully answered pointed questions about election integrity and the Republican who holds the seat, six-term incumbent Rep. Scott Perry, pausing only a few seconds before each response.\n\nBut when asked off-topic questions, the tool sometimes got tripped up and shared false information. In a conversation about snacks, it said Cheetos were \"known for being both delicious and health-conscious.\"\n\nThat's an example of an AI \" hallucination \" - a problem with still-evolving generative AI technology in which large language models tend to make statements that sound convincing but are false or made up.\n\nMouzykantskii said the mistake was fascinating but \"not representative\" of voters' experiences with the tool so far. \"We have tested Ashley much more extensively on political topics than on the topic of food and nutrition,\" he said.\n\nVoters' responses so far to Ashley have been mixed, said Joe Bachman of Indigo Strategies, a spokesperson for Daniels. He noted that while some call recipients engaged in thorough conversations, many stuck to one-word answers as one might in a phone conversation with a banking chatbot.\n\n\"There's not a replacement for live one-on-one conversations, either on the phone or at doors,\" he said. \"It's a new technology. It's going to take voters some time to get used to it, just as when campaigns started using SMS text messaging to communicate with voters.\"\n\nHe said the campaign felt the chatbot, which can speak over 20 languages, was a good opportunity to reach voters in the southern Pennsylvania district, which has a significant refugee population.\n\nMouzykantskii and Reis said they created Ashley using a combination of over 20 AI models, including both open-source and proprietary models. They declined to share what data its AI models are trained on and would not say whether they incorporated systems from OpenAI or other high-profile AI companies that have rules against usage in political campaigning.\n\nOther entrepreneurs at the intersection of AI and politics said they were skeptical about Ashley's direct interaction with voters and more often advise campaigns to use the rapidly advancing technology on the back end of campaigns, such as in drafting advertising copy.\n\n\"The guidance I've offered and seen from most people is that they are steering away from AI personalities when it comes to politics and campaigns this cycle,\" said Betsy Hoover, a founding partner at the progressive tech accelerator and venture capital firm Higher Ground Labs. \"You don't need people to be less trustful of politics right now. In fact, we need the opposite, and so this is not the cycle to try that.\"\n\nMike Nellis, CEO of the progressive digital agency Authentic, said he was concerned about the possibility of the chatbot making mistakes in conversations and didn't believe there was enough data to say whether its calls would be effective in motivating voters. The data the tool gathers through its phone calls is another concern, he said.\n\n\"Right now, that large language model knows sensitive voter information and knows the voters' responses to it,\" Nellis said. \"I don't know how safe and secure that is.\"\n\nMouzykantskii said Civox protects voter information in line with \"political campaign, technology, industry standards\" and added that he encourages regulators to pay attention to these emerging tools and set stronger guidelines for them.\n\nDaniels, 45, is an immigration lawyer and member of the Harrisburg City Council making her second run for the congressional seat, which is in a Republican-leaning district. The state's primary election is April 23.\n\nPerry beat Daniels in 2022 by 8 percentage points, easily outspending her."}
{"text": "# Haley gets endorsement from Gov. Chris Sununu ahead of pivotal New Hampshire primary\nBy **MEG KINNARD** and **HOLLY RAMER**  \nDecember 12, 2023. 10:52 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP)** - New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu endorsed Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley on Tuesday, six weeks before the state's pivotal first-in-the-nation primary.\n\nSununu appeared with Haley during a campaign town hall at a ski area in Manchester, where he said she has shown she understands the values Republicans associate with the state's \"Live Free or Die\" motto, including low taxes, limited government and local control.\n\n\"This is an opportunity for New Hampshire to lead this country, for New Hampshire to say we're not looking in the rearview mirror anymore,\" Sununu said.\n\nHis message for Donald Trump: \"Thank you for your service, Mr. President, we're moving on. This is New Hampshire, and we go forward.\"\n\n\"This is a race between two people: Nikki Haley and Donald Trump,\" Sununu told reporters after the event. \"That's it. Nikki's spent the time on the ground here, she's earned people's trust, and that's going to be the real decider.\"\n\nJoining Sununu, Haley called it \"about as rock solid as an endorsement as we could hope for.\"\n\n\"It's a great night in New Hampshire, I mean it doesn't get any better than this,\" she said.\n\nThe endorsement, first reported by WMUR-TV, comes as Haley angles to whittle away at Donald Trump's wide lead for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. A New Hampshire poll conducted in November by CNN and the University of New Hampshire found that Haley was in second place, well behind Trump, but slightly ahead of fellow candidates, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.\n\nIt's unclear how Sununu's endorsement will affect the race. While he remains popular in the state, Sununu has faced pushback from more conservative and libertarian-leaning factions within the New Hampshire Republican Party. Candidates he endorsed in last year's U.S. Senate race and a congressional race lost their primaries to candidates more closely aligned with Trump. The nominees then lost to Democrats in the general election.\n\nHaley said that track record doesn't bother her.\n\n\"What I care about is that he's won four terms here, he knows New Hampshire like the back of his hand, he's one of the most popular governors in the country and he's got a high approval rating here,\" she told reporters. \"I'm thrilled to have his endorsement.\"\n\nSununu's backing of Haley comes a month after Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds endorsed DeSantis for president ahead of that state's first-in-the-nation caucuses, saying he was best poised for victory in the general election. Trump, meanwhile, has been endorsed by South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, who heads the fourth state on the GOP voting calendar.\n\nDeSantis praised Sununu Tuesday as \"a good guy\" and \"a good campaigner\" whose support will benefit Haley, but he said it won't be enough to convince conservatives she will deliver for them.\n\n\"Even a campaigner as good as Chris is not going to be able to paper over Nikki being an establishment candidate,\" DeSantis said during a CNN town hall in Iowa.\n\nHaley on Tuesday kicked off a three-day campaign swing through New Hampshire, where she has campaigned steadily since launching her bid in February. Last week, she went up with the first ads of a $10 million television, radio and digital buy across that state, as well as Iowa, spending designed to give the former United Nations ambassador an advantage over DeSantis at a critical moment in the GOP nomination fight.\n\nThe ads have called on Republicans \"to leave behind the chaos and drama of the past\" - a reference to her frequent critique of the \"chaos\" that follows Trump - as well as her pledge to shore up America's military strength.\n\nTrump, who has led the Republican field since launching his campaign a year ago, remains the heavy favorite in early polls of likely GOP voters in New Hampshire, although some polls suggest his position in those states is not quite as strong as his national standing.\n\nSununu, a frequent Trump critic, himself passed on entering the 2024 presidential race, arguing in June that Republican candidates with \"no path to victory must have the courage to get out\" of their party's primary in order to stop Trump.\n\n\"People are frustrated. Over the last eight years, we've had a president that's more concerned about nap time and we've had a president that's worried about his jail time. We've got to be able to move forward. That's drama. That is chaos,\" he said Tuesday. \"So we're not going to as a party bring someone forward that is constantly distracted with whatever nonsense and drama that the former president brings to the table.\"\n\nAt the time Sununu decided against running, a broad field of GOP candidates was angling for the party's nomination, something Sununu argued only helped Trump's effort. Since then, the size has dwindled, a consolidation that in part has helped boost Haley, coupled with momentum from her performance in the four candidate debates.\n\nTrump won New Hampshire's 2016 GOP presidential primary with just 35% of the vote. He went on to lose the state to his Democratic challenger in both the 2016 and 2020 elections.\n\nSununu, who is in his fourth two-year term, has stumped with several 2024 hopefuls - including Haley, DeSantis and Christie - as they've campaigned in his state, saying he would ultimately endorse one of the three. Of the three, Christie has been by far the most critical of Trump.\n\n\"This puts us down one vote in New Hampshire,\" Christie spokesperson Karl Rickett said of Sununu's endorsement. \"And when Gov. Christie is back in Londonderry tomorrow, he'll continue to tell the unvarnished truth about Donald Trump.\"\n\nAsked whether Haley has been doing a sufficient job confronting Trump, Sununu said, \"Oh, sure.\" He acknowledged Christie has built his campaign around criticizing Trump, but said Haley has gone beyond telling voters what not to vote for. And Haley insisted she has explained her differences with Trump, including economic woes she blames on his administration.\n\n\"Anti-Trumpers don't think I hate him enough, pro-Trumpers don't think I love him enough,\" she said. \"At the end of the day, I put my truths out there and let the chips fall where they may.\"\n\nIn November, Americans for Prosperity - the political arm of the powerful Koch network - formally endorsed Haley's campaign, promising to commit its nationwide coalition of activists and money to helping Haley defeat Trump."}
{"text": "# DeSantis' campaign and allied super PAC face new concerns about legal conflicts, AP sources say\nBy **STEVE PEOPLES** and **THOMAS BEAUMONT**  \nDecember 12, 2023. 4:16 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (AP)** - Ron DeSantis has visited each of Iowa's 99 counties. He has the endorsement of the governor and boasts the largest get-out-the-vote operation in the state. And he has predicted victory in Iowa's Jan. 15 caucuses.\n\nBut as the Florida governor works to project strength in the Republican primary and cut into former President Donald Trump's huge lead, DeSantis' expansive political machine is facing a churn of leadership, stagnant polling numbers and new concerns about potential legal conflicts.\n\nSpecifically, there has been concern in recent weeks among some within DeSantis' operation that interactions between his campaign and his network of outside groups are blurring the lines of what's legally permissible.\n\nMultiple people familiar with DeSantis' political network said that he and his wife had expressed concerns about the messaging of Never Back Down, the largest super PAC supporting the governor's campaign, in recent months as his Iowa polling numbers stagnated in late summer and autumn.\n\nThe governor and his wife, Casey, who is widely considered his top political adviser, were especially frustrated after the group took down a television ad last month that criticized leading Republican rival Nikki Haley for allowing a Chinese manufacturer into South Carolina when she was governor.\n\nDeSantis' team shared those messaging concerns with members of Never Back Down's board, which includes Florida-based members with close ties to the governor, according to multiple people briefed on the discussions. Some of the board members then relayed the DeSantis team's wishes to super PAC staff, which was responsible for executing strategy, the people said.\n\nThe people spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal discussions.\n\nFederal laws prohibit coordination between presidential campaigns and outside groups. There is no known lawsuit or federal complaint alleging DeSantis' campaign broke the law. And in the super PAC era that began with the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, murky relationships between campaigns and allied outside groups have become commonplace.\n\nStill, Adav Noti, legal director for the Campaign Legal Center, said that the reported communication between DeSantis' team and the super PAC goes \"too far.\" Noti suggested the communications could draw the scrutiny from the Federal Election Commission, which is responsible for enforcing campaign finance laws but has been gridlocked by internal divisions.\n\n\"To actually have a conversation with the candidate's agents and the super PAC's agents about strategy - there is no plausible argument that that is legal,\" Noti said. \"This is not a gray area.\"\n\nDeSantis' campaign has strongly denied the governor has tried to influence the network of outside groups supporting him given the federal laws prohibiting coordination. Asked for comment, DeSantis spokesman Andrew Romeo described the AP's reporting as \"more nonsense from unnamed sources with agendas.\"\n\n\"While the media continues to obsess over attacking DeSantis with anonymous tabloid trash to support a false narrative, we remain focused on organizing in Iowa and sharing our vision for how to help the many Americans struggling this holiday season,\" Romeo said.\n\nNever Back Down founder Ken Cuccinelli dismissed questions about DeSantis' political operation as insignificant in the overall campaign, saying \"not a single voter gives a flying rat's tail about personnel stuff.\"\n\n\"We're going to be backing the governor all the way through this thing,\" Cuccinelli said in an interview at last Wednesday's GOP debate in Alabama. \"We're not going anywhere, and I fully expect to be right there for it.\"\n\nCuccinelli, a former Virginia attorney general, also made clear he was speaking of his own personal experience when asked directly if he felt any pressure from the DeSantises about the super PAC's strategy.\n\n\"No, not to me. No, no, I don't play those games. I just don't play those games,\" Cuccinelli told The Associated Press. \"I've met the governor, and I've encountered Casey at events, but I don't have those conversations.\"\n\nFive Never Back Down senior officials have either been fired or quit in the past two weeks, including two chief executives, the chairman and the communications director. The group has not explained the departures publicly. At the same time, DeSantis' Florida allies created a new super PAC, Fight Right, which quickly earned the public blessing of the DeSantis campaign.\n\nDeSantis said he was unfamiliar with Never Back Down's ads last week when asked at an event in Cedar Rapids - an event sponsored by the super PAC, which has hosted him on campaign stops across the state - about how well he thought they represent him.\n\n\"I don't know. I don't see them, to be honest with you. I don't watch a lot of TV. So, I don't know. I can't really speak to that,\" DeSantis told reporters, pivoting to and praising his own campaign-financed ads.\n\nThe Florida governor is relying on super PACs more than any other leading presidential candidate in the brief history of the outside groups, which exploded in importance after a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2010.\n\nNever Back Down has spent nearly $43 million on paid advertising so far this year, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact. By contrast, DeSantis' formal campaign, which he does legally control, has spent just $4.4 million.\n\nIn Iowa alone, Never Back Down has spent more than $16 million on advertising. That's more than any other political entity, campaign or super PAC in Iowa. The group was airing several ads in November, some promoting DeSantis and others critical of Haley.\n\nNever Back Down remains responsible for many of DeSantis' campaign stops and get-out-the-vote efforts.\n\nDeSantis has visited all of Iowa's 99 counties, a traditional gesture some candidates make before the caucuses to demonstrate their commitment to Iowa. Never Back Down hosted DeSantis at events in 92 of the counties he visited, according to the group's schedule.\n\nSuper PACs can accept unlimited donations, while campaigns have strict limits. The big catch: Groups like Never Back Down cannot legally coordinate with the formal campaigns on how to spend that money. And a candidate is barred from controlling a super PAC.\n\nBut as is the case with most candidate-focused super PACs in 2024, those who lead outside groups are usually close to the candidate. Many of Never Back Down's original top staff and officers, including most of those who left this month, did not have longstanding relationships with DeSantis. Late last week, Phil Cox, who managed DeSantis' 2022 reelection, was named a senior adviser to the super PAC.\n\nDeSantis on Friday praised Never Back Down, which claims 26 paid staff in Iowa and says it has collected written commitments from more than 30,000 Iowa Republicans to caucus for DeSantis next month. That's a significant figure for a contest in which the record number of participants was 186,000, in 2016.\n\nIowa's caucuses traditionally reward well-organized campaigns. DeSantis' allies hope the months of effort will help them overcome expectations from polls suggesting Trump will be dominant on Jan. 15.\n\n\"I think the idea was that they would be able to really focus on this organization,\" including in all 99 counties, DeSantis said on Iowa PBS's \"Iowa Press\" Friday. \"So I think it was smart that they did that.\"\n\nMany voters who gathered to see DeSantis at a crowded bar along Iowa's border with Nebraska late last week said they were not aware of the apparent turmoil. And those who were said they weren't particularly concerned.\n\n\"That happens with every campaign. It's early. Shakeups with people are going to happen,\" said 57-year-old Sally Madsen of Council Bluffs.\n\nMadsen, who previously supported Trump, has already decided to caucus for DeSantis. She said Trump lost her support in the final year of his presidency for how he handled the COVID-19 pandemic and his failure to help who she described as \"innocent\" Jan. 6 rioters, many of whom have been convicted and some sent to prison.\n\n\"He didn't do anything for them,\" Madsen said of Trump. \"I don't know if he could even attract good people to work for him at this point.\""}
{"text": "# Early, often and unequivocally: How Whitmer's fight for abortion rights helped turn Michigan blue\nBy **JOEY CAPPELLETTI**  \nDecember 12, 2023. 9:56 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LANSING, Mich. (AP)** - Ten years ago, as Michigan's Republican-led Legislature was on the verge of passing one of the nation's most restrictive anti-abortion laws at the time, a 42-year-old state senator from East Lansing took to the Senate floor to speak out against what she knew was about to happen.\n\nMinutes into her speech, Democrat Gretchen Whitmer tossed aside her prepared remarks and revealed for the first time publicly that she had been raped while attending college. Had she become pregnant, Whitmer said, she would not have been able to afford an abortion under the proposed law.\n\nThe bill, which Whitmer had derisively called \"rape insurance\" because it required women to declare when buying health insurance whether they expected to receive an abortion, passed anyway. But Whitmer, now in her second term as Michigan's governor after winning reelection by nearly 11 percentage points in 2022, this week removed the requirement from state law with the stroke of a pen after Michigan's Democratic-controlled Legislature sent her a bill tossing it aside.\n\n\"It's kind of a stunning full-circle moment where it does reinforce that these fights are worth having and they're winnable, even if sometimes it takes a little longer than it should,\" Whitmer said Monday in an interview with The Associated Press.\n\nWhitmer recalled the hundreds of calls and emails she received after her 2013 speech as a turning point for her, the moment when she realized how much people care about protecting a woman's right to choose whether she should have an abortion. It's a lesson she hopes to drive home all over the country as one of the nation's leading abortion rights advocates during what could prove to be a pivotal election year for the issue in 2024.\n\n\"The voters speak loud and clear,\" she said. \"And so I do think that in this moment, in this country, this is an important, crucial issue for a lot of people.\"\n\nAbortion rights moved to the political forefront after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that had long preserved them as a constitutional right. The court gave states the power to decide for themselves whether abortion should be legal.\n\nConservative states across the country moved quickly to enact abortion bans in various forms, leading to a wave of legal fights in places such as Texas, where a pregnant woman whose fetus has a fatal condition was forced to leave the state this week to obtain an abortion. Some Republicans, including several contenders for the GOP presidential nomination, have also called for a national abortion ban.\n\nThe political fallout at the ballot box has mostly gone in the opposite direction. Democrats did better than expected in last year's midterms, limiting their House losses and maintaining a narrow Senate majority, and defending abortion rights worked in Democrats' favor in several states again this year. When constitutional questions about abortion rights appeared on the ballot, even voters in Republican-leaning states from Kansas to Ohio rejected GOP-backed efforts to curb them.\n\nWhitmer says Democrats have won in Michigan by running unapologetically on the issue. Her party controls all levels of state government for the first time in 40 years after flipping both chambers of the Legislature last November.\n\nThat success was fueled by a citizen-led ballot initiative to enshrine abortion rights in the state Constitution in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. Whitmer and other Michigan Democrats emphasized their support for the initiative in their 2022 election campaigns.\n\nPresident Joe Biden's reelection campaign views the defense of abortion rights as a winning issue for Democrats in 2024. They are quick to make note of boasts by former President Donald Trump that his appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices instigated the court's reversal.\n\nBiden himself is less outspoken on the issue than other members of his party, and occasionally seems personally conflicted.\n\n\"I happen to be a practicing Catholic. I'm not big on abortion,\" he said during a June fundraiser. \"But guess what? Roe v. Wade got it right.\"\n\nBiden's hesitancy comes as his reelection campaign faces vulnerabilities. Michigan was a critical component of the so-called blue wall of states, including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, that Biden returned to the Democratic column, helping him win the White House in 2020.\n\nThe president's support in the state has wavered since the 2020 election, however, and a CNN poll released Monday showed that only 35% of respondents approved of the job he's been doing.\n\nMichigan is also home to one of the largest Arab-American and Muslim communities in the nation, and many of their leaders have been vocal about saying that his pro-Israel stance on the war that began with an attack by Hamas on Oct. 7 could jeopardize his chances to win in Michigan again.\n\nWhitmer, who is co-chair of Biden's reelection campaign and has herself been frequently mentioned as a future presidential candidate, deflected questions Monday about his chances in Michigan, insisting that she was only going to \"focus on reproductive rights today.\"\n\nWhitmer also said she understands that talking about abortion is \"not comfortable for everyone.\" But she said the chances of Republicans pushing for a federal ban on abortion should be taken seriously.\n\nFor her, that's reason enough to talk about abortion rights early, often and unequivocally.\n\n\"The prospect of a national abortion ban is real,\" she said. Using other words to talk about reproductive rights or being overly cautious about the issue, she said, \"dilutes the importance of the moment.\"\n\nIn June, Whitmer launched a \"Fight Like Hell\" federal PAC to raise money for Democratic candidates who are \"unapologetic in their fight for working people and their basic freedoms\" heading into the 2024 election. The PAC will support candidates for Congress and other offices but also will provide financial support for Biden's reelection bid.\n\nA group of eight U.S. House Democrats seeking reelection in competitive districts were announced on Tuesday as the PAC's first endorsements.\n\nSince winning full legislative control, Michigan Democrats have struck down the state's 1931 abortion ban, prohibited Michigan companies from firing or retaliating against workers for receiving an abortion and lifted regulations on abortion clinics.\n\nFor Whitmer, those successes help justify her decision a decade ago to discuss abortion in such personal terms.\n\n\"I think about my daughters who I was so worried to hear that their mom had been raped when they were 10 and 11 years old,\" Whitmer said. \"And now they're 20 and 21, and I know they're proud to see that I've stayed in this fight, and I'm trying to make life better for other women.\""}
{"text": "# After losing Houston mayor's race, US Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee to seek reelection to Congress\nDecember 11, 2023. 5:40 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**HOUSTON (AP)** - Two days after losing her bid to be Houston's next mayor, longtime U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee announced on Monday she will seek a 16th term in Congress in 2024.\n\nJackson Lee first took office in 1995. Her district includes downtown Houston and some of the city's historically Black neighborhoods, including Third and Fifth Wards.\n\n\"I am enthusiastic about the prospect of continuing our shared journey to uplift the 18th Congressional District,\" Jackson Lee, a Democrat, said in a statement. \"Your support has been invaluable, and I eagerly welcome it as I strive to further serve and represent our community with my ability to get the job done.\"\n\nJackson Lee's announcement comes after she was handily defeated by state Sen. John Whitmire in a mayoral runoff election on Saturday.\n\nShe had sought to be Houston's first Black female mayor. Jackson Lee was heavily outspent by Whitmire in the campaign and also had to deal with fallout from the release in October of an unverified audio recording that purportedly captured her profanely berating staff.\n\nIn her reelection bid to Congress, Jackson Lee will be facing at least one challenger in the Democratic primary: former Houston City Council Member Amanda Edwards, who once was an intern in the congresswoman's office."}
{"text": "# Wisconsin's Democratic attorney general vows to defend potential 2024 Trump victory in court\nDecember 11, 2023. 4:00 PM EST\n\n---\n\nMADISON, Wis. (AP) - Wisconsin's Democratic attorney general vowed Monday to defend a potential Donald Trump victory in the swing state next year, saying he's confident that the state's election systems work.\n\nTrump, a Republican, refused to concede that Democrat Joe Biden won Wisconsin in 2020. Multiple court challenges and a partial recount ultimately confirmed Biden's victory. Attorney General Josh Kaul defended the results in court.\n\nKaul told The Associated Press on Monday that the legal challenges over the 2020 election showed that Wisconsin's election systems accurately reflect the will of the voters.\n\nAsked if he would defend the 2024 results even if they show that Trump won the state, Kaul said: \"We're going to defend the results regardless of who wins the election. What is paramount is the will of the voters prevails.\""}
{"text": "# Ramaswamy was the target of death threats in New Hampshire that led to FBI arrest, campaign says\nBy **KATHY McCORMACK** and **HOLLY RAMER**  \nDecember 11, 2023. 8:39 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CONCORD, N.H. (AP)** - A New Hampshire man has been accused of sending text messages threatening to kill a presidential candidate ahead of a scheduled campaign event Monday, federal prosecutors said.\n\nThe U.S. Attorney's office did not name the candidate. However, a spokesperson for Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said Monday that the texts were directed at his campaign.\n\n\"We are grateful to law enforcement for their swiftness and professionalism in handling this matter and pray for the safety of all Americans,\" Stefan Mychajliw, deputy communications director, said in a statement.\n\nTyler Anderson, 30, of Dover, was arrested Saturday and charged with sending a threat using interstate commerce. He did not speak at his initial court appearance Monday other than telling the judge he understood the proceedings, and his court-appointed attorney declined to comment afterward. A detention hearing was scheduled for Thursday.\n\nRamaswamy went on to hold his event at the Roundabout Diner & Lounge in Portsmouth.\n\nAccording to court documents, the man received a text message from the candidate's campaign on Friday notifying him of Monday's breakfast event in Portsmouth.\n\nThe campaign staff received two text messages in response, according to an FBI agent affidavit. One threatened to shoot the candidate in the head, the other threatened to kill everyone at the event and desecrate their corpses.\n\nThe cellphone number was traced to the man, the FBI said. Agents executed a search warrant at the man's home on Saturday. The texts were found in a deleted folder, the affidavit said.\n\nThe man told the FBI in an interview that he had sent similar texts to \"multiple other campaigns,\" the affidavit said. The document includes a screenshot of texts threatening a mass shooting in response to an invitation to see a candidate \"who isn't afraid to tell it like it is.\" Republican Chris Christie calls his events \"Tell it Like It Is Town Halls.\"\n\nIn a statement, a spokesperson for the Christie campaign thanked law enforcement officials for addressing those threats.\n\nThe charge provides for a sentence of up to five years in prison, up to three years of supervised release, and a fine of up to $250,000."}
{"text": "# Biden's focus on bashing Trump takes a page from the winning Obama and Bush reelection playbooks\nBy **WILL WEISSERT**  \nDecember 10, 2023. 8:44 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - President Joe Biden's campaign manager recently sent a fundraising email meant to reassure supporters worried about the Democrat's reelection chances, urging them to take a \"quick walk down memory lane.\"\n\nJulie Chavez Rodriguez noted that many Democrats 12 years ago questioned whether President Barack Obama would win a second term. Biden was Obama's vice president.\n\n\"Flash forward to November 6, 2012. I think you may remember the day,\" she wrote. Underneath was a photo of the Obamas and Bidens celebrating their election victory.\n\nMore than a nostalgic message, that sentiment can increasingly be seen in Biden's strategy for winning in 2024.\n\nBiden is trying to focus the campaign on former President Donald Trump's comments and policy proposals, sometimes more than his own. It's a time-worn strategy of White House incumbents to try to negatively define their rivals in the public's eyes. In 2012, Obama and his allies did it with Republican Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor and current Utah senator. In 2004, President George W. Bush was successful against Democratic nominee John Kerry, then a Massachusetts senator.\n\nBut Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican nomination, is already better defined than perhaps any figure in U.S. politics. And even as Trump's promises to seek retribution and references to his enemies as \"vermin\" animate many Democrats, Biden faces low approval ratings and questions about his age and his handling of the economy and foreign affairs.\n\n\"You can't really run a playbook for the last election, or what worked previously,\" said Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist who was Romney's 2012 senior adviser and spokesman. \"I think Trump is an entirely different, nonlinear opponent compared to an Obama vs. Romney.\"\n\nSome prominent Democrats have suggested that there's a danger in making the race too much about Trump. They say Biden should play up parts of his own record and focus on abortion rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Abortion was an issue credited with helping the party exceeding expectations in last year's midterms and several races this year.\n\nAfter spending much of his presidency declining to refer to Trump by name, Biden has stepped up his warnings about his predecessor. Biden's campaign has in recent weeks blasted Trump's suggestions that he wouldn't rule as a dictator \"other than Day 1,\" that he would again pursue a repeal of Obama's health care overhaul, and that he would stage massive raids to try to deport millions of people.\n\nBiden recently told a crowd of donors in Massachusetts, \"We've got to get it done. Not because of me.\"\n\n\"If Trump wasn't running, I'm not sure I'd be running,\" Biden said. \"We cannot let him win.\"\n\nTrump's campaign did not respond to messages seeking comment. Biden's campaign says defining clear contrasts between the president and Trump is key to its strategy.\n\n\"Next year's election will be a choice between President Biden's proven track record of lowering costs and delivering for middle class families, and Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans' bleak vision of dividing us,\" Biden campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa said, referring to Trump's \"Make America Great Again\" movement. \"We're going to do the work to ensure voters understand the enormous stakes of next year's election.\"\n\nObama's 2012 campaign relied heavily on grassroots organizing and television ad spending to motivate voters. Biden, though, is working to prioritize unconventional ways to reach voters in line with significant shifts in Americans' media consumption habits, particularly about political issues.\n\nThe dynamics of the 2024 race are also different from 2012. Biden has a record of legislative accomplishments on popular issues such as infrastructure. In 2012, Americans were sharply divided over Obama's signature accomplishment, the health care law often called \"Obamacare,\" though it is now viewed more positively.\n\nBiden's aides also point to low unemployment and other signs of economic strength, although polls show Americans don't feel the economy is strong and they rate Biden poorly on the issue.\n\nObama campaign veterans hold key roles in Biden's political operation, from White House senior adviser Anita Dunn, who worked in the Obama White House, to Chavez Rodriguez, a former Obama campaign volunteer and administration official.\n\nAnother, Kate Bedingfield, who was deputy campaign manager for Biden's 2020 campaign and then White House communications director, said presidents always want to \"make the campaign about their opponent and not their own record.\" That is because governing means making compromises that can be sometimes harder to communicate in ways that resonate with voters, she said.\n\n\"They want to shift the dynamics of the race to be about the threat that their opponent poses,\" Bedingfield said. \"For the Biden campaign, in Donald Trump they have an almost existential threat.\"\n\nObama built his winning campaign around attacking Romney months before Romney was formally the GOP nominee and defining him as a corporate raider willing to slash jobs to boost profits.\n\nIn 2004, Bush won reelection despite the growing unpopularity of the war in Iraq by portraying Kerry as a flip-flopper while pro-Bush groups ran a series of ads raising questions about Kerry's record as a swift boat commander in Vietnam.\n\nBiden has kept a relatively light schedule of campaign rallies, holding just one in the first four months after launching his reelection campaign. He has held dozens of private fundraisers and spent the past week raising money in Boston, Washington, and Los Angeles.\n\nObama didn't hold his first reelection campaign rally until May 2012.\n\nOne of the most memorable pro-Obama ads featured an Indiana plant worker who described being asked to help build a stage from which the plant's employees were told they were being laid off. The plant worker blamed Romney and his private investment firm for making more than $100 million by shutting down the plant, a claim that the fact-checking site Politifact rated \"mostly false.\"\n\nEfforts to vilify Romney only intensified when video emerged of him saying 47% of people would vote for Obama because they were \"dependent upon government\" and \"believe that they are victims.\"\n\nBiden's team has similarly picked up on economic themes to slam Trump, including promoting the story of electronics giant Foxconn. Trump promised as president that the company was building a major plant that would create thousands of jobs in the critical swing state of Wisconsin. Those jobs never materialized.\n\nA year before the 2012 election, however, polls suggested Romney's public image could be shaped by negative ads in a way that Trump's cannot.\n\nA Quinnipiac University poll conducted in late 2011 found voters were somewhat more likely to have a favorable than an unfavorable opinion of Romney, 36% to 31%. Notably, another 31% said they hadn't heard enough about Romney to have an opinion.\n\nA recent Quinnipiac poll found 42% of registered voters said they had a favorable opinion of Trump and 55% had an unfavorable opinion. The same poll found only 37% having a favorable opinion of Biden while 59% had a unfavorable opinion.\n\nBedingfield agreed that many voters have already made up their mind about Trump. But she said Biden was able to use Trump's well-defined political brand against him in 2020 and could do the same next year.\n\n\"People looked at what he had done and said, 'We don't want more of this,'\" she said of Trump. \"That gives the Biden campaign a really strong roadmap.\"\n\nStuart Stevens, who was Romney's chief strategist, said that the country is now far more polarized than in 2012 and that the focus on Biden's low polling numbers \"is in the framework of a pre-Trump era.\"\n\n\"I think we're really in a very different world,\" Stevens said, adding that 2024 \"is inevitably going to be more of a referendum on Trump.\""}
{"text": "# At DC roast, Joe Manchin jokes he could be the slightly younger president America needs\nBy **AAMER MADHANI**  \nDecember 10, 2023. 1:58 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Sen. Joe Manchin used a weekend Washington roast to tease a potential third-party run for the White House, joking that the nation could use someone slightly younger than the leading contenders.\n\nSpeaking Saturday night during the Gridiron Club's winter dinner, Manchin said the country could benefit from a younger leader than President Joe Biden or the 2024 GOP frontrunner, former President Donald Trump.\n\n\"With all due respect, the president is 81 years old. Donald Trump is 77,\" said Machin, a West Virginia Democrat who announced last month he would not run for reelection in 2024. \"I truly believe the American people are ready to pass the torch to a new generation, somebody younger. I'd say maybe someone close to 76 that doesn't look a day over 70.\"\n\nThe retiring lawmaker is 76.\n\nManchin previously indicated he could potentially launch a run for the White House, saying in an NBC \"Meet the Press\" interview in November that he would \"absolutely\" consider a run for president. Some Democrats have expressed concern that a run by the centrist Manchin as an independent could cut into Biden's support and pave the way for Trump winning a second term in the White House.\n\nThe annual dinner in Washington of the Gridiron Club and Foundation, which traces its history to 1885, features songs and speeches from Democrats, Republicans and journalists that are expected to \"singe\" but \"not burn\" the capital's political elite.\n\nIn his remarks, Manchin also poked fun at the notion he could be a spoiler if he decides to run.\n\n\"I've heard it all. You all heard it all,\" Manchin said. \"Most of you probably told me. They say that my running would throw the election to Trump. Others say my running might help Biden. Hell, I'm trying to find out how it would help me.\"\n\nManchin also used humor to offer a defense of the political organization No Labels, a group with which Manchin has long ties and is weighing running a third-party slate for the White House. Supporters of Manchin and another retiring senator, Republican Mitt Romney of Utah, have launched an effort to encourage the pair to seek the No Labels' nomination.\n\n\"You'd think that No Labels is the cause of every problem that we have in Washington,\" Manchin said. \"How did you end up with so many classified documents in Mar-a-Lago? It was No Labels.\"\n\nRep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina offered the Republican response at the dinner."}
{"text": "# Peek inside Joe Biden's campaign fundraisers, where big money mingles with old jokes in swanky homes\nBy **CHRIS MEGERIAN** and **WILL WEISSERT**  \nDecember 9, 2023. 8:16 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LOS ANGELES (AP)** - If you're a Democrat with money to burn and friends in high places, you can spend thousands on tickets to a fundraiser with President Joe Biden. If not, keep reading to see what you're missing.\n\nWith an election year around the corner, Biden is accelerating his fundraising to prepare for an astronomically expensive campaign. (Think billions, not millions.) In this rarefied world, money equals access, and supporters regularly pay top dollar for a personal glimpse of the world's most powerful man.\n\nBiden is collecting cash across the Los Angeles area this weekend, and his first stop was a sprawling estate where the host joked \"it's just a normal Friday at our house\" as hundreds of donors sipped wine in the backyard.\n\n\"You're the reason why we're gonna win, God willing, in 2024,\" Biden told the audience.\n\nEach fundraiser is a little different, but there's a similar script. A look at what it's like inside the presidential money hunt.\n\n## The setting\nFundraisers are a rare glimpse at the lives of the country's wealthiest and most influential. Biden's motorcade has rolled up to a mountain villa in Park City, Utah, a townhouse in New York City and a sprawling estate at the top of Hollywood Hills.\n\nIn a Manhattan apartment with floor-to-ceiling views of Central Park, reporters were required to slip disposable covers over their shoes before they could enter the living room where donors nibbled on crustless tea sandwiches.\n\nAt Friday's fundraiser in Los Angeles, attendees wore colored wrist bands that indicated where they should sit. Ushers held up red, green, blue and orange signs to direct them to the right place.\n\nThe press corps can enter fundraisers only to hear Biden's formal remarks; no cameras are allowed. When Biden is mingling with supporters or answering their questions, reporters are sequestered in a garage, home gym or spare bedroom. Sometimes they are kept outside on the sidewalk.\n\n## The introduction\nThe lucky host often gets the privilege of introducing the president. Usually, these remarks are predictably laudatory, but sometimes they get spicy.\n\nRandi McGinn, a prominent New Mexico lawyer, joked about the attractiveness of the president's Secret Service detail and referenced Donald Trump's dalliance with a porn star.\n\nBiden smiled - or grimaced, it was hard to tell - and made the sign of the cross as she spoke.\n\nThe president always thanks his hosts and any elected officials present. If he spots any children, Biden often jokingly warns them \"this is going to be boring, boring, boring for you.\"\n\n## The unexpected\nAlthough fundraisers are often run-of-the-mill occasions, careful reporters know to stay attentive. Biden has a history of being more candid than usual when surrounded by deep-pocketed supporters.\n\nDuring a June fundraiser in California, Biden upset China by describing President Xi Jinping as a \"dictator.\" Biden also said Xi was unaware that a Chinese balloon that floated over the United States was being used for spying.\n\n\"The reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two box cars full of spy equipment is he didn't know it was there,\" Biden said.\n\nIn Park City in August, Biden ruminated about his signature legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act.\n\n\"I wish I hadn't called it that,\" Biden said, \"because it has less to do with reducing inflation than it does to do with dealing with providing for alternatives that generate economic growth.\"\n\nAnd on Tuesday in Weston, Massachusetts, the 81-year-old president suggested he might not be seeking reelection if it weren't for Trump's comeback bid.\n\n\"If Trump wasn't running, I'm not sure I'd be running,\" Biden said. \"But we cannot let him win, for the sake of the country.\"\n\n## The stories\nDonors pay top dollar to hear Biden speak at private events, but reporters can rattle off some of his well-worn lines from memory.\n\nThe president says he's \"never been more optimistic\" about the country as long as we \"remember who in hell we are.\" He cites his legislative accomplishments, from limiting prescription drug costs to investing in infrastructure such as roads and bridges. He says the rich need to \"pay their fair share\" of taxes. He warns that the U.S. is at \"an inflection point.\"\n\nHe usually talks about meeting with Xi while they each served as vice presidents of their respective countries. In Biden's telling, Xi asked him to define America. \"I said, 'I can do it in one word - possibilities,'\" Biden says.\n\nA centerpiece of Biden's fundraisers is his story of deciding to run for president against Trump in 2020.\n\nHe talks about \"people coming out of the woods, carrying torches\" during the 2017 marches in Charlottesville, Virginia, and \"chanting the same antisemitic bile that was chanted in Germany in the '30s.\" When Trump said there were \"very fine people on both sides\" of the violence, Biden says, \"that's when I decided I couldn't remain silent any longer.\"\n\n## The attacks\nFundraisers are an opportunity for Biden to rile up his supporters and score points on his opponents in a friendly environment.\n\nHe often says \"this is not your father's Republican Party,\" and he warns about \"the extreme right, the MAGA movement,\" referring to Trump's \"Make America Great Again\" campaign slogan.\n\nSometimes he avoids mentioning Trump's name by making oblique references to \"my predecessor.\" But given Trump's standing as the clear front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024, Biden has seen little reason to hold back.\n\nBiden generally warns about the potential for cuts to health care or rollbacks to environmental programs if Trump wins next year. And Biden always keeps the focus on what he describes as a threat to the country's institutions.\n\n\"Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans,\" Biden said in Minneapolis last month, \"are determined to destroy this democracy.\""}
{"text": "# GOP presidential candidates share stories of family and faith. Offstage, their sharp edges reemerged\nBy **HANNAH FINGERHUT**  \nDecember 9, 2023. 8:43 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SIOUX CENTER, Iowa (AP)** - A trio of Republican presidential candidates shared stories of family and faith before hundreds of voters in northwest Iowa on Saturday, having congenial individual conversations with their hosts not long after dueling at the campaign's latest fractious debate. But off the stage at a small Christian college in Sioux Center, the rivals' sharp edges reemerged.\n\nFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy leaned on their families to drive home their origin stories, without other candidates interrupting, at the event held in a rural, conservative corner of a state that holds the leadoff contest on the election calendar in about a month.\n\nLater, DeSantis and Ramaswamy both went after Haley, a further sign that her opponents see her as a growing threat in the 2024 race where former President Donald Trump, who skipped the event, is the front-runner in polls of Republicans nationwide and Iowa, where the caucuses are set for Jan. 15.\n\nAfter DeSantis' time with the moderators, U.S. Rep. Randy Feenstra and his wife, Lynette, he returned to a recurring campaign theme: Haley's campaign is funded by liberal Democrats and Wall Street donors and she is \"taking positions that are more palatable to those folks.\"\n\nRamaswamy told reporters that his criticisms of Haley at Wednesday night's debate were intended to illustrate the \"deep ideological divide\" in the Republican Party. He said he was unfairly being criticized himself for targeting Haley, the only woman in the race.\n\n\"It's part of a double standard that the people in this country are sick of when it comes to identity politics,\" he said. \"The good news is - I'm not letting them get away with that.\"\n\nHaley did not speak to the news media after her appearance.\n\nSteve Rehder, 59, was relieved to hear from candidates without the \"crossfire.\" He said he is deciding between supporting Haley or DeSantis, but \"really likes\" Haley and her debate performance.\n\n\"The way she had to stand while she was being attacked at the last debate. I know she just wanted to come unglued at the guy, but she stood there,\" said the livestock farmer from Hawarden.\n\nOn the stage before about 750 people, including many students from Dordt University, each candidate discussed faith, family and politics. Also appearing was pastor Ryan Binkley, who has not qualified for any debates.\n\nDeSantis was accompanied by wife, Casey. Haley sat with her 25-year-old daughter, Rena. Ramaswamy brought his 3-year-old son, Karthik.\n\nFeenstra said it was a unique chance for people to hear the candidates' principles and positions, unlike the debates that left little time for real answers from candidates because of infighting and bickering.\n\nFeenstra said he may endorse in the race, but has not yet.\n\n\"I want them to make their own decision based on what they're hearing,\" he told reporters. \"They can make that decision on their own without some politician telling them this is what has to happen.\"\n\nThe three candidates are making stops across Iowa all weekend as pressure mounts for an attention-grabbing performance in the caucuses.\n\nAs for the absent Trump, \"I'd love to hear his stance on faith and family,\" Feenstra said. \"I think that'd be very important to northwest Iowa and all of Iowa.\"\n\nRehder agreed, saying it was admirable for candidates to come to Sioux County and share their faith values. While Trump was the \"right guy at the right time\" and was a great president, Rehder said, \"he needs to shut his mouth.\"\n\n\"I don't know how he would handle this kind of setting,\" Rehder said about the \"faith and family\" event. \"But maybe he should be here so we could see that part.\""}
{"text": "# Nikki Haley looks for a strong showing, not necessarily a win, in Iowa caucuses\nBy **HANNAH FINGERHUT**  \nDecember 8, 2023. 10:22 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SIOUX CITY, Iowa (AP)** - For Nikki Haley, a win in Iowa doesn't necessarily mean a win in the state's Republican presidential caucuses.\n\n\"The way I look at it, we just need to have a good showing in Iowa,\" the former South Carolina governor said Friday in response to a question during a town hall event in Sioux City. \"I don't think that means we have to win necessarily, but I think that means we have to have a good showing.\"\n\nThe comments stand in stark contrast to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who declared decisively that \"we're going to win Iowa\" on NBC's \"Meet the Press\" last Sunday. DeSantis wouldn't say whether he would end his campaign if he didn't finish first or second.\n\nDeSantis and Haley are likely battling for a second-place finish, since former President Donald Trump continues to sit comfortably atop the field in polls of Republicans in Iowa and nationwide.\n\nThe DeSantis campaign has largely focused on Iowa, hoping to deny Trump a big win in the caucuses. A super PAC supporting DeSantis has invested more than $16 million in advertising and more on building a campaign organization.\n\nBut DeSantis has faced growing pressure from Haley, who is piquing the interest of donors and voters looking for an alternative to Trump. She recently won the support of the Koch network, the largest conservative grassroots organization in the nation.\n\nDan Dykstra asked Haley the question Friday, wondering what percentage she'd need to get in Iowa to be satisfied.\n\nDykstra acknowledged that Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds is supporting DeSantis, but \"that doesn't mean I have to,\" the 68-year-old attorney said. The Sioux City Republican will likely choose Haley or DeSantis on Jan. 15, but he hasn't committed just yet.\n\nWhat he really wanted to know: How would Haley, or any candidate, deny Trump the nomination? Haley said a strong showing in Iowa would tee up a favorable match-up between her and the former president in her home state of South Carolina.\n\n\"If she can beat DeSantis and keep the momentum going,\" Dykstra said, \"then I think that's a big deal.\""}
{"text": "# Indiana secretary of state appeals ruling for US Senate candidate seeking GOP nod\nDecember 8, 2023. 8:31 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**INDIANAPOLIS (AP)** - The Indiana secretary of state is appealing a ruling that a law stipulating voting requirements for a candidate's party affiliation is unconstitutional in a decision that lifted the hopes of a U.S. Senate hopeful who wants to run as a Republican.\n\nThe Indiana attorney general's office filed the notice of appeal Friday with the Indiana Supreme Court on behalf of Secretary of State Diego Morales.\n\nThe filing came a day after a Marion County judge granted an injunction sought by John Rust, the former chair of the egg supplier Rose Acre Farms who is running to replace Sen. Mike Braun. Rust filed a lawsuit in September against Morales, the Indiana Election Commission and Jackson County Republican Party Chair Amanda Lowery to challenge the law and ensure the possibility of his place on the ballot.\n\nThe law in question says a candidate's past two primary elections must be cast with the party the candidate is affiliated with or a county party chair must approve the candidacy. In court documents, Rust argued that this statute \"should be struck down as being unconstitutionally vague and overly broad.\"\n\nA phone message seeking comment from Rust was left Friday evening by The Associated Press.\n\nRust voted as a Republican in the 2016 primary but as a Democrat in 2012. He did not vote in the 2020 Republican primary because of the pandemic and the lack of competitive Republican races in Jackson County, the lawsuit said. Rust said his Democratic votes were for people he personally knew.\n\nLowery, the county's Republican Party chair, said in a July meeting with Rust that she would not certify him, the lawsuit said. Rust has said Lowery later cited his primary voting record.\n\nIn a November hearing, Rust said the law keeps legitimate candidates who have recently moved to Indiana or have switched political identifications from running for office.\n\nIn his ruling, Marion County Superior Court Judge Patrick J. Dietrick said the law \"unduly burdens Hoosiers' long recognized right to freely associate with the political party of one's choosing and to cast one's vote effectively.\"\n\nShould Rust prevail, he still faces an uphill challenge for the GOP nomination. U.S. Rep. Jim Banks has received the endorsement of the Indiana Republican Party and former President Donald Trump. Rust must also fulfill a signature quota for the nomination.\n\nCasting himself as a conservative gay man with an \"outsider's voice\" to Washington, D.C., Rust is the former chair of his family business Rose Acre Farms in southern Indiana. Rose Acre Farms identifies itself as the second-largest egg producer in the U.S.\n\nThe company was one of four major egg producers in the country accused of fixing the price of eggs in the 2000s. A jury in an Illinois federal court recently ruled the producers conspired to limit the domestic supply of eggs to increase prices between 2004-2008 and ordered the companies to pay $17.7 million in damages. Rose Acre Farms has denied any wrongdoing.\n\nSen. Mike Braun is vacating the seat in his bid for governor."}
{"text": "# US envoys work for new hostage release deal, scale-down of Israel-Hamas war but say no timetable\nBy **MELANIE LIDMAN**, **TARA COPP**, and **SAMY MAGDY**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 8:31 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**TEL AVIV, Israel (AP)** - The head of the CIA jetted to Europe for talks with Israeli and Qatari officials Monday, sounding out the potential for a deal on a new cease-fire and the release of hostages in Gaza, as the U.S. defense secretary spoke to Israeli military leaders about scaling back major combat operations against Hamas.\n\nStill, there was no sign that a shift in the war was imminent after more than two months of devastating bombardment and fighting. Fierce battles raged in northern Gaza, where residents said rescue workers were searching for the dead and the living under buildings flattened by Israeli strikes.\n\nPressure is growing, as France, the U.K. and Germany - some of Israel's closest allies - joined global calls for a cease-fire over the weekend. Israeli protesters have demanded the government relaunch talks with Hamas on releasing more hostages after three were mistakenly killed by Israeli troops while waving a white flag.\n\nU.S. officials have repeatedly expressed concern about the large number of civilian deaths in Gaza. But after talks with Israeli officials Monday, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said, \"This is Israel's operation. I'm not here to dictate timelines or terms.\" The U.S. has vetoed calls for a cease-fire at the U.N. and has rushed munitions to Israel.\n\nThe U.N Security Council delayed a vote to Tuesday on an Arab-sponsored resolution calling for a halt to hostilities to allow unhindered access to humanitarian aid. Diplomats said negotiations were taking place to get the U.S. to abstain or vote \"yes\" on the resolution.\n\nPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that Israel will keep fighting until it ends Hamas rule in Gaza, crushes its formidable military capabilities and frees hostages still held in Gaza since the deadly Oct. 7 attack inside Israel that ignited the war. Militants killed some 1,200 people and abducted 240 others in the attack.\n\nThe war has killed more than 19,000 Palestinians and demolished much of the north into a moonscape. Some 1.9 million Palestinians - nearly 85% of Gaza's population - have fled their homes, with most packing into U.N.-run shelters and tent camps in the southern part of the besieged territory.\n\n## HOSTAGE TALKS\nIn an apparent sign that talks on a hostage deal were growing more serious, CIA Director William Burns met in Warsaw with the head of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency and the prime minister of Qatar, a U.S. official said.\n\nIt was the first known meeting of the three since the end of a weeklong cease-fire in late November, during which some 100 hostages - including a number of foreign nationals - were freed in exchange for the release of around 240 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.\n\nNational Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said the talks were not \"at a point where another deal is imminent.\"\n\nAiming to increase public pressure on the Israeli government, Hamas released a video showing three elderly Israeli hostages, sitting in white T-shirts and pleading for Israel to bring their immediate release.\n\nThe comments were likely made under duress, but the video signaled Hamas wants to move on to discussions of releasing sick and elderly men in captivity. Israel has said it wants around 19 women and two children freed first. Hamas says the women include soldiers, for whom it is expected to demand a higher price in terms of prisoner releases.\n\nHamas and other militants are still holding an estimated 129 captives. Hamas has said no more hostages will be released until the war ends.\n\n## SCALING DOWN THE WAR\nAustin, who arrived in Israel with Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. CQ Brown, said he and Israeli officials exchanged \"thoughts on how to transition from high intensity operations\" in Gaza and how to increase the flow of humanitarian aid.\n\nAmerican officials have called for targeted operations aimed at killing Hamas leaders, destroying tunnels and rescuing hostages. U.S. President Joe Biden warned last week that Israel is losing international support because of its \"indiscriminate bombing.\"\n\nSpeaking alongside Austin, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said only that \"the war will take time.\"\n\nIsraeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said the Israeli chief of staff met with Austin and Brown and presented \"plans for the continuation of the battle in the coming stages.\"\n\nEuropean countries appear to be losing patience. \"Far too many civilians have been killed in Gaza,\" EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell posted on X.\n\nUnder U.S. pressure, Israel provided more precise evacuation instructions earlier this month as troops moved into the southern city of Khan Younis. Still, casualties have continued to mount and Palestinians say nowhere in Gaza is safe as Israel carries out strikes in all parts of the territory.\n\nIsrael reopened its main cargo crossing with Gaza to allow more aid in - also after a U.S. request. But the amount is less than half of prewar imports, even as needs have soared and fighting hinders delivery in many areas. Israel blocked entry off all goods into Gaza soon after the war started and weeks later began allowing a small amount of aid in through Egypt.\n\n## MORE DEATH AND DESTRUCTION\nAt least 110 people were killed in Israeli strikes Sunday on residential buildings in the urban Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, Munir al-Boursh, a senior Health Ministry official, told Al Jazeera television.\n\nFierce fighting continued Monday in Jabaliya and the Gaza City districts of Zaytoun and Shijaiyah, where tens of thousands of Palestinians remain trapped, crowded in homes or schools.\n\nIn Jabaliya, first responders and residents searched the rubble of many collapsed buildings. \"They use their hands and shovels,\" said Amal Radwan, who is staying at a U.N. shelter there. \"We need bulldozers and above all the bombing to stop.\"\n\nMore than 19,400 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Health Ministry, which has said that most are women and minors and that thousands more are buried under rubble. The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths.\n\nIsrael's military says 127 of its soldiers have been killed in the Gaza ground offensive. It says it has killed thousands of militants, without providing evidence.\n\nIsrael blames civilian deaths on Hamas, saying it uses them as human shields. But the military rarely comments on individual strikes.\n\n## REGIONAL TENSIONS\nIn Bahrain early Tuesday, Austin said that the U.S. and other nations have created a new force to protect commercial ships passing through the Red Sea from attacks by Yemen's Houthi rebels. The Houthis say their attacks aim to end Israel's offensive in Gaza, and their campaign has prompted a growing list of companies to halt operations in the major trade route.\n\n\"This is an international challenge that demands collective action,\" Austin said in statement.\n\nIsrael and Lebanon's Hezbollah have traded fire along the border nearly every day since the war began. And in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, over 300 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the war, including four overnight during an Israeli military raid in the Faraa refugee camp, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.\n\nThis has been the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since 2005. Most have been killed during military raids, which often ignite gunbattles, or during violent demonstrations."}
{"text": "# Pentagon announces new international mission to counter attacks on commercial vessels in Red Sea\nBy **TARA COPP** and **LOLITA C. BALDOR**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 8:02 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MANAMA, Bahrain (AP)** - The U.S. and a host of other nations are creating a new force to protect ships transiting the Red Sea that have come under attack by drones and ballistic missiles fired from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced early Tuesday in Bahrain.\n\nThe seriousness of the attacks, several of which have damaged the vessels, has led multiple shipping companies to order their ships to hold in place and not enter the Bab el-Mandeb Strait until the security situation can be addressed.\n\nThe U.S. military's Central Command reported two more of the attacks on commercial vessels Monday. A strike by attack drone and ballistic missile hit a tanker off Yemen, at roughly the same time a cargo ship reported an explosive detonating in the water near them, the military said.\n\n\"This is an international challenge that demands collective action,\" Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in statement released just after midnight in Bahrain. \"Therefore today I am announcing the establishment of Operation Prosperity Guardian, an important new multinational security initiative.\"\n\nThe United Kingdom, Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles and Spain will join the U.S. in the new mission, Austin announced. Some of the countries will conduct joint patrols while others provide intelligence support in the southern Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.\n\nSeveral other countries have also agreed to be involved in the operation but prefer not to be publicly named, a defense official said on the condition of anonymity to discuss additional details of the new mission that have not been publicly announced.\n\nThe mission will be coordinated by the already existing Combined Task Force 153, which was set up in April 2022 to improve maritime security in the Red Sea, Bab el-Mandeb and the Gulf of Aden. There have been 39 member nations in CTF 153, but officials were working to determine which of them would participate in this latest effort.\n\nSeparately, the United States has also called on the United Nations Security Council to take action against the attacks.\n\nIn a letter to council members obtained Monday by The Associated Press, U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Houthi attacks targeting commercial vessels legally transiting the international waterways continue to threaten \"navigational rights and freedoms, international maritime security, and international commerce.\"\n\nThe 15 council members discussed the Houthi threat behind closed doors Monday but took no immediate action.\n\nTwo U.S. warships - the USS Carney and the USS Mason, Navy destroyers - have been moving through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait daily to help deter and respond to attacks from the Houthis.\n\nThe move to set up the expanded operation came after three commercial vessels were struck by missiles fired by Iranian-back Houthis in Yemen on Dec. 3. Those attacks were part of an escalating campaign of violence that also included armed and other drones launched in the direction of U.S. warships.\n\nTo date the U.S. has not struck back at the Iranian-back Houthis operating in Yemen or targeted any of the militants' weapons or other sites. On Monday Austin did not answer a question as to why the Pentagon had not conducted a counterstrike."}
{"text": "# UN Security Council delays vote on resolution urging cessation of hostilities in Gaza to deliver aid\nBy **EDITH M. LEDERER**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 4:55 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**UNITED NATIONS (AP)** - The U.N. Security Council delayed until Tuesday morning a vote on an Arab-sponsored resolution calling for a halt to hostilities in Gaza to allow for urgently needed aid deliveries to a massive number of civilians as members intensified negotiations to try to avoid another veto by the United States.\n\nThe council said Monday's 5 p.m. EST vote would not take place, and diplomats said negotiations were taking place to get the United States, Israel's closest ally, to abstain or vote \"yes\" on the resolution.\n\nA key issue is how to implement and sustain a desperately needed aid operation. Human Rights Watch accused Israel earlier Monday of deliberately starving Gaza's population by blocking the delivery of water, food and fuel, a method of warfare that it described as a war crime. The United Nations' food agency reported on Dec. 14 that 56% of Gaza's households were experiencing \"severe levels of hunger,\" up from 38% two weeks earlier.\n\nThe draft on the table Monday morning called for an \"urgent and sustainable cessation of hostilities\" for humanitarian access to deliver aid. But this language is expected to be watered down to a \"suspension\" of hostilities or something possibly weaker to satisfy the Americans, the diplomats said, speaking on condition of anonymity because discussions have been private.\n\nThe U.S. vetoed a Security Council resolution on Dec. 8 that was backed by almost all council members and dozens of other nations demanding an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza. The 193-member General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a similar resolution on Dec. 12 by a vote of 153-10, with 23 abstentions.\n\nThe importance of a Security Council resolution is that it is legally binding, but in practice many parties choose to ignore the council's requests for action. General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding, but though they are a significant barometer of world opinion.\n\nThe draft resolution that was being considered by the 15 council members on Monday recognizes that civilians in Gaza don't have access to sufficient food, water, sanitation, electricity, telecommunications and medical services \"essential for their survival.\" Also, it would express the council's \"strong concern for the disproportionate effect that the conflict is having on the lives and well-being of children, women and other civilians in vulnerable situations.\"\n\nMore than 19,400 Palestinians have been killed according to the Gaza Health Ministry since Israel declared war on the Palestinian militant Hamas group following its surprise attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7 that killed about 1,200 people - mostly civilians - and took about 240 hostages.\n\nHamas controls the Gaza Strip and its Health Ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths. Thousands more Palestinians lie buried under the rubble in Gaza, the U.N. estimates. Israel says 116 of its soldiers have died in its ground offensive.\n\nThe proposed council resolution reiterates its demand that all parties comply with international humanitarian law, especially protecting civilians and the infrastructure critical for their survival including hospitals, schools, places of worship and U.N. facilities.\n\nThe draft, obtained by The Associated Press, demands the parties to the conflict - Hamas and Israel - fulfill their obligations under international humanitarian law and enable \"the immediate, safe and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance at scale directly to the Palestinian civilian population throughout the Gaza Strip.\"\n\nIt \"calls for an urgent and sustainable cessation of hostilities to allow safe and unhindered humanitarian access\" in Gaza and also \"firmly condemns all violations of international humanitarian law, including all indiscriminate attacks against civilians and civilian objects, all violence and hostilities against civilians, and all acts of terrorism.\"\n\nThe draft also demands the immediate and unconditional release of all Hamas-held hostages.\n\nThe draft confirms its \"unwavering commitment to the vision of the two-state solution,\" and stresses \"the importance of unifying the Gaza Strip with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority.\"\n\nThe draft is being negotiated by the United Arab Emirates, which is the Arab representative on the Security Council, and requests U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres establish am expeditious mechanism to monitor all humanitarian shipments to Gaza by land, sea and air."}
{"text": "# Iceland volcano erupts weeks after thousands were evacuated from a town on Reykjanes Peninsula\nBy **DAVID KEYTON**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 9:42 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**STOCKHOLM (AP)** - A volcanic eruption started Monday night on Iceland's Reykjanes Peninsula, turning the sky orange and prompting the country's civil defense to be on high alert.\n\nThe eruption appears to have occurred about four kilometers (2.4 miles) from the town of Grindavik, the Icelandic Meteorological Office said. Grainy webcam video showed the moment of the eruption as a flash of light illuminating the sky at 22:17 local time. As the eruption spread, magma, or semi-molten rock, could be seen spewing along the ridge of a hill.\n\n\"The magma flow seems to be at least a hundred cubic meters per second, maybe more. So this would be considered a big eruption in this area at least,\" Vidir Reynisson, head of Iceland's Civil Protection and Emergency Management told the Icelandic public broadcaster, RUV.\n\nIn November, police evacuated the town or Grindavik after strong seismic activity in the area damaged homes and raised fears of an imminent eruption.\n\nIceland sits above a volcanic hot spot in the North Atlantic and averages an eruption every four to five years. The most disruptive in recent times was the 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which spewed huge clouds of ash into the atmosphere and grounded flights across Europe for days because of fears ash could damage airplane engines.\n\nScientists say a new eruption would likely produce lava but not an ash cloud.\n\nIceland's foreign minister, Bjarne Benediktsson said on X, formerly known as Twitter, that there are \"no disruptions to flights to and from Iceland and international flight corridors remain open.\"\n\nA coast guard helicopter will attempt to confirm the exact location - and size - of the eruption, and will also measure gas emissions.\n\nGrindavik, a fishing town of 3,400, sits on the Reykjanes Peninsula, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) southwest of the capital, Reykjavik and not far from Keflavik Airport, Iceland's main facility for international flights."}
{"text": "# Elon Musk restores X account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones\nBy **The Associated Press**  \nDecember 10, 2023. 6:08 AM EST\n\n---\n\nElon Musk has restored the X account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, pointing to a poll on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that came out in favor of the Infowars host who repeatedly called the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting a hoax.\n\nIt poses new uncertainty for advertisers, who have fled X over concerns about hate speech appearing alongside their ads, and is the latest divisive public personality to get back their banned account.\n\nMusk posted a poll on Saturday asking if Jones should be reinstated, with the results showing 70% of those who responded in favor. Early Sunday, Musk tweeted, \"The people have spoken and so it shall be.\"\n\nA few hours later, Jones' posts were visible again and he retweeted a post about his video game. He and his Infowars show had been permanently banned in 2018 for abusive behavior.\n\nMusk, who has described himself as a free speech absolutist, said the move was about protecting those rights. In response to a user who posted that \"permanent account bans are antithetical to free speech,\" Musk wrote, \"I find it hard to disagree with this point.\"\n\nThe billionaire Tesla CEO also tweeted it's likely that Community Notes - X's crowd-sourced fact-checking service - \"will respond rapidly to any AJ post that needs correction.\"\n\nIt is a major turnaround for Musk, who previously said he wouldn't let Jones back on the platform despite repeated calls to do so. Last year, Musk pointed to the death of his first-born child and tweeted, \"I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.\"\n\nJones repeatedly has said on his show that the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 20 children and six educators never happened and was staged in an effort to tighten gun laws.\n\nRelatives of many of the victims sued Jones in Connecticut and Texas, winning nearly $1.5 billion in judgments against him. In October, a judge ruled that Jones could not use bankruptcy protection to avoid paying more than $1.1 billon of that debt.\n\nRelatives of the school shooting victims testified at the trials about being harassed and threatened by Jones' believers, who sent threats and even confronted the grieving families in person, accusing them of being \"crisis actors\" whose children never existed.\n\nJones is appealing the judgments, saying he didn't get fair trials and his speech was protected by the First Amendment.\n\nRestoring Jones' account comes as Musk has seen a slew of big brands, including Disney and IBM, stop advertising on X after a report by liberal advocacy group Media Matters said ads were appearing alongside pro-Nazi content and white nationalist posts.\n\nThey also were scared away after Musk himself endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory in response to a post on X. The Tesla CEO later apologized and visited Israel, where he toured a kibbutz attacked by Hamas militants and held talks with top Israeli leaders.\n\nBut he also has said advertisers are engaging in \"blackmail\" and, using a profanity, essentially told them to go away.\n\n\"Don't advertise,\" Musk said in an on-stage interview late last month at The New York Times DealBook Summit.\n\nAfter buying Twitter last year, Musk said he was granting \"amnesty\" for suspended accounts and has since reinstated former President Donald Trump; Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, following two suspensions over antisemitic posts last year; and far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was kicked off the platform for violating its COVID-19 misinformation policies.\n\nTrump, who was banned for encouraging the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, has his own social media site, Truth Social, and has only tweeted once since being allowed back on X."}
{"text": "# European Union investigating Musk's X over possible breaches of social media law\nBy **KELVIN CHAN**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 2:48 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - The European Union on Monday made Elon Musk's online platform X the first tech company to face an investigation under Europe's tough new regulations designed to clean up social media and protect people from toxic online content.\n\n\"Today we open formal infringement proceedings against @X\" under the Digital Services Act, European Commissioner Thierry Breton said in a post on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Musk, in response, questioned whether the EU would also scrutinize other social media sites.\n\nThe 27-nation bloc is ratcheting up the pressure on X after asking the company in October for information on its handling of hate speech, misinformation and violent terrorist content related to the Israel-Hamas war. The case presents the first test for the Digital Services Act, part of a set of pioneering regulations that the EU has drawn up to rein in the power of tech companies.\n\nThe European Commission, the EU's executive branch, \"will now investigate X's systems and policies related to certain suspected infringements\" of the DSA, spokesman Johannes Bahrke told a press briefing in Brussels. \"It does not prejudge the outcome of the investigation.\"\n\nThe San Francisco-based social media platform says it is \"committed to complying with the Digital Services Act, and is cooperating with the regulatory process. It is important that this process remains free of political influence and follows the law.\"\n\n\"X is focused on creating a safe and inclusive environment for all users on our platform, while protecting freedom of expression, and we will continue to work tirelessly towards this goal,\" the company said in a statement.\n\nMusk has touted the platform as a place for free speech to thrive, but changes that the billionaire Tesla CEO made to the site after he bought it a year ago - such as cutting the number of content moderators and restoring the banned accounts of divisive public personalities - have turned off users and advertisers, who have fled over concerns about hate speech appearing alongside their ads. He has also pulled the platform out of a voluntary EU pact against disinformation.\n\nThe EU's investigation will look into whether X failed to do enough to curb the spread of illegal content - such as hate speech or incitement of terrorism - to its 112 million users in Europe.\n\nThat includes the effectiveness of X's tools for users to flag up illegal material in posts and ads so that it can be swiftly removed, as well as whether the company is following its own policies on restricting \"sensitive content.\"\n\nThe investigation also will examine whether X's measures to combat \" information manipulation,\" especially through its crowd-sourced Community Notes fact-checking feature, were effective within the European Union.\n\nAnother area of investigation is transparency. The EU said there are \"suspected shortcomings\" in researchers' access to X's publicly accessible data\" as well as its ad database, both of which are required by the DSA.\n\nLastly, the investigation will look into whether users are being tricked by suspected \"deceptive design\" of X's interface, including for its blue check subscription service. The blue checkmarks once signified that the person or institution behind an account was genuine, such as a celebrity, athlete or journalist, but now merely indicate someone pays $8 a month to boost their posts above unchecked users.\n\n\"Are you taking action against other social media?\" Musk tweeted in response to Breton. \"Because if you have those issues with this platform, and none are perfect, the others are much worse.\"\n\nThe EU has called out X as the worst place online for fake news, and officials have exhorted owner Musk to do more to clean it up.\n\nNow, it's taking official steps under the Digital Services Act, a set of far-reaching rules designed to keep users safe online and stop the spread of harmful content that's either illegal or violates a platform's terms of service, such as promotion of genocide or anorexia.\n\nA raft of big tech companies faced stricter scrutiny after the DSA took effect earlier this year, threatening penalties of up to 6% of their global revenue - which could amount to billions - or even a ban from the EU.\n\nFines are, however, considered a last ditch resort, and Brussels could first use \"interim measures\" to force companies to comply.\n\nThere's no deadline for a decision on the investigation into X, and the commission said it would continue to gather evidence, carry out interviews and conduct inspections."}
{"text": "# Texas governor signs bill that lets police arrest migrants who enter the US illegally\nBy **VALERIE GONZALEZ** and **PAUL J. WEBER**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 9:24 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BROWNSVILLE, Texas (AP)** - Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday approved sweeping new powers that allow police to arrest migrants who illegally cross the U.S. border and give local judges authority to order them to leave the country, testing the limits of how far a state can go to enforce immigration laws.\n\nOpponents have called the measure the most dramatic attempt by a state to police immigration since a 2010 Arizona law - denounced by critics as the \"Show Me Your Papers\" bill - that was largely struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility, and Texas' law is also likely to face swift legal challenges.\n\nThe law, which takes effect in March, allows any Texas law enforcement officer to arrest people who are suspected of entering the country illegally. Once in custody, they could either agree to a Texas judge's order to leave the U.S. or be prosecuted on misdemeanor charges of illegal entry. Migrants who don't leave could face arrest again under more serious felony charges.\n\nAbbott, who signed the law in front of a section of border fence in Brownsville, predicted the number of people crossing illegally into Texas would drop by \"well over 50%, maybe 75%.\" He did not offer evidence for that estimate.\n\n\"The consequences of it are so extreme that the people being smuggled by the cartels, they will not want to be coming into the state of Texas,\" he said.\n\nThe law adds another tension point over immigration amid a struggle between the White House and Senate negotiators to reach a deal on border security. Republicans in Congress are demanding changes to the immigration system in exchange for any help for Ukraine, Israel and other national security needs.\n\nTexas Republicans have increasingly challenged the U.S. government's authority over immigration, saying President Joe Biden's administration isn't doing enough to control the 1,950-mile (3,149-kilometer) southern border. Texas has bused more than 65,000 migrants to cities across America since August 2022 and recently installed razor wire along the banks of the Rio Grande, which has snagged and injured some asylum-seekers.\n\nThe U.S. government on Monday temporarily shut down two railroad border crossings in Texas, a move that rail operators said would hamper trade ahead of Christmas. Troy Miller, U.S. Customs and Border Protection's acting commissioner, said the closures at Eagle Pass and El Paso were a response to more migrants traveling on freight trains, particularly over the last week.\n\nMiller said authorities are seeing \"unprecedented\" arrivals at the border, topping 10,000 crossings on some days this month.\n\nShortly after Abbott signed the new law, the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas said it would challenge the measure in court. More than 20 congressional Democrats also signed a letter urging the U.S. Justice Department to sue to stop the law, known as Senate Bill 4.\n\n\"SB 4 is dangerous for the people of Texas and interferes with the federal government's exclusive authority over immigration and foreign affairs,\" the letter read.\n\nMexico's government also has rebuked the measure. Under bilateral and international agreements, Mexico is required to accept deportations of its own citizens, but not those of other countries. Under the Texas law, migrants ordered to leave would be sent to ports of entry along the border with Mexico, even if they are not Mexican citizens. In September and October, Venezuelans were the largest nationality arrested for illegally crossing the U.S. border.\n\nDuring debate in the Texas House in November, GOP state Rep. David Spiller pushed back against concerns that the law would be used as a dragnet to arrest immigrants statewide. He said enforcement would mostly take place in border counties. But he also rebuffed several efforts by Democrats to narrow the law, including a proposed carve-out for police on college campuses.\n\nBecause the illegal entry charge is a misdemeanor, which has a statue of limitation of two years, Spiller has said the law will not be used to target immigrants who have long been settled in the U.S.\n\n\"This is not, 'Round up everyone who is here illegally and ship them back to Mexico,'\" he said during debate over the bill.\n\nOpponents have accused Texas Republicans of using the law as a vehicle to force the Supreme Court's new conservative majority to revisit its landmark 2012 Arizona decision. At the time, Justice Anthony Kennedy said Arizona may have \"understandable frustrations\" with immigrants who are in the country illegally but that it can't pursue policies that \"undermine federal law.\""}
{"text": "# Marvel, Disney drop actor Jonathan Majors after he's convicted of assaulting his former girlfriend\nBy **JENNIFER PELTZ**, **JAKE OFFENHARTZ**, and **JAKE COYLE**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 7:58 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Jonathan Majors was convicted Monday of assaulting his former girlfriend after a trial that he hoped would vindicate him and restore his status as an emerging Hollywood star. It did just the opposite: Marvel Studios and the Walt Disney Co. dropped him hours after the verdict.\n\nA Manhattan jury found Majors, 34, guilty of one misdemeanor assault charge and one harassment violation stemming from his March confrontation with then-girlfriend Grace Jabbari. She said he attacked her in a car and left her in \"excruciating\" pain; his lawyers said Jabbari was the aggressor.\n\nMajors, who was acquitted of a different assault charge and of aggravated harassment, looked slightly downward and showed no immediate reaction as the verdict was read. He declined to comment as he left the courthouse.\n\nHis lawyer, Priya Chaudhry, said in a statement that he \"still has faith in the process and looks forward to fully clearing his name.\" While he was convicted of an assault charge that involves recklessly causing injury, she said his team was grateful for his acquittal on the other assault count, which concerned intentionally causing injury.\n\n\"Mr. Majors is grateful to God, his family, his friends and his fans for their love and support during these harrowing eight months,\" Chaudhry said.\n\nMarvel and Disney immediately dropped the \"Creed III\" star from all upcoming projects following the conviction, said a person close to the studio who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly on the matter.\n\nBefore his arrest, Majors had been on track to become a central figure throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe, playing the antagonist role of Kang. Majors had already appeared in \"Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania\" and the first two seasons of \"Loki.\" He was to star in \"Avengers: The Kang Dynasty,\" dated for release in May 2026.\n\nMajors, whose credits include \"The Last Black Man in San Francisco,\" \"Devotion\" and \"Da 5 Bloods,\" had been one of the fastest-rising stars in Hollywood. The Yale School of Drama graduate also starred as a troubled amateur bodybuilder in \"Magazine Dreams,\" which made an acclaimed debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January and was set to open in theaters this month. Ahead of Majors' trial, Disney-owned distributor Searchlight Pictures removed \"Magazine Dreams\" from its release calendar.\n\nMajors' sentencing was set for Feb. 6. He faces the possibility of up to a year in jail for the assault conviction, though probation or other non-jail sentences also are possible.\n\nManhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement that the trial \"illustrated a cycle of psychological and emotional abuse, and escalating patterns of coercion.\"\n\nThe dispute between Majors and Jabbari began in the backseat of a chauffeured car and spilled into the streets of Manhattan.\n\nJabbari, a 30-year-old British dancer, accused Majors of hitting her in the head with his open hand, twisting her arm behind her back and squeezing her middle finger until it fractured.\n\nMajors' lawyers alleged that she flew into a jealous rage after reading a text message - from another woman - on his phone. They said Jabbari had spread a \"fantasy\" to take down the actor, who was only trying to regain his phone and get away safely.\n\nBut as Majors sought vindication from the jury, the trial also brought forth new evidence about his troubled relationship with Jabbari, whom he met on the set of \"Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania\" two years ago.\n\nProsecutors shared text messages that showed the actor begging Jabbari not to seek hospital treatment for an earlier head injury. One message warned \"it could lead to an investigation even if you do lie and they suspect something.\"\n\nThey also played audio of Majors declaring himself a \"great man,\" then questioning whether Jabbari could meet the high standards set by the spouses of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama. Majors' attorneys countered that Jabbari had surreptitiously recorded her boyfriend as part of a plot to \"destroy\" his career.\n\nOver four days of tearful testimony, Jabbari said Majors was excessively controlling and prone to fits of explosive rage that left her afraid \"physically quite a lot.\" She broke down on the witness stand as a jury watched security footage of him pushing her back into the car after the backseat confrontation. Prosecutors described the video as showing Majors \"manhandling\" her and shoving her into the vehicle \"as if she was a doll.\"\n\nMajors arrived in the courtroom each morning carrying a gold-leaf Bible, accompanied by family members and his current girlfriend, actress Meagan Good. Expressionless for much of the testimony, he wiped away tears as Chaudhry urged jurors during her closing arguments on Thursday to \"end this nightmare for Jonathan Majors.\"\n\nMajors did not take the stand. But Chaudhry said her client was the victim of \"white lies, big lies, and pretty little lies\" invented by Jabbari to exact revenge on an unfaithful partner.\n\nThe attorney cited security footage, taken immediately after the shove, that showed Majors sprinting away from his girlfriend as she chased him through the night. Jabbari then followed a group of strangers she'd met on the street to a dance club, where she ordered drinks for the group and did not appear to be favoring her injured hand.\n\n\"She was revenge-partying and charging Champagne to the man she was angry with and treating these strangers to fancy Champagne she bought with Jonathan's credit card,\" Chaudhry alleged.\n\nThe next morning, after finding Jabbari unconscious in the closet of their Manhattan penthouse, Majors called police. He was arrested at the scene, while Jabbari was transported to a hospital to receive treatment for the injuries to her ear and hand.\n\n\"He called 911 out of concern for her, and his fear of what happens when a Black man in America came true,\" Chaudhry said, accusing police and prosecutors of failing to take seriously Majors' allegations that he was bloodied and scratched during the dispute.\n\nIn her closing arguments, prosecutor Kelli Galaway said Majors was following a well-worn playbook used by abusers to cast their victims as attackers.\n\n\"This is not a revenge plot to ruin the defendant's life or his career,\" Galaway said. \"You were asked why you are here? Because domestic violence is serious.\""}
{"text": "# NFL suspends Steelers safety Damontae Kazee for the rest of the season after illegal hit vs. Colts\nDecember 18, 2023. 6:14 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - The NFL suspended Pittsburgh Steelers safety Damontae Kazee without pay for the remainder of the season for what the league described as \"repeated violations\" of rules designed to protect player safety.\n\nThe ruling, issued by NFL Vice President of Football Operations Jon Runyan on Monday, means Kazee will miss Pittsburgh's final three regular-season games and any potential playoff games if the Steelers (7-7) advance to the postseason.\n\nKazee was ejected from Pittsburgh's 30-13 loss to Indianapolis on Saturday after hitting diving Colts wide receiver Michael Pittman Jr. in the second quarter. Pittman laid out to try and catch a pass and Kazee made contact with Pittman's head. Pittman left the game and went into the concussion protocol.\n\nRunyan wrote in a letter to Kazee that illegal contact with Pittman \"could have been avoided.\" Runyan pointed to Kazee's repeated violations of safety rules as one of the driving forces behind the suspension.\n\nKazee, a seven-year veteran, has been fined nearly a half-dozen times by the league this season. He will forfeit around $208,000 in game checks by missing Pittsburgh's final three games.\n\nSteelers coach Mike Tomlin said Monday before the NFL announced Kazee's suspension that he would not speculate on any potential discipline, saying it \"doesn't help me, help (Kazee) or football itself.\"\n\nThe suspension means Pittsburgh will be without both of its starting safeties against the Bengals. Minkah Fitzpatrick is already out with a knee injury.\n\nKazee can appeal the decision to hearing officers Derrick Brooks or James Thrash, who have been appointed by the NFL and NFLPA to decide appeals of on-field player discipline."}
{"text": "# Judge criticizes Trump's expert witness as he again refuses to toss fraud lawsuit\nBy **PHILIP MARCELO**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 9:01 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Former President Donald Trump has lost his latest bid to end the business fraud lawsuit he faces in New York as he campaigns to reclaim the White House.\n\nJudge Arthur Engoron issued a written ruling Monday denying the Republican's latest request for a verdict in his favor in a lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James.\n\nAnd in doing so, the judge dismissed the credibility of one of Trump's expert witnesses at the trial, a professor who testified that he saw no fraud in the former president's financial statements.\n\nThe trial is centered on allegations Trump and other company officials exaggerated his wealth and inflated the value of his assets to secure loans and close business deals.\n\nIn the three-page ruling, Engoron wrote that the \"most glaring\" flaw of Trump's argument was to assume that the testimony provided by Eli Bartov, an accounting professor at New York University, and other expert witnesses would be accepted by the court as \"true and accurate.\"\n\n\"Bartov is a tenured professor, but the only thing his testimony proves is that for a million or so dollars, some experts will say whatever you want them to say,\" Engoron wrote.\n\nBartov, who was paid nearly $900,000 for his work on the trial, said in an email that the judge had mischaracterized his testimony.\n\nTrump took to his defense, calling Engoron's comments about Bartov a \"great insult to a man of impeccable character and qualifications\" as he excoriated the judge's decision.\n\n\"Judge Engoron challenges the highly respected Expert Witness for receiving fees, which is standard and accepted practice for Expert Witnesses,\" Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social.\n\nDuring testimony earlier this month, Bartov disputed the attorney general's claims that Trump's financial statements were filled with fraudulently inflated values for such signature assets as his Trump Tower penthouse and his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.\n\nBartov said there was \"no evidence whatsoever of any accounting fraud.\"\n\nBut Engoron, in his ruling Monday, noted that he had already ruled that there were \"numerous obvious errors\" in Trump's financial statements.\n\n\"By doggedly attempting to justify every misstatement, Professor Bartov lost all credibility,\" the judge wrote.\n\nIn an email to The Associated Press, Bartov said he never \"remotely implied\" at the trial that Trump's financial statements were \"accurate in every respect,\" only that the errors were inadvertent and there was \"no evidence of concealment or forgery.\"\n\nBartov also argued that he billed Trump at his standard rate.\n\nClosing arguments are scheduled for Jan. 11 in Manhattan."}
{"text": "# G League player and girlfriend are arrested in killing of woman found dead near Las Vegas\nDecember 18, 2023. 4:22 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LAS VEGAS (AP)** - A player with the Sacramento Kings' G League affiliate and his girlfriend have been arrested in the killing of a woman whose remains were found earlier this month near Las Vegas, authorities said.\n\nChance Comanche, 27, and Sakari Harnden, 19, face charges of murder and kidnapping in the killing of 23-year-old Marayna Rodgers, Las Vegas police announced Sunday.\n\nRodgers was reported missing on Dec. 7 and her remains were later found in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson, police said.\n\nAuthorities have not released a cause of death or discussed a possible motive, but police said investigators suspected foul play and obtained evidence to arrest Harnden and Comanche.\n\nPolice said Harnden was a friend of Rodgers, who was a medical assistant from Washington state.\n\nAccording to police, Rodgers was out with friends in Las Vegas on Dec. 5 and had a prearranged meeting with Harnden, who brought Comanche with her.\n\nHarnden was arrested Wednesday in Las Vegas and was being held without bail. Clark County Public Defender Marissa Pensabene said Monday in an email that she had no comment on Harnden's behalf.\n\nComanche was taken into custody Friday by the FBI in Sacramento, California, and was being held without bond. Police say he is awaiting extradition to Nevada and is scheduled to appear Tuesday in a Sacramento court. A lawyer for Comanche was not listed Monday in court records.\n\nThe prosecutor's office in Clark County, Nevada, didn't immediately respond to a message seeking further information. And the public defenders' offices in Las Vegas and Sacramento didn't immediately reply to Monday phone messages asking whether either was representing Comanche.\n\nComanche had been playing for the Stockton (California) Kings, the NBA G League affiliate of the Sacramento Kings, and averaged 14 points and seven rebounds in 13 games.\n\nComanche, a power forward and center, played college basketball at the University of Arizona from 2015-17 before declaring for the NBA draft.\n\nHe went undrafted and signed a free-agent contract with the Portland Trail Blazers last April but played only one game.\n\nSacramento signed Comanche in October but waived him 10 days later, at which point he joined Stockton."}
{"text": "# Earthquake in northwestern China kills at least 116 people in Gansu and Qinghai provinces\nBy **KEN MORITSUGU**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 11:01 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BEIJING (AP)** - An overnight earthquake killed at least 116 people in a cold and mountainous region in northwestern China, the country's state media reported Tuesday.\n\nSearch and rescue operations were underway in Gansu and neighboring Qinghai provinces. The earthquake left more than 500 people injured, severely damaged houses and roads, and knocked out power and communication lines, according to the media reports.\n\nThe magnitude 6.2 earthquake struck in Gansu at a relatively shallow depth of 10 kilometers (six miles) just before midnight on Monday, the China Earthquake Networks Center said. The U.S. Geological Survey measured the magnitude at 5.9.\n\nBy mid-morning, 105 people had been confirmed dead in Gansu and another 397 injured, including 16 in critical condition, Han Shujun, a spokesperson for the provincial emergency management department, said at a news conference. Eleven others were killed and at least 140 injured in Qinghai, according to state media.\n\nThe earthquake was felt in much of the surrounding area, including Lanzhou, the Gansu provincial capital, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) northeast of the epicenter. Photos and videos posted by a student at Lanzhou University showed students hastily leaving a dormitory building and standing outside with long down jackets over their pajamas.\n\n\"The earthquake was too intense,\" said Wang Xi, the student who posted the images. \"My legs went weak, especially when we ran downstairs from the dormitory.\"\n\nThe quake struck in Gansu's Jishishan county, about 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the provincial boundary with Qinghai. The epicenter was about 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) southwest of Beijing, the Chinese capital. There were nine aftershocks by 10 a.m., about 10 hours after the earthquake, the largest one registering a magnitude of 4.1, a Gansu official said.\n\nTents, folding beds and quilts were being sent to the disaster area, state broadcaster CCTV said. It quoted Chinese leader Xi Jinping as calling for an all-out search and rescue effort to minimize the casualties. The overnight low in the area was minus 15 to minus 9 degrees Celsius (5 to 16 degrees Fahrenheit), the China Meteorological Administration said.\n\nAt least 4,000 firefighters, soldiers and police officers were dispatched in the rescue effort, and the People's Liberation Army Western Theatre set up a command post to direct its work.\n\nHan, the Gansu spokesperson, said the rescue work was proceeding in an orderly manner and asked people to avoid going to the quake-hit areas to prevent traffic jams that could hinder the effort.\n\nA video posted by the Ministry of Emergency Management showed emergency workers in orange uniforms using rods to try to move heavy pieces of what looked like concrete debris at night. Other nighttime videos distributed by state media showed workers lifting out a victim and helping a slightly stumbling person to walk in an area covered with light snow.\n\nMiddle school student Ma Shijun ran out of his dormitory barefoot without even putting on a coat, according to a Xinhua report. It said the strong tremors left his hands a bit numb, and that teachers quickly organized the students on the playground.\n\nCCTV reported that there was damage to water and electricity lines, as well as transportation and communications infrastructure.\n\nEarthquakes are somewhat common in the mountainous area of western China that rises up to form the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau.\n\nLast year in September, at least 74 people were reported killed in a 6.8 magnitude earthquake that shook China's southwestern province of Sichuan, triggering landslides and shaking buildings in the provincial capital of Chengdu, where 21 million residents were under a COVID-19 lockdown.\n\nChina's deadliest earthquake in recent years was a 7.9 magnitude quake in 2008 that killed nearly 90,000 people in Sichuan. The tremor devastated towns, schools and rural communities outside Chengdu, leading to a years-long effort to rebuild with more resistant materials."}
{"text": "# 'Max Payne' and 'Rescue Me' actor James McCaffrey dies at 65\nDecember 18, 2023. 7:48 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - James McCaffrey, who voiced \"Max Payne\" in the popular video game franchise and also starred in television shows including \"Rescue Me,\" has died, according to his agent. He was 65.\n\nMcCaffrey's talent agent David Elliot confirmed Monday that the New York native passed away Sunday surrounded by family and friends.\n\nHis wife, actor Rochelle Bostrom, told The Hollywood Reporter that he died at home in Larchmont, a New York suburb of Manhattan, following a battle with myeloma, a form of cancer that affects white blood cells.\n\nFellow New York actor and \"Entourage\" star Kevin Dillon was among those who took to social media to honor McCaffrey.\n\n\"#rip James McCaffrey we were lucky to have known you,\" he wrote Sunday in an Instagram post that included a photo of the two.\n\nMcCaffrey had a 35-year career in television and film that also included roles in the television shows \"Blue Bloods\" and \"Suits.\"\n\nOn the FX drama \"Rescue Me,\" he portrayed a New York City firefighter killed on Sept. 11 who appears to Denis Leary's main character, who is also a firefighter, over the series' seven-season run, which ended in 2011.\n\nMcCaffrey also famously voiced Max Payne, the former NYPD officer who becomes a vigilante after his family is killed, in the video game series of the same name during the early 2000s.\n\n\"Trained at the Actor's Studio, he never lost his love for creating characters; however, his good looks often pushed him toward leading man roles,\" Elliot wrote in a message.\n\nBesides his wife, McCaffrey is survived by his daughter, Tiernan McCaffrey, and other family members."}
{"text": "# North Korea's Kim threatens 'more offensive actions' against US after watching powerful missile test\nBy **HYUNG-JIN KIM**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 10:38 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SEOUL, South Korea (AP)** - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un threatened \"more offensive actions\" to repel what he called increasing U.S.-led military threats after he supervised the third test of his country's most advanced missile designed to strike the mainland U.S., state media reported Tuesday.\n\nKim's statement suggests he is confident in his growing missile arsenal and will likely continue weapons testing activities ahead of next year's presidential election in the United States. But many observers say North Korea still needs to perform more significant tests to prove it has functioning missiles targeting the U.S. mainland.\n\nAfter watching Monday's launch of the Hwasong-18 intercontinental ballistic missile, Kim said the test showed how North Korea could respond if the United States were to make \"a wrong decision against it,\" according to the official Korean Central News Agency.\n\nKim stressed the need to \"never overlook all the reckless and irresponsible military threats of the enemies ... and to strongly counter them with more offensive actions,\" KCNA said.\n\nThe Hwasong-18 ICBM is a developmental, solid-fueled ICBM that is considered North Korea's most powerful weapon. Its built-in solid propellant makes launches harder for outsiders to detect than liquid-fueled missiles, which must be fueled before liftoffs. But many foreign experts say North Korea still has some other technological hurdles to master to acquire reliable nuclear-tipped ICBMs, such as one to protect warheads from the harsh conditions of atmospheric reentry.\n\nKCNA said the Hwasong-18 missile, launched on a high angle to avoid neighboring countries, flew a distance of 1,002 kilometers (622 miles) for 73.5 minutes at a maximum altitude of 6,518 kilometers (4,050 miles) before landing in an area off the North's east coast. It said Kim expressed \"great satisfaction\" with the launch, which verified again the reliability of \"the most powerful strategic core striking means\" of North Korea.\n\nIt was the North's third test of the Hwasong-18 missile. Its two previous launches occurred in April and July.\n\n\"Based on their statement, this looks to have been an exercise in signaling and a developmental test in one,\" said Ankit Panda, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. \"There's nothing new here technically as far as I can tell at this early stage, but they're certainly growing increasingly confident in their new solid propellant ICBM.\"\n\nLeif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, said the North's latest ICBM test is yet another indicator of how far its missile engine technology has progressed, but added there are limits to what North Korea can learn from lofted trajectory firings.\n\n\"Demonstrating warhead targeting and reentry capabilities would involve provocative launches across greater distances,\" Easley said. \"So more significant tests of both technology and diplomacy are likely in the New Year.\"\n\nKCNA said its Hwasong-18 test was meant to issue a warning over its rivals' confrontational military moves on North Korea. It said a recent U.S.-South Korean meeting to discuss their nuclear deterrence plan openly revealed their intention to hold joint drills with a simulated nuclear attack on North Korea.\n\nIt also referred to the second Nuclear Consultative Group meeting between senior U.S. and South Korean officials last Friday. During their meeting in Washington, the two countries agreed to update their nuclear deterrence and contingency strategies and incorporate nuclear operation scenarios in their combined military exercises next summer, according to officials in Seoul.\n\nSouth Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said during a Cabinet Council meeting on Tuesday that a \"nuclear-based, powerful Korea-U.S. alliance\" would be formed soon.\n\nThe consultative body is responsible for sharing information on nuclear and strategic weapons operation plans and joint operations, though the U.S. will retain operational control of its nuclear weapons. The group's establishment was part of U.S. efforts to ease South Korean worries about North Korean provocations while keeping Seoul from pursuing its own nuclear program.\n\nSince last year, North Korea has performed more than 100 ballistic missile tests in violation of U.N. bans in what outside experts call an effort to upgrade its nuclear arsenal and win greater U.S. concessions. The North has still avoided fresh international sanctions as China and Russia blocked the U.S. and others' efforts to toughen U.N. sanctions on the country. North Korea also faces outside suspicions that it receives sophisticated weapons technologies from Russia in return for supplying conventional arms to support Russia's war in Ukraine.\n\nThe United States and South Korea have expanded their military training and increased the temporary deployments of powerful U.S. military assets in South Korea.\n\nOn Tuesday, South Korea, the U.S. and Japan began putting into operation the sharing of real-time missile warning data on North Korea and established details of their trilateral exercises in coming years, South Korea's Defense Ministry said in a statement. It added the three countries will beef up their three-way cooperation to cope with regional challenges and promote peace in the region."}
{"text": "# Here's what you need to know about the deadly salmonella outbreak tied to cantaloupes\nBy **JONEL ALECCIA**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 2:44 PM EST\n\n---\n\nHundreds of people in the U.S. and Canada have been sickened and at least 10 people have died in a growing outbreak of salmonella poisoning linked to contaminated whole and pre-cut cantaloupe.\n\nHealth officials are warning consumers, retailers and restaurants not to buy, eat or serve cantaloupe if they don't know the source.\n\nThat's especially important for individuals who are vulnerable to serious illness from salmonella infection and those who care for them. High-risk groups include young children, people older than 65 and those with weakened immune systems.\n\nThe U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is especially concerned because many of the illnesses have been severe and because victims include people who ate cantaloupe served in childcare centers and long-term care facilities.\n\nHere's what we know about this outbreak:\n\n## How many people have been sickened in the cantaloupe salmonella outbreak?\nOverall, at least 302 people in the U.S. and 153 in Canada have been sickened in this outbreak. That includes four killed and 129 hospitalized in the U.S. and six killed and 53 hospitalized in Canada.\n\n## When did the cantaloupe outbreak begin?\nThe first U.S. case was a person who fell ill on Oct. 16, according to the CDC. The latest illness detected occurred on Nov. 28. Canadian health officials said people fell ill between mid-October and mid-November.\n\nThe first recalls were issued Nov. 6 in the U.S., according to the Food and Drug Administration. Multiple recalls of whole and cut fruit have followed.\n\n## Where did the cantaloupes come from?\nThe cantaloupes implicated in this outbreak include two brands, Malichita and Rudy, that are grown in the Sonora area of Mexico. The fruit was imported by Sofia Produce LLC, of Nogales, Arizona, which does business as TruFresh, and Pacific Trellis Fruit LLC, of Los Angeles. So far, more than 36,000 boxes or cases of cantaloupe have been recalled.\n\nOn Dec. 15, Mexican health officials temporarily closed a melon-packing plant implicated in the outbreak.\n\nRoughly one-third of FDA-regulated human food imported into the U.S. comes from Mexico, including about 60% of fresh produce imports. The average American eats about 6 pounds of cantaloupe a year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.\n\n## How did the cantaloupes get contaminated?\nHealth officials in the U.S. and Canada are still investigating, but cantaloupes generally are prone to contamination because they are \"netted\" melons with rough, bumpy rinds that make bacteria difficult to remove.\n\nSalmonella bacteria are found in animals' intestines and can spread if their waste comes in contact with fruit in the field. Contamination can come from tainted water used in irrigation, or in cleaning and cooling the melons.\n\nPoor hygienic practices of workers, pests in packing facilities and equipment that's not cleaned and sanitized properly can also lead to contamination, the FDA says.\n\nThe Mexico growing area saw powerful storms and hurricanes in late summer and early fall that resulted in flooding that could be a factor, said Trevor Suslow, a produce safety consultant and retired professor at the University of California, Davis.\n\nOnce the melons are contaminated, the nubby rinds harbor nutrients that can help the salmonella bacteria grow, Suslow said.\n\nIf the cantaloupe become moldy or damaged, the bacteria can move from the outside of the rind to the inner layer or into the flesh. Also, when the fruit is sliced - in a home kitchen, grocery store or processing plant - the bacteria can spread to the flesh.\n\nCut fruit in a tray or clamshell package can harbor the bacteria. If the fruit isn't kept very cool, the germs can grow.\n\n## How should consumers handle cantaloupe?\nIt is difficult to remove disease-causing bacteria from cantaloupe at home. Food safety experts recommend rinsing whole melons in cool water and scrubbing them with a clean produce brush and then drying completely.\n\nBlanching the cantaloupes briefly in very hot water is another method, Suslow said. And Purdue University researchers found that household items such as vinegar and iodine diluted in water could reduce exterior contamination with salmonella by 99%.\n\nFor high-risk people, it might be best to avoid cantaloupe, especially pre-cut cantaloupe and especially during an outbreak, said Amanda Deering, a Purdue University food scientist.\n\nUnderstanding that certain foods can pose a serious health risk is key, she added.\n\n\"As consumers, we just assume that our food is safe,\" she said. \"You don't want to think that a cantaloupe is what's going to take you out.\""}
{"text": "# Trump campaign lawyer testified in Nevada fake electors case to avoid prosecution, transcripts show\nBy **RIO YAMAT** and **GABE STERN**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 11:30 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LAS VEGAS (AP)** - The lawyer who helped orchestrate the Trump campaign's fake elector scheme in 2020 was a target in a criminal investigation in Nevada, but his name was removed from the indictment in exchange for his cooperation with authorities, according to newly released transcripts of secret grand jury proceedings in Las Vegas.\n\nThe documents made public Sunday show that in late November, Kenneth Chesebro testified to a grand jury in Clark County, Nevada, about the plot that ultimately led to the indictments this month of six Nevada Republicans, who made a last-ditch attempt to keep then-President Donald Trump in power by sending a phony electoral certificate to the National Archives.\n\nThe fake electors - involved in the GOP at the state or county level - are charged in state court with offering a false instrument for filing and uttering a forged instrument.\n\nChesebro's deal with state Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford's office, which investigated the case, comes on the heels of Chesebro's plea agreement with prosecutors in Georgia, where he was charged alongside Trump and 17 others with participating in efforts to overturn Trump's 2020 loss in Georgia.\n\nFord's office declined to comment on the cooperation deal Monday.\n\nChesebro pleaded guilty in Georgia to one felony charge of conspiracy to commit filing false documents just as jury selection was getting underway in his trial. As part of the deal, prosecutors agreed to dismiss six other counts.\n\nIn the Nevada case, Chesebro told the grand jury that he sent the state GOP an \"organized step-by-step explanation of what they would have to do\" to sign certificates falsely stating that Trump, not President Joe Biden, had won their state.\n\nChesebro also admitted in his testimony that he viewed Nevada as \"extremely problematic\" to the fake elector plot that spanned seven battleground states - Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.\n\n\"It requires the meeting of the electors to be overseen by the Secretary of State, who is only supposed to permit electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote in Nevada,\" Chesebro said, reading a portion of one of his memos to the grand jury.\n\nThe transcripts show that the grand jury was seated in the case on Nov. 14, nearly three years after the six Nevada Republicans gathered in Carson City, Nevada, on Dec. 14, 2020, and signed the fake certificate. The grand jury convened two more times before handing up the indictment.\n\nAccording to the transcripts, the grand jury also heard testimony from a National Archives employee, a U.S. Postal Service inspector, investigators on the case and Mark Wlaschin, the deputy secretary of state for elections in Nevada.\n\nWlaschin, who is deeply involved in Nevada's electoral processes, described a \"level of disbelief\" when receiving the false slate of electors claiming Trump won Nevada. He said he reached out to the National Archives to let them know that the documents would likely be sent to them as well.\n\n\"It wasn't legal size or a package or a box or anything like that,\" he told the grand jury of the folder he received containing the documents. \"Inside it it had a number of documents. It looked like bizarro documents, frankly.\"\n\nWlaschin wrote a letter to Nevada GOP Chairman Michael McDonald, one of the indicted fake electors who communicated with Trump directly about the plot, upon receiving the false documents a day after the fake electors signed them.\n\n\"We are returning these documents as they do not meet the statutory requirement for filing with our office,\" he wrote.\n\nAll six fake electors in Nevada pleaded not guilty Monday. Their trial is scheduled for March."}
{"text": "# Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards gives final end-of-year address\nBy **SARA CLINE**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 8:22 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BATON ROUGE, La. (AP)** - Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards delivered his final end-of-the-year address Monday, highlighting some of his accomplishments in office over the past eight years and his vague plans for the future.\n\nEdwards, first elected in 2015 and currently the lone Democratic governor in the Deep South, was unable to run for reelection this year due to consecutive term limits and Republicans seized the opportunity to regain the governor's mansion.\n\nAmong his accomplishments during his two terms in office, Edwards touted the state's Medicaid expansion, infrastructure investments, the state's unemployment rate reaching record lows and helping take the state from a more than $1 billion budget shortfall to having surplus funds this past legislative session.\n\n\"A lot has happened over the last eight years that I have been governor,\" Edwards said during his address at the governor's mansion in Baton Rouge. \"I can tell you that by any metric you can come up with and objectively speaking, we are much better off today than the day I first took office.\"\n\nWhile Edwards said much has been accomplished over the past eight years, there are some goals that were not completed, including increasing the minimum age, adding exceptions to the state's near total abortion ban and eliminating the state's death penalty. Edwards said he is going to continue to talk about these issues on the way out of office in hopes of setting them up for success in the future - an uphill battle in the GOP-dominated Legislature.\n\nMonday's address was the second-to-last public event for the governor. His final public event will be his farewell address in his hometown of Amite on Jan. 3.\n\nWhen asked about life after he leaves office, Edwards - who before entering the political world had opened a civil law practice - said he plans to move back to Tangipahoa Parish with his wife and go \"back into private business.\"\n\nHe added that he is \"genuinely pulling for\" Gov.-elect Jeff Landry and wants him to do a \"wonderful job.\" Landry is a Republican who Edwards has repeatedly butted heads with over political issues.\n\nWhile Edwards said that he has \"no expectation or intention\" to run for political office in the future, he didn't completely rule it out.\n\n\"I don't leave here intending to run for office again, but I don't say 'never' because I don't know exactly what my situation is going to be. ... I also don't know what the situation is going to be with the state,\" Edwards said.\n\nLandry will be inaugurated Jan. 8."}
{"text": "# A group representing TikTok, Meta and X sues Utah over strict new limits on app use for minors\nBy **HANNAH SCHOENBAUM**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 8:09 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SALT LAKE CITY (AP)** - A trade group that represents TikTok and other major tech companies sued Utah on Monday over its first-in-the-nation laws requiring children and teens to obtain parental consent to use social media apps.\n\nTwo laws signed in March by Republican Gov. Spencer Cox will prohibit minors from using social media between the hours of 10:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. unless authorized by a parent - and require age verification to open and maintain a social media account in the state.\n\nThe restrictions are designed to protect children from targeted advertisements and addictive features that could negatively impact their mental health. Both laws take effect March 1, 2024.\n\nThe NetChoice trade group argues in its federal lawsuit that although Utah's regulations are well-intentioned, they are unconstitutional because they restrict access to public content, compromise data security and undermine parental rights.\n\n\"We are fighting to ensure that all Utahns can embrace digital tools without the forceful clutch of government control,\" said Chris Marchese, Director of the NetChoice Litigation Center. The trade association includes many of the world's leading social media companies, including TikTok, Snapchat parent company Snap Inc., Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta, and X, formerly known as Twitter.\n\nCox predicted there would be lawsuits challenging both bills but said he wasn't worried because there is a growing body of research that demonstrates how social media use can negatively impact the mental health outcomes of children.\n\n\"I'm not going to back down from a potential legal challenge when these companies are killing our kids,\" Cox argued earlier this year.\n\nThe governor's office did not immediately respond Monday to emails seeking comment on the lawsuit. The office of Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes will represent the state in court.\n\n\"The State of Utah is reviewing the lawsuit but remains intently focused on the goal of this legislation: Protecting young people from negative and harmful effects of social media use,\" spokesperson Richard Piatt said.\n\nIn another lawsuit filed by NetChoice, a federal judge temporarily blocked Arkansas from enforcing its new law requiring parental consent for minors to create new social media accounts. Similar laws in Texas and Louisiana have not yet taken effect.\n\nUtah's state laws impose steep fines for social media companies that do not comply with the age-verification rule, which NetChoice says may lead companies to collect an excess of personal information from users that could end up threatening their online safety. The state regulations prohibit companies from using any design or feature that causes a child to become addicted to their app.\n\nUnder the laws, parents will have access to their children's accounts and can more easily sue social media companies that they claim have caused their children harm. The laws shift the burden of proof from the families onto the social media companies, requiring them to demonstrate that their products were not harmful. Any social media platform with at least five million users is subject to the new regulations.\n\nThe lawsuit also challenges the state-imposed social media curfew, arguing that it could negatively impact children by cutting them off from the news, study tools and communications with their peers.\n\nNetChoice has asked a federal judge to halt the laws from taking effect while its case moves through the legal system."}
{"text": "# Fresh off reelection in Kentucky, Democratic Gov. Beshear presents budget plan in televised speech\nBy **BRUCE SCHREINER**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 9:19 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP)** - Looking to build on his resounding reelection victory, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear took his budget directly to the voters in a televised speech Monday night as he pressed for a massive boost in education funding, child care support and continued investments in infrastructure.\n\nThe holiday message - coming about two weeks before the Republican-dominated legislature reconvenes - represents the Democratic governor's effort to turn political capital into more of a mandate for his top policy priorities, especially in public education.\n\nBeshear also proposed pay raises for state workers and increased funding for public universities, economic development and foster care. He proposed hiring more state troopers and social workers, building more juvenile detention centers and investing more in regional airports.\n\nBeshear said the state can afford that and more, without tapping into its vast budget reserves. Tax collections have surged in Kentucky even as its individual income tax rate has been lowered.\n\n\"This budget aims to meet our families where they are, to address the concerns they worry most about,\" Beshear said in his address, less than a week after being sworn in for a second term. \"Look, Kentuckians don't wake up every morning thinking about Democrat or Republican, and neither does this budget.\"\n\nPublic education - including higher teacher pay and access to universal pre-K - ranked atop his wish list, as Beshear presented his blueprint for the state's next two-year budget in a statewide speech on Kentucky Educational Television.\n\nBeshear's November reelection win in GOP-leaning Kentucky sets him up to be on the national radar in coming years when the country looks for a new generation of leaders.\n\nThe speech's timing reflected the friction of divided government in Kentucky. Governors traditionally reveal their budget plans in a televised speech when the legislature is in session. This time, the governor opted for a pre-session speech after House Republicans preempted him in early 2022 by unveiling their budget plan before the governor presented his blueprint.\n\nIn his new two-year proposal, Beshear called for pumping more than $2.5 billion of additional funding into preschool through high school education. Topping his requests is an 11% pay raise for teachers and all other public school employees. He also recommended an 11% increase in the minimum teacher salary.\n\n\"It's simple, you cannot give a child every opportunity if they don't have a teacher in every classroom,\" Beshear said. \"We won't have enough bus drivers unless we pay a better wage. And we cannot remain competitive with other states if we don't pay our teachers and other employees what they're worth.\"\n\nThe investments would lift Kentucky to the middle of the pack nationally in average teacher starting pay and average teacher pay. The state now ranks near the bottom in both categories, he said.\n\nAnother Beshear priority is providing preschool for every 4-year-old in Kentucky. The governor's budget plan includes $172 million each year of the two-year budget to accomplish that. Similar proposals previously made no headway with lawmakers.\n\nThe program would extend preschool education to an estimated 34,000 additional 4-year-olds, he said.\n\n\"This will be an unprecedented investment for Kentucky's children,\" Beshear said. \"Imagine the difference it'll make when every single Kentucky child enters kindergarten prepared to learn.\"\n\nThe governor's plan also would increase per-pupil funding under the state's main funding formula. It would fully fund teacher pensions and student transportation.\n\nAnother key Beshear proposal calls for spending about $141 million over two years for child care assistance, in part to help cushion child care programs from the loss of pandemic-era federal subsidies.\n\nMeanwhile, his budget calls for a nearly 8% increase in the base budgets of public universities, which endured state budget cuts for several years.\n\nFor the state's workforce, Beshear proposed awarding a 6% across-the-board pay raise effective next July 1, followed by a 4% raise the next year.\n\nHe proposed using $500 million in state funds for water and wastewater projects statewide and $300 million for major transportation projects - with an eye toward widening the Mountain Parkway in eastern Kentucky and building an Ohio River bridge between western Kentucky and Indiana.\n\nTo build on the state's record pace of economic development, the governor proposed allocating another $200 million to help land new employers. Half the amount would go to prepare mega-development projects and the rest would aid county and regional site development.\n\nBeshear proposed building two female-only juvenile detention centers and to retrofit other detention centers.\n\nAs with any governor's proposal, the legislature will have final say on the budget - the state's main policy document. Republican House Speaker David Osborne said lawmakers have been preparing for the next budget since finishing their last one. Now they can delve into details of Beshear's rendition.\n\n\"While we are not aware of any of the governor's requests, we welcome his early submission and are hopeful that it includes information that we have asked for over the past several months,\" Osborne said.\n\nThe state's next two-year budget period starts next July 1."}
{"text": "# Mississippi local officials say human error and poor training led to election-day chaos\nBy **MICHAEL GOLDBERG**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 8:28 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**JACKSON, Miss. (AP)** - The county election officials under whose watch ballot shortages hampered voting in Mississippi's largest county said technical mishaps and insufficient training were to blame for election day chaos in November.\n\nAt a meeting with representatives from a coalition of statewide and national civil rights organizations, Hinds County election commissioners said Monday that their mishaps caused several polling locations in Hinds County to run out of ballots. They admitted to sharing the wrong voter data with the company they contracted to print ballots, which directly led to the ballot shortages.\n\n\"Complete human error. I hate that the citizens of Hinds County had to experience that,\" said Commissioner RaToya Gilmer McGee.\n\nBut the commissioners, all Democrats, also pointed to what they said was inadequate guidance from Secretary of State Michael Watson, a Republican. The commissioners said they had to rely on a training manual written for election officials across the state.\n\n\"If there are 82 counties in the state of Mississippi, there are 82 ways to do things. And so there is no streamlining, there are no checks and balances, there are no policies and procedures,\" Gilmer McGee said.\n\nIn Mississippi's Nov. 7 general election, up to nine voting precincts in Hinds County ran out of ballots. People waited up to two hours to vote as election officials made frantic trips to office supply stores so they could print ballots and deliver them to polling places. Voting groups and political parties filed legal papers that aimed to keep polls open later or prevent them from staying open.\n\nHinds County is majority Black and a Democratic stronghold. It's unclear how many people left without voting and the political affiliations of the most affected voters.\n\nWhen Hinds County resident Monica Taylor got to the polls, someone told her there were no ballots. She asked when there would be ballots, but nobody knew.\n\n\"My grandfather is in the civil rights museum. This is what he fought for. So I'm not a person you can tell 'we don't have any ballots' and think I'm going to walk away,\" Taylor said at a public meeting last week. \"I'm not going to walk away.\"\n\nWith the 2024 election less than a year away, the situation in Hinds County has drawn the attention of the congressional committee with direct oversight over federal elections and civil rights leaders.\n\nDerrick Johnson, the national president of the NAACP who attended college in Jackson, said he hoped the episode wouldn't depress voter turnout in future elections.\n\n\"Voting is the tool to ensure one's voice is heard in this country. It is our currency in this democracy,\" Johnson said in an interview. \"You don't quit, you continue to move forward to make sure this democracy works.\"\n\nThe commissioners said they didn't receive enough specific guidance on how to print the right number of ballots for the populous county's \"split precincts,\" polling locations where voters use different ballots based on their residential address.\n\nIn a statement after the meeting, Secretary of State Michael Watson said his office was open to providing more training, but that Hinds County was unique in its election management troubles.\n\n\"We are always happy to answer questions and will gladly spend time training those who need additional help. Heading into the 2023 election, all 82 counties received the same training and resources from our office,\" Watson told The Associated Press. \"No other county experienced the issues we saw in Hinds County.\"\n\nThe five-member Commission agreed to Monday's meeting after the civil rights coalition said they had failed to provide enough information about what went wrong on election day.\n\nAfter the meeting, Leah Wong, an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said she hoped the Commission would agree to future meetings ahead of the 2024 election.\n\n\"Clearly, there are a lot more things to troubleshoot to be better for 2024. We are looking forward to working with them,\" Wong said.\n\nHarya Tarekegn, policy director for the non-profit legal group Mississippi Center for Justice, said Hinds County could have smoother elections with the right policy changes.\n\n\"That's what people fought for during the Civil Rights Movement, that's what people continue to fight for,\" Tarekegn said. \"Our ancestors fought for it, we continue to fight for it, and there will be a day when Mississippi runs the best elections. When Hinds County runs the best elections.\""}
{"text": "# Colorado releases first 5 wolves in reintroduction plan approved by voters to chagrin of ranchers\nBy **JESSE BEDAYN**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 10:35 PM EST\n\n---\n\nGRAND COUNTY, Colorado (AP) - Somewhere on a remote mountainside in Colorado's Rockies, a latch flipped on a crate and a wolf bounded out, heading toward the tree line. Then it stopped short.\n\nFor a moment, the young female looked back at it's audience of roughly 45 people who stared on in reverential silence. Then she disappeared into the forest.\n\nShe was one of five gray wolves Wildlife officials released in a remote part of Colorado's Rocky Mountains on Monday to kick off a voter-approved reintroduction program that was embraced in the state's mostly Democratic urban corridor but staunchly opposed in conservative rural areas where ranchers worry about attacks on livestock.\n\nThe wolves were set free from crates in a Grand County location that state officials kept undisclosed to protect the predators.\n\nIt marked the start of the most ambitious wolf reintroduction effort in the U.S. in almost three decades and a sharp departure from aggressive efforts by Republican-led states to cull wolf packs. A judge on Friday night had denied a request from the state's cattle industry for a temporary delay to the release.\n\nThe group watched as the first two wolves - 1-year-old male and female siblings with gray fur - were set free. The male bolted up the golden grass, running partially sideways to keep an eye on everyone behind, then turning left into the trees.\n\nThe crowd watched in silence, then some hugged each other and low murmurs started up.\n\nWhen the latch on the second crate flipped, the wolf didn't budge. Everyone waited as Colorado Gov. Jared Polis peeked into the cage.\n\nAfter roughly 30 seconds, those around the crates stepped back, giving the wolf space. The female slowly rose then bounded up a snowy divot in the dirt road, looking back before disappearing into an aspen grove.\n\nWolves \"have larger-than-life places in human imagination, in the stories we all grew up with and tell each other,\" said Polis. \"To see them in their natural habitat, and turn around look curiously at us ... is really, really a special moment that I will treasure for my entire life.\"\n\nThe other three wolves released were another pair of 1-year-old male and female siblings, as well a 2-year-old male. The wolves were all caught in Oregon on Sunday.\n\nWhen the final crate opened, the 2-year-old male with a black coat immediately darted out, making a sharp right past onlookers and dashing into the trees. He didn't look back once.\n\nWhen it all ended, a small round of applause broke out.\n\nColorado officials anticipate releasing 30 to 50 wolves within the next five years in hopes the program starts to fill in one of the last remaining major gaps in the western U.S. for the species. Gray wolves historically ranged from northern Canada to the desert southwest.\n\nThe carnivores' planned release in Colorado, voted for in a 2020 ballot measure, has sharpened divides between rural and urban residents. City and suburb dwellers largely voted to reintroduce the apex predators into the rural areas where prey can include livestock that help drive local economies and big game such as elk that are prized by hunters.\n\nThe reintroduction, starting with the release of up to 10 wolves in coming months, emerged as a political wedge issue when GOP-dominated Wyoming, Idaho and Montana refused to share their wolves for the effort. Colorado officials ultimately turned to another Democratic state - Oregon - to secure wolves.\n\nExcited wildlife advocates have started a wolf-naming contest, but ranchers in the Rocky Mountains where the releases will occur are anxious. They've seen glimpses of what the future could hold as a handful of wolves that wandered down from Wyoming over the past two years killed livestock.\n\nThe fear is such attacks will worsen, adding to a spate of perceived assaults on western Colorado's rural communities as the state's liberal leaders embrace clean energy and tourism, eclipsing economic mainstays such as fossil fuel extraction and agriculture.\n\nTo allay livestock industry fears, ranchers who lose livestock or herding and guard animals to wolf attacks will be paid fair market value, up to $15,000 per animal.\n\nHunting groups also have raised concerns that wolves will reduce the size of elk herds and other big game animals that the predators eat.\n\nMeanwhile, Colorado residents who backed the reintroduction are going to have to get used to wildlife agents killing wolves that prey on livestock.\n\nSome wolves were already killed when they crossed from Colorado into Wyoming, which has a \"predatory\" zone for wolves covering most of the state in which they can be shot on sight.\n\nJoanna Lambert, professor of wildlife ecology and conservation biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said she lost her breath when she saw the wolves gallop into the woods on Monday.\n\nFor years, Lambert and wolf advocates have been working to get wolf \"paws on the ground\" and \"all the sudden, it happened.\"\n\n\"This is a moment of rewilding,\" Lambert said, \"of doing something to stave off the biodiversity extinction crisis we are living in.\""}
{"text": "# Court date set in Hunter Biden's California tax case\nDecember 18, 2023. 7:07 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Hunter Biden is set to appear in a California courtroom next month on nine tax counts, the latest fallout from a special counsel investigation into his business affairs.\n\nPresident Joe Biden's son is scheduled for an initial appearance at an arraignment in Los Angeles on Jan. 11, according to a federal court calendar posted Monday.\n\nHe is facing three felony and six misdemeanor counts, including filing a false return, tax evasion, failure to file and failure to pay. Prosecutors say he spent millions on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills.\n\nHis defense attorney has said that prosecutors bowed to political pressure in bringing the case and Hunter Biden was targeted because of his father's political position.\n\nThe cases come after the implosion of a plea deal involving tax and gun counts that would have spared him jail time. Instead, Hunter Biden is now also charged with federal firearms courts in Delaware alleging he broke laws against drug users having guns in 2018.\n\nThe cases are now on track to possible trial as his father campaigns for reelection."}
{"text": "# Biggest solar flare in years temporarily disrupts radio signals on Earth\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 3:00 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - A NASA telescope has captured the biggest solar flare in years, which temporarily knocked out radio communication on Earth.\n\nThe sun spit out the huge flare along with a massive radio burst on Thursday, causing two hours of radio interference in parts of the U.S. and other sunlit parts of the world. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it was the biggest flare since 2017, and the radio burst was extensive, affecting even the higher frequencies.\n\nThe combination resulted in one of the largest solar radio events ever recorded, Shawn Dahl of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center said Friday.\n\nMultiple pilots reported communication disruptions, with the impact felt across the country, according to the space weather forecasting center. Scientists are now monitoring this sunspot region and analyzing for a possible outburst of plasma from the sun, also known as a coronal mass ejection, that might be directed at Earth. This could result in a geomagnetic storm, Dahl said, which in turn could disrupt high-frequency radio signals at the higher latitudes and trigger northern lights, or auroras, in the coming days.\n\nThe eruption occurred in the far northwest section of the sun. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught the action in extreme ultraviolet light, recording the powerful surge of energy as a huge, bright flash. Launched in 2010, the spacecraft is in an extremely high orbit around Earth, where it constantly monitors the sun.\n\nThe sun is nearing the peak of its 11-year or so solar cycle. Maximum sunspot activity is predicted for 2025."}
{"text": "# Geminids meteor shower peaks this week under dark skies\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nDecember 13, 2023. 2:38 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - The year's best meteor shower, the Geminids, peaks this week. Skygazers may see as many as one or even two a minute streaking across dark skies.\n\nThe meteors will reach their frenzy Thursday. But Wednesday night should provide a cosmic spectacle as well.\n\nThis week's new moon will make for prime viewing anywhere in the world where skies are clear and in spots without light pollution.\n\nNASA urged observers to look everywhere in the sky since meteors don't come from any particular direction. Between 60 and 120 meteors are expected every hour at peak time, weather permitting.\n\nNASA meteoroid expert Bill Cooke said he loves that the Geminids have a greenish hue as they speed across the sky and burn up. Most meteors appear to be colorless or white depending on their chemical makeup. Green usually comes from oxygen, magnesium and nickel.\n\nMost meteor showers originate from comets. But the Geminids come from the sun-orbiting asteroid 3200 Phaethon. Either way, when Earth passes through these leftover bits of comets or asteroids, the fragments encounter Earth's atmosphere and put on quite the show."}
{"text": "# Asteroid will pass in front of bright star Betelgeuse to produce a rare eclipse visible to millions\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nDecember 8, 2023. 3:00 AM EST\n\n---\n\nCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - One of the biggest and brightest stars in the night sky will momentarily vanish as an asteroid passes in front of it to produce a one-of-a-kind eclipse.\n\nThe rare and fleeting spectacle, late Monday into early Tuesday, should be visible to millions of people along a narrow path stretching from central Asia's Tajikistan and Armenia, across Turkey, Greece, Italy and Spain, to Miami and the Florida Keys and finally, to parts of Mexico.\n\nThe star is Betelgeuse, a red supergiant in the constellation Orion. The asteroid is Leona, a slowly rotating, oblong space rock in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.\n\nAstronomers hope to learn more about Betelgeuse and Leona through the eclipse, which is expected to last no more than 15 seconds. By observing an eclipse of a much dimmer star by Leona in September, a Spanish-led team recently estimated the asteroid to be about 34 miles wide and 50 miles long (55 kilometers wide and 80 kilometers long).\n\nThere are lingering uncertainties over those predictions as well as the size of the star and its expansive atmosphere. It's unclear if the asteroid will obscure the entire star, producing a total eclipse. Rather, the result could be a \"ring of fire\" eclipse with a miniscule blazing border around the star. If it's a total eclipse, astronomers aren't sure how many seconds the star will disappear completely, perhaps up to 10 seconds.\n\n\"Which scenario we will see is uncertain, making the event even more intriguing,\" said astronomer Gianluca Masa, founder of the Virtual Telescope Project, which will provide a live webcast from Italy.\n\nAn estimated 700 light-years away, Betelgeuse is visible with the naked eye. Binoculars and small telescopes will enhance the view. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles.\n\nBetelgeuse is thousands of times brighter than our sun and some 700 times bigger. It's so huge that if it replaced our sun, it would stretch beyond Jupiter, according to NASA.\n\nAt just 10 million years old, Betelgeuse is considerably younger than the 4.6 billion-year-old sun. Scientists expect Betelgeuse to be short-lived, given its mass and the speed at which it's burning through its material.\n\nAfter countless centuries of varying brightness, Betelgeuse dimmed dramatically in 2019 when a huge bunch of surface material was ejected into space. The resulting dust cloud temporarily blocked the starlight, NASA said, and within a half year, Betelgeuse was as bright as before.\n\nScientists expect Betelgeuse to go supernova in a violent explosion within 100,000 years."}
{"text": "# Penguin parents sleep for just a few seconds at a time to guard newborns, study shows\nBy **CHRISTINA LARSON**  \nNovember 30, 2023. 2:09 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - It's a challenge for all new parents: Getting enough sleep while keeping a close eye on their newborns. For some penguins, it means thousands of mini-catnaps a day, researchers discovered.\n\nChinstrap penguins in Antarctica need to guard their eggs and chicks around-the-clock in crowded, noisy colonies. So they nod off thousands of times each day - but only for about four seconds at a time - to stay vigilant, the researchers reported Thursday in the journal Science.\n\nThese short \"microsleeps,\" totaling around 11 hours per day, appear to be enough to keep the parents going for weeks.\n\n\"These penguins look like drowsy drivers, blinking their eyes open and shut, and they do it 24/7 for several weeks at a time,\" said Niels Rattenborg, a sleep researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence in Germany and co-author of the new study.\n\n\"What's surprising is that they're able to function OK and successfully raise their young,\" he said.\n\nChinstrap penguins, named for the thin line of black facial feathers resembling a chinstrap, usually lay their eggs in pebble nests in November. As with many other kinds of penguins, mated pairs share parenting duties. One parent tends to the eggs and chicks alone while the other goes off fishing for family meals.\n\nWhile the adults don't face many natural predators in the breeding season, large birds called brown skuas prey on eggs and small fuzzy gray chicks. Other adults may also try to steal pebbles from nests. So the devoted parents must be always on guard.\n\nFor the first time, the scientists tracked the sleeping behavior of chinstrap penguins in an Antarctic breeding colony by attaching sensors that measure brain waves. They collected data on 14 adults over 11 days on King George Island off the coast of Antarctica.\n\nThe idea for the study was hatched when Won Young Lee, a biologist at the Korean Polar Research Institute, noticed breeding penguins frequently blinking their eyes and apparently nodding off during his long days of field observations. But the team needed to record brain waves to confirm they were sleeping.\n\n\"For these penguins, microsleeps have some restorative functions - if not, they could not endure,\" he said.\n\nThe researchers did not collect sleep data outside the breeding season, but they hypothesize that the penguins may sleep in longer intervals at other times of the year.\n\n\"We don't know yet if the benefits of microsleep are the same as for long consolidated sleep,\" said Paul-Antoine Libourel, a co-author and sleep researcher at the Neuroscience Research Center of Lyon in France. They also don't know if other penguin species sleep in a similar fragmented fashion.\n\nScientists have documented a few other animals with special sleeping adaptions. While flying, frigatebirds can sleep one half of their brain at a time, and northern elephant seals can nap for 10 or 15 minutes at a time during deep dives, for example.\n\nBut chinstrap penguin microsleeps appear to be a new extreme, researchers say.\n\n\"Penguins live in a high-stress environment. They breed in crowded colonies, and all their predators are there at the same time,\" said Daniel Paranhos Zitterbart, who studies penguins at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and was not involved in the study.\n\nMicrosleeping is \"an amazing adaptation\" to enable near constant vigilance, he said."}
{"text": "# After years of decline, the Biden administration says environmental enforcement is on the upswing\nBy **MATTHEW DALY** and **MICHAEL PHILLIS**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 6:30 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - The Environmental Protection Agency conducted more on-site inspections of polluting industrial sites this year than any time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the agency said Monday as it seeks to reinvigorate its enforcement program after more than a decade of budget cuts.\n\nEPA opened nearly 200 criminal investigations this year, a 70% increase over 2022, the agency said in a report. It completed nearly 1,800 civil settlements, a 9% increase over 2022. More than half the inspections and settlements involved poor and disadvantaged communities long scarred by pollution, the agency said, reflecting the Biden administration's emphasis on environmental justice issues.\n\nBut some parts of EPA's enforcement efforts still lag. In 2023, for example, it charged 102 defendants criminally. The Trump administration charged more every year, although most years only marginally. Nearly 200 defendants were charged in the latter years of the Obama administration. There is, however, an uptick in the number of criminal cases they've opened recently.\n\nEPA said its enforcement and compliance work have resulted in the reduction, treatment, elimination or minimization of 1.84 billion pounds of pollutants, and required violators to pay over $704 million in penalties, fines, and restitution. The dollar amount is a 57% increase over 2022.\n\nThe increase comes as EPA's enforcement staff remains far below its peak of more than a decade ago, even as officials move to add about 300 positions. EPA eliminated approximately 950 enforcement positions following budget cuts imposed since 2011.\n\nThe 2011 budget and debt deal, which included automatic spending cuts, \"hit all agencies hard, but hit EPA especially hard,\" said David Uhlmann, EPA's assistant administrator for enforcement. Enforcement efforts were further hampered by an inability to complete many on-site inspections during the pandemic, which began nearly four years ago, and a series of actions by former President Donald Trump to roll back environmental regulations.\n\n\"While our work is not complete, EPA's revitalized enforcement program is making a positive difference in communities across America, particularly for people living in underserved and overburdened communities that for too long have borne the brunt of pollution,\" Uhlmann said in a statement.\n\nUhlmann, who was confirmed as EPA's enforcement chief in July after a two-year delay, said in an interview that enforcement efforts are \"still a struggle\" at the environmental agency.\n\n\"We can't replace a decade of staff cuts in one year, but I feel good that enforcement levels are back up to where they were prior to the pandemic,\" he said.\n\n\"EPA has increased enforcement activities across the nation,\" he said. \"Polluters who broke the law are being brought to justice.\"\n\nEPA sued Norfolk Southern railway over a train derailment in eastern Ohio that spilled hazardous chemicals and forced thousands of people to evacuate. Federal officials want to ensure the company pays for the cleanup.\n\nThe agency also sued Denka Performance Elastomer LLC, arguing that its petrochemical operations in southern Louisiana posed an unacceptable cancer risk to the mostly-Black community nearby. The EPA has demanded that the company reduce toxic emissions from its plant that makes synthetic rubber.\n\nThe Biden administration also went to court to try to help the troubled Jackson, Mississippi, water system, which suffered a near-total collapse in 2022 after a heavy rainstorm.\n\nIn May, the EPA reached a deal with a BP subsidiary that required the company to reduce harmful pollution from its refinery in Indiana. The company also agreed to pay a $40 million penalty under the Clean Air Act.\n\nThe agency has set climate change and environmental justice as top priorities for enforcement, along with dangerous chemicals known as PFAS that are linked to a broad range of health issues, coal ash contamination, safe drinking water, prevention of toxic air pollution and chemical accident prevention, Uhlmann said.\n\nUhlmann, a longtime environmental law professor at the University of Michigan Law School, declined to give a letter grade to the agency's overall efforts. But given budget constraints and other issues, his staff was \"hitting it out of the park\" over the past year, he said.\n\nEric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project and former head of the EPA's Office of Civil Enforcement, said he'd give the administration a \"B\" grade. They've increased enforcement and made some real improvements, but more is needed, he said.\n\n\"I have not seen a breakthrough in terms of the enforcement actions. You are talking about a pretty low bar when you start with Trump as a point of comparison,\" he said.\n\nDemocrats and environmental groups blasted the Trump administration's enforcement efforts, especially during COVID-19, with one senator saying a \"pandemic of pollution\" had been released.\n\nThe EPA under Trump weakened regulations dealing with fuel efficiency and mercury emissions and waived enforcement on a range of public health and environmental mandates, saying industries could have trouble complying with them during the pandemic. The rollbacks were among dozens of actions by the EPA to ease requirements on industry to monitor, report and reduce toxic pollutants, heavy metals and climate-damaging fossil fuel emissions.\n\nDespite complaints from the oil and gas industry about a suite of rules aimed at methane and other greenhouse gases, Uhlmann said EPA was \"committed to fair and robust enforcement of the law. We're not looking to put anybody out of business.\"\n\nEPA said it has obtained approximately $1.1 billion from so-called Superfund cleanup and cost recovery settlement agreements. This brings the total value of Superfund enforcement actions to $50 billion since the program began in 1980. More than 3,900 Superfund sites have been identified across the country."}
{"text": "# Book Review: 'Reading Jane: A Daughter's Memoir,' by Susannah Kennedy\nBy **ANITA SNOW**  \nSeptember 5th, 2023. 12:53 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n\"Reading Jane: A Daughter's Memoir,\" by Susannah Kennedy (Sibylline Press)\n\nWhen her mother Jane, a healthy 75-year-old, shockingly decides to take her own life, Susannah Kennedy is left reeling with innumerable questions. There are also 45 years worth of diaries that contain some answers and ultimately reveal some surprising secrets.\n\nThis elegantly written memoir by Kennedy, a former newspaper reporter-turned-anthropologist, opens a window into the complicated relationships that can exist between mothers and daughters, especially when the mother is a narcissistic single parent.\n\nJane is a charismatic woman who had a successful post-divorce career teaching in the inner city. She is widely liked and admired but has a fraught relationship with her daughter, Susannah, especially after the girl reaches puberty and becomes a rival for male attention.\n\nOne of the constants in the pair's lives are Jane's diaries, each one marked by the year it was filled with her remarks about every day over four and a half decades.\n\nThe notebooks aroused the young daughter's curiosity, but Jane never shared their contents, in the same way she kept many of her feelings under lock and key.\n\n\"Mommy, can I read your diaries?\" the daughter sometimes asked.\n\n\"Someday,\" the mother replied. Then, \"Maybe.\" Then, \"Probably never.\"\n\nKennedy never knows for sure if her mother intended for her to read the journals, to be Jane's confessor or interpreter. But they were all there stuffed into an Asian chest of intricately carved wood in her mother's San Francisco apartment after the suicide.\n\nSo after returning to the U.S. in the wake of her mother's death with her German husband and three children, Kennedy reads all of the volumes over a year. She learns more about her late father, a violent alcoholic who often beat her mother.\n\nKennedy also learns more about her mother's younger disabled sister, Helen, who died at age 4, shaping forever Jane's feelings about life and dying.\n\n\"No wonder I take such comfort in the idea of death,\" her mother wrote in one diary entry on March 4, 2008. \"But with Helen, long years in a vegetative state awaited us, coloring my childhood irreversibly and irrevocably informing my old age.\"\n\nKennedy also gets a look at her mother's intense loneliness through her entries about a longstanding affair with a married man and her refusal to let him leave his wife.\n\nThere are stunning revelations about the death of Jane's mother, who had been undergoing radiation for lymphoma.\n\nAnd there was the surprising envy Jane demonstrated for her teenage daughter's blossoming beauty during their glamorous summer vacations in Italy. Later, there was harsh criticism as her daughter became a mother herself, no longer the svelte blonde who turned every head in the room.\n\n\"As I read the diaries, I find entry after entry complaining about me, almost as if she were obsessed. Why was she so concerned with how I looked? So invasive in her judgements?\" the daughter writes.\n\nJane's obsession with death was well known to those who loved her, but they nevertheless thought she would live well into her nineties.\n\n\"We figured she would nag on about suicide as a safety net from illness because it made her feel better to imagine control over the ending,\" Kennedy writes. \"We didn't think she would actually do it. \"\n\nBut her mother did, choosing a San Francisco motel for her last moments and leaving her papers in order, down to the self-written obituary.\n\nReading Jane's diaries afterward brings Kennedy closer to her mother, more sympathetic to her circumstances so many years before, and more cognizant that our parents will always be with us.\n\nWe don't ever \"get over\" them, she learns. We absorb them and move on."}
{"text": "# Powerful quake in Morocco kills more than 600 people and damages historic buildings in Marrakech\nBy **SAM METZ** and **MOSA'AB ELSHAMY**  \nSeptember 9th, 2023. 3:44 AM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**RABAT, Morocco (AP)** - A rare, powerful earthquake struck Morocco late Friday night, killing hundreds of people and damaging buildings from villages in the Atlas Mountains to the historic city of Marrakech.\n\nMorocco's Interior Ministry said Saturday morning that at least 632 people had died, mostly in Marrakech and five provinces near the quake's epicenter. Another 329 people were injured. Casualty figures were expected to rise more as the search continues and as rescuers reach remote areas.\n\nMoroccan television showed scenes from the aftermath, as many stayed outside fearing aftershocks.\n\nAnxious families stood in streets or huddled on the pavement, some carrying children, blankets or other belongings.\n\nEmergency workers looked for survivors in the rubble of buildings, their reflective yellow vests illuminating the nighttime landscape. The quake ripped a gaping hole in a home, and a car was nearly buried by the chunks of a collapsed building.\n\nBaskets, buckets and clothing could be seen amid scattered stones in the remains of one building.\n\nMoroccan media reported that the 12th century Koutoubia Mosque in Marrakech, one of the city's most famed landmarks, suffered damage, but the extent was not immediately clear. Its 69-meter (226-foot) minaret is known as the \"roof of Marrakech.\"\n\nMoroccans also posted videos showing damage to parts of the famous red walls that surround the old city in Marrakech, a UNESCO World Heritage site.\n\nThe head of a town near the earthquake's epicenter told Moroccan news site 2M that several homes in nearby towns had partly or totally collapsed, and electricity and roads were cut off in some places.\n\nAbderrahim Ait Daoud, head of the town of Talat N'Yaaqoub, said authorities are working to clear roads in Al Haouz Province to allow passage for ambulances and aid to populations affected, but said large distances between mountain villages mean it will take time to learn the extent of the damage.\n\nLocal media reported that roads leading to the mountain region around the epicenter were jammed with vehicles and blocked with collapsed rocks, slowing rescue efforts.\n\nAl Haouz is known for scenic High Atlas landscapes and Amazigh villages built into mountainsides.\n\nMessages of support began to roll in from around the world on Saturday. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz posted condolences on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, currently hosting the Group of 20 summit of the world's largest economies, wrote that \"India is ready to offer all possible assistance to Morocco in this difficult time.\"\n\nA U.N. spokesperson said that \"the United Nations is ready to assist the government of Morocco in its efforts to assist the impacted population.\"\n\nThe U.S. Geological Survey said the quake had a preliminary magnitude of 6.8 when it hit at 11:11 p.m. (2211 GMT), with shaking that lasted several seconds. The U.S. agency reported a magnitude-4.9 aftershock hit 19 minutes later.\n\nThe epicenter of Friday's tremor was near the town of Ighil in Al Haouz Province, roughly 70 kilometers (43.5 miles) south of Marrakech.\n\nThe USGS said the epicenter was 18 kilometers (11 miles) below the Earth's surface, while Morocco's seismic agency put it at 11 kilometers (7 miles) down. Such shallow quakes are more dangerous.\n\nInitial reports suggest damages and deaths were severe throughout the Marrakech-Safi region, which is made up of a mixture of cities, small towns and open land and 4,520,569 call home, according to state figures.\n\nEarthquakes are relatively rare in North Africa. Lahcen Mhanni, Head of the Seismic Monitoring and Warning Department at the National Institute of Geophysics, told 2M TV that the earthquake was the strongest ever recorded in the mountain region.\n\nIn 1960, a magnitude 5.8 tremor struck near the Moroccan city of Agadir and caused thousands of deaths.\n\nThe Agadir quake prompted changes in construction rules in Morocco, but many buildings, especially rural homes, are not built to withstand such tremors.\n\nIn 2004, a 6.4 magnitude earthquake near the Mediterranean coastal city of Al Hoceima left more than 600 dead.\n\nFriday's quake was felt as far away as Portugal and Algeria, according to the Portuguese Institute for Sea and Atmosphere and Algeria's Civil Defense agency, which oversees emergency response."}
{"text": "# Phoenix is on the cusp of a new heat record after a 53rd day reaching at least 110 degrees this year\nSeptember 8th, 2023. 7:29 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**PHOENIX (AP)** - Phoenix is on the cusp of yet another heat record this summer after an additional day of 110-degree weather.\n\nThe National Weather Service said the desert city on Friday saw 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 Celsius) for the 53rd day this year, tying it with the record set in 2020. If Phoenix reaches 110 degrees or more as expected Saturday, it would mark a record 54 days in one year.\n\nAn extreme heat warning is in effect for the entire weekend, with temperatures forecast as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit (45 Celsius) on Saturday and 111 degrees Fahrenheit (43.8 Celsius) on Sunday. A high of 109 degrees Fahrenheit (42.7 Celsius) is forecast for Monday.\n\nIn July, Phoenix set a record with a 31-day streak of highs at or above 110 degrees. The previous record was 18 straight days, set in 1974.\n\nIt was part of a historic heat wave that stretched from Texas across New Mexico and Arizona and into California's desert.\n\nPhoenix has now seen over 100 days with 100-degree Fahrenheit-plus (37.7 C-plus) temperatures this year as of Wednesday. That's in line with the average of 111 days hitting triple digits every year between 1991 and 2020.\n\nMaricopa County, home to Phoenix and the most populous county in Arizona, also appears headed toward an annual record for heat-associated deaths.\n\nCounty public health officials said Wednesday that there have been 194 heat-associated deaths confirmed for this year as of Sept. 2. An additional 351 are under investigation.\n\nMaricopa County confirmed 425 heat-related deaths in 2022."}
{"text": "# Appeals court scales back order squelching Biden administration contact with social media platforms\nBy **KEVIN McGILL**  \nSeptember 8th, 2023. 8:19 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**NEW ORLEANS (AP)** - A federal appeals court Friday significantly whittled down a lower court's order curbing Biden administration communications with social media companies over controversial content about COVID-19 and other issues.\n\nThe 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans on Friday said the White House, the Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and the FBI cannot \"coerce\" social media platforms to take down posts the government doesn't like.\n\nBut the court threw out broader language in an order that a Louisiana-based federal judge issued on July 4 that effectively blocked multiple government agencies from contacting platforms such as Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) to urge that content be taken down.\n\nEven the appeals court's softened order doesn't take effect immediately. The administration has 10 days to seek a Supreme Court review.\n\nFriday evening's ruling came in a lawsuit filed in northeast Louisiana that accused administration officials of coercing platforms to take down content under the threat of possible antitrust actions or changes to federal law shielding them from lawsuits over their users' posts.\n\nCOVID-19 vaccines, the FBI's handling of a laptop that belonged to President Joe Biden's son, Hunter, and election fraud allegations were among the topics spotlighted in the lawsuit, which accused the administration of using threats of regulatory action to squelch conservative points of view.\n\nThe states of Missouri and Louisiana filed the lawsuit, along with a conservative website owner and four people opposed to the administration's COVID-19 policy.\n\nIn a posting on X, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry called Friday's ruling \"a major win against censorship.\"\n\nIn an unsigned 75-page opinion, three 5th Circuit judges agreed with the plaintiffs that the administration \"ran afoul of the First Amendment\" by at times threatening social media platforms with antitrust action or changes to law protecting them from liability.\n\nBut the court excised much of U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty's broad July 4 ruling, saying mere encouragement to take down content doesn't always cross a constitutional line.\n\n\"As an initial matter, it is axiomatic that an injunction is overbroad if it enjoins a defendant from engaging in legal conduct. Nine of the preliminary injunction's ten prohibitions risk doing just that. Moreover, many of the provisions are duplicative of each other and thus unnecessary,\" Friday's ruling said.\n\nThe ruling also removed some agencies from the order: the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency and the State Department.\n\nThe case was heard by judges Jennifer Walker Elrod and Edith Brown Clement, nominated to the court by former President George W. Bush; and Don Willett, nominated by former President Donald Trump. Doughty was nominated to the federal bench by Trump."}
{"text": "# Powerful quake in Morocco kills more than 2,000 people and damages historic buildings in Marrakech\nBy **SAM METZ** and **MOSA'AB ELSHAMY**  \nSeptember 9th, 2023. 6:03 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**MARRAKECH, Morocco (AP)** - A rare, powerful earthquake struck Morocco, sending people racing from their beds into the streets and toppling buildings in mountainous villages and ancient cities not built to withstand such force. More than 2,000 people were killed, and the toll was expected to rise as rescuers struggled Saturday to reach hard-hit remote areas.\n\nThe magnitude 6.8 quake, the biggest to hit the North African country in 120 years, sent people fleeing their homes in terror and disbelief late Friday. One man said dishes and wall hangings began raining down, and people were knocked off their feet. The quake brought down walls made from stone and masonry, covering whole communities with rubble.\n\nThe devastation gripped each town along the High Atlas' steep and winding switchbacks in similar ways: homes folding in on themselves and mothers and fathers crying as boys and helmet-clad police carried the dead through the streets.\n\nRemote villages like those in the drought-stricken Ouargane Valley were largely cut off from the world when they lost electricity and cellphone service. By midday, people were outside mourning neighbors, surveying the damage on their camera phones and telling one another \"May God save us.\"\n\nHamid Idsalah, a 72-year-old mountain guide, said he and many others remained alive but had little future to look forward to. That was true in the short-term - with remnants of his kitchen reduced to dust - and in the long-term - where he and many others lack the financial means to rebound.\n\n\"I can't reconstruct my home. I don't know what I'll do. Still, I'm alive, so I'll wait,\" he said as he walked through the desert oasis town overlooking red rock hills, packs of goats and a glistening salt lake. \"I feel heartsick.\"\n\nIn historic Marrakech, people could be seen on state TV clustering in the streets , afraid to go back inside buildings that might still be unstable. The city's famous Koutoubia Mosque, built in the 12th century, was damaged, but the extent was not immediately clear. Its 69-meter (226-foot) minaret is known as the \"roof of Marrakech.\" Moroccans also posted videos showing damage to parts of the famous red walls that surround the old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site.\n\nAt least 2,012 people died in the quake, mostly in Marrakech and five provinces near the epicenter, Morocco's Interior Ministry reported Saturday night. At least 2,059 more people were injured - 1,404 critically - the ministry said.\n\n\"The problem is that where destructive earthquakes are rare, buildings are simply not constructed robustly enough to cope with strong ground shaking, so many collapse, resulting in high casualties,\" said Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London.\n\nIn a sign of the huge scale of the disaster, Morocco's King Mohammed VI ordered the armed forces to mobilize specialized search and rescue teams and a surgical field hospital, according to a statement from the military.\n\nThe king said he would visit the hardest hit area Saturday, but despite an outpouring of offers of help from around the world, the Moroccan government had not formally asked for assistance, a step required before outside rescue crews could deploy.\n\nThe epicenter of Friday's tremor was near the town of Ighil in Al Haouz Province, roughly 70 kilometers (44 miles) south of Marrakech. Al Haouz is known for scenic villages and valleys tucked in the High Atlas Mountains.\n\nPolice, emergency vehicles and people fleeing in shared taxis spent hours traversing unpaved roads through the High Atlas in stop-and-go traffic, often exiting their cars to help clear giant boulders from routes known to be rugged and difficult long before Friday's earthquake. In Ijjoukak, a village in the area surrounding Toubkal, North Africa's tallest peak, residents estimated nearly 200 buildings had been leveled.\n\nCouch cushions, electric cords and grapes were strewn in giant piles of rubble alongside dead sheep, houseplants and doors wedged between boulders. Relatives from the town and those who had driven from major cities cried while they wondered who to call as they reckoned with the aftermath and a lack of food and water.\n\n\"It felt like a bomb went off,\" 34-year-old Mohamed Messi said.\n\nMorocco will observe three days of national mourning with flags at half-staff on all public facilities, the official news agency MAP reported.\n\nWorld leaders offered to send in aid or rescue crews as condolences poured in from countries in Europe, the Middle East and the Group of 20 summit in India. The president of Turkey, which lost tens of thousands of people in a massive earthquake earlier this year, was among those proposing assistance. France and Germany, with large populations of people of Moroccan origin, also offered to help, and the leaders of both Ukraine and Russia expressed support for Moroccans.\n\nIn an exceptional move, neighboring rival Algeria offered to open its airspace to allow eventual humanitarian aid or medical evacuation flights to travel to and from Morocco. Algeria closed the airspace when its government severed diplomatic ties with Morocco in 2021 over a series of issues. The countries have a decadeslong dispute involving the territory of Western Sahara.\n\nThe U.S. Geological Survey said the quake had a preliminary magnitude of 6.8 when it hit at 11:11 p.m. (22:11 GMT), with shaking that lasted several seconds. The U.S. agency reported a magnitude 4.9 aftershock hit 19 minutes later. The collision of the African and Eurasian tectonic plates occurred at a relatively shallow depth, which makes a quake more dangerous.\n\nEarthquakes are relatively rare in North Africa. Lahcen Mhanni, Head of the Seismic Monitoring and Warning Department at the National Institute of Geophysics, told 2M TV that the earthquake was the strongest ever recorded in the region.\n\nIn 1960, a magnitude 5.8 tremor struck near the Moroccan city of Agadir and caused thousands of deaths. That quake prompted changes in construction rules in Morocco, but many buildings, especially rural homes, are not built to withstand such tremors.\n\nIn 2004, a 6.4 magnitude earthquake near the Mediterranean coastal city of Al Hoceima left more than 600 dead.\n\nFriday's quake was felt as far away as Portugal and Algeria, according to the Portuguese Institute for Sea and Atmosphere and Algeria's Civil Defense agency, which oversees emergency response."}
{"text": "# Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis apologize for 'pain' their letters on behalf of Danny Masterson caused\nSeptember 9th, 2023. 7:14 PM GMT-4.\n\n---\n\n**LOS ANGELES (AP)** - Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis apologized Saturday for character letters the celebrity couple wrote on behalf of fellow \"That '70s Show\" actor Danny Masterson before he was sentenced for rape this week.\n\nA judge in Los Angeles on Thursday sentenced Masterson to 30 years to life in prison for raping two women in 2003.\n\nIn a video posted on Instagram, Kutcher and Kunis said they were sorry for the pain they may have caused with the letters, which were made public Friday.\n\nKutcher said the letters that asked for leniency \"were intended for the judge to read and not to undermine the testimony of the victims or retraumatize them in any way. We would never want to do that and we're sorry if that has taken place.\"\n\nKutcher said Masterson's family approached them after the actor was convicted in the rapes in May and asked them to write character letters describing \"the person that we knew for 25 years.\" The letters were posted online by The Hollywood Reporter and other digital publications.\n\nMasterson starred with Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis and Topher Grace in \"That '70s Show\" from 1998 until 2006.\n\nHe had reunited with Kutcher on the 2016 Netflix comedy \"The Ranch,\" but was written off the show when the Los Angeles Police Department investigation was revealed the following year.\n\nLos Angeles Superior Court Judge Charlaine F. Olmedo handed down the sentence to Masterson, 47, after hearing statements from the women, and pleas for fairness from defense attorneys.\n\nKutcher described Masterson as a man who treated people \"with decency, equality, and generosity,\" he wrote in his letter dated July 27, 2023.\n\nKunis in her letter to Olmedo called Masterson \"an outstanding role model and friend\" and an \"exceptional older brother figure.\"\n\nBoth rapes took place in Masterson's Hollywood-area home in 2003 when he was at the height of his fame on the Fox network sitcom \"That '70s Show.\" The victims testified that Masterson drugged them before violently raping them.\n\nKunis said in the apology video that their letters did not mean to undermine the testimony of victims.\n\n\"Our heart goes out to every single person who's ever been a victim of sexual assault, sexual abuse, or rape,\" she said."}
{"text": "# 'That '70s Show' actor Danny Masterson gets 30 years to life in prison for rapes of 2 women\nBy **ANDREW DALTON**  \nSeptember 7th, 2023. 10:01 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**LOS ANGELES (AP)** - A judge sentenced \"That '70s Show\" show star Danny Masterson to 30 years to life in prison Thursday for raping two women, giving them some relief after they spoke in court about the decades of damage he inflicted.\n\n\"When you raped me, you stole from me,\" said one woman who Masterson was convicted of raping in 2003. \"That's what rape is, a theft of the spirit.\"\n\n\"You are pathetic, disturbed and completely violent,\" she said. \"The world is better off with you in prison.\"\n\nLos Angeles Superior Court Judge Charlaine F. Olmedo handed down the sentence to the 47-year-old Masterson after hearing statements from the women, and pleas for fairness from defense attorneys.\n\nThe actor, who has been in custody since May, sat in court wearing a suit. Masterson watched the women without visible reaction as they spoke. He maintains his innocence and his attorneys plan to appeal.\n\nThe other woman Masterson was found guilty of raping said he \"has not shown an ounce of remorse for the pain he caused.\" She told the judge, \"I knew he belonged behind bars for the safety of all the women he came into contact with. I am so sorry, and I'm so upset. I wish I'd reported him sooner to the police.\"\n\nAfter an initial jury failed to reach verdicts on three counts of rape in December and a mistrial was declared, prosecutors retried Masterson on all three counts earlier this year.\n\nMasterson waived his right to speak before he was sentenced and had no visible reaction after the judge's decision, nor did the many family members sitting beside him. His wife, actor Bijou Phillips, was tearful earlier in the hearing.\n\nAt his second trial, a jury found Masterson guilty of two of three rape counts on May 31. Both attacks took place in Masterson's Hollywood-area home in 2003, when he was at the height of his fame on the Fox network sitcom \"That '70s Show.\"\n\nThey could not reach a verdict on the third count, an allegation that Masterson also raped a longtime girlfriend.\n\nThe judge sentenced the actor after rejecting a defense motion for a new trial that was argued earlier Thursday. The sentence was the maximum allowed by law. It means Masterson will be eligible for parole after serving 25 1/2 years, but can be held in prison for life.\n\n\"I know that you're sitting here steadfast in your claims of innocence, and thus no doubt feeling victimized by a justice system that has failed you,\" Olmedo told Masterson before handing down the sentence. \"But Mr. Masterson, you are not the victim here. Your actions 20 years ago took away another person's voice, and choice. One way or another you will have to come to terms with your prior actions, and their consequences.\"\n\nThe defense sought to have sentences for the two convictions run simultaneously, and asked for a sentence of 15 years to life. The prosecution asked for the full 30 years to life sentence Masterson was eligible for.\n\n\"It's his life that will be impacted by what you decide today,\" Masterson's lawyer Shawn Holley told the judge before the sentencing. \"And the life of his 9-year-old daughter, who means the world to him, and to whom he means the world.\"\n\nAfter the hearing, Holley said in a statement that \"Mr. Masterson did not commit the crimes for which he was convicted.\" She said a team of appellate lawyers has identified \"a number of significant evidentiary and constitutional issues\" with his convictions, which they are confident will be overturned.\n\nProsecutors alleged that Masterson used his prominence in the Church of Scientology - where all three women were also members at the time - to avoid consequences for decades after the attacks, and the women blamed the church for their hesitancy in going to police about Masterson.\n\nAt the sentencing hearing, one of the women, who like Masterson was born into the church, said she was shunned and ostracized for going to authorities in 2004.\n\n\"I lost everything. I lost my religion. I lost my ability to contact anyone I'd known or loved my entire life,\" she said. \"I didn't exist outside the Scientology world. I had to start my life all over at 29. It seemed the world I knew didn't want me to live.\"\n\nThe church said in a statement after the trial that it has \"no policy prohibiting or discouraging members from reporting criminal conduct of anyone - Scientologists or not - to law enforcement.\" It has also denied ever harassing any of the women.\n\nNo charges came from the woman's 2004 police report, but she returned to authorities when she learned they were investigating Masterson again in 2016. The other two women had waited more than 15 years before reporting him to anyone other than church officials.\n\nThe women testified at both trials that in 2003, they were at Masterson's home when he drugged them before violently raping them.\n\nThey said Thursday that the trauma plagued them for the decades that followed, hurting their relationships and filling their lives with fear. But they said his sentencing gave them some relief.\n\n\"I don't have to carry your shame around with me anymore,\" the first woman who spoke said. \"Now you have to hold that shame. You have to sit in a cell and hold it.\"\n\nMasterson starred with Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis and Topher Grace in \"That '70s Show\" from 1998 until 2006.\n\nHe had reunited with Kutcher on the 2016 Netflix comedy \"The Ranch,\" but was written off the show when the Los Angeles Police Department investigation was revealed the following year.\n\nWhile that investigation began before a wave of women shook Hollywood with stories about Harvey Weinstein in October 2017, the conviction and sentencing of Masterson still represents a major #MeToo era success for Los Angeles prosecutors, along with the conviction of Weinstein himself last year."}
{"text": "# Updated COVID shots are coming. They're part of a trio of vaccines to block fall viruses\nBy **LAURAN NEERGAARD**  \nSeptember 9th, 2023. 10:48 AM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Updated COVID-19 vaccines are coming soon, just in time to pair them with flu shots. And this fall, the first vaccines for another scary virus called RSV are rolling out to older adults and pregnant women.\n\nDoctors hope enough people get vaccinated to help avert another \"tripledemic\" like last year when hospitals were overwhelmed with an early flu season, an onslaught of RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, and yet another winter coronavirus surge.\n\nCOVID-19 hospitalizations have been steadily increasing since late summer, although not nearly as much as this time last year, and RSV already is on the rise in parts of the Southeast.\n\nApproval of updated COVID-19 shots is expected within days. They are among the tools the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says will help put the U.S. in \"our strongest position yet\" to avoid another chaotic respiratory season.\n\n\"There will be a lot of virus this winter. That's why we want to get ahead of it,\" CDC chief Dr. Mandy Cohen said.\n\nHere is what you need to know about fall vaccinations:\n\n## WHY MORE COVID-19 SHOTS?\nThe ever-evolving coronavirus isn't going away. Similar to how flu shots are updated each year, the Food and Drug Administration gave COVID-19 vaccine makers a new recipe for this fall.\n\nThe updated shots have a single target, an omicron descendant named XBB.1.5. It's a big change. The COVID-19 vaccines offered since last year are combination shots targeting the original coronavirus strain and a much earlier omicron version, making them very outdated.\n\nPfizer, Moderna and Novavax all have brewed new supplies.\n\nThe FDA will soon decide if each company has met safety, effectiveness and quality standards. Then the CDC must sign off before vaccinations begin. A CDC advisory panel is set to meet Tuesday to make recommendations on how best to use the latest shots.\n\nEarlier this month, European regulators authorized Pfizer's updated vaccine for this fall, for adults and children as young as 6 months.\n\n## WILL THEY BE EFFECTIVE ENOUGH?\nHealth officials are optimistic, barring a new mutant.\n\nAs expected, XBB.1.5 has faded away in the months it took to tweak the vaccine. Today, there is a soup of different coronavirus variants causing illness and the most common ones are fairly close relatives. Recent lab testing from vaccine makers and other research groups suggest the updated shots will offer crossover protection.\n\nEarlier vaccinations or infections have continued to help prevent severe disease and death but protection wanes over time, especially against milder infections as the virus continually evolves. While the FDA did allow seniors and others at high risk to get an extra booster dose last spring, most Americans haven't had a vaccination in about a year.\n\n\"The best thing people can do to maintain a normal way of life is to continue to get their booster shots,\" said Duke University vaccine expert David Montefiori.\n\n## WHO ALSO NEEDS A FLU VACCINE?\nThe CDC urges a yearly flu shot for pretty much everyone ages 6 months and up. The best time is by the end of October.\n\nLike with COVID-19, influenza can be especially dangerous to certain groups including the very young, older people and those with weak immune systems and lung or heart disease.\n\nThere are multiple kinds of flu vaccines to choose from, including a nasal spray version for certain younger people. More important, there are three shots specifically recommended for seniors to choose from because they are proven to do a better job revving up an older adult's immune system.\n\n## CAN I GET A FLU SHOT AND COVID-19 SHOT AT THE SAME TIME?\nYes.\n\nThe CDC says there is no difference in effectiveness or side effects if people get those vaccines simultaneously, although one in each arm might be more comfortable.\n\n## WHAT IS THIS NEW RSV VACCINE?\nRSV is a cold-like nuisance for most people, and not as well-known as the flu. But RSV packs hospitals every winter and can be deadly for children under 5, the elderly and people with certain high-risk health problems. Most notorious for inflaming babies' tiny airways, leaving them wheezing, it's also a common cause of pneumonia in seniors.\n\nRSV vaccines from GSK and Pfizer are approved for adults 60 and older. The CDC is advising seniors to ask their doctor if they should get the one-dose shot.\n\nThe FDA also has approved Pfizer's RSV vaccine to be given late in pregnancy so moms-to-be pass the protection to their newborns. CDC recommendations on that use are expected later this month.\n\nAlso still to come: advice on whether RSV vaccines should be given together with flu and COVID-19 shots.\n\n## WHAT ABOUT BABIES AND RSV?\nThere is one more new shot parents may hear about this fall: an injection of lab-made antibodies to guard babies from RSV.\n\nThat is different than a vaccine, which teaches the body to make its own infection-fighting antibodies, but is similarly protective.\n\nThe FDA recently approved Beyfortus, from Sanofi and AstraZeneca. The one-dose drug is recommended for all infants younger than 8 months before their first RSV season."}
{"text": "# Morocco earthquake: A look at the deadliest quakes over the past 25 years\nBy **The Associated Press**  \nSeptember 9th, 2023. 5:47 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\nThe earthquake that struck Morocco late Friday has killed more than 2,000 people, with the death toll expected to increase as rescuers struggle to reach some areas. Here's a look at the deadliest earthquakes over the past 25 years:\n\n- Sept. 8, 2023: In Morocco, a magnitude 6.8 temblor kills more than 2,000 people.\n\n- Feb. 6, 2023: In Turkey and Syria, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake kills more than 21,600 people.\n\n- April 25, 2015: In Nepal, more than 8,800 people are killed by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake.\n\n- March 11, 2011: A magnitude 9.0 quake off the northeast coast of Japan triggers a tsunami, killing more than 18,400 people.\n\n- March 11, 2011: A magnitude 9.0 quake off the northeast coast of Japan triggers a tsunami, killing more than 18,400 people.\n\n- May 12, 2008: A magnitude 7.9 quake strikes eastern Sichuan in China, resulting in over 87,500 deaths.\n\n- May 27, 2006: More than 5,700 people die when a magnitude 6.3 quake hits Indonesia's Java island.\n\n- Oct. 8, 2005: A magnitude 7.6 earthquake kills over 80,000 people in Pakistan's Kashmir region.\n\n- Dec. 26, 2004: A magnitude 9.1 quake in Indonesia triggers an Indian Ocean tsunami, killing about 230,000 people in a dozen countries.\n\n- Dec. 26, 2003: A magnitude 6.6 earthquake hits southeastern Iran, causing more than 20,000 deaths.\n\n- Jan. 26, 2001: A magnitude 7.6 quake strikes Gujarat in India, killing as many as 20,000 people.\n\n- Aug. 17, 1999: A magnitude 7.6 earthquake hits Izmit, Turkey, killing about 18,000 people."}
{"text": "# Morocco's African Cup qualifier postponed in wake of deadly earthquake\nSeptember 9th, 2023. 11:45 AM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**AGADIR, Morocco (AP)** - Morocco's qualifying game for the African Cup of Nations was postponed on Saturday in the wake of the earthquake that struck the country, killing more than 1,000 people.\n\nMorocco had been scheduled to play Liberia in Agadir on the country's western coast, but the Moroccan soccer federation said the game had been postponed indefinitely after an agreement with the Confederation of African Football.\n\nThe earthquake that struck late Friday night also damaged buildings from villages in the Atlas Mountains to the historic city of Marrakech.\n\nAgadir is roughly 170 kilometers (105 miles) southwest of the epicenter of Friday's tremor near the town of Ighil in Al Haouz Province.\n\nThe Gambian national team was in Marrakech during the earthquake ahead of a decisive qualifying game against Congo on Sunday. Gambia coach Tom Saintfiet told BBC World Service that he initially thought an airplane had crashed into the team's hotel.\n\n\"It seems it was only 30 seconds but it felt endless. It was really scary,\" Saintfiet said. \"The walls were really shaking and things were falling down from the ceiling and the walls. I never in my life saw a building moving like that. When it stopped, I started running and checking if my team members were also out of their rooms.\"\n\nNo team members were reported injured.\n\nMarrakech was hosting the game because of stadium problems in Gambia. CAF did not immediately respond to an email about the status of Sunday's match.\n\nMorocco star player Achraf Hakimi took to social media to offer his condolences to victims of the earthquake.\n\n\"It is time to help each other to save as many lives as possible. My condolences to all who lost a loved one,\" Hakimi wrote on Instagram.\n\nThe magnitude-6.8 quake was the biggest to hit the North African country in 120 years.\n\nOn Friday morning, the Morocco team arrived in Agadir and then trained at Adrar Stadium in the afternoon.\n\nThe Atlas Lions made a historic run at last year's World Cup in Qatar, becoming the first African team to reach the semifinals, where they lost to France.\n\nMorocco has already qualified for the 24-team African tournament, which begins in January in Ivory Coast.\n\nThe team was also scheduled to play a friendly match in France against Burkina Faso on Tuesday."}
{"text": "# Coco Gauff wins the US Open for her first Grand Slam title at age 19 by defeating Aryna Sabalenka\nBy **HOWARD FENDRICH**  \nSeptember 9th, 2023. 7:06 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - This was what so many folks figured Coco Gauff would do at some point. Didn't matter how young she was. Didn't matter whether there were setbacks along the way. Those outsized expectations did not make the task of becoming a Grand Slam champion as a teenager any easier - especially when that chorus was accompanied by voices of others who doubted her.\n\nShe did it, though. At age 19. At the U.S. Open, where she used to come as a kid with her parents to watch her idols, Serena and Venus Williams, compete.\n\nGauff set aside a so-so start and surged to her first major championship by coming back to defeat Aryna Sabalenka 2-6, 6-3, 6-2 in the U.S. Open final on Saturday to the delight of a raucous crowd that was loud from start to finish.\n\nWhen it was over, when she had shed tears of joy, when she had hugged Mom and Dad as they cried, too, Gauff first thanked them, and her grandparents, and her brothers, one of whom failed to answer a FaceTime call from her right after the match. And then Gauff took the microphone during the ceremony to address anyone who might have questioned if this day would arrive.\n\n\"Thank you to the people who didn't believe in me. Like a month ago, I won a (tour) title and people said I would stop at that. Two weeks ago I won a (tour) title and people were saying that was the biggest it was going to get. So three weeks later, I'm here with this trophy right now,\" said Gauff, who is on a career-best 12-match winning streak. \"Tried my best to carry this with grace, and I've been doing my best, so honestly, to those who thought they were putting water in my fire: You were really adding gas to it and now it's really burning so bright right now.\"\n\nGauff, who is from Florida, is the first American teenager to win the country's major tennis tournament since Serena Williams in 1999. If last year's U.S. Open was all about saying goodbye to Williams as she competed for the final time, this year's two weeks in New York turned into a \"Welcome to the big time!\" moment for Gauff.\n\nShe burst onto the scene at 15 by becoming the youngest qualifier in Wimbledon history and making it to the fourth round in her Grand Slam debut in 2019. She reached her initial major final at last year's French Open, finishing as the runner-up. What appeared to be a step back came this July at the All England Club, where she exited in the first round.\n\nSince then, she's won 18 of 19 contests while working with a new coaching pair of Brad Gilbert and Pere Riba.\n\nThe No. 6-seeded Gauff did it Saturday by withstanding the power displayed by Sabalenka on nearly every swing of her racket, eventually getting accustomed to it and managing to get back shot after shot. Gauff broke to begin the third set on one such point, tracking down every ball hit her way until eventually smacking a putaway volley that she punctuated with a fist pump and a scream of \"Come on!\"\n\nSoon it was 4-0 in that set for Gauff. At 4-1, Sabalenka took a medical timeout while her left leg was massaged. Gauff stayed sharp during the break - it lasted a handful of minutes, not the 50 during a climate protest in the semifinals - by practicing some serves.\n\nWhen they resumed, Sabalenka broke to get within 4-2. But Gauff broke right back, and soon was serving out the victory, then dropping onto her back on the court. She soon climbed into the stands to find her parents.\n\n\"You did it!\" Gauff's mom told her, both in tears.\n\nSabalenka came into the day with a 23-2 record at major tournaments in 2023, including her first Grand Slam title at the Australian Open in January. The 25-year-old from Belarus already was assured of rising from No. 2 to No. 1 in the WTA rankings for the first time next week.\n\nBut she was reduced to the role of foil by the fans. As often happens when an American plays in America, Gauff was the recipient of by far the most support from the seats in 23,000-capacity Arthur Ashe Stadium. Her pre-match TV interview, shown on the video screens in the arena, was drowned out by the sound of applause and cheers reverberating off the closed retractable roof.\n\nEven in the early stages, winners by Gauff were celebrated as if the match were over. So were Sabalenka's miscues. Her faults and, especially, double-faults - and there were six in all, three in her first two service games alone, plus another to hand over a break in the second set -- and assorted other mistakes, including one over-the-shoulder backhand volley into the net and what appeared to be a much simpler forehand volley.\n\nBy the end, Sabalenka had made 46 unforced errors, far more than double Gauff's total of 19.\n\nHere's another way to view it: Gauff only needed to deliver 13 winners to accumulate 83 points Saturday.\n\nWhen Sabalenka has everything calibrated just right, it's difficult for any foe to handle it - even someone as speedy, smart and instinctive as Gauff, whose get-to-every-ball court coverage managed to keep her in points few other players would be able to extend.\n\nSomehow, Gauff began doing that again and again. And Sabalenka began to miss again and again, frequently slapping her thigh, muttering or shaking her head afterward.\n\nThey traded early breaks to 2-all, before Sabalenka grabbed the next four games to take that set. During that stretch, there was a thrilling point that had the audience making noise before it was over. Gauff scrambled to keep getting Sabalenka's strokes back over the net, including somehow deflecting a booming overhead on the run, before a second, unreachable overhead bounced off the ground and into the stands.\n\nSabalenka raised her left hand and wagged her fingers, telling the folks in the stands to give her some love.\n\nBut soon, Gauff was playing better, Sabalenka was off-target more, and the love was being showered only on one of them, the sport's newest Grand Slam champion."}
{"text": "# Trump, DeSantis and other 2024 GOP prospects vie for attention at the Iowa-Iowa State football game\nBy **THOMAS BEAUMONT** and **HANNAH FINGERHUT**  \nSeptember 9th, 2023. 5:23 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**AMES, Iowa (AP)** - Donald Trump crossed paths with several Republican rivals Saturday as he attended Iowa's in-state college football grudge match, one of the former president's few visits so far to the state that holds the first nominating caucus next year.\n\nTrump waded into one of the state's largest sports crowds at Jack Trice Stadium in Ames, where Iowa State was hosting Iowa. Also at the game were Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and several other candidates, putting in face time with Iowa's elected officials and football fans.\n\nWith the race entering its traditional ramp-up after Labor Day, Trump has largely skipped holding town halls or participating in many of the state's cherished campaign traditions, but has not paid a price so far. Trump remains far ahead of DeSantis and other rivals in Iowa and nationally.\n\nTrump has made a habit of visiting Iowa on the same day as DeSantis, whom Trump treats as his main threat. Both were in and around the stadium before kickoff, reminiscent of the scene last month when Trump drew huge crowds to the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines while DeSantis addressed smaller audiences and hit the midway rides with his family.\n\nTrump on Saturday emerged from the Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity, an agricultural house in the middle of Iowa State's fraternity and sorority neighborhood, where he met privately with students first, to the cheers of hundreds pressing to get photos with the former president outside the red-brick house.\n\nTrump basked in the adoration, pumping his fists to the chants of \"Trump, Trump, Trump\" and \"U.S.A, U.S.A.\" before strolling to a grill and raising a spatula holding a hamburger.\n\nHe stopped to autograph photos and about a dozen footballs, which he tossed, both underhand and overhand, into the crowd of cheering students before departing for the game.\n\nDuring the fraternity scrum, Trump approached a reporter with the Republican-leaning Right Side Broadcasting Network, who asked what he thought of the scene.\n\n\"I guess the youth likes Trump,\" Trump said, straining to be heard above the din of the crowd.\n\nTrump endured some targeted hits during the day. As Trump's motorcade rolled on to the college campus before game time, some football fans walking the streets of Ames to the game made profane gestures as it passed. A prop plane flew over the stadium carrying a banner that read, \"Where's Melania?\" And hired performers wearing inflatable costumes, one posing as Trump and the other infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, held hands as they roamed the parking lot in face masks.\n\nMeanwhile, DeSantis met fans of both schools at tailgates and said he would be attending the game with Gov. Kim Reynolds, who has not endorsed a candidate but often has appeared with DeSantis and his wife, Casey.\n\n\"We're having a good time,\" DeSantis said to reporters. \"It's quite an atmosphere, probably a little bit more civilized than the Florida-Georgia game.\"\n\nAs he wandered from one tailgate to another, DeSantis was flanked by fans cheering and waving campaign signs from a booth hosted by the pro-DeSantis Never Back Down super PAC. Volunteers with Iowans for Trump similarly set up several booths around the parking lots, with both teams working to get fans to sign caucus pledge cards.\n\nAlso appearing before the game were candidates Doug Burgum, the North Dakota governor, and Asa Hutchinson, a former Arkansas governor, who greeted each other at a tailgate honoring veterans, where Sen. Joni Ernst camped out for most of the afternoon.\n\nAsked who he was rooting for, DeSantis said he wasn't going to \"do anything to upset\" Reynolds, who is an Iowa State graduate. Hutchinson said he was rooting for the \"underdog because I'm an underdog in this race and I want underdogs to win,\" and Burgum noted his North Dakota State Bison were playing today, though he didn't risk showing up in Ames wearing his gear.\n\nWhile fans Saturday showed up for football, not for politics, voters have had the chance to see most candidates who regularly appear at Iowa cattle calls and meet-and-greets. DeSantis is increasingly focused on winning or placing high in Iowa and says he's visited more than half of the state's 99 counties already.\n\nTrump, meanwhile, has made only five visits to Iowa this year.\n\nAt the game, Trump was sitting in a stadium suite with Iowa casino powerhouse Gary Kirke, an influential Republican donor.\n\nInstead of large-scale rallies, Trump is relying on state party events that offer large, friendly audiences at no cost to his campaign, while his political organization pays millions of dollars in legal expenses as he faces four criminal indictments. He was in neighboring South Dakota on Friday night appearing at a state party fundraiser with Gov. Kristi Noem, who endorsed him.\n\nTrump's campaign has also used digital outreach. Last week, Trump held a conference call with tens of thousands of Iowans. He has done some in-person events with voters. In June, he handed out Dairy Queen \"Blizzards\" while also confessing aloud that he did not know what the soft-serve treats were.\n\nThere is no comparable example in Iowa political history to a former president running to reclaim his old office while also under indictment for more than 90 felony counts. But other high-profile candidates and strong front-runners have done the town halls and retail campaigning for which Iowa and other early primary states are well-known.\n\nIn 2007, then-Sen. Hillary Clinton entered the race for the 2008 Democratic nomination as a national celebrity and the party's heavy favorite in national polling. Drawing larger crowds, Clinton sought to meet the demand by holding smaller meetings with local activists before speaking to packed gyms and halls.\n\nClinton also attended party events with her lesser-known rivals to demonstrate her willingness to undergo the rigor that Iowans typically demand. Ultimately, she lost the 2008 caucus to then-Sen. Barack Obama, who eventually won the nomination and the White House.\n\nTrump has foregone all but one such event in Iowa this year. The exception was the Iowa Republican Party Lincoln Dinner in July, a marquee event that helps to finance the caucus."}
{"text": "# Police announce 2 more confirmed sightings of escaped murderer on the run in Pennsylvania\nSeptember 9th, 2023. 3:32 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**WEST CHESTER, Pa. (AP)** - Police on Saturday reported two more confirmed sightings of an escaped murderer on the run for more than a week in southeast Pennsylvania amid a search by hundreds of law enforcement officers.\n\nDanelo Souza Cavalcante, 34, escaped from the Chester County Prison while awaiting transfer to state prison on Aug. 31 after being sentenced to life for fatally stabbing his ex-girlfriend in 2021. Prosecutors say he wanted to stop her from telling police that he's wanted in a killing in his home country of Brazil.\n\nAuthorities, who have described Cavalcante as extremely dangerous, didn't release details about the sightings but said they occurred Friday within the search area focused around the now-closed Longwood Gardens botanical garden in East Marlborough Township, where the fugitive inmate has been spotted several times.\n\nAuthorities believe Cavalcante, spotted almost a dozen times since his escape, has managed to obtain clothing and other supplies. Pennsylvania State Police Lt. Col. George Bivens said Friday that about 400 personnel were taking part in the search of the southeastern Philadelphia suburbs, farmland and the vast botanical garden, including tactical teams in full combat gear, tracking dogs, and officers on horseback as well as aircraft.\n\nLongwood Gardens, closed indefinitely after the sightings, sprawls across nearly 200 acres (80 hectares), with paths winding through gardens, an outdoor theater, ponds, fountains and meadows, and structures including indoor gardens, treehouses and a restaurant.\n\nOfficials in Kennett Square, about 6.5 miles (10 kilometers) away from the county prison, said the annual mushroom festival would go on as scheduled this weekend despite the ongoing search, assuring visitors that \"all necessary precautions and protocols\" were in place. They said they felt it was important to go ahead with the festival because \"bringing our community together is essential, especially during these challenging times.\"\n\nOfficials on Friday announced the firing of the prison tower guard on duty when Cavalcante scaled a wall by crab-walking up from the recreation yard, climbed over razor wire, ran across a roof and jumped to the ground. His escape went undetected for more than an hour until guards took a headcount. The guard, a corrections officer for 18 years who was put on administrative leave after the escape, also had his personal cellphone on him at the time, a violation of jail protocol, county spokesperson Michelle Bjork said.\n\nThere's now a $20,000 reward for information leading to the capture of Cavalcante, whose escape has attracted international attention and became big news in Brazil. The main newspaper in Rio de Janeiro ran a lengthy story Wednesday with the headline \"Dangerous hide-and-seek.\"\n\nProsecutors in Tocantins state have confirmed that a criminal case attributes \"the crime of double qualified homicide to the defendant Danilo Souza Cavalcante.\" Authorities allege that Válter Júnior Moreira dos Reis was killed in 2017 in Figueirópolis over a debt the victim owed Cavalcante in connection with repair of a vehicle. The case is being handled by a court specialized in combating violence against women and crimes against life."}
{"text": "# Terrorism suspect who escaped from London prison is captured while riding a bike\nBy **BRIAN MELLEY**  \nSeptember 9th, 2023. 12:43 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - A former British soldier facing terrorism charges who snuck out of a London prison on a food delivery truck was captured Saturday, police said.\n\nDaniel Abed Khalife was nabbed while riding a bicycle along a canal path west of London after a four-day manhunt.\n\nKhalife escaped from the Wandsworth Prison kitchen Wednesday and got outside the gates by strapping himself to the bottom of a catering truck.\n\nKhalife, 21, was awaiting trial on charges of violating Britain's Official Secrets Act by gathering information \"that could be useful to an enemy\" and planting fake bombs at a military base. He was discharged from the British army after his arrest earlier this year and denied the allegations. His trial is set for November.\n\nThe breakout ignited a storm of criticism as political opponents linked the escape to years of financial austerity by the United Kingdom's governing Conservative Party. The government said an independent investigation would determine how Khalife escaped the medium-security prison that opened in 1851 during the reign of Queen Victoria.\n\n\"We need answers about how on earth a prisoner charged with terror & national security offences could have escaped in this way,\" Yvette Cooper, a member of the Labour Party in the House of Commons, wrote on social media Saturday.\n\nPrime Minister Rishi Sunak thanked the police and public and said the inquiry would get to the bottom of how Khalife got away.\n\nThe escape prompted extra security checks at major transport hubs, particularly in and around the Port of Dover, the main boat crossing from England to France, and led to the shutdown of a major highway at one point.\n\nLondon counter-terror police had offered a 20,000 pound ($25,000) reward for information leading to his arrest. It was not immediately clear if anyone was in line for the reward.\n\nPolice on Friday had announced a breakthrough in the search after a witness reported seeing Khalife at a busy intersection near the prison shortly after the escape.\n\nMetropolitan Police's counterterrorism commander Dominic Murphy wouldn't say if the sighting was confirmed by surveillance cameras, but London has one of the most robust security camera networks in the world and any footage could have helped track his whereabouts.\n\n\"In terms of the investigation, it really gathered momentum yesterday afternoon, with a number of calls from the public, but really took a different course last night, when we did an intelligence-led search in the Richmond area in the early hours of this morning,\" Murphy said. \"Whilst we didn't find him at that search, while we were at that search, we had a number of calls from the public over the next hour or two, giving us various sightings of him.\"\n\nPolice had received reports he was seen in the Chiswick area of west London and they descended there on Saturday morning, with police cars and vans swarming the area and helicopters hovering overhead.\n\nPaul Wade said he opened his curtains to find five police officers outside his home.\n\n\"They said 'I expect you know why we are here,'\" he said. \"They were checking everybody's gardens.\"\n\nBut Khalife was nowhere near there when a plainclothes officer ultimately made the collar in the late morning, Murphy said.\n\nKhalife was pulled off a bicycle along the canal near the community of Northolt, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) from where he escaped.\n\nMurphy said he was cooperative when arrested. He now faces additional charges of being unlawfully at-large and being an escaped prisoner."}
{"text": "# New Mexico governor issues order suspending the right to carry firearms in public across Albuquerque\nBy **MORGAN LEE**  \nSeptember 9th, 2023. 12:05 AM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**SANTA FE, N.M. (AP)** - New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday issued an emergency order suspending the right to carry firearms in public across Albuquerque and the surrounding county for at least 30 days in response to a spate of gun violence.\n\nThe Democratic governor said she expects legal challenges but was compelled to act because of recent shootings, including the death of an 11-year-old boy outside a minor league baseball stadium this week.\n\nLujan Grisham said state police would be responsible for enforcing what amount to civil violations. Albuquerque police Chief Harold Medina said he won't enforce it, and Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen said he's uneasy about it because it raises too many questions about constitutional rights.\n\nThe firearms suspension, classified as an emergency public health order, applies to open and concealed carry in most public places, from city sidewalks to urban recreational parks. The restriction is tied to a threshold for violent crime rates currently only met by the metropolitan Albuquerque. Police and licensed security guards are exempt from the temporary ban.\n\nViolators could face civil penalties and a fine of up to $5,000, gubernatorial spokeswoman Caroline Sweeney said. Under the order, residents still can transport guns to some private locations, such as a gun range or gun store, provided the firearm has a trigger lock or some other container or mechanism making it impossible to discharge.\n\nLujan Grisham acknowledged not all law enforcement officials were on board with her decision.\n\n\"I welcome the debate and fight about how to make New Mexicans safer,\" she said at a news conference, flanked by law enforcement officials, including the district attorney for the Albuquerque area.\n\nJohn Allen said in a statement late Friday that he has reservations about the order but is ready to cooperate to tackle gun violence.\n\n\"While I understand and appreciate the urgency, the temporary ban challenges the foundation of our constitution, which I swore an oath to uphold,\" Allen said. \"I am wary of placing my deputies in positions that could lead to civil liability conflicts, as well as the potential risks posed by prohibiting law-abiding citizens from their constitutional right to self-defense.\"\n\nEnforcing the governor's order also could put Albuquerque police in a difficult position with the U.S. Department of Justice regarding a police reform settlement, said police spokesman Gilbert Gallegos.\n\n\"All of those are unsettled questions,\" he said late Friday.\n\nLujan Grisham referenced several recent shootings in Albuquerque in issuing the order. Among them was a suspected road rage shooting Wednesday outside a minor league baseball stadium that killed 11-year-old Froyland Villegas and critically wounded a woman as their vehicle was peppered with bullets while people left the game.\n\nLast month, 5-year-old Galilea Samaniego was fatally shot while asleep in a motor home. Four teens entered the mobile home community in two stolen vehicles early on Aug. 13 and opened fire on the trailer, according to police. The girl was struck in the head and later died at a hospital.\n\nThe governor also cited an August shooting death in Taos County of 13-year-old Amber Archuleta. A 14-year-old boy shot and killed the girl with his father's gun while they were at his home, authorities said.\n\n\"When New Mexicans are afraid to be in crowds, to take their kids to school, to leave a baseball game - when their very right to exist is threatened by the prospect of violence at every turn - something is very wrong,\" Lujan Grisham said in a statement.\n\nThe top-ranked Republican in the state Senate swiftly denounced the governor's actions Friday to restrict guns as a way to stem violent crime.\n\n\"A child is murdered, the perpetrator is still on the loose, and what does the governor do? She ... targets law-abiding citizens with an unconstitutional gun order,\" Sen. Greg Baca of Belen said.\n\nMiranda Viscoli, co-president of New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence, applauded the governor's order as a courageous and necessary step to curbing gun violence, even if the measure's legal fate is uncertain.\n\n\"If it saves one life, then it's worth doing,\" Viscoli said.\n\nSince 2019, Lujan Grisham has signed a raft of legislation restricting access to guns, including a 2020 \"red flag\" law allowing police or sheriff's deputies to ask a court to temporarily remove guns from people who might hurt themselves or others, an extension of background-check requirements to nearly all private gun sales.\n\nShe also signed a ban on firearms possession for people under permanent protective orders for domestic violence.\n\nFriday's order directs state regulators to conduct monthly inspections of firearms dealers statewide to ensure compliance with gun laws.\n\nThe state Department of Health will compile a report on gunshot victims at New Mexico hospitals that includes age, race, gender and ethnicity, along with the brand and caliber of firearm involved and other general circumstances."}
{"text": "# Parenting advice YouTuber Ruby Franke and business partner to remain jailed on child abuse charges\nBy **AMY BETH HANSON**  \nSeptember 8th, 2023. 6:46 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\nA Utah mother of six who gave parenting advice via a once-popular YouTube channel called \"8 Passengers\" made her initial court appearance Friday on charges that she and the owner of a relationship counseling business abused and starved her two young children.\n\nThe proceedings were delayed by about 45 minutes due to technical difficulties after more than 1,300 people sought to log in to watch the virtual hearing, said Tania Mashburn, spokesperson for the Utah State Courts.\n\nRuby Franke, 41, and Jodi Hildebrandt, 54, were charged with six felony counts of aggravated child abuse after their arrests on Aug. 30 at Hildebrandt's house in the southern Utah city of Ivins.\n\nBoth appeared before Judge Eric Gentry via video from jail wearing orange striped uniforms and spoke little. Their attorneys waived reading of the charges and the women did not enter pleas.\n\nGentry ordered them to remain jailed without bail and scheduled their next hearings for Sept. 21. Their attorneys - Lamar Winward for Franke and Douglas Terry for Hildebrandt - said they were going to ask for bail hearings.\n\nDue to the strong interest in the case - which also included people calling in to listen to the hearing - officials allowed about 50 people in the courtroom as well, Mashburn said.\n\nThe charges were filed after Franke's 12-year-old son escaped Hildebrandt's house and asked a neighbor to call police, according to the 911 call released by the St. George Police Department.\n\nThe boy was emaciated and had duct tape around his ankles and wrists, but wouldn't say why, the caller reported.\n\n\"I think he's been ... he's been detained,\" the caller said, his voice breaking up. \"He's obviously covered in wounds.\"\n\nAs the dispatcher was asking questions, the boy said he didn't know where his mom was and that his dad was not in the area. The boy said two siblings, ages 10 and 14, were still at Hildebrandt's house.\n\n\"He says everything's fine with them,\" the caller told the dispatcher. \"He says what's happened to him is his fault.\"\n\nWhile waiting for police and paramedics, the caller expressed concern that Hildebrandt may come looking for the boy.\n\nProsecutors allege the women either caused or allowed someone to torture Franke's son and injure her 10-year-old daughter. Both children were starved and harmed emotionally, court records said. It's unclear why the children were at Hildebrandt's home.\n\nThe 12- and 10-year-old were taken to the hospital, police said. They along with two other of Franke's children were taken into the custody of child protective services.\n\nFranke was known for sharing her family's life on their video blog.\n\nAmong the 1,300 attendees on the virtual hearing were people livestreaming on TikTok and providing real-time commentary, an illustration of the fascination with the case in online communities where Franke was already a divisive figure before her arrest.\n\nThe Franke family was criticized for their parenting decisions, including banning their oldest son from his bedroom for seven months for pranking his younger brother. In one video, Ruby Franke talked about refusing to take lunch to a kindergartener who forgot it at home. Another showed her threatening to cut the head off a young girl's stuffed toy to punish her for cutting things in the house.\n\nIn one video, Franke said she and her husband told their two youngest children that they would not be getting presents from Santa Claus because they had been selfish and weren't responding to punishment like being kept home from school and cleaning the floorboards.\n\n\"It's because they're so numb, and the more numb your child is, the bigger the outcome they need to wake them up,\" Franke said in a video.\n\nSome critics started an online petition asking child protective services to get involved. The Franke's oldest daughter, Sherri Franke, cut ties with her parents, she has said in social media posts. The YouTube channel, which was started in 2015, ended after seven years.\n\nPolice records from Springville, Utah - where the Franke family lived - show Sherri Franke called police on Sept. 18, 2022, to report her brothers and sisters had been left home alone for days. Police also spoke with neighbors, but were unable to contact the children. A report was made to Child and Family Services, according to the police report.\n\nRecords show officers stopped by the house four more times from Sept. 22 through Oct. 3.\n\nHildebrandt owns a counseling business called ConneXions. The business' website said Franke provides content for social media and podcasts. ConneXions videos featuring Hildebrandt and Franke were removed from YouTube after the women were charged.\n\nThe state of Utah began efforts to try to \"take appropriate action\" on Hildebrandt's clinical mental health counseling license after her arrest, said Melanie Hall, spokesperson for the Department of Commerce, which includes the state's Professional Licensing Division. If someone facing professional discipline declines to surrender their license, they are given an opportunity to respond and a hearing can be held, she said.\n\nThe agency is working with the Attorney General's Office about possibly holding an emergency hearing of the licensing board in Hildebrandt's case, Hall said."}
{"text": "# Dutch police cleared out climate protesters blocking a highway over fossil fuel subsidies\nBy **ALEKSANDAR FURTULA**  \nSeptember 9th 2023. 11:46 AM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP)** - Several thousand climate activists blocked a Dutch highway on Saturday in anger at billions of euros in government subsidies for industries that use oil, coal and gas - before police dispersed them with water cannons.\n\nA report earlier this week detailed 37.5 billion euros ($40.5 billion) in such subsidies in the Netherlands, notably related to the shipping industry, prompting calls for a quick halt to the practice.\n\nThe protesters - from Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace and other organizations - broke through a police barrier Saturday morning and sat on a main road in The Hague heading to the temporary venue for the lower house of parliament.\n\nThey threatened to stay until the subsidies are lifted, and to come back every day if the police remove them.\n\n\"This is much larger than any one of us. This concerns the whole world,\" activist Yolanda de Jager said.\n\nThe activists brandished signs with sayings like \"Fossil Fuel Subsidies are Not Cool,\" and warned that the extreme temperatures seen around the world this summer are a sign of the future, if fossil fuels aren't abandoned.\n\nAfter several hours, police moved in and fired volleys from water cannons at the crowd, and picked up or dragged some protesters away, wheeling them away in special orange wagons.\n\nProtesters on the front line held up their fists in resistance or put their heads down to protect themselves from the jets of water. Those farther back danced and jumped up and down under the spray, appearing to enjoy the shower on an unusually hot September day for the Netherlands\n\nThe roadblock is part of a series of protests led by Extinction Rebellion targeting the Dutch parliament.\n\nThe report published Monday said the Dutch government spends tens of billions per year in subsidies to industries that use fossil fuels. It was published by the The Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, known as SOMO, the Dutch arm of Friends of the Earth and Oil Change International.\n\nThe country is often seen as a leader in renewable energy and progressive climate policies, and Minister for Climate and Energy Rob Jetten acknowledged that the country has to end the subsidies, but has offered no timeline.\n\nThe report calls on lawmakers to begin phasing out the subsidies before the country's Nov. 22 general election.\n\nA new protest is planned for Sunday."}
{"text": "# Rescue begins of ailing US researcher stuck 3,000 feet inside a Turkish cave, Turkish officials say\nSeptember 9th, 2023. 3:26 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**TASELI PLATEAU, Turkey (AP)** - Rescue teams began the arduous process Saturday of extricating an American researcher who became seriously ill while he was 1,000 meters (3,000 feet) below the entrance of a cave in Turkey, officials said.\n\nIt could take days to bring Mark Dickey to the surface since rescuers anticipate he will have to stop and rest frequently at camps set up along the way as they pull his stretcher through the narrow passages.\n\n\"This afternoon, the operation to move him from his camp at 1040 meters to the camp at 700 meters began,\" Turkey's Disaster and Emergency Management Directorate, AFAD, told The Associated Press.\n\nThe 40-year-old experienced caver began vomiting on Sept. 2 because of stomach bleeding while on an expedition with a handful of others in the Morca cave in southern Turkey's Taurus Mountains.\n\nRescuers from across Europe rushed to the cave to help Dickey and to extract him, including one Hungarian doctor who treated him inside the cave on Sept. 3. Doctors gave Dickey IV fluids and 4 liters (1 gallon) of blood inside the cave, officials said. Teams comprised of a doctor and three or four others take turns staying with the American at all times.\n\nThere are 190 personnel from eight countries assisting in the rescue effort, including doctors, paramedics and experienced cavers, Mersin Gov. Ali Hamza Pehlivan told media on Saturday. He said 153 of them were search and rescue experts.\n\n\"We have received information that his condition is getting better, thanks to medical intervention. He has been in stable condition as of yesterday,\" he said.\n\nSpeaking with the AP before rescue operations began, Recep Salci, head of AFAD's search and rescue department, said the rescue will depend on Dickey's condition.\n\n\"If he feels well, we will assist him, and he will come out (of the cave) fast. But if his condition worsens, we will have to bring him up on a stretcher.\" He said bringing Dickey up in a stretcher could take up to 10 days.\n\nYusuf Ogrenecek of the Speleological Federation of Turkey says that one of the most difficult tasks of cave rescue operations is widening the narrow cave passages to allow stretcher lines to pass through at low depths.\n\n\"Stretcher lines are labor intensive and require experienced cave rescuers working long hours,\" Ogrenecek said, adding that other difficult factors range from navigating through mud and water at low temperatures to the psychological toll of staying inside a cave for long periods of time.\n\nIn Rome, Federico Catania, the spokesman for Italy's National Alpine and Speleological Rescue, described the cave as one of the deepest in the world.\n\n\"The cave is made up of many vertical shafts, so many sections that are extremely vertical with few horizontal sections where (the) rescuers are setting up temporary camps,\" he said.\n\nTurkish authorities made a video message available that showed Dickey standing and moving around on Thursday. While alert and talking, he said he was not \"healed on the inside\" and needed a lot of help to get out of the cave. He thanked the caving community and the Turkish government for their efforts to rescue him."}
{"text": "# Moroccans sleep in the streets for 3rd night following an earthquake that took more than 2,100 lives\nBy **SAM METZ** and **MOSA'AB ELSHAMY**  \nSeptember 10th, 2023. 6:08 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**AMIZMIZ, Morocco (AP)** - People in Morocco slept in the streets of Marrakech for a third straight night as soldiers and international aid teams in trucks and helicopters began to fan into remote mountain towns hit hardest by a historic earthquake.\n\nThe disaster killed more than 2,100 people - a number that is expected to rise - and the United Nations estimated that 300,000 people were affected by Friday night's magnitude 6.8 quake.\n\nAmid offers from several countries, including the United States and France, Moroccan officials said Sunday that they are accepting international aid from just four countries: Spain, Qatar, Britain and the United Arab Emirates.\n\n\"The Moroccan authorities have carefully assessed the needs on the ground, bearing in mind that a lack of coordination in such cases would be counterproductive,\" the Interior Ministry said in a statement.\n\nWhile some foreign search-and-rescue teams arrived on Sunday as an aftershock rattled Moroccans already in mourning and shock, other aid teams poised to deploy grew frustrated waiting for the government to officially request assistance.\n\n\"We know there is a great urgency to save people and dig under the remains of buildings,\" said Arnaud Fraisse, founder of Rescuers Without Borders, who had a team stuck in Paris waiting for the green light. \"There are people dying under the rubble, and we cannot do anything to save them.\"\n\nHelp was slow to arrive in Amizmiz, where a whole chunk of the town of orange and red sandstone brick homes carved into a mountainside appeared to be missing. A mosque's minaret had collapsed.\n\n\"It's a catastrophe,\" said villager Salah Ancheu, 28. \"We don't know what the future is. The aid remains insufficient.\"\n\nResidents swept rubble off the main road into town and people cheered when trucks full of soldiers arrived. But they pleaded for more help.\n\n\"There aren't ambulances, there aren't police, at least for right now,\" Ancheu said, speaking about many parts of the region on Sunday morning.\n\nThose left homeless - or fearing more aftershocks - slept outside Saturday, in the streets of the ancient city of Marrakech or under makeshift canopies in hard-hit Atlas Mountain towns like Moulay Brahim. Both there and in Amizmiz, residents worried most about the damage in hard-to-reach communities. The worst destruction was in rural communities that rely on unpaved roads that snake up the mountainous terrain covered by fallen rocks.\n\nThose areas were shaken anew Sunday by a magnitude 3.9 aftershock, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It wasn't immediately clear if it caused more damage or casualties, but it was likely strong enough to rattle nerves in areas where damage has left buildings unstable and residents feared aftershocks.\n\nIn a region where many build bricks out of mud, Friday's earthquake toppled buildings not strong enough to withstand such a mighty temblor, trapping people in the rubble and sending others fleeing in terror. A total of 2,122 people were confirmed dead and at least 2,421 others were injured - 1,404 of them critically, the Interior Ministry reported.\n\nMost of the dead - 1,351 - were in the Al Haouz district in the High Atlas Mountains, the ministry said.\n\nFlags were lowered across Morocco, as King Mohammed VI ordered three days of national mourning starting Sunday. The army mobilized search and rescue teams, and the king ordered water, food rations and shelters to be sent to those who lost homes.\n\nHe also called for mosques to hold prayers Sunday for the victims, many of whom were buried Saturday amid the frenzy of rescue work nearby.\n\nThough it said for the first time Sunday that it would accept aid from four countries, Morocco has not made an international appeal for help like Turkey did in the hours following a massive quake earlier this year, according to aid groups.\n\nAid offers poured in from around the world, and the U.N. said it had a team in Morocco coordinating international support. About 100 teams made up of a total of 3,500 rescuers are registered with a U.N. platform and ready to deploy in Morocco when asked, Rescuers Without Borders said. Germany had a team of more than 50 rescuers waiting near Cologne-Bonn Airport but sent them home, news agency dpa reported.\n\nA Spanish search-and-rescue team arrived in Marrakech and headed to the rural Talat N'Yaaqoub, according to Spain's Emergency Military Unit. Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares said in a radio interview that Moroccan authorities asked for help. Another rescue team from Nice, France, also was on its way.\n\nOfficials in the Czech Republic earlier said the country was sending about 70 members of a rescue team trained in searching through rubble after receiving an official request from the Moroccan government. Czech Defense Minister Jana Cernochova said three military planes were prepared to transport the team.\n\nIn France, which has many ties to Morocco and said four of its citizens died in the quake, towns and cities have offered more than 2 million euros ($2.1 million) in aid. Popular performers are collecting donations.\n\nThe epicenter of Friday's quake was near the town of Ighil in Al Haouz Province, about 70 kilometers (44 miles) south of Marrakech. The region is known for scenic villages and valleys tucked in the High Atlas Mountains.\n\nDevastation gripped each town along the High Atlas' steep and winding switchbacks, with homes folding in on themselves and people crying as boys and helmet-clad police carried the dead through the streets.\n\n\"I was asleep when the earthquake struck. I could not escape because the roof fell on me. I was trapped. I was saved by my neighbors who cleared the rubble with their bare hands,\" said Fatna Bechar in Moulay Brahim. \"Now, I am living with them in their house because mine was completely destroyed.\"\n\nThere was little time for mourning as survivors tried to salvage anything from damaged homes.\n\nKhadija Fairouje's face was puffy from crying as she joined relatives and neighbors hauling possessions down rock-strewn streets. She had lost her daughter and three grandsons aged 4 to 11 when their home collapsed while they were sleeping less than 48 hours earlier.\n\n\"Nothing's left. Everything fell,\" said her sister, Hafida Fairouje.\n\nThe Mohammed V Foundation for Solidarity was coordinating help for about 15,000 families in Al Haouz province, including food, medical aid, emergency housing and blankets, the state news agency MAP quoted the organization's head, Youssef Rabouli, as saying after he visited the region.\n\nRescuers backed by soldiers and police searched collapsed homes in the remote town of Adassil, near the epicenter. Military vehicles brought in bulldozers and other equipment to clear roads, MAP reported. Ambulances took dozens of wounded from the village of Tikht, population 800, to Mohammed VI University Hospital in Marrakech.\n\nIn Marrakech, large chunks were missing from a crenelated roof, and warped metal, crumbled concrete and dust were all that remained of a building cordoned off by police.\n\nTourists and residents lined up to give blood.\n\n\"I did not even think about it twice,\" Jalila Guerina told The Associated Press, \"especially in the conditions where people are dying, especially at this moment when they are needing help, any help.\" She cited her duty as a Moroccan citizen.\n\nThe quake had a preliminary magnitude of 6.8 when it hit at 11:11 p.m., lasting several seconds, the USGS said. A magnitude 4.9 aftershock hit 19 minutes later, it said. The collision of the African and Eurasian tectonic plates occurred at a relatively shallow depth, which makes a quake more dangerous.\n\nIt was the strongest earthquake to hit the North African country in over 120 years, according to USGS records dating to 1900, but it was not the deadliest. In 1960, a magnitude 5.8 temblor struck near the city of Agadir, killing at least 12,000. That quake prompted Morocco to change construction rules, but many buildings, especially rural homes, are not built to withstand such tremors.\n\nIn 2004, a magnitude 6.4 earthquake near the Mediterranean coastal city of Al Hoceima left more than 600 dead."}
{"text": "# A US Navy veteran got unexpected help while jailed in Iran. Once released, he repaid the favor\nBy **ERIC TUCKER**  \nSeptember 10th, 2023. 4:20 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Michael White had only recently arrived in a grim Iranian jail when a curious fellow prisoner, an English-speaking Iranian, approached him in the courtyard for a conversation.\n\nThe American did not reveal much at first, but it was the beginning of an unlikely friendship between White, a Navy veteran imprisoned on spying charges he says were unfounded, and Mahdi Vatankhah, a young Iranian political activist whose positions on social issues had drawn his government's ire.\n\nAs the men connected behind bars over a shared interest in politics and human rights, they developed a bond that proved vital for both.\n\nVatankhah, while in custody and after his release, helped White by providing White's mother with crucial, firsthand accounts about her son's status in prison and by passing along letters White had written while he was locked up. Once freed, White did not forget. He pushed successfully for Vatankhah's admission to the United States, allowing the men to be reunited last spring inside a Los Angeles airport, something neither could have envisioned when they first met in prison years earlier.\n\n\"He risked his life to get the information out for me when I was in the prison in Iran. He really, really did,\" White said in an interview alongside Vatankhah. \"I told him I would do everything I could in my power to get him here because I felt, one, that would be for his safety in his own life. And also I felt he could be a great contributing member of society here.\"\n\nThis year, White received permission for Vatankhah to live temporarily in the U.S. under a government program known as humanitarian parole, which allows people in for urgent humanitarian reasons or if there is a significant public benefit.\n\nVatankhah told AP he had dreamed about coming to the U.S. ever since he could remember. When he landed, \"It was like the best moment of my life. My whole life changed.\"\n\nWhite, 50, a Southern California native who spent 13 years in the Navy, was arrested in Iran in 2018 after traveling to the country to pursue a romantic relationship with a woman he met online. He was jailed on various charges, including espionage accusations that he calls bogus, as well as allegations of insulting Iran's supreme leader.\n\nHe endured what he says was torture and sexual abuse, an ordeal he documented in a handwritten diary that he secretly maintained behind bars, and was sentenced to 10 years in prison in what the U.S. government has said was a wrongful detention.\n\nVatankhah, now 24, said he had been in and out of prison since he was a teenager because of his involvement in left-leaning causes and vocal criticism of the Iranian government, including through protests, social media posts and university newspaper pieces. He met White in 2018 after one such arrest when Vatankhah faced accusations of spreading propaganda against Tehran's government.\n\nThough Vatankhah was later released, he was arrested again, this time winding up in the same cell as White in Iran's Mashhad prison.\n\nDuring the course of their friendship, Vatankhah helped White navigate his imprisonment and better understand the judicial system, functioning as an interpreter to help him communicate with guards and other inmates. In early 2020, while Vatankhah was out on furlough, he also became a vital conduit to the outside world for White.\n\nUsing contact information White had given him, Vatankhah got in touch with Jonathan Franks, a consultant in the U.S. for families of American hostages and detainees who was working on White's case and later helped spearhead the humanitarian parole process for Vatankhah. He also spoke with White's mother and smuggled out letters White had written.\n\nThe detailed information about White, his status and his health - he suffered from cancer and COVID-19 in prison - came at a crucial time, providing a proof-of-life of sorts at a time of heightened tensions between the U.S. and Iran due to a U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who led the expeditionary Quds Force of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard.\n\nWhite was released in a June 2020 prisoner swap, exchanged for an American-Iranian physician imprisoned in the U.S. for violating American sanctions laws. Vatankhah, released the same year, made his way to Turkey.\n\nWhite argued in his March application on Vatankhah's behalf that his friend met the criteria for humanitarian parole because, despite having relocated to Turkey, he was continuing to face harassment on account of his political viewpoints.\n\nVatankhah wrote in his own petition that the situation was unsafe for him in Turkey. He noted that Turkish police had raided his home and that he remained at risk of deportation to Iran.\n\nParis Etemadi Scott, a California lawyer who has worked with White and Vatankhah and filed the humanitarian parole application on the Iranian's behalf, said Vatankhah's assistance to an American - a veteran, no less - enhanced the legitimacy and urgency of his petition because it added to the potential that Vatankhah could face imminent harm.\n\nWhile many applicants do not have significant supporting documentation, \"Mahdi had this amazing amount of evidence to show that he was in fact incarcerated over and over again,\" she said.\n\nA State Department spokesman said in a statement that the office of the department's special presidential envoy for hostage affairs had worked hard to secure White's release in 2020, and after learning of Vatankhah's case, \"worked hand-in-hand with multiple partners in the U.S. government,\" including the White House National Security Council and Department of Homeland Security, to ensure his arrival in the U.S.\n\nVatankhah is now living in San Diego, where White is from. Vatankhah said his humanitarian parole is good for one year, but he already has applied for asylum, which would allow him to remain in the U.S. He's obtained a work permit and found work as a caregiver.\n\nHe's also enjoying freedom to share his political views freely without fear of retribution.\n\n\"I like to express my ideas here where I can. I can continue to use my freedom to talk against the Iranian regime.\""}
{"text": "# Hawaii volcano Kilauea erupts after nearly two months of quiet\nSeptember 11th, 2023. 1:56 AM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**HONOLULU (AP)** - Kilauea, one of the most active volcanoes in the world, began erupting Sunday after a two-month pause, displaying glowing lava that is a safe distance from people and structures in a national park on the Big Island.\n\nThe Hawaii Volcano Observatory said the eruption was observed in the afternoon at the summit of Kilauea.\n\nThe observatory said gases released by the eruption will cause volcanic smog downwind of Kilauea. People living near the park should try to avoid volcanic particles spewed into the air by the eruption, the observatory said.\n\nThe volcano's alert level was raised to warning status and the aviation color code went to red as scientists evaluate the eruption and associated hazards.\n\nIn June, Kilauea erupted for several weeks, displaying fountains of red lava without threatening any communities or structures. Crowds of people flocked to the Big Island's Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, which offered safe views of the lava.\n\nKilauea, Hawaii's second-largest volcano, erupted from September 2021 until last December. A 2018 Kilauea eruption destroyed more than 700 homes."}
{"text": "# Djokovic celebrates No. 24 with a tribute to Kobe Bryant, who wore that number and became a friend\nBy **BRIAN MAHONEY**  \nSeptember 10th, 2023. 10:23 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Novak Djokovic couldn't think about No. 24 without thinking of Kobe Bryant.\n\nSo after winning the U.S. Open on Sunday night for a historic 24th Grand Slam title, Djokovic put on a blue T-shirt that honored the Los Angeles Lakers great.\n\nThe shirt read \"Mamba Forever\" on the front, along with pictures of Bryant and Djokovic. On the back in purple was the No. 24, one of two numbers Bryant wore during his Hall of Fame career.\n\nDjokovic said he came up with the idea about a week ago as a way to honor his friend. He said he received advice on his own career from Bryant, who died in 2020 in a helicopter crash that also killed his daughter, Gianna, and seven others.\n\n\"Kobe was a close friend, we chatted a lot about the winner's mentality when I was struggling with injury and trying to make my comeback, work my way back to the top of the game,\" Djokovic said. \"He was one of the people that I relied on the most.\"\n\n\"He was always there for any kind of counsel, advice, any kind of support in the most friendly way,\" Djokovic continued. \"So of course what happened a few years ago and him and his daughter passing hurt me deeply, and I thought 24 is the jersey he wore when he became a legend of the Lakers and world basketball, so I thought it could be a nice, symbolic thing to acknowledge him for all the things he's done.\"\n\nBryant's widow, Vanessa, congratulated Djokovic with an Instagram post, saying that \"Real recognize Real\" with the hashtag MambaMentality."}
{"text": "# Giants fall flat against Cowboys after entering the season with high expectations\nBy **TOM CANAVAN**  \nSeptember 11th, 2023. 1:29 AM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. (AP)** - After being one of the NFL's biggest surprises last season and making the playoffs for the first time since 2016 under new coach Brian Daboll, the New York Giants came into the season looking to take that next step.\n\nThey did in the season opener against the Dallas Cowboys, and it was a major step backward.\n\nDespite drafting impact players at cornerback, center and wide receiver, trading for explosive tight end Darren Waller and signing several free agents to shore up the defense, Daboll and the Giants fell flat Sunday night while being embarrassed by the Cowboys 40-0.\n\n\"I think there is a little bit of anger, a little bit of embarrassment,\" defensive lineman Leonard Williams said. \"I think we obviously didn't come out here and perform the way we wanted to. But at the same time, I think we prepared well this camp, we prepared well for this week. And I think what we put on display today is not us. The leaders in this room know that, and this team knows that.\n\n\"And I think we're going to make sure we don't let something like that happen again.\"\n\nThis was a game the Giants' offense looked great for most of the opening drive - and then it all went south at the Cowboys 8. Faced with third-and-short, there was a motion penalty, a bad snap and then the totally unexpected. A missed block on a 45-yard field goal attempt led to a blocked kick that Noah Igbinoghene picked up and returned 58 yards for a touchdown.\n\n\"It was a game shift as you started to see after that happened,\" Igbinoghene said. \"I felt like we were going to do it anyway, but that was an amazing start.\"\n\nThings only got worse for the Giants after that. After a field goal by the Cowboys, DaRon Bland scored on a 22-yard interception return later in the first quarter on a play set up when Trevon Diggs hit Saquon Barkley as he was attempting to catch a pass from Daniel Jones. The ball popped in the air and Bland grabbed it.\n\nThe Cowboys' defense took over after that and forced two more turnovers and sacked Daniel Jones seven times in Dallas' biggest shutout win ever.\n\n\"We got skunked in the National Football League against Dallas, and at home, but I don't think that takes away anything from what we did in training camp,\" said Barkley, who ran for 51 yards on 12 carries. \"I feel like we had a good week of practice. We came out and we just didn't execute and play to the level we could play to.\"\n\nCowboys coach Mike McCarthy said the sacks were the key for his team after New York fell behind and had to throw.\n\n\"They were going to pound the ball and challenge our run defense over and over again and soften up the pass rush,\" McCarthy said. \"The pass rush was relentless tonight. We gave up contain a couple of times early but after that, it was in total control of the game.\"\n\nWaller, who was acquired in a trade with Las Vegas and is supposed to be a game breaker for the offense, finished with a team-high three catches for 36 yards.\n\n\"I tell the guys I've been on the losing end of games like this before, and it's (about) how you come in, is your head is high, and are you picking guys up?\" he said. \"Are you making sure you're not pointing the finger at other people, (but) knowing your part and taking personal accountability? That's how you move forward.\"\n\nNo one felt the pain more than Jones, who was also hit 12 times on a night he was 15 of 28 for 104 yards.\n\n\"We are certainly frustrated and extremely disappointed with how we performed tonight, and I know I certainly am with myself, so a lot to work on and clean up,\" he said in his first start after signing a four-year, $160 million contract. \"We are going to be critical of ourselves and look to correct it and get back on the right page.\""}
{"text": "# UN atomic watchdog warns of threat to nuclear safety as fighting spikes near a plant in Ukraine\nBy **SAMYA KULLAB**  \nSeptember 9th, 2023. 11:58 AM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**KYIV, Ukraine (AP)** - The United Nations atomic watchdog warned of a potential threat to nuclear safety from a spike in fighting near Europe's largest nuclear power plant in Ukraine, whose forces continued pressing their counteroffensive on Saturday.\n\nThe International Atomic Energy Agency said its experts deployed at the Russia-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant reported hearing numerous explosions over the past week, in a possible indication of increased military activity in the region. There was no damage to the plant.\n\n\"I remain deeply concerned about the possible dangers facing the plant at this time of heightened military tension in the region,\" IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi warned in a statement issued late Friday.\n\nHe noted that the IAEA team was informed that staff at the nuclear power plant had been reduced temporarily to minimum levels due to concerns of more military activity in the area.\n\n\"Whatever happens in a conflict zone, wherever it may be, everybody would stand to lose from a nuclear accident, and I urge that all necessary precautions must be taken to avoid it happening,\" Grossi said.\n\nThe IAEA has repeatedly expressed concern that the fighting could cause a potential radiation leak from the facility, which is one of the world's 10 biggest nuclear power stations. The plant's six reactors have been shut down for months, but it still needs power and qualified staff to operate crucial cooling systems and other safety features.\n\nAs Ukrainian forces pressed to expand their gains after recently capturing the village of Robotyne in the Zaporizhzhia region, the U.K. Defense Ministry noted in its latest report that Russia has brought in reinforcements to stymie the Ukrainian advances.\n\n\"It is highly likely that Russia has redeployed forces from other areas of the frontline to replace degraded units around Robotyne,\" it said. \"These redeployments are likely limiting Russia's ability to carry out offensive operations of its own along other areas of the front line.\"\n\nThe Washington-based Institute for the Study of War noted that the Russian military has made notable changes to its command and control structure to \"protect command infrastructure and improve information sharing.\"\n\nRussian forces have continued their barrage across Ukraine. The regional authorities in the northeastern region of Sumy that borders Russia said that the latest Russian shelling left four people wounded, one of whom later died in a hospital.\n\nThe Kremlin reaffirmed Saturday that Russia will not extend a landmark deal allowing Ukraine to export grain safely through the Black Sea until the West fully meets Moscow's demands regarding its own agricultural exports.\n\nKremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov commented on reports that Western powers were allegedly discussing a deal that would allow the Russian Agricultural Bank to open a subsidiary that would be reconnected to the SWIFT payment system and meet other Russian demands. He said that Moscow expects the West to fulfill the original agreements to facilitate Russian agricultural exports that were reached in July 2022.\n\n\"For instance, they are now saying that the West is allegedly ready to promise to open SWIFT for a subsidiary of the Russian Agricultural Bank, but the thing is that the agreements envisage SWIFT access for the Russian Agricultural Bank, not its subsidiary,\" Peskov said in a conference call with reporters.\n\nHe added that \"because they have already made a lot of promises, we considered ourselves entitled and obligated to wait first for the implementation before resuming the deal.\"\n\nRussia refused to extend the deal in July, complaining that a parallel agreement promising to remove obstacles to Russian exports of food and fertilizer hadn't been honored. It said restrictions on shipping and insurance hampered its agricultural trade, though it has shipped record amounts of wheat since last year.\n\nUkraine and its Western allies have dismissed the Kremlin's demands as a ploy to advance its own interests.\n\nOn Saturday, Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi arrived to Ukraine for an official visit and prayed at a church in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, where some of the worst atrocities of Russia's war occurred early during the invasion.\n\n\"I am grateful to Japan for remaining our key partner in Asia and supporting Ukraine,\" Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.\n\nSpeaking after talks with his Ukrainian counterpart, Hayashi pledged that \"Japan will go hand in hand with Ukraine until peace returns to its beautiful land.\"\n\nUkrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said that while Japan cannot provide Ukraine with lethal weapons, it has \"already demonstrated that it can do many other important things to improve our security.\"\n\nJapan has given Ukraine more than $7 billion in assistance since the start of the full-scale invasion. As part of its assistance, Tokyo provided two transformers to help Ukraine restore its energy systems after relentless Russian strikes, and donated 24 trucks to help Ukraine clear unexploded ordnance."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: In 'Big Fat Greek Wedding 3,' the wedding's in Greece and the formula feels ancient\nBy **JOCELYN NOVECK**  \nSeptember 8th, 2023. 3:30 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n\"We're getting married!\" This rather inevitable line crops up early in \"My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3,\" and if you're like me, it will inspire mixed reactions.\n\nFirst: Wait, so soon? We didn't know anyone was even engaged! And second: Phew, it's about time! Because, just like there can be no sunrise over the glittering Ionian sea without a sun, there can be no \"big fat Greek wedding\" movie without ... you know.\n\nYet the mere fact that a wedding is so crucial to the DNA of this trilogy - which surely will morph into a quadrilogy and then a quintology - raises its own issues. Which Greek philosopher was it who said there's no problem that can't be solved with a wedding? Right, that would be Nia Vardalos, the franchise star, writer and now director, too. But is she also saying a wedding is the only possible happy ending?\n\nThat would be out of sync with certain obvious efforts in this script - some more swallowable than others - to modernize a formula that worked so well in the beloved, hugely successful 2002 original. It's a formula that lost luster with that first, deflating sequel in 2016, a whole 14 years later. And if \"My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2\" felt like a pale imitation of the buoyant original, \"My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3\" feels sorta like a pale imitation of that pale imitation. Or, to analogize with a favored franchise food item: like a thrice-warmed piece of baklava.\n\nThen again, even thrice-warmed baklava can be worth the calories. So too this sequel will prove worthwhile for those most eager to reconnect with characters they loved, and willing to overlook clunky pacing and dialogue and sometimes absurd plot machinations. On the plus side: Vardalos and crew are really, really good at staging weddings.\n\nFor those who need a refresher: The last film left us at an NYU dorm room, dropping off Paris, teen daughter of Toula (Vardalos, empathetic and appealing as usual) and her wholesomely hunky husband Aidan, oops, Ian (John Corbett, wink wink). Paris' choice to leave her hometown of Chicago for college provided much of the half-boiled suspense in the first sequel. She got her way, but perhaps also her punishment when the whole extended family - aunts, uncles, cousins - came to drop her off. Ugh!\n\nBecause it's hard to let go of things that worked so well in the original - did we mention it was a ginormous hit? - Vardalos hasn't, really. The Portokalos family is still loving, boisterous and invasive. We've sadly lost patriarch Gus ( Michael Constantine, who died in 2021). But wife Maria is still there (Lainie Kazan has only a cameo here) and Toula is still married to hunky Ian. Everyone still uses Windex to clean objects and cure diseases.\n\nAnd the clan is on the move, led by spunky, oversharing Aunt Voula (Andrea Martin, still by far the the funniest onscreen presence), this time to ... Greece! Yes! The ostensible reason: a family reunion in their lovely ancestral mountain village (shooting was done in Corfu). The plan is to find Gus' childhood friends and fulfill his wish of giving them a precious journal he kept.\n\nWhy that journal shouldn't stay with Gus' adoring children is not truly explained - but neither is much else. Subplots are introduced and then largely ignored. A handful of new characters arrive with little backstory - like Victory (Melina Kotselou), the young, nonbinary mayor of the village - and even less character development.\n\nThe same lack of detail plagues the story arcs of returning characters. Toula's brother Nick (Louis Mandylor) - poor Nick - has been saddled with an ugly habit, namely trimming nose hairs and toenails at the family table. Why? Who knows? As for Ian, he's still a nice, patient husband, with little else to distinguish him. Toula's still the glue holding everyone together.\n\nAs for their marriage, it's fine. That's perhaps a problem. In most rom-com relationships, you don't get through three movies without some meaty conflict - we need the breakup to have the makeup! Vardalos doesn't want to go there.\n\nOr maybe she's just in a rush to get to the altar. That, we can understand. Here in Greece, all roads lead to ... the wedding. The party's in the quaint village square. The candlelit table is gorgeous, the food sumptuous. And the dancing is a joyous mix of Greek and Syrian tradition - one of the spouses-to-be is a migrant from Syria, a nod to contemporary Greek politics. Other efforts to contemporize include the briefest of nods to Victory's nonbinary status - one line from Aunt Voula - just as the first sequel introduced a gay couple, equally briefly.\n\nBut how contemporary are we getting if nothing brings resolution but a wedding? And more importantly, who will be married in the inevitable \"Greek Wedding 4?\"\n\nWill Paris (Elena Kampouris), whose own turbulent existence is quickly hinted at, marry the cute young Aristotle? (Yes, that's his name). Will there be a big fat Greek alternative wedding? Who knows, but if there's a movie, there will be a wedding. \"My Big Fat Just-Cohabiting-For-Now\" doesn't quite cut it.\n\n\"My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3,\" a Focus Films release, has been rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association \"for suggestive material and some nudity.\" Running time: 91 minutes. Two stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Oh, sister, what happened? 'The Nun II' is a face-plant horror splat\nBy **MARK KENNEDY**  \nSeptember 7th, 2023. 12:51 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n\"The Conjuring\" Universe celebrates 10 years in business this fall with the dull \"The Nun II,\" a movie that seems destined to pound a nail into this franchise's undead coffin.\n\nA new directing and writing team fails to shock or scare with a color-by-numbers plot and a meandering, languid wannabe frightfest. A few audience members fired up their phones halfway through a recent preview, a bad sign for anyone hoping for a gripping experience.\n\nA sequel to \"The Nun\" - the top-earning film in the franchise, with more than $366 million worldwide - was never going to be denied and the sequel hews carefully to the previous success. You could even say it's haunted by its better precedent.\n\nThis time it is 1956 - four years after the events of \"The Nun\" - and a demon is once again stalking Europe. It's the same horrific Valak we met last time and suspected didn't die, despite being splashed by the blood of Christ. \"The demon lives,\" we are told.\n\nReturning are Taissa Farmiga - younger sister of \"The Conjuring\" star Vera Farmiga - as wide-eyed Sister Irene, and Jonas Bloquet as Maurice, the French-Canadian hero dripping with charm. The filmmakers attempt to give us more backstory for Sister Irene - mostly flashbacks to her mom - but it doesn't add much.\n\nNew this time is Storm Reid as a skeptical novice who smokes and doesn't really buy the water-into-wine story. She is well introduced and seems a good foil to Sister Irene's devoted nun but is soon abandoned and never has her come-to-Jesus moment.\n\nThe screenplay by Ian Goldberg, Richard Naing and Akela Cooper sets most of the action in a boarding school in the South of France as Maurice tries to create a new life with a love interest but a terrible secret threatens his happiness. The characters are thin and there's lots of padding but the ancient towns the location department found are terrifically eerie and foreboding. The fatal mistake is that Sister Irene gets lost in her own film.\n\nDirector Michael Chaves, who also helmed \"The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It,\" oversees a few great moments - a possessed newsstand with all the magazine pages frantically flipping is awesome - but it's mostly the same flashlights-and-heavy-footsteps stuff. Wait for the quick cut, jump, wait, repeat.\n\n\"The Nun II\" apes the structure of its predecessor as our heroine needs to find a powerful relic to defeat the demon - and maybe Satan also, who appears as a goat but weirdly can be hindered by a strong wooden door. There's a Dan Brown-esque feel as Sister Irene searches for clues in ancient Vatican archives.\n\nIs it mere coincidence that this year also marks a truly poor \"Insidious\" outing? Both these low-budget, Patrick Wilson-connected horror franchises need a good startling. Or CPR paddles.\n\n\"The Nun II,\" a Warner Bros. Pictures release, is rated R for \"violent content and some terror.\" Running time: 110 minutes. One star out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Pinochet as a vampire in surreal, frightening 'El Conde'\nBy **LINDSEY BAHR**  \nSeptember 6th, 2023. 4:03 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\nThe Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet is not dead in Pablo Larraín's \"El Conde.\" He is instead a 250-year-old vampire living in semi-exile and wishing for death in this audacious allegory about history's tendency to repeat itself, shot in sublime, otherworldly black and white.\n\nIt is fitting that the film, in theaters Friday and on Netflix Sept. 15, is being released around the 50-year anniversary of the Sept. 11, 1973 coup which brought Pinochet to power for almost 17 years. Pinochet's regime tortured, killed and disappeared 3,065 people in the name of fighting communism, but for some in Chile the legacy is now remembered as not all bad.\n\nEvil ideas, Larraín cautions, have a tendency to live on, to mutate and to infect societies again and again even many years after they're supposedly dispelled and destroyed. Kind of like vampires living in stark, hellish exile as greedy heirs circulate to try to claim what's theirs and keep the money flowing.\n\nLarraín, the 47-year-old filmmaker behind \"Spencer,\" \"Jackie\" and \"No,\" has always considered himself a political filmmaker and has already gestured at Pinochet in previous films. In \"El Conde,\" which he co-wrote, he uses \"the language of satire and political farce\" to show the world the true nature of a dictator who \"never faced true justice,\" he said in his director's statement.\n\nPinochet stepped down in 1990 after Chileans voted against military rule, only to assume the role of commander-in-chief of the army and, later, the self-created position of lifelong senator until he resigned in 2002. He died in 2006 without being convicted in Chilean courts. That he was not brought to justice is conceived in the film as placing the country in a kind of eternal limbo, doomed to continue suffering at the hands of the General and his disciples.\n\nJaime Vadell, who is a vibrant 87, plays Pinochet. He flies around Chile like an evil, aging superman, unsure if he wants to hunt or starve himself of blood and let his clock run out. He is world weary but also prideful; He gets especially aggravated when it's suggested that he's a thief (murder, he was essentially fine with). Alfredo Castro is his devoted butler, who also hungers for blood. And Gloria Münchmeyer is composed and sinister as his string-wielding wife Lucía, trapped with their mid-age, lazy, entitled offspring as a pretty, young accountant/nun (Paula Luchsinger) attempts to take stock of the general's assets but also exorcise him. Her character, who masks her shrewdness with a wide-eyed earnestness is styled and shot with nods to Renée Jeanne Falconetti in \"The Passion of Joan of Arc.\"\n\n\"El Conde\" is obviously not a history lesson, but information flies at you fast nonetheless. It could rival \"His Girl Friday\" in words per minute, which can be challenging to process in subtitles but this is where the Netflix of it all comes in handy - the dialogue is so sharp, you don't want to miss a word. There is also an English-speaking narrator (whose identity will be revealed eventually), giving it a whimsically macabre, storybook feel.\n\nIn this fantastical, allegorical nightmare, sense and logic should be the last thing on your mind - especially when engrossed in cinematographer Ed Lachman's (\"Carol,\" \"The Virgin Suicides\") splendid photography. He apparently shot with a camera made especially for the film (an Arri Alexa Monochrome for anyone interested).\n\n\"El Conde\" might stretch its gimmicky premise a little past its welcome, but it is an intoxicating, overwhelming and gruesome cinematic experience nonetheless, which would make a fitting double feature with last year's great historical legal thriller \"Argentina 1985.\"\n\n\"El Conde,\" a Netflix release in theaters Friday and streaming on Sept. 15, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for \"some graphic nudity, gore, rape, language and sexual content, strong violence.\" Running time: 110 minutes. Three stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Denzel Washington's vigilante battles the Italian mafia in 'Equalizer 3'\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nAugust 30th, 2023. 3:07 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\nThere's an awful lot of talk about the end of movie stars considering Denzel Washington is right over here, walking around.\n\nAntoine Fuqua's \"Equalizer 3,\" a taut and textured sequel to Washington's vigilante series, isn't one of the actor's best films. It wouldn't crack his top 10. But it vividly encapsulates Washington's formidable on-screen potency.\n\nYou might think this would be in the movie's brutal action sequences, but no. It's the scenes of Washington fastidiously having a cup of tea at a sidewalk cafe or strolling the streets of a Sicilian town. This is a movie stitched together less by its plot mechanics than the pleasure of watching Denzel smirk, scowl and smile, in leisurely scenes mixed in with all the murder.\n\nIn that way, the \"Equalizer\" movies (the third of which is certainly the best of a so-so bunch), remind me of those great Walter Matthau thrillers like \"Charley Varrick\" and \"Hopscotch\" - movies about old men with expressive eyebrows who are set in their ways but have plenty of tricks left up their sleeve. (Washington, now 68, also took over Matthau's role in the remake of \"Pelham One Two Three.\")\n\nThere's no shortage these days of older stars plying their special sets of skills in action thrillers. Throw a stone in a movie theater and you're likely to hit (and risk drawing the lethal ire of) Liam Neeson, Harrison Ford or Tom Cruise. \"Equalizer 3,\" an all-in-all good entry in the genre, is on the bloodier end of the spectrum.\n\nYet curiously neither the fight sequences (rapid and grotesque) nor the film's sense of suspense (perfunctory) are much of a selling point. The film, scripted by Richard Wenk, opens with a trail of bodies through the main house of an Sicily vineyard. In the wine cellar calmly sits Robert McCall (Washington), who shrugs, \"Wouldn't let me in, so...\"\n\n\"The Equalizer\" is loosely based on an 1980s TV series about a former intelligence service agent who spends his retirement bringing the scales of justice back in balance for regular folks he happens to encounter. And there's a pleasantly episodic quality to the third film in the series.\n\nA bullet in the back leaves McCall laid up in recovery after he's taken in by a kindly village doctor named Enzo (Remo Girone). We're in Southern Italy. Most of the film was shot along the Amalfi coast, specifically the enchanting medieval fishing village of Atrani. If there's one truly implausible thing about \"Equalizer 3,\" it's the fact that there isn't a tourist in sight. McCall, who once out of bed strolls the village's cobbled steps with a cane, seems to be the only American in town. He's quickly charmed by the people who warmly welcome the \"Americano.\"\n\nAnd the same time, the Camorra mafia is pushing harder into the village, with intentions of driving out locals to make room for hotels and casinos. They make a small army of designer-dressed, tattoo-covered thugs, and they descend on the village, unaware of the lurking elite vigilante quietly sipping tea across the street from their shakedowns or eating pasta at the next table.\n\nThe well-traveled Fuqua, who helmed both prior \"Equalizer\" movies and first directed Washington in \"Training Day,\" is in his genre wheelhouse here. He trails McCall patiently and soaks up the local color, with a few touches of Christian imagery from the church above the town. There's a sinister, ominous sense of evil scourges - a heinous drug from Syria, sold by the mafia is funding terrorists cells - seeping into a society of \"good people.\"\n\nThe clear dichotomy of good and bad is cozy, and so, too, is Washington's savage, untroubled dispatching of the mafia ring. There are CIA officials in the mix, too, including Dakota Fanning's desk clerk turned operative. But they are mostly following McCall's lead. He - Washington really - is in a league of his own, and \"Equalizer 3,\" smartly, doesn't even try to suggest it's a close race. Not all are created equal, after all.\n\n\"Equalizer 3,\" a Sony Pictures release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong bloody violence and some language. Running time: 109 minutes. Three stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: 'Bottoms' is a gonzo gay high-school comedy that comes out on top\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nAugust 23rd, 2023. 6:06 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\nThe rites and rituals of the raunchy high-school comedy can be as prescribed as a class syllabus. But what makes Emma Seligman's \"Bottoms\" such an anarchic thrill is how much it couldn't care less.\n\nSure, come to \"Bottoms\" with your expectations of house parties and hijinks. But you'll be leaving with a field full of bloodied football players.\n\nSeligman's film, which opens in theaters Friday, instead follows its own demented logic in a winding and surreal comedy of adolescent absurdity. The brash PJ ( Rachel Sennott ) and the more hesitant Josie ( Ayo Edebiri ) are longtime best friends who, in reaching senior year at Rock Ridge High, have either finally attained a much sought-after status (\"We're finally hot,\" insists PJ) or bottomed out at the low end of the high-school totem pole.\n\n\"Could the ugly, untalented gays please report to the principal's office?\" the principal (Wayne Pére) announces over the PA.\n\nPJ and Josie, accepting that description, meekly make their way down the hall. But PJ plans to put up a fight. While Josie is more resigned to her lonely fate (\"I'm not trying to sow my oats,\" she says), PJ is resolved to stir it up in her final year. They have no high-minded goals or even an especially coherent plan. \"Bottoms\" likewise aspires to be no paragon of lesbian representation or female empowerment. It would rather be sillier, more gleefully un-PC and way bloodier than your average high-school comedy.\n\nPJ and Josie would most of all like to make more headway with their cheerleader crushes. Josie likes Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and PJ swoons for Brittany ( Kaia Gerber ). Neither shows even the slightest interest in PJ or Josie; Isabel is dating the football quarterback Jeff ( Nicholas Galitzine ). In the history of high school comedies, football jocks have never been seen quite like this; they're outlandish, ridiculous people. They're also babies. When the girls' car ever so slightly taps Jeff on the knee, it's taken as a near-death experience, bringing down the principal's wrath and prompting rumors (stoked by PJ) that the girls are a violent duo who killed someone in \"juvie.\"\n\nThis might have been a little running gag for most movies, but Seligman and Sennott's script takes it as a linchpin for the rest of movie. Playing off their bad reputation, PJ launches a self-defense group - a \"fight club\" - for girls, hoping that Brittany shows up, too. Of course, it would be implausible if such a student group didn't have a school-sanctioned advisor. Enter their divorcing social studies teacher Mr. G ( Marshawn Lynch ), who's in the midst of derisively giving a lesson on feminism. Yes, one of the few adults in \"Bottoms\" is the former NFL all-star running back known as \"Beast Mode\" - and he's hysterical.\n\nThis is the second movie by Seligman, whose 2020 \"Shiva Baby\" (also starring Sennott) was a clever and highly anxious debut about a bisexual Jewish woman attending a shiva with her family. Her follow-up is more antic and off-the-cuff but similarly allergic to falling back on the expected. \"Bottoms\" can feel slapdash and unmodulated. But it's always its own unhinged thing. There's one student here (Ruby Cruz, charming) planting pipe bombs. There isn't a line reading by Edebiri, currently everywhere, that doesn't have its own unique rhythm. And Sennott, a frizzy-haired ball of mayhem, is a comedy star in the making.\n\nNot all the jokes land but they do fly. \"Bottoms,\" a queer comedy with a chaotic beat, is here to break stuff - and that's a very good thing.\n\n\"Bottoms,\" an MGM release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for crude sexual content, pervasive language and some violence. Running time: 92 minutes. Three stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Filmmakers behind biopic 'Golda,' starring Helen Mirren, get lost in a swirl of smoke\nBy **MARK KENNEDY**  \nAugust 23rd, 2023. 4:08 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\nGolda Meir was many things - modern Israel's first and only female head of government and a wartime prime minister. And she now she's provided the vehicle for Helen Mirren to try to earn some more acting awards.\n\nThe great English actor dons prosthetics and an air of sourness in \"Golda\" to portray Meir facing two tragedies by fire - leading Israel's counterattack in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war while also undergoing cancer treatment.\n\nThe war's outcome laid the groundwork for a peace agreement, but Israel suffered heavy losses and Meir was criticized for the government's lack of preparation and slowness to act on intelligence indicating an attack was imminent. She resigned the following year.\n\nDirector Guy Nattiv and writer Nicholas Martin don't have much to say about Meir's childhood or early adulthood in \"Golda.\" We find her very late in life, with terrible decisions to make as Israel is attacked on the holy day of Yom Kippur from two sides. This movie is mostly a snapshot of a few demanding weeks.\n\nThe filmmakers have seized on one recurring - and eventually irritating - image: smoke. Meir was a chain-smoker and that has given them license to have her lighting up at every turn; the crack of metal lighters and burning of paper seem to end every scene. There is even a half-hearted attempt to combine her cigarette smoke with artillery fire from the front lines, a dubious effort at best.\n\nIt's not clear why smoking is so important to the filmmakers. Perhaps it's to show Meir's stubbornness or single-mindedness or stress release - she even smokes on the hospital table while enduring treatment for lymphoma - but it just becomes a filmmaking crutch, like real nicotine.\n\nMirren - following in the sturdy, lace-up work shoes of previous Meir actors like Anne Bancroft, Judy Davis and Tovah Feldshuh - does an admirable job lurching from war meeting to war meeting and tossing off great lines like: \"All political careers end in failure\" and \"I will not be taken alive.\" (Mirren has so far largely avoided the criticism that Bradley Cooper has faced for playing Leonard Bernstein, though they are both non-Jews using prosthetics.)\n\nBut the script gives Mirren little insight into what is going on inside Meir. We watch her diligently note each soldier and equipment loss in a little notebook and have panic attacks, yet what the war means to her is lost in prosthetics, the clicking of typewriters and wisps of smoke.\n\nAnother ham-fisted way the filmmakers try to instill empathy in their Meir is, bizarrely, through one of the stenographers whose son is fighting in the Suez Canal. While the men blithely natter on about troop movements and casualties, Meir will glance at the stenographer, sadly.\n\nLiev Schreiber is very good as an amused Henry Kissinger - her few scenes with him give a welcome jolt to the movie - and Camille Cottin is very strong as Meir's patient aide, washing her back and administering soup and medicine.\n\n\"Golda\" has seeds of interesting insights, like the suggestion that she was betrayed by some of the men she relied on during the war and yet protected them. Or how false intelligence is nothing new when it comes to Middle Eastern conflicts. Or how female leaders inevitably face catch-22s. But none of these is taken.\n\nThere is one moment that punctures Mirren's dour portrayal, and it comes at the very end. The credits feature footage of the real Golda Meir, smiling and laughing with Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat. Here, finally, is the complex, multidimensional woman Mirren had been chasing but failed to land.\n\n\"Golda,\" a Bleecker Street release that is in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 for \"thematic material and pervasive smoking.\" Running time: 100 minutes. Two stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: 'Strays' is furry, foul, filthy, feculent - and occasionally funny\nBy **JOCELYN NOVECK**  \nAugust 17th, 2023. 6:52 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\nHey there, fellow obsessive dog owner. Ever wonder what your beloved pooch is thinking? Of course you do. If they could only tell us what's on their minds, right?\n\nWell, in \"Strays,\" an aggressively raunchy, gleefully gross and only occasionally truly funny comedy voiced by Will Ferrell and Jamie Foxx, we find out. Turns out our canine friends are endlessly curious about why we collect their poop in little plastic bags. It must be for something really important, they surmise. But what? And why do we keep needing more?\n\nIt's actually one of the film's cleverer jokes, and Foxx's Boston terrier, Bug, has an opinion on the matter - but we won't elaborate because it's kinda gross. There's a lot of gross, both kinda and mega, over this film's 93-minute running time. Also a lot of poop jokes, and penis jokes, both canine and human. You get the picture. Although some of these pictures may stay in your mind for way longer than you'd like.\n\n\"Strays,\" directed by Josh Greenbaum with a script by Dan Perrault, begins with its star, Reggie, a border terrier with a furiously upbeat attitude, declaring that \"today is the best day ever - because every day is the best day ever!\" Hmmm, where else have we heard virtually that same line .... Oh yes, in \"Barbie\"! The resemblance pretty much stops there.\n\nReggie, voiced by Ferrell with relentless puppy-like innocence, loves his owner, Doug. But Doug doesn't love him back. Let's stop here to note that in this film, real dogs play the four leading canines - kudos to their hardworking trainers - and humans appear in supporting roles, including one celebrity cameo and also Will Forte as the most odious dog owner you've ever met.\n\nForte's Doug is particularly vile to Reggie, because it's Reggie who dug up (literally) incriminating evidence that Doug was two-timing his girlfriend, leading to her exit. Doug held onto her dog solely out of spite. He never plays with Reggie or takes him outside, except to play a profanely titled \"game\" in which Doug drives him somewhere and tosses a tennis ball, then drives away, hoping he won't return. But he always does.\n\nBut one day Doug takes Reggie far, far away and the poor pooch can't find his way back. In this gritty urban setting, he meets the strays - led by Bug (Foxx). Not exactly strays, but taking some time in the streets for various reasons, are sexy Australian Shepherd Maggie (Isla Fisher), and Hunter (Randall Park), a Great Dane with anxiety issues.\n\nThe group welcomes Reggie, who wants nothing more than to get home, and introduces him to the adventurous life of a stray. Rule number one: If you want to own something, pee on it. The other rules are too risqué to describe here.\n\nReggie's new friends soon make him understand that his owner actually abandoned him. It's a tough moment. \"Maybe I should talk to him, since I'm a therapy dog,\" says Hunter. Suddenly, though, this makeshift family is on a mission. Reggie, newly aware of Doug's mendacity, is determined to get back home and, well, bite off Doug's favorite body part. This is an experience the rest of the pack refuses to miss. Us, we could maybe pass.\n\nAnyway, the journey will include, among other things: Reggie and Bug getting dragged into the sky by a giant (computer-animated) eagle; the pack eating a forest worth of psychedelic mushrooms and mauling bunnies while high; and everyone falling prey to a dog-catcher. At the pound, it is Reggie who inspires the captive dogs to break free with the memorable slogan: \"Let's all poop to freedom!\"\n\nWhat ensues is one of the grosser scenes you'll have witnessed in a while, but that's child's play compared to the harrowing (and somewhat tonally imbalanced) finale, a painful scene involving four dogs, one human, one baseball bat and one Miley Cyrus song (\"Wrecking Ball\") which you may now want to skip for a while.\n\nThe moral of the story, if you're a dog: Family is everything, but sometimes you find it where you least expect. Love your owner but not unconditionally, because he could be a terrible human.\n\nAlso: stay away from psychedelic mushrooms. And those plastic poop bags? Still a mystery.\n\n\"Strays,\" a Universal Studios release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association \"for pervasive language, crude and sexual content, and drug use.\" Running time: 93 minutes. Two stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: 'Blue Beetle' is a little more than a bug in the superhero system\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nAugust 17th, 2023. 11:19 AM GMT-4\n\n---\n\nFranz Kafka never realized how close he came to kickstarting a superhero franchise.\n\nEver since Gregor Samsa awoke in his bed to find himself transformed into a monstrous dung beetle in \"The Metamorphosis,\" we've had spider-men, wasps, ant-men, crime-fighting ticks and mighty mantises - such a super swarm of insectoids that you might be tempted to reach for a fly swatter.\n\nWe're now back to the beetle with the new DC Comics film \"Blue Beetle,\" which opens in theaters Thursday. But what distinguishes \"Blue Beetle\" isn't its place in the bug brigade but the person doing the metamorphosizing.\n\nJaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) is the first Latino superhero in a leading role in a DC film. It's not just token casting, either. \"Blue Beetle,\" directed by Ángel Manuel Soto and written by Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer, is firmly rooted in the experience of the Reyes clan, a close-knit Mexican-American family scraping by in the shadow of the gleaming Miami-like fictional metropolis of Palmera City.\n\nJaime is their first college graduate - \"And last!\" cheerfully chimes his sister, Milagro (the very funny, scene-stealing Belissa Escobedo). The parents, Alberto (Damián Alcázar) and Rocio (Elpidia Carrillo) are broke and on the cusp of losing their home to the encroaching, all-powerful Kord Industries. Also living with them are Jaime's grandmother (Adriana Barraza) and his truck-driving uncle (George Lopez, having a ball).\n\n\"We used to have the other side of the tracks,\" says Milagro. \"Now they want that, too.\"\n\nDespite big post-college ambitions, Jaime is stuck cleaning hotel rooms with his sister. Given what his family has sacrificed for him, he's saddled with guilt. So after a chance encounter with Jenny Kord (the Brazilian actress Bruna Marquezine), niece of the company's imperial chief executive Victoria (Susan Sarandon), Jaime jumps at the chance of a job opportunity.\n\nHe happens to turn up at Kord headquarters just as Jenny is fleeing with Victoria's prized discovery: a blue metallic scarab from outer space called the Khaji da that she's using to create an privatized robotic army. It's admittedly quite a jump from the real estate business, but, well, interest rates are sky high.\n\nBefore you know it, Jaime, tasked with hiding the beetle by Jenny, is looking down at the thing when it sinks itself onto his face and quickly seeps into his body. Gregor's initial response to changing into a beetle was simply to turn over (\"How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense\"), but Jaime is afforded no such chance. He's immediately rocketed through the roof and into space.\n\nIn the broadly sketched but spirited \"Blue Beetle,\" much of what follows is as you'd expect. There's getting used to the new outfit (and the sentient being that communicates Venom-style within Jaime). A recent past to uncover. The inevitable climactic battle between two hunks of CGI.\n\nBut \"Blue Beetle,\" the final entry in a now defunct wave of DC films, distinguishes itself in other ways. Jaime's family is continually along for the ride, making up his supporting cast when the big fight comes. (The grandmother's younger days as a revolutionary emerge, comically.) Superheroes are ultimately empowerment fantasies, though they've often got away from that. \"Blue Beetle\" manages to come closer than most in evoking the thrill of the powerless suddenly handed cosmic strength.\n\nSoto plays it fast and loose, mixing in a little lewdness (\"Activate bug fart\" is a new addition to the often solemn DC universe) and shades of neon blue and purple along the way. \"Blue Beetle\" doesn't have much originality going for itself and Maridueña doesn't make a significant impression. But the film crucially gets that superhero movies don't need to be self-serious to make a serious point.\n\n\"Blue Beetle,\" light, lively and sincere, is a tribute to the tenacity and indomitability of Mexican-American families that have clawed their way into an often inhospitable society. Family members, usually plot points of some animating trauma in superhero movies, are here a central part of the action. (Lopez gets countless cracks in, and most of them land.)\n\nIt's a time of self-inquiry for the superhero movie after hints of a new downward trend (despite some notable exceptions like the blistering \"Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,\" with its Afro-Latino protagonist ). \"Blue Beetle,\" which had at one point been destined to go straight to streaming, falls in the middle of this new uncertain terrain. After a string of disappointments, future DC installments will take the comic book franchise in new directions. So it remains to be seen if \"Blue Beetle\" can be much more than a bug in the system amid larger industry shifts.\n\nBut I'd wager there will be plenty of moviegoers - especially young Hispanic ones not accustomed to seeing reflections of themselves in Hollywood comic book spectacles - who'll grin all the way through the breezy \"Blue Beetle.\" If even a low-stakes, fairly derivative superhero movie like this can charm thanks to its warm Hispanic perspective and winning supporting cast, there's plenty of hope yet for the genre - bugs and all.\n\n\"Blue Beetle,\" a Warner Bros. release is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for sequences of action and violence, language, and some suggestive references. Running time: 127 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Gal Gadot turns superspy in 'Heart of Stone'\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nAugust 10th, 2023. 10:10 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\nIt's turning out to be quite a summer for superspies and supercomputers.\n\nA month after the action feast of \"Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part I,\" in which Tom Cruise faced off with an AI supervillain called \"the Entity,\" comes a very \"MI\"-like international espionage thriller with an equally fancy and powerful machine.\n\n\"Heart of Stone\" stars Gal Gadot as Rachel Stone, an agent for an elite and clandestine intelligence agency called the Charter. Like \"Mission: Impossible,\" \"Heart of Stone\" hits glamorous global destinations (the Italian Alps, Lisbon, Senegal, Iceland) and features lengthy actions sequence including a wingsuit skydive.\n\nWhereas \"Dead Reckoning\" pushed old-school filmmaking to extremes for a gripping theatrical experience, \"Heart of Stone\" revels in its digital wizardry, feels vaguely algorithm-y in its conception and was made for Netflix. Both films, interestingly, are products of the same production company, Skydance.\n\n\"Mission: Impossible\" was born out of the Cold War, but \"Heart of Stone\" conjures a peacekeeping spy unit outside of nationhood in the hopes of kickstarting a new franchise uncluttered by governments - a globetrotting spy movie without all those pesky geopolitics; a borderless intelligence agency for a borderless streaming era.\n\nThat may sound too harsh. After all, there have been countless lackluster espionage thrillers with little connection to the real world. (\"Dead Reckoning,\" for all its thrills, has about as much to do with today's international politics as its star has to do with lengthy interviews with journalists.) And \"Heart of Stone,\" directed by Tom Harper (\"Wild Rose,\" \"The Aeronauts\"), does have a few nifty moves of its own.\n\nThe film's opening sequence begins in a very Bond-like Alpine hotel where Gadot's Stone is part of an MI6 mission posing as an inexperienced tech, not a field agent. This allows for plenty of \"She can do that?\" looks when the operation falls apart and Stone begins flashing Cruise-level skills while rushing off with a glowing parachute down the darkened slopes in slinky, snowy chase.\n\nTo the credit of Harper, cinematographer George Steel and production designer Charles Wood, the action is generally fluid in \"Heart of Stone.\" The film's handsomest design comes in Charter's secret weapon: the Heart, the so-named quantum computer with supreme hacking abilities that can process chance-of-success scenarios in real time. Its operator (Matthias Schweighöfer), like a new-age John King, contorts a room full of pixels with the wave of his hand, while guiding Charter agents from afar.\n\nAlso in the mix is Jamie Dornan's Parker, the leader of the MI6 unit that Stone is initially masquerading in - though his affiliations are also murky. The trouble is kicked off by a hacker of mysterious intentions played by Alia Bhatt, a Bollywood star making her Hollywood debut. Glenn Close pops in as the head of the CIA.\n\nI'm not sure any of them get a chance to do all that much, though Bhatt is charmingly mischievous in her scenes. Not for the first time, the actor I most wish was center stage is Sophie Okonedo, who, as a Charter leader, is the most soulful presence in a not particularly soulful film. Gadot makes for a slinky if unspectacular spy.\n\nThe plot, from screenwriters Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder, revolves around the threat of the Heart falling into the wrong hands. This means that \"Heart\" is spoken of so much that you have expect the Wilson sisters to turn up eventually.\n\nBut there is nothing in the impressively generic \"Heart of Stone,\" right down that title, that is even a little bit unexpected. All the pieces here are fine but nothing is distinct from dozens of films before it. You would swear that the movie's star AI wrote it - and even gave itself first billing, too.\n\n\"Heart of Stone,\" a Netflix release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for sequences of violence and action, and some language. Running time: 123 minutes. One and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: The movie version of a beach read arrives in Amazon's 'Red, White & Royal Blue'\nBy **LINDSEY BAHR**  \nAugust 10th, 2023. 12:02 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n\"Red, White & Royal Blue\" is a harmlessly enjoyable fantasy rom-com. It's not Nora Ephron or Nancy Meyers, nor is it really trying to be. It's more in line, aesthetically, tonally, emotionally (in other words not really emotional at all), with one of those early aughts trifles where a normal American girl discovers she's actual royalty or a not-normal American girl (usually the president's kid) starts dating. This is \"What a Girl Wants\" meets \"First Daughter\" except this time the romantic partners are men.\n\nThe movie, directed by Matthew López, the Tony-winning playwright of \"The Inheritance,\" who co-wrote the script with Ted Malawer, is based on a popular novel by Casey McQuiston that quickly became a New York Times bestseller upon its debut in 2019 and got the attention of Amazon Studios. McQuiston's story dealt a hate-turns-to-love story between the son of the American president (a woman) and a senator who begins a secret romantic affair with a British prince. Prince Henry is gay. Alex Claremont-Diaz isn't quite sure how he identifies. But both are certainly closeted. Other characters are trans and pansexual, though not solely defined by that. The president is a woman, married to a man of Latino heritage. The LA Review of Books described it as \"propulsive\" and \"pulpy\" and \"fantastical.\"\n\nLópez keeps \"Red, White & Royal Blue\" in a solidly fantastical space. You don't ever quite believe anything you're seeing - from Prince Henry's ability to go undercover at a Texas bar by simply putting on a baseball hat, to the horrendously fake snow adorning a pivotal New Year's Eve scene. And yet, like a beach read, it goes down easy and has enough surprising wit and edge that makes it a cut above a lot of mediocre rom-coms. Plus, this has Stephen Fry as the King, Uma Thurman as the U.S. president and an ethically dubious Politico reporter.\n\nTaylor Zakhar Perez (of \"The Kissing Booth\") and Nicholas Galitzine (of \"Cinderella\") star as Alex and Henry, who met once years before in an unseen \"Pride and Prejudice\"-style misunderstanding that have our two strapping leads hating one another from the start. This is a bit overdone, but at a royal wedding Alex gets quite drunk and he and the prince end up bumping into the $75,000 wedding cake which comes crashing down on them. The incident becomes known as the Buttercream Summit and has both countries scrambling to prove that they are still friends with some forced photo opportunities and interviews with the quarrelling men.\n\nHave you heard this one before? Of course you have and at almost two hours it starts to wear thin by the end. \"Red, White & Royal Blue\" tries to keep things modern and cool, with its best approximations of CW-style \"West Wing\"- meets-\"Veep\" White House and campaign staffers who say things like \"you're yucking my yum.\" Sometimes they work.\n\nThere's no \"Call Me By Your Name\" or \"Passages\"-level passion here, but López and his actors do go well beyond what their prudish predecessors ever attempted, which is not nothing. We even get a cheeky cutaway to the Washington Monument.\n\nAnd yet these characters also leave a lot to be desired. Alex, who we're told has a working-class chip on his shoulder, wears Le Labo's Santal 33 and throws an annual New Year's Eve party that looks like something Paris Hilton would have attended in Georgetown in the George W. Bush-era. And Prince Henry has a real, heartbreaking dilemma that is given the most minimal, palatable space possible. There were more opportunities that could have been explored, but \"Red, White & Royal Blue\" chose a more vanilla soft serve version. Prince Henry also gets points in Alex's book for being a David Bowie fan (which seems about as unique as being a \"Star Wars\" fan).\n\nCredit goes to Amazon, López and Berlanti Productions (also behind the teen rom-com \"Love, Simon\") for releasing this with an R-rating (though I can't imagine a similar movie with a heterosexual couple getting that).\n\nUltimately, it's not earth shattering but it's also perfectly pleasant for what it is and what it knows it isn't. \"Red, White & Royal Blue\" is a beach read in movie form and one that can and should be watched with friends.\n\n\"Red, White & Royal Blue,\" an Amazon Studios release streaming Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for \"language, some sexual content and partial nudity.\" Running time: 118 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Republicans' opposition to abortion threatens a global HIV program that has saved 25 million lives\nBy **EVELYNE MUSAMBI**, **FARNOUSH AMIRI**, **CARA ANNA**, and **ELLEN KNICKMEYER**  \nSeptember 9th, 2023. 1:40 AM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**NAIROBI, Kenya (AP)** - The graves at the edge of the orphanage tell a story of despair. The rough planks in the cracked earth are painted with the names of children, most of them dead in the 1990s. That was before the HIV drugs arrived.\n\nToday, the orphanage in Kenya's capital is a happier, more hopeful place for children with HIV. But a political fight taking place in the United States is threatening the program that helps to keep them and millions of others around the world alive.\n\nThe reason for the threat? Abortion.\n\nThe AIDS epidemic has killed more than 40 million people since the first recorded cases in 1981, tripling child mortality and carving decades off life expectancy in the hardest-hit areas of Africa, where the cost of treatment put it out of reach. Horrified, Republican U.S. President George W. Bush and Congress two decades ago created what is described as the largest commitment by any nation in history to combat a single disease.\n\nThe program known as the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, partners with nonprofit groups to provide HIV/AIDS medication to millions around the world. It strengthens local and national health care systems, cares for children orphaned by AIDS, and provides job training for people at-risk.\n\nNow a small number of Republican lawmakers are endangering the stability of the program, which officials say has saved 25 million lives in 55 countries from Ukraine to Brazil to Indonesia. That includes the lives of 5.5 million infants born HIV-free.\n\nAt the Nairobi orphanage, program manager Paul Mulongo has a message for Washington.\n\n\"Let them know that the lives of these children we are taking care of are purely in their hands,\" Mulongo says.\n\nThe issue of abortion has been a sensitive one since PEPFAR's inception in 2003. But each time the program came up for renewal in Congress, Republicans and Democrats were able to put aside partisan politics to support a program that's long been seen as the vanguard of global aid.\n\n\"Most eras in countries are measured by loss of life in war and famine and pandemic,\" said Tom Hart, president of the ONE Campaign, a nonpartisan organization that worked with Bush to create the program. \"This era has been measured in lives saved.\" The campaign has published a letter from dozens of faith leaders to Congress calling PEPFAR \"a story of medical miracles and mercy.\"\n\nBut lawmakers' bipartisan support is cracking as the program is set to expire at the end of September. The trouble began in the spring, when the Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative Washington think tank, accused the Biden administration of using PEPFAR \"to promote its domestic radical social agenda overseas.\"\n\nThe group pointed to new State Department language that called for PEPFAR to partner with organizations that advocate for \"institutional reforms in law and policy regarding sexual, reproductive and economic rights of women.\" Conservatives argued that's code for trying to integrate abortion with HIV/AIDS prevention, a claim the administration has denied.\n\nIn language echoing the early, harsh years of the epidemic, Heritage called HIV/AIDS a \"lifestyle disease\" that should be suppressed by \"education, moral suasion and legal sanctions.\" It recommended halving U.S. funding for PEPFAR, saying poor countries should bear more of the costs.\n\nShortly after that, Republican Rep. Chris Smith, a longtime supporter of PEPFAR who wrote the bill reauthorizing it in 2018, said he would not move forward with reauthorization this time unless it bars NGOs who use any funding to provide or promote abortion services. His threat comes with weight as he chairs the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee with jurisdiction over the program's funding.\n\nBut since that proposal faces stiff opposition from Democrats in Congress, Smith, with support from prominent anti-abortion groups, wants to cut PEPFAR's usual five-year funding to one year if that ban is not included. He said that would allow lawmakers annually to revisit contracts with partners they believe may support or provide abortion services.\n\n\"It's a false narrative that says that you can't do (the program) year by year as we try to protect the unborn child,\" Smith told The Associated Press.\n\nSupporters of the program say that under existing U.S. law, partners are already prohibited from using its funding for abortion services. The head of PEPFAR, John Nkengasong, told the AP he knew of no instance of the program's money going directly or indirectly to fund abortion services.\n\nHe warned that any instability in the flow of U.S. funding for PEPFAR could have dangerous implications for health globally, including in the United States. The key to controlling AIDS, he said, is the assurance that infected people have a pill to take each day.\n\nWithout that, the virus could come back, \"and about 20 million lives might be lost in the coming years,\" he said. \"The fragile gains that we've achieved will be lost.\"\n\nIn Africa, many PEPFAR partners and recipients in largely conservative countries don't support abortion either because of religious beliefs. But the idea that the program reliant on the steady supply of HIV drugs could be subject to political winds is a cause for alarm.\n\n\"If PEPFAR goes, who is going to meet that cost?\" asked Josephine Kaleebi, who leads an organization in Uganda that helped the program's first-ever recipient of HIV treatment medication.\n\n\"We are proud to say that the first recipient is alive,\" Kaleebi said.\n\nThe group, Reach Out Mbuya Community Health Initiative, was founded by members of Uganda's Catholic Church, which is against abortion. In the reception area, portraits of priests line the walls.\n\nBut Reach Out helps anyone who walks in needing HIV drugs, Kaleebi said. About 6,000 people are served, many of them \"the extremely most vulnerable\" from one of the poorest areas of the capital, Kampala.\n\nMark Dybul, who helped create and lead PEPFAR under Bush, warned that weakening PEPFAR would also hurt the diplomatic goodwill the U.S. has created in developing regions.\n\n\"It's no secret that we are in a geopolitical struggle for influence in Africa with Russia and China,\" he said. \"And our biggest influence in many ways, visible and most impactful, is PEPFAR.\" A spokesperson for former president Bush declined comment.\n\nIn neighboring Kenya, Bernard Mwololo believes he is alive because of the drugs that PEPFAR provides. \"Sometimes it's so crazy when you hear people saying that these HIV drugs should be bought by the local government,\" he said. \"I am telling you, they can't manage it.\"\n\nThe 36-year-old, now an HIV activist, has lived most of his life at the Nairobi orphanage after his parents died of AIDS. He recalled arriving and learning that he could have hope. He was enrolled in a better school, was given a bicycle and ate balanced meals.\n\nThe number of children in sub-Saharan Africa newly orphaned by AIDS reached a peak of 1.6 million in 2004, the year that PEPFAR began its rollout of HIV drugs, researchers wrote in a defense of the program published by The Lancet medical journal last month. In 2021, the number of new orphans had dropped to 382,000.\n\nAnd deaths of infants and young children from AIDS in the region have dropped by 80%.\n\nNow the orphanage is transformed. Children dart around playing soccer or swing in the colorful play area. Some are among the 1.4 million children and adults living with HIV in Kenya, according to UNAIDS. More than 1 million have received free HIV drugs because of PEPFAR.\n\nStopping PEPFAR would be like committing \"global genocide,\" said Mulongo, the orphanage program manager.\n\nHe recalled how helpless he felt watching children die before HIV drugs were readily available. Almost two decades ago, they would lose at least 30 children a month to AIDS.\n\nElsewhere in Nairobi, 16-year-old Idah Musimbi is part of a generation that has grown up without the fear that an HIV diagnosis was a likely death sentence.\n\nShe displayed the pills that have given her a sense of normalcy. She contracted HIV at birth.\n\n\"I don't think I would live for long if these drugs stopped coming. My grandparents cannot afford to buy food every day, let alone these ARVs,\" she said.\n\nHer grandfather David Shitika, a pastor, said he owes the lives of his granddaughter and her mother to PEPFAR. His daughter was diagnosed with HIV in 1995, when many people were dying.\n\n\"It was called the slimming killer disease,\" he said. \"Nobody wanted to live with an infected person, and those who died were wrapped in nylon bags before burial\" for fear of infection.\n\nNow he hopes that the Republicans' threat to PEPFAR will fade, and that his granddaughter will go on to study law and achieve her dream of becoming a judge.\n\n\"I want to tell the American people, God bless you,\" Shitika said. \"I do not know why you decided to help us.\""}
{"text": "# Biden, Modi and EU to announce rail and shipping project linking India to Middle East and Europe\nBy **AAMER MADHANI** and **JOSH BOAK**  \nSeptember 9th, 2023. 4:09 AM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**NEW DELHI (AP)** - President Joe Biden and his allies on Saturday were to outline plans for a rail and shipping corridor that would connect India with the Middle East and ultimately Europe - a possible game changer for global trade to be announced at the Group of 20 summit.\n\nThe project would include the United States, India, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the European Union and other countries in the G20, said Jon Finer, Biden's principal deputy national security adviser.\n\nBiden, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen plan to announce the project as part of the Partnership for Global Infrastructure Investment.\n\nThe rail and shipping corridor would enable greater trade among the countries, including energy products. It could also be one of the more ambitious counters to China's massive infrastructure program, through which it has sought to connect more of the world to that country's economy.\n\nFiner laid out three big rationales for the project. He said first that the corridor would increase prosperity among the countries involved by increasing the flow of energy and digital communications. Second, the project would help address the lack of infrastructure needed for growth in lower- and middle-income nations. And third, Finer said it could help \"turn the temperature down\" on \"turbulence and insecurity\" coming out of the Middle East.\n\n\"We see this as having a high appeal to the countries involved, and also globally, because it is transparent, because it is a high standard, because it is not coercive,\" Finer said.\n\nVon der Leyen was expected to describe the project as \"nothing less than historic\" and as an \"India - Middle East - Europe economic corridor\" that will make trade between India and Europe 40% faster, according to a draft of her prepared remarks.\n\nThe project will include a rail link as well as an electricity cable, a hydrogen pipeline and a high-speed data cable, according von der Leyen's prepared text, which also describes the project as \"a green and digital bridge across continents and civilizations.\"\n\nShe is also expected to announce a \"Trans-African Corridor\" that will connect the Angolan port of Lobito with Kananga province in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the copper-mining regions of Zambia.\n\nBiden participated in the summit's first session, which focused on the theme of \"One Earth.\" The U.S. president plans to draw on the theme to push for more investments to address climate change, such as his own domestic incentives to encourage the use of renewable energy, Finer said. Biden also wants to make the case that Russia's war in Ukraine is hurting many other nations, which have had to cope with greater food and energy costs as well as higher interest rate costs on their debt.\n\nUkraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has been a regular presence at international summits, including last year's G20 in Indonesia, since Russia invaded his country more than 18 months ago, was not invited by Modi's government to this year's gathering.\n\nZelenskyy has the used the high-profile gatherings to argue for continued economic and military support for his country. India is one of the most prominent U.S. allies that has largely stayed on the sidelines of the war, and has even dramatically increased its purchases of Russian oil.\n\nFiner said White House officials pushed for Zelenskyy's inclusion at the summit.\n\n\"Ultimately, it is not our decision,\" Finer said. \"But you can expect that the United States and our other partners who are working with Ukraine so closely ... We'll make that case quite forcefully in the context of these conversations.\"\n\nThe summit's second session is about \"One Family.\" Biden plans to use this portion to discuss his request to Congress for additional funding for the World Bank that could generate more than $25 billion in new lending for economic development, Finer said.\n\nThe White House more broadly is trying to strengthen the G20 as an international forum, while Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin decided not to attend.\n\nStill, China and Russia are represented at the summit and that could make it difficult for the G20 to produce a joint statement on the war in Ukraine.\n\n\"Really it's incumbent upon the Chinese government to explain why a leader would or would not participate,\" Finer said."}
{"text": "# Georgia special grand jury recommended charges against 39 people, including Sen. Lindsey Graham\nBy **KATE BRUMBACK**  \nSeptember 8th, 2023. 6:47 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**ATLANTA (AP)** - The special grand jury that investigated efforts by Donald Trump and others to overturn Georgia's 2020 election results recommended indictments against twice as many people as the 19 ultimately charged by prosecutors, leaving South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham among those not indicted.\n\nThe grand jurors' report released Friday showed they recommended racketeering charges against 39 people, including Graham, former U.S. Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue of Georgia and former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn. Charging recommendations against others included false statements and writings, influencing witnesses and criminal solicitation to commit election fraud.\n\nReleased at the request of the special grand jury, the report provides insight into one of the most expansive investigations into Trump, who is also facing two federal indictments along with unrelated state charges in New York City. While critics have accused Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis of launching an unwieldy, overly broad investigation, the report suggests she used her discretion to streamline the case.\n\nThere are many reasons Willis might have chosen not to charge all those recommended, including immunity deals with some, federal protections for others or insufficient evidence to prove charges beyond a reasonable doubt.\n\nAnthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University who has been closely following the case, speculated that Willis took some of the special grand jury's vote breakdowns into consideration when deciding who to ultimately go after.\n\n\"If you have a jury and a group of folks who have pored over evidence for eight months and there's still a 50-50 divide or a two-thirds divide ... I don't think that's something that you'd look at and say, we have a high probability of a conviction there,\" Kreis said.\n\nOf the 19 people ultimately indicted, only one was not included in the special grand jury's recommendations. A former White House aide who served as the director of Trump's Election Day operations, Michael Roman, was involved in efforts to put forth a set of fake electors after the 2020 election.\n\nThe special grand jury accused Graham and others of violating Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law -- a statute most commonly associated with mobsters -- saying they tried to overturn the state's 2020 election, which Trump, the incumbent Republican, lost to Democrat Joe Biden. The South Carolina senator, who was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger shortly after the November election, and Raffensperger has said Graham asked him whether he had the power to reject certain absentee ballots.\n\nPerdue and Loeffler were sitting U.S. senators who had failed to win enough votes in the November 2020 general election and were forced into a January 2021 runoff, which they ultimately lost to Democratic challengers. In the weeks after Trump lost and they were pushed into runoffs, they cast doubt on the validity of the election results.\n\nIn an interview on a right-wing cable news channel in mid-December 2020, Flynn said Trump \"could take military capabilities\" and place them in swing states and \"basically rerun an election in each of those states.\" He also traveled in November 2020 to the South Carolina home of conservative lawyer Lin Wood, where Wood has said meetings were held to discuss possible ways to influence the election results in Georgia and elsewhere. The special grand jury also recommended charges for Wood.\n\nTrump, the early front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, blasted the report on his Truth Social site, saying, \"They wanted to indict anybody who happened to be breathing at the time.\"\n\nGraham, who has denied wrongdoing, said, \"It should never be a crime for a federal elected official, particularly the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who will have to vote to certify a presidential election, to question and ensure the integrity of that election.\"\n\nLoeffler, who has stayed involved in politics by founding and funding a Republican-aligned group called Greater Georgia, said she was speaking up for people who felt disenfranchised in the 2020 election. \"Trying to jail your party's leading political opponent ahead of 2024 is election interference. Speaking out in defense of election integrity is not,\" she said on X, formerly Twitter.\n\nFlynn pointed to his lawyer Jesse Binnall's post on X: \"General Michael Flynn will continue to fight for the truth, for America First principles, and for Donald Trump's return to The White House in 2024.\"\n\nWood, who testified to the special grand jury, said, \"It seems unfair to me that I get smeared as someone that is recommended for indictment when the people with the power to look at the evidence and indict did not indict me.\"\n\nRepresentatives for Perdue didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.\n\nThe special grand jury foreperson, Emily Kohrs, spoke of her experience in an interview with The Associated Press in February that was followed by interviews with other news outlets. She said she appreciated the weightiness of the responsibility but also enjoyed moments of levity, like joking with Graham. She said the grand jury recommended charges against multiple people and that there would be few surprises.\n\nWhile Kohrs' whirlwind media tour was attacked by Trump's lawyers at the time and raised fears among some Trump critics that it could jeopardize the investigation, the judge overseeing the special grand jury made clear that grand jurors are free to talk about anything but their deliberations.\n\nThe panel heard testimony from some 75 witnesses before completing a report in December with recommendations for Willis on charges. She had no obligation to follow their recommendations, and she ultimately decided to go to a regular grand jury to obtain indictments.\n\nThe release of the identities of people recommended for indictment is a departure from ordinary grand jury protocol, which dictates that prosecutors do not disclose the names of individuals investigated but not charged so as to prevent potentially innocent subjects from being unduly maligned.\n\nSpecial grand juries in Georgia are relatively uncommon and are essentially an investigative tool. They can subpoena witnesses and evidence but do not have the power to bring an indictment. Instead, they can produce a report with nonbinding recommendations.\n\nFulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ordered the partial release of the report in February but declined to immediately release the panel's recommendations on who should or should not be prosecuted. The judge said at the time that he wanted to protect people's due process rights.\n\nMcBurney said in a new order filed Aug. 28 that the due process concerns were moot since a regular grand jury had indicted Trump and 18 other people under the state's anti-racketeering law. All have pleaded not guilty.\n\nMany of those indicted - including former New York Mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows - are known to have testified before the special grand jury. Trump was never called. Late Friday, a judge in Atlanta denied Meadows' request to move his case to federal court.\n\nThe parts of the report previously released in February included its conclusions, as well as a section with the grand jurors expressing concerns that one or more witnesses may have lied under oath and urging prosecutors to seek charges for perjury."}
{"text": "# Gov. Kristi Noem endorses Trump as he visits South Dakota\nBy **JILL COLVIN** and **STEPHEN GROVES**  \nSeptember 8th, 2023. 11:21 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem endorsed former President Donald Trump at a party fundraiser in Rapid City Friday night that doubled as an opportunity for Noem to showcase herself as a potential vice presidential pick.\n\nAs his rivals held town halls and meet-and-greets in early voting states, Trump headlined the South Dakota Republican Party's \"Monumental Leaders Rally\" in Rapid City, where Noem, once considered a potential 2024 candidate in her own right, instead threw her support behind the former president.\n\n\"I will do everything I can to help him win and save this country,\" Noem said as she formally offered her endorsement before Trump took the stage. She said all the other Republican presidential candidates had been invited to the event. \"All of them told us that they had better things to do. But when President Trump was invited to come be with you tonight, he said, 'I will be there,'\" she said.\n\nTrump, for his part, praised Noem as \"one of the most successful governors in the entire nation\" and said her endorsement \"means a lot.\"\n\nTrump's decision to headline the event underscores his dominance in the early stages of the GOP presidential primary even as he faces four separate indictments and 91 felony counts. South Dakota holds a late primary and isn't a competitive general election state. But with a huge lead, Trump is skipping much of the traditional primary campaign.\n\nInstead of the large-scale rallies that dominated his past runs, he is this time relying on state party events that offer large, friendly audiences at no cost to his political organization, which is facing millions of dollars in legal expenses. Friday's event looked like a typical Trump rally, but was paid for by the state Republican Party. Those in the audience purchased tickets and paid to attend.\n\nThe visit was also something of an audition for Noem. She planned the event as a way to both offer her endorsement and maximize face time with Trump as he considers potential 2024 running mates and cabinet members, according to two senior Republicans familiar with her thinking who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of the announcement.\n\nNoem will be term-limited in 2026 and, after declining to run for president this year, is eyeing her next move to maintain prominence in the GOP.\n\nAllies had hoped her appearance alongside Trump would create an image that looked like a potential presidential ticket. And they seemed to get what they desired: Several people sitting behind Trump held \"Trump-Noem 2024\" signs and, at one point, their names appeared together on a screen behind the stage at The Monument ice arena, captured in a photo by an NBC reporter.\n\nVoting won't begin until next year and Trump's historic indictments and upcoming criminal trials create an unprecedented situation that many strategists argue could influence the race in unexpected ways. That hasn't stopped those who are keen to be considered as Trump's running mate from openly jockeying for the position and trying to curry favor with him and his aides.\n\nAides caution it is far too early for serious discussions. But Trump has indicated in conversations that he is interested in selecting a woman this time around. Others whose names have been floated include New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn. Florida Rep. Byron Donalds and two of Trump's current rivals, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, have also been mentioned.\n\n\"What we're focused on is just locking up this primary and pivoting towards the general election,\" said campaign spokesman Steven Cheung.\n\nTrump has spent far less time campaigning in early-voting states than most of his rivals. But he will return to Iowa, the first state on the GOP nomination calendar, on Saturday to attend the college football game between Iowa and Iowa State.\n\nNoem was long considered a potential White House contender in her own right and had told The New York Times in November that she didn't believe Trump offered \"the best chance\" for the party in 2024. But she has since said she saw no point in joining the crowded field running for the nomination given Trump's dominant position.\n\n\"Well the fact is, none of 'em can win as long as Trump's in the race. And that's just the facts. So why run if you can't win?\" she said in an interview with Fox News in August.\n\nAsked this week whether she would consider joining a potential Trump ticket if invited, Noem told Newsmax she \"would in a heartbeat.\"\n\n\"President Trump needs a strong partner if he's going to take back the White House, and he's going to need somebody who knows what it's like to run a business, to be an employee, earn a paycheck, but also having a wife, mom and a grandma isn't bad either,\" she said.\n\nMichael Card, a longtime observer of South Dakota politics, suggested Noem might make a future National Rifle Association president or conservative commentator, but said her best opportunity may lie with Trump.\n\n\"I think Donald Trump has a 50-50 shot of getting elected at this point, so why not hitch your wagon to him if you can?\" he said.\n\nThe visit was Trump's first to South Dakota since the summer of 2020, when he headlined a fireworks celebration at Mount Rushmore on the eve of Independence Day. The then-president had been looking for a venue to turn the page after a summer of pandemic lockdowns and racial justice protests, and Noem's event at Mount Rushmore was notably devoid of pandemic restrictions.\n\nShe also gifted him a miniature replica of Mount Rushmore with his likeness carved alongside George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.\n\nA former member of Congress, Noem rose to national prominence with a mostly hands-off approach to the pandemic. Trump has often praised that approach, cheering her rejection of policies aimed at containing the spread of COVID-19 and arguing that she did a better job than his leading rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who often touts his own efforts to reopen businesses and reject mandates.\n\nDespite not running for president, Noem has continued to position herself nationally. She has been an outspoken champion for the NRA, even bragging at a spring convention for the gun-rights group that her 1-year-old granddaughter \"already has\" firearms. During the first GOP presidential debate, she appeared in an ad to encourage businesses and families to move to what she calls \"the freest state in America.\"\n\nSouth Dakota GOP chair John Wiik said he had expected about 7,000 people to attend the sold-out fundraiser, which was first envisioned as a Lincoln Day-style dinner commonly held by local Republican groups.\n\n\"I did get a lot of questions at first,\" Wiik said about Trump's decision to travel to his state just as the primary season kicks into its traditional post-Labor Day overdrive.\n\n\"But the more you look at it, Trump is a media event wherever he lands,\" Wiik said. \"He could do a rally on the moon and he'd spread his word and get just as many people, so I'm just glad he chose South Dakota.\""}
{"text": "# Inside the brand new White House Situation Room: Cutting-edge tech, mahogany and that new car smell\nBy **COLLEEN LONG**  \nSeptember 8th, 2023. 1:05 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - The White House Situation Room - a space of great mystique and even greater secrecy - just got a $50 million facelift.\n\nActually, \"room\" is a misnomer. It's a 5,500-square-foot (511-square-meter), highly secure complex of conference rooms and offices on the ground floor of the West Wing.\n\nThese are rooms where history happens, where the president meets with national security officials to discuss secret operations and sensitive government matters, speaks with foreign leaders and works through major national security crises.\n\nWhere President Barack Obama and his team watched the raid that took down al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in 2011. Where President Donald Trump monitored the 2019 operation that killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Where President Lyndon Johnson went over Vietnam War plans.\n\nThe latest redo was no small update: The total gut renovation took a year to complete.\n\nThe White House opened the classified space to a group of reporters this week for a rare visit to check out the new look. President Joe Biden got a tour on Tuesday and then received an intelligence briefing in the space, said Marc Gustafson, the Situation Room director.\n\n\"He loved it, he thought the update was fantastic,\" Gustafson said.\n\n\"Folks, the newly renovated White House Situation Room is up and running,\" Biden said in a post on X, formerly Twitter. \"My thanks to everyone who worked on this incredible facility.\n\nThe renovated space has a modern-but-vintage vibe. Old floors, furniture, computers and other tech were stripped out and replaced with pristine mahogany paneling from Maryland, stonework from a Virginia quarry, LED lights that can change colors and flat-screen panels. See-through glass offices fade to opaque with the press of a button. The whole space has that new car smell.\n\nBut there are still plenty of landline phones: No cellphones are allowed in the secure space for security reasons. (There are cubbies to stow phones near a door leading outside, where a baggie with some cocaine was found earlier this year.)\n\nAccess is tightly controlled and generally restricted to the president's national security and military advisers. Anyone listening in on classified briefings needs clearance. Even the contractors working on the renovation had to get temporary security clearances. Illuminated signs flash green for declassified and red for classified.\n\nThe hush-hush complex was created in 1961 by the Kennedy administration after the Bay of Pigs invasion. President John F. Kennedy believed there should be a dedicated crisis management center where officials could coordinate intelligence faster and better.\n\nThat was an upgrade, to be sure. But it wasn't exactly comfortable: Nixon administration national security adviser and then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger described the space as \"uncomfortable, unaesthetic and essentially oppressive.\"\n\nAfter the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the White House did a significant Situation Room update, along with a broader upgrade to presidential communications on Air Force One and the presidential helicopter. Presidents used the complex for secure video conferences before such tech became more portable. The last renovation was in 2007.\n\nThe complex is staffed around the clock by military and civilian personnel who monitor breaking developments worldwide.\n\nIt has a reception area with a U.S. seal in stonework. Behind that is the main conference room, known as the \"JFK room.\" To the right are a smaller conference room and two soundproof \"breakout rooms.\" To the left is the \"watch floor,\" a 24-7 operations center.\n\n\"It's a marriage of the traditional and the modern,\" Gustafson said of the new space.\n\nWorkers dug five feet underground to make more room and install cutting-edge technology allowing White House officials to bring together intelligence from different agencies with the push of a few buttons.\n\n\"Now we have all the capabilities,\" Gustafson said.\n\nFor those in the know, referring to the \"sit room\" is out. It's the \"whizzer,\" stemming from the complex's acronym: WHSR. (Washington does love a good acronym.)\n\nGustafson said the goal is to never need a complete renovation again. The new space was designed so panels can be removed and updated and new technology swapped in, usually with less space needs. A room once taken up by computer servers has become a smaller conference room.\n\nThe JFK room has a long wooden table with six leather chairs on each side and one at the head for the president. Leather armchairs line the walls. A giant, high-tech screen runs the length of the back wall. A 2-foot (0.6-meter) seal is positioned at the president's end of the room, larger than the old seal.\n\nThere aren't many photos of the Situation Room, but one of the most famous is the image of Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Biden and others watching the bin Laden operation.\n\nThat took place around the corner from the JFK room in a smaller conference room that no longer exists. It's been cut out entirely from the space and sent off to Obama's presidential library, Gustafson said. In its place are two smaller rooms.\n\nAnother item preserved for history is an old phone booth that stood in the complex. It was sent to storage for Biden's eventual presidential library. Gustafson didn't know if anything had been sent to Trump.\n\nGustafson said staff members have to be ready to prepare rooms for classified briefings on a moment's notice, and Biden has been known to pop in to meetings unexpectedly, particularly as Russia was invading Ukraine.\n\nWhile the area was closed for renovation, White House officials used other secure spots on the campus. Gustafson said the renovated Situation Room is having a soft opening of sorts: About 60% of the staff are back in the space with more coming every day.\n\nOne cosmetic upgrade Gustafson pointed out is the ability to swap out the different 2-foot-diameter seals that hang on the JFK room wall, depending on who is in the meeting. Seals for the president, vice president and executive staff are kept in a nearby closet and can be quickly subbed.\n\nGustafson said visitors previously remarked that the room didn't reflect Hollywood's grand imagining of the space.\n\nHe said they now declare: \"This looks like the movies.\""}
{"text": "# Biden and Modi working in 'warmth and confidence' to build ties as Chinese leader skips G20\nBy **AAMER MADHANI** and **JOSH BOAK**  \nSeptember 8th, 2023. 1:47 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**NEW DELHI (AP)** - President Joe Biden opened his visit to India on Friday by meeting privately with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Indian leader's home in a session the White House said was marked by \"undeniable warmth and confidence\" in one another going into the annual Group of 20 summit where climate, economic security and more will dominate the weekend's talks.\n\nBiden spent 52 minutes with Modi after a lavish welcome ceremony at the airport, and Kurt Campbell, a Biden adviser on the Indo-Pacific, told reporters afterward that warm sentiments have replaced a sense of distrust and uncertainty that previously defined relations between the two countries.\n\n\"What I have seen grown over time is an undeniable warmth and confidence between the two leaders,\" Campbell said.\n\nAnother adviser, Eileen Laubacher, senior director for South Asia at the White House National Security Council, added that Biden and Modi were \"so comfortable discussing, really, the breadth of things that we're trying to accomplish together.\"\n\nA joint statement issued after the meeting reaffirmed U.S.-India partnerships on several fronts, especially with regard to computer chips, telecommunications, higher education, access to shipping lanes in the Indo-Pacific and the reduction of carbon emissions that contribute to climate change. Biden also congratulated Modi on India's recent moon landing.\n\nWhile India was disappointed that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin declined to attend the G20, those absences could give Biden the space to further stitch together U.S. and India ties.\n\n\"There are undeniable opportunities here for the United States,\" Campbell said. \"We fully intend to strengthen and deepen our relationship. We leave it to China, in particular, to discuss and explain why they're not here.\"\n\nCampbell also suggested that a that a major infrastructure and communications project to connect India with the Middle East and Europe will be announced soon.\n\nBut when asked if Biden pushed Modi on press access and broader democratic issues in India, Campbell said Biden tries to be clear about issues critical to the health of democracy. Still, Campbell declined to get into specifics, saying the president \"has determined that he wants to conduct that dialogue in a dignified, respectful way.\"\n\nThe U.S. president received a Bollywood-style greeting after Air Force One landed, with dancers in flowing purple outfits gyrating to pop music.\n\nHaving feted Modi with a state visit to Washington in June, Biden is banking on the idea that successful diplomacy depends on personal connections. But it's a relationship largely being explored in private. White House reporters traveling with Biden were denied access to the leaders' meeting. Indian state media shared visuals of the meeting on social media.\n\nBiden and Modi have had more than a dozen in-person or virtual engagements since 2021 as both look to tighten the U.S.-India partnership amid shared major concerns. Those include an increasingly assertive China and monumental challenges posed by climate change, artificial intelligence, global supply chain resilience and other issues.\n\nModi has heavily branded the summit as his own. The prime minister has his image posted along the highway from the airport, greeting G20 delegates with quotes about climate change, innovation and India's unique role as an advocate for developing countries. As a result, Biden was something of a houseguest when he met his Indian counterpart.\n\nModi held the meeting at his residence, \"so it is unusual in that respect,\" White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters Thursday aboard Air Force One.\n\nBiden, a center-left Democrat, and Modi, a conservative Hindu nationalist, are hardly ideological soulmates. Yet, both leaders are increasingly drawn together by China's military and economic maneuverings in the Indo-Pacific.\n\nIndia late last month lodged an objection through diplomatic channels with Beijing over China's new standard map that lays claim to India's territory along their shared border.\n\nThe version of the Chinese map published by the Ministry of Natural Resources website shows Arunachal Pradesh and the Doklam Plateau - over which the two sides have feuded - included within Chinese borders, along with Aksai Chin in the western section that China controls but India still claims. The Philippines and Malaysia have also lodged protests over the new Chinese map.\n\nThe map was released just days after Modi and Jinping met on the sidelines of a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - and agreed to work to de-escalate tensions at their disputed border.\n\nThe administration was eager to build on the momentum from Modi's June state visit, which included announcements on climate, health care and space as well as some major private sector projects.\n\nThe two sides set the groundwork for U.S.-based General Electric to partner with India-based Hindustan Aeronautics to produce jet engines for Indian aircraft in India and the sale of U.S.-made armed MQ-9B SeaGuardian drones. U.S.-based Micron Technology agreed to build a $2.75 billion semiconductor assembly and test facility in India, with Micron spending more than $800 million and India financing the rest. The administration also plans to discuss civil nuclear issues.\n\nThe White House has sought to play down Biden and Modi 's differences over Russia's war in Ukraine. India abstained from voting on U.N. resolutions condemning Russia and refused to join the global coalition against Russia. Since the start of the war, the Modi government has dramatically increased its purchase of Russian oil.\n\nBiden's effort to pull India closer has been shadowed by concerns from activists and some American lawmakers about India's human rights record under Modi.\n\nThe prime minister has faced criticism over legislation amending the country's citizenship law that fast-tracks naturalization for some migrants but excludes Muslims, over a rise in violence against Muslims and other religious minorities by Hindu nationalists, and the recent conviction of India's top opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, for mocking Modi's surname.\n\nIndia also ranks 161st out of 180 countries in this year's Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders."}
{"text": "# Biden nominates a former Obama official to run the Federal Aviation Administration\nBy **DAVID KOENIG**  \nSeptember 7th, 2023. 10:01 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\nPresident Joe Biden on Thursday nominated a former Obama administration official to lead the Federal Aviation Administration after his first choice withdrew in March after running into opposition from Republican senators.\n\nThe White House said Biden nominated Michael G. Whitaker, a former deputy administrator at the FAA. He is currently the chief operating officer of a Hyundai affiliate working to develop an air taxi aircraft.\n\nWhitaker's nomination had been expected for months, and Biden's announcement was praised by several industry and labor groups.\n\nThe FAA, which regulates airline safety and manages the nation's airspace, has been run by back-to-back acting administrators since March 2022.\n\nThe agency faces a number of challenges including a shortage of air traffic controllers, aging technology, and alarm over close calls between planes at major airports. In addition, Congress is deliberating over legislation that will direct the agency's operations for the next five years.\n\nWhitaker worked as a lawyer for TWA, which was absorbed by American Airlines, spent 15 years at United Airlines, where he became a senior vice president and oversaw international and regulatory affairs, then moved to InterGlobe, a travel company in India.\n\nHe was deputy FAA administrator - a job that does not require Senate approval - from 2013 to 2016. He is currently the chief commercial officer for Supernal, a Hyundai subsidiary that is working on an electric-powered air taxi - which would need FAA certification to fly in the United States.\n\nThe White House said Whitaker holds a private-pilot license.\n\nLast year, Biden nominated Denver International Airport CEO Phillip Washington, but he withdrew in March after his nomination stalled in the Senate Commerce Committee. Republicans and independent Kyrsten Sinema argued that Washington lacked adequate aviation experience - his background is mostly in city transit systems, having held the Denver airport job only since mid-2021.\n\nSen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who led the GOP opposition to Biden's first pick, gave a noncommittal statement about the second choice.\n\n\"We must carefully evaluate Mike Whitaker's qualifications, experience, and temperament to determine whether he is the right person to lead the agency at this critical juncture,\" Cruz said.\n\nThe FAA has lacked a Senate-confirmed leader since early last year, when Stephen Dickson, who was chosen by President Donald Trump, quit midway through his five-year term.\n\nSince then, the agency has been run by two successive acting administrators. The first, Billy Nolen, who left FAA in June to join another air taxi company, Archer Aviation, praised Whitaker's nomination in a recent interview. \"I can't think of a better choice,\" he said. \"He will do an amazing job.\"\n\nEarl Lawrence, a former senior official at the FAA who now works for Xwing, which is developing pilotless planes to carry cargo, said Whitaker's appointment would be a win for companies making drones and autonomous aircraft - in part because of Whitaker's time at Supernal.\n\n\"He knows how to support the airlines because he worked at the airlines, and he has worked with the drone folks,\" Lawrence said. He will \"create the environment that it's OK to move forward\" with new technologies.\n\nA range of industry groups praised Whitaker as somebody they can work with - which could raise questions about FAA independence from the companies it regulates.\n\nNicholas Calio, president of the trade group Airlines for America, said Whitaker has extensive experience including on modernizing the air traffic system. He said Whitaker appreciates \"the collaborative partnership between industry and government\" to keep air travel safe.\n\nSara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, urged the Senate to confirm Biden's pick quickly. \"Whitaker has the experience to step into the role and immediately lead us forward,\" she said."}
{"text": "# Nancy Pelosi says she'll seek House reelection in 2024, dismissing talk of retirement at age 83\nBy **LISA MASCARO**  \nSeptember 8th, 2023. 5:27 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday that she will seek reelection to Congress in 2024 as Democrats try to win back the majority.\n\nPelosi, 83, made the announcement before volunteers and labor allies in the San Francisco area district she has represented for more than 35 years.\n\n\"Now more than ever our City needs us to advance San Francisco values and further our recovery,\" Pelosi said in a tweet. \"Our country needs America to show the world that our flag is still there, with liberty and justice for ALL. That is why I am running for reelection - and respectfully ask for your vote.\"\n\nRepublicans now control the House, but just narrowly, with a 222-212 majority and one vacancy. Democrats believe they have a chance to regain power as President Joe Biden runs for a second term.\n\nPelosi's announcement quells any talk of retirement for the long-serving leader, who, with the honorific title of speaker emeritus, remains an influential lawmaker, pivotal party figure and strong fundraiser for Democrats.\n\nIt also unfolds as Washington is grappling with the sunset of a political era as an older generation of leaders, including Biden, 80, face questions about their age. This past week, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, 81, said he would finish his term as leader and senator despite concerns about his recent health episodes.\n\nPelosi has long charted her own course, from her arrival in Congress as one of few women elected to the House to her tenure as one of the most powerful women in U.S. politics.\n\nFirst elected to Congress in 1987, Pelosi made history becoming the first female speaker in 2007, and in 2019 she regained the speaker's gavel.\n\nPelosi led the party through substantial legislative achievements, including passage of the Affordable Care Act, as well as turbulent times with two impeachments of Republican President Donald Trump and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.\n\nHer announcement comes as House Republicans are preparing to launch an impeachment inquiry into Biden over the business dealings of his son, Hunter.\n\nPelosi stepped away from the day-to-day political limelight after a younger generation of Democrats led by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries took charge in 2023, but she remains a political force and keeps a robust schedule of public and private events.\n\nAccording to a person familiar with Pelosi's thinking about her 2024 decision, Pelosi believes democracy hangs in the balance in the upcoming election as she works to reelect Biden and make Jeffries the next House speaker.\n\n\"Our Democracy is at stake. I just say that, very sadly, with no fear of exaggeration of it,\" Pelosi told supporters in San Francisco. \"We have in the Congress right now, a Congress that is determined to shut government down.\"\n\nPelosi is among the party's most prolific fundraisers for the House and key political strategists. She has said she does not intend to hover over the new Democratic House leadership team, but she and Jeffries are often seen huddling quietly on the House floor.\n\nIt's rare, but not unprecedented, for former party leaders to continue in Congress as members.\n\nBack in California, Pelosi's decision to seek another term is sure to disappoint other Democrats who have wanted a run for the congressional seat.\n\nBut Pelosi has priorities she is trying to secure for her home state and especially San Francisco as the city works to recover from the coronavirus pandemic-era closures that have also dimmed other metro downtowns.\n\nSan Francisco faces a delicate moment, Pelosi believes, and needs federal resources to continue its recovery, said the person familiar with her thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter.\n\nPelosi said certain stretches of the city's downtown, such as the Tenderloin District, have been inflicted with crime, violence and drugs and said she would fight for the resources to address them, but also pushed back on broad portrayals of San Francisco as unsafe and crime-ridden.\n\n\"Our city has been through a lot, will come through this very well, but it's confined to a certain part of town, and I wish people would recognize that because our city is beautiful and clean and we would love for them to visit,\" she told Nicole Wallace on MSNBC.\n\nOne of the state's long-serving leaders, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, 90, has announced she would not seek another term.\n\nPelosi has long been portrayed as a political villain by Republican critics, who view her as a far-left liberal and raise vast sums of their own using her image and actions.\n\nLast year, her husband, Paul Pelosi, was seriously injured when an attacker broke into the family's San Francisco home, seeking the Democratic leader at a highly divisive time in American politics. A trial is expected."}
{"text": "# Hundreds of military promotions are on hold as a Republican senator demands end to abortion policy\nBy **KEVIN FREKING** and **TARA COPP**  \nSeptember 7th, 2023. 12:53 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Top defense officials are accusing Republican Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville of jeopardizing America's national security with his hold on roughly 300 military promotions, raising the stakes in a clash over abortion policy that shows no signs of easing.\n\nTuberville brushed off the criticism, vowing he will not give in. \"We're going to be in a holding pattern for a long time,\" he said, if the Pentagon refuses to end its policy of paying for travel when a servicemember goes out of state to get an abortion or other reproductive care.\n\nIt's a classic Washington standoff with rippling effects across the country, placing the lives of servicemembers effectively on hold as they await what has traditionally been routine Senate approval for their promotions.\n\nFrustration mounting, the secretaries of the Navy, Air Force and Army wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post this week saying Tuberville's efforts were not only unfair to the military leaders and their families but also \"putting our national security at risk.\"\n\nThey noted that three military branches - the Army, Navy and Marine Corps - have no Senate-confirmed chiefs in place. Those jobs are being performed without the full range of legal authorities necessary to make decisions that will sustain the United States' military edge, they wrote.\n\nIn a CNN interview, Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro accused Tuberville of \"playing Russian roulette with the very lives of our servicemembers by denying them the opportunity to actually have the most experienced combat leaders in those positions to lead them in times of peace and in times of combat.\"\n\nLooking ahead, the secretaries said in their op-ed that prolonged uncertainty and political battles over military nominations \"will have a corrosive effect on the force.\"\n\n\"The generals and admirals who will be leading our forces a decade from now are colonels and captains today,\" they wrote. \"They are watching this spectacle and might conclude that their service at the highest ranks of our military is no longer valued by members of Congress or, by extension, the American public.\"\n\nTuberville took umbrage with the three defense secretaries. He said they should have spoken with him first \"if you're gonna run your mouth in the paper.\"\n\n\"I have not heard from any of them,\" he said.\n\nIf they were truly worried about readiness at such a dangerous time for the world \"you would think they would be calling, 'Coach, let's work this out.' Zero,\" said Tuberville, a former college football coach.\n\nHowever, there have been multiple attempts by both the department's top civilian leaders and its top uniformed personnel to try and show Tuberville how the holds are doing harm, a senior military official and defense official said.\n\nA senior military official familiar with previous meetings with Tuberville said that despite telling the senator about the real-world and personal challenges that his hold has created on servicemembers, Tuberville has not seemed willing to change his position.\n\nTuberville said that during the August break, he visited six states, and \"I didn't have one negative comment from anybody. I had questions, but I didn't have any negative comments.\"\n\nHe insisted that he would lift his hold on the military nominations only after the Pentagon rescinds the policy that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin put into place in October, after the Supreme Court ended the constitutional protections for abortion that had been in place nearly 50 years.\n\nOnce the Pentagon returns to pre-memo policies on travel reimbursement, Democratic leaders could bring up for a Senate vote whatever replacement policy they want to enact, he said.\n\n\"Move it back,\" Tuberville said of the current reimbursement policy. \"And then have them write up what they want to vote on, and I will accept whichever way it goes. The holds are off. Let's go to work.\"\n\nTuberville's blockade is unique because it affects hundreds of military nominations and promotions. Democratic leaders would have to hold roll call votes on every one to get around the hold, an unwieldy and time-consuming process in a chamber that already struggles to finish its basic business.\n\nIt's a decades-long tradition for the Senate to group military nominations and approve them by voice vote, avoiding lengthy roll calls and reserving valuable floor time for other important issues.\n\nBut, while unusual, Tuberville's office notes that lawmakers from both parties have threatened holds on military promotions over the years. What's truly unprecedented is the length of time it has gone on with Tuberville.\n\nAustin has called Tuberville three times about the holds, the last time was on July 18, and the Pentagon's legislative affairs staff continues to engage, a defense official said on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue. Also, Defense Department staff met with Senate Armed Services Committee staff in July to go over the details of DOD's reproductive healthcare policy.\n\nBut Steven Stafford, a spokesman for Tuberville, said there has been no contact with the Biden administration about the holds at the principal or staff level since July 18, and no further communications are planned.\n\nThe Pentagon to date has not provided data on the number of servicemembers who have relied on the new policy to get access to an abortion citing privacy issues. It emphasizes that the new policy was in response to the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, which created a situation where federal troops serving in one state may not have access to the same type of reproductive services available in others.\n\nAs many as 650 nominations could be affected by the end of the year if the impasse continues. But if Republican leaders are pressuring Tuberville to end his holds, they are not doing so publicly.\n\n\"I'm hoping that the conversations that occur this week and the conversations that Senator Tuberville has had with the military leadership will lead to a breakthrough at some point,\" said Sen. John Thune, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate.\n\nThe Pentagon said the number of promotions on hold in the Senate has reached 98 in the Air Force, 91 in the Army, 86 in the Navy, 18 in the Marines and 8 in the Space Force.\n\nSome Republicans have suggested that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., could hold votes on some of the most critical nominations. But Schumer rejected that approach.\n\n\"The bottom line is this is a problem created by Republicans and it's up to them to solve it,\" Schumer said.\n\nSen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said he would like for Schumer to schedule a vote on the Pentagon reimbursement policy, but if it fails, which it most assuredly would, \"it's now time to get these people promoted.\"\n\n\"I'd like to vote to rescind the policy, but I'm not going to hold the military up in perpetuity,\" Graham said.\n\nSen. Roger Wicker, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services committee, was asked if he had any recommendations or guidance for Tuberville that could resolve the impasse.\n\n\"I'm out of ideas,\" Wicker said."}
{"text": "# Congress returns to try to prevent a government shutdown while the GOP weighs an impeachment inquiry\nBy **STEPHEN GROVES** and **MARY CLARE JALONICK**  \nSeptember 5th, 2023. 7:02 AM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - After months of struggling to find agreement on just about anything in a divided Congress, lawmakers are returning to Capitol Hill to try to avert a government shutdown, even as House Republicans consider whether to press forward with an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.\n\nA short-term funding measure to keep government offices fully functioning will dominate the September agenda, along with emergency funding for Ukraine, federal disaster funds and the Republican-driven probe into Hunter Biden's overseas business dealings.\n\nTime is running short for Congress to act. The House is scheduled to meet for just 11 days before the government's fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, leaving little room to maneuver. And the deal-making will play out as two top Republicans, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, deal with health issues.\n\nThe president and congressional leaders, including Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, are focused on passage of a months-long funding measure, known as a continuing resolution, to keep government offices running while lawmakers iron out a budget. It's a step Congress routinely takes to avoid stoppages, but McCarthy faces resistance from within his own Republican ranks, including from some hardline conservatives who openly embrace the idea of a government shutdown.\n\n\"Honestly, it's a pretty big mess,\" McConnell said at an event in Kentucky last week.\n\nHere are the top issues as lawmakers return from the August break:\n\n## KEEPING THE GOVERNMENT OPEN\nWhen Biden and McCarthy struck a deal to suspend the nation's debt ceiling in June, it included provisions for topline spending numbers. But under pressure from the House Freedom Caucus, House Republicans have advanced spending bills that cut below that agreement.\n\nRepublicans have also tried to load their spending packages with conservative policy wins. For example, House Republicans added provisions blocking abortion coverage, transgender care and diversity initiatives to a July defense package, turning what has traditionally been a bipartisan effort into a sharply contested bill.\n\nBut Democrats control the Senate and are certain to reject most of the conservative proposals. Senators are crafting their spending bills on a bipartisan basis with an eye toward avoiding unrelated policy fights.\n\nTop lawmakers in both chambers are now turning to a stopgap funding package, a typical strategy to give the lawmakers time to iron out a long-term agreement.\n\nThe House Freedom Caucus has already released a list of demands it wants included in the continuing resolution. But they amount to a right-wing wish list that would never fly in the Senate.\n\nThe conservative opposition means McCarthy will almost certainly have to win significant Democratic support to pass a funding bill - but such an approach risks a new round of conflict with the same conservatives who in the past have threatened to oust him from the speakership.\n\nDemocrats are already readying blame for the House GOP.\n\n\"The last thing the American people deserve is for extreme House members to trigger a government shutdown that hurts our economy, undermines our disaster preparedness, and forces our troops to work without guaranteed pay,\" said White House spokesman Andrew Bates.\n\nIn a letter to his colleagues Friday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote that the focus when the Senate returns Tuesday will be \"funding the government and preventing House Republican extremists from forcing a government shutdown.\"\n\nIt leaves McCarthy desperate to get the votes to keep government offices running and avoid the political blowback. As he tries to persuade Republicans to go along with a temporary fix, McCarthy has been arguing that a government shutdown would also halt Republican investigations into the Biden administration.\n\n\"If we shut down, all of government shuts it down - investigations and everything else - it hurts the American public,\" the speaker said on Fox News last week.\n\n## IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY\nSince they gained the House majority, Republicans have launched a series of investigations into the Biden administration, with an eye towards impeaching the president or his Cabinet officials. They have now zeroed in on the president's son, Hunter Biden, and his overseas business dealings, including with Ukrainian gas company Burisma.\n\nThe inquiries have not produced evidence that President Biden took official action on behalf of his son or business partners, but McCarthy has called impeachment a \"natural step forward\" for the investigations.\n\nAn impeachment inquiry by the House would be a first step toward bringing articles of impeachment. It is not yet clear what that may look like, especially because the speaker does not appear to have the GOP votes lined up to support an impeachment inquiry. Moderate Republicans have so far balked at sending the House on a full-fledged impeachment hunt.\n\nBut Donald Trump, running once again to challenge Biden, is prodding them to move ahead quickly.\n\n\"I don't know how actually how a Republican could not do it,\" Trump said in an interview on Real America's Voice. \"I think a Republican would be primaried and lose immediately, no matter what district you're in.\"\n\n## UKRAINE AND DISASTER FUNDING\nThe White House has requested more than $40 billion in emergency funding, including $13 billion in military aid for Ukraine, $8 billion in humanitarian support for the nation and $12 billion to replenish U.S. federal disaster funds at home.\n\nThe request for the massive cash infusion comes as Kyiv launches a counteroffensive against the Russian invasion. But support for Ukraine is waning among Republicans, especially as Trump has repeatedly expressed skepticism of the war.\n\nNearly 70 Republicans voted for an unsuccessful effort to discontinue military aid to Ukraine in July, though strong support for the war effort remains among many members.\n\nIt is also not clear whether the White House's supplemental request for U.S. disaster funding, which also includes funds to bolster enforcement and curb drug trafficking at the southern U.S. border, will be tied to the Ukraine funding or a continuing budget resolution. The disaster funding enjoys wide support in the House, but could be tripped up if packaged with other funding proposals.\n\n## LEGISLATION ON HOLD\nThe Senate is expected to spend most of September focused on funding the government and confirming Biden's nominees, meaning that major policy legislation will have to wait. But Schumer outlined some priorities for the remaining months of the year in the letter to his colleagues.\n\nSchumer said the Senate would work on legislation to lower the costs of drugs, address rail safety and provide disaster relief after floods in Vermont, fires in Hawaii and a hurricane in Florida.\n\nSenators will also continue to examine whether legislation is needed to address artificial intelligence. Schumer has convened what he is calling an \"AI insight forum\" on Sept. 13 in the Senate with tech industry leaders, including Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, the CEO of X and Tesla, as well as former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates.\n\n## HEALTH CONCERNS\nSenate Republicans will return next week to renewed questions about the health of their leader, McConnell.\n\nMcConnell, 81, faces questions about his ability to continue as the top Senate Republican after he has frozen up twice during news conferences in the last two months since falling and suffering a concussion in March. During the event in Kentucky last week, he fell silent for roughly 30 seconds as he answered a question from a reporter.\n\nDr. Brian Monahan, the Capitol's attending physician, said Thursday that McConnell is cleared to work. But the question of whether McConnell - the longest-serving party leader in Senate history - can continue as Republican leader has sparked intense speculation about who will eventually replace him.\n\nMeanwhile, the health of California Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein, 90, has visibly wavered in recent months after she was hospitalized for shingles earlier this year. She suffered a fall at her San Francisco home in August and visited the hospital for testing.\n\nAnd in the House, Rep. Steve Scalise, the No. 2 Republican, disclosed last week that he has been diagnosed with a form of blood cancer known as multiple myeloma and is undergoing treatment.\n\nScalise, 57, said he will continue to serve and described the cancer as \"very treatable.\""}
{"text": "# No. 2 House Republican Steve Scalise is diagnosed with blood cancer and undergoing treatment\nAugust 29th, 2023. 10:57 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Rep. Steve Scalise, the No. 2 House Republican, said Tuesday he has been diagnosed with a form of blood cancer known as multiple myeloma and is undergoing treatment.\n\nScalise, 57, said he will continue to serve in the House. He described the cancer as \"very treatable\" and said it was detected early.\n\nThe Louisiana Republican was among several people wounded in 2017 when a rifle-wielding attacker fired on lawmakers on a baseball field in Alexandria, Virginia, outside Washington. Scalise was shot in the hip and endured lengthy hospitalizations, multiple surgeries and painful rehabilitation.\n\nThe cancer diagnosis came, Scalise said, after he had not been feeling like himself in the past week. Blood tests showed some irregularities and after additional screening, he said he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma.\n\n\"I have now begun treatment, which will continue for the next several months,\" Scalise said in a statement. \"I expect to work through this period and intend to return to Washington, continuing my work as Majority Leader and serving the people of Louisiana's First Congressional District.\"\n\nScalise also thanked his medical team and said he was \"incredibly grateful we were able to detect this early and that this cancer is treatable.\"\n\n\"I will tackle this with the same strength and energy as I have tackled past challenges,\" Scalise said.\n\nThe White House said President Joe Biden called Scalise Tuesday afternoon to express his best wishes for a swift recovery.\n\nColleagues in the House and members of Louisiana's congressional delegation offered Scalise and his family their encouragement in response to the announcement, some recalling his determination following the 2017 shooting.\n\n\"The same faith, family support, and internal strength that made Steve such an inspiration to others after he was shot will bring him through this illness and once more inspire us all,\" said Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La.\n\n\"I spoke with him today and he's in good spirits, as nothing - not a gunshot and certainly not cancer - will stop him from accomplishing what he sets his mind to,\" said House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif..\n\nWhite House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the diagnosis \"devastating news.\"\n\n\"Our hearts and prayers go out to the congressman and his family,\" Jean-Pierre said. \"Clearly, he's gone through a lot over the past couple of years.\""}
{"text": "# Judge denies Mark Meadows' request to move his Georgia election subversion case to federal court\nBy **KATE BRUMBACK**  \nSeptember 8th, 2023. 8:28 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**ATLANTA (AP)** - A judge on Friday denied Mark Meadows' request to move his Georgia election subversion case to federal court, ruling that the Trump White House chief of staff must fight the charges in state court instead.\n\nU.S. District Judge Steve Jones in Atlanta wrote in a 49-page ruling that Meadows \"has not met even the 'quite low' threshold\" to move his case to federal court, noting that the question was whether the actions at issue were related to his role as a federal official.\n\n\"The evidence adduced at the hearing establishes that the actions at the heart of the State's charges against Meadows were taken on behalf of the Trump campaign with an ultimate goal of affecting state election activities and procedures,\" Jones wrote. \"Meadows himself testified that working for the Trump campaign would be outside the scope of a White House Chief of Staff.\"\n\nThe ruling is a big early win for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who spent 2 1/2 years investigating and building the case against former President Donald Trump, Meadows and 17 others before obtaining the sweeping indictment under Georgia's anti-racketeering law. She has said she wants to try all the defendants together.\n\nTrump has indicated that he is considering asking for his trial to be moved to federal court, and several other defendants have already made the request. The ruling by Jones against Meadows could signal that the others may struggle to meet the burden required to win removal when their lawyers make their arguments before the judge later this month, though Jones made clear that he will assess each of those cases individually.\n\nThe practical effects of moving to federal court would be a jury pool that includes a broader area than just overwhelmingly Democratic Fulton County and a trial that would not be photographed or televised, as cameras are not allowed inside federal courtrooms. But it would not open the door for Trump, if he's reelected in 2024, or another president to issue pardons because any conviction would still happen under state law.\n\nMeadows filed a notice of appeal Friday night. In a court filing earlier this week, he asked to separate his case from the other defendants in the case and to halt his proceedings in the state court until a final determination is reached on his attempt to move to federal court, \"including through appeal, if an appeal is taken.\"\n\nA spokesperson for Willis declined to comment.\n\nMeadows, Trump and the others have pleaded not guilty to charges they participated in a sprawling scheme to illegally try to overturn Trump's 2020 presidential election loss in Georgia, even though the state's voters had selected Democrat Joe Biden.\n\nMeadows said his actions were taken as part of his role as chief of staff to the Republican president. He and his lawyers also argued that, since he was a federal official at the time, the charges against him should be heard in federal court and, ultimately, dismissed for lack of merit.\n\nProsecutors said the actions laid out in the indictment were meant to keep Trump in office after he lost to Biden. They said the acts were explicitly political in nature and are illegal under the Hatch Act, which restricts partisan political activity by federal employees. As such, they said, the case should stay in Fulton County Superior Court.\n\nMeadows served as Trump's fourth and final chief of staff after being tapped in March 2020 to replace Mick Mulvaney. Before being elevated to the position of the president's top aide, Meadows was a congressman representing North Carolina.\n\nFirst elected in the post-Tea Party wave of 2012, Meadows quickly established himself as a leader of a new generation of conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill. He served as chairman of the right-wing Freedom Caucus, and his actions in the House helped spur Speaker John Boehner's sudden retirement.\n\nAs Trump ascended in 2016, Meadows switched from his earlier backing of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and became a Trump supporter.\n\nJones wrote that the evidence \"overwhelmingly suggests\" that most of the actions attributed to Meadows in the indictment did not fall within \"his scope of executive branch duties.\"\n\n\"Even if Meadows took on tasks that mirror the duties that he carried out when acting in his official role as White House Chief of Staff (such as attending meetings, scheduling phone calls, and managing the President's time) he has failed to demonstrate how the election-related activities that serve as the basis for the charges in the Indictment are related to any of his official acts,\" the judge wrote.\n\nJones also made clear that he was making no judgment on the merits of the case against Meadows or any defense he might offer."}
{"text": "# Supreme Court is asked to reject limits on a drug used in the most common method of abortion\nBy **MARK SHERMAN**  \nSeptember 8th, 2023. 6:08 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - The Supreme Court is being asked to reverse an appellate ruling that would cut off mail-order access to a drug used in the most common method of abortion in the United States.\n\nThe case would be the first major abortion dispute decided by the Supreme Court since it overturned Roe v. Wade last year. That ruling has led to bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy in 15 states, with some exceptions, and once cardiac activity can be detected, which is around six weeks, in two others.\n\nIn appeals filed Friday, the Biden administration and New York-based Danco Laboratories, the manufacturer of mifepristone, argued that federal judges should not second-guess the Food and Drug Administration's approval of the drug or the conditions under which it is dispensed.\n\nA federal appeals court ruling in August would revoke approval for sending the drug through the mail and would shorten, from the current 10 weeks to seven weeks, the time during which mifepristone can be used in pregnancy.\n\nThe justices previously intervened in the case in April to assure the availability of mifepristone while a challenge proceeds in the federal courts. The Supreme Court is widely expected to agree to hear the case and have the final word, probably by early summer 2024 and in the middle of presidential and congressional campaigns.\n\nIn urging the justices to reverse the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, lawyers for Danco wrote, \"For the women and teenage girls, health care providers, and States that depend on FDA's actions to ensure safe and effective reproductive health care is available, this case matters tremendously.\"\n\nThe Justice Department said the appeals court ignored a scientific judgment about mifepristone's safety and effectivness since its approval in 2000.\n\n\"To the government's knowledge, the decisions below mark the first time any court has restricted access to an FDA-approved drug based on disagreement with FDA's expert judgment about the conditions required to assure that drug's safe use - much less done so after those conditions had been in effect for years,\" Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, the administration's top Supreme Court lawyer, wrote.\n\nAbortion opponents filed their challenge to mifepristone in November and initially won a sweeping ruling in April revoking the drug's approval entirely. The appeals court left intact the FDA's initial approval of mifepristone. But it would reverse changes regulators made in 2016 and 2021 that eased some conditions for administering the drug.\n\nWhen the high court voted in April to block any changes until a final decision, Justices Samuel Alito, the author of last year's decision overturning Roe, and Clarence Thomas said they would have allowed some restrictions to take effect while appeals played out.\n\nWomen seeking to end their pregnancies in the first 10 weeks without more invasive surgical abortion can take mifepristone, along with a second drug, misoprostol. The pills are now used in more than half of all abortions in the U.S.\n\nMisoprostol also is used to treat other medical conditions. Health care providers have said they could switch to misoprostol if mifepristone is no longer available or is too hard to obtain. Misoprostol is somewhat less effective in ending pregnancies.\n\nThe FDA has eased the terms of mifepristone's use over the years, including allowing it to be sent through the mail in states that allow access and reducing the dosage that is needed to end a pregnancy."}
{"text": "# Trump lawyers move 'insurrection' clause lawsuit aiming to bar him from the ballot to federal court\nBy **NICHOLAS RICCARDI**  \nSeptember 8th, 2023. 6:09 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**DENVER (AP)** - Attorneys for former President Donald Trump moved a lawsuit seeking to bar him from running again for the White House from state to federal court in the first step of what promises to be a tangled legal battle that seems destined for the U.S. Supreme Court.\n\nThe liberal group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed the initial lawsuit on Wednesday in Colorado state court, arguing a Civil War-era clause prohibiting higher office for those who once swore an oath to the Constitution and then engaged in \"insurrection\" prevents Trump from running in 2024.\n\nThe initial state judge in Denver assigned the case recused himself for an unspecified conflict of interest, and then Trump's attorneys on Thursday moved the case to federal court - asserting that the matter should be adjudicated at the federal level since it raises a constitutional issue. The plaintiffs in the case will argue it should first go back to state court, but both sides anticipate that ultimately the top echelons of the federal system will have to consider the issues the lawsuit raises.\n\n\"Plaintiffs' challenge to Colorado's ability to place Donald Trump on the presidential ballot depends solely on the Fourteenth Amendment,\" Trump's lawyers wrote. \"Trump's basis for removal of the state court action is federal question jurisdiction under Section 3 of Fourteenth Amendment.\"\n\nCREW's case is the first of what's expected to be many challenges filed in various states by the group and Free Speech for People, another liberal nonprofit. Activists in other states have filed lawsuits in which they represent themselves, but legal observers contend the more robust complaints by the nonprofits are more likely to end up at the nation's highest court, which has never ruled on the clause.\n\nTrump on Friday slammed the liberal organization, contending it's affiliated with a number of his critics and people with whom he clashed as president. He called the group \"TRUMP DERANGED CREW\" on his social media network Truth Social said it was \"ridiculously\" and \"Unconstitutionally\" trying to disqualify him\n\nCREW said it will ask a federal judge to return the case to state court. It has also requested a speedy ruling on the issues before Colorado's Republican primary ballot is finalized on Jan. 5."}
{"text": "# Gov. DeSantis and Florida surgeon general warn against new COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine\nSeptember 7th, 2023. 6:49 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP)** - Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday criticized recent efforts across the U.S. to tamp down a recent jump in COVID-19 cases through temporary restrictions or masking, and his state surgeon general warned against getting the latest COVID-19 vaccine, which is expected to be available this month.\n\nThe criticism from DeSantis at news conference in Jacksonville, Florida, arrived the same day that his campaign for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination sent out an email to supporters vowing to \"fight back against every bogus attempt the Left makes to expand government control\" when it comes to COVID-19 precautions.\n\nAt the Jacksonville news conference in an Irish pub, DeSantis and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo promised Florida won't be joining states, cities or school districts across the U.S. in temporarily closing schools or mandating mask-wearing because of the recent uptick in COVID-19 cases.\n\n\"People are lurching toward this insanity again,\" DeSantis said. \"As we see these things being orchestrated ... there needs to be pushback.\"\n\nLapado said there were no arguments for getting the latest vaccine. \"There are a lot of red flags,\" he said.\n\nLadapo's previous warnings against COVID-19 vaccines merited a public letter from federal health agencies saying his claims were harmful to the public. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent the letter in March to Ladapo, a DeSantis appointee who has attracted national scrutiny over his close alignment with the governor in opposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates and other health policies embraced by the federal government.\n\nLadapo last year released guidance recommending against COVID-19 vaccinations for healthy children, contradicting federal public health leaders whose advice says all children should get the shots.\n\n\"It is the job of public health officials around the country to protect the lives of the populations they serve, particularly the vulnerable. Fueling vaccine hesitancy undermines this effort,\" said the letter signed by FDA Commissioner Robert Califf and then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky.\n\nDeSantis' news conference in Jacksonville came almost two weeks after three Black people were fatally shot by a 21-year-old white supremacist who authorities say left behind ramblings that read like \"the diary of a madman.\" At a vigil the day after the shootings, DeSantis was booed by the crowd during his speech.\n\nThis year, DeSantis signed a bill allowing people to carry guns without getting a state permit. He has antagonized civil rights leaders by deriding \"wokeness.\"\n\nDuring a question-and-answer period at Thursday's news conference, an unidentified man suggested the governor's policies contributed to the shootings. The governor responded angrily, saying he shouldn't be blamed for the actions of \"some madman.\"\n\n\"I'm not going to allow you to accuse me of committing criminal activity,\" DeSantis said. \"I'm not going to take that! I'm not going to take that!\""}
{"text": "# Michigan Democrats are lining up to replac\nBy **JOEY CAPPELLETTI**  \nSeptember 7th, 2023. 11:51 AM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**LANSING, Mich. (AP)** - A battleground House race in Michigan that national Democrats are eyeing to help them flip the chamber in 2024 is growing increasingly crowded after Carl Marlinga announced Thursday he will again challenge Republican U.S. Rep. John James for the seat.\n\nMarlinga's 2024 campaign in Michigan's 10th Congressional District, which was announced in a news release provided to The Associated Press, comes after the Democrat lost last year by half a percentage point to James, who had a significant fundraising advantage.\n\nIn seeking the rematch with James in the suburban district north of Detroit, Marlinga is hoping to extend his party's recent winning streak in Michigan. Democrats have taken control of the governor's office and both chambers of the Legislature for the first time in decades, though they fell 1,600 votes short of claiming the 10th District in 2022.\n\nNational Democrats have already said they will target the GOP-held seat next year as they look to flip control of the U.S. House, where Republicans have a 10-seat majority.\n\nA former Macomb County judge and prosecutor, Marlinga beat out four other Democrats last year to win the party's nomination. He said in a statement that his campaign this year will focus on growing the economy, protecting the Great Lakes and standing up for abortion rights. He attacked James, saying the Republican is \"out of step with our community.\"\n\nBefore a rematch with James, Marlinga will first need to escape a primary that's expected to grow increasingly crowded. Diane Young, a financial planner from Macomb County, has already secured a number of endorsements, including one from prominent state Sen. Mallory McMorrow.\n\nThe Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of House Democrats, has said the district is one of 31 GOP-held seats they will \"aggressively target\" in 2024. They are also looking to hold an open seat in Michigan's 7th District after Elissa Slotkin announced a run for the U.S. Senate.\n\nRepublicans in Michigan have struggled to win both state and congressional races in recent years. Last year, Democrats swept statewide races, flipped the state House and Senate and won three of four U.S. House races that were expected to be competitive.\n\nWhile turmoil within the state party is expected to continue, Michigan Republicans hope that a high-profile race for the state's open U.S. Senate seat will help candidates further down on the ticket next year. While Donald Trump won the state in 2016, Joe Biden won it in 2020 by nearly 3%.\n\nJames has long been seen as a rising star in the Republican Party and was seen as a prime candidate to run for an open U.S. Senate seat in the state before announcing in February that he would run for the House again.\n\nThe 42-year-old Republican, however, has struggled to win elections in a state that has increasingly trended Democrat. James lost U.S. Senate races in 2018 and 2020 before narrowly winning the House race while holding significant advantages in name recognition and fundraising.\n\nIn a statement, Will Reinert, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, criticized Marlinga's \"disgusting record\" as a prosecutor that will \"be on full display as voters reject him once again.\"\n\nMarlinga was Macomb County's elected prosecutor for 20 years until 2004, when he was charged with helping a man obtain a new rape trial in exchange for contributions to Marlinga's failed 2002 congressional campaign. A federal jury acquitted Marlinga in 2006."}
{"text": "# Pence rails against Trump's 'siren song of populism' as he tries to energize his 2024 campaign\nBy **JILL COLVIN** and **ROBERT F. BUKATY**  \nSeptember 6th, 2023. 6:43 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP)** - Former Vice President Mike Pence cast the 2024 election as a fight for the future of conservatism and his party as he called on fellow Republicans to reject the \"siren song of populism\" championed by former President Donald Trump and his followers.\n\n\"Should the new populism of the right seize and guide our party, the Republican Party we've long known will cease to exist and the fate of American freedom would be in doubt,\" Pence said Wednesday afternoon in what his campaign plugged as a major speech at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College.\n\nPence's plea comes at a critical time for his campaign, which has been struggling to build momentum since its launch. Four months ahead of Iowa's kickoff caucuses, Trump remains the race's undisputed front-runner, while Pence still polls in single digits. Pence, who served four years as Trump's loyal second-in-command, has tried to paint himself as the most conservative candidate in a crowded Republican field. But he is championing policies that have fallen out of favor with many Republican voters who have embraced Trump's anti-establishment rhetoric, protectionist trade policies and isolationist worldview.\n\n\"If we are to defeat Joe Biden and turn America around, the Republican Party must be the party of limited government, free enterprise, fiscal responsibility and traditional moral values,\" Pence argued in his speech. He compared the right's ascendant populism - generally defined as a focus on ordinary people's complaints about big government and so-called elites - to the left's progressivism, calling them \"fellow travelers on the same road to ruin.\"\n\nPence, who broke with Trump before the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and refused to go along with his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, continued the more aggressive posture he has taken in recent weeks. He went after the former president repeatedly by name.\n\nHe quipped that the Republican Party \"did not begin on a golden escalator in 2015,\" a reference to Trump's campaign launch in New York, and argued that the former president has abandoned the conservative principles he ran on when Pence was his running mate in 2016.\n\n\"When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he promised to govern as a conservative. And together we did. But it's important for Republicans to know that he and his imitators on this Republican primary make no such promise today,\" Pence said. \"The truth is Donald Trump, along with his imitators, often sound like an echo of the progressives they seek to replace.\"\n\n\"The growing faction would substitute our faith in limited government and traditional values with an agenda stitched together by little else than personal grievances and performative outrage,\" he added.\n\nTrump, responding on his Truth Social site, accused Pence of going to the \"Dark Side\" after only speaking well of him for years.\n\n\"His advisers have led him down a very bad path!\" Trump said.\n\n\"The conservative movement and the Republican Party have changed for the better, and nobody wants it to go back to the way it was before,\" added Trump's adviser, Jason Miller.\n\nThe ideological shift is, in part, a reflection of changing demographics as the GOP has increasingly become a party of the working class, while Democrats have attracted college-educated voters. Right-wing populism has also been on the rise across Europe and around the globe in response to factors including globalization and mass migration.\n\nPence, in his speech, called for a course correction, accusing Trump and his followers of abandoning U.S. allies abroad with isolationist policies and ignoring the national debt.\n\nBeyond Trump, he criticized Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is polling in second, for using \"the power of the state to punish a corporation for taking a political stand that he disagreed with\" in his ongoing feud with Disney, one of the largest employers in the state. And he attacked tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who has become a favored punching bag as he has risen in the polls, for his past statements on raising inheritance taxes.\n\nPence also accused Trump and his \"imitators\" of trying to \"blatantly erode our constitutional norms,\" referencing Trump's call last year for \"the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution\" over his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.\n\n\"You know there's already a party that embraces appeasement abroad. There's already a party that would ignore our national debt,\" Pence said, adding that this is \"not conservatism. It's Republicanism that prioritizes power over principles.\"\n\nInstead, Pence repeatedly hailed the example of President Ronald Reagan, arguing the party must return to his model of limited government, strong national defense and traditional social values, including staunch opposition to abortion rights.\n\nRepublicans face a \"time for choosing,\" he said, referencing a famous Reagan speech. \"The future of this movement, of this great party, belongs to one or the other - not both. That's because the fundamental divide between these two factions is unbridgeable.\"\n\nThe speech comes ahead of the second GOP presidential debate, which will be held in California at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.\n\nPence has hinged much of his campaign on doing well in Iowa, which will hold the Republicans' first nominating contest next January. But he has also spent significant time campaigning across New Hampshire and South Carolina, which also vote early. Saint Anselm College has long been a popular venue for candidates to deliver major speeches."}
{"text": "# South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem expected to endorse Trump\nBy **STEPHEN GROVES** and **JILL COLVIN**  \nSeptember 7th, 2023. 6:37 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem is expected to endorse Donald Trump's presidential campaign when he travels to her state for a Republican fundraiser on Friday.\n\nTrump will appear in Rapid City for an event hosted by the state's GOP, and Noem is expected to introduce and endorse Trump, according to a senior Republican who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the plans.\n\nNoem's spokesman Ian Fury said only that the event should be watched for such a development.\n\nThe Republican governor has been coy about her endorsement plans, telling Fox News only that \"you'll hear something from me, too.\n\nCNN first reported news of the endorsement.\n\nWhen Trump was asked Thursday whether Noem will endorse him, he said, \"I don't know exactly.\"\n\n\"But I am going,\" he said. \"I like her a lot. I think she's great. Kristi's done a great job.\"\n\nHe praised her for taking a hands-off approach to pandemic restrictions and at times encouraging people to resume mass gatherings. In July 2020, Noem hosted Trump for a fireworks celebration at Mount Rushmore.\n\nNoem was long considered a potential candidate in her own right and had told The New York Times in November 2022 that she didn't believe Trump offered \"the best chance\" for the party in 2024. But she removed herself from presidential consideration this summer, saying there was no point in joining the crowded field running for the nomination, given Trump's dominant position.\n\nNoem, however, has looked for ways to stay in the national conversation. During the first GOP presidential debate, she ran an ad to encourage people to move to South Dakota. In the TV spot, she appeared wearing plumber's overalls and touted the state as \"the freest state in America.\"\n\nThe state's senators, John Thune and Mike Rounds, have endorsed one of Trump's rivals, their colleague South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott."}
{"text": "# Victims of Michigan dam collapse win key ruling in lawsuits against state\nBy **ED WHITE**  \nSeptember 8th, 2023. 3:22 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\n**DETROIT (AP)** - Property owners seeking to hold the state of Michigan responsible for the disastrous failure of a dam in 2020 have won a critical ruling from an appeals court.\n\nIn a 3-0 opinion, the court refused to dismiss a series of lawsuits that link the Edenville Dam's collapse to decisions by state regulators.\n\nThe court said claims of \"inverse condemnation\" - state-imposed property damage - can proceed.\n\nProperty owners say some blame belongs with the state, after regulators told the private owner of the hydroelectric dam on the Tittabawassee River to raise water levels in Wixom Lake, a reservoir behind the dam.\n\nAfter three days of rain, the dam collapsed in May 2020, releasing a torrent that overtopped the downstream Sanford Dam and flooded the city of Midland. Thousands of people were temporarily evacuated and 150 homes were destroyed.\n\nAt this early stage of the litigation, the appeals court said it must give more weight to allegations by property owners, although the state disputes them.\n\nThe court noted a 2020 Michigan Supreme Court decision about state liability in the Flint water crisis. The state's highest court said Flint residents could sue over decisions that ultimately caused lead contamination in the city.\n\n\"Plaintiffs allege that, after conducting a cursory inspection of the Edenville Dam in 2018, EGLE reported that the dam was structurally sound when it was not,\" the appeals court said Thursday, referring to the state's environment agency.\n\nThe Federal Energy Regulatory Commission asked experts to study what happened at the Edenville and Sanford dams. The 2022 report said failure was \"foreseeable and preventable\" but could not be \"attributed to any one individual, group or organization.\""}
{"text": "# Prominent activist's son convicted of storming Capitol and invading Senate floor in Jan. 6 riot\nBy **MICHAEL KUNZELMAN**  \nSeptember 9th, 2023. 12:02 PM GMT-4\n\n---\n\nThe son of a prominent conservative activist has been convicted of charges that he stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, bashed in a window, chased a police officer, invaded the Senate floor and helped a mob disrupt the certification of Democrat Joe Biden's presidential election victory.\n\nLeo Brent Bozell IV, 44, of Palmyra, Pennsylvania, was found guilty Friday of 10 charges, including five felony offenses, after a trial decided by a federal judge, according to the Justice Department.\n\nBozell's father is Brent Bozell III, who founded the Media Research Center, Parents Television Council and other conservative media organizations.\n\nU.S. District Judge John Bates heard testimony without a jury before convicting Bozell of charges including obstructing the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress convened to certify the Electoral College vote that Biden won over then-President Donald Trump, a Republican.\n\nBozell was \"a major contributor to the chaos, the destruction, and the obstruction at the Capitol on January 6, 2021,\" prosecutors said in a pretrial court filing.\n\nThe judge is scheduled to sentence Bozell on Jan. 9.\n\nBozell's lawyer, William Shipley Jr., did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on Saturday.\n\nProsecutors said that before the riot, Bozell helped plan and coordinate events in Washington in support of Trump's \"Stop the Steal\" movement. They said that after Trump's rally near the White House on Jan. 6, Bozell marched to the Capitol and joined a mob in breaking through a police line. He smashed a window next to the Senate Wing Door, creating an entry point for hundreds of rioters, according to prosecutors.\n\nAfter climbing through the smashed window, Bozell joined other rioters in chasing a Capitol Police officer, Eugene Goodman, up a staircase to an area where other officers confronted the group.\n\nLater, Bozell was captured on video entering office of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. He appeared to have something in his hand when he left, prosecutors said.\n\nEntering the Senate gallery, Bozell moved a C-SPAN camera to face the ground so it could not record rioters ransacking the chamber on a live video feed. He also spent several minutes on the Senate floor.\n\nBozell roamed thorough the Capitol for nearly an hour, reaching more than a dozen different parts of the building and passing through at least seven police lines before police escorted him out, prosecutors said.\n\nIn a pretrial court filing, Bozell's lawyer denied that Bozell helped overwhelm a police line or engaged in any violence against police.\n\n\"In fact, video evidence will show that Mr. Bozell assisted in some small way law enforcement officers that he thought could be helped by his assistance,\" Shipley wrote.\n\nShipley also argued that Bozell \"was - for the most part - simply lost and wandering from place-to-place observing events as they transpired.\"\n\nBozell was arrested in February 2021. An FBI tipster who identified Bozell recognized him in part from the \"Hershey Christian Academy\" sweatshirt that he wore on Jan. 6.\n\nMore than 1,100 people have been charged with Capitol riot-related federal crimes. More than 650 of them have pleaded guilty. Approximately 140 others have been convicted by judges or juries after trials in Washington."}
{"text": "# Texas begins flying migrants from southern border to Chicago. The 1st plane carried over 120 people\nBy **PAUL J. WEBER**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 10:03 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**AUSTIN, Texas (AP)** - Texas sent a plane with more than 120 migrants from the U.S.-Mexico border to Chicago in an escalation of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott's busing operation that has given more than 80,000 migrants free rides to Democratic-led cities across the country since last year.\n\nThe first flight, which left from El Paso and arrived Tuesday, was arranged a week after Chicago's city council took new action over the busloads of migrants that have drawn sharp criticism from Mayor Brandon Johnson. The city has said bus operators began trying to drop off people in neighboring cities to avoid penalties that include fines, towing or impoundment.\n\nBus operators could now face tougher penalties in Chicago for not unloading new arrivals at a designated location or failing to fill out city paperwork. Abbott spokesman Andrew Mahaleris said Wednesday that the flights were the result of Johnson \"targeting migrant buses\" from Texas.\n\nThe flight took off a day after Abbott signed a new law this week that would allow police in Texas to arrest migrants who illegally cross the border, ratcheting up a series of aggressive measures the state has taken in protest of President Joe Biden's immigration policies.\n\n\"Until President Biden steps up and does his job to secure the border, Texas will continue taking historic action to help our local partners respond to this Biden-made crisis,\" Mahaleris said.\n\nThe White House criticized the flight and accused Abbott of using migrants for politics.\n\n\"Yet again, Governor Abbott is showing how little regard or respect he has for human beings,\" White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández said in a statement. \"This latest political stunt just adds to his tally of extreme policies which seek to demonize and dehumanize people.\"\n\nMore than 23,000 migrants have been sent to Chicago on buses as part of Abbott's border mission known as Operation Lone Star, according to the governor's office.\n\nThe multibillion-dollar operation has also included stringing razor wire along the frontier, installing buoy barriers in the Rio Grande and deploying more officers. On Tuesday a federal appeals court ordered the Biden administration to temporarily halt cutting the concertina wire on the border while a legal challenge plays out.\n\nJohnson's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the flights to his city.\n\nConcerns have arisen about the living conditions and medical care provided for asylum-seekers arriving in Chicago, spotlighted by the death last weekend of a 5-year-old boy living at a temporary shelter for migrants."}
{"text": "# What we know about Texas' new law that lets police arrest migrants who enter the US illegally\nBy **VALERIE GONZALEZ**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 12:05 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**McALLEN, Texas (AP)** - How far can a state go to keep migrants out of the U.S.?\n\nThe answer may soon come out of Texas, where a new law signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott this week will allow police to arrest migrants who cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally and give local judges the authority to order them to leave the country.\n\nActing quickly, civil rights groups and a Texas border county filed a lawsuit Tuesday that seeks to stop the measure from taking effect in March, calling it unconstitutional. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre also blasted the Texas law but wouldn't say whether the Justice Department would challenge it.\n\nHere are some things to know:\n\n## WHO CAN BE ARRESTED?\nThe measure allows any Texas law enforcement officer to arrest people who are suspected of entering the country illegally. Once in custody, migrants could either agree to a Texas judge's order to leave the U.S. or be prosecuted on misdemeanor charges of illegal entry. Migrants who don't leave could face arrest again under more serious felony charges.\n\nArresting officers must have probable cause, which could include witnessing the illegal entry themselves or seeing it on video.\n\nThe law cannot be enforced against people lawfully present in the U.S., including those who were granted asylum or who are enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.\n\n\"The goal of these laws is to make sure that when they see somebody crossing over the border, as the National Guard see, as the Texas Department of Public Safety see, they know they're not profiling. They are seeing with their own eyes people who are violating the law,\" Abbott said Monday.\n\nHowever, critics, including Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, worry the law could lead to racial profiling and family separation. American Civil Liberties Union affiliates in Texas and some neighboring states issued a travel advisory this week warning people of a possible threat their civil and constitutional rights violations when passing through Texas.\n\nDuring a news briefing Tuesday, López Obrador said Abbott was looking to score political points with people's lives.\n\n\"The Texas governor acts that way because he wants to be the Republican vice-presidential candidate and wants to win popularity with these measures,\" López Obrador said. \"He's not going to win anything. On the contrary, he is going to lose support because there are a lot of Mexicans in Texas, a lot of migrants.\"\n\n## WHERE WILL THE LAW BE ENFORCED?\nIt can be enforced anywhere in Texas.\n\nRepublican state Rep. David Spiller, who carried the bill in the Texas House, says he expects the vast majority of arrests will occur within 50 miles (80 kilometers) of the U.S.-Mexico border.\n\nSome places are off-limits. Arrests can't be made in public and private schools; churches, synagogues or other established places of worship; hospitals and other health care facilities, including those where sexual assault forensic examinations are conducted.\n\nUnder the Texas law, migrants ordered to leave would be sent to ports of entry along the border with Mexico, even if they are not Mexican citizens.\n\n## IS THE LAW CONSTITUTIONAL?\nLegal experts and immigrant rights group have said the measure is a clear conflict with the U.S. government's authority to regulate immigration.\n\nA key claim in Tuesday's lawsuit filed by the ACLU and other groups is that it violates the U.S. Constitution's supremacy clause. The suit accuses Texas of trying \"to create a new state system to regulate immigration that completely bypasses and conflicts with the federal system.\"\n\nOpponents have called the measure the most dramatic attempt by a state to police immigration since a 2010 Arizona law - denounced by critics as the \"Show Me Your Papers\" bill - that was largely struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. The court's 2012 decision on the Arizona law stated the federal government has exclusive power over immigration.\n\nAbbott and other Republicans have said President Joe Biden is not doing enough to control the 1,950-mile (3,149-kilometer) southern border.\n\n\"In his absence, Texas has the constitutional authority to secure our border through historic laws like SB 4,\" Abbott said in a statement.\n\nThe U.S. government has not said whether it will challenge the Texas law, as it did with Arizona's measure.\n\nMexico's president has indicated his country will intervene.\n\n## WHAT IS HAPPENING ON THE BORDER?\nAbbott signed the law Monday amid an increase in border crossings that has stretched U.S. Customs and Border Protection resources. Troy Miller, the agency's acting commissioner, has called the number of daily arrivals \"unprecedented,\" with illegal crossings topping 10,000 some days across the border in December.\n\nThousands of asylum-seekers who have crossed are sleeping outside along the border overnight as they wait for federal agents to process them. Most are released with notices to appear in immigration courts, which are backlogged with more than 3 million cases.\n\nMany are crossing at the Texas cities of Eagle Pass and El Paso, where federal officials suspended cross-border rail traffic in response to migrants riding freight trains through Mexico, hopping off just before entering the U.S.\n\nThe U.S. government also recently shut down the nearby international crossing between Lukeville, Arizona, and Sonoyta, Mexico, to free Customs and Border Protection officers assigned to the port of entry to help with transportation and other support. The agency also has partially closed a few other border ports of entry in recent months, including a pedestrian crossing in San Diego."}
{"text": "# Death of 5-year-old boy prompts criticism of Chicago shelters for migrants\nBy **CLAIRE SAVAGE**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 4:11 PM EST\n\n---\n\nA 5-year-old boy living at a temporary shelter for migrants in Chicago died over the weekend after being transported to a hospital after suffering a medical emergency, the city's mayor said Monday.\n\nThe boy's death on Sunday revived community organizers' complaints about conditions at shelters and questions about how Chicago is responding to an influx of people unaccustomed to the city's cold winters and with few local contacts.\n\nChicago and other northern U.S. cities have struggled to find housing for tens of thousands of asylum-seekers, many of whom have been bused from Texas throughout the last year. Earlier this month, hundreds of asylum-seekers still awaited placement at airports and police stations in Chicago, some of them still camped on sidewalks outside precinct buildings.\n\nAlthough the city reports that police stations have been mostly cleared, massive shelters are not necessarily a safe alternative, said Annie Gomberg, a volunteer with the city's Police Station Response Team who has been working with Chicago's new arrivals since April. Gomberg said about 2,300 people have been staying at the shelter where the boy was living.\n\n\"The shelters are completely locked down to outside access. They're doing this allegedly in order to protect the residents inside,\" Gomberg said. But she said she suspects part of the reason for tight security is so the public cannot see how the shelters are being run.\n\n\"The people who live inside are coming to us and saying, 'please give us blankets, give us clothing for our children, we need bottles, we need diapers,'\" she said.\n\nJean Carlos Martinez, 5, was a resident at a shelter in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood when he suffered a medical emergency, then died shortly after arriving at Comer Children's Hospital on Sunday afternoon, said an emailed statement from Mayor Brandon Johnson.\n\n\"City officials are providing support to the family and are still gathering information on this tragedy,\" Johnson said. \"My heart and my prayers go out to the Martinez family.\"\n\nCity officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the conditions at the shelter played a role in the child's death.\n\nNearly 26,000 asylum-seekers have arrived in Chicago since August 2022. The city has resettled or reunited over 10,000 migrants and is providing shelter for nearly 14,000 others in 27 temporary shelters, according to a statement from the mayor's office Monday afternoon.\n\nChicago's spending on resources for new arrivals totals $137 million, according to a city dashboard. The city says it has been ticketing and impounding buses trying to drop off migrants outside of designated zones.\n\n\"As temperatures continue to fall, the City is enacting stricter penalties to discourage bus companies from flouting these protocols. The inhumane treatment further endangers the safety and security of asylum seekers, and adds additional strain to City departments, volunteers and mutual aid partners tasked with easing what is already a harsh transition,\" the statement said.\n\nMartinez was \"not feeling well\" when EMS transported him to a hospital, where he was later pronounced dead, Chicago police said, adding that detectives are investigating the incident.\n\nGomberg sent The Associated Press videos taken by shelter residents showing coughing and crying children in the crowded Pilsen shelter where Martinez was staying. One video showed water leaking from the ceiling onto the cots below.\n\nGomberg said people staying there told her mold is visible in the shelter, and lack of insulation makes the repurposed warehouse very cold. One of the photos shows a toddler wearing a snow suit and winter hat indoors.\n\n\"If you know Chicago at all, this is really when the rubber meets the road,\" she said. \"We could very easily have paralyzing snowstorms. We could very easily have below zero temperatures.\""}
{"text": "# Israel uncovers major Hamas command center in Gaza City as cease-fire talks gain momentum\nBy **WAFAA SHURAFA**, **SAMY MAGDY**, and **JOSEF FEDERMAN**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 7:34 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**JERUSALEM (AP)** - The Israeli military on Wednesday said it had uncovered a major Hamas command center in the heart of Gaza City, inflicting what it described as a serious blow to the Islamic militant group as pressure grows on Israel to scale back its devastating military offensive in the coastal enclave.\n\nThe army said it had exposed the center of a vast underground network used by Hamas to move weapons, militants and supplies throughout the Gaza Strip. Israel has said destroying the tunnels is a major objective of the offensive.\n\nThe announcement came as Hamas' top leader arrived in Egypt for talks aimed at brokering a temporary cease-fire and a new deal for Hamas to swap Israeli hostages for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.\n\nIsraeli leaders have vowed to press ahead with the two-month-old offensive, launched in response to a bloody cross-border attack by Hamas in October that killed some 1,200 people and saw 240 others taken hostage.\n\nThe offensive has devastated much of northern Gaza, killed nearly 20,000 Palestinians, and driven some 1.9 million people - nearly 85% of the population - from their homes. The widespread destruction and heavy civilian death toll has drawn increasing international calls for a cease-fire.\n\nHamas militants have put up stiff resistance lately against Israeli ground troops, and its forces appear to remain largely intact in southern Gaza. It also continues to fire rockets into Israel every day.\n\nThe United States, Israel's closest ally, has continued to support Israel's right to defend itself while also urging greater effort to protect Gaza's civilians.\n\nBut in some of the toughest American language yet, Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday called on Israel to scale back its operation.\n\n\"It's clear that the conflict will move and needs to move to a lower intensity phase,\" Blinken said. He said the U.S. wants to see \"more targeted operations\" with smaller levels of forces focused on specific targets, such as Hamas' leaders and the group's tunnel network.\n\n\"As that happens, I think you'll see as well, the harm done to civilians also decrease significantly,\" he said.\n\nHis comments were more pointed than statements by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who in a visit to Israel this week said the U.S. would not dictate any timeframes to its ally.\n\n## TUNNEL NETWORK\nThe Israeli military escorted Israeli reporters into Palestine Square in the heart of Gaza City to show off what it described as the center of Hamas' tunnel network.\n\nMilitary commanders boasted that they had uncovered offices, tunnels and elevators used by Hamas' top leaders. The military released videos of underground offices and claimed to have found a wheelchair belonging to Hamas' shadowy military commander, Mohammed Deif, who has not been seen in public in years.\n\nThe army's chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said the army had located a vast underground complex. \"They all used this infrastructure routinely, during emergencies and also at the beginning of the war on Oct. 7,\" he said. He said the tunnels stretched across Gaza and into major hospitals. The claims could not be independently verified.\n\nHagari also indicated that Israel was winding down its operations in northern Gaza, including Gaza City, where it has been battling Hamas militants for weeks. He said the army had moved into a final remaining Hamas stronghold, the Gaza City neighborhood of Tufah.\n\nBut the army also acknowledged a significant misstep. An investigation into its soldiers' mistaken shooting of three Israelis held hostage in Gaza found that, five days before the shooting, a military search dog with a body camera had captured audio of them shouting for help in Hebrew.\n\nHagari said the recording was not reviewed until after the hostages were killed while trying to make themselves known to Israeli forces.\n\nThe incident has sparked an uproar in Israel and put pressure on the government to reach a new deal with Hamas. The military chief has said the shooting was against its rules of engagement.\n\nThe Israeli military campaign now is largely focused on southern Gaza, where it says Hamas' leaders are hiding.\n\n\"We will continue the war until the end. It will continue until Hamas is destroyed, until victory,\" Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video statement. \"Whoever thinks we will stop is detached from reality.\"\n\n## CEASE-FIRE TALKS GAIN MOMENTUM\nAs Netanyahu vowed to continue the war, there were new signs of progress in cease-fire talks.\n\nHamas' top leader, Ismail Haniyeh, traveled to Cairo for talks on the war, part of a flurry of diplomacy. In recent days, top Israeli, American and Qatari officials have also held cease-fire talks.\n\n\"These are very serious discussions and negotiations, and we hope that they lead somewhere,\" the White House's national security spokesman, John Kirby, said aboard Air Force One while traveling with President Joe Biden to Wisconsin.\n\nBiden, however, indicated a deal was still a ways off. \"There's no expectation at this point, but we are pushing,\" he said. Asked about the rising death toll in Gaza, Biden said: It's tragic.\"\n\nHamas says no more hostages will be released until the war ends. It is insisting on the release of large numbers of Palestinian prisoners, including high-level militants convicted in deadly attacks, for remaining captives.\n\nOsama Hamdan, a senior Hamas official in Beirut, said the efforts right now are focused on how to \"stop this aggression, especially that our enemy now knows that it cannot achieve any of its goals.\"\n\nIsrael has rejected Hamas' demands for a mass prisoner release so far. But it has a history of lopsided exchanges for captive Israelis, and the government is under heavy public pressure to bring the hostages home safely.\n\nEgypt, along with Qatar and the U.S., helped mediate a weeklong cease-fire in November in which Hamas freed over 100 hostages in exchange for Israel's release of 240 Palestinian prisoners. Hamas and other militants are still holding an estimated 129 captives, though roughly 20 are believed to have died in captivity.\n\nU.N. Security Council members are negotiating an Arab-sponsored resolution to halt the fighting in some way to allow for an increase in desperately needed humanitarian aid deliveries to Gaza.\n\nA vote on the resolution, first scheduled for Monday, was pushed back again on Wednesday in the hopes of getting the U.S. to support it or allow it to pass after it vetoed an earlier cease-fire call.\n\n## HUMANITARIAN CRISIS\nMobile phone and internet service was down across Gaza again on Wednesday. The outage could complicate efforts to communicate with Hamas leaders inside the territory who went into hiding after Oct. 7.\n\nThe war has led to a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Tens of thousands of people are crammed into shelters and tent camps amid shortages of food, medicine and other basic supplies. Israel's foreign minister traveled to Cyprus to discuss the possibility of establishing a maritime corridor that would allow the delivery of large amounts of humanitarian aid to Gaza.\n\nAt least 46 people were killed and more than 100 wounded early Wednesday after Israel bombarded the urban Jabaliya refugee camp near Gaza City, according to Munir al-Bursh, a senior Health Ministry official.\n\nAt least five people were killed and dozens injured in another strike that hit three residential homes and a mosque in Gaza's southern city of Rafah Wednesday, health officials said.\n\nThe Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said Tuesday the death toll since the start of the war had risen to more than 19,600. It does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths.\n\nIsrael's military says 134 of its soldiers have been killed in the Gaza ground offensive. Israel says it has killed some 7,000 militants, without providing evidence. It blames civilian deaths in Gaza on Hamas, saying it uses them as human shields when it fights in residential areas."}
{"text": "# Jury convicts boy and girl in England of murdering transgender teenager in frenzied knife attack\nBy **PAN PYLAS**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 1:30 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - A boy and a girl were found guilty Wednesday of murdering a transgender teenager in northwest England earlier this year, in a frenzied knife attack that was described as \"horrific\" by police.\n\nBrianna Ghey, 16, was stabbed with a hunting knife 28 times in her head, neck, chest and back in broad daylight after being lured to a park in the town of Warrington on Feb. 11.\n\nThe convicted pair, who are identified only as girl X and boy Y, are 16 now but were 15 at the time. They denied killing Ghey, and each blamed the other for the fatal stabbing. It is not known which one or if both wielded the knife. Neither had been in trouble with police before.\n\nA jury of seven men and five women convicted the two following a four-week trial at Manchester Crown Court. The jurors deliberated for just four hours and 40 minutes of deliberations.\n\n\"You probably didn't anticipate sitting on a case as emotionally difficult as this one,\" Justice Amanda Yip told them.\n\nThe trial heard that the young defendants were intelligent and had a fascination with violence, torture and serial killers. They had planned the attack for weeks, detailed in a handwritten plan and phone messages found by detectives. They had also discussed killing others, which prompted police early in the investigation to rule out transphobia as a motivation behind Brianna's murder.\n\nPolice believe Brianna was killed because she was vulnerable and accessible, with her death not a hate crime but done for \"enjoyment\" and a \"thirst for killing.\"\n\n\"This was a senseless murder committed by two teenagers who have an obsession with murder,\" said Nigel Parr, senior investigating officer from Cheshire Police. \"Brianna trusted the female defendant, she was betrayed by someone she called her friend.\"\n\nYip said she won't be sentencing the pair this week. She said a life sentence was mandatory but that she would await psychologists' reports before deciding the minimum prison time the pair will be required to serve before being eligible for parole.\n\n\"Frankly I don't expect them to make a huge difference to the outcome in sentencing but given their ages and the unusual circumstances of the case, I think it is right I have all the information available,\" the judge said.\n\nNeither defendant displayed a visible reaction to the verdicts.\n\nGirl X spoke to her social worker and glanced at her parents when leaving the courtroom, while Boy Y, who avoids all eye contact, did not look over at his mother as he was led from the dock carrying his Sudoku puzzles book.\n\nBoy Y has been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and is non-verbal and girl X has traits of autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.\n\nOutside the court, Brianna's mother said her daughter's killers had not shown \"an ounce of remorse\" but she called for the families of the convicted pair to be shown some empathy and compassion.\n\n\"We miss Brianna so much and our house feels empty without her laughter,\" Esther Ghey said. \"To know how scared my usually fearless child must have been when she was alone in that park with someone that she called her friend will haunt me forever.\""}
{"text": "# Congressman told to hand over hundreds of texts and emails to FBI in 2020 election probe\nBy **MARC LEVY**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 4:59 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP)** - A federal judge is ordering Republican Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania to turn over more than 1,600 texts and emails to FBI agents investigating efforts to keep President Donald Trump in office after his 2020 election loss and illegally block the transfer of power to Democrat Joe Biden.\n\nThe ruling, late Monday, came more than a year after Perry's personal cellphone was seized by federal authorities who have explored his role in helping install an acting attorney general who would be receptive to Trump's false claims of election fraud.\n\nThe decision, by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, is largely in line with an earlier finding by a federal judge that Perry appealed to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C.\n\nBoasberg, in a 12-page decision, said that, after viewing each record, he decided that Perry, a top Trump ally, can withhold 396 of the messages under the constitution's speech and debate clause that protects the work of members of Congress.\n\nHowever, the other 1,659 records do not involve legislative acts and must be disclosed, Boasberg ruled. That includes efforts to influence members of the executive branch, discussions about Vice President Mike Pence's role in certifying the election and providing information about alleged election fraud.\n\nIn a statement Wednesday, Perry's lawyer, John Rowley, said he is reviewing how the judge ruled and will decide whether to appeal. He maintained that Perry's work was on behalf of his constituents, as well as the nation, to \"investigate the seemingly credible information he received about discrepancies in the 2020 election.\"\n\nHe also defended Perry's legal challenge as necessary to contend \"with overly aggressive prosecutors.\" In the past, Rowley has said that government officials have never described Perry to him as a target of their investigation.\n\nPerry is chairman of the Freedom Caucus, a hardline faction of conservatives. Perry has not been charged with a crime and is the only sitting member of Congress whose cellphone was seized by the FBI in the 2020 election investigation.\n\nPerry's efforts to protect the contents of his cell phone have proceeded largely in secret, except in recent weeks when snippets and short summaries of his texts and emails were inadvertently unsealed - and then resealed - by the federal court.\n\nThose messages revealed more about where Perry may fit in the web of Trump loyalists who were central to his bid to remain in power.\n\nMaking Perry a figure of interest to federal prosecutors were his efforts to elevate Jeffrey Clark to Trump's acting attorney general in late 2020.\n\nPerry, in the past, has said he merely \"obliged\" Trump's request that he be introduced to Clark. At the time, Trump was searching for a like-minded successor to use the Department of Justice to help stall the certification of Biden's election victory.\n\nBut the messages suggest that Perry was a key ally for Clark, who positioned himself as someone who would reverse the Department of Justice's stance that it had found no evidence of widespread voting fraud.\n\nTo that end, Clark had drafted a letter that he suggested sending to Georgia saying the Department of Justice had \"identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple states, including the state of Georgia,\" according to the August indictment in that state accusing Trump, Clark and 17 others of trying illegally to keep him in power.\n\nAt the time, Clark was the assistant attorney general of the Environment and Natural Resources Division and served as the acting head of the Civil Division.\n\nThe showdown over Clark brought the Justice Department to the brink of crisis, prosecutors have said, and Trump ultimately backed down after he was told that it would result in mass resignations at the Justice Department and his own White House counsel's office.\n\nClark is now described in the federal indictment of Trump as one of six unnamed and unindicted co-conspirators in an effort to illegally subvert the 2020 election."}
{"text": "# Newly released video shows how police moved through UNLV campus in response to reports of shooting\nBy **RIO YAMAT** and **GABE STERN**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 8:24 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LAS VEGAS (AP)** - Officers shouted over blaring alarms and knocked down reports of additional gunfire while responding to what became a deadly shooting at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, body camera footage released Wednesday showed.\n\nIn one video, police officers moved hastily through the university's business school on Dec. 6 amid a loud, piercing sound and called out for the alarm to be cut off. Commands were difficult to hear and, one officer noted, there was \"blood everywhere\" near a doorway on the fifth floor, the footage showed.\n\nThe suspect, Anthony Polito, was killed in a shootout with police outside the building after fatally shooting three professors, police later said. Reports of gunfire after Polito's death turned out to be the sounds of police trying to break down locked doors to clear classrooms, evacuate students and assess any remaining threats.\n\nThe more than five hours of video made public Wednesday was the first of several releases by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department that is leading the investigation. Police have not disclosed a motive for the shooting.\n\nThe three professors were inside the business school when they were killed. They are: Naoko Takemaru, 69, an author and associate professor of Japanese studies; Cha Jan \"Jerry\" Chang, 64, an associate professor in the business school's Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology department; and Patricia Navarro Velez, 39, an accounting professor focusing on research in cybersecurity disclosures and data analytics.\n\nWhile police searched door to door in the business school, fears about multiple assailants continued for more than 40 minutes, according to the videos.\n\nAt one point, a dispatcher is heard on a police sergeant's radio relaying a report that someone was \"shooting through the wall.\" Another officer knocks down the report, saying: \"That's us. We're breaching doors. There are no shots fired.\"\n\nOutside the building, students were eating and playing games about a week before final exams that were canceled in the wake of the shooting. UNLV graduation ceremonies were held this week amid tight security and remembrances of the victims, including a 38-year-old visiting professor who was critically injured.\n\nClark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill later said Polito had a 9mm handgun and nine ammunition magazines holding more than 150 bullets with him when he died.\n\nThe shocking scenes at the 30,000-student campus occurred just miles from the Las Vegas Strip where 58 people died in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. The deaths of at least two other people have since been attributed to that Oct. 1, 2017 attack.\n\nStudents, faculty members and campus employees barricaded themselves in rooms until officers from nearly every law enforcement agency in southern Nevada converged on campus and escorted them off. Many boarded buses to await interviews with investigators.\n\nPolice said Polito, 67, had been turned down for teaching positions at UNLV and other schools and taught courses at the Roseman University of Health Sciences, a private college in suburban Las Vegas between 2018 and 2022.\n\nHe left a tenured post in 2017 at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, after teaching business there for more than 15 years.\n\nMcMahill characterized Polito as \"struggling financially,\" pointing to an eviction notice taped on Polito's apartment door in Henderson. The sheriff said Polito had a \"target list\" of faculty members from UNLV and East Carolina University, but none of the shooting victims' names were on it.\n\nUniversity President Keith Whitfield characterized the shooting as \"nothing short of life-changing\" and vowed that students, faculty and alumni \"not ever forget that day.\""}
{"text": "# Federal judge blocks California law that would have banned carrying firearms in most public places\nDecember 20, 2023. 9:05 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)** - A federal judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked a California law that would have banned carrying firearms in most public places, ruling that it violates the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and deprives people of their ability to defend themselves and their loved ones.\n\nThe law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September was set to take effect Jan. 1. It would have prohibited people from carrying concealed guns in 26 places including public parks and playgrounds, churches, banks and zoos. The ban would apply whether the person has a permit to carry a concealed weapon or not. One exception would be for privately owned businesses that put up signs saying people are allowed to bring guns on their premises.\n\nU.S. District Judge Cormac Carney granted a preliminary injunction blocking the law, which he wrote was \"sweeping, repugnant to the Second Amendment, and openly defiant of the Supreme Court.\"\n\nThe decision is a victory for the California Rifle and Pistol Association, which sued to block the law. The measure overhauled the state's rules for concealed carry permits in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen. That decision said the constitutionality of gun laws must be assessed by whether they are \"consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation.\"\n\n\"California progressive politicians refuse to accept the Supreme Court's mandate from the Bruen case and are trying every creative ploy they can imagine to get around it,\" the California association's president, Chuck Michel, said in a statement. \"The Court saw through the State's gambit.\"\n\nMichel said under the law, gun permit holders \"wouldn't be able to drive across town without passing through a prohibited area and breaking the law.\" He said the judge's decision makes Californians safer because criminals are deterred when law-abiding citizens can defend themselves.\n\nThe law was supported by Newsom, who has positioned himself as a national leader on gun control while he is being increasingly eyed as a potential presidential candidate. He has called for and signed a variety of bills, including measures targeting untraceable \"ghost guns,\" the marketing of firearms to children and allowing people to bring lawsuits over gun violence. That legislation was patterned on a Texas anti-abortion law.\n\nCarney is a former Orange County Superior Court judge who was appointed to the federal bench by President George W. Bush in 2003."}
{"text": "# Bus crash kills player, assistant coach in Algerian soccer's top league, matches postponed\nDecember 20, 2023. 9:10 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ALGIERS, Algeria (AP)** - The Algerian Football Federation said late Wednesday that a bus crash has killed two members of its Ligue 1 side Mouloudia El Bayadh and that it would postpone all games scheduled for this week.\n\nThe federation said the accident killed El Bayadh reserve goalkeeper Zakaria Bouziani, 27, and assistant coach Khalid Muftah. Bouziani made two league appearances this season.\n\n\"It is with immense sadness that the president of the Algerian Football Federation, Walid Sadia... learned of the tragic road accident which left the club in mourning. MC El-Bayadh, playing in professional Ligue 1 Mobilis, and which led to the death of two members of this club,\" the federation said in a statement translated from French.\n\nLocal media said the bus carrying the team overturned in the town of Sougueur in northwestern Algeria on the way to Tizi Ouzou to play JSK Kabylie in a league game on Friday. The club said on social media that other injured team members were in stable condition.\n\n\"In the wake of the painful tragedy that befell Algerian football... the Algerian Football Federation decided to suspend all football activities scheduled for the end of this week across the entire country,\" it said in a later statement."}
{"text": "# NYC Council approves bill banning solitary confinement in city jails\nBy **PHILIP MARCELO**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 6:29 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Over the objections of Mayor Eric Adams, New York City lawmakers passed legislation Wednesday meant to ban solitary confinement in the city's jails.\n\nAdams, a Democrat, had urged the City Council to reject the bill, arguing it will make jails more dangerous for both inmates and staff. But the measure was overwhelmingly approved and has enough supporters on the council to overrule a potential veto from the mayor.\n\nThe bill places a four-hour limit on isolating inmates who pose an immediate risk of violence to others or themselves in \"de-escalation\" units. Only those involved in violent incidents could be placed in longer-term restrictive housing, and they would need to be allowed out of their cells for 14 hours each day and get access to the same programming available to other inmates.\n\nNew York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who introduced the legislation, said ahead of the vote that solitary confinement amounts to torture for those subjected to lengthy hours in isolation in small jail cells.\n\nHe and other supporters, including prominent members of New York's congressional delegation, have pointed to research showing solitary confinement, even only for a few days, increases the likelihood an inmate will die by suicide, violence or overdose. It also leads to acute anxiety, depression, psychosis and other impairments that may reduce an inmate's ability to reintegrate into society when they are released, they said.\n\n\"This is about safety at Rikers,\" Williams said, referring to New York's infamous island jail complex. \"If we want something different, we need to try something different.\"\n\nA report released by the Columbia University Center for Justice on Wednesday said that while the city Board of Correction, which oversees city-run jails, recently limited de-escalation confinement to six hours, some inmates have been locked up for far longer, even for days.\n\nInmates in restrictive housing can be locked up for 23 to 24 hours a day, according to the report, which urged City Council members and the mayor to support the bill.\n\nAdams, a former NYPD captain, in a televised interview ahead of the vote, took specific aim at a provision of the bill that requires an inmate be granted a hearing before being placed in solitary confinement. But he stopped short of saying he would veto it.\n\n\"What City Council is saying is while they're in jail if they commit an assault on someone, an inmate or a correction officer, before we place them into punitive segregation, we need to allow them to have a trial of due process,\" he told WNYW. \"That is saying, if someone assaults me on the street, before I could place them in jail, they must have a trial to determine if I'm going to arrest them and place them in the jail. That makes no sense.\"\n\nThe Correction Officers' Benevolent Association, the union representing staff in the city's jails, has also railed against the bill, as has the conservative Common Sense Caucus of the council.\n\nCouncil Minority Leader Joe Borelli, who co-chairs the caucus, said the proposal would \"essentially take away a vital tool our correction officers have to keep everyone safe.\"\n\nCalifornia's legislature last year passed legislation to restrict segregated confinement in prisons and jails, but it was vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsome."}
{"text": "# A passenger hid bullets in a baby diaper at New York's LaGuardia Airport. TSA officers caught him\nDecember 20, 2023. 8:35 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - It was a loaded diaper, but not like you would think.\n\nSecurity officers found 17 bullets concealed inside a disposable baby diaper Wednesday at New York's LaGuardia Airport, the Transportation Security Administration said.\n\nOfficers pulled the otherwise clean diaper from a passenger's carry-on bag after it triggered an alarm in an X-ray machine at an airport security checkpoint, the TSA said.\n\nAccording to the agency, the passenger initially claimed he didn't know how the bullet-filled diaper ended up in his bag. Later he suggested his girlfriend put it there, the agency said.\n\nThe TSA identified the passenger as a man from Arkansas who was ticketed for a flight to Chicago's Midway Airport, but did not disclose his name. Port Authority police cited him for unlawful possession of the 9mm ammunition.\n\nMessages seeking details were left with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport, and the Queens district attorney's office.\n\nThe diaper disguiser is just the latest LaGuardia passenger to be flagged for packing bullets - and sometimes heat. It's a problem that has cropped up at airports across the U.S.\n\nLast month, TSA officers found a .45-caliber pistol and a magazine loaded with six bullets concealed in a pair of Nike sneakers in a checked bag at LaGuardia. Firearms are allowed to be transported as checked luggage, but only in a locked, hard-sided container - not shoes.\n\nIn January 2021, officers at a security checkpoint intercepted 13 bullets hidden in a Mentos chewing gum container inside a carry-on bag. The bullets were mixed in with pieces of gum, the TSA said. The passenger, who was charged with unlawful possession of ammunition, claimed the bag belonged to his son, the agency said.\n\nIn April, officers pulled a loaded .22-caliber pistol and two boxes of ammunition - more than 100 bullets total - from a carry-on bag. That passenger claimed he had been at a shooting range and forgot to remove the gun and bullets before heading to the airport, the TSA said. He was still arrested."}
{"text": "# After 12 years, two children and 'Barbie,' Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach quietly marry\nBy **The Associated Press**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 12:15 PM EST\n\n---\n\nGreta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach are officially married, their representative told The Associated Press Wednesday.\n\nThe two filmmakers have been together for 12 years, have two children and collaborated on many films, including \"Barbie,\" which they co-wrote and Gerwig directed. They met on Baumbach's \"Greenberg\" and went on to work together on films like \"Mistress America\" and \"Frances Ha,\" which they co-wrote, Baumbach directed and Gerwig acted in.\n\nBaumbach was previously married to and shares a child with Jennifer Jason Leigh.\n\nGerwig and Baumbach wrote \"Barbie\" during the pandemic, not knowing if it would ever actually get made. In a \"60 Minutes\" interview from earlier this year Baumbach said that Gerwig signed them up to write it without telling him and he even tried to get out of it. His attempts, he laughed, were unsuccessful because \"Greta was persistent and Greta saw something,\" he said.\n\nThe film became a cultural phenomenon and the highest grosser of the year, with over $1.4 billion in ticket sales, as well as a presumed Oscar contender."}
{"text": "# On Christmas Eve, Bethlehem resembles a ghost town. Celebrations are halted due to Israel-Hamas war\nBy **MELANIE LIDMAN**  \nDecember 24, 2023. 10:12 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BETHLEHEM, West Bank (AP)** - The normally bustling biblical birthplace of Jesus resembled a ghost town on Sunday, as Christmas Eve celebrations in Bethlehem were called off due to the Israel-Hamas war.\n\nThe festive lights and Christmas tree that normally decorate Manger Square were missing, as were the throngs of foreign tourists and jubilant youth marching bands that gather in the West Bank town each year to mark the holiday. Dozens of Palestinian security forces patrolled the empty square.\n\n\"This year, without the Christmas tree and without lights, there's just darkness,\" said Brother John Vinh, a Franciscan monk from Vietnam who has lived in Jerusalem for six years.\n\nHe said he always comes to Bethlehem to mark Christmas, but this year was especially sobering, as he gazed at a nativity scene in Manger Square with a baby Jesus wrapped in a white shroud, reminiscent of the thousands of children killed in the fighting in Gaza. Barbed wire surrounded the scene, the grey rubble reflecting none of the joyous lights and bursts of color that normally fill the square during the Christmas season.\n\nThe cancellation of Christmas festivities is a severe blow to the town's economy. Tourism accounts for an estimated 70% of Bethlehem's income - almost all of that during the Christmas season.\n\nWith many major airlines canceling flights to Israel, few foreigners are visiting. Local officials say over 70 hotels in Bethlehem have been forced to close, leaving thousands of people unemployed.\n\nGift shops were slow to open on Christmas Eve, although a few did once the rain had stopped pouring down. There were few visitors, however.\n\n\"We can't justify putting out a tree and celebrating as normal, when some people (in Gaza) don't even have houses to go to,\" said Ala'a Salameh, one of the owners of Afteem Restaurant, a family-owned falafel restaurant just steps from the square.\n\nSalameh said Christmas Eve is usually the busiest day of the year. \"Normally, you can't find a single chair to sit, we're full from morning till midnight,\" said Salameh. This year, just one table was taken, by journalists taking a break from the rain.\n\nUnder a banner that read \"Bethlehem's Christmas bells ring for a cease-fire in Gaza,\" a few teenagers offered small inflatable Santas, but no one was buying. Instead of their traditional musical march through the streets of Bethlehem, young scouts stood silently with flags. A group of local students unfurled a massive Palestinian flag as they stood in silence.\n\n\"Our message every year on Christmas is one of peace and love, but this year it's a message of sadness, grief and anger in front of the international community with what is happening and going on in the Gaza Strip,\" Bethlehem's mayor, Hana Haniyeh, said in an address to the crowd.\n\nDr. Joseph Mugasa, a pediatrician, was one of the few international visitors. He said his tour group of 15 people from Tanzania was \"determined\" to come to the region despite the situation.\n\n\"I've been here several times, and it's quite a unique Christmas, as usually there's a lot of people and a lot of celebrations,\" he said. \"But you can't celebrate while people are suffering, so we are sad for them and praying for peace.\"\n\nMore than 20,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 50,000 wounded during Israel's air and ground offensive against Gaza's Hamas rulers, according to health officials there, while some 85% of the territory's 2.3 million residents have been displaced. The war was triggered by Hamas' deadly assault Oct. 7 on southern Israel in which militants killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took more than 240 hostages.\n\nThe Gaza war has been accompanied by a surge in violence, with some 300 Palestinians killed by Israeli fire.\n\nThe fighting has affected life across the West Bank. Since Oct. 7, access to Bethlehem and other Palestinian towns in the Israeli-occupied territory has been difficult, with long lines of motorists waiting to pass military checkpoints. The restrictions have also prevented tens of thousands of Palestinians from exiting the territory to work in Israel.\n\nAmir Michael Giacaman opened his store, \"Il Bambino,\" which sells olive wood carvings and other souvenirs, for the first time since Oct. 7. There have been no tourists, and few local residents have money to spare because those who worked in Israel have been stuck at home.\n\n\"When people have extra money, they go buy food,\" said his wife, Safa Giacaman. \"This year, we're telling the Christmas story. We're celebrating Jesus, not the tree, not Santa Claus, she said, as their daughter Makaella ran around the deserted store.\n\nThe fighting in Gaza was on the minds of the small Christian community in Syria, which is coping with a civil war now in its 13th year. Christians said they were trying to find joy, despite the ongoing strife in their homeland and in Gaza.\n\n\"Where is the love? What have we done with love?\" said the Rev. Elias Zahlawi, a priest in Yabroud, a city about 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Damascus. \"We've thrown God outside the realm of humanity and unfortunately, the church has remained silent in the face of this painful reality.\"\n\nSome tried to find inspiration in the spirit of Christmas.\n\nLatin Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa, arriving from Jerusalem for the traditional procession to the Church of the Nativity, told the sparse crowd that Christmas was a \"reason to hope\" despite the war and violence.\n\nThe pared-down Christmas was in keeping with the original message of the holiday and illustrated the many ways the community is coming together, said Stephanie Saldana, who is originally from San Antonio, Texas, and has lived in Jerusalem and Bethlehem for the past 15 years with her husband, a parish priest at the St Joseph Syriac Catholic Church.\n\n\"We feel Christmas as more real than ever, because we're waiting for the prince of peace to come. We are waiting for a miracle to stop this war,\" Saldana said."}
{"text": "# A weekend of combat in Gaza kills 14 Israeli soldiers as public support for the war is tested\nBy **TIA GOLDENBERG**, **WAFAA SHURAFA**, and **SAMY MAGDY**  \nDecember 24, 2023. 11:04 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**TEL AVIV, Israel (AP)** - Fourteen Israeli soldiers were killed in combat in Gaza over the weekend, the Israeli military said Sunday, in some of the bloodiest days of battle since the ground offensive began and a sign that Hamas is still putting up a fight despite weeks of brutal war.\n\nThe mounting death toll among Israeli troops - 153 since the ground offensive began - is likely an important factor in Israeli support for the war, which was sparked when Hamas-led militants stormed communities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 and taking 240 hostage.\n\nThe war has devastated parts of Gaza , killed roughly 20,400 Palestinians and displaced almost all of the besieged territory's 2.3 million people. The Health Ministry in Gaza said 166 people were killed in the coastal enclave over the past day.\n\nIsraelis still stand behind the country's stated goals of crushing Hamas' governing and military capabilities and releasing the remaining 129 captives. That support has stayed mostly steady despite rising international pressure against Israel's offensive and the soaring death toll and unprecedented suffering among Palestinians.\n\nAs Christmas Eve fell, smoke still rose over Gaza from the fighting while Bethlehem in the West Bank was hushed, its holiday celebrations called off.\n\n## HAMAS EXACTS A PRICE\nThe 14 Israeli soldiers killed on Friday and Saturday died in central and southern Gaza, a sign of how Hamas still puts up tough resistance even as Israel claims to have dealt the militant group a serious blow.\n\n\"The war exacts a very heavy price from us but we have no choice but to continue fighting,\" Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a Cabinet meeting.\n\nThere has been widespread anger against Netanyahu's government, which many criticize for failing to protect civilians on Oct. 7 and promoting policies that allowed Hamas to gain strength over the years. Netanyahu has avoided accepting responsibility for the military and policy failures.\n\nEfforts toward another exchange of hostages for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel continued. On Sunday, the head of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group also involved in the Oct. 7 attack, Ziyad al-Nakhalah, arrived in Cairo for talks. The militant group said it was prepared to consider releasing hostages only after an end to fighting. Hamas' top leader Ismail Haniyeh traveled to Cairo for talks days earlier.\n\nEgypt and Qatar have been key mediators in the conflict.\n\n## INSIDE GAZA\nIsrael's offensive has been one of the most devastating military campaigns in recent history. More than two-thirds of the 20,000 Palestinians killed have been women and children, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza, which does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.\n\nThe Palestinian Red Crescent said a 13-year-old boy was shot and killed in an Israeli drone attack while inside al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis, a part of Gaza where Israel's military believes Hamas leaders are hiding.\n\nAn Israeli strike overnight hit a house in a refugee camp west of the city of Rafah, on Gaza's border with Egypt. At least two men were killed, according to Associated Press journalists in the hospital where the bodies were taken.\n\nAt least two people were killed and six others wounded when a missile stuck a building in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.\n\nAnd Palestinians reported heavy Israeli bombardment and gunfire in Jabaliya, an area north of Gaza City that Israel had claimed to control. Hamas' military arm said its fighters shelled Israeli troops in Jabaliya and Jabaliya refugee camp.\n\n\"Sounds of explosions and gunfire never stopped,\" said Jabaliya resident Assad Radwan.\n\nIsrael has come under international criticism for the civilian death toll but it blames Hamas, citing the militants' use of crowded residential areas and tunnels. Israel has launched thousands of airstrikes since Oct. 7, and has largely refrained from commenting on specific attacks.\n\nIsrael also faces allegations of mistreating Palestinian men and teenage boys detained in homes, shelters, hospitals and elsewhere during the offensive. It has denied abuse allegations and said those without links to militants are quickly released.\n\nSpeaking to the AP from a hospital bed in Rafah after his release, Khamis al-Burdainy of Gaza City said Israeli forces detained him after tanks and bulldozers partly destroyed his home. He said men were handcuffed and blindfolded.\n\n\"We didn't sleep. We didn't get food and water,\" he said, crying and covering his face.\n\nAnother released detainee, Mohammed Salem, from the Gaza City neighborhood of Shijaiyah, said Israeli troops beat them. \"We were humiliated,\" he said. \"A female soldier would come and beat an old man, aged 72 years old.\"\n\nIsrael says it has killed thousands of Hamas militants, without presenting evidence, and says it is dismantling Hamas' vast tunnel network and killing off top commanders - an operation that leaders have said could take months.\n\n## INTERNATIONAL PRESSURE\nThe United Nations Security Council has passed a watered-down resolution calling for the speedy delivery of humanitarian aid for hungry and desperate Palestinians and the release of all the hostages, but not for a cease-fire.\n\nBut it was not immediately clear how and when deliveries of food, medical supplies and other aid, far below the daily average of 500 before the war, would accelerate. Trucks enter through two crossings - Rafah, and Kerem Shalom on the border with Israel. Wael Abu Omar, a spokesman for the Palestinian Crossings Authority, said 93 aid trucks entered Gaza through Rafah on Saturday.\n\nThe head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, reiterated U.N. calls for a humanitarian cease-fire, adding on social media that \"the decimation of the Gaza health system is a tragedy.\"\n\nIsrael's allies in Europe have stepped up calls for a stop to the fighting. But the U.S., Israel's top ally, appeared to remain firmly behind Israel despite intensifying its calls for greater protection for civilians.\n\nU.S. President Joe Biden spoke with Netanyahu on Saturday, a day after Washington shielded Israel from a harsher U.N. resolution. Biden said he did not ask for a cease-fire, while Netanyahu's office said the prime minister \"made clear that Israel would continue the war until achieving all its goals.\""}
{"text": "# Reindeer are famous for pulling Santa's sleigh, but there's a characteristic that sets them apart\nBy **HOLLY RAMER**  \nDecember 23, 2023. 12:01 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**CONCORD, N.H. (AP)** - Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer may have millions of carrots set out for him on Christmas Eve, but what about the rest of the year?\n\nFinding food in a cold, barren landscape is challenging, but researchers from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland report that reindeer eyes may have evolved to allow them to easily spot their preferred meal.\n\nIt's further evidence that while reindeer are famous for pulling Santa's sleigh, it's their vision that really sets them apart, says Nathaniel Dominy, a Dartmouth anthropology professor and co-author of a recent study published in the journal i-Perception.\n\n\"They've been sort of obscure and unheralded in the annals of visual neuroscience, but they're having their moment because they have a really fascinating visual system,\" he said in an interview.\n\nScientists have known for years that mirror-like tissue in reindeer eyes changes color from a greenish gold in the summer to vivid blue in the winter, a process that is thought to amplify the low light of polar winter. But they weren't sure what to make of another curious fact: Unlike other mammals, reindeer can see light in the ultraviolet spectrum.\n\n\"Most animals that are active under daylight conditions want to avoid UV light. UV light is damaging,\" Dominy said. \"Snow reflects UV light, which is a problem, which is why humans get snow blindness.\"\n\nSome scientists believe reindeer vision evolved to protect the animals from predators, allowing them to spot white wolves against a snowy landscape, for example. The new study points to another possibility: food.\n\nReindeer subsist largely on light-colored reindeer moss, which isn't actually a moss but rather a type of lichen that grows in crunchy, carpet-like patches across northern latitudes.\n\nResearchers traveled to the Cairngorms mountains in the Scottish Highlands, which hosts more than 1,500 species of lichen as well as Britain's only reindeer herd. They found reindeer moss absorbs UV light, meaning the white lichen that humans have trouble seeing against the snow stands out as dark patches to the animals.\n\n\"If you're a reindeer, you can see it and you have an advantage because then you're not wandering around the landscape. You can walk in a straight line and get to that food, and you conserve energy in the process,\" Dominy said. \"These animals are desperate for food, and if they can find lichen sufficiently, then they have an advantage.\"\n\nJuan Jose Negro specializes in evolutionary ecology and conservation biology at the Spanish Council for Scientific Research. While his focus is mainly on birds of prey, he found the new reindeer research intriguing.\n\n\"I love every piece of work dealing with colors and vision,\" he said. \"Every time I read other people's works, there is something that sparks new ideas. ... And in the case of the reindeer, this is leading me to want to pay more attention to this part of the spectrum.\"\n\nWhile he saw no immediate biomedical benefit to the research, such work is useful in furthering the understanding of how animals deal with difficult environments, he said.\n\nDominy echoed that point, but said it also has human implications. There has been a lot of pharmacological research on lichens because they have antioxidant properties. Reindeer eyes allowing in UV light suggests there might be some mechanism in place to protect them from damage, he said.\n\n\"Reindeer eyes are full of ascorbic acid, or vitamin C, and vitamin C is just terrific for repairing damaged cells,\" he said.\n\nWith that in mind, Dominy is updating the advice he offered after writing a 2015 paper exploring why a reindeer's red nose would be ideal for guiding Santa's sleigh.\n\nBack then, he recommended children leave Rudolph cookies and other high-calorie food to make up for the body heat he loses through his nose. Now, he says, focus on his eyes and save the milk and cookies for Santa.\n\n\"The best thing to give them to protect the health of their eyes would be something rich in vitamin C,\" he said. \"Orange juice, carrots, these would be perfect treats for reindeer on Christmas Eve.\""}
{"text": "# Second suspect arrested in theft of Banksy stop sign artwork featuring military drones\nDecember 24, 2023. 10:44 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - A second suspect was arrested in the alleged theft of a work by the elusive street artist Banksy of a stop sign adorned with three military drones, London police said Sunday.\n\nA man in his 40s was in custody on suspicion of theft and criminal damage, the Metropolitan police said. A suspect in his 20s who was arrested Saturday was released on bail.\n\nWitnesses who arrived at a street corner Friday in the south London section of Peckham less than an hour after Banksy posted a photo of the work on Instagram said they were stunned to watch a man with bolt cutters remove the sign as another man steadied a bike he stood on.\n\nThe incident was captured in photos and video.\n\nMuch of Banksy's political and satirical art is critical of war, and many of his followers interpreted the work as calling for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip."}
{"text": "# Decaying Pillsbury mill in Illinois that once churned flour into opportunity is now getting new life\nBy **JOHN O'CONNOR**  \nDecember 24, 2023. 12:17 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP)** - It was the dog, stuck atop skyscraping grain silos on Springfield's northeast side in 2019, that forced Chris Richmond's hand.\n\nThe stray had found its way to the top of the behemoth Pillsbury Mills, for decades a flour-churning engine of the central Illinois city's economy but now vacant more than 20 years. Rescue was too risky amid such decay, officials said.\n\nThe brief but precarious appearance by the dog, found dead at ground level days later after ingesting rat poison, represented the hopelessness posed by the vacant campus, Richmond recalled.\n\n\"That's when I said, 'This is just unacceptable in our community,'\" said the 54-year-old retired city fire marshal, whose father's Pillsbury paycheck made him and his brother first-generation college graduates.\n\nA year later, Richmond and allies emerged with a nonprofit called Moving Pillsbury Forward and a five-year, $10 million plan to raze the century-old plant and renew the 18-acre (7.3-hectare) site.\n\nRichmond, the group's president and treasurer, vice president Polly Poskin and secretary Tony DelGiorno have $6 million in commitments and targets for collecting the balance.\n\nHaving already razed two structures, the group expects the wrecking ball to swing even more feverishly next year. Next door to a railyard with nationwide connections, they envision a light industrial future.\n\nMeanwhile, Moving Pillsbury Forward has managed to turn the decrepit site in Illinois' capital city into a leisure destination verging on cultural phenomenon.\n\nTours have been highly popular and repeated. Oral histories have emerged. Spray-paint vandals, boosted instead of busted, have become artists in residence for nighttime graffiti exhibitions, which more than 1,000 people attended.\n\nRetired University of Illinois archeologist Robert Mazrim has mined artifacts and assembled an \"Echoes of Pillsbury\" museum beneath a leaking loading dock roof. This month, the plant's towering headhouse is ablaze with holiday lights.\n\nPerhaps the exuberance with which Moving Pillsbury Forward approaches its task sets it apart. But in terms of activist groups pursuing such formidable reclamation aspirations, it's not unusual, said David Holmes, a Wisconsin-based environmental scientist and brownfields redevelopment consultant.\n\nGovernment funding has expanded to accommodate them.\n\n\"You find some high-caliber organizations that are really focused on the areas with the biggest problems, these most-in-need neighborhoods,\" Holmes said. \"A lot of times, cities (local governments) are focused on their downtowns or whatever gets the mayor the ribbon cutting.\"\n\nMinneapolis-based Pillsbury built the Springfield campus in 1929 and expanded it several times through the 1950s. A bakery mix division after World War II turned out the world's first boxed cake mixes.\n\nThere is circumstantial evidence that the Pillsbury doughboy, the brand's seminal mascot, was first drawn by a Springfield plant manager who eschewed credit, not, as the company maintains, in a Chicago ad agency.\n\nPillsbury sold the plant in 1991 to Cargill, which departed a decade later. A scrap dealer ran afoul of the law with improper asbestos disposal in 2015, prompting a $3 million U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cleanup. After the dog's cameo, Moving Pillsbury Forward persuaded the EPA to drop a lien for its cleanup costs and purchased the property for $1.\n\nNow, all that's left is to sweep up a the remaining asbestos and lead paint chips before pulling down more than 500,000 square feet (46,450 square meters) of factory, including a 242-foot (73.8-meter) headhouse that's the city's third-tallest structure and 160 silos, four abreast and standing 100 feet (30.5 meters).\n\n\"It's daunting. Everything about this place is daunting,\" Richmond concedes. \"But a journey of 1,000 miles starts with the first step, right?\"\n\nThe timing is right. There is more money than ever available to mop up America's left-behinds, according to Holmes.\n\nThe 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $1.2 billion for brownfields cleanup, four times the typical annual allotment The Pillsbury group wants $2.6 million of the total added to what the group already has been promised by the federal, state and Springfield governments.\n\nThe application plays up the intangible benefits: economic and environmental justice availing the 12,000 people who live within 1 mile (1.61 kilometers) of the plant, only 25% of whom have a high school diploma and whose median household income is $25,000.\n\n\"It's a tough sell but at some point, there are enough people who have a vision for what it could be that that's a powerful incentive,\" Poskin said. \"It isn't going to be anything until what's there is gone. No developer is going to take on a $10 million cleanup job.\"\n\nThe group also set out to preserve memories of the place they are working to tear down. Ex-workers and neighbors have clamored for spots in ongoing tours and posed for group photos.\n\nIn a historical seniority list on display, next to \"Jackson, Ernest, 1937,\" is the message, \"Hi Grandpa. We are visiting your workplace of 42 yrs.\" Richmond and Mazrim have collected more than a dozen oral histories from past employees. Photographers are documenting what remains for historical context.\n\nAnd it's become an unlikely canvas. Minneapolis-based graffiti artists who tag their work \"Shock\" and \"Static\" were surreptitiously decorating the place in September when Richmond and Mazrim confronted them. Instead of pressing a trespassing charge, Richmond invited them to stage an exhibition. The nighttime November showing proved so popular that Richmond added a second date.\n\nArtist Eric Rieger, known to fans as HOTTEA, also took part, creating in a \"cathedral-like\" setting a huge, rectangular grid of black-light-lit neon strings of yarn suspended from the ceiling. His goal was \"a sense of really positive energy\" reminiscent of the fond memories employees experienced.\n\n\"They were so enthusiastic and that's rare to find nowadays,\" Rieger said the night of the first exhibit Nov. 9. \"I really respect what they did for this community because they're the backbone of America - they were feeding America.\""}
{"text": "# Iowa won't participate in US food assistance program for kids this summer\nDecember 23, 2023. 7:26 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)** - Iowa will not participate this summer in a federal program that gives $40 per month to each child in a low-income family to help with food costs while school is out, state officials have announced.\n\nThe state has notified the U.S. Department of Agriculture that it will not participate in the 2024 Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children - or Summer EBT - program, the state's Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Education said in a Friday news release.\n\n\"Federal COVID-era cash benefit programs are not sustainable and don't provide long-term solutions for the issues impacting children and families. An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic,\" Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds said in the news release.\n\nShe added, \"If the Biden Administration and Congress want to make a real commitment to family well-being, they should invest in already existing programs and infrastructure at the state level and give us the flexibility to tailor them to our state's needs.\"\n\nStates that participate in the federal program are required to cover half of the administrative costs, which would cost an estimated $2.2 million in Iowa, the news release says.\n\nSome state lawmakers, including Democratic Sen. Izaah Knox of Des Moines, quickly voiced their opposition to the decision.\n\n\"It's extremely disappointing that the Reynolds administration is planning to reject federal money that could put food on the table for hungry Iowa kids,\" Knox said in a statement. \"This cruel and short-sighted decision will have real impacts on children and families in my district and communities all across Iowa.\"\n\nOfficials in nearby Nebraska also announced this week that the state will not participate in Summer EBT, which would cost Nebraska about $300,000 annually in administrative costs, the Lincoln Journal Star reported.\n\n\"In the end, I fundamentally believe that we solve the problem, and I don't believe in welfare,\" Nebraska Republican Gov. Jim Pillen told the Journal Star on Friday.\n\nBut Nebraska will continue participating in a different federal program, called the Summer Food Service Program, which combines programming - like reading, physical activity and nutrition education - with food assistance, according to the Journal Star.\n\n\"We just want to make sure that they're out. They're at church camps. They're at schools. They're at 4-H. And we'll take care of them at all of the places that they're at, so that they're out amongst (other people) and not feeding a welfare system with food at home,\" Pillen said.\n\nA bipartisan group of Nebraska lawmakers have urged the state to reconsider, saying Summer EBT would address the needs of vulnerable children and benefit the state economically, the Journal Star reported.\n\nAt least 18 states and territories and two tribal nations - Cherokee Nation and Chickasaw Nation - have announced they intend to participate in Summer EBT in 2024, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The list includes Arizona, California, Kansas, Minnesota, West Virginia, American Samoa and Guam, among others.\n\nStates, territories and eligible tribal nations have until Jan. 1 to notify the Department of Agriculture of their intent to participate in the program this summer."}
{"text": "# New York governor vetoes bill that would make it easier for people to challenge their convictions\nBy **MAYSOON KHAN**  \nDecember 23, 2023. 4:45 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ALBANY, N.Y. (AP)** - New York Gov. Kathy Hochul vetoed a bill days before Christmas that would have made it easier for people who have pleaded guilty to crimes to challenge their convictions, a measure that was favored by criminal justice reformers but fiercely opposed by prosecutors.\n\nThe Democrat said the bill's \"sweeping expansion of eligibility for post-conviction relief\" would \"up-end the judicial system and create an unjustifiable risk of flooding the courts with frivolous claims,\" in a veto letter released Saturday.\n\nUnder existing state law, criminal defendants who plead guilty are usually barred from trying to get their cases reopened based on a new claim of innocence, except in certain circumstances involving new DNA evidence.\n\nThe bill passed by the Legislature in June would have expanded the types of evidence that could be considered proof of innocence, including video footage or evidence of someone else confessing to a crime. Arguments that a person was coerced into a false guilty plea would have also been considered.\n\nProsecutors and advocates for crime victims warned the bill would have opened the floodgates to endless, frivolous legal appeals by the guilty.\n\nErie County District Attorney John Flynn, the president of the District Attorney's Association of the State of New York, wrote in a letter to Hochul in July that the bill would create \"an impossible burden on an already overburdened criminal justice system.\"\n\nThe legislation would have benefitted people like Reginald Cameron, who was exonerated in 2023, years after he pleaded guilty to first-degree robbery in exchange for a lesser sentence. He served more than eight years in prison after he was arrested alongside another person in 1994 in the fatal shooting of Kei Sunada, a 22-year-old Japanese immigrant. Cameron, then 19, had confessed after being questioned for several hours without attorneys.\n\nHis conviction was thrown out after prosecutors reinvestigated the case, finding inconsistencies between the facts of the crime and the confessions that were the basis for the conviction. The investigation also found the detective that had obtained Cameron's confessions was also connected to other high-profile cases that resulted in exonerations, including the Central Park Five case.\n\nVarious states including Texas have implemented several measures over the years intended to stop wrongful convictions. Texas amended a statute in 2015 that allows a convicted person to apply for post-conviction DNA testing. In 2017, another amended rule requires law enforcement agencies to electronically record interrogations of suspects in serious felony cases in their entirety.\n\n\"We're pretty out of step when it comes to our post-conviction statute,\" Amanda Wallwin, a state policy advocate at the Innocence Project, said of New York.\n\n\"We claim to be a state that cares about racial justice, that cares about justice period. To allow Texas to outmaneuver us is and should be embarrassing,\" she said.\n\nIn 2018, New York's highest court affirmed that people who plead guilty cannot challenge their convictions unless they have DNA evidence to support their innocence. That requirement makes it very difficult for defendants to get their cases heard before a judge, even if they have powerful evidence that is not DNA-based.\n\nOver the past three decades, the proportion of criminal cases that make it to trial in New York has steadily declined, according to a report by the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. About 99% of misdemeanor charges and 94% of felony charges in the state are resolved by guilty pleas.\n\n\"In my work, I know there there are a lot of circumstances where people plead guilty to crimes because they are advised or misadvised by their attorneys at the time,\" said Donna Aldea, a lawyer at law firm Barket Epstein Kearon Aldea & LoTurco. \"Sometimes they're afraid that if they go to trial, they'll face much worse consequences, even if they didn't commit the crime.\"\n\nShe said the state's criminal justice system right now is framed in a way that makes it impossible for people to challenge their guilty pleas years later when new evidence emerges, or when they're in a better financial position to challenge their convictions.\n\nUnder the bill, those challenging their convictions would be provided court-appointed pro bono representation if they can't afford an attorney. They'd also be able to request retesting of physical evidence, as well as access to both the defense and prosecutor's discovery files related to their case.\n\nState Senator Zellnor Myrie, a New York City Democrat who sponsored the bill, said he is considering reintroducing the bill in the next legislative session to give innocent people a \"fair chance to reverse a terrible wrong.\"\n\nNick Encalada-Malinowski, the civil rights campaign director for VOCAL-NY, a grassroots organization, said the bill would have removed various barriers for folks who got their wrongful conviction cases dismissed on procedural or technical grounds.\n\nThe bill, he said, would have given them a chance to get their cases heard on the merits.\n\n\"The problem of wrongful convictions in New York requires a statewide solution,\" said Nick Encalada-Malinowski, the civil rights campaign director for VOCAL-NY, a grassroots organization. \"We're trying to have a system where people have an ability no matter where they are, if they're wrongfully convicted, to get back in courts and argue their cases.\""}
{"text": "# Judges to decide if 300 possible victims of trafficking from India should remain grounded in France\nBy **ANGELA CHARLTON** and **ELISE MORTON**  \nDecember 24, 2023. 9:18 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**PARIS (AP)** - Judges in France were expected to decide Sunday whether about 300 Indian citizens who are suspected of being victims of human trafficking should continue to be sequestered in a small airport in Champagne country.\n\nEn route to Central America, the passengers have been held at Paris-Vatry Airport since Thursday after a dramatic police operation prompted by a tip about a possible human trafficking scheme, authorities said.\n\nThe passengers appeared throughout the day before judges who will decide whether to extend their detention in the airport, according to the administration for the Marne region. If they can't be held any longer, they will be free to leave the country.\n\n\"I don't know if this has ever been done before in France,\" Francois Procureur, the head of the Châlons-en-Champagne Bar Association, told BFM TV on Saturday.\n\nThe situation is urgent because \"we cannot keep foreigners in a waiting area for more than 96 hours. Beyond that, it is the liberty and custody judge who must rule on their fate,\" he said.\n\nThe four-day period can be extended to eight days if a judge approves, then another eight days in exceptional circumstances.\n\nWith this urgency in mind, Procureur said four hearings would take place simultaneously, with four judges, four clerks and at least four lawyers taking part in the proceedings along with the Indian citizens and interpreters. \"We are all mobilized,\" he said.\n\nAccording to a statement from the Marne prefecture, the seizure order for the airliner was lifted Sunday morning, a decision which \"makes it possible to contemplate the passengers in the waiting area being rerouted.\"\n\nThe French Civil Aviation Authority then set about trying to get the necessary permissions for the plane to take off once again, which should be in place \"no later than Monday morning,\" according to the prefecture. Passengers were still undergoing questioning when the statement was issued.\n\nThe passengers included children and families. The youngest is a toddler of 21 months, and among the children are several unaccompanied minors, according to the local civil protection agency.\n\nTwo of the passengers were detained as part of a special investigation into suspected human trafficking by an organized criminal group, according to the Paris prosecutor's office. Prosecutors wouldn't comment on what kind of trafficking was alleged, or whether the ultimate destination was the U.S., which has seen a surge in Indians crossing the Mexico-U.S. border this year.\n\nThe 15 crew members of the Legend Airlines charter flight - an unmarked A340 plane en route from Fujairah airport in the United Arab Emirates to Managua, Nicaragua - were questioned and released, according to a lawyer for the Romania-based airline.\n\nAccording to an official with the Marne administration, the passengers initially remained in the plane, surrounded by police on the tarmac, but were then transferred into the main hall of the airport to sleep.\n\nLegend Airlines lawyer Liliana Bakayoko said the company was cooperating with French authorities and has denied any role in possible human trafficking. She said the airline \"has not committed any infraction.\"\n\nA \"partner\" company that chartered the plane was responsible for verifying identification documents of each passenger, and communicated their passport information to the airline 48 hours before the flight, Bakayoko told The Associated Press.\n\nThe customer had chartered multiple flights on Legend Airlines from Dubai to Nicaragua, and a few other flights had already made the journey without incident, she said. She would not identify the customer, saying only that it is not a European company.\n\nThe U.S. government has designated Nicaragua as one of several countries deemed as failing to meet minimum standards for eliminating human trafficking.\n\nNicaragua has also been used as a migratory springboard for people fleeing poverty or conflict in the Caribbean as well as far-flung countries in Africa or Asia, because of relaxed or visa-free entry requirements for some countries. Sometimes charter flights are used for the journey. From there, the migrants travel north by bus with the help of smugglers.\n\nThe influx of Indian migrants through Mexico has increased from fewer than 3,000 in 2022 to more than 11,000 from January to November this year, according to the Mexican Immigration Agency. Indian citizens were arrested 41,770 times entering the U.S. illegally from Mexico in the U.S. government's budget year that ended Sept. 30, more than double from 18,308 the previous year."}
{"text": "# A man is killed and a woman injured in a 'targeted' afternoon shooting at a Florida shopping mall\nDecember 24, 2023. 6:50 AM EST\n\n**OCALA, Fla. (AP)** - A man died in a shooting at a shopping mall in central Florida two days before Christmas in which the victim was \"targeted\" for the attack, police said.\n\nOcala Police Chief Mike Balken told reporters Saturday evening that the man was killed after he was shot multiple times in a common area at Paddock Mall in Ocala, located about 79 miles (127 kilometers) northwest of Orlando.\n\nA woman also was shot in the leg. She was treated at a local hospital and expected to recover, Balken said.\n\nThe suspect fled the scene and left behind the firearm, Balken said.\n\nPolice arrived at the mall around 3:40 p.m. after a call of multiple shots being fired at the mall.\n\n\"Officers immediately made entry into the mall (and) ultimately discovered that this was not what we would consider an active shooter,\" Balken told reporters.\n\nThe attack was likely a \"targeted act of violence\" against the man, Balken said.\n\nSeveral other mall patrons suffered injuries during the shooting, with one person having chest pain and another reporting a broken arm, police said.\n\nThe Ocala police posted photos overnight of a person of interest that appear to be taken from a mall security camera. The three images show a male with a red cap and dark clothing. Balken previously said the suspect wore a hooded sweatshirt and a mask partially covering his face.\n\nThe police also asked the public for assistance by submitting mobile phone video of the shooting scene.\n\nThe mall's corporate owner, WPG, did not immediately respond to an email seeking additional information. The mall has dozens of stores, including J.C. Penney and Foot Locker.\n\nCalvin and Diana Amos, who were shopping in the J.C. Penney store, told the Ocala Star-Banner that they evacuated the store quickly once they figured out what was going on. They described themselves as scared and apprehensive."}
{"text": "# New migrants face fear and loneliness. A town on the Great Plains has a storied support network\nBy **JESSE BEDAYN**  \nDecember 24, 2023. 12:04 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**FORT MORGAN, Colo. (AP)** - Magdalena Simon's only consolation after immigration officers handcuffed and led her husband away was the contents of his wallet, a few bills.\n\nThe hopes that had pushed her to trudge thousands of miles from Guatemala in 2019, her son's small frame clutched to her chest, ceded to despair and loneliness in Fort Morgan, a ranching outpost on Colorado's eastern plains, where some locals stared at her too long and the wind howls so fiercely it once blew the doors half off a hotel.\n\nThe pregnant Simon tried to mask the despair every morning when her toddlers asked, \"Where's papa?\"\n\nTo millions of migrants who have crossed the U.S. southern border in the past few years, stepping off greyhound buses in places across America, such feelings can be constant companions. What Simon would find in this unassuming city of a little more than 11,400, however, was a community that pulled her in, connecting her with legal council, charities, schools and soon friends, a unique support network built by generations of immigrants.\n\nIn this small town, migrants are building quiet lives, far from big cities like New York, Chicago and Denver that have struggled to house asylum-seekers and from the halls of Congress where their futures are bandied about in negotiations.\n\nThe Fort Morgan migrant community has become a boon for newcomers, nearly all of whom arrive from perilous journeys to new challenges: pursuing asylum cases; finding a paycheck big enough for food, an attorney and a roof; placing their kids in school; and navigating a language barrier, all while facing the threat of deportation.\n\nThe United Nations used the community, 80 miles (129 kilometers) west of Denver, as a case study for rural refugee integration after a thousand Somalis arrived to work in meatpacking plants in the late 2000s. In 2022, grassroots groups sent migrants living in mobile homes to Congress to tell their stories.\n\nIn the last year, hundreds more migrants have arrived in Morgan County. More than 30 languages are spoken in Fort Morgan's only high school, which has translators for the most common languages and a phone service for others. On Sundays, Spanish is heard from the pulpits of six churches.\n\nThe demographic shift in recent decades has forced the community to adapt: Local organizations hold monthly support groups, train students and adults about their rights, teach others how to drive, ensure kids are in school and direct people to immigration attorneys.\n\nSimon herself now tells her story to those stepping off buses. The community can't wave away the burdens, but they can make them lighter.\n\n\"It's not like home where you have your parents and all of your family around you,\" Simon tells those she meets in grocery stores and school pickup lines. \"If you run into a problem, you need to find your own family.\"\n\nThe work has grown amid negotiations in Washington, D.C., on a deal that could toughen asylum protocols and bolster border enforcement.\n\nOn a recent Sunday, advocacy groups organized a posada, a Mexican celebration of the biblical Joseph and Mary seeking shelter for Mary to give birth and being turned away until they were given the stable.\n\nBefore marching down the street singing a song adaption in which migrants are seeking shelter instead of Joseph and Mary, participants signed letters urging Colorado's two Democratic senators and Republican U.S. Rep. Ken Buck to reject stiffer asylum rules.\n\nA century ago, it was sugar beet production that brought German and Russian migration to the area. Now, many migrants work inside dairy plants.\n\nWhen area businesses were raided several times in the 2000s, friends disappeared overnight, seats sat empty in schools and gaps opened on factory lines.\n\n\"That really changed the the understanding of how deeply embedded migrants are in community,\" said Jennifer Piper of American Friends Service Committee, which organized the posada celebration.\n\nGuadalupe \"Lupe\" Lopez Chavez, who arrived in the U.S. alone in 1998 from Guatemala at age 16, spends long hours working with migrants, including helping connect Simon to a lawyer after her husband was detained.\n\nOne recent Saturday, Lopez Chavez sat in the low-ceilinged office of One Morgan County, a nearly 20-year-old migration nonprofit. In a folding chair, Maria Ramirez sifted through manila folders dated November 2023, when she'd arrived in the U.S.\n\nRamirez fled central Mexico, where cartel violence claimed her younger brother's life, and asked Lopez Chavez how she could get health care. Ramirez's 4-year-old daughter - who pranced behind her mother, blowing bubbles and popping the ones that landed in her brown curls - has a lung condition.\n\nRamirez said she would work anywhere to move from the living room they sleep in, with just a blanket on the floor as cushioning.\n\nIn the offices resembling a hostel's well-loved communal space, Lopez Chavez cautioned Ramirez to consult a lawyer before applying for health care. Sitting aside Ramirez were two settled migrants offering support and advice.\n\n\"A lot of stuff that you heard in Mexico (about the U.S.) was you couldn't walk on the streets, you had to live in the shadows, you'd be targeted,\" said Ramirez. \"It's beautiful to come into a community that's united.\"\n\nLopez Chavez works with new migrants because she remembers shackles snapping around her ankles after she was stopped for a traffic violation in 2012 and turned over to the U.S. immigration authorities.\n\n\"I just wanted to leave there because I'd never been in a cage before,\" Lopez Chavez said in an interview, her eyes filling with tears.\n\nAt her first court hearing, Lopez Chavez and her husband stood alone. At her second hearing, after Lopez Chavez was connected to the community, she was flanked by new friends. That wall of support allowed her to keep her chin up as she fought her immigration case before being granted residency last year.\n\nLopez Chavez now works to cultivate that strength across the community.\n\n\"I don't want any more families to go through what we went through,\" said Lopez Chavez, who also encourages others to tell their stories. \"Those examples give people the idea: If they can manage their case and win, maybe I can too.\"\n\nIn Fort Morgan, train tracks divide a mobile home park, where many migrants live, and the city's older homes. Some older migrants see new arrivals as getting better treatment by the U.S. and feel that is unfair. The community can't solve every challenge, and hasn't laid the last brick on cultural bridges between the diverse communities.\n\nBut at the posada event, crowded in the One Morgan County offices, the assurances of community itself showed through the eyes of partygoers as children in cultural regalia danced traditional Mexican dances.\n\nAmong those bouncing around the long room was 7-year-old Francisco Mateo Simon. He doesn't remember the journey to the U.S., but his mother, Magdalena, does.\n\nShe remembers how ill he became as she carried him the last miles to the border. Now he spits out armadillo facts between the nubs of incoming front teeth in their mobile home, then points to his favorite ornament on their white, plastic Christmas tree.\n\n\"That's our brand new tree,\" said his mother, as her eldest daughter practiced English with a kids' book.\n\n\"It's new,\" she repeated, \"It's our first new tree because in the past we've only had trees from the thrift store.\""}
{"text": "# As conflicts rage abroad, a fractured Congress tries to rally support for historic global challenges\nBy **STEPHEN GROVES** and **SEUNG MIN KIM**  \nDecember 24, 2023. 10:40 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - As the Senate wrapped up its work for the year, Sen. Michael Bennet took to the floor of the nearly empty chamber and made a late-night plea for Congress to redouble support for Ukraine: \"Understand the stakes at this moment.\"\n\nIt was the third time in recent months the Colorado Democrat has kept the Senate working late by holding up unrelated legislation in a bid to cajole lawmakers to approve tens of billions of dollars in weaponry and economic aid for Ukraine. During a nearly hour-long, emotional speech, he called on senators to see the nearly 2-year-old conflict as a defining clash of authoritarianism against democracy and implored them to consider what it means \"to be fighting on that freezing front line and not know whether we're going to come through with the ammunition.\"\n\nYet Congress broke for the holidays and is not expected to return for two weeks while continued aid for Ukraine has nearly been exhausted. The Biden administration is planning to send one more aid package before the new year, but says it will be the last unless Congress approves more money.\n\nWith support slipping in Congress even as conflicts and unrest rattle global security, the United States is once again struggling to assert its role in the world. Under the influence of Donald Trump, the former president who is now the Republican Party front-runner, GOP lawmakers have increasingly taken a skeptical stance toward U.S. involvement abroad, particularly when it comes to aid to Ukraine.\n\nLeaders of traditional allies Britain and France have implored Western nations to continue their robust support, but Russia's President Vladimir Putin is emboldened and building up resources for a fresh effort as the war heads towards its third year.\n\nUkraine's lifelines to the West are also imperiled in the European Union, which sent 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion) each month to ensure macroeconomic stability, pay wages and pensions, keep hospitals and schools running, provide shelter for displaced people and rebuild infrastructure destroyed in the war.\n\nThat package has now expired and the EU's executive branch failed to produce another one for the new year when Hungary vetoed a 50 billion euro ($55 billion) package this month.\n\nBolstering Ukraine's defense used to be celebrated in the U.S. Capitol as one of a few remaining bipartisan causes. But now the fate of roughly $61 billion in funding is tied to delicate policy negotiations on Capitol Hill over border and immigration changes. And in the last year, lawmakers have had to mount painstaking, round-the-clock efforts to pass even legislation that maintains basic functions of the U.S. government. Bills with ambitious changes have been almost completely out of reach for the closely divided Congress.\n\nStill, congressional leaders are trying to rally members to address global challenges they say are among the most difficult in decades: the largest land invasion of a European nation since World War II, a war between Israel and Hamas, unrest and economic calamity driving historic levels of migration and China asserting itself as a superpower.\n\nIn the Senate, both Democratic and Republican leaders have cast the $110 billion aid package, which is attempting to address all those issues, as a potential turning point for democracy around the world. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters last week that \"history will look back if we don't support our ally in Ukraine.\"\n\n\"We're living in a time when there are all kinds of forces that are tearing at democracy, at here and abroad,\" Bennet said.\n\nIn a year-end speech, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said: \"From South Texas to Southeast Asia and from the Black Sea to the Red Sea, it is an historically challenging and consequential time to protect America's interests, our allies and our own people.\"\n\nThe Republican leader, a key supporter of Ukraine aid, has tried for months to build support in his party for Ukraine. But after a $6 billion military and civilian aid package for Ukraine collapsed in October, McConnell began telling top White House officials that any funding would need to be paired with border policy changes.\n\nThe White House deliberately stayed out of the negotiations until senior officials felt the time was right to do so. But senior Republicans involved in the border talks believe the administration stepped in too late, ultimately delaying the prospects of additional Ukraine aid getting approved until the new year.\n\nSenate negotiators have had to navigate both the explosive politics of border policy as well as one of the most complex areas of American law.\n\n\"This is a tightrope, but we are still on it,\" said Sen. Chris Murphy, the lead Democratic negotiator.\n\nAt one point during the negotiations, McConnell felt compelled to stress the urgency to administration officials and impose a deadline to reach a border deal in time for the agreement to be drafted into legislative provisions before the end of the year.\n\nWith the negotiations still plodding along, McConnell called White House chief of staff Jeff Zients on Dec. 7 and said a deal must be reached within five days - a message that the Kentucky Republican emphasized to President Joe Biden himself when the two men spoke later that day, according to a person familiar with the discussions.\n\nIt wouldn't be until five days later, on Dec. 12, that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and senior White House aides came to the Capitol to participate directly in the negotiations. A White House official said the administration got involved when it did because it felt the talks had moved beyond the realm of unacceptable or unattainable measures - and to a more productive phase.\n\nA second White House official stressed that previous legislative negotiations, such as the bipartisan infrastructure law that is now more than two years old, started similarly, with Republican and Democratic senators talking on their own and the administration stepping in once it felt the talks were ready for White House involvement.\n\nStill, \"it would be nice to have had them earlier,\" Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, the chief GOP negotiator, said last week.\n\n\"We would have a lot more progress, and we would have had potential to be able to get this done by this week if they would have gotten earlier,\" Lankford said. The two White House officials and the person familiar with McConnell's phone call to Biden all spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private and ongoing negotiations.\n\nThe White House's strategy of including Republican priorities such as Israel aid and border security in the package has also raised several thorny issues for Democrats.\n\nProgressive lawmakers, critical of Israel's campaign into Gaza that has killed thousands of civilians, have called for humanitarian conditions to be placed on the money for Israel. And Latino Democrats in both the Senate and House have also been critical of restrictions on asylum claims.\n\nAny package also faces deep uncertainty in the House, where Republican Speaker Mike Johnson holds tenuous control of the closely divided chamber. Before becoming speaker in October, Johnson had repeatedly voted against aid for Ukraine, but he has surprised many by offering support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and saying he wants to find a way to approve the aid.\n\nBut Trump's allies in the House have repeatedly tried to stop the U.S. from sending more aid to Ukraine. And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a close ally to the former president, said it was a mistake for Republicans even to insist on border policy changes because it could \"give the Biden administration some kind of policy wins out on the campaign trail.\"\n\nAs the border and immigration talks drag forward in the Senate, Johnson has weighed in from afar to push for sweeping measures. On social media, he has called for \"transformational change to secure the border,\" and pointed to a hardline bill that passed the House on a party-line vote.\n\nAs senators left Washington, they still sought to assure Ukrainians that American help was on its way. White House staff and Senate negotiations planned to work on drafting border legislation for the next two weeks in hopes that it would be ready for action when Congress returns.\n\nSchumer told The Associated Press he was \"hopeful,\" but \"I wouldn't go so far as to say confident yet.\" He sought to put the pressure on Republicans, saying they needed to be ready to compromise.\n\nYet Sen. Roger Wicker, an Alabama Republican who is a Ukraine supporter, expressed confidence that Congress would act. He alluded to the words of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, another European leader who eventually elicited robust support from the U.S. to repel an invasion.\n\n\"Americans will always do the right thing,\" Wicker said. \"After they've exhausted every other alternative.\""}
{"text": "# With the Supreme Court on sideline for now, Trump's lawyers press immunity claims before lower court\nBy **ERIC TUCKER**  \nDecember 24, 2023. 7:37 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Donald Trump was acting within his role as president when he pressed claims about \"alleged fraud and irregularity\" in the 2020 election, his lawyers told a federal appeals court in arguing that he is immune from prosecution.\n\nThe attorneys also asserted in a filing late Saturday night that the \"historical fallout is tremendous\" from the four-count indictment charging Trump with plotting to overturn the election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.\n\nNo other former president has ever been indicted; Trump has been indicted four times, in both state and federal court, as he campaigns to reclaim the White House.\n\n\"The indictment of President Trump threatens to launch cycles of recrimination and politically motivated prosecution that will plague our Nation for many decades to come and stands likely to shatter the very bedrock of our Republic - the confidence of American citizens in an independent judicial system,\" the attorneys wrote in a brief filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.\n\nAt issue before the court, which has set arguments for Jan. 9, is whether Trump is immune from prosecution for what defense lawyers say are official acts that fell within the outer perimeter of a president's duties and responsibilities.\n\nU.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan earlier this month rejected that argument, siding with prosecutors from special counsel Jack Smith's team and declaring that the office of the presidency \"does not confer a lifelong 'get-out-of-jail-free' pass.\"\n\nThe appeals court's role in the dispute is center stage after the Supreme Court on Friday rejected a request from Smith to fast-track a decision on the immunity question. After Trump appealed Chutkan's order, Smith urged swift intervention from the high court in an effort to get a speedy decision that could keep the case on track for a trial scheduled to start on March 4.\n\nBut with that request denied, the two sides are advancing their arguments before the appeals court, where a three-judge panel will decide as early as next month whether to affirm or overrule Chutkan's decision.\n\nIn their latest filing, Trump's lawyers say that all of the acts Trump is accused of - including urging the Justice Department to investigate claims of voter fraud and telling state election officials that he believed the contests had been tainted by irregularities - are \"quintessential\" presidential acts that protect him from prosecution.\n\n\"They all reflect President Trump's efforts and duties, squarely as Chief Executive of the United States, to advocate for and defend the integrity of the federal election, in accord with his view that it was tainted by fraud and irregularity,\" they said.\n\nThey also contend that, under the Constitution, he cannot be criminally prosecuted for conduct for which he was already impeached, but then acquitted, by Congress.\n\nFederal prosecutors, by contrast, say Trump broke the law after the election by scheming to disrupt the Jan. 6, 2021, counting of electoral votes, including by pressing then-Vice President Mike Pence to not certify the results and by participating in a plot to organize slates of fake electors in battleground states won by Biden who would falsely attest that Trump had actually won those states.\n\nThough Trump's lawyers have suggested that he had a good faith basis to be concerned that fraud had affected the election, courts around the country and Trump's own attorney general and other government officials have found no evidence that that was the case."}
{"text": "# Iran's navy adds sophisticated cruise missiles to its armory\nDecember 24, 2023. 6:00 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP)** - Iran's navy on Sunday added domestically produced sophisticated cruise missiles to its arsenal, state TV reported.\n\nThe TV said both Talaeieh and Nasir cruise missiles have arrived at a naval base near the Indian Ocean in the southern Iranian port of Konarak, some 1,400 kilometers (850 miles) southeast of the capital, Tehran.\n\nNavy chief Adm. Shahram Irani said the Talaeieh has a range of more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) and called it \"fully smart.\" Irani said the cruise missile is capable of changing targets during travel.\n\nHe said the Nasi has a range of 100 kilometers (62 miles) and can be installed on warships.\n\nLast month, a container ship owned by an Israeli billionaire came under attack from a suspected Iranian drone in the Indian Ocean, as Israel wages war on Iran-backed Hamas in the Gaza Strip.\n\nFrom time to time Iran announces the test firing, production and commissioning of new military equipment that cannot be independently verified. The country says it has a stock of various kinds of missiles with ranges up to 2,000 kilometers (1250 miles), capable of reaching its archenemy Israel and U.S. bases in the region."}
{"text": "# Zac Efron and Lily James on the simple gesture that frames the tragedy of the Von Erich wrestlers\nBy **LINDSEY BAHR**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 1:30 PM EST\n\n---\n\nZac Efron didn't realize how much he needed a hug.\n\nHe'd transformed himself into a mass of muscle and repressed emotion to play professional wrestler Kevin Von Erich in the new film \"The Iron Claw.\" It was a taxing role and unlike anything he'd done before, both physically and psychologically. He often found himself with real bruises from recreating fights in the ring. Downtime between shots, too, was usually spent lifting.\n\nBut he didn't appreciate how much it was affecting him until he and Lily James sat down to film the first date between his character and the woman who would marry him. Pam tells Kevin that he has oldest brother syndrome. Kevin tells her that he's not actually the oldest: That brother died in an accident when he was 6 and Kevin was 5. He says he's fine, but Pam gets out of her seat, walks around the table and drapes her arms around Kevin, who seems to melt in the warmth of a love that's not conditional.\n\n\"It felt very needed, that hug,\" Efron told The Associated Press in a joint interview with James. \"It was the first time I'd embraced anyone in months without it being a fake punch, or someone trying to submit me or get me to tap out.\"\n\nEfron is half-laughing but also not. If you know anything about the Von Erichs, sometimes referred to as the Kennedys of wrestling, you know that the tragic death of the oldest brother is not the last that they would endure. In fact, the completely true account of what would transpire was too much for even the film to bear: By the time Kevin was 35 he'd have lost his four remaining brothers, three to suicide. For \"The Iron Claw,\" in theaters Friday, writer-director Sean Durkin made the decision to take the youngest, Chris, out entirely.\n\n\"The Iron Claw\" is still primarily about the relationship between the brothers David (Harris Dickinson), Kerry (Jeremy Allen White) and Mike (Stanley Simons) and their father Fritz (Holt McCallany), a wrestler who dreamt of greatness for himself and his family at any cost. Kevin told Durkin that he just wanted audiences to know how much the brothers loved one another.\n\nAs a lifetime wrestling fan who grew up following the Von Erichs, who presided over the Texas wrestling scene in the 1970s and '80s, Durkin was fascinated by ideas of American masculinity, trauma and grief, as well as Kevin's relationship with Pam that somehow survived through it all.\n\nThough Kevin had spoken a lot about his life after the deaths, there wasn't much Pam \"out there,\" Durkin found. But instead of a hinderance, it provided an opportunity to be creative and make it personal. He'd already decided that he wanted to write and figure out the story before getting in touch with his real-life subjects.\n\nJames joined the project a bit later than everyone else. Efron recalled a \"collective jump for joy\" upon finding out that she'd said yes. Though they didn't know one another beforehand, they quickly established a natural rhythm that would prove to be magic on camera and off.\n\n\"It's so nice when you meet someone at work and it just instantly kind of clicks,\" James said. \"Zac made me feel so welcome and at home in our scenes, which are so special and effortless.\"\n\nPart of that they attribute to Durkin's preference for filming long, uninterrupted takes that helped them get out of their own heads. After five minutes, Efron said, you simply forget that the camera is there. But Durkin thinks something even more special happened when it was just them.\n\n\"The second we started filming, it was like everything fell away and they were just totally present with each other and just fully responding,\" Durkin said. \"It was really fun to watch.\"\n\nIt's not just that you're watching two people fall in love. Pam shows Kevin a different way of living and a different kind of love than he had known, which becomes even more essential as everything he thought he knew about life crumbles around him.\n\n\"She's a slight horse whisperer. I was really intrigued by this woman that has such emotional intelligence and directness. She's not afraid to be fragile.\" James said. \"When Pam just goes around and hugs him, you get the feeling that he never experiences that kind of physical, gentle intimacy. It felt really moving to do that moment because she kind of knew what he needed.\"\n\nThe hug is a cathartic moment for Kevin, who has been taught to hold back his emotions in real life.\n\n\"It was the first time that it really wasn't about winning or losing and, for Kevin, about being himself and finding meaning outside of the gym and the ring and the world of his family,\" Efron said.\n\nBut Efron didn't expect to feel it too.\n\n\"It was overwhelming in the best possible way,\" he said. \"I almost didn't know how to deal with it. It felt very close to the character.\"\n\nEfron's committed performance has earned him some of the highest praise in his career. And the fact that he hadn't done anything like it before is part of the reason Durkin wanted him.\n\n\"He had the athletic background, the dance background and the physicality and those are great building blocks to being a wrestler. And he has a clear hunger for doing tough work,\" Durkin said. \"But the ultimate thing was meeting him and seeing how kind and sweet he is as a person. It's quite a silent role in a lot of ways and having that core was crucial.\"\n\nWhile filming, he said, \"A lot of my direction to Zac was 'don't cry yet.' Even in moments where it's impossible, just hold it in and keep holding it in.\"\n\nFor Efron, the exploration of repressed emotions resonated. Spending time with Kevin has only helped reinforce its importance.\n\n\"I think a lot of men deal with this,\" Efron said. \"Repressed emotion never leads to good things. It's something that I've definitely had to work on over the course of my career and life. That this movie was about that was intriguing to me. It felt personal.\"\n\nBut it wasn't all tears and bruises. They had some genuinely fun scenes to look forward to as well, including line dancing at Kevin and Pam's wedding.\n\n\"It's just the coolest thing I've ever done on camera,\" James said.\n\n\"You rocked that scene,\" Efron responded. \"By the way, I didn't know you had rehearsed. I thought you just knew that dance. I was blown away, I was like, what is going on? How do you know this? Aren't you British?\"\n\nFor both, the film was a \"real ride\" and flush with creative energy and freedom.\n\n\"It definitely rekindled something inside me,\" Efron said. \"I'm in love with this process more than ever. I really needed it. I really did.\""}
{"text": "# Movie Review: If this is goodbye, 'Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom' keeps its trident high\nBy **MARK KENNEDY**  \nDecember 21, 2023. 10:57 AM EST\n\n---\n\nIt's perhaps appropriate that the latest Aquaman movie is about a lost kingdom. In many ways, this mini-franchise is just that, a Jason Momoa kingdom that could just quietly sink below the cinematic waves.\n\nAt least Momoa is going out swinging in \"Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,\" an overstuffed tale that goes from desert to ice, steals from other movies like a coked-up magpie and says goodbye at the near-operatic level of a mid-franchise Marvel flick. Much of it doesn't happen underwater at all.\n\n\"Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom\" is likely the final installment of the King of Atlantis' storyline for a time. The new heads of DC Studios plan nearly a dozen film and TV comic book projects in the next decade and none have Aquaman front and center.\n\nHolding it all together is Momoa, and it's hard to overstate his charisma, humor and presence. DC Studios may regret deep-sixing this franchise if it doesn't find a home for an actor who actually looks like a real-life superhero. But, then again, they bungled it with Dwayne Johnson, too.\n\n\"Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom\" is equivalent to \"Thor: Love and Thunder\" or \"Fast X\" - an attempt to raise the level of the last decent entry by keeping the same overall plot but just throwing money at it - more locations, more fights, more armies led by commanders in medieval-looking suits of armor riding underwater beasts.\n\nIn 2018 - the last time Aquaman owned the movie theaters - he battled his half-brother in the Ring of Fire, trekked to the Sahara to locate a clue about the Sacred Trident, wrecked most of Sicily, found the Hidden Sea, reunited with his mom and united Atlantis, along the way slaughtering more sea creatures than the entire Red Lobster empire.\n\nThis time, Aquaman - again under director James Wan - must reconcile with his brother (Patrick Wilson, the Ken doll of the deep) and hunt down the villain from the first film, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Black Manta, who is using ancient technology to destroy the globe, super mad at the murder of his dad.\n\nThe screenplay by returning writer David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick throws everything at the sinking kitchen sink, including a cute sidekick (a genetically altered octopus) and a rare metallic ore named Orichalcum, described as \"the greatest power in human history.\" It's basically a Kinko's copy of Eternium or Vibranium. Amber Heard is back as Aquaman's wife but this new movie is a brother-brother movie and so she's somewhat sidelined.\n\nJohnson-McGoldrick unfortunately likes referencing other, better movies in the dialogue, like \"Cast Away\" and \"Harry Potter,\" and layering in terrible puns like, \"Put a hook in it.\" The sparks come from Momoa and Wilson needling each other like siblings do. Aquaman, at his heart, is a goofy, beer-drinking, motorcycle-loving bouncer while his brother is so uptight he'd bring his own coaster to the bar.\n\nThe less gloopy visuals and plot liberally steal from \"The Matrix,\" \"Pirates of the Caribbean,\" \"Star Wars\" - Martin Short voices a Jabba the Hutt monster fish - \"Jumanji,\" \"Spider-Man\" and \"Fast & Furious.\" But credit goes to layering in some messaging about global warming - toxic algae, greenhouse gasses and rising acidity levels. There's an overused song this time - \"Born to be Wild\" by Steppenwolf - but it's not clear if that's for Aquaman, the man who wants to kill him or the Earth.\n\nWith rival Marvel at a bit of a crossroads - especially in the wake of its dropping of actor Jonathan Majors - DC, which has suffered its own woes with \"The Flash,\" \"Blue Beetle\" and \"Shazam: Fury of the Gods\" in 2023 - gets a chance to end the year on a high. \"Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom\" might not be all that but it keeps its trident high even as the sea reclaims its hero.\n\n\"Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,\" a Warner Bros. Pictures release that opens in theaters this weekend, is rated PG-13 for \"sequences of sci-fi violence, action and some language.\" Running time: 143 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Behind the 'Maestro' drama is a raft of theater stars supporting the story of Leonard Bernstein\nBy **MARK KENNEDY**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 12:56 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Leonard Bernstein was a towering figure on Broadway. So it seems only fitting that the new film darma of him leans on the Great White Way to get the story right.\n\nBradley Cooper's movie \"Maestro\" is studded with theater stars - 29 of the 38 principal cast members have a background in the theater, including Gideon Glick, Michael Urie, Greg Hildreth, Nick Blaemire, Ryan Steele, Zachary Booth and Gaby Diaz.\n\nLook closely and you'll find actor-turned-director Scott Ellis playing Bernstein's manager, Harry Kraut, and rising stage star Jordan Dobson - whose credits include \"Bad Cinderella,\" \"Hadestown\" and, significantly, \"West Side Story\" - playing a young conductor.\n\nCasting director Shayna Markowitz said she didn't necessarily set out to land theater pros but it came naturally when she was trying to populate Bernstein's world authentically.\n\n\"There's kind of this amazing synergy between casting theater actors to portray people of the theater world and of Lenny's world,\" Markowitz said. \"I just feel like we got really lucky with just these wonderful New York actors that are here and that wanted to be a part of this.\"\n\nMarkowitz worked with Cooper on telling the story of a conductor, composer, pianist who helped create such musical theater classic as \"West Side Story,\" \"Candide,\" \"On the Town\" and \"Wonderful Town.\" Cooper stars alongside Carey Mulligan as Bernstein's wife.\n\nSome selections seem inspired, like the casting of dancer Ricky Ubeda by choreographer Justin Peck. In 2015, \"So You Think You Can Dance\" winner Ubeda made his Broadway debut when joining the ensemble of a revival of \"On the Town\" and in \"Maestro\" he can be seen in a dream sequence of, yes, \"On the Town.\"\n\nBut perhaps the best Easter egg is a scene in the movie when the cast is rehearsing \"Candide\" with Cooper conducting. Actor June Gable approaches Mulligan's character to ask a question. Eagle-eyed viewers will recognize that's the same Gable who was nominated for a Tony Award in the mid-1970s for \"Candide.\"\n\n\"She knew Lenny Bernstein and so was having a full-on, out-of-body experience being in that scene with Bradley,\" said Markowitz. \"She was like, 'It was crazy. I was crying. It was as if he was there.' So that was a cool moment.\"\n\nCasting directors like Markowitz use a service that alerts talent agents and managers about upcoming roles and she will makes up her own lists of actors she thinks would be perfect, which she did for \"Maestro.\"\n\n\"Every director works a little differently. Every project is obviously different and the needs are different. I adapt to how the filmmaker likes to work,\" said Markowitz. \"I think you want to find the very best actors who are most suited for the roles. That never changes.\"\n\nGlick, who has appeared on Broadway in \"Spring Awakening,\" \"Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark\" and was Tony-nominated for \"To Kill a Mockingbird,\" auditioned on tape for the role of Tommy Cothran, music director at a radio station in San Francisco and a lover of Bernstein.\n\n\"Bradley created a very loose and immersive environment that was very, very playful and it sort of reminded me of that stage in the rehearsal process when you're doing a play or a musical where you're not being result oriented and you're just exploring and taking chances,\" said Glick. \"I think you can feel that in the film.\"\n\nSome parts in \"Maestro\" are very small roles - just a few seconds of film needing a day's work - but have deep significance for the theater community, like the legendary songwriting team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green - played in \"Maestro\" by Mallory Portnoy and Nick Blaemire.\n\n\"Actors sign on to do projects or audition for projects because they want to be a part of it. And so they understood the significance of both of those parts,\" Markowitz said. \"Some actors just want to be a part of it no matter what and no matter how.\"\n\nEllis, a multiple Tony Award-nominated director, was coaxed back to acting by Cooper, a friend and colleague who had worked together onstage, most notably on \"The Elephant Man\" on Broadway.\n\nCooper thought his warm and loving relationship with Ellis could infuse the onscreen relationship he wanted to show between Bernstein and his manager.\n\n\"It was so relaxed and an incredible experience and something way out of my comfort zone,\" said Ellis, who estimated he last acted 30 years ago.\n\n\"I'm sitting there in a dressing room surrounded by these incredible actors who, as a director, I would go, 'God, I'd love to work with you on a piece.' But, all of a sudden, I realize, 'No, I'm just one of them.'\"\n\nIn many ways, \"Maestro\" is the latest artistic watering hole for Broadway veterans, joining \"Law & Order,\" \"Glee,\" \"The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,\" \"The Good Fight,\" \"The Gilded Age,\" \"Fosse/Verdon,\" \"Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist,\" \"Only Murders in the Building\" and \"Smash.\"\n\nMarkowitz, who works across film and TV and who has cast \"Dash & Lily,\" \"Ocean's Eight,\" winning the inaugural BAFTA Award for best casting in 2020 for \"Joker,\" said \"Maestro\" is special.\n\n\"This is a once-in-a-lifetime milestone film for sure,\" she said. \"I feel so lucky to have had this experience, and I'm so happy with how people are receiving it as this really special thing, because it's it's very special to me.\""}
{"text": "# Movie Review: 'The Color Purple' is a stirring big-screen musical powered by its spectacular cast\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nDecember 21, 2023. 2:40 PM EST\n\n---\n\nExuberant performances from a cast led by Fantasia Barrino, Taraji P. Henson and Danielle Brooks breathe life into Blitz Bazawule's stirring \"The Color Purple,\" adapted from the Tony-winning Broadway production.\n\nAlice Walker 's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel, which Steven Spielberg turned into the 1985 film, may be an unlikely book for such bright adaptations. Walker's novel, told through Celie's letters penned to God, is harrowingly bleak in its tale of trauma, poverty, abuse and rape. Much of Walker's \"The Color Purple\" doesn't scream song and dance.\n\nBut the emotional triumphs of Walker's novel and its soul-stirring tribute to the power of Black women lend themselves to the kind of maximalist spectacle of Bazawule's razzle-dazzle adaptation. The tragedy found in \"The Color Purple\" makes its final release all the more rousing.\n\nIt can still be an awkward mix, and, like Spielberg's movie, not all of the tonal changes work in this version of \"The Color Purple.\" But the payoff is immense, as are the thrilling performances at the movie's center.\n\nBarrino, who in 2007 took over the role on Broadway, plays Celie with a raw soulfulness. In the film's opening scenes, she's picked by Mister ( Colman Domingo ) to be his wife, though her role at his messy, ramshackle home is much closer to servant.\n\nLife with Mister, who regularly beats her, is a nightmare. That Domingo is able play such a loathsome, cruel character and yet still find subtle notes of woundedness and ultimately redemption in Mister is a testament to his dynamism as an actor. The roots of Mister's barbarism are traced to his own brutal father (Louis Gossett Jr.), one of the numerous ways in which \"The Color Purple\" contemplates cycles of abuse and inherited pain.\n\nCelie, separated from her beloved sister Nettie (Halle Bailey), has little to look forward to. But after years go by, signs of possibility begin entering the orbit of her savage rural corner of early 20th century Georgia.\n\nFirst there's Sofia ( Brooks ), the wife of Mister's more sensitive son Harpo (Corey Hawkins), who builds a juke joint on a pier above a swamp. Brooks, reprising the role she played in the 2015 stage revival, is a revelation as the strong-willed, admirably reckless Sofia. Her forceful and funny entry (and her thundering song \"Hell No!\") announce a female empowerment Celie hasn't ever dared to imagine.\n\nBazawule's film, penned by playwright Marcus Gardley, wavers most in the balance of its first half. The musical scenes, with kinetic choreography from Fatima Robinson, perhaps come too fast and furious, distracting from our connection with the meek Celie. The numbers are richly conceived - the juke joint (part of the excellent production design of Paul Denham Austerberry) is pierced with light shining through wooden planks. But some flights of fancy, like one number in which Celie is transported onto a giant turntable, make for a herky-jerky flow. The jumbled book-to-movie-to-musical-to-movie-musical path of \"The Color Purple\" sometimes shows.\n\nBut the film takes off when Shug ( Henson ) makes her show-stopping entrance. Shug, a glamorous singer who breezes in and out of their country lives, is whom Mister most pines for - and whom Celie has great affection for, as well.\n\nHenson, outfitted sumptuously by costumer Francine Jamison-Tanchuck, gives \"The Color Purple\" a vivid, movie-star splash. Celie and Shug's romance has often been downplayed - it was almost totally absent Spielberg's film. This version, while still falling short, does a little better thanks to their tender duet \"What About Love?\"\n\nIn this lengthy and star-packed musical (Ciara, Jon Batiste, H.E.R. and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor are just some of the cameos), there are more dramatic ups and downs to go. But the movie builds irresistibly toward the hard-earned emancipation of Celie, and Barrino's climactic, impassioned performance of \"I'm Here.\"\n\nBazawule, the Ghana-born filmmaker, has made one previous feature (\"The Burial of Kojo\"). But he also performs as the hip-hop artist Blitz the Ambassador and directed Beyoncé's \"Black Is King\" visual album. And his adroitness in capturing musical performance is easy to see in \"The Color Purple,\" produced by a trio of heavyweights from the first film: Oprah Winfrey, Spielberg and Quincy Jones.\n\nBut it's the movie's own power trio of Barrino, Brooks and Henson that makes \"The Color Purple\" one of the most moving big-screen musicals in recent years. Each in their own way transforms suffering into exhilarating portraits of survival and strength.\n\n\"The Color Purple,\" a Warner Bros. release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for mature thematic content, sexual content, violence and language. Running time: 140 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Descendants fight to maintain historic Black communities. Keeping their legacy alive is complicated\nBy **SHARON JOHNSON**  \nDecember 21, 2023. 3:25 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DAUFUSKIE ISLAND, S.C. (AP)** - Sallie Ann Robinson proudly stands in the front yard of her grandmother's South Carolina home. The sixth-generation native of Daufuskie Island, a once-thriving Gullah community, remembers relatives hosting meals and imparting life lessons on the next generation.\n\n\"I was born in this very house, as many generations of family have been as well,\" said Robinson, a chef and tour guide. \"I was raised here. These woods was our playgrounds.\"\n\nLong dirt roads were once occupied by a bustling community that had its own bartering system and a lucrative oyster industry.\n\n\"There were at one point over a thousand people living on this island,\" Robinson said. Now, she and several cousins are the only ones of Gullah descent who remain.\n\nHistoric Black communities like Daufuskie Island are dying, and descendants like Robinson are attempting to salvage what's left of a quickly fading history.\n\n\"The towns are the authentic source or sources of much of our culture, our history, our physical expression of place,\" said Everett Fly, a landscape architect who uncovered more than 1,800 Black historic settlements through his research.\n\nScholars define a historic Black community or town as a settlement founded by formerly enslaved people, usually between the late 19th- and early 20th-century. The enclaves often had their own churches, schools, stores and economic systems.\n\nFly and other researchers estimate there are fewer than 30 incorporated historic Black towns left in the United States, a fraction of more than 1,200 at the peak between the 1880s and 1915.\n\n\"The ones that do remain are extremely rare. They're extremely important,\" Fly said.\n\nThe eradication of these neighborhoods can be traced back to their creation when white supremacists terrorized Black people, destroying whole blocks of homes and businesses or driving them out of town, as seen with the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 and the Rosewood, Florida, massacre in 1923.\n\nBut in more recent times, the dwindling of Black strongholds is due in part to the culmination of amended ordinances, uneven tax rates, home devaluations, and political challenges that leave communities vulnerable to developers and rampant gentrification.\n\n\"Something as simple as, they change or they rezone areas,\" said Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, the director of the public history program at Howard University. \"People with political power can make determinations that will ring the death bell for these towns.\"\n\n\"We've seen gated areas, golf courses and planned unit developments directly linked to increasing the taxes and displacement of native Gullah-Geechees throughout the coast,\" said Marquetta Goodwine, known as Queen Quet, the leader of the Gullah-Geechee nation.\n\nOn St. Helena Island in South Carolina, massive banners dot driveways and sidewalks reading \"Protect the culture, protect the history, protect the land.\"\n\nThe governing Beaufort County council blocked a golf course on Gullah-Geechee land after the developer, Elvio Tropeano, requested to remove the 503-acre (204-hectare) plot from a zoning district on the island. The zoning district bans gated communities and resorts in locations considered culturally significant. Tropeano has since filed two legal actions against the county to appeal the decision, and is now considering building homes on the property.\n\nA local group, Community Coalition Action Network, supports the plan to build a golf course on the unoccupied land. Co-founder Tade' Oyeilumi said she was originally against it; then she went to a listening session.\n\n\"When I heard Mr. Tropeano speak about the development and what he wanted to do with the development, the purpose of the development and how that was going to contribute to the community that we live in, I was blown away,\" Oyeilumi said.\n\nShe fears the housing plan that the developer is now considering will instead have jarring results.\n\n\"It's going to change the infrastructure to our community. It's going to bring in that gentrification factor that people are saying they don't want, faster. The golf course, on the other hand, minimizes that,\" Oyeilumi said.\n\nResidents of Hogg Hummock, a tiny Gullah-Geechee community on Sapelo Island in Georgia, filed a lawsuit in October to halt a zoning law they say will raise taxes, forcing them to sell their homes. McIntosh County commissioners voted in September to double the size of houses allowed in the community, also known as Hog Hammock - a move locals believe will draw in wealthy outsiders who want to build vacation getaways. Only a few dozen Black residents still live in the enclave of modest homes along dirt roads.\n\n\"My ancestors were forced to work on that land, and then they fought for the right to have that land,\" said 23-year-old Keara Skates, a descendant who spent her last birthday speaking against the zoning law alongside state legislators in Atlanta, the state capital. \"Sapelo Island has historically never seen the level of growth that's being proposed. Where does that leave the descendants?\"\n\nMcIntosh County Commission Chairman David Stevens said the community's landscape is changing because some native owners have sold their property.\n\n\"I don't need anybody to lecture me on the culture of Sapelo Island,\" Stevens said, adding: \"If you don't want these outsiders, if you don't want these new homes being built ... don't sell your land.\"\n\nResearch by Brookings Institution fellow Andre Perry finds that homes in majority Black neighborhoods are appraised at significantly lower values than homes in neighborhoods where Black people are the minority. Perry says that developers can buy these homes at lower costs and sell them for a much higher price.\n\n\"A lot of people will call that a major tool of gentrification,\" said Perry. \"The people who live in those areas may be priced out ultimately, and then the companies or individuals who purchase those properties get profit as a result.\"\n\nAttorney Rukaiyah Adams runs a nonprofit called \"Rebuild Albina\" based in Portland, Oregon. The organization aims to educate, invest and restore homeownership to Black people in an area that used to be a thriving Black neighborhood.\n\n\"We cannot continue to extract and exploit to the breaking point,\" said Adams. \"We're trying to create a new model for what that might look like, how we might live together.\"\n\nIn Florida, one of the first incorporated self-governing Black municipalities in the U.S. was Eatonville, established in 1887. Located just 24 miles (39 kilometers) north of Disney World, the key challenge for present-day residents is the Orange County Public School Board, which owns 100 acres (40 hectares) of property in the middle of town.\n\nThe land was once home to Robert Hungerford Normal and Industrial School, established in 1897 as a school for Black children. In 1951, it was sold to Orange County Public Schools.\n\nIn March, a private developer interested in building commercial, office and residential units on the land terminated a sales contract with the district after protest from residents.\n\nThe school system said in a statement in March that it wouldn't consider any further bids for the land. The Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community has sued the school district to safeguard the land for educational purposes.\n\n\"There are four things that have kept Eatonville: its faith, its family, its education and its civic pride,\" said NY Nathiri, a third-generation Eatonville resident and founder of the association.\n\nNathiri smiles as she reminisces about her idyllic childhood and her family's history in the town - from her grandfather moving there at the beginning of the Great Depression, to her aunts' close relationship with author Zora Neale Hurston.\n\nDescendants of the community work to boost its economy and preserve the local heritage and culture, put on display at the town's annual ZORA! Festival.\n\n\"As long as you know your story, you know how to tell your story, and you are welcoming to people, they are going to spend money with you,\" said Nathiri.\n\nBack on Daufuskie Island, Robinson is working to restore 10 empty homes that used to be filled with her extended family. Her biggest challenge is finding people to help her write grants to help fund the restoration of her community.\n\n\"I'm not asking people to go out of pocket. I'll just say help me understand the other methods of getting funds that are out there for you,\" said Robinson.\n\nDown the street from her grandmother's house, Robinson walks through Mary Field Cemetery where many of her relatives are buried and remembers what's possible.\n\n\"There goes my baby sister, my cousin Marvin. This is my great-grandfather,\" Robinson said while pointing at headstones nestled between tall grass. \"If something looked impossible, it wasn't. They didn't live like that. If it could be done, they made a way.\""}
{"text": "# These kids want to go to school. The main obstacle? Paperwork\nBy **BIANCA VÁZQUEZ TONESS**  \nDecember 19, 2023. 1:16 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**ATLANTA (AP)** - It's unclear to Tameka how - or even when - her children became unenrolled from Atlanta Public Schools. But it was traumatic when, in fall 2021, they figured out it had happened.\n\nAfter more than a year of some form of pandemic online learning, students were all required to come back to school in person. Tameka was deeply afraid of COVID-19 and skeptical the schools could keep her kids safe from what she called \"the corona.\" One morning, in a test run, she sent two kids to school.\n\nHer oldest daughter, then in seventh grade, and her second youngest, a boy entering first grade, boarded their respective buses. She had yet to register the youngest girl, who was entering kindergarten. And her older son, a boy with Down syndrome, stayed home because she wasn't sure he could consistently wear masks.\n\nAfter a few hours, the elementary school called: Come pick up your son, they told her. He was no longer enrolled, they said.\n\nAround lunchtime, the middle school called: Come get your daughter, they told her. She doesn't have a class schedule.\n\nTameka's children - all four of them - have been home ever since.\n\n## PARENTS MUST PROVE RESIDENCY, REPEATEDLY\nThousands of students went missing from American classrooms during the pandemic. For some who have tried to return, a serious problem has presented itself. A corrosive combination of onerous re-enrollment requirements, arcane paperwork and the everyday obstacles of poverty - a nonworking phone, a missing backpack, the loss of a car - is in many cases preventing those children from going back.\n\n\"One of the biggest problems that we have is kids that are missing and chronic absenteeism,\" says Pamela Herd, a Georgetown University public policy professor. She studies how burdensome paperwork and processes often prevent poor people from accessing health benefits. \"I'm really taken aback that a district would set forth a series of policies that make it actually quite difficult to enroll your child.\"\n\nIn Atlanta, where Tameka lives, parents must present at least eight documents to enroll their children - twice as many as parents in New York City or Los Angeles. One of the documents - a complicated certificate evaluating a child's dental health, vision, hearing and nutrition - is required by the state. Most of the others are Atlanta's doing, including students' Social Security cards and an affidavit declaring residency that has to be notarized.\n\nThe district asks for proof of residency for existing students every year at some schools, and also before beginning sixth and ninth grades, to prevent students from attending schools outside of their neighborhoods or communities. The policy also allows the district to request proof the student still lives in the attendance zone after an extended absence or many tardy arrivals. Without that proof, families say their children have been disenrolled.\n\n\"They make it so damned hard,\" says Kimberly Dukes, an Atlanta parent who co-founded an organization to help families advocate for their children.\n\nDuring the pandemic, she and her children became homeless and moved in with her brother. She struggled to convince her children's school they really lived with him. Soon, she heard from other caregivers having similar problems. Last year, she estimates she helped 20 to 30 families re-enroll their children in Atlanta Public Schools.\n\nThe school district pushed back against this characterization of the enrollment process. \"When parents inform APS that they are unable to provide updated proof of residence, protocols are in place to support families,\" Atlanta communications director Seth Coleman wrote by email. Homeless families are not required to provide documentation, he said.\n\nTameka's kids have essentially been out of school since COVID hit in March 2020. She and her kids have had a consistent place to live, but nearly everything else in their lives collapsed during the pandemic. (Tameka is her middle name. The Associated Press is withholding her full name because Tameka, 33, runs the risk of jail time or losing custody of her children since they are not in school.)\n\n## ECHOES OF A PARTNER'S DEATH\nTameka's longtime partner, who was father to her children, died of a heart attack in May 2020 as COVID gripped the country.\n\nHis death left her overwhelmed and penniless. Tameka never graduated from high school and has worked occasionally as a security guard or a housecleaner for hotels. She has never gotten a driver's license. But her partner worked construction and had a car. \"When he was around, we never went without,\" she says.\n\nSuddenly, she had four young children to care for by herself, with only government cash assistance to live on.\n\nSchools had closed to prevent the spread of the virus, and the kids were home with her all the time. Remote learning didn't hold their attention. Their home internet didn't support the three children being online simultaneously, and there wasn't enough space in their two-bedroom apartment for the kids to have a quiet place to learn.\n\nBecause she had to watch them, she couldn't work. The job losses put her family even further below the median income for a Black family in Atlanta - $28,105. (The median annual income for a white family in the city limits is $83,722.)\n\nWhen Tameka's children didn't return to school, she also worried about the wrong kind of attention from the state's child welfare department. According to Tameka, staff visited her in spring 2021 after receiving calls from the school complaining her children were not attending online classes.\n\nThe social workers interviewed the children, inspected their home and looked for signs of neglect and abuse. They said they'd be back to set her up with resources to help her with parenting. For more than two years, she says, \"they never came back.\"\n\nWhen the kids missed 10 straight days of school that fall, the district removed them from its rolls, citing a state regulation. Tameka now had to re-enroll them.\n\nSuddenly, another tragedy of her partner's death became painfully obvious. He was carrying all the family's important documents in his backpack when he suffered his heart attack. The hospital that received him said it passed along the backpack and other possessions to another family member, Tameka says. But it was never found.\n\nThe backpack contained the children's birth certificates and her own, plus Medicaid cards and Social Security cards. Slowly, she has tried to replace the missing documents. First, she got new birth certificates for the children, which required traveling downtown.\n\nAfter asking for new Medicaid cards for over a year, she finally received them for two of her children. She says she needs them to take her children to the doctor for the health verifications and immunizations required to enroll. It's possible her family's cards have been held up by a backlog in Georgia's Medicaid office since the state agency incorrectly disenrolled thousands of residents.\n\nWhen she called for a doctor's appointment in October, the office said the soonest they could see her children was December.\n\n\"That's too late,\" she said. \"Half the school year will be over by then.\"\n\nShe also needs to show the school her own identification, Social Security cards, and a new lease, plus the notarized residency affidavit.\n\nShe shakes her head. \"It's a lot.\"\n\n## CALLS FROM THE SCHOOL - TO A DISCONNECTED PHONE\nSome of the enrollment requirements have exceptions buried deep in school board documents. But Tameka says no one from the district has offered her guidance.\n\nContact logs provided by the district show social workers from three schools have sent four emails and called the family 19 times since the pandemic closed classrooms in 2020. Most of those calls went to voicemail or didn't go through because the phone was disconnected. Records show Tameka rarely called back.\n\nThe only face-to-face meeting was in October 2021, when Tameka sent her kids on the bus, only to learn they weren't enrolled. A school social worker summarized the encounter: \"Discussed students' attendance history, the impact it has on the student and barriers. Per mom student lost father in May 2020 and only other barrier is uniforms.\"\n\nThe social worker said the school would take care of the uniforms. \"Mom given enrollment paperwork,\" the entry ends.\n\nThe school's logs don't record any further attempts to contact Tameka.\n\n\"Our Student Services Team went above and beyond to help this family and these children,\" wrote Coleman, the district spokesperson.\n\nInconsistent cell phone access isn't uncommon among low-income Americans. Many have phones, as Tameka's family does, but when they break or run out of prepaid minutes, communication with the phones becomes impossible.\n\nSo in some cities, even at the height of the pandemic, social workers, teachers and administrators checked on families in person when they were unresponsive or children had gone missing from online learning. In Atlanta, Coleman said, the district avoided in-person contact because of the coronavirus.\n\nTameka says she's unaware of any outreach from Atlanta schools. She currently lacks a working phone with a cell plan, and she's spent long stretches over the last three years without one. An Associated Press reporter has had to visit the family in person to communicate.\n\nThe logs provided by Atlanta Public Schools show only one attempt to visit the family in person, in spring 2021. A staff member went to the family's home to discuss poor attendance in online classes by the son with Down syndrome. No one was home, and the logs don't mention further attempts.\n\nThe details of what the district has done to track down and re-enroll Tameka's children, especially her son with Down syndrome, matter. Federal laws require the state and district to identify, locate and evaluate all children with disabilities until they turn 21.\n\nOne government agency has been able to reach Tameka. A new social worker from the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services, the same agency that came years earlier, made another visit to her home in October.\n\nThe department offered to organize a ride for her and her children to visit the doctor. But without an appointment, Tameka didn't see the point.\n\nThe social worker also shared a helpful tip: Tameka can enroll her children with most of the paperwork, and then she would have 30 days to get the immunizations. But she should act fast, the social worker urged, or the department might have to take action against her for \"educational neglect.\"\n\n## RESIDENCY CRACKDOWN WORKS AGAINST PARENTS\nTo many observers, Tameka's troubles stem from Atlanta's rapid gentrification. The city, known for its Black professional class, also boasts the country's largest wealth disparity between Black and white families.\n\n\"It looks good from the curb, but when you get inside you see that Black and brown people are worse off economically than in West Virginia - and no one wants to talk about it,\" says Frank Brown, who heads Communities in Schools of Atlanta, an organization that runs dropout-prevention programs in Atlanta Public Schools.\n\nAtlanta's school board passed many of its enrollment policies and procedures back in 2008, after years of gentrification and a building boom consolidated upper-income and mostly white residents in the northern half of the city. The schools in those neighborhoods complained of \"overcrowding,\" while the schools in the majority Black southern half of the city couldn't fill all of their seats.\n\nThe board cracked down on \"residency fraud\" to prevent parents living in other parts of town from sending their children to schools located in those neighborhoods.\n\n\"This was about balancing the number of students in schools,\" says Tiffany Fick, director of school quality and advocacy for Equity in Education, a policy organization in Atlanta. \"But it was also about race and class.\"\n\nCommunities such as St. Louis, the Massachusetts town of Everett and Tupelo, Mississippi, have adopted similar policies, including tip lines to report neighbors who might be sending their children to schools outside of their enrollment zones.\n\nBut the Atlanta metro area seems to be a hotbed, despite the policies' disruption of children's educations. In January, neighboring Fulton County disenrolled nearly 400 students from one of its high schools after auditing residency documents after Christmas vacation.\n\nThe policies were designed to prevent children from attending schools outside of their neighborhood. But according to Dukes and other advocates, the increased bureaucracy has also made it difficult for the poor to attend their assigned schools - especially after the pandemic hit families with even more economic stress.\n\n## OTHER ATLANTA PARENTS, SIMILAR BATTLES\nThe Associated Press spoke to five additional Atlanta public school mothers who struggled with the re-enrollment process. Their children were withdrawn from school because their leases had expired or were month to month, or their child lacked vaccinations.\n\nCandace, the mother of a seventh grader with autism, couldn't get her son a vaccination appointment when schools first allowed students to return in person in spring 2021. There were too many other families seeking shots at that time, and she didn't have reliable transportation to go further afield. The boy, then in fourth grade, missed a cumulative five months.\n\n\"He wasn't in school, and no one cared,\" said Candace, who asked AP not to use her last name because she worries about losing custody of her child since he missed so much school. She eventually re-enrolled him with the help of Dukes, the parent advocate.\n\nMany parents who have struggled with the enrollment policies have had difficulty persuading schools to accept their proof of residency. Adding an extra burden to those who don't own their homes, Atlanta's policy allows principals to ask for additional evidence from renters.\n\nShawndrea Gay was told by her children's school, which is located in an upper-income neighborhood, that her month-to-month lease was insufficient. Twice, investigators came to her studio apartment to verify that the family lived there. \"They looked in the fridge to make sure there was food,\" she says. \"It was no joke.\"\n\nThen, in summer 2022, the school unenrolled her children because their lease had expired. With Dukes' help, Gay was able to get them back in school before classes started.\n\nTameka hasn't reached out for help returning her kids to school. She doesn't feel comfortable asking and doesn't trust the school system, especially after they called the child welfare department. \"I don't like people knowing my business,\" she says. \"I'm a private person.\"\n\nOn a typical school day, Tameka's four children - now 14, 12, 9 and 8 - sleep late and stay inside watching television or playing video games. Only the youngest - the girl who's never been to school - has much interest in the outside world, Tameka says.\n\nThe girl often plays kickball or runs outside with other kids in their low-income subdivision. But during the week, she has to wait for them to come home from school at around 3 p.m.\n\nThe little girl should be in second grade, learning to master chapter books, spell, and add and subtract numbers up to 100. She has had to settle for \"playing school\" with her three older siblings. She practices her letters and writes her name. She runs through pre-kindergarten counting exercises on a phone.\n\nBut even at 8, she understands it's not the real thing.\n\n\"I want to go to school,\" she says, \"and see what it's like.\""}
{"text": "# In Mexico, piñatas are not just child's play. They're a 400-year-old tradition\nBy **FABIOLA SÁNCHEZ**  \nDecember 23, 2023. 12:04 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**ACOLMAN, Mexico (AP)** - María de Lourdes Ortiz Zacarías swiftly cuts hundreds of strips of newsprint and colored crepe paper needed to make a piñata, soothed by Norteño music on the radio while measuring pieces by feel.\n\n\"The measurement is already in my fingers,\" Ortiz Zacarías says with a laugh.\n\nShe has been doing this since she was a child, in the family-run business alongside her late mother, who learned the craft from her father. Piñatas haven't been displaced by more modern customs, and her family has been making a living off them into its fourth generation.\n\nOrtiz Zacarías calls it \"my legacy, handed down by my parents and grandparents.\"\n\nBusiness is steady all year, mainly with birthday parties, but it really picks up around Christmas. That's because piñatas are interwoven with Christian traditions in Mexico.\n\nThere are countless designs these days, based on everything from Disney characters to political figures. But the most traditional style of piñata is a sphere with seven spiky cones, which has a religious origin.\n\nEach cone represents one of the seven deadly sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. Hitting the paper-mache globe with a stick is a symbolic blow against sin, with the added advantage of releasing the candy within.\n\nPiñatas weren't originally filled with candy, nor made mainly of paper. Grandparents in Mexico can remember a time a few decades ago when piñatas were clay pots covered with paper and filled with hunks of sugar cane, fruits and peanuts. The treats were received quite gladly, though falling pieces of the clay pot posed a bit of a hazard.\nTraditional Christmas \"piñatas\" that will be filled with fruit and candy are displayed at a small family-run business in Acolman just north of Mexico City, Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2023. This style of piñata has a religious origin, with each cone representing one of the seven deadly sins, and hitting the globe with a stick is a symbolic blow against sin. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)\n\nBut the tradition goes back even further. Some say piñatas can be traced back to China, where paper-making originated.\n\nIn Mexico, they were apparently brought by the Spanish conquerors, but may also replicate pre-Hispanic traditions.\n\nSpanish chronicler Juan de Grijalva wrote that piñatas were used by Augustine monks in the early 1500s at a convent in the town of Acolman, just north of Mexico City. The monks received written permission from Pope Sixtus V for holding a year-end Mass as part of the celebration of the birth of Christ.\n\nBut the Indigenous population already celebrated a holiday around the same time to honor the god of war, Huitzilopochtli. And they used something similar to piñatas in those rites.\n\nThe pre-Hispanic rite involved filling clay jars with precious cocoa seeds - the stuff from which chocolate is made - and then ceremonially breaking the jars.\n\n\"This was the meeting of two worlds,\" said Walther Boelsterly, director of Mexico City's Museum of Popular Art. \"The piñata and the celebration were used as a mechanism to convert the native populations to Catholicism.\"\n\nPiñatas are also used in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Puerto Rico and Venezuela, mainly at children's parties.\n\nThe piñata hasn't stood still. Popular figures this year range from Barbie to Spider-Man. Ortiz Zacarías' family makes some new designs most of the year, but around Christmas they return to the seven-pointed style, because of its longstanding association with the holiday.\n\nThe family started their business in Acolman, where Ortiz Zacarías' mother, Romana Zacarías Camacho, was known as \"the queen of the piñatas\" before her death.\n\nOrtiz Zacarías' 18-year-old son, Jairo Alberto Hernández Ortiz, is the fourth generation to take up the centuriesold craft.\n\n\"This is a family tradition that has a lot of sentimental value for me,\" he said."}
{"text": "# Illegal crossings surge in remote areas as Congress and the White House weigh major asylum limits\nBy **ELLIOT SPAGAT**  \nDecember 19, 2023. 5:10 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LUKEVILLE, Ariz. (AP)** - Hundreds of dates are written on concrete-filled steel columns erected along the U.S. border with Mexico to memorialize when the Border Patrol has repaired illicit openings in the would-be barriers. Yet no sooner are fixes made than another column is sawed, torched and chiseled for large groups of migrants to enter, usually with no agents in sight.\n\nThe breaches stretch about 30 miles (48 kilometers) on a washboard gravel road west of Lukeville, an Arizona desert town that consists of an official border crossing, restaurant and duty-free shop. The repair dates are mostly since spring, when the flat desert region dotted with saguaro cactus became the busiest corridor for illegal crossings.\n\nA Border Patrol tour in Arizona for news organizations, including The Associated Press, showed improvements in custody conditions and processing times, but flows are overwhelming. The huge spike in migrants and resulting chaos at various border locations have increased frustration with the Biden administration's immigration policies and put pressure on Congress to reach a deal on asylum. The numbers have nudged the White House and some congressional Democrats to consider major limits to asylum as part of a deal for Ukraine aid.\n\nAs Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas left closed-door talks with congressional leaders Friday, dozens of migrants from Senegal, Guinea and Mexico walked along the Arizona border wall built during Donald Trump's presidency, looking to surrender to agents. A Mexican woman walked briskly with her two daughters and five grandchildren, ages 2 to 7, after being dropped off by a bus in Mexico and instructed by guides.\n\n\"They told us where to go; to go straight,\" said Alicia Santay, of Guatemala, who waited in a Border Patrol tent in Lukeville for initial processing. Santay, 22, and her 16-year-old sister hoped to join their father in New York.\n\nThe dates when wall breaches were fixed are often bunched together, written in white letters against rust-colored steel. One cluster showed five dates from April 12 to Oct. 3. On Friday, agents drove looking for openings and found one on a column that was repaired twice - on Oct. 31 and again Dec. 5.\n\nSmuggling organizations remove a few inches from the bottom of 30-foot (9.1-meter) steel poles, which agents say can take as little as a half-hour. Columns sway back and forth, like a cantilever swing, creating ample space for large groups to walk through. Welders often attach metal bars horizontally across several columns to prevent swinging, but there are plenty of other places to saw.\n\nAgents say it takes up to an hour to drive from Lukeville along the gravel road to discover breaches - a large chunk of time when tending to so many migrants in custody.\n\n\"Our officers and agents are responding to large groups of migrants, which means that some of our agents aren't on the line, not really monitoring for some of those cuts,\" said Troy Miller, U.S. Customs and Border Protection's acting commissioner. \"If we don't have anybody to respond, then you're going to see what you're seeing.\"\n\nThe number of daily arrivals is \"unprecedented,\" Miller said, with illegal crossings topping 10,000 some days across the border in December. On Monday, CBP suspended cross-border rail traffic in the Texas cities of Eagle Pass and El Paso in response to migrants riding freight trains through Mexico, hopping off just before entering the U.S. The Lukeville border crossing is closed, as is a pedestrian entry in San Diego, so that more officials can be assigned to the migrant influx.\n\nArrests for illegal crossings topped 2 million for the first time each of the U.S. government's last two budget years, reflecting technological changes that have increased global mobility and a host of ills prompting people to leave their homes, including wealth inequality, natural disasters, political repression and organized crime.\n\nMiller said solutions go well beyond CBP, which includes the Border Patrol, to other agencies whose responsibilities include long-term detention and asylum screenings. On cuts in the wall, Miller said Mexican authorities \"need to step up.\"\n\nArrests in the Border Patrol's Tucson sector, which includes Lukeville, topped all nine sectors on the Mexican border from May to October, except June, according to the latest public figures. It is a throwback to the early 2000s before traffic shifted to Texas, but the demographics are much different.\n\nArrests of people in families neared 72,000 in the Tucson sector from Oct. 1 through Dec. 9, more than nine times the same period last year. That's a big change from when almost all migrants were adult men. Arrests of non-Mexicans topped 75,000, nearly quadruple the number from a year ago and more than half of all sector arrests.\n\nSenegalese people accounted for more than 9,000 arrests in Tucson from Oct. 1 to Dec. 9, while arrests of people from Guinea and India each topped 4,000. Agents have encountered migrants from about four dozen Eastern hemisphere countries.\n\nAgents who pick up migrants near the wall drive them to Lukeville to have photos taken on a mobile phone that starts their processing. They drive about 45 minutes to a station in Ajo that was built to detain 100 people but housed 325 on Friday. Some are bused to other Border Patrol sectors but most are sent to Tucson, about two hours away.\n\nAt a sprawl of white tents near Tucson International Airport that was built for about 1,000 people, some migrants are flown to the Texas border for processing. Others are released within two days, as mandated by a court order in the Tucson sector. CBP policy limits detention to 72 hours.\n\nMost are released with notices to appear in immigration courts, which are backlogged with more than 3 million cases. Some are detained longer by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.\n\nThe tents are a far cry from 2021 in Donna, Texas, where more than 4,000 migrants, largely unaccompanied children, were held in a space designed for 250 under COVID-19 restrictions. Some stayed for weeks, relying on sleeping pads and foil blankets. In 2019, investigators found 900 people crammed in a cell for 125 in El Paso, with detainees standing on toilets for room to breathe. They wore soiled clothing for days or weeks.\n\nDiscussions in Congress may produce the most significant immigration legislation since 1996. Potential changes include more mandatory detention and broader use of a rule to raise thresholds for initial asylum screenings. While the higher screening standard has been applied to tens of thousands of migrants since May after entering the country illegally, they are not used in the Border Patrol's Tucson sector due to extraordinarily high flows."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Clooney's 'Boys in the Boat' is an underdog saga that's both stirring and a tad stodgy\nBy **JOCELYN NOVECK**  \nDecember 21, 2023. 5:57 PM EST\n\n---\n\nDirector George Clooney both begins and ends \"The Boys in the Boat\" on a sun-dappled lake. It's a seductive sight, calm and soothing, and aptly reflects the ethos of a film that often feels like one has walked into an oil painting: well-crafted, lovely to look at, and rather old-fashioned.\n\nTelling the true-life story of the University of Washington rowing team, a scrappy group that - incredibly - reached the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Clooney has gone for stirring and a bit stodgy, pleasing and a bit predictable. Given the craft involved, this is hardly a fatal flaw. And yet, when Joel Edgerton's coach character surveys his team at one point and remarks, \"We need an edge, Tom,\" we think: Ah, yes. A little edge here would be nice.\n\nIn place of edge, we do get moments of beauty, especially when the boys get into those boats. Rowing is, though, the last thing on the mind of Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), a homeless college student, when we first meet him.\n\nWe're in 1936 Seattle, deep into the Great Depression. Rantz is trying to learn engineering, but can barely afford to stay afloat, and we're not talking, for now, about a body of water. Abandoned by his father at 14, he can't even afford to eat lunch at the university cafeteria, slipping out to a soup kitchen. At the bursar's office, they give him two weeks to pay his bill.\n\nA fellow student says the crew team is holding tryouts. The prospect holds little interest for Joe until he learns it comes with a paycheck and a cheap room. The only problem: only eight of the hundreds who try out will make the team.\n\nBut like every substantial obstacle in this film, this one is quickly overcome: Joe and his friend are accepted. This delights the one other person in Joe's life: Joyce (a sweet and heartfelt Hadley Robinson), who sits behind him in class, nudges him when he's about to fall asleep, and starts to fall in love with him. This is not too hard - the blond and athletic Joe is, as his friend says of Joyce earlier, \"a looker\" - though not much of a talker.\n\nBut there's hardly time for chitchat anyway. Days are filled with practice, practice, practice. Their rowing coach, Al Ulbrickson, is also a man of few words, let alone praise, and even fewer smiles, but Edgerton imbues him with a gruffness that doesn't mask the heart underneath (yes, a common convention in sports dramas). Too often, though, the screenplay by Mark L. Smith (based on the nonfiction book by Daniel James Brown) leaves him with little to do but raise his binoculars momentously, or utter lines like: \"We're going to go in there and do it until we get it right!\"\n\nThe junior varsity Huskies are the quintessential underdogs in every way. And so nobody expects much when they get to their first big test, against Cal Berkeley. \"Let's show them what's in this boat!\" says the energetic coxswain, Bobby (Luke Slattery), whose job is to steer the boat, coordinate the rowers and, at key moments, urge them to greatness.\n\nWe're guided along by radio commentary: \"Washington is struggling to keep pace. Washington is surging! Washington is going to do it!\" We know the team will defy expectations and pass each big test, because if they didn't, their story would end, but Clooney and team make it pretty exciting just the same. The crowd scenes, with fans in period garb in hues of brown, are lovely.\n\nNext up is a much more difficult test, along the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie, New York, where the winner will claim the right to compete in the Olympics. Ulbrickson makes the debated call to send these boys - the university's junior boat - to the event. Before they leave, however, Joe's focus is disrupted by a disturbing meetup with a figure from his past.\n\nBut not much is made of this meeting, and though Joe gets briefly exiled from the team - he dared to tell his coach, \"I don't care\" - he is soon standing tall again, after a heart-to-heart with an older, wiser figure (Peter Guinness) who gives just the pep talk he needs. Right in time for an epic showdown presented as something of a class struggle - \"old money versus no money at all,\" announces the colorful radio announcer.\n\nThere is one more setback before this team of underdogs can make it to Berlin, and its resolution is one of the more moving moments in the script. And then, finally, they arrive in Nazi Germany, to the swastikas and the banners and patriotic crowds urging on the German team, with Adolf Hitler in the stands.\n\nWe'll avoid the spoiler, but suffice it to say that the finale does pretty much what it needs to. No, there is not much \"edge\" here, but Clooney and team prove that sometimes, slow and steady - or should we say, pretty and pleasing - can still win some races.\n\n\"The Boys in the Boat,\" a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures release, has been rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association \"for language and smoking.\" Running time: 124 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: A transformed Zac Efron gives his all in tragic, true-life wrestling tale 'Iron Claw'\nBy **JOCELYN NOVECK**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 6:14 PM EST\n\n---\n\nIt doesn't take long to understand the level of commitment Zac Efron brings to \"The Iron Claw\" as Texas wrestling brother Kevin Von Erich. Just one look at the taut mass of muscle and sinew he's become for the role will do the trick.\n\nIt's also clear from the get-go how invested writer-director Sean Durkin was in telling the true-life tale of the Von Erich family wrestling dynasty, which - shockingly, to those of us unfamiliar with the story - suffered a set of tragic losses almost too staggering to imagine. It's hardly a spoiler alert to say that Kevin, by 35, was the only surviving brother of an original six. (He is now 66). Indeed, so devastating is the story that Durkin felt the need to excise brother Chris, one of three lost to suicide, from this retelling entirely.\n\nDurkin has said he was a committed wrestling fan from his childhood in England, where he scoured magazines to learn more about the exploits of the Von Erichs, who made their name in the colorful, high-flying, entertainment-heavy wrestling world of the '70s and early '80s. And from that affection stems perhaps both the strength and weakness of \"The Iron Claw.\" It's a film that tells its stunning tale with heart and conviction, yet seems somehow reticent about pointing a truly critical finger at either the brutality of a sport that broke this family, or the man who seemed to give his sons no choice in the matter: family patriarch Fritz Von Erich.\n\nIt is with Fritz that we begin. In a 1950s-era prologue rendered in black-and-white, the eventual patriarch and promoter (an excellent Holt McCallany) is in the ring himself, displaying his famed \"Iron Claw\" maneuver: a punishing two-handed grip on a doomed opponent's skull, crushing it like a vice.\n\nWaiting in the parking lot is Fritz's wife, Doris (Maura Tierney) and their young kids. Doris is shocked that Fritz has acquired a spiffy new car to attach to their trailer, something they can't afford, but he tells her it's all part of the persona he's building: You need to be the toughest and the strongest, and then nothing will be able to hurt you.\n\nFlash forward to 1979, and Fritz has passed the dream of becoming heavyweight champion onto his remaining sons. (One of them has died at a young age in a terrible accident.) Kevin is doing his best to be the son who gets there first. Among his exploits in the ring, Kevin climbs up on top of the ropes to attack from the air, leaping onto an opponent. These fight scenes are vivid and exciting, although if you're like me, eventually you'll be shouting at the screen, begging for it all to stop, lest one more son get hurt.\n\nBut at the kitchen table, there's never talk of stopping. Fritz tells Kevin, David and Mike that they all need to work harder to win that coveted championship belt. Mike, the youngest, is interested in music, but Fritz doesn't care. Privately, Kevin seeks out his mother and asks her to intervene on Mike's behalf. But Doris relies only on her faith; this wrestling business is between the men, she says. (It is horrifying to watch her, powerless, as the sadness multiplies.)\n\nWho will achieve Dad's dream first? Will it be David, who's a great talker and taunter in the ring? Or Kevin, who possesses great physical strength but is awkward and unable to master the art of self-promotion? Suddenly, brother Kerry, a discus thrower with Olympic hopes, enters the scene. When President Jimmy Carter declares the United States won't be sending a team to Moscow in 1980, Fritz decrees that Kerry (Jeremy Allen White) will join his brothers in the ring.\n\nThere are a few lovely scenes of the brothers bonding, playing football, doing what brothers do. But the pace of the film, with its wrestling sequences and successive tragedies, doesn't allow for much relationship development. An exception is Kevin's relationship with Pam (a lovely and soulful Lily James), who woos the shy Kevin and eventually marries him, their wedding a brief joyful moment (with an infectious family line-dancing scene).\n\nBut tragedy is not far off. For those unfamiliar with the Von Erich tale, we won't reveal more plot here, other than to say that loss does not soften Fritz. At one funeral, he orders his grieving sons to remove their sunglasses, then forbids them to cry.\n\nEfron, with his rock-hard physique and '70s mullet, turns in some of the most affecting work of his career. White, too, is excellent if more inscrutable as Kerry, initially the golden boy until his own brush with disaster sends him into a downward spiral. Harris Dickinson as David and a heartbreaking Stanley Simons as Mike round out the strong ensemble. But the film does not spend a lot of time on the emotional tissue that connects the brothers, who seem more bound by loyalty and mutual hardship than anything else.\n\nThe film's emotional ending brings well-earned tears, thanks to Efron's delicate portrayal. But when we're informed by means of an epilogue that the Von Erich family in 2009 was admitted to the WWE Hall of Fame, it's hard not to consider a question that the film doesn't seem to be attacking head-on: Was any of this worth it?\n\n\"The Iron Claw,\" an A24 release, has been Rated R by the Motion Picture Association \"for language, suicide, some sexuality and drug use. Running time: 130 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Ghosts and longing and love in 'All of Us Strangers'\nBy **LINDSEY BAHR**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 5:27 PM EST\n\n---\n\nAndrew Scott plays a writer trying to write something about his dead parents in Andrew Haigh's transcendent drama \"All of Us Strangers.\" His parents' death is not recent - they died when he was 12. Not that one ever really gets over that kind of loss. But we meet Adam at a moment where he is not just thinking about them but visiting them in his childhood home, where they are preparing for Christmas. Just in case it wasn't sad enough already.\n\n\"All of Us Strangers\" will probably make you cry. Maybe even weep. And while there are some twists along the way, it never feels emotionally manipulative or unearned. In fact, it's a rather authentic and cathartic experience - a deeply felt journey of acceptance, love and forgiveness.\n\nThe most calculated flex of the movie is actually just in casting Scott, also known as \"the hot priest\" from \"Fleabag,\" opposite Paul Mescal, \"the hot guy from 'Normal People'\" (and the sad, but still hot, dad from \"Aftersun\"). It's the kind of pairing that seems designed to make the internet explode.\n\nThankfully, they have the kind of talent and chemistry that makes you immediately forget the memes and just submit to their delicate romance, which grows and runs parallel to Adam's increasingly vulnerable visits home.\n\nAdam and Harry seem to be the only residents of a luxury high-rise in London, the kind that was built before units were sold and now it feels a little desolate and even haunted, not unlike them. Adam has to practically force himself out of his apartment one night when the fire alarm rings.\n\nTheir first meeting is not a cute one. Harry shows up at Adam's door, bottle of booze in hand. He's very drunk and trying, poorly, to hide his sadness as he essentially offers himself up. Adam declines, but they soon get another, more sober chance to connect and start that beautiful, awkward dance of getting to know one another. Haigh films their growing intimacy tenderly and you root for them to save one another, so to speak.\n\nThis relationship is compelling in and of itself, but it also gives Adam a chance to talk about what he couldn't talk about with his parents (Dad is Jamie Bell and Mum is Claire Foy) when they were alive. It was, as the styling and musical cues makes unambiguous, the 1980s in the suburbs. Loving as they were, they were also products of their time and more fearful of social stigmas and AIDS than the consequences of not fully accepting their son for who he is.\n\nIn one particularly devastating conversation, Dad apologizes to Adam for not coming into his room when he was crying. One could see this making a good double feature with \"The Iron Claw,\" in films that make the undeniable case for fathers being more affectionate with their sons in very different ways.\n\nIt's quite the Christmas tearjerker but also provides moments of levity and joy and fun, with both Mum and Dad and Harry. The most authentically sad stories aren't exclusively sad, after all. Haigh dares audiences to meet \"All of Us Strangers\" on its own astral plane as we whiplash between past and present in a dreamy 35mm haze of nightclubs and '80s sweaters.\n\nThings aren't wrapped up in a sitcom bow, either. These wounds are still very much open, but perhaps now more likely to turn to scars than to fester.\n\n\"All of Us Strangers,\" a Searchlight Pictures release in select theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for \"language, some drug use and sexual content.\" Running time: 105 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: A helicopter father flies his duck family south in 'Migration'\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 12:02 PM EST\n\n---\n\nIllumination, maker of \"Despicable Me,\" \"Sing\" and \"The Super Mario Bros. Movie,\" has built its animation empire by mostly staying close to a child-like outlook. Illumination's in-house mascots, the Minions, are basically themselves careening toddlers.\n\nBut the studio's latest, \"Migration,\" carries a faintly more parental perspective. Its central character is a father duck, Mack Mallard (Kumail Nanjiani), whose fears and paranoia have kept his feathered family rooted to a small New England pond. But after much cajoling from his wife (Elizabeth Banks) and two ducklings (Caspar Jennings, Tresi Gazal), Mack and company take flight for their first winter migration south to Jamaica.\n\n\"Migration\" is vividly animated with warm cartoon tones that would do Daffy proud. But it never quite spreads its wings. Stories of overly cautious moms or dads turned adventurers are not exactly fresh material, even if it is atypical that a helicopter parent like Mack can actually fly.\n\nWritten by \"White Lotus\" creator Mike White, \"Migration\" - a family road trip movie sans the road - mostly comes off as a gentle suggestion to take that Caribbean vacation you've been putting off. White, having mocked lavish trips to Hawaii and Italy on his HBO series, has less satire for the Mallards' excursion to Jamaica - though the journey to get there is certainly perilous.\n\nOnce the family sets off, with Uncle Dan (Danny DeVito) in tow, their stops include a fearful night with a bug-eyed heron (Carol Kane) who makes them a bed in a frying pan; a New York encounter with a flock of pigeons and their tough-talking leader (Awkwafina); a parrot (Keegan-Michael Key) caged by a chef who specializes in duck à l'orange; and a cult-like farm where ducks are being ominously well treated.\n\nThese are not, you may be thinking, the most salient dangers that await most winged creatures making their way south. Loss of sanctuary or fluctuating climate are no issues here, though the duck à l'orange chef, who has his own helicopter, proves to be a surprisingly regular threat.\n\nIt's around then that \"Migration\" begins to feel more like a wild goose chase. That's not the worst thing for a holiday family movie, though it happens to make \"Migration\" very comfortably the second-best heron-featuring movie in theaters right now. Hayao Miyazaki's \"The Boy and the Heron\" is far richer in both its imagination and its menagerie of avian life.\n\nPossibly sensing \"Migration\" needed a little boost, a \"Despicable Me\" short is playing along with it: \"Mooned,\" in which the Minions get a taste of zero gravity.\n\n\"Migration\" is directed by the French filmmaker Benjamin Renner, who crafted the enchanting 2012 film \"Ernest and Celestine\" with the delicacy of a cherished children's book. That touch is harder to discern in \"Migration.\" (For a truly magical French-made movie on the subject, seek out the 2001 documentary \"Winged Migration.\")\n\nBut considering migration today is a word so often accompanied by crisis, there's pleasant enough diversion in Renner's film. Like Illumination's \"The Super Mario Bros. Movie,\" the movie's most abundant resource is its lush sense of color. Though that's not enough to turn the tide on the long-running duck season, wabbit season debate, the superb plumage of \"Migration\" makes for fine bird watching.\n\n\"Migration,\" a Universal release in theaters Dec. 22, is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association for action/peril and mild rude humor. Running time: 92 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Auto pioneer Enzo Ferrari gets a solid biopic but it doesn't make the heart race\nBy **MARK KENNEDY**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 1:55 PM EST\n\n---\n\nNapoleon Bonaparte. Leonard Bernstein. Willy Wonka. Aquaman - there are a ton of Guy Movie Heroes out there as 2023 ends. And yet up zooms another - in \"Ferrari.\"\n\nDirector Michael Mann has put his stylish spotlight on yet one more stoic, brilliant and broken uber-masculine dudes, Enzo Ferrari. The movie is set during a turbulent few months in 1957 when the Italian automaker's private and professional lives threatened to careen out of control.\n\nIt's a solid vehicle but it will leave you, well, unmoved.\n\n\"Ferrari\" has excellent work by Adam Driver as Ferrari, aged up two decades with grey at his temple, sunglasses clamped to his head at all times and a frosty demeanor.\n\nWhen we meet him, Ferrari is at a crossroads. He needs to ramp up production and sell hundreds of cars a year or risk bankrupting the company that he and his wife, Laura, have built from the ashes of world war.\n\nEnzo and Laura are still recovering from losing a son to muscular dystrophy but she doesn't know that Mr. Ferrari has another family - a girlfriend (Shailene Woodley, great but wrong here) who has given birth to a secret son.\n\nLaura is played by Penélope Cruz, whose grief is profound, her eyes heavy and her gait plodding, possibly overacting. Laura knows her husband is a cad but the rule is he must be home before the maid arrives with the morning coffee. It's a signal that the surfaces of things matter.\n\nThe private and public lives of Ferrari will ultimately come to a head with the results of the treacherous 1,000-mile race across Italy, the Mille Miglia. If Ferrari has a good showing - and embarrasses competitor Maserati - he can fill orders and everything is buono. If not, disastro.\n\nMost of Mann's toolkit is here - slick and moody camerawork, a poetic surrounding and heightened use of music, even the car porn of \"Miami Vice.\" But \"Ferrari\" - despite Mann's leaning on Italian opera - fails to ignite. One scene split between high Mass while simultaneously drivers zip through a track doesn't work no matter how high the volume is pushed.\n\nPart of the problem is Troy Kennedy Martin's script, which tries to have it both ways, a domestic drama and also some kinetic, superb race scenes, with thick metal gears scraping, engines roaring and brave goggle-wearing drivers risking their necks at 130 mph.\n\nFerrari himself is on the sidelines, barking orders, and so he's lost in the second half, while we're never really invested in the five drivers he has sent out to represent the brand. Distance is a strange part of the movie and viewers will fight to find a heart in the cool elegance.\n\nDriver does the best an actor can to reveal the warmth inside Ferrari, who seems most vulnerable alone in the crypt of his son. Outside, he screams things like \"I must have total control\" and demands his drivers have \"deadly passion.\"\n\nThe movie tends to lose itself - maybe fetishize - Italian artistry: tailored shirts, fountain pens, curving exhaust manifolds, cappuccino cups and the gloriousness of Italy's cobble-street cities.\n\nOver it all hangs loss - sons, brothers and drivers die - so that fresh deaths are almost run-of-the-mill. Ferrari doesn't miss a beat when he loses a key employee; he hires another even before the body is cold. \"We all know that death is nearby,\" he says.\n\nBut the viewer is not so callous and a horrific event during the big race unmoors the movie. The end drifts off unresolved and tragically rerouted, it's engine broken. Failure has been snatched from the jaws of victory.\n\nThe fact that we know the future of Ferrari - it will produce graceful, expensive roadsters lusted after and insulted in equal turns - takes away some of the jeopardy. It's also hard to root for a rich CEO with a mistress. If anything, this is a movie that will make you hit the gas a little harder coming home.\n\n\"Ferrari,\" a Neon release that drives into theaters on Christmas Day, is rated R for \"for some violent content/graphic images, sexual content and language.\" Running time: 130 minutes. Two stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: In harrowing 'Zone of Interest,' the Holocaust's evils are cloaked in mundanities\nBy **JOCELYN NOVECK**  \nDecember 14, 2023. 9:14 AM EST\n\n---\n\nIt's just a woman trying on a fur coat alone in her room, and sampling a lipstick. It's just a few friends discussing toothpaste orders over coffee in the kitchen. It's just a housewife showing off her new garden and children's pool, or a dad taking his kids fishing in a river.\n\nThe crucial context is that these scenes are occurring only a stone wall away from the gas chambers and crematoriums of Auschwitz. And it's their very mundanity that makes them evil - the \"banality of evil,\" to use Hannah Arendt's well-known phrase. In his meticulous and harrowing film \"The Zone of Interest,\" writer-director Jonathan Glazer has found a way to convey evil without ever depicting the horror itself. But though it escapes our eyes, the horror assaults our senses in other, deeper ways.\n\nHow does one even begin to depict the Holocaust? The question has challenged filmmakers for eight decades. Attempts to humanize the horror often lose sight of the scale of the genocide. And efforts to do justice to the unimaginable scale can lose sight of the human suffering.\n\nGlazer has chosen a different route. Shooting, incredibly, on location, his entry point is an ordinary German couple trying to build a prosperous life for their family. It just happens to be at Auschwitz. And it just happens to be Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the notorious real-life former commandant of the camp, and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, brilliant in a terribly difficult role).\n\nHöss spends his days overseeing the \"processing\" of trainloads of people, most sent directly to the gas chambers. Then he comes home, where he and Hedwig eat dinner, celebrate birthdays, read their kids bedtime stories, make plans for a spa holiday.\n\nOr they go on picnics, which is where we begin, on an idyllic afternoon, the Höss family picking berries and sunning themselves. As darkness falls, they head back to their pristine two-story villa on the camp's outskirts (in what the Nazis called the \"zone of interest\").\n\nIt takes a while before we see the telltale signs: the camp watchtower, and later the flames blackening the sky. But we do hear sounds. Awful sounds. Dogs barking. Gunshots. Cries of fear, yelling. And the ugly roar - is it the belching chimney, or the arriving trains, or both? It all melds together, and you can't get it out of your head. (Mica Levi wrote the chilling score.)\n\nHedwig surely hears all this. And so, we wonder what she's thinking as she takes a nice fur coat into the bedroom and models it in the mirror, finding it to her liking, and ordering her maid to repair the lining.\n\nThe subtext, not spelled out: The coat, and lipstick in the pocket, is from a Jewish prisoner, no longer alive. Soon we hear chatter over coffee in the kitchen, about toothpaste. Hedwig has found a diamond hidden in a tube - those prisoners are crafty, she says - and so she is \"ordering\" more toothpaste, again turning the mundane into the truly hideous.\n\nNearby, between Rudolf and some visiting businessmen, the chatter is perhaps more consequential, yet just as incongruous. They are discussing a more efficient model of oven - the best mass cremation system money can buy, you might say. The words \"burning,\" \"cooling\" and \"reloading\" are heard; the word \"murder\" is not.\n\nLife continues: An outing with the kids on a tranquil nearby river in a new kayak, Dad's birthday gift, leads to an unexpected unpleasantness. Standing in the river fishing, Höss realizes that human remains are floating by.\n\nYet Hedwig Höss loves her home. She proudly shows off her growing garden, with its small swimming pool and wooden slide, to her visiting mother, who murmurs supportively: \"You've really landed on your feet, my child.\" Hedwig is proud. Her husband calls her \"the Queen of Auschwitz,\" she notes.\n\nAdapting loosely from the Martin Amis novel of the same name, but choosing a real-life protagonist, Glazer spent years combing through records to piece together the Höss family history, and built his set for their home some 200 yards from where the real one stood.\n\nThe meticulousness with which Glazer and production designer Chris Oddy render this home - with its baby blue-colored beds in the kids' room, only feet from putrid camp barracks - is an achievement. Glazer also has set up multiple surveillance-style cameras, tracking different pieces of action, and the effect is that of a documentary, with dialogue that often feels unscripted.\n\nAs for what happens over the wall, we see Höss there only once, in tight closeup. Hedwig certainly never crosses over. \"They'll have to drag me out of here,\" she says, when her husband tells her they're being transferred out. And she demands successfully to stay at Auschwitz, with the children. \"We're living how we dreamed we would,\" she says. (Glazer found evidence from a former gardener that such a conversation happened.)\n\nThe film ends just as Höss learns - in what amounts to a promotion - that he'll return to Auschwitz to step up the Final Solution with the annihilation of Hungary's Jews, arriving at the rate of 12,000 a day.\n\nAnd the real-life Höss did return, to implement more mass murder (he was later executed for war crimes), and to his wife, who'd found a way to grow beautiful flowers regardless of what was happening on the very same soil.\n\nSurely few of us can imagine modeling a fur coat ripped from a doomed prisoner. But what Glazer is trying to tell us with such scenes - and also in his jolting final minutes - is that history is full of examples of ordinary, unremarkable people finding ways to block out the suffering of others. And that if we always assume we are so vastly different, we may be losing the chance to learn from the past.\n\n\"The Zone of Interest,\" an A24 release, has been rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association \"for thematic material, some suggestive material and smoking.\" Running time: 105 minutes. Four stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Jeffrey Wright is brilliant in the smart and funny satire 'American Fiction'\nBy **LINDSEY BAHR**  \nDecember 13, 2023. 3:45 PM EST\n\n---\n\nJeffrey Wright's Thelonious \"Monk\" Ellison is at the end of his rope at the beginning of \"American Fiction,\" a crowd-pleaser that's both funny and smart in its satire of race, media, artists, identity politics and even Hollywood. It opens in theaters this week.\n\nA classic frustrated artist, Monk is a professor and an author who writes literary stories that he wants to see in the world. He's not interested in race, or at least the kind of \"Black misery porn\" stories that seem to be omnipresent, whether it's in the Black history month advertisement on television with images of addicts and slaves, or at a book convention.\n\nThe latest hit that has him fuming is a book called \"We's Lives In Da Ghetto,\" written by a comfortably upper middle class Black woman (Issa Rae) who gives interviews about how dismayed she was in her post-college job at a literary agency that she didn't see stories about \"her people.\" But exploitative and demeaning as they are, those are also the ones that get the book deals, that sell, that draw the big crowds at book events, that get the movie deals.\n\nMonk's books, smart as they are, don't - until one drunken night he writes a parody of the kind of Black novel he hates, under a pseudonym, and suddenly becomes a sensation.\n\nCord Jefferson, in his directorial debut, establishes the movie's tone well right off the bat in scene in which a white girl is offended that Monk has written a certain word, all seven letters of it, on the blackboard.\n\n\"With all due respect, Britney, I got over it. I'm pretty sure you can too,\" he says. When she pushes back, Jefferson cuts to a closeup of Wright growling before a quick cut to Britney's exit. We overhear Monk in the background angrily asking the remaining students if they actually want to talk about the reading.\n\nMonk does not suffer fools and seems incapable of not saying exactly what he feels at any given moment, but he's also rubbed a few too many people the wrong way. A few minutes in, he finds himself on an unwanted mandatory break, in Boston, with his family: Mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams), sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) and brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown).\n\nThis family is complex and struggling - who isn't - but not in the ways that the novels Monk hates always seem to want Black families to be. Lisa's a family planning doctor trying to recover financially from a divorce and take care of her quickly deteriorating mother. Cliff is also a doctor, a plastic surgeon, discovering after a marriage to a woman that he likes men. They all have lingering trauma from their dead father, worries about money and how they'll afford a care facility for their mom.\n\nJefferson adapted the story from Percival Everett's \"Erasure,\" which remains relevant 20 years later. It is particularly withering in its send up of white people clamoring for their idea of authentic Black stories, like the literary agent Paula Bateman (Miriam Shor) and the film producer Wiley (a very funny Adam Brody whose character might be a spiritual continuation of his \"Thank You For Smoking\" assistant). Wiley is currently working on a film called \"Plantation Annihilation\" in which the ghosts of slaves go on a murderous rampage.\n\nWhile it's not exactly subtle, it's also not entirely simplistic either - I'm not sure the film ever really reconciles Rae's character in particular, much to the frustration of Monk (and us).\n\nStill, it's hardly a surprise that \"American Fiction\" won the people's choice prize at the Toronto Film Festival earlier this year. The film is immensely watchable, staged without flash or pretention, that relies on its sharp script and talented and charismatic actors to carry the audience through. Wright is particularly delightful at the center of it all as he navigates a new relationship as well as the consequences of his lie and how far he's willing to go with it.\n\n\"American Fiction,\" an MGM release in theaters Friday and expanding on Dec. 22, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for \"language throughout, some drug use, sexual references and brief violence.\" Running time: 117 minutes. Three stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Review: Timothée Chalamet waltzes through the whimsical 'Wonka' but Roald Dahl's daring is missing\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nDecember 13, 2023. 11:52 AM EST\n\n---\n\nThe original 1971 \"Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory\" may have been a delicious dream, lined with trees of gumballs and fields of lollipops. But never has there been a more cautionary tale about the danger of too much of a good thing.\n\nMagical as that Roald Dahl-scripted film was, it remains lodged in our imaginations less for its sugary goodness than the way darkness, satire and even mania ebb around its edges - flowing down that nightmarish watery tunnel and pooling somewhere in the back of Gene Wilder's eyes. Charlie Bucket and Grandpa Joe may bubble with laughter all the way up the ceiling, but there's a spinning metal blade up there.\n\n\"Wonka,\" the latest attempt to revisit Dahl's masterwork, bears no such danger. It's going more for the taste of an Everlasting Gobstopper - an ingenious confection that piles flavor on top of flavor. Tasty though that can be, you miss the daring of Dahl in the more wanly whimsical \"Wonka.\"\n\nThe original 1971 \"Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory\" may have been a delicious dream, lined with trees of gumballs and fields of lollipops. But never has there been a more cautionary tale about the danger of too much of a good thing.\n\nMagical as that Roald Dahl-scripted film was, it remains lodged in our imaginations less for its sugary goodness than the way darkness, satire and even mania ebb around its edges - flowing down that nightmarish watery tunnel and pooling somewhere in the back of Gene Wilder's eyes. Charlie Bucket and Grandpa Joe may bubble with laughter all the way up the ceiling, but there's a spinning metal blade up there.\n\n\"Wonka,\" the latest attempt to revisit Dahl's masterwork, bears no such danger. It's going more for the taste of an Everlasting Gobstopper - an ingenious confection that piles flavor on top of flavor. Tasty though that can be, you miss the daring of Dahl in the more wanly whimsical \"Wonka.\"\n\nAnd you might fairly wonder: What's so wrong that? Who doesn't want a cynicism-free, candy-colored charm overload? \"Wonka\" may be too much of a good thing, but for many (particularly kids) it will surely, well, delight. Even for a movie predicated on retooling IP, \"Wonka\" comes across as remarkably sincere in its feel-good aspirations.\n\nIn the film's opening scenes, Willy (Chalamet) breezes into a frigid, unnamed European-styled city, singing \"I've got nothing to offer but my chocolate and a hatful of dreams.\" He arrives like a too-confident traveling salesman, eager to sell his chocolate to the world.\n\nImmediately fleeced of his few coins, Willy sets down on a bench for the night and pulls a candle out of his hat that he lights with a gentle blow. He's offered a bed for the night at inn. There, the innkeeper Mrs. Scrubit (Olivia Colman) and her henchman Bleacher (Tom Davis) trap needy drifters into years of indentured labor with elaborate contracts.\n\nThis Wonka can't read, a twist that I doubt Dahl would have endorsed, given how much, for him, reading and imagination were intertwined. Before Willy has even gotten started, he finds himself imprisoned with a handful of other similarly misfortunate souls, including the young Noodle (a very natural Calah Lane).\n\nBut inspired by his late mother (Sally Hawkins, seen in tender childhood flashbacks), Willy isn't much daunted in his dream to open a shop alongside other candy makers in the Galeries Gourmet. He manages to escape repeatedly to dazzle customers with chocolates of exotic ingredients before slipping through manhole covers to make a getaway, like Harry Lime in \"The Third Man.\"\n\nSensing the potential power of Wonka's enchanting chocolates (some cause levitation), the monopolizing local chocolatiers - Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), Prodnose (Matt Lucas) and Fickelgruber (Mathew Baynton) - band together to squash Willy with the aid of a chocolate-addicted police chief (Keegan-Michael Key), whose waistline expands throughout the film.\n\nThat bit, like most others in the film, doesn't quite land despite the good cheer it's delivered with. \"Wonka\" assembles a wide array of top-notch comic actors - not only Key and Colman but Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa; Simon Farnaby (who co-wrote the script with King) as a security guard, mirroring his \"Paddington 2\" cameo; and Rowan Atkinson as a corrupt priest.\n\nBut most of the jokes in \"Wonka\" are as memorable as its songs. The gag of Grant, the \"Paddington 2\" MVP, smothered in orange makeup and green hair as a proudly debonair Oompa Loompa, is never quite as clever as the movie thinks it is. (On the press trail for the film, Grant has been 10 times funnier. )\n\nNeil Hannon's songs are generic, but Chalamet sings them well. When a few notes from Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley's \"Pure Imagination\" float by, they only serve as a reminder to how much better the tunes were in the original.\n\nI may be being too hard on \"Wonka.\" This is an eminently pleasant movie, propped up by its indefatigable good cheer and King's immaculately tidy craftsmanship. The costumes (Lindy Hemming), cinematography (Chung-hoon Chung) and, in particular, the ingenious production design (Nathan Crowley) craft a wonder-filled backdrop. A film doesn't need scenery this good for Chalamet to carry it. His Wonka is simpler and brighter than Wilder's, more a figure of pure optimism, like Paddington.\n\nBut we've also had some exemplary Dahl adaptations lately that didn't forget that worlds of imagination come alive when the cruelties of life and of childhood aren't just paid lip service. (Veruca Salt or Mike Teavee, for instance, wouldn't fit anywhere in \"Wonka.\") I'm thinking of Wes Anderson's inventive Dahl-adapted shorts, released this fall on Netflix, and Matthew Warchus' terrific \"Matilda the Musical,\" from last year. \"Wonka\" is a more mixed addition: More tailored for kids yet less about childhood.\n\n\"Wonka,\" a Warner Bros. release, is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association for \"some violence, mild language and thematic elements.\" Running time: 116 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: In 'Poor Things,' Emma Stone takes an unusual path to enlightenment\nBy **LINDSEY BAHR**  \nDecember 6, 2023. 4:46 PM EST\n\n---\n\nIt is sickly hilarious to make a movie in which so much consensual sex is had, often so gleefully, that is not the least bit sexy. Though Bella Baxter's insatiable libido might be her guiding light at first in \"Poor Things,\" sexual liberation (or \"furious jumping,\" as she calls it) is only part of this fantastical, anarchic journey to consciousness.\n\nFilmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and his star, Emma Stone, have a good and strange thing going whether she's playing a striving scullery maid who works her way into the favor of Queen Anne, or a re-animated Victorian woman finding independence. Stone helps make his black humor more accessible, and he creates unorthodox opportunities for her to play and stretch. We, the audience, are the benefactors.\n\n\"Poor Things\" was not a whole cloth invention. It is an adaptation of Alasdair Gray's 1992 novel, done by \"The Favourite\" screenwriter Tony McNamara whose edges and wit haven't dulled and in fact flourishes outside the cruelty of the previous film. Don't worry, the humor is plenty dark here, but self-actualization looks good on them.\n\nIn this depraved and not so subtle fairy tale, men see Bella as a thing to possess and control. Her creator, Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a mad scientist with violent scars all over his face from a childhood as test subject for his own father, wants to hide her away from the corrupting influences of the world. His horrified student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), enlisted to study Bella, wants her to be his wife. And the dandy attorney Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) sees a sex doll, someone with the potential to be as wild and adventuresome as him and eschew the conventional stuffiness of their time. Everyone assumes that Bella will not be too much of a problem. And everyone is wrong.\n\nIt wouldn't be a Lanthimos movie without some immense, irreconcilable discomfort, like using a highly sexualized woman with the mind of a toddler for comedic purposes. But this is hardly the first fairy tale to exploit its heroine for her innocence or naivete. Does it make it better if that's the point? Is it making light of second-degree rape? Is it the film's responsibility to answer to? Or is this the prickly post-film debate that everyone is supposed to be having? That is something only the individual can answer.\n\nStone moves like a doll who hasn't quite figured out she has joints yet and talks in incomplete, childish sentences. She is not actually mimicking a toddler, it's something weirder and more fantastical than that. In \"La La Land\" she moved as though walking on air. In \"Poor Things,\" there is a marionette quality.\n\nAnd Bella evolves quickly. She learns to walk and speak and think and masturbate and dance and read and philosophize about inequalities. It does not ever occur to her to not do, or say, exactly what she pleases in this opera of appetites. And her evolution is appropriately messy, taking her to Portugal, Alexandria and Paris, as she figures out her likes and dislikes. You almost want to see her go up against the mean teens in Barbie. Social mores really are the dullest things.\n\nThis story exists in a Victorian dream/nightmare, a vision so stuffed with fantasy it reminded me of \"The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.\" But it is undoubtedly among the year's most sumptuous visual delights with production design by James Price and Shona Heath, and costumes by Holly Waddington. Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan again employ the fisheye lens that they used in \"The Favourite.\" It's extra, but at least it makes more sense in this purposely disorienting world.\n\nWhile it is Stone's movie, all the supporting men are exemplary and unexpected, especially Ruffalo who is so deliriously fun and funny that it's almost criminal that he hasn't been unleashed like this before.\n\n\"Poor Things,\" a Searchlight Pictures release in select theaters Friday and everywhere on Dec. 22, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for \"gore, disturbing material, graphic nudity, language and strong sexual content.\" Running time: 141 minutes.\n\nThree and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Review: Swan song or not, Hayao Miyazaki's 'The Boy and the Heron' is a master surveying his empire\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nDecember 5, 2023. 6:39 PM EST\n\n---\n\nWhen Hayao Miyazaki's \"The Boy and the Heron\" premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro said in his introductory remarks: \"We are privileged enough to be living in a time where Mozart is composing symphonies.\"\n\nYou might be tempted to call that hyperbole, but - this being Miyazaki, the legendary anime filmmaker of \"Spirited Away,\" \"My Neighbor Totoro\" and \"Kiki's Delivery Service\" - it's closer to fact. The occurrence of a new film from Miyazaki deserves to be treated like the coming of a seldom-seen comet or something rarer still, like a winning New York Jets season.\n\nTen years ago, Miyazaki released the profoundly personal \"The Wind Rises.\" It was then expected to be his swan song. But the 82-year-old filmmaker - known for his propensity for retiring again and again - soon announced that he would make one more. A decade of anticipation followed. Then, just as \"The Boy and the Heron\" finally debuted, word came that Miyazaki is pondering yet another movie.\n\nAs long as he keeps extending, so does our chance to keep returning to some of the most magical realms of animation. Watching \"The Boy and the Heron,\" which opens nationwide Friday, is like returning to a faintly familiar dreamland. Only, since the only location here is really Miyazaki's boundless imagination, it's less the feeling of stepping back into a recognizable place than it is revisiting a well-remembered sense of discombobulation and wonder.\n\n\"The Boy and the Heron,\" loosely adapted from Genzaburō Yoshino's 1937 novel \"How Do You Live?,\" first feels like a familiar setup for Miyazaki. A young protagonist is harboring an inexpressible grief while traveling to a new home. In the film's indelible, nightmarish opening scenes, a boy's mother dies in a Tokyo hospital fire amid bombing late in World War II. Flames fill the frame.\n\nA year later, the boy, Mahito (voiced by Soma Santoki in the subtitled version I saw) is sent to live in a country estate by his father, who has already found a new wife, Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura). She's also the younger sister of Mahito's deceased mother. The basic framework of the story has personal echoes for Miyazaki. As a three-year-old, he was evacuated with his family to the countryside during the war.\n\nMahito is miserable in his new home. He doesn't like his stepmother-to-be and the kids at school are unkind. To escape going to school, he gives himself a head wound. Not unlike the 10-year-old Chihiro of \"Spirited Away,\" who's transported into a fantastical world from an abandoned amusement park en route to her family's new home, Mahito finds a portal to a surreal dimension while ambling around the estate's grounds.\n\nHe's prodded toward an old tower, built by Mahito's great-uncle, by an ornery gray heron (Masaki Suda) who won't leave him alone. Think of herons and you might picture elegant, long-legged creatures, but this one is more of an annoying pest. It's also a kind of disguise, because a big-nosed man peels back the bird's head like a child momentarily taking off a Hollywood costume. He becomes something of a mischievous guide to Mahito. In Miyazaki films, guardian angels seldom look the part. (The English dub versions includes a voice cast of Christian Bale, Gemma Chan, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson.)\n\nOnce Mahito makes his way into the tower, he lands in a fantasy world that, for its pure vividness, rivals anything Lewis Carroll ever dreamed up. There are armies of giant parakeets who protect a Parakeet King and little balls of sprites called the Waruwaru that float serenely to the sky. Almost like a Miyazaki greatest hits, \"The Boy and the Heron\" is filled with little fluffy orbs and fantastical oversized creatures, with drips of blood and drops of tears. It is, though, more avian than any previous Miyazaki movie, which tended to lead into wooded forests or watery seas. \"The Boy and the Heron\" will be, certainly, a hit among psychedelic-loving bird watchers.\n\nBut just as in the world above, there is violence and cruelty here, too. (Gird yourself now for the fate of the Waruwaru.) This is less a fantasy to escape to than a parallel world, populated with childlike versions of some of the people in Mahito's life, including his mother. It's a dizzying place that seems just as directly pulled from Miyazaki's subconscious as any other realm he's conjured before. You'll leave \"The Boy and the Heron\" in disbelief that this, supposedly, is a filmmaker in autumn. It's just as uncompromising a vision, and just as attuned to the experience of childhood.\n\n\"The Boy and the Heron\" eventually drifts toward an aged, long-haired wizard (voiced by Shōhei Hino) who's spent his years holding this strange world together. As it teeters on the brink of collapse, he offers to bequeath his creation and all its responsibilities to Mahito, who instead decides to return to his own world. It's a parting sentiment from Miyazaki, a great sorcerer himself. Here, Miyazaki makes his peace with seeing his own tower crumble, while imploring his legion of followers: Go and create your own worlds, dream your own dreams.\n\nWhether it's a final goodbye or not, it's among the most poignant partings of recent cinema. It's a grand culmination of both Miyazaki's extraordinary body of work and of a film that gathers, like a flock, or a symphony, so many of his trademark obsessions.\n\n\"The Boy and the Heron,\" a Studio Ghibli release is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for some violent content/bloody images and smoking. Running time: 124 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: 'Leave the World Behind' is a terrific blend of thriller, disaster and satire\nBy **MARK KENNEDY**  \nDecember 5, 2023. 12:57 PM EST\n\n---\n\nImagine that it's close to midnight and there's a knock at the door of your luxurious weekend rental home. A man is standing there, calmly apologizing. He says it's his home and that he and his daughter need your help. He's also dressed immaculately in a tux.\n\nWhat would you do?\n\nDid the tux make a difference? Would the man's race?\n\nThat early scene is when Netflix's \"Leave the World Behind\" really kicks into gear and never slackens as this terrific, apocalyptic, psychological thriller races to its conclusion, exploring race, affluence and responsibility along the way.\n\nThe luxurious home becomes a castle of sorts as the outside world crumbles. The man who says he's the owner tries to explain why he's turned up. \"Under the circumstances, we thought you'd understand,\" he says. But understanding is in short supply here.\n\nAdapted from Rumaan Alam's acclaimed novel, the movie is set against an end-of-days disaster in which technology - Wi-Fi, TV, phones, internet - has gone silent due to a cyberattack and there's been a massive blackout.\n\nWell-to-do Amanda (a tart Julia Roberts) and her Atlantic magazine-quoting husband Clay (a hangdog Ethan Hawke) must work with the even-more-well-off G.H. (a calmly sophisticated Mahershala Ali) and his savvy daughter Ruth, (a superb Myha'la). The racial divide easily swamps their joint class affiliation.\n\nAlso along for the disaster are Amanda and Clay's children, a \"Friends\"-obsessed daughter (a soulful Farrah Mackenzie, who even wears her hair in a \"Rachel\" 'do) and her older, slightly bratty 16-year-old brother (a brooding Charlie Evans).\n\nIt's a story brilliantly adapted and directed by Sam Esmail, showrunner of \"Mr. Robot,\" who has made \"Leave the World Behind\" into a homage of Alfred Hitchcock, complete with the image of a man trying to outrun a crashing plane and using the master's discordant loud music. Esmail, who manages to make a group of deer appear sinister, even makes a Hitchcockian cameo as a corpse on a beach.\n\nThe director paces the deepening dread flawlessly and there are visual delights throughout, like when the family starts off on their adventure with their car exiting at \"Point Comfort.\" The camera often swirls and soars through glass cracks or holes in roofs like an uneasy bird, or parks itself at strange angles.\n\nThe mysterious catastrophe - ships beach themselves, driverless cars crash like lemmings - sloughs away any pretense at civility, leaving the adults and children to turn on each other. Amanda, in particular, reveals a dark side and her husband - before the disaster, a can't-we-all-get-along bro - abandons a hysterical survivor by the side of the road. Community is shattered, guns come out and protect-at-all-costs is the motto of the day.\n\nThe acting is first rate and it needs to be - this is a drama of manners and secrets, and each sigh or glance reveals so much. We haven't seen a nasty Roberts character in a while and Ali balances sophistication and slyness artfully. Together, they have some of the film's best scenes.\n\nBut a warning of sorts: It's best to click play on your remote knowing that the movie is more a satire than a true action-survival movie - the open-ended ending may divide viewers. Click anyway because the journey never drags. And don't be surprised if there's a jump in sales of survival tools this holiday season.\n\n\"Leave the World Behind,\" a Netflix release that starts streaming Friday, is rated R for \"some sexual content, brief bloody images, language and drug use.\" Running time: 141 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Review: In concert film 'Renaissance,' Beyoncé offers glimpse into personal life during world tour\nBy **JONATHAN LANDRUM JR.**  \nDecember 1, 2023. 10:07 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LOS ANGELES (AP)** - In Beyoncé's concert film, she describes her recent Renaissance World Tour as being run like a machine: From lighting to set design, the superstar had a hand in everything production-related to ensure her stadium tour exceeded expectations after four years of preparation.\n\nAs a perfectionist, Beyoncé was tirelessly determined - working almost 50 days straight - to create an epic concert experience. This becomes clear in her movie \"Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,\" which chronicles the massive tour in support of her seventh studio album.\n\nWritten, directed and produced by Beyoncé, \"Renaissance\" perfectly captures her dazzling performances for the big screen and includes some intimate behind-the-scenes footage from the normally private singer, who has rarely done interviews in the past decade.\n\nBeyoncé released her nearly three-hour \"Renaissance\" movie through AMC Theaters in similar fashion as the \"Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour\" film, which opened with a record-breaking $97 million domestically for a concert film last month. But unlike Swift, whose project primarily focused on her onstage performances, Beyoncé offers more insight into her personal life.\n\n\"I'm really excited for everyone to see the process,\" she says in the film.\n\nWith \"Renaissance,\" Beyoncé displays more of her human side like in her 2019 Netflix film \"Homecoming,\" which delved into the singer headlining the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. This time, she goes a step further into her story as arguably music's hardest-working performer, who attempts to juggle being a mother of three while she maintains her mental and physical fortitude during her tour.\n\nBeyoncé expressed frustration with challenges to her lofty aspirations for her tour and felt she wasn't being heard because she's a Black woman. The tour ultimately grossed around $500 million, according to Billboard. She opens up about having surgery on her knee, which forced her into rehabilitation a month before her first opening show in Stockholm.\n\nUnlike her tour, Beyoncé confesses, she's \"not a machine.\"\n\nBut through her aches and pains, Beyoncé - who is the most decorated Grammy artist in history - showed up and performed at a very high level. It's what she demanded of herself and others who mirrored her mentality to make each show come into fruition.\n\nThe film showcases a few big-name performers who accompanied Beyoncé onstage, including Megan Thee Stallion in Houston. During her Los Angeles stint, Kendrick Lamar was a special guest along with Diana Ross, who sang to Beyoncé for her 42nd birthday.\n\nBut out of all the celebrity appearances, the one who stole the show was Beyoncé's 11-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy, who made her presence felt as a background dancer. Initially, the singer was opposed to pushing Blue into the limelight of performing in front of tens of thousands.\n\n\"She told me she was ready to perform, and I told her no,\" Beyoncé says in the film.\n\nShe eventually agreed to give her daughter one chance to show her stuff. Her first performance, however, was subjected to heavy criticism on social media. But Blue Ivy used that to train harder. She gained confidence as the tour progressed and gained more standing ovations each time she hit the stage.\n\nBlue Ivy's growth brought joy to Beyoncé and to Mathew Knowles, the proud grandfather who is shown saying, \"Now, that's a Knowles!\"\n\nDuring a stop in Houston, Beyoncé along with her mother, Tina Knowles, drove around her old Third Ward neighborhood before they stopped by her childhood home. The return to her hometown marked another reunion between Beyoncé and all the members of the girl group Destiny's Child - which included Kelly Rowland, Michelle Williams, LeToya Luckett and LaTavia Roberson, who was once ousted from the group.\n\nNow, it appears there's peace among them. There were no words exchanged on camera except for a collective hug, which Beyoncé called during her narration a \"new birth for us. A lot of healing.\"\n\nBeyoncé along with her mother shared heartfelt moments of the singer's late uncle Johnny - a Black gay man who introduced her to house music as a child and made her a prom dress. She dedicated the \"Renaissance\" album to him.\n\nThe film squeezes in Beyoncé's appreciation for her devoted Beyhive fanbase who are often shown in the audience in various cities. During her shows, she expresses her gratitude for them, calling them \"beautiful faces.\"\n\nDespite the presence of jams like \"Alien Superstar,\" \"Church Girl\" and \"Cuff It,\" not every song performed on tour made the cut for the film.\n\nAnd that's just fine. \"Renaissance\" is more about getting a glimpse into Beyoncé's life - even for just a little bit.\n\n\"Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,\" an AMC release, is not rated. Running time: 168 minutes. Four stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: 'Eileen,' a wonderful novel about an 'invisible' young lady becomes an oddball film\nBy **MARK KENNEDY**  \nNovember 28, 2023. 1:53 PM EST\n\n---\n\nSomething strange has happened to Eileen Dunlop, and we don't just mean the plot of \"Eileen.\" The adaptation of novelist Ottessa Moshfegh's delicious coming-of-age heroine has had a weird birth onto film.\n\nThe plot and setting haven't changed: It's late 1964 in a frigid coastal town in Massachusetts. \"Everybody's kind of angry here - it's Massachusetts,\" Eileen explains in one her best lines. She works as a clerk at a juvenile corrections facility, goes home to an alcoholic dad and repeats. Her whole world is a prison.\n\nIn print, she is dark and self-obsessed and deliciously willing to poke into every squeamish horror, even her own \"folds and caverns.\" On celluloid, she is just a plain, anti-social Jane. In print in one scene, she scratches her nether regions and pointedly uses the unwashed fingers to shake hands with a boss. In the film, she just walks away. Eileen has been neutered.\n\nIt's not clear what has happened since Moshfegh - along with Luke Goebel - is a screenwriter as well as a producer. Moshfegh's original creation is a \"fabulous shoplifter\" who keeps a dead field mouse in the glove box of her smoky Dodge Coronet and loves National Geographic issues that feature unusual, painful tribal rituals. None of that made it to the film. That leaves her too inert, too passive - wide-eyed without the naughty.\n\n\"Eileen\" was always going to be a hard book to adapt, especially since it's so internal. It's really a character study for most of the way, then events get jolted by an unexpected outsider - a real deus ex machina - and then it evolves into a low-stakes noir thriller, right down to the film's too heavy Hitchcockian end credits.\n\nThomasin McKenzie playing the titular character has a lot to do and she does it admirably, appearing mouse-ish from the outside, pulling pubic hair out of a bar of soap with delightful glee and taking the occasional flight of fancy by dreaming of executing her dad or having a hot and heavy tryst with a guard. \"Get a life, Eileen. Get a clue,\" says her unamusing dad.\n\nThe deus ex machina here is Anne Hathaway as the glamorous Harvard-trained psychiatrist Rebecca Saint John, who drinks cocktails, smokes furiously - \"It's a nasty habit. That's why I like it\" - dances alone in bars and doesn't buy any '50s conventions. \"I don't get what's popular,\" she says. Hathaway could have pulled back the throttle a little, often overawing McKenzie's mouse.\n\nHathaway's sophisticated character is the key to unlocking Eileen, and the young woman begins mimicking the older, often wearing her dead mother's clothes as she smokes or drinks martinis. They have a sort of flirtation - game recognizing game. \"You really think you're a normal person?\" the psychiatrist asks Eileen.\n\nWhile director William Oldroyd often gets lost in the heavy darkness of noir, the screenwriters have some fabulous lines, like when Saint John tells Eileen: \"You remind me of a girl in a Dutch painting. You have a strange face. It's plain but fascinating - with a beautiful turbulence.\"\n\nOr when gin-soaked dad - a great Shea Whigham - calmly destroys his daughter: \"Some people, they're the real people. Like in a movie. They're the ones you watch, they're the ones making moves. And other people, they're just there, filling the space,\" he says. \"That's you, Eileen. You're one of them.\"\n\nAnd that's the fate of \"Eileen,\" too, unfortunately. By sanding off all the dark human quirks from their deeply human heroine, the filmmakers have left us a film that's just filling the space.\n\n\"Eileen,\" a Neon release in theaters Dec. 1, is rated R for \"violent content, sexual content and language.\" Running time: 97 minutes. Two stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Review: Bradley Cooper's 'Maestro' leaves many notes of Bernstein unplayed\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nNovember 21, 2023. 6:37 PM EST\n\n---\n\nBradley Cooper's \"Maestro,\" a high-wire act of a biopic, leaps constantly between on stage and off, flying through Leonard Bernstein's very public life as a conductor while diving into his more private marriage to Felicia Montealegre. How each side of Bernstein's existence interacts with the other is the tension and harmony of \"Maestro.\" Which is authentic? Which a performance?\n\nResolving those dichotomies is, thankfully, not the aim of Cooper's admirably ambitious if performative drama about the musical conscience of 20th century America. Bernstein's polymorphous life was spread between his family life and a string of male lovers, just as it was between conducting and the solitary toil of composing. \"Maestro\" resists neat conclusions about any facet of an expansively contradictory life.\n\n\"If you carry around both personalities, I suppose that means you become a schizophrenic and that's the end of it,\" Bernstein (Cooper) says with a laugh in a TV interview alongside Montealegre (Carey Mulligan).\n\n\"Maestro,\" which debuts Wednesday in theaters before streaming next month on Netflix, isn't a cradle-to-the-grave biopic, though it doesn't avoid some of the genre's standard pitfalls, either. It's largely set around the beginning and end of his relationship with Montealegre, an actor he first meets at a party. \"Hello, I'm Lenny,\" he says, grinning from the piano bench.\n\nIt's a framework with some benefits -- no matter what the title says, this is Mulligan's movie - that also omits much of Bernstein's most lasting accomplishments. There is little here of music making, generally, and virtually none of \"West Side Story,\" \"Candide,\" \"On the Waterfront\" or all those influential TV broadcasts. Fans such as Lydia Tár may not approve.\n\nBut \"Maestro\" begins, thrillingly, in a black-and-white blur. Characters exit scenes like they're falling through trap doors, a surreal swirl propelled by the verve of Bernstein's music. In the first scene, a 25-year-old Bernstein is woken with a call notifying him to substitute for Bruno Walter in conducting the New York Philharmonic that night. Enthralled, he pulls open the blinds, slaps, in rhythm, the bare bottom of the man sharing his bed and runs down stairs that magically lead right into Carnegie Hall.\n\nIt won't be the last time that \"Maestro\" draws a straight line between lovemaking and music. \"If nothing sings in you, then you can't make music,\" Montealegre will later tell him. Music, no doubt, swells most in the Bernstein of \"Maestro\" when he's liberated to be himself.\n\nOn the night of their first date, Bernstein and Montealegre end up, fittingly, on a stage running lines, with one floor lamp casting them in shadow. \"Even though you're the king, you're quite taken with me,\" she says, explaining his characterization.\n\nThe fiction is quickly borne out, albeit with a foreboding sense of marital trouble. Another headlong sprint between scenes ends with the two rushing onto the stage of \"Fancy Free,\" the Jerome Robbins ballet that will lead to \"On the Town.\" Bernstein, himself, joins the hip-swinging sailors.\n\n\"Maestro\" is, for this roughly first black-and-white hour, wonderfully brisk and free of normal biopic constraints. It's like a dream of 1950s New York modernism. Dialogue moves at an urbane clip. The photography, by Matthew Libatique, dips confidently between intimate exchanges and wide-shot vistas of the Berkshires of Tanglewood or of Central Park. (This is, most definitely, a great Central Park movie, full of romance and encounters along its pathways.)\n\nWhen \"Maestro\" shifts forward and into color, it loses its brio. The film, which Cooper wrote with Josh Singer, skips over the central decades of Bernstein's accomplishments, taking up residence instead in the early 1970s.\n\nBy then, Bernstein and Montealegre are married with three children (the oldest, Jamie, is played by Maya Hawke) and a house in Connecticut. But even though Montealegre entered into the marriage without wool over her eyes (\"I know exactly who you are,\" she tells him, early on), all is now discord. Bernstein's dalliances, she tells him, have gotten sloppy. In a Thanksgiving Day argument in their Manhattan apartment overlooking the park, she seethes: \"If you're not careful, you're going to die a lonely queen.\" Right about then, an inflated Snoopy floats past the window, like an eclipse.\n\nIn scene after scene like this, \"Maestro\" is staged exquisitely. But even as the film moves from its nervy first hour to its melodramatic set pieces, artifice steadily grips \"Maestro.\" Cooper's Bernstein has come under criticism for the prosthetic nose, but it's other affectations in his performance that smother. It's a sincere performance, thoughtful and dedicated, but it's also mannered and showy, drowning in turtlenecks, cigarettes and accents.\n\nBut Cooper, a sensitive director, was also wise enough to follow Mulligan's increasingly moving performance. (She gets top billing, too.) The film's slide into family dynamics comes at the expense of Bernstein's larger story, but it yields a beautiful platform for Mulligan to capture a woman too infatuated by her husband to abandon him, but too clear-eyed not to be devasted.\n\n\"It's my own arrogance to think I could survive on what he could give,\" she says.\n\nIt's a powerfully piercing moment, followed by an extended, passionate recreation of Bernstein in 1976 conducting Mahler's Second Symphony. There, gyrating at the podium before an orchestra, the film tells us, may be where Bernstein truly gives all of himself.\n\nSome of America's top filmmakers have long been tempted to tackle a film on Bernstein, among them Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg (both credited producers here). But Cooper's film never finds its balance. If Bernstein's sexuality must be the prism through which we view him, why do his male lovers (Matt Bomer makes a brief impression) pass by so fleetingly? \"Maestro\" is a fine portrait of a complicated marriage. But for a man who contained symphonies, that leaves a lot of notes unplayed.\n\n\"Maestro,\" a Netflix release is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for some language and drug use. Running time: 129 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Emerald Fennell chronicles a promising young man in audacious, shock-filled 'Saltburn'\nBy **JOCELYN NOVECK**  \nNovember 21, 2023. 9:55 AM EST\n\n---\n\nTwo years ago Emerald Fennell stood on the Oscars stage hoisting her writing trophy for \"Promising Young Woman,\" a scathing look at rape culture and a balancing act of wit, style, shock value, audacity, great acting and pitch-black humor - plus a timely #MeToo message.\n\nThat's a lot for a debut film, and we didn't even mention the best director nomination. Not surprisingly, anticipation has been hot for the writer-director's next effort (as an actor, she's already graced a little film this year called \"Barbie,\" in the suitably dark role of pregnant, discontinued Midge).\n\nNow \"Saltburn\" is here, and the results are enticing but decidedly mixed - perhaps because Fennell seems to be trying to one-up herself by leaning on the shock value, at the eventual expense of other storytelling elements.\n\nMake no mistake, the clever writing is here, as is the style, the sleek technique, and some terrific performances (Rosamund Pike is especially delicious in a supporting role). What's missing, or muddled, is the message - and perhaps even more, the heart. After two hours of cringing and gasping in both awe and discomfort, we're left admiring the \"how\" of what she's doing but still figuring out the \"why.\"\n\nOne thing that's not lacking: beauty. Unsurprisingly, Fennell excels at lush production values, especially in presenting the imposing, seductive and somewhat debauched Saltburn - no, not a person, but a country manor! This is England, and a story of class dynamics, so it's surely fitting that the star be a piece of real estate. (And let's just say, the phrase \"real estate porn\" takes on an added dimension here.)\n\nWe start, though, at Oxford. Here we meet our main character, Oliver Quick (and if that doesn't take you straight back to Dickens, nothing will). It's 2006, and Oliver (Barry Keoghan, ever-watchable and unpredictable) is a freshman on scholarship, feeling out of his league. At his first tutorial, he announces he read all 50 books on the summer reading list. His bemused teacher tells him nobody does that.\n\nOliver soon learns that life at Oxford isn't about what you've read, but who you know. In the Hogwarts-style dining hall, he can barely find someone to sit with - only a needy mathematics major. He has no earthly connection to the rest of the privileged, entitled (and in some cases, titled) student body, but aches to fit in.\n\nAnd then aristocratic golden boy Felix appears, like a Greek god. Played by Jacob Elordi, currently appearing as Elvis in \"Priscilla,\" Felix is gorgeous and effortlessly rakish; he seems to have never encountered hardship. Unless you count a flat tire on his bike, which is how Oliver meets him, lending his own bike so Felix can get to class.\n\nThe two become friends. It's obvious what's in it for Oliver, but what's in it for Felix? That's less clear, but Oliver's home life has been hard. So, when Oliver tells Felix a tragedy has occurred involving his drug-addicted parents, Felix invites him to spend the summer at his family palace, er, home.\n\nThe family includes Felix's beautiful but unstable sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver), his comically out-of-touch father, Sir James (Richard E. Grant, very funny), and the terrifically droll Pike as Elspeth, Felix's glamorous, clueless mother. Also spending the summer is cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe, excellent) a Saltburn outsider himself - American-born, a person of color - but compared to Oliver an insider, which is crucial. The great Carey Mulligan, Oscar-nominated for \"Promising Young Woman,\" has a welcome cameo as an unwelcome guest.\n\nThe early Saltburn days are intoxicating. Felix points out the various Rubens portraits, the original Shakespeare folios, that sort of thing. Days are spent lounging languidly on the lawn by the mossy pond. Dinner is black tie, so Oliver needs a loaner jacket and cufflinks. These people even play tennis in tuxes.\n\nThen the really crazy stuff starts happening.\n\nAnd we mean Fennell-level crazy. In \"Promising Young Woman\" there was a slow burn to the shocking, graphic ending. Here, the shocks come early. A few involve bodily fluids. Fennell knows how to startle the most jaded of film audiences - guests at the screening I attended either gasped or giggled in embarrassment.\n\nFennell is also comfortable with the world she seeks to paint. Even if you didn't know beforehand, it's pretty clear from the vividly rendered Oxford scenes that the director attended Oxford herself, and her scenes of student life at that storied institution, seen through outsider Oliver, form the most authentic-feeling part of the film.\n\nBut how long will Oliver remain an outsider? Will this uncertain and complicated young man, who arrives at the Saltburn gates too early and too naive to have waited for the footmen to collect him at the station, ever fit in, something he covets above all else? That's the question the rest of the movie answers, taking increasingly sinister twists and turns.\n\nAs if in a garden maze, perhaps? Like any self-respecting, spectacular period mansion, Saltburn has one of those, too, where some key action takes place. More broadly, though, the maze seems to symbolize the effect of this film: pretty, seductive, challenging, forbidding and ultimately confounding.\n\n\"Saltburn,\" an Amazon/MGM Studios release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association \"for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, language throughout, some disturbing violent content, and drug use.\" Running time: 127 minutes. Two stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Disney's musical fairy tale 'Wish' is beautiful, but lacking magic\nBy **LINDSEY BAHR**  \nNovember 20, 2023. 9:58 AM EST\n\n---\n\nWalt Disney Animation's \"Wish\" is stunning to look at with textured and rich watercolor-inspired animation and easter egg treasures for audiences nostalgic for the classics. But it is also more concept than story: A strained and forgettable attempt to pay homage to the studio's 100 years. The origin of the wishing star is as fine a motivation as any for a jumping off point, but \"Wish,\" directed by Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn, seems to have been drawn not from someone's earnest imagination and dreams, but a corporate board trying to reverse-engineer magic and charm.\n\nCase in point: In one of the awfully generic songs, \"I Am a Star,\" a cute, talking rabbit chirpily sings to our heroine Asha that \"when it comes to the universe, we're all shareholders.\" Ugh.\n\nI'm probably not alone in having learned several vocabulary words from Disney songs as a child, but there is something so dispiriting about hearing the word \"shareholders\" in what is supposed to be a rallying, inspirational anthem in a fairy tale world where talking goats and magic exist. There is no sign of corporations or public offerings in the Kingdom of Rosas, though that could have been an interesting path to take. Instead, this is a place founded by a guy, Magnifico (Chris Pine), who has the ability to grant wishes (and other magic things, too).\n\nNow, you may think you know what a wish is, but this movie needs it to be a little more complicated than that and thus has to explain it over and over again to justify itself. Wishes aren't just small wants, they're everything - your soul, your reason for living - and Magnifico has convinced all his subjects to give him theirs upon their 18th birthday for protection. He stores these wishes in floating orbs in an observatory in his castle, that he'll then grant back to some at a later date.\n\nAsha, the lead voiced by Ariana DeBose (\"West Side Story\" Oscar-winner and the reason \"Angela Bassett did the thing\" lives rent-free in my head) is a spirted subject of Rosas who is about to turn 18 and give her wish to Magnifico. She is fan No.1 of Rosas and Magnifico, but when she discovers (about 15 minutes into the film) that he doesn't have any intention of granting her 100-year-old grandfather's wish, she turns on him and Rosas and begins an accidental revolution. This is after Asha and Magnifico sing a duet \"At All Costs\" that is fully a love song about two people but has been shoehorned in here to be about Rosas and the wishes. It's strangely awkward.\n\nThe original songs, by Julia Michaels and Benjamin Rice, are slick and poppy and ultimately inoffensive. Their appeal might depend on how you felt about Benj Pasek and Justin Paul's songs for \"The Greatest Showman.\" If you loved those, the \"Wish\" soundtrack is probably for you. If not, sorry, though \"Knowing What I Know Now\" is pretty catchy.\n\n\"Wish\" also doesn't seem to have a solid handle on how the lack of these wishes affect the population of Rosas. A few walk around like sleepy shells, but most everyone else seems happy and content even after having volunteered this essential part of their being. Maybe that's the point? But this is a movie that has some surprising parallels (in themes and unresolved storylines) with \"Don't Worry Darling\" that don't stop at Chris Pine relishing his handsome villain era.\n\nThe animation really is quite lovely overall and striking after so many years of computer generated smoothness and perfection. But this is also a strange mixture of both styles and the storybook like textures makes some of the characters faces and the star look almost too fake for the world they're in.\n\nThe star, a speechless innocent, is also lacking a certain spark that might make it as iconic as the filmmakers want it to be. Or perhaps it just has the misfortune of looking too similar to the nihilist star from \"The Super Mario Bros. Movie\" from earlier this year.\n\n\"Wish\" is harmless holiday programming for the family, but it's strange to watch a movie about celebrating the individual \"star\" in everyone that feels like it was made by mandate, not a dream. And I would bet that every person who worked on this film probably grew up loving Disney and that each has dozens of ideas more inspired than this to commemorate 100 years and take this company into the future. Maybe next time.\n\n\"Wish,\" a Walt Disney Co. release in theaters Tuesday, is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association for \"thematic elements and mild action.\" Running time: 92 minutes. Two stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: 'Fallen Leaves' is deadpan nirvana\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nNovember 16, 2023. 5:06 PM EST\n\n---\n\nIn a movie year rife with grand, three-hour opuses from auteur filmmakers comes a slender 81-minute gem that outclasses them all. Aki Kaurismäki's \"Fallen Leaves,\" short, sweet and utterly delightful, is the kind of movie that's so charming, you want to run it back the moment it's over.\n\nKaurismäki, the writer-director Finnish master of the deadpan, has for nearly four decades been making minimalist, clear-eyed fables about mostly working-class characters in harsh economic realities. Bleak as his films are, they're also funny, compassionate and profound. They put up a tough, droll front that never quite hides the heart underneath.\n\nThe same could be said for one of the main characters in the plaintive and tender \"Fallen Leaves.\" When Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), a construction worker, is invited by his friend Houtari (Kaurismäki veteran Janne Hyytiäinen) to karaoke, he replies: \"Tough guys don't sing.\"\n\n\"You're not a tough guy,\" Houtari responds.\n\n\"Fallen Leaves,\" Kaurismäki's first since 2017's \"The Other Side of Hope,\" is about Holappa and a woman named Ansa (Alma Pöysti), both solitary people scraping by in Helsinki. They first encounter each other at that karaoke bar where Houtari proudly sings (for the rest of the movie, whenever he appears he'll be seeking compliments for his performance), but Ansa and Holappa watch quietly apart.\n\nKaurismäki draws them together, but slowly. \"Fallen Leaves\" is the best big-screen romance of the year even though its prospective lovers exchange only a handful of words and, for most of the film, don't know each other's names.\n\nIt's more about the circumstances they're both in. In the beginning of the film, Ansa is working at a supermarket while a security guard glares at her. She's fired for keeping an expired item instead of throwing it away. At home, she looks at her bills and then shuts the power off. Her next job, at a restaurant, fizzles on pay day when the owner is arrested for selling drugs.\n\nHolappa loses his job, too. After an accident at a construction site due to shoddy equipment, he's fired for having alcohol in his blood. He's a scapegoat, but the drinking problem is real. He keeps vodka in his locker and hidden on the job site.\n\n\"I'm depressed because I drink and I drink because I'm depressed,\" he tells Houtari.\n\nThe cinematography of longtime Kaurismäki collaborator Timo Salminen is so spare, with occasional pops of color and irony, that \"Fallen Leaves\" has a timeless feeling. It casts the cruelty of the world as an eternal state, a sense only enhanced and expanded upon in the most precise contemporary reference of the film. Whenever Ansa turns the radio on, news from the war in Ukraine is being read.\n\nIn Kaurismäki's film, the world is full of bullying authorities. (His radiant 2011 film \"Le Havre,\" about an old French shoe shiner helping a migrant boy, hinged on a police officer who in the climactic moment choses to look the other way.) In \"Fallen Leaves,\" the only thing to do is curse the jerks who make life miserable, have a drink and head to the movies.\n\nThat's where Ansa and Holappa go, once they finally meet, for a date. They see Jim Jarmusch's \"The Dead Don't Die,\" a funny choice not just because it's a zombie comedy but because Jarmusch, a friend of Kaurismäki's, is so similar in deadpan style to him. Outside, the couple stands in front of telling posters: \"Le Cercle Rouge,\" \"Fat City,\" \"Pierrot le Fou\" - each a touchstone to the director.\n\nIt's little odes to cinema like these that make \"Fallen Leaves\" - winner of the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival and Finland's Oscar submission - one of the most personal and self-reflective films for Kaurismäki. He probably wouldn't stand for all the analysis or the praise. But as Ansa and Holappa come together without a word of flowery romance, they carve out a small, private refugee from the world around them - just like the movies do. There isn't a bit of fat on \"Fallen Leaves,\" just some lean truths about life and a dog named Chaplin.\n\n\"Fallen Leaves,\" a Mubi release, is unrated by the Motion Picture Association. Running time: 81 minutes. In Finnish with English subtitles. Four stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Review: In Ridley Scott's 'Napoleon,' the emperor has no clothes but plenty of ego\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nNovember 22, 2023. 12:44 AM EST\n\n---\n\nFor such a famed historical figure, Napoleon has made only fleeting appearances in movies since Abel Gance's 1927 silent film.\n\nStanley Kubrick had grand designs for a Napoleon epic that went unmade. (Steven Spielberg is attempting to revive those plans as a series ). Napoleon and his bicorne hat - more icon of history than a real character - mostly only pops up in time-traveling odysseys like \"Time Bandits\" or \"Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.\"\n\nThe party, though, is finally on in Ridley Scott's \"Napoleon,\" starring Joaquin Phoenix. Scott doesn't do anything small, not even famously diminutive French emperors. And his two-hour-38-minute big-screen biopic serves up a heaping historical spectacle complete with bloody European battles and massive military maneuvers.\n\nBut don't mistake \"Napoleon\" for your average historical epic. Our first sense that this may not be a grand glorification of a Great Man of history comes early in the film, when a 24-year-old Bonaparte leads the siege on the British troops controlling the port city of Toulon. When Napoleon, then a major, charges forward in the fight, he's visibly terrified, even panting. He looks more like Phoenix's anxious protagonist in \"Beau Is Afraid\" than the man who would become France's Caesar. Napoleon doesn't storm the gates so much as lurch desperately at them.\n\nAnd for the rest of Scott's film and Phoenix's riveting performance, Napoleon's actions are never much more complicated than that. He assumes power cavalierly. His coup d'état against the French Directory in 1799 is a ramshackle farce. He flings his armies around the continent without the slightest concern. He's prone to petulant rages, screaming at the British: \"You think you're so great because you have boats!\"\n\n\"Napoleon\" subscribes more to the Not-So-Great Man theory of history. This Napoleon isn't extraordinary nor is he much of a man. He's a boyishly impulsive, thin-skinned brute, careening his way through Europe and leaving battlefields of dead soldiers in his wake. When he, while on a campaign in Egypt, is informed over lunch that his wife, Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby), is having an affair back in Paris, he responds curtly to the messenger: \"No dessert for you.\"\n\nFor more than 200 years, characterizations of Napoleon have ranged from genius reformer born out of the French Revolution to marauding tyrant whose wars left three million dead. Napoleon, himself, helped shape his legacy while exiled on St. Helena with a self-serving memoir. Some of the titans of 19th century literature reckoned with him. Victor Hugo wrote Napoleon lost at Waterloo because he had grown \"troublesome to God.\" Tolstoy, in \"War and Peace,\" was less impressed, calling him, \"that most insignificant instrument of history.\"\n\nIn \"Napoleon,\" which begins with Marie Antoinette at the guillotine and ends with Napoleon on St. Helena where he died at age 51 in 1821, it's startling how much disregard the movie has for its protagonist. Hollywood historical epics have traditionally leaned toward aggrandizement, not the undressing of fragile, deluded male egos who exclaim over dinner: \"Destiny has brought me here! Destiny has brought me this lamb chop!\"\n\nHere is a sweeping historical tapestry - no one does it better today than Scott - with a damning, almost satirical portrait at its center. That mix - Scott's spectacle and Phoenix's the-emperor-has-no-clothes performance - makes \"Napoleon\" a rivetingly off-kilter experience.\n\nIt's not always a smooth mix. Phoenix's characterization may at times have more in common with some of his past depictions of melancholy loners (\"The Master,\" \"The Joker\") than any factual record of Napoleon. A quality like ambition, you'd think, would be prominent in depicting Napoleon. He was a notorious workaholic, meticulously organized and an energetic intellectual - little of which is present here, making Napoleon's rise to power sometimes hard to fathom.\n\nBut that's also part of the point of \"Napoleon,\" which surely has some contemporary echoes. There are plenty of enablers along the way (a highlight of the supporting cast is Paul Rhys as the scheming diplomat Talleyrand) as the film marches through major events like the fall of Robespierre, the 1799 coup, Napoleon making himself Emperor in 1804 and the triumphant Battle of Austerlitz. The last is Scott's finest set piece in the film, ending in a rout of the Russian forces as they flee over a frozen pond while the bombardment of cannons plunges them into an icy grave.\n\nBut in David Scarpa's screenplay, the real through line in \"Napoleon\" isn't the string of battles leading up to the downfall we all know is coming at Waterloo. (There, Rupert Everett's sneering Duke of Wellington enlivens the military tactics.) It's Napoleon's relationship with Joséphine that makes the main thread.\n\nWhen he first sees her across a crowded party, he stands transfixed. Anyone would be. The slinky Kirby, sporting a pixie cut, rivals Phoenix for most potent presence in \"Napoleon.\" She has a complete hold on Napoleon, who turns out to be no more suave in the bedroom than he is among society. When he returns from Egypt furious from the well-publicized rumors of her infidelity, they have a prolonged fight that ends with her turning the tables. \"You are nothing without me,\" she tells him, as he cowers, happily. \"Say it.\"\n\nThere's a version of the film that could be wholly focused on their dynamic. Joséphine is omnipresent for a long stretch - he writes her constantly from the battlefront in letters narrated to us - but \"Napoleon\" never quite finds its balance in cutting between their life together and the military exploits. Scott is expected to release a four-hour director's cut on Apple TV+ after the film's theatrical run, which may offer a more calibrated version.\n\nBut the 85-year-old Scott - himself a symbol of ceaseless ambition - has made a film that, like his previous \"The Last Duel,\" is a provocative takedown of male power. Scott has made plenty of brawny, swaggering epics in his time - including \"Gladiator,\" with an Oscar-nominated Phoenix as the Roman emperor Commodus. But even though not everything in \"Napoleon\" coheres, it's appealing destabilizing. In one of the film's final images, Napoleon and his hat are in silhouette as he slumps to his death like a keeling ship, going down.\n\n\"Napoleon,\" an Apple Studios release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong violence, some grisly images, sexual content and brief language. Running time: 158 minutes. Three stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Emotional complexity, melodramatic wit and masterful acting in 'May December'\nBy **LINDSEY BAHR**  \nNovember 15, 2023. 4:06 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThere is hardly a false note in \"May December,\" an audaciously self-aware, mischievously funny and emotionally complex drama that defies simple categorization.\n\nFilmmaker Todd Haynes, working from a script by newcomer Samy Burch, deftly mixes cheesy movie of the week tropes with the psychological depths of Bergman to make this wholly singular piece that never quite lets the viewer relax on solid ground.\n\nThe set up involves an actor, Elizabeth Barry, played by Natalie Portman, who is spending some time with the real person she's decided to play in a film. That subject is Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), who, when she was 36, was arrested and imprisoned for starting a physical relationship with a 12-year-old boy. Two decades later Gracie and that boy, Joe (Charles Melton), are married with three kids, one in college and twins about to go.\n\nThere have been cheap, seemingly exploitative movies made about them before, which we get brief glimpses of. Gracie tells Elizabeth, on their first meeting, that she just wants her to tell the story right. Elizabeth responds that she wants her to \"feel seen and known.\" Both Moore and Portman are smiling sweetly, on perfectly polite stranger behavior, but it is also deeply uncomfortable. Is one lying? Are both? Who can we trust? Who do we like? Does it matter?\n\nWe already knew that Haynes was a master of melodrama, with films like \"Carol\" and \"Far From Heaven,\" but in \"May December\" he gestures to the aesthetics of ripped-from-the-tabloids Lifetime fare. He layers that with a boldly dramatic score, borrowed from the past (the late French composer Michel Legrand's theme from \"The Go-Between\") and brilliantly deployed in both comedic and serious ways. Early in the film, Gracie is preparing for Elizabeth's arrival and opens her refrigerator when the score dips. We brace for something serious and dramatic as the camera zooms in on Moore: \"I don't think we have enough hot dogs,\" she says.\n\nElizabeth isn't just there to watch them eat dinner and ask some questions. She is wildly driven to get to some sort of truth about Gracie, running around town like an investigative journalist interviewing everyone she can. Portman plays Elizabeth as impishly manipulative, utilizing the full power of her character's celebrity and its effect on people to get intimate confessions. It is a deliriously fun and unnerving send-up of both stardom and an actor's process. Late in the film, she calls it a story. Joe reminds her that it's their actual life. You can almost imagine Elizabeth Barry's deeply untruthful press tour for the film.\n\nGracie is harder to grasp, but she will keep the audience, and Elizabeth, on their toes for the duration. Just when you think you have a handle on something, she subverts it. We are, however, treated to some of her private moments that only Joe sees - her fragility, her delusions, her naivete. And Moore and Portman are electric in their scenes together, masterful performers whose characters are similarly performing for one another.\n\nIt's wonderfully fun to watch what they do, how they can make even the most basic of interactions slyly subversive and catty and how both try to maintain control over every conversation. But that they are great is not the big surprise of the film: Melton is. He will break your heart and not because of any huge Oscar-reel moment, but all the small ones leading up to the very earned tears. He's the sobering remind that behind all the intrigue and scandal and fun of the quest for truth, if we accept the reality of \"May December\" as some sort of reality, then we have to accept the tragedy of Joe.\n\nMelton plays this 36-year-old father of three college age kids quietly. His first scenes with Gracie show a relationship that reads more mother-son than wife-husband, and not even just because of the age difference. At times he seems like a shadow of a person, playing the role of beer-drinking, hot dog grilling contented dad with an almost empty nest. He is, in this movie, still becoming, and maybe just now starting to grapple with the truth, as he raises his monarch butterflies and attempts to flirt over text with another person.\n\nIn fact, Joe, and Melton, might be the biggest masterstroke of \"May December.\" Scandalous fun and camp are, you imagine, relatively easy with performers like this. But to give it a soul, too? It makes it monumental.\n\n\"May December,\" a Netflix release in theaters Nov. 17 and streaming Dec. 1, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for \"some sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language.\" Running time: 117 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Taika Waititi's 'Next Goal Wins' is a sweet, frothy diversion but no knee slide\nBy **MARK KENNEDY**  \nNovember 15, 2023. 10:47 AM EST\n\n---\n\nIn \"Next Goal Wins,\" a soccer coach comes from far away to lead a hapless group of athletes. He's a fish-out-of-water type, ill-suited for the job, but rises to the occasion and everyone feels good at the end. Wait, you're thinking, that's the plot of \"Ted Lasso.\" Well, only kind of.\n\nWriter-director Taika Waititi - the manic, slightly unhinged mind behind \"Thor: Love and Thunder\" and \"Jojo Rabbit\" - offers a sports movie that's not, of course, a sports movie and the opposite of whatever Jason Sudeikis was doing on his TV series.\n\n\"Next Goal Wins\" - \"inspired by true events\" - stars Michael Fassbender as a bitter Dutch-American soccer coach assigned to help the struggling American Samoa national team qualify for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. The team is an international laughing stock and still stinging from having been on the wrong side of the worst loss in international soccer history - a 31-0 thrashing by Australia in 2001.\n\nWaititi and co-writer Iain Morris based their movie on a 2014 British documentary of the same name and you can instantly tell why Waititi gravitated toward the story. It has a clash of civilizations, explores overcoming loss and it has a beautiful lesson about embracing those who are different.\n\nIn Waititi's hands, it becomes a sloppy, quirky, pop culture-studded frothy comedy that gently apes other underdog sports movies but doesn't offer much but a mildly funny respite from reality. It makes \"Bend it like Beckham\" seem really deep.\n\nWaititi himself - he couldn't resist stepping into his own film - frames the movie in the first minutes by playing a priest on American Samoa who promises this will not be a tale of woe but \"a tale of woah!\" (Shakespeare isn't laughing).\n\nFassbender here is the opposite of Lasso - he's broken inside, angry outside, egotistical and unyielding, a coach fired from his last three teams and given a career lifeline no one else wants. He has no home-spun wisdom to offer, just routine high school bullying. \"Something's not right about that guy,\" says one islander. \"Well,\" comes the response. \"He is white.\"\n\nThe coach will eventually be redeemed by American Samoa itself, by the nobility of its people and the goodness of their souls, with the movie getting dangerously close to worn out movie cliche territory.\n\nThe script had an opportunity to really examine the demand of winning at all costs versus the rewards of merely having fun and having a passion for sports but abandons any lessons in a flurry of team-building montages.\n\nThis being a Waititi movie, there's a scattershot of pop culture references - \"Karate Kid,\" \"Taken,\" \"The Matrix,\" \"Any Given Sunday\" and even Frank Sinatra (\"You're riding high in April, shot down in May\"). At times, these seem more like the director's idiosyncrasies than plot advancers.\n\nThe script also takes a weird sort of glee mocking the islanders, who are portrayed sometimes as playing dress-up. One sits at a desk with a keyboard and a monitor but no computer and another makes siren noises with his mouth in a police car because of faulty equipment.\n\n\"Next Goal Wins\" is most winning in the way it handles the team's star player, Jaiyah Saelua, who became the first nonbinary player to compete in a men's FIFA qualifier. Played with real tenderness and joy by nonbinary actor Kaimana, the way the team and coach relate to Saelua is genuine and touching.\n\nThere are other really nice turns by Oscar Kightley, Will Arnett and Elisabeth Moss, but it's Fassbender who must do the bulk of the lifting here. His accent is spotty and he may initially not have been on the top of everyone's list for the part but he sticks the landing, to mix sports metaphors. \"Next Goal Wins\" isn't a tale of \"woe\" or \"woah!\" but \"meh.\"\n\n\"Next Goal Wins,\" a Searchlight Pictures release that's in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 for \"some strong language and crude material.\" Running time: 103 minutes. Two stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Review: The Hunger Games return in 'The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,' with the odds in its favor\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nNovember 13, 2023. 12:17 AM EST\n\n---\n\nTwo hours and 37 minutes is pretty long for a \"ballad,\" but you can't call it \"The Hunger Games: The Three-Cycle Opera of Songbirds and Snakes\" now, can you?\n\nConcision was never much in favor in the four \"Hunger Games\" films, which reached a seeming finale with 2015's \"The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2.\" The intervening years have done nothing to shrink the ambitions of this unapologetically gaudy dystopic series where the brutal deaths of kids are watched over by outrageously styled Capitol denizens with names like Effie Trinket.\n\nThat clash of YA allegory and color palette is just as pronounced, if not more so, in \"The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,\" a prequel set 64 years before the original books, adapted from Suzanne Collins' 2020 book of the same name.\n\n\"The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,\" which opens in theaters Nov. 16, is an origin story of the Hunger Games, themselves, as well as numerous characters - primarily the devious President Coriolanus Snow, played by Donald Sutherland in the first four films. Here, Snow is an impoverished but opportunistic 18-year-old student played by Tom Blyth.\n\nJust as in the \"Hunger Games\" films led by Jennifer Lawrence's Katniss Everdeen, the new one proves how much you can sacrifice in story when you've got a thrilling young performer commanding the screen.\n\nFrancis Lawrence's prequel often wobbles, especially in the early going. And yet, in the end, \"The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,\" propelled by Blyth's performance, manages to be the deepest expression yet of the series' melodrama of adolescence. In Panem, the only thing more tragic than the suffering inflicted by adults on the young may be a bright kid warping wickedly into one of those elders, too.\n\nThat generational divide was always at the heart of the appeal of \"The Hungers Games,\" a fantasy where no adult or institution can be trusted, and the normal pressures of teendom are amplified in a modern, televised Roman Coliseum - an \"American Idol\" with murder - concocted by elders. It's madness shrugged off as, \"That's just the way it is.\"\n\nIn \"The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,\" we see how it got to be that way. The 10th annual Hunger Games are approaching but it feels more like pre-Super Bowl times when the NFL and the AFL played in separate leagues. The broadcast is low rent, the ratings are poor and the games themselves are staged in a dilapidated stadium.\n\nWith little food in the fridge, Coriolanus is living with his cousin Tigris (Hunter Schafer) and grandmother (Fionnula Flanagan). Their family has fallen on hard times, in part because of a family rivalry with Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage), the dean of the academy who harbors hatred for the Snows. (Dinklage, whose wry presence adds a kick to the film, has managed to appear once again in an outlandish fantasy with a man named Snow.)\n\nAs the students gather amid Third Reich architectures (the production design by Uli Hanisch is stellar) and the games' founder Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis, majestic in blue, with a turquoise eye) gazes on, Coriolanus is assigned his tribute, Lucy Gray Baird, a bold young woman from District 12 (also the home of Katniss) who wears a rainbow skirt and sports a dubious Southern accent. During the reaping ceremony, she makes an immediate impression, putting a snake down the back of a rival and bursting into song for the cameras. See, now there's concision, I thought. You get your songbird and snake, straight off.\n\nLawrence's Katniss was a thrilling female warrior whose seizing of center stage had reverberations off screen, paving the way for blockbuster female protagonists. Rachel Zegler's Lucy Gray is inevitably a disappointment by comparison. Lawrence's film, scripted by Michael Arndt and Michael Lesslie, for a while has the stale feeling of an unneeded retread. The tonal fluctuations, always a tricky balance in Panem, can be ridiculous. The stadium is abruptly bombed by unseen rebels. Once the games begin, one tribute concocts rabies.\n\nThe main thing holding our attention at this point is Jason Schwartzman's Lucretius Flickerman, a TV host with a Salvador Dali mustache who wants the games wrapped up just so he can make his dinner reservations. (It's been a very good year for Schwartzman, who transformed himself in Wes Anderson's \"Asteroid City\" and transmogrified in \"Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.\" )\n\nBut \"Songbirds and Snakes\" sneakily begins making a case for itself. The relationship between Coriolanus and Lucy Gray is compellingly complex. He works desperately to help her survive the games because he believes in her, and maybe loves her, but also because her success benefits him, too. Whether Lucy Gray is as purehearted as her songs, too, is up for debate. Both, we sense, are cunningly playing the hands they've been delt, seeking an advantage where they can. When Coriolanus begins making suggestions for the games to Volumnia, he proves himself a natural-born marketer.\n\nThat there's tension in Coriolanus' character, considering we know how he ultimately ends up, is a tribute to just how good Blyth is. We've by now seen plenty of prequels that show us how some famous villain broke bad, but there's nothing in Blyth's performance that telegraphs his future. He's a sincere striver - we root for him because of his poverty and his puck - who's operating in the society he's found himself. He's a villain born entirely of circumstance.\n\n\"The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes\" extends the saga for a third act that takes places in District 12, an addition that another franchise might have saved for the next installment. But it's also where that tragedy of \"The Hunger Games,\" and Coriolanus' fate, earns some of the Shakespearean touches that have liberally been sprinkled throughout. (Shakespeare's \"Coriolanus,\" is likewise about an ambiguous warrior set amid times of famine and class struggle.)\n\n\"The Hunger Games\" kicked off a YA craze in film that had its ups and downs but petered out several years ago. Whether \"The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes\" is enough to relight those embers remains to be seen, but it is a reminder how good a platform they offered young actors. It's a ritual worth returning to.\n\n\"The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,\" a Lionsgate release is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for strong violent content and disturbing material. Running time: 157 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Nicolas Cage finds fame to be highly overrated in chillingly funny 'Dream Scenario'\nBy **JOCELYN NOVECK**  \nNovember 8, 2023. 5:51 PM EST\n\n---\n\nQuick: What's a good adjective for Nicolas Cage's screen presence? Mercurial, perhaps? Volcanic? Volatile?\n\nHow about mundane, schlubby, average? Not the page we'd think to turn to in our Roget's Thesaurus.\n\nYet here Cage is, channeling his inner drabness to chillingly comic effect in Kristoffer Borgli's \"Dream Scenario.\" As Paul Matthews (heck, even the name is drab), a college professor at nowhere famous, he performs his job with perfect mediocrity, and seems a fairly mediocre husband and dad, too. With his graying beard, wire-rimmed specs and shiny bald spot, Cage's Paul is the guy in the room you ignore.\n\nUntil, suddenly, you can't. Because something weird starts happening. Paul starts appearing in people's dreams. Everyone's dreams.\n\nThe premise is delicious - and precarious. It recalled for me the setup in a very different movie, \"Yesterday,\" where only one guy on Earth remembers the Beatles. It makes for a fantastic beginning, but you immediately worry how they'll manage to keep it going.\n\nBut Borgli, the Norwegian writer-director making his English-language debut here (Ari Aster co-produces), is aiming for a broader statement about the nature of fame. And while the topic, which he's broached before, may not be original, it's ripe for exploration in the right hands - especially with an actor as inventive and unpredictable as Cage. Fame can be intoxicating, this film is saying, but it can and probably will turn on you in an instant, unless you're Taylor Swift (OK, we added that last part).\n\nWe begin on an autumn day by a suburban swimming pool, where Paul is raking leaves near his teen daughter. Scary things start dropping from the heavens, and suddenly the girl is grabbed by an unknown force and lifted, screaming, into the sky. Dad? He does nothing to help.\n\nIt's only the girl's dream. But then there are more. Paul and his patient wife, Janet (Julianne Nicholson, reliably excellent) run into someone at the theater, and she too has dreamed about Paul. At a dinner party, several guests discover to their shock that they've been dreaming about the same person. Yep, Paul.\n\nWhat's happening? On campus, Paul's students, who mostly chat among themselves during his unremarkable lectures on evolutionary biology, start listening - they're dreaming about him, too.\n\nIn many of these dreams, Paul stands by, inexplicably, as others experience peril - slithering alligators, for example. But in real life, for once, Paul has the floor - a man who until now seethed with frustration over his unrealized ambitions as others succeeded. Now, everyone is interested in him.\n\nBorgli never stops to analyze the science of this bizarre development, and frankly, Paul doesn't either. He takes a meeting with a snarky group of branding experts (led by Michael Cera, perfectly cast) who want to market him up the wazoo. They can get him a Sprite commercial! Well, Paul doesn't want that - he just wants a book deal for his biology research. But his ears perk up at the idea of an endorsement from Barack Obama. (\"I know Malia,\" one of these young professionals says.)\n\nOne young woman even lets on to Paul that in her dreams, the two have great sex. This is too stunning for the schlubby Paul to ignore, especially when she invites him home to recreate the dream. Needless to say, it doesn't go as well in real life. In fact, the dénoument is utterly, agonizingly humiliating.\n\nAnd then, everyone's dreams change. Suddenly Paul is the one causing harm. His students, terrified, don't want to see him anymore. He gets sent home from a dinner with friends. He can't even sit in a coffee shop and read a book without a fellow diner spitting on his food.\n\nAs for the branding consultants, well, they inform Paul that Obama is off the table - but hey, they could get him time with Joe Rogan or maybe Tucker Carlson.\n\nWe won't spoil the ending, but let's just make the obvious point that Borgli is not making a rom-com - is there a word for \"horror-com\"? We walk away from this funny, sad, scary film acutely reminded that if fame has two sides, one of them is pretty darned horrible.\n\nAnd perhaps, as you walk home from the multiplex this time, you might even revel in the fact that nobody's paying attention. Obscurity can be underrated.\n\n\"Dream Scenario,\" an A24 release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association \"for language, violence and some sexual content.\" Running time: 102 minutes. Three stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Iman Vellani is a scene-stealer in low-stakes 'The Marvels'\nBy **LINDSEY BAHR**  \nNovember 9, 2023. 12:28 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThe stakes feel immensely low in \"The Marvels,\" and it's not because this is a movie that spends a fair amount of time following cats or has an out-of-nowhere musical number. It's possibly because somewhere along the way, Marvel movies just stopped feeling like events. And this galactic trifle from director Nia DaCosta does not seem to be the one to make them again feel like a must for anyone who has not kept up with all their Disney+ series and who has forgotten what phase the MCU is in and why it matters.\n\nYes, Iman Vellani (as Ms. Marvel/Kamala Khan) gets her big moment on the big screen and nails it, as does Teyonah Parris (Monica Rambeau). Yes, there is a new villain, and it's a woman (Zawe Ashton as Dar-Benn) with a powerful new toy. Yes, Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) will have to face her past to move forward. And, yes, there is plenty of action, butt-kicking, wormhole jumping, glowing eyes and smashing of concrete walls.\n\nBut this is also a movie that teases danger, like a bad guy who appears to be knocked down reaching for another weapon, only to cut away. Granted, this happens in the middle of a hectic sequence involving the three leads fighting three fights in three different locations and switching with one another. Not that it really mattered what that guy was reaching for anyway - it never felt like anyone was in peril. It's also not quite funny either, but does introduce the crutch that Monica, Carol and Kamala can switch places in a flash. They'll try to explain why this is happening to you several times, each getting more confusing.\n\nThis is sort of a movie about a new team forming, sort of about fandom, sort of about accepting responsibility. But there is little doubt that these three will figure out a way to work together. There's some unresolved hurt between Monica and Carol but they're also both professionals, for goodness' sake. And Kamala just has to stop fangirling over Captain Marvel. These three are not given enough downtime to really enjoy whatever chemistry is there, perhaps because the movie seems more interested in the Khan family FaceTiming with their daughter and the goings-on in Nick Fury's (Samuel L. Jackson) oddly chaotic ship.\n\nDaCosta, working with Marvel for the first time, keeps the energy up and the story moving at a quick clip, though. Those fretting about all the three-hour films in cinemas at the moment should be happy to hear that this is kept to a tight 105 minutes. And it is a colorful, vibrant affair, too, a very welcome change from \"Ant-Man 3,\" helped no doubt by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, mostly known for working with Steve McQueen.\n\nAnd Vellani is the real standout star, a refreshingly human presence in stark contrast to Larson's cool and unflappable Captain Marvel. As Kamala/Ms. Marvel, you see in her someone who is excited and overwhelmed, in over her head and learning on the go. I wish they'd gone further with a conflict between her and her idol that is too quickly resolved. There is a warm sitcom tidiness to most of the conflicts here, right down to the Khan family shaking their heads at their daughter after a near-death incident as though she'd just borrowed the car without permission.\n\nIt's supposed to be a big deal that this movie has all women fighting a villain who's a woman, but as is often the case with Marvel's girl power attempts, it feels a little pandering in all the wrong places and doesn't really engage with any specific or unique female point of view. When our three heroes suit up, they do so off screen and come out with fresh hairdos and makeup. They look like their best selves and will continue looking like their best selves throughout a harrowing battle, which leaves some of their uniforms torn but not an eyelash out of place. I thought we'd reached a pro-hair tie place with our female superheroes, but these women, including Dar-Benn, are defiantly against the convenience; instead, they're constantly flipping their locks out of their eyes during fights, despite seeming more practical than that.\n\nAlso poor Ashton, who is such a splendid actor, has been saddled with one of the more forgettable and generic villain arcs. She gets to snarl a few one-liners and stomp around with tyrannical purpose in fantastically detailed costumes, but it seems to be a missed opportunity to not develop her more.\n\nBringing \"Endgame\"-like event hysteria back to Marvel was never going to be in the cards for \"The Marvels,\" or \"Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.\" At least this movie seems to be enjoying itself (sometimes a little too much) with moments of whimsy and weirdness and at least one deranged and amusing gift for cat lovers everywhere.\n\nMaybe it's just those pesky stakes again. This seems designed to be a minor Marvel - a fun enough, inoffensive, largely forgettable steppingstone - a get-to-know-them brick on a path only Kevin Feige has the blueprints for. And maybe it'll be something great, eventually.\n\n\"The Marvels,\" a Walt Disney Co. release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for \"action/violence and brief language.\" Running time: 105 minutes. Two stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: In David Fincher's 'The Killer,' an assassin hides in plain sight\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nNovember 7, 2023. 9:55 AM EST\n\n---\n\nIt's a noir staple to open with a bit of narration, but once the nameless hit-man protagonist of David Fincher's \"The Killer\" starts gabbing, he doesn't stop.\n\nAs Fincher's assassin (Michael Fassbender) awaits his target from a high, unfinished floor in a Paris building that looks out on the home of his mark, his inner monologue runs with a smooth, affectless monotone. His musings are a mix of professional tips (\"Anticipate, don't improvise\"), nihilistic existential observations (\"Most people refuse to believe that the great beyond is anything more than a cold, infinite void\") and sincere self-reflections (\"I'm not exceptional, I'm just apart\").\n\nThat last line is the most telling one. \"The Killer\" is a terse, minimalist thriller in the cool, cold-hearted tradition of Jean Pierre Melville's \"Le Samouraï.\" But while its methodical and solitary assassin acts and moves like cunning killers we've seen before, he blends into a modern background. He doesn't wear a trench coat or fedora; he dresses like a German tourist, with a dopey bucket hat. He shops for tools on Amazon. He picks up supplies at Home Depot. His position in Paris is an unused WeWork space.\n\nIn \"The Killer,\" an agent of death is hiding in plain sight. He's an assassin for our homogeneous, corporate world operating in the same spaces we all do. He eats McDonalds. He drives a white Avis rental van that's the exact same as a dozen others in the rental car parking lot. Sameness is his superpower.\n\nThat also means that his nihilism is ours, too. \"The Killer,\" which begins streaming Friday on Netflix, is a thriller where pointlessness isn't just lurking in the shadows. It's everywhere, even in a movie plot that grows increasingly resistant to offering the usual genre satisfactions. Fassbender's hitman, a background actor supreme, is a lethal manifestation of our soulless environment.\n\nIn that opening scene, he boasts of having a batting average (1.000, he brags) 'better than Ted Williams.' Yet the job goes badly. In the ensuing turmoil, he races to erase his footsteps but not before a dissatisfied client has his girlfriend (Sophie Charlotte) nearly beaten to death at their clandestine Dominican Republic home.\n\nHe embarks on a location-hopping mission to eliminate those responsible, an odd twist for an assassin who, at length, preaches disaffection. Much doesn't quite fit in \"The Killer.\" That he even has a live-in girlfriend - we barely see her and his thoughts never again turn back to her - seems unlikely. A revenge plot also doesn't quite suit such a dispassionate protagonist. \"Forbid empathy,\" he says. And the movie, too, can be withholding of anything like emotion. The most distinct thing about Fassbender's killer is that, like Patrick Bateman bopped to Huey Lewis and the News, he listens exclusively to the Smiths.\n\nThere's much pleasure to be found in the unnamed hit man's proficiency, just as there is in Fincher's cool finesse. Here, the director - long known for his own meticulous rigor - is working with some regular collaborators, among them screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker (\"Se7en\"), composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross ( \"The Social Network\" ) and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt (\"Mank\" ). And there's a kinetic thrill to seeing Fincher back in B-movie territory. (The script is based on a French graphic novel by Alexis \"Matz\" Nolent.)\n\nEspecially good is a nighttime sequence set in Florida that begins and ends with a bloodthirsty dog and in between features violent hand-to-hand combat that careens through glass and walls. The scene, like several others in \"The Killer,\" is a filmmaking feat of control. Fassbender, a natural at playing a loner (see \"Shame\"), is captivating throughout because he so possesses the movie's chief traits of guile and a deadpan sense of humor.\n\nEverything here is tantalizingly close to calculated perfection that it comes almost as a surprise how \"The Killer\" ends up missing its mark. You could call it a feature of the film's existentialism, but \"The Killer\" increasingly is working, albeit proficiently, in a vacuum. Our hitman travels from place to place - always with fake passports with the names of TV characters like Felix Unger, Lou Grant or Sam Malone - but we don't get anywhere deeper with him or anything else. Meaningless may be the point in \"The Killer,\" but at a certain point in this stylishly composed but empty vessel, you feel like pleading as another Fincher protagonist once did: What's in the box?\n\n\"The Killer,\" a Netflix release is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong violence, language and brief sexuality. Running time: 118 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: In 'Radical,' an unorthodox teacher in a violent Mexican border town\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nNovember 1, 2023. 4:00 PM EST\n\n---\n\nOn their first day sixth grade, the students of Jose Urbina Lopez Elementary School in the Mexican border city of Matamoros find their new teacher rolling on the floor surrounded by overturned desks.\n\nThey're not desks, he exclaims. They're lifeboats.\n\nSo begins Christopher Zalla's \"Radical,\" an inspirational based-on-a-true-story drama about an unconventional teacher named Sergio Juarez Correa (Eugenio Derbez). His day-one lesson is ultimately about buoyancy. But the metaphor isn't hard to grasp. In Lopez's classroom, education is a life raft.\n\n\"Radical,\" which opens in theaters Friday, is a conventional but stirring entry in the crowded canon of uplifting educator tales like \"Stand and Deliver,\" \"Lean on Me\" and \"The Class.\"\n\n\"Radical,\" though, isn't set at an inner-city school in Los Angeles, New Jersey or Paris, like those films are. Matamoros, along the Rio Grande and across from Brownsville, Texas, is considered a lawless place, known for extreme violence and migrant encampments. \"Radical\" is also set in 2011, among the bloodiest years of Mexico's drug war.\n\nThat makes for an especially unlikely backdrop for classroom revival. The school, itself, is known as \"The School of Punishment.\" For safety, its gates are locked during the school hours.\n\nSergio's self-empowering method is to allow kids to follow their curiosity and find answers for themselves. They're skeptical at first but soon are engaged and excited by their freedom to lead their own learning. More than once, Sergio says the students don't even really need him.\n\nThere are plenty of familiar beats as the school year moves along. Sergio's ways draw the ire of other teachers. Parents are distrustful, wondering if he's giving kids facing a harsh future false hope. But while \"Radical,\" an audience winner at the Sundance Film Festival, is formulaic in its approach, it gets enough out of it likable cast to earn at least a passing grade.\n\nDerbez, the Mexican actor and comedian, already made an impression in the classroom as the encouraging music teacher of the best picture-winning \"CODA.\" Here, he takes center stage, playing Sergio with a winning sincerity and full-bodied resistance to the rules.\n\nThree of the students are brought into focus: Paloma (Jennifer Trejo), a math whiz with astronaut dreams who lives beside the landfill her father works at; Lupe (Mia Fernanda Solis), a budding philosopher whose pregnant mother expects her to help with childcare; and Nico (Danilo Guardiola), a plucky kid who's being trained by a local dealer as a drug courier.\n\nTheir stories are never quite at the center of \"Radical,\" which sticks closest to its star teacher. But each young actor is natural, particularly Trejo. Her real-life character, Paloma Noyola Bueno, was the central figure in a Wired article that \"Radical\" is partially derived from.\n\nBut the best relationship captured in \"Radical\" is the one between Sergio and the school's cautious, less energetic principal Chucho (a wonderful Daniel Haddad). He at first seems like an impediment to Sergio, warning him not to \"kick the hornet's nest.\" But before long, he's a co-conspirator, willing to - in a further experiment on buoyancy - cannonball into a cold tub. Together, Derbez and Haddad help make \"Radical\" float, too.\n\n\"Radical,\" a TelevisaUnivision release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for some strong violent content, thematic material and strong language. In Spanish with subtitles. Running time: 127 minutes. Three stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: A serene debut from Raven Jackson in 'All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt'\nBy **LINDSEY BAHR**  \nNovember 1, 2023. 2:35 PM EST\n\n---\n\nNature provides much of the soundtrack to \"All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,\" a poised and occasionally transcendent debut from writer-director Raven Jackson.\n\nThe sounds of crickets and birds, flowing water and the wind in the long summer grass are only sporadically punctured by a song at a party, or a brief moment of a swelling score. These are the kind of details that make you feel immediately rooted in a place. It's not just the nature setting on a sleep app either, or, if it is, sound supervisor Miguel Calvo ensure that it doesn't feel like that. It's thoughtful and precise and also lets you more fully enjoy the moments where those human-made sounds take over.\n\nThis might be a lot of talk about sound design to start, but it's also a bit of a primer on what to expect from \"All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,\" which counts \"Moonlight\" filmmaker Barry Jenkins among its producers. Like sitting in a field for hours without a phone or a book or a companion to chat with, just the world around you, Jackson's film requires a level of conscious, almost meditative submission. The dialogue is sparse, the narrative is also. It is probably not an accident that some of the first words uttered, minutes in, are \"not too quick ... slow, take your time.\" It applies to the fishing lesson between father and daughter that we're witnessing, yes, but it works on another level too.\n\n\"All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt\" is a collection of moments in the life of Mack (Charleen McClure as an adult, Kaylee Nicole Johnson as a child), sometimes skipping back and forth in time. There are long stretches where the camera lingers on a hug, or the red painted toes of a mother at a party, the back of our heroine's head, a fish on a table, a crying infant getting their first bath in a kitchen sink, or two sisters sitting on a porch, in silence, until one breaks into laughter. And there are many, many hands. It's possible the camera spends more or at least equal time on hands - preparing a fish, digging in the dirt, holding - or not holding - another, swirling muddy water in a pond. Within this tapestry there are glimpses of great loss, of solitude, of new life and of transitions that feel familiar even if they're not your own.\n\nFor as stubbornly minimalist as it is, the imagery is always vibrant, aided by the rich, primary colors of the costumes, and thoughtfully composed shots, whether of a worm wriggling or a classic silhouette looking outside a darkened door. The emotion, too, is surprisingly palpable considering how little we really know about the people we're watching.\n\nStill, at a certain point, you may find yourself yearning for more - more story, more arc, more information, something to hold onto, to sustain interest or engagement. Sometimes it feels like you're wandering through a gallery of moving moments that you understand on an intellectual level are connected but maybe don't add up to a completely satisfying whole - especially at a trim, but standard, feature length.\n\nThat it works as well as it does is quite a feat, though. And with \"All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,\" Jackson has firmly established herself as a filmmaker to watch.\n\n\"All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,\" an A24 release in theaters Friday, is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association for \"thematic content and brief sensuality.\" Running time: 97 minutes. Three stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: 'Rustin' with an outstanding Colman Domingo is a terrific look at March on Washington\nBy **MARK KENNEDY**  \nOctober 31, 2023. 3:50 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThe 1963 March on Washington drew an estimated 250,000 people from across the country - the largest march at that point in American history - and was the place where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic \"I Have a Dream\" speech.\n\nIt likely wouldn't have happened without the work of a master strategist: Bayard Rustin, a gay Black socialist and pacifist-activist from Pennsylvania, whose close friendship with King was the engine in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement.\n\nThe winning, triumphant Netflix movie \"Rustin\" explores the stressful weeks leading up to the march from the grassroots level, with Colman Domingo starring as the organizer who many people know nothing about.\n\nIt was he who wrangled 80,000 boxed lunches, 22 first aid stations, six water tanks, 2,200 chartered buses, six chartered flights, 292 latrines, over 1,000 Black police officers and a change to the city's subway schedule, not to mention snagging celebrities like Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Lena Horne and James Baldwin.\n\nDomingo is debonair, frisky, droll, passionate and utterly captivating as Rustin - the film representing the electric meeting of winning material with the perfect performer.\n\n\"You're irrelevant,\" Rustin is told at an after-work get-together by a more militant activist. \"It's Friday night. I've been called worse,\" Rustin responds, taking a sip of his cocktail.\n\nBut as wonderful as Domingo is, it's the astonishing amount of talent in front of and behind the camera that will take your breath away. No matter how small, each performance brings fire and makes the most of a few minutes on camera.\n\nIs that Jeffrey Wright as a dour Rep. Adam Clayton Powell? Yes, indeed. Wait, isn't that Adrienne Warren? Yup. Kevin Mambo and Audra McDonald, too? Yes and yes. Chris Rock ages up to play a stuffy NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins and Glynn Turman is awesome, as always, as labor leader A. Philip Randolph.\n\nDa'Vine Joy Randolph plays Mahalia Jackson, Michael Potts is \"Cleve\" Robinson, CCH Pounder as Dr. Anna Hegeman, appropriately, gets her own warm round of applause during the movie. And Aml Ameen plays an understated King, his moments with Rustin playing like two old friends.\n\nThere's excellence in the music - Branford Marsalis provides the jazzy score, including lonely sax solos and mournful double bass plucks - and Lenny Kravitz contributed an original song, \"Road to Freedom.\"\n\nThe biopic has a presidential seal or at least a former presidential seal - Barack Obama and Michelle Obama's Higher Ground produced. (Obama awarded Rustin a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom.)\n\n\"Rustin\" is more than just the public-facing story of how the March on Washington came about. It's also a portrait of a man who has to hide his sexuality. If it was widely known, his career, the march and maybe even the Civil Rights Movement itself could be at risk.\n\nDomingo shows the immense pressures faced by being a religiously-raised, Black gay man in the racist and homophobic 1960s, enough psychic forces to tear a man apart.\n\n\"On the day that I was born Black, I was also born a homosexual,\" Rustin tells King before a crucial meeting with Black leadership. \"They either believe in freedom and justice for all or they do not.\"\n\nDirector George C. Wolfe, a theater legend, keeps this biopic intriguing, making it almost feel like a caper. Will they pull off their audacious effort? Of course, but the twists and turns endured make organizing the march a bit like the rush to get a big musical on its feet. Wolfe adds that energy.\n\nThe screenplay by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black isn't shy about exposing the divides within the movement and the ugly homophobic feelings of the era. There is a smart flashback to 1942 when the camera goes to black and white.\n\nThe movie take viewers to places perhaps unfamiliar, like to training sessions where Black police officers were taught about nonviolence and to Manhattan apartments where protesters would talk about their own stories of segregation to convince rich white folks to contribute money for buses.\n\nThe final section - the actual march itself - mixes new footage with some from that day. There was some fear by the organizers that not enough people would come, but the hero of \"Rustin\" doesn't waver - and is seen bluffing with reporters right up until the end. \"Rustin\" is as vibrant as the movement it covers.\n\n\"Rustin,\" a Netflix release in select theaters Friday and that hits Netflix on Nov. 17, is rated PG-13 for \"Some violence, sexual material, brief drug use, racial slurs, thematic material, language and smoking.\" Running time: 108 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: 'Pain Hustlers' tells a sadly familiar story with a kitchen-sink style\nBy **JOCELYN NOVECK**  \nOctober 26, 2023. 4:29 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThe wife of a man who nearly died of an opioid overdose comes bursting into the office of the sleazy doctor who prescribed it, wrongly, in exchange for personal gain. She slugs the doctor, in her agony.\n\nThe scene comes deep into the new Netflix film \"Pain Hustlers,\" and it feels bracingly real and tragic.\n\nIf only the rest of the movie, the latest in a string of opioid-themed films, felt the same. Instead, despite a high-powered cast featuring a reliably solid Emily Blunt, an expertly low-life Chris Evans and the gifted Catherine O'Hara, the film tries too hard to be something it isn't, or shouldn't be: slick and breezy and too clever for its own good, filled with mockumentary interviews, wild montages, and other tricks used to more disciplined effect in more accomplished films.\n\nNot that Blunt isn't an effective presence here as Liza Drake, a struggling, single Florida mom who works at a strip club but wants to move up in life - to be treated with respect, and to support her ailing teen daughter and her flighty mother. Indeed, Blunt carries the film with her intelligent and likable presence.\n\nBut that speaks precisely to the other big problem with the film, which is directed by \"Harry Potter\" vet David Yates and inspired by the article and book by Evan Hughes, telling the real-life tale of an opioid startup that intentionally mis-marketed a fentanyl spray meant for severe cancer pain. Here, the bare bones are the same, but Yates and screenwriter Wells Tower invent their own corrupt company and their own characters.\n\nAnd the filmmakers seem determined to make their protagonist likable. In giving Liza a fairly ironclad excuse for her actions - her sweet, plucky daughter needs costly brain surgery - they take an easy way out. Not to mention that through most of the film, Liza believes (unbelievably, really, given her smarts) that she's merely helping patients get the right drug. Wouldn't it have been more interesting to see Blunt play a character who knew exactly what she was doing?\n\nInstead, Liza claims at the start, looking back: \"I did it for the right reasons.\" And here's sales rep Pete, her unscrupulous colleague: \"This was 2011. Strictly speaking, we were not part of the opioid crisis.\" Evans, leaning into the sleaze, is fun to watch throughout, though the filmmakers care oddly little about his backstory.\n\nThen there's Jackie, Liza's mom, wacky but also steely, and, in the hands of a wonderful comic actor like O'Hara, vivid in everything she does. Lest you think Mom doesn't approve of Liza's slippery new career, heck, she joins her at the company, and even makes moves on the boss - but we're getting ahead of ourselves.\n\nWhen we first meet Liza, she's living in her sister's garage. At the strip club, she meets Pete, who, mid-flirtation, suggests she come work for him, promising $100k in commissions in one year.\n\nLiza's daughter, Phoebe (Chloe Coleman, in a lovely performance) gets in trouble at high school, engaging in what one might call, um, arson. We also learn she suffers from epilepsy. She requires a stable environment, the doctor says. And then Liza and daughter get kicked out of the garage and move into a cheap motel, eating instant noodles. Liza reconsiders that job offer.\n\nOutfitted with a fake resume - Pete, with a quick edit, gives her a biochem degree - Liza gets hired by Zanna, the company run by eccentric billionaire doctor Jack Neel (Andy Garcia, efficiently creepy) and proves a quick study. Against all odds, she finds a doctor (Brian D'Arcy James, playing against type as a sleazeball pain doc in need of a hair transplant) to write a prescription for Lonafen, a sublingual fentanyl spray. Soon she's corralled him into a \"speakers program\" designed to bribe more doctors.\n\nMoving quickly from sundresses to color-blocked power ensembles, Liza starts raking in commissions, and she and Pete hire a team of hungry salespeople. Pete likens what they're doing to driving a few miles over the speed limit - technically illegal, but everybody does it. Meanwhile, Liza's suddenly able to afford a condo fit for a king, buy Mom a car, and enroll Phoebe in private school.\n\nZanna, named for Neel's own late wife, goes public, and is the industry's new kid on the block. The company's celebratory slogan, shouted at decadent parties: \"We Own Cancer!\"\n\nBut things start getting uncomfortable. Neel, increasingly paranoid, rejects Liza's proposed compliance plan. Then, he decides the best way to improve flat sales is to market Lonafen off-label - for any kind of pain, even headaches.\n\nLiza is aghast - Pete, not so much - but her daughter's condition worsens, and Medicaid won't cover the operation. She needs cash. Then, patients start overdosing. The look one man's widow gives a weeping Liza, wordless, is chilling.\n\nThe pace picks up as the law starts bearing down. But ultimately, \"Pain Hustlers\" feels like a retreading of the same ground covered in other recent works, bringing nothing especially new to the table and, in splitting the stylistic difference between slick/breezy and poignant/authentic, succeeding fully at neither.\n\n\"Pain Hustlers,\" a Netflix release that begins streaming Friday, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association \"for language throughout, some sexual content, nudity and drug use.\" Running time: 122 minutes. Two stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Video game-to-horror flick 'Five Nights at Freddy's' misfires badly\nBy **MARK KENNEDY**  \nOctober 26, 2023. 10:05 AM EST\n\n---\n\nJust in time for Halloween comes \"Five Nights at Freddy's,\" a video game adaptation with the potential treat of demented Chuck E. Cheese-like animatronic creatures running amok. But the trick turns out to be on us.\n\nThe movie - built from developer Scott Cawthon's video game about anthropomorphic robots killing people - poorly fits into this vehicle and the problems start with the creatures themselves.\n\nYes, they have unsettling bright eyes and teeth. But, c'mon, one wears a bow tie, like a guest on PBS. They're more threadbare than eerie. Yes, they stomp around like The Terminator but one is a chubby chicken with the slogan \"Let's Eat.\" They look about as scary as overgrown Care Bears with a drinking problem. One is, we're not kidding, a cupcake.\n\nCaught between PG and R, as well as lost at the crossroads of inadvertent comedy and horror, the PG-13 \"Five Nights at Freddy's\" has to go down as one of the poorest films in any genre this year.\n\nLike the video game, our hero here is a night watchman who is mysteriously hired to look after the ruins of an abandoned children's pizza-and-games restaurant. We learn that it was shuttered in the '80s due to a raft of missing kids.\n\nJosh Hutcherson plays the guard with a mix of hotheadedness and compassion. \"Just do your job and you'll be fine,\" he is advised. \"Don't let the place get to you.\"\n\nWhy has he taken this silly job? To keep custody of his young sister, Abby (a very good Piper Rubio), proving he's a good guy. Other actors include the great Mary Stuart Masterson, slumming it as his aunt, and Matthew Lillard chewing scenery as if it were a slice of pepperoni.\n\nDirector Emma Tammi - using a script credited to her, Cawthon and Seth Cuddeback - do their darndest to fill the film up with a backstory and a reason for there to be murderous animatronic characters in the first place. So we have family betrayal, the lifetime pain of an abducted sibling, a possible romantic interest and a plot so tortured it should have a cameo in \"Saw.\"\n\n\"I made a mistake. I don't want this,\" our hero screams toward the end and you can feel the movie theater's paying audience agreeing wholeheartedly.\n\nThere are so many questions that will keep you awake. Why was \"Talking in Your Sleep\" by the Romantics used so heavily? Why do the scriptwriters not understand human decay? Why does the dialogue often veer from flirty to angry so abruptly in the same scene? Why is it revealed only in the last 10 minutes that the maniacal Care Bears can talk?\n\nIt's ironic that much of the coolest action happens in a dreamstate. You may need to nudge your seatmates awake to rejoin the show when that happens. Maybe that's why \"Talking in Your Sleep\" was needed?\n\nThe filmmakers waste the rare attempt in a horror flick to make a kids' ball pit scary, but the absolute lowest point is when the supposedly murderous animatronics - Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie, Chica and Foxy - host a kiddie dance party. It's as if even they can't overcome their inner nature, having originated from Jim Henson's Creature Shop. This whole thing should have remained a game.\n\n\"Five Nights at Freddy's,\" a Universal Pictures release in theaters and streaming on Peacock starting Friday, is rated PG-13 for \"strong violent content, bloody images and language.\" Running time: 110 minutes. Zero stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Teen dreams and adult nightmares in Sofia Coppola's 'Priscilla'\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nOctober 25, 2023. 2:35 PM EST\n\n---\n\nDreamily gazing at the album covers of Elvis Presley was not, statistically speaking, a rare habit among American teen girls in the late 1950s and early '60s.\n\nBut for Priscilla Beaulieu, teenage fantasy became a strange and surreal reality. Sofia Coppola's \"Priscilla,\" starring Cailee Spaeny, captures all the dreaminess, the absurdity and, finally, the nightmare of falling in love with Elvis.\n\nPriscilla was just 14 years-old - a 9th grader - when she first met him. It was 1959. She was living in West Germany, where her Air Force officer stepfather was stationed. The swoony early scenes of Coppola's film find a solitary Priscilla sipping soda in a Navy base diner while a cover of Frankie Avalon's \"Venus\" (\"Venus, make her fair / A lovely girl with sunlight in her hair\") plays around her.\n\nA man approaches and asks if she likes Elvis. Of course she does. Would she like to meet him? Um, what? After some negotiations with her parents, Priscilla is sitting there on the sofa at a small party when the King of Rock 'n' Roll, himself (Jacob Elordi), strolls down the stairs. Big, big sigh.\n\nCoppola, the writer-director of \"The Virgin Suicides,\" \"Lost in Translation\" and \"Somewhere,\" has always been innately attuned to the forming identities, swelling desires and intimate revelations of young women. In the story of Priscilla Presley (the film is based on her 1985 memoir, \"Elvis and Me\" ), Coppola has found a tale tailor-made for her delicately perceptive style of filmmaking.\n\nAs a movie, \"Priscilla\" is the diametric opposite of Baz Luhrmann's \"Elvis.\" Where Luhrmann's film was lurid and careening, Coppola's is muted and textured. Her film is a kind of fairy tale that turns claustrophobic and cautionary.\n\n\"Priscilla\" is, at least at first, quite funny. After Priscilla initially catches Elvis' eye at that party, she's back at school learning about the food groups. How could anyone possibly stomach that? Or when, after Elvis hasn't called following his stint in the military, Priscilla's mother asks her if there aren't any boys in school she might be interested in, instead. Priscilla doesn't need to say anything; just the image of lining up your average 9th grade boy against Elvis Presley is enough.\n\nYet their courtship continues in somewhat traditional fashion. Elvis, played with relaxed magnetism by Elordi (\"The Kissing Booth,\" \"Saltburn\"), is drawn to Priscilla because she reminds him of home; it's clear her purity is part of her appeal to him. It's a long time before they have sex, though her youth remains tacitly problematic. \"Wow, she's young,\" says one woman watching Elvis lead Priscilla upstairs. \"Like a little girl.\"\n\nTheir life together is initially sweet if deranged. Priscilla drifts through a dream world even if Elvis' extremes are glaring to us. His bedroom in Graceland is comically gaudy. \"I got this for you,\" we hear Elvis say kindly, before a handgun is handed over.\n\nNo Presley songs play in \"Priscilla.\" (While Priscilla Presley is an executive producer, the Elvis estate didn't participate in the film.) But it does share a telling track ( Carl Orff's \"Gassenhauer\" ) with Terence Malick's \"Badlands,\" another movie about an underage teen girl (Sissy Spacek) who throws her life in with a charismatic drifter with matinee-idol looks (Martin Sheen).\n\nAnd like they do for Holly in \"Badlands,\" things turn increasingly dark for Priscilla. Elvis treats her like a doll he keeps at home while he goes in and out. \"It's either me or a career, baby,\" he tells her. Coppola, who dedicates the movie to her mother, Eleanor Coppola, has long specialized in gilded cages (\"Marie Antoinette,\" \"The Bling Ring\"). Graceland turns out to be a prison to Priscilla.\n\nThere aren't many false notes in Coppola's richly layered film, handsomely shot by Philippe Le Sourd, with sumptuous production design from Tamara Deverell and fine, toned-down costumes by Stacey Battat.\n\nBut \"Priscilla\" fades where \"Elvis\" found its footing. When Presley's downturn accelerates in Las Vegas, Luhrmann's movie swelled with tragedy. In the same time period here, Priscilla awakens. Yet it feels underdeveloped, coming too quickly, in a sudden rush - albeit a terrific rush, with Dolly Parton playing.\n\nA constant throughout, though, is Spaeny. This is a deft breakthrough performance perfectly poised between youthful fantasy and adult reality.\n\n\"Priscilla,\" an A24 release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for drug use and some language. Running time: 113 minutes. Three stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: 'Persian Version' finds laughter, tears in Iranian American tale of resilient women\nBy **JOCELYN NOVECK**  \nOctober 23, 2023. 5:35 PM EST\n\n---\n\nLet nobody say writer-director Maryam Keshavarz doesn't know how to start a movie.\n\nThe first time we see Leila, her alter ego in the autobiographical, warm-hearted, personal, funny but also somewhat chaotic \"The Persian Version,\" she's walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. Headed to a Halloween party, she's carrying a surfboard and wearing what she calls a \"burkini\" - a sexy bikini, but paired with a niqab, the face-covering garment worn by some Muslim women.\n\nIt's surely not an accident that Leila is crossing a bridge, because her film (and Halloween costume) is about bridging two identities - her Iranian heritage, and her American life. Leila (an engaging Layla Mohammadi) is a New York born-and-raised aspiring screenwriter (she wants to be an Iranian Martin Scorsese) who, we learn, has never been fully comfortable in either world. American kids would call her names at school; Iranians saw her as too Americanized.\n\nThere are other bridges to be crossed here, too. The most important is that between Leila and her formidable immigrant mother, Shireen (the wonderful Niousha Noor), who created a successful life in America out of sheer grit, educating herself and becoming an adept businesswoman while running a household full of boys and one girl. It's the girl, Leila, with whom Shireen has the fraught relationship, because - well, if you're a mother or a daughter you probably get it.\n\nBut there's a deeper backstory behind this troubled dynamic, and to learn all that, we must take a journey - a long journey, in terms of the film's run time - back to a remote village in 1960s rural Iran. But let's not get ahead of ourselves, because first adult Leila, gay and newly divorced from her wife, gets pregnant with the guy in drag who plays Hedwig on Broadway.\n\nWe told you this was chaotic.\n\nAbout that Halloween party: Leila wins the costume prize - justifiably! - and also hooks up in a back room with Maximillian (Tom Byrne, charming in a less roguish Hugh Grant way), who's starring in \"Hedwig and the Angry Inch\" at the Belasco Theatre (where the show did actually run). And when she gets pregnant - professing she didn't know you could get pregnant from a one-night stand - Max says he's all in.\n\nKeshavarz, whose film won the audience prize at Sundance, likes a flashback, and one of them takes us back to Leila's childhood summer trips to Iran, fooling guards at the airport looking for banned American music and videos, and bringing Cyndi Lauper to her Iranian relatives. Who, in turn, dance with abandon to \"Girls Just Wanna Have Fun\" - a joyous scene.\n\nBack in the States (the film toggles perhaps too frequently between eras, mostly 2000s New Jersey, 1980s Brooklyn and 1960s rural Iran) adult Leila's father needs a heart transplant. And Leila is hurting from her failed marriage. In flashback, we see her bringing her wife to Thanksgiving dinner and her mother, unable to approve of the gay relationship, ultimately kicking the couple out in disgust.\n\nWhat has made her mother's heart so cold, particularly with her daughter? Leila's grandmother hints that a mysterious scandal long ago brought Shireen to America. To understand, we're taken back to that village in Iran, where Shireen was a bride at 14, coping with early motherhood and heartbreak. Luckily, this section of the film stars an extraordinary young actor, Kamand Shafieisabet in her first film, packing an emotional wallop into every scene.\n\nAs vividly as Keshavarz portrays the country of her heritage, she is unable to return there - her first feature, \"Circumstance,\" about sexual desire between two girls in Iran, won her her first audience award at Sundance but also got her banned from the country.\n\nIn any case we end \"The Persian Version\" not in Iran but back in the States, in a place not usually very comical but where most comedies involving a birth, even a dramatic comedy like this, eventually wind up: the maternity ward.\n\nThe scene here is intentionally crowded and yes, chaotic, just like the entire film. But it ends on a note that brings easy tears.\n\nThe rebelliousness of each of the strong women here - mother and daughter - somehow coalesces into understanding. Such moments can be sappy, but here, as with her lovely opening shot, Keshavarz does it well. She sticks the landing.\n\n\"The Persian Version,\" a Sony Pictures Classics release, in limited release Friday and nationwide on Nov. 3, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association \"for language and some sexual references.\" Running time: 107 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: A holiday movie with some bite in Alexander Payne's 'The Holdovers'\nBy **LINDSEY BAHR**  \nOctober 23, 2023. 4:30 PM EST\n\n---\n\nAlexander Payne brings audiences to a New England boarding school in 1970 in \"The Holdovers,\" a textured, nostalgic and often funny piece about three lonely and mismatched souls stuck together over Christmas break. It's a keeper and possibly even destined to become a classic.\n\nThe holiday movie genre is suspect - even the most well-intentioned entries can be too saccharine, too wistful, too \"Lifetime.\" But Payne, working with a sharp script written by David Hemingston, keeps \"The Holdovers\" grounded and real. Even absent your own memories of smoking indoors or handsewn outerwear, this is the kind of thoughtful, precisely constructed movie where you can almost taste the cigarette smoke and feel your fingers numbing through drafty wool mittens.\n\nWith its knowingly retro production titles starting the film, \"The Holdovers\" lets you settle in and submit to something that could very well have been made in the time it was set, which was one of Payne's goals. Similarly, the recurring Damien Jurado song \"Silver Joy,\" a soothing and melancholy tune that perfectly sets the tone and place, feels like a forgotten Cat Stevens melody - not something from the past decade. It's all part of the transportive magic of the experience.\n\nPaul Giamatti stars as Paul Hunham, a curmudgeonly ancient history instructor whose only pleasure seems to be derived from holding his privileged students to account and failing them without regard for political considerations. He's the kind of guy who looks suspiciously at a smiling colleague giving him homemade Christmas cookies and wants to start a new lesson in the last hours before the break.\n\nPaul draws the short straw for holdover duty - i.e. babysitting the students staying on campus during the break for various reasons. After a few days of chaos and humor, the group is whittled down to just one: Angus Tully (newcomer Dominic Sessa), whose mom abandoned their plans for a beach vacation at the last minute to spend time with her new husband. And no one is happy, least of all Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), the head cook mourning her son's death in Vietnam.\n\nThe actors get to explore depths beyond the tropes of the cranky teacher, the depressed cook and the privileged jerk as they clumsily try to navigate an unpleasant situation. To make matters even bleaker, food deliveries stop over the break and the heat is turned off everywhere but the infirmary, where they must bunk in sad hospital beds for the duration.\n\nIt's strange to think that this is the first time that Giamatti has reunited with Payne since screaming about not wanting Merlot in \"Sideways,\" which came out almost 20 years ago. These two together make for a special match. Giamatti doesn't let the characters' quirks (a glass eye) overwhelm his choices - this man's pathos runs deep, as does his militant view of what a Barton man does and does not do.\n\nRandolph also adds turbulent emotion to what could have been a tertiary, one-note character consumed in grief. She is in grief, which comes on in both expected and unexpected ways, but she's also witty and wise and a perfect foil to Paul's didactics.\n\nBut the true discovery is Sessa, making his film debut. They found him in the drama department at one of their shooting locations, Deerfield Academy. Casting modern teens in period pieces can be a tricky art, but Sessa somehow looks straight out of 1969. And he goes head-to-head with his seasoned co-stars, exhibiting a real capacity for both drama and physical comedy.\n\nThe idea of found family is a little too neat and cliche for \"The Holdovers,\" but perhaps more resonant and believable are the hard, and sometimes comically, learned lessons about how to be a decent person in the world - how to look outside of your own problems to empathize with and maybe even help others. No one comes out of this fixed or healed; It's just a bit of life mixed up in the surreal pressure cooker of the holidays.\n\n\"The Holdovers,\" a Focus Features release opening in New York and Los Angeles Friday, in limited release Nov. 3, nationwide on Nov. 10, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for \"some drug use, language and brief sexual material.\" Running time: 133 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Netflix's 'Old Dads' is a recycling of PC grievances and a Bill Burr career nadir\nBy **MARK KENNEDY**  \nOctober 19, 2023. 9:00 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThe new Netflix movie \"Old Dads\" has a title problem. It really should be called \"Old Dads Yelling at Clouds\" or \"Old Dads Raging at QR Codes.\" It's designed for people who find it hard to navigate the Netflix scroll and so blame millennials for being woke.\n\nBill Burr, who directs from a script by him and Ben Tishler, leads a meandering, unfunny assault on PC culture that would seem perfectly in place in the 1990s alongside \"Illiberal Education\" by Dinesh D'Souza and the rantings of Pat Buchanan. It's so dated there's even a mention of Halliburton.\n\nThe whiff of deep, old school morass about modern life comes from the moment the movie begins with the Miramax logo and a rock guitar solo, two clear signals we're going back in time when making fun of Starbucks cup sizes was funny.\n\nBurr, who plays a 51-year-old dad with a young son and another child on the way, is immediately ranting about the lack of parking spots, mechanical scooters, pre-school etiquette, Twitter, emotional learning, vaping and paper straws. Cutting edge humor, this is not.\n\nBurr, who has also conspired to sully the reputations of onscreen buddies Bobby Cannavale and Bokeem Woodbine by inviting them into this mess, go on to mock trans identity and the notion of \"check your privilege.\"\n\n\"No offense, you're just coming across a little old, you know? A little out of touch,\" a younger guy tells Burr, who responds: \"Like your generation? Filming yourselves while you're flipping water bottles?\"\n\nThe plot is loosey-goosey, never anything engrossing and more like a series of set pieces for Burr to act badly. The three old dads once owned a high-end throwback jersey company - throwback at least is on brand - and have sold it, returning as employees to a 28-year-old new boss, who fancies himself a disruptor. \"I appreciate you,\" he tells them, which naturally enrages them.\n\nStrap in for a lot of purposely baiting slurs and then amazement that there's push-back. \"Is it ever over with these people?\" whines Burr's dad, whose style of parenting is to rub dirt into a child's wound to make them more macho.\n\nWhile Burr is a boiling cauldron of grievances, Cannivale's dad tries too hard being cool - saying things are \"fleek\" and that he has \"gotta bounce\" - and Woodbine's carefully curated life is suddenly under threat. Things go south for all of them when they \"exercise free speech\" - in other words, spew misogynist hate.\n\nTheir friendships begin to rend and their wives - portrayed as either cold, needy or intimidating - begin bickering. Mostly because Burr is a Gen-X anti-social warrior, prone to go on an angry rant no matter the consequences. \"What, you're mad?\" he screams at his pregnant wife. \"Cause I'm honest?\" No, 'cause your toxic, dude.\n\nIn one scene, the three old dads try to trap a millennial into using the n-word when he sings along to N.W.A.'s \"Straight Outta Compton.\" Why? That will apparently expose the hypocrisy of the younger generation. But it doesn't. It's also a moment lifted from another earlier Netflix movie, \"You People.\"\n\nThere's no way this cinematic slop would lead to a strip club, is there? You bet your G-string it does. That's where Burr's old dad comes to a realization, and where the others come to their own realizations. That they should be better men? No, it's too late for that. You can't teach an old dad new tricks. As for you, gentle viewer, you're better off watching water bottles flip in the air for 100 minutes.\n\n\"Old Dads,\" a Netflix release streaming starting Friday, is rated R for \"pervasive language, sexual material, nudity and brief drug use.\" Running time: 104 minutes. Zero stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: In 'Nyad,' Jodie Foster swims away with a showcase for Annette Bening\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nOctober 18, 2023. 10:00 PM EST\n\n---\n\nIn \"Nyad,\" there are two feats of perseverance on display. First, there is the ceaseless determination of Diana Nyad (Annette Bening) to accomplish a marathon swim from Cuba to Florida across 103 miles of open, shark-infested waters. Then there is the mettle of Nyad's support team to tolerate the singularly self-absorbed and stubborn Nyad. Both, in the film, are an endurance sport.\n\n\"Nyad,\" which opens in limited theaters Friday and streams Nov. 3 on Netflix, is in many ways a conventional sports drama, defined by long odds and personal triumph. But there is enough here to help the film, directed by the intrepid filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, if not swim against the tide of sports-biopic convention then at least ride a swift current to the finish line.\n\nFirst and foremost there's the fact that this is a sports drama led by two actresses in their 60s: Bening and Jodie Foster, who plays Diana's best friend and personal trainer Bonnie Stoll. When \"Nyad\" gets underway, the setting isn't the 1970s, when Nyad's record swims made her a headline-grabbing sensation. It's Diana's 60th birthday, which for her only marks her long distance from a real challenge. \"Where's the excellence?\" she says.\n\nDiana soon thereafter gets back in the pool, resolving to complete the Cuba-to-Florida swim, a route some moviegoers may associate more with the Go-Fast boats of Michael Mann's \"Miami Vice\" than athletic pursuit. For Diana, the 50-hour endeavor is a matter of completing a long-ago abandoned dream and a way to prove to herself (and everyone else) that age is no match for her will.\n\nIt's the rare role that could be said to be both shark and Oscar bait. Yet Bening's performance has little vanity to it. Her Diana is obsessively single-minded to the point of unlikeable. When Diana hits the ocean, Bening turns into a ferociously forward-moving force who won't let anything - not thunder storms, nor jelly fish stings - stop her in her quest. Just keep swimming? She'd leave Dory in the dust.\n\nDiana also comes close to outswimming the people trying hardest to help her. Though the film is principally a showcase for Bening, it's Foster's supporting turn that lifts \"Nyad.\" Foster is a rare screen presence these days, which only makes her warmth and ease all the more powerful here. \"Nyad\" is balanced between Diana's admirably insane ambition and Bonnie's loyal (up to a point) support for her friend. In any case, it's a reminder, like a pail of cold water, of just how good Foster can be.\n\nOther supporting characters are along for the ride, too, most notably Rhys Ifans' crusty sea-dog navigator John Bartlett. He's a cliche but a darn likable one. Nyad has, herself, often been a brash and savvy self-promoter less likely to share the spotlight. It's to the movie's credit that it pushes back against its prickly protagonist at the same time it exalts her.\n\nBut \"Nyad\" does accept Nyad's ultimate accomplishment, even if some have disputed it. Her 2013 swim to the Florida Keys was never ratified by the World Open Water Swimming Assn., and fellow marathon swimmers have cast doubts on it. Nyad has forcefully maintained she completed the swim, without assistance. At times, \"Nyad\" bends over backwards to depict Nyad as conscientious of the rules.\n\nVasarhelyi and Chin, in their narrative debut, mix in documentary footage throughout the film, smoothly transitioning from the non-fiction world they come from. They're the filmmaking team behind documentary standouts like the Oscar-winning \"Free Solo\" and the Thai cave chronicle \"The Rescue.\"\n\nThose films were excellent not just due to Vasarhelyi and Chin's own filmmaking adventurousness but because of their firm grasp of the psychology of those who push themselves to physical extremes. \"Nyad\" relies on flashbacks to Diana's past - including an encounter with an unnamed swim coach Nyad said sexually assaulted her and others - to dig into what fuels her.\n\nAnd just like Alex Honnold of \"Free Solo\" and the British cave divers of \"The Rescue,\" \"Nyad\" convincingly argues that to accomplish something great - to really dream big - you may need a dose of delusion, too.\n\n\"Nyad,\" a Netflix release is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for thematic material involving sexual abuse, some strong language and brief partial nudity. Running time: 121 minutes. Three stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Cornwell/le Carré, through Errol Morris' lens, in riveting 'The Pigeon Tunnel'\nBy **LINDSEY BAHR**  \nOctober 18, 2023. 3:39 PM EST\n\n---\n\nErrol Morris's conversation with the late David Cornwell in \"The Pigeon Tunnel\" is fascinating even without the filmmaking flourishes.\n\nCornwell, better known by his pen name John le Carré, was the spy-turned-novelist whose tales of espionage and betrayal defined an era, gave literary heft to a genre and inspired numerous adaptations. And here, Morris challenges him to reflect on his unconventional childhood - his con-man father, his mother who left him at 5 never to return - on through his time in the secret services and beyond. You hear how he quite literally began life on the run, how he learned to be a \"little spy\" from quite a young age, how his father loomed so large in his imagination and how untrustworthy his own memory even turned out to be.\n\nIt could have been just a transcript; It would have been a must-read.\n\nCornwell died in 2020 at 89, and this film which will be streaming on Apple TV+ Friday, is said to be his final and \"most candid\" interview. That might simply be marketing-hype but, of course, this is not just an interview. It's an Errol Morris film, right down to the Philip Glass score. And while the Interrotron and the reenactments might not be the revolutionary storytelling devices they once were, they're almost comforting at this point and no less effective at creating a mood and an emotional experience around a sharp conversation.\n\nMorris turns \"The Pigeon Tunnel\" into a le Carré-style thriller itself - a probing examination at the man behind George Smiley, the betrayals of his life, both to him and by him, and up through his fascination with spies and double agents. It scarcely matters if you've never read or even heard of \"The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.\" At the heart of \"The Pigeon Tunnel\" are some wonderful, and chilling, observations about life and the nature of man, and a fascinating story about a master storyteller.\n\nLike any good spy or novelist for that matter, Cornwell is as equally interested in his interviewer - or interrogator. He cheekily uses these words almost interchangeably. The nature of any interview has as much to do with the subject as it does the questioner.\n\n\"This is a performance,\" Cornwell says. \"You need to know something about the ambitions of the people you're talking to.\"\n\nAnd to understand Cornwell, or at least poke at some truths about him, you have to look at this father, Ronnie Cornwell. Ronnie was a con man straight out of a novel - charming, contradictory, always on the brink of success, sometimes on the run, occasionally in jail and never second guessing himself. He taught Cornwall the art of the performance and made childhood for him and his brother \"terribly exciting,\" if fraught and false. Later in life, he asked his now wealthy son to repay him for costs spent on his education.\n\nOnce, at a hotel in Monte Carlo as a child, Cornwell remembers fixating on the tunnel that pigeons would fly through to provide ample shooting targets for paying men. They were bred on the roof, sent through the tunnel to either die or go back to the roof once again to tempt death all over again. Many of his books, he said, had the working title \"The Pigeon Tunnel,\" which he found to be a metaphor for a lot of things. It took until his memoir in 2016 for it to stick to publication.\n\nThere might not be anything quite so shocking as Robert McNamara admitting mistakes, but Cornwell has his own crosses, including regrets about painting the secret services as \"so bloody brilliant\" at the wrong time. He even wonders if he'd have been a traitor in a different life. But, he says, \"luckily I found a home for my larceny.\"\n\nCornwell also seemed at peace with himself and his purpose (looking in the mirror was only hard, he said, when he had a hangover). He'd discovered that writing was his freedom and he was happiest when doing so - a revelation that everyone should be so lucky to have for themselves. That, or, to have Errol Morris oversee their last interview.\n\n\"The Pigeon Tunnel,\" an Apple Original Films release streaming Friday on Apple TV+, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for \"brief language, some violence, smoking.\" Running time: 93 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Scorsese's epic 'Killers of the Flower Moon' is sweeping tale of greed, richly told\nBy **JOCELYN NOVECK**  \nOctober 18, 2023. 11:23 AM EST\n\n---\n\nThere tends to be lots of fast talking and fast moving in Martin Scorsese films, often from shifty types trying to get away with something. Or sometimes, simply because the master filmmaker has so much to pack in.\n\nBut in \"Killers of the Flower Moon,\" everything seems to slow down, and especially when the camera lands on Lily Gladstone. As Mollie, the Osage woman at the heart of this sprawling, real-life tale of greed and treachery on a scale both broad and intimate, Gladstone is the quiet, powerful center - taking her time, letting her eyes do the work, and unafraid of silence.\n\nIt's a beautifully cadenced performance, all the more impressive because Gladstone's sharing the screen with two of our most celebrated actors. Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro both turn in superb work for their legendary director, appearing together for the first time in 30 years. But Gladstone, in the rare Scorsese film that gives center stage to a female character, is the emotional core here, and it's her face that stays etched in our memory.\n\nBased on David Grann's gripping whodunit set among the Osage in 1920s Oklahoma, \"Killers\" is a departure in other ways for the 80-year-old filmmaker. It's his first Western, a genre he's long wanted to explore - albeit a uniquely Scorsese Western, with an upended world of heroes and villains. And in telling this Osage story, he focuses on a people he's never depicted before, deeply mindful of honoring their experience and their rituals, beliefs and customs.\n\nIt surely won't surprise anyone that Scorsese brings his full wealth of artistic resources to this endeavor, along with his brilliant cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto, and inspired production designer, Jack Fisk. Together, on location in Oklahoma, they've created an oil boomtown astonishing in its precision, detail and spirit.\n\nIt may also not surprise anyone that Scorsese has taken three and a half hours (albeit three minutes less than \"The Irishman\" ) to tell his tale. This may be a source of debate, but it's hard to argue that a story this hefty - a chronicle of a dark chapter in American history and a shocking true crime tale, all framed in a fraught love story - doesn't deserve the length, considering the craft in every shot. And with some scenes - a boisterous prairie wedding, or a dance on a boomtown main drag - you feel you could have stayed longer still.\n\nWe begin with a late 19th-century ceremony, one of many portrayals of Osage spiritual life. Then, in a memorable image, there's a whoosh from underground: Oil, spurting from land that was supposed to be worthless.\n\nThanks to this discovery, we learn in a terrific prologue using silent-movie title cards, the Osage become enormously wealthy. But they're deemed \"incompetent\" and appointed white \"guardians\" who control their assets. This is how we meet Mollie, asking for her own money to pay medical bills.\n\nMeanwhile, Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) steps off the train, a World War I vet with a taste for women and finer things, but no money, or talent to speak of. Perhaps his uncle can help. William Hale (De Niro) is a cattle rancher but more like a king around these parts - indeed, King's his nickname - a white man who speaks the Osage language and calls himself their best friend.\n\nBut it's clear from the get-go Hale has sinister motives, and De Niro's just the guy to ooze sinister from every pore as this Godfather-like figure (he commits crimes, and they're organized). Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth depart here from Grann's book, which holds us in suspense as to Hale's motives. He wants Osage money, and tells Ernest that if he woos and marries Mollie - well, even less-than-brilliant Ernest can do the math.\n\nSo can Mollie. Trusting but hardly naive, she knows Ernest covets her wealth, but there's growing affection between the two, and their marriage, gorgeously rendered, is a happy occasion.\n\nBut then the Osage start dying, one by one, in suspicious ways - including, eventually, Mollie's sisters and mother. As for Ernest, he's no angel, spending time robbing and gambling. But is he doing more? DiCaprio's mouth settles into a tortured frown as he becomes increasingly torn between marital loyalty and fealty to his venal uncle.\n\nFinally, federal agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons, perfectly cast) shows up, working for J. Edgar Hoover in what became the FBI. (It's White who figured most prominently in Grann's book, and indeed DiCaprio was once slated to play him.) This last act finds its way to a crackling courtroom scene perhaps only Scorsese could bring together: jittery DiCaprio and menacing De Niro, joined by a bombastic Brendan Fraser and a sputtering John Lithgow.\n\nIndeed, the vast supporting cast includes countless faces you may recognize, as well as cameos of a number of musicians, and dozens of Osage actors in key parts. Scorsese's late friend Robbie Robertson wrote the memorable score.\n\nWe won't spoil the ingenious epilogue in which Scorsese ties up the loose narrative ends - with another significant cameo. But the fact that this epilogue comes after, oh, 200 minutes of expertly sustained tension is just another sign that in the latter years of his career, Scorsese is upping the ante - in terms of scale, yes, but also ambition.\n\nHe has called his work an offering to the Osage, and to other Native peoples. It also feels like an offering to those who love cinema, allowing us to watch a master of the craft continue to force himself, unlikely as it seems, to stretch and learn. May he keep stretching - himself, and us.\n\n\"Killers of the Flower Moon,\" an AppleTV+ release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association \"for violence, some grisly images, and language.\" Running time: 206 minutes. Four stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: In the elated 'Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,' every seat is the best seat in the house\nBy **MARIA SHERMAN**  \nOctober 12, 2023. 8:35 PM EST\n\n---\n\nIt opens with a clock counting down until show time - the dropped stomach, rollercoaster slowly encroaching its apex sensation - and then, a gentle fake out. Taylor Swift is heard before she is seen. \"It's been a long time...\" her voice carries. Then the drop hits: an abridged performance of \"Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince\" into \"Cruel Summer,\" a track that TikTok breathed new life into four years after its initial release on her 2019 album \"Lover.\"\n\nThis is the moment it should become clear: \"Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour\" film is a near exact replica of her blockbuster concert performance, which recaps all 10 of her studio albums across 17 years of recorded work. There will be no narrative breaks, no behind-the-scenes footage, no additional ornamentation of the monolithic set (with the exception of a few CGI effects and album title cards to introduce each epoch.) The film delivers on the promise of its title: this is the Eras Tour in full - conveniently viewable at an AMC theater near you.\n\nFor those who've managed to snag tickets to the Eras Tour concert, it is the ability to relive the experience, likely with loved ones who weren't as lucky. For those who didn't attend, it's a chance to test expectations versus reality. But for everyone, it is the opportunity to have every seat in the house transform into the best seat in the house. \"Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour\" is all up close and personal footage from every vantage point, courtesy of Sam Wrench, who shot and directed it.\n\nWhere else but in this film can you be placed inches from Swift's moss-covered \"evermore\" album -era piano as she introduces \"Champagne Problems\" - so close as to examine phalanges as they press down on the final notes of the song's coda? And where else does it sound this good, highlighting sonic details that might've been missed in the stadium setting? Like guitars placed high in the mix on \"Look What You Made Me Do,\" differing slightly from the recording, or emphasis placed on moments fans have transformed into opportunities from insider participation, like when everyone shouts, \"1, 2, 3, 4, let's go, bitch!\" in \"Delicate,\" as inspired by a viral video?\n\nEdits to the three-and-a-half-hour concert production are few on screen. Costume changes are cut down. Some songs are snipped, like \"The Archer,\" \"Cardigan,\" \"Wildest Dreams,\" and \"no body no crime.\" The \"Speak Now\" section is just one song long: \"Enchanted,\" with \"Long Live\" soundtracking the end credits alongside images of \"Eras Tour\" bloopers and an endless exchange of friendship bracelets. On stage banter, too, is limited, mostly reserved for humor and exposition.\n\nAs previously reported, the concert film, compiled from several Swift shows at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, a suburb of Los Angeles, is expected to launch with $100 million, or possibly more. Advance ticket sales worldwide have already surpassed $100 million.\n\nAMC announced that the concert film broke its record for highest ticket sales revenue in a single day. The theater chain Cinemark reported domestic pre-sale records are more than \"10 times higher pre-sales than any other cinema engagement event.\"\n\nIt's too early to tell, but all signs point to her usurping 2011's \"Justin Bieber: Never Say Never\" as the biggest concert film, ever. And for the premiere Wednesday night in Los Angeles, Swift shut down The Grove, a bustling mall just south of Hollywood, and watched her performance in an auditorium alongside a star-studded audience of Adam Sandler, Mariska Hargitay, actor Julia Garner, \"Queer Eye\" co-host Karamo Brown, country star Maren Morris, singer Hayley Kiyoko and Bachelor Nation's Becca Tilley.\n\nIt is massive, but nothing could exactly recreate the decibel-bursting exhilaration of a live music performance, particularly one at this scale. But in this format, Swift gets as close as possible - and for her, being an exception to the rule is par for the course. In a fractured, algorithmic music industry, Swift is a final exemplar of monoculture, a figure recognizable by most. And because of that fact, she's able to fully communicate her power in a concert film with little to no dialogue.\n\n(That, admittedly, is something available to only her and Beyoncé, a superstar Swift has learned from and mirrored, in some ways. For example: Beyoncé limits traditional press appearances to instead present her own story in her own terms; Swift has begun to do the same. Relatedly, Bey will release a documentary chronicling her Renaissance World Tour, premiering at AMC theaters in North America on Dec. 1 in a similar agreement to Swift.)\n\nThe success of Swift's concert film, too, has something to do with the setting of a theater. Her revealing 2020 documentary, \"Miss Americana,\" was released to Netflix and meant to be absorbed with a kind of intimacy. The viewer is with her in the backseat of car, listening to her incredible candor about the pressures of being Swift, and in a particularly memorable moment, disordered eating.\n\nA very different viewing experience, \"Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour\" is meant to be enjoyed communally - a shout-along affair where fans in bespoke cosplay can dance and sing and film the screen on their smartphones, breaking the rules of the traditional movie-going experience. Strangers become friends. And all the while, feeling closer to Swift than ever before.\n\n\"Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,\" an AMC release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for some strong language and suggestive material. Running time: 168 minutes. Three stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: In 'Anatomy of a Fall,' a sharp courtroom drama that will end relationships\nBy **LINDSEY BAHR**  \nOctober 10, 2023. 2:20 PM EST\n\n---\n\nOf all the ways that a relationship can end, a fundamental disagreement about a work of art is in some ways extremely silly. And yet, a film or a book exposing an irreparable rift in a love that perhaps wasn't as compatible, as symbiotic or as caring as one might have thought is also, somehow, as good a reason as any. Maybe it will even, eventually, provide a funny story.\n\nAnother, more excruciating, way for a relationship to end is with one party falling off the roof of a house to their death, followed by a humiliating public trial to determine the fault or innocence of the other, as happens in Justine Triet's Palme d'Or-winning \"Anatomy of a Fall.\" And just like \"The Corrections\" before it, it seems that \"Anatomy of a Fall\" might be the new litmus test for modern relationships. See it with a romantic partner at your own risk. But, from my perch, this is one that's worth the debate(s) it provokes.\n\nSandra Hüller, the German actor known for \"Toni Erdmann\" and, soon, \"The Zone of Interest,\" is Sandra, a writer living in a chalet in the French Alps with her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis), and 11-year-old son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner). Triet thrusts the audience into a tense and stressful atmosphere, introducing us to Sandra in the midst of an interview with a grad student, a woman, which will become significant later. Sandra is a little prickly and sipping a glass of red wine while deflecting questions back at her interviewer. It is hard to focus on what they're saying, however, as an instrumental version of 50 Cent's \"P.I.M.P.\" blares through the household on a deafening, constant and maddening loop. Samuel's choice, apparently.\n\nThe student leaves, Sandra waves goodbye from a balcony, 50 Cent still playing, glass of red still in hand and Daniel, who is blind, heads out for a walk with his dog. He returns to find his father on the ground outside, dead and bleeding out. Sandra's lawyer, Vincent (Swann Arlaud, a calming presence), later analyzes the fall trajectory and finds the cause of death \"inconclusive.\"\n\n\"Stop,\" Sandra says. \"I did not kill him.\"\n\n\"That's not the point,\" Vincent responds.\n\nIt's one brief exchange that could sum up the 150-minute film, which is a smartly constructed and wholly engaging whodunit, courtroom thriller, marriage drama and, at some points, satire. This is not really a tearjerker, but a visceral dismantling of a life that's either happening in the wake of a tragedy or a murder. Either way, it's uncomfortable to watch Samuel's sharp, merciless advocate (Antoine Reinartz) grill Sandra about their marriage troubles and why, in his mind, that makes her a likely suspect. She's also accused of doing it for material for her books.\n\nHüller makes the audience squirm along with her as she plays the tricky game of knowing when to take the insults and when to push back (without seeming \"unlikable,\" of course), and she's doing this all in two languages that aren't the character's own (French and English). It's exhausting, illuminating and triggering to be reminded of the internalized misogyny that still exists and even thrives in marriages that look evolved and equal on paper. But it's hard to fight back when parties can hide their own culpability behind therapy-speak.\n\nFor Daniel, the trial and his part in it plays out like a vicious divorce proceeding, in which his parents' characters are dissected and annihilated. He bears witness to their fights, their infidelities, their insecurities and all manner of speculation made by prosecutors, therapists and judges about the private matters of this couple, the complexities of which are far too great for a child burdened with the loss of one parent and the possible imprisonment of another.\n\nAnd, of course, Samuel is unable to speak for himself - not really at least. His therapist has some insights and assumptions, his lawyer has many, and there is one brutal argument that we're all privy too, since he himself recorded it in secret to inspire his own writings. For some audiences, this might be the biggest and most egregious injustice of all, coating everything with an uncertainty that will never be resolved. At a certain point, you might even forget that it's a murder trial you're watching.\n\n\"Anatomy of a Fall\" may not be a film with many concrete answers, ultimately, but the truths it uncovers are irrefutable.\n\n\"Anatomy of a Fall,\" a Neon release, in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for \"sexual references, violent images and some language.\" Running time: 150 minutes. Four stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: In 'Fair Play,' a battle of the sexes on Wall Street\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nOctober 4, 2023. 5:20 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThe disquieting root of Chloe Domont's slinky, slick feature debut \"Fair Play\" lies in the face of Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) as he learns that his fiance Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) has been given the promotion at their Wall Street hedge fund he thought was his.\n\n\"Congratulations,\" he says with a grin that looks more like a grimace. \"That's amazing.\"\n\nEhrenreich, a cunning actor here given a part to chew on, conveys the moment with the just right mix of of support for Emily and shattering woundedness. Up to this point, we've seen Emily and Luke as only a swoon-worthy romantic pair deeply in love with one another. In the film's breezy opening moments, they slip away from a party to have sex in a bathroom. After, Luke kneels to propose.\n\nBut the engagement ring lies ominously on the counter when both dress in the morning for work in their their Chinatown apartment at the same high-powered hedge fund in downtown New York. They've left some inner version of their selves at home; at the office, they must keep their relationship a secret for the sake of company policy and their own career ambitions.\n\nWork-life balance gets more than a little wobbly in \"Fair Play,\" which debuts Friday on Netflix, and so do traditional gender roles. Luke initially puts up a good front, but his alpha male persona (and his libido) takes a beating when Emily's meetings with the sexist boss Campbell (Eddie Marsan) go past midnight and banter around the office turns to his fiance. In \"Fair Play,\" the supportive male may just be a facade.\n\nSince its hit arrival at the Sundance Film Festival, \"Fair Play\" has been hailed for reviving the long-dormant-but-often-missed erotic thriller. While there are bits of that in Domont's film, \"Fair Play\" is neither especially erotic nor much of a thriller. What it is, though, is often gripping battle of the sexes set in a toxic, misogynist corporate world where power and sex are inextricably linked currencies.\n\nThe movie is brilliant and breezy at first but sputters just as its catching fire. It may, in fact, be wrong to call this a battle of the sexes - Luke turns out to be not really up for a fight. He transforms into an emasculated and increasingly volatile wreck and \"Fair Play\" lurches toward a lurid and overcooked third act. For Emily - and surely countless women just like her - \"Fair Play\" is more of a horror movie, and an accurate one at that.\n\nBut for a while, Domont's film is electric thanks to its lead actors. Dynevor is especially terrific playing a woman whose first thought when she's promoted isn't pride for herself but concern for the hurt feelings of Luke.\n\nAt its best, \"Fair Play\" feels like a demented game where everything in high finance comes down to how you project yourself, man or woman. Emily knows when meeting the boss to switch her drink order from a Diet Coke to Macallen 25, neat. It's in sly moments like these that Domont is at her most playful. Double entendres fly. Coming home drunk one night, Emily tries to cajole a tired Luke into sleeping with her. \"C'mon,\" she says, \"I'll do all the work.\"\n\n\"Fair Play,\" a Netflix release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for pervasive language, sexual content, some nudity, and sexual violence. Running time: 113 minutes. Three stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Jamie Foxx leads a crowd-pleasing courtroom drama in 'The Burial'\nBy **LINDSEY BAHR**  \nOctober 4, 2023. 3:54 PM EST\n\n---\n\nJamie Foxx deploys his movie star charm judiciously and skillfully as a litigator with swagger to spare in \"The Burial,\" a very entertaining courtroom drama.\n\nFoxx is one of those actors, blessed with an allure and glamour that runs so deep that it's almost tempting to dismiss a performance like this as one that's natural. It's one of those compliments that's rotten at its core - of course he, or Clooney, or whomever, is good at being slick and appealing, right? If it looks effortless, we assume it is, denying them the work that goes into every role.\n\nThe same could be said for \"The Burial,\" which is glossy, appealing and goes down suspiciously easy. Is there a catch or did director and co-writer Maggie Betts just prove her commercial chops in her sophomore feature? (It's the latter.) Just take a look at the poster used for its marketing campaign -- a little retro, a little cheesy, and a lot self-aware. This movie and everyone involved knows what it is.\n\nIn a probably skewed memory of the mid-90s, these sort of mid-budget \"rousing courtroom dramas\" seemed ubiquitous, but have gone the way of the rom-com at least in big theatrical releases. \"The Burial\" will be in some theaters for a week, before coming to your living room on Oct. 13 on Prime Video.\n\nThis story is a classic David vs. Goliath one, in which a Biloxi funeral home owner, Tommy Lee Jones as Jeremiah O'Keefe, goes up against a billionaire, Raymond Loewen (Bill Camp). Both were children of funeral parlor owners, but O'Keefe stayed local while Loewen took the so-called \"death care\" business corporate. He made a fortune acquiring funeral homes in Canada and then the United States in anticipation of a \"golden age of death,\" in which the baby boomers start meeting their ends in mass numbers. \"The Burial\" is loosely based on a true story, which was chronicled by Jonathan Harr in The New Yorker in 1999.\n\nBetts focuses her lens on Foxx's character, Willie E. Gary, a self-made success in personal injury law, who has never lost a case and doesn't plan to. Jeremiah's case is a contract one but a young associate played by the always appealing Mamoudou Athie convinces him that he's going to need a lead counsel who is Black if they're going to have a chance. The trial has been set for a poor, largely Black area, and Jeremiah's longtime lawyer, Mike Allred (Alan Ruck, playing a character who would probably be a Con-Head), is an obvious racist. He's working on it, he says chillingly to a team of Black lawyers.\n\nWhen Willie does finally agree to go out of his comfort zone and take on a different kind of case (his ego stoked by the promise that this could make him as famous as Johnnie Cochran), there is a steep and humbling learning curve and a formidable opponent in Jurnee Smollett's Ivy League-educated lawyer representing the Loewen Group.\n\nBetts shares a screenwriting credit with Doug Wright, the Pulitzer and Tony-winning playwright, who has been with the project for years, with Alexander Payne once attached to direct. Betts was coming off a promising, but small, debut - the religious drama \"Novitiate,\" with Margaret Qualley and Melissa Leo. \"The Burial\" too is assured and straightforward, and faces questions about race and privilege and inequality head on. This story is about two older white men fighting about a contract, sure, but Betts and Wright expand its scope with sensitivity and nuance. Like many good courtroom dramas before it, this case is bigger than just these two guys.\n\nSmollett's Mame is the big invention of the movie, which doesn't grate the way it usually does when screenwriters add a fictional, exceptional woman to diversify a too-male story. Mame is not a one note character - she is brilliant and accomplished but also keenly aware that she can't stumble, falter or lose her cool the way her male counterparts can. Sometimes you even forget that you really shouldn't be rooting for her to win, which is a shrewd touch for a movie with a pretty obvious conclusion and an easily hateable villain.\n\nBut this show belongs to Foxx, and it's a fun feast to see him grandstand and doubt himself and charm all kinds of jurors and make us feel empathetic for a guy who is himself ostentatiously wealthy, no matter if it was easy for the actor or not.\n\n\"The Burial,\" an MGM/Amazon Studios release in theaters Friday and streaming Oct. 13, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for \"language.\" Running time: 125 minutes. Three stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: 'The Exorcist: Believer' doesn't desecrate the original but it won't compel you\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nOctober 4, 2023. 3:28 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThere may be no holier ground in horror than \"The Exorcist.\" As endlessly as William Friedkin's 1973 film has been ripped off and resurrected, its power remains unalloyed, its place in movie history consecrated.\n\nWhy is it that, after we've seen seen so many heads twist around, \"The Exorcist\" can still turn heads? Much, surely, is owed to its patient, restrained approach, icy atmospheres and and evocative, uncluttered imagery - all conjured in the dawning dread of post-1960s America.\n\nBut the possession of young Regan MacNeil still haunts, I think, for its absolute belief in good and evil. It's a supernatural movie that treats the supernatural as straightforwardly natural. The devil is as real and present as all those concrete steps.\n\nThere were flop sequels that followed and plenty of spinoffs that failed to grip. But now, just two months after the death of Friedkin and a few months shy of the original's 50th anniversary, comes a sequel from director David Gordon Green.\n\nHollywood's propensity for reaching back to old classics may be, by now, enough to inspire the kind of projectile vomiting Friedkin made famous. \"The Exorcist: Believer\" was produced by Blumhouse with the intent of launching a new series of films, but it feels guided largely by affection and respect for Friedkin's original rather than more cynical motivations.\n\nThe film's main additions are that, this time, there are two possessed girls (double the fun?) and the Catholic Church is no longer the sole or even the primary demon battler. This is a multidenominational \"Exorcist,\" yet also a less profoundly spiritual one.\n\nGreen, one of today's most protean filmmakers, has been at this before. He rebooted the \"Halloween\" films in a trilogy that started off promisingly with an update to the slasher suburban nightmare before devolving in subsequent films.\n\nIt's easier to recycle \"Halloween\" than it is \"The Exorcist.\" Yet the first thing you notice about \"Believer\" is its sure-handedness. Green, working from a script he wrote with Peter Sattler from a story by Green, Danny McBride and Scott Teems, moves nimbly in setting the atmosphere, refraining from the kinds of flashy camera movement or schlocky scares often found in horror films. There's craftsmanship in how \"Believer\" is stitched together - at least at first.\n\nThirteen years after the death of his pregnant wife in an earthquake in Haiti, Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) lives with his 13-year-old daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett). They are close and Victor is a little overprotective. When Angela and a friend Katherine (Olivia O'Neill) walk through the woods after school and start performing a seance by candlelight, it's not hard to guess where this might be going.\n\nBut \"The Exorcist: Believer\" initially gets its hooks into you thanks to the agility of the filmmaking, the levelheaded presence of Odom Jr. and a fine performance by newcomer Jewett. The girls go missing for several days and, when they return, no longer seem themselves. As things begin to get ugly, the film's attention shifts to the parents - this is more a movie about parenting than it is about faith - including the blurrily characterized parents of Katherine (Norbert Leo Butz and Jennifer Nettles), whose bond with their daughter may be less than Victor's with Angela.\n\nIf \"The Exorcist\" seemed to summon demons, the best \"The Exorcist: Believer\" can do is to conjure tropes. Fingers claw. Heads turn. Bodies levitate. Once the film gets both possessed girls tied down in chairs, back to back, with a cobbled-together team of spiritual defenders around them, \"Believer\" bogs down in a prolonged torture chamber of horror cliches.\n\nGreen, who has long had a keen eye for casting, populates the film with some fine actors. Ellen Burstyn, Oscar-nominated for \"The Exorcist,\" returns as Chris MacNeil, though it may be the film's biggest mistake to so quickly and gruesomely dispatch its most potent performer. Ann Dowd, as a nurse who lives next door, also adds to the film's dramatic heft.\n\nBut \"The Exorcist: Believer\" never manages anything like the deep terror of the original, and the film's climactic scenes pass by with a lifeless predictability. Been there, exhumed that. It may be that to get near the dark danger of \"The Exorcist\" you have to climb your own steps and fight your own demons.\n\n\"The Exorcist: Believer,\" a Universal Pictures release is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for or some violent content, disturbing images, language and sexual references. Running time: 111 minutes. Two stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Check out 'The Royal Hotel' but don't linger in this subtle horror flick\nBy **MARK KENNEDY**  \nOctober 4, 2023. 1:32 PM EST\n\n---\n\n\"The Royal Hotel\" is a horror movie but don't expect any jump-cuts, scary masks or serial killers. It's more like the horror that dawns on a frog when it realizes it is being boiled alive.\n\nFilmmaker Kitty Green tells a captivating tale of two young American female backpackers who find themselves tending bar for a few weeks in a very remote part of Australia.\n\nThe bar is a dump ironically called \"The Royal Hotel\" and the clientele are rough, hard-drinking miners unfamiliar with the etiquette of Miss Manners or even just respectful interaction.\n\nOur two heroines - Julia Garner from \"Ozark\" and Jessica Henwick from \"Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery\" - really should not be in this situation. They are the recipients of dirty jokes, drunken behavior, offensive nicknames and constant propositions. One client pays for his beer by passive-aggressively tossing coins at them.\n\n\"Wouldn't hurt you to smile a bit?\" they are asked.\n\nGreen, who directs with a screenplay she wrote with Oscar Redding, explores how women respond to a male-centered environment and how it can test their own friendship. The constant threat of violence hangs over this tale very uncomfortably, its wingman always being alcohol. Would-be heroes come and then show their true nature, slinking off.\n\nIt is a subtle movie, with the growing accretion of indignities building slowly until one of the women blurts out: \"I'm scared. I'm scared of this place. I'm scared of everyone and everything in this place.\"\n\nAnd yet, they stay.\n\nThe remoteness of the bar - a bus is always several days away - helps explain some of the stasis, but the two women have the very human tendency to settle: They make excuses, they blame themselves, they point to cultural misunderstandings and another day begins.\n\nHugo Weaving plays the bar owner, the arbiter of what is correct (mis)behavior. But the moral center is played by Ursula Yovich, who speaks truth to power and when she leaves, allows chaos to fully enter.\n\n\"The Royal Hotel\" has a pessimistic - OK, accurate - view of gender relations. The two sides simply don't understand each other - \"I can't hear you,\" says one of the women early on to a would-be suitor - and attempts at conversation are so often drowned out by noise. It asks how you can rationalize ending up mopping up puke in a dive bar in rural Down Under.\n\nThe movie perfectly starts with a dark remix of Men at Work's \"Down Under.\" Remember the lyrics: \"Buying bread from a man in Brussels/He was 6-foot-4 and full of muscle/I said, 'Do you speak my language?' He just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich.\"\n\n\"The Royal Hotel\" shares a vibe with Alex Garland's sophisticated horror film \"Men\" - an arty indictment of toxic masculinity that often felt like a lecture. But Green's film doesn't feel like that. The final scene will make you cheer, even if the ultimate message is murky.\n\n\"The Royal Hotel,\" a Neon release, is rated R for \"language throughout, sexual content and nudity.\" Running time: 91 minutes. Three stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Her voice is lower, but Joan Baez has songs to sing and secrets to tell in new doc\nBy **JOCELYN NOVECK**  \nOctober 3, 2023. 5:08 PM EST\n\n---\n\nBob Dylan called it her \"heart-stopping soprano,\" and it's true that when Joan Baez unleashed that pure, angelic voice on the protest song \"We Shall Overcome,\" you could believe we would, indeed, overcome.\n\nThe celebrated folk singer and activist was singing about civil rights, of course. But what we learn in the thoughtful, thorough and sometimes harrowingly intimate \"Joan Baez: I Am a Noise\" is that Baez was also seeking to overcome much on a personal scale: anxiety, depression, loneliness and, late in life, troubling repressed memories about her own father.\n\nIf that sounds like a lot to cover in 113 minutes, it is - especially because the new documentary, directed by Maeve O'Boyle, Miri Navasky and Karen O'Connor, also recaps a 60-year performing career, with the singer telling her story through interviews and an incredible wealth of archival material. We see Baez entering for the very first time a storage unit filled to the ceiling by her late mother with photos, home films, audio recordings, letters, drawings and even tapes of therapy sessions.\n\nAnd she gave her directors the key. The film was originally intended simply to cover Baez's last, 2018 \"Fare Thee Well\" tour, but Baez decided to leave a more thorough legacy.\n\nThe film begins with novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez's quote about how everyone has three lives: public, private and secret. Well, this is certainly apt for Baez, who emerged as a sudden star in 1959, an 18-year-old with a guitar and that bell-like voice, and went on to make some 40 albums, with a 2017 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. As we see from her own anguished drawings and letters beginning in youth, her intensely public life masked both a difficult private one and some dark secrets as well.\n\nAnd then there was Dylan, the same age as Baez, that inscrutable genius who stole her heart and then broke it. It was intoxicating being together, recounts Baez, who introduced him lovingly to her audiences, until a painful UK tour when his fame blossomed and \"it was horrible.\" Then, staring into the camera, she says: \"Hi, Bob!\" It's a welcome and rare opportunity to laugh with her.\n\nBut back to the beginning, where Baez, on the cusp of 80, is preparing for the tour, rehearsing at home in northern California. Her hair is fully gray; her face has not changed much. \"I know I look good for my age, but there is a limit,\" she quips of upcoming retirement. As for her voice, it's there, but definitely lower and more ragged.\n\nAmid concert footage, we toggle to scenes of Baez's youth. We also hear, on and off, a strange (and rather distracting) male voice sounding like a hypnotist. It turns out to be her therapist.\n\nThe story begins with lovely, black-and-white footage of Joan as a child, dancing in a field with her parents and sisters. Her Mexican-born father was dashing. The scenes look idyllic, but there are signs of trouble ahead when, in an interview from the present, Joan notes mysteriously: \"I'm way too conflicted to just have a bunch of happy memories.\"\n\nWe see pages from young Joan's journal, its copious sketches brought to life by wonderfully inventive animation, and hear how white kids called her \"the dumb Mexican\" in school. Panic attacks and anxiety set in. Even when she becomes a star, breaking out at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, her self-image doesn't seem to thrive. Nestled among the many letters to her parents is a drawing of a very small girl: \"This is how I felt on the Carnegie Hall stage.\"\n\nAnd then a charismatic singer-songwriter invades her life.\n\n\"I was just stoned on that talent,\" she says of Dylan. One of the best moments of the film has Baez at the mic, during good times, imitating Dylan imitating her.\n\nBut later, on that tour to Britain, he leaves her in his wake. \"Dylan broke my heart,\" she says.\n\nA new phase sees Baez deeply engaged in protests against the Vietnam War - even going to jail. There, young activist David Harris visits her. The two will marry, she'll become pregnant, and then HE will go to jail. When he comes out, the marriage is troubled and doesn't last. \"He was too young and I was too crazy,\" she says. Gabriel, her son, plays drums in his mother's band on the farewell tour.\n\nLater scenes have Baez discussing a phase of reliance on Quaaludes, which cause her to make some questionable decisions, including posing for an album cover in huge aviator goggles.\n\nThe final act deals with accusations against her father of inappropriate sexual behavior with Joan and one of her sisters, Mimi. Her parents, both deceased, denied it, and Joan's own memories lack detail. She has said she could not have told this story while her parents were still alive.\n\nThere's an excruciating tape of a phone message from her accused dad, and then a tender scene where Baez comforts her aging and dying mother.\n\nAnd then, after footage of a final concert at New York's Beacon Theater, we see the now-retired Baez dancing in a field near her home. A nod perhaps to the childhood scenes - but also maybe a statement that while she hasn't overcome it all, she's overcome a heckuva lot.\n\n\"Joan Baez: I Am a Noise,\" a Magnolia Pictures release, is unrated by the Motion Picture Association. Running time: 113 minutes. Three stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Humans take a back seat in the stunning AI, sci-fi epic 'The Creator'\nBy **LINDSEY BAHR**  \nSeptember 27, 2023. 4:30 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThe artificial intelligence in Gareth Edwards' \"The Creator,\" a visually magnificent if by-the-books epic, is not the AI making headlines at the moment. This is AI in the classic sci-fi mold - the Roy Battys of \"Blade Runner,\" the Avas of \"Ex Machina,\" the ones whose sentience we question and debate endlessly. Will the machines kill us? Take our jobs? Or do something that the movies haven't dreamed possible yet?\n\nAs the retired special forces guy cleaning up nuclear debris, Joshua (John David Washington), flatly tells a fellow worker when she posits that the AIs were indeed after their jobs: \"They can have this one.\"\n\nRegardless, for now, artificial intelligence is more allegory for the other than aspiring screenwriters, filmmakers or trash collectors. And, for Edwards and his co-writer Chris Weitz, they might even have more capacity for humanity and goodness than humans, which is not exactly part of the ChatGPT conversation either, though that would be an interesting twist.\n\nIn the world of \"The Creator\" they're welcomed by society at first as an unambiguous good - a helpful servant class that have the ability to make our human lives better. But as they so often do in sci-fi dystopias, they turned on us. Actually, more specifically, they turned on the U.S. when they dropped a nuclear weapon on downtown Los Angeles. Naturally, that means war.\n\nWashington's Joshua lost his family in the attack and when we meet him, he's undercover in New Asia to try to find the creator of these advanced AIs, a shadowy, elusive figure they call Nimrata. Joshua got busy with other pursuits though. He fell in love with, married and is about to welcome a baby with his on-the-ground source Maya (Gemma Chan), taken from him in an unexpected raid by his peers - one of many truly sublime sequences in which a hovering death star-like aircraft called NOMAD scans the lush landscape with ominous blue lasers. Edwards, who had a complicated journey making \"Rogue One,\" does not deny himself the pleasure of riffing on \"Star Wars\" iconography.\n\nAllison Janney's hardened Colonel later attempts to recruit him for one last shot at finding Nimrata and the ultimate weapon he's suspected of building, but a jaded Joshua demurs that he doesn't care about going extinct: \"I've got TV to watch.\" Of course he eventually says yes and ends up travelling with a Very Special Child, a wide-eyed AI whom he names Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), who might be able to help him find what he's looking for. Voyles is a captivating presence and undeniably compelling. Unfortunately, the script denies her the edge and nuance that would make her more believable as a person as well as a machine. Even Grogu is a little sassy sometimes.\n\nBut this is also a film where the visuals upstage the pretty predictable story and even the actors, including the likes of Washington and Ken Watanabe. The lush landscapes of Southeast Asia are stunningly photographed by Edwards and co-cinematographers Greig Fraser (\"Dune\") and Oren Soffer, who shot on location in eight countries with an unusually low-cost camera for a Hollywood studio film (the Sony FX3, which goes for under $4,000).\n\nSpeaking of cost - \"The Creator\" was made for around $80 million and looks a thousand times better than movies (mainly of the superhero variety) that cost three times as much. This was part of Edwards' design and could be revolutionary for filmmaking. In addition to using a camera any hobbyist could buy at a local store, instead of pre-determining the concept art and visual effects and forcing the actors to look at little silver balls or tracking markers, they added them in after the fact. It makes a huge difference.\n\n\"The Creator\" is an original movie too, and even if it is a somewhat convoluted and silly mishmash of familiar tropes and sci-fi cliches, it still evokes the feeling of something fresh, something novel, something exciting to experience and behold - which is so much more than you can say about the vast majority of big budget movies these days. And it's worth taking a chance on it at the cinemas.\n\n\"The Creator,\" a 20th Century Studios release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for \"strong language, some bloody images, violence.\" Running time: 132 minutes. Three stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Documentary 'Carlos' is a loving, respectful portrait of guitar god Santana\nBy **MARK KENNEDY**  \nSeptember 26, 2023. 2:10 PM EST\n\n---\n\nA new documentary on rock icon Carlos Santana begins with the legendary philosopher-guitarist asking a simple question: \"Do you believe in magic?\"\n\n\"Magic. Not tricks - the flow of grace,\" he says.\n\nYou may be convinced you do a little less than 90 minutes later by director Rudy Valdez's intimate portrait of a man with a magical ability and a story told with few tricks.\n\n\"Carlos\" is a traditional linear tale, tracing Santana's formative years in Tijuana, Mexico, his set at Woodstock, his relentless touring and dive into spirituality, climaxing with his triumphant 1999 \"Supernatural\" album.\n\nIt's lovingly told - and intimate. There is the first known recording of a 19-year-old Santana in 1966 - already a guitar master with a familiar, blistering style - and one later in life in which he delights his children behind a couch with sock puppets.\n\nBut some of the most powerful images are several old homemade clips Santana made himself, alone at home just jamming. It's like hearing the magic flow straight from the source, watching unfiltered genius work while his guitar gently wails.\n\nValdez uses various images almost like a collage to capture his subject - talk show clips, old concerts, and newly conducted interviews with the master, one at sundown with the icon beside a fire. The only forced bit is a roundtable of Santana's wife and sisters.\n\nA highlight is watching Santana and his band play in the rain during 1982's Concert for the Americas in the Dominican Republic. Other directors might show a short clip and go but Valdez lets it play long, a treat.\n\nWe see Santana grow up to a violinist father and a fierce mother, who became mesmerized by the blues-rock of Ray Charles, B.B. King and Little Richard. He was pressing tortillas at a diner in San Francisco in the late 1960s - he calls the city a \"vortex of newness\" - and go to the Fillmore to listen to the Grateful Dead and Country Joe and the Fish.\n\nAfter being busted trying to sneak into the legendary venue without paying, impresario Bill Graham was so impressed by this skinny guitarist that he invited him to open for the Who, Steve Miller and Howling Wolf.\n\nAt Woodstock - he and his band wouldn't have their debut album out for months more - Santana hits the stage very high by accident (Thanks, Jerry Garcia) and says a little prayer: \"God, I know you're here. Please keep me in time and in tune.\" Throughout his set, Santana seems to be wrestling the neck of his guitar, which to him resembled a snake.\n\nHis first royalty check was spent on a home and a refrigerator for mom, fulfilling a promise. \"It's better than Grammys and Oscars and Heisman trophies. It feels better than anything,\" he says in the documentary.\n\nInevitably, the fall comes, with the drugs and overindulgence. Shocked by the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, Santana decides he must choose between heroin or spiritual meditation. He picks the latter, dresses in white, eats healthy, turn to jazz and decides to \"surf the cosmos of imagination.\"\n\nWith enduring hits like \"Oye Como Va\" and \"Black Magic Woman,\" Santana was voted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998, the first person of Hispanic heritage to be inducted. But he wasn't done yet. \"This Earth time is an illusion,\" he argues, after all.\n\n\"Supernatural,\" which arrived in 1999 during a Latin pop explosion, won a total of nine Grammys with such hits as \"Smooth,\" \"Put Your Lights On\" and \"Maria Maria.\" He is called a second-act king. Man, he's a hot one.\n\nValdez shows real style illustrating that Santana's bands were far from stable when it came to its lineups - he cleverly shows various different singers belt out the same section of \"Black Magic Woman\" live - and captures Santana today watching an old concert he did with his late dad. \"He's proud of me and I'm proud of him. And I miss him,\" he tells the camera.\n\nSantana deserves to be on the Mount Rushmore of rock and that's why in so many ways \"Carlos\" is a corrective to the thinking of people like Jann Wenner, co-founder of Rolling Stone, who overlooked Santana for his new book of transcendent rockers, \"The Masters.\" A master is hiding in plain sight."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: St4llone, St4tham are back in 'Expend4bles,' yet another expend4ble sequel\nBy **JOCELYN NOVECK**  \nSeptember 21, 2023. 6:00 PM EST\n\n---\n\nIt's a throwaway line, but maybe a bit too meaningful, under the circumstances. \"Gravity is setting in,\" says Barney, Sylvester Stallone's aging character in \"Expend4bles,\" when someone asks how he's doing.\n\nIndeed. Gravity is setting in throughout \"Expend4bles,\" a movie whose most enticing mystery is not the secret identity of its shadowy villain, but how you pronounce the film's title. Are we supposed to enunciate the mid-word numeral, or is it merely visual? Is this what stands for a smart new spin on a tired franchise? Will we soon have \"My Big F4t Greek Wedding\"? Are these questions supposed to distract us from how stunningly mediocre the film is?\n\nPerhaps we digress. This is, obviously, the fourth \"Expendables\" film, but our considered scientific opinion is that you needn't see the first three to catch up. True, there's no explanatory intro, but if you've seen earlier \"Expendables\" films, you'll know there's not much to know. These guys are the indestructible mercenaries who swoop in - literally, on Barney's turboprop plane - to do dirty work in miserable places. The body count is head-spinningly high (this film, directed by Scott Waugh, returns to an R rating after a switch to PG-13 for the last installment). The dialogue is head-spinningly mundane. The flow of testosterone is, well, head-spinning.\n\nLeading the pack, as ever, is Stallone's Barney Ross and his expert knife-wielding best bud, Lee Christmas - Jason Statham, reveling in his Cockney charm and smiling more than usual. (This is not a bad thing. Statham has a nice smile. This may be the only good thing.) Also back are Dolph Lundgren's Gunner and Randy Couture's Toll Road.\n\nAnd now, perhaps in a nod to the previously unrecognized fact that half the human race is female, we have Megan Fox as mercenary leader Gina. More on her in a bit. Also providing new blood is Andy Garcia as a prickly CIA handler, Curtis \"50 Cent\" Jackson as an ex-Marine and new team member, and two martial arts stars: Iko Uwais as ruthless arms dealer Rahmat, and Tony Jaa as quiet warrior Decha. Other additions: Jacob Scipio is the son of Antonio Banderas' character from the last film, and Levy Tran is a new female teammate, adept with a whip chain.\n\nGot all that? In a prelude scene in New Orleans, we reconnect with Barney, who now has salt-and-pepper hair, and a bad back - so bad, he enlists Christmas to help him recover his prized skeleton ring at a biker bar, which he's lost in a thumb-wrestling contest. The thugs dispatched and the ring collected, it's time to get back to work.\n\nThis means a trip to Libya, to \"Gadhafi's old chemical plant,\" where aforementioned arms dealer Rahmat (Uwais) is securing detonators for a nuclear weapon. CIA handler Marsh (Garcia) needs the Expendables to stop him. The other thing you should know is that Barney is determined to unmask a shadowy figure codenamed Ocelot who's maybe pulling all the strings.\n\nNot surprisingly, the Expendables run into resistance. The body count mounts, and then something happens that will change the trajectory of the film. We can't give it away, but let's just say it brings Statham's Christmas to the forefront for much of the film.\n\nBut he makes an early error that sidelines him for a bit. Leading the next stage of the mission will be Gina (Fox), his ex (or maybe current?) girlfriend. Gina is introduced to us the only way a woman in a testosterone-dripping franchise like this can be: Sexy AND crazy, yelling like the dickens in a hot little dress. She also wears an absurd amount of makeup, including on the mission. Apparently, there's a brand of matte lipstick that holds up very well through mortal combat. Which is convenient if your ex-boyfriend may or may not be showing up.\n\nAll this action takes place on a freighter where the aforementioned nuclear bomb is being stored. It includes countless killings and also a motorcycle chase (on a freighter!) It all gets very tiresome.\n\nIt doesn't help that the special effects sometimes seem thrown together with about as much care as the script. Some of the most obvious green screens provide inadvertent comedy. As for intended comedy, the only truly funny scene is when Christmas, sidelined, tries out a job as security detail for an obnoxious social media influencer.\n\nThe likable British action star is having a busy year. In \"Expend4bles,\" as mentioned, they let him smile a lot, and it's a nice touch. Still, if there's an \"Expend5bles,\" they're gonna need more than a Statham smile and another mid-word numeral in the title.\n\n\"Expend4bles,\" a Lionsgate release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association \"for strong/bloody violence throughout, language and sexual material.\" Running time: 103 minutes. One star out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie review: A star-making turn for Eve Hewson in the feel-good 'Flora and Son'\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nSeptember 20, 2023. 5:15 PM EST\n\n---\n\nJohn Carney, the Irish filmmaker of \"Once,\" \"Sing Street\" and \"Begin Again,\" makes the movie version of \"three chords and the truth.\"\n\nHis films, unabashedly earnest, feel-good movies for cynical times, are lo-fi musicals that tell simple stories, charmingly. There are love interests, usually. But the abiding romance is for music. His films are the sort that would be easier to dismiss as \"sentimental\" if his central belief - in the redemptive power of music - didn't happen to be kinda true.\n\nThe song remains much the same in Carney's latest charmer, \"Flora and Son,\" starring Eve Hewson as a working-class single mother in Dublin who takes up guitar lessons. Flora's initial instinct when she snags a beat-up acoustic guitar out of a dumpster, is to give it to her troubled 14-year-old son, Max (Orén Kinlan) as a day-late birthday present. Max, though, is nonplussed.\n\n\"You expect me to turn into Ed (expletive) Sheeran?\" he says.\n\nTheir life together in a small apartment is far from harmonious. Their interactions are caustic and cruel. Flora, who we first meet dancing at a nightclub and going home with a man she immediately regrets, isn't shy about her disinterest in parenting. Max, meanwhile, is close to getting kicked out of school.\n\nThese are problems that, perhaps, take more than a six string to solve. But Carney, who wrote and directed the film, has a way of not hitting the cornball notes too hard and mixing in enough humor to keep the saccharine tones from overpowering.\n\nPondering her sad state of affairs, Flora finds new resolve. \"This can't be my story,\" she says, like a good protagonist. \"This can't be my narrative.\" She flips around on YouTube looking for guitar lessons before settling on Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a laid-back instructor in Southern California who she's immediately attracted to.\n\nTheir lessons over Zoom are intimate; Carney sometimes enhances the effect by transporting Jeff into Flora's kitchen. They talk James Blunt and Joni Mitchell. Jeff shares one of his own songs, which Flora bluntly critiques and then helps shape into a lovely duet. (Carney and Gary Clark penned the film's songs.) Outside of the frame, their interactions have some irony. Hewson, the daughter of Bono, was probably born with chops.\n\nThe movie proceeds with the satisfying structure of a song: verse, chorus, bridge. Flora's ex-husband, Ian (Jack Reynor), doubts her commitment. But Flora proves adept at her new hobby, which fosters a newfound connection with her son.\n\nHewson has been a standout in the TV series \"The Knick\" and \"Bad Sisters,\" but she can be verifiably called a movie star after \"Flora and Son.\" Her character isn't miles off ones we've seen many times, but Hewson's confident, charismatic leading performance has enough grit and spunk to light up the screen. Nepo baby or not, she's a total star.\n\n\"Flora and Son,\" like a B-side to Carney's earlier hits, may sound a little like a tune you've heard before. But it's sung with enough heart to have even the coldest cynic humming.\n\n\"Flora and Son,\" an Apple TV+ release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for language throughout, sexual references and brief drug use. Running time: 97 minutes. Three stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: An immigrant teen who wants to fit in enters a nightmare in 'It Lives Inside'\nBy **LINDSEY BAHR**  \nSeptember 20, 2023. 2:19 PM EST\n\n---\n\nA beautiful Indian American teen, Samidha (Megan Suri), just wants to fit in with her suburban classmates in the new horror \"It Lives Inside.\" But there's a demon at large and it's not hormones or puberty - it's a literal monster that will maim and kill you and anyone who tries to help in this grisly, if imperfect, metaphor for the immigrant experience.\n\nIt's the feature debut of Bishal Dutta, who co-wrote the film with Ashish Mehta, and crafts an effectively menacing PG-13 rated nail-biter centered around the interesting and conflicting dynamics of an Indian American family. The mom, Poorna (Neeru Bajwa) is determined to keep up with the traditions of the country they left behind. Samidha - sorry, Sam -- would rather not, which her dad supports, in theory. She shaves her arms in the morning and posts a Kardashian-level selfie with a carefully chosen filter. She \"forgets\" the lunch her mother has packed her. She resents the Indian customs and holidays that prevent her from hanging out with the cute guy in her class. And she's cast aside her old best friend, a fellow Indian American named Tamira (Mohana Krishnan), hoping that maybe she can just blend in and not be the \"Indian girl\" anymore. Essentially, she's a normal teen, through and through.\n\nUnfortunately for Sam, Tamira has gotten pretty weird. Her childhood friend skulks around school like a ghost, hidden behind a curtain of unbrushed hair and cradling a cloudy Mason jar like her life depended on it - not exactly the kind of person that an aspiring popular girl wants on her resume. And it just gets worse because, naturally, IT does live inside that Mason jar and that Mason jar is unable to withstand a fall to the floor. Oops.\n\nDutta gets your heartrate going off the bat, with a creepy prologue as screams flood out of a normal suburban house, but Sam's descent into one of the haunted never quite finds a suitable or consistent tone. It's all moody, wide-eyed paranoia with \"Stranger Things\" vibes that's occasionally interrupted by run-of-the-mill jump-scares and demonic nightmare visions. It'll startle and spook, but it also doesn't feel incredibly original, which is an odd failure for a story that has chosen to focus on a very original threat.\n\nHer parents are a bit confounding and frustrating too - as she becomes increasingly paranoid and scared (which seems reasonable after she witnesses the shocking death of a classmate, regardless of whether it was invisible demon or rabid wild animal) they respond like she's just a delinquent who has broken curfew or been caught skipping school. The only one who seems to care and listen is her teacher (\"Get Out's\" Betty Gabriel), which does not put her in the good graces of the vindictive, flesh-eating Pishacha.\n\nThe story also doesn't really grapple enough with the intriguing themes of assimilation, alienation and identity once the monster is at large - perhaps it's because we're simply plopped in the middle of a mystery that doesn't give us enough to really care about anyone involved. One kid's already dead. Tamira is already weird. Sam is already cool.\n\n\"It Lives Inside\" is still a welcome respite from the other long-in-the-tooth horror franchises populating theaters this time of year in that it's just something new - new faces, new themes, a promising filmmaker to watch - but I wish it would have embraced more of the things that make it unique as opposed to trying to fit in with its genre brethren. Sort of like Sam. I mean, Samidha.\n\n\"It Lives Inside,\" a Neon release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for \"teen drug use, brief strong language, bloody images, terror, violent content.\" Running time: 99 minutes. Two stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Israeli military says Gaza ground offensive has expanded into urban refugee camps\nBy **NAJIB JOBAIN**, **WAFAA SHURAFA**, and **SAMY MAGDY**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 2:36 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP)** - Israeli forces on Tuesday expanded their ground offensive into urban refugee camps in central Gaza after bombarding the crowded Palestinian communities and ordering residents to evacuate. Gaza's main telecom provider announced another \"complete interruption\" of services in the besieged territory.\n\nThe military's announcement of the new battle zone threatens further destruction in a war that Israel says will last for \"many months\" as it vows to crush the ruling Hamas militant group after its Oct. 7 attack. Israeli forces have been engaged in heavy urban fighting in northern Gaza and the southern city of Khan Younis, driving Palestinians into ever-smaller areas in search of refuge.\n\nThe U.S. said Israel's minister for strategic affairs, Ron Dermer, was meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan. Despite U.S. calls for Israel to curb civilian casualties and international pressure for a cease-fire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military was deepening the fighting.\n\n\"We say to the Hamas terrorists: We see you and we will get to you,\" Netanyahu said.\n\nIsrael's offensive is one of the most devastating military campaigns in recent history. More than 20,900 Palestinians, two-thirds women and children, have been killed, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza, whose count doesn't differentiate between civilians and combatants. The agency said 240 people were killed over the past 24 hours.\n\nThe U.N. human rights office said the continued bombardment of middle Gaza had claimed more than 100 Palestinian lives since Christmas Eve. The office noted that Israel had ordered some residents to move there.\n\nIsrael said it would no longer grant automatic visas to U.N. employees and accused the world body of being \"complicit partners\" in Hamas' tactics. Government spokesman Eylon Levy said Israel would consider visa requests case by case. That could further limit aid efforts in Gaza.\n\nResidents of central Gaza described shelling and airstrikes shaking the Nuseirat, Maghazi and Bureij camps. The built-up towns hold Palestinians driven from their homes in what is now Israel during the 1948 war, along with their descendants.\n\n\"The bombing was very intense,\" Radwan Abu Sheitta said by phone from Bureij.\n\nThe Israeli military ordered residents to evacuate a belt of territory the width of central Gaza, urging them to move to nearby Deir al-Balah. The U.N. humanitarian office said the area ordered evacuated was home to nearly 90,000 people before the war and now shelters more than 61,000 displaced people, mostly from the north.\n\nThe military later said it was operating in Bureij and asserted that it had located a Hamas training camp.\n\nThe telecom outage announced by Paltel follows similar outages through much of the war. NetBlocks, a group that tracks internet outages, confirmed that network connectivity in Gaza was disrupted again and \"likely to leave most residents offline.\"\n\nSenior Hamas official Osama Hamdan said several countries had sent proposals to resolve the conflict following news of an Egyptian proposal that would include a transitional Palestinian government in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. He did not offer details of the proposals.\n\n## REGIONAL SPILLOVER\nDefense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel faces a \"multi-arena war\" on seven fronts - Gaza and the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran. \"We have responded and acted already on six of these,\" he told the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.\n\nIranian-backed militia groups around the region have stepped up attacks in support of Hamas.\n\nIranian-backed militias in Iraq carried out a drone strike on a U.S. base in Irbil on Monday, wounding three American service members, according to U.S. officials. In response, U.S. warplanes hit three locations in Iraq connected to a main militia, Kataib Hezbollah.\n\nAlmost daily, Hezbollah and Israel exchange missiles, airstrikes and shelling across the Israeli-Lebanese border. On Tuesday, Israel's military said Hezbollah struck a Greek Orthodox church in northern Israel with a missile, wounding two Israeli Christians, and fired again on arriving soldiers, wounding nine.\n\n\"Hezbollah is risking the stability of the region for the sake of Hamas,\" said Israel's military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari.\n\nIn the Red Sea, attacks by Houthi rebels in Yemen against commercial ships have disrupted trade and prompted a U.S.-led multinational naval operation to protect shipping routes. The Israeli military said a fighter jet on Tuesday shot down a \"hostile aerial target\" above the Red Sea that the military asserted was on its way to Israeli territory.\n\n## A MASS GRAVE\nMore than 85% of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes. U.N. officials say a quarter of the territory's population is starving under Israel's siege, which allows in a trickle of food, water, fuel, medicine and other supplies. Last week, the U.N. Security Council called for immediately speeding up aid deliveries, but there has been little sign of change.\n\nIn an area Israel had declared a safe zone, a strike hit a home in Mawasi, a rural area in the southern province of Khan Younis. One woman was killed and at least eight were wounded, according to a cameraman working for The Associated Press at the nearby hospital.\n\nIn response, Israel's military said that it wouldn't refrain from operating in safe zones, \"if it identifies terrorist organization activity threatening the security of Israel.\"\n\nHamas' Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 240 others hostage. Israel aims to free the more than 100 hostages who remain in captivity.\n\nIsrael blames Hamas for the high civilian death toll in Gaza, citing militants' use of crowded residential areas and tunnels. Israel says it has killed thousands of militants, without presenting evidence.\n\nAt the Kerem Shalom border crossing, U.N. and Gazan medical workers unloaded a truck carrying about 80 unidentified bodies that had been held by Israeli forces in northern Gaza. They were buried in a mass grave.\n\nMedical workers called the odors unbearable. \"We cannot open this container in a neighborhood where people live,\" Dr. Marwan al-Hams, health emergency committee director in Rafah, told the AP. He said the health and justice ministries would investigate the bodies for possible \"war crimes.\"\n\nHamas has shown resilience. The Israeli military announced the deaths of two more soldiers, bringing the total killed since the ground offensive began to 161."}
{"text": "# Lose a limb or risk death? Growing numbers among Gaza's thousands of war-wounded face hard decisions\nBy **WAFAA SHURAFA** and **JACK JEFFERY**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 12:11 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP)** - The doctors gave Shaimaa Nabahin an impossible choice: lose your left leg or risk death.\n\nThe 22-year-old had been hospitalized in Gaza for around a week, after her ankle was partially severed in an Israeli airstrike, when doctors told her she was suffering from blood poisoning. Nabahin chose to maximize her chances of survival, and agreed to have her leg amputated 15 centimeters (6 inches) below the knee.\n\nThe decision upended life for the ambitious university student, as it has for untold others among the more than 54,500 war-wounded who faced similar gut-wrenching choices.\n\n\"My whole life has changed,\" said Nabahin, speaking from her bed at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central town of Deir al-Balah. \"If I want to take a step or go anywhere, I need help.\"\n\nThe World Health Organization and the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza say amputations have become commonplace during the Israel-Hamas war, now in its 12th week, but could not offer precise figures. At the hospital in Deir al-Balah, dozens of recent amputees are in various stages of treatment and recovery.\n\nExperts believe that in some cases, limbs could have been saved with proper treatment. But after weeks of Israel's blistering air and ground offensive, only nine out of Gaza's 36 hospitals are still operational. They are greatly overcrowded, offer limited treatment and lack basic equipment to perform surgeries. Many wounded are unable to reach the remaining hospitals, pinned down by Israeli bombardment and ground combat.\n\nSean Casey, a WHO official who recently visited several hospitals in Gaza, said the acute lack of vascular surgeons - the first responders to trauma injuries and best positioned to save limbs - is increasing the likelihood of amputations.\n\nBut also in many cases, he said, the severe nature of the injuries means some limbs are not salvageable, and need to be removed as soon as possible.\n\n\"People may die of the infections that they have because their limbs are infected,\" Casey told a news conference last week. \"We saw patients who were septic.\"\n\nIsrael declared war after Hamas militants stormed across the border on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking more than 240 hostages. Israel has vowed to keep up the fight until Hamas is destroyed and removed from power in Gaza and all the hostages are freed. More than 20,600 Palestinians have been killed in the fighting, about 70% of them women and children, according to Gaza's Health Ministry, which does not differentiate between civilians and combatants among the dead.\n\nBefore the war, Gaza's health system was overwhelmed after years of conflict and a border blockade enforced by Israel and Egypt in response to the 2007 Hamas takeover of the territory. In 2018 and 2019, thousands were wounded by Israeli army fire in weekly Hamas-led anti-blockade protests, and more than 120 of the wounded had limbs amputated.\n\nEven then, Gaza amputees had a hard time getting prostheses that would help them return to an active life.\n\nThose joining the ranks of amputees now face near-impossible conditions. Some 85% of the population of 2.3 million have been displaced, crowding into tents, schools-turned-shelters or homes of relatives. Water, food and other basic supplies are scarce.\n\nOn Nov. 13, when an Israeli airstrike hit the home of Nabahin's neighbor in Bureij, an urban refugee camp in central Gaza, her ankle and arteries in her leg were partially severed by a clump of cement that blew into her home from the explosion next door. She was the only one of her family who was injured, while a number of her neighbors were killed, she said.\n\nShe was quickly taken to nearby Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, where doctors managed to sew up her leg and and stop the bleeding.\n\nBut after that, Nabahin said she received minimal treatment or attention from doctors, who were dealing with a growing number of critically wounded people amid dwindled medical supplies. Days later, her leg turned a dark color, she said.\n\n\"They discovered that there was ... shrapnel that was poisoning my blood,\" she said.\n\nThe amputation went well, but Nabahin said she remains in acute pain and can't sleep without sedatives.\n\nJourdel Francois, an orthopedic surgeon with Doctors Without Borders, says the risk of post-op infections in war-stricken Gaza is high. Francois, who worked at Nasser Hospital in the southern town of Khan Younis in November, said hygiene was poor, mainly because of scarce water and the general chaos in a hospital that's overwhelmed with patients while hosting thousands of displaced civilians.\n\nHe recalled a young girl whose legs had been crushed and urgently needed a double amputation, but she couldn't be booked into surgery that day because of the high number of other critical injuries. She died later that night, Francois said, likely from sepsis, or blood poisoning by bacteria.\n\n\"There are 50 (injured) people arriving every day, you have to make a choice,\" he told The Associated Press by phone after leaving Gaza.\n\nAt Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, many of the new amputees struggle to get to grips with how the loss of limb has changed their lives. Nawal Jaber, 54, had both legs amputated after she was injured on Nov. 22, when an Israeli bombardment hit her neighbor's empty house and damaged her house in Bureij. Her grandson was killed, and her husband and son were wounded, she said.\n\n\"I wish I could meet the needs of my children, (but) I am unable,\" the mother of eight said, with tears streaming down her face.\n\nBefore the conflict, Nabahin had started her degree in international relations in Gaza and planned to travel to Germany to continue her studies.\n\nShe said her goal now is to get out of Gaza, to \"save what is left of me, and to install a prosthetic limb and live my life normally.\""}
{"text": "# The rapper Ye, who has a long history of making antisemitic comments, issues an apology in Hebrew\nBy **MARIA SHERMAN**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 3:29 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThe rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who has a long history of making antisemitic comments, apologized to the Jewish community in an Instagram post written in Hebrew on Tuesday.\n\n\"I sincerely apologize to the Jewish community for any unintended outburst caused by my words or actions,\" Ye wrote.\n\n\"It was not my intention to offend or demean, and I deeply regret any pain I may have caused,\" continued the rapper, who legally changed his name to Ye in 2021.\n\nThe statement arrives less than two weeks after Ye went on an antisemitic rant in Las Vegas while promoting his upcoming album \"Vultures,\" due out Jan. 12. In the rant, he made insidious insinuations about Jewish influence and compared himself to Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler.\n\n\"After causing untold damage by using his vast influence and platform to poison countless minds with vicious antisemitism and hate, an apology in Hebrew may be the first step on a long journey towards making amends to the Jewish community and all those who he has hurt,\" the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement to The Associated Press and other news outlets on Tuesday. \"Ultimately, actions will speak louder than words but this initial act of contrition is welcome.\"\n\nThe American Jewish Committee, however, criticized Ye's use of Hebrew in the apology.\n\n\"Beyond being bizarre and possibly a ploy to gain more attention, the Hebrew apology - posted without translation - is inaccessible to most American Jews who do not speak the language,\" the AJC said in a statement to the AP. \"To be sure, using Hebrew to communicate with the Jewish community intentionally denies most American Jews- and, consequently, non-Jews-the ability to directly see Kanye's apology.\"\n\n\"While he claims that he is committed to learning and greater understanding, this apology speaks to 'any pain I may have caused,' rather than acknowledging the pain that he has caused,\" the AJC continued.\n\nYe has a history of offensive and antisemitic comments, including repeated praise of Hitler and the Nazis. He also once suggested slavery was a choice and called the coronavirus vaccine \"the mark of the beast.\" In October 2022, he was criticized for wearing a \"White Lives Matter\" T-shirt at his Paris Fashion Week show and tweeted that he was going to go \"death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,\" an apparent reference to the U.S. defense readiness condition scale, DEFCON.\n\nLater that month, the Balenciaga fashion house cut ties with Ye and he lost the lucrative partnership with Adidas that helped catapult him to billionaire status over his remarks.\n\n\"Ye's recent comments and actions have been unacceptable, hateful and dangerous, and they violate the company's values of diversity and inclusion, mutual respect and fairness,\" the German sportswear company said at the time. Adidas has sold hundreds of millions of euros in remaining Yeezy shoes, donating part of the profits to groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Philonise & Keeta Floyd Institute for Social Change.\n\n(Recently, though, Adidas CEO Bjørn Gulden said on a podcast episode that he didn't think Ye \"meant what he said and I don't think he's a bad person.\" Gulden later apologized, the Anti-Defamation League said.)\n\nHe was also dropped by talent agency CAA, and his documentary with MRC Entertainment was scrapped. He was locked out of his accounts on Instagram and what was then known as Twitter, though he has since returned to both platforms.\n\nThis isn't the first the rapper has apologized for his antisemitic comments. He expressed some remorse for his \"death con 3\" tweet on a podcast in October 2022, characterizing the initial tweet as a mistake and apologizing to \"the Jewish community.\" He also went on \"Piers Morgan Uncensored.\"\n\n\"I will say I'm sorry for the people that I hurt with the confusion that I caused,\" he said on the show. But less than two months later, he told conspiracy theorist and host Alex Jones that he sees \"good things about Hitler.\"\n\n\"We've seen this behavior from Kanye before - the antisemitic rant and the follow-up apology,\" the American Jewish Committee said.\n\nYe's latest apology ends with him saying he's committed to \"learning from this experience\" and plans on \"making amends.\" A representative for Ye did not immediately respond to the AP's request for further comment."}
{"text": "# How Ukrainian special forces secured a critical Dnipro River crossing in southern Ukraine\nBy **MSTYSLAV CHERNOV**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 10:29 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**KHERSON, Ukraine (AP)** - Their first battle plan was outdated the moment the dam crumbled. So the Ukrainian special forces officers spent six months adapting their fight to secure a crossing to the other side of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine.\n\nBut it wasn't enough just to cross the river. They needed backup to hold it. And for that, they needed proof that it could be done. For one of the officers, nicknamed Skif, that meant a flag - and a photo op.\n\nSkif, Ukrainian shorthand for the nomadic Scythian people who founded an empire on what is now Crimea, moves like the camouflaged amphibian that he is: Calculating, deliberate, until the time to strike.\n\nHe is an officer in Center 73, one of Ukraine's most elite units of special forces - frontline scouts, drone operators, underwater saboteurs. Their strike teams are part of the Special Operations Forces that run the partisans in occupied territories, sneak into Russian barracks to plant bombs and prepare the ground for reclaiming territory seized by Russia.\n\nTheir mission on the more dynamic of the two main fronts in the six-month counteroffensive reflects many of the problems of Ukraine's broader effort. It's been one of the few counteroffensive successes for the Ukrainian army.\n\nBy late May, the Center 73 men were in place along the river's edge, some of them almost within view of the Kakhovka Dam. They were within range of the Russian forces who had controlled the dam and land across the Dnipro since the first days after the February 2022 full-scale invasion. And both sides knew Ukraine's looming counteroffensive had its sights on control of the river as the key to reclaim the occupied south.\n\nIn the operation's opening days, on June 6, an explosion destroyed the dam, sending a wall of reservoir water downstream, killing untold numbers of civilians, and washing out the Ukrainian army positions.\n\n\"We were ready to cross. And then the dam blew up,\" Skif said. The water rose 20 meters (yards), submerging supply lines, the Russian positions and everything else in its path for hundreds of kilometers. The race was on: Whose forces could seize the islands when the waters receded, and with them full control of the Dnipro?\n\nFor most Ukrainians who see them on the streets in the nearly deserted frontline villages of the Kherson region, they are the guys in T-shirts and flip-flops - just regular people. The locals who refused to evacuate have all become accustomed to the sounds of war, so even their unnerving calm in the face of air raid alarms, nearby gunfire and artillery doesn't seem unusual.\n\nAP joined one of the clandestine units several times over six months along the Dnipro. The frogmen are nocturnal. They transform themselves from nondescript civilians into elite fighters, some in wetsuits and some in boats. In the morning, when their operations end, they're back to anonymity.\n\nThey rarely take credit for their work and Ukrainians rarely learn about their operations. But Russian military statements gleefully and erroneously announcing the destruction of Center 73 are an indication of their effectiveness.\n\n## JUNE 2023\nThe men had the most modern equipment, night-vision goggles, waterproof rifles that can be assembled in a matter of seconds, underwater breathing apparatus that produces no surface bubbles, and cloaks that hide their heat signature during nighttime raids.\n\nIt was a matter of days before the start of the counteroffensive, and Center 73 had already located the Russian positions they would seize on the Dnipro River islands. Skif's men were within earshot of the June 6 explosion that destroyed the Kakhovka Dam, flooded vast stretches of the Kherson region, and upended Skif's attack plan.\n\nAn AP investigation found Russian forces had the means, motive and opportunity to blow up the dam.\n\nBoth the Russians and Ukrainians retreated from the river to regroup - Russians to the south and Ukrainians to the north.\n\nAbandoned homes, clubs, shops became headquarters, with banks of computer screens filling the rooms and improvised weapons workshops nearby. Always secretive, frequently changing locations, they meticulously plan every operation, they sleep only a few hours during the day with curtains closed.\n\nThey wake around sunset, load gear into a 4X4 and drive to a different point on the riverbank to scout new routes for a counteroffensive, provoke Russian forces into shooting at them to pinpoint the enemy's location, retrieve soggy caches of supplies with their boat. Periodically, they captured a Russian soldier stuck in a tree or found a clutch of landmines washed up on shore.\n\nAnd they themselves were stuck. Other special forces took part in battles in eastern Ukraine, the other main front in the counteroffensive. Skif's men waited patiently for the water to subside so they could seize positions and lay the groundwork for the arrival of infantry and marines in the Kherson region.\n\nSkif, a veteran of the 2022 battle for Mariupol who had survived 266 days as a prisoner of war, wanted to fight. He had been part of Center 73 before Mariupol and rejoined after he was freed in a POW exchange.\n\nUkraine created its special forces in response to Russia's lightning-fast annexation of Crimea and invasion of Donbas in 2014, a precursor to the wide-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.\n\n\"We realized that we were much smaller in terms of number than our enemy,\" said Oleksandr Kindratenko, a press officer for Special Operations Forces. \"The emphasis was placed on quality. These were supposed to be small groups performing operational or strategic tasks.\"\n\nHe said they were trained and equipped in part by Europeans, including those from NATO countries, but their own recent battle experience means they are now as much teachers as students.\n\nTasks that the unit considers routine - scouting as close to Russians as possible, planting explosives under their noses, underwater operations - most soldiers would consider high-risk. High-risk missions are practically a death wish.\n\nSkif knew he first had to plan and persuade the generals that if his men could secure a bridgehead - a strategic crossing point - it would be worthwhile to send troops. And that would mean high-risk river missions.\n\n\"My phone book is a little graveyard,\" he said. \"A lot of good, decent people are dead. They were killed on the battlefield. One burned to death in an armored truck. One was shot by howitzers. Somebody stepped on a landmine. Everyone died differently, and there are so many of them.\"\n\n## JULY - AUGUST 2023\nThe water retreated in July. The Russians and Ukrainians advanced again toward the river from opposite directions, the Russians from the south and Ukrainians from the north.\n\nGroups of Center 73 scouted and advanced along the river. The mission for Skif's unit was to reclaim an island near the dam, now a web of cracked mud and dead trees. Their network of spies in the Kherson region, as well as drones and satellite images, told them where Russian forces had re-positioned.\n\nThey disembarked the boats and moved in, walking through the bare branches of the forest through swarms of mosquitoes so loud their bodycam picked up the sound. One of the men tripped a wire connected to a grenade and flung himself as far as he could away from the Russian explosive.\n\nJust as the shrapnel pierced his back, mayhem broke out. The injured Ukrainian crawled toward the unit's waiting boat 3 kilometers (2 miles) away, as the Russian troops who set the boobytrap rained gunfire on them. Skif's men made it to the boat, which sprang a leak, and retreated back to their side of the Dnipro. Russians established their position on the island, and it took weeks more for the Ukrainians to expel them.\n\nThen new orders came. Go upstream and breach Russian defenses beneath a destroyed railway bridge.\n\nThe men had an often-underestimated advantage over their Russian enemy: Many Ukrainians grow up bilingual and understand Russian communications intercepted in real time, while Russian soldiers need a translator for Ukrainian.\n\nSo when Skif's unit started picking up Russian radio communications by the railway bridge, they immediately grasped how many men they were up against and the kind of munitions they would face. They made the crossing, avoided the Russians, and waited for backup,\n\nThat's when their advantage evaporated. In a single battle, the Russians sent Iskander missiles and dozens of drones, dropping hundreds of grenades.\n\n\"In the air, they had absolute dominance compared to us and they held the ground,\" he said.\n\nThe backup was nowhere near enough. Ukrainian forces retreated under heavy fire. More men out of commission and another difficult task ahead.\n\n## SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2023\nA lucky thing happened soon after that battle. A Russian officer who claimed he'd been opposed to the war since its beginning was sent to the front in Kherson. It was, he later said, every bit as bad as he'd feared.\n\nHe made contact with Ukrainian intelligence and said he had 11 comrades who felt similarly. The group surrendered to Skif and his men.\n\nThe Russians told Skif exactly what he needed to know about their unit on the island they were now tasked with taking, just outside the village of Krynky.\n\nHe was sure he could take the island and more with 20 experienced men. But not without the promise of sufficient backup so Ukrainian regular forces could hold the territory. Fine, his commander said. He'd get the backup - if he returned with footage of his unit in the village hoisting the Ukrainian flag.\n\nAnd that's how, in mid-October, a Ukrainian drone carrying the national blue and yellow flag came to fly above Krynky at just the moment Skif and his men made their way to the occupied village across the river. They got their photo op to prove the road was cleared, sent it to the military headquarters, and established the bridgehead.\n\n## NOVEMBER - DECEMBER 2023\nMultiple Ukrainian brigades were sent to hold the position and have been there ever since.\n\nBut nighttime temperatures are dipping well below freezing, and Ukrainian forces are vastly underequipped compared to the Russians nearby. Holding and advancing in winter is much harder on soldiers' bodies and their morale.\n\nIn recent weeks, Russia has sent waves of glide bombs - essentially enormous munitions retrofitted with gliding apparatus to allow them to be launched from dozens of kilometers (miles) away, as well as swarms of grenade-launching drones and Chinese all-terrain vehicles, according to the Institute for the Study of War and the Hudson Institute, two American think-tanks analyzing open-source footage from the area.\n\nIn a news conference earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the battle and acknowledged Russian forces had pulled back \"several meters.\" But he insisted Ukrainian forces were battling pointlessly and losing far more than they gained.\n\n\"I don't even know why they're doing this,\" Putin said.\n\nDespite having never fully controlled the territory during the six-month counteroffensive, Russia claims it as its own.\n\nAnd Ukrainian forces and Center 73 keep fighting into the new year.\n\n\"This is our work,\" Skif said. \"No one knows about it, no one talks about it, and we do it with little reward except to benefit our country.\""}
{"text": "# Mexico's army-run airline takes to the skies, with first flight to the resort of Tulum\nDecember 26, 2023. 4:11 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MEXICO CITY (AP)** - Mexico launched its army-run airline Tuesday, when the first Mexicana airlines flight took off from Mexico City bound for the Caribbean resort of Tulum.\n\nIt was another sign of the outsized role that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has given to Mexico's armed forces. The airline's military-run holding company now also operates about a dozen airports, hotels, trains, the country's customs service and tourist parks.\n\nGen. Luís Cresencio Sandoval, Mexico's defense secretary, said that having all those diverse businesses run by the military was \"common in developed countries.\"\n\nIn fact, only a few countries like Cuba, Sri Lanka, Argentina and Colombia have military-run airlines. They are mostly small carriers with a handful of prop planes that operate mostly on under-served or remote domestic routes.\n\nBut the Mexicana airline plans to carry tourists from Mexican cities to resorts like Cancun, Puerto Vallarta, Los Cabos, Zihuatanejo, Acapulco and Mazatlan. Flights appear to be scheduled every three or four days, largely on weekends.\n\nThe carrier hopes to compete mainly on price: the first 425 tickets sold offered prices of about $92 for the flight from Mexico City to Tulum, which the government claimed was about one-third cheaper than commercial airlines.\n\nHowever, Mexicana's first flight didn't go according to plan. The company said Flight MXA 1788 had to be re-routed to the colonial city of Merida because of poor weather conditions in Tulum. After a wait, it finally took off again and arrived in Tulum about five hours after it took off from Mexico City, about double the usual travel time.\n\nMexicana also hopes to fly to 16 small regional airports that currently have no flights or very few. For those worried about being told to \"Fasten your seatbelt, and that's an order,\" the cabin crew on the Mexicana flight appeared to be civilians. In Mexico, the air force is a wing of the army.\n\nSandoval said the airline began operations with three Boeing jets and two smaller leased Embraer planes, and hopes to lease or acquire five more jets in early 2024.\n\nLópez Obrador called the takeoff of the first Boeing 737-800 jet \"a historic event\" and a \"new stage,\" marking the return of the formerly government-run airline Mexicana, which had been privatized, then went bankrupt and finally closed in 2010.\n\nThe airline combines Lopez Obrador's reliance on the military - which he claims is the most incorruptible and patriotic arm of the government - and his nostalgia for the state-run companies that dominated Mexico's economy until widespread privatizations were carried out in the 1980s.\n\nLópez Obrador recalled fondly the days when government-run firms operated everything from oil, gas, electricity and mining, to airlines and telephone service. He bashed the privatizations, which were carried out because Mexico's indebted government could no longer afford to operate the inefficient, state-owned companies.\n\n\"They carried out a big fraud,\" the president said at his daily morning news briefing. \"They deceived a lot of people, saying these state-run companies didn't work.\"\n\nIn fact, the state-run companies in Mexico accumulated a well-deserved reputation for inefficiency, poor service, corruption and political control. For example, Mexico's state-run paper distribution company often refused to sell newsprint to opposition newspapers.\n\nWhen the national telephone company was owned by the government, customers routinely had to wait years to get a phone line installed, and were required to buy shares in the company in order to eventually get service, problems that rapidly disappeared after it was privatized in 1990.\n\nWhile unable to restore the government-run companies to their former glory, the administration depicts its efforts to recreate them on a smaller scale as part of a historic battle to return Mexico's economy to a more collectivist past.\n\n\"This will be the great legacy of your administration, and will echo throughout eternity,\" the air traffic controller at Mexico City's Felipe Angeles airport intoned as the first Mexicana flight took off.\n\nLópez Obrador has also put the military in charge of many of the country's infrastructure building projects, and given it the lead role in domestic law enforcement.\n\nFor example, the army built both the Felipe Angeles airport and the one in Tulum.\n\nApart from boosting traffic at the underused Felipe Angeles airport, the army-run Mexicana apparently will provide flights to feed passengers into the president's Maya Train tourism project. The army is also building that train line, which will connect beach resorts and archaeological sites on the Yucatan Peninsula.\n\nThe army, which has no experience running commercial flights, has created a subsidiary to be in charge of Mexicana."}
{"text": "# Sweden moves a step closer to NATO membership after Turkey's parliamentary committee gives approval\nBy **SUZAN FRASER**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 1:55 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ANKARA, Turkey (AP)** - The Turkish parliament's foreign affairs committee gave its consent to Sweden's bid to join NATO on Tuesday, drawing the previously nonaligned Nordic country closer to membership in the Western military alliance.\n\nSweden's accession protocol will now need to be approved in the Turkish parliament's general assembly for the last stage of the legislative process in Turkey. No date has been set.\n\nTurkey, a NATO member, has delayed ratification of Sweden's membership for more than a year, accusing the country of being too lenient toward groups that Ankara regards as threats to its security, including Kurdish militants and members of a network that Ankara blames for a failed coup in 2016.\n\nThe Turkish parliament's foreign affairs committee had begun discussing Sweden's membership in NATO last month. But the meeting was adjourned after legislators from Erdogan's ruling party submitted a motion for a postponement on grounds that some issues needed more clarification and that negotiations with Sweden hadn't \"matured\" enough.\n\nOn Tuesday, the committee resumed its deliberations and a large majority of legislators in the committee voted in favor of Sweden's application to join.\n\nBriefing the committee members before the vote, Deputy Foreign Minister Burak Akcapar cited steps Sweden had taken steps to meet Turkish demands, including lifting restrictions on defense industry sales and amending anti-terrorism laws in ways that \"no one could have imaged five or six years ago.\"\n\n\"It is unrealistic to expect that the Swedish authorities will immediately fulfill all of our demands. This is a process, and this process requires long-term and consistent effort,\" he said, adding that Turkey would continue to monitor Sweden's progress.\n\nSwedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billström welcomed the committee's decision on a message posted on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.\n\n\"The next step is for parliament to vote on the matter. We look forward to becoming a member of NATO,\" he tweeted.\n\nNATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg also welcomed the development, saying that he counts on Turkey and Hungary \"to now complete their ratifications as soon as possible. Sweden's membership will make NATO stronger.\"\n\nHungary has also stalled Sweden's bid, alleging that Swedish politicians have told \"blatant lies\" about the condition of Hungary's democracy. Hungary hasn't announced when the country's ratification may occur.\n\nEarlier this month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had openly linked ratification of Sweden's NATO membership to the U.S. Congress' approval of a Turkish request to purchase 40 new F-16 fighter jets and kits to modernize Turkey's existing fleet.\n\nErdogan also also called on Canada and other NATO allies to life arms embargoes imposed on Turkey.\n\nThe White House has backed the Turkish F-16 request but there is opposition in Congress to military sales to Turkey.\n\nSweden and Finland abandoned their traditional positions of military nonalignment to seek protection under NATO's security umbrella, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Finland joined the alliance in April, becoming NATO's 31st member, after Turkey's parliament ratified the Nordic country's bid.\n\nNATO requires the unanimous approval of all existing members to expand, and Turkey and Hungary are the only countries that have been holding out.\n\nThe delays have frustrated other NATO allies who were swift to accept Sweden and Finland into the alliance."}
{"text": "# 6-year-old boy traveling to visit grandma for Christmas put on wrong Spirit flight\nDecember 26, 2023. 12:12 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**FORT MYERS, Fla. (AP)** - A 6-year-old boy who left on a flight for the Christmas holiday to visit his grandmother in southwest Florida instead was put on the wrong plane and ended up 160 miles away in Orlando, Florida.\n\nWhen the grandmother, Maria Ramos, showed up on Thursday at Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers to greet her grandson who was flying for the first time from Philadelphia, she was told he wasn't on the Spirit Airlines flight.\n\n\"I ran inside the plane to the flight attendant and I asked her, 'Where's my grandson? He was handed over to you at Philadelphia?' She said, 'No, I had no kids with me,'\" Ramos told WINK News.\n\nShe then got a call from her grandson from the airport in Orlando, telling her that he had landed.\n\nIn a statement, Spirit Airlines said the boy was under the care and supervision of an airlines employee the entire time, even though he was incorrectly boarded on a flight to Orlando. Once the mistake was discovered, the airlines let the family know, the statement said.\n\n\"We take the safety and responsibility of transporting all of our Guests seriously and are conducting an internal investigation,\" the statement said. \"We apologize to the family for this experience.\""}
{"text": "# Whisky wooing young Chinese away from 'baijiu' as top distillers target a growing market\nDecember 25, 2023. 10:56 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BEIJING (AP)** - A distillery in southwestern China is aiming to tap a growing taste among young Chinese for whisky in place of the traditional \"baijiu\" liquor used to toast festive occasions.\n\nThe more than $100 million distillery owned by Pernod Ricard at the UNESCO World Heritage site Mount Emei launched a pure-malt whisky, The Chuan, earlier this month.\n\nThe French wine and spirits group says it is produced using traditional whisky-making techniques combined with Chinese characteristics including locally grown barley and barrels made with oak from the Changbai mountains in northeastern China.\n\n\"Chinese terroir means an exceptional and unique environment for aging, including the water source here - top-notch mineral water. The source of water at Mount Emei is very famous,\" says Yang Tao, master distiller at the distillery.\n\nA centuries-old drink, whisky is relatively new to China, but there are already more than 30 whisky distilleries in the mainland, according to the whisky website Billion Bottle.\n\nWhisky consumption in China, as measured by volume, rose at a 10% compound annual growth rate from 2017 to 2022, according to IWSR, a beverage market analysis firm. Sales volume is forecast to continue to grow at double digit rates through 2028, according to Harry Han, an analyst with market research provider Euromonitor International.\n\n\"We see huge potential for whisky here in China. It is a product which is developing very nicely, very strongly,\" said Alexandre Ricard, chairman and CEO of Pernod Ricard. \"We do believe that the Chinese have developed a real taste, particularly for malt whisky.\"\n\nRaymond Lee, founder of the Single Malt Club China, a whisky trading and distribution company in Beijing, said whisky has become more popular as the economy has grown.\n\n\"As the economy develops and personal income increases, many people are pursuing individuality. In the past we all lived the same lives. When your economic conditions reach a certain level, you will start to seek your own individuality. Whisky caters just to the consumption mindset of these people. And its quality is very different from that of other alcoholic drinks,\" he says.\n\nOn a recent Friday night at a bar in Beijing, 28-year-old Sylvia Sun, who works in the music industry, was enjoying a whisky on the rocks.\n\n\"The taste of it lingers in your mouth for a very long time. If I drink it, I will keep thinking about it the rest of tonight,\" she said.\n\n\"Now the country is more and more open, and there are increasing opportunities to go abroad, and they have absorbed different kinds of cultures. They also have the courage to try new things. When they try something new - for example whisky - they realize that it's very different from China's baijiu. Whisky may be easier for them to accept,\" Lee said."}
{"text": "# First Amendment claim struck down in Project Veritas case focused on diary of Biden's daughter\nBy **LARRY NEUMEISTER**  \nDecember 25, 2023. 7:22 PM EST\n\n---\n\nCriminal prosecutors may soon get to see over 900 documents pertaining to the alleged theft of a diary belonging to President Joe Biden's daughter after a judge rejected the conservative group Project Veritas' First Amendment claim.\n\nAttorney Jeffrey Lichtman said on behalf of the nonprofit Monday that attorneys are considering appealing last Thursday's ruling by U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres in Manhattan. In the written decision, the judge said the documents can be given to investigators by Jan. 5.\n\nThe documents were produced from raids that were authorized in November 2021. Electronic devices were also seized from the residences of three members of Project Veritas, including two mobile phones from the home of James O'Keefe, the group's since-fired founder.\n\nProject Veritas, founded in 2010, identifies itself as a news organization. It is best known for conducting hidden camera stings that have embarrassed news outlets, labor organizations and Democratic politicians.\n\nIn written arguments, lawyers for Project Veritas and O'Keefe said the government's investigation \"seems undertaken not to vindicate any real interests of justice, but rather to stifle the press from investigating the President's family.\"\n\n\"It is impossible to imagine the government investigating an abandoned diary (or perhaps the other belongings left behind with it), had the diary not been written by someone with the last name 'Biden,'\" they added.\n\nThe judge rejected the First Amendment arguments, saying in the ruling that they were \"inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent.\" She also noted that Project Veritas could not claim it was protecting the identity of a confidential source from public disclosure after two individuals publicly pleaded guilty in the case.\n\nShe was referencing the August 2022 guilty pleas of Aimee Harris and Robert Kurlander to conspiracy to commit interstate transportation of stolen property. Both await sentencing.\n\nThe pleas came two years after Harris and Kurlander - two Florida residents who are not employed by Project Veritas - discovered that Ashley Biden, the president's daughter, had stored items including a diary at a friend's Delray Beach, Florida, house.\n\nThey said they initially hoped to sell some of the stolen property to then-President Donald Trump's campaign, but a representative turned them down and told them to take the material to the FBI, prosecutors say.\n\nEventually, Project Veritas paid the pair $20,000 apiece to deliver the diary containing \"highly personal entries,\" a digital storage card with private family photos, tax documents, clothes and luggage to New York, prosecutors said.\n\nProject Veritas was not charged with any crime. The group has said its activities were newsgathering and were ethical and legal.\n\nTwo weeks ago, Hannah Giles, chief executive of Project Veritas, quit her job, saying in a social media post she had \"stepped into an unsalvageable mess - one wrought with strong evidence of past illegality and post financial improprieties.\" She said she'd reported what she found to \"appropriate law enforcement agencies.\"\n\nLichtman said in an email on behalf of Project Veritas and the people whose residences were raided: \"As for the continued investigation, the government isn't seeking any prison time for either defendant who claims to have stolen the Ashley Biden diary, which speaks volumes in our minds.\""}
{"text": "# The imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny resurfaces with darkly humorous comments\nDecember 26, 2023. 6:24 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**MOSCOW (AP)** - Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Tuesday released a sardonic statement about his transfer to a Arctic prison colony nicknamed the \"Polar Wolf,\" his first appearance since associates lost contact with him three weeks ago.\n\nNavalny, the most prominent and persistent domestic foe of President Vladimir Putin, is serving a 19-year sentence on an extremism conviction. He had been incarcerated in central Russia's Vladimir region, about 230 kilometers (140 miles) east of Moscow, but supporters said he couldn't be found beginning on Dec. 6.\n\nThey said Monday that he had been traced to a prison colony infamous for severe conditions in the Yamalo-Nenets region, about 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow.\n\n\"I am your new Santa Claus,\" Navalny said in a tweet, referring to his location above the Arctic Circle in the prison in the town of Kharp.\n\nThe region is notorious for long and severe winters. The town is about 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Vorkuta, whose coal mines were among the harshest of the Soviet Gulag prison-camp system.\n\nNavalny, who is noted for sharply humorous comments, said he was in a good mood after being transported to the new prison, but suggested the northern winter darkness is discouraging: \"I don't say 'Ho-ho-ho,' but I do say 'Oh-oh-oh' when I look out of the window, where I can see night, then the evening, and then the night again.\"\n\nPrisoner transfers in Russia often result in contact with inmates being lost for weeks. Navalny's supporters contend the transfer was arranged to keep Navalny out of sight amid Putin's announcement that he will run for another term as president in the March election.\n\nNavalny has been behind bars in Russia since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. Before his arrest, he campaigned against official corruption and organized major anti-Kremlin protests.\n\nHe has since received three prison terms and spent months in isolation in Penal Colony No. 6 for alleged minor infractions. He has rejected all charges against him as politically motivated."}
{"text": "# Court reverses former Nebraska US Rep. Jeff Fortenberry's conviction of lying to federal authorities\nBy **STEFANIE DAZIO**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 4:38 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LOS ANGELES (AP)** - An appellate court on Tuesday reversed a 2022 federal conviction against former Rep. Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska, ruling that he should not have been tried in Los Angeles.\n\nFortenberry was convicted in March 2022 on charges that he lied to federal authorities about an illegal $30,000 contribution to his campaign from a foreign billionaire at a 2016 Los Angeles fundraiser. He resigned his seat days later following pressure from congressional leaders and Nebraska's GOP governor.\n\nIn its Tuesday ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit wrote that the trial venue of Los Angeles was improper because Fortenberry made the false statements during interviews with federal agents at his home in Lincoln, Nebraska, and in his lawyer's office in Washington.\n\n\"Fortenberry's convictions are reversed so that he may be retried, if at all, in a proper venue,\" the decision said.\n\nA federal jury in Los Angeles found the nine-term Republican guilty of concealing information and two counts of making false statements to authorities. He vowed to appeal from the courthouse steps.\n\nFortenberry and his wife, Celeste Fortenberry, praised the court's decision.\n\n\"We are gratified by the Ninth Circuit's decision,\" Jeff Fortenberry said in a statement. \"Celeste and I would like to thank everyone who has stood by us and supported us with their kindness and friendship.\"\n\nThom Mrozek, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles, noted that the appellate court left a path open for future proceedings against Fortenberry.\n\n\"The ruling does not preclude a retrial on the charges that then-Congressman Fortenberry made multiple false statements to federal agents,\" Mrozek said in a statement. \"We are evaluating potential next steps before deciding how best to move forward.\"\n\nPatricia Hartman, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, declined to comment on the ruling's potential impact for federal prosecutors in Washington.\n\n\"We cannot comment on matters where we don't have charges filed,\" she said in an email Tuesday.\n\nA spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Nebraska did not immediately return a phone message.\n\nFortenberry was charged after denying to the FBI that he was aware he had received illicit funds from Gilbert Chagoury, a Nigerian billionaire of Lebanese descent.\n\nAt trial, prosecutors presented recorded phone conversations in which Fortenberry was repeatedly warned that the contributions came from Gilbert Chagoury, a Nigerian billionaire of Lebanese descent. The donations were funneled through three strawmen at the 2016 fundraiser in Los Angeles.\n\nThe case stemmed from an FBI investigation into $180,000 in illegal campaign contributions to four campaigns from Chagoury, who lived in Paris at the time. Chagoury admitted to the crime in 2019 and agreed to pay a $1.8 million fine.\n\nIt was the first trial of a sitting congressman since Rep. Jim Traficant, D-Ohio, was convicted of bribery and other felony charges in 2002."}
{"text": "# For a new generation of indie rock acts, country music is king\nBy **MARIA SHERMAN**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 11:30 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LOS ANGELES (AP)** - Singer-songwriter Mitski's \"My Love Mine All Mine,\" plays out like a whispered dirge.\n\nThe song is gothic lounge music for a listener who only has about two minutes to have their heart broken - a silky soft slow burn stacked with a choir, organ, bass and most critically, pedal steel guitar, the kind favored by country and western purists.\n\nIn no way does that description scream \"mainstream hit,\" and yet, for 12 weeks, it has been on the Billboard Hot 100, an unusual metric of success for a wholly independent artist. And for 10 weeks, her indie rock-meets-chamber pop-meets-country held the No. 1 position on Billboard's TikTok trending chart.\n\nMitski is not from the American South, though her discography has long considered small town U.S.A. and she relocated to Nashville a few years ago to mine the geography's humanity. (\"Valentine, Texas\" from last year's \"Laurel Hell\" album is an example, but there are many.)\n\nShe is, of course, not the first indie artist to explore weeping Americana sounds. Many of the leading acts in contemporary indie rock pull from the South - like Mitski - or hail from there, like soloists Angel Olsen and Waxahatchee, or groups like Plains, Wednesday and two-thirds of the Grammy-nominated band boygenius. Lucinda Williams ' \"too country for rock 'n' roll, too rock 'n' roll for country\" style is a clear predecessor; and every few generations, it seems like a great new band pulls from alt-country's narrative specificity.\n\n## A WORLD INTERESTED IN COUNTRY\nInterestingly, indie rock's current adoption of country comes at a time of increased global interest in country music. According to the Midyear Music Report for data and analytics platform Luminate, country music experienced its biggest streaming week ever this year, a whopping 2.26 billion.\n\nThe genre has historically been enjoyed by English-speaking Americans, but their reporting shows growth in non-Anglophonic territories such as Philippines, Indonesia, India, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, and Vietnam.\n\nIn March 2023, Spotify launched a new playlist dedicated to the phenomenon of country-influence in indie rock titled \"Indie Twang.\" It's curated by Carla Turi, Spotify's folk and acoustic music editor, who says the playlist was the result of conversations dating back to summer 2022, when they noticed growing \"country influence in indie rock,\" as she calls it. It's a legacy that extends to the late 2010s when country iconography started cropping up in spaces not-traditionally considered country: everything from Lil Nas X's \"Old Town Road\" to Mitski's 2018 album \"Be the Cowboy.\"\n\n\"I also think, through the lockdown we experienced in 2020, listeners sort of emerged craving more organic-sounding music as a way to connect with others,\" she continued. The indie twang playlist was born out of all of that, amplified by successful indie artists like Ethel Cain and Plains.\n\n\"I'm seeing this space as a kind of movement, rather than a trend,\" she adds. \"The sound will always have its peaks and valleys. I do think that the fanbase, overall, continues to grow. I think that this sort of surge of Americana and singer-songwriter music here in the States has shifted listening habits across the entire country.\"\n\n## AN ALTERNATIVE STATE OF MIND\nIn 2023, these indie artists offer an alternative to the pop-country acts dominating mainstream charts like Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs, and Jason Aldean. The movement is led by female performers, for one, and artists who don't immediately fit into a traditional genre format.\n\nThey also offer an alternative to traditional images of indie rock: instead of shying away from their geographic identities - like moving to New York and smoothing out to \"y'alls\" and \"ma'ams\" from their speech and music - they're embracing them. Banjos and lap steel abound. Songs about God, rural roads, trucks, guns, humidity, and crickets do, too.\n\nLike Turi, Jess Williamson of Plains sees the connection to country music from a more traditional indie rock audience as a post-COVID-19 lockdown revelation. \"We saw people leaving cities, moving to smaller towns and out to the country. We saw people in cities baking bread, starting herb gardens, craving something simple, nostalgic, and that feels good,\" she said.\n\n\"On tour, we covered 'Goodbye Earl' by the Chicks, everyone is singing along, and that's the least cool s--- I can imagine. People are through being cool and are embracing who we are and what we really like. And for a lot of people, that's country music.\"\n\nShe says she had to leave the South in order to return to it and fully appreciate her love for both it and country music, the way \"Texans leave and then immediately get a tattoo of the state of Texas,\" she says, laughing.\n\n## KEEPING IT CLOSE TO HOME\nKarly Hartzman, frontperson of the Ashville band Wednesday, has never left North Carolina. \"I think where we live is inseparable from our music at this point. Of course, we are influenced by country music, but country music sounds and feels the way it does because of the environment it's made in. A great country song feels like where it's from,\" she says.\n\nWednesday's 2023 full-length \"Rat Saw God\" made AP's best albums of the year list for its alt-country rock sensibility, where pulling the listener into the quiet parts of a Carolinas hometown is as much a part of the sonic fabric as lap steel or guitar fuzz or a poetic line sung out of key.\n\nHartzmann adds that the complications of living in the South are \"the stereotypes ... which are founded of course. The politics, the racism, and the inequity,\" she says. \"I'm strongly against leaving this place 'cause I disagree with the politics of those in power, though. It's invigorating cause I feel empowered to fight against that (expletive), especially for those who are unable to do that themselves here.\"\n\nShe says the South is her \"favorite place on Earth\" - beyond its influential music - but the appeal to stick around and create there is economic, too, which may have an impact on indie artists pulling from country sounds.\n\n\"I think affordability is a big factor for people trying to make it from their hometowns now instead of moving to big cities,\" she says. \"The internet makes that possible, obviously.\"\n\nIt also means, for listeners on an Indie Twang playlist, or those at a rock club in a major city or a honky tonk in a small town, new approaches to familiar Southern sounds are more accessible than ever before."}
{"text": "# Baltimore's new approach to police training looks at the effects of trauma, importance of empathy\nBy **LEA SKENE**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 9:36 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BALTIMORE (AP)** - A three-minute viral video shows an irate Baltimore police officer berating a teenager because he ignored orders to stop skateboarding and called the officer \"dude.\"\n\n\"Obviously your parents don't put a foot in your butt quite enough because you don't understand the meaning of respect,\" he shouted at the skateboarder, who remained relatively calm.\n\nThat 2007 interaction cost the officer his job. But as policing evolves, others are learning from his mistakes.\n\nThe Baltimore Police Department recently started requiring its members to complete a program on emotional regulation that uses video as a learning tool and teaches them the basics of brain science by examining the relationship between thoughts, feelings and actions. It's a far cry from traditional police training.\n\nIn a city whose embattled police force has long struggled to earn public trust, especially since Freddie Gray's 2015 death from spinal injuries sustained in police custody, department leaders are demonstrating their willingness to think outside the box. The approach could become more common as agencies nationwide dedicate more resources to addressing mental health challenges among officers and preventing negative public interactions.\n\nBaltimore's program is overseen by the anti-violence organization Roca, which works primarily with at-risk youth from the city's poorest and most violent neighborhoods - a population that has more in common with police officers than some might think, according to Roca staff. The organization has provided a curriculum for the eight-hour Rewire4 course, which is now required of all Baltimore police officers. Other law enforcement agencies along the East Coast have also adopted the program, including the Boston Police Department.\n\n\"In the streets, we look at some police officers like they're crazy, and they look at us like we're crazy,\" said James \"JT\" Timpson, a Baltimore resident who helps lead the Roca Impact Institute. \"But we're both experiencing the same thing, which is trauma.\"\n\nUnderstanding that common ground helps officers relate to members of the public, said Maj. Derek Loeffler, who oversees training and education for the Baltimore Police Department.\n\nOfficers in the course were asked to describe some of their most memorable calls for service. One officer recalled a case where three children were found decapitated, comparing the scene to something out of a horror movie. She said the images will haunt her forever.\n\n\"It takes a toll,\" instructor Lt. Lakishia Tucker told the class. \"This stuff ain't normal that we see, that we deal with, that we handle on a daily basis.\"\n\nPolice officers are human underneath the uniform, she said, and experiencing repeated trauma can result in hypervigilant behavior.\n\nInstructors played the 2007 viral video as an example of what happens when a person gets triggered and starts operating in survival mode, which they called \"bottom brain\" because it activates neurological pathways associated with fear and stress responses. The \"top brain,\" however, is where reason prevails, leading to slower, more careful decision-making.\n\nThe training, which was observed by an Associated Press reporter, presented a series of practices rooted in cognitive behavioral therapy, a type of psychotherapy aimed at strengthening healthy neurological pathways in the brain through awareness and repetition. \"Flex your thinking\" and \"Label your feelings\" are among the skills presented. Participants can also sign up to receive key lesson reminders via text messages from Roca staff after the training.\n\nThe Rewire4 curriculum is a modified version of what the organization's outreach workers use in their interactions with at-risk youth. Roca, which was founded in Massachusetts over three decades ago, opened an office in Baltimore in 2018. It has since provided hundreds of young men with life-coaching services, job opportunities and behavioral health tools aimed at preventing the rapidly escalating conflicts that so often turn deadly.\n\nExposing police to similar tools could help reduce police violence, avoid unfavorable headlines and build community trust, organizers said.\n\n\"Today is an invitation for you to learn something that can help you personally and professionally,\" Tucker told the class of officers. \"Law enforcement is different today. Every single thing is being recorded.\"\n\nThe increased prevalence of body cameras and cellphones means officers are facing more pressure to stay calm even when they get triggered.\n\nDuring the class, instructors talked about how to avoid a \"bottom brain\" reaction, in part by approaching others with empathy.\n\n\"We have to learn how to separate the person from the behavior,\" Tucker said.\n\nThat could mean dismantling stereotypes, such as assuming everyone in a certain neighborhood is a drug dealer, said Sgt. Amy Strand, another instructor.\n\n\"I like to twist it and say, what about us?\" she said, describing how some people assume all police officers are corrupt and aggressive. \"We get it dealt to us, so let's not deal it out to everybody else. Give some grace.\"\n\nThe Baltimore Police Department recently started administering the training amid a slew of other reform efforts dating back years. In the wake of Gray's death, Justice Department investigators uncovered a pattern of unconstitutional policing practices, especially against Black residents. That led to a 2017 federal consent decree mandating a series of court-ordered changes.\n\nSoon thereafter, several officers were indicted on federal racketeering charges as the Gun Trace Task Force corruption scandal reverberated through the department, further fracturing public trust. In recent months, the department received criticism after two police shootings in adjacent neighborhoods.\n\nSgt. Maria Velez, the third instructor, said the career brings its challenges, but she still wants to help people. She asked her colleagues to think about their reasons for joining the police force.\n\n\"This is more than just a job. You have a calling for this, something inside of you that makes you want to get up every single day and push through adversity,\" she said. \"Everyone here is still choosing to show up, regardless of what's happened.\""}
{"text": "# Beyoncé's childhood home in Houston burns on Christmas morning\nDecember 26, 2023. 9:11 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**HOUSTON, Texas (AP)** - Beyoncé's childhood home caught fire early on Christmas morning, though the family living there escaped safely.\n\nThe fire was reported at about 2 a.m. Monday and the Houston Fire Department arrived on the scene of the two-story brick house within three to five minutes, the Houston Chronicle reported.\n\n\"We had it contained in about 10 minutes,\" Houston Fire Department District Chief Justin Barnes told the newspaper.\n\nBeyoncé Knowles' family bought the home on the 2400 block of Rosedale in 1982 and Beyoncé lived there until she was 5 years old. She was seen taking photos of the property when she was in her hometown for her Renaissance World Tour.\n\nThe home in the historic Riverside Terrace neighborhood was built in 1946.\n\nA message sent to Beyoncé's publicist was not immediately returned late Monday.\n\nThe cause of the blaze was under investigation."}
{"text": "# Subscription-based care moves beyond peddling birth control and helping with hair loss\nBy **TOM MURPHY**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 9:17 AM EST\n\n---\n\nNeed help losing weight or handling depression? How about a pill that lowers cholesterol and treats erectile dysfunction?\n\nOnline subscription services for care have grown far beyond their roots dealing mainly with hair loss, acne or birth control. Companies including Hims & Hers, Ro and Lemonaid Health now provide quick access to specialists and regular prescription deliveries for a growing list of health issues.\n\nHims recently launched a weight-loss program starting at $79 a month without insurance. Lemonaid began treating seasonal affective disorder last winter for $95 a month. Ro still provides birth control, but it also connects patients trying to have children with regular deliveries of ovulation tests or prenatal vitamins.\n\nThis Netflix-like approach promises help for two common difficulties in the U.S.: access to health care and prescription refills. But it also stirs concern about care quality.\n\n\"This isn't medicine. This is selling drugs to consumers,\" said Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, who studies pharmaceutical marketing at Georgetown.\n\nThe online providers say they screen their patients carefully and send customers elsewhere if they can't help them. They also think they've tapped a care approach that patients crave.\n\n\"The growth we've seen on our platform is a testament to how people are looking to get the care they need,\" Hims spokeswoman Khobi Brooklyn said.\n\nThe publicly traded Hims has topped 1.4 million subscribers this year. It expects to pull in at least $1.2 billion in annual sales by 2025.\n\nThat pales compared to the $300 billion-plus in annual revenue generated by health care giants like CVS Health. But Hims' 2025 projection is more than eight times what the company brought in at the start of the decade.\n\nSubscription-based health care has been around for years, particularly in primary care, where patients can pay monthly fees to gain better access to doctors. The e-commerce giant Amazon recently entered that niche with a subscription plan that gives some customers access to virtual and in-person care.\n\nOnline versions of subscription-based care started growing after the COVID-19 pandemic made Americans more comfortable with telemedicine. That has led to a surge of investor money flowing to companies providing this care, said Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, a Harvard researcher who studies consumer health care.\n\nMany condition-specific plans offer patients regular visits with a health care provider and then recurring prescriptions for a monthly fee.\n\nThat simplicity can be attractive, Mehrotra noted.\n\n\"You can just get the care you need and move on with life just as you pay for Netflix or whatever,\" he said.\n\nHims debuted weight loss earlier this month after starting a heart health program last summer that includes the combination pill treatments.\n\nIts rival Ro added weight loss last year to a lineup that also includes treatment plans for eczema, excessive sweating and short eyelashes, among other issues.\n\nLemonaid offers treatment plans for insomnia and high blood pressure. It also touts cholesterol management for $223 a year without insurance. That includes provider visits, lab work and prescriptions for generic medicines.\n\nThese companies still push sexual health help, especially on social media. But broader growth remains a priority.\n\nHims says in a regulatory filing that it sees significant future opportunities in menopause, post-traumatic stress disorder and diabetes.\n\nRo CEO Zach Reitano noted in an interview earlier this year that his company's obesity treatments are \"upstream\" to other chronic diseases. He said patients who want help losing weight also care about improving their overall health.\n\nReitano told The Associated Press he thought one of the health care system's biggest problems was that \"it is not built around what patients want.\"\n\nSubscriptions, whether for medicine or meal kits, offer predictable costs and may seem like good deals at first. But customer enthusiasm can fade, and companies may feel pressure to find new business, said Jason Goldberg, chief commerce strategy officer at Publicis Groupe.\n\nThe approach also comes with reputational baggage.\n\nRobRoy Chalmers turned to Hims for help with erectile dysfunction. But the Seattle artist decided to cancel his subscription and cut costs after a few months.\n\nHe kept receiving bills after he thought he stopped the subscription. He said he emailed and called customer service. He didn't get a response until he criticized Hims on social media.\n\n\"The amount of effort I needed to go through for them to make good was too much,\" he said. \"This is every subscription-based company in my mind.\"\n\nFugh-Berman worries mainly about care quality. She noted that talk therapy can be as effective as prescriptions for some conditions.\n\n\"Mental health care should never just be about drugs,\" she said.\n\nShe also noted that a diagnosis can change over time. Patients on regular medications must be monitored in case the drug causes problems like higher blood pressure.\n\nLemonaid Health does that, according to Dr. Matthew Walvick, the company's top medical official. He said Lemonaid routinely follows up with patients to monitor for side effects and update their medical history.\n\nBrooklyn said Hims' program for mental health care includes psychiatry and talk therapy.\n\nRepresentatives of both companies say they also encourage patients to get in-person help when needed.\n\nMehrotra worries more broadly. He noted that overall patient health may get overlooked when customers come to these companies with a specific condition or medicine in mind.\n\nSomeone visiting a primary care doctor for birth control may also get screened for depression, he noted.\n\n\"These companies are very solution-oriented,\" Mehrotra said. \"They're not thinking about that comprehensive care.\"\n\nWalvick said Lemonaid collects an extensive patient medical history that delves into issues like smoking or drug use to offer \"the best possible comprehensive care.\"\n\nBrooklyn said Hims & Hers provides access to safe care for many issues but shouldn't replace a primary care doctor. She added that every part of the health care system should be focused on improving access.\n\n\"The traditional health care system in the U.S. has always been slow to adapt to our changing society's needs,\" she said."}
{"text": "# Biden orders strikes on an Iranian-aligned group after 3 US troops wounded in drone attack in Iraq\nBy **AAMER MADHANI**, **ZEKE MILLER**, and **QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 12:35 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - U.S. President Joe Biden ordered the United States military to carry out retaliatory airstrikes against Iranian-backed militia groups after three U.S. service members were injured in a drone attack in northern Iraq.\n\nNational Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said one of the U.S. troops suffered critical injuries in the attack that occurred earlier Monday. The Iranian-backed militia Kataib Hezbollah and affiliated groups, under an umbrella of Iranian-backed militants, claimed credit for the attack that utilized a one-way attack drone.\n\nIraqi officials said that U.S. strikes targeting militia sites early Tuesday killed one militant and wounded 18. They came at a time of heightened fears of a regional spillover of the Israel-Hamas war.\n\nIran announced Monday that an Israeli strike on the outskirts of the Syrian capital of Damascus killed one of its top generals, Seyed Razi Mousavi, who had been a close companion of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the former head of Iran's elite Quds Force. Soleimani was slain in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq in January 2020.\n\nIranian officials vowed revenge for the killing of Mousavi, but didn't immediately launch a retaliatory strike. The militia attack Monday in northern Iraq was launched prior to the strike in Syria that killed Mousavi.\n\nBiden, who was spending Christmas at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland, was alerted to the attack by White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan shortly after it occurred Monday and ordered the Pentagon and his top national security aides to prepare response options to the attack on an air base used by American troops in Irbil.\n\nSullivan consulted with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Biden's deputy national security adviser, Jon Finer, was with the president at Camp David and convened top aides to review options, according to a U.S. official, who wasn't authorized to comment publicly and requested anonymity.\n\nWithin hours, Biden convened his national security team for a call in which Austin and Gen. CQ Brown, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, briefed Biden on the response options. Biden opted to target three locations used by Kataib Hezbollah and affiliated groups, the official said.\n\nThe U.S. strikes were carried out at about 4:45 a.m. Tuesday in Iraq, less than 13 hours after the U.S. personnel were attacked. According to U.S. Central Command, the retaliatory strikes on the three sites \"destroyed the targeted facilities and likely killed a number of Kataib Hezbollah militants.\"\n\n\"The President places no higher priority than the protection of American personnel serving in harm's way,\" Watson said. \"The United States will act at a time and in a manner of our choosing should these attacks continue.\"\n\nThe latest attack on U.S. troops follows months of escalating threats and actions against American forces in the region since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel that sparked the devastating war in Gaza.\n\nThe dangerous back-and-forth strikes have escalated since Iranian-backed militant groups under the umbrella group called the Islamic Resistance in Iraq and Syria began striking U.S. facilities Oct. 17, the date that a blast at a hospital in Gaza killed hundreds. Iranian-backed militias have carried out more than 100 attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria since the start of the Israel-Hamas war more than two months ago.\n\nIn November, U.S. fighter jets struck a Kataib Hezbollah operations center and command and control node, following a short-range ballistic missile attack on U.S. forces at Al-Assad Air Base in western Iraq. Iranian-backed militias also carried out a drone attack at the same air base in October, causing minor injuries.\n\nThe U.S. has also blamed Iran, which has funded and trained the Hamas group, for attacks by Yemen's Houthi militants against commercial and military vessels through a critical shipping choke point in the Red Sea.\n\nThe Biden administration has sought to prevent the Israel-Hamas war from spiraling into a wider regional conflict that either opens up new fronts of Israeli fighting or draws the U.S. in directly. The administration's measured response - where not every attempt on American troops has been met with a counterattack - has drawn criticism from Republicans.\n\nThe U.S. has thousands of troops in Iraq training Iraqi forces and combating remnants of the Islamic State group, and hundreds in Syria, mostly on the counter-IS mission. They have come under dozens of attacks, though as yet none fatal, since the war began on Oct. 7, with the U.S. attributing responsibility to Iran-backed groups.\n\n\"While we do not seek to escalate conflict in the region, we are committed and fully prepared to take further necessary measures to protect our people and our facilities,\" Austin said in a statement.\n\nThe clashes put the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani in a delicate position. He came to power in 2022 with the backing of a coalition of Iranian-backed parties, some of which are associated with the same militias launching the attacks on U.S. bases.\n\nA group of Iranian-backed militias known as the Popular Mobilization Forces were key in the fight against Islamic State militants after the extremist group overran much of Iraq in 2014. The PMF is officially under the command of the Iraqi army, but in practice the militias operate independently.\n\nIn a statement Tuesday, Sudani condemned both the militia attack in Irbil and the U.S. response.\n\nAttacks on \"foreign diplomatic mission headquarters and sites hosting military advisers from friendly nations ... infringe upon Iraq's sovereignty and are deemed unacceptable under any circumstances,\" the statement said.\n\nHowever, it added that that the retaliatory strikes by the U.S. on \"Iraqi military sites\" - referring to the militia - \"constitute a clear hostile act.\" Sudani said some of those injured in the strikes were civilians."}
{"text": "# Imprisoned Russian politician Navalny is now in a penal colony near the Arctic Circle\nDecember 25, 2023. 11:31 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**MOSCOW (AP)** - Associates of imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said Monday that he has been located at a prison colony above the Arctic Circle nearly three weeks after contact with him was lost.\n\nNavalny, the most prominent foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is serving a 19-year sentence on charges of extremism. He had been imprisoned in the Vladimir region of central Russia, about 230 kilometers (140 miles) east of Moscow, but his lawyers said they had not been able to reach him since Dec. 6.\n\nHis spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, said he was located in a prison colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region about 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow.\n\nNavalny is \"fine - at least as much as possible after such a long stage\" and a lawyer visited him, Yarmysh told The Associated Press.\n\nThe region is notorious for long and severe winters. The town is about 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Vorkuta, whose coal mines were among the harshest of the Soviet Gulag prison-camp system.\n\n\"It is almost impossible to get to this colony; it is almost impossible to even send letters there. This is the highest possible level of isolation from the world,\" Navalny's chief strategist, Leonid Volkov, said on X.\n\nTransfers within Russia's prison system are shrouded in secrecy and inmates can disappear from contact for several weeks. Navalny's team was particularly alarmed when he could not be found because he had been ill and reportedly was being denied food and kept in an unventilated cell.\n\nYarmysh said the transfer was connected with the campaign for the Russian presidential election in March. While Putin's reelection is all but certain, given his overwhelming control over the country's political scene and a widening crackdown on dissent, Navalny's supporters and other critics hope to use the campaign to erode public support for the Kremlin leader and his military action in Ukraine.\n\n\"They deliberately sent him to this particular colony precisely in order to isolate Alexei as much as possible, so as not to give him any opportunity to communicate with the outside world,\" she said. \"This is all happening precisely because Alexei, despite the fact that he is in prison, is still the main opponent of Vladimir Putin ... It is not surprising that they began to transfer him to another colony right now, so that he could not interfere with Putin's campaign.\"\n\nNavalny has been behind bars in Russia since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. Before his arrest, he campaigned against official corruption and organized major anti-Kremlin protests.\n\nHe has since received three prison terms and spent months in isolation in Penal Colony No. 6 for alleged minor infractions. He has rejected all charges against him as politically motivated."}
{"text": "# Ikuzo! Ottawa's roster brings international flavor to newly launched women's pro hockey league\nBy **JOHN WAWROW**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 9:10 AM EST\n\n---\n\n\"Ikuzo!\" as they'd say in Japan. Or how about \"Pojďme!\" or \"Útra fel!\" in Czech or Hungarian.\n\nThe roster of Ottawa's new Professional Women's Hockey League team has such an array of international talent that defenseman Jincy Roese said one way to spur the bonding experience was having everyone learn how to say \"Let's go!\" in various languages.\n\n\"Oh, my gosh, it's so cool,\" said Roese, a U.S. national team player from O'Fallon, Missouri. \"A lot of us are foreigners. I don't think anyone is local to Ottawa, even. But it's cool to experience different cultures. ... And we just have these conversation point to go off which has really helped foster a good team environment.\"\n\nThe PWHL is awaiting rights clearances to unveil the nicknames of its original six franchises in kicking off its inaugural season starting Jan. 1. For now, perhaps Ottawa can go by \"The Ambassadors.\"\n\nThe team features the league's most diverse roster with 11 Canadians, seven Americans, two Czechs, a German, Hungarian and Japan's Akane Shiga.\n\nEven coach Carla MacLeod has international connections. The former Canadian national team player also doubles as head coach of the fast-developing Czech Republic women's national team, and was an assistant on Japan's 2014 Olympic team.\n\n\"The vision of this league has always been one to be the best leagues in the world. In order to do that, you have to have the world involved,\" MacLeod said. \"For us, it was a no-brainer to go down that path.\"\n\nMost of the PWHL's 139 rostered players hail from the sport's two global powers, with 76 from Canada and 50 from the U.S. Next in line are five players from the Czech Republic and two from Sweden. Aside from Ottawa, teams also feature players from Finland, France, Austria and Switzerland.\n\nOttawa, so far, is more the exception than the rule. And the challenge for the newly launched PWHL in becoming the world's top pro women's league will be expanding its international reach, much like the NHL did with the influx of Europeans in the late 1970s and Russians a decade later.\n\nOttawa general manager Michael Hirshfeld focused on attracting players outside of North America by taking into account the diverse population of Canada's capital as a way to attract fans. Hirshfeld also understood how Ottawa isn't a hotbed for developing players in comparison to Toronto, Minnesota, or Boston's hub of women's college programs.\n\n\"We always felt that we were going to be a little bit disadvantaged to those other teams because they have so many homegrown players,\" Hirshfeld said. \"And so our niche, we thought, was the European angle.\"\n\nAnd yes, they need at least one translator.\n\nWhile the European players are mostly fluent in English, Shiga is not. The team has leaned on Madoka Suzuki, a Japanese-born member of Ottawa's Carleton University's men's hockey program, to help in the interim.\n\n\"Akane's become the most beloved player on the team,\" Hirshfeld said. \"They're all learning Japanese so they can talk to her.\"\n\nThe common connection of being new to Ottawa is also helping bond players.\n\n\"It's a fresh slate for all of us,\" said Brianne Jenner, who grew up outside of Toronto. \"We're all kind of bonded by making Ottawa home and making that dressing room ours and that culture ours, and figuring out what our identity is going to be.\"\n\nKaterina Mrazova is already feeling at home in Ottawa, where she represented the Czech Republic at the 2013 women's world championships.\n\n\"Everyone's bringing their culture, but at the same time, it's amazing to see and learn from different countries,\" the 31-year-old Mrazova said. \"I'm really happy to see that everyone is having such fun and supporting each other. That's a big thing on our team.\"\n\nThe makeup of the PWHL's five other teams varies. Minnesota leads the league with 18 Americans, 11 of whom are from \"State of Hockey,\" while Toronto features 21 Canadians. New York has 14 Canadians and seven Americans.\n\nNew York was the PWHL's only team to reach across the border during the league's free agency period by signing Americans Alex Carpenter and Abby Roque, and Canadian Micah Zandee-Hart. New York's roster also features the league's only player from France in Chloe Aurard, who completed her five-year career at Northeastern in March with 89 goals and 204 points in 167 games.\n\n\"It's evolving everywhere,\" Aurard said of the women's game. \"To be drafted in this league is huge. And I really hope to be an example for future French players.\"\n\nMacLeod thinks the mix of styles her Ottawa players bring are an advantage, because it will allow the team to develop and sport as a whole to grow.\n\n\"I've had the unique experience of coaching different countries to learn how great the players are,\" MacLeod said. \"And when you blend them in with those top North American players, everyone's rising. And I think it's going to be great for our game.\""}
{"text": "# Canada announces temporary visas for people in Gaza with Canadian relatives\nDecember 21, 2023. 4:21 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**OTTAWA, Ontario (AP)** - People in the Gaza Strip who have Canadian relatives may apply for temporary visas to Canada, the country's immigration minister said Thursday. However, the federal government cannot guarantee safe passage out of the besieged Palestinian territory.\n\nImmigration Minister Marc Miller expects the program to be up and running by Jan. 9. Until now, the government has focused on getting 660 Canadians, permanent residents and their spouses and children out of Gaza.\n\nMiller said the government will start accepting applications for people with extended family connections to Canada, including parents, grandparents, siblings and grandchildren.\n\nHe said people will be offered three-year visas if they meet eligibility and admissibility criteria.\n\nMiller said he's not sure how many people will be able to come to Canada under the program, but he expects the number will be in the hundreds.\n\nMiller said it's been difficult to get Canadians out of Gaza. \"We have limited ability,\" he said."}
{"text": "# Hornets' Miles Bridges denied access to Canada for NBA game due to legal problems, AP source says\nBy **STEVE REED**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 6:38 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP)** - Charlotte Hornets forward Miles Bridges has been denied entrance to Canada due to his past legal problems and will not be available to play Monday night in Toronto against the Raptors, a person familiar with the situation told The Associated Press.\n\nThe person said Bridges was turned away at the border. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to speak publicly on the matter.\n\nHornets coach Steve Clifford would not comment on the reason for Bridges' absence when he spoke to reporters before Monday's game.\n\n\"The only thing I'm going to say is neither Miles nor (rookie center Nathan Mensah from Ghana) will be here with us tonight,\" Clifford said. \"That's all I'm going to say.\"\n\nBridges is currently serving three years of probation after pleading no contest in exchange for no jail time in the June 2022 domestic violence case involving the mother of his two children, who accused Bridges of assaulting her in front of them. He must adhere to a 10-year criminal protection order for the woman, weekly narcotics and marijuana testing, and restitution, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office.\n\nBridges most recently turned himself in on Oct. 13 after an arrest warrant was issued for an alleged protection order violation.\n\nThe warrant had originally been issued on Jan. 2, but had not previously been served until October, just before the NBA season. Per court documents, Bridges \"unlawfully\" and \"knowingly\" violated the protection order.\n\nThat case is still pending.\n\nCanada Border Services Agency spokesperson Rebecca Purdy said they do not provide details on specific individual cases, but anybody seeking entry into the country must \"demonstrate they meet the requirements to enter.\"\n\n\"Admissibility is decided case-by-case and based on the information made available at the time of entry,\" Purdy said in an email to the AP. \"Several factors are used in determining if an individual is admissible to Canada, including involvement in criminal activity, human rights violations, organized crime, security, health or financial reasons.\"\n\nBridges was suspended by the NBA for the first 10 games of the season after sitting out all of last season. He is averaging 19.6 points and 7.2 rebounds per game since his return from suspension in 12 starts.\n\nBridges' absence means the Hornets will be severely shorthanded for a second straight game as they look to snap a four-game losing streak.\n\n\"It's all hands on deck,\" Clifford said.\n\nWhen they hosted Philadelphia on Saturday, the Hornets were without three starters in LaMelo Ball (right ankle), Gordon Hayward (illness) and Mark Williams (back), plus two key reserves in P.J. Washington (left shoulder) and Cody Martin (left knee). The Hornets lost guard Terry Rozier in the third quarter when he caught an elbow to the nose.\n\nWithout those players, the Hornets lost 135-82, their worst loss in franchise history. Charlotte's only win in its past seven games was a home victory over Toronto on Dec. 8.\n\nRozier and Washington were both set to return Monday against the Raptors, the Hornets announced.\n\nClifford said he shared a positive message with his players at Monday morning's shootaround.\n\n\"We are obviously super (undermanned) here,\" Clifford said, \"and we can win tonight.\""}
{"text": "# Hilary Knight scores in OT to lift US women past Canada 3-2 in Rivalry Series\nDecember 14, 2023. 11:01 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**KITCHENER, Ontario (AP)** - Captain Hilary Knight scored on a power play 28 seconds into overtime to give the United States women's hockey team a 3-2 victory over Canada on Thursday night and a 3-0 lead in the seven-game Rivalry Series.\n\nKnight beat goalie Ann-Renée Desbiens with a one-timer after Emily Clark took a penalty late in the third.\n\nMurphy and Kirsten Simms also scored for the Americans and Aerin Frankel made 32 saves.\n\n\"I thought our team got stronger as the game went on,\" U.S. coach John Wroblewski said. \"We had a lot of youth and speed out there tonight and I'm proud of how we worked.\"\n\nDanielle Serdachny and Clark scored for Canada and Desbiens stopped 19 shots.\n\nThe Americans opened the series last month with a 3-1 victory in Tempe, Arizona, and a 5-2 decision in Los Angeles. They've now won four straight against Canada dating to their 6-3 victory in the gold-medal game in April in the world championships.\n\nThe teams will meet in Sarnia, Ontario on Saturday before the series shifts to Saskatchewan for games in Saskatoon on Feb. 7 and Regina on Feb. 9. Game 7 is set for St. Paul. Minnesota., on Feb. 11."}
{"text": "# Mexico closes melon-packing plant implicated in cantaloupe Salmonella outbreak that killed 8 people\nDecember 15, 2023. 2:38 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MEXICO CITY (AP)** - Mexico's Health Department on Friday ordered the temporary closure of a melon-packing plant implicated in salmonella infections that killed five people in Canada and three in the United States.\n\nThe department did not name the company involved, but Canada's Public Health Agency linked the outbreak to Malichita and Rudy brand cantaloupes.\n\nMexico did not say what violations were found at the plant in the northern border state of Sonora, and said testing was being done to find the source of the contamination.\n\nInspectors took samples of water and swiped surfaces at the plant to look for traces of salmonella bacteria.\n\nSince October, at least 230 people in the U.S. and 129 in Canada have been sickened in this outbreak.\n\nThe cantaloupes implicated in this outbreak include two brands, Malichita and Rudy, that are grown in the Sonora area.\n\nThe fruit was imported by Sofia Produce LLC, of Nogales, Arizona, which does business as TruFresh, and Pacific Trellis Fruit LLC, of Los Angeles. So far, more than 36,000 boxes or cases of cantaloupe have been recalled.\n\nHealth officials are warning consumers, retailers and restaurants not to buy, eat or serve cantaloupe if they don't know the source."}
{"text": "# Canadian police charge man accused of selling deadly substance with 14 new murder charges\nBy **ROB GILLIES**  \nDecember 12, 2023. 12:48 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**TORONTO (AP)** - Canadian police said Tuesday they are charging a man with 14 counts of second-degree murder along with the previously announced 14 charges of aiding suicide for allegedly selling lethal substances on the internet to people at risk of self harm.\n\nAn international investigation is underway following the arrest in Canada earlier this year of Kenneth Law, who was initially charged with two counts of counseling and aiding suicide.\n\nCanadian police say Law, from the Toronto area, used a series of websites to market and sell sodium nitrite, a substance commonly used to cure meats that can be deadly if ingested. He is accused of shipping them to people in more than 40 countries.\n\nBritish police said they are investigating the deaths of 88 people in the U.K. linked to the websites. Authorities in the United States, Italy, Australia and New Zealand also have launched investigations.\n\nYork Regional Police Inspector Simon James announced the new charges against Law, and said all charges that he faces relate to the same 14 victims in the Canadian province of Ontario, who were between the ages of 16 and 36. More than one victim is below the age of 18. Police declined to name the victims.\n\n\"We are aware of other of police investigations in other jurisdictions outside of the province of Ontario and we are aware of other police investigations in other countries outside Canada,\" James said.\n\nBritain's National Crime Agency has previously said it has identified 232 people in the United Kingdom who bought products from the websites in the two years up to April, 88 of whom died. The agency said it was investigating whether any crimes had been committed in the U.K.\n\nLaw is in custody in Canada and is next court date is Dec. 19. His lawyer said his client will be pleading not guilty to the new murder charges.\n\n\"One of the challenges that we face is that a number of these sites are located in other countries where Canadian law does not apply,\" James said.\n\nIt is against the law in Canada for someone to recommend suicide, although assisted suicide has been legal since 2016 for people aged at least 18. Any adult with a serious illness, disease or disability may seek help in dying, but they must ask for that assistance from a physician."}
{"text": "# Deaths from tainted cantaloupe increase to 3 in U.S. and 5 in Canada\nBy **JONEL ALECCIA**  \nDecember 7, 2023. 6:19 PM EST\n\n---\n\nA salmonella outbreak tied to tainted cantaloupe has now killed eight people - three in the U.S. and five in Canada, health officials reported Thursday.\n\nDozens more illnesses were reported by both countries. In the U.S., at least 230 people have been ill in 38 states and 96 have been hospitalized since mid-November, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.\n\nThe tainted cantaloupe was also shipped to Canada, where 129 cases have been reported, including 44 hospitalizations, health officials reported.\n\nMany of the people who fell ill reported eating pre-cut cantaloupe in clamshell packages and trays sold in stores. Consumers should not buy, eat or serve cantaloupe, if they don't know the source, the CDC said.\n\nNew recalls of whole and pre-cut fruit have been added to a growing list, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said. Last week, Cut Fruit Express initiated a recall of cantaloupe chunks and fruit mixes containing cantaloupe. On Tuesday, TGD Cuts, LLC launched a recall of specific fresh fruit cup, clamshell and tray products that contained cantaloupe from the company TruFresh.\n\nHealth officials are still working to determine whether additional products are linked to the illnesses.\n\nSalmonella can cause serious illness in young children, people older than 65 and those with weakened immune systems."}
{"text": "# Canadian National purchase of Iowa railroad will add 275 miles of track to North American network\nDecember 6, 2023. 6:05 PM EST\n\n---\n\nWATERLOO, Iowa (AP) - Canadian National is buying a small railroad in Iowa to expand its network in the United States.\n\nCN announced the agreement to buy Iowa Northern Railway Wednesday, but didn't disclose financial terms. The U.S. Surface Transportation Board must approve the transaction next year before it can be completed.\n\nIowa Northern has about 275 miles of track serving a mix of agricultural and industrial shippers in the state. Iowa Northern Chairman Daniel Sabin said he believes CN will maintain his railway's commitment to providing reliable service while helping connect shippers with bigger markets.\n\nCN CEO Tracy Robinson said the deal should strengthen the Montreal-based railroad. CN is already one of North America's six biggest railroads with more than 18,000 miles of track across Canada and the United States.\n\n\"By enabling all of us to play an even more important role in this critical supply chain and densifying our southern network, we are accelerating sustainable, profitable growth,\" Robinson said."}
{"text": "# At tribal summit, Biden says he's working to 'heal the wrongs of the past' and 'move forward'\nBy **COLLEEN LONG**, **SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN**, and **HALLIE GOLDEN**  \nDecember 6, 2023. 3:52 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - President Joe Biden told Native American nations gathered for a summit Wednesday that his administration was working to heal the wrongs of the past as he signed an executive order that seeks to make it easier for Indigenous peoples to access federal funding, and have greater autonomy over how to spend it.\n\nBiden also threw his support behind a request to allow Haudenosaunee Confederacy to compete under its own flag in the 2028 Olympics in lacrosse, a sport they invented.\n\nHistorically, federal policies attacked Native people's rights to self-governance and caused lasting economic damage. Biden said the actions at the summit were \"key steps\" that would help usher in an new era of tribal sovereignty. \"A new era grounded in dignity and respect that recognizes your fundamental rights to govern and grow on your own terms,\" he said.\n\n\"It's hard work to heal the wrongs of the past and change the course, and move forward,\" Biden said.\n\nYurok Tribal Council Member Phillip Williams described Biden's speech as inspirational.\n\n\"It felt like our highest official in the land acknowledges the crimes of the past,\" he said. \"His contribution to society is to help to heal the tribal nations.\"\n\nBiden signed the order as members of his administration and tribal nation leaders stood behind him on stage at the Department of the Interior. The order in part creates a clearinghouse for Native American and Alaska native tribes to find and access grants and it requests that federal agencies ensure that funding is accessible and equitable. It also gives them more authority over how to spend the money.\n\nThat news was welcomed by Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren, who said the funding they get from the federal government to help the hundreds of thousands of people on their reservation that extends across Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, can be difficult to spend.\n\n\"There's so much policies and things that are attached to it and requirements that are attached to it that sometimes it's just overwhelming to try to get it done,\" he said.\n\nTyson Johnston, self governance executive director for the Quinault Indian Nation in northwest Washington state, who is responsible for coordinating the relocation of their villages in the face of dangerous sea level rise, highlighted the importance of this type of autonomy when it comes to climate change.\n\nIn July, the Biden administration announced $120 million in grant funding for tribes in the U.S. to boost their resiliency to climate change.\n\n\"All of us are going to have different adaptation strategies and different priorities moving forward. So boxing us in and keeping us in kind of bureaucratic red tape is really not going to work if we want to continue to make meaningful change,\" he said.\n\nBiden hosted the summit in person last year and virtually the year before. This year, White House officials said, the goal was to provide an opportunity for tribal leaders to have more meaningful conversations directly with members of Biden's Cabinet.\n\nWhile the federal government has an obligation to consult with tribal governments, some Native American and Alaska Native leaders have complained that federal agencies often treat the process as a check-the-box practice despite efforts by Haaland to make changes.\n\nFrom Nevada to Alaska, permitting decisions over mining projects, oil and gas development and the preservation of sacred areas, for example, have highlighted what some leaders say are shortcomings in the process.\n\nThe Democratic administration also announced more than 190 agreements that allow tribes to manage federal lands, waters and natural resources and a new study to help better interpret and tell the history of Native Americans, particularly during periods of federal reform.\n\n\"Yes, there are parts of our history that are painful, but there are also those that we celebrate and that show our resilience, strength and our contributions,\" said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna.\n\nBiden said he was throwing his support behind the effort to allow the confederacy to play under its own flag at the Los Angeles Olympics. The International Olympic Committee would have to make an exception to a rule permitting only teams playing as part of an official national Olympic committee to compete in the Games. The Haudenosaunee have competed as their own team at a number of international events since 1990.\n\nThe Haudenosaunee Nationals Lacrosse Organization, established in 1983, is among the best in the world. The confederacy is made up of six different nations, the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas and Tuscarora Nation. It spans the border between the U.S. and Canada.\n\n\"Their circumstances are unique,\" Biden said. \"They should be granted an exception to field their own team at the Olympics.\"\n\nThe Department of the Interior is also working on final revisions to a rule overhauling how human remains, funerary objects and sacred objects are repatriated. The new rules streamline the requirements for museums and federal agencies to identify possible items for repatriation.\n\nOfficials also announced that the White House Council on Native American Affairs, which is co-chaired by Haaland and Tanden, has published a guide outlining best practices and procedures for the management, treatment and protection of sacred sites. The document was recently finalized after taking into account feedback from tribal leaders.\n\nIn Nevada, Arlan Melendez, chairman of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, said Tuesday that promises about meaningful consultation haven't materialized as several tribes have fought to halt construction of one of the largest lithium mines in the world. The tribes say the mine is being built illegally near the sacred site of an 1865 massacre along the Nevada-Oregon line.\n\n\"Consultation has to happen in the early stages,\" he said. \"If you do consultation after the project is already rolling, it doesn't do you so much good at that point. So we are little bit disappointed in them.\""}
{"text": "# Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Agnes Chow jumps bail and moves to Canada\nBy **KANIS LEUNG**  \nDecember 4, 2023. 11:08 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**HONG KONG (AP)** - One of Hong Kong's best-known pro-democracy activists who moved to Canada to pursue her studies said she would not return to the city to meet her bail conditions, becoming the latest politician to flee Hong Kong under Beijing's crackdown on dissidents.\n\nAgnes Chow, a famous young face in the city's once-vibrant pro-democracy movement, was arrested in 2020 under a Beijing-imposed national security law that was enacted following 2019 anti-government protests. She was released on bail but also served more than six months in jail in a separate case over her role in the protests.\n\nAfter Chow was released from prison in 2021, she had to regularly report to the police. She said in an Instagram post on Sunday night that the pressure caused her \"mental illnesses\" and influenced her decision not to return to the city.\n\nMany of her peers have been jailed, arrested, forced into self-exile or silenced after the introduction of the security law in 2020.\n\nThe suppression of the city's pro-democracy movement highlights that freedoms promised to the former British colony when it returned to China in 1997 have been eroded drastically. Both Beijing and Hong Kong governments have hailed the security law for bringing back stability to the semi-autonomous Chinese city.\n\nChow said the authorities in July offered to return her passport so she could pursue studies in Canada under the condition that she traveled to mainland China with them. She agreed, she said, and her trip in August included a visit to an exhibition on China's achievements and the headquarters of tech giant Tencent. The authorities later returned her passport.\n\nAfter considering the situation in Hong Kong, her safety and her health, Chow said she \"probably won't return\" to the city again.\n\n\"I don't want to be forced to do things that I don't want to do anymore and be forced to visit mainland China again. If it continues, my body and my mind will collapse even though I am safe,\" she wrote.\n\nChow told TV Tokyo on Monday that she was still weighing her next steps, including the option of seeking asylum in Canada, the broadcaster reported. Asked whether she would take up political activism there, she said she wanted to do something in Hong Kong's interest, TV Tokyo said.\n\nHong Kong police on Monday \"strongly condemned\" Chow's move, without naming her, saying it was \"against and challenging the rule of law.\"\n\n\"Police urge the woman to immediately turn back before it is too late and not to choose a path of no return. Otherwise, she will bear the stigma of 'fugitive' for the rest of her life,\" the police said in a statement.\n\nThe police did not respond to questions from The Associated Press on Chow's mainland China trip.\n\nAsked about Chow's case at a daily briefing, China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Hong Kong is a law-based society and no one has a privilege beyond law. Any illegal acts will be punished, he said.\n\nHong Kong leader John Lee said during a weekly briefing on Tuesday that police had given Chow lenient treatment but were deceived. Lee said those who supported offering her leniency \"must find this utterly disappointing\" and that police would learn from their experiences and continue to safeguard law and order.\n\nHe said some residents had underestimated the threat posed by foreign forces to national security and that Hong Kong's own national security law, scheduled to be completed next year, must proceed with \"full strength.\" Similar legislative efforts were shelved in 2003 after fears about lost freedoms sparked a massive protest.\n\nThe Hong Kong government also strongly condemned Chow's acts in a statement and said her credibility had gone \"bankrupt.\"\n\n\"Unless fugitives surrender themselves, otherwise they would be pursued for life,\" it wrote.\n\nChow rose to fame with other prominent young activists Joshua Wong and Nathan Law as a student leader, including in pro-democracy protests in 2014.\n\nShe co-founded the now-defunct pro-democracy party Demosisto with Wong and Law, but the party was disbanded on June 30, 2020, the same day the security law was enacted.\n\nWong is now in custody and faces a subversion charge that could result in life imprisonment if convicted. Law fled to Britain and the police in July offered a reward of 1 million Hong Kong dollars ($127,600) for information leading to his arrest."}
{"text": "# Canadian mining company starts arbitration in case of closed copper mine in Panama\nDecember 1, 2023. 6:17 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PANAMA CITY (AP)** - Canada's First Quantum Minerals Ltd. announced Friday it has requested arbitration proceedings to fight a Panamanian decision to halt a major open-pit copper mine concession in Panama or obtain damages.\n\nFirst Quantum said one arbitration was requested under the Canada-Panama Free Trade Agreement. It has also started proceedings before the International Court of Arbitration, which would meet in Miami, Florida, the company said in a statement.\n\nIn a historic ruling on Tuesday, Panama's Supreme Court declared that legislation granting the mine a 20-year concession was unconstitutional. That decision was celebrated by thousands of Panamanians activists who had argued the project would damage a forested coastal area and threaten water supplies.\n\nFirst Quantum said it requested arbitration from the international panel on Wednesday and that it had initiated proceedings under the free trade agreement even before the court ruling. It did not say what remedy or damages it was seeking, but did say it was open to talks.\n\nFirst Quantum's subsidiary, Cobre Panama, \"reiterates that transparency and compliance with the law has always been fundamental for the development of its operations and remains open to constructive dialogue in order to reach consensus,\" the company said.\n\nThe mine, which would be closed by the court ruling, has been an important economic engine for the country since the mine began large-scale production in 2019.\n\nBut moves this year to grant the company the 20-year concession triggered massive protests that paralyzed the Central American nation for over a month, mobilizing a broad swath of society, including Indigenous communities, who said the mine was destroying key ecosystems.\n\nThe company has said the mine generates 40,000 jobs, including 7,000 direct jobs, and that it contributes the equivalent of 5% of Panama's GDP.\n\nThe firm said it would take time to properly close the mine.\n\n\"The Court's decision does not take into account a planned and managed closure scenario, in which key environmental measures are required to be implemented to maintain the environmental safety of the site during this process,\" including water treatment and the storage of mine tailings.\n\nPanama two weeks ago received an initial payment of $567 million from First Quantum under the new contract that was finalized in October. Due to the legal dispute, the amount went directly to a restricted account.\n\nThe contract also stipulated that Panama would receive at least $375 million annually from the mining company, an amount that critics considered meager.\n\nCobre Panama published a scathing statement on Wednesday saying the Supreme Court decision will likely have a negative economic impact and warned that lack of maintenance of drainage systems in the mines could have \"catastrophic consequences.\"\n\nThe move also \"puts at risk\" all of Panama's other business contracts, the company said."}
{"text": "# India-US ties could face their biggest test in years after a foiled assassination attempt on a Sikh\nBy **KRUTIKA PATHI**  \nDecember 1, 2023. 8:52 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW DELHI (AP)** - Ties between India and the U.S. had never looked better than they did in June, when President Joe Biden honored Prime Minister Narendra Modi with a pomp-filled state visit. The relationship was among the most consequential in the world and \"more dynamic than at any time in history,\" Biden declared as he stood next to Modi at a press conference.\n\nThose ties could now face their biggest test in recent years, after U.S. prosecutors this week accused an Indian official of directing a plot to assassinate a prominent Sikh separatist leader living in New York City.\n\nAs the case unfolds in a New York court, rather than behind closed doors, the two governments may struggle to control the narrative and the fallout, even though it was unlikely to cause more serious long-term damage, experts said.\n\n\"They are going to try people (in court). That will pose problems ... Quite obviously, things are not going to be the same,\" said G Parthasarthy, a retired Indian diplomat.\n\nBut more damningly, it's the second such accusation in months, following Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's allegations that the Indian government may have been linked to the killing of a Sikh separatist near Vancouver in June.\n\nAccording to an unsealed indictment released Wednesday, U.S. officials became aware in the spring of a plot to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, an American citizen who advocates for the creation of a sovereign Sikh state. India considers him a terrorist.\n\nThe plot, which was foiled by U.S. officials who set up a sting, emerged just days after the killing of Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar, and was meant to precede a string of other politically motivated killings in the United States and Canada, according to the indictment.\n\nUnder the indictment, Nikhil Gupta, 52, an Indian national, faces charges including murder for hire. The Indian official was not charged or identified by name in the court filing, which described him as a \"senior field officer\" with responsibilities in security management and intelligence.\n\nThe goal was to kill at least four people in the two countries by June 29, and then more after that, prosecutors contended on Wednesday.\n\n\"The US allegations certainly bolster Canada's case from the vantage point that that incident can no longer be viewed as a one-off,\" said Derek Grossman, an Indo-Pacific analyst at the RAND Corporation.\n\nBoth Biden and Trudeau are said to have raised the matter with Modi when they met at the Group of 20 Summit in September in New Delhi.\n\nIndia's reaction to the two cases has differed sharply. With Canada, it exchanged harsh words as it refuted claims that Trudeau made publicly after returning to Ottawa, with both sides expelling diplomats.\n\nWith the U.S., New Delhi's response has been more cooperative.\n\nIndia's foreign ministry said this week it had set up a high-level committee to investigate the U.S. accusations, adding that the alleged link to an Indian official was \"a matter of concern\" and \"against government policy.\"\n\n\"India's response to Canada was anger, denial, and defiance. Its response to the U.S. was mild and subdued,\" said Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia institute at the Wilson Center, a think tank.\n\nThis is partly explained by the fact that \"for India, the U.S. just matters much more and so the power imbalance is very stark,\" said Milan Vaishnav, director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.\n\n\"Secondly, this is now a judicial process in the U.S where authorities infiltrated this plot and were able to document it in granular detail\", which Trudeau struggled to do when he made the allegation in Canada's Parliament without providing public evidence, Vaishnav added.\n\nU.S. officials have said intelligence sharing among the \"Five Eyes\" alliance - made up of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States - contributed to Trudeau's statements. There were no further details.\n\nTrudeau's intentions were also widely questioned by Indian officials at the time, who suggested it was a move to shore up domestic political support among Canada's Sikhs, who comprise 2% of its population. New Delhi has often complained of Western nations giving free rein to Sikh separatists and not quashing threats to India's national security, but those accusations have predominantly been aimed at Ottawa.\n\nStill, the case is particularly sensitive given the high priority that Biden has placed on boosting ties with India, and the recent zeal from Western powers to court India as a major partner in their push to counter China's rising assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.\n\nU.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday said it was an ongoing legal matter and he couldn't comment in detail but it was \"something we take very seriously\", adding that officials looked forward to seeing the results of the Indian investigation.\n\nA senior administration official, who spoke to the Associated Press this week on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive exchanges with Indian government, said The White House first became aware of the plot in late July. They added that high-level officials had met with Indian counterparts after they found out about the plot to underscore that India needed to investigate, hold those responsible accountable and give assurances that this would not happen again, or it could permanently damage the trust established between our two countries.\n\nEven after the administration found out about the assassination plot, it didn't scale down engagement with India and \"high-level meetings went on as scheduled,\" said Kugelman.\n\nThe Biden administration \"has gone out of its way to bolster this partnership\" by rolling out business and defense deals, including the transfer of highly sensitive defense technology which was approved by Congress recently, Vaishnav said.\n\nHuman rights groups and political opponents have raised concerns of democratic backsliding in India, accusing Modi's government of stifling dissent and targeting minorities, but the U.S. has been steadfast in advancing ties.\n\n\"From the perspective of Washington, they have made what is now a 25 year-long long bet that India's rise would be good for the world and U.S. interests. The obvious looming factor here is China,\" Vaishnav said. \"Having said that, there are many people in the U.S. system who are shocked - because arranging and executing a targeted assassination of citizen of a partner country is verboten. It doesn't happen often.\"\n\nAnalysts say the two countries will have to navigate difficult diplomatic terrain in the coming months.\n\n\"Both will want to work through this in a way that doesn't hurt the relationship. But the US won't simply shrug off such a shocking alleged act, and India won't back down in its effort to pursue what it views as dangerous security threats,\" Kugelman said.\n\nClues as to where things stand, and what impact this has made on India-U.S. ties, could come as soon as January, as India has invited Biden to be the chief guest at its Republic Day parade.\n\nIf Biden doesn't accept, it could be seen as a possible snub or signal that the U.S. isn't ready to move on just yet - but given a heavy January schedule that includes his State of the Union address, it could also just be for scheduling reasons, Kugelman said.\n\nHowever, \"if he were to accept... then that would deliver a much-needed confidence boost to the relationship,\" he added."}
{"text": "# US prosecutors say plots to assassinate Sikh leaders were part of a campaign of planned killings\nBy **LARRY NEUMEISTER**  \nNovember 30, 2023. 7:10 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - A foiled plot to assassinate a prominent Sikh separatist leader in New York, just days after another activist's killing, was meant to precede a string of other politically motivated murders in the United States and Canada, according to U.S. prosecutors.\n\nIn electronic communications and audio and video calls secretly recorded or obtained by U.S. law enforcement, organizers of the plot talked last spring about plans to kill someone in California and at least three other people in Canada, in addition to the victim in New York, according to an indictment unsealed Wednesday.\n\nThe goal was to kill at least four people in the two countries by June 29, and then more after that, prosecutors contend.\n\nAfter Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh activist who had been exiled from India, was shot and killed outside a cultural center in Surrey, British Columbia, on June 18, one of the men charged with orchestrating the planned assassinations told a person he had hired as a hitman that he should act urgently to kill another activist, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun.\n\n\"We have so many targets,\" Nikhil Gupta said in a recorded audio call, according to the indictment. \"We have so many targets. But the good news is this, the good news is this: Now no need to wait.\"\n\nHe urged the hitman to act quickly because Pannun, a U.S. citizen living in New York, would likely be more cautious after Nijjar's slaying.\n\n\"We got the go-ahead to go anytime, even today, tomorrow - as early as possible,\" he told a go-between as he instructed the hitman to kill Pannun even if there were other people with him. \"Put everyone down,\" he said, according to the indictment.\n\nThe attack plans were foiled, prosecutors said, because the hitman was actually an undercover U.S. agent.\n\nThe U.S. attorney in Manhattan announced charges Wednesday against Gupta, and said in court papers that the plot to kill Pannun was directed by an official in the Indian government. That government official was not charged in the indictment or identified by name, but the court filing described him as a \"senior field officer\" with responsibilities in security management and intelligence.\n\nIndian officials have denied any complicity in Nijjar's slaying. External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said Wednesday that the Indian government had set up a high-level inquiry after U.S. authorities raised concerns about the plot to kill Pannun.\n\nCourt filings revealed that even before Nijjar's killing in Canada, U.S. law enforcement officials had become aware of a plot against activists who were advocating for the secession from India of the northern Punjab state, where Sikhs are a majority.\n\nU.S. officials said they began investigating when Gupta, in his search for a hitman, contacted a narcotics trafficker who turned out to be a Drug Enforcement Administration informant.\n\nOver the ensuing weeks, the pair communicated by phone, video and text messages, eventually looping in their hired assassin - the undercover agent.\n\nThe Indian government official told Gupta that he had a target in New York and a target in California, the indictment said. They ultimately settled on a $100,000 price and by June 3, Gupta was urging his criminal contact in America to \"finish him brother, finish him, don't take too much time .... push these guys, push these guys ... finish the job.\"\n\nDuring a June 9 call, Gupta told the narcotics trafficker that the murder of Pannun would change the hitman's life because \"we will give more bigger job more, more job every month, every month 2-3 job,\" according to the indictment.\n\nIt was unclear from the indictment whether U.S. authorities had learned anything about the specific plan to kill Nijjar before his ambush on June 18.\n\nThe indictment portrayed Gupta as boasting that he and his associates in India were behind both the Canadian and New York assassination plots. He allegedly told the Drug Enforcement Administration informant on June 12 that there was a \"big target\" in Canada and on June 16 told him: \"We are doing their job, brother. We are doing their New York (and) Canada (job),\" referring to individuals directing the plots from India.\n\nAfter Nijjar was killed, Gupta told the informant that Nijjar was the target he had mentioned as the potential Canadian \"job\" and added: \"We didn't give to (the undercover agent) this job, so some other guy did this job ... in Canada.\"\n\nOn June 30, Gupta was arrested in the Czech Republic at the request of the United States after arriving there on a trip from India. Federal authorities have not said when he might be brought to the United States to face murder-for-hire and conspiracy charges. It was unclear who would provide legal representation if he arrives in the U.S.\n\nPannun told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday that he will continue his work.\n\n\"They will kill me. But I don't fear the death,\" he said.\n\nHe mocked India's claim that it is conducting its own investigation into the assassination plots.\n\n\"The only thing, I think, (the) Indian government is going to investigate (is) why their hitman could not kill one person. That's what they will be investigating,\" he said.\n\nPannun said he rejects the Indian government's decision to label him a terrorist.\n\n\"We are the one who are fighting India's violence with the words. We are the one who are fighting India's bullets with the ballot,\" he said. \"They are giving money, hundreds of thousands, to kill me. Let the world decide who is terrorist and who is not a terrorist.\"\n\nSome international affairs experts told the AP that it was unlikely the incidents would seriously damage the relationship between the U.S. and India.\n\n\"In most cases, if Washington accuses a foreign government of staging an assassination on its soil, U.S. relations with that government would plunge into deep crisis,\" said Michael Kugelman, director of the Wilson Centre's South Asia institute. \"But the relationship with India is a special case. Trust and goodwill are baked into the relationship, thanks to rapidly expanding cooperation and increasingly convergent interests.\"\n\nDerek Grossman, Indo-Pacific analyst at the Rand Corp., said the Biden administration has demonstrated that it is prioritizing the need to leverage India as part of its strategy to counter Chinese power.\n\n\"I think publicizing the details of the thwarted plot will have very little, if any, impact on the deepening U.S.-India strategic partnership,\" he said."}
{"text": "# Paraguay official resigns after signing agreement with fictional country\nNovember 30, 2023. 2:15 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP)** - A Paraguayan government official was replaced after it was revealed that he signed a memorandum of understanding with representatives of a fugitive Indian guru's fictional country, who also appear to have duped several local officials in the South American country.\n\nThe revelation sparked a scandal - and lots of social media mockery - in Paraguay but it's hardly the first time self-described representatives of the United States of Kailasa duped international leaders. Earlier this year, they managed to participate in a United Nations committee meeting in Geneva and also signed agreements with local leaders in the United States and Canada.\n\nArnaldo Chamorro was replaced as chief of staff for Paraguay's Agriculture Ministry on Wednesday shortly after it was revealed that he signed a \"proclamation\" with representatives of the United States of Kailasa.\n\nAmong other things, the Oct. 16 \"proclamation\" expressed a \"sincere wish and recommendation for the government of Paraguay to consider, explore and actively seek the establishment of diplomatic relations with the United States of Kailasa and support the admission of the United States of Kailasa as a sovereign and independent state in various international organizations, including, among others, the United Nations,\" according to a copy of the agreement posted on social media.\n\nRepresentatives of the fictional country met with Chamorro and Agriculture Minister Carlos Giménez, Chamorro said in a radio interview.\n\nDuring the interview, Chamorro recognized he didn't know where Kailasa was located and said he signed what he characterized as a \"memorandum of understanding\" because they offered to help Paraguay with a variety of issues, including irrigation.\n\nPhotos posted in Kailasa's social media accounts also showed representatives of the fictional country signing agreements with local leaders of the María Antonia and Karpai municipalities. The social media account celebrated each of these signings.\n\nOn Kailasa's website, the fictional country is described as the \"revival of the ancient enlightened Hindu civilizational nation which is being revived by displaced Hindus from around the world.\" It is led by a self-styled guru, Nithyananda, who is wanted in India on several charges, including sexual assault. His whereabouts are unknown.\n\nRepresentatives of the United States of Kailasa participated in two U.N. committee meetings in Geneva in February, according to media reports.\n\nIn March, Newark City Hall in New Jersey acknowledged it had gotten scammed when it signed a sister city agreement with Kailasa."}
{"text": "# What to know about the Sikh independence movement following US accusation that activist was targeted\nBy **SHEIKH SAALIQ**  \nNovember 30, 2023. 5:35 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW DELHI (AP)** - The U.S. has charged an Indian national in what prosecutors allege was a failed plot to assassinate a Sikh separatist at the behest of an unnamed Indian government official.\n\nThe charges announced Wednesday against an Indian national arrested in June in Europe come two months after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said there were credible accusations that India may have been linked to the killing of a Sikh activist near Vancouver, straining relations between the two countries.\n\nThe U.S. case is particularly sensitive given the high priority that President Joe Biden placed on improving ties with India and courting it to be a major partner in the push to counter China's increasing assertiveness.\n\nIndia, which has banned the Sikh independence - or Khalistan - movement, denied having a role in the Canada killing and said it was examining information shared by the U.S. and taking those accusations seriously.\n\nHere are some details about the issue:\n\n## WHAT IS THE KHALISTAN MOVEMENT?\nIndia's Sikh independence movement eventually became a bloody armed insurgency that shook India in the 1970s and 1980s. It was centered in the northern Punjab state, where Sikhs are the majority, though they make up about 1.7% of India's overall population.\n\nThe insurgency lasted more than a decade and was suppressed by an Indian government crackdown in which thousands of people were killed, including prominent Sikh leaders.\n\nHundreds of Sikh youths were also killed during police operations, many in detention or during staged gunfights, according to rights groups.\n\nIn 1984, Indian forces stormed the Golden Temple, Sikhism's holiest shrine, in Amritsar to flush out separatists who had taken refuge there. The operation killed around 400 people, according to official figures, but Sikh groups say thousands were killed.\n\nThe dead included Sikh militant leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, whom the Indian government accused of leading the armed insurgency.\n\nOn Oct. 31, 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who ordered the raid on the temple, was assassinated by two of her bodyguards, who were Sikh.\n\nHer death triggered a series of anti-Sikh riots, in which Hindu mobs went from house to house across northern India, particularly in New Delhi, pulling Sikhs from their homes, hacking many to death and burning others alive.\n\n## IS THE MOVEMENT STILL ACTIVE?\nThere is no active insurgency in Punjab today, but the Khalistan movement still has some supporters in the state, as well as in the sizable Sikh diaspora beyond India. The Indian government has warned repeatedly over the years that Sikh separatists were trying to make a comeback.\n\nPrime Minister Narendra Modi's government has also intensified the pursuit of Sikh separatists and arrested dozens of leaders from various outfits that are linked to the movement.\n\nWhen farmers camped out on the edges of New Delhi to protest controversial agriculture laws in 2020, Modi's government initially tried to discredit Sikh participants by calling them \"Khalistanis.\" Under pressure, the government later withdrew the laws.\n\nEarlier this year, Indian police arrested a separatist leader who had revived calls for Khalistan and stirred fears of violence in Punjab. Amritpal Singh, a 30-year-old preacher, had captured national attention through his fiery speeches. He said he drew inspiration from Bhindranwale.\n\n## HOW STRONG IS THE MOVEMENT OUTSIDE OF INDIA?\nIndia has been asking countries like Canada, Australia and the U.K. to take legal action against Sikh activists, and Modi has personally raised the issue with the nations' prime ministers. India has particularly raised these concerns with Canada, where Sikhs make up nearly 2% of the country's population.\n\nEarlier this year, Sikh protesters pulled down the Indian flag at the country's high commission in London and smashed the building's window in a show of anger against the move to arrest Amritpal Singh. Protesters also smashed windows at the Indian consulate In San Francisco and skirmished with embassy workers.\n\nIndia's foreign ministry denounced the incidents and summoned the U.K.'s deputy high commissioner in New Delhi to protest what it called the breach of security at the embassy in London.\n\nThe Indian government also accused Khalistan supporters in Canada of vandalizing Hindu temples with \"anti-India\" graffiti and of attacking the offices of the Indian High Commission in Ottawa during a protest in March.\n\nLast year, Paramjit Singh Panjwar, a Sikh militant leader and head of the Khalistan Commando Force, was shot dead in Pakistan."}
{"text": "# A Dutch court orders Greenpeace activists to leave deep-sea mining ship in the South Pacific\nBy **MIKE CORDER**  \nNovember 30, 2023. 12:17 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP)** - A Dutch court ruled Thursday that Greenpeace protesters staging a sit-in must leave a deep-sea mining exploration ship in the Pacific Ocean between Mexico and Hawaii but that they can continue to demonstrate around the vessel.\n\nCanada-based The Metals Company, whose subsidiary Nauru Ocean Resources Inc. runs the ship, Coco, accused the protesters of endangering the crew and breaking international law.\n\nThe case was heard in Amsterdam, where the Greenpeace protest ship Arctic Sunrise, which is involved in the protest, is registered.\n\nGreenpeace began the protest a week ago by paddling kayaks beneath the Coco for up to 10 hours at a time to prevent it deploying equipment in the water. Two activists also boarded the ship and pledged to stay camped on the main crane used to deploy and retrieve equipment from the water until The Metals Company agrees to leave.\n\nThe protest comes as international demand for critical minerals found on the seafloor grows, but an increasing number of countries say more research is needed into the environmental impacts of deep-sea mining.\n\nA subsidiary of The Metals Company has been conducting exploratory research in the Clarion Clipperton Zone of the Pacific since 2011. They say data from their latest expedition, researching how the seabed recovered from exploration last year, will be used in an application to begin mining in 2025.\n\nIn a summary ruling, Amsterdam District Court said that Greenpeace can \"continue its actions around a ship in the South Pacific, but must instruct its activists to immediately leave\" the vessel.\n\nThe court said that while Greenpeace has a profound interest in protesting against the research \"its interest in doing so on the ship itself weighs less heavily than the interest of the owner of the ship, who is responsible for the safety of those on board.\"\n\nThe court said Greenpeace would have to pay 50,000 euros ($54,560) per day up to a maximum of 500,000 euros if the activists remain on the ship.\n\nA Greenpeace statement called the ruling \"a massive setback for the deep-sea mining industry.\" It also lashed out at The Metals Company, claiming it \"has never been interested in scrutiny and they can't stand that Greenpeace is watching and opposing them at every turn.\"\n\n\"We are determined to keep bringing this dangerous industry to public attention and will continue to disrupt this dangerous industry\", said Mads Christensen, head of Greenpeace International.\n\nThe Metals Company CEO & Chairman Gerard Barron welcomed the ruling.\n\n\"We respect Greenpeace's right to peaceful protest and expression of opinions,\" Barron said. \"However, our foremost responsibility is to ensure the safe continuance of our legally-mandated operations, and the safety of all those involved.\"\n\nHe said the company would \"continue to gather the important scientific data\" for members of the International Seabed Authority.\n\nEnvironmental groups reject deep-sea mining and fear the international authority will soon authorize the world's first license to harvest minerals from the ocean floor.\n\nMining companies say that harvesting minerals from the deep sea instead of land is cheaper and has less of an environmental impact. But scientists and environmental groups argue that less than 1% of the world's deep seas have been explored, and they warn that deep-sea mining could unleash noise, light and suffocating dust storms."}
{"text": "# Canada says Google will pay $74 million annually to Canadian news industry under new online law\nBy **ROB GILLIES**  \nNovember 29, 2023. 3:05 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**TORONTO (AP)** - Canada's government said Wednesday it reached a deal with Google for the company to contribute $100 million Canadian dollars annually to the country's news industry to comply with a new Canadian law requiring tech companies to pay publishers for their content.\n\nThe agreement removes a threat by Google to block the ability to search for Canadian news on Google in Canada. Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta already has been blocking Canadian news since earlier this year.\n\n\"Google has agreed to properly support journalists, including local journalism,\" Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said. \"Unfortunately Meta continues to completely abdicate any responsibility towards democratic institutions.\"\n\nPascale St-Onge, the minister of Canadian heritage, said that Google will contribute $100 million Canadian ($74 million) - indexed to inflation - in financial support annually for a wide range of news businesses across the country.\n\n\"It's good for the news sector. If there is a better deal struck elsewhere in the world, Canada reserves the right to reopen the regulation,\" St-Onge said at a news conference.\n\n\"This shows that this legislation works. That it is equitable. And now it's on Facebook to explain why they are leaving their platform to disinformation and misinformation instead of sustaining our news system,\" she said.\n\nCanada in late June passed the Online News Act to require tech giants to pay publishers for linking to or otherwise repurposing their content online. Meta responded to the law by blocking news content in Canada on its platforms. Google's owner Alphabet previously had said it planned to do the same when the law takes effect in December.\n\nMeta has said the Online News Act \"is based on the incorrect premise that Meta benefits unfairly from news content shared on our platforms, when the reverse is true.\"\n\nMeta's change means that people in Canada are not able to view or share news on Facebook and Instagram - including news articles, videos and audio posted by outlets inside or outside of Canada. Links posted by Canadian outlets are still visible in other countries.\n\nSt-Onge has called Meta's move \"irresponsible.\"\n\n\"With newsrooms cutting positions or closing entirely, the health of the Canadian news industry has never been more at risk,\" she said in Wednesday's statement.\n\nKent Walker, president of global affairs at Google and Alphabet, thanked the minister in a statement and said Google would continue sending valuable traffic to Canadian publishers.\n\nEarlier this year, Canada's government said it would stop advertising on Facebook and Instagram, in response to Meta's stance.\n\nMeta has taken similar steps in the past. In 2021, it briefly blocked news from its platform in Australia after the country passed legislation that would compel tech companies to pay publishers for using their news stories. It later struck deals with Australian publishers.\n\nTrudeau said the deal is going to resonate around the world as countries deal with the same challenges that Canada's media landscape is facing."}
{"text": "# Young man gets life sentence for Canada massage parlor murder that court declared act of terrorism\nNovember 28, 2023. 12:12 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**TORONTO (AP)** - A Canadian man who pleaded guilty to the murder of a Toronto massage parlor employee received a life prison sentence Tuesday for what a judge described as an act of terrorism related to an internet subculture that fuels sexual loneliness into rage and misogyny.\n\nThe man, who cannot be named because he was 17 years old at the time of the February 2020 stabbing that killed 24-year-old Ashley Noelle Arzaga and seriously wounded another woman identified only by the initials J.C., also was sentenced to three years for attempted murder, to be served concurrently.\n\nHe pleaded guilty last year to both first-degree murder and attempted murder charges. The judge said the life sentence included no chance of parole for 10 years.\n\nIn June, Justice Sukhail Akhtar ruled that the massage parlor attack amounted to an act of terrorism due to its links to so-called \"incel\" ideology, which stands for \"involuntary celibate.\" It is promoted through a fringe online subculture dominated by men who blame women for a lack of they active sex lives they argue they are entitled to have.\n\nThe ruling was believed to be the first time a Canadian court declared terrorist activity as incel-motivated.\n\nThe court considered evidence that included the defendant's plans to seek out women to violently attack with a 17-inch sword after he was radicalized by misogynistic views online.\n\nThe incel movement also was linked to a 2018 rampage in Toronto in which a man used a van to kill 10 people, as well as to attacks in California and Florida.\n\nProsecutors wanted the man in Tuesday's case sentenced as an adult, noting he was six months shy of turning 18 at the time and meticulously researched, planned and made choices surrounding the attack that reflected adult thoughts and actions. They also argued he has shown no remorse.\n\nAdults found guilty of first-degree murder face an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years. The defense had sought to have the parole ineligibility limited to 10 years because of his age at the time of the murder."}
{"text": "# Environmental protesters board deep-sea mining ship between Hawaii and Mexico\nBy **DANIEL SHAILER**  \nNovember 27, 2023. 9:50 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**MEXICO CITY (AP)** - Greenpeace activists have boarded a deep-sea mining ship in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Mexico and said Sunday they'll stay to protest exploration the ship is conducting to support activity that would destroy marine life.\n\nCanada-based The Metals Company, whose subsidiary runs the ship, accused the protesters of endangering the crew and breaking international law.\n\nThe escalating conflict comes as international demand for critical minerals found on the seafloor grows, but an increasing number of countries say more research is needed into the environmental impacts of deep-sea mining.\n\nGreenpeace began the protest Thursday by positioning kayaks beneath the ship, Coco, for up to 10 hours at a time to block it from deploying equipment to the water.\n\nIn response, the company's CEO Gerard Barron threatened an injunction on Saturday afternoon - according to correspondence shared by Greenpeace and reviewed by The Associated Press - alleging protesters broke international law and jeopardized the safety of crew members.\n\nDuring the protest one kayak was capsized by propeller wash when Coco accelerated without warning, Greenpeace claims. Legal representatives from The Metals Company's subsidiary NORI said this was an example of how the protest was not safe.\n\nNo injunction has been filed yet, according to Greenpeace. The company said it would use all legal measures available to protect stakeholders' rights.\n\nLater that day, two activists boarded Coco. They will remain camped on the main crane used to deploy and retrieve equipment from the water until The Metals Company agrees to leave, according to Louisa Casson, head of Greenpeace's campaign against deep-sea mining.\n\n\"We will continue to try and disrupt as much as we can, because we are very concerned that this is a tick-box exercise that is purely designed to gather data so they can put in a mining application next year,\" Casson said Sunday, from a Greenpeace ship near Coco.\n\nA subsidiary of The Metals Company has been conducting exploratory research in the Clarion Clipperton Zone since 2011. They say data from their latest expedition, researching how the seabed recovered from exploration last year, will be used in an application to begin mining in 2025.\n\nGreenpeace's \"actions to stop the science suggest a fear that emerging scientific findings might challenge their misleading narrative about the environmental impacts,\" Barron told The Associated Press in response to the camping protesters.\n\nHe added that if research were to show their mining would be unjustifiably destructive The Metals Company is \"100%\" prepared to withdraw.\n\nCasson said the company's actions suggest that is not true. \"That they are doing this in the interest of science is really very questionable,\" said Casson. \"There is a clear economic motive: they are entirely a deep-sea mining company.\"\n\nAs they suck up nodules from the sea floor, The Metals Company said they expect mostly to find manganese, which President Joe Biden declared a critical mineral last year. Driven by clean energy technologies, demand for other key battery ingredients like lithium has as much as tripled, according to a market review this July.\n\n\"It makes sense to be able to extract these raw materials from parts of the planet where there is the least life, not the most life,\" said Barron. \"You can't get away from the fact there's about 10 grams of biomass per square meter in the abyssal plains,\" much less than at most terrestrial mines.\n\nThat, said Casson, is an apples and oranges comparison, when studies also show over 5,000 species inhabit this part of the Pacific, which scientists say would be harmed by light and sound pollution, as well as huge clouds of dust.\n\nOn Tuesday this week Mexico joined a coalition of 23 other countries calling for a moratorium on deep-sea mining. While France alone sought an outright ban, the other signatories are requesting a pause for more research into the effects of deep-sea mining."}
{"text": "# Canada, EU agree to new partnerships as Trudeau welcomes European leaders\nNovember 24, 2023. 4:30 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ST. JOHN'S, Newfoundland (AP)** - Canada and the European Union said Friday they are making strides toward new partnerships on green energy, digital transformation and research funding, as a Canada-EU Summit got underway in the Atlantic coast province of Newfoundland.\n\nPrime Minister Justin Trudeau announced during opening remarks Thursday evening that Canada is joining Horizon Europe, a $100 billion scientific research program. Afterward, the two parties said in a joint statement on Friday that substantive negotiations are complete and they are working toward its \"prompt signature and implementation.\"\n\n\"Canadian companies are already benefiting from Horizon and have for many years, but there is much more that we'll be able to access now that we are full partners,\" Trudeau said.\n\n\"It is an exciting articulation of what have been long-standing partnerships between scientists on both sides of the Atlantic.\"\n\nOttawa and Brussels started negotiations on Canada joining it a year ago, with an initial goal of signing the agreement this past spring.\n\nCanada has also worked out a deal to build water bombers and ship them to the EU, after both regions faced devastating forest fires this past summer.\n\nAnd Canada and the EU have announced what they are calling a new Green Alliance, which is focused on deepening existing partnerships on fighting climate change, halting biodiversity loss and intensifying technological and scientific co-operation.\n\nA new digital partnership was also part of the package of announcements on Friday.\n\nEuropean Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Canada \"is a perfect match\" for Europe's resource needs, and she urged Ottawa to join a global partnership on the issue that the EU will launch within weeks.\n\nTrudeau also said Canada and the EU are committed to helping Ukraine continue in its fight against the Russian invasion, and announced that Canada is donating additional small arms and ammunition to the country."}
{"text": "# A former Canadian RCMP intelligence official is found guilty of breaching secrets law\nNovember 22, 2023. 5:55 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**OTTAWA, Ontario (AP)** - A jury found a former senior intelligence official in Canada's national police force guilty on Wednesday of breaching the country's secrets law.\n\nJurors declared Cameron Jay Ortis guilty of three counts of violating the Security of Information Act and one count of attempting to do so.\n\nThey also found him guilty of breach of trust and fraudulent use of a computer.\n\nOrtis, 51, had pleaded not guilty to all charges, including violating the secrets law by revealing classified information to three individuals in 2015 and trying to do so in a fourth instance.\n\nHe testified he offered secret material to targets in a bid to get them to use an online encryption service set up by an allied intelligence agency to spy on adversaries.\n\nThe prosecution argued Ortis lacked authority to disclose classified material and that he was not doing so as part of a sanctioned undercover operation.\n\nOrtis could face a stiff prison sentence.\n\nFollowing the verdict, Justice Robert Maranger told the court that Ortis's bail would be revoked prior to sentencing.\n\nThe defense contended that the former official did not betray Canada, but was rather acting on a \"clear and grave threat.\"\n\nOrtis led the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's Operations Research group, which assembled and developed classified information on cybercriminals, terror cells and transnational criminal networks.\n\nHe told the jury that in September 2014, he was contacted by a counterpart at a foreign agency who advised him of a particularly serious threat.\n\nOrtis said the counterpart informed him in strict confidence about an online encryption service called Tutanota that was secretly set up to monitor communications of interest.\n\nOrtis said he then quietly devised a plan, dubbed Nudge, to entice investigative targets to sign on to the encryption service, using promises of secret material as bait.\n\nThe company, now known as Tuta, denies having ties to intelligence agencies.\n\nAlthough Ortis asked one target for thousands of dollars before he would send full versions of sensitive documents, there was no evidence he received money from the individuals he contacted.\n\nEven so, the prosecution portrayed Ortis as self-serving and reckless, flouting rules and protocols on a solo mission that sabotaged national security and even endangered the life of a genuine undercover officer.\n\nThe prosecution, which called several current and former RCMP employees to testify, argued that no one other than Ortis had heard of Operation Nudge and that no records of the project could be found.\n\nOrtis was taken into custody in September 2019.\n\nThe trail to his arrest began the previous year when the RCMP analyzed the contents of a laptop computer owned by Vincent Ramos, chief executive of Phantom Secure Communications, who had been apprehended in the United States.\n\nAn RCMP effort known as Project Saturation revealed that members of criminal organizations were known to use Phantom Secure's encrypted communication devices.\n\nRamos would later plead guilty to using his Phantom Secure devices to help facilitate the distribution of cocaine and other illicit drugs to countries including Canada."}
{"text": "# India restores e-visa services for Canadians. The move could ease diplomatic tensions\nBy **KRUTIKA PATHI**  \nNovember 22, 2023. 12:14 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW DELHI (AP)** - India restored electronic visa services for Canadian nationals, an Indian foreign ministry official said Wednesday, two months after Canada alleged the South Asian nation was involved in the assassination of a Sikh separatist in Canada.\n\nThe electronic visa was back in order on Wednesday, the official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak to reporters.\n\nThe move could ease tensions between the two countries that swapped accusations and expelled each other's diplomats, with India introducing a visa ban on Canadian nationals.\n\nA diplomatic spat erupted between the two countries after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in September that there were \"credible allegations\" of Indian involvement in the killing of Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar in suburban Vancouver in western Canada.\n\nNijjar, a 45-year-old Sikh activist and plumber, was killed by masked gunmen in June in Surrey, outside Vancouver.\n\nFor years, India had said that Nijjar, a Canadian citizen born in India, had links to terrorism, an allegation he denied but dismissed the Canadian allegation of its involvement in his killing as \" absurd.\"\n\nNew Delhi's worries about Sikh separatist groups in Canada have long strained the relationship between the two countries, despite maintaining strong defense and trade ties. India had previously accused Canada of harboring separatists and \"terrorists.\"\n\nThe allegation brought the discord to the forefront with Canada recalling 41 of its 62 diplomats in India after New Delhi warned it would strip their diplomatic immunity - something Canadian officials characterized as a violation of the Geneva Convention.\n\nLast month, India eased the ban and resumed services for entry, business, medical and conference visas for Canadian nationals."}
{"text": "# Salmonella in cantaloupes sickens dozens in 15 states, U.S. health officials say\nBy **JONEL ALECCIA**  \nNovember 17, 2023. 6:14 PM EST\n\n---\n\nU.S. health officials are warning consumers not to eat certain whole and cut cantaloupes and pre-cut fruit products linked to an outbreak of salmonella poisoning.\n\nAt least 43 people in 15 states have been infected in the outbreak announced Friday, including 17 people who were hospitalized. Several brands of whole and pre-cut cantaloupes and pre-cut fruit have been recalled. They include Malichita brand whole cantaloupe, Vinyard brand pre-cut cantaloupe and ALDI whole cantaloupe and pre-cut fruit products.\n\nConsumers who have the products in their homes should throw them away.\n\nThe products were sold between Oct. 16 and Nov. 10 and recalled earlier this month. Investigators are working to identify any additional cantaloupe products that may be contaminated. Officials in Canada are investigating an outbreak involving the same strain of salmonella, which they detected in a sample of Malichita brand cantaloupe.\n\nThe number of people sickened in the outbreak is likely much higher than those reported and the outbreak may not be limited to states with known illnesses. It typically takes three to four weeks to determine whether a sick person is part of an outbreak.\n\nMost people infected with salmonella develop diarrhea, fever and stomach cramps within six hour to six days after consuming food contaminated with the bacteria. Illnesses typically last four to seven days. Vulnerable people, including children, people older than 65 and those with weakened immune systems may develop severe illnesses that require medical care or hospitalization."}
{"text": "# Canada tops Italy to win Billie Jean King Cup for 1st time one year after men's team won Davis Cup\nNovember 12, 2023. 7:01 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SEVILLE, Spain (AP)** - Canada gave another display of its depth in world tennis by winning the Billie Jean King Cup on Sunday, a year after its men's team won the Davis Cup.\n\nLeylah Fernandez and Marina Stakusic won their singles matches as Canada beat Italy 2-0 to claim its first-ever Billie Jean King Cup.\n\nCanada men's team will try to defend its first Davis Cup title later this month in Malaga, Spain.\n\nStakusic, ranked 258th in the world, put Canada ahead by defeating No. 43 Martina Trevisan 7-5, 6-3 for the biggest win of her career, then Fernandez sealed the victory by beating Jasmine Paolini 6-2, 6-3 at La Cartuja Stadium.\n\n\"I'm extremely happy, ecstatic,\" Fernandez said. \"I can finally say, 'We're world champions,' and we deserve it.\"\n\nThe 20th-ranked Fernandez, runner-up in the 2021 U.S. Open, was perfect for Canada in Seville with four singles victories and one in doubles, while the 18-year-old Stakusic entered the tournament without a win over a top 100 opponent but earned three of them while representing her nation. Her only defeat was against No. 10 Barbora Krejcikova.\n\n\"It's definitely not what I imagined would happen coming here,\" Stakusic said. \"It's been an incredible week and I'm super happy I got to spend it with these women.\"\n\nCanada's Heidi El Tabakh became the first female captain to win the Billie Jean King Cup since American Kathy Rinaldi in 2017.\n\n\"I'm so incredibly proud and it's been a pleasure sharing the court with them all week,\" she said. \"Everyone who is here currently has been a huge asset to the Canadian team throughout the years. We wouldn't be here without every single one of them.\"\n\nCanada had beaten 11-time champion Czech Republic in the semifinals, while four-time champion Italy advanced past Slovenia for its first final appearance since 2013.\n\n\"When you fall down, it means you have something to pick yourself up for,\" Italy captain Tathiana Garbin said. \"You have to look around and find what is your treasure. I think we have learned a lot this week.\"\n\nThe 12-team BJK Cup Finals offered a record total of $9.6 million in prize money, including $2.4 million to the champions, the same as the men's Davis Cup.\n\nCanada is the 13th nation to win the Billie Jean King Cup, and the second new champion after Switzerland's triumph in Glasgow a year ago.\n\nThe women's teams competed in four round-robin groups, with the winners advancing to the semifinals. The United States was eliminated by the Czech Republic in a group that also included title-holder Switzerland.\n\nThe biggest team competition in women's tennis started two days after the end of the WTA Finals in Cancun, Mexico, which featured the top eight players on the tour - including winner Iga Swiatek."}
{"text": "# Fernandez leads Canada into Billie Jean King Cup final after win over Czechs. Italy beats Slovenia\nNovember 11, 2023. 6:05 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SEVILLE, Spain (AP)** - Leylah Fernandez led Canada into the Billie Jean King Cup final after beating Wimbledon champion Marketa Vondrousova and then helping to secure a 2-1 win over the Czech Republic in a decisive doubles match on Saturday.\n\nFernandez beat Vondrousova 6-2, 2-6, 6-3 to pull Canada level after Barbora Krejcikova had beaten Marina Stakusic 6-2, 6-1 to give the Czechs the early advantage.\n\nThe 20th-ranked Fernandez got right back on the indoor hardcourt in Seville to help Gabriela Dabrowski beat Krejcikova and Katerina Siniakova 7-5, 7-6 (3).\n\nIn Sunday's final, Canada will face Italy which saw off Slovenia 2-0 after winning both singles matches.\n\nKrejcikova, the 2021 French Open champion, has also paired with Siniakova to win seven major doubles titles including this year's Australian Open.\n\nThe Czech Republic, an 11-time champion, had also won all seven previous meetings with Canada.\n\nItaly reached its first final of the competition in a decade.\n\nMartina Trevisan beat Kaja Juvan 7-6, 6-3 in the opening singles match of the semifinal after breaking her opponent three times. Jasmine Paolini gave the Italians an insurmountable lead after seeing off Tamara Zidansek 6-2, 4-6, 6-3.\n\n\"What they have done, it's something incredible,\" Italian captain Tathiana Garbin said. \"We want always to push ourselves to the limit, and we try to dream again tomorrow.\"\n\nJuvan double-faulted on set point in the tiebreaker and let Trevisan take the lead.\n\nTrevisan was pushed to tears at one moment from the tension.\n\n\"I had to be happy because I won the set, but I was crying,\" she said. \"Too many emotions to manage. But the heart and head were there, so I'm very happy.\"\n\nZidansek's serve also betrayed her in the second match when the Slovenian doubled-faulted to cede her service game and fall behind 5-3.\n\nSlovenia was playing its first semifinal at the competition."}
{"text": "# Eritrea withdraws from qualifying for 2026 World Cup days before first game against Morocco\nNovember 10, 2023. 4:05 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ZURICH (AP)** - Eritrea has withdrawn from African qualifying for the 2026 World Cup just days before its opening game against Morocco, FIFA confirmed Friday.\n\nEritrea last played an international game almost four years ago but was scheduled to open its qualifying program against Morocco next week. Morocco coach Walid Regragui on Thursday acknowledged that the game in Agadir likely would not go ahead.\n\n\"All of Eritrea's matches have been canceled, while the rest of the match schedule for Group E remains unchanged,\" FIFA said Friday.\n\nMorocco, the 2022 World Cup semifinalist, is favored to advance from the group that includes Niger, Republic of Congo, Tanzania and Zambia.\n\nOnly teams that finish top in the nine African groups will advance directly to the 2026 World Cup being hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico.\n\nA 10th African team can qualify for the inaugural 48-team World Cup through inter-continental playoffs in March 2026."}
{"text": "# US and India reaffirm security ties as their top diplomats and defense officials hold talks\nBy **ASHOK SHARMA**  \nNovember 10, 2023. 12:38 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW DELHI (AP)** - India and the U.S. underlined their commitment to boosting security ties Friday as their top diplomats and defense chiefs met to discuss regional security, China and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.\n\nU.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin met with their Indian counterparts in New Delhi as part of an Asian trip aimed at showing unity over Russia's war in Ukraine and preventing differences on the Israel-Hamas war from deepening.\n\nBlinken said the U.S. and India were continuing to \"deepen our collaboration on everything from emerging technologies to defense to people-to-people ties\" and align diplomacy for \"an Indo-Pacific region that's free, that's open, that's prosperous, that's resilient.\"\n\nHe said the two sides discussed the crisis in the Middle East and \"we appreciate the fact that from day one India has strongly condemned the attacks of Oct. 7. And as our joint statement makes clear, India and the United States stand with Israel against terrorists.\"\n\nIndian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said the situation in the Middle East was a big concern. While India has condemned the Hamas attack on Israel, it balances its position by calling for talks on \"a sovereign, independent and viable state of Palestine living within secure and recognized borders, side-by-side at peace with Israel.\"\n\nBlinken met with India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi and \"reaffirmed their shared vision for close partnership in the Indo-Pacific,\" said U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller.\n\n\"They emphasized working together to address ongoing crises such as Russia's war against Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East,\" Miller said.\n\nVinay Mohan Kwatra, India's top bureaucrat in the foreign ministry, said India's tense ties with China also were discussed at the official-level talks, but declined to give details.\n\nIndia's relationship with China has deteriorated since 2020, when Indian and Chinese troops clashed along their disputed border in the Himalayan Ladakh region, leaving 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers dead. A standoff involving thousands of soldiers in the eastern Ladakh region continues, despite several rounds of military and diplomatic talks.\n\nBlinken said he also discussed with the Indian side a diplomatic dispute that erupted when Canada alleged that India was involved in the assassination of a Sikh separatist in Canada.\n\nBlinken said that the U.S. wants the two sides to resolve their differences in a cooperative way and urged India to \"work with Canada on its investigation.\"\n\nThe dispute started when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said there were \"credible allegations\" of Indian involvement in the killing of Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar in suburban Vancouver in western Canada. India rejected the accusation.\n\nIndia and the U.S. have held so-called two-plus-two talks between India's external affairs and defense ministers and the U.S. secretaries of state and defense since 2018 to discuss issues of concern and strengthen bilateral ties.\n\nAustin and his Indian counterpart, Rajnath Singh, discussed a roadmap for defense industrial cooperation that will fast-track technology cooperation and co-production of defense systems, India's defense ministry said.\n\n\"We're integrating our industrial bases, strengthening our inter-operability, and sharing cutting-edge technology,\" Austin said in his opening remarks.\n\nWashington expects India to be a leading security provider in the Indo-Pacific region.\n\nDuring Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the United States in June, the two sides adopted a policy guide for defense industries to enable them to produce advanced defense systems together and collaborate on research and testing of prototypes.\n\nThe two sides reached an agreement that will allow U.S.-based General Electric to partner with India-based Hindustan Aeronautics to produce jet engines for Indian aircraft in India and the sale of U.S.-made armed MQ-9B SeaGuardian drones.\n\nA joint statement at the conclusion of Blinken and Austin's visit to New Delhi on Friday said the two sides reaffirmed their roadmap for defense industrial cooperation to strengthen India's capabilities, enhance its defense production, facilitate technology-sharing, and promote supply chain resilience."}
{"text": "# Canada says it can fight climate change and be major oil nation. Massive fires may force a reckoning\nBy **SUMAN NAISHADHAM** and **VICTOR CAIVANO**  \nNovember 9, 2023. 9:32 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**FORT MCMURRAY, Canada (AP)** - During a May wildfire that scorched a vast swath of spruce and pine forest in northwestern Canada, Julia Cardinal lost a riverside cabin that was many things to her: retirement project, gift from from her husband, and somewhere to live by nature, as her family had done for generations.\n\n\"That was our dream home,\" said Cardinal, a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, as she scanned the cabin's flattened, charred remains in September. \"It's like a displacement.\"\n\nThousands of wildfires in Canada this year have incinerated an area larger than Florida, releasing into the atmosphere more than three times the amount of carbon dioxide that is produced by Canada in a year. And some are still burning.\n\nHome to dense forests, sweeping prairies and nearly a quarter of the planet's wetlands, Canadian leaders, including liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, have long insisted the country can exploit its natural resources while protecting biodiversity and leading the global fight against climate change. But the seemingly endless fire season, which created hazardous air in many U.S. states thousands of miles away, is putting a spotlight on two aspects of Canada that increasingly feel at odds: the country's commitment to fighting climate change and its status as the world's fourth-largest oil producer and fifth-largest gas producer - fuels that when used release carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere and intensifies the dry conditions for wildfires to swallow millions of acres.\n\n\"They're portraying Canada as environmental,\" said Jean L'Hommecourt, an environmental advocate belonging to the Fort McKay First Nation. \"But the biggest source of the carbon is here.\"\n\n## OIL FOCUS AND ADVOCACY\nCanada is among roughly 100 nations that have pledged by midcentury to reach \"zero emissions,\" or take as much greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere as it contributes. At last year's U.N. climate conference, known as COP27, it also joined other rich nations to promise more money for developing countries to fight climate change.\n\nYet to the same conference, Canada brought the second-largest delegation of fossil fuel executives of any country in the world, an analysis by The Associated Press found. Eleven executives from major Canadian oil, gas, and steel companies, including Enbridge and Parkland Corporation attended COP27 - where countries set climate priorities and timelines for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. The only country to send a larger delegation of fossil fuel executives was Russia, AP found.\n\n\"We're not there to drive an agenda, but we do have a perspective to offer,\" said Pete Sheffield, chief sustainability officer at pipeline and natural gas giant Enbridge Inc., echoing what other Canadian energy executives told The AP about their attendance at COP27.\n\nOne such perspective is that Canadian oil producers can keep extracting oil at current rates, and with the help of technology, clean up their own operations so the country can still hit its climate targets. But even if Canada's oil producers manage to do so, their plans don't consider the greenhouse gas emissions that result from when customers use their products to power cars, heat homes, take flights, and so forth.\n\n## OIL, FIRES AND SMOKE\nIn the western province of Alberta, where many ferocious wildfires burned, huge deposits of thick crude oil, mixed with tarry sand, sit beneath the forest and near the snaking Athabasca River. Extraction from this area, referred to as the \"oil sands,\" uses huge amounts of energy, making Canada's oil - most of which is extracted here - some of the world's dirtiest.\n\nIn Alberta, the industry's mark on the landscape is profound: over an area larger than New York City, oil companies have carved chunks of earth into open-pit mines plunging hundreds of feet deep, created lake-sized chemical runoff pools and left otherworldly stacks of neon yellow sulfur byproduct. On the sides of roads in the oil sands, air cannons boom periodically to keep birds away from the vast toxic ponds and scarecrows dressed as oil workers float above them.\n\nOn a recent morning, dozens of oil workers boarded a charter plane in Calgary that would take them deep into Alberta's wilderness where black bears, caribou, and moose roam. There, operators boarded buses to oil sands projects, where they would work 7-, 14- or 21-day shifts.\n\nDuring other weeks, the fires in Alberta burned so close that oil companies had to temporarily shut down oil and gas production, and average Canadians couldn't safely breathe the air. In September, smoke from wildfires in the neighboring provinces of British Columbia and the Northern Territories blanketed Fort McMurray, an Albertan city of 68,000 where community centers bear the names of oil companies. The skies were a hazy, rust color.\n\n\"This is to the point where you don't even want to be outside,\" said Brittnee McIsaac, a school teacher who often had to keep her students inside for recess because it was too dangerous to breathe the smoke-filled air.\n\nMcIsaac, whose husband works in the oil industry, said that the smoke this year, combined with a major wildfire in 2016, have made more people in town concerned about climate change, even if many residents get their paychecks from the nearby oil patch.\n\n\"It really takes a toll on the mental health; just how dreary it is every day,\" she said of the smoke.\n\nStill, Canadian producers have no plans to slow down. Since 2009, oil sands extraction has grown. Today, Canada produces about 4.9 million barrels of oil a day, with oil and gas contributing almost a third of the country's emissions in 2021. Oil and gas make up about 5% of Canada's GDP, while in Alberta, the heart of Canadian oil country, the sector accounts for about 21%.\n\nCarmen Lee-Essington, vice president of Cenovus' oil sands operations, said the company plans to extract all the oil below ground at their Sunrise plant. Cenovus estimates that could last until 2070. That is decades after when scientists warn that the world needs to have moved beyond fossil fuels and rely almost entirely on renewable forms of energy.\n\n\"When that time comes, we will abandon the facility here. We will decommission it, the metal and all the infrastructure that you see will be shipped off-site,\" said Lee-Essington.\n\n## SUSTAINABLE FUTURE?\nPart of Canada's reasoning to produce so much oil and gas in the 21st century is that it's a stable democracy with stricter environmental and human rights laws than other oil giants that the West has historically relied upon. Canada is the largest foreign supplier of oil to the U.S., exporting an amount equal to 22% of U.S. consumption.\n\nBut climate scientists warn that current levels of oil and gas production will mean Canada won't reach net zero emissions, never mind the additional contributions to climate change from wildfires along the way.\n\nScientists at Climate Action Tracker, a group that scrutinizes nations' pledges to reduce emissions, label the country's progress as \"highly insufficient,\" stressing that Canada needs to implement its climate policies much faster to reach its own targets. For the high-carbon energy sector, much of the plan rests on the build-out of carbon capture, a technology that pulls in carbon dioxide, either at the source of emissions or from the air. But carbon capture is energy intensive, expensive and years away from operating at scale.\n\n\"There's no way Canada can reach our 2050 target if oil and gas doesn't do its fair share,\" said Steven Guilbeault, Canada's minister of environment and climate change.\n\nThe wildfires, which scientists say will burn more and longer as the planet warms, will add to the challenge of cutting emissions. They also pose significant health risks to Canadians and anyone who comes in contact with the smoke.\n\nIn June, a fire got close to the subarctic, mostly indigenous hamlet of Fort Chipewyan, in northern Alberta. A former fur trading settlement, it abuts one of the world's largest inland deltas. In warmer months, the village can only be reached by boat or plane, since the main road into town is made of ice that melts in the spring. When the wildfires approached, residents first tried fleeing by boat, only to realize that water levels at the massive Athabasca Lake had gotten so low, they couldn't leave. Soon after, the Canadian military sent its aircraft to evacuate people to Fort McMurray, where hundreds of people stayed for weeks.\n\nIn the blaze, Julia Cardinal and her husband Happy Cardinal would lose their cabin, which was about a 45-minute boat ride from Fort Chipewyan. Several months later, the trauma of the fire is still vivid.\n\n\"That was our home,\" said Julia Cardinal, as she walked over the burned cabin, identifying the pots, pans and nails that survived the blaze. \"There are some things we will never, ever replace.\"\n\nStill, the couple's feelings are complicated. While they understand the role of climate change in the fires, and the impact of oil on the climate and lakes and rivers surrounding them, they are not quick to blame the industry. Happy Cardinal was an oil sands worker until retiring three years ago.\n\n\"That's where my money comes from,\" he said."}
{"text": "# Finkel stops 31 shots, United States beats Canada 3-1 in opener of Rivalry Series\nBy **JOHN MARSHALL**  \nNovember 9, 2023. 12:51 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**TEMPE, Ariz. (AP)** - Hilary Knight has played in four Olympics, 13 world championships and been a part of the U.S. women's national team since 2007.\n\nNow the Americans' captain at 34, she may be getting better instead of slowing down.\n\nKnight had a goal and an assist, Aerin Frankel stopped 31 shots and the United States beat Canada 3-1 in the opener of the Rivalry Series on Wednesday night.\n\n\"It seems like she comes out of nowhere and scores goals,\" Canada's Sara Nurse said. \"But obviously she's a super talented player around the net and doesn't miss many.\"\n\nThe Americans won the last time these rivals met, scoring four unanswered goals to beat Canada 6-3 in the gold medal game of the IIHF World Championships in April.\n\nCanada had the early jump in the first of seven games in the 2023-24 version of the Rivalry Series, but Frankel made some tough saves to keep the Canadians from scoring.\n\nTeam USA scored first on Knight's goal in the closing seconds of the first period, and Canada tied it on Brianne Jenner's goal in the second at Mullett Arena, home of the NHL's Arizona Coyotes.\n\nTaylor Heise, the No. 1 overall pick in the inaugural PWHL draft, scored early in the third period to put the U.S. up 2-1, and Alex Carpenter sealed it by scoring off a turnover with 1:20 left in regulation.\n\nEmerance Maschmeyer had 23 saves for Canada.\n\nGame 2 of the series is Saturday in Los Angeles before most of the players report to training camps for the newly former Professional Women's Hockey League next week.\n\n\"I was actually expecting us to have a better start than we did or a little more electricity from our young players,\" U.S. coach John Wroblewski said. \"But sometimes that nervousness can get you into a spot where you're wound up. It took us a while to settle in.\"\n\nFrankel was sharp in the first period, stopping Jessie Eldridge from point-blank range and Ella Shelton on a power play late.\n\nMaschmeyer also made some tough stops, including against Abbey Murphy on a short breakaway. Maschmeyer couldn't get back into position after the rebound and Knight flipped in a backhander with eight seconds left.\n\n\"Our team really stacked together a lot of good play tonight,\" Knight said.\n\nJenner tied it midway through the second, punching in a rebound of her own shot past Frankel after the Americans allowed her to skate freely through the slot.\n\nCanada's Kristin O'Neill had a goal waved off early in the third period for using a high stick. Heise scored a few minutes after that on a rebound that caromed out to the right circle, then Carpenter slipped a backhander between Mashmeyer's pads.\n\n\"Just puck management, let too many plays get away from us,\" Jenner said. \"You can't really do that and not expect the other team to capitalize.\""}
{"text": "# Teenager Stakusic leads Canada to win over host Spain in BJK Cup Finals. Italy tops France\nNovember 8, 2023. 7:15 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SEVILLE, Spain (AP)** - Teenager Marina Stakusic got the biggest win of her career to help Canada defeat host Spain 3-0 in Group C of the Billie Jean King Cup Finals on Wednesday.\n\nThe 18-year-old Stakusic, ranked No. 258 in the world, defeated No. 65 Rebeka Masarova 6-3, 6-1 to give Canada the first point of the day at La Cartuja Stadium.\n\nStakusic's previous career-best victory had been against No. 152 Jaimee Fourlis in 2022. She had never beaten a top 100 opponent.\n\n\"This is such a special feeling and makes me believe that I belong here,\" Stakusic said. \"It is also super special to win in front of all the Canadians who I have worked with for a long time. What a feeling - it is the most meaningful win for me so far - and it will give me so much confidence going forward.\"\n\nLeylah Fernandez gave Canada the second point by edging Sara Sorribes Tormo 7-6 (8), 7-6 (7).\n\nIn the doubles, Eugenie Bouchard and Gabriela Dabrowski beat Sorribes Tormo and Masarova 6-2, 7-5.\n\nIn Group D, Italy defeated France 2-1 with early victories in the singles matches. Martina Trevisan rallied to defeat Alize Cornet 2-6, 6-2, 6-2 and Jasmine Paolini beat Caroline Garcia 7-6 (6), 5-7, 6-4.\n\nFrance came from behind to win the doubles match with Garcia and Kristina Mladenovic defeating Elisabetta Cocciaretto and Trevisan 5-7, 6-2, 10-6.\n\nThe 12 teams in the BJK Cup Finals compete in four round-robin groups and the winners will advance to the semifinals this weekend."}
{"text": "# Biden pledges at Americas summit an alternative to Chinese-led infrastructure and development loans\nBy **JOSH BOAK** and **FATIMA HUSSEIN**  \nNovember 3, 2023. 12:03 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - President Joe Biden on Friday welcomed government leaders from countries across the Americas to an economic summit by pledging to increase U.S. investment in the region in part to counter China's influence.\n\nThe U.S. president did not specifically mention China in his opening remarks at the first Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity Leaders' Summit. But Biden openly alluded to the country that has emerged as a chief geopolitical competitor to the United States that has offered development loans to countries in the Western Hemisphere.\n\n\"We want to make sure that our closest neighbors know they have a real choice between debt trap diplomacy and high quality, transparent approaches to infrastructure and to development,\" Biden said. \"By combining the commitment of the United States government to mitigate investment risk with the agility of private sector financing, we believe we can deliver gains for workers and families throughout the region.\"\n\nAmong the other topics being discussed at the summit are migration, supply chains and efforts geared toward environmental sustainability.\n\nAlong with Biden, officials from Barbados Canada, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay and Panama attended summit events.\n\nFriday's event was announced last year at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. The focus on trade comes as competition has intensified between the United States and China, the world's two largest economies. Biden, a Democrat, has provided government incentives to build U.S. infrastructure and for companies to construct new factories. But after the coronavirus pandemic disrupted manufacturing and global shipping, there has has also been an effort to diversify trade and reduce dependence on Chinese manufacturing.\n\nIn 2022, the U.S. exported $1.2 trillion worth of goods and services to other countries in the Western Hemisphere, according to the U.S. Trade Representative. It also imported $1.2 trillion in goods and services from those countries. But the majority of that trade was with Canada and Mexico.\n\nBy contrast, the U.S. imported $562.9 billion worth of goods and services from China last year.\n\nTreasury Secretary Janet Yellen outlined the Biden administration's goals in a Thursday speech at the Inter-American Development Bank. The U.S. wants to diversify supply chains with \"trusted partners and allies,\" a strategy that she said had \"tremendous potential benefits for fueling growth in Latin America and the Caribbean.\"\n\nYellen, who regularly talks about her friendshoring strategy for increasing supply chain resilience by working primarily with friendly nations as opposed to geopolitical rivals like China, laid out her vision of new U.S. investment in South America at the development bank.\n\nThe Inter-American Development Bank, which is the biggest multilateral lender to Latin America, would support new projects through grants, lending and new programs. The U.S. is the bank's largest shareholder, with 30% of voting rights.\n\nIncreasingly, policymakers in the U.S. have expressed concern about China's influence at the bank. While the Asian superpower holds less than 0.1% voting rights, it holds large economic stakes in some of the 48 member countries of the bank."}
{"text": "# Birds in North America will be renamed to avoid any 'harmful' historical associations with people\nBy **CHRISTINA LARSON**  \nNovember 1, 2023. 7:10 PM EST\n\n---\n\nBirds in North America will no longer be named after people, the American Ornithological Society announced Wednesday.\n\nNext year, the organization will begin to rename around 80 species found in the U.S. and Canada.\n\n\"There is power in a name, and some English bird names have associations with the past that continue to be exclusionary and harmful today,\" the organization's president, Colleen Handel, said in a statement. \"Everyone who loves and cares about birds should be able to enjoy and study them freely.\"\n\nRather than review each bird named after a person individually, all such birds will be renamed, the organization announced.\n\nBirds that will be renamed include those currently called Wilson's warbler and Wilson's snipe, both named after the 19th century naturalist Alexander Wilson. Audubon's shearwater, a seabird named for John James Audubon, also will get a new name.\n\nIn 2020, the organization renamed a bird once referring to a Confederate Army general, John P. McCown, as the thick-billed longspur.\n\n\"I'm really happy and excited about the announcement,\" said Emily Williams, an ornithologist at Georgetown University who was not involved in the decision.\n\nShe said heated discussions over bird names have been happening within birdwatching communities for the past several years.\n\n\"Naming birds based on habitat or appearance is one of the least problematic approaches,\" she said.\n\nEarlier this year, the National Audubon Society announced that it would retain its name, even as critics and some voices within the organization have argued that it should dump the association with a man, John James Audubon, whose family owned slaves.\n\n\"The name has come to represent so much more than the work of one person,\" Susan Bell, chair of the National Audubon Society's Board of Directors, told Audubon magazine in March, adding, \"We must reckon with the racist legacy of John James Audubon.\"\n\nA 2020 encounter in New York's Central Park served as a public wake-up call about the discrimination that Black people sometimes face when trying to enjoy the outdoors.\n\nChristian Cooper, a Black birdwatcher, was looking for birds when he asked a white woman, Amy Cooper, to follow local rules and leash her dog. Cooper called 911 and was later charged with filing a false police report, though the charges were later dropped.\n\nSoon after, a collective of birdwatchers organized the first Black Birders Week to increase the visibility of Black nature lovers and scientists.\n\nAnd a group called Bird Names for Birds sent a petition to the ornithological society urging it to \"outline a plan to change harmful common names\" of birds."}
{"text": "# Opponents of military rule in Myanmar applaud new sanctions targeting gas revenues\nNovember 1, 2023. 1:36 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BANGKOK (AP)** - A U.N.-appointed human rights expert and opponents of Myanmar's military government have welcomed the latest sanctions imposed by the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada on companies providing financial resources to the army-installed regime and high-ranking officials. The move is linked to rising violence and human rights abuses in the Southeast Asian nation.\n\nThe U.S. Treasury Department said Tuesday it was imposing sanctions on Myanmar's state-owned Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise, a joint venture partner in all offshore gas projects and a vital source of hard cash for the military government. The sanctions block access to money and resources under U.S. control, and prohibit U.S. citizens from providing financial services to - or for the benefit of - MOGE starting from Dec. 15.\n\nFive officials are on the sanctions list: the ministers of industry and investment and foreign economic relations; the director generals of the prosecution and prisons departments; and the chief of general staff for the combined military forces. Three organizations were also designated for sanctions, according to the Treasury Department.\n\nThe U.K. also sanctioned five people and one entity that it said are involved either in providing financial services to the regime or the supply of restricted goods, including aircraft parts.\n\nCanada also imposed sanctions against 39 individuals and 22 entities in coordination with the U.K. and the U.S.\n\nTom Andrews, a special rapporteur working with the U.N. human rights office, said in a statement that the fresh sanctions were important steps forward and that the ban on financial services that benefit MOGE would hit the junta's largest source of revenue.\n\n\"These actions signal to the people of Myanmar that they have not been forgotten, but there is much more that the international community can and must do.\" said Andrews, urging U.N. member states to take stronger, coordinated action \"to support the heroic efforts of the people of Myanmar to defend their nation and save their children's future.\"\n\nJustice for Myanmar, an underground group of researchers and activists from Myanmar, also said the U.S. move against MOGE was a welcome step \"to disrupt the junta's single biggest source of foreign revenue.\" The group operates covertly because the military government does not tolerate critics of its rule.\n\n\"The U.S. should continue to target the junta's access to funds, including through full sanctions on MOGE in coordination with its allies,\" the group said in a statement.\n\nThe sanctions are the latest the Western governments have imposed on Myanmar's military regime, after the army seized power from the elected civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi on Feb. 1, 2021.\n\nWidespread nonviolent protests following the military takeover were suppressed by deadly force and triggered armed resistance in much of the country that some experts characterize as a civil war.\n\n\"Today's action, taken in coordination with Canada and the United Kingdom ... denies the regime access to arms and supplies necessary to commit its violent acts,\" Brian Nelson, the Treasury Department's undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a statement.\n\n\"Collectively, we remain committed to degrading the regime's evasion tactics and continuing to hold the regime accountable for its violence,\" he said.\n\nThe Myanmar public and human rights groups had called for sanctions targeting gas revenues shortly after the army takeover. About 50% of Myanmar's foreign income derives from natural gas revenues. Several offshore gas fields operate in Myanmar's maritime territory, run by companies from Thailand, Japan, Malaysia, India and South Korea in partnership with MOGE. China is an investor in the pipeline that delivers the gas to the country.\n\nThe European Union imposed sanctions against MOGE in February last year."}
{"text": "# Book Review: Ralph Nader profiles corporate leaders he sees as role models in 'The Rebellious CEO'\nBy **ANDREW DeMILLO**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 2:52 PM EST\n\n---\n\nConsumer advocate Ralph Nader has built his life's reputation on his fights with corporate America. But it turns out there are some CEOs he actually likes.\n\nAt least that's the premise of \"The Rebellious CEO: 12 Leaders Who Did It Right,\" Nader's look at executives who he says \"stood against the gray crowd\" by putting a premium on social responsibility as much as they did on profits. The dozen leaders he profiles are presented as models for businesses on how to balance both those needs.\n\nThe brief biographies of the CEOs give Nader a chance to highlight what he sees as the shortcomings of today's corporations. But, surprisingly, he commends the CEOs profiled for not forgetting the bottom line and notes that all of them insisted \"nothing would be possible if they didn't pay attention to profits.\"\n\nThe chapters are sprinkled with Nader's anecdotes from his interactions with the CEOs profiled, and leans on their own writings as well. The CEOs highlighted include Ray Anderson, the carpet-tile manufacturing executive who was spurred to set sustainability goals for his company, and Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard's support for conservation efforts.\n\nNader also praises CEOs for their work at the consumer level, including Southwest Airlines - though also noting its cancellation of more than 16,000 flights last year over the holidays that eventually led to a multi-million settlement.\n\nNader strays into adulation at times, but the book offers an interesting perspective on business leadership from one of the most well known antagonists of corporations."}
{"text": "# Book Review: The Velvet Underground's story and afterlife told in the oral history 'Loaded'\nBy **MICHAEL HILL**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 9:45 AM EST\n\n---\n\nBefore they became synonymous with downtown cool, the Velvet Underground played a multi-band bill at a suburban New Jersey high school in 1965. Parents and kids in the crowd were repelled by the \"screeching urge of sound\" from Lou Reed and his bandmates, a local reviewer wrote, and retreated in horror after their second song, \"Heroin.\"\n\nThe Velvet Underground soon found a more appreciative audience when artist Andy Warhol spotted them and set them up at the Factory, his Manhattan studio-and-happening space. But wide success and fame eluded the Velvet Underground during their fractious run. They became lionized as edgy musical groundbreakers later on - reversing the stereotypical rock band success story by breaking up and then conquering the world.\n\nVeteran journalist and author Dylan Jones tells that unusual story in \"Loaded: The Life (and Afterlife) of The Velvet Underground.\" Or more precisely, Jones weaves together an oral history that relies on the voices of friends, Warhol \"superstars,\" fellow musicians and members of the band. Jones interviewed a bunch of people who were in the orbit of Reed, John Cale and the other band members. The author also relies on past interviews from Reed and others who have died.\n\nThe staying power of the Velvet Underground stems from their songs, which could be beautiful, dissonant or hypnotic. But it also revolves around their style, which has been widely copied by rockers ever since. They wore sunglasses inside. They didn't care what you thought. They could barely stand each other. \"We hated everybody and everything,\" said Cale.\n\nThis is largely a story about Reed, who was a restless artist, a canny songwriter and - quite often - a surly jerk. But some of the book's most compelling passages describe Reed's difficult and all-too-brief partnership with the equally intense Cale, a classically trained musician from Wales.\n\nThe book also tracks the post-Velvet work of Reed, Cale and the singer/songwriter Nico, who was featured on the band's debut album. Reed finally began getting his due in 1972 with the release of the \"Transformer\" album, which included the signature song \"Walk On the Wild Side.\"\n\nGood oral histories hit the right mix of insight, opinion and dish. And Jones mostly delivers. The off-the-wall stuff is in there too, like tales of Cale chopping the head off a chicken on stage and Reed slapping around David Bowie at a restaurant.\n\nJones falls a bit short in his mission of softening the image of Reed, who was notorious for being difficult, especially with journalists. But he convincingly makes the case for the band's historical importance.\n\n\"Unpack the last 50 years of pop,\" Jones writes, \"and the broken fragments of the Velvet Underground are everywhere.\""}
{"text": "# Book Review: 'Soldier of Destiny' traces Ulysses S. Grant's complicated route before the White House\nBy **ANDREW DeMILLO**  \nDecember 11, 2023. 2:05 PM EST\n\n---\n\nUlysses S. Grant's standing among the presidents has improved in recent years, with critically acclaimed biographies by Ron Chernow and others offering a new perspective on his time in the White House.\n\nBut the 18th president who led the Union armies to victory in the Civil War still leaves a complicated legacy, especially when it comes to his relationship to slavery. That relationship is the centerpiece of John Reeves' enlightening \"Soldier of Destiny: Slavery, Secession and the Redemption of Ulysses S. Grant.\"\n\nReeves' book isn't a comprehensive biography, and it doesn't cover Grant's time in the White House. But it gives readers an enlightening look at how he benefited from slavery years before he helped end the institution.\n\nReeves traces the evolution of Grant from someone who \"actively participated in the slave culture of St. Louis\" before the Civil War. Reeves is fair and blunt in depicting the role slavery played in Grant's life as he tried to provide a \"respectable middle-class lifestyle\" for his family before the war.\n\n\"And this lifestyle, it must be remembered, was dependent on the ownership of human property,\" Reeves writes. He also points out the ambivalence Grant displayed about slavery before the Civil War.\n\nBut he also examines the characteristics and skills that it took for Grant to go from an officer who was forced to resign from the Army to one of the most revered military heroes in history. This includes a detailed look at the key battles he faced during the Civil War.\n\nReeves doesn't shy from highlighting the stains upon Grant's military legacy including the reports of drinking that dogged Grant throughout the years. He also devotes a chapter to the order Grant issued expelling Jewish people from a military district he oversaw, an effort that was intended to halt illegal cotton speculation and remains a \"black mark on his character,\" Reeves writes.\n\nReeves manages to stitch Grant's flaws and virtues into a thought-provoking portrait of a key historical figure who never lost faith in himself or his country."}
{"text": "# Book Review: David Mamet screams at clouds in new collection of grievances about Hollywood\nBy **MARK KENNEDY**  \nDecember 4, 2023. 11:30 AM EST\n\n---\n\nJust in time for Christmas, when you need a gift for that weird old uncle who is upset that everyone gets a trophy in youth soccer, comes a new David Mamet book.\n\n\"Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood\" is a collection of observations, stories and aphorisms about Hollywood from one of America's foremost writers and, these days, provocateurs. It is virtually unreadable.\n\nThis is a book that resembles the idled rantings from a feverish, unsolicited email stuck in your spam folder. There are weird capitalizations, uneasy conclusions and the rat-a-tat of non-sequiturs all held together by bad faith. It's illustrated by Mamet's own cartoons, which echo a middle schooler's sense of humor and maturity.\n\nHe clearly hates film producers - \"Village Idiots\" is the nicest of adjectives - but he hates PC culture more. He lambasts \"Diversity Porn,\" arguing that the logical extension of color-conscious casting is an Asian woman playing Harry Truman. He thinks modern culture has made frightened sheeps of men.\n\n\"Today in Los Angeles the teenage girls walk about virtually naked, and the males, rather than getting a pass for ogling the good clean fun, are terrified of even inadvertent gawking.\" He won a Pulitzer Prize once. Now he's basically endorsing wet T-shirt contests.\n\nThroughout is the stringent waft of misogyny. In one cartoon, Mamet asks \"Who was the most fetching female in film history\" over a drawing of Lassie. He includes jokes like this: \"Ann-Margret is the only girl in Hollywood who still has her hyphen.\" Again, this is a man who name-checks Herodotus and Kipling.\n\nIn one section, he tries to belittle entire topics of critical thought like a proto-incel. \"Inequity, Gender Politics, Feminism, and like doctrines are like modern art: a first glance is sufficient. There's no information to be gained from an in-depth study.\"\n\nMamet is the acclaimed author of theater classics such as \"Glengarry Glen Ross,\" \"American Buffalo\" and \"Race,\" all works struggling to find relevance in the modern age. His Hollywood input includes scripts for \"The Untouchables,\" \"Heist,\" \"Wag the Dog\" and \"The Edge,\" glorious all.\n\nSections in the book unusually begin with a tart statement, like \"Trivia is gossip without malice\" or \"People flourish in hierarchy,\" and then meander to some backstage trivia about Hollywood's Golden Age before ending with something outrageous and unconnected, often with Nazis. Hitler appears on Page 8 and never really leaves.\n\nTo be fair, there are intriguing parts, like when he discusses the nuts and bolts of screenwriting: \"The dialogue is of as little concern to a skilled screenwriter as the paint is to the mechanic.\" And run-ins with Billy Wilder, Don Ameche, Sue Mengers and Bob Evans are fun.\n\nBut \"Everywhere an Oink Oink\" is a vanity project: He loves re-settling scores, boasts about being fired from jobs or thrown out of places - he got tossed from a Williams Sonoma for going in the wrong door and, when confronted, replied \"It's alright, I'm an Illegal Immigrant.\"\n\nAt one point, Mamet's editor is compelled to dismiss in a footnote one of the writer's so-called facts: \"A complete fabrication.\" But the wrong thing remains there. All over, Mamet repeats himself, another gripe for a book that feels unedited. One may loath his individual conclusions, but to get them twice makes the author even smaller, petty and unhinged.\n\n\"Either they or I are marching to the beat of a Different Drummer. In which event either one or many of us must be out of step,\" he writes.\n\nYes, indeed."}
{"text": "# Book Review: 'Eyeliner' examines the staple makeup product's revolutionary role in global society\nBy **LESLIE AMBRIZ**  \nNovember 30, 2023. 8:37 PM EST\n\n---\n\nZahra Hankir opens \"Eyeliner: A Cultural History\" by marveling over her mother's elegant beauty process as she delicately sweeps black kohl on her waterline, dreaming of displaying that same confidence one day.\n\nFor Hankir, eyeliner is more than just a cosmetic product. It provides protection and empowerment. It provides cultural connection. It exists beyond borders, gender roles and Western beauty standards. Lining one's waterline or drawing a delicate black line across an eyelid is more than aesthetics. For many of the underrepresented groups and communities of color highlighted in Hankir's book, applying the product is a ritual deeply rooted in spirituality, culture, identity and more. To loosely quote Audre Lorde, if self-care is an act of resistance, then an eyeliner is a tool in the rebellion throughout Hankir's novel.\n\nThe Lebanese-British journalist seamlessly takes her readers on a global investigation of how the cosmetic product is used worldwide. Through intimate narratives with varied characters from different cultures and communities, we learn more about the product's rise in prominence while having a fly-on-the-wall inside look at the ways it serves medicinal purposes, fuels spiritual practices, uplifts self-expression and how its mere existence on someone's eyelid can be viewed as a form of defiance.\n\nHankir begins this thoroughly researched journey by educating her readers on Egypt's Queen Nefertiti and her rise as a symbol of \"ideal feminine beauty.\" The Egyptian queen posthumously influenced mainstream culture, leading eventually to the beauty item's spot in shopping mall stores and in makeup ads across Western society. But while detailing Nefertiti's legacy, Hankir does not shy away from reflecting on how the queen's thick-lined trademark became twisted and co-opted by white Western culture. She addresses it head-on and shares the complete history of its popularity. All of the good and the bad that follows popularity.\n\nThe book is a little over 300 pages long and packs enough information for readers to walk away with more in-depth knowledge of the staple product sitting idly inside their makeup bag. As readers twist open their liner applicator, they'll be reminded of the Wodaabe men who wear kohl to enhance their appearance and attract a partner in a ritual ceremony. They'll think of artists like Shirin Neshat, who wear the item as a form of solidarity for the women back home who cannot publicly line their eyes. They'll remember the drag queens who drew on their bold, exaggerated liner as they prepared to perform and the stories of the Cholas in Mexican-American culture who wore the product, expressing their dual femininity and strength.\n\n\"Eyeliner\" comes full circle, highlighting today's beauty influencers and allowing viewers to see the ripple effects of popularity and cultural exchange as this one beauty product carries the constant line of simultaneously emphasizing the beauty and power each person possesses as they line their eyes and prepare to embark on their personal journeys."}
{"text": "# Book Review: 'Welcome to The O.C.' serves as a definitive look-back at the 20-year-old Fox drama\nBy **MIKE HOUSEHOLDER**  \nNovember 27, 2023. 3:20 PM EST\n\n---\n\n\"California, here we come.\"\n\nThe refrain from the Phantom Planet tune \"California\" that served as the theme song for \"The O.C.\" welcomed viewers to Fox's short-lived but much-loved prime-time soap that focused on a group of teenagers and parents navigating the emotional ups and downs of life in affluent Newport Beach.\n\nNow, 20 years after the show's debut, Rolling Stone TV critic Alan Sepinwall is taking readers \"right back where we started from\" in a splendid retrospective that relies on the memories of those who brought the show's 96 episodes to life.\n\n\"Welcome to The O.C.\" - the title references a memorable line from the pilot (minus a not-so-friendly word that punctuates the sentiment) - features recollections from creator Josh Schwartz, executive producer Stephanie Savage, the show's stars, Fox executives and many more.\n\nThe oral history serves as a definitive look-back at the four-season series that introduced \"Chrismukkah\" (a celebration of both Christmas and Hanukkah in the blended Cohen household) and a host of indie-rock bands whose songs played over some of \"The O.C.\"'s biggest moments.\n\nNone was more monumental than the controversial decision to kill off Mischa Barton's Marissa Cooper, one of the show's central characters, in season three's finale in 2006.\n\nThe book devotes a chapter to the behind-the-scenes intrigue that led to Barton's exit as well as the fallout. Spoiler alert: Those close to the show didn't like it very much, starting with Barton herself, who called it \"a little bit of a bummer.\"\n\nOthers used stronger - and strikingly similar - language.\n\nKelly Rowan, who played Cooper's neighbor, Kirsten Cohen, said the storyline was \"a big mistake,\" breaking up the characters who came to be known as \"The Core Four\" - Kirsten Cohen's comic-book- and indie-music-loving son Seth, played by Adam Brody; Ben McKenzie's Ryan Atwood, a troubled outsider who is taken in by the Cohens; Summer Roberts (Rachel Bilson), Seth Cohen's dream girl and classmate; and Cooper, the beautiful girl-next-door who is Ryan's soulmate.\n\nSavage acknowledged it was a \"terrible, terrible mistake.\"\n\nAnd Schwartz, who at the time was one of the youngest EPs in the television industry, agreed.\n\n\"I very quickly realized, 'Oh my God, what have we done? I think we made a terrible mistake,'\" he said.\n\n\"The O.C.\" lasted one more season. Schwartz and Savage went on to helm a multitude of other small-screen gems, including \"Chuck\" and \"Gossip Girl.\" The Core Four had become stars, and the show gave screen time to future headliners such as Chris Pratt,Olivia Wilde and Shailene Woodley.\n\n\"Welcome to The O.C.\" is a must-read for viewers of the show's original run, but it works, too, for those meeting the Cohens and their fellow Orange County residents for the first time via streaming services."}
{"text": "# Book Review: 'Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars' argues history repeats itself\nBy **KRYSTA FAURIA**  \nNovember 27, 2023. 12:10 PM EST\n\n---\n\n\"There is nothing new under the sun.\" So goes the adage which conveys the tendency for history to repeat itself.\n\nIt's this unstated premise that drives Kliph Nesteroff's latest book, \"Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars.\" In it, Nesteroff artfully seeks to demonstrate how current catchphrases like \"cancel culture\" and \"political correctness\" are just variations of the same generational and ideological divides which have undergirded American society throughout Hollywood's history.\n\nNesteroff turns his attention to comedians in particular, citing the ways in which they have historically been unique targets of the culture wars.\n\nHis arguments are cogent and his histories entertaining - how is it possible that \"vaguely defined spirit of the times\" is not a quote about wokeness, but instead a denunciation of critiques levied on comedians more than half a century ago?\n\nStill, it's worth noting that Nesteroff began his career as a comedian, which perhaps betrays an inherent sympathy for the prophetic martyrs who have frequently been subjected to unjust censorship and criticism throughout the history of showbiz."}
{"text": "# Book Review: Lauren Grodstein's masterpiece of historical fiction set in Warsaw Ghetto during WWII\nBy **ANN LEVIN**  \nNovember 27, 2023. 11:18 AM EST\n\n---\n\nThe Oneg Shabbat archive was a secret project of Jewish prisoners in the Warsaw Ghetto to record their histories as they awaited deportation to Nazi death camps during World War II. Lauren Grodstein has used this historical fact as the basis for her mesmerizing new novel, \"We Must Not Think of Ourselves.\"\n\nIt is narrated by a fictional schoolteacher, Adam Paskow, who conducts interviews for the real-life archives as he falls in love with a married woman, Sala Wiskoff, with whom he shares overcrowded quarters.\n\nGrodstein, who was inspired to write the book after a Jewish family heritage trip to Warsaw, where she first encountered the diary entries, propaganda posters and other materials that comprise the archives, excels at character development and naturalistic dialogue. In Adam, she has created an immensely appealing protagonist, notwithstanding his adulterous affair with Sala, who is equally charismatic.\n\nBefore the war, Adam was living a quiet, bookish life in a prosperous neighborhood of Warsaw with his wealthy Polish Catholic wife. They were very much in love. But after she dies and the Nazis invade Poland, he is forced out of their cozy flat (\"filled with books and Oriental rugs\") and into the gated and locked ghetto, patrolled by armed guards, where he teaches English to some of the displaced children.\n\nAdam and Sala are flirtatious almost from the beginning as Adam, who is a bit of a dreamer, struggles to comprehend the reality of their situation. \"They can't kill all of us,\" he says to Sala. \"Can't they?\" she replies. \"It's illogical,\" he reasons. \"And the Nazis pride themselves on being logical.\" Later, he thinks to himself, \"How on earth could they pull such a thing off? And would the world really... let them?\"\n\nOf course, it does. As the war drags on and conditions in the ghetto worsen, Adam finally has a moment of reckoning. Reflecting on the purpose of the project launched by historian Emanuel Ringelblum, who named it Oneg Shabbat, or \"joy of the sabbath,\" after the day of the week when the archivists met, Adam thinks: \"Now I realize that we are creating a portrait of Polish Jews at the end of our history.\"\n\nBut that was not to be. In a twist on \"Sophie's Choice,\" Adam, who never identified strongly as a Jew before the war, obtains documents that will let him and two others escape to freedom - he just has to decide which two. It is a deeply moving conclusion to an extraordinary work of historical fiction."}
{"text": "# Book Review: A dazzlingly fun historical fiction, 'A True Account' tests the borders of reality\nBy **DONNA EDWARDS**  \nNovember 21, 2023. 1:23 PM EST\n\n---\n\nHannah Masury, for a brief time, was a pirate. At least, according to the mysterious manuscript that shows up on Professor Marian Beresford's desk, brought by a bright-faced student excited at the possibility of finding the treasure that Hannah left behind.\n\nNovelist and historian Katherine Howe embarks on a dazzlingly fun historical fiction, \"A True Account: Hannah Masury's Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself: A Novel\" - aptly named given the way it tests the boundaries between reality and imagination.\n\nWhen undergrad Kay Lonergan brings Hannah's found manuscript to her professor, Marian's years of cynicism have hardened her. She highly doubts its authenticity and even points out the more doubtful details, verging on breaking the fourth wall. But Kay convinces Marian to approach her famous explorer of a father and persuade him, and his expedition society club, to back their trip in search of long-lost pirate booty.\n\nAnd is that jealousy we detect in the professor? The further the story gets, the more it seems that Kay is everything Marian wishes she was: young, exciting, fashionable, carefree, commanding, self-assured. But Hannah's manuscript might be just the thing to spark some excitement into Marian's dull life - and to finally win her father's attention and approval.\n\nHistory buffs will appreciate the accurate inclusion of figures such as pirate William Fly and Puritan preacher Cotton Mather. Those who aren't so thrilled about history will enjoy Hannah's wry take on the happenings of the early 1700s.\n\nMirrored in Hannah's restlessness with the status quo is Marian's inability to fit into the mold set for women of the early 1900s. She quickly becomes endeared to the young pirate who disguised herself as a cabin boy and went bravely adventuring with one of the world's most notoriously vicious pirates, Edward Low.\n\nHannah's manuscript, which is about half of the book, follows only hints of the linguistic style of 18th-century American literature. Mercifully, she's far more readable than Mathers.\n\n\"A True Account\" is a slow start that picks up quickly into a wild voyage of satisfying twists and an even more satisfying ending. The story ties threads of fact and fiction into an intricate knot that's just as enjoyable to look at as it is to untangle."}
{"text": "# Book Review: 'I Would Meet You Anywhere' is a breathtaking account of an adoptee's search for family\nBy **DONNA EDWARDS**  \nNovember 20, 2023. 3:58 PM EST\n\n---\n\nSusan Kiyo Ito always knew she was adopted, but uncovering her birth family became a decadeslong process marked by moments of warm connection and icy divides - raw stories compiled into a memoir that's alternately touching and heartbreaking.\n\nOpening on the fateful moment when Ito is about to meet her birth mother for the first time, \"I Would Meet You Anywhere\" transcends a title and becomes a refrain throughout the book.\n\nIto's relationship with Yumi is fraught from the beginning, but her birth mother holds the key to the information she needs to find the other half of her DNA. Ito meets Yumi when and where the latter deems convenient - New Jersey, California, a small Midwestern town; in a house, a hotel, a hospital. And Ito would meet her anywhere.\n\nIn the process of finding her birth parents and piecing together her origins, Ito explores the theme of family - and what it means to occupy the various roles within it - pondering the symmetry in the first 17 years she spent living with her mom, Kikuko, taking care of her to the last 27 years of her mom's life when their roles reversed.\n\nMeanwhile, Yumi flits in and out of the story, leaving the impression of her taking up more space than her physical presence.\n\nIto is left wondering about the reproductive choices that have shaped her life, starting with her conception. After all, what choice did Yumi have? Her family had started over with nothing after the United States forced them into internment camps, along with an estimated 120,000 other Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals.\n\nThere aren't many things Yumi refuses to talk about, but these topics are frustratingly the most important ones, big question marks that threaten to burn answerless into oblivion.\n\nUnlike Yumi, the author is totally open about her thoughts, feelings and experiences. Ito's prose follows her mood; the default of easy conversational writing becomes stilted when she's upset, flowing when she's hopeful.\n\nPart 2 ends in a burst of poetry disguised as prose, an astounding compilation of similes and squishy adjectives that perfectly capture a feeling that rests right on the periphery of language. It's an absolutely surreal moment of her life described the only way one can truly capture such a confluence of happenstance: with uncanny poetic prose that verges on nonsense, if it weren't so utterly fitting.\n\n\"I Would Meet You Anywhere\" is breathtaking. Like a master quilter, Ito is able to find the patterns and fit them together in a beautiful, cohesive story that's balanced and satisfying, working in tandem to create a blanket of meaning enshrouding an entire life, plus some."}
{"text": "# Book Review: San Diego private eye tangles with FBI and Russian mob in fast-paced 'Odyssey's End'\nBy **BRUCE DESILVA**  \nNovember 20, 2023. 12:58 PM EST\n\n---\n\nAuthor Matt Coyle has put San Diego private eye Rick Cahill through a lot in his fine series of crime novels. Rick has accumulated sinister enemies on both sides of the law. He's been shot and beaten so many times that his body is laced with scars. And he's in the early stages of CTE, a degenerative brain disease that unleashes fits of rage and may soon kill him.\n\nHis wife, convinced that Rick's work - and Rick himself -are too dangerous, has left him, taking their 20-month-old daughter with her.\n\nAs \"Odyssey's End,\" the 10th book in the series, opens, Rick is considering another line of work but fears he's too much of an adrenaline junkie to give it up. Still, he can't quit just yet - not until he can tuck enough money aside to secure his little girl's future.\n\nSuch is his state of mind when two old enemies suddenly reappear. Sergei Volkov, a homicidal Russian mob boss who has reasons to want Rick dead, has just been released from federal prison. And Peter Stone, Rick's longtime nemesis, shows up with a surprising request.\n\nStone says he needs a kidney transplant, but aging, violent criminals don't rank high on donor lists. His only hope is an organ from his grown daughter, but she's gone missing. So Stone wants Rick to find her.\n\nRick figures Stone's story is a lie, or at least not the whole truth. Besides, there's no way Rich wants to work for this psychopath. But when Stone hands him $50,000 dollars, Rick reluctantly takes the job.\n\nAs he digs into the case, Rick is threatened by two FBI agents who mistakenly think he is searching for Theodore Raskin, the fugitive founder of a fraudulent crypto currency firm. Soon, more complications arise, and several people associated with Rick's investigation end up dead.\n\nCoyle's prose is vivid and tight, his characters are well drawn, and the tension rarely lets up in this fast-paced tale of duplicity and betrayal. The climactic scene is a long-drawn-out gun battle in which Rick, armed with a handgun, takes on a small army of Russian mobsters brandishing automatic rifles. That Rick prevails is satisfying in a John Wick sort of way, but some readers might his survival a tad farfetched."}
{"text": "# Book Review: Benjamin Taylor's brief new biography of Willa Cather displays the devotion of a fan\nBy **ANN LEVIN**  \nNovember 14, 2023. 7:31 AM EST\n\n---\n\nBenjamin Taylor has a thing for Willa Cather. This year, the 150th anniversary of her birth, he has written a passionate love letter to her in the form of a brief but illuminating biography. \"Chasing Bright Medusas\" clocks in at just over 150 pages but it offers a fine introduction to one of the leading novelists of the American frontier.\n\nTaylor, a prize-winning author who also penned short books about Philip Roth and Marcel Proust, argues that Cather's move at age 9 from Virginia's Shenandoah Valley to Red Cloud, Nebraska, where for the first time she encountered Jews, Norwegians, Mexicans and immigrants of all kinds, was a foundational event that \"made her a cosmopolitan while she was still a provincial.\"\n\nHe also demonstrates how, as she matured as a writer, she differed sharply from her younger contemporaries in the literary world, including Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Dos Passos, in her \"unironic\" idealism about America's possibility.\n\nHis other major themes include her complicated relationship to both gender and religion. About the former, he agrees with other critics who have simply taken her strong preference for women as a given. But he adds another layer of complexity by asserting that she preferred \"to talk about love at its most exalted, above the reach of mere carnality... sexual nature is what she intends to rise above.\"\n\nAs for religion, he explains how it was closely bound up with her profound reverence for nature, especially the \"harsh beauty of the Southwest,\" which \"seemed to her the landscape of an inner life.\" It was also part and parcel of her desire for literary immortality. \"There is no God but one God and Art is his revealer,\" Cather wrote to a friend when she was still in her early 20s. \"That's my creed and I'll follow it to the end.\"\n\nPortraying her as a relatively late bloomer - she had a lengthy stint in journalism before she began writing fiction - Taylor repeatedly marvels at both her physical courage and stamina and her iron discipline as a writer. He cites with admiration what she once wrote to a friend: \"If only I could nail up the front door and live in a mess, I could simply become a fountain pen and have done with it - a conduit for ink to run through.\"\n\nBy marshaling judicious quotes from her letters as well as her short stories and novels, including such classics as \"My Antonia\" and \"Death Comes for the Archbishop,\" Taylor makes a case for Cather's enduring place in the American literary canon."}
{"text": "# Book Review: 'UFO' is a detailed look at the history of the search for the truth that's out there\nBy **ANDREW DeMILLO**  \nNovember 13, 2023. 2:35 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThe truth may be out there, but making sense out of it isn't easy.\n\nDiscussion about unidentified flying objects has moved over the years from fodder for science fiction movies or jokes to the subject of congressional hearings. Garrett M. Graff's \"UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here - and Out There\" is the perfect guide for readers interested in learning how that discussion has evolved.\n\nGraff offers an authoritative and objective look at the history of UFO sightings and research into the possibility of extraterrestrial life over the past 75 years.\n\nIt's a narrative as compelling as Graff's other works, including his history of Watergate, and requires the same skill that he's demonstrated in navigating government documents.\n\nThe deeply researched history traces the ways the government has struggled to wrap its arms around the questions raised by UFOs - or, as they're now known, \"unidentified aerial phenomena\" - sightings going back to the 1940s.\n\n\"It's not that the government knows something it doesn't want to tell us,\" Graff writes at the outset of the book. \"It's that the government is uncomfortable telling us it doesn't know anything at all.\"\n\nGraff profiles a sprawling cast of characters who have played a role in the search for UFOs and alien life over the years, from amateur ufologists to famed astronomer Carl Sagan to Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge.\n\nThey're all battling hoaxes and public skepticism and trying to overcome the lingering question first posed by physicist Enrico Fermi: if extraterrestrial life is prevalent, why don't we see more of it?\n\nGraff highlights the advances in science that are made over the years in trying to answer that question, but also in showing just how vast and unknown the universe is.\n\nThe book shows how attitudes toward UFOs have changed over the years, not just by scientists and the government but also in popular culture. Those shifting attitudes have led to more openness about discussing sightings, and the national security implications of not knowing what they could be.\n\nGraff is unlikely to convert firm skeptics, but he may at least convince them to keep an open mind the next time they read about UFOs or UAPs."}
{"text": "# Book Review: Rock 'n' roller and Rush pioneer Geddy Lee goes deep in his memoir, 'My Effin' Life'\nBy **MARK KENNEDY**  \nNovember 14, 2023. 7:28 AM EST\n\n---\n\nGeddy Lee is a rock star, that's undeniable. But he's also a polite Canadian to the core. So it's fitting that the Rush icon picked a not-too-bawdy title for his memoir.\n\n\"My Effin' Life\" is an engrossing tale of a \"classic underachiever\" who became a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame vocalist, bassist, and keyboard player. It's a great read for anyone interested in the brilliant prog-rock trio or the music scene from the 1970s onward.\n\nLee's writing is a lot like his band's songs - deep, gloriously nerdy, sometimes wandering and wonderfully thoughtful. It's a 400-page narrative from a perfectionist who calls himself \"Mr. Bossypants.\"\n\n\"It's a compulsion to exhaust every possibility to make the perfect record,\" he writes. \"I don't want to have to live with errors. Impossible, I know, but what's the effin' point of not shooting for the moon?\"\n\nThe book is enlivened by photos of scrawled lyric sheets, studio doodles and private emails as Lee traces the rise of a band who faced a pre-MTV landscape, a lack of coast-to-coast progressive radio network or sympathetic critics. One reviewer said he sounded like \"a guinea pig with an amphetamine habit.\"\n\nReaders will go chronologically as Rush - including guitarist Alex Lifeson and drummer and lyricist Neil Peart - go from sleeping on luggage in the back of a rented station wagon to five-star hotels. Along the way there are dubious sartorial choices like kimonos and lots of cocaine.\n\nThe band - considered the patron saints of brainy, technical, ambitious rock - leans on all kinds of sources, from the sci-fi of Robert. A Heinlein and J.R.R. Tolkien, to Ayn Rand, Rod Serling and Jean-Paul Sartre.\n\nThere are hard-won tips for musicians, like never believing any producer who says \"Don't worry, lads. It'll all be fixed in the mix.\" Lee also advises bands to demand final approval on everything, offer soundchecks and take your wallet onstage. One tip seems universal: \"Do NOT drop psychedelics before an interview.\"\n\nIt's a treat to see Lee geek out on audio equipment - like \"the JP-8 with its trendy arpeggiator fed by an 808 drum box\" - and later wine. Sipping a glass of 1978 Musigny he writes may be the most rewarding experience he's had.\n\nA private treasure is seeing the photo - snapped by a friend - that captured the moment Lee and his future wife Nancy first locked lips. \"How many folks can boast a relationship of 50-plus years and still have a photo of their very first kiss?\" he writes.\n\nLee throws shade at musician Billy Preston and producer Steve Lillywhite but also turns his critical eye on himself - his neuroses and poor husbanding - and his band, writing that with the album \"Vapor Trails,\" they \"disappeared up our own asses.\"\n\nOne thing to beware of is Lee's modesty, like the time he casually mentions that he became \"besotted\" by baseball. In actuality, he has a massive collection of baseball memorabilia, including balls signed by the Beatles and Shoeless Joe Jackson.\n\nLee - born Gershon Eliezer Weinrib - was a \"shy, long-haired, brooding character\" who grew up in Toronto, born to parents who survived the Holocaust. This is not something he tosses off - it causes echoes throughout his life.\n\nChapter 3 - Lee says you can skip it, but you mustn't - is a meticulously examination of the horrific paths his parents took into hell, a 40-page indictment of Nazi evil that starts in Poland and ends with his mom rescued at Bergen-Belsen and dad from Dachau. Lee's laser-focus on details is put to astounding use here.\n\nHe suspects his earliest vocal style may have been rooted in his childhood \"listening to the stories of what my parents had endured in the camps, suffering all the bullying and alienation, so that when I did begin to sing it did come rushing out as a screaming banshee.\"\n\nThis is a memoir where tragedy seems always around the corner, especially later when bandmate Peart is tortured by loss. The memoir even ends with a scene in a Toronto cemetery where Lee introduces his grandson, Finnian, to the boy's great-great grandfather - in the ground.\n\nIt may be hard in parts but always worth it. It's an effin' good read."}
{"text": "# Book Review: Mitch Albom spins moving Holocaust tale in 'The Little Liar'\nBy **ROB MERRILL**  \nNovember 13, 2023. 9:36 AM EST\n\n---\n\nMitch Albom's books often capture the zeitgeist, but his new novel about the fate of Greek Jews during World War II packs a particular punch in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7.\n\n\"The Little Liar\" tells the story of four interconnected characters, three of them Jews living in Salonika, Greece, at the onset of Germany's invasion, and the other a Third Reich devotee carrying out Hitler's orders on the Mediterranean island.\n\nNico Krispis is the title character and it's his journey from a beautiful boy who has never told a lie to a Nazi pawn that drives the novel. Nico and his brother, Sebastian, are just boys when the story begins and by the end they're middle-aged men who have lived lives defined by the choices they made during the war. Between them is their childhood friend Fannie, who both boys crushed on when they were growing up, and who Sebastian throws off a train bound for Auschwitz at the start of the novel.\n\nThe book's narrator presents as the definition of reliable: \"I am Truth. And this is a story about a boy who tried to break me.\" Truth often breaks the fourth wall and \"speaks\" directly to the reader and sometimes the plot is broken up by parables, as in the one where Parable himself urges Truth to don colorful clothes instead of walking about naked and scaring the populace. That story precedes a chapter called \"The Lie of Resettlement\" - which explains the myth that Germans told Jews about their destination in the east where they would live and work with their families as they boarded cattle cars bound for concentration camps.\n\nRevealing more plot details is counterproductive for a story whose full scope, like a distant image coming into focus through a lens, sharpens with each turn of the page. As with all Albom books, the pages turn quickly. For most, this is a book that will be read in just one or two sittings. But no matter how long it takes, it will stay with you.\n\nInspired by what really happened to 50,000 Jewish people living in Greece during the Holocaust, Albom has created art that can be added to the long list of movies, music, theater and books that are humanity's best hope to deliver on the words inscribed on memorials around the world: \"Never Forget.\""}
{"text": "# Book Review: Alice McDermott's 'Absolution' captures America with Vietnam War in the background\nBy **ANITA SNOW**  \nNovember 8, 2023. 1:31 PM EST\n\n---\n\nLiving in Western diplomatic privilege with cooks and maids and drivers, the women in the new novel \"Absolution\" spend their days attending luncheons, lectures and cocktail parties as the Vietnam War rumbles in the background.\n\nIt's 1963 Saigon, but the wives of ambitious American attorneys and engineers are focused on writing clever letters with French phrases to be slipped into light blue airmail envelopes and the daily dressing rituals that include girdles, stockings and white dress shields fastened with tiny gold safety pins.\n\nAlice McDermott's ninth novel perfectly captures the manner and mood of that era and the constricted lives that women led as \"helpmeets\" for their husbands. McDermott won the National Book Award for her novel \"Charming Billy.\"\n\nIn \"Absolution,\" Irish American newlywed Tricia is just 23, proud of her handsome engineer husband who is on loan to the Navy and hoping they can quickly start a family during their time in southeast Asia.\n\nTricia soon meets Charlene, who is slightly older and has three children. Charlene is dedicated to doing good by raising money to stuff baskets with toys and candy that she and the other ladies deliver to hospitals and later a leper colony. Tricia is pulled into the group of women right away.\n\nBarbie dolls are a new trend and Charlene comes up with an idea for a doll outfit that the other Americans can't resist: a traditional Vietnamese ensemble of slim white pants and overdress, topped off with a conical hat.\n\nBarbie's Vietnamese-style getup made by a talented local seamstress is huge success and Charlene raises ever more cash for her charitable deeds.\n\nThe words \"absolution\" and \"absolved\" pop up repeatedly in the book that serves as a nod to \" The Quiet American,\" another look at early U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Its author, English writer Graham Greene, was a Catholic convert who used his own novels to study the moral questions of modern times.\n\nTricia, raised a devout Catholic in the years before Vatican II, learns during her year in Vietnam about obligation, grace and sacrifice even as everything seems to collapse around her. She's looking for absolution - a forgiveness of sins - in an imperfect world she can't control and she doesn't always understand.\n\nTricia finally has some questions answered 60 years later, when Charlene's daughter, Rainey, finds her living as a widow in Washington and they relive their memories of that time.\n\nJust like America's involvement in Vietnam, Tricia looks back to see that even good intentions can have terrible consequences, but absolution is possible in the end."}
{"text": "# Book Review: Tess Gerritsen writes an un-put-downable spin on espionage novels with 'The Spy Coast'\nBy **DONNA EDWARDS**  \nNovember 6, 2023. 3:03 PM EST\n\n---\n\nMaggie Bird just wants to relax into a quiet retirement, raising chickens in the cold little town of Purity, Maine. Even in these remote woods, though, trouble manages to find her. She'll have to face her past if she has any hope of staying alive.\n\nSpy novel meets travelog with a murder mystery in \"The Spy Coast,\" Book 1 of the new \"Martini Club\" series. Engrossing from the get-go, Tess Gerritsen's prose is undeniable - a true professional at sucking you right into the story.\n\nWhen a young spy shows up dead outside Maggie's home, her friends immediately jump to action, recalling their former lives as CIA operatives.\n\nThey may be in their 60s now, but these retirees are more than capable, exasperating Officer Jo Thibodeau. While the young police chief's involvement in the case is an annoying obstacle for Maggie, she can't help but be beguiled by this woman who reminds her of her former self. Jo's constant run-ins with the self-named Martini Club promise her character will have a lasting place in this fiction.\n\nThroughout the novel, we learn about Maggie's final job 16 years ago: Operation Cyrano. These flashbacks slowly reveal bits about Danny - the man Maggie met in Bangkok - and his connection to the messy end of her career.\n\nIn her author's note, Gerritsen says she \"wanted to write about spies who don't look like James Bond.\" She exceeded her goal by miles, handling the Martini Club's old age beautifully and foregoing a glamorized portrayal of espionage in favor of one that reflects a grind - a job just like any other, except for the high likelihood of death.\n\nGerritsen has dozens of titles under her belt, including the novels that inspired the TV series \"Rizzoli & Isles,\" and her wealth of experience shows. She makes it look seamlessly easy; every piece fits together, every chapter is gripping and fun, blood spatters are described with just the right level of ominous medical accuracy. And with the same level of detail, she describes amazing dishes from around the world, their flavor notes mouthwateringly cataloged.\n\nMost chapters focus on Maggie, the only character to get first-person perspective, though Gerritsen affords us the occasional, tantalizing glimpse into what's going on with other key players. It's the perfect mix - Maggie completely won me over, and getting to be in her head is an absolute treat.\n\n\"The Spy Coast\" is a positively devourable and un-put-downable start to what promises to be an excellent series."}
{"text": "# Book Review: Solitary writer ruminates on grief, love and writing during pandemic's first spring\nBy **ANN LEVIN**  \nNovember 6, 2023. 10:29 AM EST\n\n---\n\nThe flood of pandemic literature shows no sign of letting up. In the three-plus years since the COVID-19 lockdown, we have seen fiction from the likes of Gary Shteyngart, Elizabeth Strout and many others. Now Sigrid Nunez, author of \"Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag\" and the National Book Award-winning \"The Friend,\" has written a pandemic novel called \"The Vulnerables.\"\n\nThe title refers to the groups of people, including the elderly, considered at high risk of getting severely ill at the start of the pandemic in spring 2020. The unnamed narrator, a stand-in for the 72-year-old author, is among them.\n\nIn the publishing world \"The Vulnerables\" is classified as a novel but it more often reads like an elegant, funny essay about what it felt like to be stuck in New York City in the early days of the lockdown, when your wealthier friends fled to their country houses, leaving you alone with a bad case of writer's block.\n\nThe narrator broods about the writing life even though she knows that \"whenever I write something about writing or being a writer, I am annoying the hell out of some people.\" Indeed, self-awareness is a great part of her charm. \"For the writer,\" she muses, \"obsessive rumination is a must.\"\n\nAbout halfway through the book, Nunez stumbles on something like a plot: the narrator is asked to take care of a male parrot named Eureka for a couple stranded in California by the pandemic. The college student who had agreed to do it has fled the city, too, in a worrying display of Gen Z irresponsibility. Then he returns, in part because he missed the bird. \"We're bros, he explained, to make me feel even more left out.\"\n\nInitially antagonistic, they slowly form a bond over edibles, vegan ice cream and microdoses of psilocybin. I briefly wondered whether Nunez was heading into \"Harold and Maude\" territory, the 1971 movie about a troubled young man who falls in love with a much older woman.\n\nBut as a writer and academic thoroughly steeped in literary theory, Nunez knows that a conventional marriage plot is not an option in contemporary fiction, not \"with the world on fire and its systems collapsing... with hope after hope turning out to have been merely false hope.\" Plus, someone like her likely would have thought that he was not just too troubled but also too young. And so, their unlikely friendship becomes just one more oddball incident in this elegiac essay-novel."}
{"text": "# Book Review: Edel Rodriguez shows Cuban history as a warning for the US in new graphic memoir 'Worm'\nBy **DONNA EDWARDS**  \nNovember 6, 2023. 9:48 AM EST\n\n---\n\nDecades before Edel Rodriguez made his iconic, mouth-only political illustration of Donald Trump for the cover of Time magazine, he was a boy growing up in Fidel Castro's Cuba.\n\nIn his new graphic memoir, \"Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey,\" Rodriguez mixes historical context and personal stories to recount his harrowing journey growing up under - then escaping - Communism and authoritarianism in Cuba, as well as the warning signs he recognizes in America today.\n\nBefore diving into his life, Rodriguez paints a picture of the Cuba he was born into, starting with a short history of the Cuban Revolution that culminated in the January 1959 insurrection and Castro seizing power.\n\nThen, Rodriguez zooms in to focus on the small town of El Gabriel, 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Havana, where his family has lived for generations. Here we see the echoes of Cuban politics in Edel's daily life as his grandfather saves every scrap and his grandmother warns that the walls have ears.\n\nThe style is similar to the simplistic but expressive look of his famed political cartoons, but with a printmaking look. Rodriguez uses a limited, layered color palette - mainly red, green and black like the Pan-African flag.\n\nBut the mildly cartoon-y style is sometimes broken up by detailed portraits and elegant compositions. A depiction of his grandmother holding young Edel early in the book recalls Dorothea Lange's photojournalism of the Great Depression, surrounded by streaky black darkness. Depictions of roses, a skull, a goat and a Santería evil eye dance around them, illuminated in sepia spotlights and looking like they could have come straight from a deck of tarot cards. It makes for a arresting piece that takes up the entire page.\n\nMost of the panels in \"Worm\" are large - if not full-page illustrations, the space is often split into thirds or halves, letting traditional paneling fall by the wayside in favor of sweeping images marked by chunky notes of narration. Even speech bubbles tend toward full paragraphs.\n\nUniquely positioned to comment on autocracies and authoritarianism, Rodriguez reveals his personal fears about the future of the United States, particularly after the Jan. 6 insurrection. He portrays the crowd on the Capitol much like the one in Havana in January 1959 that start the novel, bringing it full-circle in a striking visual comparison.\n\nIt's these moments at the end that bump \"Worm\" up from good to great.\n\nThe final chapter is a touching, personal interview with Edel's father. Namely, he wants to know, why did his parents take such risks to put their family on a rickety old fishing boat for an overnight voyage to Florida? Why go to America, when they were already preparing paperwork for Spain?\n\nAfter everything Edel and his family went through, after seeing how his peers who stayed in Cuba fared, after witnessing how narrowly the U.S. managed to hang onto democracy, what his father passes along proves a heart-rending ending that gives a slight tilt to the story, reframing Rodriguez's historical memoir as a sincere warning."}
{"text": "# Book Review: 'The Warped Side of Our Universe' a novel look at secrets of cosmos\nBy **ANDREW DeMILLO**  \nOctober 30, 2023. 11:42 AM EST\n\n---\n\nBlack holes, wormholes and other mysteries of the universe are so firmly embedded in popular culture - from Carl Sagan's \"Contact\" to Christopher Nolan's \"Interstellar\" - that readers with no scientific background have some images in mind when the concepts are mentioned.\n\nBut in \"The Warped Side of Our Universe: An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves,\" physicist Kip Thorne and artist Lia Halloran find a novel approach to exploring these topics in startling detail.\n\nThe collaboration between the two is just as fascinating as the book itself. Thorne is among three astrophysicists who won the Nobel prize in physics in 2017 for their research into gravitational waves. For the past 13 years he and Halloran have partnered on this book as a way to explain the research that has helped shed light on the far reaches the universe.\n\nWritten in verse form, Thorne's writing is perfectly complemented by Halloran's vivid illustrations in explaining how that research has pierced a universe that is \"varied and vast.\"\n\nThe paintings portray a swirling universe of wonders, explaining a black hole's characteristics with images of Halloran's wife being bent by its warped spacetime. Images of other scientists such as Sagan and Stephen Hawking appear throughout the paintings in the book, alongside illustrations of black holes colliding and wormholes metamorphizing into time machines.\n\nThe book guides readers through the history of the research into these concepts, including the work on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, that led to the 2017 Nobel. And it offers a glimpse at the work ahead that physicists hope will reveal more about the birth of the universe."}
{"text": "# Book Review: Henry Winkler grapples with the Fonz and dyslexia in his entertaining new memoir\nBy **MARK KENNEDY**  \nOctober 31, 2023. 10:02 PM EST\n\n---\n\nHenry Winkler's memoir begins on a Tuesday morning in October 1973, at his first audition for \"Happy Days.\" He was almost 28 - quite a bit old for a high schooler - and struggling with something he didn't know had a name.\n\n\"Being Henry: The Fonz... and Beyond,\" released Tuesday by Celadon Books, is a breezy, inspirational story of one of Hollywood's most beloved figures who became an unlikely TV screen icon and later a champion for those with dyslexia.\n\nWinkler's 245-page book charts his course chronologically from the Fonz to \"Barry\" - and the frustrating fallow periods in between - painting a portrait of a man trying to overcome a bitter, loveless childhood and a disability that made reading impossibly hard and simply trying to become a better man.\n\n\"I was, in my mind, always a little boy,\" he writes. \"My real self was like a kernel of corn sheathed in yards of concrete - as insulated as the nuclear material at Chernobyl.\"\n\nHe describes himself at the \"Happy Days\" audition as \"a short Jew from New York City with a unibrow and hair down to my shoulders, confident about next to nothing in my life.\" He had graduated from Yale's drama school and bagged a few roles despite having difficulty reading.\n\nThe Fonz almost never happened for him: The fearsome Barry Diller, then head of development for ABC, and future Disney CEO Michael Eisner were skeptical of Winkler getting the part. But writer-creator Garry Marshall saw something.\n\nLater, Winkler dishes, the immense popularity of the Fonz eclipsed anyone else on the show and the network secretly approached him with the idea of spinning off a show or changing the name to \"Fonzie's Happy Days.\" Winkler refused.\n\nThe end of \"Happy Days\" brought its own stress for a man who admits that \"worrying is my favorite indoor sports.\" He writes: \"I was terrified of being a flash in the pan. A one-hit wonder. Was I?\"\n\nOver the years, there were guest spots on shows like \"Arrested Development,\" \"Royal Pains\" and \"Parks and Recreation\" until finally \"Barry,\" the show in 2018 that would prove a second tentpole to his career and produce his first primetime Emmy.\n\nIn 2003, Winkler branched out into children's books with Lin Oliver, writing about the adventures of Hank Zipzer, a young boy with dyslexia who overcomes many learning challenges.\n\nThe 28-book series \"Hank Zipzer: The World's Greatest Underachiever\" was based on Winkler's own experience with undiagnosed dyslexia. \"At the height of my fame and success, I felt embarrassed, inadequate,\" he writes.\n\nThe memoir is enlivened by an unusual move: Winkler includes long reaction passages from his wife, Stacey, who is pretty brutal about Winkler's immaturity, his parenting, his own parents and a crippling fear of poverty. \"A very big thing I'd learned about Henry was that when he wasn't working, he was absolutely miserable. Adrift. Insecure. Anxious,\" she writes.\n\nIt's telling that Winkler - who writes he has lately benefited from therapy - includes a frank perspective from outside his own head.\n\nThere are fun moments throughout: How Winkler came to produce \"MacGyver\" and how he got fired from directing \"Turner & Hooch.\" There's a hysterical section about trying to direct Burt Reynolds in \"Cop & ½\" and, while Winkler is a nice guy, he's still capable of throwing some shade at Michael Keaton.\n\nHe wonderfully captures the late Robin Williams - \"within 42 seconds, I knew, I was in the presence of greatness\" - and how ABC made Ron Howard so mad during \"Happy Days\" that he became a film director almost out of spite.\n\nBut one figure looms over this book and career - the Fonz, whose moody expression fills the back cover. Winkler by the end has come to peace with his creation.\n\n\"For a long time after 'Happy Days,' I was saddened that the world could only see me as the Fonz,\" he writes. \"But I never lost sight of what the character gave me - a roof over my head, food on the table, my children's education - and how much it gave me in terms of introducing me to the whole world.\""}
{"text": "# Book Review: 'White Holes' by Carlo Rovelli reads more like poetry than science lesson\nBy **ANDREW DeMILLO**  \nOctober 30, 2023. 10:33 AM EST\n\n---\n\nIt doesn't take a degree in astrophysics or expertise on Albert Einstein to appreciate \"White Holes,\" theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli's latest book. But brushing up on Dante Alighieri's work might help.\n\nRovelli liberally sprinkles quotes from Dante throughout his slim book exploring the hypothesis that black holes eventually transform into an inverse white hole. It's fitting for a book that says as much about imagination and exploration as it does about physics.\n\nOftentimes, Rovelli's book feels more like poetry than a science lesson as he explains black holes in striking detail and the theoretical concepts behind white holes.\n\nUnlike black holes, there is no proof that white holes exist. There are no satellite images of them. As Rovelli describes them, white holes are another solution of Einstein's equation, \"how a black hole would appear if we could film it and run the film in reverse.\"\n\nIn the book, Rovelli says he keeps two readers in mind when he's writing - those who know nothing about physics that he can communicate to, and those who know everything but he can offer new perspectives.\n\nThat's why there are no equations to pore over as Rovelli explains the nature of black holes and how time and gravity operate differently in white holes. A handful of illustrations, however do help in walking readers through these concepts.\n\nThe book won't turn lay readers into an expert on white holes or theoretical physics. But Rovelli helps readers grasp how important imagination is to seeing the universe in new ways is, for both artists and scientists.\n\n\"Science and art are about the continual reorganization of our conceptual space, of what we call meaning,\" Rovelli writes."}
{"text": "# Book Review: Broad themes meet niche topics in Fadipe's debut novel 'The Sun Sets in Singapore'\nBy **DONNA EDWARDS**  \nOctober 30, 2023. 10:02 AM EST\n\n---\n\nDara's dream of defying the odds and becoming a partner at her firm is just within reach when Lani enters the picture. This handsome Nigerian man is about to irrevocably change her life, and her best friend's and the newcomer to their book club's lives, too.\n\nKehinde Fadipe's debut novel, \"The Sun Sets in Singapore,\" brings three expat Nigerian women to the stage to highlight the specific struggles that come with their race, gender and backgrounds - particularly in an upscale and competitive environment like Singapore.\n\nLani is joining Dara's firm, and the timing is impeccable for undermining the years of cutthroat efforts and ludicrous hours she's sunk into her job trying to secure a partnership. She tells her best friend, Amaka, in hopes they can dig up some dirt on the guy and figure out what to do.\n\nBut Amaka, who's trying to keep her workplace romance and the battle over her father's estate thoroughly compartmentalized, is zapped by an immediate attraction to Lani. Her coping mechanism of choice is pricey shoes and handbags, and with the stresses piling up, Amaka's on track to blow through everything her father left.\n\nThen there's Lillian, a former concert pianist who followed her husband from the United States to Singapore in an attempt to escape her demons. But the emotional scars left by the death of her parents at an early age can't be outrun. When she sees Lani, he's the spitting image of her father. The grief, stress and aimlessness that have ruled her life for so long begin to bubble over.\n\nThe women find themselves in the same book club, which cycles through tons of enticing titles that Fadipe has kindly included a list of at the end of the novel. When the women get into discussing the books they've read, it's clearly a statement on the story; halfway through, there's essentially a book report on \"Americanah\" about the way women oppress each other. It's heavy handed, but it works.\n\nFadipe's novel tackles broad, common themes: misogyny in the workplace, family strife and love triangles. But it's also exceptionally niche.\n\nDara loves Greek mythology, Amaka knows designer fashion inside and out, and classical music is embedded in Lillian like DNA. Plus, their very status as Nigerians in Singapore is a rarity that brings up hyper-specific experiences unfamiliar to most Western readers. It's uncomfortable, cool, and confusing all at once. And in the moments when you know the reference, it's highly rewarding.\n\n\"The Sun Sets in Singapore\" is charming, sweet, funny and emotional - but also exhausting. Its high drama, quick turns and brutally unrelenting pace demand you keep up or drop out, which makes it all the more disappointing when the pivotal climax is as clear as day with a red flag the size of Singapore waving right in readers' faces for pages. The tone doesn't change between the women's chapters, so I found myself flipping back on multiple occasions to figure out which \"she\" we were reading about.\n\nWould I read it again? No. Am I glad I read it? Absolutely. Just the opportunity to experience something completely new makes \"The Sun Sets in Singapore\" worth picking up and discussing at your own book club."}
{"text": "# Book Review: 'A Brief History of Intelligence' may help humans shape the future of AI\nBy **ROB MERRILL**  \nOctober 23, 2023. 2:28 PM EST\n\n---\n\nEver wonder how Homo sapiens got so smart? How come we developed actual language when all the other animals didn't? How about what first made a nematode turn its body in a different direction? Or... what's a nematode?\n\nAnswers to those questions and much, much more can be found in the pages of Max Bennett's new book \"A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI and the Five Breakthroughs that Made Our Brains.\" At 365 pages plus 45 more with a glossary, chapter notes and a bibliography, readers can quibble whether it's indeed brief, but it is certainly thorough.\n\nBennett's premise - he's a software entrepreneur who founded a company called Bluecore that \"helped predict what consumers would buy before they knew what they wanted\" - is that humans won't ever create true artificial intelligence without understanding exactly what led to the real intelligence we already possess. So he begins with those nematodes - worms, to you and me - and painstakingly details the five breakthroughs that over the course of billions of years evolved into the three-pound brain that is folded into all of our skulls.\n\nThe first half of the book is a touch dry, detailing not only what caused worms to turn (food!), but how fish learn via trial and error and the pivotal role the basal ganglia plays in dictating behavior, among many, many other evolutionary developments. Bennett cites the work of psychologists and neuroscientists every step of the way and includes plenty of charts and graphs to make his points. It can feel like you're reading a textbook at times. But to his credit, he begins each new chapter with actual prose, as in this description of the Cambrian explosion more than 500 million years ago: \"The gooey microbial mats of the Ediacaran that turned the ocean floor green would have long since faded and given way to a more familiar sandy underbelly. The sensible, slow, and small creatures of the Ediacaran would have been replaced by a bustling zoo of large mobile animals as varied in form as in size.\"\n\nWhen Bennett begins to connect the evolution of the human brain to where we are in the development of artificial intelligence is when the book, for this reader, gets more interesting. Why can't machines truly learn? Even ChatGPT, which every industry seems to be embracing these days, can't \"learn things sequentially,\" writes Bennett. \"They learn things all at once and then stop learning.\" We've trained ChatGPT using the entire contents of the Internet, but the software can't learn new things because of the risk that it will forget old things, or learn the wrong things.\n\nBennett is intelligent enough not to draw any conclusions about AI in a field that is changing daily, but he does end his book with a challenge. Evolution gave us our magnificent human brain, he writes, and now that we are in a position to play god and create a new form of intelligence, we must first decide on our goal - are we destined to spread out across the cosmos? Or will we fail, victims of pride or climate change or something yet unseen, just another branch on the evolutionary tree, which will grow on without humans and perhaps never add a limb called \"Artificial Intelligence?\" No reader alive today will live long enough for that answer, but Bennett makes a solid case for why reverse engineering the human brain may lead to future breakthroughs in the science of AI."}
{"text": "# Book Review: Sandra Newman puts a feminist spin on '1984' with 'Julia'\nBy **ROB MERRILL**  \nOctober 23, 2023. 12:58 PM EST\n\n---\n\nRejoice, comrades! Almost 75 years after George Orwell's \"1984\" was published in 1949, readers can return to Airstrip One with its Newspeak and Ministries of Truth, Peace, Love and Plenty. On second thought, maybe it's not a place anyone wants to revisit. Maybe Orwell's depiction of an ultra-totalitarian society in which \"doublethink\" - \"Truth is Hate. Plenty is Hate. Peace is Hate. Love is Hate\" - rules, hits a little too close to the real world in 2023.\n\nBut don't let that argument dissuade you from reading Sandra Newman's remarkable new novel, \"Julia.\" Marketed as a \"retelling\" of \"1984\" (Orwell's estate actually approved its publication), it's not quite as bleak as its progenitor. And the omniscient third-person feminist perspective from inside the head of Winston Smith's lover, Julia, is refreshing.\n\nJulia is a mechanic in the Ministry of Truth's Fiction Department, \"perpetually fascinated by the plot machinery, how it worked and the ways it could go wrong.\" When we first meet her, she's an ideal citizen - embracing the Party line in public, but always cognizant of Big Brother watching via the ubiquitous telescreens and expressing her cynicism only in private. Oh, and she's falling in love with a young woman named Vicky at the hostel where they both live. In fact, it's Vicky's fondness for Julia that sets in motion the events that spark the plot of \"1984.\" The love note Julia slips to Winston Smith? Turns out Vicky actually slipped it first to Julia!\n\n\"1984\" fans will enjoy experiencing the story from this point forward through Julia's eyes, but for readers who aren't Orwellian scholars, it's important that \"Julia\" hold up on its own as well. Newman introduces the tenets of the Party - \"War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength\" - and describes the surveillance society of Big Brother in great detail and it's all just as horribly shocking as when you read it the first time.\n\nDon't be discouraged though - after Winston and Julia, ahem, \"rat\" each other out to their torturers, we're treated to a \"Part Three\" that actually goes beyond the plot of \"1984.\" It's the rare answer to that perennial question at the end of a good book, \"and then what happened?\" And for a little while, just a little, readers can hope that rebellions aren't always doomed, and an individual might have some power over the collective."}
{"text": "# Book Review: Dolly Parton gives a tour of her closet in 'Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones'\nBy **MAE ANDERSON**  \nOctober 17, 2023. 1:30 PM EST\n\n---\n\nDolly Parton's iconic look -- big hair, big heels and tight low-cut dresses covered in rhinestones or beads - is a big part of her lasting appeal, nearly as important as her vast catalogue of country ballads and bangers that made her a star.\n\nIn \"Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones,\" Parton takes fans on a detailed tour through her closet, filled with 450 vivid photos of decades of sparkly dresses, jumpsuits, jeans and even wigs, which she started wearing early in her career.\n\nShe chronicles how she always knew she wanted a maximalist, flashy look, and stayed true to her personal style despite seemingly endless objections by her father, managers and others who always wanted her to \"tone it down.\"\n\n\"From early on I loved the big hair and makeup, the long nails, the high heels, the flashy clothes,\" she writes. \"But believe it or not, I had to fight for that look.\"\n\nStarting with replicas of Dolly's \"Coat of Many Colors,\" based on her famous song about a coat her mother made her, Dolly gives a tour of how her style evolved through the decades, from the country costumes she wore as the \"girl singer\" on \"The Porter Wagoner Show\" in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to the jumpsuits she wore during her rising solo career and the flashy rhinestone-studded gowns and outfits she wore making it big in Hollywood movies like \"9 to 5\" and \"Rhinestone.\"\n\nThe book is a joint effort with her niece, Rebecca Seaver, and music journalist Holly George-Warren. It includes profiles and remembrances from her favorite designers, makeup artists and stylists and others that help put together Parton's famous look. And fans can get a glimpse of some of Parton's outfits at an accompanying exhibit at Lipscomb University in Nashville Oct. 31-Dec. 9."}
{"text": "# Book Review: Sly Stone wants to take you higher in memoir with tales of funk, drugs and survival\nBy **CHRISTOPHER WEBER**  \nOctober 17, 2023. 11:03 AM EST\n\n---\n\nWhile summoning stories from his remarkable yet erratic life in music, Sly Stone admits he occasionally had to depend on the recollections of others because his own memory wasn't always reliable.\n\nAt one point in his new memoir, Stone, now 80, remembers that during the hazy excesses of his 1970s rock stardom he briefly shared a Los Angeles mansion with a baboon that had the run of the place. He's just not sure where the primate came from.\n\n\"I forgot where I got him?\" Stone muses. \"Baboon store?\"\n\nHis book, co-written with Ben Greenman, overflows with wit and wordplay befitting a maestro whose funkiest song with his band the Family Stone was \"Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)\" - also the title of the book.\n\nBorn Sylvester Stewart in Texas and raised in Vallejo, California, across the bay from San Francisco, he studied music composition at a junior college while working as a radio DJ, becoming known for his whimsical patter and eclectic playlists.\n\nStone clearly recalls his early and evolving vision of a no-barriers style of music that would meld Motown pop-soul, James Brown's funk, R&B, gospel and psychedelic rock. Shortly after forming in 1966, Sly and the Family Stone produced a string of sunny hits including \"Everyday People,\" \"I Want To Take You Higher,\" \"Hot Fun in the Summertime\" and \"Stand!\" that captured the hippy spirit of the times.\n\nStone's band included Black and white musicians while featuring women not just singing but playing instruments - a rarity at the time. A triumphant set at Woodstock and a star turn in the subsequent film of the concert made him a household name.\n\n\"Rhythm, melody and lyrics carried inspiration to the people,\" he writes. That inspiration became a lasting influence for generations of artists including The Jackson 5, Prince and countless hip-hop acts.\n\nStone's music took a darker and more cynical turn as drugs took hold and the dream of the '60s devolved into political assassinations, racial strife and lingering war in Vietnam. He takes readers through the agonizing recording process of his 1971 classic \"There's a Riot Goin' On,\" on which he says he \"sacrificed technique for feeling.\" The album has an anguished tone, exemplified by the volatile funk of the single \"Luv N' Haight.\"\n\nMeanwhile at concerts, fans never knew whether they'd get one of his famously ecstatic performances, or if Stone would bother showing up at all.\n\nHe espoused Black Power, but not loudly enough for Black Panthers, who accused Stone of acquiescing to white America. Meanwhile, some white people thought he was too militant. While unafraid to be political, he remained defiantly nonviolent and never shook the notion that, yes, people can all get along. \"We exist to coexist,\" he writes.\n\nThat uplifting spirit returns, if only sporadically, for 1973's \"Fresh,\" his last great album. The band splintered soon after and Stone entered a decades-long cycle of addiction, middling solo offerings, doomed tours and tax troubles.\n\nPredictably, the memoir contains no shortage of occasionally humorous - but mostly bleak - backstage tales of debauchery and drug abuse. While on tour in his glory days Stone carried a violin case filled with cocaine. Later he said he went on PCP binges because \"it threw your perspective off, which I liked.\" Eventually he was overtaken by a dependence on crack cocaine that drained his talents, ruined relationships and led to regular stints in jail and rehab.\n\n\"Arrest records were the new records, and I was hitting the charts,\" he writes. \"Court dates were my new concerts, and I was still just as good as arriving on time.\"\n\nHip-hop empresario Questlove, whose publishing imprint produced the book, writes in the introduction that \"Sly has lived a hundred lives, and they are all here.\" Fans will certainly appreciate the vivid accounts from recording studios, concert stages and star-studded parties. But readers looking for personal insights will come away disappointed. Stone is self-aware but not particularly self-reflective.\n\nHowever, even during his gloomiest days, Stone said he relied on his compositions to keep the darkness out, always remaining true to \"the larger idea of music as a spiritual force.\""}
{"text": "# Book Review: Clever new novel uses museum wall labels to narrate life story of rich American woman\nBy **ANN LEVIN**  \nOctober 16, 2023. 11:02 AM EST\n\n---\n\nChristine Coulson, who spent 25 years working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has written a short, clever novel that tells the story of a woman over the course of her life in a series of museum wall labels. In doing so, she acknowledges a sad but undeniable truth - that for much of the 20th century and perhaps even today, a certain kind of wealthy, white socialite in America was nothing more than an object to be critiqued, described, evaluated and displayed.\n\nThe woman's name is Caroline Margaret Brooks Whitaker, better known as Kitty, and she is indisputably the star of \"One Woman Show.\" We are meant to read her life story as if we were walking through an exhibition at a museum like the Met, gazing at a set of related decorative objects laid out in chronological order in a series of vitrines.\n\nAt the start of the show, it is 1911 and Kitty, a girl of 5, is declared to be \"a masterpiece,\" \"all fireworks,\" a \"golden child,\" depicted under the watchful gaze of her doting parents, Minty and Whit Whitaker. At age 10, she already has \"porcelain manners\" yet senses her \"suffocating\" future: \"the fragile need to be forever cared for according to someone else's tastes and appetites.\"\n\nFor the rest of the novel, the object labels offer up a road map of her well-bred life: from the Chapin School on Manhattan's Upper East Side to Miss Porter's in Connecticut, where Kitty practices balancing books on her head to improve her posture. Then the \"privileged bohemia\" of Smith College where, like former first lady Barbara Bush, she drops out after freshman year to get married. In her case, to the heir to a Pittsburgh mining fortune, whom she met at an Egyptian-themed spring cotillion in 1925. She is excited about being the centerpiece of a \"new dynastic collection.\"\n\nOccasionally, Coulson inserts a page of dialogue to flesh out the motivations of the characters. But it is remarkable how much information she can convey about Kitty's life, including her infertility, multiple marriages and touch of kleptomania, solely using wall labels.\n\nAt the beginning of the novel Coulson slyly announces that the exhibition, \"One Woman Show,\" opening Oct. 17, 2023 (when the book was to go on sale), was \"made possible by gin, taffeta and stock dividends.\" The closing image is haunting: a wrapped and crated Kitty, warehoused for lack of interest. \"A classical form ... Once flawless, inevitable. Now broken, irrelevant. Chipped, cracked, and packed away.\""}
{"text": "# Book Review: John Grisham brings back 'The Firm' star Mitch McDeere in 'The Exchange'\nBy **ROB MERRILL**  \nOctober 16, 2023. 10:03 AM EST\n\n---\n\nThirty-two years after \"The Firm\" launched his career as a legal novelist who churns out bestselling books that almost invariably become movies, John Grisham returns with a sequel starring Mitch McDeere.\n\nIn \"The Exchange,\" it's 2000 and McDeere is now a high-powered partner at the world's largest law firm, Scully & Pershing, having \"established a reputation as a sort of legal SWAT team leader sent in by Scully to rescue clients in distress.\" He lives a very privileged life in Manhattan with his wife and two young boys.\n\nGrisham fans will love the first 37 pages, as McDeere travels back to Memphis for the first time since the events in \"The Firm\" and meets with an old friend. It's an excuse for Grisham to fill in the 15-year time gap since Mitch and his wife Abby fled Memphis on the run from the Chicago mob, who was hunting him for his role exposing crimes at Bendini, Lambert & Locke, but it's inconsequential to the new story Grisham has to tell.\n\nThat narrative kicks off when Mitch is called to Rome to take the lead on a case involving a Turkish company that built a $400 million bridge to nowhere in the Libyan desert that Colonel Gaddafi (yes, it's the year 2000 and the Libyan dictator is still alive) is now refusing to pay for. When Mitch assigns a London-based Scully associate to go on a fact-finding mission to the bridge, she is taken hostage and this legal thriller pretty much drops the adjective and just becomes a thriller.\n\nMitch's job is not to legally outsmart his colleague's captors, but to try and make sure she's not beheaded by terrorists by working every angle to come up with their ransom. The action skips from New York to Rome to London to Tripoli to Istanbul and it's very easy to imagine the establishing aerial shots in the movie version as the plot crosses continents.\n\nGrisham fans will devour it; but there were times when this reader wished the action would slow down a little so we could spend some time with the characters. Mitch is always on the move - in a car, on a plane, in a boardroom - conversations are clipped, and the plot pace is furious.\n\nGrisham certainly reflects the urgency of Mitch's mission in his writing, but some of the best parts of the book are when the story gets a chance to breathe a little, as in this scene on a boat off the coast of Maine:\n\n\"Tanner inched the throttle up a notch and the wake grew wider. They were nearing a cove with the Atlantic not far away. The water was deep blue and flat, but an occasional wave sent mist over the boat and refreshed everyone. With his left hand, Mitch reached over and took hers.\"\n\nIt's not much, but in this frenetic novel, it's a moment that conveys the love between Mitch and Abby without words and maybe, just maybe, the promise of an extended future where they aren't always on the run."}
{"text": "# Book Review: Film historian exploits tumult, gossip in gripping account of Hollywood in the '50s\nBy **KRYSTA FAURIA**  \nOctober 9, 2023. 12:59 PM EST\n\n---\n\nWhen film historian Foster Hirsch began research for his latest book about the changing and turbulent movie landscape of the 1950s, he could not have known the timeliness of his subject matter upon the release of \"Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties: The Collapse of the Studio System, the Thrill of Cinerama, and the Invasion of the Ultimate Body Snatcher.\"\n\nFollowing a summer of historic Hollywood strikes and discussions about our own new technology, evolving studio framework and the increasing import of television, Hirsch looks to history to show us there is nothing new under the sun.\n\nThough the decade gave us a host of classics still beloved by critics, Hirsch's epic historical account peels back the curtain to reveal the tumultuous uncertainty that characterized the Tinseltown of the '50s.\n\nHe meticulously contextualizes important historical details while artfully combining them with some good old-fashioned Hollywood gossip. The result is a gripping yet informative report on a time in show business where threats to the industry seemingly lurked around every corner of society.\n\nWhile this book is not for the casually interested reader - Hirsch is a college professor likely writing for his industry-obsessed colleagues after all - it promises to entertain and educate movie lovers wanting to know more about the evolution of the film industry.\n\nIn conjunction with the book's release, Hirsch is co-programming \" 50 from the '50s,\" a four-week film festival in New York beginning this week featuring some of the decade's most iconic films."}
{"text": "# Book Review: Isa Arsén delivers an unconventional love story in debut novel 'Shoot the Moon'\nBy **ROB MERRILL**  \nOctober 9, 2023. 11:10 AM EST\n\n---\n\nIf you're going to write a novel, why not do as the title of Isa Arsén's debut suggests? \"Shoot the Moon\" refers to the actual act of getting astronauts to the lunar surface, but this work of fiction also attempts to shoot the moon like a fearless player in a Hearts card game - thematically, there's bisexuality, loss, Daddy issues, and a unique wormhole that allows for some very specific time travel.\n\nThe bulk of the novel takes place in the late 1960s, as NASA is indeed trying to beat the Soviets to the moon. Annie Fisk is the lead character, a recent physics graduate whose father played a role developing the atomic bomb before dying young. By page five Annie is in love with an Apollo 11 astronaut named Norm she meets at a NASA Christmas party. And by page seven we've gone backwards 18 years and 8-year-old Annie is meeting a like-aged stranger named Diana in the back garden of her childhood home in New Mexico.\n\nThe plot only gets trippier from there. In 1968, Annie really does discover a wormhole behind a bunch of computer power units at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. To say much more about where it leads and how she and Norm test it and what ultimately happens is to spoil the aha! moments of the book. The best parts are when things click into place as Arsén connects earlier scenes to later ones. There are times when the achronological nature of the story gets confusing and you may have to flip back a chapter or three to orient yourself, but perhaps that's to be expected in a story involving time travel.\n\nAs for time, it's Annie's obsession. She either doesn't have enough of it, or regrets what she's already spent, or worries about the future. The wormhole makes her question the future because it repudiates everything she knows to be scientifically true, but it also helps her learn about her past. As one of her college professors puts it during a phone call about the anomaly she's discovered in Houston: \"The greatest stunt reality ever pulled was convincing us there was any such thing as normal... That's the big secret, Annie: time goes on, agnostic of all our own mess, and it just keeps getting weirder.\"\n\nThis is a weird book, yes, but also a bold and unconventional love story. Arsén writes with real heart and certainly demonstrates talent as a storyteller. You can tell she cares for this character Annie she created, and readers should look forward to what she creates next."}
{"text": "# Book Review: 'Differ We Must' illustrates Abraham Lincoln's political skills\nBy **ANDREW DeMILLO**  \nOctober 3, 2023. 9:10 AM EST\n\n---\n\nIn \"Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded In a Divided America,\" Steve Inskeep is taking on one of the most challenging tasks for a biographer by profiling the nation's 16th president.\n\nThere's little new to be said or explored about Lincoln that's not already covered in the massive pile of biographies already out there. But Inskeep, co-host of NPR's \"Morning Edition,\" tries an approach that illuminates Lincoln's political skill.\n\nFrom the opening pages of the biography, Inskeep details how much Lincoln's political skill was a part of the late president's legacy and character. As Inskeep puts it, \"Lincoln preserved the country and took part in a social revolution because he engaged in politics.\"\n\nInskeep illustrates that political skill by focusing on 16 encounters Lincoln had throughout his lifetime. They include well-known and well-chronicled figures in Lincoln's political upbringing, such as William Seward, George McClellan and Frederick Douglass.\n\nEven though these chapters tread familiar ground, Inskeep manages to adeptly use them to show how Lincoln's mastery of politics adapted and evolved throughout his career.\n\nBut the most compelling chapters profile lesser-known figures and their connections to Lincoln. They include Mary Ellen Wise, who disguised her gender to serve as a Union soldier and confronted Lincoln to collect her back pay. As Inskeep recounts, Lincoln ensured Wise got her pay and the president also got news coverage that reinforced him as a man of the people.\n\nIn the last chapter, Inskeep uses Lincoln's at-times fraught marriage with Mary Todd to show how his rocky home life helped prepare him for leading a country during the Civil War.\n\n\"The skills he needed at home resembled some he needed for work,\" Inskeep writes.\n\nThe brisk biography, filled with lively anecdotes and interesting analysis, offers more than enough to stand out among recent additions to the collection of Lincoln biographies."}
{"text": "# Book Review: Sketch-comedy star Keegan-Michael Key breaks down the art form in hilarious new book\nBy **MIKE HOUSEHOLDER**  \nOctober 2, 2023. 3:31 PM EST\n\n---\n\nKeegan-Michael and Elle know more than a few of the Key characteristics of successful sketch comedy.\n\nWhich means they would be the first to point out that lines like that don't pass muster.\n\nKeegan-Michael Key, half of the famed \"Key & Peele\" comedy duo, and his wife, Elle Key, a writer, director and producer, have translated their award-winning podcast, \"The History of Sketch Comedy,\" into a hilarious and informative new book.\n\n\"The History of Sketch Comedy: A Journey Through the Art and Craft of Humor\" traces the art form from its earliest iterations hundreds of years ago to its current purveyors, including \"Saturday Night Live\" and \"A Black Lady Sketch Show,\" among others.\n\nIn between, the authors deconstruct some of the medium's most notable examples. The Keys provide transcripts of some of these classics, such as \"The Argument\" from the \"Monty Python\" troupe. As Michael Palin and John Cleese banter back and forth, Keegan-Michael Key interjects every so often. \"It's so stupid,\" he writes. \"And by stupid I do mean awesome.\"\n\nThis is where the book is at its best, because it is clear the Keys love and appreciate the science behind a good sketch, which they point out requires the following: \"characters, a premise, and some sort of comedic escalation or heightening.\"\n\nIt was a particular treat to read Key's breakdown of the famed (215 million views and counting on YouTube) \"Substitute Teacher\" sketch from \"Key & Peele.\" Watching Key's Mr. Garvey character butcher names (A-A-Ron!) is laugh-out-loud funny. So, is reading about how he and Jordan Peele made that three minutes of comedy bliss come to life.\n\n\"The History of Sketch Comedy\" also features essays from comic giants, and in some cases, famous fans - Peele, Mel Brooks, Carol Burnett, Jim Carrey, Stephen Colbert, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ken Jeong, Mike Myers, Gary Oldman and others.\n\nReaders probably will feel as though they learned something by reading this book. They definitely will laugh throughout the process."}
{"text": "# Book Review: 'Extremely Online' shows how creators and influencers have shaped social media\nBy **ANDREW DeMILLO**  \nOctober 2, 2023. 3:19 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThere's no shortage of books published in the past several years that have focused on the recent history of social media companies and the founders of the tech giants running them.\n\nIn \"Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet,\" Taylor Lorenz makes a valuable and entertaining contribution to that collection by telling the story through the prism of the users, creators and influencers who have shaped social media and its impact on our culture.\n\nLorenz, technology columnist for The Washington Post, has written what she calls a social history of social media that profiles the motley collection of figures who have had arguably more influence on the landscape of the modern Internet than most Silicon Valley executives.\n\nFrom mommy bloggers to TikTok celebrities, Lorenz focuses on the users who \"revolutionized new approaches to work, entertainment, fame, ambition in the 21st century.\"\n\nAs someone who has covered those new approaches over the years, Lorenz is well-positioned to chronicle that history. Lorenz tells the story of how tech companies struggled to adapt to users' needs and demands over the past two decades.\n\nThe book is an enlightening history of the pioneers of influencers such as bloggers Heather Armstrong and Julia Allison, as well as the rise and fall of platforms such MySpace and Vine.\n\nShe also explores the dark side of social media's rise, looking at how platforms have been weaponized from \"Gamergate\" to the rapid spread of misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. She lays bare the challenges created by the transformation of social media, noting that \"tech founders may control source code, but users shape the product.\""}
{"text": "# Book Review: Romance strikes in 'Maybe Once, Maybe Twice' with quirky lines and an epic soundtrack\nBy **DONNA EDWARDS**  \nOctober 2, 2023. 12:47 PM EST\n\n---\n\nOn Maggie Vine's 30th birthday, she makes a marriage pact with the handsome, broad-shouldered, sunbeam-smile-having Garrett Scholl. Thing is, the struggling singer-songwriter had already made a similar deal with her first boyfriend, Asher Reyes, who's now an extremely successful - and attractive - actor. Thus the two great loves of Maggie's life come crashing back to her at 35.\n\nAlison Rose Greenberg's second novel, \"Maybe Once, Maybe Twice,\" is a long, luscious buildup of will-they-won't-they, love-triangling, song-writing, and trips down memory lane as the narrative hops back to teen Maggie and 20-something Maggie to flesh out her past.\n\nGreenberg writes exceptional characters who still fit into the ordinary world, like our protagonist. Maggie Vine is the chic, All The Feels, folk-singing heroine we wanted but secretly didn't believe could exist so tastefully. She's got humor and sorrow, pride and doubt, good moments and bad, and a model-gorgeous, standoffish-yet-lovable best friend for a sidekick.\n\nMaggie wants it all: love, a kid, and a career. And, honestly, why can't she have it?\n\nWhen Maggie learns that Asher will be co-producing a film adaptation of her favorite novel, it could be the key to unlocking all her dreams. She can reconnect with Asher, prove herself as the best musician to write the songs for it, and, with the kind of money she'd make on a movie deal like that, she could start a family.\n\nGreenberg's style is sharp and funny, with quirky lines like \"Stop trying to make me fall in love with Dave Matthews!\" and \"Progressive grandmas are national treasures.\"\n\nFor as fun as the story is, you can almost forget that it still takes place in an insidious industry that often uses women's bodies and minds for the gains of the men at the top. Except Maggie can't forget.\n\nAfter more than 100 pages, we get the name of the man who had dangled a career in front of her before ripping it apart: Cole Wyan.\n\nThe tone turns downright ominous surrounding this Chekhov's gun of a man who we readers hope against all hope doesn't find his way back into the pages of this book.\n\nBut Greenberg doesn't leave us hanging in despair. Maggie Vine always chooses hope, and finally, FINALLY, maybe it's possible that a woman does all the right things and actually comes out better for it; rewarded for fighting back and going to therapy and telling the truth.\n\nRipe for a super-meta film adaptation (about the novel about a film adaptation of a novel), \"Maybe Once, Maybe Twice\" is everything you want in a smart romantic comedy: deep, tear-inducing emotions; sharp, sardonic humor; steamy sex scenes played by even steamier leads; and an epic soundtrack underneath it all.\n\nMusically, it's hands-down five stars, complete with an accompanying playlist on Spotify. Musical mentions range from Dolly Parton to Fall Out Boy to Olivia Rodrigo. And, of course, Stevie Nicks - the novel's very title is an homage to the great musical prowess of the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer.\n\nThe story wraps up quickly - a sudden halt at the end of a roller coaster that leaves you wondering what that ending really means, and whether lightning strikes three times."}
{"text": "# Migrant caravan slogs on through southern Mexico with no expectations from a US-Mexico meeting\nBy **EDGAR H. CLEMENTE**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 10:06 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**HUIXTLA, Mexico (AP)** - Under a beating sun, thousands of migrants in a caravan continued to trudge through southern Mexico on Tuesday, with some saying they expect nothing good from an upcoming meeting this week between American and Mexican officials about the migrant surge at the U.S. border.\n\nThe migrants passed by Mexico's main inland immigration inspection point outside the town of Huixtla, in southern Chiapas state. National Guard officers there made no attempt to stop the estimated 6,000 members of the caravan.\n\nThe migrants were trying to make it to the next town, Villa Comaltitlan, about 11 miles (17 kilometers) northwest of Huixtla. In the past, Mexico has let migrants go through, trusting that they would tire themselves out walking along the highway. No migrant caravan has ever walked the 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) to the U.S. border.\n\nU.S. officials are expected to press Mexico to stop more migrants at a meeting scheduled for Wednesday.\n\nThe meeting \"will be between fools and fools, who want to use women and children as trading pieces,\" said migrant activist Luis García Villagrán, one of the organizers of the caravan. \"We are not trading pieces for any politician.\"\n\n\"What Mexico wants is the money, the money to detain and deport migrants,\" Villagrán said.\n\nMexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador confirmed last week that U.S. officials want Mexico to do more to block migrants at its southern border with Guatemala, or make it more difficult to move across Mexico by train or in trucks or buses - a policy known as \"contention.\"\n\nBut the president said that in exchange, he wants the United States to send more development aid to migrants' home countries, and to reduce or eliminate sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela, noting \"that is what we are going to discuss, it is not just contention.\"\n\nSome on the caravan, like Norbey Díaz Rios, a migrant from Colombia, said turning back was not an option. Díaz Rios, 46, said he left his home because of threats from criminal gangs, and plans to ask for asylum in the U.S.\n\n\"You know that you are walking for a purpose, with a goal in mind, but it is unsure if you are going to make it, or what obstacles you will find along the way,\" said Díaz Rios. \"I can't return to Colombia.\"\n\n\"They should give me a chance to remain in a country where I can get papers and work and provide for my family,\" he added.\n\nU.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and White House homeland security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall will travel to Mexico City for the talks.\n\nThis month, as many as 10,000 migrants were arrested daily at the southwest U.S. border.\n\nThe Mexican government felt pressure to address that problem, after U.S. officials briefly closed two vital Texas railway border crossings, claiming they were overwhelmed by processing migrants.\n\nThat put a chokehold on freight moving from Mexico to the U.S., as well as grain needed to feed Mexican livestock moving south. The rail crossings have since been reopened, but the message appeared clear.\n\nThe caravan started out on Christmas Eve from the city of Tapachula, near the border with Guatemala, and migrants spent Christmas night sleeping on scraps of cardboard or plastic stretched out under awnings, in tents, or on the bare ground.\n\nThe migrants included single adults but also entire families, all eager to reach the U.S. border, angry and frustrated at having to wait weeks or months in the nearby city of Tapachula for documents that might allow them to continue their journey.\n\nMexico says it detected 680,000 migrants moving through the country in the first 11 months of 2023.\n\nIn May, Mexico agreed to take in migrants from countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba who had been turned away by the U.S. for not following rules that provided new legal pathways to asylum and other forms of migration.\n\nBut that deal, aimed at curbing a post-pandemic jump in migration, appears to be insufficient as numbers rise once again, disrupting bilateral trade and stoking anti-migrant sentiment."}
{"text": "# Drummond, DeRozan lead the way as Bulls hold off Hawks 118-113\nBy **ANDREW SELIGMAN**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 10:42 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CHICAGO (AP)** - Andre Drummond had season highs of 24 points and 25 rebounds in his first start of the season, DeMar DeRozan scored 25 points and the Chicago Bulls cooled off Atlanta's Trae Young somewhat in beating the Hawks 118-113 on Tuesday night.\n\nYoung finished with 21 points and 13 assists after tying Oscar Robertson's record of seven consecutive games with at least 30 points and 10 assists.\n\nThe Bulls won for the ninth time in 13 games with Zach LaVine sidelined because of inflammation in his right foot. And they did it this time with center Nikola Vucevic out because of bruised muscles around his left hip and groin.\n\nDeRozan scored 11 points in the fourth quarter, including four in the final 26 seconds to help Chicago come away with the win.\n\nDrummond made 11 of 13 shots and played 39 minutes with Vucevic sidelined. Coby White and Ayo Dosunmu each scored 19. White missed all seven 3-pointers and the Bulls were 7 of 25 from beyond the arc, but they made enough shots to bounce back from a loss to injury-riddled Cleveland on Saturday.\n\nBogdan Bogdanovic led Atlanta with 22 points. Dejounte Murray finished with 17 after scoring 20 or more in five straight games, and the Hawks lost their third in a row.\n\nThe game was tied at 106-all when Alex Caruso nailed a 3 with just under four minutes remaining and the Bulls were up 111-110 when DeRozan hit a 14-footer with 1:42 left.\n\nMurray then got called for a charge. With a chance to make it a two-possession game, White missed a 3 and Caruso came away with a steal, only to miss a 3 and a layup.\n\nYoung then cut it to 113-111 when he made a free throw with 43 seconds remaining. But DeRozan spun for a finger roll to bump Chicago's lead to four with 26 seconds left, and the Bulls hung on from there.\n\nBut Chicago could be down two key players at least for a little while, with Vucevic joining LaVine on the sideline.\n\nCoach Billy Donovan was not sure how long Vucevic will be out. The two-time All-Star had an MRI on Tuesday.\n\nVucevic was hurt trying to defend a dunk by Cleveland's Max Strus during the Bulls' loss to the Cavaliers on Saturday. Strus' right knee struck Vucevic in the groin area.\n\nVucevic, averaging 16.7 points and 10.4 rebounds, missed his first game this season. He played in all 82 games last year.\n\nLaVine, meanwhile, started doing some light cutting on Tuesday.\n\n## UP NEXT\nHawks: Host Sacramento on Friday.\n\nBulls: Host Indiana on Thursday."}
{"text": "# Markkanen has 31 points and 12 boards as Jazz roll to 130-118 win, handing Spurs 5th straight loss\nBy **RAUL DOMINGUEZ**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 10:41 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SAN ANTONIO (AP)** - Lauri Markkanen had 31 points and 12 rebounds, and the Utah Jazz overcame a slow start to beat the San Antonio Spurs 130-118 on Tuesday night.\n\nJordan Clarkson added 24 points, Collin Sexton had 20 and Walker Kessler scored 11 for Utah.\n\nKeldon Johnson led San Antonio with 26 points, Devin Vassell had 22, Jeremy Sochan added 19 and Victor Wembanyama had 15.\n\nThe Spurs (4-25) have lost five straight since snapping a franchise-worst 18-game losing streak.\n\nThe Jazz (13-18) have won three in a row and six of eight after starting the season 2-7.\n\nWembanyama returned after missing two of the past three games with a right ankle injury. He was scheduled to play Saturday in Dallas but stepped on a ball boy during warmups and was held out as a precaution.\n\nWembanyama was 6 for 15 from the field and had seven rebounds, five blocks and four assists in 25 minutes.\n\nSan Antonio brought Johnson, a longtime starter, off the bench for the second time this season and the change keyed a 15-point lead in the first quarter.\n\nStarting in place of Johnson, Julian Champagnie had eight points in the first two minutes. He opened with a 3-pointer off a feed from Wembanyama and soared for a dunk on Sochan's assist.\n\nChampagnie finished with 16 points.\n\nSan Antonio opened 6 for 7 on 3-pointers in building a 28-15 lead eight minutes into the game. The Spurs finished 16 for 35 on 3s.\n\nThat fast start dissipated as Utah went on a 23-9 run bridging the first and second quarters. Clarkson capped the spurt with a pair of free throws as the Jazz captured their first lead at 38-37 with eight minutes remaining in the first half.\n\nMarkkanen and Clarkson combined for 18 points on 6-for-8 shooting in the second quarter.\n\nIt was another successful return for Clarkson to his hometown. He entered the game averaging 16.7 points in 26 games against the Spurs.\n\nThe Spurs have the worst record in the Western Conference and are second in the league to the Detroit Pistons (2-28), who have lost 27 straight - a single-season record.\n\n## UP NEXT\nJazz: At New Orleans on Thursday.\n\nSpurs: At Portland on Thursday."}
{"text": "# Franz Wagner scores 28 to lead the Magic to a 127-119 win over the Wizards\nBy **MATT SUGAM**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 10:39 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Franz Wagner had 28 points, nine assists, and eight rebounds, rookie Anthony Black scored a career-high 23 points and the Orlando Magic defeated the Washington Wizards 127-119 on Tuesday night.\n\n\"We're playing good ball right now, and I'm just trying to focus on that, honestly,\" Black said. \"It's going to come game-by-game, getting more comfortable. So I'm just trying to keep doing things that's helping us win.\"\n\nPaolo Banchero overcame a slow start to finish with 24 points and eight assists and Jalen Suggs returned from a two-game absence due to a left wrist injury to score 11.\n\n\"He looked good. His conditioning was on point, he was out there defending the right way, crawling into the basketball, trying to do a lot of the right things,\" Magic coach Jamahl Mosley said of Suggs. \"Having a couple of games off, there wasn't as much rust as we'd thought there'd be.\"\n\nJordan Poole had 30 points to lead the Wizards, who have lost four of their last five, and Tyus Jones added 22.\n\nTrailing by as many as eight, Washington's bench came up with 12 points in the first quarter, and a 14-4 run tied things at 33 after one.\n\nThe Magic went on a 7-0 run to take a 45-38 lead in the second quarter and force Washington to call timeout with 6:44 left in the half.\n\nThe Wizards' Corey Kispert came off the bench and started the game 6 of 6 including 3 of 3 on 3-pointers for 15 first-half points as Washington fought back from down nine to trail 63-60 at the half.\n\nThe Magic led by as many as nine several times in the third before Banchero hit a left-handed layup for the last shot of the third quarter to give Orlando a 98-88 lead.\n\nWashington trailed by as many as 17 in the fourth quarter, but an 11-0 run capped by Jones' 3-pointer made it 117-111 with 3:10 remaining. Poole hit a pair of free throws with 2:02 remaining to cut the deficit to four and did so again on a dunk with just under a minute to play, but that's the closest Washington got.\n\n\"It's the togetherness that we have, our poise, our communication,\" Wagner said. \"We have guys that like playing with each other and for each other and I think that shows in the last couple of minutes when stuff isn't going our way that we come together and kind of find our groove again.\"\n\nThe Magic had 70 points in the paint and caused 21 turnovers. They've won the first three games of a four-game regular season series with the Wizards.\n\n\"Overall, I think schematically we did the right things,\" Wizards coach Wes Unseld Jr. said. \"Clean up on a couple of those turnovers and some of the transition opportunities and paint points, I think it's a different ballgame.\"\n\nDaniel Gafford had 13 points and 13 rebounds while Kyle Kuzma had 17 for the Wizards. However, he was only 6 of 18 from the field while accounting for six turnovers.\n\n\"I just didn't play well,\" Kuzma said. \"If I would have found more of a rhythm, we probably would have won because everybody else played well.\"\n\n## UP NEXT\n\nMagic: Host Philadelphia on Wednesday night.\n\nWizards: Host Toronto on Wednesday night."}
{"text": "# Brian Holloway returns 2 picks for TDs, Texas State beats Rice 45-21 in First Responder Bowl\nDecember 26, 2023. 9:54 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DALLAS (AP)** - Linebacker Brian Holloway returned two interceptions for touchdowns, Jahmyl Jeter ran for three scores, and Texas State beat Rice 45-21 in the First Responder Bowl on Tuesday in the Bobcats' first bowl appearance as an FBS program.\n\nHolloway had a 36-yard pick-6 early in the second quarter and returned his second interception 48 yards for a TD in the third that made it 38-21. Both picks came against AJ Padgett, who was intercepted three times overall. Shawqi Itraish relieved Padgett in the fourth quarter and threw two more picks as Texas State forced seven turnovers.\n\nJeter had a 29-yard touchdown run and two scores from 1 yard out. Nash Jones, a 6-foot-5, 320-pound offensive tackle, scored on a 3-yard run for the Bobcats (8-5), who are in their 12th FBS season.\n\nDean Connors scored on runs of 3 and 28 yards for the Owls (6-7), who fell short of their first winning season and first bowl victory since 2014.\n\nIsmail Mahdi rushed for 122 yards on 24 carries for the Bobcats.\n\nTexas State led 14-7 when Holloway stepped in front of tight end Boden Green between the hash marks, and the senior ran in untouched.\n\nHolloway's second score occurred less than two minutes after Jones caught T.J. Finley's lateral from the opposite side of the field and jogged in for a 31-21 lead. Holloway made the grab amid midfield traffic, ran toward the right sideline and raced in to become the first Texas State player with two interceptions for touchdowns in a game.\n\nFinley was 15 of 29 for 152 yards.\n\nPadgett was 10 of 21 for 81 yards and a touchdown in addition to the three picks.\n\n## THE TAKEAWAY\n\nTexas State: Mahdi, a sophomore, went into the bowl season with an FBS-leading average of 167.8 all-purpose yards per game. He had 34 yards on kick returns to finish with 153 yards, a total diminished by his minus-3 yards receiving on one catch.\n\nRice: In addition to being intercepted five times, the Owls muffed a pooch kickoff and muffed a punt."}
{"text": "# Pistons set single-season record with 27th straight loss, as Cunningham's 41 not enough against Nets\nBy **DAVE HOGG**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 10:36 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DETROIT (AP)** - The Detroit Pistons set an NBA single-season record with their 27th straight loss Tuesday night, as Cam Johnson scored 24 points and Mikal Bridges added 21 to lead the Brooklyn Nets to a 118-112 victory.\n\nCade Cunningham scored 41 points but the Pistons (2-28) broke a tie with the 2010-11 Cleveland Cavaliers and 2013-14 Philadelphia 76ers. The 76ers hold the overall mark at 28, a skid that started in the 2014-15 season and carried over into 2015-16.\n\n\"A lot of this load is trusted to me, on the court and in the locker room,\" Cunningham said. \"Every day, I try to lead the squad, and I haven't been successful at that - 2-28. It's only right that I speak for it and be the face of it.\"\n\nCunningham scored 37 in the second half and shot 15 for 21 from the field, but Bojan Bogdanovic was the only other Pistons player with more than 15. Cunningham's teammates shot 36.2% (25 for 69), including 28.6% (6 for 21) on 3-pointers.\n\n\"You have to be real about where we are,\" Pistons coach Monty Williams said. \"Nobody wants something like this attached to them, and the bottom line is it is my job. Coaches are graded on their records.\"\n\nNic Claxton and Day'Ron Sharpe each added double-doubles for the Nets, who beat the Pistons for the second straight game.\n\n\"I didn't sleep very well last night, anticipating how tough this game was going to be,\" Nets coach Jacque Vaughn said. \"Any time you play a team back-to-back like that, it is really tough to (win).\"\n\nDorian Finney-Smith's 3-pointer capped a 13-0 run that put the Nets up 105-97 with 4:53 to play. Cunningham missed a pair of free throws, but came back with a 3-pointer and a three-point play to pull Detroit within 109-106 with 1:54 left.\n\nAfter Johnson's 3-pointer, a pair of layups from Cunningham made it 112-10. Finney-Smith, though, hit a baseline 3 to put the Nets up 115-110 with 38 seconds left.\n\n\"We had a little bit of execution and composure down the stretch,\" Johnson said. \"It didn't always go our way, but we were able to pull it out.\"\n\nAlec Burks missed a 3-pointer, and the Nets clinched the game from the free-throw line as fans chanted \"Sell the team! Sell the team!\"\n\nBrooklyn took an 11-point lead early in the third quarter, but the Pistons responded with an 11-0 run to tie the game at 71. Cunningham scored 18 of Detroit's 31 points in the period, keeping Detroit within 88-85 going into the fourth.\n\nThe Pistons started the game with a 22-8 run, giving hope to a large crowd, but the Nets outscored them 53-32 in the rest of the first half.\n\n\"To have a start like that and then kind of let it go in the second quarter - that's the quarter that put us in the hole,\" Williams said. \"I think we had six turnovers in the second quarter. That's something that has plagued us all year long.\"\n\n## UP NEXT\n\nNets: Host Milwaukee on Wednesday\n\nPistons: At Boston on Thursday."}
{"text": "# Missing pregnant Texas teen and her boyfriend found dead in a car in San Antonio\nDecember 26, 2023. 10:14 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SAN ANTONIO, Texas (AP)** - A missing pregnant Texas teenager and her boyfriend were found dead in a parked car Tuesday in San Antonio and police said they may have been there for days.\n\nSavanah Nicole Soto, 18, and Matthew Guerra, 22, were reported missing by police in Leon Valley, a few miles northwest of San Antonio suburb.\n\nTwo bodies were found in a Kia Optima matching the description of one belonging to the boyfriend and they may have been there for three or four days, Police Chief William P. McManus said at a news conference.\n\nHe didn't identify the bodies pending confirmation by the medical examiner but said they were believed to be those of the missing couple.\n\nMcManus didn't provide other details and said he didn't know whether a weapon had been found in the car.\n\n\"What we're looking at right now is a very, very perplexing crime scene,\" the chief said.\n\n\"Detectives right now are looking at this as a possible murder but we don't know for sure,\" he said. \"Because of the complexity, the complex crime scene, we can't say for sure what we have.\"\n\nThe bodies were found Tuesday afternoon after someone spotted the car in the parking lot of an apartment complex in San Antonio and alerted the family, KENS-TV reported. Relatives then called police.\n\nSoto was a week overdue to deliver and was scheduled to have an induced labor at a hospital last Saturday night, her family told the station.\n\nGloria Cordova said she last heard from her daughter on Friday afternoon and got no answer when she knocked on her Leon Valley apartment door Saturday afternoon.\n\nLeon Valley police issued a CLEAR Alert for Soto on Monday and later said her boyfriend also was missing. Soto's family organized a search of the area near her apartment on Christmas night.\n\n\"Savanah was so, so happy because she was going to be a mommy. It breaks my heart,\" her mother told KENS-TV."}
{"text": "# The death toll rises to 18 in a furnace explosion at a Chinese-owned nickel plant in Indonesia\nBy **MOHAMMAD TAUFAN**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 6:55 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**PALU, Indonesia (AP)** - The death toll following the explosion of a smelting furnace at a Chinese-owned nickel plant on Indonesia's Sulawesi island rose to 18 on Tuesday, as police ordered the plant to stop operations until an investigation is completed.\n\nThe blast, which occurred on Sunday, was the latest in a series of fatalities at nickel smelting plants in Indonesia that are part of China's ambitious transnational development program known as the Belt and Road Initiative.\n\nNickel is a key component in global battery production for electric vehicles.\n\nFour Chinese and nine Indonesian workers died instantly on Sunday when the furnace exploded while they were repairing it, Central Sulawesi police chief Agus Nugroho said. Three more victims died a day later while being treated at a local hospital.\n\nTwo more workers died on Tuesday while hospitalized, bringing the total number of fatalities to 18, including eight workers from China, said Deddy Kurniawan, a spokesperson for PT Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park, known as PT IMIP, the parent company of PT Indonesia Tsingshan Stainless Steel, where the explosion occurred.\n\nThe plant is in the Bahodopi neighborhood of Morowali regency.\n\n\"We have ordered PT Indonesia Tsingshan Stainless Steel to stop its operation until our entire investigation is completed,\" said Nugroho, the police chief, adding that authorities had set up a team to determine whether negligence by the company led to the deaths.\n\nThe blast was so powerful that it demolished the furnace and damaged parts of the side walls of the building, Nugroho said.\n\nThe head of central Sulawesi's manpower and transmigration office, Arnold Firdaus, said that joint investigation team is made up of 18 members, and it includes officials from the central government in Jakarta and a working group from the Chinese Embassy.\n\nPT IMIP said in a statement on Sunday that the furnace was under maintenance and not operating at the time of the explosion. However, \"residual slag in the furnace\" came into contact \"with flammable items,\" causing the furnace walls to collapse and the remaining steel slag to flow out.\n\nRescuers extinguished the fire and evacuated workers after a nearly four-hour operation, Kurniawan said.\n\nAbout 41 workers were still being treated at a hospital and the company's clinic on Tuesday with serious to minor injuries, including 11 Chinese nationals. Three of them who suffered serious burns will be flown to China for further treatment, Kurniawan said.\n\nIn a news briefing on Monday, Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning expressed condolences for the victims and said that China is \"saddened by the casualties caused by the accident.\"\n\nShe said her ministry is working closely with authorities in Indonesia and has instructed the Chinese Embassy in Jakarta to assist in the aftermath, including ensuring medical treatment is provided to the injured and helping to determine the cause of the explosion.\n\nA three-member working group from the Chinese Embassy in Jakarta has arrived at the site on Monday to guide the company to carry out aftermath care and \"follow-up work,\" Mao said.\n\nIt was the third tragedy this year at Chinese-owned nickel smelting plants in Central Sulawesi province, which has the largest nickel reserves in Indonesia.\n\nTwo dump truck operators were killed when they were engulfed by a wall of black sludge-like material following the collapse of a nickel waste disposal site in April.\n\nIn January, two workers, including a Chinese national, were killed in riots that involved workers of the two nations at an Indonesia-China joint venture in neighboring North Morowali regency.\n\nLast year, a loader truck ran over and killed a Chinese worker while he was repairing a road in PT IMIP's mining area, and an Indonesian man burned to death when a furnace in the company's factory exploded.\n\nNearly 50% of PT IMIP's shares are owned by a Chinese holding company, and the rest are owned by two Indonesian companies. It began smelter operations in 2013 and is now the largest nickel-based industrial area in Indonesia."}
{"text": "# Afghan schoolgirls are finishing sixth grade in tears. Under Taliban rule, their education is over\nBy **MOHAMMAD HABIB RAHMANI**  \nDecember 25, 2023. 1:35 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**KABUL, Afghanistan (AP)** - Bahara Rustam, 13, took her last class at Bibi Razia School in Kabul on Dec. 11 knowing it was the end of her education. Under Taliban rule, she is unlikely to step foot in a classroom again.\n\nIn September 2021, a month after U.S. and NATO troops withdrew from Afghanistan following two decades of war, the Taliban announced that girls were barred from studying beyond sixth grade.\n\nThey extended this education ban to universities in December 2022. The Taliban have defied global condemnation and warnings that the restrictions will make it almost impossible for them to gain recognition as the country's legitimate rulers.\n\nLast week, U.N. special envoy Roza Otunbayeva expressed concern that a generation of Afghan girls is falling behind with each day that passes.\n\nLast week, an official in the Education Ministry said Afghan girls of all ages are allowed to study in religious schools known as madrassas, which have traditionally been boys-only. But Otunbayeva said it was unclear if there was a standardized curriculum that allowed modern subjects.\n\nBahara is holding onto her education and pores over textbooks at home. \"Graduating (from sixth grade) means we are going to seventh grade,\" she said. \"But all of our classmates cried and we were very disappointed.\"\n\nThere was no graduation ceremony for the girls at Bibi Razia School.\n\nIn another part of Kabul, 13-year old Setayesh Sahibzada wonders what the future holds for her. She is sad she can't go to school anymore to achieve her dreams.\n\n\"I can't stand on my own two feet,\" she said. \"I wanted to be a teacher. But now I can't study, I can't go to school.\"\n\nAnalyst Muhammad Saleem Paigir warned that excluding women and girls from education will be disastrous for Afghanistan. \"We understand that illiterate people can never be free and prosperous,\" he said.\n\nThe Taliban have barred women from many public spaces and most jobs, all but confining women to their homes."}
{"text": "# 276 Indians stuck in a French airport for days for a human trafficking probe arrive in India\nBy **ANGELA CHARLTON** and **RAFIQ MAQBOOL**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 7:50 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**MUMBAI, India (AP)** - A charter plane that was grounded in France for a human trafficking investigation arrived in India with 276 Indians aboard Tuesday, authorities said. The passengers had been heading to Nicaragua but were instead blocked inside a rural French airport for four days in an exceptional holiday ordeal.\n\nUpon arrival in Mumbai, the passengers filed out of the airport without speaking publicly about what they'd been through or where they would go next. Carrying backpacks or small suitcases, some wore hoods or masks to conceal their identities.\n\nA total of 303 passengers had originally boarded the Legend Airlines A340 plane last week in Fujairah airport in the United Arab Emirates for a flight to Managua, Nicaragua. When the plane stopped in France's Vatry Airport in Champagne country for refueling Thursday, it was grounded by police based on an anonymous tip that it could be carrying human trafficking victims.\n\nThe Vatry airport was requisitioned by police for days. Local officials, medics and volunteers installed cots and ensured regular meals and showers for those held inside. Then it turned into a makeshift courtroom Sunday as judges, lawyers and interpreters filled the terminal to carry out emergency hearings to determine the next steps.\n\nThe plane was authorized to leave Monday and took off for Mumbai. Local French authorities said that 276 of the original 303 passengers boarded the flight to India, and 25 others requested asylum in France.\n\nThe asylum-seekers, who include five children, were transferred to a special zone in Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport for processing, it said.\n\nThe passengers grounded in France had included a 21-month-old child and several unaccompanied minors.\n\nThe remaining two passengers were initially detained as part of a human trafficking investigation but were released Monday after appearing before a judge, the Paris prosecutor's office said. The judge named them as \"assisted witnesses\" to the case, a special status under French law that allows time for further investigation and could lead to eventual charges or to the case being dropped.\n\nProsecutors wouldn't comment on whether the passengers' ultimate destination could have been the U.S., which has seen a surge in Indians crossing the Mexico-U.S. border this year.\n\nFrench authorities are working to determine the aim of the original flight, and opened a judicial inquiry into activities by an organized criminal group helping foreigners enter or stay in a country illegally, the prosecutor's office said.\n\nIt did not specify whether human trafficking - which the U.N. defines as \"the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of people through force, fraud or deception, with the aim of exploiting them for profit\" - is still suspected.\n\nSome lawyers at Sunday's hearings protested authorities' handling of the situation and the passengers' rights, suggesting that police and prosecutors overreacted to the anonymous tip.\n\nThe Indian Embassy tweeted its thanks to French officials for ensuring that the Indians could go home.\n\nLegend Airlines lawyer Liliana Bakayoko said some passengers didn't want to go to India because they had paid for a tourism trip to Nicaragua. The airline has denied any role in possible human trafficking.\n\nThe U.S. government has designated Nicaragua as one of several countries deemed as failing to meet minimum standards for eliminating human trafficking. Nicaragua has also been used as a migratory springboard for people fleeing poverty or conflict because of relaxed or visa-free entry requirements for some countries. Sometimes charter flights are used for the journey."}
{"text": "# Pakistani police free 290 Baloch activists arrested while protesting extrajudicial killings\nBy **MUNIR AHMED**  \nDecember 25, 2023. 2:41 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**ISLAMABAD (AP)** - Pakistani police Monday freed 290 Baloch activists who were arrested when they attempted to hold a protest last week in the capital, Islamabad.\n\nTheir release came days after protest organizers gave authorities a deadline to release all those detained.\n\nThe activists had traveled 1,600 kilometers (about 1,000 miles) on Thursday from Turbat, a town in Baluchistan province, to protest forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings in the militancy-ravaged southwest.\n\nThe protesters were mostly women and some had brought along their children, aged 7-12, when security forces used batons and water canons to disperse and arrest them.\n\nThey wanted to draw attention to the case of 24-year-old Balaach Mola Bakhsh, who died in November while in police custody in Baluchistan. Authorities said he was killed after militants ambushed the police vehicle transporting him.\n\nPolice said Bakhsh was carrying explosives when he was arrested. His family insists he is innocent, demanding justice for him. They also said he had been detained since October. Police said they arrested him in November.\n\nThe police use of force against the protesters sparked anger among Baluchistan residents and drew nationwide condemnation from top human rights activists.\n\nProtest organizers said that as the dozens of vehicles carrying the activists reached the outskirts of Islamabad before dawn Thursday, police used water canons against them and started beating them up to prevent them from reaching the heart of the capital.\n\nAt the weekend, organizers and protesters held a sit-in outside the Islamabad Press Club to denounce the violence. \"Four female police officers with batons hit me,\" Mahrang Baloch, one of the organizers, told reporters as she and dozens of others held portraits of those detained by the police, demanding their release.\n\nSenator Mushtaq Ahmed and top human rights activist Farhat Ullah Baba attended the sit-in and condemned the use of force by authorities.\n\n\"These peaceful demonstrators are victims of state terrorism,\" Ahmed said, adding that every citizen had the right to peacefully protest in Pakistan.\n\nBaluchistan province - which borders Afghanistan and Iran and is rich in oil, gas and minerals - has been the scene of low-level insurgency by Baluch nationalists for more than two decades. Baluch nationalists initially wanted a share of provincial resources, but later initiated an insurgency for independence.\n\nAccording to human rights activists, those who demand a greater share of the province's natural resources often go missing after being detained by security forces."}
{"text": "# Tokyo court only holds utility responsible to compensate Fukushima evacuees and reduces damages\nBy **MARI YAMAGUCHI**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 7:15 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**TOKYO (AP)** - A Tokyo court on Tuesday held only the operator of the tsunami-wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant responsible for paying damages to dozens of evacuees.\n\nThe Tokyo High Court also slashed the amount to half of what the lower court had ordered and relieved the government of responsibility - a decision that plaintiffs and their lawyers criticized as belittling their suffering and the severity of the disaster.\n\nThe court ordered only the Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, known as TEPCO, to pay a total of 23.5 million yen ($165,000) to 44 of the 47 plaintiffs, while not holding the government accountable.\n\nTuesday's ruling apparently backpedaled from an earlier decision in March 2018, when the Tokyo District Court held both the government and TEPCO accountable for the disaster, which the ruling said could have been prevented if they both took better precautionary measures, ordering both to pay 59 million yen ($414,400) in damages.\n\nThe decision comes at a time when Japan's government tries to accelerate reactor restarts to maximize nuclear energy to meet decarbonization targets, while seeking to tone down the impact of the nuclear disaster 13 years ago, and its memory gradually fades.\n\nThree reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant melted after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami hit on March 11, 2011, releasing massive amounts of radiation in the area and displacing more than 160,000 people at one point. About 27,000 of them are still unable to return home.\n\nThe government has pushed for the decontamination of affected areas and the reopening of no-go zones, and has urged evacuees to return to their homes while cutting back support for them. The government-set compensation program, which is mostly based on distance from the plant and radiation levels, has triggered divisions and discrimination among communities.\n\nThe dispute centers on whether the government could have foreseen the risk of a massive tsunami, and whether the disaster could have been averted if the government had ordered the utility to take precautions.\n\nIn the ruling, judge Hiro Misumi said the flooding of the plant because of the tsunami wasn't preventable even if the industry ministry used its authority and ordered the utility to enhance a seawall based on a tsunami estimate at that time.\n\nThe decision is among the four rulings that apparently came in line with the June 2022 Supreme Court decision that said the government wasn't liable for the disaster and that the disaster from a tsunami that high wasn't foreseeable or preventable.\n\nMotomitsu Nakagawa, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said that Tuesday's high court ruling was \"almost a mere copy and paste\" of the top court decision and that it \"makes me infuriated.\"\n\nNakagawa said the ruling takes the disaster-hit residents' suffering lightly, and the reduction of the amount of compensation is also tantamount to saying that the operator can get away with paying only that much damage in a disaster.\n\nHe said that he planned to discuss a possible appeal to the Supreme Court after consulting with his clients.\n\nYuya Kamoshita, who has evacuated to Tokyo from Iwaki, south of the Fukushima Daiichi plant with his family, said the ruling was unacceptable because it trivialized the evacuees' sufferings, and failed to hold the government accountable even though the nuclear power plant was operated as part of the national energy policy."}
{"text": "# Beijing sees most hours of sub-freezing temperatures in December since 1951\nDecember 25, 2023. 2:51 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BEIJING (AP)** - Beijing recorded the most hours of sub-freezing temperatures in December in more than seven decades as a cold wave has enveloped northern and central swathes of China, bringing snowstorms and record-breaking temperatures.\n\nA weather observatory in the Chinese capital as of Sunday had recorded more than 300 hours of sub-freezing temperatures since Dec. 11 - the most since records began, in 1951, according to the official newspaper Beijing Daily.\n\nThe city saw nine consecutive days with temperatures below minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit), the paper added.\n\nParts of northern and central China have shivered under frigid cold snaps this month, with authorities closing schools and highways several times due to snowstorms.\n\nTemperatures at 78 weather stations across the country hit record lows for the month of December, while average temperatures this month in northern and some central parts of China hit record lows set in 1961, according to the National Meteorological Centre."}
{"text": "# Grounded charter jet freed to leave France. Lawyer says most passengers expected to return to India\nBy **ANGELA CHARLTON** and **ELISE MORTON**  \nDecember 24, 2023. 6:47 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PARIS (AP)** - A charter plane sequestered while carrying 303 Indians to Nicaragua was authorized Sunday to leave the French airport where it has been grounded for four days for a human trafficking investigation. A lawyer for the airline said the plane would take many of the stranded passengers back to India on Monday.\n\nLocal authorities were working through Christmas Eve on formalities to allow some passengers to leave the small Vatry Airport in Champagne country, regional prosecutor Annick Browne told The Associated Press. All of the passengers, including a 21-month-old child, had been stuck in the airport terminal since Thursday.\n\nTwo passengers were detained as part of a special French investigation into suspected human trafficking by an organized criminal group. Several others requested asylum in France, according to the local administration. Prosecutors said 11 passengers were unaccompanied minors who were put under special administrative care.\n\nThe Legend Airlines A340 plane stopped Thursday for refueling in Vatry en route from Fujairah airport in United Arab Emirates for Managua, Nicaragua, and was grounded by police based on an anonymous tip that it could be carrying trafficking victims.\n\nThe airport was requisitioned by police for days, and then turned into a makeshift courtroom Sunday as judges, lawyers and translators filled the terminal to carry out emergency hearings to determine whether to keep the Indians sequestered any longer.\n\nThe hearings were halted midway because of a dispute over the procedure used to block the Indians in the airport, and a decision on next steps was expected overnight, the prosecutor said Sunday.\n\nThe seizure order for the airliner was lifted Sunday morning, a decision that \"makes it possible to contemplate the passengers in the waiting area being rerouted,\" according to a statement from the Marne administration.\n\nThe French Civil Aviation Authority then set about trying to get the necessary permissions for the plane to take off once again, which should be in place \"no later than Monday morning,\" according to the prefecture.\n\nLegend Airlines lawyer Liliana Bakayoko told AP that the company hoped the plane could head to Mumbai, India, on Monday \"with as many passengers as possible.\"\n\nShe estimated around 280 passengers should be able to leave. The prosecutor and regional administration could not confirm an exact figure.\n\nLocal officials, medics and volunteers installed cots and ensured regular meals and showers for those held in the airport. But lawyers at Sunday's hearings protested authorities' overall handling of the strange situation.\n\n\"I'm surprised at how things unfolded in the waiting area. People should have been informed of their rights, and clearly that was not the case,\" Francois Procureur, the head of the Châlons-en-Champagne Bar Association, told BFM television. He called the mass, hasty airport hearings \"unprecedented.\"\n\nForeigners can be held up to four days in a transit zone for police investigations in France, after which a special judge must rule on whether to extend that for eight days.\n\nProsecutors wouldn't comment on what kind of trafficking was alleged, or whether the passengers' ultimate destination was the U.S., which has seen a surge in Indians crossing the Mexico-U.S. border this year.\n\nThe 15 crew members were questioned and released Saturday, Bakayoko said. She said the airline denied any role in possible human trafficking. A \"partner\" company that chartered the plane was responsible for verifying identification documents of each passenger and communicated their passport information to the airline 48 hours before the flight, Bakayoko said.\n\nThe U.S. government has designated Nicaragua as one of several countries deemed as failing to meet minimum standards for eliminating human trafficking. Nicaragua has also been used as a migratory springboard for people fleeing poverty or conflict because of relaxed or visa-free entry requirements for some countries. Sometimes charter flights are used for the journey.\n\nIndian citizens were arrested 41,770 times entering the U.S. illegally from Mexico in the U.S. government's budget year that ended Sept. 30, more than double from 18,308 the previous year."}
{"text": "# A merchant vessel linked to Israel has been damaged in a drone attack off India's west coast\nDecember 23, 2023. 10:56 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW DELHI (AP)** - A drone hit an Israeli-affiliated merchant vessel off the coast of India in the Arabian Sea on Saturday, a British maritime security firm said, damaging the vessel but causing no casualties.\n\nThe incident on the Liberian-flagged chemical product tanker occurred 120 miles (200-kilometers) southwest of the Indian port of Veraval, said Ambrey. It gave no further details about the vessel's Israeli links.\n\nAmbrey said the drone attack struck the stern and caused a fire onboard that was later extinguished without any casualties among the crew. The firm said the vessel suffered some structural damage and some water was taken onboard.\n\n\"The vessel was Israel-affiliated. She had last called in Saudi Arabia and was destined for India at the time,\" Ambrey said.\n\nThe Indian Navy responded after the shipping company requested assistance, a naval official said.\n\n\"Indian Navy had dispatched an aircraft, which arrived overhead the MV (merchant vessel),\" a statement said. \"Safety of the crew and ship was ascertained. A warship has also been dispatched to provide any assistance as required.\"\n\nMajor global shipping firms have rerouted their vessels after attacks in the Red Sea since the Israel-Hamas war began on Oct. 7. Many vessels take a longer and costlier route around the southern tip of Africa.\n\nNo one immediately claimed responsibility for Saturday's attack."}
{"text": "# 'Pray for us': Eyewitnesses reveal first clues about a missing boat with up to 200 Rohingya refugees\nBy **KRISTEN GELINEAU**, **EDNA TARIGAN**, and **REZA SAIFULLAH**  \nDecember 22, 2023. 11:12 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PIDIE, Indonesia (AP)** - Their screams and sobs could be heard from the ailing boat soon after it emerged into view amid the vastness of the Andaman Sea. Crowded on board were tiny babies and children, alongside mothers and fathers begging to be saved.\n\nThe passengers were ethnic Rohingya Muslims who had fled surging gang violence and rampant hunger in the squalid refugee camps of Bangladesh, only to find themselves adrift with a broken engine. For a moment, it appeared their salvation had arrived in the form of another boat carrying Rohingya refugees that had pulled up alongside them.\n\nBut those on board the other boat - itself overloaded and beginning to leak - knew if they allowed the distressed passengers onto their vessel, it would sink. And all would die.\n\nThey wanted to help, but they also wanted to live.\n\nSince November, more than 1,500 Rohingya refugees fleeing Bangladesh in rickety boats have landed in Indonesia's northern province of Aceh - three-quarters of them women and children. On Thursday, Indonesian authorities spotted another five boats approaching Aceh's coast.\n\nWith so many Rohingya attempting the dangerous crossing in recent weeks, nobody knows how many boats did not make it, and how many people died.\n\nThis account of two boats in distress at sea - one was saved, the other vanished - was told to The Associated Press by five survivors from the vessel that made it to shore.\n\nIt provides the first clues into the fate of the boat carrying up to 200 Rohingya refugees that has been missing for weeks. On Dec. 2, the United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR, put out an urgent message about the two boats in distress and urged countries to look for them.\n\nBut in the case of the boat that remains missing, it appears no one searched.\n\nFrom a grey, trash-strewn beach near where they staggered ashore on Dec. 10, the survivors told the AP of their harrowing journey and the agonizing decisions made along the way.\n\n\"I remember feeling that together, we would be finished. Together, we would sink. Together, we would drown,\" says 31-year-old Muhammed Jubair, who was among the 180 people on his boat to be rescued, along with his three children, wife and brother-in-law.\n\n## TEARFUL GOODBYES\nThe story of the missing boat and its passengers begins the way most Rohingya boat journeys do - with tearful goodbyes in sweltering shelters in the camps of Bangladesh, where more than 750,000 Rohingya fled in 2017 following sweeping attacks by the military in their homeland of Myanmar.\n\nIn one of those shelters, Noor Fatima clutched her 14-year-old brother, Muhammed Ansar, forcing herself to hold back tears as the boy began to cry along with the rest of their family. She knew she had to stay strong so he wouldn't fear the journey ahead.\n\nAnsar was the family's only son - the only one with a shot at an education and a job in Indonesia. They hoped he would someday make enough money to support them in the camps. There were few alternatives: Bangladesh bans camp residents from working, so their survival is entirely dependent on food rations, which were slashed this year.\n\nWorsening hunger caused by the ration cuts and a spike in gang violence sparked the latest exodus by sea from the camps.\n\nIt was Nov. 20, and Ansar would be making the trip with several relatives, including his 20-year-old cousin, Samira Khatun, and her 3-year-old son. As her brother left, Fatima told herself many other boats had made it safely to Indonesia. Surely his would, too.\n\nThe next day, Samira called Fatima's family and her father, telling them they were aboard the boat. \"We are on our way,\" she said. \"Pray for us.\"\n\nAbdu Shukkur didn't know his bright and bubbly 12-year-old daughter, Kajoli, was planning to flee the camps until a trafficker called him and said he was taking her by boat to Indonesia.\n\nShukkur begged the trafficker to leave Kajoli behind, but her friends were going on the boat, and she wanted to go with them. He later received a phone call from Kajoli herself, when she was already on board.\n\nAll he could do was pray.\n\n## THE BOATS COME TOGETHER\nThe boat Jubair and his family were on was chugging across the sea, carrying 180 Rohingya bound for Indonesia. It was overloaded, but the engine was still working.\n\nDays into its 1,800-kilometer (1,100-mile) journey, the passengers on Jubair's boat spotted another vessel bobbing in the waves. It was Kajoli, Ansar and Samira's boat - their engine was broken, water was seeping in and the passengers were panicking.\n\nThose on Jubair's boat worried if they got too close, the people on the distressed vessel would jump onto their boat, sinking them all, says one of Jubair's fellow passengers, Rujinah, who goes by one name and who was on board with five of her children.\n\nTheir fears were not unfounded. As Jubair's boat drew nearer, between 20 and 30 people began preparing to make the jump, says Zakir Hussain, another passenger.\n\nThe captain of Jubair's boat shouted at those on the distressed vessel to stay put. Then he asked for a rope so he could tie the two boats together. The captain told the other boat's passengers he would tow their vessel behind his, and they would search for land together.\n\nAccording to Hussain, their captain also issued a warning: \"If you try to jump into our boat, we won't help you.\"\n\nWhat happened next is disputed.\n\nAround the same time, Shukkur, the father of Kajoli, says his nephew made a call to the captain of Kajoli's boat and was told by the captain that he and his family had left the distressed vessel and were on the boat that came to their rescue.\n\nHowever, the survivors interviewed by the AP in Aceh either denied that happened or said they didn't see it.\n\nTethered together, the two boats began moving through the water. And then, two or three nights later, a vicious storm crashed down on them. Pounding waves throttled the boats, destroying the engine on Jubair's vessel.\n\nNow, in the dark, they were both helplessly adrift.\n\n## TRAGEDY STRIKES\nIt was then, the passengers on Jubair's boat say, that the ropes between the two vessels were severed. No one says they saw how it happened - but what they did see was the other boat drifting off to their right.\n\nOver the howling wind and churning surf, Jubair could hear the passengers on the other boat pleading for their lives.\n\n\"They were crying and shouting loudly, 'Our ropes are broken! Our ropes are broken! Please help us!' But how could we help?\" Jubair says. \"We would die with them.\"\n\nThe other boat drifted farther away, the passengers say, until it vanished from view.\n\nOn Jubair's boat, people began to wail.\n\n\"They are also Muslim. They are also part of our community,\" says Rujinah. \"That's why our people were also crying for them.\"\n\n## THE RESCUE\nFor days, Jubair and his fellow passengers languished at sea, their food and water gone. Eventually, a plane spotted them, and a Navy ship arrived, delivering food, water and medicine. The passengers say they don't know which country sent the rescue vessel that towed them into Indonesian waters and then left when their boat was close to land.\n\nThat's when their captain and another crew member fled the vessel on a small fishing boat, Jubair says. Abandoned, the exhausted passengers worked together to guide the battered boat onto the beach, where they have spent their nights sleeping under tarps. They wash and drink from a nearby stream.\n\nFacing an increasingly hostile reception from locals, they have no idea what their future holds in Indonesia. But at least, they say, they are alive. They hope the passengers on the other boat are, too.\n\n\"I feel very sad for them because we were in the same situation, and now we are safe,\" says Hussain. \"We are just praying for that boat to find land and for the passengers to stay alive.\"\n\n## THE AGONY OF THE UNKNOWN\nWeeks have passed, and the families of those on board the lost boat have heard nothing. Ann Maymann, the UNHCR's representative in Indonesia, urged regional governments to launch a search.\n\n\"Here you have hundreds of people that are obviously distressed at the best and, at the worst, they are not even distressed any longer,\" Maymann told the AP. \"Those nations in this region have fully capable and resourced search and rescue capacities.\"\n\nThe governments of regional countries that the AP reached out to either did not respond to requests for comment or said they were unaware of the boat.\n\nMeanwhile, a familiar feeling of dread has crept into Bangladesh's camps, which mourned the loss in 2022 of another boat carrying 180 people that an AP investigation concluded had sunk.\n\nFatima struggles to sleep as she waits for news of Ansar, her little brother. One way or another, she says, they just want answers.\n\nOne night, Fatima says, Ansar came to their mother in a dream and told her he was on an island. The family believes he is alive, somewhere.\n\nShukkur also had a dream about his daughter, Kajoli, but in it, her boat sank. He believes his little girl and all her fellow passengers are dead.\n\nHis agony echoes throughout the camp's crowded warren of shelters.\n\n\"Many parents,\" he says, \"are screaming for their children.\""}
{"text": "# Death toll from China earthquake rises to 149, with 2 still missing\nDecember 24, 2023. 10:25 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BEIJING (AP)** - The death toll from China's most powerful earthquake in years has risen to 149, with two people still missing after the tremor hit northwestern parts of the country last week.\n\nThe 6.2-magnitude quake struck a remote mountainous area between Gansu and Qinghai provinces on Dec. 18, reducing homes to rubble and triggering heavy mudslides that inundated two villages in Qinghai province.\n\nState broadcaster CCTV said Monday the death toll in Donghai city in Qinghai has risen by one, to 32, and rescuers were still searching for two missing people. In neighboring Gansu, authorities had reported 117 dead.\n\nNearly 1,000 were injured and more than 14,000 homes were destroyed in China's deadliest earthquake in nine years.\n\nPrimary schools in Jishishan county in Gansu resumed classes in tents on Monday, state media reported. Local authorities said they would use the upcoming winter break to repair damaged schools and erect temporary structures so that classes could resume as normal in the spring semester.\n\nAuthorities also rushed to erect temporary housing units for survivors facing temperatures well below freezing. CGTN, the state broadcaster's international arm, said the first batch of 500 temporary housing units had been built for residents in Meipo, a village in Gansu, on Friday night.\n\nMore than 87,000 people have been resettled after the quake.\n\nThe tremor caused economic losses estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars in the agricultural and fisheries industries, according to state media.\n\nChinese Premier Li Qiang on Saturday visited several villages in Gansu and a county in Qinghai and urged authorities to improve living conditions for the survivors, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.\n\nLi said the top priority of relief efforts was to make sure people stay warm and safe in winter.\n\nFunerals were held throughout the week, some following the Muslim traditions of much of the population in the affected area.\n\nMost of China's earthquakes strike in the western part of the country, including Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, as well as the Xinjiang region and Tibet.\n\nThe country's deadliest earthquake in recent years was a 7.9-magnitude tremor in 2008 that left nearly 90,000 dead or presumed dead and devastated towns and schools in Sichuan province, leading to a yearslong effort to rebuild with more resistant materials."}
{"text": "# Furnace explosion at Chinese-owned nickel plant in Indonesia kills at least 13 and injures 46 others\nBy **MOHAMMAD TAUFAN**  \nDecember 24, 2023. 10:58 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PALU, Indonesia (AP)** - A smelting furnace exploded Sunday at a Chinese-owned nickel plant on Indonesia's Sulawesi island, killing at least 13 workers and injuring dozens of others, police and a company official said.\n\nIt was the latest in a series of deadly incidents at nickel smelting plants in Indonesia that are part of China's ambitious transnational development program known as the Belt and Road Initiative.\n\nNickel is a key component in global battery production for electric vehicles.\n\nAt least four Chinese and nine Indonesian workers died when the furnace exploded while they were repairing it, said Central Sulawesi police chief Agus Nugroho.\n\nThe blast was so powerful it demolished the furnace and damaged parts of the side walls of the building, said Nugroho, adding that about 46 workers were injured, including 14 Chinese nationals, some in critical condition.\n\nAuthorities are working to determine whether negligence by the company led to the deaths, Nugroho said.\n\nThe accident occurred at PT Indonesia Tsingshan Stainless Steel, a subsidiary of PT Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park, known as PT IMIP, in the Bahodopi neighborhood of Morowali regency.\n\n\"We sincerely apologize for this incident and we are working closely with authorities to investigate what caused the accident,\" said company spokesperson Deddy Kurniawan.\n\nRescuers extinguished the fire and evacuated workers after a nearly four-hour operation, he added.\n\nIn a statement released Sunday afternoon by the company, Kurniawan said the furnace was under maintenance and not operating at the time. However, \"residual slag in the furnace\" came in contact \"with flammable items\" driving the furnace walls to collapse and the remaining steel slag to flow out.\n\nPreviously, the company said explosive liquids at the bottom of the furnace triggered a fire and a subsequent explosion in nearby oxygen cylinders.\n\nIt was the third deadly incident this year at Chinese-owned nickel smelting plants in Central Sulawesi province, which has the largest nickel reserves in Indonesia.\n\nTwo dump truck operators were killed when they were engulfed by a wall of black sludge-like material following the collapse of a nickel waste disposal site in April.\n\nIn January, two workers, including a Chinese national, were killed in riots that involved workers and security guards at an Indonesia-China joint venture in North Morowali regency.\n\nLast year, a loader truck ran over and killed a Chinese worker while he was repairing a road in PT IMIP's mining area, and an Indonesian man burned to death when a furnace in the company's factory exploded.\n\nNearly 50% of PT IMIP's shares are owned by a Chinese holding company, and the rest are owned by two Indonesian companies. It began smelter operations in 2013 and is now the largest nickel-based industrial area in Indonesia.\n\nThree Chinese workers in March filed a complaint to Indonesia's National Commission on Human Rights, alleging that their health is deteriorating due to dust and smoke exposure while working seven-day weeks without a break at PT IMIP. They added that workers there don't have adequate safety equipment.\n\nData collected by the Mining Advocacy Network, an Indonesian watchdog, showed that at least 22 workers from China and Indonesia have died in nickel smelting plants in Central Sulawesi province since 2019, including two Chinese nationals who committed suicide."}
{"text": "# Strong earthquake in northwest China that killed at least 148 causes economic losses worth millions\nDecember 23, 2023. 9:53 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BEIJING (AP)** - The strong earthquake that hit northwest China this week, killing at least 148 people, caused economic losses estimated to be worth tens of millions in the agricultural and fisheries industries, state media said Saturday.\n\nOfficials in Gansu conducted preliminary assessments that showed the province's agricultural and fisheries industries have lost 532 million yuan (about $74.6 million), state broadcaster CCTV reported.\n\nAuthorities were considering the best use of the relief fund, set up days before, for the agricultural sector to resume production as soon as possible, the report said.\n\nThe magnitude 6.2 quake struck in a mountainous region Monday night between Gansu and Qinghai provinces and about 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) southwest of Beijing, the Chinese capital. CCTV said 117 people were killed in Gansu and 31 others died in neighboring Qinghai, while three people remained missing. Nearly 1,000 were injured and more than 14,000 homes were destroyed.\n\nDuring a visit Saturday to several villages in Gansu and a county in Qinghai, Chinese Premier Li Qiang urged authorities to improve living conditions for the survivors of the quake by every available method, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.\n\nLi said the top priority of relief efforts was to make sure people stay warm and safe in winter, the report added.\n\nCGTN, the Chinese state broadcaster's international arm, said the first batch of 500 temporary housing units had been built for residents in Meipo, a village in Gansu, on Friday night.\n\nMany had spent the night in shelters set up in the area as temperatures plunged well below freezing. Funerals were held, some following the Muslim traditions of much of the population in the affected area.\n\nMost of China's earthquakes strike in the western part of the country, including Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, as well as the Xinjiang region and Tibet. The latest quake was the deadliest one in the country in nine years."}
{"text": "# Anger in remote parts of Indian-controlled Kashmir after 3 are killed while in army custody\nBy **AIJAZ HUSSAIN**  \nDecember 23, 2023. 9:08 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW DELHI (AP)** - Anger has spread in some remote parts of Indian-controlled Kashmir after three civilians were killed while in army custody, officials and residents said Saturday.\n\nLocals said the Indian army detained at least eight civilians on Friday for questioning, the day after rebels fighting against Indian rule ambushed two army vehicles in the southern Poonch district, killing four soldiers and wounding three others. Poonch is close to the highly militarized line of control that divides the disputed Himalayan region between India and Pakistan.\n\nLocals accused army personnel of torturing the three of those detained to death in a nearby military camp. The bodies were later handed to the local police who in turn contacted the families. Residents said the bodies bore marks of severe torture.\n\nThe five other detainees were taken to an army hospital after they were severely tortured, their families said.\n\nMohammed Younis, a resident, said soldiers came to his Topa Peer village in Poonch district Friday morning and detained nine villagers, including his two brothers and a cousin. An elderly man was let go, he said, but the others were ruthlessly beaten and electrocuted.\n\n\"My two brothers and a cousin are badly hurt due to torture. They are being treated in an army hospital,\" Younis said after seeing one of his brothers.\n\nVideos reportedly showing the torture of detained civilians spread online hours after their incarceration, triggering widespread anger.\n\nAuthorities cut off internet services on smart devices in Poonch and nearby Rajouri on Saturday morning, a common tactic to dispel possible protests and discourage dissemination of the videos.\n\nLt. Col. Suneel Bartwal, an Indian army spokesman, said a search operation for the militants responsible for the ambush has been ongoing since Thursday evening, adding he had no \"input\" about the circumstances surrounding the death of the three civilians.\n\nLate Saturday, the Indian military said in a statement that \"reports have been received regarding three civilian deaths\" in Poonch.\n\n\"The matter is under investigation. Indian army stands committed to extending full support and cooperation in the conduct of investigations,\" it said.\n\nThe government's information department wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that after medical formalities, a legal action \"has been initiated by the appropriate authority\" into the killings, without further explanation. It said authorities also announced financial assistance to the victims' families.\n\nSenior police and civil officials visited the village and supervised the burials. Local officials said police would investigate the incident, in an attempt to pacify the villagers.\n\nProtests erupted in Srinagar, the region's main city, with at least three pro-India Kashmiri political parties staging demonstrations against the killings.\n\nMehbooba Mufti, the region's former top elected official who was once an ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling party, said the recent acquittal of an army officer in the killing of three civilians in a staged gunbattle three years ago had \"emboldened\" the army, \"creating a false precedent among the forces that they can operate without restraint.\"\n\nIn 2020, the Indian army killed three young men from Rajouri in a fake gunfight and portrayed them as Pakistani terrorists. But after an outcry and a police investigation, the Indian military in a rare admission acknowledged wrongdoing and that its soldiers exceeded their legal powers granted to them under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act.\n\nThe Indian army's internal court had sentenced an officer to life imprisonment for the killings. However, a military tribunal in November this year suspended his sentence.\n\nThe Armed Forces Special Powers Act gives the Indian military in Kashmir sweeping powers to search, seize and even shoot suspects on sight without fear of prosecution. Under the act, local authorities need federal approval to prosecute erring army or paramilitary soldiers in civilian courts.\n\nIndia has long relied on military force to retain control over the portion of Kashmir it administers and has fought two wars over the territory with Pakistan, which also claims the mountain region as its own.\n\nMilitants in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir have been fighting New Delhi's rule since 1989. Most Muslim Kashmiris support the rebels' goal of uniting the territory, either under Pakistani rule or as an independent country.\n\nIndia insists the Kashmir militancy is Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. Pakistan denies the charge, and most Kashmiris consider it a legitimate freedom struggle. Tens of thousands of civilians, rebels and government forces have been killed in the conflict.\n\nBut the territory has simmered in anger since 2019, when New Delhi ended the region's semi-autonomy and drastically curbed dissent, civil liberties and media freedoms while intensifying counterinsurgency operations.\n\nWhile Kashmir Valley, the heart of anti-India rebellion, has witnessed many militants killed in counter-rebel operations, remote Rajouri and Poonch have seen deadly attacks against Indian troops in the past two years. At least three dozen soldiers have been killed in such attacks."}
{"text": "# A South Korean religious sect leader has been sentenced to 23 years in prison over sex crimes\nBy **JIWON SONG**  \nDecember 22, 2023. 8:39 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**SEOUL, South Korea (AP)** - A South Korean religious sect leader whose sex crimes were featured in the popular Netflix series \"In the Name of God: A Holy Betrayal\" earlier this year was sentenced to 23 years in prison on Friday, court officials said.\n\nThe Daejeon District Court in central South Korea said that it handed the prison term to Jeong Myeong-seok after convicting him of sexual violence against three of his female followers from 2018-2021.\n\nJeong, 78, is leader of the Christian Gospel Mission in South Korea, which is also known as Jesus Morning Star, or JMS.\n\nA court statement said that Jeong's convicted crimes include \"quasi-rape\" and \"quasi-imitative rape,\" which court officials said meant illicit sexual intercourse with a person who was unconscious or unable to resist.\n\nThe court refused to provide details of Jeong's convicted sexual crimes.\n\nDozens of Jeong's supporters gathered near the court, shouted slogans and raised placards that say Jeong isn't guilty.\n\nNews reports said that Jeong called himself a reincarnated Jesus Christ, or Messiah. But Jeong and his defense lawyer denied that, according to the court statement.\n\nJeong committed the crimes after he was released earlier in 2018 after spending 10 years in prison over sexual violence against other female followers."}
{"text": "# North Korea appears to be looking to make more bomb fuels at its main nuclear facility, experts say\nBy **HYUNG-JIN KIM**  \nDecember 22, 2023. 11:12 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**SEOUL, South Korea (AP)** - North Korea appears to have started operating a light-water reactor at its main nuclear complex in a possible attempt to establish a new facility to produce bomb fuels, the U.N. atomic agency and outside experts said.\n\nIf correct, the assessment would show that North Korea has taken a step to implement leader Kim Jong Un's repeated vows to build more nuclear weapons in response to what he described as intensifying U.S.-led military threats.\n\nThe International Atomic Energy Agency has observed increased levels of activity at and near the light-water reactor at the Yongbyon nuclear complex and since mid-October, a strong water outflow from its cooling system, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said Thursday.\n\nThe observations were consistent with the commissioning of the light-water reactor, or LWR, Grossi said.\n\n\"The LWR, like any nuclear reactor, can produce plutonium in its irradiated fuel, which can be separated during reprocessing, so this is a cause for concern,\" he said. \"I repeat that the further development of (North Korea's) nuclear program, including the construction and operation of the LWR, is a violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions and is deeply regrettable.\"\n\nThe IAEA has not had access to Yongbyon or other locations in North Korea since the country kicked out the agency's inspectors in 2009. The IAEA has said it uses satellite imagery and open source information to monitor developments in North Korea's nuclear program.\n\nObservers say light-water reactors are best-suited for electricity generation, but North Korea could adapt one at Yongbyon to produce plutonium for weapons. Shin Jongwoo, a military expert at the Seoul-based Korea Defense and Security Forum, said the Yongbyon complex isn't used for producing civilian energy so outsiders suspect the reported light-water reactor operation is related to the North's nuclear weapons program.\n\n\"North Korea has talked about bolstering its nuclear strength and building more tactical nuclear weapons to be mounted on ballistic missiles. So (the light-water reactor operation) is suspected to be activities\" to extract plutonium, Shin said.\n\nPlutonium is one of the two key ingredients used to manufacture nuclear weapons, along with highly enriched uranium. Yongbyon has long produced plutonium from its widely known 5-megawatt reactor, and the light-water reactor would be an additional plutonium-producing source. Yongbyon has an uranium-enrichment facility as well.\n\nConstruction of the light-water reactor began more than a decade ago. It is known to have a bigger capacity than the 5-megawatt reactor, meaning it could produce more bomb fuel, according to Lee Choon Geun, an honorary research fellow at South Korea's Science and Technology Policy Institute.\n\nLee said plutonium is better suited for miniaturized nuclear warheads. Some experts say North Korea has been working to build warheads small enough to be placed on short-range missiles targeting South Korea.\n\nGrossi said recent observations indicate that the water discharge seen in October is warm, an indication the reactor has reached criticality. But without access to the facility, the IAEA cannot confirm its operational status.\n\nIn 2019, during a summit with then-President Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un offered to dismantle the Yongbyon complex if he won extensive sanctions relief. But the Americans rejected Kim's offer because it would be a limited denuclearization step that would leave North Korea's already-built nuclear weapons and covert nuclear facilities intact.\n\nAfter his diplomacy with Trump fell apart, Kim has focused on enlarging his nuclear arsenal and building more high-tech weapons in what experts believe is a bid to increase his leverage in future diplomacy with the U.S. In a key political meeting in December 2022, Kim ordered the \"exponential\" expansion of the North's nuclear arsenal.\n\nTensions on the Korean Peninsula deepened earlier this week, after North Korea test-launched the solid-fueled Hwasong-18 intercontinental ballistic missile - its most advanced weapon designed to strike the mainland U.S. - in its third test this year.\n\nThe Yongbyon complex, which North Korea calls \"the heart\" of its nuclear program and research, has been at the center of international concerns for decades. It's not clear exactly how much weapons-grade plutonium or highly enriched uranium has been produced at Yongbyon and where North Korea stores it.\n\nAccording to a South Korean estimate in 2018, North Korea had manufactured 20-60 nuclear weapons. But some experts say the North likely has more than 100 nuclear weapons."}
{"text": "# Khan ordered released on bail in official secrets case in Pakistan. But he won't be freed right away\nBy **MUNIR AHMED**  \nDecember 22, 2023. 7:35 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**ISLAMABAD (AP)** - In a surprise ruling, Pakistan's Supreme Court on Friday ordered the release of former Prime Minister Imran Khan and one of his party deputies on bail in a case involving the revelation of official secrets after his ouster last year.\n\nBut Khan - currently serving a three-year sentence in jail in a graft case - won't be freed right away because he still faces two other corruption cases.\n\nKhan faces possible death if he is found guilty of revealing official secrets. Khan is accused of revealing a classified cable that was sent to Islamabad by Pakistan's ambassador in Washington when the former premier was in power. Khan says he didn't disclose the exact content of the cable.\n\nKhan and Qureshi have been asked to submit surety bonds of 1 million rupees (about $3,600) to secure bail.\n\nFriday's ruling, which Khan's defense team viewed as a legal victory and a political boost, was issued over charges of the former premier revealing state secrets when he waved an allegedly confidential document, dubbed Cipher, last year at a rally following his ouster from power. The document hasn't been made public.\n\n\"The court's order is proof enough that the charges against Khan and Shah Mahmood Qureshi were fabricated,\" Khan lawyer Salman Safdar said. Qureshi is a senior vice president at Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party.\n\nPakistan's government said the Cipher document was diplomatic correspondence between the Pakistani ambassador to Washington and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Islamabad. Khan confirmed the correspondence and insisted his ouster was a conspiracy by the United States, his successor Shehbaz Sharif, and the Pakistani military - accusations that they have all denied.\n\nThe judges of the Supreme Court concluded in their ruling that there wasn't enough evidence that Khan revealed official secrets while waiving the document.\n\nThis came two days after his party announced that Khan would run in Pakistan's upcoming parliamentary election from prison. According to Pakistani election laws, Khan can submit his nomination papers as his appeal against his conviction in the graft case is yet to be decided on.\n\nAnalysts said the surprise development could help his party to win the election, which will be held on Feb. 8.\n\nKhan has had almost no contact with the outside world since he was imprisoned in August. Over the weekend, Khan for the first time used artificial intelligence to deliver a speech to his supporters.\n\nThe Cipher case trial is being held in Adiyala prison in the garrison city of Rawalpindi where Khan is jailed. Only his legal team is allowed to attend court hearings, as authorities say the case is too sensitive.\n\nKhan pleaded not guilty when he was indicted last week.\n\nThe court is expected to conclude the hearing and announce the verdict early next year.\n\nKhan's main political rival is Nawaz Sharif, a three-time former prime minister, who self-exiled and recently returned to Pakistan after having corruption charges overturned. Nawaz plans to run for a seat in the parliament in an effort aimed at becoming a prime minister for the fourth time."}
{"text": "# Japan Cabinet OKs record military budget to speed up strike capability, eases lethal arms export ban\nBy **MARI YAMAGUCHI**  \nDecember 22, 2023. 11:05 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**TOKYO (AP)** - Japan's Cabinet on Friday approved a hefty 16% increase in military spending next year and eased its postwar ban on lethal weapons exports, underscoring a shift away from the country's self-defense-only principle.\n\nThe moves came as Japan accelerates the deployment of long-range cruise missiles that can hit targets in China or North Korea while Japanese troops increasingly work with allies and take on more offensive roles.\n\nIn a latest step under a new security strategy that Japan adopted a year ago, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's government also allowed the export of weapons and components made in Japan under foreign licenses to the licensing nations. The controversial move is the first major revision of Japan's arms export ban since an earlier easing in 2014.\n\n\"In taking the action, we hope to contribute to defend a free and open international order based on the rule of law and to achieve the peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region,\" Kishida told reporters. \"There is no change to our principle as a pacifist nation.\"\n\nThe government quickly approved the first export shipment under the change, agreeing to send to the United States surface-to-air Patriot guided missiles produced in Japan under an American license. Officials said it would complement U.S. stock, raising speculation that Japanese-produced Patriots may be sent to Ukraine.\n\nThe easing also paves the way for future possible exports to the U.S., Britain and six European licensing nations involving dozens of lethal weapons and components, including F-15s and fighter jet engines.\n\n\"The scope, scale, and speed of Japan's security reforms have been unprecedented,\" U.S. Ambassador Rahm Emanuel said in a statement on X. He praised the easing of the defense equipment and transfer policy as historic and \"a significant example of Japan's shared commitment to deterrence.\"\n\nThe ban on the export of lethal weapons has limited the scope of Japan's efforts to develop arms technology and equipment. The easing would help strengthen Japan's feeble defense industry and broaden the country's new official military aid designed for like-minded nations in the Indo-Pacific region in countering Chinese assertiveness, experts say.\n\nJapan is spending more than 70 billion yen ($490 million) in 2024 for the development of a next-generation fighter jet with Britain and Italy, and the project hinges on a futher easing of restrictions to allow the export of jointly developed lethal weapons to third countries - a change Kishida wants by the end of February.\n\nThe 7.95 trillion-yen ($56 billion) defense budget for the 2024 fiscal year that begins in March marks the second year of the five-year military buildup program. The spending plan is part of a 112.7 trillion-yen ($794 billion) national budget and still needs the approval by the parliament.\n\nThe reinforcement of strike capability envisioned under the strategy is a major break from Japan's postwar principle of limiting its use of force to self-defense.\n\nThe budget adopted by the Cabinet also will further fortify the military with F-35 stealth combat jets and other American weapons.\n\nJapan plans to spend 43 trillion yen ($300 billion) through 2027 to bolster its military power and to nearly double its annual spending to around 10 trillion yen ($68 billion), which would make Japan the world's third-biggest military spender after the United States and China.\n\nThe budget would boost Japan's arms spending for a 12th year. Last year, the government budgeted 6.8 trillion yen (about $48 billion).\n\nThe centerpiece of Japan's 2024 military budget is an early deployment of \"standoff\" missiles that officials say are needed to reinforce air defenses, especially to protect Japan's southwestern islands in case a conflict erupts between China and Taiwan.\n\nSome 734 billion yen ($5.15 billion) is earmarked for Type-12 cruise missiles and U.S.-made Tomahawks as well as development of next generation long-range missiles. Japan will also spend more than 80 billion yen ($562 million) for the development of hypersonic guided missiles with a range of 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles).\n\nDefense Minister Minoru Kihara announced earlier this month a decision to bring forward deployment of some Tomahawks and Type-12s by the end of March 2026, a year before the original target. Officials said the step is a result of Japan facing its \"severest\" security environment in the postwar era that has also led it to increase joint operations with the U.S., Australia, Britain and other friendly nations.\n\nFunding the surge in military spending as well as securing necessary personnel is not easy for Japan, a country with a rapidly aging and shrinking population.\n\nDefense Ministry officials said the budget addresses the cost impacts of a weaker yen and price increases through measures such as bulk purchases and long-term contracts.\n\nIt calls for spending 90 billion yen ($632 million) on subsidies to strengthen Japan's feeble defense industry and allow more foreign arms sales.\n\nThe budget also includes 1.25 trillion yen ($8.78 billion) to bolster Japan's missile defense systems, including construction of two Aegis-equipped warships for deployment in 2027-2028 at a cost of 373 billion yen ($2.62 billion).\n\nThe warships are to have Lockheed Martin SPY-7 radar that officials say could locate harder-to-detect missile launches, including those on a high-arch trajectory that North Korea has often used to test-fire missiles, including an inter-continental ballistic missile launched this week.\n\nJapan plans to spend 75.5 billion yen ($530 million) to develop glide-phase interceptors with the United States that are expected to be deployed around 2030 and designed to counter hypersonic missiles being developed by China, North Korea and Russia."}
{"text": "# Hong Kong court rejects activist publisher Jimmy Lai's bid to throw out sedition charge\nBy **KANIS LEUNG**  \nDecember 21, 2023. 11:05 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**HONG KONG (AP)** - A Hong Kong court on Friday rejected a bid by prominent activist publisher Jimmy Lai to throw out a sedition charge against him, delivering the ruling on the third day of his landmark national security trial.\n\nLai, 76, was arrested during the city's crackdown on dissidents following huge pro-democracy protests in 2019.\n\nHe faces possible life imprisonment if convicted under a sweeping national security law imposed by Beijing. He is charged with colluding with foreign forces to endanger national security and conspiring with others to publish seditious publications.\n\nForeign governments, business professionals and legal scholars are closely watching the case, which is tied to the now-shuttered pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily that Lai founded. Many view it as a trial of the city's freedoms and a test for judicial independence in the Asian financial hub.\n\nHong Kong is a former British colony that returned to China's rule in 1997 under a promise the city retain its Western-style civil liberties for 50 years. That promise has become increasingly threadbare since the introduction of the security law, which has led to the arrests and silencing of many leading pro-democracy activists.\n\nEarlier this week, judges Esther Toh, Susana D'Almada Remedios and Alex Lee heard arguments from both sides about whether the prosecution had missed the time limit for charging Lai with sedition. The law requires the prosecution of sedition charges to begin within six months after an alleged offense is committed.\n\nOn Friday, the judges, who were approved by the government to oversee the proceedings, ruled the prosecution filed the charge in time. \"The application of the defence must fail,\" they wrote in their judgment.\n\nThey said the limitation on time started to run on June 24, 2021, the last date of the alleged conspiracy, which the prosecution earlier said involved at least 160 articles.\n\nThe trial is expected to last about 80 days without a jury.\n\nWearing a navy blazer, Lai smiled at his family members after he entered the courtroom and appeared calm.\n\nHis prosecution has drawn criticism from the United States and the United Kingdom. Beijing has called their comments irresponsible, saying they went against international law and the basic norms of international relations.\n\nHong Kong, once seen as a bastion of media freedom in Asia, ranked 140th out of 180 countries and territories in Reporters Without Borders' latest World Press Freedom Index. The group said the city had seen an \"unprecedented setback\" since 2020, when the security law was imposed.\n\nThe governments of both Hong Kong and China have hailed the law for bringing back stability to the city."}
{"text": "# From fugitive to shackled prisoner, 'Fat Leonard' lands back in US court and could face more charges\nBy **JOSHUA GOODMAN** and **ERIC TUCKER**  \nDecember 21, 2023. 6:35 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MIAMI (AP)** - A defense contractor at the center of one of the biggest bribery scandals in U.S. military history is expected to face additional charges following his return to the United States from Venezuela as part of a broader prisoner swap between the two countries, a federal prosecutor said Thursday.\n\nLeonard Glenn Francis, who is nicknamed \"Fat Leonard,\" faced a federal judge for the first time since snipping off his ankle monitor last year and disappearing weeks before a sentencing hearing on charges that he offered more than $500,000 in cash bribes to Navy officials, defense contractors and others.\n\nHe was later arrested in Venezuela and had been in custody there since, but was returned to the U.S. in a large swap Wednesday that also saw the release of 10 American detainees by Venezuela in exchange for the Biden administration freeing Alex Saab, a Colombian-born businessman and close ally of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro who'd been charged in the U.S. in a money laundering case.\n\nFrancis, shackled and in a beige jumpsuit, stood by quietly as a federal magistrate judge in Miami ordered him to be transferred to the Southern District of California, the region where his case was initially filed.\n\nProsecutors said additional charges would be presented against Francis for failing to appear at a hearing in his ongoing bribery case in San Diego.\n\n\"Not right now,\" an otherwise expressionless but soft-spoken Francis said in response to Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Becerra's question about whether he could afford an attorney.\n\nFrancis was arrested in a San Diego hotel nearly a decade ago as part of a federal sting operation. Investigators say he bilked the U.S. military out of more than $35 million by buying off dozens of top-ranking Navy officers with booze, sex, lavish parties and other gifts.\n\nThe scandal led to the conviction and sentencing of nearly two dozen Navy officials, defense contractors and others on various fraud and corruption charges. Investigators say Francis, who owned and operated his family's ship-servicing business, abused his position as a key contact for U.S. Navy shops at ports across Asia, wooing naval officers with Kobe beef, expensive cigars, concert tickets and wild sex parties at luxury hotels from Thailand to the Philippines.\n\nHe pleaded guilty in 2015 and was allowed to stay out of jail at a rental home, on house arrest with a GPS ankle monitor and security guards.\n\nBut weeks before he faced sentencing in September 2022, Francis made a daring escape as he cut off his ankle monitor and disappeared. Officials said he fled to Mexico, made his way to Cuba and eventually got to Venezuela.\n\nHe was arrested a couple weeks later before boarding a flight at the Simon Bolivar International Airport outside Caracas. Venezuelan officials said he intended to reach Russia.\n\nHe had been in custody in Venezuela ever since, and officials said he sought asylum there.\n\nNewly unsealed court documents show federal prosecutors making preparations last week for Saab's release from U.S. custody, telling a judge that they anticipated that President Joe Biden would grant clemency for Saab and requesting an order for the U.S. Marshals Service to take Saab out of federal prison \"based on significant foreign policy interests of the United States.\""}
{"text": "# 4 Indian soldiers killed and 3 wounded in an ambush by rebels in disputed Kashmir\nDecember 21, 2023. 1:35 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW DELHI (AP)** - Four Indian soldiers were killed and three others were wounded in an ambush by militants fighting against New Delhi's rule in disputed Kashmir, officials said on Thursday.\n\nThe Indian military said militants fired at two army vehicles in southern Poonch district late afternoon on Thursday. The area is close to the highly militarized line of control that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan.\n\nLt. Col. Suneel Bartwal, an Indian army spokesman, said soldiers retaliated to the fire and in the ensuing fight, four soldiers were killed and three others were injured. He said a search operation continued in the area.\n\nNo other details were available and there was no independent confirmation of the ambush.\n\nNuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan each administer part of Kashmir, but both claim the territory in its entirety.\n\nMilitants in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir have been fighting New Delhi's rule since 1989. Most Muslim Kashmiris support the rebels' goal of uniting the territory, either under Pakistani rule or as an independent country.\n\nIndia insists the Kashmir militancy is Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. Pakistan denies the charge, and most Kashmiris consider it a legitimate freedom struggle. Tens of thousands of civilians, rebels and government forces have been killed in the conflict.\n\nBut since 2019, the territory has simmered in anger when New Delhi ended the region's semi-autonomy and drastically curbed dissent, civil liberties and media freedoms while intensifying counterinsurgency operations.\n\nLast month, government forces killed seven militants in two separate counterinsurgency operations while rebels killed four Indian soldiers, including two army officers, in the region."}
{"text": "# Taliban official says Afghan girls of all ages permitted to study in religious schools\nDecember 21, 2023. 11:57 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**KABUL, Afghanistan (AP)** - Afghan girls of all ages are permitted to study in religious schools, which are traditionally boys-only, a Taliban official said Thursday.\n\nA day earlier, U.N. special envoy Roza Otunbayeva told the Security Council and reporters that the United Nations was receiving \"more and more anecdotal evidence\" that girls could study at the Islamic schools known as madrassas.\n\nBut Otunbayeva said it wasn't clear what constituted a madrassa, if there was a standardized curriculum that allowed modern education subjects, and how many girls were able to study in the schools.\n\nThe Taliban have been globally condemned for banning girls and women from education beyond sixth grade, including university. Madrassas are one of the few options for girls after sixth grade to receive any kind of education.\n\nMansor Ahmad, a spokesman at the Education Ministry in the Afghan capital Kabul, said in messages to The Associated Press that there are no age restrictions for girls at government-controlled madrassas. The only requirement is that girls must be in a madrassa class appropriate to their age.\n\n\"If her age is not in line with the class and (the age) is too high, then she is not allowed,\" said Ahmad. \"Madrassas have the same principles as schools and older women are not allowed in junior classes.\" Privately run madrassas have no age restrictions and females of all ages, including adult women, can study in these schools, according to Ahmad.\n\nThere are around 20,000 madrassas in Afghanistan, of which 13,500 are government-controlled. Private madrassas operate out of mosques or homes, said Ahmad. He did not give details on how many girls are studying in the country's madrassas or if this number increased after the bans.\n\nOtunbayeva addressed the Security Council on the one-year anniversary of the Taliban banning women from universities. Afghanistan is the only country in the world with restrictions on female education.\n\nHigher education officials in Kabul were unavailable for comment Thursday on when or if the restrictions would be lifted, or what steps the Taliban are taking to make campuses and classrooms comply with their interpretation of Islamic law.\n\nAfghanistan's higher education minister, Nida Mohammed Nadim, said last December that the university ban was necessary to prevent the mixing of genders and because he believed some subjects being taught violated the principles of Islam."}
{"text": "# Myanmar's military should be investigated for war crimes, Amnesty International says\nBy **Associated Press**  \nDecember 21, 2023. 10:00 AM EST\n\n---\n\nBANGKOK (AP) - The human rights group Amnesty International on Thursday accused the Myanmar military of indiscriminate killings, detaining civilians, and using air-dropped cluster munitions in response to an insurgency in the northeast and west, and demanded an investigation into war crimes.\n\nFighting has been raging in the northern part of Shan state since the Arakan Army, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army and the Ta'ang National Liberation Army, calling themselves the Three Brotherhood Alliance, launched a coordinated offensive on Oct. 27. A little more than two weeks later, the Arakan Army also attacked outposts in its home state of Rakhine in the west.\n\nThe offensive of the well-trained and well-armed ethnic militias has been seen as a significant challenge for the army, which has struggled to contain a nationwide uprising by members of the People's Defense Forces, a pro-democracy armed group established after the army seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021.\n\nThe alliance has claimed widespread victories including the capture of four border crossings in the northern part of Shan state. Soon after the fighting began, the military government acknowledged that it had lost three towns and vowed counterattacks on the alliance.\n\nThe U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, known as OCHA, said in its report on Dec.15 that 378 civilians have reportedly died and 505 others have been injured while more than 660,000 people have been displaced by the fighting that began in late October. According to OCHA's estimates, more than 2.6 million people have been displaced nationwide since the army takeover nearly three years ago.\n\nIn its report, Amnesty International said it had documented a nighttime airstrike by the military on Namhkam township in Shan in early December, most likely using cluster munitions that are internationally banned. Cluster munitions open in the air, releasing smaller \"bomblets\" across a wide area.\n\nOne of the groups in the Three Brotherhood Alliance, the Ta'ang National Liberation Army also said in a statement on Dec. 2 that the military's jet fighters dropped cluster munitions twice at night on Namhkam township, killing one local resident, injuring five others and damaging more than 12 houses.\n\nAmnesty International said civilians and civilian sites were indiscriminately attacked by the military in Rakhine's Pauktaw township. The report said the army's attacks on civilians and the use of banned cluster munitions \"should be investigated as war crimes.\"\n\n\"The Myanmar military has a blood-stained résumé of indiscriminate attacks with devastating consequences for civilians, and its brutal response to a major offensive by armed groups fits a longstanding pattern,\" said Matt Wells, Director of Amnesty International's Crisis Response Program. \"Nearly three years after the coup, the suffering of civilians across Myanmar shows no signs of easing, even as the issue has largely fallen off the international agenda.\"\n\nAmnesty said it based its findings on interviews with 10 people from Pauktaw and analyses of photographs, video material and satellite imagery.\n\nIn a separate report released on Thursday, another monitoring group, Human Rights Watch, charged that another faction in the Three Brotherhood Alliance, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, had abducted and forcibly recruited civilians fleeing fighting in Shan.\n\nThe MNDAA, which is an armed grouping of the Kokang minority, is seeking to oust a rival faction from power by seizing the town of Laukkaing, which is the capital of what is officially called the Kokang Self-Administered Zone, in the northeast, near the border with China.\n\nTwo residents of Laukkaing told the AP on Thursday that their colleagues were forcibly taken by the MNDAA for recruitment while fleeing the fighting.\n\nThe Associated Press reached out to MNDAA representatives seeking comment but received no response."}
{"text": "# Pakistan arrests activists to stop them from protesting in Islamabad against extrajudicial killings\nBy **MUNIR AHMED**  \nDecember 21, 2023. 9:25 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**ISLAMABAD (AP)** - Pakistan's police used water cannons, swung batons, and arrested dozens of activists in an overnight crackdown to stop protesters from entering the capital to denounce the forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings in the militancy-ravaged southwest, the organizers said Thursday.\n\nAbout 200 protesters, some of them families with children, began their nearly 1,600-kilometer (1,000-mile) convoy around Nov. 28, heading toward Islamabad from the town of Turbat. They planned to rally in the capital to draw attention to the death of Balaach Mola Bakhsh. The 24-year-old died in November while in police custody in Baluchistan province.\n\nPolice say Bakhsh was carrying explosives when he was arrested in November, and two days later he died when militants ambushed a police van that was transporting him. Activists say police were holding him since they arrested him in October, and suspect he was killed intentionally in a staged counterterrorism operation. Such arrests by security forces are common in Baluchistan and elsewhere, and people who are missing are often found to have been in the custody of authorities, sometimes for years.\n\nSince then, human rights activists and Bakhsh's family have been demanding justice for him. They also want the counterterrorism officials who they claim killed the man arrested.\n\nThe gas-rich southwestern Baluchistan province at the border of Afghanistan and Iran has been a scene of low-level insurgency by Baloch nationalists for more than two decades. Baloch nationalists initially wanted a share from the provincial resources, but later initiated an insurgency for independence. They also say security forces have been holding hundreds of their supporters for the past several years.\n\nAs the group of vehicles carrying the demonstrators reached the outskirts of Islamabad before dawn Thursday, police asked them to stop and turn around. When the demonstrators refused, officers started beating dozens of activists with batons.\n\nPolice in Islamabad insisted they avoided the use of force against the rallygoers, but videos shared by the rallygoers on social media showed police dragging women, swinging batons and using water cannons in freezing temperatures to disperse the protesters. Police were also seen throwing demonstrators into police trucks.\n\nIt drew condemnation from human rights organizations nationwide.\n\nCaretaker Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-haq Kakar, who is from Baluchistan, sent his Cabinet members to hold talks with the families of missing Boluch people.\n\nAfter these talks, Information Minister Murtaza Solangi said at a news conference in Islamabad that the government has started releasing most of the rallygoers, including women and children, and remaining people will also be freed after investigations. Authorities say the government will consider the demands of the demonstrators.\n\nBaloch activist Farida Baluch tweeted that her \"elderly mother and niece, symbols of resilience, faced arrest and brutality in Islamabad.\" She asked the international community to take \"notice of the plight of Baloch activists and missing persons' families.\"\n\nIn a statement, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan strongly condemned \"the violent police crackdown on Baloch protestors in Islamabad\" where it said women, children and older people subjected to unwarranted force in the form of water cannons and batons.\n\n\"Numerous women protestors have reportedly been arrested and separated from their male relatives and allies,\" the statement said. It said the rallygoers were denied their constitutional right to peacefully protest. The commission demanded an immediate release of the detainees and sought an apology from the government."}
{"text": "# India's opposition lawmakers protest their suspension from Parliament by the government\nBy **ASHOK SHARMA**  \nDecember 21, 2023. 2:42 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW DELHI (AP)** - Dozens of opposition lawmakers suspended from Parliament by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government for obstructing proceedings held a street protest on Thursday accusing the government of throttling democracy in the country.\n\nThey briefly marched outside the Parliament building in New Delhi behind a huge \"Save Democracy\" banner and carried placards reading \"Democracy is in danger.\" The suspensions came as legislators were due to debate a contentious criminal reform bill.\n\nMore than 140 opposition lawmakers were suspended from the two houses of Parliament over the past week for demanding a statement from Home Minister Amit Shah about a Dec. 13 security breach when two intruders stormed the chamber by jumping from the visitors' gallery and releasing yellow smoke canisters. They created panic among lawmakers and disrupted parliamentary proceedings.\n\nOne of the intruders jumped from seat to seat before he was overpowered by some lawmakers and security staff and was later arrested. The police have also arrested several of their accomplices outside Parliament. The intruders claimed that they wanted to highlight the government's attention to rising unemployment in the country.\n\nThe opposition lawmakers demanded a discussion in Parliament about the breach of security, but were accused of creating disorder.\n\nSharad Pawar, a top opposition leader, said the government's action marked the highest-ever suspensions of lawmakers in a session of Parliament.\n\nMallikarjun Kharge, the Congress party president, said \"If the prime minister and the home minister won't speak in the parliament, then where will they speak?\"\n\nGovernment leaders asked the opposition members to wait for the findings of an inquiry set up to investigate the security breach. The opposition blocked the proceedings of Parliament for several days by raising anti-government slogans and carrying placards into the chamber.\n\nThe suspended members are now barred from entering Parliament's chamber. The suspension will last until Friday when the current winter session of parliament ends.\n\nThe governing Hindu nationalist party government pushed on with legislative business despite the lawmakers' suspensions, including passing three bills seeking to overhaul criminal laws."}
{"text": "# Coal mine cart runs off the tracks in northeastern China, killing 12 workers\nDecember 21, 2023. 2:14 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BEIJING (AP)** - An accident in a coal mine in China's northeastern Heilongjiang province left 12 people dead and 13 injured, state broadcaster CCTV reported Thursday.\n\nThe coal workers were in a mining cart underground that ran off the tracks, according to state media reports.\n\nThe accident occurred Wednesday afternoon in Jixi city in Heilongjiang province at the Kunyuan mine and was reported by Chinese media on Thursday.\n\nChina has been working to improve mine safety to combat accidents, which happen with some frequency. Last Thursday, three people died in an accident in China's coal-producing province Shanxi. A coal mine explosion killed 11 people in Shanxi in August, and a coal mine fire in southern China's Guizhou province killed 16 people in September.\n\nLast month, a major fire at a coal mining company building in Shanxi killed 26 people and injured dozens of others, but the blaze was not in the mine itself."}
{"text": "# South Korean court orders Japanese firms to compensate more wartime Korean workers for forced labor\nBy **HYUNG-JIN KIM**  \nDecember 21, 2023. 7:08 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**SEOUL, South Korea (AP)** - South Korea's top court ordered two Japanese companies to financially compensate more of their wartime Korean workers for forced labor, as it sided Thursday with its contentious 2018 verdicts on the firms that caused a huge setback in relations between the Asian neighbors.\n\nBut observers said that Thursday's ruling won't likely hurt bilateral ties much since Seoul and Tokyo, now governed by different leaders, are pushing hard to bolster their partnerships in the face of shared challenges like North Korea's evolving nuclear threats and China's increasing assertiveness.\n\nThe Supreme Court ruled that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries must provide between 100 million and 150 million won ($76,700 and $115,000) in compensation to each of four plaintiffs - all bereaved families of its former employees who were forced to work for the company during Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula. The court also said Nippon Steel Corp. must give 100 million won (about $76,700) to each of seven Korean plaintiffs, also all bereaved relatives, for similar colonial-era forced labor.\n\n\"I felt so sad when I heard the name of (my father) being stated as the deceased at today's trial, but I was still really glad that we won - though it's a bit late,\" said Joo Soon-ja, daughter of the late Joo Seok-bong, a forced laborer, as she held her father's large framed photo.\n\nIn two separate verdicts in 2018, the top South Korean court ordered Mitsubishi and Nippon Steel to compensate a total of 15 other Korean employees for forced labor. That irked Japan, which has insisted all compensation issues were already settled by a 1965 bilateral treaty that normalized their diplomatic relations. But the 2018 South Korean court rulings said that the treaty can't prevent individuals from seeking compensation for forced labor, because Japanese companies' use of such laborers were \"acts of illegality against humanity\" that were linked to Tokyo's illegal colonial occupation and its war of aggression.\n\nIn Thursday's ruling, the South Korean Supreme Court cited that argument in one of the 2018 verdicts, saying it paved the way for \"a judicial remedy for forced labor victims within Republic of Korea.\" Japan's chief Cabinet secretary, Yoshimasa Hayashi, called the ruling \"absolutely unacceptable,\" saying it clearly violated the 1965 treaty.\n\nThe wrangling touched off by the 2018 rulings led to the two countries downgrading each other's trade status, and Seoul's previous liberal government threatening to spike a military intelligence-sharing pact. Their strained ties complicated efforts by the United States to build a stronger trilateral Washington-Seoul-Tokyo cooperation to counter challenges posed by North Korea and China.\n\nThe Seoul-Tokyo relations, however, began thawing after South Korea's current conservative president, Yoon Suk Yeol, announced in March that his country would use a local corporate fund to compensate forced labor victims without demanding Japanese contributions. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida later expressed sympathy for the suffering of Korean forced laborers during a Seoul visit. The two countries revived high-level talks and withdrew economic retaliatory steps against each other.\n\nOn Thursday, the two countries held their first high-level economic talks in Seoul in about eight years and agreed to work together to realize substantial cooperation on economic sectors based on improving ties, according to South Korea's Foreign Ministry.\n\nEleven of the 15 former forced laborers or their families involved in the 2018 rulings had accepted compensation under Seoul's third-party reimbursement plan, but the remaining four still refuse to accept it, according to Lee Kook Un, a leader of their support group. He said that about 70 other suits seeking damages from more than 10 Japanese companies are still pending in South Korean courts.\n\nLim Soosuk, spokesperson of South Korea's Foreign Ministry, told reporters Thursday that the government would try to provide compensation to the Korean plaintiffs related to Thursday's ruling through the third-party reimbursement system as well. He said that the South Korean government would also continue necessary communication with Japan.\n\nChoi Eunmi, a Japan expert at the Seoul-based Asan Institute for Policy Studies, said that Thursday's ruling \"won't likely cause big troubles in Korea-Japan relationships,\" because South Korea has already determined how to handle such verdicts with the establishment of the domestic compensation fund.\n\nChoi said that because some forced labor victims refuse to accept compensation under the third-party reimbursement system, the South Korean fund hasn't completely resolved the issue. But she said an attempt by a future South Korean government to spike the system would undermine South Korea's credibility in Japan and deteriorate bilateral ties severely.\n\nYoon's push to improve ties with Japan drew strong backlash from some of the forced labor victims and liberal opposition politicians, who have demanded direct compensation from the Japanese companies. But Yoon defended his move, saying it's essential to boosting ties with Japan to jointly cope with North Korea's advancing nuclear arsenal, the intensifying U.S.-China rivalry and global supply chain challenges."}
{"text": "# 5 more boats packed with refugees approach Indonesia's shores, air force says\nBy **YAYAN ZAMZAMI** and **NINIEK KARMINI**  \nDecember 21, 2023. 4:25 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (AP)** - Indonesian authorities detected at least five boats packed tight with refugees approaching shores of Aceh province, officials said Thursday.\n\nThe boats are the latest in a surge of vessels that have arrived in Aceh, most carrying Rohingya refugees from southern Bangladesh, where the persecuted Muslim minority fled in 2017 following attacks by the military in their homeland of Myanmar.\n\nIndonesia intensified patrols of its waters after a sharp rise in Rohingya refugees arriving since November, said Aceh's Air Force Base Commander Col. Yoyon Kuscahyono. He said air patrols detected at least five boats Wednesday entering Indonesian waters, likely carrying Rohingya refugees. They were spotted entering the regencies of Lhokseumawe, East Aceh, Pidie, Aceh Besar and Sabang in north Aceh province.\n\nIndonesia appealed to the international community for help on Dec. 12, after more than 1,500 Rohingya refugees arrived on its shores since November.\n\nMuslims comprise nearly 90% of Indonesia's 277 million people, and Indonesia once tolerated such landings while Thailand and Malaysia pushed them away. But there has been a surge of anti-Rohingya sentiment in 2023, especially in Aceh, on the northern part of the island of Sumatra, where most end up landing. Residents accuse the Rohingya of poor behavior and creating a burden, and in some cases have pushed their boats away.\n\nWith pressure growing on President Joko Widodo's government to take action, he said Indonesia will still help the refugees temporarily on a humanitarian basis.\n\nIndonesia, like Thailand and Malaysia, is not a signatory to the United Nations' 1951 Refugee Convention outlining their legal protections, so is not obligated to accept them. However, they have so far all provided at least temporary shelter to refugees in distress.\n\nIndonesian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lalu Muhamad Iqbal told reporters Wednesday that the government is willing to provide temporary shelters for Rohingya refugees \"to give time for international organizations that have a mandate to handle this matter, especially UNHCR, to able to carry out their obligations.\"\n\nAbout 740,000 Rohingya were resettled in Bangladesh after fleeing their homes in neighboring Myanmar to escape a brutal counterinsurgency campaign carried out in 2017 by security forces. Accusations of mass rape, murder and the burning of entire villages are well documented, and international courts are considering whether Myanmar authorities committed genocide and other grave human rights abuses.\n\nThe Muslim Rohingya are largely denied citizenship rights in Buddhist-majority Myanmar and face widespread social discrimination. Efforts to repatriate them have failed because of doubts their safety can be assured.\n\nMost of the refugees leaving by sea attempt to reach Muslim-majority Malaysia, east of Aceh across the Malacca Strait, in search of work."}
{"text": "# Australia to send military personnel to help protect Red Sea shipping but no warship\nBy **ROD McGUIRK**  \nDecember 21, 2023. 5:10 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**CANBERRA, Australia (AP)** - Australia will send 11 military personnel to support a U.S.-led mission to protect cargo shipping in the Red Sea, but it won't send a warship or plane, the defense minister said Thursday.\n\nDefense Minister Richard Marles said that Australia's military needs to keep focused on the Pacific region.\n\nThe United States announced this week that several nations are creating a force to protect commercial shipping from attacks by drones and ballistic missiles fired from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen.\n\nMarles said that 11 military personnel would be sent in January to Operation Prosperity Guardian's headquarters in Bahrain, where five Australians are already posted.\n\n\"We won't be sending a ship or a plane,\" he told Sky News television. \"That said, we will be almost tripling our contribution to the combined maritime force.\"\n\n\"We need to be really clear around our strategic focus, and our strategic focus is our region: the northeast Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Pacific,\" Marles added.\n\nThe U.S. and its allies are concerned by China's growing assertiveness in the region.\n\nAustralia is one of the United States' closest military allies. Last week, the U.S. Congress passed legislation allowing the sale of Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines to Australia under a security pact that includes Britain.\n\nMarles rejected opposition lawmakers' criticism that a failure to send a warship as the United States had requested made Australia a less reliable partner and ally.\n\n\"That's patently ridiculous,\" Marles said.\n\nThe U.S. is aware of the scale of the Australian defense force and the need to maintain its focus on the Asia-Pacific region, he said.\n\n\"It is to state the obvious that to take a major asset and put it in the Middle East is to take a major asset away from what we're doing in the immediate region,\" Marles said.\n\nOpposition defense spokesman Andrew Hastie called on Australia to send a warship.\n\n\"It's in our national interest to contribute. If we want others to help us in a time of need, we need to step up and reciprocate now,\" Hastie said.\n\nSeveral cargo ships in the Red Sea have been damaged by the attacks. Multiple shipping companies have ordered their ships not to enter the Bab el-Mandeb Strait until security is improved."}
{"text": "# Thailand sends 3 orangutans rescued from illicit wildlife trade back to Indonesia\nBy **JINTAMAS SAKSORNCHAI**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 11:32 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BANGKOK (AP)** - Three trafficked Sumatran orangutans were sent back from Thailand to Indonesia on Thursday as part of a joint effort between the countries to tackle the illegal wildlife trade.\n\nNobita and Shizuka, both 7 years old, and Brian, 5 years old, had been living at a wildlife sanctuary in the western Thai province of Ratchaburi. After the repatriation, there are no more trafficked orangutans currently under the care of Thai authorities, officials said.\n\nRachmat Budiman, Indonesia's Ambassador to Thailand, thanked the authorities in both countries for the repatriation and said he has \"mixed feelings\" about it: happy the orangutans will be back in their natural habitat but sad for the Thai caretakers who had bonded with the animals over several years.\n\nThe orangutans were transported from the sanctuary to Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi International Airport before being put on a plane to Jakarta. Thai officials said Indonesia covers the cost for transportation and the animals' health examinations.\n\nThey will be sent to a rehabilitation center in Sumatra before being released into their natural habitat, Rachtmat said.\n\nThe repatriation is \"important\" because it shows the two countries' commitment to collaborate in the fight against the illicit wildlife trade, said Athapol Charoenchansa, Thailand's director-general of the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation. He said he hoped it would raise awareness about wildlife conservation in the region.\n\nThai and Indonesian officials fed the animals bananas and dragon fruit while they were being displayed inside their crates at the Bangkok airport before they were taken onto the plane.\n\nIn 2016, Nobita and Shizuka were just months old when they were found during a sting operation in Bangkok by wildlife officials, who had agreed to buy the pair online for $20,000. The then-baby orangutans, named after characters from the popular Japanese cartoon Doraemon, were put into a basket in the back of a taxi, and photos of them hugging each other tightly in the basket went viral at the time.\n\nBrian, another male orangutan, was rescued from traffickers and sent to Thai wildlife officials in 2019.\n\nThailand has sent 74 orangutans back to Indonesia since 2006 in six batches, including the three on Thursday. In 2020, two orangutans named Ung-Ing and Natalie were repatriated.\n\nThe Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species - CITES - prohibits international trade in orangutans. They are found only in the forests of Sumatra and Borneo but their habitat is shrinking due to the growth of agricultural land use, making them more vulnerable to poaching. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, the global authority on the status of the natural world, lists orangutans as critically endangered.\n\nOrangutans are often sold into the pet trade and for display in zoos and other attractions."}
{"text": "# UN is seeking to verify that Afghanistan's Taliban are letting girls study at religious schools\nBy **EDITH M. LEDERER**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 8:05 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**UNITED NATIONS (AP)** - The United Nations is seeking to verify reports that Afghanistan's Taliban rulers are allowing girls of all ages to study at Islamic religious schools that are traditionally boys-only, the U.N.'s top official in the country said Wednesday.\n\nU.N. special envoy Roza Otunbayeva told the U.N. Security Council and elaborated to reporters afterward that the United Nations is receiving \"more and more anecdotal evidence\" that girls can study at the schools, known as madrassas.\n\n\"It is not entirely clear, however, what constitutes a madrassa, if there is a standardized curriculum that allows modern education subjects, and how many girls are able to study in madrassas,\" she said.\n\nThe Taliban have been globally condemned for banning girls and women from secondary school and university, and allowing girls to study only through the sixth grade.\n\nTaliban education authorities \"continue to tell us that they are working on creating conditions to allow girls to return to school. But time is passing while a generation of girls is falling behind,\" Otunbayeva said.\n\nShe said that the Taliban Ministry of Education is reportedly undertaking an assessment of madrassas as well as a review of public school curriculum and warned that the quality of education in Afghanistan \"is a growing concern.\"\n\n\"The international community has rightly focused on the need to reverse the ban on girls' education,\" Otunbayeva said, \"but the deteriorating quality of education and access to it is affecting boys as well.\"\n\n\"A failure to provide a sufficiently modern curriculum with equality of access for both girls and boys will make it impossible to implement the de facto authorities' own agenda of economic self-sufficiency,\" she added.\n\nA Human Rights Watch report earlier this month said the Taliban's \"abusive\" educational policies are harming boys as well as girls.\n\nThe departure of qualified teachers, including women, regressive curriculum changes and an increase in corporal punishment have led to greater fear of going to school and falling attendance, the report said. Because the Taliban have dismissed all female teachers from boys' schools, many boys are taught by unqualified people or sit in classrooms with no teachers at all, it said.\n\nTurning to human rights, Otunbayeva said that the key features in Afghanistan \"are a record of systemic discrimination against women and girls, repression of political dissent and free speech, a lack of meaningful representation of minorities, and ongoing instances of extrajudicial killing, arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture and ill-treatment.\"\n\nThe lack of progress in resolving human rights issues is a key factor behind the current impasse between the Taliban and the international community, she said.\n\nOtunbayeva said Afghanistan also faces a growing humanitarian crisis. With Afghans confronting winter weather, more people will depend on humanitarian aid, but with a drop in funding many of the needy will be more vulnerable than they were a year ago, she said.\n\nU.N. humanitarian coordinator Ramesh Rajasingham said that \"humanitarian needs continue to push record levels, with more than 29 million people requiring humanitarian assistance - one million more than in January, and a 340% increase in the last five years.\"\n\nBetween January and October, he said, the U.N. and its partners provided assistance to 26.5 million people, including 14.2 million women and girls. But as the year ends, the U.N. appeal is still seeking to close a $1.8 billion funding gap.\n\nRajasingham said the humanitarian crisis has been exacerbated by three earthquakes in eight days in October in the western province of Herat that affected 275,000 people and damaged 40,000 homes.\n\nA further problem is the return of more than 450,000 Afghans after Pakistan on Nov. 1 ordered \"illegal foreigners\" without documentation to leave, he said. More than 85% of the returnees are women and children, he said, and many have been stripped of their belongings, arrive in poor medical condition and require immediate assistance at the border as well and longer-term support."}
{"text": "# Separatist leader in Pakistan appears before cameras and says he has surrendered with 70 followers\nBy **ABDUL SATTAR**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 12:50 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**QUETTA, Pakistan (AP)** - The leader of the main insurgent group in southwestern Pakistan appeared before cameras on Wednesday to say he has surrendered to authorities with some 70 of his followers and is giving up his yearslong fight for independence.\n\nSarfraz Bungulzai, who was previously known by his nom de guerre as Mureed Baluch, told reporters in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province, that he feels remorse for the deadly attacks he and his Baluch National Army carried out against Pakistani security forces.\n\nThe group, also known by its acronym as BNA, has been banned by the government in Islamabad.\n\nThe development is a significant boost for Pakistan's government, which has battled militants and insurgents of various groups across the country. Earlier this year, Pakistan top intelligence agency arrested another prominent BNA member - Gulzar Imam, also known by the name Shambay, the group's founder.\n\nSpeaking at a government-organized news conference, Bungulzai declared that he deeply regrets his role in abducting civilians for ransom and the killings of unarmed people. It was not clear if he spoke under duress, if he had been taken into custody or if he would face any charges.\n\nThe insurgent leader also said he decided to lay down his arms after talks with authorities - but he stopped short of saying whether he and those who surrendered with him had been promised amnesty.\n\nBungulzai further said he became motivated to give up the fight after learning that his group, the Baluch National Army, was foreign funded and had the backing of neighboring India. He did not offer any evidence to his claims or provide details.\n\nThere was no immediate comment from New Delhi.\n\nPakistan often blames India for fomenting dissent within Pakistan, including the rebellion in Baluchistan, where small separatist groups have for years waged a low-scale insurgency against the state, demanding a greater share of resources or full independence from Islamabad.\n\nBaluch separatist groups have also targeted gas pipelines across the province, which borders Iran and Afghanistan and is rich in oil and gas. Bungalzai's BNA has been behind the killing of hundreds of people there and has claimed responsibility for bombings and attacks in other parts of Pakistan as well.\n\nDuring the televised news conference, Bungulzai also urged other separatists to lay down their arms and fight peacefully, through mainstream politics, for their rights. \"The state is not our enemy, and we were misguided by foreign intelligence,\" he said.\n\nThere was no immediate response from the BNA to the reported surrender of its leader and scores of its members.\n\nPakistan's caretaker Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar welcomed Bungulzai's surrender in a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter.\n\nBaluchistan has been the scene of an insurgency by Baluch nationalists for more than two decades."}
{"text": "# Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina kicks off election campaign amid an opposition boycott\nBy **JULHAS ALAM**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 10:08 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP)** - Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina formally kicked off her ruling Awami League party's campaign Wednesday amid an election boycott by the country's main opposition party.\n\nAddressing a massive rally in the northeastern city of Sylhet, Hasina strongly criticized the Bangladesh Nationalist Party for refusing to participate in the Jan. 7 general election. She also blamed the party, which is led by former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, and its allies for recent acts of violence.\n\nHundreds of thousands of Awami League supporters cheered and raised their hands when Hasina asked if they would cast their ballots for the ruling party's candidates, the United News of Bangladesh agency reported.\n\nThe prime minister denounced the party of her archrival Zia after the country's railway minister alleged that arson and sabotage caused a fire on a passenger train that killed four people Tuesday. Hasina joined the minister Wednesday in accusing the Bangladesh Nationalist Party of being behind it.\n\n\"They thought that with some incidents of arson the government will fall. It's not that easy,\" United News of Bangladesh quoted her as saying.\n\n\"Where do they get such courage? A black sheep sitting in London gives orders and some people are here to play with fire. ... Their hands will be burned in that fire,\" Hasina said in an apparent reference to Zia's son, Tarique Rahman, who has been in self-exile in the United Kingdom since 2008.\n\nRahman was convicted of various criminal violence charges, including a 2004 grenade attack on an opposition rally when his mother was prime minister and Hasina was opposition leader. He is the acting chief of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party in the absence of the ailing Zia, who was convicted of corruption and sentenced to 17 years in prison.\n\nOn Wednesday, the party urged Bangladeshis to join a non-cooperation movement against the government by refusing to pay taxes.\n\nRuhul Kabir Rizvi, a senior joint secretary-general of the party, also urged citizens and government workers not to cooperate with Hasina's administration in running the country and holding the election next month in which is the prime minister is seeking a fourth consecutive term.\n\nZia's party has intermittently calling for transportation blockades and general strikes while demanding Hasina's resignation. The party says more than 20,000 opposition supporters have been arrested since Oct. 28, when a massive anti-government rally turned violent.\n\nAuthorities blamed the Bangladesh Nationalist Party for an attack on the official residence of the country's chief justice and the death of a police officer on the day of the rally. Hasina's critics say her administration has used the police and other agencies to silence them.\n\nBangladesh is a parliamentary democracy with a history of violence, especially before and during elections. Campaigning for next month's vote began across the country on Monday with about 1,900 candidates, including many independents, running for parliament seats in 300 constituencies.\n\nZia's party's call to boycott the polls came after its demands for a caretaker government to conduct the election were not met. The party accused Hasina of rigging the 2018 vote and said it did not have any faith the coming election would be fair. The boycott means voters have little choice but to reelect Hasina.\n\nThe government has denied accusations of targeting the opposition but warned that any \"acts of sabotage\" or \"attempts to create chaos\" in the country would not be tolerated.\n\nThe United Nations, the United States and the European Union earlier urged all sides to refrain from violence and work together to create conditions for a free, fair and peaceful election. A call for political dialogue got no response from the two major parties."}
{"text": "# Party of Pakistan's popular ex-premier Imran Khan says he'll contest upcoming elections from prison\nBy **MUNIR AHMED**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 8:54 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**ISLAMABAD (AP)** - Pakistan's former premier Imran Khan will run in upcoming parliamentary elections from prison, his party said Wednesday, which legal experts said is possible while his appeal of his conviction in a corruption case is being considered.\n\n\"Imran Khan has decided to contest elections for three seats in the National Assembly,\" or the lower house of parliament, said Gohar Khan, head of the former premier's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, or PTI. In Pakistan, politicians usually run for a seat from more than one constituency to expand their chances of winning.\n\nThe 71-year-old former prime minister, the country's most well-known opposition figure, is serving at a high-security prison in the garrison city of Rawalpindi. He was removed as prime minister in April 2022 following a vote of no confidence in Parliament by his political opponents.\n\nKhan was disqualified from holding public office months ago. But he has challenged the ruling by the country's election commission.\n\nKanwar Dilshad, a former commission official, said Khan's political rivals may object to his filing of nomination papers.\n\n\"Imran Khan will have to fight a long legal battle to contest the elections, as technically he is eligible to run for the parliament, but practically there are multiple cases against him,\" Dilshad said.\n\nThis week, Khan for the first time used artificial intelligence to deliver a speech to supporters. The surprise development could help his party to win the upcoming elections in February, according to analysts.\n\nHis spokesman, Zulfiqar Bukhari, said Khan will contest the vote in the cities of Lahore, Mianwali and Islamabad.\n\nKhan has had almost no contact with the outside world since he was imprisoned in August on a corruption charge. He faces a slew of other legal cases that could make it difficult for him to contest the election.\n\nKhan came to power in 2018. Since his ouster in 2022, he has alleged without providing evidence that his government was toppled by former premier Shehbaz Sharif as part of a U.S. plot - claims that both the premier and Washington have denied.\n\nSharif and his elder brother Nawaz Sharif, who has served three times as premier, have also announced their candidacies for parliament. Their Pakistan Muslim League enjoys an edge over Khan and his party."}
{"text": "# Christian group and family raise outcry over detention of another 'house church' elder in China\nBy **HUIZHONG WU**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 11:00 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BANGKOK (AP)** - Ding Zhongfu was awakened by loud pounding on his door. Five policemen greeted Ding, an elder in a Chinese church.\n\nThe officers pinned him to the wall that Thursday morning in November and interrogated him while searching the apartment he shared with his wife, Ge Yunxia, and their 6-year old daughter.\n\nDing's family now pleads for his release after he was taken from his home in China's central Anhui province on suspicion of fraud. In their first public comments on the case, the family denies that Ding committed any fraud.\n\nInstead, they told The Associated Press in an interview, it is part of a wider crackdown on religious freedoms in China.\n\nFour others were detained, all senior members of the Ganquan church, a name that means \"Sweet Spring,\" according to the family. All were taken on suspicion of fraud, according to a bulletin from a Christian prayer group.\n\n\"Under the fabricated charge of 'fraud,' many Christians faced harsh persecution,\" said Bob Fu, the founder of a U.S.-based Christian rights group, ChinaAid, who is advocating for Ding's release.\n\nPolice have started using fraud charges in recent years against leaders of what are known as house churches, or informal churches not registered with the government in China.\n\nWhile China allows the practice of Christianity, it can only legally be done at churches registered with the state. Many who choose to worship in house churches say that joining a state church means worshiping the supremacy of the government and Communist Party over God, which they reject.\n\nBeijing in the past several years has increased the pressure on house churches. In 2018, Chinese leader Xi Jinping issued a five-year plan to \"Sinicize\" all the nation's officially allowed religions, from Islam to Christianity to Buddhism, by infusing them with \"Chinese characteristics\" such as loyalty to the Communist Party. Heeding the call, local governments started shutting down house churches through evictions, police interrogations and arrests.\n\nIn 2022, pastor Hao Zhiwei in central Hubei province was sentenced to eight years in prison after being charged with fraud, according to Fu. That same year, preachers Han Xiaodong and Li Jie and church worker Wang Qiang were also arrested on suspicion of committing fraud.\n\nOn Dec. 1 police called Ding Zhongfu's wife into the station saying that her husband was being criminally detained on suspicion of fraud. They declined to give her a copy of any paperwork they had her sign that acknowledged they were investigating him.\n\nA police officer at the Shushan branch's criminal division who answered the phone Tuesday declined to answer questions, saying he could not verify the identity of The Associated Press journalist calling.\n\nThe family had been preparing to move to the United States in December to join Ding's daughter from a previous marriage.\n\n\"I wasn't necessarily a proponent of him moving to the U.S.,\" said the daughter, Wanlin Ding, because it would be such a drastic uprooting. \"It wasn't until this event that I realized how serious it was.\"\n\nShe had wanted him to be part of her wedding in the spring.\n\nDing's Ganquan house church had been forced to move multiple times in the past decade, Ge said. The congregation pooled money to buy property so they could use it as a place of worship. Because the churches aren't recognized by the government, the deeds were put in the names of Ding and two other church members.\n\nStill, police forbid them from using the property to worship, showing up ahead of services to bar people from entering.\n\nIn recent years, Ding's wife said, the church had been meeting at more random locations to avoid police. The church has about 400-500 worshipers from all levels of society.\n\nDing, in addition to managing the church's finances, served as an elder in the community, someone people could come to with their problems.\n\nOne friend called Ding a \"gentle\" person in a handwritten testimony for the pastor's case as part of the public plea for his release: \"He was always proactively helping those in society who needed to be helped.\""}
{"text": "# A Japan court orders Okinawa to approve a modified plan to build runways for US Marine Corps\nBy **MARI YAMAGUCHI**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 9:50 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**TOKYO (AP)** - A Japanese court on Wednesday ordered the governor of Okinawa to approve the central government's modified plan for landfill work at the planned relocation site of a key U.S. military base on the southern island despite persistent opposition and protests by residents.\n\nThe decision will move forward the suspended construction at a time Okinawa's strategic importance is becoming key for the Japan-U.S. military alliance in the face of growing tensions with China. Japan also rapidly seeks to buildup its military in the southwestern region.\n\nThe ruling by the Fukuoka High Court Naha branch allows the Land and Transport Ministry to order the modification work designed to reinforce extremely soft ground at the designated relocation site for U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, overriding Gov. Denny Tamaki's disapproval. The ruling ordered Tamaki to issue the approval within three working days.\n\nTamaki said it was unjust that the will of the residents is crushed by the central government.\n\nTamaki, noting the spirit of local government autonomy and democracy, said in a statement that the ruling that allows the government's forcible execution of its planned construction of a new military base is \"absolutely unacceptable.\"\n\nIf completed, the new site will serve a key Marine Corps facility for the region and will be also home to MV-22 Ospreys that are currently deployed at Futenma.\n\nTamaki can still appeal to the Supreme Court, but the local government at this point has no power to stop the work unless the top court overturns the decision.\n\nOkinawa and the central government have long tussled over the relocation of the Futenma base.\n\nThe Japanese and U.S. governments initially agreed in 1996 to close the Futenma air station a year after the rape of a schoolgirl by three U.S. military personnel led to a massive anti-base movement. But persistent protests and lawsuits between Okinawa and Tokyo have held up the plan for nearly 30 years.\n\nJapan's central government began the reclamation work off Henoko Bay on the eastern coast of Okinawa in 2018 to pave the way for the relocation of the Futenma base from its crowded neighborhood on the island.\n\nThe central government later found out that large areas of the designated reclamation site are on soft ground, which some experts described \"as soft as mayonnaise,\" and submitted a revision to the original plan with additional land improvement. But Okinawa's prefectural government rejected the revision plan and suspended the reclamation work.\n\nThe ground improvement plan requires tens of thousands of pillars and massive amounts of soil, which opponents say would damage the environment. It is expected to cost 930 billion yen ($6.5 billion), 2.5 times the initial estimate, and take 12 years to finish, according to the Defense Ministry.\n\nThe Supreme Court in September turned down Okinawa's appeal in another lawsuit that ordered the prefecture to withdraw its rejection of the modified landfill plan.\n\nTamaki has called for a significant reduction of the U.S. militar y on the island, which is home to more than half of 50,000 American troops based in Japan under the bilateral security pact. Tamaki also has demanded the immediate closure of Futenma base and the scrapping of the base construction at Henoko. Okinawa accounts for just 0.6% of Japanese land.\n\nTokyo and Washington say the relocation within Okinawa, instead of moving it elsewhere as demanded by many Okinawans, is the only solution.\n\n\"We believe that action should be taken promptly in line with this ruling,\" Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said. He pledged that the government will continue to make effort for the return of the Futenma air station as soon as possible to reduce the burden from the base."}
{"text": "# 9 people have died in wild weather in Australian states of Queensland and Victoria, officials say\nDecember 26, 2023. 11:18 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BRISBANE, Australia (AP)** - At least nine people have died in wild weather in the Australian eastern states of Queensland and Victoria, officials said on Wednesday.\n\nThree men were killed after a boat with 11 people aboard capsized in rough weather in Moreton Bay off the south Queensland coast on Tuesday, police said.\n\nAmbulances took the eight survivors to hospital in stable conditions.\n\nA 59-year-old woman was killed by a falling tree at the Queensland city of Gold Coast on Monday night. The body of a 9-year-old girl was found on Tuesday in the neighboring city of Brisbane hours after she disappeared in a flooded stormwater drain.\n\nThe bodies of a 40-year-old woman and a 46-year-old woman were found in the Mary River in the Queensland town of Gympie. They were among three women swept into the flooded river through a stormwayter drain on Tuesday. Another 46-year-old woman managed to save herself.\n\nQueensland Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll blamed \"extraordinarily difficult weather\" for the tragedies.\n\n\"It has been a very tragic 24 hours due to the weather,\" Carroll told reporters.\n\nSevere weather has lashed parts of southeast Australia since Monday including Queensland and Victoria.\n\nA woman, who is yet to be identified, was found dead late Tuesday after flash flooding receded at a camp ground at Buchan in regional Victoria.\n\nEarlier on Tuesday, a 44-year-old man was killed by a falling branch at his rural property at Caringal in eastern Victoria.\n\nThunderstorms and strong winds have brought down more than 1,000 power lines in parts of Queensland and left 85,000 people without electricity."}
{"text": "# Contrary to politicians' claims, offshore wind farms don't kill whales. Here's what to know.\nBy **CHRISTINA LARSON**, **JENNIFER McDERMOTT**, **PATRICK WHITTLE**, and **WAYNE PARRY**  \nDecember 23, 2023. 3:01 PM EST\n\n---\n\nPORTLAND, Maine (AP) - Unfounded claims about offshore wind threatening whales have surfaced as a flashpoint in the fight over the future of renewable energy.\n\nIn recent months, conservatives including former President Donald Trump have claimed construction of offshore wind turbines is killing the giant animals.\n\nScientists say there is no credible evidence linking offshore wind farms to whale deaths. But that hasn't stopped conservative groups and ad hoc \"not in my back yard\"-style anti-development groups from making the connection.\n\nThe Associated Press sorts fact from fiction when it comes to whales and wind power as the rare North Atlantic right whale's migration season gets underway:\n\n## WHERE ARE U.S. OFFSHORE WIND PROJECTS?\nTo date, two commercial offshore wind farms are under construction in the United States. Danish wind energy developer Ørsted and the utility Eversource are building South Fork Wind, located 35 miles (56 kilometers) east of Montauk Point, New York. Ørsted announced Dec. 7 that the first of its 12 turbines there is now sending electricity onto the grid. Vineyard Wind is building a 62-turbine wind farm 15 miles (24 kilometers) off Massachusetts. Both plan to open by early next year, and other large offshore wind projects are obtaining permits.\n\nThere are also two pilot projects - five turbines off Rhode Island and two off Virginia. The Biden administration aims to power 10 million homes with offshore wind by 2030 - a key piece of its climate goals.\n\nLawsuits from community groups delayed Ørsted's two large offshore wind projects in New Jersey and the company recently announced it's cancelling those projects. That decision was based on their economic viability and had nothing to do with offshore wind opposition in New Jersey, said David Hardy, group executive vice president and CEO Americas at Ørsted.\n\n## ARE U.S. WIND FARMS CAUSING WHALE DEATHS?\nExperts say there's no evidence that limited wind farm construction on the Atlantic Coast has directly resulted in any whale deaths, despite politically motivated statements suggesting a link.\n\nRumors began to swirl after 2016, when an unusual number of whales started to be found dead or stranded on New England beaches -- a trend that predates major offshore wind farm construction that began this year.\n\n\"With whale strandings along the Northeast earlier this year in places like New Jersey, the reality is that it's not from offshore wind,\" said Aaron Rice, a marine biologist at Cornell University.\n\nIn answering questions about whale strandings earlier this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that around 40% of recovered whale carcasses showed evidence of death from fishing gear entanglement or vessel strikes. The others could not be linked to a specific cause.\n\nIn Europe, where offshore wind has been developed for more than three decades, national agencies also have not found causal links between wind farms and whale deaths.\n\nMeanwhile, U.S. scientists are collecting data near offshore wind farms to monitor any possible impacts short of fatality, such as altered behavior or changes to migration routes. This research is still in preliminary stages, said Doug Nowacek, a marine biologist at Duke University who helped put trackers on whales this summer off Massachusetts as part of a 5-year federally-funded study.\n\n## WHAT REAL DANGERS DO WHALES FACE?\nWhile the exact causes of recent whale strandings along the East Coast mostly are not known, whales do face dangers from human activities.\n\nThe biggest threats are shipping collisions and entanglement in fishing gear, according to scientists and federal authorities. Underwater noise pollution is another concern, they say.\n\nSome advocates for protecting whales have characterized the push against offshore wind power as a distraction from real issues. \"It seems that this is being used in an opportunistic way by anti-wind interests,\" said Gib Brogan, fisheries campaign director at the environmental group Oceana.\n\nSince 2016, humpback whales have been dying at an advanced rate - one the federal government terms an \"unusual mortality event.\" The much rarer North Atlantic right whale with fewer than 360 on Earth is also experiencing an unusual mortality event.\n\nNOAA reports 83 whales have died off the East Coast since Dec. 1, 2022. Roughly half were humpbacks between Massachusetts and North Carolina, and two were critically-endangered right whales in North Carolina and Virginia.\n\n## WHAT'S BEING DONE TO PROTECT WHALES NEAR WIND FARMS?\nFederal law sets limits on human-generated sound underwate r for continuous noise and short sudden bursts.\n\nMarine construction projects can reduce possible impact on marine mammals, including by pausing construction during migration seasons, using \"bubble curtains\" to contain sound from pile-driving and stationing trained observers with binoculars on ships to look for marine mammals.\n\nOffshore wind developers are taking steps required by regulators, but also are voluntarily adopting measures to ensure marine mammals are not harmed. Ørsted won't drive piles between Dec. 1 and April 30, when whales are on the move. It uses additional lookout vehicles, encircles monopiles for turbines with bubble curtains and does underwater acoustic monitoring.\n\nEquinor plans to use acoustic monitoring and infrared cameras to detect whales when it starts developing two lease areas off Long Island with its partner bp. The company says it will limit pile driving to months when right whales are least likely to be present.\n\n## WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE ALLEGING WIND FARMS CAUSE WHALE DEATHS?\nOne vocal opponent of offshore wind is the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the foundation's center for energy, climate and environment, wrote in November that Ørsted's scrapped New Jersey wind project was \"unsightly\" and a threat to wildlife.\n\n\"Whales and birds ... stand to gain if offshore wind abandons the Garden State,\" Furchtgott-Roth wrote.\n\nØrsted's Hardy said claims about wind farms killing whales are \"not scientific\" but \"very much politically-driven misinformation.\"\n\nThe Heartland Institute, another conservative public policy group, has also pushed back at offshore wind projects. H. Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the institute, said the wind projects are subject to unfairly lax regulatory restrictions compared to fossil fuel projects.\n\n\"We think it should be held to the same standard that any oil and gas project would be,\" Burnett said.\n\nSmaller anti-wind groups have also organized in coastal communities to oppose projects they feel jeopardize water views, coastal industries and recreation.\n\n## WHAT'S THE IMPACT OF MISINFORMATION?\nOffshore wind opponents are using unsupported claims about harm to whales to try to stop projects, with some of the loudest opposition centered in New Jersey.\n\nMisinformation can cause angst in coastal communities where developers need to build shoreside infrastructure to operate a wind farm.\n\nRepublican politicians have taken opposition from shore towns and community groups seriously. GOP congressmen from New Jersey, Maryland and Arizona got the U.S. Government Accountability Office to open an investigation into the offshore wind industry's impacts on commercial fishing and marine life and want a moratorium on projects.\n\nNew Jersey's Democrat-controlled Legislature remains steadfastly behind the industry.\n\n## ARE WHALES IMPACTED BY CLIMATE CHANGE?\nOne reason whale advocates push for renewable energy is that they say climate change is harming the animals - and less reliance on fossil fuels would help solve that problem.\n\nScientists say global warming has caused the right whale's preferred food - tiny crustaceans - to move as waters have warmed.\n\nThat means the whales have strayed from protected areas of ocean in search of food, leaving them vulnerable to ship strikes and entanglements. Large whales play a vitally important role in the ecosystem by storing carbon, so some scientists say they are also part of the solution to climate change."}
{"text": "# International astronaut will be invited on future NASA moon landing\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 4:35 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - An international astronaut will join U.S. astronauts on the moon by decade's end under an agreement announced Wednesday by NASA and the White House.\n\nThe news came as Vice President Kamala Harris convened a meeting in Washington of the National Space Council, the third such gathering under the Biden administration.\n\nThere was no mention of who the international moonwalker might be or even what country would be represented. A NASA spokeswoman later said that crews would be assigned closer to the lunar-landing missions, and that no commitments had yet been made to another country.\n\nNASA has included international astronauts on trips to space for decades. Canadian Jeremy Hansen will fly around the moon a year or so from now with three U.S. astronauts.\n\nAnother crew would actually land; it would be the first lunar touchdown by astronauts in more than a half-century. That's not likely to occur before 2027, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.\n\nAll 12 moonwalkers during NASA's Apollo program of the 1960s and 1970s were U.S. citizens. The space agency's new moon exploration program is named Artemis after Apollo's mythological twin sister.\n\nIncluding international partners \"is not only sincerely appreciated, but it is urgently needed in the world today,\" Hansen told the council.\n\nNASA has long stressed the need for global cooperation in space, establishing the Artemis Accords along with the U.S. State Department in 2020 to promote responsible behavior not just at the moon but everywhere in space. Representatives from all 33 countries that have signed the accords so far were expected at the space council's meeting in Washington.\n\n\"We know from experience that collaboration on space delivers,\" said Secretary of State Antony Blinken, citing the Webb Space Telescope, a U.S., European and Canadian effort.\n\nNotably missing from the Artemis Accords: Russia and China, the only countries besides the U.S. to launch their own citizens into orbit. Russia is a partner with NASA in the International Space Station, along with Europe, Japan and Canada. Even earlier in the 1990s, the Russian and U.S. space agencies teamed up during the shuttle program to launch each other's astronauts to Russia's former orbiting Mir station.\n\nDuring Wednesday's meeting, Harris also announced new policies to ensure the safe use of space as more and more private companies and countries aim skyward. Among the issues that the U.S. is looking to resolve: the climate crisis and the growing amount of space junk around Earth. A 2021 anti-satellite missile test by Russia added more than 1,500 pieces of potentially dangerous orbiting debris, and Blinken joined others at the meeting in calling for all nations to end such destructive testing."}
{"text": "# Orange tabby cat named Taters steals the show in first video sent by laser from deep space\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nDecember 19, 2023. 6:30 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - An orange tabby cat named Taters stars in the first video transmitted by laser from deep space, stealing the show as he chases a red laser light.\n\nThe 15-second video was beamed to Earth from NASA's Psyche spacecraft, 19 million miles (30 million kilometers) away. It took less than two minutes for the ultra high-definition video to reach Caltech's Palomar Observatory, sent at the test system's maximum rate of 267 megabits per second.\n\nThe video was loaded into Psyche's laser communication experiment before the spacecraft blasted off to a rare metal asteroid in October. The mission team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, decided to feature an employee's 3-year-old playful kitty.\n\nThe video was streamed to Earth on Dec. 11 and released by NASA this week. Despite the vast distance, the test relayed the video faster than most broadband internet connections here on Earth, said the project's Ryan Rogalin.\n\nNASA wants to improve communications from deep space, especially as astronauts gear up to return to the moon with an eye toward Mars. The laser demo is meant to transmit data at rates up to 100 times greater than the radio systems currently used by spacecraft far from Earth.\n\nMore test transmissions are planned as Psyche heads toward the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. But Taters won't be making anymore appearances, according to JPL.\n\nJoby Harris, an art director in JPL's DesignLab, couldn't be prouder, but doesn't want his cat's newfound celebrity to go to his head.\n\n\"I'm celebrating his spotlight with him, but making sure he keeps his paws on the carpet,\" Harris said in an email Tuesday."}
{"text": "# Jeff Bezos' rocket company launches experiments in first flight since 2022 crash\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nDecember 19, 2023. 1:18 PM EST\n\n---\n\nJeff Bezos' space company successfully launched a rocket carrying experiments on Tuesday, its first flight since engine trouble caused a crash more than a year ago.\n\nThe New Shepard rocket soared from West Texas, lifting a capsule full of tests, many of which were aboard the failed Blue Origin launch in September 2022. No one was aboard that flight or this latest one.\n\nThis time, the capsule made it to the fringes of space, exposing the experiments from NASA and others to a few minutes of weightlessness, before parachuting back down to the desert. The rocket landed first, after releasing the capsule. It reached an altitude of 66 miles (107 kilometers) during the 10-minute flight.\n\nDuring last year's failed launch, the rocket started to veer off course shortly after liftoff, prompting the escape system to kick in and catapult the capsule off the top. The capsule landed safely, but the rocket came crashing down.\n\nThe problem was traced to an overheated rocket engine nozzle that broke apart. Design changes were made to the nozzles and combustion chambers.\n\nBlue Origin has been launching from this remote area, southeast of El Paso, for almost 20 years. The company launched its first experiments for NASA in 2019 and its first passengers in 2021 that included Bezos and his brother. The second crew, a few months later, included \"Star Trek\" actor William Shatner.\n\nAltogether, Blue Origin has launched six times with 31 passengers, interspersing the 10-minute flights with research hops.\n\n\"Following a thorough review of today's mission, we look forward to flying our next crewed flight soon,\" said launch commentator Erika Wagner.\n\nBlue Origin's New Glenn rocket, designed to reach orbit, has yet to fly. The company is aiming for a debut sometime next year from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It's named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the world. New Shepard is named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space."}
{"text": "# Oregon appeals court finds the rules for the state's climate program are invalid\nDecember 20, 2023. 8:55 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PORTLAND, Ore. (AP)** - A state appeals court in Oregon decided late Wednesday that the rules for a program designed to limit and drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel companies are invalid. The program, started in 2022, is one of the strongest climate programs in the nation.\n\nState environmental officials said the court's decision hinges on an administrative error and doesn't touch on whether the state Department of Environmental Quality has the authority to implement the program. The Climate Protection Program targets a 90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from transportation fuels and natural gas by 2050.\n\nWednesday's decision by the Oregon Court of Appeals comes in a case brought by fossil fuel companies that alleged the state Environmental Quality Commission erred in its rulemaking for the program. The commission acts as the Department of Environmental Quality's policy and rulemaking board.\n\nThe court in its decision said it concluded the rules for the program were invalid.\n\nThe department said the decision was limited to an administrative error and not effective immediately, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported.\n\n\"The court did not make a decision about whether the Environmental Quality Commission has authority to adopt the Climate Protection Program,\" Lauren Wirtis, a department spokesperson, said in a statement.\n\nThe department is confident it has the authority to adopt and enforce the program and is evaluating next steps with the state Department of Justice, Wirtis said.\n\nNW Natural, one of the litigants, said it was pleased with the court's decision and that it is committed to moving toward a low-carbon energy future.\n\nA group of environmental, climate and social justice groups agreed with the state position that the decision focused on a procedural technicality and did not undermine the Department of Environmental Quality's authority to set greenhouse gas emissions limits on the oil and gas industry."}
{"text": "# A six-planet solar system in perfect synchrony has been found in the Milky Way\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nNovember 29, 2023. 11:02 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - Astronomers have discovered a rare in-sync solar system with six planets moving like a grand cosmic orchestra, untouched by outside forces since their birth billions of years ago.\n\nThe find, announced Wednesday, can help explain how solar systems across the Milky Way galaxy came to be. This one is 100 light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles.\n\nA pair of planet-hunting satellites - NASA's Tess and the European Space Agency's Cheops - teamed up for the observations.\n\nNone of the planets in perfect synchrony are within the star's so-called habitable zone, which means little if any likelihood of life, at least as we know it.\n\n\"Here we have a golden target\" for comparison, said Adrien Leleu of the University of Geneva, who was part of an international team that published the results in the journal Nature.\n\nThis star, known as HD 110067, may have even more planets. The six found so far are roughly two to three times the size of Earth, but with densities closer to the gas giants in our own solar system. Their orbits range from nine to 54 days, putting them closer to their star than Venus is to the sun and making them exceedingly hot.\n\nAs gas planets, they're believed to have solid cores made of rock, metal or ice, enveloped by thick layers of hydrogen, according to the scientists. More observations are needed to determine what's in their atmospheres.\n\nThis solar system is unique because all six planets move similar to a perfectly synchronized symphony, scientists said. In technical terms, it's known as resonance that's \"precise, very orderly,\" said co-author Enric Palle of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands.\n\nThe innermost planet completes three orbits for every two by its closest neighbor. It's the same for the second- and third-closest planets, and the third- and fourth-closest planets.\n\nThe two outermost planets complete an orbit in 41 and 54.7 days, resulting in four orbits for every three. The innermost planet, meanwhile, completes six orbits in exactly the time the outermost completes one.\n\nAll solar systems, including our own, are thought to have started out like this one, according to the scientists. But it's estimated only 1-in-100 systems have retained that synchrony, and ours isn't one of them. Giant planets can throw things off-kilter. So can meteor bombardments, close encounters with neighboring stars and other disturbances.\n\nWhile astronomers know of 40 to 50 in-sync solar systems, none have as many planets in such perfect step or as bright a star as this one, Palle said.\n\nThe University of Bern's Hugh Osborn, who was part of the team, was \"shocked and delighted\" when the orbital periods of this star system's planets came close to what scientists predicted.\n\n\"My jaw was on the floor,\" he said. \"That was a really nice moment.\""}
{"text": "# Oldest black hole discovered dating back to 470 million years after the Big Bang\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nNovember 6, 2023. 1:56 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - Scientists have discovered the oldest black hole yet, a cosmic beast formed a mere 470 million years after the Big Bang.\n\nThe findings, published Monday, confirm what until now were theories that supermassive black holes existed at the dawn of the universe. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory teamed up over the past year to make the observations.\n\nGiven the universe is 13.7 billion years old, that puts the age of this black hole at 13.2 billion years.\n\nEven more astounding to scientists, this black hole is a whopper - 10 times bigger than the black hole in our own Milky Way.\n\nIt's believed to weigh anywhere from 10% to 100% the mass of all the stars in its galaxy, said lead author Akos Bogdan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. That is nowhere near the miniscule ratio of the black holes in our Milky Way and other nearby galaxies - an estimated 0.1%, he noted.\n\n\"It's just really early on in the universe to be such a behemoth,\" said Yale University's Priyamvada Natarajan, who took part in the study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. A companion article appeared in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. \"It's astounding how this thing actually is sitting in place already with its galaxy so early on in the universe.\"\n\nThe researchers believe the black hole formed from colossal clouds of gas that collapsed in a galaxy next door to one with stars. The two galaxies merged, and the black hole took over.\n\nThe fact that Chandra detected it via X-ray confirms \"without a doubt that it is a black hole,\" according to Natarajan. With X-rays \"you're actually capturing the gas that is being gravitationally pulled into the black hole, sped up and it starts glowing in the X-rays,\" she said.\n\nThis one is considered a quasar since it's actively growing and the gas is blindingly bright, she added.\n\nThe Webb telescope alone may have spotted a black hole that is 29 million years older, according to scientists, but it's yet to be observed in X-rays and verified. Natarajan expects more early black holes will be found - perhaps not as far out, but still quite distant.\n\n\"We are expecting a new window to open in the universe, and I think this is the first crack,\" she said.\n\nThe two space telescopes - Webb and Chandra - used a technique called gravitational lensing to magnify the region of space where this galaxy, UHZ1, and its black hole are located. The telescopes used the light from a much closer cluster of galaxies, a mere 3.2 billion light-years from Earth, to magnify UHZ1 and its black hole much farther in the background.\n\n\"It's a pretty faint object, and thanks to like luck, nature has magnified it for us,\" Natarajan said\n\nLaunched in 2021 to a point 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away, Webb is the biggest and most powerful astronomical observatory ever sent into space; it sees the universe in the infrared. The much older Chandra has X-ray vision; it rocketed into orbit in 1999.\n\n\"I absolutely find it amazing that Chandra can do such amazing discoveries 24 years after its launch,\" Bogdan said."}
{"text": "# NASA spacecraft discovers tiny moon around asteroid during close flyby\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nNovember 3, 2023. 11:09 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - The little asteroid visited by NASA's Lucy spacecraft this week had a big surprise for scientists.\n\nIt turns out that the asteroid Dinkinesh has a dinky sidekick - a mini moon.\n\nThe discovery was made during Wednesday's flyby of Dinkinesh, 300 million miles (480 million kilometers) away in the main asteroid belt beyond Mars. The spacecraft snapped a picture of the pair when it was about 270 miles out (435 kilometers).\n\nIn data and images beamed back to Earth, the spacecraft confirmed that Dinkinesh is barely a half-mile (790 meters) across. Its closely circling moon is a mere one-tenth-of-a-mile (220 meters) in size.\n\nNASA sent Lucy past Dinkinesh as a rehearsal for the bigger, more mysterious asteroids out near Jupiter. Launched in 2021, the spacecraft will reach the first of these so-called Trojan asteroids in 2027 and explore them for at least six years. The original target list of seven asteroids now stands at 11.\n\nDinkinesh means \"you are marvelous\" in the Amharic language of Ethiopia. It's also the Amharic name for Lucy, the 3.2 million-year-old remains of a human ancestor found in Ethiopia in the 1970s, for which the spacecraft is named.\n\n\"Dinkinesh really did live up to its name; this is marvelous,\" Southwest Research Institute's Hal Levison, the lead scientist, said in a statement."}
{"text": "# NASA's Lucy spacecraft swoops past first of 10 asteroids on long journey to Jupiter\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nNovember 1, 2023. 4:11 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - NASA's Lucy spacecraft on Wednesday encountered the first of 10 asteroids on its long journey to Jupiter.\n\nThe spacecraft on Wednesday swooped past the pint-sized Dinkinesh, about 300 million miles (480 million kilometers) away in the main asteroid belt beyond Mars. It was \"a quick hello,\" according to NASA, with the spacecraft zooming by at 10,000 mph (16,000 kph).\n\nLucy came within 270 miles (435 kilometers) of Dinkinesh, testing its instruments in a dry run for the bigger and more alluring asteroids ahead. Dinkinesh is just a half-mile (1 kilometer) across, quite possibly the smallest of the space rocks on Lucy's tour.\n\nLucy's main targets are the so-called Trojans, swarms of unexplored asteroids out near Jupiter that are considered to be time capsules from the dawn of the solar system. The spacecraft will swing past eight Trojans believed to be up to 10 to 100 times bigger than Dinkinesh. It's due to zip past the final two asteroids in 2033.\n\nNASA launched Lucy on its nearly $1 billion mission two years ago. The spacecraft is named after the 3.2 million-year-old skeletal remains of a human ancestor found in Ethiopia in the 1970s. Lucy will next swing past an asteroid named after one of the fossil Lucy's discoverers: Donald Johanson.\n\nOne of two solar wings on the spacecraft remains loose. Flight controllers gave up trying to latch it down, but it is believed to be stable enough for the entire mission.\n\nWednesday's flyby caps what NASA is calling Asteroid Autumn. NASA returned its first samples of rubble from an asteroid in September. Then in October, it launched a spacecraft to a rare, metal-rich asteroid named Psyche.\n\nUnlike those missions, Lucy will not stop at any asteroids or collect any samples.\n\nIt will take at least a week for the spacecraft to send back all its pictures and data from the flyby.\n\nUntil now, Dinkinesh's only been \"an unresolved smudge in the best telescopes,\" Southwest Research Institute's Hal Levison, the lead scientist, said in a statement."}
{"text": "# 'Ring of fire' eclipse brings cheers and shouts of joy as it moves across the Americas\nBy **MARÍA VERZA** and **IVÁN VALENCIA**  \nOctober 14, 2023. 10:58 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CANCÚN, México (AP)** - First came the darkening skies, then the crescent-shaped shadows on the ground, and finally an eruption of cheers by crowds that gathered Saturday along the narrow path of a rare \"ring of fire\" eclipse of the sun.\n\nIt was a spectacular show for millions of people across the Americas as the moon moved into place and blocked out all but a brilliant circle of the sun's outer edge.\n\nHundreds of people filed into the planetarium in the Caribbean resort city of Cancún to watch the eclipse. Some peered through box projectors, while others looked through telescopes and special glasses.\n\nExcited children whistled, as some adults raised their arms toward the sky as if to welcome the eclipse.\n\nVendors selling plants outside observed the dance between the moon and the sun in a more natural way - with the help of trees as the shifting sunlight filtered through the leaves, casting unique shadows on the sidewalk.\n\n\"There was silence and like a mist, as if it was dusk, but only a few minutes later the birds were singing again,\" said Carmen Jardines, 56, one of the vendors.\n\nArtemia Carreto, was telling passersby about her experience as a child in southern Mexico, when they were told to look instead at the river where it reflected beautifully on the sand beneath the water.\n\nWhile she wasn't near a river this time, Carreto said she was carried away by the sensations induced by changing temperatures and a feeling of heaviness that she pegged to the rotation of the Earth.\n\nFor Pilar Cáceres, there was a sense of energy.\n\n\"It is something that nature brings us and that we must watch,\" said the 77-year-old retired elementary school teacher who watched the eclipse by following its shadow through a piece of cardboard.\n\nAncient Maya astronomers who tracked the movements of the sun and moon with precision referred to eclipses as \"broken sun.\" They may have used dark volcanic glass to protect their eyes, said archeologist Arturo Montero of Tepeyac University in Mexico City.\n\nUnlike a total solar eclipse, the moon doesn't completely cover the sun during a ring of fire eclipse. When the moon lines up between Earth and the sun, it leaves a bright, blazing border.\n\nThe entire eclipse - from the moment the moon starts to obscure the sun until it's back to normal - lasted 2 1/2 to three hours at any given spot. The ring of fire portion was from three to five minutes, depending on the location.\n\nSaturday's U.S. path: Oregon, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Texas in the U.S., with a sliver of California, Arizona and Colorado. Then: Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia and Brazil. Much of the rest of the Western Hemisphere got a partial eclipse.\n\nNASA and other groups livestreamed the event.\n\nIn the U.S., some eclipse watchers traveled to remote corners of the country to try to get the best view possible while those in Albuquerque got a double treat as the eclipse coincided with an international balloon fiesta that typically draws tens of thousands of spectators and hundreds of hot air balloon pilots from around the world.\n\nThere were hoots, hollers and yelps from the balloon launch field as the moon began to cover the sun. Some pilots used their propane burners to shoot flames upward in unison as the spectacle unfolded.\n\n\"It's very exciting to be here and have the convergence of our love of flying with something very natural like an eclipse,\" said Allan Hahn, a balloon pilot from Aurora, Colorado.\n\nAt Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, enthusiasts hit the trails before sunrise to stake out their preferred spots among the red rock hoodoos.\n\nWith the ring of fire in full form, cheers echoed through the canyons of the park.\n\n\"I just think it's one of those things that unites us all,\" said John Edwards, a cancer drug developer who traveled alone across the country to watch the eclipse from Bryce Canyon.\n\nKirby James and Caroline McGuire from Toronto didn't realize they would be in a prime spot when they planned their trip to southern Utah.\n\n\"Nothing that you can read could prepare you for how it feels,\" said Kirby James, 63, a co-founder of a software company. \"It's the moment, especially when the ring of fire came on, you realized you were having a lifetime experience.\"\n\nFor the small towns and cities along the path, there was a mix of excitement, worries about the weather and concerns they'd be overwhelmed by visitors flocking to see the annular solar eclipse.\n\nIn Eugene, Oregon, oohs and ahs combined with groans of disappointment as the eclipse was intermittently visible, the sun's light poking through the cloud cover only at times.\n\nIn southern Colombia, the Tatacoa desert played host to astronomers helping a group of visually impaired people experience the perfect golden ring created by the moon and sun through raised maps and temperature changes.\n\nColombia Science Minister Yesenia Olaya said moments like this should inspire people to promote science among children, so they see it as \"a life project.\"\n\nJuan Pablo Esguerra, 13, waited months to make the trip to the desert with his father to witness the eclipse.\n\n\"I like the astronomy because it's a spectacular experience,\" he said. \"This is the best that I've seen in my life.\"\n\nIn Mexico City, some children came dressed as astronauts as thousands of people gathered at the main esplanade of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the country's main public college. People shared special glasses, and the university set up telescopes.\n\nSaturday's eclipse marked the first for Brazil since 1994. The country's national observatory broadcast the event online while thousands flocked to parks and beaches in the north and northeastern regions to soak in the phenomenon.\n\nNext April, a total solar eclipse will crisscross the U.S. in the opposite direction. That one will begin in Mexico and go from Texas to New England before ending in Canada.\n\nThe next ring of fire eclipse is in October next year at the southernmost tip of South America. Antarctica gets one in 2026. It will be 2039 before another ring of fire is visible in the U.S., and Alaska will be the only state in its direct path."}
{"text": "# NASA spacecraft launched to mysterious and rare metal asteroid in first mission of its kind\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nOctober 13, 2023. 1:04 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - NASA's Psyche spacecraft rocketed away Friday on a six-year journey to a rare metal-covered asteroid.\n\nMost asteroids tend to be rocky or icy, and this is the first exploration of a metal world. Scientists believe it may be the battered remains of an early planet's core, and could shed light on the inaccessible centers of Earth and other rocky planets.\n\nSpaceX launched the spacecraft into an overcast midmorning sky from NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Named for the asteroid it's chasing, Psyche should reach the huge, potato-shaped object in 2029.\n\n\"It's so thrilling,\" said Laurie Leshin, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Added Arizona State University's Jim Bell, part of the Psyche team: \"What a great ride so far.\"\n\nAn hour later, the spacecraft separated successfully from the rocket's upper stage and floated away, drawing applause from ground controllers.\n\nAfter decades of visiting faraway worlds of rock, ice and gas, NASA is psyched to pursue one coated in metal. Of the nine or so metal-rich asteroids discovered so far, Psyche is the biggest, orbiting the sun in the outer portion of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter alongside millions of other space rocks. It was discovered in 1852 and named after Greek mythology's captivating goddess of the soul.\n\n\"It's long been humans' dream to go to the metal core of our Earth. I mean, ask Jules Verne,\" lead scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University said ahead of the launch.\n\n\"The pressure is too high. The temperature is too high. The technology is impossible,\" she said. \"But there's one way in our solar system that we can look at a metal core and that is by going to this asteroid.\"\n\nAstronomers know from radar and other observations that the asteroid is big - about 144 miles (232 kilometers) across at its widest and 173 miles (280 kilometers) long. They believe it's brimming with iron, nickel and other metals, and quite possibly silicates, with a dull, predominantly gray surface likely covered with fine metal grains from cosmic impacts.\n\nOtherwise, it's a speck of light in the night sky, full of mystery until the spacecraft reaches it after traveling more than 2 billion miles (3.6 billion kilometers).\n\nScientists envision spiky metal craters, huge metal cliffs and metal-encrusted eroded lava flows greenish-yellow from sulfur - \"almost certain to be completely wrong,\" according to Elkins-Tanton. It's also possible that trace amounts of gold, silver, platinum or iridium - iron-loving elements - could be dissolved in the asteroid's iron and nickel, she said.\n\n\"There's a very good chance that it's going to be outside of our imaginings, and that is my fondest hope,\" she said.\n\nBelieved to be a planetary building block from the solar system's formation 4.5 billion years ago, the asteroid can help answer such fundamental questions as how did life arise on Earth and what makes our planet habitable, according to Elkins-Tanton.\n\nOn Earth, the planet's iron core is responsible for the magnetic field that shields our atmosphere and enables life.\n\nLed by Arizona State University on NASA's behalf, the $1.2 billion mission will use a roundabout route to get to the asteroid. The van-size spacecraft with solar panels big enough to fill a tennis court will swoop past Mars for a gravity boost in 2026. Three years later, it will reach the asteroid and attempt to go into orbit around it, circling as high as 440 miles (700 kilometers) and as close as 47 miles (75 kilometers) until at least 2031.\n\nThe spacecraft relies on solar electric propulsion, using xenon gas-fed thrusters and their gentle blue-glowing pulses. An experimental communication system is also along for the ride, using lasers instead of radio waves in an attempt to expand the flow of data from deep space to Earth. NASA expects the test to yield more than 10 times the amount of data, enough to transmit videos from the moon or Mars one day.\n\nThe spacecraft should have soared a year ago, but was held up by delays in flight software testing attributed to poor management and other issues. The revised schedule added extra travel time. So instead of arriving at the asteroid in 2026 as originally planned, the spacecraft won't get there until 2029.\n\nThat's the same year that another NASA spacecraft - the one that just returned asteroid samples to the Utah desert - will arrive at a different space rock as it buzzes Earth."}
{"text": "# In many Indigenous cultures, a solar eclipse is more than a spectacle. It's for honoring tradition\nBy **TERRY TANG**  \nOctober 12, 2023. 2:26 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PHOENIX (AP)** - For a few hours, Krystal Curley and her Indigenous women's work group took over a college auditorium to share traditional Navajo practices regarding this weekend's highly anticipated solar eclipse. More than 50 people - young and old - showed up for the chance to either connect with or remember cultural protocol going back hundreds of years.\n\nThey laid out books on Navajo astronomy and corn pollen used for blessings. A medicine man fielded questions from the majority Navajo, or Diné, audience on what to do when the moon partially shrouds the sun.\n\nDon't: Look at the eclipse, eat, drink, sleep or engage in physical activity.\n\nDo: Sit at home and reflect or pray during what's considered an intimate, celestial moment.\n\n\"There's so many things we're not supposed to do as Diné people compared to other tribes, where it's OK for them to look at the eclipse or be out or do things,\" said Curley, executive director of nonprofit Indigenous Life Ways.\n\nThe belief is pronounced on the Navajo Nation but not shared among all Indigenous cultures North, Central and South America that will be in the primary viewing path for the \"ring of fire\" eclipse Saturday. Navajo, which has the largest reservation in the U.S., is closing well-known tourist destinations like Monument Valley and the Four Corners Monument to allow residents to be at home with curtains drawn in silence.\n\nNavajo-led tour companies also will cease operations during the phenomenon. Some Indigenous groups elsewhere are using the occasion to pass down cultural teachings, share stories and ensure members, especially younger generations, learn sacred traditions.\n\nIn Navajo culture, an eclipse is about solemnity - not spectacle. It marks the end of a cycle and the power of when the moon and sun are in alignment. When the sun is blocked, it is undergoing a rebirth. It also is seen as the moon and the sun embracing each other.\n\nPaul Begay, a Navajo cultural adviser for guided hikes with Taadidiin Tours in Antelope Canyon, plans to quietly sit at home in Page, Arizona. Begay said he was taught from a young age that deities are responsible for creation starting with the first man and first woman, who traveled through four worlds.\n\nBegay described an eclipse as a disturbance, or death of the sun, which is considered a father figure in Navajo. Out of respect, he said, all activity stops.\n\n\"It's just a show of reverency, a show of being the way the holy people would want you to be,\" Begay said. \"Of course, the eclipse will subside in due time and activities go back to normalcy.\"\n\nShiyé Bidzííl, who is Navajo and Lakota, plans to view it with his 12-year-old twin sons and 11-year-old daughter outside their home in Chinle, Arizona. He even bought special viewing glasses last week. Bidzííl, who says Lakota believe they descend from \"Star People,\" grew up finding stargazing compelling and wants to educate his children on the significance of the celestial alignment.\n\n\"My sons, they're all into stars and space and planets and moons, things like that,\" Bidzííl said.\n\nIn southern Oregon, GeorGene Nelson, director of the Klamath Tribes' language department, says no tribal tradition dictates that she hunker down. She will be part of an educational panel at Running Y Resort in Klamath Falls. She wants to share eclipse-related stories from the Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin-Paiute people.\n\nThe story she learned is that a grizzly bear is trying to eat the moon. Meanwhile, a frog jumps on the moon and the moon decides to keep the frog as his wife so she can chase away the bear. The frog ends up married to the sun, too.\n\n\"Our people used to gather when these eclipses started happening ... calling for the frog to come,\" Nelson said. \"When the eclipse is over with, then that's the frog being successful in chasing the grizzly bear.\"\n\nKlamath Tribes officials won't be able to avoid the eclipse-driven fanfare. EclipseFest23, a festival in Klamath County roughly 20 miles (32 kilometers) from Crater Lake National Park, started Tuesday. The five-day celebration features food trucks, a beer garden and rock band Smash Mouth, performing Saturday. The county's 60,000-plus population could double by Saturday with all the extra foot traffic, said Tim Sexton, Klamath Tribes fire program manager.\n\n\"Just the sheer number of people over here at one time looking for places to stay overnight or even places to have a nice view of the eclipse could unwittingly (do) damage,\" Sexton said. \"A lot of these areas are remote. With this number of people, there's a tendency for folks to not want to stay in a big crowd and they'll go to areas they haven't seen visitors for a while.\"\n\nIn Oklahoma off the premiere path of the eclipse, other tribes are recounting origin stories of eclipses, said Chris Hill, a cultural specialist for Native American programming in Tulsa Public Schools. In his own Muscogee (Creek) Nation tribe, the 66 tribal towns each have a unique story surrounding eclipses, he said.\n\nThe story he grew up with was that a rabbit being chased by a little boy transformed into a \"little person\" and offered the boy three wishes. After food and friends, the boy asked for shade. So, the little person lobbed cornmeal at the sun, covering it, and proclaimed the moon and sun have been brought together. The little person then teaches the boy a \"friendship dance.\" The eclipse symbolizes that friendship.\n\n\"During that time of the eclipse, we all pay homage, we all get silent. We all basically don't do anything during that time. But we also prepare medicines for that time, too,\" Hill said.\n\nStill, there are a lot of people who are \"colonized\" and don't follow tradition, he added.\n\nCurley, of Indigenous Life Ways, wants to do more workshops to educate Natives about celestial events - even giving them corn pollen, or tádídíín, for the post-eclipse offering.\n\n\"We know people are hungry for traditional knowledge,\" she said. \"I'm really thankful our young people are really interested in preserving our ways.\""}
{"text": "# NASA shows off its first asteroid samples delivered by a spacecraft\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nOctober 11, 2023. 9:59 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - NASA on Wednesday showed off its first asteroid samples delivered last month by a spacecraft - a jumble of black dust and rubble that's the most ever returned to Earth.\n\nScientists anticipated getting a cupful but are still unsure how much was grabbed from the carbon-rich asteroid named Bennu, almost 60 million miles (97 million kilometers) away. That's because the main sample chamber has yet to be opened, officials said during an event at Johnson Space Center in Houston.\n\n\"It's been going slow and meticulous, but the science is already starting,\" said the mission's lead scientist, Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona.\n\nNASA's Osiris-Rex spacecraft collected the samples three years ago from the surface of Bennu and then dropped them off sealed in a capsule during a flyby of Earth last month. The expected cupful was far more than the teaspoon or so that Japan brought back from a pair of missions.\n\nBlack dust and particles were scattered around the outside edge of the internal sample chamber, according to Lauretta. He said there's still \"a whole treasure chest of extraterrestrial material\" to be studied. The samples are priceless, the preserved building blocks from the dawn of the solar system.\n\nNo one at Wednesday's celebration at Johnson got to see any of the samples firsthand - just photos and video. The asteroid pieces were behind locked doors in a new lab at the space center, accessible only to scientists in protective gear.\n\nBesides carbon, the asteroid rubble holds water in the form of water-bearing clay minerals, Lauretta and others pointed out.\n\n\"That is how we think water got to the Earth,\" he said. \"Minerals like we're seeing from Bennu landed on Earth 4 billion years ago to 4.5 billion years ago, making our world habitable.\"\n\nThat was one of the primary reasons for the $1 billion, seven-year mission: to help learn how the solar system - and Earth in particular - formed. \"You can't get more exciting than that,\" said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.\n\nBack in 2020, Lauretta and his team lost some of their haul when the lid on the sample container jammed a few days after the spacecraft collected the material. It vacuumed up so many pieces from Bennu that small rocks got lodged under the lid and prevented it from closing, sending pieces floating off into space.\n\nThat's why scientists did not have a precise measurement of what was coming back; they estimated 250 grams, or about a cupful, ahead of the Sept. 24 landing in the Utah desert. They won't have a good count until the container is opened, within two weeks or so.\n\nMuch of the material shown Wednesday was overflow from when the lid was stuck open, before everything could be sealed inside the return capsule. The larger visible rocks were under an inch (2.5 centimeters) in size.\n\n\"We have a bounty of sample on our hands already and we're not even inside\" the main sample container, said NASA astromaterials curator Francis McCubbin.\n\nOnce the samples are archived, the team will dole out particles to researchers around the world, while saving a fair amount for future analysis when better technology should be available.\n\nNASA has another asteroid-chasing spacecraft on a Florida launch pad, ready to blast off later this week. The destination will be a rare asteroid made of metal named Psyche. No samples will be coming back."}
{"text": "# 'Ring of fire' solar eclipse will slice across Americas on Saturday with millions along path\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nOctober 10, 2023. 12:04 PM EST\n\n---\n\nTens of millions in the Americas will have front-row seats for Saturday's rare \"ring of fire\" eclipse of the sun.\n\nWhat's called an annular solar eclipse - better known as a ring of fire - will briefly dim the skies over parts of the western U.S. and Central and South America.\n\nAs the moon lines up precisely between Earth and the sun, it will blot out all but the sun's outer rim. A bright, blazing border will appear around the moon for as much as five minutes, wowing skygazers along a narrow path stretching from Oregon to Brazil.\n\nThe celestial showstopper will yield a partial eclipse across the rest of the Western Hemisphere.\n\nIt's a prelude to the total solar eclipse that will sweep across Mexico, the eastern half of the U.S. and Canada, in six months. Unlike Saturday, when the moon is too far from Earth to completely cover the sun from our perspective, the moon will be at the perfect distance on April 8, 2024.\n\nHere's what you need to know about the ring of fire eclipse, where you can see it and how to protect your eyes:\n\n## WHAT'S THE PATH OF THE RING OF FIRE ECLIPSE?\nThe eclipse will carve out a swath about 130 miles (210 kilometers) wide, starting in the North Pacific and entering the U.S. over Oregon around 8 a.m. PDT Saturday. It will culminate in the ring of fire a little over an hour later. From Oregon, the eclipse will head downward across Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Texas, encompassing slivers of Idaho, California, Arizona and Colorado, before exiting into the Gulf of Mexico at Corpus Christi. It will take less than an hour for the flaming halo to traverse the U.S.\n\nFrom there, the ring of fire will cross Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia and, finally, Brazil before its grand finale over the Atlantic.\n\nThe entire eclipse - from the moment the moon starts to obscure the sun until it's back to normal - will last 2 1/2 to three hours at any given spot. The ring of fire portion lasts from three to five minutes, depending on location.\n\n## WHERE CAN THE ECLIPSE BE SEEN?\nIn the U.S. alone, more than 6.5 million people live along the so-called path of annularity, with another 68 million within 200 miles (322 kilometers), according to NASA's Alex Lockwood, a planetary scientist. \"So a few hours' short drive and you can have over 70 million witness this incredible celestial alignment,\" she said.\n\nAt the same time, a crescent-shaped partial eclipse will be visible in every U.S. state, although just barely in Hawaii, provided the skies are clear. Canada, Central America and most of South America, also will see a partial eclipse. The closer to the ring of fire path, the bigger the bite the moon will appear to take out of the sun.\n\nCan't see it? NASA and others will provide a livestream of the eclipse.\n\n## HOW TO PROTECT YOUR EYES DURING THE ECLIPSE\nBe sure to use safe, certified solar eclipse glasses, Lockwood stressed. Sunglasses aren't enough to prevent eye damage. Proper protection is needed throughout the eclipse, from the initial partial phase to the ring of fire to the final partial phase.\n\nThere are other options if you don't have eclipse glasses. You can look indirectly with a pinhole projector that you can make yourself, including one made with a cereal box.\n\nCameras - including those on cellphones - binoculars, or telescopes need special solar filters mounted at the front end.\n\n## SEEING DOUBLE\nOne patch of Texas near San Antonio will be in the cross-hairs of Saturday's eclipse and next April's, with Kerrville near the center. It's one of the locations hosting NASA's livestream.\n\n\"Is the city of Kerrville excited? Absolutely!!!\" Mayor Judy Eychner said in an email. \"And having NASA here is just icing on the cake!!!\"\n\nWith Saturday's eclipse coinciding with art, music and river festivals, Eychner expects Kerrville's population of 25,000 to double or even quadruple.\n\n## WHERE'S THE TOTAL ECLIPSE IN APRIL?\nApril's total solar eclipse will crisscross the U.S. in the opposite direction. It will begin in the Pacific and head up through Mexico into Texas, then pass over Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, the northern fringes of Pennsylvania and New York, and New England, before cutting across Canada into the North Atlantic at New Brunswick and Newfoundland. Almost all these places missed out during the United States' coast-to-coast total solar eclipse in 2017.\n\nIt will be 2039 before another ring of fire is visible in the U.S., and Alaska will be the only state then in the path of totality. And it will be 2046 before another ring of fire crosses into the U.S. Lower 48. That doesn't mean they won't be happening elsewhere: The southernmost tip of South America will get one next October, and Antarctica in 2026.\n\n## GOING AFTER THE SCIENCE\nNASA and others plan a slew of observations during both eclipses, with rockets and hundreds of balloons soaring.\n\n\"It's going to be absolutely breathtaking for science,\" said NASA astrophysicist Madhulika Guhathakurta.\n\nEmbry-Riddle Aeronautical University's Aroh Barjatya will help launch three NASA-funded sounding rockets from New Mexico's White Sands Missile Range before, during and after Saturday's eclipse. The goal is to see how eclipses set off atmospheric waves in the ionosphere nearly 200 miles (320 kilometers) up that could disrupt communications.\n\nBarjatya will be just outside Saturday's ring of fire. And he'll miss April's full eclipse, while launching rockets from Virginia's Wallops Island.\n\n\"But the bittersweet moment of not seeing annularity or totality will certainly be made up by the science return,\" he said."}
{"text": "# NASA's first asteroid samples land on Earth after release from spacecraft\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nSeptember 25, 2023. 12:42 AM EST\n\n---\n\nNASA's first asteroid samples fetched from deep space parachuted into the Utah desert Sunday to cap a seven-year journey.\n\nIn a flyby of Earth, the Osiris-Rex spacecraft released the sample capsule from 63,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) out. The small capsule landed four hours later on a remote expanse of military land, as the mothership set off after another asteroid.\n\n\"We have touchdown!\" Mission Recovery Operations announced, immediately repeating the news since the landing occurred three minutes early. Officials later said the orange striped parachute opened four times higher than anticipated - around 20,000 feet (6,100 meters) - basing it on the deceleration rate.\n\nTo everyone's relief, the capsule was intact and not breached, keeping its 4.5 billion-year-old samples free of contamination. Within two hours of touchdown, the capsule was inside a temporary clean room at the Defense Department's Utah Test and Training Range, hoisted there by helicopter.\n\nThe sealed sample canister will be flown on Monday to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, where it will be opened in a new, specially designed lab. The building already houses the hundreds of pounds (kilograms) of moon rocks gathered by the Apollo astronauts.\n\n\"We can't wait to crack into it. For me, the real science is just beginning,\" said the mission's lead scientist, Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona. He'll accompany the samples all the way to Texas.\n\nLori Glaze, NASA's planetary science division director, added: \"Those are going to be a treasure for scientific analysis for years and years and years to come.\"\n\nScientists estimate the capsule holds at least a cup of rubble from the carbon-rich asteroid known as Bennu, but won't know for sure until the container is opened in a day or two. Some spilled and floated away when the spacecraft scooped up too much material, which jammed the container's lid during collection three years ago.\n\nJapan, the only other country to bring back samples, gathered about a teaspoon during a pair of asteroid missions.\n\nThe pebbles and dust delivered Sunday represent the biggest haul from beyond the moon. Preserved building blocks from the dawn of our solar system, the samples will help scientists better understand how Earth and life formed, providing \"an extraordinary glimpse\" of 4.5 billion years ago, said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.\n\nOsiris-Rex, the mothership, rocketed away on the $1 billion mission in 2016. It reached Bennu two years later and, using a long stick vacuum, grabbed rubble from the small roundish space rock in 2020. By the time it returned, the spacecraft had logged 4 billion miles (6.2 billion kilometers).\n\nAt a news conference several hours later, Lauretta said he broke into tears of joy upon hearing that the capsule's main parachute had opened.\n\n\"I knew we had made it home,\" he said, so overwhelmed with emotion when he arrived at the scene that he wanted to hug the capsule, sooty but undamaged and not even bent.\n\nFlight controllers for spacecraft builder Lockheed Martin stood and applauded the touchdown from their base in Colorado. NASA camera views showed the charred capsule upside down on the sand with its parachute disconnected and strewn nearby, as the recovery team moved in via helicopters.\n\n\"Boy, did we stick that landing,\" Lauretta said. \"It didn't move, it didn't roll, it didn't bounce. It just made a tiny little divot in the Utah soil.\"\n\nBritish astronomer Daniel Brown, who was not involved in the mission, said he expects \"great things\" from NASA's largest sample return since the Apollo moon landings more than a half-century ago. With these asteroid samples, \"we are edging closer to understanding its early chemical composition, the formation of water and the molecules life is based on,\" he added from Nottingham Trent University.\n\nOne Osiris-Rex team member was stuck in England, rehearsing for a concert tour. \"My heart's there with you as this precious sample is recovered,\" Queen's lead guitarist Brian May, who's also an astrophysicist, said in a prerecorded message. \"Happy Sample Return Day.\"\n\nEngineers estimate the canister holds 250 grams (8.82 ounces) of material from Bennu, plus or minus 100 grams (3.53 ounces). Even at the low end, it will easily surpass the minimum requirement of the mission, Lauretta said.\n\nIt will take a few weeks to get a precise measurement, said NASA's lead curator Nicole Lunning.\n\nNASA plans a public show-and-tell in October.\n\nCurrently orbiting the sun 50 million miles (81 million kilometers) from Earth, Bennu is about one-third of a mile (one-half of a kilometer) across, roughly the size of the Empire State Building but shaped like a spinning top. It's believed to be the broken fragment of a much larger asteroid.\n\nDuring a two-year survey, Osiris-Rex found Bennu to be a chunky rubble pile full of boulders and craters. The surface was so loose that the spacecraft's vacuum arm sank a foot or two (0.5 meters) into the asteroid, sucking up more material than anticipated.\n\nThese close-up observations may come in handy late next century. Bennu is expected to come dangerously close to Earth in 2182 - possibly close enough to hit. The data gleaned by Osiris-Rex will help with any asteroid-deflection effort, according to Lauretta.\n\nOsiris-Rex is already chasing after the asteroid Apophis, and will reach it in 2029.\n\nThis was NASA's third sample return from a deep-space robotic mission. The Genesis spacecraft dropped off bits of solar wind in 2004, but the samples were compromised when the parachute failed and the capsule slammed into the ground. The Stardust spacecraft successfully delivered comet dust in 2006.\n\nNASA's plans to return samples from Mars are on hold after an independent review board criticized the cost and complexity. The Martian rover Perseverance has spent the past two years collecting core samples for eventual transport to Earth."}
{"text": "# The fall equinox is here. What does that mean?\nBy **MADDIE BURAKOFF**  \nSeptember 22, 2023. 10:09 AM EST\n\n---\n\nNEW YORK (AP) - Fall is in the air - officially.\n\nThe equinox arrives on Saturday, marking the start of the fall season for the Northern Hemisphere.\n\nBut what does that actually mean? Here's what to know about how we split up the year using the Earth's orbit.\n\n## WHAT IS THE EQUINOX?\nAs the Earth travels around the sun, it does so at an angle.\n\nFor most of the year, the Earth's axis is tilted either toward or away from the sun. That means the sun's warmth and light fall unequally on the northern and southern halves of the planet.\n\nDuring the equinox, the Earth's axis and its orbit line up so that both hemispheres get an equal amount of sunlight.\n\nThe word equinox comes from two Latin words meaning equal and night. That's because on the equinox, day and night last almost the same amount of time - though one may get a few extra minutes, depending on where you are on the planet.\n\nThe Northern Hemisphere's spring - or vernal - equinox can land between March 19 and 21, depending on the year. Its fall - or autumnal - equinox can land between Sept. 21 and 24.\n\n## WHAT IS THE SOLSTICE?\nThe solstices mark the times during the year when the Earth is seeing its strongest tilt toward or away from the sun. This means the hemispheres are getting very different amounts of sunlight - and days and nights are at their most unequal.\n\nDuring the Northern Hemisphere's summer solstice, the upper half of the earth is tilted in toward the sun, creating the longest day and shortest night of the year. This solstice falls between June 20 and 22.\n\nMeanwhile, at the winter solstice, the Northern Hemisphere is leaning away from the sun - leading to the shortest day and longest night of the year. The winter solstice falls between December 20 and 23.\n\n## WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN METEOROLOGICAL AND ASTRONOMICAL SEASONS?\nThese are just two different ways to carve up the year.\n\nMeteorological seasons are defined by the weather. They break down the year into three-month seasons based on annual temperature cycles. By that calendar, spring starts on March 1, summer on June 1, fall on Sept. 1 and winter on Dec. 1.\n\nAstronomical seasons depend on how the Earth moves around the sun.\n\nEquinoxes, when the sun lands equally on both hemispheres, mark the start of spring and autumn. Solstices, when the Earth sees its strongest tilt toward or away from the sun, kick off summer and winter."}
{"text": "# NASA spacecraft delivering biggest sample yet from an asteroid\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nSeptember 20, 2023. 12:48 PM EST\n\n---\n\nPlanet Earth is about to receive a special delivery - the biggest sample yet from an asteroid.\n\nA NASA spacecraft will fly by Earth on Sunday and drop off what is expected to be at least a cupful of rubble it grabbed from the asteroid Bennu, closing out a seven-year quest.\n\nThe sample capsule will parachute into the Utah desert as its mothership, the Osiris-Rex spacecraft, zooms off for an encounter with another asteroid.\n\nScientists anticipate getting about a half pound (250 grams) of pebbles and dust, much more than the teaspoon or so brought back by Japan from two other asteroids. No other country has fetched pieces of asteroids, preserved time capsules from the dawn of our solar system that can help explain how Earth - and life - came to be.\n\nSunday's landing concludes a 4 billion-mile (6.2-billion-kilometer) journey highlighted by the rendezvous with the carbon-rich Bennu, a unique pogo stick-style touchdown and sample grab, a jammed lid that sent some of the stash spilling into space, and now the return of NASA's first asteroid samples.\n\n\"I ask myself how many heart-pounding moments can you have in one lifetime because I feel like I might be hitting my limit,\" said the University of Arizona's Dante Lauretta, the mission's lead scientist.\n\nA brief look at the spacecraft and its cargo:\n\n## THE LONG JOURNEY\nAsteroid chaser Osiris-Rex blasted off on the $1 billion mission in 2016. It arrived at Bennu in 2018 and spent the next two years flying around the small spinning space rock and scouting out the best place to grab samples. Three years ago, the spacecraft swooped in and reached out with its 11-foot (3-meter) stick vacuum, momentarily touching the asteroid's surface and sucking up dust and pebbles. The device pressed down with such force and grabbed so much that rocks became wedged around the rim of the lid. As samples drifted off into space, Lauretta and his team scrambled to get the remaining material into the capsule. The exact amount inside won't be known until the container is opened.\n\n## ASTEROID BENNU\nDiscovered in 1999, Bennu is believed to be a remnant of a much larger asteroid that collided with another space rock. It's barely one-third of a mile (half a kilometer) wide, roughly the height of the Empire State Building, and its black rugged surface is packed with boulders. Roundish in shape like a spinning top, Bennu orbits the sun every 14 months, while rotating every four hours. Scientists believe Bennu holds leftovers from the solar system's formation 4.5 billion years ago. It may come dangerously close and strike Earth on Sept. 24, 2182 - exactly 159 years after the asteroid's first pieces arrive. Osiris-Rex's up-close study can help humanity figure out how to deflect Bennu if needed, Lauretta said.\n\n## GAME DAY\nOsiris-Rex will release the sample capsule from 63,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) out, four hours before it's due to touch down at the Defense Department's Utah Test and Training Range on Sunday morning. The release command will come from spacecraft builder Lockheed Martin's control center in Colorado. Soon afterward, the mothership will steer away and take off to explore another asteroid. The capsule - nearly 3 feet wide (81 centimeters) and 1.6 feet tall (50 centimeters) - will hit the atmosphere at 27,650 mph (44,500 kph) for the final 13 minutes of descent remaining. The main parachute will slow the last mile (1.6 kilometers), allowing for a mild 11 mph (18 kph) touchdown. Once everything is deemed safe, the capsule will be hustled by helicopter to a makeshift clean lab at the range. The next morning, a plane will carry the sealed container full of rubble to Houston, home to NASA's Johnson Space Center. NASA is livestreaming the touchdown, set for around 10:55 a.m. EDT.\n\n## CLEANER THAN CLEAN\nA new lab at Johnson will be limited to the Bennu rubble to avoid cross-contamination with other collections, said NASA curator Kevin Righter. Building 31 already holds the moon rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts from 1969 through 1972, as well as comet dust and specks of solar wind collected during two previous missions and Mars meteorites found in Antarctica. The asteroid samples will be handled inside nitrogen-purging gloveboxes by staff in head-to-toe clean room suits. NASA plans a splashy public reveal of Bennu's riches on Oct. 11.\n\n## ASTEROID AUTUMN\nThis fall is what NASA is calling Asteroid Autumn, with three asteroid missions marking major milestones. The Osiris-Rex touchdown will be followed by the launch of another asteroid hunter on Oct. 5. Both the NASA spacecraft and its target - a metal asteroid - are named Psyche. Then a month later, NASA's Lucy spacecraft will encounter its first asteroid since soaring from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2021. Lucy will swoop past Dinkinesh in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter on Nov. 1. It's a warmup for Lucy's unprecedented tour of the so-called Trojans, swarms of asteroids that shadow Jupiter around the sun. Neither Psyche nor Lucy will collect souvenirs, nor will Osiris-Rex on its next assignment, to explore the asteroid Apophis in 2029.\n\n## OTHER SAMPLE RETURNS\nThis is NASA's third sample return from deep space, not counting the hundreds of pounds (kilograms) of moon rocks gathered by the Apollo astronauts. The agency's first robotic sample grab ended with a bang in 2004. The capsule bearing solar wind particles slammed into the Utah desert and shattered, compromising the samples. Two years later, a U.S. capsule with comet dust landed intact. Japan's first asteroid sample mission returned microscopic grains from asteroid Itokawa in 2010. It's second trip yielded about 5 grams - a teaspoon or so- from the asteroid Ryugu in 2020. The Soviet Union transported moon samples to Earth during the 1970s, and China returned lunar material in 2020."}
{"text": "# Across the Northern Hemisphere, now's the time to catch a new comet before it vanishes for 400 years\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nSeptember 6, 2023. 1:23 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - A newly discovered comet is swinging through our cosmic neighborhood for the first time in more than 400 years.\n\nStargazers across the Northern Hemisphere should catch a glimpse as soon as possible - either this week or early next - because it will be another 400 years before the wandering ice ball returns.\n\nThe comet, which is kilometer-sized (1/2-mile), will sweep safely past Earth on Sept. 12, passing within 78 million miles (125 million kilometers).\n\nEarly risers should look toward the northeastern horizon about 1 1/2 hours before dawn - to be specific, less than 10 or so degrees above the horizon near the constellation Leo. The comet will brighten as it gets closer to the sun, but will drop lower in the sky, making it tricky to spot.\n\nAlthough visible to the naked eye, the comet is extremely faint.\n\n\"So you really need a good pair of binoculars to pick it out and you also need to know where to look,\" said said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies.\n\nThe comet will come closest to the sun - closer than Mercury is - on about Sept. 17 before departing the solar system. That's assuming it doesn't disintegrate when it buzzes the sun, though Chodas said \"it's likely to survive its passage.\"\n\nItalian astronomer Gianluca Masi, founder of the Virtual Telescope Project, said in an email that the next week represents \"the last, feasible chances\" to see the comet from the Northern Hemisphere before it's lost in the sun's glare.\n\n\"The comet looks amazing right now, with a long, highly structured tail, a joy to image with a telescope,\" he said.\n\nIf it survives its brush with the sun, the comet should be visible in the Southern Hemisphere by the end of September, Masi said, sitting low on the horizon in the evening twilight.\n\nStargazers have been tracking the rare green comet ever since its discovery by an amateur Japanese astronomer in mid-August. The Nishimura comet now bears his name.\n\nIt's unusual for an amateur to discover a comet these days, given all the professional sky surveys by powerful ground telescopes, Chodas said, adding, \"this is his third find, so good for him.\"\n\nThe comet last visited about 430 years ago, Chodas said. That's about a decade or two before Galileo invented the telescope."}
{"text": "# Rare blue supermoon dazzles stargazers around the globe\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nAugust 31, 2023. 9:07 AM EST\n\n---\n\nA rare blue supermoon - the closest full moon of the year - dazzled stargazers Wednesday night.\n\nSaturn joined the celestial spectacle, visible alongside the moon, at least where skies were clear.\n\nIt was the second full moon of August, thus the blue label. And it was unusually close to Earth, therefore a supermoon.\n\nThe moon appeared to be bigger and brighter than usual, given its close proximity to Earth: just 222,043 miles (357,344 kilometers) or so. The Aug. 1 supermoon was more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) farther away.\n\nIf you missed it, it will be a long wait: The next blue supermoon isn't until 2037. But another regular supermoon is on the horizon at the end of September, the last one of the year."}
{"text": "# Rare blue supermoon brightens the night sky this week in the closest full moon of the year\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nAugust 29, 2023. 5:00 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - Stargazers are in for a double treat this week: a rare blue supermoon with Saturn peeking from behind.\n\nThe cosmic curtain rises Wednesday night with the second full moon of the month, the reason it's considered blue. It's dubbed a supermoon because it's closer to Earth than usual, appearing especially big and bright.\n\nThis will be the closest full moon of the year, just 222,043 miles (357,344 kilometers) or so away. That's more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) closer than the Aug. 1 supermoon.\n\nAs a bonus, Saturn will be visible as a bright point 5 degrees to the upper right of the moon at sunset in the east-southeastern sky, according to NASA. The ringed planet will appear to circle clockwise around the moon as the night wears on.\n\nIf you missed the month's first spectacle, better catch this one. There won't be another blue supermoon until 2037, according to Italian astronomer Gianluca Masi, founder of the Virtual Telescope Project.\n\nClouds spoiled Masi's attempt to livestream the supermoon rising earlier this month. He's hoping for clearer skies this time so he can capture the blue supermoon shining above St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican.\n\nWeather permitting, observers don't need binoculars or telescopes - \"just their own eyes.\" said Masi.\n\n\"I'm always excited to admire the beauty of the night sky,\" he said, especially when it features a blue supermoon.\n\nThe first supermoon of 2023 was in July. The fourth and last will be in September."}
{"text": "# The Perseid meteor shower peaks this weekend and it's even better this year\nBy **MADDIE BURAKOFF**  \nAugust 9, 2023. 12:46 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - The annual Perseid meteor shower reaches its peak this weekend, sending bright trails of light streaking across the night sky.\n\nWith only a sliver of moon in the sky, conditions this year will be ideal for seeing lots of meteors.\n\n\"If you've got nice clear weather and a good dark sky, you go out just before dawn and you'll see a Perseid per minute or so,\" said NASA meteor scientist Bill Cooke. \"That's a pretty good show.\"\n\nHere's how to watch the meteor shower:\n\n## WHAT ARE THE PERSEIDS?\nThe Perseids - one of the biggest meteor showers we can see - occur every year in the late summer. Meteor showers happen when the Earth moves through fields of debris floating around in space. The Perseids come from comet Swift-Tuttle, a big ball of ice and rock that sheds pieces of dusty debris as it orbits around the sun. When the Earth passes by, those bits get caught in our atmosphere and burn up, creating the streaking lights. The Perseids get their name from the constellation Perseus, because the meteors' paths appear to start out from this point in the sky.\n\n## WHEN IS THE SHOWER?\nThis year's shower is already active, but the main event will be this weekend, when the shower reaches its peak from Saturday night into Sunday morning. Starting around 11 p.m. local time Saturday, a few meteors will start to show up - maybe one every 15 minutes, Cooke estimated. They'll keep picking up the pace until before dawn on Sunday, when \"you'll see meteors appear all over the place,\" he said.\n\n## HOW CAN I SEE THEM?\nDuring this weekend's peak, the moon will be a waning crescent - just a small slice in the sky. That's good news because a bright moon can make it harder to spot the meteors. Last year, the moon was full during the peak. Anyone in the Northern Hemisphere will have a good view this year, as long as the sky is clear of light pollution and clouds. You don't need any equipment to see them, but you will need to give your eyes around half an hour to adjust to the dark. Avoid looking at your cellphone since that can ruin your night vision.\n\nThe Perseids can appear anywhere in the sky. So just \"lie on your back, look away from the moon and take in as much sky as you can,\" Cooke said."}
{"text": "# NASA hears signal from Voyager 2 spacecraft after mistakenly cutting contact\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nAugust 1, 2023. 9:25 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - After days of silence, NASA has heard from Voyager 2 in interstellar space billions of miles away.\n\nFlight controllers accidentally sent a wrong command nearly two weeks ago that tilted the spacecraft's antenna away from Earth and severed contact.\n\nNASA's Deep Space Network, giant radio antennas across the globe, picked up a \"heartbeat signal,\" meaning the 46-year-old craft is alive and operating, project manager Suzanne Dodd said in an email Tuesday.\n\nThe news \"buoyed our spirits,\" Dodd said. Flight controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California will now try to turn Voyager 2's antenna back toward Earth.\n\nIf the command doesn't work - and controllers doubt it will - they'll have to wait until October for an automatic spacecraft reset. The antenna is only 2% off-kilter.\n\n\"That is a long time to wait, so we'll try sending up commands several times\" before then, Dodd said.\n\nVoyager 2 rocketed into space in 1977, along with its identical twin Voyager 1, on a quest to explore the outer planets.\n\nStill communicating and working fine, Voyager 1 is now 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, making it the most distant spacecraft.\n\nVoyager 2 trails its twin in interstellar space at more than 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from Earth. At that distance, it takes more than 18 hours for a signal to travel one way."}
{"text": "# Two supermoons in August mean double the stargazing fun\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nJuly 29, 2023. 5:46 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - The cosmos is offering up a double feature in August: a pair of supermoons culminating in a rare blue moon.\n\nCatch the first show Tuesday evening as the full moon rises in the southeast, appearing slightly brighter and bigger than normal. That's because it will be closer than usual, just 222,159 miles (357,530 kilometers) away, thus the supermoon label.\n\nThe moon will be even closer the night of Aug. 30 - a scant 222,043 miles (357,344 kilometers) distant. Because it's the second full moon in the same month, it will be what's called a blue moon.\n\n\"Warm summer nights are the ideal time to watch the full moon rise in the eastern sky within minutes of sunset. And it happens twice in August,\" said retired NASA astrophysicist Fred Espenak, dubbed Mr. Eclipse for his eclipse-chasing expertise.\n\nThe last time two full supermoons graced the sky in the same month was in 2018. It won't happen again until 2037, according to Italian astronomer Gianluca Masi, founder of the Virtual Telescope Project.\n\nMasi will provide a live webcast of Tuesday evening's supermoon, as it rises over the Coliseum in Rome.\n\n\"My plans are to capture the beauty of this ... hopefully bringing the emotion of the show to our viewers,\" Masi said in an email.\n\n\"The supermoon offers us a great opportunity to look up and discover the sky,\" he added.\n\nThis year's first supermoon was in July. The fourth and last will be in September. The two in August will be closer than either of those.\n\nProvided clear skies, binoculars or backyard telescopes can enhance the experience, Espenak said, revealing such features as lunar maria - the dark plains formed by ancient volcanic lava flows - and rays emanating from lunar craters.\n\nAccording to the Old Farmer's Almanac, the August full moon is traditionally known as the sturgeon moon. That's because of the abundance of that fish in the Great Lakes in August, hundreds of years ago."}
{"text": "# Two planets sharing same orbit around their star? Astronomers find strongest evidence yet\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nJuly 19, 2023. 1:13 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - Astronomers reported Wednesday the discovery of what could be two planets sharing the same orbit around their star.\n\nThey said it's the strongest evidence yet of this bizarre cosmic pairing, long suspected but never proven.\n\nUsing a telescope in Chile, the Spanish-led team spotted a cloud of debris in the same orbit as an already confirmed planet circling this star, 370 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus. They suspect it's either a planet in formation or remnants of a planet that once was.\n\nAsteroids are known to accompany planets around their star - for example, Jupiter and its so-called Trojan asteroids. But planets in the same orbit \"have so far been like unicorns,\" noted study co-author Jorge Lillo-Box of Madrid's Center for Astrobiology.\n\n\"They are allowed to exist by theory, but no one has ever detected them,\" he said in a statement.\n\nThe scientists said they will need to wait until 2026 in order to properly track the two objects around the star known as PDS 70.\n\nThe confirmed planet with the suspected tagalong takes 119 years to complete a lap. A gas giant, it's three times the size of Jupiter. Another gas giant is known to circle this star, albeit from a much greater distance.\n\nLead author Olga Balsalobre-Ruza of the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid, said the findings, published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, are \"the first evidence\" that such double worlds might exist.\n\n\"We can imagine that a planet can share its orbit with thousands of asteroids as in the case of Jupiter, but it is mind-blowing to me that planets could share the same orbit,\" she said in a statement."}
{"text": "# Northern lights might be visible this week, but most of the US won't see them\nBy **MADDIE BURAKOFF**  \nJuly 12, 2023. 7:33 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - The northern lights could put on a show this week - though the audience will be much smaller than some early forecasts had suggested.\n\nThe sky spectacle will be fairly typical: Stretches of Canada have a chance to spot the shimmering curtain of the aurora borealis, while a few in the U.S. could see a faint reddish glow on the horizon. Here's what to know about the updated predictions.\n\n## WHO CAN SEE THE LIGHTS THIS WEEK?\nAn early forecast by the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, using data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, suggested that the northern lights could be visible much farther south than usual this week. But that forecast was based on long-term predictions about the solar activity responsible for the display. Forecasts using more current data from NOAA predict nothing special for the U.S.\n\n\"For the same reasons that it's hard to predict weather on Earth, it's hard to predict weather in space,\" said Northeastern University physicist Jonathan Blazek.\n\nIn North America, the predictions show a broad stretch of Canada and Alaska could see the northern lights overhead Wednesday and Thursday. Those in small slices of the contiguous U.S. - including parts of Wisconsin, Michigan and Montana - could also get a peek. But for them the aurora will probably be a \"faint glow on the horizon,\" rather than a shimmering green curtain, said Lt. Bryan Brasher, a project manager for NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center.\n\nFor those in range, seeking out clear, dark skies between 9 p.m. and 3 a.m. will give the best chance to see the aurora's colorful glow.\n\n## WHAT CAUSES THE NORTHERN LIGHTS?\nThe northern lights happen when particles from the sun make their way toward Earth and collide with our planet's atmosphere.\n\nThe sun is constantly sending material our way in a stream known as the solar wind. These particles carry an electric charge, and when they bump into gases such as oxygen and nitrogen in the Earth's atmosphere, they transfer some of their energy - \"like two billiard balls hitting each other,\" Brasher said.\n\nThis puts the atoms and molecules in an excited state. They shake off some of that energy in the form of light, creating the colorful displays of greens, blues, pinks and reds.\n\nThis solar wind is always flowing, but its levels can vary.\n\n\"There are solar storms where you get more particles than usual. It's windier than usual,\" Blazek said. \"There's also periods when it's fairly quiet.\"\n\nIt's during those periods of stronger solar wind activity when we tend to see more auroras, Blazek explained. More solar particles can make the northern lights brighter and also push them down toward the equator - giving people farther south a view.\n\nSometimes, the sun also shoots out huge amounts of plasma in what's known as a coronal mass ejection, Brasher said. If one of these outbursts hits Earth, even in a \"glancing blow,\" it can disturb our planet's magnetic field and also cause shimmering auroras.\n\n## HOW IS IT PREDICTED?\nScientists are constantly monitoring the sun using telescopes on Earth and in space in part because space weather can impact radio communications, satellites, power grids and more, Brasher said.\n\nThe sun spins on its axis once every 27 days. So, if scientists notice a spot with high activity, they might get a hint that it could come back around in a few weeks, he said.\n\nBut conditions can change by the time the sun makes a full rotation. Even then, there are so many factors at play that it can be hard to be sure about what's to come.\n\nGenerally, the sun's activity is \"on the up-and-up\" as we're heading toward a solar maximum in the next couple of years, Brasher said. So we may be seeing more solar storms soon - which will mean more northern lights.\n\n\"Everyone should stay tuned, because we probably have a lot more coming,\" Brasher said."}
{"text": "# Webb Space Telescope reveals moment of stellar birth, dramatic close-up of 50 baby stars\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nJuly 12, 2023. 6:55 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - The Webb Space Telescope is marking one year of cosmic photographs with one of its best yet: the dramatic close-up of dozens of stars at the moment of birth.\n\nNASA unveiled the latest snapshot Wednesday, revealing 50 baby stars in a cloud complex 390 light-years away. A light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles (9.7 trillion kilometers).\n\nThe region is relatively small and quiet yet full of illuminated gases, jets of hydrogen and even dense cocoons of dust with the delicate beginnings of even more stars.\n\nAll of the young stars appear to be no bigger than our sun. Scientists said the breathtaking shot provides the best clarity yet of this brief phase of a star's life.\n\n\"It's like a glimpse of what our own system would have looked like billions of years ago when it was forming,\" NASA program scientist Eric Smith told The Associated Press.\n\nSmith pointed out that the starlight visible in the image actually left there 390 years ago. On Earth in 1633, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei went on trial in Rome for saying that the Earth revolved around the sun. The Vatican in 1992 acknowledged Galileo was wronged.\n\nThis cloud complex, known as Rho Ophiuchi, is the closest star-forming region to Earth and is found in the sky near the border of the constellations Ophiuchus and Scorpius, the serpent-bearer and scorpion. With no stars in the foreground of the photo, NASA noted, the details stand out all the more. Some of the stars display shadows indicating possible planets in the making, according to NASA.\n\nIt \"presents star birth as an impressionistic masterpiece,\" NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a tweet.\n\nWebb - the largest and most powerful astronomical observatory ever launched into space - has been churning out cosmic beauty shots for the past year. The first pictures from the $10 billion infrared telescope were unveiled last July, six months after its liftoff from French Guiana.\n\nIt's considered the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, orbiting Earth for 33 years. A joint NASA-European Space Agency effort, Webb scans the universe from a more distant perch, 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away.\n\nStill ahead for Webb: Astronomers hope to behold the earliest stars and galaxies of the universe while scouring the cosmos for any hints of life on planets outside our solar system.\n\n\"We haven't found one of them yet,\" Smith said. \"But we're still only one year into the mission.\""}
{"text": "# NASA capsule flies over Apollo landing sites, heads home\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nDecember 5, 2022. 2:33 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - NASA's Orion capsule and its test dummies swooped one last time around the moon Monday, flying over a couple Apollo landing sites before heading home.\n\nOrion will aim for a Pacific splashdown Sunday off San Diego, setting the stage for astronauts on the next flight in a couple years.\n\nThe capsule passed within 80 miles (130 kilometers) of the far side of the moon, using the lunar gravity as a slingshot for the 237,000-mile (380,000-kilometer) ride back to Earth. It spent a week in a wide, sweeping lunar orbit.\n\nOnce emerging from behind the moon and regaining communication with flight controllers in Houston, Orion beamed back photos of a close-up moon and a crescent Earth - Earthrise - in the distance.\n\n\"Orion now has its sights set on home,\" said Mission Control commentator Sandra Jones.\n\nThe capsule also passed over the landing sites of Apollo 12 and 14. But at 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometers) up, it was too high to make out the descent stages of the lunar landers or anything else left behind by astronauts more than a half-century ago. During a similar flyover two weeks ago, it was too dark for pictures. This time, it was daylight.\n\nDeputy chief flight director Zebulon Scoville said nearby craters and other geologic features would be visible in any pictures, but little else.\n\n\"It will be more of a tip of the hat and a historical nod to the past,\" Scoville told reporters last week.\n\nThe three-week test flight has exceeded expectations so far, according to officials. But the biggest challenge still lies ahead: hitting the atmosphere at more than 30 times the speed of sound and surviving the fiery reentry.\n\nOrion blasted off Nov. 16 on the debut flight of NASA's most powerful rocket ever, the Space Launch System or SLS.\n\nThe next flight - as early as 2024 - will attempt to carry four astronauts around the moon. The third mission, targeted for 2025, will feature the first lunar landing by astronauts since the Apollo moon program ended 50 years ago this month.\n\nApollo 17 rocketed away Dec. 7, 1972, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, carrying Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt and Ron Evans. Cernan and Schmitt spent three days on the lunar surface, the longest stay of the Apollo era, while Evans orbited the moon. Only Schmitt is still alive."}
{"text": "# 3 Chinese astronauts return to Earth after 6-month mission\nDecember 4, 2022. 8:56 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BEIJING (AP)** - Three Chinese astronauts landed in a northern desert on Sunday after six months working to complete construction of the Tiangong station, a symbol of the country's ambitious space program, state TV reported.\n\nA capsule carrying commander Chen Dong and astronauts Liu Yang and Cai Xuzhe touched down at a landing site in the Gobi Desert in northern China at approximately 8:10 p.m. (1210 GMT), China Central Television reported.\n\nPrior to departure, they overlapped for almost five days with three colleagues who arrived Wednesday on the Shenzhou-15 mission for their own six-month stay, marking the first time China had six astronauts in space at the same time. The station's third and final module docked with the station this month.\n\nThe astronauts were carried out of the capsule by medical workers about 40 minutes after touchdown. They were all smiles, and appeared to be in good condition, waving happily at workers at the landing site.\n\n\"I am very fortunate to have witnessed the completion of the basic structure of the Chinese space station after six busy and fulfilling months in space,\" said Chen, who was the first to exit the capsule. \"Like meteors, we returned to the embrace of the motherland.\"\n\nLiu, another of the astronauts, said that she was moved to see relatives and her fellow compatriots.\n\nThe three astronauts were part of the Shenzhou-14 mission, which launched in June. After their arrival at Tiangong, Chen, Liu and Cai oversaw five rendezvous and dockings with various spacecraft including one carrying the third of the station's three modules.\n\nThey also performed three spacewalks, beamed down a live science lecture from the station, and conducted a range of experiments.\n\nThe Tiangong is part of official Chinese plans for a permanent human presence in orbit.\n\nChina built its own station after it was excluded from the International Space Station, largely due to U.S. objections over the Chinese space programs' close ties to the People's Liberation Army, the military wing of the ruling Communist Party.\n\nWith the arrival of the Shenzhou-15 mission, the station expanded to its maximum weight of 100 tons.\n\nWithout attached spacecraft, the Chinese station weighs about 66 tons - a fraction of the International Space Station, which launched its first module in 1998 and weighs around 465 tons.\n\nWith a lifespan of 10 to 15 years, Tiangong could one day be the only space station still up and running if the International Space Station retires by around the end of the decade as expected.\n\nChina in 2003 became the third government to send an astronaut into orbit on its own after the former Soviet Union and the United States.\n\nChina has also chalked up uncrewed mission successes: Its Yutu 2 rover was the first to explore the little-known far side of the moon. Its Chang'e 5 probe also returned lunar rocks to Earth in December 2020 for the first time since the 1970s, and another Chinese rover is searching for evidence of life on Mars.\n\nOfficials are reported to be considering an eventual crewed mission to the moon, although no timeline has been offered."}
{"text": "# Molten lava on Hawaii's Big Island could block main highway\nBy **AUDREY McAVOY** and **HAVEN DALEY**  \nDecember 3, 2022. 2:34 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**HILO, Hawaii (AP)** - Many people on the Big Island of Hawaii are bracing for major upheaval if lava from Mauna Loa volcano slides across a key highway and blocks the quickest route connecting two sides of the island.\n\nThe molten rock could make the road impassable and force drivers to find alternate coastal routes in the north and south. That could add hours to commute times, doctor's visits and freight truck deliveries.\n\n\"I am very nervous about it being cut off,\" said Frank Manley, a licensed practical nurse whose commute is already an hour and 45 minutes each way from his home in Hilo to a Kaiser Permanente clinic in Kailua-Kona.\n\nIf the highway closes, he anticipates driving two-and-a-half to three hours in each direction. Manley fears he might lose pay if an accident or other traffic disruption along an alternate route delays his arrival.\n\nThe lava is oozing slowly at a rate that might reach the road next week. But its path is unpredictable and could change course, or the flow could stop completely and spare the highway.\n\nThe slow-moving flow was coursing about 2.7 miles (4.3 kilometers) from the road Friday, U.S. Geological Survey scientists reported.\n\nThere are more affordable housing options on the island's east side, home to the county seat, Hilo. But many jobs at beach resorts, in construction and other industries are readily available on the west side, where Kailua-Kona is located. Saddle Road, also known as Route 200 or Daniel K. Inouye Highway, connects the two communities.\n\nThe state Department of Transportation took steps Thursday to remove potential traffic obstacles on the northern coastal route by reopening a lane across Nanue Bridge that was closed for repairs.\n\nHilo also is one of the island's major harbors, where a wide variety of goods arrive by ship before proceeding across the island by truck.\n\nHawaii County Councilor Susan \"Sue\" L. K. Lee Loy, who represents Hilo and parts of Puna, said she's concerned about big rigs traveling across aging coastal bridges.\n\n\"It's going to take a lot to rethink how we move about on Hawaii Island,\" she said.\n\nManley said he would have to get up at 3 a.m. to reach work by 8 a.m. If he left at 5 p.m., he wouldn't get home until 8 p.m. \"That drastically reduces my amount of time that I would be able to spend with my family,\" he said.\n\nTanya Harrison of Hilo said she would need a full day off work to travel to her doctor in Kona.\n\nThere are more than 200,000 Big Island residents. Amidst throngs of tourists, delivery trucks and commuters forced to reroute, Harrison said she couldn't imagine the congestion.\n\n\"It might even be quicker just to fly to Honolulu,\" she said of the hour flight. \"There's no line at the Hilo airport. Fly over, see the doctor, come back would actually be quicker than driving.\"\n\nOutrigger Kona Resort & Spa plans to provide rooms at a Kailua-Kona hotel so its dozen or so Hilo-based employees can avoid the long commute five days per week.\n\nA shutdown could also affect major astronomy research at the summit of Mauna Kea, a 13,803-foot (4,207-meter) peak next to Mauna Loa that is home to some of the world's most advanced telescopes.\n\nThe road heading to Mauna Kea's summit is midway between Hilo and Kona. If lava crosses Saddle Road on either side of Mauna Kea Access Road, many telescope workers would be forced to take long, circuitous routes.\n\nRich Matsuda, associate director for external relations at W.M. Keck Observatory, said telescopes may need to adjust staff schedules and house workers at a facility partway up the mountain for a while so they don't have to commute.\n\nThere's also a chance the lava flow may head directly across the lower part of Mauna Kea Access Road, which could block workers from reaching the summit. Matsuda hopes they'll be able to use gravel or other bypass routes if that happens.\n\nThe telescopes previously have shut down for multi-day or weeklong winter storms. \"So we're prepared to do that if we have to,\" Matsuda said.\n\nHilo resident Hayley Hina Barcia worries about the difficulty of reaching west-side surf spots and relatives in different parts of the island.\n\n\"A lot of my family is on the Puna side and we have other family in Kona,\" Barcia said. \"We use this road to see each other, especially with the holidays coming up, to spend time, so we're looking to have to go several hours longer to go the south way or taking the north road.\"\n\nGeologists with the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said if Mauna Loa follows historical patterns, they expect the eruption, which began Sunday night, to continue for one to two weeks.\n\nSince then, traffic has clogged the road as people try to glimpse the lava. A handful of resulting accidents included a two-vehicle crash that sent two people to the hospital with \"not serious injuries,\" Hawaii Police Department spokesperson Denise Laitinen said.\n\nU.S. Rep. Ed Case and U.S. Rep. Kaiali'i Kahele sent a letter to President Joe Biden saying Hawaii County would need \"immediate help\" to keep island communities safe if lava flow blocks the highway. The two Hawaii Democrats noted that restricted access could hinder emergency services because one of the island's primary hospitals is on the east side."}
{"text": "# Chinese spaceship with 3 aboard docks with space station\nNovember 30, 2022. 12:35 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BEIJING (AP)** - Three Chinese astronauts docked early Wednesday with their country's space station, where they will overlap for several days with the three-member crew already onboard and expand the facility to its maximum size.\n\nDocking with the Tiangong station came at 5:42 a.m. Wednesday, about 6 1/2 hours after the Shenzhou-15 spaceship blasted off atop a Long March-2F carrier rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center.\n\nThe six-month mission, commanded by Fei Junlong and crewed by Deng Qingming and Zhang Lu, will be the last in the station's construction phase, according to the China Manned Space Agency. The station's third and final module docked earlier this month, one of the last steps in China's effort to maintain a constant crewed presence in orbit.\n\nThe crew of the Shenzhou-15 will spend several days working with the existing three-member crew of the Tiangong station, who will return to Earth after their six-month mission.\n\nFei, 57, is a veteran of the 2005 four-day Shenzhou-6 mission, the second time China sent a human into space. Deng and Zhang are making their first space flights.\n\nThe station has now expanded to its maximum size, with three modules and three spacecraft attached for a total mass of nearly 100 tons.\n\nTiangong can accommodate six astronauts at a time and the handover will take about a week. That marks the station's first in-orbit crew rotation.\n\nChina has not yet said what further work is needed to complete the station. Next year, it plans to launch the Xuntian space telescope, which, while not part of Tiangong, will orbit in sequence with the station and can dock occasionally with it for maintenance.\n\nWithout the attached spacecraft, the Chinese station weighs about 66 tons - a fraction of the International Space Station, which launched its first module in 1998 and weighs around 465 tons.\n\nWith a lifespan of 10 to 15 years, Tiangong could one day be the only space station still up and running if the International Space Station retires in the coming years as planned.\n\nWhile China's crewed space program is officially three decades old this year, it truly got underway in 2003, when China became only the third country after the U.S. and Russia to put a human into space using its own resources.\n\nThe program is run by the ruling Communist Party's military wing, the People's Liberation Army, and has proceeded almost entirely without outside support. The U.S. excluded China from the International Space Station because of its program's military ties, although China has engaged in limited cooperation with other nations' space agencies.\n\nChina has also chalked up uncrewed mission successes: Its Yutu 2 rover was the first to explore the little-known far side of the moon.\n\nChina's Chang'e 5 probe also returned lunar rocks to Earth in December 2020 for the first time since the 1970s, and another Chinese rover is searching for evidence of life on Mars.\n\nOfficials are reporting considering an eventual crewed mission to the moon, although no timeline has been offered, even as NASA presses ahead with its Artemis lunar exploration program that aims to send four astronauts around the moon in 2024 and land humans there as early as 2025.\n\nWhile proceeding smoothly for the most part, China's space program has also drawn controversy. Beijing brushed off complaints that it has allowed rocket stages to fall to Earth uncontrolled after NASA accused it of \"failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris.\" In that case, parts of a Chinese rocket landed in the Indian Ocean.\n\nChina is also reportedly developing a highly secret space plane and its increasing space capabilities feature in the latest Pentagon defense strategy, which said the program was a component of China's \"holistic approach to joint warfare.\""}
{"text": "# Biden, Macron ready to talk Ukraine, trade in state visit\nBy **Aamer Madhani** and **Sylvie Corbet**  \nNovember 29, 2022. 8:33 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - French President Emmanuel Macron arrived in Washington on Tuesday for the first state visit of Joe Biden's presidency - a revival of diplomatic pageantry that had been put on hold because of the COVID-19 pandemic.\n\nThe Biden-Macron relationship had a choppy start. Macron briefly recalled France's ambassador to the United States last year after the White House announced a deal to sell nuclear submarines to Australia, undermining a contract for France to sell diesel-powered submarines.\n\nBut the relationship has turned around with Macron emerging as one of Biden's most forward-facing European allies in the Western response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. This week's visit - it will include Oval Office talks, a glitzy dinner, a news conference and more - comes at a critical moment for both leaders.\n\nThe leaders have a long agenda for their Thursday meeting at the White House, including Iran's nuclear program, China's increasing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific and growing concerns about security and stability in Africa's Sahel region, according to U.S. and French officials. But front and center during their Oval Office meeting will be Russia's war in Ukraine, as both Biden and Macron work to maintain economic and military support for Kyiv as it tries to repel Russian forces.\n\nThe visit also comes as both Washington and Paris are keeping an eye on China after protests broke out last weekend in several mainland cities and Hong Kong over Beijing's \"zero COVID\" strategy. At a red carpet arrival ceremony after landing in Washington on Tuesday evening, Macron ignored a shouted question from a reporter about whether he and Biden planned to discuss the China protests - the biggest show of public dissent in China in decades.\n\nIn Washington, Republicans are set to take control of the House, where GOP leader Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday following a meeting with Biden and fellow congressional leaders again vowed that Republicans will not write a \"blank check\" for Ukraine. Across the Atlantic, Macron's efforts to keep Europe united will be tested by the mounting costs of supporting Ukraine in the nine-month war and as Europe battles rising energy prices that threaten to derail the post-pandemic economic recovery.\n\nWhite House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on Monday described Macron as the \"dynamic leader\" of America's oldest ally while explaining Biden's decision to honor the French president with the first state visit of his presidency.\n\nThe U.S. tradition of honoring foreign heads of state dates back to Ulysses S. Grant, who hosted King David Kalakaua of the Kingdom of Hawaii for a more than 20-course White House dinner, but the tradition has been on hold since 2019 because of COVID-19 concerns.\n\n\"If you look at what's going on in Ukraine, look at what's going on in the Indo Pacific and the tensions with China, France is really at the center of all those things,\" Kirby said. \"And so the president felt that this was exactly the right and the most appropriate country to start with for state visits.\"\n\nMacron was also Republican Donald Trump's pick as the first foreign leader to be honored with a state visit during his term. The 2018 state visit included a jaunt by the two leaders to Mount Vernon, the Virginia estate of George Washington, America's founding president.\n\nFrench government spokesperson Olivier Veran said Tuesday that Macron's second state visit is \"a strong symbol of the partnership between France and the United States.\" It shows \"very strong ties\" between the countries and comes at a moment where the world is faced with important international issues, including the war in Ukraine, food security, climate and energy, he said.\n\nVeran added that there is a need for \"re-synchronizing\" the agendas of the European Union and the United States to face crises, especially on energy and rising prices.\n\nMacron has a packed day of meetings and appearances in and around Washington on Wednesday - including a visit to NASA headquarters with Vice President Kamala Harris and talks with Biden administration officials on nuclear energy.\n\nOn Thursday, Macron will have his private meeting with Biden followed by a joint news conference and visits to the State Department and Capitol Hill before Macron and his wife, Brigitte Macron, are feted at the state dinner. Grammy winner Jon Batiste is to provide the entertainment. The White House prepared for days for Macron's arrival, setting up a large tent for the festivities on the South Lawn and decorating light poles bordering the White House complex with French flags.\n\nMacron will head to New Orleans on Friday, where he is to announce plans to expand programming to support French language education in U.S. schools, according to French officials.\n\nFor all of that, there are still areas of tension in the U.S.-French relationship.\n\nBiden has steered clear of embracing Macron's calls on Ukraine to resume peace talks with Russia, something Biden has repeatedly said is a decision solely in the hands of Ukraine's leadership.\n\nPerhaps more pressing are differences that French and other European Union leaders have raised about Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, sweeping legislation passed in August that includes historic spending on climate and energy initiatives. Macron and other leaders have been rankled by a provision in the bill that provides tax credits to consumers who buy electric vehicles manufactured in North America.\n\nThe French president, in making his case against the subsidies, will underscore that it's crucial for \"Europe, like the U.S., to come out stronger ... not weaker\" as the world emerges from the tumult of the pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, according to a senior French government official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity to preview private talks.\n\nMacron earlier this month said the subsidies could upend the \"level playing field\" on trade with the EU and called aspects of the Biden legislation \"unfriendly.\"\n\nThe White House, meanwhile, plans to counter that the legislation goes a long way in helping the U.S. meet global efforts to curb climate change. The president and aides will also impress on the French that the legislation will also create new opportunities for French companies and others in Europe, according to a senior Biden administration official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity to preview the talks.\n\nMacron's visit comes about 14 months after the relationship hit its nadir after the U.S. announced its deal to sell nuclear submarines to Australia.\n\nAfter the announcement of the deal, which had been negotiated in secret, France briefly recalled its ambassador to Washington. A few weeks later Macron met Biden in Rome ahead of the Group of 20 summit, where the U.S. president sought to patch things up by acknowledging his administration had been \"clumsy\" in how it handled the issue.\n\nMacron's visit with Harris to NASA headquarters on Wednesday will offer the two countries a chance to spotlight their cooperation on space.\n\nFrance in June signed the Artemis Accords, a blueprint for space cooperation supporting NASA's plans to return humans to the moon by 2024 and to launch a historic human mission to Mars.\n\nThe same month, the U.S. joined a French initiative to develop new tools for adapting to climate change, the Space for Climate Observatory."}
{"text": "# China rocket taking 3 to space station to blast off Tuesday\nNovember 28, 2022. 2:54 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BEIJING (AP)** - A rocket carrying three astronauts to finish building China's space station will blast off Tuesday amid intensifying competition with the U.S., the government said Monday,\n\nThe crew includes a veteran of a 2005 space mission and two first-time astronauts, according to the China Manned Space Agency.\n\nThe Shenzhou-15 mission will take off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the edge of the Gobi Desert at 11:08 p.m. Tuesday night, the agency said. A Long March-2F carrier rocket, China's standard workhorse for crewed missions, will be used to sling it into space, it said.\n\nThe six-month mission, commanded by Fei Junlong and crewed by Deng Qingming and Zhang Lu, will be the last \"in the construction phase of China's space station,\" agency official Ji Qiming told reporters Monday.\n\nFei, 57, is a veteran of the 2005 four-day Shenzhou-6 mission, the second time China sent a human into space. Deng and Zhang are making their first space flights.\n\nThe station's third and final module docked with the station earlier this month, one of the last steps in China's more than decade-long effort to maintain a constant crewed presence in orbit.\n\nThe astronauts will overlap briefly onboard the station, named Tiangong, with the previous crew, who arrived in early June for a six-month stay.\n\nAfter the Shenzhou-15 spaceship makes an automated docking with the Tianhe core modules' front port, the station will be expanded to its maximum size, with three modules and three spaceships for a total mass of nearly 100 tons, Ji said.\n\nIt will also be at maximum capacity for several days. Tiangong has room to accommodate six astronauts at a time and the handover will take about a week. Previous missions to the space station have taken about 13 hours from liftoff to docking.\n\nNext year, China plans to launch the Xuntian space telescope, which, while not part of Tiangong, will orbit in sequence with the station and can dock occasionally with it for maintenance.\n\nNo other future additions to the space station have been publicly announced.\n\nThe permanent Chinese station weighs about 66 tons - a fraction of the International Space Station, which launched its first module in 1998 and weighs around 465 tons.\n\nWith a lifespan of 10 to 15 years, Tiangong could one day find itself the only space station still running if the International Space Station adheres to its 30-year operating plan.\n\nChina's crewed space program is officially three decades old this year, but it truly got underway in 2003, when China became only the third country after the U.S. and Russia to put a human into space using its own resources.\n\nThe program is run by the ruling Communist Party's military wing, the People's Liberation Army, and has proceeded methodically and almost entirely without outside support. The U.S. excluded China from the International Space Station because of its program's military ties.\n\nChina has also chalked up successes with uncrewed missions, and its lunar exploration program generated media buzz last year when its Yutu 2 rover sent back pictures of what was described by some as a \"mystery hut\" but was most likely only a rock. The rover is the first to be placed on the little-explored far side of the moon.\n\nChina's Chang'e 5 probe returned lunar rocks to Earth for the first time since the 1970s in December 2000 and another Chinese rover is searching for evidence of life on Mars. Officials are also considering a crewed mission to the moon.\n\nNo timeline has been offered for a crewed lunar mission, even as NASA presses ahead with its Artemis lunar exploration program that aims to send four astronauts around the moon in 2024 and land humans there as early as 2025.\n\nChina's space program has also drawn controversy. Beijing brushed off complaints that it has allowed rocket stages to fall to Earth uncontrolled after NASA accused it of \"failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris\" when parts of a Chinese rocket landed in the Indian Ocean.\n\nChina's increasing space capabilities also feature in the latest Pentagon defense strategy.\n\n\"In addition to expanding its conventional forces, the PLA is rapidly advancing and integrating its space, counterspace, cyber, electronic, and informational warfare capabilities to support its holistic approach to joint warfare,\" the strategy said.\n\nThe U.S. and China are at odds on a range of issues, especially self-governing Taiwan, which Beijing threatens to annex with force."}
{"text": "# NASA's Orion capsule enters far-flung orbit around moon\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nNovember 25, 2022. 6:12 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - NASA's Orion capsule entered an orbit stretching tens of thousands of miles around the moon Friday, as it neared the halfway mark of its test flight.\n\nThe capsule and its three test dummies entered lunar orbit more than a week after launching on the $4 billion demo that's meant to pave the way for astronauts. It will remain in this broad but stable orbit for nearly a week, completing just half a lap before heading home.\n\nAs of Friday's engine firing, the capsule was 238,000 miles (380,000 kilometers) from Earth. It's expected to reach a maximum distance of almost 270,000 miles (432,000 kilometers) in a few days. That will set a new distance record for a capsule designed to carry people one day.\n\n\"It is a statistic, but it's symbolic for what it represents,\" Jim Geffre, an Orion manager, said in a NASA interview earlier in the week. \"It's about challenging ourselves to go farther, stay longer and push beyond the limits of what we've previously explored.\"\n\nNASA considers this a dress rehearsal for the next moon flyby in 2024, with astronauts. A lunar landing by astronauts could follow as soon as 2025. Astronauts last visited the moon 50 years ago during Apollo 17.\n\nEarlier in the week, Mission Control in Houston lost contact with the capsule for nearly an hour. At the time, controllers were adjusting the communication link between Orion and the Deep Space Network. Officials said the spacecraft remained healthy."}
{"text": "# Company: Leak at Pennsylvania gas storage well plugged\nBy **MICHAEL BIESECKER**  \nNovember 20, 2022. 5:16 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThe operator of a natural gas storage well in Western Pennsylvania says workers have successfully plugged a leak that had been spewing massive amounts of planet-warming methane into the atmosphere for two weeks.\n\nEquitrans Midstream said the well at its Rager Mountain storage facility, located in a rural area about 1.5 hours east of Pittsburgh, was sealed shut with concrete on Sunday. The well had been venting about 100 million cubic feet of natural gas per day since Nov. 6, according to initial estimates.\n\nIf accurate, that would total more than 1.4 billion cubic feet in methane, equal to the greenhouse gas emissions from burning more than 7,200 tanker trucks of gasoline.\n\nPennsylvania environmental regulators have issued the company notice of five potential violations of state law.\n\nA written statement provided Sunday by Equitrans says the company had verified a 0% gas reading at and around the well. More than 250 feet of cement was pumped into the wellbore above two plugs to ensure venting does not recur, the company said.\n\nThe Rager facility is in Jackson Township, at the heart of the Marcellus Shale formation that has seen a boom in gas production since the introduction of hydraulic fracturing more than a decade ago. Residents living as four miles away from the leak told The Associated Press on Friday they could hear the roar of pressurized gas escaping from the well and smell the fumes.\n\nMethane, the primary component of natural gas, is colorless and odorless. But when the gas is processed for transport and sale, producers add a chemical called mercaptan to give it a distinctive \"rotten egg\" smell that helps make people aware of leaks.\n\nMethane's Earth-warming power is some 83 times stronger over 20 years than the carbon dioxide that comes from car tailpipes and power plant smokestacks. Oil and gas companies are the top industrial emitters of methane, which, once released into the atmosphere, will be disrupting the climate for decades, contributing to more heat waves, hurricanes, wildfires and floods.\n\nThe leak came as the Environmental Protection Agency on Nov. 11 updated proposed new rules intended to cut methane and other harmful emissions from oil and gas operations.\n\nThe citations issued against the company by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection include failures to properly maintain and operate the gas facility, creating a public nuisance and producing a \"hazard to public health a safety.\" The company was also cited for failing to provide state inspectors \"free and unrestricted access.\""}
{"text": "# Boebert switches congressional districts, avoiding a Democratic opponent who has far outraised her\nBy **JESSE BEDAYN** and **NICHOLAS RICCARDI**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 10:23 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DENVER (AP)** - Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert announced Wednesday she is switching congressional districts, avoiding a likely rematch against a Democrat who has far outraised her and following an embarrassing moment of groping and vaping that shook even loyal supporters.\n\nIn a Facebook video Wednesday evening, Boebert announced she would enter the crowded Republican primary in retiring Rep. Ken Buck's seat in the eastern side of the state, leaving the more competitive 3rd District seat she barely won last year - and which she was in peril of losing next year as some in her party have soured on her controversial style.\n\nBoebert implied in the video that her departure from the district would help Republicans retain the seat, saying, \"I will not allow dark money that is directed at destroying me personally to steal this seat. It's not fair to the 3rd District and the conservatives there who have fought so hard for our victories.\"\n\n\"The Aspen donors, George Soros and Hollywood actors that are trying to buy this seat, well they can go pound sand,\" she said.\n\nBoebert called it \"a fresh start,\" acknowledging the rough year following a divorce with her husband and video of her misbehaving with a date at a performance of the musical \"Beetlejuice\" in Denver. The scandal in September rocked some of her faithful supporters, who saw it as a transgression of conservative, Christian values and for which Boebert apologized at events throughout her district.\n\nShe already faced a primary challenge in her district, as well as a general election face-off with Democrat Adam Frisch, a former Aspen city council member who came within a few hundred votes of beating her in 2022. A rematch was expected, with Frisch raising at least $7.7 million to Boebert's $2.4 million.\n\nInstead, if Boebert wins the primary to succeed Buck she will run in the state's most conservative district, which former President Donald Trump won by about 20 percentage points in 2020, in contrast to his margin of about 8 percentage points in her district. While it's not required that a representative live in the congressional district they represent, only the state the district is in, Boebert said she would be moving - a shift from Colorado's western Rocky Mountain peaks and high desert mesas to its eastern expanse of prairie grass and ranching enclaves.\n\nIn 2022, Frisch's campaign found support in the conservative district from unaffiliated voters and Republicans who'd defected over Boebert's brash, Trumpian style. In this election, Frisch's campaign had revived the slogan \"stop the circus\" and framed Frisch as the \"pro-normal\" alternative to Boebert's more partisan politics.\n\nIn a statement after Boebert's announcement, Frisch said he's prepared for whoever will be the Republican candidate.\n\n\"From Day 1 of this race, I have been squarely focused on defending rural Colorado's way of life, and offering common sense solutions to the problems facing the families of Colorado's 3rd Congressional District.\" he said. \"My focus will remain the same.\"\n\nThe Republican primary candidate who has raised the second most behind Boebert in the 3rd District, Jeff Hurd, is a more traditional Republican candidate. Hurd has already garnered support from prominent Republicans in the district, first reported by VailDaily.\n\nBoebert rocked the political world by notching a surprise primary win against the incumbent Republican congressman in the 3rd District in 2020 when she ran a gun-themed restaurant in the town of Rifle, Colorado. She then tried to enter the U.S. Capitol carrying a pistol and began to feud with prominent liberal Democrats like Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez."}
{"text": "# US announces new weapons package for Ukraine, as funds dwindle and Congress is stalled on aid bill\nBy **LOLITA C. BALDOR**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 6:51 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - The U.S. on Wednesday announced what officials say could be the final package of military aid to Ukraine unless Congress approves supplemental funding legislation that is stalled on Capitol Hill.\n\nThe weapons, worth up to $250 million, include an array of air munitions and other missiles, artillery, anti-armor systems, ammunition, demolition and medical equipment and parts. The aid, provided through the Presidential Drawdown Authority, will be pulled from Pentagon stockpiles.\n\nIn a statement, Marine Lt. Col. Garron Garn, a Pentagon spokesman said there is no more funding to replace the weapons taken from department stocks. And the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which provides long-term funding for future weapons contracts, is also out of money.\n\nAs a result, Garn said Wednesday, \"Without the supplemental funding, there will be a shortfall in replenishing U.S. military stocks, affecting American military readiness.\"\n\nPresident Joe Biden is urging Congress to pass a $110 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other national security needs. It includes $61.4 billion for Ukraine, with about half to replenish Pentagon stocks. It also includes about $14 billion for Israel as it fights Hamas and $14 billion for U.S. border security. Other funds would go for security needs in the Asia-Pacific.\n\nDue to an accounting error that overvalued some of the weapons sent to Ukraine over the past year or more, there is still about $4.2 billion in restored drawdown authority. But since the Pentagon has no money to replenish inventory sent to Kyiv, the department will have to \"rigorously assess\" any future aid and its implications on the U.S. military's ability to protect America, Garn said.\n\nThis is the 54th tranche of military aid taken from department shelves and sent to Ukraine, and it is similar in size and contents to many of the other recent packages.\n\nU.S. defense and government leaders have argued that the weapons are critical for Ukraine to maintain its defense and continue efforts to mount an offensive against Russian forces during the winter months.\n\nIn a Pentagon briefing last week, Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder noted the recent letter that the Defense Department comptroller sent to Congress warning that the U.S. will be using up the last of its replenishment funds by the end of the year.\n\n\"Once those funds are obligated, we will have exhausted the funding available for us to provide security assistance to Ukraine,\" said Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary. \"We would, again, continue to urge the passage of the supplemental that we've submitted. ... It is imperative that we have the funds needed to ensure that they get the most urgent battlefield capabilities that they require.\"\n\nThe latest aid package comes as the war in Ukraine drags on into its 22nd month. Russia fired almost 50 Shahed drones at targets in Ukraine and shelled a train station in the southern city of Kherson where more than 100 civilians were gathered to catch a train to Kyiv. And a day earlier, Ukrainian warplanes damaged a Russian ship moored in the Black Sea off Crimea as soldiers on both sides are struggling to make much progress along the front lines."}
{"text": "# How the US keeps funding Ukraine's military - even as it says it's out of money\nBy **LOLITA C. BALDOR**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 1:31 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - The White House has been increasingly pressuring Congress to pass stalled legislation to support Ukraine's war against Russia, saying that funding has run out.\n\nOn Tuesday, however, President Joe Biden touted a new military aid package worth $200 million for Ukraine.\n\nMoney is dwindling. But the announcement of more weapons being sent to Kyiv just underscores the complexity of the funding. So has the money run out? Or are there still a few billion dollars floating around?\n\nIt's complicated.\n\n## STORE CREDIT ...\nIn a Nov. 4 letter to Congress, White House budget director Shalanda Young said flatly: \"We are out of money to support Ukraine in this fight. This isn't a next year problem. The time to help a democratic Ukraine fight against Russian aggression is right now.\"\n\nSince then, the U.S. has announced three more aid packages totaling $475 million. That may seem contradictory, but it's due to the complex programs used to send aid to Ukraine.\n\nThere are two pots of money for weapons and security assistance set up specifically for the war. One is the Presidential Drawdown Authority, or PDA, under which the U.S. provides weapons already in its stockpile. The other is the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which funds long-term weapons contracts.\n\nMoney for USAI has all been spent. That pot is empty.\n\nAnd money for the PDA also appeared to be gone. But then the Pentagon determined that it had overstated the value of the weapons it had already sent Ukraine, overcharging the Ukraine weapons account by $6.2 billion. That effectively left Ukraine with a store credit that is slowly being whittled down. It now stands at around $4.4 billion.\n\nPDA packages continued to be announced every few weeks. But in recognition of the dwindling money, the latest packages have been smaller - about $200 million or less, compared with previous ones that often totaled $400 million to $500 million.\n\n## ... BUT EMPTY SHELVES\nIn theory, the Pentagon would have enough equipment to offer these smaller packages for months. But there's a caveat: While the credit exists, there may not be enough stock on the Pentagon shelves. So some weapons may be unavailable.\n\nCongressional funding to buy weapons to replace the ones the U.S. sends to Ukraine is now down to about $1 billion. That dwindling money means the military services are worried they won't be able to buy all the weapons they need to ensure the U.S. military is ready to defend the American homeland.\n\nFor example, the 155 mm rounds commonly used by Howitzers are one of the most requested artillery munitions by Kyiv. The demand has been so high that the Army has pressed the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in Pennsylvania, where the shell casings for the rounds are made, to increase production in order to meet war demands and have enough on hand for American military needs.\n\nOn Thursday, Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, told reporters the U.S. could provide the full $4.4 billion in weapons, but with only a quarter of that amount available for replenishment, it's a tough choice. \"We have to start to make decisions about our own readiness,\" he said.\n\n## THE POLITICAL WRANGLING\nThe U.S. has already sent Ukraine $111 billion in weapons, equipment, humanitarian assistance and other aid since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion more than 21 months ago. But the latest package is stalled.\n\nSupport for Ukraine funding has been waning as some lawmakers see the war taking funding from domestic needs. But the broader problem is a political battle over the southern U.S. border.\n\nPresident Joe Biden is urging Congress to pass a $110 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other national security needs. It includes $61.4 billion for Ukraine, with about half to replenish Pentagon stocks. It also includes about $14 billion for Israel as it fights Hamas and $14 billion for U.S. border security. Other funds would go for security needs in the Asia-Pacific.\n\nProspects for compromise remain in doubt, even as Zelenskyy warned in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington on Monday that, \"If there's anyone inspired by unresolved issues on Capitol Hill, it's just Putin and his sick clique.\"\n\n## THE JOBS ARGUMENT\nHarkening back to the \"all politics is local\" idea, the Pentagon and the White House have rolled out maps and statistics to show members of Congress how their own districts and states are reaping benefits from the Ukraine funding.\n\nCharts detail $10 billion in industry contracts for weapons ranging from air defense systems and missiles to a wide array of drones, ammunition and other equipment. And they break out an additional nearly $16.8 billion in contracts to replenish Pentagon stocks.\n\nThe maps show contracts benefitting industries and companies in more than 35 different states. And U.S. officials are hoping the local jobs argument will help build support for the funding.\n\n## HOW BIG IS THE NEED?\nWinter has set in, so the fighting in Ukraine has leveled off a bit. And along stretches of the battlefront, fighting is somewhat stalemated.\n\nBut Ukrainian forces have been taking ground back in some key locations, and Zelenskyy and other leaders have said they want to keep pushing forward. Ukraine does not want to give the Russians weeks or months this winter to reset and further solidify their fighting positions - as they did last winter.\n\nDuring his visit to Washington this week, Zelenskyy said his forces are making progress, and the White House pointed to newly declassified intelligence that shows Ukraine has inflicted heavy losses on Russia in recent fighting around the eastern city of Avdiivka - including 13,000 casualties and over 220 combat vehicles lost. The Ukrainian holdout in the country's partly occupied east has been the center of some of the fiercest fighting in recent weeks.\n\nPutin on Thursday, however, said his troops are making gains.\n\n\"Almost all along the line of contact our armed forces, let's put it modestly, are improving their positions, almost all are in an active stage of action and there is an improvement in the position of our troops all along,\" he said."}
{"text": "# A Russian drone and artillery attack kills 6 in Ukraine and knocks out power in a major city\nBy **HANNA ARHIROVA**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 3:10 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**KYIV, Ukraine (AP)** - Russia fired almost 50 Shahed drones at targets in Ukraine and shelled a train station where more than 100 civilians were gathered to catch a train to Kyiv, Ukrainian officials said Wednesday. The barrages killed at least five people and knocked out power in most of the southern city of Kherson.\n\nThe aerial barrage came a day after Ukrainian warplanes damaged a Russian ship moored in the Black Sea off Crimea as both sides' soldiers struggle to make much progress along the front line of the 22-month war.\n\nOvernight, the Kremlin's forces launched an artillery and drone bombardment of the Kherson region just as some 140 civilians were waiting for a train at the region's capital city of the same name, according to Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko. The shelling killed one policeman and injured two other police officers, as well as two civilians.\n\nMore than 100 people who were waiting for the train at the time of the attack arrived in Kyiv on Wednesday morning, national rail operator Ukrzaliznytsia said.\n\nThe attack on the Kherson region and its capital hit residential areas and a mall as well as striking the power grid, leaving around 70% of households in Kherson city without electricity during the winter cold, regional Gov. Oleksandr Prokudin said.\n\nIt was not immediately possible to estimate when power might be restored, he said.\n\nTargeting energy infrastructure was also a Russian tactic last winter, when it tried to break Ukrainians' spirit by denying them heating and running water.\n\nIn Odesa, another major city in southern Ukraine, the drone assault killed two people and wounded three, including a 17-year-old man, regional Gov. Oleh Kiper said.\n\nUkraine's air force said it intercepted 32 out of the 46 drones that Russia fired overnight.\n\nA Western military assessment, meanwhile, reckoned that Russia's capture this week of a city in eastern Ukraine would not provide it with a springboard for major battlefield gains.\n\nUkrainian commander-in-chief Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi said Tuesday that his troops had retreated to the northern outskirts of the city of Marinka, which sits about 20 kilometers (12 miles) west of Donetsk, the largest city in Russian-held territory.\n\nZaluzhnyi said his troops had held Marinka for almost two years but Russians \"were destroying it street by street, house by house.\"\n\nThe Institute for the Study of War, a think tank, said, \"Russian forces are highly unlikely to make rapid operational advances from Marinka.\"\n\nBut it noted that \"localized Russian offensive operations are still placing pressure on Ukrainian forces in many places along the front in eastern Ukraine.\"\n\nAmid concerns that weapons supplies from abroad could diminish as allies become fatigued with the war, Ukraine's minister of strategic industries told a briefing on Wednesday that the defense sector aims to increase production significantly next year and that production was three times higher in 2023 than in the previous year.\n\nOleksandr Kamyshin said Ukraine is now producing six Bohdana self-propelled artillery units per month. Bohdanas are a strategically important weapon for the Ukrainian defense industry as they are the only Ukrainian-produced self-propelled gun using NATO-standard 155mm rounds instead of the 152mm rounds used by artillery based on Soviet technology.\n\nKamyshin also said the country next year aims to produce up to 1,000 long-range strike drones - which have a range of about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) - an increase from only a few dozen a month currently. It is also targeting production of 10,000 middle-range and 1,000 long-range strike drones."}
{"text": "# Trump ballot ban appealed to US Supreme Court by Colorado Republican Party\nBy **NICHOLAS RICCARDI**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 9:24 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DENVER (AP)** - The Colorado Republican Party on Wednesday appealed that state's supreme court decision that found former President Donald Trump is ineligible for the presidency, the potential first step to a showdown at the nation's highest court over the meaning of a 155-year-old constitutional provision that bans from office those who \"engaged in insurrection.\"\n\nThe first impact of the appeal is to extend the stay of the 4-3 ruling from Colorado's highest court, which put its decision on pause until Jan. 4, the day before the state's primary ballots are due at the printer, or until an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is finished. Trump himself has said he still plans to appeal the ruling to the nation's highest court as well.\n\nThe U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was added after the Civil War to prevent former Confederates from returning to government. It says that anyone who swore an oath to \"support\" the constitution and then \"engaged in insurrection\" against it cannot hold government office.\n\nThe Colorado high court ruled that applies to Trump in the wake of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, intended to stop the certification of President Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election. It was the first time in history that the provision was used to block a presidential contender's campaign.\n\n\"The Colorado Supreme Court has removed the leading Republican candidate from the primary and general ballots, fundamentally changing the course of American democracy,\" the party's attorneys wrote. The filing was posted on the website of a group run by Jay Sekulow, a former attorney for Trump representing the Colorado Republican Party who announced he was filing the appeal Wednesday. Colorado Republican Party chairman Dave Williams also said the appeal was filed Wednesday.\n\nThe attorneys added: \"Unless the Colorado Supreme Court's decision is overturned, any voter will have the power to sue to disqualify any political candidate, in Colorado or in any other jurisdiction that follows its lead. This will not only distort the 2024 presidential election but will also mire courts henceforth in political controversies over nebulous accusations of insurrection.\"\n\nThe U.S. Supreme Court is expected to take the case, either after the Colorado GOP's appeal or Trump's own appeal. If Trump ends up off the ballot in Colorado, it would have minimal effect on his campaign because he doesn't need the state, which he lost by 13 percentage points in 2020, to win the Electoral College in the presidential election. But it could open the door to courts or election officials striking him from the ballot in other must-win states.\n\nSean Grimsley, an attorney for the plaintiffs seeking to disqualify Trump in Colorado, said on a legal podcast last week that he hopes the nation's highest court hurries once it accepts the case, as he expects it will. \"We obviously are going to ask for an extremely accelerated timeline because of all the reasons I've stated, we have a primary coming up on Super Tuesday and we need to know the answer,\" Grimsley said.\n\nMore than a dozen states, including Colorado, are scheduled to hold primaries March 5 - Super Tuesday.\n\nTo date, no other court has sided with those who have filed dozens of lawsuits to disqualify Trump under Section 3, nor has any election official been willing to remove him from the ballot unilaterally without a court order.\n\nThe Colorado case was considered the one with the greatest chance of success, however, because it was filed by a Washington D.C.-based liberal group with ample legal resources. All seven of the Colorado high court justices were appointed by Democrats.\n\nHowever, the unprecedented constitutional questions in the case haven't split on neatly partisan lines. Several prominent conservative legal theorists are among the most vocal advocates of disqualifying Trump under Section 3. They argue the plain meaning of the constitutional language bars him from running again, just as clearly as if he didn't meet the document's minimum age of 35 for the presidency.\n\nThe half-dozen plaintiffs in the Colorado case are all Republican or unaffiliated voters.\n\nTrump has been scathing about the cases, calling them \"election interference.\" He continued that on Wednesday as he cheered a ruling earlier that day by the Michigan Supreme Court leaving him on the ballot, at least for the primary, in that state.\n\n\"The Colorado people have embarrassed our nation with what they did,\" Trump said on Sean Hannity's radio show."}
{"text": "# Pro-Palestinian protesters block airport access roads in New York, Los Angeles\nBy **JAKE OFFENHARTZ**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 7:14 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Pro-Palestinian protesters briefly blocked entrance roads to airports in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday, snarling traffic as U.S. airlines contended with a rush of holiday travel.\n\nThe demonstrations stopped cars on the outskirts of New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, where some travelers set off on foot to bypass the jammed roadway, as well as Los Angeles International Airport. A total of 62 people were arrested during the two protests, police said.\n\nIn New York, activists locked arms and held banners demanding an end to the Israel-Hamas war and expanded rights for Palestinians, bringing traffic to a standstill on the Van Wyck Expressway leading up to the airport for about 20 minutes.\n\nVideo posted to social media showed passengers, some carrying suitcases, leaving vehicles behind and stepping over barriers onto the highway median.\n\nTwenty-six people in the protest were arrested for disorderly conduct and impeding vehicular traffic, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey dispatched two buses to help travelers caught in the backup reach the airport, agency spokesperson Steve Burns said.\n\nAround the same time as the New York protest, a major thoroughfare leading to the Los Angeles airport was shut down by another group of pro-Palestinian protesters, who dragged traffic cones, trash bins, scooters and debris into the lanes, according to news helicopter footage.\n\nIn a statement, the Los Angeles Police Department accused protesters of throwing a police officer to the ground and \"attacking uninvolved passerbys in their vehicles,\" without providing further details about either incident.\n\nThe group appeared to flee when police arrived, though the Los Angeles Police Department said traffic around the airport remained impacted roughly two hours after the demonstration was declared unlawful.\n\nA spokesperson for the LAPD said 35 people were arrested for rioting and one person was arrested for battery of a police officer. No officers were injured, according to the spokesperson. An estimated 215,000 passengers and 87,000 vehicles were expected to pass through the Los Angeles airport on Wednesday.\n\nSince the Israel-Hamas war erupted on Oct. 7, near nightly protests have broken out in cities across the United States. In New York, pro-Palestinian organizers have responded to the growing death toll in Gaza with escalating actions aimed at disrupting some of the city's best-known events, including the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and the annual tree-lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center.\n\nAt a news conference Tuesday, New York City Mayor Eric Adams criticized some of the protest organizers' tactics and suggested police may need to ramp up their response.\n\n\"I don't believe that people should be able to just take over our streets and march in our streets,\" he said. \"I don't believe people should be able to take over our bridges. I just don't believe you can run a city this complex where people can just do whatever they want.\""}
{"text": "# Danny Masterson sent to state prison to serve sentence for rape convictions, mug shot released\nDecember 27, 2023. 7:04 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DELANO, Calif. (AP)** - \"That '70s Show\" actor Danny Masterson has been sent to a California state prison to serve his sentence for two rape convictions.\n\nAuthorities said Wednesday that the 47-year-old Masterson has been admitted to North Kern State Prison, and they released his first prison mug shot. The photo shows him wearing orange prison attire, with long hair and a beard.\n\nIn June, Masterson was convicted of raping two women in his Los Angeles home in 2003. In September, a judge sentenced him to 30 years to life in prison. His wife, actor Bijou Phillips, filed for divorce in the weeks that followed after a marriage of nearly 12 years.\n\nHe had been held in Los Angeles County jail in the months since while post-sentencing hearings were held and issues resolved, including the turnover of all the guns Masterson owned, some of which had to be located.\n\nIt will be more than 25 years before Masterson will be eligible for parole.\n\nMasterson's lawyers said they plan to appeal the conviction."}
{"text": "# Argument over Christmas gifts turns deadly as 14-year-old kills his older sister, deputies say\nDecember 27, 2023. 7:01 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LARGO, Fla. (AP)** - A Florida woman holding her 11-month-old son in a baby carrier was fatally shot by her 14-year-old brother while trying to defuse an argument over Christmas gifts he was having with a 15-year-old brother who also was armed, authorities said.\n\nThe 15-year-old brother then shot his 14-year-old brother, though not fatally, for killing their sister on Sunday in Largo, Florida, which is located in the Tampa metro area, the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office said in a news release.\n\nThe argument over gifts started while the three siblings were Christmas shopping with their mother and the sister's two sons, ages 6 and 11 months. It continued when they went to their grandmother's house where the sister, 23, told the younger brother to stop arguing with his older brother since it was Christmas Eve. The younger brother then told his sister he was going to shoot her and her infant, and then he shot her in the chest, the sheriff's office said.\n\nThe older brother then shot his younger brother outside the home because of what he had done to their sister and he fled the home, tossing his firearm in a nearby yard, authorities said. He was taken to a mental health facility after he was located since he had threatened to harm himself. Once he is released from the mental health facility, he will be taken to a juvenile detention center, the news release said.\n\nThe 14-year-old brother was charged with first-degree murder, child abuse and for possessing a firearm as a delinquent. His 15-year-old brother was charged with attempted first-degree murder and tampering with evidence, the sheriff's office said.\n\nThere was no court docket available online to indicate whether either of the teens had an attorney who could comment."}
{"text": "# A woman who burned Wyoming's only full-service abortion clinic is ordered to pay $298,000\nBy **MEAD GRUVER**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 2:30 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP)** - A judge has ordered a woman who set fire to Wyoming's only full-service abortion clinic to pay nearly $300,000 in restitution, the full amount sought by prosecutors.\n\nLorna Green is serving five years in prison for burning Wellspring Health Access weeks before the clinic was set to open in Casper in 2022. The fire gutted the building while it was being renovated for the new clinic and delayed its opening by almost a year.\n\nAfter opening this past April, Wellspring is now the only abortion clinic in Wyoming. A clinic in Jackson that provided pill abortions closed Dec. 15 due to rising costs.\n\nOn Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Alan Johnson ordered Green, 22, to pay about $298,000 in restitution including $240,000 to Nationwide General Insurance Company, the clinic's insurer.\n\nGreen must also pay $33,500 to the building's owner, Christine Lichtenfels, and $24,500 to Julie Burkhart, founder and president of Wellspring Health Access. Burkhart expressed satisfaction with the restitution.\n\n\"Not only did we have the emotional struggle and that trauma from the arson but also it was quite challenging for us financially. So I'm glad this is the final piece and it has been put to rest,\" Burkhart said Wednesday.\n\nThe restitution was identical to the amounts sought by prosecutors and unopposed by Green's attorney, Ryan Semerad, who in an emailed statement said Wednesday that Green \"looks forward to a productive and peaceful life after her term of incarceration.\"\n\nGreen has expressed remorse for the crime, which she said was driven by anxiety and nightmares about the planned clinic. The Casper College mechanical engineering student had shown no sign of anti-abortion views on social media but told investigators she opposed abortion.\n\nShe admitted driving from Laramie to Casper, breaking into the clinic through a door and lighting gasoline she poured in trays and splashed on the floor. After months of little progress, investigators increased the reward to $15,000 and got tips leading to Green's arrest in March.\n\nGreen pleaded guilty in June to arson and in September received the minimum prison sentence. She had faced up to 20 years in prison.\n\nThe arson and eventual opening of the clinic happened as new laws in Wyoming seek to ban abortion in nearly all cases. The laws, including the nation's first explicit ban on abortion pills, have been put on hold by a judge amid a lawsuit filed by four women and two nonprofits including Wellspring Health Access.\n\nAfter hearing arguments in the lawsuit Dec. 14, Wyoming District Judge Melissa Owens is weighing whether to rule on the laws. Her decision would likely be appealed, putting Wyoming's abortion laws before the state Supreme Court."}
{"text": "# Students in Indonesia protest the growing numbers of Rohingya refugees in Aceh province\nBy **YAYAN ZAMZAMI**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 10:04 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (AP)** - Students in Indonesia's Aceh province rallied on Wednesday, demanding the government drive away Rohingya refugees who have been arriving by sea in growing numbers. The protest came as police named more suspects in human trafficking of refugees.\n\nOver 1,500 Rohingya - who fled violent attacks in Myanmar to subsequently leave overcrowded refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh in search of a better life elsewhere - have arrived in Aceh, on the tip of the island of Sumatra, since November. They have faced some hostility from fellow Muslims in Aceh.\n\nAbout 200 students protested in front of the provincial parliament in Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh, calling on lawmakers to turn away the Rohingyas, saying their presence would bring social and economic upheaval to the community.\n\n\"Get out Rohingya,\" the protesters chanted. Many criticized the government and the U.N. refugee agency for failing to manage the refugee arrivals. Some protesters burned tires on the street.\n\n\"We urged the parliament speaker to immediately take a firm action to remove all Rohingya refugees from Aceh,\" said Teuku Wariza, one of the protest organizers.\n\nThe protesters marched to a local community hall in Banda Aceh, where about 137 Rohingya are taking shelter. The demonstrators threw out clothes and household items belonging to the refugees, forcing authorities to relocate them to another shelter.\n\nFootages obtained by The Associated Press shows a large group of refugees, mostly women and children, crying and screaming as a mob, wearing university green jackets, is seen breaking through a police cordon and forcibly putting the Rohingya on the back of two trucks.\n\nThe incident drew an outcry from human rights group and the UNHCR, which said the attack left the refugees shocked and traumatized.\n\n\"UNHCR reminds everyone that desperate refugee children, women and men seeking shelter in Indonesia are victims of persecution and conflict, and are survivors of deadly sea journeys,\" the agency said in a statement released late Wednesday.\n\nThe statement called on local authorities to urgently act to protect the refugees and humanitarian workers.\n\nIndonesia had once tolerated the refugees while Thailand and Malaysia pushed them away. But the growing hostility of some Indonesians toward the Rohingya has put pressure on President Joko Widodo's government to take action.\n\nWidodo earlier this month said the government suspected a surge in human trafficking for the increase in Rohingya arrivals.\n\nAlso Wednesday, police in Banda Aceh named two more suspected human smugglers from Bangladesh and Myanmar, following the Dec. 10 arrival of another boat with refugees. One of the suspects, the boat's captain, himself a refugee, was charged with trafficking.\n\n\"This is not an easy issue, this is an issue with enormous challenges,\" Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi told reporters.\n\nAbout 740,000 Rohingya were resettled in Bangladesh after fleeing their homes in Myanmar to escape a brutal counterinsurgency campaign carried out in 2017 by security forces. Accusations of mass rape, murder and the burning of entire villages are well documented, and international courts are considering whether Myanmar authorities committed genocide and other grave human rights abuses.\n\nEfforts to repatriate the Rohingya have failed because of doubts their safety can be assured. The Rohingya are largely denied citizenship rights in Buddhist-majority Myanmar and face widespread social discrimination."}
{"text": "# Denver Broncos bench QB Russell Wilson and will turn to Jarrett Stidham\nBy **ARNIE MELENDREZ STAPLETON**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 7:08 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ENGLEWOOD, Colo. (AP)** - The Denver Broncos are benching quarterback Russell Wilson in a move that could have major ramifications for both his future and theirs.\n\nAlthough the move keeps open the team's options next year and could ultimately save the Broncos $37 million, coach Sean Payton on Wednesday called the switch to journeyman Jarrett Stidham more of a football decision than a financial one.\n\n\"I understand all the speculation and everything that surrounds a move like that, and I can tell you we're desperately trying to win,\" Payton said. \"Sure, in our game today there are economics and all those other things, but the No. 1 push behind this ... is to get a spark offensively.\"\n\nThe Broncos (7-8) have a narrow path to the playoffs. They'd have to win out and Kansas City (9-5) would have to lose out for Denver to make the playoffs for the first time since the 2015 season.\n\nPayton said the entire offensive operation, himself included, has been deficient and this move isn't meant as an indictment of Wilson alone.\n\n\"I can't replace the entire offensive line, I can't bring in five new receivers,\" Payton said, \"and if it continues over a period of time, then there'll be another guy here talking to you, as well.\"\n\nPayton and Wilson have always been a clash of styles and two weeks ago Payton berated his QB on the sideline while Wilson patiently listened without response.\n\nGoing with a journeyman with two NFL starts in his five-year career over a Super Bowl champion who was the fastest QB in league history to 100 wins could backfire on Payton.\n\n\"There's always risk but as a head coach you've got to make some tough decisions and they're not always going to be right,\" Payton said. \"So, you trust your instincts and you go by what you feel and those have been good for me over the years.\"\n\nStidham will start Sunday when the Broncos host the Los Angeles Chargers (5-10) and in all likelihood start at Las Vegas in the season finale, too.\n\nIt's a remarkably similar situation to last year when Stidham started the Raiders' final two games after the team benched Derek Carr in a business decision and sent him home.\n\nThis circumstance in Denver differs from the Raiders' situation a year ago because the Broncos will dress Wilson, who could theoretically get into the game Sunday.\n\nIf Wilson doesn't play another down this season, however, the Broncos will have kept open their options in 2024 - although his five-year, $242.6 million contract extension that kicks in next season carries massive dead money chargers over the next two years if Denver decides to part ways with Wilson.\n\nWilson's $39 million salary for next season is already guaranteed but if he's on the roster March 17, his 2025 salary of $37 million also becomes guaranteed. Because injured players cannot be cut, the Broncos would be on the hook for that 2025 salary if Wilson gets hurt and can't pass his spring physical.\n\nThat's the reason the Raiders sent Carr home a year ago.\n\nPayton insisted no determination has been made about Wilson's future in Denver, although it will be hard to move on from him because of the salary cap hit the Broncos would absorb.\n\nIf the Broncos release Wilson after June 1, they'd owe him his $39 million salary for next season and they'd owe $85 million in dead money spread over two years, which would seriously handicap their roster building and force Payton to find a bargain solution at quarterback, something that could be difficult with a middling group of free agent QBs in 2024.\n\nTrading Wilson before June 1 would leave the Broncos with $68 million in dead money next season unless the acquiring team would pay his $22 million option bonus.\n\nThe Broncos, who have traded away three first- and three second-round picks to acquire Wilson and Payton, have just six selections in next April's draft and no second-rounders.\n\nThey'll likely be picking in the teens, too, when the four QBs projected as first-rounders - USC's Caleb Williams, North Carolina's Drake Maye, LSU's Jayden Daniels and J.J. McCarthy, should he leave Michigan - figure to be long gone by the time the Broncos are on the clock.\n\nWilson made a brief appearance at his locker Wednesday, but the team said he won't address his benching until Friday.\n\nAfter the Broncos lost to the Patriots on Christmas Eve, Wilson was asked about his future in Denver and said, \"I came here to win a championship for us and to find a way to do that. I obviously love being here with these guys, these teammates. I'm excited to keep playing ball and playing hard for us.\"\n\nWilson has rebounded from an awful 2023 season when he threw a career-low 16 touchdown passes to go with 11 interceptions. This year, his 26 TD throws rank sixth in the league and he has eight interceptions.\n\nWilson is just 11-19 as Denver's starter since the blockbuster trade brought him over from Seattle last year. The Seahawks are 17-16 since then and reached the NFC playoffs last season behind Wilson's former backup, Geno Smith.\n\nPayton called each QB into his office Wednesday to notify them of the switch. He said Wilson was disappointed but had responded like a true pro.\n\nStidham, who signed a two-year, $10 million deal with Denver last offseason, worked with the starters Wednesday for the first time save for a handful of snaps he took at Detroit two weeks ago.\n\n\"To get a true evaluation and see what he can do, I mean, he needs to play,\" Payton said. \"But I'm hopeful he gives us a spark.\""}
{"text": "# Amazon Prime ads on movies and TV shows will begin in late January\nBy **Associated Press**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 4:52 PM EST\n\n---\n\nIf you are an Amazon Prime Video user, get ready to see ads on movies and TV shows starting next month.\n\nPrime will include ads beginning on Jan. 29, the company said in an email to U.S. members this week, setting a date for an announcement it made back in September. Prime members who want to keep their movies and TV shows ad-free will have to pay an additional $2.99.\n\nAmazon is also planning to include advertisements in its Prime service in the United Kingdom and other European countries, as well as Canada, Mexico and Australia next year.\n\nThe tech giant follows other major streamers -- such as Netflix and Disney -- who have embraced a dual model that allows them to earn revenue from ads and also offer subscribers the option to opt out with a higher fee.\n\nAmazon said in its email that it will \"aim to have meaningfully fewer ads\" than traditional TV and other streaming providers.\n\nThe ads, the company said, \"will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time.\""}
{"text": "# Kevin Durant has 18th career triple-double, Suns beat Rockets 129-113 to end losing streak\nDecember 27, 2023. 10:43 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**HOUSTON (AP)** - Kevin Durant had 27 points, 10 rebounds and a career-high 16 assists for his 18th career triple-double, helping the Phoenix Suns beat the Houston Rockets 129-113 on Wednesday night to snap a three-game losing streak.\n\nDurant was 9 of 16 from the field and also had two steals and a block in Phoenix's first road victory since Nov. 26. The Suns improved to 15-15.\n\nEric Gordon matched Durant with 27 points in his first game back in Houston since being traded in February. He scored 17 points in the Suns' 43-point second quarter en route to a 73-55 halftime lead. Devin Booker added 20 points, and Grayson Allen had 16.\n\nAlperen Sengun led Houston with 24 points, and Jalen Green added 23 with a season-high six 3-pointers. The Rockets are 15-14.\n\nPhoenix shot 76% in the second quarter to push its lead to 20, and 12 was the closest the Rockets would get in the second half.\n\nJabari Smith Jr scored nine points for Houston before leaving in the third quarter because of a sprained left ankle sprain. A night earlier, the Rockets lost Dillon Brooks to an oblique strain, which forced him to miss a game for the first time this season.\n\n## UP NEXT\nSuns: Host Charlotte on Friday night.\n\nRockets: Host Philadelphia on Friday night."}
{"text": "# Shaylee Gonzales makes six 3s, leads No. 5 Texas past Jackson State 97-52\nBy **MARK ROSNER**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 10:31 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**AUSTIN, Texas (AP)** - Shaylee Gonzales matched a career high with six 3-pointers while scoring a season-best 21 points, and No. 5 Texas beat Jackson State 97-52 on Wednesday night while playing without star point guard Rori Harmon and leading scorer Taylor Jones.\n\nHarmon missed the game with an unspecified injury. She sat on the Longhorns' bench and walked with a limp.\n\nFreshman forward Madison Booker took over point guard duties, a role she usually performs as a backup, and finished with 16 points, a season-best nine assists and just one turnover in 32 minutes. Khadija Faye scored 14 points for Texas (13-0), and DeYona Gaston had 13 points and eight rebounds.\n\nAndriana Avent led Jackson State (5-6) with 11 points but was just 2 of 12 from the field. Angel Jackson had eight rebounds.\n\nGonzales finished 6 of 9 from 3-point range. She also had five assists.\n\nTexas shot 57% from the field, including 9 of 16 on 3s.\n\nJackson State, which has lost five straight, averages 18 offensive rebounds a game, third best in the country. The Tigers grabbed 24 against Texas, but converted them into only 11 points. They shot 24.2% for the game and committed 17 turnovers.\n\n## HARMON'S IMPACT\nHarmon averages 14.1 points, 7.8 assists and 5.6 rebounds. She ranks second nationally in assists and first in assist-to-turnover ratio at 6.64.\n\nCoach Vic Schaefer has advocated repeatedly for Harmon as the top all-around point guard in the country. She provided validation with 27 points, 13 assists and strong defense against UConn star Paige Bueckers during a 80-68 victory against the then-No. 11 Huskies on Dec. 3.\n\n## BIG PICTURE\nJackson State: The Tigers' four defeats before facing Texas also were against Power Five schools: Kansas State, Oregon State, Mississippi State and Miami. Jackson State begins Southwestern Athletic Conference competition in January as the favorite to win the league for the fifth straight season as voted by the coaches and sports information directors.\n\nTexas: Jones, who leads the Longhorns in scoring (16.2 points per game) and rebounding (7.4) and ranks second nationally in field goal percentage (71.3%), missed her second straight game with a hip injury. Schaefer did not have a timetable for her return. The 6-foot-4 junior missed nine games last season with what the team said was a lower-body injury. Jones had shoulder surgery and missed the last 21 games of the 2021-22 season while playing at Oregon State.\n\n## UP NEXT\nJackson State: Hosts Alcorn State on Jan. 6 in its SWAC opener.\n\nTexas: Hosts No. 10 Baylor on Saturday in its Big 12 opener."}
{"text": "# Charlie Coyle scores twice as Bruins beat Sabres 4-1 to end 4-game skid\nBy **MARK LUDWICZAK**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 10:23 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP)** - Charlie Coyle scored twice and Brad Marchand had two assists to lead the Boston Bruins to a 4-1 win over the Buffalo Sabres on Wednesday night.\n\nMason Lohrei and Morgan Geekie also scored for the Bruins, who ended a four-game losing streak. Jeremy Swayman made 25 saves.\n\nErik Johnson scored for the Sabres. Devon Levi made 21 saves.\n\nSpecial teams played a big role in the outcome as the Bruins scored on their first three power-play chances. Meanwhile, the Sabres went 0 for 6 with the man advantage.\n\nLohrei opened the scoring 4:19 in, sending the rebound of a shot past Levi.\n\nCoyle stretched the lead to two goals, scoring on a power play with 6:18 left in the first period. Jake DeBrusk got the puck behind the Buffalo net and spotted a wide-open Coyle in front of the Buffalo crease. Coyle then buried a one-timer.\n\nCoyle scored his second power-play goal of the game 4:18 into the second, when his shot deflected off Johnson's skate into the net.\n\nGeekie made it 4-0 with 6:16 left in the second on another power-play goal for the Bruins. After Charlie McAvoy's shot bounced off the end boards, Geekie fired the puck toward the net and a sprawling Levi was unable to make the save. It was Geekie's fourth goal in seven games.\n\nJohnson got the Sabres on the board 5:11 into the third, scoring on a slap shot from the right circle.\n\nTage Thompson, Buffalo's No. 1 center, missed the game due to personal reasons.\n\n## UP NEXT\nBruins: Host the New Jersey Devils on Saturday.\n\nSabres: Host the Columbus Blue Jackets on Saturday."}
{"text": "# Guentzel, Malkin and Letang lead Penguins surge past Islanders, 7-0\nBy **SCOTT CHARLES**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 10:26 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Jake Guentzel and Evgeni Malkin each scored twice, Kris Letang had six assists including five in the second period alone, and the Pittsburgh Penguins toppled the New York Islanders 7-0 on Wednesday night.\n\nTristan Jarry finished with 21 saves for his fourth shutout of the season. Rickard Rakell, Radim Zohorna and Valtteri Puustinen also scored for Pittsburgh and Marcus Pettersson picked up four assists.\n\nLetang became the first defenseman in NHL history to record five points in a period and the first player of any position in Penguins history to do so.\n\nIlya Sorokin made 19 saves as the Islanders' nine-game point streak on home ice (6-0-3) came to an end. Semyon Varlamov replaced Sorokin to begin the third period and made six saves.\n\nPittsburgh scored six times within a 10:27 stretch of the second period.\n\nGuentzel scored twice within 12 seconds to give the Penguins a 3-0 lead. He cleverly redirected Letang's shot that was headed wide of the net past Sorokin prior to converting a breakaway.\n\nLetang took advantage of a gap in the Islanders neutral zone coverage and hit Guentzel with a pass in stride behind New York's defense.\n\nIslanders coach Lane Lambert called timeout between Guentzel's goals in an effort to get control of the game, but the Penguins continued to convert on offense and capitalize on the Islanders poor defensive structure.\n\nMalkin extended the lead to four goals when Reilly Smith found him all alone in the slot at 12:48. Malkin struck again later on a pass from Letang, his fourth assist of the period.\n\nZohorna capped off an explosive six-goal second period with his fourth of the season at 17:13.\n\nPittsburgh scored six goals in a single period on the road for the first time since March 21, 2000 when they did it against the Islanders.\n\nIslanders defenseman Noah Dobson was on the ice for four goals while Pittsburgh outshot New York 20-7 in the middle period.\n\nRakell buried a loose puck that squeaked past Sorokin at 6:44 of the second period to kick off the outburst.\n\nPuustinen converted a one-time feed from Letang midway through the third period for his first NHL goal.\n\n## UP NEXT:\nPenguins: Host St. Louis Blues Saturday\n\nIslanders: Host Washington Capitals Friday."}
{"text": "# University of Wisconsin system fires chancellor for reputation-damaging behavior\nDecember 27, 2023. 10:17 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MADISON, Wis. (AP)** - The Universities of Wisconsin Board of Regents decided unanimously Wednesday to fire the chancellor of one of its campuses for unspecified behavior that could damage the school system's reputation.\n\nJoe Gow was fired from his position as chancellor of UW-La Crosse effective immediately, the university announced Wednesday night.\n\n\"In recent days, we learned of specific conduct by Dr. Gow that has subjected the university to significant reputational harm. His actions were abhorrent,\" UW President Jay Rothman said.\n\nAs a tenured faculty member, Gow will be placed on paid administrative leave as he transitions into his faculty role, Rothman said.\n\nHowever, Rothman said he filed a complaint Wednesday evening with interim Chancellor Betsy Morgan asking that Gow's status as a tenured faculty member be reviewed.\n\nAn outside law firm has been hired \"to undertake a fulsome investigation of the matter,\" Rothman said.\n\nAn email seeking comment was sent to Gow.\n\nUW System Regent President Karen Walsh released a statement saying \"Gow has shown a reckless disregard for the role he was entrusted with at UW-La Crosse to serve students, faculty and staff, and the campus community.\""}
{"text": "# Bus collides head-on with truck in central India, killing at least 13\nDecember 27, 2023. 9:44 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW DELHI (AP)** - A bus caught fire after colliding head-on with a truck on a highway in central India, killing at least 13 people, police said on Thursday.\n\nTwelve bus passengers died in the blaze and the truck driver was killed by the impact of the accident in Guna district in Madhya Pradesh state on Wednesday night, said police officer Anoop Bhargava.\n\nAnother 16 people suffered burns or bone fractures and were taken to a hospital, Bhargava said.\n\nThe region is nearly 900 kilometers (565 miles) south of New Delhi.\n\nDeadly road accidents are common in India, often due to reckless driving, poorly maintained roads and aging vehicles. More than 110,000 people are killed every year in road accidents across India, according to police."}
{"text": "# Harbaugh, Michigan savor trip to Disneyland after wild journey to CFP Rose Bowl semifinal\nBy **JOE REEDY**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 9:39 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ANAHEIM, Calif. (AP)** - With a third straight trip to the College Football Playoff semifinals, Michigan can't be considered a Cinderella.\n\nHowever, as coach Jim Harbaugh and some of his players took in a day at Disneyland before resuming preparations for Monday's Rose Bowl against Alabama, many considered this year's journey a cross between \"The Lion King\" and a spin on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.\n\nThe top-ranked and 13-0 Wolverines have shown that whatever obstacles are put in their way, it ends up galvanizing them. That included two suspensions to coach Jim Harbaugh that ended up being a total of six games.\n\nRunning back Blake Corum already thought Michigan had a strong team mentally going into the season. But it ended getting even stronger with all of the tumult surrounding their coach.\n\n\"We've built up a strong callus. Whatever anyone throws at us, we take it on the chin and keep on pushing,\" he said.\n\nThe best example of Michigan using it to their advantage and then punishing its opponent came at Penn State on Nov. 11. One day after Harbaugh was suspended three games by the Big Ten for violating the conference's sportsmanship policy over alleged sign-stealing, the Wolverines ran it on 32 straight plays in a 24-15 victory.\n\n\"The more stress you throw at us, it hypes us even more. It gives us purpose to do what we do,\" senior linebacker Kris Jenkins said. \"We are ready to show the world and shock the world.\"\n\nEven though Harbaugh's suspensions have ended, questions about his future at his alma mater remain. When asked if he would entertain offers from the NFL during the offseason, including one from the Los Angeles Chargers after they fired Brandon Staley on Dec. 14, Harbaugh deflected both questions and said his singular focus is on the upcoming game.\n\n\"Just a very one-track mind about this game. Right now having fun with the family, the team and the players. We're at the happiest place on Earth. We're going to enjoy ourselves and then get back to business,\" Harbaugh said. \"We have some good meetings tonight and we'll wake up tomorrow and practice. This is straight out of the Jack Harbaugh playbook, one day at a time.\"\n\nJenkins said there aren't any concerns about Harbaugh's future since the questions have come up every year.\n\n\"We know at the end of the day Jim loves us to death. He preaches that all the time. At the end of the day if he does what's best for him, we absolutely love and support that,\" he said.\n\nOne difference between the past two Michigan teams that made the CFP and this one is that the preparations leading up to the Rose Bowl have been better.\n\nThe Wolverines lost to eventual national champion Georgia in the 2021 Orange Bowl and fell short in a shootout to TCU in last season's Fiesta Bowl.\n\nHarbaugh noted there was no jet lag from the cross-country trip and that the team looked good during a short session on Wednesday.\n\n\"Guys have been sharp, very energized, locked in and focused,\" he said. \"It's in a good place, just refining that.\n\n\"This is the happiest place on earth. Disneyland. I mean, nailed it with that slogan, Especially as a kid, you know, then once you get to be about 17, 18, 19, or 59, 60, I mean, the happiest place on earth is a winning locker room. We're gonna be at the happiest place on earth today and we got a chance to be in the happiest place on Earth, which will be a winning locker room at the Rose Bowl, on Monday.\""}
{"text": "# Lakers guard Gabe Vincent has arthroscopic knee surgery, will be out for at least 2 months\nDecember 27, 2023. 9:36 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**EL SEGUNDO, Calif. (AP)** - Los Angeles Lakers guard Gabe Vincent will be out for at least two more months after undergoing arthroscopic surgery on his left knee.\n\nThe Lakers announced that Vincent had the surgery Wednesday. He will be re-evaluated by team doctors in eight weeks.\n\nVincent has appeared in only five games since signing with the Lakers in the offseason to be their backup point guard. He played in the Lakers' first four games of the season in October, but then missed 23 straight with knee pain.\n\nHe returned to play 14 minutes against Chicago on Dec. 20, but was quickly shut down again.\n\nVincent spent his first four NBA seasons with the Miami Heat, scoring a career-high 9.4 points per game last season with 2.5 assists and 33.4% shooting on 3-pointers.\n\nThe Lakers have struggled for a consistent rotation at guard due to Vincent's absence, D'Angelo Russell's inconsistency and Max Christie's unimpressive play. They've been forced to try several new rotations and to put the ball in LeBron James' hands as their primary playmaker more frequently.\n\nLos Angeles has lost six of eight since winning the inaugural NBA In-Season Tournament. The Lakers host Charlotte on Thursday night."}
{"text": "# 2 Australians killed in Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, says Australia's acting foreign minister\nBy **ROD McGUIRK**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 9:30 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CANBERRA, Australia (AP)** - Two Australian citizens including an alleged Hezbollah fighter were killed by an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, Australia's acting foreign minister said on Thursday.\n\nIbrahim Bazzi and his brother Ali Bazzi were killed in the airstrike on Tuesday in the town of Bint Jbel in southern Lebanon, Acting Foreign Minister Mark Dreyfus said.\n\nIbrahim Bazzi had arrived in Lebanon recently from Sydney to accompany his Lebanese wife Shorouq Hammoud to Australia, news media reported. Hammoud, who had recently received an Australian visa, was also killed in the attack.\n\nTheir three coffins were draped in the flag of Hezbollah, an ally of the Palestinian Islamist faction Hamas, which is at war with Israel.\n\nDreyfus said Australia was investigating Hezbollah's claim that Ali Bazzi was one of its fighters.\n\n\"Hezbollah is a listed terrorist organization under Australian law. It's an offense for any Australian to cooperate with, to support, let alone to fight with a listed terrorist organization like Hezbollah,\" Dreyfus told reporters.\n\nDreyfus said his government had communicated with Israel about the airstrike but declined to disclose what was said.\n\n\"In the context of the current conflict, Australia has consistently called for civilian lives to be protected and we have consistently raised our concerns about the risk of this conflict spreading,\" Dreyfus said.\n\nDreyfus repeated a government warning for Australians not to travel to Lebanon. Australians already in the country should leave while commercial air services are still available.\n\nThe Australian embassy in Beirut was ready to provide consular assistance to the Bazzi family if required, he said."}
{"text": "# Magnitude 3.8 earthquake shakes part of eastern Arkansas\nDecember 27, 2023. 8:34 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ETOWAH, Ark. (AP)** - A magnitude 3.8 earthquake rattled parts of northeastern Arkansas on Wednesday, according to geologists.\n\nThe earthquake occurred shortly before noon near the town of Etowah, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. The rural town, which has a population of about 250 people, is located about 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of Memphis, Tennessee.\n\nThe Arkansas Division of Emergency Management said there were no reports from county officials of damage or injuries.\n\nEtowah is near the New Madrid fault line, which has been responsible for numerous small and large earthquakes. Beginning in late 1811, a series of powerful earthquakes occurred along the fault line, including one with an estimated magnitude of 7.7.\n\nJeremy Brown, who lives near Etowah, told The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that he \"thought an 18 wheeler struck the house for a second.\"\n\nSome people reported feeling the quake in western Tennessee.\n\nShianna Wallace of Drummonds, Tennessee, told WREG that she was sitting on her reclining chair when she began to feel a swaying sensation.\n\n\"It was just like movement. Maybe like a wave and you're on a raft and it was a wave. It was just kind of weird,\" she told the station."}
{"text": "# Colorado man sentenced in Nevada power plant fire initially described as terror attack\nBy **KEN RITTER**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 9:44 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LAS VEGAS (AP)** - A Colorado man was sentenced Wednesday to prison in Nevada following his arrest last January for setting his car afire at a remote facility in what authorities initially characterized as a terror attack on the electric system serving several Las Vegas Strip casinos.\n\nMohammed Reza Mesmarian, 35, was sentenced to two to 10 years following his plea in November to guilty but mentally ill on charges of felony arson and property destruction in the incident at a remote desert solar array about 25 miles (40 kilometers) northeast of downtown Las Vegas.\n\n\"This was not so much an act of terrorism as a person going through personal issues during COVID, the loss of a marriage and his business,\" Mesmarian's attorney, Jeffrey Nicholson, told The Associated Press after sentencing. Nicholson said he sought probation, but he called Clark County District Court Judge Ronald Israel's sentence \"a good and fair decision.\"\n\nMesmarian received credit for nearly a year already served in custody and could be paroled in early 2024.\n\nMesmarian, a dentist, is from Aurora, Colorado, where state records showed he faced Dental Board discipline and his license to practice was restricted in July 2022. Records also showed that Mesmarian filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy in October 2022. Nicholson said Wednesday he didn't immediately know the status of his client's dental license.\n\nMesmarian initially faced charges including terrorism, arson, destruction of property and escape. He spent months in custody during court proceedings that eventually determined he was competent to stand trial.\n\nPolice reported that no one was injured in the Jan. 4 fire, which wasn't immediately detected. Mesmaian was found and arrested a day later at a campground at Lake Mead, the Colorado River reservoir behind Hoover Dam east of Las Vegas.\n\nInvestigators said they learned that Mesmarian had rammed his car through a fence, crashed it against a transformer, set it ablaze and sat in a chair watching flames for about 15 minutes before walking away.\n\nThe incident in Nevada came just days after two men were arrested and charged with vandalizing electrical substations in Washington state and a month after federal regulators ordered a review of security standards following shootings that damaged two electric substations in North Carolina.\n\nThe Las Vegas-area facility, known as the Mega Solar Array, is operated by Chicago-based Invenergy. It serves several MGM Resorts International properties including Bellagio, MGM Grand, Aria and Park MGM. The resort operator said it switched to the statewide electric grid, and there was no effect at the casino resorts. Officials said the power facility returned to service within days."}
{"text": "# Prominent Republican Georgia lawmaker Barry Fleming appointed to judgeship\nDecember 27, 2023. 8:08 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ATLANTA (AP)** - A prominent Georgia state lawmaker was appointed Wednesday to a judgeship, and a special election for his House seat will be needed in coming months.\n\nRep. Barry Fleming of Harlem will serve as a superior court judge in Columbia County, replacing Judge James Blanchard Jr., who retired, Gov. Brian Kemp said in a news release. Fleming will be sworn in on Jan. 10, said Kemp spokesperson Garrison Douglas.\n\nKemp chooses judges from lists of candidates prepared by the Judicial Nominating Commission, whose members are appointed by the governor.\n\nFleming lost a race for House speaker to Jon Burns in 2022. He's been most recognized in recent years for leading the committee that authored a new election law in 2021 which restricted voting by mail and gave the legislature greater control over how elections are run. But House Speaker David Ralston stripped Fleming of his chairmanship after Fleming unsuccessfully ran for whip later in 2021. He was seen as a more right-wing alternative to Burns and Ralston.\n\nHis law practice, which has represented municipalities and counties around the city of Augusta, became a target of protests after the 2021 election law was enacted.\n\nFleming had previously served as whip starting in 2004, when Republicans took control of the chamber for the first time in more than 100 years. Among his other achievements then were passing a law requiring voters to show photo identification. Fleming stepped down to run an unsuccessful congressional race in 2008, but won reelection to the state House in 2012 and has served since.\n\nKemp must call a special election within 10 days of Fleming stepping down. That election must occur no sooner than 30 days and no later than 60 days after Kemp issues the call. That means the election could be timed to coincide with Georgia's March 12 presidential primary.\n\nFleming's 125th House District includes parts of Columbia and McDuffie counties.\n\nKemp on Wednesday also named Alison Sosebee as a superior court judge for Fannin, Gilmer and Pickens counties in north Georgia's Appalachian Judicial Circuit. Sosebee has been the district attorney in that circuit since 2013. She will replace Judge John Worcester, who died in August.\n\nThe governor named Mark Hendrix, solicitor general in Liberty County, to a newly created judgeship in the coastal Atlantic Circuit. That circuit covers Bryan, Evans, Liberty, Long, McIntosh and Tattnall counties."}
{"text": "# North Korea's Kim vows to bolster war readiness to repel 'unprecedented' US-led confrontations\nBy **HYUNG-JIN KIM**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 7:58 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SEOUL, South Korea (AP)** - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un called for bolstered war readiness to repel what he said were unprecedented U.S.-led confrontational moves in comments during a key political meeting tasked with setting state objectives for 2024, state media reported Thursday.\n\nKim's comments indicated once again that North Korea will likely continue weapons tests to modernize its nuclear arsenal for the time being. But observers say Kim likely hopes to eventually use his boosted arsenal as leverage in diplomacy with Washington, possibly after the U.S. presidential election in November next year.\n\nDuring Wednesday's second-day session of the ruling party's plenary meeting, Kim set forth unspecified tasks for the military and the munitions industry to \"further accelerate the war preparations\" in the face of \"(anti-North Korea) confrontation moves by the U.S. and its vassal forces unprecedented in history,\" the official Korean Central News Agency said.\n\nIt said Kim also clarified the party's stance on expanding North Korea's strategic cooperation with anti-imperialist countries amid the world's rapidly changing geopolitical situation. KCNA said Kim spoke about the direction of the North's dealings with South Korea as well but didn't elaborate.\n\nThe Workers' Party meeting is expected to last several days, and state media are expected to publicize details of its discussions after it ends, likely on Dec.31. Experts say North Korea is expected to come up with pledges and steps to strengthen its nuclear attack capability and expand cooperation with Russia and China, which are also locked in separate confrontations with the U.S.\n\nTopics to be dealt with at the meeting could include North Korea's push to operate more spy satellites following its launch of its first military reconnaissance satellite on Nov. 21. After the November launch, North Korea said it will submit to the plenary meeting a plan to launch more satellites to improve its spaced-based surveillance capabilities on its rivals.\n\nSince last year, North Korea has performed a barrage of missile tests in breach of U.N. bans, including last week's launch of the solid-fueled Hwasong-18 intercontinental ballistic missile - its most advanced weapon designed to attack the mainland U.S. The North has argued it has sovereign, legitimate rights to conduct such tests to deal with the expansion of U.S.-South Korean military exercises that it views as invasion rehearsals.\n\nKim has refused to return to diplomacy with the U.S. since his high-stakes diplomacy with then-President Donald Trump fell apart in 2019. A main sticking point in the collapsed Kim-Trump diplomacy was how much sanctions relief North Korea would be given in return for a partial surrender of its nuclear program."}
{"text": "# Comedian Tom Smothers, one-half of the Smothers Brothers, dies at 86\nBy **FRAZIER MOORE** and **ANDREW DALTON**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 6:34 PM EST\n\n---\n\nTom Smothers, half of the Smothers Brothers and the co-host of one of the most socially conscious and groundbreaking television shows in the history of the medium, has died at 86.\n\nThe National Comedy Center, on behalf of his family, said in a statement Wednesday that Smothers died Tuesday at home in Santa Rosa, California, following a cancer battle.\n\n\"I'm just devastated,\" his brother and the duo's other half, Dick Smothers, told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday. \"Every breath I've taken, my brother's been around.\"\n\nWhen \"The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour\" debuted on CBS in the fall of 1967 it was an immediate hit, to the surprise of many who had assumed the network's expectations were so low it positioned their show opposite the top-rated \"Bonanza.\"\n\nBut the Smothers Brothers would prove a turning point in television history, with its sharp eye for pop culture trends and young rock stars such as the Who and Buffalo Springfield, and its daring sketches - ridiculing the Establishment, railing against the Vietnam War and portraying members of the era's hippie counterculture as gentle, fun-loving spirits - found an immediate audience with young baby boomers.\n\n\"We were moderate. We were never out there,\" Dick Smothers said. \"But we were the first people through that door. It just sort of crept in as the '60s crept in. We were part of that generation.\"\n\nThe show reached No. 16 in the ratings in its first season. It also drew the ire of network censors. After years of battling with the brothers over the show's creative content, the network abruptly canceled the program in 1970, accusing the siblings of failing to submit an episode in time for the censors to review.\n\nNearly 40 years later, when Smothers was awarded an honorary Emmy for his work on the show, he jokingly thanked the writers he said had gotten him fired. He also showed that the years had not dulled his outspokenness.\n\n\"It's hard for me to stay silent when I keep hearing that peace is only attainable through war,\" Smothers said at the 2008 Emmy Awards as his brother sat in the audience, beaming. He dedicated his award to those \"who feel compelled to speak out and are not afraid to speak to power and won't shut up.\"\n\nDuring the three years the show was on television, the brothers constantly battled with CBS censors and occasionally outraged viewers as well, particularly when Smothers joked that Easter \"is when Jesus comes out of his tomb and if he sees his shadow, he goes back in and we get six more weeks of winter.\" At Christmas, when other hosts were sending best wishes to soldiers fighting overseas, Smothers offered his to draft dodgers who had moved to Canada.\n\nIn still another episode, the brothers returned blacklisted folk singer Pete Seeger to television for the first time in years. He performed his song \"Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,\" widely viewed as ridiculing President Lyndon Johnson. When CBS refused to air the segment, the brothers brought Seeger back for another episode and he sang it again. This time, it made the air.\n\nAfter the show was canceled, the brothers sued CBS for $31 million and were awarded $775,000. Their battles with the network were chronicled in the 2002 documentary \"Smothered: The Censorship Struggles of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.\"\n\n\"Tom Smothers was not only an extraordinary comedic talent, who, together with his brother Dick, became the most enduring comedy duo in history, entertaining the world for over six decades - but was a true champion for freedom of speech,\" National Comedy Center Executive Director Journey Gunderson said in a statement.\n\nThomas Bolyn Smothers III was born Feb. 2, 1937, on Governors Island, New York, where his father, an Army major, was stationed. His brother was born two years later. In 1940 their father was transferred to the Philippines, and his wife, two sons and their sister, Sherry, accompanied him.\n\nWhen the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the family was sent home and Maj. Smothers remained. He was captured by the Japanese during the war and died in captivity. The family eventually moved to the Los Angeles suburb of Redondo Beach, where Smothers helped his mother take care of his brother and sister while she worked.\n\n\"Tommy was the greatest older brother. He took care of me,\" Dick Smothers said. \"His maturity was amazing. Sometimes you lose part of your childhood.\"\n\nThe brothers had seemed unlikely to make television history. They had spent several years on the nightclub and college circuits and doing TV guest appearances, honing an offbeat comedy routine that mixed folk music with a healthy dose of sibling rivalry.\n\nThey would come on stage, Tom with a guitar in hand and Dick toting an upright bass. They would quickly break into a traditional folk song - perhaps \"John Henry\" or \"Pretoria.\" After playing several bars, Tom, positioned as the dumb one despite being older, would mess up, then quickly claim he had meant to do that. As Dick, the serious, short-tempered one, berated him for failing to acknowledge his error, he would scream in exasperation, \"Mom always liked you best!\"\n\n\"It was the childlike enthusiasm through ignorance, and me, the teacher, correcting him - sometimes I'd correct him even if I was wrong,\" Dick Smothers said. \"I was the perfect straight man for my brother. I was the only straight man for my brother.\"\n\nThey continued that shtick on their show but also surrounded themselves with a talented cast of newcomers, both writers and performers.\n\nFuture actor-filmmaker Rob Reiner was among those on the crack writing crew the brothers assembled.\n\n\"Tommy was funny, smart, and a fighter,\" Reiner said on social media Wednesday. \"He created a ground breaking show that celebrated all that was good about American Democracy.\"\n\nOther writers included musician Mason Williams and comedian Steve Martin, who presented Smothers with the lifetime Emmy. Regular musical guests included John Hartford, Glen Campbell and Jennifer Warnes.\n\nThe brothers had begun their own act when Tom, then a student at San Jose State College, formed a music group called the Casual Quintet and encouraged his younger brother to learn the bass and join. The brothers continued on as a duo after the other musicians dropped out, but began interspersing comedy with their limited folk music repertoire.\n\n\"We never wrote anything, we just made it up, and tried to remember what we made up,\" Dick Smothers said. \"I just responded to Tom, if he said something that wasn't in the bit, I wouldn't stick to the script, I would listen.\"\n\nThe brothers' big break came in 1959 when they appeared at San Francisco's Purple Onion, then a hot spot for new talent. Booked for two weeks, they stayed a record 36. They had a similar run at New York's Blue Angel. But to their disappointment, they couldn't get on \"The Tonight Show,\" then hosted by Jack Paar.\n\n\"Paar kept telling our agent he didn't like folk singers - except for Burl Ives,\" Smothers told the AP in 1964. \"But one night he had a cancellation, and we went on. Everything worked right that night.\"\n\nDick Smothers said Wednesday that \"we weren't that good when we were on 'The Tonight Show.' We were just charmingly different.\"\n\nThe brothers went on to appear on the TV shows of Ed Sullivan, Jack Benny and Judy Garland, among others. Their comedy albums were big sellers and they toured the country, especially colleges.\n\nBefore their more vaunted show, the duo got a sitcom in 1965. \"The Smothers Brothers Show\" was about a businessman (Dick) haunted by his late brother (Tom), a fledgling guardian angel. It lasted just one season.\n\nShortly after CBS canceled the \"Comedy Hour,\" ABC picked it up as a summer replacement, but the network didn't bring it back in the fall. NBC gave them a show in 1975 but it failed to find an audience and lasted only a season. The brothers went their separate ways for a time. Among other endeavors, Smothers got into the wine business, launching Remick Ridge Vineyards in Northern California's wine country.\n\n\"Originally the winery was called Smothers Brothers, but I changed the name to Remick Ridge because when people heard Smothers Brothers wine, they thought something like Milton Berle Fine Wine or Larry, Curly and Mo Vineyards,\" Smothers once said.\n\nThey eventually reunited to star in the musical comedy \"I Love My Wife,\" a hit that ran on Broadway for two years. After that they went back on the road, playing casinos, performing arts centers and corporate gatherings around the country, remaining popular for decades.\n\n\"We just keep resurfacing,\" Smothers commented in 1997. \"We're just not in everyone's face long enough to really get old.\"\n\nAfter a successful 20th anniversary \"Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour\" in 1988, CBS buried the hatchet and brought them back.\n\nThe show was quickly canceled, though it stayed on the air long enough for Smothers to introduce the \"Yo-Yo Man,\" a bit allowing him to demonstrate his considerable skills with a yo-yo while he and his brother kept up a steady patter of comedy. The bit remained in their act for years.\n\n\"It was like a great marriage, you go through some rough spots, but you still don't lose that focus,\" Dick Smothers said.\n\nThey retired in 2010, but returned for a series of shows in 2021 that would be their last before Tom Smothers' illness left him unable to continue.\n\n\"The audience exploded,\" Dick Smothers said of those shows. \"It was like a clap of thunder. They were young again.\"\n\nSmothers married three times and had three children. He is survived by his wife Marcy, children Bo and Riley Rose, and brother Dick, in addition to other relatives. He was predeceased by his son Tom and sister Sherry."}
{"text": "# Americans ramped up spending during the holidays despite some financial anxiety and higher costs\nBy **ANNE D'INNOCENZIO** and **HALELUYA HADERO**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 11:06 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Holiday sales rose this year and spending remained resilient during the shopping season even with Americans wrestling with higher prices in some areas and other financial worries, according to the latest measure.\n\nHoliday sales from the beginning of November through Christmas Eve climbed 3.1%, a slower pace than the 7.6% increase from a year earlier, according to Mastercard SpendingPulse, which tracks all kinds of payments including cash and debit cards.\n\nThis year's sales are more in line with what is typical during the holiday season, however, after a surge in spending last year during the same period.\n\n\"This holiday season, the consumer showed up, spending in a deliberate manner\" said Michelle Meyer, Chief Economist, Mastercard Economics Institute. \"The economic backdrop remains favorable with healthy job creation and easing inflation pressures, empowering consumers to seek the goods and experiences they value most.\"\n\nThe number of people seeking unemployment benefits has remained very low by historical standards and employers are still having a hard time finding enough workers.\n\nStill, sales growth was a bit lower than the 3.7% increase Mastercard SpendingPulse had projected in September. The data released Tuesday excludes the automotive industry and is not adjusted for inflation.\n\nClothing sales rose 2.4%, though jewelry sales fell 2% and electronics dipped roughly 0.4%. Online sales jumped 6.3 % from a year ago and in-person spending rose a modest 2.2%.\n\nConsumer spending accounts for nearly 70% of U.S. economic activity and economists carefully monitor how Americans spend, particularly during the holidays, to gauge how they're feeling financially.\n\nThere had been rising concern leading up to the holiday about the willingness of Americans to spend because of elevated prices for daily necessities at a time that savings have fallen and credit card delinquencies have ticked higher. In response, retailers pushed discounts on holiday merchandise earlier in October compared with a year ago. They also took a cautious approach on how much inventory to order after getting stung with overstuffed warehouses last year.\n\nThe latest report on the Federal Reserve's favored inflation gauge, issued Friday, shows prices are easing. But costs remain still higher at restaurants, car shops, or for things like rent. Americans, however, unexpectedly picked up their spending from October to November as the holiday season kicked off, underscoring their spending power in the face of higher costs.\n\nA broader picture of how Americans spent their money arrives next month when the National Retail Federation, the nation's largest retail trade group, releases its combined two-month statistics based on November-December sales figures from the Commerce Department.\n\nThe trade group expects holiday expects U.S. holiday sales will rise 3% to 4%. That's lower than last year's 5.4% growth but again, more consistent with typical holiday spending, which rose 3.6% between 2010 and 2019 before the pandemic skewered numbers.\n\nIndustry analysts will dissect the fourth-quarter financial performance from major retailers when they release that data in February.\n\nThe big concern: whether shoppers will pull back sharply after they get their bills in January. Nikki Baird, vice president of Aptos, a retail technology firm, noted customers, already weighed down by still high inflation and high interest rates, might pull back more because of the resumption of student loan payments that kicked in Oct. 1.\n\n\"I am worried about January,\" she said. \"I can see a bit of a last hurrah.\""}
{"text": "# A Christmas rush to get passports to leave Zimbabwe is fed by economic gloom and a price hike\nBy **FARAI MUTSAKA**  \nDecember 24, 2023. 3:03 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP)** - Atop many Christmas wish lists in economically troubled Zimbabwe is a travel document, and people are flooding the passport office this holiday season ahead of a price hike planned in the New Year.\n\nThe desperation at the office in the capital city of Harare is palpable as some people fear the hike could push the cost of obtaining a passport out of reach and economic gloom feeds a surge in migration.\n\nNolan Mukona said he woke up at dawn to get in line at the passport office but when he arrived at 5 a.m. there were already more than 100 people waiting. Some people had slept outside the office overnight.\n\n\"The only thing that can make my Christmas a cheerful one is if I manage to get a passport,\" said the 49-year-old father of three. \"I have been saving for it for the last three months and I have to make sure I get it before January.\"\n\nAt $120, passports were already pricey for many in a country where the majority struggle to put food on the table. The finance minister's budget proposals for 2024 said passport fees would rise to $200 in January, sparking an outcry. The hike was then reduced to $150.\n\nSeveral million Zimbabweans are estimated to have left the southern African country over the past two decades when its economy began collapsing. The migration has taken renewed vigor in recent years as hopes of a better life following the 2017 ouster of longtime president Robert Mugabe fade. The late president was accused of running down the country.\n\nMany people, including professionals such as schoolteachers, are taking short nursing courses and seeking passports to leave for the United Kingdom to take up health care work.\n\nAccording to figures released by the U.K.'s immigration department in November, 21,130 Zimbabweans were issued visas to work in the health and care sector from September last year to September this year, up from 7,846 the previous year.\n\nOnly India and Nigeria, countries with significantly larger populations than Zimbabwe, have more people issued such work visas.\n\nMany more Zimbabweans choose to settle in neighboring South Africa.\n\nAccording to South Africa's statistics agency, just over 1 million Zimbabweans are living in that country, up from more than 600,000 during its last census in 2011, although some believe the figure could be much higher as many cross the porous border illegally.\n\nThe economic desperation has coupled with the expected increase in the price of travel documents to create an end-of-year rush.\n\nThe passport office has increased working hours to operate at night to cater to the growing numbers. Enterprising touts sell spots for $5 for those who want to skip the line.\n\n\"It's my gateway to a better life,\" said Mukona of the passport he hopes to get.\n\nHe plans to leave his work as an English teacher at a private college to migrate to the United Kingdom as a carer. Once there, he hopes to have his family follow, a move that may be endangered by recent proposals by U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to change migration visa rules to limit the ability of migrant workers to bring their families to the U.K.\n\nHarare-based economist Prosper Chitambara said a lack of formal jobs and low prospects of economic recovery have turned the passport from a mere travel document into a life-changing document for many.\n\n\"The challenging economic situation is not showing signs of remission so this is an incentive for Zimbabweans to migrate,\" said Chitambara. \"The passport is now more than just a travel document. Being in possession of a passport means changed economic fortunes because it's a major step towards leaving.\"\n\nThe economist predicted a tougher New Year for Zimbabweans, citing a raft of new or higher taxes proposed by the finance minister.\n\nZimbabwe's government says the migration comes at a huge cost to the country because of a brain drain, particularly in the health sector. It has pleaded to the World Health Organization to intervene and stop richer countries from recruiting Zimbabwean nurses, doctors and other health professionals.\n\nVice President Constantino Chiwenga earlier this year described the recruitment as \"a crime against humanity\" and proposed a law to stop health professionals from migrating.\n\nLife has not always turned out rosy for those leaving.\n\nThe British press has reported the abuse of people settling in the United Kingdom as care workers, with some ending up living on the streets or barely earning enough to survive.\n\nA report by Unseen, a U.K charity, in October said \"the care sector is susceptible to worker exploitation and modern slavery. Many people providing their labor in the sector receive low pay and the work is considered low-skilled.\"\n\nThe group, which campaigns against modern slavery and exploitation, said Zimbabweans were among the top nationalities to be victimized in the care sector.\n\nDespite such reports, many in Zimbabwe are not deterred.\n\n\"I will deal with those issues when I get there. Right now my priority is getting hold of a passport and leaving. Anything is better than being in Zimbabwe right now,\" said Mukona."}
{"text": "# Federal Reserve's favored inflation gauge tumbles in November as prices continue to ease\nBy **PAUL WISEMAN**  \nDecember 22, 2023. 11:19 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - The Federal Reserve's preferred measure of prices fell last month, another sign that inflation is easing and that Americans should benefit from reduced interest rates and get relief from painful price shocks in 2024.\n\nFriday's report from the Commerce Department showed that U.S. consumer prices slid 0.1% last month from October and rose 2.6% from November 2022. The month-over-month drop was the largest since April 2020 when the economy was reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic.\n\nExcluding volatile food and energy prices, so-called core inflation last month rose 0.1% from October and 3.2% from a year earlier.\n\nThe numbers show somewhat more progress against inflation than economists had expected. Inflation is steadily moving down to the Fed's year-over-year target of 2% and appears to be clearing the way for Fed rate cuts in 2024. That, in turn, could translate into lower rates on everything from mortgages to credit cards.\n\nRates on loans for cars, homes and other larger purchases tend to track the direction of Fed monetary policy, so when benchmark interest rates are cut in the U.S., consumer costs typically fall and free up more money for households to spend elsewhere.\n\nThe rate on the benchmark 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is already dropping: This week it dipped to a six-month low 6.67%, down from 7.79% in October.\n\nAmericans have already seen some relief from high prices. Consider the ingredients of a BLT sandwich: Prices are down almost 1% over the past year for bacon, more than 10% for lettuce and 4% for tomatoes. Car rental prices have tumbled 11%, air fares 12%, furniture 3%.\n\nAfter nearly two years of Fed rate hikes - 11 since March 2022 - inflation has come down from the four-decade highs it hit last year. The Labor Department's closely watched consumer price index was up 3.1% last month from November 2022, down from a 9.1% year-over-year increase in June 2022.\n\nEncouraged by the progress, the Fed has decided not to raise rates at each of its last three meetings and has signaled that it expects to cut rates three times next year.\n\n\"A sustained easing in price pressures will support a shift in the (Fed's) policy stance next year, from holding rates steady to lowering them over time,\" said Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics. \"The exact timing will depend on how the labor market, inflation and growth will evolve next year. Based on our forecasts, we expect the Fed to start cutting rates by the middle of next year.\"\n\nDespite widespread predictions that higher rates would cause a recession, the U.S. economy and job market have remained strong. That has raised hopes the Fed can achieve a \"soft landing\" - bringing inflation to its 2% year-over-year target without sending the economy into recession.\n\nThe U.S. inflation gauge the Commerce Department issued Friday is called the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index. It showed year-over-year inflation peaking at 7.1% in June 2022.\n\nThe Fed prefers the PCE index over the Labor Department's CPI in part because it accounts for changes in how people shop when inflation jumps - when, for example, consumers shift away from pricey national brands in favor of cheaper store brands.\n\nFriday's report also showed that consumer spending rose 0.2% last month after rising 0.1% in October. Personal income rose 0.4% last month, a tick up from 0.3% in October."}
{"text": "# Stock market today: Wall Street ticks closer to record highs to cap its 8th straight winning week\nBy **STAN CHOE**  \nDecember 22, 2023. 4:57 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Wall Street capped its eighth straight winning week with a quiet finish Friday, following reports showing inflation on the way down and the economy potentially on the way up.\n\nThe S&P 500 rose 0.2% to sit less than 1% below its record set nearly two years ago. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 18 points, or less than 0.1%, and the Nasdaq composite edged 0.2% higher.\n\nBristol Myers Squibb helped lift the market and rose 2% after it said it will buy Karuna Therapeutics in a cash deal valued at a total of $14 billion. That helped offset an 11.8% slump for Nike, which cut its revenue forecast for its fiscal year and dragged sharply on the Dow. The athletic giant cited weakness in China, the downsides of a stronger U.S. dollar for exporters and other challenges.\n\nBut Wall Street's focus was squarely on a suite of economic reports released Friday, which led to some swings in Treasury yields.\n\nFalling yields have been a primary reason the stock market has charged roughly 15% higher since late October. Not only do they boost the economy by encouraging borrowing, they also relax the pressure on the financial system and goose prices for investments. They've been easing on hopes that inflation has cooled enough for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates through 2024.\n\nA report on Friday showed the measure of inflation the Federal Reserve prefers to use slowed by more than economists expected, down to 2.6% in November from 2.9% a month earlier. It echoed other inflation reports for November released earlier in the month.\n\n\"Inflation has fallen very quickly this year, especially in the last three to five months,\" said Niladri \"Neel\" Mukherjee, chief investment officer of TIAA's Wealth Management team. Over the next few months, \"I think inflation will fade away in terms of top-of-mind items\" as risks for financial markets.\n\nFriday's data also showed spending by U.S. consumers unexpectedly rose during the month. While that's a good sign for growth for an economy driven mainly by consumer spending, it could also indicate underlying pressure remains on inflation.\n\n\"People are tightening their belts, but they're not suffocating their spending,\" said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management.\n\nThe Federal Reserve is walking a tightrope, trying to slow the economy enough through high interest rates to cool inflation, but not so much that it tips into a recession. A stronger-than-expected economy could complicate the balancing act.\n\nOther reports on Friday showed orders for long-lasting manufactured goods strengthened more in November than expected, sales of new homes unexpectedly weakened and sentiment for U.S. consumers improved.\n\nThe yield on the 10-year Treasury was at 3.89%, roughly its same level from late Thursday. But it swerved a couple of times following the release of the reports. The 10-year yield is still down comfortably from October, when it was above 5% and putting painful downward pressure on the stock market.\n\nTraders are largely betting the Federal Reserve will cut its main interest rate by at least 1.50 percentage points by the end of next year, according to data from CME Group. The federal funds rate is currently sitting within a range of 5.25% to 5.50% at its highest level in more than two decades.\n\nThe Federal Reserve released projections last week showing its typical policymaker expects to cut the federal funds rate several times next year, but likely by only half as much as what Wall Street is expecting.\n\nCritics say Wall Street is too optimistic about how many rate cuts may come in 2024 and when they could begin. They warn the big run for stocks since late October on anticipation of such support may be overdone, or at the least pulling forward returns that would have happened in 2024.\n\nWith its eight straight weekly gains, the S&P 500 is in the midst of its longest winning streak since 2017.\n\nMukherjee of TIAA Wealth Management is relatively optimistic about the U.S. economy in coming years, particularly as artificial-intelligence technology helps reshape the world. But he sees the economy enduring at least a soft patch in the first half of 2024 as the effects of past rate hikes fully make their way through the system.\n\nPlus, he sees the Federal Reserve more hesitant to cut rates than Wall Street expects.\n\n\"I think the market has run ahead of itself a little bit in pricing in six rate cuts,\" he said. \"Inflation is coming down very quickly, but this is a Fed which has been scarred once when they took the view that inflation was transitory back in 2021, and they overstayed their welcome at zero interest rates for longer than anyone though they would. They want to make sure they're reasonably comfortable, quite comfortable with inflation somewhere in the vicinity of their target.\"\n\nAll told, the S&P 500 rose 7.88 points to 4,754.63. The Dow slipped 18.38 to 37,385.97, and the Nasdaq gained 29.11 to 14,992.97.\n\nIn stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed in Europe and Asia.\n\nHong Kong's Hang Seng dropped 1.7% after China released new regulations for online gaming. That sent stocks of Tencent, China's largest gaming company, and rival NetEase down sharply."}
{"text": "# Turkish central bank raises interest rate to 42.5% to combat high inflation\nDecember 21, 2023. 7:42 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**ANKARA, Turkey (AP)** - Turkey's central bank hiked its key interest rate by 2.5 percentage points on Thursday as part of its efforts to combat high inflation that has left many households struggling to afford rent and essential items.\n\nThe bank's Monetary Policy Committee raised its benchmark rate to 42.5%, delivering its seventh interest rate hike in a row to tame inflation, which rose to 61.98% last month.\n\nBut the bank signaled that the rate hikes - which took borrowing costs from 8.5% to the current 42.5% - could soon end.\n\n\"The committee anticipates to complete the tightening cycle as soon as possible,\" it said. \"The monetary tightness will be maintained as long as needed to ensure sustained price stability.\"\n\nThe series of rate hikes came after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan - a longtime proponent of an unorthodox policy of cutting rates to fight inflation - reversed course and appointed a new economic team following his reelection in May.\n\nThe team includes former Merrill Lynch banker Mehmet Simsek, who returned as finance minister, a post he held until 2018, and Hafize Gaye Erkan, a former U.S.-based bank executive, who took over as central bank governor in June.\n\nPrior to that, Erdogan had fired central bank governors who resisted his rate-slashing policies, which economists said ran counter to traditional economic thinking, sent prices soaring and triggered a currency crisis.\n\nIn contrast, central banks around the world raised interest rates rapidly to target spikes in consumer prices tied to the rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic and then Russia's war in Ukraine.\n\n\"There is much still to be done in taming inflation but the bond market is optimistic that Turkey is on the right track,\" said Cagri Kutman, Turkish market specialist at KNG Securities. \"Turkish bonds have been amongst the strongest performing out of major economies over the past month.\"\n\nBartosz Sawicki, market analyst at Conotoxia fintech, said that the central bank was likely to complete its rate hikes next month at 45%.\n\n\"Consequently, the (central bank) is set to halt the tightening before the local elections in March,\" he wrote in an email."}
{"text": "# American consumers are feeling much more confident as holiday shopping season peaks\nBy **MATT OTT**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 5:53 PM EST\n\n---\n\nAmerican consumers are feeling more confident than they have since summer, good news for businesses with the all-important holiday shopping season peaking.\n\nThe Conference Board, a business research group, said Wednesday that its consumer confidence index rose for the second straight month, to 110.7 in December from 101 in November. That's much better than analysts' forecasts of 104.5 and the highest reading since July.\n\nAmericans' expectations of a recession in the next 12 months declined to the lowest level so far this year.\n\nThe index measures both Americans' assessment of current economic conditions and their outlook for the next six months.\n\nConsumer spending accounts for about 70% of U.S. economic activity, so economists pay close attention to consumer behavior as they take measure of the broader economy.\n\nThe index measuring Americans short-term expectations for income, business and the job market shot up to 85.6 in December from 77.4 in October. It's the first time in four months that its been above 80. A reading below 80 for future expectations historically signals a recession within a year.\n\nThe survey's write-in responses indicated that rising prices are still consumers' top concern, while worries over interest rates and geopolitical conflicts declined.\n\nConsumers' view of current conditions also jumped this month, to 148.5, from 136.5 in November.\n\nThe survey also showed modest increases in consumers' intent to purchase homes, autos, appliances and spend on vacations.\n\nAmericans unexpectedly picked up their spending at retailers from October to November as the unofficial holiday season kicked off, underscoring the power of shoppers despite elevated prices. Retail sales rose 0.3%, in November from October, when sales fell 0.2%, according to the Commerce Department."}
{"text": "# UK rate cut speculation swells as inflation falls by more than anticipated to 2-year low of 3.9%\nBy **PAN PYLAS**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 8:51 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - Inflation in the U.K. as measured by the consumer prices index eased back to its lowest level in more than two years, official figures showed Wednesday, in a development that stoked speculation that the Bank of England may start cutting interest rates sooner than expected.\n\nThe Office for National Statistics said that inflation dropped to 3.9% in the year to November, its lowest level since September 2021, from 4.6% the previous month. That decline was bigger than anticipated in financial markets.\n\nThe agency said the biggest driver for the fall was a decrease in fuel prices after an increase at the same time last year. The decreasing rate in food price inflation also contributed to the decline.\n\nThe sharp drop has fueled expectations that the Bank of England, which sets interest rates in order to hit a 2% target, may move to reduce borrowing rates possibly in the first half of 2024.\n\nThe pound dropped 0.6% to $1.2650, a sign that traders think the central bank may look to cut rates soon, which would reduce relative returns for holders of the currency.\n\n\"The Bank has been loath to put a timetable on rate cuts in 2024, but this clearly raises the prospect of the Bank being in a position to ease policy in the first half of the year, rather than later,\" said Neil Wilson, chief markets analyst at Finalto. \"At least it will prompt the market to buy into this idea.\"\n\nThat's a marked change from last week when the Bank of England left its main interest rate at a 15-year high of 5.25%, where it has stood since August following the end of nearly two years of hikes. Bank Gov. Andrew Bailey said that interest rate policy would likely have to remain \"restrictive for an extended period of time.\"\n\nThe Bank of England has managed to get inflation down from a four-decade high of more than 11%, but still has a way to go to get to its target of 2%.\n\nHigher interest rates targeted a surge in inflation, first stoked by supply chain issues during the coronavirus pandemic and then Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which pushed up food and energy costs.\n\nWhile the interest rate increases have helped in the battle against inflation, the squeeze on consumer spending, primarily through higher mortgage rates, has weighed on the growth of the British economy. There are growing worries that rates will stay high for too long, unnecessarily damaging the economy.\n\nHowever soon the Bank of England decides to cut rates, it's very likely that relatively high borrowing rates and low economic growth will be the backdrop for next year's general election. That's also a concern for the governing Conservative Party, which opinion polls say is way behind the main opposition Labour Party."}
{"text": "# From AI and inflation to Elon Musk and Taylor Swift, the business stories that dominated 2023\nBy **PAUL WISEMAN** and **KEN SWEET**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 5:57 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThe tide turned against inflation.\n\nArtificial intelligence went mainstream - for good or ill.\n\nLabor unions capitalized on their growing might to win more generous pay and benefits.\n\nElon Musk renamed and rebranded the social media platform Twitter, removed guardrails against phony or obscene posts and ranted profanely when advertisers fled in droves.\n\nThe American housing market, straining under the weight of heavy mortgage rates, took a wallop.\n\nAnd Taylor Swift's concert tour scaled such stratospheric heights that she invigorated some regional economies and drew a mention in Federal Reserve proceedings.\n\nA look back at 10 top business stories in 2023:\n\n## RAGING AGAINST INFLATION\nThe Fed and most other major central banks spent most of the year deploying their interest-rate weapons against the worst bout of inflation in four decades. The trouble had erupted in 2021 and 2022 as the global economy roared out of the pandemic recession, triggering supply shortages and igniting prices.\n\nBy the end of 2023, though, the Fed, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England had taken a breather. Their aggressive rate hikes had brought inflation way down from the peaks of 2022, when Russia's invasion of Ukraine sent energy and grain prices rocketing and intensified price spikes.\n\nIn the United States, the Fed's policymakers delighted Wall Street investors by signaling in December that 2024 would likely be a year of rate cuts - three to be exact, in their expectations - and not rate hikes. The Bank of England and ECB sounded a more cautious note, suggesting that inflation, though trending down, remained above their target.\n\n\"Should we lower our guard?\" Christine Lagarde, the ECB president, told reporters. \"We ask ourselves that question. No, we should absolutely not lower our guard.\"\n\nThe Council on Foreign Relations, which tracks interest rates in 54 countries, found that central banks turned aggressive toward inflation in the spring of 2022. Policies remain tight, the council found, but the overall anti-inflation stance has eased.\n\n## AI GOES MAINSTREAM\nArtificial intelligence thrust itself into public consciousness this year. But the technology, while dazzling for its ability to retrieve information or produce readable prose, has yet to match people's science fiction fantasies of human-like machines.\n\nCatalyzing a year of AI fanfare was ChatGPT. The chatbot gave the world a glimpse of advances in computer science, even if not everyone learned quite how it works or how to make the best use of it.\n\nWorries escalated as this new cohort of generative AI tools threatened the livelihoods of people who write, draw, strum or code for a living. AI's ability to produce original content helped fuel strikes by Hollywood writers and actors and legal challenges from bestselling authors.\n\nBy year's end, the AI crises had shifted to ChatGPT's own maker, OpenAI, which was nearly destroyed by corporate turmoil over its CEO, and to a meeting room in Belgium, where European Union leaders emerged after days of talks with a deal for the world's first major AI legal safeguards.\n\n## WORKERS SCORE GAINS\nThe long-battered American labor movement flexed its muscle in 2023, taking advantage of widespread worker shortages to demand - and receive - significantly better pay and benefits. From Hollywood writers and actors to autoworkers to hotel workers, 510,000 laborers staged 393 strikes in the first 11 months of 2023, according to Cornell University's Labor Action Tracker.\n\nUnder its pugnacious new president, Shawn Fain, the United Auto Workers struck the Big Three automakers - Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, the parent of Chrysler, Jeep and Ram - and won pay raises, improved benefits and numerous other concessions.\n\nHollywood writers and actors, as a result of their walkouts, secured higher pay and protection from the unrestricted use of artificial intelligence, among other concessions.\n\nThe unions' gains marked a resurgence for their workers after years following the Great Recession of 2007-2009 when union power further dwindled, wage gains languished and employers seemed to have their pick of job candidates. An explosive economic rebound from the COVID-19 recession of 2020 and a wave of retirements left companies scrambling to find workers and provided labor unions with renewed leverage\n\nStill, even now, unions remain a shadow of what they once were: As of last year, roughly 10% of U.S. employees belonged to labor unions, way down from 20% in 1983. And back in the 1970s, the United States experienced an average of 500 strikes a year, involving 2 million workers, said Johnnie Kallas, a labor expert at Cornell.\n\n## MUSK'S X-RATED TRANSFORMATION\nA little more than a year ago, Elon Musk walked into Twitter's San Francisco headquarters, fired its CEO and other top executives and began transforming the social media platform into what's now known as X.\n\nSince then, the company has been bombarded by allegations of misinformation, endured significant advertising losses and suffered declines in usage.\n\nDisney, Comcast and other high-profile advertisers stopped spending on X after the liberal advocacy group Media Matters issued a report showing that their ads were appearing alongside material praising Nazis. (X has sued the group, claiming it \"manufactured\" the report to \"drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp.\")\n\nThe problems culminated when Musk went on an expletive-ridden rant in an on-stage interview about companies that had halted spending on X. Musk asserted that advertisers that pulled out were engaging in \"blackmail\" and, using a profanity, essentially told them to get lost.\n\n\"Don't advertise,\" X's billionaire owner said.\n\n## HOUSING'S MISERABLE YEAR\nRemarkably, the U.S. economy and job market largely avoided pain in 2023 from the Fed's relentless campaign against inflation - 11 interest-rate hikes since March 2022.\n\nNot so the housing market.\n\nAs the Fed jacked up borrowing rates, the average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rate shot up from 4.16% in March 2022 to 7.79% in October 2023. Home sales crumbled. For the first 10 months of 2023, sales of previously occupied homes sank 20%.\n\nYet at the same time and despite the sales slump, home prices kept rising. The combination of high mortgage rates and rising prices made homeownership - or the prospect of trading up to another house - unaffordable for many.\n\nContributing to the squeeze was a severe shortage of homes for sale. That, too, was a consequence of higher rates. Homeowners who were sitting on super-low mortgage rates didn't want to sell their houses only to have to buy another and take on a new mortgage at a much higher rate. Mortgage giant Freddie Mac says 60% of outstanding mortgages still have rates below 4%; 90% are below 6%.\n\n## CRYPTO CHAOS (CONTINUED)\nIf 2022 was the year that the cryptocurrency industry collapsed, 2023 was the year of the spillover from that fall.\n\nThe year's headlines from crypto were dominated by convictions and legal settlements as Washington regulators adopted a much more aggressive stance toward the industry.\n\nA jury convicted Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of the crypto exchange FTX, of wire fraud and six other charges. Weeks later, the founder of Binance, Chengpeng Zhao, agreed to plead guilty to money laundering charges as part of a settlement between U.S. authorities and the exchange. Among the other crypto heavyweights that met legal trouble were Coinbase, Gemini and Genesis.\n\nYet speculation that crypto may gain more legitimacy among investors helped more than double the price of bitcoin. After years of delays, regulators are eventually expected to approve a bitcoin exchange-traded fund. Whether that would prove sufficient to sustain bitcoin's rally over the long run remains to be seen.\n\n## BANKING JITTERS\nHistorically, high interest rates benefit banks; they can charge more for their loans. But in 2023, higher rates ended up poisoning a handful of them.\n\nThe industry endured a banking crisis on a scale not seen since 2008. Three midsized banks - Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank - collapsed.\n\nFor years, banks had loaded up their balance sheets with high-quality mortgages and Treasurys. In an era of ultra-low rates, those mortgages and bonds paid out puny interest.\n\nEnter the specter of inflation and the Fed's aggressive rate hikes. As rates jumped, the banks' bonds tumbled in value because investors could now buy new bonds with much juicier yields. With pressure on the banks mounting, some anxious depositors withdrew their money. After one such bank run, Silicon Valley collapsed. Days later, Signature Bank failed. First Republic was seized and sold to JPMorgan Chase.\n\nInvestors remain concerned about midsized institutions with similar business models. Trillions of dollars in commercial real estate loans that remain on these banks' books could become problematic in 2024.\n\n## GLOBAL MARKETS RALLY\nFrom Austria to New Zealand, stock markets rallied through 2023. As inflation eased, stocks climbed despite sluggish global economic growth.\n\nA tumble in crude oil prices helped slow inflation. A barrel of Brent crude, the international standard, dropped 14% through mid-December on expectations that the world has more than enough oil to meet demand.\n\nAn index that spans nearly 3,000 stocks from 47 countries returned 18% in U.S. dollar terms as of Dec. 11. Healthy gains for Apple, Nvidia and other U.S. Big Tech stocks powered much of the gains. So did the 45% return for the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, which sells the Wegovy drug to treat obesity and the 33% return for the Dutch semiconductor company ASML.\n\nThe bond market endured more turbulence. Bond prices tumbled for much of the year, and their yields rose, over uncertainty about how far central banks would go in raising rates to curb inflation.\n\nThe yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury briefly topped 5% in October to reach its highest level since 2007. Yields have since eased on the expectation that the Fed is done raising rates.\n\n## WORLD ECONOMY'S RESILIENCE\nOver the past three years, the global economy has absorbed one hit after another. A devastating pandemic. The disruption of energy and grain markets stemming from Russia's invasion of Ukraine. A resurgence of inflation. Punishing interest rates.\n\nAnd yet economic output kept growing in 2023, if only modestly. Optimism grew about a \"soft landing\" - a scenario in which high rates tame inflation without causing a recession. The head of the International Monetary Fund praised the global economy for its \"remarkable resilience.\"\n\nThe United States has led the way. Defying predictions that high rates would trigger a U.S. recession, the world's largest economy has continued to grow. And employers, fueled by solid consumer spending, have kept hiring at healthy rates.\n\nStill, the accumulated shocks are restraining growth. The IMF expects the global economy to expand just 2.9% in 2024 from an expected 3% this year. A major concern is a weakened China, the world's No. 2 economy. Its growth is hobbled by the collapse of an overbuilt real estate market, sagging consumer confidence and high rates of youth unemployment.\n\n## THE U.S. ECONOMY (TAYLOR'S VERSION)\nTaylor Swift dominated popular culture, with her record-shattering $1 billion concert tour, her anointment as Time magazine's Person of the Year and her high-profile romance with Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chiefs football star.\n\nThe Swift phenomenon went further yet. It extended into the realm of the national economy. Her name came up at a July news conference by Fed Chair Jerome Powell, when Powell was asked whether Swift's blockbuster ticket sales revealed anything about the state of the economy. Though Powell avoided a direct reply, Swift's name came up that same month in a Fed review of regional economies: Her tour was credited with boosting hotel bookings in Philadelphia.\n\nEconomist Sarah Wolfe of Morgan Stanley has calculated that Swifties spent an average of $1,500 on airfares, hotel rooms and concert tickets to her shows (though it's perhaps worth noting that Beyonce fans spent even more - an average $1,800)."}
{"text": "# Houthi attacks on commercial ships have upended global trade in vital Red Sea corridor\nBy **COURTNEY BONNELL**  \nDecember 18, 2023. 2:34 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - The attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea by Yemen's Houthi rebels have scared off some of the world's top shipping companies and oil giants, effectively rerouting global trade away from a crucial artery for consumer goods and energy supplies that is expected to trigger delays and rising prices.\n\nBP said Monday that it has \"decided to temporarily pause all transits through the Red Sea,\" including shipments of oil, liquid natural gas and other energy supplies. Describing it as a \"precautionary pause,\" the London-based oil and gas corporation said the decision faces ongoing review but crew safety was the priority.\n\nBoth oil and European natural gas prices rose partly over market nerves about attacks by the Iranian-backed Houthis, who confirmed two new attacks Monday. It is the latest targeting of container ships and oil tankers passing through a narrow waterway that separates Yemen from East Africa and leads north to the Red Sea and Suez Canal, through which an estimated 10% of the world's trade passes.\n\nBesides critical energy supplies reaching Europe and beyond on tankers, food products like palm oil and grain and most of the world's manufactured products move by container ships - many of them heading through the Suez Canal.\n\n\"This is a problem for Europe. It's a problem for Asia,\" said John Stawpert, senior manager of environment and trade for the International Chamber of Shipping, which represents 80% of the world's commercial fleet.\n\nHe noted that 40% of Asia-Europe trade normally goes through the waterway: \"It has the potential to be a huge economic impact.\"\n\nAlmost all goods that stores needed for Christmas will have already been delivered, but online orders could be delayed, analysts say, because four of the world's five largest container shipping companies have paused or rerouted movements through the Red Sea in the last several days.\n\nMSC, Maersk, CMA CGM Group and Hapag-Lloyd are leaders in alliances that move the bulk all consumer goods between Asia and Europe, so \"virtually all services will have to make this rerouting,\" said Simon Heaney, senior manager of container research for Drewry, a maritime research consultancy.\n\nShips will have to go around the Cape of Good Hope at the bottom of Africa instead, adding what some analysts have said could be a week to 10 days or even longer to voyages.\n\nDepending on what companies decide to do, they will have to add more ships to make up the extra time or burn more fuel for the longer journey and if they decide to go faster to meet their itineraries - both of which would release more climate-changing carbon dioxide, Heaney said.\n\n\"The impact will be longer transit times, more fuel spent, more ships required, potential disruption and delays - at least in the first arrivals in Europe,\" he said, noting that ships could arrive to ports from their longer journeys \"in clumps.\"\n\nThat brings up the cost of shipping, but \"I don't think it's going to go to the heights that it reached during the pandemic,\" Heaney said.\n\nSupply chain disruptions increased as people stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic ramped up orders for all sorts of products, driving up consumer prices around the world.\n\nStawpert of the shipping chamber said he would expect to see some price increases for consumers in the short term but that it depends how long the security threat lasts.\n\nThe Houthis have targeted Israeli-linked vessels during Israel's war with Hamas but escalated their attacks in recent days, hitting or just missing ships without clear ties.\n\nBrig. Gen. Yahya Saree, the Houthi military spokesman, said Monday that they launched what he described as \"naval aircraft\" at the Cayman Islands-flagged Swan Atlantic, a chemical and oil products carrier, and Panama-flagged MSC CLARA cargo ship. He didn't offer further details.\n\nDenmark-based operator Uni-Tankers said the Swan Atlantic, which was carrying vegetable oils to France's Reunion Island off Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, was hit by an unknown object that ignited a small fire. Crew members put it out and all were reported to be safe, the company said. It received military aid and continued on its journey.\n\nU.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at a news conference during a visit to Israel that he was convening a meeting of his counterparts in the Middle East and beyond on Tuesday to address the Houthi risk to shipping.\n\n\"These attacks are reckless, dangerous, and they violate international law,\" Austin said. \"We're taking action to build an international coalition to address this threat.\"\n\nU.S., French, U.K. and other coalition warships already patrol the area, keeping the waterway open. Stawpert said deployments by navies have increased and that should boost confidence in the shipping industry and ease the threat to some degree.\n\n\"We would also hope for a surge in forces, given how important this is to the world economy and people around the world,\" he said.\n\nDisruptions expected from the Red Sea could have far-reaching effects because they would happen at the same time ships are being restricted through the Panama Canal, a major trade route between Asia and the United States.\n\nSome companies had planned to reroute to the Red Sea - which is a crucial thoroughfare for Asia-Europe shipments - to avoid delays at the Panama Canal caused by a lack of rainfall, analysts say.\n\nNow, some may be scared away from that alternative by the threat of Houthi attacks. That means those taking extra precautions to avoid risks and delays from both global trade arteries will have to take the longer journey around Africa.\n\n\"It's unprecedented that the two have coincided,\" the analyst Heaney said, adding that neither the Suez nor Panama canals are closed, \"it's just that they're becoming less viable for the short term.\"\n\nThe cancellations also will mean problems for cash-strapped Egypt, he said, with millions in fees that shipping companies pay to clear the Suez Canal representing a big source of income for a country whose economy is struggling with high inflation and a weakening currency."}
{"text": "# Stock market today: Asian shares are mixed. Japan's central bank keeps its monetary policy unchanged\nBy **ELAINE KURTENBACH**  \nDecember 19, 2023. 12:25 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BANGKOK (AP)** - Asian shares were mixed Tuesday after a seven-week winning streak on Wall Street cooled.\n\nU.S. futures were flat and oil prices edged higher.\n\nTokyo's Nikkei 225 index gained 0.9% to 33,063.00 after the Bank of Japan kept its ultra-lax monetary policy unchanged, as expected. The dollar rose against the yen, climbing to 143.38 yen from 142.79.\n\nThe S&P/ASX 200 in Sydney added 0.8% to 7,486.90, while South Korea's Kospi was nearly unchanged, at 2,566.30.\n\nHong Kong's Hang Seng index declined 0.6% to 16,527.75 and the Shanghai Composite index fell less than 1 point to 2,930.18.\n\nBangkok's SET also was little changed, while Taiwan's Taiex fell 0.7%.\n\nOn Monday, the S&P 500 rose 0.5% to 4,740.56 and the Nasdaq composite picked up 0.6% to 14,904.81. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished essentially flat after most of a 0.2% gain faded by late afternoon, closing at 37,306.02.\n\nRetailers and big technology companies were among the big gainers. Amazon.com rose 2.7% and Etsy climbed 4.7% for the biggest gain among S&P 500 stocks.\n\nChipmaker Nvidia rose 2.4%, while Meta added 2.9% and Netflix closed 3% higher.\n\nEnergy companies also rallied as the price of crude oil jumped more than $1 amid growing concerns about attacks from Iranian-backed Houthis on shipping in the Red Sea. Oil and natural gas giant BP has joined the growing list of companies that have halted shipments in the major trade route.\n\nValero Energy rose 2.6% and Marathon Petroleum added 2.3%.\n\nU.S. Steel soared 26.1% after agreeing to be acquired by Japan's Nippon Steel. The Pittsburgh steel maker played a key role in the nation's industrialization. The all-cash deal is valued at about $14.1 billion, or $14.9 billion with debt. That's nearly double what was offered just four months ago by rival Cleveland Cliffs.\n\nInvestors had several other corporate buyout updates to review. Photoshop maker Adobe rose 2.5% following an announcement that it is terminating its planned $20 billion buyout of Figma. Door maker Masonite International fell 16% after saying it will by PGT Innovations in a deal worth about $13 billion.\n\nTreasury yields mostly rose. The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 3.95% from 3.92% late Friday.\n\nThe broader market surged last week and added to solid December gains after the Federal Reserve signaled that inflation may have cooled enough for the central bank to shift to cutting interest rates in 2024. The Dow closed out last week with a record, while the S&P 500 ended the week with its longest weekly winning streak in six years, while edging closer to its all-time high.\n\nThe benchmark S&P 500 is now up more than 23% this year, while the Nasdaq is up more than 42%.\n\nLower interest rates typically take pressure off of financial markets. The Fed's goal since 2022 has been to slow the economy and grind down prices for investments enough through high interest rates to get inflation under control. Economic growth has slowed, but has not dipped into recession, while inflation continues easing.\n\nWall Street is betting that those conditions mean the Fed is done raising interest rates and could start cutting them in early 2024. Investors will get their last big inflation update of the year on Friday when the government releases its report on personal consumption expenditures. It's the Fed's preferred measure of inflation and has been easing since the middle of 2022.\n\nAnalysts polled by FactSet expect the measure of inflation to soften to 2.8% in November from 3% in October.\n\nInvestors will also have a few big earnings reports to review this week, which could give them a better sense of how companies and consumers are faring amid high interest rates and lingering inflation. Package delivery service FedEx will report its latest financial results on Tuesday and Cheerios maker General Mills will report its results on Wednesday. Athletic footwear giant Nike will report its latest results on Thursday.\n\nEarly Tuesday, U.S. benchmark crude oil was down 1 cent at $72.81 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude, the international standard, was up 11 cents at $78.08 per barrel.\n\nThe euro rose to $1.0929 from $1.0925 late Monday."}
{"text": "# The Federal Reserve could do what was thought impossible: Defeat inflation without a steep recession\nBy **CHRISTOPHER RUGABER**  \nDecember 16, 2023. 7:29 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - It was the most painful inflation Americans had experienced since 1981, when \"The Dukes of Hazzard\" and \"The Jeffersons\" were topping the TV charts. Yet the Federal Reserve now seems on the verge of defeating it - and without the surge in unemployment and the deep recession that many economists had predicted would accompany it.\n\nInflation has been falling more or less steadily since peaking in June of last year at 9.1%. And when the Fed's preferred inflation gauge for November is reported next week, it's likely to show that in the past six months, annual inflation actually dipped just below the Fed's target of 2%, economists at UBS estimate.\n\nThe cost of goods - such as used cars, furniture and appliances - has fallen for six straight months. Compared with a year ago, goods prices are unchanged, held down by improved global supply chains.\n\nHousing and rental costs, a major driver of inflation, are growing more slowly. Wage growth has cooled, too, though it still tops inflation. Milder wage growth tends to ease pressure on restaurants, hotels and other employers to increase their prices to cover their labor costs.\n\n\"I think it's really good to see the progress that we're making,\" Chair Jerome Powell said at a news conference Wednesday after the Fed's latest policy meeting. \"If you look at the ... six-month measures, you see very low numbers.\"\n\nOn Friday, the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan agency, estimated that inflation will drop to 2.1% by the end of next year.\n\nThere will likely be bumps on the road toward getting inflation fully under control, officials have said. Powell insisted that \"no one is declaring victory.\" And he reiterated that the central bank wants to see further evidence of falling inflation before it would feel confident that it is sustainably headed back to the 2% target.\n\nYet many economists, normally a cautious lot, are now willing to declare that inflation is nearly back under control after two-plus years in which it imposed hardships on millions of American households.\n\n\"It appears that inflation has returned to 2%,\" said Tim Duy, chief economist at SGH Macroeconomics. \"The Fed looks like it has won that battle.\"\n\nPrices spikes are also moderating overseas, with both the Bank of England and European Central Bank keeping their benchmark interest rates unchanged this week. Though inflation is still at 4.6% in the United Kingdom, it has fallen to 2.4% in the 20 countries that use the euro currency.\n\nWith inflation cooling, Powell said the 19 officials on the Fed's policy setting committee had discussed the prospects for rate cuts at this week's meeting. The officials also projected that the Fed will cut its key interest rate three times next year.\n\nThat stance marked a drastic shift from the rate-hiking campaign the Fed began in March 2022. Beginning then, the central bank raised its benchmark rate 11 times, from near zero to roughly 5.4%, its highest level in 22 years, to try to slow borrowing, spending and inflation. The result was much higher costs for mortgages, auto loans, business borrowing and other forms of credit.\n\nPowell's suddenly more optimistic words, and the Fed's rate-cut projections, sent stock market indexes soaring this week. Wall Street traders now foresee a roughly 80% likelihood that the first rate cut will occur when the Fed meets in March, and they are forecasting a total of six cuts in 2024.\n\nOn Friday, John Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a top lieutenant of Powell's, sought to pour some cold water on those expectations. Speaking on CNBC, Williams said it was \"premature to be even thinking\" about whether to cut rates in March. But he also mentioned that his forecast was for inflation to move down \"sustainably\" to 2%.\n\nThe week's events represented a departure from just two weeks ago, when Powell had said it was \"premature\" to say whether the Fed had raised its key rate high enough to fully conquer high inflation. On Wednesday, he suggested that the Fed was almost certainly done with rate increases.\n\nRecent data appeared to have helped shift Powell's thinking. On Wednesday, a measure of wholesale prices came in lower than economists had expected. Some of those figures are used to compile the Fed's preferred inflation gauge, which, as a result, is expected to show much lower inflation numbers next week.\n\nPowell said some Fed officials had even updated their economic projections on Wednesday, not long before they were issued, in light of the lower-than-expected wholesale price report.\n\n\"The speed at which inflation has fallen has been like an earthquake at the Fed,\" Duy wrote in a note to clients Wednesday.\n\nAnd yet in the meantime, the economy keeps growing, defying widespread fears from a year ago that 2023 would bring a recession, a consequence of the much higher borrowing rates the Fed engineered. A report on retail sales Thursday showed that consumers grew their spending last month, likely encouraged by increased discounting that will also lower inflation. Such trends are supporting the growing belief that the economy will achieve an elusive \"soft landing,\" in which inflation is defeated without an accompanying recession.\n\n\"We think the Fed cannot believe its luck: We are back to 'immaculate disinflation,' \" Krishna Guha, an economic analyst at investment bank Evercore ISI, wrote in a client note.\n\nEconomists credit the Fed's rapid rate hikes for contributing to inflation's decline. In addition, a recovery in global supply chains and a jump in the number of Americans - and recent immigrants - searching for jobs have helped cool the pace of wage growth.\n\nJon Steinsson, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said that by aggressively raising their key interest rate in about 15 months - the fastest such pace in four decades - Fed officials kept Americans' inflation expectations largely in check. Expectations can become self-fulfilling: If people expect higher inflation, they often take actions, such as demanding higher wages, that can send prices higher still.\n\n\"They played a crucial role,\" Steinsson said.\n\nStill, a continued decline in inflation isn't guaranteed. One wild card is rental prices. Real-time measures of new apartment leases show those costs rising much more slowly than they did a year ago. It takes time for that data to flow into the government's figures. In fact, excluding what the government calls \"shelter\" costs - rents, the cost of homeownership and hotel prices - inflation rose just 1.4% last month from a year earlier.\n\nBut Kathy Bostjancic, an economist at Nationwide, said she worries that a shortage of available homes could raise housing costs in the coming years, potentially keeping inflation elevated.\n\nThe Fed's rate hikes, Bostjancic said, could actually prolong the shortage. Today's higher mortgage rates may limit home construction while also discouraging current homeowners from selling. Both trends would keep a lid on the supply of homes and keep prices elevated.\n\nYet Fed officials appear confident in their forecasts that inflation is steadily slowing. In September, 14 of 19 Fed policymakers had said there were risks that inflation could rise faster than they expected. This month, only eight said so.\n\n\"Their projections have mostly gone down, and they think the probability that there will be some flare-up of inflation is lower,\" said Preston Mui, senior economist at Employ America, an advocacy group."}
{"text": "# Congressional Budget Office projects lower inflation and higher unemployment into 2025\nBy **FATIMA HUSSEIN**  \nDecember 15, 2023. 1:36 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - The Congressional Budget Office said Friday it expects inflation to nearly hit the Federal Reserve's 2% target rate in 2024, as overall growth is expected to slow and unemployment is expected to rise into 2025, according to updated economic projections for the next two years.\n\nThe office's Current View of the Economy from 2023 to 2025 report estimates that the unemployment rate will hit 4.4% in the fourth quarter of 2024 and remain close to that level through 2025.\n\nCurrently, the unemployment rate is 3.7%, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data.\n\nMeanwhile, gross domestic product, otherwise known as the overall health of the economy, is estimated to fall from 2.5% in 2023 to 1.5% in 2024 - then rebound to 2.2% in 2025, according to the CBO projections.\n\nCompared with its February 2023 projections, CBO's Friday report predicts weaker growth, lower unemployment, and higher interest rates in 2024 and 2025.\n\nBut in a reminder that the U.S. economy has seldom behaved as anticipated through the pandemic and its aftermath, the employment forecast looks very different from the pace of hiring so far this year.\n\nThe jobless rate has now remained below 4% for nearly two years, the longest such streak since the late 1960s.\n\nAnd on the inflation front, most economists expect growth to slow and inflation to continue to decline.\n\nThis week, the Federal Reserve kept its key interest rate unchanged for a third straight time, and its officials signaled that they are edging closer to cutting rates as early as next summer.\n\nAt a news conference, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that officials are likely done raising rates because of how steadily inflation has cooled.\n\nIn keeping with the agency's mandate to provide objective, impartial analysis, the report makes no policy recommendations, CBO director Phillip Swagel said in the report."}
{"text": "# From New York to Tokyo, stock markets around the world have rallied in 2023\nBy **STAN CHOE**  \nDecember 14, 2023. 10:38 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - It's been a great year for stock markets around the world.\n\nWall Street's rally has been front and center, with the U.S. stock market the world's largest and its clear leader in performance in recent years. The S&P 500 is on track to return more than 20% for the third time in the last five years, and its gangbusters performance has brought it back within 2% of its record set at the start of 2022. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at a record high Wednesday.\n\nEven in Japan, which has been home to some of the world's most disappointing stocks for decades, the market marched upward to touch its highest level since shortly after its bubble burst in 1989.\n\nAcross developed and emerging economies, stocks have powered ahead in 2023 as inflation has regressed, even with wars raging in hotspots around the world. Globally, inflation is likely to ease to 6.9% this year from 8.7% in 2022, according to the International Monetary Fund.\n\nThe expectation is for inflation to cool even further next year. That has investors feeling better about the path of interest rates, which have shot higher around much of the world to get inflation under control. Such hopes have been more than enough to offset a slowdown in global economic growth, down to an estimated 3% this year from 3.5% last year, according to the IMF.\n\nThis year's glaring exception for global stock markets has been China. The recovery for the world's second-largest economy has faltered, and worries are rising about cracks in its property market. Stocks in Hong Kong have taken a particularly hard hit.\n\nThis year's big gains for global markets may carry a downside, though: Some possible future returns may have been pulled forward, limiting the upside from here.\n\nEurope's economy has been flirting with recession for a while, for example, and many economists expect it to remain under pressure in 2024 because of all the hikes to interest rates that have already been pushed through.\n\nAnd while central banks around the world may be set to cut interest rates later in 2024, which would relieve pressure on the economy and financial system, rates are unlikely to return to the lows that followed the 2008 financial crisis, according to researchers at investment giant Vanguard. That new normal for rates could also hem in returns for stocks and make markets more volatile.\n\nFor the next decade, Vanguard says U.S. stocks could return an annualized 4.2% to 6.2%, well below their recent run. It's forecasting stronger potential returns from stocks abroad, both in the emerging and developed worlds."}
{"text": "# How Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea are affecting global trade\nBy **COURTNEY BONNELL**  \nDecember 21, 2023. 10:29 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - The attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea by Yemen's Houthi rebels have rerouted a majority of global trade away from the crucial maritime artery for consumer goods and energy supplies, a shift expected to trigger delays and rising prices.\n\nOil, natural gas, grain and everything from toys to electronics typically travel through the waterway separating Africa and the Arabian Peninsula en route to the Suez Canal, where 12% of the world's trade passes.\n\nSome of the world's largest container shipping companies and oil giant BP are sending vessels on longer journeys that bypass the Red Sea. In response to the growing impact to global trade, the U.S. and a host of other nations have created a new force to protect ships.\n\nHere are things to know about the recent attacks and the impact on global shipping:\n\n## WHY ARE HOUTHIS ATTACKING SHIPS?\nThe Houthis are Iranian-backed rebels who seized Yemen's capital, Sanaa, in 2014, launching a grinding war against a Saudi-led coalition seeking to restore the government.\n\nThe Houthis have sporadically targeted ships in the region, but the attacks have increased since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. They have used drones and anti-ship missiles to attack vessels and in one case used a helicopter to board and seize an Israeli-owned ship and its crew.\n\nThey have threatened to attack any vessel they believe is either going to or coming from Israel. That's now escalated to apparently any vessel, with container ships and oil tankers flagged to countries like Norway and Liberia being attacked or drawing missile fire.\n\nThe Houthis also have hailed vessels by radio to try to convince them to change course closer to the territory they control.\n\n## WHY IS THE RED SEA IMPORTANT?\nThe Red Sea has the Suez Canal at its northern end and the narrow Bab el-Mandeb Strait at the southern end leading into the Gulf of Aden. It's a busy waterway with ships traversing the Suez Canal to bring goods between Asia and Europe and beyond.\n\nIn fact, 40% of Asia-Europe trade normally goes through the area, including a huge amount of energy supplies like oil and diesel fuel for import-dependent Europe, said John Stawpert, senior manager of environment and trade for the International Chamber of Shipping, which represents 80% of the world's commercial fleet.\n\nSo do food products like palm oil and grain and anything else brought over on container ships, which is most of the world's manufactured products.\n\nIn all, about 30% of global container traffic and more than 1 million barrels of crude oil per day typically head through the Suez Canal, according to global freight booking platform Freightos Group.\n\n## HOW ARE HOUTHI ATTACKS AFFECTING TRADE?\nHuge shipping container companies MSC, Maersk, CMA CGM Group and Hapag-Lloyd, among others, are avoiding the Red Sea and sending their ships around Africa and the Cape of Good Hope. That adds what analysts say could be a week to two weeks to voyages.\n\nShippers amounting to 62% of global capacity are opting for the longer route, according to Freightos. That's lead the number of vessels moving through the Red Sea to drop by more than 40% in a week, said Project44, a tech company whose platform helps companies track shipments.\n\nLondon-based BP also that it has \"decided to temporarily pause all transits through the Red Sea,\" including shipments of oil, liquid natural gas and other energy supplies.\n\nDepending on what companies decide to do, they will have to add more ships to make up the extra time or burn more fuel for the longer journey and if they decide to go faster to meet their itineraries - both of which would release more climate-changing carbon dioxide, said Simon Heaney, senior manager of container research for Drewry, a maritime research consultancy.\n\n\"The impact will be longer transit times, more fuel spent, more ships required, potential disruption and delays - at least in the first arrivals in Europe,\" he said.\n\nThat brings up the cost of shipping, but \"I don't think it's going to go to the heights that it reached during the pandemic,\" Heaney said.\n\nSupply chain disruptions increased as people stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic ramped up orders for all sorts of products, driving up consumer prices worldwide.\n\nStawpert of the shipping chamber said he would expect to see some price increases for consumers in the short term but that it depends how long the security threat lasts.\n\nProject44 foresees higher gasoline prices because if the conflict drags on, a \"major disruption to oil is anticipated\" and that would push up the cost of crude. Oil prices already have been rising.\n\nThe company also expects products could be missing from store shelves after the busy holiday shopping season, with new shipments taking longer to arrive.\n\nHowever, \"one saving grace may be the timing, as December and early January are typically slow, post-holiday season times for ocean freight,\" Judah Levine, head of research for Freightos, said in a blog post.\n\n## HOW IS THE WORLD RESPONDING?\nU.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced a security initiative to protect ships in the Red Sea that includes United Kingdom, Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles and Spain.\n\nSome of those countries will conduct joint patrols while others provide intelligence support in the southern Red Sea and the nearby Gulf of Aden, Austin said. The goal is to provide ships and other assets to help protect trade in the area.\n\nIt builds on the existing presence of U.S. and other coalition warships that patrol to keep the waterway open. The Houthis have no formal naval warships to use to impose a cordon, relying on harassing fire and only one helicopter-borne assault so far.\n\nMeanwhile, ships are still moving through the Red Sea, though insurance costs have doubled, which can add hundreds of thousands of dollars to a journey for the most expensive ships, said David Osler, insurance editor for Lloyd's List Intelligence, which provides analysis for the global maritime industry.\n\nHe expects those costs to keep rising."}
{"text": "# European Central Bank keeps its key interest rate at a record high. Now, when will it cut?\nBy **DAVID McHUGH**  \nDecember 14, 2023. 10:35 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**FRANKFURT, Germany (AP)** - The European Central Bank kept its key interest rate at a record high Thursday and said it will leave it there as long as needed to battle back inflation, signaling that cuts are not around the corner despite expectations it will act next year to support the shrinking economy.\n\nIt follows similar decisions this week by the U.S. Federal Reserve, Bank of England and Swiss National Bank to leave rates unchanged. The Fed went further by signaling it could make three interest rate cuts next year.\n\nThe ECB gave away little about its future moves after keeping its benchmark rate at 4%, reiterating that it will make decisions based on the latest information on how the economy is doing.\n\n\"Should we lower our guard? We ask ourselves that question. No, we should absolutely not lower our guard,\" bank President Christine Lagarde said at a news conference, speaking hoarsely and coughing at times because she said she was recovering from COVID-19 but was no longer contagious.\n\nPolicymakers \"did not discuss rate cuts at all, no discussion, no debate on this issue,\" she said. Lagarde also stressed that future decisions will ensure that rates \"will be set at sufficiently restrictive levels for as long as necessary.\"\n\nCentral banks worldwide drastically raised rates to contain inflation that broke out in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. They're now trying to balance keeping rates high for long enough to ensure inflation is contained against the risk that higher borrowing costs could throw their economies into recession.\n\nInflation has fallen more than expected in the 20 European Union countries that use the euro currency, to 2.4% in November from a peak of 10.6% in October 2022. That's not too far from the ECB's goal of 2% considered best for the economy.\n\nThat has led analysts to predict the ECB will cut rates next year, though the timing is not certain and forecasts range from March to September for the move.\n\nWhile inflation is down following a record pace of rate hikes, economic growth has lagged because the cost of borrowing has surged for things like home purchases and business investment in new offices and factory equipment. The eurozone saw economic output shrink 0.1% in the July-to-September quarter.\n\nMeanwhile, wages are still catching up to higher prices in shops, leaving European consumers less than euphoric even as European city centers deck themselves in Christmas lights.\n\nIn Paris, travel agent Amel Zemani says Christmas shopping will have to wait for the post-holiday sales.\n\n\"I can't go shopping this year, I can't afford Christmas gifts for the kids,\" she said. \"What do they want? They want sneakers. I'm waiting for the sales to give them the gifts then. And they understand.\"\n\nSteven Ekerovich, an American photographer living in the French capital, said that while \"Paris was lagging easily 50% behind the rest of the major cosmopolitan cities in pricing, it's catching up fast. Rents, food, clothing. So, you have got to be careful now.\"\n\nThat lingering inflation being felt across the eurozone is what the ECB is trying to stamp out.\n\nThe bank's messaging Thursday showed that \"there's still a long way to go before the ECB starts cutting rates,\" said Carsten Brzeski, chief eurozone economist at ING bank. \"It should also be clear that the end of a hiking cycle does not imminently lead to a cutting cycle.\"\n\nBrzeski said he sees the first rate cuts in June.\n\nOn the other hand, inflation was likely to be \"quite a lot lower\" than the ECB expects, so the first cut of a quarter-percentage point could come in April, with four more such cuts more to follow, said Andrew Kenningham, chief Europe economist at Capital Economics.\n\nHigher interest rates combat inflation by increasing the cost of borrowing throughout the economy, from bank loans and lines of credit for businesses to mortgages and credit cards. That makes it more expensive to borrow to buy things or invest, lowering demand for goods and easing prices."}
{"text": "# Bank of England holds interest rates at a 15-year high despite worries about the economy\nBy **PAN PYLAS**  \nDecember 14, 2023. 10:14 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - The Bank of England kept borrowing rates unchanged Thursday despite mounting worries over the state of the British economy, and it showed little sign that it is contemplating cutting them anytime soon - unlike the U.S. Federal Reserve.\n\nThe central bank left its main interest rate at a 15-year high of 5.25%, where it has stood since August following the end of nearly two years of hikes.\n\nSix of the nine members of the Monetary Policy Committee voted to keep rates on hold while three wanted a quarter-point hike - a clear signal to the markets that rate cuts are not on the agenda yet.\n\nThat was backed up by bank Gov. Andrew Bailey, who said in a statement that interest rate policy would likely have to remain \"restrictive for an extended period of time.\"\n\nThe Bank of England has managed to get inflation down from a four-decade high of over 11% - but there's still a ways to go for it to get back to the bank's 2% target.\n\nInflation, as measured by the consumer price index, stood at 4.6% in the year to October, clearly still too high for comfort.\n\n\"We've come a long way this year .... but there is still some way to go,\" Bailey said.\n\nThe bank's decision to hold rates follows two years of hikes that targeted a surge in inflation, first stoked by supply chain issues during the coronavirus pandemic and then Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which pushed up food and energy costs.\n\nWhile the interest rate increases have helped in the battle against inflation, the squeeze on consumer spending, primarily through higher mortgage rates, has weighed on growth in the British economy. There are growing worries that rates will stay high for too long, unnecessarily damaging the economy.\n\n\"With inflation trending downwards and the economy at risk of recession, the case for interest rate cuts is likely to grow over the coming months,\" said Suren Thiru, economics director at the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.\n\nThe U.S. Fed already has signaled that it expects to make three interest rate cuts next year after it kept rates on hold Wednesday. The European Central Bank, which sets policy for the 20 European Union countries using the euro currency, also left rates unchanged but indicated, like the Bank of England, that it would stay the course for a while.\n\nThose different stances were evident in the performance of the British pound as investors priced in the likelihood of more imminent cuts from the Fed, which would reduce relative returns for holders of the dollar. The pound was up by a full cent at $1.2750 and unchanged against the euro.\n\nHowever soon the Bank of England decides to cut rates, it's very likely that high borrowing rates and low economic growth will be the backdrop for next year's general election. That's hardly ideal for the governing Conservative Party, which opinion polls say is way behind the main opposition Labour Party."}
{"text": "# Text of the policy statement the Federal Reserve released Wednesday\nDecember 13, 2023. 2:21 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Below is the statement the Fed released Wednesday after its policy meeting ended:\n\nRecent indicators suggest that growth of economic activity has slowed from its strong pace in the third quarter. Job gains have moderated since earlier in the year but remain strong, and the unemployment rate has remained low. Inflation has eased over the past year but remains elevated.\n\nThe U.S. banking system is sound and resilient. Tighter financial and credit conditions for households and businesses are likely to weigh on economic activity, hiring, and inflation. The extent of these effects remains uncertain. The Committee remains highly attentive to inflation risks.\n\nThe Committee seeks to achieve maximum employment and inflation at the rate of 2 percent over the longer run. In support of these goals, the Committee decided to maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 5-1/4 to 5-1/2 percent. The Committee will continue to assess additional information and its implications for monetary policy.\n\nIn determining the extent of any additional policy firming that may be appropriate to return inflation to 2 percent over time, the Committee will take into account the cumulative tightening of monetary policy, the lags with which monetary policy affects economic activity and inflation, and economic and financial developments. In addition, the Committee will continue reducing its holdings of Treasury securities and agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities, as described in its previously announced plans. The Committee is strongly committed to returning inflation to its 2 percent objective.\n\nIn assessing the appropriate stance of monetary policy, the Committee will continue to monitor the implications of incoming information for the economic outlook. The Committee would be prepared to adjust the stance of monetary policy as appropriate if risks emerge that could impede the attainment of the Committee's goals. The Committee's assessments will take into account a wide range of information, including readings on labor market conditions, inflation pressures and inflation expectations, and financial and international developments.\n\nVoting for the monetary policy action were Jerome H. Powell, Chair; John C. Williams, Vice Chair; Michael S. Barr; Michelle W. Bowman; Lisa D. Cook; Austan D. Goolsbee; Patrick Harker; Philip N. Jefferson; Neel Kashkari; Adriana D. Kugler; Lorie K. Logan; and Christopher J. Waller."}
{"text": "# Wholesale inflation in US slowed further last month, signaling that price pressures continue to ease\nBy **PAUL WISEMAN**  \nDecember 13, 2023. 9:02 AM EST\n\n---\n\nWholesale inflation in the United States was unchanged in November, suggesting that price increases in the economy's pipeline are continuing to gradually ease.\n\nThe Labor Department reported Wednesday that its producer price index - which tracks inflation before it reaches consumers - was flat from October to November after having fallen 0.4% the month before. Measured year over year, producer prices rose just 0.9% from November 2022, the smallest such rise since June.\n\nExcluding volatile food and energy costs, so-called core wholesale prices were unchanged from October and were up just 2% from a year ago - the mildest year-over-year increase since January 2021. Among goods, prices were unchanged from October to November, held down by a 4.1% drop in gasoline prices. Services prices were also flat.\n\nWednesday's report reinforced the belief that inflation pressures are cooling across the economy, including among wholesale producers. The figures , which reflect prices charged by manufacturers, farmers and wholesalers, can provide an early sign of how fast consumer inflation will rise in the coming months.\n\nYear-over-year producer price inflation has slowed more or less steadily since peaking at 11.7% in March 2022. That is the month when the Federal Reserve began raising its benchmark interest rate to try to slow accelerating prices. Since then, the Fed has raised the rate 11 times, from near zero to about 5.4%, the highest level in 22 years.\n\nThe Fed is expected later Wednesday to announce, after its latest policy meeting, that it's leaving its benchmark rate unchanged for the third straight meeting. Most economists believe the Fed is done raising rates and expect the central bank to start reducing rates sometime next year.\n\nOn Tuesday, the Labor Department reported that consumer prices rose just 0.1% last month from October and 3.1% from a year earlier. But core prices, which the Fed sees as a better indicator of future inflation, were stickier, rising 0.3% from October and 4% from November 2022. Year-over-year consumer price inflation is down sharply from a four-decade high of 9.1% in June 2022 but is still above the Fed's 2% target.\n\n\"The data confirm the downtrend in inflation, although consumer prices are moving lower more gradually,\" said Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics. \"For the Fed, there is nothing in today's figures that changes our expectation that (its policymakers) will hold policy steady today, and rates are at a peak.\"\n\nDespite widespread predictions that the Fed rate hikes would cause a recession, the U.S. economy and job market have remained surprisingly strong. That has raised hopes the Fed can pull off a so-called soft landing - raising rates enough to tame inflation without sending the economy into recession."}
{"text": "# Stock market today: Asian shares are mixed ahead of the Fed's decision on interest rates\nBy **ELAINE KURTENBACH**  \nDecember 12, 2023. 11:25 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BANGKOK (AP)** - Asian shares were mixed on Wednesday after Wall Street rose to its highest level since early 2022, slightly below its record high, following a report showing inflation in the United States is behaving pretty much as expected.\n\nBenchmarks declined in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Seoul but rose in Tokyo and Sydney. U.S. futures edged higher while oil prices slipped.\n\nThe Bank of Japan's quarterly \"tankan\" report measured business sentiment among major manufacturers at plus 12, up from plus 9 in October and plus 5 in June. The survey measures corporate sentiment by subtracting the number of companies saying business conditions are negative from those replying they are positive.\n\n\"The continued improvement in the 'tankan' suggests that the drop in Q3 GDP was just a blip, but we still expect GDP growth to slow sharply next year,\" Marcel Thieliant of Capital Economics said in a commentary.\n\nTokyo's Nikkei 225 rose 0.4% to 32,985.19 and the S&P/ASX 200 in Australia was up 0.4% at 7,263.30.\n\nShares in China declined on what analysts said was disappointment over a lack of major stimulus measures from a major economic planning conference that ended on Tuesday.\n\nHong Kong's Hang Seng slipped 0.7% to 16,252.67 and the Shanghai Composite index was down 0.5% at 2,989.15. South Korea's Kospi lost 0.6% to 2,521.81.\n\nTaiwan's Taiex edged 0.1% higher and Bangkok's SET lost0.5%.\n\nOn Tuesday, the S&P 500 climbed 0.5% to sit just 3.2% below its all-time high set at the start of 2022. It closed at 4,643.70. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.5% to 36,577.94 and the Nasdaq composite rose 0.7% to 14,533.40.\n\nBig Tech stocks helped lead the way following solid gains for Nvidia, Meta Platforms and some other of Wall Street's largest and most influential stocks. They overshadowed a 12.4% tumble for Oracle, whose revenue for the latest quarter fell short of analysts' forecasts.\n\nOn Wall Street, Choice Hotels International fell 1.9% after it said it's taking its buyout offer for Wyndham Hotels & Resorts directly to its rival's shareholders. Choice already owns 1.5 million shares of Wyndham, whose board has cited concerns about value and regulatory approval while rebuffing Choice in the past.\n\nToymaker Hasbro slipped 1.1% after it announced additional job cuts as part of its cost-cutting program.\n\nBut Wall Street's spotlight was on the inflation report, which showed U.S. consumers paid prices for gasoline, food and other living costs last month that were 3.1% higher overall than a year earlier. That was a slight deceleration from October's 3.2% inflation and exactly in line with economists' expectations.\n\nThe data likely changes nothing about what the Federal Reserve will do at its latest meeting on interest rates, which ends Wednesday. The widespread expectation is still for the Fed to keep its main interest rate steady.\n\nThe Fed has already yanked its main interest rate from virtually zero early last year to more than 5.25%, its highest level since 2001. It's hoping to slow the economy and hurt investment prices by exactly the right amount: enough to stamp out high inflation but not so much that it causes a steep recession.\n\nOn the winning side of Wall Street, Icosavax soared 49.5% after AstraZeneca said it would buy the biopharmaceutical company for at least $838 million in cash, with the price tag rising if certain milestones are met.\n\nCrude oil prices fell to take some more pressure off inflation. A barrel of benchmark U.S. crude gave up 20 cents to $68.41 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. On Tuesday, it lost $2.71 to settle at $68.61.\n\nIt had been above $93 in September but has been coming down amid worries about demand from the global economy failing to keep up with available supplies.\n\nBrent crude, the international standard, slipped 23 cents to $73.01 per barrel. It fell $2.79 on Tuesday to $73.24 per barrel.\n\nThe U.S. dollar rose to 145.60 Japanese yen from 145.45 yen. The euro slipped to $1.0788 from $1.0793."}
{"text": "# How rising prices for restaurants, car repair and other services kept inflation up last month\nBy **CHRISTOPHER RUGABER**  \nDecember 12, 2023. 3:24 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Held down by sinking gas prices, U.S. inflation was mostly unchanged last month. But underlying price pressures - from apartment rents, restaurant meals, auto insurance and many other services - remained stubbornly high.\n\nLast month's inflation data arrived just a day before the Federal Reserve will end a two-day policy meeting and announce its latest decisions on interest rates. The Fed is expected on Wednesday to keep its key rate unchanged for the third straight time.\n\nMost economists expect the rate of price increases to keep slowing in the coming months. Though the decline could follow a bumpy path, inflation should fall much closer to the Fed's 2% target by the end of 2024. Wages and rental prices, among other items, are now increasing more gradually.\n\nIn November, much cheaper gas held down overall prices, which rose just 0.1% from October, the government said. Compared with a year ago, inflation dipped to 3.1%, down from a 3.2% year-over-year rise in October.\n\nPrices in the vast service sector, though, still surged uncomfortably fast. Core prices - which exclude volatile food and energy costs and are considered a better guide to the path of inflation - rose 0.3% from October to November, slightly faster than the 0.2% increase the previous month. Measured from a year ago, core prices were up 4%, the same as in October.\n\n## WHERE IS INFLATION LIKELY GOING FROM HERE? \nAmerica's consumers will probably continue to feel relief in the form of milder price increases in the coming months. And in some areas, notably the prices of physical goods, many items are actually becoming cheaper rather than just rising more slowly.\n\nFurniture and appliances both dropped in price last month. They're now cheaper, on average, than they were a year ago. Clothing prices, which fell from October to November, are up just 1.1% from a year earlier. And though used cars jumped 1.6% last month, they're down 3.8% from a year earlier.\n\nHousing costs, though, were again among the key factors lifting inflation. Rental prices rose 0.5% from October to November and are up 6.9% in the past year. Although those increases are down from recent peaks, they're still much sharper than they were pre-pandemic.\n\nAt the same time, new apartment buildings are flooding the market, and real-time data providers like Zillow and ApartmentList show rent growth for new apartments tumbling. As those prices feed into the government's measure, they should help cool inflation.\n\nWage growth, while still rising at a healthy clip, is also cooling. Though they rose 4% last month from a year earlier, according to the November jobs report, that's down from a peak of nearly 6% nearly two years ago. Slower wage growth should ease inflationary pressures because employers won't have to raise prices so much to cover their labor costs.\n\n\"The main takeaway is we're on that path towards returning to the Fed's 2% target,\" said Alan Detmeister, an economist at UBS. \"But we're getting there slowly.\"\n\nPrices are cooling - or even becoming cheaper - for some of the items that have been leaving the biggest marks on consumers' budgets. Gas prices, for example, sank 6% just from October to November. From a peak of $5 about a year and a half ago, the national average has dropped to $3.15 a gallon as of Monday, according to AAA.\n\nAnd grocery prices ticked up just 0.1% in November and are only 1.7% higher than they were a year ago. Bread, beef, chicken and pork prices all dropped.\n\n## WHAT DO AMERICANS THINK?\nSurveys show that Americans are mostly gloomy about the economy, despite steady job growth, a low unemployment rate and falling inflation. Yet when it comes to consumer prices, their outlook has improved recently.\n\nFor example, Americans now foresee inflation rising just 3.4% in the year ahead, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That level of expected inflation is nearly back to pre-pandemic levels and is the lowest since the spring of 2021 - down from a peak of 6.8% in June 2022. (Inflation expectations typically exceed the actual inflation figures.)\n\nLower inflation expectations are important because they are often self-fulfilling. If, for example, Americans expect inflation to rise more quickly, they then typically adjust their own behavior accordingly. Most significantly, they may demand - and receive - higher pay, which would then pressure their employers to raise prices further.\n\nFed officials have often pointed to low inflation expectations as a reason why they may succeed in pulling off a rare \"soft landing,\" in which inflation would fall back to 2%, without causing a sharp recession.\n\n## WHAT WILL THE FED DO NEXT? \nThe Fed is set to leave its benchmark interest rate unchanged when its latest meeting ends Wednesday. Inflation still exceeds the Fed's 2% annual target, which is why its officials are set to keep rates high. But inflation is also cooling faster than policymakers expected, which means the Fed's policymakers likely see no reason to further raise rates.\n\nThough Fed Chair Jerome Powell has expressed optimism about slowing inflation, he said earlier this month that it was \"premature\" to assume that the Fed was done raising its benchmark rate or to speculate about rate cuts, which many on Wall Street expect as early as spring.\n\nThe stickiness of inflation in the economy's service sector will likely keep Powell from signaling a clear end to rate hikes or acknowledging the prospect of future rate cuts. The Fed chair has been scrutinizing the costs of services as a guide to whether underlying inflationary trends are cooling.\n\nMichael Gapen, chief economist at Bank of America, said Tuesday's persistent inflation data \"fits the 'wait and see and be careful' narrative that the Fed is constructing.\"\n\n\"In terms of building confidence that you're in a disinflationary environment and opening the door to cuts,\" Gapen added, \"I think you have to say, well, we need more time to assess where services inflation is is going.\"\n\nStill, if indeed the Fed leaves its key rate unchanged for the third straight time, it would suggest that it's probably done raising borrowing costs.\n\nThe central bank has raised its key rate to about 5.4%, the highest level in 22 years, in a determined drive to conquer inflation. Its rate hikes have made mortgages, auto loans, business borrowing and other forms of credit much costlier, reflecting the Fed's goal of slowing borrowing and spending enough to tame inflation."}
{"text": "# Speculation about eventual rate cuts is rising, but Fed is set to leave interest rates unchanged\nBy **CHRISTOPHER RUGABER**  \nDecember 11, 2023. 11:37 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - With inflation edging closer to the Federal Reserve's 2% target, its policymakers are facing - and in some cases fueling - hopes that they will make a decisive shift in policy and cut interest rates next year, possibly as soon as spring.\n\nSuch a move would reduce borrowing costs across the economy, making mortgages, auto loans and business borrowing less expensive. Stock prices could rise, too, though share prices have already risen in expectation of cuts, potentially limiting any further rise.\n\nFed Chair Jerome Powell, though, has recently downplayed the idea that rate reductions are nearing. With the central bank poised to keep its key short-term rate unchanged when it meets this week, Powell hasn't yet signaled that the Fed is conclusively done with its hikes. Speaking recently at Spelman College in Atlanta, the Fed chair cautioned that \"it would be premature to conclude with confidence\" that the Fed has raised its benchmark rate high enough to fully defeat inflation.\n\nBut the Fed's two-day meeting that ends Wednesday will mark the third straight time that its officials have kept their key rate unchanged, lending weight to the widespread assumption that rate hikes are over.\n\nThe economy, after all, is headed in the direction the Fed wants: On Tuesday, when the government releases the November inflation report, it's expected to show that annual consumer price increases slowed to 3.1%, according to a survey of economists by FactSet, down sharply from a peak of 9.1% in June 2022.\n\nAnd job openings have declined, which means companies are less desperate to hire and feel less pressure to sharply raise wages, which can accelerate inflation. Consumers are still spending, though more modestly, and the economy is still expanding.\n\nSuch trends suggest progress toward what economists call a \"soft landing,\" in which inflation reaches the Fed's 2% target without causing a recession. Analysts are increasingly encouraged by what they say is an unusually smooth adjustment to lower inflation.\n\nThat sunnier outlook represents a shift in thinking. Last year, many economists had insisted that defeating inflation would require a sharp recession and high unemployment. In fact, falling inflation, without an accompanying recession or job losses, is \"historically unprecedented,\" economists at Goldman Sachs wrote in a recent note.\n\nAustan Goolsbee, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said in an interview with The Associated Press last month that the United States is on track this year for the fastest annual drop in inflation on record. If so, Goolsbee said, the result could be a \"bigger soft landing than conventional wisdom believes has ever been possible.\"\n\nThat said, a soft landing is hardly a sure thing. If, for example, the Fed miscalculated and kept interest rates too high for too long, it could eventually derail the economy and tip it into a recession.\n\n\"There's more risk of a recession than a re-acceleration in inflation at these interest rates,\" said Julia Coronado, president of MarcoPolicy Perspectives, an economic research firm. \"So ultimately, the next move is likely to be a cut because of that.\"\n\nThe timing of any rate cuts will depend on the health of the economy. A recession - or the threat of one - would likely prompt more, and earlier, interest rate reductions by the Fed.\n\nYet Friday's jobs report for November showed that businesses are still adding jobs at a healthy pace, and the unemployment rate dropped to a low 3.7% from 3.9%. Such figures suggested that the most-anticipated recession in decades is not imminent. Investors have since pushed back their expectations for the first Fed rate cut from March to May.\n\nThe Fed could cut rates this year even if the economy plows ahead, as long as inflation kept falling. A steady slowdown in price increases would have the effect of raising inflation-adjusted interest rates, thereby making borrowing costs higher than the Fed intends. Reducing rates, in this scenario, would simply keep inflation-adjusted borrowing costs from rising.\n\nYet economists say any rate cuts in response to lower inflation may take longer than Wall Street expects because the Fed will want to be sure inflation is in check before making such a move.\n\nJim Bullard, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and now dean of Purdue University's business school, said that while he thinks the Fed is on track for a soft landing, the policymakers must be cautious about rate cuts.\n\n\"I don't think you want to be too early on that, because if you start the process of cutting the policy rate and then inflation goes back up, I think that could cause a lot of problems,\" Bullard said. Such premature cuts have been blamed for the Fed's failure to quell inflation in the 1970s.\n\nAnd if job gains and economic growth remain healthy, then perhaps rate cuts aren't needed anytime soon, Bullard added.\n\n\"Why lower the policy rate if the real economy is doing just fine?\" he asked. \"You might as well just sit back and enjoy the disinflation.\"\n\nEither way, when the Fed issues its quarterly economic projections Wednesday, they will include a forecast of where its policymakers think their key rate will be at the end of 2024. Coronado expects only two rate cuts to be penciled in - half the number that financial markets now expect.\n\nIf the Fed does cut rates twice in 2024, the first one may not occur until as late as fall. Nancy Vanden Houten, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, says her firm doesn't expect the first rate cut until the third quarter of the year.\n\n\"The Fed is going to want to see a bit more progress before contemplating rate cuts,\" she said. \"Financial markets have gotten pretty ahead of themselves in our view. We think rate hikes are done, but it's going to be many months before the Fed starts cutting rates.\""}
{"text": "# Biden goes into 2024 with the economy getting stronger, but voters feel horrible about it\nBy **JOSH BOAK**  \nDecember 11, 2023. 10:39 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - President Joe Biden goes into next year's election with a vexing challenge: Just as the U.S. economy is getting stronger, people are still feeling horrible about it.\n\nPollsters and economists say there has never been as wide a gap between the underlying health of the economy and public perception. The divergence could be a decisive factor in whether the Democrat secures a second term next year. Republicans are seizing on the dissatisfaction to skewer Biden, while the White House is finding less success as it tries to highlight economic progress.\n\n\"Things are getting better and people think things are going to get worse - and that's the most dangerous piece of this,\" said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who has worked with Biden. Lake said voters no longer want to just see inflation rates fall - rather, they want an outright decline in prices, something that last happened on a large scale during the Great Depression.\n\n\"Honestly, I'm kind of mystified by it,\" she said.\n\nBy many measures, the U.S. economy is rock solid. Friday's employment report showed that employers added 199,000 jobs in November and the unemployment rate dropped to 3.7%. Inflation has plummeted in little over a year from a troubling 9.1% to 3.2% without causing a recession - a phenomenon that some once skeptical economists have dubbed \"immaculate.\"\n\nYet people remain dejected about the economy, according to the University of Michigan's Index of Consumer Sentiment. The preliminary December figures issued Friday showed a jump in sentiment as people seem to recognize that inflation is cooling. But the index is still slightly below its July level.\n\nIn a possible warning sign for Biden, people surveyed for the index brought up the 2024 election. Sentiment rose dramatically more among Republicans than Democrats, potentially suggesting that GOP voters became more optimistic about winning back the White House.\n\n\"Consumers have been feeling broadly uneasy about the economy since the pandemic, and they are still coming to grips with the notion that we are not returning to the pre-pandemic 'normal,'\" Joanne Hsu, director and chief economist of the survey, said of the overall trend in recent months.\n\nJared Bernstein, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, stressed that a strong underlying economy is \"absolutely necessary\" to eventually lifting consumer sentiment. His argument is that as the economy continues to improve, more people will recognize the benefits and sentiment will improve.\n\n\"We've got to keep fighting to lower costs and build on the progress that we've made,\" Bernstein said. \"We just need more time to get these gains to working Americans - that's our plan.\"\n\nThe White House has made three major shifts in its messaging in hopes of building up confidence in Biden's economic leadership. The president this summer began to pepper his speeches with the term \"Bidenomics\" to describe his policies, only to have Republicans latch onto the word as a point of attack.\n\nWhite House officials have pointed out specific items for which prices have fallen outright. They noted lower prices for turkeys during Thanksgiving as well as for eggs. Biden repeatedly emphasizes that he lowered insulin costs for Medicare participants, while other officials discuss how gasoline prices have dropped from their peak.\n\nSecond, Biden recently started to blame inflation on corporations that hiked prices when they saw an opportunity to improve their profits, bringing more prominence to an argument first used when gasoline prices spiked. The president's argument is suspicious to many economists, yet the intended message to voters is that Biden is fighting for them against those he blames for fueling inflation.\n\n\"Let me be clear: Any corporation that is not passing these savings on to the consumers needs to stop their price gouging,\" Biden said recently in Pueblo, Colorado. \"The American people are tired of being played for suckers.\"\n\nAnd Biden is now going after the track record of former President Donald Trump, the current GOP front-runner. Biden's campaign sent out a statement after Friday's employment report that said, \" Despite his claims of being a jobs president, Donald Trump had the worst jobs record since the Great Depression, losing nearly three million jobs.\"\n\nThe Republican counter to Biden has been to dismiss the positive economic data and focus on how voters are feeling. As the annual inflation rate has fallen, GOP messaging has focused instead on multi-year increases in consumer prices without necessarily factoring in wage gains. And Republican lawmakers have argued that people should trust their gut on the economy instead of the statistics cited by Biden.\n\n\"Joe Biden's message to them is just this: He says don't believe your lying eyes,\" Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyoming, said in a recent floor speech.\n\nVirginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, put the blame solely on Biden for inflation and people feeling downtrodden.\n\n\"The challenge is rising cost of living,\" said Youngkin, speaking at a Monday event in Washington hosted by Bloomberg News. \"And it's just clear over the course of now the last three years of the Biden economy we have seen inflation really run away from a lot of folks and 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.\"\n\nBiden's speeches over the past two years have done little to improve his anemic polling on the economy. Administration officials had once assumed that better economic numbers would overcome any doubts among voters, only to find that the negativity stayed even as the U.S. economy became likely to avoid a recession once forecasted by economists.\n\nClaudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist, has been surprised by the anger generated online when she has noted the signs of a strong economy.\n\nA typical U.S. household is better off than it was in 2020. Inequality has lessened somewhat in recent years as wage growth has favored poorer workers. Yet people still seem rattled and disconnected by the shock of the pandemic, the arrival of government aid and the inflation that followed as hiring improved.\n\n\"People have really been jerked around,\" Sahm said. \"Things have been turned on and off. Everything has moved fast. It's been disruptive and confusing. We're just tired.\"\n\nThere is no solitary cause for this gap between the major data and public feeling. But the experts trying to make sense of things have multiple theories about what's going on. Besides the pandemic's impact, it's possible that social media has distorted how people feel about the economy as they watch the posh lifestyles of influencers. Many people also judge the economy based on their own political beliefs, rather than the underlying numbers.\n\nIt could simply be that people need time to adjust after a period of rising inflation. As a result, there's a lag before a slowing rate of inflation boosts how consumers feel, according to a recent analysis by economists Ryan Cummings and Neale Mahoney.\n\n\"Sentiment is still being weighed down by the high inflation we had last year,\" Cummings said. \"As that recedes further into the rearview mirror, its effects are likely to diminish.\"\n\nAnother possibility is that the loss of pandemic aid from the government left people materially poorer. Millions of households got checks from the government and an expanded child tax credit deposited directly into their accounts. Republicans blamed this funding for feeding inflation, but the money also initially helped to shelter people from the pain of rising prices.\n\nAdjusting for government transfers and taxes, the average annual income for someone in the lower half of earners was $34,800 when Biden took office, according to an analysis provided by Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.\n\nThat average fell to $26,100 by March 2023 in a sign that wage growth could not make up for the loss of government aid.\n\nSamuel Rines, an investment strategist at Corbu, found that companies including Pepsi, Kraft-Heinz, Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark latched onto the higher food and energy prices after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine to boost their own products' prices and increase profits.\n\nEarnings reports suggest that consumers started to tire of some companies' double-digit price increases this summer, prompting those companies to indicate that future prices increases will be closer to the historic average of 2%.\n\nBiden can reasonably argue that companies took advantage of the war in Ukraine and the pandemic to raise their prices, Rines said. But the increases happened 12 to 18 months ago and Biden's current argument doesn't apply to what businesses are doing now.\n\nRines said of the president's message on price gouging: \"It's pretty much 18 months too late.\""}
{"text": "# Stock market today: Asia markets rise ahead of US consumer prices update\nBy **DAMIAN J. TROISE** and **ALEX VEIGA**  \nDecember 11, 2023. 11:18 PM EST\n\n---\n\nAsia markets opened higher following a positive close on Wall Street. Investors are eagerly awaiting a crucial U.S. inflation report later in the day, which will likely set the tone for the Federal Reserve's final meeting of the year on Wednesday.\n\nU.S. futures and oil prices advanced.\n\nTokyo's Nikkei 225 added 0.5% to 32,959.50. Data released on Tuesday showed the wholesale prices in Japan rose by 0.3% from the previous year in November, which marked the slowest rate of increase in almost three years, suggesting a moderation in inflationary pressure in the economy.\n\nHong Kong's Hang Seng gained 1.1% to 16,367.00, and the Shanghai Composite edged 0.1% higher, to 2,993.65.\n\nChinese leaders are holding an annual economic conference expected to wrap up Tuesday with pledges to spur stable growth.\n\nIn Seoul, the Kospi was up 0.4% at 2,534.15. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 climbed 0.5% to 7,233.90.\n\nIndia's Sensex gained 0.2%, while the SET in Bangkok lost 0.3%.\n\nOn Monday, the S&P 500 rose 0.4% to 4,622.44, finishing at its highest level in 20 months. The Dow gained 0.4% to 36,404.93 and the Nasdaq added 0.2% to close at 14,432.49.\n\nThe muted gains follow a six-week winning streak by the major stock indexes. The S&P 500 is up 20.4% for the year and the Nasdaq is up 37.9%.\n\nCigna surged 16.7% for the biggest gain among S&P 500 stocks after the health insurer announced a $10 billion stock buyback, and the Wall Street Journal reported that the company is no longer pursuing a merger with Humana.\n\nMacy's jumped 19.4% following reports that an investor group is launching a bid to take the storied retailer private for $5.8 billion.\n\nOn Tuesday, the government will release its November report on consumer inflation. Analysts expect the report to show that inflation continued slowing to 3.1% from 3.2% in October. On Wednesday, the government will release its November report on inflation at the wholesale level, which is also expected to show that the rate of inflation is easing.\n\nWall Street is overwhelmingly betting that the Fed will keep its benchmark interest rate at a range of 5.25% to 5.50% into early 2024 and could start cutting rates by the middle of that year. Analysts are also becoming more comfortable with the possibility that the central bank can pull off a \"soft landing,\" which refers to inflation easing under high interest rates without the economy falling into a recession.\n\n\"With inflation coming down faster than expected, it now appears likely that the Fed will refrain from additional rate hikes,\" Brian Rose, a senior U.S. economist at UBS, said in a note to investors. \"At the same time, inflation is still too high and the labor market is still too tight for the Fed to consider cutting rates soon.\"\n\nStrong consumer spending and a solid jobs market have provided a bulwark to the broader economy, where growth has slowed but has so far avoided stalling. The government's jobs report on Friday showed that U.S. employers added more jobs last month than economists expected. Workers' wages also rose more than expected, and the unemployment rate unexpectedly improved.\n\nSeveral big companies will report their earnings this week and are among the few remaining to release their results. Software company Adobe will report on Wednesday and Olive Garden owner Darden Restaurants will release its results on Friday.\n\nTreasury yields were little changed. The yield on the 10-year Treasury held steady at 4.22%.\n\nIn energy trading, U.S. benchmark crude oil added 25 cents to $71.57 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It gained 0.1% Monday. Brent crude, the international standard, picked up 24 cents to $76.27 per barrel.\n\nThe U.S. dollar fell to 145.60 Japanese yen from 146.16 yen. The euro rose to $1.0769 from $1.07613."}
{"text": "# Solid US hiring lowers unemployment rate in latest sign of a still-sturdy job market\nBy **CHRISTOPHER RUGABER**  \nDecember 8, 2023. 5:16 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - U.S. employers added a healthy 199,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate fell, fresh signs that the economy could achieve an elusive \"soft landing,\" in which inflation would return to the Federal Reserve's 2% target without causing a steep recession.\n\nFriday's report from the Labor Department showed that the unemployment rate dropped from 3.9% to 3.7%, not far above a five-decade low of 3.4% in April. The jobless rate has now remained below 4% for nearly two years, the longest such streak since the late 1960s.\n\nLast month's job gain was inflated by the return of about 40,000 formerly striking auto workers and actors, who were not at work in October but were back on the job in November.\n\nThe latest jobs report and other recent data portray an economy and a labor market that, while still sturdy, are downshifting back to pre-pandemic norms. Businesses are hiring but are less desperate to fill huge numbers of jobs. More Americans have come off the sidelines to look for work, and immigration has jumped this year.\n\nAs a result, employers are finding it easier to hire, with fewer complaints of worker shortages and less pressure to aggressively raise pay, which can fuel inflation.\n\n\"What we wanted was a strong but moderating labor market, and that's what we saw in the November report,\" said Robert Frick, an economist at the Navy Federal Credit Union.\n\nA cooling job market is also just what the Fed was hoping to achieve as it sought to slow the economy and inflation with its rapid interest rate hikes in the past year and a half. Hiring has averaged just over 200,000 a month in the past three months, down from an average of about 320,000 in the same period last year.\n\nAnd most of last month's job gains were concentrated in just a few sectors. The health care industry - doctors' offices and hospitals - added 93,000 jobs in November. Hotels and restaurants added 40,000, and governments 49,000, accounting for nearly all the job growth. By contrast, retailers, shipping and warehousing companies, and temporary help agencies all cut jobs.\n\nStill, last month's hiring gain raised the proportion of Americans who are employed to 60.5%, the highest level since the pandemic struck, though it remains below the pre-COVID level of 61.1%.\n\nIn the meantime, wages are growing at a slower but still-healthy pace. In November, average hourly pay rose 4% from a year earlier, matching the previous month's figure, which was the smallest since June 2021. Still, average pay is now growing faster than inflation, which should support consumer spending.\n\nAnd layoffs remain low, according to government data, despite job cuts at such companies as Panera Bread, a restaurant chain, and Spotify, the music streaming platform, which cited higher interest rates as a reason it had to cut about 1,500 jobs globally.\n\nBecky Frankiewicz, president of the staffing giant Manpower Group North America, said more employers are moving workers they may not need in one part of the company to another division rather than laying them off. Many companies still recall the difficulty they had finding workers during the pandemic and want to hold onto staff.\n\n\"Everything we see continues to point to a slow glide into a cooler labor market,\" she said.\n\nAaron Seyedian, owner of a small cleaning company based in Takoma Park, Maryland, says his business is still growing and hiring. He has enough demand to add five workers to his 30-person staff.\n\nSeyedian's company, \"Well-Paid Maids,\" has just raised its starting pay from $23 to $24 an hour. He said he hasn't had any trouble finding people to hire.\n\n\"From my perspective,\" Seyedian said, \"the economy is still strong, and people still want to spend money.\"\n\nFor the Fed, Friday's jobs report won't likely alter the near-certainty that it will keep interest rates unchanged for the third straight time when it meets next week. The central bank has raised its key rate 11 times since March 2022, from near zero to roughly 5.4%. The result has been much more expensive mortgages, auto loans, credit cards and business borrowing.\n\nMost economists and Wall Street traders think the Fed's next move will be to cut rates, though the strength in Friday's jobs report could lead the central bank to keep rates at a peak for a longer period. Before the jobs report, Wall Street traders foresaw a 55% likelihood that the Fed would cut rates at its March meeting, according to the CME FedWatch, tool. Now, they don't expect the first cut until May.\n\nGuy Berger, former principal economist at the career website LinkedIn, said the job market's resilience means the Fed can keep rates high to fight inflation without worrying so much about triggering a recession.\n\n\"If we're not cooling, what's the rush?\" to cut rates, Berger said.\n\nMany of the most recent economic figures have pointed toward a potential soft landing. Companies are advertising fewer job openings, and Americans are switching jobs less often than they did a year ago, trends that typically slow wage growth and inflation pressures.\n\nMost economists expect growth to slow and inflation will continue to decline. The economy is expected to expand at just a 1.5% annual rate in the final three months of this year, down from a scorching 5.2% pace in the July-September quarter. Cooler growth should help bring down inflation while still supporting a modest pace of hiring.\n\nInflation has tumbled from a peak of 9.1% in June 2022 to just 3.2% last month. And according to a different inflation measure that the Fed prefers, prices rose at just a 2.5% annual rate in the past six months - not far above the central bank's 2% target.\n\nChristopher Waller, a key Fed official who typically favors higher rates, buoyed the markets' expectations last week for rate hikes when he suggested that if inflation kept falling, the Fed could cut rates as early as spring.\n\nFed Chair Jerome Powell, though, pushed back against such speculation last Friday, when he said it was \"premature to conclude\" that the Fed has raised its benchmark rate high enough to quell inflation. And it was too soon, he added, to \"speculate\" about when the Fed might cut rates.\n\nBut Powell also said interest rates are \"well into\" restrictive territory, meaning that they're clearly constraining growth. Many analysts took that remark as a signal that the Fed is done raising rates."}
{"text": "# Inflation eased in 2023. That's giving investors hope for a gentler Federal Reserve next year\nBy **DAMIAN J. TROISE**  \nDecember 7, 2023. 8:00 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Inflation gradually loosened its grip on Wall Street and the economy in 2023, raising hopes for a gentler Federal Reserve and solid gains for the market next year.\n\nStocks rallied to their best month of the year in November as investors raised their bets that the Fed is done hiking interest rates to fight inflation. The economy has cooled under the weight of rising interest rates, as the central bank intended, but remains surprisingly resilient.\n\nEasing inflation and a solid economy heading into 2024 have increased the chance that the central bank could achieve a \"soft landing\" for the economy. That means inflation easing back to the central bank's target rate of 2% under high interest rates without the economy slipping into a recession.\n\n\"Importantly, the soft-landing scenario is very much at play here, with market participants anticipating the 'good' rate cuts to take place: those that the Fed is able to, but not forced to make,\" said Katie Nixon, Chief Investment Officer for Northern Trust Wealth Management.\n\nA steep drop in gasoline prices helped slow inflation and broader energy prices have been falling throughout the year. U.S. crude oil prices are down about 10% in 2023.\n\nConsumer electronic prices have also eased, along with some groceries. Consumers have seemingly shifted their spending, which is still strong but has slowed overall.\n\nInflation fell to 3% in November, according to a government report on personal spending that is the Fed's preferred measure. It peaked at 7.1% in 2022. Rates of inflation have fallen even more steeply elsewhere, slipping to 2.4% in Europe last month, the lowest in over two years. Much of that easing has been because of lower energy costs. Inflation peaked in Europe in 2022 at 10.6%.\n\n\"Slowing growth, slowing inflation is our base case scenario for 2024, creating a favorable backdrop for stocks and bonds,\" said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer and founding partner at Cresset.\n\nThe S&P 500 hit its highest point of the year on Dec. 1, reaching 4,594.63 points. Analysts expect that the index will finally breach 4,600, a level that the market has struggled to surpass as it advanced in 2023.\n\nInflation is expected to continue easing through 2024 and Wall Street is betting that the Fed will start cutting interest rates by mid-year. That could add more fuel to corporate earnings, which helps drive stock prices. Stock values are typically determined by how much profit a company generates and how much investors are willing to pay for each $1 of that. Investors typically look ahead, which means stocks have likely already factored in expectations for better earnings in 2024.\n\nThe price-to-earnings value for the broader S&P 500 has remained steady in 2023 after recovering from lower values in 2022. The technology sector is much more expensive, hovering around its highest levels in two decades.\n\n\"We anticipate global risk appetite increasing as 2024 begins, with markets experiencing some volatility as they start to discount a recovery later in the year,\" said investment management company Invesco in its 2024 outlook.\n\nRetailers and other consumer-focused companies could benefit from a resilient economy with easing inflation and lower borrowing costs. Expensive technology stocks also tend to look more attractive to investors when interest rates fall."}
{"text": "# US job openings fall to lowest level since March 2021 as labor market cools\nBy **PAUL WISEMAN**  \nDecember 5, 2023. 11:18 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - U.S. employers posted 8.7 million job openings in October, the fewest since March 2021, in a sign that hiring is cooling in the face of higher interest rates yet remains at a still-healthy pace.\n\nThe Labor Department's report said Tuesday that openings were down significantly from 9.4 million in September.\n\nLayoffs were up modestly in October. And the number of Americans who quit their jobs - which generally reflects confidence in their ability to find better pay or working conditions elsewhere - was down slightly.\n\nThe drop in job openings last month was particularly steep in healthcare and social assistance, where they fell by 236,000; finance, which includes banking, insurance and real estate and which has been hit particularly hard by higher interest rates, down 217,000; and hotels, restaurants and bars, down 124,000.\n\nStill, despite the sharp drop in October, job openings remain at historically high levels. They have now exceeded 8 million for 32 straight months - a threshold they had never reached before 2021.\n\nU.S. hiring is slowing from the breakneck pace of the past two years. Still, employers have added a solid 239,000 jobs a month this year. And the unemployment rate has come in below 4% for 21 straight months, the longest such streak since the 1960s.\n\nThe job market has shown surprising resilience even as the Federal Reserve has raised its benchmark interest rate 11 times since March 2022 to fight the worst bout of inflation in four decades. The resulting higher borrowing costs have helped ease inflationary pressures. Consumer prices were up 3.2% in October from a year earlier, down from a peak of 9.1% in June 2022.\n\nThe Labor Department will issue the November jobs report on Friday. It is expected to show that employers added nearly 173,000 jobs last month. That would be up from 150,000 in October, in part because of the end of strikes by autoworkers and Hollywood writers and actors. The unemployment rate is expected to have remained at 3.9%, according to a survey of forecasters by the data firm FactSet.\n\nThough unemployment remains low, 1.93 million Americans were collecting unemployment benefits in the week that ended Nov. 18, the most in two years. That suggests that those who do lose their jobs need unemployment assistance longer because it is getting harder to find new employment.\n\nOverall, the combination of easing inflation and resilient hiring has raised hopes the Fed can manage a so-called soft landing - raising rates just enough to slow the economy and tame price increases without tipping the economy into recession. The cooling of the job market could mean a lessening of inflation pressures and less need for the Fed to keep interest rates high.\n\nThe drop in openings \"will be welcome news for policymakers\" at the Fed, said Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics. \"Overall, the labor market remains strong, but it is cooling. And wages and inflation are decelerating. The data support our view that rates are at a peak and the Fed's next move will be a rate cut, likely in (the second quarter of) 2024.\""}
{"text": "# Stock market today: Asian shares are mostly up as weak jobs data back hopes for an end to rate hikes\nBy **ELAINE KURTENBACH**  \nDecember 5, 2023. 11:16 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BANGKOK (AP)** - Asian shares advanced on Wednesday after most stocks slipped on Wall Street following a mixed set of reports on the U.S. economy.\n\nHong Kong's Hang Seng gained 0.5% to 16,413.96 while the Shanghai Composite edged 0.1% higher, to 2,968.75.\n\nThe gains followed selloffs the day before amid worries about the health of China's economy, the world's second largest.\n\nTokyo's Nikkei 225 added 1.7% to 33,339.26 and the Kospi in Seoul was up 0.6% at 2,509.04. In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 climbed 1.5% to 7,166.10.\n\nIndia's Sensex gained 0.6% and the SET in Bangkok advanced 0.9%.\n\nOn Tuesday, the S&P 500 edged 0.1% lower, to 4,567.18, for its first back-to-back loss since October. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 0.2%, to 36,124.56, and the Nasdaq composite rose 0.3%, to 14,229.91.\n\nU.S. stocks and Treasury yields wavered after reports showed that employers advertised far fewer job openings at the end of October than expected, while growth for services businesses accelerated more last month than expected.\n\nThat kept alive questions about whether the U.S. economy can pull off a perfect landing where it snuffs out high inflation but avoids a recession.\n\nOn Wall Street, KeyCorp fell 3.7% and led a slump for bank stocks after it cut its forecast for income from fees and other non-interest income. But gains of more than 2% for Apple and Nvidia, two of the market's most influential stocks, helped to blunt the losses.\n\nWith inflation down from its peak two summers ago, Wall Street is hopeful the Federal Reserve may finally be done with its market-shaking hikes to interest rates and could soon turn to cutting rates. That could help the economy avoid a recession and give a boost to all kinds of investment prices.\n\nTuesday's report showed that employers advertised just 8.7 million jobs on the last day of October, down by 617,000 from a month earlier and the lowest level since 2021.\n\nA separate report said that activity for U.S. services industries expanded for the 41st time in the last 42 months, with growth reported by everything from agriculture to wholesale trade. Strength there has been offsetting weakness in manufacturing.\n\nIn the bond market, Treasury yields continued to sag further from the heights they reached during late October.\n\nThe yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.17% from 4.26% late Monday, offering more breathing space for stocks and other markets. It had been above 5% and at its highest level in more than a decade during October.\n\nThe yield on the two-year Treasury, which more closely tracks expectations for the Fed, went on a jagged run following the economic reports. It fell from 4.61% just before the reports' release to 4.57% and then yo-yoed before easing back to 4.55%.\n\nTraders widely expect the Federal Reserve to hold its key interest rate steady at its next meeting next week, before potentially cutting rates in March, according to data from CME Group.\n\nFed officials have recently hinted that the federal funds rate may indeed already be at its peak. It's above 5.25%, up from nearly zero early last year. But Fed Chair Jerome Powell and others have also warned Wall Street about being overzealous in its predictions about how early a cut could happen.\n\nLower yields have been one reason prices cryptocurrencies have been rising recently. Excitement about a possible exchange-traded fund tied to bitcoin, which would open it to new kinds of investors, has also helped send it above $43,000 recently.\n\nIn other trading, U.S. benchmark crude oil added 7 cents to $72.39 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude, the international standard, picked up 9 cents to $77.29 per barrel.\n\nThe U.S. dollar rose to 147.31 Japanese yen from 147.17 yen. The euro slipped to $1.0800 from $1.0802."}
{"text": "# Economists predict US inflation will keep cooling and the economy can avoid a recession\nDecember 4, 2023. 12:01 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Most business economists think the U.S. economy could avoid a recession next year, even if the job market ends up weakening under the weight of high interest rates, according to a survey released Monday.\n\nOnly 24% of economists surveyed by the National Association for Business Economics said they see a recession in 2024 as more likely than not. The 38 surveyed economists come from such organizations as Morgan Stanley, the University of Arkansas and Nationwide.\n\nSuch predictions imply the belief that the Federal Reserve can pull off the delicate balancing act of slowing the economy just enough through high interest rates to get inflation under control, without snuffing out its growth completely.\n\n\"While most respondents expect an uptick in the unemployment rate going forward, a majority anticipates that the rate will not exceed 5%,\" Ellen Zentner, president of the association and chief U.S. economist at Morgan Stanley, said in a statement.\n\nThe Federal Reserve has raised its main interest rate above 5.25% to the highest level since early in the millennium, up from virtually zero early last year.\n\nHigh rates work to slow inflation by making borrowing more expensive and hurting prices for stocks and other investments. The combination typically slows spending and starves inflation of its fuel. So far, the job market has remained remarkably solid despite high interest rates, and the unemployment rate sat at a low 3.9% in October.\n\nMost of the surveyed economists expect inflation to continue to slow in 2024, though many say it may not get all the way down to the Federal Reserve's target of 2% until the following year.\n\nOf course, economists are only expecting price increases to slow, not to reverse, which is what it would take for prices for groceries, haircuts and other things to return to where they were before inflation took off during 2021.\n\nThe median forecast of the surveyed economists called for the consumer price index to be 2.4% higher in the final three months of 2024 from a year earlier. That would be milder than the inflation of more than 9% that U.S. households suffered during the summer of 2022.\n\nExpectations are split among economists on when the Federal Reserve could begin cutting interest rates, something that can relieve pressure on the economy and act like steroids for financial markets. Some economists think the first cut could arrive during the first three months of 2024, while roughly a quarter of the survey's respondents think it won't happen until the last three months of the year."}
{"text": "# Israel's military campaign in Gaza seen as among the most destructive in recent history, experts say\nBy **JULIA FRANKEL**  \nDecember 22, 2023. 5:20 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**JERUSALEM (AP)** - The Israeli military campaign in Gaza, experts say, now sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history.\n\nIn just over two months, the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria's Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine's Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II. It has killed more civilians than the U.S.-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against the Islamic State group.\n\nThe Israeli military has said little about what kinds of bombs and artillery it is using in Gaza. But from blast fragments found on-site and analyses of strike footage, experts are confident that the vast majority of bombs dropped on the besieged enclave are U.S.-made. They say the weapons include 2,000-pound (900-kilogram) \"bunker-busters\" that have killed hundreds in densely populated areas.\n\nWith the Palestinian death toll in Gaza surpassing 20,000, the international community is calling for a cease-fire. Israel vows to press ahead, saying it wants to destroy Hamas' military capabilities following the militant group's Oct. 7 cross-border rampage that triggered the war, in which it killed 1,200 people and took 240 others hostage.\n\nThe Biden administration has quietly continued to supply arms to Israel. Last week, however, President Joe Biden publicly acknowledged that Israel was losing international legitimacy for what he called its \"indiscriminate bombing.\"\n\nHere's a look at what is known so far about Israel's campaign on Gaza.\n\n## HOW MUCH DESTRUCTION IS THERE IN GAZA?\nIsrael's offensive has destroyed over two-thirds of all structures in northern Gaza and a quarter of buildings in the southern area of Khan Younis, according to an analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of the CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University, experts in mapping damage during wartime.\n\nThe percentage of damaged buildings in the Khan Younis area nearly doubled in just the first two weeks of Israel's southern offensive, they said.\n\nThat includes tens of thousands of homes as well as schools, hospitals, mosques and stores. U.N. monitors have said that about 70% of school buildings across Gaza have been damaged. At least 56 damaged schools served as shelters for displaced civilians. Israeli strikes damaged 110 mosques and three churches, the monitors said.\n\nIsrael holds Hamas responsible for civilian deaths by embedding militants in civilian infrastructure. Those sites also shelter multitudes of Palestinians who have fled under Israeli evacuation orders.\n\n\"Gaza is now a different color from space. It's a different texture,\" said Scher, who has worked with Van Den Hoek to map destruction across several war zones, from Aleppo to Mariupol.\n\n## HOW DOES THE DESTRUCTION STACK UP HISTORICALLY?\nBy some measures, destruction in Gaza has outpaced Allied bombings of Germany during World War II.\n\nBetween 1942 and 1945, the allies attacked 51 major German cities and towns, destroying about 40-50% of their urban areas, said Robert Pape, a U.S. military historian. Pape said this amounted to 10% of buildings across Germany, compared to over 33% across Gaza, a densely populated territory of just 140 square miles (360 square kilometers).\n\n\"Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history,\" said Pape. \"It now sits comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever.\"\n\nThe U.S.-led coalition's 2017 assault to expel the Islamic State group from the Iraqi city of Mosul was considered one of the most intense attacks on a city in generations. That nine-month battle killed around 10,000 civilians, a third of them from coalition bombardment, according an Associated Press investigation at the time.\n\nDuring the 2014-2017 campaign to defeat IS in Iraq, the coalition carried out nearly 15,000 strikes across the country, according to Airwars, a London-based independent group that tracks recent conflicts. By comparison, the Israeli military said last week it has conducted 22,000 strikes in Gaza.\n\n## WHAT TYPES OF BOMBS ARE BEING USED?\nThe Israeli military has not specified what it is using. It says every strike is cleared by legal advisers to make sure it complies with international law.\n\n\"We choose the right munition for each target - so it doesn't cause unnecessary damage,\" said the army's chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari.\n\nWeapons experts have been able to draw conclusions by analyzing blast fragments found on-site, satellite images and videos circulated on social media. They say the findings offer only a peek into the full scope of the air war.\n\nSo far, fragments of American-made Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) bombs and smaller diameter bombs have been found in Gaza, according to Brian Castner, a weapons investigator with Amnesty International.\n\nThe JDAM bombs include precision-guided 1,000- and 2,000-pound (450-kilogram and 900-kilogram) \"bunker-busters.\"\n\n\"It turns earth to liquid,\" said Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon defense official and a war crimes investigator for the U.N. \"It pancakes entire buildings.\"\n\nHe said the explosion of a 2,000-pound bomb in the open means \"instant death\" for anyone within about 30 meters (100 feet). Lethal fragmentation can extend for up to 365 meters (1,200 feet).\n\nIn an Oct. 31 strike on the urban refugee camp of Jabaliya, experts say a 2,000-pound bomb killed over 100 civilians.\n\nExperts have also identified fragments of SPICE (Smart, Precise Impact, Cost-Effective) 2000-pound bombs, which are fitted with a GPS guidance system to make targeting more precise. Castner said the bombs are produced by the Israeli defense giant Rafael, but a recent State Department release first obtained by The New York Times showed some of the technology had been produced in the United States.\n\nThe Israeli military is also dropping unguided \"dumb\" bombs. Several experts pointed to two photos posted to social media by the Israeli Air Force at the start of the war showing fighter jets stocked with unguided bombs.\n\n## IS THE STRATEGY WORKING? \nIsrael says it has two goals: destroy Hamas and rescue the 129 hostages still held by militants.\n\nEleven weeks into the war, Israel says it has destroyed many Hamas sites and hundreds of tunnel shafts and has killed 7,000 Hamas fighters out of an estimated 30,000-40,000. Israeli leaders say intense military pressure is the only way to free more hostages.\n\nBut some families of hostages worry that the bombing endangers their loved ones. Hostages released during a weeklong cease-fire last month recounted that their captors moved them from place to place to avoid Israeli bombardment. Hamas has claimed that several hostages died from Israeli bombs, though the claims could not be verified.\n\nThe level of destruction is so high because \"Hamas is very entrenched within the civilian population,\" said Efraim Inbar, head of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, a think tank. He also said intense bombardment of Hamas' tunnels is needed to protect advancing Israeli ground forces from attacks."}
{"text": "# British actor Tom Wilkinson, known for 'The Full Monty' and 'Michael Clayton,' dies at 75\nBy **SYLVIA HUI**  \nDecember 30, 2023. 5:03 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - Tom Wilkinson, the Oscar-nominated British actor known for his roles in \"The Full Monty,\" \"Michael Clayton\" and \"The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,\" has died, his family said. He was 75.\n\nA statement shared by his agent on behalf of the family said Wilkinson died suddenly at home on Saturday. It didn't provide further details.\n\nWilkinson was nominated for a best actor Academy Award for his work in 2001's family drama \"In The Bedroom\" and in the best supporting actor category for his role in \"Michael Clayton,\" a 2007 legal thriller that starred George Clooney.\n\nHe is remembered by many in Britain and beyond for playing former steel mill foreman Gerald Cooper in the 1997 comedy \"The Full Monty,\" about a group of unemployed steel workers who formed an unlikely male stripping act.\n\nWilkinson was born in Yorkshire in northern England in 1948 and spent part of his childhood in Canada. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in the 1970s.\n\nHe starred in dozens of other TV dramas and movies, from \"Rush Hour\" and \"Batman Begins\" to \"Shakespeare in Love,\" \"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind\" and \"Valkyrie.\"\n\nHe most recently reunited with his \"Full Monty\" co-stars, Robert Carlyle and Mark Addy in a Disney+ series of the same name.\n\n\"He'll be sorely missed by everyone who had the pleasure of working with him,\" Carlyle said in a statement. \"Such a huge performer, a real titan of an actor, one of the greats of not only his, but of any generation.\"\n\nWilkinson was recognized for his services to drama in 2005 when he was appointed a member of the Order of the British Empire.\n\nHe also won a 2009 Golden Globe and 2008 Emmy for his role as Benjamin Franklin in the HBO series \"John Adams.\"\n\nWilkinson married actress Diana Hardcastle in 1988. The couple had two daughters."}
{"text": "# Maine state official who removed Trump from ballot was targeted in swatting call at her home\nBy **MARK THIESSEN**  \nDecember 30, 2023. 6:22 PM EST\n\n---\n\nA fake emergency call to police resulted in officers responding Friday night to the home of Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows just a day after she removed former President Donald Trump from the state's presidential primary ballot under the Constitution's insurrection clause.\n\nShe becomes the latest elected politician to become a target of swatting, which involves making a prank phone call to emergency services with the intent that a large first responder presence, including SWAT teams, will show up at a residence.\n\nBellows was not home when the swatting call was made, and responding officers found nothing suspicious.\n\nWhile no motive for the swatting attempt was released by the Maine Department of Public Safety, Bellows said she had no doubts it stemmed from her decision to remove Trump from the ballot.\n\nThe swatting attempt came after her home address was posted on social media by a conservative activist. \"And it was posted in anger and with violent intent by those who have been extending threatening communications toward me, my family and my office,\" she told The Associated Press in a phone call Saturday.\n\nAccording to the Maine Department of Public Safety, a call was made to emergency services from an unknown man saying he had broken into a house in Manchester.\n\nThe address the man gave was Bellows' home. Bellows and her husband were away for the holiday weekend. Maine State Police responded to what the public safety department said ultimately turned out to be a swatting call.\n\nPolice conducted an exterior sweep of the house and then checked inside at Bellows' request. Nothing suspicious was found, and police continue to investigate.\n\n\"The Maine State Police is working with our law enforcement partners to provide special attention to any and all appropriate locations,\" the public safety statement said.\n\nBellows said the intimidation factors won't work. \"Here's what I'm not doing differently. I'm doing my job to uphold the Constitution, the rule of law.\"\n\nOther high-profile politicians who have been targets of swatting calls include U.S. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, Georgia U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost.\n\nBellows said she, her family and her office workers have been threatened since her decision to remove Trump from the ballot. At least one Republican lawmaker in Maine wants to pursue impeachment against her.\n\n\"Not only have there been threatening communications, but there have been dehumanizing fake images posted online and even fake text threads attributed to me,\" said Bellows, who has worked in civil rights prior to becoming secretary of state.\n\n\"And my previous work taught me that dehumanizing people is the first step in creating an environment that leads to attacks and violence against that person,\" she said. \"It is extraordinarily dangerous for the rhetoric to have escalated to the point of dehumanizing me and threatening me, my loved ones and the people who work for me.\"\n\nShe said the people of Maine have a strong tradition of being able to disagree on important issues without violence.\n\n\"I think it is extraordinarily important that everyone deescalate the rhetoric and remember the values that make our democratic republic and here in Maine, our state, so great,\" she said.\n\nThe Trump campaign said it would appeal Bellows' decision to Maine's state courts, and Bellows suspended her ruling until that court system rules on the case.\n\nThe Colorado Supreme Court earlier this month removed Trump from that state's ballot, a decision that also was stayed until the U.S. Supreme Court decides whether he would be barred under the insurrection clause, a Civil War-era provision which prohibits those who \"engaged in insurrection\" from holding office."}
{"text": "# Netanyahu says Gaza war on Hamas will go on for 'many more months,' thanks US for new weapons sales\nBy **WAFAA SHURAFA**, **SAMY MAGDY**, and **ABBY SEWELL**  \nDecember 30, 2023. 6:13 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP)** - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday that Israel's war on Hamas in Gaza will continue for \"many more months,\" pushing back against persistent international cease-fire calls after mounting civilian deaths, hunger and mass displacement in the besieged enclave.\n\nNetanyahu thanked the Biden administration for its continued backing, including approval for a new emergency weapons sale, the second this month, and prevention of a U.N. Security Council resolution seeking an immediate cease-fire. Israel argues that ending the war now would mean victory for Hamas, a stance shared by the Biden administration, which at the same time urged Israel to do more to avoid harm to Palestinian civilians.\n\nIn new fighting, Israeli warplanes struck the urban refugee camps of Nuseirat and Bureij in the center of the territory Saturday as ground forces pushed deeper into the southern city of Khan Younis.\n\nThe Health Ministry in Gaza said Saturday that more than 21,600 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's unprecedented air and ground offensive since the deadly Oct. 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel. The ministry, which does not distinguish between the deaths of civilians and combatants, said 165 Palestinians were killed over the past 24 hours. It has said about 70% of those killed have been women and children.\n\nThe number of Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza combat rose to 170, after the military announced two more deaths Saturday.\n\nThe war has displaced some 85% of Gaza's 2.3 million residents, sending swells of people seeking shelter in Israeli-designated safe areas that the military has nevertheless bombed. Palestinians are left with a sense that nowhere is safe in the tiny enclave.\n\nWith Israeli forces expanding their ground offensive this week, tens of thousands more Palestinians streamed into the already crowded city of Rafah at the southernmost end of Gaza.\n\nThousands of tents and makeshift shacks have sprung up on Rafah's outskirts next to U.N. warehouses. Displaced people arrived in Rafah on foot or on trucks and carts piled high with mattresses. Those who did not find space in overwhelmed shelters pitched tents on roadsides.\n\n\"We don't have water. We don't have enough food,\" Nour Daher, a displaced woman, said Saturday from the sprawling tent camp. \"The kids wake up in the morning wanting to eat, wanting to drink. It took us one hour to find water for them. We couldn't bring them flour. Even when we wanted to take them to toilets, it took us one hour to walk.\"\n\nIn the Nuseirat camp, resident Mustafa Abu Wawee said a strike hit the home of one of his relatives, killing two people.\n\n\"The (Israeli) occupation is doing everything to force people to leave,\" he said over the phone while helping to search for four people missing under the rubble. \"They want to break our spirit and will, but they will fail. We are here to stay.\"\n\n## MORE U.S. WEAPONS FOR ISRAEL\nThe State Department said Friday that Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Congress he approved a $147.5 million sale for equipment, including fuses, charges and primers, that is needed for 155 mm shells Israel bought previously.\n\nIt marked the second time this month that the Biden administration is bypassing Congress to approve an emergency weapons sale to Israel. Blinken made a similar decision on Dec. 9 to approve the sale to Israel of nearly 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition worth more than $106 million.\n\nBoth moves have come as President Joe Biden's request for a nearly $106 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other national security needs remains stalled in Congress, caught up in a debate over U.S. immigration policy and border security. Some Democratic lawmakers have spoken of making the proposed $14.3 billion in American assistance to its Mideast ally contingent on concrete steps by Netanyahu's government to reduce civilian casualties in Gaza during the war with Hamas.\n\n## THE WAR'S TIMELINE\nBlinken, who has repeatedly traveled to the Middle East during the war, was expected back in Israel and other countries in the region in January. U.S. officials have urged Israel to start shifting from high intensity combat to more targeted operations, but said they were not imposing a deadline.\n\nNetanyahu said Israel needs more time.\n\n\"As the chief of staff said this week, the war will continue many more months,\" he told a televised news conference Saturday. \"My policy is clear. We will continue to fight until we have achieved all the objectives of the war, first and foremost the annihilation of Hamas and the release of all the hostages.\"\n\nMore than 120 hostages remain in Gaza, after militants seized more than 240 in the Oct. 7 assault that also killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians.\n\nNetanyahu is also at odds with the Biden administration over who should run Gaza after the war. He has rejected the U.S.-backed idea that a unified Palestinian government should run both Gaza and parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank as a precursor to eventual statehood. Instead, he has insisted on open-ended Israeli security control in Gaza, without saying what would come next.\n\n## TRADING FOR HOSTAGES\nFamilies of hostages and their supporters have demanded that the government prioritize hostage releases over other war objectives, and have staged large protests every weekend, including Saturday.\n\nEgypt, one of the mediators between Israel and Hamas, has proposed a multistage plan that would kick off with a swap of hostages for prisoners, accompanied by a temporary cease-fire - along the lines of an exchange during a weeklong truce in November.\n\nHamas insists the war must end before it will discuss hostage releases. Osama Hamdan, a senior Hamas official in Beirut, reiterated that position Saturday, but also told The Associated Press that \"we have not given any final answer so far\" to the Egyptian proposal.\n\nAsked about reports of possible progress toward a deal, Netanyahu said Saturday that \"we see a possibility, maybe, for movement\" but that he did not want to raise \"exaggerated expectations.\"\n\n## DIFFICULTIES IN DELIVERING AID\nMore than a week after a U.N. Security Council resolution called for the unhindered delivery of aid at scale across besieged Gaza, conditions have only worsened, U.N. agencies warned.\n\nAid officials said the aid entering Gaza remains woefully inadequate. Distributing goods is hampered by long delays at two border crossings, ongoing fighting, Israeli airstrikes, repeated cuts in internet and phone services and a breakdown of law and order that makes it difficult to secure aid convoys, they said.\n\nNearly the entire population is fully dependent on outside humanitarian aid, said Philippe Lazzarini, head of UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees. A quarter of the population is starving because too few trucks enter with food, medicine, fuel and other supplies - sometimes fewer than 100 trucks a day, according to U.N. daily reports."}
{"text": "# Shelling kills 21 in Russian city of Belgorod following Moscow's aerial attacks across Ukraine\nBy **The Associated Press**  \nDecember 30, 2023. 5:49 PM EST\n\n---\n\nShelling in the center of the Russian border city of Belgorod Saturday killed 21 people, including three children, local officials reported.\n\nA further 110 people were wounded in the strike, said regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, making it one of the deadliest attacks on Russian soil since the start of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine 22 months ago.\n\nRussian authorities accused Kyiv of carrying out the attack, which took place the day after an 18-hour aerial bombardment across Ukraine killed at least 41 civilians.\n\nImages of Belgorod on social media showed burning cars and plumes of black smoke rising among damaged buildings as air raid sirens sounded. One strike hit close to a public ice rink in the very heart of the city, which lies 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of the Ukrainian border and 415 miles (670 kilometers) south of Moscow. While previous attacks have hit the city, they have rarely taken place in daylight and have claimed fewer lives.\n\nRussia's Defense Ministry said it identified the ammunition used in the strike as Czech-made Vampire rockets and Olkha missiles fitted with cluster-munition warheads. It provided no additional information, and The Associated Press was unable to verify its claims.\n\n\"This crime will not go unpunished,\" the ministry said in a statement on social media.\n\nThe Kremlin said Russian President Vladimir Putin had been briefed on the situation, and that the country's health minister, Mikhail Murashko, was ordered to join a delegation of medical personnel and rescue workers traveling to Belgorod from Moscow.\n\nRussian diplomats also called for a meeting of the U.N. Security Council in connection with the strike. Speaking to Russia's state news agency, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Britain and the United States were guilty of encouraging Kyiv to carry out what she described as a \"terrorist attack.\" She also placed blame on EU countries who had supplied Ukraine with weapons.\n\n\"Silence in response to the unbridled barbarity of Ukraine's Nazis and their puppeteers and accomplices from 'civilized democracies' will be akin to complicity in their bloody deeds,\" the ministry said in a statement.\n\nEarlier Saturday, Moscow officials reported shooting down 32 Ukrainian drones over the country's Moscow, Bryansk, Oryol, and Kursk regions.\n\nThey also reported that cross-border shelling had killed two other people in Russia. A man died and four other people were wounded when a missile struck a private home in the Belgorod region late Friday evening and a 9-year-old was killed in a separate incident in the Bryansk region.\n\nCities across western Russia have come under regular attack from drones since May, with Russian officials blaming Kyiv. Ukrainian officials never acknowledge responsibility for attacks on Russian territory or the Crimean Peninsula. However, larger aerial strikes against Russia have previously followed heavy assaults on Ukrainian cities.\n\nRussian drone strikes against Ukraine continued Saturday, with the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces reporting that 10 Iranian-made Shahed drones had been shot down across the Kherson, Khmelnytskyi, and Mykolaiv regions.\n\nLocal officials reported that three people had been killed by Russian missiles: a 55-year-old man in the Kherson region, a 43-year-old man in Stepnohirsk, a town in Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia region, and a 32-year-old in the Chernihiv region.\n\nOn Friday, Moscow's forces launched 122 missiles and dozens of drones across Ukraine, an onslaught described by one air force official as the biggest aerial barrage of the war.\n\nAs well as the 39 deaths, at least 160 people were wounded and an unknown number were buried under rubble in the assault, which damaged a maternity hospital, apartment blocks, and schools.\n\nWestern officials and analysts recently warned that Russia limited its cruise missile strikes for months in an apparent effort to build up stockpiles for massive strikes during the winter, hoping to break the Ukrainians' spirit.\n\nFighting along the front line is largely bogged down by winter weather after Ukraine's summer counteroffensive failed to make a significant breakthrough along the roughly 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) line of contact.\n\nRussia's ongoing aerial attacks have also sparked concern for Ukraine's neighbors.\n\nPoland's defense forces said Friday that an unknown object had entered the country's airspace before vanishing off radars, and that all indications pointed to it being a Russian missile.\n\nSpeaking to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti, Russia's charge d'affaires in Poland, Andrei Ordash, said Saturday that Moscow would not comment on the event until Warsaw had given the Kremlin evidence of an airspace violation.\n\n\"We will not give any explanations until we are presented with concrete evidence because these accusations are unsubstantiated,\" he said."}
{"text": "# Russia says it downed dozens of Ukrainian drones headed for Moscow, following a mass strike on Kyiv\nBy **The Associated Press**  \nNovember 26, 2023. 3:28 PM EST\n\n---\n\nUkraine tried to attack Moscow with dozens of drones, Russian authorities said Sunday, just a day after Ukrainian officials reported that Russia had launched its most intense drone attack on Kyiv since the beginning of its full-scale war in 2022.\n\nRussian air defenses brought down at least 24 drones over the Moscow region - which surrounds but doesn't include the capital - and four other provinces to the south and west, the Russian Defense Ministry and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin reported in a series of Telegram updates. Neither referenced any casualties.\n\nAndrei Vorobyev, governor of the Moscow region, wrote on Telegram that the drone strikes damaged three unspecified buildings there, adding that no one was hurt.\n\nOne drone crashed into a 12-story apartment building in the western Russian city of Tula, about 180 kilometers (113 miles) south of Moscow, slightly wounding one resident and causing limited damage, local Gov. Aleksei Dyumin wrote on Telegram on Sunday morning.\n\nMoscow's Vnukovo and Domodedovo airports also briefly shut down because of the drone attack, according to Russian state-run news agency Tass. Both appeared to have resumed normal operation by 6 a.m. local time Sunday, according to data from international flight tracking portals.\n\nRussian Telegram channels speculated that Ukrainian forces had deployed a previously unseen type of drone in the purported strike, pointing out some similarities to the Iranian-made weapons Moscow routinely employs in its attacks on Ukraine.\n\nThe Russian capital has come under attack from drones regularly since May, with Russian officials blaming Ukraine. Military analysts commented at the time that the early attacks deployed Ukrainian locally-made drones, which couldn't carry as heavy a payload as the Iranian-made Shaheds used by Russia.\n\nUkrainian officials didn't immediately acknowledge or comment on the strikes, which came a day after Russia targeted the Ukrainian capital with more than 60 Shahed drones. At least five civilians were wounded in the hourslong assault, which saw several buildings damaged by falling debris from downed drones, including a kindergarten. The wounded included an 11-year-old child, according to Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko.\n\nThe Ukrainian air force early on Sunday said it had brought down eight of nine Shahed drones fired overnight by Russian forces.\n\nAlso on Sunday morning, the Russian Defense Ministry reported that two Soviet-made S-200 rockets fired by Kyiv were shot down over the sea of Azov, which stretches between the Crimean Peninsula and Ukraine's Russian-occupied southeastern coast.\n\nAccording to local news sources, air raid sirens sounded earlier in Russian-annexed Crimea, which on Friday came under what Russian officials called a major drone attack. Road traffic was also briefly halted on Sunday morning across the 19-kilometer (12-mile) bridge that connects Crimea to the Russian mainland.\n\nThere were no reports of casualties, and no comment from officials in Kyiv.\n\nElsewhere, parts of Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine were left without power following a nighttime Ukrainian strike on a thermal power plant in the Donetsk region, a Moscow-installed local official reported on Telegram Sunday. According to Denis Pushilin, who heads the province that Russia illegally annexed last year, the attack on the Starobesheve plant took out the electricity in parts of the occupied cities of Donetsk and Mariupol, along with other nearby areas.\n\nOn the outskirts of Donetsk, Russian troops have continued their attempts to advance near Avdiivka, the eastern town that has been a Ukrainian stronghold and fighting hot spot since the early days of the war, according to reports by the Ukrainian General Staff and analysis by the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.\n\nThe Ukrainian General Staff said Sunday morning that Kyiv's forces beat back Russian assaults to the northeast, west and southwest of Avdiivka over the previous 24 hours, as Moscow's troops strain to encircle the city.\n\nSeveral Russian bloggers also made unconfirmed claims that Ukrainian forces had begun withdrawing from the industrial zone on Avdiivka's southern flank, although others said that Russian troops lacked complete control of the area. These claims couldn't be independently verified.\n\nRussian shelling killed two civilians in the Donetsk region on Saturday and overnight, acting Ukrainian Gov. Ihor Moroz reported on Telegram on Sunday morning. Over that same period, Russian shells wounded one person in Ukraine's northern Sumy province, which borders Russia, according to a Telegram update by the Ukrainian regional military command."}
{"text": "# Prosecutors urge appeals court to reject Trump's immunity claims in election subversion case\nBy **ERIC TUCKER**  \nDecember 30, 2023. 3:51 PM EST\n\n---\n\nWASHINGTON (AP) - Special counsel Jack Smith urged a federal appeals court Saturday to reject former President Donald Trump's claims that he is immune from prosecution, saying the suggestion that he cannot be held to account for crimes in office \"threatens the democratic and constitutional foundation\" of the country.\n\nThe filing from Smith's team was submitted ahead of arguments next month on the legally untested question of whether a former president can be prosecuted for acts taken while in the White House.\n\nThough the matter is now being considered by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, it's likely to come again before the Supreme Court, which earlier this month rejected prosecutors' request for a speedy ruling in their favor holding that Trump can be forced to stand trial on charges that he plotted to overturn the results of the 2020 election.\n\nThe outcome of the dispute is critical for both sides especially since the case has been effectively paused while Trump advances his immunity claims in the appeals court.\n\nProsecutors are hoping a swift judgment rejecting those arguments will restart the case and keep it on track for trial, currently scheduled for March 4 in federal court in Washington. But Trump's lawyers stand to benefit from a protracted appeals process that could significantly delay the case and potentially push it beyond the November election.\n\nTrump's lawyers maintain that the appeals court should order the dismissal of the case, arguing that as a former president he is exempt from prosecution for acts that fell within his official duties as president.\n\nSmith's team has said no such immunity exists in the Constitution or in case law and that, in any event, the actions that Trump took in his failed effort to cling to power aren't part of a president's official responsibilities.\n\nThe four-count indictment charges Trump with conspiring to disrupt the certification in Congress of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021, when rioters motivated by his falsehoods about the election results stormed the U.S. Capitol in a violent clash with police. It alleges that he participated in a scheme to enlist slates of fake electors in battleground states who would falsely attest that Trump had won those states and encouraged then-Vice President Mike Pence to thwart the counting of votes.\n\nThose actions, prosecutors wrote, fall well outside a president's official duties and were intended solely to help him win reelection.\n\n\"A President who unlawfully seeks to retain power through criminal means unchecked by potential criminal prosecution could jeopardize both the Presidency itself and the very foundations of our democratic system of government officials to use fraudulent means to thwart the transfer of power and remain in office,\" Smith's team wrote.\n\nIn their brief, prosecutors also said that though the presidency plays a \"vital role in our constitutional system,\" so, too, does the principle of accountability in the event of wrongdoing.\n\n\"Rather than vindicating our constitutional framework, the defendant's sweeping immunity claim threatens to license Presidents to commit crimes to remain in office,\" they wrote. \"The Founders did not intend and would never have countenanced such a result.\"\n\nWhile Trump's lawyers have argued that the indictment threatens \"the very bedrock of our Republic,\" prosecutors say the defense has it backwards.\n\n\"It is the defendant's claim that he cannot be held to answer for the charges that he engaged in an unprecedented effort to retain power through criminal means, despite having lost the election, that threatens the democratic and constitutional foundation of our Republic,\" they said.\n\nA three-judge panel is set to hear arguments on Jan. 9. Two of the judges, J. Michelle Childs and Florence Pan, were appointed by President Joe Biden. The third, Karen LeCraft Henderson, was assigned to the bench by former President George H.W. Bush.\n\nU.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan earlier rejected the immunity arguments, asserting that the office of the presidency does not confer a \"'get-out-of-jail free card.\" Trump's lawyers then appealed that decision, prompting Smith to seek to bypass the court and request an expedited decision from the Supreme Court.\n\nThe justices last week denied that request without explanation, leaving the matter with the appeals court.\n\nTrump faces three other criminal prosecutions. He is charged in Florida with illegally retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate and faces a state prosecution in Georgia that accuses him of trying to subvert that state's 2020 presidential election and a New York case that accuses him of falsifying business records in connection with a hush money payment to a porn actress."}
{"text": "# How recent 'swatting' calls targeting officials may prompt heavier penalties for hoax police calls\nBy **JEFF AMY**  \nDecember 29, 2023. 12:32 PM EST\n\n---\n\nATLANTA (AP) - A spate of false reports of shootings at the homes of public officials in recent days could be setting the stage for stricter penalties against so-called swatting in more states.\n\nU.S. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, Georgia U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost have been among the victims.\n\nSeveral Georgia lawmakers targeted say they want increased penalties for swatting, like laws enacted this year in Ohio and Virginia. Similar bills are pending in other states and Congress.\n\nHere's a look at the issue and what could be done about it:\n\n## WHAT IS 'SWATTING'?\nSwatting is the act of making a prank call to emergency services to prompt a response at a particular address. The goal is to get authorities, particularly a SWAT team, to show up.\n\nCalls in multiple states in recent days featured the voice of a man calling himself \"Jamal,\" claiming he had shot his wife because she was sleeping with another man and saying he was holding the boyfriend hostage, demanding $10,000.\n\nTwo Ohio lawmakers said they thought they were targeted recently for helping pass a law making swatting a felony in the state.\n\nGeorgia state Sen. Clint Dixon said the incident at his house in Buford on Christmas evening was \"quite startling\" for himself, his wife and three children.\n\n\"I was watching a little football and my wife was upstairs packing for a trip, and all of a sudden, I heard her, you know, start yelling, 'There's police running at the door.' She saw on our Ring doorbell,\" he told WABE.\n\n## WHO'S BEEN TARGETED RECENTLY?\nA man in New York called the Georgia suicide hotline just before 11 a.m. Monday, claiming that he had shot his girlfriend at Greene's home in Rome, Georgia, and was going to kill himself next, said Kelly Madden, the Rome police spokesperson. The call was quickly transferred to police when suicide hotline responders recognized the congresswoman's address.\n\nThe department said it contacted Greene's private security detail to confirm she was safe and that there was no emergency. The call was then determined to be a swatting attempt so the response was canceled while police were on the way. Greene has been the subject of multiple swatting attempts.\n\nScott wrote on X that police were sent to his home in Naples, Florida, while he and his wife were out at dinner on Wednesday night. Police said they met Scott's private security service at the home, but didn't find anything out of place.\n\n\"These criminals wasted the time & resources of our law enforcement in a sick attempt to terrorize my family,\" Scott wrote.\n\nIn Boston, a male caller claimed on Monday that he had shot his wife and had tied her and another man up at Wu's home. The Democratic mayor said she was surprised to open the door and see flashing lights, but said her home has been targeted by multiple swatting calls since she took office in 2021.\n\n\"For better or worse, my family are a bit used to it by now, and we have a good system with the department,\" Wu told WBUR.\n\nAlso targeted have been a Republican congressman from New York, Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and a former state senator in Nebraska. Dixon was among four Georgia state senators who were recently swatted. In Ohio, a total of three current or former state lawmakers were affected.\n\nJones said his home in a small town south of Atlanta was swatted on Wednesday, only to have a bomb threat called in on Thursday.\n\n\"Thankfully everyone is safe, and I commend our local law enforcement officers for their professionalism,\" Jones wrote on X. \"Let me be clear - I will not be intimidated by those attempting to silence me,\" Jones wrote on X We will put an end to this madness.\n\n## HOW WIDESPREAD IS THE PROBLEM?\nHundreds of cases of swatting occur annually, with some using caller ID spoofing to disguise their number. And those targeted extend far beyond public officials.\n\nPolice in Lincoln, Nebraska, told KETV-TV that they had handled three swatting calls in the same 48-hour period in which they went to the unoccupied home of former state Sen. Adam Morfeld.\n\nThe FBI said earlier this year that it had created a national database in conjunction with other law enforcement agencies to track swatting incidents nationwide. Police had for months reported a huge surge in fake claims about active shooters at schools and colleges. There have also been reports of hundreds of swatting incidents and bomb threats against synagogues and other Jewish institutions since the Israel-Hamas war began.\n\nThe Anti-Defamation League estimates that by 2019 there were more than 1,000 incidents of swatting nationwide each year. That group says each incident can costs taxpayers thousands of dollars in emergency response costs.\n\n## DO FALSE THREATS POSE OTHER RISKS?\nSuch calls have proven dangerous and even outright deadly.\n\nIn 2017, a police officer in Wichita, Kansas, shot and killed a man while responding to a hoax emergency call. Earlier this year, the city agreed to pay $5 million to settle a related lawsuit, with the money to go to the two children of 28-year-old Andrew Finch.\n\nIn 2015, police in Maryland shot a 20-year-old man in the face with rubber bullets after a fake hostage situation was reported at his home.\n\nIn addition to putting innocent people at risk, police and officials say they worry about diverting resources from real emergencies.\n\n## WHAT KIND OF RESPONSE COULD THIS PROMPT?\nPolice are investigating the recent threats. No arrests have yet been reported.\n\nOhio earlier this year made it a felony offense to report a false emergency that prompts response by law enforcement. And Virginia increased the penalties for swatting to up to 12 months in jail.\n\nDixon, the Georgia state senator, said in a statement he planned to introduce a bill during the upcoming legislative session to strengthen penalties for false reporting and misuse of police forces.\n\n\"This issue goes beyond politics - it's about public safety and preserving the integrity of our institutions,\" he said.\n\nJones, the Georgia lieutenant governor, promised \"an end to this madness\" after his home in a small town south of Atlanta was swatted on Wednesday, only to have a bomb threat called in to his office on Thursday.\n\n\"Let me be clear - I will not be intimidated by those attempting to silence me,\" Jones wrote on X."}
{"text": "# Trump is blocked from the GOP primary ballot in two states. Can he still run for president?\nBy **NICHOLAS RICCARDI**  \nDecember 29, 2023. 12:46 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DENVER (AP)** - First, Colorado's Supreme Court ruled that former President Donald Trump wasn't eligible to run for his old job in that state. Then, Maine's Democratic secretary of state ruled the same for her state. Who's next?\n\nBoth decisions are historic. The Colorado court was the first court to apply to a presidential candidate a rarely used constitutional ban against those who \"engaged in insurrection.\" Maine's secretary of state was the first top election official to unilaterally strike a presidential candidate from the ballot under that provision.\n\nBut both decisions are on hold while the legal process plays out.\n\nThat means that Trump remains on the ballot in Colorado and Maine and that his political fate is now in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Maine ruling will likely never take effect on its own. Its central impact is increasing pressure on the nation's highest court to say clearly: Can Trump still run for president after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol?\n\n## WHAT'S THE LEGAL ISSUE?\nAfter the Civil War, the U.S. ratified the 14th Amendment to guarantee rights to former slaves and more. It also included a two-sentence clause called Section 3, designed to keep former Confederates from regaining government power after the war.\n\nThe measure reads:\n\n\"No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.\"\n\nCongress did remove that disability from most Confederates in 1872, and the provision fell into disuse. But it was rediscovered after Jan. 6.\n\n## HOW DOES THIS APPLY TO TRUMP?\nTrump is already being prosecuted for the attempt to overturn his 2020 loss that culminated with Jan. 6, but Section 3 doesn't require a criminal conviction to take effect. Dozens of lawsuits have been filed to disqualify Trump, claiming he engaged in insurrection on Jan. 6 and is no longer qualified to run for office.\n\nAll the suits failed until the Colorado ruling. And dozens of secretaries of state have been asked to remove him from the ballot. All said they didn't have the authority to do so without a court order - until Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows' decision.\n\nThe Supreme Court has never ruled on Section 3. It's likely to do so in considering appeals of the Colorado decision - the state Republican Party has already appealed, and Trump is expected to file his own shortly. Bellows' ruling cannot be appealed straight to the U.S. Supreme Court - it has to be appealed up the judicial chain first, starting with a trial court in Maine.\n\nThe Maine decision does force the high court's hand, though. It was already highly likely the justices would hear the Colorado case, but Maine removes any doubt.\n\nTrump lost Colorado in 2020, and he doesn't need to win it again to garner an Electoral College majority next year. But he won one of Maine's four Electoral College votes in 2020 by winning the state's 2nd Congressional District, so Bellows' decision would have a direct impact on his odds next November.\n\nUntil the high court rules, any state could adopt its own standard on whether Trump, or anyone else, can be on the ballot. That's the sort of legal chaos the court is supposed to prevent.\n\n## WHAT ARE THE ARGUMENTS IN THE CASE?\nTrump's lawyers have several arguments against the push to disqualify him. First, it's not clear Section 3 applies to the president - an early draft mentioned the office, but it was taken out, and the language \"an officer of the United States\" elsewhere in the Constitution doesn't mean the president, they contend.\n\nSecond, even if it does apply to the presidency, they say, this is a \"political\" question best decided by voters, not unelected judges. Third, if judges do want to get involved, the lawyers assert, they're violating Trump's rights to a fair legal procedure by flatly ruling he's ineligible without some sort of fact-finding process like a lengthy criminal trial. Fourth, they argue, Jan. 6 wasn't an insurrection under the meaning of Section 3 - it was more like a riot. Finally, even if it was an insurrection, they say, Trump wasn't involved in it - he was merely using his free speech rights.\n\nOf course, the lawyers who want to disqualify Trump have arguments, too. The main one is that the case is actually very simple: Jan. 6 was an insurrection, Trump incited it, and he's disqualified.\n\n## WHAT'S TAKEN SO LONG?\nThe attack was three years ago, but the challenges weren't \"ripe,\" to use the legal term, until Trump petitioned to get onto state ballots this fall.\n\nBut the length of time also gets at another issue - no one has really wanted to rule on the merits of the case. Most judges have dismissed the lawsuits because of technical issues, including that courts don't have the authority to tell parties whom to put on their primary ballots. Secretaries of state have dodged, too, usually telling those who ask them to ban Trump that they don't have the authority to do so unless ordered by a court.\n\nNo one can dodge anymore. Legal experts have cautioned that, if the Supreme Court doesn't clearly resolve the issue, it could lead to chaos in November - or in January 2025, if Trump wins the election. Imagine, they say, if the high court ducks the issue or says it's not a decision for the courts to make, and Democrats win a narrow majority in Congress. Would they seat Trump or declare he's ineligible under Section 3?\n\n## WHY DID MAINE DO THIS?\nMaine has an unusual process in which a secretary of state is required to hold a public hearing on challenges to politicians' spots on the ballot and then issue a ruling. Multiple groups of Maine voters, including a bipartisan clutch of former state lawmakers, filed such a challenge, triggering Bellows' decision.\n\nBellows is a Democrat, the former head of the Maine chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, and has a long trail of criticism of Trump on social media. Trump's attorneys asked her to recuse herself from the case, citing posts calling Jan. 6 an \"insurrection\" and bemoaning Trump's acquittal in his impeachment trial over the attack.\n\nShe refused, saying she wasn't ruling based on personal opinions. But the precedent she sets is notable, critics say. In theory, election officials in every state could decide a candidate is ineligible based on a novel legal theory about Section 3 and end their candidacies.\n\nConservatives argue that Section 3 could apply to Vice President Kamala Harris, for example - it was used to block from office even those who donated small sums to individual Confederates. Couldn't it be used against Harris, they say, because she raised money for those arrested in the unrest after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020?\n\n## IS THIS A PARTISAN ISSUE?\nWell, of course it is. Bellows is a Democrat, and all the justices on the Colorado Supreme Court were appointed by Democrats. Six of the 9 U.S. Supreme Court justices were appointed by Republicans, three by Trump himself.\n\nBut courts don't always split on predictable partisan lines. The Colorado ruling was 4-3 - so three Democratic appointees disagreed with barring Trump. Several prominent legal conservatives have championed the use of Section 3 against the former president.\n\nNow we'll see how the high court handles it."}
{"text": "# New state laws for 2024 impact guns, pornography, taxes and even fuzzy dice\nBy **DAVID A. LIEB** and **GEOFF MULVIHILL**  \nDecember 30, 2023. 2:24 PM EST\n\n---\n\nFuzzy dice finally will be free to dangle in Illinois.\n\nStarting Monday, police there no longer will be allowed to pull over motorists solely because they have something hanging from the rearview mirror of the windshield. That means air fresheners, parking placards and, yes, even those dice are fair game to hang.\n\nThe revised Illinois windshield rule is one of hundreds of new laws taking effect with the new year in states across the U.S. While some may seem a bit pedestrian, others have real practical effects or touch on controversial issues such as restrictions on weapons and medical treatments for transgender people.\n\nThough the original Illinois windshield law was meant to improve roadway safety, it came to be seen by some as an excuse for pulling over drivers. The new law still prohibits objects that obstruct a driver's view but forbids law enforcement officers from conducting stops or searches solely because of suspected violations.\n\n\"With this new law, we are sending a powerful message that the state does not tolerate racial profiling or other forms of discrimination,\" said Democratic state Sen. Christopher Belt, one of the bill's sponsors.\n\nAnother new Illinois law seeks to stifle a more modern form of distracted driving by prohibiting people from participating in video conferences or scanning social media while behind the wheel.\n\n## GUNS AND PORNOGRAPHY\nSeveral states have new laws regulating guns and online activity.\n\nA Minnesota law will allow authorities to ask courts for \" extreme risk protection orders \" to temporarily take guns from people deemed to be an imminent threat to others or themselves. Minnesota will be at least the 20th state with such a red-flag law.\n\nColorado will become one of a dozen states banning so-called ghost guns. The new law prohibits firearms that are assembled at home or 3D-printed without serial numbers, practices that have allowed owners to evade background checks.\n\nThe U.S. Supreme Court declined to block an Illinois law from taking effect Monday that bans high-powered semiautomatic rifles and high-capacity magazines. But a federal judge recently blocked a California law that would have banned carrying concealed guns in many public places.\n\nSeveral state laws delve into acceptable online activities. A new Connecticut law requires online dating operators to adopt policies for handling harassment reports by or between users.\n\nA North Carolina law will require pornographic website operators to confirm viewers are at least 18 years old by using a commercially available database. The law lets parents sue companies if their children were allowed to access the pornography. Another new Illinois law will allow lawsuits from victims of deepfake pornography, in which videos or images are manipulated without their consent.\n\n## LGBTQ+ ISSUES\nOver the past few years, there has been a major push by conservatives to restrict access to gender-affirming treatments for transgender minors. Bans are on the books in 22 states, including some where judges have paused enforcement as they consider challenges to the policies.\n\nNew bans on access for minors to puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgery, which is rare, are scheduled to take effect Jan. 1 in Idaho, Louisiana and West Virginia. The West Virginia law contains an exception: Teens could still access treatment with parental consent and a diagnosis of severe gender dysphoria from two doctors.\n\nWhile many Republican-led legislatures have imposed restrictions, many Democrat-dominated states have responded with transgender protections. A law taking effect Monday in Hawaii requires new marriage certificates to be issued to people who request to change how their sex is listed. The state also is replacing gender-specific terms in state law; \"mother\" is being replaced with \"birthing parent\" and \"father\" with \"non-birthing parent.\"\n\nIn Colorado, new buildings wholly or partly owned by government entities will be required to have on every floor where there are public restrooms at least one that does not specify the gender of the users.\n\nThe conservative push on LGBTQ+ policies also has come with efforts to keep certain books out of school or public libraries. An Indiana law taking effect makes it easier for parents and others to challenge books in school libraries. By contrast, a new Illinois law would block state funding for public libraries that ban or restrict books.\n\n## TAXES AND WAGES\nThe new year brings a variety of new laws on taxes and wages - perennial issues for state governments.\n\nMore than 20 states will raise minimum wages for workers, further widening the gap between state requirements and the federal minimum, which has been static at $7.25 an hour since July 2009. In several states, the new minimum wage will more than double that rate.\n\nMaryland's minimum wage will be set at $15 an hour. In New Jersey, it will be $15.13 an hour for most employees. In Connecticut, $15.69 per hour. In New York City, $16 an hour, though it will be $15 in most of the rest of the state. California's statewide minimum wage also will rise to $16 per hour. And in Washington, the minimum rate will be $16.28.\n\nResidents in some states will gain money by paying less in taxes, continuing a three-year trend in which nearly every state has reduced, rebated or suspended some type of broad-based tax.\n\nIn Kansas, the sales tax on groceries will drop from 4% to 2% in its next step toward eventual elimination, producing a savings of $208 annually for a family spending an average of $200 weekly on groceries.\n\nAbout 1 million tax filers are expected to benefit from Connecticut's first income tax rate reduction since the mid-1990s. Lower-income workers and retirees also stand to benefit from expanded tax breaks.\n\nMissouri also will reduce its income tax rate while expanding tax exemptions for Social Security benefits and military training pay. Businesses will be able to claim tax credits for hiring interns or apprentices.\n\nAlabama will exempt overtime pay from the state's income tax, though that lasts only until June 2025 unless renewed by lawmakers."}
{"text": "# Consulting firm McKinsey agrees to $78 million settlement with insurers over opioids\nBy **DEE-ANN DURBIN**  \nDecember 30, 2023. 12:26 PM EST\n\n---\n\nConsulting firm McKinsey and Co. has agreed to pay $78 million to settle claims from insurers and health care funds that its work with drug companies helped fuel an opioid addiction crisis.\n\nThe agreement was revealed late Friday in documents filed in federal court in San Francisco. The settlement must still be approved by a judge.\n\nUnder the agreement, McKinsey would establish a fund to reimburse insurers, private benefit plans and others for some or all of their prescription opioid costs.\n\nThe insurers argued that McKinsey worked with Purdue Pharma - the maker of OxyContin - to create and employ aggressive marketing and sales tactics to overcome doctors' reservations about the highly addictive drugs. Insurers said that forced them to pay for prescription opioids rather than safer, non-addictive and lower-cost drugs, including over-the-counter pain medication. They also had to pay for the opioid addiction treatment that followed.\n\nFrom 1999 to 2021, nearly 280,000 people in the U.S. died from overdoses of prescription opioids, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Insurers argued that McKinsey worked with Purdue Pharma even after the extent of the opioid crisis was apparent.\n\nThe settlement is the latest in a years-long effort to hold McKinsey accountable for its role in the opioid epidemic. In February 2021, the company agreed to pay nearly $600 million to U.S. states, the District of Columbia and five U.S. territories. In September, the company announced a separate, $230 million settlement agreement with school districts and local governments.\n\nAsked for comment Saturday, McKinsey referred to a statement it released in September.\n\n\"As we have stated previously, we continue to believe that our past work was lawful and deny allegations to the contrary,\" the company said, adding that it reached a settlement to avoid protracted litigation.\n\nMcKinsey said it stopped advising clients on any opioid-related business in 2019."}
{"text": "# Cargo ship carrying burning lithium-ion batteries reaches Alaska, but kept offshore for safety\nBy **MARK THIESSEN**  \nDecember 30, 2023. 3:28 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP)** - A large cargo ship with a fire in its hold is being kept 2 miles (3.22 kilometers) offshore of an Alaska port as a precaution while efforts are undertaken to extinguish the flames, the U.S. Coast Guard said Saturday.\n\nThere were no injuries to the 19 crew members aboard the Genius Star XI, which was carrying a load of lithium-ion batteries across the Pacific Ocean, from Vietnam to San Diego, the guard's Alaska district said in a release.\n\nThe fire started on Christmas Day in cargo hold No. 1, a spokesperson for ship owner Wisdom Marine Group said in a statement. The crew released carbon dioxide into the hold and sealed it over concerns of an explosion.\n\nShip's personnel alerted the Coast Guard early Thursday morning about the fire. The Coast Guard said it diverted the 410-foot (125-meter) cargo ship to Dutch Harbor, one of the nation's busiest fishing ports located in Unalaska, an Aleutian Islands community about 800 miles (1,287 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage.\n\nThe ship arrived Friday, but an order preventing the Genius Star XI from going close to shore was issued to \"mitigate risks associated with burning lithium-ion batteries or toxic gasses produced by the fire,\" Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Mike Salerno said in an email to The Associated Press.\n\n\"The city's primary concern is protecting the health and safety of our community members, the environment, fisheries and commerce,\" Unalaska acting city manager Marjie Veeder said in a statement.\n\nVeeder said the city's emergency operations center \"is acting on behalf of the community and advocating our position to protect our community. We are actively monitoring the situation.\"\n\nThere is danger associated with any vessel fire, prompting the Coast Guard to issue another safety measure besides preventing the ship from getting closer than 2 miles (3.22 kilometers) to shore.\n\n\"The safety of Unalaska residents and the surrounding communities is a top priority for us, so as a precaution we are keeping a one-mile (1.61-kilometer) safety zone around the vessel,\" Salerno said.\n\nThe owners said there has been no oil leaks associated with the incident.\n\nA team of marine firefighting experts late Friday conducted an assessment of the ship and found no signs of structural deformation or blistering outside of the cargo hold, the Coast Guard said.\n\nThat team remains on board the ship to evaluate the situation, Salerno said.\n\nAn expert hired by the Taipei, Taiwan-based Wisdom Marine Group \"is working diligently to create contingency plans, arrange for a firefighting team, and ensure the necessary equipment is in place,' the group said in a statement.\n\nThe Coast Guard will investigate the cause of the fire.\n\nThe Genius Star XI left Vietnam on Dec. 10 en route to Dutch Harbor, according to the Marine Traffic website. The ship with a carrying capacity of more than 13,000 tons (11,793 metric tonnes) sails under the flag of Panama."}
{"text": "# Retirements could tip control of the House majority. It's Republicans who have the early edge\nBy **KEVIN FREKING**  \nDecember 30, 2023. 1:38 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - A chaotic year for the House is coming to a close with more Democrats than Republicans deciding to leave the chamber, a disparity that could have major ramifications in next year's elections.\n\nAbout two dozen Democrats have indicated they won't seek reelection, with half running for another elected office. Meanwhile, only 14 Republicans have said they are not seeking another term, with three seeking elected office elsewhere.\n\nMore retirements can be expected after the holidays, when lawmakers have had a chance to spend time with families and make decisions ahead of reelection deadlines. But so far, the numbers don't indicate the dysfunction in the House is causing a mass exodus for either party.\n\n\"Members sort of knew that this is what the institution is currently like when they chose to run for office,\" said Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a think tank that maintains a database of vital statistics on Congress, including retirements. \"Some of them may well be feeling frustrated at this point in time, but anybody who has been elected to Congress in recent years, they're not surprised at what they're finding when they are getting to Washington.\"\n\nRepublicans certainly had the most high-profile exits. Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., became only the third lawmaker to be expelled by colleagues since the Civil War. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., was the first-ever speaker removed from that office by his colleagues. He opted to leave effective Dec. 31 rather than serve among the rank-and-file.\n\nBut it's the departure of a handful of Democrats in competitive districts that has Republicans thinking the overall retirement picture gives them an advantage in determining who will control the House after the 2024 elections.\n\nReps. Katie Porter of California, Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia proved they could win toss-up congressional districts in good election cycles for Democrats and not-so-good cycles. They are all seeking higher office within their home states. Porter and Slotkin are running for the U.S. Senate. Spanberger is running for governor in 2025.\n\nDemocrats are also losing six-term Rep. Dan Kildee of Michigan to retirement, leaving them with another competitive open seat to defend in a state that will be crucial in the presidential election. Rep. Jennifer Wexton, D-Va., is not seeking reelection due to health challenges in a district that leans Democratic but is more competitive than most.\n\nOn the other side of the aisle, the Republicans leaving office generally represent districts that Democrats have little chance of flipping. They'll be replaced by Republicans, predicted Rep. Richard Hudson, the chairman of the House Republican campaign arm.\n\n\"Retirements are a huge problem for the Democrats. They're not a problem for us,\" Hudson said.\n\nThe exception is Santos, who represented a competitive New York district. Democrats hope former Rep. Tom Suozzi can win back the seat, which he gave up when he ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2022.\n\nRepublican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma said he found it \"a bit of a surprise\" that the number of Democrats leaving office exceeded the Republican exits given all that has transpired this year.\n\n\"Politically, I think we're very well positioned for 2024,\" Cole said. \"I just think the margins are going to remain narrow no matter who wins. The number of competitive seats is so much lower than it was even a decade ago, the polarization is so much greater, that it's hard to move big numbers. Whoever wins the presidency probably wins the House.\"\n\nSometimes, legislators in the states tip the scales in determining the makeup of Congress. It's one reason there are so few competitive races.\n\nThree incumbent House Democrats from North Carolina have essentially been left with little opportunity to return after GOP lawmakers in the state drew new boundaries for their congressional districts. What were once competitive seats became near locks for whichever Republican emerges from the state's primary elections.\n\nDemocratic Rep. Jeff Jackson decided to run for attorney general rather than attempt to run again for a Charlotte-area seat that he had just won in the 2022 midterms. Rep. Wiley Nickel, a fellow freshman who flipped a toss-up district in the last election, also announced he would not be running, and would focus instead on a potential U.S. Senate bid in 2026. And Rep. Kathy Manning said she won't file for reelection under the current maps but would run if a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn the new districts is successful.\n\nManning said the city of Greensboro in her district was split into three pieces and combined with rural counties. She won in 2022 by a margin of 9 percentage points, but she said the new district gives a 16-point advantage to a Republican candidate.\n\nDemocrats are hoping court-ordered redistricting in Alabama and Louisiana will favor their side and effectively make the redistricting battles a wash.\n\nAmbition is also playing a role in the retirement trends. About half of the Democrats not seeking reelection to the House are seeking office elsewhere. That includes three members running for the seat once held by California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who entered the Senate in 1992 and served more than three decades before her death in September. Slotkin is running for the seat Sen. Debbie Stabenow has held for more than two decades. Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota is running for president against fellow Democrat Joe Biden.\n\n\"If you are interested in a higher office, you're going to be sensitive to when those things come up. They don't always come up,\" Reynolds said.\n\nStill, a few lawmakers do attribute their leaving, at least in part, to the dysfunction they've witnessed in Congress.\n\nDemocratic Rep. Brian Higgins of New York doesn't plan to wait for the election to get out. He's retiring sometime in February.\n\n\"We're spending more time doing less. And the American people aren't served,\" he said when announcing his retirement last month.\n\nRepublican Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., described a similar sense of frustration in his retirement announcement. He's been critical of Republican leaders for \"lying to America\" that the 2020 election was stolen and downplaying the Jan. 6 insurrection.\n\n\"Our nation is on a collision course with reality and a steadfast commitment to the truth,\" Buck said."}
{"text": "# What does Watch Night mean for Black Americans today? It dates back to the Emancipation Proclamation\nBy **Associated Press**  \nDecember 30, 2023. 8:49 AM EST\n\n---\n\nThe tradition of Watch Night services in the United States dates back to Dec. 31, 1862, when many Black Americans gathered in churches and other venues, waiting for President Abraham Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation into law, and thus free those still enslaved in the Confederacy.\n\nIt's still being observed each New Year's Eve, at many multiracial and predominantly Black churches across the country.\n\n# What is the historical background of Watch Night services?\nAs the Civil War raged on, Lincoln issued an executive order on Sept. 22, 1862, declaring that enslaved people in the rebellious Confederate states were legally free. However, this decree - the Emancipation Proclamation - would not take effect until the stroke of midnight heralding the new year.\n\nThose gathering on the first Watch Night included many African Americans who were still legally enslaved as they assembled, sometimes in secrecy.\n\n\"At the time, enslaved Black people could find little respite from ever-present surveillance, even in practicing their faith,\" explains the National Museum of African American History and Culture. \"White enslavers feared that religion, which was often used to quell slave resistance, could incite the exact opposite if practiced without observance.\"\n\n## How have Watch Night traditions evolved?\nOver its 160-year history, Watch Night has evolved into an annual New Year's Eve tradition - it not only commemorates freedom from slavery, but also celebrates the importance of faith, community and perseverance.\n\nThis description from the African American museum offers some details:\n\n\"Many congregants across the nation bow in prayer minutes before the midnight hour as they sing out \"Watchman, watchman, please tell me the hour of the night.' In return the minister replies \"It is three minutes to midnight'; 'it is one minute before the new year'; and 'it is now midnight, freedom has come.'\"\n\nThe museum notes that the Watch Night worship services were traditionally followed by a \"fortuitous meal\" on New Year's Day, often featuring a dish called Hoppin' John.\n\n\"Traditionally, Hoppin' John consists of black-eyed peas, rice, red peppers, and salt pork, and it is believed to bring good fortune to those who eat it,\" the museum says. \"Some other common dishes include: candied yams, cornbread, potato salad, and macaroni and cheese.\"\n\n## How are congregations observing Watch Night this year?\nSome of this year's services will be conducted virtually, without in-person attendance. Beulah Baptist Church in Philadelphia and First Congregational Church in Atlanta are among those choosing this option.\n\nAmong the many churches offering in-person services are Abyssinian Baptist Church in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, Reid Temple AME Church in Glenn Dale, Maryland; and Shiloh Baptist Church in Trenton, New Jersey.\n\nIn Salem, North Carolina, the Rev. William Barber II, a prominent anti-poverty and social-justice activist, will be leading an interfaith Watch Night service at Union Baptist Church along with its senior pastor, Sir Walter Mack. The event is billed as a \"service of lament, hope and call to action.\""}
{"text": "# For transgender youth in crisis, hospitals sometimes compound the trauma\nBy **HANNAH SCHOENBAUM**  \nDecember 29, 2023. 12:24 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (AP)** - Four days of waiting under the flickering fluorescent lights of UNC Hospitals' emergency room left Callum Bradford desperate for an answer to one key question.\n\nThe transgender teen from Chapel Hill needed mental health care after overdosing on prescription drugs. He was about to be transferred to another hospital because the UNC system was short on beds.\n\nWith knots in his stomach, he asked, \"Will I be placed in a girls' unit?\"\n\nYes, he would.\n\nThe answer provoked one of the worst anxiety attacks he had ever experienced. Sobbing into the hospital phone, he informed his parents, who fought for days to reverse the decision they warned would cause their already vulnerable son greater harm.\n\nAlthough they initially succeeded in blocking the transfer, the family had few remaining options when a second overdose landed Callum back in UNC's emergency room a few months later. When the 17-year-old learned he was again scheduled to be sent to an inpatient ward inconsistent with his gender identity, he told doctors his urge to hurt himself was becoming uncontrollable, according to hospital records given by the family to The Associated Press.\n\n\"I had an immense amount of regret that I had even come to that hospital, because I knew that I wasn't going to get the treatment that I needed,\" Callum said. \"That moment of crisis and shock and fear, I would wish anything that that hadn't happened, because I truly think that I took a step backwards from where I was before in terms of my mental health.\"\n\nAs the political debate over health care for transgender youth has intensified across the U.S., elected officials and advocates who favor withholding gender-affirming medical procedures for minors have often said parents are not acting in their children's best interest when they seek such treatment.\n\nMajor medical associations say the treatments are safe and warn of grave mental health consequences for children forced to wait until adulthood to access puberty-blocking drugs, hormones and, in rare cases, surgeries.\n\nYouth and young adults ages 10-24 account for about 15% of all suicides, and research shows LGBTQ+ high school students have higher rates of attempted suicide than their peers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.\n\nSome transgender teens say the negative rhetoric popularized by many Republican politicians in recent years has become too much to bear. In North Carolina, legislators enacted new limits to gender-affirming care for trans youth this year while barely discussing flaws in the psychiatric care system. It's one of at least 22 states that have passed laws restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors. Most face legal challenges.\n\nNorth Carolina lacks uniform treatment standards across hospitals and runs low on money and staff with proper training to treat transgender kids in crisis. That means the last-resort measures to support patients like Callum often fail to help them, and sometimes make things worse.\n\nSending a transgender child to a unit that does not align with their gender identity should be out of the question, no matter a hospital's constraints, said Dr. Jack Turban, director of the gender psychiatry program at the University of California, San Francisco, and a researcher of quality care barriers for trans youth in inpatient facilities.\n\n\"If you don't validate the trans identity from day one, their mental health's going to get worse,\" Turban said. \"Potentially, you're sending them out at a higher suicide risk than they came in.\"\n\nWhen North Carolina lawmakers allocated $835 million to shore up mental health infrastructure earlier this year, none of the money was specifically allocated to the treatment needs of trans patients. Though the funding may benefit everyone, a lack of direct action has left trans youth at the mercy of a system ill-equipped to help them when they need it most.\n\nA nationwide dearth of pediatric psychiatric beds was compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw an unprecedented number of people seeking emergency mental health services, according to a report by the American Psychiatric Association. Demand has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels.\n\nA \"dire shortage\" of at least 400 inpatient psychiatric beds for North Carolina youth has left UNC with no choice but to send patients to other facilities, even those that cannot accommodate specific needs, said Dr. Samantha Meltzer-Brody, chair of the UNC Department of Psychiatry.\n\nEmergency rooms are not designed for boarding, nor can they provide comprehensive mental health treatment. That creates an immediate need to place patients left waiting in the ER for days or even weeks before a bed opens up, Meltzer-Brody said.\n\nWhile UNC's own inpatient program assigns all children to individual rooms on co-ed floors, it sends overflow patients to some hospitals that don't make such accommodations.\n\n\"We have no choice but to refer people to the next available bed,\" Meltzer-Brody said of the University of North Carolina-affiliated hospital. \"If you're talking about the LGBTQ+ community and seeking trans care, you may be sent to a place that is not providing care in a way that is going to be most optimal.\"\n\nCallum exploded when he was told about plans to place him in a unit for girls, his records note. He shouted and cried hysterically until he ended up in an isolation room. Doctors later found him banging his head against the wall in a trance-like state.\n\n\"It was almost as if sort of my brain had turned off because of such a shock,\" he recalled. \"I had never acted on such severe self-harm without even realizing that I was doing it.\"\n\nUNC declined to comment on Callum's case, despite the family's willingness to waive its privacy rights. But Meltzer-Brody did broadly address barriers to gender-affirming treatment for all psychiatric patients.\n\nThe public hospital system's policy on gender-designated facilities recommends inpatient assignments based on a patient's \"self-identified gender when feasible.\" But with the ER overrun in recent years, Meltzer-Brody said meeting that goal is a challenge.\n\nThe issue extends beyond transgender youth, affecting patients with autism, addiction and acute psychiatric disorders who are sometimes sent to facilities unfit to provide specialized care.\n\nIt doesn't help, she said, that there is no national standard for how psychiatric hospitals must cater to transgender patients.\n\nThe LGBTQ+ civil rights organization Lambda Legal has outlined best practices for hospitals treating transgender patients under the Affordable Care Act. The organization says denying someone access to a gender-affirming room assignment is identity-based discrimination, based on its interpretation of the law.\n\nBut such cases rarely end up in court, because the burden falls on families to advocate for their rights while supporting a child in crisis, said Casey Pick, law and policy director at The Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on LGBTQ+ suicide prevention.\n\n\"These are circumstances that are themselves often inherently traumatic, and adding a layer of trauma on top of that in the form of discrimination based on an individual's gender identity just compounds the issue,\" Pick said. \"The last thing we should have to do is then add the additional trauma of going to court.\"\n\nParents including Callum's father, Dan Bradford, describe feeling helpless while their children are receiving psychiatric care involuntarily, which isn't uncommon after attempted suicide. Callum's involuntary commitment designation also temporarily stripped his mother and father of many parental rights to make medical decisions for their son.\n\nA psychiatrist himself, Dan Bradford always has supported his son's medical transition, which began with puberty-blocking drugs, followed by a low dose of testosterone that he still takes. Eventually, Callum underwent top surgery to remove his breasts. Irreversible procedures like surgery are rarely performed on minors, and only when doctors determine it's necessary.\n\n\"In Callum's case, the gender dysphoria was so strong that not pursuing gender-affirming medical treatments, like pretty quickly, was going to be life-threatening,\" his father said, wiping tears from his eyes. \"Any risk that might be associated with the treatments seemed trivial, quite frankly, because we were afraid we're going to lose our kid if we didn't.\"\n\nNorth Carolina law bars medical professionals from providing hormones, puberty blockers and gender-transition surgeries to anyone under 18. But some kids like Callum, who began treatment before an August cut-off date, can continue if their doctors deem it medically necessary.\n\nAlthough he retained access to hormones, Callum said it has been brutal seeing the General Assembly block his transgender friends from receiving the treatments he credits as life-saving.\n\n\"When these public policies are discussed or passed, that sends a really strong message to these kids that their government, their society and their community either accepts them and validates them or doesn't,\" said Turban, the researcher at UC San Francisco.\n\nHis research has found that many medical providers still lack training about LGBTQ+ identities and make common mistakes, such as printing the wrong gender designation on a hospital wristband or placing a transgender patient in a single-occupancy room when everyone else has a roommate.\n\nFearing the plan to place his son in a girls' ward would be deeply traumatizing, Dan Bradford secured a spot at a residential treatment center in Georgia. He pleaded with UNC to release Callum early and convinced the North Carolina hospital that was supposed to take him to reject the transfer.\n\nThe teen then spent 17 weeks in an individualized treatment program in Atlanta, recovering from the circumstances that landed him in the ER and the added trauma he endured there. He has since returned home and is taking care of his mental health by playing keyboard and rowing with his co-ed team on the calm waters of Jordan Lake. For the first time in years, Callum said he's thinking about his future.\n\nThere are some positive developments on the horizon for North Carolina youth facing mental health crises.\n\nThe new state funding for mental health services approved in October has enabled UNC Hospitals to open a 54-bed youth behavioral health facility in Butner, 28 miles (45 kilometers) north of Raleigh. State Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kody Kinsley said the facility should alleviate some barriers to individualized care, including for transgender patients. And UNC has announced plans to open a freestanding children's hospital within the next decade.\n\nLeaders of the Butner facility, which began its phased opening this month, have promised to take a whole-family approach so parents are not shut out of their child's treatment plan. Nearly every patient will be placed in an individual room on a co-ed floor.\n\nThe new facility and funding will allow more patients to stay in single-occupancy rooms at UNC, but overflow patients may still be sent elsewhere, Meltzer-Brody said. The hospital system has not changed its policies on transgender patient referrals, and other facilities across the state that receive those patients still lack uniform standards for treating them.\n\nAlthough Callum said his experiences eroded his trust in the state's inpatient care network, he is optimistic that the new resources could give others a more gender-affirming treatment experience, if they are paired with policy changes.\n\n\"I'm still here, and I'm happy to be here,\" he said. \"That's all I want for all my trans friends.\""}
{"text": "# In Romania, hundreds dance in bear skins for festive 'dancing bear festival'\nBy **ANDREEA ALEXANDRU** and **VADIM GHIRDA**  \nDecember 30, 2023. 12:10 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**COMANESTI, Romania (AP)** - Centuries ago, people in what is now northeastern Romania donned bear skins and danced to fend off evil spirits. That custom is today known as the Dancing Bears Festival, drawing crowds of tourists every December.\n\nHundreds of people of all ages, clad in bear costumes, dance every year around Christmas to the deafening beat of drums and roam villages and towns. The highlight of this year's festival falls on Dec. 30, with bear-clad dancers descending on the town of Comanesti, in eastern Romania, for the finale.\n\nVisitors come from as far as Japan to see the spectacle, featuring lines of people in costumes with gaping bear jaws and claws marching and dancing. Giant red pompom decorations are usually added to the furs. Some of the \"bears\" jokingly growl or pretend to attack the spectators.\n\nLocals say the custom dates back to the pre-Christianity era when people believed that wild animals staved off misfortune or danger. Dancing \"bears\" visited people's homes and knocked on their doors to wish them good luck and a Happy New Year.\n\n\"The bear runs through our veins, it is the spirit animal for those in our area,\" said Costel Dascalu, who started taking part in the festival when he was 8. At the time, Romania was still under communist rule and the festival was relatively low-key.\n\n\"I want to keep the tradition alive,\" the 46-year-old added. When the holiday season approaches, he joked, \"our breath smells like bears, and we get goose bumps when we hear the sound of drums.\"\n\nResidents are happy that the tradition has lived on after many Romanians left the region in the 1990s to look for better jobs in Western Europe.\n\nBrown bears are widely present in Romania's traditions and culture, and the animals can often be seen by mountain roads and in forests. Excessive bear hunting prompted the authorities to issue a ban in 2016.\n\nParticipants in the festival say most of the bear skins they use as costumes have been preserved for generations and treated with great care.\n\nWearing a full-sized bear fur isn't easy: Including the head and claws, the costume could weigh up to 50 kilograms (110 pounds). The most expensive bear skins can cost some 2,000 euros ($2,200), according to local media."}
{"text": "# Google settles $5 billion privacy lawsuit over tracking people using 'incognito mode'\nBy **The Associated Press**  \nDecember 29, 2023. 8:11 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SAN FRANCISCO (AP)** - Google has agreed to settle a $5 billion privacy lawsuit alleging that it spied on people who used the \"incognito\" mode in its Chrome browser - along with similar \"private\" modes in other browsers - to track their internet use.\n\nThe class-action lawsuit filed in 2020 said Google misled users into believing that it wouldn't track their internet activities while using incognito mode. It argued that Google's advertising technologies and other techniques continued to catalog details of users' site visits and activities despite their use of supposedly \"private\" browsing.\n\nPlaintiffs also charged that Google's activities yielded an \"unaccountable trove of information\" about users who thought they'd taken steps to protect their privacy.\n\nThe settlement, reached Thursday, must still be approved by a federal judge. Terms weren't disclosed, but the suit originally sought $5 billion on behalf of users; lawyers for the plaintiffs said they expect to present the court with a final settlement agreement by Feb. 24.\n\nGoogle did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the settlement."}
{"text": "# Social media companies made $11 billion in US ad revenue from minors, Harvard study finds\nBy **BARBARA ORTUTAY** and **HALELUYA HADERO**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 3:12 PM EST\n\n---\n\nSocial media companies collectively made over $11 billion in U.S. advertising revenue from minors last year, according to a study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health published on Wednesday.\n\nThe researchers say the findings show a need for government regulation of social media since the companies that stand to make money from children who use their platforms have failed to meaningfully self-regulate. They note such regulations, as well as greater transparency from tech companies, could help alleviate harms to youth mental health and curtail potentially harmful advertising practices that target children and adolescents.\n\nTo come up with the revenue figure, the researchers estimated the number of users under 18 on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube in 2022 based on population data from the U.S. Census and survey data from Common Sense Media and Pew Research. They then used data from research firm eMarketer, now called Insider Intelligence, and Qustodio, a parental control app, to estimate each platform's U.S. ad revenue in 2022 and the time children spent per day on each platform. After that, the researchers said they built a simulation model using the data to estimate how much ad revenue the platforms earned from minors in the U.S.\n\nResearchers and lawmakers have long focused on the negative effects stemming from social media platforms, whose personally-tailored algorithms can drive children towards excessive use. This year, lawmakers in states like New York and Utah introduced or passed legislation that would curb social media use among kids, citing harms to youth mental health and other concerns.\n\nMeta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, is also being sued by dozens of states for allegedly contributing to the mental health crisis.\n\n\"Although social media platforms may claim that they can self-regulate their practices to reduce the harms to young people, they have yet to do so, and our study suggests they have overwhelming financial incentives to continue to delay taking meaningful steps to protect children,\" said Bryn Austin, a professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Harvard and a senior author on the study.\n\nThe platforms themselves don't make public how much money they earn from minors.\n\nSocial media platforms are not the first to advertise to children, and parents and experts have long expressed concerns about marketing to kids online, on television and even in schools. But online ads can be especially insidious because they can be targeted to children and because the line between ads and the content kids seek out is often blurry.\n\nIn a 2020 policy paper, the American Academy of Pediatrics said children are \"uniquely vulnerable to the persuasive effects of advertising because of immature critical thinking skills and impulse inhibition.\"\n\n\"School-aged children and teenagers may be able to recognize advertising but often are not able to resist it when it is embedded within trusted social networks, encouraged by celebrity influencers, or delivered next to personalized content,\" the paper noted.\n\nAs concerns about social media and children's mental health grow, the Federal Trade Commission earlier this month proposed sweeping changes to a decades-old law that regulates how online companies can track and advertise to children. The proposed changes include turning off targeted ads to kids under 13 by default and limiting push notifications.\n\nAccording to the Harvard study, YouTube derived the greatest ad revenue from users 12 and under ($959.1 million), followed by Instagram ($801.1 million) and Facebook ($137.2 million).\n\nInstagram, meanwhile, derived the greatest ad revenue from users aged 13-17 ($4 billion), followed by TikTok ($2 billion) and YouTube ($1.2 billion).\n\nThe researchers also estimate that Snapchat derived the greatest share of its overall 2022 ad revenue from users under 18 (41%), followed by TikTok (35%), YouTube (27%), and Instagram (16%)."}
{"text": "# A British warship arrives in Guyana as tensions heat up in border dispute with Venezuela\nBy **MANUEL RUEDA**  \nDecember 30, 2023. 10:52 AM EST\n\n---\n\nBOGOTA, Colombia (AP) - A British warship arrived in Guyana on Friday afternoon amid rising tensions from a border dispute between the former British colony and Venezuela.\n\nThe HMS Trent's visit led Venezuela to begin military exercises a day earlier in the eastern Caribbean near its border with Guyana as the Venezuelan government presses its claim to a huge swath of its smaller neighbor.\n\nBrazil's Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed concern Friday about the situation and urged the two South American countries to return to dialogue. It said other nations should avoid \"military activities\" that support either side.\n\nBrazil's statement called on Guyana and Venezuela to stay true to the Argyle Declaration, an agreement signed earlier this month in which their leaders said they would solve the border dispute through nonviolent means.\n\nThe dispute is over Essequibo, a sparsely populated region that is the size of Florida and rich in oil and minerals. Venezuela has long claimed it was cheated out of the territory when Europeans and the U.S. set the border.\n\nThe U.K. Defense Ministry has said that the ship is visiting Guyana as part of a series of engagements in the region and that the vessel will conduct training exercises with Guyana's military.\n\nOn its account on X, formerly Twitter, the ship posted photos of sailors welcoming Britain's ambassador to Guyana and the chief of staff of Guyana's Defense Force, Brig. Gen. Omar Khan. They were hosted at a formal lunch and provided with a tour of the ship's capabilities.\n\nIn an interview with The Associated Press, Khan said such operations \"remain an important part of the regional security spectrum of activities. It has been so in the past and will continue in the future.\"\n\nOfficials have been tight-lipped on the nature of the exercises.\n\nThe warship is generally used to intercept pirates and drug smugglers, and it recently conducted joint exercises with the navies of several West African nations. It is equipped with cannons and a landing pad for helicopters and drones and can carry around 50 marines.\n\nIn a statement late Thursday, Guyanese President Irfaan Ali said Venezuela \"had nothing to fear\" from the ship's activities in Guyanese waters.\n\n\"Guyana has long been engaged in partnerships with regional and international states aimed at enhancing internal security,\" Ali said. \"These partnerships pose a threat to no one and are in no way intended to be aggressive.\"\n\nBut Venezuela on Thursday began military exercises involving 5,000 troops in the eastern Caribbean, citing the visit by the British patrol ship.\n\nIn a nationally televised speech, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro accused Guyana of betraying the spirit of the Argyle Declaration.\n\n\"We will not let anyone push us around,\" Maduro said, surrounded by military commanders. He described Britain's decision to send a warship as a threat from a \"decaying former empire.\"\n\nGuyana has controlled Essequibo for decades, but Venezuela revived its historical claim to the region earlier this month through a referendum in which voters were asked whether the territory should be turned into a Venezuelan state.\n\nCritics of Maduro say the socialist leader has reignited the border dispute to draw attention from the nation's internal problems as Venezuela prepares for a presidential election next year. Maduro intends to run for a third term.\n\nVenezuela says it was the victim of a land theft conspiracy in 1899, when Guyana was a British colony and arbitrators from Britain, Russia and the United States decided the boundary.\n\nVenezuelan officials also argue that an agreement among Venezuela, Britain and the then colony of British Guiana signed in 1966 to resolve the dispute effectively nullified the original arbitration.\n\nGuyana maintains the initial accord is legal and binding and asked the United Nations' top court in 2018 to rule it as such, but a decision is years away."}
{"text": "# Hit-Boy enters Grammys with producer nod while helping father navigate music industry after prison\nBy **JONATHAN LANDRUM Jr.**  \nDecember 28, 2023. 8:38 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LOS ANGELES (AP)** - When Hit-Boy walks the Grammy red carpet, he expects to proudly strut into the Feb. 4 awards ceremony with his father beside him for the first time.\n\nFor three decades, Hit-Boy's dad was in-and-out of prison, with his recent stint lasting nine years until his release several months ago. With his father's newfound freedom, the super producer - who has worked with music heavyweights from Jay-Z, Nas and Kanye West - is focused on strengthening their father-son bond while navigating the music industry together.\n\nHit-Boy has the Grammys and a producer of the year, non-classical nomination in his sights. He's had three songs involving Brent Faiyaz, Blxst and The Alchemist. He also produced three Nas albums, including \"King's Disease III,\" which is up for best rap album; one with Musiq Soulchild; and his two \"Surf or Down\" albums, which featured the producer as a rapper and his father on several tracks under the stage name Big Hit.\n\nWhen Hit-Boy first heard about being a nominee again, he felt an instant \"wave of emotions.\" He was one of the most productive producers this past year compared to others in his category - which includes Jack Antonoff, Metro Boomin, Dernst \"D'Mile\" Emile II and Daniel Nigro.\n\n\"I literally broke down in tears,\" said Hit-Boy, a three-time Grammy winner through Jay-Z and Kanye West's \"... In Paris,\" Nipsey Hussle's \"Racks in the Middle\" and Nas' album \"King Disease.\" He's worked with top performers including Beyoncé, Mary J. Blige, Drake, Mariah Carey, Ariana Grande and Jennifer Lopez.\n\nBut for Hit-Boy, this past year was different.\n\n\"When I really look back and had that moment to reflect, I was like 'Wow, I didn't have the biggest artists in the world that's going to stream,\" he said. \"They are going to make it work. I was working with artists that don't have million-dollar budgets behind them.\"\n\nThroughout the year, Hit-Boy said he worked mostly with Nas and his father, Big Hit, who recorded his lyrics for the intro on \"Surf or Down Vol. 1\" while incarcerated. After his father's release, Hit-Boy took him directly to the studio - where they both laid down tracks.\n\nThis month, Big Hit, 52, released his debut album \"The Truth is in My Eyes,\" which features Snoop Dogg, Benny The Butcher, Musiq Soulchild, Dom Kennedy, The Alchemist and Mozzy. He said it was tough being away from his son and watching his success from afar.\n\n\"It was torture just knowing the kind of impact I could've had and what I missed in his life,\" said the rapper, who was arrested during a traffic stop in Illinois in 2014. Turns out, he had an outstanding warrant, which stemmed from a hit-and-run accident in Los Angeles that left several people injured.\n\nAt the time, Hit-Boy said his father was gaining positive momentum and made good impressions with the likes of Jay-Z and 50 Cent before his arrest, which the producer called devastating.\n\n\"I thought about how I could have shaped and molded him,\" Big Hit said. \"Being a wonderful addition. Instead of bringing him down, I could have tightened him up. But I still did my best in the situation where I was at. But we're pushing full speed ahead. We're bridging that gap.\"\n\nSince Big Hit's release, Hit-Boy has been laser-focused on keeping his father busy and spending time with him almost daily while creating an independent lane for their careers. The producer said he's funded \"every single thing since he touched down.\"\n\n\"It's bigger than just doing the music,\" Hit-Boy said. \"I'm creating that network, helping them to have a workflow. I'm spending money on these marketing plans. I'm coming with all the best ideas I can. Every day is an adventure. My whole life, he's got out and went back in. Stressed out that he might do something to jeopardize it again. It's part of that brainwork where you just got to hold it down and financially. I wanted to build, put together pieces that would bring people completely into his world.\"\n\nHit-Boy said several labels have offered Big Hit deals, but they turned them down. The producer said they'll be better off on their own for now.\n\n\"They wanted to put some cool money in his pocket,\" Hit-Boy said. \"But I've been in the game since I was 19. He got locked up at 19 until he was in his 30s. Now, I'm in my 30s and I'm locked up in the industry, because I'm still to this day in a bad publishing deal with Universal Music Publishing Group. I would feel so crazy to let my dad get caught up with these same systems, the same ways and ideologies that I've been fed since I was a kid. I just can't go for it.\"\n\nHit-Boy, 36, and his team decided against releasing Big Hit's new album on digital stream platforms. He wants people to buy directly from them, which according to his team has so far worked out.\n\n\"We got physical CDs. We're not going to do any DSPs, no streaming,\" the producer said. \"I've been seeing a lot of people complain about that. Snoop just went on a platform and talked about how he got a billion streams, but only earned about $40,000 or $45,000. I feel like if we sell 10,000 CDs, we're going to blow that out the water. We're going to start small. We don't need to have a billion streams, because that might only equate to 10,000. We're going to let people buy the music directly from us.\"\n\nHit-Boy said he and his father are making music, doing business together like he always wanted. If he could win a Grammy with his dad, mother and young son in attendance, it would mean the world to him.\n\n\"Every time I won a Grammy, he was locked up,\" he said. \"That would be dope to win. I'm going to speak it into existence.\""}
{"text": "# Was 2023 a tipping point for movies? 'Barbie' success and Marvel struggles may signal a shift\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 10:00 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Eight years ago, Steven Spielberg predicted that the superhero movie would one day go \"the way of the Western.\"\n\nSpielberg's comments caused a widespread stir at the time. \"Avengers: The Age of Ultron\" was then one of the year's biggest movies. The following year would bring \"Captain America: Civil War,\" \"Deadpool\" and \"Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.\" The superhero movie was in high gear, and showing no signs of slowing down.\n\nBut Spielberg's point was that nothing is forever in the movie business. These cycles, Spielberg said, \"have a finite time in popular culture.\" And the maker of \"E.T.,\" \"Jurassic Park\" and \"Jaws\" might know a thing or two about the ebbs and flows of pop-culture taste.\n\nAs 2023 draws to a close, no one is sounding the death knell of the superhero movie. The Walt Disney Co.'s \"Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3\" made $845.6 million worldwide and Sony's \"Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse\" ($691 million) was one of the most acclaimed films of the year. Marvel is still mightier than any other brand in the business.\n\nBut more than ever before, there are chinks in the armor of the superhero movie. Its dominance in popular culture is no longer quite so assured. A cycle may be turning, and a new one dawning.\n\nFor the first time in more than two decades, the top three movies at the box office didn't include one sequel or remake: \"Barbie,\" \"The Super Mario Bros. Movie\" and \"Oppenheimer.\" The last time that happened was 2001, when \"Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone,\" \"Shrek\" and \"Monsters, Inc.\" topped the box office.\n\nNo, it's not exactly a lineup of originality like, say, 1973, when \"The Exorcist, \"The Sting\" and \"American Graffiti\" led all movies in ticket sales. \"Barbie\" and \"The Super Mario Bros.,\" based on some of the most familiar brands in the world, will generate spinoffs and sequels of their own.\n\nBut it's hard not to sense a shift in moviegoing, one that might have reverberations for years to come for Hollywood.\n\n\"There's an inflection point in 2023,\" says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for data firm Comscore. \" Barbenheimer is just one part of that story. Audiences, they want to be challenged. I think the tried and true is not necessarily working.\"\n\nGreta Gerwig's \"Barbie,\" from Warner Bros., was the year's runaway hit, with more than $1.4 billion in ticket sales worldwide. It was a blockbuster like none seen before: an anarchic comedy that set a string of records for a movie directed by a woman.\n\nNearly as unprecedented was the success of Christopher Nolan's \"Oppenheimer,\" a three-hour drama that nearly grossed $1 billion. As different as it and \"Barbie\" were, they were each original feats of cinema and personal statements by its directors.\n\nAt the same time, the Walt Disney Co.'s Marvel, a hit-making machine like none other in movie history, faltered like never before. \"The Marvels\" marked a new low for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, collecting $200 million globally. DC Studios, in the midst of a revamp, saw disappointing results for \"The Flash\" and \"Blue Beetle\" before watching \"Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom\" sink to a $28.1 million debut.\n\nBoth Marvel and DC have already made moves to right their ships. Bob Iger, Disney's chief executive, has called turning around Marvel his top priority. He said the superhero studio has suffered greatly from too many films and series leading to \"diluted quality.\" The James Gunn, Peter Safran-led DC, meanwhile, won't officially launch until 2025 with \"Superman Legacy.\"\n\nIn the meantime, something else will have to fill the void. That was a theme in 2023, too, when the writers and actors strikes marred release plans and forced the delay of several films including Warner's \"Dune: Part Two,\" Sony's next \"Ghostbusters\" movie and MGM's \"Challengers.\"\n\nThose disruptions will continue in 2024. Analysts aren't expecting a banner year for Hollywood in part because films like the next \"Mission: Impossible\" film and the \"Spider-Verse\" sequel, both delayed by the strikes, won't make their original dates.\n\nOverall ticket sales in U.S. and Canadian theaters for 2023 are expected to reach about $9 billion, according to Comscore, an improvement of about 20% from 2022. The industry is still trying to regain its pre-pandemic footing, when ticket sales regularly surpassed $11 billion. Output of wide-releases in 2023 (88) still trailed those in 2019 (108) by 18.5%.\n\nHollywood is still coaxing moviegoers back to theaters - something \"Barbie,\" \"Oppenheimer\" and \"Mario\" went a long way to helping.\n\n\"It reinforced something that we've known for 100 years in the business: People like going to the shared experience out of the home,\" says Jeffrey Goldstein, distribution chief for Warner Bros. \"They love being entertained. Movies are a good financial proposition and can bring in a mass audience.\"\n\n\"It probably started with 'Mario' last April,\" adds Goldstein. \"I think that showed audiences again that theaters are a fun place to be to. And it showed studios and content creators: Up your game.\"\n\nIf 2023 is any guide, hits will come from increasingly unpredictable places.\n\nThat was the case with \"Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,\" a film released just two months after Swift's recorded concerts in a first-of-its-kind distribution deal with AMC Theatres. It grossed $250 million worldwide, and was followed by the similarly released \"Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,\" another No. 1 debut.\n\nMore surprising was \"Sound of Freedom,\" a $15 million film from the independent Angel Studios, which matched Swift with $250 million worldwide. It was released with a unique \"pay it forward\" program that allowed people to donate tickets.\n\nGoing into 2023, no one was betting \"Sound of Freedom\" would outgross \"The Marvels\" or that \"Five Nights at Freddy's\" would have a bigger opening weekend than \"Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.\"\n\n\"There are going to be examples of big-budget, traditional blockbusters that do well,\" says Dergarabedian. \"But for every one of those, there have been two that failed. An audience that's finding a lot of interesting material on streaming is becoming more open to films like 'Godzilla Minus One,' Indian cinema, Japanese anime. There's a shift in audience taste and studios need to get a handle on this.\"\n\nThat poses as much of a challenge as an opportunity to studios. If more-of-the-same no longer has quite the same appeal for moviegoers, an industry that for years has depended on sequels, prequels, reboots and remakes to make up the bulk of its profits may require new creativity.\n\nThe Western didn't vanish all at once. After two decades of ubiquity, it began going out of style in the 1960s. And the Western, of course, continues to be rich territory for filmmakers. This year, 81-year-old Martin Scorsese made his first Western in \"Killers of the Flower Moon,\" the three-hour-plus $200 million epic from Apple Studios.\n\nThe superhero movie, likewise, won't ever die. But its heyday might have reached its endgame."}
{"text": "# US military space plane blasts off on another secretive mission expected to last years\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nDecember 28, 2023. 10:49 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThe U.S. military's X-37B space plane blasted off Thursday on another secretive mission that's expected to last at least a couple of years.\n\nLike previous missions, the reusable plane resembling a mini space shuttle carried classified experiments. There's no one on board.\n\nThe space plane took off aboard SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center at night, more than two weeks late because of technical issues.\n\nIt marked the seventh flight of an X-37B, which has logged more than 10 years in orbit since its debut in 2010.\n\nThe last flight, the longest one yet, lasted 2 1/2 years before ending on a runway at Kennedy a year ago.\n\nSpace Force officials would not say how long this orbital test vehicle would remain aloft or what's on board other than a NASA experiment to gauge the effects of radiation on materials.\n\nBuilt by Boeing, the X-37B resembles NASA's retired space shuttles. But they're just one-fourth the size at 29 feet (9 meters) long. No astronauts are needed; the X-37B has an autonomous landing system.\n\nThey take off vertically like rockets but land horizontally like planes, and are designed to orbit between 150 miles and 500 miles (240 kilometers and 800 kilometers) high. There are two X-37Bs based in a former shuttle hangar at Kennedy."}
{"text": "# South Africa launches case at top UN court accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza\nBy **MIKE CORDER**  \nDecember 29, 2023. 5:07 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP)** - South Africa launched a case Friday at the United Nations' top court accusing Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and asking the court to order Israel to halt its attacks - the first such challenge made at the court over the current war. Israel swiftly rejected the filing \"with disgust.\"\n\nSouth Africa's submission to the International Court of Justice alleges that \"acts and omissions by Israel ... are genocidal in character\" as they are committed with the intent \"to destroy Palestinians in Gaza\" as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnic group.\n\nSouth Africa has been a fierce critic of Israel's military campaign in Gaza. Many there, including President Cyril Ramaphosa, have compared Israel's policies regarding Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank with South Africa's past apartheid regime of racial segregation. Israel rejects such allegations.\n\nSouth Africa asked The Hague-based court to issue an interim order for Israel to immediately suspend its military operations in Gaza. A hearing into that request is likely in the coming days or weeks. The case, if it goes ahead, will take years, but an interim order could be issued within weeks.\n\nThe Israeli government rejected \"with disgust\" the genocide accusations, calling it a \"blood libel.\" A Foreign Ministry statement said South Africa's case lacks a legal foundation and constitutes a \"despicable and contemptuous exploitation\" of the court.\n\nIsrael also accused South Africa of cooperating with Hamas, the Palestinian militant group behind the deadly Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel that triggered the ongoing war.\n\nThe statement also said Israel operates according to international law and focuses its military actions solely against Hamas, adding that the residents of Gaza are not an enemy. It asserted that it takes steps to minimize harm to civilians and to allow humanitarian aid to enter the territory.\n\nSouth Africa can bring the case under the Genocide Convention because both it and Israel are signatories to it.\n\nWhether the case will succeed in halting the war remains to be seen. While the court's orders are legally binding, they are not always followed. In March 2022, the court ordered Russia to halt hostilities in Ukraine, a binding legal ruling that Moscow flouted as it pressed ahead with its attacks.\n\nSouth Africa's foreign ministry said in a statement that the country is \"gravely concerned with the plight of civilians caught in the present Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip due to the indiscriminate use of force and forcible removal of inhabitants.\"\n\nThe ministry added that there are \"ongoing reports of international crimes, such as crimes against humanity and war crimes, being committed as well as reports that acts meeting the threshold of genocide or related crimes as defined in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, have been and may still be committed in the context of the ongoing massacres in Gaza.\"\n\nSouth Africa's president earlier accused Israel of war crimes and acts \"tantamount to genocide.\" And South Africa last month pushed for the International Criminal Court, which also is based in The Hague, to investigate Israel's actions in Gaza.\n\nThe ICC prosecutes individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, while the International Court of Justice settles disputes between nations.\n\nIn the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Foreign Ministry welcomed South Africa's accusations against Israel. In a statement on social media, it urged the court to \"immediately take action to protect Palestinian people and call on Israel, the occupying power, to halt its onslaught against the Palestinian people.\"\n\nBalkees Jarrah, associate international justice director at Human Rights Watch, said South Africa's case \"provides an important opportunity for the International Court of Justice to scrutinize Israel's actions in Gaza using the Genocide Convention of 1948.\" She said South Africa is looking to the United Nations' highest judicial body \"to provide clear, definitive answers on the question of whether Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.\"\n\nJarrah stressed that the ICJ case \"is not a criminal case against individual alleged perpetrators, and it does not involve the International Criminal Court (ICC), a separate body. But the ICJ case should also propel greater international support for impartial justice at the ICC and other credible venues.\""}
{"text": "# An American-Canadian-Israeli woman previously believed to be held hostage in Gaza is declared dead\nBy **MELANIE LIDMAN**  \nDecember 29, 2023. 3:24 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**TEL AVIV, Israel (AP)** - An Israeli kibbutz hard-hit by Hamas' assault on southern Israel announced on Thursday the death of Judih Weinstein - an American-Canadian-Israeli woman who had previously been thought to be held hostage in Gaza.\n\nThe news came six days after Weinstein's husband, Gad Haggai, was also declared dead.\n\nWeinstein, 70, and Haggai, 73, were taking an early morning walk near their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz on the morning of Oct. 7 when Hamas militants burst across the border into Israel, killing about 1,200 people and kidnapping 240 others.\n\nIn the early hours of the morning, Weinstein was able to call emergency services and let them know that both she and her husband had been shot and send a message to her family.\n\nWeinstein and her husband had been thought to be among the hostages still held in captivity in Gaza. But six days ago, the kibbutz announced that Haggai was killed Oct. 7 and his body was taken to Gaza.\n\nOn Thursday, the kibbutz said it had learned that Weinstein was also killed on Oct. 7 and her body is also in Gaza.\n\nIt was not immediately clear how Israeli authorities determined their deaths.\n\nThe couple are survived by two sons and two daughters and seven grandchildren, the kibbutz said.\n\nU.S. President Joe Biden said he was \"devastated\" to learn of Weinstein's death, especially after hearing about the couple during a meeting with their daughter.\n\nThe families \"have been living through hell for weeks. No family should have to endure such an ordeal,\" he said in a statement.\n\nWeinstein was born in New York and was an active member of Kibbutz Nir Oz, a small community near the Gaza border where she taught English to children with special needs. The kibbutz said she also taught meditation techniques to children and teenagers who suffered from anxiety as a result of rocket fire from Gaza. Haggai was a retired chef and jazz musician.\n\n\"Judy dedicated her life to serving others, spending years teaching English and using her passions for poetry, puppeteering, and mindfulness to empower children of all backgrounds,\" her family said in a statement.\n\nIn a YouTube video made during a brief round of fighting between Israel and the Islamic Jihad militant group last May, Weinstein read a series of poems and expressed hope for better days ahead.\n\n\"I truly hope that the next time I'm recording some Haiku it won't be under duress, under rocket fire, under conditions where people are at war,\" she said. \"May we all be granted the right to our basic rights of home, food, shelter and peaceful days. Here's hoping.\"\n\nAl Haggai, one of the couple's sons, told Israel's Channel 13 that the family had originally hoped their mother's multiple citizenships would allow her to be released during the week-long cease-fire in late November, when 105 hostages were let go. Almost all were women and children.\n\nHe said that when his mother's name was not on any of the daily lists, he started to suspect that something happened to her.\n\nAccording to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office, at least 23 of the approximately 129 hostages believed to be held in Gaza have either died or been killed in captivity.\n\nNir Oz was one of the hardest-hit Israeli communities on Oct. 7, with roughly one quarter of its residents killed or kidnapped.\n\nThe families of missing hostages have drawn widespread support and sympathy in Israel as they press the government to reach a new cease-fire deal to bring home their loved ones.\n\nNetanyahu met Thursday in Tel Aviv with some of the families, where he told them there were behind-the-scenes efforts to bring the hostages home, according to a statement from his office.\n\n\"I can't elaborate on the details, we are working to return everyone,\" he said.\n\nWeinstein's friend Adele Raemer, a fellow English teacher from nearby Kibbutz Nirim, remembered her friend as an empathetic and funny person, who found creative ways of connecting with children with special needs, including through puppetry.\n\nWeinstein had just finished an intensive year-long course with Tel Aviv University's Educational Technology Center, to develop an app called ClassRelax to help teachers bring aspects of meditation and mindfulness into the classroom, Raemer said.\n\nShe added that Weinstein and Haggai regularly walked together in the fields around the kibbutz.\n\n\"They walked every morning, that was what was going to keep them healthy. Unfortunately that was what got them killed in the end,\" she said."}
{"text": "# As Gaza war grinds on, tensions soar along Israel's volatile northern border with Lebanon\nBy **TIA GOLDENBERG** and **ABBY SEWELL**  \nDecember 28, 2023. 2:00 PM EST\n\n---\n\nTEL AVIV, Israel (AP) - Israeli officials are stepping up threats against the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, warning that Israel is running out of patience as the two sides continue to trade fire along Israel's volatile northern border.\n\nBenny Gantz, a member of Israel's War Cabinet, said Wednesday that if the international community and the Lebanese government don't restrain Hezbollah, Israel will. Israel's army chief, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, said the military is in a state of high readiness and has approved plans in case it decides to open a second front in the north.\n\nThe fighting along Israel's northern border broke out when Hezbollah began firing rockets shortly after the Oct. 7 cross-border attack by Hamas triggered the war in Gaza.\n\nWhile at a lower intensity than the battle in Gaza, the simultaneous fighting has caused destruction, displacement and death on both sides and raised fears of a wider regional war.\n\nHere is a look at the battle between Israel and Hezbollah:\n\n## WHAT DOES THE FIGHTING INVOLVE?\nHezbollah fighters have been attacking Israeli posts and villages along the border, and the group has launched rockets and drones toward Israeli targets. Israeli tanks, artillery and aircraft have been striking areas on the Lebanese side of the border. The fighting has been mostly brief, but almost daily.\n\nThe Israeli military says more than 1,700 rockets have been fired from Lebanon toward Israel, killing 15 Israelis, including nine soldiers, and injuring more than 150 people.\n\nIsrael has evacuated about 60,000 people from more than 40 northern communities, including the main city of Kiryat Shemona, which has 22,000 residents. Israeli media outlets have aired footage of battered homes and barren communities, with Israeli soldiers guarding empty streets.\n\nOn the Lebanese side, around 74,500 people have been displaced by the fighting, according to the International Organization for Migration.\n\nNearly 160 people have been killed by Israeli airstrikes and shelling in Lebanon, according to an Associated Press tally. Most of those were fighters with Hezbollah and allied groups, but at least 19 civilians have also been killed, including journalists and children.\n\nHuman rights groups and local officials have also accused Israel of hitting Lebanese border areas with shells containing white phosphorus, a controversial incendiary munition. The strikes have burned hundreds of hectares (acres) of farm and woodland and injured civilians. Israel says all its actions conform with international law.\n\n## WHY ARE THEY FIGHTING?\nIsrael and Iran-backed Hezbollah are longtime bitter enemies, dating back to Israel's occupation of parts of south Lebanon from 1982 to 2000.\n\nAfter Hezbollah fighters ambushed an Israeli patrol in 2006 and took two Israeli soldiers hostage, the sides fought a vicious monthlong war that ended in a draw - but not before Israeli bombardment wreaked widespread destruction in southern Lebanon and parts of Beirut.\n\nThe border area had largely been quiet since that war, aside from sparse skirmishes and sporadic tensions. Israel estimates that Hezbollah has some 150,000 rockets and missiles in its arsenal, many of which can strike virtually anywhere in Israel, including the economic capital, Tel Aviv.\n\nHezbollah says its attacks aim to ease pressure on the Gaza Strip, where Israel is fighting an unprecedented ground, air and sea offensive meant to topple Hamas and return some 129 people held captive in the territory.\n\n## THE IRAN CONNECTION\nAlthough there has been no proof that Iran, Israel's archenemy, ordered the Oct. 7 attack, its fingerprints have been visible throughout the ensuing conflict.\n\nIn addition to Iran's support for Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran-backed groups in Yemen, Syria and Iraq have launched attacks on Israel and its allies in support of Hamas.\n\nIn the Red Sea, attacks by Houthi rebels in Yemen against ships they believe to be connected to Israel have disrupted trade and prompted the launch of a U.S.-led multinational naval operation to protect shipping routes.\n\nIran-backed militias in Iraq have also launched dozens of attacks on bases housing U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria, which they have said are in retaliation for Washington's support of Israel.\n\nAnd on Monday, Iranian state media blamed Israel for a strike on a Damascus neighborhood that killed a high-ranking Iranian general.\n\nAmos Harel, a military commentator for the daily Haaretz newspaper, wrote Wednesday that the general's killing was a message to Iran that it can no longer enjoy immunity while its proxies attack Israel.\n\n\"It also brings us closer to the possibility of a growing escalation against Hezbollah, and even against the Iranians, on the northern front,\" he wrote.\n\n## WHAT IS HEZBOLLAH'S ROLE?\nHezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, faces a risky balancing act.\n\nJoining Hamas would risk dragging Lebanon - beset by economic calamity and internal political tensions - into a conflict it can ill afford, fueling domestic opposition to the group. The World Bank has already said the clashes are likely to harm Lebanon's economy.\n\nLebanon is in the fourth year of a crippling economic crisis and is bitterly divided between Hezbollah and its allies and opponents, paralyzing the political system.\n\nBut staying entirely on the sidelines as Israeli troops battle in the Gaza Strip could compromise Hezbollah's credibility, and a Hamas defeat would be a blow to Iran.\n\nHezbollah has been careful to limit its attacks on Israel, while keeping open the threat of a broader escalation.\n\n\"If Israel goes too far, we will retaliate twice as much,\" Hezbollah's deputy leader, Sheikh Naim Kassem, said Thursday. \"We will not fear either Israeli or American threats or intimidation.\"\n\n## A NEW FRONT FOR ISRAEL?\nWith its soldiers bogged down in Gaza, Israel has mostly sought to limit the fighting in its north. Hezbollah's military capabilities are far superior to those of Hamas.\n\nStill, Israeli officials are increasingly warning that the country is prepared to expand the fighting and that Hezbollah should be prepared to pay a price for the damage it has wrought over the past three months.\n\nIsrael already has bolstered forces in the north and could well turn its sights on Hezbollah once it scales down or wraps up the war in Gaza.\n\nIsrael's top ally, the U.S, which has sent military reinforcements to the region, says it prefers to see a negotiated solution to the mounting tensions rather than a second war front.\n\nIsrael also wants Hezbollah to abide by a 2006 U.N. cease-fire agreement that states the border area in southern Lebanon must be \"free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons\" other than Lebanese government forces and U.N. peacekeepers. Under the resolution, Hezbollah should not have military presence in the border region.\n\nLebanon, meanwhile, argues that Israel violates the resolution with its air force's frequent entry into Lebanese airspace and by its presence in Chebaa Farms, a disputed area along the country's border with the Golan Heights, an area seized by Israel from Syria in 1967.\n\nIsraeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said Wednesday that Hezbollah must respect the 2006 cease-fire. Otherwise, he warned, Nasrallah \"must understand that he's next.\""}
{"text": "# In a crisis-ridden world, Germany's chancellor uses his New Year's speech to convey confidence\nBy **KIRSTEN GRIESHABER**  \nDecember 30, 2023. 6:00 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BERLIN (AP)** - Germany's chancellor used his New Year's speech to call on his country's citizens not to lose confidence in the future as they adapt to a world experiencing multiple crises and changing at an ever-faster pace.\n\n\"So much suffering; so much bloodshed. Our world has become a more unsettled and harsher place. It's changing at an almost breathtaking speed,\" Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in the prerecorded speech to be broadcast Sunday.\n\nScholz was referring to Russia's war on Ukraine, a resulting rise in energy prices, the suffering during the coronavirus pandemic, and the attack by Hamas that triggered Israel's military offensive in Gaza.\n\n\"The result is that we, too, are having to change,\" he said. \"This is a worrying thing for many of us. In some, it is also causing discontent. I do take that to heart. But I also know this: We in Germany will get through it.\"\n\nThe chancellor pointed out how despite widespread worry a year ago, Germans did not end up without heat last winter after Russia cut off most of its natural gas supplies to Europe.\n\n\"Things have turned out differently. Inflation has gone down. Wages and pensions are going up. Our gas storage facilities are filled to the brim for the winter,\" he said, expressing confidence in the policies of his multi-party coalition government.\n\nThe German government led by Scholz has become known for infighting during two years in power and has seen its poll ratings slump. Germany's economy also is underperforming, but the chancellor nonetheless tried to paint a positive picture of the year ahead.\n\nMany families will have to pay less in taxes, and the government plans to put oney into the country's ailing transportation infrastructure and clean energy, he said.\n\n\"'Who will manage, if not you in Germany?' - that's something I hear from many people around us in Europe and the rest of the world,\" Scholz said. \"And there's something in that. More women and men have jobs in Germany today than at any time in the past.\"\n\nScholz also stressed the importance of the European Union, especially in times of crisis.\n\n\"Our strength resides in the European Union. When the EU presents a united front, it speaks for more than 400 million people. In a world of 8 billion, soon to be 10 billion people, that's a real asset,\" he said.\n\nHowever, the chancellor made clear that Germany needs the work of all its people to take the country forward.\n\n\"My fellow citizens, our strength also resides in the realization that each and every one of us is needed in our country - the top researcher just like the carer, the police officer just like the delivery driver, the pensioner just like the young trainee,\" he said.\n\n\"If we get that into our heads, if we deal with one another in that spirit of respect, then we need have no fear about the future,\" Scholz said. \"Then the year 2024 will be a good year for our country, even if some things do turn out differently from the way we imagine them today, on the eve of that new year.\""}
{"text": "# Israeli-French hostage recounts harrowing experience in captivity\nDecember 30, 2023. 1:46 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**JERUSALEM (AP)** - An Israeli woman who recently returned from captivity in the Gaza Strip says she was groped by her Palestinian kidnapper and lived in constant fear throughout the weeks she was held hostage.\n\nMia Schem, a 21-year-old dual citizen of Israel and France, was attending a music festival in southern Israel when Hamas militants burst across the border and raided the event site on Oct. 7. More than 300 people were killed and dozens taken hostage.\n\nShe was released on Nov. 30 during a weeklong cease-fire.\n\nIn an interview broadcast Friday on Israel's Channel 13 TV, Schem said she was captured after she got out her friend's burning car. She said her captor began touching her upper body inappropriately and only stopped after she screamed and he noticed that she had been shot in the arm and badly wounded.\n\n\"I started screaming, going crazy,\" she said. \"There were burnt vehicles, bodies.\"\n\nWhile in captivity, she was held in a house with a family and watched around the clock by the father, Schem said. She said his constant staring made her uncomfortable and fearful that he might try to harm her. The man's wife did not like her and sometimes denied her food for days at a time, she said.\n\nIsraeli authorities have said that sexual violence was part of the Hamas rampage into southern Israel, and they accused the international community of playing down or ignoring the pain of the victims.\n\nThe Associated Press generally does not identify victims of sexual violence, but Schem spoke out publicly about her experience.\n\nSchem made international headlines when Hamas released a video of her in captivity days after she was taken hostage. In the video, she lay in bed as someone bandaged her right arm, and she says she wants to go home. At the time, it was the first sign of life from the hostages.\n\nSchem said she barely slept during her time as a hostage because she was so terrified, and that she also did not shower or receive any medications. She said her captor's children occasionally came in to look at her \"like I'm some animal in a petting zoo.\"\n\nSchem said she was taken from the home into a tunnel and held with other hostages during her final days in captivity.\n\nDuring this time, she said she knew she would soon be released. Schem said she was kept with six or seven people in a small room and received just one piece of pita bread a day. She said she feels guilty because of the other hostages she left behind.\n\nSchem broke down during the interview, saying she still has not come to terms with her return as she processes the ordeal. \"I can't get it out of my head,\" she said."}
{"text": "# Houthis show no sign of ending 'reckless' Red Sea attacks as trade traffic picks up, commander says\nBy **REBECCA SANTANA**  \nDecember 30, 2023. 7:10 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CHRISTIANSTED, U.S. Virgin Islands (AP)** - Yemen's Houthi rebels show no signs of ending their \"reckless\" attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea, the top commander of U.S. naval forces in the Middle East said Saturday, even as more nations join the international maritime mission to protect vessels in the vital waterway and trade traffic begins to pick up.\n\nSince Operation Prosperity Guardian was announced just over 10 days ago, 1,200 merchant ships have traveled through the Red Sea region, and none has been hit by drone or missile strikes, Vice Adm. Brad Cooper said in an Associated Press interview. He said additional countries are expected to sign on. Denmark was the latest, announcing Friday it plans to send a frigate to the mission that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced during a visit to Bahrain, where the Navy's 5th Fleet is based, saying that \"this is an international challenge that demands collective action.\"\n\nThe Iran-backed Houthis say their attacks are aimed at Israel-linked ships in an effort to stop the Israeli offensive in Gaza.\n\nThe narrow Bab el-Mandeb Strait connects the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea and then the Suez Canal. The crucial trade route links markets in Asia and Europe. The seriousness of the attacks, several of which have damaged vessels, led multiple shipping companies to order their vessels to hold in place and not enter the strait until the security situation improved. Some major shippers were sending their ships around Africa and the Cape of Good Hope, adding time and costs to the journeys.\n\nCurrently there are five warships from the United States, France, and the United Kingdom patrolling the waters of the southern Red Sea and the western Gulf of Aden, said Cooper, who heads the 5th Fleet. Since the operation started, the ships have shot down a total of 17 drones and four anti-ship ballistic missiles, he said.\n\nust two days ago, the USS Mason, a Navy destroyer, downed a drone and anti-ship ballistic missile that were fired by the Houthis, according to U.S. Central Command. The U.S. said the 22nd attack on international shipping by the Houthis since Oct. 19 caused no damage to any of the 18 ships in the area or any reported injuries.\n\n\"I expect in the coming weeks we're going to get additional countries,\" Cooper said, noting Denmark's recent announcement.\n\nThe U.S. has said that more than 20 nations are participating, but a number of those nations have not acknowledged it publicly.\n\nOn Saturday, Austin discussed the ongoing illegal Houthi attacks in a call with Netherlands' defense minister, Kajsa Ollongren, according to the Pentagon. Both condemned the attacks as unacceptable and \"profoundly destabilizing\" to international order and global commerce, with Austin stressing that they constitute \"a significant international problem that demands collective action.\"\n\nCooper said the coalition is in direct communication with commercial ships to provide guidance on \"maneuvering and the best practices to avoid being attacked,\" and working closely with the shipping industry to coordinate security.\n\nAn international task force had been set up in April 2022 to improve maritime security in the region. But Cooper said Operation Prosperity Guardian has more ships and a persistent presence to assist vessels.\n\nSince the operation started, the Houthis have stepped up their use of anti-ship ballistic missiles, Cooper said. \"We are cleareyed that the Houthi reckless attacks will likely continue,\" he said.\n\nThe Houthis seized Yemen's capital, Sanaa, in 2014, launching a grinding war against a Saudi-led coalition that sought to restore the government. The militants have sporadically targeted ships in the region, but the attacks increased since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.\n\nThe Houthi threatened to attack any vessel they believe is either going to or coming from Israel. That has escalated to apparently any vessel, with container ships and oil tankers flagged to countries such as Norway and Liberia being attacked or drawing missile fire.\n\nThe shipping company Maersk had announced earlier that it had decided to re-route its ships that have been paused for days outside the strait and Red Sea, and send them around Africa instead. Maersk announced Dec. 25 that it was going to resume sending ships through the strait, citing the operation. Cooper said another shipping company had also resumed using the route.\n\n\"Commerce is definitely flowing,\" Cooper said."}
{"text": "# Revelers prepare to pack into Times Square for annual New Year's Eve ball drop\nDecember 30, 2023. 4:52 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - The confetti has been tested for airiness. The giant numerals - 2 0 2 4 - are in place. And the luminous ball, bedazzled with 2,688 crystal triangles, is fixed to the pole from which it makes its 60-second descent at 11:59 p.m.\n\nWith throngs of revelers set to usher in the new year under the bright lights of Times Square, officials and organizers say they are prepared to welcome the crowds and ensure their safety.\n\nAt a security briefing Friday, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said there were \"no specific threats\" to the annual New Year's Eve bash, which is expected to draw tens of thousands of people to the heart of midtown Manhattan on Sunday.\n\nThe celebrity-filled event will include live performances from Flo Rida, Megan Thee Stallion and LL Cool J, as well as televised appearances from Cardi B and others. Organizers said in-person attendance is expected to return to pre-COVID levels, even as foot traffic around Times Square remains down slightly since the pandemic.\n\nAmid near-daily protests in New York sparked by fighting between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza, police said they would expand the security perimeter around the party, creating a \"buffer zone\" that will allow them to head off potential demonstrations.\n\nPro-Palestinian marches have disrupted recent events in New York, including the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and the ceremonial lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.\n\n\"We will be out here with our canines, on horseback, our helicopters, our boats,\" Adams said. Officials will also monitor protests with drones, he said. \"But as we saw last year, after having no specific threats, we get a threat.\"\n\nDuring last year's New Year's Eve party, a machete-wielding man attacked three police officers a few blocks from Times Square.\n\nOn Saturday, as organizers practiced raising and lowering the iconic ball, Times Square Alliance President Tom Harris said he was confident the painstaking preparations would contribute to a seamless night.\n\n\"The star of the show just had a dress rehearsal and performed marvelously,\" he said. \"I'm confident that everything is going to go fantastic in Times Square tomorrow night.\"\n\nHis advice for those planning to attend the countdown: \"Come early.\""}
{"text": "# Air raids over eastern Syria near Iraqi border kill 6 Iran-backed militants\nBy **QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA** and **KAREEM CHEHAYEB**  \nDecember 30, 2023. 11:40 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BAGHDAD (AP)** - Three overnight airstrikes on eastern Syria near a strategic border crossing with Iraq killed six Iran-backed militants Saturday, two members of Iraqi militia groups told The Associated Press.\n\nThe strikes on the border region of Boukamal came hours after an umbrella group of Iran-backed Iraqi militants known as the Islamic Resistance claimed an attack on a U.S. military base in northern Iraq's city of Irbil.\n\nThe group has conducted over a hundred attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq and eastern Syria since the onset of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7.\n\nFour of the militants killed were from Lebanon's powerful Hezbollah group, while the other two were Syrian, the militia group members said. Another two were injured, they added. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not cleared to speak with journalists.\n\nMeanwhile, an activist collective that covers news in the area, Deir Ezzor 24, said the airstrikes hit two militant posts and a weapons warehouse that it says was recently stocked with rocket launchers and munitions.\n\nBritain-backed opposition war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that in addition to the weapons warehouse, the strikes targeted a militants' convoy that had arrived in Syria from Iraq and a location where a militia affiliated with Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard was training.\n\nThe monitoring group reported that the strikes killed nine people - three Syrians and six people from other nationalities.\n\nA U.S. official said the United States did not carry out the strikes. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military operations.\n\nWashington has confirmed previous strikes on Iran-backed militia positions following the surge of attacks over the past two months.\n\nPresident Joe Biden last week ordered the U.S. military to carry out strikes on Iranian-backed Iraqi groups following a rocket attack that wounded three U.S. troops.\n\nThe spike in tension has put Baghdad in a delicate situation. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani has tried to ease the strain between the militant groups that helped him reach power and the U.S. where Iraq's foreign reserves are housed.\n\nThe Boukamal region in Deir el-Zour, Syria, located along the Iraqi border, has been a strategic area for Iran-backed militants since it was taken back from the extremist Islamic State group in 2019. U.S. coalition forces conducted strikes targeting convoys there before the recent spike in tensions.\n\nLater, Syrian state media reported that Israeli airstrikes over areas south of the city of Aleppo caused damage, but no casualties were reported. Pro-government radio station Sham FM said the strikes were near Aleppo's airport but did not damage it.\n\nThe Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said just one of six Israeli missiles landed near the airport and that the rest landed in areas where Iran-backed militants and weapons warehouses were present. It said the strikes killed or wounded seven people, without giving further details.\n\nIsrael has carried out hundreds of strikes on targets inside government-controlled parts of war-torn Syria in recent years.\n\nIt does not usually acknowledge such airstrikes. When it has, however, it said it was targeting Iran-backed groups there that supported Syrian President Bashar Assad's government."}
{"text": "# US citizen inspired by Hamas sought to wage jihad against 'No. 1 enemy' America, prosecutors say\nDecember 29, 2023. 4:30 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - A U.S. citizen living in Egypt sought to join the al Shabaab terrorist organization and wage violent jihad against America and its allies in the wake of Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Israel, federal prosecutors said Friday.\n\nKarrem Nasr, 23, of Lawrenceville, New Jersey, was arrested Dec. 14 after flying from Egypt to Nairobi, Kenya, where prosecutors say he was planning to meet with al Shabaab members before traveling to train in Somalia, where the terror group is based.\n\nNasr was returned to the U.S. on Thursday and was scheduled to appear Friday before a federal magistrate in Manhattan. He is charged with attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.\n\nCourt records did not list a lawyer who could speak on Nasr's behalf.\n\nNasr, also known as Ghareeb Al-Muhajir, expressed his desire to join al Shabaab in online postings and communications with a paid FBI informant who was posing as a facilitator for terrorist organizations, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Friday.\n\nNasr told the informant \"the No. 1 enemy is America,\" which he described as the \"head of the snake,\" the complaint said. He posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that jihad was \"coming soon to a US location near you,\" the complaint said. The post, under the name \"Egyptian Muslim,\" included airplane, bomb, and fire emojis.\n\nNasr, who moved to Egypt in July, started communicating with the FBI informant in November via an encrypted messaging app, according to the criminal complaint. He told the informant that he had been thinking of waging jihad \"for a long time\" but that he was \"not capable of doing it\" before Hamas attacked Israel, the complaint said.\n\n\"After the October 7th events, I felt that something has changed,\" Nasr told the informant, according to the complaint. \"To the better, I mean. I felt that pride and dignity came back to the Muslims.\"\n\nThe U.S. designated al Shabaab a foreign terrorist organization in 2008.\n\nThe group evolved from a coalition of Islamic insurgents that fought Somalia's fledgling central government and seized control of large swaths of territory in the early 2000s. It has been blamed for myriad violence, including suicide bombings, a beheading and the targeted assassinations of civilians and journalists.\n\nSomalia's President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has pledged to wipe out al Shabaab within a year. The group has been losing territory since the government, backed by local militias, African Union troops and Western powers, launched an extensive offensive against it in May."}
{"text": "# France heightens security for New Year's Eve, with 90,000 police officers to be mobilized\nDecember 29, 2023. 9:37 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**PARIS (AP)** - Security will be tight across France on New Year's Eve, with 90,000 law enforcement officers set to be deployed, domestic intelligence chief Céline Berthon said Friday.\n\nOf those, 6,000 will be in Paris, where French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said over 1.5 million people are expected to attend celebrations on the Champs-Elysees.\n\nSpeaking at a press conference, Darmanin cited a \"very high terrorist threat\" because, in part, of \"what is happening in Israel and Palestine,\" referring to the Israel-Hamas war.\n\nDarmanin said that police for the first time will be able to use drones as part of security work, and that tens of thousands of firefighters and 5,000 soldiers would also be deployed.\n\nNew Year's Eve celebrations in Paris will center on the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, including DJ sets, fireworks and video projections on the Arc de Triomphe.\n\nThe security challenge ahead of the Olympics was highlighted when a tourist was killed in a knife attack near the Eiffel Tower on Dec. 2. Large-scale attacks - such as that at the Bataclan in 2015, when Islamic extremists invaded the music hall and shot up cafe terraces, killing 130 people - also loom in memory.\n\nThe knife attack raised concern in France and abroad about security for the Games that begin July 26, in just under seven months. But law enforcement officials appear eager to show off a security-ready Paris."}
{"text": "# US sanctions money network tied to the Yemen Houthi rebels blamed for shipping vessel attacks\nBy **FATIMA HUSSEIN**  \nDecember 28, 2023. 9:40 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - The U.S. on Thursday imposed sanctions on a group of money exchange services from Yemen and Turkey alleged to help provide funding to Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who have been launching attacks on commercial shipping vessels in the southern Red Sea - including a drone and a missile that were shot down Thursday by the U.S. military.\n\nIncluded in the sanctions are the head of a financial intermediary in Sana'a, Yemen, along with three exchange houses in Yemen and Turkey. U.S. Treasury alleges that the people and firms helped transfer millions of dollars to the Houthis at the direction of sanctioned Iranian financial facilitator Sa'id al-Jamal.\n\nThe sanctions block access to U.S. property and bank accounts and prevent the targeted people and companies from doing business with Americans.\n\nThursday's action is the latest round of financial penalties meant to punish the Houthis.\n\nEarlier this month, the U.S. announced sanctions against 13 people and firms alleged to be providing tens of millions of dollars from the sale and shipment of Iranian commodities to the Houthis in Yemen.\n\nBrian E. Nelson, Treasury's undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said Thursday's action \"underscores our resolve to restrict the illicit flow of funds to the Houthis, who continue to conduct dangerous attacks on international shipping and risk further destabilizing the region.\"\n\nNelsons said the U.S. and its allies \"will continue to target the key facilitation networks that enable the destabilizing activities of the Houthis and their backers in Iran.\"\n\nThe Houthis have sporadically targeted ships in the region in the past, but the attacks have increased since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, spiking after an Oct. 17 explosion at a hospital in Gaza killed and injured many. Houthi leaders have insisted Israel is their target.\n\nThe U.S. military's Central Command reported another attempt to attack commercial vessels Thursday. It said the USS Mason, a Navy destroyer, shot down one drone and one ballistic missile that were fired by the Houthis around 6 p.m. local time.\n\n\"There was no damage to any of the 18 ships in the area or reported injuries,\" CentCom said, adding that it was the 22nd attempted attack by Houthis on international shipping since Oct. 19.\n\nIn December, the White House also announced that it was encouraging its allies to join the Combined Maritime Forces, a 39-member partnership that exists to counter malign action by non-state actors in international waters, as it looks to push back against the Houthis.\n\nThe attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea by Yemen's Houthi rebels have scared off some of the world's top shipping companies and oil giants, effectively rerouting global trade away from a crucial artery for consumer goods and energy supplies that is expected to trigger delays and rising prices."}
{"text": "# Iran holds funeral for a general who was killed by an alleged Israeli airstrike in Syria\nDecember 28, 2023. 7:34 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**TEHRAN, Iran (AP)** - Iran held a funeral Thursday for a high-ranking general of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard who was killed by an alleged Israeli airstrike in Syria.\n\nHundreds of mourners accompanied the flag-draped casket of Gen. Razi Mousavi from a central square of Tehran to a shrine in the north of the city where he was buried.\n\nThe head of the Guard, Gen. Hossein Salami, praised Mousavi and vowed his death would be avenged.\n\n\"We will never keep silent in the face of martyrdom of the sons of this nation,\" Salami said. \"Our revenge will be tough as always, but a revenge that could compensate for the martyrdom of Seyed Razi is nothing but the removal of Israel from the face of existence.\"\n\nIran does not recognize Israel and occasionally calls for destruction of the Jewish state.\n\nSalami described Mousavi as a close companion of Gen. Qassim Soleimani, the head of Iran's elite Quds Force, who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Iraq in January 2020. He said Iran also would avenge Soleimani's death and that Hamas' Oct. 7 attacks in southern Israel that triggered the war in Gaza were an unrelated and independent action.\n\n\"I officially announce that the Al-Aqsa Storm was and is fully Palestinian. Palestine is capable on its own,\" the general said.\n\nThe crowd chanted, \"No compromise! No surrender! Battle with America!\"\n\nIsrael views Iran as its greatest threat because of Tehran's disputed nuclear program and its support for regional militant groups like Hamas, Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels in Yemen who have targeted international shipping in what they portray as a blockade of Israel.\n\nIran insists its regional allies act independently.\n\nEarlier Thursday, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei prayed before Mousavi's casket, state TV footage showed. Khamenei offered condolences to family of the general and a group of ranking officials who were present in the prayer.\n\nThe killing of the general, a longtime adviser of the Guard in Syria, comes amid ongoing fears of the Israel-Hamas war broadening into a regional conflict. Iran-backed groups in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq have launched attacks on Israel and its allies in support of Hamas.\n\nIn recent years, Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes on targets inside government-controlled parts of Syria. It occasionally says it's targeting Iran-backed groups that have backed President Bashar Assad's government. Iran said an Israeli strike earlier this month killed two of its generals."}
{"text": "# Israeli strikes across Gaza kill dozens of Palestinians, even in largely emptied north\nBy **WAFAA SHURAFA**, **SAMY MAGDY**, and **JACK JEFFERY**  \nDecember 28, 2023. 7:04 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP)** - Israeli forces bombarded cities, towns and refugee camps across Gaza on Thursday, killing dozens of people in a widening air and ground offensive against Hamas that has forced thousands more to flee from homes and shelters in recent days.\n\nThe war has already killed over 20,000 Palestinians and driven around 85% of the population of 2.3 million from their homes. Much of northern Gaza has been leveled, and it has been largely depopulated and isolated from the rest of the territory for weeks. Many fear a similar fate awaits the south as Israel expands its offensive to most of the tiny enclave.\n\nIsrael has vowed to dismantle Hamas - which is still putting up stiff resistance, even in the north - and bring back more than 100 hostages still held by the militants after their Oct. 7 attack into southern Israel. The assault killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians.\n\nIsraeli officials have brushed off international calls for a cease-fire, saying it would amount to a victory for Hamas.\n\nThe United States - while providing crucial support for the offensive - has urged Israel to take greater measures to spare civilians and allow in more aid. But humanitarian workers say the amount of food, fuel and medical supplies entering is still far below what is needed, and 1 in 4 Palestinians in Gaza is starving, according to U.N. officials.\n\n## STRIKES FROM NORTH TO SOUTH\nAn Israeli airstrike on a home in the northern town of Beit Lahiyeh - one of the first targets of the ground invasion that began in October - buried at least 21 people, including women and children, according to a family member.\n\nBassel Kheir al-Din, a journalist with a local TV station, said the strike flattened his family house and severely damaged three neighboring homes. He said 12 members of his family - including three children ages 2, 7 and 8 - were buried and presumed dead, and that nine neighbors were missing.\n\nIn central Gaza, Israeli warplanes and artillery pounded the built-up Bureij and Nuseirat refugee camps, leveling buildings, residents said. Israel said this week it would expand its ground offensive into central Gaza. The Israeli military typically launches waves of airstrikes and shelling before troops and tanks move in.\n\nA hospital in the nearby town of Deir al-Balah received the bodies of 25 people killed overnight, including five children and seven women, hospital records showed Thursday. Nonstop explosions could be heard throughout the night in the town where hundreds of thousands of people have sought shelter, with many spending cold nights sleeping on sidewalks.\n\n\"It was another night of killing and massacres,\" said Saeed Moustafa, a resident of the Nuseirat camp. He said people were still crying out from the rubble of a house hit Wednesday by an airstrike.\n\n\"We are unable to get them out. We hear their screams, but we don't have equipment,\" he said.\n\nFarther south, in Khan Younis, the Palestinian Red Crescent said a strike near its Al-Amal Hospital killed at least 10 people and wounded another 12. Much of the city's population has left, but many are sheltering near Al-Amal and another hospital, hoping they will be spared from the bombardment.\n\nA strike Thursday evening destroyed a residential building in the town of Rafah, at the southernmost end of Gaza, killing at least 23 people, according to the media office of the nearby Al-Kuwaiti Hospital said.\n\nOutside of Gaza, Israeli security forces shot and killed a Palestinian man who they say got out of his car and stabbed two security workers at a checkpoint between the West Bank and east Jerusalem.\n\nThe security workers were in moderate condition, according to the Magen David Adom rescue service.\n\nThe occupied West Bank has experienced a surge in violence since Oct. 7, with more than 300 Palestinians killed in unrest and clashes with Israeli forces.\n\n## ANOTHER WAVE OF DISPLACEMENT\nRami Abu Mosab, who lives in the Bureij refugee camp, said thousands of people have fled their homes in recent days because of the intense bombardment. He plans to remain there because nowhere in Gaza is safe.\n\n\"Here is death and there is death,\" he said, \"To die in your home is better.\"\n\nBureij and Nuseirat are among several camps across the region that were built to house hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war surrounding Israel's creation. They have since grown into crowded residential neighborhoods.\n\nSome 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes during that conflict, an exodus the Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or catastrophe. Some 1.9 million have been displaced within Gaza since Oct. 7.\n\nAs Israel has broadened its offensive, fleeing Palestinians have packed into areas along the Egyptian border and the southern Mediterranean coastline, where shelters and tent camps are overflowing. Even in those areas, Israel continues to strike what it says are militant targets.\n\nThe U.N. humanitarian office said the scale and intensity of the fighting impedes its aid deliveries. The office, known as OCHA, cited blocked roads, a scarcity of fuel and telecommunications blackouts as some of the obstacles hampering the humanitarian response.\n\nStill, it said the U.N. World Food Program provided food parcels to about a half-million people in U.N. shelters in southern and central Gaza since Saturday.\n\nThe Israeli military blames the high civilian death toll on Hamas, which positions fighters, tunnels and rocket launchers in dense residential areas. But the military rarely comments on individual strikes.\n\nIsrael's offensive in Gaza has already been one of the most devastating military campaigns in recent history. More than 21,300 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been killed, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza. Another 55,600 have been wounded, it says. Those counts do not differentiate between civilians and combatants.\n\nThe military says it has killed thousands of militants, without presenting evidence, and that 167 of its soldiers have been killed and hundreds wounded in the ground offensive."}
{"text": "# The number of wounded Israeli soldiers is mounting, representing a hidden cost of war\nBy **TIA GOLDENBERG**  \nDecember 28, 2023. 8:15 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**RAMAT GAN, Israel (AP)** - Igor Tudoran spent just 12 hours inside the Gaza Strip before a missile slammed into his tank, leaving him with a life-altering injury.\n\n\"Already within the tank, I understood from the condition of my leg that I would lose it. But the question was how much of it will I lose,\" he said, seated on a bed in the hospital where he has been treated since he was wounded last month.\n\nTudoran, 27, a reservist who volunteered for duty after the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel by Hamas that triggered the war, lost his right leg beneath the hip. He has kept up a positive attitude - but concedes that his hopes of becoming an electrician may no longer be possible.\n\nTudoran is part of a swelling number of wounded Israeli fighters, yet another sizable and deeply traumatized segment of Israeli society whose struggles are emerging as a hidden cost of the war that will be felt acutely for years to come. Given the large numbers of wounded, advocates worry the country is not prepared to address their needs.\n\n\"I have never seen a scope like this and an intensity like this,\" said Edan Kleiman, who heads the nonprofit Disabled Veterans Organization, which advocates for more than 50,000 soldiers wounded in this and earlier conflicts. \"We must rehabilitate these people,\" he said.\n\nIsrael's Defense Ministry says roughly 3,000 members of the country's security forces have been wounded since Hamas militants stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 240 people hostage. Nearly 900 of those are soldiers wounded since Israel began its ground offensive in late October, in which troops have engaged in close combat with Hamas militants. More than 160 soldiers have been killed since the ground operation began.\n\n\"They add up,\" said Yagil Levy, who teaches civil-military relations at Israel's Open University, of the wounded. \"There could be a long-term impact if we see a big rate of people with disabilities that Israel must rehabilitate, which can produce economic issues as well as social issues.\"\n\nThe war has also brought unprecedented suffering to Palestinians in Gaza, where more than 21,000 have been killed, over 55,000 wounded and amputations have become commonplace. Most of the tiny enclave's population has been displaced.\n\nIsraelis still largely stand behind the war's objectives and it is mostly seen as an existential battle meant to restore a sense of security lost in Hamas' attacks. The country's mainstream media hardly cover the hardship endured by Palestinians, and their plight barely registers in Israeli public discourse.\n\nIn a country with compulsory military service for most Jews, the fate of soldiers is a sensitive and emotional topic.\n\nThe names of fallen soldiers are announced at the top of hourly newscasts. Their funerals are packed with strangers who come to show solidarity. Their families receive generous support from the army.\n\nBut historically the plight of the wounded, though lauded as heroes, has taken a backseat to the stories of soldiers killed in battle. After the fanfare surrounding tales of their service and survival recedes, the wounded are left to contend with a new reality that can be disorienting, challenging and, for some, lonely. Their numbers have not had significant bearing on public sentiment toward Israel's wars in the way that mounting soldiers' deaths have.\n\nThe exceptionally large numbers of wounded in this war, however, will provide a visible reminder of the conflict for years to come.\n\nPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emphasized their sacrifice during a recent visit to wounded soldiers at Sheba Medical Center, Israel's largest hospital, which has treated and rehabilitated many of the injured. \"You are genuine heroes,\" he said.\n\nAt Sheba, soldiers and civilians wounded in the war spilled out into the corridors on a recent day and passed the time with their families on an outdoor deck. Soccer paraphernalia adorned the wounded soldiers' hospital beds as did the ubiquitous Israeli flag.\n\nOne man who had lost a leg after being attacked at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7 lay in the sun on the hospital grounds, his wheelchair parked nearby. The Israeli pop diva Rita handed out hugs to some wounded soldiers. A military helicopter carrying more wounded landed nearby.\n\nThe Israeli Defense Ministry said it was working at \"full capacity\" to assist the wounded, and that it was cutting red tape and hiring employees to deal with the influx.\n\nJonathan Ben Hamou, 22, who lost his left leg beneath the knee after a rocket-propelled grenade struck the bulldozer he was using to help clear the way for other troops, is already looking forward to the day when he can use a state-funded prosthetic.\n\nBen Hamou, who mostly uses a wheelchair since the incident in early November, said that he eventually plans to pursue his goal of attending a military commanders' course.\n\n\"I'm not ashamed of the wound,\" said Ben Hamou, who filmed the RPG's moment of impact as well as his evacuation to hospital. \"I was wounded for the country in a war inside Gaza. I am proud.\"\n\nBut Kleiman, who himself was wounded in an operation in the Gaza Strip in the early 1990s, said he thinks Israeli authorities are not grasping the severity of the situation.\n\nThe disabled veterans group is ramping up efforts to address what he suspects will be the overwhelming needs of a new cadre of wounded soldiers. He said the organization is tripling its manpower, adding therapists and employees to help wounded veterans navigate bureaucracy and upgrade rehab centers.\n\nKleiman said the number of wounded is likely to stretch close to 20,000 once those diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder are included.\n\nHe said if wounded soldiers don't receive the mental and physical care they need, including making their homes or cars accessible, it could stunt their rehabilitation and delay or even prevent their reentry into the workforce.\n\n\"There are wounded whose lives have been ruined,\" said Idit Shafran Gittleman, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, a Tel Aviv research center. \"They will have to contend with their wound their entire lives.\""}
{"text": "# On foot and by donkey cart, thousands flee widening Israeli assault in central Gaza\nBy **WAFAA SHURAFA**, **SAMY MAGDY**, and **LEE KEATH**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 6:07 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP)** - Thousands of Palestinian families fled Wednesday from the brunt of Israel's expanding ground offensive into Gaza's few remaining, overcrowded refuges, as the military launched heavy strikes across the center and south of the territory, killing dozens, Palestinian health officials said.\n\nOn foot or riding donkey carts loaded with belongings, a stream of people flowed into Deir al-Balah - a town that normally has a population of around 75,000. It has been overwhelmed by several hundred thousand people driven from northern Gaza as the region was pounded to rubble.\n\nBecause U.N. shelters are packed many times over capacity, the new arrivals set up tents on sidewalks for the cold winter night. Most crowded onto streets around the town's main hospital, Al-Aqsa Martyrs, hoping it would be safer from Israeli strikes.\n\nStill, no place is safe in Gaza. Israeli offensives are crowding most of the population into Deir al-Balah and Rafah at the territory's southern edge as well as a tiny rural area by the southern coastline. Those areas continue to be hit by Israeli strikes that regularly crush homes full of people.\n\nIsrael has said its campaign in Gaza is likely to last for months, vowing to dismantle Hamas across the territory and prevent a repeat of its Oct. 7 attack into southern Israel. Benny Gantz, a member of the country's three-man War Cabinet, said the fighting \"will be expanded, according to need, to additional centers and additional fronts.\"\n\nHe and other Israeli officials also threatened greater military action against Lebanon's Hezbollah, hiking fears of an all-out war on that front.\n\nThe two sides have exchanged fire almost daily across the border. Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen warned Wednesday that \"all options are on the table\" if Hezbollah does not withdraw from the border area, as called for under a 2006 U.N. cease-fire.\n\nHezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah \"must understand that he's next,\" Cohen said.\n\n## DEATH, DISPLACEMENT AND STARVATION\nIsrael's offensive in Gaza has already been one of the most devastating military campaigns in recent history. More than 21,100 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been killed, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza. The count doesn't differentiate between civilians and combatants.\n\nSome 85% of Gaza's population of 2.3 million people have fled their homes. U.N. officials say a quarter of Gaza's population is starving under Israel's siege, which allows in only a trickle of food, water, fuel and other supplies.\n\nThe latest people to be displaced fled from several built-up refugee camps in central Gaza targeted in the latest phase of Israel's ground assault. One of the camps, Bureij, came under heavy bombardment throughout the night as Israeli troops moved in.\n\n\"It was a night of hell. We haven't seen such bombing since the start of the war,\" said Rami Abu Mosab, speaking from Bureij, where he has sheltered since fleeing his home in northern Gaza.\n\nThe Israeli military issued evacuation orders for Bureij and neighboring areas Tuesday. The area was home to nearly 90,000 people before the war and now shelters more than 61,000 displaced people, mostly from the north, according to the U.N. Bureij camp, like others in Gaza, houses refugees from the 1948 war surrounding Israel's creation and their descendants and now resembles other densely populated neighborhoods.\n\nIt was not known how many were evacuating. In Deir al-Balah over the past two days, empty lots have filled up with families in tents or sleeping on blankets on the ground.\n\nThis was the third move further south for Ibrahim al-Zatari, a daily laborer. First he, his wife and four children moved in with relatives in Gaza City after a strike flattened their home in northern Gaza. Later, they fled to Bureij to escape fighting in the city. On Wednesday morning, they made an hourslong journey on foot to Deir al-Balah, where - like many others - they wandered the streets looking for an empty spot to lie down.\n\n\"There is no foothold here,\" he said. \"Where should we go?\"\n\nWith much of northern Gaza leveled, Palestinians fear a similar fate awaits other areas, including Khan Younis, where Israeli forces launched ground operations in early December. The Israeli military said Wednesday it deployed another brigade in the city, a sign of the tough fighting.\n\nIsraeli shelling Wednesday struck a residential building in Khan Younis next to Al-Amal Hospital, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent, which runs the facility.\n\nHealth Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra said at least 20 people were killed and dozens more wounded. Footage from the scene showed several torn bodies lying in the street as rescue workers loaded a man whose legs had been severed onto a stretcher.\n\nDespite U.S. calls for Israel to shift to a more precise assault, the military so far appears to be following the same pattern used in earlier phases of the ground offensive in northern Gaza and Khan Younis. Before troops move in, heavy bombardment targets what Israel says is Hamas' tunnels and military infrastructure. Fierce urban fighting follows as troops move block to block, backed by airstrikes and shelling that the military says aim to force out pockets of militants. The resulting devastation has been massive.\n\nIsrael has said Hamas must be destroyed after its its Oct. 7 attack in which militants broke through Israel's formidable defenses and killed some 1,200 people - mostly civilians - and abducted around 240. An estimated 129 remain in captivity after dozens were freed.\n\nIsrael blames Hamas for the high civilian death toll in Gaza because the militants operate in residential areas. Late Wednesday, the army said it destroyed a network of tunnels that stretched for several kilometers in Gaza City and served as a command and control center. Part of it ran under a hospital and had an exit inside a neighboring school, it said.\n\nThe military says it has killed thousands of militants, without presenting evidence, and that 164 of its soldiers have been killed in the ground offensive.\n\n## WARNING OVER LEBANON\nCross-border exchanges of fire have escalated between Hezbollah and the Israeli military.\n\nAn Israeli strike on a family home in Lebanon overnight killed a Hezbollah fighter, his brother and his sister-in-law, local officials and state media said Wednesday. A day earlier, a Hezbollah strike wounded 11 people in northern Israel.\n\nSince the Gaza war began, the near daily battles have forced tens of thousands of Israelis to evacuate their homes from nearby communities. At least nine soldiers and four civilians have been killed on the Israeli side, and around 150 people on the Lebanese side, mostly fighters from Hezbollah and other groups, but also 17 civilians.\n\nGantz warned that time for diplomatic pressure was \"running out.\"\n\n\"If the world and the Lebanese government will not act to stop the firing on the northern settlements and keep Hezbollah away from the border, the IDF will do so,\" he said, referring to the Israeli military.\n\nIn the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces killed at least six Palestinians during an overnight raid in the refugee neighborhood of Nur Shams, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. More than 300 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the start of the war, mostly in confrontations with Israeli forces during raids and protests."}
{"text": "# UN appoints a former Dutch deputy premier and Mideast expert as its Gaza humanitarian coordinator\nBy **EDITH M. LEDERER**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 3:14 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**UNITED NATIONS (AP)** - Sigrid Kaag, the Netherlands' former deputy prime minister and a Mideast expert, was appointed the U.N. coordinator for humanitarian aid to war-torn Gaza, the United Nations chief announced Tuesday.\n\nThe announcement by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres follows the Security Council's adoption of a resolution on Friday requesting him to expeditiously appoint a senior humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza, where more than 2 million civilians are in desperate need of food, water and medicine,\n\nGuterres said Kaag, who speaks fluent Arabic and five other languages, \"brings a wealth of experience in political, humanitarian and development affairs as well as in diplomacy\" to her new post. She is expected to start on Jan. 8.\n\n\"She will facilitate, coordinate, monitor, and verify humanitarian relief consignments to Gaza,\" he said, adding that Kaag will also establish a U.N. mechanism to accelerate aid deliveries \"through states which are not party to the conflict.\"\n\nGaza's entire 2.3 million population is in food crisis, with 576,000 people at catastrophic or starvation levels and the risk of famine is \"increasing each day,\" according to a report released last Thursday by 23 U.N. and nongovernmental organizations. It blamed the widespread hunger on insufficient aid entering Gaza.\n\nIsrael stopped all deliveries of food, water, medicine and fuel into Gaza after the militant Hamas group's Oct. 7 incursion into southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people.\n\nThe Israel-Hamas war has so far killed more than 20,900 people in Gaza, two-thirds of them women and children, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, which doesn't differentiate between civilians and combatants among the dead.\n\nAfter U.S. pressure, Israel allowed a trickle of aid in through Egypt, but U.N. agencies say that for weeks, only 10% of food needs has been entering Gaza. Last week, Israel opened the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza and truck traffic increased but an Israeli strike on Thursday morning on the Palestinian side of the crossing stopped aid pickups, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, or UNRWA, said.\n\nKaag has for years worked in the Middle East, including in the Palestinian territories. She started working for the United Nations in 1994 in Sudan and has worked for UNRWA and as regional director for the Mideast for the U.N. children's agency UNICEF.\n\nShe also served as assistant director of the U.N. Development Program, headed the U.N. mission to destroy Syria's chemical weapons, and was U.N. special envoy for Lebanon until October 2017.\n\nKaag then became minister for trade and development in the Dutch government, and in 2018 she became the country's first female foreign minister. Most recently, she served as deputy prime minister and the first female minister of finance from January 2022.\n\nIn July, she announced she was leaving Dutch politics because of \"hate, intimidation and threats\" that put \"a heavy burden on my family.\" She told the website Euronews that after becoming finance minister and deputy prime minister she received many death threats, but the most frightening was when a man showed up at her home shouting and waving a burning torch.\n\n\"You don't know what's going to happen, and the safety of your family is obviously of the highest priority,\" Kaag, a mother of four, told Euronews in October. \"For me it was difficult, but bearable. It was different for my family. I always listen to them, and their opinion counts more than anything else in the world.\""}
{"text": "# The Biden administration once again bypasses Congress on an emergency weapons sale to Israel\nBy **MATTHEW LEE**  \nDecember 29, 2023. 10:11 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - For the second time this month the Biden administration is bypassing Congress to approve an emergency weapons sale to Israel as Israel continues to prosecute its war against Hamas in Gaza under increasing international criticism.\n\nThe State Department said Friday that Secretary of State Antony Blinken had told Congress that he had made a second emergency determination covering a $147.5 million sale for equipment, including fuses, charges and primers, that is needed to make the 155 mm shells that Israel has already purchased function.\n\n\"Given the urgency of Israel's defensive needs, the secretary notified Congress that he had exercised his delegated authority to determine an emergency existed necessitating the immediate approval of the transfer,\" the department said.\n\n\"The United States is committed to the security of Israel, and it is vital to U.S. national interests to ensure Israel is able to defend itself against the threats it faces,\" it said.\n\nThe emergency determination means the purchase will bypass the congressional review requirement for foreign military sales. Such determinations are rare, but not unprecedented, when administrations see an urgent need for weapons to be delivered without waiting for lawmakers' approval.\n\nBlinken made a similar decision on Dec. 9, to approve the sale to Israel of nearly 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition worth more than $106 million.\n\nBoth moves have come as President Joe Biden's request for a nearly $106 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other national security needs remains stalled in Congress, caught up in a debate over U.S. immigration policy and border security. Some Democratic lawmakers have spoken of making the proposed $14.3 billion in American assistance to its Mideast ally contingent on concrete steps by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government to reduce civilian casualties in Gaza during the war with Hamas.\n\nThe State Department sought to counter potential criticism of the sale on human rights grounds by saying it was in constant touch with Israel to emphasize the importance of minimizing civilian casualties, which have soared since Israel began its response to the Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7.\n\n\"We continue to strongly emphasize to the government of Israel that they must not only comply with international humanitarian law, but also take every feasible step to prevent harm to civilians,\" it said.\n\n\"Hamas hides behind civilians and has embedded itself among the civilian population, but that does not lessen Israel's responsibility and strategic imperative to distinguish between civilians and Hamas terrorists as it conducts its military operations,\" the department said. \"This type of campaign can only be won by protecting civilians.\"\n\nBypassing Congress with emergency determinations for arms sales is an unusual step that has in the past met resistance from lawmakers, who normally have a period of time to weigh in on proposed weapons transfers and, in some cases, block them.\n\nIn May 2019, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made an emergency determination for an $8.1 billion sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan after it became clear that the Trump administration would have trouble overcoming lawmakers' concerns about the Saudi and UAE-led war in Yemen.\n\nPompeo came under heavy criticism for the move, which some believed may have violated the law because many of the weapons involved had yet to be built and could not be delivered urgently. But he was cleared of any wrongdoing after an internal investigation.\n\nAt least four administrations have used the authority since 1979. President George H.W. Bush's administration used it during the Gulf War to get arms quickly to Saudi Arabia."}
{"text": "# Mexico and Venezuela restart repatriation flights amid pressure to curb soaring migration to U.S.\nBy **MEGAN JANETSKY**  \nDecember 30, 2023. 6:33 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MEXICO CITY (AP)** - Mexico and Venezuela announced Saturday that they have restarted repatriation flights of Venezuelans migrants in Mexico, the latest move by countries in the region to take on a flood of people traveling north to the United States.\n\nThe move comes as authorities say at least 10,000 migrants a day have been arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, many of them asylum seekers. It also comes as a migrant caravan of thousands of people from across the region - largely Venezuelans - has trekked through southern Mexico this week.\n\nThe repatriation flights are part of an agreement made between regional leaders during a summit in Mexico in October that aimed to seek solutions for migration levels that show few signs of slowing down.\n\nMexico's Ministry of Foreign Relations said the two countries began repatriations with a flight on Friday and a second on Saturday in an effort to \"strengthen their cooperation on migration issues.\" The statement also said the two countries plan to implement social and work programs for those repatriated to Venezuela.\n\n\"Mexico and Venezuela reiterate their commitment to address the structural causes that fuel irregular migration in the region, and to achieve a humanitarian management of such flows,\" the statement read.\n\nMexico's government said it previously carried out a similar repatriation flight last Jan. 20 with 110 people.\n\nAs migration has soared in recent years, the U.S. government has pressured Latin American nations to control the movement of migrants north, but many transit countries have struggled to deal with the quantities of people.\n\nThis week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other Biden administration officials were in Mexico City to meet with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador about the high levels of migrants landing on the U.S.-Mexico border.\n\nLópez Obrador said he also spoke about the issue in a phone call with Presient Joe Biden on Dec. 20.\n\n\"He asked - Joe Biden asked to speak with me - he was worried about the situation on the border because of the unprecedented number of migrants arriving at the border,\" Mexico's leader said. \"He called me, saying we had to look for a solution together.\"\n\nLópez Obrador has said he is willing to help, but in exchange he wants the U.S. to send more development aid to migrants' home countries and to reduce or eliminate sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela.\n\nMexico's president and other critics of American foreign policy have cited the sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela as one of the root causes of high migration."}
{"text": "# Pope Francis denounces the weapons industry as he makes a Christmas appeal for peace in the world\nBy **NICOLE WINFIELD**  \nDecember 25, 2023. 8:23 AM EST\n\n---\n\nPope Francis on Monday blasted the weapons industry and its \"instruments of death\" that fuel wars as he made a Christmas Day appeal for peace in the world and in particular between Israel and the Palestinians.\n\nSpeaking from the loggia of St. Peter's Basilica to the throngs of people below, Francis said he grieved the \"abominable attack\" of Hamas against southern Israel on Oct. 7 and called for the release of hostages. And he begged for an end to Israel's military campaign in Gaza and the \"appalling harvest of innocent civilians\" as he called for humanitarian aid to reach those in need.\n\nFrancis devoted his Christmas Day blessing to a call for peace in the world, noting that the biblical story of the birth of Christ in Bethlehem sent a message of peace. But he said that Bethlehem \"is a place of sorrow and silence\" this year.\n\nFrancis' annual \"Urbi et Orbi\" (\"To the City and the World\") speech typically offers a lament of all the misery facing the world, and this year's edition was no different. From Armenia and Azerbaijan to Syria and Yemen, Ukraine to South Sudan and Congo and the Korean peninsula, Francis appealed for humanitarian initiatives, dialogue and security to prevail over violence and death.\n\nHe called for governments and people of goodwill in the Americas in particular to address the \"troubling phenomenon\" of migration and its \"unscrupulous traffickers\" who take advantage of innocents just looking for a better life.\n\nHe took particular aim at the weapons industry, which he said was fueling the conflicts around the globe with scarcely anyone paying attention.\n\n\"It should be talked about and written about, so as to bring to light the interests and the profits that move the puppet strings of war,\" he said. \"And how can we even speak of peace, when arms production, sales and trade are on the rise?\"\n\nFrancis has frequently blasted the weapons industry as \"merchants of death\" and has said that wars today, in Ukraine, in particular, are being used to try out new weapons or use up old stockpiles.\n\nHe called for peace between Israel and Palestinians, and for the conflict to be resolved \"through sincere and persevering dialogue between the parties, sustained by strong political will and the support of the international community.\"\n\nVatican officials said about 70,000 people filled St. Peter's Square for Francis' noonday speech and blessing. They included many people flying Palestinian flags, as well as some Ukrainian ones.\n\nFrancis' address from the loggia marked his main appearance for Christmas Day, though he is expected to deliver a blessing on Tuesday, the feast of St. Stephen, which is also a holiday in Italy. Rounding out the holiday, he is to celebrate a New Year's Eve vigil in the basilica and Mass the following day.\n\nDespite his recent bout of bronchitis, the 87-year-old Francis appeared to hold up well Monday and during Christmas Eve Mass the previous night, though he occasionally coughed and seemed out of breath."}
{"text": "# An Israeli airstrike in Syria kills a high-ranking Iranian general\nBy **KAREEM CHEHAYEB**  \nDecember 25, 2023. 3:59 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BEIRUT (AP)** - An Israeli airstrike Monday in a Damascus neighborhood killed a high-ranking Iranian general, Iranian state media said.\n\nIranian officials and allied militant groups in the region vowed revenge for the killing but did not immediately launch any retaliatory strike.\n\nThe killing of Seyed Razi Mousavi, a longtime adviser of the Iranian paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in Syria, comes amid ongoing fears of the Israel-Hamas war sparking a regional spillover. Iran-backed groups in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq have launched attacks on Israel and its allies in support of Hamas.\n\nClashes along the Lebanon-Israel border between Hezbollah and Israel have continued to intensify, with daily exchanges of missiles, airstrikes and shelling across the frontier.\n\nIn the Red Sea, attacks by Houthi rebels in Yemen against ships they believe to be connected to Israel have disrupted trade and prompted the launch of a U.S.-led multinational naval operation to protect shipping routes.\n\nIran-backed militias in Iraq operating under an umbrella group dubbed the Islamic Resistance in Iraq have also launched more than 100 attacks on bases housing U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria, which they have said are in retaliation for Washington's support of Israel.\n\nThe group claimed an attack on a U.S. base next to the commercial airport in Irbil in northern Iraq on Monday. A U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity in accordance with regulations, confirmed the attack and said it had caused injuries but did not provide further details.\n\nIsraeli strikes killed two other generals earlier this month in Syria.\n\nIsrael on Monday struck the Sayida Zeinab neighborhood, located near a Shiite Muslim shrine, Iran's official news agency IRNA and Britain-based opposition war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. IRNA described Mousavi as a close companion of Gen. Qassim Soleimani, the head of Iran's elite Quds Force who was slain in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq in January 2020.\n\nNeither the Israeli military nor Syrian state media immediately issued a statement about Monday's attack. Israeli officials declined to comment.\n\nIran's President Ebrahim Raisi in a statement said that Mousavi was \"martyred while serving as an adviser for the resistance front, defending holy shrines in Syria as well as safeguarding Islamic ideals.\" He threatened that the \"Israeli regime will definitely pay for this crime.\"\n\nHossein Akbari, Iran's ambassador to Syria, condemned the killing, saying that Mousavi was in Syria as a \"formal military advisor.\"\n\n\"(Israel) will definitely get a response to this crime at the right time and the right situation,\" Akbari said, speaking from Damascus.\n\nThough IRNA didn't provide other details about the attack, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the Israeli military targeted Mousavi after he entered a farm in the area, which allegedly was one of several offices for Hezbollah. The Lebanese militant group, alongside Iran and Russia, has played a key military role in keeping President Bashar Assad's government in power throughout the Syrian conflict.\n\nHezbollah in a statement called Mousavi \"one of the best of brothers who worked to support the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon for decades of his honorable life.\"\n\nIsrael has carried out hundreds of strikes on targets inside government-controlled parts of war-torn Syria in recent years. It doesn't usually acknowledge its airstrikes on Syria. But when it does, Israel says it's targeting Iran-backed groups there that have backed Assad's government."}
{"text": "# Liverpool star Mohamed Salah 'shares pain' of grieving families at Christmas amid Israel-Hamas war\nDecember 25, 2023. 10:50 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LIVERPOOL, England (AP)** - Liverpool soccer star Mohamed Salah says he \"shares the pain\" of grieving families at Christmas amid the Israel-Hamas war.\n\nThe Egypt international posted a message on X, formerly known as Twitter, saying: \"Christmas is a time when families get together and celebrate.\n\n\"With the brutal war going on in the Middle East, especially the death and destruction in Gaza, this year we get to Christmas with very heavy hearts and we share the pain of those families who are grieving the loss of their loved ones.\n\n\"Please do not forget them and do not get used to their suffering. Merry Christmas.\"\n\nEgypt has floated an ambitious plan to end the war."}
{"text": "# Egypt floats plan to end Israel-Hamas war. The proposal gets a cool reception\nBy **SAMY MAGDY**, **NAJIB JOBAIN**, and **JOSEF FEDERMAN**  \nDecember 25, 2023. 10:04 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAIRO (AP)** - Israel and Hamas on Monday gave cool public receptions to an Egyptian proposal to end their bitter war. But the longstanding enemies stopped short of rejecting the plan altogether, raising the possibility of a new round of diplomacy to halt a devastating Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip.\n\nThe Egyptian plan calls for a phased hostage release and the formation of a Palestinian government of experts to administer the Gaza Strip and occupied West Bank, according to a senior Egyptian official and a European diplomat familiar with the proposal.\n\nThe Egyptian official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the proposal, said the details were worked out with the Gulf nation of Qatar and presented to Israel, Hamas, the United States and European governments. Egypt and Qatar both mediate between Israel and Hamas, while the U.S. is Israel's closest ally and a key power in the region.\n\nIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not comment directly on the proposal. But speaking to members of his Likud Party, he said he was determined to press ahead with Israel's offensive, launched in response to an Oct. 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel that killed 1,200 people and took 240 others hostage.\n\n\"We are expanding the fight in the coming days and this will be a long battle and it isn't close to finished,\" he said.\n\nHamas has continued to fire rockets into Israel throughout the fighting. Late Monday, it launched a barrage of rockets, triggering air raid sirens in the southern city of Ashkelon. AP video showed what appeared to be several interceptions by Israel's rocket defense system. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.\n\nThe Egyptian proposal falls short of Israel's declared goal of crushing Hamas. It also appears to be at odds with Israel's insistence on maintaining military control over Gaza for an extended period after the war.\n\nBut Netanyahu faces heavy domestic pressure to reach a deal to bring home the more than 100 Israeli hostages who remain in captivity in Gaza.\n\nAs he vowed to continue the war during a speech in parliament, relatives of the hostages interrupted him and called for their immediate return. \"Now! Now!\" they shouted.\n\nThe rising death toll of Israeli soldiers from the ground operation also threatens to undermine public support for the war. The Israeli military announced the deaths of two more soldiers Monday, bringing the total killed in the war to 156.\n\nNetanyahu's War Cabinet was expected to meet late Monday. It was unclear if they would discuss the Egyptian proposal.\n\nHamas did not officially react to the proposal. But it is unclear if Hamas would agree to relinquish power after controlling Gaza for the past 16 years.\n\nIzzat Rishq, a senior Hamas official who is believed to be based in Qatar, issued a statement repeating the group's position that it will not negotiate without a \"complete end to the aggression.\" He said Hamas would not agree to a \"temporary or partial truce for a short period of time.\"\n\nWord of the proposal came as Israeli airstrikes heavily pounded central and southern Gaza.\n\nIn the Maghazi refugee camp Monday, rescue workers were still pulling bodies from the wreckage of a strike the previous night. Records at the nearby Al-Aqsa Hospital seen by The Associated Press showed at least 106 people killed, making it one of the deadliest strikes of Israel's air campaign.\n\nThe United Nations' World Health Organization visited the hospital on Monday, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.\n\n\"The hospital is taking in far more patients than its bed capacity and staff can handle. Many will not survive the wait,\" he said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.\n\nThe war has devastated large parts of Gaza, killed more than 20,600 Palestinians and displaced almost all of the territory's 2.3 million people.\n\nU.N. officials have warned that a quarter of the population is starving under Israel's siege of the territory, which allows in only a trickle of supplies.\n\nIn the southern Gaza Strip, Hamas admitted to shooting dead a 13-year-old boy who was among a group of people who tried to seize aid from a truck. The shooting prompted a violent protest and rare public criticism of Hamas.\n\n## EGYPTIAN PROPOSAL\nThe Egyptian proposal is an ambitious bid not only to end the war but also to lay out a plan for the day after.\n\nIt calls for an initial cease-fire of up to two weeks during which Palestinian militants would free 40 to 50 hostages, among them women, the sick and the elderly, in return for the release of 120-150 Palestinians from Israeli prisons, the Egyptian official said.\n\nAt the same time, negotiations would continue on extending the cease-fire and the release of more hostages and bodies held by Palestinian militants, he said. Israeli officials estimate that 20 of the hostages have died or been killed in captivity.\n\nEgypt and Qatar would also work with all Palestinian factions, including Hamas and the rival, internationally recognized Palestinian Authority, to agree on the establishment of a government of experts, he said.\n\nThe government would rule Gaza and the West Bank for a transitional period as Palestinian factions work toward presidential and parliamentary elections, he added.\n\nIn the meantime, Israel and Hamas would negotiate a comprehensive \"all-for-all\" deal, he said. This would include the release of all remaining hostages in return for all Palestinian prisoners in Israel, as well as the Israeli military's withdrawal from Gaza and the Palestinian militants' halting of rocket attacks into Israel.\n\nMore than 8,000 Palestinians are held by Israel on security-related charges or convictions, according to Palestinian figures. Some have been convicted in deadly attacks on Israelis. While their release would be controversial, Israel has a history of agreeing to lopsided releases.\n\nEgyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry spoke by phone Monday with Iran's chief diplomat, Hossein Amirabdollahian, on the war in Gaza, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said. The statement said Shoukry discussed efforts to achieve a comprehensive cease-fire. It didn't offer further details. Iran is a major supporter of Hamas.\n\nIn Washington, the White House declined to comment about the Egyptian proposal.\n\nU.S. officials remain in close contact with Egypt and Qatar about getting more hostages released and several proposals have been floated, according to a person familiar with the talks. While the Egyptian proposal is viewed as a positive sign, the U.S. is skeptical it will result in a breakthrough, the person said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss behind the scenes diplomacy.\n\n## INSIDE GAZA\nIsrael's offensive has been one of the most devastating military campaigns in recent history. More than two-thirds of the 20,674 Palestinians killed have been women and children, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza, which does not differentiate between civilians and combatants among the dead.\n\nThe offensive has led to a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, with shortages of food, medicines and other basic supplies.\n\nWith aid shipments limited, crowds have tried to seize some of the goods coming in on trucks. Hamas gunmen have been seen on top of some of the vehicles. The group says it is protecting the shipments, while Israel accuses it of stealing aid.\n\nIn the southern Gaza Strip, Hamas acknowledged that a policeman with the Hamas-run Interior Ministry shot dead a 13-year-old boy, saying the shots were fired when a group of people tried to seize aid from a truck near the city of Rafah on Sunday, an official with Hamas government media office said Monday.\n\nThe shooting prompted a violent protest and rare public criticism of Hamas, which has shown little tolerance for dissent during its rule.\n\nEnraged relatives of the slain boy, Ahmed Brikeh, attempted to attack a police station, burning tires and demanding the policeman be held accountable.\n\nA relative, Mosaad Brikeh, blamed Hamas for the killing in video comments circulated on social media, accusing the policeman of shooting the boy \"directly in his head.\"\n\nHe said the family has previously cooperated with Hamas to secure the border area with Egypt. He called for the policeman to be held accountable, warning the family would prevent \"any vehicles\" from passing through the area.\n\nThe devastation of the war over the past weeks has brought sporadic eruptions of anger against Hamas, something that has previously been unthinkable during the group's 16-year rule over Gaza.\n\nIsrael faces international criticism for the civilian death toll. It blames Hamas, citing the militants' use of crowded residential areas and tunnels. Israel says it has killed thousands of Hamas militants, without presenting evidence.\n\nLate on Monday, the Israeli army said it had discovered the stolen car of the family of an Israeli hostage, Samer Al-Talalka, in a hospital compound in northern Gaza. Al-Talalka was among three hostages mistakenly shot dead by Israeli soldiers in Gaza earlier this month.\n\nThe army said grenade fragments and bloodstains of another hostage were found in the vehicle. \"The finding of the vehicle directly links the hospital to the brutal events of Oct. 7,\" it said.\n\n## CHRISTMAS AMID WAR\nDozens of members of Gaza's tiny Christian community held a Christmas Eve service in the Holy Family Church in Gaza City, which they have also used as a shelter. Last week, Catholic officials said that two Christian women were killed by Israeli sniper fire at the compound.\n\n\"This is not a feast,\" said Kamal Ayad, whose wife and daughter were killed in the shooting. \"This is a feast of pain for the Palestinian people.\"\n\nHe said his only wish was for \"peace and hope for a cease-fire.\"\n\nThe service was held late Sunday, but details only emerged on Monday due to frequent internet outages.\n\nBethlehem was hushed for Christmas, its holiday celebrations called off."}
{"text": "# Pope says 'our hearts are in Bethlehem' as he presides over the Christmas Eve Mass in St. Peter's\nDecember 29, 2023. 1:45 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**VATICAN CITY (AP)** - Recalling Jesus' birth in a stable in Bethlehem, Pope Francis in a Christmas Eve homily said that \"the clash of arms even today\" prevents Jesus \"from finding room in the world.\"\n\nThe pontiff presided Sunday over the evening Mass attended by about 6,500 faithful who took their place amid the splendor of St. Peter's Basilica behind rows of white-clad prelates.\n\n\"Our hearts are in Bethlehem, where the Prince of Peace is once more rejected by the futile logic of war, \" the pope said, referring to the war sparked by Hamas' deadly Oct. 7 rampage and hostage-taking in Israel.\n\nAs Mass began, a statuette of the Christ child was unveiled before the altar bedecked in greenery and white flowers, and children representing all corners of the globe placed flowers around a gilded throne.\n\nFrancis, draped in white robes, led the Mass standing at the foot of one of St. Peter's grand columns.\n\nRecalling that Jesus was born during a census, which in the scriptures had \"negative associations,\" Francis warned against \"the quest for worldly power and might, fame and glory, which measures everything in terms of success, results, numbers and figures, a world obsessed with achievement.\"\n\nBy contrast, Jesus entered the world humbly, taking human flesh. \"Here, we see not a god of wrath and chastisement, but the God of mercy, who takes flesh and enters the world in weakness,\" the pope said.\n\nA pagan deity is linked to \"power, worldly success and idolatry of consumerism,\" the pope said. \"God, on the other hand, waves no magic want; he is no god of commerce who promises everything all at once. He does not save us by pushing a button, but draws near us, in order to change our world from within.\"\n\nWhen the Christmas Eve Mass ended, the pope, pushed in a wheelchair, moved down the basilica with the life-sized statue of Baby Jesus on his lap and flanked by children carrying bouquets. The statue was placed in a manger in a nativity scene in the basilica.\n\nFrancis, 87, has been using a wheelchair to navigate long distances due to a painful knee ligament and a cane for shorter distances.\n\nDuring the traditional Angelus blessing overlooking St. Peter's Square at midday, the pontiff remembered those suffering from war, recalling specific fighting in Ukraine and Israel's bombardment and siege of the Gaza Strip in response to Hamas' attack.\n\n\"We are close to our brothers and sisters suffering from war. We think of Palestine, Israel, Ukraine. We also think of those who suffer from misery, hunger, slavery,\" Francis said. \"May the God who took a human heart for himself infuse humanity into the hearts of men,\" he added.\n\nSpeaking from the window of his studio to the thousands of faithful gathered in St. Peter's Square for the Angelus prayer, the pontiff also invited the faithful \"not to confuse celebration with consumerism. One can and, as a Christian, must celebrate in simplicity without waste and by sharing with those who lack necessities or lack companionship.\"\n\nTraditionally, Catholics mark Christmas Eve by attending Mass at midnight. But over the years, the starting time at the Vatican has crept earlier, reflecting the health or stamina of popes and then the pandemic. The Vatican has kept a 7:30 p.m. time originally set during a pandemic curfew.\n\nOn Christmas Day, tens of thousands of Romans, tourists and pilgrims were expected to crowd into St. Peter's Square to hear Pope Francis deliver an address on world issues and give his blessing. The speech, known in Latin as \"Urbi et Orbi\" (to the city and to the world), is traditionally an occasion to review crises including war, persecution and hunger, in many parts of the globe."}
{"text": "# At least 68 killed in central Gaza in airstrike, adding to weekend's bloodshed\nBy **WAFAA SHURAFA** and **SAMY MAGDY**  \nDecember 25, 2023. 5:34 AM EST\n\n---\n\nDEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza (AP) - At least 68 people were killed by an Israeli strike in central Gaza, health officials said Sunday, while the number of Israeli soldiers killed in combat over the weekend rose to 17.\n\nAssociated Press journalists at a nearby hospital watched frantic Palestinians carry the dead, including a baby, and wounded following the strike on the Maghazi refugee camp east of Deir al-Balah. One bloodied young girl looked stunned while her body was checked for broken bones.\n\nThe 68 fatalities include at least 12 women and seven children, according to early hospital figures.\n\n\"We were all targeted,\" said Ahmad Turkomani, who lost several family members including his daughter and grandson. \"There is no safe place in Gaza anyway.\"\n\nEarlier, the Health Ministry in Gaza gave the death toll as 70. The Israeli military had no immediate comment.\n\nAs Christmas Eve fell, smoke rose over the besieged territory, while in the West Bank Bethlehem was hushed, its holiday celebrations called off. In neighboring Egypt, tentative efforts continued on a deal for another exchange of hostages for Palestinians held by Israel.\n\nThe war has devastated parts of Gaza, killed roughly 20,400 Palestinians and displaced almost all of the territory's 2.3 million people.\n\nThe mounting death toll among Israeli troops - 156 since the ground offensive began - could erode public support for the war, which was sparked when Hamas-led militants stormed communities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 and taking 240 hostage.\n\nIsraelis still largely stand behind the country's stated goals of crushing Hamas' governing and military capabilities and releasing the remaining 129 captives. That's despite rising international pressure against Israel's offensive, and the soaring death toll and unprecedented suffering among Palestinians.\n\n## HAMAS EXACTS A PRICE\n\"The war exacts a very heavy price from us, but we have no choice but to continue fighting,\" Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.\n\nIn a nationally televised speech, Israeli President Isaac Herzog appealed for the country to remain united. \"This moment is a test. We will not break nor blink,\" he said.\n\nThere has been widespread anger against his government, which many criticize for failing to protect civilians on Oct. 7 and promoting policies that allowed Hamas to gain strength over the years. Netanyahu has avoided accepting responsibility for the military and policy failures.\n\n\"Over time, the public will find it hard to ignore the heavy price paid, as well as the suspicion that the aims that were loudly heralded are still far from being attained, and that Hamas is showing no signs of capitulating in the near future,\" wrote Amos Harel, military affairs commentator for the Haaretz newspaper.\n\nThe Israeli military said it had completed the dismantling of Hamas' underground headquarters in northern Gaza, part of an operation to take down the vast tunnel network and kill off top commanders that Israeli leaders have said could take months.\n\nEfforts toward negotiations continued. The head of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ziyad al-Nakhalah, arrived in Egypt for talks. The militant group, which also took part in the Oct. 7 attack, said it was prepared to consider releasing hostages only after fighting ends. Hamas' top leader Ismail Haniyeh traveled to Cairo for talks days earlier.\n\n## INSIDE GAZA\nIsrael's offensive has been one of the most devastating military campaigns in recent history. More than two-thirds of the 20,000 Palestinians killed have been women and children, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza, which does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.\n\nOn Friday, Israeli airstrikes on two homes in Gaza killed 90 Palestinians, including dozens from an extended family, according to rescuers and hospital officials. One of the homes, located in Gaza City, became one of the deadliest airstrikes in the war after 76 people from the al-Mughrabi family were killed, said Mahmoud Bassal, a spokesman for Gaza's Civil Defense department.\n\nThe Palestinian Red Crescent said a 13-year-old boy was shot and killed in an Israeli drone attack while inside al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis, a part of Gaza where Israel's military believes Hamas leaders are hiding.\n\nAn Israeli strike overnight hit a house in a refugee camp west of the city of Rafah, on Gaza's border with Egypt. At least two men were killed, according to Associated Press journalists in the hospital where the bodies were taken.\n\nAt least two people were killed and six others wounded when a missile stuck a building in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.\n\nAnd Palestinians reported heavy Israeli bombardment and gunfire in Jabaliya, an area north of Gaza City that Israel had claimed to control. Hamas' military arm said its fighters shelled Israeli troops in Jabaliya and Jabaliya refugee camp.\n\nIsrael faces international criticism for the civilian death toll but it blames Hamas, citing the militants' use of crowded residential areas and tunnels. Israel has launched thousands of airstrikes since Oct. 7. It says it has killed thousands of Hamas militants, without presenting evidence.\n\nIsrael also faces allegations of mistreating Palestinian men and teenage boys detained in homes, shelters, hospitals and elsewhere during the offensive. It has denied abuse allegations and said those without links to militants are quickly released.\n\nSpeaking to the AP from a hospital bed in Rafah after his release, Khamis al-Burdainy of Gaza City said Israeli forces detained him after tanks and bulldozers partly destroyed his home. He said men were handcuffed and blindfolded.\n\n\"We didn't sleep. We didn't get food and water,\" he said, crying and covering his face.\n\nAnother released detainee, Mohammed Salem, from the Gaza City neighborhood of Shijaiyah, said Israeli troops beat them. \"We were humiliated,\" he said. \"A female soldier would come and beat an old man, aged 72 years old.\"\n\n## INTERNATIONAL PRESSURE\nThe United Nations Security Council has passed a watered-down resolution calling for the speedy delivery of humanitarian aid for hungry and desperate Palestinians and the release of all the hostages, but not for a cease-fire.\n\nBut it was not immediately clear how and when deliveries of food, medical supplies and other aid, far below the daily average of 500 before the war, would accelerate. Trucks enter through two crossings: Rafah, and Kerem Shalom on the border with Israel. Wael Abu Omar, a spokesman for the Palestinian Crossings Authority, said 123 aid trucks entered Gaza on Sunday,\n\nThe head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, reiterated U.N. calls for a humanitarian cease-fire, adding on social media that \"the decimation of the Gaza health system is a tragedy.\"\n\nAmid concerns about a wider regional conflict, the U.S. Central Command said a patrol ship in the Red Sea on Saturday shot down four drones launched from Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen, a while two Houthi anti-ship ballistic missiles were fired into international shipping lanes.\n\nThe Iran-backed Houthis say their attacks are aimed at Israel-linked ships in an effort to stop the Israeli offensive in Gaza."}
{"text": "# Israel's Supreme Court overturns a key component of Netanyahu's polarizing judicial overhaul\nBy **JOSEF FEDERMAN** and **MELANIE LIDMAN**  \nJanuary 1, 2024. 2:54 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**JERUSALEM (AP)** - Israel's Supreme Court struck down a key component of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's contentious judicial overhaul Monday, delivering a landmark decision that could reopen the fissures in Israeli society that preceded the country's ongoing war against Hamas.\n\nThe planned overhaul sparked months of mass protests, threatened to trigger a constitutional crisis between the judicial and legislative branches of government, and rattled the cohesion of Israel's powerful military.\n\nThose divisions were largely put aside after Hamas militants carried out a bloody cross-border attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, triggering a war that has raged in Gaza for nearly three months. But Monday's court decision could reignite those tensions even while the country remains at war.\n\nJustice Minister Yariv Levin, a Netanyahu ally and the architect of the overhaul, lambasted the court's decision, saying it demonstrated \"the opposite of the spirit of unity required these days for the success of our soldiers on the front.\"\n\nThe ruling \"will not discourage us,\" Levin said without indicating whether the government would try to revive his plan in the short term. \"As the campaigns are continuing on different fronts, we will continue to act with restraint and responsibility,\" he said.\n\nIn Monday's decision, the court narrowly voted to overturn a law passed in July that prevents judges from striking down government decisions they deem \"unreasonable.\" Opponents had argued that Netanyahu's efforts to remove the standard of reasonability opens the door to corruption and improper appointments of unqualified cronies to important positions.\n\nThe law was the first in a planned overhaul of the Israeli justice system. The overhaul was put on hold after Hamas militants carried out their Oct. 7 attack, killing some 1,200 people and kidnapping 240 others. Israel immediately declared war, and is pressing forward with an offensive that Palestinian health officials say has killed nearly 22,000 people in Gaza.\n\nIn an 8-7 decision, the Supreme Court justices struck down the law because of the \"severe and unprecedented harm to the core character of the State of Israel as a democratic country.\"\n\nThe justices also ruled 12-3 that they had the authority to overturn so-called \"Basic Laws,\" major pieces of legislation that serve as a sort of constitution for Israel.\n\nIt was a significant blow to Netanyahu and his hard-line allies, who claimed the national legislature, not the high court, should have the final word over the legality of legislation and other key decisions. The justices said the Knesset, or parliament, does not have \"omnipotent\" power.\n\nNetanyahu's government could decide to ignore Monday's ruling, setting the stage for a constitutional showdown over which branch of government has ultimate authority.\n\nThe court issued its decision because its outgoing president, Esther Hayut, is retiring, and Monday was her last day on the job.\n\nNetanyahu and his allies announced their sweeping plan to reshape the judiciary shortly after taking office a year ago. It calls for curbing the power of the judges, including by limiting the Supreme Court's ability to review parliamentary decisions and changing the way judges are appointed.\n\nSupporters said the changes aim to strengthen democracy by circumscribing the authority of unelected judges and turning over more powers to elected officials. But opponents see the overhaul as a power grab by Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption charges, and an assault on a key watchdog.\n\nThe Movement for Quality Government in Israel, a good-government group that opposed the legislation, called the Supreme Court's ruling \"a tremendous public victory for those who seek democracy.\"\n\n\"Only an unreasonable government, one that acts unreasonably, that makes unreasonable moves, abolishes the reasonablility standard,\" the group's chairman, Eliad Shraga, said.\n\nBefore the Israel-Hamas war, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets in weekly protests against the government. Among the demonstrators were military reservists, including fighter pilots and members of other elite units, who said they would stop reporting for duty if the overhaul was passed. Reservists make up the backbone of the Israeli military.\n\nWhile the reservists quickly returned to duty after the Oct. 7 attacks in a show of unity, it remains unclear what would happen if the overhaul efforts were revived. A resumption of the protests could undermine national unity and affect the military's readiness if soldiers refused to report for duty.\n\nUnder the Israeli system, the prime minister governs through a majority coalition in parliament - in effect, giving him control over the executive and legislative branches of government.\n\nAs a result, the Supreme Court plays a critical oversight role. Critics say that by seeking to weaken the judiciary, Netanyahu and his allies are trying to erode the country's checks and balances and consolidate power over the third, independent branch of government.\n\nNetanyahu's allies include an array of ultranationalist and religious parties with a list of grievances against the court.\n\nHis allies have called for increased West Bank settlement construction, annexation of the occupied territory, perpetuating military draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox men, and limiting the rights of LGBTQ+ people and Palestinians.\n\nThe U.S. had previously urged Netanyahu to put the plans on hold and seek a broad consensus across the political spectrum."}
{"text": "# Access to busy NYC airport's international terminal restricted due to pro-Palestinian protest\nJanuary 1, 2024. 5:57 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Access to a busy terminal at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport was restricted Monday as pro-Palestinian protesters converged on the airport for the second time in a week.\n\nVideos posted online show heavy traffic and a slow-moving line of cars, some flying Palestinian flags and featuring text on the windows such as \"Stop the genocide.\" Police directed a line of cars around a checkpoint. Protesters also had planned to arrive at the airport in Queens, New York, by public transportation.\n\nThe New Year's Day action was the latest in a series of protests around the nation calling for a cease-fire since the Israel-Hamas war broke out on Oct. 7. Last Wednesday, activists brought traffic to a standstill on an expressway leading up to JFK for about 20 minutes. Protesters shut down a major thoroughfare leading to the Los Angeles International Airport on the same day.\n\nEntry into JFK's Terminal 4 was temporarily restricted Monday afternoon to ticketed passengers, employees and people with what authorities consider a valid reason to be there, such as passenger pickups, according to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the region's airports.\n\nSimilarly, AirTrain access was temporarily restricted to ticketed passengers and employees.\n\n\"The Port Authority, in coordination with our local, state, and federal partners, has deployed safety and security measures to help ensure an uninterrupted travel experience at JFK,\" port authority spokesperson Seth Stein said in an email.\n\nThe Port Authority of New York and New Jersey didn't report any arrests.\n\nCity officials had warned people flying out of JFK on Monday, a busy travel day, to get to the airport early because of the protests.\n\nPolice said the caravan of cars was later headed to protest outside LaGuardia Airport, which is also in Queens."}
{"text": "# An Israeli who fought Hamas for 2 months indicted for impersonating a soldier and stealing weapons\nBy **MELANIE LIDMAN**  \nJanuary 1, 2024. 4:09 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**Jerusalem (AP)** - An Israeli man who never served in the military was charged with impersonating a soldier and stealing weapons after sneaking into an army unit and joining the fighting against Hamas.\n\nAccording to an indictment filed Sunday, Roi Yifrach, 35, took advantage of the chaotic situation in the aftermath of Hamas' Oct. 7 attack to join combat operations and steal large amounts of military gear, including weapons, munitions, and sensitive communications equipment.\n\nIsraeli media said he spent time fighting in Gaza and even appeared in a photo next to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during one of his visits to soldiers in the field.\n\nYifrach went to southern Israel on Oct. 7 and presented himself alternately as a combat soldier from elite anti-terrorism units, a bomb dispersal expert, and a member of the Shin Bet internal security service, the indictment said.\n\nPolice arrested Yifrach on Dec. 17 and found large amounts of weapons, grenades, magazines, walkie-talkies, a drone, uniforms, and other military equipment in his possession.\n\nEitan Sabag, Yifrach's lawyer, told Israel's Channel 12 TV that Yifrach went down to the south to help as a paramedic with a first responder organization, and fought bravely to defend Israel for more than two months. \"He was helping people and helping rescue people, all under fire, while also fighting against terrorists,\" Sabag said.\n\nPolice also detained four other people, including a police officer, in connection with the weapons theft."}
{"text": "# A Colorado mother suspected of killing 2 of her children makes court appearance in London\nJanuary 1, 2024. 7:51 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - A Colorado mother suspected of killing two of her young children and injuring a third made an initial court appearance Monday in London, where she was arrested over the weekend.\n\nKimberlee Singler, 35, was held after her initial appearance in Westminster Magistrates' Court. She has a Jan. 29 hearing scheduled on whether she should be be extradited to the United States to face two counts of first-degree murder, one count of attempted murder, three counts of child abuse and one count of assault.\n\nSingler disappeared as Colorado police prepared to arrest her in the deaths of her 9-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son, who were found slain Dec. 19 during what was reported as a burglary. Singler had minor injuries and a wounded 11-year-old daughter was hospitalized for several days before being released.\n\nSingler was initially treated as a crime victim and had cooperated with police. But officers could not locate her when they went to arrest her Dec. 26.\n\nPolice nabbed her Saturday in the Kensington section of London.\n\nShe had been in a long-running legal dispute over the children with her ex-husband, according to court records.\n\nThe victims were Aden Wentz, 7, and Elianna \"Ellie\" Wentz, 9, Colorado television station KDVR-TV reported Monday, based on a statement from their father, Kevin Wentz, who said he was cooperating with investigators."}
{"text": "# Train derails and catches fire near San Francisco, causing minor injuries and service disruptions\nJanuary 1, 2024. 10:50 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ORINDA, Calif. (AP)** - Several people suffered minor injuries and service was disrupted when a commuter train derailed and caught fire on New Year's Day in the San Francisco Bay Area, officials said.\n\nThe Bay Area Rapid Transit train had just left Orinda on its way to Lafayette around 9 a.m. Monday when the front two cars went off the track, agency spokesperson Jim Allison said.\n\nAll passengers were evacuated and fire crews quickly extinguished flames in two cars, he said.\n\nSeveral passengers were taken to hospitals with minor injuries, Allison said. The total number of people injured wasn't immediately known. The remaining passengers walked back to Orinda Station.\n\nPassenger Enrique Gonzalez said the train was delayed and when it started moving again he heard a \"few loud pops\" and \"saw smoke billowing out in between cars.\"\n\n\"I was sitting right there at the window and saw the flames shoot up,\" he told the San Francisco Chronicle.\n\nEarly indications were that the derailment happened at an interlocking section of rail, where trains can switch from one track to another, Allison said. It wasn't immediately clear what caused the derailment about 8 miles (13 kilometers) northeast of Oakland.\n\nOfficials didn't immediately say how many people were on the train when it derailed.\n\nService was discontinued on a 12-mile (19-kilometer) stretch of rail between Rockridge and Walnut Creek in both directions, the Chronicle reported. BART officials said Orinda Station would likely be closed for the rest of the day as crews remove the damaged cars and inspect the tracks.\n\nWhile the transit system was carrying fewer passengers than usual on New Year's Day, the disruption will likely impact tens of thousands of people, Allison said.\n\n\"It's certainly unfortunate people are stranded on a holiday like this,\" he said."}
{"text": "# Rays shortstop Wander Franco arrested amid allegations of relationship with minor, AP source says\nBy **MARTÍN ADAMES**  \nJanuary 1, 2024. 5:23 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (AP)** - Tampa Bay Rays shortstop Wander Franco was arrested Monday in the Dominican Republic after being interviewed by prosecutors investigating him for an alleged relationship with a minor, according to an official in the Puerto Plata province prosecutor's office.\n\nFranco appeared before prosecutors while accompanied by two lawyers, days after not showing up for a meeting with prosecutor Olga Diná Llaverías, according to the official, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the case. The official said the interview lasted nearly three hours.\n\nLlaverías had originally requested Franco appear Dec. 28, two days after prosecutors and police visited two of Franco's properties in Baní, the All-Star player's hometown some 37 miles (60 kilometers) southwest of the capital, to request his appearance. They did not find the 22-year-old player there.\n\nAuthorities have released little information about the case because it involves a minor.\n\nFranco must be brought before a judge within 24 hours, according to Dominican law. Franco's U.S. attorney, Jay Reisinger, declined comment. The AP was not able to reach Franco's attorneys in the Dominican Republic.\n\nThe Dominican Republic's prosecutors' office said on Aug. 14 that Franco was under investigation because of postings on his social media channels suggesting he had a relationship with a minor. The AP has not been able to verify the reported posts.\n\nFranco was placed on administrative leave by Major League Baseball in August under its the joint domestic violence, sexual assault and child abuse policy with the players' association. He was paid and received service time while on administrative leave. There is no timetable for a conclusion of MLB's investigation and whether the results of the probe might lead to discipline by MLB."}
{"text": "# Les McCann, innovative jazz musician best known for 'Compared to What,' dies at 88\nBy **The Associated Press**  \nJanuary 1, 2024. 5:42 PM EST\n\n---\n\nLes McCann, a prolific and influential musician and recording artist who helped found the soul-jazz genre and became a favorite source for sampling by Dr. Dre, A Tribe Called Quest and hundreds of other hip-hop performers, has died. He was 88.\n\nMcCann died Friday in Los Angeles a week after being hospitalized with pneumonia, according to his longtime manager and producer, Alan Abrahams.\n\nA Lexington, Kentucky, native, McCann was a vocalist and self-taught pianist whose career dated back to the 1950s, when he won a singing contest while serving in the U.S. Navy and appeared on \"The Ed Sullivan Show,\" the top variety program of its time. With admirers including Quincy Jones and Miles Davis, he went on tour worldwide and released dozens of albums, starting in 1960 with \"Les McCann Ltd. Plays the Truth.\"\n\nHe was best known for \"Compared to What,\" a funky protest song on which he first teamed up with his future musical partner, saxophonist Eddie Harris. Written by Eugene McDaniels and recorded live at the 1968 Monteaux Jazz Festival, \"Compared to What\" blended jazzy riffs and McCann's gospel-style vocals. The song condemned war, greed and injustice with such couplets as \"Nobody gives us rhyme or reason/Have one doubt, they call it treason.\"\n\nAmong those covering \"Compared to What\" was Roberta Flack, a McCann protégé whose career he helped launch by setting up an audition with Atlantic Records. McCann was a pioneer in merging jazz with soul and funk. He would record with Flack and tour with such popular musicians as Wilson Pickett, Santana and the Staples Singers.\n\nHis other albums included \"Talk to the People\" (1972), \"Layers\" (1973) and \"Another Beginning\" (1974). Last month, Resonance Records issued \"Never A Dull Moment! - Live from Coast to Coast (1966-1967).\""}
{"text": "# Missing Chinese exchange student found safe in Utah following cyber kidnapping scheme, police say\nBy **Associated Press**  \nJanuary 1, 2024. 7:32 PM EST\n\n---\n\nRIVERDALE, Utah (AP) - A foreign exchange student from China who was reported missing last week in Utah has been found in what authorities said was an apparent \"cyber kidnapping\" scheme to extort $80,000 from the student's family.\n\nThe 17-year-old student was reported missing Friday, a day after he was last seen at the home where he had been staying in Riverdale, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) from Salt Lake City.\n\nRiverdale police initially said that they believed the student had been forcefully taken from his home. But on Sunday night they said he was found safe in a tent about 25 miles (40 kilometers) away from Riverdale in the Brigham City area.\n\nHe was convinced that his family in China was threatened and that he needed to isolate himself, according to police. It's unclear how he received this information or why he was isolating himself.\n\nMeanwhile, his family had received a ransom note and photograph of the student that made it appear that he'd been abducted and was in danger. The family paid $80,000 in ransom before he was found."}
{"text": "# 135th Rose Parade boasts floral floats, sunny skies as California tradition kicks off the new year\nJanuary 1, 2024. 4:55 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PASADENA, Calif. (AP)** - Floral floats, marching bands and equestrian units took to the streets under a sunny California sky as the 135th Rose Parade drew hundreds of thousands of spectators on New Year's Day.\n\nThe Pasadena tradition on Monday featured Broadway legend Audra McDonald as grand marshal and the theme \"Celebrating a World of Music: The Universal Language.\"\n\nAfter recent rains and gray skies, there was plenty of sun for the 8 a.m. start of the spectacle with a military flyover of a B-2 stealth bomber.\n\nAmong the fanciful floats was Kaiser Permanente's colorful \"Symphony of You,\" which featured 8,000 roses and received the President Award for most outstanding use and presentation of flowers.\n\nThe top prize, the 2024 Sweepstakes Trophy, went to the San Diego Zoo for the 55-foot (16.8-meter) float \"It All Started With a Roar,\" depicting its mascot Rex the Lion and celebrating wildlife conservation.\n\nThe scheduled performers included Destiny's Child singer Michelle WIlliams, \"The Voice\" winner Cassadee Pope and \"American Idol\" champion Jordin Sparks.\n\nHuge crowds lined the 5.5-mile (8.8-kilometer) parade route. Many camped out on sidewalks overnight, staking out their spots in the afternoon on New Year's Eve.\n\nThe parade was briefly interrupted by about 50 pro-Palestinian protesters carrying a banner demanding a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas. They blocked the route before peacefully dispersing under police orders, said city spokesperson Lisa Derderian.\n\nMcDonald was set to toss the coin before the 110th Rose Bowl college football game between Alabama and Michigan."}
{"text": "# Elvis, fishmongers and a Kraken win in a nautical scene for the NHL Winter Classic\nBy **TIM BOOTH**  \nJanuary 1, 2024. 8:01 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SEATTLE (AP)** - The part-owner of the franchise who was once more known for his exploits on the football field led the way off the bus, followed by players clad in white T-shirts and orange overalls as a tribute to the fishmongers working across town at Pike Place Market.\n\nA few minutes later, a gaggle of Elvises - or would it be Elvi? - strode their way into the stadium in white jumpsuits, sunglasses and mostly fake hair.\n\n\"Believe it or not, Paul Cotter didn't even wear a wig. That's just naturally his hair,\" Vegas' Keegan Kolesar said. \"So he was pretty spot on.\"\n\nThe 15th version of the NHL Winter Classic had a decidedly local flair as both the Seattle Kraken and Vegas Golden Knights tapped into two of the most well-known aspects of their communities.\n\nEventually, the theatrics were replaced by actual hockey. Playing in front of a sellout crowd of 47,313, the Kraken posted a 3-0 victory, with Joey Daccord posting the first shutout in a Winter Classic.\n\n\"Just to walk out to the ice like that and hear the roar of the crowd was insane and I'll never forget it,\" Daccord said.\n\nThe victory capped a nearly perfect day for the home team. It started with Kraken minority owner Marshawn Lynch leading the team off the bus in outfits that paid tribute to the fishing industry and the workers at the nearby market who fling fish around every day.\n\nSeattle's Jordan Eberle said there was talk of ditching the T-shirts under the overalls, but, \"I thought we'd look like firemen strippers.\"\n\nFor the reigning Stanley Cup champion Golden Knights, well, was there any other choice than Elvis? It was the brainchild of veteran defenseman Alec Martinez.\n\n\"I mean, it's literally Vegas,\" defenseman Zach Whitecloud said.\n\nT-Mobile Park was transformed into a nautical landscape tapping into the region's maritime influence for the meeting of the NHL's two most recent expansion franchises. There were lakes created in the outfield, docks leading from the baseball clubhouses to the ice and a shipwreck in center field with the tentacles of a Kraken pulling the ship underwater.\n\nThe back of the shipwreck had a stage where Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Heart performed after the first intermission. The pregame featured Seattle native Sir Mix-a-Lot performing as the Kraken walked to the ice while stuffed fish were being thrown around them.\n\nThe NHL placed the game at the home of baseball's Seattle Mariners in part because of the retractable roof in case protection from the Pacific Northwest's notoriously wet weather was needed. But the league got its wish for an open-air game as fog burned off by late morning and a day of sun and clouds covered the ballpark.\n\n\"I think we'd be silly to try to normalize it. It's not. It's a different environment. It's an awesome environment,\" Seattle coach Dave Hakstol said. \"I think everybody should acknowledge that. But at the same time, you have to dial in and acknowledge that the two points are equally as important as any other two points throughout the year.\""}
{"text": "# The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier is returning home after extended deployment defending Israel\nBy **TARA COPP**  \nJanuary 1, 2024. 5:53 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - After months of extra duty at sea providing protection for Israel, the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier strike group will be heading home, the Navy announced Monday.\n\nThe Ford and its accompanying warships will be replaced by the amphibious assault ship the USS Bataan and its accompanying warships, the USS Mesa Verde and the USS Carter Hall. The three vessels had been in the Red Sea and have been transiting toward the Eastern Mediterranean over the last few days.\n\nThe Ford will sail for home \"in the coming days,\" the U.S. 6th Fleet, the European-based U.S. naval command that's responsible for ships sailing in the Mediterranean, said in a statement.\n\nThe Ford was sent to the Eastern Mediterranean to be within striking distance of Israel since the day after Hamas' Oct. 7 attacks. The carrier stayed in the Eastern Mediterranean while its accompanying warships had sailed into the Red Sea, where they repeatedly intercepted incoming ballistic missiles and attack drones fired from Houthi-controlled Yemen. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited the Ford last month.\n\nSince it was extended in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Ford and the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier have been part of a two-carrier presence bracketing the Israel-Hamas war, underscoring U.S. concerns that the conflict will widen. The Eisenhower has recently patrolled near the Gulf of Aden, at the mouth of the Red Sea waterway, where so many commercial vessels have come under attack in recent weeks.\n\nOn Sunday, helicopters from the Eisenhower and its destroyer the USS Gravely responded to a distress call from the container ship Maersk Hangzhou, which was under attack by four Iranian-backed Houthi small boats. As the helicopters responded, the boats fired at them with crew-served weapons and small arms and the helicopters returned fire, sinking three of the four boats and killing their crews, the U.S. Central Command said.\n\nThe incessant attacks on the commercial ships have led some companies to suspend transits through the narrow Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Gulf of Aden to the southern Red Sea and then the Suez Canal.\n\nThe Bataan's accompanying warship the Mesa Verde is a transport dock ship, carrying approximately 2,000 Marines from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit. Those Marines provide \"forces capable of supporting a wide range of missions,\" the U.S. 6th Fleet said. The Carter Hall is a dock landing ship, which carries amphibious landing craft and their crews. Both vessels and the Bataan can support rotary aircraft; the Bataan can also carry and support Marine Corps' F-35 vertical takeoff fighter aircraft."}
{"text": "# North Korea's Kim says he'll launch 3 more spy satellites and build more nuclear weapons in 2024\nBy **HYUNG-JIN KIM**  \nDecember 30, 2023. 9:45 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SEOUL, South Korea (AP)** - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his country will launch three additional military spy satellites, build more nuclear weapons and introduce modern unmanned combat equipment in 2024, as he called for \"overwhelming\" war readiness to cope with U.S.-led confrontational moves, state media reported Sunday.\n\nKim's comments, made during a key ruling Workers' Party meeting to set state goals for next year, suggest he'll continue a run of weapons tests to increase his leverage in future diplomacy ahead of the U.S. presidential elections in November next year. Observers say Kim could eventually offer to halt North Korea's testing activities and take other limited denuclearization steps in return for sanctions relief but he has no intentions of fully abandoning his advancing nuclear arsenal.\n\nDuring the five-day meeting that ended Saturday, Kim said moves by the United States and its followers against North Korea have been unprecedented this year, pushing the Korean Peninsula to the brink of a nuclear war, according to the official Korean Central News Agency.\n\n\"The grave situation requires us to accelerate works to acquire overwhelming war response capabilities and thorough and perfect military readiness to suppress any types of provocations by the enemies at a stroke,\" Kim said, according to KCNA.\n\nKim set forth plans to fire three more military spy satellites next year in addition to the country's first reconnaissance satellite launched in November. He also ordered authorities to press ahead with work to manufacture more nuclear weapons and develop various types of modern unmanned combat equipment such as armed drones and powerful electronic warfare devices, KCNA said.\n\nKim has been focusing on modernizing his nuclear and missile arsenals since his high-stakes nuclear diplomacy with then-President Donald Trump broke down in 2019 due to wrangling over international sanctions on the North. Since last year, Kim's military has test-fired more than 100 ballistic missiles, many of them nuclear-capable weapons targeting the mainland U.S. and South Korea, in violation of U.N. bans.\n\nThe United States and South Korea responded by expanding their military exercises and deploying U.S. strategic assets such as bombers, aircraft carriers and a nuclear-armored submarine. North Korea calls the moves U.S-.led invasion rehearsals.\n\nSouth Korea's spy agency said last week that North Korea will likely launch military provocations and cyberattacks ahead of South Korean parliamentary elections in April and the U.S. presidential election in November.\n\n\"Pyongyang might be waiting out the U.S. presidential election to see what its provocations can buy it with the next administration,\" said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul.\n\n\"The Kim regime has closed the political door on denuclearization negotiations but could offer rhetorical restraint and a testing freeze in exchange for sanctions relief,\" Easley said. \"Although North Korea has no intention of giving up nuclear weapons, it might try to extract payment for acting like a so-called responsible nuclear power.\"\n\nIn the face of deepening confrontations with the U.S. and its partners, North Korea has sought to beef up its cooperation with Russia and China, which have repeatedly blocked the U.S. and others' attempts to toughen U.N. sanctions on the North over its banned missile tests. The U.S. and South Korea accuse North Korea of supplying conventional arms like artillery and ammunition to Russia in return for high-tech Russian technologies to boost its own military programs.\n\nJulianne Smith, U.S. permanent representative to NATO, said earlier this month the U.S. assessed that the suspected Russian technologies North Korea seeks are related to fighter aircraft, surface-to-air missiles, armored vehicles, ballistic missile production equipment or materials of that kind. Smith said U.S. intelligence indicates that North Korea has provided Russia with more than 1,000 containers of military equipment and munitions.\n\nSouth Korean officials said Russian support likely enabled North Korea to put its spy satellite into orbit for the first time on Nov. 21. Many foreign experts are skeptical about the satellite's ability to take militarily meaningful high-resolution images. But South Korean Defense Minister Shin Wonsik said in November that Russia could help North Korea produce higher-resolution satellite photos."}
{"text": "# Mickey Mouse will soon belong to you and me - with some caveats\nBy **ANDREW DALTON**  \nDecember 30, 2023. 1:58 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LOS ANGELES (AP)** - M-I-C-K-E-Y will soon belong to you and me.\n\nWith several asterisks, qualification and caveats, Mickey Mouse in his earliest form will be the leader of the band of characters, films and books that will become public domain as the year turns to 2024.\n\nIn a moment many close observers thought might never come, at least one version of the quintessential piece of intellectual property and perhaps the most iconic character in American pop culture will be free from Disney's copyright as his first screen release, the 1928 short \"Steamboat Willie,\" featuring both Mickey and Minnie Mouse, becomes available for public use.\n\n\"This is it. This is Mickey Mouse. This is exciting because it's kind of symbolic,\" said Jennifer Jenkins, a professor of law and director of Duke's Center for the Study of Public Domain, who writes an annual Jan. 1 column for \"Public Domain Day.\" \"I kind of feel like the pipe on the steamboat, like expelling smoke. It's so exciting.\"\n\nU.S. law allows a copyright to be held for 95 years after Congress expanded it several times during Mickey's life.\n\n\"It's sometimes derisively referred to as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act,\" Jenkins said. \"That's oversimplified because it wasn't just Disney that was pushing for term extension. It was a whole group of copyright holders whose works were set to go into the public domain soon, who benefited greatly from the 20 years of extra protection.\"\n\n\"Ever since Mickey Mouse's first appearance in the 1928 short film Steamboat Willie, people have associated the character with Disney's stories, experiences, and authentic products,\" a Disney spokesperson said in a statement to The Associated Press. \"That will not change when the copyright in the Steamboat Willie film expires.\"\n\nCurrent artists and creators will be able to make use of Mickey, but with major limits. It is only the more mischievous, rat-like, non-speaking boat captain in \"Steamboat Willie\" that has become public.\n\n\"More modern versions of Mickey will remain unaffected by the expiration of the Steamboat Willie copyright, and Mickey will continue to play a leading role as a global ambassador for the Walt Disney Company in our storytelling, theme park attractions, and merchandise,\" Disney's statement said.\n\nNot every feature or personality trait a character displays is necessarily copyrightable, however, and courts could be busy in the coming years determining what's inside and outside Disney's ownership.\n\n\"We will, of course, continue to protect our rights in the more modern versions of Mickey Mouse and other works that remain subject to copyright,\" the company said.\n\nDisney still solidly and separately holds a trademark on Mickey as a corporate mascot and brand identifier, and the law forbids using the character deceptively to fool consumers into thinking a product is from the original creator. Anyone starting a film company or a theme park will not be free to make mouse ears their logo.\n\nDisney's statement said it \"will work to safeguard against consumer confusion caused by unauthorized uses of Mickey and our other iconic characters.\"\n\n\"Steamboat Willie,\" directed by Walt Disney and his partner Ub Iwerks and among the first cartoons to have sound synced with its visuals, was actually the third cartoon featuring Mickey and Minnie the men made, but the first to be released. It features a more menacing Mickey captaining a boat and making musical instruments out of other animals.\n\nIn it, and in a clip from it used in the introduction to Disney animated films in recent years, Mickey whistles the 1910 tune \"Steamboat Bill.\" The song inspired the title of the Buster Keaton film \" Steamboat Bill Jr,\" released just a few months before \"Steamboat Willie,\" which in turn may have inspired the title of the Disney short. The copyright wasn't renewed on the Keaton film and it's been in the public domain since 1956.\n\nAnother famous animal sidekick, Tigger, will join his friend Winnie the Pooh in the public domain as the book in which the bouncing tiger first appeared, \"The House at Pooh Corner,\" turns 96. Pooh, probably the most celebrated prior character to become public property, took on that status two years ago when A.A. Milne's original \"Winnie the Pooh\" entered the public domain, resulting in some truly novel uses, including this year's horror film \"Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey.\"\n\nYoung Mickey could get the same treatment.\n\n\"Now, the audience is going to set the terms,\" said Cory Doctorow, an author and activist who advocates for broader public ownership of works.\n\nJan. 1, 2024, has long been circled on the calendars of public domain watchers, but some say it serves to show how overlong it takes for U.S. works to go public, and many properties with less pedigree than Winnie or Minnie can disappear or be forgotten with their copyrights murky.\n\n\"The fact that there are works that are still recognizable and enduring after 95 years is is frankly remarkable,\" Doctorow said. \"And it makes you think about the stuff that we must have lost, that would still have currency.\"\n\nOther properties entering the U.S. public domain are Charlie Chaplin's film \"Circus,\" Virginia Woolf's novel \"Orlando\" and Bertolt Brecht's musical play \"The Threepenny Opera.\"\n\nThe current copyright term passed in 1998 brought the U.S. into closer sync with the European Union, making it unlikely Congress would extend it now. There are also now powerful companies, including Amazon with its fan-fiction-heavy publishing arm and Google with its books project, that in some cases advocate for the public domain.\n\n\"There's actually more pushback now than there was 20 some years ago when the Mickey Mouse act was passed,\" said Paul Heald, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law who specializes in copyright and international intellectual property law.\n\nIn some instances, the U.S. goes well beyond Europe, and maintains copyright on work that is already public in its country of origin, though international agreements would allow the U.S. to adopt the shorter term of other nations on work produced there.\n\nThe books of George Orwell for example, including \"Animal Farm\" and \"1984,\" both published in the 1940s, are now public domain in his native Great Britain.\n\n\"Those works aren't going to fall into the public domain in the United States for 25 years,\" Heald said. \"It would be literally costless for Congress to pass a law saying, 'we now adopt the rule of the shorter term,' which would throw a butt ton of works into the public domain over here.\""}
{"text": "# American democracy has overcome big stress tests since the 2020 election. More challenges are ahead\nBy **NICHOLAS RICCARDI**  \nDecember 31, 2023. 10:05 AM EST\n\n---\n\nOver the past three years, the world's oldest democracy has been tested in ways not seen in decades.\n\nA sitting president tried to overturn an election and his supporters stormed the Capitol to stop the winner from taking power. Supporters of that attack launched a campaign against local election offices, chasing out veteran administrators and pushing conservative states to pass new laws making it harder to vote.\n\nAt the same time, the past three years proved that American democracy was resilient.\n\nFormer President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election results failed, blocked by the constitutional system's checks and balances, and he now faces both federal and state charges for those efforts. Then the voters stepped in. In every presidential battleground state, they rejected all candidates who supported Trump's stolen election lies and were running for statewide offices that had some oversight of elections.\n\nThe election infrastructure in the country performed well, with only scattered disruptions during the 2022 midterms. New voting laws, many of which are technical and incremental, had little discernable impact on actual voting.\n\n\"Voters have stepped up to defend our democracy over the past few years,\" said Joanna Lydgate, chief executive officer of States United, which tracks those who refuse to believe in the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. \"State and local officials have done a tremendous job in protecting our free and fair elections.\"\n\nSo why all the worry? As Lydgate and anyone else who works in the pro-democracy field quickly notes, the big test - what Lydgate calls \"the Super Bowl\" - awaits in 2024.\n\nTrump is running for the White House again and has been dominating the Republican primary as the first votes approach. He has called for pardoning those prosecuted for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, continues to insist falsely that the 2020 election was \"stolen\" and says he will use the federal government to seek revenge on his political enemies.\n\nTrump has used increasingly authoritarian rhetoric as he campaigns for the GOP nomination. If he wins, allies have been planning to seed the government with loyalists so the bureaucracy doesn't hinder Trump's more controversial plans the way it did during his first term.\n\nIt's gotten to the point that Trump was recently asked by conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt whether he planned to be a dictator: \"Not at all,\" Trump responded. \"No, I'm gonna rule as somebody that's very popular with the people.\"\n\nThe 2024 election could cause all sorts of conflict, including scenarios that have notably not materialized despite widespread concern since 2020: violence at the polls, overly aggressive partisan poll watchers or breakdowns in the ballot count.\n\nIt seems unlikely, though, that Trump could return to the White House if he loses the election. That's what he failed to accomplish in 2020, and he's in a weaker position now.\n\nHis strategy then was to use Republican dominance in swing state legislatures, governorships and secretary of state offices to try to send slates of fake electors to Congress even though Democrat Joe Biden won those states and captured the presidency.\n\nSince then, Republicans have lost two of those swing state secretary of state offices - in Arizona and Nevada - as well as the governor's office in Arizona and control of the state legislatures in Michigan and Pennsylvania. In Congress, lawmakers passed a bipartisan bill closing some of the loopholes in the counting of Electoral College votes that Trump tried to exploit to stay in office, making it harder to challenge state certifications on the House floor.\n\nThe upshot is it will be far harder for Trump to try to overturn a loss in 2024 than in 2020. The most likely way he returns to the White House is by winning the election outright.\n\n\"It's not to say the risks are gone,\" said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. \"It's to say we've successfully fought the last war.\"\n\nHistory is full of examples of authoritarians who first came to office by winning a legitimate democratic election. But the risk to democracy of someone legitimately winning an election is different than the risk of a candidate trying to overturn an election loss.\n\nWhen Trump began to falsely claim he had won the 2020 election and urged Republicans to overrule their states' voters and send his electors to Congress, every GOP official with the power to do that refused. The Republican leaders of the Michigan Legislature turned down his request to overrule voters. In Georgia, where the presidential ballots were counted three times and affirmed Biden's win, Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger earned Trump's fury by rejecting him. So did then- Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and the Republican leaders of that state's legislature.\n\nSome Republicans did try to aid Trump. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton led a group of 17 GOP attorneys general in filing a lawsuit urging the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the election. The high court swiftly dismissed the case. Trump lost all but one of more than 60 lawsuits he and his allies filed in states to overturn the election, sometimes before judges he had appointed.\n\nThen in November 2022, every swing state candidate who backed Trump's effort to overturn his loss and who was running for a statewide office with a role in elections lost.\n\n\"There's little doubt our democracy has gotten dinged up in a couple of moments of late, but we have decided we like it compared to the alterative,\" said Justin Levitt, who served as adviser for democracy and voting rights for two years in the Biden White House and is now a law professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.\n\nElection deniers have been able to make gains in one area - offices where they simply have to win a Republican primary. That's meant they have taken power in local governments in many rural areas, often disrupting elections and embracing conspiracy theories or procedures such as hand-counting, which is less reliable and more time-consuming than tabulating thousands of votes on machines.\n\nThey also have been able to expand their power within Republican legislative bodies from statehouses to Congress. U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who helped organize a brief supporting the quickly thrown-out lawsuit to overturn Biden's victory, is now the House speaker.\n\nIf Johnson retains his speakership in January 2025, he could be in a position to disrupt certification of a Biden victory. Republicans more willing to subvert democracy also could have greater sway in state legislatures.\n\nThen there's the view of Trump backers. They report being even more worried about democracy than those who oppose him. Normally members of the party out of power feels like democracy isn't working as well for them, but Trump's situation is different. He's the first president in history to face prosecution and is promoting the narrative that he's being persecuted by his likely general election opponent.\n\nTrump says the criminal cases and separate attempts to bar him from the ballot under the insurrection clause of the Constitution are a form of election interference.\n\nThe Colorado Supreme Court found his role in the Jan. 6 attack was sufficient grounds to remove him from the state's ballot under the 14th Amendment, a ruling Trump's campaign said it will appeal soon to the U.S. Supreme Court, where three of his nominees help form the conservative majority. On Thursday, Maine's Democratic secretary of state struck Trump from that state's primary ballot, becoming the first election official to take such action. Shenna Bellows suspended her ruling until Maine's court system rules on the case.\n\nWhile campaigning, Trump has adopted an \"I'm rubber and you're glue\" approach, accusing Biden of being the actual threat to democracy.\n\nA more revealing argument comes from a contention one of the former president's attorneys made before the Colorado Supreme Court. Scott Gessler, a former Colorado secretary of state, was arguing against attempts by a liberal group to boot Trump from the ballot.\n\n\"If the entire nation chooses someone to be president, can that be an insurrection or is that a democratic choice?\" Gessler asked.\n\nGessler was addressing the hypothetical case of a former Confederate winning the White House in the 19th century, but it's easy to see how this applies to the election before us.\n\nOr, as Levitt said of American democracy: \"It is kind of up to us how resilient we make it.\""}
{"text": "# On New Year's Eve, DeSantis urges crowd to defy odds and help him 'win the Iowa caucuses'\nBy **THOMAS BEAUMONT**  \nJanuary 1, 2024. 12:12 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WEST DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)** - To underscore how much Iowa means to Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor was unwilling to put his campaigning there on hold even in the waning hours of 2023.\n\nAt a New Year's Eve event in a Sheraton Hotel ballroom in West Des Moines, jeans and cowboy boots outnumbered tuxedos and cocktail dresses, and Miller Lite seemed more popular than champagne.\n\nBut the modesty of the affair, where roughly 200 people turned out for the last campaign event of the busy year in Iowa, belied its importance to the host, who has wagered the future of his Republican bid for president on the leadoff Iowa caucuses, just two weeks away.\n\n\"Are you ready to work hard over these next two weeks and win the Iowa caucuses?\" DeSantis asked supporters who turned out at the suburban hotel Sunday evening.\n\nWhile Donald Trump prepares to return this week for a series of rallies, DeSantis did not leave Iowa alone during the week between Christmas and New Year's. He campaigned in the suburbs of Des Moines, Cedar Rapids and Davenport, revisiting spots he had gone to in 2023 as part of his drive to touch all 99 of Iowa's counties as a gesture of commitment to the leadoff nominating contests.\n\nBut Trump holds a large advantage in Iowa polls as well as a sophisticated campaign organization in the state, threatening to deny DeSantis the win he needs to justify his claim to be the leading alternative to the former president.\n\nAppearing Sunday night with his wife, Casey, and their young children, DeSantis urged his audience to defy the odds. \"I think we have an opportunity to just make a statement that in this country it's we the people that ultimately decide these things,\" he said. \"Because I think you have a lot of media, they don't think you even matter.\"\n\nDeSantis wasn't alone in Iowa between Christmas and New Year's, a period typically free from politics. The Jan. 15 caucuses' earlier-than-usual spot on the election-year calendar lured former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley to eastern Iowa stops Friday and Saturday, as she competes with DeSantis as a Trump alternative.\n\nBiotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy also stormed the state, trying to remain part of the conversation despite curtailing his advertising spending. Ramaswamy held more than two dozen Iowa events last week and over the weekend.\n\nNo one has more riding on Iowa than DeSantis, who reshuffled a campaign viewed early as national in scope after summer staff shakeups prompted by overspending and internal disagreements. He stood onstage Sunday evening in West Des Moines with Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and evangelical Christian leader Bob Vander Plaats, who have risked their own influence by backing DeSantis.\n\nDeSantis and his supporters asked the audience Sunday to ignore polls that show him trailing Trump appreciably.\n\n\"Everywhere I go the polls do not match up with reality,\" Vander Plaats told the crowd. \"Going up in northwest Iowa - heavy Trump country - they all say the same thing to me. They like what he did, but it's time to turn the page.\"\n\nDeSantis has an unrelenting Iowa schedule ahead of him beginning early this week. Trump, who has drawn hundreds - even thousands - more to fewer events, plans his own blitz over the final two weeks, including in deeply conservative northwest Iowa."}
{"text": "# Maine bars Trump from ballot as US Supreme Court weighs states' authority to block former president\nBy **NICHOLAS RICCARDI** and **DAVID SHARP**  \nDecember 29, 2023. 12:27 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**PORTLAND, Maine (AP)** - Maine's Democratic secretary of state on Thursday removed former President Donald Trump from the state's presidential primary ballot under the Constitution's insurrection clause, becoming the first election official to take action unilaterally as the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to decide whether Trump remains eligible to return to the White House.\n\nThe decision by Secretary of State Shenna Bellows follows a ruling earlier this month by the Colorado Supreme Court that booted Trump from the ballot there under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. That decision has been stayed until the U.S. Supreme Court decides whether Trump is barred by the Civil War-era provision, which prohibits those who \"engaged in insurrection\" from holding office.\n\nThe Trump campaign said it would appeal Bellows' decision to Maine's state courts, and Bellows suspended her ruling until that court system rules on the case. In the end, it is likely that the nation's highest court will have the final say on whether Trump appears on the ballot in Maine and in the other states.\n\nBellows found that Trump could no longer run for his prior job because his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol violated Section 3, which bans from office those who \"engaged in insurrection.\" Bellows made the ruling after some state residents, including a bipartisan group of former lawmakers, challenged Trump's position on the ballot.\n\n\"I do not reach this conclusion lightly,\" Bellows wrote in her 34-page decision. \"I am mindful that no Secretary of State has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access based on Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. I am also mindful, however, that no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection.\"\n\nThe Trump campaign immediately slammed the ruling. \"We are witnessing, in real-time, the attempted theft of an election and the disenfranchisement of the American voter,\" campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement.\n\nLegal experts said that Thursday's ruling demonstrates the need for the nation's highest court, which has never ruled on Section 3, to clarify what states can do.\n\n\"It is clear that these decisions are going to keep popping up, and inconsistent decisions reached (like the many states keeping Trump on the ballot over challenges) until there is final and decisive guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court,\" Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California-Los Angeles, wrote in response to the Maine decision. \"It seems a certainty that SCOTUS will have to address the merits sooner or later.\"\n\nWhile Maine has just four electoral votes, it's one of two states to split them. Trump won one of Maine's electors in 2020, so having him off the ballot there, should he emerge as the Republican general election candidate, could have outsized implications in a race that is expected to be narrowly decided.\n\nThat's in contrast to Colorado, which Trump lost by 13 percentage points in 2020 and where he wasn't expected to compete in November if he wins the Republican presidential nomination.\n\nIn her decision, Bellows acknowledged that the U.S. Supreme Court will probably have the final word but said it was important she did her official duty.\n\nThat won her praise from the former state lawmakers who filed one of the petitions forcing her to consider the case.\n\n\"Secretary Bellows showed great courage in her ruling, and we look forward to helping her defend her judicious and correct decision in court. No elected official is above the law or our constitution, and today's ruling reaffirms this most important of American principles,\" Republican Kimberley Rosen, independent Thomas Saviello and Democrat Ethan Strimling said in a statement.\n\nBut other Republicans in the state were outraged.\n\n\"The Secretary of State's decision would deny thousands of Mainers the opportunity to vote for the candidate of their choice, and it should be overturned,\" U.S. Sen. Susan Collins wrote on the social media site X.\n\n\"This is a sham decision that mimics Third World dictatorships,\" Maine's House Republican leader, Billy Bob Faulkingham, said in a statement. \"It will not stand legal scrutiny. People have a right to choose their leaders devoid of mindless decisions by partisan hacks.\"\n\nThe criticism wasn't just along normal partisan lines, though. Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat who represents Maine's 2nd congressional district that Trump won in 2020, noted on X that he'd voted to impeach Trump for the Jan. 6 attack and doesn't believe he should win next year's election.\n\n\"However, we are a nation of laws, and therefore until he is actually found guilty of the crime of insurrection, he should be allowed on the ballot,\" Golden wrote.\n\nThe Trump campaign on Tuesday requested that Bellows disqualify herself from the case because she'd previously tweeted that Jan. 6 was an \"insurrection\" and bemoaned that Trump was acquitted in his impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate after the capitol attack. She refused to step aside.\n\n\"My decision was based exclusively on the record presented to me at the hearing and was in no way influenced by my political affiliation or personal views about the events of Jan. 6, 2021,\" Bellows told the Associated Press Thursday night.\n\nBellows is a former head of the Maine chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. All seven of the justices of the Colorado Supreme Court, which split 4-3 on whether to become the first court in history to declare a presidential candidate ineligible under Section 3, were appointed by Democrats. Two Washington, D.C.-based liberal groups have launched the most serious prior challenges to Trump, in Colorado and a handful of other states.\n\nThat's led Trump to contend the dozens of lawsuits nationwide seeking to remove him from the ballot under Section 3 are a Democratic plot to end his campaign. But some of the most prominent advocates have been conservative legal theorists who argue that the text of the Constitution makes the former president ineligible to run again, just as if he failed to clear the document's age threshold - 35 years old - for the office.\n\nLikewise, until Bellows' decision, every top state election official, whether Democrat or Republican, had rejected requests to bar Trump from the ballot, saying they didn't have the power to remove him unless ordered to do so by a court.\n\nIn California, which has the largest trove of delegates in the 2024 presidential contest, Trump was included on the certified list of candidates released Thursday for the state's March 5 primary.\n\nSecretary of State Shirley Weber faced political pressure to reject Trump's candidacy in the state, including from Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, a fellow Democrat who urged her in a Dec. 20 letter to \"explore every legal option\" to remove the former president from the California ballot. Weber later responded that she was guided by \"the rule of law,\" and indicated the proper venue to resolve ballot challenges was in the courts.\n\nThe timing on the U.S. Supreme Court's decision is unclear, but both sides want it fast. Colorado's Republican Party appealed the Colorado high court decision on Wednesday, urging an expedited schedule, and Trump is also expected to file an appeal within the week. The petitioners in the Colorado case on Thursday urged the nation's highest court to adopt an even faster schedule so it could rule before March 5, known as Super Tuesday, when 16 states, including Colorado and Maine, are scheduled to vote in the Republican presidential nominating process.\n\nThe high court needs to formally accept the case first, but legal experts consider that a certainty. The Section 3 cases seem tailor-made for the Supreme Court, addressing an area of U.S. governance where there's scant judicial guidance.\n\nThe clause was added in 1868 to keep defeated Confederates from returning to their former positions of power in local and federal government. It prohibits anyone who broke an oath to \"support\" the Constitution from holding office. The provision was used to bar a wide range of ex-Confederates from positions ranging from local sheriff to Congress, but fell into disuse after an 1872 congressional amnesty for most former Confederates.\n\nLegal historians believe the only time the provision was used in the 20th Century was in 1919, when it was cited to deny a House seat to a socialist who had opposed U.S. involvement in World War I. But since the Jan. 6 attack, it has been revived.\n\nLast year, it was cited by a court to remove a rural New Mexico County Commissioner who had entered the Capitol on Jan. 6. One liberal group tried to remove Republican Reps. Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene from the 2022 ballot under the provision, but Cawthorn lost his primary so his case was thrown out, and a judge ruled for Greene."}
{"text": "# Americans sour on the primary election process and major political parties, an AP-NORC poll says\nBy **NICHOLAS RICCARDI** and **LINLEY SANDERS**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 7:56 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - With the GOP presidential primaries just about to start, many Republicans aren't certain that votes will be counted correctly in their contest, as pessimism spreads about the future of both the Democratic and Republican parties, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.\n\nAbout one-third of Republicans say they have a \"great deal\" or \"quite a bit\" of confidence that votes in the Republican primary elections and caucuses will be counted correctly. About three in 10 Republicans report a \"moderate\" amount of confidence, and 32% say they have \"only a little\" or \"none at all.\" In contrast, 72% of Democrats have high confidence their party will count votes accurately in its primary contests. Democrats are also slightly more likely than Republicans to have a high level of confidence in the Republican Party's vote count being accurate.\n\nRepublicans continue to be broadly doubtful about votes being counted accurately - in the early contests or beyond them. About one-quarter of Republicans say they have at least \"quite a bit\" of confidence that the votes in the 2024 presidential election will be counted accurately, significantly lower than Democrats. Slightly fewer than half of U.S. adults overall (46%) believe the same, which is in line with an AP-NORC poll conducted in June.\n\nThe skepticism among Republicans comes after years of former President Donald Trump falsely blaming his 2020 loss on election fraud. Federal and state election officials and Trump's own attorney general have said there is no credible evidence the election was tainted. The former president's allegations of fraud were also roundly rejected by courts, including by judges Trump appointed.\n\n\"Nothing will be fair because the last election was rigged,\" said Julie Duggan, 32, of Chicago, a Trump voter, referring to 2020. \"I don't trust any of them at this point.\"\n\nThe AP-NORC poll found a widespread lack of trust in both major political parties among U.S. adults overall.\n\nAbout one-quarter of U.S. adults say they have \"only a little\" confidence or \"none at all\" that both the Democratic Party and Republican Party have a fair process for selecting a presidential nominee. About half of independents have that low level of confidence in both party's processes, compared with one-quarter of Republicans and 19% of Democrats.\n\nSlightly fewer than half of U.S. adults - 46% - say they are pessimistic about the way the country's leaders are chosen.\n\nAbout half of U.S. adults are pessimistic about the future of the Republican Party, including one-third of Republicans and 45% of independents. The poll found 45% of U.S. adults are pessimistic about the future of the Democratic Party, including about one-quarter of Democrats and 41% of independents.\n\n\"The way they're spending our money, sending it all over the world and not protecting our people here in the United States of America,\" said Gary Jackson, a 65-year-old retired trucker and Republican in Boise, Idaho. \"Right now, I'm not impressed with either party.\"\n\nChristine Allen, a political independent in Gambrills, Maryland, sees her state's last governor, Larry Hogan, a moderate Republican, as a model for the country. But Hogan refused to run in the GOP presidential primary, which she sees as emblematic of how the two-party system prevents talented leaders from holding office,\n\n\"Everybody right now is a bunch of children, stomping their feet until they get their way,\" Allen, 44, said. \"Everybody's at fault here. There's no winners.\"\n\nNonetheless, Allen thinks the primaries will be fair. \"They're fairer than the Electoral College,\" she said.\n\nEven those who identify with the two political parties are uneasy about whom their organizations will nominate. A recent AP-NORC poll found that Democrats and Republicans are also not especially confident that their party's primary contests will result in a candidate who can win the general election in November. Additionally, there are some doubts on both sides that the emerging candidates will represent their party's views or Americans overall.\n\nOnly three in 10 Democrats say they are confident the Democratic party's process will result in a candidate whose views represent most Americans. About one-quarter of Democrats believe the process will produce a candidate whose views represent their own. Similarly, about three in 10 Republicans say the GOP process will produce a candidate who represents a majority of Americans. About one-third of Republicans expect they'll get a nominee whose views represent their own.\n\nMark Richards, a 33-year-old middle school teacher in Toledo, Ohio, and a Democrat, said he expects President Joe Biden will be nominated again by the party, despite his low job approval numbers. The incumbent faces only token opposition in the Democratic presidential primary.\n\n\"I feel like there's got to be someone better out there, but I don't think another Democrat is going to unseat Joe Biden,\" Richards said.\n\nThough Richards thinks the primaries will be fair and the votes accurately counted, he sees the nominating system as inherently flawed. \"It's all about money, who can get the most money from PACs and Super PACs,\" he said, referring to political committees that donate to candidates or spend millions of dollars on their behalf.\n\nThe poll of 1,074 adults was conducted Nov. 30-Dec. 4, 2023, using a sample drawn from NORC's probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, designed to represent the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points."}
{"text": "# Punishing their own but passing few laws, a Congress in chaos leaves much to do in 2024\nBy **LISA MASCARO**  \nDecember 22, 2023. 12:05 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - This Congress started with showy bluster, a bitter 15-round, multi-day spectacle to elect a House speaker, a Republican who vowed to \"never quit,\" and then did just that.\n\nHouse lawmakers proceeded not only to oust the GOP speaker, they also punished their own colleagues with censures and expulsion, launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden and were barely able to conduct the basics of governing by keeping federal offices from shuttering.\n\nWhile this first year of the 118th Congress was a historic one, thanks to the dizzying turmoil coming from the Republicans on the House side of the Capitol, next year is headed toward more of the same. With just 27 bills and resolutions signed into law, not counting a few board appointments, it's among the most do-nothing sessions of Congress in recent times.\n\n\"This fall has been a very actively stupid political environment,\" said Rep. Patrick McHenry, the bow-tie-wearing Republican from North Carolina, who emerged as a voice of reason as the interim House speaker leading the chamber during the upheaval.\n\nWhile Americans typically give low marks to Congress, as the branch of government closest to the people, it's still the main venue the U.S. relies on, at times more so than the presidency or the courts, to work out the nation's problems and challenges.\n\nThe need for a functioning Congress - what one scholar calls \"the place\" where it all happens - is even more apparent heading into a tumultuous presidential election year and with hot wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East.\n\n\"People's expectations for this Congress were so low, and so just doing the bare minimum seems like a passing grade,\" said Philip Wallach, author of \"Why Congress\" and a senior scholar at the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington.\n\nHe said he's grading this Congress on a curve. \"I see this as symptoms rather than causes - symptoms of a lot of sort of institutional and cultural breakdowns or decay that have led to a lot of really bad feelings and a lot of desire to lash out across the aisle,\" he said.\n\nNext year has its own challenges ahead with Biden facing a potential rematch against Donald Trump, the former president and Republican party front-runner. Trump's loss in 2020 resulted in his supporters laying siege to the U.S. Capitol, and a charge of insurrection led to his second impeachment, for which he was acquitted by the Senate. It now threatens his removal from the Colorado ballot.\n\nSenate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said \"the dark cloud of Donald Trump looms\" as the GOP tries to find its way.\n\n\"We're going to persevere,\" Schumer said in an interview with The Associated Press, listing bills to lower the price of insulin, ensure child safety online and others he is lining up for the new year.\n\nWhile the House Republicans, in majority control, led the chaos, including the removal of indicted GOP Rep. George Santos of New York, the Senate, despite its proclivity toward moderation, was not immune to the dysfunction.\n\nOne single Republican, Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, threw the Defense Department into crisis by blocking the promotions of hundreds of military officers, including some of the nation's most essential four-star generals. He finally relented just before the holiday recess.\n\nAnd as Ukraine fights for its political survival against the Russian invasion, senators tried, and failed, to broker a U.S.-Mexico border security deal demanded by Republicans in exchange for providing more American military aid to the Western ally - despite a personal visit from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pleading to help.\n\n\"I'm not very happy with how productive the Senate has been this year, and hopefully it will get better,\" acknowledged Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.\n\nTrump's influence is especially felt in the border security talks as the former president intensifies his long history of lashing out at immigrants to the U.S. in alarming language evocative of World War II. It's putting pressure on his party as Republicans follow his lead.\n\nThe chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said he's \"heartsick\" Congress failed to approve Ukraine aid before year's end. But he remains confident it will get done in the new year.\n\nHeading into 2024, new House Speaker Mike Johnson will start the year under the same pressure to pass legislation to keep the government funded, starting Jan. 19, that led to then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy's ouster after he brokered a budget-cutting debt deal with Biden.\n\nThe Republican-era speakers are being forced to relinquish control, a bottom-up approach, as the hard-right Freedom Caucus and its allies, many aligned with Trump, refuse to go along with compromises emanating from the Speaker's office.\n\nThe GOP's right flank is fueling the revolt, deploying rarely used procedural tactics to advance their own ideas and halt those of Republican leadership.\n\nMuch like the \"motion to vacate,\" which was used to eject McCarthy, the right wing is relying on privileged resolutions to censure Democrats and try to impeach Biden and others, seizing control of the House floor.\n\nAnd in a series of stunning rebukes to GOP leadership, enough Republican lawmakers opposed procedural rules to advance the few major bills that did become law this year - to keep the government running and authorize military programs - that the Republican speakers had no choice but to rush to Democrats for help.\n\n\"The speakers are just trying to cope,\" Wallach said.\n\nWhile House Republicans passed a strict border security bill that the Senate refused to consider, Johnson, in a sign of challenges ahead, urged Biden on Thursday to act on his own, without Congress, to stem record numbers of migrant arrivals.\n\n\"It must start with you,\" Johnson wrote. \"I urge you to immediately take executive actions.\"\n\nIt's a shift from Nancy Pelosi's run as speaker, when the powerful gavel wielded political fear and discipline, but also legislative results. The last Congress, among the most productive in decades, passed more than 300 pieces of legislation over two years, including major infrastructure and climate change bills.\n\nBy year's end, it wasn't just the ousted McCarthy calling it quits, but dozens of lawmakers heading for the exits.\n\nAfter his stint as interim speaker, McHenry, a powerful committee chairman with allies across Congress, promptly announced he, too, would be retiring at the end of his term, as his far-right colleagues claim increasing power.\n\n\"We need people to be realists, not just blind ideologues,\" he said."}
{"text": "# Presidential candidate Haley cheers on Iowa hoops star Caitlin Clark in between campaign stops\nBy **HANNAH FINGERHUT**  \nDecember 30, 2023. 8:13 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP)** - Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley finally got her wish to see Iowa basketball star Caitlin Clark, catching the fourth-ranked Hawkeyes in between campaign stops Saturday.\n\nHaley walked into Carver-Hawkeye Arena alongside her son, Nalin, wearing an Iowa button on her jacket. The former South Carolina governor called Iowa coach Lisa Bluder a \"rock star\" and made a reference to her home-state Gamecocks, the current No. 1 women's basketball team.\n\n\"We are used to women's basketball in South Carolina,\" Haley said. \"We're excited, so glad to be here. Go Lady Hawkeyes.\" Last March, in an NCAA tournament semifinal, Clark scored 41 points as Iowa ended the perfect season of defending champion South Carolina.\n\nAt the game, Haley chatted with former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad and David Bluder, the coach's husband.\n\nEven as some fans approached Haley as she took her seat, all eyes were on Clark, the reigning Associated Press national player of the year.\n\nClark, who has earned fame and fortune with her once-in-a-generation game, has about 20,000 more followers on Instagram than does Haley, a former U.N. ambassador.\n\nEarlier Saturday, at an appearance in Coralville, Haley flubbed the Iowa star's name, calling her \"Caitlin Collins,\" perhaps with CNN's Kaitlan Collins in mind.\n\nBut there's no doubt Haley knows all about Clark. During a stop in Ankeny in November, Haley said that if there was a way to get to a game and meet Clark, she would be there.\n\nCampaigning in Iowa Friday and Saturday, Haley attempted to pivot from an awkward moment in New Hampshire, when she was asked at a town hall event about the reason for the Civil War and didn't include slavery in her response. During four similar events in eastern Iowa, addressing more than 500 people in total, Haley didn't mentioned the episode and was never asked about it during the Q&A.\n\nHaley is hoping to build on momentum as the Jan. 15 Iowa caucuses approach battling Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for what may amount to a second-place finish. Former President Donald Trump continues to be a commanding force in the party, frustrating some Iowa voters who want a more competitive race."}
{"text": "# Activists who engage with voters of color are looking for messages that will resonate in 2024\nBy **AYANNA ALEXANDER** and **GARY FIELDS**  \nDecember 30, 2023. 8:32 AM EST\n\n---\n\nWASHINGTON (AP) - This year's elections in Louisiana didn't go the way that voting rights advocate Ashley Shelton had hoped, with the far-right conservative attorney general replacing a term-limited Democratic governor and consolidating Republican control in the state.\n\nTurnout was just 37%, despite the efforts of activists like her.\n\n\"Even when you work hard and you do all the things you're supposed to, you get an unfortunate outcome, which was these statewide elections,\" said Shelton, the executive director of Power Coalition for Equity & Justice in Louisiana.\n\nShe said it will be a challenge to regain trust from the communities of color she typically focuses on, mostly because of a constant drumbeat of disappointments in recent years, from attacks on voting rights to the failure of a sweeping student loan forgiveness plan. While Louisiana is not a battleground for national races, Shelton's experience in the state serves as a window into some of the challenges President Joe Biden faces as his reelection campaign plans strategies to engage the diverse communities that helped him win in 2020.\n\nShelton and other activists say they already are looking for messages that will resonate with voters, despite fighting through their own fatigue. That follows recent polling showing that adults in the United States are broadly unenthusiastic about a rematch between Biden and former President Donald Trump at the top of the ticket.\n\n\"I don't have the luxury of being tired or frustrated or exasperated,\" she said. \"I have to just get back in the community with folks and understand how to reconnect them to the power in their voice.\"\n\nVoting advocacy groups that were essential to Biden's victory are coming into the new year expecting to have a difficult time rebuilding the same level of support, especially among voters of color and younger voters.\n\nJust 33% of nonwhite adults under age 45 approve of Biden's job performance, according to the most recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs research poll. Just as concerning for the Biden camp is the precipitous drop he has seen overall among Black and Hispanic adults from his first months in office, when his approval rating was 86% among Black adults, 63% among Hispanic adults and 49% among white adults. Now those approval rate stand at 50%, 36% and 40%, respectively.\n\nDemocratic campaign strategists say they are encouraging more robust outreach to Black voters in key states. Biden's campaign said it already is laying the groundwork for just such an effort.\n\nVoting activists said they know voters of color are essential for Biden and cited myriad reasons for the drop in support. Among them is the failure to pass a law that would have strengthened voting rights, after numerous Republican-controlled states passed restrictions in the past few years, and Biden's promise about student loan forgiveness, only to see the Supreme Court kill it.\n\n\"The candidates who are predicted to be at the top of the ballot in 2024 do pose an issue,\" said Lily Trieu, executive director of Asian Texans for Justice. \"A lot of young people, especially, are feeling really disillusioned with Biden.\"\n\nThe Rev. Frederick Haynes, president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the Chicago-based civil rights group founded more than 50 years ago by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, said the Democratic Party needs to tell voters what it has accomplished and what it plans to do beyond next year's election.\n\n\"Rainbow PUSH will be challenging the administration: What are you doing to get the message through the appropriate mediums to the communities that you say you're serving?\" Haynes said.\n\nThe Biden campaign agrees and said it is highlighting gains that include delivering on broadband internet access, especially in communities of color, reducing unemployment rates and diversifying the federal judiciary, said Quentin Fulks, the principal deputy campaign manager.\n\nFulks added that the campaign also has begun organizing programs in two crucial states, Arizona and Wisconsin, to communicate with Latino, Black and young voters.\n\n\"There's a lot at stake here, and our job as a campaign is to communicate that. But it has to be mixed with also, 'What have you done for me and what has the administration done and what will this administration continue to do to try to improve the lives of people?'\" Fulks said. \"Our campaign is not taking our foot off the gas, nor are we taking any of these voters for granted.\"\n\nThe Trump campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.\n\nThe Georgia Black Republican Council also is planning a radio and billboard campaign highlighting issues it thinks are pertinent to Black voters in a state expected to be closely contested. Among the topics are school choice, immigration and abortion. The organization has plans to conduct listening sessions at Black churches across the state.\n\nOther voting advocates say their messages to communities of color will range from successes, such as continued low unemployment, to explanations about why priorities such as federal voting and police overhaul legislation failed. Statewide issues will be a critical part of their messaging, highlighting book bans, gerrymandered districts and abortion.\n\nElsie Cooke-Holmes, international president of Delta Sigma Theta, a historically Black sorority, said her organization is developing a national strategy and will hold webinars with members to fashion strategies for local communities.\n\nEven if voters are not excited about the presidential race, they have to be educated about how issues will affect them \"not only at the top of the ticket but all the way up and down the ballot,\" Cooke-Holmes said. \"So much of what has been decided, especially with these voter suppression laws, is certainly at the state level and the local level. We want to make sure that that education happens and that message is crafted.\"\n\nThe groups also plan to highlight some of the direct attacks on their efforts and priorities. Since 2021, for example, about 10 states have attempted to create or increase criminal penalties and fines for individuals and groups that assist voters. Several of those laws faced legal challenges.\n\nRecently, a panel of three federal appeals court judges ruled that private individuals and groups do not have the ability to sue under a key section of the Voting Rights Act. It's another example of an attack on the tools that remain to protect voters, said Cesar Ruiz, an associate counsel with a focus on voting rights for LatinoJustice.\n\nYterenickia Bell, senior director of the And Still I Vote Program at the Leadership Conference Education Fund, will be targeting women of color between age 18 and 35 in 11 states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.\n\n\"We have to remind them when we go to that door that the country is only as successful as the young people who are engaged,\" she said, pointing out that many of the front-line civil rights activists of the 1960s were their age at the time.\n\nStudent debt, climate change, health care, abortion and reproductive care will be the selling points to that targeted group, Bell said.\n\n\"Black voters are pragmatic voters\" and the younger ones are less party-centric and more focused on issues, said LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter. \"At the end of the day, this cannot be an election just around the candidates. It can't be just Trump. It can't be just about Biden. It really has to be, 'How does democracy protect us?'\"\n\nMishara Davis, director of issue and electoral organizing at State Voices, said the message cannot be one size fits all.\n\n\"The same messaging that we use for young Black students in Georgia may look a little different than when we're speaking to white women in Wyoming,\" Davis said. \"Or we're speaking to a church congregation in Arkansas compared to someone in Detroit.\"\n\nThat method was proved in Ohio last fall when voters approved a constitutional amendment that guaranteed the right to abortion, said Prentiss Haney, co-executive director of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. He said the group registered at least 20,000 people, 90% of whom were Black voters, and knocked on more than 200,000 doors, making their outreach the largest Black voter engagement program in the state.\n\nThe key was not treating the Black community as if it was monolithic, he said. The group is aiming to take a similar approach in 2024, when Ohio will have one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country.\n\n\"What we did is understand that there's diversity in values and ideology, especially in Black voters anywhere in the country, and especially in Ohio,\" Haney said.\n\nAs long as the messaging is tailored to meet the needs of a diverse audience and prioritizes the issues they care most about - rather than focusing on personalities and candidates - it will be successful, said Rev. William Barber, co-founder of the Poor People's Campaign.\n\nThe questions should be about who supports health care, higher wages, voting rights and bodily autonomy, he said.\n\nThe ground troops might be worn down, Barber said, but \"there's two kinds of tired: There's a tired when I'm going to quit, and there's a sick-and-tired but I'm not going to quit because I know I have the power to change this.\""}
{"text": "# Trump's dominance in GOP frustrates some in Iowa eager for a competitive campaign\nBy **HANNAH FINGERHUT**  \nDecember 30, 2023. 12:28 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)** - The Iowa frenzy is typically in full force by now.\n\nWith less than three weeks until the Iowa caucuses formally usher in the presidential nomination process, White House hopefuls are usually in a heated competition. They fan out across the state and pack as many events into a single day as is humanly possible - all in a bid to appeal to undecided voters and lock down support that could lift them to victory in Iowa and keep them in the race for months to come.\n\nBut as the campaign intensifies ahead of the Jan. 15 caucuses, the normal frenzy is subdued. While the schedule is filling up, former President Donald Trump is such a commanding force in the party that some voters worry the contest that normally transforms Iowa into the center of the political world may turn out to be something of a snooze.\n\n\"It's kind of frustrating,\" said Jenna Maifeld, a 19-year-old student at the University of Iowa who is eager to participate in her first caucus but is disappointed with the campaign cycle's lack of competition. \"I feel like a lot of people's voices aren't being heard.\"\n\nThere's still time for the dynamics of the race to shift. And Trump's rivals are hardly ceding the state to him, working to convince voters that his victory isn't inevitable. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has effectively centered his campaign on Iowa, pumping it with advertising and crafting a robust travel schedule of events and media availabilities. Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley is also campaigning throughout Iowa, stepping up criticism of Trump while laying the groundwork for a potentially stronger showing in New Hampshire, where the Jan. 23 primary includes more independent voters.\n\nThe question is whether any of those efforts will notably erode Trump's standing, a prospect some voters find unlikely at this point.\n\n\"A lot of candidates are hoping that one of these spears in his back will finally take him down, but I doubt it,\" said Nick Peters, a 31-year-old from Prairie City who is also among the Iowa Republicans frustrated by Trump's dominance.\n\nTrump enters the final stretch before the caucuses facing a host of challenges. He's the subject of 91 criminal charges related to everything from his handling of classified information to efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The Colorado Supreme Court and Maine's top election official have recently declared Trump ineligible to appear on their states' ballots, decisions the former president is likely to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.\n\nAnd Trump is embroiled in controversy over his harsh rhetoric toward immigrants, repeatedly using language that extremism experts say echoes writings from Adolf Hitler about the \"purity\" of Aryan blood, which underpinned Nazi Germany's systematic murder of millions of Jews and other \"undesirables\" before and during World War II.\n\nFor now, however, Trump's baggage appears to be doing little to deter a majority of Republican voters. In fact, Trump has sought to turn his vulnerabilities into something of an advantage, arguing that he's been indicted on behalf of his supporters. He's also aimed to turn around concerns that he poses a threat to democracy by accusing President Joe Biden of harnessing the power of government against a political rival. There's no evidence that Biden or the White House had any influence on the Justice Department's decision to criminally charge Trump.\n\nIt's Trump's impenetrable base of support that has left many feeling resigned to seeing his name on the ballot in November.\n\n\"If democracy is working fairly and if the country wants him, then it's going to be him,\" said Dylan Kooiman, a 21-year-old student at Dordt University in Sioux Center, Iowa, who said it would be hard for him to support Trump given his legal battles. \"It doesn't always fall the way everyone wants it.\"\n\nIowans are historically proud of the role they play at the beginning of the presidential election calendar every four years. Voters are accustomed to intimate exchanges with candidates, who pay visits to living rooms, neighborhood centers and county fairgrounds in an effort to connect and persuade.\n\nThe pride Iowans take in their role in shaping the presidential contest is also matched with a perennial anxiety that their status may not last forever. The final period ahead of the 2020 caucuses, which focused on Democrats, was unusually muted because many candidates, who were also senators, had to be in Washington to participate in Trump's first impeachment trial. A bungled effort to report results contributed to Democrats removing Iowa from their leadoff spot, replacing it instead with South Carolina.\n\nRepublicans have kept Iowa in the opening position in the 2024 campaign. But like so many traditions, Trump has abandoned some long held Iowa political practices, particularly when it comes to retail campaigning. He's largely traded living rooms for rallies, prompting some criticism that he's taking Iowa for granted.\n\nTrump is stepping up his efforts in the closing weeks to prove that he's willing to work for a win that's so commanding that his rivals will have to give up. He is, for example, taking the rare step of holding four campaign events over two days in early January, appearing in rural western Iowa, in industrial eastern Iowa along the Mississippi River and stops in between.\n\nIf he's successful, he may be on a path to a race that few Americans appear eager to embrace. Nearly 3 in 10 U.S. adults, or 28%, say they would be dissatisfied with both Trump and Biden becoming their parties' respective nominees, a recent AP-NORC poll showed.\n\nIndependents (43%) are more likely than Democrats (28%) or Republicans (20%) to express their displeasure with both men gaining party nominations.\n\nRick Hyndman may be one of the thousands of Iowans who wants to support Trump again, but he also thinks Trump needs to speak more to the middle.\n\nIn line to attend a Trump rally in Coralville, the 70-year-old local retiree was noncommittal, waiting to hear some signals from the former president that he could appeal to independents to ensure his electability in the general election. Hyndman thinks he could, by focusing on the issues and avoiding putting other people down.\n\nDespite that concern, Hyndman thinks neither DeSantis nor Haley can beat him.\n\n\"I don't see anybody stepping up,\" he said. \"We've been waiting.\""}
{"text": "# Maine secretary of state who opted to keep Trump off primary ballot is facing threat of impeachment\nBy **DAVID SHARP**  \nDecember 29, 2023. 7:28 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PORTLAND, Maine (AP)** - Maine's top election official could face an impeachment attempt in the state Legislature over her decision to keep former President Donald Trump off the Republican primary ballot.\n\nAt least one Republican lawmaker has vowed to pursue impeachment against Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows despite long odds in the Democratic-controlled Legislature.\n\nBellows said Friday that she had no comment on the impeachment effort, but said she was duty-bound by state law to make a determination on three challenges brought by registered Maine voters. She reiterated that she suspended her decision pending an anticipated appeal by Trump in Superior Court.\n\n\"Under Maine law, I have not only the authority but the obligation to act,\" she said. \"I will follow the Constitution and the rule of law as directed by the courts,\" she added.\n\nBellows' decision Thursday followed a ruling earlier this month by the Colorado Supreme Court that removed Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. That decision is on hold until the U.S. Supreme Court decides whether Trump violated the Civil War-era provision prohibiting those who \"engaged in insurrection\" from holding office.\n\n\"In 150 years, no candidate was kept off a ballot for engaging in an insurrection. It's now happened twice to Donald Trump in the last two weeks. There will be major pressure on the Supreme Court to offer clarity very soon,\" said Derek Muller, a Notre Dame Law School professor and election law scholar.\n\nIn Maine, state Rep. John Andrews, who sits on the Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee, called the decision \"hyper-partisanship on full display\" as he pressed for an impeachment proceeding. He said he sent a notice to the state revisor's office for a joint order to set the wheels in motion ahead of lawmakers' return to Augusta next week.\n\n\"There is bipartisan opposition to the extreme decision made by the secretary of state. She has clearly overstepped her authority. It remains to be seen if her effort at voter suppression will garner enough Democrat support to remove her from her position,\" said House Republican leader Billy Bob Faulkingham.\n\nThe decision exposed Bellows to hate and vitriol on social media - along with posts showing support - and her office said Bellows and members of her staff were subjected to threats, something she called \"unacceptable.\"\n\n\"My obligation is to the Constitution and the rule of law. It's the Constitution and the rule of law that make our Democratic Republic so great. No one should be threatened for doing their job,\" she said Friday evening.\n\n\"I hope those people who are engaging in angry and threatening communications consider the impact of their words and actions,\" she added.\n\nAmong Maine's congressional delegation, only Democratic U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, who represents the liberal 1st Congressional District, supported Bellows' conclusion that Trump incited an insurrection, justifying his removal from the March 5 primary ballot.\n\nU.S. Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, said Friday that absent a final judicial determination on the issue of insurrection, the decision on whether Trump should be considered for president \"should rest with the people as expressed in free and fair elections.\"\n\nU.S. Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat representing the 2nd Congressional District, agreed that \"until (Trump) is found guilty of the crime of insurrection, he should be allowed on the ballot.\"\n\nU.S. Sen. Susan Collins, the state's senior senator, was one of a handful of Republicans to vote to convict Trump during his second impeachment trial, and she criticized him in a floor speech for failing to obey his oath of office.\n\nBut she nonetheless disagreed with Bellows' decision. \"Maine voters should decide who wins the election, not a secretary of state chosen by the Legislature,\" she said."}
{"text": "# Top Hamas official Saleh Arouri, who headed West Bank operations, killed in Beirut blast\nBy **BASSEM MROUE**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 12:14 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BEIRUT (AP)** - An explosion in Beirut on Tuesday killed Saleh Arouri, a top official with the Palestinian militant group Hamas and three others, officials with Hamas and the Lebanese group Hezbollah said.\n\nLebanon's state-run National News Agency said the blast killed four people and was carried out by an Israeli drone. Israeli officials declined to comment.\n\nIf Israel is behind the attack it could mark a major escalation in the Middle East conflict. Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has vowed to retaliate against any Israeli targeting of Palestinian officials in Lebanon.\n\nHamas official Bassem Naim confirmed to The Associated Press that Arouri was killed in the blast. A Hezbollah official speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations also said Arouri was killed.\n\nArouri, one of the founders of Hamas' military wing, had headed the group's presence in the West Bank. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had threatened to kill him even before the Hamas-Israel war began on Oct. 7.\n\nThe explosion shook Musharafieh, one of the Lebanese capital's southern suburbs, which are a stronghold of the militant Hezbollah group, which is an ally of Hamas. The explosion caused fire in Hadi Nasrallah street south of Beirut.\n\nThe explosion came during more than two months of heavy exchanges of fire between Israeli troops and members of Hezbollah along Lebanon's southern border.\n\nSince the fighting began on Oct. 8, the fighting has been concentrated a few miles (kilometers) from the border but on several occasions Israel's air force hit Hezbollah targets deeper in Lebanon.\n\nEarlier in the day, Hezbollah said its fighters carried out several attacks along the Lebanon-Israel border targeting Israeli military posts."}
{"text": "# Israel says it will defend itself against genocide accusations at world court filed by South Africa\nBy **WAFAA SHURAFA**, **SAMY MAGDY**, and **MELANIE LIDMAN**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 12:12 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**TEL AVIV, Israel (AP)** - Israel will defend itself before the United Nation's top court against charges that it has engaged in genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, officials said Tuesday, setting the stage for what is likely to be a landmark case in international law.\n\nSouth Africa launched the case Friday at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, Netherlands, saying the Israeli military campaign targeting Hamas has resulted in enough death, destruction and humanitarian crisis in Gaza to meet the threshold of genocide under international law. South Africa asked the court to order Israel to halt its attacks in Gaza.\n\nIsrael rarely cooperates in international court cases against it, dismissing the United Nations and international tribunals as unfair and biased. Its decision to respond to the charge signals that the government is concerned about the potential damage to its reputation.\n\nThe genocide charge strikes at the heart of Israel's national identity. The country sees itself as a bulwark of security for Jews after the Holocaust killed 6 million Jews, and world support for Israel's creation in Palestine in 1948 was deeply rooted in outrage over Nazi atrocities.\n\nThe convention against genocide was drawn up by world powers the same year in hopes of preventing similar atrocities.\n\nEylon Levy, an official in the Israeli prime minister's office, accused South Africa of \"giving political and legal cover\" to Hamas after its Oct. 7 attack triggered Israel's campaign.\n\n\"The state of Israel will appear before the International Court of Justice at the Hague to dispel South Africa's absurd blood libel,\" he said.\n\nIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to press ahead with the war until Hamas is crushed and the more than 100 hostages still held by the militant group in Gaza are freed, which he has said could take several more months.\n\nBut Israel is under growing international pressure to scale back the offensive ahead of a visit to the region by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has urged Israel to do more to protect Palestinian civilians. On Monday, Israel said it was withdrawing thousands of troops from other areas in a potential shift away from the massive air and ground operations that have devastated the Hamas-ruled enclave.\n\nStill, heavy fighting continued Tuesday in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.\n\nIsrael's onslaught in Gaza has been unprecedented in the century-old Mideast conflict, killing nearly 22,000 Palestinians and leveling large swaths of the tiny Mediterranean territory. Since the war began, Israel has banned entry of food, water, medicine and other supplies to Gaza's population of 2.3 million people, except for a trickle of aid that the U.N. says falls far below the territory's needs.\n\nIsrael's War Cabinet was to meet later Tuesday, Netanyahu's office said. The agenda reportedly includes a discussion on postwar arrangements for Gaza, a highly polarizing issue in Israel.\n\nUntil now, Netanyahu has not presented any plan despite repeated U.S. requests. He has rejected proposals that the Palestinian Authority, which currently administers pockets of self-rule in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, undergo reforms and then take over administration of Gaza as a precursor to Palestinian statehood.\n\n## TROOPS ROTATE OUT BUT COMBAT CONTINUES\nThe army said Monday that five brigades, or several thousand troops, would leave Gaza in the coming weeks. Still, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said it would be a mistake to think that Israel is planning on halting the war.\n\n\"The feeling that we will stop soon is incorrect,\" he said Tuesday. \"Without a clear victory, we will not be able to live in the Middle East.\"\n\nIsrael has said it's close to achieving operational control over most of northern Gaza, where ground troops have been battling militants for over two months. But Gallant said several thousand Hamas fighters are believed to still be in the north, and residents reported clashes in several parts of Gaza City, as well as in the nearby urban Jabaliya refugee camp.\n\nFierce fighting has continued in other areas of the Palestinian territory, especially the south, where many of Hamas' forces remain intact and where most of Gaza's population has fled.\n\nPalestinians reported heavy airstrikes and artillery shelling in the southern city of Khan Younis and farming areas to the east. The Palestinian Red Crescent said Israel bombed its headquarters in the city, killing five people. At least 14,000 displaced people are sheltering in the building, it said.\n\nFighting was also underway in and around the built-up Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza. The army issued evacuation orders to people living in parts of nearby Nuseirat camp. A strike Tuesday leveled a building in Nuseirat, killing at least eight people, according to officials at the nearby hospital. Associated Press footage showed people pulling several children out of the wreckage.\n\n## GENOCIDE CASE\nHamas' Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,200 people, and 240 others were taken hostage.\n\nIsrael responded with an air, ground and sea offensive that has killed more than 21,900 people in Gaza, two-thirds of them women and children, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory. The count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants. The Israeli military says 173 soldiers have died since it launched its ground operation.\n\nThe campaign has driven some 85% of Gaza's population from their homes, forcing hundreds of thousands of people into overcrowded shelters or teeming tent camps in Israeli-designated safe areas that the military has nevertheless bombed. Palestinians are left with a sense that nowhere is safe. The siege has left a quarter of Gaza residents facing starvation, according to the United Nations.\n\nIsrael says, without providing evidence, that more than 8,000 militants have been killed. It blames Hamas for the high civilian death toll, saying the militants embed within residential areas, including schools and hospitals.\n\nIn its case to the ICJ, South Africa accused Israel of \"genocidal\" acts that aim \"to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.\" It pointed to \"indiscriminate use of force and forcible removal of inhabitants\" as well as the Israeli siege. It argued that no attack on a state - even one \"involving atrocity crimes\" - can justify violations of the 1948 convention against genocide.\n\nIsrael, a signatory to the convention, angrily rejected the charge. \"The Jewish people know more than any other what genocide is,\" national security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot.\n\nThe case is likely to take years to reach a final judgment. But the court will likely rule within weeks on Pretoria's request for interim orders known as provisional measures, including that Israel \"immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza\" and \"take all reasonable measures\" to prevent genocide. The provisional measures orders are considered binding but not always followed.\n\nIsrael's decision to defend itself means it can use the courtroom to present legal arguments justifying its actions in Gaza. But the move could also leave the country open to more international condemnation if it ultimately loses the case and is found to have breached the genocide convention.\n\nThe case comes as Israel's Supreme Court struck down a key component of Netanyahu's contentious judicial overhaul plan, which had deeply divided Israelis and threatened the military's readiness before the Oct. 7 Hamas attack.\n\nThe Supreme Court ruling could help Israel at the International Court of Justice, since it and other international tribunals consider whether countries have their own independent judiciaries in deciding on whether to intervene.\n\nIt's unclear what concrete effects an ICJ ruling against Israel would have, but it would likely isolate the country politically and economically.\n\n\"Israel can't afford to ignore this,\" said Barak Medina, a law professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem."}
{"text": "# Turkey detains 33 people suspected of spying for Israel\nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:52 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**ANKARA, Turkey (AP)** - Turkish authorities have detained 33 people suspected of spying for Israel, Turkey's state-run news agency reported on Tuesday.\n\nAuthorities were still searching for 13 others believed to have links to Israel's Mossad security service, the Anadolu Agency reported.\n\nThe suspects were detained in raids in Istanbul and seven other provinces for allegedly planning to carry out activities that included \"reconnaissance\" and \"pursuing, assaulting and kidnapping\" foreign nationals living in Turkey, the agency reported.\n\nThe suspects were allegedly recruited to spy on Palestinians residing in Turkey as well as Israeli activists opposed to their government, Anadolu said. Israeli officials allegedly contacted the suspects via social media, it said.\n\nThe report comes weeks after the head of Israel's domestic security agency, Shin Bet, said in an audio recording that his organization is prepared to destroy Hamas \"in every place,\" including in Lebanon, Turkey and Qatar.\n\nTurkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned Israel of \"serious consequences\" if it pressed ahead with its threat to attack Hamas officials on Turkish soil.\n\nTurkey and Israel had normalized ties in 2022 by reappointing ambassadors following years of tensions. But those ties quickly deteriorated after the Israel-Hamas war, with Ankara becoming one of the strongest critics of Israel's military actions in Gaza.\n\nIsrael initially withdrew its diplomats from Turkey over security concerns and later announced it was recalling its diplomats for political reasons, citing \"increasingly harsh statements\" from Turkish officials. Turkey also pulled out its ambassador from Israel.\n\nErdogan's reaction to the Israel-Hamas war was initially fairly muted. But the Turkish leader has since intensified his criticism of Israel, describing its actions in Gaza as verging on \"genocide.\" He has called for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be prosecuted for \"war crimes\" and compared him to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.\n\nErdogan, whose government has hosted several Hamas officials in the past, has also said the militant group - considered a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States and the European Union - is fighting for the liberation of its lands and people."}
{"text": "# Russia covered up and undercounted true human cost of floodings after dam explosion, AP investigation finds\nBy **SAMYA KULLAB** and **ILLIA NOVIKOV**  \nDecember 28, 2023. 8:07 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**MYKOLAIV, Ukraine (AP)** - They recognized the TV repairman.\n\nThe residents of Oleshky in Russian-occupied southern Ukraine could not identify many of those they buried after a catastrophic dam collapse in June sent water coursing through their homes and shattered their lives. The bodies were too bloated and discolored, volunteer rescuers and health workers said. They described seeing faces that resembled rubber masks, frozen in that last frenzied gasp for air. But to those secretly keeping count of the drowned, Yurii Bilyi was no stranger.\n\nThe cheerful 56-year-old was a town fixture. He had serviced many homes and spent his days working from a shop just across the street from the churchyard where he was buried, in a hurriedly dug mass grave, The Associated Press has learned.\n\nAnastasiia Bila, his daughter, remembers his last words clearly over the unstable phone connection. \"Nastya,\" he affectionately called her, hoping to soothe her anxieties as flood waters rose quickly, inundating 600 square kilometers (230 square miles), submerging entire towns and villages along the banks of the Dnipro River, the majority in Russian-occupied areas. \"I've seen worse under occupation.\"\n\nOver six months since the catastrophic explosion that destroyed the Kakhovka Dam in the southern Kherson region, an AP investigation has found Russian occupation authorities vastly and deliberately undercounted the dead in one of the most devastating chapters of the 22-month war. Russian authorities took control of the issuance of death certificates, immediately removing bodies not claimed by family, and preventing local health workers and volunteers from dealing with the dead, threatening them when they defied orders.\n\n\"The scale of this tragedy, not just Russia, but even Ukraine doesn't realize,\" said Svitlana, a nurse who initially oversaw the process of collecting death certificates and later escaped to Ukrainian-controlled territory. \"It's a huge tragedy.\"\n\nRussia, which didn't respond to questions for this article, has said 59 people drowned in the territory it controls, roughly 408 square kilometers (160 square miles) of flooded areas. But in the Russian-occupied town of Oleshky alone, which Ukrainian military officials estimate had a population of 16,000 at the time of the flooding, the number is at least in the hundreds. An exact figure for the dead - in Oleshky, the occupied area's most populous town before the war, and beyond - may never be known, even if Ukrainian forces retake the territory and are able to investigate on the ground.\n\nThe AP spoke to three health workers who kept records of the dead in Oleshky, one volunteer who buried bodies and said she was later threatened by Russian police, and two Ukrainian informants passing intelligence from the area to the Ukrainian security service. According to their accounts, mass graves were dug, and unidentified bodies were taken away and never seen again.\n\nNearly a dozen interviews were conducted with other residents, rescue volunteers and recent escapees from the area. The AP also gained access to a closed Telegram chat group of 3,000 Oleshky residents who posted about bodies lying on the streets, bodies collected by police and the many missing.\n\nMost spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity or, like Svitlana, on condition only their first names be used, fearing reprisal from Russia on family members still in occupied territory.\n\nTogether, these accounts reveal a calculated attempt by Russian authorities to cover up the true cost of the dam collapse, which the AP has found was likely caused by Moscow. Residents of Oleshky fear their enduring traumas risk being forgotten as the war grinds on, and their beloved once idyllic home is gradually depopulated.\n\n## A TOWN ABANDONED\nThe dam burst in the early hours of June 6, causing extensive flooding along the lower Dnipro River, submerging entire communities across the Ukraine-controlled right and Russian-occupied left banks in a matter of hours.\n\nAt first, the Russian-appointed administration in Kherson told residents not to be alarmed. In a post on its official Telegram channel, it stressed the \"situation is not critical.\" So most went about their normal day - walking dogs, going to work, staying at home. Choices that would later prove fatal.\n\nBy the afternoon the water levels were rising quickly, inundating two-story homes as the powerful current swept everything away. The elderly struggled to climb up to roofs, people clung to their chimneys waiting to be saved by local rescue crews, most of them civilians who owned boats.\n\nFor the first three days of the floods occupation authorities were nowhere to be found, locals said, having apparently fled, despite initially reassuring residents. Conspicuously absent were police and prosecutors, both Russian-appointed officials authorized to deal with the deceased.\n\nBodies were piling up and decaying in the summer heat, their stench wafted in the air. Wailing relatives approached the town's medical workers, not knowing where to take the dead.\n\n\"A lot of people drowned,\" said Svitlana, the head nurse at the Oleshky District Multidisciplinary Hospital, the city's main primary health center, which later transformed into a shelter for people forced out of their homes. The putrefaction of flesh caused many corpses to inflate. \"People were floating around the city like balloons.\"\n\nThey needed to be buried. \"We took the responsibility,\" the nurse said.\n\nThey had the authority to issue death certificates both under Ukrainian law and Russian rule. The health center functioned as a main hospital for Oleshky residents after Russia occupied the town in March 2022, soon after Russia invaded Ukraine. Health workers continued to receive salaries from Ukraine, deposited electronically into their bank accounts, a crucial link tying them to their homeland as the occupation's draconian laws began to transform everything else before their eyes.\n\nRussian rubles replaced Ukrainian hryvnias in the market. Some residents accepted Russian passports to make life under occupation easier. Keeping record of the Ukrainian dead, largely caused by shelling before the floods, became a last vestige of Ukrainian control.\n\nFor health workers in the hospital, it was a matter of national necessity. After occupation authorities forbade the issuance of death certificates in the Ukrainian language on Jan. 1, health workers continued to do so in secret to ensure the Ukrainian medical database was up to date in Kyiv, the capital. Residents were given two certificates, one to satisfy their new occupiers, and the other to keep moored to their homeland. Health workers told residents to hide the latter.\n\nThe same procedure was followed immediately after the dam collapse.\n\nIn total, around 15 death certificates were electronically sent during the first week after the flood to Svitlana Serdiukova, the health facility's medical director in exile, who was keeping track of the registry remotely in government-controlled Ukraine. Svitlana, the nurse in Oleshky, was in direct contact with her during this time.\n\nThe cause of death for all 15 was asphyxia by drowning.\n\n## RUSSIA CERTIFIES THE DEAD\nEverything came to a halt on June 12.\n\nThe Russian state emergency rescue service workers were back in Oleshky by the afternoon of June 9, and three days later, they began reasserting control.\n\nThey brought large trucks and road-clearing equipment and offered to evacuate people first to Radensk, in Kherson region, and from there relocate them to Chelyabinsk and Tula in Russia. The residents refused to be taken that far, asking only to be taken to a dry patch in Oleshky.\n\nThey were refused. Many stayed put.\n\nRussian authorities had strict orders for the hospital: Doctors were now forbidden from issuing death certificates for flood victims. They were still permitted to issue certificates for other causes of death, however. The new rule was issued verbally, said Svitlana and Yelena, a fellow nurse at the hospital.\n\nFrom that moment on, they said, flood victims would have to be referred for autopsies in facilities elsewhere in Kherson region, in Kalanchak, Skadovsk, and Henichesk, where doctors approved by occupation authorities would be in charge of issuing the certificates after conducting forensic examinations. Relatives could not bury their family members without the crucial document.\n\nSvitlana said she pressed the police for an official order proving the old policy in place since March had changed. They didn't have it, and responded to her queries with threats, she said.\n\n\"They said: 'You will suffer the consequences for doing this.' I said, 'Alright, I am ready, and the doctor, too.'\"\n\nThe order deprived doctors of responsibility for flood victims. It also took away their ability to keep records of the dead for Kyiv.\n\nSerdiukova's record-keeping could go no further. The last Ukrainian death certificate she received was on June 14.\n\nThe police came to the hospital daily to make copies of death certificates issued by doctors, to ensure the rules were being obeyed. \"You need to understand under what circumstances we worked there - under the FSB, police, prosecutors,\" Svitlana said, using the acronym for the Russian security service that is the main successor agency of the Soviet-era KGB.\n\nThe hospital referred just under 50 bodies to the new autopsy centers, but this doesn't reflect the total dead. Residents were given specific numbers to call police who dispatched workers to collect discovered bodies, circumventing the hospital altogether. Family members were charged 10,000 rubles (equivalent to about $108) as a service fee, a hefty sum for many under occupation. Those who couldn't afford that begged doctors to write a different cause of death, such as \"heart attack,\" so they could be buried quickly, both nurses said.\n\nBodies without relatives to claim them were never seen again.\n\nThe rescue service also patrolled Oleshky's streets to collect the dead.\n\nOn June 15, the hospital began giving vaccines against hepatitis A, dysentery and typhoid amid rising concerns of water-borne diseases. A worker from the town's municipal \"Pobut\" service, responsible for cleaning streets, arrived visibly inebriated, Svitlana said.\n\nSvitlana told him to return when he was sober. But the man, in his early 40s, replied, he could not but drink after what he had seen. He had been ordered to dig out the dead from under their collapsed homes, he said, and bury them in mass graves.\n\nHe recognized some.\n\n\"The TV guy has drowned, the ginger, Yura,\" he told her, referring to his hair color, according to Svitlana's account.\n\nShe knew him, too.\n\n## A FATHER BURIED\nAnastasiia Bila, Yurii's daughter, was in Lviv in western Ukraine, where she had fled before the invasion, when she spoke to her father for the last time. It was on June 6, at around 3 p.m.\n\nHe had refused to evacuate their family home. He had two German shepherds he could not abandon.\n\nThe connection was intermittent. She urged him to go to the second floor of the house if the water levels continued to rise. She tried to call again a half-hour later, but there was no reception.\n\nShe made a plea on the private Telegram chat: \"Bilyi Yurii Anatoliyovych, does not get in touch for a second day,\" she wrote, adding his last known location, his home's address: Dniprovska, 85. \"Please help me find my father, maybe someone saw or knows his whereabouts, any information.\"\n\nOn Sunday, five days later, Bila's uncle was able to check on his brother by hiring a boat with his wife and son. They found Bilyi's lifeless body. He told Anastasiia she could stop looking for her father.\n\nThe body was buried in a mass grave in the yard of the Orthodox Pokrovska Church in the center of Oleshky. It was not possible to bury him and others anywhere else, as most places were still flooded, Bila said.\n\nBilyi's shop has been on the same street.\n\nThe grave was doused with chlorine, Bila's uncle, who witnessed the burial, recounted to her, she said. The priest prayed over the dead.\n\nPobut workers, made up of local Ukrainians and acting on orders of occupation authorities, were responsible for collecting and burying the dead, according to health workers. They dug on a daily basis between June 10-20. The bodies were buried without coffins, not even bags to cover them.\n\nAs the unit was acting on orders of occupation authorities, the decision to bury people in mass graves likely came from those authorities, health workers said.\n\n\"The first bodies were buried in the city center (church), as 90% of the city was underwater,\" said Bila. \"Those bodies were not processed by a hospital, no autopsy or time of death, they were buried right away,\" she said.\n\nSerdiukova later confirmed Bilyi was not in Ukraine's registry. Officially he is considered a missing person.\n\nThe exact number of bodies in the grave where Bilyi was buried is not known. Bila said her uncle did not tell her a precise number. He is living under occupation and did not respond to questions from the AP.\n\nBut the hospital workers the AP interviewed estimate the number to be between 10 to 20. For a time, they tried to document who was buried where. They asked relatives to fill out forms detailing where bodies were found, how they were clothed, and later, which plot of which grave they were buried in.\n\n\"The bodies were collected and buried in a mass grave to ensure they don't start decomposing on city streets. After de-occupation there will be an exhumation. That's when we'll be able to investigate everything,\" said Serdiukova.\n\nWith the return of the Russian state emergency service, the process became more orderly. They arrived with trucks to carry bodies and a special rescue team.\n\nThe fate of unidentified bodies, those without relatives to claim them, carted away by the Russian rescue service is also not known. Yelena, the nurse, approached a truck driver and asked him what would happen to them.\n\nHe told her casually that the bodies with no relatives were buried in a mass grave, she said. Without caskets, in black bags.\n\nWhile several people interviewed referred to more mass graves than the one where Bila's father was buried, the AP was unable to determine the precise number of such graves or how many people were buried in them.\n\nBila considers herself lucky. At least her father is buried in the town he loved and refused to leave, even under the threat of death.\n\nLike many, she's waiting for Ukraine to liberate the town. Then, she said, \"I'll be able to re-bury him in a proper cemetery.\"\n\n## THE THREAT\nThe volunteer was not afraid of dead bodies. When the floods inundated her neighborhood in Oleshky, the sight of the floating dead did not stir her like it did the others. She had witnessed her best friend's death when she was a teenager.\n\n\"It's the living that frighten me,\" she said.\n\nOn June 7, she, her husband and three neighbors went about evacuating trapped residents inside homes. By June 9, she witnessed dead bodies for the first time. They were \"bloated and partially decomposed. They were floating. I often couldn't recognize a person,\" she said.\n\nSome were trapped under the sticky mud and had to be dug out. Those she knew, around 20, she took to the hospital with the hopes that relatives could claim the bodies. The rest were taken to another church in the city, blessed by a priest and buried in the town's cemetery. She said she collected \"more than 100\" dead.\n\nThe health workers estimate 200 to 300 people drowned in Oleshky. \"I'm even afraid to say it out loud,\" said Yelena.\n\nMany were older, unable to physically leave their homes or climb up to the roof, according to the accounts of rescue volunteers, residents who reported relatives dead, and health workers.\n\n\"I buried them with my own hands,\" the volunteer said. There was no money to hire diggers, she said, but people volunteered to do it for free. The graves were dug shallow, 1 meter (3 feet) deep. Any more and they would flood. The volunteer said she used bedsheets to cover them. When those ran out, she said, she found plastic film.\n\nPits were dug for each person, but sometimes for up to three, the volunteer said.\n\nBut this work was put to a stop when the Russian rescue service returned. Occupation authorities prohibited volunteers from collecting or burying the dead, telling them this was a job for the police only.\n\nRussian emergency service trucks arrived. Workers in white bodysuits put the dead in black bags, witnesses said. One driver told the volunteer they were destined for autopsies in Henichesk, an occupied port city about three hours away.\n\nSome days later, several police officers came to the volunteer's home. She said they told her that an informant had told them she had been involved in burying people without death certificates. They interrogated her about why she had transported bodies, and how many she had recovered. She explained there was no other option, the bodies were smelling.\n\nThey reprimanded her, telling her she did not have the right to collect bodies and eventually forced her to sign a document promising she would stop collecting the dead because she didn't have the right qualifications, she said.\n\n\"They told me that if I continue doing so they'll 'cage me', That's when I stopped,\" the volunteer said. \"I was scared for myself and my family.\"\n\nThe police visited her home almost every day after that, she said.\n\n\"They had video journalists coming here to show how Russia helps here. They wanted to conceal the consequences of the dam explosion, so that people don't talk about how many people suffered and how many needed help. They wanted to hide it,\" she said. \"That's why they prohibited us.\"\n\n## WORLDS APART\nThe evidence is still hidden in Oleshky: documents detailing the dead, plots where they are buried, photos, the death certificates collected in secret.\n\n\"I hid all these papers behind closed doors so that no one knew,\" Svitlana said. \"With time everything is forgotten, some people might leave, their life will change, but with those papers - no one will forget. It was important to save them.\"\n\nShe is waiting for Ukraine to liberate the territory so the truth can come to light. She cleared her phone and left documents behind to keep them out of the hands of Russians who routinely stop Ukrainians leaving occupied areas and conduct thorough security checks.\n\nResidents, speaking to the AP after they returned to Ukraine-controlled territory, said most of the town is no longer habitable. Many remain missing since the floods, while battles inch closer. Ukrainian forces are reportedly advancing near the Krynky area, which lies 40 kilometers (24 miles) from Oleshky. There was a pause during the flooding from shelling, which resumed with ferocity, residents say.\n\nBoth Russia and Ukraine have traded blame for bringing down the dam, but analysts agree that Russia had motive. The dam's collapse occurred right as Ukraine launched what would develop into a disappointing counteroffensive. The flooding altered the geography of the Dnipro River, complicating plans set out by Ukrainian military leaders.\n\nNow, two-thirds of Oleshky is gone, entire districts and homes are destroyed, according to the accounts of half a dozen residents who left.\n\n\"There are two Ukraines,\" said Svitlana. \"One is at war, in tragedy, many people are left homeless. And the other is living life well and flourishes.\"\n\nIn Oleshky, divisions between the townspeople have deepened, sometimes within members of a single family. The volunteer's sister moved to Russia. Bila's uncle and his family are estranged from hers because he harbors pro-Russian views, she said.\n\nSvitlana said colleagues still in Oleshky told her that her office was ransacked after she left in August. But she is confident the documents are still hidden.\n\n\"It's a durable book,\" she said."}
{"text": "# Ex-celebrity lawyer Tom Girardi found competent to stand trial for alleged $15 million client thefts\nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:59 PM EST\n\n---\n\n***LOS ANGELES (AP)*** - Disgraced Los Angeles celebrity lawyer Tom Girardi has been found competent to stand trial on charges that he stole more than $15 million from his clients.\n\nA federal judge filed a notice of the brief order Tuesday under seal. Lawyers for both sides were given five days to identify any information in it that they would like the judge to keep confidential.\n\nGirardi, 84, is the estranged husband of \"The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills\" star Erika Jayne.\n\nGirardi pleaded not guilty in Los Angeles last year to wire fraud on charges that he embezzled from clients, including an Arizona widow whose husband was killed in a boat accident; a Los Angeles couple injured in a car wreck that paralyzed their son; and a man who was severely burned in the 2010 San Bruno gas pipeline explosion.\n\nIf convicted, he could be sentenced to decades in federal prison.\n\nThe Associated Press sent an email seeking comment to his public defenders.\n\nAt issue in the competency hearing was whether Girardi understood the charges and proceedings against him and could help with his own defense. His lawyers argued that he was unable to take part in the trial because he has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, which they said has left him confused and with memory problems. He currently is staying in the memory care unit of a nursing home.\n\nProsecutors contended that Girardi was exaggerating his symptoms.\n\nAs one of the nation's most prominent plaintiff's attorneys, Girardi took on powerful corporations, movie studios and Pacific Gas and Electric in a case that led to a $333 million settlement, which was portrayed in the 2000 Julia Roberts film \"Erin Brockovich.\"\n\nBut his law empire collapsed, he was disbarred in California in 2022 over client thefts, and he faces mounting legal problems.\n\nGirardi also faces federal wire fraud charges in Chicago, where he is accused of stealing about $3 million from family members of victims of a 2018 Lion Air crash that killed 189 people.\n\nThe Chicago court is expected to follow the competency decision in California."}
{"text": "# No. 1 Purdue handles Maryland 67-53 to snap Terrapins' 19-game home winning streak\nBy **NOAH TRISTER**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 9:02 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**COLLEGE PARK, Md. (AP)** - Zach Edey had 23 points and 12 rebounds, and No. 1 Purdue cruised past Maryland 67-53 on Tuesday night to snap the Terrapins' 19-game home winning streak.\n\nThe Boilermakers (13-1, 2-1 Big Ten) won their sixth straight, having little difficulty with this offensively challenged Maryland team. Purdue hadn't won at Maryland since 2017. Although the Terps (9-5, 1-2) hung tough defensively for a while, they couldn't overcome shooting woes that have made this season a disappointment so far.\n\nThe Boilermakers took an 8-0 lead and forced Maryland to take an early timeout. The Terps managed only 19 points in the first half and trailed by 13 at the break. Then Purdue quickly pushed the lead to 22 in the second.\n\nOnly Oral Roberts and Boise State (21 each) had longer home winning streaks than Maryland entering this game, but the Terps went down at Xfinity Center for the first time since December 2022 against UCLA. Maryland also had an overall five-game winning streak snapped.\n\nJahmir Young scored 26 points for the Terps, the only Maryland player with more than nine. The poor shooting by Maryland was across the board - 33% from the field, 5 of 22 from 3-point range and 6 of 11 on free throws.\n\nBraden Smith scored 14 points for Purdue and Lance Jones added 11.\n\n## BIG PICTURE\nPurdue: The Boilermakers' defense vs. Maryland's offense always seemed like a possible mismatch, and Purdue's quick start took the crowd out of the game, pretty much for good.\n\nMaryland: The Terps had some success on the offensive boards but were badly outplayed otherwise. Their offense simply isn't good enough to make them much of a threat to the top Big Ten teams at the moment.\n\n## UP NEXT\nPurdue: Hosts No. 9 Illinois on Friday night.\n\nMaryland: At Minnesota on Sunday."}
{"text": "# Spencer scores 20 points, leads No. 4 UConn to 85-56 blowout of DePaul in Big East play\nBy **PAT EATON-ROBB**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:51 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**STORRS, Conn. (AP)** - Cam Spencer scored 20 points to lead No. 4 UConn to an 85-56 rout of DePaul on Tuesday night.\n\nThe graduate transfer from Rutgers shot 7 for 11 from the field, including 4 of 7 from 3-point range.\n\nAlex Karaban added 17 points for the Huskies (12-2, 2-1 Big East) and was 3 of 4 from behind the arc. Hassan Diarra scored 14 as did freshman Stephon Castle, who also had seven assists.\n\nDa'Sean Nelson scored 19 points and Elijah Fisher had 17 for DePaul (3-10, 0-2), which shot just 36% from the floor (20 of 56).\n\nIt was the Huskies' 17th straight win over the Blue Demons.\n\nUConn had struggled in its first two conference games this season, a 15-point loss at Seton Hall and a four-point comeback win over St. John's at home on Dec. 23.\n\nThe defending national champions started slowly in this one as well, with four early turnovers. They didn't score until a layup by Castle more than four minutes into the game.\n\nA layup by Jaden Henley gave the Blue Demons an 11-10 lead midway through the first half. But then UConn went on a 16-2 run, including a highlight-reel dunk from Castle on a long lob pass from Diarra.\n\nThe Huskies held DePaul to eight first-half baskets. A layup by Karaban capped a 9-1 spurt that sent UConn into halftime up 38-19.\n\n## BIG PICTURE\nDePaul: The Blue Demons were picked last in the Big East preseason coaches' poll and haven't done much to exceed those expectations.\n\nUConn: Played its second game without 7-foot-2 center Donovan Clingan, who is recovering from a tendon injury in his right foot. Huskies coach Dan Hurley said Clingan is out of a walking boot, but is expected to miss another two to three weeks. The sophomore is averaging 13.9 points and 6.3 rebounds per game.\n\n## UP NEXT\nDePaul: The Blue Demons visit Georgetown on Saturday.\n\nUConn: The Huskies travel to Indianapolis to face Butler on Friday."}
{"text": "# Antonio Pierce has a final chance to make the case he should be the Raiders' coach\nBy **MARK ANDERSON**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:38 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**HENDERSON, Nev. (AP)** - Antonio Pierce has one more chance to, as he has said, improve his resume on the grass.\n\nLike his 4-4 record since replacing Josh McDaniels on Halloween night, Pierce's resume is a mixed bag.\n\nHe has brought energy to what had been a lackluster locker room, and the Raiders' defense has been better this season. On the flip side, Pierce has struggled with in-game decisions - often punting on the opposing team's side of the field and misusing timeouts.\n\nNone of that might matter if owner Mark Davis already has his mind made up to again chase the shiny object and make a play for a coach such as Jim Harbaugh, who has led Michigan to Monday's national championship game against Washington.\n\nBut if Davis is still considering removing the interim tag from Pierce's job title, then Sunday's season finale against the Denver Broncos could take on extra meaning for the coach and his staff.\n\n\"At the end of day, everything will be looked at by wins and losses, and I think that's fair and that's what this business is about,\" Pierce said. \"But I do also think it's about what do you build in the foundation? And I think for the most part in these eight or nine weeks, it's been a solid foundation that we've built as a team and as an organization that we can look on and say, 'OK, those are things that went well and there's some other things that we can do better.'\"\n\nPierce's future isn't the only question for the Raiders as the season comes to an end.\n\nLas Vegas will have to decide what to do at quarterback. Aidan O'Connell has had promising moments, but hasn't proven he will be more than a mid-level quarterback. That's especially bad timing for him given that next year's draft is considered the strongest at that position in many years.\n\nThere are positions throughout the lineup that Raiders management will have to evaluate, and with the team mathematically eliminated from the postseason, players who haven't seen much action could get a closer look on Sunday.\n\nSo while it would appear the Raiders don't have much to play for, there are still questions about this team that need to be answered.\n\n\"Unless you plan on retiring and not playing in the NFL or coaching in the NFL, this is still on your resume,\" Pierce said. \"You always look at the last four, five or six games of the season of how a team plays, how they're coached. So I think for us it's very important, it's still part of the process and evaluation.\"\n\n## WHAT'S WORKING\nIn two of the past three games, WR Davante Adams has 21 catches for 227 yards and three touchdowns. This has been a down year by Adams' standards, but he still managed to eclipse 1,000 yards for the fifth time in six seasons and is two receptions from hitting the 100 mark for the fifth time over the same span.\n\n## WHAT NEEDS WORK\nConsistency. The Raiders sometimes look like a playoff team and will put together back-to-back promising performances. But they don't build on such play, with the 23-20 loss at Indianapolis on Sunday a prime example. Las Vegas had 26 first downs to 16 for the Colts and outgained them 370 yards to 349, but the Raiders couldn't get out of their own way with untimely penalties.\n\n## STOCK UP\nDefensive coordinator Patrick Graham could be a candidate for head coaching jobs this offseason. Las Vegas allows 19.8 yards per game, which is eighth in the NFL and 18 places higher than last season when the Raiders gave up a 24.6 average.\n\n## STOCK DOWN\nCB Jack Jones has been a big part of the defense's late-season improvement, but he made two critical mistakes against the Colts. The most egregious was an offside on a missed 50-yard field goal by the Colts that would've kept the Raiders within a touchdown. A second attempt from 45 yards gave Indianapolis a two-possession lead with 3:15 left. Jones also was called for pass interference on a deep throw on third down.\n\n## INJURIES\nRB Josh Jacobs (quadriceps) has missed the past three games and TE Michael Mayer (toe) has sat out two straight.\n\n## KEY NUMBER\n19 - The Raiders have missed the playoffs that many times in the past 21 seasons.\n\n## NEXT STEPS\nConclude the season by hosting the Broncos on Sunday."}
{"text": "# Baylor opens new basketball arena on banks of Brazos River\nBy **STEPHEN HAWKINS**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:36 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WACO, Texas (AP)** - Baylor's basketball teams are playing in a new home along the banks of the Brazos River after 35 years under the golden dome of the Ferrell Center.\n\nThe 18th-ranked Bears christened the brand-new Foster Pavilion in their nonconference finale on Tuesday night against Cornell. The sixth-ranked women's team debuts Wednesday night against instate rival and 23rd-ranked TCU in a matchup of undefeated Big 12 teams.\n\nWhile there are parts of the $212 million facility not yet completed away from the court, the 7,000-seat arena with standing-room space for about 500 more spectators was ready for games. It came 18 months after ground was broken in May 2022.\n\nAthletic director Mack Rhoades said there were a lot of conversations about whether to move in for games without everything done.\n\n\"There were two primary drivers for us when we thought about that decision. One was our student-athletes, giving our student-athletes, particularly our seniors, an opportunity to play in a venue like this,\" Rhoades said. \"And then I think for our basketball programs, we knew both of them were going to be really, really good teams this year, but giving them the best home-court advantage that they could have during the Big 12 season.\"\n\nBefore tipoff Tuesday, when most seats were filled, the school's mascot delivered the game ball with a rappel from the rafters, where there are banners that commemorate the men's 2021 national championship and three national titles won by the women's team. Former player Matt Sayman delivered an invocation.\n\nFoster Pavilion is on the edge of campus across Interstate 35 from McLane Stadium, the football stadium that opened in 2014. The basketball arena is part of a $700 million riverfront development in partnership between the school and city of Waco.\n\n\"We were very intentional about the fieldhouse design, about walking in, about clean sightlines, big volume, about holding noise, making sure that in the arena portion, it can be as loud as possible for our fans and for our basketball programs,\" Rhoades said.\n\nIt is just over a mile from the Ferrell Center, which had a basketball capacity for more than 10,000 fans. It was built for about $12.5 million and opened in 1988.\n\nFerrell Center will remain home to the school's national champion acrobatics & tumbling team, and the women's volleyball squad.\n\nThe men's and women's basketball teams will continue to use their practice gyms at the Ferrell Center. The Development Center at the new arena with practice courts, dedicated locker rooms and team lounges will be completed later this year.\n\nIf the Baylor women make the NCAA Tournament and host first- and second-round games, those would be played at the Ferrell Center because of the extra space needed that wouldn't yet be available in the new building."}
{"text": "# Rookies are getting additional playing time at the end of the Chargers' lost season\nBy **JOE REEDY**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:24 PM EST\n\n---\n\nBefore their 2023 campaign turned into a lost season, the Los Angeles Chargers gave plenty of playing time to rookies Quentin Johnston, Tuli Tuipulotu and Derius Davis.\n\nThe rest of the Chargers' draft class is getting some valuable regular-season snaps as Los Angeles (5-11) concludes one of the most disappointing seasons in franchise history.\n\nOffensive lineman Jordan McFadden, linebacker Daiyan Henley and defensive lineman Scott Matlock saw extended playing time during Sunday's 16-9 loss to the Denver Broncos.\n\nThe loss was the Chargers' fourth straight and seventh of their last eight. They have lost both games since coach Brandon Staley and general manager Tom Telesco were fired on Dec. 15.\n\nMcFadden, a fifth-round pick, had seen only 15 offensive snaps before playing all 62 at left guard against the Broncos with Zion Johnson inactive due to a neck injury.\n\nMcFadden graded well in his first NFL start. He didn't allow a pressure or sack in pass blocking.\n\n\"When you do not hear a guy on the offensive line, it is a good thing,\" interim coach Giff Smith said. \"I think he proved he is an NFL player and obviously a good draft pick for us. Hopefully we can get Zion back, but definitely with McFadden moving forward we are really pleased.\"\n\nWhen Henley was selected in the third round, it was with the expectation he would contribute on special teams. Henley has done that, but against the Broncos he had three tackles in eight snaps at middle linebacker.\n\nSmith said Henley struggled early but improved in the second half.\n\nSixth-round pick Matlock saw a season-high 32 snaps and is getting more playing time after Sebastian Joseph-Day was waived on Dec. 22. Joseph-Day ended up signing with the San Francisco 49ers.\n\nMost of the attention related to the rookies continues to be on Johnston, who has faced a tough learning curve. With Keenan Allen and Joshua Palmer inactive due to injuries, Johnston was held to three receptions for 29 yards, all during the fourth quarter.\n\nJohnston was covered by Denver cornerback Pat Surtain II on 32 of his 34 routes. Johnston was targeted three times when matched up against Surtain and had two catches for 20 yards.\n\n\"I thought Quentin is making strides. It showed out there with some big catches in the fourth quarter. I think that is the stuff as a rookie that you can build on,\" Smith said. \"That is a tough matchup against Patrick, and I thought he held his own. He competed hard and made some catches for us down the stretch.\"\n\nThe entire draft class is likely to see more playing time in the finale against Kansas City. With a new general manager and coaching staff coming in over the next couple months, getting snaps and time on tape is valuable.\n\n## WHAT'S WORKING\nGetting sacks. The Chargers have 47 on the season after sacking Jarrett Stidham twice. That is tied for the fifth-most by the franchise since 1982, when sacks became an official statistic, and the most since 2010, when the Chargers finished with 47. They lead the league with 29 third-down sacks.\n\n## WHAT NEEDS HELP\nScoring touchdowns. Los Angeles has not reached the end zone in two of its last five games. It is also tied with Carolina with a league-low eight touchdowns over the last seven games.\n\n## STOCK UP\nAlex Erickson. The seventh-year receiver, who was on the practice squad at the beginning of the season, had seven receptions for 98 yards. It was Erickson's best game since 2019, when he had eight receptions for 137 yards for Cincinnati in a loss to Jacksonville.\n\n## STOCK DOWN\nEssang Bassey. The cornerback was a couple steps behind Lil'Jordan Humphrey on what ended up being a 54-yard touchdown. Bassey had a chance to bring down Humphrey at the Chargers 35-yard line and limit him to a 19-yard gain, but he slipped while trying to make the tackle.\n\n## INJURIES\nLB Joey Bosa remains on injured reserve but continues to practice under the 21-day window to return.\n\n## KEY NUMBER\n16 - Sacks for Khalil Mack, a career high for the 11th-year linebacker. Mack recorded his 100th career sack in his 150th game on Sunday.\n\n## NEXT STEPS\nThe Chargers have dropped eight of their last nine games to division opponents and haven't defeated the Chiefs when hosting them since 2013."}
{"text": "# A congressman and a senator's son have jumped into the Senate race to succeed Mitt Romney in Utah\nBy **MEAD GRUVER**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 9:07 PM EST\n\n---\n\nA congressman and a senator's son jumped into the race Tuesday for the Utah U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Mitt Romney.\n\nRepublican U.S. Rep. John Curtis announced his campaign to a TV station after saying last fall he had decided not to run.\n\nAfter people asked him to reconsider, he decided he could carry over his work representing Utah but with a bigger platform, Curtis told KSL-TV.\n\nCurtis has served eastern Utah's Third District since 2017. He was previously mayor of Provo, Utah, for seven years and for a time was a county-level Democratic Party official.\n\nBrent Orrin Hatch also announced his candidacy Tuesday. Hatch is one of six children of the late Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, who retired after 42 years in office in 2019 and died in 2022.\n\nBrent Hatch is a trial lawyer who is treasurer and past director of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization that advocates interpreting the U.S. Constitution according to the context in which it was written.\n\nHe was an associate White House counsel under President George H.W. Bush and a Utah delegate to the 2004 Republican National Convention.\n\nHe described himself as \"not a professional politician\" in a statement through his campaign.\n\n\"I have worked for over 33 years here in Utah as a lawyer protecting the rights of individuals and companies. But I still have an insider's knowledge of the highest levels of government,\" he said in the statement.\n\nRomney, 76, announced in September he won't seek a second term in the Senate, saying it was time for younger leaders to step in. Romney also served as governor of Massachusetts and was the 2012 Republican nominee for president.\n\nRomney is among several Republicans who opposed former President Donald Trump and have been voted out or not sought re-election.\n\nOthers running to succeed Romney include former Utah House speaker Brad Wilson, a Republican who announced his campaign in September, and lesser-known Republicans including Riverton, Utah, Mayor Trent Staggs and Roosevelt, Utah, Mayor Rod Bird Jr.\n\nRepublicans carry a substantial advantage in Utah, outnumbering Democrats by a more than 3-to-1 margin."}
{"text": "# New Mexico regulators revoke the licenses of 2 marijuana grow operations and levies $2M in fines\nBy **SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:14 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP)** - New Mexico marijuana regulators on Tuesday revoked the licenses of two growing operations in a rural county for numerous violations and have levied a $1 million fine against each business.\n\nOne of the businesses - Native American Agricultural Development Co. - is connected to a Navajo businessman whose cannabis farming operations in northwestern New Mexico were raided by federal authorities in 2020. The Navajo Department of Justice also sued Dineh Benally, leading to a court order halting those operations.\n\nA group of Chinese immigrant workers sued Benally and his associates - and claimed they were lured to northern New Mexico and forced to work long hours illegally trimming marijuana on the Navajo Nation, where growing the plant is illegal.\n\nIn the notice made public Tuesday by New Mexico's Cannabis Control Division, Native American Agricultural Development was accused of exceeding the state's plant count limits, of not tracking and tracing its inventory, and for creating unsafe conditions.\n\nAn email message seeking comment on the allegations was not immediately returned by Benally. David Jordan, an attorney who represented him in the earlier case, did not return a phone message Tuesday.\n\nThe other business to have its license revoked was Bliss Farm, also located in rural Torrance County within miles of Benally's operation. State officials said the two businesses, east of Albuquerque, are not connected in any way.\n\nThe state ordered both to immediately stop all commercial cannabis activity.\n\n\"The illicit activity conducted at both of these farms undermines the good work that many cannabis businesses are doing across the state,\" Clay Bailey, acting superintendent of the New Mexico Regulation and Licensing Department, said in a statement. \"The excessive amount of illegal cannabis plants and other serious violations demonstrates a blatant disregard for public health and safety, and for the law.\"\n\nState regulators cited Bliss Farm for 17 violations. Regulators said evidence of a recent harvest without records entered into the state's track and trace system led the division to conclude that plants were transferred or sold illicitly.\n\nAdam Oakey, an Albuquerque attorney representing the group of investors that own the operation, told The Associated Press in an interview that the company had hoped the state would have first worked with it to address some of the issues before revoking the license.\n\n\"We did our best to get into compliance but we fell below the bar,\" he said, adding that he's afraid the state's action might discourage others in the industry from coming to New Mexico.\n\nThe company already has invested tens of millions of dollars into the operation and will likely have to go to court to reopen the farm, Oakey said.\n\nAs for Native American Agricultural Development, regulators said there were about 20,000 mature plants on site - four times more than the number allowed under its license. Inspectors also found another 20,000 immature plants.\n\nThe other violations included improper security measures, no chain of custody procedures, and ill-maintained grounds with trash and pests throughout. Compliance officers also saw evidence of a recent harvest but no plants had been entered into the state's track-and-trace system.\n\nThe violations were first reported last fall by Searchlight New Mexico, an independent news organization. At the time, Navajo Attorney General Ethel Branch told the nonprofit group that the tribe and the Shiprock area still deserved justice for the harm done previously by the grow operation that had been set up in northwestern New Mexico years earlier.\n\nFederal prosecutors will not comment, but the New Mexico Attorney General's Office confirmed Tuesday that in general it \"continues to investigate, with our federal partners, potential criminal activity within the New Mexico cannabis industry.\""}
{"text": "# Souvenir sellers have flooded the Brooklyn Bridge. Now the city is banning them\nBy **JAKE OFFENHARTZ**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:12 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Visitors to New York City hoping to take home a souvenir from the Brooklyn Bridge will now have to settle for a photograph, as vendors are about to be banned from the iconic span.\n\nThe new rule, which goes into effect Wednesday, aims to ease overcrowding on the bridge's heavily trafficked pedestrian walkway, where dozens of trinket sellers currently compete for space with tourists and city commuters.\n\nAs crowds flocked to the bridge over the holiday season, the situation turned dangerous, according to New York City Mayor Eric Adams. He pointed to videos that showed pedestrians leaping from the elevated walkway onto a bike lane several feet below in order to bypass a human traffic jam.\n\n\"It's not only a sanitary issue, it's a public safety issue,\" Adams said on Tuesday. \"People would've trampled over each other. We need order in this city. That is one of our major landmarks.\"\n\nThe new rules will apply to all of the city's bridges - though none have close to as many vendors as the 140-year-old Brooklyn Bridge, which is often lined with tables offering phone cases, knock-off Yankees caps, novelty license plates and more.\n\nThose who sell items on the bridge acknowledge that vendors have proliferated in recent years, driven by relaxed enforcement during the coronavirus pandemic and the availability of low-priced merchandise. A decision two years ago to relocate cyclists to a lane of the roadway also freed up space for stalls.\n\nIn the middle span of the bridge, entrepreneurs have now set up nearly a dozen rotating selfie platforms where tourists can pay to take panoramic photos.\n\nMD Rahman, who has sold hot dogs and pretzels out of a cart on the bridge for 15 years, said he understands the need to crack down on the illicit vendors. But he criticized the city's plan as overly broad, since it also applies to veteran sellers, like himself, who hold mobile vending licenses.\n\n\"The problem is the illegal and unlicensed people selling things up there,\" Rahman said, pointing to the newer group of vendors in the middle of the bridge. \"To punish everyone, it's crazy. I don't know what is going to happen to my family now.\"\n\nIn recent days, police officers have posted flyers in multiple languages across the bridge, telling vendors they will have to leave. But some had doubts about whether the city would actually follow through on the plan.\n\n\"Maybe I come back in a few weeks,\" said Qiu Lan Liu, a vendor selling hats and T-shirts, many of them featuring the New York Police Department's insignia, NYPD. \"I'll see what other people do.\"\n\nAs news spread of the coming ban, some tourists said they were taking advantage of the low-priced souvenirs while they were still available. Ana Souza, an Oklahoma resident, proudly held an \"I Love New York\" tote she'd found for just $10, a fraction of the price she'd seen at brick-and-mortar shops.\n\nJenny Acuchi was visiting New York from Oakland, California. \"It's a little crowded, but not as much as I expected,\" she said. \"The thing that makes it crowded is that everyone is taking photos.\"\n\nAmong the supporters of the new rules were some disability rights advocates, who said the ban would immediately improve access for wheelchair users. In a statement, the city's transportation chief Ydanis Rodriguez celebrated the improvements to an attraction he dubbed \"America's Eiffel Tower.\"\n\nRashawn Prince, who uses the bridge to sells copies of his self-published book, \"How to Roll a Blunt for Dummies!\" said he was unmoved by the comparison.\n\n\"I've been to the Eiffel Tower,\" Prince said. \"There's vendors there, too.\""}
{"text": "# Bucs down to one more chance to clinch 3rd straight NFC South title, 4th consecutive playoff berth\nBy **FRED GOODALL**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:12 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**TAMPA, Fla. (AP)** - There's no more room for error in Tampa Bay's bid for a fourth straight playoff appearance.\n\nWin Sunday's regular-season finale at last-place Carolina, and the Buccaneers are in as NFC South champions.\n\nLose and they're out.\n\n\"By any means necessary, we have to show up,\" coach Todd Bowles said.\n\n\"All we need is a chance to get in,\" quarterback Baker Mayfield reiterated, \"and we're still sitting where we need to be.\"\n\nWhile beating the Panthers to earn what would be a franchise-record third consecutive division title may not appear to be a daunting challenge, the Bucs (8-8) have not performed consistently enough this season to draw any conclusions about how they might play this week.\n\nAt 2-14, Carolina has the worst record in the NFL and is coming off a 26-0 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars.\n\nBut the Bucs are looking to rebound from a stinker of their own after wasting an opportunity to clinch the division title in a listless 23-13 loss to the New Orleans Saints.\n\n\"Very disappointing. It was like we didn't know what's at stake,\" linebacker Lavonte David said. \"We came out very flat on both sides of the ball.\"\n\nMayfield threw a pair of interceptions and the Bucs also fumbled twice to lose the turnover battle 4-0. Offensively, they were held scoreless into the fourth quarter. Defensively, they struggled to stop the Saints in critical situations while falling behind 20-0.\n\nNew Orleans (8-8) climbed into a tie with Tampa Bay for the division lead. If the Bucs lose to the Panthers, then the winner of Sunday's Saints-Atlanta Falcons finale will win the NFC South and host a playoff game the following weekend.\n\n\"Our thing is we can't beat ourselves. We don't care if they were 14-2. In the NFL anybody can beat anybody any given week, and division games are always tough,\" Bowles said.\n\n\"We have to play our game, make less mistakes, and then we'll worry about the opponent on Sunday,\" the coach added. \"If we can do that, we will have a chance to win.\"\n\n## WHAT'S WORKING\nComing off the clunker they played against the Saints, it's hard to identify anything that's working. The offense was shut out until the middle of the fourth quarter. The defense contributed to a 17-point halftime deficit by allowing New Orleans to convert six of nine third downs through the first two quarters. Even usually superb punter Jake Camarda struggled with a couple of bad kicks.\n\n## WHAT NEEDS HELP\nThe pass rush remains inconsistent. The Bucs had one sack against the Saints, and that came on a play in which Derek Carr scrambled out of bounds. The defense finished with no quarterback hits.\n\n## STOCK UP\nWith teams doing everything they can to try to slow down Mike Evans and Chris Godwin, rookie WR Trey Palmer is developing into a reliable option for Mayfield. He had four receptions for 84 yards and a touchdown against New Orleans, hiking his season totals to 37 catches for 375 yards and three TDs.\n\n## STOCK DOWN\nOn a play that typified how poorly things went against the Saints, a wide-open Palmer caught a deep pass before stumbling - and not only falling, but fumbling - on a 54-yard gain to the New Orleans 21. Saints CB Isaac Yiadom recovered.\n\n## INJURIES\nMayfield took a hard hit to the ribs after releasing a pass on a 2-point conversion try with 1:37 remaining against the Saints. Bowles said while the quarterback is sore, he should be fine to play against the Panthers. LB Shaquil Barrett (groin) and CB Carlton Davis (concussion) were inactive against New Orleans. Their status will be determined later in the week.\n\n\"They're trending in the right direction,\" Bowles said of Barrett and Davis. \"Once I see them Wednesday, I'll have a better feel.\"\n\n## KEY NUMBER\n3,907. In throwing for 309 yards and two TDs vs. the Saints, Mayfield established new career single-season bests for passing yards (3,907) and touchdown passes (28).\n\n## NEXT STEPS\nA win at Carolina not only would give the Bucs their third straight division title, but ensure a home playoff game the following week."}
{"text": "# Court rules absentee ballots with minor problems OK to count\nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:09 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MADISON, Wis. (AP)** - Wisconsin election clerks can accept absentee ballots that contain minor errors such as missing portions of witness addresses, a court ruled Tuesday in a legal fight that has pitted conservatives against liberals in the battleground state.\n\nDane County Circuit Court ruled in favor of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin in its lawsuit to clarify voting rights protections for voters whose absentee ballots have minor errors in listing their witnesses' addresses.\n\nThe ruling means that absentee ballots with certain technical witness address defects will not be rejected in future elections, the league said.\n\nA Waukesha County Circuit Court, siding with Republicans, barred the Wisconsin Elections Commission in 2022 from using longstanding guidance for fixing minor witness address problems on absentee ballots without contacting the voter. That ruling left absentee voters at risk of having their ballots rejected due to technical omissions or errors with no guarantee that they would be notified and given the chance to correct any errors and have their votes counted.\n\nThe League's lawsuit argued that rejecting absentee ballots for the omission of certain witness address components violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits denying the right to vote based on an error that has no material bearing on determining voting eligibility.\n\nIn Tuesday's order, the Dane County Circuit Court wrote, \"the Witness Address Requirement is not material to whether a voter is qualified. . . . As such, rejecting ballots for trivial mistakes in the Witness Address requirement directly violates the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.\"\n\n\"All voters deserve to have their votes counted regardless of whether they vote in person or absentee,\" Debra Cronmiller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, said in a news release. \"Small errors or omissions on the absentee certificate envelope should not prevent voters from exercising their constitutional rights.\"\n\nThe Fair Elections Center, a Washington-based, nonpartisan voting rights and election reform advocate, sued on behalf of the league.\n\n\"Wisconsinites should not have their right to vote denied due to technical errors, especially when they are not uniformly given an opportunity to remedy such issues,\" said Jon Sherman, the center's litigation director. \"Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act to prohibit exactly this type of disenfranchisement, and the court's order today enforces that federal law's protections as to four categories of absentee ballots.\"\n\nA telephone message seeking comment on the ruling was left Tuesday evening at the offices of the Wisconsin Republican Party."}
{"text": "# Seahawks needing help to reach playoffs shows what's gone wrong this season for Seattle\nBy **TIM BOOTH**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:00 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**RENTON, Wash. (AP)** - Going into the final week of the regular season, the Seattle Seahawks find themselves in the exact same position as a year ago when they needed a win and a Green Bay loss to make the postseason.\n\nThe fact Seattle is in this spot yet again is an indictment on what's gone wrong with this season.\n\nBack in the summer, the tone was that this would be the season where Seattle closed the gap in the NFC West and made the jump from surprise playoff participant to possibly challenging San Francisco as the best in the division.\n\nInstead, Seattle (8-8) is already locked into finishing in third place in the NFC West and lost control of its path to the playoffs with Sunday's 30-23 loss to Pittsburgh.\n\nRather than just needing a win over Arizona in the regular-season finale, the Seahawks must beat the Cardinals and have Green Bay lose at home to Chicago in order for Seattle to reach the postseason for a second straight year.\n\n\"It just felt like a really crappy outing as we all saw that at a time we needed it the most,\" Seattle coach Pete Carroll said during his weekly radio show on Tuesday.\n\nThe Seahawks are without question a heavily flawed team. The regression of their defense throughout the season and the inconsistencies on offense have provided enough evidence of their shortcomings.\n\nWhat the loss to Pittsburgh brought into question is the competitive desire of this group. Seattle had won two straight to gain control of its playoff path and then gave it all away over 60 minutes.\n\nEven if Seattle beats Arizona and gets the help it needs from Chicago, there is little reason to believe a playoff trip this season will be any different than it was a year ago when the Seahawks squeaked in with help from other teams and then were blown out by San Francisco in the wild-card round.\n\n\"We've got to go out there in their place and make it happen,\" quarterback Geno Smith said. \"We're the type of team that's going to always bounce back. We've got the right leadership. We've got the right coaches, right players, and we're going to make it happen.\"\n\n## WHAT'S WORKING\nSmith had an excellent performance that got overshadowed by the defensive issues. Smith threw for 290 yards and one touchdown, and added another 33 yards rushing, including Seattle's longest run play of 25 yards.\n\nAfter missing two games because of a groin injury, Smith has completed 69% of his passes with three TDs and no interceptions the past two weeks.\n\n## WHAT NEEDS HELP\nIt can't get worse for Seattle's run defense, can it? While the 208 yards Seattle allowed weren't a season high, the manner in which Pittsburgh gained all those yards might be the most demoralizing of the season. The Steelers duo of Najee Harris and Jaylen Warren broke countless tackles and turned a number of short runs into longer gains, such as Harris' 9-yard touchdown run. Seattle gave up three runs of 18 yards or longer and is allowing 159.1 yards per game rushing over the past 11 games.\n\n## STOCK UP\nIt's going to get lost in the issues with the defense, but DK Metcalf had another big game and has posted another 1,000-yard season. Metcalf had five catches for 106 yards. It was his third 100-yard game of the season and gave him 1,104 yards receiving going into the season finale. It's the third time in five seasons Metcalf has topped the 1,000-yard mark and the first time doing it in consecutive seasons after having 1,048 yards last season.\n\n## STOCK DOWN\nThere are plenty of options of those who didn't play well on the defensive side. And while the run defense was the crux of the issues, Seattle didn't do a good job defending the Pittsburgh passing game. The Seahawks had just one sack and two QB hits on Mason Rudolph - all from Leonard Williams - and the secondary got hit for five pass plays of 20 or more yards.\n\n## INJURIES\nSeattle lost a pair of offensive linemen in the defeat to Pittsburgh. Center Evan Brown left with a concussion and right tackle Abe Lucas continued to have issues with a balky knee. Carroll said Tuesday that Brown is in concussion protocol but progressing. He sounded pessimistic that Lucas would be able to make it back for Sunday's game.\n\n## KEY NUMBER\n17 - Seattle's defense has gone 17 consecutive drives without forcing a three-and-out from the opponent. The Seahawks forced a three-and-out on the opening drive against Tennessee two weeks ago and have not since. In those 17 drives, the Seahawks have allowed scores on nine of those possessions.\n\n## NEXT STEPS\nSeattle's only path to the playoffs requires winning in a place where it been challenging in the past. The Seahawks have won four of their past five trips to Arizona, but two of those were one-score games and last season the Seahawks got a late touchdown for a 31-21 win."}
{"text": "# Arizona border crossing with Mexico to reopen a month after migrant influx forced closure\nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:23 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LUKEVILLE, Ariz. (AP)** - A border crossing on the most direct route from Phoenix to the nearest beaches will reopen Thursday, authorities said, one month after it closed in response to a large migrant influx.\n\nU.S. Customs and Border Protection said it was also reopening a pedestrian border crossing in San Diego on Thursday and resuming full operations at a bridge in Eagle Pass, Texas, and a crossing in Nogales, Arizona.\n\nThe moves reflect a drop in illegal crossings from December highs, authorities said. Troy Miller, acting CBP commissioner, said last month that crossings had reached \"unprecedented\" heights, topping 10,000 on several days.\n\nThe Lukeville closure on Dec. 4 brought heavy pressure on CBP from Arizona's top elected officials. While remote, it is used to travel to Puerto Peñasco, or Rocky Point, a resort area on Mexico's Sea of Cortez. Americans also visit the border community of Sonoyta to eat, shop and get dental and medical care.\n\nCargo rail crossings in the Texas border cities of Eagle Pass and El Paso closed for five days last month in what U.S. authorities said was a response to large numbers of migrants riding freight trains through Mexico to the U.S. border. Businesses complained of major economic losses.\n\nLukeville and other crossings closed because CBP said it needed to reassign officials to processing migrants."}
{"text": "# The Saints realized their potential in Week 17, but was it too late?\nBy **BRETT MARTEL**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 7:52 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW ORLEANS (AP)** - Now that the New Orleans Saints have avoided the dreaded fate of playing meaningless late-season football, all they can do is try to replicate their most recent performance - easily among their best during an up-and-down 2023 campaign - and hope that fortune favors them.\n\nThe Saints demonstrated during their 23-13 victory at Tampa Bay on Sunday that they're capable of seizing control of a game against a playoff-contending rival, overcoming injuries and winning convincingly with their season on the line.\n\n\"Everything was clicking; everything worked out,\" tight end Juwan Johnson said. \"The defense was playing lights out and the offense was playing really well. Just from the first drive, we were hitting on all cylinders.\"\n\nNew Orleans found the end zone on its opening drive and remained in front, building a 20-point third-quarter lead that proved too much for the NFC South-leading Buccaneers to overcome.\n\nThe Saints' defense produced four Tampa Bay turnovers. New Orleans' offense never coughed up the ball.\n\nDerek Carr, whose bouts of inconsistency have gotten him booed at times, was efficient and effective. He completed 24 of 32 passes with two touchdowns.\n\nWhether one of New Orleans' best and most complete performances came a little too late will be known soon enough.\n\nThe Saints (8-8) pulled even with the Buccaneers (8-8) in the win-loss column, but Tampa Bay holds the tiebreaker by virtue of its superior record against common opponents.\n\nStill, the Saints remain alive in both the NFC South and wild-card races, even if winning this weekend is not enough by itself to assure New Orleans a postseason berth.\n\n\"We're guaranteed one more opportunity to go and prove it a little bit more,\" coach Dennis Allen said. \"That's what we're going to focus on.\"\n\n## WHAT'S WORKING\nNew Orleans' pass defense has ranked in the top 10 virtually all season and is currently ninth. The Saints also rank fifth in interceptions per pass attempt (3.1%) after Alontae Taylor and Jonathan Abram each picked off Baker Mayfield.\n\n## WHAT NEEDS HELP\nThe defense's approach to protecting late leads has caused consternation.\n\nAfter stifling Mayfield and the Tampa Bay offense with aggressive, opportunistic play for three quarters, New Orleans allowed touchdown passes of 22 and 47 yards in the last eight minutes. The Saints also gave up another 54-yard reception in the fourth quarter that might have been more costly if Trey Palmer hadn't fumbled the ball away as he fell to the ground without being touched.\n\n\"We've got to fix that because that's inexcusable to let the ball go over your head,\" said Allen, who oversees the defense. \"When you get in those situations, you've been playing well for such a long time doing it one way, don't change how you're playing.\"\n\n## STOCK UP\nJohnson's production had fallen below expectations for much of this season, but at Tampa Bay, the 27-year-old, fourth-year pro had eight catches for 90 yards and a touchdown. Abram had his best game this season with five tackles, one interception, a pass defended and a forced fumble.\n\n## STOCK DOWN\nChris Olave, who leads the Saints with 87 catches for 1,067 yards, experienced a dip in production at Tampa Bay, finishing with three catches for 26 yards.\n\n## INJURIES\nTop running back Alvin Kamara has a sprained ankle that sidelined him for the second half at Tampa Bay. Linebacker Nephi Sewell was carted off with what appeared to be a serious knee injury. Offensive tackle Landon Young also left with a knee injury.\n\n## KEY NUMBER\n1 - The number of New Orleans' opening offensive series that have ended in a touchdown this season after the Saints got in the end zone on their first possession at Tampa Bay.\n\n## NEXT STEPS\nThe Saints close out the regular season at home against Atlanta. If New Orleans wins, it needs a loss by Tampa Bay to win the NFC South, or it needs losses by both Seattle and Green Bay to capture the NFC's last wild-card playoff spot."}
{"text": "# Vikings still struggling to stop the quarterback carousel from spinning with Cousins out\nBy **DAVE CAMPBELL**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 7:38 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MINNEAPOLIS (AP)** - Kirk Cousins naturally evoked the loudest roar of the night in Minnesota, further amping up a high-energy atmosphere for a crucial game against Green Bay.\n\nWho could've predicted earlier this season that such a sight would signal a big problem for the Vikings?\n\nRecovering from a torn Achilles tendon, Cousins was relegated to the role of hype man when he ripped his shirt off to fire up the crowd from a perch above the stadium right before kickoff. His encouraging and insightful presence on the sideline did little to help his replacements.\n\nWhen Jaren Hall was benched for Nick Mullens at halftime, after an interception and a fumble each set up a Packers touchdown, Vikings coach Kevin O'Connell switched quarterbacks for the fifth time in nine games. Though there was little reason to doubt Cousins would avoid injury in 2023 as he did over the first 11 years of his NFL career, the lack of a proven backup has bitten the Vikings (7-9) badly.\n\nThe spinning carousel has also further laid bare their conundrum for 2024 and beyond with Cousins bound for free agency and the dire need to begin developing the next franchise quarterback, whether or not the four-time Pro Bowl pick returns. That player is likely not currently on the roster, as evidenced by the 16 turnovers the quarterbacks have been responsible for in eight games since Cousins went down.\n\nO'Connell held off on announcing a starter for the final game of the regular season, with Hall, Mullens and Joshua Dobbs all under consideration.\n\n\"I think we've been able to move the football most of the time consistently. We've had some spurts where we haven't, and we've had to take a long look at that,\" O'Connell said.\n\n## WHAT'S WORKING\nFinding a success story from the 33-10 loss to the Packers is a stretch, but the combination of play design and route-running consistently had receivers open for Hall and Mullens. Much of the problem was them either not making fast enough reads or not having enough time to throw.\n\n## WHAT NEEDS HELP\nThe pass protection was as weak as it's been all season against the Packers. LT Christian Darrisaw allowed the most damaging of the four sacks, when Preston Smith swam past him to knock the ball out of Hall's arm and give Green Bay the ball at the Minnesota 37 with 26 seconds left before halftime. The Packers scored a touchdown three plays later for a 23-3 lead.\n\n## STOCK UP\nCB Najee Thompson leads the Vikings with seven special teams tackles this season. He had his punt coverage skills on full display on Sunday, setting up their only touchdown by forcing a fumble by Packers returner Samari Toure and recovering the ball at the 7-yard line on the first play of the fourth quarter.\n\n\"I told a lot of kids when I was a freshman in college, 'I'm going to go play in the league on special teams,'\" said Thompson, who was undrafted out of Georgia Southern. \"I just kept working at it.\"\n\n## STOCK DOWN\nCB Akayleb Evans, who was benched down the stretch against Detroit on Dec. 24 after some costly missed tackles, was vulnerable again in pass coverage and run stopping. The absence of fellow starter Byron Murphy for the past two games with a knee injury made the struggles by Evans more pronounced.\n\n## INJURY REPORT\nMurphy will have an opportunity to return this week, but there's no guarantee he'll be cleared. RG Ed Ingram avoided significant injury to his shoulder, O'Connell said, after being forced out on Sunday. WR Jordan Addison (ankle) and CB Mekhi Blackmon (shoulder) played against the Packers after being listed as questionable, and O'Connell lauded their toughness.\n\n## KEY NUMBER\n2-6. That's tied for their fourth-worst home record in history, their worst such mark since going 1-7 in 2011.\n\n## UP NEXT\nThe Vikings will have a slim chance to return to the playoffs by beating the Lions on Sunday. They would then need Green Bay to lose to Chicago, New Orleans to lose to Atlanta and Seattle to lose at Arizona to claim the last wild-card berth. If the Saints win, the Vikings could tack a loss by Tampa Bay at Carolina onto losses by the Packers and the Seahawks and still get in if they win.\n\nOn the flip side, losing at Detroit would significantly improve their draft position this spring. The Vikings have the same record as Atlanta, Chicago and Las Vegas, and wins by two of those three teams with a loss to the Lions would land them in the top 10."}
{"text": "# Former Packers center Ken Bowman, who played on three straight championship teams, dies at 81\nJanuary 2, 2024. 7:43 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**GREEN BAY, Wis. (AP)** - Ken Bowman, who played center for the Green Bay Packers from 1964-73 and was part of three consecutive championship teams, has died. He was 81.\n\nThe Packers announced Tuesday that Bowman died last Wednesday in Oro Valley, Arizona. The team did not disclose a cause of death, but the Packers' statement cited Bowman's wife, Roseann, saying he died of natural causes.\n\nBowman was part of the Packers' NFL title-winning team in 1965, the year before the first Super Bowl, and the Super Bowl-winning teams of the next two seasons.\n\nHe is perhaps best known for snapping the ball to Bart Starr and delivering a block on the Hall of Fame quarterback's game-winning 1-yard touchdown sneak in the \"Ice Bowl,\" the Packers' 21-17 victory over the Dallas Cowboys in a 1967 NFL championship game that had a kickoff temperature of minus-13 degrees Fahrenheit.\n\nThat sent the Packers to the Super Bowl, where they beat the Oakland Raiders. A year earlier, Bowman stepped in for an injured Bill Curry at center during the first Super Bowl, helping the Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs.\n\nThe Packers selected Bowman out of Wisconsin in the eighth round of the 1964 draft. He played in 123 games and made 107 starts, all with Green Bay.\n\nBowman was the Packers' player representative for part of his career. He also was an NFL Players Association vice president."}
{"text": "# Police say Massachusetts man shot wife and daughter before shooting himself\nJanuary 2, 2024. 7:06 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DOVER, Mass. (AP)** - A Dover, Massachusetts, man shot and killed his wife and daughter before taking his own life last week, investigators said Tuesday.\n\n\"Preliminary results provided to investigators confirms that Teena Kamal, 54, and her daughter Arianna Kamal, 18, were victims of homicide by gunshot,\" Norfolk District Attorney Michael Morrissey's office said in a statement. \"Rakesh Kamal, 57, their husband and father respectively, died by gunshot wound consistent with being self-inflicted.\"\n\nPolice in Dover, located about 19 miles (31 kilometers) west of Boston, discovered the bodies Thursday after responding to a 911 call from a relative who had stopped by to check on the family.\n\nWhile full forensic and ballistics testing of the gun have not been finalized, the firearm found with Rakesh Kamal is consistent with a .40-caliber Glock 22 pistol, investigators said.\n\nThe gun was not registered to Rakesh Kamal and he was not licensed to possess it, investigators said. Massachusetts State Police have contacted the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for help in determining the origin of the firearm.\n\nThe deaths remain under investigation by Dover and Massachusetts State Police.\n\nDover is one of the richest communities in the state.\n\nMorrissey said last week that law enforcement hadn't received any reports of violence at the address."}
{"text": "# Rivera won't announce the Commanders' QB vs. the Cowboys yet\nBy **STEPHEN WHYNO**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 7:03 PM EST\n\n---\n\nRon Rivera refused Tuesday to reveal who will start at quarterback for the Washington Commanders in their season finale this weekend against the Dallas Cowboys.\n\nIt could be an 18th consecutive start for Sam Howell, the first of the season for Jacoby Brissett or even Jake Fromm's first NFL game action in nearly two years.\n\n\"We don't have to let anybody know until tomorrow, so we're just going to wait,\" Rivera said on a video call with reporters. \"We don't want to give them any head start on anything.\"\n\nNo matter who starts, the Commanders need to do a better job helping that QB. Howell has been sacked a league-high 61 times, the product of a lack of offensive balance with the team largely abandoning the run for a pass-heavy approach.\n\nBrissett was 18 of 23 for 224 yards and three touchdowns in two recent games in relief of Howell. Rivera last week benched Howell for Brissett, who then popped up on the injury report Friday with a hamstring injury that kept him out against San Francisco.\n\nNot learning until two hours before kickoff that he'd be starting, Howell threw two more interceptions against the 49ers in a 27-10 loss, Washington's seventh in a row, to give him a league-worst 19 this season.\n\nAsked about the switch back to Howell after practicing with Brissett during the week, veteran tight end Logan Thomas said: \"Both of them are obviously different. But we're all professionals. We know how to work with either guy.\"\n\nIt's unclear if Brissett, on a one-year contract and set to be a free agent again this offseason, is healthy enough to practice this week or play Sunday against Dallas.\n\n\"He's just been working with the trainers and everybody, and we'll see how he is,\" Rivera said.\n\n## WHAT'S WORKING\nArizona's stunning comeback win at Philadelphia not only allowed the Niners to celebrate clinching the NFC's top seed, it boosted the Commanders' draft status. They could pick as high as second, pending the result of their game and New England's at home against the New York Jets.\n\nThat would give whoever's next in charge the chance to take one of the top quarterback prospects available, Ohio State receiver Marvin Harrison Jr. or a standout offensive tackle.\n\n## WHAT NEEDS HELP\nThe offense isn't the only problem, and there are plenty of holes to fill on defense, too. Cornerback Kendall Fuller, safety Kam Curl and linebacker Cody Barton are all pending free agents, and Washington will need new edge rushers after trading Chase Young and Montez Sweat prior to the deadline.\n\n## STOCK UP\nOne of the few bright spots this season has been second-year running back Brian Robinson Jr., who averaged 4.9 yards a carry against San Francisco. Robinson has eight total touchdowns this season with 358 yards receiving to go with 708 on the ground as he has shown he can catch as well as run in the pros.\n\n## STOCK DOWN\nRight tackle Trent Scott had a rough time filling in for injured starter Andrew Wylie. Scott was flagged three times and struggled in pass and run blocking.\n\n## INJURIES\nAlready depleted in the secondary, the Commanders lost two young cornerbacks to injury Sunday: Tarik Castro-Fields injured a shoulder and Christian Holmes had a concussion.\n\n\"It was unfortunate,\" Rivera said. \"They were playing pretty well. It was kind of fun to watch those guys get those opportunities.\"\n\n## KEY NUMBER\n13 1/2 - Points the Cowboys are favored to win by on FanDuel Sportsbook, the second consecutive home game Washington has been a double-digit underdog.\n\n## NEXT STEPS\nBrace for an invasion of Dallas fans, similar to 2018 when Eagles fans flooded FedEx field to watch their team clinch a playoff spot. The Cowboys can win the NFC East simply by beating Washington, which they did 45-10 on Thanksgiving."}
{"text": "# Elections head in Nevada's lone swing county resigns, underscoring election turnover in key state\nBy **GABE STERN**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:41 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**RENO, Nev. (AP)** - The rapid turnover among election officials in Nevada continued on Tuesday, when the top election official in the state's lone swing county abruptly announced her resignation less than a month before early voting commences for the Feb. 6 presidential preference primary.\n\nWashoe County Registrar of Voters Jamie Rodriguez said in her resignation letter that she wanted to pursue opportunities away from elections and spend more time with family ahead of a crucial 2024 election cycle.\n\nHer last day will be March 15, though she will use her accrued time before then.\n\nEleven of Nevada's 17 counties have had turnover in top county election positions since the 2020 election, most of which occurred between 2020 and the 2022 midterms, according to an Associated Press tally.\n\nThat already included Washoe County, whose past registrar of voters, Deanna Spikula, submitted her resignation in June 2022 in part because she received death threats and harassment.\n\nThe county had no additional comment on Rodriguez's departure, other than forwarding along Rodriguez's resignation letter, which was first reported by KRNV-TV in Reno.\n\nWashoe County was the subject of an extensive elections audit that found rapid turnover and understaffing among the office hindered smooth election processes, communication with county residents and ballot development and preparation.\n\nThe county has hired additional elections staff since then - including Rodriguez's replacement, current deputy registrar of voters Cari-Ann Burgess, who joined the department in September after previously working in elections in Minnesota and rural Douglas County, Nevada.\n\nIn an interview with The Associated Press last month before Rodriguez resigned, Burgess said preparation for the Feb. 6 primary, which will mostly remain symbolic for Republicans, was on schedule and that there had not been a lot of outside inquiries yet about the primary.\n\n\"We're sitting really well,\" she said last month. \"The road to February sixth is going to be pretty smooth.\"\n\nThe resignations across the Western swing state since 2020 were due to a confluence of factors: some received threats and harassment because of false claims of a stolen 2020 presidential election perpetrated by former president Donald Trump. Others resigned over a lack of support from the state. And many struggled with drastic changes in Nevada voting processes that fell on their small county offices to implement, including a universal mail ballot system, where ballots were sent to every registered voter in the mail.\n\nIt remains unclear if those factors resulted in Rodriguez's resignation. She did not respond to a text sent to her work phone requesting comment on her departure.\n\nThe resignations across Nevada had slowed slightly since the 2022 midterms. Rodriguez is the second top county election official to resign in the past year.\n\nNevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, the state's top election official, has focused on better retaining election officials across the state amidst the turnover. He pushed new state laws last legislative session that make it a felony to harass or intimidate election officials while on the job, along with training courses and a manual that would streamline preparation for new officials thrust into leading elections roles.\n\n\"We have to be ready and prepared to deal with the team changing talent,\" Aguilar testified in front of state lawmakers last March while pushing for the manual.\n\nHis office did not have an immediate response to Rodriguez's departure on Tuesday."}
{"text": "# Mike Vrabel wants his Titans to beat the Jags in season finale because losing 'sucks'\nBy **TERESA M. WALKER**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 6:53 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP)** - Tennessee coach Mike Vrabel wants his Titans to finish off the most painful and ugly season of his tenure with a victory.\n\nNot just to build momentum for 2024. There are many reasons, and Vrabel summed up the biggest motivation succinctly.\n\n\"It sucks to lose,\" Vrabel said Tuesday.\n\n\"Losing. Awful. That's why I want to win. Because you don't sleep. You want to win for the players that bust their tail. That's it. You know? I mean, it's not about, 'Hey, we'll go into the offseason with a good note.' Nobody knows what you did on January 7th ... in April when you come back.\"\n\nVrabel had the Titans (5-11) in position to play for a postseason berth in each game of his six seasons until Dec. 17, when they were eliminated from contention. Now they are mired in a second three-game skid this season after a 26-3 loss at Houston, and they've lost 18 of 23 games dating back to last season.\n\nThat's when a seven-game skid ended Tennessee's bid for a third straight AFC South title. They were about three minutes from winning the game and the division, but a late turnover cost the Titans both.\n\nThe Titans host Jacksonville (9-7) on Sunday with the Jaguars in the reverse position from a year ago, needing to win to clinch a consecutive title. Tennessee has lost its last three home games by three points each, two in overtime.\n\n\"We need a win for a lot of reasons,\" Vrabel said.\n\n## WHAT'S WORKING\nDespite a revolving door at spots on defense, the Titans remain the NFL's stingiest unit when backed up inside their own 20, allowing touchdowns on 37.9% of drives. They held Houston to three field goals.\n\nThe Texans scored only one touchdown on offense.\n\n## WHAT NEEDS HELP\nThe offensive line. Tennessee already has allowed more sacks with 62 through 16 games than in any of its previous 24 seasons as the Titans. The line has allowed 13 sacks in the past two losses alone, the first resulting in an injury to quarterback Will Levis for the second time in three games.\n\nThe Titans may wind up replacing as many as four starters this offseason. Only the Jets (63) and Giants (83) have allowed more sacks.\n\n## STOCK UP\nRyan Tannehill. The veteran quarterback, whose contract is up after this season, came off the bench and completed his first nine passes. He finished 16 of 20 for 168 yards and a 101.7 passer rating despite being sacked five times. Tannehill told reporters later he felt like John Wick at the end of a movie, while not specifying which chapter of the gunslinger series starring Keanu Reeves.\n\n## STOCK DOWN\nWR Treylon Burks. The 18th pick overall in the 2022 draft dropped a deep pass from Levis on the second play from scrimmage. At a minimum, a deep completion might've eased the pressure on the Titans' woeful offensive line and kept Levis healthy.\n\n## INJURIES\nVrabel said Levis (right foot) will be evaluated throughout the week. Tannehill will start if the rookie is unable to play. The Titans listed 18 players last week on their injury report, which included Levis with a sprained left ankle.\n\nRG Daniel Brunskill lasted 12 snaps after starting with an injured ankle that cost him a start a week ago. Rookie Colton Dowell hurt a knee while being the gunner on punt coverage. TE Kevin Rader appeared to take a helmet off a knee.\n\n## KEY NUMBER\n0 - The Titans are another loss from going winless in the AFC South. Before this latest loss, they had the best record in the division since 2018 at 19-15 under Vrabel. They will finish last for the first time since the 2015 season. They've lost eight straight divisional games.\n\nWorse? Vrabel has yet to beat any of the AFC South's current coaches.\n\n## NEXT STEPS\nFinish this season as quickly as possible. Assess the coaching staff, then get ready for free agency with the second-most cap space in the NFL for the 2024 season. The Titans also are poised to draft inside the top eight for the first time since 2017, when they had the fifth overall pick."}
{"text": "# The Steelers' pursuit of a playoff berth in the present has led to questions about the future\nBy **WILL GRAVES**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 6:49 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PITTSBURGH (AP)** - Mike Tomlin doesn't want to talk about the future. Mason Rudolph or Kenny Pickett either.\n\nConsidering the Pittsburgh Steelers still have plenty to play for when their topsy-turvy regular season wraps up on Saturday in Baltimore with a chance to inch toward a playoff berth that seemed unlikely just two weeks ago, that's probably wise.\n\nThere's still plenty on the line - in the short term anyway - for a team that has ping-ponged between intriguing and inert for four solid months. The Steelers can reach the postseason in multiple ways, most of them reliant on beating the Ravens (13-3) and getting help on Sunday from either Tennessee or Miami.\n\nNo matter how the weekend goes, given Pittsburgh's wildly uneven play it's hard to imagine the Steelers sticking around in the playoffs for long should they get there, setting the stage for an offseason where they might have to re-evaluate the most important position on the team.\n\nAnd it's all thanks to a player rendered an afterthought on the depth chart for the better part of four years.\n\nRudolph's solid and occasionally spectacular play has given Pittsburgh's moribund offense a welcome if somewhat unexpected jolt. The Steelers have topped 30 points in consecutive weeks for the first time since 2020. They put up 468 yards in Seattle, a place the franchise had won just once in nine tries previously.\n\nNow, the player set to become a free agent in March who wondered if he would be getting into commercial real estate by the end of 2024 looks like someone who will be on an NFL roster this time next year. Maybe even in Pittsburgh.\n\n\"I love playing for this team and love winning games,\" Rudolph said Tuesday. \"We'll keep trying to do that.\"\n\nRudolph has been able to do - over the course of two games anyway against defenses ranked near the bottom of the league - what Pickett and Mitch Trubisky have mostly failed to for the past two years: make plays downfield with his arm and get the Steelers to the end zone with regularity.\n\nThe player who first caught the eye of then-Steelers general manager Kevin Colbert while lighting up the University of Pittsburgh for 497 yards passing and five touchdown passes in an Oklahoma State win at Acrisure Stadium in 2017 is averaging 11.1 yards per pass attempt since taking over for an ineffective Trubisky.\n\nYes, it's a small sample size. Still, it's symbolic of what Tomlin called Rudolph's \"calculated risk-taking\" approach, an approach that Pickett has failed to truly embrace.\n\nIn the span of two weeks, Rudolph's emergence has shifted the focus away from things such as Tomlin's hold on the locker room and wide receiver George Pickens' fickle relationship with reporters (and run blocking) and toward what the Steelers will do at quarterback in 2024.\n\nTomlin has been Pickett's biggest supporter from the day Pittsburgh selected the former Pitt star in the first round of the 2022 draft. He began the 2023 season bullish on Pickett's development, saying he expected Pickett to \"kill it.\"\n\nFor a variety of reasons, it simply hasn't happened. Pickett has just six touchdown passes on the season, the fewest in the league among any quarterback with at least 300 pass attempts.\n\nOn Tuesday, rather than talk about starting during a potentially season-defining game against their biggest rival, Pickett spent it denying rumors he refused to serve as Rudolph's backup in Seattle after recovering from right ankle surgery.\n\nIt's not exactly what the Steelers envisioned in September after a high-flying preseason that sent expectations soaring.\n\nThose expectations haven't been met. Still, maybe Rudolph and the Steelers find a way to sneak in. It's happened before. If they do, Rudolph probably keeps his job and Pittsburgh heads into the offseason likely having to rethink the configuration of its quarterback room.\n\nFor a team seemingly stuck in NFL purgatory - too good to be bad, too bad to be good - the Steelers never are boring.\n\n## WHAT'S WORKING\nThe shared workload of Najee Harris and Jaylen Warren. The two running backs have each surpassed 1,000 yards of total offense, giving the Steelers perhaps the best one-two combination at the position in the league. They've also done it without any underlying drama, refreshing for a team that has seen a season full of it among other position groups.\n\n## WHAT NEEDS HELP\nWhile the defense is finding a way to keep points down despite a seemingly never-ending string of injuries at inside linebacker and safety, yards have been easy to come by. The Steelers have given up an average of 353 yards over their past four games and now face the NFL's second-highest-scoring offense, though one that could be without MVP favorite Lamar Jackson if the Ravens choose to rest him for the playoffs.\n\n## STOCK UP\nWatt became the second Steeler to be voted team MVP by his teammates for a fourth time when he received the honor on Tuesday. The perennial All-Pro is tied for the NFL lead with 17 sacks and has a chance at winning a second AP Defensive Player of the Year Award if he can make a late push with another dynamic performance against the Ravens.\n\n## STOCK DOWN\nCenter Mason Cole's shotgun snaps have been an issue at times throughout the season and while he's worked at it repeatedly, there are still a handful of snaps a game that threaten to get away from Rudolph, whose quick reflexes averted disaster on a couple of occasions in Seattle.\n\n## INJURIES\nSafeties Minkah Fitzpatrick (knee) and LB Elandon Roberts (pectoral) didn't practice on Tuesday and odds of them playing seem remote at best.\n\n## KEY NUMBER\n1 - the number of regular-season games - out of 275 - during Tomlin's 17-year tenure in which the Steelers have been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs.\n\n## NEXT STEPS\nTry to keep the momentum going in Baltimore on Saturday and hope for a little help from Miami and/or Tennessee on Sunday to reach the playoffs."}
{"text": "# Voter challenges in Georgia before 2021 runoff didn't violate Voting Rights Act, judge says\nBy **KATE BRUMBACK**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:53 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ATLANTA (AP)** - A conservative group did not violate the Voting Rights Act when it announced it was challenging the eligibility of more than 360,000 Georgia voters just before a 2021 runoff election for two pivotal U.S. Senate seats, a judge ruled Tuesday. But he expressed concerns about the group's methods.\n\nU.S. District Judge Steve Jones issued a 145-page decision in favor of Texas-based nonprofit True the Vote. Fair Fight, a group founded by former Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, had sued True the Vote and several individuals, alleging that their actions violated a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that prohibits voter intimidation.\n\nThe evidence presented at trial did not show that the actions of True the Vote \"caused (or attempted to cause) any voter to be intimidated, coerced, or threatened in voting,\" Jones concluded. But he wrote that the list of voters to be challenged compiled by the group \"utterly lacked reliability\" and \"verges on recklessness.\"\n\n\"The Court has heard no testimony and seen no evidence of any significant quality control efforts, or any expertise guiding the data process,\" he wrote.\n\nIn the weeks after the November 2020 general election, then-President Donald Trump and his supporters were promoting false claims of widespread voter fraud that had cost him the election. In Georgia, two U.S. Senate races that would ultimately decide control of the Senate were headed for an early January runoff election.\n\nTrue the Vote announced the voter challenges just after early in-person voting began for that runoff. The group said it had good reason to believe the voters no longer lived in the districts where they were registered and were ineligible to vote there.\n\nGeorgia election officials rejected only a few dozen ballots cast in the runoff, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. The two Democratic challengers went on to beat the Republican incumbents by ten of thousands of votes, securing control of the Senate for their party.\n\nJones wrote that to succeed in proving a violation of the Voting Rights Act, Fair Fight and the individual voters who sued along with it would have had to show that True the Vote's actions caused or could have caused someone to be \"intimidated, threatened, or coerced\" from voting or trying to vote.\n\nFair Fight's arguments \"suggest that any mass challenge of voters near an election (especially if negligently or recklessly made) constitutes intimidation or an attempt to intimidate,\" Jones wrote, adding that he disagreed. He noted that county election boards ultimately decide whether someone is eligible once a challenge is filed. The law doesn't limit the number of voter challenges or their proximity to an election, he wrote.\n\n\"In making this conclusion, the Court, in no way, is condoning TTV's actions in facilitating a mass number of seemingly frivolous challenges,\" Jones wrote in a footnote. \"The Court, however, cannot under the operative legal framework say that these actions were contrary to Georgia law (which is unchallenged by Plaintiffs).\"\n\nFair Fight had argued that public statements True the Vote made about the challenges amounted to voter intimidation. But Jones disagreed, pointing out that the statements were not aimed at any particular voter and none of the challenged voters who testified said they had seen the statements.\n\nTrue the Vote President Catherine Engelbrecht celebrated the ruling, saying in an emailed statement that it \"sends a clear message to those who would attempt to control the course of our nation through lawfare and intimidation.\"\n\nFair Fight Executive Director Cianti Stewart-Reid expressed disappointment, saying in an emailed statement that in the past two years other groups have drawn \"from True the Vote's anti-voter playbook to launch their own mass voter challenge efforts that continue to this day.\" She vowed that Fair Fight would continue to push back against the challenges."}
{"text": "# Kentucky secretary of state calls for a 'tolerant and welcoming society' as he starts his 2nd term\nBy **BRUCE SCHREINER**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 6:34 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP)** - Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams called on Bluegrass State policymakers to promote a \"tolerant and welcoming society\" as he joined four fellow Republicans for their public swearing-in ceremony Tuesday as they started their terms as statewide officeholders.\n\nA crowd that included U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell looked on as the five officials ceremonially took the oath of office at the state Capitol. They were officially sworn in on New Year's Day.\n\nAlong with Adams, they included Attorney General Russell Coleman, State Auditor Allison Ball, State Treasurer Mark Metcalf and State Agriculture Commissioner Jonathan Shell.\n\nAdams was reelected to a second term last November, while the other Republican victors are in their first terms. As usual, the oaths included the archaic passage in which they swore they've never fought a duel with deadly weapons or been involved in one in any way.\n\nGov. Andy Beshear and Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman, both Democrats, were sworn in to their second terms last month. Beshear attended the ceremony for the GOP officials Tuesday.\n\nIn his speech after taking the oath, Adams quipped: \"It is great to not be fired.\" His speech quickly turned serious, as Adams bemoaned that Kentucky remains atop \"far too many undesirable categories.\" He urged state leaders to continue creating a business and tax environment that attracts more people.\n\n\"Just as important, are we going to offer a tolerant and welcoming society that won't repel those otherwise interested in becoming Kentuckians?\" Adams added.\n\nIf the state fails on that front, he warned, it could \"lose our next generation to other states, too. A generation uninterested in relitigating the culture wars of the '80s.\"\n\nLast year, Kentucky's GOP-dominated Legislature enacted a measure banning access to gender-affirming health care for young transgender people, joining several other Republican-leaning states in the action. Adams didn't mention the legislation in his speech Tuesday, but his comments appeared to double down on his interview late last year with the Lexington Herald-Leader, in which he told the newspaper that his biggest takeaway from the 2023 election results, led by Beshear's victory, was that Republicans had a messaging problem. Republicans tried to push the transgender issue to the forefront of the governor's race.\n\nThe other Republican officeholders offered glimpses of their top priorities in their new jobs. McConnell - the main architect of the GOP's rise to dominance in Kentucky - spoke in personal terms about his connections to them in his speech.\n\nColeman, a former federal prosecutor, promised to make Kentucky safer and to enforce the rule of law as attorney general. After serving two terms as state treasurer, Ball said that as auditor she'll serve as a watchdog of taxpayer dollars at an even \"deeper level.\" Metcalf vowed to \"protect Kentucky's money, to safeguard its pensions, to give taxpayers true value.\" And Shell said that he'll team with his staff to \"make a difference for rural Kentucky, for urban Kentucky and for agriculture in this state.\"\n\nAt the end of his remarks, Coleman said: \"Now, let's get to work,\" echoing the comments of his fellow officeholders."}
{"text": "# Chicago Bulls hopeful injured guard Zach LaVine can return to the lineup on Friday\nBy **DAN GELSTON**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 6:40 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PHILADELPHIA (AP)** - Chicago Bulls guard Zach LaVine could return to the lineup as early as Friday's game against Charlotte if there are no setbacks in his recovery from a sore right foot.\n\nLaVine has not played since Nov. 28 and is testing out his foot this week in a rehab stint with the G League's Windy City Bulls. A two-time All-Star, LaVine averaged 21 points in 18 games this season. The Bulls entered Tuesday's game in Philadelphia with a 10-5 record this season without LaVine - they were just 15-19 overall.\n\nBulls coach Billy Donovan said Tuesday he was encouraged by LaVine's health reports following two days of practice with Windy City. LaVine was scheduled to practice at least one more time this week with the G League team.\n\n\"The part that we're most concerned about is when he started having to do all that cutting, how he responded,\" Donovan said. \"He responded well. So now we've gotten through that and now he's ramping up. I just don't know from the medical staff how many days they want to see him because he's been out (17) games. What do they feel is an adequate enough time for him to get his legs back under him? Do they feel that he's got at least enough physical contact that they would feel comfortable with him going back into playing?\"\n\nThe 28-year-old LaVine signed a five-year, $215.16 million extension after the 2021-22 season, largely considered one of the worst max deals in recent NBA history. He's been the subject of recent trade rumors and Bulls executive Arturas Karnisovas could look to move LaVine in a package deal before the Feb. 8 trade deadline. Chicago's recent run of success without him could embolden Karnisovas to shop LaVine.\n\n\"I think he sees how we're playing, what we're doing, and the thing he'd want to do is come in and contribute and enhance that and make it better,\" Donovan said of LaVine. \"It's been very, very positive, our conversations. I think he wants to help the group as much as he can. I don't think it's necessarily so much that he has to change his game. It's what he does really, really, really well. Can he bring that to the table for us?\"\n\nThrough only 18 games, LaVine's 44% shooting percentage was his lowest since 2017-18, when he played just 24 games because of injuries. He was also shooting a career-worst 34% from 3-point range.\n\n\"I don't think he was finishing at the level he has throughout his career; shooting it at the level he was throughout his career,\" Donovan said. \"I think he takes great pride in those things. I think as hard as he works, and all these guys work, when they don't see the ball go into the basket, for a lot of them it's disappointing or it's frustrating. I think there's no question before the injury happened, I think if you look at his numbers compared to what he has been doing, there was certainly a difference there.\""}
{"text": "# Housing, climate change, assault weapons ban on agenda as Rhode Island lawmakers start new session\nJanuary 2, 2024. 6:26 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP)** - Rhode Island lawmakers met Tuesday for the start of the state's new Legislative session, with the top issues under consideration including investing in public transit and safe affordable housing, defending against climate change and weighing a call for same-day voter registration.\n\nAdvocates are also pushing lawmakers to act on gun safety initiatives by passing two bills - one that would require the secure storage of all firearms and a second that would ban the manufacture, sale and possession of assault-style weapons while providing current owners a pathway to keep their guns.\n\nSpeaker Joseph Shekarchi said he is hopeful Rhode Island has dodged a recession but warned that tough choices loom as federal pandemic relief funds dry up.\n\n\"We're not out of the woods yet,\" he told fellow House members, adding that lawmakers must continue to address the challenge of creating more affordable housing while also confronting strains on the state's health care system.\n\nAmong other bills being reintroduced during the new session are proposals to address driving under the influence. One would require the license plates of a vehicle be confiscated by police if the driver was arrested for driving while their license was suspended, revoked or cancelled for refusing to submit to a chemical test or for operating under the influence. Another proposal would increase sentences and fines for driving to endanger, resulting in death or personal injury.\n\nUnder a proposed \"baby bond\" bill, a child born in Rhode Island to a family eligible for Medicaid would receive a lump sum of money that would be invested by the state treasury until the child reaches 18 years of age.\n\nThe goal is to help lower-income families build wealth. When the child reaches 18, they can use the money to buy a home, pay for higher education or start a small business. A similar program has been created in Connecticut."}
{"text": "# Pakistan slumps to 75-4 on Day 1 of 3rd test in Warner's farewell for Australia\nJanuary 2, 2024. 9:03 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SYDNEY (AP)** - Much of the pre-match attention may have been on veteran David Warner's last test for Australia, but it was the pace bowlers who stole the spotlight Wednesday by ripping through Pakistan's fragile top order in a torrid opening session.\n\nAustralia skipper Pat Cummins snared two wickets as Pakistan slumped to 75-4 at lunch after winning the toss and opting to bat at the Sydney Cricket Ground.\n\nCummins, coming off a ten-wicket haul in the Boxing Day test at Melbourne, took the key wicket of Babar Azam. Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood set the tone by each taking a wicket in the first two overs.\n\nAt the break, Pakistan captain Shan Masood was unbeaten on 32 and Mohammad Rizwan was 12 not out, digging-in for a 28-run stand as the tourists try and avoid a series sweep.\n\nStarc (1-28) struck with the second ball, teasing Shafique into an uncontrolled swipe which the opener could only edge through to Steve Smith at second slip.\n\nHazlewood (1-23) struck in the next over when he had test rookie Saim Ayub edging through to Alex Carey in his debut innings.\n\nFrom 4-2, Babar and Massood started the rebuild for Pakistan, with Babar especially attacking the Aussie quick bowlers.\n\nBut the rally was short-lived as Cummins removed Babar (26) with a ball that came back at the right-hander and struck him on the pad. Umpire Michael Gough turned down the initial Australian appeal, but the TV umpire overturned the decision to reduce Pakistan to 39-3 at the end of the first hour.\n\nSaud Shakeel was Cummins' second wicket, edging behind to Carey to leave Pakistan's first innings in tatters at 47-4.\n\nThe lead up to the match has been almost exclusively about Warner's last test for Australia, and the 112-test veteran, flanked by his three daughters, led the home team out on to the SCG for his final test.\n\nOn Tuesday, Warner took to social media to plead for the return of his \"baggy green\" test cricket cap which was in a bag that went missing in transit between Melbourne and Sydney this week. On Wednesday, he was wearing a new cap.\n\nAustralia won the first two tests in Perth and Melbourne to clinch the three-match series but with World Test Championship points at stake, Australia named an unchanged lineup for the third consecutive match.\n\nPakistan, which hasn't beaten Australia in a test Down Under since 1985, rested pace bowler Shaheen Shah Afridi to bring in a second spinner, Sajid Khan, and dropped Imam-ul-Haq to bring in 21-year-old Ayub."}
{"text": "# Gypsy Rose Blanchard is free and reflecting on prison term for conspiring to kill her abusive mother\nBy **HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:20 PM EST\n\n---\n\nGypsy Rose Blanchard said she has found a way to forgive her mother - and herself. But it has been a long journey from years of abuse and the darkest parts of her life splashed across tabloids to living in prison.\n\nBlanchard, now 32, was paroled last week from a Missouri women's prison. Her release came 8 1/2 years after she persuaded her boyfriend at the time to kill her abusive mother, Clauddine \"Dee Dee\" Blanchard - in a desperate bid to be free of her.\n\nFor years, her mother forced her to pretend that she was suffering from leukemia, muscular dystrophy and other serious illnesses.\n\n\"At first I was really angry with her, very confused. And I'm still confused,\" Blanchard told The Associated Press in a phone interview Tuesday. \"But I understand that she had a lot of mental issues. And so I think that's brought me to a place of forgiveness by just trying to understand where she was coming from. I don't believe that she was evil.\n\n\"I know, that she was very sick,\" she continued. This journey, Blanchard explained, also involved forgiving herself.\n\nDee Dee Blanchard had essentially kept her daughter prisoner and duped doctors into doing unnecessary procedures by telling them that her daughter's medical records had been lost in Hurricane Katrina. Gypsy Rose Blanchard's attorney said the mother had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a psychological disorder in which parents or caregivers seek sympathy through the exaggerated or made-up illnesses of their children.\n\nThe mother-daughter duo received charitable donations, and even a home near Springfield from Habitat for Humanity.\n\nForced to use a wheelchair and feeding tube, Gypsy felt trapped. She said her mother, who lied about Gypsy's age to make her seem younger, prevented her from having much of a relationship with her father - or with anyone else.\n\n\"I wish I could go back and tell my younger self, 'Call your dad. Reach out for help with people because they will actually believe you,'\" she said. \"The main reason why I didn't is because I really felt like nobody would believe me whenever I said that things just wasn't right at home.\"\n\nWhen she turned 23, she supplied a knife to her boyfriend, and hid in a bathroom while he repeatedly stabbed her mother, according to the probable cause statement. Then Gypsy and Nicholas Godejohn, who she met on a Christian dating website, made their way by bus to Godejohn's home in Wisconsin, where they were arrested.\n\nGodejohn is serving a life sentence in Missouri while prosecutors cut Blanchard a deal because of the abuse she had endured.\n\nIncarceration was \"nothing but self-discovery,\" she said. She made friends, earned her GED and overcame early shortcomings in her education that left her unable to do basic math. While behind bars, she even met and married someone who forged a relationship with Gypsy by writing to her on a whim.\n\n\"I was in a little cocoon. And now that I'm free, I've emerged as a butterfly,\" she said.\n\nShe describes her husband Ryan Scott Anderson, a 37-year-old special education teacher from Lake Charles, Louisiana, as a \"teddy bear.\" In the pre-dawn hours last Thursday, Anderson picked her up at the prison. They had planned to go to the Kansas City Chiefs game on Sunday; she dreamed she might even bump into superstar Taylor Swift as she cheered on her boyfriend, tight end Travis Kelce. Swift's music had been an inspiration to Blanchard.\n\nBut going to the game was deemed too much, too soon. Instead she headed to Louisiana and started to settle into post-prison life. Her father also lives in the state, and she said she is finally \"getting to know him as an adult.\"\n\n\"This is what I've been wanting for so long,\" she said. \"But it's an adjustment. But it's a wonderful adjustment.\" She added that given her childhood, it also is her \"first taste of actual, real, full fledged freedom.\"\n\nThis week, she is delighting in the little things. She used a Keurig coffee maker for the first time Tuesday. She played video games with her father using a virtual reality headset. She described both experiences as \"amazing.\"\n\nShe isn't sure yet what will come next and said she wants to give herself a little bit of time before she decides. Eventually, she wants to have children with her husband. But when is a question mark, as is possibilities for employment. The only jobs she has ever had were all in prison, where she took photos and helped out with janitorial tasks.\n\n\"Right now, I'm really not sure what my skill is,\" she said, \"so I'm going to have to kind of discover that over time.\"\n\nAs she adjusts, there has been a fresh round of media coverage. A Lifetime docuseries \"The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard\" and her own eBook, \"Released: Conversations on the Eve of Freedom\" (Penguin Random House) are coming out this month.\n\nAround the U.S. people learned about the bizarre case from the 2017 HBO documentary \"Mommy Dead and Dearest\" and the 2019 Hulu miniseries \"The Act.\"\n\nWhile there have been many TV specials and interviews over the years, she steered clear of watching them, fearing it would be \"emotionally traumatizing,\" she said. This docuseries will be the first she has ever watched.\n\n\"I am at least putting myself out there to be a cautionary tale,\" she said. \"because I don't want anyone to have to go through what I went through.\""}
{"text": "# Surprising Colts control their playoff destiny entering prime-time showdown with Texans\nBy **MICHAEL MAROT**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 6:09 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**INDIANAPOLIS (AP)** - The Indianapolis Colts weren't supposed to be here, playing a prime-time game in Week 18 with a chance to make the playoffs.\n\nNot with a rookie quarterback who then suffered a season-ending injury that forced Indy (9-7) to rely on a veteran backup for its final 12 games. Not with an inconsistent running game or a first-time head coach. And certainly not with a defense allowing 24.5 points per game.\n\nYet this gritty bunch is here, one win away from reaching the postseason for the first time since 2020, completing a mission perhaps only they believed possible and, yes, proving the critics wrong. They can't wait.\n\n\"One thing I've learned is how scrappy, how tough this team is,\" 2021 NFL rushing champ Jonathan Taylor said after Sunday's 23-20 win over Las Vegas. \"We knew we had tough players, but it's a different story when you say you have a tough team.\"\n\nTaylor is one of many Indy players who have overcome obstacles.\n\nHe opened training camp and the regular season on the physically-unable-to-perform list with an ankle injury, forcing him to miss Indy's first four games. Thumb surgery kept him out of three late-season contests. Now, he appears to be rounding into form.\n\nQuarterback Gardner Minshew struggled with turnovers during a three-game losing streak after replacing the injured Anthony Richardson in Week 5. He rebounded by leading the Colts (9-7) to four straight wins before alternating wins and losses over the past four weeks to forge a three-way tie with Houston and Jacksonville atop the AFC South.\n\nIf Minshew extends his career-best single-season victory total to eight Saturday night against the Texans, Indy will be playoff bound. With a win and a Jaguars loss Sunday at Tennessee, the Colts would claim their first division crown since 2014.\n\n\"In this league, everybody's got a chance,\" Minshew said. \"There's a lot of parity, and then I think even when you're struggling a little bit there at 3-5, I think everybody pulled together instead of growing apart. We were able to get us in this position. So, I think everybody is fired up for the opportunity.\"\n\nNow that they are here, the Colts don't intend to fritter away this opportunity - playing at home, playing for the postseason and playing to prove they are every bit the playoff team they thought they could be.\n\n\"We know what's at stake,\" Steichen said. \"It's go out and take care of business. It's win or go home.\"\n\n## WHAT'S WORKING\nRun defense. After watching Las Vegas' Zamir White run for 145 yards against Kansas City in Week 16, the Colts cut those numbers in half. He finished with 20 carries for 71 yards as the Raiders averaged 3.4 yards per carry.\n\n## WHAT NEEDS HELP\nTakeaways. Indy still ranks in the top half of the league, but after recording at least one turnover in 19 consecutive games, it has gone two weeks without one. The Colts must find a way to force turnovers against the Texans and dynamic rookie quarterback C.J. Stroud.\n\n## STOCK UP\nTrey Sermon. While Taylor looks like he has fresh legs after missing so much time, Sermon has filled in nicely for injured RB Zack Moss. He had 17 carries for 88 yards in a win over Pittsburgh and had a 27-yard run to set up a late field goal against Las Vegas.\n\n## STOCK DOWN\nPass defense. Raiders quarterback Aidan O'Connell tested the coverage early and often, going 30 of 47 for 299 yards with two TD passes one week after completing no passes in the final three quarters against Kansas City. All-Pro receiver Davante Adams did the heavy lifting, but the Colts' young secondary, which had a pick-6 negated by a pass interference call, needs to find a quick fix before facing Stroud.\n\n## INJURIES\nWR Michael Pittman Jr. (concussion protocol) and RT Braden Smith (knee) returned from injuries last weekend. The Colts are hoping CB Kenny Moore II (back) and Moss (right forearm) can play this week.\n\n## KEY NUMBER\n1 - Since producing double-digit win seasons in 12 of 13 years from 2002-14, Indy has only done it twice since - in 2018 and 2020. The Colts need one more win to hit that milestone and if they get it Saturday, Steichen will become the fifth straight non-interim, first-year coach to lead Indy to the playoffs.\n\n## NEXT STEPS\nWhat must the Colts do to beat the Texans? Re-establish home-field advantage against a team they have historically dominated, and do something that has proved tricky - replicate last week's strong performance."}
{"text": "# Air Canada had the worst on-time performance among large airlines in North America, report says\nJanuary 2, 2024. 6:01 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MONTREAL, Quebec (AP)** - Air Canada, Canada's largest carrier, had the worst on-time performance among large airlines in North America in 2023, according to a report from Cirium, the aviation analytics company.\n\nThe country's flag-carrying airline landed 63% of its 276,451 flights on time last year, placing it last among the continent's 10 largest airlines. That means roughly 140,000 planes arrived at the gate more than 15 minutes after scheduled arrival.\n\nDelta Air Lines led the list for the most on-time airline in North America with its over 1.6 million flights arriving on time 85% of the time. Alaska Airlines was second at 82% of its 404,925 flights arriving on time.\n\nCanada's other major airline, WestJet, placed seventh in North America with a score of 69% for 182,296 flights.\n\nIn the past, Air Canada has pointed to a shortage of air traffic controllers, bad weather and a network running at full tilt amid high demand, which can mean longer recovery times after a disruption.\n\nCEO Michael Rousseau has acknowledged Air Canada's relatively low ranking, including after a wave of flight delays in June and July.\n\nDespite more staff and revamped technology, the carrier's operations failed to meet \"expected levels,\" he told analysts on a conference call in August."}
{"text": "# Kentucky lawmakers return to work, and the next state budget is on top of their agenda\nBy **BRUCE SCHREINER**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 12:14 PM EST\n\n---\n\nFRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) - Kentucky lawmakers returned to work Tuesday for a 60-day session that'll be dominated by negotiations over the next state budget, with Republican supermajorities in both chambers once again shaping Bluegrass State policies even as voters have extended an era of divided government by reelecting Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear.\n\nBoth the House and Senate gaveled in at midday to begin the grind of legislating through mid-April. Efforts to craft the next two-year budget - the state's overarching policy document - likely won't wrap up until late in the session.\n\nBeshear offered his budget blueprint in a televised speech last month, calling for massive funding increases for public education topped by a proposed 11% pay raise for teachers and all other public school employees. The governor also is resuming his push for state-funded preschool for every 4-year-old in Kentucky. Republican lawmakers have charted their own course on education policies.\n\nLawmakers will review hundreds of other bills in the coming months. Familiar issues that could grab headlines include abortion and school choice. New issues for Kentucky could include efforts to rein in diversity, equity and inclusion offices in higher education.\n\nA push to relax Kentucky's near-total abortion ban could resurface. Last year, a bill to add exceptions to the ban for pregnancies caused by rape or incest made no headway in the legislature. Beshear, an abortion-rights supporter, made his support for those exceptions a prominent part of his successful reelection campaign. Kentucky's current abortion law bans the procedure except when carried out to save a pregnant woman's life or to prevent a disabling injury.\n\nAnother potential high-profile issue could be efforts to put a school-choice constitutional amendment on the fall ballot in Kentucky. The goal would be to remove constitutional hurdles for school choice initiatives. It comes after school choice advocates suffered setbacks in courts. A state judge last month struck down a law aimed at setting up a funding method for charter schools. In 2022, Kentucky's Supreme Court struck down another law meant to award tax credits for donations supporting private school tuition.\n\nOne dynamic that will be watched closely is the relationship between the governor and GOP lawmakers. Beshear's first term featured annual policy clashes with Republican lawmakers, who overrode numerous gubernatorial vetoes. Beshear has noted that he also signed more than 600 bipartisan bills into law, including signature measures to legalize sports betting and medical marijuana and to expand early voting."}
{"text": "# Vehicle fleeing from suburban Madison traffic stop crashes, killing all 3 people inside\nJanuary 2, 2024. 12:14 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MONONA, Wis. (AP)** - A vehicle fleeing a suburban Madison police traffic stop crashed overnight, killing all three people who were riding inside, authorities said.\n\nMonona police tried to stop \"a suspicious vehicle\" about 9 p.m. Monday, but the driver fled, the Wisconsin Department of Justice Division of Criminal Investigation said.\n\nAfter a Dane County deputy deployed a tire deflation device, the vehicle crashed in the nearby town of Cottage Grove and all three people in the vehicle died at the scene, DCI said in a statement.\n\nThe agency's statement did not elaborate on the circumstances of the crash, including whether the driver may have lost control after running over the device or swerved to avoid it.\n\nDCI did not immediately respond Tuesday to messages left by The Associated Press asking about the specific circumstances of the crash and also why Monona police had deemed the vehicle \"suspicious.\"\n\nThe AP also left a message for the Dane County Medical Examiner asking whether the three crash victims have been identified.\n\nMonona Police Chief Brian Chaney said in a statement that he has requested the assistance of DCI and the Wisconsin State Patrol in investigating the pursuit and fatal crash.\n\nThe officers involved have been placed on administrative duty while DCI investigates with assistance from the Wisconsin State Patrol.\n\nDCI said it will turn over its findings to the Dane County District Attorney when the investigation is completed."}
{"text": "# After 180 years, a small daily newspaper in the US Virgin Islands says it is closing\nJanuary 2, 2024. 12:09 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP)** - A small daily newspaper in the U.S. Virgin Islands whose owner credited past generations of literate slaves for its survival is closing after 180 years in print.\n\nThe St. Croix Avis, which published its first edition in 1844, can no longer compete with social media and digital newspaper subscription services, according to owner and publisher Rena Brodhurst.\n\n\"That is an impossible mission we are unable to fulfill,\" she said in a statement published Sunday.\n\nIt wasn't immediately clear when the paper would stop publishing, although Brodhurst said the company would soon exhaust its final shipment of newsprint.\n\n\"I give thanks to the Moravian Church that insisted the enslaved learn to read, write, and comprehend. The St. Croix Avis would never have been possible without that concept of ensuring a literate Black population,\" she said.\n\nThe paper is based on the island of St. Croix, home to some 41,000 people, the majority of them Black of slave descent.\n\nSlavery in the Danish West Indies was abolished in 1848.\n\nWhen it was founded, the St. Croix Avis published most of its content in Danish until shifting primarily to English after the U.S. government bought the U.S. Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917, according to the U.S. Library of Congress.\n\nIn the years following its first publication, the St. Croix Avis covered multiple weather events, including an apparent hurricane that hit the neighboring island of St. Thomas in 1867. A portion of the headline read, \"Frightful Loss of Lives and Property!!!\"\n\nThe paper also covered events such as Citizenship Day, remarking that \"the catching of the greased pig afforded much merriment to onlookers.\"\n\nBrodhurst thanked the community for supporting the St. Croix Avis in her open letter as she lamented its closure.\n\n\"What an incredible journey we have had together, learning, growing, rejoicing, and crying together,\" she wrote. \"The road we traveled together has been monumental.\""}
{"text": "# Somalia dismisses Ethiopia-Somaliland coastline deal, says it compromises sovereignty\nBy **OMAR FARUK**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 11:58 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP)** - Somalia's president on Tuesday rejected an agreement signed between Ethiopia and the breakaway region of Somaliland to give landlocked Ethiopia access to its coast, calling it a violation of international law.\n\n\"We will not stand idly by and watch our sovereignty being compromised,\" President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud told a joint session of Somalia's federal parliament.\n\nSomaliland, a region strategically located by the Gulf of Aden, broke away from Somalia in 1991 as the country collapsed into warlord-led conflict. The region has maintained its own government despite its lack of international recognition.\n\nOn Monday, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Somaliland President Muse Bihi Abdi signed a memorandum of understanding to allow Ethiopia to lease a 20-kilometer (12.4-mile) stretch of coastline to establish a marine force base.\n\nSomaliland's president said the agreement also included a clause that Ethiopia would recognize Somaliland as an independent country in the near future.\n\nSomalia's president said Somalia and Ethiopia share a long history and that embracing a peaceful coexistence is the only way to ensure lasting peace in the region.\n\nHe also expressed concern that Ethiopia's presence could give rise to extremism, saying that Ethiopia's incursion into Somalia in 2006 to fight the Islamic Courts Union led to the rise of the extremist group al-Shabab, which still poses a significant threat.\n\n\"We need to be cautious to avoid jeopardizing the significant strides we've made towards defeating this group, and this move is creating another opportunity for al-Shabab to recruit,\" Mohamud said,\n\nAl-Shabab through its spokesman, Sheik Ali Dhere, urged the Somali people to unite and defend their land and sea against perceived external threats. The statement was carried by the group's radio arm, Andalus.\n\nWith a population of more than 120 million, Ethiopia is the most populous landlocked country in the world.\n\nThe agreement strengthens the security, economic and political partnership between Ethiopia and Somaliland, a statement from the Ethiopian prime minister's office said.\n\nThe agreement \"is unlikely to affect regional stability in the short term,\" said Matt Bryden, strategic advisor for Sahan Research, a Nairobi-based think tank.\n\nSomalia has no means to impose its will by force on Somaliland, but it is likely to deploy instruments of juridical sovereignty to isolate it, Bryden said. These include restricting the activities of aid agencies and donor governments, restraining international flights and warning foreign commercial interests against doing business with Somaliland, he said.\n\nHowever, an escalation in political and diplomatic posturing by neighboring countries such as Djibouti and Eritrea is \"very likely\" in the longer term, Bryden said."}
{"text": "# Republican-led Mississippi Legislature begins 4-year term with new leadership in the House\nBy **EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 11:36 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**JACKSON, Miss. (AP)** - The Republican-controlled Mississippi Legislature begins its annual session Tuesday, with all members being sworn in for a four-year term and the House electing new leaders after the previous speaker chose not to seek reelection.\n\nRep. Jason White of West secured promises of support from his Republican colleagues weeks ago to become the next House speaker. He will succeed Republican Philip Gunn of Clinton, who held the leadership post for the past 12 years.\n\nWhite was speaker pro tempore under Gunn, the second-highest leadership post in the 122-member House. Republican Rep. Manly Barton of Moss Point is in line to become the new speaker pro tem. In that role, he will be a close adviser to White and will preside over the House when White is away.\n\nRepublican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann returns for his second term presiding over the 52-member Senate. He and six other statewide officials will be inaugurated Thursday.\n\nRepublican Gov. Tate Reeves will be inaugurated Jan. 9, beginning his second term in that job after previously serving as state treasurer and lieutenant governor.\n\nReeves is pushing legislators to eliminate the state income tax, saying that will help Mississippi compete with Florida and Texas, which don't tax income. In 2022, legislators and Reeves enacted Mississippi's largest-ever tax cut, which reduces the income tax over four years beginning in 2023.\n\nHosemann said legislators could consider another income tax cut or a reduction in the 7% grocery tax, depending on how the economy is faring. Any income tax reduction would continue to be phased in rather than happening suddenly, he said.\n\n\"We may well get to the elimination of the income tax, probably at the rate we're going faster than they proposed last time, by doing it in a cogent, fiscally responsible way versus some political statement,\" Hosemann said.\n\nConservative groups are pushing \"school choice\" plans, which could allow parents to send their children to other public schools outside their attendance zone if those schools accept the students, or could allow public money to go toward private schools or homeschooling.\n\nLegislators could consider reviving a way for people to petition to put issues on the statewide ballot. In 2021, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled that the state's initiative process was invalid because it required people to gather signatures from five outdated congressional districts rather than the four current districts.\n\nFor the first time, they could also give serious consideration to expanding Medicaid to people who work in jobs that provide modest wages and no health insurance.\n\nMedicaid expansion is an option under the health care overhaul signed into law in 2010 by then-President Barack Obama. Mississippi is one of 10 states that have not taken the option, with Reeves calling Medicaid \"welfare.\" Gunn also opposed expansion.\n\nThe incoming House speaker said he wants legislators to get a firm idea of how many people could become eligible for Medicaid coverage if it's expanded. White also said he wants to talk to business leaders about whether they could cover part of the state's cost.\n\n\"It's got to be something we can afford and that makes sense,\" White said. \"We are one of the poor states, if not the poorest. It's foolish for us to not figure out a way to make this work.\""}
{"text": "# Robbery suspect, other driver killed in wrong-way crash on Missouri interstate\nJanuary 2, 2024. 11:16 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP)** - Two people are dead after a Missouri robbery suspect's vehicle was going the wrong way on an interstate highway while being chased by officers early Tuesday and slammed into another vehicle, killing both drivers, police said.\n\nThe accident happened just after 4 a.m. on Interstate 435 in Kansas City. Names of those killed have not been released.\n\nArmed robberies occurred between around 2:30 a.m. and 4 a.m. at three convenience stores. Soon after the third crime, police saw the suspect vehicle and initiated a pursuit, police spokeswoman Alayna Gonzalez said in a news release.\n\nDuring the chase, the driver traveled south in the northbound lanes of the interstate, causing the crash, Gonzalez said.\n\nThe accident remains under investigation."}
{"text": "# Indiana woman is rescued after passerby directs police to car crash site along little-used road\nJanuary 2, 2024. 1:32 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**GARY, Ind. (AP)** - A woman who was trapped in a car that crashed early on New Years Day was rescued after a passerby directed officers to the crash scene along a little-used northwest Indiana road, police said.\n\nPolice and emergency responders spent two hours searching unsuccessfully for the car after a woman called 911 about 3:40 a.m. Monday and said she and another woman were trapped in a car that had flipped over in Gary, police said.\n\nOne of the women eventually got out of the wrecked car, which was upside down, and flagged down a passerby who directed officers to the crash, the Lake County Sheriff's Department said.\n\nGreg Zellers, who's a mechanic, said he was on his way to work about 6:30 a.m. when the woman flagged him down and walked him to where the car had crashed about 50 yards (46 meters) from the roadway.\n\nHe told WLS-TV the car's headlights and tail lights weren't visible and there is little traffic on the road in Gary's Buffington Harbor area.\n\n\"It's very difficult to see from the road,\" said Zellers, who directed first responders and two officers to the crashed car.\n\n\"They asked me to stay until they got here. So I did, but then I needed to get to work,\" he said.\n\nThe woman trapped in the car told police she could not feel her legs. She was airlifted to a hospital and a message seeking information on her condition was left Tuesday morning for a Gary police spokesperson.\n\nLake County Sheriff Oscar Martinez said he appreciated the efforts of the passerby, the two officers and first responders who rescued the woman.\n\n\"Their diligence helped to prevent what could have been a tragedy,\" he said in a statement."}
{"text": "# Small earthquake shakes Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.\nJanuary 2, 2024. 9:45 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**ROCKVILLE, Md. (AP)** - A small earthquake shook the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., early Tuesday, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.\n\nThe quake with a preliminary magnitude of 2.3 happened around 12:51 a.m. It was centered nearly 2 miles (about 3.2 kilometers) west of Rockville in Montgomery County, with a preliminary depth of about 9.5 miles (15.3 kilometers).\n\nBy midmorning, the agency had received more than 1,400 reports through its website from people who reported feeling the temblor across Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, the District of Columbia and Pennsylvania.\n\nMontgomery County Fire and Rescue Service spokesperson Pete Piringer posted on social media that there were no reports of injury or damage."}
{"text": "# Rohingya refugees in Sri Lanka protest planned closure of U.N. office, fearing abandonment\nBy **KRISHAN FRANCIS**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:43 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP)** - A group of Rohingya refugees living in Sri Lanka staged a protest outside the office of the U.N. refugee agency Tuesday, saying they fear losing their living allowance once the agency's office in the island nation closes at the end of this year.\n\nThe protesters also want to be resettled in another country because Sri Lanka does not allow them to live there permanently.\n\nAbout 100 Rohingya refugees live in Sri Lanka, most of them rescued at sea by the navy while they were trying to reach Indonesia after fleeing Myanmar for Bangladesh.\n\nAbout 740,000 Rohingya were resettled in Bangladesh after fleeing their homes in Myanmar to escape a brutal counterinsurgency campaign by security forces. But the camps in Bangladesh are squalid, with surging gang violence and rampant hunger, leading many to flee again.\n\nRuki Fernando, a rights activist in Sri Lanka, said the refugees receive basic allowance from the U.N. agency and are provided with limited health care by the Sri Lankan government. However, the refugee children don't receive education and adults aren't allowed to work.\n\n\"We didn't intend to come to Sri Lanka, but were rescued off the seas in Sri Lanka and brought to Sri Lanka by the navy. We also had to endure a hard time in detention in Sri Lanka and still live a very hard life in a new country where we can't speak our language, and many don't have family members, relatives and friends,\" the refugees said in a petition to the U.N. agency's representative.\n\nThe petition said the refugees were upset to learn of the office's upcoming closure and pleaded for it to \"help us find a permanent solution in another country that will help us overcome uncertainty and not make us and our children permanently stateless.\"\n\nThe U.N. refugee agency could not immediately be reached Tuesday.\n\nThe office in Sri Lanka was especially active during the country's quarter-century civil war which ended in 2009."}
{"text": "# Man charged with assaulting wife's co-worker, pushing cook's head toward deep fryer, police say\nJanuary 2, 2024. 12:11 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**HIGH POINT, N.C. (AP)** - Police in North Carolina have charged a man with assaulting his wife's co-worker behind the counter of a fast food restaurant, saying he put his hands around the cook's neck and pushed his head toward a deep fryer.\n\nHigh Point Police officers were called Thursday to the McDonald's on South Main Street, where a manager in training said she called her husband for help after employees were disrespecting her, police said in an incident report posted online. Witnesses told police that when the woman's husband arrived, he walked around the counter and placed his hands around the cook's neck, pushing his head toward the deep fryer and punching him several times in the face until he was pulled away, the report states.\n\nThe victim, who had a large contusion to his forehead and right eye and scratches on his neck, chose to have his family take him to the hospital, police said.\n\nOfficers watched store video of the attack, police said. They arrested the husband and charged him with assault and battery or simple assault."}
{"text": "# Spaniard imprisoned in Iran after visiting grave of Mahsa Amini arrives home after release\nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:11 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**MADRID (AP)** - A Spaniard who spent 15 months in an Iranian prison after visiting the tomb of Mahsa Amini returned home to Madrid on Tuesday after being released.\n\n\"I can't believe it. This has been very hard, but I am here. We have no idea how fortunate we are to have been born in his country,\" Santiago Sánchez Cogedor told a group of reporters at the airport after he was embraced by family and friends upon arrival.\n\nSánchez Cogedor was on a solo walking trek to the men's soccer World Cup in Qatar when he was arrested in Iran in October 2022. His arrest followed his visit to the tomb of Amini, a woman whose death while being held by Iran's morality police for violating Iran's Islamic dress code sparked protests in the country.\n\nHe remained behind bars until Iran's embassy to Spain announced his release on Sunday.\n\nThe 41-year-old was walking all the way from Spain with the goal of reaching Qatar to support Spain's national team at soccer's biggest global event.\n\nSánchez Cogedor said that he would not comment on politics, but he read to reporters what he called a diploma given to him by his fellow prisoners in Iran that indicated he had \"passed the test of life.\""}
{"text": "# Cold spell in Finland and Sweden sends temperature below minus 40\nBy **JARI TANNER**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 10:07 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**HELSINKI (AP)** - Finland and Sweden recorded their coldest temperatures of the winter Tuesday when thermometers plummeted as low as minus 40 degrees Celsius (minus 40 Fahrenheit) as a cold spell grips the Nordic region.\n\nCold and snow disrupted transportation throughout the region, including in Norway where a major highway in the south was closed due to the weather and ferry lines suspended operations. Swedish train operators said the cold snap caused substantial problems for rail traffic in the Arctic north.\n\nNikkaluokta, a small village inhabited by indigenous Sami people in northern Sweden, recorded a temperature of minus 41.6 degrees C (minus 42.8 F) early Tuesday, Swedish public broadcaster SVT reported.\n\n\"It's the coldest temperature we have had so far this winter, and it will continue to be quite cold weather in the north,\" SVT meteorologist Nils Holmqvist said.\n\nThe Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute reported temperatures of minus 30 C (minus 22 F) in several locations in northern Sweden, and issued a warning for snow and wind for central and southern Sweden. Its second-highest warning applies from midnight into Wednesday.\n\nIn neighboring Finland, this winter's cold record was recorded in the northwestern town of Ylivieska where temperatures fell to minus 37.8 C (minus 36 F) early Tuesday, and forecasters said temperatures would be lower than minus 40 C in parts of the nation through the week.\n\nTemperatures in the Finnish capital, Helsinki, were expected to hover between minus 15 and minus 20 C (around zero F).\n\nIn the southern Norway town of Arendal, officials said schools would be closed Wednesday because it wasn't possible to clear the sidewalks in time for children to get to school.\n\nSeveral ferry companies throughout the region canceled crossings, including those from southern Norway to Denmark where a key bridge was closed to vehicles with light trailers because of strong winds, Danish officials said."}
{"text": "# Thai prime minister says visa-free policy for Chinese visitors to be made permanent in March\nJanuary 2, 2024. 6:19 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BANGKOK (AP)** - Thailand and China will soon implement visa-free entry for each other's citizens, Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin said Tuesday.\n\nChinese nationals will be granted visa-free entry on a permanent basis beginning March 1, Srettha said after his Cabinet's weekly meeting. Chinese visitors have been allowed visa-free entry since September last year, but the privilege was due to expire on Feb. 29.\n\nThailand's visa-exemption policy aims to give a boost to the country's tourism industry, which was badly damaged by the coronavirus pandemic. The country received about 40 million visitors in 2019, and the government estimated they spent 1.9 trillion baht ($53.2 billion) - an amount that plummeted by more than 99% by 2021, according to data from the Ministry of Tourism and Sports.\n\nChina is a major source of tourists to Thailand, with almost 11 million visitors in 2019, accounting for 27.6% of all arrivals that year before the pandemic devastated the tourist market.\n\nLast year, Thailand saw 28 million foreign tourist arrivals, including 3.4 million from China. Chinese visitors ranked second to Malaysia, which accounted for about 4.4 million visitors.\n\nTuesday's decision to grant Chinese citizens permanent visa-free privileges was made after negotiations between Bangkok and Beijing, Srettha said. He said China agreed to extend visa-free entry to Thai visitors in exchange for allowing Chinese nationals the permanent visa exemption.\n\nIn Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said China welcomed the Thai move, saying it was in the fundamental interest of the two countries.\n\n\"The competent authorities of both sides are currently in close communication on the specific matter, and we look forward to the relevant arrangements coming into effect as soon as possible,\" he said.\n\nAccording to the Bangkok Post online, Thai Foreign Minister Parnpree Bahiddha-Nukara said he will travel to China by early February to sign the agreement for mutual visa-free entry."}
{"text": "# Biden and Trump are poised for a potential rematch that could shake American politics\nBy **STEVE PEOPLES**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 6:39 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LACONIA, N.H. (AP)** - U.S. presidential elections have been rocked in recent years by economic disaster, stunning gaffes, secret video and a pandemic. But for all the tumult that defined those campaigns, the volatility surrounding this year's presidential contest has few modern parallels, posing profound challenges to the future of American democracy.\n\nNot since the Supreme Court effectively decided the 2000 campaign in favor of Republican George W. Bush has the judiciary been so intertwined with presidential politics.\n\nIn the coming weeks, the high court is expected to weigh whether states can ban former President Donald Trump from the ballot for his role in leading the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Meanwhile, a federal appeals court is weighing Trump's argument that he's immune from prosecution.\n\nThe maneuvers are unfolding as prosecutors from New York to Washington and Atlanta move forward with 91 indictments across four criminal cases involving everything from Trump's part in the insurrection to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his hush money paid to a porn actress.\n\nDepending on how Trump's appeals play out, he could be due in court as early as March 4, the day before Super Tuesday, raising the unprecedented prospect that he could close in on the GOP nomination from a courtroom.\n\nOn the Democratic side, President Joe Biden is seeking reelection as the high inflation that defined much of his first term appears to be easing. But that has done little to assuage restless voters or ease widespread concerns in both parties that, at 81, he's simply too old for the job.\n\nAnd at least three serious candidates who have launched outsider presidential bids threaten to scramble the campaign and eat into the support from independent voters who were critical to Biden's success in 2020.\n\nFacing such uncertainty, few expect the traditional rules of politics to apply in 2024. Jim Messina, who managed former President Barack Obama's reelection, said Trump could very well defeat Biden in the fall, even if the former president is in prison.\n\n\"We just don't know,\" Messina said. \"Everyone in the world knows, especially me, that this election is going to be really, really close.\"\n\n## Implications for abortion, immigration and U.S. role in the world\nThe results will have long-term implications on everything from the future of abortion rights and immigration policy to the role of the U.S. in the world. A Trump victory would raise the possibility of the U.S. largely abandoning Ukraine as it seeks to repel Russia's invasion. Domestic politics could also test Biden's commitment to Israel, a policy that threatens to erode his standing with young voters and people of color who are critical elements of his coalition.\n\nOne of the few certainties at this point is that Biden is a virtual lock to be the Democratic nominee again, facing only token opposition in this year's primary despite overwhelming concerns within his own party about his physical and mental fitness. And though a few rivals are fighting furiously to stop Trump, he is well positioned to win the GOP nomination for the third consecutive election.\n\nThe strength of the GOP opposition to Trump will become more clear on Jan. 15 when the Iowa caucuses launch the nomination process. Trump holds a commanding lead in most national polls, although former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are fighting to stop him.\n\nThat hasn't been easy, however, as DeSantis has struggled to connect with voters and has embraced culture war topics that often left him competing for the same base of support as Trump. And Haley's pitch as a more sensible, moderate candidate was threatened last week when she was pressed on the cause of the Civil War and didn't mention slavery.\n\nAllies of DeSantis and Haley privately concede that their best chance to wrestle the nomination away from Trump would come in a long-shot push for a contested convention in Wisconsin in July.\n\nMany leaders in both parties are already convinced that Trump will be the GOP nominee. More than 90 House Republicans, 18 senators and seven governors have endorsed Trump. Haley and DeSantis have secured the endorsements of just six House Republicans, no senators and two governors combined.\n\n\"This will be one of the earliest primaries wrapped up in my lifetime,\" Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who endorsed Trump back in November 2022, said in an interview. \"I'm already focused on the general election. ... There is going to be a political earthquake next November.\"\n\n## Biden vs. Trump\nPublic polling strongly suggests that voters do not want a rematch between Trump and Biden.\n\nMost U.S. adults overall (56%) would be \"very\" or \"somewhat\" dissatisfied with Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024, according to a poll conducted last month by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. A similar majority (58%) said they would be very or somewhat dissatisfied with Trump as the GOP's pick.\n\nPerhaps because of such apathy, some voters simply don't believe Biden and Trump will end up on the general election ballot, despite strong evidence to the contrary. That's an idea that conservative strategist Sarah Longwell, who founded the Republican Accountability Project, says she hears regularly during weekly focus groups with voters across the political spectrum.\n\n\"Voters really aren't thinking about it, so they don't see the thing that's coming right at us - the most likely scenario, which is Trump vs. Biden,\" Longwell said. \"But Trump is so dangerous. ... I wish the level of urgency from everybody matched the reality of where we are headed.\"\n\n## Threats to democracy\nWhile concerns about Biden are centered on his age, Trump has increasingly embraced authoritarian messages that serve as clear warnings of his plans to dismantle democratic norms if he returns to the White House.\n\nEchoing strongmen leaders throughout history, Trump has framed his campaign as one of retribution and has spoken openly about using the power of government to pursue his political enemies. He has repeatedly harnessed rhetoric once used by Adolf Hitler to argue that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are \"poisoning the blood of our country.\" He said on Fox News last month that he would not be a dictator \" except for day one. \" And he shared a word cloud last week to his social media account highlighting words like, \"revenge,\" \"power\" and \"dictatorship.\"\n\nBiden, like his party more broadly, has leaned into concerns about the future of democracy should Trump return to the White House, but that has done little to improve his standing. Early polls reveal weakness among core segments of his coalition, including voters of color and young people.\n\nPeople on Biden's team do not fear that his base will defect to Trump in the general election, but they privately worry some of the Democratic president's supporters may not vote at all. They're betting that Biden's achievements, which include landmark legislation on gun control, climate change and infrastructure, will eventually help overcome pervasive concerns about his age.\n\nUltimately, however, Biden's campaign believes that voters will rally behind the president once they fully understand that Trump could realistically return to the White House.\n\n## 'This election will be a choice'\nAtlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, who sits on Biden's advisory council, said the president's reelection campaign \"knows it can't take any vote for granted,\" which is why the campaign has already invested heavily in efforts to mobilize Biden's diverse coalition.\n\n\"This election will be a choice - a choice between a president who has delivered historic results for the American people and someone who poses an existential threat to our democracy and freedoms,\" Dickens said. \"We will win in November once we fully make the case, explain the stakes and make the choice clear.\"\n\nMeanwhile, there is a sense of deep uncertainty on the ground in Iowa and New Hampshire, where Republican presidential candidates in particular have been showering primary voters with attention for much of the last year.\n\nRodney Martell, a 65-year-old Republican from Loudon, New Hampshire, said he's ready for the voting to begin. He's supporting Haley's primary bid, but said he'd support Trump in the general election if he had no other choice - even if Trump is a convicted felon.\n\nMartell said he doubts the 2024 election will ultimately be a rematch of Trump and Biden, however: \"Honestly, if it comes to that kind of race again, I think it could get pretty ugly.\"\n\nMore than 1,000 miles to the west, Susie Fortuna offered a similar assessment during a recent Haley campaign event in Coralville, Iowa. Fortuna lives in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, but she was in Iowa to visit family.\n\nShe isn't convinced that Biden and Trump will emerge as their party's nominees, either. The political year ahead, she said, feels \"unsettling.\"\n\n\"I feel like there are things out there that we don't know yet, to be honest,\" Fortuna said."}
{"text": "# DeSantis and Haley will appear at next week's CNN debate at the same time as Trump's Fox town hall\nBy **DAVID BAUDER**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 3:21 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley are set to appear at next week's Republican presidential debate on CNN, while former President Donald Trump participates in a Fox News town hall at the same time.\n\nBoth events will be held at 9 p.m. ET on Jan. 10 in Des Moines, Iowa, just five days before the state's first-in-the-nation GOP voting contest.\n\nThe CNN debate, to be moderated by Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, will be the first to focus solely on the two candidates vying to become Trump's chief competition. The former president has been leading by wide margins in polls of likely Republican voters.\n\nBiotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who participated in previous debates, did not qualify for the CNN event. Candidates needed to achieve 10% support in at least three specific polls of likely Republican voters or caucusgoers, at least one of them measuring voters just in Iowa.\n\nIn a post on X on Tuesday, Ramaswamy predicted that the DeSantis-Haley debate would be \"the most boring in modern history\" and said he would participate in a podcast hosted by Tim Pool instead.\n\nTrump did not participate in any of the earlier debates, saying he didn't want to lend credence to his lower-polling rivals. He has instead typically held competing events, including an interview with Tucker Carlson and traveling to Michigan to criticize President Joe Biden and his push for electric cars during an autoworkers' strike.\n\nHis town hall next Wednesday will air in the time slot normally held by one of his top media supporters, Sean Hannity. But Hannity will be preempted that night, with Fox anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum instead moderating that session.\n\nIt was not immediately clear whether it was the Trump campaign or Fox News that initiated plans for the town hall. A CNN spokeswoman declined to comment on the counterprogramming.\n\nDeSantis and Haley have both criticized Trump for not participating in the debates.\n\n\"With only three candidates qualifying, it's time for Donald Trump to show up,\" Haley said on Tuesday. \"As the debate stage continues to shrink, it's getting harder for Donald Trump to hide.\"\n\nMeanwhile, NBC News and The Des Moines Register said it would hold a series of 30-minute interviews with DeSantis, Haley and Ramaswamy that will posted digitally on Wednesday. Trump and Christie declined the interview requests, NBC said.\n\nHaley and DeSantis will also appear in back-to-back town hall events on CNN this Thursday."}
{"text": "# Trump appeals Maine ruling barring him from ballot under the Constitution's insurrection clause\nBy **NICHOLAS RICCARDI** and **DAVID SHARP**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:10 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PORTLAND, Maine (AP)** - Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday appealed a ruling by Maine's secretary of state barring him from the state's primary ballot over his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.\n\nTrump, the early front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, appealed the Maine decision by Democrat Shenna Bellows, who became the first secretary of state in history to bar someone from running for the presidency under the rarely used Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. That provision prohibits those who \"engaged in insurrection\" from holding office.\n\nThe former president is expected to soon appeal a similar ban by the Colorado Supreme Court. That appeal would go to the U.S. Supreme Court, while Bellows' action is being appealed to a Maine Superior Court.\n\nTrump's appeal on Tuesday asks that Bellows be required to place him on the March 5 primary ballot. The appeal argues that she abused her discretion and relied on \"untrustworthy evidence.\"\n\n\"The secretary should have recused herself due to her bias against President Trump, as demonstrated by a documented history of prior statements prejudging the issue presented,\" Trump's attorneys wrote.\n\nBellows reiterated to The Associated Press on Tuesday that her ruling was on pause pending the outcome of the appeal, which had been expected.\n\n\"This is part of the process. I have confidence in my decision and confidence in the rule of law. This is Maine's process and it's really important that first and foremost every single one of us who serves in government uphold the Constitution and the laws of the state,\" she said.\n\nTrump's critics have filed dozens of lawsuits seeking to disqualify him in multiple states.\n\nNone succeeded until a slim majority of Colorado's seven justices - all of whom were appointed by Democratic governors - ruled against Trump last month. The Colorado court's 4-3 decision was the first time in history the provision was used to bar a presidential contender from the ballot.\n\nTrump lost Colorado in 2020, and he doesn't need to win it again to garner an Electoral College majority next year. But he earned one of Maine's four Electoral College votes in 2020 by winning the state's 2nd Congressional District, so Bellows' decision could have an impact next November.\n\nCritics warned that it was an overreach and that the court could not simply declare that the Jan. 6 attack was an \"insurrection\" without a more established judicial process.\n\nA week after Colorado's ruling, Bellows issued her own. Critics warned it was even more perilous because it could pave the way for partisan election officials to simply disqualify candidates they oppose. Bellows, a former head of Maine's branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, has previously criticized Trump and his behavior on Jan. 6.\n\nThe Constitution's Section 3 has been barely used since the years after the Civil War, when it kept defeated Confederates from returning to their former government positions. The two-sentence clause says that anyone who swore an oath to \"support\" the Constitution and then engaged in insurrection cannot hold office unless a two-thirds vote of Congress allows it.\n\nTrump's lawyers argue the provision isn't intended to apply to the president, contending that the oath for the top office in the land isn't to \"support\" the Constitution but instead to \"preserve, protect and defend\" it. They also argue that the presidency isn't explicitly mentioned in the amendment, only any \"officer of the United States\" - a legal term they contend doesn't apply to the president.\n\nTrump made the opposite argument defending against his prosecution for fraud by the Manhattan District Attorney's office, contending the case should move to federal court because the president is \"an officer of the United States.\" The prosecutors argued that language only applies to presidential appointees - Trump's position here.\n\nThe contention that Section 3 doesn't apply to the president drew a scathing response from the Colorado Supreme Court last month.\n\n\"President Trump asks us to hold that Section 3 disqualifies every oathbreaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oathbreakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land,\" the court's majority opinion said. \"Both results are inconsistent with the plain language and history of Section 3.\"\n\nAs for history, Congress granted amnesty to most former Confederates in 1872, and Section 3 fell into disuse. Legal scholars believe its only application in the 20th century was being cited by Congress in 1919 to block the seating of a socialist who opposed U.S. involvement in World War I and was elected to the House of Representatives.\n\nBut it returned to use after Jan. 6, 2021. In 2022, a judge used it to remove a rural New Mexico county commissioner from office after he was convicted of a misdemeanor for entering the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Liberal groups sued to block Republican Reps. Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene from running for reelection because of their roles on that day. Cawthorn's case became moot when he lost his primary in 2022, and a judge ruled to keep Greene on the ballot.\n\nSome conservatives warn that, if Trump is removed, political groups will routinely use Section 3 against opponents in unexpected ways. They have suggested it could be used to remove Vice President Kamala Harris, for example, because she raised bail money for people arrested after George Floyd's murder at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020.\n\nTrump and his allies have attacked the cases against him as \"anti-democratic\" and sought to tie them to President Joe Biden because the Colorado case and some others are funded by liberal groups who share prominent donors with the Democratic president. But Biden's administration has noted that the president has no role in the litigation.\n\nThose who support using the provision against Trump counter that the Jan. 6 attack was unprecedented in American history and that there will be few cases so ripe for Section 3. If the high court lets Trump stay on the ballot, they've contended, it will be another example of the former president bending the legal system to excuse his extreme behavior."}
{"text": "# A Hamas official killed in a Beirut strike had been on Israel's hit list for years\nBy **BASSEM MROUE**, **ABBY SEWELL**, and **KAREEM CHEHAYEB**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 4:48 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BEIRUT (AP)** - Saleh Arouri, the deputy political head of Hamas and a founder of the group's military wing, had been in Israel's sights for years before he was killed in a drone strike in a southern suburb of Beirut on Tuesday.\n\nIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had threatened to kill him even before Hamas carried out its deadly surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, sparking the ongoing brutal war in Gaza.\n\nIsrael had accused Arouri, 57, of masterminding attacks against it in the West Bank, where he was the group's top commander. In 2015, the U.S. Department of the Treasury designated Arouri as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist offering $5 million for information about him.\n\nAsked about assassination threats against him in an interview with Beirut-based Al-Mayadeen in August, Arouri said, \"It is not strange for us for the commanders and cadres of the movement to be martyred.\"\n\n\"I never expected to reach this age, so I am living on borrowed time,\" he said.\n\nIn the same interview, he threatened that in case of a comprehensive war, \"Israel will suffer a defeat unprecedented in history.\"\n\nBorn in the town of Aroura in the occupied West Bank, Arouri joined Hamas and eventually went into exile, first to Damascus, where the Syrian government was a strong supporter of the group. But he left in 2011 when Hamas split with President Bashar Assad, siding with the opposition in Syria's civil war.\n\nHe went on to Turkey, but had to leave there in 2018 in an exodus of Hamas officials after Ankara improved its relations with Israel and after Qatar - a backer of the Palestinian militant group - was hit by a boycott led by its rival Saudi Arabia and other nations in the region.\n\nArriving in Beirut, Arouri made few public appearances but helped to pull Hamas closer to Hezbollah's orbit. Hamas was able to build up its political and military presence in Lebanon - but under careful control by Hezbollah.\n\nArouri also became a key figure in the group's reconciliation with Assad, and he proudly proclaimed himself part of the \"Axis of Resistance,\" the collection of Iran's regional allies, including Hezbollah and Syria,\n\nIn early September, Arouri held a meeting with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah that was attended by Ziad Nakhaleh, the leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, during which they discussed the situation in the Palestinian territories. A similar meeting was convened after the Israel-Hamas war broke out in October.\n\nSince Oct. 7, Arouri kept a low profile while others in the Hamas political leadership made frequent public appearances in Beirut, including in near-daily press conferences.\n\nHe seems to have been hiding in plain sight. He was killed in a strike on an apartment building in the middle of Beirut's southern suburbs, a political and security stronghold of Hezbollah but also a densely populated urban area.\n\nHamas officials confirmed Arouri's death, along with six other Hamas members, including two military commanders. A Lebanese security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said the attack appeared to have been carried out by a drone that fired missiles into the building, targeting one specific floor.\n\nThe explosion shook the surrounding area, shattering windows in neighboring buildings and causing a fire on the street in the Musharafieh district. Residents of the area rushed to the streets around the targeted building, digging through rubble and broken glass looking for survivors or bodies.\n\nLebanon's state-run National News Agency blamed an Israeli drone. Israeli officials declined to comment.\n\nAn Associated Press photographer at the scene described seeing at least two bodies and other body parts scattered in the street. Hezbollah security members fired in the air to disperse the crowd gathered around the building.\n\nA witness at the scene, Abbas Ghannam, told the AP that he had heard the sound of a drone before the explosion.\n\n\"It was not a military jet, it was a drone. It has a low sound,\" he said.\n\nIf Israel was behind the strike, it would be its first attack on Beirut since the 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah in the summer of 2006.\n\nIt could mark a major escalation in the conflict in Lebanon. After Netanyahu's previous threats to Arouri, Nasrallah warned Israel not to target any Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian or Iranian officials in Lebanon saying that would lead to \"harsh retaliation\" by the group.\n\nHezbollah said in a statement that the targeting of Arouri \"in the heart of the southern suburbs of Beirut\" constituted \"a serious attack on Lebanon, its people, its security, sovereignty and resistance.\"\n\n\"We affirm that this crime will never pass without response and punishment,\" it said.\n\nNasrallah is set to speak Wednesday, on the anniversary of the killing of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in a U.S. airstrike. Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani said Tuesday that the killing of Arouri \"once again proved that straw foundation of Zionists is based on assassination and crime,\" Iranian media reported. He called it a sign of Israel's \"heavy defeat\" before Palestinian militant groups in the war in Gaza."}
{"text": "# Judge rules former clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses must pay $260,000 in fees, costs\nJanuary 2, 2024. 12:00 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LEXINGTON, Ky. (AP)** - Former county clerk Kim Davis, who refused to issue marriage licenses in Kentucky to same-sex couples, must pay a total of $260,104 in fees and expenses to attorneys who represented one couple, according to a federal judge's ruling.\n\nThat's in addition to $100,000 in damages a jury said the former Rowan County clerk should pay the couple who sued.\n\nAttorneys for Davis had argued that the fees and costs sought by the attorneys were excessive, but U.S. District Judge David L. Bunning disagreed and said Davis must pay since the men prevailed in their lawsuit, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported.\n\nAttorneys for Davis were expected to appeal the ruling.\n\nDavis drew international attention when she was briefly jailed in 2015 over her refusal, which she based on her belief that marriage should only be between a man and a woman.\n\nDavis was released only after her staff issued the licenses on her behalf but removed her name from the form. Kentucky's state legislature later enacted a law removing the names of all county clerks from state marriage licenses."}
{"text": "# First Pooh, now Mickey. In public domain, early Mickey Mouse version will star in horror movies\nJanuary 2, 2024. 7:41 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LOS ANGELES (AP)** - The earliest iteration of Mickey Mouse is on a rampage, barely two days in the public domain.\n\nSlashed free of Disney's copyright as of Monday, the iconic character from \"Steamboat Willie\" is already the focus of two horror films. On Monday, just hours after the 1928 short entered the public domain, a trailer for \"Mickey's Mouse Trap\" dropped on YouTube. Another yet-to-be-titled film was announced Tuesday.\n\n\"Steamboat Willie\" featured early versions of both Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, it was the third cartoon featuring the duo they made but the first to be released. In it, a more menacing Mickey, bearing more resemblance to rat than mouse, captains a boat and makes musical instruments out of other animals.\n\nIt's perhaps fitting, then, that the first projects announced are seemingly low-budget and campy slasher movies - and not unprecedented. Winnie the Pooh - sans red shirt - entered the public domain in 2022; scarcely a year later, he was notching up a heavy body count in the microbudget \"Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey.\"\n\nIn the trailer for \"Mickey's Mouse Trap,\" directed by Jamie Bailey, what appears to be a human in a comically small Mickey mask terrorizes a group of young people at an arcade.\n\n\"A place for fun. A place for friends. A place for hunting,\" text flashed during the trailer reads. \"The mouse is out.\"\n\n\"We just wanted to have fun with it all. I mean it's Steamboat Willie's Mickey Mouse murdering people,\" director Jamie Bailey said in a statement cited by trade publications. \"It's ridiculous. We ran with it and had fun doing it and I think it shows.\"\n\nNo release date has been set.\n\nThe second movie is from director Steven LaMorte, who previously directed a horror parody of \"The Grinch,\" which is not in the public domain (the movie is thus called \"The Mean One\").\n\n\"A late-night boat ride turns into a desperate fight for survival in New York City when a mischievous mouse becomes a monstrous reality,\" is the logline for the untitled film, per a post on LaMorte's Instagram.\n\n\"Steamboat Willie has brought joy to generations, but beneath that cheerful exterior lies a potential for pure, unhinged terror,\" LaMorte said in a release cited by the trades. The movie has yet to begin production.\n\nWith the expiration of the 95-year copyright, the public is allowed to use only the initial versions of Mickey and Minnie - not the more familiar character designs.\n\n\"We will, of course, continue to protect our rights in the more modern versions of Mickey Mouse and other works that remain subject to copyright,\" Disney said in a statement ahead of the characters entering the public domain.\n\nLaMorte told Variety that the producers of his film are working with a legal team so as not to run afoul of Disney, and will call their raging rodent Steamboat Willie instead of Mickey Mouse.\n\n\"We are doing our due diligence to make sure there's no question or confusion of what we're up to,\" he said."}
{"text": "# Harvard president Claudine Gay resigns amid plagiarism claims, backlash from antisemitism testimony\nBy **STEVE LeBLANC** and **COLLIN BINKLEY**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:59 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP)** - Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigned Tuesday amid plagiarism accusations and criticism over testimony at a congressional hearing where she was unable to say unequivocally that calls on campus for the genocide of Jews would violate the school's conduct policy.\n\nGay is the second Ivy League president to resign in the past month following the congressional testimony - Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned Dec. 9.\n\nGay, Harvard's first Black president, announced her departure just months into her tenure in a letter to the Harvard community.\n\nFollowing the congressional hearing, Gay's academic career came under intense scrutiny by conservative activists who unearthed several instances of alleged plagiarism in her 1997 doctoral dissertation. The Harvard Corporation, Harvard's governing board, initially rallied behind Gay, saying a review of her scholarly work turned up \"a few instances of inadequate citation\" but no evidence of research misconduct.\n\nDays later, the Harvard Corporation said it found two additional examples of \"duplicative language without appropriate attribution.\" The board said Gay would update her dissertation and request corrections.\n\nThe Harvard Corporation said the resignation came \"with great sadness\" and thanked Gay for her \"deep and unwavering commitment to Harvard and to the pursuit of academic excellence.\"\n\nAlan M. Garber, provost and chief academic officer, will serve as interim president until Harvard finds a replacement, the board said in a statement. Garber, an economist and physician, has served as provost for 12 years.\n\nGay's resignation was celebrated by the conservatives who put her alleged plagiarism in the national spotlight - with additional plagiarism accusations surfacing as recently as Monday in The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication.\n\nChristopher Rufo, an activist who has helped rally the GOP against higher education, said he's \"glad she's gone.\"\n\n\"Rather than take responsibility for minimizing antisemitism, committing serial plagiarism, intimidating the free press, and damaging the institution, she calls her critics racist,\" Rufo said on X, formerly Twitter. \"This is the poison\" of diversity, equity and inclusion ideology, said Rufo, who has led conservative attacks on DEI both in business and in education.\n\nGay, in her letter, said it has been \"distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor - two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am - and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.\"\n\nBut Gay, who is returning to the school's faculty, added \"it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge.\"\n\nYoel Zimmermann, a visiting research undergrad from Munich, Germany, studying physics at Harvard, said that as a Jewish student he's noticed fellow members of the Jewish community have felt uncomfortable with the climate on campus.\n\n\"I think it was about time that Claudine Gay resigned,\" Zimmerman said. \"She just did too many things wrong, especially with her testimony in Congress. I think that was just the kind of final tipping point that should have led to her removal immediately.\"\n\nSupporters of Gay lamented her resignation.\n\n\"Racist mobs won't stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism,\" award-winning author Ibram X. Kendi, who survived scrutiny of an antiracist research center he founded at Boston University, said in an Instagram post.\n\nThe Rev. Al Sharpton in a statement called pressure for Gay to resign \"an attack on every Black woman in this country who's put a crack in the glass ceiling\" and an \"assault on the health, strength, and future of diversity, equity, and inclusion.\"\n\nCritics welcomed her decision.\n\nHouse Committee on Education and the Workforce Chairwoman Rep. Virginia Foxx called Gay's resignation welcome news but said the problems at Harvard are much larger than one leader.\n\n\"Postsecondary education is in a tailspin,\" the North Carolina Republican said in a statement. \"There has been a hostile takeover of postsecondary education by political activists, woke faculty, and partisan administrators.\"\n\nIsraeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, in a statement on X, also weighed in on Gay's resignation.\n\n\"A little context. A failure in leadership and denial of antisemitism have a price. I hope that the esteemed Harvard University will learn from this dismal conduct,\" he wrote.\n\nGay, Magill and MIT's president, Sally Kornbluth, came under fire last month for their lawyerly answers to a line of questioning from New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, who asked whether \"calling for the genocide of Jews\" would violate the colleges' codes of conduct.\n\nThe three presidents had been called before the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce to answer accusations that universities were failing to protect Jewish students amid rising fears of antisemitism worldwide and fallout from Israel's intensifying war in Gaza, which faces heightened criticism for the mounting Palestinian death toll.\n\nGay said it depended on the context, adding that when \"speech crosses into conduct, that violates our policies.\" The answer faced swift backlash from Republican and some Democratic lawmakers as well as the White House. The hearing was parodied in the opening skit on \"Saturday Night Live.\"\n\nGay later apologized, telling The Crimson student newspaper that she got caught up in a heated exchange at the House committee hearing and failed to properly denounce threats of violence against Jewish students.\n\n\"What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community - threats to our Jewish students - have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged,\" Gay said.\n\nThe episode marred Gay's tenure at Harvard - she became president in July - and sowed discord at the Ivy League campus. Rabbi David Wolpe later resigned from a new committee on antisemitism created by Gay, saying in a post on X that \"events on campus and the painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped.\"\n\nThe House committee announced days after the hearing that it would investigate the policies and disciplinary procedures at Harvard, MIT and Penn. Separate federal civil rights investigations were previously opened at Harvard, Penn and several other universities in response to complaints submitted to the U.S. Education Department."}
{"text": "# 'Bachelorette' Rachel Lindsay's husband, Bryan Abasolo, files for divorce after 4 years of marriage\nJanuary 2, 2024. 3:07 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LOS ANGELES (AP)** - The bloom is off the final rose for \"Bachelorette\" star Rachel Lindsay and husband Bryan Abasolo, who found love on the reality dating show. Court records show that Abasolo filed to end their marriage Tuesday.\n\nHe cited irreconcilable differences for the breakup and his filing in Los Angeles Superior Court says the pair separated on Dec. 31.\n\n\"After more than 4 years of marriage, Rachel and I have made the difficult decision to part ways and start anew,\" Abasolo said in a statement posted to his Instagram account. \"Sometimes loving yourself and your partner means you must let go.\"\n\nAfter competing on Season 21 of \"The Bachelor,\" Lindsay gained fame as the first Black lead on any iteration of \"The Bachelor\" franchise when she was picked as \"The Bachelorette\" in 2017. She chose Abasolo as her winning suitor and they married in August 2019. Lindsay, an attorney and author, recently left her correspondent position at entertainment news show \"Extra.\" Abasolo is a chiropractor who has adopted the moniker \"Dr. Abs.\"\n\nIn his statement, he asked for respect for their family and friends as they navigate their next steps.\n\nLindsay has yet to comment on the matter directly on her social media, and her publicists did not immediately return a request for comment. In an Instagram post from New Year's Eve, she called 2023 \"one of the hardest years of my life.\"\n\nThe pair have no children together. Abasolo is seeking spousal support from Lindsay and wants her to pay his attorneys' fees. The filing does not indicate the couple has a prenuptial agreement on how their assets should be divided."}
{"text": "# Prosecutors recommend six months in prison for a man at the center of a Jan. 6 conspiracy theory\nJanuary 2, 2024. 6:57 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Federal prosecutors on Tuesday recommended a six-month term of imprisonment for a man at the center of a right-wing conspiracy theory about the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol - an attack that he has admitted to joining.\n\nRay Epps, who is scheduled to be sentenced next Tuesday, pleaded guilty in September to a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct on restricted grounds.\n\nEpps, a onetime Donald Trump supporter from Arizona, became the focus of a conspiracy theory that he was an undercover government agent who incited the Capitol attack. Right-wing news outlets amplified the conspiracy theory and drove him into hiding after the Jan. 6 riot.\n\nEpps, who worked as a roofer after serving four years as infantry in the U.S. Marine Corps, has vehemently denied ever working for the FBI. Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Gordon said during Epps' plea hearing in September that he was not a confidential source for the FBI \"or any other law enforcement agency.\"\n\nEpps, 62, filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox News Channel last year, saying the network was to blame for spreading the baseless claims that led to death threats and bullet casings in his yard.\n\nIn videos shared widely on social media and right-wing websites, Epps is seen the day before the riot saying, \"Tomorrow, we need to go into the Capitol ... peacefully.\" On Jan. 6, video shows him saying, \"As soon as the president is done speaking, we go to the Capitol.\"\n\nEpps has said he left Capitol grounds when he saw people scaling walls and never actually went inside the building.\n\nProsecutors say Epps participated in a \"a rugby scrum-like group effort\" to push past a line of police officers.\n\n\"Even if Epps did not physically touch law enforcement officers or go inside of the building, he undoubtedly engaged in collective aggressive conduct,\" they wrote in a court filing.\n\nBut they also noted that Epps turned himself in to the FBI two days after the riot after learning that agents were trying to identify him. The false conspiracy theory about Epps not only has harmed him \"but also attempts to undermine the integrity of the ongoing and overall federal prosecution,\" prosecutors said.\n\n\"Epps only acted in furtherance of his own misguided belief in the 'lie' that the 2020 presidential election had been 'stolen,'\" they wrote. \"However, due to the outrage directed at Epps as a result of that false conspiracy theory, he has been forced to sell his business, move to a different state, and live reclusively.\"\n\nThe charge to which Epps pleaded guilty is punishable by a maximum of one year behind bars.\n\nEpps served as an Arizona chapter leader for the Oath Keepers before parting ways with the anti-government extremist group a few years before the Jan. 6 attack.\n\nOath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and other members were convicted of seditious conspiracy in the Jan. 6 attack for what prosecutors said was a weekslong plot to stop the transfer of power from Trump to Democrat Joe Biden. Rhodes was sentenced in May to 18 years in prison.\n\nMore than 1,200 defendants have been charged with Capitol riot-related federal crimes. Over 900 of them have pleaded guilty or been convicted after trials decided by a judge or jury."}
{"text": "# Lawsuit aims to keep Pennsylvania congressman off ballot over Constitution's insurrection clause\nBy **MARC LEVY**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 6:38 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP)** - A liberal activist asked a Pennsylvania court on Tuesday to bar U.S. Rep. Scott Perry from the state's primary ballot, arguing that Perry isn't eligible because of his efforts to keep President Donald Trump in office and block the transfer of power to Democrat Joe Biden.\n\nThe seven-page lawsuit asks Pennsylvania's Commonwealth Court to declare that Perry engaged in insurrectionist activity and cannot hold public office under the Constitution's insurrection clause. The lawsuit by activist Gene Stilp names Perry and Pennsylvania's secretary of state, Al Schmidt.\n\nPerry, a Republican, is expected to run for a seventh term, although candidates cannot file paperwork yet to qualify for Pennsylvania's April 23 primary ballot.\n\nIn part, the filing cites Perry's role in trying to use the Department of Justice to help Trump stall the certification of the election by installing an acting attorney general who would be receptive to Trump's false claims of election fraud.\n\nThe challenge comes on the heels of Maine's Democratic secretary of state removing Trump from the state's presidential primary ballot under the clause and a ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court that booted Trump from the ballot there. Trump is expected to appeal both to the U.S. Supreme Court.\n\nIn a statement, Perry's lawyer, John P. Rowley, suggested that those appeals would ensure that the lawsuit against Perry is nullified.\n\n\"This lawsuit was filed by a partisan activist who clearly has no regard or understanding of how our Democratic Republic works,\" Rowley wrote. \"It is but the latest effort by an extremist to disqualify a duly elected official with whom he disagrees. We are confident the Supreme Court will put an end to this lunacy.\"\n\nPerry has not been charged with a crime, although he is the only sitting member of Congress whose cellphone was seized by the FBI in its investigation into efforts to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.\n\nPerry has fought efforts by federal investigators to review texts and emails from his cell phone. A judge last month ordered Perry to turn over more than 1,600 texts and emails to FBI agents. Perry did not appeal it, his lawyer said.\n\nSchmidt's office declined comment Tuesday. It previously opposed a similar lawsuit in federal court seeking to remove Trump from the ballot in Pennsylvania. Stilp last week withdrew that lawsuit, and plans to file a new lawsuit in state court, saying he has a better chance of success there than in federal court.\n\nThe 155-year-old Civil War-era clause - Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution - bars from office those who \"engaged in insurrection.\" It was designed to keep representatives who had fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War from returning to Congress.\n\nSimilar challenges in 2022 failed to block several other members of Congress from ballots, including Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs of Arizona.\n\nTo get on Pennsylvania's primary ballot, candidates cannot file paperwork until Jan. 23. The deadline to file is Feb. 13."}
{"text": "# Man found dead at Salt Lake City airport after climbing inside jet engine\nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:53 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SALT LAKE CITY (AP)** - A man was found dead inside an airplane engine Monday night at Salt Lake City International Airport after police say he breached an emergency exit door, walked onto the tarmac and climbed inside the jet's engine.\n\nOfficers found 30-year-old Kyler Efinger, of Park City, unconscious inside an engine mounted to the wing of a commercial aircraft loaded with passengers, the Salt Lake City Police Department announced Tuesday. The plane had been sitting on a de-icing pad, and its engines were rotating.\n\nEfinger was a ticketed passenger with a boarding pass to Denver, police said.\n\nThe manager of a store inside the airport had reported a disturbance just before 10 p.m., telling dispatchers with the Airport Control Center that he saw a passenger pass through an emergency exit. Officers quickly found Efinger's clothing, shoes and other personal items on one of the runways.\n\nAfter locating him, the officers told air traffic controllers to notify the pilot to shut down the aircraft's engines. The specific stage of engine operation remains under investigation, police said Tuesday.\n\nFirst responders pulled Efinger out of the engine intake cowling, which directs air flow to the engine fan. They attempted life-saving measures, performing CPR and administering naloxone, a fast-acting medication that can reverse opioid overdose and restore normal breathing. He was pronounced dead at the scene.\n\nSalt Lake City police are working with the state medical examiner's office to determine the cause of death, which may include a toxicology report.\n\nPassengers were removed from the plane when Efinger was found, but overall airport operations were not interrupted, police said. An initial investigation indicates the man accessed the airport's ramp area from the emergency exit and climbed inside the nearby engine.\n\nAn airport spokesperson did not immediately respond to email and phone messages seeking comment."}
{"text": "# Venice is limiting tourists to protect the city\nDecember 30, 2023. 10:01 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**MILAN (AP)** - The Italian city of Venice announced new limits Saturday on the size of tourist groups, the latest move to reduce the pressure of mass tourism on the famed canal city.\n\nStarting in June, groups will be limited to 25 people, or roughly half the capacity of a tourist bus, and the use of loudspeakers, \"which can generate confusion and disturbances,\" will be banned, the city said in a statement.\n\nThe city official charged with security, Elisabetta Pesce, said the policies were aimed at improving the movement of groups through Venice's historic center as well as the heavily visited islands of Murano, Burano and Torcello.\n\nThe city previously announced plans to test a new day-tripper fee this year. The 5 euros ($5.45) per person fee will be applied on 29 peak days between April and mid-July, including most weekends. It is intended to regulate crowds, encourage longer visits and improve the quality of life for Venice residents.\n\nThe U.N. cultural agency cited tourism's impact on the fragile lagoon city as a major factor in it twice considering placing Venice on UNESCO's list of heritage sites in danger.\n\nThe city escaped the first time by limiting the arrival of large cruise ships through the Giudecca Canal and again in September when it announced the roll-out of the day-tripper charge, which had been delayed when tourism declined during the COVID-19 pandemic."}
{"text": "# The 1972 Andes plane crash story has been told many times. 'Society of the Snow' is something new\nBy **LESLIE AMBRIZ**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 4:38 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LOS ANGELES (AP)** - When Gustavo Zerbino watched \"La Sociedad de la Nieve,\" the 1972 plane crash survivor felt as if he was being submerged \"into boiling water,\" reliving the roughly 70 days he and his teammates were stranded in the snow-covered Andes mountains.\n\nZerbino praised J.A. Bayona's raw and unfiltered film, which is being released Thursday as \"Society of the Snow\" on Netflix in the U.S., but said he also felt the same anxieties and emotions he felt while stranded as a young athlete more than 50 years ago.\n\n\"Fortunately, that feeling ended in 2 1/2 hours,\" he told The Associated Press this past October. (All interviews for this story were conducted in Spanish.)\n\nBayona's movie is based on Pablo Vierci's book of the same title, and follows the story of the Uruguayan Air Force plane disaster. The Old Christians rugby team was traveling with relatives and friends to Chile for a match when their plane crashed, stranding them in the mountains where they faced snow storms, avalanches and starvation, forcing them to eat the flesh of those who had died.\n\nThe tale of the tragedy has been told numerous times. It's been referenced in shows like \"Seinfeld,\" dramatized in countless films like the 1993 narrative film \"Alive\" with Ethan Hawke, served as the subject of documentaries and plays and even inspired Showtime's Emmy-nominated \"Yellowjackets.\"\n\n\"We always felt something was missing,\" says Zerbino, reflecting on past projects. \"'Society of the Snow' is the book that filled in that missing piece.\"\n\nTackling the complex story of endurance and survival, Bayona wanted to do more than just direct a dramatic interpretation of real-life tragedy. He wanted to tell a story that honored the event's survivors and victims and their Uruguayan culture.\n\n\"It's more a reflection than an action book and ultimately helped me a lot in understanding the characters,\" the Spanish director said of Vierci's book. Vierci is an associate producer on the film.\n\nBayona, whose credits include 2018's \"Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,\" wanted to build on the connection between the living and the dead, including a seamless on-screen homage throughout the film to those who died.\n\n\"When he showed us the drafts of what he was working on, it sent shivers down our spines; our hearts stopped. I mean, we already saw that it was very real, very powerful, and we saw that there was genius at work,\" Zerbino said.\n\nThe Golden Globe-nominated film is narrated by Numa Turcatti, who died shortly before the rescue and is played here by Enzo Vogrincic. That decision was made by the director and supported by Vierci.\n\n\"I was always attracted to the possibility and the need to tell it from the point of the view of the dead,\" Vierci said. \"This is a story of 45 individuals providing a window through which we can observe how they endured major adversities and built a society where compassion and mercy prevailed.\"\n\nBayona's film seeks to honor the story and strays away from glamorizing or sensationalizing the horrors the passengers and crew members endured. Beyond speaking to the survivors, victims' loved ones and visiting the crash site, he wove in Candombe Uruguayan music at high points of tension and added Turcatti's favorite song from a popular Uruguayan band into one of the film's early blissful scenes.\n\n\"I was very interested in getting into the culture of Uruguay and the culture of the time,\" he said.\n\nHis approach even included crash survivors, like Carlitos Páez, who turned 19 while stranded and plays his own father in the movie.\n\n\"I wanted to get as close to reality as possible,\" said Bayona, who put his cast on a medically supervised weight-loss program and shot the avalanche scenes in freezing conditions.\n\nThe film is now shortlisted for best international feature film at the 2024 Academy Awards.\n\nWhen Vogrincic first heard about the project, the Uruguayan actor knew he had to be part of the story.\n\n\"From a young age, you already know about it,\" the actor said. \"It fills you with a sense of pride because they're Uruguayan ... but as you get deeper into the story, you realize that the story is much bigger. It talks about humanity as a whole.\"\n\nZerbino watched the film with other crash survivors and victims' family members. The end credits were met with a standing ovation, he said.\n\nAccording to the former rugby player, this was the first time many victims' relatives had engaged with retellings of the story.\n\n\"They hadn't read or watched past books or movies around the event because they didn't want to suffer. Some did, and others didn't, and well, they reconciled with the story through this film,\" said Zerbino who feels he made a commitment to preserve his late team members' legacies.\n\nBayona's film champions Zerbino and the other survivors' mission: to tell the story of those who gave up their literal selves to keep their friends alive.\n\n\"I have a commitment, a commitment from before leaving the mountain to be a witness and transmit the legacy of my dead friends,\" Zerbino said."}
{"text": "# NFL fines Panthers owner David Tepper $300,000 for tossing drink at Jaguars fans\nBy **ROB MAADDI**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 6:16 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThe NFL has fined Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper $300,000 for tossing a drink at fans in Jacksonville toward the end of a game on Sunday.\n\nThe league called Tepper's conduct \"unacceptable\" in a statement released Tuesday.\n\n\"All NFL personnel are expected to conduct themselves at all times in ways that respect our fans and favorably reflect on their team and the NFL,\" the statement said.\n\nTepper's reaction came after rookie quarterback Bryce Young threw an interception with less than three minutes to play in a 26-0 loss to the Jaguars.\n\n\"I am deeply passionate about this team and regret my behavior on Sunday,\" Tepper said in a statement. \"I should have let NFL stadium security handle any issues that arose. I respect the NFL's code of conduct and accept the League's discipline for my behavior.\"\n\nIt wasn't clear whether Tepper was reacting to something said to him or another loss for the NFL's worst team. The Panthers are 2-14 and won't even have the No. 1 overall pick in the draft because it was traded to Chicago for the top pick used to select Young.\n\nPanthers general manager Scott Fitterer was standing near Tepper when he tossed whatever remained of his drink while watching the game from a club suite.\n\nIn 2009, the NFL fined the late Titans owner Bud Adams $250,000 for making an obscene gesture at Buffalo fans while celebrating Tennessee's victory over the Bills.\n\nFans have been banned from stadiums for throwing drinks at players.\n\nIt's been a rough year for Tepper, who fired first-year coach Frank Reich after just 11 games. Since Tepper bought the Panthers less than six years ago, he has gone through coaches Ron Rivera, Matt Rhule and Reich, plus interim coaches Perry Fewell, Steve Wilks and Chris Tabor."}
{"text": "# A missing person with no memory: How investigators solved the cold case of Seven Doe\nBy **SOPHIA TAREEN**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 7:17 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**CHICAGO (AP)** - Buried at the edge of a Chicago Catholic cemetery are an elderly person's remains marked only by a cement cylinder deep in the ground labeled with the numbers 04985. The person died in 2015 at a nursing home not remembering much, including their own name.\n\nThey went by Seven.\n\nNow police specializing in missing people and cold cases have discovered Seven's identity in one of the most unusual investigations the Cook County sheriff's office has pursued and one that could change state law. Using post-mortem fingerprints, investigators identified Seven as 75-year-old Reba C. Bailey, an Illinois veteran missing since the 1970s.\n\nThe breakthrough is bringing closure to generations of relatives and friends. But whether they knew the name or the numeral, the investigation has unearthed more mysteries about how Reba, a Women's Army Corps veteran raised in a large family, became homeless with no recollection, aside from wanting to be identified as a man called Seven.\n\nPublic records, interviews, newspapers and police work have offered some insight about the person with two lives, even with so much still unknown. Investigators say the next step is to honor them with a new gravestone and military honors.\n\n\"That's a horrible circumstance that someone could die and no one knows who they are. That's why we pursue these cases so strongly, out of dignity,\" said Commander Jason Moran, who oversees the sheriff's missing persons unit. \"A person deserves a name.\"\n\n## A CURIOUS COLD CASE\nThe case of Seven Doe - the name often appearing in official records - came to Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart last year.\n\nHis office has gained notoriety for work on cold cases, including identifying victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy and leading efforts to locate missing women statewide.\n\nSeven's case was unusual from the start.\n\nThe unidentified body belonged to an elderly woman who died of natural causes in an assisted living facility in Chicago. She was a ward of the state because she had no legal name or family she could remember.\n\n\"We never had anything like that before,\" Dart said of Seven being unidentified both in life and death. \"This one is different and it just kept getting more different.\"\n\nThe cause of death was heart disease with diabetes and dementia as contributing factors, according to the Cook County medical examiner. Fingerprints taken at the time of death in November 2015 were run against police databases as is customary. There was no match for a criminal record.\n\nShe was buried at Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery on the city's Far South Side in a section for unclaimed people. The medical examiner marked it as the 4,985th case of the year.\n\nDart's office usually takes up unsolved cases at least three years after they've gone cold. By then, it's unlikely they'll interfere with active investigations.\n\nWith foul play ruled out, investigators started by running Seven's fingerprints against more state and federal databases, including military records.\n\nThere was a match.\n\nInvestigators found 1961 Army records for Reba. They then tried to find relatives she was last in contact with in the 1970s, and identified five deceased siblings, most recently a sister who passed in 2007.\n\nThey also located more than half a dozen living nieces and nephews, a marriage record and evidence of traumatic events that would offer a window into her life.\n\n\"Human identification is a mix of science and circumstance,\" Moran, who has been with the sheriff's department for more than two decades, said of his work. \"It makes it very interesting to learn about who they were. The passage of time creates these difficulties. So we do the best we can to piece together who they were in life.\"\n\n## FAMILY FOLKLORE AND FACTS\nMost of Reba's living relatives - nephews and nieces in Florida, Alabama and Illinois - never met her.\n\nBut they had heard of her.\n\nReba's disappearance is part of family lore, something discussed at gatherings and reunions. So when Rick Bailey got a call from investigators about his long-lost aunt, he was \"totally in shock.\"\n\nBailey, a Florida funeral home director, is named after his father, Reba's older brother Richard who died in 2000.\n\n\"My dad had searched for years to try and find his sister,\" said Bailey, who's 65 and believes Reba's siblings would celebrate the news. \"They would all be thrilled if they were here.\"\n\nHe and other relatives have helped investigators learn more about Reba's early years.\n\nShe was born in 1940 in Danville, about 140 miles (225 kilometers) south of Chicago, the daughter of a carpenter who often moved for work. Census records show multiple addresses for the family in Illinois and Alabama.\n\nTragedy hit Reba's life at age 10 when she lost her mother in a car wreck that also left her, her father and her brother injured.\n\nAccording to an October 1950 Chicago Tribune brief, Reba's father backed up \"to pick up a suitcase he saw beside the highway\" when they were struck by another car. Edna Bailey, 46, died at a hospital.\n\nOther records about Reba's youth are sparse. Most of the people who would have answers are dead.\n\nHer photo doesn't appear in the yearbooks of public or private Catholic schools in Danville. The building in Chicago's Gold Coast where 1950 Census records show her family lived no longer exists. Her name doesn't appear in a nearby high school's yearbooks.\n\nShe worked stints as an elevator operator at a private club and as a sales clerk, according to military records which also list her hobbies as swimming, bowling, golf and photography.\n\nAbout a decade after the accident, she joined the Women's Army Corps, serving in Alabama, Texas and California. Military records show she was awarded a medal for good conduct and honorably discharged in 1962 \"due to marriage.\"\n\nAround that time at age 21, she married John H. Bilberry, who was also in the Army, in California. No divorce records were found, but Bilberry remarried fourteen years later. His 1989 obituary said he served in Vietnam. The woman he remarried and two of his siblings have died.\n\nAfter the military, few know what happened to Reba.\n\nDifferent family stories have her popping up at a family visit in Arizona with her husband and often seeing an aunt in Chicago. Some relatives told police she took up alcohol and drugs and began dressing like a man.\n\nAmanda Ingram, who would have been Reba's great-niece, took up her grandfather's search for his sister. As a family historian she keeps a meticulous family tree, with Census records and photos, on a family website.\n\nIngram has recently seen pictures of her late aunt and recognizes some Bailey family features, like a longer face shape. In one photo, Reba is wearing a black button down, her salt and pepper hair cropped short above her deep-set eyes. Prominent teeth peek out of a subtle smile.\n\nIngram hopes to find more answers.\n\n\"It is kind of like an onion,\" she said. \"You keep peeling it back and hopefully you find the story you really wanted to know.\"\n\n## THE COOK WITH NO PAST\nOn a snowy day in the late 1970s, a person wearing a military-style jacket and aviator cap fastened under the chin was curled up on the porch of St. Francis Catholic Worker House.\n\nThe house on Chicago's North Side was a place for homeless people and others who wanted to live in a community.\n\nResident Denise Plunkett was leaving for work at a hospital when she stumbled upon the person dressed in men's clothes. The encounter was so unusual that Plunkett, now 83, remembers it vividly.\n\nThe person spoke of themselves in the third person and didn't answer personal questions about where they had come from. When asked their name, they would either say \"Mr. Seven\" or \"He's a number, not a name. His name is Seven.\"\n\nNobody knew why.\n\nPlunkett overlapped for a few years with Seven at the house and suspected there were possible mental health problems, but Seven declined help.\n\nSeven quickly found a prominent role at the house.\n\nHe became the cook, whipping up beans and rice dishes and pasta casseroles each day. Word spread quickly in the neighborhood - home to several homeless advocacy organizations - that the meals at St. Francis were hearty. Crowds would line up outside the door for Seven's cooking, sometimes more than 100 people for a single dinner.\n\nFor more than two decades, Seven stayed at the white house located on a leafy residential block, sleeping in the men's quarters and smoking on the porch.\n\nResidents there didn't learn much else about his life.\n\n\"I figured Seven would tell their story when they were ready to tell it,\" said former house resident Sam Guardino. \"I accepted him for who they were and who they presented as.\"\n\nWhen told about the recent identification of Reba Bailey and her early years, those who lived with Seven at the house had a similar response.\n\n\"It's absolutely mind boggling,\" said Plunkett.\n\n## A WARD OF THE STATE\nWhile the time between Reba's military service and the worker house are a mystery, the end of Seven's life is well documented.\n\nSeven left the worker house in 2003 after passing out in a hallway. Doctors later said it was diabetic shock. St. Francis was unable to provide the around-the-clock medical care that was required.\n\nSince Seven did not have a legal name, Chicago police were called and launched an investigation. They filed a \"found persons report,\" documenting Seven's memory loss and confusion.\n\nThey attempted to take fingerprints twice, but were unsuccessful, blaming both \"disfigured\" fingers and unreadable results, according to police reports. Chicago police, including the primary detective on the case, did not return messages from The Associated Press.\n\nPolice attempted to find an identity, circulating Seven's photo to other Illinois law enforcement agencies. There was a false alarm with a person named \"Skeven,\" who had died in a car crash.\n\nA physical description of Seven noted very few teeth with one large front tooth, short white hair, blue eyes and light complexion.\n\nAuthorities did not account for gender identity, going only by biological sex, despite what Seven said. The police report noted \"'Seven' believes she is a male. A medical examination reveals that 'Seven' is female.\"\n\nThe investigation into Seven's identity was soon suspended.\n\n\"She has no last name or any recollection of her past prior to 27 years ago. There is no information with regard to relatives and she currently does not possess a Social Security number,\" the police report concluded.\n\nWith no family stepping forward and no identity, Seven became a ward of the state and was placed at a nursing home along Lake Michigan.\n\nThe unusual position, as an unidentified adult ward of the state, was chronicled in a 2012 Chicago Tribune story where Seven was referred to as a woman. In it, Seven was described as a \"lifelong Cubs fan\" with \"fleeting childhood memories of visiting the Indiana Dunes,\" a national park outside Chicago.\n\nThree years later, Seven died.\n\nFamily members who have learned more about their great aunt's life in later years have found comfort.\n\n\"We know she was cared for,\" Ingram said. \"That is the best that my grandfather could have ever asked for.\"\n\n## CHANGING STATE LAW\nThe cold case could prompt a change in Illinois law.\n\nThe Cook County sheriff's office wants to amend the state's Missing Persons Identification Act to require postmortem fingerprints be checked against all available state and federal databases, not just police. The idea is a fuller search at the time of death could help identify people sooner. Dart's office is drafting the legislation, which state lawmakers could take up this year.\n\nWith unidentified homicide victims, an earlier match could help with investigations that are already challenged by the passage of time.\n\n\"It's frustrating,\" Moran said. \"As every day goes by, sometimes you lose evidence, sometimes you lose family.\"\n\nSuch a change could also bring families closure sooner. Moran said families of missing people live in \"a cruel limbo\" not knowing if their loved one is alive or dead.\n\nIn Reba's case, relatives could have held a memorial service and buried her where they wanted eight years ago.\n\n\"Her family would have known earlier,\" Moran said.\n\n## MYSTERIES LINGER\nCook County investigators have updated the entry for Seven Doe in a federal database of missing people, adding Reba Bailey's name and photo.\n\nBut many other parts of the case remain mysterious.\n\n\"We don't know what she was thinking or feeling or what her wishes were,\" Moran said.\n\nRelatives wonder whether Reba had children, what happened with the marriage and about their aunt's gender identity.\n\nThey don't know what prompted her to fall out of contact. Family stories suggest it was a dispute with her father, but there are different versions about whether it was over her decision to join the military, her sexual orientation or something else.\n\nInvestigators have also tried to explain Reba's memory loss. They've floated theories about brain damage from the car accident that killed her mother or her military service.\n\nReba served at Fort Ord in California, a polluted former Army base, and Fort McClellan in Alabama, once the home of chemical weapons training where the federal government has acknowledged potential exposure to toxins.\n\nNo one has been able to figure out the meaning behind the name Seven.\n\nInvestigators hypothesized that it was possibly related to military service or birth order.\n\nReba was the youngest of six, including two siblings who died as children. But her great-niece recently found matches on Ancestry.com for previously unknown relatives, including one who could be another Bailey sibling. Ingram said her grandfather sometimes mentioned another baby in the family.\n\nPublic records in Illinois couldn't verify the existence of another birth; neither could police.\n\nBut if there was another sibling, Reba would have been child number seven.\n\n\"It does bring closure to a lot of mysteries that we have had,\" Ingram said about knowing her aunt's identity. \"It opens a lot of other doors.\"\n\n## HONORING A LIFE\nOn a recent fall day, Moran walked to a back corner of Mount Olivet on Chicago's Far South Side to the section of the cemetery for unclaimed people. The cement cylinders sit nearly submerged in the ground, sometimes leaving them covered in dirt and debris. The medical examiner marks them with the office initials \"ME\", the year and the case number.\n\nMoran reached down gently brushed leaves off 04985. By spring, he hopes it'll be replaced. The sheriff's office is pursuing a new gravestone, military marker and a memorial ceremony for Reba's life.\n\nFamily members had considered moving the remains closer to other family buried in either Florida or Alabama. One brother, Richard an Air Force veteran, is buried at the Barrancas National Cemetery in Florida. But moving the body would be expensive and complicated.\n\n\"We decided as a family not to disturb her,\" Rick Bailey said. \"At least we know where she is now.\""}
{"text": "# US national debt hits record $34 trillion as Congress gears up for funding fight\nBy **FATIMA HUSSEIN** and **JOSH BOAK**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 7:12 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - The federal government's gross national debt has surpassed $34 trillion, a record high that foreshadows the coming political and economic challenges to improve America's balance sheet in the coming years.\n\nThe U.S. Treasury Department issued a report Tuesday logging U.S. finances, which have become a source of tension in a politically divided Washington that could possibly see parts of the government shutdown without an annual budget in place.\n\nRepublican lawmakers and the White House agreed last June to temporarily lift the nation's debt limit, staving off the risk of what would be a historic default. That agreement lasts until January 2025. Here are some answers to questions about the new record national debt.\n\n## HOW DID THE NATIONAL DEBT HIT $34 TRILLION?\nThe national debt eclipsed $34 trillion several years sooner than pre-pandemic projections. The Congressional Budget Office's January 2020 projections had gross federal debt eclipsing $34 trillion in fiscal year 2029.\n\nBut the debt grew faster than expected because of a multi-year pandemic starting in 2020 that shut down much of the U.S. economy. The government borrowed heavily under then President Donald Trump and current President Joe Biden to stabilize the economy and support a recovery. But the rebound came with a surge of inflation that pushed up interest rates and made it more expensive for the government to service its debts.\n\n\"So far, Washington has been spending money as if we had unlimited resources,\" said Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at Loyola Marymount University. \"But the bottom line is there is no free lunch,\" he said, \"and I think the outlook is pretty grim.\"\n\nThe gross debt includes money that the government owes itself, so most policymakers rely on the total debt held by the public in assessing the government's finances. This lower figure - $26.9 trillion - is roughly equal in size to the U.S. gross domestic product.\n\nLast June, the Congressional Budget Office estimated in its 30-year outlook that publicly held debt will be equal to a record 181% of American economic activity by 2053.\n\n## WHAT IS THE IMPACT TO THE ECONOMY?\nThe national debt does not appear to be a weight on the U.S. economy right now, as investors are willing to lend the federal government money. This lending allows the government to keep spending on programs without having to raise taxes.\n\nBut the debt's path in the decades to come might put at risk national security and major programs, including Social Security and Medicare, which have become the most prominent drivers of forecasted government spending over the next few decades. Government dysfunction, such as another debt limit showdown, could also be a financial risk if investors worry about lawmakers' willingness to repay the U.S. debt.\n\nForeign buyers of U.S. debt - like China, Japan, South Korea and European nations - have already cut down on their holdings of Treasury notes.\n\nA Peterson Foundation analysis states that foreign holdings of U.S. debt peaked at 49 percent in 2011, but dropped to 30 percent by the end of 2022.\n\n\"Looking ahead, debt will continue to skyrocket as the Treasury expects to borrow nearly $1 trillion more by the end of March,\" said Peterson Foundation CEO Michael Peterson. \"Adding trillion after trillion in debt, year after year, should be a flashing red warning sign to any policymaker who cares about the future of our country.\n\n## HOW COULD IT AFFECT ME?\nThe debt equates to about $100,000 per person in the U.S. That sounds like a lot, but the sum so far has not appeared to threaten U.S. economic growth.\n\nInstead, the risk is long term if the debt keeps rising to uncharted levels. Sohn said a higher debt load could put upward pressure on inflation and cause interest rates to remain elevated, which could also increase the cost of repaying the national debt.\n\nAnd as the debt challenge evolves over time, choices may become more severe as the costs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid increasingly outstrip tax revenues.\n\nWhen it could turn into a more dire situation, is anyone's guess, says Shai Akabas, director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, \"but if and when that happens, it could mean very significant consequences that occur very quickly.\"\n\n\"It could mean spikes in interest rates, it could mean a recession that leads to lots more unemployment. It could lead to another bout of inflation or weird going on with consumer prices -several of which are things that we've experienced just in the past few years,\" he said.\n\n## HOW DO REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS DIFFER?\nBoth Democrats and Republicans have called for debt reduction, but they disagree on the appropriate means of doing so.\n\nThe Biden administration has been pushing for tax hikes on the wealthy and corporations to reduce budget deficits, in addition to funding its domestic agenda. Biden also increased the budget for the IRS, so that it can collect unpaid taxes and possibly reduce the debt by hundreds of billions of dollars over 10 years.\n\nRepublican lawmakers have called for large cuts to non-defense government programs and the repeal of clean energy tax credits and spending passed in the Inflation Reduction Act. But Republicans also want to trim Biden's IRS funding and cut taxes further, both of which could cause the debt to worsen.\n\nBoth claims are previews of cases that will likely be put to voters in this year's presidential election.\n\nWhite House spokesman Michael Kikukawa put the blame on the GOP, saying in a statement that the steady accrual over years was \"trickle-down debt - driven overwhelmingly by repeated Republican giveaways skewed to big corporations and the wealthy.\"\n\nBy contrast, Republican lawmakers have said that borrowing during the Biden administration contributed to the 2022 spike in inflation rates that dragged down the Democratic president's approval ratings.\n\nAkabas said, \"There is growing concern among investors and rating agencies that the trajectory we're on is unsustainable - when that turns into a more dire situation is anyone's guess.\""}
{"text": "# Prosecutors say Sen. Menendez cashed in by linking Qatari royal family member with NJ businessman\nBy **LARRY NEUMEISTER**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:16 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez used his international clout to help a friend get a multimillion-dollar deal with a Qatari investment fund, partly by taking actions favorable to Qatar's government, federal prosecutors said Tuesday in a revised indictment.\n\nThe new allegations deepen the legal challenges for Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, who already was charged with wielding his political influence to secretly advance Egypt's interests.\n\nThe superseding indictment in New York said the senator and his wife accepted bribes of gold bars and cash from New Jersey real estate developer Fred Daibes as a reward for several corrupt acts that included his help securing a major investment from the Qatari fund.\n\nProsecutors said Menendez introduced Daibes to a member of Qatar's royal family who was also a principal in the investment firm, met personally with Qatari officials and made public statements supportive of Qatar while the real estate deal was being negotiated.\n\nThe indictment said the Qatari investor eventually invested tens of millions of dollars in Daibes' development project, in a deal finalized in 2023.\n\nAdam Fee, a lawyer for Menendez, said in a statement that prosecutors lacked proof of any wrongdoing.\n\n\"What they have instead is a string of baseless assumptions and bizarre conjectures based on routine, lawful contacts between a Senator and his constituents or foreign officials. They are turning this into a persecution, not a prosecution,\" he said.\n\n\"At all times, Senator Menendez acted entirely appropriately with respect to Qatar, Egypt, and the many other countries he routinely interacts with. Those interactions were always based on his professional judgment as to the best interests of the United States because he is, and always has been, a patriot.\"\n\nTim Donohue, a lawyer for Daibes, said he had no immediate comment.\n\nThe indictment did not identify the member of the Qatari royal family involved. Messages left with Qatar's consulate in New York and with its sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Authority, were not immediately returned.\n\nNo new charges were added to the latest version of an indictment that already charged Menendez in a bribery conspiracy that allegedly enriched the senator and his wife with a luxury car besides the cash and gold. The allegations involving Qatar occurred from 2021 through 2023.\n\nOther parts of the indictment accuse Menendez, 70, and his wife, Nadine Menendez, of taking bribes from two other New Jersey businessmen besides Daibes. All have pleaded not guilty.\n\nAmong other things, Menendez is accused of ghostwriting a letter to fellow senators encouraging them to lift a hold on $300 million in aid to Egypt.\n\nAfter his September arrest, the senator gave up his position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He has resisted calls for him to resign from his Senate seat.\n\nThe indictment contains new details about the relationship between Menendez and Daibes, a powerful New Jersey real estate developer.\n\nDaibes has been credited with building out a string of luxury waterfront buildings, known as the \"gold coast,\" in the New Jersey town of Edgewater.\n\nAlong the way, he has maintained cozy relationships with local officials, which enabled him to chase off rival developers and renege on promises to build affordable housing, according to a report from the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation.\n\nDaibes already faced federal fraud charges when he was arrested in September on charges that he paid bribes to Menendez, a longtime friend. He was also accused of attempting to convince a federal prosecutor to go easy on Daibes in his bank fraud case.\n\nThe indictment said that while the Qatari investment company was considering its investment in the Daibes real estate development, Menendez made multiple public statements supporting the government of Qatar and then provided them to Daibes so he could share them with the Qatari investor and a Qatari government official.\n\nIn one August 2021 instance, the indictment said, Menendez used an encrypted messaging application to send Daibes the text of a press release in which he praised the government of Qatar, before texting Daibes: \"You might want to send to them. I am just about to release.\"\n\nTwo months later, Menendez and his wife returned from a trip to Qatar and Egypt and were picked up at the airport by Daibes' driver, the indictment said. The next day, it added, Menendez performed an internet search for \"how much is one kilo of gold worth.\"\n\nThe Qatari Investment Co. signed a letter of intent to enter a joint venture with a company controlled by Daibes in May 2022, the indictment said. Thereafter, it added, Daibes gave Menendez at least one gold bar.\n\nA search of Menendez's residence produced two 1-kilogram gold bars and nine 1-ounce gold bars with serial numbers showing they'd previously been possessed by Daibes, along with about 10 envelopes of cash with tens of thousands of dollars bearing the fingerprints or DNA of Daibes, the indictment said.\n\nThe revised indictment said a Qatari investment official also sent tickets to a Formula One auto racing event to one of Nadine Menendez's close relatives.\n\nThe indictment said Menendez did not report any of the cash or gold received by himself or his spouse as required for a U.S. senator on annual financial disclosure forms.\n\nJudge Sidney H. Stein, who is presiding over the case, refused last week to extend a May 5 trial date after defense lawyers requested more time to prepare.\n\nIn a letter to the judge late Tuesday, prosecutors said they would not oppose a delayed arraignment of the defendants or an arraignment by video."}
{"text": "# Justice Dept. accuses 2 political operatives of hiding foreign lobbying during Trump administration\nBy **ERIC TUCKER** and **ALAN SUDERMAN**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:15 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Two well-connected political consultants provided false information about lobbying work on behalf of a wealthy Persian Gulf country during the Trump administration, according to Justice Department court records unsealed Tuesday.\n\nCharging documents filed in federal court in Washington allege that Barry P. Bennett, an adviser to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, spearheaded a covert and lucrative lobbying campaign aimed at advancing the interests of a foreign country, including by denigrating a rival nation.\n\nThe country for whom the work was done is not named in the documents but it matches the description of Qatar, which in 2017 paid Bennett's company $2.1 million for lobbying work, and was identified in a 2020 Justice Department subpoena that was earlier obtained by The Associated Press and that sought records related to Bennett's foreign lobbying.\n\nFederal prosecutors filed two criminal counts against Bennett in a charging document known as an information, which is typically filed only with a defendant's consent and generally signals that the parties have reached a resolution. Prosecutors said the case will be dismissed after he complies with the terms of a deferred prosecution agreement, including the payment of a $100,000 fine.\n\nThe Justice Department also reached a similar agreement with Douglas Watts, a New Jersey political consultant who prosecutors say worked alongside Bennett and failed to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.\n\nThe law, enacted in 1938 to unmask Nazi propaganda in the United States, requires people to disclose to the Justice Department when they advocate, lobby or perform public relations work in the U.S. on behalf of a foreign government or political entity.\n\nA lawyer for Bennett did not immediately return messages sent to his law firm. Justin Dillon, a lawyer for Watts, declined to comment Tuesday evening. An email to the Qatari embassy was not immediately returned.\n\nAccording to the Justice Department, Bennett signed a contract in 2017 for his company, Avenue Strategies, to perform lobbying work on behalf of the Qatari embassy. He also registered with the Justice Department that year to lobby for the embassy.\n\nBut as part of that strategy, prosecutors said he also covertly operated another company called Yemen Crisis Watch that operated a public relations campaign to denigrate one of Qatar's unnamed rivals - both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were engaged in military operations in Yemen that critics say contributed to a humanitarian crisis - and improve Qatar's standing with the U.S. government.\n\nThat effort included lobbying Congress and Trump, as well as a social media campaign, publishing opinion articles in newspapers and producing a television documentary, according to prosecutors. Yemen Crisis Watch urged the public to contact their lawmakers and urge them to \"cease supporting\" the intervention in Yemen by Qatar's unnamed rival, prosecutors said.\n\nRobert Schuller, a prominent televangelist, and former Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer both helped Yemen Crisis Watch's efforts, according to earlier reporting from the Wall Street Journal and the Topeka Capital-Journal. Neither man has been charged with any wrongdoing and messages sent to them were not immediately returned.\n\nProsecutors say Bennett's consulting company did not disclose in its FARA filings the creation of Yemen Crisis Watch, and that Watts made false statements during interviews with the FBI about his knowledge of the company's formation and its activities.\n\nThe case is among severalprobes by federal law enforcement officials related to Qatar's aggressive influence campaign during the Trump administration, when it was the target of a blockade by Saudi Arabia and other neighbors."}
{"text": "# Biden administration asks Supreme Court to allow border agents to cut razor wire installed by Texas\nJanuary 2, 2024. 5:03 PM EST\n\n---\n\nWASHINGTON (AP) - The Biden administration is asking the Supreme Court to allow Border Patrol agents to cut razor wire that Texas installed on the U.S.-Mexico border, while a lawsuit over the wire continues.\n\nThe Justice Department filed an emergency appeal Tuesday, asking the justices to put on hold last month's appellate ruling in favor of Texas, which forced federal agents to stop cutting the concertina wire the state has installed along roughly 30 miles (48 kilometers) of the Rio Grande near the border city of Eagle Pass. Large numbers of migrants have crossed there in recent months.\n\nThe court case pitting Republican-led Texas against Democratic President Joe Biden's administration is part of a broader fight over immigration enforcement. The state also has installed razor wire around El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley, where migrants have crossed in high numbers. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also has authorized installing floating barriers in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass and allowed troopers to arrest and jail thousands of migrants on trespassing charges.\n\nIn court papers, the administration said the wire impedes Border Patrol agents from reaching migrants as they cross the river and that, in any case, federal immigration law trumps Texas' own efforts to stem the flow of migrants into the country.\n\nTexas officials have argued that federal agents cut the wire to help groups crossing illegally through the river before taking them in for processing."}
{"text": "# Marsha Warfield, bailiff Roz Russell on 'Night Court,' returns to the show that has a 'big heart'\nBy **MARK KENNEDY**  \nJanuary 1, 2024. 11:20 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Fans of the rebooted hit NBC sitcom \"Night Court\" might have been forgiven for tuning in all season long and asking \"Where's Roz?\"\n\nRoz Russell - played by comedian Marsha Warfield - was the salty, no-nonsense bailiff alongside Bull Shannon who had a world-weary view of the shenanigans in the courtroom during the show's original run from 1984 to 1992.\n\nBut Roz wasn't in the reboot that aired at the top of 2023. John Larroquette as prosecutor Dan Fielding was the only full-time cast member to return.\n\nSo fans were excited when Roz popped up in the season one finale, surprising Fielding as a defendant. \"Roz?!\" he exclaimed in disbelief. Seconds later, the screen went dark.\n\nThe reboot has been spearheaded by Melissa Rauch, a former star of \"The Big Bang Theory\" who is the new night court judge and the sunshine to Larroquette's gloom.\n\nThe revival earned the highest ratings for a comedy series on the network since 2017. Season two begins Tuesday with Warfield's Roz with a lot of explaining to do.\n\nShe talked to The Associated Press about the show, why it became so popular and what it felt like to be back on the set.\n\n## Interview\nAP: Was it hard to keep your appearance a surprise?\n\nWARFIELD: Yes and no, but not really. I'm pretty good at keeping secrets, and especially when your job depends on it. I can pretty much handle that.\n\nAP: Were you OK not being a full-time part of the reboot?\n\nWARFIELD: I knew when they were talking about a reboot, in the way they were talking about it, being involved was not necessarily going to happen. That was OK. I wished them all the best from day one. You know, if they asked, I'd be happy to do it. But if they don't ask, I understand. So it was a pleasant surprise to get the call.\n\nAP: Did you expect to be on the original show so long?\n\nWARFIELD: I was only signed for one show and they were saying they didn't know what they were going to do with the role since the last two bailiffs had passed on. They didn't know if they were going to have revolving bailiffs or no bailiff or would just leave it to Bull or what. And so when I got the gig, it was just the one and I had no expectations.\n\nAP: A steady gig must have been sweet.\n\nWARFIELD: An ensemble part on a Top 10 show? It was wonderful for me.\n\nAP: Why do you think the original struck such a nerve?\n\nWARFIELD: \"Night Court\" had a big heart. It was wacky. It was zany. It was misogynist. It was awkward. It was all of that. It was burlesque. But underneath it all was the heart of a puppy.\n\nAP: Does that apply to the reboot, too?\n\nWARFIELD: Yes, Melissa brings that same kind of heart to this project. This is a love thing. This is not just, \"Oh, we can make money doing this.\" She loves this show. The people involved love the show and they love doing it. We did, too.\n\nAP: What was it like stepping back on the set?\n\nWARFIELD: It was like it was like going back to your prom when you're in your 70s.\n\nAP: Is Roz the role you're most associated with?\n\nWARFIELD: Pretty much, yeah, sure. I've done other things that have fortunately had positive responses and all that, but I did \"Night Court\" for six seasons and so a lot more people saw that and a lot of them now have fond memories. They also have memories not so much for themselves, but they have memories of being with their family. They're like, 'I used to sneak and watch with my brother\" or \"My dad used to let me stay up and watch it.\" So it's the memories that they have of their families and the times they spent with people they cared about.\n\nAP: Might you come back again?\n\nWARFIELD: If it's up to me, yeah, I'm back next week. But it ain't up to me. So if they call me, I'd be more than happy to. If they don't, again, I wish them all the best. I have no expectations, but I have tremendous affection for the show and I would be honored."}
{"text": "# Trial of man charged with stabbing Salman Rushdie may be delayed until author's memoir is published\nBy **CAROLYN THOMPSON**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 5:52 PM EST\n\n---\n\nMAYVILLE, N.Y. (AP) - Salman Rushdie's plans to publish a book about a 2022 attempt on his life may delay the trial of his alleged attacker, which is scheduled to begin next week, attorneys said Tuesday.\n\nHadi Matar, the man charged with repeatedly stabbing Rushdie as the author was being introduced for a lecture, is entitled to the manuscript and related material as part of his trial preparation, Chautauqua County Judge David Foley said during a pretrial conference.\n\nFoley gave Matar and his attorney until Wednesday to decide if they want to delay the trial until they have the book in hand, either in advance from the publisher or once it has been released in April. Defense attorney Nathaniel Barone said after court that he favored a delay but would consult with Matar.\n\nJury selection is scheduled to begin Jan. 8.\n\n\"It's not just the book,\" Barone said. \"Every little note Rushdie wrote down, I get, I'm entitled to. Every discussion, every recording, anything he did in regard to this book.\"\n\nRushdie, who was left blinded in his right eye and with a damaged left hand in the August 2022 attack, announced in October that he had written about the attack in a memoir: \"Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder,\" which is available for pre-order. Trial preparation was already well under way when the attorneys involved in the case learned about the book.\n\nDistrict Attorney Jason Schmidt said Rushdie's representatives had declined the prosecutor's request for a copy of the manuscript, citing intellectual property rights. Schmidt downplayed the relevance of the book at the upcoming trial, given that the attack was witnessed by a large, live audience and Rushdie himself could testify.\n\n\"There were recordings of it,\" Schmidt said of the assault.\n\nMatar, 26, of New Jersey has been held without bail since his arrest immediately after Rushdie was stabbed in front of a stunned audience at the Chautauqua Institution, a summer arts and education retreat in western New York.\n\nSchmidt has said Matar was on a \"mission to kill Mr. Rushdie\" when he rushed from the audience to the stage and stabbed him more than a dozen times until being subdued by onlookers.\n\nA motive for the attack was not disclosed. Matar, in a jailhouse interview with The New York Post after his arrest, praised late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and said Rushdie \"attacked Islam.\"\n\nRushdie, 75, spent years in hiding after Khomeini issued a 1989 edict, a fatwa, calling for his death after publication of his novel \"The Satanic Verses,\" which some Muslims consider blasphemous. Over the past two decades, Rushdie has traveled freely.\n\nMatar was born in the U.S. but holds dual citizenship in Lebanon, where his parents were born. His mother has said that her son changed, becoming withdrawn and moody, after visiting his father in Lebanon in 2018."}
{"text": "# Suburbs put the brakes on migrant bus arrivals after crackdowns in Chicago and New York\nBy **MIKE CATALINI** and **CLAIRE SAVAGE**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 5:54 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**TRENTON, N.J. (AP)** - In Edison, New Jersey, the mayor warned he would send people back to the border if they came to his city in buses. In Rockford, Illinois, authorities said 355 migrants who landed on a charter flight wouldn't be staying.\n\n\"NO MIGRANT BUSES THIS EXIT,\" signs along Interstate 55 in Grundy County, Illinois, southwest of Chicago said ahead of Christmas weekend.\n\nNervous officials in suburbs and outlying cities near Chicago and New York are giving migrants arriving from the southern border a cold shoulder amid attempts to circumvent restrictions on buses in those two cities, opening a new front in response to efforts led by Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to pay for migrants to leave his state.\n\nThe suburban backlash comes amid what the acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection calls \"unprecedented\" arrivals, with illegal entries topping 10,000 several days last month. For months, big-city Democratic mayors including Eric Adams of New York and Brandon Johnson of Chicago have pleaded with the Biden administration for help addressing the influx.\n\nAbbott has bused more than 80,000 migrants from Texas to Democratic-led cities since 2022, though some buses have also arrived from other states. Abbott's administration also recently began chartering planes as Chicago and New York started cracking down on buses making unscheduled drop-offs, with fines and tickets.\n\nA plane carrying 355 migrants from San Antonio landed at Chicago Rockford International Airport at 1 a.m. on New Year's Eve, with local officials saying none left the airport that's about 85 miles (137 kilometers) from downtown Chicago before boarding buses. The city of Chicago said migrants on the Boeing 777 boarded eight buses chartered by Abbott to be dropped off in \"various suburbs.\" A flight earlier in December brought 120 migrants to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport.\n\nSome Chicago suburbs also have adopted or are considering regulations on buses. Tinley Park's ordinance vows to \"cite, impound or take other appropriate measures\" against buses that make unannounced stops in the town of about 60,000 people. The village of Broadview, a suburb of 8,000 residents west of Chicago, said last week that it had to take action \"because the unloading of passengers in inclement or severe weather without a coordinated plan poses a significant threat to the health, safety and welfare\" of the people aboard the buses.\n\nIn New Jersey, migrants are being dropped off at train stations in Jersey City, Secaucus and Trenton, according to state officials. Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy's office has said the state is primarily being used as a transit point and that \"nearly all of them\" are headed to New York. Murphy's office said the state is working with federal and local authorities, but didn't provide further details.\n\nMurphy said last summer that New Jersey couldn't support the arrivals amid discussion that the Biden administration was considering using the Atlantic City airport as a possible destination. It was a change of tune for Murphy, a self-styled progressive who first ran for governor in 2017 and suggested he would declare New Jersey a \"sanctuary state,\" a loose term for a place with immigrant-friendly policies.\n\nTrenton Mayor Reed Gusciora said most migrants who arrived in his city have moved on to New York, but 10 people have stayed with family in the area.\n\n\"We empathize when someone is trying to seek asylum or when someone is trying to take them in. But we don't have the capacity to take them in,\" he said.\n\nEdison Mayor Sam Joshi said in a Facebook post that he has \"instructed our law enforcement and emergency management departments to charter a bus to transport the illegal migrants right back to the southern Texas/Mexican border.\"\n\nThe mayors of New York and Chicago have blamed Abbott.\n\n\"This is a diabolical plan by this governor and we're going to have to respond based on what he is doing,\" Adams said Tuesday.\n\nHours after the flight landed in Rockford, Johnson told CBS' \"Face the Nation\" that \"Abbott is determined to continue to sow seeds of chaos\" by having people arrive in the middle of the night with no notice.\n\nAbbott has defended his tactics by saying President Joe Biden needs to do more to secure the border. His spokesperson Renae Eze on Tuesday also renewed attacks on Democratic mayors, saying their hypocrisy \"knows no bounds.\"\n\nGrundy County Sheriff Ken Briley said the highway signs south of Chicago were part of an emergency effort to avoid people being dropped off outside in the cold with no money, food or winter clothes during the holiday weekend. No buses have stopped in the county, and the signs have since been removed, Briley said.\n\nAbout 30 migrants from Venezuela were recently dropped off at 4:30 a.m. at a gas station in Kankakee County, according to Sheriff Mike Downey. The people \"were left without money, food, adequate clothing, and were under the impression that they had reached their destination.\"\n\n\"I don't think this problem is going to stop,\" said Briley. \"We're a rural community. We just don't have the same kind of tax base that the city of Chicago does to be able to provide those resources.\""}
{"text": "# Witness threat claim delays bail hearing for ex-gang leader held in Tupac Shakur killing\nBy **KEN RITTER**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 4:04 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LAS VEGAS (AP)** - A bail hearing was postponed Tuesday in Las Vegas for a former Los Angeles-area gang leader charged with orchestrating the killing of hip-hop music legend Tupac Shakur in 1996, giving defense attorneys time to respond to prosecutors' allegations that witnesses in the case may be at risk.\n\nDuane \"Keffe D\" Davis' court-appointed attorneys sought the delay to respond to prosecutors' allegations, filed last week, that jail telephone recordings and a list of names provided to Davis' family members show that Davis poses a threat to the public if he is released.\n\nNo court hearing was held Tuesday. One of Davis' attorneys, Robert Arroyo, told The Associated Press later that the defense wanted to respond in court in writing. He declined to provide details. Arroyo said last week he did not see evidence that any witness had been named or threatened.\n\nDavis is the only person ever charged with a crime in the drive-by shooting that also wounded rap music mogul Marion \"Suge\" Knight, who is now serving 28 years in a California prison for an unrelated fatal shooting in the Los Angeles area in 2015.\n\nDavis has pleaded not guilty and is due for trial in June on a murder charge. He has remained jailed without bail since his arrest Sept. 29 outside his Henderson home. Las Vegas police had served a search warrant there in mid-July.\n\nDavis, originally from Compton, California, is now housed at the Clark County Detention Center in Las Vegas, where detainees' phone calls are routinely recorded. If convicted at trial, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.\n\nIn a recording of an October jail call, prosecutors say Davis' son told the defendant about a \"green light\" authorization. Their court filing made no reference to Davis instructing anyone to harm someone, or to anyone associated with the case being physically harmed.\n\n\"In (Davis') world, a 'green light' is an authorization to kill,\" prosecutors Marc DiGiacomo and Binu Palal told Clark County District Court Judge Carli Kierny in the court document, adding that at least one witness was provided assistance from federal authorities \"so he could change his residence.\"\n\nProsecutors also point to Davis' own words since 2008 - in police interviews, in his 2019 tell-all memoir and in the media - that they say provides strong evidence that he orchestrated the September 1996 shooting.\n\nDavis' attorneys argue that his descriptions of Shakur's killing were \"done for entertainment purposes and to make money.\"\n\nArroyo and co-counsel Charles Cano have argued their 60-year-old client is in poor health after a battle with cancer that is in remission, poses no danger to the community, and won't flee to avoid trial. They want Kierny to set bail at not more than $100,000.\n\nDavis maintains that he was given immunity from prosecution in 2008 by FBI agents and Los Angeles police who were investigating the killings of Shakur in Las Vegas and rival rapper Christopher Wallace, known as The Notorious B.I.G. or Biggie Smalls, six months later in Los Angeles.\n\nDavis' bail hearing is now scheduled for Jan. 9."}
{"text": "# Gunman breaks into Colorado Supreme Court building; intrusion unrelated to Trump case, police say\nBy **NICHOLAS RICCARDI** and **COLLEEN SLEVIN**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 5:36 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DENVER (AP)** - A man leaving the scene of a car wreck Tuesday shot his way into the Colorado Supreme Court building and inflicted \"extensive damage\" to the building before being arrested by police, authorities said, adding the incident seems unrelated to the court's recent ruling banning former President Donald Trump from the ballot.\n\nColorado's justices have received threats ever since they ruled 4-3 last month that a rarely used constitutional provision barring from office those who \"engaged in insurrection\" applies to Trump. Authorities, however, said Tuesday's incident appears unrelated to that case. Trump is expected to appeal that ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court later Tuesday.\n\n\"The CSP and DPD are treating this incident seriously, but at this time, it is believed that this is not associated with previous threats to the Colorado Supreme Court Justices,\" the Colorado State Patrol said in a statement said, using the acronyms for the state patrol and Denver Police Department.\n\nThe car wreck occurred just by the building in downtown Denver at 1:15 a.m., after which a man identified by police as Brandon Olsen, 44, pointed a handgun at the driver of the other car, police records show. Olsen then shot his way through a window at the Ralph Carr Colorado Justice Center, which houses the state's Supreme Court and several other courtrooms and administrative offices, shortly thereafter and entered, authorities said.\n\nOlsen, who is scheduled to appear in court Wednesday, had no attorney listed in court documents yet.\n\nPolice said Olsen held up an unarmed security guard and got a key that let him into the rest of the building. He made his way to the seventh floor, where he fired further shots and apparently set a fire, triggering the fire extinguishers, according to the Denver Police affidavit signed in support of his arrest.\n\nAt 3 a.m., Olsen called 911 and voluntarily surrendered to police, the document says. Authorities say no one in the building was injured.\n\nSeveral hours after the crash, a large shattered window could be seen on the ground floor of the building, with glass spilled out on the sidewalk along a busy street downtown. A state patrol trooper guarded it.\n\nThe state patrol is responsible for security at the building and other neighboring state buildings like the Capitol. The patrol has said it has increased security for the Supreme Court justices since their ruling but declined to detail how. It said its security officers are unarmed but can call armed state patrol officers stationed nearby for help.\n\n\"They work in tandem,\" state patrol spokesperson Trooper Gabriel Moltrer said."}
{"text": "# US women are stocking up on abortion pills, especially when there is news about restrictions\nBy **LAURA UNGAR**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 11:01 AM EST\n\n---\n\nThousands of women stocked up on abortion pills just in case they needed them, new research shows, with demand peaking in the past couple years at times when it looked like the medications might become harder to get.\n\nMedication abortion accounts for more than half of all abortions in the U.S., and typically involves two drugs: mifepristone and misoprostol. A research letter published Tuesday in JAMA Internal Medicine looked at requests for these pills from people who weren't pregnant and sought them through Aid Access, a European online telemedicine service that prescribes them for future and immediate use.\n\nAid Access received about 48,400 requests from across the U.S. for so-called \"advance provision\" from September 2021 through April 2023. Requests were highest right after news leaked in May 2022 that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade - but before the formal announcement that June, researchers found.\n\nNationally, the average number of daily requests shot up nearly tenfold, from about 25 in the eight months before the leak to 247 after the leak. In states where an abortion ban was inevitable, the average weekly request rate rose nearly ninefold.\n\n\"People are looking at looming threats to reproductive health access, looming threats to their reproductive rights, and potentially thinking to themselves: How can I prepare for this? Or how can I get around this or get out ahead of this?\" said Dr. Abigail Aiken, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the letter's authors.\n\nDaily requests dropped to 89 nationally after the Supreme Court decision, the research shows, then rose to 172 in April 2023 when there were conflicting legal rulings about the federal approval of mifepristone. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on limits on the drug this year.\n\nCo-author Dr. Rebecca Gomperts of Amsterdam, director of Aid Access, attributed this spike to greater public awareness during times of uncertainty.\n\nResearchers found inequities in who is getting pills in advance. Compared with people requesting pills to manage current abortions, a greater proportion were at least 30 years old, white, had no children and lived in urban areas and regions with less poverty.\n\nAdvance provision isn't yet reaching people who face the greatest barriers to abortion care, said Dr. Daniel Grossman, an OB-GYN at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the research.\n\n\"It's not surprising that some people would want to have these pills on hand in case they need them, instead of having to travel to another state or try to obtain them through telehealth once pregnant,\" he added in an email, also saying more research is needed into the inequities.\n\nRecently, Aiken said, some other organizations have started offering pills in advance.\n\n\"It's a very new idea for a lot of folks because it's not standard practice within the U.S. health care setting,\" she said. \"It will actually be news to a lot of people that it's even something that is offered.\""}
{"text": "# Apparent Israeli strike kills senior Hamas figure in Beirut and raises fears conflict could expand\nBy **WAFAA SHURAFA**, **BASSEM MROUE**, and **TIA GOLDENBERG**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 5:30 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BEIRUT (AP)** - An apparent Israeli strike in the Lebanese capital of Beirut killed Hamas' No. 2 political leader Tuesday, marking a potentially significant escalation of Israel's war against the militant group and heightening the risk of a wider Middle East conflict.\n\nSaleh Arouri, who was the most senior Hamas figure killed since the war with Israel began, was also a founder of the group's military wing. His death could provoke major retaliation by Lebanon's powerful Hezbollah militia.\n\nThe strike hit an apartment in a building in a Shiite district of Beirut that is a Hezbollah stronghold, and Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has vowed to strike back against any Israeli targeting of Palestinian officials in Lebanon.\n\nHezbollah and the Israeli military have been exchanging fire almost daily over the Israeli-Lebanese border since Israel's military campaign in Gaza began nearly three months ago. But so far the Lebanese group has appeared reluctant to dramatically escalate the fighting. A significant response now could send the conflict spiraling into all-out war on Israel's northern border.\n\nLebanon's state-run National News Agency said the strike was carried out by an Israeli drone, and Israeli officials declined to comment. Speaking to reporters, Israeli military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari did not directly mention Arouri's death but said, \"We are focused and remain focused on fighting against Hamas.\"\n\n\"We are on high readiness for any scenario,\" he added.\n\nThe killing comes ahead of a visit to the region by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, even as the United States has tried to prevent a spread of the conflict, repeatedly warning Hezbollah - and its regional supporter, Iran - not to escalate the violence.\n\nIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to press ahead with the assault in Gaza until Hamas is crushed and the more than 100 hostages still held by the militant group in Gaza are freed, which he has said could take several more months. At the same time, Israeli officials have increasingly warned in recent days of stepped-up action against Hezbollah unless its cross-border fire stops.\n\n## BEIRUT STRIKE\nNetanyahu and other Israeli officials have repeatedly threatened to kill Hamas leaders wherever they are. The group's Oct. 7 attack from Gaza into southern Israel killed around 1,200 people, and some 240 others were taken hostage.\n\nIsrael claims to have killed a number of mid-level Hamas leaders in Gaza, but this would be the first time it has reached into another country to target the group's top leaders, many of whom live in exile around the region.\n\nArouri was the deputy of Hamas' supreme political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, and headed the group's presence in the West Bank. He was also a key liaison with Hezbollah.\n\nTuesday's blast shook a residential building in the Beirut suburb of Musharafieh, killing four people, according to the Lebanese news agency. Hamas confirmed that Arouri was killed along with six other members of the group, including two military commanders.\n\nHamas' leader, Haniyeh Ismail, said the movement was \"more powerful and determined\" following the attack. \"They left behind them strong men who will carry the banner after them,\" he said of those killed.\n\nHezbollah called the strike \"a serious attack on Lebanon, its people, its security, sovereignty and resistance.\"\n\n\"We affirm that this crime will never pass without response and punishment,\" it said.\n\nSince the Gaza conflict began, Lebanese have feared their country could be pulled into a full-fledged war. Hezbollah and Israel fought a monthlong war in 2006, when Israeli bombardment wreaked heavy destruction in southern Lebanon.\n\n## GAZA COMBAT CONTINUES\nIsrael's air, ground and sea assault in Gaza has killed more than 21,900 people in Gaza, two-thirds of them women and children, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory. The count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.\n\nThe campaign has driven some 85% of Gaza's population from their homes, forcing hundreds of thousands of people into overcrowded shelters or teeming tent camps in Israeli-designated safe areas that the military has nevertheless bombed. Israel's siege of the territory has left a quarter of Gaza residents facing starvation, according to the United Nations.\n\nIsrael announced Monday that it would withdraw five brigades, or several thousand troops, from Gaza in the coming weeks. Still, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said it would be a mistake to think that Israel is planning on halting the war.\n\n\"The feeling that we will stop soon is incorrect,\" he said Tuesday. \"Without a clear victory, we will not be able to live in the Middle East.\"\n\nIsrael has said it's close to achieving operational control over most of northern Gaza, where ground troops have been battling militants for over two months. But Gallant said several thousand Hamas fighters are believed still to be in the north, and residents reported clashes in several parts of Gaza City, as well as in the nearby urban Jabaliya refugee camp.\n\nFierce fighting has continued in other parts of the Palestinian territory, especially the south, where many of Hamas' forces remain intact and where most of Gaza's population has fled.\n\nPalestinians reported heavy airstrikes and artillery shelling in the southern city of Khan Younis and farming areas to the east. The Palestinian Red Crescent said Israel bombed its headquarters in the city, killing five people. At least 14,000 displaced people are sheltering in the building, it said.\n\nFighting was also underway in and around the built-up Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza. The army issued evacuation orders to people living in parts of nearby Nuseirat camp. A strike Tuesday leveled a building in Nuseirat, killing at least eight people, according to officials at the nearby hospital. Associated Press footage showed people pulling several children out of the wreckage.\n\n## GENOCIDE CASE\nIn other developments, officials said Israel will defend itself before the United Nation's top court against charges that it has engaged in genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The announcement set the stage for what is likely to be a landmark case in international law.\n\nSouth Africa launched the case Friday at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, Netherlands, saying the Israeli military campaign targeting Hamas has resulted in enough death, destruction and humanitarian crisis in Gaza to meet the threshold of genocide under international law. South Africa asked the court to order Israel to halt its attacks in Gaza.\n\nIsrael rarely cooperates in international court cases against it, dismissing the United Nations and international tribunals as unfair and biased. Its decision to respond to the charge signals that the government is concerned about potential damage to its reputation.\n\nThe genocide charge strikes at the heart of Israel's national identity. The country sees itself as a bulwark of security for Jews after the Holocaust killed 6 million Jews, and world support for Israel's creation in Palestine in 1948 was deeply rooted in outrage over Nazi atrocities.\n\nThe convention against genocide was drawn up by world powers the same year in hopes of preventing similar atrocities.\n\nEylon Levy, an official in the Israeli prime minister's office, accused South Africa of \"giving political and legal cover\" to Hamas after its Oct. 7 attack triggered Israel's campaign.\n\n\"The state of Israel will appear before the International Court of Justice at the Hague to dispel South Africa's absurd blood libel,\" he said.\n\nMany South Africans, including President Cyril Ramaphosa, have compared Israel's policies regarding Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank with South Africa's past apartheid regime of racial segregation. Israel rejects such comparisons."}
{"text": "# South Africa's genocide case against Israel sets up a high-stakes legal battle at the UN's top court\nBy **MIKE CORDER**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 3:34 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP)** - South Africa has launched a case at the United Nations' top court alleging that Israel's military campaign in Gaza amounts to genocide.\n\nThe filing and Israel's decision to defend itself at the International Court of Justice set up a high-stakes showdown before a panel of judges in the Great Hall of Justice.\n\nThe case will likely drag on for years. At its heart is the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, drawn up in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust.\n\nThe convention defines genocide as acts such as killings \"committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.\"\n\nHere are some further details on the case and its ramifications.\n\n## WHAT IS SOUTH AFRICA'S ARGUMENT?\nSouth Africa's 84-page filing says Israel's actions \"are genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part\" of the Palestinians in Gaza.\n\nIt asks the ICJ, also known as the world court, for a series of legally binding rulings. It wants the court to declare that Israel \"has breached and continues to breach its obligations under the Genocide Convention,\" and to order Israel to cease hostilities in Gaza that could amount to breaches of the convention, to offer reparations, and to provide for reconstruction of what it's destroyed in Gaza.\n\nThe filing argues that genocidal acts include killing Palestinians, causing serious mental and bodily harm, and deliberately inflicting conditions meant to \"bring about their physical destruction as a group.\" And it says statements by Israeli officials express genocidal intent.\n\nSouth Africa argues that the court has jurisdiction because both countries are signatories of the genocide convention. The convention's ninth article says disputes between nations over the convention can be submitted to the International Court of Justice.\n\nMany South Africans, including President Cyril Ramaphosa, have compared Israel's policies regarding Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank with South Africa's past apartheid regime of racial segregation. Israel rejects such allegations.\n\n## WHAT WAS ISRAEL'S RESPONSE?\nIsrael's government swiftly rejected the genocide claim. A Foreign Ministry statement said South Africa's case lacks a legal foundation and constitutes a \"despicable and contemptuous exploitation\" of the court.\n\nEylon Levy, an official in the Israeli prime minister's office, on Tuesday accused South Africa of \"giving political and legal cover\" to the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that triggered Israel's campaign. But he confirmed that Israel would send a legal team to the Hague \"to dispel South Africa's absurd blood libel,\" he said.\n\nAn Israeli official said the country, which has a history of ignoring international tribunals, decided to defend itself for several reasons. Among them are Israel's role in promoting the original genocide convention after the Holocaust and its belief that \"we have a strong case.\" He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was discussing behind-the-scenes deliberations.\n\nIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to press ahead with the war until Hamas is crushed and the more than 100 hostages still held by the militant group in Gaza are freed. He's said that could take several more months.\n\n## WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?\nSouth Africa's filing includes a request for the court to urgently issue legally binding interim orders for Israel to \"immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza.\"\n\nSuch orders, known as provisional measures, would remain while the case progresses. They're legally binding but not always followed. In 2022, in a genocide case filed by Ukraine against Russia, the court ordered Moscow to immediately suspend its invasion. The order was ignored, and deadly strikes continue.\n\nThe court will soon schedule public hearings. Lawyers for South Africa and Israel can make arguments. Judges drawn from around the world will likely take days or weeks to issue a decision on preliminary measures.\n\nThe court will then enter a lengthy process of considering the full case.\n\nIsrael could challenge the jurisdiction and seek to have the case thrown out before lawyers start arguing. Other countries that have signed the genocide convention could also apply to make submissions.\n\n## IS THE COURT HEARING SIMILAR CASES?\nTwo other genocide cases are on the busy court's docket. The case filed by Ukraine shortly after Russia's invasion accuses Moscow of launching the military operation based on trumped-up claims of genocide and accuses Russia of planning acts of genocide in Ukraine.\n\nAnother ongoing case involves Gambia - acting on behalf of Muslim nations - accusing Myanmar of genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority.\n\nIn a past case brought by Bosnia, the court in 2007 ruled that Serbia \"violated the obligation to prevent genocide ... in respect of the genocide that occurred in Srebrenica in July 1995.\" The court declined to order Serbia to pay compensation. Croatia also sued Serbia in 2015, but the world court ruled that Serbia didn't breach the convention in that case.\n\n## ICJ OR ICC?\nThe Hague calls itself the international city of peace and justice. It is home not only to the ICJ, but to the International Criminal Court, based just a few miles (kilometers) away, near the North Sea coastline.\n\nThe two courts have different mandates.\n\nThe ICJ, which held its first sitting in 1946 as the world emerged from the carnage of WWII, adjudicates cases between nations. They're often land and maritime border disputes, as well as disagreements over interpretation of international treaties.\n\nThe ICC is much younger. It started work in 2002 with the lofty goal of ending global impunity for atrocities. Unlike the ICJ, it seeks to hold individuals criminally responsible for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.\n\nThe ICC has an ongoing investigation into the Israel-Palestinian conflict, dating back to the last war in Gaza. So far, it has not issued any arrest warrants.\n\nICC prosecutor Karim Khan said last month that an investigation into possible crimes by Hamas militants and Israeli forces \"is a priority for my office.\"\n\n## WHAT ABOUT PAST U.N. CASES? \nTwo now-defunct U.N. tribunals also held landmark genocide trials.\n\nThe International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted a series of high-ranking Bosnian Serbs, including former President Radovan Karadzic and his military chief Gen. Ratko Mladic, for their roles in the July 1995 massacre of more than 8,000 men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica.\n\nBoth Karadzic and Mladic were given life sentences.\n\nThe International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted a string of leaders involved in the African nation's 1994 genocide when some 800,000 people, mainly ethnic Tutsis, were slaughtered."}
{"text": "# The Empire State rings in the new year with a pay bump for minimum-wage workers\nBy **Associated Press**  \nJanuary 1, 2024. 12:27 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ALBANY, N.Y. (AP)** - New York's minimum-wage workers had more than just the new year to celebrate Monday, with a pay bump kicking in as the clock ticked over to 2024.\n\nIn the first of a series of annual increases slated for the Empire State, the minimum wage increased to $16 in New York City and some of its suburbs, up from $15. In the rest of the state, the new minimum wage is $15, up from $14.20.\n\nThe state's minimum wage is expected to increase every year until it reaches $17 in New York City and its suburbs, and $16 in the rest of the state by 2026. Future hikes will be tied to the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, a measurement of inflation.\n\nNew York is one of 22 states getting minimum wage rises in the new year, according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute.\n\nIn California, the minimum wage increased to $16, up from $15.50, while in Connecticut it increased to $15.69 from the previous rate of $15.\n\nThis most recent pay bump in New York is part of an agreement made last year between Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state Legislature. The deal came over the objections of some employers, as well as some liberal Democrats who said it didn't go high enough.\n\nThe federal minimum wage in the United States has stayed at $7.25 per hour since 2009, but states and some localities are free to set higher amounts. Thirty states, including New Mexico and Washington, have done so."}
{"text": "# Brazil's economy improves during President Lula's first year back, but a political divide remains\nBy **MAURICIO SAVARESE**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 12:28 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**RIO DE JANEIRO (AP)** - Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva likes to boast he had a good first year after returning to the job. The economy is improving, Congress passed a long-overdue tax reform bill, rioters who wanted to oust him are now in jail, and his predecessor and foe Jair Bolsonaro is barred from running for office until 2030.\n\nStill, the 78-year-old leader has struggled to boost his support among citizens and lawmakers. Some major setbacks, including a series of votes by Congress to override his vetoes, signaled that Lula's future could be less productive in a Brazil almost evenly split between his supporters and Bolsonaro's.\n\n\"Brazil's political polarization is such that it crystallized the opinions of Lula and Bolsonaro voters beyond the economy,\" said political consultant Thomas Traumann, the author of a recent best-selling book on Brazil's political divisions. \"These groups are separated by very different world views, the values that form the identity of each group are more important than food prices or interest rates.\"\n\nLula took office on Jan. 1, 2023, after a narrow victory over Bolsonaro in October 2022. At the beginning of his four-year term, only one fourth of Brazil's Congress sided with him. Business and opposition leaders feared Lula had gone too far to the left.\n\nA riot led by Bolsonaro supporters destroyed government buildings in the capital of Brasilia on Jan. 8 and more turmoil looked certain. Former Finance Minister Paulo Guedes, among other conservatives, forecast Lula's policies would make Brazil's economy soon turn as sour as those in crisis-ridden Argentina and Venezuela.\n\n\"Six months to become Argentina. One year and a half to become Venezuela,\" Guedes said in an interview.\n\nFast forward to December.\n\nBrazil's economy is set to grow 3% this year instead of the 0.6% expected by market economists. Inflation looks controlled at about 4.7% on a yearly basis, slightly above projections but far from the double digits of recent years. The unemployment rate fell to 7.5% in November, one percentage point below the day Bolsonaro left office.\n\nThe Sao Paulo stock exchange hit record levels in December, rising above 134,000 points for the first time in its history. Brazil's real currency is also rising against the U.S. dollar. All that brought back the optimistic, keen-to-travel-abroad Lula who had been missing during almost a decade of personal gloom.\n\n\"We needed to get our house fixed (in 2023), put things into place,\" Lula said in a meeting at the presidential palace on Dec. 12. \"And now I say get ready. Next year, the Brazilian economy will not let anyone down.\"\n\nYet some polls have shown unchanged support for the president, at between 38% and 40% since January 2023. The numbers didn't pick up even after the announcement of a higher minimum wage in 2024, the buildup of Bolsonaro's legal woes or Brazil's return as a player in foreign affairs under Lula.\n\nAbout a third of Brazilians consider Lula's presidency about average and another third deeply dislike the way he governs Latin America's powerhouse economy, which rose once again to the top 10 biggest in the world after years of sinking.\n\nLula's supporters are at home, but Bolsonaro's are still taking to the streets.\n\nThough not as numerous as in the recent past, the few thousand protesters asking Congress to impeach Lula on corruption allegations have shown the resilience of the far-right leader's political base.\n\nBolsonaro was barred in June 2023 from running for office again until 2030 after Brazil's electoral court ruled that he abused his power and cast unfounded doubts on the country's electronic voting system.\n\nEngineer Eduardo Carlos Santos, 73, believes Brazil's economy recovered due to the work of Bolsonaro. A devout evangelical, as with many in the former president's base, he says there is a cultural war against conservatives and that leftists should have no place in government.\n\n\"Like it or not, Bolsonaro left a better economy and Lula is just reaping the fruits of that,\" said Santos, who blames the economic difficulties during the previous presidency on the COVID-19 pandemic and health restrictions. \"Lula is a former inmate, sentenced for corruption. He had his time in office, we needed to move the country to another direction. I don't see a bright year coming ahead.\"\n\nLula was imprisoned for alleged corruption in 2018, when he led polls to return to the presidency. He was released after the country's Supreme Court ruled the following year that prison sentences could only take place after every appeal has been exhausted - which was not the case with Lula. Later, the same court ruled that the judge in Lula's case, now a pro-Bolsonaro senator, was biased against him.\n\nLula's difficulties on the streets also appeared in Congress, which voted several times to override his vetoes, especially on environmental legislation. The most recent was in December, when lawmakers reinstated legislation to undo protections of Indigenous peoples' land rights. The decision set up a new battle between lawmakers and the country's top court on the matter.\n\nBrazil's Congress also decided to override Lula's veto of a multibillion-dollar bill that exempts multiple sectors of the economy from paying some taxes. The bill was introduced in 2011 and would lose validity at the end of 2023. It will remain in place until 2027, one year after the president's term ends.\n\nOther measures depleted the federal treasury of budget money by enabling lawmakers to approve earmarked resources for themselves, without interference from the executive branch.\n\nLula's allies have blamed some defeats on Speaker Arthur Lira, once a staunch Bolsonaro supporter who has operated more quietly. Lira, who will remain in his position for another year, can't run for reelection under current congressional rules.\n\nSupporters of the president are also upset with his decision not to appoint another woman to replace Chief Justice Rosa Maria Weber on the Supreme Court. They also complain about the leftist leader's slow approach in providing more resources for welfare programs and inclusion.\n\nThat's the case of Daniela Fernandes, 34, who works in a government agency in Sao Paulo.\n\n\"I believe we can improve our economy, but I am also hoping that the revenue gets spent with the poor, not in making the rich richer with high interest rates and construction work that only suits some lawmakers,\" he said. \"I am here because I want our president to tame the military that sided with Bolsonaro all these years, to challenge the far-right on the streets too.\"\n\nTraumann, the political consultant, said Lula's future will depend on how he moves between antagonistic groups within Brazilian society.\n\n\"Dealing with this divided country is surely the biggest challenge for the Lula administration next year,\" he said."}
{"text": "# Price cuts boost Tesla's 4Q sales, beating estimates as electric vehicle growth rate slows\nBy **TOM KRISHER**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 4:43 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DETROIT (AP)** - Steep price cuts helped electric vehicle maker Tesla Inc. increase its fourth-quarter vehicle sales by almost 20% as EV sales growth slowed across the industry.\n\nThe Austin, Texas, company said Tuesday that it sold 484,507 vehicles worldwide from October through December. That handily beat Wall Street estimates of 473,000 for the quarter, according to data provider FactSet.\n\nFor the full year, Tesla said it sold just over 1.8 million vehicles, up 37.7% from 2022 numbers.\n\nFull-year sales numbers fell far short of CEO Elon Musk's prediction of 50% sales growth in most years. But the company did exceed an internal target for the year of 1.8 million vehicle sales.\n\nTesla chopped prices in the U.S. multiple times during the year, at times by $20,000 on some of its higher-priced models. Even its lowest-price model, the rear-wheel-drive 3, saw a cut of at least $6,600. Industry analysts expect the price cuts to trim Tesla's profit margins when it reports earnings on Jan. 24 after the markets close.\n\nThe increase helped Tesla hold off Chinese powerhouse BYD to keep the title of the world's top seller of electric vehicles. Fast-growing BYD reported a 73% EV sales increase for last year to 1.57 million.\n\nAs usual, the bulk of Tesla's sales were its lower-priced Models 3 and Y, with deliveries of 461,538 globally in the fourth quarter. That was up 19% from a year ago. Sales of its other models, mainly the S and X with some new Cybertrucks, grew 34% to 22,969. The company didn't break out sales for individual models.\n\nThe company produced nearly 495,000 vehicles for the quarter, about 10,000 more than it delivered.\n\nTesla shares slipped 6 cents to end Tuesday at $248.42."}
{"text": "# Warren Buffett, James Simons and Phil Knight are among the top charity donors of 2023\nBy **MARIA DI MENTO of The Chronicle of Philanthropy**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 6:37 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThe Chronicle of Philanthropy's annual list of the biggest charitable donations from individuals or their foundations totaled more than $3.5 billion in 2023. Four universities received big gifts in 2023, along with four scientific research institutes and a health-care system. The other gifts went to a family foundation and a racial-justice group.\n\nThe list has 11 gifts because of ties. Eight of the donors are multibillionaires, and their combined net worth is $305.1 billion.\n\nTopping the list is a gift from the investment guru Warren Buffett, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes at roughly $119 billion. He gave 1.5 million shares of Berkshire Hathaway Class \"B\" stock valued at $541.5 million to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for his first wife, who died in 2004.\n\nBuffett created the grantmaker in 1964 to manage the family's charitable giving, and it remains a family affair. Two of his three children serve on its board, and it is led by his former son-in-law. The foundation primarily backs women's reproductive health. It also provides college scholarships for students in Nebraska, where the family is from.\n\nThe donation is a special contribution that Buffett announced in November rather than one of the annual contributions he makes to the foundation and several other grant makers, which are payments toward multibillion-dollar pledges he announced in 2006.\n\nBuffett's gift is followed on the list by a donation from the mathematician and hedge-fund founder James Simons and his wife, Marilyn. The couple gave $500 million through their Simons Foundation to the State University of New York at Stony Brook to support the university's endowment and to boost scholarships, professorships, research, and clinical care.\n\nThe Simons, who have an estimated net worth of $30.7 billion, have deep ties to the university. James Simons was chairman of its mathematics department from 1968 to 1978, and Marilyn Simons earned two degrees there: a bachelor's degree in 1974 and a Ph.D. in economics in 1984. They have given the institution nearly $600 million through their foundation over the last 10 years.\n\nTying for third on the list is a contribution from Ross Brown, the founder of Cryogenic Industries, an industrial equipment manufacturer. In November, Brown gave the biggest gift to science in 2023 when he pledged $400 million to the California Institute of Technology. The gift will be fulfilled through his family foundation and a donor-advised fund; the money will be used to launch the Brown Institute for Basic Sciences.\n\nThe center will support scientific research at other universities and will house the Ross Brown Investigators Award Program, a fellowship program Brown started in 2020 that until this year was operated out of his foundation. The program provides five-year, $2 million awards to midcareer, tenured faculty working on chemistry and physics research.\n\nBrown told the Chronicle in November that he no longer wanted to house the program at his foundation because he was worried about mission drift and controlling the costs of the program. A Caltech alumnus, he said the university seemed like the best fit for the fellowships.\n\nNow that Brown has moved the program over to Caltech, university officials are in charge of awarding the $2 million grants to at least eight researchers each year. To avoid conflicts of interest, only researchers at other universities will be considered for the awards. However, Brown is directing some of this donation - about $1 million a year - toward other fundamental physical science research efforts at Caltech. There are three other donations on the list that support scientific research.\n\nNike cofounder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny, made a $400 million pledge to the 1803 Fund. The commitment from the Knights, whose net worth is pegged at $43 billion, will establish Rebuild Albina, an effort to revive the economic and cultural prosperity of Albina, a historic area of Portland, Oregon, that was once a thriving Black neighborhood but fell into neglect in the 1970s.\n\nBlack families in Albina were displaced by a ruinous mix of predatory lending, discriminatory government practices, and huge, long-term construction projects that shuttered businesses and destroyed the neighborhood. It was a pattern that played out in many U.S. cities during that era. Rebuild Albina officials plan to renovate the area, pay for education programs and education-related services for children and their families, and support a range of projects meant to deepen the area's cultural roots. The Knights are giving the money both personally and through their Knight Foundation.\n\nDaniel and Jennifer Gilbert gave $375 million through their Gilbert Family Foundation to Henry Ford Health to build two medical centers to take the fourth spot on the list. Dan Gilbert founded Rocket Mortgage and is chairman of the Cleveland Cavaliers. The couple's net worth is estimated at nearly $29 billion.\n\nOne of the medical centers will be a rehabilitation center at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. The center will serve patients recovering from spinal-cord injuries, stroke, traumatic brain injuries, and other conditions. The Gilberts directed $10 million of the total to create a special fund to pay for rehabilitation care for low-income Detroit residents who have little or no health insurance coverage.\n\nThe other medical center, the Nick Gilbert Neurofibromatosis Research Institute, will bring medical professionals and researchers from Henry Ford Health and Michigan State University Health Sciences together to seek a cure for neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder that causes tumors to grow on nerve pathways throughout the body. Nick Gilbert, the donors' oldest son, was diagnosed with the disease as a child and devoted much of his life to raising awareness about it. He died in May at age 26.\n\nComing in at No. 5 is a gift from financier Kenneth Griffin, who gave $300 million through his Kenneth C. Griffin Charitable Fund to back financial aid and a range of other programs within Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Griffin, whose net worth is estimated at roughly $38 billion, has given extensively to his alma mater over the years, including tens of millions of dollars for financial aid for undergraduates.\n\nGriffin made another gift that was among the biggest of 2023. He partnered with the entertainment executive David Geffen to provide $400 million to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Neither philanthropist would disclose the precise amount he gave through his grantmaker so the Chronicle didn't count those contributions in its rankings.\n\nThe Chronicle's annual rankings are based on the 10 biggest publicly announced gifts. The tally does not include contributions of artwork or gifts from anonymous donors. In March, the Chronicle will unveil its annual ranking of the 50 biggest donors, a list based on philanthropists' total contributions in 2023 rather than individual gifts."}
{"text": "# Planes collide and catch fire at Japan's busy Haneda airport, killing 5. Hundreds evacuated safely\nBy **MARI YAMAGUCHI** and **FOSTER KLUG**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 12:29 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**TOKYO (AP)** - A large passenger plane and a Japanese coast guard aircraft collided on the runway at Tokyo's Haneda Airport on Tuesday and burst into flames, killing five people aboard the coast guard plane, officials said.\n\nAll 379 people on Japan Airlines flight JAL-516 got out safely before the Airbus A350 was fully engulfed in flames, Transport Minister Tetsuo Saito confirmed.\n\nThe pilot of the coast guard's Bombardier Dash-8 plane escaped but the five crew members died, Saito said. The aircraft was preparing to take off to deliver aid to an area affected by a major earthquake on Monday, officials said.\n\nTelevision footage showed an orange fireball erupting from the Japan Airlines plane as it collided with the coast guard aircraft while landing, and the airliner then spewed smoke from its side as it continued down the runway. Within 20 minutes, all passengers and crew members slid down emergency chutes to get away.\n\nAs firefighters tried to put out the blaze with streams of water, the area around the plane's wing caught fire. The flames spread throughout the plane, which eventually collapsed. The fire was put out about six hours later.\n\nTuesday's accident was the first time that an Airbus A350, among the industry's newest large passenger planes, was severely damaged. It entered commercial service in 2015. Airbus in a statement said it was sending specialists to help Japanese and French authorities and that the plane was delivered to Japan Airlines in late 2021.\n\nThe A350 had flown from Shin Chitose airport near the city of Sapporo, the transport minister said.\n\nJAL Managing Executive Officer Tadayuki Tsutsumi told a news conference late Tuesday that the A350 was making a \"normal entry and landing\" on the runway, without specifying how it collided with the coast guard plane. Noriyuki Aoki, also a managing executive officer at JAL, said that the airline's understanding is that the JAL flight had received permission to land from aviation control officials.\n\nPolice are expected to investigate the accident on suspicion of professional negligence, NHK television reported.\n\nCoast guard spokesperson Yoshinori Yanagishima said its Bombardier Dash-8 plane, which is based at Haneda, had been due to head to Niigata to deliver relief goods to residents affected by a deadly earthquake in the region on Monday. The turboprop Dash-8 is widely used on short-haul and commuter flights.\n\nThe coast guard pilot reported to his base that his aircraft exploded after colliding with the commercial plane, Vice Commander Yoshio Seguchi told reporters.\n\nShigenori Hiraoka, head of the Transport Ministry Civil Aviation Bureau, said the collision occurred when the JAL plane landed on one of Haneda's four runways where the coast guard aircraft was preparing to take off. Transport safety officials were analyzing communication between aviation control officials and the two aircraft and planned to interview JAL officials to determine what led to the collision.\n\nHiraoka praised JAL for \"taking appropriate procedures\" to safely evacuate all passengers and crew members.\n\nSwede Anton Deibe, 17, a passenger on the Japan Airlines plane, told Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that \"the entire cabin was filled with smoke within a few minutes. We threw ourselves down on the floor. Then the emergency doors were opened and we threw ourselves at them.\n\n\"The smoke in the cabin stung like hell. It was a hell. We have no idea where we are going so we just run out into the field. It was chaos,\" Deibe added.\n\nAnother passenger told NHK television that cabin attendants were calm and told everyone to leave their baggage behind, then all lights went off and the temperature inside the cabin started rising. The passenger said she was afraid she might not get off the plane alive.\n\nAll passengers and crew members slid down the escape chutes within 20 minutes from the landing and survived. Some passengers told media interviews that they felt relieved only after reaching a grassy area beyond the tarmac.\n\nJAL said four passengers were taken to a medical facility, and that the airline is checking for injuries. NHK said 14 other people were injured.\n\nThe transport minister said officials were doing their utmost to prevent any delays in the delivery of relief goods and other operations for the disaster-hit region. Transport officials said the airport's three other runways had reopened.\n\nHaneda is the busier of two major airports serving the Japanese capital, with many international and transcontinental flights. It is particularly favored by business travelers due to its proximity to central parts of the city.\n\nThe twin-engine, twin-aisle A350 is used by a number of long-haul international carriers. More than 570 of the aircraft are in operation, according to Airbus.\n\nJAL operates 16 of the A350-900 version aircraft, according to its website. It recently announced details of 13 of the newer A350-1000 variant it plans to bring into service, saying it will become \"the airline's new flagship for international service after nearly 20 years.\" The first of those planes arrived a few weeks ago, slated for the Haneda-New York JFK route.\n\nThe International Air Transport Association trade group said on the X social media platform that its thoughts were with those aboard the two aircraft, saying that \"the last two days have been difficult for Japan.\""}
{"text": "# South Korean opposition leader is stabbed in the neck. Police say attacker approached for autograph\nBy **HYUNG-JIN KIM** and **JIWON SONG**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 12:38 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SEOUL, South Korea (AP)** - South Korea's tough-speaking liberal opposition leader, Lee Jae-myung, was stabbed in the neck Tuesday by an unidentified knife-wielding man who attempted to kill the politician during his visit to the southeastern city of Busan, police said.\n\nLee, 59, the head of the main opposition Democratic Party, was airlifted to a Seoul hospital after receiving emergency treatment in Busan. Lee's party later said he was recovering at an intensive care unit at the Seoul National University Hospital following a two-hour operation.\n\nThe attack happened as Lee walked through a crowd of journalists and others after a tour of the proposed site of a new airport in Busan. The attacker approached Lee, saying he wanted his autograph, then stabbed him in the left side of his neck, senior Busan police officer Sohn Jae-han said in a briefing.\n\nSohn said Democratic Party officials quickly subdued the attacker before police officers detained him. He said 41 police officers had been deployed to the area for crowd control and traffic management.\n\nTV footage showed Lee, his eyes closed, lying on the ground as a person pressed a handkerchief to his neck. A witness, Jin Jeong-hwa, told YTN television that Lee had bled a lot.\n\nVideos circulated on social media showed the suspect, wearing a paper crown reading \"I'm Lee Jae-myung,\" in a possible attempt to pose as a supporter.\n\nSohn said the suspect, aged about 67, told investigators that he bought the 18-centimeter (7-inch) knife online. He said police are investigating the motive for the attack.\n\nOther officers confirmed to The Associated Press that police are expected to request that the suspect be formally arrested for alleged attempted murder because he told investigators he intended to kill Lee.\n\nLee's Democratic Party called the incident \"a terrorist attack on Lee and a serious threat to democracy.\" It called on police to make a thorough, swift investigation.\n\nAt the Seoul National University Hospital, party spokesperson Kwon Chil-seung told reporters that Lee's jugular vein was damaged and that he had a medical procedure called revascularization. Kwon cited the hospital, whose public affairs office refused to disclose Lee's status, citing privacy rules.\n\nPolice and emergency officials earlier said Lee was conscious after the attack and wasn't in critical condition.\n\nPresident Yoon Suk Yeol expressed deep concern about Lee's health and ordered authorities to investigate the attack, saying such violence would not be tolerated, according to Yoon's office.\n\nLee lost the 2022 presidential election to Yoon by 0.7 percentage points, the narrowest margin recorded in a South Korean presidential election.\n\nRecent public surveys indicated Lee and his main conservative rival Han Dong-hoon, a former justice minister, are the two early favorites to succeed Yoon as president when his single five-year term ends in 2027.\n\nSince his defeat, Lee has been a harsh critic of Yoon's major policies. Last year, Lee held a 24-day hunger strike to protest what he called Yoon's failure to oppose Japan's release of treated radioactive wastewater from its crippled Fukushima nuclear power, his handling of the country's post-pandemic economy and his hard-line policies on North Korea.\n\nLee faces an array of corruption allegations, including that he provided unlawful favors to a private investor who reaped huge profits from a dubious housing project in the city of Seongnam, where Lee was mayor for a decade until 2018. Lee has denied legal wrongdoing and accused Yoon's government of pursuing a political vendetta.\n\nLast September, a South Korean court denied an arrest warrant for Lee over the allegations, but Lee faces a continuing investigation by prosecutors. The court hearing was arranged after the opposition-controlled parliament voted to lift Lee's immunity to arrest, a move that reflected growing divisions within his Democratic Party over his legal troubles.\n\nLee, who also served as governor of Gyeonggi province, which surrounds Seoul, is known for his outspoken style. His supporters see him as an anti-elitist hero who could reform establishment politics, eradicate corruption and solve growing economic inequality. Critics view him as a populist who relies on stoking divisions and demonizing his conservative opponents.\n\nOther violence against high-profile figures has occurred in South Korea in recent years.\n\nIn March 2022, Song Young-gil, then the leader of the Democratic Party, was assaulted by a man wielding a hammer during a rally for Lee ahead of the presidential vote. Song was treated for stitches but avoided serious injury.\n\nIn 2015, then-U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Mark Lippert was slashed in the face and arm by an anti-American activist. The assault required 80 stitches to close the cut on Lippert's face.\n\nIn 2006, Park Geun-hye, then a conservative opposition leader, was knifed by a man with a box cutter during an election rally. She was given 60 stitches to close an 11-centimeter (4-inch) gash on her face. Park was elected president in 2012."}
{"text": "# Police are seeking a motive in a fiery fatal crash in New York. No link to terrorism has been found\nJanuary 2, 2024. 12:32 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP)** - A man who died after crashing an SUV loaded with gas cans outside an upstate New York concert venue appeared to have been aiming at a pedestrian crossing, but investigators have found no evidence that the crash that killed two ride-hail passengers early on New Year's Day was terror-related, police said Tuesday.\n\nRochester police Chief David Smith told a news conference that the suspect in the crash, tentatively identified as Michael Avery of the Syracuse area, may have suffered from undiagnosed mental health problems. Avery had spent days in the Rochester area and made at least a half-dozen purchases of gasoline and gas containers before the crash. But officials say the motive remains unknown.\n\n\"I have been getting inundated with questions as to why this individual would choose ... Rochester, New York, why he would choose to do this on New Year's Day, and why he would appear to target concert goers trying to have a great time to bring in the new year,\" Mayor Malik Evans said. \"Those are all questions that have been raised, and things that we just don't have answers to yet.\"\n\nThe crash happened shortly before 1 a.m. Monday as officers were directing traffic after a concert by the jam band let out at the Kodak Center theater complex.\n\nThe driver sped up, crossed into the oncoming lane of traffic and appeared to have intentionally been driving toward a pedestrian crossing, according to police.\n\nA Ford Expedition struck a Mitsubishi Outlander, sending both vehicles through a group of pedestrians that were in the crosswalk.\n\nTwo rear-seat passengers in the Outlander were killed. Avery died last night, according to Smith. At least nine pedestrians were injured, one with \"life-altering\" injuries. The rest were expected to make full recoveries, officials said.\n\nThe collision caused a blaze that took the fire department more than an hour to extinguish.\n\nPolice searched Avery's hotel room after the crash and did not find a suicide note.\n\nPolice say Avery drove to the Rochester area on Wednesday and checked into a hotel, renting the Expedition two days later at the local airport. He went on a buying spree of gasoline and gasoline containers around the area on Saturday.\n\nOfficials said the FBI's joint terrorism task force was involved in the investigation, which is usual in cases like this.\n\n\"We've uncovered no evidence of an ideology and no nexus to terrorism, either international or domestic so far in the investigation,\" said Jeremy Bell, assistant special agent in charge of the Rochester office."}
{"text": "# Donald Trump is expected to appeal the Colorado and Maine rulings banning him from primary ballots\nBy **NICHOLAS RICCARDI**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 11:15 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**DENVER (AP)** - Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday is expected to appeal rulings from Colorado and Maine that ban him from the states' ballots, setting up a high-stakes showdown over a 155-year-old addition to the Constitution that bars from office those who \"engaged in insurrection.\"\n\nTrump would appeal the Colorado Supreme Court ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court and the decision by Maine's Democratic secretary of state to that state's Superior Court.\n\nIt would mark the first time the nation's highest court could rule on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, two sentences added to the Constitution after the Civil War to prevent Confederates from returning to their former government offices. The clause says that anyone who swore an oath to support the Constitution and then \"engaged in insurrection\" against it is no longer eligible.\n\nThe appeals come as tensions mount over rulings that could keep the 2024 Republican presidential front-runner off ballots, though both the Maine and Colorado rulings are on hold until the appeals end, and Trump technically remains on the primary ballots in both states.\n\nOn Tuesday morning, Denver police arrested a man who fled a car crash and ran into the Colorado Supreme Court building. Police said he pointed a gun at an unarmed security officer, getting the guard's keys and access to the whole building, and fired his gun several times. No one was injured.\n\nA motive wasn't immediately clear, but the Colorado State Patrol said the shooting didn't appear to be related to previous threats to the justices, all of whom were appointed by Democratic governors.\n\nDozens of lawsuits citing the constitutional provision were filed against Trump last year in a bid to end his presidential campaign, contending he disqualified himself by inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to stop Democrat Joe Biden from replacing him as president.\n\nNone of the lawsuits succeeded until the Colorado court's ruling last month. Activists similarly asked dozens of top election officials to not place Trump on the ballot due to his alleged violation of Section 3. None acted until Maine's Shenna Bellows barred him a week after the Colorado ruling.\n\nIf the Supreme Court does not rule on the merits of the cases, legal experts say, states could face the legal chaos that the high court is supposed to dispel.\n\nAdvocates of disqualifying Trump argue the matter is simple - Section 3 makes him no longer eligible for the presidency, just as if he somehow didn't meet other constitutional requirements, such as being a natural-born citizen at least 35 years old.\n\nTrump's attorneys contend that's a wild misreading of a vague clause that was rarely used after the 1870s. They contend that Jan. 6 was not legally an insurrection, that the provision doesn't apply to the president and that whether Trump qualifies for the ballot is not a decision for unelected state judges to make."}
{"text": "# ESPN apologizes for showing video of woman flashing breast during Sugar Bowl broadcast\nJanuary 2, 2024. 5:12 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW ORLEANS (AP)** - ESPN apologized Monday night for a video clip of a woman baring her breast that was shown during the broadcast of the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans.\n\nIt was aired coming out of a commercial during the second half of Washington's 37-31 victory over Texas in a semifinal game of the College Football Playoff. A clip of people wandering on Bourbon Street in New Orleans showed a woman pulling down her top to expose her breast.\n\n\"We regret that this happened and apologize that the video aired in the telecast,\" ESPN's Bill Hofheimer said in a statement to The Associated Press."}
{"text": "# What does a total abortion ban look like in Dominican Republic?\nBy **MARÍA TERESA HERNÁNDEZ**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:02 AM EST\n\n---\n\nSANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (AP) - The Dominican Republic is one of four Latin American nations that criminalizes abortion without exceptions. Women face up to 2 years in prison for having an abortion, while the penalties for doctors or midwives range from 5 to 20 years. Abortion rights activists argue that the country's total abortion ban not only restricts women's reproductive choices but also puts their lives in danger.\n\nHere's a look at the country's ban.\n\n## What role does religion play?\nNo other nation bears a Bible on its flag.\n\nThe country's motto is \"God, Country, Freedom,\" and the government holds a concordat, or agreement, with the Vatican, which implies that the official religion is Catholicism, although the constitution allows freedom of worship.\n\nThe Catholic Church influences sex education. The \"Learning to Love\" program, recently implemented by the Ministry of Education, aims to reinforce Catholic values for students.\n\nCatholics and evangelicals are united against decriminalizing abortion and hold sway among legislators. \"We have gained a pro-life majority in Congress,\" said anti-abortion activist Martharís Rivas. \"We have always contributed to the debates, and bishops approach congressmen to talk.\"\n\n## Is abortion impossible?\nNo. In the countryside, ancestral knowledge is used to terminate pregnancies with concoctions. Some medical personnel in urban areas facilitate abortions with medications such as misoprostol.\n\n\"It's not legal, but if someone calls, I know how to handle it,\" said a health worker who asked for anonymity to avoid prosecution. \"We use prescriptions. It (misoprostol) is used to treat ulcers, so you can prescribe a B complex, an antacid and there won't be trouble.\"\n\nIn addition, there are \"acompañantes\" networks like in Mexico, said activist Sergia Galván.\n\n\"In 1995, we had three clandestine abortion centers, but there came a time when the risks were too high,\" Galván said. \"Historically we have had mechanisms, but they are insufficient in the midst of restrictions.\"\n\n## What about spontaneous abortions?\nThe situation in public hospitals is extremely delicate, said nurse Francisca Peguero. \"We have seen teenagers dying in emergency rooms because doctors face a dilemma: If they treat them, they might be criminalized.\"\n\nAccording to Peguero, clinics are monitored by police officers who, upon seeing a woman bleeding, can report her.\n\n## What do abortion rights activists want?\nAs a first step, abortion rights activists would like legal abortion access when the woman's life is at risk, when the pregnancy is the product of rape or incest and when fetal malformations are incompatible with life."}
{"text": "# $842 million Powerball ticket sold in Michigan, first time the game has been won on New Year's Day\nJanuary 2, 2024. 6:38 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**JOHNSTON, Iowa (AP)** - Someone in Michigan has won an $842.4 million Powerball jackpot on the first day of 2024, the first time it has been won on New Year's Day since the game's start in 1992.\n\nThe winning numbers drawn were: 12, 21, 42, 44, 49 and red Powerball: 1.\n\nFinal ticket sales pushed the jackpot beyond its earlier estimate of $810 million to $842.4 million at the time of the drawing, making it the fifth-largest Powerball jackpot and 10th-largest U.S. lottery jackpot ever won.\n\nBefore the big win on New Year's, the jackpot had been growing since mid-October.\n\nThe chance of winning the Powerball jackpot is 1 in 292.2 million.\n\nThe lucky ticket holder will have the choice between an annuitized prize of $842.4 million, payable over 30 years, or a lump sum payment of $425.2 million. Both prize options are before taxes.\n\nOther top-winning tickets include four sold in California, Connecticut, Florida and Maryland, that matched all five white balls to win $1 million prizes. Two tickets, from Florida and Texas, matched all five white balls and won $2 million prizes by including the Power Play option for an additional $1 per play.\n\nPowerball is played in 45 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands."}
{"text": "# How to spend the winter planning and preparing for your spring garden\nBy **JESSICA DAMIANO**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 9:04 AM EST\n\n---\n\nGardening isn't usually the first thing that springs to mind when the calendar page turns to January. But with the holidays behind us, there's no better time to start planning and preparing our 2024 gardens.\n\nOf course, that will mean different things in different places. It's impossible to account for every microclimate in every region, but frost - or lack thereof - is the defining characteristic that should guide gardeners over winter.\n\n## WHAT YOU CAN DO NOW\nIn regions where frosts and freezes are common, gardeners should monitor for heaving, the lifting of plant roots and bulbs out of the soil resulting from the season's freeze-thaw cycles. Pushed up out of the ground, even ever so slightly, they become vulnerable to exposure and could die.\n\nTake periodic walks around beds and borders and push heaved roots back into the ground with your foot, then apply a few inches of protective mulch over them.\n\nKeep off the grass. Walking on frozen or muddy lawns can injure grass and damage soil structure, which is difficult to repair.\n\nProtect young trees from rodent nibbling by wrapping their bottom halves with plastic collars or mesh hardware cloth.\n\nGently remove snow from evergreen branches to avoid buckling and breaking. A long-handled broom is the best tool for the job.\n\nPile shoveled snow over perennial beds and borders (as long as you haven't applied ice-melt chemicals). Roots will benefit from the added insulation.\n\nHeating systems are as drying to houseplants as they are to humans. Keep plants away from radiators and heating vents, and mist them every other day or place a humidifier nearby.\n\nIn the Northeast and Upper Midwest, go on a search-and-destroy mission through the garden, inspecting tree branches, patio furniture and other surfaces for the egg cases of spongy moths. They look like gray or beige wads of used chewing gum. Each mass contains up to 1,000 eggs, so scraping them off now and dropping them into a bucket of hot, soapy water will reduce the next generation of the hardwood-tree-decimating insects. Wear gloves - it's icky work.\n\nIn warmer regions, January is a great time to test your soil's pH. A reading of 7 indicates a neutral pH. Higher than 7 is alkaline; lower is acidic. Learn what levels your specific plants require and, if necessary, amend the soil with dolomitic lime to raise its pH or elemental sulfur to lower it. Follow package directions.\n\nIt's generally safe to transplant or prune established trees in the South now. And, as long as the soil is dry and workable, you can plant bare-root roses, bulbs, fruit trees, herbs and cooler-season vegetables like beets, broccoli, cabbage and lettuces.\n\nGet a head start by sowing flower seeds in containers or flats. Wait until the end of the month to start warm-season vegetables like tomatoes and peppers.\n\n## GENERAL TIPS\nThis is a good time to take inventory of supplies and leftover seeds, noting what needs to be replenished. Take advantage of off-season sales and clearances.\n\nPlace plant and seed orders as gardening catalogs begin to arrive. The most popular selections will likely sell out quickly, and most retailers will ship at the correct planting time for your region.\n\nIf spotted lanternflies are present in your region, inspect tree trunks and branches, patio furniture, cars and other structures for their egg masses. The wax-coated blobs, which appear to be covered in mud, contain up to 50 eggs apiece. Scrape them off into a zipper-top plastic bag filled with hand sanitizer, then seal the bag and place it in the trash. Your contribution to this effort is vital to slowing the spread of this destructive insect."}
{"text": "# Chinese factory activity slows in December in a third straight month of contraction\nBy **ELAINE KURTENBACH**  \nJanuary 1, 2024. 4:38 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BANGKOK (AP)** - A survey of factory managers in China shows manufacturing contracted in December in the latest sign the world's second-largest economy remains sluggish.\n\nThe official purchasing managers index, or PMI, fell to 49 last month in what officials said was evidence of weak demand, the National Bureau of Statistics reported on Sunday. It was the third straight month of contraction. The PMI is on a scale up to 100 where 50 marks the cutoff between expansion and contraction.\n\nThe index has fallen in eight of the past nine months, with an increase only in September. In November, the index was at 49.4, down from 49.5 the month before.\n\nDespite unexpectedly prolonged weakness after the pandemic, China's economy grew at a 5.2% pace in the first three quarters of the year and showed signs of improvement in November, with factory output and retail sales rising.\n\nIn recent months, the government has raised spending on construction of ports and other infrastructure, cut interest rates and eased curbs on home-buying to try to stimulate the domestic demand that economists say is needed to sustain growth.\n\nIn his New Year speech, leader Xi Jinping said China had achieved a \"smooth transition\" from the country's response to the pandemic, which at times involved the shut downs of factories and parts of or entire cities.\n\nChina's economy has become \"more resilient and dynamic than before,\" Xi said in remarks carried by the official Xinhua News Agency.\n\nGlobal demand for manufactured goods has suffered as central banks around the world have raised interest rates to battle decades-high rates of inflation. Price pressures have eased in recent months, but demand has yet to rebound to prepandemic levels. That has ramifications across the region since supply chains linked to China are scattered across many Asian countries.\n\nReliance on exports to fuel growth in China means more competition as the government invests in still more industrial construction, Stephen Innes of SPI Asset Management said in a commentary. He noted that \"the biggest constraint on the manufacturing sector hasn't been access to capital but rather weak demand, so expanding manufacturing investment mostly means expanding excess capacity.\"\n\nChina's non-manufacturing PMI rose in December to 50.4, the statistics bureau reported. The service sector PMI sub-index was 49.3, however, unchanged from November's reading.\n\nDespite a slump in the housing market brought about by a crackdown on excess borrowing by property developers, the construction industry is thriving: the sub-index for that sector climbed to 56.9 in December, well into expansionary territory, from 55 in November, the report said."}
{"text": "# Prosecutors say there's no need for a second trial of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried\nBy **LARRY NEUMEISTER**  \nDecember 29, 2023. 9:08 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - A second trial of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried on charges not in the cryptocurrency fraud case presented to a jury that convicted him in November is not necessary, prosecutors told a judge Friday.\n\nProsecutors told U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan in a letter that evidence at a second trial would duplicate evidence already shown to a jury. They also said it would ignore the \"strong public interest in a prompt resolution\" of the case, particularly because victims would not benefit from forfeiture or restitution orders if sentencing is delayed.\n\nThey said the judge can consider the evidence that would be used at a second trial when he sentences Bankman-Fried on March 28 for defrauding customers and investors of at least $10 billion.\n\nBankman-Fried, 31, who has been incarcerated since several weeks before his trial, was convicted in early November of seven counts, including wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy and three conspiracy charges. He could face decades in prison.\n\nLast spring, prosecutors withdrew some charges they had brought against Bankman-Fried because the charges had not been approved as part of his extradition from the Bahamas in December 2022. They said the charges could be brought at a second trial to occur sometime in 2024.\n\nHowever, prosecutors at the time said that they would still present evidence to the jury at the 2023 trial about the substance of the charges.\n\nThe charges that were temporarily dropped included conspiracy to make unlawful campaign contributions, conspiracy to bribe foreign officials and two other conspiracy counts. He also was charged with securities fraud and commodities fraud.\n\nIn their letter to Kaplan, prosecutors noted that they introduced evidence about all of the dropped charges during Bankman-Fried's monthlong trial.\n\nThey said authorities in the Bahamas still have not responded to their request to bring the additional charges at a second trial.\n\nA lawyer for Bankman-Fried declined comment.\n\nA conviction on the additional charges would not result in a potential for a longer prison sentence for Bankman-Fried, prosecutors said.\n\n\"Proceeding with sentencing in March 2024 without the delay that would be caused by a second trial would advance the public's interest in a timely and just resolution of the case,\" prosecutors wrote. \"The interest in avoiding delay weighs particularly heavily here, where the judgment will likely include orders of forfeiture and restitution for the victims of the defendant's crimes.\""}
{"text": "# Boeing asks airlines to inspect 737 Max jets for potential loose bolt\nBy **WYATTE GRANTHAM-PHILIPS**  \nDecember 29, 2023. 12:00 PM EST\n\n---\n\nBoeing is asking airlines to inspect its 737 Max jets for a potential loose bolt in the rudder control system, the airplane maker and Federal Aviation Administration confirmed this week.\n\nThe FAA said it would be \"closely monitoring\" the targeted inspections. The agency said Thursday that Boeing issued its inspection guidance to airlines after an international operator found a bolt with a missing nut during routine maintenance. In a separate case, Boeing also discovered an undelivered aircraft that had a nut that was not properly tightened.\n\n\"The issue identified on the particular airplane has been remedied,\" the Arlington, Virginia, company told The Associated Press on Friday. \"Out of an abundance of caution, we are recommending operators inspect their 737 MAX airplanes and inform us of any findings.\"\n\nBoeing added that it will continue to update both customers and federal regulators on the progress.\n\nThe FAA said it will remain in contact with Boeing and impacted airlines as the inspections are performed, and potentially \"consider additional action based on any further discovery of loose or missing hardware.\"\n\nAccording to Boeing, there have been no in-flight incidents caused by this condition to date - noting that crews' routine checks would signal if the rudder was not working properly before an aircraft pushes back from the gate.\n\nThe company added that all airplanes Boeing is set to deliver onward will have the inspection (which is estimated to take about two hours per plane) prior to delivery.\n\nU.S. carriers with 737 Max jets in their fleet include United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, American Airlines and Alaska Airlines. All four of these carriers told The Associated Press Friday that they don't expect operational impacts. Southwest, for example, said it was currently performing all of these inspections during routine overnight maintenance.\n\nA firm timeline for the inspections wasn't provided for each airline, but Alaska said it expected to complete the process by the first half of January.\n\nBoeing's 737 Max jets were grounded worldwide for 20 months after two crashes in 2018 and 2019 killed a total of 346 people. Investigations focused on an automated flight-control system that pushed the nose of the plane down based on faulty sensor readings. Boeing did not tell pilots and airlines about the system until after the first crash.\n\nThe FAA, which also faced criticism for the way it approved the Max jets prior to these deadly crashes, has since moved to provide a more-detailed certification process for large planes and required safety disclosures."}
{"text": "# More Americans think foreign policy should be a top US priority for 2024, an AP-NORC poll finds\nBy **WILL WEISSERT** and **LINLEY SANDERS**  \nJanuary 1, 2024. 1:27 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - In this time of war overseas, more Americans think foreign policy should be a top focus for the U.S. government in 2024, with a new poll showing international concerns and immigration rising in importance with the public.\n\nAbout 4 in 10 U.S. adults named foreign policy topics in an open-ended question that asked people to share up to five issues for the government to work on in the next year, according to a December poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.\n\nThat's about twice as many who mentioned the topic in the AP-NORC poll conducted last year.\n\nLong-standing economic worries still overshadow other issues. But the new poll's findings point to increased concern about U.S. involvement overseas - 20% voiced that sentiment in the poll, versus 5% a year ago.\n\nIt also shows that the Israeli-Hamas war is feeding public anxiety. The conflict was mentioned by 5%, while almost no one cited it a year ago. The issue has dominated geopolitics since Israel declared war on Hamas in Gaza after that group's Oct. 7 attack on Israeli soil.\n\nFour percent of U.S. adults mentioned the conflict between Russia and Ukraine as something for their government to focus on this year. That's similar to the 6% who mentioned it at the end of 2022.\n\nForeign policy has gained importance among respondents from both parties. Some 46% of Republicans named it, up from 23% last year. And 34% of Democrats list foreign policy as a focal point, compared with 16% a year ago.\n\nWarren E. Capito, a Republican from Gordonsville, Virginia, worries China could soon invade Taiwan, creating a third major potential source of global conflict for the U.S. \"They would love to have us split three ways,\" he said of China, and \"we're already spread so thin.\"\n\nImmigration is also a rising bipartisan concern.\n\nOverall, the poll found that concerns about immigration climbed to 35% from 27% last year. Most Republicans, 55%, say the government needs to focus on immigration in 2024, while 22% of Democrats listed immigration as a priority. That's up from 45% and 14%, respectively, compared with December 2022.\n\nJanet Brewer has lived all her life in San Diego, across from Tijuana, Mexico, and said the situation on the border has deteriorated in recent years.\n\n\"It's a disaster,\" said Brewer, 69, who works part time after running a secretarial and legal and medical transcription small business. \"It's crazy.\"\n\nThe politics of foreign military aid and immigration policy are entangled, with President Joe Biden 's administration promoting a $110 billion package that includes aid for Ukraine and Israel that remains stalled in Congress while Republicans push for a deal allowing major changes in immigration policy and stricter enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border.\n\nBrewer said she wouldn't vote for Biden or a Republican for president in 2024, and may opt for independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But she also questions whether a change in the White House would necessarily improve immigration policy.\n\nAs for foreign aid, she said: \"I know that we need to help. But come on. We've done enough.\"\n\nEven as immigration and foreign policy rose as concerns, those issues were no match for worries about the economy. Inflation has fallen, unemployment is low and the U.S. has repeatedly defied predictions of a recession - yet this poll adds to a string of them showing a gloomy outlook on the economy.\n\nSome 76% of U.S. adults said this time that they want the government to work on issues related to the economy in 2024, nearly the same as the 75% who said so at this point in 2022.\n\nAbout 85% of Republicans and 65% of Democrats name the economy as a top issue. But Republicans are more likely than Democrats to want the government to address some specific economic issues: on inflation 41% vs. 22% and on government spending or debt, 22% vs. 7%.\n\nMeanwhile, 3 in 10 U.S. adults listed inflation as an issue that the government should focus on, unchanged from 2022.\n\nThe economy is a top issue mentioned by 18- to 29-year-olds (84%), followed by inflation specifically (39%), personal finances issues (38%) and foreign policy (34%). In the same age bracket, 32% mentioned education or school loans as something for the government to address in 2024. That's despite the Biden administration trying new, more modest efforts to cancel debts after the Supreme Court struck down its larger original push.\n\nAmong those 30 and older, only 19% mention student loans. But Travis Brown, a 32-year-old forklift operator in Las Vegas, noted that he's back to getting calls seeking payment of his student loans.\n\n\"Right now, with the economy, wages are not matching,\" Brown said. \"Blue collar's going away and I don't see how that's going to boost an economy. An economy thrives off the working class. Not off the rich.\"\n\nBrown also suggested that the U.S. is too focused on shipping aid to its overseas allies.\n\n\"I care about others, I do,\" he said. \"But when you sit here and say, 'I just sent $50 million over to Israel' and then I go outside and I see half a neighborhood rundown ... you've got to take care of home.\"\n\nOne possible sign that larger sentiments on the economy could be improving slightly is that overall mentions of personal financial issues declined some, with 30% mentioning them now compared with 37% last year. Drops occurred for Democrats, 27% vs. 33%, and among Republicans, falling to 30% compared with 37% in 2022.\n\nOne-quarter of U.S. adults say 2024 will be a better year than 2023 for them personally, and 24% expect it will be a worse year. Some 37% of Republicans expect it'll be a worse year for them, compared with 20% of independents and 13% of Democrats.\n\nJust 5% of U.S. adults are \"extremely\" or \"very\" confident that the federal government can make progress on the important problems and issues facing the country in 2024, with 7% of Democrats and 11% of independents being optimistic, compared with 1% of Republicans.\n\nBrown is a Democrat but said he was disillusioned enough to perhaps sit out the presidential election - especially if it proves to be a 2020 rematch between Biden and former President Donald Trump, who has built a commanding early lead in the 2024 Republican primary.\n\n\"I don't think I will participate and maybe that's bad,\" Brown said. \"But, it's like, you're losing faith.\"\n\nThe poll of 1,074 adults was conducted Nov. 30-Dec. 4, 2023, using a sample drawn from NORC's probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, designed to represent the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points."}
{"text": "# Sen. Fetterman says he thought news about his depression treatment would end his political career\nDecember 31, 2023. 3:57 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Sen. John Fetterman acknowledges having \"dark conversations\" about harming himself before he hit \"the emergency brake\" and sought treatment for depression.\n\nHe remembers thinking about his three school-age kids. \"I can't be a blueprint for my children. I can't let them be left alone or not to understand why he would have done that,\" the first-term Pennsylvania Democrat told NBC's \"Meet the Press\" in a deeply personal and introspective interview taped before the broadcast that aired Sunday.\n\nSo he checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, last Feb. 15. \"There was nowhere else to go,\" he said, describing how he often felt during his stay that \"there wasn't any hope sometimes and like, 'What do I have left?'\"\n\nHe also wondered whether he would survive politically.\n\n\"When it got released where I was and where it was going, it was a big story. And so, I had assumed that that would be the end of my career,\" he said\n\nWhen he sought treatment for clinical depression, Fetterman was still coping with the effects of the stroke he had in May 2022, during his campaign for one of the Senate's most contested seats. \"My heart technically stopped, and it was a very touch-and-go situation,\" said Fetterman, 54. A pacemaker was implanted with a defibrillator to manage two heart conditions, atrial fibrillation and cardiomyopathy.\n\nHis victory over Republican Mehmet Oz had helped Democrats keep control of the Senate and made him a national figure. It was the height of his political career. But he couldn't make it out of bed at his home in Braddock, in western Pennsylvania.\n\n\"I really scared my kids, and they thought, 'You won, Dad. Why aren't we enough? Why are you still so sad? Why are you even more sad?' And it was hard for - to explain why I was. And, of course, a 9-year-old child wouldn't understand that. And it was awful,\" Fetterman said.\n\nSo much so that he said he \"pleaded not to go down to D.C.\" later that November for orientation sessions in Washington for newly elected lawmakers.\n\nHis favorite holiday was nearing, yet he was unable to think about getting Christmas presents for his children and \"dreading\" his swearing in on Capitol Hill early in the new year.\n\nWithin two months, he was at Walter Reed. Aides had described the new senator as being withdrawn and uninterested in eating, discussing work or the usual banter with staff.\n\n\"This is a conversation that I've had with myself and anybody that knows they're unable to address their depression, is they start to have dark conversations with themself about self-harm,\" Fetterman said. \"And things continued to kind of tick off the list. And then I kind of hit the emergency brake.\"\n\nHe added, \"I knew I needed help.\"\n\nBefore checking into Walter Reed, Fetterman had never publicly discussed his battle with depression. He has since said that he has experienced it on and off throughout his life.\n\nHe left Walter Reed at the end of March after six weeks of inpatient treatment with his depression \"in remission,\" according to a statement from his office.\n\nDoctors describe \"remission\" as when a patient responds to treatment so that they have returned to normal social function and they are indistinguishable from someone who has never had depression.\n\nFetterman has since become a visible presence in the Capitol, bantering with reporters, joking with Senate colleagues and speaking up at Senate hearings.\n\nTo others who are now \"facing a really dark holiday time,\" Fetterman offered this guidance: \"I know that last year's was desolate. And this year's might be desolate. Next year's can be the best ever. And that's what happened for me.\""}
{"text": "# Powerful earthquakes leave at least 55 dead, destroy buildings along Japan's western coast\nBy **HIRO KOMAE** and **YURI KAGEYAMA**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 10:41 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WAJIMA, Japan (AP)** - A series of powerful earthquakes that hit western Japan have left at least 55 people dead and damaged thousands of buildings, vehicles and boats. Officials warned Tuesday that more quakes could lie ahead.\n\nAftershocks continued to shake Ishikawa prefecture and nearby areas a day after a magnitude 7.6 temblor slammed the area.\n\nDamage was so great that it could not immediately be assessed. Japanese media reports said tens of thousands of homes were destroyed.\n\nGovernment spokesperson Yoshimasa Hayashi said 17 people were seriously injured and gave a slightly lower death toll, saying he was aware of the prefecture's tally.\n\nWater, power and cell phone service were still down in some areas. Residents expressed sorrow about their uncertain futures.\n\n\"It's not just that it's a mess. The wall has collapsed, and you can see through to the next room. I don't think we can live here anymore,\" Miki Kobayashi, an Ishikawa resident, said as she swept around her house.\n\nThe house was also damaged in a 2007 quake, she said.\n\nAlthough casualty numbers continued to climb gradually, the prompt public warnings, relayed on broadcasts and phones, and the quick response from the general public and officials appeared to have limited some of the damage.\n\nToshitaka Katada, a University of Tokyo professor specializing in disasters, said people were prepared because the area had been hit by quakes in recent years. They had evacuation plans and emergency supplies in stock.\n\n\"There are probably no people on Earth who are as disaster-ready as the Japanese,\" he told The Associated Press.\n\nJapan is frequently hit by earthquakes because of its location along the \"Ring of Fire,\" an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin.\n\nKatada warned the situation remains precarious and unpredictable. The March 2011 quake and tsunami in northeastern Japan had been preceded by other quakes.\n\n\"This is far from over,\" Katada said.\n\nPredictions by scientists have repeatedly been proven wrong, such as with the 2016 quake in southwestern Kumamoto, an area previously seen as relatively quake-free.\n\n\"Having too much confidence in the power of science is very dangerous. We are dealing with nature,\" Katada said.\n\nJapanese media's aerial footage showed widespread damage in the hardest-hit spots, with landslides burying roads, boats tossed in the waters and a fire that had turned an entire section of Wajima city to ashes.\n\nJapan's military dispatched 1,000 soldiers to the disaster zones to join rescue efforts, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Tuesday.\n\n\"Saving lives is our priority and we are fighting a battle against time,\" he said. \"It is critical that people trapped in homes get rescued immediately.\"\n\nA quake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.6 shook the Ishikawa area as he was speaking. Quakes continued to rock the area, reaching more than 100 aftershocks over the past day.\n\nNuclear regulators said several nuclear plants in the region were operating normally. A major quake and tsunami in 2011 caused three reactors to melt and release large amounts of radiation at a nuclear plant in northeastern Japan.\n\nOn Monday, the Japan Meteorological Agency issued a major tsunami warning for Ishikawa and lower-level tsunami warnings or advisories for the rest of the western coast of Japan's main island of Honshu, as well as for the northern island of Hokkaido.\n\nThe warning was downgraded several hours later, and all tsunami warnings were lifted as of early Tuesday. Waves measuring more than one meter (3 feet) hit some places.\n\nStill, half-sunken ships floated in bays where tsunami waves had rolled in, leaving a muddied coastline.\n\nPeople who were evacuated from their houses huddled in auditoriums, schools and community centers. Bullet trains in the region were halted, but service was mostly restored by Tuesday afternoon. Sections of highways were closed.\n\nWeather forecasters predicted rain, setting off worries about crumbling buildings and infrastructure.\n\nThe region includes tourist spots famous for lacquerware and other traditional crafts, along with designated cultural heritage sites.\n\nU.S. President Joe Biden said in a statement that his administration was \"ready to provide any necessary assistance for the Japanese people.\""}
{"text": "# Russian missiles hit Ukrainian cities, killing 5 and injuring more than 100, Kyiv officials say\nBy **ILLIA NOVIKOV** and **HANNA ARHIROVA**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 10:55 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**KYIV, Ukraine (AP)** - Ukraine's two largest cities came under attack Tuesday from Russian missiles that killed five people and injured more than 100, officials said, as the war approached its two-year mark and the Kremlin stepped up its winter bombardment of urban areas.\n\nThe Ukrainian Interior Ministry said Tuesday evening that the attack killed five civilians and injured 127 as air defenses downed Russian Kinzhal missiles that can fly at 10 times the speed of sound. The Kremlin's forces targeted Kyiv, the capital, and the northeastern Kharkiv region whose provincial capital is also called Kharkiv, authorities said.\n\nThere was some confusion over the death toll as Kharkiv Gov. Oleh Syniehubov initially reported one death there but later said the injured woman thought to have been killed was in a coma. He said 52 people were wounded in Kharkhiv.\n\nAir defenses shot down all 10 of the hypersonic missiles, out of about 100 of various types that were launched, Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi claimed. It was the most Kinzhals used by Russia in one attack since the start of the war, air force spokesperson Yurii Ihnat said.\n\nThe barrage extended Russian attacks that began Friday with its largest single assault on Ukraine since the war started, as fighting along the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line has subsided into grinding attrition amid winter. At least 41 civilians were killed since the weekend.\n\nAt a nine-story Kyiv apartment building where two people were killed, 48-year-old Inna Luhina was getting ready for work when a blast shattered her windows and she and other family members, including her 80-year-old mother, were struck by flying glass.\n\nMore than 100 survivors gathered at a school set up as a temporary shelter.\n\nIryna Dzyhil, a 55-year-old resident of the same building, said the explosion threw her and her husband from their chairs, and a subsequent fire trapped them on the top floor until emergency crews rescued them via the roof.\n\n\"They say they're hitting military targets, but they're hitting people, killing our children and our loved ones,\" Dzyhil said of the Russians.\n\nRussia fired almost 100 missiles of various types in the attacks, Zelenskyy said on X, formerly Twitter. He claimed at least 70 were shot down, almost all of them in the Kyiv area, noting that Western-supplied air defense systems such as Patriots and NASAMS had saved hundreds of lives.\n\nRussia's Defense Ministry said it had launched missile and drone strikes on military industrial facilities in and around Kyiv. Depots storing missiles and munitions supplied by the West also were targeted, it said.\n\n\"The goal of the strike has been achieved, all the targets have been hit,\" it said without elaborating.\n\nIt was not possible to independently verify either side's claims.\n\nZelenskyy said that since Sunday, Russian forces have launched about 170 Shahed drones and dozens of missiles, with most aimed at civilian areas.\n\nThe Kh-47M2 Kinzhal is an air-launched hypersonic ballistic missile. Russian forces rarely use such expensive missiles against Ukraine, due to their limited stocks.\n\nThe attacks created a desolate morning scene in Kyiv, with most cafes and restaurants remaining closed. Many people opted to stay indoors or seek refuge in shelters as powerful blasts shook the city from early morning. Air raid sirens blared for nearly four hours, and the city's subway stations - which function as shelters - were crowded.\n\nAfter the air force issued warnings about incoming missiles, people wearing pajamas underneath their coats took sleeping bags, mats and their pets to subway stations while loud explosions echoed above. At one of the central stations, called Golden Gates, hundreds of people filled the spacious underground areas while trains continued to run.\n\n\"Perhaps today was the most frightening because there were so many explosions,\" said resident Myroslava Shcherba.\n\nOn Saturday, shelling of the Russian border city of Belgorod killed more than two dozen people. Russia blamed Ukraine for the attack and has struck back repeatedly since then.\n\nThe Belgorod attack was one of the deadliest on Russian soil since Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine started more than 22 months ago. Russian officials said the death toll reached 26, including five children, after a new salvo of rockets Tuesday.\n\nAir defense systems near Belgorod shot down four missiles fired Tuesday by a Ukrainian Vilkha multiple rocket launcher, the Russian Defense Ministry said. Over the previous 24 hours, Ukraine has carried out at least 50 attacks, including shelling and explosives from drones, regional Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov said.\n\nCities in western Russia have regularly come under drone attacks since May, although Ukrainian officials never acknowledge responsibility for strikes on Russian territory or the annexed Crimean Peninsula.\n\n\"They want to intimidate us and create uncertainty within our country. We will intensify strikes. Not a single crime against our civilian population will go unpunished,\" Russian President Vladimir Putin said Monday, describing the barrage of Belgorod as a \"terrorist act.\"\n\nHe accused Western nations of using Ukraine to try to \"put Russia in its place.\" While vowing retribution, he insisted Moscow would only target military infrastructure in Ukraine, but officials in Kyiv report civilian casualties from daily attacks on apartment buildings, shopping centers and residential areas.\n\nIn other developments, Russia's Defense Ministry said one of its warplanes accidentally released munitions over the southwestern Russian village of Petropavlovka in the Voronezh region Tuesday, damaging six houses but causing no injuries. It said an investigation will determine the cause of the accident but didn't say what type of weapon the warplane dropped.\n\nIn April, munitions accidentally released by a Russian warplane caused a powerful blast in Belgorod, damaging several cars and slightly injuring two people."}
{"text": "# How Dominican women fight child marriage and teen pregnancy while facing total abortion bans\nBy **MARÍA TERESA HERNÁNDEZ**  \nJanuary 2, 2024. 8:00 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**AZUA, Dominican Republic (AP)** - It was a busy Saturday morning at Marcia González's church. A bishop was visiting, and normally she would have been there helping with logistics, but on this day she was teaching sex education at a local school.\n\n\"I coordinate activities at the church and my husband is a deacon,\" González said. \"The bishop comes once a year and children are being confirmed, but I am here because this is important for my community.\"\n\nFor 40 years, González and her husband have pushed for broader sex education in the Dominican Republican, one of four Latin American nations that criminalizes abortion without exceptions. Women face up to 2 years in prison for having an abortion; penalties for doctors or midwives range from 5 to 20 years.\n\nWith a Bible on its flag, the Caribbean country has a powerful lobby of Catholics and evangelicals who are united against decriminalizing abortion.\n\nPresident Luis Abinader committed to the decriminalization of abortion as a candidate in 2020, but his government hasn't acted on that pledge. For now, it depends on whether he is re-elected in May.\n\nTo help girls prevent unplanned pregnancies in this context, González and other activists have developed \"teenage clubs,\" where adolescents learn about sexual and reproductive rights, self-esteem, gender violence, finances and other topics. The goal is to empower future generations of Dominican women.\n\nOutside the clubs, sex education is often insufficient, according to activists. Close to 30% of adolescents don't have access to contraception. High poverty levels increase the risks of facing an unwanted pregnancy.\n\nFor the teenagers she mentors, González's concerns also go beyond the impossibility of terminating a pregnancy.\n\nAccording to activists, poverty forces some Dominican mothers to marry their 14 or 15-year-old daughters to men up to 50 years older. Nearly 7 out of 10 women suffer from gender violence such as incest, and families often remain silent regarding sexual abuse.\n\nFor every 1,000 adolescents between 15 and 19, 42 became mothers in 2023, according to the United Nations Population Fund. And until 2019, when UNICEF published its latest report on child marriage, more than a third of Dominican women married or entered a free union before turning 18.\n\nDominican laws have prohibited child marriage since 2021, but community leaders say that such unions are still common because the practice has been normalized and few people are aware of the statute.\n\n\"In my 14-year-old granddaughter's class, two of her younger friends are already married,\" González said. \"Many mothers give the responsibility of their younger children to their older daughters so, instead of taking care of little boys, they run away with a husband.\"\n\nActivists hope education can help prevent girls from facing this situation.\n\n\"There are myths that people tell you when you have your period,\" said Gabriela Díaz, 16, during a recent encounter organized by the Women's Equality Center. \"They say that we are dirty or we have dirty blood, but that is false. We are helping our body to clean itself and improve its functions.\"\n\nDíaz calls González \"godmother,\" a term applied by Plan International to community leaders who implement the programs of this UK-based organization, which promotes children's rights.\n\nAccording to its own data, San Cristóbal and Azua, where González lives, are the Dominican cities with the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and child marriage.\n\nTo address this, its clubs accept girls between 13 and 17. Each group meets 2 hours per week, welcomes up to 25 participants and is led by volunteers like González.\n\nIn San Cristobal, also in southern Dominican Republic, the National Confederation of Rural Women (CONAMUCA) sponsors teenage clubs of its own.\n\n\"CONAMUCA was born to fight for land ownership, but the landscape has changed, and we have integrated new issues, such as food sovereignty, agrarian reform, and sexual and reproductive rights,\" said Lidia Ferrer, one of its leaders.\n\nIts clubs gather 1,600 girls in 60 communities, Ferrer said. The topics they study vary from region to region, but among the recurring ones are adolescent pregnancy, early unions and feminicide.\n\n\"The starting point is our own reality,\" said Kathy Cabrera, who joined CONAMUCA clubs at age 9 and two decades later takes new generations under her wing. \"It's how we live and suffer.\"\n\nMigration is increasingly noticeable in rural areas, Cabrera said. Women are forced to walk for miles to attend school or find water, and health services fail in guaranteeing their sexual and reproductive rights.\n\n\"We have a government that tells you 'Don't have an abortion' but does not provide the necessary contraception to avoid it.\"\n\nShe has witnessed how 13-year-old girls bear the children of 65-year-old men while neither families nor authorities seem to be concerned. On other occasions, she said, parents \"give away\" their daughters because they cannot support them or because they discover that they are no longer virgins.\n\n\"It's not regarded as sexual abuse because, if my grandmother got pregnant and married at an early age, and my great-grandmother too and my mother too, then it means I should too,\" Cabrera said.\n\nIn southern Dominican communities, most girls can relate to this, or know someone who does.\n\n\"My sister got pregnant at 16 and that was very disturbing,\" said 14-year-old Laura Pérez. \"She got together with a person much older than her, and they have a baby. I don't think that was right.\"\n\nThe clubs' dynamics change as needed to create safe and loving environments for girls to share what they feel. Some sessions kick off with relaxation exercises and others with games.\n\nSome girls speak proudly of what they have learned. One of them mentioned she confronted her father when he said she shouldn't cut any lemons from a tree while menstruating. Another said that her friends always go to the bathroom in groups, to avoid safety risks. They all regard their godmothers as mentors who have their backs.\n\n\"They call me to confide everything,\" González said. \"I am happy because, in my group, no girl has become pregnant.\"\n\nMany girls from teenage clubs have dreams they want to follow. Francesca Montero, 16, would like to become a pediatrician. Perla Infante, 15, a psychologist. Lomelí Arias, 18, a nurse.\n\n\"I want to be a soldier!\" shouted Laura Pérez, the 14-year-old who wants to be careful not to following her sister's footsteps.\n\n\"I was undecided, but when I entered CONAMUCA I knew I wanted to become a soldier. In here we see all these women who give you strength, who are like you, but as a guide,\" Pérez said. \"It's like a child seeing an older person and thinking: 'When I grow up, I want to be like that.'\""}
{"text": "# Abortion debate creates 'new era' for state supreme court races in 2024, with big spending expected\nBy **CHRISTINE FERNANDO** and **ANDREW DeMILLO**  \nDecember 29, 2023. 1:12 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CHICAGO (AP)** - The 2024 elections will be dominated by the presidential contest and the battle for control of Congress, but another series of races is shaping up to be just as consequential.\n\nCrucial battles over abortion, gerrymandering, voting rights and other issues will take center stage in next year's elections for state supreme court seats - 80 of them in 33 states.\n\nThe races have emerged as some of the most hotly contested and costliest contests on the ballot since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the consitutional right to an abortion. The decision shifted the abortion debate to states, creating a \"new era\" in state supreme court elections, said Douglas Keith, senior counsel in the judiciary program at the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks spending in judicial races.\n\n\"We have seen attention on state supreme court elections like never before and money in these races like never before,\" Keith said.\n\nHeated court races in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in 2023 handed victories to Democrats and saw tens of millions of dollars in TV ads, offering a preview of 2024. They're also prompting groups to consider investing in states they would not previously have considered.\n\n## ABORTION AND GERRYMANDERING TOP ISSUES\nAt least 38 lawsuits have been filed challenging abortion bans in 23 states, according to the Brennan Center. Many of those are expected to end up before state supreme courts.\n\nThe ACLU is watching cases challenging abortion restrictions in Wyoming, Kentucky, Ohio, Utah, Florida, Nevada, Arizona, Nebraska, Georgia and Montana.\n\n\"After Roe v. Wade was overturned, we had to turn to state courts and state constitutions as the critical backstop to protecting access to abortion,\" said Brigitte Amiri, deputy director at the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project. \"And the stakes are unbelievably high in each of these cases in each of these states.\"\n\nThe ACLU was among major spenders on behalf of Democrats in this year's state supreme court contests in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.\n\nAnother big player in recent court races has been the Republican State Leadership Committee, which has said its focus is mainly on redistricting, or the drawing of political district boundaries. The group called state supreme courts the \"last line of defense against far-left national groups,\" but didn't say how much it intends to spend on next year's races or which states it's focusing on.\n\nIn Ohio, Democrats are expected to cast state supreme court races as an extension of the November election in which voters enshrined the right to abortion in the state constitution. The state has more than 30 abortion restrictions in place that could be challenged now that the amendment has passed.\n\n\"The state supreme court is going to be the ultimate arbiter of the meaning of the new constitutional amendment that the people voted for and organized around,\" said Jessie Hill, law professor at Case Western Reserve University and a consultant for Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights. \"That is a huge amount of power.\"\n\nWith three seats up for a vote and a current Republican majority of 4-3, Democrats have an opportunity to flip the majority of the court while Republicans will try to expand their control. Hill said the \"very high-stakes election\" will serve as another test of the salience of the abortion issue in turning out voters.\n\n\"We saw an incredible number of voters come out to vote on that amendment and an incredible amount of investment in those campaigns,\" Hill added. \"I think we'll see a similar attention and investment in Ohio come next year.\"\n\nRedistricting also is likely to be a main focus in the state's supreme court races, given the court will have realigned politically since it issued a series of rulings finding Ohio's congressional and legislative maps unconstitutionally gerrymandered to favor Republicans, said David Niven, political science professor at the University of Cincinnati. He expects millions of dollars to be spent on those campaigns.\n\n\"There's often little conversation about these races, but they are just so utterly consequential in very tangible, practical ways that touch voters' everyday lives,\" he said.\n\n## MAP BROADENS FOR CONSEQUENTIAL RACES\nPending legislative and congressional redistricting cases also could play a role in North Carolina.\n\nRepublicans in North Carolina are looking to expand their majority two years after the court flipped from Democratic control in the 2022 election. That flip to a 5-2 GOP majority led to dramatic reversals in 2023 on rulings made by the previous court, which had struck down a 2018 photo voter identification law as well as district maps for the General Assembly and the state's congressional delegation.\n\nGroups on both sides also are expected to focus on Michigan, where Democrats hold a 4-3 majority on the state Supreme Court. Candidates run without political affiliations listed on the ballot, though they're nominated by political parties.\n\nTwo incumbents - one Democrat, one Republican - will be up for election in 2024. The court recently kept former President Donald Trump on the state's ballot, denying a liberal group's request to kick him off. It is currently weighing a high-profile case over a Republican legislative maneuver that gutted a minimum wage hike backed by voters.\n\n## 2023 RACES A PREVIEW\nIn Wisconsin, abortion played a dominant role in the 2023 court race, with Democrats flipping the court to a 4-3 majority in a campaign that shattered previous national records for spending in state supreme court elections.\n\nLiberal-leaning Justice Janet Protasiewicz defeated former Justice Dan Kelly, who previously worked for Republicans and had support from the state's leading anti-abortion groups.\n\nProtasiewicz was targeted with impeachment threats this year over comments she made on the campaign trail about redistricting as Republicans argued she had prejudged what then was an expected case on the state's heavily gerrymandered state legislative districts. Experts say the controversy is an example of how more money and attention have changed the dynamics of many state supreme court races to be increasingly partisan.\n\nDemocrats in Pennsylvania added to their majority on the court after a race with tens of millions of dollars in spending. Democrat Dan McCaffery won after positioning himself as a strong defender of abortion rights.\n\n## CONTESTED SEATS EVEN IN DEEP RED STATES \nIt remains to be seen whether abortion rights will play a factor in states where party control isn't at stake. That includes Arkansas, where the court is expected to maintain its 4-3 conservative majority. The seats up next year include the chief justice position, which has drawn three sitting justices.\n\nA fight over abortion could wind up before the court, with a group trying to put a measure on the ballot next year that would scale back a state ban on the procedure that took effect once Roe was overturned.\n\nAbortion rights supporters also aren't writing off longshot states such as Texas and its all-Republican high court, which rejected the request from a pregnant woman whose fetus had a fatal condition to be exempted from the state's strict abortion ban.\n\nIn Montana, Republicans have spent huge sums to try to push the court in a more conservative direction. The liberal-leaning court is expected to hear cases related to restrictions on transgender youth and abortion. A landmark climate change case also is pending before the court, which will have two of its seven seats up for election.\n\nJeremiah Lynch, a former federal magistrate running for the open chief justice position, has cast himself as a defender of the court's independence and has warned voters to expect a barrage of negative advertising. Cory Swanson, a county attorney also running for the post, announced his bid on a conservative talk show and recently vowed to weed out any \"radicalized\" applicants for law clerks in response to antisemitism on college campuses.\n\nIn West Virginia, where conservatives have a current 5-4 majority on the court and two seats will be up for grabs, GOP chair Elgine McArdle said Republicans aim to focus more on judicial races than in years past.\n\n\"One area the state party has never really engaged much in is nonpartisan races, including the judicial races,\" McArdle said. \"That won't be the case this time around.\""}
{"text": "# Election officials see a range of threats in 2024, from hostile countries to conspiracy theorists\nBy **CHRISTINA A. CASSIDY**  \nDecember 28, 2023. 9:20 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**ATLANTA (AP)** - For election officials preparing for the 2024 presidential election, the list of security challenges just keeps growing.\n\nMany of the concerns from four years ago persist: the potential for cyberattacks targeting voter registration systems or websites that report unofficial results, and equipment problems or human errors being amplified by those seeking to undermine confidence in the outcome.\n\nAdd to that the fresh risks that have developed since the 2020 election and the false claims of widespread fraud being spread by former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies. Death threats directed at election workers and breaches of voting equipment inside election offices have raised questions about safety and security. Some states have altered their voting and election laws, expanded legislative control of local elections and added penalties for election workers who violate rules.\n\nThe turmoil has contributed to a wave of retirements and resignations among election staff, creating a vacuum of institutional knowledge in some local election offices.\n\nWith Trump running again and already warning that the 2024 vote is \"on its way to being another rigged election,\" election workers are bracing for a difficult year that will have no margin for error.\n\n## FOREIGN THREATS\nNational security experts have warned for years that foreign governments - primarily Russia, China and Iran - want to undermine the U.S. and see elections as a pathway to do it.\n\nIn 2016, Russia sought to interfere with a multi-pronged effort that included accessing and releasing Democratic emails and scanning state voter registration systems for vulnerabilities. Four years later, Iranian hackers obtained voter data and used it to send misleading emails.\n\nIn 2022, there were multiple instances in which hackers linked to Iran, China and Russia connected to election infrastructure, scanned state government websites and copied voter information, according to a recent declassified report.\n\nWhile there has been no evidence of any compromises affecting the integrity of U.S. elections, experts say those countries are more motivated than ever given tensions across the globe.\n\n\"Election 2024 may be the first presidential election during which multiple authoritarian actors simultaneously attempt to interfere with and influence an election outcome,\" Microsoft warned in a November threat assessment.\n\nThe company said it was unlikely that Russia, China and Iran would sit out next year's contest because the \"stakes are simply too high.\" The report said Russia remains \"the most committed and capable threat to the 2024 election,\" with the Kremlin seeing next year's vote as a \"must-win political warfare battle\" that could determine the outcome of its war against Ukraine.\n\nMichigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said she believes foreign adversaries have a \"greater incentive than ever before\" to get involved in the upcoming elections.\n\n\"We're going to do everything we can to be prepared, but we are facing well-funded, serious adversaries, and that requires all of us to be clear-eyed about those challenges -- and for voters to also know that there are foreign actors that want to influence their vote to further their own goals and not America's,\" she said.\n\n## ELECTION SYSTEM VULNERABILITIES\nMany of the conspiracy theories that have persisted since Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden relate to voting technology and claims that equipment was manipulated to steal the vote. There is no evidence of manipulation, and the systems have safeguards to detect problems.\n\nAn intensive effort has been underway for several years to build defenses around voting machines and tabulators and develop plans to recover if tampering occurs. Experts are particularly concerned about non-voting systems such as voter registration databases, electronic poll books and websites that report results because they rely on internet connections.\n\nExperts have warned that a well-timed attack, perhaps using ransomware that locks up computers until payments are made or systems are restored from backups, could disrupt election operations.\n\nMany local election offices have been moving their systems off countywide networks to protect them, but not all have. In early September, election officials in Hinds County, Mississippi, were preparing for statewide elections when everything came to an abrupt halt.\n\nWorkers in the election office were unable to access their computers for about three weeks. The breach of the county's computers caused a slight delay in processing voter registration forms and pushed back training for poll workers.\n\nLocal election offices, particularly in rural areas, often struggle to secure enough funding, personnel and cybersecurity expertise. Hinds County Election Commissioner Shirley Varnado said it was a \"wonderful idea\" to have their election office networks separated from the county but would take money they don't have.\n\n\"That should be done, but we're in a building without heat or air,\" she said.\n\nElection integrity groups say more needs to be done and point to a series of voting system breaches since the 2020 election that have resulted in proprietary software being distributed among various Trump allies. They want a federal investigation and for authorities to force anyone with copies to hand them over.\n\nThey also worry about technical failures, noting an incident last November in which some votes in a Pennsylvania judicial race were flipped. The prevalence of false election claims has made it difficult to raise valid criticisms, said Susan Greenhalgh, a senior adviser on election security with Free Speech For People, a left-leaning nonprofit focused on election and campaign finance reforms.\n\n\"Our election system is not perfect,\" Greenhalgh said. \"There are a lot of things that need to be and should be improved.\"\n\n## INCREASED PROTECTIONS\nImprovements since the 2016 election, in which Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton, include replacing outdated and vulnerable voting machines that lacked paper records of every vote cast. In 2020, an estimated 93% of ballots cast nationwide produced a paper record, up from 82% four years earlier.\n\nAfter 2016, election systems were added to the list of critical infrastructure in the U.S. that also includes dams, banks and nuclear power plants.\n\nIn 2018, Congress established the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which provides security reviews. CISA Director Jen Easterly launched a cyber defense initiative in 2021 and last summer said 10 new regional election security advisers would be hired to work directly with local election offices.\n\n\"There's just been so much that has transformed the face of election infrastructure security over the past seven years,\" Easterly said in an interview last August. \"In a space where people can sometimes get pretty down, I think we should be optimistic.\"\n\nLarry Norden, an election expert with the Brennan Center for Justice, said he sees \"massive progress\" but also said turnover in local election offices has diminished institutional knowledge.\n\nJust 29% of local election officials surveyed this year for the Brennan Center were aware of CISA routine vulnerability scans, and just 31% were aware of the agency's physical security assessments.\n\n\"There was not nearly as much awareness of the services that are offered as I think there should be,\" Norden said. \"It's not surprising, but it means there's work to do.\"\n\n## 'PERFECT STORM'\nStaffing has long been a challenge for local election offices, which rely on both permanent and temporary workers, including those who staff some 80,000 polling locations nationally on Election Day.\n\nBut 2020 was a tipping point, with coronavirus pandemic-related challenges before the presidential vote and everything that followed: death threats, a flood of information requests from election skeptics, hostile county boards and new laws that impose fines or criminal penalties on election officials for violating rules. That contributed to a wave of retirements and resignations among election officials. Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson said two-thirds of county clerks there are new since the 2020 election.\n\n\"This all combines into this perfect storm,\" said Henderson, a Republican. \"It's a real challenge.\"\n\nInsider threats - the possibility that someone working in an election office could tamper with systems or provide access to them - poses another concern. To address this, election officials have been boosting security around key equipment by limiting access and adding surveillance cameras.\n\nMeanwhile, the threats and harassment have continued. Georgia's Fulton County, a target of various 2020 election conspiracy theories, was one of several election offices in November sent envelopes containing a powdery substance that in some cases tested positive for fentanyl.\n\nThe letters are another reminder of the charged environment surrounding U.S. elections heading into 2024. Despite all the challenges, Henderson said election officials are doing everything they can to prepare.\n\n\"When you have a human-run system, there will be human error. That's just part of it,\" she said. \"But we're working hard to make sure that we mitigate those human errors and mitigate the risks and continually improve our processes so that people can have the confidence that when they vote, only eligible voters are voting, and when they vote, their votes count accurately.\""}
{"text": "# Nikki Haley doesn't mention slavery when asked what caused the Civil War. She later walks that back\nBy **MEG KINNARD**  \nDecember 28, 2023. 1:47 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP)** - Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley was asked at a New Hampshire town hall about the reason for the Civil War, and she didn't mention slavery in her response. She walked back her comments hours later.\n\nAsked during Wednesday night's town hall in Berlin what she believed had caused the war - the first shots of which were fired in her home state of South Carolina - Haley talked about the role of government, replying that it involved \"the freedoms of what people could and couldn't do.\"\n\nShe then turned the question back to the man who had asked it. He replied that he was not the one running for president and wished instead to know her answer.\n\nAfter Haley went into a lengthier explanation about the role of government, individual freedom and capitalism, the questioner seemed to admonish Haley, saying, \"In the year 2023, it's astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word 'slavery.'\"\n\n\"What do you want me to say about slavery?\" Haley retorted before abruptly moving on to the next question.\n\nHaley, the former United Nations ambassador and South Carolina governor, has been working to become the leading alternative to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. It's unclear whether her comments will have a long-term political impact, particularly among the independent voters who are crucial to her campaign.\n\nShe backpedaled on her Civil War comments 12 hours later, with her campaign disseminating a Thursday morning radio interview in which she said, \"Of course the Civil War was about slavery,\" something she called \"a stain on America.\" She went on to reiterate that \"freedom matters. And individual rights and liberties matter for all people.\"\n\nHer GOP rivals quickly jumped on her original comments, even though most of them have been accused of downplaying the effects of slavery themselves.\n\nFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis' campaign recirculated video of the original exchange on social media, adding the comment, \"Yikes.\" Campaigning in Iowa on Thursday, DeSantis said that Haley \"has had some problems with some basic American history\" and that it's \"not that difficult to identify and acknowledge the role slavery played in the Civil War.\"\n\nDeSantis faced criticism over slavery earlier in the year when Florida enacted new education standards requiring teachers to instruct middle school students that slaves developed skills that \"could be applied for their personal benefit.\" U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Black Republican in the Senate and DeSantis' then-rival for the GOP presidential nomination, rejected that characterization, saying instead that slavery was about \"separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives.\"\n\nMake America Great Again Inc., a super PAC supporting Trump's campaign, sent out a release saying Haley's response shows she \"is clearly not ready for primetime.\" The group also included an X post from Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, a Black Republican who supports Trump, reading \"1. Psst Nikki... the answer is slavery PERIOD. 2. This really doesn't matter because Trump is going to be the nominee. Trump 2024!\"\n\nTrump did not mention the two centuries of slavery in America at a 2020 event marking the 223rd anniversary of the signing of the Constitution. He instead focused on America's founding having \"set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that abolished slavery, secured civil rights, defeated communism and fascism and built the most fair, equal and prosperous nation in human history.\"\n\nIssues surrounding the origins of the Civil War and its heritage are still much of the fabric of Haley's home state, and she has been pressed on the war's origins before. As she ran for governor in 2010, Haley, in an interview with a now-defunct activist group then known as The Palmetto Patriots, described the war as between two disparate sides fighting for \"tradition\" and \"change\" and said the Confederate flag was \"not something that is racist.\"\n\nDuring that same campaign, she dismissed the need for the flag to come down from the Statehouse grounds, portraying her Democratic rival's push for its removal as a desperate political stunt.\n\nFive years later, Haley urged lawmakers to remove the flag from its perch near a Confederate soldier monument following a mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, in which a white gunman killed nine Black church members who were attending Bible study. At the time, Haley said the flag had been \"hijacked\" by the shooter from those who saw the flag as symbolizing \"sacrifice and heritage.\"\n\nSouth Carolina's Ordinance of Secession - the 1860 proclamation by the state government outlining its reasons for seceding from the Union - mentions slavery in its opening sentence and points to the \"increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery\" as a reason for the state removing itself from the Union.\n\nOn Wednesday night, Christale Spain - elected this year as the first Black woman to chair South Carolina's Democratic Party - said Haley's response was \"vile, but unsurprising.\"\n\n\"The same person who refused to take down the Confederate Flag until the tragedy in Charleston, and tried to justify a Confederate History Month,\" Spain said in a post on X, of Haley. \"She's just as MAGA as Trump,\" Spain added, referring to Trump's \"Make America Great Again\" slogan.\n\nJaime Harrison, current chairman of the Democratic National Committee and South Carolina's party chairman during part of Haley's tenure as governor, said her response was \"not stunning if you were a Black resident in SC when she was Governor.\"\n\n\"Same person who said the confederate flag was about tradition & heritage and as a minority woman she was the right person to defend keeping it on state house grounds,\" Harrison posted Wednesday night on X. \"Some may have forgotten but I haven't. Time to take off the rose colored Nikki Haley glasses folks.\""}
{"text": "# Trump says he didn't know his immigration rhetoric echoes Hitler. That's part of a broader pattern\nBy **JILL COLVIN**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 2:01 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Donald Trump has centered his unlikely rise from reality television star to onetime - and potentially future - president on the idea that he's wiser than Washington's bumbling political class, once going so far as to label himself a \"very stable genius.\"\n\nBut when it comes to one of history's darkest moments, Trump is professing ignorance.\n\nFacing criticism for repeatedly harnessing rhetoric once used by Adolf Hitler to argue that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are \"poisoning the blood of our country,\" Trump insisted he had no idea that one of the world's most reviled and infamous figures once used similar words. The Nazi dictator spoke of impure Jewish blood \"poisoning\" Aryan German blood to dehumanize Jews and justify the systemic murder of millions during the Holocaust.\n\n\"I never knew that Hitler said it,\" Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Friday, volunteering once again that he never read Hitler's biographical manifesto, \"Mein Kampf.\"\n\n\"I know nothing about Hitler,\" he insisted. \"I have no idea what Hitler said other than (what) I've seen on the news. And that's a very, entirely different thing than what I'm saying.\"\n\nTrump's assertion that he knows so little about one of the 20th century's most documented figures is notable for someone seeking the presidency, a role steeped in and shaped by history. But claiming ignorance, particularly when it comes to people who espouse racist or antisemitic rhetoric, is a tactic Trump has repeatedly deployed when aiming to distance himself from uncomfortable storylines.\n\nAfter he was endorsed by former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke during his winning 2016 campaign, Trump insisted he had no knowledge of the white supremacist who had run for office numerous times and is described by the Anti-Defamation League as \"perhaps America's most well-known racist and anti-Semite.\"\n\n\"Just so you understand, I don't know anything about David Duke, OK?\" he told CNN's Jake Tapper in February 2016. \"I don't know anything about what you're even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists.\"\n\nAsked if he would condemn the white supremacists supporting him, Trump said he would \"have to look at the group. I mean, I don't know what group you're talking about.\" He continued to repeat that assertion even after Tapper said he was referring to the KKK.\n\n## OTHER CASES\nTrump has also pleaded ignorance in other cases. As he ran for reelection in 2020, Trump said he didn't know much about QAnon, the convoluted conspiracy that alleges Democrats are involved in a satanic pedophilia ring and casts Trump as the nation's savior - even as he retweeted accounts promoting the conspiracy.\n\n\"I know nothing about it,\" he said during an NBC town hall. Nonetheless, he refused to rule it out as false. \"I don't know that and neither do you,\" he said.\n\nIt was the same when Trump was asked to condemn the Proud Boys militia group, which was key in organizing the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Enrique Tarrio and other members of the far-right extremist group have been found guilty of seditious conspiracy and other crimes for their part in the attack, which was part of a desperate bid to keep Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.\n\n\"I don't know who the Proud Boys are,\" Trump told reporters after instructing the group, during a presidential debate, to \"Stand back and stand by.\"\n\n\"I mean, you'll have to give me a definition 'cause I don't really know who they are,\" Trump said of the group, which was drawing headlines at the time.\n\nTrump has also suggested he was unaware of some of the most consequential periods of American history. At a recent rally in Reno, Nevada, Trump said he had to ask Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to define the post-Civil War era known as Reconstruction as he boasted about his growing popularity with Hispanic voters and Republican wins along the border.\n\n\"They say the first time since Reconstruction. You know what Reconstruction means? That means the Civil War,\" Trump told the audience. \"I said, 'Give me a definition, governor, of Reconstruction. You said I'm the first one to win all of these towns since Reconstruction.' He said, 'Well, Reconstruction: since the Civil War.' That's a long time ago. That's pretty good.\"\n\nTrump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said Trump \"has been very clear that he's talking about criminals and terrorists who have crossed the border under Joe Biden's watch. When he's back in the White House, the United States will return to a secure border and a system that places the safety and security of Americans first.\"\n\n## 'THE MOST SAVAGE CRIME'\nThe former president's claims about Hitler are particularly notable given his upbringing in New York, home to one of the nation's largest Jewish populations.\n\nTrump has also participated in Holocaust memorial events. He spoke at a ceremony at the U.S. Capitol hosted by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2017, where he denounced Holocaust deniers as accomplices to \"horrible evil.\" And he paid a brief visit to Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust memorial, where he called the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews \"the most savage crime against God and his children.\"\n\nTrump's insistence that he has not read \"Mein Kampf\" - an assertion he also made at an Iowa rally last week - evoked a different Hitler book he once allegedly had in his possession.\n\nJournalist Marie Brenner reported in Vanity Fair magazine in 1990 that Trump's ex-wife, Ivana Trump, told her lawyer that, \"from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler's collected speeches, 'My New Order,' which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.\"\n\nTrump told Brenner that, \"it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of 'Mein Kampf,' and he's a Jew.\" Davis confirmed to Brenner that he had indeed given Trump \"a book about Hitler,\" but it was \"My New Order, \" a collection of Hitler's speeches. \"I thought he would find it interesting,\" Davis said, adding, \"I am his friend, but I'm not Jewish.\"\n\n\"Later, Trump returned to this subject.,\" Brenner wrote. \"'If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them,'\" Brenner wrote.\n\n## HISTORY\nKnowing basic American history is important for a president, said Princeton University professor Julian Zelizer, who studies political history.\n\n\"We don't need a historian as president, but certainly you want a president with a feel for some of the basic parts of American history, of world history,\" he said, noting, for instance, that Reconstruction was a \"a formative moment for civil rights and race relations.\"\n\nIn \"Mein Kampf,\" Hitler wrote that, \"All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.\"\n\nTrump told Hewitt his message was \"very different\" and he had \"zero\" racist intent.\n\n\"I'm not a student of Hitler. I never read his works,\" he said. \"They say that he said something about blood. He didn't say it the way I said it, either, by the way. It's a very different kind of a statement. What I'm saying when I talk about people coming into our country is they are destroying our country.\"\n\nStill, he repeated \"poisoning\" references eight times.\n\nAmong those references: \"They are poisoning our country. They are poisoning the blood of our country. They're coming from all over the world. They're coming from prisons. They're coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. They're terrorists. Absolutely that's poisoning our country. That's poisoning the blood of our country. And that's what's happening.\""}
{"text": "# Michigan Supreme Court will keep Trump on 2024 primary ballot\nBy **COREY WILLIAMS** and **NICHOLAS RICCARDI**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 3:21 PM EST\n\n---\n\nMichigan's Supreme Court is keeping former President Donald Trump on the state's primary election ballot.\n\nThe court said Wednesday it will not hear an appeal of a lower court's ruling from groups seeking to keep Trump from appearing on the ballot.\n\nIt said in an order that the application by parties to appeal a Dec. 14 Michigan appeals court judgment was considered, but denied \"because we are not persuaded that the questions presented should be reviewed by this court.\"\n\nThe ruling contrasts with Dec. 19 decision by a divided Colorado Supreme Court which found Trump ineligible to be president because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. That ruling was the first time in history that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment has been used to disqualify a presidential candidate.\n\nThe Michigan and Colorado cases are among dozens hoping to keep Trump's name off state ballots. They all point to the so-called insurrection clause that prevents anyone from holding office who \"engaged in insurrection or rebellion\" against the Constitution. Until the Colorado ruling, all had failed.\n\nThe Colorado ruling is likely to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has never ruled on the rarely used Civil War-era provision.\n\nThe plaintiffs in Michigan can technically try again to disqualify Trump under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment in the general election, though it's likely there will be a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the issue by then. The state's high court on Wednesday upheld an appeals court ruling that the Republican Party could place anyone it wants on the primary ballot. But the court was silent on whether Section 3 of the 14th Amendment would disqualify Trump in November if he becomes the GOP nominee.\n\n\"We are disappointed by the Michigan Supreme Court's decision,\" said Ron Fein, legal director of Free Speech for People, the liberal group that filed the suit to disqualify Trump in the state. \"The ruling conflicts with longstanding US Supreme Court precedent that makes clear that when political parties use the election machinery of the state to select, via the primary process, their candidates for the general election, they must comply with all constitutional requirements in that process.\"\n\nTrump hailed the order, calling the effort to keep him off the ballot in multiple states a \"pathetic gambit.\"\n\nOnly one of the court's seven justices dissented. Justice Elizabeth M. Welch, a Democrat, wrote that she would have kept Trump on the primary ballot but the court should rule on the merits of the Section 3 challenge. The court has a 4-3 Democratic majority.\n\nTrump pressed two election officials in Michigan's Wayne County not to certify 2020 vote totals, according to a recording of a post-election phone call disclosed in a Dec. 22 report by The Detroit News. The former president 's 2024 campaign has neither confirmed nor denied the recording's legitimacy.\n\nAttorneys for Free Speech for People, a liberal nonprofit group also involved in efforts to keep Trump's name off the primary ballot in Minnesota and Oregon, had asked Michigan's Supreme Court to render its decision by Christmas Day.\n\nThe group argued that time was \"of the essence\" due to \"the pressing need to finalize and print the ballots for the presidential primary election.\"\n\nEarlier this month, Michigan's high court refused to immediately hear an appeal, saying the case should remain before the appeals court.\n\nFree Speech for People had sued to force Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to bar Trump from Michigan's ballot. But a Michigan Court of Claims judge rejected that group's arguments, saying in November that it was the proper role of Congress to decide the question.\n\nLooking ahead to the next 14th Amendment decision, Trump's lawyers on Wednesday asked Maine's Democratic Secretary of State to disqualify herself from deciding whether the former president can be on that state's primary ballot. Shenna Bellows held a public hearing earlier this month on requests to bar Trump from the Maine ballot, and her ruling is expected this week.\n\nTrump's attorneys asked Bellows to step aside, pointing to tweets that she posted after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol calling it an \"insurrection\" and bemoaning that Trump wasn't convicted by the U.S. Senate after being impeached by the House of Representatives."}
{"text": "# Nikki Haley has bet her 2024 bid on South Carolina. But much of her home state leans toward Trump\nBy **MEG KINNARD**  \nDecember 27, 2023. 8:18 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**GILBERT, S.C. (AP)** - Standing inside a rustic barn a short drive from the state capital, Henry McMaster shocked many South Carolina Republicans seven years ago by backing Donald Trump for president.\n\nThen the lieutenant governor, McMaster became the first statewide-elected official in the country to endorse Trump in 2016. The event was in Lexington County, the adopted political home of then-Gov. Nikki Haley, who had repeatedly criticized Trump and endorsed Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.\n\nTrump would win the 2016 primary in South Carolina and eventually the presidency. After campaigning against him, Haley would accept his nomination as United Nations ambassador, making McMaster governor.\n\nThat complicated history is coming to the fore as Haley mounts a spirited effort to become the leading Republican alternative to Trump. Her strategy is centered on a strong showing in next month's Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary before much of the campaign's focus shifts to South Carolina, where the Feb. 24 contest could be the last chance for anyone other than Trump to prove they can survive.\n\nBut her home state has shifted closer to Trump in the near-decade since she last ran for state office, threatening her ability to tap into her local roots to notch the victory she has promised.\n\n\"Ten years is an eternity when all politics are national,\" said Matt Moore, a former state GOP chairman. \"Trump tapped into thousands of low-frequency voters who have reshaped South Carolina politics. Many of them weren't focused on state-level issues prior, or even now.\"\n\n## Trump's grip on GOP\nThe former president this time has the endorsement of almost every major South Carolina Republican. Sen. Lindsey Graham, who ran against Trump, suggested he would destroy the Republican Party and openly questioned McMaster's thinking over the 2016 endorsement, is now a close ally of the former president and is co-chairing Trump's state campaign with McMaster.\n\nSouth Carolina's lieutenant governor, state treasurer, attorney general and three of its six Republican U.S. House members all back Trump. The only congressman to endorse Haley is Rep. Ralph Norman, a longtime ally.\n\nTrump drew an estimated 50,000 people to a sweltering Fourth of July rally in Pickens, South Carolina, in the strongly conservative Upstate. Haley, meanwhile, set a record for her campaign last month with 2,500 people along the state's southern coast, known for its wealthier and more traditional conservative set.\n\nJohn Reed, a businessman from upscale Hilton Head Island who donated to Haley's 2010 campaign, backed Trump in 2016 and 2020. But he is supporting Haley this time because he says she offers a contrast from Trump's \"divisive and disrespectful\" tenor.\n\n\"I think Nikki's the best of them because she has abilities and experience,\" said Reed. \"Trump's narcissism and pride and arrogance is just too much for the office.\"\n\nLosing South Carolina would be a huge blow to Haley's campaign, which is counting on outlasting rivals like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and picking up momentum from people open to a Trump alternative. A home state primary loss has devastated previous campaigns, including Rubio, who dropped out of the 2016 primary after a blowout loss to Trump in Florida. Sen. Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the 2020 Democratic race after losing several primaries in one day, including in her home state of Massachusetts.\n\nLexington County, where McMaster endorsed Trump, is Haley's adopted political home and the area she represented in the state legislature. She came back to the same rustic barn in April to hold a rally for her presidential campaign.\n\nShe was little known when she launched a bid for governor against three high-profile candidates - including McMaster - running on a message of fiscal responsibility and going after what she described as entrenched powers in Columbia. She aligned with the \"tea party\" movement that arose during President Barack Obama's first term.\n\nHer key endorsement in that race was Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor who remained a powerhouse in GOP politics after her 2008 vice presidential bid. After also being backed by Mitt Romney, whose 2008 White House run she had supported, Haley nearly won the GOP primary outright and was victorious in the runoff.\n\n## Haley's record\nHaley points to several accomplishments during her six years as governor, including bringing economic investment and jobs to the state, requiring companies to verify the employment eligibility of their workers, and supporting voter ID laws. She's perhaps best remembered nationally for helping to persuade the Legislature to remove the Confederate battle flag from the Statehouse grounds after a mass shooting in which a white gunman killed eight Black church members who were attending Bible study - although Haley had previously dismissed the need for the flag to come down.\n\nHaley's presidential campaign points toward her previous popularity in South Carolina as a signal she will perform well when it comes time for her home state's voters to make their selection.\n\n\"South Carolinians first elected Nikki when she was the anti-establishment, conservative candidate for governor,\" said Olivia Perez-Cubas. \"They know she has what it takes to win because they've seen her beat the odds before - not just once, but twice.\"\n\nBut Trump changed Republican politics in South Carolina and nationally.\n\nThat includes Lexington County, where the county GOP has been roiled for months by a legal battle between two people claiming to oversee it, a split within a recently elected slate supportive of Trump's \"Make America Great Again\" vision.\n\nMichael Burgess, who served as a vice chairman for the Lexington County GOP and described himself as a \"never ever, ever Trumper,\" said he felt the area's shift toward populism in the years after Trump's 2016 election.\n\n\"Lexington County is a microcosm of South Carolina,\" said Burgess, who teaches AP U.S. History at a local high school. \"What we've seen since the 2020 election is a concerted effort by MAGA to take over the county party mechanism, and essentially, when they do that, to drive out long-term establishment Reagan Republicans.\"\n\nBurgess, who said he voted for neither Trump nor Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016 and supported Democrat Joe Biden in 2020, said he had initially backed South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott in the 2024 GOP primary, but now sees Haley as the party's best bet to defeat Trump.\n\nBut another person who supported Haley when she ran in 2010 now blames her for criticizing Trump in 2016, even though he supported her work as governor.\n\n\"When she came out and said, 'We need to ignore a lot of the loud voices,' that kind of really rubbed me wrong, because it was those voices that got her elected governor,\" said Allen Olsen, who founded a \"tea party\" group in South Carolina's capital city of Columbia. \"Although I understood what she was doing, it really kind of felt like I got stabbed in the back.\"\n\nState Rep. RJ May, a leader of the state's House Freedom Caucus, argued Haley is now more of an establishment figure due to her service as governor and then United Nations ambassador.\n\nHe said he doesn't see Trump the same way - even though Trump is now a former president running his third campaign for the White House.\n\n\"It's hard to take that lane from Donald Trump, considering the weaponization of the federal government that we're seeing,\" said May, who has not endorsed a candidate in the presidential primary. \"One thing I don't think you can call Donald Trump is an insider.\"\n\nBut there are still people in South Carolina who have been waiting for Haley to run for the White House.\n\nAt the event in Bluffton, South Carolina, that drew 2,500 people, Veronica Wetzel donned a \"Nikki 2024\" hat she said she bought years ago. Now, she said she's ready to vote for Haley, in part because she wants to see Republicans win in November.\n\n\"I really don't know if Donald Trump can win,\" said Wetzel, adding she had supported Trump in past contests. \"We need to put somebody in there who can win because the last thing we need right now is to lose this election.\""}
{"text": "# Police investigating incidents involving Colorado justices after Trump removed from state's ballot\nBy **COLLEEN SLEVIN**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 8:23 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DENVER (AP)** - Police said Tuesday they are investigating incidents directed at Colorado Supreme Court justices and providing extra patrols around their homes in Denver following the court's decision to remove former President Donald Trump from the state's presidential primary ballot.\n\nThe Denver Police Department declined in an email to provide details about its investigations, citing safety and privacy considerations and because they are ongoing.\n\nThe department \"is currently investigating incidents directed at Colorado Supreme Court justices and will continue working with our local, state and federal law enforcement partners to thoroughly investigate any reports of threats or harassment,\" the email said.\n\nOfficers responded to the home of one justice on Thursday evening, but police said it appeared to be a \"hoax report.\" That case is also still being investigated police said.\n\nThe FBI said it is working with local law enforcement on the matter.\n\n\"We will vigorously pursue investigations of any threat or use of violence committed by someone who uses extremist views to justify their actions regardless of motivation,\" a spokesperson for the Denver's FBI office, Vikki Migoya, said in a statement.\n\nIn a 4-3 decision last week, Colorado's highest court overturned a ruling from a district court judge who found that Trump incited an insurrection for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, but had said he could not be barred from the ballot because it was unclear that U.S. Constitution's insurrection clause was intended to cover the presidency.\n\nThe state's highest court didn't agree, siding with attorneys for six Colorado Republican and unaffiliated voters who argued that it was nonsensical to imagine that the framers of the amendment, fearful of former confederates returning to power, would bar them from low-level offices but not the highest one in the land.\n\nThe court stayed its decision until Jan. 4, or until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the case. Colorado officials say the issue must be settled by Jan. 5, the deadline for the state to print its presidential primary ballots."}
{"text": "# As social media guardrails fade and AI deepfakes go mainstream, experts warn of impact on elections\nBy **ALI SWENSON** and **CHRISTINE FERNANDO**  \nDecember 26, 2023. 3:57 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Nearly three years after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, the false election conspiracy theories that drove the violent attack remain prevalent on social media and cable news: suitcases filled with ballots, late-night ballot dumps, dead people voting.\n\nExperts warn it will likely be worse in the coming presidential election contest. The safeguards that attempted to counter the bogus claims the last time are eroding, while the tools and systems that create and spread them are only getting stronger.\n\nMany Americans, egged on by former President Donald Trump, have continued to push the unsupported idea that elections throughout the U.S. can't be trusted. A majority of Republicans (57%) believe Democrat Joe Biden was not legitimately elected president.\n\nMeanwhile, generative artificial intelligence tools have made it far cheaper and easier to spread the kind of misinformation that can mislead voters and potentially influence elections. And social media companies that once invested heavily in correcting the record have shifted their priorities.\n\n\"I expect a tsunami of misinformation,\" said Oren Etzioni, an artificial intelligence expert and professor emeritus at the University of Washington. \"I can't prove that. I hope to be proven wrong. But the ingredients are there, and I am completely terrified.\"\n\n## AI DEEPFAKES GO MAINSTREAM\nManipulated images and videos surrounding elections are nothing new, but 2024 will be the first U.S. presidential election in which sophisticated AI tools that can produce convincing fakes in seconds are just a few clicks away.\n\nThe fabricated images, videos and audio clips known as deepfakes have started making their way into experimental presidential campaign ads. More sinister versions could easily spread without labels on social media and fool people days before an election, Etzioni said.\n\n\"You could see a political candidate like President Biden being rushed to a hospital,\" he said. \"You could see a candidate saying things that he or she never actually said. You could see a run on the banks. You could see bombings and violence that never occurred.\"\n\nHigh-tech fakes already have affected elections around the globe, said Larry Norden, senior director of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Just days before Slovakia's recent elections, AI-generated audio recordings impersonated a liberal candidate discussing plans to raise beer prices and rig the election. Fact-checkers scrambled to identify them as false, but they were shared as real across social media regardless.\n\nThese tools might also be used to target specific communities and hone misleading messages about voting. That could look like persuasive text messages, false announcements about voting processes shared in different languages on WhatsApp, or bogus websites mocked up to look like official government ones in your area, experts said.\n\nFaced with content that is made to look and sound real, \"everything that we've been wired to do through evolution is going to come into play to have us believe in the fabrication rather than the actual reality,\" said misinformation scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.\n\nRepublicans and Democrats in Congress and the Federal Election Commission are exploring steps to regulate the technology, but they haven't finalized any rules or legislation. That's left states to enact the only restrictions so far on political AI deepfakes.\n\nA handful of states have passed laws requiring deepfakes to be labeled or banning those that misrepresent candidates. Some social media companies, including YouTube and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have introduced AI labeling policies. It remains to be seen whether they will be able to consistently catch violators.\n\n## SOCIAL MEDIA GUARDRAILS FADE\nIt was just over a year ago that Elon Musk bought Twitter and began firing its executives, dismantling some of its core features and reshaping the social media platform into what's now known as X.\n\nSince then, he has upended its verification system, leaving public officials vulnerable to impersonators. He has gutted the teams that once fought misinformation on the platform, leaving the community of users to moderate itself. And he has restored the accounts of conspiracy theorists and extremists who were previously banned.\n\nThe changes have been applauded by many conservatives who say Twitter's previous moderation attempts amounted to censorship of their views. But pro-democracy advocates argue the takeover has shifted what once was a flawed but useful resource for news and election information into a largely unregulated echo chamber that amplifies hate speech and misinformation.\n\nTwitter used to be one of the \"most responsible\" platforms, showing a willingness to test features that might reduce misinformation even at the expense of engagement, said Jesse Lehrich, co-founder of Accountable Tech, a nonprofit watchdog group.\n\n\"Obviously now they're on the exact other end of the spectrum,\" he said, adding that he believes the company's changes have given other platforms cover to relax their own policies. X didn't answer emailed questions from The Associated Press, only sending an automated response.\n\nIn the run-up to 2024, X, Meta and YouTube have together removed 17 policies that protected against hate and misinformation, according to a report from Free Press, a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights in tech and media.\n\nIn June, YouTube announced that while it would still regulate content that misleads about current or upcoming elections, it would stop removing content that falsely claims the 2020 election or other previous U.S. elections were marred by \"widespread fraud, errors or glitches.\" The platform said the policy was an attempt to protect the ability to \"openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial or based on disproven assumptions.\"\n\nLehrich said even if tech companies want to steer clear of removing misleading content, \"there are plenty of content-neutral ways\" platforms can reduce the spread of disinformation, from labeling months-old articles to making it more difficult to share content without reviewing it first.\n\nX, Meta and YouTube also have laid off thousands of employees and contractors since 2020, some of whom have included content moderators.\n\nThe shrinking of such teams, which many blame on political pressure, \"sets the stage for things to be worse in 2024 than in 2020,\" said Kate Starbird, a misinformation expert at the University of Washington.\n\nMeta explains on its website that it has some 40,000 people devoted to safety and security and that it maintains \"the largest independent fact-checking network of any platform.\" It also frequently takes down networks of fake social media accounts that aim to sow discord and distrust.\n\n\"No tech company does more or invests more to protect elections online than Meta - not just during election periods but at all times,\" the posting says.\n\nIvy Choi, a YouTube spokesperson, said the platform is \"heavily invested\" in connecting people to high-quality content on YouTube, including for elections. She pointed to the platform's recommendation and information panels, which provide users with reliable election news, and said the platform removes content that misleads voters on how to vote or encourages interference in the democratic process.\n\nThe rise of TikTok and other, less regulated platforms such as Telegram, Truth Social and Gab, also has created more information silos online where baseless claims can spread. Some apps that are particularly popular among communities of color and immigrants, such as WhatsApp and WeChat, rely on private chats, making it hard for outside groups to see the misinformation that may spread.\n\n\"I'm worried that in 2024, we're going to see similar recycled, ingrained false narratives but more sophisticated tactics,\" said Roberta Braga, founder and executive director of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas. \"But on the positive side, I am hopeful there is more social resilience to those things.\"\n\n## THE TRUMP FACTOR\nTrump's front-runner status in the Republican presidential primary is top of mind for misinformation researchers who worry that it will exacerbate election misinformation and potentially lead to election vigilantism or violence.\n\nThe former president still falsely claims to have won the 2020 election.\n\n\"Donald Trump has clearly embraced and fanned the flames of false claims about election fraud in the past,\" Starbird said. \"We can expect that he may continue to use that to motivate his base.\"\n\nWithout evidence, Trump has already primed his supporters to expect fraud in the 2024 election, urging them to intervene to \" guard the vote \" to prevent vote rigging in diverse Democratic cities. Trump has a long history of suggesting elections are rigged if he doesn't win and did so before voting in 2016 and 2020.\n\nThat continued wearing away of voter trust in democracy can lead to violence, said Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Alliance for Securing Democracy, which tracks misinformation.\n\n\"If people don't ultimately trust information related to an election, democracy just stops working,\" he said. \"If a misinformation or disinformation campaign is effective enough that a large enough percentage of the American population does not believe that the results reflect what actually happened, then Jan. 6 will probably look like a warm-up act.\"\n\n## ELECTION OFFICIALS RESPOND\nElection officials have spent the years since 2020 preparing for the expected resurgence of election denial narratives. They've dispatched teams to explain voting processes, hired outside groups to monitor misinformation as it emerges and beefed up physical protections at vote-counting centers.\n\nIn Colorado, Secretary of State Jena Griswold said informative paid social media and TV campaigns that humanize election workers have helped inoculate voters against misinformation.\n\n\"This is an uphill battle, but we have to be proactive,\" she said. \"Misinformation is one of the biggest threats to American democracy we see today.\"\n\nMinnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon's office is spearheading #TrustedInfo2024, a new online public education effort by the National Association of Secretaries of State to promote election officials as a trusted source of election information in 2024.\n\nHis office also is planning meetings with county and city election officials and will update a \"Fact and Fiction\" information page on its website as false claims emerge. A new law in Minnesota will protect election workers from threats and harassment, bar people from knowingly distributing misinformation ahead of elections and criminalize people who non-consensually share deepfake images to hurt a political candidate or influence an election.\n\n\"We hope for the best but plan for the worst through these layers of protections,\" Simon said.\n\nIn a rural Wisconsin county north of Green Bay, Oconto County Clerk Kim Pytleski has traveled the region giving talks and presentations to small groups about voting and elections to boost voters' trust. The county also offers equipment tests in public so residents can observe the process.\n\n\"Being able to talk directly with your elections officials makes all the difference,\" she said. \"Being able to see that there are real people behind these processes who are committed to their jobs and want to do good work helps people understand we are here to serve them.\""}
{"text": "# In battleground Arizona, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. draws Biden and Trump voters united by distrust\nBy **JONATHAN J. COOPER**  \nDecember 25, 2023. 8:25 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**PHOENIX (AP)** - Some voted for Donald Trump, others for Joe Biden. A few had never wanted anything to do with politics before they heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on a podcast or YouTube video.\n\nLined up outside a Phoenix wedding hall tucked between a freeway, a railroad track and a U-Haul rental center, the hundreds of people who turned out Wednesday to hear Kennedy speak shared little in common ideologically. What united them was a deep-seated distrust - of the media, of corporations and especially of the government - and a belief that Kennedy is the only person in politics willing to tell them the truth.\n\n\"I like that he talks to us like adults,\" said Gilbert Limon, a 48-year-old pharmacist from Phoenix. \"He tells you the majority of what you need to know. Whereas I feel like (other politicians) just give you bits and pieces to try to fit their agenda. I've had enough of that.\"\n\nVoters are not enthusiastic about a Biden-Trump rematch, and alternatives like Kennedy or the No Labels third-party movement, which would typically be longshots, see an opening. Kennedy's appearance in a 2024 battleground state highlights how he could influence the election in ways that are tough to predict. Allies of both Trump and Biden have expressed concerns that Kennedy's independent bid could pull votes from their candidate in next year's expected general election rematch.\n\nCandidates from outside the Republican and Democratic parties rarely make a splash, if they can make the ballot to begin with. But third-party candidates don't usually carry a famous last name like Kennedy's, or his existing network of supporters.\n\nKennedy made the stop in Phoenix as part of his laborious push to get access to the 2024 presidential ballot as an independent candidate, which he figures will require him to collect at least a million signatures across the country. Aides mingled in the crowd, filling up his petitions to qualify in Arizona.\n\nBallot access for independent and minor-party candidates is an expensive and complicated process, with each state setting its own rules. Campaigns usually hire people to collect signatures and often need a small army of lawyers to challenge access rules and fight back against others trying to keep the candidates off the ballot.\n\nAmerican Values 2024, a super PAC supporting Kennedy, has pledged to spend $15 million to help him get on the ballot in 10 states. Kennedy secured a victory in Utah, where the lieutenant governor pushed back the deadline to qualify from January to March after Kennedy filed suit.\n\nKennedy is a member of one of the Democratic Party's most famous families - his father was the attorney general for his uncle, President John F. Kennedy. But he's more recently built closer ties to the far right, where his conspiratorial and isolationist views are at home.\n\nEnriqueta Porras, a 52-year-old physician from Phoenix, voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Trump in 2020. She said she's torn about the third-party conundrum. She'd like to vote for someone she believes in, like Kennedy, but also wants to make sure Biden loses and may vote strategically.\n\n\"I don't want to be that person,\" Porras said, \"but I feel like there's a lot at stake and that may just have to happen.\"\n\nOne of the nation's most prominent anti-vaccine activists, Kennedy has long had a loyal following of people who reject the scientific consensus that vaccines are safe and effective, and they form a backbone of his presidential campaign.\n\nAn organization that Kennedy founded, Children's Health Defense, currently has a lawsuit pending against a number of news organizations, among them The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines.\n\nRigorous study and real-world evidence from hundreds of millions of administered shots prove that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective. Deaths caused by vaccination are extremely rare and the risks associated with not getting vaccinated are far higher than the risks of vaccination.\n\nAmong the dozen Kennedy supporters who spoke to the AP in Phoenix, many share his view that corporations, especially drug companies, wield too much power.\n\nDebra Sheetz first started paying attention to Kennedy when she was doing her own research on COVID-19 vaccinations.\n\n\"I've been listening to him for the last several years,\" she said. \"I was so interested when he decided to make this big leap into politics because he has a lot of good ideas. He can really speak to what people really care about.\"\n\nSheetz, 71, voted for Biden in 2020, she said sheepishly, because she found him to have \"more balance, a little more sanity\" compared with Trump. But she was disillusioned by Biden's support for pandemic-era restrictions and what she sees as a loss of freedom to speak freely.\n\n\"We lost our First Amendment,\" said Sheetz, who lives in Ashland, Oregon, but has spent the past few years traveling the country in her RV. \"The most important thing is the ability for free speech and free ideas to share. Other ways to look at things. If you lose that, authoritarianism is there.\"\n\nCurt Eastin, a 65-year-old professional coach from Chandler, a Phoenix suburb, voted for Biden in 2020 but won't again. If Kennedy weren't running, he'd vote for Trump next year, he said.\n\n\"I like that I can trust him. I think he's honest,\" he said. \"And even if I don't agree with him, I know that he came to his conclusions honestly. I can't trust any of the other people.\"\n\nKennedy is keenly aware that his fans avoid the mainstream media, where journalists often flag the falsity of his vaccine claims, in favor of free-wheeling alternative sources online. He said he's drawing support especially from young people but struggling with people in his own generation.\n\n\"The problem with the baby boomers, I think, is they get their news from MSNBC, Fox and CNN,\" he told the crowd in Phoenix, which responded with boos. \"Whereas young people are getting their news from podcasts and other alternative sources.\"\n\nThird party or independent candidates rarely do well in presidential contests. Even the most successful recent example, Ross Perot in 1992, didn't win a single electoral vote despite winning 19% of the popular vote.\n\nSometimes, minor-party candidates will get enough votes that partisans will blame them for tipping the scales to elect the popular vote loser, like Ralph Nader in 2000 or Jill Stein in 2016, both Green Party candidates.\n\n\"One of the biggest reasons I like him is because of his stance on partisanship in our House and our Senate, and I like how he wants to try and reunite both of them,\" said Michael Chacon, a 23-year-old student in Tempe who has never voted and still wasn't sure whether he will in 2024. \"I think that's a really good idea. I think cooperation would go along way.\""}
{"text": "# Trump says he's eager to debate Biden in 2024, even if controversial commission plans events\nBy **JILL COLVIN**  \nDecember 22, 2023. 1:55 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Former President Donald Trump says he is eager to debate President Joe Biden, even if the debates are sponsored by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates. And he says he is open to debating a single Republican rival if a serious challenger emerges after the New Hampshire primary.\n\nTrump, who has skipped all of the primary debates so far citing his commanding lead in the polls, was asked if he will debate Biden if named his party's nominee during an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt Friday.\n\n\"Oh will I look forward to that,\" Trump responded. \"How about 10 debates?\"\n\nThat's even, he said, if the debates are sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which he and fellow Republicans have railed against for years.\n\n\"They are totally corrupt and they're terrible. With that being said, I would do 20 debates, even if it was organized by them. I would do as many debates as they want,\" he said. \"I'd do a debate every night with this guy.\"\n\nThe Republican National Committee voted unanimously in April 2022 to withdraw from the commission's events, alleging biased, and required that candidates sign a pledge vowing to only participate in debates sanctioned by the committee. Trump, however, never signed the pledge.\n\nThe nonprofit was established in 1987 and has sponsored every general election presidential and vice presidential debates since. The organization outlines the rules for each debate and selects the locations, dates and moderators for the events.\n\nTrump also said in the interview that he would be willing to participate in a Republican primary debate if the race comes down to just him and a single rival after the New Hampshire primary. Public polls currently show him with large leads in all the early-voting states, but Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, has been gaining ground, particularly in New Hampshire.\n\n\"Yeah, I would, if it was very close, I would debate that Republican,\" Trumps said.\n\nStill, Trump claimed he is \"not worried\" about Haley, who also served as ambassador to the United Nations during the Trump administration.\n\nBiden's campaign has not yet committed to general election debates next year. Quentin Fulks, Biden's top deputy campaign manager, told reporters earlier this month that the campaign would \"look at the schedule\" that the Commission on Presidential Debates released in November, but that \"right now\" their \"focus is on making sure we continue to build out a campaign and infrastructure that's going to be able to be competitive in 2024.\"\n\nTrump has skipped all of the GOP primary debates, but has long said a general election campaign would be different.\n\n\"We have to debate,\" he told Fox News host Bret Baier in a June interview. \"He and I have to definitely debate. That's what I love. The two of us have to debate.\"\n\nThe commission has set a schedule of three presidential debates to be held in college towns in Texas, Virginia and Utah between Sept. 16 and Oct. 9, 2024, as well as one vice presidential debate in Pennsylvania.\n\nAs president, Trump repeatedly accused the commission of unfair treatment and ultimately refused to participate in the second 2020 debate after a decision was made for it to be held virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic. National Democrats also expressed frustration with the commission in 2020, accusing it of failing to enforce rules when it came to Trump.\n\nBiden's campaign, the commission, and the RNC did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Trump's remarks Friday."}
{"text": "# Tape reveals Donald Trump pressured Michigan officials not to certify 2020 vote, a new report says\nBy **The Associated Press**  \nDecember 22, 2023. 3:26 PM EST\n\n---\n\nDonald Trump pressured two election officials not to certify 2020 vote totals in a key Michigan county, according to a recording of a post-election phone call disclosed in a new report by The Detroit News.\n\nThe former president 's 2024 campaign neither confirmed nor denied the recording's legitimacy, insisting in a statement that all of Trump's actions after his defeat to Democrat Joe Biden were taken to uphold his oath of office and ensure fair elections.\n\nTrump has consistently repeated falsehoods about the 2020 election as he runs again for the White House. No evidence of voter fraud that could have changed the outcome of the election has since emerged in a litany of federal, state and outside investigations.\n\nThe Nov. 17, 2020, telephone call included then-President Trump, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and Wayne County elections authorities Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, both of them Republicans, The Detroit News reported. Trump told the two canvassers that they would look \"terrible\" if they certified results after having initially opposed certification, the newspaper said. The two ultimately issued signed affidavits asserting their opposition to certifying Wayne County's results.\n\nThe newspaper said the recordings were made by a person who was present for the call with Palmer and Hartmann.\n\nThe report comes as Trump seeks the 2024 Republican nomination while grappling with multiple criminal indictments, including a federal case and a Georgia case tied to his efforts to overturn Biden's victory. As he campaigns for a return to the White House, Trump continues to repeat the lies that the 2020 election was stolen, despite multiple recounts and court cases confirming his defeat.\n\nBiden won Michigan, with Wayne County, which includes Detroit, providing a trove of Democratic votes. As such, it was one of the key places Trump focused on in the weeks after Election Day in 2020.\n\n\"We've got to fight for our country,\" Trump said on the recordings, according to The News. \"We can't let these people take our country away from us.\"\n\nNational GOP Chairwoman McDaniel, a Michigan native, reportedly said during the call: \"If you can go home tonight, do not sign it,\" adding, \"We will get you attorneys.\"\n\nTrump is said to have reinforced the point, assuring the local officials: \"We'll take care of that.\"\n\nSteven Cheung, a Trump spokesman, said in a statement Friday that Trump's actions were \"were taken in furtherance of his duty as President of the United States to faithfully take care of the laws and ensure election integrity.\"\n\n\"President Trump and the American people have the Constitutional right to free and fair elections,\" Cheung said.\n\nTrump sat Friday for a lengthy interview on conservative radio but host Hugh Hewitt did not ask about the Michigan report. Trump instead spent the interview clarifying his remarks earlier this month that he had \"day one\" plans akin to being a \"dictator. \" Asked directly on Friday whether he would rule as an authoritarian, Trump responded: \"Not at all. No, I'm gonna rule as somebody that's very popular with the people.\"\n\nTrump also doubled down on previous comments that people entering the U.S. illegally are \"poisoning the blood of our country.\" He insisted he was \"not talking about a specific group\" and said he had not been aware that he was using rhetoric that Adolf Hitler used as German dictator.\n\n\"I know nothing about Hitler. I'm not a student of Hitler. I never read his works,\" Trump told Hewitt. Despite those denials, Trump insisted confidently that Hitler \"didn't say it the way I said it.\"\n\nHewitt did ask whether Trump, if he were elected to another term, would willingly cede power when it concluded and he was constitutionally barred from holding office any longer.\n\n\"Of course. And I did that this time,\" he said, before reverting to his false claims of a rigged 2020 election.\n\nThe Republican National Committee did not immediately respond on Friday to The Detroit News' report around the 2020 telephone call featuring McDaniel.\n\nThe new disclosure of the recording appears to add details to communications with local officials referenced in the Jan. 6 committee's final report on Trump's actions after the 2020 election and leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters on the day that Congress convened to ratify the Electoral College results.\n\nThat congressional report states that Trump and McDaniel called Palmer and Hartmann \"about 20 minutes after\" the two officials had changed their initial votes and agreed to certify the results. \"The Select Committee doesn't know what President Trump privately said on that phone call,\" the report states. The committee states that Hartmann, at the time of the congressional inquiry, said that he was not pressured in a conversation he described as involving \"general comments about different states.\" But the Jan. 6 committee emphasized Palmer and Hartmann's decision, made after Trump's call, to issue the signed affidavits reasserting their original opposition to certification.\n\nThe Michigan call would have occurred about six weeks before another call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. That conversation is among the key points in Trump's indictment in Fulton County that accuses the former president of a racketeering scheme to overturn Biden's narrow victory in Georgia.\n\n\"I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,\" Trump told Raffensperger in that call. \"Because we won the state.\"\n\nGeorgia counted its votes three times before certifying Biden's win by a 11,779-vote margin.\n\nA recording of Trump is also at issue in a Florida-based federal case accusing the former president of mishandling classified information after leaving the White House. In that case, prosecutors allege that in a July 2021 interview, Trump showed people, who were working on a book about his former chief of staff Mark Meadows, classified information about a Pentagon plan of attack on an unspecified foreign country.\n\n\"These are the papers,\" Trump says in a moment that seems to indicate he's holding a secret Pentagon document. \"This was done by the military, given to me.\""}
{"text": "# Need last-minute gifts? Presidential hopefuls offer ornaments, gift wrap - and Trump mug shot merch\nBy **MEG KINNARD**  \nDecember 22, 2023. 12:06 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP)** - The field of 2024 presidential candidates may have some options for shoppers scrambling for a last-minute holiday gift.\n\nAs the campaign for the White House kicks into full gear, the contenders are offering an onslaught of holiday-themed merchandise, many of which capture some of the surreal aspects of the 2024 race. Donald Trump, for instance, is embracing his status as the first former president to face criminal charges by emblazoning his mug shot on Christmas sweaters, gift wrap and stockings.\n\nTrump and his supporters have embraced the image of him intensely glaring into a Fulton County Jail camera since he surrendered on charges that he illegally tried to interfere in Georgia's 2020 election.\n\nTrump's campaign is hardly backing away from his status, offering items emblazoned with the mug shot almost immediately after it was taken in August, with nearly daily emails offering supporters a mug, T-shirt or poster bearing the image, along with the words \"Never Surrender.\"\n\nNearly all of the 2024 candidates have online stores and most have tchotchkes that riff on the year's politics.\n\nYou can snag a Nikki Haley tree ornament and wrapping paper emblazoned with the hopeful's campaign logo, or a litany of more traditional items like hats, shirts, and even \"Past my prime?\" drink koozies that harken back to the comment that led in part to Don Lemon being bounced from CNN.\n\nDon't forget Ron DeSantis' set of golf balls whose box bares the phrase that he \"has a pair\" - a slight at Trump for not participating in the GOP primary debates. Or Vivek Ramaswamy's \"Nikki = Corrupt\" T-shirt, the phrase the entrepreneur wrote on a notepad after a debate night tirade against Haley's service on the board of aerospace giant Boeing Co.\n\nDemocrats are also taking advantage of the chance to pump up their sales - and the associated campaign donations that come with them. President Joe Biden's reelection campaign has a slew of the usual apparel fare. There's also its line of \"Dark Brandon\" shirts, signs, mugs and even holiday gift wrap with the president's red-eyed caricature that embraces the 2021-era \"Let's Go Brandon\" phrase intended as an insult (but which Democrats have aimed to operationalize in a tongue-in-cheek battle cry).\n\nRobert F. Kennedy Jr.'s store has apparel, stickers and a number of items with \"No shirt, no shoes, no Secret Service,\" recalling the independent candidate's ongoing denial of federal protection despite security issues during his campaign.\n\nYou're out of luck, though, if you're looking for official Chris Christie or Dean Phillips merch - holiday or otherwise - although there are a number of third-party purveyors ready to hook you up with shirts, hats and even beach towels.\n\nThe Trump mug shot merch has been popping up along the campaign trail as Trump and others have been stumping across Iowa ahead of the Jan. 15 caucuses.\n\nA Christmas version features a red and white Santa hat atop Trump's head. There's also a mug shot Christmas stocking and with wrapping paper to match, as well as another version with the candidate pumping his fist in the air.\n\nAt a recent Trump campaign event in Cedar Rapids, there was plenty of Trump merchandise in the crowd of at least 700, with the former president's name, \"Make America Great Again\" slogan and his mug shot blazoned on hats, T-shirts signs and more. One couple, who declined to speak to an Associated Press reporter, were wearing matching red and green MAGA Christmas sweaters.\n\nPat Sand, a 57-year-old from Marcus, Iowa, who was wearing a Trump campaign hat and button, said Trump's use of his mug shot on merchandise, including on Christmas-themed items, \"puts the name and the face out there, good or bad.\"\n\nSand said he has novelty toilet paper that features Trump's mug shot on it - although he added, with a laugh, that he does not use it.\n\n\"My daughter got it for me,\" he said. \"It was sarcasm.\"\n\nOutside the event, Scott Bohac from the Cleveland, Ohio, area was one of a handful of sellers of unofficial merchandise that set up tables and tents outside Trump's events.\n\nAs the crowd was streaming home and a winter storm was starting to roll in, Bohac - who has spent the last three years traveling the country selling shirts outside Trump rallies - was folding the last few T-shirts he made for that day's event.\n\n\"Some of these vendors got like 20 different shirts. I push one shirt,\" said Bohac, who said he designs a new one for each event with the date and location of the rally - like a concert - along with a word like \"Trump\" and some kind of image in the center, which he said is \"usually always eagles.\"\n\nSaying he has not started selling the designs featuring Trump's mug shot, Bohac said sales have gone up for him since Trump started facing criminal indictments, and that it's smart for the campaign to use it.\n\n\"I just left that for everybody else,\" he said. \"I do my thing.\"\n\nCampaigns use their merchandising opportunities - from \"Dark Brandon\" to \"Nikki = Corrupt\" to the mug shot - to seize on the moment, said J. Mark Powell, a GOP strategist and longtime collector of political memorabilia in South Carolina.\n\n\"What we're seeing in this cycle is making the most of things that are talked about at this very moment, but which will soon turn into trivia questions for political junkies,\" he said, adding that the fast fashion way that campaigns utilize third-party vendors to make and sell their wares also brings in donations and user data, as well as visibility and generates pride among supporters.\n\n\"Giving someone a Biden coffee mug or a roll of Trump wrapping paper isn't going to change the mind of a single undecided or independent voter,\" said. \"It just makes existing supporters feel good about their candidate.\"\n\nIn the future, Powell said that he imagines a campaign merchandising strategy that might reflect fewer novelty items and more ideology.\n\n\"Could liberals one day have the opportunity to buy an electric scooter to show their support for green energy, or conservatives purchase a barrier to be placed on a border wall?\" he asked. \"It sounds farfetched now, but who would have imagined Trump wrapping paper five years ago?\""}
{"text": "# New Mexico parties certify 5 GOP candidates for June presidential primary amid challenge to Trump\nBy **MORGAN LEE**  \nDecember 22, 2023. 2:46 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SANTA FE, N.M. (AP)** - Donald Trump is among a slate of presidential candidates New Mexico's major political parties certified Friday to appear on the state's June 4 primary ballots, amid uncertainty about whether any state can bar the former president from contention under anti-insurrection provisions of the U.S. Constitution.\n\nTrump is among five contenders for the GOP nomination who a presidential primary nominating committee certified for New Mexico's primary ballot. The Republican Party reserved the option to withdraw candidates from the primary until mid-February if any drop out of national contention.\n\nFor now, the certified Republican candidates include former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy.\n\n\"If nobody drops out, fine, we'll keep it the way it is,\" state Republican Party Chairman Steve Pearce said.\n\nNew Mexico Supreme Court Chief Justice C. Shannon Bacon oversaw the committee meeting with one or more representatives from each party, including the Libertarian Party of New Mexico that earned major party status with a strong showing in the 2016 presidential election. Lars Mapstead was presented as the sole contender for the Libertarian presidential nomination.\n\nParty-certified presidential candidates will be vetted in February by the New Mexico secretary of state's office to ensure they meet administrative requirements to run for the office. New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat, said she won't exclude candidates that meet administrative requirements - unless a court with jurisdiction intervenes.\n\nThe Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday barred Trump from the state's ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits anyone from holding office who swore an oath to support the Constitution and then \"engaged in insurrection\" against it. It's the first time in history the provision has been used to prohibit someone from running for the presidency, and the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to have the final say over whether the ruling will stand.\n\nLittle-known presidential candidate John Anthony Castro has challenged Trump's eligibility to appear on the ballot in New Mexico and Arizona in federal court based on anti-insurrection provisions of the 14th Amendment. The Arizona lawsuit was dismissed earlier this month and a ruling is pending in New Mexico. Trump lost the New Mexico vote in 2016 and again in 2020 by a wider margin.\n\nPearce, the GOP chairman, said Trump should be allowed to compete for the nomination in New Mexico regardless of litigation, arguing that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol was not an insurrection.\n\n\"Even if (Trump) gets convicted of something in all of these cases, that doesn't prohibit him from running and serving,\" Pearce said after Friday's meeting. \"Everybody should be treated fairly under the law, and I don't think that's occurring.\"\n\nA county commissioner in southern New Mexico last year was removed and banished from public office by a state district court judge for engaging in insurrection at the Jan. 6, 2021, riots that disrupted Congress from certifying Joe Biden's presidential victory.\n\nFormer Otero County commissioner Couy Griffin has appealed that ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court after the New Mexico Supreme Court declined to hear the case based on missed filing deadlines. It's unclear whether the U.S. Supreme Court will take up Griffin's case once it's fully briefed next year.\n\nThe constitutional provision used to bar Griffin - and now Trump in Colorado - has only been used a handful of times. It originally was created to prevent former Confederates from returning to government positions.\n\n\"These are constitutional issues and it is not the secretary of state's role to make this kind of a legal finding in New Mexico,\" said Alex Curtas, a spokesperson to Secretary of State Toulouse Oliver. \"As long as a candidate meets all the administrative requirements to be placed on the ballot in 2024, they would not be excluded from the ballot unless a court with jurisdiction made a legal finding and ordered that person to be excluded.\"\n\nDemocratic Party-certified candidates in New Mexico include not only President Joe Biden but also Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips and self-help author Marianne Williamson."}
{"text": "# A voter pushed Nikki Haley to call Donald Trump a 'grave danger' to the US. Here's how she responded\nBy **THOMAS BEAUMONT**  \nDecember 21, 2023. 6:30 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ANAMOSA, Iowa (AP)** - Nikki Haley stopped short Thursday of answering one Iowa voter's question the way he'd hoped.\n\nAsked by 44-year-old Jacob Schunk to label Donald Trump a \"grave danger to our country,\" Haley ticked through criticisms of the former president ranging from foreign policy to government spending. And then the former United Nations ambassador addressed the challenge that she and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, her closest rival for second place behind Trump, are facing just weeks before primary voting begins.\n\n\"The problem is, what I have faced is anti-Trumpers don't think I hate him enough. Pro-Trumpers don't think I love him enough,\" Haley told Schunk at a town hall in eastern Iowa.\n\nHaley's comment reflects one of the central challenges facing her campaign as she tries to win over those who still admire the former president without alienating them. It's a balancing act that will likely intensify in final weeks ahead of the Jan. 15 Iowa caucuses, where a stronger-than expected showing could give Haley a boost heading into the New Hampshire, where she has gained support and appears right now to be the best-positioned Trump alternative.\n\nHer chief rival to become Trump's leading foil, DeSantis, is facing a similarly challenging dynamic as he steps up criticism of the former president while criticizing the litany of court cases that could remove him from the ballot in some states. On Wednesday, DeSantis attacked the Colorado Supreme Court's ruling that Trump was ineligible for the ballot under to the U.S. Constitution, suggesting the court was trying to boost Trump and help Democrats who want to run against him.\n\nSpeaking with the Christian Broadcasting Network on Thursday, DeSantis argued that the criminal indictments had made it harder to run against Trump by \"distorting the primary.\"\n\n\"I would say if I could have one thing change, I wish Trump hadn't been indicted on any of this stuff,\" he said. \"It's just crowded out, I think, so much other stuff, and it's sucked out a lot of oxygen.\"\n\nTrump and his campaign team have mostly tried to tear down DeSantis but are devoting new attention to Haley in recent days. Allies of both Trump and DeSantis have aired ads in which she is accused of reversing her position to not raise South Carolina's gas tax when she served as governor.\n\nThe ads left out that Haley said she would only sign the 2015 measure to raise the gas tax if lawmakers agreed to cut state income taxes. The plan ultimately died.\n\n\"I'm getting it from all angles,\" she said. \"And I get it. That means we're surging.\"\n\nHaley addressed an audience of about 100 people on Thursday as she wrapped up a four-day campaign trip through small Iowa cities. Haley didn't cite the indictments against Trump but suggested as she often does that his leadership is too chaotic given the threats the U.S. faces.\n\nSchunk said afterward that he is leaning toward supporting her even if she didn't say exactly what he wanted.\n\n\"She was 95% there,\" Schunk said after the event. \"I think there's some strategy there in terms of she's not quite saying Donald Trump is a danger to the country. I think she thinks it. But she's not willing to say it.\""}
{"text": "# Man accused of texting death threats to Ramaswamy faces similar charges involving 2 more candidates\nBy **KATHY McCORMACK**  \nDecember 21, 2023. 1:56 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CONCORD, N.H. (AP)** - A New Hampshire man who was released from jail after he was accused of sending text messages threatening to kill a presidential candidate now faces two more charges that he threatened the lives of different candidates.\n\nTyler Anderson, 30, of Dover, was indicted by a federal grand jury Wednesday on three counts of sending a threat using interstate commerce. He is scheduled to be arraigned on Jan. 5.\n\nA message seeking comment was sent to his lawyer.\n\nAnderson was arrested on Dec. 9 and was released Dec. 14. A federal judge set forth several conditions for his release, including that he avoid contact with any presidential candidate and their political campaigns. Anderson, who is receiving mental health treatment, must also take all of his prescribed medications. Guns in his home, belonging to a roommate, must be removed.\n\nThe U.S. Attorney's office did not name the candidates. When Anderson was arrested, a spokesperson for Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said that the texts were directed at his campaign. According to court documents, Anderson received a text message from the candidate's campaign notifying him of a breakfast event in Portsmouth. The campaign staff received two text messages in response. One threatened to shoot the candidate in the head, the other threatened to kill everyone at the event and desecrate their corpses.\n\nAnderson had told the FBI in an interview that he had sent similar texts to \"multiple other campaigns,\" according to a court document.\n\nThe latest charges say similar texts were sent to two different candidates before the Ramaswamy messages, on Nov. 22 and Dec. 6.\n\nOn Nov. 22, a campaign received texts threatening to \"impale\" and \"disembowel\" a candidate. On Dec. 6, texts were sent to another candidate's campaign with threats to shoot the candidate in the head and conduct a mass shooting.\n\nA court document filed when Anderson was arrested included a screenshot of texts from Dec. 6 threatening a mass shooting in response to an invitation to see a candidate \"who isn't afraid to tell it like it is.\" Republican Chris Christie calls his events \"Tell it Like It Is Town Halls.\"\n\nA spokesperson for the Christie campaign had thanked law enforcement officials for addressing those threats.\n\nEach charge provides for a sentence of up to five years in prison, up to three years of supervised release, and a fine of up to $250,000."}
{"text": "# Harris to kick off 2024 with stops in Nevada, South Carolina, home to some of Democrats' first votes\nBy **MEG KINNARD**  \nDecember 21, 2023. 1:14 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP)** - Vice President Kamala Harris is visiting Nevada and South Carolina next month, two of the earliest states on the Democratic presidential calendar, where she'll court voters she and President Joe Biden hope to win over.\n\nHarris will meet with members of the powerful casino workers' Culinary Union in Las Vegas on Jan. 3, which offers one of the most powerful endorsements in Nevada Democratic politics, the White House said Thursday.\n\nThree days later, she plans to head to Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, home of the Democrats' leadoff primary, to address an annual women's retreat of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest historically Black denomination in the U.S.\n\nHarris has been touring the country to tout the administration's accomplishments, most recently angling to energize younger voters during a multi-stop college tour. Next month she plans to embark on a nationwide series of events to rally voters to give Biden a second term and regain full control of Congress.\n\nBoth South Carolina and Nevada are critical early-voting states for Biden and Harris as they seek reelection next year. The visit will be Harris' seventh as vice president to South Carolina, where Black voters play a critical role in Democratic politics - one of the reasons for the White House-led schedule overhaul that placed the state's primary first on the 2024 voting calendar on Feb. 3.\n\nNew Hampshire, which has traditionally voted first, is still holding its contest on Jan. 23. Biden isn't participating or campaigning there, and the state is risking possible penalties over its decision.\n\nThe White House says Harris' stop in Nevada will be her ninth while in office. The state, which has a 29% Latino population will hold its primary three days after South Carolina on Feb. 6.\n\nWhen she ran for president in 2019, Harris held a town hall meeting with the union's rank-and-file members. Though most of the 2020 Democratic candidates held private meetings with the union's leaders, Harris was the first to get a coveted invite to speak to members. Ultimately, the union didn't endorse anyone in the Democratic primary.\n\nCulinary's 60,000 members are mostly women and immigrants - immigration reform, health care and worker issues are among the union's top priorities. Last month, the union ended a lengthy labor dispute that had brought the threat of a historic strike to the Strip, voting to approve their contract agreement with casino giant Caesars Entertainment. The White House said Harris intends to celebrate the victory with union members."}
{"text": "# Biden should keep expanding approach to Black voters, group of Democratic strategists says\nBy **BILL BARROW**  \nDecember 21, 2023. 12:37 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ATLANTA (AP)** - Some top Democrats are worried that a dip in Black voter turnout, along with other challenges, could doom President Joe Biden and his party in 2024.\n\nA group of Democrats is offering a new analysis of the most recent campaigns in Georgia and Michigan, pitching those battlegrounds as models for drawing in more Black voters next year and beyond. They argue that Democratic power players need to think - and spend money - in new ways, going beyond efforts that can be last-minute or superficial as they try to reassemble Biden's 2020 coalition.\n\n\"The days of the symbolic fish fry and one-time church visit are over,\" wrote the authors of the analysis by strategists widely credited for helping flip Georgia and Michigan to Biden. \"Black voters have always required an approach to voter engagement as diverse as the Black voting coalition.\"\n\nBiden has long depended on Black voters - first as a Delaware senator and most notably in the 2020 South Carolina primary, which delivered him a decisive win that led much of the Democratic field to consolidate behind him. And his campaign says the president's reelection effort already reflects the priorities and approach advocated by the outside strategists.\n\n\"The campaign is designing comprehensive and robust programs in battleground states to mobilize and engage Black voters,\" said Michael Tyler, the campaign's communications director. He noted the campaign already is running targeted digital ads and building outreach programs in Black communities, months earlier than presidential campaigns typically have launched such efforts.\n\nYet just 50% of Black adults said they approve of Biden in a December poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs. That is compared with 86% in July 2021, with the gap fueling concerns about his reelection prospects.\n\nThe new report, shared exclusively with The Associated Press and being presented privately to Democratic power players, contends as part of several recommendations that the left must more regularly engage all Black voters, including the most reluctant, while amplifying arguments about abortion rights in Black communities.\n\nSaid Lauren Groh-Wargo, a leader of the push and longtime adviser to Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams: \"People need to see something different; they need to see you coming to them and asking for their vote in their cultural spaces.\"\n\nThe authors include veterans of Abrams' operation and Michigan's efforts to approve an abortion-rights referendum and re-elect Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Abrams lost her second bid against Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, but Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock beat Herschel Walker to retain his Senate seat, bolstered in part by years of work by Abrams and other organizers.\n\nThe report explores why the two states' 2022 electorates differed from other racially diverse battlegrounds. The contributors want to share their conclusions with the party's biggest donors and top strategists, including those running Biden's 2024 campaign. One of Biden's top campaign aides, Quentin Fulks, managed Warnock's campaign, a point Tyler noted in his response to the report. Fulks and Tyler are both Georgia natives.\n\nThe campaign's approach so far is \"happening through the leadership of ... a native Georgian from a rural county who won statewide in Georgia last cycle and helped drive historic turnout in one of the most competitive states in the country,\" Tyler said.\n\nArizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are the seven states that will be critical in deciding the Electoral College next year. Across those states in 2022, Black turnout dropped, on average, about 22% from the 2018 midterms, according to multiple Democratic firms' data analysis. Lagging Black support for Biden in any three of those states next fall could cut off his path to the required 270 electoral votes.\n\nMichigan's Black turnout in 2022 was about 90% of its 2018 totals, according to the analysis. But among Black voters under 35, the 2022 turnout was 96% of 2018 levels - notably outpacing other battlegrounds, Georgia included. That bolstered Whitmer's nearly 11-point victory and the abortion rights referendum, which passed by 13 points. The analysis found Michigan's Black voters supported the initiative by a higher proportion than any other race or ethnicity; that finding was repeated recently in Ohio's abortion referendum, authors said.\n\n\"We were open to the research that showed us just how much this would resonate in Black communities,\" said Michigan Democratic Chairwoman Lavora Barnes, the first Black woman to hold her post and a co-author of the report.\n\n\"We made it part of a broader message about rights and freedom,\" she added, saying Black Americans, because of their historical experience with oppression, are especially attuned to \"having our rights taken away.\"\n\nWhitmer, who embraced the nonpartisan abortion-rights campaign, said the lessons must carry forward as some Republicans propose national abortion restrictions.\n\n\"My generation assumed that these rights would always be intact for us and our children,\" the governor, 52, said recently. \"Lo and behold, here we are having to fight over and over again to protect these rights.\"\n\nBlack turnout in Georgia, meanwhile, was about 92% of 2018 levels; Black voters over 50 exceeded their 2018 marks.\n\nIf Georgia's Black turnout had tracked the 2022 battleground average, the analysis calculates that about 175,000 fewer voters would have cast November ballots. With Warnock winning more than 9 out of 10 Black votes, that shortfall almost certainly would have meant his defeat to Walker, the only GOP statewide nominee who lost in Georgia last year.\n\nAnd if Black turnout in other 2022 battlegrounds reflected Georgia's, Democrats almost certainly would have defeated Republican Sen. Ron Johnson in Wisconsin and may have won a North Carolina Senate seat, expanding their narrow majority, the authors argue.\n\nBiden was in Milwaukee on Wednesday touting his economic arguments and his administration's support for minority owned businesses. Milwaukee also is the site of one of the campaign's earliest organizing efforts aimed at Black voters, a commitment of money and personnel that Biden's advisers say demonstrates their commitment to engaging the full electorate.\n\nIndeed, those kinds of programs and some of the recommendations from Georgia are challenging and expensive. Abrams' operation began a decade ago trying to expand voter participation in Georgia, focusing on Black and other nonwhite residents who rarely or never voted. Now Georgia's political footprint involves hundreds of paid canvassers, sophisticated digital outreach, voter registration drives and door-knocking campaigns even in non-election years.\n\nThe report argues that the investment over time creates so-called \"super voters\" who make the Democratic investment worth it. The document details tactics Georgia and Michigan Democrats have used and that the authors say can be scaled in other states.\n\nThe authors note that in 2018, when Abrams first ran for governor, Georgia had more than 1.1 million Black voters deemed \"low propensity\" and unlikely to vote. After the 2022 election, that has dropped to between 700,000 and 800,000.\n\nConversely, the \"super voter\" measure - defined as people who have cast three consecutive general election ballots - has climbed from about 525,000 Black Georgians after 2016 to more than 850,000 after 2022.\n\nDonors and most campaigns, though, still gravitate to traditional turnout models aimed at regular or semi-regular voters. They see the Abrams approach as costing too much money per vote.\n\n\"We need other groups out there making contacts with inactive voters because most campaigns just aren't cut out to do that,\" said Preston Elliot, Whitmer's 2022 campaign manager, who was not involved in the analysis. He complimented figures like Groh-Wargo, Abrams and Barnes but cautioned that the latest effort comes down to resources.\n\n\"There are enough tasks out there for everyone to play their parts,\" Elliot said. \"But ultimately we're talking about finite money here.\""}
{"text": "# Donald Trump's GOP rivals once again compelled to rally to his defense after Colorado ruling\nBy **JILL COLVIN** and **HANNAH FINGERHUT**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 7:27 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**AMES, Iowa (AP)** - With less than a month to go before voting begins, Donald Trump 's Republican rivals are once again rallying to his defense, this time after Colorado's Supreme Court ruled to remove him from the state's presidential primary ballot under the U.S. Constitution's insurrection clause.\n\nJust as they had following Trump's successive indictments as he racked up 91 criminal charges, the GOP front-runner's opponents cast the landmark decision - the first time in history the 14th Amendment has been used to disqualify a presidential candidate and one the former president has vowed to appeal - as inappropriate, a \"stunt\" and an \"attack on democracy.\"\n\nFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis charged the court's ruling was a plot to ensure Trump wins the nomination because Democrats view him as the weakest Republican candidate.\n\n\"Look, it's unfair. They're abusing power, 100%,\" he told an audience in Urbandale, Iowa, on Wednesday morning. \"But the question is: Is that going to work? And I think they have a playbook that unfortunately will work and it'll give Biden or the Democrat or whoever, the ability to skate through this thing. That's their plan.\"\n\nThe court's ruling once again highlighted a defining dynamic of the GOP primary: While the trail of lawsuits and criminal charges following Trump had been expected to seriously damage his candidacy, they have instead had the opposite effect among Republicans. Primary voters - including many who had been open to backing rival candidates - have rallied around the former president, who has cast himself as the victim of a politically motivated effort by Democratic President Joe Biden and his administration to damage his chief political rival.\n\n\"I think that it confirms Americans' deepest suspicions that many of our institutions can be weaponized against them. So it serves as a proof point for the former president,\" said Republican strategist Devin O'Malley, who served as communications chief to former Vice President Mike Pence's campaign.\n\nO'Malley noted all of the justices on the Colorado court were appointed by Democratic governors. \"On its face this is just so plainly partisan that it only helps him,\" he said.\n\nIndeed, even former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a fierce Trump critic who has blasted the other candidates for being overly deferential to the former president, slammed the ruling as ill-advised.\n\n\"I don't think it's appropriate to take him off the ballot through the courts,\" he told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday. \"I think we have to beat him at the ballot box. And that's the way that that defeat will be most validated by the American people.\"\n\nFormer United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley told reporters Tuesday that the \"last thing we want is judges telling us who can and can't be on the ballot.\" And entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who has cast himself as the heir to Trump's \"Make America Great Again\" movement, pledged to withdraw his name from the Colorado GOP primary unless Trump is allowed on the ballot, and demanded DeSantis, Christie and Haley to do the same.\n\nThe Colorado Republican Party, however, said he wouldn't have to and the party would instead convert their election from a primary to a caucus if the decision is allowed to stand. The party had previously laid out a contingency plan in which delegates would be chosen at an April 6 state convention instead of a March primary, according to a copy provided to The Associated Press.\n\nThe Colorado case is one of dozens of lawsuits that have been filed nationally to disqualify Trump from the ballot under Section 3, which was designed to keep former Confederates from returning to government after the Civil War. It bars from office anyone who swore an oath to \"support\" the Constitution and then \"engaged in insurrection or rebellion\" against it, and has been used only a handful of times since the decade after the Civil War. Trump had won all of the cases until Tuesday night.\n\nTrump faces four criminal indictments, including one in Washington alleging he illegally sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election and fueled the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to prevent the peaceful transition of power.\n\nMany Republicans have long rejected those allegations or suggested Trump's conduct before leaving office didn't break the law.\n\nIn an August AP-NORC poll, just 15% of Republicans said they think Trump did something illegal with regard to the Jan. 6 riot, compared with 47% of adults overall. Another 23% of Republicans said Trump did something unethical, but not illegal, while 46% said they think he did nothing wrong.\n\nSeveral Iowans who came to see DeSantis on Wednesday said they disagreed with the Colorado court's decision and expected it would bolster the former president's support.\n\n\"I definitely think it will entrench the Trump supporters, those who have already made up their mind,\" said Sean Ealy, 46 of Ellsworth, Iowa, who said he voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020. \"It will be another thing that will be on a list of things of, you know, them attacking Trump and the unconstitutionality of it.\"\n\nEaly said he won't be supporting Trump in the caucus next year in part because of the prosecutions against him. But the court's decision is \"awful\" and \"unconstitutional,\" Ealy said, and \"it certainly feels like there's a vendetta against Trump.\"\n\nRoger Fritz, a 57-year-old engineer from Jewell, Iowa, called the decision \"bogus\" and \"wrong\" and argued citizens should have the opportunity to vote for any candidate. But Fritz, attending a DeSantis event in Ames Tuesday, said he was concerned Trump's legal battles would ultimately make him unelectable.\n\n\"I don't agree with it,\" he said. \"But the other party and those people are hell-bent on putting Trump in jail and I don't see how he can win if he's in jail.\"\n\nBiden's campaign and White House officials repeatedly declined to comment on the Colorado ruling. That's despite his re-election team ramping up its efforts to highlight Trump's most controversial and radical statements and policy proposals.\n\n\"The president is not involved, we're not involved in this,\" White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. \"This is a legal process and we're not involved in this.\n\nBut Biden, during a trip to Milwaukee, said there was \"no question\" Trump was an insurrectionist, saying that's \"self evident. You saw it all.\"\n\n\"Whether the 14th Amendment applies or not, we'll let the court make that decision. But he certainly supported an insurrection. There's no question about it. None. Zero. And he seems to be doubling down on it,\" Biden said."}
{"text": "# Chris Christie outlines his national drug crisis plan, focusing on treatment and stigma reduction\nBy **HOLLY RAMER**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 2:58 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ROCHESTER, N.H. (AP)** - Calling the latest wave of the nation's drug crisis \"a test of our national resolve,\" Republican presidential hopeful Chris Christie returned to a New Hampshire recovery center Wednesday to outline a people-focused, not punitive, policy plan.\n\n\"This is a test to see who we want to be as both a people and as a country,\" he said at the Hope on Haven Hill wellness center, which services pregnant women and mothers struggling with substance use disorder. \"We need an approach that remembers and reflects on the very basic humanity of every single one of those 100,000 victims, as well as the treasures each one of them could have brought to this country.\"\n\nChristie led a White House commission on opioid misuse in 2017, and he praised former president Donald Trump for endorsing all 56 of its recommendations. But only about half have been enacted, and both Trump and President Joe Biden have treated the problem as a crisis in name only, Christie said. Meanwhile, other Republican presidential candidates, have focused too narrowly on preventing drugs from getting into the country, he said.\n\nWithout mentioning them by name, he described Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's vow to shoot drug dealers at the border, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley's plan to cut off trade with China and Trump's threat to take military action against Mexico.\n\n\"It will be important to stem some of the flow of this stuff into our country, but that's not going to be what fixes this problem by itself. And people who say that's what will do it just are not telling the truth,\" he said.\n\nWith 110,000 people dying of drug overdoses last year, reducing stigma and providing treatment is the only thing that's going to get the problem under control, he said.\n\n\"We don't solve this crisis unless we focus on substance use disorder and what gets us there and what helps to help get people out of it and into recovery,\" he said.\n\nChristie said he finds Biden's inaction particularly galling given Hunter Biden's struggles with addiction.\n\n\"He owes it to this country as a father who understands the pain that every family member goes through when there's someone with active addiction in their family,\" he said. \"It's astonishing to me he's not talking about this.\"\n\nChristie said he would increase access to medication-assisted treatment by making the telehealth policies created during the coronavirus pandemic permanent, requiring all federally qualified health centers to provide such treatment and creating mobile opioid treatment programs.\n\nHe also called for expanding block grants to states, tied to specific requirements for data collection and sharing. The pandemic, he argued, showed that vast amounts of data can be gathered and shared quickly, and the same should be done to track overdose deaths and identify the areas of greatest need.\n\n\"We've been told for decades it's just too difficult to accurately track and understand,\" he said. \"If we keep saying that these things are too hard, what we're saying is that working harder at this is too much and that the lives that we're losing are not worth it. I'm sorry, I just don't believe that.\"\n\nJackie Lacrosse, who lives in Hope on Haven Hill's transitional shelter with her three-year-old daughter, asked Christie what he would do to help those in recovery secure housing. She was pleased with his answer - reallocating money in federal programs to target that population - as well as his approach overall.\n\n\"I think Chris is super knowledgeable, and I think he can bring that knowledge and his history to the campaign,\" she said.\n\nChristie met the recovery center's founder during his 2016 campaign for president when she was just getting the program off the ground and has visited its facilities since. While the types of drugs have changed - from overprescribed painkillers to heroin to street-drugs laced with fentanyl - the stories he hears from voters have not, he said in an interview before his speech.\n\n\"The sad thing is, I see no difference eight years later, and I think that's the thing that is the most concerning and frustrating,\" he said."}
{"text": "# The Constitution's insurrection clause threatens Trump's campaign. Here is how that is playing out\nBy **NICHOLAS RICCARDI**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 6:05 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DENVER (AP)** - Former President Donald Trump's bid to win back the White House is now threatened by two sentences added to the U.S. Constitution 155 years ago.\n\nThe Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday barred Trump from the state's ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits anyone who swore an oath to support the Constitution and then \"engaged in insurrection\" against it from holding office. It's the first time in history the provision has been used to prohibit someone from running for the presidency, and the U..S. Supreme Court is likely to have the final say over whether the ruling will stand.\n\nIf it does - which many legal experts say is a longshot - it's the end of Trump's campaign because a Supreme Court decision would apply not just in Colorado, but to all states. It also could open a new world of political combat, as politicians in the future fish for judicial rulings to disqualify their rivals under the same provision.\n\nSome conservatives have even considered using it against Vice President Kamala Harris, who raised bail money for those jailed during the violence following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. They said that also should be considered an \"insurrection\" against the Constitution.\n\nSome answers related to the 14th Amendment cases seeking to remove Trump from the ballot:\n\n## WHAT'S THE IMPACT OF THE RULING?\nSo far, very little in the real world. Aware that the case was very likely going to the U.S. Supreme Court, the 4-3 Colorado Supreme Court majority stayed their own order until Jan. 4 - the day before the state's primary ballots are due at the printer - or until the Supreme Court rules.\n\nTechnically, the ruling applies only to Colorado, and secretaries of state elsewhere are issuing statements saying Trump remains on the ballot in their state's primary or caucus.\n\nBut it could embolden other states to knock Trump off the ballot. Activists have asked state election officials to do so unilaterally, but none have. Dozens of lawsuits have been filed, but all failed until Colorado.\n\nThe U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled on the meaning of Section 3. The justices can take the case as quickly as they like once Trump's campaign files its appeal, which is not expected this week. The high court then could rule in a variety of ways - from upholding the ruling to striking it down to dodging the central questions on legal technicalities. But many experts warn that it would be risky to leave such a vital constitutional question unanswered.\n\n\"It is imperative for the political stability of the U.S. to get a definitive judicial resolution of these questions as soon as possible,\" Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote shortly after the ruling. \"Voters need to know if the candidate they are supporting for president is eligible.\"\n\n## WHAT WILL THE US SUPREME COURT DO?\nIt's always dangerous to try to predict a Supreme Court ruling. The high court is comprised of six justices appointed by Republicans, including three nominated by Trump himself. Partly because this is completely new legal ground, it's hard to predict how individual justices will rule based on their ideology.\n\nSome of the strongest advocates of using Section 3 against Trump have been prominent conservative legal theorists and lawyers who argue that courts have to follow the actual words of the Constitution. Here, they argue, there's no wiggle room - Trump is clearly disqualified.\n\nThe Colorado high court's seven justices were all appointed by Democrats. But they split 4-3 on the ruling. The majority quoted a ruling from Neil Gorsuch, one of Trump's conservative Supreme Court appointees, from when he was a federal judge in Colorado. He ruled then that the state properly kept a naturalized citizen born in Guyana off the presidential ballot because he didn't meet the constitutional qualifications.\n\nCourts are very hesitant to limit voters' choices, however. There's even a term for that - the \"political question,\" whether a legal dispute is better settled by the people the voters have selected to make the laws than by unelected judges. That's one reason all the other Section 3 lawsuits had failed so far.\n\nSometimes courts have dodged the essential question. That's what happened in Minnesota, where the state Supreme Court allowed Trump to stay on the ballot because, it found, the state party can place whomever it likes on its primary ballot. A Michigan appeals court came to the same conclusion. A New Hampshire judge dismissed a lawsuit by a little-known longshot Republican presidential candidate, saying the question of whether Trump belonged on the ballot was \"non-justiciable.\"\n\n## WHAT IS SECTION 3 OF THE 14th AMENDMENT?\nSection 3 of the 14th Amendment was written to keep former confederates from returning to government office. It reads:\n\n\"No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.\"\n\nThe provision was used often in the years immediately after the Civil War, but fell into disuse after Congress granted an amnesty to many confederate veterans in 1872. The only record of it being used in the 20th century, according to legal scholars, was as justification in refusing to seat a socialist congressman in 1919 because he opposed U.S. involvement in World War I.\n\n## WHAT ARE TRUMP'S LEGAL ARGUMENTS?\nThe argument to disqualify Trump is that he clearly held an office under the United States, swore an oath and broke it in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. So he can't return to office unless two-thirds of Congress lets him back in.\n\nThe arguments against disqualifying Trump are many. Trump's lawyers have argued that, technically, the president isn't an officer \"under the United States\" - that it's a legal term of art that refers to government appointees and therefore the provision doesn't apply to him.\n\nEven if it did, they've argued the Jan. 6 attack wasn't an insurrection - it was more of a riot. And even if it was an insurrection, Trump didn't \"engage\" in it - all he did was exercise his rights to free speech under the First Amendment. And state courts, the argument goes, aren't in a position to determine whether Jan. 6 was an insurrection - it would take months at least to hold a trial and get all the facts, and most witnesses are out of their jurisdiction.\n\nFinally, even if the courts concluded Jan. 6 was an insurrection and Trump was barred, that's not their decision to make - it's a political question for Congress.\n\n## WHAT THE COLORADO JUSTICES SAID\nThe majority opinion said the Colorado Supreme Court did have jurisdiction to decide the matter, that the presidency was clearly an office in the United States and that Trump's actions related to the Capitol attack fit the insurrection clause, in part because he urged his supporters during a rally beforehand to fight.\n\n\"President Trump asks us to hold that Section 3 disqualifies every oathbreaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oathbreakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land,\" the court's majority opinion said. \"Both results are inconsistent with the plain language and history of Section 3.\"\n\nIt's worth noting that three of the judges on the Colorado high court agreed with some of Trump's arguments. They particularly chafed at the rushed and improvised nature of the groundbreaking case, which was heard by a district court judge in Denver judge in less than two months. That included a week of testimony from a handful of police and protesters who were at the Jan. 6 attack, two constitutional law professors and experts on a president's emergency powers and on right-wing political speech..\n\n\"I have been involved in the justice system for 33 years now, and what took place here doesn't resemble anything I've seen in a courtroom,\" Justice Carlos Samour wrote in a scathing dissent.\n\n\"If President Trump committed a heinous act worthy of disqualification, he should be disqualified for the sake of protecting our hallowed democratic system, regardless of whether citizens may wish to vote for him in Colorado,\" Samour concluded. \"But such a determination must follow the appropriate procedural avenues. Absent adequate due process, it is improper for our state to bar him from holding public office.\""}
{"text": "# Cleveland businessman Bernie Moreno lands Trump endorsement in Ohio's US Senate GOP primary\nBy **JULIE CARR SMYTH**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 4:39 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP)** - Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno has landed Donald Trump's endorsement in the GOP race for a 2024 contender to unseat third-term Democrat Sherrod Brown, one of his party's most vulnerable incumbents.\n\nThe former president and 2024 presidential candidate backed Moreno, a wealthy Cleveland businessman, in a post on his social media network, Truth Social, Tuesday.\n\n\"Bernie Moreno, a highly respected businessman from the GREAT State of Ohio, is exactly the type of MAGA fighter that we need in the United States Senate,\" Trump wrote. He said Moreno would \"always stand up to the Fascist 'nut jobs' and the spineless RINOS\" and is the \"successful political outsider\" needed to defeat Brown, whom he labeled a \"Liberal career politician.\"\n\nThe endorsement stands to elevate Moreno against his two Republican rivals: Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose and state Sen. Matt Dolan, whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians baseball team. In the 2016 and 2020 presidential races, Trump twice won Ohio by wide margins, and he retains a strong following in the state.\n\nAs in 2022, when he backed venture capitalist and memoirist JD Vance, Trump's pick for Senate is a former critic of the man.\n\nMoreno supported Marco Rubio for president in the 2016 Republican primary, and once tweeted that listening to Trump was \"like watching a car accident that makes you sick, but you can stop looking.\" In 2021, NBC News reported on an email exchange around the time of Trump's first presidential run in which Moreno referred to Trump as a \"lunatic\" and a \"maniac.\"\n\nTrump's decision to back Moreno is a blow to LaRose, who has taken a number of steps to win his favor. Just days after entering the Senate race this summer, LaRose endorsed Trump for president - reversing an earlier stance that the state's elections chief should remain politically neutral. The next month, he fired a long-time trusted aide after old tweets surfaced in which the staffer criticized Trump.\n\nDolan is the one candidate in the GOP field who has not sought to align himself with Trump. Both he and Moreno ran last year for the open Senate seat won by Vance. Though Dolan was a late entrant into the crowded and bitter GOP primary, he managed a third-place finish.\n\nMoreno had dropped out of the 2022 contest at Trump's behest.\n\nFollowing the endorsement, the conservative We the People Convention organization and Freedom for All PAC joined Trump in praising and endorsing Moreno - and called on both LaRose and Dolan to step aside.\n\nConvention President Tom Zawistowski said in a statement that Brown's lack of a costly primary will otherwise give the Democrat an advantage headed into the fall.\n\nMoreno, too, called for consolidation.\n\n\"(Trump's) support makes clear that there is only one Pro-Trump, America First candidate in this race,\" he said in accepting the endorsement. \"It's time for Ohio Republicans to unite around our campaign so we can end Sherrod Brown's 50-year political career in the fall.\"\n\nRepresentatives of both LaRose's and Dolan's campaigns said the candidates are staying in the race.\n\nOhio Democratic Party spokesperson Reeves Oyster predicted a heated fight.\n\n\"Bernie Moreno has made it clear he won't fight for Ohioans and doesn't understand the issues facing their daily lives,\" she said in a statement. \"As this primary heats up, it's clear this slugfest is only going to get messier, nastier, and more expensive from here.\""}
{"text": "# Trump defends controversial comments about immigrants poisoning the nation's blood at Iowa rally\nBy **HANNAH FINGERHUT** and **ALI SWENSON**  \nDecember 19, 2023. 11:59 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WATERLOO, Iowa (AP)** - Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday defended his comments about migrants crossing the southern border \"poisoning the blood\" of America, and he reinforced the message while denying any similarities to fascist writings others had noted.\n\n\"I never read 'Mein Kampf,'\" Trump said at a campaign rally in Waterloo, Iowa, referencing Adolf Hitler's fascist manifesto.\n\nImmigrants in the U.S. illegally, Trump said Tuesday, are \"destroying the blood of our country, they're destroying the fabric of our country.\"\n\nIn the speech to more than 1,000 supporters from a podium flanked by Christmas trees in red MAGA hats, Trump responded to mounting criticism about his anti-immigrant \"blood\" purity rhetoric over the weekend. Several politicians and extremism experts have noted his language echoed writings from Hitler about the \"purity\" of Aryan blood, which underpinned Nazi Germany's systematic murder of millions of Jews and other \"undesirables\" before and during World War II.\n\nAs illegal border crossings surge, topping 10,000 some days in December, Trump continued to blast Biden for allowing migrants to \"pour into our country.\" He alleged, without offering evidence, that they bring crime and potentially disease with them.\n\n\"They come from Africa, they come from Asia, they come from South America,\" he said, lamenting what he said was a \"border catastrophe.\"\n\nTrump made no mention of the Colorado Supreme Court's decision Tuesday to disqualify him from the state's ballot under the U.S. Constitution's insurrection clause, though his campaign blasted out a fundraising email about it during his speech.\n\nThe former president has long used inflammatory language about immigrants coming to the U.S., dating back to his campaign launch in 2015, when he said immigrants from Mexico are \"bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists.\"\n\nBut Trump has espoused increasingly authoritarian messages in his third campaign, vowing to renew and add to his effort to bar citizens from certain Muslim-majority countries, and to expand \" ideological screening \" for people immigrating to the U.S. He said he would be a dictator on \"day one\" only, in order to close the border and increase drilling.\n\nIn Waterloo on Tuesday, Trump's supporters in the crowd said his border policies were effective and necessary, even if he doesn't always say the right thing.\n\n\"I don't know if he says the right words all of the time,\" said 63-year-old Marylee Geist, adding that just because \"you're not fortunate enough to be born in this country,\" doesn't mean \"you don't get to come here.\"\n\n\"But it should all be done legally,\" she added.\n\nIt's about the volume of border crossings and national security, said her husband, John Geist, 68.\n\n\"America is the land of opportunity, however, the influx - it needs to be kept to a certain level,\" he said. \"The amount of undocumented immigrants that come through and you don't know what you're getting, things aren't regulated properly.\"\n\nAlex Litterer and her dad, Tom, of Charles City said they were concerned about migrants crossing the southern border, especially because the U.S. doesn't have the resources to support that influx. But the 22-year-old said she didn't agree with Trump's comments, adding that immigrants who come to the country legally contribute to the country's character and bring different perspectives.\n\nPolling shows most Americans agree, with two-thirds saying the country's diverse population makes the U.S. stronger.\n\nBut Trump's \"blood\" purity message might resonate with some voters.\n\nAbout a third of Americans overall worry that more immigration is causing U.S.-born Americans to lose their economic, political and cultural influence, according to a late 2021 poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.\n\nJackie Malecek, 50, of Waterloo said she likes Trump for the reasons that many people don't - how outspoken he is and \"that he's a little bit of a loose cannon.\" But she thought Trump saying immigrants are \"poisoning the blood\" took it a little too far.\n\n\"I'm very much for cutting off what's happening at the border now. There's too many people pouring in here right now, I watch it every single day,\" Malecek said. \"But that wording is not what I would have chosen to say.\"\n\nMalecek supports allowing legal immigration and accepting refugees, but she is concerned about the waves of migrants crossing the border who are not being vetted.\n\nSen. JD Vance, a Republican from Ohio, lashed out at a reporter asking about Trump's \"poisoning the blood\" comments, defending them as a reference to overdoses from fentanyl smuggled over the border.\n\n\"You just framed your question implicitly assuming that Donald Trump is talking about Adolf Hitler. It's absurd,\" Vance said. \"It is obvious that he was talking about the very clear fact that the blood of Americans is being poisoned by a drug epidemic.\"\n\nAt a congressional hearing July 12, James Mandryck, a Customs and Border Protection deputy assistant commissioner, said 73% of fentanyl seizures at the border since the previous October were smuggling attempts carried out by U.S. citizens, with the rest being done by Mexican citizens.\n\nExtremism experts say Trump's rhetoric resembles the language that white supremacist shooters have used to justify mass killings.\n\nJon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University's Program on Extremism, pointed to the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooter and the 2019 El Paso Walmart shooter, who he said used similar language in writings before their attacks.\n\n\"Call it what it is,\" said Lewis. \"This is fascism. This is white supremacy. This is dehumanizing language that would not be out of place in a white supremacist Signal or Telegram chat.\"\n\nAsked about Trump's \"poisoning the blood\" comments, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell replied with a quip about his own wife, an immigrant, who was an appointee in Trump's administration.\n\n\"Well, it strikes me that didn't bother him when he appointed Elaine Chao Secretary of Transportation,\" McConnell said.\n\nTrump currently leads other candidates, by far, in polls of likely Republican voters in Iowa and nationwide. Trump's campaign is hoping for a knockout performance in the caucuses that will deny his rivals momentum and allow him to quickly lock up the nomination. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has staked his campaign on Iowa, raising expectations for him there.\n\n\"I will not guarantee it,\" Trump said of winning Iowa next month, \"but I pretty much guarantee it.\""}
{"text": "# Tim Scott endorses Donald Trump ahead of New Hampshire Republican primary\nBy **MEG KINNARD**, **JILL COLVIN**, and **JONATHAN J. COOPER**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 11:02 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CONCORD, N.H. (AP)** - Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina endorsed Donald Trump Friday ahead of next week's New Hampshire primary, the latest sign the Republican party is rallying around the former president's candidacy after his historic Iowa win.\n\nThe decision marks a major blow to Scott's fellow South Carolinian Nikki Haley, the former U.N. ambassador who is banking on a strong showing in New Hampshire to keep her presidential hopes alive.\n\nScott flew with Trump from Florida to New Hampshire to deliver his effusive endorsement in a rousing call-and-response speech that resembled a vice presidential tryout.\n\nThe U.S. needs a president who will close the southern border, unite the country, protect social security and restore order, and one who doesn't see race, Scott said.\n\n\"We need a president who sees Americans as one American family, and that's why I came to the very warm state of New Hampshire to endorse the next president of the United States, President Donald Trump,\" Scott said.\n\nScott did not mention Haley, who as South Carolina governor elevated him from the House to the Senate and made him one of the nation's most prominent Black Republicans.\n\nWith four days to go before the first-in-the-nation primary, Trump asked New Hampshire voters to deliver a decisive victory that could end the GOP primary and allow him to fully turn his attention to the November contest against Democratic President Joe Biden.\n\n\"We want to win by big numbers,\" he said, \"so everybody has to vote.\"\n\nBefore he spoke, Trump's crowd was warmed up by New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, a rising GOP star whose tough questioning of the presidents of elite universities led two of them to resign after they gave milquetoast responses to antisemitism.\n\nTrump later invited Stefanik for her moment onstage - giving the appearance of vice presidential auditions.\n\nTrump surrogates, many believed to be angling for his vice presidential nod, have fanned out to heap praise on the former president ahead of the New Hampshire primary and last week's Iowa caucuses.\n\nTrump all but ruled out Haley for the role during his rally in Concord. He has been under considerable pressure from the right to make clear he won't pick Haley, including from his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.\n\n\"She is not presidential timber,\" Trump said of Haley. \"Now when I say that, that probably means that she's not gonna be chosen as the vice president.\"\n\nScott last May launched his own bid to challenge Trump before shuttering his effort about six months later, having had trouble gaining traction in the polls despite millions invested by high-profile donors.\n\nIn his efforts to run a positive campaign, Scott was often overshadowed by other candidates - particularly on the debate stage, where he seemed to disappear as others sparred.\n\nIn a sign that the GOP is increasingly coalescing around the front-runner, Trump has been appearing on the campaign trail with several other former rivals who have endorsed him, including North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.\n\nUnlike those two, however, who were more reticent to critique Trump as they ran against him, Scott was at times critical of the former president during his own campaign.\n\nIn Concord, supporters waited hours in 17-degree weather, snaking through a dark hotel parking lot, to see Trump in person Friday evening.\n\nAmong them was Nancy Catano, a 72-year-old part-time schoolteacher who spent three hours in the frigid cold and was thrilled to learn about Scott's planned endorsement.\n\n\"Oh awesome. I love him. That's wonderful,\" she said. \"That's going to be wonderful. That's great support for him.\"\n\nCatano said it was notable that former Trump rivals were now rallying around him as the front-runner. \"So they're realizing that we need to unite to win. We have to win,\" she said.\n\nShe said she has zero doubt Trump will be the nominee at this point.\n\n\"I think Tuesday is gonna be an exciting day,\" she said. \"He wiped out Iowa and I'm expecting the same here in New Hampshire.\"\n\nTrump celebrated his decisive victory in Iowa and heaped scorn on his rivals. He called Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ' fall to a distant second place \"one of the great self-destructions I think I've ever witnessed.\" Haley, he said, is \"not capable of doing this job.\"\n\nThere has been speculation that Scott could potentially be a running mate option for Trump, should the former president win the GOP nomination. When Scott entered the race in May, Trump welcomed his latest competitor with open arms, wishing him \"good luck\" with hospitality that some suggested was an acknowledgment that Trump saw an increased number of competitors as beneficial to his own bid.\n\nScott's endorsement was sought by the remaining major contenders in the Republican primary, particularly ahead of South Carolina's Feb. 24 primary, which has historically been influential in determining the eventual nominee.\n\nDeSantis, who placed just ahead of Haley in Iowa's caucuses this week, has been shifting his campaign resources from Iowa to South Carolina. He planned to stump in the state on Saturday, aiming to continue his effort to take on Haley - who has been pinning much of her early-states campaign on New Hampshire - directly in her home state.\n\nHaley appointed Scott to the Senate in 2012. On Friday, a spokesperson for her campaign downplayed Scott's impending endorsement of Trump.\n\n\"Interesting that Trump's lining up with all the Washington insiders when he claimed he wanted to drain the swamp,\" Olivia Perez-Cubas said. \"But the fellas are gonna do what the fellas are gonna do.\"\n\nBeth Scaer, 61, of Nashua, said she briefly considered Ramaswamy but quickly decided \"he wasn't a serious candidate\" and is now backing DeSantis, whom she praised for being pro-life and for protecting children \"from the gender cult.\"\n\nScott's decision to endorse Trump made no difference to her.\n\n\"No one's endorsement would matter to me,\" Scaer said.\n\nDavid Josko, 76, of Rollinsford, said he'll probably vote for DeSantis now that former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has dropped out. He said he would have supported Trump \"if he just kept doing his job instead of having to pull a bear's tail,\" he said, using an expression he said described Trump's provocative behavior.\n\n\"It seemed to me like the press was pushing more for Trump because they can make more money off of Trump,\" Josko said at an Irish pub in Dover where he went to see DeSantis speak. \"And so, like, anytime anybody burped, it became big news.\""}
{"text": "# Biden and Netanyahu have finally talked, but their visions still clash for ending Israel-Hamas war\nBy **AAMER MADHANI** and **ZEKE MILLER**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 7:13 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finally spoke Friday after a glaring, nearly four-week gap in direct communication during which fundamental differences have come into focus over a possible pathway to Palestinian statehood once the fighting in Gaza ends.\n\nBiden and his top aides have all but smothered Netanyahu with robust support, even in the face of global condemnation over the mounting civilian death toll and humanitarian suffering in Gaza as the Israelis have carried out military operations in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.\n\nBut the leaders' relationship has increasingly shown signs of strain as Netanyahu has repeatedly rebuffed Biden's calls for Palestinian sovereignty, gumming up what the U.S. president believes is the key to unlocking a durable peace in the Middle East - the oft-cited, elusive two-state solution.\n\nNeither side shows signs of budging.\n\nFriday's phone call came one day after Netanyahu said that he has told U.S. officials in plain terms that he will not support a Palestinian state as part of any postwar plan. Biden, for his part, in Friday's call reaffirmed his commitment to work toward helping the Palestinians move toward statehood.\n\n\"As we're talking about post-conflict Gaza ... you can't do that without also talking about the aspirations of the Palestinian people and what that needs to look like for them,\" said National Security Council spokesman John Kirby.\n\nThe leaders spoke frequently in the first weeks of the war. But the regular cadence of calls between Biden and Netanyahu, who have had a hot-and-cold relationship for over three decades, has slowed considerably. Their 30- to 40-minute call Friday was their first conversation since Dec. 23.\n\nBoth sides are hemmed in by domestic political considerations.\n\nThe chasm between Biden, a center-left Democrat, and Netanyahu, who leads the most conservative government in Israel's history, has expanded as pressure mounts on the United States to use its considerable leverage to press Israel to wind down a war that has already killed nearly 25,000 Palestinians.\n\nThere is also growing impatience with Netanyahu in Israel over the lack of progress in freeing dozens of hostages still held by Islamic militants in Gaza.\n\n\"There is certainly a reason to be concerned,\" says Eytan Gilboa, an expert on U.S.-Israeli relations at Israel's Bar-Ilan University, \"The more and more we see political considerations dominating the relationship between Biden and Netanyahu, which is likely to continue because of the upcoming presidential election and the weakness of both leaders, the more we will see them pulling apart.\"\n\nIn their most recent calls, Biden's frustration with Netanyahu has grown more evident, even though the U.S. leader has been careful to reaffirm his support for Israel at each step, according to U.S. officials who requested anonymity to discuss the leaders' private interactions.\n\nYet, Biden, at least publicly, has not given up on the idea of winning over Netanyahu. Asked by a reporter on Friday if a two-state solution is impossible while Netanyahu is in office, Biden replied, \"No, it's not.\"\n\nAides insist Biden understands the political box Netanyahu finds himself in with his hard-right coalition and as he deals with ongoing corruption charges that have left the prime minister fighting for his freedom, not just his political future.\n\nBiden, meanwhile, faces American voters in November, in a likely rematch with former President Donald Trump. Netanyahu and Trump forged a close relationship during the Republican's term in office. Biden faces criticism from some on his left who believe he hasn't pushed the Israelis hard enough to demonstrate restraint as it carries out military operations.\n\nKey Democratic lawmakers, including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, this week warned that Netanyahu's position on statehood could complicate negotiations in the Senate on a spending package that includes military aid for Israel.\n\nExpect Netanyahu to \"use every trick that he has to keep his coalition together and avoid elections and play out the clock,\" said Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at the Israel Policy Forum. \"And I'm sure that part of it is a conviction that if he waits until November, he may end up with Donald Trump back in the Oval Office.\"\n\nIn recent weeks, some of the more difficult conversations have been left to Ron Dermer, a top aide to Netanyahu and former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., and Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. The two top aides talk almost daily - sometimes multiple times during a day, according to a U.S. official and an Israeli official, who were not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.\n\nOther senior Biden administration officials including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, as well as senior advisers Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein, have been at the forefront of the administration's push to engage the Israelis and other Middle East allies as the Biden-Netanyahu dialogue has become less constructive.\n\nNetanyahu, who has opposed calls for a two-state solution throughout his political career, told reporters this week that he flatly told U.S. officials he remains opposed to any postwar plan that includes establishment of a Palestinian state.\n\nThe prime minister's latest rejection of Biden's push in that direction came after Blinken this week said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that Israel and its Middle East neighbors had \"a profound opportunity\" to solve the generational Israel-Palestinian conflict. Asked if he thought Netanyahu was up to making the most of the moment, Blinken demurred.\n\n\"Look, these are decisions for Israelis to make,\" Blinken said. \"This is a profound decision for the country as a whole to make: What direction does it want to take? Does it see - can it seize - the opportunity that we believe is there?\"\n\nThe Biden-Netanyahu relationship has seen no shortage of peaks and valleys over the years. As vice president, Biden privately criticized Netanyahu after the the Israeli leader embarrassed President Barack Obama by approving the construction of 1,600 new apartments in disputed East Jerusalem in the middle of Biden's 2010 visit to Israel.\n\nNetanyahu publicly resisted, before eventually relenting to, Biden's calls on the Israelis to wind down a May 2021 military operation in Gaza. And in late 2019, during a question and answer session with voters on the campaign trail, Biden called Netanyahu an \"extreme right\" leader.\n\nThe path to a two-state solution - one in which Israel would co-exist with an independent Palestinian state - has eluded U.S. presidents and Middle East diplomats for decades.\n\nBut as the war grinds on, Biden and his team have pressed the notion that there is a new dynamic in the Middle East in which Israel's Arab and Muslim neighbors stand ready to integrate Israel into the region once the war ends, but only if Israel commits to a pathway to a Palestinian state.\n\nBiden has proposed that a \"revitalized\" Palestinian Authority, which is based in the West Bank, could run Gaza once combat ends. Netanyahu has roundly rejected the idea of putting the Palestinian Authority, which is beset by corruption, in charge of the territory.\n\nNetanyahu argues that a Palestinian state would become a launchpad for attacks on Israel. So Israel \"must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River,\" Netanyahu said. \"That collides with the idea of sovereignty. What can we do?\"\n\nWhite House officials have sought to play down Netanyahu's public rejection of Biden's call for a two-state solution, noting that the prime minister's rhetoric is not new.\n\nThey hold out hope Israel could eventually come around to accepting a Palestinian state that comes with strong security guarantees for Israel.\n\n\"I don't think Biden has any illusions about Netanyahu,\" said Daniel Kurtzer, who served as U.S. ambassador to Egypt during the Bill Clinton administration and to Israel under George W. Bush. \"But I don't think he's ready to slam the door on him. And that's because he gets the intersection between the policy and the politics.\""}
{"text": "# Donald Trump goes from calm to indignant in newly released deposition video of civil fraud lawsuit\nBy **MICHAEL R. SISAK**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 8:31 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Months before Donald Trump's defiant turn as a witness at his New York civil fraud trial, the former president came face-to-face with the state attorney general who is suing him when he sat for a deposition last year at her Manhattan office.\n\nVideo made public Friday of the seven-hour, closed-door session last April shows the Republican presidential frontrunner's demeanor going from calm and cool to indignant - at one point ripping Attorney General Letitia James lawsuit against him as a \"disgrace\" and \"a terrible thing.\"\n\nSitting with arms folded, an incredulous Trump complained to the state lawyer questioning him that he was being forced to \"justify myself to you\" after decades of success building a real estate empire that's now threatened by the court case.\n\nTrump, who contends James' lawsuit is part of a politically motivated \"witch hunt\" was demonstrative from the outset. The video shows him smirking and pouting his lips as the attorney general, a Democrat, introduced herself and told him that she was \"committed to a fair and impartial legal process.\"\n\nJames' office released the video Friday in response to requests from media outlets under New York's Freedom of Information Law. Trump's lawyers previously posted a transcript of his remarks to the trial docket in August.\n\nJames' lawsuit accuses Trump, his company and top executives of defrauding banks, insurers and others by inflating his wealth and exaggerating the value of assets on annual financial statements used to secure loans and make deals.\n\nJudge Arthur Engoron, who will decide the case because a jury is not allowed in this type of lawsuit, has said he hopes to have a ruling by the end of January.\n\nFriday's video is a rare chance for the public at large to see Trump as a witness.\n\nCameras were not permitted in the courtroom when Trump testified on Nov. 6, nor were they allowed for closing arguments in the case on Jan. 11, where Trump defied the judge and gave a six-minute diatribe after his lawyers spoke.\n\nHere are the highlights from Trump's videotaped deposition:\n\n## 'YOU DON'T HAVE A CASE'\nTelling James and her staff, \"you don't have a case,\" Trump insisted the banks she alleges were snookered with lofty valuations suffered no harm, got paid in his deals, and \"to this day have no complaints.\"\n\n\"Do you know the banks made a lot of money?\" Trump asked, previewing his later trial testimony. \"Do you know I don't believe I ever got even a default notice and, even during COVID, the banks were all paid. And yet you're suing on behalf of banks, I guess. It's crazy. The whole case is crazy.\"\n\nBanks \"want to do business with me because I'm rich,\" Trump told James. \"But, you know what, they're petrified to do business because of you.\"\n\nTrump complained New York authorities \"spend all their time investigating me, instead of stopping violent crime in the streets.\"\n\nHe said they'd put his recently jailed ex-finance chief Allen Weisselberg \"through hell and back\" for dodging taxes on company-paid perks.\n\nAt a previous deposition in the case, in August 2022, Trump invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and refused to answer questions more than 400 times. He said he did so because he was certain his answers would be used as a basis for criminal charges.\n\n## DON'T TAKE MY WORD FOR IT\nTrump said he never felt his financial statements \"would be taken very seriously,\" and that people who did business with him were given ample warning not to trust them.\n\nTrump described the statements as \"a fairly good compilation of properties\" rather than a true representation of their value. Some numbers, he noted, were \"guesstimates.\"\n\nTrump claimed the statements were mainly for his use, though he conceded financial institutions sometimes asked for them. Even then, he insisted it didn't matter legally if they were accurate or not, because they came with a disclaimer.\n\n\"I have a clause in there that says, 'Don't believe the statement. Go out and do your own work,\" Trump testified. \"You're supposed to pay no credence to what we say whatsoever.\"\n\n## WHAT'S IN A NAME? $10 BILLION\nTrump estimated that his \"brand\" alone is worth \"maybe $10 billion.\"\n\nHe called it \"the most valuable asset I have\" and attributed his political success to the ubiquity of his name and persona.\n\n\"I became president because of the brand, OK,\" Trump said. \"I became president. I think it's the hottest brand in the world.\"\n\n## 'MOST IMPORTANT JOB IN THE WORLD'\nAfter Trump was elected, he put the Trump Organization into a trust overseen by his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and longtime finance chief, Weisselberg.\n\nTrump claimed he did so not because it was required but because he wanted to be a \"legitimate president\" and avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.\n\nPlus, Trump said, he was busy solving the world's problems - like preventing North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un from launching a nuclear attack.\n\n\"I considered this the most important job in the world, saving millions of lives,\" Trump testified. \"I think you would have nuclear holocaust if I didn't deal with North Korea. I think you would have a nuclear war, if I weren't elected. And I think you might have a nuclear war now, if you want to know the truth.\"\n\n## OBSTRUCTED VIEW\nIn one of his more animated moments, Trump urged his inquisitors to look right out the window for a view of his 40 Wall Street office tower - just across the street from James' office where he testified.\n\nAsked how the building was doing, financially, Trump gestured toward the building with his thumb and answered: \"Good. It's right here. Would you like to see it?\"\n\n\"I don't think we're allowed to open the windows,\" Wallace said.\n\n\"Open the curtain,\" Trump suggested, bobbing his head around waiting for someone to oblige.\n\n\"No,\" Wallace said.\n\n\"Open the curtain, go ahead,\" Trump said. \"It's right here. I just looked out the window.\"\n\n\"Can't open it?\" defense lawyer Clifford Robert asked, after a beat.\n\n\"I wouldn't,\" Wallace said.\n\n## 'BEAUTIFUL' AND 'INCREDIBLE'\nTrump showed off his knack for superlatives, uttering the words \"beautiful\" and \"incredible\" 15 times each and \"phenomenal\" six times as he described his properties.\n\nTrump called his Turnberry, Scotland, golf course \"one of the most iconic places in the world,\" and the renovated villas at his Doral golf resort near Miami \"the most beautiful rooms you've ever seen.\"\n\nTrump described his 213-acre Seven Springs estate north of New York City as \"the greatest house in New York State.\"\n\nHis golf courses in Aberdeen, Scotland? \"Really incredible.\" Jupiter, Florida? \"An incredible facility.\" Just outside Los Angeles? \"An incredible property ... an unbelievable property ... a phenomenal property that fronts on the ocean.\"\n\n\"I don't want to sell any of them,\" Trump testified. \"But if I ever sold them - if I ever put some of these things up for sale - I would get numbers that were staggering.\"\n\nHe said he could get $1.5 billion for his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and maybe $2.5 billion for Doral.\n\nTrump suggested he could get \"a fortune\" from the Saudi Arabia-backed LIV golf league for the Turnberry course, a former British Open site.\n\n\"There would be people that would do anything to own Doral. There are people that would do anything to own Turnberry or Mar-a-Lago or ... Trump Tower or 40 Wall Street.\""}
{"text": "# Microsoft says state-backed Russian hackers accessed emails of senior leadership team members\nBy **FRANK BAJAK**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 7:25 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BOSTON (AP)** - State-backed Russian hackers broke into Microsoft's corporate email system and accessed the accounts of members of the company's leadership team, as well as those of employees on its cybersecurity and legal teams, the company said Friday.\n\nIn a blog post, Microsoft said the intrusion began in late November and was discovered on Jan. 12. It said the same highly skilled Russian hacking team behind the SolarWinds breach was responsible.\n\n\"A very small percentage\" of Microsoft corporate accounts were accessed, the company said, and some emails and attached documents were stolen.\n\nA company spokesperson said Microsoft had no immediate comment on which or how many members of its senior leadership had their email accounts breached. In a regulatory filing Friday, Microsoft said it was able to remove the hackers' access from the compromised accounts on or about Jan. 13.\n\n\"We are in the process of notifying employees whose email was accessed,\" Microsoft said, adding that its investigation indicates the hackers were initially targeting email accounts for information related to their activities.\n\nThe Microsoft disclosure comes a month after a new U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rule took effect that compels publicly traded companies to disclose breaches that could negatively impact their business. It gives them four days to do so unless they obtain a national-security waiver.\n\nIn Friday's SEC regulatory filing, Microsoft said that \"as of the date of this filing, the incident has not had a material impact\" on its operations. It added that it has not, however, \"determined whether the incident is reasonably likely to materially impact\" its finances.\n\nMicrosoft, which is based in Redmond, Washington, said the hackers from Russia's SVR foreign intelligence agency were able to gain access by compromising credentials on a \"legacy\" test account, suggesting it had outdated code. After gaining a foothold, they used the account's permissions to access the accounts of the senior leadership team and others. The brute-force attack technique used by the hackers is called \"password spraying.\"\n\nThe threat actor uses a single common password to try to log into multiple accounts. In an August blog post, Microsoft described how its threat-intelligence team discovered that the same Russian hacking team had used the technique to try to steal credentials from at least 40 different global organizations through Microsoft Teams chats.\n\n\"The attack was not the result of a vulnerability in Microsoft products or services,\" the company said in the blog. \"To date, there is no evidence that the threat actor had any access to customer environments, production systems, source code, or AI systems. We will notify customers if any action is required.\"\n\nMicrosoft calls the hacking unit Midnight Blizzard. Prior to revamping its threat-actor nomenclature last year, it called the group Nobelium. The cybersecurity firm Mandiant, owned by Google, calls the group Cozy Bear.\n\nIn a 2021 blog post, Microsoft called the SolarWinds hacking campaign \"the most sophisticated nation-state attack in history.\" In addition to U.S. government agencies, including the departments of Justice and Treasury, more than 100 private companies and think tanks were compromised, including software and telecommunications providers.\n\nThe main focus of the SVR is intelligence-gathering. It primarily targets governments, diplomats, think tanks and IT service providers in the U.S. and Europe."}
{"text": "# 121 unmarked graves in a former Black cemetery found at US Air Force base in Florida, officials say\nJanuary 19, 2024. 9:46 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**TAMPA, Fla. (AP)** - As many as 121 unmarked graves in a former Black cemetery have been discovered at a U.S. Air Force base in Florida, military officials confirmed.\n\nA non-intrusive archaeological survey performed over the past two years at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa identified 58 probable graves and 63 possible graves, base officials said Thursday, WFTS-TV reported. The Tampa Bay History Center notified MacDill officials about the possible Black cemetery in 2019, and the base hosted a memorial service in 2021, dedicating a memorial on-site to those buried there.\n\n\"We know obviously there was wrong done in the past, but we're working together with our community members,\" base spokesperson Lt. Laura Anderson said. \"We want to make what was wrong right.\"\n\nOfficials said they plan to expand the search area this year and will continue to work with the community to determine how to best document the site and to pay respect to the people buried there."}
{"text": "# Ousted Florida Republican chair cleared of rape allegation, but police seek video voyeurism charge\nBy **TERRY SPENCER**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 6:02 PM EST\n\n---\n\nPolice cleared the ousted chair of the Florida Republican Party of rape allegations on Friday, but said they have asked prosecutors to charge him with illegally video recording the sexual encounter he had with a female acquaintance.\n\nThe Sarasota Police Department said in a statement that a review of a cellphone video Christian Ziegler made of the Oct. 2 encounter showed that it was \"likely consensual,\" making it impossible to charge him with rape. However, police said the woman told investigators that she never consented to be video recorded and was unaware it had occurred.\n\nPolice turned their findings over to the office of Sarasota County State Attorney Ed Brodsky on Friday, recommending that Ziegler be charged video voyeurism. Under Florida law, that is a third-degree felony that is punishable by up to five years in prison.\n\nBrodsky told The Associated Press that his prosecutors will begin an immediate examination of the evidence and recommendation. He said they will also review the decision not to charge Ziegler with rape or sexual assault.\n\n\"We want to be thorough,\" said Brodsky, an elected Republican.\n\nDerek Byrd, Ziegler's attorney, said in a statement that \"since day one, we have been confident Mr. Ziegler would be exonerated from these baseless allegations.\"\n\n\"He has been completely honest, forthright, and has been fully cooperative with law enforcement at every stage of this investigation,\" Byrd said. \"While we are disappointed that the Sarasota Police Department 'punted' the decision on the remaining portion of the case to the State Attorney's office, we strongly believe that the State Attorney will not prosecute Mr. Ziegler for any crime.\"\n\nZiegler, 40, previously admitted having sex with the woman but insisted it was consensual and blamed political opponents for sensationalizing the matter. Court records show that his wife, Bridget Ziegler, told detectives the three had engaged in sex once more than a year ago. Police said Bridget Ziegler backed out of the planned encounter but her husband went to the accuser's apartment alone.\n\nBridget Ziegler is a prominent conservative who co-founded the Moms for Liberty organization and is also an elected member of the Sarasota County school board. She was also appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis to the board that now oversees Walt Disney World's land development. DeSantis pushed through legislation last year disbanding a Disney-controlled board after the company opposed his bill that limits sex education in schools.\n\nThe Republican Party of Florida ousted Ziegler earlier this month as police investigated the rape accusation against him. The party had suspended Ziegler last month and demanded his resignation, saying he couldn't effectively lead during a critical election year with the allegations swirling around him. DeSantis, U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, and other Republican leaders had also called on Ziegler to step down.\n\nIt wasn't immediately clear what the conclusion of the rape investigation would mean for Ziegler's future with the state Republican Party. Evan Power, who had been vice chair of the state GOP, has already been chosen to replace Ziegler.\n\nEarlier, Sarasota Police Detective Angela Cox said in search warrant affidavits that investigators were seeking emails, photos, videos, contacts and other information from Ziegler's cellphone and Google account as part of their investigation into the woman's accusation.\n\nThe woman told detectives that she and Ziegler have known each other for more than 20 years. She said that on Oct. 2, she agreed to have sex with Ziegler and his wife but backed out after being told that Ziegler's wife \"couldn't make it.\"\n\nThe woman said that a while later, she left her apartment to walk her dog and found Ziegler standing in the hallway. She says he pushed her inside and raped her, according to the affidavits. Investigators say the apartment complex's security video shows Ziegler entering the building and leaving.\n\nThe woman's sister told Cox that the woman called her and told her she was raped. The woman reported the rape two days later.\n\nIn late October, after Ziegler tried to contact the woman, police had her exchange monitored phone and text message conversations with him. According to the affidavits, he insisted they are friends and at one point suggested that they meet in person.\n\n\"Hell no, not after what you did to me. Do you understand I am terrified of you?\" she wrote to him.\n\nHe replied that he had to go.\n\nIn a phone call, the woman told Ziegler that he had sexually assaulted her.\n\n\"Those are big words, please don't, no I didn't,\" he replied. \"You invited me in.\"\n\nHe offered her \"financial help\" before becoming suspicious that their calls were being recorded.\n\nIn a Nov. 2 interview with detectives with his attorney present, Ziegler said the sex was consensual and that he had recorded it. He said he then deleted the video, but after the accusation he recovered it and uploaded it to Google."}
{"text": "# Sports Illustrated staff could be laid off as the iconic magazine's publisher faces money troubles\nBy **JOE REEDY** and **DAVID BAUDER**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 5:21 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThe jobs of people who produce Sports Illustrated were in limbo Friday after the company that paid to maintain the iconic brand's print and digital products told staff that its license was revoked.\n\nIn an email to employees Friday morning, the Arena Group, which operates Sports Illustrated and related properties, said that because of the revocation, \"we will be laying off staff that work on the SI brand.\"\n\nAuthentic Brands Group owns the Sports Illustrated brand and had been licensing it to Arena. Authentic later said in a statement it intends to keep Sports Illustrated going. The company is negotiating with Arena and other publishing entities to determine who will do that, according to a person with knowledge of the talks who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly about them.\n\nUntil those negotiations are resolved, it's unclear which journalists would actually do the work of making Sports Illustrated. It was not clear how many jobs were affected.\n\nSports Illustrated's employee union said in a statement that the layoffs initially announced by Arena would be a significant number and possibly all, of the NewsGuild workers represented.\n\n\"We have fought together as a union to maintain the standard of this storied publication that we love, and to make sure our workers are treated fairly for the value they bring to this company. It is a fight we will continue,\" Mitch Goldich, NFL editor and unit chair, said in a statement.\n\nThe guild's statement also called for Authentic to \"ensure the continued publication of SI and allow it to serve our audience in the way it has for nearly 70 years.\"\n\nAuthentic said it would do so, and that \"we are confident that going forward the brand will continue to evolve and grow in a way that serves sports news readers, sports fans and consumers. We are committed to ensuring that the traditional ad-supported Sports Illustrated media pillar has best in class stewardship to preserve the complete integrity of the brand's legacy.\"\n\nIn a statement on Friday, the Arena Group said it was negotiating with Authentic about the license, \"with plans to sustain our commitment to delivering quality content throughout the ongoing discussions.\"\n\nArena admitted that it had failed to make a quarterly payment of $3.75 million and Authentic had put it on notice that it intended to end the licensing agreement. As a result, Arena announced Thursday it would make a \"significant reduction\" in its workforce of more than 100 people.\n\nThe Arena Group acquired publishing rights from Authentic in 2019 for at least 10 years. The group's stewardship of Sports Illustrated has had many hurdles since then. In December, it fired chief executive officer Ross Levinsohn when the magazine's alleged use of AI-generated stories drew public backlash.\n\nSports Illustrated has had a rough six years. It was acquired by Meredith Publishing in 2018 as part of the purchase of Time Inc., which started the magazine in 1954.\n\nLess than a year later, Meredith sold the magazine's intellectual property to Authentic for $110 million. Authentic owns the intellectual property of many brands and stars, including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Muhammad Ali and Reebok.\n\nOnce a weekly publication, Sports Illustrated was reduced to biweekly publishing in 2018 and became a monthly in 2020."}
{"text": "# How to stay healthy during cold, flu and COVID-19 season\nBy **CARLA K. JOHNSON**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 5:45 PM EST\n\n---\n\nWinter is here, inflicting its usual array of symptoms - coughs, nasal congestion, fatigue and fever - and, this year, a new COVID-19 variant is dominating the scoreboard.\n\nCOVID-19 is leading hospital admissions among the respiratory viruses, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.\n\nLast week, 25 U.S. states had high or very high levels for respiratory illnesses with fever, cough and other symptoms. That's down from 37 states the week before, the CDC said.\n\nSince the beginning of October, there have been at least 16 million illnesses, 180,000 hospitalizations, and 11,000 deaths from flu so far this season. The CDC said 47 children have died of flu.\n\nJanuary can be the worst month for these illnesses. With vaccination rates low, what can you do to protect yourself from respiratory viruses, including influenza, COVID-19 and RSV?\n\n## BACK TO BASICS\nHand-washing remains crucial to reducing the spread of viral infections. Take your time at the sink. Twenty seconds is recommended. If you feel silly singing \"Happy Birthday\" twice while you scrub with soapy water, count to 20. Slowly.\n\nUse hand sanitizer with 60% alcohol when you don't have access to soap and water.\n\nAlso, wear a mask in crowded areas. Increase ventilation in your workplace and home.\n\n## NOT TOO LATE TO VACCINATE\nIn the United States, only 17% of those eligible have received the updated COVID-19 vaccine, which provides good protection against the now-dominant JN.1 variant.\n\nIt's not too late to roll up your sleeve. While you're at it, make sure you've had your annual flu shot. Those 60 and older may want to get the RSV vaccine, which also is recommended during pregnancy to prevent RSV in infants.\n\n## WHEN YOU HAVE CHILDREN AT HOME\nYoung children seem to pick up every germ going around. Can their parents avoid getting sick?\n\nThis time of year, children are indoors in close quarters with other kids, touching the same toys and surfaces, said Jennifer Sonney of University of Washington School of Nursing in Seattle. Some haven't learned to cover their coughs and they simply haven't been exposed to many illnesses, so their immune systems are still developing.\n\nIt's important to take care of yourself if you're a parent or caregiver of young children, said Sonney who is immediate past president of the National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners.\n\n\"We know if you are sleep deprived or dehydrated or experiencing a lot of stress, that can compromise your immune function,\" Sonney said.\n\nHaving young children is very demanding, \"so all of this advice needs to be interpreted within the context of reality,\" she said. \"Despite doing everything right, kids are still going to get colds.\"\n\nA special note if your baby is sick: It's a good idea to have saline drops and a bulb syringe at home. They can be used to clear mucus from tiny nostrils.\n\n\"A couple drops of saline into one nostril and suction it and then do the other side,\" Sonney said. \"Doing that before eating and sleep is going to help a lot.\"\n\nA home kit for children could also include acetaminophen or ibuprofen for fevers, tissues for runny noses and water bottles of sippy cups for staying hydrated.\n\n## TEST TO TREAT\nIf you do get sick, prompt testing can help determine whether you have COVID-19 or influenza. That's important to see if you need one of the medicines that can help prevent severe illness: Paxlovid for COVID-19 and Tamiflu for flu.\n\nIf you don't have a test kit at home, look for a test-to-treat site at a pharmacy clinic or health center near your. There is also a free home-based test-to-treat program for adults who are uninsured or rely on government health insurance."}
{"text": "# A diverse coalition owed money by Rudy Giuliani meets virtually for first bankruptcy hearing\nBy **JAKE OFFENHARTZ**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 8:59 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - A group of people and businesses who say they are owed money by Rudy Giuliani gathered virtually Friday for the first court hearing since he declared bankruptcy last month after losing a defamation suit to two Georgia election workers.\n\nDuring a two-hour Zoom hearing, an attorney for Giuliani told a U.S. bankruptcy judge that the former New York City mayor lacks the funds to pay the $148 million he owes the election workers for spreading a conspiracy about their role in the 2020 election. Others with claims against Giuliani should expect to wait as well.\n\n\"There's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,\" the attorney, Gary Fischoff, said, noting that Giuliani was making his living as a radio and podcast host while dealing with a wide range of \"financial issues.\"\n\nThe bankruptcy filing has brought forth a diverse coalition of creditors who previously sued Giuliani for unrelated issues.\n\nIn addition to the election workers, creditors include a supermarket employee who was thrown in jail for patting Giuliani's back, two elections technology companies that he spread conspiracies about, a woman who says he coerced her into sex, several of his former attorneys, the IRS and Hunter Biden. Biden is suing Giuliani, saying he wrongly shared his personal data after obtaining it from the owner of a computer repair shop.\n\nGiuliani's bankruptcy filing last month came one day after a judge ordered him to immediately pay $148 million to Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea \"Shaye\" Moss. The Chapter 11 declaration halted the judgment but also prevented Giuliani from challenging the verdict.\n\nDuring Friday's hearing, Giuliani's attorney tried to convince the bankruptcy judge, Sean Lane, to temporarily lift a stay to allow him to appeal the judgment.\n\nLane agreed to the procedural step, with certain conditions, adding, \"There is a legitimate concern here about the expenses and the cost and the delay.\"\n\nSome of Giuliani's creditors have expressed concerns that he is taking advantage of the bankruptcy process to avoid paying his debts.\n\nNoting that Giuliani has a \"transactional relationship with the truth,\" an attorney for a group of creditors, Abid Qureshi, urged the judge to set guardrails ensuring the litigation did not drag on unnecessarily.\n\nAnd he hinted at possible conflict among those who say they are owed money by Giuliani, cautioning that the judge's decision could carry \"unintended consequences of a certain creditor jumping the queue.\"\n\nRon Kuby, an attorney representing Daniel Gill, a ShopRite employee who is suing Giuliani for allegedly fabricating an assault against him, said there was \"no disharmony among the creditors.\"\n\nThe next hearing is scheduled for Jan. 31."}
{"text": "# Rifts emerge among top Israeli officials over how to handle the war against Hamas in Gaza\nBy **JULIA FRANKEL**, **NAJIB JOBAIN**, and **BASSEM MROUE**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 8:01 PM EST\n\n---\n\nJERUSALEM (AP) - A member of Israel's War Cabinet cast doubt on the country's strategy for releasing hostages held by Hamas, saying only a cease-fire can free them, as the prime minister rejected the United States' calls to scale back its offensive.\n\nThe comments by Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief, marked the latest sign of disagreement among top Israeli officials over the direction of the war against Hamas, now in its fourth month.\n\nIn his first public statements on the course of the war, Eisenkot said that claims the dozens of hostages could be freed by means other than a cease-fire amounted to spreading \"illusions\" - an implicit criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who heads the five-member War Cabinet and who insists that pursuing the war will win their release.\n\nEisenkot's statements came as some relatives of hostages have intensified their protests, a sign of mounting frustration over the government's seeming lack of progress toward a deal to release the remaining captives.\n\nEli Shtivi, whose 28-year-old son Idan has been held in Gaza since he was kidnapped by Hamas militants from the open-air Tribe of Nova music festival on Oct. 7., began a hunger strike Friday night outside Netanyahu's private residence in the coastal town of Caesarea. Shtivi pledged to eat only a quarter of a pita a day - the reported daily meal of the hostages - until the prime minister agrees to meet with him. Dozens of people joined him for what organizers said was an overnight protest.\n\nThe day before, rifle-toting Israeli police scuffled with protesters who blocked a major highway in Tel Aviv to call for an immediate deal to release the hostages. Police detained seven protesters overnight, according to Israeli media.\n\nMeanwhile, communications began to gradually return in Gaza after a nearly eight-day blackout, the longest such cutoff since the war began. The phone and internet blackout made it nearly impossible for people in Gaza to communicate with the outside world or within the territory, hampering deliveries of humanitarian aid and rescue efforts amid continued Israeli bombardment.\n\nFor the past week, Gaza residents have struggled to get a signal on their phones. Many head to the beach, where some can pick up a non-Palestinian network. With families scattered across the tiny Mediterranean territory, networks are critical to make sure relatives are still alive as Israeli airstrikes crush homes.\n\n\"The people behind me came to check on their friends, family and loved ones,\" said Karam Mezre, referring to others sitting with him on a rock at the beach in central Gaza, scanning their phones.\n\nEven when communications return, \"it is intermittent and not stable,\" said Hamza Al-Barasi, who was displaced from Gaza City.\n\nThe blackout has also made it difficult for information to get out of Gaza on the daily death and destruction from Israel's offensive. The assault has pulverized much of the Gaza Strip, home to some 2.3 million people, as Israel vows to crush Hamas after its unprecedented Oct. 7 raid into Israel. In the attack, about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed and 250 others taken hostage. Israel has said more than 130 hostages remain in Gaza, but not all of them are believed to be alive.\n\nIsrael's offensive, one of the deadliest and most destructive military campaigns in recent history, has killed nearly 25,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities, and uprooted more than 80% of the territory's population.\n\nIsrael has also cut off all but a trickle of supplies into the besieged territory, including food, water and fuel, causing what U.N. officials say is a humanitarian disaster.\n\nThe United States, Israel's closest ally, has provided strong military and political support for the campaign, but has increasingly called on Israel to scale back its assault and take steps toward establishing a Palestinian state after the war - a suggestion Netanyahu has soundly rejected.\n\nSpeaking during a nationally televised news conference Thursday, Netanyahu reiterated his longstanding opposition to a two-state solution, saying Israel \"must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River.\"\n\nOn Friday, President Joe Biden and Netanyahu spoke by phone after a glaring, almost four-week gap in direct communication amid fundamental differences over their visions for Gaza once the war ends.\n\nBiden, for his part, in Friday's call reaffirmed his commitment to work toward helping the Palestinians move toward statehood.\n\nNetanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant have also said the fighting will continue until Hamas is crushed, and argue that only military action can win the hostages' release.\n\nBut commentators have begun to question whether Netanyahu's objectives are realistic, given the slow pace of the offensive and growing international criticism, including genocide accusations at the United Nations world court, which Israel vehemently denies. Critics accuse Netanyahu of trying to avoid looming investigations of governmental failures, keep his coalition intact and put off elections. Polls show that the popularity of Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption charges, has plummeted during the war.\n\nSpeaking to the investigative program \"Uvda\" on Israel's Channel 12 television, Eisenkot said the Israeli hostages \"will only return alive if there is a deal, linked to a significant pause in fighting.\" He said dramatic rescue operations are unlikely because the hostages are apparently spread out, many of them in underground tunnels.\n\nClaiming hostages can be freed by means other than a deal \"is to spread illusions,\" said Eisenkot, whose son was killed in December while fighting in Gaza.\n\nDefense Minister Gallant has said troops disabled the Hamas command structure in northern Gaza, from which significant numbers of troops were withdrawn earlier in the week, and that the focus is now on the southern half of the territory.\n\nBut Eisenkot also dismissed suggestions that the military has delivered a decisive blow against Hamas.\n\n\"We haven't yet reached a strategic achievement, or rather only partially,\" Eisenkot said. \"We did not bring down Hamas.\"\n\nThe militant group has continued to fight back across Gaza, even in the most devastated areas, and launched rockets into Israel.\n\nIn his interview, Eisenkot also confirmed that a preemptive strike against Lebanon's Hezbollah militia was called off at the last minute during the early days of the war. He said he was among those arguing against such a strike in an Oct. 11 Cabinet meeting that he said left him hoarse from shouting.\n\nSuch an attack would have been a \"strategic mistake\" and would likely have triggered a regional war, Eisenkot said.\n\nIn a thinly veiled criticism of Netanyahu, Eisenkot also said strategic decisions about the war's direction must be made urgently and that a discussion about an endgame should have started immediately after the war began.\n\nHe said he examines every day whether he should remain in the War Cabinet, which also includes Netanyahu, Gallant, former Defense Minister Benny Gantz and Ron Dermer, strategic affairs minister in the Netanyahu government. Eisenkot is a parliament member from the opposition National Unity alliance headed by Gantz.\n\n\"I know what my red line is,\" Eisenkot said when asked at what point he would quit. \"It's connected to the hostages, that is one of the objectives, but it's also connected to the way in which we need to run this war.\"\n\nThe war has rippled across the Middle East, with Iranian-backed groups attacking U.S. and Israeli targets. Fighting between Israel and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon threatens to erupt into all-out war, and Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen continue to target international shipping despite U.S.-led airstrikes.\n\nThe United States conducted a sixth strike against Houthi rebels in Yemen on Friday, taking out anti-ship missile launchers that were prepared to fire, according to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing military operations. President Joe Biden has acknowledged that bombing the militants has yet to stop their attacks on shipping in the crucial Red Sea corridor."}
{"text": "# Women and children are the main victims of the Israel-Hamas war with 16,000 killed, UN says\nBy **EDITH M. LEDERER**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 10:10 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**UNITED NATIONS (AP)** - Women and children are the main victims in the Israel-Hamas war, with some 16,000 killed and an estimated two mothers losing their lives every hour since Hamas' surprise attack on Israel, the United Nations agency promoting gender equality said Friday.\n\nAs a result of the more than 100-day conflict, UN Women added, at least 3,000 women may have become widows and heads of households and at least 10,000 children may have lost their fathers.\n\nIn a report released Friday, the agency pointed to gender inequality and the burden on women fleeing the fighting with children and being displaced again and again. Of the territory's 2.3 million population, it said, 1.9 million are displaced and \"close to one million are women and girls\" seeking shelter and safety.\n\nUN Women's executive director, Sima Bahous, said this is \"a cruel inversion\" of fighting during the 15 years before the Hamas attack on Oct. 7. Previously, she said, 67% of all civilians killed in Gaza and the West Bank were men and less then 14% were women.\n\nShe echoed U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres' calls for a humanitarian cease-fire and the immediate release of all hostages taken captive in Israel on Oct. 7.\n\n\"However much we mourn the situation of the women and girls of Gaza today, we will mourn further tomorrow without unrestricted humanitarian assistance and an end to the destruction and killing,\" Bahous said in a statement accompanying the report.\n\n\"These women and girls are deprived of safety, medicine, health care, and shelter. They face imminent starvation and famine. Most of all they are deprived of hope and justice,\" she said.\n\nThe health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says nearly 25,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict, 70% of them women and children. The United Nations says more than a half million people in Gaza - a quarter of the population - are starving.\n\nIn Israel, around 1,200 people were killed during the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that sparked the war, and some 250 people were taken hostage by militants. More than 100 hostages are believed to still be held captive in Gaza.\n\nBahous said UN Women had heard \"shocking accounts of unconscionable sexual violence during the attacks\" by Hamas, and she echoed U.N. calls for accountability, justice and support for all those affected.\n\nDespite escalating hostilities in Gaza, the agency said women-led and women's rights organizations continue to operate. It found that 83% of women's organizations surveyed in the Gaza Strip are at least partially operational, mainly focusing on the emergency response to the war.\n\nBut UN Women said its analysis of funding from last year's flash appeal for Gaza found that just 0.09% of funding went directly to national or local women's rights organizations.\n\nBahous said there is a need for much more aid to get to Gaza, especially to women and children, and for an end to the war.\n\n\"This is a time for peace,\" she said. \"We owe this to all Israeli and Palestinian women and girls. This is not their conflict. They must no longer pay its price.\""}
{"text": "# Dior puts on a daytime fashion ballet under the Parisian stars\nBy **THOMAS ADAMSON**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 5:36 PM EST\n\n---\n\nPARIS (AP) - Dior's menswear maestro Kim Jones transformed a sunny afternoon in Paris into a starlit evening of balletic grandeur at Paris Fashion Week, in a display of fashion theatrics.\n\nInspired by the legendary ballet icons Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, Jones delivered an exuberant spectacle at the Ecole Militaire annex on Friday.\n\nAmid the haunting melodies of Sergei Prokofiev's \"Romeo and Juliet,\" the collection intertwined Dior's fine tailoring with a joyful explosion of theatrical glamour. It drew screams and cheers from a VIP audience - as it explored the duality of an artist's persona onstage and backstage.\n\nHere are some highlights of the fall-winter 2024 men's shows:\n\n## DIOR'S BALLET STARS\nIn a front row as starry as the simulated night sky above, luminaries like Lewis Hamilton, Bill Nighy, Kate Moss, Nicholas Hoult, Rita Ora, Princess Eugenie and Pharrell Williams witnessed a fashion ballet that transcended the traditional runway. Their presence underscored the collection's appeal to a diverse audience, from royalty to pop culture icons.\n\nJones' mastery in blending traditional codes with modernity was evident. Muted beiges and grays, signature to Dior's palette, were enlivened with exuberant bursts of color - saffron yellow socks, lilac blue sandals, and handbags, and vividly striped sweaters.\n\nThe pieces de resistance included a gleaming Renaissance cape-shawl with silver scallop fringe and woolen coats reinvented with double sleeves, cascading down poetically.\n\nEchoing Jones' own words, \"The collection, or rather collections, are about contrast: the contrasts in the House of Dior in terms of ready-to-wear and haute couture. It's the difference between onstage and backstage; the life of Nureyev theatrically and in reality.\"\n\nThis sentiment was captured in contrasts between the subdued tones and tailoring of the first half of the show and the shimmer, gleam and sparkle that dominated the latter part in a dazzling crescendo.\n\nThe collection verged on the encyclopedic. A silver Uchikake kimono paid homage to Nureyev's lavish style. Alongside this were modern silhouettes - sleek trousers and ribbed knits, each a testament to Jones' contemporary flair.\n\nAs the show culminated, the audience was left half in awe and half grappling for their cameras as the neon stage rose up like a sci-fi movie carrying the models into the air. Thus it melded styles from the past with a futuristic, space-age edge.\n\n## NIGO'S SOFT KENZO WARRIORS\nIn a fashion-forward fusion of traditional themes and streetwise flair, designer Nigo's Friday night show for Kenzo whispered of soft warriors and echoed the brand's past.\n\nThis season's collection signified a slight departure from the previous spring's focus on preppy and collegiate themes.\n\nNigo began fall with an reinterpretation of checks - a microscopic view transforming into blown up patterns, with silhouettes comprising broad shoulders and cascading lapels. A highlight was a pastel furry vest, resembling armor, yet with a streetwear edge. This piece, adorned with a diagonal black strap reminiscent of an Asian sword tie, encapsulated the theme of \"soft warriors.\" Likewise, so did the martial arts-style belts adorning several women's outfits.\n\nNigo, Kenzo's first Japanese designer since founder Kenzo Takada, stepped into the spotlight in his January 2022 debut, marking a pivotal moment in fashion history. His journey, from the vibrant streets of A Bathing Ape to the luxurious corridors of Kenzo, reflects a shift in the industry's approach to diversity and creativity.\n\nThe parallels between Nigo and Takada are striking. Both share Japanese roots, attended the same Tokyo fashion college, and possess an East-meets-West artistic vision. Nigo's tenure at Kenzo brings a blend of his streetwear heritage and the house's traditional motifs.\n\n## JUNYA WATANABE'S THRIFT-SHOP CHIC\nJunya Watanabe unveiled a collection that was a masterful blend of eerie mood-setting and aggressive urban fashion. The spot-lit runway, casting elongated shadows, set the stage for a show that echoed Watanabe's long-standing tradition of avant-garde experimentation and cultural fusion.\n\nThe models, sometimes adorned with black punk-styled hair and draped in billowing jewelry, walked down the runway in dark ensembles that seemed to capture the essence of Watanabe's unique design ethos.\n\nTheir attire, a chaotic yet intentional layering of styles, evoked the sense of a meticulously curated thrift shop adventure. This approach, reminiscent of Watanabe's earlier works, highlighted his ability to transform the shambolic into the sublime.\n\nThe clothes featured a mix of traditional tailoring and streetwear elements, a nod to his 2001 debut when he first merged high fashion with everyday wear. The collection's tailored jackets were reinterpreted with the house's unique perspective, blurring the lines between formal and casual.\n\nThis creative contradiction was seen in the use of unconventional fabric combinations and turning classic silhouettes into something very contemporary. The eclectic, layered pieces, seemed to embody the spirit of Watanabe's philosophy: a fusion of the traditional and the avant-garde."}
{"text": "# A baby lived because an Oregon teen couldn't stand by after she saw 3 people get electrocuted\nBy **CLAIRE RUSH** and **GENE JOHNSON**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 8:49 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**PORTLAND, Ore. (AP)** - Majiah Washington noticed a flash outside her home this week in Portland, where a dangerous storm had coated the city with ice. Opening her blinds, she saw a red SUV with a downed power line on it and a couple who had been putting their baby in the car.\n\nThe woman screamed to her boyfriend to get the baby to safety, and he grabbed the child and began to scramble up the driveway on concrete so slick it was almost impossible to walk. But before he made it halfway, he slid backward and his foot touched the live wire - \"a little fire, then smoke,\" Washington said.\n\nThe mother, six months pregnant, tried to reach the baby, but she too slipped and was electrocuted. So was her 15-year-old brother, when he came out to help.\n\nWashington, 18, was on the phone with a dispatcher when she saw the baby, lying on top of his father, move his head - the 9-month-old was alive. Having just seen three people shocked to death, she decided to try to save the boy.\n\nShe kept a low crouch to avoid sliding into the wire as she approached, she said at a news conference Thursday, a day after the deaths. As she grabbed the baby she touched the father's body, but she wasn't shocked, she said.\n\n\"I was concerned about the baby,\" said Washington, who recognized the woman as her neighbor's daughter. \"Nobody was with the baby.\"\n\nPortland Fire and Rescue spokesman Rick Graves praised Washington for her heroism but confessed he didn't understand how she and the baby weren't also electrocuted. The baby was examined at a hospital and is fine, authorities have said.\n\n\"We do have fortunately with us a toddler that is going to be able to thrive and do what they possibly can as they move forward,\" Graves said. \"And they are here, in part, because of the heroic acts of a member of our community.\"\n\nThe snow, freezing rain, ice and frigid temperatures that hammered the Pacific Northwest in the past week have now been blamed for at least 10 deaths in Oregon, from hypothermia and falling trees or utility poles, along with five from hypothermia in the Seattle area.\n\nOregon's governor declared a statewide emergency Thursday night after requests for aid from multiple counties \"as they enter the sixth day of severe impacts\" from the weather.\n\nThe ice weighs down trees and power lines making them prone to snap, especially in strong winds. That appears to be what caused the electrocution deaths: A large branch broke from a tree, landed on utility wires and pushed one onto the vehicle.\n\nWashington's neighbor, Ronald Briggs, declined to speak with The Associated Press beyond confirming that his 21-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son had been killed.\n\nBut he told Portland television station KGW that his daughter had come over to use the internet after hers went out. He and his wife had just gotten in their own car to run an errand when they heard the boom and saw the SUV apparently on fire.\n\nHe watched as the couple slid to their deaths - and then told his 15-year-old son, Ta'Ron Briggs, a high school sophomore, to keep his distance, to no avail.\n\n\"I told him, 'Don't go down there - try to get away from them.' And he slid, and he touched the water, and he, and he died too,\" Briggs said. \"I have six kids. I lost two of them in one day.\"\n\n\"It just hurt,\" he said. \"Being a good father cannot solve this right now.\""}
{"text": "# Good girl! Officer enlists a Michigan man's dog to help rescue him from an icy lake\nJanuary 19, 2024. 11:06 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP)** - A man who fell through the ice on a frozen Michigan lake was rescued after a quick-thinking state police officer used the stranded man's dog to get rescue equipment to him and pull the man to safety.\n\nBystanders called 911 on Thursday after the 65-year-old Traverse City man fell through ice-covered Arbutus Lake, state police said.\n\nThe body camera worn by Michigan State Police Motor Carrier Officer Kammeron Bennetts captured the rescue, initially showing the man trapped in frigid waters with just his head and shoulders above the thin ice, and his dog standing at his side.\n\nIt shows Bennetts first trying to throw a rescue disc tethered to a rope out to the man. When it fails, Bennetts asks the man to send his dog to him.\n\n\"Send your pup here. Will she come to me?\" he yells to the man, who replies that his dog's name is Ruby.\n\n\"Ruby come here! Come here Ruby!\" Bennetts shouts in the video before whistling for the canine, which runs to him and arrives tail wagging.\n\nThe officer ties the rescue disc to the dog's collar and asks the man to call Ruby back to him. When she returns to her owner, Bennetts tells the man to take the disc from Ruby and to start kicking his legs.\n\n\"Bring your feet up to the surface by kicking your feet!\" he yells, pulling the man onto the lake's icy surface and urging him to hold onto the disc as he keeps pulling on the rope, dragging him onto safer ice near the lake's edge. Bennetts and a local firefighter are then able to grab his arms to complete the rescue, with Ruby still attached to the rope.\n\nState police said the man was taken by ambulance to a hospital for treatment and later released. The agency cheered the rescue in a posting on X, formerly known as Twitter, praising Ruby in particular.\n\n\"What a good girl!!! Amazing ice rescue from 7th District, MCO Bennetts. Creative thinking helped save a life!! EXCELLENT JOB MCO Bennetts and RUBY!!\" the tweet states, adding, \"Great team work and well done!\""}
{"text": "# Lions finally giving fans, including Eminem, chance to cheer for a winner after decades of futility\nBy **LARRY LAGE**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 3:57 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DETROIT (AP)** - Eminem stood alongside Pro Football Hall of Famers Barry Sanders and Calvin Johnson before the Detroit Lions hosted a playoff game for the first time in three decades, soaking up an electric atmosphere at Ford Field.\n\n\"The energy in the building was amazing,\" Johnson said in a telephone interview, taking a break from snowboarding in Utah. \"You could feel it. I wish we could've had that kind of experience.\"\n\nHe's not alone.\n\nDetroit was an NFL powerhouse a long time ago, winning three league titles from 1952 to 1957 in the pre-Super Bowl era, but the franchise had only one postseason win since.\n\nUntil last Sunday's victory.\n\nThe Lions beat the Matt Stafford-led Los Angeles Rams 24-23 in a wild-card game that whipped the crowd into so much of a frenzy that the decibels were almost as loud as a jet engine.\n\nDetroit's party might get kicked up a notch.\n\nThe Lions are hosting Tampa Bay on Sunday, playing a second home playoff game in one postseason for the first time in team history.\n\nSinger Bob Seger, actor Jeff Daniels, actor, writer and producer Keegan-Michael Key - all from Michigan - are expected to attend the divisional game along with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and one of the team's biggest fans: Eminem.\n\nThe rapper has expressed himself and shared his fandom recently on Instagram, saying his New Year's resolution was for the Lions to win the Super Bowl and asking Stafford for a favor.\n\n\"Can you just let us have this one?\" Eminem asked in a post last week.\n\nNow, Eminem is playfully asking coach Dan Campbell to put him in the game.\n\n\"I'm going to be there that night,\" Eminem said. \"I will suit up, and I will score us the winning touchdown in the third quarter.\"\n\nIf Detroit, which is favored by almost a touchdown by FanDuel Sportsbook, beats the Buccaneers it will move a step closer to potentially reaching the Super Bowl for the first time.\n\nWhile there are scores of long-suffering fans in the Motor City, it has also attracted some new ones and engaged with them in the digital age.\n\nSweta Patel, who was born in India and lives in suburban Detroit, didn't know what a first down was about a decade ago. The 41-year-old Patel has developed her knowledge of the game and affinity for the organization thanks to some interactions on social media and in person as a season-ticket holder.\n\nWhen she posted on social media about having knee surgery, Lions players wished her a speedy recovery. When Patel shared that she had a miscarriage in 2021, she heard from Campbell himself shortly after he was hired.\n\n\"He's just a man of the people,\" she said. \"His voice was almost cracking in that video, and it just really brought some comfort to me.\"\n\nMike McCord and millions more in Michigan have waited a long time for their favorite team to bring them joy.\n\nThe 68-year-old McCord was a toddler when his late father, Darris, a Pro Bowl defensive lineman, helped Detroit beat Cleveland at Briggs Stadium, which was later known as Tiger Stadium, for the NFL title in 1957.\n\nMcCord began attending games six-plus decades ago and his family has had season-tickets for more than a half-century, passing the passion for the Honolulu Blue and Silver down to his 36-year-old daughter, Riley.\n\n\"It's been a long 50 years,\" he said. \"We've been through thick and thin - mostly thin.\"\n\nThe Lions hit rock bottom in 2008, becoming the NFL's first 0-16 team, during the worst nine-season stretch in the league since World War II. During a particularly putrid stretch of futility, football historians had to go back to the Dayton Triangles during the 1920s to find a team that lost so often.\n\nWhen coach Matt Patricia was fired during the 2020 season, Mike McCord was ready to give up his tickets on the 40-yard line in the 22nd row behind Detroit's bench.\n\nMcCord's daughter, hoping to seal the deal to renew the family's four tickets, had a custom coffee cup made with the words \"One More Year\" under the team's logo.\n\n\"We didn't know what that next season was going to look like,\" Riley McCord said. \"So, I got that cup.\"\n\nTeam owner Sheila Ford Hamp began to turn the team around three years ago when she finally landed a winning combination in the front office and on the sideline, hiring general manager Brad Holmes and Campbell.\n\nThe Lions built momentum by closing the last season with eight wins over the last 10 games and lived up to unusually high expectations in 2023, tying a franchise record with 12 wins in the regular season and earning a division title for the first time in three decades.\n\n\"Detroit's a great sports town,\" McCord said. \"We've seen the Tigers win it. We've seen the Pistons win it. We've seen the Red Wings win it. We've seen a lot of good things, but never from our Lions.\n\n\"We hope this is the year to finally relieve that pain, and I think they could do it. That's the good thing. We're still in it, and we could go all the way.\""}
{"text": "# Biden is skipping New Hampshire's primary. One of his opponents says he's as elusive as Bigfoot\nBy **WILL WEISSERT**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 1:33 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PETERBOROUGH, N.H. (AP)** - Trying to upset President Joe Biden in New Hampshire's primary, Democratic challenger Dean Phillips is running a TV ad across the state comparing him to Bigfoot - the argument being both are hard to find.\n\n\"I'm something of an expert on elusive creatures,\" a man dressed as sasquatch intones in the spot. \"So I challenged myself to find President Biden in New Hampshire during this primary season. I thought I was good at hiding.\"\n\nBiden isn't campaigning here. He pushed through Democratic rule changes that prioritized voters of color, deemphasizing New Hampshire's primary. That angered party officials here who forged ahead with a primary anyway.\n\nWith his name not on the ballot, Biden's allies are running a write-in campaign to try and ensure he doesn't lose - or come uncomfortably close to losing - to any of the nearly two dozen candidates actually on it - a motley collection including a hopeful whose first name is President and a performance artist who wears a rubber boot on his head.\n\nWhile Tuesday's vote won't affect the numbers in the Democratic nomination fight, it does carry risks for an incumbent with low approval ratings and nagging worries within his party about his reelection prospects. Biden's challengers also include Phillips, who is a Democratic congressman from Minnesota, and self-help author Marianne Williamson, and both are raising questions about Biden's age and electability that his team would rather avoid.\n\nAnything less than a strong finish for the president could hurt, further fueling concerns about his chances in November in a likely a rematch with former President Donald Trump. But Biden supporters in New Hampshire echo his campaign's arguments that he must be reelected to thwart the dire threat Trump poses to the country's core values.\n\n\"There's definitely some frustration and disappointment for how this played out, but I trust that Granite Staters are able to look at the bigger picture and realize the stakes of this election,\" said Angela Brennan, a first-term New Hampshire representative backing the write-in campaign. \"This is truly a choice between democracy and dictatorship.\"\n\nPhillips is perhaps Biden's highest-profile challenger in New Hampshire, though he has revamped his message over several months and been sharply criticized by his colleagues in Congress.\n\nHis campaign has faced an often bumpy ride. No voters showed up to one recent event he held, leading him to deadpan to reporters, \"Sometimes, if you build it, they don't come.\"\n\nOn Thursday, Phillips won the endorsement of entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who garnered national attention running a longshot Democratic bid in 2020. As Yang declared during a Dartmouth rally that he was endorsing Phillips, organizers cued blaring walk-up music and the congressman bounded into the room cheering into his own handheld mic.\n\nOnly Yang wasn't finished with his speech. \"No, no, no,\" he cried. \"I have more time here.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" replied Phillips, as he eventually headed back into the hallway. \"Bye everybody!\"\n\nBut he and others have soldiered on through the New Hampshire winter. Earlier in the week, Phillips stood in a state legislator's kitchen in his stocking feet. Heavy snowy had fallen the day before and around 15 attendees were asked to leave their slushy shoes at the door.\n\nThat kind of personal access is prized by people here who cherish their state's first-in-the-nation primary.\n\n\"We'll be showing them that it's not just the polls, it's voters saying, 'It's time to move on,'\" Phillips said of his chances of pulling a New Hampshire upset. He calls Biden \"a good man\" who will nonetheless lose to Trump if he doesn't step away.\n\nHis host that night was Peter Leishman, a 66-year-old representative from Peterborough who works in the railroad business and supported Biden's three previous runs for the White House, in 1988, 2008, and during his win over Trump.\n\n\"It's time for a change,\" Leishman said.\n\nThe White House and Biden's reelection campaign generally aren't commenting on Phillips other than noting his near-uniform voting record supporting the president's legislative priorities. But New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Ray Buckley, who once warned that the new calendar meant a major Democratic challenger could embarrass Biden, now says his write-in campaign should easily prevail.\n\nPeople vote on key issues like abortion, not a party delegate rule, he said.\n\n\"It doesn't seem to be having any impact at all,\" Buckley said.\n\nAlso running and seeking a boost from Biden's skipping New Hampshire is self-help author Williamson, another 2020 contender who recently told an audience in Portsmouth, \"Even if the Democratic Party can take delegates away from me or any other candidate, they can't take the significance of the New Hampshire primary away from you.\"\n\nPhillips has spent almost $2.5 million on television and digital ads in New Hampshire, according to media tracking firm AdImpact. The Bigfoot-style spot has racked up nearly 4 million impressions on TV and online, according to AdImpact.\n\nThe Biden write-in push has just one paid staffer and no official support from the president's reelection campaign. Relying on volunteers, it works out of an office lent by the AFL-CIO and is spreading the word mostly by visiting Democratic gatherings around the state and holding house parties, while producing thousands of yard signs, as well as hand-held placards it hopes supporters will hoist at every polling location on Tuesday.\n\nA super PAC called Granite for America is also sending mail to New Hampshire Democrats with three-step instructions on how to cast a write-in vote, and trumpeting Biden pledges to protect Social Security and abortion rights, while preventing Trump from returning to the White House.\n\nHow much is being spent on that effort isn't clear but it seems substantial. One Democratic voter received five mailers from the super PAC in two days this week, and one of the group's leaders, former New Hampshire Democratic Party chair Kathy Sullivan, said she got a call from a woman saying, \"I've had seven mailings and I'm going to vote for him. You can stop sending them.\"\n\nSullivan promised that only one more would be coming.\n\n\"I'm very happy with what we've done and I hope that it works, but this being New Hampshire, we never know until the election,\" she said with a laugh. What would constitute a Biden win? \"I don't have a number in mind, I don't have a percentage in mind.\"\n\nEllen Lavoie Cooke, a 65-year-old Democrat from Dover, said she plans to write in Biden's name: \"I'm not embarrassed to be an American like I was when his predecessor was in office.\"\n\nYet Desmond Kager, a 24-year-old engineering consultant from Plymouth, is a Democrat who doesn't support Trump but noted of Biden: \"I probably won't be voting for him because of the write-in.\"\n\n\"If Republicans or Democrats can put someone on the ticket that actually is, you know, worth voting for, then I'll I vote for them,\" he said. \"But it's been hard the last couple elections.\"\n\nWrite-in organizers are attempting to manage expectations, noting that undeclared New Hampshire voters can participate in either party's primary. That means Biden supporters could vote in the Republican primary, where Trump and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley are locked in a fiercer and higher-profile battle for the state's GOP delegates.\n\nTracy Moloney, 63, a math department administrator at Dartmouth College, came to hear Phillips speak at the event with Yang and plans to vote for him - though she said she'd ultimately vote for Biden in November if he's the nominee.\n\n\"I don't know how he does that,\" Moloney said of Phillips beating Trump. \"But I also don't know how Biden does it. That should scare everyone.\""}
{"text": "# Fetterman backs Andy Kim as Democrats scramble to keep Menendez's Senate seat in New Jersey\nBy **MIKE CATALINI**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 11:34 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**TRENTON, N.J. (AP)** - Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. John Fetterman has backed Rep. Andy Kim in the congressman's bid to win a contested primary for New Jersey's Senate seat, as Democrats jockey to push indicted Sen. Bob Menendez out of office.\n\nFetterman was an early proponent of calling for Menendez's ouster from Congress after federal prosecutors charged Menendez, his wife and business associates with taking bribes in cash and gold bars in exchange for helping the government of Egypt - and, in a later indictment, Qatar as well.\n\nMenendez and the other defendants have pleaded not guilty, and the senator has vowed to fight the charges. Unlike the first time he was indicted - charges that ultimately led to a hung jury in 2017 - Menendez has lost support within the Democratic Party in his home state, where his influence was once virtually unassailable.\n\nFetterman called Kim, a three-term congressman from southern New Jersey's 3rd District, a man of integrity and \"deep honor.\" Without mentioning Menendez by name, Fetterman drew an implied contrast with him.\n\n\"I feel very secure knowing that he has no gold bars underneath his mattress and won't ever be accused of being a foreign agent for Egypt or Qatar,\" he said.\n\nIt's unclear the extent to which endorsements will resonate with voters, but they can help campaigns with fundraising, generate a sense of momentum or inevitability and project strength.\n\nFetterman's endorsement comes amid a pitched internal struggle among New Jersey Democrats who have called for Menendez's ouster and are competing to succeed him.\n\nMenendez hasn't said if he'll run again and has so far withstood calls for his resignation.\n\nThe June primary is shaping up as a battle, so far, between Kim and the state's first lady, Tammy Murphy. Other Democrats are also campaigning in the race, though Murphy and Kim have gone tit-for-tat with a number of high-profile endorsements, and each has raised millions so far.\n\nMurphy unveiled the backing this week of officials in the Democratic stronghold of Atlantic City as well as the state trooper's union. She's already received backing from influential county party chairmen whose support is key to how the ballot is drafted, with preferred candidates getting favorable placement.\n\nFetterman's backing on Thursday seemed to come in response.\n\n\"To have someone who is a sitting senator, who knows the job, knows the role of a legislator at this moment, and also just understands the crazy, chaotic moment that we live in right now, that's something that stands out, and I'm glad to have his support,\" Kim said in an emailed statement.\n\nMurphy's campaign said in an emailed statement that she's traveling the state to earn support from voters. She will \"stand up for key Democratic values in DC,\" said campaign spokesperson Alexandra Altman.\n\nFetterman joins fellow Pennsylvanian Gov. Josh Shapiro in wading into the race. Shapiro has raised money for Murphy, according to her campaign.\n\nAlso seeking or considering a run on the Democratic side are long-time civil rights organizer Lawrence Hamm and labor leader Patricia Campos-Medina.\n\n\"This race for U.S. Senate is very contentious now,\" Hamm said, referring to Murphy and Kim. \"We know at least two of these candidates are expected to spend millions.\"\n\nThe GOP primary is also still shaping up. Mendham Mayor Christine Serrano Glassner, a declared candidate, said through a spokesperson on Friday that the Democratic Party \"enabled\" corruption by supporting Menendez for years.\n\nKeeping New Jersey's Senate seat in Democratic hands is crucial for the party, which has narrow control of the chamber heading into this fall's election. New Jersey hasn't elected a Republican to the Senate since 1972."}
{"text": "# Potential problems with New Hampshire's aging ballot scanners could prompt conspiracy theories\nBy **CHRISTINA A. CASSIDY**  \nJanuary 18, 2024. 5:05 PM EST\n\n---\n\nWhen New Hampshire voters cast their ballots in Tuesday's first-in-the-nation primary, many will do so using scanners that are at least 15 years old - with some potentially dating back to Bill Clinton's presidency.\n\nElection experts say the aging AccuVote ballot tabulators in use across roughly half the state's towns and cities don't pose additional security risks. The concern is their age.\n\nWith a dwindling supply of replacement parts, breakdowns could create Election Day headaches for local election officials, who might be forced to count ballots by hand - a process that could delay reporting their results. Malfunctions and ballot-counting delays in other states in recent years have sometimes been used to promote conspiracy theories that undermine public confidence in the vote, despite no evidence of any widespread problems with voting machines.\n\nFranklin, a small city about 20 miles north of the state capital, has no wiggle room if something goes awry with its scanners.\n\n\"We have three machines and three polling places. That's it, no backup,\" said Olivia Zink, a member of the Franklin City Council who also is executive director of the voter advocacy group Coalition for Open Democracy. \"If one goes down, we hand count.\"\n\nZink, who will be working at her local polling place Tuesday, said she is less worried about hand counting even if turnout is robust among the 4,500 registered voters because the ballot contains only the presidential primary. She urged everyone to be patient if results are delayed. One potential glitch: If it's snowy or rainy, damp ballots can mess up a ballot scanner.\n\n\"If it's a sunny, beautiful day, we're in great shape,\" Zink said.\n\nReducing the chances of a major disruption is the ballot itself, with just a single race and a state requirement that vote counting continue uninterrupted until finished. New Hampshire will hold primaries for state and local races later in the year.\n\nAll New Hampshire voters mark their ballot by hand, but how those ballots are counted depends on the city or town. Just under half opt to hand count and have done so for years, but those are among the least populated in the state. The most populous towns and cities use machine tabulators, so most ballots cast in the state are counted electronically using the AccuVote scanners.\n\nThe same type of ballot scanners are used by local voting jurisdictions in five other states, according to Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group that tracks U.S. voting equipment.\n\n\"You could say it's primitive technology. You could say it's simple and reliable technology. Both of those things can be true,\" said Mark Lindeman, the group's policy and strategy director.\n\nHe said New Hampshire's tabulators have been kept in good condition and that the biggest challenge for election officials is finding replacement parts. He sees the worst-case scenario as local election officials having to resort to hand counting because a tabulator has failed and they don't have access to a backup.\n\n\"As worst cases go, that's a pretty good one,\" Lindeman said. \"The ballots are safe. This will not prevent New Hampshire voters from voting or prevent New Hampshire voters from having their votes counted.\"\n\nEven so, any problems with voting machines or ballot counting devices provide an opening for those who want to cast doubt on the outcome. Former President Donald Trump, who won this week's Iowa caucuses but faces a potentially tougher test in New Hampshire, regularly signals that an anticipated close election will be \"rigged.\"\n\nHis false claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden, has produced a tsunami of conspiracy theories about voting machines.\n\n\"If there are major failures and results come really late, and if there is not information ahead of time to the public that we might be hand-counting and what that involves - in a worst-case scenario the vacuum that leaves could allow folks to come forward with conspiracy theories and question what the results are,\" said McKenzie St. Germain with the voter advocacy group America Votes NH.\n\nIn Derry, south of Manchester, Town Clerk Tina Guilford tested her eight tabulators this week to ensure they were working properly and counting ballots correctly. It's a process being repeated across the state as local election officials prepare for the primary.\n\nDerry's tabulators are roughly turn-of-the-century technology - each about 20 to 22 years old, Guilford said. The town agreed to buy replacements that officials hope will be in place by March when new tabulators will be certified for use in the state.\n\nDerry, with its nearly 20,000 registered voters, doesn't need all eight AccuVote scanners running at the same time, so they have options if one were to be taken out of service, Guilford said. It has happened before, when hand sanitizer gummed up a machine in 2020 during the pandemic.\n\n\"I don't foresee any issues,\" she said.\n\nSecretary of State David Scanlan, New Hampshire's top election official, said he has been encouraging local officials to make sure they have enough staff to handle any hand counting that may be necessary.\n\nIt's expected that every jurisdiction will have to count some ballots by hand given Biden's decision to skip the state's primary in favor of a revamped Democratic schedule that elevated South Carolina over Iowa and New Hampshire. That has prompted a write-in campaign for him, and any ballots with write-in candidates will have to be tallied by hand.\n\nIn recent years, hand counting has gained favor among those pushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 election as they seek to ban voting machines and electronic tabulators. While hand counting is used in some parts of the country, it usually occurs in small jurisdictions where the process is manageable.\n\nLast year, New Hampshire lawmakers rejected a proposal that would have required all votes to be counted by hand.\n\nExperts say not only are machines faster, but studies have shown they are more accurate. Many election officials do rely on some measure of hand counting as part of their post-election process to verify that the machines worked correctly.\n\nScanlan said he has been encouraging voters to understand that it's not unusual for some machines to have problems and stressed that election officials have plans to deal with it, even if it means a delay in releasing results.\n\n\"That just happens in any election,\" he said. \"I would expect that this election is going to be no different than any other election we've conducted in the past.\""}
{"text": "# Nevada Republican Senate primary candidates take aim at absent front-runner in debate\nBy **GABE STERN**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 3:58 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**RENO, Nev. (AP)** - Seven Republicans vying for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in Nevada circled the familiar talking points of GOP politics at a debate on Thursday, while also taking shots at the front-runner, who made an apparently strategic decision not to attend.\n\nThe debate in a Reno casino ballroom focused on increased border security, anti-abortion stances and cutting government spending and size, but candidates spent much of their time criticizing retired Army Capt. Sam Brown, whose backing in Washington, D.C., and formidable 2022 campaign have made him a fundraising juggernaut above the crowded primary field.\n\nNearly every candidate called out Brown for his absence and described him as an establishment candidate not willing to face voters, a combative signal by a group of lesser-known Republicans attempting to gain ground in an otherwise cordial debate.\n\n\"Don't vote for Sam Brown. Look at one of these candidates up here,\" said Bill Conrad, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and former deputy mayor of Modesto, California, who co-founded Redmove, the conservative group hosting the debate.\n\nBrown's campaign said the decision to skip the debate reflected his comfortable lead in resources and grassroots support. The non-engagement strategy has been employed by other campaign front-runners, most notably by former President Donald Trump.\n\n\"The numbers say it all: Sam Brown is the only candidate in this race with the resources, support and grassroots energy to take on Jacky Rosen,\" Brown's campaign said in a statement. \"Nevada Republicans are uniting behind Donald Trump and Sam Brown because they are the only conservative champions who can defeat Biden and Rosen in November.\"\n\nFormer U.S. Ambassador to Iceland Jeff Gunter also was not on stage after backing out last month, due to him speaking at another Republican event, according to a campaign spokesperson.\n\n\"I will debate Scam Brown at any time,\" Gunter said in the statement, employing a nickname he often uses to disparage Brown.\n\nThe other candidates on stage included Jim Marchant, a former candidate for Nevada secretary of state and outspoken election denier; Tony Grady, an Air Force veteran and former candidate for lieutenant governor; Stephanie Phillips, a real estate broker; and Ronda Kennedy, an attorney.\n\nFormer President Donald Trump has skipped all Republican primary debates in the current presidential campaign, electing to hold rallies or appear on rival television networks in a strategy that has deprived the events of viewership and media attention while he remains the dominant front-runner. The last GOP primary debate between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley drew fewer than 2.6 million viewers.\n\nBrown, a Purple Heart recipient, was a heavily recruited candidate for Republicans in Washington looking to avoid a repeat of their lackluster showing in the 2022 midterm elections, when flawed GOP candidates helped Democrats win battleground races and hold the Senate majority.\n\nTwo years ago, Brown was a longshot Senate candidate who criticized Republican front-runner Adam Laxalt for agreeing only to a pre-recorded debate instead of a live, prime-time broadcast.\n\n\"He must feel safe at 8 a.m., on a Monday morning, in a closed studio, where working-class Nevadans can't challenge him,\" Brown said of the former Nevada Attorney General, who enjoyed the backing of the Republican Party's most influential figures, from former President Donald Trump to then-Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell.\n\nLaxalt won that primary handily but lost narrowly in the general election to incumbent Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto.\n\nThis cycle, Brown often has brushed past questions about his primary opponents to focus attacks on incumbent Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen. He said the crowded field was a product of Rosen's leadership, not his.\n\nBut on Thursday, Rosen was seldom mentioned as Brown weathered attacks from his opponents.\n\n\"I hope you remember the one that's not here,\" Kennedy said."}
{"text": "# In snowy DC, the March for Life rallies against abortion with an eye toward the November elections\nBy **ASHRAF KHALIL** and **ALANNA DURKIN RICHER**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 5:01 PM EST\n\n---\n\nWASHINGTON (AP) - Thousands of opponents of abortion rights rallied under falling snow on Friday at the annual March for Life, as speakers urged the impassioned crowd to capitalize on the movement's major victory in the Supreme Court and keep fighting until abortion is eliminated.\n\nMonths before a presidential election that could be heavily influenced by abortion politics, anti-abortion activists packed the National Mall carrying signs with messages such as \"Life is precious\" and \"I am the pro-life generation.\" After listening to speeches, the crowd, braving frigid temperatures, marched past the U.S. Capitol and Supreme Court. One group planted in front of Court, beating a drum and chanting: \"Everyone you know was once an embryo.\"\n\nFriday's March for Life is the second such event in the nation's capital since the June 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended the federal protection for abortion rights enshrined in Roe v. Wade. Last year's march was triumphant, with organizers relishing a state-by-state fight in legislatures around the country.\n\nSpeakers praised the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade but said it was more important now than ever to keep up the pressure on lawmakers to advance abortion restrictions.\n\n\"Roe is done, but we still live in a culture that knows not how to care for life,\" said Benjamin Watson, a former NFL player who is now an anti-abortion advocate. \"Roe is done, but the factors that drive women to seek abortions are ever apparent and ever increasing. Roe is done, but abortion is still legal and thriving in too much of America.\"\n\nFriday's event appeared smaller than in past years as ice and snow complicated travel plans. But the crowd was fired up as speakers, which included members of Congress and Michigan University Football Coach Jim Harbaugh, urged participants to keep fighting until abortion becomes \"unthinkable.\"\n\n\"Let's be encouraged, let's press on and hope that we can join together and make this great difference,\" House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. \"We can stand with every woman for every child, and we can truly build a culture that cherishes and protects life.\"\n\nThe snow fell heavily throughout the speeches as young people built snowmen and had snowball fights behind the stage. Near the Capitol, the crowd celebrated as a group on a balcony of the Cannon House Office building cheered on the march.\n\n\"I almost didn't come when I saw the forecast, but this is just incredible,\" said Stephanie Simpson, a 42-year-old grocery store employee from Cleveland, who has attended the last four marches.\n\nRoberto Reyes, a Mexican native and Carmelite friar, said: \"All these people are going to remember this year's march for the rest of their lives!\"\n\nMembers of the crowd described overturning Roe v. Wade as a victory, but said the anti-abortion fight rages on.\n\n\"The key message this year is that our work is not done,\" said Bishop Michael Burbidge, chair of the committee for pro-life activities for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.\n\nThe movement has seen mixed results. The ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization reverted abortion lawmaking back to the states, and 14 states are now enforcing bans on abortion throughout pregnancy. Two more have such bans on hold because of court rulings. And another two have bans that take effect when cardiac activity can be detected, about six weeks into pregnancy - often before women know they're pregnant.\n\nBut abortion restrictions have also lost at the ballot box in Ohio, Kansas and Kentucky. And total bans have produced high-profile causes for abortion rights supporters to rally around. Kate Cox, a Texas mother of two, sought an abortion after learning the baby she was carrying had a fatal genetic condition. Her request for an exemption from Texas' ban, one of the country's strictest, was denied by the state Supreme Court, and she left Texas to seek an abortion elsewhere.\n\nMovement organizers now expect abortion rights to be a major Democratic rallying cry in President Joe Biden's reelection campaign.\n\n\"The pro-abortion forces, that's one of the major things they're going to run on,\" said Susan Swift, president of Pro-Life Legal and a veteran anti-abortion activist. \"That's one of the only things that seems to animate their base.\"\n\nBiden campaign officials openly state that they plan to make Biden synonymous with the fight to preserve abortion rights.\n\nVice President Kamala Harris has led the charge on the issue for the White House. She will hold the first event in Wisconsin on Monday, which would have been the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the lawsuit that led to the landmark 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion."}
{"text": "# Lawyer hired to prosecute Trump in Georgia is thrust into the spotlight over affair claims\nBy **KATE BRUMBACK** and **ALANNA DURKIN RICHER**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 3:51 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ATLANTA (AP)** - Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis hired attorney Nathan Wade to lead the Georgia prosecution of Donald Trump and 18 others over efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Now, allegations of a romantic relationship between Willis and Wade are raising questions about his past work and qualifications and threaten to taint one of four criminal cases against the former president.\n\nShe has defended her hiring of Wade - who has little prosecutorial experience - and has not directly denied a romantic relationship. The claim surfaced last week in a motion filed by a defense attorney representing a former Trump campaign staffer, who did not provide concrete proof. The lawyer is seeking to get the indictment tossed and to remove Willis and Wade from the case.\n\nThe district attorney's relative silence for over a week has allowed Trump and other critics to exploit the claims as the former president vies to win back the White House. But while it's created a political storm, the legal implications are less clear.\n\n\"It's certainly a huge political problem, it is certainly scandalous and salacious, if true,\" said Anthony Michael Kreis, a Georgia State University law professor who is following the case. But he questioned whether it affects prosecutors' ability to handle the case professionally.\n\n\"Where is the line between an ethical lapse or a political misjudgment and something that kind of taints this office?\" he asked.\n\nOutside of any effect on this case, Willis, an elected Democrat, is up for reelection this year, and this could become a campaign issue depending on how she ultimately responds.\n\nThe motion filed last week by lawyer Ashleigh Merchant, who represents former Trump campaign staffer and onetime White House aide Michael Roman, alleges that Willis paid Wade large sums and benefitted personally when he, in turn, used his earnings to take her to Napa Valley, Florida and the Caribbean. Wade has been paid more than $650,000 at a rate of $250 an hour since his hiring, according to records Merchant cited.\n\nWade did not respond to an email seeking comment.\n\nThe judge has scheduled a Feb. 15 hearing on the matter and ordered prosecutors to file a response by Feb. 2.\n\nMerchant has not provided proof of a romantic relationship. She wrote that filings in Wade's pending divorce are sealed. She also cited \"sources close\" to the two without elaborating. She is now seeking to unseal Wade's divorce case. The Associated Press and other news organizations have also filed to unseal the case.\n\nWade's wife has subpoenaed Willis for a deposition in the divorce case. In a filing Thursday seeking to quash that subpoena, a lawyer for Willis accused Joycelyn Wade of trying to obstruct and interfere with the criminal election interference case.\n\nIn a response filed Friday, a lawyer for Joycelyn Wade wrote that Nathan Wade has taken trips to to San Francisco and Napa Valley, Florida, Belize, Panama and Australia, as well as taking Caribbean cruises since filing for divorce and that Willis \"was an intended travel partner for at least some of these trips as indicated by flights he purchased for her to accompany him.\"\n\nThe filing includes credit card statements that show Wade - after he had been hired as special prosecutor - purchased plane tickets in October 2022 for him and Willis to travel to Miami and bought tickets in April to San Francisco in their names.\n\nJoycelyn Wade's filing says she is seeking to question Willis about \"her romantic affair\" with Nathan Wade, saying there \"appears to be no reasonable explanation for their travels apart from a romantic relationship.\"\n\nWillis spokesperson Jeff DiSantis declined to comment Friday on Joycelyn Wade's filing.\n\nWillis vigorously defended Wade's credentials at a church service on Sunday and suggested the questioning of his hiring was rooted in racism. She has three special prosecutors working on the election case - a white woman, a white man and a Black man - \"they only attacked one,\" she said, referring to Wade.\n\nThe other special prosecutors are John Floyd, a nationally recognized expert on anti-racketeering laws, and Anna Cross, who worked for two decades as a prosecutor and handled numerous high-profile cases.\n\nWillis cited Wade's 10 years as a municipal court judge and more than 20 years in private practice. But Wade's prosecutorial experience is thin. He worked for the Cobb County solicitor general's office, which handles misdemeanor cases, for less than a year in the late 1990s, a county spokesperson said.\n\nIn a December 2010 letter, then-Attorney General Thurbert Baker designated Wade a special assistant attorney general. Baker left office the next month. A spokesperson for the attorney general's office said they \"have not found any information to confirm that Mr. Wade has served as a Special Assistant Attorney General.\"\n\nIt's not the first time Wade's qualifications have been challenged.\n\nAfter his firm was tapped in 2020 by then-Cobb County Sheriff Neil Warren to review operations at the local jail, a TV news station sued the sheriff, alleging the investigation was a sham designed to prevent the release of records about inmate deaths. The lawsuit said Wade had \"no apparent experience, qualifications, or training in conducting jailhouse investigations.\"\n\nMonths into the investigation, Wade told the TV station's lawyer that he had no notes or other written documentation of his work, saying he had only \"what's going on in my mind about it.\"\n\nRecords obtained by the AP through an open records request indicate that Wade billed the sheriff's office $44,000 for 80 hours of work, or $550 an hour, in November and December 2020. The sheriff's office said it had no report or other documents produced from that investigation.\n\nWade was also very involved with the special grand jury investigation that preceded Trump's indictment. That panel's foreperson told the AP that Wade generally led those proceedings, describing him as \"very much a prosecutor.\" Since Trump and the others were indicted, Wade has been a near-constant presence in the courtroom during hearings. But it's generally other prosecutors who argue motions, cross-examine witnesses or write briefs.\n\nThe Trump team - including outside Georgia - is following the fracas. Defense lawyers in the federal classified documents case have demanded any records related to 2022 meetings between Wade and White House staff. Records show Wade billed for what he described as \"travel to Athens; conf with White House Counsel\" in May 2022. There's another charge for \"Interview with DC/White House.\"\n\nA review of visitor logs at the White House did not turn up any meeting with Wade. There was a conference call in May 2022 between Willis' team and the White House counsel's office to ask whether investigators could interview former White House officials, or whether they would be bound by federal rules that prohibit unauthorized disclosures of official information, according to a person familiar with the call who spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak publicly about it. But it wasn't immediately clear whether Wade was on that call.\n\nIt's not surprising that Trump has seized on the Willis and Wade allegations.\n\nTrump took a similar tack during the FBI's investigation into Russian election interference amid revelations that the lead agent in that probe had had an extramarital relationship with a lawyer for the bureau. The two had traded anti-Trump texts, including messages calling him an \"idiot\" and \"loathsome human\" and describing the prospect of a Trump victory in 2016 as \"terrifying.\"\n\nTrump used the texts to try to undermine the investigation and to paint the FBI as politically biased against him. The agent, Peter Strzok, was later fired, though a subsequent Justice Department inspector general report did not find evidence that investigative steps during the Russia probe had been taken for partisan or political reasons.\n\nRobert James, who was previously district attorney in DeKalb County, Georgia, said if Wade and Willis are romantically involved, it's an optics problem, but he doesn't see anything inherently improper about a relationship. Even if Wade spends money on Willis, that's likely not an issue unless there's evidence of some sort of conspiracy to profit, he said.\n\n\"I have no belief, unless something different than what I've heard comes out, that Fani Willis is going to be disqualified from this case,\" James said."}
{"text": "# Democratic drama and Biden write-ins promise a New Hampshire primary to remember\nBy **ROBERT YOON**  \nJanuary 17, 2024. 9:37 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Is a New Hampshire primary without the frontrunner on the ballot and no delegates up for grabs still a New Hampshire primary? Depends on who you ask.\n\nOn Tuesday, voters in the Granite State will once again help kick off the presidential primary season, on the heels of the Iowa caucuses that began the nomination process on the Republican side Monday. But this year, there's something different about the traditional first-in-the-nation primary, at least on the Democratic side.\n\nFor starters, the Democratic National Committee, which has the ultimate say in how its presidential nominee will be picked, says state party officials violated national party rules by scheduling its contest earlier than allowed. As a result, the primary will have zero delegates at stake on Tuesday. Normally, the contest would have determined how the state's original allotment of 23 pledged delegates to the presidential nominating convention in Chicago this summer would be allocated to the various candidates.\n\nFurthermore, President Joe Biden, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for a second term, decided to skip New Hampshire since their primary violates party rules and will not appear on the ballot. It was Biden's idea to bump the state from its prized primary calendar slot in favor of South Carolina, which resuscitated his struggling campaign in 2020. That year, Biden placed fourth in the Iowa caucuses and fifth in New Hampshire with only 8% of the vote.\n\nThe New Hampshire Democratic Party is nevertheless proceeding with the primary - which they note state law requires to be held before any other primary - and has already started the process of selecting people to serve as national convention delegates. This earned a sharp rebuke from the DNC, which called the upcoming primary both \"meaningless\" and \"detrimental.\"\n\nIn response, state Democratic party chairman Ray Buckley said in a statement, \"Well, it's safe to say in New Hampshire, the DNC is less popular than the NY Yankees. State law requires the New Hampshire Secretary of State to conduct the first-in-the-nation primary and he is going to follow the law - period. Nothing has changed, and we look forward to seeing a great Democratic voter turnout on January 23rd.\"\n\nAlthough Biden's name will not appear as a printed option on the ballot, some New Hampshire Democrats have mounted an effort to encourage primary voters to cast their ballots for Biden as a write-in candidate. Write-in candidates are eligible to win elections in New Hampshire. President Lyndon Johnson did exactly that in 1968 when he won the New Hampshire primary as a write-in candidate, although he dropped out of the race 19 days later after what was widely perceived as a disappointing 8-point win over Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy.\n\nIn the 2020 New Hampshire Democratic primary, write-in votes comprised only 2% of the total vote, or about 6,000 votes. A large-scale write-in effort would increase the workload for local elections officials, but New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan has said that he expects results to be available on primary night, including a tally of write-in votes for Biden.\n\n\"It sounds like it would be a big job, but you have to remember, it is one race where it is 'vote for one,' and it's fairly easy to sort through the ballots,\" he told reporters at a briefing in October. \"It's going to be some extra work. I don't know that it's going to be that formidable.\"\n\nScanlan has also said the counting process will be largely unaffected in communities that already hand-count ballots. The process will take longer in larger jurisdictions that use machines to count regular ballots because they will have to hand-count write-ins. He added that local officials are enlisting additional help to speed up the count.\n\n\"I think that is a challenge that can be overcome,\" he said. \"I fully expect the towns are going to be able to get the volunteer resources they need to help with that.\"\n\nThe New Hampshire primary ballot provides would-be write-in voters with the following instructions: \"To vote for a person whose name is not printed on the ballot, write in the name of the person in the 'WRITE-IN' space, and completely fill in the oval opposite your choice....\" Scanlan advises voters to follow these instructions but adds that it's important for local elections officials to determine the voter's intent when reviewing ballots.\n\n\"If somebody wrote in the name of a candidate and they did not fill in the oval, that does not disqualify that vote,\" he said in an interview with WMUR-TV. \"The intent of that voter would be for the name that they actually wrote on the ballot. And that's how that ballot would be counted.\"\n\nIn New Hampshire, ballots without a darkened oval in a particular contest are typically categorized as \"blank.\" Thus, write-in votes where the oval is not filled in might be initially included in the \"blank\" total instead of the write-in total. This would be corrected as local election officials determine whether a ballot initially categorized as \"blank\" is actually a valid write-in vote.\n\nAs for variations in the spelling of a write-in candidate's name, Scanlan says the name doesn't have to be spelled correctly or written a specific way if the voter's intent is clear.\n\n\"If they write in just 'Biden,' I think that intent is very clear. If they write in 'Bidon,' I think the intent is still pretty clear,\" he said in October. \"If they just write 'Joe,' then you have to ask the question, well, are there any other Joe's on the ballot or running. If there are, then you probably don't know which 'Joe' the person's voting for.\"\n\nThe Associated Press will report a running total of unprocessed write-in votes as provided by election officials. The AP will then provide a breakdown of write-ins for Biden as well as a combined total of non-Biden write-ins as local officials sort the ballots throughout the night and the following days. As the number of write-ins for Biden and \"Other write-ins\" goes up, the number of unprocessed write-ins will go down.\n\nA total of 21 Democrats will appear by name on the New Hampshire primary ballot on Tuesday, in addition to the option to vote for a write-in candidate. Republicans will also hold a primary, which features 24 listed candidates (while Republicans can also vote for a write-in candidate, the percentage exercising that option is expected to be minimal).\n\nAs for delegates, if recent history is any guide, it's still possible that New Hampshire Democrats will send a delegation to the Democratic National Convention this summer and that they'll cast votes for the nomination. In 2008, when Michigan and Florida held primaries earlier than allowed under party rules, the DNC initially said both states would be stripped of all their delegates. Then, after negotiations with the campaigns of then-Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, it announced that delegates from both states could each cast half a vote. By the time the convention began, party officials voted to grant Michigan and Florida delegates full voting rights in the interest of party unity.\n\nThe last successful statewide write-in effort for federal office was in 2010, when Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska lost the Republican primary but won the general election despite not appearing on the ballot. She received 99% of the write-in votes cast, but the final result wasn't known for more than two weeks after Election Day."}
{"text": "# President Joe Biden signs bill to avoid a partial government shutdown\nJanuary 19, 2024. 1:31 PM EST\n\n---\n\nWASHINGTON (AP) - President Joe Biden on Friday signed a short-term spending bill that keeps the federal government operating until early March.\n\nThe bill averts what would've been a partial government shutdown starting Saturday. It does not address additional aid for Ukraine, which remains in limbo as key legislators continue to negotiate a border security measure that would go in tandem with more support for Kyiv.\n\nCongress, ahead of the winter snowstorm that struck Washington, D.C., on Friday, passed the short-term bill with large bipartisan majorities on Thursday. The vote was 77-18 in the Senate and 314-108 in the House.\n\nUnder the bill, funding for agencies overseeing agriculture, veterans affairs, energy, transportation and housing runs through March 1. Funding for the rest of the federal government now runs through March 8. It's meant to buy lawmakers extra time to draft full-year spending bills through the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.\n\nSpeaker Mike Johnson, R-La., will continue to face pressure from House conservatives who want him to abandon a bipartisan agreement that sets overall spending levels for those full-year bills at $1.66 trillion. Those conservatives say that is too much money, but Democrats and moderate Republicans say Congress must abide by that deal and avoid legislative dysfunction during an election year."}
{"text": "# US Navy fighter jets strike Houthi missile launchers in Yemen, officials say\nBy **LOLITA C. BALDOR**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 6:31 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - U.S. fighter jets struck Iranian-backed Houthi rebel sites for the sixth time Friday, taking out three anti-ship missiles in Yemen that were prepared to fire, according to U.S. officials.\n\nThe officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing military operations, said the strikes were carried out by F/A-18 aircraft off the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier. And they resembled similar U.S. attacks on Houthi launchers that have been occurring almost daily this week.\n\nIn a statement later Friday, U.S. Central Command said the strike was at about 6:45 p.m. local time in Sanaa, Yemen's capital, and that the missiles were aimed into the southern Red Sea and were prepared to launch. It said the U.S. determined they presented an imminent threat to merchant vessels and the U.S. Navy ships in the region, and so struck them in self-defense. The statement did not say how the strikes were carried out.\n\nPresident Joe Biden acknowledged Thursday that the bombardment of Houthi sites, including a massive array of strikes on Jan. 12 by U.S. and British forces, has yet to stop the militants' attacks on vessels in the Red Sea that have disrupted global shipping.\n\nAl-Masirah, a Houthi-run satellite news channel, said there were air raids in the western city of Hodieda on Friday, targeting the al-Jabaana neighborhood in the west of the city. The location of the U.S. strikes could not be immediately confirmed.\n\nU.S. warships and aircraft, in rapid succession, have taken out Houthi missiles poised to launch over the past few days, underscoring the military's increasing ability to watch, detect and strike militant activities in Yemen.\n\nAt the White House, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby noted the uptick in preemptive missions.\n\n\"This is the fourth preemptive action that the U.S. military has taken in the past week against Houthi missile launchers that were ready to launch attacks, in this case, anti-ship missiles,\" he said, adding that the self-defense strikes are aimed at improving security in the shipping lanes.\n\nBut so far the strikes have not deterred Houthi attacks on ships in the southern Red Sea or Gulf of Aden, which also have been happening nearly daily.\n\nThe Biden administration put the Houthis back on its list of specially designated global terrorists. The sanctions that come with the formal designation are meant to sever violent extremist groups from their sources of financing, while also allowing vital humanitarian aid to continue flowing to impoverished Yemenis. And the White House has made it clear that the retaliatory strikes will also continue.\n\n\"They continue to have offensive capability, and they still continue to be willing to use it,\" Kirby said. \"We also have plenty of defense capability available to us and we continue to use it as well.\"\n\nFor months, the Houthis have attacked ships in the Red Sea that they say are either linked to Israel or heading to Israeli ports. They say their attacks aim to end the Israeli air-and-ground offensive in the Gaza Strip that was triggered by the Palestinian militant group Hamas' Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel. But the links to the ships targeted in the rebel assaults have grown more tenuous as the attacks continue."}
{"text": "# Maine's top election official appeals the ruling that delayed a decision on Trump's ballot status\nBy **DAVID SHARP**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 1:27 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PORTLAND, Maine (AP)** - Maine's secretary of state is appealing a judge's ruling that put on hold her decision to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on a similar case in Colorado.\n\nShenna Bellows concluded last month that Trump didn't meet ballot qualifications under the insurrection clause in the U.S. Constitution, citing his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. That made her the first election official to ban the Republican ex-president from the ballot under the 14th Amendment.\n\nBut a state judge this week sent the case back to Bellows, a Democrat, with instructions to await the U.S. Supreme Court decision before withdrawing, modifying or upholding her decision.\n\nOn Friday, Bellows filed a notice of appeal. She said she welcomes guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court but also wanted an expedited review from the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.\n\n\"I know both the constitutional and state authority questions are of grave concern to many,\" Bellows said Friday in a statement. \"This appeal ensures that Maine's highest court has the opportunity to weigh in now, before ballots are counted, promoting trust in our free, safe and secure elections.\"\n\nBellows said previously that she will follow the rule of law and abide by any decision issued by the courts.\n\nThe timelines are tight as the March 5 primary approaches. The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing arguments on the Colorado case on Feb. 8, which likely means there wouldn't be enough time to meet statutory deadlines for Bellows to reissue a ruling on Trump's ballot status and for additional appeals to be filed before Election Day.\n\nThe state will begin mailing overseas ballots on Saturday, and Trump's name is on the ballots. If Trump were to be kept off the ballot, then Bellows would have to notify local election officials that votes cast for him would not be counted.\n\nThe nation's highest court has never ruled on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits those who \"engaged in insurrection\" from holding office. Some legal scholars say the post-Civil War clause applies to Trump for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election and encouraging his backers to storm the U.S. Capitol after he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. Activists conducted a campaign urging election officials to bar Trump under the clause.\n\nTrump's campaign slammed Bellows' decision to remove him from the ballot, saying, \"We are witnessing, in real-time, the attempted theft of an election and the disenfranchisement of the American voter.\"\n\nMaine Republicans continued to attack Bellows' motives on Friday. \"There is a coordinated national effort to win this election for Joe Biden before a single vote is cast,\" Maine GOP Chair Joel Stetkis said."}
{"text": "# Grand jury indicts Alec Baldwin in fatal shooting of cinematographer on movie set in New Mexico\nBy **MORGAN LEE**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 4:09 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SANTA FE, N.M. (AP)** - A grand jury indicted Alec Baldwin on Friday on an involuntary manslaughter charge in a 2021 fatal shooting during a rehearsal on a movie set in New Mexico, reviving a dormant case against the actor.\n\nSpecial prosecutors brought the case before a grand jury in Santa Fe this week, months after receiving a new analysis of the gun that was used. They declined to answer questions after spending about a day and a half presenting their case to the grand jury.\n\nDefense attorneys for Baldwin indicated they'll fight the charge.\n\n\"We look forward to our day in court,\" said Luke Nikas and Alex Spiro, defense attorneys for Baldwin, in an email.\n\nWhile the proceeding is shrouded in secrecy, two of the witnesses seen at the courthouse included crew members - one who was present when the fatal shot was fired and another who had walked off the set the day before due to safety concerns.\n\nBaldwin, the lead actor and a co-producer on the Western movie \"Rust,\" was pointing a gun at cinematographer Halyna Hutchins during a rehearsal on a movie set outside Santa Fe in October 2021 when the gun went off, killing her and wounding director Joel Souza.\n\nBaldwin has said he pulled back the hammer, but not the trigger, and the gun fired.\n\nThe charge has again put Baldwin in legal trouble and created the possibility of prison time for an actor who has been a TV and movie mainstay for nearly 40 years, with roles in the early blockbuster \"The Hunt for Red October,\" Martin Scorsese's \"The Departed\" and the sitcom \"30 Rock.\"\n\nThe indictment provides prosecutors with two alternative standards for pursuing an involuntary manslaughter charge against Baldwin in the death of Hutchins. One would be based on negligent use of a firearm, and the other alleges felony misconduct \"with the total disregard or indifference for the safety of others.\"\n\nJudges recently agreed to put on hold several civil lawsuits seeking compensation from Baldwin and producers of \"Rust\" after prosecutors said they would present their case to a grand jury. Plaintiffs in those suits include members of the film crew.\n\nLos Angeles-based attorney Gloria Allred, who is representing the slain cinematographer's parents and younger sister in a civil case, said Friday that her clients have been seeking the truth about what happened the day Hutchins was killed and will be looking forward to Baldwin's trial.\n\nNeama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor and president of the West Coast Trial Lawyers firm in Los Angeles, pointed to previous missteps by prosecutors, saying they will need to do more than present ballistics evidence to make a case that Baldwin had a broader responsibility and legal duty when it came to handling the gun on the set.\n\nSpecial prosecutors dismissed an involuntary manslaughter charge against Baldwin in April, saying they were informed the gun might have been modified before the shooting and malfunctioned. They later pivoted and began weighing whether to refile a charge against Baldwin after receiving a new analysis of the gun.\n\nThe analysis from experts in ballistics and forensic testing relied on replacement parts to reassemble the gun fired by Baldwin, after parts of the pistol were broken during testing by the FBI. The report examined the gun and markings it left on a spent cartridge to conclude that the trigger had to have been pulled or depressed.\n\nThe analysis led by Lucien Haag of Forensic Science Services in Arizona stated that although Baldwin repeatedly denied pulling the trigger, \"given the tests, findings and observations reported here, the trigger had to be pulled or depressed sufficiently to release the fully cocked or retracted hammer of the evidence revolver.\"\n\nThe weapons supervisor on the movie set, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, has pleaded not guilty to involuntary manslaughter and evidence tampering in the case. Her trial is scheduled to begin in February.\n\n\"Rust\" assistant director and safety coordinator David Halls pleaded no contest to unsafe handling of a firearm last March and received a suspended sentence of six months of probation. He agreed to cooperate in the investigation of the shooting.\n\nAn earlier FBI report on the agency's analysis of the gun found that, as is common with firearms of that design, it could go off without pulling the trigger if force was applied to an uncocked hammer, such as by dropping the weapon.\n\nThe only way the testers could get it to fire was by striking the gun with a mallet while the hammer was down and resting on the cartridge, or by pulling the trigger while it was fully cocked. The gun eventually broke during testing.\n\nThe 2021 shooting resulted in a series of civil lawsuits, including wrongful death claims filed by members of Hutchins' family, centered on accusations that the defendants were lax with safety standards. Baldwin and other defendants have disputed those allegations.\n\nThe Rust Movie Productions company has paid a $100,000 fine to state workplace safety regulators after a scathing narrative of failures in violation of standard industry protocols, including testimony that production managers took limited or no action to address two misfires on set before the fatal shooting.\n\nThe filming of \"Rust\" resumed last year in Montana, under an agreement with the cinematographer's widower, Matthew Hutchins, that made him an executive producer."}
{"text": "# Jesse Eisenberg had to throw out his playbook to direct Kieran Culkin in 'A Real Pain'\nBy **LINDSEY BAHR**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 11:45 AM EST\n\n---\n\nPARK CITY, Utah (AP) - Jesse Eisenberg had not seen \"Succession\" when he was writing his new film \"A Real Pain.\" But his sister Hallie Eisenberg knew from years of watching Roman Roy that Kieran Culkin would be perfect.\n\nThe film, which premieres at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday, follows two very mismatched cousins, one anxiety ridden and rule following and the other a more spontaneous spirit, on a trip to Poland. They're reuniting to see where their late grandmother was from and also explore some Holocaust locations.\n\nEisenberg had wanted to play the spontaneous one, which was similar to a character he'd played on stage in \"The Spoils\" in England. But he was gently talked out of it. It was, he realized, a taxing role that might be too much to handle while also directing. And so, Culkin became aspirational.\n\nThey'd met previously through their mutual friend Emma Stone, who also produced \"A Real Pain,\" but he really didn't know him well. And he'd quickly discover that casting Culkin and directing him, even getting him on set, was a different kind of challenge that he hadn't expected.\n\nThree weeks before shooting, when Eisenberg was \"knee-deep in securing locations,\" Culkin told him he was thinking of dropping out. He didn't drop out, but he also arrived on set only a day before filming, telling Eisenberg simply that he understood the character and that he also works best without blocking.\n\n\"I had spent months blocking out the scenes with Polish actors,\" Eisenberg said. \"Halfway through day one we had to change our plan. And it was completely to the advantage of the movie because Kieran is such a live wire. He's such a spontaneous actor and he's so brilliantly funny. To kind of hem him in with my pre-planned shot list would have killed the spontaneity and the energy of the movie.\"\n\nIt both \"flummoxed and elated\" his cinematographer who had never worked with an actor who didn't adhere to marks. But, Eisenberg said, the scenes where they could ditch the dolly and just follow Culkin \"sparkled.\"\n\n\"I love both characters so much,\" Eisenberg said. \"I suspect audiences will just assume I'm very much like the character I play. But both are people I know. At once I am kind of the nervous person in the room who wishes I can get out of my own head. And on the other hand, I am a performer.\"\n\n\"A Real Pain,\" which is seeking distribution at the festival, is both funny and profound - an odd couple trip and an exploration of ideas of modern pain in the face of historical family traumas.\n\nEisenberg has been wanting to set a movie in Poland for about 18 years. The first play he'd written was about a self-centered young American who goes to Poland to stay with his cousin, a survivor of the war, to take advantage of a free room in an exotic locale. It was based in part on an experience he'd actually had. On stage, Vanessa Redgrave played his cousin.\n\n\"I tried for years to adapt that into a movie, and it was never good,\" Eisenberg said.\n\nIt took on various iterations too, including one about cousins who are more contemporaries going to Mongolia for Tablet Magazine. But it wasn't until he saw an advertisement that said \"Auschwitz Tour (with lunch)\" that the story cracked open.\n\n\"I remember thinking, oh, that's the story. It's these kind of middle-class trips to the most horrific places on Earth where the interpersonal dynamics of the group could be explored against a backdrop of real historical trauma,\" he said \"You can explore the dramatic irony of taking one of these trips, but staying in the Radisson Hotel. Seeing Auschwitz during the day and drinking wine at night with your group.\"\n\nHe enlisted the help of renowned Polish film producer Ewa Puszczynska, who was fresh off \"The Zone of Interest,\" which would be essential both in legitimizing this American production abroad and in managing logistics for a very complex shoot.\n\n\"We are in a different location every day and every location has challenges. We are in airports, on trains, in city centers, at monuments, at a concentration camp. The first feature film to be able to film at this concentration camp,\" he said. \"It was just this incredibly ambitious production. And thank goodness we had the best producers in the country shepherding it.\"\n\nThose in the tour group, led by a character played by \"White Lotus\" star Will Sharpe, are mostly retired Jewish Americans (Jennifer Grey among them). But Eisenberg also wanted to broaden the story and included a character, Eloge, (Kurt Egyiawan) based on a friend of his who survived the Rwandan genocide and later converted to Judaism in Winnipeg. His hope is that \"A Real Pain\" speaks to a cross-cultural, universal experience - though he's also worried that sounds too much like a commercial. What he really wants, though, is for audiences to find it funny.\n\n\"It plays lighter than the themes might imply,\" he said.\n\n\"A Real Pain\" is his second as a director, after the mother-son film \"When You Finish Saving the World\" which premiered at the festival a few years ago. It's a busy Sundance for Eisenberg. In addition to trying to sell \"A Real Pain,\" Eisenberg is also starring in \"Sasquatch Sunset,\" about a family of Sasquatches. And on opening night he presented a tribute award to his friend and oft-co-star Kristen Stewart, who said she hopes that he gets behind the camera more often.\n\n\"He been a real reluctant filmmaker. He's always like, 'Oh, I could never,'\" Stewart said. \"I'm like, no, no, you are a born storyteller. And that's the way that his acting comes across. Like some actors really service other people's stories. And then some people are writers themselves, even within their acting. Jesse is just like a kind of virtuoso artist.\""}
{"text": "# 'Freaky Tales,' Kristen Stewart and Christopher Nolan help kick off Sundance Film Festival\nBy **LINDSEY BAHR**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 2:26 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**PARK CITY, Utah (AP)** - Thousands of cinema lovers, Hollywood celebrities, industry executives and filmmakers from around the world have arrived in a very snowy Park City, Utah, for 10 days of movie watching.\n\nThe 40th edition of the Sundance Film Festival, the world's premier showcase for independent film, kicked off Thursday with a starry gala honoring festival veterans such as Kristen Stewart and Christopher Nolan and numerous world premieres.\n\nNineteen films played on day one, including documentaries about Brian Eno, Lollapalooza and Frida Kahlo, Yance Ford's inquiry into policing in America, \"Power,\" as well as the mock government experiment \"Girls State.\" In fiction premieres, some lucky ticketholders were among the first to see Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's 80s-set \"Freaky Tales\" or \"Thelma,\" featuring June Squibb as a Los Angeles grandmother who gets scammed and goes on a mission to get her money back with the late Richard Roundtree.\n\nThe festival has always been a major sales market for studios and distributors looking for films to fill their slates, including both theatrical and streaming releases. But in the aftermath of the dual Hollywood strikes, sales this year could be even more robust. The theatrical release calendar for the first half of the year was \"decimated,\" producer Jason Blum noted at the opening day press conference. Around 80% of the 91 features playing do not yet have distributors.\n\n\"The one positive thing about the strike is that movies that might have struggled shouldn't because there's so many holes in the release schedule,\" Blum said. \"I hope that a bunch of Sundance movies end up in theaters quickly.\"\n\nFestival director Eugene Hernandez added that \"these films are ready for their audience.\"\n\nBlum, a Sundance board member, has had a longstanding relationship with the festival going back to the premiere of \"Reality Bites\" in 1992, which he said he almost missed because he was trapped \"in a snowbank with Ethan Hawke.\"\n\nOver the years, Blum has experienced both sides of the acquisition coin at Sundance, as the one buying films (including, he laughed, one of the least successful acquisitions ever, \"Happy, Texas\") and the one selling them (like Damien Chazelle's \"Whiplash.\") He also brought Jordan Peele's \"Get Out\" to the festival and said the response to that first screening \"started the whole thing.\"\n\nThe main hub of activity remains in Park City, where many of the shops and restaurants on Main Street have been transformed into a hub of branded lounges from various sponsors and media partners. In addition to the venues playing movies around the clock, there are various talks and panels on everything from the legacy of Sundance to making your first feature. There will also be screenings in Salt Lake City, and, beginning on Jan. 25, online showings of select films for virtual festival passholders.\n\nSlightly outside of town Thursday, some of the festival's most well-heeled attendees gathered at the DeJoria Center in Kamas, Utah, for an opening night fundraising gala in which Nolan, Stewart, \"Past Lives\" director Celine Song and \"The Eternal Memory\" director Maite Alberdi received tribute awards.\n\nEisenberg gave the award to Stewart, who he has worked with on three films: \"two gentle talkies and one aggressive shoot 'em up,\" he said.\n\n\"Kristen is one of these rare performers where she is so committed, so authentic, so feeling, that you almost want to make sure she's okay at the end of the day,\" he said.\n\nStewart has been coming to Sundance for 20 years and this year has two films debuting: Rose Glass's crime thriller \"Love Lives Bleeding,\" which is heading to theaters in March, and \"Love Me,\" with Steven Yeun, in which a buoy and a satellite fall in love.\n\n\"My whole life I have loved this festival,\" Stewart said. \"I knew that in my bones this was just like a place full of 'yes' in a world full of 'no.' I couldn't even understand why, but I knew it.\"\n\nRobert Downey Jr. also was on hand to toast his \"Oppenheimer\" director, who, he said, \"is a bit blue because a terrible tragedy has befallen him and I don't mean to bring this up and I know it's very personal: He has become recognizable on the street.\"\n\nNolan won a screenwriting award for \"Memento\" after it screened at Sundance in 2001. Both that film and \"Following,\" which played \"up the hill\" at Slamdance, were independently financed before he and his wife and producer Emma Thomas went on to have great successes with studio films.\n\nBut Nolan said he doesn't think he has ever been an independent filmmaker, insofar as filmmaking is dependent on other people, from the crew to those who help get a movie out to the world.\n\n\"A lot of people know it came to Sundance, a lot of people know that it was a hit and enabled so much more that came after it for us,\" Nolan said.\n\nBut, he said, not a lot of people know that earlier, when the film was finished, all the independent distributors passed on buying it and the filmakers found themselves in \"terrible limbo\" for a year not knowing whether it would ever be seen by an audience.\n\n\"It was an appalling position to be in, but so many people became so important in that moment,\" Nolan said. \"These people who saw the film, believed in it and stood by it, those are the people you depend on as a filmmaker. You can't get anywhere without them.\"\n\nThe film festival runs through Jan. 28."}
{"text": "# In 'Origin,' Ava DuVernay and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor seek the roots of racism\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 1:55 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Ava DuVernay kept hearing she had to read \"Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.\" She had Isabel Wilkerson's book in galleys before it was published in 2020. Oprah Winfrey kept telling her to read it. But she put it off. It seemed an imposing read. Copies kept proliferating in her home.\n\n\"At one point, a high-profile director said to me, 'I heard you got the book,'\" DuVernay says. \"And I was like, 'Yeah, I got a couple copies.' He said, 'No, I heard you're doing it.' I said, 'As in doing a movie?' So I said I better read this.\"\n\nBut even once she cracked Wilkerson's book open, it took DuVernay a few reads before it really sunk in. \"Caste,\" a best-seller released shortly before the death of George Floyd, reframed American racism through historical stratifications of caste. \"Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste,\" wrote Wilkerson. \"Caste is the bones, race the skin.\"\n\nFor DuVernay, whose films ( \"The 13th,\"\"Selma\" ) have illuminated American history with rigor and passion, the thesis of \"Caste\" was eye-opening.\n\n\"I was so wrapped up with the idea of race as a Black woman. That was the lens through which I see myself and the world sees me,\" says DuVernay. \"That's what I thought.\"\n\n\"Origin,\" DuVernay's new film, isn't a direct adaptation of Wilkerson's book. DuVernay, who wrote the script, centers it on Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), following the author while she researches the book and navigates her own personal joys and tragedies. The film takes a heavyweight work of historical and sociological inquiry and transforms it into a deeply humanistic drama and a globe-trotting detective story.\n\n\"She's Indiana Jones. She's going around the world in search of the holy grail,\" says Ellis-Taylor. \"She's on this process of discovery and then in the middle of that worldwide hunt, she loses, and her loss is immeasurable. But she's still searching. That is a hero. That is a cinematic hero.\"\n\nDuVernay and Ellis-Taylor met for an interview last month in the downtown offices of Neon, which is releasing \"Origin\" theatrically Friday. They had only just begun talking about their still-fresh experience making the film. Ellis-Taylor hadn't yet seen it and wasn't sure she was going to. \"It was so personal for me,\" she said. \"I don't want to share it with anybody yet.\"\n\nSome have overlooked \"Origin\" since its Venice Film Festival debut. DuVernay has lamented Ellis-Taylor's absence thus far from the pomp of award season. But underestimating \"Origin\" would be a mistake. The film, which made numerous 10 lists including this critic's, is audaciously original in how it fuses big ideas with emotional warmth.\n\nIf \"Caste\" sought to describe some of the man-made hierarchies that repeat throughout history, \"Origin\" - which DuVernay and her producing partner, Paul Garnes, gathered financing for independently - is itself a work that boldly and beautifully transcends conventional Hollywood limitations.\n\nDuVernay and Garnes raised $38 million with the help of philanthropists - including the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation - many of whom had little Hollywood experience but believed in the movie. Melinda Gates is a producer. NBA stars like Chris Paul invested.\n\n\"We are in an industry and a society where everything has a label. If there's a Black woman director and a Black woman lead, it has to be about things they care about,\" DuVernay says. \"My hope is that we can somehow break caste.\"\n\n\"Origin\" opens with a dramatic recreation of the shooting of Trayvon Martin and later dips into historical vignettes including Nazi Germany, Jim Crow-era Mississippi and the experience of the Dalits in India. It steps into stories from history while capturing Wilkerson's life with her husband (Jon Bernthal) and mother (Emily Yancy) - intimate dramas that touchingly counter and clarify some of the social structures Wilkerson traces while seeking the roots of racism.\n\n\"I wanted something where her intimate personal journey ran alongside, mirrored, challenged and actually complemented this huge universal truth that we don't really know,\" DuVernay says. \"And I felt like somewhere in there, there were touch points where they could complement each other. One doesn't always lead perfectly into other, but that they were in a conversation.\"\n\nEllis-Taylor, the Oscar-nominated co-star of \"King Arthur,\" had acted in DuVernay's 2019 miniseries \"When They See Us,\" about the 1989 Central Park jogger case. She signed on to \"Origin\" without a script. \"I had read 'The Warmth of Other Suns,'\" she says, alluding to Wilkerson's prior book. \"So how bad could it be?\"\n\nDuVernay describes the making of \"Origin\" as centered on her work with Ellis-Taylor, a collaboration founded on their mutual personal connection to the material.\n\n\"These things that she speaks about in her pillars of caste, that's stuff I lived with. They're not abstract ideas. That's my reality,\" says Ellis-Taylor, who was raised in Mississippi.\n\nSeeing race as a caste was, to Ellis-Taylor, a revelatory new paradigm.\n\n\"That excites me. That sets me on fire,\" she says. \"And I believe this film is a dangerous film. If it does the work that I want it to do in theaters, it should make people angry. It should make people mad. I felt myself as being a soldier in that battle.\"\n\nDuVernay, too, describes herself as ready for \"ugly feedback\" to the film. A prominent proponent of inclusivity in cinema and the first African American woman to direct a $100 million-budgeted live-action film, she's accustomed to the cultural battles that often accompany frank discussions of race.\n\n\"I am used to it. But on 'Selma' I was unprepared and it hurt me. It hurt me when people came at me about LBJ (on 'Selma') and that I'm tearing down people's legacy and that I'm wrong and how dare I do this and that when I was advancing the perspective of a group of people that usually don't have a story told from their point of view,\" says DuVernay. \"It seems whenever I do that, I'm wrong. I've felt that vitriol and felt that anger.\"\n\n\"In this, I'm prepared for it in a way I hadn't been before,\" DuVernay adds. \"And my preparation involves: Deal with it. I'm not going to fight you. It's in there. Have at it.\"\n\nYet the most common reaction to \"Origin\" from audiences has been an outpouring of emotion. Moviegoers often come out of the theater drying their eyes. Far from academic, the movie's power builds through its straightforward humanity - what DuVernay calls \"15 little love stories.\"\n\nIn between are some painful historic episodes. Yet even filming those - like the Martin shooting - the director doesn't find agonizing.\n\n\"My experience in shooting these kinds of films before has given me a set of muscles and tools where it doesn't bother me, and I actually feel empowered and bolstered because I get to be the teller of these stories,\" says DuVernay.\n\n\"Origin\" was shot quickly, in 37 days across three countries during early 2023. DuVernay turned it around quickly, completing the edit in time for Venice in September. It was a fast enough process that Ellis-Taylor has trouble locating it chronologically in her mind.\n\n\"I think I know why,\" she says. \"Because it doesn't feel real. It feels like a miracle.\"\n\nDuVernay calls \"Origin\" the film she's proudest of, partly because of how she made it outside the studio system. Each film before has felt to DuVernay, who started in the industry as a publicist, like a test, either to herself or to prove her talent behind the camera. Her last movie, \"A Wrinkle in Time, \" for the Walt Disney Co., adapted a famously difficult-to-adapt novel. The experience of \"Origin\" - while no less daunting -- was different.\n\n\"For me, it's shifted everything I know about myself and my work. To be working with a freedom and an abandon yet a sense of certainty in my skills. To not feel like 'Oh, I didn't go to film school and I'm just skating by,'\" DuVernay says. \"This was just free.\""}
{"text": "# Raiders remove interim tag and hire Antonio Pierce as their head coach\nBy **MARK ANDERSON**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 8:39 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**HENDERSON, Nev. (AP)** - Mark Davis could've waited to see if he could lure someone from an unusually deep roster of coaches on the open market to the Las Vegas Raiders.\n\nAnd even though Antonio Pierce's resume was relatively thin, the Raiders owner determined he had done enough since becoming the interim coach on Halloween night to get the job full time.\n\nThe Raiders announced Friday the hiring of Pierce as their new coach, crossing out the word \"interim\" in a post on X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter. He's the fourth interim coach the Raiders have elevated, joining Art Shell, Tom Cable and Marty Feldman.\n\nPierce, 45, took over as interim coach after Josh McDaniels was fired. The Raiders went 5-4 under his watch and the team went 8-9 overall.\n\n\"Can't think of anyone more deserving,\" Las Vegas tackle Jermaine Eluemunor posted on X. \"The Raider way is the only way that needs to be in Vegas.\"\n\nThat's despite Bill Belichick, Mike Vrabel and Pete Carroll being available, along with Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh taking a few NFL interviews after leading the Wolverines to the college national championship\n\nDavis hired from outside two years ago in going with McDaniels over player favorite Rich Bisaccia, who led the Raiders on an unlikely late run to make the playoffs.\n\nLike with Bisaccia, Pierce had his players' backing early, but whether that convinced Davis to hire him was the question. So the players kept up the pressure, including star defensive end Maxx Crosby. On his podcast, \"The Rush with Maxx Crosby,\" he said this week that \"nothing is off the table\" on his end if Pierce isn't hired.\n\n\"AP doesn't have a bunch of experience as a head coach, but the reality is he's come in and helped change the culture,\" Crosby said on his podcast. \"He's helped us win games, and he's helped our defense take off to a different level and our team in general. We're a few pieces away from being in contention. We all feel that. We feel like we should be playing this weekend (in the playoffs).\"\n\nPierce also won over much of the fan base. The crowd chanted \"AP!\" as the clock wound down in the season-ending 27-14 victory over the Denver Broncos.\n\nPierce will be charged with restoring a championship pedigree that has three Vince Lombardi trophies to a once-iconic franchise that has missed the playoffs in 19 of the past 21 seasons.\n\nNFL hiring rules prohibited Davis from hiring Pierce before going through a league-mandated process. Davis had to interview at least two external minority and/or female candidates in person to satisfy the Rooney rule. He did that.\n\nThe Raiders interviewed former Buffalo defensive coordinator Leslie Frazier. ESPN reported the club also interviewed former New Orleans Saints co-defensive coordinator Kris Richard.\n\nPierce is the second Black coach to receive a head job during this hiring cycle. The New England Patriots promoted Jerod Mayo to replace Belichick.\n\nThe Raiders are the only NFL team with a Black coach, general manager and president. The GM, however, is an interim in Champ Kelly, though he also could get the job full time. Kelly has long been considered a strong candidate to get the position, but the fact he wasn't announced along with Pierce's hire raises questions.\n\nDavis told The Athletic he has thought about about hiring a director of football operations, so it's possible he is reorganizing the front office that could still include Kelly.\n\nPierce will have to make decisions regarding his staff, and it's most likely he will take a close look at his offense. Bo Hardegree became the interim offensive coordinator when Mick Lombardi was fired at midseason, but it's possible and maybe even likely Pierce goes outside the organization for the OC.\n\nBeyond that, Pierce will have to work with whoever becomes the general manager on personnel issues, including what to do at quarterback. Pierce installed rookie Aidan O'Connell as the starter. He improved as the season progressed, but didn't erase concerns about the need for a franchise quarterback. The Raiders pick 13th in this year's draft, so the top QBs likely will be gone by the time they select.\n\nThe future of running back Josh Jacobs also will need to be resolved. After leading the NFL in rushing in 2022, Jacobs got into a contract dispute after the Raiders placed the franchise tag on him. The sides agreed to a one-year deal after training camp. Jacobs' production dropped from 1,653 yards to 805 this season and he missed the final month because of a quadriceps injury."}
{"text": "# Atlanta Falcons complete a second interview with former Patriots coach Bill Belichick\nBy **PAUL NEWBERRY**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 8:06 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ATLANTA (AP)** - Bill Belichick completed his second coaching interview with the Atlanta Falcons on Friday, moving closer to joining the franchise that endured its biggest disappointment with him on the opposite sideline.\n\nThe Falcons also met virtually with Detroit Lions defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn, but all eyes were on Belichick amid reports that he was the team's top choice and had flown to Atlanta on one of owner Arthur Blank's private jets.\n\nIf Belichick heads to the Falcons, a team that hasn't had a winning season since 2017 and has never won a Super Bowl championship, it would be a stunning turn of events.\n\nBelichick was coach of the New England Patriots when they pulled off the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history, rallying from a 28-3 deficit in the second half to beat the Falcons 34-28 in overtime after the 2016 season.\n\nAtlanta made the playoffs a year later but hasn't been back since. Arthur Smith was fired just hours after this season's final game - an ugly loss at New Orleans that capped his third straight 7-10 campaign.\n\nBelichick, whose six Super Bowl titles are more than any other coach, is coming off a 4-13 season - the worst of his career - that led to him parting ways with the Patriots less than two weeks ago.\n\nHis final season in New England with marred by major issues at quarterback. Mac Jones was benched and Bailey Zappe struggled as well.\n\nThe Falcons endured similar problems at the most prominent position on the field, switching back and forth between Desmond Ridder and Taylor Heinicke in a desperate bid by Smith to save his job.\n\nIf Belichick comes to Atlanta, it would surely be with an understanding that Blank, CEO Rich McKay and general manager Terry Fontenot are willing to pursue an upgrade at quarterback.\n\nWith a career record of 333-178, including the playoffs, Belichick clearly wants to keep coaching as he approaches the late Don Shula's record of 347 victories.\n\nBelichick teamed with quarterback Tom Brady to capture a half-dozen rings over an 18-season span in what many consider the greatest dynasty in NFL history. For good measure, Belichick was a part of two more championship teams while working on the New York Giants' staff under Bill Parcells.\n\nBut Belichick's reputation took a big hit after Brady left the Patriots following the 2019 season - and immediately won his seventh Super Bowl ring with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a rival of the Falcons in the NFC South.\n\nThe Patriots have had only one winning season since then - a one-and-done playoff appearance in 2021 - while posting a record of 29-38. That's not much better than Atlanta's 25-42 mark over the same span.\n\nIn addition to Belichick and Glenn, the Falcons have interviewed Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh, Baltimore Ravens defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald, Cincinnati Bengals offensive coordinator Brian Callahan, San Francisco 49ers defensive coordinator Steve Wilks, Carolina Panthers defensive coordinator Ejiro Evero, Ravens assistant head coach and defensive line coach Anthony Weaver, and Philadelphia Eagles offensive coordinator Brian Johnson."}
{"text": "# Josh Hader agrees to $95 million, 5-year contract with Astros, AP source says\nBy **RONALD BLUM**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 4:02 PM EST\n\n---\n\nHard-throwing reliever Josh Hader and the Houston Astros agreed to a $95 million, five-year contract on Friday, a person familiar with the negotiations told The Associated Press.\n\nThe person spoke on condition of anonymity because the deal was subject to a successful physical.\n\nHader will get a $19 million salary in each of the next five seasons, none of it deferred. He gets a full no-trade provision and would receive a $1 million bonus for winning the Mariano Rivera/Trevor Hoffman Reliever of the Year Award.\n\nHader's deal can be considered the most lucrative for a relief pitcher, even while falling short of the total dollars in Edwin Díaz's $102 million, five-year contract with the New York Mets that began last year. Díaz's deal includes $26.5 million in deferred payments he won't completely receive until 2042 and was valued at $93.2 million for baseball's luxury tax and $88.8 million by the players' association.\n\nA 29-year-old with long, flowing hair, Hader returns to the Astros organization after spending two years in their minor league system from mid-2013 through mid-2015. He figures to take over as closer and push Ryan Pressly back to a setup role in a bullpen that also includes Rafael Montero and Bryan Abreu.\n\nHéctor Neris became a free agent and remains unsigned. Houston reached the agreement three days after announcing reliever Kendall Graveman will miss the season after right shoulder surgery.\n\nHader became a free agent for the first time last fall after turning down a $20,325,000 qualifying offer from San Diego, which acquired him in a deadline trade from Milwaukee in 2022. Hader made $14.1 million last year.\n\nHe was 2-3 with a 1.28 ERA and 33 saves in 38 chances for San Diego in 61 appearances last season, striking out 85 and walking 30 in 56 1/3 innings. He disappointed in his Padres debut season with a 7.31 ERA and seven saves over 19 games down the stretch.\n\nHader has been picked to the last five National League All-Star teams, starting in 2018, his first full season in the big leagues. During the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, when there wasn't an All-Star Game, Hader had 13 saves to lead the NL for the only time.\n\nHe is 20-21 with a 2.50 ERA with 165 saves in 190 chances over 349 appearances with the Brewers and Padres.\n\nA Maryland native, Hader was a 19th-round draft pick out of high school by Baltimore in the 2012 amateur draft. Hader got traded a year later to Houston, which in 2015 sent him to Milwaukee as part of a six-player deal. He made his big league debut in June 2017, and had a 2.08 ERA in 35 appearances the rest of that season.\n\nBecause Hader turned down a qualifying offer, San Diego will receive an extra pick in next July's amateur draft. Houston will forfeit a draft selection."}
{"text": "# Murray and Jokic help Nuggets hand Celtics their first loss at home this season, 102-100\nBy **KYLE HIGHTOWER**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 11:31 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BOSTON (AP)** - The Denver Nuggets felt they let a winnable game slip away in the closing minutes during a narrow loss at Philadelphia earlier this week.\n\nThey found themselves in a similar situation late against one of the NBA's top teams and made sure not to let it happen again.\n\nJamal Murray scored 35 points, Nikola Jokic finished with 34 and Denver held on to hand the Boston Celtics their first home loss of the season, 102-100 on Friday night.\n\n\"Both teams were countering each other,\" Murray said. \"Both throwing haymakers and we were able to have the final punch.\"\n\nJokic added 12 rebounds and nine assists to help the defending NBA champions end the Celtics' streak at 20 home victories. It was the first of two regular-season meetings between teams with sights on representing their respective conferences in the NBA Finals. They play again in Denver on March 7.\n\nJayson Tatum had a chance to tie it in the closing seconds, but he missed a one-legged fadeaway off the rim that was contested by Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. He finished with 22 points and eight rebounds. Derrick White had 24 points and Kristaps Porzingis added 21.\n\n\"I think I kind of rushed it, and that's on me,\" Tatum said. \"I had more time than I gave myself.\"\n\nJokic, the two-time NBA MVP, feasted on a Celtics defense that opted not to double-team him for most of the game. He was efficient, connecting on 14 of 22 field attempts. It also didn't stop him from finding his teammates, as he had nine of his assists in the first three quarters. Murray also played solid, going 15 of 22 from the field.\n\nNuggets coach Michael Malone said it was a needed effort against a Boston defense that entered ranked third in the league in defensive efficiency.\n\n\"They played for themselves and they played for other people,\" Malone said. \"It was high-level basketball from two All-Star players.\"\n\nIt was even more impressive by Jokic, who was playing in the aftermath of the sudden death of Warriors assistant coach Dejan Milosevic on Wednesday. Milosevic coached Jokic in Serbia.\n\nMurray said Jokic's response on the court while absorbing the emotions of Milosevic's passing have been \"amazing.\"\n\n\"The last couple of days, just been supporting him, comforting him, giving him a hug,\" Nuggets coach Michael Malone said. \"Nikola went out there and he honored Dejan's memory and his legacy, by playing at the level he played at. Not easy to do with a heavy heart. But Nikola is a special person.\"\n\nThe game was played with high energy throughout, featuring 13 lead changes and eight ties.\n\nDenver erased a six-point halftime deficit with a 12-4 run to open the third quarter. Boston responded with a 9-0 run to retake the lead and carried an 82-81 lead into the fourth.\n\nMurray hit five of his first six shots in the final period to put the Nuggets in front 95-91. Boston pushed back with a 7-0 run, capped by Brown's driving layup.\n\nJokic scored coming out of a timeout. Following two empty Boston possessions, he put the Nuggets ahead again with a short hook in the lane.\n\nJokic missed an awkward stepback 3, but Michael Porter Jr. was there to put it back in. Tatum then got free for a driving dunk to cut Denver's lead to 101-100.\n\nA shot-clock violation gave the ball back to Boston with just over a minute to play.\n\nWhite misfired on a 3 and Porzingis was called for a foul on the rebound, but Aaron Gordon missed his corner 3-point attempt on the other end. Tatum rebounded, drove the length of the floor and got up a layup that rolled off the rim.\n\nGordon was fouled and hit his first free throw. A double lane violation was called on his missed second attempt, resulting in a jump ball with 17.1 seconds left.\n\nBoston won the tip and got it to Tatum, who was trapped. But he was able to call a timeout with 13.4 seconds remaining.\n\nThe Celtics nearly lost the ball when play resumed before taking another timeout with 4.9 left to set up their final shot.\n\nBoston took a 61-55 edge into the half after a fast-paced opening 24 minutes.\n\n## UP NEXT\nNuggets: Visit the Washington Wizards on Sunday.\n\nCeltics: Open a three-game road trip Sunday at Houston."}
{"text": "# The police response to the Uvalde shooting was riddled with failures, a new DOJ report says\nBy **ACACIA CORONADO**, **ERIC TUCKER**, **JAKE BLEIBERG**, and **LINDSAY WHITEHURST**  \nJanuary 18, 2024. 9:56 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**UVALDE, Texas (AP)** - Police officials who responded to the deadly Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooting waited far too long to confront the gunman, acted with \"no urgency\" in establishing a command post and communicated inaccurate information to grieving families, according to a Justice Department report released Thursday that identifies \"cascading failures\" in law enforcement's handling of the massacre.\n\nThe report, the most comprehensive federal accounting of the maligned police response to the May 24, 2022, shooting at Robb Elementary School, catalogs a sweeping array of training, communication, leadership and technology problems that federal officials say contributed to the crisis lasting far longer than necessary. All the while, the report says, terrified students inside the classrooms called 911 and agonized parents begged officers to go in.\n\n\"Had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in active shooter situations and gone right after the shooter and stopped him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,\" Attorney General Merrick Garland said Thursday at a news conference in Uvalde after Justice Department officials briefed family members on their findings. The Uvalde victims, he said, \"deserved better.\"\n\nEven for a mass shooting that has already been the subject of intense scrutiny and in-depth examinations - an earlier report by Texas lawmakers, for instance, faulted law enforcement at every level with failing \"to prioritize saving innocent lives over their own safety\" - the nearly 600-page Justice Department study adds to the public understanding of how officers failed to stop an attack that killed 19 children and two staff members.\n\nThe flawed initial response was compounded in the following days by an ineptitude that added to family members' anguish, according to the report.\n\nOne family member spent hours pulling glass out of an injured son's body because some of the surviving children had not been screened for medical care. A county district attorney told families that they would need to wait for autopsy results before death notifications were made, prompting some to yell: \"What, our kids are dead? No, no!\"\n\nHospital staff \"untrained in delivering painful news\" told some family members that their loved ones had died, while in other cases, families received incorrect information suggesting that a child had survived when they had not. At one point, an official told waiting families that another bus of survivors was coming, but that was untrue.\n\n\"Mirroring the failures of the law enforcement response, state and local agencies failed to coordinate, leading to inaccurate and incomplete information being provided to anxious family and community members and the public,\" said Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta.\n\nThe law enforcement response was massive, comprising at least 380 personnel from 24 local, county, state and federal agencies.\n\nBut the problems began almost immediately with a flawed assumption by officers that the shooter was barricaded, or otherwise contained, even as he continued to fire shots. That \"mindset permeated throughout much of the incident response\" as police, rather than rushing inside the classrooms to end the carnage, waited more than an hour to confront the gunman in what the report called a costly \"lack of urgency.\"\n\nThe gunman, Salvador Ramos, was killed roughly 77 minutes after police arrived on the scene, when a tactical team finally went into the classroom to take him down.\n\n\"An active shooter with access to victims should never be considered and treated as a barricaded subject,\" the report says, with the word \"never\" emphasized in italics.\n\nIn other errors, the report says, police acted with \"no urgency\" in establishing a command center, creating confusion among police about who was in charge. The then-school district police chief, Pete Arredondo, discarded his radios on arrival, deeming them unnecessary.\n\nThough he tried to communicate by phone with officers in the school hallway, \"unfortunately, on multiple occasions, he directed officers intending to gain entry into the classrooms to stop, because he appeared to determine that other victims should first be removed from nearby classrooms to prevent further injury,\" the report says.\n\nUvalde, a community of more than 15,000 about 85 miles (140 kilometers) southwest of San Antonio, continues to struggle with the trauma left by the killings and remains divided on the issue of accountability. Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell has said she's still considering whether to bring criminal charges.\n\nPresident Joe Biden said in a statement Thursday that the report identified \"multiple points of failure that hold lessons for the future\" and that \"no community should have to go through\" what Uvalde did.\n\nIn Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott initially praised the officers' courage, saying the reason the shooting was \"not worse is because law enforcement officials did what they do\" and that they had been brave in \"running toward gunfire for the singular purpose of trying to save lives.\"\n\nBut that narrative crumbled under scrutiny, as a report from a panel of state lawmakers and investigations by journalists laid bare how a mass of officers went in and out of the school with weapons drawn but didn't enter the classroom where the shooting was taking place.\n\n\"The actions of the responding officers, combined with the 'heroic' storyline that started with (a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety) and continued the next day during the Governor's and director's news conference, dealt a serious blow to public confidence in local and state law enforcement,\" the report states.\n\nThe city of Uvalde said in a statement that it had requested the federal investigation and fully cooperated with it and had \"already implemented changes in leadership, new personnel, new training, and new equipment.\"\n\nThe report intentionally omits the identity of the gunman or any explanation of a possible motive. But it does include page-long remembrances of each of the victims, including 10-year-old Jose Flores Jr., who loved cars and the Houston Astros, and Amerie Jo Garza, who on the morning of the shooting had celebrated her appointment to the honor roll.\n\nAnd it highlights anguished and panicked quotes from a 911 call by students trapped in the classroom - \"Help!\" \"Help!\" \"Help!\" \"I don't want to die. My teacher is dead\" - experiencing \"unimaginable horror\" while officers stood just outside in the hallway.\n\n\"I hope that the failures end today,\" said Kimberly Rubio, whose daughter Lexi Rubio was killed in the shooting. \"My child, our children are named in this report because they are dead.\" Of the officers who failed, she said: \"They should be named.\"\n\nVelma Lisa Duran, whose sister Irma Garcia was one of the teachers killed, said before the release of the report that she was daunted by the prospect of reliving the circumstances of her sister's death and what she really wanted was criminal charges.\n\n\"A report doesn't matter when there are no consequences for actions that are so vile and murderous and evil,\" said Duran. \"What do you want us to do with another report? ... Bring it to court,\" she said.\n\nThe federal review was launched just days after the shooting. Since then, how police respond to mass shootings around the country has come under closer scrutiny.\n\nThe families of some of the Uvalde victims have blasted police as cowards and demanded resignations. At least five officers have lost their jobs, including two Department of Public Safety officers and the on-site commander, Arredondo.\n\nNo one has been charged with a crime."}
{"text": "# Texas prosecutor convenes grand jury to investigate Uvalde shooting, multiple media report\nBy **ACACIA CORONADO** and **JAKE BLEIBERG**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 7:08 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**UVALDE, Texas (AP)** - A Texas prosecutor has convened a grand jury to investigate the Uvalde school shooting, multiple newspapers reported Friday, as families of the 19 children and two teachers killed continued their calls for criminal charges against officers involved in the hesitant and haphazard police response to the massacre.\n\nUvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell told the San Antonio Express-News that a grand jury will review evidence related to the May 24, 2022, shooting at Robb Elementary School. She did not disclose what the grand jury will focus on, the newspaper reported. During the attack, police waited more than an hour to confront and kill the gunman in what U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday called \"a failure that should not have happened.\"\n\nMitchell did not immediately respond to emailed questions and calls to her office Friday. The empaneling of the grand jury was first reported by the Uvalde Leader-News.\n\nRelatives of the children and teachers who were fatally shot renewed their demands for the indictment of police officers after the Justice Department on Thursday released a scathing report that again laid bare numerous failures by police during one of the deadliest classroom shootings in U.S. history.\n\n\"I'm very surprised that no one has ended up in prison,\" Velma Lisa Duran, whose sister Irma Garcia was one of the two teachers killed in the shooting, said Thursday. \"It's sort of a slap in the face that all we get is a review ... we deserve justice.\"\n\nThe release of the nearly 600-page report - roughly 20 months after the shooting - leaves a criminal investigation by Uvalde County prosecutors as one the last unfinished reviews by authorities into the attack. But the report is deliberately silent on the question that still burns in the minds of many victims' families: Will anyone responsible for the failures be charged with a crime?\n\nPresident Joe Biden said Thursday that he had not yet read the full findings. \"But I don't know that there's any criminal liability,\" he said.\n\nSince the shooting, at least five officers have lost their jobs, including two from the Texas Department of Public Safety and the on-site commander, then-school district police chief, Pete Arredondo. But no one has been charged in the criminal investigation that was led by the Texas Rangers. The Justice Department report says the FBI has assisted the Rangers but is not doing its own investigation.\n\nThe Rangers - part of the Texas DPS, which had more than 90 officers on the scene of the shooting - submitted their initial findings in early 2023. Mitchell initially said she hoped to bring the case to a grand jury by the end of last year, but she pushed back that timeline in December.\n\n\"My office continues to methodically and systematically dissect the Texas Rangers investigation of which I have possessed for less than a year,\" Mitchell told the Leader-News. \"I want to ensure that our efforts in this process are careful, deliberate and fair.\"\n\nThe pace of the criminal investigation has long frustrated families of the victims, Uvalde's former Republican mayor and a Democratic state senator who represents the small South Texas town. \"It's really a shame where we are now,\" state Sen. Roland Gutierrez said Thursday, prior to the reports that a grand jury had been empaneled.\n\nIn the federal report, the Justice Department detailed \"cascading failures\" by police, from waiting more than 70 minutes to confront the gunman to repeatedly giving false information to grieving families about what had happened. The document is among the most comprehensive accountings to date of what went wrong. It says training, communication, leadership and technology problems extended the crisis, even as agonized parents begged officers to go in and terrified students called 911 from inside a classroom where the gunman had holed up.\n\nUvalde is a close-knit city of 15,000 about 85 miles (140 kilometers) southwest of San Antonio. Parents of children killed in the shooting grew up and went to school with some of the officers they now blame, and they feel abandoned by local and state leaders who they see as intent on moving past the massacre.\n\n\"We need our community,\" Brett Cross, who was raising his 10-year-old nephew, Uziyah Garcia when the boy was killed in the shooting, said Thursday. \"It is hard enough waking up every day and continuing to walk out on these streets, walk to a (grocery store) and see a cop who you know was standing there when our babies were murdered and bleeding out.\"\n\nThe Justice Department report faults state and local officials with undercutting the public's trust in law enforcement by repeatedly releasing false and misleading information about the police response. That includes Gov. Greg Abbott, who initially praised the officers' courage \"running toward gunfire.\"\n\nAs what happened has become clear, Jesse Rizo has been among those left looking for more accountability. Rizo, whose niece Jacklyn Cazares was among the shooting victims, still hopes Mitchell will bring charges, but he has little faith in those in power.\n\n\"You hope for the best,\" he said Thursday, \"but the past will tell you basically what your outcome is going to be.\""}
{"text": "# What to know about the Justice Department's report on police failures in the Uvalde school shooting\nBy **ALANNA DURKIN RICHER** and **CLAUDIA LAUER**  \nJanuary 18, 2024. 2:37 PM EST\n\n---\n\nA Justice Department report released Thursday details a myriad of failures by police who responded to the shooting at a school in Uvalde, Texas, when children waited desperately for over an hour before officers stormed a classroom to take the gunman down.\n\nThe federal review, which was launched just days after the May 2022 shooting, provides a damning look at the missteps by police after a gunman opened fire at Robb Elementary School. It was not a criminal investigation but one of the most exhaustive reviews of law enforcement's failure to stop the attack. Nineteen students and two teachers died in the shooting.\n\n\"The victims and survivors of the shooting at Robb Elementary on May 24, 2022, deserved better,\" Attorney General Merrick Garland told reporters in Uvalde.\n\nLocal officials are still weighing whether to bring charges.\n\nHere are some of the major takeaways from the report:\n\n## THE MOST SIGNIFICANT FAILURE\nThe Justice Department concluded that the chief failure was that police didn't treat the crisis as an active shooter situation and engage the gunman quickly. Initially, several officers did approach the classrooms where students were trapped inside with the gunman, but retreated after he fired at them.\n\nLaw enforcement then treated the situation as if the gunman was barricaded, dead or otherwise contained, focusing on calling for more SWAT equipment and evacuating surrounding classrooms instead of engaging the shooter and saving lives.\n\n\"First responders on the scene, including those with specific leadership responsibilities, did not coordinate immediate entry into the classrooms, running counter to generally accepted practices for active shooter response to immediately engage the subject to further save lives,\" the report said.\n\nThe report includes excerpts from a 911 call from terrified 9- and 10-year-old children trapped with the shooter while law enforcement waited just outside the classrooms. \"I don't want to die. My teacher is dead,\" one of them said. At that point, the students and their teachers had been trapped in classrooms with the shooter for 37 minutes. It was another 13 minutes after the call ended before survivors were rescued.\n\nThere were numerous signs that should have prompted police leaders to send officers in sooner, the report states, including the victims' injuries and the gunman firing about 45 rounds \"in law enforcement officer presence.\"\n\n\"For 77 agonizing, harrowing minutes, children and staff were trapped with an active shooter,\" the report said, \"They experienced unimaginable horror. The survivors witnessed unspeakable violence and the death of classmates and teachers.\"\n\n## THE RECOMMENDATIONS\nThe report includes a slew of recommendations, including that officers responding to such a crisis must prioritize neutralizing the shooter and aiding victims in harm's way.\n\n\"An active shooter with access to victims should never be considered and treated as a barricaded subject,\" it says. Evacuations should be limited to those who are immediately in danger and \"not at the expense of the priority to eliminate the threat,\" the Justice Department said. And officers must be prepared to engage the shooter \"using just the tools they have with them,\" even if they only have a standard issue firearm, it said.\n\nGarland said if law enforcement had followed best practices, \"lives would have been saved and people would have survived.\"\n\nOther recommendations address coordination between agencies responding to shootings, the release of information to the public, and providing proper support and trauma services.\n\n## ERRORS COMPOUNDING TRAUMA\nThe Justice Department also outlined failures in communication, including instances of incomplete, inaccurate or disjointed releases of information that led to lingering distrust in the community.\n\nThe report cites the county district attorney telling family members that authorities had to wait for autopsy reports before death notifications could be made. Family members who had not been told that children had died, yelled back: \"What, our kids are dead? No, no!\"\n\nOther examples included injured children, some with bullet wounds, being loaded onto a bus as the building was being cleared; parents spending hours removing glass shards from their children because they had not been screened before being released; an adult victim who was carried to a walkaway outside the school to receive medical attention who then died; and untrained hospital staff telling family members that their loved ones had died.\n\nThe report also highlights misinformation from authorities, including blaming a staff member for an open door that allowed the shooter to enter the building - later proving false. Some officers told frantic families that a shooter was in custody when that was not the case.\n\n## WHAT ARE VICTIMS' FAMILIES SAYING? \nFamily members, many of whom had been briefed on the federal report before its release, had mixed reactions. Some told news outlets they were grateful that the federal investigation supported their criticisms, but many had hoped the report would include a recommendation for federal charges against those criticized most heavily.\n\nPresident Joe Biden, when asked about the report Thursday, said the federal government would do its best to implement the recommendations, \"But I don't know that there's any criminal liability.\"\n\nVelma Lisa Duran, whose sister Irma Garcia was one of the teachers killed, told The Associated Press Thursday that she was grateful for the federal agency's work but disappointed that local prosecutors have yet to bring any charges.\n\n\"A report doesn't matter when there are no consequences for actions that are so vile and murderous and evil,\" said Duran. \"What do you want us to do with another report? ... Bring it to court,\" she said."}
{"text": "# 2 weeks of winter storms kill dozens and cause cold chaos in parts of the US, but a thaw is coming\nBy **CLAIRE RUSH**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 6:03 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PORTLAND, Ore. (AP)** - Two weeks of storms that have turned roads into icy death traps, frozen people to death from Oregon to Tennessee and caused power outages that could take weeks to fix continued to sock both coasts with another round of weather chaos on Friday.\n\nThe rain, snow, wind and bitterly cold temperatures have been blamed for at least 55 deaths in the U.S. over the past two weeks as a series of storms moved across the country. Schools and roads have closed, and air traffic has been snarled\n\nThere is hope. The forecast for next week calls for above average temperatures across almost the whole country, according to the National Weather Service.\n\nHeavier-than-forecast snow fell in New York City, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., on Friday and Michigan City, Indiana, received 17 inches (43 centimeters) of lake-effect snow. But the biggest problems remained in places hit hard by storms earlier in the week.\n\nOn the West Coast, Oregon's governor declared a statewide emergency Thursday night, nearly a week after the start of a crippling ice storm.\n\nThousands have been without power since last weekend in parts of Oregon's Willamette Valley because of the freezing rain.\n\n\"We lost power on Saturday, and we were told yesterday that it would be over two weeks before it's back on,\" said Jamie Kenworthy, a real estate broker in Jasper in Lane County.\n\nAbout 90,000 customers remained without electricity Friday afternoon in the state after back-to-back storms, according to poweroutage.us.\n\nPortland Public Schools canceled classes for the fourth straight day amid concerns about icy roads and water damage to buildings, and state offices in the city were also ordered closed.\n\nIce was also a problem in the South. Snow and freezing rain added another coat of ice in Tennessee on Thursday. More than 9 inches (22.8 centimeters) of snow has fallen around Nashville since Sunday, nearly twice the yearly average.\n\nAuthorities blamed at least 17 deaths in Tennessee on the weather. Several were from traffic wrecks. In Washington County, a patient in an ambulance and a person in a pickup were killed in a head-on crash when the truck lost control on a snowy road.\n\nExposure to cold was deadly, too. A 25-year-old man was found dead in a mobile home in Lewisburg after a space heater fell over and turned off.\n\n\"There was ice on the walls in there,\" Marshall County Chief Deputy Bob Johnson said.\n\nKentucky reported five deaths from the freezing weather. A statement from Gov. Andy Beshear didn't provide details.\n\nThe cold in Washington state was blamed for five deaths. The people - most of them presumed homeless - died from exposure to cold in just four days last week in Seattle as temperatures plummeted to well below freezing, the medical examiner's office said.\n\nTwo people died from exposure as far south as Louisiana, where temperatures in part of the state stayed below freezing for more than two days.\n\nThe cold broke so many water mains in Memphis that the entire city was placed on a boil water notice because the pressure was so low, Memphis Light, Gas and Water said. Bottled water was being given out in at least two locations Friday.\n\nIn Jackson, Mississippi, law enforcement agencies are investigating whether social media rumors about a potential water outage during the cold snap prompted people to fill bathtubs with tap water. The water system in Mississippi's capital experienced a drop in pressure that temporarily made faucets run dry for thousands of customers Wednesday and Thursday, though service was restored by Friday.\n\nA significant drop in blood donations led Chattanooga, Tennessee-based Blood Assurance to recommend that more than 70 hospitals in five states halt elective surgeries until Wednesday to let the organization rebuild its inventory. In a news release Thursday, the group cited the weather and several massive blood transfusions in the previous 24 hours in its plea to the hospitals in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina and Tennessee.\n\nAaron Robison, 62, has been staying at one of Nashville's warming centers and said the cold wouldn't have bothered him when he was younger. But now with arthritis in his hip and having to rely on two canes, he needed to get out of the cold.\n\n\"Thank God for people helping people on the streets. That's a blessing,\" he said.\n\nOn Friday, more bitterly cold air was spilling into the Midwest from Canada. Several states were under an advisory as forecasters warned of wind chills dipping to minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 34 degrees Celsius) could be common through Sunday morning.\n\nSince extreme cold weather set in last week, more than 60 oil spills and other environmental incidents have been reported in North Dakota's Bakken oil fields. Wind chills as low as minus 70 degrees F (minus 56.6 C) have strained workers and equipment, increasing the likelihood of accidents.\n\nLake-enhanced snow finally moved out of Buffalo, New York, late Thursday after burying parts of the city and some suburbs in five feet of snow in five days. The Buffalo Bills renewed their call for snow shovelers Friday, offering $20 an hour for help digging out Highmark Stadium before Sunday's divisional playoff game against the Kansas City Chiefs.\n\nThe West Virginia Legislature left after a brief session Friday because not enough lawmakers could get through snow-covered highways to the Capitol to vote on bills.\n\nIn Washington, snow fell softly and the streets around the U.S. Capitol were silent. Schools closed again for the second time in a week, and the government was on a two-hour delay. President Joe Biden still planned to host mayors from around the country on Friday, though, and was heading to his Delaware beach home for the weekend."}
{"text": "# Analysis: Risk of spiraling Mideast violence grows as war in Gaza inflames tensions\nBy **JON GAMBRELL**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 1:38 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**JERUSALEM (AP)** - Israel's war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip has raised the temperature on tensions across the Middle East, increasing the risk that other conflicts in the region could spin out of control.\n\nWhether it is assaults on shipping vessels by Houthi rebels in Yemen or tit-for-tat attacks between Iran and Pakistan, a line can be drawn back to the war that was started when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostage.\n\nSince then, Israel has killed more than 24,000 Palestinians and displaced nearly 2 million others from their homes, arousing anger throughout the Muslim world.\n\nWith no end in sight to the war, tensions in the region are worsening by the day.\n\n## THE HOUTHI THREAT DRAWS IN THE U.S.\nThe Houthis, a rebel group that has held Yemen's capital since 2014, link their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden directly back to the war in Gaza. But their targets increasingly have had tenuous - if no links at all - to the war.\n\nThe U.S. has retaliated with multiple strikes against the Houthis, the latest coming Friday when Navy fighter jets targeted missile launchers in Yemen.\n\nArmed and supported by Iran, the Houthis have a world view guided by their group's slogan: \"God is the greatest, death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, victory to Islam.\"\n\nYemen, the Arab world's poorest country, is locked in a stalemated war between the Houthis and parties under the banner of a Saudi-led coalition.\n\nAny direct military confrontation with the U.S. bolsters the Houthis' position within Yemen's fractious political scene. It also raises their profile within the so-called \"Axis of Resistance,\" which is made up of Iran and the militant groups it supports, including Hamas and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.\n\nThe brewing conflict with the U.S. also allows the Houthis to ignore both Arab and international efforts to reach a permanent cease-fire and potential peace deal in Yemen.\n\nThe U.S. has a long, complicated history in Yemen. It includes America's relationship with the country's late 33-year strongman president, a yearslong drone-strike campaign against suspected al-Qaida members and struggling to help broker an end to the war as famine threatens the country.\n\n## IRAN FLEXES POWER AND FACES RESISTANCE\nOn the surface, airstrikes launched this week between Iran and Pakistan may not seem to be connected to the Israel-Hamas war; but they are.\n\nThey spring in part from suicide bombings by the Islamic State earlier this month that killed more than 90 people in Iran. It was the deadliest militant attack in Iran since its 1979 Islamic Revolution.\n\nIn taking credit for the attack, the Islamic State called on its supporters around the world to avenge the bloodshed in the Gaza Strip by attacking Christians and Jews. But it also criticized Palestinian-aligned militants such as Hamas and Hezbollah for receiving support from Iran.\n\nThe Islamic State group follows an extremists' version of Sunni Islam and views Shiites like those in Iran as heretics.\n\n\"Iran and its parties were spared from a fierce battle that Gaza is enduring alone from the blood of its children and women,\" the Islamic State group message said.\n\nThe Islamic State attack increased the pressure faced by Iran's theocracy. It has struggled to regain control following women-led mass demonstrations and individual protests sparked by the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini.\n\nIran hasn't directly intervened in the Israel-Hamas war, despite long describing Israel as its archenemy. But it has faced years of attacks likely carried out by Israel as part of a wider shadow war across the Mideast since the collapse of its nuclear deal with world powers.\n\nIran first launched strikes this week against targets in Iraq and Syria in response to the Islamic State suicide bombings. The assault drew anger, but no direct response from either nation.\n\nBut then Iran launched an attack on what it described as militant hideouts in Pakistan after alleging the suicide bombers passed through the country from Afghanistan. The attack killed two children and immediately raised tensions with nuclear-armed Pakistan, which also maintains a strong conventional military to counter its neighboring rival, India.\n\nPakistan responded Thursday with its own strikes inside Iran, killing at least nine people.\n\nThe U.S., China and the U.N. have urged restraint, and on Friday both countries appeared to signal efforts to tamp down tensions. But the potential for escalation, while low, remains. Iran wants to present itself as a regional Mideast power, while Pakistan's military needs to show it can deter India -- in part, so it can maintain domestic support key to its political power.\n\n## WILL SIMMERING TENSIONS BOIL OVER?\nThere are risks that crises across the region could spin out of control.\n\nSome hardline members of the Israeli government have called for Palestinians to be expelled from the Gaza Strip into the Sinai Peninsula. That could destabilize Egypt and the longstanding peace between it and Israel.\n\nSyria is still in the midst of a civil war. Neighboring Jordan, a crucial power in Jerusalem, is suspected of launching airstrikes in Syria to disrupt drug smugglers, including one this week that killed nine people.\n\nStill technically at war with Israel since its founding in 1948, Syria has been a launching pad for attacks aimed at the Israel-occupied Golan Heights since the start of the war.\n\nGoaded by Hamas to get into the fight, Hezbollah militants in Lebanon have also launched strikes into Israel since the start of the war in Gaza. Israel has retaliated, but so far the two sides have stopped short of full-scale war along their border.\n\nEven in Afghanistan - where the Taliban hold sway since the fall of Kabul in 2021 - an affiliate of the Islamic State group may yet to take advantage of the Gaza war to launch new attacks amid the extremists' new campaign tied to the conflict."}
{"text": "# At Davos, leaders talked big on rebuilding trust. Can the World Economic Forum make a difference?\nBy **JAMEY KEATEN**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 9:00 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**DAVOS, Switzerland (AP)** - Business and political elites descended on the Swiss Alpine snows of Davos to suss out \"rebuilding trust\" in a splintering world. If there's any takeaway from the World Economic Forum's annual meeting - boldly touting that theme - it's that we still have a long way to go.\n\nFrom full-blown wars in Ukraine and the Middle East to suspicions that corporate chiefs and tech whizzes are out to make a buck off of displacing workers with artificial intelligence, trust is clearly in short supply.\n\nThe Davos gathering wrapped up Friday after a yearly pulse-taking of leading decision-makers. The idea is getting people together, and big announcements are often just a byproduct - not the aim. That's if they come at all.\n\n\"It's unrealistic to think that Davos - or any meeting, anywhere in the world - in one meeting can rebuild trust when it's fragmented on so many dimensions,\" said Rich Lesser, chairman of Boston Consulting Group.\n\nBut thousands of conversations between the social, private and public sectors help create \"a starting point for rebuilding trust,\" he said.\n\nA big artistic wall headlined \"Rebuilding Trust\" that greeted bigwigs from Bill Gates to the Iranian foreign minister was full of phrases like \"Growth and Jobs,\" \"Climate Nature Energy\" and \"Cooperation and Security\" - buzzwords that, to some, smack of empty talk.\n\nCritics say the annual meeting, which started more than half a century ago, are a preserve of business chieftains who covet greater wealth and politicians who want to stay in power. The event is hard-wired to foster can-do optimism, but geopolitical gloom weighs heavy.\n\n\"What is striking, if not shocking, for me at Davos is this weird commitment on the part of the participants to adopt an optimistic mindset,\" said Agnès Callamard, secretary-general of Amnesty International.\u2028\"But optimism for the purpose of maintaining the status quo and keeping my privilege. That's not optimism.\"\n\n\"That's craziness, frankly, and it's battering our poor world,\" she added.\n\nThe general conclusion, attendees said, was that the global economic picture is a bit brighter than might have been thought - interest rates and inflation seem to have peaked in the richest markets - but it's still anybody's guess where intractable wars and looming elections in places like the U.S., India, the European Union and South Africa will redirect the world.\n\nHere are some takeaways from Davos and the work that still lies ahead:\n\n## UKRAINE NEEDS MORE MONEY\nLong before Russia's war, Ukraine staked out prime real estate on the Davos Promenade main drag to promote its development and efforts to turn westward. Over the last two years, authorities in Kyiv have used the event to call for more support for their fight.\n\nIn 2022, months after Russia's invasion, that was an easier ask. This year, Ukraine war fatigue in Europe and the U.S. have set in.\n\nPresident Volodymyr Zelenskyy headlined Tuesday's action, pleading for more support from Western allies as billions in new funding from the United States and European Union remain locked up by homegrown political squabbles.\n\n\"Please, strengthen our economy, and we will strengthen your security,\" Zelenskyy urged.\n\nBritain, for its part, played up its recent 2.5-billion pound ($3.2 billion) contribution to Kyiv and urged allies to follow suit.\n\n## AI: THE FUTURE AND THE RISK\nConcerns about the economy that dominated last year have given way to hope - at least from business execs - that generative AI could boost productivity and cut down on rote tasks.\n\nBut naysayers fear explosive growth of the technology is going too fast for regulators, threatens to push people out of their jobs and could foment greater misinformation than is already found on social media.\n\nSome say humans have to maintain control, not allow technology to make crucial decisions on its own.\n\n\"No matter how much AI can do, humans are still the deciding factor. So we have to focus on the training of human resources, especially the highly skilled workers,\" Pham Minh Chinh, Vietnam's prime minister, said on a Davos panel.\n\n## THE CLIMATE OF FEAR ...\nThe plight of Israeli hostages held by Hamas and fears about Israel's long-term security were on people's lips, as was what some critics of Israel call genocide in Gaza - an accusation that Israeli leaders, whose people were massacred in the Holocaust, vociferously deny.\n\nRenewed talk of the creation of a Palestinian state - an idea rejected by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again this week - animated discussions with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and others, as did hopes for a normalization of Israel's ties with the Arab world, especially Saudi Arabia. Both seem unlikely in the near future.\n\nFears raged about how many more Palestinians will die or be injured, whether Israeli hostages will survive captivity and whether the conflict will spill over to even more of the Middle East.\n\nIran and its proxies, for instance, have stepped up military action in several parts of the region, and it's triggered retaliatory strikes from the likes of Pakistan, the U.S. and Britain.\n\n## ... AND FEAR ABOUT THE CLIMATE\nAn unusually rainy Thursday - snow is far more often the norm in Davos this time of year - sent tongues wagging about another possible, if temporary, sign of climate change that future-minded CEOs and political leaders want to address.\n\nThe gabfest at the Swiss ski resort, just a month after the latest U.N. climate conference, wasn't likely to push forward the effort to battle global warming. But corporate leaders shared ideas about how they're trying to help.\n\nThe U.N. chief, citing the hottest year on record in 2023 and fears that it could be hotter still in coming years, said countries are not doing enough.\n\n\"In the face of the serious - even existential threats - posed by runaway climate chaos and the runaway development of artificial intelligence without guardrails, we seem powerless to act together,\" Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in Davos. \"As climate breakdown begins, countries remain hellbent on raising emissions.\"\n\nBut \"the phaseout of fossil fuels is essential and inevitable\" he added. \"No amount of spin or scare tactics will change that.\""}
{"text": "# A probe into a Guyana dormitory fire that killed 20 children finds a series of failures\nBy **BERT WILKINSON**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 9:37 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**GEORGETOWN, Guyana (AP)** - A government commission in Guyana tasked with investigating a fire that killed 20 children at an Indigenous boarding school found multiple errors and systematic failures.\n\nCalling for reforms to avoid a repeat of the deadly 2023 fire, the report presented to President Irfaan Ali late Friday found there was a delay in seeking help and contacting the fire station, and that when help arrived, there were issues with crowd control and access to the dormitory located in the town of Mahdia near the border with Brazil.\n\nThe report also noted there was a lack of water supply and found \"inadequacies\" in the fire service and firefighting equipment.\n\n\"These factors assisted with the speed of the conflagration,\" said Brig. Gen. Joseph Singh, commission chair and retired army chief of staff.\n\nThe report confirmed that the May 2023 fire was intentionally set by a 15-year-old student, who was later arrested and charged with multiple counts of murder. Nineteen students and the infant son of the dormitory manager died. At least 14 other students younger than 18 were rescued from the blazing, one-story building.\n\nInvestigators found that many of the dormitory's windows had iron grills to keep out unwanted adult visitors, and panicked dorm officials were unable to find the keys to five doors that had no grills in time to save people.\n\nThe report cited \"human failure\" amid \"chaotic and fiery circumstances.\"\n\nPolice have explained that grills were placed on windows to prevent some of the teenage girls from escaping at night and on weekends to socialize with miners who flash gold, diamonds and cash in attempts to groom girls for sexual favors. The commission contended that such culture needs to change given that the acts occur \"with the tacit support of family members who benefit financially from such arrangements.\"\n\nPresident Ali echoed calls for a culture change among students and adults, noting that education officials and other authorities face \"tremendous difficulties in the behavioral pattern and changes in many schools, and we now have to work and see how we incorporate a higher degree of discipline through a systemic intervention.\"\n\nGuyana's government builds dormitory schools to house students from rural communities while their parents carry out daily chores such as hunting and farming. Months after the fire, government officials said they would pay $25,000 to the parents of each of the children who died in the fire as part of a settlement."}
{"text": "# North Korea says it tested a nuclear-capable underwater drone in response to rivals' naval drills\nBy **KIM TONG-HYUNG**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 1:40 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SEOUL, South Korea (AP)** - North Korea said Friday it has tested a nuclear-capable underwater attack drone in response to a combined naval exercise by South Korea, the United States and Japan this week, as it continues to blame its rivals for raising tensions in the region.\n\nThe test of the drone, purportedly designed to destroy naval vessels and ports, came days after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un declared he is scrapping his country's long-standing goal of a peaceful reunification with South Korea and that his country will rewrite its constitution to define South Korea as its most hostile foreign adversary.\n\nTensions on the Korean Peninsula have risen to their highest point in years, with Kim accelerating his weapons testing and threatening nuclear conflict. The United States and its Asian allies have responded by strengthening their combined military exercises, which Kim calls rehearsals for an invasion.\n\nThe underwater drone, which North Korea said it first tested last year, is among a broad range of weapon systems demonstrated in recent years as Kim expands his arsenal of nuclear-capable weapons. South Korea's military says North Korea has exaggerated the capabilities of the drone.\n\nNorth Korea's military said it conducted the test in the country's eastern waters in response to a naval drill by the U.S., South Korea and Japan which ended Wednesday in waters south of Jeju island. It did not say when the test occurred.\n\n\"Our army's underwater nuke-based countering posture is being further rounded off and its various maritime and underwater responsive actions will continue to deter the hostile military maneuvers of the navies of the U.S. and its allies,\" North Korea's Defense Ministry said in a statement.\n\n\"We strongly denounce the U.S. and its followers for their reckless acts of seriously threatening the security of (North Korea) from the outset of the year and sternly warn them of the catastrophic consequences to be entailed by them,\" it said.\n\nSouth Korea's Defense Ministry denounced North Korea's recent tests as a violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions and a threat to \"peace in the Korean Peninsula and the world.\" It said in a statement that the U.S. and South Korean militaries were maintaining a firm defense posture against possible North Korean provocations.\n\nU.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is very concerned about the current situation on the Korean peninsula, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said. Guterres reiterated his call \"for de-escalation, the full implementation of Security Council resolutions and for the creation of an environment that's conducive to dialogue and the resumption of diplomatic talks which are frankly the only possible path forward,\" Dujarric said.\n\nNorth Korea in recent months has tested various missile systems designed to target the United States and its Asian allies, and announced an escalatory nuclear doctrine that authorizes the military to conduct preemptive nuclear strikes if North Korea's leadership is under threat.\n\nNorth Korea conducted its first ballistic missile test of 2024 on Sunday. State media described it as a new solid-fuel, intermediate-range missile tipped with a hypersonic warhead, likely intended to target U.S. military bases in Guam and Japan.\n\nAt an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Thursday, South Korea urged the council \"to break the silence\" over North Korea's escalating missile tests and threats. Russia and China, both permanent members of the Security Council, have blocked U.S.-led efforts to increase sanctions on North Korea over its recent weapons tests, underscoring a divide deepened over Russia's war on Ukraine. South Korea is serving a two-year term on the council."}
{"text": "# Flexible underpinnings of new big Stellantis vehicles will help company navigate political changes\nBy **TOM KRISHER**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 12:15 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DETROIT (AP)** - On the surface, you wouldn't think the platform beneath a new generation of automobiles has anything to do with politics and elections.\n\nBut at Stellantis, new large vehicle underpinnings announced Friday are key to the company's ability to adjust to European and U.S. government electric vehicle requirements that could change depending on this year's elections.\n\nCEO Carlos Tavares says the company's new large platform is flexible enough to handle batteries and electric motors, gas-electric hybrids and internal combustion engines. The company also can build midsize to large vehicles on those underpinnings, including sedans, crossover vehicles, SUVs and even off-road Jeeps.\n\nThat flexibility is important, he said, because policies promoting EVs as a way to fight climate change could be rescinded depending on who is elected U.S. president or to European parliaments this year.\n\nTavares often says that EVs for 40% more to make than vehicles with combustion engines, boosting prices beyond what the middle class can afford. Governments have tried to promote EV sales with subsidies and tax credits, but some countries are starting to rethink those.\n\n\"As soon as you do not fix the affordability issue by giving me a significant subsidy that will fix it, then I stop buying,\" Tavares said of consumers. \"That message is loud and clear.\"\n\nElectric vehicle sales growth already is slowing in many countries with consumers balking at the added cost as well as limited range and too few charging stations. On Friday, Ford said it was cutting production of the F-150 Lightning electric pickup after weaker-than-expected electric vehicle sales growth.\n\nSome politial candidates, including GOP front-runner Donald Trump in the U.S., have criticized the move to EVs, indicating they would end policies to promote them.\n\nStellantis, maker of Jeep, Ram, Dodge and other vehicles, has plans for two scenarios, one if populist candidates who are against EVs win, the other if EV-friendly candidates are elected, Tavares said. \"One is to accelerate (EVs), the other one is to slow down,\" he said. \"Not necessarily stop. We need to fix the global warming issue.\"\n\nTavares said in some European countries, governments are imposing electric vehicles on consumers who can't afford them. So many are keeping their current vehicles longer, raising the average vehicle age, which he said is a \"disaster\" for the planet.\n\nStellantis, he said, makes money on its EVs now, unlike many competitors. Those who can't get strong prices for their vehicles won't have money to invest in lower-cost new ones, and could wind up being consolidated into another company or going out of business, he said.\n\nIf companies keep cutting EV prices to attract buyers and don't make money, there could be a \"bloodbath\" in the industry, Tavares said.\n\nStellantis said vehicles built off the new large platform will be built at multiple North American and European factories. In North America, it's likely that the first new vehicles to come out will be a replacement for the Dodge Charger muscle car and a new version of the Jeep Wagoneer S.\n\nThe platform can handle front wheel drive, all wheel drive and rear wheel drive vehicles, the company said. The first will reach the market this year, with eight vehicles from Jeep, Dodge, Chrysler, Alfa Romeo and Maserati on sale by the end of 2026.\n\nThe company can vary the length and width of vehicles and differentiate them from each other with ride and handling changes as well as infotainment and other interior features. Use of a platform for both battery and gasoline powertrains is unique to the industry, with many competitors building different chassis for each type of propulsion.\n\n\"The flexibility and agility of this platform is its hallmark and will be a driving force for our success in the shift to electrification in North America,\" Tavares said.\n\nA midsize vehicle platform announced by the company last year has similar flexibility, the company said. It's also planning a new small-vehicle platform."}
{"text": "# 2023 was slowest year for US home sales in nearly 30 years as high mortgage rates frustrated buyers\nBy **ALEX VEIGA**\nJanuary 19, 2024. 5:28 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LOS ANGELES (AP)** - Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes sank in 2023 to a nearly 30-year low, as sharply higher mortgage rates, rising prices and a persistently low level of homes on the market combined to push homeownership out of reach for many Americans.\n\nThe National Association of Realtors said Friday that existing U.S. home sales totaled 4.09 million last year, an 18.7% decline from 2022. That is the weakest year for home sales since 1995 and the biggest annual decline since 2007, the start of the housing slump of the late 2000s.\n\nThe median national home price for all of last year edged up just under 1% to record high $389,800, the NAR said.\n\nLast year's home sales slump echoes the nearly 18% annual decline in 2022, when mortgage rates began rising, eventually more than doubling by the end of the year. That trend continued in 2023, driving the average rate on a 30-year mortgage by late October to 7.79%, the highest level since late 2000.\n\nThe sharply higher home loan borrowing costs limited home hunters' buying power on top of years of soaring prices. A dearth of homes for sale also kept many would-be homebuyers and sellers on the sidelines.\n\nStill, a pullback in mortgage rates since late last year, and forecasts calling for a further rate declines this year, is fueling hopes that home sales will begin to bounce back from their dismal showing in 2023.\n\n\"The latest month's sales look to be the bottom before inevitably turning higher in the new year,\" said Lawrence Yun, the NAR's chief economist. \"Mortgage rates are meaningfully lower compared to just two months ago, and more inventory is expected to appear on the market in upcoming months.\"\n\nMortgage rates have been mostly easing since November, echoing a pullback in the 10-year Treasury yield, which lenders use as a guide to pricing loans. The yield has largely come down on hopes that inflation has cooled enough for the Federal Reserve to shift to cutting interest rates this year.\n\nThe average rate on a 30-year home loan was 6.6% this week, according to mortgage buyer Freddie Mac. If rates continue to ease, as many economists expect, that should help boost demand heading into the spring homebuying season, which traditionally begins in late February.\n\nStill, the average rate remains sharply higher than just two years ago, when it was 3.56%. That large gap between rates now and then has helped limit the number of previously occupied homes on the market by discouraging homeowners who locked in rock-bottom rates from selling.\n\n\"Prospective homebuyers have been shut out of the market by a lack of inventory,\" said Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist at Bright MLS. \"If there had been more listings on the market in 2023, we would have had more home sales.\"\n\nAt the end of December, there were just 1 million homes on the market, the NAR said. While that's a 4.2% increase from a year earlier, the number of available homes remains well below the monthly historical average of about 2.25 million.\n\nThe available inventory at the end of last month amounts to a 3.2-month supply, going by the current sales pace. That's down 3.5% from the previous month, but up from 2.9% from December 2022. In a more balanced market between buyers and sellers, there is a 4- to 6-month supply.\n\nThat means homebuyers are likely to face intense competition for the relatively few homes on the market, which should keep pushing up prices.\n\n\"There will still be a demand-supply imbalance in the housing market well into 2024,\" Sturtevant said.\n\nDespite easing mortgage rates, home sales in December declined after rising the previous month. Existing home sales fell 1% from November to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.78 million, the slowest sales pace since August 2010, the NAR said.\n\nSales fell 6.2% from a year earlier. Last month's sales pace is short of the roughly 3.83 million that economists were expecting, according to FactSet.\n\nHome prices rose for the sixth straight month in December. The national median home sales price rose 4.4% from a year earlier to $382,600, the NAR said.\n\nHomebuyers continued to face a competitive market due to the shortage of homes for sale.\n\nHomes sold last month typically within just 29 days after hitting the market, and 56% of properties that sold in December were on the market for less than a month, the NAR said.\n\nFirst-time homebuyers who don't have any home equity to put toward their down payment continued to have a tough time getting into the housing market. They accounted for just 29% of all homes sold last month, down from 31% in November and December 2022. They've accounted for 40% of sales historically.\n\n\"Renters, potential first-time buyers (are) really struggling to get into the market,\" Yun said."}
{"text": "# Apple offers rivals access to tap-and-go payment tech to resolve EU antitrust case\nJanuary 19, 2024. 7:39 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - Apple has promised to open up its tap-and-go mobile payment system to rivals, the European Union said Friday, as the U.S. tech company seeks to resolve an antitrust case and avoid a fine that potentially could be worth billions.\n\nApple proposed letting third-party mobile wallet and payment service providers access the contactless payment function on its iOS operating system, the EU said. The 27-nation bloc now is seeking feedback from \"all interested parties\" on the changes before making a decision on the case.\n\nThe European Commission, the bloc's executive arm and top antitrust enforcer, accused Apple in 2022 of abusing its dominant position by limiting access to its mobile payment technology.\n\nBrussels has been using antitrust cases and new digital laws to rein in the power of Apple and other tech giants and protect consumers.\n\nThe commission alleged that Apple was restricting competition by blocking developers of rival mobile wallet apps from accessing the near-field communication, or NFC, technology used by its Apple Pay system. That prevents those developers from offering competing services on Apple devices, the EU said.\n\nBreaches of EU competition law can draw fines worth up to 10% of a company's annual global revenue, which in Apple's case, could amount to tens of billions of euros (dollars).\n\nThe changes Apple is proposing to ease EU antitrust concerns would last for a decade and apply to rival mobile wallet makers as well as iOS users in the bloc's 27 countries, plus Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein, the commission said.\n\nApple said that through \"ongoing discussions\" with the commission, it offered to provide developers of payment, banking and digital wallet apps with an option for their users to \"make NFC contactless payments from within their iOS apps, separate from Apple Pay and Apple Wallet.\""}
{"text": "# Stock market today: Wall Street hits record high following a 2-year round trip scarred by inflation\nBy **STAN CHOE**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 5:12 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Wall Street returned to record heights Friday to cap a punishing, two-year round trip dogged by high inflation and worries about a recession that seemed inevitable but hasn't arrived.\n\nThe S&P 500, which is the centerpiece of many 401(k) accounts and the main measure that professional investors use to gauge Wall Street's health, rallied 1.2% to 4,839.81. It erased the last of its losses since setting its prior record of 4,796.56 at the start of 2022. During that time, it dropped as much as 25% as inflation soared to levels unseen since Thelonious Monk and Ingrid Bergman were still alive in 1981.\n\nEven more than high inflation itself, Wall Street's fear was focused on the medicine the Federal Reserve traditionally uses to treat it. That's high interest rates, which press the brakes on the economy by making borrowing more expensive and hurting prices for stocks and other investments. And the Fed rapidly hiked its main interest rate from virtually zero to its highest level since 2001, in a range between 5.25% and 5.50%.\n\nHistorically, the Fed has helped induce recessions through such increases to interest rates. Coming into last year, the widespread expectation on Wall Street was that it would happen again.\n\nBut this time was different, or at least it has been so far. The economy is still growing, the unemployment rate remains remarkably low and optimism is on the upswing among U.S. households.\n\n\"I don't think this cycle is normal at all,\" said Niladri \"Neel\" Mukherjee, chief investment officer of TIAA's Wealth Management team. \"It's unique, and the pandemic introduced that element of uniqueness.\"\n\nAfter shooting higher as snarled supply chains caused shortages because of COVID-19 shutdowns, inflation has been cooling since its peak two summers ago. It's eased so much that Wall Street's biggest question now is when the Federal Reserve will begin moving interest rates lower.\n\nSuch cuts to rates can act like steroids for financial markets, while releasing pressure that's built up on the economy and the financial system.\n\nTreasury yields have already relaxed significantly on expectations for rate cuts, and that helped the stock market's rally accelerate sharply in November. The yield on the 10-year Treasury slipped Friday to 4.13%, and it's down sharply from the 5% that it reached in October, which was its highest level since 2007.\n\nOf course, some critics say Wall Street has gotten ahead of itself, again, in predicting how soon the Federal Reserve may begin cutting interest rates.\n\n\"The market is addicted to rate cuts,\" said Rich Weiss, chief investment officer of multi-asset strategies at American Century Investments. \"They just can't get enough of it and are myopically focused on it.\"\n\nRepeatedly since the Fed began this rate-hiking campaign early in 2022, traders have been quick to forecast an approaching easing of rates, only to be disappointed as high inflation proved to be more stubborn than expected. If that happens again, the big moves higher for stocks and lower for bond yields may need to revert.\n\nThis time around, though, the Fed itself has hinted that rate cuts are coming, though some officials have indicated they may begin later than the market is hoping for. Traders are betting on a nearly coin flip's chance that the Fed will start cutting in March, according to data from CME Group.\n\n\"The truth is likely somewhere between what the Fed is saying and what the market is expecting,\" said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management. \"That will continue to cause dips and rips\" for financial markets \"until the two reconcile with each other.\"\n\nSome encouraging data came Friday after a preliminary report from the University of Michigan suggested the mood among U.S. consumers is roaring higher. It said sentiment jumped to its highest level since July 2021. That's important because spending by consumers is the main driver of the economy.\n\nPerhaps more importantly for the Fed, expectations for upcoming inflation among households also seem to be anchored. A big worry has been that such expectations could take off and trigger a vicious cycle that keeps inflation high.\n\nFriday's lift for Wall Street came with a big boost from technology stocks, something that's become typical in its run higher.\n\nSeveral chip companies rose for a second straight day after heavyweight chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. delivered a better forecast for revenue this year than analysts expected. Broadcom rose 5.9%, and Texas Instruments climbed 4%.\n\nAll told, the S&P 500 rose 58.87 points to its record. The Dow Jones Industrial Average set its own record a month earlier, and it gained 395.19, or 1.1%, Friday to 37,863.80. The Nasdaq composite jumped 255.32, or 1.7%, to 15,310.97.\n\nLast year, a select few Big Tech companies were responsible for the wide majority of the S&P 500's gains. Seven of them accounted for 62% of the index's total return, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.\n\nMany of those stocks - Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Nvidia, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Tesla - rode a furor in the market around technology related to artificial intelligence. The hope is AI will lead to a boom in profits, both for companies using it and for companies providing the hardware for it.\n\nInvestors may have wished they had stayed in just those stocks, which got the nickname of \"the Magnificent 7.\" But some of them remain below their record highs, such as Tesla. It's still down 48% from its all-time high set in November 2021.\n\nFriday's return of the S&P 500 to a record serves as another example that investors who stay patient and spread their investments across the U.S. stock market end up making back all their losses. Sometimes it can take a long time, like the lost decade of 2000 through 2009 when the S&P 500 tumbled through the dot-com bubble bust and the global financial crisis. But the market has historically made investors whole again, given enough time.\n\nIncluding dividends, investors with S&P 500 index funds already returned to break-even a month ago.\n\nOf course, risks still remain for investors. Besides uncertainty about when the Fed will begin cutting interest rates, it's also still not a sure thing that the economy will avoid a recession.\n\nHikes to interest rates take a notoriously long time to make their way fully through the system, and they can cause things to break in unexpected places within the financial system."}
{"text": "# The largest great ape to ever live went extinct because of climate change, study finds\nBy **CHRISTINA LARSON**  \nJanuary 10, 2024. 7:24 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - An ancient species of great ape was likely driven to extinction hundreds of thousands of years ago when climate change put their favorite fruits out of reach during dry seasons, scientists reported Wednesday.\n\nThe species Gigantopithecus blacki, which once lived in southern China, represents the largest great ape known to scientists - standing 10 feet tall (3 meters) and weighing up to 650 pounds (295 kilograms).\n\nBut its size may also have been a weakness.\n\n\"It's just a massive animal - just really, really big,\" said Renaud Joannes-Boyau, a researcher at Australia's Southern Cross University and co-author of the study published in the journal Nature. \"When food starts to be scarce, it's so big it can't climb trees to explore new food sources.\"\n\nThe giant apes, which likely resembled modern orangutans, survived for around 2 million years on the forested plains of China's Guangxi region. They ate vegetarian diets, munching on fruits and flowers in tropical forests, until the environment began to change.\n\nThe researchers analyzed pollen and sediment samples preserved in Guangxi's caves, as well as fossil teeth, to unravel how forests produced fewer fruits starting around 600,000 years ago, as the region experienced more dry seasons.\n\nThe giant apes didn't vanish quickly, but likely went extinct sometime between 215,000 and 295,000 years ago, the researchers found.\n\nWhile smaller apes may have been able to climb trees to search for different food, the researchers' analysis shows the giant apes ate more tree bark, reeds and other non-nutritious food.\n\n\"When the forest changed, there was not enough food preferred by the species,\" said co-author Zhang Yingqi of China's Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.\n\nMost of what scientists know about the extinct great apes comes from studying fossil teeth and four large lower jaw bones, all found in southern China. No complete skeletons have been found.\n\nBetween around 2 million and 22 million years ago, several dozen species of great apes inhabited Africa, Europe and Asia, fossil records show. Today, only gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and humans remain.\n\nWhile the first humans emerged in Africa, scientists don't know on which continent the great ape family first arose, said Rick Potts, who directs the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and was not involved in the study."}
{"text": "# Ancient human DNA hints at why multiple sclerosis affects so many northern Europeans today\nBy **LAURAN NEERGAARD**  \nJanuary 10, 2024. 7:55 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Ancient DNA helps explain why northern Europeans have a higher risk of multiple sclerosis than other ancestries: It's a genetic legacy of horseback-riding cattle herders who swept into the region about 5,000 years ago.\n\nThe findings come from a huge project to compare modern DNA with that culled from ancient humans' teeth and bones - allowing scientists to trace both prehistoric migration and disease-linked genes that tagged along.\n\nWhen a Bronze Age people called the Yamnaya moved from the steppes of what are now Ukraine and Russia into northwestern Europe, they carried gene variants that today are known to increase people's risk of multiple sclerosis, researchers reported Wednesday.\n\nYet the Yamnaya flourished, widely spreading those variants. Those genes probably also protected the nomadic herders from infections carried by their cattle and sheep, concluded the research published in the journal Nature.\n\n\"What we found surprised everyone,\" said study co-author William Barrie, a genetics researcher at the University of Cambridge. \"These variants were giving these people an advantage of some kind.\"\n\nIt's one of several findings from a first-of-its-kind gene bank with thousands of samples from early humans in Europe and western Asia, a project headed by Eske Willerslev of Cambridge and the University of Copenhagen who helped pioneer the study of ancient DNA. Similar research has traced even earlier cousins of humans such as Neanderthals.\n\nUsing the new gene bank to explore MS was a logical first step. That's because while MS can strike any population, it is most common among white descendants of northern Europeans and scientists have been unable to explain why.\n\nThe potentially disabling disease occurs when immune system cells mistakenly attack the protective coating on nerve fibers, gradually eroding them. It causes varying symptoms - numbness and tingling in one person, impaired walking and vision loss in another - that often wax and wane.\n\nIt's not clear what causes MS although a leading theory is that certain infections could trigger it in people who are genetically susceptible. More than 230 genetic variants have been found that can increase someone's risk.\n\nThe researchers first examined DNA from about 1,600 ancient Eurasians, mapping some major shifts in northern Europe's population. First, farmers from the Middle East began supplanting hunter-gatherers and then, nearly 5,000 years ago, the Yamnaya began moving in - traveling with horses and wagons as they herded cattle and sheep.\n\nThe research team compared the ancient DNA to about 400,000 present-day people stored in a UK gene bank, to see the MS-linked genetic variations persist in the north, the direction the Yamnaya moved, rather than in southern Europe.\n\nIn what is now Denmark, the Yamnaya rapidly replaced ancient farmers, making them the closest ancestors of modern Danes, Willerslev said. MS rates are particularly high in Scandinavian countries.\n\nWhy would gene variants presumed to have strengthened ancient immunity later play a role in an autoimmune disease? Differences in how modern humans are exposed to animal germs may play a role, knocking the immune system out of balance, said study co-author Dr. Astrid Iversen of Oxford University.\n\nThe findings finally offer an explanation for the north-south MS divide in Europe but more work is needed to confirm the link, cautioned genetic expert Samira Asgari of New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine, who wasn't involved with the research, in an accompanying commentary."}
{"text": "# How to stay warm in layered clothing and avoid frostbite this winter\nBy **TRISHA AHMED** and **MARK VANCLEAVE**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 1:25 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MINNEAPOLIS (AP)** - As a bout of bitter and deadly cold sweeps the U.S., millions of Americans are being told to dress in layers if they must go outside.\n\nIn places that rarely experience bone-chilling temperatures, that advice can be confounding. What does it mean to layer up? Is it different from just putting on a coat? Is there a way to do it wrong?\n\nPeople in Minnesota, a state that is no stranger to the cold, have wisdom to share.\n\n## WHAT IS LAYERING?\nLayering means wearing multiple pieces of clothing to keep your body comfortable in cold weather. Each layer creates an insulating pocket of air that protects you better than just wearing a big jacket, and layering helps move sweat and moisture away from your skin.\n\nNo matter how cold it is, you're probably going to sweat when you go outside and start moving, said Claire Wilson, executive director of The Loppet Foundation - a nonprofit that promotes winter recreation and activities in Minneapolis.\n\nIf you're wearing the correct layers, you can feel perspiration wick away from your body, she said. The idea is to add another layer if you get cold, or take off a layer when you get hot or wet.\n\n## AVOID COTTON AND WETNESS\nWilson said she loves to shop at thrift stores for layers that won't break the bank.\n\n\"Just look for things that aren't cotton,\" she said.\n\nCotton absorbs moisture, so it stays wet longer, Wilson explained. Cotton socks can get wet in your boots or shoes if you walk in the snow, and a cotton shirt under your jacket can get wet with sweat. Cotton won't dry quickly, so you'll get colder, she said.\n\nInstead, choose wool socks and fabrics made of fleece, polyester or polypropylene, she said. You can also repurpose old vests and shirts, which are great at keeping your core warm. Many of these items might also already be in your closet; layering up doesn't have to cost a fortune.\n\n## THINK OF THREE MAIN LAYERS\nWilson recommends starting with a base layer, then a mid layer, and then an outer layer.\n\nThe base layer is closest to your skin, so it's important for the fabric to wick away moisture, she said. Choose polyester over cotton for this. Then, wear a mid layer - a vest or a shirt - to keep your core warm. Some people choose to wear more than one mid layer. Finally, wear a traditional winter jacket that breaks the wind a little but also insulates you, Wilson said.\n\n## DRESS TO PREVENT FROSTBITE\nFrostbite - a painful injury in which skin freezes, blood flow decreases and tissue gets damaged - can happen within minutes in cold weather when skin is not adequately covered.\n\n\"We see people with frostbite inside their shoes and gloves all the time,\" said Dr. James Miner, chief of emergency medicine at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis.\n\nSymptoms include blistering of the skin because it's damaged, along with bruising and swelling. Frostbite can even result in the loss of a limb, if it's not properly treated.\n\nThe hospital sees about a dozen people a day with frostbite when temperatures hover near zero (minus 18 degrees Celsius), Miner said.\n\nLayering up can prevent frostbite because it traps a bit of insulating air between each layer of fabric, Miner said. It's more effective than simply wearing a big coat because layers \"tend to keep the moisture from outside - or the moisture from your body - from traveling as far as it gets trapped\" by the air within each layer.\n\nMiner recommends a waterproof outer layer, like a raincoat, to keep the lower layers dry.\n\nChildren typically require one more layer than adults, said Toni Hauser, supervisor of emergency preparedness and response for the Minneapolis Health Department. Hauser suggests keeping extra clothing or blankets in your car as well, in case you run out of gas or your car breaks down and you need to be outside.\n\n## PROTECT SPECIFIC BODY PARTS\n\"Three words: Cover Your Bum (CYB)!\" the city of Minneapolis says in a blog post about staying warm in cold weather. In other words, wear a winter jacket that falls closer to your knees than your hips.\n\nThe post also recommends keeping your legs warm with fleece-lined leggings or a pair of long underwear under your pants. Woolen socks and winter boots are a big help, too. Fur-lined gloves or mittens can also keep your hands warm and prevent dry skin. And keep your ears cozy with ear muffs or a hat."}
{"text": "# Prince Harry drops libel case against Daily Mail after damaging pretrial ruling\nBy **BRIAN MELLEY**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 2:52 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - Prince Harry dropped his libel lawsuit Friday against the publisher of the Daily Mail tabloid following a punishing ruling in which a judge suggested he might lose at trial.\n\nLawyers for the Duke of Sussex notified the High Court in London that he would not continue the suit against Associated Newspapers Ltd., one of several cases he had pending in his high-profile battle with the British press.\n\nNo reason was given, but it came the day he was due to hand over documents in the case and after a punishing ruling last month in which a judge ordered Harry to pay the publisher nearly 50,000 pounds (more than $60,000) in legal fees after he failed to achieve victory without going to trial.\n\nThe action will leave him on the hook to pay the publisher's legal fees, which the Daily Mail reported to be 250,000 pounds ($316,000). A spokesperson for the duke said it was premature to speculate about costs.\n\nHarry, 39, the estranged younger son of King Charles III, has broken ranks with the royal family in his willingness to go to court and it has become the main forum in his efforts to hold the news media accountable for hounding him throughout his life.\n\nAssociated Newspapers is one of three tabloid publishers he has sued over claims they used unlawful means, such as deception, phone hacking or hiring private investigators, to try to dig up dirt on him. That case against Associated and another against the publisher of The Sun are headed for trial.\n\nIn the sole case that has gone to trial, Harry scored a big victory last month against the publishers of the Daily Mirror when a judge ruled that phone hacking was \"widespread and habitual\" at Mirror Group Newspapers, and executives at the papers covered it up. He was awarded 140,000 pounds ($177,000).\n\nThe libel case involved a Mail on Sunday article that said Harry tried to hide his efforts to retain publicly funded protection in the United Kingdom after walking away from his role as a working member of the royal family.\n\nHarry's lawyers claimed the article attacked his honesty and integrity by purporting to reveal that court documents \"contradicted public statements he had previously made about his willingness to pay for police protection for himself and his family\" while in the U.K. He said the article would undermine his charity work.\n\nThe publisher argued the article expressed an honest opinion and caused no serious harm to his reputation.\n\nIn March, Harry sought summary judgment - to win the case without going to trial - and tried to knock out the Mail's defense but a judge didn't buy it.\n\nJustice Matthew Nicklin ruled on Dec. 8 that the publisher was more likely to prevail in its defense showing that statements issued on Harry's behalf were misleading and that the February 2022 article reflected an \"honest opinion\" and wasn't libelous.\n\n\"The defendant may well submit that this was a masterclass in the art of 'spinning,'\" Nicklin wrote, in refusing to strike the honest opinion defense.\n\nHarry also has a lawsuit pending against the government's decision to protect him on a case-by-case basis when he visits Britain. He claims that hostility toward him and his wife on social media and relentless hounding by the news media threaten their safety. He cited media intrusion for his decision to leave life as a senior royal and move to the United States\n\nHarry's spokesperson said his focus remains on that case and his family's safety."}
{"text": "# Neo-Nazi podcasters sent to prison on terror charges for targeting Prince Harry and his young son\nBy **BRIAN MELLEY**  \nJanuary 4, 2024. 4:28 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - A neo-Nazi podcaster who called for the deaths of Prince Harry and his young son received a prison sentence Thursday along with his co-host Thursday. The sentencing judge in London called the duo \"dedicated and unapologetic white supremacists\" who encouraged terrorism.\n\nChristopher Gibbons and Tyrone Patten-Walsh espoused racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, homophobic and misogynistic views and encouraged listeners of their \"Lone Wolf Radio\" podcast to commit violent acts against ethnic minorities, authorities said.\n\nUsing aliases on their show, the pair said \"the white race was likely to be 'genocided' unless steps were taken to fight back.\" They approved of a day when so-called race traitors would be hanged, particularly those in interracial relationships. Prince Harry's wife, Meghan, is biracial.\n\nOn one episode, Gibbons said the Duke of Sussex should be \"prosecuted and judicially killed for treason\" and called Harry's son, Archie, who is now 4, a \"creature\" that \"should be put down.\"\n\nGibbons, 40, was sentenced to eight years in prison, the Metropolitan Police said. Patten-Walsh, 34, was given a 7-year term. Both will be on the equivalent of probation for three years after their release.\n\n\"The evidence demonstrates that you desire to live in a world dominated by white people purely for white people. Your distorted thinking is that the white race has ceded too much influence to Blacks and Asians, to Jews and Muslims, to gays, to white liberals and to white people in mixed-race relationships,\" Judge Peter Lodder said.\n\nWhile Patten-Walsh and Gibbons were entitled to hold their beliefs - regardless of being \"as preposterous as they are offensive to a civilized society\" - Lodder said they had gone too far.\n\nThe London men started \"Lone Wolf Radio,\" which had 128 subscribers and around 9,000 views of its 21 episodes in June 2020.\n\nThe two celebrated right-wing extremists who carried out mass murders in Norway, Christchurch, New Zealand and Charleston, South Carolina. They also posted images of a Nazi executing a Jewish man at the edge of a pit of corpses and Nelson Mandela being lynched.\n\nA Kingston Crown Court jury convicted them in July of eight counts of encouraging terrorism.\n\nGibbons was also convicted of two counts of disseminating terrorist documents through his online neo-Nazi \"radicalization\" library that had more than 2,000 subscribers, authorities said.\n\nCmdr. Dominic Murphy, who heads the Met's counter terrorism unit, said the material they disseminated \"is exactly the kind that has the potential to draw vulnerable people - particularly young people - into terrorism.\""}
{"text": "# Japan's imperial family hosts a poetry reading with a focus on peace to welcome the new year\nBy **YURI KAGEYAMA**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 2:28 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**TOKYO (AP)** - A mother's love and a yearning for peace flowed from Japanese Empress Masako's poem, read Friday at an annual celebration of poetry at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo.\n\nThe poem sings of how Masako was touched by what her daughter, Princess Aiko, wrote after her school trip to the southern Japanese city of Hiroshima, which was devastated by an atomic bomb in the closing days of World War II.\n\nStarting the new year with poetry is part of Japanese culture. The gathering at the palace is believed to have begun in the 13th century, according to the Imperial Household Agency.\n\nAmong the guests wearing suits, kimono and other formalwear were people who had won awards for their own poems.\n\nVarious works written in traditional \"waka\" style were presented Friday, solemnly read aloud in a sing-song way, like a chant, as the imperial family watched. Waka - literally meaning Japanese-style song - is short-form poetry that usually follows a 5-7-5-7-7 syllable format.\n\nAiko's poem depicted her fascination with the waka form, which she has studied at Gakushuin University. She marveled at how the art has survived a thousand years, which she imagined to include deep human suffering.\n\nEmperor Naruhito's poem affirmed the idea of peace by describing seeing the smiles of all the people during his travels throughout Japan.\n\nNaruhito - grandson of the wartime emperor Hirohito - and his family are fairly popular, greeted by waving crowds wherever they go. The emperor does not have political power, but he carries symbolic significance for Japan. Naruhito's father, Akihito, abdicated in 2019. The move is rare for a Japanese emperor, whose reign typically ends upon death.\n\nThe official translation of Masako's poem reads: \"How moved I was to read / My daughter's deep feelings for peace / After her first visit / To Hiroshima.\""}
{"text": "# US in deep freeze while much of the world is extra toasty? Yet again, it's climate change\nBy **SETH BORENSTEIN**  \nJanuary 16, 2024. 6:13 PM EST\n\n---\n\nMuch of the United States is shivering through brutal cold as most of the rest of the world is feeling unusually warm weather. However strange it sounds, that contradiction fits snugly in explanations of what climate change is doing to Earth, scientists said.\n\nIn a map of global temperatures the last several days, big chunks of the world - the Arctic, Asia, parts of Africa, the Middle East and South America - show as dark red, signifying more than a dozen degrees Fahrenheit (7 degrees Celsius) warmer than the late 20th-century average. But the United States stands out like a cold thumb - a deep bluish-purple that is just as out of whack but on the frigid side.\n\nWind chills in parts of North Dakota reached minus 70 degrees (minus 56 degrees Celsius), while the heat index in Miami was more than 160 degrees warmer at 92 (33 degrees Celsius). The fourth-coldest NFL football game took place in Kansas City, while across the globe the thermometer hit a blistering 92 degrees, 12 degrees (6.8 degrees Celsius) warmer than average on Friday during tennis' Australian Open in Melbourne. Warm temperature records fell overnight in Aruba, Curacao, parts of Argentina, Oman and Iran.\n\nWhere weather was warmer than usual, it was happening both in the southern hemisphere, which is in summer, and in the northern hemisphere, which is in winter. For example, Oman, in the north, had its warmest January night ever at 79.5 degrees (26.4 degrees Celsius). Argentina, in the south, had a record for warmest January night at 81.1 Fahrenheit (27.3 Celsius).\n\nIf it seems as if the world has gone topsy-turvy, in a way it has. Because this all comes from what's happening in the Arctic, where it used to be warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Now, it's warming three to four times faster.\n\n\"When the Arctic is off-the-charts warm (like now), we're more likely to see frigid cold invade places like Texas that are ill-equipped to deal with it,\" said Jennifer Francis, a Woodwell Research Center climate scientist and a pioneer in the theory of Arctic Amplification, which links the cold outbreaks to climate change. \"Rapid Arctic warming is one of the clearest symptoms of human-caused climate change, making winter extremes more likely even as the globe warms overall.\"\n\nThe way the cold is invading is through a weather phrase that is becoming increasingly familiar to Americans: The polar vortex. It's a weather term that goes back to 1853 but has only been frequently used in the past decade or so.\n\nThat could be because the icy stabs are happening more often, said winter weather expert Judah Cohen of Atmospheric Environmental Research, a commercial firm outside of Boston.\n\nThe polar vortex is strong, icy weather that usually stays over the top of the planet, penned in by strong winds that whip around it, Cohen said.\n\nIt's like an ice skater spinning rapidly with her arms tucked in, he said. But when the polar vortex weakens, the arms start flailing out, the skater slips and \"all the cold air then gets released away from the center of the polar vortex,\" Cohen said.\n\nThe current cold outbreak is consistent with Arctic change and the polar vortex, Cohen said. \"What we found is when the polar vortex stretches like a rubber band, severe extreme winter weather is much more likely in the United States. That's where it tends to be focused and in January we have an extreme case of that stretching of the polar vortex.\"\n\nThis one is stronger and may last longer than most, Cohen said.\n\nCohen and others have done studies that show the polar vortex outbreaks have become more frequent in recent decades.\n\nThe idea is the jet stream - the upper air circulation that drives weather - is wavier in amplified global warming, said University of Wisconsin-Madison climate scientist Steve Vavrus. And those wave changes in the upper air knock the polar vortex out of its place and toward the United States, Cohen said.\n\nIt's a theory still debated by climate scientists but growing in acceptance. Initially, Vavrus and Francis theorized it was due to melting Arctic sea ice leading to barometic pressure changes. Now several scientists say it's more complicated, yet still connected to climate change and the supercharged warming in the Arctic, with other factors like Siberian snow cover and other atmospheric waves also playing a role.\n\n\"The key takeaway for me right now is that Arctic Amplification is happening and has complex interactions within our climate system. Winter will always bring us cold weather, but like the warm season it may be changing ways that we understand and ways that we are still learning about,\" said University of Georgia meteorology professor Marshall Shepherd. \"Unlike the Vegas slogan, what happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic.\"\n\nThink of what's happening as an orchestra making one symphony, and \"what's driving all those orchestra instruments is a warming planet,\" Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini said.\n\nGensini and Cohen said this cold snap in the United States will fade in several days to be replaced by unusually warm weather, due to climate change. But another polar vortex looks like it's coming at the end of the month, though not as strong as this one, they said.\n\nDespite the U.S. cold, Earth's global average temperature keeps flirting with daily, weekly and monthly records, as it has for more than seven months. That's because the United States is only 2% of Earth's surface, scientists said.\n\n\"A place like Chicago or Denver or Lincoln, Omaha, Oklahoma City, Dallas, Houston, I mean we're all experiencing it,\" said Gensini, who said the temperature outside his window Tuesday was 6 below. \"We're one isolated pocket if you look globally.\""}
{"text": "# He warned authorities about the Maine gunman, but they downplayed his texts. Now he's speaking out\nBy **HOLLY RAMER**, **NICK PERRY**, and **DAVID SHARP**  \nJanuary 11, 2024. 5:37 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LEWISTON, Maine (AP)** - Sean Hodgson watched and worried as his best friend of nearly two decades unraveled. His former roommate and fellow U.S. Army reservist's anger and paranoia were mounting, he had access to guns, and he refused to get help. So Hodgson did the hardest thing of his life: He sent a text about Robert Card to their Army supervisor.\n\n\"I believe he's going to snap and do a mass shooting,\" he wrote on Sept. 15.\n\nSix weeks later, Card fatally shot 18 people at a bowling alley and a bar in Lewiston before killing himself. His body was found in a trailer after a two-day search and regionwide lockdown.\n\n\"I wasn't in his head. I don't know exactly what went on,\" Hodgson told The Associated Press last week in an exclusive interview, his first since the Oct. 25 shootings. \"But I do know I was right.\"\n\nThe series of warning signs about Card have been well documented. In May, relatives warned police that Card had grown paranoid, and they expressed concern about his access to guns. In July, Card was hospitalized in a psychiatric unit for two weeks after shoving a fellow reservist and locking himself in a motel room. In August, the Army barred him from handling weapons while on duty and declared him nondeployable.\n\nAnd in September, Hodgson raised the most glaring red flag, telling authorities to change the passcode to the gate at their Army Reserve training facility and arm themselves if Card showed up.\n\n\"Please,\" he wrote. \"I believe he's messed up in the head.\"\n\nBut authorities declined to confront Card - the clearest example of the missed opportunities to intervene and prevent the deadliest shooting in state history. That's hard to swallow for Hodgson, who's pushing back against an independent report for law enforcement that described him as \"over the top\" and \"alarmist.\"\n\n\"I did my job, and I went over and beyond it, and I literally spelled it out for them,\" said Hodgson, 43, referred to by only his last name in documents related to the case. \"I don't know how clear I could have gotten.\"\n\nHodgson's account, taken together with law enforcement documents, videos and other interviews, provides the most comprehensive picture to date of potential missteps leading up to the attack.\n\nIn replying to AP's questions about the investigation and Hodgson's warning, the Army Reserve said in a statement this week that no one should jump to conclusions until its own investigation and an independent probe by the Army inspector general are finalized.\n\n\"Any speculation at this point without having all the details could affect the outcome of the investigation. More details may become available once the investigation is complete,\" Lt. Col. Addie Leonhardt, Army Reserve spokesperson, said in the statement. Officials wouldn't comment further.\n\nSheriff Joel Merry - of Sagadahoc County, where Card lived - didn't respond to AP's questions about whether Hodgson's warning was taken seriously enough but suggested a need for public policy changes. He previously said his office has been \"fully transparent\" and is cooperating with an independent commission appointed by the governor.\n\nHodgson said he doesn't know where the failings occurred but believes more could have been done to help his friend and prevent tragedy.\n\n\"I understand he did a horrific thing. I don't agree with it. But I loved him,\" he said. \" I didn't want any of this for anybody.\"\n\nFor much of their friendship, Card was \"the sensible one,\" Hodgson said. They met in 2006 in the Army Reserve and became especially close when they both divorced around the same time.\n\nWhen Hodgson was evicted from his New Hampshire apartment in 2022, Card told him to move to Maine, and they lived together for about a month, he said. When Card was hospitalized in New York in July, Hodgson was the one who drove him back to Maine.\n\nBy then, Hodgson said, Card had begun venting to him about his belief that those around him were accusing him of being a pedophile. Hodgson believed some of Card's complaints were true - a case of mistaken identity stemming from the fact that another Robert Card is on the state's sex offender registry - and described an incident at the bowling alley when a father snatched his daughter away from Card after he offered the toddler a hello.\n\n\"I always believed him. I always stuck by him,\" Hodgson said. \"I am the closest one to Robert Card. Besides his mother, he pushed everybody away.\n\n\"I was the last one he pushed away.\"\n\nIn September, after a night out at the Oxford Casino, Card began \"flipping out,\" Hodgson said - pounding the steering wheel and almost crashing multiple times. After Hodgson begged him to pull over, he said, Card punched him in the face.\n\n\"We were having a good night, and he just snapped,\" he said.\n\nHodgson told Card to drop him off at a gas station near his house.\n\n\"I love you, and I'll always be here for you no matter what,\" he said he told his friend as he got out of the car.\n\nHodgson sent his text two days later, telling his training supervisor he feared what Card might do. He didn't speak to Card after that, he said, though they passed each other at work.\n\n\"It took me a lot to report somebody I love,\" he said. \"But when the hair starts standing up on the back of your neck, you have to listen.\"\n\nAfter his text, Hodgson said, military officials followed up, asking whether Card threatened specific people. He told them he hadn't. But they didn't ask for help in approaching Card, he said, even though they drove trucks for the same company and he knew his friend's schedule and route.\n\n\"I could've told them when he was at work, when he was at home, what hours he worked,\" he said.\n\nAuthorities briefly staked out the Army Reserve Center and visited Card's home. They declined to confront him, fearing that would \"throw a stick of dynamite on a pool of gas,\" according to video released last month by the Sagadahoc County Sheriff's Office.\n\nIn the videos, officials downplayed Hodgson's warning, suggesting he might have been drunk when he texted at 2:04 a.m. Speaking to police at the training center, Army Reserve Capt. Jeremy Reamer describes Hodgson as \"not the most credible of our soldiers\" and later tells Sagadahoc Sheriff Sgt. Aaron Skolfield his message should be taken \"with a grain of salt.\"\n\nHodgson, who was unaware of those comments until contacted by AP, acknowledged in a series of interviews that he struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol addiction but said he wasn't drinking that night and was awake because he works nights and was waiting for his boss to call.\n\nHodgson also acknowledges that he faces two criminal charges, one alleging he assaulted a woman he was dating in 2022 and another alleging that he violated his bail conditions by possessing alcohol last month. He's also in hot water for wrecking a military vehicle last summer, he said. But he said authorities should have taken him more seriously given his relationship with Card, his past training on threat detection and mitigation, and his previous work as a security officer at a nuclear plant.\n\n\"That was the most difficult thing I ever had to do, was report him to command, and I did that. And for them to discredit me?\" he said. \"It pisses me off because all they had to do is listen.\"\n\nIn a text message this week, Reamer declined to comment on questions from AP and referred them to Army Reserve public affairs officers.\n\nAccording to the independent review for the Sagadahoc County Sheriff's Office, officers didn't have sufficient grounds the day they staked out Card's house to force the issue and take him into protective custody after he refused to answer the door. That step is necessary to trigger Maine's \"yellow flag\" law. It allows a judge to temporarily remove someone's guns during a psychiatric health crisis.\n\nBut Stephanie Sherman, an attorney who's represented several families of survivors of the 2022 mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, said police had more than enough information to take to a local judge.\n\nThe videos show officers with a disturbingly casual approach to the threat Card posed, Sherman said. She also noted that Skolfield referred to the Cards as a \"big family in this area\" and said he didn't want to publicize over police radio that officers were visiting the home.\n\n\"It was sort of balancing the safety of the public versus this family's reputation,\" she said. \"And that should not be a factor.\"\n\nWatching the videos was gut-wrenching for Tammy Asselin, who became separated from her 10-year-old daughter during the chaos of the bowling alley shooting. She said it was the first time she knew for sure that steps could have been taken to prevent the massacre.\n\n\"Listening to that interaction between the military and the sheriff, it hurt me to hear the giggle and the laughter in their voice,\" Asselin said, a tear running down her cheek. \"Because I don't think they would be giggling and laughing had they been the ones in my shoes that day, not knowing where their daughter was.\"\n\nFor weeks after sending the text about Card to their supervisor, Hodgson said he prayed that it wouldn't come true. But as soon as he heard about the shooting, he called his sergeant.\n\n\"I don't believe in coincidences,\" he said he told him. \"I know it's Robert Card.\"\n\nHodgson was driving to Massachusetts for work that day. He fielded phone calls to and from multiple law enforcement agencies that didn't seem to be communicating with one another, he said.\n\nHe said he told authorities right away that Card likely was headed to the Maine Recycling Corp.\n\nCard had worked there, and it wasn't far from the boat launch where his car was found after the shootings. His body would eventually be found there, after initial unsuccessful searches that critics said were too cautious.\n\nMore than two months later, Hodgson said, he hates that Card \"took the easy way out\" and isn't around to answer questions or face the consequences of what he did. It's not the Robert Card he knew and loved for 17 years, he said, and he struggles with that every day.\n\nHodgson said he wants people to know he did everything he could to save lives.\n\n\"I don't know how to express to people how much I loved him, how much I cared about him,\" he said. \"And how much I hate what he did.\""}
{"text": "# Key moments in the arguments over Donald Trump's immunity claims in his election interference case\nBy **ERIC TUCKER** and **ALANNA DURKIN RICHER**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 10:27 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Appeals court judges signaled Tuesday that they will likely reject Donald Trump's claims that he is immune from prosecution in his election interference case. The outcome seemed clear during arguments that touched on a range of political and legal considerations.\n\nThe Republican presidential primary front-runner made his first trip in months to Washington's federal courthouse, where his lawyers sought to convince an appeals court to dismiss the case charging him with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The defense's argument was met with outright skepticism by the three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.\n\nThe judges did not say when they might rule, but the timing of their decision is crucial with a March 4 trial date looming. Trump's lawyers, who are hoping to delay the case beyond the November presidential election, are certain to go to the U.S. Supreme Court if the D.C. court sides with special counsel Jack Smith.\n\nA look at some of the key moments from Tuesday's arguments:\n\n## THE JURISDICTION DEBATE\nAt the very outset of the arguments - before Trump's lawyer even began making his case for immunity - Judge J. Michelle Childs peppered him with questions about whether it's proper for the court to consider Trump's appeal at this time.\n\nMost issues in criminal cases can't be appealed until after a trial verdict, though there are certain circumstances when a defendant can appeal immediately. Smith's team has not challenged the appeals court's ability to hear the immunity issue ahead of trial. But a watchdog group called American Oversight filed a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that the appeals court should dismiss Trump's challenge because Supreme Court precedent shows that it lacks jurisdiction to consider the issue now. If the appeals court agrees that it lacks jurisdiction, it would send the case back to the trial court before even deciding the immunity issue.\n\nTrump's attorney, D. John Sauer, told the judges that presidential immunity is clearly an issue meant to be resolved before trial. He argued that legal precedent supports the idea that the appeals court is right to consider the immunity claim at this time.\n\n## DRONE STRIKES AND SEAL TEAM SIX\nThe conduct being argued before the court concerned Trump's efforts to undo the election results, but that didn't stop the judges and lawyers from debating how the concept of presidential immunity could be applied in a range of hypothetical scenarios.\n\nIn the telling of Sauer, Trump's attorney, allowing the prosecution of Trump would also mean that a president could be charged with giving false information to Congress to induce the nation into war or for authorizing drone strikes on a U.S. citizen abroad.\n\nWhen Judge Florence Pan asked Sauer if a president who ordered SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival could be charged, the attorney appeared to equivocate, saying the president would first have to have been impeached and convicted by the Senate in order to be prosecuted. That's in keeping with the defense argument that immunity applies to former presidents who, like Trump, have been impeached but acquitted.\n\nLater, James Pearce, a member of Smith's team, expressed exasperation at that argument, saying, \"What kind of world are we living in?\" if a president could escape accountability for such an action.\n\n\"I think that's an extraordinarily frightening future,\" he said.\n\n## TRUMP'S IMPEACHMENT ACQUITTAL\nPart of Trump's argument is that the Constitution prevents his prosecution because he was acquitted by the U.S Senate of inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack in his historic impeachment trial. The defense argues that the Constitution's impeachment judgment clause suggests that a president can be criminally charged only if he is impeached and convicted of similar conduct.\n\nJudge Pan, however, highlighted comments made by the lawyer who represented Trump during his impeachment trial as he urged senators to acquit. During that trial, attorney David Schoen said there is a judicial and investigative process in this country \"to which no former office holder is immune,\" telling senators: \"That's the process that should be running its course.\"\n\nPan repeatedly pressed Sauer over whether he believes that Trump could be prosecuted in this case had he been convicted by the Senate. Sauer said that a prosecution could potentially be brought in that situation, though he said he was not conceding that this particular case would be appropriate, telling the judge there are a \"tons of other problems\" with it.\n\nPearce, the prosecutor on Smith's team, said Trump's impeachment argument is wrong for a host of reasons, including practical ones.\n\n\"It would mean that if a former president engages in assassination, selling pardons, these kinds of things, and then isn't impeached and convicted, there is no accountability for that individual. And that is frightening,\" he told the judges.\n\n## 'CHIEF POLITICAL OPPONENT'\nThe arguments mostly focused on the Constitution and the intricacies of case law and legal immunity.\n\nBut the politics of the case were never far from the surface, especially with Trump taking a break from the campaign trail so that he could attend in person. His campaign sought ahead of time to fundraise off the appearance, writing in an email solicitation that Trump would be heading \"into the belly of the beast.\"\n\nAnd speaking later to reporters, he insisted that his prosecution posed a \"real threat to democracy.\"\n\nThere is no indication that President Joe Biden has had any influence on the case, and in fact, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith in 2022 as a way to try to insulate the Justice Department from claims of political bias.\n\nBut at times during Tuesday's arguments, Trump's lawyer echoed the words of his own client.\n\n\"We are in a situation where we have the prosecution of the chief political opponent who's winning in every poll ... and it's being prosecuted by the administration that he's seeking to replace,\" Sauer said.\n\nHe added: \"That is the frightening future. That is tailor-made to launch cycles of recrimination elimination that will shape our republic for the future.\""}
{"text": "# With Trump present in court, judges express skepticism of claims that he's immune from prosecution\nBy **ERIC TUCKER**, **ALANNA DURKIN RICHER**, and **LINDSAY WHITEHURST**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 7:48 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - With Donald Trump listening intently in the courtroom, federal appeals court judges in Washington expressed deep skepticism Tuesday that the former president was immune from prosecution on charges that he plotted to overturn the results of the 2020 election.\n\nThe panel of three judges, two of whom were appointed by President Joe Biden, also questioned whether they had jurisdiction to consider the appeal at this point in the case, raising the prospect that Trump's appeal could be dispensed with on more procedural grounds.\n\nDuring lengthy arguments, the judges repeatedly pressed Trump's lawyer to defend claims that Trump was shielded from criminal charges for acts that he says fell within his official duties as president. That argument was rejected last month by the lower-court judge overseeing the case against Trump, and the appeals judges suggested through their questions that they, too, were dubious that the Founding Fathers envisioned absolute immunity for presidents after they leave office.\n\n\"I think it's paradoxical to say that his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed allows him to violate criminal law,\" said Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, an appointee of former President George H.W. Bush.\n\nThe outcome could carry enormous ramifications both for the landmark criminal case against Trump and for the broader, and legally untested, question of whether an ex-president can be prosecuted for actions taken in the White House. It will also likely set the stage for further appeals before the U.S. Supreme Court, which last month declined a request to weigh in but could still get involved later.\n\nA swift decision is crucial for special counsel Jack Smith and his team, who are eager to get the case - now paused pending the appeal - to trial before the November election. But Trump's lawyers, in addition to seeking to get the case dismissed, are hoping to benefit from a protracted appeals process that could delay the trial well past its scheduled March 4 start date, including until potentially after the election.\n\nUnderscoring the importance to both sides, Trump, the 2024 Republican presidential primary front-runner, attended Tuesday's arguments even though the Iowa caucuses are just one week away and despite the fact that there's no requirement that defendants appear in person for such proceedings. Making his first court appearance in Washington since his arraignment in August, Trump sat at the defense table, watching closely and occasionally taking notes and speaking with his lawyers.\n\nHis appearance and his comments afterward underscored his broader effort to portray himself as the victim of a justice system he claims is politicized. Though there's no evidence Biden has had any influence on the case, Trump's argument could resonate with Republican voters in Iowa as they prepare to launch the presidential nomination process.\n\nAfter the hearing, Trump spoke to reporters at The Waldorf-Astoria hotel, which used to be the Trump International Hotel, calling Tuesday \"a very momentous day.\" He insisted he did nothing wrong and claimed he was being prosecuted for political reasons.\n\n\"A president has to have immunity,\" he said.\n\nFormer presidents enjoy broad immunity from lawsuits for actions taken as part of their official White House duties. But because no former president before Trump has ever been indicted, courts have never before addressed whether that protection extends to criminal prosecution.\n\nTrump's lawyers insist that it does, arguing that courts have no authority to scrutinize a president's official acts and that the prosecution of their client represents a dramatic departure from more than two centuries of American history that would open the door to future politically motivated cases.\n\n\"To authorize the prosecution of a president for official acts would open a Pandora's box from which this nation may never recover,\" said D. John Sauer, a lawyer for Trump, asserting that, under the government's theory, presidents could be prosecuted for giving Congress \"false information\" to enter war or for authorizing drone strikes targeting U.S. citizens abroad.\n\nHe later added, \"If a president has to look over his shoulder or her shoulder every time he or she has to make a controversial decision and wonder if 'after I leave office, am I going to jail for this when my political opponents take power?' that inevitably dampens the ability of the president.\"\n\nBut the judges were skeptical about those arguments. Judges Henderson and Florence Pan noted the lawyer who represented Trump during his 2021 impeachment trial suggested that he could later face criminal prosecution, telling senators at the time: \"We have a judicial process in this country. We have an investigative process in this country to which no former office holder is immune.\"\n\n\"It seems that many senators relied on that in voting to acquit\" Trump, Pan told Sauer.\n\nJudge J. Michelle Childs also questioned why former President Richard Nixon would need to be granted a pardon in 1974 after the Watergate scandal if former presidents enjoy immunity from prosecution. Sauer replied that in Nixon's case, the conduct did not involve the same kind of \"official acts\" Trump's lawyers argue form the basis of his indictment.\n\nAside from the merits of the immunity claim, the judges jumped right into questioning Trump's lawyer over whether the court has jurisdiction to hear the appeal at this time. Sauer said presidential immunity is clearly a claim that is meant to be reviewed before trial. Smith's team also said that it wants the court to decide the appeal now.\n\nSmith's team maintains that presidents are not entitled to absolute immunity and that, in any event, the acts Trump is alleged in the indictment to have taken - including scheming to enlist fake electors in battleground states won by Biden and pressing his vice president, Mike Pence, to reject the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021 - fall outside a president's official job duties.\n\n\"The president has a unique constitutional role but he is not above the law. Separation of powers principles, constitutional text, history, precedent and immunity doctrines all point to the conclusion that a former president enjoys no immunity from prosecution,\" prosecutor James Pearce said, adding that a case in which a former president is alleged to have sought to overturn an election \"is not the place to recognize some novel form of immunity.\"\n\nWhen Judge Henderson asked how the court could write its opinion in a way that wouldn't open the \"floodgates\" of investigations against ex-presidents, Pearce said he did not anticipate \"a sea change of vindictive tit-for-tat prosecutions in the future.\" He called the allegations against Trump fundamentally unprecedented.\n\n\"Never before has there been allegations that a sitting president has, with private individuals and using the levers of power, sought to fundamentally subvert the democratic republic and the electoral system,\" he said. \"And frankly, if that kind of fact pattern arises again, I think it would be awfully scary if there weren't some sort of mechanism by which to reach that criminally.\"\n\nIt's not clear how quickly the panel from the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals from the D.C. Circuit will rule, though it has signaled that it intends to work quickly.\n\nU.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected the immunity arguments, ruling last month that the office of the presidency does not confer a \"'get-out-of-jail-free'\" pass. Trump's lawyers appealed that decision, but Smith's team, determined to keep the case on schedule, sought to leapfrog the appeals court by asking the Supreme Court to fast-track the immunity question. The justices declined to get involved.\n\nThe appeal is vital to a Trump strategy of trying to postpone the case until after the November election, when a victory could empower him to order the Justice Department to abandon the prosecution or even to seek a pardon for himself. He faces three other criminal cases, in state and federal court, though the Washington case is scheduled for trial first."}
{"text": "# Armed men storm an Ecuador TV studio during a live broadcast as attacks in the country escalate\nBy **GONZALO SOLANO** and **ALLEN PANCHANA**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 10:58 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador (AP)** - Masked men broke onto the set of a public television channel in Ecuador waving guns and explosives during a live broadcast Tuesday, and the president issued a decree declaring that the violence-plagued country had entered an \"internal armed conflict.\"\n\nThe men armed with pistols and what looked like sticks of dynamite entered the set of the TC Television network in the port city of Guayaquil during a news program that was airing live in thousands of homes across the nation and shouted that they had bombs. Noises similar to gunshots could be heard.\n\nNo one was killed in the attack, and authorities later said that all the masked intruders had been arrested, 13 in all, and would be charged with terrorism.\n\nAuthorities have not said who was behind the television station occupation, or a series of other attacks that have shaken the South American country recently, but they follow the apparent escapes from prison of two leaders of Ecuador's most powerful drug gangs.\n\nAlina Manrique, the head of news for TC Television, said she was in the control room at TC Television, across from the studio, when the masked men burst into the building. One of them pointed a gun at her head and told her to get on the floor, Manrique said.\n\nThe incident was aired live, although the station's signal was cut off after about 15 minutes. Manrique said some of the assailants ran from the studio and tried to hide when they realized they were surrounded by police.\n\n\"I am still in shock\" Manrique told The Associated Press in a phone interview. \"Everything has collapsed .... All I know is that its time to leave this country and go very far away.\"\n\nEcuador has been rocked by a series of attacks, including the abductions of several police officers, in the wake of a notorious gang leader's apparent weekend escape from prison. President Daniel Noboa on Monday declared a national state of emergency, a measure that lets authorities suspend people's rights and mobilize the military in places like prisons.\n\nShortly after the gunmen stormed the TV station, Noboa issued another decree designating 20 drug trafficking gangs operating in the country as terrorist groups and authorizing Ecuador's military to \"neutralize\" them within the bounds of international humanitarian law. It also said the country had entered an internal armed conflict.\n\nEcuador's attorney general's office said the 13 people arrested will be charged with terrorism. It tweeted that it will present the charges in coming hours. Ecuadorian law establishes a penalty of up to 13 years in prison for anyone convicted of terrorism.\n\nThe government has not said how many attacks have taken place since authorities announced that Los Choneros gang leader Adolfo Macías, alias \"Fito,\" was discovered missing from his cell in a low security prison Sunday. He was scheduled to be transferred to a maximum security facility that day.\n\nOn Tuesday, Ecuadorean officials announced that another gang leader, Fabricio Colón Pico of the Los Lobos group, had escaped from a prison in the town of Riobamba. Colón Pico was captured on Friday as part of a kidnapping investigation and has also been accused of trying to murder one of the nation's lead prosecutors.\n\nOther attacks have included an explosion near the house of the president of the National Justice Court and the Monday night kidnappings of four police officers. Police said one officer was abducted in the capital, Quito, and three in Quevedo city.\n\nWill Freeman, a political analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that while gangs in Ecuador have previously assassinated a presidential candidate and set off car bombs in front of government buildings, Tuesday's events marked a new peak in violence in the country.\n\n\"This is a turning point,\" Freeman said. \"Depending on how the government responds it will set the precedent for these kinds of incidents to continue, or it will use this as a catalyst and make some very necessary structural reforms so that the state can start to win its war against crime.\"\n\nLocated on South America's Pacific coast between Peru and Colombia, the world's largest cocaine producers, Ecuador has become a key transit point for the drug in recent years. Much of the violence suffered by the country comes as drug gangs fight each other and the government for control of ports and smuggling routes.\n\nFreeman said that Ecuador's government will have to find ways to control prisons, from where gang leaders continue to lead their operations and might have to consider extraditing some of the top criminal leaders to the United States. The nation of 20 million people might also have to make judicial reforms to give judges greater safety and enable them to anonymously rule over cases involving the drug gangs.\n\n\"If these guys can storm a TV station or kill a presidential candidate you as a judge will not go up against them unless you really have strong assurances of your safety,\" Freeman said.\n\nLos Choneros is one of the Ecuadorian gangs that authorities consider responsible for a spike in violence, much of tied to drug trafficking, that reached a new level last year with the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio. The gang has links with Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, according to authorities.\n\nThe whereabouts of Macías are unknown. Prosecutors opened an investigation and charged two guards in connection with his alleged escape, but neither the police, the corrections system, nor the federal government confirmed whether the prisoner fled the facility or might be hiding in it.\n\nIn February 2013, he escaped from a maximum security facility but was recaptured weeks later.\n\nNoboa said in a message on Instagram that he wouldn't stop until he \"brings back peace to all Ecuadorians,\" and that his government had decided to confront crime. The wave of attacks began a few hours after Noboa's announcement.\n\nStates of emergency were widely used by Noboa's predecessor, Guillermo Lasso, as a way to confront the wave of violence that has affected the country.\n\nMacías, who was convicted of drug trafficking, murder and organized crime, was serving a 36-year sentence in La Regional prison in the port of Guayaquil.\n\nLos Choneros and other similar groups linked to Mexican and Colombian cartels are fighting over drug trafficking routes and control of territory, including from within detention facilities, where more than 450 inmates have died since 2021, according to authorities."}
{"text": "# Sprawling storms wallop US with tornado reports, damage and heavy snow, closing roads and schools\nBy **SCOTT McFETRIDGE** and **KATHY McCORMACK**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 9:41 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)** - A sprawling storm hit the U.S. South, with tornado warnings and high winds that blew roofs off homes, flipped over campers and tossed about furniture in Florida on Tuesday, while another storm buried cities across the Midwest in more than a half a foot of snow, stranding people on highways as it headed to the Northeast.\n\nThe weather has already affected campaigning for Iowa's Jan. 15 precinct caucuses, where the snow is expected to be followed by frigid temperatures that could drift below zero degrees (minus 18 Celsius). It forced former President Donald Trump's campaign to cancel multiple appearances by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders and her father, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who had been scheduled to court Iowa voters on Trump's behalf Monday.\n\nWhite House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at Tuesday's briefing that winter storms continue to be a threat across the country.\n\n\"We are closely monitoring the weather, and we encourage all Americans to do the same,\" she said.\n\n## THE SOUTH IS HIT WITH DEADLY STORMS AND TORNADO WARNINGS\nAt least three deaths were attributed to the storm pummeling the South, where 55 mph (88 kph) winds and hail moved through the Florida Panhandle and into parts of Alabama and Georgia by sunrise Tuesday, along with several reports of radar-confirmed tornadoes, the National Weather Service said. A wind gust of 106 mph (171 kph) was recorded before dawn near the coast in Walton County, Florida.\n\nNear Cottonwood, Alabama, a small city near the Georgia and Florida borders, 81-year-old Charlotte Paschal was killed when her mobile home was tossed from its foundation, the Houston County coroner said. A suspected tornado had touched down in the area.\n\nPolice in Clayton County, south of Atlanta, say a man died during heavy rain when a tree fell on his car on a state highway in Jonesboro.\n\nStorm-related injuries were reported in Florida, but no deaths. A section of Panama City Beach, Florida, showed parts of roofs blown away, furniture, fences and debris strewn about, and a house that appeared tilted on its side, leaning on another home. About 10 miles (16 kilometers) away in Panama City, police early Tuesday asked residents to stay indoors and off the roads \"unless absolutely necessary.\" Both cities are in Bay County, where multiple tornadoes were reported, Sheriff Tommy Ford said in a brief Facebook Live post.\n\nThe Walton County sheriff's department in the Florida Panhandle posted photos of power lines draped across a road, damage to a gas station and large pieces of building materials littering the area. About 70 miles (112 kilometers) northeast, in Jackson County, Florida, photos showing damage to a campground and RV park in Marianna were posted.\n\nThe National Weather Service office in Tallahassee is planning to send out three tornado survey teams on Wednesday to examine suspected tornado damage in Walton, Bay and Jackson counties in Florida, and two more on Thursday to look at Houston County, Alabama, and Calhoun County, Georgia.\n\nFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who gave his State of the State address Tuesday as tornado warnings were active outside the Capitol, issued an executive order to include 49 counties in North Florida under a state of emergency.\n\nHeavy rain across Georgia stopped air traffic at Atlanta's busy airport for a time Tuesday morning and caused flash flooding, blocking some lanes on freeways around Atlanta during the morning commute. More than 80 public school systems across Georgia called off classes entirely while others taught students online or delayed the start of in-person classes.\n\nRain and high winds extended into the nation's capital Tuesday night, forcing Vice President Kamala Harris' aircraft to divert from Joint Base Andrews to Dulles International Airport near Washington when it encountered wind shear - a sudden shift in wind direction or speed - as Harris returned from a trip to Georgia.\n\nMore than 200,000 customers were without power in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, while nearly 150,000 people in North Carolina lacked electricity, according to the PowerOutage.us website.\n\nIn North Carolina, one person has died and two others were in critical condition after a suspected tornado struck a mobile home park in the town of Claremont, north of Charlotte, said Amy McCauley, a spokesperson for Catawba County. And in Rocky Mount, downed power lines shut down both directions of I-95, one of the nation's busiest highways, the North Carolina's Department of Transportation said in a statement\n\nNorth Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper declared a state of emergency before the storm arrived. Some schools canceled classes or shut down early.\n\nA possible tornado knocked down several old brick storefronts in downtown Bamberg, South Carolina, blocking the main intersection through the city about 60 miles (96 kilometers) south of Columbia. Thousands of bricks blocked U.S. 301, the main road through that part of the state, and about 40 homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed, said Democratic Rep. Justin Bamberg, who represents the area.\n\n## UP TO A FOOT OF SNOW POSSIBLE FOR LARGE SWATH OF THE MIDWEST\nIn the Midwest, where a snowstorm started Monday, up to 12 inches (30 centimeters) of snow could blanket a broad area stretching from southeastern Colorado all the way to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. That includes western Kansas, eastern Nebraska, large parts of Iowa, northern Missouri and northwestern Illinois, said Bob Oravec, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in College Park, Maryland.\n\nIn Des Moines, Iowa, Laura Burianov had nearly finished shoveling her driveway Tuesday morning. But with snow still falling, she acknowledged she likely would have to shovel again later in the day.\n\n\"It's going to get harder. I shoveled last night and you can't really tell, but I can pretend that three less inches makes a difference,\" she said.\n\nThe storm dumped around 8 to 12 inches (20 to 30 centimeters) of snow across Kansas, eastern Nebraska and South Dakota, western Iowa, and southwestern Minnesota on Monday. In North Sioux City, South Dakota, the National Weather Service reported 15 inches (38 centimeters) of snow. Lower amounts fell over central Minnesota, Wisconsin and northern Illinois.\n\nMadison, Wisconsin, was under a winter storm warning until early Wednesday, with as much as 9 inches (23 centimeters) of snow and 40 mph (64 kph) winds on tap.\n\nPoor road conditions contributed to a fatal crash early Tuesday in southeastern Wisconsin, Jefferson County Sheriff Paul Milbrath said in a news release. An SUV driver was killed following a head-on collision with a semitrailer on state Highway 18 around 5:40 a.m. The driver of the semitrailer was not hurt. Sheriff's Capt. Travis Maze said in a telephone interview that layers of slush and snow covered the center and fog lines on the highway.\n\nIn western Michigan, a 35-year-old woman died Tuesday after she lost control of her minivan on a slushy highway and it collided with an SUV, the Lake County Sheriff's Office said. The ambulance taking her to a Grand Rapids hospital, where she was pronounced dead, was struck by another vehicle en route there, and a second ambulance was needed to finish the transport to the hospital.\n\nNorthwestern Illinois was also under a winter storm warning with forecasts calling for 7 to 12 inches (18 to 30 centimeters) of snow by early Wednesday. The Chicago area as well as Gary, Indiana, were under winter storm advisories, with forecasts calling for up to 6 inches (15 centimeters) of snow and wind gusts of up to 30 mph (48 kph).\n\nIt was the first major winter storm of the season for the Kansas City metro area in Kansas and Missouri, where the National Weather Service predicted 6 inches (15 centimeters) of snow by the time the storm moved on later Tuesday.\n\nWhiteout conditions in central Nebraska closed a long stretch of Interstate 80, while Kansas closed Interstate 70 from the central city of Russell all the way west to the Colorado border. Several vehicles slid off I-70 in the northeastern part of the state, authorities said.\n\n## WINTER WEATHER EXPECTED TO MOVE INTO NORTHEAST TUESDAY NIGHT\nFrom the Midwest, the storm was expected to head east, bringing a combination of snow, rain and strong winds to the Northeast by Tuesday night, as well as concerns about flooding in areas such as New England, parts of which got more than a foot of snow Sunday.\n\nNew Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy already declared a state of emergency as of 5 p.m. Tuesday, ahead of what's expected to be heavy rain and wind that will exacerbate the effects of bad weather conditions since December. He encouraged people Monday not to underestimate the storm.\n\nIn New York City, officials began evacuating nearly 2,000 migrants who had been housed at a sprawling white tent complex at a former airport located in a remote corner of Brooklyn. An aide to New York City Mayor Eric Adams pointed to predicted wind speeds of more than 70 mph (112 kph) Tuesday night.\n\nIn western New York, an empty tractor trailer blew over on the state Thruway on Tuesday morning, temporarily blocking all westbound traffic, state police said. The state banned empty trucks and trailers on numerous major roadways.\n\nIn Maine, Gov. Janet Mills has delayed the opening of all state offices until noon Wednesday due to the storm.\n\nMassachusetts electricity provider National Grid said they were prepared for possible hazardous wind gusts and heavy rains and have additional crews and personnel to respond to any power outages.\n\n## COLD FRONT IN SOUTHWEST BRINGS FREEZING TEMPERATURES AND SNOW\nIn parts of Arizona, a cold front brought below-freezing temperatures early Tuesday, with the National Weather Service reporting a minus-17 reading at the Snow Bowl in northern Arizona. In northeastern New Mexico, the state Department of Transportation said snowplows spent hours Monday afternoon clearing U.S. Highway 56 to free more than 25 stranded vehicles."}
{"text": "# Austin kept prostate cancer, surgery complications a secret from everyone, even Biden\nBy **LOLITA C. BALDOR** and **TARA COPP**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 6:56 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has prostate cancer, and his recent secretive hospitalization was for surgery and later to treat a urinary tract infection related to that operation, his doctors said Tuesday.\n\nThe cancer revelation answers the main question about Austin's hospitalization, which has now lasted eight days. But it may only add to questions of accountability, since President Joe Biden only learned about the cancer diagnosis on Tuesday, even though it was made about a month ago.\n\n\"Nobody at the White House knew that Secretary Austin had prostate cancer until this morning,\" said John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman. \"And the president was informed immediately after.\"\n\nThe 70-year-old Austin was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Dec. 22 and underwent surgery to treat the cancer. He developed the infection a week later. Biden and other senior administration officials were not told for days about his hospitalization or his cancer.\n\nAccording to the doctors, the cancer was detected when Austin had a regular screening in early December. They said he \"underwent a minimally invasive surgical procedure\" and went home the next day. But on Jan. 1 he reported nausea and severe abdominal, hip and leg pain due to the infection.\n\nThey said his prostate cancer was detected early, and his prognosis is excellent.\n\nThe cancer revelation comes after days of persistent questions about Austin's hospitalization and the delays in notifying key leaders. And it raises more questions about the transparency and truthfulness of the Defense Department, which for the past four days said he was initially at Walter Reed for an \"elective medical procedure,\" and not prostate surgery.\n\nAsked about that choice of wording, Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, Pentagon press secretary, said in a briefing on Tuesday that it was developed in consultation with Austin's doctors.\n\nWhen pressed on the delays in public notification, Ryder said, \"Despite the frequency of prostate cancer, discussions about screening, treatment and support are often deeply personal and private ones.\" It was still not clear Tuesday how this will affect Austin's job, travel or other public engagements going forward. Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks is expected to take on some of his day-to-day duties as he recovers.\n\nThe lack of transparency about Austin's hospitalization -- including the failure to tell Biden and other top officials about it or the reason for it for days - has triggered sharp criticism.\n\nAustin spoke with Biden on Saturday, the same day he issued a public statement saying he recognized he could have done a better job insuring the public was informed about his hospitalization, and said \"I commit to doing better.\" He did not, however, tell the president in that phone call that he had cancer.\n\nSeveral Republican lawmakers even said Austin should be ousted. Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, launched a formal inquiry into the situation. And, earlier Tuesday, the White House chief of staff ordered Cabinet members to notify his office if they ever can't perform their duties.\n\nDr. John Maddox, trauma medical director, and Dr. Gregory Chesnut, director of the Center for Prostate Disease at Walter Reed, provided the first details of Austin's prognosis in a statement put out by the Pentagon. They said he was under anesthesia during the initial surgery, and when he went to intensive care on Jan. 2 the infection had triggered an intestinal backup and his stomach had to be drained with a tube in his nose.\n\nMedical experts said it's likely Austin had urine leak into his abdomen, a rare complication of prostate surgery, and that led to a bowel problem.\n\n\"All of this is temporary and reverses relatively quickly,\" said Dr. Benjamin Davies, a professor of urology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.\n\n\"We anticipate a full recovery, although this can be a slow process,\" Maddox said. They noted that prostate cancer is the most common cancer among American men, and it affects 1 in every 8 men - and 1 in every 6 African American men - during their lifetime.\n\nThe doctors said Austin underwent a surgical procedure called a prostatectomy. That is a common procedure to remove all or part of the prostate gland and is often used to treat prostate cancer, but is not the only option. Some men and their doctors choose radiation treatment or actively monitoring the disease, which involves watching it closely but no immediate treatment.\n\nProstate surgery can be done with small incisions and the aid of a tiny camera. It's not minor surgery, experts said, but \"it's not as big a deal as it once was,\" said Dr. David Penson, who chairs Vanderbilt University's urology department. \"It's not all that different than, say, having your gallbladder removed with a laparoscope.\"\n\nMeanwhile, the Biden administration, reeling from learning of Austin's surprise, is mounting a policy review. And the Pentagon has also begun its own review.\n\nChief of staff Jeff Zients sent a memo to Cabinet secretaries directing them to send to the White House by Friday any existing procedures for delegating authority in the event of incapacitation or loss of communication.\n\nBiden and other top officials weren't informed for days that Austin had been hospitalized and had turned over power to his deputy. A Pentagon spokesman blamed the lapse on a key staffer being out sick with the flu.\n\n\"Agencies should ensure that delegations are issued when a Cabinet Member is traveling to areas with limited or no access to communication, undergoing hospitalization or a medical procedure requiring general anesthesia, or otherwise in a circumstance when he or she may be unreachable,\" Zients said in the memo. He also directed agencies to document when any such transfer of authority occurs and that the person serving in the acting role promptly establish contact with relevant White House staff.\n\nA copy of the memo was obtained by The Associated Press.\n\nDuring Austin's two hospitalizations, he transferred some of his authorities to Hicks, but she was not told why. The White House was not informed Austin was in the hospital until Jan. 4, and the public and Congress didn't learn of it until a day later.\n\nThe Pentagon issued a memo Monday on its internal review, and broadened the circle of leaders who would be informed of any delegation of authorities by the defense secretary to ensure that, in the future, \"proper and timely notification has been made to the President and White House and, as appropriate, the United States Congress and the American public.\"\n\nGoing forward, any time authority is transferred, a wider swath of officials will also be notified, to include the Pentagon's general counsel, the chair and vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the combatant commanders, service secretaries, the service chiefs of staff, the White House Situation Room, and the senior staff of the secretary and deputy secretary of defense."}
{"text": "# DeSantis and Haley go head to head: How to watch the fifth Republican presidential debate\nBy **MEG KINNARD**  \nJanuary 10, 2024. 5:55 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)** - The fifth Republican presidential debate of the 2024 election season will also be its first head-to-head matchup.\n\nFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley are the only candidates taking part in Wednesday night's debate in Iowa. President Donald Trump, widely considered the GOP field's front-runner, will again be skipping the event.\n\nOther previous debate participants, including conservative entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, didn't make the cut. Hours before the debate was set to begin, Christie dropped out of the race.\n\nHere's how to watch the debate:\n\n## What time is the Republican debate?\nThe debate will start at 9 p.m. EST Wednesday. It's being moderated by CNN's Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.\n\n## What channel is the Republican debate on?\nCNN is carrying the debate live on its broadcast network, as well as on CNN International, CNN en Español and CNN Max. It's the first debate of the 2024 election cycle that CNN is hosting.\n\n## Where is the Republican debate?\nThe setting for the fifth GOP debate is Des Moines' Drake University, which has played host to presidential debates in each of the four-year cycles since 2007.\n\nThe debate comes just five days before the Iowa caucuses kick off the 2024 voting calendar.\n\n## Which candidates will be on stage?\nThree candidates - Trump, DeSantis and Haley - qualified for the debate stage, but only DeSantis and Haley have committed to attend.\n\nInstead of joining his rivals, Trump is participating in a town hall on Fox News, airing at the same time and taking place about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) from the debate site.\n\nHaley and DeSantis were both scheduled to take part in their own Fox News town halls earlier this week in Des Moines. The rivalry between the two has only increased as they vie to be the leading GOP alternative to Trump.\n\nDeSantis has said he expects to win Iowa despite trailing far behind Trump in polls. He has portrayed Haley, a former South Carolina governor who was Trump's U.N. ambassador, as a puppet of wealthy donors and someone who has flip-flopped on key issues.\n\nHaley, who hopes to edge out the better-organized DeSantis in Iowa, has accused him of misrepresenting her record, especially on taxes, and of falsely portraying himself as tough on China.\n\nTo qualify for CNN's Iowa debate, candidates needed to register at least 10% support in three separate polls, either nationally or in Iowa.\n\nRamaswamy, who qualified for other debates but not this one, said he would be participating in a podcast with Tim Pool instead.\n\n## What's up next?\nThere are already other debates on the books in the next state to cast GOP votes: New Hampshire, on Jan. 23.\n\nABC has announced plans for a debate on Jan. 18 at Saint Anselm College. CNN also intends to hold another debate on Jan. 21 at New England College.\n\nCandidates who finish in one of the top three spots in the Iowa caucuses will be invited to participate in CNN's New Hampshire debate, as well as those who meet the network's polling qualification, which includes a 10% polling threshold in New Hampshire."}
{"text": "# A US citizen has been arrested in Moscow on drug charges\nJanuary 9, 2024. 12:00 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MOSCOW (AP)** - A U.S. citizen has been arrested on drug charges in Russia, officials said Tuesday, a move that comes amid soaring Russia-U.S. tensions over Ukraine.\n\nThe arrest of Robert Woodland Romanov was reported by the press service of the Moscow courts. It said the Ostankino District Court ruled on Saturday to keep him in custody for two months on charges of preparing to get involved in illegal drug trafficking pending an official investigation. It didn't offer any details of the accusations.\n\nThe U.S. State Department said it was aware of reports of the recent detention of a U.S. citizen and noted that it \"has no greater priority than the safety and security of U.S. citizens overseas,\" but refrained from further comment, citing privacy considerations. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow issued a similar statement.\n\nRussian media noted that the name of the accused matches that of a U.S. citizen interviewed by the popular daily Komsomolskaya Pravda in 2020.\n\nIn the interview, the man said that he was born in the Perm region in the Ural Mountains in 1991 and adopted by an American couple when he was two. He said that he traveled to Russia to find his Russian mother and eventually met her in a TV show in Moscow.\n\nThe man told Komsomolskaya Pravda that he liked living in Russia and decided to move there. The newspaper reported that he settled in the town of Dolgoprudny just outside Moscow and was working as an English teacher at a local school.\n\nThe news about the arrest come as Washington has sought to win the release of jailed Americans Paul Whelan and Evan Gershkovich. The State Department said last month that it had put multiple offers on the table, but they had been rejected by the Russian government.\n\nGershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter, was detained in March while on a reporting trip to the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, about 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) east of Moscow. He has remained behind bars ever since on espionage accusations that he and the Journal have denied. The U.S. government has declared him to be wrongfully detained.\n\nWhelan, a corporate security executive from Michigan, has been jailed in Russia since his December 2018 arrest on espionage-related charges that both he and the U.S. government dispute. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison.\n\nAnalysts have pointed out that Moscow could be using jailed Americans as bargaining chips amid U.S.-Russian tensions that soared when Russia sent troops into Ukraine. At least two U.S. citizens arrested in Russia in recent years - including WNBA star Brittney Griner - have been exchanged for Russians jailed in the U.S."}
{"text": "# Moon landing attempt by US company appears doomed after 'critical' fuel leak\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nJanuary 8, 2024. 10:15 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - The first U.S. moon landing attempt in more than 50 years appeared to be doomed after a private company's spacecraft developed a \"critical\" fuel leak just hours after Monday's launch.\n\nPittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology managed to orient its lander toward the sun so the solar panel could collect sunlight and charge its battery, as a special team assessed the status of what was termed \"a failure in the propulsion system.\"\n\nIt soon became apparent, however, that there was \"a critical loss of fuel,\" further dimming hope for what had been a planned moon landing on Feb. 23.\n\nLate Monday, the company said the leak was continuing and estimated that the lander would start losing solar power in about 40 hours.\n\nThe trouble was reported about seven hours after Monday's predawn liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket provided the lift for Astrobotic's lander, named Peregrine, putting it on a long, roundabout path to the moon.\n\nA propulsion system problem \"threatens the ability of the spacecraft to soft land on the moon,\" the company said. The lander is equipped with engines and thrusters for maneuvering, not only during the cruise to the moon but for lunar descent.\n\nAstrobotic released a photo from a lander-mounted camera, which the company said showed a \"disturbance\" in a section of thermal insulation. That aligns with what is known so far of the problem, the company said.\n\nAstrobotic was aiming to be the first private business to successfully land on the moon, something only four countries have accomplished. A second lander from a Houston company is due to launch next month. NASA gave the two companies millions to build and fly their own lunar landers.\n\nThe space agency wants the privately owned landers to scope out the place before astronauts arrive while delivering tech and science experiments for the space agency, other countries and universities as well as odds and ends for other customers. Astrobotic's contract with NASA for the Peregrine lander was $108 million and it has more in the pipeline.\n\nBefore the flight, NASA's Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration, noted that while using private companies to make deliveries to the moon will be cheaper and quicker than going the usual government route, there will be added risk. He stressed that the space agency was willing to accept that risk, noting Monday: \"Each success and setback are opportunities to learn and grow.\"\n\nThe last time the U.S. launched a moon-landing mission was in December 1972. Apollo 17's Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt became the 11th and 12th men to walk on the moon, closing out an era that has remained NASA's pinnacle.\n\nThe space agency's new Artemis program - named after the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology - looks to return astronauts to the moon's surface within the next few years. First will be a lunar fly-around with four astronauts, possibly before the end of the year.\n\nHighlighting Monday's moonshot was the long-delayed initial test flight of the Vulcan rocket. The 202-foot (61-meter) rocket is essentially an upgraded version of ULA's hugely successful workhorse Atlas V, which is being phased out along with the company's Delta IV. Jeff Bezos' rocket company, Blue Origin, provided the Vulcan's two main engines.\n\nULA declared success once the lander was free of the rocket's upper stage, nearly an hour into the flight and before the spacecraft's propulsion system malfunctioned and prevented the solar panel from properly pointing toward the sun.\n\nLanding on the moon has long been a series of hits and misses. The Soviet Union and the U.S. racked up a string of successful moon landings in the 1960s and 70s, before putting touchdowns on pause. China joined the elite club in 2013 and India in 2023. But last year also saw landers from Russia and a private Japanese company slam into the moon. An Israeli nonprofit crashed in 2019.\n\nNext month, SpaceX will provide the lift for a lander from Intuitive Machines. The Houston company's Nova-C lander takes a more direct one-week route to the moon.\n\nBesides flying experiments for NASA, Astrobotic drummed up its own freight business, packing the 6-foot-tall (1.9-meter-tall) Peregrine lander. On board the lander: a chip of rock from Mount Everest, toy-size cars from Mexico and ashes and DNA of deceased space enthusiasts, including \"Star Trek\" creator Gene Roddenberry and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke.\n\nThe Navajo Nation recently sought to have the launch delayed because of the human remains. saying it would be a \"profound desecration\" of a celestial body revered by Native Americans. Astrobotic chief executive John Thornton said the December objections came too late but promised to try to find \"a good path forward\" with the Navajo for future missions.\n\nOne of the spaceflight memorial companies that bought room on the lander, Celestis, said in a statement that no single culture or religion owns the moon and should not be able to veto a mission. More remains are on the rocket's upper stage, which was boosted into a perpetual orbit around the sun reaching as far out as Mars.\n\nCargo fares for Peregrine ranged from a few hundred dollars to $1.2 million per kilogram (2.2 pounds), not nearly enough for Astrobotic to break even. But for the first flight, that's not the point, according to Thornton.\n\n\"A lot of people's dreams and hopes are riding on this,\" Thornton said days before the flight."}
{"text": "# 'Soldiers of Christ' killing unsettles Korean Americans in Georgia and stokes fear of cults\nBy **SUDHIN THANAWALA**  \nJanuary 8, 2024. 12:24 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. (AP)** - Just days into the admission process for Soldiers of Christ, Sehee Cho was faint and feeble.\n\nThe 33-year-old had come to the Atlanta suburb of Lawrenceville from South Korea in July to heal from a traumatic experience. Instead, police say, the Soldiers group led by two Korean American brothers held her captive for weeks, torturing and starving her until she died.\n\nOfficers discovered her decaying body, weighing just 70 pounds (32 kilograms), in September in the trunk of a car, and prosecutors have charged the brothers, their mom, a third brother and three others with murder.\n\nThe gory details - covered widely in Korean news outlets in the U.S. - have shocked the large Korean community in metro Atlanta. Community leaders say the case is a wake-up call for Korean Americans to be more vigilant about religious cults and potential threats to new arrivals from South Korea.\n\n\"It really kind of alerted people that we should not be so comfortable,\" said Sarah Park, president of the Atlanta chapter of the Korean American Coalition.\n\nThe proximity of the slaying to the heart of Korean social and cultural life in the region was unsettling, she added.\n\nThe brothers and mother lived in a part of Gwinnett County dubbed \"The Seoul of the South\" for its abundance of Korean restaurants, bakeries, and other establishments. The car with Cho's body was left in the parking lot of a popular Korean spa on a main thoroughfare in the Korean business district.\n\n\"Usually, Koreans are good people, so they don't guard themselves or watch strangers,\" said Sunny Park, a prominent Korean American businessman. \"But now they will.\"\n\nCommunity leaders say what's even more unsettling is the relatively young ages of most of the defendants - five are in their 20s and one is 15 - and their religious ties. The mom and brothers, at least for a time, attended church locally, and the father is a pastor in the area. He has not been charged.\n\nThe church is a respected and essential part of Korean life in the U.S, and some local pastors worry the slaying could indicate broader cult-like activity that has gone undetected. Religious cults have been a concern in South Korea.\n\n\"Korean Christians in the United States need to be aware of their existence and their reality,\" said the Rev. Byeong Cheol Han, senior pastor of the Korean Central Presbyterian Church of Atlanta.\n\nInvestigators have not been able to find any Soldiers of Christ members or affiliates outside of the small group of defendants, police say. Still, Han and other pastors organized a seminar in November to alert local college students about Korean cults and how they operate.\n\nProsecutors say Joonho Lee - the founder of Soldiers of Christ - wanted 12 disciples and met a Korean American student at Georgia State University after Cho's death to try to recruit her. David Boyle, an attorney for another defendant in the case, Eric Hyun, 26, has said his client was also recruited by the group and tortured.\n\nOne of the defendants told police Joonho Lee received instructions directly from God, investigators say.\n\nA Gwinnett County police detective testified at an Oct. 19 hearing that the group made video recordings of themselves beating Cho with a belt and putting her in ice baths - once when she appeared weak and a second time when she looked like she was close to death. Five of the defendants sat stoically in the courtroom, listening through headsets to a Korean translation of the lurid evidence.\n\nLee's attorney, Scott Drake, said outside the hearing that he was still gathering information and could not immediately comment. He did not respond to multiple phone messages and emails.\n\nLee, 26, told investigators that Cho went through the initiation voluntarily, according to prosecutors. Cho's mother knew Lee's mother in South Korea and brought Cho to the Lee family home on July 21 to \"find God\" and ease her depression, Gwinnett County police Det. Angela Carter said at the hearing.\n\nMessages the defendants exchanged, however, show Cho tried to quit the training almost immediately after it began, but the group would not let her go, prosecutors say. \"There is no quitting this program,\" the 15-year-old defendant, Junyeong Lee, told investigators, according to police.\n\nProsecutors have charged him as an adult. He, Joonho Lee and a third defendant whom police have also described as a leader of the group, Joonhyun Lee, 22, are brothers. Their mother, Mihee Lee, 54, was arrested about a month after they were taken into custody in September.\n\nThe Associated Press left phone and email messages with an attorney for Junyeong Lee, David Whitman. Attorney Jason Park, who is representing Joonhyun Lee, said he was limited from speaking about a case that is still active.\n\nMihee Lee's attorney, John Burdges, declined to comment. At the Oct. 19 hearing, however, he questioned Cho's mental state and the claim that she was held against her will.\n\nThe initiation took place at the Lee family's modest stucco and stone home in a subdivision in Lawrenceville about 30 miles (48 kilometers) northeast of Atlanta. No one answered the door there on a recent afternoon, though windows were open and the front lawn was mowed and cleared of leaves.\n\nJung Wook Lee, an attorney of Korean descent in nearby Duluth, said acquaintances of hers had met the Lee family at church and didn't think anything was wrong.\n\n\"We're just kind of curious how did it start and how did it unravel in such an evil way,\" she said during a networking event and talk for Asian Americans in Norcross, Georgia, on Dec. 11.\n\nJongwon Lee, another attorney, recalled receiving help from a Korean church in Doraville, Georgia, when he arrived in the U.S. with limited English skills more than a decade ago.\n\n\"Korean people are shocked that some people did a horrible thing in the name of religion,\" he said.\n\nThe other two defendants are Gawon Lee, 26, a cousin of the Lee family who was visiting from South Korea, and Hyunji Lee, 25, Joonho Lee's fiancee. Gawon Lee's attorney, John Kim, did not respond to calls and emails. In addition to murder, all seven defendants are charged with false imprisonment and concealing death.\n\nAshley McMahan, Hyunji Lee's attorney, said her client was treated like an \"indentured servant\" by the other defendants. She was also in South Korea for some of the time that prosecutors say Cho was held and did not know what was happening, McMahan added.\n\nProsecutors, however, say Joonho Lee told Hyunji Lee in a chat message shortly after the initiation started around July 27 that Cho had apparently not even had water for three days and kept fainting, according to an indictment filed on Nov. 29.\n\nOn Aug. 17, Cho was screaming for food, Junyeong Lee reported in a chat message. His other brother, Joonhyun Lee, instructed him to beat her if she screamed again, the indictment says.\n\nTwo days later, prosecutors say Joonhyun Lee authored a chat message to himself with dates that he said Cho began \"fasting\" and was assaulted. The final date in the message was 8/18: \"1 AM time of death (estimated time).\""}
{"text": "# How an animated character named Marlon could help Trump win Iowa's caucuses\nBy **HANNAH FINGERHUT**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 11:14 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**SIOUX CENTER, Iowa (AP)** - Well before Donald Trump takes the stage, a waiting audience of hundreds of supporters sits captivated as dramatic music begins to swell throughout the room. On projector screens, a rotating Planet Earth appears.\n\n\"Making America Great Again starts one place on Earth, and one place only,\" a deep-voiced narrator begins as the image zooms into the middle of the U.S. \"Right here in Iowa.\"\n\nIt's the beginning of a nearly three-minute \"Schoolhouse Rock!\"-like video featuring an animated character named Marlon, who informs viewers of \"everything you need to know about how to successfully caucus for President Trump.\"\n\nThe goal is to turn out a wave of first-time caucusgoers and generate a commanding win for the former president in Iowa's leadoff voting contest on Jan. 15, setting the stage for a romp through the Republican primary and a strong start to the general election campaign. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley are battling for a notable finish in Iowa that could propel one of them to a head-to-head challenge with Trump for the GOP nomination.\n\nMost campaigns use face time at events to encourage Iowans to caucus for the candidate, and they rely on pledge cards with names, addresses and phone numbers to contact supporters again later. But the Trump campaign doesn't wait until after the voters leave the venue -- they are filling in any gaps in knowledge of how the caucuses work on site.\n\nThe civics lesson, with its easy-to-follow instructions, is a reflection of just how quirky the caucus process is. Unlike primaries, which allow voters to cast their ballots throughout the day, Iowa caucusgoers are required to show up at a specific time - 7 p.m. Central time on the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday - and at a site that may be different from their usual polling place. Caucusgoers also have to stay put for what can be a lengthy process of protocol and supporting speeches.\n\nAnd it's often cold, sometimes snowing. Below-zero temperatures are forecast across Iowa on caucus day.\n\n\"We'd love bad weather,\" Trump said Saturday in Newton, arguing that it will dissuade other candidates' supporters but not his. \"My people will walk on glass.\"\n\nBut it's not only the weather that may make it challenging for people to participate.\n\nMarin Curtis, 25, from North Liberty stood in line for a Trump rally in Coralville, but she has never been to a caucus before and she doesn't know much about it. Besides, she said, she has a toddler and might not be able to make it.\n\nRon Wheeldon, 64, an undecided truck driver from Newton, Iowa, was scoping out candidates at several campaign events, even though he'll have to work the night shift on the day of the caucuses.\n\nAnd in Sioux Center last month, Steve and Shari Rehder of Hawarden were attending a forum of some major candidates, including DeSantis and Haley. They said they were interested in an alternative to Trump. But whoever they like won't be getting their vote on caucus night - they'll be out of state on vacation.\n\nThe get-out-the-vote efforts by Trump's 2024 campaign are a nod to the lessons learned since 2016, when the political novice acknowledged not knowing the first thing about caucuses. Trump finished second to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz that year in Iowa's leadoff voting, though he would go on to win the next three early states, the GOP nomination and ultimately the presidency.\n\nThis year, the former president has been touting his lead in national and early state polls, but he has also warned his supporters not to get complacent and says he isn't taking Iowa for granted. In Sioux Center last Friday, he kicked off the first of at least eight \"commit to caucus\" events and noted he plans to be back in Iowa on caucus day.\n\n\"Look, we gotta get out and vote because, you know, bad things happen when you sit back,\" Trump said, encouraging the crowd to \"really show the strength\" of support. \"We're voting now, but it's going to make a big difference in November.\"\n\nWrapped in a blanket waiting in line for Trump's rally, Josie Zeutenhorst, a 20-year-old from Sioux Center who attends Dordt University, said she wanted to hear from Trump in person instead of on TV. She recognizes how much of an impact voters can have on election results but wasn't planning on participating in a caucus.\n\n\"I don't know enough, I guess,\" she said. \"I don't really know how it works.\"\n\nIn a follow-up interview after the rally, Zeutenhorst said she found the caucus instructional video \"very helpful\" and felt more comfortable having learned the process.\n\n\"I really am considering it,\" she said of participating in the caucuses, though she still isn't sure it'll work with her schedule.\n\nRegan Ronning, 52, who attended a Trump rally back in 2016, said the Trump campaign called him a few months ago to ask if he'd be a caucus captain. Now he's door knocking and making phone calls to people in his area.\n\n\"Education's a big part of it,\" he said. Ronning thinks the videos and volunteers help, since some of the people he talks to are confused about what a caucus is. \"I just try to tell them what the process is, that it's nothing scary.\"\n\nTrump's team has said they've held hundreds of trainings for their volunteers and precinct captains, the individuals representing the campaign within a given precinct on caucus night.\n\nThe campaign also has had captains prioritize a new assignment - to bring 10 people to the caucuses who have never participated in one before. The campaign has identified several hundred thousand Trump supporters across Iowa who fit the bill.\n\nIt's an approach they hope to replicate in the general election, as they seek to chip away at the Biden coalition and win over voters who have generally supported Democrats.\n\nMeanwhile, Trump's competitors are trying to persuade voters in Iowa that the race isn't over yet.\n\n\"This is the most impactful vote you can cast. The number of people that go to these caucuses is 150-, 200,000 people,\" DeSantis told a crowd in Sioux Center last week. \"So if you're coming and you bring neighbors or family members, all that, you're packing a big punch.\""}
{"text": "# Haley accuses Biden of giving 'offensive' speech at the church where racist mass shooting occurred\nBy **MEG KINNARD**  \nJanuary 8, 2024. 9:32 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)** - Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley took aim Monday night at the Democrat she'd like to face in the November election, calling it \"offensive\" that President Joe Biden gave \"a political speech\" at the South Carolina church where nine Black parishioners were slain in a 2015 racist attack.\n\n\"For Biden to show up there and give a political speech, it's offensive in itself,\" the former United Nations ambassador and South Carolina governor said during a town hall on Fox News in Des Moines, Iowa. \"I don't need someone who palled around with segregationists in the '70s and has said racist comments all the way through his career lecturing me or anyone in South Carolina about what it means to have racism, slavery, or anything related to the Civil War.\"\n\nBiden was in Haley's home state Monday, delivering jabs at some of his possible GOP general election opponents without naming them. He took the pulpit at Mother Emanuel, a historic AME church in Charleston where nine Black parishioners were slain in June 2015 by a white gunman as they prayed during a Wednesday night Bible study.\n\nAs governor at the time of the shooting, Haley gained national attention for her response, which included signing legislation into law removing the Confederate battle flag from the Statehouse grounds. During her previous campaigns, Haley had advocated against removing the flag, portraying an opponent's call to do so as a political stunt.\n\nBut Haley has been on the defensive for not explicitly naming slavery as the root cause of the Civil War when the question was posed at a campaign event. Her campaign responded Monday with a list of comments attributed to Biden that it said showed he's racially insensitive.\n\nDuring his speech Monday, Biden called it a \"lie\" that the war was about states' rights.\n\n\"So let me be clear, for those who don't seem to know: Slavery was the cause of the Civil War,\" Biden said. \"There's no negotiation about that.\"\n\nHaley's campaign followed Biden's speech by sending reporters a timeline called \"Biden's Racial Comments and Actions,\" such as a 1974 reference to himself as being \"a token Black\" in the Senate; saying in 1981 that George Wallace, the segregationist former Alabama governor, was \"right about some things\"; and, in 2007, saying then-Sen. Barack Obama was \"the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.\"\n\nBiden's reelection campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.\n\nHaley's town hall came a week ahead of Iowa's kickoff caucuses, the first official votes of the 2024 nominating cycle.\n\nFor Haley, the stakes are high. Amid an escalating battle for second place to GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, she and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have increasingly traded barbs as they aim to draw lines of distinction between themselves and secure the mantle as the top alternative to Trump.\n\nOn Monday, Trump's super PAC released a video with an old clip of the then-South Carolina governor urging an audience not to reference people who entered the U.S. illegally as \"criminals.\" Those comments came a month after Trump's 2015 campaign launch speech, in which he said immigrants from Mexico were bringing drugs and crime with them.\n\nDeSantis' campaign also released its closing argument ad for Iowa caucusgoers, taking Haley to task for her recent comments to New Hampshire voters that they would have the opportunity to \"correct\" the decision made by Iowa caucusgoers - a comment that could signal that she not only doesn't expect to win Iowa, but that she doesn't expect to place second, ahead of DeSantis.\n\nHaley on Monday repeatedly accused DeSantis of \"lying because he's losing\" and said Trump's allies were intentionally misconstruing things she had said."}
{"text": "# Biden condemns white supremacy in a campaign speech at a church where Black people were killed\nBy **COLLEEN LONG**, **ZEKE MILLER**, and **DARLENE SUPERVILLE**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 8:00 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP)** - Courting Black voters he needs to win reelection, President Joe Biden on Monday denounced the \"poison\" of white supremacy in America, declaring at the site of a deadly racist church shooting in South Carolina that such ideology has no place in America, \"not today, tomorrow or ever.\"\n\nBiden spoke from the pulpit of Mother Emanuel AME Church, where in 2015 nine Black parishioners were shot to death by the white stranger they had invited to join their Bible study. The Democratic president's speech followed his blunt remarks last Friday on the eve of the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, in which he excoriated former President Donald Trump for \"glorifying\" rather than condemning political violence.\n\nAt Mother Emanuel, Biden said \"the word of God was pierced by bullets of hate, of rage, propelled not just by gunpowder, but by a poison, a poison that has for too long haunted this nation.\"\n\nThat's \"white supremacy,\" he said, the view by some whites that they are superior to other races. \"It is a poison, throughout our history, that's ripped this nation apart. This has no place in America. Not today, tomorrow or ever.\"\n\nIt was a grim way to kick off a presidential campaign, particularly for someone known for his unfailing optimism and belief that American achievements are limitless. But it's a reflection of the emphasis Biden and his campaign are placing on energizing Black voters amid deepening concerns among Democrats that the president could lose support from this critical constituency heading into the election.\n\nBiden's campaign advisers and aides hope the visit lays out the stakes of the race in unequivocal terms three years after the cultural saturation of Trump's words and actions while he was president. It's a contrast they hope will be paramount to voters in 2024.\n\nBiden also used his second major campaign event of the year to thank the state's Black voters. After an endorsement by Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn, one of the highest-ranking African Americans in the U.S. House, the state made Biden the winner of its Democratic presidential primary in 2020. That, in turn, set him on a path to become the party's nominee and defeat Trump to win the presidency.\n\n\"I owe you,\" he said.\n\nBiden was briefly interrupted when several people upset over by his staunch support for Israel in its war against Hamas called out that if he really cared about lives lost he would call for a cease-fire in Gaza to help innocent Palestinians who are being killed under Israel's bombardment. The chants of \"cease-fire now\" were drowned out by audience members chanting \"four more years.\"\n\nThe president also swiped at Republican presidential candidates Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, and Trump, without naming either one.\n\nHaley was governor at the time of the shooting and gained national attention for her response, which included signing legislation into law removing the Confederate flag from the state Capitol. But she has been on the defensive recently for not explicitly naming slavery as the root cause of the Civil War when the question was posed at a campaign event. Her campaign responded Monday with a list of comments attributed to Biden that it said showed he's racially insensitive.\n\nBiden called it a \"lie\" that the war was about states' rights. \"So let me be clear, for those who don't seem to know: Slavery was the cause of the Civil War. There's no negotiation about that.\"\n\nHaley, speaking at a Fox News Channel town hall on Monday, pushed back that it was \"offensive\" for Biden to give a political speech at the church. She also raised Biden's ties to Democratic segregationist senators early in his career.\n\nDuring his successful 2020 run for the White House, Biden faced criticism from fellow Democratic contenders for alluding to his work with Sens. James Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia while trying to make a point about lost civility in national politics.\n\n\"I don't need someone who palled around with segregationists in the '70s and has said racist comments all the way through his career lecturing me or anyone in South Carolina about what it means to have racism, slavery, or anything related to the Civil War,\" Haley said.\n\nOn more current events, Biden noted the scores of failed attempts by Trump in the courts to overturn the 2020 election in an attempt to hold onto power, as well as the former president's embrace of the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.\n\n\"Let me say what others cannot: We must reject political violence in America. Always, not sometimes. Always. It's never appropriate,\" Biden said. He said \"losers are taught to concede when they lose. And he's a loser,\" meaning Trump.\n\nIt was June 17, 2015, when a 21-year-old white man walked into the church and, intending to ignite a race war, shot and killed nine Black parishioners and wounded one more. Biden was vice president when he attended the memorial service in Charleston.\n\nBiden's aides and allies say the shootings are among the critical moments when the nation's political divide started to sharpen and crack. Though Trump, the current Republican presidential front-runner, was not in office at the time and has called the shooting \"horrible,\" Biden is seeking to tie Trump's current rhetoric to such violence.\n\nTwo years after the attack, as the \"Unite The Right\" gathering of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, erupted in violent clashes with counterprotesters. Trump said merely that \"there is blame on both sides.\"\n\nBiden and his aides argue it's all part of the same problem: Trump refused to condemn the actions of the white nationalists at that gathering. He's repeatedly used rhetoric once used by Adolf Hitler to argue that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are \"poisoning the blood of our country,\" yet insisted he had no idea that one of the world's most reviled and infamous figures had used similar words.\n\nAnd Trump continues to repeat his false claims that he won the 2020 election, as well as his assertion that the Capitol rioters were patriotic and those serving prison time are \"hostages.\"\n\nAt Mother Emanuel, Biden revisited themes from the Jan. 6 anniversary speech he delivered Friday.\n\nBiden has repeatedly suggested that democracy itself is on the ballot, asking whether it is still \"America's sacred cause.\"\n\nTrump, who faces 91 criminal charges stemming from his efforts to overturn his loss to Biden and three other felony cases, argues that Biden and other top Democrats are themselves seeking to undermine democracy by using the legal system to thwart the campaign of Biden's chief rival.\n\nSouth Carolina is the first official Democratic nominating contest where Biden wants another strong showing.\n\nIn an interview with The Associated Press before Biden's appearance, Malcolm Graham, a brother of Charleston church victim Cynthia Graham-Hurd, said the threat of racism and hate-fueled violence is part of a needed national conversation about race and American democracy.\n\n\"Racism, hatred and discrimination continue to be the Achilles' heel of America, of our nation,\" said Graham, a city councilman in Charlotte, North Carolina. \"Certainly, what happened to the Emanual Nine years ago is a visible example of that. What happened in Buffalo, years later, where people were killed under similar circumstances, shows that racism and discrimination are still real and it's even in our politics.\"\n\nAfter the speech, Biden met privately with religious leaders and family members and survivors of the church shooting. He also dropped in at Hannibal's Kitchen, a soul food restaurant, to shake hands.\n\nLater Monday, Biden flew to Dallas to make a brief stop at a memorial service for Eddie Bernice Johnson, the influential former Texas congresswoman who died on New Year's Eve. Johnson was 89.\n\nBiden said in a statement last week that he and Johnson had worked together during her 30 years in Congress and he was grateful for her friendship and partnership."}
{"text": "# Trump is raising expectations heading into the Iowa caucuses. Now he has to meet them\nBy **STEVE PEOPLES** and **THOMAS BEAUMONT**  \nJanuary 8, 2024. 8:41 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**NORTH LIBERTY, Iowa (AP)** - When Donald Trump launched his 2024 presidential campaign after a disappointing midterm election for Republicans, his trajectory was something of a mystery. But seven days before Iowa's kick-off caucuses, his standing among the GOP faithful is hardly in doubt.\n\nVoters, campaign operatives and even some of the candidates on the ground here overwhelmingly agree that the Republican former president is the prohibitive favorite heading into the Jan. 15 caucuses - whether they like it or not.\n\n\"Everybody sees the writing on the wall,\" said Angela Roemerman, a 56-year-old Republican from Solon, Iowa, as she waited for former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley to arrive for a weekend rally at Field Day Brewing Co. in North Liberty.\n\n\"It's a little depressing,\" Roemerman said as her order of tortilla chips arrived, lamenting \"all the drama\" surrounding Trump. \"We don't need another four years. But Trump's going to win.\"\n\nJust beneath all the perceived certainty about Trump's victory, however, lies serious risks for the front-runner. Trump continues to fuel sky-high expectations, despite questions about the strength of his voter-turnout operation, a closing message clouded by lies about the 2020 election and stormy weather forecasts that could dissuade supporters from showing up.\n\nFew believe such issues will lead to a straight-up loss next week in Iowa, but in the complicated world of presidential politics, a win is not always a win.\n\n## Meeting expectations\nShould Trump fail to meet expectations with a resounding victory in Iowa, he would enter next-up New Hampshire and South Carolina much more vulnerable. Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis continue to pour millions of dollars into Iowa advertising as they cross the state, backed by well-funded allies with robust get-out-the-vote operations, in a relentless effort to narrow Trump's margin of victory.\n\nAt the same time, Trump's team privately acknowledges that it has cut back on its door-knocking, get-out-the-vote operation heading into the final week. They insist they can ensure his loyalists show up on caucus day more effectively by relying on rallies, phone calls and a peer-to-peer text message program. That's even as allies of DeSantis and Haley push ahead with traditional get-out-the-vote plans at voters' doorways.\n\nNew Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, who has endorsed Haley and spent the weekend campaigning with her across Iowa, conceded that \"it will be tough\" to beat Trump here.\n\n\"There's obviously a strong implication Trump's gonna likely win the Iowa caucus,\" Sununu told The Associated Press, even as he insisted momentum was building for Haley that will show up more clearly in New Hampshire's Jan. 23 first-in-the-nation primary. \"In New Hampshire, she clearly has a chance to do something no one thought was possible, which was to beat Trump in an early state.\"\n\nAware of the risks, the former president's team is scrambling to lower expectations for Iowa.\n\nTrump's advisers in recent days have been quick to remind reporters - at least privately - that no Republican presidential candidate has won a contested Iowa caucus by more than 12 points since Bob Dole in 1988.\n\nThe Trump campaign sees Dole's margin as the floor for Trump's victory, a senior adviser told The Associated Press, requesting anonymity to share internal discussions. The adviser described the mood on the campaign as confident but not comfortable, acknowledging questions about the strength of rival organizations and, as always, the weather, which could affect turnout if there is snow or extreme cold.\n\n## Frigid forecast\nHeavy snowfall, blowing and drifting snow and dangerous travel conditions are expected Monday and Tuesday of this week to be followed by frigid temperatures that could drift below 0 degrees by caucus day.\n\nThe weather has already forced the Trump campaign to cancel multiple appearances by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders and her father, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who had been scheduled to court Iowa voters on Trump's behalf Monday.\n\nEver defiant, Trump projected confidence as he raced across the state for a series of \"commit to caucus\" rallies over the weekend before returning to his Florida estate. He's scheduled to return to Iowa on Wednesday for a Fox News town hall.\n\nAt every stop over the weekend, he talked about his dominant standing in the polls. He's also frequently repeated lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him by voter fraud, a claim refuted by the courts and his own administration but one that fueled a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol.\n\nStill, weather is the more immediate concern heading into the final full week of campaigning in Iowa.\n\nTrump told an audience of more than 2,000 in Clinton on Saturday night that his aides told him he shouldn't worry about cold weather, although his opponents probably should.\n\n\"The other side will never vote, because they don't have any enthusiasm,\" Trump said. Stoking the crowd, he added, \"We won't lose one vote, because our people, they're going to walk on glass.\"\n\nThat's not to say there's no risk.\n\n\"The biggest risk is you say, you know, 'We're winning by so much, darling, let's stay home and watch television,'\" Trump said the night before in Mason City. \"And if enough people do that, it's not going to be pretty.\"\n\n## Trump's risks\nIndeed, Trump has a loyal base of support but he's also targeting a significant number of first-time caucus participants who don't necessarily know where to go next Monday or how the complicated caucus process works. The events feature a series of speeches and votes that can span multiple hours, and in many cases, they're not held at regular polling locations.\n\nA Des Moines Register poll conducted in December found that 63% of likely first-time Republican caucus participants say Trump is their first choice.\n\nOne of the first-time participants may be William Caspers, a 37-year-old farmer from Rockwell, Iowa. He said he had never attended a political event of any kind before Trump's Mason City event on Friday. While he's supporting Trump \"100%\" in 2024, he said he was only \"pretty sure\" he would caucus for him.\n\n\"Where is it going to be? Where do I go? I'm kind of confused about that,\" Caspers said. He noted that he was in the bathroom when a caucus explainer video played at the big screen at the front of the event hall. Several hundred other voters were still in line outside during the video.\n\n\"So, the caucus is this Monday?\" Caspers asked an AP reporter, who clarified that it was Monday Jan. 15.\n\nNot far away, Jackie Garlock, of nearby Clear Lake, was wearing a white hat indicating her status as one of Trump's \"caucus captains.\" The campaign has promoted its efforts to recruit and train hundreds of such captains, who will represent the campaign within a given precinct on Monday night.\n\nGarlock said she only briefly attended one virtual training on Zoom, which she described as largely a pep rally. She also said that she's not particularly good or experienced at political organizing.\n\nBut she's not worried.\n\n\"I have a lot of confidence,\" she said of Trump's chances next week as she scanned the crowded North Iowa Events Center. \"I just look at the number of people who are here and I think, how can they all be wrong?\"\n\n## Haley and DeSantis\nMeanwhile, Haley and DeSantis are spending big money to attack each other on Iowa television, although Haley has had a decided spending advantage in the caucus' final days.\n\nOverall, Haley and her allies are on pace to spend more than $15 million in Iowa television advertising this month alone; DeSantis' team is spending less than $5 million, according to an AP analysis of data from the media tracking firm AdImpact.\n\nVirtually none of the attack ads from Haley or DeSantis is directed at Trump. That's even as Haley's primary super PAC is running multiple ads describing DeSantis as \"a dumpster fire,\" and one of DeSantis' evolving group of super PACs recently launched an ad campaign calling Haley \"Tricky Nikki.\"\n\nTrump and his allies are spending nearly $10 million this month in Iowa. And he's shifted some of his attacks away from DeSantis and toward Haley. But he's also investing in ads targeting Democratic President Joe Biden, his likely general election opponent.\n\nOf all the candidates on the ground in Iowa this week, only DeSantis is predicting an outright victory over Trump. He moved his entire campaign leadership to the state in recent months and visited each of Iowa's 99 counties.\n\n\"You're going to see an earthquake on Jan. 15,\" DeSantis told dozens of supporters at a downtown bar in Dubuque."}
{"text": "# DeSantis and Haley are battling to emerge in Iowa as the preferred Republican alternative to Trump\nBy **THOMAS BEAUMONT**  \nJanuary 6, 2024. 11:32 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**DUBUQUE, Iowa (AP)** - Second place in the Iowa caucuses is seldom so important.\n\nThe rivalry between GOP presidential candidates Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley has become a leading storyline before the first Republicans vote on Jan. 15. The two are in an increasingly testy contest to emerge in Iowa as the preferred alternative to former President Donald Trump for the party's 2024 nomination.\n\nFlorida Gov. DeSantis has said he expects to win Iowa despite trailing far behind Trump in polls. He portrays Haley, a former South Carolina governor who was Trump's U.N. ambassador, as a puppet of wealthy donors and someone who has flip-flopped on key issues.\n\nHaley, who hopes to edge the better-organized DeSantis in Iowa, has accused him of misrepresenting her record, especially on taxes, and of falsely portraying himself as tough on China.\n\nThe stakes are enormous for both.\n\nDeSantis would upend the race if he were to beat Trump in the caucuses. Haley's allies believe they could hobble DeSantis if she finishes ahead of him. The thinking is that a second-place finish would give her a boost before New Hampshire's Jan. 23 primary and a chance to take on Trump directly in South Carolina a month later.\n\n\"I don't know if we'll get to second. I certainly hope so. That's our mission,\" said Mark Harris, lead strategist for Stand for America, a pro-Haley super political action committee. \"We do that, we turn the page and head into a state where I think we're in a great position to win.\"\n\nTrump has been operating at a different level, attracting tens of thousands to rallies in larger cities since the fall and packing events into the final stretch of the campaign in every corner of the state. His campaign has spent months organizing caucusgoers and recruiting \"captains\" responsible for turning out voters on Jan. 15.\n\nHe has ramped up his attacks of Haley in speeches and campaign ads, which Haley has said is a sign he is taking her more seriously. Before a Trump speech Friday, her campaign issued a statement about the former president going after her on immigration.\n\n\"Nikki Haley is rising,\" her campaign said. \"Donald Trump is scared. This is a two-person race.\"\n\nBut Haley must also fend off DeSantis. His camp has hit her for several recent comments about the cause of the Civil War and the role of Iowa in the GOP nomination process. In an interview with NBC News and the Des Moines Register, DeSantis referred to Haley as a \"phony.\"\n\nDeSantis has repeatedly mentioned comments Haley made in New Hampshire this past week when she suggested that New Hampshire voters would \"correct\" Iowa's results. Haley tried to play down the remark by explaining it as a nod to the good-natured rivalry between the two early-voting states.\n\n\"We're getting down to crunch time in the Iowa caucuses,\" DeSantis told more than 300 people jammed into a bar Saturday in downtown Dubuque. \"And no, your votes don't need to be corrected by any other state. I don't care what Nikki Haley says.\"\n\nHaley answered a recent question in New Hampshire about the cause of the Civil War without mentioning slavery. She walked back her answer a day later and said \"of course\" slavery was a cause of the war.\n\nThe Civil War comment came up again at a CNN town hall Thursday. DeSantis' campaign posted on X, formerly Twitter, an excerpt of Haley's response, in which she said she had \"Black friends growing up.\"\n\nWhile the original remark prompted rebuke from Democrats and GOP rivals, especially former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who mentioned that South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union over slave rights, the dust-up never came up in questions at four Iowa events the following weekend.\n\nWhat Haley did mention at an event Friday, as she has regularly in recent weeks, is an ad aired by a DeSantis-aligned super PAC in which she is accused of flip-flopping on a pledge not to raise the fuel tax while governor of South Carolina.\n\n\"Every one of those commercials is a lie,\" she said. She said she resisted gas tax-increase proposals until she offered a compromise to proponents that came with an even larger income tax reduction. The proposal died without action.\n\nDeSantis has shaken up his campaign staff and recalibrated his message several times over the past year and has bet heavily on a strong Iowa finish. He visited all 99 counties, aided by an aligned super PAC, Never Back Down, that spent the summer and fall sending organizers door to door to recruit supporters.\n\nHaley's team began organizing much later and only last month received the endorsement of the political arm of the billionaire Koch Brothers' Americans for Prosperity. That group is now canvassing voters and organizing for Haley.\n\nStill, the pro-Haley super PAC Stand for America has emerged the biggest spender down the stretch, purchasing more than $27.5 million in ads since the start of last year, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact. Two DeSantis-allied groups, Never Back Down and Fight Right, have combined to spend about $26 million over the same period.\n\nFormer Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, a Republican who has not endorsed in the race, described Haley's comment about Iowa an unfortunate mistake, but not one that would likely derail her campaign. His successor, Gov. Kim Reynolds, has endorsed DeSantis.\n\n\"Second is a possibility. If she gets second here, there would be tremendous momentum going into New Hampshire,\" Branstad said Friday at an event where Haley was speaking. \"It's going to be difficult because DeSantis has spent a lot of time here and has the governor's support.\"\n\nCandidates running in Iowa work to show respect for the state's traditions and its leadoff status, though some question Iowa's ultimate influence. The last Republican to win a contested caucus and become the GOP nominee was George W. Bush in 2000.\n\n\"You can't be antagonistic or dismissive of people whose votes you want,\" said Ellen Carmichael, a Republican campaign messaging strategist who has worked on presidential campaigns. \"To me, that was just such an unforced error. They take it seriously, with such reverence for the system. You don't want to diminish that.\""}
{"text": "# Iowa's Christian conservatives follow their faith when voting, and some say it leads them to Trump\nBy **MICHELLE L. PRICE**  \nJanuary 7, 2024. 9:08 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)** - Pastor Charles Hundley opened his worship service on a cold Sunday in northeast Des Moines with a prayer that made it clear one endorsement above all will matter in Iowa's caucuses eight days away.\n\n\"We thank you for the upcoming election, Lord - or caucus, as we call it in Iowa,\" said Hundley, speaking from the sanctuary of his evangelical Christian church in his slight Texas drawl as his parishioners bowed their heads.\n\n\"It doesn't matter what our opinion is,\" he went on. \"It's really what's your opinion that matters. But you've given us the privilege of being able to exercise a beautiful gift. The gift of vote. We thank you for that.\"\n\nWhile Hundley stops short of suggesting to his parishioners which candidate divine guidance should lead them to support, he is among more than 300 pastors and other faith leaders who've been described as supporters by former President Donald Trump's campaign. It's a message that some members of Hundley's First Church of God have taken to heart, saying their faith informs their intention to caucus for Trump.\n\nThe former president and his rivals for the Republican nomination in 2024 have for months been heavily courting social conservatives and white evangelical Christians, long seen as the most influential group in Iowa's Republican caucuses.\n\nRon Betts, a 72-year-old Republican who said he plans to caucus for \"Trump all the way,\" said he felt the former president \"exemplified what Jesus would do.\"\n\nHundley said he doesn't speak about politics from the pulpit or privately urge members of his congregation to support his favored candidate, but he encourages them to participate and use their faith to make their choices.\n\n\"I look at it from a Christian perspective,\" he said. \"I expect them to look at it from a Christian perspective. What does God say of us?\"\n\nBefore weather forced a postponement, the First Church of God on Monday was supposed to host a Trump campaign event featuring Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump's former press secretary, and her father, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister and former presidential candidate, as part of what's billed as a Team Trump Iowa Faith Tour.\n\nTrump, who has a commanding polling lead in Iowa, has been emphasizing his endorsements from faith leaders and success in seating three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision that protected abortion rights nationwide. The former president, however, has faced some pushback from conservatives for failing to endorse national abortion restrictions.\n\nTrump frequently features a prayer at the start of his campaign events, something his rivals have also included at their stops. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has portrayed himself as more conservative than Trump, features religious rhetoric as he campaigns and has the backing of more than 100 faith leaders, including the influential Iowa evangelical figure Bob Vander Plaats.\n\nTrump has long seemed like an unlikely fit for the conservative faithful who shape the first contest of the Republican primary. He entered politics as a brash, thrice-married former reality television star who spent decades as a New York City tabloid fixture, boasted of his sexual prowess and once supported abortion rights. His frequent lies and distortions in his campaigns and presidency focused on everything from his political rivals to the pandemic to the 2020 election results. And last year a jury found him liable for sexual abuse.\n\nIn his first race for the White House in 2016, his image seemed to dog him as he struggled in Iowa, losing the state to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. But as the former president again seeks the White House, he is finding strong support among the faithful.\n\nWhile about one-third of U.S. adults, 37%, have a favorable opinion of Trump, he's seen more favorably among those who identify themselves as evangelicals or born-again Christians. About half of evangelicals in an AP-NORC poll conducted in October said they have a favorable view of Trump. That's even higher among white born-again Christians, at 56%.\n\nTrump has focused his third campaign around a message of retribution and harsh justice, a framework that doesn't seem to be hurting him with evangelicals. Some members of Hundley's church pointed to those themes as a reason Trump best aligns with their faith, suggesting his tough stance on the border and calls for harsher punishment for crimes reflect a sense of justice they see as rooted in Christianity.\n\nThe 72-year-old Betts likened Trump's legal troubles - from the 91 criminal charges he currently faces to the effort in some states to keep him off the 2024 presidential ballot because of his push to overturn his 2020 election loss - to a crucifixion.\n\n\"I think they are doing the same thing they did to Jesus on the cross,\" Betts said. \"I can see a lot of correlation there.\"\n\nCliff Carey, a 73-year-old member of Hundley's congregation, said Trump supported things he supports as a Christian and pointed to his actions around abortion in particular, calling him \"the greatest pro-life president we've ever seen.\"\n\n\"I think he's an imperfect individual just like the rest of us, but I think God used that man to govern in godly principles,\" he said.\n\nHis sister-in-law, Cindy Carey, agreed.\n\n\"I wouldn't vote for him as my pastor,\" she said. \"I want him to lead our nation back to that city on a hill, shining city on a hill.\"\n\nCarey feels Trump's \"Make America Great Again\" slogan is about returning the country to the Christian principles she believes it was founded on.\n\n\"I definitely take my belief and my understanding of the Bible into the voting booth with me.\" she said. \"I believe 100% that that's my responsibility.\""}
{"text": "# Feeling caucus confusion? Your guide to how Iowa works\nBy **ROBERT YOON**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 3:50 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - The race for the White House is about to officially begin, and despite some prolonged jockeying over the election calendar, the long primary season will once again begin in Iowa with a caucus process that has served as the lead-off voting event since the 1970s.\n\nWhile Iowa has played an outsize role in presidential politics for generations, the details of how the caucuses actually work can surprise and mystify even hard-core political junkies. The Republican process this year is largely unchanged, but there are significant changes to the traditional voting schedule on the Democratic side. Much of what you think you know about the Iowa caucuses may no longer be applicable in 2024.\n\nSince the contested Iowa caucuses of 2016 and 2020 may seem like a long time ago, here's an update of what they are, how they work and why they matter.\n\n## WHAT IS A CAUCUS?\nA political caucus is a gathering of people with a shared interest or goal. The Iowa caucuses are a series of local meetings held throughout the state where participants conduct party business and usually indicate their preference for a presidential nominee to represent the party on the November ballot. It's also the first step in a months-long process to select people to serve as delegates to the national party conventions this summer.\n\n## HOW ARE CAUCUSES DIFFERENT FROM PRIMARIES?\nOne of the main differences between caucuses and primaries is the amount of time allotted for voting to occur and the methods by which people can vote. In a primary, people can show up at the polls and cast ballots throughout Election Day, from the early morning until polls close in the evening. They have the option of casting an absentee ballot if they can't make it to the polls on Election Day, and in some states, people may vote before Election Day. The Iowa caucuses, on the other hand, are held in the evening and voters must attend in person in order to participate, except in a few isolated instances. Caucuses are run by political parties, whereas primaries are usually (but not always) run by the state.\n\n## ARE BOTH THE REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS HOLDING CAUCUSES IN IOWA THIS YEAR?\nSort of. While both the state Republican and Democratic parties will hold caucuses on Jan. 15, only the Republican event will have an immediate, binding impact on the presidential race. In a departure from previous years, the Democratic caucuses will be held only to conduct administrative party business and to start the process of choosing delegates to the national conventions. Iowa Democrats will express their preferences for their party's presidential nominee through a mail-in voting process, the results of which will not be known until March.\n\n## WHAT'S AT STAKE?\nFor Democrats, nothing is at stake, since the 2024 caucuses will have no bearing on the presidential race.\n\nFor Republicans, there are usually two prizes in the Iowa caucuses: delegates and bragging rights. Iowa Republican voters will indicate their picks for the party's presidential nominee, and the results of that vote will determine how many of the state's 40 convention delegates each candidate will receive. Candidates win national convention delegates in direct proportion to the percentage of the vote they receive. There is no minimum threshold required to qualify for delegates.\n\nHowever, Iowa makes up a minuscule share of the total number of Republican delegates nationwide (only 1.6%). So, in theory, a candidate who performs poorly in Iowa has plenty of opportunities in the remaining states and territories to more than make up the difference. But because of Iowa's first-in-the-nation placement in the presidential campaign calendar, the caucus results often give a disproportionate boost to the winners and to those who perform strongly or surpass expectations, while often having a winnowing effect on the field by nudging underperforming candidates out of the race. They can also signal to voters in other states, fairly or unfairly, which candidates are possibly on a better footing in the race for the nomination and have momentum (or the \"Big Mo\" as candidate George H.W. Bush called it after winning the 1980 caucuses) heading into the next contests.\n\n## HOW WILL THE REPUBLICAN CAUCUSES WORK IN 2024?\nThere will be two main agenda items at every Republican caucus site: holding a binding vote for the party's presidential nominee and electing delegates to attend county conventions, which is the next step in the multi-tiered process of electing delegates to attend the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this summer.\n\nThe binding presidential vote functions essentially like a party-run primary, only with very limited polling hours and no accommodation for absentee voting, except for a tiny handful of overseas and military voters. There are speeches on behalf of various candidates before the voting and a variety of party business after the vote. Individual caucus chairs are allowed to exercise some discretion in how to conduct the vote, but the voting is done by secret ballot and there is no set list of candidates. Voters must be given the option to vote for any candidate they choose. In the past, some caucus sites have pre-printed the names of major candidates and provided a write-in option, but typically, voters vote by writing the name of a candidate on a blank slip of paper.\n\nThere is no walking around the caucus room to form candidate preference groups. That voting method was a feature of Democratic caucuses from 1972 to 2020 but is no longer in use by either party in 2024.\n\nThe Republican caucuses will convene statewide at 7 p.m. local time (8 p.m. EST), and begin with the election of a caucus chair and secretary. Only registered Republicans may participate in the caucuses and only in their designated home precincts. However, Iowans may register or change their party affiliation on caucus day. Voters must turn 18 by the November general election in order to participate.\n\n## HOW WILL THE DEMOCRATIC CAUCUSES WORK IN 2024?\nIowa Democrats had to completely redo their caucus and presidential delegate selection process after their 2020 caucuses devolved into chaos and failed to produce a clear, undisputed winner.\n\nThis year, Iowa Democrats will still hold caucuses on the same day as Republicans, but unlike in previous years, caucus-goers will not vote or indicate their pick to represent the party on the November presidential ballot. Instead, they will vote for a party nominee through a mail-in voting process that begins Jan. 12 and concludes on March 5.\n\nThe Democratic caucuses on Jan. 15 will elect delegates to the county conventions in March, which is the next step in selecting the individuals to serve as delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August. National convention delegates will be required to vote for a presidential nominee in accordance with the results of the mail-in voting process."}
{"text": "# A timeline of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's hospitalization and lack of White House notification\nBy **TARA COPP** and **LOLITA C. BALDOR**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 7:39 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - The revelation that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had prostate cancer surgery and was later hospitalized in intensive care due to complications from that operation without President Joe Biden, Cabinet members or even his deputy knowing has put an intense spotlight on what staff knew when and why they did not inform government or military leaders or the public.\n\nOn the night of Austin's ambulance ride to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, his personal security detail was with him, and there are now questions about why that did not trigger an immediate call to an operations center to inform his key staff.\n\nDespite persistent questions, details about what happened and Austin's medical status only slowly dribbled out, day by day. Eight days after Austin was hospitalized for an infection stemming from the surgery a week earlier, the Defense Department finally released a detailed statement from his doctors outlining his cancer and subsequent complications.\n\nAlthough doctors say he is recovering well, there are many unanswered questions about the lack of disclosure and what impact the diagnosis will have on his ability to do his job, which entails an aggressive travel and public schedule.\n\nHere's a look at the timeline:\n\nEarly December: During regular medical screenings, Austin's lab results identify prostate cancer which requires treatment. He does not disclose that news to staff or the White House.\n\nDec. 22: Austin undergoes what doctors have now described as a \"minimally invasive surgical procedure called a prostatectomy to treat and cure prostate cancer.\" Austin is under general anesthesia during this procedure at Walter Reed. He does not inform the White House or senior staff that he is undergoing the procedure, but he does temporarily transfer some of his authorities to Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. Hicks is not told the reason for the transfer, which is not unusual.\n\nDec. 23: Austin is discharged from Walter Reed.\n\nDec. 24-31: Austin is working from home. On Dec. 25, in response to militia attacks in Iraq and Syria that injured several U.S. service members, U.S. Central Command strikes multiple facilities used by Kataib Hezbollah and affiliated groups in Iraq.\n\nJan. 1: By the evening, Austin is in severe pain, but conscious, and is taken by ambulance back to Walter Reed. He is admitted to the intensive care unit. His personal security detail is with him, but no call is made to an operations center or to key staff to alert them of the hospitalization. He is evaluated throughout the evening. Neither his staff nor the White House are informed of the development.\n\nJan. 2: Austin is visited by a junior aide. Following the guidance of his physicians, he again transfers \"certain operational responsibilities that require constant secure communications capabilities\" to Hicks, who is on vacation in Puerto Rico. She again is not told why.\n\nAlso that day, Austin's senior staff, including chief of staff Kelly Magsamen, his senior military assistant, Lt. Gen. Ron Clark, the assistant defense secretary for public affairs, Chris Meagher, and Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, say they are informed of Austin's hospitalization. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. CQ Brown is also told. None of those officials notifies the White House, National Security Council or Hicks. Austin remains in the intensive care unit.\n\nJan. 4: The U.S. conducts strikes against a militia target in Baghdad. Hicks is still assuming the authorities Austin transferred to her, but the Pentagon says Austin had pre-approved the strike before his hospitalization. Hicks is finally told Austin is in the hospital, and she and Magsamen begin working on a statement to notify Congress and others. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan is notified and he notifies Biden.\n\nAlso that day, Ryder briefs the media and never mentions Austin's hospitalization.\n\nJan. 5: The congressional notifications begin that evening, just minutes before the Pentagon issues its first public statement about Austin's status. The three-sentence statement says only that he was admitted to Walter Reed on Jan. 1 because of complications from a \"recent elective medical procedure\" and is recovering. It does not state his condition or if he is still in the hospital. The Pentagon Press Association issues an immediate statement underscoring the seriousness of the lapse: \"The public has a right to know when U.S. Cabinet members are hospitalized, under anesthesia or when duties are delegated as the result of any medical procedure.\"\n\nJan. 6: Austin issues a statement saying: \"I could have done a better job ensuring the public was appropriately informed. I commit to doing better.\" He still does not divulge what medical issues he is addressing. And Defense Department officials still will not say publicly when the White House and others were notified. Austin also speaks to Biden, but does not tell the president he has prostate cancer.\n\nJan 7: Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle say they will be looking further into the matter. Ryder for the first time reveals publicly that Austin went to Walter Reed for the medical procedure on Dec. 22 and that he was admitted to the ICU on Jan. 1 due to severe pain, but provides no other details about the procedure.\n\nJan. 8: The White House and Pentagon begin separate reviews of policies on notification when there is a transfer of power and how the public will be informed. Several Republicans call for Austin to resign. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby says Biden still supports Austin, and Ryder says Austin has no plans to resign. Ryder, in his first public briefing to reporters on the matter, provides a more detailed timeline of events and says Austin is still hospitalized but out of the ICU. He does not disclose the ailment. The Pentagon does not know when he will be discharged.\n\nJan. 9: The Defense Department releases a statement from Austin's doctors revealing he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and that the procedure on Dec. 22 was prostate surgery. The doctors' statement says Austin was taken back to Walter Reed on Jan. 1 after he developed a urinary tract infection related to that surgery and was admitted to the ICU. They say he is expected to fully recover.\n\nAlso on Jan. 9, the White House says Biden had not been informed until that day that his defense chief had cancer."}
{"text": "# US and Chinese military officers resume talks as agreed by Biden and Xi\nBy **TARA COPP**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 5:57 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - U.S. and Chinese military officers have resumed talks that were frozen after former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in the summer of 2022, a development U.S. officials have said is key to keeping the growing competition between the two great powers from turning into direct conflict.\n\nDuring the deputy-level talks at the Pentagon, the two parties discussed setting future meetings between their military officers, including potentially scheduling a future meeting between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and newly appointed Chinese Defense Minister Dong Jun.\n\nAustin is currently hospitalized due to complications from prostate cancer treatment. He had not been scheduled to attend Tuesday's meeting. Dong is a former naval commander who was appointed in late December after his predecessor, Li Shangfu, was removed from office.\n\nLi was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2018 for buying Russian weapons. After he was named the defense minister in March 2023, the U.S. did not lift the sanctions. No U.S. defense secretary has visited China since Jim Mattis visited in 2018.\n\nThe face-to-face meetings follow a call between Gen. CQ Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his counterpart Gen. Liu Zhenli, several weeks ago, which marked the first senior military communications between the U.S. and China since August 2022.\n\nChina's delegation at the meeting was headed by Maj. Gen. Song Yanchao, deputy director of the Central Military Commission for international military cooperation. He met with Michael Chase, the Pentagon's deputy assistant secretary of defense for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia.\n\nWhile administrative in nature, the two-day talks do allow both sides to raise policy concerns. In a readout of the meeting, the Pentagon said that Chase talked about operational safety in the Indo-Pacific and the United States' commitment to \"our longstanding 'One China' policy, which is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act,\" the Pentagon said in a readout of the meeting.\n\n\"The Department will continue to engage in active discussions with PRC counterparts about future engagements between defense and military officials at multiple levels,\" the Pentagon said in the readout.\n\nThe agreement to resume the military talks was reached between President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping during their summit in San Francisco last November.\n\nIn a briefing with reporters prior to the meetings, a senior U.S. defense official said while the resumption of the talks is a good sign, \"we're clear-eyed\" that significant differences remain between the two militaries, including the implications of China's movement toward a reunification with Taiwan, which could commit the U.S. to aid in Taiwan's defense. The official spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity to provide details ahead of the meeting.\n\nPelosi's 2022 visit to Taiwan angered China because it claims the island as part of its territory and views visits by foreign government officials as recognition of the island's sovereignty. She was the highest-ranking American official to visit Taiwan in 25 years.\n\nFor the past two years, the Pentagon has faced increased difficulty contacting the Chinese military as the number of intercepts between U.S. and Chinese aircraft and ships sharply rose. According to the Pentagon's most recent report on China's military power, Beijing \"denied, canceled or ignored\" military-to-military communications and meetings with the Pentagon for much of the past two years. The report warned that the lack of such talks \"raises the risk of an operational incident or miscalculation spiraling into crisis or conflict.\""}
{"text": "# Ray Epps, a target of Jan. 6 conspiracy theories, gets a year of probation for his Capitol riot role\nBy **MICHAEL KUNZELMAN**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 9:22 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - A man targeted by right-wing conspiracy theories about the U.S. Capitol riot was sentenced on Tuesday to a year of probation for joining the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by a mob of fellow Donald Trump supporters.\n\nRay Epps, a former Arizona resident who was driven into hiding by death threats, pleaded guilty in September to a misdemeanor charge. He received no jail time, and there were no restrictions placed on his travel during his probation, but he will have to serve 100 hours of community service.\n\nHe appeared remotely by video conference and wasn't in the Washington, D.C., courtroom when Chief Judge James Boasberg sentenced him. Prosecutors had recommended a six-month term of imprisonment for Epps.\n\nEpps' sentencing took place in the same building where Trump was attending an appeals court hearing as the Republican former president's lawyers argued he's immune from prosecution on charges he plotted to overturn the results of the 2020 election he lost.\n\nFox News Channel and other right-wing media outlets amplified conspiracy theories that Epps, 62, was an undercover government agent who helped incite the Capitol attack to entrap Trump supporters. Epps filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox News last year, saying the network was to blame for spreading baseless claims about him.\n\nEpps told the judge that he now knows that he never should have believed the lies about a stolen election that Trump and his allies told and that Fox News broadcast.\n\n\"I have learned that truth is not always found in the places that I used to trust,\" said Epps, who asked for mercy before learning his sentence.\n\nThe judge noted that many conspiracy theorists still refuse to believe that the Capitol riot was an insurrection carried out by Trump supporters. The judge said he hopes that the threats against Epps and his wife subside so they can move on with their lives.\n\n\"You were hounded out of your home,\" the judge said. \"You were hounded out of your town.\"\n\nFederal prosecutors have backed up Epps' vehement denials that he was a government plant or FBI operative. They say Epps has never been a government employee or agent beyond serving in the U.S. Marines from 1979 to 1983.\n\nThe ordeal has forced Epps and his wife to sell their property and businesses and flee their home in Queen Creek, Arizona, according to his lawyer.\n\n\"He enjoys no golf, tennis, travel, or other trappings of retirement. They live in a trailer in the woods, away from their family, friends, and community,\" attorney Edward Ungvarsky wrote in a court filing.\n\nThe internet-fueled accusations that upended Epps' life have persisted even after the Justice Department charged him with participating in the Jan. 6 siege.\n\n\"Fear of demented extremists has no apparent end in sight so long as those who spread hate and lies about Mr. Epps don't speak loudly and publicly to correct the messaging they delivered,\" Epps' lawyer wrote.\n\nEpps pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct on restricted grounds, a charge punishable by a maximum of one year behind bars.\n\nA prosecutor, Michael Gordon, said Epps doesn't deserve to be inundated with death threats but should serve jail time for his conduct on Jan. 6.\n\n\"He didn't start the riot. He made it worse,\" Gordon told the judge.\n\nEpps' lawyer sought six months of probation without any jail time. Ungvarsky said his client went to Washington on Jan. 6 to peacefully protest the certification of the Electoral College vote for Joe Biden, a Democrat, over Trump, a Republican.\n\n\"You're never going to see Mr. Epps commit a crime again,\" the defense attorney said.\n\nOn the evening of Jan. 5, 2021, Epps was in a crowd at Washington's Black Lives Matter Plaza when he was captured on video advocating for entering the Capitol the following day. At Trump's \"Stop the Steal\" rally on Jan. 6, Epps was recorded telling other attendees: \"As soon as the President is done speaking, we go to the Capitol. The Capitol is this way!\"\n\nAt the Capitol, Epps was photographed whispering into the ear of another man before rioters breached a police barricade. Epps also helped other rioters push a large, metal-framed sign into a group of police officers and participated in \"a rugby scrum-like group effort\" to push past a line of officers, Gordon, an assistant U.S. attorney, said in a court filing.\n\n\"Even if Epps did not physically touch law enforcement officers or go inside of the building, he undoubtedly engaged in collective aggressive conduct,\" Gordon wrote.\n\nEpps surrendered to the FBI two days after the riot after learning that agents were trying to identify him. He agreed to be interviewed by FBI agents as well as by the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 insurrection.\n\nThe government initially declined to prosecute Epps in 2021 after the FBI investigated his conduct on Jan. 6 and found insufficient evidence to charge him with a crime, according to Ungvarsky. Epps isn't accused of entering the Capitol or engaging in any violence or destruction on Jan. 6.\n\n\"Mr. Epps was one of many who trespassed outside the Capitol building. Through the exercise of prosecutorial discretion, most of those persons will never be charged,\" the defense lawyer wrote.\n\nMore than 1,200 defendants have been charged with Capitol riot-related federal crimes. Over 900 of them have pleaded guilty or been convicted after trials decided by a judge or jury. Approximately 750 rioters have been sentenced, with nearly two-thirds getting some term of imprisonment.\n\nEpps once served as an Arizona chapter leader for the Oath Keepers, but he parted ways with the anti-government extremist group a few years before the Jan. 6 attack.\n\nOath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and other members were convicted of seditious conspiracy for plotting to stop the peaceful transfer of presidential power from Trump to Biden after the 2020 election. Rhodes was sentenced last year to 18 years in prison.\n\nFox News has sought the dismissal of Epps' lawsuit, calling it \"a direct attack on the First Amendment.\""}
{"text": "# Maine House votes down GOP effort to impeach election official who removed Trump from ballot\nBy **DAVID SHARP**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 2:10 PM EST\n\n---\n\nAUGUSTA, Maine (AP) - Democrats who control the Maine Legislature on Tuesday rejected a Republican effort to impeach the state's top election official for her decision to remove former President Donald Trump from the state ballot over his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.\n\nThe Maine House voted 80-60 against the resolution targeting Shenna Bellows, the first secretary of state in history to block someone from running for president by invoking the U.S. Constitution's insurrection clause.\n\nBellows, who watched the entire proceeding from the gallery, vowed to abide by any legal ruling on her decision to keep Trump off Maine's March 5 primary ballot, which is under appeal in Maine Superior Court.\n\nRepublicans are furious over Bellows' conclusion that the GOP frontrunner shouldn't be on the ballot. They argued that her decision disenfranchised the more than 300,000 voters in Maine who chose Trump in the last election.\n\nGOP Rep. Michael Soboleski, of Phillips, called the secretary's action \"election interference of the highest order\" and a fellow Republican, Rep. James Thorne, of Carmel, said it \"does nothing but further divide the political banner between the parties, and indeed the people of the state of Maine.\"\n\n\"There has been no conviction in a court of law. She is not a judge. She is not a jury. And I believe that the people feel absolutely disenfranchised,\" added Rep. Katrina Smith, a Republican from Palermo.\n\nBut they had faced long odds in seeking retribution against the Democrat.\n\nThe proposal called for a panel to investigate Bellows' actions and report back to the 151-member House. If the proposal had moved forward - and there had been an impeachment vote - then there would have been a trial in the 35-member Senate, where Democrats also have a majority.\n\nDemocratic Rep. Kevin O'Connell, of Brewer, said Bellows \"faithfully discharged her oath of office.\" He called her \"an honorable person\" who should not be removed from office for \"simply doing her job.\"\n\n\"You might disagree with her decision, and some folks do. But every government official has an obligation to follow the law and fulfill their oath to the Constitution,\" he said.\n\nAfterward, Bellows said she stood by her assessment that the impeachment effort was \"political theater\" and that she acted as required by state law after Trump's candidacy was challenged.\n\n\"If people disagree with the decision, the proper venue for resolving that disagreement is with the courts. And indeed Mr. Trump has appealed to Superior Court. If people disagree with the authority delegated to the secretary under Maine election law, the proper venue is for the legislature to amend the law,\" Bellows said after the vote.\n\nSection 3 of the 14th Amendment prohibits those who \"engaged in insurrection\" from holding office. Some legal scholars say the post-Civil War clause applies to Trump for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election and encouraging his backers to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.\n\nSo far, Colorado is the only other state to bar Trump from the ballot. That decision by the Colorado Supreme Court is currently under appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.\n\nOn Monday, Trump's lawyers asked a judge to pause his appeal of Bellow's decision to allow time for a U.S. Supreme Court decision that could render it moot. But the attorney general's office, which is representing Bellows, objected to the effort to delay the legal process in Maine.\n\nBellows, 48, is Maine's 50th secretary of state and the first woman to hold the office, beginning in the role in January 2021 after being elected by lawmakers.\n\nThe former state senator also served as executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine from 2005 to 2013 and worked on successful drives to legalize same-sex marriage, same-day voter registration and ranked choice voting.\n\nWhile Maine has just four electoral votes, it's one of two states to split them, so the state could have outsized importance in what's expected to be a close presidential race this year. Trump earned one of Maine's electors when he was elected in 2016 and again in 2020 when he lost reelection."}
{"text": "# A former gang leader charged in the killing of Tupac Shakur is granted $750,000 bail and house arrest\nBy **KEN RITTER**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 7:50 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LAS VEGAS (AP)** - A Nevada judge set bail Tuesday at $750,000 for a former Los Angeles-area gang leader charged with orchestrating the killing of hip-hop legend Tupac Shakur in 1996, saying he can serve house arrest with electronic monitoring ahead of trial on a murder charge.\n\nCourt-appointed attorneys for Duane \"Keffe D\" Davis told The Associated Press after the judge's decision that they believe Davis can post that amount. They had asked for bail of not more than $100,000 and noted for the judge that the demands of preparing a defense based on two decades of evidence may require a postponement of the current June trial date.\n\nClark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson told reporters that he expects Clark County District Judge Carli Kierny will hold a \"source hearing\" to determine whether money posted for bail is legally obtained. The judge did not set a new trial date but called for a status check Feb. 20.\n\nProsecutors Binu Palal and Marc DiGiacomo argued Tuesday that Davis has never left gang life, that his 15 years of admissions about his role in Shakur's killing show he is guilty of murder, and that a jailhouse phone call in October suggested he poses a threat to witnesses.\n\n\"There is one constant,\" Palal told the judge. \"Mr. Davis has consistently admitted to being architect of the murder.\"\n\nDiGiacomo called Davis \"a very, very high danger to the community.\"\n\nThe judge, in her ruling, acknowledged that Davis \"made a living talking about his past life as a leader of the South Side Crips,\" a street gang in his hometown of Compton, California, \"and also the killing of Mr. Shakur in graphic detail.\"\n\nRobert Arroyo and co-counsel Charles Cano argued that police and prosecutors could have arrested Davis 15 years ago but didn't, and that the prosecutors were wrong with their interpretation of the jail telephone call and a list of names provided to Davis' family. The defense lawyers said it is Davis and his family who are at risk.\n\nArroyo and Cano said their 60-year-old client is in poor health after battling cancer, which is in remission, and said he would not flee to avoid trial.\n\nThey also downplayed evidence against Davis as the product of tales told by witnesses with gang backgrounds that make them not credible, and noted the prosecution lacks evidence, including the gun and the car involved in the September 1996 drive-by shooting that killed Shakur.\n\nArroyo focused Tuesday on what he called \"the obvious question\" dating to 2008 and 2009 - when Davis talked with police in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. He went on to write a 2019 tell-all memoir and began giving interviews on social media in which he described his role as gang leader and \"shot-caller\" in Shakur's death.\n\n\"If his guilt is so overwhelming, what's been happening for 15 years?\" Arroyo asked in court Tuesday. \"Why did we wait 15 years to make the arrest?\"\n\nDavis was arrested Sept. 29 outside his home in suburban Henderson, which Las Vegas police had searched in mid-July. He pleaded not guilty in November to first-degree murder and has been jailed without bail at the Clark County Detention Center in Las Vegas, where detainees' phone calls are routinely recorded. If convicted at trial, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.\n\nArroyo argued Tuesday that his client's accounts in \"the YouTube world\" accentuated violence to attract viewers and make money.\n\n\"Conflict sells,\" Arroyo said. \"They get on these interviews, they puff out their chest. They're trying to get clicks.\"\n\nProsecutors say Davis' own words are strong evidence that he is responsible for the crime, even if he didn't pull the trigger. DiGiacomo said other people who have described Davis' role in other media interviews, and to police, corroborate his accounts.\n\nDavis is the only person still alive who was in the car from which shots were fired, mortally wounding Shakur and wounding rap mogul Marion \"Suge\" Knight. Knight is serving 28 years in a California prison for an unrelated fatal shooting in the Los Angeles area in 2015.\n\nDavis' attorneys noted that Knight is an eyewitness to the Shakur shooting but did not testify before the grand jury that indicted their client.\n\nDavis maintains he was given immunity from prosecution in 2008 by an FBI and Los Angeles police task force investigating the killings of Shakur in Las Vegas and rival rapper Christopher Wallace, known as The Notorious B.I.G. or Biggie Smalls, six months later in Los Angeles.\n\nDiGiacomo and Palal say any immunity agreement was limited. Last week, they submitted to the court an audio recording of a December 2008 task force interview during which they said Davis was told that what he said in the room would not be used against him, but that if he talked to other people he could be in legal jeopardy.\n\nDavis' attorneys responded with a reference to the publication 12 years ago of a book written by former Los Angeles police Detective Greg Kading, who attended those interviews.\n\n\"Duane is not worried,\" the attorneys said, \"because his alleged involvement in the death of Shakur has been out in the public since ... 2011.\""}
{"text": "# Even Andrew Scott was startled by his vulnerability in 'All of Us Strangers'\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 11:15 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - On a recent winter day in New York when the sun was shining, Andrew Scott rushed into a coffee shop between recording sessions for an upcoming series.\n\n\"I'm scheduled tighter than a teenage pop star,\" he said, beaming.\n\nThe interview had been postponed once, and the location was switched at the last minute to save Scott some time in traffic. But he sat down fully engaged and eager to start talking. Immediately, though, a passerby tapped on the storefront glass and asked for a photo. Scott, without a grumble, sprinted out to oblige, even though the gesture seemed more like a command (\"You're under arrest,\" joked Scott) than a polite request.\n\nScott, the 47-year-old Irish actor, is in demand like never before. That's partly due to accrued good will. A regular presence on stage in the West End, Scott is known to many as the \"Hot Priest\" of \"Fleabag\" or the cunning Moriarty of \"Sherlock.\" Soon, he'll play Tom Ripley in the Netflix series \"Ripley,\" adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel.\n\nBut the real reason Scott's time is short right now is Andrew Haigh's new film, \"All of Us Strangers.\" In it, Scott plays a screenwriter working on a script about his childhood. The film is gently poised in a metaphysical realm; when Adam (Scott) returns to his childhood home, he finds his parents (Claire Foy, Jamie Bell) as they were before they died many years earlier.\n\nAt the same time, the movie, loosely adapted from Taichi Yamada's 1987 book \"Strangers,\" balances a budding romance with a neighbor ( Paul Mescal ), a relationship that unfolds with profound reverberations of family, intimacy and queer life. In a dreamy, longing ghost story, Scott is its aching, shimmering soul.\n\n\"The challenge of it was to try to go to that place but not gild the lily too much,\" Scott says. \"As an actor, I have to be in touch with that playful side of myself and that part of you that's childish. I was actually quite struck by how vulnerable I looked in the film.\"\n\nScott's acutely tender performance has made him a contender for the Academy Awards. He was named best actor by the National Society of Film Critics. At the Golden Globes on Sunday (Scott wore a white tux and t-shirt), he was nominated for best actor in a drama.\n\nScott has long admired actors like Anthony Hopkins, Judi Dench and Meryl Streep - performers with a sense of humor who, he says, \"are able to understand what you feel and what you present.\" Scott, too, is often funny on screen (see Lena Dunham's medieval romp \"Catherine Called Birdy\" ). And even in quiet moments, he seems to be buzzing inside at some discreet frequency. Something is always going on under the surface.\n\nHe's been acting since he was young; drama classes were initially a way to get over shyness. Scott's first film role came at age 17. He has often spoken about seeking to maintain a childlike perspective in acting. In that way, \"All of Us Strangers\" is particularly fitting. On Adam's trips home, he sort of morphs back into the child he was. In one scene, he wears his old pajamas and crawls into bed with his parents.\n\n\"So many of the things that are required of you as an actor are a sense of humor and some ability to be able to put yourself in a situation. Because it's all down to imagination,\" says Scott. \"For me, that's the thing you need to keep. That's the thing - because I started out when I was young - I don't want to move too far away from. Like when kids go, 'OK, you be this and I'll be this.' That ability doesn't leave us. What does leave us is a lack of self-consciousness. Our job is to hold on to that.\"\n\nHaigh, the British filmmaker of \"45 Years\" and \"Weekend,\" began thinking of Scott for the role early on. They met and talked through the script for a few hours.\n\n\"He's a similar generation to me. He's a tiny bit younger than me, but he's from the same generation,\" says Haigh. \"He understands that experience.\"\n\nScott came out publicly in 2013, but his natural inclination is to be private. \"I feel like I've given so much of myself in the film, you think you don't want to give it all away,\" he says. He describes \"All of Us Strangers\" - which Haigh shot partly in his childhood home - as personal, but not autobiographical in its depiction of the alienation that can linger after coming out.\n\n\"Mercifully, I feel very comfortable for the most part. But it stays with you that pain, and it actually makes you more compassionate, I think. Because we shot in Andrew's childhood home, that sort of threw down the gauntlet in relation to how much of his own personality he was giving,\" says Scott. \"I wanted it to be sort of unadorned, unarmored and raw. That's why I think there's such tenderness in the film.\"\n\nScott has sometimes recoiled from how sexuality is talked about the media and in Hollywood. He recently said the phrase \"openly gay\" should be done away with. As of late December, Scott hadn't yet watched \"All of Us Strangers\" with his parents, though he planned to.\n\n\"The best way to express it is to say I'll be very sensitive to how they watch it and how they feel about it, and how it makes me feel them watching it,\" Scott says.\n\nThe tenderness in the film is also owed in part to Scott's chemistry with Mescal. On-screen chemistry is an amorphous quality that the film industry has long tried to turn into a science with camera tests and marketing that flirts with real-life romance.\n\nBut for Scott, it's something different. He and Phoebe Waller-Bridge had chemistry, overwhelmingly, in \"Fleabag,\" but that didn't have anything to do with sexual attraction. Pinpointing that quality is something Scott pondered during Simon Stephens and Sam Yates' recent staging of Chekhov's \"Uncle Vanya\" at the National Theater. Scott played all eight roles, meaning he essentially had to have chemistry with himself.\n\n\"Chemistry isn't just about sexual chemistry. It's something to do with listening, and I think it's something to do with playfulness,\" Scott says. \"Your ability to listen to someone and take note of what someone is doing is chemistry. You have to wait and see what the other actor is doing.\"\n\nA few moments later, Scott will have to rush out just as quickly as he arrived. But before that, he leaned back, naturally lit by the winter sun, and pondered whether \"All of Us Strangers,\" in the nakedness of his performance, had taken him somewhere he hadn't before been as an actor.\n\n\"Yeah, I think so,\" said Scott. \"Or else to return to something that perhaps I've been before.\""}
{"text": "# Lindsay Lohan, Reneé Rapp and the stars of the new 'Mean Girls' turn out for premiere\nBy **JOHN CARUCCI**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 10:32 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - She doesn't even go here, but Lindsay Lohan still joined the cast of the new \"Mean Girls\" at the musical film's premiere Monday night in New York.\n\nLohan, the star of the original 2004 film, reunited with Tina Fey - who wrote both the classic film, the Broadway show it inspired and this new adaptation - and posed with the new Cady Heron, Angourie Rice, on the pink carpet.\n\n\"It was an amazing movie to work on when I did it, and I can't wait to see this new iterative version of it. I think it's gonna be wonderful,\" Lohan told The Associated Press.\n\nLohan said it \"felt great\" to hear of the movie's impact on teens over the years and was excited that the new film, which releases Friday, will deal with new topics.\n\n\"I loved Lindsay's performance in the 2004 film so much, it's one of my favorites,\" Rice said. \"So in everything I did, I just hoped that my performance would be adding to the legacy that she started.\"\n\nJust like the 2004 version, the musical movie follows Cady's move to the suburbs, where she experiences the treacherous hierarchies of high school. There, she finds herself accepted by an elite yet shallow group of girls known as the Plastics, led by Regina George - here played by Reneé Rapp. It's billed as \"a new twist from Tina Fey,\" incorporating songs and new technology, but Fey said the \"core story\" still resonates two decades later.\n\n\"In a way, things haven't changed that much, right? People have new ways to mess with each other, right? They can do it over the internet, but it's still just human beings pulling someone else down to make themselves momentarily feel better, right?\" she told the AP.\n\nLohan concurred, saying the movie is a good \"wake-up call.\"\n\n\"I think the characters in this movie definitely were relatable, too, and I think that's so important,\" she said, \"and it's good to have a new refresher of it 20 years later for people to see and know that it's still goes on and cliques still happen.\"\n\nIn addition to Lohan, Fey, Rice and Rapp, the starry premiere featured actors from the new movie like Jon Hamm,Auli'i Cravalho and Busy Philipps, as well as directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. and producer Lorne Michaels.Megan Thee Stallion, who recently released the song \"Not My Fault\" with Rapp, and Fey's \"30 Rock\" co-star Jane Krakowski also turned out.\n\nAs for Lohan, she told the AP she starts filming a Netflix movie next week and is in \"Irish Rose,\" out on the streaming service in March. She said she's also filming \"something else coming up this summer.\"\n\nWhen asked what it's like having a baby and seeing what kids go through as teenagers, as portrayed in \"Mean Girls,\" Lohan replied, \"Oh my god, he's not a teenager yet.\"\n\n\"Don't rush me. I want to savor every moment,\" she continued. \"But it's a blessing. It's the biggest blessing in the world.\""}
{"text": "# Marin Alsop to become Philadelphia Orchestra's principal guest conductor next season\nBy **THE ASSOCIATED PRESS**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 11:01 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**PHILADELPHIA (AP)** - Marin Alsop will become principal guest conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra next season, succeeding Nathalie Stutzmann.\n\nAlsop, 67, was music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra from 2007-08 through 2020-21, the first woman to lead a top-level American orchestra. She agreed to a three-year term with the Philadelphia Orchestra starting with a 2024 tour of China, the organization said Tuesday. She will conduct it for two or three weeks per season.\n\nAlsop debuted with the orchestra in 1990 and has led it 32 times. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Philadelphia Orchestra's music director since 2012-13, reached out to her along with the orchestra's management. She said the orchestra had long put aside its reputation for a heavy string sound, developed when Eugene Ormandy was music director from 1936-80.\n\n\"It's a much different organism that when I first conducted them,\" she said. \"They're super-flexible. They're super-engaged. They're super-enthusiastic,\n\nShe is in her fifth season as chief conductor of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and her first season as chief conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony and as principal guest conductor of London's Philharmonia Orchestra. She began in 2020 as the chief conductor of the Ravinia Festival, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.\n\nAlsop is to make her Metropolitan Opera debut in April leading the company debut of John Adams' \"El Niño.\"\n\nIn 2005, she received a MacArthur Foundation \"genius grant.\""}
{"text": "# Tennessee Titans fire coach Mike Vrabel after back-to-back losing seasons\nBy **TERESA M. WALKER**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 6:04 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP)** - Tennessee Titans controlling owner Amy Adams Strunk wants a fresh approach to compete in the NFL, so she fired coach Mike Vrabel on Tuesday morning after six seasons and losing 18 of the past 24 games.\n\nStrunk said in a statement it was a decision \"as difficult as any I've made.\"\n\nBut she said she believes teams best positioned to win must be aligned and collaborate across the board. The Titans started that shift a year ago, hiring Ran Carthon as the franchise's first Black general manager and expanding its analytics staff. More changes were needed to \"fully achieve our vision.\"\n\nStrunk said she assessed the team throughout the season in an interview released by the team. The Titans went 7-10 in 2022 and just finished a 6-11 season Sunday.\n\n\"I thought it was time to make that change,\" Strunk said.\n\nThe announcement came a day after the Titans cleaned out their lockers with Vrabel not speaking to reporters. It was the first time in the franchise's 27 seasons in Tennessee the head coach did not talk to reporters since the team moved to the state from Texas.\n\nSeveral Titans, from rookie quarterback Will Levis to two-time Pro Bowl defensive lineman Jeffery Simmons, all said they wanted to keep Vrabel as their coach.\n\nThe Titans hired Carthon from San Francisco where he spent six seasons. The Niners have made the playoffs three straight seasons and four of five, including reaching Super Bowl 54, and currently are the NFC's No. 1 seed.\n\nCarthon said at a news conference Tuesday he has a couple of candidates already for his first head coaching search. The search process starts immediately.\n\n\"We have to get it right, and I'm confident that we will,\" Carthon said.\n\nCarthon dispelled speculation of friction between himself and Vrabel, saying the coach was part of every meeting on players. Carthon also said Vrabel never talked with him about wanting more control over personnel.\n\n\"We're not going to bring players in here that the coaches don't want to coach,\" Carthon said.\n\nThe Titans now are the sixth NFL team at the moment looking for a new coach, joining Atlanta and Washington who fired coaches Monday. The Raiders, the Chargers and Panthers didn't wait for the season to end before firing coaches.\n\nNFL teams can't start in-person interviews until after the divisional round after owners voted in October to push those back a week to slow down the hiring process and try to increase diversity in hiring.\n\nThey also cannot interview head coaching candidates employed by other NFL teams until Tuesday or Wednesday for any coach whose team is done or team has a playoff bye. Teams can start virtual interviews.\n\nAny internal candidates or someone not currently employed by the NFL can interview in person.\n\nStrunk said the Titans thought of trying to trade Vrabel as a coach expected to be a top candidate. She noted a coach has to be willing to be traded, and trying to deal Vrabel might've delayed the Titans' search by three weeks.\n\n\"To get the right head coach, I was just not willing to go to the back of the line and take a chance of missing out on someone we really wanted,\" Strunk said.\n\nHired in January 2018, Vrabel went 56-48 overall, including a 2-3 record in the playoffs that included reaching the AFC championship game in the 2019 season as part of three straight playoff berths.\n\nThe Titans contended for a playoff spot in the season finale of his first five seasons until they were eliminated from postseason contention for this season in December. Vrabel wound up coaching a team that used the most players in the NFL in each of the past three seasons because of injuries.\n\nCarthon said nine starters missed the season finale and that figuring out how to stay healthier will be a part of the process as the Titans hire a new coach.\n\nVrabel signed a contract extension after a 2021 season where he won the AP NFL Coach of the Year award. He said last week that \"of course he wants to be here\" in 2024, but used an expletive to make clear that losing stinks.\n\nStrunk fired general manager Jon Robinson on Dec. 6, 2022, in the midst of the team's seven-game slide to blow a third straight division title. She hired Carthon in January 2023, though he had few resources to fix the roster.\n\nThe Titans go into this offseason with the seventh overall draft pick, the second-most salary cap space in the NFL and believe they have their quarterback after Levis went 3-6 as a rookie. The 33rd pick overall out of Kentucky took over at the end of October after veteran Ryan Tannehill sprained his right ankle.\n\nStrunk said she will never shy away from having \"unapologetically high expectations\" for the team her late father founded in 1960. She called this offseason as important as any in the franchise's history. This will be the third head coach Strunk has hired since taking over in March 2015.\n\n\"I'm prepared to make the hard decisions to hopefully get us there sooner,\" Strunk said.\n\nTennessee breaks ground on a new enclosed stadium expected to cost $2.1 billion sometime this spring, which is set to open for the 2027 season. That only adds to the pressure of making the right decisions from top to bottom moving forward."}
{"text": "# Rays shortstop Wander Franco faces lesser charge as judge analyzes evidence in ongoing probe\nBy **MARTÍN ADAMES ALCÁNTARA**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 11:54 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (AP)** - Wander Franco is facing a lesser charge after a judge in the Dominican Republic analyzed evidence that alleges the Tampa Bay Rays shortstop had a relationship with a 14-year-old girl and paid her mother thousands of dollars for her consent.\n\nOriginally accused of commercial and sexual exploitation and money laundering - charges that carry up to 30 years, 10 years and 20 years of prison respectively - Franco now stands accused instead of sexual and psychological abuse, according to a judge's resolution that The Associated Press obtained on Tuesday.\n\nFranco has not been formally accused, but if found guilty on the new charge, he could face between two to five years in prison.\n\nDominican law allows authorities to detain a suspect while prosecutors gather evidence to support their accusations, with a judge later determining whether there is sufficient evidence for charges to be formally filed and the case to move forward.\n\nIn his decision, Judge Romaldy Marcelino observed that prosecutors gave the case against Franco a different and more serious treatment because \"the accused is a professional MLB player,\" he said, referring to Major League Baseball. He didn't elaborate.\n\nThe judge also determined that the money Franco is accused of giving the teen's mother cannot be considered payment for the girl's alleged services since the mother requested money after finding out about their relationship, which lasted four months, according to evidence collected by prosecutors.\n\nThe girl's 35-year-old mother also is charged in the case and remains under house arrest. The original charges of money laundering still stand against her. The AP is not naming the woman in order to preserve her daughter's privacy.\n\nFranco was conditionally released Monday from a jail in the northern province of Puerto Plata after being detained for a week. He was ordered to pay 2 million Dominican pesos ($34,000) as a type of deposit and is required to meet with authorities once a month in the Dominican Republic as the investigation continues.\n\nFranco was having an All-Star season before being sidelined in August, when Dominican authorities began investigating claims he had been in a relationship with a minor. Major League Baseball launched its own investigation, placing Franco on the restricted list on Aug. 14 before moving him to administrative leave on Aug. 22. Both investigations are ongoing.\n\nFranco signed a $182 million, 11-year contract in 2021. His salary last year and this year is $2 million per season."}
{"text": "# Column: Tiger Woods and Nike was a partnership for a lifetime until it wasn't\nBy **DOUG FERGUSON**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 11:00 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**KAPALUA, Hawaii (AP)** - The red shirt on Sunday came to identify Tiger Woods.\n\nSo did the swoosh.\n\nWoods and Nike were partners from the time he stepped to a podium at the Greater Milwaukee Open in August 1996, a 20-year-old fresh off his unprecedented third straight U.S. Amateur title. With a swoosh on his striped shirt, he gazed at the room and said, \"I guess, hello world, huh?\"\n\nIt all sounded so innocent until Nike launched its \"Hello, World\" campaign a few days later. That wasn't put together overnight, but so what? It worked.\n\nJust about everything did when it came to Woods and Nike.\n\n\"Amazing run. Great partnership,\" said Mark Steinberg, his agent at Excel Sports.\n\nThere was some downtime during a commercial shoot in Florida in 1999 when Woods began bouncing a golf ball off his wedge and a producer decided to catch it on camera. The result was a 30-second spot of Woods bouncing the ball while switching hands, going through the legs, behind the back and then popping it up in the air and making solid contact with a baseball swing. Pure magic.\n\nOne of the most famous shots in Masters history was his pitch up the slope on the 16th green, back down the slope toward the hole and then the ball comes to a stop - with the swoosh in full view - before dropping for birdie. That wasn't scripted, of course. It just seemed that way.\n\nWoods had switched to the Nike golf ball in May 2000 and then won the next four majors, the only player in history to hold them all at the same time.\n\nHe switched to Nike irons a week before the Ryder Cup in 2002. Asked about the timing of the change, Woods said: \"Off the record? Because the majors are over.\" Asked for a comment on the record, he thought for a minute, laughed and said, \"Because the majors are over.\"\n\nAnd now the partnership is over after 27 years.\n\nWoods has had three regular caddies and two agents during that time. He has had six corporate sponsors on his bag and four swing coaches. He has used three golf balls and and four brands of irons.\n\nWhat never changed was his relationship with Nike.\n\n\"I would have thought without a doubt he would have been a lifer,\" Curtis Strange said.\n\nStrange has his own history with Nike Golf. He and Peter Jacobsen wore the swoosh when it was best known for sneakers, particularly the Air Jordan created for Michael Jordan, who remains the one athlete forever linked with Nike.\n\nStrange had a swoosh with \"Nike Golf\" in block letters when he won back-to-back in the U.S. Open, the first to do that since Ben Hogan. He even wore a red shirt on Sunday for the second title at Oak Hill in 1989. Not many remember that. Even fewer probably cared.\n\n\"They were still so young,\" Strange said. \"Even when they pushed us a little bit in ads and posters, it was a small piece of the market.\"\n\nAnd then it became much bigger when Nike co-founder Phil Knight signed Woods.\n\n\"What Michael Jordan did for basketball, Tiger Woods absolutely can do for golf,\" Knight told Golf World magazine about the original deal (5 years, $40 million) that seemed so enormous at the time and now looks to be what his father, Earl Woods, once called it - chump change.\n\n\"The world has not seen anything like what he's going to do for the sport,\" Knight said. \"It's almost art. I wasn't alive to see Claude Monet paint, but I am alive to see Tiger play, and that's pretty great.\"\n\nHe was right about what Woods did for his sport. He created a popularity boom not seen since Arnold Palmer, and Woods was the catalyst behind network TV deals that made everyone richer than they imagined, at least in the non-Saudi division.\n\nBut it never really translated into success for Nike Golf. It outsourced the golf ball. It once made a square-shaped driver (Woods never used it). And then it abandoned the equipment in 2016 and stuck with apparel.\n\nBrooks Koepka remains a Nike athletic and equipment holdout - he still uses a Nike 3-iron.\n\nKnight told Bloomberg in a 2017 interview about Nike's decision to get out of the golf equipment business that it was a \"fairly simple equation.\"\n\n\"We lost money for 20 years on equipment and balls and realized next year wasn't going to be any different,\" he said.\n\nWoods wasn't giving Nike much visibility lately, either, mainly a product of knee surgeries, five back surgeries and most recently the February 2021 car crash outside Los Angeles that shattered bones in his right leg and led to ankle fusion surgery in April.\n\nAnd then he switched to FootJoy shoes when he did return following the car crash, saying he needed \"something that allowed me to be more stable.\" Nike responded by saying it would work with Woods to \"meet his needs.\" Woods was still wearing FootJoy a month ago.\n\nWoods, who turned 48 a few weeks ago, wants to play a tournament a month if his body allows. He gets more eyeballs than any golfer in history. But it's still only six tournaments.\n\nWoods spoke of \"another chapter\" in his social media post announcing the end with Nike. Steinberg, the agent, hinted at \"an exciting announcement\" at Riviera in February. But it will be a different look. It's hard to imagine Woods can create the moments he had with Nike over the years, mainly because Woods is more about medical science than painting like Claude Monet.\n\nNike still has Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy, and Nelly Korda from the LPGA Tour, in its stable. Cutting ties with Woods will lead to speculation its day in golf are numbered, though there has been no indication of that.\n\nAs for Woods? He will show up in Los Angeles for the first time without a swoosh to be found. At least the Sunday shirt will be red."}
{"text": "# Miami Marlins in agreement to hire Rachel Balkovec as director of player development, AP source says\nBy **ALANIS THAMES**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 2:24 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MIAMI (AP)** - The Miami Marlins are in agreement with Yankees minor league manager Rachel Balkovec to become their director of player development, according to a person familiar with the deal.\n\nThe person confirmed an MLB.com report of Balkovec's hiring to The Associated Press on Tuesday on condition of anonymity because the team had not announced the deal.\n\nBalkovec finished her second season as manager at Class A Tampa in September. She debuted with the team in April 2022 with a win as the first woman to manage a Major League Baseball affiliate.\n\nBefore that, Balkovec was the first woman to serve as a full-time minor league strength and conditioning coach, then the first to be a full-time hitting coach in the minors with the Yankees.\n\nA former softball catcher at Creighton and New Mexico, Balkovec got her first job in professional baseball with the St. Louis Cardinals as a minor league strength and conditioning coach in 2012.\n\nIn 2016, Balkovec joined the Houston Astros, hired as the Latin American strength and conditioning coordinator and later was the strength and conditioning coach at Double-A Corpus Christi.\n\nShe joined the Yankees organization as a minor league hitting coach in 2019.\n\nThe Marlins have made a series of front office moves since the 2023 season ended.\n\nA month after parting ways with general manager Kim Ng, who led the organization for three seasons, the Marlins hired former Rays GM Peter Bendix as their new president of baseball operations. Ng was the first woman to become GM of a major league team.\n\nBendix got to work immediately, bringing in former San Francisco Giants manager Gabe Kapler as an assistant GM."}
{"text": "# Trump suggests unauthorized migrants will vote. The idea stirs his base, but ignores reality\nBy **ALI SWENSON**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 3:35 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Donald Trump is seizing on his party's frustration with the recent surge of illegal crossings at the southern U.S. border to churn up fears around another top GOP concern - voter fraud.\n\nIn the final stretch before Iowa's caucuses next Monday, the former Republican president has repeatedly suggested that Democrats are encouraging migrants to flow into the country illegally in order to register them to vote in the 2024 election.\n\nThe unsupported claim, which Trump and other Republicans have carted out in past election years, is resonating with voters who agree that security is lacking at both the border and the polls. Experts say it also can be damaging, giving undue traction to false stereotypes and extremist ideologies such as the racist \" great replacement theory.\"\n\nThe GOP frontrunner flicked at the idea of Democrats registering unauthorized migrants to vote at least twice over the weekend in Iowa.\n\n\"I think they really are doing it because they want to sign these people up to vote. I really do,\" Trump said in Mason City on Friday. \"They can't speak a word of English for the most part, but they're signing them up.\"\n\nThe comments came after he posted recently on his Truth Social platform that \"crazed\" Democrats are allowing unvetted migrants into the country \"so they can vote, vote vote.\"\n\nHis message is welcome to some of Trump's Iowa supporters who are still angry about the outcome of the 2020 election. Trump continues to promote the lie that widespread fraud cost him reelection, despite multiple audits, reviews and recounts in the battleground states where he disputed the results, dozens of failed legal challenges and his own attorney general saying there was no evidence to back up the claims.\n\nMichell Harvilla, awaiting Trump's appearance in Clinton, Iowa, on Saturday, said she \"absolutely\" believes Democrats favor allowing people into the country illegally to influence the 2024 election.\n\n\"I fully believe the last one was rigged,\" said the 58-year-old middle school library and media director, who caucused for Ted Cruz in 2016 but voted for Trump twice.\n\nBillionaire Elon Musk also has pushed the narrative on his social media platform X in recent days, claiming that Democrats are \"importing voters.\"\n\nThe Trump campaign didn't immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. In response to an email directed to Musk, the platform sent only an automated response.\n\nThese claims ignore the facts around noncitizen voting in federal elections, which is illegal and remains exceedingly rare even as it is thoroughly scrutinized, according to Sean Morales-Doyle, director of voting rights at the Brennan Center for Justice.\n\nAnyone registering to vote in the U.S. must attest under penalty of perjury that they are a U.S. citizen, Morales-Doyle said. Lying is punishable by fines, imprisonment and deportation, he said - such steep penalties that very few people are willing to accept the risk.\n\nOn top of that, federal law requires states to regularly maintain their voter rolls and remove anyone ineligible, a process that identifies immigrants living in the country illegally. Even with this and other vetting processes in place, only a small number of noncitizen voters have been uncovered - evidence that Trump's theory has no teeth, Morales-Doyle said.\n\nIn 2017, the Brennan Center examined 42 local jurisdictions around the country in the 2016 election, including some of the most populous counties in Arizona, California, Florida and Texas. Of 23.5 million votes cast, election officials found only about 30 cases of potential noncitizen voting that they referred for prosecution or further investigation.\n\nMore recent investigations also haven't shown proof of widespread noncitizen voting. A Georgia audit of its voter rolls conducted in 2022 found fewer than 2,000 instances of noncitizens attempting to register to vote for 25 years, none of which succeeded. Millions of new Georgia voters registered during that period.\n\nOccasional instances in which noncitizens have been found to cast ballots illegally or attempted to register captured widespread attention, helping feed the narrative that they are voting in large numbers. Ahead of the 2022 midterms, Colorado's secretary of state mistakenly sent postcards to about 30,000 noncitizens that encouraged them to register to vote, a problem apparently connected to the state's driver's license database. The office said no noncitizens would be allowed to register if they tried.\n\nThe Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, an organization that encourages voter participation among Latinos, said it hasn't found evidence of noncitizens voting in its decades of advocacy work.\n\n\"The Latino and immigrant communities know the law,\" the group said in an emailed statement.\n\nSuggesting that non-English speakers are somehow less qualified to vote than other populations also is misleading, said Morales-Doyle. The Voting Rights Act bans voting discrimination against language minorities and builds in requirements for language assistance at the polls, he said.\n\nFederal law doesn't stop states or municipalities from granting noncitizens the right to vote in local races. Some have, among them several cities in Maryland and Vermont, while several states ban the practice. New York City passed a law in 2022 that would allow legally documented noncitizens and \"Dreamers\" to vote for mayor and other elected officials, but a judge blocked the move.\n\nOn the flip side, some states and federal lawmakers have sought to require voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship when they register. But these efforts have been challenged by advocates and blocked by federal courts for the burden they impose on voters.\n\nThe Brennan Center and other advocacy groups say proof-of-citizenship requirements disenfranchise people when many eligible voters don't have birth certificates or other applicable documents at hand. They say providing citizenship proof is an unnecessary step when research shows noncitizens are not voting in significant numbers.\n\nTrump's claims that noncitizens are casting ballots aren't new. After the 2016 election, he falsely claimed in a private meeting with congressional leaders that he would have won the popular vote if it weren't for the votes of 3 million to 5 million immigrants living in the country illegally.\n\nYet the idea may be especially effective with his base now, as videos of migrants traveling to the border inundate social media amid a massive surge in migration through the U.S. border with Mexico that the nation's leaders are still struggling to address.\n\nAn estimated 10.5 million people were living illegally in the United States in 2021, according to Pew Research Center's latest figures, published in November. That snapshot was taken before the recent surge of migrants from around the world, a break from the recent past when migrants primarily came from Mexico and Central America.\n\nMillions are in the U.S. seeking asylum or entering on parole, a legal authority granted for humanitarian reasons or when deemed a \"significant public benefit.\" Asylum-seekers and those on parole may be eligible to work but cannot vote. That right is exclusively held for citizens, unless specifically allowed for local elections.\n\nU.S. authorities made 5.9 million arrests for illegal crossings from Mexico from March 2021, when a COVID-inspired lull ended, through November 2023. That included a record-high 2.2 million arrests in the 12-month period ending Sept. 30, 2022. Many people are released to seek asylum in immigration courts, which are backlogged with 3 million cases that take years to decide.\n\nThe White House and Congress are negotiating how best to reduce the number of migrants traveling to the southern border. Meanwhile, public confusion around border policy leaves room for false claims to spread, said Jared Holt, a senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think tank that tracks online hate, disinformation and extremism.\n\nHe said false noncitizen voting claims over the years have helped build support for a more sinister conspiracy theory about a grand plot to diminish the influence of white Americans by replacing them with minorities.\n\n\"It's sort of a tongue-in-cheek way of pushing the great replacement theory, but in a way that has been understood to be less morally repugnant or perceivably more defensible,\" Holt said. \"I don't think you have to scratch very far below the surface to understand what is really being said.\""}
{"text": "# More delays for NASA's astronaut moonshots, with crew landing off until 2026\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 3:54 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - Astronauts will have to wait until next year before flying to the moon and at least two years before landing on it, under the latest round of delays announced by NASA on Tuesday.\n\nThe space agency had planned to send four astronauts around the moon late this year, but pushed the flight to September 2025. The first human moon landing in more than 50 years also got bumped, from 2025 to September 2026. NASA cited safety concerns with its own spacecraft, as well as development issues with the moonsuits and landers coming from private industry.\n\n\"Safety is our top priority,\" said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. The delays will \"give Artemis teams more time to work through the challenges.\"\n\nThe news came barely an hour after a Pittsburgh company abandoned its own attempt to land its spacecraft on the moon because of a mission-ending fuel leak.\n\nLaunched Monday as part of NASA's commercial lunar program, Astrobotic Technology's Peregrine lander was supposed to serve as a scout for the astronauts. A Houston company will give it a shot with its own lander next month.\n\nNASA is relying heavily on private companies for its Artemis moon-landing program for astronauts, named after the mythological twin sister of Apollo.\n\nSpaceX's Starship mega rocket will be needed to get the first Artemis moonwalkers from lunar orbit down to the surface and back up. But the nearly 400-foot (121-meter) rocket has launched from Texas only twice, exploding both times over the Gulf of Mexico. A third test flight is planned for February.\n\nThe longer it takes to get Starship into orbit around Earth, first with satellites and then crews, the longer NASA will have to wait to attempt its first moon landing with astronauts since 1972. During NASA's Apollo era, 12 astronauts walked on the moon. The competition back then was the Soviet Union; now it's China. Nelson told reporters he's not worried that China will beat America to the moon with a crew, even with the latest delay. Even so, \"we don't fly until it's ready,\" he stressed.\n\nThe Government Accountability Office warned in November that NASA was likely looking at 2027 for its first astronaut moon landing, citing Elon Musk's Starship as one of the many technical challenges. Another potential hurdle: the development of moonwalking suits by Houston's Axiom Space.\n\n\"We need them all to be ready and all to be successful in order for that very complicated mission to come together,\" said Amit Kshatriya, NASA's deputy associate administrator. He added that even with the delay, a 2026 moon landing represents \"a very aggressive schedule.\"\n\nNASA has only one Artemis moonshot under its belt so far. In a test flight of its new moon rocket in 2022, the space agency sent an empty Orion capsule into lunar orbit and returned it to Earth. To engineers' surprise, some charred material came off the capsule's heat shield during reentry. Later, testing of another capsule uncovered a design flaw in the life-support electronics, and separate battery issues popped up.\n\nIt's the same kind of capsule that will carry astronauts to and from the moon, linking up with Starship in lunar orbit for the trip down to the surface and back up.\n\nStarship will need to fill up its fuel tank in orbit around Earth, before heading to the moon; SpaceX estimates an estimated 10 fuel transfers will be needed. The company plans an orbiting fuel depot to handle the job, another key aspect of the program yet to be demonstrated.\n\nNASA's moon-landing effort has been delayed repeatedly over the past decade, adding to billions of dollars to the cost. Government audits project the total program costs at $93 billion through 2025."}
{"text": "# Supreme Court rejects appeal by ex-officer Tou Thao, who held back crowd as George Floyd lay dying\nJanuary 9, 2024. 2:01 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MINNEAPOLIS (AP)** - The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to review the federal civil rights conviction of a former Minneapolis police officer who held back a concerned crowd while fellow officers pinned down a dying George Floyd.\n\nThe high court, without comment, on Monday rejected the appeal of Tou Thao, who had argued that prosecutors failed to prove his actions on the day that Floyd died were willful, and alleged that prosecutorial misconduct deprived him of his right to a fair trial.\n\nThao had testified that he merely served as a \"human traffic cone\" when he held back concerned bystanders as former Officer Derek Chauvin, who is white, knelt on Floyd's neck for 9 1/2 minutes while the Black man pleaded for his life on May 25, 2020. A bystander video captured Floyd's fading cries of \"I can't breathe.\" Floyd's murder touched off protests worldwide and forced a national reckoning on police brutality and racism.\n\nThao was one of three former officers who were convicted in a 2022 federal trial of violating Floyd's civil rights. Chauvin pleaded guilty in that case earlier, after being convicted of second-degree murder in a separate trial in state court. Thao and the two other former officers were convicted in state court of aiding and abetting Floyd's murder. Thao is serving his 3 1/2-year federal and 4 3/4-year state sentences concurrently.\n\nThe U.S. Supreme Court rejected Chauvin's appeal of his state murder conviction in November. He's recovering from being stabbed 22 times by a fellow inmate at the federal prison in Tucson, Arizona, later that week. He's appealing his federal conviction separately."}
{"text": "# Investigation into why a panel blew off a Boeing Max 9 jet focuses on missing bolts\nBy **DAVID KOENIG** and **TOM KRISHER**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 8:19 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThe extended grounding of some Boeing 737 Max jetliners is adding to pressure on Boeing and the subcontractor that made the fuselage and installed a panel that blew out leaving a gaping hole in an Alaska Airlines plane last week.\n\nInvestigators know the sequence of events that led to the blowout Friday night, but they don't know the cause. A key question is whether bolts used to help secure the panel, called a door plug, were installed. A National Transportation Safety Board investigator says the bolts have not been recovered and the agency won't know if they were even in place until the door plug is examined in a laboratory.\n\nAdding to Boeing's problems, Alaska Airlines and United Airlines - the two U.S. carriers that fly the Max 9 - reported finding loose bolts and other hardware in other panels, suggesting quality issues with the door plugs are not limited to one plane.\n\nThe plugs are installed in Max 9 fuselages by subcontractor Spirit AeroSystems, which was spun off by Boeing in 2005. Spirit has a history of manufacturing problems, many uncovered in a U.S. House probe of two fatal crashes involving Boeing 737 Max 8 planes.\n\n\"The focus needs to turn to Spirit,\" said former congressman Peter DeFazio, who chaired the investigating committee. \"Boeing has been happy with the crappy stuff from Spirit because it's cheap.\"\n\nThe company said in a statement Monday that \"quality and product integrity\" are a priority. \"Spirit is a committed partner with Boeing on the 737 program, and we continue to work together with them on this matter,\" it said.\n\nThe process of inspecting Max 9s and returning them to service has been slower than Alaska and United had hoped. The Federal Aviation Administration grounded all Max 9s in the United States on Saturday until they could be inspected, but Boeing didn't provide inspection instructions until Monday.\n\nOn Tuesday, the FAA said those instructions were being revised \"because of feedback,\" and it extended the grounding of the planes.\n\n\"The safety of the flying public, not speed, will determine the timeline for returning the Boeing 737-9 Max to service,\" the FAA said in a statement.\n\nHowever, the inspection delays threw airline schedules into turmoil.\n\nUnited said it canceled another 170 flights Tuesday because of the grounding. Alaska said it scrubbed 109 flights because it couldn't fly Max 9s.\n\nThe part that failed on the Alaska flight is installed on some Boeing jets when airliners don't have enough seats to require more emergency exits. The plugs are lighter than an aircraft door, reducing the plane's weight and saving fuel. They are common on cargo planes that have been converted from passenger use.\n\nDuring a briefing late Monday, NTSB officials described how the plug on Alaska flight 1282 rolled upward and flew off the jet. Four bolts and 12 connecting points between the plug and the door frame are supposed to prevent that from happening.\n\n\"We have not yet recovered the four bolts that restrain (the plug) from its vertical movement, and we have not yet determined if they existed there,\" said NTSB aerospace engineer Clint Crookshanks. \"That will be determined when we take the plug to our lab in Washington, D.C.\"\n\nIt is not clear whether Spirit AeroSystems or Boeing technicians last worked on the door plug, which can be opened for maintenance. Steven Wallace, former head of accident investigations for the FAA, said it was unlikely that Alaska crews worked on the plug because the plane was only delivered to the airline in October.\n\nThat means the investigation will likely focus on manufacturing, assembly and quality control, Wallace said.\n\nThis could put more pressure on Boeing CEO David Calhoun, who was brought in to help the company get past the crisis created by the Max crashes. During his tenure, Boeing has lost $23 billion and struggled with manufacturing flaws that have at times held up deliveries of 737s and larger Boeing 787s.\n\nCalhoun called an all-employees meeting Tuesday, hosted at the company's 737 factory in Renton, Washington.\n\n\"We're going to approach this, number one, acknowledging our mistake,\" Calhoun said, according to comments provided by Boeing. Reporters were not allowed to attend. The CEO said he trusts the NTSB to find the cause of the accident, and trusts the FAA to take all necessary steps \"to ensure every next airplane that moves into the sky is in fact safe, and that this event can never happen again.\"\n\nNo one was seriously hurt Friday aboard the affected Alaska jetliner, but Ed Pierson, a former senior manager at Boeing's 737 factory, said the door plug issue is a wake-up call for Boeing and regulators to act before something worse happens.\n\nPierson, now the executive director of The Foundation for Aviation Safety, said Boeing assembly line workers are pressured to rush, and that the company has cut back on quality control inspections. That, he said, can lead to mistakes.\n\n\"The pressure is 'Move the plane down the line,' It's not, 'Stop, let's fix it, let's do it right,'\" he said.\n\nOther former Boeing employees and outsiders who have examined the company say its safety culture degraded after a 1997 merger that left many McDonnell Douglas leaders in charge.\n\n\"They rejected the Boeing culture, where the engineers had the final say on everything, in order to chase the stock price and their executive options,\" DeFazio said. \"They need to go back to being what they were and could be, which is the greatest engineering aerospace company in the world.\"\n\nSpirit AeroSystems' record is also likely to come under more scrutiny.\n\nIn a federal securities lawsuit filed last May in Manhattan, an investor charged that Spirit concealed widespread quality failures including defects in fuselage fittings, improperly drilled holes in bulkheads that keep planes pressurized, and missing fasteners.\n\nThe lawsuit includes an unidentified manufacturing team leader's email that said a manager told workers to falsify reports on the number of defects found on planes. The lawsuit was reported early Tuesday by The Lever, an investigative-journalism website. Spirit declined Tuesday to comment on the lawsuit.\n\nSen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said the NTSB must determine \"whether additional inspection and maintenance should have been done before the aircraft carried passengers anywhere.\" He asked new FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker what the regulatory agency is doing to protect air traveler safety.\n\nA focus on how the door plugs were installed could be the best outcome for Boeing, said John Goglia, a former member of the NTSB. He said a finding of sloppy installation work would eliminate the need for more costly, time consuming door plug redesign.\n\n\"Installation errors happen all the time,\" said Goglia, who started his career as an aircraft mechanic. Faulting the installation in Boeing planes \"impeaches their quality system, but it doesn't impeach their design.\"\n\nShares of The Boeing Co. fell 1% Tuesday, a day after they plunged 8%. Spirit AeroSystems was nearly unchanged Tuesday but lost 11% Monday."}
{"text": "# Blinken urges Israel to engage with region on postwar plans that include path to Palestinian state\nBy **MATTHEW LEE**, **NAJIB JOBAIN**, and **SAMY MAGDY**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 7:44 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**TEL AVIV, Israel (AP)** - U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday called on Israel to work with moderate Palestinians and neighboring countries on plans for postwar Gaza, saying they were willing to help rebuild and govern the territory but only if there is a \"pathway to a Palestinian state.\"\n\nThe U.S. and Israel are united in the war against Hamas but sharply divided over Gaza's future, with Washington and its Arab allies hoping to revive the long-moribund peace process, an idea that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partners sharply oppose.\n\nThe war in Gaza is still raging, with no end in sight, and fueling a humanitarian catastrophe in the tiny coastal enclave. The fighting has also stoked escalating violence between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah militants that has raised fears of a wider conflict.\n\nSpeaking at a news conference after meeting with top Israeli leaders, Blinken said Israel \"must stop taking steps that undercut the Palestinians' ability to govern themselves effectively.\"\n\nIsrael, he added \"must be a partner of the Palestinian leaders who are willing to lead their people\" and live \"side by side in peace with Israel.\" Settler violence, settlement expansion, home demolitions and evictions \"all make it harder, not easier, for Israel to achieve lasting peace and security.\"\n\nU.S. officials have called for the Palestinian Authority, which currently administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, to take the reins in Gaza. Israeli leaders have rejected that idea but have not put forward a concrete plan beyond saying they will maintain open-ended military control over the territory.\n\nBlinken has said that Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey agreed to begin planning for the reconstruction and governance of Gaza once the war ends. The leaders of Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority are set to meet Wednesday in Jordan's southern Red Sea city of Aqaba.\n\n## HEAVY FIGHTING IN GAZA\nThe United States, which has provided crucial military and diplomatic support for Israel's offensive, has pressed it to shift to more precise operations targeting Hamas. But the pace of death and destruction has remained largely the same, with hundreds killed in recent days.\n\nIsrael has vowed to keep going until it destroys Hamas, which triggered the war with its Oct. 7 attack into southern Israel. Palestinian militants killed some 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and abducted around 250 others, nearly half of whom were released during a weeklong cease-fire in November.\n\nThe Israeli military says it has dismantled Hamas infrastructure in northern Gaza - where entire neighborhoods have been demolished - but is still battling small groups of militants. The offensive's focus has shifted to the southern city of Khan Younis and built-up refugee camps in central Gaza.\n\n\"The fighting will continue throughout 2024,\" said Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, a military spokesman.\n\nSince the war began, Israel's assault in Gaza has killed more than 23,200 Palestinians, roughly 1% of the territory's population, and more than 58,000 people have been wounded, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza. About two-thirds of the dead are women and children. The death toll does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.\n\nA strike late Monday hit a house in the central town of Deir al-Balah, killing the mother, three daughters and three small grandchildren of Jamal Naeim, a well-known dentist in Gaza. Outside the hospital, Naeim cradled a small bundle of white cloth containing all that remained of one of his adult daughters, Shaimaa, who was also a dentist.\n\n\"This is what we found of her, just the skin of her head and her hair,\" he said, breaking into sobs. Naeim is the brother of Bassem Naeim, a political figure in Hamas, but is not a member of the group himself, residents said.\n\nAt least eight people were killed when a strike hit a five-story residential building in Rafah in southern Gaza on Tuesday, Palestinian Health officials said. Six of the bodies were taken to nearby Al-Kuwaiti Hospital and were counted by an Associated Press journalist. Two other corpses were transported to Youssef al-Najjar Hospital, also in Rafah, according to Dr. Sohaib al-Hams, who works at Al-Kuwaiti Hospital.\n\nMonday was one of the deadliest days yet for Israeli troops in Gaza, with nine killed, according to the military. Six of them died in an accidental blast when forces were preparing a controlled demolition of a weapons production site in central Gaza, the military said.\n\nIt says 185 soldiers have been killed since the ground offensive began in late October.\n\n## A HUMANITARIAN CRISIS\nNearly 85% of Gaza's population of 2.3 million have been driven from their homes by the fighting, and a quarter of its residents face starvation, with only a trickle of food, water, medicine and other supplies entering through an Israeli siege.\n\nThe U.N. humanitarian office, known as OCHA, warned that the fighting was severely hampering aid deliveries. Several warehouses, distribution centers, health facilities and shelters have been affected by the military's evacuation orders, it said.\n\nThe situation is even more dire in northern Gaza, which Israeli forces cut off from the rest of the territory in late October. Tens of thousands of people who remain there face shortages of food and water.\n\nThe World Health Organization has been unable to deliver supplies to the north for two weeks. OCHA said the military rejected five planned aid convoys to the north over that period, including deliveries of medical supplies and fuel for water and sanitation facilities.\n\nBlinken said more food, water, medicine and other aid needs to enter and be distributed effectively. He called on Israel to \"do everything it can to remove any obstacles from crossings to other parts of Gaza.\"\n\n## FEARS OF A WIDER CONFLICT\nThe war in Gaza has threatened to trigger a wider conflict, with Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah trading escalating strikes following the killing of Hamas' deputy political leader in Beirut last week.\n\nOn Tuesday, Hezbollah said its exploding drones targeted the Israeli army's northern command in the town of Safed - deeper into Israel than previous fire by the group. The Israeli military said a drone fell at a base in the north without causing damage, suggesting it had been intercepted. Military officials did not identify the base.\n\nIsraeli strikes in southern Lebanon meanwhile killed at least four Hezbollah members, including one who was killed in the village where a funeral was held for a Hezbollah commander killed the day before.\n\nIsrael claimed the man killed ahead of the funeral, Ali Hussein Barji, was in charge of Hezbollah's drones in the south, but a Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity in accordance with the group's regulations, said he was only a fighter."}
{"text": "# Hottest year ever, what can be done? Plenty: more renewables and nuclear, less methane and meat\nBy **JENNIFER McDERMOTT**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 4:06 PM EST\n\n---\n\nWhenever there is bad news about climate change, people ask: What can be done?\n\nTuesday's news, that 2023 shattered annual heat records, will likely prompt such questions. The European climate agency said average global temperatures were 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than pre-industrial times. That's barely within the international goal countries agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate accord to avoid a world devastated by climate change.\n\nScientists and energy experts have long laid out roadmaps - solutions - to reduce greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane that are heating up the planet. And there's hope for the way forward, the International Energy Agency said in its World Energy Outlook for 2023.\n\nLed by solar and electric vehicles, investment in clean energy has risen by 40% since 2020. Proponents of nuclear power say ramping up that carbon-free source can replace fossil fuels now as a way of making electricity.\n\nSharp cuts in methane emissions have become a global priority, as shown by the discussions at the United Nations COP28 climate talks in Dubai last month. Each person can also reduce their impact on the environment through the choices they make, whether that's saving energy at home, switching to an electric vehicle, reducing air travel or eating less meat and more plant-based foods.\n\nBelow is a closer look at all of these solutions.\n\n## RENEWABLES ROLLOUT\nNearly 200 countries agreed last month at COP28 to move away from fossil fuels by tripling the use of renewable energy by 2030. It was the first time they've made that crucial pledge to transition, but it will require new installations at double the current rate.\n\nUN chief António Guterres said a fossil fuel phaseout is \"inevitable.\" Scientists overwhelmingly agree the world needs to drastically cut the burning of coal, oil and gas to limit global warming. That's because when fossil fuels are burned, carbon dioxide forms and is released.\n\nAs an example, a 200-megawatt onshore wind project consisting of roughly 50 turbines, on average, avoids the emissions equivalent of taking 100,000 cars off the road or planting 20 million trees, according to the American Clean Power Association. The United States, which has lagged far behind Europe and Asia in building large offshore wind farms, now has two sending power to the grid that could full open early this year.\n\n## NEW NUCLEAR\nTo control global warming, the IEA says global nuclear capacity needs to expand by about 3% each year. The global nuclear industry launched an initiative at COP28 for nations to pledge to triple nuclear energy by 2050. More than 20 have already signed on, including the United States and the host of the talks, the United Arab Emirates.\n\nThe World Nuclear Association says this form of electricity can be deployed on a large scale in time to combat climate change by directly replacing fossil fuel plants. Unlike fossil fuel-fired power plants, nuclear reactors do not produce carbon dioxide while operating.\n\nU.S. nuclear companies are also working on the next generation of reactors that are far smaller and cheaper than traditional ones. These small modular reactors and microreactors in the future could power a community, campus or military complex. Skeptics, however, caution that nuclear technology still comes with significant safety, security and environmental risks that other low-carbon energy sources don't.\n\n## LESS METHANE\nMethane, or natural gas, is an extraordinarily powerful greenhouse gas, more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. It's responsible for about 30% of today's global warming.\n\nMany nations are prioritizing bringing down methane emissions as a crucial, quick way to curb further warming, because it doesn't last as long as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere absorbing the sun's heat.\n\nThe Biden administration last month issued a final rule aimed at reducing methane emissions, targeting the U.S. oil and natural gas industry for its role.\n\nSeparately, 50 oil companies representing nearly half of global production pledged at COP28 to reach near-zero methane emissions and stop wasting natural gas by burning it off, by 2030. Environmental groups, however, called the pledge a \"smokescreen to hide the reality that we need to phase out oil, gas and coal.\"\n\n## PERSONAL CHOICES\nEvery individual can make choices that protect the environment and slow climate change, according to the United Nations' sustainable development goals.\n\nThe UN says start saving energy wherever possible - reduce heating and cooling, switch to LED light bulbs and energy-efficient electric appliances, wash laundry in cold water and hang things to dry. Improving a home's energy efficiency through better insulation or replacing an oil or gas furnace with an electric heat pump can reduce the equivalent of up to 900 kilograms of CO2 per year.\n\nSwitching from a gasoline or diesel-powered car to an electric vehicle, taking fewer flights and shifting from a diet reliant on meat to a vegetarian one can also make significant dents in one's carbon footprint, the UN said. Producing plant-based foods generally results in fewer greenhouse gas emissions and requires less energy, land and water."}
{"text": "# Earth shattered global heat record in '23 and it's flirting with warming limit, European agency says\nBy **SETH BORENSTEIN**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 4:37 PM EST\n\n---\n\nEarth last year shattered global annual heat records, flirted with the world's agreed-upon warming threshold and showed more signs of a feverish planet, the European climate agency said Tuesday.\n\nThe European climate agency Copernicus said the year was 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times. That's barely below the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit that the world hoped to stay within in the 2015 Paris climate accord to avoid the most severe effects of warming.\n\nAnd January 2024 is on track to be so warm that for the first time a 12-month period will exceed the 1.5-degree threshold, Copernicus Deputy Director Samantha Burgess said. Scientists have repeatedly said that Earth would need to average 1.5 degrees of warming over two or three decades to be a technical breach of the threshold.\n\nThe 1.5 degree goal \"has to be (kept) alive because lives are at risk and choices have to be made,\" Burgess said. \"And these choices don't impact you and I but they impact our children and our grandchildren.\"\n\nThe record heat made life miserable and sometimes deadly in Europe, North America, China and many other places last year. But scientists say a warming climate is also to blame for more extreme weather events, like the lengthy drought that devastated the Horn of Africa, the torrential downpours that wiped out dams and killed thousands in Libya and the Canada wildfires that fouled the air from North America to Europe.\n\nIn a separate Tuesday press event, international climate scientists who calculate global warming's role in extreme weather, the group's leader, Imperial College climate scientist Friederike Otto said \"we definitely see in our analysis the strong impact of it being the hottest year.\"\n\nThe World Weather Attribution team only looks at events that affect at least 1 million people or kill more than 100 people. But Otto said her team was overwhelmed with more than 160 of those in 2023, and could only conduct 14 studies, many of them on killer heat waves. \"Basically every heat wave that is occurring today has been made more likely and is hotter because of human-induced climate change,\" she said.\n\nThe United States lurched through 28 weather disasters last year that caused at least $1 billion in damage, smashing the old record of 22 set in 2020, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Tuesday. The number of these costly disasters, which are adjusted to account for inflation, has soared, averaging only three per year in the 1980s and just under six per year in the 1990s.\n\nThe U.S. billion-dollar disasters last year included a drought, four floods, 19 severe storms, 2 hurricanes, a wildfire and a winter storm. They combined to kill 492 people and cause nearly $93 billion in damage, according to NOAA.\n\nAntarctic sea ice hit record low levels in 2023 and broke eight monthly records for low sea ice, Copernicus reported.\n\nCopernicus calculated that the global average temperature for 2023 was about one-sixth of a degree Celsius (0.3 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the old record set in 2016. While that seems a small amount in global record-keeping, it's an exceptionally large margin for the new record, Burgess said. Earth's average temperature for 2023 was 14.98 degrees Celsius (58.96 degrees Fahrenheit), Copernicus calculated.\n\n\"It was record-breaking for seven months. We had the warmest June, July, August, September, October, November, December,\" Burgess said. \"It wasn't just a season or a month that was exceptional. It was exceptional for over half the year.\"\n\nThere are several factors that made 2023 the warmest year on record, but by far the biggest factor was the ever-increasing amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that trap heat, Burgess said. Those gases come from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.\n\nOther factors including the natural El Nino - a temporary warming of the central Pacific that alters weather worldwide - other natural oscillations in the Arctic, southern and Indian oceans, increased solar activity and the 2022 eruption of an undersea volcano that sent water vapor into the atmosphere, Burgess said.\n\nMalte Meinshausen, a University of Melbourne climate scientist, said about 1.3 degrees Celsius of the warming comes from greenhouse gases, with another 0.1 degrees Celsius from El Nino and the rest being smaller causes.\n\nCopernicus records only go back to 1940 and are based on a combination of observations and forecast models. Other groups, including the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, the United Kingdom's Meteorological Office and Berkeley Earth go back to the mid-1800s and will announce their calculations for 2023 on Friday, with expectations of record-breaking marks.\n\nThe Japanese Meteorological Agency, which uses similar techniques as Copernicus and goes back to 1948, late last month estimated that it was the warmest year at 1.47 degrees Celsius (2.64 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. The University of Alabama Huntsville global dataset, which uses satellite measurements rather than ground data and dates to 1979, last week also found it the hottest year on record, but not by as much.\n\nThough actual observations only date back less than two centuries, several scientists say evidence from tree rings and ice cores suggest this is the warmest the Earth has been in more than 100,000 years.\n\n\"It basically means that our cities, our roads, our monuments, our farms, in practice all human activities never had to cope with the climate this warm,\" Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo said at a Tuesday press conference. \"There were simply no cities, no books, agriculture or domesticated animals on this planet the last time the temperature was so high.\"\n\nFor the first time, Copernicus recorded a day where the world averaged at least 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) more than pre-industrial times. It happened twice and narrowly missed a third day around Christmas, Burgess said.\n\nAnd for the first time, every day of the year was at least one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times. For nearly half the year - 173 days - the world was 1.5 degrees warmer than the mid-1800s.\n\nMeinshausen, the Australian climate scientist, said it's natural for the public to wonder whether the 1.5-degree target is lost. He said it's important for people to keep trying to rein in warming.\n\n\"We are not abolishing a speed limit, because somebody exceeded the speed limit,\" he said. \"We double our efforts to step on the brakes.\"\n\nBut Buontempo said it's only going to get hotter: \"Following the current trajectory in a few years time the record-breaking year of 2023 will probably be remembered as a cold year.\""}
{"text": "# Gabriel Attal is France's youngest-ever prime minister at age 34 and the first who is openly gay\nBy **SYLVIE CORBET**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 8:17 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PARIS (AP)** - France saw its youngest-ever prime minister and first openly gay one named Tuesday as President Emmanuel Macron seeks a fresh start for the rest of his term amid growing political pressure from the far right.\n\nGabriel Attal, 34, rose to prominence as the government spokesperson then education minister and had polled as the most popular minister in the outgoing government.\n\nHis predecessor Elisabeth Borne resigned Monday following political turmoil over an immigration law that strengthens the government's ability to deport foreigners.\n\nMacron will work with Attal to name a new government in the coming days, though some key ministers are expected to stay on.\n\n\"I know I can count on your energy and your commitment,\" Macron posted on X in a message to Attal. The president made a reference to Attal reviving the \"spirit of 2017,\" when Macron shook up politics and shot to a surprise victory as France's youngest-ever president on a pro-business centrist platform aimed at reviving one of the world's biggest economies.\n\nDuring the handover ceremony, Attal said: \"I could read and hear it: the youngest president of the Republic in history appoints the youngest prime minister in history. I want to see it only as the symbol of boldness and movement. It is also, and perhaps above all, a symbol of confidence in young people.\"\n\nAttal said his goals include making security an \"absolute priority\" and promoting values of \"authority and respect of others.\" He also vowed to strengthen public services including schools and the health system and push for \"better controlling immigration.\"\n\nMacron, 46, has shifted rightward on security and migration issues since his election, notably as far-right rival Marine Le Pen and her anti-immigration, anti-Islam National Rally have gained political influence.\n\nThe president's second term lasts until 2027, and he is constitutionally barred from a third consecutive term. Political observers have suggested that Macron, a staunch supporter of European integration, wants his new government to prepare for June's European Union elections, where far-right, anti-EU populists are expected to increase their influence.\n\nCritics from both left and right took aim at Attal for his limited experience, his Paris upbringing seen as out of touch with people struggling in the provinces, and his loyalty to the president.\n\nLe Pen posted on X: \"What can the French expect from this 4th prime minister and 5th government in 7 years (under Macron)? Nothing,\" calling on voters instead to choose her party in the European elections.\n\nIn a statement, Eric Ciotti, head of the conservative party The Republicans, said, \"France urgently needs action: it needs a different approach.\" The Republicans would remain a \"responsible opposition\" to the centrist government, he added.\n\nThe founder of the hard-left France Unbowed party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, writing on X, mocked Attal for \"returning to his position as spokesman. The function of prime minister is disappearing. The presidential monarch alone rules his court.\"\n\nUnder the French political system, the prime minister is appointed by the president, accountable to the parliament and is in charge of implementing domestic policy, notably economic measures. The president holds substantial powers over foreign policy and European affairs and is the commander-in-chief of the country's armed forces.\n\nAttal, a former member of the Socialist Party, joined Macron's newly created political movement in 2016 and was spokesperson from 2020 to 2022, a job that made him well-known to the French public. He was then named budget minister before being appointed in July as education minister, one of the most prestigious positions in government.\n\nAttal quickly announced a ban on long robes in classrooms that took effect with the new school year in September, saying the garments worn mainly by Muslims were testing secularism in the schools.\n\nHe also launched a plan to experiment with uniforms in some public schools, as part of efforts to move the focus away from clothes and reduce school bullying.\n\nAttal recently detailed on national television TF1 how he suffered bullying at middle school, including homophobic harassment.\n\nAttal will face the same obstacle as his predecessor: Macron's centrists lost their majority in parliament last year, forcing the government into political maneuvering and using special constitutional powers to be able to pass laws.\n\nThe tough negotiations over the immigration bill and heated parliament debate raised questions over the ability of Borne's government to pass major legislation.\n\nBorne also faced mass protests last year, often marred by violence, against a law to increase the retirement age from 62 to 64, and days of riots across France triggered by the deadly police shooting of a teen.\n\nBorne left office saying she's proud of the work done over the last 20 months that allowed her government \"to pass the budget, the pension reform, the immigration law and more than 50 other texts designed to meet the challenges faced by our country.\"\n\nInterior Minister Gérald Darmanin, who championed the immigration bill, said he was ready to continue his work at the head of the country's police forces especially as the Paris Olympics are to start in less than 200 days, with major security issues at stake."}
{"text": "# ChatGPT-maker braces for fight with New York Times and authors on 'fair use' of copyrighted works\nBy **MATT O'BRIEN**  \nJanuary 10, 2024. 4:05 PM EST\n\n---\n\nA barrage of high-profile lawsuits in a New York federal court will test the future of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence products that wouldn't be so eloquent had they not ingested huge troves of copyrighted human works.\n\nBut are AI chatbots - in this case, widely commercialized products made by OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft - breaking copyright and fair competition laws? Professional writers and media outlets will face a difficult fight to win that argument in court.\n\n\"I would like to be optimistic on behalf of the authors, but I'm not. I just think they have an uphill battle here,\" said copyright attorney Ashima Aggarwal, who used to work for academic publishing giant John Wiley & Sons.\n\nOne lawsuit comes from The New York Times. Another from a group of well-known novelists such as John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and George R.R. Martin. A third from bestselling nonfiction writers, including an author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography on which the hit movie \"Oppenheimer\" was based.\n\n## THE LAWSUITS\nEach of the lawsuits makes different allegations, but they all center on the San Francisco-based company OpenAI \"building this product on the back of other peoples' intellectual property,\" said attorney Justin Nelson, who is representing the nonfiction writers and whose law firm is also representing The Times.\n\n\"What OpenAI is saying is that they have a free ride to take anybody else's intellectual property really since the dawn of time, as long as it's been on the internet,\" Nelson said.\n\nThe Times sued in December, arguing that ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot are competing with the same outlets they are trained on and diverting web traffic away from the newspaper and other copyright holders who depend on advertising revenue generated from their sites to keep producing their journalism. It also provided evidence of the chatbots spitting out Times articles word-for-word. At other times the chatbots falsely attributed misinformation to the paper in a way it said damaged its reputation.\n\nOne senior federal judge is so far presiding over all three cases, as well as a fourth from two more nonfiction authors who filed another lawsuit last week. U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein has been at the Manhattan-based court since 1995 when he was nominated by then-President Bill Clinton.\n\n## THE RESPONSE\nOpenAI and Microsoft haven't yet filed formal counter-arguments on the New York cases, but OpenAI made a public statement this week describing The Times lawsuit as \"without merit\" and saying that the chatbot's ability to regurgitate some articles verbatim was a \"rare bug.\"\n\n\"Training AI models using publicly available internet materials is fair use, as supported by long-standing and widely accepted precedents,\" said a Monday blog post from the company. It went on to suggest that The Times \"either instructed the model to regurgitate or cherry-picked their examples from many attempts.\"\n\nOpenAI cited licensing agreements made last year with The Associated Press, the German media company Axel Springer and other organizations as offering a glimpse into how the company is trying to support a healthy news ecosystem. OpenAI is paying an undisclosed fee to license AP's archive of news stories. The New York Times was engaged in similar talks before deciding to sue.\n\nOpenAI said earlier this year that access to AP's \"high-quality, factual text archive\" would improve the capabilities of its AI systems. But its blog post this week downplayed the importance of news content for AI training, arguing that large language models learn from an \"enormous aggregate of human knowledge\" and that \"any single data source - including The New York Times - is not significant for the model's intended learning.\"\n\n## WHO'S GOING TO WIN?\nMuch of the AI industry's argument rests on the \"fair use\" doctrine of U.S. copyright law that allows for limited uses of copyrighted materials such as for teaching, research or transforming the copyrighted work into something different.\n\nIn response, the legal team representing The Times wrote Tuesday that what OpenAI and Microsoft are doing is \"not fair use by any measure\" because they're taking from the newspaper's investment in its journalism \"to build substitutive products without permission or payment.\"\n\nSo far, courts have largely sided with tech companies in interpreting how copyright laws should treat AI systems. In a defeat for visual artists, a federal judge in San Francisco last year dismissed much of the first big lawsuit against AI image-generators, though artists have since amended their complaint. Another California judge shot down part of comedian Sarah Silverman's arguments against Facebook parent Meta but her case was amended in December and joined with another one that includes writers Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michael Chabon.\n\nThe most recent lawsuits have brought more detailed evidence of alleged harms, but Aggarwal said when it comes to using copyrighted content to train AI systems that deliver a \"small portion of that to users, the courts just don't seem inclined to find that to be copyright infringement.\"\n\nTech companies cite as precedent Google's success in beating back legal challenges to its online book library. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 let stand lower court rulings that rejected authors' claim that Google's digitizing of millions of books and showing snippets of them to the public amounted to copyright infringement.\n\nBut judges interpret fair use arguments on a case-by-case basis and it is \"actually very fact-dependent,\" depending on economic impact and other factors, said Cathy Wolfe, an executive at the Dutch firm Wolters Kluwer who also sits on the board of the Copyright Clearance Center, which helps negotiate print and digital media licenses in the U.S.\n\n\"Just because something is free on the internet, on a website, doesn't mean you can copy it and email it, let alone use it to conduct commercial business,\" Wolfe said. \"Who's going to win, I don't know, but I'm certainly a proponent for protecting copyright for all of us. It drives innovation.\"\n\n## BEYOND THE COURTS\nSome media outlets and other content creators are looking beyond the courts and calling for lawmakers or the U.S. Copyright Office to strengthen copyright protections for the AI era. A panel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony Wednesday from media executives and advocates in a hearing dedicated to AI's effect on journalism.\n\nRoger Lynch, chief executive of the Conde Nast magazine chain, planned to tell senators that generative AI companies \"are using our stolen intellectual property to build tools of replacement.\"\n\n\"We believe that a legislative fix can be simple - clarifying that the use of copyrighted content in conjunction with commercial Gen AI is not fair use and requires a license,\" says a copy of Lynch's prepared remarks."}
{"text": "# Airlines say they found loose parts in door panels during inspections of Boeing Max 9 jets\nBy **DAVID KOENIG**, **CLAIRE RUSH**, and **TOM KRISHER**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 5:49 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**PORTLAND, Ore. (AP)** - Federal investigators say a door panel slid up before flying off an Alaska Airlines jetliner last week, and they are looking at whether four bolts that were supposed to help hold the panel in place might have been missing when the plane took off.\n\nThe comments Monday from the National Transportation Safety Board came shortly after Alaska and United Airlines reported separately that they found loose parts in the panels - or door plugs - of some other Boeing 737 Max 9 jets.\n\n\"Since we began preliminary inspections on Saturday, we have found instances that appear to relate to installation issues in the door plug - for example, bolts that needed additional tightening,\" Chicago-based United said.\n\nAlaska said that as it began examining its Max 9s, \"Initial reports from our technicians indicate some loose hardware was visible on some aircraft.\"\n\nThe findings of investigators and the airlines are ratcheting up pressure on Boeing to address concerns that have grown since the terrifying fuselage blowout Friday night. A plug covering a spot left for an emergency door tore off the plane as it flew 16,000 feet (4,800 meters) above Oregon.\n\nBoeing has called an online meeting for all employees Tuesday to discuss safety.\n\nThe company, which has had problems with various planes over the years, pledged to \"help address any and all findings\" that airlines make during their inspections of Max 9 jets. Boeing has delivered more than 200 to customers around the world, but 171 of them were grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration on Saturday until the door plugs can be inspected and, if necessary, fixed.\n\nThe door plugs are inserted where emergency exit doors would be located on Max 9s with more than about 200 seats. Alaska and United have fewer seats in their Max 9s, so they replace heavy doors with the plugs.\n\nThe panels can be opened for maintenance work. The bolts prevent the mechanism from moving upward on rollers when the plane is in flight.\n\nDuring Alaska Airlines flight 1282 on Friday night, roller guides at the top of one of the plugs broke - for reasons the investigators don't fully understand yet - allowing the entire panel to swing upward and lose contact with 12 \"stop pads\" that keep the panel attached to the door frame on the plane, NTSB officials said at a news briefing in Portland.\n\nNTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said the safety board was investigating whether four bolts that help prevent the panel from sliding up on rollers were missing when the plane took off from Portland or whether they blew off \"during the violent, explosive decompression event.\"\n\nThe interior of the plane suffered extensive damage, but pilots were able to return to Portland and land safely. Officials say there were no serious injuries among the 171 passengers and six crew members.\n\nThe lost door panel was found Sunday near Portland in the back yard of a school teacher's home. NTSB officials said it will be sent to the agency's lab in Washington, D.C., for detailed study that might help pinpoint why the plug broke loose.\n\nAlaska and United have canceled hundreds of flights since the weekend because of their grounded planes. Alaska has 65 Max 9s, and United has 79. The airlines waited until Monday before Boeing and the FAA completed instructions for how to inspect their planes.\n\nThe jet involved in Friday's blowout is brand-new, having been put in service in November. After a cabin-pressurization system warning light came on during three flights, the airline stopped flying it over the Pacific to Hawaii. Some aviation experts questioned why Alaska continued using the plane on overland routes until it figured out what was causing the pressurization warnings.\n\nHomendy said Monday, however, that NTSB has seen no evidence to link the warnings with the blowout of the door plug.\n\nThe Max is the newest version of Boeing's 737, a twin-engine, single-aisle plane that debuted in the late 1960s and has been updated many times. The 737 has long been a workhorse for airlines on U.S. domestic routes.\n\nShares of Boeing fell 8% and Spirit AeroSystems, which installs the door plugs on Max jets, dropped 11% on Monday."}
{"text": "# SEC chair denies a bitcoin ETF has been approved, says account on X was hacked\nBy **KEN SWEET**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 11:58 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - The Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday that a post sent from the agency's account on the social platform X announcing the approval of a long-awaited bitcoin exchange-traded fund was \"unauthorized,\" and that the agency's account was hacked.\n\nThe price of bitcoin briefly spiked more than $1,000 after the post on X, formerly known as Twitter, claimed \"The SEC grants approval for #Bitcoin ETFs for listing on all registered national securities exchanges.\" Cryptocurrency investors had already driven bitcoin's price above $46,000 in anticipation of the approval.\n\nAn ETF would provide a way to invest in bitcoin without having to buy the cryptocurrency outright on a crypto exchange such as Binance or Coinbase.\n\nBut soon after the initial post appeared, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said on his personal account that the SEC's account was compromised and, \"The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products.\" Gensler called the post unauthorized without providing further explanation.\n\n\"Welp,\" wrote Cory Klippsten, CEO of Swan Bitcoin, on X. Like many bitcoin investors, Klippsten had been expecting the agency to approve bitcoin ETFs potentially as soon as this week.\n\nThe price of bitcoin swung from about $46,730 to just below $48,000 after the unauthorized post hit, and then dropped to around $45,200 after the SEC's denial. It was trading around $46,150 at 6:15 p.m. ET.\n\nShortly after Gensler's statement, it appeared that the SEC had gotten back control over the account.\n\nIt was unclear exactly how the SEC's social media account was hacked. X's @Safety account tweeted on Tuesday night that a preliminary investigation by the platform determined \"an unidentified individual\" got control of a phone number associated with the account \"through a third party.\"\n\nIt did not elaborate, though it did say that the compromised SEC account, @SecGov, did not have two-factor authentication activated.\n\nEven before that news, politicians who have long expressed frustration at how Gensler operates the SEC - Republicans in particular - expressed anger at what they suggested were lax SEC security controls over its accounts.\n\n\"Just like the SEC would demand accountability from a public company if they made a colossal market-moving mistake, Congress needs answers on what just happened,\" said Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, who sits on the Senate Banking Committee.\n\nThis is not the first time there has been false market-moving information about the future of bitcoin on regulated exchanges. A false report back in October implied that fund manager BlackRock had gotten approval for bitcoin ETF, causing bitcoin prices to jump sharply.\n\nElon Musk gutted Twitter's content moderation and security teams after taking over the platform in late 2022. And while internet watchdog groups have complained about a spike in toxic content, including antisemitic and other hate speech on X, many also worry about account integrity.\n\n\"The consequences of account takeovers could potentially be significant, and especially during an election year,\" said Brett Callow, an analyst with the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft.\n\nA spokesperson for X did not immediately respond to a request for comment."}
{"text": "# A judge has temporarily halted enforcement of an Ohio law limiting kids' use of social media\nBy **JULIE CARR SMYTH**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 4:28 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP)** - A federal judge issued an order Tuesday temporarily halting enforcement of a pending Ohio law that would require children to get parental consent to use social media apps.\n\nU.S. District Court Judge Algenon Marbley's temporary restraining order came in a lawsuit brought Friday by NetChoice, a trade group representing TikTok, Snapchat, Meta and other major tech companies. The litigation argues that the law unconstitutionally impedes free speech and is overbroad and vague.\n\nWhile calling the intent to protect children \"a laudable aim,\" Marbley said it is unlikely that Ohio will be able to show the law is \"narrowly tailored to any ends that it identifies.\"\n\n\"Foreclosing minors under sixteen from accessing all content on websites that the Act purports to cover, absent affirmative parental consent, is a breathtakingly blunt instrument for reducing social media's harm to children,\" he wrote.\n\nThe law is similar to those enacted in other states. It was set to take effect Jan. 15.\n\nBesides requiring social media companies to obtain a parent's permission for children under 16 to sign up for social media and gaming apps, it also mandates that the companies provide parents with their privacy guidelines, so that families can know what content will be censored or moderated on their child's profile.\n\nThe Social Media Parental Notification Act was part of an $86.1 billion state budget bill that Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed into law in July. The administration pushed the measure as a way to protect children's mental health, with Republican Lt. Gov. Jon Husted saying at the time that social media was \"intentionally addictive\" and harmful to kids.\n\nHusted expressed disappointment in the judge's action Tuesday.\n\n\"The big-tech companies behind this lawsuit were included in the legislative process to make sure the law was clear and easy to implement, but now they claim the law is unclear,\" he said in a statement. \"They were disingenuous participants in the process and have no interest in protecting children.\"\n\nThe governor also lamented the decision.\n\n\"The negative effects that social media sites and apps have on our children's mental health have been well documented, and this law was one way to empower parents to have a role in their kids' digital lives,\" he said in a statement.\n\nNetChoice filed suit against GOP Attorney General Dave Yost in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. The group has won lawsuits against similar restrictions in California and Arkansas."}
{"text": "# A fuel leak forces a US company to abandon its moon landing attempt\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 5:22 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - A crippling fuel leak forced a U.S. company on Tuesday to give up on landing a spacecraft on the moon.\n\nAstrobotic Technology's lander began losing fuel soon after Monday's launch, possibly because of a ruptured tank. The spacecraft had trouble keeping its solar panel pointed towards the sun and generating solar power, as flight controllers scrambled to salvage what they could of the mission.\n\n\"Given the propellant leak, there is, unfortunately, no chance of a soft landing on the moon,\" Astrobotic said in a statement.\n\nAstrobotic had been targeting a lunar landing on Feb. 23, following a roundabout, fuel-efficient flight to the moon. It could have been the first U.S. moon landing in more than 50 years, and the first by a private company. A second lander from a Houston company is due to launch next month.\n\nOnly four countries have pulled off a successful moon landing.\n\nPittsburgh-based Astrobotic said the new goal was to keep the lander operating as long as possible in space, in order to avoid a similar problem on its next mission a year or so from now. Flight controllers managed to keep the spacecraft pointed toward the sun and its battery fully charged, with another 40 hours of operations anticipated.\n\nThe company said a stuck valve may have caused high-pressure helium to flood an oxidizer tank, causing it to burst just hours into the flight. A formal review board comprised of industry experts will determine the cause.\n\nThere is no indication that United Launch Alliance's new Vulcan rocket, which launched the lander, contributed to the problem, the company added.\n\nNASA paid Astrobotic $108 million to fly its experiments to the moon on this mission, part of the agency's commercial lunar program."}
{"text": "# Arrest warrant issued for Montana man accused of killing thousands of birds, including eagles\nBy **MATTHEW BROWN**  \nJanuary 8, 2024. 7:05 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BILLINGS, Mont. (AP)** - A federal judge issued an arrest warrant Monday for a Montana man who failed to show up for an initial court appearance on charges of killing thousands of birds, including bald and golden eagles. A second defendant pleaded not guilty.\n\nThe two men, working with others, killed about 3,600 birds on Montana's Flathead Indian Reservation and elsewhere over a six-year period beginning in 2015, according to a grand jury indictment unsealed last month. The defendants also were accused of selling eagle parts on a black market that has been a long-running problem for U.S. wildlife officials.\n\nMagistrate Judge Kathleen L. DeSoto issued a warrant for Simon Paul, 42, of St. Ignatius, Montana, after he failed to appear at his scheduled arraignment Monday in U.S. District Court in Missoula.\n\nTravis John Branson, 48, of Cusick, Washington, pleaded not guilty and was released pending further proceedings in the case.\n\nThe two defendants are charged with a combined 13 counts of unlawful trafficking of bald and golden eagles and one count each of conspiracy and violating wildlife trafficking laws.\n\nPaul and Branson worked with others who were not named in the indictment to hunt and kill the birds, and in at least one instance used a dead deer to lure an eagle that was then shot, according to prosecutors. The men then conspired to sell eagle feathers, tails, wings and other parts for \"significant sums of cash,\" the indictment said.\n\nThey face up to five years in federal prison on each of the conspiracy and wildlife trafficking violations. Trafficking eagles carries a penalty of up to one year in prison for a first offense and two years in prison for each subsequent offense.\n\nBranson could not be reached for comment and his court-appointed attorney, federal defender Michael Donahoe, did not immediately respond to a message left at his office. Paul could not be reached for comment.\n\nBald eagles are the national symbol of the United States, and both bald and golden eagles are widely considered sacred by American Indians. U.S. law prohibits anyone without a permit from killing, wounding or disturbing eagles or taking any parts such as nests or eggs.\n\nBald eagles were killed off across most of the U.S. over the last century, due in large part to the pesticide DDT, but later flourished under federal protections and came off the federal endangered species list in 2007.\n\nGolden eagle populations are less secure, and researchers say illegal shootings, energy development, lead poisoning and other problems have pushed the species to the brink of decline."}
{"text": "# Coal miners in North Dakota unearth a mammoth tusk buried for thousands of years\nBy **JACK DURA**  \nJanuary 7, 2024. 12:28 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BISMARCK, N.D. (AP)** - The first person to spot it was a shovel operator working the overnight shift, eyeing a glint of white as he scooped up a giant mound of dirt and dropped it into a dump truck.\n\nLater, after the truck driver dumped the load, a dozer driver was ready to flatten the dirt but stopped for a closer look when he, too, spotted that bit of white.\n\nOnly then did the miners realize they had unearthed something special: a 7-foot-long mammoth tusk that had been buried for thousands of years.\n\n\"We were very fortunate, lucky to find what we found,\" said David Straley, an executive of North American Coal, which owns the mine.\n\nThe miners unearthed the tusk from an old streambed, about 40 feet (12.1 meters) deep, at the Freedom Mine near Beulah, North Dakota. The 45,000-acre (18,210-hectare) surface mine produces up to 16 million tons (14.5 million metric tons) of lignite coal per year.\n\nAfter spotting the tusk, the crews stopped digging in the area and called in experts, who estimated it to be 10,000 to 100,000 years old.\n\nJeff Person, a paleontologist with the North Dakota Geologic Survey, was among those to respond. He expressed surprise that the mammoth tusk hadn't suffered more damage, considering the massive equipment used at the site.\n\n\"It's miraculous that it came out pretty much unscathed,\" Person said.\n\nA subsequent dig at the discovery site found more bones. Person described it as a \"trickle of finds,\" totaling more than 20 bones, including a shoulder blade, ribs, a tooth and parts of hips, but it's likely to be the most complete mammoth found in North Dakota, where it's much more common to dig up an isolated mammoth bone, tooth or piece of a tusk.\n\n\"It's not a lot of bones compared to how many are in the skeleton, but it's enough that we know that this is all associated, and it's a lot more than we've ever found of one animal together, so that's really given us some significance,\" Person said.\n\nMammoths once roamed across parts of Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. Specimens have been found throughout the United States and Canada, said Paul Ullmann, a University of North Dakota vertebrate paleontologist.\n\nThe mine's discovery is fairly rare in North Dakota and the region, as many remains of animals alive during the last Ice Age were destroyed by glaciations and movements of ice sheets, Ullmann said.\n\nOther areas have yielded more mammonth remains, such as bonebeds of skeletons in Texas and South Dakota. People even have found frozen carcasses in the permafrost of Canada and Siberia, he said.\n\nMammoths went extinct about 10,000 years ago in what is now North Dakota, according to the Geologic Survey. They were larger than elephants today and were covered in thick wool. Cave paintings dating back 13,000 years depict mammoths.\n\nUllmann calls mammoths \"media superstars almost as much as dinosaurs,\" citing the \"Ice Age\" film franchise.\n\nThis ivory tusk, weighing more than 50 pounds (22.6 kilograms), is considered fragile. It has been wrapped in plastic as the paleontologists try to control how fast it dehydrates. Too quickly, and the bone could break apart and be destroyed, Person said.\n\nOther bones also have been wrapped in plastic and placed in drawers. The bones will remain in plastic for at least several months until the scientists can figure how to get the water out safely. The paleontologists will identify the mammoth species later, Person said.\n\nThe mining company plans to donate the bones to the state for educational purposes.\n\n\"Our goal is to give it to the kids,\" Straley said.\n\nNorth Dakota has a landscape primed for bones and fossils, including dinosaurs. Perhaps the best known fossil from the state is that of Dakota, a mummified duckbilled dinosaur with fossilized skin, Ullmann said.\n\nThe state's rich fossil record is largely due to the landscape's \"low-elevation, lush, ecologically productive environments in the past,\" Ullmann said.\n\nNorth Dakota's location adjacent to the Rocky Mountains puts it in the path of eroding sediments and rivers, which have buried animal remains for 80 million years or more, he said.\n\n\"It's been a perfect scenario that we have really productive environments with a lot of life, but we also had the perfect scenario, geologically, to bury the remains,\" Ullmann said."}
{"text": "# Roy Calne, a surgeon who led Europe's first liver transplant, has died aged 93\nBy **JILL LAWLESS**  \nJanuary 7, 2024. 11:47 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - Roy Calne, a pioneer of organ transplantation who led Europe's first liver transplant operation in 1968, has died aged 93.\n\nCalne's family said he died late Saturday in Cambridge, England, where he was professor emeritus of surgery at Cambridge University.\n\nBorn in 1930, Calne trained as a doctor at Guy's Hospital in London and developed an interest in organ transplantation in the 1950s - partly inspired, he later said, by his father's work as a car mechanic. At the time he was told the procedure would be impossible.\n\nHe is considered one of the fathers of organ transplantation, alongside American scientist Dr. Thomas Starzl. Their work on the surgical procedure and treatment to prevent organ rejection was done initially on dogs. In 1960, Calne's dog experiments demonstrated for the first time that a drug could fend off organ rejection. Starzl attempted the first human liver transplant in 1963. That patient died during the procedure.\n\nThe next several patients also died within weeks of their transplants, but the surgeries showed that transplanted livers could function.\n\n\"It was terrible at the beginning. We had so many dreadful complications,\" Calne said in 1999.\n\nIn May 1968, Calne led a transplant operation on a 46-year-old woman with liver cancer, at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge. The patient died two months later of an infection resulting from the immunosuppressive drugs given to prevent rejection.\n\nCalne focused on finding better ways to stop patients' bodies rejecting donor organs. He helped develop the breakthrough anti-rejection drug cyclosporine and was the first physician to administer it to transplant patients.\n\nAnti-rejection drugs transformed patients' survival chances, and liver transplants have saved thousands of lives since they gained wide acceptance in the 1980s.\n\nCalne also helped carry out the world's first triple liver, lung and heart transplant in 1986 and in 1994 led a six-organ transplant of liver, kidney, stomach, duodenum, small intestine and pancreas.\n\nIn 1974, Calne was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, the British national academy of science, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1986.\n\nIn 2012, Calne and Starzl shared the prestigious Lasker Award for their research. In 2021, Addenbrooke's Hospital named its transplant unit, one of Britain's largest, after Calne.\n\nCalne was also an accomplished artist who painted portraits of dozens of his patients and medical colleagues."}
{"text": "# 'Peach Fuzz' has been dubbed the color of the year. What does that have to do with your garden?\nBy **JESSICA DAMIANO**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 8:54 AM EST\n\n---\n\nWith a new year comes new trends, and the 2024 Pantone color of the year, \"Peach Fuzz,\" will be dictating many of them. What does this have to do with your garden? Everything.\n\nThe Pantone Color Institute has been governing worldwide color trends since 2000, providing, according to its website, \"a universal language of color that enables color-critical decisions through every stage of the workflow for brands and manufacturers.\"\n\nThat means that, come spring, you can expect to see peach-toned clothing, shoes, home furnishings and wall paints dominating their respective domains as designers scramble to satisfy a trend-hungry public. You'll also see a plethora of peachy plants at the nursery.\n\nBreeding new plants takes much longer - at least a decade, in most cases - than making new textiles. But make no mistake: Garden centers will be stocking a dizzying array of existing peach-toned plants this spring, and many will be new to us.\n\nSome of my favorites:\n\n## ROSES\nAt Last is a beautiful light-orange shrub rose that checks all the boxes: It's highly fragrant, low-maintenance, disease-resistant, and blooms from early summer through fall in zones 5-9.\n\nPeach Drift, too, offers disease resistance and repeat blooming from spring through frost, but with a spreading habit. This groundcover rose is ideal for hillsides or open areas in zones 4-11.\n\n## SHRUBS\nDouble Take flowering quince is a long-blooming, low-maintenance, heat- and drought-tolerant spring bloomer with soft peach flowers that grows in zones 5-9. Unlike older varieties, it doesn't have thorns, so you can work around it and make bouquets without getting pricked.\n\nSuntastic Peach abelia puts forth pretty white flowers all summer long, but the real star of the show is its bright-peach evergreen foliage. As a bonus, it offers superior drought resistance and heat tolerance and is smaller than standard abelias. Grow it in zones 6-10.\n\nPeaches and Cream is a bushy, heat- and drought-resistant Grevillea shrub suited for zones 9-11. Its eye-catching, multi-toned flowers bloom year-round against bright green, dense, dissected foliage.\n\n## PERENNIALS\nFirefly Peach Sky yarrow flowers emerge peachy and then fade to yellow as they age, creating a kaleidoscope of peach, orange, cream and yellow interest as some flowers in different stages of maturity converge. Thrives in zones 3-8.\n\nPyromania Hot and Cold, a Kniphofia or red hot poker plant, has spiky flowers that are peachy at their tips and creamy at their base, making for quite the garden conversation piece. They rebloom all summer in zones 5-9 over tall, grassy foliage, and resist drought, salt, deer and rabbits.\n\nVenti Tequila Sunrise dahlia is a showy, vigorous plant that lives up to its name. Peach-toned double flowers with coral tips and yellow bases bloom on mounded plants from early summer through frost. Hardy in-ground in zones 8-10; dig up and store tubers indoors over winter in colder zones.\n\nFresco Apricot is a striking plant: It's taller and narrower than most other echinaceas, and its large zinnia-like flowers are a delicious peachy-apricot shade. Expect nearly nonstop blooms from June through October in zones 4-9.\n\n## ANNUALS\nCelway Salmon cockscomb boasts velvety, spiked flower clusters, each composed of one central plume surrounded by several smaller plumes atop tall, strong stems. The salmon-colored clusters bloom from spring through late summer, and their longevity in bouquets makes them well-suited for the cutting garden.\n\nVivacia Orange dianthus is a low-growing, creeping plant with grass-like foliage and large, solid, light-orange blooms. Although some cultivars are perennial, this one is categorized as annual.\n\nSuperbena Peachy Keen verbena is a vigorous grower that blooms continuously from spring through fall without deadheading. It's also heat-tolerant and deer-resistant.\n\nToucan Coral Canna is a dramatic plant with pretty peach flowers and a strong tropical vibe. The long-blooming plant tolerates heat, humidity and drought, and deer tend to avoid it.\n\nBegonia Cocoa Enchanted Sunrise has unusual, dark, chocolate-colored leaves with lime green veins that contrast strikingly with its large, peach-toned flowers. The shade lover is hardy in zones 8-11 and widely treated as an annual elsewhere.\n\n## FOLIAGE PLANTS\nNorthern Exposure Amber coral bells is a low-growing, densely mounded plant with evergreen leaves that performs equally well in full shade as in full sun. Tall, slender stems hold up tiny, bell-shaped, green flowers in late spring for added interest.\n\nColeus Fancy Feathers Copper is a mounding plant with a whimsical tuft of narrow, yellow-orange and pink leaves that will brighten shady spots, whether in the ground or in a container, as well as your mood."}
{"text": "# A Russian billionaire blames Sotheby's for losing millions on art by Picasso and da Vinci\nBy **LARRY NEUMEISTER**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 11:53 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Sotheby's defended itself at a trial Monday against accusations that it helped defraud a Russian oligarch out of tens of millions of dollars, saying it knew nothing of wrongdoing by an art buyer who advised the billionaire on buying works by famed artists like Amedeo Modigliani and Leonardo da Vinci.\n\nSotheby's attorney Sara Shudofsky told a jury in an opening statement in Manhattan federal court that billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev was \"trying to make an innocent party pay for what somebody else did to him.\"\n\nShudofsky said the fertilizer magnate, a savvy businessman who has run highly successful businesses, had \"good reason to be angry with himself\" after spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy art masterpieces without taking \"the most basic steps\" to protect himself from a broker who cheated him.\n\n\"Sotheby's didn't know anything about those lies,\" the attorney said. \"Sotheby's had no knowledge of and didn't participate in any misconduct.\"\n\nShe spoke after Rybolovlev's lawyer, Daniel Kornstein, insisted that a London-based Sotheby's executive was part of a group of executives who were in on an elaborate fraud.\n\n\"As a result of participating in the fraud, Sotheby's made a lot of money,\" Kornstein said. \"Sotheby's had choices, but they chose greed.\"\n\nThe trial is likely to provide a window into how high-stakes transactions involving art enthusiasts worldwide develop and their importance to the operations of auction houses that rely heavily on their reputations as they match up some of the world's wealthiest investors.\n\nRybolovlev, 57, who bought a Palm Beach mansion from Donald Trump for about $95 million in 2008, is expected to testify. In 2016, as Trump readied himself to become president, he called the deal \"the closest I came to Russia\" when he was questioned about his ties to the country.\n\nIn one order last March, Judge Jesse M. Furman urged lawyers to work toward a settlement to avert a trial that would be \"expensive, risky, and potentially embarrassing to both sides.\"\n\nThe case stems from $2 billion Rybolovlev spent from 2002 to 2014 to acquire a world-class art collection through purchases by two of his companies: Accent Delight International Limited and Xitrans Finance Limited.\n\nTo carry out the purchases for Rybolovlev's home in Geneva, Switzerland, he relied heavily on Yves Bouvier, an art broker who claimed he could save Rybolovlev money by handling negotiations for art in return for a 2% commission, Kornstein said.\n\nBefore long, Bouvier became such a trusted friend of the billionaire that he attended small birthday parties for Rybolovlev and his daughter and joined him at soccer matches, the lawyer said.\n\n\"Bouvier turned out to be a con man\" who bought works of art from Sotheby's and sometimes nearly doubled the price before he resold the art to Rybolovlev, Kornstein said.\n\n\"If you're the buyer and operating in darkness, you have no way of learning that unless the auction house knows about it and can help you out,\" he said.\n\nIn all, Bouvier pocketed $164 million through his \"secret markups\" and another $6.4 million by collecting his 2% commission, Kornstein said.\n\nThe lawyer told jurors to look at documents including emails that \"don't lie\" and would prove that auction house executives knew what was happening. He urged them to ignore what he predicted would be \"fairy tales\" from Sotheby's witnesses.\n\nDavid Bitton and Yves Klein, Swiss lawyers for Bouvier, said in a statement Tuesday that Bouvier \"strongly objects to any allegation of fraud.\"\n\nThey said the allegations against Bouvier in New York have been rejected \"by authorities around the world,\" with all nine legal cases brought against him in Singapore, Hong Kong, New York, Monaco and Geneva, Switzerland, being discontinued.\n\nThey also cited a news release issued by the Office of the Attorney General in Geneva in early December in which it announced it had closed an investigation that began in 2017 after conducting hearings \"which did not provide any evidence to raise sufficient suspicion against the defendants.\"\n\nAlso in December, Bouvier's lawyers announced that Bouvier had settled with Rybolovlev under undisclosed terms that ensure neither will comment on their past disputes.\n\nIn all, Rybolovlev had accused Bouvier of defrauding him through sales of 38 art pieces, including Picasso's \"Homme Assis au Verre\" and Rodin's \"Le Baiser,\" \"L'Éternel Printemps\" and \"Eve,\" but the judge last year disqualified from the trial many of the dozen or so works bought in private sales through Sotheby's on various legal grounds.\n\nAmong the four works at issue in the trial was de Vinci's \"Salvator Mundi,\" a depiction of Christ as \"Saviour of the World,\" which Bouvier bought from Sotheby's for $83 million, only to resell it to Rybolovlev for over $127 million, which Kornstein said was a \"secret markup\" of over $44 million.\n\nIn 2017, Rybolovlev arranged for Christie's to sell it and it went for a historic $450 million, becoming the most expensive painting ever sold at auction.\n\nOther artworks that Kornstein said involved improper markups that will be addressed at the trial were a Modigliani sculpture and paintings by Gustav Klimt and Rene Magritte.\n\nIn 2018, Rybolovlev was included on a list that the Trump administration released of 114 Russian politicians and oligarchs it said were linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin.\n\nHowever, he was not included on a list of Russian oligarchs sanctioned after Russia attacked Ukraine, and Kornstein told the jury that his client hasn't lived in Russia in 30 years."}
{"text": "# A man who claimed to be selling Queen Elizabeth II's walking stick is sentenced for fraud\nJanuary 9, 2024. 12:41 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - A 26-year-old man who tried to sell what he claimed was a walking stick used by the late Queen Elizabeth II has been sentenced for defrauding eBay buyers.\n\nDru Marshall, from Hampshire in southern England, claimed he was a senior footman at Windsor Castle and that the proceeds from the sale of the \"antler walking stick\" would go to cancer research. The auction had reached 540 pounds ($686) before he cancelled the listing after learning police had launched an investigation, prosecutors said.\n\nHe was found guilty of fraud by false representation at Southampton Magistrates' Court and sentenced on Monday to a 12-month community order.\n\n\"Dru Marshall used the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to try and hoodwink the public with a fake charity auction - fueled by greed and a desire for attention,\" Julie Macey, a senior crown prosecutor, said. \"Marshall's scheme was ultimately foiled before he could successfully con any unsuspecting victims.\""}
{"text": "# New rule tightens worker classification standards; Uber, Lyft say their drivers won't be affected\nBy **DAVID HAMILTON** and **ALEXANDRA OLSON**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 5:40 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - The Biden administration enacted a new labor rule Tuesday that aims to prevent the misclassification of workers as \"independent contractors,\" a step that could bolster both legal protections and compensation for millions in the U.S. workforce.\n\nMajor app-based platforms including Uber, Lyft and DoorDash expressed confidence that the new rule would not force them to reclassify their gig drivers. But business groups warned the rule creates uncertainty for employers and much depends on how the Labor Department decides to enforce it.\n\nThe Labor Department rule, which the administration proposed 15 months ago, replaces a Trump-era standard that narrowed the criteria for classifying employees as contractors. Such workers are not guaranteed minimum wages or benefits, such as health coverage and paid sick days.\n\nLabor advocates have supported the rule, saying employers have exploited lax rules to misclassify workers and avoid properly compensating them. In a report, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute said construction workers, truck drivers, cleaners, landscapers, security guards and call center workers are among the most commonly misclassified workers. It estimated that misclassified construction workers lose between $10,177 and $16,729 per year.\n\nThe rule, while will take effect March 11, directs employers to consider six criteria for determining whether a worker is an employee or a contractor, without predetermining whether one outweighs the other. That's a change from the Trump-era rule, which prioritized two criteria: how much control a company has over its workers and how much \"entrepreneurial opportunity\" the work provides.\n\nAdvocates say the new rule offers a more comprehensive approach to determining whether workers are truly in business for themselves. In a briefing with reporters Monday evening, Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su said misclassified workers \"sometimes work side by side with individuals who are properly classified, doing the same work.\"\n\n\"But misclassified employees don't get paid for all of their hours,\" Su said. \"They've seen their economic security eroded because of misclassification.\"\n\nPotentially at issue for ride-hailing, delivery and other apps is a requirement that employers consider whether the jobs performed by workers are an integral part of the company's business.\n\nMary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, which represents about 2 million workers, said in a statement that the new rule \"takes direct aim\" at the practices of corporations like Uber and Lyft that have taken \"advantage of misclassifying workers to shirk accountability as employers, avoid paying their fair share and game a system already rigged in their favor.\"\n\nBut it's up to employers initially to decide how to weigh each criteria, which also include how much control the employer has over the worker, whether the work requires special skills, the degree of permanence of the relationship between worker and employer, and the investment a worker makes, such as car payments.\n\n\"This rule does not materially change the law under which we operate, and won't impact the classification of the over one million Americans who turn to Uber to make money flexibly,\" Uber's head of federal affairs, CR Wooters, said in a prepared statement.\n\nLyft also said the new rule will not force the company to change its business model, while warning that \"this new guidance creates additional complexities and ambiguities for companies and courts alike across the country.\"\n\nFlex Association, a group that represents major app-based rideshare and delivery platforms, said it will \"seek to ensure implementation of this rule does not target workers who overwhelmingly turn to app-based platforms to earn supplemental income on their own terms.\"\n\nThe new rule comes at a time when more states are passing laws that guarantee a minimum wage and other benefits for app-based workers, including New York last year.\n\nThe U.S. Chamber of Commerce is considering challenging the rule in court, said Marc Freedman, the chamber's vice president of workplace policy.\n\nFreedman said the new guidelines make it difficult for companies to know whether they are giving enough importance to any of the six criteria. He said it will depend on how aggressively the Labor Department decides to implement the rule, but the structure is biased toward classifying workers as employees.\n\n\"It leaves employers in the dark about whether they made the right decision,\" Freedman said in an interview with The Associated Press. \"The only time they can be confident is if they call a worker an employee.\"\n\nJessica Looman, administrator of the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division, said during the briefing that the final rule isn't intended to apply specifically to certain industries or type of work. Asked about enforcement, Looman said the department will focus on the \"most vulnerable workers,\" particularly those who are being unfairly deprived of minimum wages and overtime pay.\n\nThe rule does not carry the same weight as laws passed by Congress or state legislatures. Instead, it offers an interpretation of who should qualify for protections under the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act.\n\nFinancial markets appeared to shrug off news of the new rule Tuesday. Shares of Uber gained 2.2%, while Lyft slipped about 0.5%. When the administration unveiled the proposed rules in October 2022, they dropped 10% and 12% respectively."}
{"text": "# Los Angeles County has thousands of 'unclaimed dead.' These investigators retrace their lives\nBy **STEFANIE DAZIO**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 2:19 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LOS ANGELES (AP)** - Arusyak Martirosyan struggles to open the door of a stranger's one-bedroom apartment overflowing with the belongings from a life lived but not claimed in death.\n\nWedged against the door is a giant box of Gain laundry detergent and plastic tubs piled high. Blouses and T-shirts, suspended by hangers over a living room curtain rod, block out almost all sunlight. Bins and boxes, brimming with more clothes, hide the carpet. Empty takeout containers and Tupperware, with bugs trapped inside, cover the stove.\n\nThe 74-year-old woman died in October in the hospital, and weeks later no one had come forward for her remains. Wearing a Tyvek protective suit and trailed by the building's property manager, Martirosyan hunts for a greeting card or letter sent to her that could have a family member's address on the return label - anything that would lead to a relative who could give this woman a proper burial.\n\nMartirosyan acts as a living representative of those Los Angeles County calls \"the unclaimed dead.\" She is one of more than a dozen investigators who work for the Public Administrator, an understaffed and little-known branch of the county's Department of the Treasurer and Tax Collector.\n\nHer job is to unearth who the woman was beneath all her belongings and find out who she loved, who loved her and what she wanted after her death.\n\nMartirosyan and her colleagues spend three years investigating a case before relinquishing the deceased to a communal gravesite, a last resort in the county cemetery. Similar work is done in cities across the U.S. but in Los Angeles, with one of the nation's largest homeless populations, the efforts are particularly difficult.\n\nIt is a painstaking process to retrace a life. Investigators, who handle about 200 cases yearly, are given a manila file folder containing a name, birthdate and little else for each death.\n\n\"I go through their lives in so many ways,\" Martirosyan said. \"They do become mine.\"\n\nIn the beginning, it's a race against time. The person's body lays frozen in the county morgue as the investigators scramble to find family before being forced to give the go-ahead to cremate the remains.\n\nFor weeks, they call nursing homes and houses of worship, scour public records and ancestry websites and comb through homes and apartments.\n\n\"We're like stepping into the shoes of the dead person,\" said Dennis Cotek, one of Martirosyan's supervisors, who acknowledges he often thinks about the lives he has encountered even after going home for the day.\n\n\"I always say a little prayer for them,\" he said.\n\nThe deceased may not have any surviving next-of-kin, or their loved ones can't afford to pay for an individual burial. Other times, estranged relatives refuse to be involved or a friend is unable to petition a court to take possession of their remains.\n\nMartirosyan, who has been on the job just over a year, said her work has made her keenly aware of her own mortality and spurred tearful but important conversations with her teenage son.\n\n\"This is going to happen, in one way or another, to all of us,\" she said.\n\nThat's also what largely drives her and the rest of the army of public servants on their quest to bring dignity to tens of thousands of people who die alone in the most populous U.S. county. Their efforts culminate with a communal burial and a multilingual, interfaith ceremony, an event that has been held annually since 1896.\n\nThe most recent ceremony on Dec. 14 recalled the universal devastation and loneliness of the pandemic. The burial of 1,937 people included for the first time those who died from the coronavirus. Among the dead were immigrants, children and homeless people.\n\n\"We don't know enough about the people we are burying today to really do them justice,\" county supervisor Janice Hahn said.\n\nSeveral dozen people, some wiping away tears, attended the outdoor ceremony as clergy members prayed over the communal grave in the county cemetery. Each laid a white rose at the gravesite.\n\n\"I wished we could have been there for all of them when they were still alive, in a better way, so that they didn't have to die completely disconnected and alone,\" said Susan Rorke, a local resident who has attended the services for a decade. \"I may end up in this graveyard in a ceremony when I die. So I don't miss this event.\"\n\nMany people at the service were county employees like Martirosyan and Carlos Herrera, a maintenance worker who has volunteered to help dig the graves for more than 30 years.\n\nIn early December, Herrera and his team dug a 14-foot-deep (4.27 meters) plot for the 1,937 plastic boxes containing the ashes of each person and, if known, a label with their names. The site was marked by a flat gravestone. It bears no names; only the year of their deaths, which was 2020 for this group.\n\nCotek and Martirosyan are just beginning to retrace the life of the 74-year-old woman. The investigators searched her apartment in November, having only a few basic facts in the manila folder, including a local pastor's phone number and the date when she moved into the apartment: 1988.\n\nMartirosyan methodically flipped through folders in a filing cabinet as Cotek pulled worn black-and-white composition notebooks off a bookshelf.\n\nFramed Korean Bible verses hung on the walls. They found disability benefit forms, a blank U.S. citizenship application, bank statements - all potentially important clues that went into an evidence bag.\n\nBack at their office in downtown Los Angeles, the investigators handed over the evidence bag to a colleague with a suggestion to look in Korea for potential relatives.\n\nIf no one is found after three years, the county will handle the woman's interment. If she left behind enough money in her estate, her ashes would go into an individual niche with a nameplate in a columbarium, where urns are stored.\n\nWhile her possessions were not deemed to be worth selling, the county has a warehouse full of boxes of belongings, including vinyl records, Barbie doll collections, classic cars and framed artwork, that it auctions off to pay for niches for other decedents. If there's not enough to cover that, the person's ashes will be placed in the communal grave.\n\nThe woman could be buried there in 2026.\n\nThe day after searching her apartment, Martirosyan nets a breakthrough on another case. A woman cries upon learning by phone that her mother, from whom she had been estranged, has died. It's devastating news for the daughter, but it means her mother won't end up in the county's unclaimed grave.\n\n\"This is a good day for us,\" Martirosyan said. \"At least for this portion of their lives, they're connected.\"\n\nBut in a county of nearly 10 million, there's always another life yet to be claimed.\n\nMartirosyan turns to her backlog of cases and begins again."}
{"text": "# Cocoa grown illegally in a Nigerian rainforest heads to companies that supply major chocolate makers\nBy **TAIWO ADEBAYO**  \nDecember 20, 2023. 3:48 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**OMO FOREST RESERVE, Nigeria (AP)** - Men in dusty workwear trudge through a thicket, making their way up a hill where sprawling plantations lay tucked in a Nigerian rainforest whose trees have been hacked away to make room for cocoa bound for places like Europe and the U.S.\n\nKehinde Kumayon and his assistant clear low bushes that compete for sunlight with their cocoa trees, which have replaced the lush and dense natural foliage. The farmers swing their machetes, careful to avoid the ripening yellow pods containing beans that will help create chocolate, the treat shoppers are snapping up for Christmas.\n\nOver the course of two visits and several days, The Associated Press repeatedly documented farmers harvesting cocoa beans where that work is banned in conservation areas of Omo Forest Reserve, a protected tropical rainforest 135 kilometers (84 miles) northeast of the coastal city of Lagos in southwestern Nigeria.\n\nTrees here rustle as dwindling herds of critically endangered African forest elephants rumble through. Threatened pangolins, known as armored anteaters, scramble along branches. White-throated monkeys, once thought to be extinct, leap from one tree to the next. Omo also is believed to have the highest concentration of butterflies in Africa and is one of the continent's largest and oldest UNESCO Biosphere Reserves.\n\nCocoa from the conservation zone is purchased by some of the world's largest cocoa traders, according to company and trade documents and AP interviews with more than 20 farmers, five licensed buying agents and two brokers all operating within the reserve.\n\nThey say those traders include Singapore-based food supplier Olam Group and Nigeria's Starlink Global and Ideal Limited, the latter of which acknowledged using cocoa supplies from the forest. A fewer number of those working in the forest also mentioned Tulip Cocoa Processing Ltd., a subsidiary of Dutch cocoa trader and producer Theobroma.\n\nThose companies supply Nigerian cocoa to some of the world's largest chocolate manufacturers including Mars Inc. and Ferrero, but because the chocolate supply chain is so complex and opaque, it's not clear if cocoa from deforested parts of Omo Forest Reserve makes it into the sweets that they make, such as Snickers, M&Ms, Butterfinger and Nutella. Mars and Ferrero list farming sources on their websites that are close to or overlap with the forest but do not provide specific locations.\n\nGovernment officials, rangers and the growers themselves say cocoa plantations are spreading illegally into protected areas of the reserve. Farmers say they move there because their cocoa trees in other parts of the West African country are aging and not producing as much.\n\n\"We know this is a forest reserve, but if you are hungry, you go to where there is food, and this is very fertile land,\" Kumayon told the AP, acknowledging that he's growing cocoa at an illegal plantation at the Eseke farming settlement, separated only by a muddy footpath from critical habitat for what UNESCO estimates is the remaining 100 elephants deep in the conservation zone.\n\nConservationists also point to the world's increasing demand for chocolate. The global cocoa and chocolate market is expected to grow from a value of $48 billion in 2022 to nearly $68 billion by 2029, according to analysts at Fortune Business Insights.\n\nThe chocolate supply chain has long been fraught with human rights abuses, exploitative labor and environmental damage, leading to lawsuits, U.S. trade complaints and court rulings. In response, the chocolate industry has made wide-ranging pledges and campaigns to ensure they are sourcing cocoa that is traceable, sustainable and free of abuse.\n\nCompanies say they have adopted supply chain tracing from primary sources using GPS mapping and satellite technology as well as partnered with outside organizations and third-party auditors that certify farms' compliance with sustainability standards.\n\nBut those working in the forest say checks that some companies rely on are not done, while one certifying agency, Rainforest Alliance, points to a lack of regulations and incomplete data and mapping in Nigeria.\n\nAP followed a load of cocoa that farmers had harvested in the conservation zone to the warehouses of buying agents in the reserve and then delivered to an Olam facility outside the entrance of the forest.\n\nStaffers at Olam's and Tulip's facilities just outside the reserve, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they're not authorized to discuss their companies' supplies, confirmed that they source cocoa from farmers in the conservation zone.\n\nAP also photographed cocoa bags labeled with the names and logos of Olam and Tulip in farmers' warehouses inside the conservation zone.\n\n## 'THEY BUY EVERYTHING'\nThe Omo reserve consists of a highly protected conservation zone ringed by a larger, partially protected outer region. Loggers, who are also a major source of deforestation, can get government licenses to chop down trees in the outer areas, but no licenses are given anywhere for cocoa farming. Agriculture is banned from the conservation area, except for defined areas where up to 10 indigenous communities can farm for their own food.\n\nNigeria is one of Africa's biggest oil suppliers and largest economy; after petroleum, one of its top exports is cocoa. It's the world's fourth-largest producer of cocoa, accounting for more than 5% of global supply, according to the International Cocoa Organization. Yet it's far behind the world's largest producers, Ivory Coast and Ghana, which together supply more than half of the world's demand and are often singled out in companies' sustainability programs.\n\nAccording to World Bank trade data and Nigeria's export council, more than 60% of Nigeria's cocoa heads to Europe and about 8% to the United States and Canada.\n\nIt passes through many hands to get there: Farmers grow the cocoa beans, then brokers scout farms to buy them. Licensed buying agents purchase the cocoa from brokers and sell it to big commodity trading companies like Olam and Tulip, which export it to chocolate makers.\n\nIn October, AP followed a blue- and white-striped van loaded with bags of cocoa beans along a road pitted with deep mud holes within the conservation zone to an Olam warehouse just outside the entrance of the forest. At the warehouse, which Olam confirmed was theirs, AP photographed the cocoa being unloaded from the van, whose registration number matched the one filmed in the forest.\n\nFarmer Rasaq Kolawole and licensed buying agent Muraina Nasir followed the van to sell the cocoa, and neither expressed misgivings about the deforestation.\n\n\"We are illegal occupants of the forest,\" said farmer Kolawole, a college graduate and former salesperson.\n\nAP also visited four cocoa warehouses in the forest belonging to licensed buying agents: Kadet Agro Allied Investments Ltd., Bolnif Agro-allied Farms Nigeria Ltd., Almatem and Askmana. Managers or owners all told AP that they buy from farmers growing cocoa in protected areas of the forest and that they sell that cocoa to Olam. Three of the warehouse managers told AP that they also sell to Tulip and Starlink.\n\n\"They do not differentiate between cocoa from local - that is farms outside the forest - and the reserve,\" said Waheed Azeez, proprietor of Bolnif, describing how \"big buyers like Olam, Tulip and Starlink\" buy cocoa sourced from deforested lands. \"They buy everything, and most of the cocoa is from the reserve.\"\n\nDespite AP's findings, Olam insists that it \"forbids\" members of its \"Ore Agbe Ijebu\" farmer group from \"sourcing from protected areas and important natural ecosystems like forests.\" That Ijebu farmer group is listed as a sustainable supplier on Olam's website and is said to be in Ijebu Ife, a community near the reserve.\n\n\"Any farmers found not complying with the code and illegally encroaching on forest boundaries are removed from our supply chain and expelled from the OAIJ farmer group,\" the company said in a statement emailed to AP.\n\nHowever, Askmana manager Sunday Awoke said, \"Olam does not know the farmers. We buy from the farmers and sell directly to Olam, and no assessment against deforestation takes place.\"\n\nSpeaking to AP as a convoy of motorcycles brought bags of cocoa from the conservation area to his warehouse within the reserve, Awoke said he used to be a conservation worker who fought deforestation by farmers.\n\n\"But I am on the other side now. I wish to go back, but survival first, and this pays more,\" he said.\n\nOthers agreed.\n\n\"The place is not meant for cocoa farming, but elephants,\" said Ewulola Bolarinwa, who is both a broker and a leader of those who farm at the Eseke settlement inside the conservation zone. \"We have a lot of big buyers who supply the companies in the West, including Olam, Tulip and many more.\"\n\n## COCOA TO CHOCOLATE\nFerrero, which makes Ferrero Rocher hazelnut balls, Nutella chocolate hazelnut spread and popular Baby Ruth, Butterfinger and Crunch candy bars, lists a farming group in a community near the forest as the source of its cocoa supplied by Olam, the Italian company says on its website.\n\nMcLean, Virginia-based Mars Inc., one of the world's largest end users of cocoa with brands from Snickers to M&Ms, Dove, Twix and Milky Way, uses Nigerian cocoa from both Olam and Tulip, according to online company documents.\n\nFerrero, Mars and Tulip say they're committed to their anti-deforestation policies, use GPS mapping of farms, and their suppliers are certified through independent standards.\n\nFerrero also says it relies on satellite monitoring to show that its \"cocoa sourcing from Nigeria does not come from protected forest areas.\" Mars says its preliminary findings show that none of the farms it's mapped overlap with the reserve.\n\nTulip's managing director, Johan van der Merwe, said in an email that the company's cocoa bags, which AP photographed in farmers' warehouses inside the conservation zone, are reused and distributed widely so it's possible they're seen across Nigeria. He also said \"field operatives\" complete digital questionnaires about sourcing with all farmers and suppliers.\n\nOn the ground, however, farmers and licensed buying agents who said they supply Tulip told AP that they were not required to complete any questionnaire before their cocoa is purchased.\n\n\"Though we know they depend on our cocoa, we don't directly sell cocoa to the exporters like Olam and Tulip, middlemen do, and there are no questions about deforestation,\" said farmer Saheed Arisekola, 43, also a college graduate who said he turned to farming because he could not get a job.\n\nAs farmers, brokers and buying agents say cocoa from the conservation area flows into Olam's export supply, U.S. customs records show a slice of where it might be going.\n\nOlam's American arm, Olam Americas Inc., received 18,790 bags of Nigerian cocoa shipped by its Nigerian subsidiary, Outspan Nigeria Limited, between March and April 2022, according to trade data from ImportGenius.\n\nOlam and Tulip are both licensed to trade Nigerian cocoa certified by the Rainforest Alliance. However, Olam told AP that its license does not cover the Ijebu area, where it sources the cocoa it sends to Ferrero and is near Omo Forest Reserve. Ferrero says Olam's sustainability standard in the area is verified by a third-party body.\n\nFarmers who told AP that their cocoa heads to Olam and Tulip said they are not Rainforest Alliance certified. Tulip has only one farm with active certification in Nigeria, the nonprofit's database shows.\n\nThe Rainforest Alliance says it certifies that farms operate with methods that prohibit deforestation and other anti-sustainability practices. It says farmers must provide GPS coordinates and geographic boundaries for their plantations, which are checked against public forest maps and satellite data.\n\nThe Rainforest Alliance told AP that Nigeria has \"unique forest regulation challenges,\" including incomplete or outdated data and maps that can \"lead to discrepancies when comparing forest data with real on-ground conditions.\"\n\nIt said it is working to get updated data from Nigerian authorities and would decertify any farms found to be operating illegally in conservation areas following a review. The organization also says companies it licenses can buy cocoa certified by other agencies or that isn't certified at all.\n\nStarlink Global and Ideal Limited - the Nigerian cocoa exporter that the farmers and buying agents said they sell to - doesn't have its own farmland in the reserve, \"only suppliers from there,\" spokesman Sambo Abubakar told AP.\n\nStarlink does not make sustainable sourcing claims on its website, but it supplies at least one company that does - New York-based General Cocoa Co., U.S. trade data shows.\n\nBetween March and April 2023, Starlink shipped 70 containers, each loading 4,000 bags of dried cocoa beans, to General Cocoa, according to ImportGenius trade data.\n\nGeneral Cocoa, which is owned by Paris-headquartered Sucden Group, supplies Mars, according to online company documents.\n\nJean-Baptiste Lescop, secretary general of Sucden Group, says the company manages risks to forest conservation by sourcing Rainforest Alliance cocoa, mapping farms and using satellite images but that it's a \"continuous process\" because most farmers in Nigeria don't have official land ownership documents.\n\nSucden investigates reports of problems and is working on a response to AP's findings about Starlink, Lescop said.\n\n## WHERE'S THE ENFORCEMENT?\nThe conservation zone, which spans about 650 square kilometers (250 square miles), is the only remaining vital rainforest in Nigeria's southwest, conservation officials say. Such forests help absorb carbon from the atmosphere and are crucial for Nigeria to meet its pledges under the Paris climate agreement.\n\nBesides helping fight climate change, the forest is designated an Important Bird and Biodiversity Area by BirdLife International, with significant populations of at least 75 bird species.\n\n\"There are now more than 100 illegal settlements of cocoa farmers, who came from other states because the land here is very fertile,\" said Emmanuel Olabode, a conservation manager who supervises the reserve's rangers in the protected areas. \"But after some years, the land becomes unproductive.\"\n\nThe farmers know this.\n\n\"We'll then find another land somewhere else or go back to our original homes to start new businesses,\" said Kaseem Olaniyi, who acknowledges that he farms illegally in the conservation zone after moving in 2014 from a neighboring state.\n\nThe government in Ogun state, which owns the forest, said in a statement to AP that the \"menace of cocoa farming\" in the reserve dates back decades and that \"all the illegal farmers were forcefully evicted\" in 2007 before they found their way back.\n\n\"Arrangements are in the pipeline to engage the services of the Nigerian Police Force and the military to evict them from the Forest Reserve,\" the government statement said.\n\nHowever, Omolola Odutola, spokeswoman for the federally controlled police, said they do not have records of such a plan.\n\nThe farmers have been ordered not to start new farms, and those who spoke with AP said they are complying. But forest guards said new farms are sprouting up in remote areas that are difficult to detect.\n\nRangers - who work for the government's conservation partner, the nonprofit Nigerian Conservation Foundation - and forest guards who are employed by the state government both told AP that lax government enforcement has made combating cocoa expansion a challenge.\n\nThey told AP that previous arrests have done little to stop the farmers from returning and that has led to a sense of futility when they encounter illegal farming.\n\nThe state government said it \"has never compromised regulations\" but acknowledged that farmers are in the forest despite its efforts. Homes and other buildings at farming settlements visited by AP have been marked for removal, including warehouses like that of licensed buying agent Kadet, one of the biggest there.\n\nFarmers' homes lack running water and toilets, forcing women and children to collect water from narrow streams to use while the men work.\n\nThe removals have not taken place because officials make money from the cocoa business in the forest, according to farmers and buying agents, who lament the difficult living conditions, with mud roads filled with holes creating high transportation costs that eat away their already meager profits.\n\nThe state government declined to comment about making money from illegal cocoa farming in the forest.\n\nThe agents have formed a lobby group that has \"rapport with government officials\" to ensure farmers remain in the conservation zone despite threats to evict them, said Azeez, the owner of buying agent Bolnif who is also chairman of a committee that monitors risks against cocoa business in the forest.\n\nThe European Union, the largest destination of cocoa from West Africa, has enacted a new regulation on deforestation-free products that requires companies selling commodities like cocoa to prove they have not caused deforestation. Big companies must ensure they're following the rules by the end of 2024.\n\nExperts at the Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria are launching a \"Trace Project\" in six southern states - though it doesn't include Ogun state where Omo Forest Reserve is located - to advance efforts against deforestation in cocoa production and ensure Nigeria's cocoa is not rejected in Europe.\n\n\"From the preliminary data collected, major exporters are implicated in deforestation, and it is their responsibility to ensure compliance with standards,\" said Rasheed Adedeji, who leads the institute's research outreach.\n\nBut farmers say they'll keep finding places to work.\n\n\"The world needs cocoa, and the government also gets taxes because the cocoa is exported,\" said Olaniyi, one of the farmers."}
{"text": "# In $25M settlement, North Carolina city `deeply remorseful' for man's wrongful conviction, prison\nJanuary 9, 2024. 6:20 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CONCORD, N.C. (AP)** - A man wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for 44 years has reached a $25 million combined settlement with a central North Carolina city and the state of North Carolina involving a lawsuit accusing authorities of misconduct, the man's lawyers said Tuesday.\n\nThe settlement, which will end a wrongful incarceration lawsuit filed by attorneys for Ronnie Wallace Long in 2021, also included a public written apology from the city of Concord for its role in his imprisonment. The city, located about 25 miles (40 kilometers) northeast of Charlotte, has agreed to pay $22 million of the settlement.\n\n\"We are deeply remorseful for the past wrongs that caused tremendous harm to Mr. Long, his family, friends, and our community,\" the city's statement read. \"While there are no measures to fully restore to Mr. Long and his family all that was taken from them, through this agreement we are doing everything in our power to right the past wrongs and take responsibility.\"\n\nLong, now 68, was a young Black man living in Concord when he was accused of raping a white woman. An all-white jury in Cabarrus County that Long's attorneys said was handpicked by local law enforcement leaders convicted Long of burglary and rape in 1976. At age 21, Long received two life sentences.\n\nLong was helped for years in his criminal case appeal by a wrongful convictions clinic at Duke University's law school. Long's attorneys had said that more than 40 fingerprints collected from the scene were never shared and did not match Long's. Semen samples also were never disclosed to the defense. They later disappeared.\n\nIn August 2020, a federal appeals court ordered a new hearing for Long in his effort to obtain relief. Almost immediately, his conviction was vacated and Long was released from prison. Gov. Roy Cooper later that year granted him a full pardon of innocence.\n\nA few months later, a state commission awarded Long $750,000 - by law the state's top compensation for victims of wrongful incarceration. He then sued in federal court in Raleigh, and in part accused Concord police officers of \"extraordinary misconduct\" that led to his wrongful conviction and imprisonment in violation of his civil rights.\n\nAs part of the settlement, Long also received $3 million from the State Bureau of Investigation \"as a result of the SBI's role in hiding evidence from Mr. Long and his legal team that proved his innocence,\" a news release from his attorneys in the lawsuit said. An SBI spokesperson didn't immediately respond Tuesday to an email and text seeking comment.\n\nThe city of Concord also said Tuesday it \"acknowledges and accepts responsibility for the significant errors in judgment and willful misconduct by previous city employees that led to Long's wrongful conviction and imprisonment.\"\n\nWhile Long's attorneys described the monetary payments as one of the largest wrongful conviction settlements nationwide, they said the city's statement was extremely important to their client.\n\n\"This result speaks to the magnitude of injustice that occurred in Mr. Long's case,\" said Chris Olson, one of his lawyers in the lawsuit, adding the \"apology goes a long way in helping Mr. Long heal.\""}
{"text": "# Meta to hide posts about suicide, eating disorders from teens' Instagram and Facebook feeds\nBy **BARBARA ORTUTAY**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 6:13 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SAN FRANCISCO (AP)** - Meta said Tuesday it will start hiding inappropriate content from teenagers' accounts on Instagram and Facebook, including posts about suicide, self-harm and eating disorders.\n\nThe social media giant based in Menlo Park, California, said in a blog post that while it already aims not to recommend such \"age-inappropriate\" material to teens, now it also won't show it in their feeds, even if it is shared by an account they follow.\n\n\"We want teens to have safe, age-appropriate experiences on our apps,\" Meta said.\n\nTeen users - provided they did not lie about their age when they signed up for Instagram or Facebook - will also see their accounts placed on the most restrictive settings on the platforms, and they will be blocked from searching for terms that might be harmful.\n\n\"Take the example of someone posting about their ongoing struggle with thoughts of self-harm. This is an important story, and can help destigmatize these issues, but it's a complex topic and isn't necessarily suitable for all young people,\" Meta said. \"Now, we'll start to remove this type of content from teens' experiences on Instagram and Facebook, as well as other types of age-inappropriate content.\"\n\nMeta's announcement comes as the company faces lawsuits from dozens of U.S. states that accuse it of harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms.\n\nCritics said Meta's moves don't go far enough.\n\n\"Today's announcement by Meta is yet another desperate attempt to avoid regulation and an incredible slap in the face to parents who have lost their kids to online harms on Instagram,\" said Josh Golin, executive director of the children's online advocacy group Fairplay. \"If the company is capable of hiding pro-suicide and eating disorder content, why have they waited until 2024 to announce these changes?\""}
{"text": "# Armed man fatally shot by police in Baltimore suburb, officials say\nJanuary 9, 2024. 6:12 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PIKESVILLE, Md. (AP)** - Police in a Baltimore suburb shot and killed a man late Tuesday morning after responding to a 911 call about a domestic disturbance, officials said.\n\nThe initial call came from a hotel, but responding officers found the suspect had fled on foot. They located him at a nearby gas station and convenience store soon thereafter, Baltimore County Police spokesperson Joy Stewart said at a news conference Tuesday evening.\n\nWhen officers approached the suspect inside the store, he pointed a gun at them, Stewart said. The officers retreated outside, she said, but the suspect exited the store and \"engaged our officers.\"\n\nThree officers opened fire in response, Stewart said. She did not specify whether the suspect fired his gun.\n\nThe suspect was later pronounced dead at a local hospital. His identity has not been released.\n\nOfficials said all three officers were wearing body cameras that were switched on during the deadly encounter.\n\nPer state law, the Maryland Attorney General's Office is investigating the shooting, which occurred in Pikesville, a suburb northwest of Baltimore."}
{"text": "# Alabama lead rusher Jase McClellan joins Tide's NFL draft exodus\nJanuary 9, 2024. 6:12 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (AP)** - Alabama running back Jase McClellan is entering the NFL draft, leaving the Crimson Tide without their two leading rushers going into next season.\n\nMcClellan announced his decision Tuesday on social media. No. 2 rusher Roydell Williams had already entered the transfer portal.\n\nMcClellan had the most productive of his four seasons with Alabama in 2023, rushing for a team-best 890 yards and eight touchdowns.\n\n\"The coaches, staff and teammates that I have met here are ones that I will cherish and remember forever,\" McClellan posted. \"But, after some long talks with my family, I believe that the next chapter of my life is here now.\"\n\nHe joins a number of teammates in opting to declare for the draft, including linebackers Dallas Turner and Chris Braswell, cornerbacks Kool-Aid McKinstry and Terrion Arnold, wide receiver Jermaine Burton and offensive tackle JC Latham.\n\nMcClellan missed the SEC championship game win over Georgia with a foot injury but had a big game in the Rose Bowl.\n\nHe had 14 carries for 87 yards and two touchdowns in the loss to Michigan, which went on to win the national championship. He also had 15 catches for 137 yards.\n\nMcClellan finished his college career rushing for 1,981 yards and 18 touchdowns.\n\nThe top returning running backs are Jamarion Miller (215 yards) and Justice Haynes (160)."}
{"text": "# Warriors forward Draymond Green committed to playing without 'antics' that have plagued him\nBy **JANIE McCAULEY**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 10:48 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SAN FRANCISCO (AP)** - Draymond Green is vowing a commitment to playing without the \"antics\" that have plagued him on the court throughout his career, working over the past month on ways to control his emotions and not let hostility take over.\n\nOh, yes, he still plans to compete on the edge and isn't promising he will be perfect during this process.\n\n\"Antics isn't something that got me here, and so when I look back on these situations it's like, 'Can you remove the antics?' I'm very confident I can remove the antics,\" Green said, \"and I'm very confident that if I do remove the antics, no one's worried about how I play the game of basketball. Nobody's worried about how I carry myself in the game of basketball but it's the antics. So that's my focus.\"\n\nThrough therapy, Green said he has learned techniques to better deal with tense moments during games when he has previously lost his cool, embracing the idea of improving himself after being disciplined by the NBA with an indefinite suspension last month.\n\n\"As far as not crossing the line with a referee, yes, that's a big point of emphasis for me, and knowing and understanding where that line is,\" Green said, speaking for more than 35 minutes Tuesday following his first formal practice since being reinstated Saturday from a 12-game league suspension.\n\nHe added it's about \"developing a practice, developing a routine\" - and the NBA, Warriors and others supported him in how that might look.\n\nStill, Green insists he has \"cost my team enough\" and feels a sense of urgency to get back on the court and help the Warriors. He doesn't have a return date: \"Not yet but I'm pushing to make that as soon as possible.\"\n\n\"Accepting what the league handed down was the easy part from a personal standpoint,\" Green said.\n\nHe noted that a positive of the indefinite timeline was focusing on \"being in a better space\" without the stress of focusing on an immediate return to basketball. He even contemplated retirement and didn't touch a ball for \"the first 10 days because it was the least important thing to me.\"\n\nFor now, Green will prepare for how he handles himself going forward.\n\n\"Going into anything, you can only best prepare yourself for what moments you may face and then you'll be put to the test,\" he said. \"What is real is preparing yourself and doing a lot of self work so that when you are in these moments you know where you can turn to.\"\n\nCoach Steve Kerr said he has spoken to Green about finishing this special run with the Warriors on a positive note. They also discussed the idea of \"no more buts,\" such as giving an apology without explanation and then moving forward - a combination of humility with his bravado.\n\n\"Let's do it the right way, let's do it with dignity, let's do it with competitive desire, let's do it joyfully,\" Kerr shared of his message.\n\n\"He's obviously still a huge part of this thing.\"\n\nGreen rejoined the Warriors on Sunday for a walk-through and then sat on the bench for a loss to Toronto. It wasn't clear when he would return to game action - but Kerr said Green would need to do some scrimmaging to determine his status.\n\nGreen said he received applause from teammates as he reintegrated into a film session that was appreciated but not necessarily deserved.\n\nHe served his second suspension this season, this time for hitting Phoenix center Jusuf Nurkic in the face on Dec. 12.\n\nThe fiery Warriors forward also had previously served a five-game suspension in November for putting a chokehold on Minnesota big man Rudy Gobert.\n\n\"What makes Draymond great is his bravado, his emotions,\" Kerr said. \"I don't expect Draymond to all of a sudden behave like Steph Curry or Tim Duncan. I want him to behave like himself. But there needs to be some humility in the wake of everything that's happened that goes along with that bravado. We still need that bravado, we still need that emotion. We need the humility that comes when you know you're wrong, when you've made serious mistakes, when you've put your team at peril. That balance is the key to all of this, and Draymond knows that.\"\n\nLast season during training camp, Green took a leave of absence from the 2022 NBA champions in what Kerr called a \"mutual decision\" after he violently punched then-teammate Jordan Poole in the face.\n\nThe league announced Saturday the end of Green's indefinite suspension, saying he \"demonstrated his commitment to conforming his conduct to standards expected of NBA players\" during the penalty that began Dec. 14. Green has met with a counselor as well as having multiple joint meetings with representatives of the league, the Warriors and the National Basketball Players Association.\n\nThe 33-year-old Green, a key member of four Warriors championships, was ejected for the 18th time in his career - most among active NBA players - during that 119-116 loss at Phoenix.\n\nGreen noted he also wants his children to see him trying to be a better example and exhibiting growth from the mistakes he has made.\n\n\"If I can help one person grow, great,\" Green said. \"My goal is that a lot of people can learn from it. My goal most importantly is to grow. ... I'll probably mess up along the way and that's all a part of growing.\""}
{"text": "# New Jersey's State of the State: Teen voting, more AI, lower medical debt among governor's pitches\nBy **MIKE CATALINI**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 5:50 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**TRENTON, N.J. (AP)** - New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy on Tuesday announced a series of new measures he wants the newly expanded Democrat-led Legislature to adopt, including allowing 16-year-olds to vote in school board elections, reducing medical debt, expanding affordable housing and launching an artificial intelligence \"moonshot.\"\n\nMurphy delivered his sixth state of the state address before a joint legislative session in the ornate Assembly chamber where Democrats picked up six seats in the November election. Murphy also reiterated calls he's made since his reelection in 2021 to further ease property taxes and expand free pre-K, among the measures that he says make the state \"stronger and fairer.\"\n\n\"From day 1, the vision has been to grow New Jersey from the bottom up and the middle out,\" Murphy said.\n\nThe annual speech kicks off the legislative year and will be followed in a few weeks by the governor's budget address, where he'll specify how he wants lawmakers to allot the state's income for the year.\n\nThe two-term governor concentrated heavily on his and fellow Democrats' efforts to help rein in property taxes, among the highest in the country, all part of an effort that Murphy said makes the state \"the best place anywhere to raise a family.\"\n\nRepublicans, who are in the minority in the Legislature, said they would work with the governor to make the state more affordable, but balked at many of his specific proposals. Taxes are still too high, they said, despite the governor's focus on affordability.\n\n\"Our tax burden is still the highest in the nation, and the tax hurdles we put in front of the businesses are still the highest in the nation,\" said Republican Sen. Declan O'Scanlon.\n\nMurphy's newest proposals include a call for letting 16- and 17-year-olds vote in school board elections. A handful of towns and cities around the country, including California, Maryland and Vermont have similar allowances, according to the National Youth Rights Association.\n\n\"Encouraging our young neighbors to engage with democracy is really about encouraging them to become lifelong voters,\" he said.\n\nIn an emotional highpoint, Murphy's voice quavered as he said he would name a package of bills to reduce medical debt after Louisa Carman, a 25-year-old member of his staff who was killed in a car accident on New Year's Day.\n\n\"In the wealthiest nation in the world, nobody should have to worry about being able to afford critical health care services or a lifesaving medical procedure,\" he said.\n\nThe state has long struggled with how to enforce affordable housing requirements, currently being managed through the courts. He called on legislators to send him a bill to make it easier to build such housing, though it's unclear exactly what that measure would look like.\n\nHe also called on the state's \"top minds\" to pioneer artificial intelligence technology, and laid out a kind of welcome mat for firms working on AI.\n\n\"Our state government will be a catalyst for bringing together innovators and leaders to invest in research and development,\" he said.\n\nA left-leaning former financial executive, Murphy came into office contrasting himself with his predecessor, Republican Chris Christie, who is in the midst of his second run for the GOP nomination for president.\n\nMurphy has steered the state in a different direction: Where Christie clashed with labor leaders, Murphy on Tuesday hailed the state's expanded unionized workforce. Christie vetoed funding for abortion services, which Murphy has restored - and the list goes on.\n\nMurphy has signed gun control bills into law, and touted them in his speech Tuesday, highlighting the state's record drop in gun deaths. He's signed into law tax hikes on the wealthy, overseen the establishment of a recreational marijuana industry, and signed a bill to enact a $15 an hour minimum wage, which took effect this year.\n\nWhile Murphy delivered on a number of campaign promises, thanks in large part to Democrats who control the Legislature, a 2023 vow to rewrite the state's Prohibition-era liquor license system remains unfulfilled.\n\nMurphy also did not mention the state's involvement in taking over the Paterson police department or give an update on a promise to close the state's women's prison, which the governor said last year was partially underway."}
{"text": "# Gov. Kristi Noem touts South Dakota's workforce recruitment effort\nBy **JACK DURA**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 5:42 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PIERRE, S.D. (AP)** - South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem touted her state's economic success and employment opportunities Tuesday, highlighting her workforce recruitment campaign to lawmakers who are beginning their legislative session.\n\nIn her State of the State address, the second-term Republican governor urged the GOP-controlled Legislature to ban foreign adversaries from owning farm land, define antisemitism, boost teacher pay and offer \"second chance\" occupational licensing for people with criminal histories.\n\nNoem lauded her Freedom Works Here advertising campaign to attract people to move to the state, which has 20,000 open jobs. She said the videos, which feature her as a plumber, welder and in other high-demand jobs, have already drawn thousands of new residents and hundreds of millions of views.\n\n\"I'm not going to slow down. We can't afford it, not when people are flocking here by the thousands to be like us, not when we are the few beacons of hope left in this country,\" she said.\n\nSouth Dakota, which has about 900,000 residents, had a 2% unemployment rate in November, just behind North Dakota's 1.9% rate and Maryland's 1.8% rate. Nationally, the rate was 3.7% for that month, the most recent data available from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.\n\nNoem said South Dakota's workforce has grown by more than 10,000 people in the last year. In a news release, she noted \"huge increases of out-of-state applicants seeking licenses in South Dakota - including a 78% increase in plumbers, a 44% increase in electricians, and a 43% increase in accountants,\" reported from state licensing boards.\n\nRepublican Senate Majority Leader Casey Crabtree said he welcomed Noem's economic message.\n\n\"When we've got a strong economy, we've got a better quality of life. It means better education. It means better health care. It means a better all-around life for the people of South Dakota, and so continuing to focus on that is smart,\" Crabtree said.\n\nDemocratic state Rep. Linda Duba said she wants to see \"hard data\" and the return on investment from the Freedom Works Here campaign, which has drawn scrutiny from a top legislative panel. The campaign's first phase cost $5 million. The budget for its second phase is about $1.5 million.\n\nDuba also said that while she supports some of the governor's goals, she would like to see earlier help for criminal offenders on their addictions and a focus on support for families through such things as child care and food assistance.\n\nNoem touted South Dakota's parenting and pregnancy resources, including a nursing services program for first-time mothers, care coordination for pregnant women enrolled in Medicaid, and safe sleep recommendations for new parents.\n\nThe governor also announced plans to hang the flags of the Standing Rock and Rosebud Sioux tribes in the state Capitol rotunda on Wednesday. The two tribes will be the first of the nine tribal nations within South Dakota's boundaries to have their flags displayed. Noem called the tribes \"part of who we are as South Dakotans.\"\n\nIn December, Noem presented her budget plan to lawmakers, including 4% increases for the state's \"big three\" priorities of K-12 education, health care providers and state employees. She pitched a nearly $7.3 billion budget for fiscal year 2025.\n\nOnce seen a 2024 presidential candidate, Noem last year endorsed former President Donald Trump in his bid."}
{"text": "# Three-strikes proposal part of sweeping anti-crime bill unveiled by House Republicans in Kentucky\nBy **BRUCE SCHREINER**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 7:57 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP)** - Republican lawmakers in the Kentucky House unveiled a three-strikes measure on Tuesday that would keep people locked up after being convicted of a third violent felony.\n\nThe proposal is part of a much broader anti-crime bill designated as a priority for Republicans in the 60-day session. The measure surfaced during the second week of the session after lawmakers spent months meeting with stakeholders and tinkering with many of the provisions.\n\nDozens of House members quickly signed on as cosponsors, with more expected to follow.\n\n\"This bill is about putting people who are going to continue to commit crime, getting them off our streets,\" said Republican Rep. Jason Nemes, among the bill's supporters.\n\nThe proposal would result in life in prison without the possibility of parole for those who commit three violent felonies in Kentucky, GOP Rep. Jared Bauman, the bill's lead sponsor, told reporters.\n\nCrime was a central issue in last year's gubernatorial campaign, won by Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear. Beshear and GOP challenger Daniel Cameron offered competing public safety plans.\n\nLawmakers will ultimately set the policy direction for any anti-crime bill reaching the governor's desk.\n\nThe legislation unveiled Tuesday also seeks to crack down on the prevalence of fentanyl - a powerful synthetic opioid blamed as a key factor for the state's high death toll from drug overdoses. The bill would toughen penalties for knowingly selling fentanyl or a fentanyl derivative that results in a fatal overdose.\n\nThe measure would create a standalone carjacking law and increase penalties for several crimes, ranging from attempted murder to fleeing or evading police. Other provisions aim to crack down on drive-by shootings and would offer both workers and business owners civil and criminal immunity in cases where they tried to prevent theft or protect themselves and their stores. It also would limit bail payments by charitable bail organizations to less than $5,000.\n\nThe American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky criticized several elements including the three-strikes measure, with Kungu Njuguna, a policy analyst for the group, saying that \"criminalization penalties don't make us safe.\"\n\nNjuguna pointed to already-high incarceration rates in Kentucky and said a better strategy for improving public safety is to invest more in mental health and substance use treatment, affordable housing, transportation and education.\n\n\"We need to get at the root causes of what get people into the criminal legal system and prevent them from getting into the system,\" Njuguna told reporters.\n\nThe three-strikes proposal reflects the overarching goal of combating violent crime, bill supporters said.\n\n\"We cannot just stand by as our state's most violent offenders circulate between the courts, the correction system and back on our streets committing crimes,\" Bauman said. \"Let's shut the revolving door.\"\n\nNemes added: \"If you've committed two violent acts against somebody, you should go to prison for a long time, perhaps the rest of your life. Three's certainly enough. What about the fourth victim? We're trying to reduce victims.\"\n\nThe state has significantly increased the number of drug treatment beds, trying to tackle an underlying cause for crime, and more efforts will be forthcoming to overcome drug addiction, Nemes said.\n\n\"But this bill is about better identifying those who are going to commit violence against us, finding them and putting them in jail for a long time,\" Nemes said."}
{"text": "# City council committee recommends replacing Memphis police chief, 1 year after Tyre Nichols death\nBy **ADRIAN SAINZ**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 5:29 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP)** - A Memphis City Council committee voted Tuesday to replace police chief Cerelyn \"CJ\" Davis a year after the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols by five officers generated intense criticism of her department and led to a federal investigation into how it fights crime.\n\nThe council's executive committee, which includes all of the council's 13 members, recommended by a 7 -6 vote to reject the reappointment of Davis. The council will vote later on a binding vote on the fate of Davis, who was hired by the city in 2021.\n\nThe new mayor - Paul Young, who took office Jan. 1 after he was elected in November - had sought the reappointment of Davis, saying he firmly believed she was the right person for the job but that he would make a change if she did not produce the results the city needs. Davis was appointed by previous Mayor Jim Strickland, who left office due to term limits.\n\nDavis was in charge of the department when Nichols, who was Black, was hit with a stun gun, pepper sprayed, punched and kicked by officers after a traffic stop. The officers were part of a crime-suppression team called the Scorpion unit, which was established in 2021, after Davis took over as Memphis Police Director.\n\nNichols died on Jan. 10, 2023 - three days after the beating - and camera footage of it was released publicly. The beating was part of a series of cases of police brutality against Black people that sparked protests and renewed debate the need for police reform in the U.S.\n\nIn all, seven officers were fired for violating department policies, resulting in Nichols' death, while an eighth was allowed to retire before he could be fired.\n\nFive of the fired officers - Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin, Desmond Mills Jr. and Justin Smith - were charged with second-degree murder and other offenses in state court, and with civil rights violations in federal court. The five officers are Black.\n\nMills pleaded guilty in November to federal charges of excessive force and obstruction of justice. The plea is part of a larger deal in which prosecutors said he had also agreed to plead guilty later to state charges. The four other officers have pleaded not guilty to the state and federal charges.\n\nThe officers said they pulled Nichols over because he was driving recklessly, but Davis, the police director, has said no evidence was found to support that allegation.\n\nDavis disbanded the Scorpion unit after the beating, and was initially praised for quickly firing the officers. But Nichols' death shined a bright light on the department and Davis, and calls for her ouster increased among activists and citizens frustrated with an increase in overall crime - which includes a city-record 398 homicides and a jump in auto burglaries to more than 14,000 last year.\n\nThe U.S. Department of Justice announced an investigation in July into how Memphis police officers use force and conduct arrests, one of several \"patterns and practices\" investigations it has undertaken in other cities. The probe is looking at how officers use force and conduct arrests, and answers long-standing calls for such an investigation from critics of the way police treat minorities in majority-Black Memphis.\n\nIn March, the Justice Department said it was conducting a separate review concerning use of force, de-escalation strategies and specialized units in the police department.\n\nDavis, the city and the former officers are also being sued by Nichols' mother in federal court. Filed in April, the $550 million lawsuit blames them for his death and accuses Davis of allowing the Scorpion unit's aggressive tactics to go unchecked despite warning signs.\n\nThe committee meeting was contentious at times, with council members questioning Davis about her record and whether her officers support her. A group of uniformed police officers sat in the audience in support of their boss. Some audience members held signs saying \"We support chief Davis,\" while others had signs saying \"No on chief Davis.\"\n\nDavis made a presentation that detailed accomplishments during her tenure, including hiring more than 400 officers and expanding community-oriented policing. Young also spoke in support of her and the other people he recommended for appointment to city jobs.\n\nBut council chair JB Smiley Jr., who voted against Davis' reappointment, said Memphis \"deserves better.\"\n\n\"Chief Davis had two and a half years,\" Smiley said. \"That's ample time to get it right.\""}
{"text": "# Former UK opposition leader Corbyn to join South Africa's delegation accusing Israel of genocide\nBy **GERALD IMRAY**  \nJanuary 10, 2024. 9:24 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP)** - Former U.K. opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn will join a South African delegation for this week's hearings at the International Court of Justice, where the country accuses Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in the war in Gaza, the South African government said Tuesday.\n\nSouth Africa brought the case against Israel last month, accusing it of intending \"to destroy Palestinians in Gaza,\" and asked the U.N.'s top court to order Israel to halt its attacks. Israel rejected South Africa's allegations of genocide \"with disgust\" and said it will defend itself at the court.\n\nSouth Africa's Justice Ministry said Corbyn was one of a number of \"senior political figures from progressive political parties and movements across the globe\" who will join the South African delegation at the Hague in the Netherlands for two days of preliminary hearings which begin on Thursday.\n\nCorbyn was the only one of those foreign political figures in its delegation named by the South African government.\n\nCorbyn's leadership of the left-of-center Labour Party in Britain was stained by allegations of antisemitism. He is a longtime supporter of the Palestinian cause and a fierce critic of Israel. He was suspended from the Labour group in Parliament in 2020, and later barred from running for the party after Britain's equalities watchdog found party officials had committed acts of \"harassment and discrimination\" against Jews and said anti-Jewish prejudice had been allowed to spread within Labour under his leadership.\n\nCorbyn expressed support for South Africa's case against Israel on Monday and criticized the British government in a message posted on X, formerly Twitter.\n\n\"Every day, another unspeakable atrocity is committed in Gaza,\" he wrote. \"Millions of people around the world support South Africa's efforts to hold Israel to account. Why can't our government?\"\n\nU.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said that Britain stands by Israel as it wages war on Hamas in response to the group's surprise Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, when Palestinian militants killed around 1,200 people, mainly civilians.\n\nEarlier Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken dismissed the case filed by South Africa against Israel, calling the allegations \"meritless\" and saying they distract from efforts to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza.\n\nIsrael's assault in Gaza has killed more than 23,200 Palestinians, roughly 1% of the territory's population, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza. About two-thirds of the dead are women and children. The death toll does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.\n\nSouth Africa's delegation to the Hague will be led by Minister of Justice Ronald Lamola and will also include senior figures from the office of President Cyril Ramaphosa and the Ministry of Justice, the Justice Ministry said in a statement.\n\n\"We are determined to see the end of the genocide that is currently taking place in Gaza,\" Lamola said.\n\nJustice Ministry spokesperson Chrispin Phiri delivered a separate statement on video naming the South African delegation while wearing a red and white checkered Palestinian keffiyeh scarf around his neck.\n\nSouth Africa is not a global diplomatic heavyweight but its decision to open a case against Israel is a reflection of its historic support for the Palestinians that dates back to the days of the late anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela.\n\nMandela compared the plight of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank with that of Black South Africans under the apartheid system of forced racial segregation in his own country, which ended in 1994. South Africa has for years referred to Israel as an \"apartheid state.\"\n\nSouth Africa's ruling African National Congress party remains a strong supporter of the Palestinians. Last month, Mandela's grandson, Mandla Mandela, an ANC lawmaker, hosted Hamas officials at a conference in South Africa and invited them to a ceremony marking the 10th anniversary of his grandfather's death.\n\nThe South African Jewish Board of Deputies said it was \"disgusted\" by the presence of Hamas in South Africa."}
{"text": "# An Oregon judge enters the final order striking down a voter-approved gun control law\nJanuary 9, 2024. 7:14 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PORTLAND, Ore. (AP)** - An Oregon judge has entered the final order striking down a gun control law that was narrowly approved by voters in 2022.\n\nHarney County Circuit Court Judge Robert Raschio signed the general judgment on Monday. The judgment finalizes the opinion Raschio issued in November finding the law violated the right to bear arms under the Oregon Constitution.\n\nThe law, one of the toughest in the nation, was among the first gun restrictions to be passed after a major U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year changed the guidance judges are expected to follow when considering Second Amendment cases.\n\nThe law requires people to undergo a criminal background check and complete a gun safety training course to obtain a permit to buy a firearm. It also bans high-capacity magazines.\n\nMeasure 114 has been tied up in state and federal court since it was approved by voters in November 2022.\n\nThe state trial stemmed from a lawsuit filed by gun owners claiming the law violated the right to bear arms under the state constitution. Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, one of the defendants in the case, vowed to appeal the ruling."}
{"text": "# Chelsea wasteful as second-tier Middlesbrough gains 1-0 first-leg advantage in League Cup semifinal\nJanuary 9, 2024. 6:46 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MIDDLESBROUGH, England (AP)** - Cole Palmer missed from close range and Chelsea lost 1-0 to second-tier Middlesbrough in the first leg of their League Cup semifinal on Tuesday.\n\nHayden Hackney scored in the 37th minute and Middlesbrough held on at Riverside Stadium against its Premier League opponent.\n\nMauricio Pochettino's expensively assembled team has been eyeing cup trophies to make up for a disappointing Premier League campaign. They'll have work to do in the second leg at Stamford Bridge on Jan. 23.\n\n\"We had too many chances to score where we didn't score. That is football,\" Pochettino told Sky Sports. \"We have another 90 minutes at Stamford Bridge, and I think we need to be positive.\"\n\nMiddlesbrough hasn't been this far in the League Cup since winning the competition in 2004.\n\nHackney scored after sprinting past midfielder Moises Caicedo - a big-money signing last summer - inside the box and poking Isaiah Jones' low cross past goalkeeper Djordje Petrovic into the net.\n\n\"It was amazing. Great ball. I just got on the end of it,\" the 21-year-old Hackney said. \"We said before the game - try to keep it tight and catch them on the counter.\"\n\nPalmer, who shot wide earlier in the first half, just needed a tap in to equalize after Middlesbrough goalkeeper Tom Glover misplayed Enzo Fernandez's shot in the fourth minute of first-half stoppage time.\n\nIn what should have been a simple catch, the ball instead bounced off Glover's chest directly to Palmer, who tried to volley it in from about 5 yards out. He got under it, however, and his left-footed effort sailed over the crossbar.\n\nThe 21-year-old Palmer, who joined Chelsea from Manchester City for around $52 million in the offseason, is Chelsea's co-leading scorer this season with eight goals.\n\nMiddlesbrough is 12th in the Championship and lost to Aston Villa 1-0 on Saturday in the FA Cup third round.\n\n\"To beat a team of the quality of Chelsea, in any circumstances for us, is unbelievable,\" said Middlesbrough manager Michael Carrick, the former Manchester United star. \"The lads were just exceptional. It was an incredible night.\"\n\nLiverpool hosts Fulham on Wednesday in the other League Cup semifinal first leg."}
{"text": "# County official Richardson says she'll challenge US Rep. McBath in Democratic primary in Georgia\nJanuary 9, 2024. 7:04 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ATLANTA (AP)** - Jerica Richardson, a county commissioner in suburban Atlanta, announced Tuesday that she will challenge U.S. Rep. Lucy McBath in the Democratic primary in May in a new congressional district on the west side of Atlanta.\n\nRichardson, a Cobb County commissioner, had previously said she would run for Congress, but her decision had been uncertain after Georgia state lawmakers radically reconfigured McBath's current district. McBath jumped to a new 6th Congressional District in Fulton, Cobb, Douglas and Fayette counties in which Richardson will also run.\n\nThe new district is majority Black, and Richardson and McBath are both Black. No other candidates have announced they're running.\n\nRichardson said in a statement Tuesday that she decided to run against McBath after a Georgia judge ruled Monday that Cobb County commissioners could not override lawmakers and redraw their own districts.\n\nThe Republican-majority Legislature passed maps that drew Richardson out of her commission district. Commissioners asserted in 2022 that they had home-rule authority to draw their own districts, but a judge rejected that claim. The county has said it will appeal the judge's ruling to the state Supreme Court.\n\nBut in the meantime, Richardson said, she's running for Congress.\n\n\"Too many voters feel they are being ignored,\" Richardson said. \"I decided to run to remind people just how powerful they really are, to restore hope, and help spread information that empowered members of my community.\"\n\nRunning against McBath could be an uphill climb. The incumbent said last week that she's already raised more than $1 million for her 2024 race.\n\n\"I refuse to let the GOP bully me out of Congress,\" McBath said Friday. \"The stakes are too high.\"\n\nRichardson, though, said that there's no incumbent in the district and that most of the constituents will be voting for a different representative than they have now. Most of the district has been represented by U.S. Reps. David Scott or Nikema Williams, both Atlanta Democrats.\n\nIt will be the second election in a row that McBath has run in a new district. After the district she originally won was redrawn to favor Republicans, she jumped to her current 7th District, which includes parts of Gwinnett and Fulton counties. But in a December special session ordered by a federal judge, Republican lawmakers dissolved that district and created a new 7th District stretching north into the Georgia mountains. Republican U.S. Rep. Rich McCormick is running for that seat."}
{"text": "# Walmart experiments with AI to enhance customers' shopping experiences\nBy **WYATTE GRANTHAM-PHILIPS** and **ANNE D'INNOCENZIO**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 9:25 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LAS VEGAS (AP)** - Walmart has unveiled plans to dive further into the world of artificial intelligence - and drones - to improve its customers' shopping experiences.\n\nIn a Tuesday keynote at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, the nation's largest retailer announced it will be expanding its drone delivery to 1.8 million additional households in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area later this year. Drones aren't new to Walmart - which has already completed 20,000 drone deliveries across seven states to date - but company leaders say that this expansion is a sign of growing demand and efficiency.\n\nWalmart executives said no other rival has gotten this close to this type of drone concentration of households in a big metro market.\n\nAmong AI advances, Walmart announced a generative AI-powered search tool for iOS users that suggests relevant products for consumer queries, ranging from football watch parties to bridal showers.\n\nThe company also provided a glimpse into \"InHome Replenishment,\" which aims to use AI to learn consumers' shopping habits and keep them stocked on their favorite groceries, as well as a beta platform that allows customers to create outfits virtually and get feedback from their friends.\n\nMeanwhile Sam's Club, which Walmart owns, has a new twist on checking out - whether it's with the \"scan and go\" technology, self-checkout or just using a traditional staffed register. Instead of stopping at a cashier to show the receipt, cameras at the stores' exits take a picture of what's in shoppers' carts to confirm purchases.\n\nThis camera technology is available in 10 clubs so far, according to Sam's Club CEO Chris Nicholas, and is being rolled out further later this year."}
{"text": "# Missouri lawmaker expelled from Democratic caucus announces run for governor\nBy **SUMMER BALLENTINE**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 5:07 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP)** - A Missouri lawmaker is running for governor after she was kicked out of the state House Democratic caucus for her ties to a man cited by the Anti-Defamation League as a Holocaust denier.\n\nSuburban St. Louis state Rep. Sarah Unsicker announced her bid to replace outgoing Republican Gov. Mike Parson on Monday in Washington, D.C. Parson is prohibited by term limits from running for another term.\n\nIn Missouri, where no Democrats hold statewide elected office, the GOP is favored to hold onto the governorship.\n\nSupport from Unsicker's Democratic colleagues floundered last year after she posted photos on social media showing her at a restaurant with the man who the Anti-Defamation League cites as having denied the Holocaust.\n\nHouse Democrats voted to kick her out of their caucus in December.\n\nIn a copy of her campaign speech posted to her website, Unsicker, first elected in 2016, said government \"forms the foundation upon which the structure of society is built.\"\n\n\"In Missouri, the cracks in that foundation have gotten so bad that the society built on top is no longer stable,\" she said. \"Keeping our house in order by protecting our democracy is a sacred obligation. And I have been punished by my own party for pointing out the cracks in that foundation.\"\n\nHouse Democratic Minority Leader Crystal Quade, who launched her own campaign for governor in July, last month praised Unsicker's past work in the Missouri Legislature as \"a strong advocate for society's vulnerable, especially children.\"\n\n\"Recently, however, she has chosen to use social media to promote individuals who espouse baseless conspiracies and racist and anti-Semitic ideologies that are antithetical to the values of inclusiveness, tolerance and respect House Democrats are dedicated to upholding,\" Quade said in a statement.\n\nA spokesman for Quade's gubernatorial campaign declined to comment Tuesday on Unsicker's entrance into the race.\n\nUnsicker was previously running as a Democrat for attorney general. She dropped out of that race last month.\n\nIt is unclear whether Unsicker plans to run for governor as a Democrat.\n\nIn Missouri, political parties have the option to deny candidates from running under their banner. The state Democratic Party's spokeswoman did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.\n\nOfficial candidate filing in Missouri begins Feb. 27.\n\nOther gubernatorial candidates include Springfield businessman Mike Hamra, a Democrat, and Republicans Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe, Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and state Sen. Bill Eigel."}
{"text": "# Migrant families begin leaving NYC hotels as first eviction notices kick in\nBy **PHILIP MARCELO**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 5:03 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Migrant families were moved out of a midtown Manhattan hotel on Tuesday as part of Mayor Eric Adams' plan to ease the pressure on New York City's strained shelter system by imposing a 60-day limit on shelter stays.\n\nThe roughly 40 families that left Row NYC, in the heart of the city's Theater District, are the first of scores of families that are expected to leave city shelters in the coming weeks. Some of those leaving on Tuesday immediately reapplied for beds, while others said they had managed to find more permanent accommodations outside of the system.\n\nAdams, a Democrat, imposed the limit in October for homeless migrant families, saying the move was necessary to relieve a shelter system overwhelmed by asylum-seekers crossing the southern U.S. border.\n\nMaria Quero, a 26-year-old from Venezuela who is nearly nine months pregnant, was among those standing outside the Row hotel Tuesday morning with her luggage and other personal effects in tow.\n\nShe said her plan was to head across town to the Roosevelt Hotel, another midtown accommodation that's been repurposed as an intake center for arriving migrants. There, city officials say, migrant families could reapply for another 60-day stay in the shelter system.\n\n\"We have no idea what is going to happen there,\" Quero said in Spanish as her husband, David Dominguez, gathered their belongings for the roughly 20-minute walk. \"It's very stressful. It gives me a lot of anxiety.\"\n\nThe two, who arrived in the country six months ago and had been at the Row for five months, said they don't have friends or family they can stay with if they can't secure another city bed.\n\n\"Let's hope we have a suitable place. We know people who have been to the tents while they are pregnant,\" added Dominguez, referring to the temporary shelters the city has erected in Brooklyn to house the newest arrivals. \"A woman cannot be in a tent when she's pregnant.\"\n\nThe Adams administration has warned for weeks that no one seeking a new placement is guaranteed another bed.\n\nBut Adams and other city officials said Monday that they would prioritize families and try to place them near their children's schools in order to minimize any disruption to their education.\n\n\"This is not going to be a city where we're going to place children and families on the street and have them sleep on the street,\" Adams said ahead of Tuesday's move-outs. \"That is not going to happen.\"\n\nImmigrant advocates have held rallies in recent days saying the new policy could lead to families waiting in long lines in the bitter cold to secure a new shelter placement - the situation single migrant adults have faced since the fall, when they were limited to 30 days in city shelters.\n\nThe time limits could also disrupt the schooling of migrant children who might have to change schools if their families are moved elsewhere, advocates say.\n\nCity Comptroller Brad Lander said Tuesday that he's launching an investigation into the Adams' administration's implementation of the 60-day policy, including whether it was properly explained to families and its ultimate costs.\n\n\"What information is actually being provided to people? Are there protocols for the 60-day evictions?\" he said outside the Row hotel as families checked out.\n\nSome 4,800 eviction notices have been sent to migrant families in shelters.\n\nMayra Martinez, a 40-year-old mother from Colombia, said her three children have mixed feelings about leaving the Row.\n\nThe family had been living at the hotel for more than a year and have saved up enough to rent a three-bedroom apartment in nearby Newark, New Jersey.\n\n\"They like it here, but you can't cook in the hotel and they miss home-cooked food,\" Martinez said in Spanish as she and her husband loaded their belongings into a waiting rideshare. \"They're also a little sad because of their school. They'll have to change and get used to a new school.\"\n\nThe hotel evictions occurred as city officials also temporarily evacuated nearly 2,000 migrants housed at Floyd Bennett Field, the former airport in Brooklyn, ahead of a potentially damaging storm. Adams' administration had erected the temporary shelter at the airfield in response to the waves of new immigrants arriving in the city.\n\n\"To be clear, this relocation is a proactive measure being taken out of an abundance of caution to ensure the safety and well-being of individuals working and living at the center,\" Kayla Mamelak, an Adams spokesperson, said in a statement. \"The relocation will continue until any weather conditions that may arise have stabilized and the facility is once again fit for living.\"\n\nThe residents, many of them families with children, were sent to nearby James Madison High School, also in Brooklyn."}
{"text": "# The family of an Arizona professor killed on campus reaches multimillion-dollar deal with the school\nJanuary 9, 2024. 5:03 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**TUCSON, Ariz. (AP)** - The family of a University of Arizona professor who was fatally shot on campus in the fall of 2022 has reached a multimillion-dollar agreement with the school, attorneys for the man's wife and sons said Tuesday.\n\nA statement by the law firm representing Kathleen Meixner, wife of professor Thomas Meixner, and their two sons, said that the family agreed not to sue the university as part of the agreement. The family in March filed a claim against the university as a precursor to a lawsuit, seeking $9 million.\n\nIn addition to an unspecified amount of money, the agreement includes \"non-monetary commitments that affirm the university's continuing support for the well-being of those most affected by these events,\" the university and the Arizona Board of Regents said in a statement. It added that the family would continue to have a voice in the planning and implementation of safety measures on campus.\n\nThomas Meixner was shot on Oct. 5, 2022, inside the building where he headed the school's Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences. House later, police arrested Murad Dervish, a 46-year-old former graduate student later charged in Meixner's killing.\n\nAn independent review released last March showed there were multiple missed opportunities to investigate and possibly arrest Dervish. The company contracted to conduct the review interviewed nearly 140 people.\n\nDervish faces a first-degree murder charge when he goes on trial later this year. He had been expelled from the school and barred from campus after being accused of sending threatening text messages and emails to Meixner and other professors.\n\nKathleen Meixner said the family welcomed the increased security measures instituted on campus after the report came out.\n\n\"We must look to the future, and with urgency, ensuring that tragedies like ours do not happen to others,\" she said in her statement."}
{"text": "# Dolphins sign pass rushers Justin Houston and Bruce Irvin, adding depth to injured linebacker group\nJanuary 9, 2024. 4:46 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. (AP)** - The Miami Dolphins signed veteran linebackers Justin Houston and Bruce Irvin on Tuesday and placed three more players on injured reserve.\n\nHouston and Irvin are expected to add depth to a linebacker group that has been decimated by injuries, as Jerome Baker, Cameron Goode and Andrew Van Ginkel have all gone down in the past week.\n\nMiami is preparing for its wild-card game at Kansas City on Saturday night.\n\nHouston is quite familiar with the Chiefs, who selected him in the third round of the 2011 draft. He spent the first eight seasons of his career there before stints with Indianapolis (2019-20), Baltimore (2021-22) and Carolina (2023).\n\nHouston, who turns 35 on Jan. 21, has been selected to four Pro Bowls and was an All-Pro with the Chiefs in 2014. His 112 sacks are third most among active players. He was released by the Panthers last month after signing a one-year deal with the team in August.\n\nIrvin, 36, was a first-round pick by Seattle in 2012 and most recently played for the Detroit Lions. He has 56 1/2 sacks, three interceptions, 13 passes defensed, 16 forced fumbles and three fumble recoveries.\n\nIrvin was released from Detroit's practice squad last week after one sack in two appearances this season.\n\nMiami ended the regular season without its top two edge rushers in Jaelan Phillips (Achilles tendon) and Bradley Chubb (ACL). Baker (wrist), Goode (knee) and Van Ginkel (foot) all suffered injuries in the Dolphins' regular-season finale against Buffalo that will sideline them for the playoffs."}
{"text": "# Small-town Minnesota hotel shooting kills clerk and 2 possible guests, including suspect, police say\nBy **TRISHA AHMED**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 4:41 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MINNEAPOLIS (AP)** - A shooting at a small-town Minnesota hotel killed an employee and two possible guests, including the suspect, authorities said Tuesday, one day after an active shooter alert was issued.\n\nAn employee at the Super 8 in Cloquet, Minnesota, called police shortly after 6:30 p.m. Monday to say they had found another employee who looked like she had been attacked, Cloquet police Chief Derek Randall said at a news conference Tuesday.\n\nPolice arrived within three minutes and found a 22-year-old clerk with a gunshot wound inside the hotel. She was transported to a hospital but later died, Randall said.\n\nOfficers also found a 35-year-old man from Deer River, Minnesota, with multiple gunshot wounds dead inside a vehicle in the hotel parking lot.\n\nAnd, they found a 32-year-old man from Ramsey, Minnesota, dead outside on the hotel's property with evidence suggesting he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and a handgun was next to him, Randall said. Authorities used hotel surveillance video to confirm he was the shooter.\n\nAccording to the video, the shooting lasted about 10 minutes before officers arrived, Randall said.\n\nAuthorities did not immediately release the names of the three people. Randall said they did not have information yet about a motive or connection between the three, though they believe both the men were hotel guests.\n\nThe investigation is ongoing. Police said there are no further threats to the public.\n\nOfficials had issued an alert at about 7 p.m. Monday about an active shooter at the hotel and warned people in the surrounding area of Big Lake Road and Highway 33 to shelter in place.\n\n\"Based on what the officers found, we believed that there was an active shooter situation,\" Randall said Tuesday. \"We took a cautious approach and issued an alert until more information about the suspects whereabouts were known.\"\n\nA hockey game was finishing up at the town's arena a couple of blocks away when the alert was issued, Randall said. Officers escorted people at the arena to their vehicles and out of the area.\n\nThe order was lifted about 90 minutes later after police reported finding the suspected shooter dead and announced there wasn't any active threat.\n\nAbout 12,000 people live in Cloquet, which is about 20 miles (32 kilometers) west of Duluth.\n\nMinnesota Gov. Tim Walz mentioned the shooting at a separate news conference Tuesday,\n\n\"In a community like this, the chances that someone knows someone involved is very high, and that makes it very much more personalized. ... We've got to continue to reduce gun violence,\" he said. \"We cannot live in a world where we just accept that this is a normal occurrence. It is not.\""}
{"text": "# Bueckers says teammates returning from injuries may help her decide to play another year at UConn\nBy **PAT EATON-ROBB**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 4:38 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**STORRS, Conn. (AP)** - UConn star Paige Bueckers suggested Tuesday that she may return for another season if it means getting to play again with now-injured teammates, including Azzi Fudd and Aubrey Griffin.\n\nBueckers, the national player of the year as a freshman who missed much of the past two seasons with her own knee injuries, is expected to be a top pick in the WNBA draft should she choose not to return to school.\n\n\"It's not about teams in the draft, who's got what pick,\" Bueckers said. \"It's all about me loving playing here, me loving my teammates and wanting to get more experiences and more time with them and more time in the program.\"\n\nBueckers was responding to a question from The Associated Press about whether the ability to accomplish something with Fudd and Griffin could be a factor in her decision to stay in school or enter the draft.\n\n\"That's, I think, the deciding factor,\" she said. \"Me just wanting to be here longer.\"\n\nFudd, who suffered a season-ending knee injury in November, already has said she will be back next season. Griffin, a graduate student who suffered a knee injury in a win over Creighton last week, also has another year of eligibility remaining, should she wish to use it, coach Geno Auriemma confirmed Tuesday.\n\nGriffin was undergoing more tests on her left knee, but Auriemma said he is not expecting good news.\n\nUConn also lost expected starter Jana El Alfy to a preseason Achilles tendon injury, post player Ayanna Patterson to knee surgery last month and guard Caroline Ducharme to a concussion and neck issues. It's not clear when or if Ducharme will return.\n\nAuriemma said that because of those injuries, Bueckers has had to adjust her role and become a more vocal leader for the young Huskies, who are starting two freshmen.\n\n\"She's probably one more college year away from really, really getting it,\" he joked, pausing to give the television cameras a huge smile.\n\nBueckers has two more seasons of eligibility remaining after this one because of the coronavirus pandemic and the medical redshirt she took last season after suffering her second knee injury at UConn.\n\nThe No. 13 Huskies (12-3) host Providence (8-8) on Wednesday in Hartford."}
{"text": "# Broncos' brass indicates a divorce with QB Russell Wilson isn't inevitable following his benching\nBy **ARNIE MELENDREZ STAPLETON**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 6:07 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ENGLEWOOD, Colo. (AP)** - Maybe Russell Wilson and the Denver Broncos aren't headed for a costly divorce, after all.\n\nThe possibility of working things out with their benched $242.6 million quarterback was the main message that emerged from the Broncos' season-ending news conference Wednesday.\n\nCoach Sean Payton said no decision has been made at QB but everyone will have clarity soon: \"I spent a half hour with Russ yesterday and I told him I don't think it's going to be a long, drawn-out process. But it hasn't been decided relative to what our plans are and that as soon as we know something that certainly he would be the first to know.\"\n\nPayton said there was indeed a scenario in which Wilson returns as his starting quarterback next season despite being benched after throwing for 28 touchdowns through 15 games.\n\n\"Yeah, otherwise it would have been like, 'Hey, good-bye,'\" Payton said. \"So, we'll look at all the scenarios and try to do what's best for the Denver Broncos.\"\n\nGeneral manager George Paton said the \"door is open\" to a reconciliation that would keep Wilson in Denver, adding, \"I've talked to Russ. He's open to returning.\"\n\nWilson's agent, Mark Rodgers, didn't immediately return messages from The Associated Press afterward.\n\nThe Broncos are on the hook for Wilson's $39 million salary in 2024 and they'd also have $85 million in dead cap charges over the next two years if they let him go.\n\n\"This would be extreme,\" Paton said.\n\nIt would also be an NFL record, more than doubling the $40-plus million the Atlanta Falcons incurred in dead cap charges following QB Matt Ryan's departure.\n\nBut CEO Greg Penner, who is the league's richest owner, said the substantial financial fallout from a split with Wilson wouldn't be the deciding factor in the team's quarterback decision.\n\n\"Obviously, the financial part of it is a significant component in terms of how this works out in the future, but that's not what will drive this decision,\" Penner said. \"The decision will be driven on what's in the best interests of this football team winning games.\"\n\nThe Broncos (8-9) posted a losing record for a seventh straight season and extended their playoff drought to eight years in Payton's first year as coach. He benched Wilson for the final two games and Jarrett Stidham went 1-1 with a pair of middling performances in his place.\n\nAfter Wilson was benched, he said in an interview at his locker on Dec. 29 that the team approached him during the bye week following Denver's biggest win in years, a 24-9 dispatch of the Chiefs in Week 8 that snapped a 16-game losing skid to Kansas City, and threatened to bench him if he didn't adjust his $37 million injury guarantee in 2024.\n\nHe declined to change anything in the contract and remained the starter until he was benched following a loss to the Patriots on Christmas Eve in what the Broncos insist was a football move, not a financial one.\n\nThe Broncos didn't respond publicly to Wilson's comments about being threatened with his starting job until Wednesday's news conference.\n\nThe owner, GM and head coach all declined to characterize Paton's interaction with Wilson's agent as a threat to bench the quarterback if he didn't adjust his contract.\n\n\"During the bye week I did reach out to Russ's agent in a good faith and a creative attempt to adjust his contract,\" Paton said. \"We couldn't get a deal done and we moved on with our season. It didn't come up again. Fast forward, Week 17 Sean makes a change in the quarterback position. This was a football decision made by Sean in what he thought was in the best interest of the team. This was completely independent of any conversations I had with the agent.\"\n\nThe head coach has said all along he wasn't privy to the talks between management and Wilson's agent.\n\nPenner indicated he'll let Payton and Paton figure out who will be under center for Denver in 2024, whether that's Wilson, Stidham, a 2024 draft pick or another team's castoff.\n\n\"As CEO, I definitely want to be briefed to know what's going on. That being said, I entrust people to do their jobs and I don't coach the football team, I don't call the agents and have negotiations on player contracts,\" Penner said. \"Again, I believe the approach to Russell's agent was done in a constructive way. And it just didn't lead to an agreement.\""}
{"text": "# A judge has found Ohio's new election law constitutional, including a strict photo ID requirement\nBy **JULIE CARR SMYTH**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 4:05 PM EST\n\n---\n\nCOLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - A federal judge has upheld as constitutional provisions of the sweeping election law that Ohio put in place last year, rejecting a Democratic law firm's challenge to strict new photo ID requirements, drop box restrictions and tightened deadlines related to absentee and provisional ballots.\n\nIn a ruling issued Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Donald Nugent determined that the state's new photo ID requirement \"imposes no more than a minimal burden, if any, for the vast majority of voters.\"\n\nNugent also rejected the other claims asserted by the Elias Law Group, whose suit filed last year on behalf of groups representing military veterans, teachers, retirees and the homeless argued the law imposed \"needless and discriminatory burdens\" on the right to vote.\n\nThe suit was filed the same day Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed the legislation over the objections of voting rights, labor, environmental and civil rights groups that had been pleading for a veto.\n\nThe judge wrote that voters have no constitutional right to a mail-in voting option - or, for that matter, early voting - at all. He added that Ohio's new schedule for obtaining and returning absentee ballots remains more generous than 30 other states.\n\nHe said the claim that limiting ballot drop boxes to a single location harmed voters was misplaced, because the 2023 law was the state's first to even allow them.\n\nWhile that was true, Republican lawmakers' decision to codify a single-drop box limit per county followed a yearslong battle over the issue.\n\nIn the run-up to the 2020 election, three courts scolded Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose for issuing an order setting the single-box limit, calling it unreasonable and arbitrary. Democrats and voting rights groups had sought for drop boxes to be set up at multiple locations, particularly in populous counties, to ease voting during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nIn a 2020 lawsuit filed by Democrats, a state appellate court ultimately ruled that LaRose had the power to expand the number of drop boxes without further legislative authorization, but that he didn't have to. In codifying his single-box limit, the 2023 law addressed the issue for the first time.\n\nBut Nugent said opponents of the law failed to make a persuasive case.\n\n\"Put simply, Plaintiffs did not provide evidence that the drop-box rules of HB 458 imposed any burden on Ohio voters, much less an 'undue' one,\" he wrote.\n\nDerek Lyons, president and CEO of Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, a group co-founded by Republican strategist Karl Rove, praised the ruling in a statement.\n\n\"RITE is very proud to have helped defend Ohio's important and commonsense election law,\" he said. \"With Ohio courts affirming the new law, voters can have confidence Ohio's elections are an accurate measure of their will.\""}
{"text": "# South Carolina no longer has the least number of women in its Senate after latest swearing-in\nBy **JEFFREY COLLINS**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 4:01 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP)** - Tameika Isaac Devine didn't break a glass ceiling when she took her oath of office Tuesday to be South Carolina's newest senator, but she did pull her state up from having the least number of women in its upper chamber.\n\nSouth Carolina now has six women in its Senate. They are still a small enough group that they sometimes band together across party lines as the \"Sister Senators,\" such as when they fought stricter abortion regulations last year or worked to expand child care options.\n\nSouth Carolina had no women in its Senate until the election of Republican Katrina Shealy in 2012.\n\n\"You break the ceiling and they come from everywhere,\" said a smiling Shealy, who fought misunderstandings and endured a few sexist comments when she first joined the chamber.\n\nIt's been a busy year for the Sister Senators. They were awarded the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for their work to block a state ban on abortions after cardiac activity is detected - usually around six weeks of pregnancy. They argued that women need at least a few more weeks to even realize they are pregnant and to make what is a momentous decision. The bill ultimately passed despite their efforts.\n\nDevine won a special election for a Columbia area seat that opened up when Sen. John Scott died in 2023. She campaigned in part on a platform of bringing more women into office.\n\nDevine's election means women now make up 13% of the South Carolina Senate, up from a previous lowest-in-the-nation rank of 10%. Alabama has the least, with 11%; West Virginia, the second-least, at 11.8%; and Louisiana the third-least, at 12.8%, according to the Center for American Women and Politics.\n\nThe women who do hold office in South Carolina are trying to recruit others across the political spectrum. Democratic Rep. Spencer Wetmore introduced a bill allowing candidates to use donations to pay for child care while they are campaigning.\n\nIn a speech after she was sworn in, Devine hinted at the difficult juggling act female candidates have to manage, as she thanked her college-age daughter and her elementary and middle school-age sons.\n\n\"Sometimes it's not easy when I miss story time or maybe something at school, but they know I am here to work for the citizens of South Carolina and that gives them pride,\" said Devine, who spent 20 years as a Columbia City Councilwoman before being knocked out of politics for a bit after she lost a run for mayor in 2021.\n\nShealy and the other women in the Senate welcomed Devine with open arms. But they said they are still Republicans and Democrats.\n\n\"Yes, we're like sisters. So we fight sometimes. We don't agree on everything, but we agree this state needs to take a good look at women's issues,\" Shealy said.\n\nAlso sworn in Tuesday was Sen. Deon Tedder, who at 33 is now the youngest South Carolina senator by six years. The Charleston Democrat won a special election for a seat left open when Marlon Kimpson left for a job in President Joe Biden's administration."}
{"text": "# Lawyers may face discipline for criticizing a judge's ruling in discrimination case\nBy **MIKE SCHNEIDER**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 9:10 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ORLANDO, Fla. (AP)** - A father-daughter pair of lawyers in Florida may face disciplinary action for speaking out against a judge's ruling that overturned a jury decision awarding $2.7 million to a Black doctor who alleged he was subjected to racial discrimination.\n\nCivil rights attorney Jerry Girley represented the doctor after he was fired from AdventHealth in Orlando in 2021. A jury sided with Girley's client, but the judge presiding over the case reversed that decision because he said the plaintiff failed to prove unlawful racial discrimination had taken place.\n\nGirley and his daughter, Brooke Girley - who was not involved in the case - publicly criticized the judge's decision, according to The Florida Bar. The organization of licensed lawyers in Florida says Jerry Girley gave an interview in which he said the decision was improper and that the court system doesn't provide equal justice to all. The Florida Bar said Brooke Girley wrote on social media that \"Even when we win, it only takes one white judge to reverse our victory.\"\n\nThe state judge in the case, Kevin Weiss, said in court papers that the Girleys' allegations \"spread across the internet\" and led to death threats requiring police protection at his home.\n\nThe Florida Bar says the criticism leveled at Weiss amounted to the Girleys violating an oath they took promising to respect the courts and judicial officers.\n\nThe Girleys and their attorney, David Winker, argue that disciplining them could chill free speech for Florida lawyers.\n\nIn a series of hearings this week, The Florida Bar asked Circuit Judge Lisa Herndon to find that the Girleys had violated their oaths and recommend disciplinary action. Punishment could go as far as disbarment or suspension of the Girleys' law licenses.\n\nOn Tuesday, Herndon said Jerry Girley had indeed violated his oath, according to Winker. The judge is scheduled to rule in Brooke Girley's case on Wednesday and hear disciplinary recommendations Thursday. Ultimately, the Florida Supreme Court will make any final decision.\n\nJerry Girley, who is Black, said the entire affair should be considered in the context of Florida's political environment, where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has removed two Democratic prosecutors, public colleges have been blocked from using taxpayer money on diversity programs and standards for teaching Black history say teachers should instruct middle-school students that enslaved people \"developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.\"\n\n\"What is disturbing to me, as a Black man living in Florida, is I find I have to be careful about what I say, what I think about race, not just in courts, but in schools, in corporate settings,\" Girley said. \"It's a weight.\""}
{"text": "# Guam police say a man who fatally shot a South Korean tourist has been found dead\nJanuary 9, 2024. 4:14 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**HAGATNA, Guam (AP)** - A man suspected of fatally shooting a South Korean tourist during a robbery last week in Guam was found dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and his alleged getaway driver was in custody, police in the U.S. territory said Tuesday.\n\nPolice said the first suspect was found dead inside a parked car Tuesday night, KUAM-TV reported. Police won't release his name until his family has been notified.\n\nA second man believed to have been the driver of the SUV allegedly used in the deadly Jan. 4 robbery was found in a game room and taken into custody, police said.\n\nGuam heavily relies on tourism and U.S. government spending to power its economy. South Korea sends more tourists to Guam than any other country.\n\nShortly after the shooting, the Guam Visitors Bureau offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible. Guam's governor vowed the U.S. territory would do everything to keep its people and visitors safe.\n\nDetectives said a they got a break in the case six days into the investigation when a citizen gave them a tip.\n\nPolice also reviewed surveillance footage from about 20 businesses in the Tumon tourist district where the shooting took place. The victim was staying at a hotel in Tumon with his wife during a trip to celebrate his retirement.\n\nThe surveillance video allegedly captured the suspect's silver Toyota 4-Runner taking off from the area on the day of the shooting.\n\nInvestigators are looking into whether the gun found on the suspect had been used in the fatal shooting.\n\n\"We are not sure yet, but there may be information that it may be,\" Guam Police Chief Stephen Ignacio said during a news conference at police headquarters. \"There's other scientific examinations that need to be conducted to see if there is direct correlation between the two.\"\n\nThe suspect was found dead in a car in the village of Yona, which is about a 30-minute drive from Tumon. He has a criminal record for illegal drug possession, and there was also an active warrant out for his arrest.\n\nThe alleged driver of the SUV was found in a Yona game room. He has an arrest record for assault and disorderly conduct.\n\nGuam is an island of about 170,000 people approximately 3,900 miles (6,300 kilometers) west of Hawaii."}
{"text": "# Starting his final year in office, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee stresses he isn't finished yet\nBy **HALLIE GOLDEN**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 7:22 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP)** - Addressing the Legislature at the start of his final year in office, Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee returned to one of his top priorities and the issue that defined his brief presidential bid: climate change.\n\n\"We know that climate change is hurting us now, today. But climate collapse does not have to be our inevitable future,\" he said in his 11th State of the State address. \"This Legislature put us on a clear - and necessary - path to slash greenhouse gases by 95% by 2050.\"\n\nInslee touted the state's 1-year-old Climate Commitment Act, a landmark policy that works to cap and reduce pollution while creating revenue for climate investments. It raised $1.8 billion in 2023 through quarterly auctions in which emission allowances are sold to businesses covered under the act. He said the money is going to electric school buses, free transit rides for young people and public electric vehicle chargers.\n\nBut that major part of his climate legacy is in question. A conservative-backed initiative that is expected to end up on the November ballot aims to reverse the policy.\n\nIn a seeming nod to that challenge and the path ahead for his climate policy, he said: \"Any delay would be a betrayal of our children's future. We are now on the razor's edge between promise and peril.\"\n\nInslee, who is the longest-serving governor in office in the U.S., stressed he wasn't making a goodbye speech. There is plenty more he wants to see accomplished in the 60-day session, which started Monday.\n\nHe urged lawmakers to pass legislation that would increase transparency surrounding oil prices in the face of what he described as \"the roller coaster of gas prices.\" He also discussed helping families add energy-efficient heat pumps designed to reduce emissions and slash energy bills.\n\nOutside of climate change, the governor asked lawmakers for about $64 million more to treat and prevent opioid use. He also pushed for more funding for drug trafficking investigations and referenced the need for more police officers.\n\nInslee also brought up homelessness. The state has the fourth most unsheltered people in the U.S., according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.\n\n\"Some think we can just wave a wand and those living in homelessness will simply disappear,\" he said. \"But this is the real world, and we have an honest solution: Build more housing, connect people to the right services, and they'll have a chance to succeed.\"\n\nInslee neared the end of his remarks by describing what he sees as two grave threats in the state and the nation - threats to democracy and to abortion rights.\n\nFollowing the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, he urged lawmakers to join states like Ohio, which approved a constitutional amendment that ensures access to abortion and other forms of reproductive health care.\n\n\"Fundamentally, this is an issue of freedom - freedom of choice when facing one of the most intimate and personal decisions in life,\" he said.\n\nDespite these challenges, overall he stressed that the \"state of our state is stronger than ever.\"\n\nRepublican leadership had a much more negative view of the progress the state has made.\n\n\"By any metric you want to pick, there is a growing catalog of crises facing the state,\" House Republican Leader Rep. Drew Stokesbary told reporters following the speech. \"The vast majority of which have gotten significantly worse during the last 12 years, when Jay Inslee was governor.\"\n\nDemocrats have a majority in both the House and Senate.\n\nSen. John Braun, Republican leader, tore into the very notion of the Climate Commitment Act, calling it \"essentially a large gas tax.\"\n\n\"Here we are in the state of Washington. We might be thinking we're innovative, we have fabulous companies that are innovative. And yet our solution is not innovative at all,\" he said.\n\nInslee was first elected in 2012. He announced in May that he would not seek a fourth term."}
{"text": "# Browns kicker Hopkins 'unlikely' to play against Texans in playoff game because of hamstring injury\nBy **TOM WITHERS**  \nJanuary 9, 2024. 8:42 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BEREA, Ohio (AP)** - Dustin Hopkins couldn't finish Cleveland's last game against Houston. The kicker won't even start the next one.\n\nHopkins is expected to sit out Saturday's wild-card playoff game against the Texans with a hamstring injury that hasn't healed since he hurt it while chasing a returner in Cleveland's win over the Texans on Dec. 24.\n\nCoach Kevin Stefanksi said Tuesday that it was \"unlikely\" Hopkins will play. Hopkins, who was one of the NFL's most accurate kickers all season, missed the final two regular-season games with the injury.\n\nStefanski said Hopkins \"is progressing, but I don't think he'll be ready for this week.\"\n\nHopkins injured his left, non-kicking leg while trying to run down Houston's Dameon Pierce, who returned a kickoff 98 yards for a touchdown. The Browns held off from placing him on injured reserve.\n\nWhile Hopkins got hurt hustling, Stefanski said it would be hard to discourage any player in a similar situation.\n\n\"It's always that fine line, where you want to make a play for the team, you want to hustle, but you also don't want to put yourself in harm's way,\" he said. \"So those are things we talk about, but you can't deny that our guys have great effort out there.\"\n\nLosing Hopkins is a significant blow to the Browns. He's been one of Cleveland's most valuable players this season.\n\nHopkins is 33 of 36 on field-goal tries and made all eight attempts beyond 50 yards. Acquired just before the season in a trade with the Los Angeles Chargers, he's also made four game-winning kicks.\n\nWith Hopkins out, Riley Patterson will handle kicking duties for the Browns (11-6), who signed him to their practice squad on Dec. 25. Three days later, he made a 33-yard field goal as Cleveland clinched a playoff spot with a win over the New York Jets.\n\n\"I feel terrible for Dustin,\" Patterson said. \"He has been amazing this year and could have very easily have gone to the Pro Bowl. I feel bad for him. I'm just here to fill in and help out any way that I can. So that's my main focus right now.\"\n\nPatterson is 6 of 7 on extra points with Cleveland. He played in 13 games for Detroit, making 15 of 17 field goals and 35 of 37 PATs before being released.\n\nPatterson kicked in two playoff games last season for Jacksonville and went 3 of 3 on field goals and 4 of 4 on extra points.\n\nThe 24-year-old said it was difficult being let go by the Lions, but he is grateful to land on a Browns team with high expectations.\n\n\"It's been enjoyable,\" Patterson said. \"I was frustrated leaving Detroit, for sure, because I felt like I was a part of that team there. These guys have been so welcoming to me. Hopping on to a really great team with a bunch of really great guys in a fun locker room.\n\n\"I couldn't ask for anything more, so I feel like I'm a part of this team. I'm ready to help out with whatever they need, so I'm here.\"\n\nSeveral other Browns players were kept out of practice Tuesday, including wide receiver Amari Cooper, who set a franchise record with 265 yards against the Texans last month. Cooper hurt his heel against the Texans and sat out the past two weeks.\n\nStar defensive end Myles Garrett wasn't at practice for personal reasons."}
{"text": "# 2 boys who fell through ice on a Wisconsin pond last week have died, police say\nJanuary 9, 2024. 3:28 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SUN PRAIRIE, Wis. (AP)** - Two boys who were hospitalized last week after falling through the ice on a Madison-area pond have died, police said.\n\nThe boys, ages 8 and 6, were taken last Friday to a hospital in critical condition after first responders pulled them from a retention pond in Sun Prairie, police said.\n\nSun Prairie police Lt. Ryan Cox said Monday morning that one of the boys died over the weekend. Assistant Police Chief Shunta Boston said later Monday that the Dane County Medical Examiner's Office had confirmed that the second boy had died, the Wisconsin State Journal reported.\n\nMessages seeking information on whether autopsies had been completed on the boys and if they had been identified were left Tuesday with the medical examiner's office by The Associated Press."}
{"text": "# Tottenham signs Germany forward Timo Werner on loan from Leipzig\nJanuary 9, 2024. 7:19 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - Tottenham signed Timo Werner on loan from Leipzig on Tuesday, giving the Germany forward another shot at the Premier League after his inconsistent stint with Chelsea.\n\nThe 27-year-old Werner joined Spurs on a six-month deal that included an option to make the transfer permanent this summer.\n\nIn the short term, Werner would plug a gap left by the departure of captain Son Heung-min to the Asian Cup with South Korea potentially until mid-February.\n\nThe move could also boost Werner's resumé ahead of the European Championship this summer in Germany.\n\nWerner played for Chelsea from 2020-22 and helped the London club win the Champions League, but it was still an underwhelming stint in English soccer. He tallied 23 goals in 89 total appearances in his time at Stamford Bridge.\n\nWerner returned to Leipzig in the summer of 2022 and scored 16 goals last season. But he's made only four starts under coach Marco Rose this campaign.\n\nThe speedy Werner said he was encouraged by his discussions with Spurs' Australian manager Ange Postecoglou.\n\n\"He gave me straight away the feeling that I need to join a club - what I want to feel when you talk to a manager - and also the tactics and the style, how he wants to play, how he lets the team play,\" he said. \"For me, I thought straight away that it fits perfectly.\"\n\nFinancial details were not disclosed."}
{"text": "# Congressional leaders announce an agreement on spending levels, a key step to averting shutdown\nBy **KEVIN FREKING**  \nJanuary 7, 2024. 7:08 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Congressional leaders have reached an agreement on overall spending levels for the current fiscal year that could help avoid a partial government shutdown later this month.\n\nThe agreement largely hews to spending caps for defense and domestic programs that Congress set as part of a bill to suspend the debt limit until 2025. But it does provide some concessions to House Republicans who viewed the spending restrictions in that agreement as insufficient.\n\nIn a letter to colleagues, House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday the agreement would secure $16 billion in additional spending cuts from the previous agreement brokered by then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden and is about $30 billion less than what the Senate was considering.\n\n\"This represents the most favorable budget agreement Republicans have achieved in over a decade,\" Johnson writes.\n\nBiden said the agreement \"moves us one step closer to preventing a needless government shutdown and protecting important national priorities.\"\n\n\"It reflects the funding levels that I negotiated with both parties and signed into law last spring,\" Biden said in a statement. \"It rejects deep cuts to programs hardworking families count on, and provides a path to passing full-year funding bills that deliver for the American people and are free of any extreme policies.\"\n\nThe agreement speeds up the roughly $20 billion in cuts already agreed to for the Internal Revenue Service and rescinds about $6 billion in COVID relief money that had been approved but not yet spent, according to Johnson's letter.\n\n\"It's a good deal for Democrats and the country,\" Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told colleagues in a briefing call.\n\nEssentially, Democrats see the trade-offs they made as mild. In a description provided to reporters, they said the COVID savings would have \"no significant impact on any current projects or activities in motion.\" And they said that moving all of the $20.2 billion in IRS cuts to this year instead of over two years would still leave the agency able to maintain \"critical investments\" that Congress provided in 2022. At the time, Congress provided the IRS with an additional $80 billion that could be spent over 10 years.\n\nOverall, the agreement calls for $886 billion in defense funding. It would provide $772 billion in domestic, non-defense spending, when including $69 billion called for in a side deal to the debt ceiling bill that McCarthy had reached with the White House, Democrats said.\n\nThe most conservative House Republicans opposed the earlier debt ceiling agreement and even brought House proceedings to a halt for a few days to show their displeasure. Many were surely wanting additional concessions, but Democrats have been insistent on abiding by the debt ceiling agreement's spending caps, leaving Johnson in a difficult spot.\n\n\"It's even worse than we thought,\" the House Freedom Caucus said of the agreement in a tweet posted on X. \"This is total failure.\"\n\nLawmakers needed an agreement on overall spending levels so that appropriators could write the bills that set line-by-line funding for agencies. Money is set to lapse Jan. 19 for some agencies and Feb. 2 for others.\n\nThe agreement is separate from the negotiations that are taking place to secure additional funding for Israel and Ukraine while also curbing restrictions on asylum claims at the U.S. border.\n\nIn a joint statement, Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries voiced their support for the agreement.\n\n\"It will also allow us to keep the investments for hardworking American families secured by the legislative achievements of President Biden and Congressional Democrats,\" Schumer and Jeffries said.\n\nBut they also warned House Republicans about trying to add conservative policy riders to the bills in the coming days, saying Democrats would not support \"poison pill policy changes in any of the twelve appropriations bills put before the Congress.\"\n\nRep. Patrick McHenry, who helped lead the debt ceiling negotiations when McCarthy was speaker, noted that two-thirds of both parties in the House supported that agreement.\n\n\"This deal, which adheres to that framework, deserves equally as robust support,\" McHenry said.\n\nSenate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., tweeted that he was encouraged that leaders identified a \"path toward completing\" the spending bills. It was a cautious recognition that some obstacles could lie ahead.\n\n\"America faces serious national security challenges, and Congress must act quickly to deliver the full-year resources this moment requires,\" McConnell said."}
{"text": "# The Pentagon adds new details about Austin's secretive hospital stay and the delay in telling Biden\nBy **TARA COPP**, **COLLEEN LONG**, and **KEVIN FREKING**  \nJanuary 7, 2024. 6:45 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - The Pentagon released new details Sunday about Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's continued hospitalization, saying he had a medical procedure Dec. 22, went home a day later and was admitted to intensive care Jan. 1 when he began experiencing severe pain.\n\nThe latest information came as members of both parties in Congress expressed sharp concerns about the secrecy of Austin's hospital stay and the fact that the president and other senior leaders were kept in the dark about it for days.\n\nThe statement, released by Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, did not, however, provide any details about the medical procedure or what actually happened on Monday to require Austin to be in intensive care at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.\n\nRyan said Austin was placed in the hospital's intensive care unit \"due to his medical needs, but then remained in that location in part due to hospital space considerations and privacy.\"\n\nThe Pentagon's failure to disclose Austin's hospitalization, including to President Joe Biden, the National Security Council and top Pentagon leaders, for days reflects a stunning lack of transparency about his illness, how serious it was and when he may be released. Such secrecy, when the United States is juggling myriad national security crises, runs counter to normal practice with the president and other senior U.S. officials and Cabinet members.\n\nRyder said the National Security Council and Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks were not notified until Thursday, Jan. 4, that Austin had been hospitalized since Jan. 1. Ryder said Austin's chief of staff, Kelly Magsamen, was ill and \"unable to make notifications before then.\" He said she informed Hicks and the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, on Thursday.\n\nOnce notified, Hicks began preparing statements to send to Congress and made plans to return to Washington. Hicks was in Puerto Rico on leave but had communications equipment with her to remain in contact and had already been tasked with some secretary-level duties on Tuesday.\n\nThe Pentagon did not say if Hicks was given an explanation on Tuesday for why she was assuming some of Austin's duties, but temporary transfers of authority are not unusual and are often done without detailed explanations. Hicks decided not to return after she was informed that Austin would resume full control on Friday.\n\nBiden was told of Austin's medical stay on Thursday by Sullivan, according to three people with knowledge of the hospitalization who were not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.\n\nIn a statement issued Saturday evening, Austin took responsibility for the delays in notification.\n\n\"I recognize I could have done a better job ensuring the public was appropriately informed. I commit to doing better,\" he said, acknowledging the concerns about transparency. \"But this is important to say: this was my medical procedure, and I take full responsibility for my decisions about disclosure.\"\n\nAustin, 70, remains hospitalized and officials have been unable to say how long he will be at Walter Reed. In his statement, Austin said he is on the mend and is looking forward to returning to the Pentagon soon, but he provided no other details about his ailment.\n\nSen. Roger Wicker, the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the episode erodes trust in the Biden administration and called on the department to provide lawmakers with a \"full accounting of the facts immediately.\"\n\n\"I am glad to hear Secretary Austin is in improved condition and I wish him a speedy recovery,\" Wicker said in a statement. \"However, the fact remains that the Department of Defense deliberately withheld the Secretary of Defense's medical condition for days. That is unacceptable.\"\n\nIt's not just Republicans expressing alarm. In a joint statement, Reps. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and Adam Smith, D-Wash., said they were \"concerned with how the disclosure of the Secretary's condition was handled.\"\n\nAmong the questions they had were what the medical procedure was and what the resulting complications were, how and when the delegation of his responsibilities was made, and the reason for the delay in notification to the president and lawmakers. Rogers is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and Smith is the panel's top Democrat.\n\n\"Transparency is vitally important,\" said the two lawmakers. \"Austin\" must provide these additional details on his health and the decision-making process that occurred in the past week as soon as possible.\"\n\nSecretary of State Antony Blinken voiced support for Austin at a news conference in Qatar on Sunday.\n\n\"He is an extraordinary leader in this country, in uniform and now out of uniform,\" Blinken said. \"And it's been a highlight of my service to be able to serve alongside him,.\" He added: \"I'm very much looking forward to see him fully recovered and working side by side in the year ahead.\"\n\nRyder said Austin is able to do his full duties, has secure communications at Walter Reed, and is in contact with his senior team, getting updates and providing guidance. He said he doesn't know if Austin will do in-person briefings this coming week.\n\nThe Pentagon Press Association, which represents journalists who cover the Defense Department, sent a letter of protest on Friday evening, calling the delay in alerting the public \"an outrage.\"\n\n\"At a time when there are growing threats to U.S. military service members in the Middle East and the U.S. is playing key national security roles in the wars in Israel and Ukraine, it is particularly critical for the American public to be informed about the health status and decision-making ability of its top defense leader,\" the group said in its letter.\n\nOther senior U.S. leaders have been much more transparent about hospital stays. When Attorney General Merrick Garland went in for a routine medical procedure in 2022, his office informed the public a week in advance and outlined how long he was expected to be out and when he would return to work."}
{"text": "# The US sees a drop in illegal border crossings after Mexico increases enforcement\nBy **VALERIE GONZALEZ** and **ELLIOT SPAGAT**  \nJanuary 7, 2024. 1:10 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**EAGLE PASS, Texas (AP)** - Daniel Bermudez's family had fled Venezuela and was headed to the U.S. to seek asylum when the freight train they were riding through Mexico was stopped by immigration officials.\n\nHis wife tried to explain that her family had permission to go to the U.S. Instead, they flew her to Mexico's southern border as part of a surge of enforcement actions that U.S. officials say have contributed to a sharp drop in illegal border crossings.\n\nIn addition to forcing migrants from trains, Mexico also resumed flying and busing them to the southern part of the country and started flying some home to Venezuela.\n\nEven if temporary, the decrease in illegal crossings is welcome news for the White House. President Joe Biden's administration is locked in talks with Senate negotiators over restricting asylum and $110 billion in aid for Ukraine and Israel hangs in the balance.\n\nBermudez said his wife became separated from her family when she talked to authorities as he gathered his stepchild and their belongings. He wanted to run, but his wife said they shouldn't because they had followed procedure by making an appointment with U.S. immigration authorities.\n\n\"I told her, `Don't trust them. Let's go into the brush,'\" Bermudez said, adding that other migrants had fled. He recalled her telling him, \"Why are they sending us back if we have an appointment?\"\n\nLast week, Bermudez, his stepchild and two other relatives were waiting for her at a shelter in the Mexican border town of Piedras Negras as she took a bus back in hopes of still making the date.\n\nMexico's immigration agency sent at least 22 flights from its border region with the U.S. to southern cities during the last 10 days of December, according to Witness at the Border, an advocacy group that tracks flight data. Most were from Piedras Negras, which is across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas.\n\nMexico also ran two removal flights to Venezuela with 329 migrants. The stretch was punctuated by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken's visit to Mexico City on Dec. 28 to confront unprecedented crossings to the United States.\n\nMexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said a financial shortfall that had led the immigration agency to suspend deportations and other operations was resolved. He did not offer details.\n\nArrests for illegal crossings into the U.S. from Mexico fell to about 2,500 on Monday, down from more than 10,000 on several days in December, according to U.S. authorities. In the Border Patrol's busiest area, arrests totaled 13,800 during the seven-day period ending Friday, down 29% from 19,400 two weeks earlier, according to Tucson, Arizona, sector chief John Modlin.\n\nThe drop led U.S. Customs and Border Protection to reopen the port of entry in Lukeville, Arizona, on Thursday after a monthlong closure on the most direct route from Phoenix to its nearest beaches. The U.S. also restored operations at Eagle Pass and three other locations.\n\nMerchants in Eagle Pass, a city of about 30,000 people, saw sales take \"a major hit\" while a bridge was closed to vehicle traffic so border agents could be reassigned to help process migrants, Maverick County Judge Ramsey English Cantu said.\n\n\"We survive pretty much from everything that comes from the Mexican side,\" he said.\n\nLast month, CBP resumed freight crossings in Eagle Pass and El Paso, Texas, after a five-day shutdown that U.S. officials said was a response to as many as 1,000 migrants riding atop a single train through Mexico before trying to walk across the border.\n\nIn Piedras Negras on Thursday, Casa del Migrante housed about 200 migrants, down from as high as 1,500 recently.\n\nAmong them was Manuel Rodriguez, 40, who said his family will miss their appointment to seek asylum that was made through the U.S. government's CBP One app. He said the appointment was registered with his in-laws, who were deported to Venezuela after authorities boarded the bus they were riding.\n\n\"It was all under her name and she lost everything,\" Rodriguez said.\n\nProposals being discussed by the White House and Senate negotiators include a new expulsion authority that would deny rights to seek asylum if illegal border crossings reach a certain threshold. Any such authority would almost certainly depend on Mexico's willingness to take back non-Mexicans who enter the U.S illegally, something it does now on a limited scale.\n\nMexico's support was critical to defunct Trump-era policies that forced 70,000 asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for hearings in U.S. immigration court and to deny rights to seek asylum during the COVID-19 pandemic.\n\nAndrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., cautioned against overstating Mexico's role in the recent drop in traffic. Panama reported that less than 25,000 migrants walked through the Darién jungle in December, about half of October's level and a sign that fewer people are leaving South America for the U.S. Migration usually drops in December amid holidays and cold weather.\n\n\"The U.S. is able to lean on Mexico for a short-term enforcement effect on migration at the border, but the long-term effects are not always clear,\" Selee said."}
{"text": "# Officers in Colorado are investigating an apparent altercation between Rep. Boebert and ex-husband\nBy **THE ASSOCIATED PRESS**  \nJanuary 8, 2024. 3:59 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SILT, Colorado (AP)** - An investigation is being conducted into an apparent altercation between U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert and her ex-husband Jayson Boebert at a restaurant, police in Silt, Colorado, confirmed Sunday.\n\nIt's unclear what happened on Saturday, but Boebert's campaign released a statement Sunday in which she said she \"didn't punch Jayson in the face and no one was arrested. I will be consulting with my lawyer about the false claims he made against me and evaluate all of my legal options.\"\n\nPolice Chief Mike Kite confirmed the investigation, but declined to release details, including who called police.\n\nOfficers planned to talk with witnesses and ask the restaurant owners for any video that might have captured what happened, Kite said.\n\nThe Miner's Claim restaurant issued a statement Monday saying it was cooperating in the investigation.\n\n\"Since the beginning, the Miner's Claim has fully cooperated with law enforcement and intends to continue until this matter is resolved,\" it said.\n\nJayson Boebert did not respond to a Facebook message from The Associated Press seeking comment, but told The Denver Post that he called police on Sunday morning to say he didn't want to press charges.\n\n\"I don't want nothing to happen,\" Jayson Boebert said. \"Her and I were working through a difficult conversation.\"\n\nKite declined to say whether Jayson Boebert made that call.\n\n\"This is a sad situation for all and another reason I'm moving,\" Lauren Boebert's statement said.\n\nBoebert, a Republican who has served two terms in the U.S. House representing the western side of Colorado, announced on Dec. 27 that she was switching congressional districts this year to run for a seat representing the eastern side of the state. The seat is open with the retirement of Republican U.S. Rep. Ken Buck.\n\nIn her current district, Boebert probably would have faced a Democratic challenger who nearly defeated her in the 2022 general election and who has far outraised her.\n\nIn September, Boebert and a guest were kicked out of a musical performance of \"Beetlejuice\" in Denver after guests complained they were vaping, singing, using phones and causing a disturbance. She later apologized.\n\nIn her relatively short time in Washington, Boebert built a national profile and has aligned with the extreme right wing of the GOP. Her assertive style has grabbed headlines, most famously when she heckled President Joe Biden during his 2022 State of the Union address."}
{"text": "# Senior Biden leaders and Pentagon officials unaware for days that defense secretary was hospitalized\nBy **LOLITA C. BALDOR**  \nJanuary 6, 2024. 8:56 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Senior Biden administration leaders, top Pentagon officials and members of Congress were unaware for days that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had been hospitalized since Monday, U.S. officials said Saturday, as questions swirled about his condition and the secrecy surrounding it.\n\nThe Pentagon did not inform the White House National Security Council or top adviser Jake Sullivan of Austin's hospitalization at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, until Thursday, according to two administration officials. The officials were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.\n\nThe Pentagon's failure to disclose Austin's hospitalization for days reflects a stunning lack of transparency about his illness, how serious it was and when he may be released. Such secrecy, at a time when the United States is juggling myriad national security crises, runs counter to normal practice with the president and other senior U.S. officials and Cabinet members.\n\nStill, President Joe Biden spoke with Austin on Saturday, and expressed confidence in him, according to a White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly about internal discussions and spoke on condition of anonymity.\n\nIn a statement issued Saturday evening, Austin took responsibility for the delays in notification.\n\n\"I recognize I could have done a better job ensuring the public was appropriately informed. I commit to doing better,\" said Austin, acknowledging the concerns about transparency. \"But this is important to say: this was my medical procedure, and I take full responsibility for my decisions about disclosure.\"\n\nAustin, 70, remained hospitalized due to complications following a minor elective medical procedure, his press secretary said, as it became increasingly clear how closely the Pentagon held information about his stay at Walter Reed. In his statement, Austin said he is on the mend and is looking forward to returning to the Pentagon soon, but he provided no other details about his ailment.\n\nAir Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were notified about Austin's hospitalization, but he would not confirm when that notice happened.\n\nA number of U.S. officials said Saturday that many of the most senior Pentagon service leaders were unaware until Friday that Austin was in the hospital. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Politico was the first to report the White House learned of his condition on Thursday.\n\nRyder said members of Congress were told late Friday afternoon, and other officials said lawmakers were informed after 5 p.m. It was not clear when key senior members of Austin's staff were told, but across the Pentagon, many staff found out when the department released a statement about Austin's hospital stay just minutes after 5 p.m. Many believed Austin was out on vacation for the week.\n\nDeputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, who took over when Austin was hospitalized, was also away. A U.S. official said she had a communications setup with her in Puerto Rico that allowed her to do the job while Austin, who spent 41 years in the military and retired as a four-star Army general in 2016, was incapacitated.\n\nRyder said Saturday that Austin is recovering well and resumed his full duties Friday evening from his hospital bed. Asked why the hospital stay was kept secret for so long, Ryder said on Friday that it was an \"evolving situation,\" and that due to privacy and medical issues, the Pentagon did not make Austin's absence public. Ryder declined to provide any other details about Austin's medical procedure or health.\n\n\"The Department of Defense deliberately withheld the Secretary of Defense's medical condition for days. That is unacceptable,\" said Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, the highest-ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. \"We are learning more every hour about the Department's shocking defiance of the law.\"\n\nSen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, also criticized the delayed notice.\n\n\"The Secretary of Defense is the key link in the chain of command between the president and the uniformed military, including the nuclear chain of command, when the weightiest of decisions must be made in minutes,\" said Cotton in a statement, adding that if Austin didn't immediately tell the White House, \"there must be consequences for this shocking breakdown.\"\n\nThe Pentagon Press Association, which represents media members who cover the Defense Department, sent a letter of protest on Friday evening to Ryder and Chris Meagher, the assistant defense secretary for public affairs.\n\n\"The fact that he has been at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for four days and the Pentagon is only now alerting the public late on a Friday evening is an outrage,\" the PPA said in its letter. \"At a time when there are growing threats to U.S. military service members in the Middle East and the U.S. is playing key national security roles in the wars in Israel and Ukraine, it is particularly critical for the American public to be informed about the health status and decision-making ability of its top defense leader.\"\n\nOther senior U.S. leaders have been much more transparent about hospital stays. When Attorney General Merrick Garland went in for a routine medical procedure in 2022, his office informed the public a week in advance and outlined how long he was expected to be out and when he would return to work.\n\nAustin's hospitalization comes as Iranian-backed militias have repeatedly launched drones, missiles and rockets at bases where U.S. troops are stationed in Iraq and Syria, leading the Biden administration to strike back on a number of occasions. Those strikes often involve sensitive, top-level discussions and decisions by Austin and other key military leaders.\n\nThe U.S. is also the chief organizer behind a new international maritime coalition using ships and other assets to patrol the southern Red Sea to deter persistent attacks on commercial vessels by Houthi militants in Yemen.\n\nIn addition, the administration, particularly Austin, has been at the forefront of the effort to supply weapons and training to Ukraine, and he's also been communicating frequently with the Israelis on their war against Hamas."}
{"text": "# Biden will address State of the Union in a moment the House speaker calls a great challenge for the US\nBy **SEUNG MIN KIM**  \nJanuary 6, 2024. 12:59 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - President Joe Biden will give his annual State of the Union address on March 7.\n\nIn a letter sent to the White House on Saturday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., extended the formal invitation for Biden to speak to a joint session of Congress. Johnson said he was inviting Biden \"in this moment of great challenge for our country.\" On X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, Biden accepted. \"Looking forward to it, Mr. Speaker,\" the president said.\n\nThis will be the first State of the Union for Johnson as speaker, who traditionally sits behind the president and to his left during the address to Congress. This year's speech will offer an opportunity for Biden to detail his broader vision and policy priorities as he campaigns for reelection in November.\n\nNotably, Biden's address is scheduled for after a pair of critical deadlines to avert a government shutdown.\n\nFunding for federal agencies that oversee programs for veterans, and on transportation, housing, agriculture and energy, is set to expire Jan. 19. Funding for the rest of the federal government, including the Pentagon, State Department and Homeland Security, will run out Feb. 2.\n\nThe annual address from the president to Congress is usually scheduled for late January or February.\n\nBiden's March 7 address would be the latest that a president has delivered the State of the Union since 1934, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt revived the practice of giving the annual speech in person. Before this year, the latest that a State of the Union had been given was in 2022, when Biden delivered it on March 1 of that year, according to the Congressional Research Service.\n\nIn last year's State of the Union, Biden repeatedly declared that he would \"finish the job\" on critical parts of his agenda that remained incomplete, such as capping insulin costs for all Americans, taking more aggressive actions on climate change, banning so-called assault-style weapons and pushing for higher taxes on corporations and the rich.\n\nIt was also his first State of the Union in front of a divided Congress, and some House Republicans interrupted and jeered at Biden, particularly when he spoke about efforts from some GOP lawmakers to cut Medicare and Social Security."}
{"text": "# On Jan. 6 many Republicans blamed Trump for the Capitol riot. Now they endorse his presidential bid\nBy **LISA MASCARO**  \nJanuary 6, 2024. 10:00 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - In the follow-up to their 2018 bestseller \"How Democracies Die,\" authors Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky write about three rules that political parties must follow: accept the results of fair elections, reject the use of violence to gain power and break ties to extremists.\n\nIn the aftermath of the 2020 election, they write, only one U.S. political party \"violated all three.\"\n\nSaturday marks the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and Donald Trump, the former president, is far-and-away the leading Republican candidate in 2024. He still refuses to acknowledge his earlier loss to President Joe Biden. Far from rejecting the rioters, he has suggested he would pardon some of those who have been convicted of violent crimes. Rather than distance himself from extremists, he welcomes them at his rallies and calls them patriots.\n\nAnd Trump is now backed by many of the Republican leaders who fled for their lives and hid from the rioters, even some who had condemned Trump. Several top GOP leaders have endorsed his candidacy.\n\nThe support for Trump starkly highlights the divisions in the aftermath of the deadly storming of the Capitol and frames the question about whose definition of governance will prevail - or if democracy will prevail at all.\n\n\"If our political leaders do not stand up in defense of democracy, our democracy won't be defended,\" said Levitsky, one of the Harvard professors whose new book is \"Tyranny of the Minority.\"\n\n\"There's no country in the world, no country on Earth in history, where the politicians abdicated democracy but the institutions held,\" he told The Associated Press. \"People have to defend democracy.\"\n\nThe third anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack comes during the most convulsive period in American politics in at least a generation, with Congress barely able to keep up with the basics of governing, and the start of the presidential nominating contests just over a week away.\n\nTrump's persistent false claims that the election of 2020 was stolen - which has been rejected in at least 60 court cases, every state election certification and by the former president's one-time attorney general - continue to animate the presidential race as he eyes a rematch with Biden.\n\nInstead, Trump now faces more than 90 criminal charges in federal and state courts, including the federal indictment brought by special counsel Jack Smith that accused Trump of conspiring to defraud the U.S. over the election.\n\nBiden, speaking Friday near Pennsylvania's Valley Forge, commemorated Jan. 6, saying on that day \"we nearly lost America - lost it all.\"\n\nWhile the Congress returned that night to certify the election results and show the world democracy was still standing, Biden said Trump is now trying to revise the narrative of what happened that day - calling the rioters \"patriots\" and promising to pardon them. And he said some Republicans in Congress were complicit.\n\n\"When the attack on Jan. 6 happened there was no doubt about the truth,\" Biden said. \"Now these MAGA voices - who know the truth about Trump and Jan. 6 - have abandoned the truth and abandoned the democracy.\"\n\nAt a quieter Capitol, without much ceremony planned for Saturday, it will be the last time the anniversary will pass before Congress is called upon again, on Jan. 6, 2025, to certify the results of the presidential election -- democracy once more put to the test.\n\nRep. Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat who led Trump's impeachment over the insurrection, said Biden's 306-232 electoral victory in 2020 remains \"the hard, inescapable, irradicable fact that Donald Trump and his followers have not been able to accept - to this day.\"\n\nRaskin envisions a time when there will be a Capitol exhibit, and tours for visitors, to commemorate what happened Jan. 6, 2021. Five people died during the riot and the immediate aftermath, including Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by police.\n\nAll told,140 police officers were injured in the Capitol siege, including U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick who died later. Several others died later by suicide.\n\nOne officer, Harry Dunn, has announced he is running for Congress to \"ensure it never happens again.\"\n\nTrump's decision to reject the results of the 2020 election was the only time Americans have not witnessed the peaceful transfer of presidential power, a hallmark of U.S. democracy.\n\nA giant portrait of George Washington resigning his military commission hangs in the U.S. Capitol, a symbol of the voluntary relinquishing of power - a move that was considered breathtaking at the time. He later was elected the first U.S. president.\n\nTrump opened his first rally of his 2024 presidential campaign with a popular recording of the J6 Prison Choir --- riot defendants singing \"The Star-Spangled Banner\" recorded over a phone line from jail, interspersed with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.\n\nMore than 1,200 people have been charged in the riot, with nearly 900 convicted, including leaders of the extremist groups the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who are serving lengthy terms for seditious conspiracy.\n\nTrump has called Jan. 6 defendants \"hostages\" and said there was so much love at the \"Stop the Steal\" rally he held near the White House that day before he encouraged the mob to march down Pennsylvania Avenue, assuring he would be with them at the Capitol, though he never did join.\n\nAllies of Trump scoff at the narrative of Jan. 6 that has emerged. Mike Davis, a Trump ally sometimes mentioned as a future attorney general, has mocked the Democrats and others for turning Jan. 6 into a \"religious holiday.\"\n\nRepublican Kevin McCarthy, who went on to become House speaker, had called Jan. 6 the \"saddest day\" he ever had in Congress. But McCarthy, R-Calif., retired last month he endorsed Trump for president and said he would consider joining his cabinet.\n\nSenate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has said he would back whomever becomes the Republican Party nominee, despite a scathing speech at the time in which he called Trump's actions \"disgraceful\" and said the rioters \"had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth because he was angry he lost an election.\"\n\nAsked about Trump's second-term agenda, GOP lawmakers brushed off his admission that he would be a dictator on \"day one.\"\n\n\"He's joking,\" said Trump ally Byron Donalds, R-Fla.\n\n\"Just bravado,\" said Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn. \"There's still checks and balances.\"\n\nLevitsky said when he and his colleague wrote their earlier book, they believed that the Republicans in Congress would be a \"bulwark against Trump.\"\n\nBut with so many of the Trump detractors having retired or been voted out of office, \"We were much less pessimistic than we are today.\""}
{"text": "# Trump returns to Iowa 10 days before the caucuses with a commanding lead over the Republican field\nBy **HANNAH FINGERHUT**, **JILL COLVIN**, and **STEVE PEOPLES**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 11:14 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SIOUX CENTER, Iowa (AP)** - Former President Donald Trump urged his supporters Friday evening not to be complacent in the face of a commanding polling lead as he kicked off the sprint to the Iowa caucuses with his first events of the election year.\n\n\"Ten days from now, the people of this state are going to cast the most important vote of your entire lives,\" Trump told several hundred supporters gathered in Sioux Center. He implored them to turn out on caucus night, warning, \"Bad things happen when you sit back.\"\n\nTrump held a pair of commit-to-caucus events, one in the far northwest corner of the state on the border with South Dakota and one in north-central Mason City. He'll spend Saturday in Newton in central Iowa before heading to Clinton in the state's far east.\n\nThe visit came the day before the third anniversary of Jan. 6, 2021, when a violent mob of Trump's supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol as part of a desperate bid to keep him in power after his 2020 election loss. Trump did not acknowledge the date Friday, but railed against the treatment of those who have been jailed for participating in the riot, labeling them \"hostages\" and saying it will \"go down as one of the saddest things in the history of our country.\"\n\nMore than 1,230 people have been charged with federal crimes for their participation, including felonies like assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy.\n\nTrump also asked at one point in Sioux Center whether there was anyone in the friendly room who wasn't planning to vote for him, but then quickly warned them not to raise their hands.\n\n\"They're going to say he incited an insurrection,\" he said to laughs.\n\nAnd over and over, he repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen - the same lies that motivated the rioters.\n\nTrump also spent much of the night lashing out at President Joe Biden, who earlier Friday delivered a speech warning that Trump's efforts to retake the White House pose a grave threat to the country and democracy.\n\n\"We all know who Donald Trump is,\" Biden said near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where George Washington and the Continental Army spent a bleak winter nearly 250 years ago. \"The question we have to answer is: Who are we?\"\n\nBiden said Jan. 6 marked a moment where \"we nearly lost America - lost it all.\"\n\nTrump, who faces 91 criminal charges stemming from his efforts to overturn his loss to Biden and other state and federal cases, continued to argue that it is, instead, Biden who poses the threat.\n\n\"He is a danger to democracy,\" Trump charged in Mason City.\n\nThe former president and his campaign have spent months accusing Biden and other Democrats of using the justice system to damage their chief political rival. There is no evidence that Biden has influenced the investigations led by state officials or the Justice Department - which has also indicted his son, Hunter Biden, twice.\n\n\"Joe Biden's record is an unbroken streak of weakness, incompetence, corruption, and failure,\" Trump told the crowd in Sioux Center. \"That's why Crooked Joe is staging his pathetic fearmongering campaign event in Pennsylvania today.\"\n\nTrump's team is hoping for a knockout win in Iowa on Jan. 15 that will deny his rivals an opportunity to seize momentum and set the table for him to lock up the nomination by the spring. They also hope to turn out a wave of new voters who have never caucused before in a show of strength ahead of an increasingly likely general election rematch against Biden.\n\n\"You have to get out and vote because it sets the tone. It even sets the tone, frankly, for November,\" Trump said in Mason City.\n\nWhile he remains far ahead in Iowa and other early state and national polls, Trump also continued to lash out at his top Republican rivals, unleashing some of his most pointed attacks to date against former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, who has seen growing support in recent months following a series of well-reviewed debate performances.\n\nTrump tried to cast both her and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who was once the only rival he criticized, as \"establishment pawns,\" alleging they would \"sell\" voters \"out.\" DeSantis, who has staked his campaign on Iowa, entered the race with sky-high expectations but has struggled to gain traction against Trump.\n\n\"Sadly, the establishment losers and sellouts lagging far behind us in the Republican primary cannot be trusted on taxes, on trade, or anything else,\" Trump charged. \"They'll betray you just like they betrayed me.\"\n\nHaley's campaign has been celebrating Trump's recent attention - including a new attack ad - arguing it reflects his growing concern that she is gaining on him.\n\nDeSantis and Haley needled each other at their own events in Iowa Friday, with DeSantis leaning into his opponent's flippant comment about the role of Iowa among the early-voting states. DeSantis, appearing with Texas Rep. Chip Roy and Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, hounded Haley for \"insulting\" Iowans by suggesting New Hampshire voters could \"correct\" the caucus results.\n\nHaley, who held morning and evening events in Des Moines, described the comment as good-natured ribbing among early-voting states. She is the former governor of South Carolina, which will vote third.\n\nDeSantis, campaigning across central and northeastern parts of the state, also repeatedly told his crowds of about 100 people that Trump failed to follow through with his previous campaign promises and accused the former president of running a campaign all about himself.\n\nWhile Trump last visited Iowa before Christmas, his allies have been fanning out across the state, holding their own events on his behalf. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who are both considered potential vice presidential picks, have been working to get out the vote in recent days, as has his son Eric Trump.\n\nTrump's team has repeatedly argued that any margin of victory larger than 12 percentage points would be a historic win in an open caucus. Trump lost the state in 2016 to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz but ultimately won the nomination and the presidency.\n\nThis time, Trump is facing criminal charges across four separate jurisdictions. But those charges have only solidified his support.\n\nMichael Grevengoed, 34, from Doon, Iowa, is planning to caucus for Trump on Jan. 15 and said he isn't concerned about Trump's legal woes.\n\n\"They're brought against him, yes, and he may be indicted for them, but I don't think they're legitimate reasons for him not to be president,\" he said.\n\nIn addition to his criminal charges, Trump is also facing efforts to remove him from the ballot over his attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss. The Supreme Court said Friday it would take up the question of whether states can bar him from the ballot.\n\nMarj Wichers, who lives in Sioux Center and said her backseat was full of Trump gear she bought for her grandchildren outside the venue, criticized efforts to disqualify him.\n\n\"He's got to get back in there,\" said Wichers, after standing in line for four hours to attend the first event. \"If they don't want to put him on the ballot, I'll write his name down.\"\n\nWichers, 58, said she works the night shift so she might not be able to caucus on Jan. 15.\n\n\"I think he's going to get in anyway, so I'm not too worried about it,\" she said."}
{"text": "# Blaine Luetkemeyer, longtime Missouri Republican congressman, won't seek reelection\nBy **JIM SALTER**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 11:45 AM EST\n\n---\n\nMissouri Republican U.S. Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer will not seek reelection, though his departure in what is considered a safe Republican district is unlikely to impact the balance of power after the 2024 election.\n\nLuetkemeyer, 71, announced his decision Thursday. He joins a growing list of House members who plan to retire or seek other office.\n\n\"It has been an honor to serve the great people of the Third Congressional District and state of Missouri for these past several years,\" Luetkemeyer said in a statement. \"However, after a lot of thoughtful discussion with my family, I have decided to not file for re-election and retire at the end of my term in December.\"\n\nLuetkemeyer, who was first elected in 2008, represents a large geographic area that stretches from the western suburbs of St. Louis to Jefferson City and Columbia in central Missouri. Luetkemeyer narrowly defeated Democrat Judy Baker in 2008, but in every subsequent election has won the general election by more than 30 percentage points.\n\nThe Cook Political Report lists the 3rd District as solid Republican.\n\nMissouri politics have moved decidedly to the right over the past two decades. Six of the state's eight members of the U.S. House are Republicans, as are all of the statewide officeholders.\n\nNationally, about two dozen Democrats have indicated they won't seek reelection, with half running for another elected office. Luetkemeyer is among about 15 Republicans have said they are not seeking another term, with three seeking elected office elsewhere.\n\nRepublican exits have involved higher-profile lawmakers.\n\nRep. George Santos of New York became only the third lawmaker to be expelled by colleagues since the Civil War. Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California was the first speaker to be removed from that office by his colleagues. He opted to leave effective Dec. 31 rather than serve among the rank-and-file.\n\nBut the departure of a handful of Democrats in competitive districts has Republicans optimistic that they have the early edge in determining which party controls the House after the 2024 elections."}
{"text": "# Florida man charged with threatening to kill US Rep Eric Swalwell and his children\nJanuary 4, 2024. 3:45 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP)** - A South Florida man threatened to kill U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell and his children in a series of voicemails left at the California Democrat's Washington office last month, federal prosecutors said.\n\nMichael Shapiro, 72, of Greenacres, Florida, was arrested Wednesday morning on a charge of transmitting a threatening communication, according to court records. He made his initial appearance in West Palm Beach federal court, where a bond of $250,000 was set.\n\nAccording to a criminal complaint, Shapiro left five voicemail messages at Swalwell's office D.C. office on Dec. 19. The complaint doesn't name the member of Congress, but Swalwell confirmed that the messages were left for him in a social media post on Wednesday.\n\n\"No threat is going to stop me from representing my constituents,\" Swalwell said. \"MAGA Republicans have chosen violence over voting and this is what it looks like.\"\n\nIn one of the messages, Shapiro stated that he was going to \"come after you and kill you,\" according to the complaint. In another message, he stated that he was going to \"come and kill your children,\" officials said.\n\nShapiro also accused Swalwell of being a Chinese spy, despite multiple investigations revealing no evidence of such activity. Suspected spy, Christine Fang, came into contact with Swalwell's campaign as he was first running for Congress in 2012 and participated in fundraising for his 2014 campaign.\n\nFederal investigators alerted Swalwell to their concerns and briefed Congress about Fang in 2015, at which point Swalwell says he cut off contact with her. The House Ethics Committee began a probe of Swalwell's connection to Fang in 2021, but the probe ended last year without finding any wrongdoing.\n\nShapiro placed the threatening calls from his home in South Florida, investigators said. The complaint also noted that Shapiro pleaded guilty in federal court in 2019 for making threatening communications to another victim.\n\nA defense attorney for Shapiro didn't immediately respond to a message seeking comment from The Associated Press."}
{"text": "# Speaker Johnson demands hard-line policies during a border visit as Ukraine aid hangs in the balance\nBy **VALERIE GONZALEZ** and **STEPHEN GROVES**  \nJanuary 3, 2024. 6:44 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**EAGLE PASS, Texas (AP)** - U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson led about 60 fellow Republicans in Congress on a visit Wednesday to the Mexican border to demand hard-line immigration policies in exchange for backing President Joe Biden's emergency wartime funding request for Ukraine. He expressed serious doubts about whether he would support a bipartisan compromise.\n\nThe trip to Eagle Pass, Texas, came as the Senate engages in delicate negotiations in hopes of striking a deal on border policies that could unlock Senate GOP support for Biden's $110 billion package for Ukraine, Israel and other U.S. security priorities.\n\nBut Johnson, R-La., told The Associated Press during the border tour that he was holding firmly to the policies of a bill passed by House Republicans in May without a single Democratic vote. The bill, H.R. 2, would revive many of the policies pursued by former President Donald Trump, build more of the border wall and impose new restrictions on asylum seekers. Democrats called the legislation \"cruel\" and \"anti-immigrant,\" and Biden promised a veto.\n\n\"If it looks like H.R. 2, we'll talk about it,\" Johnson said of any border legislation that emerges from the Senate.\n\nWith the number of illegal crossings into the United States topping 10,000 on several days last month, Eagle Pass has been at the center of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott's Operation Lone Star, his nearly $10 billion initiative that has tested the federal government's authority over immigration and elevated the political fight over the issue.\n\nThe GOP House members touted their event as the largest congressional border trip ever. They traveled in two large buses beneath an international bridge in Eagle Pass where just two weeks ago illegal crossings prompted a large federal response that included closing railroad traffic and creating a large field for processing migrants. By Wednesday, the field sat empty with only stakes in the ground and orange fencing.\n\nAt a news conference, Johnson suggested he could use a looming government funding deadline as further leverage.\n\n\"If President Biden wants a supplemental spending bill focused on national security, it better begin with defending America's national security,\" he said. Johnson added: \"We want to get the border closed and secured first.\"\n\nBiden has expressed willingness to make policy compromises as the historic number of migrants crossing the border is an increasing challenge for his 2024 reelection campaign. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and White House staff have been involved in the Senate negotiations.\n\n\"We've got to do something,\" Biden told reporters Tuesday night. He said Congress should approve his national security proposal because it also includes money for managing the influx of migrants. \"They ought to give me the money I need to protect the border,\" he said.\n\nAdministration officials have criticized Johnson's trip as a political ploy that will do little to solve the problem. White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said Republicans were compromising national security by threatening to shut down the government and delaying approval of funding for additional border security.\n\n\"When they're at the border, they're going to see the magnitude of the problem and why we have said now for about three decades, their broken immigration system is in desperate need of legislative reform,\" Mayorkas told CNN on Wednesday. \"So we are focused on the solutions, and we hope that they will return to Washington and focus on the solutions as well.\"\n\nHouse Republicans also contend that Mayorkas' management of the border has amounted to a dereliction of his duties and they are moving ahead with rare impeachment proceedings against a Cabinet member, with a first committee hearing on the matter scheduled for next week. Mayorkas told MSNBC he would cooperate with an inquiry.\n\nDuring parts of December, border crossings in Eagle Pass, as well as other locations, swamped the resources of Customs and Border Protection officials. Authorities closed cargo rail crossings in Eagle Pass and El Paso for five days and shut down border crossings in the Arizona city of Lukeville.\n\nAuthorities say the numbers of migrants eased over the December holidays as part of a seasonal pattern. The border crossings are reopening, and arrests for illegal crossings from Mexico fell to about 2,500 on Monday, from more than 10,000 on several days in December, officials said.\n\n\"We need to fix the border. There's virtually unanimous agreement among Democrats and Republicans about that,\" Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. He added: \"Everyone's going to have to give something to get this done.\"\n\nRepublicans are pressuring Biden and Democrats to accept strict border measures, and they see the high number of migrants arriving at the border as a political weakness for the president.\n\nSenate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told reporters in Kentucky on Tuesday that in a conversation with 81-year-old Biden, he made the case: \"You can't do anything about how old you are, you can't do anything about inflation, but this is something that's measurable that you could claim credit for.\"\n\nMcConnell also said he was approaching the talks with \"optimism that somehow we will get this all together and we're giving it our best shot.\"\n\nSen. James Lankford, the Oklahoma Republican negotiating the Senate agreement, called H.R. 2 \"a great bill,\" but said it was not realistic to expect the president or Senate Democrats to support the measures.\n\nSenate negotiators have focused on tougher asylum protocols for migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, bolstering border enforcement with more personnel and high-tech systems, and enforcement measures that would kick in if the number of daily crossings passed a certain threshold.\n\nSens. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz, Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Lankford met Wednesday afternoon and said they were trying to agree on legislative text they could present to their colleagues. Sinema said the group was \"closing in\" on an agreement, but technical work remained before Congress returns to Washington next week.\n\n\"We're going to work out a bill, if we're successful, that will have Republican and Democratic votes,\" said Murphy, the chief Democratic negotiator.\n\nMurphy has raised concern that the longer the talks draw out, the longer it leaves Ukraine's defenses hanging without assured support from the U.S. in the war with Russia.\n\nThe Pentagon in late December announced what officials say could be the final package of military aid for Ukraine if Congress does not approve Biden's funding request. The weapons, worth up to $250 million, include air munitions and other missiles, artillery, anti-armor systems, ammunition, demolition and medical equipment and parts.\n\nRussia has unleashed a flurry of missile and drone strikes on Ukraine in the new year."}
{"text": "# The Supreme Court is allowing Idaho to enforce its strict abortion ban, even in medical emergencies\nBy **MARK SHERMAN**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 9:40 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - The Supreme Court on Friday allowed Idaho to enforce its strict abortion ban, even in medical emergencies, while a legal fight continues.\n\nThe justices said they would hear arguments in April and put on hold a lower court ruling that had blocked the Idaho law in hospital emergencies, based on a lawsuit filed by the Biden administration.\n\nThe Idaho case gives the court its second major abortion dispute since the justices in 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed states to severely restrict or ban abortion. The court also in the coming months is hearing a challenge to the Food and Drug Administration's rules for obtaining mifepristone, one of two medications used in the most common method of abortion in the United States.\n\nIn the case over hospital emergencies, the Biden administration has argued that hospitals that receive Medicare funds are required by federal law to provide emergency care, potentially including abortion, no matter if there's a state law banning abortion.\n\nThe administration issued guidance about the federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, two weeks after the high court ruling in 2022. The Democratic administration sued Idaho a month later.\n\nU.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill in Idaho agreed with the administration. But in a separate case in Texas, a judge sided with the state.\n\nIn a statement Friday night, President Joe Biden objected to the high court's decision and said his administration \"will continue to defend a woman's ability to access emergency care under federal law.\"\n\nIdaho makes it a crime with a prison term of up to five years for anyone who performs or assists in an abortion.\n\nThe administration argues that EMTALA requires health care providers to perform abortions for emergency room patients when needed to treat an emergency medical condition, even if doing so might conflict with a state's abortion restrictions.\n\nThose conditions include severe bleeding, preeclampsia and certain pregnancy-related infections.\n\n\"For certain medical emergencies, abortion care is the necessary stabilizing treatment,\" Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in an administration filing at the Supreme Court.\n\nThe state argued that the administration was misusing a law intended to prevent hospitals from dumping patients and imposing \"a federal abortion mandate\" on states. \"EMTALA says nothing about abortion,\" Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador told the court in a brief.\n\nJust Tuesday, the federal appeals court in New Orleans came to the same conclusion as Labrador. A three-judge panel ruled that the administration cannot use EMTALA to require hospitals in Texas to provide abortions for women whose lives are at risk due to pregnancy. Two of the three judges are appointees of President Donald Trump, and the other was appointed by another Republican president, George W. Bush.\n\nThe appeals court affirmed a ruling by U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix, also a Trump appointee. Hendrix wrote that adopting the Biden administration's view would force physicians to place the health of the pregnant person over that of the fetus or embryo even though EMTALA \"is silent as to abortion.\"\n\nAfter Winmill, an appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton, issued his ruling, Idaho lawmakers won an order allowing the law to be fully enforced from an all-Republican, Trump-appointed panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. But a larger contingent of 9th Circuit judges threw out the panel's ruling and had set arguments in the case for late January.\n\nThe justices' order Friday takes the case away from the appeals court. A decision is expected by early summer.\n\nFriday's development is just one of several legal battles currently making their way through the courts in Idaho.\n\nSeparately, four women and several physicians have filed a lawsuit asking an Idaho court to clarify the circumstances that qualify patients to legally receive an abortion. That lawsuit was recently granted the greenlight to move forward despite attempts by the Attorney General's office to dismiss the case.\n\nMeanwhile, a federal judge in November temporarily blocked Idaho's \"abortion trafficking\" law from being enforced while a lawsuit challenging its constitutionality is underway. That law, which Idaho lawmakers passed last year, was designed to prevent minors from getting abortions in states where the procedure is legal if they don't have their parents' permission."}
{"text": "# The Supreme Court will decide if Donald Trump can be kept off 2024 presidential ballots\nBy **MARK SHERMAN** and **NICHOLAS RICCARDI**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 7:43 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - The Supreme Court said Friday it will decide whether former President Donald Trump can be kept off the ballot because of his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, inserting the court squarely in the 2024 presidential campaign.\n\nThe justices acknowledged the need to reach a decision quickly, as voters will soon begin casting presidential primary ballots across the country. The court agreed to take up Trump's appeal of a case from Colorado stemming from his role in the events that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.\n\nUnderscoring the urgency, arguments will be held on Feb. 8, during what is normally a nearly monthlong winter break for the justices. The compressed timeframe could allow the court to produce a decision before Super Tuesday on March 5, when the largest number of delegates are up for grabs in a single day, including in Colorado.\n\nTrump, speaking at a campaign event in Iowa, said: \"All I want is fair. I just hope that they're going to be fair.\"\n\nThe court will be considering for the first time the meaning and reach of a provision of the 14th Amendment barring some people who \"engaged in insurrection\" from holding public office. The amendment was adopted in 1868, following the Civil War. It has been so rarely used that the nation's highest court had no previous occasion to interpret it.\n\nColorado's Supreme Court, by a 4-3 vote, ruled last month that Trump should not be on the Republican primary ballot. The decision was the first time the 14th Amendment was used to bar a presidential contender from the ballot.\n\nTrump is separately appealing to state court a ruling by Maine's Democratic secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, that he was ineligible to appear on that state's ballot over his role in the Capitol attack. Both the Colorado Supreme Court and the Maine secretary of state's rulings are on hold until the appeals play out.\n\nThe high court's decision to intervene, which both sides called for, is the most direct involvement in a presidential election since Bush v. Gore in 2000, when a conservative majority effectively decided the election for Republican George W. Bush. Only Justice Clarence Thomas remains from that court.\n\nThree of the nine Supreme Court justices were appointed by Trump, though they have repeatedly ruled against him in 2020 election-related lawsuits, as well as his efforts to keep documents related to Jan. 6 and his tax returns from being turned over to congressional committees.\n\nAt the same time, Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh have been in the majority of conservative-driven decisions that overturned the five-decade-old constitutional right to abortion, expanded gun rights and struck down affirmative action in college admissions.\n\nSome Democratic lawmakers have called on Thomas to step aside from the case because of his wife's support for Trump's effort to overturn the results of the election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. Thomas is unlikely to agree, and there was every indication Friday that all the justices are participating. Thomas has recused himself from only one other case related to the 2020 election, involving former law clerk John Eastman, and so far the people trying to disqualify Trump haven't asked him to recuse.\n\nThe 4-3 Colorado decision cites a ruling by Gorsuch when he was a federal judge in that state. That Gorsuch decision upheld Colorado's move to strike a naturalized citizen from the state's presidential ballot because he was born in Guyana and didn't meet the constitutional requirements to run for office. The court found that Trump likewise doesn't meet the qualifications due to his role in the U.S. Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021. That day, the Republican president had held a rally outside the White House and exhorted his supporters to \"fight like hell\" before they walked to the Capitol.\n\nThe two-sentence provision in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states that anyone who swore an oath to uphold the constitution and then \"engaged in insurrection\" against it is no longer eligible for state or federal office. After Congress passed an amnesty for most of the former confederates the measure targeted in 1872, the provision fell into disuse until dozens of suits were filed to keep Trump off the ballot this year. Only the one in Colorado was successful.\n\nTrump had asked the court to overturn the Colorado ruling without even hearing arguments. \"The Colorado Supreme Court decision would unconstitutionally disenfranchise millions of voters in Colorado and likely be used as a template to disenfranchise tens of millions of voters nationwide,\" Trump's lawyers wrote.\n\nThey argue that Trump should win on many grounds, including that the events of Jan. 6 did not constitute an insurrection. Even if it did, they wrote, Trump himself had not engaged in insurrection. They also contend that the insurrection clause does not apply to the president and that Congress must act, not individual states.\n\nCritics of the former president who sued in Colorado agreed that the justices should step in now and resolve the issue, as do many election law experts.\n\n\"This case is of utmost national importance. And given the upcoming presidential primary schedule, there is no time to wait for the issues to percolate further. The Court should resolve this case on an expedited timetable, so that voters in Colorado and elsewhere will know whether Trump is indeed constitutionally ineligible when they cast their primary ballots,\" lawyers for the Colorado plaintiffs told the Supreme Court.\n\nThe issue of whether Trump can be on the ballot is not the only matter related to the former president or Jan. 6 that has reached the high court. The justices last month declined a request from special counsel Jack Smith to swiftly take up and rule on Trump's claims that he is immune from prosecution in a case charging him with plotting to overturn the 2020 presidential election, though the issue could be back before the court soon depending on the ruling of a Washington-based appeals court.\n\nAnd the court has said that it intends to hear an appeal that could upend hundreds of charges stemming from the Capitol riot, including against Trump."}
{"text": "# Chief Justice Roberts casts a wary eye on the uses of artificial intelligence in the federal courts\nBy **MARK SHERMAN**  \nDecember 31, 2023. 6:23 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Chief Justice John Roberts on Sunday turned his focus to the promise, and shortcomings, of artificial intelligence in the federal courts, in an annual report that made no mention of Supreme Court ethics or legal controversies involving Donald Trump.\n\nDescribing artificial intelligence as the \"latest technological frontier,\" Roberts discussed the pros and cons of computer-generated content in the legal profession. His remarks come just a few days after the latest instance of AI-generated fake legal citations making their way into official court records, in a case involving ex-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.\n\n\"Always a bad idea,\" Roberts wrote in his year-end report, noting that \"any use of AI requires caution and humility.\"\n\nAt the same time, though, the chief justice acknowledged that AI can make it much easier for people without much money to access the courts. \"These tools have the welcome potential to smooth out any mismatch between available resources and urgent needs in our court system,\" Roberts wrote.\n\nThe report came at the end of a year in which a series of stories questioned the ethical practices of the justices and the court responded to critics by adopting its first code of conduct. Many of those stories focused on Justice Clarence Thomas and his failure to disclose travel, other hospitality and additional financial ties with wealthy conservative donors including Harlan Crow and the Koch brothers. But Justices Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor also have been under scrutiny.\n\nThe country also is entering an the beginning of an election year that seems likely to enmesh the court in some way in the ongoing criminal cases against Trump and efforts to keep the Republican former president off the 2024 ballot.\n\nAlong with his eight colleagues, Roberts almost never discusses cases that are before the Supreme Court or seem likely to get there. In past reports, he has advocated for enhanced security and salary increases for federal judges, praised judges and their aides for dealing with the coronavirus pandemic and highlighted other aspects of technological changes in the courts.\n\nRoberts once famously compared judges to umpires who call balls and strikes, but don't make the rules. In his latest report, he turned to a different sport, tennis, to make the point that technology won't soon replace judges.\n\nAt many tennis tournaments, optical technology, rather than human line judges, now determines \"whether 130 mile per hour serves are in or out. These decisions involve precision to the millimeter. And there is no discretion; the ball either did or did not hit the line. By contrast, legal determinations often involve gray areas that still require application of human judgment,\" Roberts wrote.\n\nLooking ahead warily to the growing use of artificial intelligence in the courts, Roberts wrote: \"I predict that human judges will be around for a while. But with equal confidence I predict that judicial work - particularly at the trial level - will be significantly affected by AI.\""}
{"text": "# Supreme Court rejects prosecutor's push to fast-track ruling in Trump election subversion case\nBy **MARK SHERMAN** and **ERIC TUCKER**  \nDecember 22, 2023. 6:14 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - The Supreme Court said Friday it will not immediately take up a plea by special counsel Jack Smith to rule on whether former President Donald Trump can be prosecuted for his actions to overturn the 2020 election results.\n\nThe ruling is a scheduling win for Trump and his lawyers, who have sought repeatedly to delay the criminal cases against him as he campaigns to reclaim the White House in 2024. It averts a swift ruling from the nation's highest court that could have definitively turned aside his claims of immunity, and it further throws into doubt the possibility of the landmark trial proceeding as scheduled on March 4.\n\nThe issue will now be decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which has signaled it will act quickly to decide the case. Special counsel Jack Smith had cautioned that even a rapid appellate decision might not get to the Supreme Court in time for review and final word before the court's traditional summer break.\n\nSmith had pressed the Supreme Court to intervene, citing significant public interest in a prompt resolution to the case. The request to leapfrog the appeals court, which Smith himself acknowledged was \"extraordinary,\" also underscored prosecutors' concerns that the fight over the issue could delay the start of Trump's trial beyond next year's presidential election.\n\nThe justices turned down Smith's request in a single-sentence order Friday. As is customary, the court gave no explanation for the decision.\n\nWith the justices remaining out of the dispute for now, additional appeals are likely that could delay the case. If the appeals court, which is set to hear arguments on Jan. 9, turns down Trump's immunity claims, he could then ask for the Supreme Court to get involved - giving the justices another opportunity to decide if they want to weigh in.\n\nU.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has already put the case on hold while Trump pursues his claim that he is immune from prosecution. Chutkan has raised the possibility of keeping the March trial date if the case promptly returns to her court.\n\nShe earlier rejected the Trump team's arguments that an ex-president could not be prosecuted over acts that fall within the official duties of the job.\n\n\"Former presidents enjoy no special conditions on their federal criminal liability,\" Chutkan wrote in a Dec. 1 ruling. \"Defendant may be subject to federal investigation, indictment, prosecution, conviction, and punishment for any criminal acts undertaken while in office.\"\n\nIn a statement Friday, Trump insisted anew that he was \"entitled to presidential immunity\" and was looking forward to having his case heard before the appeals court.\n\nThere are still more Trump-related cases that the Supreme Court, which includes three justices appointed by him, is poised to grapple with.\n\nTrump's lawyers plan to ask the court t to overturn a decision by the Colorado Supreme Court barring him from that state's ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits anyone who swore an oath to support the Constitution and then \"engaged in insurrection\" against it from holding office.\n\nAnd the court separately has agreed to hear a case over the charge of obstruction of an official proceeding that has been brought against Trump and more than 300 of his supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.\n\nIn the current immunity case, Smith had tried to persuade the justices to take up the matter directly, bypassing the appeals court.\n\n\"This case presents a fundamental question at the heart of our democracy: whether a former president is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office or is constitutionally protected from federal prosecution when he has been impeached but not convicted before the criminal proceedings begin,\" prosecutors wrote.\n\nUnderscoring the urgency for prosecutors, Smith and his team wrote: \"It is of imperative public importance that respondent's claims of immunity be resolved by this Court and that respondent's trial proceed as promptly as possible if his claim of immunity is rejected.\"\n\nTrump's lawyers have for months signaled that they would ultimately ask the Supreme Court to take up the immunity question. But they urged the justices this week to stand down for now, saying there was no reason to rush a decision.\n\n\"Importance does not automatically necessitate speed. If anything, the opposite is usually true. Novel, complex, sensitive and historic issues - such as the existence of presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts - call for more careful deliberation, not less,\" Trump's lawyers wrote.\n\nJustice Department policy prohibits the indictment of a sitting president. Though there's no such bar against prosecution for a former commander in chief, lawyers for Trump say that he cannot be charged for actions that fell within his official duties as president - a claim that prosecutors have vigorously rejected.\n\nTrump faces charges accusing him of working to overturn the results of the 2020 election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden before the violent riot at the Capitol. He has denied any wrongdoing.\n\nThe high court still could act quickly once the appeals court issues its decision. A Supreme Court case usually lasts several months, but on rare occasions, the justices shift into high gear.\n\nNearly 50 years ago, the justices acted within two months of being asked to force President Richard Nixon to turn over Oval Office recordings in the Watergate scandal. The tapes were then used later in 1974 in the corruption prosecutions of Nixon's former aides.\n\nIt took the high court just a few days to effectively decide the 2000 presidential election for Republican George W. Bush over Democrat Al Gore.\n\nThe case in Washington is one of four he faces.\n\nHe's also been charged by Smith with illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, a case set for trial next May, and is accused by state prosecutors in Georgia of scheming to subvert that state's presidential election and in New York in connection with a hush money payment to a porn actress."}
{"text": "# Trump downplays Jan. 6 on the anniversary of the Capitol siege and calls jailed rioters 'hostages'\nBy **MICHELLE L. PRICE**, **JILL COLVIN**, and **THOMAS BEAUMONT**  \nJanuary 6, 2024. 10:25 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEWTON, Iowa (AP)** - Former President Donald Trump, campaigning in Iowa Saturday, marked the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol by casting the migrant surge on the southern border as the \"real\" insurrection.\n\nJust over a week before the Republican nomination process begins with Iowa's kickoff caucuses, Trump did not explicitly acknowledge the date. But he continued to claim that countries have been emptying jails and mental institutions to fuel a record number of migrant crossings, even though there is no evidence that is the case.\n\n\"When you talk about insurrection, what they're doing, that's the real deal. That's the real deal. Not patriotically and peacefully - peacefully and patriotically,\" Trump said, quoting from his speech on Jan. 6, before a violent mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol as part of a desperate bid to keep him in power after his 2020 election loss.\n\nTrump's remarks in Newton in central Iowa came a day after Biden delivered a speech near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where he cast Trump as a grave threat to democracy and called Jan. 6 a day when \"we nearly lost America - lost it all.\"\n\nWith a likely rematch of the 2020 election looming, both Biden and Trump have frequently invoked Jan. 6 on the campaign trail. Trump, who is under federal indictment for his efforts to overturn his 2020 loss to Biden, has consistently downplayed or spread conspiracy theories about a riot in which his supporters - spurred by his lies about election fraud - tried to disrupt the certification of Biden's win.\n\nTrump also continued to bemoan the treatment of those who have been jailed for participating in the riot, again labeling them \"hostages.\" More than 1,230 people have been charged with federal crimes connected to the violence, including assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy.\n\n\"They ought to release the J6 hostages. They've suffered enough,\" he said in Clinton, in the state's far east. \"Release the J6 hostages, Joe. Release 'em, Joe. You can do it real easy, Joe,\" he said.\n\nTrump was holding the commit-to-caucus events just over a week before voting will begin on Jan. 15. He arrived at his last event nearly three-and-a-half hours late due to what he said was a mechanical issue with a rented plane.\n\nAfter Trump spoke in Newton, he signed hats and other items people in the crowd passed to him, including a copy of a Playboy magazine that featured him on the cover.\n\nOne man in the crowd, Dick Green, was standing about 15 feet away, weeping after the former president autographed his white \"Trump Country\" hat and shook his hand.\n\n\"It'll never get sold. It will be in my family,\" Green said of the hat.\n\nA caucus captain and a pastor in Brighton, Iowa, Green said he had prayed for four years to meet Trump.\n\n\"I'll never forget it,\" he said. \"It's just the beginning of his next presidency.\"\n\nTrump spent much of the day assailing Biden, casting him as incompetent and the real threat to democracy. But he also attacked fellow Republicans, including the late Sen. John McCain of Arizona, whose \"no\" vote derailed GOP efforts to repeal former President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law.\n\n\"John McCain, for some reason, couldn't get his arm up that day,\" said Trump of McCain, who was shot down over Vietnam in 1967 and spent 5½ years as a prisoner of war. The injuries he suffered left him unable to lift his arms over his head for the rest of his life. His daughter, Meghan McCain, responded on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, calling Trump an expletive and her father an \"American hero.\"\n\nEarlier Saturday, Trump courted young conservative activists in Des Moines, speaking to members of Run GenZ, an organization that encourages young conservatives to run for office.\n\nTrump's campaign is hoping to turn out thousands of supporters who have never caucused before as part of a show of force aimed at denying his rivals momentum and demonstrating his organizing prowess heading into the general election.\n\nHis chief rivals, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, were also campaigning in the state as they battle for second place in hopes of emerging as the most viable alternative to Trump, who is leading by wide margins in early state and national polls.\n\nTrump has used the trip to step up his attacks against Haley, who has been gaining ground. He again cast her Saturday as insufficiently conservative and a \"globalist' beholden to Wall Street donors, and accused her of being disloyal for running against him.\n\n\"Nikki will sell you out just like she sold me out,\" he charged.\n\nOn Friday, Trump had highlighted several recent Haley statements that drew criticism, including her comment that voters in New Hampshire correct Iowa's mistakes (\"You don't have to be corrected,\" he said) and her failure to mention slavery when asked what had caused the Civil War.\n\n\"I don't know if it's going to have an impact, but you know like ... slavery's sort of the obvious answer as opposed to her three paragraphs of bulls---,\" he told a crowd Friday.\n\nIn Newton, he said that he was fascinated by the \"horrible\" war, which he suggested he could have prevented.\n\n\"It's so fascinating,\" he said. \"It's just different. I just find it... I'm so attracted to seeing it... So many mistakes were made. See that was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you.\"\n\nHaley's campaign has pointed to his escalating attention, including a new attack ad, as evidence Trump is worried about her momentum.\n\n\"God bless President Trump, he's been on a temper tantrum every day about me ... and everything he's saying is not true,\" Haley told a crowd Saturday in North Liberty, Iowa."}
{"text": "# Liz Cheney urges New Hampshire primary voters to take a stand against GOP 'cowardice'\nBy **HOLLY RAMER**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 11:20 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**HANOVER, N.H. (AP)** - On a mission to keep former President Donald Trump from returning to the White House, former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney implored New Hampshire voters Friday to use their upcoming presidential primary to send a message to the world.\n\n\"Speak for us all. Tell the world who we are with your vote. Tell them that we are a good and a great nation,\" she said at Dartmouth College a little over two weeks before the Jan. 23 primary. \"But make sure they know that we do not bend, we do not break and we do not yield in the defense of our freedom. Show the world that we will defeat the plague of cowardice sweeping through the Republican party.\"\n\nCheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, had been a leading Republican voice for years. But she parted with many of her colleagues over Trump's false claims of voting fraud and her position as vice chair of the Congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.\n\nOn Friday, the Supreme Court said it will decide whether Trump can be kept off ballots because of his role in the attack. Cheney said she agrees with those who believe he should be disqualified under a provision of the 14th Amendment barring some people who \"engaged in insurrection\" from holding public office.\n\n\"This is a process that will go through the courts and we'll see how that unfolds. But here's no question in my mind that his actions clearly constituted an offense that is within the language of the 14th Amendment,\" she said. \"There's not a requirement that you be convicted in the Senate or in a court of law, and so I believe in the plain language of the constitution.\"\n\nCheney, who was soundly defeated in her 2022 primary, said she disagrees with many of President Joe Biden's policies but said conservative Republicans should recognize \"The threat posed by Donald Trump and the threat posed by Joe Biden are not even remotely similar.\"\n\n\"Our nation can survive and recover from policy mistakes. We cannot recover from a president willing to torch the Constitution,\" she said.\n\nAs for her political future, Cheney demurred when asked if she is planning a third-party run for president.\n\n\"I'm going to do whatever the most effective thing is to ensure that Donald Trump is not elected,\" she said. \"I'll make a decision about what that is in the coming months as we see what happens in the Republican primaries.\""}
{"text": "# Hezbollah, Israel trade heavy cross-border fire as Blinken seeks to prevent regional escalation\nBy **BASSEM MROUE**, **SAMY MAGDY**, and **NAJIB JOBAIN**  \nJanuary 6, 2024. 6:09 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BEIRUT (AP)** - Israel and Lebanon-based Hezbollah traded fire Saturday in one of the heaviest days of cross-border fighting in recent weeks, a day after the militia's leader urged retaliation for the targeted killing, presumably by Israel, of a top Hamas leader in Lebanon's capital.\n\nHezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said that if his group didn't strike back for the killing Tuesday of Saleh Arouri, Hamas' deputy political leader, all of Lebanon would be vulnerable to Israeli attacks.\n\nWith the risk of regional escalation, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken kicked off an urgent Middle East diplomatic tour, his fourth since the Israel-Hamas war erupted three months ago.\n\n\"It is absolutely necessary to avoid Lebanon being dragged into a regional conflict,\" the European Union's foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said in Beirut during his own Middle East tour.\n\nHezbollah said it launched 62 rockets toward an Israeli air surveillance base on Mount Meron and scored direct hits in its \"initial response\" to Arouri's killing. It said rockets also struck two army posts near the border. The Israeli military said about 40 rockets were fired toward Meron and that a base was targeted. The army's chief spokesperson, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said the rockets caused no casualties in Israel.\n\nHagari said the military struck the Hezbollah squads that fired the rockets and also attacked Hezbollah military sites. Hezbollah said six of its fighters were killed Saturday, raising the toll since the fighting began to 150.\n\nIsraeli airstrikes on southern Lebanon hit the outskirts of Kouthariyeh al-Siyad, a village about 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the border, Lebanon's state-run National News Agency said, adding that there were casualties. Such strikes deeper inside Lebanon have been rare since the border fighting started nearly three months ago. NNA also said Israeli forces shelled border areas including the town of Khiam.\n\nSeparately, the armed wing of the Islamic Group in Lebanon, the country's branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and a close ally of Hamas, said it fired two volleys of rockets toward the Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona on Friday night. Two of the group's members were killed in the strike that killed Arouri.\n\nThe war in Gaza was triggered by a deadly Hamas attack on southern Israel in which militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took roughly 250 hostages.\n\nIn recent weeks, Israel has been scaling back its military assault in northern Gaza and pressing its offensive in the territory's south, where most of Gaza's 2.3 million Palestinians are being squeezed into smaller areas in a humanitarian disaster while being pounded by Israeli airstrikes.\n\nIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a video statement reiterated that \"the war must not be stopped\" until the objectives of eliminating Hamas, getting Israel's hostages returned and ensuring that Gaza won't be a threat to Israel are met.\n\nOn Saturday, the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said 122 Palestinians had been killed over the past 24 hours, bringing the total since the start of the war to 22,722. The count does not differentiate between combatants and civilians. The ministry has said two-thirds of those killed have been women or children. The overall wounded rose to 58,166, the ministry said.\n\nThe Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah received at least 46 bodies overnight, according to hospital records seen by The Associated Press. Many were men who apparently had been shot. The dead also included five members of a family who were killed in an airstrike.\n\nThe latest Israeli-dropped leaflets urged Palestinians in some areas near the hospital to evacuate, citing \"dangerous fighting.\"\n\nIn the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, the focus of Israel's ground offensive, the European Hospital received the bodies of 18 people killed in an overnight airstrike on a house, said Saleh al-Hamms, head of the hospital's nursing department. Citing witnesses, he said more than three dozen people had been sheltering in the house, including some who had been displaced.\n\nIsrael has held Hamas responsible for civilian casualties, saying the group embeds itself within Gaza's civilian infrastructure. Still, international criticism of Israel's conduct has grown because of the rising civilian death toll. The United States has urged Israel to do more to prevent harm to civilians, even as it sends weapons and munitions while shielding its close ally against international censure.\n\nThe U.S. also has pressed Israel to let much more aid into Gaza. Two U.S. senators who visited Egypt's Rafah border crossing described lines of hundreds of trucks that have been waiting for weeks to enter.\n\nBlinken began his latest Mideast trip in Turkey, which the Biden administration believes can exert influence, particularly on Iran and its proxies, to tamp down fears of a regional conflagration.\n\nThose fears have spiked in recent days with incidents in the Red Sea, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. On Saturday, a drone launched from an area of Yemen controlled by the Houthi militant group was shot down by the U.S. destroyer Laboon near multiple commercial vessels in the Red Sea, the U.S. Central Command said in a statement, adding there were no casualties or damage reported.\n\nIn talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, Blinken sought support for nascent plans for post-war Gaza that could include monetary or in-kind contributions to reconstruction efforts and some form of participation in a proposed multinational force that could operate in or adjacent to the territory.\n\nBlinken then traveled to Turkish rival and fellow NATO ally Greece to meet Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who has been supportive of U.S. efforts to prevent the Israel-Hamas war from spreading.\n\nOther stops include Jordan, followed by Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia on Sunday and Monday. Blinken will visit Israel and the West Bank next week before wrapping up the trip in Egypt.\n\nThe EU's foreign policy chief also will visit Saudi Arabia on Sunday. He said he aims to jump-start a European-Arab initiative to revive a peace process that would result in a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."}
{"text": "# Blinken says Turkey is committed to a 'positive' role in postwar Gaza as he opens a diplomatic push\nBy **MATTHEW LEE**  \nJanuary 6, 2024. 3:24 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CHANIA, Greece (AP)** - U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Saturday that Turkey is committed to playing \"a positive, productive\" role for postwar Gaza and prepared to use its influence in the region to prevent the Israel-Hamas conflict from broadening even more.\n\nThe latest Mideast mission by America's top diplomat opened with talks in Turkey and Greece before shifting to the region for \"not necessarily easy conversations\" with allies and partners about what they are willing to do \"to build durable peace and security.\"\n\nBlinken's fourth visit in three months comes as developments in Lebanon, northern Israel, the Red Sea and Iraq have put intense strains on what had been a modestly successful U.S. push to prevent a regional conflagration since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, and as international criticism of Israel's military operation mounts.\n\nBlinken held meetings with Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, in Istanbul about what Turkey and others can do to exert influence, particularly on Iran and its proxies, to ease tensions, speed humanitarian aid deliveries to Gaza and begin planning for reconstruction and governance of postwar Gaza. Much of the territory has been reduced to rubble by Israeli bombardments.\n\nIn Chania, a port city on the Mediterranean island of Crete, Blinken later visited with Greece's prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, at his residence. \"These are difficult and challenging times,\" Mitsotakis said.\n\nBlinken's day was ending in Jordan, with stops in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia on Sunday and Monday. Blinken will visit Israel and the West Bank on Tuesday and Wednesday before wrapping up the trip in Egypt. He said his priorities are protecting civilians - \"far too many Palestinians have been killed\" - getting more humanitarian aid into Gaza, ensuring Hamas cannot strike again and developing a framework for Palestinian-led governance in the territory and \"a Palestinian state with security assurances or Israel.\"\n\nThe ultimate goal, he said, is lasting peace, and his talks will focuses on what U.S. allies and partners are prepared to do to help with that process.\n\n\"These are not necessarily easy conversations. There are different perspectives, different needs, different requirements, but it is vital that we engage in this diplomacy now both for the sake of Gaza itself and more broadly the sake of the future for Israelis and Palestinians and for the region as a whole,\" Blinken said.\n\n\"There is clearly a strong desire among the majority of people in the region for a future that is one of peace, of security, of de-escalation of conflicts, of integration of countries and that's one path, that's one future. The other future is an endless cycle of violence, a repetition of the horrific events that we've seen and lives of insecurity and conflict for people in the region, which is what virtually no one wants.\"\n\nTurkey, and Erdogan in particular, have been harshly critical of Israel and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the prosecution of the war and the impact it has had on Palestinian civilians.\n\nBut Blinken told reporters before he flew from Crete to Amman that \"from our conversations today, it's clear that Turkey is prepared to play a positive, productive role in the work that needs to happen the day after the conflict ends and as well more broadly in trying to find a path to sustainable peace and security.\" Blinken would not go in details about what he heard from the Turkish officials.\n\n``I think they're also prepared ... to use the ties, the influence they have, the relationships they have with some of the critical players and some of the critical countries in the region to do everything possible to deescalate and to prevent the conflict from spreading. ... They clearly have a shared interest with us in doing just that and I'm confident from these conversations that they're going to make every possible effort,\" Blinken said.\n\nHours before Blinken's meetings, Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah militia fired dozens of rockets at northern Israel and said the barrage was an initial response to the targeted killing, presumably by Israel, of a top leader from the allied Hamas group in Lebanon's capital this past week.\n\nStepped-up attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea by Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels have disrupted international trade and led to increased efforts by the U.S. and its allies to patrol the vital commercial waterway and respond to threats. The coalition of countries issued what amounted to a final warning to the Houthis on Wednesday to cease their attacks on vessels or face potential targeted military action. Since Dec. 19, the militants have carried out at least two dozen attacks in response to the Israel-Hamas war.\n\nFrom the Turkish officials, Blinken sought at least consideration of potential monetary or in-kind contributions to reconstruction efforts in Gaza and participation in security arrangements, according to U.S. officials.\n\nBlinken also stressed the importance that the U.S. places on Turkey's ratification of Sweden's membership in NATO, a long-delayed process that the Turks have said they will complete soon. Sweden's entry to the alliance is seen as a significant response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.\n\nA Turkish official said Fidan told Blinken that Israel's \"increasing aggression\" in Gaza was a threat to the region and he called for an immediate cease-fire and the delivery of \"uninterrupted\" humanitarian aid. Fidan said negotiations for a two-state solution should begin \"as soon as possible,\" according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issues in the private talks.\n\nFidan also said Turkey was awaiting the outcome of its request to upgrade its fleet of F-16 fighter jets and stressed that the ratification of Sweden's NATO membership lay in the hands of the Turkish parliament."}
{"text": "# A woman in her 90s is rescued alive 5 days after Japan's deadly earthquake\nBy **HIRO KOMAE**, **AYAKA MCGILL**, and **YURI KAGEYAMA **  \nJanuary 6, 2024. 9:54 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WAJIMA, Japan (AP)** - A woman in her 90s was pulled alive from a collapsed house in western Japan late Saturday, 124 hours after a major quake slammed the region, killing at least 126 people, toppling buildings and setting off landslides.\n\nThe woman in Suzu city, Ishikawa Prefecture, had survived for more than five days after the 7.6 magnitude quake that hit the area Monday. Nationally broadcast news footage showed helmeted rescue workers covering the view of the area with blue plastic, and the woman was not visible.\n\nChances for survival diminish after the first 72 hours. Several other dramatic rescues have been reported over the past few days as soldiers, firefighters and others joined a widespread effort.\n\nAmong the 126 dead was a 5-year-old boy who had been recovering from injuries he suffered when boiling water spilled on him during Monday's 7.6 magnitude earthquake. His condition suddenly worsened and he died Friday, according to Ishikawa prefecture, the hardest-hit region.\n\nAftershocks threatened to bury more homes and block roads crucial for relief shipments. Officials warned that roads already cracked could collapse completely. That risk was growing with rain and snow expected overnight and Sunday.\n\nWajima city has recorded the highest number of deaths with 69, followed by Suzu with 38. More than 500 people were injured, at least 27 of them seriously.\n\nThe temblors left roofs sitting haplessly on roads and everything beneath them crushed flat. Roads were warped like rubber. A fire turned a neighborhood in Wajima to ashes.\n\nMore than 200 people were still unaccounted-for, although the number has fluctuated. Eleven people were reported trapped under two homes that collapsed in Anamizu.\n\nFor Shiro Kokuda, 76, the house in Wajima where he grew up was spared but a nearby temple went up in flames and he was still looking for his friends at evacuation centers.\n\n\"It's been really tough,\" he said.\n\nJapan is one of the fastest-aging societies in the world. The population in Ishikawa and nearby areas has dwindled over the years. A fragile economy centered on crafts and tourism is now more imperiled than ever.\n\nIn an unusual gesture from nearby North Korea, leader Kim Jong Un sent a message of condolence to Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, the official Korean Central News Agency reported Saturday.\n\nJapan received messages earlier expressing sympathy and promises of aid from United States President Joe Biden and other allies.\n\nJapanese government spokesperson Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters that Japan was grateful for all the messages, including the one from North Korea. Hayashi said the last time Japan received a condolence message from North Korea for a disaster was in 1995.\n\nAlong Japan's coastline, power was gradually being restored, but water supplies were still short. Emergency water systems were also damaged.\n\nThousands of troops were flying and trucking in water, food and medicine to the more than 30,000 people who had evacuated to auditoriums, schools and other facilities.\n\nThe nationally circulated Yomiuri newspaper reported that its aerial study had located more than 100 landslides in the area, some blocking lifeline roads. Some communities remained isolated and waiting for aid.\n\n\"I hope the city recovers, and I hope people won't leave, and they stay here to work hard toward recovery,\" said Seizo Shinbo, a seafood trader, who was stocking up on noodles, canned goods and rice balls at a supermarket.\n\n\"There is no food. There is no water. And the worst is gas. People are still in kilometer-long lines,\" Shinbo said."}
{"text": "# Cumbersome process and 'arbitrary' Israeli inspections slow aid delivery into Gaza, US senators say\nBy **LEE KEATH**  \nJanuary 6, 2024. 3:43 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAIRO (AP)** - At Egypt's Rafah border crossing, lines of hundreds of trucks carrying aid wait for weeks to enter Gaza, and a warehouse is full of goods rejected by Israeli inspectors, everything from water testing equipment to medical kits for delivering babies, two U.S. senators said Saturday after a visit to the border.\n\nSens. Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley pointed to a cumbersome process that is slowing relief to the Palestinian population in the besieged territory - largely due to Israeli inspections of aid cargos, with seemingly arbitrary rejections of vital humanitarian equipment. The system to ensure that aid deliveries within Gaza don't get hit by Israeli forces is \"totally broken,\" they said.\n\n\"What struck me yesterday was the miles of backed-up trucks. We couldn't count, but there were hundreds,\" Merkley said in a briefing with Van Hollen to a group of reporters in Cairo.\n\nThe U.S. has been pressing Israel for weeks to let greater amounts of food, water, fuel, medicine and other supplies into Gaza, and the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution on Dec. 22 calling for an immediate increase in deliveries. Three weeks ago, Israel opened its Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza, adding a second entry point for aid after Rafah.\n\nStill, the rate of trucks entering has not risen significantly. This week, an average of around 120 trucks a day entered through Rafah and Kerem Shalom, according to U.N. figures, far below the 500 trucks of goods going in daily before the war and far below what aid groups say is needed.\n\nOther than the trickle of aid through the crossings, Israel has barred the entry of supplies since its assault on Gaza began three months ago, aiming to destroy Hamas after its Oct. 7 attack on Israel.\n\nThe result has been a humanitarian catastrophe for the territory's 2.3 million Palestinians.\n\nAlmost the entire population depends on the trucks coming across the border for their survival. One in four Palestinians in Gaza is starving, and the rest face crisis levels of hunger, according to the U.N. More than 85% of Gaza's people have been driven from their homes by Israeli bombardment and ground offensives. Most live in U.N. shelters crowded many times beyond their capacity, in tent camps that have sprung up or on the streets. The few functioning hospitals are overwhelmed with wounded and patients amid outbreaks of disease, as sanitation systems have collapsed.\n\nVan Hollen and Merkley said a more simplified process for getting aid into Gaza is necessary. During a three-day visit to Egypt, they met with Egyptian officials, U.N. aid agencies and non-governmental relief groups working in Gaza. At Rafah on Friday, they also spoke to doctors who had come out of Gaza and a truck driver waiting to get in.\n\nTrucks carrying aid cargos can wait for weeks at the border for their turn to be processed, they said they were told by aid officials. They enter the Egyptian side of the border, drive along no-man's land to the Israeli facility at Nitzana for inspection by the military, then return to Rafah to cross into Gaza - or go to Kerem Shalom for inspection and entry there.\n\nKerem Shalom operates eight hours a day, and both it and Nitzana close part of Friday and all Saturday. \"This, in a 24-hour-a day\" humanitarian crisis, Van Hollen said.\n\nIsrael says the inspections are necessary to prevent items of military use from reaching Hamas.\n\nDuring the process, cargos are unloaded and reloaded several times. If inspectors reject a single item in a truck, it must return with its entire cargo to be re-packaged, starting the weeks-long process all over again, said Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland.\n\nThe reasons for rejection are often \"very vague, and they are conveyed informally. Sometimes they were very unreasonable,\" said Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon.\n\nThe two senators said they saw a warehouse in Rafah filled with material that had been rejected in inspection. It included oxygen cylinders, gas-powered generators, tents and medical kits used in delivering babies.\n\nAid workers told the senators the tents were refused because they included metal poles, and the medical kits because they included scalpels. Most solar-powered equipment appears to be barred - though it is vital in Gaza, where central electricity has collapsed and fuel for generators is in short supply.\n\n\"The warehouse was a testament to the arbitrariness\" of the process, Van Hollen said.\n\nThere is a process for pre-approving cargos, but it can take weeks, they said, and even items that obtained prior approval are sometimes rejected during inspection. After inspection, trucks are considered \"sanitized\" and their drivers are not allowed to interact with anyone; the senators said they were told one truck driver was turned back after someone brought him a cup of coffee, violating the rule.\n\nThe process is \"completely incompatible\" with a humanitarian crisis of this extent, Merkley said. \"There has to be a simplified process\" that honors Israel's concerns over potential military uses of goods but also addresses the scale of the situation, he said.\n\nThe senators, who both sit on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, said they were drawing up recommendations for changes.\n\nSpeaking to reporters in Jerusalem this week, Col. Elad Goren, a senior official in the Israeli military body overseeing Palestinian civilian affairs known as COGAT, admitted that Israeli security checks could be hampering rapid aid delivery but largely blamed the bottlenecks on international agencies and the United Nations.\n\nAsked about certain forms of medical equipment not being allowed in, he said, \"I want to make it clear we are not refusing anything that is underneath four headlines ... Food, water, medical supplies and shelters.\"\n\nGoren said the U.N. should increase manpower and workers' hours and deploy more trucks to deliver aid. He maintained the humanitarian situation in Gaza was under control and there was sufficient food. Officials at COGAT did not respond to Associated Press requests for comment on the senators' briefing.\n\nVan Hollen and Merkley said U.N. and other aid workers described extensive problems in distributing aid. They must ration the small amount of fuel Israel allows to enter Gaza between hospitals, bakeries and aid trucks. Frequent collapses of the communications system - or simple inability to recharge phone batteries - makes contact and coordination with aid teams impossible.\n\nArranging safe passage for aid deliveries is an enormous challenge, they said. \"Nothing about deconfliction is working,\" Merkley said. Aid groups inform the Israeli military of their movements but even once they have assurances an area is safe, it sometimes gets struck.\n\n\"No place really becomes deconflicted,\" Merkley said. \"It is not safe for them to move.\""}
{"text": "# Hasina wins Bangladesh vote, but low turnout and opposition boycott raise doubts over its legitimacy\nBy **KRUTIKA PATHI** and **JULHAS ALAM**  \nJanuary 7, 2024. 11:20 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP)** - Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has won an overwhelming majority in Bangladesh's parliamentary election after a campaign fraught with violence and a boycott from the main opposition party, giving her and her Awami League a fourth consecutive term.\n\nWhile the Election Commission has been slow to announce the results of Sunday's election, TV stations with journalists across the country reported the Awami League won 224 seats out of 299. Independent candidates took 62, while the Jatiya Party, the third largest in the country, took 11 seats and Kallyan Party got 1. The results for the rest of the constituencies were still coming in.\n\nThe election was held in 299 out of 300 parliamentary seats. In one seat, the election was postponed as required by law after an independent candidate died.\n\nA final official declaration from the Election Commission is expected on Monday.\n\nAt least 18 arson attacks preceded the vote but the election day passed in relative calm. Turnout was around 40%, Chief Election Commissioner Kazi Habibul Awal said after the polls closed.\n\nThe main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party led by former premier Khaleda Zia refused to accept the election outcome, saying Bangladeshi voters have rejected the government's one-sided election.\n\nSecurity incidents, including four deaths in an arson attack on a passenger train on Friday, intensified tensions ahead of the election that was shunned by Zia's party and its allied groups. They accuse Hasina of turning Bangladesh into a one-party state and muzzling dissent and civil society.\n\nAuthorities blamed much of the violence on the BNP, accusing it of seeking to sabotage the election. On Saturday, detectives arrested seven men belonging to the BNP and its youth wing for their alleged involvement in the train attack. The party denied any role in the incident.\n\nOn Sunday, a supporter of an Awami League candidate was stabbed to death in Munshiganj district near the capital, Dhaka, officials said. Police did not comment immediately.\n\nA victory for the 76-year-old Hasina, the country's longest-serving leader and one of its most consequential, would come with a deeply contentious political landscape.\n\nThe vote, like previous elections, has been defined by the bitter rivalry between Hasina's Awami League and the BNP, led by Zia, who is ailing and under house arrest on corruption charges, which her supporters claim are politically motivated.\n\nThe two women ran the country alternately for many years, cementing a feud that has since polarized Bangladesh's politics and fueled violence around elections. This year's vote raised questions over its credibility when there are no major challengers to take on the incumbent.\n\nBadshah Mia, a rickshaw puller in Dhaka, said he wouldn't vote given the limited choices, adding that the atmosphere didn't exude that of \"a fair election.\"\n\nSakibul Hasan Chowdhury, a businessman, felt the same. \"There is no opposition and no candidate of my choice. So how would I benefit from voting?\"\n\nA small business owner, Habibur Rahman, said he was voting for the ruling party candidate in his constituency but added that there didn't seem to be much of a turnout.\n\nCritics and rights groups say the vote follows a troubling pattern, where the past two elections held under Hasina were sullied by allegations of vote-rigging - which authorities have denied - and another boycott by opposition parties.\n\nThe government has rejected a monthslong demand by the BNP to have a neutral caretaker government administer Sunday's vote.\n\nThe government has defended the election, saying 27 parties and 404 independent candidates are participating. But with scores of candidates from the Awami League running as independents and mostly smaller opposition parties in the race, analysts say Hasina's win is near inevitable.\n\nMichael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center, said none of those contesting would be able to mount much of a challenge to Hasina's party. \"The outcome is all but guaranteed, and that is that the Awami League will return (to power) again,\" he said, noting that \"Bangladesh's democracy will be in an extremely precarious state once the election is done.\"\n\nThe vote has also been called into question by accusations of a sweeping crackdown against the BNP. The party says about 20,000 of its members were jailed ahead of the vote on trumped-up charges. The government disputed the figures and denied that arrests were made due to political leanings, saying the numbers of those arrested were between 2,000-3,000. The country's law minister in an interview with BBC said 10,000 were likely arrested.\n\nAbdul Moyeen Khan, a former minister and BNP leader, said the spate of arrests forced him and scores of other party members to go into hiding for weeks until candidacy nominations were halted. \"It was the only way we could ensure our safety and carry on raising our voice (against the government)\" he said.\n\n\"We are not boycotting an election - what we are boycotting is a fake and one-sided election that this government is carrying out,\" Khan added.\n\nHasina is credited with transforming the economy of a young nation born out of war and making its garment sector one of the world's most competitive. Her supporters say she has staved off military coups and neutralized the threat of Islamic militancy. And internationally, she's helped raise Bangladesh's profile as a nation capable of doing business and maintaining diplomatic ties with countries often at odds with each other, like India and China.\n\nYet her critics say her rise has risked turning Bangladesh into becoming a one-party state where democracy is under threat, as emboldened government agencies increasingly use oppressive tools to mute critics, shrink press freedoms and restrict civil society.\n\nThe global economic slowdown is also being felt in Bangladesh, exposing cracks in its economy that have triggered labor unrest and dissatisfaction with the government.\n\nAfter casting her ballot, Hasina dismissed concerns over the legitimacy of the vote, telling reporters she was accountable to the people and whether they accepted the election or not was what mattered to her.\n\n\"I'm trying my best to ensure that democracy should continue in this country,\" she added. \"Without democracy, you cannot make any development.\""}
{"text": "# Police probe UK Post Office for accusing over 700 employees of theft. The culprit was an IT glitch\nBy **JILL LAWLESS**  \nJanuary 6, 2024. 8:04 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - U.K. police have opened a fraud investigation into Britain's Post Office over a miscarriage of justice that saw hundreds of postmasters wrongfully accused of stealing money when a faulty computer system was to blame.\n\nThe Metropolitan Police force said late Friday that it is investigating \"potential fraud offences arising out of these prosecutions,\" relating to money the Post Office received \"as a result of prosecutions or civil actions\" against accused postal workers.\n\nPolice also are investigating potential offenses of perjury and perverting the course of justice over investigations and prosecutions carried out by the Post Office.\n\nBetween 1999 and 2015, more than 700 post office branch managers were accused of theft or fraud because computers wrongly showed that money was missing. Many were financially ruined after being forced to pay large sums to the company, and some were convicted and sent to prison. Several killed themselves.\n\nThe real culprit was a defective computer accounting system called Horizon, supplied by the Japanese technology firm Fujitsu, that was installed in local Post Office branches in 1999.\n\nThe Post Office maintained for years that data from Horizon was reliable and accused branch managers of dishonesty when the system showed money was missing.\n\nAfter years of campaigning by victims and their lawyers, the Court of Appeal quashed 39 of the convictions in 2021. A judge said the Post Office \"knew there were serious issues about the reliability\" of Horizon and had committed \"egregious\" failures of investigation and disclosure.\n\nA total of 93 of the postal workers have now had their convictions overturned, according to the Post Office. But many others have yet to be exonerated, and only 30 have agreed to \"full and final\" compensation payments. A public inquiry into the scandal has been underway since 2022.\n\nSo far, no one from the publicly owned Post Office or other companies involved has been arrested or faced criminal charges.\n\nLee Castleton, a former branch manager who went bankrupt after being pursued by the Post Office for missing funds, said his family was ostracized in their hometown of Bridlington in northern England. He said his daughter was bullied because people thought \"her father was a thief, and he'd take money from old people.\"\n\nHe said victims wanted those responsible to be named.\n\n\"It's about accountability,\" Castleton told Times Radio on Saturday. \"Let's see who made those decisions and made this happen.\"\n\nThe long-simmering scandal stirred new outrage with the broadcast this week of a TV docudrama, \"Mr. Bates vs the Post Office.\" It charted a two-decade battle by branch manager Alan Bates, played by Toby Jones, to expose the truth and clear the wronged postal workers.\n\nPost Office Chief Executive Nick Read, appointed after the scandal, welcomed the TV series and said he hoped it would \"raise further awareness and encourage anyone affected who has not yet come forward to seek the redress and compensation they deserve.\"\n\nA lawyer for some of the postal workers said 50 new potential victims had approached lawyers since the show aired on the ITV network.\n\n\"The drama has elevated public awareness to a whole new level,\" attorney Neil Hudgell said. \"The British public and their overwhelming sympathy for the plight of these poor people has given some the strength to finally come forward. Those numbers increase by the day, but there are so many more out there.\""}
{"text": "# Russian shelling kills 11 in Donetsk region while Ukraine claims it hit a Crimean air base\nJanuary 6, 2024. 11:38 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**KYIV, Ukraine (AP)** - Eleven people were killed Saturday in Russian shelling in Ukraine's partially occupied Donetsk province, according to regional Gov. Vadym Filashkin. Five children were among the dead and eight further people were wounded in the attack on the Pokrovsk district, he said.\n\nUkraine's military claimed Saturday it successfully attacked the Saki military airbase in the west of the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula.\n\n\"Saki airfield! All targets were hit!\" Air Force commander Mykola Oleshchuk wrote on Telegram. He also published a photo appearing to show the airfield, though it was not immediately possible to verify the image.\n\nRussian officials did not comment on the alleged attack, but Russia's Defense Ministry said in the early hours of Saturday that it had successfully downed four Ukrainian missiles over the peninsula overnight. Later on Saturday, the ministry reported that its air defense forces had shot down six anti-ship missiles over the Black Sea.\n\nTraffic was temporarily suspended for a third straight day on a bridge connecting the peninsula, which Moscow seized illegally in 2014, with Russia's southern Krasnodar region. The span is a crucial supply link for Russia's war effort.\n\nIn Russia, local officials in Belgorod - some 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the border with Ukraine - said that an \"air target\" was shot down on approach to the city. Ukrainian attacks on Dec. 30 in Belgorod killed 25 people, officials there said, with rocket and drone attacks continuing throughout this week.\n\nAs Russians prepared to celebrate Orthodox Christmas, Christmas Eve masses in Belgorod were canceled due to the \"operational situation,\" mayor Valentin Demidov said."}
{"text": "# Orthodox mark Christmas, but the celebration is overshadowed for many by conflict\nBy **THE ASSOCIATED PRESS**  \nJanuary 6, 2024. 5:54 PM EST\n\n---\n\nOrthodox Christians packed churches Saturday night for Christmas Eve services, a holiday overshadowed for many believers by conflict.\n\nTraditions vary, but typically the main worship service for Orthodox Christians takes place the night before Christmas, which is Jan. 7.\n\nPatriarch Kirill, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, the world's largest Orthodox denomination, led elaborate and well-attended services at Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral. In ornately decorated vestments, dozens of priests and officiants took part, swinging smoking incense censers and chanting the liturgy.\n\nIn his Christmas message, broadcast just before the service Saturday night, Kirill spoke on the theme of sacrificial love, noting that Jesus Christ \"saved us from the wrong path in life, from the wrong life orientation.\" He also called for prayers for Russia, so that \"no alien evil will could disrupt the peaceful flow of life.\"\n\nRussian President Vladimir Putin was joined by families of military personnel who have died in the war in Ukraine at Christmas Eve services at his Novo-Ogaryovo residence, in the western suburbs of Moscow.\n\nIn a statement congratulating Orthodox Christians, Putin highlighted the \"efforts of religious organizations aimed at supporting our heroes - participants in the special military operation,\" as the Kremlin refers to Russia's efforts in Ukraine.\n\nOfficials said about a million people were expected to go to church in the Russian capital. But nighttime services were canceled in the Russian border city of Belgorod due to the \"operational situation,\" Mayor Valentin Demidov said.\n\nUkrainian attacks in Belgorod on Dec. 30 killed 25 people, officials there said, making it one of the deadliest strikes on Russian soil since the start of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine nearly 23 months ago. Rocket and drone attacks on the city continued throughout this week.\n\nRussians and Orthodox in some other countries observe Christmas on Jan. 7.\n\nBut Ukraine, which is a predominantly Orthodox country, officially observed Christmas this year as a public holiday on Dec. 25. The change, enacted in legislation signed by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in July, reflects Ukrainians' dismay with the nearly 23-month-old Russian invasion and their assertion of a national identity.\n\nIn neighboring Belarus, Christmas is officially celebrated with public holidays on both Dec. 25 and on Jan. 7. About 80% of believers are Orthodox, belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church, while around 14% are Catholics, living mainly in the west, north and center of the country.\n\nPresident Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus for 30 years, calls himself an \"Orthodox atheist.\" He usually attends Christmas Eve services and lights a candle in an Orthodox church.\n\nHe wished Orthodox Christians a happy Christmas, saying in a statement that he is \"convinced that by preserving the Orthodox traditions of mercy and moral purity, together we will create the best future for our native Belarus.\"\n\nOrthodox believers in Serbia marked the day by burning oak branches at services outside churches and temples, including hundreds who gathered at the St. Sava Temple - the biggest Orthodox church in the Balkans.\n\nThe young oak tree symbolizes Christ and his entry into the world, with the centuries-old tradition led by Serbian Orthodox church priests. As the fire was lit, dozens of people of all ages threw small branches of dried oak into the large bonfire.\n\n\"In these hard times, we need to come together in unity and to nurture peace, love, and respect towards each other,\" Belgrade resident Mica Jovanovic told The Associated Press.\n\nCelebrations in the Middle East were darkened by another conflict: the Israel-Hamas war.\n\nIn Bethlehem, where Orthodox Christmas Eve normally draws tens of thousands of tourists to visit the traditional birthplace of Jesus, roughly 100 observers milled about in Manger Square. They were nearly outnumbered by police officers and clergymen.\n\nChristmas festivities were canceled in the West Bank town after the heads of major churches in Jerusalem asked their congregations to \"forgo any unnecessarily festive activities\" in light of the fighting in Gaza. The majority of Christians in the region are Palestinians, and Christian leaders have called upon observers to spend the holidays praying for peace and an end to the war.\n\nDespite the cancellation of festivities, church leaders still gathered to welcome the arrival of patriarchs from different Orthodox churches - Greek, Coptic and Ethiopian - and a customary procession of Boy Scouts proceeded through Bethlehem, though without the usual fanfare. A midnight Mass was planned.\n\nSamir Qumseyeh, a Palestinian Christian and founder of a Christian TV channel, has been filming the celebrations since 1996. He said this year's observance was even more muted than at the height of the second intifada, when Israeli forces locked down parts of the West Bank in response to Palestinians carrying out suicide bombings and other attacks that killed Israeli civilians.\n\n\"Even during the intifada, still the festivals and the joy were there,\" Qumseyeh said. \"But this year, I am feeling very, very, very sad. But I understand why the church leaders had to do this. You cannot show joy when the people of Gaza are suffering.\"\n\nIn Iraq, many Christians canceled Christmas and New Year's celebrations in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, as well as in an act of continued mourning for the victims of a deadly fire that killed more than 100 people at a wedding in the predominantly Christian Hamdaniya area of northern Iraq in September.\n\nDozens of Iraqi Armenian Orthodox Christians attended Christmas Eve Mass in Baghdad but the celebration was limited to Christmas prayers and rituals.\n\n\"In 2023, we went through many crises, including the Hamdaniya tragedy which the entire world learned about, as well as to Gaza and our brothers in Palestine,\" Gebre Kashikian, pastor of the Armenian Church in Baghdad, said at the Mass.\n\nIn Istanbul, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I presided over the Blessing of the Waters ceremony on the Golden Horn. The tradition sees the patriarch toss a wooden cross into the inlet, which this year nearly 50 swimmers competed to recover.\n\nKostas Kypros, from Alexandroupoli in Greece, emerged from the water clutching the crucifix. \"I am very happy. I wish the best for everyone. I was lucky and I pulled out the cross,\" Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency reported him as saying.\n\nEarlier, members of Istanbul's tiny Greek Orthodox community and visitors from neighboring Greece attended an Epiphany service led by Bartholomew I at the Patriarchal Church of St George in Istanbul's Fener district.\n\nBartholomew I is regarded as the \"first among equals\" among patriarchs in Eastern Orthodoxy and the spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians. The patriarchate dates from the 1,100-year Orthodox Greek Byzantine Empire, which ended in 1453 when the Muslim Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople, today's Istanbul."}
{"text": "# Pope Francis warns against ideological splits in the Church, says focus on the poor, not 'theory'\nBy **FRANCES D'EMILIO**  \nJanuary 6, 2024. 6:35 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**VATICAN CITY (AP)** - Amid resistance to some Vatican policy by more conservative factions of the Catholic church, Pope Francis on Saturday cautioned the faithful against fracturing into groups \"based on our own ideas.\"\n\nHe issued the call to abandon \"ecclesiastical ideologies\" in his homily in St. Peter's Basilica during Epiphany Day Mass, the last major Christmas season holiday.\n\nFrancis also warned against \"basking in some elegant religious theory\" instead of finding God in the faces of the poor.\n\nLast month, Francis gave permission for priests to bless couples outside of marriage, including same-sex relationships, as long as the blessing was pastoral and not liturgical or part of some religious rite.\n\nSome bishops who view Francis as a dangerous progressive immediately rejected such blessings. That prompted the Vatican earlier this week to issue a statement stressing that the blessings don't constitute heresy and there were no doctrinal grounds to reject the practice.\n\nFrancis in his Epiphany homily didn't cite the pushback against his same-sex blessings policy. But he deviated from the written text of the homily to cite the \"need to abandon ecclesiastical ideologies.\"\n\nFrancis said the Church needed to ensure that \"our faith will not be reduced to an assemblage of religious devotions or mere outward appearance.\"\n\n\"We find the God who comes down to visit us, not by basking in some elegant religious theory, but by setting out on a journey, seeking the signs of his presence in everyday life,\" especially in the faces of the poor, the pontiff said.\n\nThe pontiff, who turned 87 last month and who battled health problems last year, held up well during the Epiphany ceremony, which included singing of Christmas hymns. At the end of the 90-minute service, an aide wheeled Francis down the basilica's center aisle. The pope has a chronic knee problem and uses a wheelchair to navigate longer distances.\n\nHe has dedicated much of his nearly 11-year-old papacy to encouraging attention to marginalized people, including the poor. While the Church teaches that homosexual acts are sinful, Francis has made efforts to make LGBTQ+ Catholics feel welcome."}
{"text": "# South Korea says the North has again fired artillery shells near their sea border\nBy **HYUNG-JIN KIM**  \nJanuary 6, 2024. 11:18 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**SEOUL, South Korea (AP)** - North Korea conducted a new round of artillery drills near the disputed sea boundary with South Korea on Saturday, officials in Seoul said, a day after the North's similar exercises prompted South Korea to respond with its own firing drills in the same area.\n\nThe North's back-to-back firing exercises come after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un repeatedly called for stronger war readiness to cope with what he called deepening confrontation led by the U.S.\n\nExperts say North Korea is likely to continue its provocative run of weapons tests to boost its leverage in potential future negotiations with Washington as the U.S. heads into November elections.\n\nSouth Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement that the North fired more than 60 rounds into the waters north of the western sea boundary on Saturday afternoon.\n\nThe joint chiefs said South Korea strongly urges North Korea to halt acts that heighten tensions. It said it will take corresponding military steps if North Korea continues artillery drills that pose a threat to South Korean nationals.\n\nThe statement didn't say whether South Korea would respond with its own drills. South Korean media reported the South didn't stage firing exercises, after determining the direction of North Korean shells fired Saturday was less provocative than Friday.\n\nThe Koreas' firing exercises were a violation of a 2018 inter-Korean agreement that was meant to ease front-line military tensions. Struck during a brief period of rapprochement, the accord calls for a halt in live-fire exercises and aerial surveillance in front-line buffer and no-fly zones. But rising animosities over the North's first military spy satellite launch in November has left the military agreement in tatters, with both Koreas taking steps to breach the deal.\n\nOn Friday, North Korea used coast artillery systems to fire about 200 rounds, also north of the sea boundary, in its first maritime firing exercise in the buffer zone in about a year.\n\nIn response, South Korea's Defense Ministry said troops on two border islands fired artillery rounds south of the sea boundary. Local media said South Korea fired 400 rounds.\n\nAhead of the South Korean drills, South Korean authorities asked residents on five major islands near the sea boundary to evacuate to safe places due to worries that North Korea would fire back. The evacuation order was lifted a few hours later.\n\nNorth Korea's military said later Friday that its drills were in response to South Korea's military training earlier in the week. It warned that North Korea will launch \"tough counteraction on an unprecedented level\" if South Korea engages in provocations.\n\nThe Koreas' poorly marked western sea boundary was the site of bloody naval skirmishes between the Koreas in 1999, 2002 and 2009. The North's alleged torpedoing of a South Korean warship killed 46 South Korean sailors in March 2010, and the North's artillery bombardment of Yeonpyeong Island killed four South Koreans in November 2010.\n\nIn a recent key ruling party meeting, Kim fired off fierce, derisive rhetoric against South Korea, saying South Korea must not be considered as a partner for reconciliation or unification. He ordered the military to use all available means - including nuclear weapons - to conquer South Korea in the event of a conflict.\n\nSince 2022, North Korea has conducted more than 100 missile tests, many of them nuclear-capable weapons targeting the U.S. mainland and South Korea. The U.S. and South Korea have responded by expanding their military training, which North Korea calls an invasion rehearsal."}
{"text": "# A timeline of key moments leading to Japan planes colliding. Human error is seen as a possible cause\nBy **MARI YAMAGUCHI**  \nJanuary 6, 2024. 6:39 AM EST\n\n---\n\nIt only took 18 minutes to evacuate the 379 passengers of Japan Airlines Flight 516 after their plane burst into flames just after touchdown at Tokyo's Haneda airport Tuesday evening. A smaller coast guard Bombardier Dash-8 aircraft, preparing to take off to deliver urgent aid to quake-hit central Japan, was using the same runway when the two collided. The captain of the coast guard craft escaped with burns but his five crew members died.\n\nThe Associated Press collected accounts from officials and transcripts of traffic control communication. Here is a look at key moments leading to the collision.\n\n## TRAFFIC CONTROLS\nTranscripts of the recorded communication, released by the transport ministry Wednesday, at 5:43 p.m., show airport traffic control and the JAL Airbus A350 establish communications four minutes before landing. Two minutes later, traffic control tells the JAL plane it's allowed to land on the designated runway, 34R, with the pilot saying \"cleared to land.\"\n\nJust 10 seconds later, the outgoing coast guard plane identifies itself, telling traffic control it's on a taxiway to the runway. The traffic controller instructs it to \"taxi to holding point C5\" before the runway and says it gets No. 1 departure priority. The Bombardier repeats the instruction, then adds: \"No. 1, thank you.\"\n\nThe traffic controls make no further communication with either the JAL flight or the coast guard aircraft over the next two minutes until the crash, while communicating with two other flights.\n\nNHK television airs footage from its monitoring camera set up at the Haneda airport showing the coast guard Bombardier moving from the C5 taxiway onto the runway, during the two-minute interval, and stopping there just before the collision.\n\n## LANDING AND COLLISION\nAt 5:47 p.m., about 40 seconds after the Bombardier is seen on the runway, the JAL flight touches down right behind coast guard aircraft and rams into it, creating an orange fireball against the night sky. The much smaller Bombardier is quickly engulfed in fire, while the A350 - covered in flames and spewing gray smoke - continues down the runway for about 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) before coming to a stop, where fire engines and emergency workers scramble to put out the fire.\n\nEmergency procedures in cabin are already in motion.\n\n## EVACUATION\nThe JAL flight crew starts emergency response. The usual cabin announcement system malfunctions, according to JAL, and the crew is shouting into a megaphone to make sure all passengers hear their instructions.\n\nFlight attendants repeatedly urge passengers to stay calm and to leave their belongings behind while making their way toward the closest of the only three usable emergency exits - two frontward ones and the third on the back - as the five others were deemed unsafe.\n\nA survivor's video shows smoke filling the cabin as people grow desperate. Some shout, \"please let us out!\" as children start crying. But many others remain calm and follow instructions to leave the burning plane on emergency chutes.\n\nThe captain ensures nobody is left behind in the cabin. He is the last one to leave the aircraft at 6:05 p.m., 18 minutes after touchdown.\n\nExperts and media describe the 18-minute evacuation as \"a miracle,\" praising the JAL crew for their response.\n\n## AFTERMATH\nThe Haneda airport, one of the world's busiest, reopens later Tuesday three other runways. But hundreds of flights have been canceled, including about 200 on Saturday, the last long weekend of Japan's New Year holiday season.\n\nAt around 2:15 a.m. Wednesday, more than eight hours after the collision, the blaze is finally extinguished.\n\nAviation safety officials say they will inspect the A350 as part of their investigation to find out the cause of the collision, increasingly seen as human error with transcripts showing no clear takeoff approval was given to the coast guard plane.\n\nBy Friday, a team of six investigators from the Japan Transport Safety Board recovers flight data and voice recorders from the Bombardier and interviews three JAL pilots and nine cabin attendants.\n\n JAL starts removing A350 debris from the runway to its hanger.\n\nTransport Minister Tetsuo Saito says they plan to reopen the runway by Monday and that the airport's traffic control operation is creating a new position among its team for monitoring aircraft movement on runways starting Saturday.\n\nOn Saturday, the JTSB experts recover voice data from the A350, crucial to the probe, and begin interviewing traffic controllers who were on call during the collision."}
{"text": "# Thousands of mourners in Islamabad attend funeral for Pakistani cleric gunned down in broad daylight\nJanuary 6, 2024. 9:09 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**ISLAMABAD (AP)** - Thousands of mourners attended a funeral Saturday for a Pakistani Sunni Muslim cleric gunned down in broad daylight on the outskirts of the capital, Islamabad, police and a spokesman for the cleric's organization said.\n\nThe funeral of Masoodur Rehman Usmani was held a day after unidentified gunmen shot and killed him and wounded his driver in the neighborhood of Ghauri Town, according to a statement from Islamabad police.\n\nNo one claimed responsibility for the attack, which is a rare occurrence in this part of Pakistan. Police said they were using closed-circuit TV footage to track down the assailants, and vowed that they would be arrested and brought to justice.\n\nAuthorities in Islamabad have stepped up security by deploying additional police and some embassies were advising their nationals to avoid visiting the area where the funeral for Usmani was to be held.\n\nUsmani was a deputy secretary at the Sunni Ulema Council, which emerged after Pakistan outlawed the Sipah-e-Sahaba extremist group, which has been accused of killing thousands of Shiites in recent decades across the country.\n\nSunni clerics in their speeches at the funeral asked the government to ensure the arrest of those responsible for Usmani's killing. Top cleric Ahmed Ludhianvi threatened a sit-in in Islamabad if they were not arrested within the week.\n\nThe funeral was livestreamed on social media by organizers, who wanted to hold the event outside parliament. But police refused their request, and the event was instead held in a busy commercial area in Islamabad.\n\nPakistan has suffered frequent sectarian violence between the majority Sunni and minority Shiite groups, but authorities say it is still unclear who was behind the killing, although mourners were seen chanting slogans against Shiites and neighboring Iran, which is often accused by Sunni groups of backing Shiite organizations in Pakistan.\n\nMost Sunnis and Shiites live together peacefully in Pakistan, though tensions have existed for decades."}
{"text": "# Guam investigates fatal shooting of Korean visitor and offers $50,000 reward for information\nJanuary 5, 2024. 4:16 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**HAGATNA, Guam (AP)** - Authorities in the U.S. territory of Guam on Friday vowed to bring to justice those who fatally shot a South Korean visitor in a tourist district.\n\nThe shooting occurred shortly before 8 p.m. Thursday when the traveler and his wife were walking toward Tsubaki Towers, a hotel on Guam's popular Tumon Bay, from nearby Gun Beach, KUAM-TV reported, citing police.\n\nAn older model, dark-colored SUV approached them from behind, Guam Police Chief Stephen Ignacio said at a news conference.\n\nA passenger holding a gun got of the vehicle and demanded they hand over their belongings, Ignacio said, adding, \"A struggle ensued.\"\n\nThe victim was taken to Guam Regional Medical City, where he died from his injuries the next morning. He had been visiting Guam while celebrating his retirement.\n\nThe Guam Visitors Bureau has offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible.\n\nGuam is an island of about 170,000 people approximately 3,900 miles (6,275 kilometers) west of Hawaii.\n\nIts warm weather has made it a favored tourist destination for many nearby Asian nations. South Korea sent nearly 270,000 travelers to Guam in the first nine months of last year, more than any other country.\n\nThe island is also home to major Air Force and Navy installations. Its economy relies heavily on tourism and U.S. government spending.\n\nIn Kook Kim, the Korean consulate's head of mission, urged Guam's officials to act quickly.\n\n\"Arrest the suspect in no time and carry out a thorough investigation to bring them to justice,\" he said at the news conference.\n\nCarl Gutierrez, the CEO of the Guam Visitors Bureau, assured visitors that Guam is safe.\n\n\"We invite them here to a safe destination. We want to ensure that,\" he said.\n\nGuam's governor met with the late victim's wife.\n\n\"I consoled her, I hugged her, I cried with her. I prayed with her, knowing as a wife and a mother some of the pain that she is going through,\" Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero said in a video message posted on Instagram.\n\nShe urged the people of Guam to come forward with information that would help solve the case.\n\n\"Guam remains a safe place, and we are continuing to do everything we can to keep it safe, not just for our people, but our visitors,\" she said."}
{"text": "# Experts warn that foreign armed forces headed to Haiti will face major obstacles\nBy **DÁNICA COTO**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 8:38 AM EST\n\n**SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP)** - An international armed force slated to fight violent gangs in Haiti this year will face multiple challenges including shifting gang allegiances and widespread corruption among police, politicians and the country's elite, a new report warned Friday.\n\nThe multinational force, which will be led by Kenya, has yet to deploy as it awaits a court ruling in the east African country. If given the green light, a small team of Kenyans is expected to arrive in Haiti early this year, with a total of up to 5,000 personnel eventually participating in the mission.\n\nBurundi, Chad, Senegal, Jamaica and Belize also have pledged troops for the multinational mission.\n\n\"Major challenges lie in wait for the mission once it is on the ground,\" the report by Belgium-based International Crisis Group stated. \"Haiti's gangs could ally to battle it together. Fighting in Haiti's ramshackle urban neighborhoods will put innocent civilians at risk. Links between corrupt police and the gangs could make it difficult to maintain operational secrecy. For all these reasons, preparation will be of critical importance.\"\n\nSome 300 gangs control an estimated 80% of the capital of Port-au-Prince, with their tentacles reaching northward into the Artibonite region, considered Haiti's food basket.\n\nLast year, gangs were suspected of killing nearly 4,000 people and kidnapping another 3,000, a spike compared with previous years, according to U.N. statistics. More than 200,000 people also have been forced to flee their communities as gangs set fire to homes, killing and raping their way across neighborhoods controlled by rivals.\n\nHaiti's National Police is no match for them: less than 10,000 officers are on duty at any time in a country of more than 11 million people. Ideally, there should be some 25,000 active officers, according to the U.N.\n\n\"The police are completely outnumbered and outgunned by the gangs,\" said Diego Da Rin, with International Crisis Group, who spent nearly a month in Haiti late last year to do research for the report.\n\nHe said the people he interviewed were very skeptical that the force would even be deployed, given that it was approved by the U.N. Security Council last October, a year after Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry requested the urgent mobilization of an international armed force.\n\nInternational Crisis Group also warned that authorities need to determine what will happen to gang members as the forces carry out their mission. It noted that prisons are severely overcrowded, and that Haiti's broken judicial system will be unable to handle thousands of cases once suspected criminals are arrested.\n\nDa Rin said he interviewed a Haitian security expert who did not want to be identified for fear of retaliation whom he quoted as saying, \"Where are the prison facilities to put thousands of gang members? Is the international community suggesting that we kill thousands of lads? What structures are in place to reintegrate these young people into society? I'm appalled by what's left unsaid.\"\n\nInternational Crisis Group also interviewed unidentified people it said were privy to deployment discussions who were quoted as saying that gang leaders might unite to face foreign armed forces and attack them if they perceive the mission as weak. However, they said gang leaders would be willing to talk about possible disarmament if it appears the mission could overpower them.\n\nLast August, Jimmy Chérizier, a former police officer considered Haiti's most powerful gang leader, said he would fight any foreign armed force if it commits abuses.\n\nThe mission also faces other challenges, according to the report.\n\nProtecting civilians will be tricky because gang members control Port-au-Prince's crowded slums and can easily blend in since they don't wear uniforms or have any distinctive symbols. In addition, collusion between gangs and police will likely cause leaked information that would stonewall operations, the report stated.\n\nInternational Crisis Group said it separately interviewed two sources within Haiti's National Police who were quoted as saying that senior commanders previously managed to prevent the capture of a powerful gang leader because of his alleged links to politicians or police.\n\nEven if the mission is successful, officials must stop the flow of weapons and ammunition into Haiti, the report stated, and sever \"the strong bond between gangs and Haitian business and political elites.\""}
{"text": "# Dominican judge orders conditional release of Rays shortstop Wander Franco while probe continues\nBy **MARTÍN ADAMES ALCÁNTARA** and **DÁNICA COTO**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 6:21 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PUERTO PLATA, Dominican Republic (AP)** - A judge on Friday ordered the conditional release of Tampa Bay Rays shortstop Wander Franco while he is investigated for allegations he had a relationship with a 14-year-old girl and gave her mother a car and thousands of dollars in exchange for her consent, according to court documents obtained by The Associated Press.\n\nThe judge said Franco is allowed to leave the Dominican Republic but must return once a month to meet with authorities. He also was ordered to pay 2 million Dominican pesos ($34,000) as a type of deposit as the investigation continues.\n\nFranco, who was expected to be released early Saturday, did not speak to reporters after the hearing ended. During a bathroom break earlier in the day, he briefly told reporters that \"everything is in God's hands.\"\n\nSupporters who gathered outside the courthouse clapped after the ruling and shouted \"Boss! Boss!\" in reference to Franco. Franco's father, also called Wander Franco, exclaimed, \"God is just.\"\n\nThe 22-year-old All-Star is accused of commercial sexual exploitation and money laundering. The judge in the case, Rumaldi Marcelino, had several options for a ruling Friday: release Franco on bond, temporarily arrest him, prevent him from leaving the Dominican Republic or demand that he make occasional appearances until the investigation or a trial has ended.\n\nThe girl's 35-year-old mother, who faces the same charges as Franco, was ordered held under house arrest as the investigation continues. She smiled slightly as she left the courtroom but did not comment. The AP is not naming the woman in order to preserve her daughter's privacy.\n\nFranco, who was detained Monday in the northern province of Puerto Plata, hasn't been charged with any crimes. The judge has received a nearly 600-page document detailing the evidence that prosecutors gathered during a monthslong investigation.\n\nThe athlete's lawyers have not commented other than saying that Franco was \"doing fine.\"\n\nProsecutors said the investigation began after they received an anonymous tip in July 2023 stemming from someone who saw a media post alluding to the relationship. The AP has not been able to verify the reported post.\n\nAuthorities accuse Franco of taking the minor away from her home in Puerto Plata in December 2022 and having a four-month relationship with her with consent from the girl's mother.\n\nThey accuse Franco of sending the mother monthly payments of $1,700 for seven months and buying her a car \"in order to allow the relationship and let her go out with him wherever she wanted,\" according to the document, which quoted the girl.\n\nThe girl also was quoted as saying that she had demanded for a local digital media site to publish an item about her alleged relationship with the baseball player because she was \"tired\" of her mother, whom she accused of taking Franco's money and not sharing any of it with her.\n\nDays later, Franco published a live video alleging it was a scheme to extort money from him, the document stated.\n\nIn September 2023, authorities raided the home of the girl's mother and seized 800,000 Dominican pesos ($13,700) as well as $68,500 they said was found hidden behind a frame. Another seizure at a different home found a guarantee certificate from a local bank for 2.1 million Dominican pesos ($36,000) that they said was delivered by Franco for the \"commercial and sexual exploitation\" of the girl.\n\nIn addition, they seized a Suzuki Swift worth $26,600, according to the document. Authorities noted that days before the car was bought, the teenager's mother had the equivalent of $821 in her bank account. The mother also bought property in Puerto Plata worth $36,000, they said.\n\nAuthorities also state that Franco's mother had sent money to the girl's mother, but she has not been charged in the case even though they said she got involved \"to avoid traces of her son with the accused.\"\n\nFranco arrived at a court in Puerto Plata on Friday morning and remained silent while being escorted through a group of journalists that peppered with him questions. The girl's mother, who works at a local bank and was wearing sunglasses, also declined comment as she was escorted to a courtroom.\n\nOutside, a small group of young Dominican players donned in baseball attire gathered to support Franco, carrying posters that read, \"Free Franco,\" and \"We all are Franco.\"\n\nFranco was having an All-Star season before being sidelined in August, when authorities in the Dominican Republic began investigating claims he had been in a relationship with a minor. Major League Baseball launched its own investigation, placing Franco on the restricted list on Aug. 14 before moving him to administrative leave on Aug. 22. Both investigations are ongoing.\n\nFranco signed a $182 million, 11-year contract in 2021. His salary last year and this year is $2 million per season."}
{"text": "# US actor Christian Oliver and his 2 daughters died in a plane crash in the Caribbean, police say\nJanuary 5, 2024. 1:40 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP)** - U.S. actor Christian Oliver and his two daughters died in a plane crash near a tiny private island in the eastern Caribbean, according to police in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.\n\nThe crash occurred Thursday just west of Petit Nevis island near Bequia as the plane headed for nearby St. Lucia, police said in a statement.\n\nThey identified the daughters as Madita Klepser, 10, and Annik Klepser, 12, adding that the pilot, Robert Sachs, also died.\n\nIt wasn't immediately clear what caused the crash, according to police.\n\nAuthorities said fishermen and divers in the area went to the crash site to help as the St. Vincent and Grenadines Coast Guard headed to the area.\n\n\"The selfless and brave acts of the fishermen and divers is very much appreciated,\" police said.\n\nThe 51-year-old actor born in Germany had dozens of crediting film and television roles, including in the 2008 film \"Speed Racer\" film and \"The Good German,\" a 2006 World War II film by Steven Soderbergh that starred George Clooney and Cate Blanchett.\n\nHe appeared throughout season two of the 1990s series \"Saved by the Bell: The New Class,\" playing a Swiss transfer student named Brian Keller."}
{"text": "# Brazil postpones visa requirements for U.S., Canada and Australia citizens to April\nJanuary 5, 2024. 9:22 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**RIO DE JANEIRO (AP)** - Brazil postponed for the second time the reintroduction of requirements to obtain tourist visas for citizens of the U.S., Australia and Canada, officials said.\n\nFormer president Jair Bolsonaro scrapped the visa requirements in 2019 to support the tourism industry, but the three countries continued to demand visas from Brazilians. The South American country requires visas from travelers based on principles of historical reciprocity and equal treatment.\n\nThe government initially postponed the visa implementation on Oct. 1. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in September then set Jan. 10 as the new deadline. On Thursday night, Brazil's presidency said it would be postponed yet again till April. 10.\n\nThe statement said the government was still finalizing the new visa system and wanted to avoid implementing it close to the high season, mainly during the New Year's celebrations and Carnival festivities in February, which attract tens of thousands of tourists.\n\nLula reinstated the visa requirements after he took office one year ago. The countries in question initially included Japan, but the east Asian nation struck a deal with Brazilian authorities in September to ease travel provisions between the two, keeping its citizens off of the new list."}
{"text": "# Death toll in Islamic State-claimed suicide blasts rises to 91\nJanuary 6, 2024. 4:16 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**TEHRAN, Iran (AP)** - The death toll from a suicide bombing in Iran claimed by the Islamic State group has risen to at least 91, state TV reported Saturday.\n\nThe TV quoted Babak Yektaparast, a spokesman for the country's emergency services, as saying an 8-year boy and a 67-year-old man who were wounded in the attack have now died.\n\nYektaparast added that there are 102 people still being treated in hospitals, of whom 11 are in critical condition.\n\nIn Wednesday's attack, one suicide bomber detonated his explosives, then another attacked 20 minutes later as emergency workers and other people tried to help the wounded.\n\nThe attack took place in Kerman, about 820 kilometers (510 miles) southeast of the capital, Tehran. It targeted a commemoration for Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani, killed in 2020 by a U.S. drone strike as he led its expeditionary Quds Force.\n\nThe intelligence ministry said Friday that one of the two suicide bombers was a Tajik national and 11 people linked to the attack have been arrested."}
{"text": "# United Arab Emirates acknowledges mass trial of prisoners previously reported during COP28\nBy **JON GAMBRELL**  \nJanuary 6, 2024. 5:40 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP)** - The United Arab Emirates on Saturday acknowledged it is conducting a mass trial of 84 inmates previously reported by dissidents as it hosted the United Nations COP28 climate talks last month.\n\nThe trial likely includes a prominent activist lauded by rights group abroad.\n\nThe state-run WAM news agency quoted the country's attorney general, Hamad al-Shamsi, as saying the 84 defendants face charges of \"establishing another secret organization for the purpose of committing acts of violence and terrorism on state territory.\"\n\nThe statement did not name the suspects, though it described \"most\" of those held as members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a pan-Arab Islamist group long targeted in the autocratic UAE as a threat to its hereditary rulers.\n\nAl-Shamsi said the accused all had a lawyer assigned to them and that after nearly six months of research, prosecutors referred the accused to trial. The statement said the trial was still going on.\n\nIn December, the trial was first reported by the Emirates Detainees Advocacy Center, a group run by an Emirati - also called Hamad al-Shamsi - who lives in exile in Istanbul after being named on a terrorism list by the UAE himself. That group said 87 defendants faced trial. The different numbers of defendants reported by the UAE and the group could not be immediately reconciled.\n\nAmong those likely charged in the case is Ahmed Mansoor, the recipient of the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders in 2015. Mansoor repeatedly drew the ire of authorities in the UAE by calling for a free press and democratic freedoms in this federation of seven sheikhdoms.\n\nMansoor was targeted with Israeli spyware on his iPhone in 2016 likely deployed by the Emirati government ahead of his 2017 arrest and sentencing to 10 years in prison over his activism.\n\nDuring COP28, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch held a demonstration in which they displayed Mansoor's face in the U.N.-administered Blue Zone at the summit in a protest carefully watched by Emirati officials.\n\nAnother person likely charged is activist Nasser bin Ghaith, an academic held since August 2015 over his tweets. He was among dozens of people sentenced in the wake of a wide-ranging crackdown in the UAE following the 2011 Arab Spring protests. Those demonstrations saw the Islamists rise to power in several Mideast nations, though the Gulf Arab states did not see any popular overthrow of their governments.\n\nThe UAE, while socially liberal in many regards compared with its Middle Eastern neighbors, has strict laws governing expression and bans political parties and labor unions. That was seen at COP28, where there were none of the typical protests outside of the venue as activists worried about the country's vast network of surveillance cameras."}
{"text": "# Jordanian army says it killed 5 drug smugglers in clashes on the Syrian border\nJanuary 6, 2024. 2:02 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**AMMAN (AP)** - The Jordanian army said Saturday that it killed five drug and weapon smugglers and arrested 15 in a day of clashes with armed groups of smugglers attempting to cross into Jordan from Syria.\n\nThe army statement said the clashes broke out before dawn between Jordanian border guards and armed organizations \"that practice smuggling and rely on systematic infiltration operations.\" It said the smuggling operations have recently increased in frequency.\n\nThe state-run Jordan News Agency reported that in recent days smugglers have \"aimed to cross the Kingdom's border by force by targeting border guards.\"\n\nJordanian security forces seized Captagon amphetamine pills, hashish and weapons, the statement said.\n\nSmugglers have used Jordan as a corridor in recent years to smuggle the highly addictive Captagon out of Syria, mainly to oil-rich Arab Gulf states. The drug is used recreationally and by people with physically demanding jobs to keep them alert.\n\nJordanian authorities have intercepted some smuggling attempts, including some in which smugglers used drones to fly the drugs over the border.\n\nThe United States, Britain and European Union accuse Syrian President Bashar Assad, his family and allies, including Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group, of facilitating and profiting from the trade. Damascus has denied the accusations.\n\nOver the past year, a number of airstrikes believed to be carried out by Jordan have hit drug trade facilities and figures in Syria.\n\nIn late August, an airstrike hit an alleged drug factory in southern Syria near the Jordanian border, an attack believed to have been carried out by Jordan's air force. In May, another airstrike on a village in Sweida killed a well-known Syrian drug kingpin and his family. Activists believe that strike was conducted by the Jordanians.\n\nJordan did not claim responsibility for the strikes."}
{"text": "# For many displaced families in Gaza, survival follows a strict routine\nBy **MOHAMMED JAHJOUH** and **JACK JEFFERY**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 9:15 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**MUWASI, Gaza Strip (AP)** - Stranded in a corner of southern Gaza, members of the Abu Jarad family are clinging to a strict survival routine.\n\nThey fled their comfortable three-bedroom home in northern Gaza after the Israel-Hamas war broke out nearly three months ago. The 10-person family now squeezes into a 16-square meter (172-square foot) tent on a garbage-strewn sandy plot, part of a sprawling encampment of displaced Palestinians.\n\nEvery family member is assigned daily tasks, from collecting twigs to build a fire for cooking, to scouring the city's markets for vegetables. But their best efforts can't mask their desperation.\n\nAt night \"dogs are hovering over the tents,\" said Awatif Abu Jarad, an older member of the family. \"We are living like dogs!\"\n\nPalestinians seeking refuge in southern Gaza say every day has become a struggle to find food, water, medicine and working bathrooms. All the while, they live in fear of Israeli airstrikes and the growing threat of illnesses.\n\nIsrael's bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza, now in its 13th week, have pushed almost all Palestinians toward the southern city of Rafah along the Egyptian border. The area had a prewar population of around 280,000, a figure that has bulged to over 1 million in recent days, according to the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees.\n\nRafah's apartment blocks are crammed with people, often extended families who have opened their doors to displaced relatives. West of the city, thousands of nylon tents have sprung up. Thousands more people are sleeping in the open, despite the cool and often rainy winter weather.\n\nMost of northern Gaza is now under the control of the Israeli army, which early in the war urged Palestinians to evacuate to the south. As the war progressed, more evacuation orders were issued for areas in the south, forcing Palestinian civilians to crowd into ever smaller spaces, including Rafah and a nearby sliver of land called Muwasi. Even these purportedly safe spaces are often hit by airstrikes and shelling.\n\nThe war broke out on Oct. 7 after Hamas militants stormed into southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and abducting 240 others. The fighting has killed over 22,400 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory, which does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.\n\nAccording to Nouman, Awatif's brother, the conflict drove the family the entire length of Gaza. They fled their home in the northern border town of Beit Hanoun on the first day of the war and stayed with a relative in the nearby town of Beit Lahia.\n\nSix days later, the intensity of Israeli strikes in the border area sent them south to Al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City. As people started to evacuate the hospital two days later, they traveled to the Nuseirat urban refugee camp in central Gaza, making the 10-kilometer (6-mile) journey on foot.\n\nThey stayed in a cramped U.N. school building in Nuseirat for over two months, but left on Dec. 23 as the Israeli army turned its focus toward Hamas targets in central Gaza refugee camps.\n\nThey escaped to Muwasi on Dec. 23, believing it was the safest option. On the first night, they slept out in the open. Then they bought nylon and wood in a Rafah market to build a tent.\n\nNouman, an accountant, sleeps on the nylon-covered floor with his wife, sister, six daughters and one grandchild. They sleep on their sides to conserve space.\n\nHe said the tent cost 1,000 shekels, about $276. \"It is completely crazy,\" he said. In Rafah's demand-driven war economy, larger pre-built family tents now range from $800 to $1,400.\n\nThe family's hardship begins at 5 a.m. Nouman said his first job is to start a small fire to cook breakfast, while his wife and daughters knead dough for flatbread and then wash their utensils and metal cooking griddle.\n\nAfter eating, their attention turns to fetching water and food, tasks that take up most of the daylight hours.\n\nNouman said he and several of his younger relatives collect jugs of water from one of the public pipes nearby, water that is exclusively used for washing and not suitable for drinking. Next, they head to one of the dozens of drinking water tankers dotted across the city, where they wait in line for hours.\n\nA gallon of drinking water costs one shekel, or 28 cents. Some, so desperate for cash, wait in line just to sell their space.\n\nAfter the water is fetched, family members move between several open markets to hunt for vegetables, flour and canned food for that evening's meal. Meanwhile, Nouman busies himself with scouring the ground for twigs and bits of wood to make a fire.\n\nFood prices have soared. Gaza is facing acute food and medicine shortages and is dependent largely on aid and supplies that trickle in through two crossings, one Egyptian and one Israeli, and what has been grown in the recent harvest. More than half a million people in Gaza - roughly a quarter of the population - are starving, the United Nations said in late December.\n\nDalia Abu Samhadana, a young mother sheltering with her uncle's family in a crowded house of 20 in Rafah, says the only food staples at her local market are tomatoes, onions, eggplants, oranges and flour. All are virtually unaffordable.\n\nA 25-kilogram (55-pound) bag of flour before Oct. 7 cost around $10. Since then it has fluctuated between $40 and $100.\n\n\"My money has almost run out,\" said Abu Samhadana, unsure of how she will be able to feed her daughter.\n\nDisplaced Palestinians in Rafah are entitled to free aid if they register with the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, which hands out flour, blankets, and medical supplies at 14 spots across southern Gaza. They often spend hours in line waiting for the aid to be distributed.\n\nAbu Samhadana, who is originally from the nearby southern town of Khan Younis, said she has tried to register for free aid several times but has been turned away due to the lack of available supplies.\n\nThe U.N. agency is simply overwhelmed and is already providing support to 1.8 million people in Gaza, according to Juliette Touma, its communications director. She said she did not know if the agency had stopped registering new aid seekers.\n\nWith few options left, some hungry Palestinians in Rafah have resorted to grabbing packages from aid trucks as they pass by. The U.N. refugee agency confirmed that some supplies of aid had been snatched from moving trucks but did not provide any details.\n\nHamas police escorting aid trucks from border crossings to U.N. warehouses have been seen beating people, mostly teenagers, as they try to grab what they can. In some cases, they have fired shots into the air. In one incident, a 13-year-old boy was killed when Hamas police opened fire.\n\nMeanwhile, health officials warn of the growing spread of diseases, especially among children.\n\nThe World Health Organization has reported tens of thousands of cases of upper respiratory infections, diarrhea, lice, scabies, chickenpox, skin rashes and meningitis in U.N. shelters.\n\nThe rapid spread of disease is mainly due to overcrowding and poor hygiene caused by a lack of toilets and water for washing.\n\nThe Abu Jarad family dug its own makeshift toilet attached to the tent to avoid communal bathrooms. Still, the family is vulnerable to disease.\n\n\"My granddaughter is 10 months old, and since the day we came to this place, she has been suffering from weight loss and diarrhea,\" said Majeda, Nouman's wife.\n\nGoing to the pharmacy offers little help. \"We can't find any (suitable) medicines available,\" she said."}
{"text": "# Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius freed after serving nearly 9 years in prison for killing girlfriend\nBy **GERALD IMRAY**, **NQOBILE NTSHANGASE**, and **MOGOMOTSI MAGOME**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 1:17 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**PRETORIA, South Africa (AP)** - Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius, a double-amputee who became a global star competing at his sport's highest level while running on carbon-fiber blades, was released from prison on Friday after serving nearly nine years for killing his girlfriend, the model Reeva Steenkamp.\n\nPistorius, 37, quietly left the Atteridgeville Correctional Center in Pretoria and was processed at a parole office before being released to his family, Department of Corrections spokesperson Singabakho Nxumalo told The Associated Press. Nxumalo, who referred to Pistorius' release as an \"operation\" designed to avoid a media scramble, declined to give further details.\n\n\"I can only tell you he was released this morning,\" Nxumalo said.\n\nPistorius served nearly nine years of his murder sentence of 13 years and five months for the fatal shooting of Steenkamp at his home on Valentine's Day 2013. He became eligible for early release having served at least half his sentence, and was approved for parole in November.\n\nPistorius will live under strict parole conditions, including a ban on speaking to the media, until his sentence expires in December 2029. He is expected to initially live at his uncle's mansion in the upscale Pretoria suburb of Waterkloof, which is where he stayed during his seven-month trial in 2014.\n\nA police van was outside that house and a police officer was seen coming out later Friday. The officer declined to comment to reporters. Three black private security vehicles were also parked in front of the mansion.\n\nPistorius and his brother and sister grew up under the care of their uncle and aunt, Arnold and Lois Pistorius, after becoming estranged from their father. Pistorius' mother died when he was a teenager. Arnold Pistorius was seen driving out of the home, as was Pistorius' sister, Aimee\n\nPistorius' trial drew a horde of media from around the world, and even though corrections officials warned ahead of time that he wouldn't be \"paraded\" for the cameras upon his release, a few dozen reporters, photographers and TV cameras were camped outside the prison in the hopes of seeing him.\n\nPistorius maintains that he shot the 29-year-old Steenkamp in error after mistaking her for a dangerous intruder hiding in a bathroom in his Pretoria villa in the middle of the night. He fired four times through a locked toilet cubicle door, hitting Steenkamp in the head, hip and hand. He claimed he fired in what he believed was self-defense and that he didn't know it was his girlfriend in the cubicle. Prosecutors alleged that he intentionally killed her in anger during an argument.\n\nIn addition to her modeling career, Steenkamp was a reality TV star with a law degree who had become an activist against the scourge of violence against women in South Africa - a tragic irony given how she died. She and Pistorius had only been dating for a few months.\n\nSteenkamp's mother, June Steenkamp, said in a statement Friday that she had accepted Pistorius' parole, although the pain of her daughter's death was \"still raw and real.\" Steenkamp's father, Barry Steenkamp, died last year.\n\n\"Has there been justice for Reeva? Has Oscar served enough time? There can never be justice if your loved one is never coming back, and no amount of time served will bring Reeva back,\" June Steenkamp said. \"We who remain behind are the ones serving a life sentence.\"\n\n\"With the release of Oscar Pistorius on parole, my only desire is that I will be allowed to live my last years in peace with my focus remaining on the Reeva Rebecca Steenkamp Foundation, to continue Reeva's legacy.\"\n\nThe Department of Corrections has emphasized that the champion Paralympic sprinter's release - like every other offender on parole - doesn't mean he has completed his sentence.\n\nPistorius' parole conditions include restrictions on when he's allowed to leave home, a ban on consuming alcohol, and orders that he must attend programs on anger management and violence against women. He must also perform community service.\n\nPistorius also will have to regularly meet with parole officials and will be subjected to unannounced visits by authorities. He is not allowed to leave the Waterkloof district without permission and is not allowed to speak to the media until the end of his sentence. He could be sent back to prison if he is in breach of any of his parole conditions.\n\nSouth Africa doesn't use monitoring devices on parolees. But the Department of Corrections said a parole official will constantly monitor Pistorius, who will have to inform the official of any major changes in his life, such as if he wants to get a job or change addresses.\n\nOnce a wealthy athlete who drove sports cars and was endorsed by Nike, Pistorius was left broke after his lengthy murder trial, his chief defense lawyer said in 2014. He sold the house where he killed Steenkamp to pay some of his legal bills.\n\nSteenkamp's family did not oppose his parole application in November, although June Steenkamp said then that she didn't believe Pistorius had been fully rehabilitated and that he was still lying about the shooting.\n\nBefore the killing, Pistorius was seen as an inspiring role model after having had both of his legs amputated below the knee as a baby because of a congenital condition. He became a champion sprinter on his carbon-fiber running blades and made history by competing against nondisabled athletes at the 2012 London Olympics.\n\nHis trial destroyed his image. He was accused of being prone to angry outbursts and acting recklessly with guns, while witnesses testified about altercations he had with others, including an argument in which he allegedly threatened to break a man's legs.\n\nPistorius was first convicted of culpable homicide - a charge comparable to manslaughter - and sentenced to five years in prison for killing Steenkamp. After appeals by prosecutors, he was ultimately found guilty of murder and had his sentence increased, although that judgment by the Supreme Court of Appeal still didn't definitively rule that he knew it was Steenkamp behind the bathroom door.\n\nPistorius was sent to prison in 2014, released on house arrest in 2015 during an appeal, and then sent back to prison in 2016. He was initially incarcerated at the maximum security Kgosi Mampuru II Prison in Pretoria but was moved to Atteridgeville early in his sentence because it's better suited to holding disabled prisoners.\n\nReaction to Pistorius' parole has been muted in South Africa, in stark contrast to the first days and months after Steenkamp's killing, which sparked angry protests outside of the courthouse calling for him to receive a long prison sentence. There is no death penalty in South Africa.\n\n\"He has ticked all the necessary boxes,\" said Themba Masango, secretary general of Not In My Name International, a group that campaigns against violence against women. \"And we can only wish and hope Oscar Pistorius will come out a better human being.\"\n\n\"We tend to forget that there is a possibility where somebody can be rehabilitated.\""}
{"text": "# Track star, convicted killer, now parolee. A timeline of Oscar Pistorius's life\nBy **GERALD IMRAY**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 1:51 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP)** - Major moments in the life of Oscar Pistorius, the South African double-amputee Olympic runner who was released from prison on parole Friday having served nearly nine years of a murder sentence for the 2013 killing of girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.\n\nPistorius, 37, will have to live under strict conditions until his full sentence of 13 years and five months expires on Dec. 5, 2029.\n\nNov. 22, 1986 - Pistorius is born with a congenital condition where he has no fibula bones. His legs are amputated below the knee before he is a year old.\n\nMay 16, 2008 - Already a multiple Paralympic champion, Pistorius wins a ruling at sport's highest court that overturns a previous ban and allows him to compete against able-bodied athletes at the world's biggest track events on his specially designed carbon-fiber running blades.\n\nAug. 4, 2012 - Pistorius realizes his sporting dream to compete at the Olympics. He finishes second in a heat in the 400 meters to qualify for the semifinals in London but doesn't qualify for the final. \"Blade Runner\" still makes history as the first double-amputee to run at the Olympics and becomes one of the most recognizable athletes on the planet.\n\nFeb. 14, 2013 - Pistorius is at the height of his fame when South African police announce that he has been arrested in connection with the Valentine's Day shooting death of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp at his villa in the capital, Pretoria. The bombshell news reverberates around the world when Pistorius is charged with murder for shooting the 29-year-old model and law graduate multiple times through a toilet cubicle door in the predawn hours.\n\nMar. 3, 2014 - Pistorius' murder trial begins at the Pretoria High Court under the glare of the world's media, which is permitted to film the court proceedings live. While Pistorius claims he shot Steenkamp by mistake believing she was a dangerous intruder in his home, prosecutors allege he killed her intentionally in a late-night argument. During his dramatic seven-month trial, Pistorius cries, wails and at times vomits in the courtroom as prosecutors describe Steenkamp's fatal shooting. He also undergoes a psychiatric evaluation. The trial shatters his image as prosecutors say he has a history of angry outbursts, being verbally abusive towards girlfriends, and acting recklessly with guns.\n\nSept. 12, 2014 - Pistorius is acquitted of murder by a judge but found guilty of a charge comparable to manslaughter for killing Steenkamp. He is also convicted on a separate charge relating to him and a group of friends recklessly firing a gun under a table in a restaurant. He is sentenced to five years in prison for manslaughter. Prosecutors say they will appeal the \"shockingly light\" sentence.\n\nDec. 3, 2015 - A panel of judges at South Africa's Supreme Court of Appeal overturns Pistorius' manslaughter conviction and finds him guilty of murder. The trial judge sentences him to six years in prison for murder, which prosecutors again appeal.\n\nNov. 24, 2017 - The Supreme Court of Appeal more than doubles Pistorius' sentence to 13 years and five months in prison. Pistorius had been first jailed at the Kgosi Mampuru II Prison in Pretoria, a notorious apartheid-era jail. He is moved to the city's Atteridgeville Correctional Centre, which officials say is better suited to disabled prisoners.\n\nJun. 22, 2022 - Pistorius meets face-to-face with Steenkamp's father, Barry Steenkamp, as part of a victim-offender dialogue that he must undertake if he wants to be eligible to be released on parole. Barry Steenkamp, who died last year, says after the meeting that he still believes Pistorius is lying about his daughter's killing and wants him to stay in prison for life.\n\nMar. 31, 2023 - Pistorius attends a parole hearing but is denied early release. The Department of Corrections says he hasn't served the required time in prison and will only be eligible in August 2024. Authorities later concede that was an error due to a miscount by a court over how long Pistorius had already served in prison before his sentence was changed in 2017.\n\nNov. 24, 2023 - Pistorius is granted parole at a second hearing and officials say he will be released Jan. 5, although he will still be strictly monitored for the next five years until he has served his entire sentence."}
{"text": "# Senegal's opposition leader faces another setback in presidential race after application is rejected\nBy **BABACAR DIONE**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 1:09 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DAKAR, Senegal (AP)** - Senegal's top opposition leader on Friday suffered major setbacks in his quest to contest the presidency when a top court upheld the defamation conviction against him and the Constitutional Council rejected his application to be a presidential candidate on the basis that it was incomplete.\n\nOusmane Sonko 's application case at the council was \"examined without his representative (in) a flagrant violation of the law\" before it was rejected, his lawyer, Ciré Cledor Ly, told reporters. \"From the outset, the government has shown its willingness to invalidate Ousmane Sonko's candidacy.\"\n\nThe council's decision came hours after the Supreme Court rejected the jailed opposition leader's appeal of his conviction for defamation after being sued by a government minister. The trial was seen as the latest twist in a prolonged legal battle involving several charges which the opposition leader has alleged is to stop his presidential bid in the February elections.\n\n\"The trial was the very last chance,\" Sonko's lawyer Khoureychi Ba said of the ruling delivered after a session that started on Thursday. \"I realize that Mr. Sonko's opponents have succeeded in eliminating him from the Feb. 25 presidential election,\" Ba said.\n\nSonko, who finished third in the country's 2019 presidential election, is widely seen as the main challenger to President Macky Sall's ruling party. Sall himself ultimately decided not to seek a third term in office after Sonko's supporters launched months of protests that at times turned deadly.\n\nAlthough the Constitutional Council's decision has nothing to do with Sonko's conviction for defamation, the council has the final say on all the candidacies, including that of the opposition leader. Under Senegal's electoral code, such a conviction makes one ineligible for a presidential race.\n\nSonko is currently in prison on a different charge, and will continue to face the six-month suspended prison sentence handed him when he was convicted in the defamation case last year.\n\nEl-Hadji Diouf, a lawyer representing Mame Mbaye Niang, the minister who filed the defamation suit against Sonko, celebrated Friday's ruling as a \"big, important win.\"\n\n\"The minister's lawyers won on all counts. The six-month suspended prison sentence was upheld. ... We are celebrating our victory,\" said Diouf.\n\nSonko's presidential bid has faced a prolonged legal battle that started when he was accused of rape in 2021. In June, he was acquitted of the rape charges but was convicted of corrupting youth and sentenced to two years in prison, which ignited deadly protests across the country. Senegalese authorities also dissolved Sonko's political party in late July and detained him.\n\nAfter overcoming one of his last remaining legal hurdles in December when a ruling that effectively barred him from contesting the presidency was overturned, Sonko formally submitted his candidacy to beat a Dec. 26 deadline. Eligible candidates will be announced in the first two weeks of January and the campaign season kicks off the following month."}
{"text": "# With banku and jollof rice, Ghanian chef tries to break world cook-a-thon record\nBy **FRANCIS KOKUTSE**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 2:16 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ACCRA, Ghana (AP)** - A chef in Ghana has been preparing banku and other regional dishes on live TV since New Year's Day as she tries to break a world record for marathon cooking - an attempt being cheered on and widely celebrated in this West African nation.\n\nFailatu Abdul-Razak had cooked for over 110 hours as of Friday afternoon at a hotel in the northern city of Tamale where she is aiming to break the Guinness World Record for a cook-a-thon of 119 hours and 57 minutes held by Irish chef Alan Fisher.\n\nAbdul-Razak \"has put Ghana on the map,\" said Isaac Sackey, the president of the Chefs' Association of Ghana. \"So we need to try to honor her.\"\n\nWest Africa has been gripped in a frenzy of world record attempts in several categories since Nigerian chef Hilda Baci claimed the world cooking record last May with a 100-hour performance before being dethroned by Fisher.\n\nThe Guinness World Record organization has yet to publicly comment about Abdul-Razak's attempt, which could reach 120 hours in the early hours of Saturday. Any confirmation of the feat from the organization would likely come long afterward.\n\nCelebrities, government leaders and hundreds of ordinary people have flocked to the Modern City Hotel in Tamale where the chef's cooking stage is set. The onlookers dance, sing and enjoy the prepared food amid the countdown to 120 hours.\n\nGhanaian Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia spoke about the attempt via Facebook earlier in the week and donated 30,000 Ghana Cedis ($2,564) to the chef.\n\n\"Go for gold,\" he urged her.\n\nAbdul-Razak had said at the outset that her attempt was a \"national assignment\" on behalf of Ghana and its citizens. Among dishes she has prepared are Ghana's banku - fermented corn meal balls in a soup - as well as the spicy jollof rice enjoyed across West Africa.\n\n\"If I fail this, believe me, I have put our president, Ghanaians, people who have supported (and) groomed me, my family and friends into shame,\" she said.\n\nUnder the guidelines, she is entitled to only five-minute breaks every hour or an accumulated one hour after a stretch of 12 hours.\n\nThere have been concerns raised about the endeavor's likely mental toll on the chef. Last month, Ghanaian Afua Asantewaa Owusu Aduonum was forced to end her attempt to break the world record for the longest time spent singing, after her medical team said her body showed signs of mental stress.\n\nIt's the \"excitement\" that keeps record-seekers going during their attempts, said Annabella Osei-Tutu, associate professor of psychology at the University of Ghana.\n\n\"A lot of hype has got into it, so momentarily, they are running on adrenaline. After the episode, they will perhaps start feeling the toll on their body,\" Osei-Tutu said."}
{"text": "# Winter weather batters both US coasts; Sierra snow shuts down I-80; East Coast storm into Monday\nBy **STEVE LeBLANC** and **SCOTT SONNER**  \nJanuary 6, 2024. 7:44 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BOSTON (AP)** - Winter weather battered both U.S. coasts Saturday as New Englanders braced for an even more potent mix of snow and freezing rain through the weekend and a Sierra Nevada storm packing heavy snow shut down a stretch of interstate and briefly knocked out power to tens of thousands in Reno, Nevada.\n\nWinter storm warnings and watches were in effect throughout the Northeast, and icy roads made for hazardous travel as far south as North Carolina.\n\nThe National Weather Service said it was a \"major winter storm\" that would continue into Sunday evening, with up to a foot (30 centimeters) of snow in parts of New England and pockets of rain/freezing rain in the central Appalacians.\n\nNew York Gov. Kathy Hochul said she expected two-thirds of her state to get 8 inches (20 centimeters) of snow or more, \"fortunately missing some of our more populated areas downstate, the Long Island and New York City.\"\n\n\"If they get anything beyond rain, it'll be just a wintry mix of 1 to 2 inches (2.5 to 5 centimeters), but really for our Southern Tier ... it's going to be the first major snowstorm of the year and we're ready for it,\" she told Spectrum News.\n\nIn the West, a winter storm warning was in effect through Saturday night in the Sierra Nevada from south of Yosemite National Park to north of Reno, where the weather service said as much as 20 inches (51 centimeters) of snow could fall in the mountains around Lake Tahoe with winds gusting up to 100 mph (160 kph) over ridgetops.\n\nThe California Highway Patrol said numerous spinouts and collisions forced the temporary closure of I-80 for several hours from west of Truckee, California, to the state line west of Reno, where more than 27,000 homes briefly lost power in high winds at midday.\n\nFewer than 1,000 customers were without power by nightfall, and westbound lanes of the interestate had reopened but a steady snow was falling in Reno and CHP warned of potential closures throught the night.\n\nThe weather service said that system would continue to bring heavy mountain snow and coastal rain overnight before moving into central and Southern California, then off to the Southwest and the southern Rockies.\n\nThe East Coast system was expected to track along the northeastern coastline throughout the weekend, with the heaviest snowfall expected in Pennsylvania, parts of the Hudson Valley and portions of New England.\n\nIn Massachusetts and portions of Rhode Island, the National Weather Service declared a winter storm warning from 4 p.m. Saturday through 1 a.m. Monday, with snow accumulations of 6 inches (15.2 centimeters) up to a foot (30.4 centimeters) and winds gusting as high as 35 mph (56 kph).\n\nThe weather service predicted similar levels of snow in portions of Maine and New Hampshire, with slightly less - 3 to 6 inches (7.6 to 15.2 centimeters) - in areas of Vermont.\n\nBoston Mayor Michelle Wu said the city was preparing for the storm but wasn't expecting it to be a major event, and the timing of the snow meant it would likely have less of an impact on city life. Storm surges were also not expected.\n\nIce arrived early Saturday to some western North Carolina and southern Virginia areas, ranging from a fine coating to around a quarter-inch (6.4 millimeters). Watauga County, North Carolina saw some of the highest amounts, said meteorologist Dennis Sleighter of the National Weather Service's Blacksburg, Virginia, office.\n\nThe National Weather Service in Mount Holly, New Jersey, said 6 to 12 inches (15.2 to 30.4 centimeters) of snow could fall in the southern Pocono mountains and northern New Jersey, with smaller snow and sleet totals changing to rain in other areas that could cause some flooding. Forecasters also warned of hazardous marine conditions Saturday night with gale-force wind gusts and 6-foot to 10-foot (1.8- to 3-meter) seas.\n\nForecasters also warned of another storm Tuesday into Wednesday that is expected to bring rain and some flooding as well as high winds and coastal flooding.\n\nPhiladelphia has already reached 705 consecutive days with less than an inch (0.64 centimeters) of snow, through Friday - beating the prior record of 661 days that ended on Dec. 15, 1973. New York City went 691 days through Friday, outstripping the prior record of 383 days that ended on March 21, 1998. Baltimore reached 707 days through Friday, beating the prior record of 672 days that ended on Dec. 25, 2012.\n\nConnecticut Gov. Ned Lamont says it's been about two years since a major storm hit the state.\n\n\"I think this storm's been a long time coming,\" Lamont said."}
{"text": "# NRA chief, one of the most powerful figures in US gun policy, says he's resigning days before trial\nBy **MICHAEL R. SISAK**, **LINDSAY WHITEHURST**, and **JAKE BLEIBERG**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 6:47 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - The longtime head of the National Rifle Association said Friday he is resigning, just days before the start of a civil trial over allegations he treated himself to millions of dollars in private jet flights, yacht trips, African safaris and other extravagant perks at the powerful gun rights organization's expense.\n\nWayne LaPierre, the executive vice president and chief executive officer, said his departure is effective Jan. 31. The trial is scheduled to start Monday in New York Attorney General Letitia James' lawsuit against him, the NRA and two others who've served as executives. LaPierre was in court this week for jury selection and is expected to testify at the trial. The NRA said it will continue to fight the lawsuit, which could result in a further shakeup of its leadership and the appointment of an independent monitor to oversee its finances.\n\n\"With pride in all that we have accomplished, I am announcing my resignation from the NRA,\" LaPierre said in a statement released by the organization, which said he was exiting for health reasons. \"I've been a card-carrying member of this organization for most of my adult life, and I will never stop supporting the NRA and its fight to defend Second Amendment freedom. My passion for our cause burns as deeply as ever.\"\n\nJames, a Democrat, heralded LaPierre's resignation as an \"important victory in our case\" and confirmed the trial will go on as scheduled. His exit \"validates our claims against him, but it will not insulate him or the NRA from accountability,\" James said in a statement.\n\nAndrew Arulanandam, a top NRA lieutenant who has served as LaPierre's spokesperson, will assume his roles on an interim basis, the organization said.\n\nLaPierre, 74, has led the NRA 's day-to-day operations since 1991, acting as the face and vehement voice of its gun-rights agenda and becoming one of the most influential figures in shaping U.S. gun policy. He once warned of \"jack-booted government thugs\" seizing guns, brought in movie star Charlton Heston to serve as the organization's president, and condemned gun control advocates as \"opportunists\" who \"exploit tragedy for gain.\"\n\nIn one example of the NRA's evolution under LaPierre, after the Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado, in 1998, the NRA signaled support for expanded background checks for gun purchases. But after a gunman killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, LaPierre repudiated background checks and called for armed guards in every school. He blamed video games, lawmakers and the media for the carnage, remarking: \"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.\"\n\n\"The post-Sandy Hook apocalyptic speech was kind of the talismanic moment when, for him and the NRA, there was no going back,\" Robert Spitzer, a political science professor at the State University of New York-Cortland and author of several books on gun politics.\n\nThe NRA remains a strong political force, with Republican presidential hopefuls flocking to its annual convention last year. In recent years, though, the organization has been beset by financial troubles, dwindling membership, and infighting among its 76-member board along with lingering questions about LaPierre's leadership and spending.\n\nAfter reporting a $36 million deficit in 2018, fueled mostly by misspending, the NRA cut back on longstanding programs that had for decades been core to its mission, including training and education, recreational shooting and law enforcement initiatives. In 2021, the organization filed for bankruptcy and sought to incorporate in Texas instead of New York, where it was founded as a nonprofit charity in 1871 - but a judge rejected the move, saying it was a transparent attempt to duck James' lawsuit.\n\n\"(LaPierre) is, more that any other single person, responsible for putting the NRA in the dumpster situation it is right now,\" Spitzer said.\n\nGun control advocates lauded LaPierre's resignation, mocking his oft-repeated talking point in the wake of myriad mass shootings over the years.\n\n\"Thoughts and prayers to Wayne LaPierre,\" said Kris Brown, president of the gun-control advocacy group Brady: United Against Gun Violence. \"He's going to need them to be able to sleep at night. Wayne LaPierre spent three decades peddling the Big Lie that more guns make us safer - all at the expense of countless lives. He has blood on his hands, and I won't miss him.\"\n\nAnother advocacy group, March For Our Lives, said that when it was founded in 2018 after a mass shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school, the NRA \"was an untouchable and seemingly all-powerful political juggernaut.\" Months later, the group sent a letter to the New York attorney general's office raising questions about alleged financial misdeeds involving NRA executives, including LaPierre. The letter sparked the investigation that led to James' lawsuit.\n\n\"All it took was some meddling kids and a whole lot of determination to take down one of the largest and most powerful lobbying machines in American history,\" March for Our Lives said in a statement.\n\nJames sued LaPierre and three co-defendants - NRA general counsel John Frazer, retired finance chief Wilson Phillips and LaPierre's ex-chief of staff Joshua Powell - in 2020, alleging they cost the organization tens of millions of dollars from questionable expenditures including lucrative consulting contracts for ex-employees, and gifts for friends and vendors.\n\nLaPierre is accused of setting himself up with a $17 million contract with the NRA if he were to exit the organization, and spending NRA money on travel consultants, luxury car services, and private flights for himself and his family - including more than $500,000 on eight trips to the Bahamas over a three-year span.\n\nAs punishment, James is asking that LaPierre and the other defendants be ordered to pay the NRA back and that they be banned from serving in leadership positions of any charitable organizations conducting business in New York, which would bar them from any NRA involvement.\n\nPowell, who wrote of \"staggering\" waste and corruption in his 2020 book \"Inside the NRA,\" settled with James' office late Friday. He agreed to testify at the trial, pay the NRA $100,000 and forgo further nonprofit involvement. Frazer and Phillips have denied wrongdoing.\n\nDefending himself in prior testimony, LaPierre said that cruising the Bahamas on a vendor's 108-foot (33-meter) yacht was a \"security retreat\" because he was facing threats after the Sandy Hook and Parkland shootings. LaPierre also took steps to purchase a $6.5 million \"safe house\" for him and his wife in Texas through the NRA after the Parkland shooting, but the deal fell through, the lawsuit said.\n\nLaPierre conceded not reporting the yacht trips on conflict-of-interest forms, testifying: \"It's one of the mistakes I've made.\" Some expenses related to the trips were covered by the NRA, the lawsuit said.\n\nPhillip Journey, an ex-NRA board member who clashed with LaPierre and is expected to testify at the New York trial, said LaPierre's resignation doesn't resolve open questions before the court or fix persistent rot within the organization.\n\n\"Honestly, the grifters are a snake with many heads and this is just one,\" said Journey, a Kansas judge who is running to rejoin the NRA board.\n\nJourney also testified at the NRA's bankruptcy trial in Texas and said he anticipates there is enough evidence for the James to prove her case. \"It's a tragic end to a career that had many high points,\" Journey said of LaPierre stepping down. \"It's one of his own making.\""}
{"text": "# New round of Epstein documents offer another look into his cesspool of sexual abuse\nJanuary 5, 2024. 10:30 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - More than 130 additional court files were unsealed Friday in a lawsuit involving Jeffrey Epstein, providing yet more detail about the late millionaire financier's sexual abuse of underage girls and interactions with celebrities.\n\nThe latest round of documents included excerpts of testimony from people who worked for Epstein, copies of phone messages he received - including one from Harvey Weinstein - and lots of legal memos from lawyers discussing who could potentially have been called as a witness if the lawsuit ever went to trial.\n\nNo blockbuster revelations were apparent. Lots of the records covered material that has been the subject of many past news stories about Epstein and his victims. But like other documents previously made public in lawsuits related to Epstein, they provide a window into the rarified world he inhabited.\n\nThe records are all related to a defamation lawsuit that one of Epstein's victims, Virginia Giuffre, filed in 2015 against the millionaire's girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, who was accused by multiple women of helping Epstein recruit underage victims. The suit was settled in 2017. Maxwell was later prosecuted and is serving a 20-year prison sentence.\n\nHere are some takeaways from the latest batch of released documents:\n\n## PRINCE ANDREW\nThe records released Friday include the 2009 deposition of a former housekeeper at Epstein's home in Palm Beach, Florida, who talked about how much time the financier spent with Prince Andrew, the British royal who was a longtime friend of Maxwell's.\n\nJuan Alessi testified that \"Prince Andrew spent weeks with us\" and when he visited, he would receive daily massages at the mansion.\n\nAlessi said Andrew would stay in the main guest bedroom, which he described as \"the blue room.\" He recalled seeing Andrew's former wife, Sarah Ferguson, on one occasion, but added, \"I don't think she slept in there.\"\n\nAlessi also remembered seeing other celebrities including Donald Trump and \"a lot of queens and other famous people that I can't remember.\"\n\nTrump, whose Mar-a-Lago club is also in Palm Beach, would come over to Epstein's home for dinner, Alessi said, but he \"never sat at the table,\" dining instead with Alessi in the kitchen. Asked whether Trump ever received massages, he said, \"No. Because he's got his own spa.\"\n\nAlessi, who worked at Epstein's sprawling home from 1990 to 2002, previously testified at Maxwell's 2021 trial that he saw \"many, many, many\" young adult female visitors, often lounging topless by the pool. He also admitted to stealing $6,300 from Epstein's desk.\n\nPrince Andrew was publicly criticized when photos emerged of him visiting Epstein in New York even after the financier was imprisoned in Florida for a sex crime.\n\nGiuffre sued Andrew, accusing him of sexually abusing her when she was 17. Andrew said he didn't remember ever meeting Giuffre. The lawsuit was settled in 2022 without ever going to trial, but the allegations damaged his public standing and led Andrew to withdraw from some royal duties.\n\nThe Associated Press typically does not name people who say they are the victims of sexual abuse unless they have come forward publicly with their stories, as Giuffre has.\n\n## PHONE RECORDS\nOne document unsealed Friday contains copies of phone messages Epstein received, handwritten by staffers, in 2004, a year before police in Palm Beach started investigating allegations that he was paying underage girls for sex.\n\nAt the time, Epstein was getting attention for hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, offering free rides on his private jet to celebrities including former President Bill Clinton and actor Kevin Spacey.\n\nThe phone messages, while mostly mundane, give a small taste of those associations.\n\n\"She had on the phone Mr. Harvey Weinstein,\" reads one message about a missed call.\n\nWeinstein, then a force in Hollywood, was once part of a media investment group that included Epstein.\n\n\"At the time, Epstein was seen as a wealthy power broker with access to many people of various industries and for many reasons,\" said Weinstein's spokesman, Juda Engelmayer. \"It wasn't uncommon for people of that caliber to talk, as we see from the lists that have been coming out. There was and remains nothing more to that.\"\n\nWeinstein would be charged years later with raping and sexually assaulting women in the entertainment business and is serving lengthy prison terms after convictions in New York and Los Angeles.\n\nEpstein also got several messages about missed calls from Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modeling agent who was close to Epstein. Brunel was awaiting trial on charges that he raped underage girls when he killed himself in a Paris jail in 2022.\n\n## RECRUITING YOUNG GIRLS\nWhen Epstein was initially investigated by Palm Beach police in 2005, detectives spoke to a number of girls from an area high school who said they had been paid money to give massages to Epstein.\n\nTony Figueroa, who worked as a driver for Epstein and once dated Giuffre, talked about the effort to recruit those girls during his 2016 deposition.\n\n\"Jeffrey was giving us $200 apiece for every one that we brought over,\" he said. \"I would get friends that I went to school with and I would take them over there and introduce them, and then I would just leave.\"\n\nHe said Maxwell would also call him occasionally, \"asking me to get girls.\"\n\nFigueroa has told the same story in media interviews in the years since that deposition.\n\n## \"HAVE MY BABY\"\nA woman who worked for Epstein, Johanna Sjoberg, testified in her 2016 deposition that Epstein asked her to perform sexualized massages.\n\nHe also told her he wanted her to be the mother of his baby, a request she said he made several times.\n\n\"I don't believe that I said flat-out no. I didn't agree to it. I would just say, 'Oh, yeah, really? Okay,\" Sjoberg testified, according to a transcript of her deposition.\n\nLater in her questioning, Sjoberg was asked if Maxwell ever made the same request. Sjoberg said no.\n\nMaxwell was also asked about that in her 2016 deposition, and she called the claim \"completely rubbish.\"\n\n\"I can't testify to anything Jeffrey did or didn't do when I am not present, but I have never asked anybody to carry a baby for me,\" Maxwell said. She added that she didn't remember having any conversations with Epstein about babies.\n\nSjoberg also testified that Epstein took her on a shopping trip to Victoria's Secret where he \"picked out everything and went into the room with me, the fitting room, which was very odd.\"\n\nSjoberg said that while in the room, Epstein joked that he'd previously been in there with another girl who called him \"Dad.\"\n\nSjoberg, like Giuffre, has previously gone public with her story in media interviews.\n\n## PUBLIC RELATIONS DISASTER\nThe legal storm that Epstein and Maxwell were facing is captured well in a Jan. 11, 2015, email by her attorney Philip Barden, who referred to Maxwell as \"G,\" and to Epstein as \"JE.\"\n\nHe urged a strong public response to Giuffre's claims because silence was \"reputational suicide.\"\n\n\"Now it is reported that G engaged in direct abuse - as I feared would happen. Next reports to the authorities will be made,\" Barden wrote in a message to an individual whose name was blacked out, with Maxwell copied on the missive.\n\n\"It is necessary from a litigation, investigatory and reputational reason to issue a cogent denial. I can see why JE doesn't want this as it may not suit him but he is already toast,\" he added.\n\nFour years later Epstein would be dead by suicide, found in a jail cell after he was arrested in July 2019 on sex trafficking charges. It would be two more years before a jury in New York agreed that Maxwell helped Epstein recruit and groom teenage girls for sexual abuse and sometimes joined in the abuse."}
{"text": "# A look back at Louisiana Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards' eight years in office\nBy **SARA CLINE**  \nJanuary 6, 2024. 6:52 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BATON ROUGE, La. (AP)** - It was 2012 and Louisiana was spiraling toward a historic budget crisis, with public colleges bracing for another round of cuts that campus leaders said were chasing away students and shuttering programs.\n\nJohn Bel Edwards, then-a rural state representative, had had enough. He turned to a fellow lawmaker and said, \"I'm running for governor.\"\n\nThe Democrat went on to shock the country, defying near-universal predictions and winning Louisiana's gubernatorial election in the reliably red state twice.\n\nEdwards, currently the lone Democratic governor in the Deep South, has reached his final two days in office after eight years. His tenure has been marked by successes - expanding Medicaid, joining climate change initiatives, climbing out of a budget deficit and investing in education - while navigating historical crises and facing challenges from a GOP-dominated legislature.\n\nA decade ago, Edwards, a lawyer from a 4,000-person town in eastern Louisiana, had little name recognition as he campaigned for governor with a bare-bones team. Campaign strategists say a number of factors led to the longshot candidate's victories: A scandal-ridden Republican opponent, Edwards' military background and religious conservatism that attracted GOP voters, and a strong Democratic turnout from Black voters.\n\nEdwards' first act as governor - which he has described as the \"easiest big decision\" he made in office - was to expand Medicaid. More than 440,000 working poor and nonelderly adults enrolled within the first budget year, and Louisiana's uninsured rate dropped from 22.7% to 9.4%.\n\nEdwards entered office in crisis mode, inheriting a financial mess that included more than a $1 billion budget shortfall. The state has vastly improved financially, with an estimated $2.2 billion in extra revenue during last year's legislative session.\n\nFinancial woes weren't the only crisis Edwards faced his first year: There were fatal floods, the shooting of Alton Sterling - a Black man killed by police - that triggered unrest and an ambush-style attack that left three officers dead.\n\nDuring Edwards' time in office there were around 50 state disaster declarations and 21 federal - from hurricanes, wildfires, threats to New Orleans' drinking water supply to COVID-19. The West Point graduate says his Army experience influenced the way he managed crises, utilizing timely and accurate information to formulate a strategy and employ tactics.\n\nDuring the start of the pandemic, Edwards and Republicans - including Gov.-elect Jeff Landry - came together in a bipartisan plea for people to do their part to avoid spreading the virus. It was a rare truce during a time of deep political divides nationwide.\n\nAlthough a Democrat, Edwards' stances on abortion and moderate pro-gun views appealed to some Republicans. Edwards said ahead of his reelection in 2019 former President Donald Trump urged the governor to switch parties.\n\nEdwards remained a Democrat, and in return Trump traveled to Louisiana to rally against him. Edwards won reelection.\n\nWorking across the aisle with a GOP supermajority also proved challenging and, at times, unsuccessful. Edwards wielded his veto powers - at one point blocking a bill prohibiting transgender athletes from competing on girls' sports teams. In a rarity, lawmakers overrode two of the governor's vetoes - passing into law a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors and overturning Edwards' blockage of a new congressional map that lacked a second majority-Black district.\n\nLawmakers also halted a slew of Edwards' goals, including increasing the minimum age and eliminating the state's death penalty.\n\nPerhaps one of the biggest moments of scrutiny of Edwards came following the deadly arrest of Black motorist Ronald Greene in 2019. The legislature put together a committee probing the death and to see if the governor was complicit in a cover-up of troopers. However, lawmakers abandoned their work in June without issuing any finding or hearing from the governor, despite Edwards saying he was willing to testify.\n\nThroughout his time in office, Edwards has maintained strong approval ratings among the public, continuously vowing to put people before politics.\n\nIn the Deep South state, which has had a front-row seat to the effects of climate change, Edwards put Louisiana on a path to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050.\n\nWhile Louisiana has tens of thousands of jobs tied to the oil and gas industry, efforts to expand Louisiana's renewable energy industry have come to the forefront during Edwards' administration.\n\nUnable to run for reelection because of consecutive term limits, Edwards leaves office Monday and will join a New Orleans-based law firm where he will focus on bringing renewable energy deals to the state.\n\nEdwards says he has \"no intention\" to run for political office in the future, but he hasn't outright ruled it out. For now, the governor said he is optimistic about Louisiana's future and ready to go home."}
{"text": "# Nearly 3,000 pages of Jeffrey Epstein documents released, but some questions remain unanswered\nJanuary 6, 2024. 3:24 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - For nearly two decades, journalists, police detectives, FBI agents, lawyers and amateur sleuths have pried into the depraved world of Jeffrey Epstein.\n\nYet even after the release of thousands of pages of court records in recent days, some questions about the millionaire pedophile remain unanswered. The documents have gotten a lot of attention, but they shed little new light on the financier's habitual sexual abuse of underage girls.\n\nMore than anything, the public is still fascinated with the possibility that some of the rich and powerful men in Epstein's social circle were also involved in the abuse.\n\nHere's a look at what we know - and what we don't - about Epstein and his crimes:\n\n## JETSETTER TO CONVICT\nEpstein first began getting media attention in 2002 after news organizations, including The Associated Press, covered a trip to Africa by former President Bill Clinton, actor Kevin Spacey and comedian Chris Tucker. The five-day tour of Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, Mozambique and South Africa was intended to draw attention to the fight against AIDS.\n\nAfter the visit, New York magazine ran a profile of the man who provided the private jet for the trip: Jeffrey Epstein. The story portrayed him as an \"international moneyman of mystery,\" who cultivated relationships with Nobel Prize-winning scientists and diplomats but puzzled Wall Street insiders who couldn't figure out how a college dropout got so rich.\n\n\"Terrific guy,\" Epstein's neighbor in both Florida and New York, Donald Trump, said in the story. \"He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.\"\n\nThose celebrity contacts made it big news when Epstein was arrested in 2006 over allegations that he had hired multiple teenage girls to give him sexualized massages at his home in Palm Beach, Florida.\n\nTwo years later, prosecutors allowed Epstein to plead guilty to a charge involving a single victim. He served 13 months in a jail work-release program, then quietly started rebuilding his network of influential friends, with the help of his socialite former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell.\n\nAfter a series of Miami Herald stories about the plea bargain that deprived Epstein's victims of justice, federal prosecutors in New York revived the investigation and charged Epstein in 2019 with sex trafficking.\n\nWhen Epstein killed himself in jail, prosecutors charged Maxwell with facilitating his illicit sexual encounters and participating in some of the abuse. She was convicted and is serving a 20-year prison term.\n\n## WAS ANYONE ELSE INVOLVED?\nIn 2009, one of Epstein's victims, Virginia Giuffre, filed a lawsuit saying he had flown her around the world for sexual encounters with billionaires, politicians, royals and heads of state.\n\nShe initially kept the names of those men secret, but in later legal filings started providing names: Britain's Prince Andrew, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, the French modeling scout Jean Luc Brunel, the billionaire Glenn Dubin and the law professor Alan Dershowitz, who had represented Epstein.\n\nSome details of Giuffre's allegations have changed over time. She initially said she was 15 when Epstein began to abuse her, but she later acknowledged that she met him the summer she turned 17.\n\nIn 2022, she withdrew her allegations against Dershowitz, saying she \"may have made a mistake\" in identifying him as one of her abusers. She said she \"was very young at the time\" and \"it was a very stressful and traumatic environment.\"\n\nIn one newspaper interview, for which Giuffre was paid $160,000, she described dancing with Prince Andrew at a club but said there was no sexual contact. Later, she said they had three sexual encounters. She said the newspaper had refused to print those allegations.\n\nIn another interview, she described riding in a helicopter with Bill Clinton and flirting with Donald Trump, but she later said in a deposition that those things hadn't happened and were mistakes by the reporter.\n\nGiuffre's allegations have been investigated by the FBI. No charges have been brought based on her claims, but because of the attention generated by them Brunel was investigated in France and charged with raping other underage girls. He killed himself while awaiting trial.\n\nManhattan's top federal prosecutor in 2020, Geoffrey Berman, sought to speak with Prince Andrew about matters related to Epstein, but the royal declined to be interviewed. Berman blasted Andrew at the time for falsely portraying himself to the public as eager to cooperate when he was actually dodging questions.\n\nAndrew has repeatedly denied having sex with Giuffre and said he couldn't recall ever meeting her, though a photograph appears to show them together, and a member of Epstein's household staff also testified about seeing the two at Epstein's home in New York.\n\nMany of the documents unsealed in recent days involve efforts by Maxwell's lawyers to discredit Giuffre, and Giuffre's lawyers' efforts to gather evidence backing up her accounts.\n\nThe records released in the case have contained scant evidence of wrongdoing by famous figures, but testimony from multiple witnesses confirmed Giuffre's accounts of Epstein's sexual misconduct.\n\n## DEATH BEHIND BARS\nAny chance that Epstein himself might have been able to answer questions about his famous friends died with him at a federal detention center in Manhattan in August 2019.\n\nThe death, a month after he was arrested, has fueled conspiracy theories. But multiple investigations, including an autopsy and FBI probe, have concluded Epstein died by suicide.\n\nJustice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said in a June report that Epstein was able to take his own life because of \"negligence, misconduct and outright job performance failures\" within the jail.\n\nThe Metropolitan Correctional Center was shut down in 2021 amid concerns about squalid conditions, COVID-19, crumbling infrastructure and lingering questions about Epstein's death.\n\nOverworked officers assigned to guard Epstein had failed to recognize he had amassed a surplus of bed linens. After a first suspected suicide attempt, jail officials left him alone and never assigned him a new cellmate.\n\nOn the night Epstein died, officers sat at desks just 15 feet (4.6 meters) from his cell, shopping online and snoozing instead of making required rounds every 30 minutes, prosecutors said.\n\nThe day before Epstein killed himself, a federal court unsealed about 2,000 pages of records in Giuffre's lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell - the same case involved in the records released in recent days.\n\nThat, combined with a lack of significant interpersonal connections and \"the idea of potentially spending his life in prison were likely factors contributing to Mr. Epstein's suicide,\" prison officials wrote in documents obtained by The Associated Press.\n\nWhether Epstein would have ever been keen to answer questions to clear up some of the mysteries surrounding his life is a different story. In a 2016 deposition in Giuffre's lawsuit, he repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.\n\n## WHAT'S NEXT\nThe document dump isn't over yet. So far, 191 of the approximately 250 files that U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska authorized for release have been made public. Lawyers involved in the case are posting them to the docket on a rolling basis, as per the judge's instructions.\n\nAnother batch is expected Monday, though there is little indication they will yield more than what has already been seen in the nearly 3,000 pages of deposition transcripts, legal memos, emails and other records made public since Wednesday.\n\nVersions of many of those records had already been made public in past years, though with some sections blacked out for privacy reasons or to protect the identities of Epstein's victims."}
{"text": "# China sanctions 5 US defense companies in response to US sanctions and arms sales to Taiwan\nBy **KEN MORITSUGU**  \nJanuary 7, 2024. 4:14 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BEIJING (AP)** - China announced sanctions Sunday on five American defense-related companies in response to U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and U.S sanctions on Chinese companies and individuals.\n\nThe sanctions will freeze any property the companies have in China and prohibit organizations and individuals in China from doing business with them, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement posted online.\n\nIt was unclear what impact, if any, the sanctions would have on the companies, BAE Systems Land and Armaments, Alliant Techsystems Operations, AeroVironment, Viasat and Data Link Solutions. Such sanctions are often mostly symbolic as American defense contractors generally don't sell to China.\n\nThe Foreign Ministry said the U.S. moves harmed China's sovereignty and security interests, undermined peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and violated the rights and interests of Chinese companies and individuals.\n\n\"The Chinese government remains unwavering in our resolve to safeguard national sovereignty, security and territorial integrity and protect the lawful rights and interests of Chinese companies and citizens,\" the ministry statement said.\n\nThe announcement was made less than a week ahead of a presidential election in Taiwan that is being contested in large part over how the government should manage its relationship with China, which claims the self-governing island as its territory and says it must come under its rule.\n\nThe Chinese Foreign Ministry did not specify which arms deal or which U.S. sanctions China was responding to, though spokesperson Wang Wenbin had warned three weeks ago that China would take countermeasures following the U.S. government's approval of a $300 million military package for Taiwan in December.\n\nThe deal includes equipment, training and equipment repair to maintain Taiwan's command, control and military communications capabilities.\n\nThe U.S. said the sale would support the modernization of Taiwan's armed forces and the maintenance of a credible defense. \"The proposed sale will improve the recipient's capability to meet current and future threats by enhancing operational readiness,\" a news release from the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency said.\n\nTaiwan is a major flashpoint in U.S.-China relations that analysts worry could explode into military conflict between the two powers. China says that U.S. arms sales to Taiwan are interference in its domestic affairs.\n\nThe Chinese military regularly sends fighter planes and ships into and over the waters around Taiwan, in part to deter the island's government from declaring formal independence. An invasion doesn't appear imminent, but the constant military activity serves as a reminder that the threat is ever-present.\n\nThe U.S. switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China in 1979, but it is bound by its own laws to ensure that Taiwan has the ability to defend itself. America and its allies sail warships through the Taiwan Strait, a 160-kilometer (100-mile) -wide waterway that separates the island from China."}
{"text": "# Polish farmers suspend their blockade at the Ukrainian border after a deal with the government\nJanuary 6, 2024. 2:23 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WARSAW, Poland (AP)** - Polish farmers who had blockaded a border crossing to Ukraine ended their protest after reaching an agreement with the government that met their demands, Poland's state news agency PAP reported Saturday.\n\nThe frustration of the farmers was one of the challenges facing the new Polish government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, which seeks to support Ukraine while also addressing the demands of Polish farmers and truckers whose livelihoods have been hurt by the war.\n\nSince November, both farmers and truckers have been blockading border crossings, threatening the flow of some aid going into Ukraine.\n\nPolish farmers complain that imports of Ukrainian foods have caused prices to fall, hurting their incomes, while truckers say they are being undercut by their Ukrainian counterparts.\n\nThe truckers are continuing their protest, creating queues of many kilometers at serveral border crossings. This week truckers had to wait over two days before they could cross.\n\nAgriculture Minister Czeslaw Siekierski signed an agreement Saturday with a farmers group called Deceived Village and Teresa Kubas-Hul, a leader of the Podkarpackie region, which borders Ukraine. Under the deal, the farmers agreed to suspend their protest at the Medyka border crossing.\n\nThe deal states that the agriculture minister accepted the demands of the farmers, who sought a corn production subsidy of 1 billion Polish zlotys ($250 million), a lower agricultural tax and preferential liquidity loans, PAP reported.\n\nThe demands are to be implemented after the legislative process is completed and the necessary approvals from the European Union are obtained, PAP reported."}
{"text": "# A minibus explodes in Kabul, killing at least 2 civilians and wounding 14 others\nJanuary 6, 2024. 12:07 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ISLAMABAD (AP)** - A minibus exploded in a mostly Shiite Muslim neighborhood in Afghanistan's capital of Kabul killing at least two civilians and wounding 14 others, a Taliban official said Saturday. It was the first attack in the country in 2024.\n\nPolice spokesman Khalid Zadran said the explosion happened in the western part of the city, in the Dashti Barchi area. Police launched an investigation, he said.\n\nNo one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but the Islamic State group's affiliate in the region has in the past targeted Shiite schools, hospitals and mosques in the same area.\n\nIn November, also in the same area of Kabul, the IS claimed responsibility for a minibus explosion in which seven people were killed and 20 others were wounded.\n\nOn Oct. 26, four people were killed and seven were wounded when an explosion hit a sports club in the same neighborhood. IS also claimed responsibility for that attack.\n\nTaliban Defense Minister Mohammad Yaqoob Mujahid said last week there was a 90% decrease in attacks by the IS affiliate in the past year.\n\nThe IS affiliate has been a major rival of the Taliban since the latter seized control of Afghanistan in August 2021. IS militants have struck in Kabul and in northern provinces, often targeting Shiites, whom IS considers to be apostates."}
{"text": "# Death toll rises to 5 in hospital fire in northern Germany\nJanuary 6, 2024. 6:39 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BERLIN (AP)** - The death toll in a fire that broke out in a hospital in Germany this week has risen to five, with all of the victims patients, as investigators sought to understand the cause of the blaze.\n\nThe fire broke out late Thursday at the hospital in Uelzen, southeast of Hamburg. Emergency workers arrived to flames and calls for help. They evacuated several people, and were able to stop the fire from spreading any further, according to the dpa news agency, which cited police.\n\nFirefighters and police, some using ladders, rescued several patients from their rooms.\n\nThe German news agency dpa reported late Friday that a fifth victim succumbed to injuries, raising the earlier death toll of four to five.\n\nSix people were seriously injured and 16 others had lesser injuries, dpa reported, citing the hospital. The injured suffered smoke inhalation and burns.\n\nThe cause of the fire was still unclear on Saturday."}
{"text": "# Bangladesh's main opposition party starts a 48-hour general strike ahead of Sunday's election\nBy **JULHAS ALAM**  \nJanuary 6, 2024. 11:53 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP)** - Bangladesh's main opposition party on Saturday started a 48-hour general strike on the eve on a general election, calling on people to boycott the vote because it says the government of incumbent Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina can't guarantee its fairness.\n\nHasina is seeking to return to power for a fourth consecutive term. The main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, led by former premier Khaleda Zia, has vowed to disrupt the election through the strike and boycott.\n\nCampaigning in the nation of 169 million people has been marred by violence, with at least 15 people killed since October. At least 18 arson attacks were reported across the country between Friday midnight and Saturday night, Talha Bin Jasim, an official with the Media Cell of the Fire Service and Civil Defense in Dhaka, told The Associated Press by phone.\n\nAt least 10 of the attacks targeted polling stations, he said, with police calling them acts of sabotage.\n\nDetectives arrested seven men belonging to the BNP and its youth wing for their alleged involvement in an arson attack on a passenger train on Friday night in which four people were killed, according to Harun Or Rashid, the head of the Detective Branch in the capital, Dhaka.\n\nThey were detained in separate raids in the city, he said Saturday, adding that the suspects held a meeting online two days ago about committing such attacks on polling stations and trains.\n\nBangladesh is a parliamentary democracy but has a history of military coups and assassinations.\n\nOn Saturday morning, a small group of BNP supporters marched across the Shahbagh neighborhood in the capital, Dhaka, calling on people to join the strike. Another rally by about 200 left-wing protesters took place outside the National Press Club to denounce the election.\n\nThe Election Commission said ballot boxes and other election supplies had been distributed in preparation for the vote on Sunday in over 42,000 precincts. There are more than 119 million registered voters.\n\nRuhul Kabir Rizvi, a BNP senior official, repeated his party's demand for Hasina to resign, calling the election \"skewed.\"\n\n\"The government is again playing with fire. The government has resorted to its old tactics of holding a one-sided election,\" he said.\n\nChief Election Commissioner Kazi Habibul Awal told reporters on Saturday that the parliamentary election would be free and fair, adding, \"We want our election to be observed not only nationally, but internationally as well.\"\n\nResponding to questions on the main opposition shunning the vote, Awal said that had the BNP participated, the election would have been \"more competitive\" and \"more festive.\" He acknowledged that the recent violence may have a negative impact on voters turning up on Sunday.\n\nOn Friday, an apparent arson attack on a train in Dhaka killed four people. Mahid Uddin, an additional police commissioner with the Dhaka Metropolitan Police, said the fire was \"clearly an act of sabotage\" aimed at scaring people ahead of the election. He did not name any political party or groups as suspects, but said police would seek those responsible.\n\nForeign Minister A.K. Abdul Momen said in a statement Saturday that the timing of the attack, just days before the election, was meant to hinder the democratic process. \"This reprehensible incident, undoubtedly orchestrated by those with malicious intent, strikes at the very heart of our democratic values,\" he said.\n\nPolice said a murder case was filed by a railway official on Saturday, accusing unidentified people as suspects.\n\nTalha Bin Jasim, an official with the Media Cell of the Fire Service and Civil Defense in Dhaka, told The Associated Press by phone on Saturday night that at least 18 arson attacks had been reported from across the country since Friday midnight.\n\nHe said that at least 10 polling stations were among them, with police calling them acts of sabotage.\n\nHe said a small fire was reported early Saturday at a Buddhist monastery at Ramu area in southern Cox's Bazar district. Local media, quoting police in the area, said that it was not clear if it was merely a fire incident or an act of sabotage. Local authorities said they would investigate.\n\nThe Election Commission has asked authorities to increase security around polling stations.\n\nFaruk Hossain, a spokesman of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police, told The Associated Press police had reinforced security across Dhaka and that railway transportation was back to normal following Friday's attack.\n\nBangladesh's increasingly polarized political culture has been dominated by a struggle between two powerful women, Hasina and Zia.\n\nZia, head of the BNP, is ailing and currently under house arrest. Her party says the charges of corruption are politically motivated, an allegation the government denied.\n\nTensions have spiked since October when violence broke out at a massive anti-government rally demanding Hasina's resignation and a caretaker government to oversee the election. Hasina's administration said there was no constitutional provision to allow a caretaker government.\n\nCritics have accused Hasina of systemically suffocating the opposition by implementing repressive security measures. Zia's party claimed that more than 20,000 opposition supporters have been arrested, but the government said those figures were inflated and denied arrests were made due to political leanings. The attorney general put the figure between 2,000-3,000 while the law minister said the numbers were about 10,000."}
{"text": "# Myanmar confirms a key northeastern city on border with China has been seized by an ethnic alliance\nBy **GRANT PECK**  \nJanuary 6, 2024. 4:05 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BANGKOK (AP)** - Myanmar's military government has acknowledged that it withdrew its forces from a key city on the northeastern border with China after it was taken over by an alliance of ethnic armed groups it has been battling for months.\n\nThe fall of Laukkaing late Thursday is the biggest in a series of defeats suffered by Myanmar's military government since the ethnic alliance launched an offensive Oct. 27. It underlines the pressure the government is under as it battles pro-democracy guerrillas in the wake of a 2021 military takeover as well as ethnic minority armed groups across the country.\n\nEthnic armed organizations have battled for greater autonomy for decades, but Myanmar has been wracked by what amounts to civil war since the army seized power in February 2021 from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, sparking nationwide armed resistance by pro-democracy forces.\n\nThe Three Brotherhood Alliance that took Laukkaing is composed of the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, the Ta'ang National Liberation Army and the Arakan Army. The MNDAA is a military force of the Kokang minority, who are ethnic Chinese.\n\nPhotos and videos on social media showed a vast amount of weapons that the alliance claimed to have captured.\n\nLaukkaing is the capital of the Kokang Self-Administered Zone, which is geographically part of northern Shan state in Myanmar.\n\nMyanmar government spokesperson Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun told the Popular News Journal, a pro-army website, on Saturday that the military and its local commanders relinquished control of Laukkaing after considering many aspects, including the safety of the family members of the soldiers stationed there.\n\nHe said the military also took into consideration Myanmar's relationship with China, which is just across the border from Laukkaing. China, which has good relations with both the military and the ethnic alliance, has been seeking an end to the fighting.\n\nBeijing protested after artillery shells landed in its territory on Wednesday, wounding five people. Zaw Min Tun said the alliance had fired the shells and that it tried to blame the military in order to damage its relationship with China.\n\nA statement posted by the alliance on social media late Friday declared that the entire Kokang region had become a \"Military Council-free area,\" referring to Myanmar's ruling junta,\n\nIt said 2,389 military personnel - including six brigadier generals - and their family members had surrendered by Friday and that all were evacuated to safety.\n\nVideo clips circulating on social media purportedly showed the soldiers and their family members being transported in various vehicles. The Shwe Phee Myay News Agency, an online news site reporting from Shan state, reported that many of them were taken to Lashio, the capital of Shan's northern region, under an agreement with the MNDAA for their repatriation.\n\nIt's unclear whether the Three Brotherhood Alliance will try to extend its offensive outside of Shan state, but it has vowed to keep fighting against military rule.\n\nThe alliance cast its offensive as a struggle against military rule and an effort to rid the region of major organized criminal enterprises. China has publicly sought to eradicate cyberscam operations in Laukkaing that have entrapped tens of thousands of Chinese nationals, who have been repatriated to China in recent weeks.\n\nBut the offensive was also widely recognized as an effort by the MNDAA to regain control of the Kokang Self-Administered Zone by ousting a rival Kokang group backed by the military government from its seat of power.\n\nPeng Deren, the MNDAA commander, said in a New Year's speech published by The Kokang, an affiliated online media site, that the alliance had seized over 250 military targets and five border crossings with China. He said more than 300 cyberscam centers were raided and more than 40,000 Chinese involved in the operations were repatriated."}
{"text": "# Turkish justice minister says 15 suspects jailed ahead of trial for spying for Israel\nBy **ANDREW WILKS**  \nJanuary 6, 2024. 1:47 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**ISTANBUL (AP)** - A court in Istanbul has ordered 15 of 34 people detained on suspicion of spying for Israel be held in prison awaiting trial, Turkey's justice minister said late Friday.\n\nThe suspects were arrested Tuesday for allegedly planning to carry out activities that included \"reconnaissance\" and \"pursuing, assaulting and kidnapping\" foreign nationals living in Turkey.\n\nJustice Minister Yilmaz Tunc said in a social media post that 26 suspects were referred to the court on a charge of committing \"political or military espionage\" on behalf of Israeli intelligence. Eleven were released under judicial control conditions and eight were awaiting deportation.\n\nIsrael's foreign intelligence agency Mossad is said to have recruited Palestinians and Syrian nationals inside Turkey as part of the operation against foreigners living in Turkey, state-run Anadolu news agency reported.\n\nThe agency cited a prosecution document as saying the operation targeted \"Palestinian nationals and their families ... within the scope of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.\"\n\nOne suspect allegedly collected information about Palestinian patients recently transferred to Turkey for health care. Turkey has accepted dozens of Palestinian patients from Gaza since the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict.\n\nThe suspects were detained in raids on 57 addresses in Istanbul and seven other provinces. Weeks earlier, the head of Israel's domestic Shin Bet security agency said his organization was prepared to target Hamas anywhere, including in Lebanon, Turkey and Qatar.\n\nTurkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned Israel of \"serious consequences\" if it pressed ahead with its threat to attack Hamas officials on Turkish soil.\n\nTurkey and Israel had normalized ties in 2022 by reappointing ambassadors following years of tensions. But those ties quickly deteriorated after the Israel-Hamas war, with Ankara becoming one of the strongest critics of Israel's military actions in Gaza.\n\nIsrael initially withdrew its diplomats from Turkey over security concerns and later announced it was recalling its diplomats for political reasons, citing \"increasingly harsh statements\" from Turkish officials. Turkey also pulled out its ambassador from Israel.\n\nErdogan's reaction to the Israel-Hamas war was initially fairly muted. But the Turkish leader has since intensified his criticism of Israel, describing its actions in Gaza as verging on \"genocide.\" He has called for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be prosecuted for \"war crimes\" and compared him to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.\n\nErdogan, whose government has hosted several Hamas officials in the past, has also said the militant group - considered a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States and the European Union - is fighting for the liberation of its lands and people."}
{"text": "# Taiwan says Chinese balloons are harassment and a threat to air safety\nJanuary 6, 2024. 12:58 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP)** - Taiwan's Defense Ministry accused China on Saturday of harassment and trying to affect public morale by repeatedly sending balloons over the self-governing island.\n\nA ministry analysis found that the paths of the balloons posed a serious threat to international passenger flights, according to a report by Taiwan's official Military News Agency. The ministry called for an immediate end to the activity to ensure flight safety,\n\n\"The ministry urged the people (of Taiwan) to clearly understand the Chinese Communist Party's cognitive combat methods and face it rationally and calmly so as to avoid being affected by it,\" the report said.\n\nThe purpose of the balloons is unclear, and a Chinese state media outlet has accused Taiwan's ruling Democratic Progressive Party and Taiwanese and American media of hyping what it says are harmless weather balloons. The balloon incidents come ahead of a Jan. 13 presidential election in Taiwan in which the island's relations with China are a major issue.\n\nTaiwan's Defense Ministry has reported several instances of Chinese balloons flying near or over the island in the past month. It said Saturday that two balloons had been detected over the Taiwan Strait on Friday, one 33 nautical miles and the other 51 nautical miles off the island's northwest coast.\n\nChina views Taiwan, which is about 160 kilometers (100 miles) off China's east coast, as a renegade province that must come under its control. Chinese leader Xi Jinping said in an annual New Year's address this week that Taiwan would \"surely be reunified\" with China in the future."}
{"text": "# UN agency says it is handling code of conduct violations by staffer for anti-Israel posts internally\nBy **EDITH M. LEDERER**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 10:35 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**UNITED NATIONS (AP)** - The U.N. agency promoting equality for women said Friday that violations of the U.N. Code of Conduct requiring impartiality by a mid-level manager, who reportedly supported pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli posts on social media, are being dealt with internally.\n\nLast month, the Geneva-based advocacy group UN Watch, which often criticizes anti-Israel actions at the United Nations, reported that Sarah Douglas, the deputy chief of UN Women's peace and security office, had endorsed 153 posts on social media since Hamas ' Oct. 7 attacks in southern Israel that exposed her partisan views about the war in Gaza.\n\nUN Watch's Executive Director Hillel Neuer posted on X, formerly Twitter, some examples including posts that accused Israel of \"genocide\" and celebrated shutting down bridges and highways for pro-Palestinian campaigns and rallies.\n\nAfter UN Watch publicized the posts, Neuer said Douglas deleted her social media accounts, but he said the group has screenshots of her posts.\n\nLast week, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said when asked about Douglas' posts: \"I understand there was a violation of the Code of Conduct by this individual.\"\n\nDouglas has not commented on her social media posts.\n\nUN Watch said a campaign it launched on Instagram and X demanding that Douglas be fired had received nearly 5,000 signatures by Dec. 27. Two U.S. senators, Rick Scott, a Florida Republican, and Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, have also called on UN Women to fire her.\n\n\"We are aware of reports relating to a mid-level manager and the incompatibility of her social media activity with the standards of conduct required of U.N. staff members,\" UN Women said Friday in response to an AP question on what action it is taking on the violations and the calls for her firing.\n\n\"UN Women takes these concerns very seriously,\" it said. \"The standards of conduct are clear and breaches are dealt with appropriately and in accordance with UN Women's accountability and legal framework.\"\n\nUN Women said: \"Such processes are internal and not made public.\""}
{"text": "# A drug cartel has attacked a remote Mexican community with drones and gunmen, rights group says\nBy **MEGAN JANETSKY**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 6:36 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MEXICO CITY (AP)** - A small community in Guerrero, a Mexican state plagued by unrelenting cartel violence, was attacked by drones and armed men, a local human rights group told the Associated Press on Friday.\n\nThe religious and human rights organization Minerva Bello Center said Thursday's attack on at least 30 people was carried out by a drug cartel. The center's director, José Filiberto Velázquez, said the victims were likely killed, though authorities still had not been able to enter the remote community or confirm the deaths.\n\nThe community of Helidoro Castillo, on the fringes of Tlacotepec, is caught in an escalating war between the La Familia Michoacana and the Jalisco New Generation cartels.\n\nVelázquez said drone attacks by the cartels and violence have been escalating over the past year. He said he heard from the community around midday Thursday that La Familia Michoacana was launching \"explosive devices\" from drones. But communications from the community soon went dark.\n\nLater in the night, he heard from local police, who said one survivor of the attack escaped and told them that after the drone attack armed men came to the community as residents were slaughtering a pig and that \"they were being mowed down.\"\n\nThe human rights leader also spoke to locals in nearby communities that said they heard the attack and were terrified the same could happen to them.\n\n\"This is a conflict that has many communities terrified,\" Velázquez said.\n\nVelázquez said neither human rights groups nor authorities had been able to enter the small town due to its remoteness and the risks. Because of that, little was known about the attack.\n\nGuerrero state prosecutors confirmed there had been a \"violent act\" in the town and that security forces were investigating the incident. But the office told The Associated Press they couldn't provide any more information.\n\nMexico is home to at least 200 cartels and criminal organizations, according to conflict-tracking organization Crisis Group. Rival cartels warring for territory have caused violence to surge in recent years.\n\nGuerrero has become one of the hotspots for conflict, and in October a police chief and 13 officers were ambushed and shot dead in the southern Mexican state.\n\nAs researchers report that cartels have practically carved out their own \"fiefdoms\", they've also grown more bold, warring with drones in other parts of Mexico, pushing into legal industries like the avocado trade, and even constructing their own Wi-Fi networks and forcing locals to pay under the threat of death."}
{"text": "# UN humanitarian chief calls Gaza 'uninhabitable' 3 months into Israel-Hamas war\nBy **EDITH M. LEDERER**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 5:10 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**UNITED NATIONS (AP)** - The U.N. humanitarian chief described Gaza on Friday as \"uninhabitable\" three months into Israel's war with Hamas, warning that famine was looming and a public health disaster unfolding.\n\nIn a grim assessment of the devastating impact of Israel's military response to the horrific Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, Martin Griffiths said that Gaza's 2.3 million people face \"daily threats to their very existence\" while the world just watches.\n\nHe said tens of thousands of people, mostly women and children, have been killed or injured, families are sleeping in the open as temperatures plummet, and areas where Palestinians were told to relocate have been bombed.\n\n\"People are facing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded (and) famine is around the corner,\" Griffiths said. The few partially functioning hospitals are overwhelmed and critically short of supplies, medical facilities are under relentless attack, infectious diseases are spreading, and amidst the chaos some 180 Palestinian women are giving birth every day.\n\n\"Gaza has simply become uninhabitable,\" the U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs said.\n\nHe said the humanitarian community is facing an \"impossible mission\" - trying to help more than two million people while U.N. staff and aid workers from partner organizations are killed, communications blackouts continue, roads are damaged, truck convoys are shot at, and vital commercial supplies \"are almost non-existent.\"\n\nGriffiths reiterated U.N. demands for an immediate end to the war and the release of all hostages, declaring that \"It is time for the international community to use all its influence to make this happen.\"\n\nThe Oct. 7 attack into southern Israel by Hamas, which controls Gaza, killed around 1,200 people, and its fighters and other militants took some 250 people hostage. More than 120 remain in captivity.\n\nIsrael's air, ground and sea assault in Gaza, aimed at obliterating Hamas, has killed more than 22,400 people, two-thirds of them women and children, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory. The count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.\n\nThe three-month conflict has displaced some 85% of Gaza's residents, and the United Nations has identified more than 37,000 structures destroyed or damaged in the war so far.\n\nThe U.N. children's agency UNICEF said Friday that most young children and pregnant women aren't getting enough nutrition, with fewer than 200 aid trucks entering Gaza every day - less than half the prewar level - and distribution hampered by the fighting.\n\nA survey by UNICEF found that 90% of children under the age of two are eating two or fewer of the five essential food groups each day, mainly bread or milk. A quarter of pregnant women said they only eat one food group per day.\n\nUNICEF says cases of diarrhea among children under the age of five have risen from 48,000 to 71,000 - an indication of poor nutrition. Normally, only 2,000 cases of diarrhea are reported each month in the Gaza Strip.\n\nIsrael cut off food, clean water, medicine, electricity and fuel deliveries to Gaza immediately after the Hamas attack. In response to U.S. pressure it allowed a trickle of aid in through Egypt in late October, and the number of trucks has increased from about 100 to up to 200 every day.\n\nIsraeli authorities have repeatedly said there is enough food in the territory, and that they have taken the necessary steps to allow aid in, blaming any shortages on U.N. bodies.\n\nBut U.N. associate spokesperson Stephanie Tremblay reiterated Friday that \"the current response is only meeting a fraction of people's needs.\"\n\nShe repeated what U.N. Secretary-General said last month: \"It's a mistake to quote the effectiveness of the humanitarian operation in Gaza based only on the number of trucks. An effective aid operation in Gaza requires security. It requires staff who can work in safety. It requires good logistical capacity and the resumption of commercial activity.\"\n\nTremblay said until those requirements are met, Gazans will not receive enough aid.\n\nNonetheless, the U.N. World Food Program reported that in December it reached 975,000 vulnerable people with food across Gaza and in the West Bank, she said.\n\nIn an indication of difficulties getting aid into Gaza, some international efforts are resorting to dropping supplies from planes. France announced Friday that French and Jordanian C-130 planes dropped a total of seven tons of medical aid to the Jordanian field hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis in a joint operation overnight.\n\n\"The humanitarian situation remains critical in Gaza,\" French President Emmanuel Macron said Friday on X, formerly Twitter. \"In a difficult context, France and Jordan delivered aid to the population and to those who are helping them.\"\n\nThe airdrop, a first from a Western country in the Gaza Strip, was agreed during Macron's recent visit to Jordan, where he met with King Abdullah II last month, the French presidency said."}
{"text": "# Top White House budget official warns of 'dire' situation on Ukraine aid\nBy **SEUNG MIN KIM**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 4:47 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - President Joe Biden's top budget official warned in stark terms Friday about the rapidly diminishing time that lawmakers have to replenish U.S. aid for Ukraine, as the fate of that money to Kyiv remains tied up in negotiations over immigration where a deal has so far been out of reach.\n\nShalanda Young, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, stressed that there is no avenue to help Ukraine aside from Congress approving additional funding to help Kyiv as it fends off Russia in a war that is now nearly two years old. While the Pentagon has some limited authority to help Kyiv absent new funding from Capitol Hill, \"that is not going to get big tranches of equipment into Ukraine,\" Young said Friday.\n\nWhile the administration still has presidential drawdown authority, which allows it to pull weapons from existing U.S. stockpiles and send them quickly to Ukraine, officials have decided to forgo that authority because Congress has not approved additional money to essentially backfill that equipment - a move that Young said was a \"very tough decision.\" The U.S. sent a $250 million weapons package to Ukraine late last month, which officials say was likely the last package because of the lack of funding.\n\nYoung also detailed the impact that a lack of additional U.S. aid would have on Ukraine aside from its military capabilities, such as Kyiv being able to pay its civil servants to ensure that its government can continue to function amid Russia's barrage.\n\n\"Yes, Kyiv might have a little time from other donors to make sure they can keep their war footing, keep the civil service, but what happens in the (European Union), in other NATO allies, if the U.S. pulls out their support?\" Young said during a breakfast with journalists Friday hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. \"I'm very concerned that it's not just the United States' resources that are necessary for Kyiv to stop Putin. It is: What message does that send to the rest of the world? And what will their decisions be if they see the United States not step up to the plate?\"\n\nYoung, a veteran congressional budget staffer, added that the situation was \"dire\" and \"certainly, we've bypassed my comfort level\" in the time that has gone by since Congress greenlighted new funding for Ukraine. Biden requested a smaller tranche of new aid to Ukraine in September, but then went to Congress with a sweeping national security spending request in late October that included roughly $60 billion in new funding for Ukraine.\n\nThat ask from Biden also included about $14 billion in managing and caring for the high number of migrants who continue to arrive at the southern border, and the president has said he is willing to negotiate with Republicans to accept some policy changes that would tighten asylum and other migration laws - a key demand of GOP lawmakers.\n\nComplicating the dynamics further is that Washington is confronting a pair of deadlines - the first on Jan. 19, the second on Feb. 2 - to fund the federal government or risk a shutdown at the start of a presidential election year. Key lawmakers have yet to reach topline spending figures for each federal agency, a necessary step before the broader bills funding the government can even be written.\n\nYoung said she is not yet pessimistic, but that \"I'm not optimistic\" on the prospects of averting a shutdown in the coming weeks because of sharp new warnings from House Republicans, dozens of whom traveled to the border this week with Speaker Mike Johnson, that they were willing to shutter the government if they didn't extract sufficient concessions on border policy from the White House.\n\n\"The rhetoric this week has concerned me that that is the path that House Republicans are headed down, even though I will say I think leadership is working in good faith to prevent a shutdown,\" Young said.\n\nAsked whether the emergency spending request with Ukraine should pass before legislation to fund the government, Young added: \"I'll take it however they can pass it. I mean, beggars shouldn't be choosing. And I'll take it, how they can pass it. It just needs to be passed.\""}
{"text": "# Belarus' authoritarian leader tightens control over the country's religious groups\nBy **YURAS KARMANAU**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 2:11 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**TALLINN, Estonia (AP)** - Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has signed a law into effect that significantly tightens control over various religious denominations and organizations.\n\nThe law, published on the presidential website this week, mandates that all denominations and religious groups reapply for state registration, which authorities reserve the right to refuse.\n\nIt's the latest step in Lukashenko's a crackdown on dissent, which intensified after a disputed presidential election in 2020 gave the authoritarian leader a sixth term in office. The government arrested more than 35,000 protesters in demonstrations that denounced the vote as rigged, and thousands of them were beaten in custody. Many were forced to leave the country to escape prosecution.\n\nSince 2022, involvement in unregistered organizations became a criminal offense, punishable by up to two years in prison.\n\nAccording to official data in 2023, a total of 3,417 religious groups were registered in Belarus, a country of 9.5 million. About 80% are Orthodox Christians; nearly 14% are Catholics, residing mostly in western, northern and central parts of the country; and about 2% belong to Protestant churches.\n\nDuring the 2020 anti-government protests, some Catholic and Protestant churches gave shelter and support to the demonstrators.\n\nThe new law gives authorities broad powers to deny registration and to shut down any religious organization. It stipulates that in order to be registered, a religious group or denomination needs to have at least one parish that operated in Belarus for at least 30 years. All denominations and groups must reapply for registration within a year.\n\nIt also prohibits those accused of involvement with what authorities deem as extremist or terrorist activities from running a religious organization, and it bans the use of any symbols other than religious ones in church services. It also outlaws any gatherings in churches other than for a service.\n\nThe Rev. Zmitser Khvedaruk, a Protestant pastor, said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press that the law was \"repressive.\"\n\nHe expressed concern that \"Protestant churches in Belarus will become the main target of the new law\" in the predominantly Orthodox country, especially given their popularity among younger people.\n\n\"Many Protestant churches in Belarus will face a tough choice - to either cease their activities or return to the dark Soviet times, when Protestant churches effectively worked underground and illegally gathered at people's homes, with (believers) praying under the threat of criminal prosecution,\" Khvedaruk told AP.\n\nAnalysts say Belarusian authorities are seeking to tighten control over the entire public sphere ahead of parliamentary elections set for next month and a presidential vote in 2025.\n\n\"The Belarusian authorities view the clergy as leaders of public opinion, who influence large groups of people; therefore, they strive to take all denominations under tight, centralized control,\" said Natallia Vasilevich, coordinator of the Christian Vision monitoring group. \"The new law is repressive and doesn't conform to international standards of freedom of conscience.\""}
{"text": "# Former energy minister quits Britain's Conservatives over approval of new oil drilling\nJanuary 5, 2024. 1:59 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - Britain's former energy minister said Friday he is quitting the Conservative Party and stepping down as a lawmaker over the government's backtracking on its environmental commitments.\n\nChris Skidmore said he could not support a forthcoming bill that will authorize new North Sea oil and gas drilling and called the U.K.'s retreat from its climate goals \"a tragedy.\"\n\nSkidmore has been a Conservative lawmaker since 2010. He wrote a government-commissioned review published a year ago setting out how Britain could reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 while creating thousands of new green jobs.\n\nHe said that \"as the former energy minister who signed the U.K.'s net zero commitment by 2050 into law, I cannot vote for a bill that clearly promotes the production of new oil and gas.\"\n\n\"To fail to act, rather than merely speak out, is to tolerate a status quo that cannot be sustained,\" he added in a statement.\n\nHe said he would step down when Parliament returns next week from its Christmas break.\n\nConservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has watered down some green goals that he said imposed \"unacceptable costs\" on ordinary people. He delayed a ban on selling new gas and diesel cars, scrapped a domestic energy-efficiency rule and greenlit hundreds of new North Sea oil and gas licenses.\n\nSkidmore said it was \"a tragedy that the U.K. has been allowed to lose its climate leadership, at a time when our businesses, industries, universities and civil society organizations are providing first-class leadership and expertise to so many across the world, inspiring change for the better.\"\n\n\"I cannot vote for the bill next week,\" he said. \"The future will judge harshly those that do.\""}
{"text": "# UN chief names a new envoy to scope out the chances of reviving Cyprus peace talks\nBy **MENELAOS HADJICOSTIS**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 2:45 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP)** - U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday named a former Colombian foreign minister as his personal envoy to scope out the chances of reviving talks to resolve Cyprus' ethnic divide, an issue that has defied international diplomacy for nearly five decades.\n\nMaría Ángela Holguín Cuéllar will work on Guterres' behalf to \"search for common ground on the way forward\" and to serve as the U.N. chief's advisor on Cyprus, U.N. associate spokesperson Stephanie Tremblay said.\n\nCuéllar served as Colombia's top diplomat during 2010-2018 and as the country's representative to the U.N. during 2004-2006.\n\nShe is expected to travel to Cyprus soon to sound out Greek Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides and the leader of the breakaway Turkish Cypriots, Ersin Tatar.\n\nCyprus was divided into ethnic Greek and Turkish sides in 1974, when Turkey invaded just days after a coup mounted by supporters of union with Greece. Only Turkey recognizes a Turkish Cypriot declaration of independence and keeps some 40,000 troops in the Mediterranean island nation's breakaway north.\n\nA Cyprus peace deal would reduce a source of potential conflict next door to an unstable Middle East and allow for the easier harnessing of hydrocarbon reserves in the eastern Mediterranean Sea's natural gas-rich waters.\n\nBut Guterres' appointment of an envoy to inform him whether it would be worth trying to jumpstart the long-stalled peace talks reflects a more cautious approach as a result of numerous failed attempts to produce an accord. If anything, the two sides have grown further apart since the last major push for progress in the summer of 2017.\n\nTurkey and the Turkish Cypriots say they have ditched an agreed-upon framework that called for reunifying Cyprus as a federated state with Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot zones. Instead, they are advocating fpr what effectively amounts to a two-state deal.\n\nTurkish Cypriots argue that the majority Greek Cypriots want to lord over the entire island by refusing to equally share power. They also support Turkey's insistence on maintaining military intervention rights and a permanent troop presence on the island as part of any deal.\n\nGreek Cypriots strongly oppose a deal that would formalize the island's ethnic cleave and reject a Turkish Cypriot demand for veto powers on all government decisions at a federal level. They also reject Turkey's stipulations, arguing a permanent Turkish troop presence and a right to military intervention would would undercut the country's sovereignty.\n\nBefore Cuellar's appointment, the two Cypriot sides appeared to have eased up on antagonistic rhetoric, but tensions between them linger. In recent months, there were Greek Cypriot accusations of stepped up, unauthorized Turkish Cypriot incursions into the U.N.-controlled buffer zone in a suburb of Nicosia, the country's divided capital.\n\nIn his New Year's message, Christodoulides called the envoy's appointment a \"first important step\" to reviving peace talks. He said he was \"absolutely ready\" to move things forward but acknowledged that the \"road will be long and the difficulties a given.\"\n\nTatar told a Turkish Cypriot newspaper last week that he had \"no expectations\" of any peace talks in the new year. He said Cuellar's assignment to identify areas of agreement won't lead anywhere if Turkish Cypriot \"sovereignty and equality\" are not accepted."}
{"text": "# US biotech company halts sales of DNA kits in Tibet, as lawmakers mull more export controls on China\nBy **DIDI TANG**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 12:46 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - A U.S. biotech company has halted sales of its DNA testing products in the Chinese ethnic region of Tibet, as lawmakers mull export controls to keep Beijing from using American products to conduct massive surveillance of its own citizens.\n\nThermo Fisher, based in Waltham, Mass., said in a statement that it made the decision in mid-2023 to cease sales of human identification products in Tibet \"based on a number of factors.\" It did not specify the \"factors.\" The news site Axios first revealed Thermo Fisher's decision this week.\n\nThe move by the biotech company, which in 2019 took similar measures in the ethnic region of Xinjiang, came at a time of concerns on the Capitol Hill over Beijing's human rights record. About a year ago, a bipartisan group of lawmakers demanded to know if the company was certain its equipment was not used to aid or abet rights abuses in China, following reports that the Chinese government had been collecting DNA data from hundreds of thousands of Tibetans. Beijing faces criticisms for its rule in Tibet, after the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader for most Tibetans, was forced to flee in 1959 when a revolt failed.\n\nChina has denied the allegation. \"It is groundless accusation saying that the Chinese government is collecting DNA data from ethnic minorities in Xinjiang and Xizang to strengthen surveillance,\" said Liu Pengyu, spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, referring to Tibet by its Chinese name of Xizang. \"China is a country under the rule of law, and the privacy of Chinese citizens is fully protected by law, regardless of their ethnicity.\"\n\nThe company's action reflects the intensifying scrutiny U.S. firms face when doing business with China. The Biden administration says it looks to protect national security and press China on human rights while maintaining cooperation and keeping tensions from spiraling out of control. It says it seeks to \"responsibly manage\" the U.S.-China economic relationship.\n\nThe administration last August restricted U.S. investments in sensitive technologies that could boost China's military powers, following a ban on most advanced computer chips. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said the U.S. will use its tools to protect human rights, and the U.S. already bans import of goods made with forced labor in the ethnic region of Xinjiang in China's northwest.\n\nBeijing argues that Washington is using the human rights issue to suppress China's growth.\n\n\"China opposes the relevant parties politicizing normal economic cooperation and stopping cooperation with China based on groundless lies,\" Liu said.\n\nIn a January 2023 response to U.S. lawmakers, Thermo Fisher said it was confident that its products were \"being used for their intended use in Tibet, namely police casework and forensics.\" In its statement emailed to the AP on Thursday, Thermo Fisher said the sales of its human identification products in Tibet had been \"consistent with routine forensic investigation in an area of this size.\" It declined further comment.\n\nLawmakers and rights advocates applauded Thermo Fisher's decision to pull out of Tibet but urged the company to do more.\n\n\"I remain concerned that the continued sale of these products throughout the rest of China will continue to enable the CCP's techno totalitarian surveillance state,\" said Rep. Mike Gallagher, chair of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. \"Thermo Fisher needs to immediately stop the sale of all DNA collection kits to all of China.\"\n\nRep. Chris Smith, chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, said the decision by Thermo-Fisher was \"a long-overdue step to remove the company from further complicity in egregious human rights abuses.\"\n\nThe U.S. Commerce Department should continue to make \"more systematic efforts\" to prevent American companies from working with China's police and security apparatus in Tibet, Smith said.\n\n\"There is much more work to be done to starve the globe's dictators and authoritarians of the PRC's technological tools of repression - particularly when abetted by U.S. corporations,\" the congressman said, referring to China by its official name, the People's Republic of China, or the PRC.\n\nMaya Wang, interim China director at Human Rights Watch, praised Thermo Fisher for its action but said, \"This is not enough,\" and the company should do more to ensure its products sold elsewhere in China are not contributing to mass surveillance."}
{"text": "# Hezbollah leader says his group must retaliate for suspected Israeli strike in Beirut\nBy **BASSEM MROUE**, **WAFAA SHURAFA**, and **NAJIB JOBAIN**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 7:30 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BEIRUT (AP)** - The leader of the Lebanese militia Hezbollah said Friday that his group must retaliate after a presumed Israeli strike hit a Beirut neighborhood this week, killing a senior Hamas official, or else all of Lebanon would be vulnerable to Israeli attack.\n\nHassan Nasrallah appeared to be making the case for a response to the Lebanese public, even at the risk of escalating the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel. But he gave no indication of how or when the militants would act.\n\nThe strike that killed Hamas' deputy political leader, Saleh Arouri, threatened months of efforts by the United States to prevent the war in Gaza from spiraling into a regional conflict.\n\nNasrallah said it was the first strike by Israel in the Lebanese capital since 2006.\n\n\"We cannot keep silent about a violation of this seriousness,\" he said, \"because this means that all of our people will be exposed (to targeting). All of our cities, villages and public figures will be exposed.\"\n\nThe repercussions of silence are \"far greater\" than the risks of retaliating, he added.\n\nTensions are rising on multiple fronts as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrives in the region. Iraqis are furious after an American airstrike killed a militia leader in Baghdad. At the same time, the U.S. is struggling to deter attacks by Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels on commercial Red Sea shipping.\n\nIn Gaza, Israel is moving to scale down its military assault in the north of the territory and pressing its heavy offensive in the south, vowing to crush Hamas. In the south, most of Gaza's 2.3 million Palestinians are being squeezed into smaller areas in a humanitarian disaster, while still being pounded by Israeli airstrikes.\n\nSince the start of the Gaza war, Hezbollah has fired rockets and missiles into northern Israel, bringing a return bombardment from Israel in near daily cross-border exchanges. After the strike Tuesday in Beirut, the Lebanon-Israel front appeared to be at a critical juncture, with the potential to veer into an all-out war.\n\nOn Friday, Israeli aircraft, tanks and artillery struck several areas in Lebanon after rockets and missiles were fired toward Israel, the military said.\n\nBut Hezbollah has held back from a dramatic escalation, wary of a repeat of the two sides' 2006 war in which Israeli bombardment wreaked extensive destruction in Lebanon.\n\nNasrallah said Friday that the details of Hezbollah's response \"will be decided on the battlefield.\" He did not elaborate.\n\nThe Beirut strike is not the only thing threatening a wider fight between Israel and Lebanon.\n\nIsraeli officials have threatened greater military action against Hezbollah unless it withdraws it fighters from Lebanese territory near their shared border.\n\nA pullback - called for under a 2006 U.N. truce but never implemented - is necessary to stop barrages and allow the return of tens of thousands of Israelis to homes they evacuated near the border, Israel says.\n\nNasrallah boasted about the evacuations, saying that after Israel forced Lebanese to flee in past conflicts, Hezbollah had now done the same to Israelis, putting political pressure on the government.\n\nHezbollah's cross-border attacks aim to engage Israeli forces away from Gaza, Nasrallah said, and the only way to stop them is \"to stop the aggression on Gaza.\"\n\nIsrael says it aims to destroy Hamas' military capabilities and remove it from power in Gaza after the militants' Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, in which they killed around 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and abducted around 250 others.\n\nThe army's chief spokesperson, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said Friday the military plans an investigation into failures connected with the Hamas attack, which generated heavy criticism of military, intelligence and political leaders for being caught off guard. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted the government must focus on the war first and answer questions later.\n\nIsrael's onslaught in Gaza has killed more than 22,600 people, more than two-thirds of them women and children, according to the territory's Health Ministry. The ministry's count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.\n\nMuch of northern Gaza - the most urbanized part of the tiny territory - has been flattened by bombardment and fighting. Most of its population has fled south, joining its residents who have largely been driven from their homes as well. The risk of famine is increasing daily, according to the U.N. humanitarian office, known by the acronym OCHA.\n\nThe ground offensive threatens to bring further destruction in the south, particularly in the main battleground city Khan Younis.\n\nFootage aired on Al Jazeera TV showed devastation in downtown Khan Younis. No building in the city's central Sunneya Square has been left untouched. Some structures have been leveled, while others have been partially destroyed or scorched.\n\nAlmost every day this week, strikes have hit in and around Khan Younis' Al Amal Hospital and a hospital run by the Palestinian Red Crescent, killing dozens of people, the OCHA said.\n\nMartin Griffiths, the U.N. humanitarian chief, said in a statement Friday that the humanitarian community is facing an \"impossible mission\" of supporting more than 2 million people in Gaza while aid workers are killed, communications blackouts continue, roads are damaged and truck convoys carrying vital supplies shot at. Gaza's handful of partially functioning hospitals are overwhelmed and infectious diseases are spreading, he said.\n\nIsraeli bombardment continued around the territory. At least 13 people were killed when an apartment building was leveled in Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza, hospital officials said.\n\nIn Rafah, at Gaza's southernmost end, relatives and friends wept over the bodies of six people killed in a strike on a house overnight, including three children.\n\nSohad al-Derbashi, whose sister was killed in the strike, said the owner of the house had evacuated, fearing he would be targeted since he works as a civil servant in Gaza's Hamas-led administration, as do thousands of others in the territory. When he came to visit the house last night, the strike hit, she said. Her sister, living on the floor below, was crushed.\n\n\"They were civilians, innocent people, with no connection to anything. Even the target who was with Hamas was a civil employee. What did he do wrong?\" el-Derbashi said."}
{"text": "# Azerbaijan names a former oil exec to lead climate talks. Activists have concerns\nBy **SIBI ARASU**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 12:31 PM EST\n\n---\n\nAzerbaijan's ecology minister has been named to lead the United Nations' annual climate talks later this year, prompting concern from some climate activists over his former ties to the state oil company in a major oil-producing nation.\n\nMukhtar Babayev's appointment was announced on X by the United Arab Emirates, which hosted the climate talks that just ended in December, and confirmed Friday by the United Nations. Officials in Azerbaijan did not immediately respond to messages seeking to confirm the appointment.\n\nBabayev, 56, has been his country's minister for ecology and natural resources since 2018. Before that, he worked at Azerbaijan's state oil company for more than two decades.\n\nSimilar concerns dogged Sultan al-Jaber, the head of the UAE's national oil company, as he presided over the talks in Dubai known as COP28. The COP president is responsible for running talks and getting nearly 200 countries to agree on a deal to help limit global warming, and skeptics questioned whether al-Jaber would be willing to confront the fossil fuels causing climate change.\n\nThe conference ultimately resulted in a final agreement that for the first time mentioned fossil fuels as the cause of climate change and acknowledged the need to transition away from them, but it had no concrete requirements to do so.\n\nOil and natural gas bring in around 90% of Azerbaijan's export revenues and finance around 60% of the government budget, according to the International Energy Agency. Climate activists said the country needs to look past its own fossil fuel interests if it's going to host successful talks.\n\nMohamad Adow of climate think tank Power Shift Africa said it's \"concerning to be once again having the world's climate negotiations coordinated by a petrostate that has a big interest in oil and gas production.\" But he was hopeful that climate negotiators could be successful in Azerbaijan's capital Baku as \"the COP in Dubai resulted in an outcome more positive than many expected.\"\n\n\"He's got a huge job to do,\" said Adow. \"He needs to start working on getting rich countries to deliver serious, long-term finance that will tackle the climate crisis.\"\n\nHarjeet Singh, global engagement director for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said that \"with another petrostate hosting the climate conference, our concerns multiply.\"\n\nBabayev \"must transcend the vested interests of the powerful fossil fuel industry that is primarily responsible for the climate crisis,\" Singh said.\n\nMelanie Robinson, global director for the climate program at World Resources Institute, didn't comment directly on Babayev but said \"stakes will be high\" in Azerbaijan, where nations will tackle issues including how to finance climate change adaptation and mitigation around the world, particularly in poorer countries.\n\n\"As with all presidencies, the world will be looking to Azerbaijan to fairly facilitate the most ambitious outcome possible,\" she said.\n\nThe United Nations moves the talks around the world with different regions taking turns. They're typically announced two years in advance, but the decision to hold 2024 talks in Azerbaijan came just 11 months before the negotiations are supposed to start.\n\nThat was due to a longtime standoff between Eastern European nations, the region designated to host in 2024. A prisoner swap between Azerbaijan and Armenia in early December led to Armenia supporting Azerbaijan's COP29 bid."}
{"text": "# US fugitive accused of faking his death to avoid rape charges is extradited to Utah from Scotland\nBy **BRIAN MELLEY** and **HANNAH SCHOENBAUM**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 6:06 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SALT LAKE CITY (AP)** - An elusive U.S. fugitive accused of faking his own death and traveling the globe to avoid rape charges has been extradited to Utah from Scotland, the Utah County prosecutor's office said Friday.\n\nThe man known in the U.S. as Nicholas Rossi, whose legal name is Nicholas Alahverdian, is charged with sexually assaulting a former girlfriend in Orem, Utah, in 2008, according to local prosecutors. He also faces multiple complaints against him in Rhode Island for alleged domestic violence.\n\nRossi, 36, was Utah-bound on Friday and will stand trial in Utah County for felony rape charges, county prosecutor David Leavitt said.\n\n\"This is a great day,\" Leavitt said in a statement thanking his staff for working with U.S. and international authorities to identify Rossi and bring him to justice more than a decade after his alleged crimes.\n\nIn response to an inquiry from The Associated Press about Rossi's return, Police Scotland would only confirm it assisted other law enforcement agencies to extradite a 36-year-old man.\n\nRossi's run from the law took a bizarre turn when he was arrested in December 2021 after being recognized by someone at a Glasgow hospital while he was being treated for COVID-19. He insisted he was an Irish orphan named Arthur Knight and had never set foot on American soil.\n\nThe man had said he was framed by authorities who took his fingerprints while he was in a coma so they could connect him to Rossi. He repeatedly appeared in court in a wheelchair, using an oxygen mask and speaking in a less-than-convincing British accent.\n\nAfter a protracted court battle, Judge Norman McFadyen of Edinburgh Sheriff Court ruled in August that the extradition could move forward. The judge called Rossi \"as dishonest and deceitful as he is evasive and manipulative.\"\n\nProsecutors identified at least 10 aliases Rossi had used to evade capture. They also presented medical reports from doctors involved in his care, some describing how he appeared to have faked seizures and others stating that he did not have any ongoing problems with his lungs.\n\nMcFadyen dismissed his claims of mistaken identity as \"implausible\" and \"fanciful.\" The judge said Rossi presented unreliable evidence and he wasn't \"prepared to accept any statement of fact made by him unless it was independently supported.\"\n\nRossi lost an appeal in December.\n\nRossi, who grew up in foster homes in Rhode Island, made a name for himself there as a vocal critic of the state's Department of Children, Youth and Families.\n\nFour years ago, he told media in Rhode Island that he had late-stage non-Hodgkin lymphoma and had weeks to live. An obituary published online claimed he died Feb. 29, 2020.\n\nAbout a year later, Rhode Island state police, Alahverdian's former lawyer and his former foster family questioned whether he was actually dead.\n\nAuthorities in Rhode Island have said Alahverdian is wanted in the state for failing to register as a sex offender, though his former lawyer there, Jeffrey Pine, told the AP that the charge had been dropped when he left the state. The FBI has said he also faces fraud charges in Ohio, where he was convicted of sex-related charges in 2008.\n\nPolice in England said they also were investigating and seeking to interview Rossi in connection with an older rape allegation made in April 2022 in the city of Chelmsford."}
{"text": "# Heavy rains leave parts of England and Europe swamped in floodwaters\nBy **BRIAN MELLEY**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 11:26 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - Residents of riverside towns in England that were swamped by rains that washed over Europe this week bailed out Friday as flooding disrupted train service and officials warned that waters could rise in the days ahead.\n\nA powerful storm that brought damaging winds inundated more than 1,000 homes and businesses and left several communities under muddy brown water, officials said. Buildings and cars were submerged as streets turned to streams, farmland was flooded and boats were torn from their moorings.\n\nA landslide and floodwaters disrupted train travel on several lines operating out of London and on routes in southwest England that stretch into Wales.\n\n\"It's been a terrible start to the new year,\" Ken Button said as he pumped water out of the furniture shop where he works in the town of Newark-on-Trent. \"We'll have to see what we can salvage.\"\n\nHeavy rains also left parts other parts of Europe under water as a cold snap gripped northern areas of the continent.\n\nWater levels remained extremely high in the Netherlands on Friday. Many flood plains in the low-lying nation were inundated and residents in some towns around the Ijsselmeer inland sea near Amsterdam used sandbags to protect their homes.\n\nDozens of Ukrainian refugees were evacuated overnight from a hotel near the town of Monnickendam north of Amsterdam after it was cut off by floodwaters, local broadcaster NH Nieuws reported.\n\nSeveral roads in the north and northwest of the Netherlands were closed Friday because of flooding.\n\nIn France, a flood warning issued at the highest level was lifted near the Belgian border as waters receded.\n\nBut several hundred people had to be evacuated and thousands of homes were damaged in a repeat of floods that hit the same region of France in November.\n\nFrench authorities warned that waterways would likely remain extremely high in the coming weeks.\n\nIn the U.K., the ground was already saturated from a series of fall tempests when Storm Henk struck with intense rainfall. Even as drier weather arrived, hundreds of flood warnings were in place Friday and the Environment Agency warned that the impact from flooding could last another five days.\n\n\"There's really nowhere for the water to go,\" Caroline Douglass, the flood director for the agency, told the BBC. \"The ground is completely saturated, so in that situation we get more flooding and greater impacts than we've seen, and probably in areas where people aren't used to.\"\n\nAlmost every river in England was listed as exceptionally high by the agency and some set records. The River Itchen in Southampton doubled its previous record for December.\n\nThe River Trent through Nottinghamshire county topped its banks, leading the county to declare a major incident, which can help it obtain government assistance. Residents of a trailer park for those over age 55 were evacuated.\n\nFirefighters helped about 50 people evacuate their homes in the Hackney Wick section of East London after a canal burst its banks.\n\nAerial footage showed where narrow rivers had escaped their channel and spread across lower-lying land.\n\nIn Gloucestershire, a county in southwest England, residents waded down a street in knee-deep water. A man with a handsaw strapped to his back canoed across a meadow in the town of Henley-on-Thames.\n\nCars parked in the town of Wallingford were buried up to their windows in water. A long canal boat that broke free of its tether had tipped on its side and was pinned against a bridge on the River Soar in Leicestershire county."}
{"text": "# Lawyer for alleged victim of Dani Alves files legal complaint after video circulates on social media\nBy **JOSEPH WILSON**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 9:52 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BARCELONA, Spain (AP)** - The lawyer representing the woman who was allegedly sexually assaulted by Brazilian soccer player Dani Alves has filed a legal complaint with Spanish authorities after a video circulated on social media that reportedly reveals the identity of her client.\n\nEster García, the lawyer of the alleged victim, told The Associated Press on Friday that her office filed the legal complaint. Spanish newspaper La Vanguardía said García filed the complaint with Catalan police in Barcelona.\n\nIn the video, alleged images of the young woman are shown along with information supposedly revealing her name and other personal data.\n\nThe Spanish state prosecutors' office in Barcelona told the AP that it was analyzing the video to see if there were grounds to open a formal investigation. Spanish law forbids the publication of material revealing the identity of someone without their consent.\n\nThe prosecutors' office has also asked the Barcelona-based court to ensure it guarantees the privacy of the trial that is scheduled to begin on Feb. 5.\n\nAlves is accused of sexually assaulting the woman in a Barcelona night club in December 2022. The former Barcelona right back has been in pre-trial jail since January 2023. His requests to be released on bail have been rejected because the court considered him a flight risk.\n\nAlves has denied any wrongdoing. He initially claimed he did not have any sexual contact with the woman, but then later said he had consensual sex with the accuser. He was indicted by an investigative judge in August when the court said there was enough evidence to open a trial.\n\nState prosecutors are seeking a nine-year prison sentence if found guilty. The victim's lawyers want him to spend 12 years behind bars.\n\nThe 40-year-old Alves won 42 soccer titles, including three Champions Leagues with Barcelona and two Copa Americas with Brazil. He played at his third World Cup in 2022 in Qatar."}
{"text": "# After 16-year restoration, Greece unveils palace where Alexander the Great became king\nBy **DEREK GATOPOULOS** and **COSTAS KANTOURIS**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 9:22 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**ANCIENT AIGAI, Greece (AP)** - It was the largest building of classical Greece: the palace where Alexander the Great was proclaimed king before he launched a conquest that took him as far as modern-day Afghanistan.\n\nThe Palace of Aigai in northern Greece was fully reopened Friday following a 16-year renovation that cost more than 20 million euros ($22 million) and included financial support from the European Union.\n\nIt was built more than 2,300 years ago during the reign of Alexander's father, Phillip II, who had transformed the kingdom of Macedonia into a dominant military power of ancient Greece. Aigai was its royal capital.\n\n\"After many years of painstaking work, we can reveal the palace ... What we are doing today is an event of global importance,\" Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said at an inauguration event at the site Friday.\n\nThe palace contained column-rimmed courtyards, courts, places of worship, and spacious banquet halls, its floors decorated with patterned marble and intricate mosaics. The building covered a ground area of 15,000 sq. meters (160,000 sq feet), a little under the area covered by the U.S. Capitol building.\n\nShaped like two adjoining, unequally sized, square donuts, the Palace of Aigai was the administrative and spiritual center of the kingdom. The palace remains and nearby royal tombs are a United Nations World Heritage Site at the area next to the modern village of Vergina. Like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, the marble columns were resurrected by fitting pieces of stone unearthed in the ruins together with replica replacement parts.\n\nSome 65 kilometers (40 miles) southwest of the port city of Thessaloniki, in northern Greece, Aigai drew international attention in the late 1970s during burial mound excavations in the area of rolling green hills with patches of wild poppies and daffodils.\n\nThe late Greek archaeologist Manolis Andronikos led the digs and discovered the royal tombs, recovering a gold casket and other gold artifacts as well as the bones widely believed to belong to Philip II. The discoveries revealed the sophistication of the ancient Macedonians, who had often been sidelined in historical accounts by attention on Athens.\n\nAngeliki Kottaridi was still an archaeology student at university when she joined the project as a young assistant. She devoted her life's work to the excavations and decades later became the driving force behind the new museum at Aigai, which opened a year ago, and the palace restoration.\n\nShe retired on Dec. 31 as head of the region's archaeological service and was honored at Friday's ceremony.\n\n\"What you discover is stones scattered in the dirt, and pieces of mosaics here and there,\" Kottaridi told state television ahead of Friday's inauguration.\n\n\"Then you have to assemble things and that's the real joy of the researcher,\" Kottariridi said. \"So when people ask me what makes me happy, I tell them it's not the moment something is revealed. It's the moment you realize you can take the knowledge one step further.\"\n\nThe renovated site will open to the public Sunday."}
{"text": "# China calls for peaceful coexistence and promises pandas on the 45th anniversary of U.S.-China ties\nBy **KEN MORITSUGU**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 9:45 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BEIJING (AP)** - Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Friday that the United States and China must insist on peaceful coexistence and transcend their differences like they did when they established diplomatic relations 45 years ago this week.\n\nWang also promised that giant pandas would return to the U.S. - and specifically California - by the end of the year.\n\n\"China-U.S. cooperation is no longer a dispensable option for the two countries or even for the world, but a must-answer question that must be seriously addressed,\" he said.\n\nWang struck a relatively positive note at a lavish banquet marking the anniversary with 300 guests at a hall in the sprawling Diaoyutai state guest house complex in the Chinese capital.\n\nThe two countries are trying to navigate - and avoid a war - in what may be their most difficult waters since the U.S. ended official ties with Taiwan and recognized the communist government in Beijing as the government of China on Jan. 1, 1979.\n\nChina's rise as an economic and military power is challenging long-standing American leadership in the Asia region and globally.\n\n\"The world is currently undergoing profound changes unseen in a century,\" Wang said. \"We must think about how to calibrate the direction of the large ship of China-U.S. relations (and) avoid hidden reefs and dangerous shoals.\"\n\nBoth Wang and David Meale, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy, cited congratulatory letters exchanged by Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday's anniversary.\n\nMeale, who spoke after Wang, said Biden expressed his commitment to managing the relationship responsibly and said he looked forward to building on the progress made by past leaders of the two countries.\n\nWang did criticize the use of \"the big stick of sanctions\" and engaging in power games, charges that China often levels at the United States. He denied that China seeks to supplant any other country and called on the U.S. to respect China's development path and core interests.\n\nThe giant pandas in Memphis, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C., returned to China last year, and some feared that China would stop lending pandas to American zoos because of the tensions between the two countries.\n\nBut Xi raised hope for California in November when he told an audience in San Francisco that China was ready to continue cooperating with the U.S. on pandas and \"do our best to meet the wishes of the Californians.\"\n\nWang told Friday's banquet audience that \"preparations are ready for a giant panda return to California within the year.\""}
{"text": "# Global food prices declined from record highs in 2022, the UN says. Except for these two staples\nJanuary 5, 2024. 10:30 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**ROME (AP)** - Global prices for food commodities like grain and vegetable oil fell last year from record highs in 2022, when Russia's war in Ukraine, drought and other factors helped worsen hunger worldwide, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said Friday.\n\nThe FAO Food Price Index, which tracks monthly changes in the international prices of commonly traded food commodities, was 13.7% lower last year than the 2022 average, but its measures of sugar and rice prices growing in that time.\n\nLast month, the index dropped some 10% compared with December 2022. The drop in food commodity prices in 2023 comes despite a difficult year for food security around the world.\n\nClimate effects like dry weather, flooding and the naturally occurring El Nino phenomenon, combined with fallout from conflicts like the war in Ukraine, bans on food trade that have added to food inflation and weaker currencies have hurt developing nations especially.\n\nWhile food commodities like grain have fallen from painful surges in 2022, the relief often hasn't made it to the real world of shopkeepers, street vendors and families trying to make ends meet.\n\nMore than 333 million people faced acute levels of food insecurity in 2023, according to another U.N. agency, the World Food Program.\n\nRice and sugar in particular were problematic last year because of climate effects in growing regions of Asia, and prices have risen in response, especially in African nations.\n\nWith the exception of rice, the FAO's grain index last year was 15.4% below the 2022 average, \"reflecting well supplied global markets.\" That's despite Russia pulling out of a wartime deal that allowed grain to flow from Ukraine to countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.\n\nCountries buying wheat have found supply elsewhere, notably from Russia, with prices lower than they were before the war began, analysts say.\n\nThe FAO's rice index was up 21% last year because of India's export restrictions on some types of rice and concerns about the impact of El Niño on rice production. That has meant higher prices for low-income families, including places like Senegal and Kenya.\n\nSimilarly, the agency's sugar index last year hit its highest level since 2011, expanding 26.7% from 2022 because of concerns about low supplies. That followed unusually dry weather damaging harvests in India and Thailand, the world's second- and third-largest exporters.\n\nThe sugar index improved in the last month of 2023, however, hitting a nine-month low because of strong supply from Brazil, the biggest sugar exporter, and India lowering its use for ethanol production.\n\nMeanwhile, meat, dairy and vegetable oil prices dropped from 2022, with vegetable oil - a major export from the Black Sea region that saw big spikes after Russia invaded Ukraine - hitting a three-year low as global supplies improved, FAO said."}
{"text": "# Official suggests Polish president check social media security after odd tweet from private account\nJanuary 5, 2024. 9:21 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WARSAW, Poland (AP)** - Poland's minister of digital affairs suggested Friday that President Andrzej Duda check the security of access to his social accounts after a bizarre tweet went out that was almost immediately removed.\n\nThe tweet published Thursday on Duda's private account said: \"Tell him to ask his wife what 'having balls' means. She knows!\"\n\nThe tweet was quickly deleted, but internet users took screenshots that were shared, creating amusement but also criticism that the head of state wasn't being cautious enough with his online behavior.\n\nDuda's office has not explained what the message published on X, formerly Twitter, referred to, nor did it explain how it was published.\n\nThe government, led by Duda's political rival, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, suggested the president should exercise greater caution and said it could offer security assistance.\n\n\"Due to the fact that an unusual entry appeared on President Andrzej Duda's account on the X website, which disappeared quite quickly, I asked the president to check the security of access to his social accounts,\" Minister of Digital Affairs Krzysztof Gawkowski tweeted.\n\nIn the past, Duda has engaged with anonymous users of social media. He also took calls from Russian pranksters who pretended to be the United Nations secretary-general and the French president."}
{"text": "# Companies pull ads from TV station after comments on tattooing and sending migrants to Auschwitz\nBy **VANESSA GERA**  \nJanuary 5, 2024. 9:05 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WARSAW, Poland (AP)** - Prosecutors in Poland are investigating after commentators joked on a right-wing television station that migrants should be sent to Auschwitz or be tattooed or microchipped like dogs, and some companies have pulled advertising from the broadcaster.\n\nThe remarks were made over the past week by guests on TV Republika, a private station whose role as a platform for conservative views grew after the national conservative party, Law and Justice, lost control of the Polish government and public media.\n\nDuring its eight years in power, Law and Justice turned taxpayer-funded state television into a platform for programming that cast largescale migration into Europe as an existential danger. The state media broadcast conspiracy theories, such as a claim that liberal elites wanted to force people to eat bugs, as well as antisemitic and homophobic content and attacks on the party's opponents, including the new Prime Minister Donald Tusk.\n\nSpreading hate speech is a crime under Polish law. While public TV stations were shielded from market and legal pressures under the previous government, TV Republika now faces both.\n\nIKEA said it was pulling its advertising from the station, prompting some conservative politicians to urge people to boycott the Swedish home goods giant. Other companies, including Carrefour and MasterCard subsequently said they were pulling their ads, too.\n\nThe controversial on-air statements were made as the European Union has been trying to overhaul its outdated asylum system, including with a plan to relocate migrants who arrived illegally in recent years.\n\nJan Pietrzak, a satirist and actor, said Sunday on TV Republika that he had \"cruel joke\" in response that idea.\n\n\"We have barracks for immigrants: in Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Stutthof,\" Pietrzak said, referring to concentration and death camps that Nazi German forces operated in occupied Poland during World War II.\n\nThree days later, Marek Król, a former editor of the Polish weekly news magazine Wprost, said migrants could be chipped like dogs, referring to microchips that can help reunite lost pets with their owners, but that it would be cheaper to tattoo numbers on their left arms.\n\nPietrzak has since appeared on air. TV Republika's programming director, Michał Rachoń, said the channel deeply disagreed with Król's statement but did not say he was being banned from its airwaves, Rachoń said the station \"is the home of freedom of speech, but also a place of respect for every human being.\"\n\nA right-wing lawmaker, Marek Jakubiak, then compared immigrants to \"unnecessary waste.\" In that case, Rachoń, who was the host, asked him to avoid \"ugly comparisons.\"\n\nPrime Minister Tusk strongly condemned recent outbursts of xenophobia and said it resulted from such people and their ideas being rewarded for years by the former government and by current President Andrzej Duda.\n\nThe Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum condemned the \"immoral political statements regarding refugees.\"\n\n\"This has gone beyond the limits of what is acceptable in the civilized world,\" director Piotr Cywiński said.\n\nRafał Pankowski, head of the Never Again anti-racism association, said he was shocked by the comments but heartened by the disgust expressed on social media and the companies pulling advertising.\n\n\"It came to the point where society, or a big part of society, is just fed up with all this hate speech,\" Pankowski said. \"The awareness and impatience have been growing for quite some time.\""}
{"text": "# Italian opposition demands investigation after hundreds give fascist salute at Rome rally\nBy **FRANCES D'EMILIO**  \nJanuary 8, 2024. 4:32 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ROME (AP)** - Opposition politicians in Italy on Monday demanded that the government, headed by far-right Premier Giorgia Meloni, explain how hundreds of demonstrators were able to give a banned fascist salute at a Rome rally without any police intervention.\n\nThe rally Sunday night in a working-class neighborhood commemorated the slaying in 1978 of two members of a neo-fascist youth group in an attack later claimed by extreme-left militants.\n\nAt one point in the rally, participants raised their right arm in a straight-armed salute that harks back to the fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini. Under post-war legislation, use of fascist symbolism, including the straight-armed salute also known as the Roman salute, is banned.\n\nDemocratic Party chief Elly Schlein, who heads the largest opposition party in the legislature, was among those demanding Monday that Meloni's interior minister appear in Parliament to explain why police apparently did nothing to stop the rally.\n\nSchlein and others outraged by the use of the fascist-salute in the rally noted with irony that last month, when a theater-goer at La Scala's opera house's premier shouted \"Long live anti-fascist Italy!\" The man was quickly surrounded by police from Italy's anti-terrorism squad.\n\n\"If you shout 'Long live anti-fascist Italy' in a theater, you get identified (by police); if you go to a neo-fascist gathering with Roman salutes and banner, you don't,\" said Schlein in a post of the social media platform X. Then she added: \"Meloni has nothing to say?\"\n\nRai state television said Monday evening that Italian police were investigating the mass salute at the rally.\n\nDeputy Premier Antoni Tajani, who leads a center-right party in Meloni's 14-month-old coalition, was pressed by reporters about the flap over the fascist salute.\n\n\"We're a force that certainly isn't fascist, we're anti-fascist,\" Tajani said at a news conference on another matter. Tajani, who also serves as foreign minister, noted that under Italian law, supporting fascism is banned. All rallies \"in support of dictatorships must be condemned,\" he said.\n\nLeaders of Italy's tiny Jewish community also expressed dismay over the fascist salute.\n\n\"It's right to recall the victims of political violence, but in 2024 this can't happen with hundreds of people who give the Roman salute,\" Ruth Dureghello, who for several years led Rome's Jewish community, wrote on X.\n\nMussolini's anti-Jewish laws helped pave the way for the deportation of Italian Jews during the German occupation of Rome in the latter years of World War II.\n\nThe rally was held on the anniversary of the youths slaying outside an office of what was then the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, a party formed after World War II that attracted nostalgists for Mussolini. After the two youths were slain, a third far-right youth was killed during clashes with police in demonstrations that followed.\n\nMeloni, whose Brothers of Italy party has its roots in neo-fascism, has taken her distance from Mussolini's dictatorship, declaring that \" the Italian right has handed fascism over to history for decades now.\"\n\nThe late 1970s saw Italy blooded by violence by extreme right-wing and extreme left-wing proponents. The bloody deeds included deadly bombings linked to the far-right, and assassinations and kidnapping claimed by the Red Brigades and other left-wing extremists."}
{"text": "# Uvalde report: 376 officers but 'egregiously poor' decisions\nBy **JAKE BLEIBERG** and **PAUL J. WEBER**  \nJuly 17, 2022. 11:55 PM EST\n\n---\n\nUVALDE, Texas (AP) - Nearly 400 law enforcement officials rushed to a mass shooting at a Uvalde elementary school, but \"egregiously poor decision-making\" resulted in more than an hour of chaos before the gunman who took 21 lives was finally confronted and killed, according to a damning investigative report released Sunday.\n\nThe nearly 80-page report was the first to criticize both state and federal law enforcement, and not just local authorities in the South Texas town for the bewildering inaction by heavily armed officers as a gunman fired inside two fourth-grade classrooms at Robb Elementary School, killing 19 students and two teachers.\n\nAltogether, the report and more than three hours of newly released body camera footage from the May 24 tragedy amounted to the fullest account to date of one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history. Some families blasted police as cowards and demanded resignations.\n\n\"At Robb Elementary, law enforcement responders failed to adhere to their active shooter training, and they failed to prioritize saving innocent lives over their own safety,\" the report said.\n\nThe gunman fired approximately 142 rounds inside the building - and it is \"almost certain\" that at least 100 shots came before any officer entered, according to the report, which laid out in detail numerous failures. Among them:\n\n- No one assumed command despite scores of officers being on the scene.\n\n- The commander of a Border Patrol tactical team waited for a bullet-proof shield and working master key for the classroom, which may have not even been needed, before entering the classroom.\n\n- A Uvalde Police Department officer said he heard about 911 calls that had come from inside the classroom, and that his understanding was the officers on one side of the building knew there were victims trapped inside. Still, no one tried to breach the classroom.\n\nThe report - the most complete account yet of the hesitant and haphazard response to the May 24 massacre - was written by an investigative committee from the Texas House of Representatives. Swiftly, the findings set in motion at least one fallout: Lt. Mariano Pargas, a Uvalde Police Department officer who was the city's acting police chief during the massacre, was placed on administrative leave.\n\nUvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin said an investigation would be launched to determine whether Pargas should have taken command of the scene. He also disclosed for the first time that some officers had left the force since the shooting but did not provide an exact number, saying it was as many as three.\n\n\"It's a joke. They're a joke. They've got no business wearing a badge. None of them do,\" Vincent Salazar, grandfather of 11-year-old Layla Salazar, who was among those killed, said Sunday.\n\nAnger flashed in Uvalde even over how the report was rolled out: Tina Quintanilla-Taylor, whose daughter survived the shooting, shouted at the three-member Texas House committee as they left a news conference after the findings were released.\n\nCommittee members had invited families of the victims to discuss the report privately, but Quintanilla-Taylor said the committee should have taken questions from the community, not just the media. \"I'm pissed. They need to come back and give us their undivided attention,\" she said later.\n\n\"These leaders are not leaders,\" she said.\n\nAccording to the report, 376 law enforcement officers massed at the school. The overwhelming majority of those who responded were federal and state law enforcement. That included nearly 150 U.S. Border Patrol agents and 91 state police officials.\n\n\"Other than the attacker, the Committee did not find any 'villains' in the course of its investigation,\" the report said. \"There is no one to whom we can attribute malice or ill motives. Instead, we found systemic failures and egregiously poor decision making.\"\n\nThe report noted that many of the hundreds of law enforcement responders who rushed to the school were better trained and equipped than the school district police - which the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, the state police force, previously faulted for not going into the room sooner.\n\nInvestigators said it was not their job to determine whether officers should be held accountable, saying that decisions rests with each law enforcement agency. Prior to Sunday, only one of the hundreds of officers on the scene - Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief - was known to have been on leave.\n\n\"Everyone who came on the scene talked about this being chaotic,\" said Texas state Rep. Dustin Burrows, a Republican who led the investigation.\n\nOfficials with the Texas Department of Public Safety and U.S. Border Patrol did not immediately return requests for comment Sunday.\n\nThe report followed weeks of closed-door interviews with more than 40 people, including witnesses and law enforcement who were on the scene of the shooting.\n\nNo single officer has received as much scrutiny since the shooting as Arredondo, who also resigned from his newly appointed seat on the City Council after the shooting. Arredondo told the committee he treated the shooter as \"barricaded subject,\" according to the report, and defended never treating the scene as an active-shooter situation because he did not have visual contact with the gunman.\n\nArredondo also tried to find a key for the classrooms, but no one ever bothered to see if the doors were locked, according to the report.\n\n\"Arredondo's search for a key consumed his attention and wasted precious time, delaying the breach of the classrooms,\" the report read.\n\nThe report criticized as \"lackadaisical\" the approach of the hundreds of officers who surrounded the school and said that they should have recognized that Arredondo remaining in the school without reliable communication was \"inconsistent\" with him being the scene commander. The report concluded that some officers waited because they relied on bad information while others \"had enough information to know better.\"\n\nHours after the report was released, Uvalde officials separately made public for the first time hours of body camera footage from the city's police officers who responded to the attack. It includes video of several officers reacting to word from a dispatcher, roughly 30 minutes after the shooting began, that a child in the room had called 911.\n\n\"The room is full of victims. Child 911 call,\" an officer says.\n\nOther body camera video from Uvalde Staff Sgt.. Eduardo Canales, the head of the city's SWAT team, shows the officer approaching the classrooms when gunfire rings out at 11:37 a.m. Canales asks if he's bleeding, and later says he's bleeding from his ear.\n\nA minute later, Canales says: \"Dude, we've got to get in there. We've got to get in there, he just keeps shooting. We've got to get in there.\" Another officer can be heard saying \"DPS is sending their people.\"\n\nIt is 72 minutes later, at 12:50 p.m., when officers finally breach the classrooms and kill the shooter.\n\nCalls for police accountability have grown in Uvalde since the shooting.\n\nThe report is the result of one of several investigations into the shooting, including another led by the Justice Department. A report earlier this month by tactical experts at Texas State University alleged that a Uvalde police officer had a chance to stop the gunman before he went inside the school armed with an AR-15.\n\nBut in an example of the conflicting statements and disputed accounts since the shooting, McLaughlin has said that never happened. Officers told the committee that the person they thought was the gunman was actually a school coach.\n\nThe earlier report had been done at the request of the Texas Department of Public Safety, which McLaughlin has increasingly criticized and accused of trying to minimize the role of its troopers during the massacre. Steve McCraw, the head of Texas DPS, has called the police response an abject failure.\n\nThe committee didn't \"receive medical evidence\" to show that police breaching the classroom sooner would have saved lives, but it concluded that \"it is plausible that some victims could have survived if they had not had to wait 73 additional minutes for rescue.\"\n\nMichael Brown, whose 9-year-old son was in the cafeteria at Robb Elementary on the day of the shooting and survived, came to the committee's news conference Sunday carrying signs saying \" We Want Accountability\" and \"Prosecute Pete Arredondo.\"\n\nBrown said he has not yet read the report but already knows enough to say that police \"have blood on their hands.\"\n\n\"It's disgusting. Disgusting,\" he said. \"They're cowards.\""}
{"text": "# Texas state police won't punish more officers over Uvalde\nBy **PAUL J. WEBER**  \nFebruary 10, 2023. 5:14 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**AUSTIN, Texas (AP)** - Texas state police will not discipline any more of its officers over the Uvalde school shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead as heavily armed agents hesitated to confront the lone gunman, a spokesperson confirmed Friday.\n\nThe decision is a turning point nearly nine months after one of the worst school attacks in U.S. history, and the widespread outrage over the officers who allowed more than 70 minutes to go by before stopping the massacre.\n\nIt also raises new questions about how many of the nearly 400 law enforcement personnel who were at Robb Elementary School last May might face discipline. They came from a constellation of agencies in South Texas, including the Texas Department of Public Safety, U.S. Border Patrol and local police. Two DPS officers have been fired, and one of them is appealing his termination.\n\nIn total, five officers in Texas who were on the scene that day are known to have either been fired or resigned.\n\nState police had 91 officers on the scene, more than any other law enforcement agency. Travis Considine, a spokesman for the department, confirmed Friday that four of seven officers placed under internal review after the shooting were cleared of wrongdoing. DPS Director Steve McCraw told The Dallas Morning News on Thursday that no others would face discipline.\n\n\"Just the two,\" McCraw said.\n\nOfficers on the scene waited more than 70 minutes before a team finally breached a fourth-grade classroom and confronted the 18-year-old gunman, who had been armed with an AR-15 style rifle and fired more than 140 rounds inside the school, according to an investigative report by Texas lawmakers.\n\nBody camera video, school surveillance footage and witness accounts have since laid bare the lengthy inaction by police and how no officers rushed to stop the attack. McCraw has called the response an \"abject failure.\"\n\nThe first DPS officer was fired in October. Another of the seven resigned before the review was finished, then joined the Uvalde school district as a campus police officer. She was fired less than 24 hours after outraged parents in Uvalde found out about her hiring.\n\nUvalde's school police chief at the the time of the attack was fired in August and the city's acting police chief that day later stepped down.\n\nSeveral parents of the victims have demanded for months that McCraw resign. Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales, whose district includes Uvalde, has also said McCraw should go. But the longtime DPS director reiterated to reporters Thursday that he planned to stay on the job."}
{"text": "# Columnist accusing Trump of sex assault faces cross-examination in a New York courtroom\nBy **JAKE OFFENHARTZ** and **LARRY NEUMEISTER**  \nJanuary 18, 2024. 6:26 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - With former President Donald Trump no longer in the courtroom Thursday, a columnist who accused him of sexually attacking her concluded her testimony with an emphatic denial that she had benefited from the publicity that followed the allegations.\n\nA Trump attorney tried to show the jury that E. Jean Carroll has achieved the fame, if not the fortune, she desired after the publication of a memoir accusing Trump of raping her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s.\n\nCarroll responded: \"No, my status was lowered. I'm partaking in this trial to bring my own reputation and status back.\"\n\nThe testimony came on the third day of a trial in Manhattan federal court that will determine what damages, if any, Trump owes for remarks he made about Carroll when he was president. A jury has already found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll in 1996 and defaming her in a separate round of denials he made following his presidency.\n\nIn her final day on the witness stand, Carroll said her allegations against Trump - first made public in a 2019 article in New York Magazine - had brought her an unexpected degree of infamy, along with death threats.\n\nAn attorney for Trump, Alina Habba, countered that Carroll's social media followers increased \"exponentially\" since the allegations, adding that she had gained professional opportunities and social standing among left-leaning celebrities.\n\n\"I've been invited to two parties,\" Carroll responded dryly, before adding: \"Yes, I'm more well known and I'm hated by a lot more people.\"\n\nTrump, who had attended the first two days of the trial, was in Florida Thursday for the funeral of his mother-in-law.\n\nDuring the previous day's proceeding, he was scolded by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan and threatened with expulsion after a lawyer for Carroll complained he was grumbling about the case loudly enough that jurors could hear him.\n\nThough he was absent from the courtroom Thursday, Trump's presence still loomed over the proceedings, as lawyers for Carroll played a video of his press conference from the previous evening describing the trial as \"rigged\" and Carroll as \"a person I never knew.\"\n\nOn Thursday, Habba also showed jurors a series of mean tweets sent to Carroll in the hours after her allegations became public in 2019 but before Trump released his first public statements - an apparent effort to prove the vitriol directed at Carroll was unrelated to the former president's statements.\n\n\"They follow Donald Trump. They want to emulate him,\" Carroll said. \"They're standing up for the man they admire.\"\n\nThe judge quickly shut down the line of questioning, saying it was \"simply repetitious.\"\n\nCarroll has testified that her life changed dramatically after Trump branded her a liar, claimed he never met her and asserted that she made her claims against him to promote her book and damage him politically. She said she lives in fear, sleeps with a loaded gun beside her and wishes she could boost her security but doesn't have enough money.\n\nLast May, a jury in the same courtroom awarded Carroll $5 million in damages after concluding Trump sexually abused her in a Bergdorf Goodman store across the street from Trump Tower in spring 1996 and then defamed her with statements in October 2022.\n\nIn that verdict, jurors rejected Carroll's claim that she was raped, finding Trump responsible for a lesser degree of sexual abuse. The judge said the jury's decision was based on \"the narrow, technical meaning\" of rape in New York penal law and that, in his analysis, the verdict did not mean that Carroll \"failed to prove that Mr. Trump 'raped' her as many people commonly understand the word 'rape.'\"\n\nTrump did not attend that trial and has said recently on the campaign trail that he was advised by his attorney to stay away.\n\nTrump has been animated during his two days in the courtroom this week, shaking his head at testimony he disagreed with, passing notes to his lawyers and speaking to them while jurors were in the room.\n\nDuring his confrontation with the judge on Wednesday, Trump responded to the threat to eject him from the courtroom with: \"I would love it.\"\n\nThat prompted the judge to say: \"I know you would. You just can't control yourself in these circumstances, apparently.\"\n\nAfter he left the courthouse Wednesday, Trump told reporters that Kaplan, a Bill Clinton appointee, was \"a nasty judge\" and a \"Trump-hating guy\" who was \"obviously not impartial.\"\n\nSometime next week, the jury will be asked to determine damages. Carroll is seeking $10 million in compensatory damages and substantially more in punitive damages.\n\nNorthwestern University sociologist Ashlee Humphreys, who testified at last year's trial, told the jury Thursday that Trump's 2019 statements had caused between $7.2 million and $12.1 million in harm to Carroll's reputation after they were seen or heard about up 104 million times through social, print and broadcast media. Her estimates were based on what she said it would cost to repair Carroll's reputation.\n\nHabba said in an opening statement that Carroll should not receive more money, particularly since the death threats and comments she receives on social media are not unusual for public figures with a strong social media presence.\n\n\"Regardless of a few mean tweets, Ms. Carroll is now more famous than she has ever been in her life, and loved and respected by many, which was her goal,\" Habba told jurors."}
{"text": "# Wastewater tests can find mpox, study finds. Expect more bugs to be tracked that way\nBy **MIKE STOBBE**  \nJanuary 18, 2024. 1:01 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Wastewater testing does a good job at detecting mpox infections, U.S. health officials said in a report Thursday that bolsters a push to use sewage to track more diseases.\n\nU.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers found that over the course of a week, there was a 32% likelihood the tests would detect the presence of at least one person infected with mpox in a population ranging from thousands to millions.\n\nAmy Kirby, who oversees the CDC's wastewater surveillance work, said initially they didn't know if the tests would work for a rare infection like mpox.\n\n\"It turns out it worked really very well,\" she said.\n\nThe chance that the tests could detect infections rose as more people were infected. When there were 15 or more people infected in a community, there was a 76% chance wastewater testing could find mpox.\n\nThe water that goes down a sink, shower drain or toilet can carry bits of viruses or bacteria that come off the skin or are excreted in urine or poop. Studies have shown wastewater testing can be an early warning system, signaling a bug has hit a community even before doctors start reporting cases.\n\nWhole cities can be watched from a single sample, said Joshua Levy, a researcher at the Scripps Research Institute in California who has studied wastewater monitoring and develops related technology.\n\n\"Almost every kind of virus that we've gone looking for is detectable,\" Levy said.\n\nThe U.S. monitoring system is growing but still a patchwork. Currently, 863 of the nation's 3,143 counties - roughly a quarter - are reporting wastewater data to the CDC. Those are larger counties that are home to most of the U.S. population, but it misses a lot of rural homes that aren't hooked up to municipal sewage systems.\n\nThis approach to disease tracking rose to prominence in 2020, when health officials began testing wastewater for genetic evidence of the coronavirus. It has grown into a mainstay of the CDC's COVID-19 tracking as fewer nasal swab test results are reported.\n\nIn 2022, the CDC began working with a small group of cities to also look for polio in wastewater. That same year also saw a new effort to look for mpox, previously known as monkeypox, which erupted in outbreaks in the U.S. and other countries.\n\nIn the new study, the CDC looked at wastewater samples from 89 sites in 16 states, taken from August 2022 through May 2023. When mpox DNA was detected, the researchers checked cases reported by doctors \"to basically see if we were seeing the same thing,\" said the CDC's Carly Adams, the lead author of the report.\n\nIt not only worked, the approach appears to be more sensitive for detecting mpox than COVID-19, CDC officials said. CDC officials, however, cautioned it is difficult to do head-to-head-comparisons, because of differences among germs and how well doctors are diagnosing and reporting cases of various diseases.\n\nThe CDC has also begun collecting data for flu and RSV - about 40 states have been testing for those viruses and reporting that data. The agency isn't yet posting it publicly as officials work through the best ways to display it, though Kirby said it should go live by next fall.\n\nThe agency also plans to start tracking germs that are resistant to antibiotics. And Kirby said by early next year the agency would start monitoring some food poisoning bugs.\n\n\"Wastewater surveillance is outperforming everyone's expectations,\" Kirby said. \"We are really excited to see where else we can apply this new tool to help us understand disease in communities.\""}
{"text": "# Take these steps to protect yourself from winter weather dangers\nBy **JUAN A. LOZANO**  \nJanuary 17, 2024. 6:29 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**HOUSTON (AP)** - The arctic blast of winter weather that is gripping much of the U.S. this week is also bringing with it various hazards that people have to contend with to keep warm and safe.\n\nThese dangers can include carbon monoxide poisoning, hypothermia and frozen pipes that can burst and make homes unlivable.\n\nPublic safety officials and experts say there are multiple ways people can prepare themselves to avoid these winter weather hazards and keep themselves safe.\n\n## STAYING SAFE INSIDE YOUR HOME\nOfficials say that during a winter storm, people should stay indoors. But home heating systems running for hours can increase the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning as the deadly fumes can be produced by furnaces, stoves and heaters, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.\n\nCarbon monoxide can also be created when people use portable generators or run cars in their garages to stay warm or charge their phones.\n\nDr. Alex Harding, assistant professor of emergency medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said because carbon monoxide is odorless and colorless, people won't necessarily be aware of it.\n\n\"The symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning can be really insidious. They can sneak up on patients and can range from just developing a headache or maybe a little bit of nausea to all the way to losing consciousness and seizures,\" he said.\n\nHouston Fire Chief Samuel Peña said residents should not operate generators inside their homes or even in their garages.\n\n\"We all don't want you to sacrifice safety for warmth,\" Peña said.\n\n## DEALING WITH HYPOTHERMIA\nProlonged exposure to frigid temperatures can put people at risk to hypothermia, a condition that happens when one's body loses heat faster than it can produce it.\n\n\"Hypothermia is definitely one of the bigger concerns, especially if we do have any kind of certainty in like power grids or electricity failing,\" Harding said.\n\nThe danger of hypothermia is greater for someone who is outside, exposed to wind gusts and isn't wearing appropriate clothing or has clothing that gets wet.\n\n\"If they have a safe place that's warm, where they can hunker down, where they have water and food and all those kind of necessities ... then that's going to limit their exposure to those risks,\" Hardin said.\n\nBut vulnerable populations like people with disabilities or homeless individuals can have problems with finding a warm and safe place to stay. In Houston, officials have worked in recent years to improve their services for disabled individuals and homeless people during winter weather and other situations, like natural disasters, said Julian Ochoa, who is the Houston Office of Emergency Management's emergency preparedness manager for vulnerable populations.\n\n## PROTECTING YOUR HOME'S PIPES\nFrozen pipes in a home during severe winter weather is a particular problem in parts of the South, including in Houston, as such equipment is often located outside of structures. But other parts of the country also have to deal with this problem.\n\nJose Parra, a master plumber with Abacus Plumbing, Air Conditioning & Electrical in Houston, advises people to insulate any pipes that are exposed to the outside, turn off and drain sprinkler systems and let faucets inside a home drip during freezing temperatures so water can run through the pipes and protect them.\n\n\"A lot of what we're fixing, I would say 80% to 90%, could have been prevented with just a little bit of work ahead of time,\" Parra said."}
{"text": "# Why the back-to-back health announcements from King Charles III and Kate were so unusual\nBy **SYLVIA HUI** and **JILL LAWLESS**  \nJanuary 18, 2024. 2:00 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - The double health announcements from the United Kingdom's royal family - on Kate, the Princess of Wales' abdominal surgery and King Charles III 's prostate treatment - have put a spotlight on the private lives of senior royals.\n\nDetails of royal health are always a tricky issue in the U.K., because members of the monarchy are private individuals but also, in a sense, public property. Charles, 75, is head of state, and Kate, 42, is destined to be queen when her husband Prince William succeeds his father on the throne.\n\nThe brief media statements on the health scares were so unusual that they dominated Thursday's newspaper front pages, with headlines calling them \"royal health bombshells.\"\n\nThe disclosure of Charles' and Kate's health details was seen by some royal observers as a sign that the monarchy is adapting to modern communications after centuries of staying tight-lipped about health matters.\n\n## WHAT WAS ANNOUNCED?\nRoyal officials announced Wednesday that Kate had undergone \"planned\" abdominal surgery and was expected to remain in The London Clinic, a private hospital, for 10 to 14 days. She isn't expected to resume public duties until April.\n\nThe princess' office at Kensington Palace didn't offer further details, but said that her condition wasn't cancerous. Though she has generally experienced good health and is seen as fit and sporty, Kate was hospitalized during her pregnancies because of severe morning sickness.\n\nWilliam also has postponed some official duties so that he can devote time to his wife and their three children. He visited his wife on Thursday, and British media reported that the Princess of Wales was \"doing well.\"\n\nSoon after the announcement of Kate's hospitalization, Buckingham Palace said that Charles will undergo a \"corrective procedure\" for an enlarged prostate next week. The palace said the king's condition is benign. Queen Camilla said Thursday that Charles was \"fine\" and \"looking forward to getting back to work.\"\n\n## A HISTORY OF SECRECY\nWhen U.K. monarchs had real power, news of illness was withheld for fear it might weaken their authority. The habit of secrecy lingered after royals became constitutional figureheads.\n\nThe British public wasn't told that Charles' grandfather, King George VI, had lung cancer before his death in February 1952 at the age of 56, and some historians have claimed that the king himself wasn't told he was terminally ill. The public death announcement said only that the king had \"passed peacefully away in his sleep.\"\n\nHis father, King George V, died in 1936 after suffering from heart and lung disease. A half-century later, diary extracts were published revealing that the king's physician had injected the terminally ill monarch with morphine and cocaine to speed his death - partly so it could be announced in the morning newspapers \"rather than the less appropriate evening journals.\"\n\n## GREATER OPENNESS?\nThe U.K. and international media have been focused on the health of Britain's senior royals in recent years as the late Queen Elizabeth II faded from public view during the last months of her 70-year reign.\n\nEven then, few specific details were released about the late monarch's condition. The public was told only that the queen was suffering from \"mobility issues.\" The cause of her death in September 2022 at the age of 96 was listed on the death certificate simply as \"old age.\"\n\nWednesday's announcements gave more details than the public would have expected in the past.\n\nSome royal experts said that while the latest statement on Kate was coy and shrouded in some secrecy, the one on Charles showed that the monarch was keen to try a new and more open kind of communication.\n\nThe publicity was seen as a decision by Charles to help boost awareness of prostate health, and encourage other men to have their prostates checked.\n\n\"I think it symbolizes the kind of campaigning king that Charles is - he wants to put this issue on the agenda by being quite open and candid,\" Ed Owens, a royal historian and author, told The Associated Press. \"We know that King Charles wants to talk about issues of personal significance - and there's nothing more significant or personal to him than his health.\"\n\nReleasing the news about both royals on the same day was also about news management, Owens added. While Kate's condition sounded more serious, the king's can be seen as a \"positive news story to complement a more complicated one in the case of Catherine's health,\" he said.\n\n\"It means that we haven't got the story rolling on about what exactly (Kate's) been suffering from. Rather, we are instead talking about King Charles III and him wanting to set a good example to other men his age,\" Owens said.\n\n## 'KING'S PUBLIC HEALTH MESSAGE'\nOne headline dubbed the release of Charles' health details the \"King's public health message.\" It's worked: Prostate Cancer UK, a charity that promotes public awareness of prostate health, says there has been a surge of interest in its work thanks to the royal announcements.\n\n\"We have been receiving lots of calls from men and women that are concerned about them and their loved ones, wanting to talk about their prostate problems and signs and symptoms,\" said Sophie Smith, a senior specialist nurse at the charity.\n\nAn enlarged prostate is common in men over age 50. The condition affects how one urinates, and isn't usually a serious health threat. It's not cancer and doesn't lead to an increased risk of developing prostate cancer.\n\n\"It's about getting that conversation started,\" Smith added. \"We know that men often don't talk about it, they don't sit with their mates and say, 'I've getting problems going to the toilet.' It's something quite personal, a bit taboo.\"\n\n## WIDER IMPLICATIONS\nWhile Charles's condition wasn't worrying, the announcements that the monarch, Kate and William would all be out of action in one way or another in the coming days did lead to larger questions about what happens to matters of state in more serious cases.\n\nThis is especially of interest because Charles presides over a much more \"slimmed-down\" monarchy than his predecessors, with just four royals under 65 years old: William, Kate, Charles's younger brother Prince Edward and his wife Sophie.\n\nWhen monarchs can't undertake their duties on a temporary basis, \"Counsellors of State,\" who include senior royals like Queen Camilla and Prince Harry, can stand in and deputize if needed.\n\n\"It points to a fundamental question - how does the king get the monarchy ready for the middle of the 21st century with this smaller family in tow?\" Owens said. \"I think it points to the fact that he has to reduce the amount of engagements, the amount of work that is being undertaken by this family.\""}
{"text": "# 6 alleged gang members convicted of killing Chicago rapper FBG Duck in 2020\nJanuary 18, 2024. 12:49 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CHICAGO (AP)** - A federal jury has convicted six alleged gang members in the 2020 fatal shooting of Chicago rapper FBG Duck, a killing that prosecutors said was part of long-running violence over gang territories on the city's South Side.\n\nJurors deliberated for about 16 hours over three days before announcing Wednesday that they had reached a verdict, convicting the six defendants of murder in the aid of racketeering and conspiracy to commit murder.\n\nFBG Duck, whose real name was Carlton Weekly, was shot 16 times outside the luxury clothing store Dolce & Gabbana in Chicago's upscale Gold Coast neighborhood on Aug. 4, 2020. The 26-year-old's girlfriend and another man were wounded in the attack.\n\nThe jury convicted Charles Liggins, 32; Kenneth Roberson, 30; Christopher Thomas, 24; Marcus Smart, 25; Tacarlos Offerd, 32; and Ralph Turpin, 34, of murder in the aid of racketeering and conspiracy to commit murder. Liggins, Roberson, Thomas, Smart and Offerd were also convicted of using a firearm in Weekly's murder.\n\nA life sentence is mandatory for a conviction of murder in aid of racketeering. Sentencing hearings for all six are scheduled for August and September.\n\nProsecutors said Weekly was killed as part of a yearslong gang conflict between factions of the Black Disciples and Gangster Disciples on Chicago's South Side. The six defendants were purportedly members or associates of O-Block, a rival faction of Black Disciples, prosecutors said.\n\nMorris Pasqual, the acting U.S. attorney in Chicago, said his office will continue working with law enforcement \"to prioritize combating the unacceptable level of gang violence in Chicago.\"\n\n\"The jury's verdicts today hold the six defendants accountable for a brutal murder that took the life of Carlton Weekly,\" Pasqual said in a statement.\n\nWeekly's mother, LaSheena Weekly, wept Wednesday as she listened to the jury verdicts in an overflow courtroom at a federal courthouse in Chicago.\n\n\"When I go home and tell my grandkids that their father('s) justice has been served, that's going to be a big burden lifted off my shoulders,\" she told reporters after the verdicts were announced. \"I just want to thank the United States government for doing a very good job in making sure that these guys will never hurt another mom and another child again.\""}
{"text": "# Transgender candidate facing disqualification in Ohio now cleared to run despite omitting deadname\nBy **SAMANTHA HENDRICKSON**  \nJanuary 18, 2024. 7:17 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP)** - A transgender candidate vying for a seat in the Republican-majority Ohio House was cleared to run Thursday after her certification had been called into question for omitting her former name on qualifying petitions as required by a little-used state elections law.\n\nThe Mercer County Board of Elections chose not take up a vote on disqualifying Arienne Childrey, a Democrat from Auglaize County who is one of four transgender individuals campaigning for the Legislature, for not disclosing her previous name on petition paperwork.\n\nChildrey, who legally changed her name in 2020, has said she would have provided her deadname - the name a transgender person was assigned at birth but does not align with their gender identity - if she had known about the law.\n\n\"I would have filled out whatever was necessary, because at the end of the day, while it would have been a hit to my pride, there is something much more important than my pride, and that's fighting for this community,\" Childrey said.\n\nThe Ohio law, unfamiliar even to many state elections officials, mandates that candidates disclose any name changes in the past five years on their petition paperwork, with exemptions for changes caused by marriage. But the law isn't listed in the 33-page candidate requirement guide and there is no space on the petition paperwork to list any former names.\n\nAll four transgender candidates for the Legislature this year have run into issues with the name-change law, which has been in place in some form for decades but is rarely used - typically in the context of candidates wishing to use a nickname.\n\nThe complications in Ohio come at a time when Republican-controlled state governments nationwide have moved to limit transgender rights. Last year, legislatures passed dozens of bills restricting medical care for transgender youth, governing pronoun and bathroom usage at schools and dictating which sports teams transgender athletes can join.\n\nEarlier this month, Ohio's Mercer County Board of Elections received a protest to Childrey's ballot certification from county Republican Party Chairman Robert J. Hibner. Because the ballot is for the upcoming March 19 primary, the board ruled Hibner's protest invalid, as Hibner is from the opposing political party.\n\nThe board did not immediately respond to questions regarding the elections law itself and what role it played in Thursday's decision to keep Childrey on the ballot.\n\nIf Childrey were to win the Democratic primary, she would likely face Rep. Angie King, a Republican lawmaker who has sponsored anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and voted for bans on gender-affirming care for minors in November's general election.\n\nChildrey told The Associated Press Thursday that it's \"nice to take a deep breath\" as she and her team now plunge into campaigning.\n\n\"Hopefully people will see that this is a marginalized community in Ohio, and yet we're still standing,\" she said.\n\nLast week, Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose said his office is open to putting the rule on the candidate guide but not to tweaking the law and it's up to candidates to ensure they comply with Ohio election law.\n\nBut Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said Tuesday that the law should be amended and county boards should stop disqualifying transgender candidates on these grounds. DeWine did not say how it might be amended.\n\n\"We shouldn't be denying ballot access for that reason,\" the governor told Cleveland.com's editorial board. \"It certainly should be fixed.\"\n\nDeWine recently vetoed a proposed ban on gender-affirming care for minors, but the state House overrode that veto. The Senate is expected to do the same next week.\n\nVanessa Joy, a real estate photographer from Stark County running for the Ohio House who legally changed her name in 2022, was disqualified earlier this month for omitting her deadname from petition paperwork. She appealed her disqualification but was denied. Joy, who said the current law is a barrier to transgender individuals who want to seek office but do not want to disclose their deadname, is now working with legal counsel and the Ohio Democratic Party to try to change the law.\n\nAri Faber, a Democratic candidate for the Ohio state Senate from Athens, was cleared to run but must use his deadname since he has not legally changed it.\n\nBobbie Arnold, a contractor from West Alexandria running as a Democrat for the Ohio House, had her possible disqualification dismissed Tuesday by the Montgomery County Board of Elections and will be on the ballot in the March primary.\n\nHowever, under the state law, if Arnold or Childrey were to win their elections, they could still be removed from office for not disclosing their deadname and both are consulting with legal counsel about that part of the law.\n\nArnold hopes that between Joy's work with her own team to change the law and DeWine's call for candidates to stay on the ballot, that won't be an issue come November.\n\nFor now, like Childrey, she's excited to start campaigning.\n\n\"It's important for the overall well-being of our society that every voice has an opportunity to be heard,\" said Arnold, who went to Childrey's hearing to support her. \"And that's something that we're not experiencing right now in Ohio.\"\n\nIn light of the outcomes of Childrey and Arnold's cases, Joy appealed again Thursday to the Stark County Board of Elections."}
{"text": "# Netanyahu says he told the US that he opposes a Palestinian state in any postwar scenario\nBy **NAJIB JOBAIN**, **JOSEF FEDERMAN**, and **JACK JEFFERY**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 12:05 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**JERUSALEM (AP)** - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday rejected calls from the United States to scale back Israel's military offensive in the Gaza Strip or take steps toward the establishment of a Palestinian state after the war, drawing an immediate scolding from the White House.\n\nThe tense back and forth reflected what has become a wide rift between the two allies over the scope of Israel's war and its plans for the future of the beleaguered territory.\n\n\"We obviously see it differently,\" White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said.\n\nNetanyahu spoke just a day after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Israel would never have \"genuine security\" without a pathway toward Palestinian independence. Earlier this week, the White House also announced that it was the \"right time\" for Israel to lower the intensity of its devastating military offensive in Gaza.\n\nIn a nationally televised news conference, Netanyahu struck a defiant tone, repeatedly saying that Israel would not halt its offensive until it realizes its goals of destroying Gaza's Hamas militant group and bringing home all remaining hostages held by Hamas.\n\nHe rejected claims by a growing chorus of Israeli critics that those goals are not achievable, vowing to press ahead for many months. \"We will not settle for anything short of an absolute victory,\" Netanyahu said.\n\nIsrael launched the offensive after an unprecedented cross-border attack by Hamas on Oct. 7 that killed 1,200 people and took some 250 others hostage. Roughly 130 hostages are believed by Israel to remain in Hamas captivity. The war has stoked tensions across the region, threatening to ignite other conflicts.\n\nIsrael's assault, one of the deadliest and most destructive military campaigns in recent history, has killed nearly 25,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities, caused widespread destruction and uprooted over 80% of the territory's 2.3 million people from their homes.\n\nThe staggering cost of the war has led to increasing calls from the international community to halt the offensive. After initially giving Israel wall-to-wall support in the early days of the war, the United States, Israel's closest ally, has begun to express misgivings and urged Netanyahu to spell out his vision for postwar Gaza.\n\nThe United States has said the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority, which governs semi-autonomous zones in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, should be \"revitalized\" and return to Gaza. Hamas ousted the authority from Gaza in 2007.\n\nThe U.S. has also called for steps toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. The Palestinians seek Gaza, the West Bank and east Jerusalem for their state. Those areas were captured by Israel in 1967.\n\nSpeaking Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Blinken said the two-state solution was the best way to protect Israel, unify moderate Arab countries and isolate Israel's arch-enemy, Iran.\n\nWithout a \"pathway to a Palestinian state,\" he said, Israel would not \"get genuine security.\"\n\nAt the same conference, Saudi Arabia's foreign minister said the kingdom is ready to establish full relations with Israel as part of a larger political agreement. \"But that can only happen through peace for the Palestinians, through a Palestinian state,\" he said.\n\nNetanyahu, who leads a far-right government opposed to Palestinian statehood, repeated his longstanding opposition to a two-state solution. He said a Palestinian state would become a launching pad for attacks on Israel.\n\nHe said Israel \"must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River,\" adding: \"That collides with the idea of sovereignty. What can we do?\"\n\n\"This truth I tell to our American friends, and I put the brakes on the attempt to coerce us to a reality that would endanger the state of Israel,\" he said.\n\nThe comments prompted an immediate rebuke from the White House. Kirby said that President Joe Biden would \"not stop working\" toward a two-state solution.\n\nBefore Oct. 7, Israeli society was bitterly divided over Netanyahu's plan for a judicial overhaul. Since the attack, the country has rallied behind the war. But divisions have once again begun to surface over Netanyahu's handling of the war.\n\nFamilies of the hostages and their many supporters have called for a new cease-fire that could bring them home. Hamas released over 100 hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners during a weeklong cease-fire in November.\n\nDozens of people attended a somber gathering in Tel Aviv in solidarity with the family of Kfir Bibas, the youngest Israeli hostage, marking his first birthday. The red-haired infant and his 4-year-old brother Ariel were taken hostage along with their mother, Shiri, and their father, Yarden. All four remain in captivity.\n\nCommentators have begun to question whether Netanyahu's objectives are realistic, given the slow pace of the offensive and growing international criticism, including genocide accusations at the United Nations world court, which Israel vehemently denies.\n\nNetanyahu's opponents accuse him of delaying any discussion of postwar scenarios to avoid looming investigations of governmental failures, keep his coalition intact and put off elections. Polls show that the popularity of Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption charges, has plummeted during the war.\n\n## MEDICINES BOUND FOR HOSTAGES ENTER GAZA\nThere was no word Thursday on whether medicines that entered the territory as part of a deal brokered by France and Qatar had been distributed to dozens hostages with chronic illnesses who are being held by Hamas.\n\nThe agreement was the first to be brokered between the warring sides since November. The deal includes large shipments of medicine, food and humanitarian aid for Palestinian civilians as well.\n\nQatar confirmed late Wednesday that the medicine had entered Gaza, but it was not yet clear if it had been distributed to the hostages, who are being held in secret locations, including underground bunkers.\n\nThe International Committee for the Red Cross, which helped facilitate the hostage releases, said it was not involved in distributing the medicine.\n\n## FIGHTING IN GAZA\nHamas has continued to fight back across Gaza, even in the most devastated areas, and launch rockets into Israel. It says it will not release any more hostages until there is a permanent cease-fire, something Israel and the United States, its top ally, have ruled out.\n\nHundreds of thousands of Palestinians have heeded Israeli evacuation orders and packed into southern Gaza, where shelters run by the United Nations are overflowing and massive tent camps have gone up.\n\nIsrael has continued to strike what it says are militant targets in all parts of Gaza, often killing women and children. Early Thursday, medics said an Israeli airstrike on a home killed 16 people, half of them children, in the southern Gaza town of Rafah.\n\nIsrael blames the high civilian death toll on Hamas because it fights in dense residential areas. Israel says its forces have killed roughly 9,000 militants, without providing evidence, and that 193 of its own soldiers have been killed since the Gaza ground offensive began.\n\nOn Thursday, the Israeli army said it had destroyed \"the heart\" of Hamas' weapons manufacturing industry near a major north-south road in central Gaza. It said the complex included weapons factories and an extensive tunnel network used to ship arms throughout Gaza.\n\n## WAR REVERBERATES ACROSS REGION\nThe war has rippled across the Middle East, with Iranian-backed groups attacking U.S. and Israeli targets. Low-intensity fighting between Israel and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon threatens to erupt into all-out war, and Houthi rebels in Yemen continue to target international shipping despite United States-led airstrikes.\n\nThe Israeli military said it fired an interceptor at a \"suspicious aerial target\" - likely a drone or missile - approaching over the Red Sea on Thursday, triggering air raid sirens in the southern city of Eilat. The Houthis have launched drones and missiles toward Israel that mostly fell short or were intercepted and shot down.\n\nMeanwhile, Iran has launched a series of missile attacks targeting what it described as an Israeli spy base in Iraq and militant bases in Syria."}
{"text": "# US forces strike Houthi sites in Yemen as Biden says allied action hasn't yet stopped ship attacks\nBy **ZEKE MILLER**, **AAMER MADHANI**, and **TARA COPP**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 10:02 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - U.S. forces on Thursday conducted a fifth strike against Iranian-backed Houthi rebel military sites in Yemen as President Joe Biden acknowledged that the American and British bombardment had yet to stop the militants' attacks on vessels in the Red Sea that have disrupted global shipping.\n\nThe latest strikes destroyed two Houthi anti-ship missiles that \"were aimed into the southern Red Sea and prepared to launch,\" U.S. Central Command said in a statement posted to X, formerly known as Twitter. They were conducted by Navy F/A-18 fighter aircraft, the Pentagon said.\n\nBiden said the U.S. would continue the strikes, even though so far they have not stopped the Houthis from continuing to harass commercial and military vessels.\n\n\"When you say working, are they stopping the Houthis, no. Are they going to continue, yes,\" Biden said in an exchange with reporters before departing the White House for a domestic policy speech in North Carolina.\n\nHours after Biden spoke, Houthi Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree said in a prerecorded statement that its forces had carried out another missile attack against the Marshall Islands-flagged, U.S.-owned cargo ship Chem Ranger. Saree said the attack took place in the Gulf of Aden, the waters just south of Yemen.\n\nThat attack did not affect the ship, U.S. Central Command said in a statement late Thursday.\n\n\"The crew observed the missiles impact the water near the ship,\" there were no reported injuries or damage and the ship continued on its way, Central Command said.\n\nThe continued harassment of the ships has driven the U.S. and international partners to take extraordinary steps to defend them through a joint mission named Operation Prosperity Guardian, in which the consortium is trying to create a protective umbrella for the vessels by intercepting any missiles or drones that target them. It has also led the U.S. and British militaries to take measures to knock out missile sites, radars and air defense systems to try to tamp down the Houthis' ability to attack.\n\nOn Wednesday the U.S. military fired another wave of ship- and submarine-launch missile strikes against 14 Houthi-controlled sites. That same day, the administration put the Houthis back on its list of specially designated global terrorists. The sanctions that come with the formal designation are meant to sever violent extremist groups from their sources of financing, while also allowing vital humanitarian aid to continue flowing to impoverished Yemenis.\n\n\"These strikes will continue for as long as they need to continue,\" National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Thursday, adding, \"I'm not going to telegraph punches one way or another.\"\n\nDespite sanctions and military strikes, including a large-scale operation carried out Friday by U.S. and British warships and warplanes that hit more than 60 targets across Yemen, the Houthis keep harassing commercial and military ships. The U.S. has strongly warned Iran to cease providing weapons to the Houthis.\n\n\"We never said the Houthis would immediately stop,\" the Pentagon's deputy press secretary, Sabrina Singh, said at a briefing, when asked why the strikes have not seemed to stop the Houthis. Since the joint U.S. and British operation got underway last Friday, hitting 28 locations and struck more than 60 targets in that initial round, the Houthis' attacks have been \"lower scale,\" Singh said.\n\nFor months, the Houthis have claimed attacks on ships in the Red Sea that they say are either linked to Israel or heading to Israeli ports. They say their attacks aim to end the Israeli air-and-ground offensive in the Gaza Strip that was triggered by the Palestinian militant group Hamas' Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel. But the links to the ships targeted in the rebel assaults have grown more tenuous as the attacks continue.\n\nThe attacks have also raised questions as to whether the conflict between Israel and Hamas has already expanded into a wider regional war.\n\n\"We don't seek war, we don't think we are at war. We don't want to see a regional war,\" Singh said."}
{"text": "# Father of American teen killed in West Bank by Israeli fire rails against US support for Israel\nBy **JULIA FRANKEL** and **NASSER NASSER**  \nJanuary 20, 2024. 1:29 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**AL-MAZRA'A ASH-SHARQIYA, West Bank (AP)** - The father of an American teen killed by Israeli fire in the occupied West Bank railed against Washington's military support for Israel, as hundreds of mourners buried the 17-year-old in the family's ancestral Palestinian village Saturday.\n\nThe death of Tawfiq Ajaq on Friday drew an immediate expression of concern from the White House and a pledge from Israeli police to investigate.\n\nIt was the latest fatal shooting in the West Bank, where nearly 370 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza more than three months ago. The Biden administration has repeatedly expressed concern about violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in recent months.\n\nDuring Saturday's funeral, the teen's father criticized the long-standing U.S. support for Israel. \"They are killer machines,\" he said of Israeli forces. \"They are using our tax dollars in the U.S. to support the weapons to kill our own children.\"\n\nTawfiq Ajaq was born and raised in Gretna, Louisiana, near New Orleans, relatives said. His parents brought him and his four siblings to the village of Al-Mazra'a Ash-Sharqiya last year so they could reconnect with Palestinian culture.\n\nOn Saturday, crowds of Palestinians pulsed through village streets, following men who held aloft a stretcher with the teen's body, wrapped in a Palestinian flag.\n\nHafez Ajaq implored Americans to \"see with their own eyes\" the ongoing violence in the West Bank.\n\n\"The American society does not know the true story,\" he said. \"Come here on the ground and see what's going on. ... How many fathers and mothers have to say goodbye to their children? How many more?\"\n\nThe circumstances of the shooting remained unclear.\n\nAjaq's relative, Joe Abdel Qaki, said that Ajaq and a friend were having a barbecue in a village field when he was shot by Israeli fire, once in the head and once in the chest.\n\nAbdel Qaki said he arrived at the field shortly after the shooting and helped transport Ajaq to an ambulance. He said Israeli forces briefly detained him and other Palestinians at the scene, asking for their IDs before the men could get to Ajaq.\n\nHe said Ajaq died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.\n\nIsraeli police said they received a report Friday regarding a \"firearm discharge, ostensibly involving an off-duty law enforcement officer, a soldier and a civilian.\" Police did not identify who fired the shot, though it said the shooting targeted people \"purportedly engaged in rock-throwing activities along Highway 60,\" the main north-south thoroughfare in the West Bank.\n\nAl-Mazra'a Ash-Sharqiya is located just east of the highway.\n\nPolice said the incident would be investigated. Investigations of those involved in fatal shootings of Palestinians by Israel's police and military have rarely yielded speedy results, and indictments are uncommon.\n\nAsked about the shooting, U.S. national security spokesman John Kirby said that officials at the White House were \"seriously concerned about these reports.\"\n\n\"The information is scant at this time. We don't have perfect context about exactly what happened here,\" Kirby said. \"We're going to be in constant touch with counterparts in the region to - to get more information.\"\n\nSince Oct. 7, when Hamas staged its deadly attack on southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostage, Israeli forces have clamped down on suspected militants in the West Bank, carrying out near nightly arrest raids.\n\nThe Palestinian Health Ministry says 369 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7. Most of the Palestinians were killed during shootouts in the West Bank that the Israeli military says began during operations to arrest Palestinian gunmen. In several documented instances, Israeli forces and settlers have killed Palestinians who witnesses report were not engaged in violence.\n\nThe U.S. has given military and diplomatic support to Israel's war on Hamas, but has urged Israel to scale back the intensity of its attacks. Nearly 25,000 Palestinians have been killed so far in Israel's offensive, Gaza health officials said.\n\nIsrael captured the West Bank, along with east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek those territories for a future independent state."}
{"text": "# A man cleared in a 1996 Brooklyn killing said for decades he knew who did it. Prosecutors now agree\nBy **JENNIFER PELTZ**  \nJanuary 18, 2024. 9:36 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - A man who served 14 years in prison for a deadly 1990s shooting was exonerated Thursday after prosecutors said they now believe the killer was an acquaintance he has implicated for decades.\n\n\"I lost 14 years of my life for a crime that I didn't commit,\" Steven Ruffin told a Brooklyn judge after sighing with emotion.\n\nAlthough Ruffin was paroled in 2010 and has since built a career in sanitation in Georgia, he said that getting his manslaughter conviction dismissed and his name cleared \"will help me move on.\"\n\n\"If you know you're innocent, don't give up on your case - keep on fighting, because justice will prevail,\" Ruffin, 45, said outside court. \"That's all I've wanted for 30 years: somebody to listen and really hear what I'm saying and look into the things I was telling them.\"\n\nProsecutors said they were exploring whether to charge the man they now believe shot 16-year-old James Deligny on a Brooklyn street during a February 1996 confrontation over some stolen earrings. Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said after court that charges, if any, wouldn't come immediately.\n\n\"You have to be able to convict someone beyond a reasonable doubt, and we have to make sure that that evidence is sufficient to do so,\" said Gonzalez, who wasn't DA when Ruffin was tried. \"You have a lot of factors working against us procedurally, but also factually - unfortunately, this is 30 years ago.\"\n\nRuffin's conviction is the latest of more than three dozen that Brooklyn prosecutors have disavowed after reinvestigations over the last decade.\n\nOver a dozen, including Ruffin's, were connected to retired Detective Louis Scarcella. He was lauded in the 1980s and '90s for his case-closing prowess, but defendants have accused him of coercing confessions, engineering dubious witness identifications and other troubling tactics. He has denied any wrongdoing.\n\nProsecutors said in their report on the Ruffin case that they \"did not discover any misconduct by Scarcella\" in the matter. A message seeking comment was sent to his attorney.\n\nProsecutors said the police investigation - and their office's own at the time - \"were wholly inadequate\" and tunnel-visioned, failing to look into the person they now believe was the gunman.\n\nThe mistaken-identity shooting happened as Ruffin and others were looking for a robber who had just snatched earrings from Ruffin's sister. In fact, Deligny wasn't the robber, authorities say.\n\nTipsters led police to Ruffin, then a 17-year-old high school student, and the victim's sister identified him in a lineup that a court later deemed flawed. Scarcella wasn't involved in the lineup, but he and another detective questioned Ruffin.\n\nThe teen told them, twice, that he saw but wasn't involved in Deligny's shooting, according to police records quoted in prosecutors' report.\n\nThen Scarcella brought the teen's estranged father - a police officer himself - to the precinct. The father later testified that he told his son to \"tell the truth,\" but Ruffin said his father leaned on him to confess.\n\nAnd he did confess, saying he fired because he thought Deligny was about to pull something out of his jacket. Ruffin told the detectives they could retrieve the gun from his sister's boyfriend, and they did, prosecutors' report said.\n\nRuffin quickly recanted to his father, who didn't tell the detectives his son had taken back his confession, according to prosecutors' report. The teen went on to testify at his trial that he didn't shoot Deligny but saw and knew the killer - his sister's boyfriend, the one who'd given police the gun, broken up into parts and stuffed into potatoes.\n\nJurors at Ruffin's trial heard from the boyfriend, but only about his relationships with the defendant, his sister and others in the case. When the jury was out of the room, the boyfriend invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and declined to answer other questions, including where he'd been on the night of the shooting.\n\nProsecutors didn't release the boyfriend's name Thursday, and the names of lawyers who have represented him weren't immediately available. He told prosecutors during their recent reinvestigation that he had nothing to do with the shooting and didn't give detectives the gun. He also said he never confessed to anyone, though prosecutors say Ruffin's stepfather, sister and late mother all have said he made admissions to them.\n\nAsked Thursday about the boyfriend, Ruffin's lawyers noted that the prospect of any prosecution now is uncertain.\n\n\"We only wish that in 1996, Detective Scarcella and others had performed the investigation they should have and been able to get this right the first time,\" attorney Garrett Ordower said, noting that Deligny's family may now never have the finality of a conviction in his death.\n\nAs for Ruffin, he's focused on his future, including promotion opportunities at his job in Atlanta. His now-voided conviction, he said, \"never defined me.\"\n\n\"This never really spoke of the person I was or the man I was going to become,\" he said. \"So this, to me, is a great closure of a chapter my life, but my life is still going up.\""}
{"text": "# Trump is joined by South Carolina leaders at New Hampshire rally as he tries to undercut Haley\nBy **MICHELLE L. PRICE** and **JILL COLVIN**  \nJanuary 21, 2024. 10:12 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP)** - Donald Trump surrounded himself with leaders from Nikki Haley's home state in a show of strength before Tuesday's New Hampshire primary.\n\nTrump was joined at a rally at the NHU Arena in Manchester on Saturday night by South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, the state's lieutenant governor and a slew of other senior officials, including the state's attorney general, treasurer and House speaker. The statewide officials, along with U.S. Reps. Joe Wilson, William Timmons and Russell Fry appeared on stage with Trump.\n\n\"Almost every politician from South Carolina is endorsing me,\" Trump declared.\n\nThe South Carolinians urged the voters to carry Trump to a win in New Hampshire before the contest moves to their state and its decisive early contest set for next month.\n\n\"If you do that and you win by a big margin here, we'll finish the job in South Carolina,\" said Murrell Smith, the speaker of the South Carolina House of Representatives.\n\nThe appearances are yet another blow from South Carolina against Haley, who is hoping her appeal among independent and unaffiliated voters will propel her to a strong enough finish in New Hampshire to turn the race into a two-person contest against Trump.\n\nOn Friday, the former president and GOP front-runner received the endorsement of South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who joined him at a rally in Concord. Scott dropped his own bid for the Republican nomination in November. A dozen years ago, Haley, then serving as governor of their state, elevated Scott from the House by appointing him as senator, making him one of the nation's most prominent Black Republicans.\n\nMcMaster and other top officials had already endorsed Trump. Haley has a famously fractious relationship with many of her state's Republican power brokers even as she was twice elected governor - defeating McMaster in the GOP primary the first time.\n\nHer response on Saturday made clear she hadn't forgotten that rivalry.\n\n\"I'm sorry, is that the person I ran against for governor and beat?\" she asked. \"Just checking.\"\n\nHaley campaign manager Betsy Ankney also brushed off the appearances at an event hosted by Bloomberg News, insisting endorsements had \"never been Nikki's game.\"\n\nTrump on Saturday night repeatedly railed against Haley and New Hampshire's voting laws, which allow unaffiliated voters to participate in either the Republican or Democratic primary. The state's more moderate electorate is expected to make the contest much closer than it was in leadoff Iowa, which is considered more conservative.\n\n\"Don't listen to polls. Get out and vote. We need a big big win against these terrible people,\" Trump said.\n\nHaley, meanwhile, highlighted on Saturday a gaffe Trump made at his rally the night before.\n\nTrump repeatedly suggested Haley had been in charge of keeping the Capitol secure on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the building to try to stop his election loss from being certified. Haley was not at the Capitol that day. And Trump has consistently downplayed his administration's failure to keep the Capitol safe or his delay in trying to call off the rioters.\n\n\"They're saying he got confused. That he was talking about something else, that he was talking about Nancy Pelosi,\" Haley said. \"When you're dealing with the pressures of a presidency, we can't have someone else where we question whether they're mentally fit to do this.\"\n\nTrump, 77, has repeatedly tried to suggest 81-year-old President Joe Biden is not sharp enough to be president and on Saturday sought to defend his own mental acuity. He again bragged of having \"aced\" a cognitive test he took while president - a test that is, in fact, intended to test for early dementia and other cognitive impairment.\n\n\"I don't mind being 80 but I'm 77. That's a big difference,\" he said.\n\nHe added a few minutes later: \"I feel my mind is stronger now than it was 25 years ago.\"\n\nAfter the rally, Reps. Timmons and Fry called on Haley to leave the race ahead of the South Carolina primary next month.\n\n\"We're gonna have another election on Tuesday. But after that, when Trump wins, overwhelmingly, we've to get behind him,\" Timmons said.\n\nEven with their state's top elected Republicans and much of the congressional delegation in New Hampshire to advocate for Trump this week, some South Carolina voters were undeterred about backing other candidates.\n\n\"I'm a strong Republican, and I just vote Republican because I think they have a lot in common with supporting the United States and the regular citizens of the United States,\" said Sandra Chase, following an event for GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis in Lexington, South Carolina, on Saturday afternoon.\n\nDeSantis, coming off a second-place finish in leadoff Iowa, has shifted some of his focus away from New Hampshire, where the state's independent voters are seen to provide more of an opening for Haley. He's instead been campaigning this weekend in South Carolina.\n\nChase said she had previously backed Trump but wanted to go in a different direction this year.\n\n\"I just want to pick the best candidate, and I think the best candidate is Ron DeSantis,\" she said. \"But I mean, everybody is allowed to support whoever they want to support.\""}
{"text": "# Former GOP presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson endorses Nikki Haley, says Trump divides America\nJanuary 20, 2024. 6:41 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Former Republican presidential candidate and ex-Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson endorsed Nikki Haley on Saturday, days before she tries to take on frontrunner Donald Trump in the New Hampshire primary.\n\nHutchinson is a conservative whose opposition to Trump became central in his longshot bid for the GOP primary before he dropped out Tuesday.\n\nIn a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Hutchinson said: \"Anyone who believes Donald Trump will unite this country has been asleep over the last 8 years. Trump intentionally tries to divide America and will continue to do so.\"\n\nHutchinson added: \"Go @NikkiHaley in New Hampshire.\"\n\nHaley's campaign did not immediately return a message seeking comment.\n\nAfter finishing third in the leadoff contest in Iowa earlier this month, Haley has been looking to appeal to independent and unaffiliated voters in New Hampshire's Jan. 23 primary to garner a strong finish and turn the race against Trump into a two-person contest.\n\nHutchinson dropped out after finishing sixth in the caucuses.\n\nHis backing comes a day after another of their former rivals in the GOP presidential contest, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, endorsed Trump. Another former candidate, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has also backed Trump.\n\nHaley last weekend won the support of former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican who had fueled speculation that he was preparing for his own third-party bid.\n\nTrump's campaign did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment."}
{"text": "# DeSantis gets a warm welcome in South Carolina, but even some supporters think he can't beat Trump\nBy **MEG KINNARD**  \nJanuary 20, 2024. 5:33 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. (AP)** - Ron DeSantis on Saturday tried to frame his White House campaign as the one that can top GOP front-runner Donald Trump and Nikki Haley in pivotal South Carolina, but some who came out to see him in this coastal tourist mecca said they felt the state was likely to go the former president's way in next month's primary.\n\nIt was some of the same sentiment as well in DeSantis' stop at a diner in Florence, where the former Navy officer leaned heavily into his experience as the \"only veteran running for president.\"\n\n\"Everybody's scared to death of Trump,\" said Steven Best, a Trump supporter who said he only came out to see DeSantis because his wife wanted to, citing efforts to remove Trump from the ballot over his attempt to overturn the 2020 election as support for his viewpoint.\n\n\"I love his message,\" said David Steding as he and his wife waited for the Florida governor earlier in Myrtle Beach. \"I just don't think he's going to win here.\"\n\nThe Stedings were among hundreds waiting to see DeSantis take the stage at a restaurant just off one of the main thoroughfares in Myrtle Beach. He scheduled two other stops Saturday in a state whose primary has historically been influential in determining the party's nominee.\n\nThe events reflect his decision to shift his campaign away from New Hampshire and its leadoff Republican primary on Tuesday, where he is not expected to match his finish in last Monday's Iowa causes, won by Trump with DeSantis edging Haley for second.\n\nAt his first appearance, DeSantis jabbed at Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, which holds its primary on Feb. 24. In front of video screens displaying the logos of his campaign and super political action committee, he asked the crowd to \"tell me major achievements of Nikki Haley when she was governor? Anybody?\"\n\nAfter someone shouted out \"gas tax\" - which both DeSantis and Trump have accused Haley of trying to raise during her six years in office - DeSantis said it was notable that \"nobody named an achievement.\" He said \"the hands would shoot up\" if people in a Florida crowd were asked to list his accomplishments during just over one term in office.\n\nDeSantis and Trump have argued that Haley, when governor, flip-flopped over her support for a gas tax. A super PAC supporting Trump's campaign has run a TV ad mashing up clips of State of the State addresses in which she opposed, then called for, such a measure. Haley has characterized the critiques as evidence that her opponents, particularly Trump, are threatened by her candidacy.\n\nBoth Trump and DeSantis have omitted a significant part of the gas tax proposal Haley floated in 2015. In the speech her opponents have cited, Haley went on to say that, \"in order to get my signature on any gas tax increase,\" South Carolina would also \"need to cut our state income tax by 2%.\"\n\nThat plan died in the Legislature. South Carolina lawmakers ultimately raised the gas tax under her successor, overriding a veto by Gov. Henry McMaster, Trump's top backer in the state.\n\nOn Saturday, McMaster and Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette were among the South Carolina leaders heading to New Hampshire to appear with Trump at a rally there. Sen. Tim Scott, another South Carolinian, endorsed Trump at a New Hampshire event on Friday night.\n\nAwaiting DeSantis, Julie Maid said that she was ready to support DeSantis in South Carolina, despite Trump's lead.\n\n\"DeSantis is a straight shooter, and he'll tell you how it is, but not have the dramatics that Trump does,\" Julie Maid said. \"DeSantis is my front-runner.\"\n\nStanding behind her in line, Steding wasn't so sure.\n\n\"I'm here,\" said Steding, as he and his wife, Shavonne, moved their way along the line snaking into the venue. \"I don't know if I'm going to vote for him. But I'm here.\""}
{"text": "# Nikki Haley has spent 20 years navigating Republican Party factions. Trump may make that impossible\nBy **BILL BARROW**  \nJanuary 20, 2024. 9:52 PM EST\n\n---\n\nWhen Nikki Haley was a South Carolina legislator, she backed budgets boosted by federal aid. Running for governor, she criticized a \"bailout culture\" and dependence on Washington.\n\nShe once called the Confederate battle flag a heritage symbol and sidestepped calls to remove it from statehouse grounds. After a racist massacre in Charleston, Haley moved to take it down.\n\nWhen Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, she opposed him before joining his administration as U.N. ambassador. Now, Haley is running against Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination saying he is an agent of chaos.\n\nFor almost 20 years, Haley has worked to navigate Republicans' rightward march, trying to cultivate both the GOP establishment and the firebrand conservative base that gave rise to Trump. She is seen as either a pragmatic unifier or a finger-to-the-wind politician, and as she seeks the Republican nomination, her political pivots have become her opponents' most persistent line of attack.\n\n\"Maybe she can be a bit of a chameleon,\" said former state Rep. Doug Brannon, a fellow Republican. \"The governor and I did not get along,\" he said, \"but that doesn't mean that she isn't a brilliant politician.\"\n\nShapeshifting is a long-practiced political art. Bill Clinton earned the nickname \"Slick Willie\" and won two terms in the White House. Trump went from being emphatically supportive of abortion rights to telling voters he alone was responsible for the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, winning over white evangelicals.\n\nIn the 2024 campaign, Haley has leaned into her critics. Trump skipping debates has meant she and the former president have not confronted each other face to face but she has forcefully defended herself against his suggestions that she is out of step with today's Republican Party.\n\n\"For those reporting that I'm a moderate, I will ask you or anybody, Trump or anybody in Fox (News) suits saying that I'm not a conservative: Name one thing that I wasn't conservative about,\" she said Friday in New Hampshire.\n\nShe offered a litany of measures she signed as governor to lower taxes, boost voter identification requirements and overhaul public employee pensions, among other matters. \"The difference is who is deciding who's conservative and who's moderate,\" she said.\n\nRob Godfrey, who served in Haley's administration, said she \"has never been an angry candidate or angry in governing\" but relishes \"using the bully pulpit.\"\n\n\"She prides herself on being willing to call out people she thinks are not serving their constituents well,\" Godfrey said. He insisted his old boss is less concerned about positioning and ideology than achieving the most conservative, \"good government\" policy outcome possible.\n\n\"That approach rubs some people the wrong way,\" Godfrey said. \"It always has.\"\n\nHaley, 52, was first elected to the South Carolina legislature from a suburban Columbia district 20 years ago. The daughter of Indian immigrants, she defeated a 30-year legislative veteran in the Republican primary. She once told The New York Times that Hillary Clinton, the Democrats' 2016 presidential nominee, had inspired her to run for office.\n\nHaley quickly rose to a leadership post but collided with colleagues over her push for more recorded votes instead of voice votes that spared lawmakers scrutiny. So she soon aimed for the executive branch. She joined a 2010 gubernatorial primary that included the lieutenant governor, attorney general and a sitting congressman. Haley nearly won the nomination outright, with 48.9% of the primary vote. Haley defeated U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett in a runoff 65% to 35%.\n\nWhit Ayres, a national pollster who worked for Barrett, said the campaign previewed Haley's ability to cast a wide net. \"Those margins tell you something about her political skills,\" he said.\n\nIn the legislature, Haley voted to take millions of dollars in federal aid during the financial crisis of 2008-09 to keep the American financial system from collapsing and sending the country into a possible depression.\n\nBy 2010, though, there was rising anger about the impact that crisis had on Americans who lost their homes or saw their retirement accounts dwindle as Wall Street titans were rarely held responsible. That gave birth to the tea party, which stoked fires of populism that propelled Trump six years later. Gubernatorial candidate Haley railed against bailouts and trumpeted an endorsement from Sarah Palin, the 2008 vice presidential nominee and tea party favorite.\n\n\"When Sarah Palin showed up, that was a turning point,\" Ayres said. \"We knew then she was for real.\"\n\nHaley paired her Palin endorsement with another from the more moderate Mitt Romney as he geared up for his second presidential bid. She later endorsed Romney in the 2012 Republican presidential primary. In 2014, she expanded her first general election margin to win a second term with 56% of the vote.\n\n\"She's managed to be all things to all people,\" said Kay Koonce, a Democratic National Committee member from South Carolina who acknowledged that Haley's success had frustrated her party.\n\nAs governor, Haley had disputes with fellow Republicans that often seemed personal. She vetoed spending measures and threatened to campaign against party members in their primaries. Conservative opponents seized on disclosures that she worked during her time as a legislator for a Columbia-area hospital system that had regulatory requests before state government. She faced ethics charges that were dismissed by a committee dominated by House Republicans.\n\nShe successfully courted business investment in the state, including some from China. To recruit firms, she backed subsidies some tea party adherents detested. But she reminds Republican primary voters that the deals were always for non-union shops.\n\nShe also made a mark on social issues, signing a 2016 measure outlawing abortions at 20 weeks with exceptions. That would not satisfy many in the GOP's national base now. But Haley has argued against a stricter national ban and said the sound conservative position is to leave the issue to state governments.\n\nHaley burnished her conservative persona beyond policy debates. She told her Instagram followers in December 2013 that she got a handgun for Christmas. \"I must have been good Santa gave me a Beretta PX4 Storm,\" she posted.\n\nGodfrey, who still maintains contact with Haley, said the best example of her approach came after a white supremacist in 2015 killed eight Black worshippers at a Charleston church. Haley had previously said removing the Confederate battle flag from Capitol grounds was not a priority. After the shooting, she quickly convened multiracial, bipartisan conversations that led to the Civil War banner finally being taken down. \"She was giving cover\" to Republican legislators, Godfrey said, and \"building consensus.\"\n\nKoonce countered: \"She deserves some of the credit\" but that \"should not erase what she had said before it took all those people dying to do the right thing.\"\n\nAs Haley's own ambitions broadened beyond South Carolina, she, like so many Republicans, had to figure out how to run against Trump.\n\nIn 2016, she delivered the Republican response to President Barack Obama's last State of the Union address. Weighing her party's rightward push, Haley complimented Obama as a barrier breaker and communicator. She urged Republicans to accept shared responsibility for the nation's problems. And she warned conservatives: \"During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices. We must resist that temptation.\" She didn't name Trump but soon endorsed Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.\n\nAfter Trump's November victory, she was at Trump Tower in New York talking to the president-elect about jobs.\n\nEarly in her 2024 campaign, Haley stepped lightly around Trump. But on the eve of the first contests, her criticisms have become more direct, on issues like Trump's role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.\n\n\"I think what happened on Jan. 6 was a terrible day, and I think President Trump will have to answer for it,\" she said on a debate stage Wednesday in Iowa. It was perhaps as far as she has gone in criticizing Trump.\n\nHaley has separately confirmed that she will vote for the Republican nominee; she has not ruled out joining Trump on the ticket as his running mate.\n\nAyres said Haley's approach is pragmatic, like much of her career. About half the party's voters, Ayres said, voted for Trump twice and would again - but are open to someone else.\n\n\"Following Chris Christie's lead would cap her at the small percentage of 'Never Trumpers,'\" Ayres added, referring to the former New Jersey governor who hammered Trump before dropping out of the race.\n\nChristie was caught on a hot mic predicting Haley \"is going to get smoked\" by Trump. On that, even a Democrat sided with Haley.\n\n\"Chris Christie is exactly right about Trump,\" Koonce said. \"But I'm sitting there listening to him criticize her again and I'm thinking, 'Well, she's the one who's still on the stage.'\""}
{"text": "# Democrats believe abortion will motivate voters in 2024. Will it be enough?\nBy **COLLEEN LONG** and **CHRIS MEGERIAN**  \nJanuary 21, 2024. 12:24 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - When Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump said recently that he was \"proud\" to have a hand in overturning the abortion protections enshrined in Roe v. Wade, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake took it as a political gift, thinking to herself, \"Oh my God, we just won the election.\"\n\nIt may not be that simple, but as the 2024 race heats up, President Joe Biden's campaign is betting big on abortion rights as a major driver for Democrats in the election. Republicans are still trying to figure out how to talk about the issue, if at all, and avoid a political backlash.\n\n\"A vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is a vote to restore Roe, and a vote for Donald Trump is a vote to ban abortion across the country,\" said Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Biden's campaign manager. \"These are the stakes in 2024.\"\n\nSince Roe was overturned in 2022, voters have pushed back by approving a number of statewide ballot initiatives to preserve or expand the right to abortion. Support for abortion rights drove women to the polls during the 2022 midterm elections, delivering Democrats unexpected success. For many people, the issue took on higher meaning, part of an overarching concern about the future of democracy, according to AP VoteCast, a nationwide survey of more than 94,000 voters in the midterm elections.\n\nDemocrats have since worked to broaden how they talk to voters about the Supreme Court's decision, delivered by a conservative majority that included three justices nominated by Trump, and what it means for people's access to health care and their personal freedoms.\n\nThe Biden campaign is launching a nationwide political push this coming week centered on Monday's 51st anniversary of the 1973 decision that codified abortion rights. Vice President Kamala Harris, the administration's chief messenger on this, will hold the first event Monday in Wisconsin.\n\nOn Tuesday, Biden, Harris, first lady Jill Biden and second gentleman Doug Emhoff head to Virginia for a campaign stop focused on the issue. More events featuring top Democrats in battleground states are also in the works.\n\nThe campaign on Sunday released a advertising campaign scheduled to run all week, including during \"The Bachelor\" season premiere and the NFL conference championships. The spot features Dr. Austin Dennard, an OB-GYN in Texas who had to leave her state to get an abortion when she learned that her baby had a fatal condition called anencephaly.\n\n\"In Texas, you are forced to carry that pregnancy, and that is because of Donald Trump overturning Roe v. Wade,\" she said.\n\nFocusing on abortion will not be a silver bullet for Democrats. The economy, foreign policy, immigration and inflation are major issues, too, as is concern about Biden's age as he tries to overcome low poll numbers. Many voters are simply turned off by the prospect of a likely 2024 Trump-Biden rematch.\n\nStill, Democrats believe abortion will be a key motivator for base voters and help expand their coalition. Biden aides and allies point to recent elections that have overwhelmingly shown that, when voters can choose, they have chosen to safeguard abortion rights.\n\nThe issue isn't vanishing from the headlines anytime soon, either. The Supreme Court will decide whether to restrict access to medication prescribed for abortion and to treat other reproductive issues. And there is an ongoing stream of stories about the impact of abortion bans, such as the mother who had to sue, then flee, her home state to end her doomed pregnancy.\n\nDemocrats spent decades trying to calibrate their message, always defending the right to choose while also making overtures to voters who are conflicted about the issue. President Bill Clinton's mantra was that abortion should be \"safe, legal and rare.\"\n\nBut the loss of federal abortion protections has been a catalyst for a broader and bolder message about abortion and reproductive rights after the historic setback from the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that overturned Roe.\n\n\"We know that if we talk about this issue as a fundamental freedom, we are able to resonate across demographics - older voters, younger voters, people of color, folks in rural areas,\" said Mini Timmaraju, head of Reproductive Freedom for All, formerly NARAL Pro-Choice America.\n\nBiden aides said the strategy is to let the president be who he is - an 81-year-old Catholic man who doesn't use the word abortion much, preferring to talk instead about the issue in the context of personal freedom.\n\nThe White House often frames the fight as part of a larger battle that involves book bans, voting rights and other social issues. For more aggressive talk about abortion and how the ripple effects of the decision are affecting maternal health, there's Harris.\n\nTimmaraju said those \"different messages resonate with different parts of the electorate.\"\n\nMichigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Democrat and vocal advocate for abortion rights, said it would be good if Biden spoke more forcefully on the topic.\n\n\"I think people want to know that this is a president that is fighting,\" Whitmer told CBS' \"Face the Nation\" on Sunday. \"To use maybe more ... blunt language, maybe that would be helpful.\"\n\nSince the high court overturned Roe, roughly 25 million women now live in states with some type of ban in effect. The impacts are increasingly felt by women who never intended to end their pregnancies, yet have had emergency medical care denied or delayed because of the new restrictions.\n\nAccording to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll, among Democrats, nearly nine in 10 say abortion should generally be legal. Four in 10 say it should be legal in all cases, and nearly half say it should be legal in most cases.\n\nAs for Republicans, the topic was largely absent in the lead-up to this year's Iowa caucuses, a remarkable change in a state that has long backed religious conservatives vowing to restrict the procedure. Part of the change is because Republicans achieved a generational goal with the overturning of Roe. But it also underscores a fear among Republican candidates and voters alike that vocalizing their desire to further restrict abortion rights might be politically dangerous.\n\n\"I am calling the time period we are in now 'the new fight for life,'\" said Benjamin Watson, a former NFL player who is now an anti-abortion advocate. \"Roe is done, but we still live in a culture that knows not how to care for life. Roe is done, but the factors that drive women to seek abortions are ever apparent and ever increasing.\"\n\nOverall, opinions on abortion remain complex, with most people believing it should be allowed in some circumstances and not in others. About two-thirds of U.S. adults say abortion should generally be legal, but only about one-quarter say it should always be legal and only about 1 in 10 say it should always be illegal.\n\nTrump has waffled on the topic. During a recent Fox News town hall, he expressed support for limited exceptions and criticized state laws that ban abortion after six weeks. But he also has promoted his own role.\n\n\"For 54 years they were trying to get Roe v. Wade terminated, and I did it and I'm proud to have done it,\" he said.\n\nThe Biden administration is nearing the limits of what it can do to preserve access to abortion absent congressional legislation. In the immediate aftermath June 24, 2022 Supreme Court decision, the administration quickly tried to flex its regulatory muscle to fight back against Republican efforts to severely restrict abortion. Many efforts have been challenged in court.\n\nBiden had invited states with robust abortion access to apply for Medicaid waivers that would help pay for women to travel for the care. But so far, only California has applied to unlock federal money for the effort.\n\nThe top U.S. health official, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, is on a three-day East Coast tour to talk with doctors and medical students about access to abortion and birth control.\n\n\"This is the beginning of an effort to reach out to all Americans,\" Becerra said, and \"say to the American people how important it is that we stand up at a crucial time.\""}
{"text": "# Trump mocks Nikki Haley's first name. It's his latest example of attacking rivals based on race\nBy **BILL BARROW**  \nJanuary 20, 2024. 9:51 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**ATLANTA (AP)** - Donald Trump used his social media platform Friday to mock Nikki Haley 's birth name, the latest example of the former president keying on race and ethnicity to attack people of color, especially his political rivals.\n\nIn a post on his Truth Social account, Trump repeatedly referred to Haley, the daughter of immigrants from India, as \"Nimbra.\" Haley, the former South Carolina governor, was born in Bamberg, South Carolina, as Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. She has always gone by her middle name, \"Nikki.\" She took the surname \"Haley\" upon her marriage in 1996.\n\nTrump, himself the son, grandson and twice the husband of immigrants, called Haley \"Nimbra\" three times in the post and said she \"doesn't have what it takes.\"\n\nThe attack comes four days before the New Hampshire primary, in which Haley is trying to establish herself as the only viable Trump alternative in the Republicans' 2024 nominating contest.\n\nTrump's post was an escalation of recent attacks in which he referenced Haley's given first name - though he's misspelled it \"Nimrada\" - and falsely asserted she is ineligible for the presidency because her parents were not U.S. citizens when she was born in 1972.\n\nThe attacks echo Trump's \"birther\" rhetoric against President Barack Obama. Trump spent years pushing the conspiracy theory that the nation's first Black president was born in Kenya and not a \"natural born\" U.S. citizen as required by the Constitution. That effort was part of Trump's rise among Republicans' most culturally conservative base ahead of his 2016 election that surprised much of the U.S. political establishment.\n\nHaley has dismissed Trump's latest attacks as proof that she threatens his bid for a third consecutive nomination.\n\n\"I'll let people decide what he means by his attacks,\" Haley told reporters in New Hampshire on Friday when asked about Trump's false assertions that her heritage disqualifies her from the Oval Office. \"What we know is, look, he's clearly insecure if he goes and does these temper tantrums, if he's spending millions of dollars on TV. He's insecure, he knows that something's wrong.\"\n\nTrump's campaign did not reply to an inquiry about his comments.\n\nSince Monday's Iowa caucuses - which Trump won by 30 points over Ron DeSantis, who placed second - Haley has aimed to portray the rest of the GOP primary battle as a two-way race between Trump and herself despite her narrow third-place finish. Haley's campaign is aiming for a stronger showing in New Hampshire, hoping for a springboard into her home state South Carolina, which holds the South's first presidential primary next month.\n\nFor his part, Trump bounces between declarations that the nominating fight is already effectively over and blasting Haley as if the two are indeed locked in a tight contest. Trump still criticizes his other remaining rival, DeSantis, but his preferred pejoratives for the Florida governor, \"Ron DeSanctimonious\" or \"Ron DeSanctus,\" have nothing to do with race or ethnicity. DeSantis is white.\n\nTrump's focus on Haley's name comes as far-right online forums have for months been littered with mentions of her given name alongside racist commentary and false \"birther\" claims. Haley's name and family background also have become talking points on the left. Some widely circulating social media posts have called her a hypocrite for saying America was \"never a racist country\" when she likely experienced racism herself.\n\nPastor Darrell Scott, a Black man who has led a diversity coalition for Trump's previous campaigns, defended the former president's latest attacks as \"slings and arrows\" that come in election season.\n\n\"You have to dissect politics as politics. It's not personal,\" said Scott. \"He's not intending to demean her or degrade her in any way. He's just doing that to garner votes.\"\n\nScott said Trump \"has a compassionate side that most people don't see\" and defended his aggressive approach as a \"goose-and-gander situation\" for a public figure constantly \"under attack for everything.\"\n\nTara Setmayer, senior adviser to the Lincoln Project group that opposes Trump from within the conservative movement, agreed that Trump's rhetoric works in a Republican primary. But she said that's a damning reality for the party and does not excuse his behavior.\n\n\"These are the rantings of an incredibly, almost pathetically insecure man who has demonstrated over his entire career his racism and bigotry,\" said Setmayer, who is multiracial and calls herself a former Republican and now a conservative independent. \"Why would anyone expect it to be any different now, when an entire political party has enabled this level of morally questionable behavior?\"\n\nAmid the fallout Friday, Trump won the endorsement of South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the Senate's only Black Republican and formerly a presidential candidate himself. Haley appointed Scott to the Senate in 2012, during her first term as governor.\n\nTrump has a long history of using race, ethnicity and immigrant heritage as a cudgel.\n\nFor years, he has referred to Obama as \"Barack Hussein Obama,\" putting an obvious emphasis on the 44th president's middle name. Obama was the son of a white American mother and a Black father from Kenya. He was born in Hawaii, though Trump spent years asserting Obama had manufactured the story and a birth certificate to support it. Trump eventually admitted his claims were false but then, during the 2016 general election, said he did so only to \"get on with the campaign.\"\n\nWhen David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, encouraged Republican primary voters to back Trump in 2016, Trump responded in a CNN interview that he knew \"nothing about David Duke, I know nothing about white supremacists.\"\n\nTrump is also among many Republicans who deliberately mispronounce Vice President Kamala Harris's name. Rather than the correct \"KA'-ma-la,\" Trump sometimes says, \"Ka-MAH-la.\" Harris, who is of Indian and Jamaican descent, is the first woman to become vice president and the third non-white person as either president or vice president, following Obama and Charles Curtis, Herbert Hoover's vice president who had Native American ancestry.\n\nLeading up to Trump's 2017 inauguration, civil rights icon John Lewis, then a Black congressman from Georgia, said he would not attend Trump's inauguration because he considered him an illegitimate president. Trump reacted by blasting Lewis's Atlanta-based district as being in \"horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested).\" The district includes downtown Atlanta, Coca-Cola's world headquarters, the Georgia Institute of Technology and principal sites of the 1996 Olympic Games, among other attributes.\n\nDuring his presidency, Trump questioned during a meeting with lawmakers why the U.S. would accept immigrants from Haiti and \"shithole countries\" across Africa instead of countries like Norway. He did not explicitly mention race but the White House followed disclosure of his comments with a statement explaining that Trump supported granting access to the U.S. for \"those who can contribute to our society.\"\n\nHe also has said that four congresswomen of color should go back to the \"broken and crime infested\" countries they came from, ignoring the fact that all of the women are American citizens and three were born in the U.S.\n\nTrump's mother was born Mary Anne MacLeod in Scotland and came to the United States between the two world wars. His paternal grandfather, Frederick Trump, was a Bavarian-born immigrant from Germany in the 1880s. Trump's first wife, Ivana Zelníčková before their marriage, was born in what is now the Czech Republic. His third wife, former first lady Melania Trump, was born Melanija Knavs in what is now Slovenia. That means four of Trump's five children also are children of immigrants.\n\nHaley frames her family's story as proof that the U.S. \"is not a racist country.\" She sometimes highlights her role in taking down the Confederate battle flag from South Carolina statehouse grounds after a racist massacre in her state - though she had sidestepped requests to remove the banner earlier in her term. And Haley has for years navigated Trump's penchant for racist rhetoric.\n\n\"I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the KKK,\" Haley said during the 2016 primary campaign after she had endorsed Florida Sen. Marco Rubio over Trump. \"That is not a part of our party; that is not who we want as president.\""}
{"text": "# GOP Speaker Mike Johnson has a House majority in name only. He's left with daunting choices ahead\nBy **LISA MASCARO**  \nJanuary 20, 2024. 9:01 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - New Speaker Mike Johnson finds himself leading House Republicans with a majority in name only.\n\nUnable to unite his unruly right flank and commanding one of the slimmest House majorities in history, Johnson is being forced to rely on Democrats for the basics of governing, including the latest bill to prevent a federal shutdown.\n\nApproaching his first 100 days on the job, Johnson faces daunting choices ahead. He can try to corral conservatives, who are pushing rightward in endless hours of closed-door meetings, to work together as a team. Or he can keep reaching out to Democrats for a bipartisan coalition to pass compromise legislation.\n\nSo far, rather than the speaker of a dysfunctional GOP majority, Johnson, R-La., has shown he is willing to compile a rare, large supermajority of Democrats and Republicans to get things done with Democratic President Joe Biden.\n\nAnd that supermajority is exactly what some in Congress want, but others fear is coming.\n\n\"Everyone understands the reality of where we are,\" Johnson said at a weekly news conference.\n\n\"The House Republicans have the second-smallest majority in history,\" he said. \"We're not going to get everything that we want. But we're going to stick to our core conservative principles.\"\n\nJohnson is about as conservative as they come in Washington. He's a \"movement\" conservative steeped in Christian beliefs who made his way from Louisiana working in the trenches of hard-right social policy, particularly against abortion, gay rights and other issues.\n\nElected in 2016, Johnson has become aligned with Donald Trump who won the White House that year, and Johnson led a key legal challenge for Trump in 2020 trying to overturn Biden's election.\n\nFor now, the far-right forces that ousted Johnson's predecessor, former Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, from the speaker's office, are allowing a grace period. They are frustrated by Johnson's reluctance to take dramatic action such as a government shutdown to win their priorities. But they are heartened that at least Johnson is forthcoming with them.\n\nBut the hard-line Republicans are watching and waiting - any single lawmaker can file a motion for a vote to oust the speaker - especially as Johnson confronts the challenges ahead on government spending, U.S. border security and wars in Ukraine and Gaza.\n\n\"It's a loss for the American people to join hands with Democrats to form a governing coalition,\" said Virginia Rep. Bob Good, the newly elected chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, after last week's vote to keep government running.\n\nGood complained that passage of the short-term spending bill, which Biden signed into law before the Friday midnight deadline, was \"a failure.\"\n\nJohnson will confront another shutdown threat March 1 when some of the temporary funding again runs out.\n\nMore immediately, Johnson and House Republicans are warily watching Senate negotiations over an immigration and border security package designed to reduce the record flow of migrants and expedite the deportations of some of those who have already entered the United States illegally.\n\nBiden is considering the emerging border deal as part of his broader $110 billion national security package, which has grown urgent as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's forces need to replenish weaponry in their fight against Russia's invasion.\n\nBut such a deal swapping border policy for Ukraine aid could be politically devastating for Johnson, whose Trump-aligned Republicans want an even harder line against the migrants at the U.S-Mexico border and a more isolationist approach to U.S. foreign policy that rejects Ukraine aid.\n\nBiden hosted congressional leaders at the White House this past week, surrounding the new speaker with prominent and influential voices, including the chairmen of the national security committees, to impress on Johnson the weight of the challenges ahead.\n\nIt put the speaker in a central seat of U.S. power.\n\nThe top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Adam Smith of Washington state, spoke up at one point during the White House meeting. He made a pitch to Johnson.\n\n\"The argument I made to him was, 'You know, the border is not going to be 'solved,'\" Smith recalled.\n\nSmith told Johnson there is no \"magic piece of legislation\" that will suddenly end the countless numbers of migrants pouring northward.\n\n\"But we can make it better,\" Smith said.\n\n\"So make it better,\" Smith went on. \"And I said, 'You know, politically, you are still going to be in a position to bash Democrats on the border. That's not going away.'\"\n\nSmith added, \"So why don't you do something good for the border, do something good for Ukraine, and you still got your politics. And it's a win, win win.\"\n\nAnd Johnson's response?\n\n\"He didn't say anything,\" Smith said.\n\nHovering over Johnson's speakership is Trump, the former president who elevated McCarthy to the speakership but then did not save him from removal. Trump is now the party's front-runner for the presidential nomination in 2024 to challenge Biden for the White House.\n\nJohnson and Trump talk often, but some of Trump's strongest allies in the House are those conservatives pushing the speaker rightward and denying him a governing majority.\n\nTrump signaled his skepticism of the emerging border deal but also his trust, for now, in the speaker's ability to drive the hardest bargain possible for Republicans.\n\nIn many ways, Johnson finds himself living day to day, much the way McCarthy was, trying to keep Congress functioning, and hold on to his job.\n\n\"Speaker Johnson is in a 24-hour survival mode,\" said Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a key Democratic negotiator on the border package. \"He needs to say whatever he needs to say in order to survive Wednesday to Thursday, and Thursday to Friday.\"\n\nThe vote late last week to prevent a shutdown exposed the limits of Johnson's grasp on his majority.\n\nRepublicans control the House by just a few seats, 220-213. That number will drop over the weekend, when one of the many lawmakers who have already announced their retirements leaves early. Absences, illnesses and weather delays trim the numbers further.\n\nWhen voting was underway, 107 Republicans were voting against the temporary spending bill and 106 voted for it, which would have been a politically embarrassing outcome if not even a majority of Johnson's majority was on board.\n\nBy the time the gavel struck closing the voting, the bill was overwhelmingly approved, with Democrats and Republicans, 314-108. The final tally was 107 Republicans in favor of the bill, 106 Republicans against.\n\n\"He's doing the best he can,\" said Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a failed rival for the speaker's gavel. \"Mike's a good guy, a friend, and it's a tough position but he's doing the best he can.\""}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Ava DuVernay's 'Origin' is a powerful, artful, interpretation of 'Caste'\nBy **LINDSEY BAHR**  \nJanuary 17, 2024. 9:26 AM EST\n\n---\n\nWords like \"important\" and \"vital\" are thrown around possibly a little too much in film criticism. It's not that we don't mean it - it's just that sometimes we (ok, I) can get a bit excited. And when watching and reviewing good films in real time, it's impossible to know what is yet to come. Will there be something else that makes that superlative seem silly in retrospect? Often times, yes.\n\nAva DuVernay's new film \"Origin\" is that something else. It is a powerful and artistic interpretation of an academic book that was anything but an obvious candidate for a narrative feature.\n\nThe book in question is \"Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,\" in which Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson offers an overriding theory about power and hierarchy and systemic dehumanization in social structures, connecting the Black experience in America to the Dalits of India and Jewish people in Nazi Germany. The New York Times reviewer called it one of the most powerful non-fiction books he'd ever encountered and \"the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.\"\n\nThat \"Caste\" was appealing to DuVernay, who has made documentaries like \"13th,\" connecting slavery to mass incarceration of Black men, is not surprising. What's she's done with it is. Instead of rehashing the facts of the book, DuVernay has turned \"Caste\" into an investigative, fictionalized drama in which we follow the character Isabel Wilkerson as she puts the pieces together while her life crumbles.\n\nWith an unconventional structure, in which we are often transported to different stories in different times, in the American South, Nazi Germany and early 20th century India, \"Origin\" is nonetheless alarmingly effective, a riveting and haunting journey to a kind of enlightenment.\n\nWilkerson is played beautifully by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, an actor deep enough to engage with the academic and intellectual inquiries of the film, and charismatic enough to make what sounds like homework absorbing. Hers is the kind of 360-degree Black woman that we don't see leading films very often: She is at once confident and full of doubt and vulnerability, accomplished but searching, determined and still wary. And she's unafraid to pursue her hunch that everyone, civilians and book editors alike, seems to be telling her isn't worth it.\n\nThis is a character who is surrounded by love when we meet her, with a fairly perfect and supportive husband (Jon Bernthal), her aging mother Ruby (Emily Yancy) and a cousin/confidant in Marion (Niecy Nash-Betts). She is not immediately interested in an assignment about Trayvon Martin, and is a bit stuck knowing that whatever she does, she'll have to give herself over fully to it. In \"Origin,\" a push comes in the form of loss and her research takes on a vital urgency to, not to be too hyperbolic, figure out why everything is rotten before she too leaves the earth.\n\nDuVernay takes us into her findings as Wilkerson learns about a group of Harvard students, two Black, two white, who integrate themselves into a segregated Southern community to study it, a Nazi party member who fell in love with a Jewish woman, and an Indian intellectual who rose out of his lowly caste and advocated for Dalit rights. They feel a bit like different movies. But while it might not be the most elegantly stitched together anthology, it works on a gut level. DuVernay and Ellis-Taylor commit to the big swing, and audiences who give it a chance may find themselves changed - or at least a little more curious, a little more alert - because of it.\n\nIs it premature to say that \"Origin\" might just be DuVernay's magnum opus? Well, perhaps. But hopefully it's the start of a vibrant and bold new era of storytelling for her, with those pesky wrinkles in time firmly in the rearview mirror.\n\n\"Origin,\" a Neon release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for \"scenes of violence.\" Running time: 135 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: Still trying to make 'fetch' happen, now in song: 'Mean Girls' gets a musical update\nBy **JOCELYN NOVECK**  \nJanuary 12, 2024. 7:08 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThe first \"Mean Girls,\" that compulsively watchable high-school based social satire by Tina Fey, came out in 2004. The Broadway musical opened in 2018. Now it's 2024, and we have a screen adaptation of the theater adaptation. How long will this reconfiguring go on? Is there a limit?\n\nOr ... does the limit not exist?\n\nForgive us that utterly blatant setup for one of the original's most famous lines. It's just that some of them are so darned memorable. Like, \"You can't sit with us!\" - screeched. Or when Regina, the haughtiest queen bee ever to carry a cafeteria tray, scathingly tells her minion Gretchen, who's trying out her new word \"fetch,\" to \"Stop trying to make 'fetch' happen. It's NOT going to happen!!\"\n\nBut even in \"Mean Girls 17,\" should it come to that, someone will still be trying to make \"fetch\" happen. And it's actually not a bad word to describe the experience of watching the new \"Mean Girls\" - a slick, fizzy bit of entertainment that's occasionally delightful and usually fun, even if the translation to 2024 definitely has its rough spots.\n\nIf you've recently re-watched the first film, you may be surprised here at how many lines remain, word for word. What's impressive is how many still work - unlike some social comedies that felt right 20 years ago but have scenes that fall with a thud now (see \"Love Actually\").\n\nThere are exceptions, though. I'll confess to feeling queasy throughout about the \"dumb girl\" character who remains in the Plastics, Regina's social group. There is, thankfully, no more reference to a coach sleeping with a student, which would not have been funny, even with Jon Hamm as the coach. Slut-shaming has been conspicuously toned down - the insult in Regina's famous Burn Book is now \"cow\" and not \"slut.\"\n\nOn the other hand, fat-shaming? That's still there, as when the camera zooms in rudely on the rear end of a character who's gained a few pounds.\n\nAs for the casting, some of it works wonderfully, particularly the duo who introduce the film, which is again written by Fey, with music by Jeff Richmond (her husband), and lyrics by Nell Benjamin. Damian, the beloved character described affectionately by Janis as \"almost too gay to function\" (but that's only OK when she says it), and Janis, his best friend, a talented artist whose fallout with Regina left her in the dirt socially, function almost as quasi-narrators. Jaquel Spivey, of Broadway's \"A Strange Loop,\" is hilarious and also moving as Damian - you wait for each new line, and he wastes none of them. And Auli'i Cravalho as Janis has a gorgeous voice and charismatic screen presence. (And a huge song, though from the trailer, you wouldn't know anyone has songs at all.)\n\nAngourie Rice is the new Cady, the Lindsay Lohan role, a home-schooled math whiz who arrives in suburban Chicago straight from Kenya, where her mother was doing zoological research, into the snake pit of high school. Rice is a sweet presence but not as convincing in the \"bad Cady\" moments as Lohan. As for the Plastics, singer Reneé Rapp, formerly Regina on Broadway, imbues the role with powerhouse vocals and an angrier edge than the excellent Rachel McAdams did - when she's enraged, boy, you feel it.\n\nOnce again, Cady begins her first school day in math class with Ms. Norbury, once played by Fey - and again by Fey! Tim Meadows is also back as the principal; both look older but certainly not two decades.\n\nCady has a rough entry and ends up eating lunch in a bathroom stall, but is rescued by Janis and Damian. In the cafeteria, she has her first encounter with Queen Bee Regina. \"My name is Regina George,\" sings Rapp, in some of the show's best lyrics, \"I am a massive deal. I don't care who you are, I don't care how you feel.\"\n\nThe Plastics - Regina, needy Gretchen (Bebe Woods) and intellectually challenged Karen (Avantika) - adopt Cady and teach her the rules: Wear pink on Wednesdays. No tank tops two days in a row. A ponytail? Once a week. Also: You can't date someone's ex-boyfriend, because those are \"the rules of feminism.\" At such moments, one can literally hear Fey writing the line. (Side note: Please come back to the Golden Globes, Tina, and bring Amy Poehler.) (Speaking of Poehler, she is missed as Regina's \"cool\" mom, but aptly replaced by Busy Philipps.)\n\nThings go south quickly when Cady falls for Regina's ex, Aaron, who sits in front of her in AP Calculus (leading to the excellent lyric \"Calcu-lust.\") Regina isn't going to give up Aaron without a dirty fight. So Cady, aided by Damian and Janis, plots to bring Regina down from inside, pretending to be a loyal Plastic.\n\nBut at what point does Cady stop pretending and BECOME a Plastic? (Ask Janis.)\n\nDirectors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. keep the action moving briskly. A key visual difference is technology. In the 2004 film, friends spoke to each other on the telephone, in split screens. Now, of course, gossip and bullying take place via social media. In some ways this makes it all seem more vicious. When Regina takes an embarrassing tumble onstage at the Christmas performance, we witness a social media shaming that is much crueler than anything that happened in the 2004 version.\n\nAnd yet, it's believable, of course. One comes away from this latest \"Mean Girls\" thinking that in some ways things may have gotten better for high schoolers than they were in 2004 - but in other ways, things have only gotten meaner.\n\n\"Mean Girls,\" a Paramount Pictures release, has been rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association \"for sexual material, strong language, and teen drinking. \" Running time: 105 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Review: In the bonkers 'The Beekeeper,' Jason Statham has more than a bee in his bonnet\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nJanuary 10, 2024. 6:44 PM EST\n\n---\n\nSecret agents and murderous assassins seem to lurk in increasingly mundane places.\n\nRemember \"The Accountant\" with Ben Affleck? Or \"The Tax Collector\" with Shia LaBeouf? Or more recently, how about \"The Bricklayer\" with Adam Eckhardt? You probably don't - none of these films were exactly Oscar winners. But there's probably a notary public somewhere wondering when he's going to get his Liam Neeson treatment.\n\n\"The Beekeeper,\" the new Jason Statham revenge thriller, may have them all beaten - or at least bee-ten. The film, directed by David Ayer (who also did \"The Tax Collector\") has found probably the widest disparity yet between innocuous occupation and savage killer. As bodies accrue, so do the double takes from those confused by the source of all the mayhem. Again and again they utter in disbelief: \"A beekeeper?\"\n\nBelieve it, honey. \"The Beekeeper\" carries that ludicrous premise as far as it can, and then well beyond. If you've been searching for a movie where Jason Statham gravely vows to \"protect the hive\" an implausible number of times, you have found it.\n\nThe bee metaphors - there is even, rather impressively, a \"To bee or not to bee\" reference - come fast and furious in \"The Beekeeper,\" a movie that flirts with a so-bad-it's-good vibe but is too serious to quite pull it off. It can be divertingly bonkers, but ends up a rather grim and slipshod \"John Wick\" ripoff.\n\nThe film, scripted by Kurt Wimmer, begins the action with one of the more absurd inciting incidents in recent memory. Statham is a humble beekeeper for Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad) on a New England farm. She soon falls victim to a phishing scam that robs her of all her money, including the $2 million charity fund she manages. Eloise calls a number that pops up on her screen and is talked into sharing her passwords by a smarmy scammer (David Witts) who's simultaneously using the call as a lesson to a room full of hackers who cheer him on like the predatory stock brokers of \"The Wolf of Wall Street.\"\n\nEloise doesn't press CTRL-ALT-DELETE or even call the fraud department of her bank. She kills herself. And guess who's mad? The beekeeper.\n\nEloise's daughter, Verona (a good Emmy Raver-Lampman), is an FBI agent who throws herself into the case. But meanwhile Statham's beekeeper, after a well-placed call, gets the location of the call center. He turns up with a few tanks of gasoline and some terse words about, you know, the hive, and burns down the place, killing a few people along the way.\n\nThat brings the attention of higher-ups. Only the guy in charge is a 28-year-old twerp named Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson, enjoying himself) who brashly underestimates his new enemy at every step of the way. His entitlement is owed to his rather good connections. He's protected by the former head of the CIA, Wallace Westwyld (Jeremy Irons) and happens to be the son of the U.S. president (Jemma Redgrave).\n\nFingers get cut off and bodies accumulate as our man - his name turns out to be Adam Clay - tears through the criminal apparatus with ruthless blunt force. Statham, who has both the look and personality of a bullet, dispatches anyone in his path with the kind efficiency I dream of bringing to opening a pickle jar. A few twists of the wrist and he's done.\n\nClay, brace yourselves, isn't just an actual beekeeper. He's a retired Beekeeper, an elite, clandestine secret service that operates well off the government books and that adopts a surprising amount of its mission statements from the natural way of bees. They have a whole secret order and stuff, bringing \"The Beekeeper\" into plainly \"Wick\"-ian - and less fun - territory.\n\nYes, this silly beekeeper thriller goes all the way to the top. As the movie's renegade protagonist makes his way closer and closer to the White House, with blood and chaos in his wake, \"The Beekeeper\" begins to feel like an uncomfortable B-movie crosspollination of today's conspiracy theory-marred political landscape, with a violent, self-appointed guardian of America slashing his way toward the president. Most of the dead bodies are secret service.\n\nDisquieting thoughts, maybe, for a beekeeper movie. Ayer's movie is mostly just having some cynical world-building fun, even if its hero feels like a part more suited to Mr. Bean. And, besides, while John Wick was first propelled into action by the death of his dog, Clay doesn't bat an eye when his honeycombs get blown to smithereens. This guy doesn't even really care about bees.\n\n\"The Beekeeper\" an MGM release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong violence throughout, pervasive language, some sexual references and drug use. Running time: 105 minutes. Two stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Movie Review: In 'I.S.S.,' war on Earth disrupts life aboard the International Space Station\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nJanuary 17, 2024. 5:16 PM EST\n\n---\n\nWith war raging in Ukraine and U.S.-Russia relations below freezing, the Cold War movie may be alive, again, too.\n\nAfter decades when fears of mutual destruction and nuclear fallout filtered into movies from \"Fail Safe\" to \"WarGames,\" anxiety over current Russian-American geopolitics plays a provocative role in the new space thriller \"I.S.S.\"\n\nGabriela Cowperthwaite's film, opening in theaters Friday, is set aboard the International Space Station, which the opening credits note is a symbol of post-Cold War U.S.-Russia collaboration. The astronauts and cosmonauts are a friendly band of fellow scientists, but that harmony is significantly challenged when bombs begin falling across the Earth's surface. Gazing down below, bioengineer Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose) initially thinks the bright flashes all over North America are volcano eruptions.\n\nIt's an intriguing premise that \"I.S.S.\" can't translate into a coherent thriller. But it's striking that exactly 60 years after \"Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,\" we are again offered the chance to sit in the dark and contemplate the horror of a speculative U.S.-Russia war. History may not repeat itself, but movie genres might.\n\nOne reason why \"I.S.S.\" isn't successful, though, is that it feels more cribbed from past Cold War movies than it does any current reality. It was penned by Nick Shafir, whose script landed on the Black List in 2020, several years before the war in Ukraine began. And its chamber-piece framework - the space station is essentially the film's sole setting - carries over many of the dynamics that defined Cold War movies of the late 20th century. Among the three Americans and three Russians on board are hawks and doves; each nationality mirrors the other.\n\nKira is the new arrival at the space station. Nearly everything is shared, she's told, and talking politics is a no-no. \"We definitely don't talk about what's going on down there,\" she's told. From space, it's said, there are no visible borders on the planet below.\n\nCommander Gordon Barrett (Chris Messina) heads up the American group. It's he who gets an urgent transmission from Houston after the war has started. It's mildly charming to think that amid nuclear fallout, someone will be immediately concerned with the fate of a floating science lab. (\"Abort the experiments!\") But the message also supplies an ominous new mission: Take control of the space station.\n\nA new suspicion grips the I.S.S. The Russian contingent - Weronika (Masha Mashkova), Alexey (Pilou Asbaek) and Nichola (Costa Ronin) - likewise grows more wary of their cohabitants. Allegiances get tested, particularly in the case of Gordon and Weronika, who seem more than colleagues. Cowperthwaite ( \"Blackfish,\"\"Our Friend\" ) doesn't have the knack for close-quarters suspense that might have led to something more like a low-budget, geopolitical \"Gravity.\" But she's also not done favors by the script's clumsy twists. Is a zero-gravity repair mission outside the space station the best thing for Gordon to do moments after the onset of global warfare?\n\nBut \"I.S.S.\" will suffice as a high-concept B-movie. And given how much mileage the movies once got out of Soviet villains, it may just be the beginning of a new cycle. It's notable that of the film's plot machinations, all-out warfare wasn't the least implausible invention.\n\n\"I.S.S.,\" a Bleecker Street release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for some violence and language. Running time: 95 minutes. Two stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Nikki Haley tries to draw New Hampshire's independents without alienating voters who backed Trump\nBy **HOLLY RAMER**  \nJanuary 21, 2024. 10:20 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**CONCORD, N.H. (AP)** - Richard Anderson drove through a snowstorm last week to see his preferred candidate in New Hampshire's Republican primary. But he's not sure how far he'll go to support her if she wins the nomination.\n\nAnderson, a 73-year-old independent voter from Jackson, liked what he heard from Nikki Haley at the Mount Washington Hotel. But he disagrees with the former U.N. ambassador's plan to pardon former President Donald Trump if he is convicted of any of the crimes he's been charged with.\n\n\"That bothers me,\" he said. \"I'll still vote for her in the primary, but I'll wait to see if she's still saying that in the general election.\"\n\nHaley's best shot at shaking Trump's grip on the Republican nomination rests with her ability to attract New Hampshire's independent voters - including some who might not stick with her in November - without alienating too many conservatives. Other Republicans have hit the right balance here, notably John McCain in two GOP primary victories. But those wins came long before Trump's rise in politics and the Republicans' rightward shifts both in the state and nationally.\n\n\"It's a very difficult needle to thread,\" said Nathan Shrader, an associate professor of politics at New England College, \"because if she makes too much of an overt play for the independent voters, that could be a turnoff for some of the Republicans who we know in the Trump era are more conservative than they might have been a generation ago.\"\n\nDemocrats can't vote in the GOP primary, but voters unaffiliated with a party - who make up nearly 40% of registered voters in New Hampshire - can. That makes them a key target, though they aren't a monolith.\n\nA CNN/University of New Hampshire poll released Sunday found that a majority of registered Republicans likely to vote in the primary - 67% - said they planned to vote for Trump. But a majority of those registered as undeclared - 58% - said they support Haley.\n\nThe poll, taken Tuesday through Friday, also found more registered Republicans in the state view Haley unfavorably (47%) than favorably (31%). Trump, meanwhile is viewed favorably by 76% of registered Republicans and unfavorably by just 16%.\n\nHaley was viewed favorably by 42% of people who have registered themselves as undeclared, while 32% viewed her unfavorably. Just 34% of the same group, by contrast, views Trump favorably, compared with 59% unfavorably.\n\nSome Haley supporters interviewed at her events are left-leaning voters who have little ideological overlap with Haley but are intent on stopping Trump. Others lean Republican and agree with her policies.\n\nCorinne Pullen is a blend of both. Pullen, a retired 68-year-old nurse from Canterbury, said she's impressed with Haley's \"strict and strong\" foreign policies and her plans to decrease federal spending. She considers Trump a \"narcissistic braggadocio buffoon.\"\n\n\"When I compare these two candidates, it is a no-brainer who I would feel comfortable and safe having in the White House,\" she said.\n\nTrump has turned that crossover appeal into an attack line, suggesting that Haley is being propped up by \"radical left Democrats.\" The former president's campaign argues Haley will struggle with conservatives in closed primaries like that of her home-state South Carolina, where the Feb. 24 primary is the next big matchup for her and Trump.\n\n\"Her entire focus at this point in time ... has been about turning out Democrats and behavioral Democrats to hijack the Republican primary in New Hampshire,\" Trump senior advisor Chris LaCivita told reporters this month.\n\nAs if to underscore that point, Trump on Saturday arranged for South Carolina's current governor, lieutenant governor, and several other elected leaders to come to New Hampshire to campaign with him. The day before, he won a rousing endorsement from South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, whom Haley appointed to the Senate when she was governor.\n\nHaley, however, dismissed that move.\n\n\"I won South Carolina twice as governor,\" she said recently. \"I think I know what favorable territory is in South Carolina. We are going to South Carolina. We're going to be strong in South Carolina.\" She added: \"The road is never going to stop here in New Hampshire, that's always been the plan.\"\n\nDante Scala, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire, is skeptical that Haley can pull together a strong and diverse enough coalition to top Trump in Tuesday's primary. Even if she did, \"how do you duplicate that elsewhere?\" he asked. \"The answer is, you don't. I don't think you can pull off that magic trick in state after state.\"\n\nUnlike McCain, who openly appealed to \"Republicans, independents, Democrats, Libertarians, vegetarians, all of them,\" Haley doesn't mention independents in her stump speech. But the super PAC backing her is filling its mailboxes with fliers citing her endorsement from New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a Trump critic, and her plans on the economy and debt reduction.\n\nHaley described herself to reporters Thursday as \"a conservative that knows how to talk to moderates and independents and not make them feel bad, but make them feel included.\"\n\nAt the same time, she pushed back against criticism from Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that she isn't conservative enough.\n\n\"Show me where I'm moderate, because I'm not,\" she said.\n\nThat didn't stop Vermont Gov. Phil Scott, a moderate Republican who voted for Biden in 2020, from endorsing her on Saturday and urging New Hampshire voters to \"showcase their deep-rooted independent streak.\" And it doesn't bother independent voter Kristen Mansharamani, who described herself as \"further left\" than Haley on abortion, education and other issues but said she believes Haley would be a unifying leader.\n\n\"I told my 12-year-old son that I am looking for the person who I think is going to get rid of some of the standstill and the polarization in politics and I think she can do that better than anyone else out there right now,\" said Mansharamani, 48, of Lincoln.\n\nIn Iowa, Haley was the top candidate for the most anti-Trump Republicans, including those who said the former president did something illegal in one of the pending criminal cases against him, according to data from AP VoteCast, a wide-ranging survey of likely Iowa voters before they entered the caucuses.. Two-thirds of Haley's caucusgoers said they would not ultimately vote for Trump in the general election.\n\nIn New Hampshire, some anti-Trump independents supporting Haley say they aren't sure whether they'd back her in a general election either.\n\nAmy Watson, a 59-year-old oral surgeon from Hollis, praised Haley's tenure as U.N. ambassador and governor but said Haley's views on environmental issues may be a dealbreaker in November.\n\n\"As things transpire, I think I'm going to consider what she has to say,\" she said. \"I'm very much concerned about global warming, so that's one area where she may lose me.\""}
{"text": "# Latest EPA assessment shows almost no improvement in river and stream nitrogen pollution\nBy **MELINA WALLING** and **MICHAEL PHILLIS**  \nJanuary 21, 2024. 9:40 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**ST. LOUIS (AP)** - The nation's rivers and streams remain stubbornly polluted with nutrients that contaminate drinking water and fuel a gigantic dead zone for aquatic life in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a recently released Environmental Protection Agency assessment.\n\nIt's a difficult problem that's concentrated in agricultural regions that drain into the Mississippi River. More than half of the basin's miles of rivers and streams were in poor condition for nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer that drains into waterways, the agency found. For decades, federal and state officials have struggled to control farm runoff, the biggest source of nutrient pollution that is not typically federally regulated.\n\nIt's a problem only expected to get harder to control as climate change produces more intense storms that dump rain on the Midwest and South. Those heavy rains flood farm fields, pick up commercial fertilizers and carry them into nearby rivers.\n\n\"It's really worrying that we are clearly not meeting the goals that we've set for ourselves,\" said Olivia Dorothy, director of river restoration with the conservation group American Rivers.\n\nThe assessment is based on samples collected in 2018 and 2019 and it allows experts to compare river conditions from previous rounds of sampling, although different sampling sites were used. It takes years for the agency to compile the results and release the report, which is the most comprehensive assessment of the nation's river and stream health. Phosphorus levels dipped slightly while nitrogen levels remained almost exactly the same.\n\nAbout half of all river miles were found to be in poor condition for snails, worms, beetles and other bottom dwelling species that are an important indicator of biological health of the river. About a third were also rated as having poor conditions for fish based on species diversity.\n\n\"Controlling pollution is a big job. It is hard work,\" said Tom Wall, director of watershed restoration, assessment and protection division at EPA. \"Things are not getting worse, despite the tremendous pressures on our waterways. And we would like to see more progress.\"\n\nWater pollution from factories and industry is typically federally regulated. The Biden administration recently proposed toughening regulations on meat and poultry processing plants to reduce pollution, Wall said.\n\nWhen nutrient pollution flows into the Gulf of Mexico, it spurs growth of bacteria that consume oxygen. That creates a so-called \"dead zone,\" a vast area where it's difficult or impossible for marine animals to survive, fluctuating from about the size of Rhode Island to the size of New Jersey, according to Nancy Rabalais, professor of oceanography and wetland studies at Louisiana State University.\n\nThat affects the productivity of commercial fisheries and marine life in general, but nutrient pollution is also damaging upstream. Too much nitrate in drinking water can affect how blood carries oxygen, causing human health problems like headaches, nausea and abdominal cramps. It can especially affect infants, sometimes inducing \"blue baby syndrome,\" which causes the skin to take on a bluish hue.\n\nThe EPA established the hypoxia task force in the late 1990s to reduce nutrient pollution and shrink the dead zone, but it relies on voluntary efforts to reduce farm runoff and hasn't significantly reduced the dead zone.\n\nAnne Schechinger, Midwest director with the Environmental Working Group, said new regulations are needed, not voluntary efforts. She said the Biden administration has done a lot to improve drinking water, but not enough to reduce agricultural runoff.\n\nMethods to prevent runoff include building buffers between farmland and waterways, creating new wetlands to filter pollutants and applying less fertilizer.\n\nIt's a politically fraught issue, especially in major Midwest farming states that significantly contribute to the problem. Many of those states cite their voluntary conservation programs as evidence they're taking on the problem, yet the new EPA data shows little progress.\n\nMinnesota is one of the few states that has a so-called \"buffer law\" that requires vegetation to be planted along rivers, streams and public drainage ditches. But because groundwater and surface water are closely connected in much of the Upper Midwest, nutrient pollution can end up leaching underground through farm fields and eventually bypass those buffers, ending up in streams anyway, said Gregory Klinger, who works for the Olmsted County, Minnesota soil and water conservation district.\n\nThere should also be a focus on preventing over-fertilizing - about 30% of farmers are still using more than the recommended amounts of fertilizer on their fields, said Brad Carlson, an extension educator with the University of Minnesota who communicates with farmers about nutrient pollution issues.\n\nMartin Larsen, a farmer and conservation technician in southeast Minnesota, said he and other farmers are interested in practices that reduce their nutrient pollution. He's broken up his typical corn and soybean rotation with oats and medium red clover, the latter a kind of plant that can increase nitrogen levels in the soil naturally. He's been able to get by with about half as much fertilizer for a corn crop that follows a clover planting as compared to a corn-corn rotation.\n\nGrowing oats and red clover as cover crops improves soil, too. But Larsen said it's difficult for many farmers to plant them when they often rely on an immediate payback for anything they grow. Cover crops are planted on just 5.1% of harvested farmland, according to 2017 data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.\n\nLarsen said since regulations are so unpopular, more should be done to incentivize better practices. For example, he said that could include companies shifting the makeup of feed they use for animals, giving farmers an opening to plant some crops that use less fertilizer. Or government programs that do more to subsidize things like cover crops.\n\nHe said that many farmers in his community acknowledge the need to do things differently. \"But we also feel very trapped in the system,\" he said."}
{"text": "# Much of US still gripped by Arctic weather as Memphis deals with numerous broken water pipes\nBy **TRAVIS LOLLER**  \nJanuary 21, 2024. 2:28 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP)** - Much of the U.S. remained gripped by deadly Arctic weather Sunday - with subfreezing conditions reaching as far south as Texas and Florida. But the numbing cold is expected to ease up in the coming days.\n\nNationally, winter storms this month have claimed at least 67 lives around the U.S., many involving hypothermia or road accidents.\n\nOn Sunday, crews in Memphis, Tennessee continued to work around the clock to find and fix broken pipes that were causing low water pressure throughout the system. Some residents have been without running water for days, and all of the utility's 400,000 customers continued to be under a boil water notice.\n\nMemphis Light, Gas and Water President and CEO Doug McGowen said in a video posted to social media on Saturday evening that he hopes to have an estimate of when pressure will be restored on Sunday afternoon.\n\n\"Hang in there,\" McGowen said. \"Neighbors help neighbors.\"\n\nAs of Saturday afternoon, the utility had repaired 36 broken water mains and more than 2,000 leaks in homes and businesses. As temperatures began to rise above freezing on Sunday, more leaks were expected to become apparent. McGowen asked residents to stop dripping faucets once things warmed up, a measure that would add 5 to 10 million gallons a day to the system and help restore water pressure.\n\nRhodes College, in Memphis, began sending residential students home on Saturday and moving those who could not return home to hotels. The school was planning virtual classes on Monday and Tuesday.\n\n\"We ask that you NOT come to campus either day due to the ongoing water situation and the hazards that creates,\" the school announcement said.\n\nSam Roth is a junior majoring in politics, philosophy and economics who drove back home to Nashville rather than staying in a hotel where he would still be required to boil water.\n\n\"Our faucets stopped working, and they said not to use any of the restrooms on our floor, and our showers were not working very well either,\" he said of the situation in his dormitory.\n\n\"It's a little annoying, but the school's doing everything they can to accommodate everyone,\" he said. \"I just feel worse for the people that are without water in the city that don't have a hotel they can go stay at.\"\n\nRestaurants and bars were using bottled water to serve customers on Sunday. Some restaurants remained closed, citing the water issue, while others had a modified menu. Cafe Eclectic was open but not serving espresso drinks.\n\nMemphis was the largest, but not the only, water system in Tennessee to experience problems from the unusually cold weather. The Tennessee Emergency Management Agency said on Saturday night that 28 water systems have issued boil water notices.\n\nIn Tipton County, the fire department in Mason warned residents on Saturday to be prepared for a multiday water outage. Firefighters were helping to distribute bottled water to residents throughout the town of 1,300 residents.\n\nFire officials said in a Facebook post that water crews were working at all hours to try to isolate and repair leaks. The department said that there remains enough water pressure to operate fire hydrants if they are needed for firefighting.\n\nThe mayor acknowledged in an interview with WMC-TV that the town has had water issues in the past due to a system that needs updates.\n\n\"Honestly, we have a bad system. Nobody took care of it for a long time and everything is falling apart,\" Mayor Eddie Noeman said.\n\n\"The whole town has been without water for five days,\" said exasperated Mason resident Christina Ray. The fire department is handing out water but limiting it to one case per day, per household. That's not enough for her family, which was collecting snow to flush the toilets.\n\n\"It's hard to cook. It's hard to flush toilets. It's hard to do dishes. We can't wash laundry,\" she said.\n\nRay managed to find the last seven gallons of water at a grocery store, she said, but if her 15-year-old daughter has school on Monday, Ray is considering getting a hotel room in a neighboring town so that she can take a shower and get clean clothes.\n\nWith warmer temperatures predicted this week, Ray has another worry.\n\n\"I have not been sleeping very well because I've been wondering if my pipes are going to burst,\" she said.\n\nThe continued cold weather is also responsible for at least 25 deaths in Tennessee, according to the Tennessee Department of Health. Nationally, winter storms this month have claimed at least 67 lives around the U.S., many involving hypothermia or road accidents.\n\nElsewhere, freezing rain, sleet and high wind gusts later Sunday would make traveling in parts of Kansas and Oklahoma particularly treacherous, the National Weather Service said. Wind chills in Iowa made it feel like minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 7 degrees Celsius) in some parts.\n\nBut the end of subzero temperatures - which blasted into the U.S. on Friday - was in sight for parts of the country. The daily high temperatures in Iowa's capital of Des Moines, for example, were expected to stay above freezing starting Monday.\n\n\"With no additional replenishment of arctic air from Canada, a steady warm-up is in store for the mid-section of the country,\" the weather service said.\n\nIn western New York, Buffalo Bills fans were getting ready for another home playoff game Sunday evening against the Kansas City Chiefs, with temperatures forecast around 20 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 7 degrees Celsius), winds around 10 mph (16 kph) and a slight chance of snow showers. On Friday and Saturday, hundreds of people showed up at Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park to help shovel snow out of the stands for the second week in a row, earning $20 an hour.\n\nThe Erie County Sheriff's Office was urging fans Sunday to not throw snowballs in the stadium or trespass on the new stadium construction site.\n\nOn the West Coast, more freezing rain was forecast in the Columbia River Gorge and the area was expected to remain near or below freezing through at least Sunday night. Trees and power lines already coated with ice could topple if they get more, the National Weather Service warned.\n\n\"Stay safe out there over the next several days as our region tries to thaw out,\" the weather service said. \"Chunks of falling ice will remain a hazard as well.\""}
{"text": "# Amid tough reelection fight, San Francisco mayor declines to veto resolution she criticized on Gaza\nJanuary 20, 2024. 8:47 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SAN FRANCISCO (AP)** - Amid a tough reelection fight, Mayor London Breed has declined to veto a non-binding resolution from the San Francisco supervisors calling for an extended cease-fire in Gaza, a measure she blamed for inflaming tensions in the city.\n\nThe first-term Democrat posted her decision online Friday, faulting the board for veering into foreign policy in which its members have no legal authority or expertise. She said the debate over the resolution left the city \"angrier, more divided and less safe.\"\n\n\"Their exercise was never about bringing people together,\" Breed wrote in a statement. \"It was about choosing a side.\"\n\nA divided board approved the resolution earlier this month, which also condemned Hamas as well as the Israeli government and urged the Biden administration to press for the release of all hostages and delivery of humanitarian aid. Cease-fire advocates in the audience erupted into cheers and chants of \"Free Palestine.\"\n\nBreed earlier criticized the supervisors, saying \"the process at the board only inflamed division and hurt.\"\n\nSan Francisco joined dozens of other U.S. cities in approving a resolution that has no legal weight but reflects pressure on local governments to speak up on the Israel-Hamas war, now in its fourth month following a deadly Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants.\n\nBreed said she mostly refrains from commenting on nonbinding resolutions from the board, but in this case she made an exception. Her decision came in the run-up to the March 5 primary election, in which she is telling voters she is making progress against homelessness, public drug use and property crime in a city that has seen a spate of unwelcome publicity about vacant downtown offices and stratospheric housing prices.\n\nReaction to the ongoing Israeli military action in Gaza is shaking campaigns from the White House to City Halls. A poll by The Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research in early November found 40% of the U.S. public believed Israel's response in Gaza had gone too far.\n\nBreed lamented the suffering in Gaza and the loss of life on both sides. But she chastised activists who jeered when a man spoke of family members killed in the Hamas attack, and she wrote that a Jewish city employee was surrounded by protesters in a restroom.\n\nBreed wrote that \"abject antisemitism\" had apparently become acceptable to a subset of activists.\n\n\"The antisemitism in our city is real and dangerous,\" she wrote, adding that vetoing the resolution likely would lead to more divisive hearings and \"fan even more antisemitic acts.\"\n\nBreed said she had spoken to numerous Jewish residents \"who tell me they don't feel safe in their own city. ... They are fearful of the growing acts of vandalism and intimidation.\"\n\nSupervisor Dean Preston, who introduced the cease-fire resolution, told the San Francisco Chronicle he was happy that the mayor did not veto the resolution, which is now final.\n\nLara Kiswani, executive director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, an organization that has planned protests calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, told the newspaper that Breed's statement amplified \"dangerous, racist, well-worn anti-Arab tropes that seem to completely disregard our community.\""}
{"text": "# 911 calls from Maui capture pleas for the stranded, the missing and those caught in the fire's chaos\nBy **REBECCA BOONE**, **CLAUDIA LAUER**, and **LINDSAY WHITEHURST**  \nJanuary 21, 2024. 11:43 AM EST\n\n---\n\nThe day after the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century destroyed a seaside community on Maui, the barrage of 911 calls didn't stop: Reports of missing people, stranded family members and confused tourists trapped without food or water lit up the emergency lines every few minutes, interspersed with reports of new fires starting and older ones flaring back up.\n\nThe 911 recordings from the morning and early afternoon of Aug. 9 were the third batch of calls released by the Maui Police Department in response to a public record request. They show how first responders and emergency dispatchers - many of whom had already worked long hours during what was likely the most harrowing experience of their lives - continued to be hindered by limited staffing and widespread communication failures.\n\nSeveral callers reached out to 911 throughout the morning asking for wellness checks for relatives or friends they couldn't reach. Cell communications were still down in some areas. Authorities told people to call the nonemergency police number to file missing person reports or so that police could check with the Red Cross and other volunteers who had registered evacuees at the shelters.\n\nBut callers who couldn't get through on the nonemergency line, turned to 911.\n\n\"My house is in Lahaina, in the fire area. And I have not been able to contact my husband. Is there any way that I can get someone to drive by the house?\" a woman asked just after 1:30 p.m.\n\nAnother caller at about 9:45 a.m. called to report that his wife was missing.\n\n\"She should be in Lahaina. She went to work yesterday,\" the caller told a dispatcher.\n\nIn one case, a 911 caller reported that a family missing their 15-year-old son had been \"ignored.\"\n\nThe operator answers were the same each time. Emergency responders weren't able to help find missing people because they were still trying to get everyone to safety, still working hotspots and responding to fires. There weren't enough officers to do house checks or wellness checks, but most of the town had been evacuated to the shelters.\n\nThey told callers to wait for cellphone communications to return and to keep trying the nonemergency line.\n\n\"I'm really sorry, that's all I can give you right now,\" one operator said.\n\nMaui County and police officials did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment on Saturday.\n\nOne hundred people died because of the Lahaina fire, and thousands of survivors remain displaced because their homes were destroyed or badly damaged.\n\nCallers turned to 911 when information was scarce or when they heard contradicting information.\n\nA handful of residents called to ask if the Lahaina Bypass had reopened, saying they had heard an announcement on the radio that it had opened for traffic. Emergency dispatchers repeatedly batted down the misinformation.\n\nEarly in the morning dispatchers rebuked some callers asking how to get to the airport, or what roads would be open, saying the line was for emergencies only.\n\nOne caller retold how he and his family while evacuating had grabbed an elderly couple to help them also get out of Lahaina. But he said the husband had gone with him and the wife had gone with his uncle, and they could not contact each other to reunite the couple.\n\n\"We don't know what to do with him,\" the caller said.\n\n\"You can bring him to one of the emergency shelters so he can rest and get something to drink,\" the dispatcher told him, adding that once communications were back up, the volunteers there could help find his wife.\n\nDispatchers were forced to deal with sometimes impossible situations, trying to reassure people while also knowing resources were scarce.\n\nAn exhausted Lahaina survivor, walking along the highway south of town, called asking for help just before 1 p.m.\n\n\"Our house is all burned down and everyone is just passing us by. We're dying out here. There's like 12 of us, all like walking along the Pali,\" he said, using a nickname for a coastal, cliffside portion of the Honoapiilani Highway. He asked for someone to pick the group up, saying he feared dying of heat exhaustion.\n\nThe dispatcher said there were no buses to come get them, but they could send ambulances if they needed.\n\nJust before 11 a.m., someone from another island called on behalf of some Lahaina residents who lost their home and vehicles but had fled up the mountain, away from the burning town.\n\n\"She's got her husband and their two children and then some neighbors,\" the caller said. The group was safe from the fire, but had no food and water and no way to evacuate.\n\n\"I'm going to let the fire department know,\" the dispatcher said, \"but we are really short on resources. And they're going to see what they can do.\"\n\nAt that point, fire crews were still trying to extinguish the flames that had destroyed much of Lahaina, as well as fighting three other fires in and around the towns of Kula and Kihei. People living near those blazes continued to report flames at their properties and fires reigniting like they had in Lahaina.\n\nIn one case, a 911 caller reported seeing flames and hotspots on their property and trying to put them out with a garden hose that was rapidly losing pressure. Another reported that her husband and son were fighting a fire that had broken out on their ranch in the Upcountry region of Maui, but they feared they'd need help from a helicopter.\n\nSome areas were still dotted with potentially dangerous downed power lines. One person who called several times in the morning reported that lines were sparking and smoking at her home in the Kula area and she and her husband were unable to turn the power off. They eventually did so with the help of a friend that worked at the power company.\n\nCallers had trouble controlling their frustration at times. A woman called in tears saying her family had left their resort when the power went out the previous day.\n\n\"We slept in our car. We can't get ahold of the hotel. My medication, my car keys, everything is there. My kid has autism. His medication is there. I just don't know what to do,\" she said.\n\nThe dispatcher offered to have a medic sent out for the woman's son and also suggested she try to have her doctor call in a prescription. But she said no one was being let back into Lahaina."}
{"text": "# Palestinian death toll in Gaza surpasses 25,000 while Israel announces the death of another hostage\nBy **NAJIB JOBAIN** and **SAMY MAGDY**  \nJanuary 21, 2024. 1:48 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP)** - The Palestinian death toll from the war between Israel and Hamas has soared past 25,000, the Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip said Sunday, while Israel announced the death of another hostage and appeared far from achieving its goals of freeing more than 100 others and crushing the militant group.\n\nThe deaths, destruction and displacement from the war are without precedent in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The war has divided Israelis while the offensive threatens to ignite a wider conflict involving Iran-backed groups in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen that support the Palestinians.\n\nIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he stressed in his conversation with U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday that he rejects Hamas demands for a cease-fire, Israeli forces' withdrawal and the release of Palestinians held by Israel in exchange for the remaining hostages. He said that agreeing means another devastating Hamas attack \"would only be a matter of time.\"\n\nNetanyahu also rejects calls from U.S, its closest ally, for postwar plans that would include a path to Palestinian statehood. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the refusal to accept a two-state solution unacceptable.\n\n\"The Middle East is a tinderbox. We must do all we can to prevent conflict igniting across the region,\" Guterres added. \"And that starts with an immediate humanitarian cease-fire to relieve the suffering in Gaza.\"\n\nIn the latest of near-daily clashes between Hezbollah forces and Israeli troops along the Lebanese border, an Israeli airstrike Sunday hit a car near a Lebanese army checkpoint in the southern town of Kafra, killing one person and injuring several others, Lebanese state media reported. Israel's military said its aircraft and tanks struck a number of Hezbollah targets, and that an anti-tank missile launched from Lebanon hit a house in Avivim in northern Israel. No injuries were reported.\n\n## GAZA DEATH TOLL CLIMBS\nThe war began with Hamas' attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7. Palestinian militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 250 hostages back to Gaza.\n\nIsrael's military announced the death of 19-year-old Sgt. Shay Levinson, who was among the hostages. His date of death was given as Oct. 7, but there were no further details. According to Israeli media, his body is still in Gaza.\n\nIsrael has responded to the Oct. 7 attack with a bombing campaign and ground invasion that laid waste to entire neighborhoods in northern Gaza and spread south, striking some areas where it told civilians to seek refuge. Ground operations are now focused on the southern city of Khan Younis and built-up refugee camps in central Gaza dating to the 1948 war surrounding Israel's creation.\n\n\"The plumes of smoke from tanks, artillery and the planes of the air force will continue to cover the sky over the Gaza Strip until we will achieve our goals,\" Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said.\n\nIsrael's military said the demolition last week of a key building at Israa University in Gaza was under review, and asserted that preliminary findings indicated Hamas had used the compound for military purposes. The university has said the \"attack\" came weeks after Israeli forces occupied the building.\n\nSince the war started, 25,105 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, while another 62,681 have been wounded, the Health Ministry said. The toll included the 178 bodies brought to Gaza's hospitals since Saturday, Health Ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qidra said.\n\nThe overall toll is thought to be higher because many casualties remain buried under rubble or in areas that medics cannot reach, Al-Qidra said.\n\nThe Health Ministry does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its figures but says about two-thirds of the people killed in Gaza were women and minors. The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government, but its casualty figures from previous wars were largely consistent with those of U.N. agencies and even the Israeli military.\n\nThe Israeli military says it has killed around 9,000 militants, without providing evidence, and blames the high civilian death toll on Hamas because it positions fighters, tunnels and other militant infrastructure in dense neighborhoods. The military released footage of a tunnel under a residential neighborhood in Khan Younis where the army believes at least 20 hostages were kept at different times.\n\nThe war has displaced some 85% of Gaza's residents, with hundreds of thousands packing U.N.-run shelters and camps in the south. U.N. officials say a quarter of the population of 2.3 million is starving as a trickle of humanitarian aid reaches them because of the fighting and Israeli restrictions.\n\nIsrael said 260 trucks of aid entered Gaza on Sunday, the highest number since the war began. About 500 entered daily before that, according to the U.N.\n\n\"Bread does not suffice for one hour,\" said Ahmad Al-Nashawi, who accepted donated food at a tent camp in the southern city of Rafah. \"You can see how many children we have other than women and men. What matters most for a child is to eat.\"\n\n## ISRAELIS INCREASINGLY DIVIDED\nSome top Israeli officials have begun to acknowledge that Netanyahu's goals of \"complete victory\" over Hamas and returning the remaining hostages might be mutually exclusive.\n\nA member of Israel's War Cabinet, former army chief Gadi Eisenkot, said last week that the only way to free the hostages was through a cease-fire.\n\nBut Netanyahu's far-right coalition partners push him to step up the offensive, with some calling for the \"voluntary\" emigration of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza and the re-establishment of Jewish settlements there.\n\nHamas is believed to be using the hostages as shields for its top leaders. Israel has rescued one hostage, and Hamas says several have been killed in Israeli airstrikes or during failed rescue operations.\n\nIsrael's government faces growing pressure from hostages' families, who want an exchange like the one during a weeklong November cease-fire. Other Israelis are frustrated by the security failures ahead of the Oct. 7 attack and by Netanyahu's handling of the war.\n\nNear the site of an Oct. 7 massacre during a music festival, families of Israeli victims planted trees.\n\n\"What happened after 109 days? Nothing. We're just still waiting,\" said one father, Idan Bahat."}
{"text": "# Across Germany, anti-far right protests draw hundreds of thousands - in Munich, too many for safety\nJanuary 21, 2024. 11:59 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BERLIN (AP)** - A protest against the far right in the German city of Munich Sunday afternoon ended early due to safety concerns after approximately 100,000 people showed up, police said. The demonstration was one of dozens around the country this weekend that drew hundreds of thousands of people in total.\n\nThe demonstrations came in the wake of a report that right-wing extremists recently met to discuss the deportation of millions of immigrants, including some with German citizenship. Some members of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, were present at the meeting.\n\nIn the western city of Cologne, police confirmed \"tens of thousands\" of people showed up to protest on Sunday, and organizers spoke of around 70,000 people. A protest Sunday afternoon in Berlin drew at least 60,000 people and potentially up to 100,000, police said, according to the German news agency dpa.\n\nA similar demonstration Friday in Hamburg, Germany's second-largest city, drew what police said was a crowd of 50,000 and had to be ended early because of safety concerns. And Saturday protests in other German cities like Stuttgart, Nuremberg and Hannover drew tens of thousands of people.\n\nAlthough Germany has seen other protests against the far right in past years, the size and scope of protests being held this weekend - not just in major cities, but also in dozens of smaller cities across the country - are notable. The large turnout around Germany showed how these protests are galvanizing popular opposition to the AfD in a new way.\n\nThe AfD is riding high in opinion polls: recent surveys put it in second place nationally with around 23%, far above the 10.3% it won during the last federal election in 2021.\n\nIn its eastern German strongholds of Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia, the AfD is leading the polls ahead of elections this fall.\n\nThe catalyst for the protests was a report from the media outlet Correctiv last week on an alleged far-right meeting in November, which it said was attended by figures from the extremist Identitarian Movement and from the AfD. A prominent member of the Identitarian Movement, Austrian citizen Martin Sellner, presented his \"remigration\" vision for deportations, the report said.\n\nThe AfD has sought to distance itself from the extremist meeting, saying it had no organizational or financial links to the event, that it wasn't responsible for what was discussed there and members who attended did so in a purely personal capacity. Still, one of the AfD's co-leaders, Alice Weidel, has parted ways with an adviser who was there, while also decrying the reporting itself.\n\nProminent German politicians and elected officials voiced support for the protests Sunday, joining leaders from major parties across the spectrum who had already spoken out.\n\n\"The future of our democracy does not depend on the volume of its opponents, but on the strength of those who defend democracy,\" German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in a video statement. Those turning out to protest, he added, \"defend our republic and our constitution against its enemies.\""}
{"text": "# North Korea stresses alignment with Russia against US and says Putin could visit at an early date\nBy **KIM TONG-HYUNG**  \nJanuary 21, 2024. 10:02 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**SEOUL, South Korea (AP)** - North Korea said Sunday that Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed his willingness to visit the North at an unspecified \"early date\" as the countries continue to align in the face of their separate, intensifying confrontations with the United States.\n\nThe North Korean Foreign Ministry highlighted Putin's intent for a visit following North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui's meetings with Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow last week. The ministry said in a statement published by state media that the two countries agreed to further strategic and tactical cooperation with Russia to establish a \"new multi-polarized international order,\" a reference to their efforts to build a united front against Washington.\n\nPutin had already confirmed his willingness to visit the capital, Pyongyang, at a convenient time during his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Russia's Far East in September. One of the few world leaders openly supporting Putin's war on Ukraine, Kim has been actively boosting the visibility of his ties with Russia in an attempt to break out of diplomatic isolation and strengthen his footing, as he navigates a deepening nuclear standoff with Washington, Seoul and Tokyo.\n\nIn a separate statement on Sunday, the North's Foreign Ministry condemned the U.N. Security Council for calling an emergency meeting over the country's latest ballistic test, which state media described as a new intermediate-range solid-fuel missile tipped with a hypersonic warhead. The ministry said the test-firing on Jan. 14 was among the country's regular activities to improve its defense capabilities and that it didn't pose a threat to its neighbors.\n\nSouth Korea on Thursday urged the Security Council \"to break the silence\" over North Korea's escalating missile tests and threats. Russia and China, both permanent members of the council, have blocked U.S.-led efforts to increase sanctions on North Korea over its recent weapons tests, underscoring a divide deepened over Russia's war on Ukraine.\n\nThe alignment between Pyongyang and Moscow has raised international concerns about alleged arms cooperation, in which the North provides Russia with munitions to help prolong its fighting in Ukraine, possibly in exchange for badly needed economic aid and military assistance to help upgrade Kim's forces. Both Pyongyang and Russia have denied accusations by Washington and Seoul about North Korean arms transfers to Russia.\n\nNorth Korea's Foreign Ministry, in comments published by state media, said Choe and the Russian officials in their meetings expressed a \"strong will to further strengthen strategic and tactical cooperation in defending the core interests of the two countries and establishing a new multi-polarized international order.\"\n\nRussia expressed \"deep thanks\" to North Korea for its \"full support\" over its war on Ukraine, the North Korean ministry said. It said Choe and the Russian officials expressed \"serious concern\" over the United States' expanding military cooperation with its Asian allies that they blamed for worsening tensions in the region and threatening North Korea's sovereignty and security interests.\n\nTensions on the Korean Peninsula are at their highest point in years, after Kim in recent months used Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a distraction to ramp up his weapons tests and military demonstrations. The United States, South Korea and Japan have responded by strengthening their combined military exercises, which Kim portrays as invasion rehearsals, and sharpening their deterrence plans built around nuclear-capable U.S. assets.\n\nIn the latest tit-for-tat, North Korea on Friday said it conducted a test of a purported nuclear-capable underwater attack drone in response to a combined naval exercise by the United States, South Korea and Japan last week, as it continued to blame its rivals for tensions in the region.\n\nChoe's visit to Moscow came as Kim continues to use domestic political events to issue provocative threats of nuclear conflict.\n\nAt Pyongyang's rubber-stamp parliament last week, Kim declared that North Korea is abandoning its long-standing goal of a peaceful unification with war-divided rival South Korea and ordered the rewriting of the North's constitution to cement the South as its most hostile foreign adversary. He accused South Korea of acting as \"top-class stooges\" of the Americans and repeated a threat that he would use his nukes to annihilate the South if provoked.\n\nAnalysts say North Korea could be aiming to diminish South Korea's voice in the regional nuclear standoff and eventually force direct dealings with Washington as it looks to cement its status as a nuclear weapons state."}
{"text": "# Two opposition leaders in Senegal are excluded from the final list of presidential candidates\nBy **BABACAR DIONE**  \nJanuary 21, 2024. 11:19 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**DAKAR, Senegal (AP)** - Senegal's highest election authority has excluded two top opposition leaders from the final list of candidates for the West African nation's presidential election next month. The party of the main challenger called the move a \"dangerous precedent\" on Sunday.\n\nThe list published Saturday by Senegal's Constitutional Council named 20 candidates, including Prime Minister Amadou Ba, who has the backing of outgoing President Macky Sall and is seen as a major contender.\n\nOpposition leader Ousmane Sonko, who finished third in the country's 2019 presidential election,was disqualified from the ballot because he faces a six-month suspended sentence following his conviction for defamation, the Constitutional Council said.\n\n\"This conviction renders him ineligible for a period of five years,\" the council said.\n\nSonko, who currently is imprisoned on a different charge, was widely seen as the politician with the best chance of defeating Sall's ruling party. His PASTEF party, which authorities dissolved last year, called Sonko's disqualification \"the most dangerous precedent in the political history of Senegal.\"\n\nThe council also deemed Karim Wade, another opposition leader and the son of former Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, as ineligible for the ballot. It said Wade had dual citizenship at the time he formally declared his presidential candidacy, although he had renounced his French nationality three days earlier.\n\n\"The recent decision of the Constitutional Council is scandalous, it is a blatant attack on democracy (and) violates my fundamental right to participate in the presidential election,\" Wade wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.\n\nThe Constitutional Council's decision could further complicate preparations for the Feb. 25 election. Opposition supporters accused Sall's government last year of clamping down on their activities, and some protests in support of Sonko turned deadly."}
{"text": "# Libya says production has resumed at its largest oilfield after more than 2-week hiatus\nBy **SAMY MAGDY**  \nJanuary 21, 2024. 9:10 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAIRO (AP)** - Libya's state-owned oil company resumed production at the country's largest oilfield Sunday, ending a more than two-week hiatus after protesters blocked the facility over fuel shortages.\n\nThe National Oil Corp. said in a terse statement that it lifted the force majeure at the Sharara oil field in the country's south and resumed full production. It didn't provide further details. Force majeure is a legal maneuver that releases a company from its contractual obligations because of extraordinary circumstances.\n\nThe company had activated the maneuver on Jan. 7 after protesters from the desert town of Ubari, about 950 kilometers (590 miles) south of the capital, Tripoli, shut down the field to protest fuel shortages.\n\nOver the past two weeks the company's chief, Farhat Bengdara, and military officials from eastern Libya have been negotiating with the protest leaders, Fezzan Group.\n\nBarzingi al-Zarrouk, the protesters' spokesman, announced that they have suspended their protest after they reached agreement with the company.\n\nHe said the agreement was brokered by the self-styled Libyan National Army, which is commanded by powerful military general Khalifa Hifter. Hifter's forces control Libya's east and much of the south.\n\nThe protesters have reportedly called for rehabilitating infrastructure and repairing roads in the southwestern region of Fezzan, one of the historic three provinces of Libya. They previously closed the field for two days in July.\n\nLibya's light crude has long featured in the country's yearslong civil conflict, with rival militias and foreign powers jostling for control of Africa's largest oil reserves.\n\nLibya has been in turmoil since a NATO-backed uprising toppled and killed longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. The North African nation has for most of the past decade been split between rival administrations in the east and the west, each backed by militias and foreign governments."}
{"text": "# 6-legged spaniel undergoes surgery to remove extra limbs and adjusts to life on 4 paws\nJanuary 20, 2024. 5:36 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - A spaniel born with six legs that was found abandoned in a supermarket parking lot is now like other dogs after having her extra limbs surgically removed.\n\nAriel, who was named for \"The Little Mermaid\" character because the additional appendage with two paws on the end looked like a flipper, ran through the grass outside a veterinary hospital Saturday as she adjusted to life on four legs.\n\n\"She is doing brilliantly,\" said Vicki Black, director of the Langford Vets Small Animal Referral Hospital, where she was operated on Thursday.\n\nThe dog, who had multiple birth defects, was found in the center of Pembroke, Wales, in September. Greenacres Rescue took her in and raised funds for her surgery.\n\nBlack said the hospital, which is part of the University of Bristol, had never seen a six-legged dog or performed such an operation.\n\n\"Ariel was a complicated little dog,\" Black said. \"We are a center committed to career-long learning and are proud to innovate and treat pets like Ariel.\"\n\nThe extra legs extended from the right hindquarter and appeared to be of no use, dangling beside her wagging tail, as she walked a bit awkwardly in a video shot before the operation.\n\nOn Saturday as she was discharged, she took to the lawn outside the hospital with the determination of a bird dog, nose to the ground and pulling on her leash. Just like any other dog."}
{"text": "# Air pollution and politics pose cross-border challenges in South Asia\nBy **RIAZAT BUTT**  \nJanuary 20, 2024. 10:02 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LAHORE, Pakistan (AP)** - The air smells burnt in Lahore, a city in Pakistan's east that used to be famous for its gardens but has become infamous for its terrible air quality.\n\nToxic smog has sickened tens of thousands of people in recent months. Flights have been canceled. Artificial rain was deployed last December to battle smog, a national first. Nothing seems to be working.\n\nLahore is in an airshed, an area where pollutants from industry, transportation and other human activities get trapped because of local weather and topography so they cannot disperse easily. Airsheds also contribute to cross-border pollution. Under certain wind conditions, 30% of pollution in the Indian capital New Delhi can come from Pakistan's Punjab province, where Lahore is the capital. There are six major airsheds in South Asia, home to many of the world's worst polluted cities.\n\nExperts are calling for greater cross-border cooperation among countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and India to address air pollution together rather than working in silos on a city-by-city basis. But it's a tall order when political relations in the region are fraught.\n\nTies between India and Pakistan are broken. Their interactions are riddled with animosity and suspicion. They have fought three wars, built up their armies and developed nuclear weapons. Travel restrictions and hostile bureaucracies largely keep people from crossing the border for leisure, study and work, although the countries make exceptions for religious pilgrimages.\n\n\"There's a recognition among the technical and scientific community that air pollution doesn't need a visa to travel across borders,\" said Pakistani analyst Abid Suleri, from the nonprofit Sustainable Development Policy Institute. The culprits and problems are the same on both sides of the India-Pakistan border, he said, so it makes no sense for one province to implement measures if a neighboring province across the border isn't adopting the same practices.\n\nRegional and international forums offer opportunities for candid discussions about air pollution, even if governments aren't working together directly or publicly, Suleri said, adding that countries should treat air pollution as a year-round problem, rather than a seasonal one arriving with cold weather.\n\n\"Airshed management needs a regional plan,\" he said. \"But 2024 is an election year in India and Pakistan, and government-to-government cooperation hasn't reached that level.\"\n\nPakistan is weeks away from voting in national parliamentary elections. So far, only the former foreign minister and political party leader Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has pledged heavy investment in climate adaptability, following record-breaking floods that killed more than 1,700 people.\n\nIn India, air pollution doesn't figure as a core issue that people would vote on, said Bhargav Krishna, a fellow at the New Delhi-based Sustainable Futures Collaborative think-tank. But the experience or impact of climate change could make people think about how they vote.\n\nKrishna said that regional elections sometimes see air pollution-related promises. \"It was a feature of every party's election manifesto in the New Delhi elections in 2020,\" he noted.\n\nAccording to the World Bank, a regional airshed management policy would involve countries agreeing to set common air quality targets and measures that everyone can implement, meeting regularly to share their experiences and, if possible, setting common air quality standards.\n\nThe global body said almost 93% of Pakistanis are exposed to severe pollution levels. In India, it's 96% of the population. More than 1.5 billion people are exposed to high concentrations of air pollution in these two countries alone. It estimates around 220,000 deaths a year in Pakistan's Punjab can be attributed to causes related to bad air.\n\nGray haze hangs pall-like over Punjab's homes, mosques, schools, streets and farmland. There are 6.7 million vehicles on Lahore's roads every day. Construction, emissions and waste are rife. There is scant visibility at major intersections after dark. Smog shrouds landmarks like the Mughal-era Badshahi Mosque.\n\nThe shopping website Daraz has reported a spike in searches for air purifiers and face masks since last October, especially in Punjab.\n\nPulmonologist Dr. Khawar Abbas Chaudhry laments the deterioration of Lahore, which he describes as a \"once beautiful\" city. The hospital where he works is part of the Bill Gates-backed Evercare Group that has hospitals in the region, including India and Bangladesh, and in East Africa.\n\nChaudhry says he has seen a 100% increase of patients sickened with respiratory illnesses this winter. He attributes this rise to air pollution.\n\nThere are forums within Evercare to discuss issues like air pollution, and he and colleagues, including those from India, talk about smog's health impact. But this dialogue is only happening within one institution.\n\n\"Countries, governments, departments need to be involved,\" said Chaudhry. \"They need to meet regularly. Ultimately, people need to reach out and that could put some pressure on movers and shakers on both sides of the border.\"\n\nPratima Singh, a senior research scientist at Bengaluru-based Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy, has researched air pollution in India for over a decade.\n\nShe said South Asian countries could emulate the European Union model of collaboration to deal with pollution challenges, formalize new policies and share data and best practices.\n\nAfter India launched its National Clean Air Programme in 2019, authorities quickly found it was crucial for cities to understand what was happening in surrounding areas -- and the boundary kept expanding. \"Everyone started realizing that airshed management is essential if we want to actually solve the problem,\" Singh said.\n\nThe director of Punjab's Environment Protection Department, Syed Naseem Ur Rehman Shah, is proud of local achievements to fight air pollution. Emissions from industry and brick kilns are under control, farmers can soon buy subsidized machinery to end the menace of crop stubble burning, and there is a drive toward getting electric three-wheeled tuk-tuks, motorbikes and buses on the roads, he said.\n\nAlthough things are getting better, Shah said it will take time.\n\nHe has gone to India to discuss climate change and said a regional body, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, provides opportunities for countries to talk about air pollution. But he acknowledges the absence of formal cooperation at a ministerial level with India.\n\nA screen in a monitoring room, called the Smog Cell, showed Pakistan's Air Quality Index to be higher than China's that day. Shah said the province only exceeds World Health Organization-recommended levels for PM2.5 - fine particulate matter that can be inhaled. Everything else about the air quality is within parameters, he said.\n\nHis assessment is of little consolation to Pakistani poet and former ambassador Ata ul Haq Qasmi, who is in Evercare for respiratory issues exacerbated by air pollution. \"If my friends aren't in hospital, they should be,\" he said. \"You only have to step outside for it (the smog) to grab you.\""}
{"text": "# Japan becomes the fifth country to land a spacecraft on the moon\nBy **MARI YAMAGUCHI**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 11:57 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**TOKYO (AP)** - Japan became the fifth country in history to reach the moon when one of its spacecrafts without astronauts successfully made a soft landing on the lunar surface early Saturday.\n\nHowever, space officials said they needed more time to analyze whether the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, achieved its mission priority of making a pinpoint landing. They also said the craft's solar panel had failed to generate power, which could shorten its activity on the moon.\n\nSpace officials believe that the SLIM's small rovers were launched as planned and that data was being transmitted back to Earth, said Hitoshi Kuninaka, head of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, a unit of Japan's space agency.\n\nBut he said that SLIM's solar battery wasn't generating power and that it had only a few more hours of battery life. He said the priority was for the craft to gather as much data about its landing and the moon as possible on the remaining battery.\n\nJapan follows the United States, the Soviet Union, China and India in reaching the moon.\n\nKuninaka said he believes that Japan's space program at least achieved \"minimum\" success.\n\nSLIM landed on the moon at about 12:20 a.m. Tokyo time Saturday (1520 GMT Friday).\n\nThere was a tense wait for news after the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's mission control initially said that SLIM was on the lunar surface, but that it was still \"checking its status.\" No further details were given until a news conference nearly two hours later.\n\nFor the mission to be considered fully successful, space officials needed to confirm whether SLIM made a pinpoint landing. Kuninaka said that while more time was needed, he personally thought it was most likely achieved, based on his observation of data showing the spacecraft's movement until the landing and its ability to transmit signals after landing. He said the solar panel is possibly not in the planned angle, but there is still hope.\n\nDespite the solar panel issue, \"it's delightful news,\" Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said in a message posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, pledging the government's continuing backing for the endeavors toward new challenges.\n\nNASA Administrator Bill Nelson also lauded SLIM's landing with an X message, congratulating Japan \"on being the historic 5th country to land successfully on the Moon! We value our partnership in the cosmos and continued collaboration\" in the U.S.-led multinational Artemis Moon exploration.\n\nSLIM, which was aiming to hit a very small target, is a lightweight spacecraft about the size of a passenger vehicle. It was using \"pinpoint landing\" technology that promises far greater control than any previous moon landing.\n\nWhile most previous probes have used landing zones about 10 kilometers (six miles) wide, SLIM was aiming at a target of just 100 meters (330 feet).\n\nA landing of such precision would be a world's first, and would be crucial technology for a sustainable, long-term and accurate space probe system, said Hiroshi Yamakawa, president of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA.\n\nJapan needs the technology to secure its place and contribute in international space projects, Yamakawa said.\n\nThe project was the fruit of two decades of work on precision technology by JAXA.\n\nSLIM, nicknamed \"the Moon Sniper,\" started its descent at midnight Saturday, and within 15 minutes it was down to about 10 kilometers (six miles) above the lunar surface, according to the space agency, which is known as JAXA.\n\nAt an altitude of five kilometers (three miles), the lander was in a vertical descent mode, then at 50 meters (165 feet) above the surface, SLIM was supposed to make a parallel movement to find a safe landing spot, JAXA said.\n\nThe spacecraft was testing technology to allow moon missions to land \"where we want to, rather than where it is easy to land,\" JAXA has said. The spacecraft also was supposed to seek clues about the origin of the moon, including analyzing minerals with a special camera.\n\nThe SLIM, equipped with a pad each on its five legs to cushion impact, was aiming to land near the Shioli crater, near a region covered in volcanic rock.\n\nThe closely watched mission came only 10 days after a moon mission by a U.S. private company failed when the spacecraft developed a fuel leak hours after the launch.\n\nSLIM was launched on a Mitsubishi Heavy H2A rocket in September. It initially orbited Earth and entered lunar orbit on Dec. 25.\n\nJapan hopes to regain confidence for its space technology after a number of failures. A spacecraft designed by a Japanese company crashed during a lunar landing attempt in April, and a new flagship rocket failed its debut launch in March.\n\nJAXA has a track record with difficult landings. Its Hayabusa2 spacecraft, launched in 2014, touched down twice on the 900-meter-long (3,000-foot-long) asteroid Ryugu, collecting samples that were returned to Earth.\n\nA successful pinpoint landing by SLIM, especially on the moon, would raise Japan's profile in the global space technology race.\n\nTakeshi Tsuchiya, aeronautics professor at the Graduate School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo, said it was important to confirm the accuracy of landing on a targeted area.\n\n\"It is necessary to show the world that Japan has the appropriate technology in order to be able to properly assert Japan's position in lunar development,\" he said. The moon is important from the perspective of explorations of resources, and it can also be used as a base to go to other planets, like Mars, he said.\n\nExperts say Japan needs to demonstrate its consistency in the precision landing technology to be competitive.\n\nSLIM was carrying two small autonomous probes - lunar excursion vehicles LEV-1 and LEV-2, which officials say were believed to have been released just before landing.\n\nLEV-1, equipped with an antenna and a camera, is tasked with recording SLIM's landing. LEV-2, is a ball-shaped rover equipped with two cameras, developed by JAXA together with Sony, toymaker Tomy and Doshisha University."}
{"text": "# Private US lander destroyed during reentry after failed mission to moon, company says\nBy **MARCIA DUNN**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 2:52 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)** - A U.S. company's failed moonshot ended with a fiery plunge over the South Pacific, officials confirmed Friday.\n\nAstrobotic Technology said contact and then tracking was lost as its lunar lander reentered Earth's atmosphere Thursday, 10 days after launching from Florida. It received confirmation Friday from U.S. Space Command that the spacecraft broke apart during its final moments, CEO John Thornton said.\n\nA fuel leak shortly after liftoff had nixed any chance of a moon touchdown.\n\n\"What a wild adventure we were just on,\" Thornton said. \"Certainly not the outcome we were hoping for and certainly challenging right up front.\"\n\nAfter consulting with NASA and other government experts, Astrobotic took steps to destroy its crippled lander in order to protect other spacecraft. Flight controllers at the company's Pittsburgh headquarters briefly fired the engines, getting the lander in the right location for reentry despite little fuel.\n\nThornton said an investigation board will be convened to determine what went wrong. Engineers suspect a stuck valve in the propellant system caused a tank to rupture.\n\n\"We were coming from the highest high of the perfect launch and came down to a lowest low\" when the tank burst a few hours after liftoff, he told reporters.\n\nThe 6-foot-tall (1.9-meter-tall) lander, named after the Peregrine falcon, made it all the way out to the moon's orbit, more than 240,000 miles (390,000 kilometers) away, before doing a U-turn and hurtling back toward Earth.\n\nIt was the first U.S. lunar lander in more than a half-century. The next one is set to blast off next month, built and operated by Houston's Intuitive Machines. NASA paid millions of dollars to the two companies to fly its experiments to the moon, part of an effort to commercialize lunar deliveries ahead of astronauts' arrival.\n\nRight before Friday's U.S. news conference, a lunar lander from Japan touched down on the moon, but it was unable to generate crucial solar power. The U.S., Russia, China and India have successfully landed spacecraft on the moon and only the U.S. has landed astronauts.\n\nAstrobotic's lander carried a variety of experiments - including five from NASA - as well as ashes and DNA from 70 space enthusiasts, including \"Star Trek\" creator Gene Roddenberry. Flight controllers were able to turn on some experiments and collect data,\n\nThe company is already is working on an even bigger lunar lander that will carry NASA's Viper rover to the moon in a year."}
{"text": "# Stabbing in Austin leaves one person dead and two injured\nJanuary 21, 2024. 3:02 PM EST\n\n---\n\nA man suspected of stabbing three people - one fatally - at a residence in north Austin is under arrest, police said Sunday.\n\nInterim Police Chief Robin Henderson of the Austin Police Department said police heard screaming from inside the residence when they arrived and forced their way inside.\n\nOnce inside, they saw a man with a knife holding a female who had been stabbed. They opened fire shortly after. The suspect was struck and injured.\n\n\"Due to the exigency of the situation, to preserve life and prevent further harm to the individuals inside, the officers made the decision to force entry through the front door of the residence,\" Henderson said during a news conference Sunday. \"The female who had been held by the suspect was escorted outside of the residence by the officers.\"\n\nThree children were inside the residence but were unharmed, Henderson said.\n\nOfficers found the body of a woman with stab wounds in one of the bedrooms.\n\nHenderson said the relationship among the people involved is not yet known.\n\nThe officers who discharged their firearms were placed on administrative duties as per policy."}
{"text": "# 'Burn, beetle, burn': Hundreds of people torch an effigy of destructive bug in South Dakota town\nJanuary 21, 2024. 2:53 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**RAPID CITY, S.D. (AP)** - In what's become an annual winter tradition, hundreds of people carrying torches set fire to a giant wooden beetle effigy in Custer, South Dakota, to raise awareness of the destructive impact of the mountain pine beetle on forest land in the Black Hills.\n\nCuster firefighters prepared and lighted the torches for residents to carry in a march to the pyre Saturday night in the 11th Burning Beetle fest, the Rapid City Journal reported.\n\nPeople set the tall beetle effigy on fire amid drum beats and chants of \"Burn, beetle, burn.\" Firefighters kept watch, warning participants not to throw the torches, even as some people launched the burning sticks into pine trees piled at the base of the beetle. Fireworks dazzled overhead.\n\nThe event, which includes a talent show and \"bug crawl,\" supports the local arts.\n\nThe U.S. Forest Service calls the mountain pine beetle \"the most aggressive, persistent, and destructive bark beetle in the western United States and Canada.\" The Black Hills have experienced several outbreaks of the beetle since the 1890s, the most recent being from 1996-2016, affecting 703 square miles (1820 square kilometers), according to the South Dakota Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources."}
{"text": "# Reformed mobster went after 'one last score' when he stole Judy Garland's ruby slippers from 'Oz'\nBy **JOSH FUNK**  \nJanuary 21, 2024. 12:02 AM EST\n\n---\n\nThe aging reformed mobster who has admitted stealing a pair of ruby slippers that Judy Garland wore in \"The Wizard of Oz\" gave into the temptation of \"one last score\" after an old mob associate led him to believe the famous shoes must be adorned with real jewels to justify their $1 million insured value.\n\nTerry Jon Martin's defense attorney finally revealed the 76-year-old's motive for the 2005 theft from the Judy Garland Museum in the late actor's hometown of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, in a new memo filed ahead of his Jan. 29 sentencing in Duluth, Minnesota.\n\nThe FBI recovered the shoes in 2018 when someone else tried to claim an insurance reward on them, but Martin wasn't charged with stealing them until last year.\n\nMartin pleaded guilty in October to using a hammer to smash the glass of the museum door and display case to take the slippers. He had hoped to harvest real rubies from the shoes and sell them. But a fence, a person who deals in stolen goods, informed him the rubies were glass and Martin got rid of the slippers less than two days after he took them, he said.\n\nDefense attorney Dane DeKrey said in his memo that an unidentified former mob associate tempted Martin to steal the shoes, even though he hadn't committed a crime in nearly 10 years after his last prison stint.\n\n\"At first, Terry declined the invitation to participate in the heist. But old habits die hard, and the thought of a 'final score' kept him up at night,\" DeKrey wrote. \"After much contemplation, Terry had a criminal relapse and decided to participate in the theft.\"\n\nDeKrey and prosecutors are recommending the judge sentence Martin to time served because he is physically incapable of presenting a threat to society. Martin is in hospice care with a life expectancy of less than six months. He needs oxygen at all times because of his chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder and was in a wheelchair at his most recent court appearance. Even if he were sentenced to prison, his poor health might be grounds for a compassionate release.\n\nMartin had no idea about the cultural significance of the ruby slippers and had never seen the movie. Instead, DeKrey said he was just looking for one last big score, and the \"old Terry\" with a lifelong history of crimes like burglary and receiving stolen property beat out the \"new Terry\" who seemed to \"finally put his demons to rest\" after being released from prison in 1996 and became \"a contributing member of society.\"\n\nDeKrey urged the judge to consider the major events of Martin's life when deciding whether a lenient sentence is appropriate.\n\nMartin suffered under a cruel stepmother who mistreated him and his three brothers so badly for several years that he left home at the age of 16 and began drinking and stealing.\n\nWhile on parole from prison, Martin's girlfriend became pregnant with twins, but he missed their birth after his parole was revoked. Right after his girlfriend brought the 1-month-old twins to prison to meet him, they died after a train struck her vehicle.\n\n\"This was truly the turning point in Terry's life - his villain origin story - and the reason he not only went down his dark path but accelerated towards it,\" DeKrey wrote. \"His son said it best: 'the twins' death made (my dad) just give up on life; he decided on a life of crime.'\"\n\nMartin's lawyer also said the judge should consider that Martin had not committed any other crimes in nearly a decade before stealing the slippers nor in the years since then. DeKrey said Martin didn't even try to claim a slice of the insurance reward money when some of his former associates tried to collect.\n\nGarland wore several pairs of ruby slippers during filming of the classic 1939 musical, but only four authentic pairs are known to remain. The stolen slippers were insured for $1 million, but federal prosecutors put the current market value at about $3.5 million.\n\nThe FBI said a man approached the insurer in 2017 and claimed he could help recover them but demanded more than the $200,000 reward being offered. The slippers were recovered during an FBI sting in Minneapolis. The FBI has never disclosed how it tracked down the slippers, which remain in the agency's custody.\n\nThe slippers were on loan to the museum from Hollywood memorabilia collector Michael Shaw when Martin stole them. Three other pairs worn by Garland in the movie are held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Smithsonian Museum of American History and a private collector.\n\nSeveral rewards were offered over the years in hopes of figuring out who stole the slippers, which were key props in the film. Garland's character, Dorothy, has to click the heels of the slippers three times and repeat, \"There's no place like home,\" to return to Kansas.\n\nGarland was born Frances Gumm in 1922. She lived in Grand Rapids, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) north of Minneapolis, until she was 4, when her family moved to Los Angeles. She died in 1969.\n\nThe Judy Garland Museum, located in the house where she lived, says it has the world's largest collection of Garland and Wizard of Oz memorabilia."}
{"text": "# A century after Lenin's death, the USSR's founder seems to be an afterthought in modern Russia\nBy **JIM HEINTZ**  \nJanuary 21, 2024. 1:01 AM EST\n\n---\n\nNot long after the 1924 death of the founder of the Soviet Union, a popular poet soothed and thrilled the grieving country with these words: \"Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live.\"\n\nA century later, the once-omnipresent image of Vladimir Lenin is largely an afterthought in modern Russia, despite those famous lines by revolutionary writer Vladimir Mayakovsky.\n\nThe Red Square mausoleum where his embalmed corpse lies in an open sarcophagus is no longer a near-mandatory pilgrimage but a site of macabre kitsch, open only 15 hours a week. It draws far fewer visitors than the Moscow Zoo.\n\nThe goateed face with its intense glare that once seemed unavoidable still stares out from statues, but many of those have been the targets of pranksters and vandals. The one at St. Petersburg's Finland Station commemorating his return from exile was hit by a bomb that left a huge hole in his posterior. Many streets and localities that bore his name have been rechristened.\n\nThe ideology that Lenin championed and spread over a vast territory is something of a sideshow in modern Russia. The Communist Party, although the largest opposition grouping in parliament, holds only 16% of the seats, overwhelmed by President Vladimir Putin's political power-base, United Russia.\n\nLenin \"turned out to be completely superfluous and unnecessary in modern Russia,\" historian Konstantin Morozov of the Russian Academy of Sciences told the AP.\n\nCommunist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov talks as if Lenin still was in charge: \"100 years since the day when his big and kind heart stopped, the second century of Lenin's immortality begins,\" he said.\n\nPutin himself appears inclined to keep Lenin at arm's length, even aiming some darts at him.\n\nIn a speech three days before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Putin dismissed its sovereign status as an illegitimate holdover from Lenin's era, when it was a separate republic within the Soviet Union.\n\n\"As a result of Bolshevik policy, Soviet Ukraine arose, which even today can with good reason be called 'Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's Ukraine.' He is the author and the architect,\" Putin said.\n\nIn a speech a year earlier, Putin said that allowing Ukraine and other republics the nominal right to secede had planted \"the most dangerous time bomb.\"\n\nWhatever objections to those policies, Putin also is clearly aware of the emotional hold that Lenin retains for many Russians, and he does not support initiatives that arise periodically to remove the body from the mausoleum.\n\n\"I believe it should be left as it is, at least for as long as there are those, and there are quite a few people, who link their lives, their fates as well as certain achievements ... of the Soviet era with that,\" he said in 2019.\n\nSuch links may persist for decades. A 2022 opinion survey by state-run polling agency VTsIOM found that 29% of Russians believed Lenin's influence would fade so much that in 50 years he would be remembered only by historians. But that response was only 10 percentage points lower than one to the same question a decade earlier, suggesting Lenin remains important.\n\nLenin's hold on Russia's heart is still strong enough that three years ago, the Union of Russian Architects succumbed to a public outcry and canceled a competition soliciting suggestions for how the Red Square mausoleum could be repurposed. That competition did not even specifically call for the removal of Lenin's body.\n\nLenin died on Jan. 21, 1924, at age 53, severely weakened by three strokes. His widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, wanted him to be buried in a conventional grave.\n\nLenin's close associates had feared his death for months. Artist Yuri Annenkov, summoned to do his portrait at the dacha where he was convalescing, said he had \"the helpless, twisted, infantile smile of a man who had fallen into childhood.\"\n\nAmid those concerns, Josef Stalin told a Politburo meeting of a proposal by \"some comrades\" to preserve Lenin's body for centuries, according to a history by Russian news agency Tass. The idea offended Leon Trotsky, Lenin's closest lieutenant, who likened it to the holy relics displayed by the Russian Orthodox Church - a staunch opponent of the Bolsheviks- that had \"nothing in common with the science of Marxism.\"\n\nBut Stalin, once a divinity school student, understood the value of the secular analogue to a saint.\n\nThe weather may have tipped the scales. Temperatures were reportedly as low as minus 30 C (minus 22 F) when Lenin's body was displayed during a wake in Moscow, stalling decomposition and inspiring authorities to hastily build a small wooden mausoleum in Red Square and make further efforts to preserve the body.\n\nA later version, a more modernist take on ancient stepped pyramids clad in somber deep red stone, opened in 1930. By that time, Trotsky had been forced into exile and Stalin was in full control, bolstered by a determination to portray himself as absolutely loyal to Lenin's ideals.\n\nIn the end, the cult of \"Lenin After Lenin\" may have worked against the Soviet Union rather than strengthening it by enforcing a rigid mindset, in the view of some historians.\n\n\"In many ways the tragedy of the USSR lay in the fact that all subsequent generations of leaders tried to rely on certain 'testaments of Lenin,'\" Vladimir Rudakov, editor of the journal Istorik, wrote in this month's issue.\n\nThe Mayakovsky poem that proclaimed Lenin's immortality was \"a parting word, or a spell, or a curse,\" Rudakov said.\n\nAbout 450,000 people file past Lenin's corpse per year, according to Tass, about a third of the number of Moscow Zoo visitors and a sharp contrast from the Soviet era when seemingly endless lines shuffled across Red Square.\n\nThe honor guards whose goose-stepping rotations fascinated visitors were removed from outside the mausoleum three decades ago. At the annual military parade through Red Square, the structure is blocked from view by a tribune where dignitaries watch the festivities.\n\nLenin is still there - just harder to see."}
{"text": "# Ron DeSantis ends his struggling presidential bid before New Hampshire and endorses Donald Trump\nBy **STEVE PEOPLES**  \nJanuary 21, 2024. 3:18 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended his Republican presidential campaign Sunday on the eve of the New Hampshire primary and endorsed Donald Trump, ending a White House bid that failed to meet expectations that he would emerge as a serious challenger to the former president.\n\n\"It's clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance,\" he said in a video posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary comes Tuesday.\n\nThe ambitious big-state governor entered the 2024 presidential contest with major advantages in his quest to take on Trump, and early primary polls suggested DeSantis was in a strong position to do just that. He and his allies amassed a political fortune well in excess of $100 million, and he boasted a significant legislative record on issues important to many conservatives, like abortion and the teaching of race and gender issues in schools.\n\nSuch advantages did not survive the reality of presidential politics in 2024. From a high-profile announcement that was plagued by technical glitches to constant upheavals to his staff and campaign strategy, DeSantis struggled to find his footing in the primary. He lost the Iowa caucuses - which he had vowed to win - by 30 percentage points to Trump.\n\nAnd now, DeSantis' political future is in question after suspending his presidential bid after just one voting contest. The 45-year-old is term limited as Florida governor."}
{"text": "# Nikki Haley questions Trump's mental fitness after he appears to confuse her for Nancy Pelosi\nBy **MEG KINNARD**  \nJanuary 20, 2024. 8:41 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP)** - Nikki Haley on Saturday questioned whether Donald Trump is mentally capable of serving as president again after he repeatedly seemed to confuse her with former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a campaign speech.\n\nAs she campaigned in Keene, New Hampshire, Haley referenced Trump's speech the night before, in which he mistakenly asserted that Haley was in charge of Capitol security on January 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the building seeking to stop the certification of his loss to Democrat Joe Biden.\n\nTrump first said that Haley turned down security offered by his administration on Jan. 6 and then again mentioned Haley, adding, \"They destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it.\"\n\nTrump, 77, has accused Pelosi of turning down security he says his administration offered, but a special House committee empaneled to probe the attack found no evidence to support that claim.\n\n\"They're saying he got confused, that he was talking about something else, he's talking about Nancy Pelosi,\" Haley said on Saturday.\n\n\"He mentioned me multiple times in that scenario. The concern I have is - I'm not saying anything derogatory - but when you're dealing with the pressures of the presidency, we can't have someone else that we question whether they're mentally fit to do this,\" Haley said. \"We can't.\"\n\nSpeaking at a Bloomberg News forum on Saturday in Manchester, Haley campaign manager Betsy Ankney referenced Haley's remarks and said Trump \"made a pretty apparent gaffe last night.\"\n\n\"It's a distinction without a difference. It's Nikki and Nancy,\" Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita said to reporters Saturday night. \"What's the difference?\"\n\nAt his rally Saturday night in Manchester, Trump said that he took a cognitive test and \"aced it.\"\n\n\"I'll let you know when I go bad. I really think I'll be able to tell you,\" he added. \"I feel my mind is stronger now than it was 25 years ago. Is that possible?\"\n\nTrump, who won Monday's Iowa caucuses and is the current GOP front-runner, picked Haley to serve as his United Nations ambassador and has ramped up his criticism of her campaign as the year's votes have gotten underway.\n\nOn Saturday, he stumped in New Hampshire with a robust complement of backers from Haley's home state of South Carolina, including Gov. Henry McMaster and several U.S. House members. A day earlier, Sen. Tim Scott - who ended his own 2024 bid in November and was appointed to the Senate by Haley in 2012 - endorsed Trump over Haley in a rousing call-and-response speech of his own in New Hampshire.\n\nSince entering the GOP race nearly a year ago, Haley, 52, has advocated for \"mental competency tests\" for older politicians, a swipe at the ages of both Trump and Biden."}
{"text": "# Can Trump be stopped? That and more key questions heading into the New Hampshire primary\nBy **STEVE PEOPLES**  \nJanuary 21, 2024. 12:55 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CONCORD, N.H. (AP)** - Donald Trump's effort to march to the Republican presidential nomination faces perhaps its greatest challenge on Tuesday when voters in New Hampshire hold the first-in-the-nation primary.\n\nThe former president enters the contest emboldened by his record-setting performance in last week's Iowa caucuses. But New Hampshire has a more moderate political tradition and primary rules that allow unaffiliated voters to participate in the race. Trump-backed MAGA candidates have struggled here in recent years.\n\nNikki Haley is hoping to capitalize on those vulnerabilities. The former U.N. ambassador is the only candidate left in the GOP primary aiming to defeat Trump outright. After a disappointing finish in Iowa, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is effectively surrendering new Hampshire and focusing on South Carolina's Feb. 24 primary.\n\nA Haley victory would usher in a more competitive phase of a primary that Trump has so far dominated. A Trump win, however, could create a sense of inevitability around the prospect that he could become the GOP nominee for the third consecutive time.\n\nDon't forget that Democrats have a primary, too. President Joe Biden is not on the ballot, having made South Carolina the first formal stop on the Democratic primary calendar. But New Hampshire is sticking to tradition and hosting its own Democratic primary anyway.\n\nHere's what we're watching for on Tuesday:\n\n## CAN TRUMP BE STOPPED?\nIf Trump's rivals can't beat him in New Hampshire, they may not be able to stop him anywhere else.\n\nTuesday's election has essentially become a one-on-one fight between Trump and Haley, which is exactly what Trump's Republican critics have been clamoring for. Haley appears competitive and enjoys support among moderate voters and independents. She's also earned the backing of popular New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu.\n\nStill, Trump remains the favorite.\n\nSensing a knock-out blow, the former president has called in his growing army of prominent supporters in recent days to help demonstrate his strength. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, Trump's former opponent, endorsed Trump at a New Hampshire rally over the weekend. New York Rep. Elise Stefanik and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance stumped for Trump on Saturday before an appearance from South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster.\n\nA significant number of New Hampshire Republicans insist they will never support Trump. And without a competitive Democratic primary in the way, many left-leaning unaffiliated voters could decide to support Haley. But that doesn't change the fact that Republican primary elections are typically decided by Republicans, and Trump's grip on the base appears stronger than ever.\n\nStill, New Hampshire loves a comeback story (just ask Bill Clinton), so we wouldn't rule anything out.\n\n## IT'S ALL ABOUT TURNOUT\nMore than any issue or shortcoming, Trump's fate may be tied most to who actually shows up to vote on Tuesday.\n\nIowa saw one of its lowest turnouts in recent history in last week's caucuses. Low turnout elections typically favor the candidate with the strongest support among the party's base. And in 2024, that's Trump.\n\nBut Haley's team has been trying to expand the New Hampshire electorate by appealing to less-ideological moderate Republicans and left-leaning independents.\n\nNew Hampshire law allows unaffiliated voters to participate in either party's nomination contest. Democrats are not allowed to vote in the GOP primary, although voters had an opportunity to change their registration back in October.\n\nHaley needs a large turnout to have a chance on Tuesday. And that's exactly what state officials are expecting.\n\nNew Hampshire Secretary of State David M. Scanlan predicted that 322,000 voters would participate in the Republican primary, which would be a record high. On the Democratic side, he's expecting just 88,000 given that there's virtually no competition.\n\nTo defeat Trump, Haley probably needs more than a record-high turnout overall - she needs to bring out unaffiliated voters in record numbers, too. Trump's team is skeptical. And history is not on her side.\n\n## DISAPPEARING DESANTIS\nIt will be hard to ignore DeSantis' decline once all the votes are counted on Tuesday.\n\nThe Florida governor visited the state for the first time in June as a front-runner in the 2024 primary. Seven months later, he's been forced to surrender New Hampshire before a single vote is cast because of his dismal numbers here following his 30-point drubbing in Iowa.\n\nDeSantis actually spent the weekend campaigning in South Carolina, which hosts its primary election in five weeks, to try to distance himself from what's expected to be an ugly finish here.\n\nWe're curious whether DeSantis' departure actually ends up helping Trump, given that most of DeSantis' supporters had positive views of the former president.\n\nIt's also worth wondering if Tuesday marks the final primary election day for DeSantis as a 2024 candidate. During a brief appearance in New Hampshire last week before he sped to South Carolina, he said he would only continue to stay in the race if there was a path to victory.\n\nIf he's embarrassed again on Tuesday, his shrinking path may disappear altogether.\n\n## HOW MUCH DOES ELECTABILITY REALLY MATTER?\nPublicly and privately, Democratic leaders have repeatedly acknowledged that they fear Haley much more than Trump in a prospective general election matchup against Biden. We're about to find out whether Republican primary voters agree.\n\nHaley has spent months telling voters that, without Trump's chaos and political baggage, she would be better positioned to defeat Biden in November. That argument didn't help her much in Iowa, where she finished just behind DeSantis.\n\nShe's betting that voters in swing-state New Hampshire will place more value on her longer-term political appeal. Sununu, New Hampshire's popular GOP governor, has been at Haley's side for weeks reminding voters of Trump's dismal record in national elections ever since he entered the White House.\n\nIt's unclear if the message has resonated.\n\nIf it doesn't, it'll be because Trump has effectively convinced Republican voters that he - not Haley - is the most electable general election candidate. That's a risky bet, given his extraordinary legal problems, the stunning attack he inspired on the U.S. Capitol and his demonstrated record of alienating suburban voters in successive elections.\n\nBiden's unpopularity is no doubt muddying the issue.\n\nStill, New Hampshire voters have an opportunity to cast a strategic vote Tuesday based on the one issue that seems to matter more than all else in today's politics: the ability to beat the other side.\n\n## A PRESIDENTIAL EMBARRASSMENT?\nIt may not be the headline, but New Hampshire Democrats are voting for their presidential nominee on Tuesday as well. And as much as Biden's team wants you to think they don't care about the outcome, they're paying attention.\n\nBiden won't be on New Hampshire ballot, of course.\n\nHe's avoiding New Hampshire altogether after pushing the Democratic National Committee to break tradition and award the nation's opening primary to South Carolina, a much more diverse state that's set to vote on Feb. 3. Furious about Biden's decision, the \"Live Free or Die\" state ignored the president's wishes and will host its own unsanctioned Democratic primary anyway.\n\nThere are several lesser known Democrats on the ballot, including Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., and progressive activist Maryanne Williamson. Eager to demonstrate Biden's strength despite his absence, the president's allies in the state have been encouraging voters to write in Biden's name.\n\nThe outcome will have no bearing on the number of delegates needed to secure the Democratic nomination. But an underwhelming finish, even in a write-in campaign, would represent an unwanted embarrassment as Biden tries to improve his political standing heading into the fall campaign."}
{"text": "# In small-town Wisconsin, looking for the roots of the modern American conspiracy theory\nBy **TIM SULLIVAN**  \nJanuary 21, 2024. 7:12 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**APPLETON, Wis. (AP)** - The decades fall away as you open the front doors.\n\nIt's the late 1950s in the cramped little offices - or maybe the pre-hippie 1960s. It's a place where army-style buzz cuts are still in fashion, communism remains the primary enemy and the decor is dominated by American flags and portraits of once-famous Cold Warriors.\n\nAt the John Birch Society, they've been waging war for more than 60 years against what they're sure is a vast, diabolical conspiracy. As they tell it, it's a plot with tentacles that reach from 19th-century railroad magnates to the Biden White House, from the Federal Reserve to COVID vaccines.\n\nLong before QAnon, Pizzagate and the modern crop of politicians who will happily repeat apocalyptic talking points, there was Birch. And outside these cramped small-town offices is a national political landscape that the Society helped shape.\n\n\"We have a bad reputation. You know: 'You guys are insane,'\" says Wayne Morrow, a Society vice president. He is standing in the group's warehouse amid 10-foot (3-meter) shelves of Birch literature waiting to be distributed.\n\n\"But all the things that we wrote about are coming to pass.\"\n\nBack when the Cold War loomed and TV was still mostly in black and white, the John Birch Society mattered. There were dinners at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York and meetings with powerful politicians. There was a headquarters on each coast, a chain of bookstores, hundreds of local chapters, radio shows, summer camps for members' children.\n\nWell-funded and well-organized, they sent forth fevered warnings about a secret communist plot to take over America. It made them heroes to broad swaths of conservatives, even as they became a punchline to a generation of comedians.\n\n\"They created this alternative political tradition,\" says Matthew Dallek, a historian at George Washington University and author of \"Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right.\" He says it forged a right-wing culture that fell, at first, well outside mainstream Republican politics.\n\nConspiracy theories have a long history in the United States, going back at least to 1800, when secret forces were said to be backing Thomas Jefferson's presidential bid. It was a time when such talk moved slowly, spread through sermons, letters and tavern visits.\n\nNo more. Fueled by social media and the rise of celebrity conspiracists, the last two decades have seen ever-increasing numbers of Americans lose faith in everything from government institutions to journalism. And year after year, ideas once relegated to fringe newsletters, little-known websites and the occasional AM radio station pushed their way into the mainstream.\n\nToday, outlandish conspiracy theories are quoted by more than a few U.S. senators, and millions of Americans believe the COVID pandemic was orchestrated by powerful elites. Prominent cable news commentators speak darkly of government agents seizing citizens off the streets.\n\nBut the John Birch Society itself is largely forgotten, relegated to a pair of squat buildings along a busy commercial street in small-town Wisconsin.\n\nSo why even take note of it today? Because many of its ideas - from anger at a mysterious, powerful elite to fears that America's main enemy was hidden within the country, biding its time - percolated into pockets of American culture over the last half-century. Those who came later simply out-Birched the Birchers. Says Dallek: \"Their successors were politically savvier and took Birch ideas and updated them for contemporary politics.\"\n\nThe result has been a new political terrain. What was once at the edges had worked its way toward the heart of the discourse.\n\nTo some, the fringe has gone all the way to the White House. In the Society's offices, they'll tell you that Donald Trump would never have been elected if they hadn't paved the way.\n\n\"The bulk of Trump's campaign was Birch,\" Art Thompson, a retired Society CEO who remains one of its most prominent voices, says proudly. \"All he did was bring it out into the open.\"\n\nThere's some truth in that, even if Thompson is overstating things.\n\nThe Society had spent decades calling for a populist president who would preach patriotism, oppose immigration, pull out of international treaties and root out the forces trying to undermine America. Trump may not have realized it, but when he warned about a \"Deep State\" - a supposed cabal of bureaucrats that secretly controls U.S. policy - he was repeating a longtime Birch talking point.\n\nA savvy reality TV star, Trump capitalized on a conservative political landscape that had been shaped by decades of right-wing talk radio, fears about America's seismic cultural shifts and the explosive online spread of misinformation.\n\nWhile the Birch Society echoes in that mix, tracing those echoes is impossible. It's hard to draw neat historical lines in American politics. Was the Society a prime mover, or a bit player? In a nation fragmented by social media and offshoot groups by the dozens, there's just no way to be sure. What is certain, though, is this:\n\n\"The conspiratorial fringe is now the conspiratorial mainstream,\" says Paul Matzko, a historian and research fellow at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute. \"Right-wing conspiracism has simply outgrown the John Birch Society.\"\n\nTheir beliefs skip along the surface of the truth, with facts and rumors and outright fantasies banging together into a complex mythology. \"The great conspiracy\" is what Birch Society founder Robert Welch called it in \"The Blue Book,\" the collection of his writings and speeches still treated as near-mystical scripture in the Society's corridors.\n\nWelch, a wealthy candy company executive, formed the Society in the late 1950s, naming it for an American missionary and U.S. Army intelligence officer killed in 1945 by communist Chinese forces. Welch viewed Birch as the first casualty of the Cold War. Communist agents, he said, were everywhere in America.\n\nWelch shot to prominence, and infamy, when he claimed that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the hero general of World War II, was a \"dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.\" Also under Kremlin control, Welch asserted: the secretary of state, the head of the CIA, and Eisenhower's younger brother Milton.\n\nSubtlety has never been a strong Birch tradition. Over the decades, the Birch conspiracy grew to encompass the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, public education, the United Nations, the civil rights movement, The Rockefeller Foundation, the space program, the COVID pandemic, the 2020 presidential election and climate-change activism. In short, things the Birchers don't like.\n\nThe plot's leaders - \"insiders,\" in Society lexicon - range from railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt to former President George H.W. Bush and Bill Gates, whose vaccine advocacy is, they say, part of a plan to control the global population. While his main focus was always communism, Welch eventually came to believe that the conspiracy's roots twisted far back into history, to the Illuminati, an 18th-century Bavarian secret society.\n\nBy the 1980s, the Society was well into its decline. Welch died in 1985 and the society's reins passed to a series of successors. There were internal revolts. While its aura has waned, it is still a force among some conservatives - its videos are popular in parts of right-wing America, and its offices include a sophisticated basement TV studio for internet news reports. Its members speak at right-wing conferences and work booths at the occasional county fair.\n\nScholars say its ranks are far reduced from the 1960s and early 1970s, when membership estimates ranged from 50,000 to 100,000. \"Membership is something that has been closely guarded since day one,\" says Bill Hahn, who became CEO in 2020. He will only say the organization \"continues to be a growing operation.\"\n\nToday, the Society frames itself as almost conventional. Almost.\n\n\"We have succeeded in attracting mainstream people,\" says Steve Bonta, a top editor for the Society's New American magazine. The group has toned down the rhetoric and is a little more careful these days about throwing around accusations of conspiracies. But members still believe in them fiercely.\n\n\"As Mr. Welch came out with on Day One: There is a conspiracy,\" Hahn says. \"It's no different today than it was back in December 1958.\"\n\nIt can feel that way. Ask about the conspiracy's goal, and things swerve into unexpected territory. The sharp rhetoric re-emerges and, once again, the decades seem to fall away.\n\n\"They really want to cut back on the population of the Earth. That is their intent,\" Thompson says.\n\nBut why?\n\n\"Well, that's a good question, isn't it?\" he responds. \"It makes no sense. But that's the way they think.\""}
{"text": "# Lauren Boebert switched districts in a bid to stay in Congress. Winning over voters won't be easy\nBy **JESSE BEDAYN**  \nJanuary 21, 2024. 11:37 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LAST CHANCE, Colo. (AP)** - Fleeing a tough reelection bid in the district where she lives, Colorado Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert is moving from the mountains to the plains, in the hopes of finding conservative pastures green enough to salvage her place in Congress.\n\nTo win, she'll have to convince a new swath of voters that her brand of white-hot, far-right political activism - built on divisive one-liners and partisan ferocity in the U.S. House - is more needed in Washington than the home-grown Republicans she now faces in the primary.\n\nWhile Boebert's new district voted for President Donald Trump by a nearly 20 percentage point margin in 2020, more than double the margin in her old district, and some Republican voters are already admirers, others are greeting her with hands-on-hips skepticism.\n\n\"She feels she is a better candidate than the ones that we have,\" said Robin Varhelman, seated behind a desk at the cattle auction she owns in Brush. \"She's gonna have to explain to people why.\"\n\nVarhelman, flanked by the massive head of a bull named Big Red she used to rope, with a cap reading \"USA Trump\" hanging from its right ear, said she wasn't sure if Boebert made the switch for the good of the state or her own survival.\n\nAfter Boebert eked out a victory by just 546 votes in 2022, her home district moved from Republican-leaning to a toss-up for 2024 - threatening the GOP's already threadbare control of the U.S. House.\n\nThe narrow margin in Congress leaves both major parties fighting fiercely for every available seat in 2024. Boebert's move to the new district, where she'll have to take on at least nine other Republicans for her party's nomination, probably gives the GOP a better chance to win both.\n\nThat's part of her reason for switching, she said in a phone interview, but she gave another reason for jumping into a race that's already considered safely Republican: \"There is need for my voice in Congress.\"\n\nAfter attacking the Democrat who nearly upset her in 2022 as the beneficiary of outside money, Boebert has become the outsider and will have to live down the \"carpetbagger\" label that her new opponents are already lobbing her way.\n\nBoebert's abdication came after a video surfaced last year of the congresswoman vaping and groping with a date in a Denver theater, which rattled even devoted supporters as she barreled toward an election rematch against Adam Frisch. The Democrat she nearly lost to in 2022 had received triple her campaign donations in this year's race, benefiting tangibly from her disruptive profile, which grated on donors far beyond state and district borders.\n\n\"I can read the tea leaves,\" Boebert said. \"I don't want the left to have a chance to buy the seat from us, and their only argument is me.\"\n\nNumber crunchers, political experts and the National Republican Campaign Committee generally agree that Boebert's exodus will give Republicans a better chance to retain that district - though newly elected NRCC Chair Rep. Richard Hudson said the organization had no hand in the decision.\n\nFrisch said he's \"taking a bit of a victory lap\" after Boebert's retreat, and is plugging ahead with the same bipartisan platform, buoyed by at least $7.7 million in his campaign coffers. Frisch is expected to face Jeff Hurd - a mild-mannered conservative in the old GOP tradition, who said his goal is \"making local headlines, not national headlines.\"\n\nIn Boebert's new district, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson has endorsed her candidacy, and the NRCC is treating her as an incumbent. Less happy with the switch is Republican state Rep. Richard Holtorf, now one of her opponents.\n\n\"By Lauren Boebert district shopping and becoming a carpetbagger so she can keep her office in D.C., she has now become part of the swamp,\" he said.\n\nWhether Boebert will join the ranks of American politicians who have relocated and won remains unclear.\n\nThat road is littered with many who \"could never quite convince voters that they were in this for something other than their own ambition,\" said Christopher Galdieri, a politics professor at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, who wrote a book on American politicians who've picked up and moved races.\n\nBoebert does have some things working in her favor - she's not leaving Colorado, she's a known conservative gladiator on national issues such as immigration and reducing the national debt, and she's a dedicated acolyte for Trump, whose popularity among rural Republicans remains high.\n\nRancher Dawn Whitney, who attended one of Varhelman's recent auctions, said Boebert's flag-bearing for conservative, Christian and agrarian values is already enough to earn her vote.\n\n\"Ranchers and farmers are pretty much the same everywhere,\" said Whitney, her calloused hands busy at a word search puzzle as the auctioneer chanted.\n\n\"As long as she is country related, I think she'll be fine,\" said Whitney, who cited a well-worn reason voters cling to Boebert: Rural residents often feel their political power slipping and see an outspoken champion in Boebert.\n\n\"She don't back down,\" she said.\n\nStill, Boebert is joining a race that is practically guaranteed to elect a Republican anyway, said Galdieri. In effect, that means she's pushing aside \"homegrown options\" to run in a safer district.\n\n\"Voters notice that,\" he said.\n\nWhile some voters - even if they chafed at Boebert's style - weren't as miffed that she changed districts, the June Republican primary is where her opponents can do the most damage. Along with Holtorf, she'll face Mike Lynch, minority leader in Colorado's House of Representatives.\n\n\"I was a fan of Lauren Boebert when she first got there,\" he said. \"And then I think, for lack of a better term, she drank the Kool-Aid and became what she was fighting.\"\n\nBoebert's retort is unwavering.\n\n\"If there's anyone who takes on the swamp, it's me,\" she said. \"I'm the only candidate in this race who's actually done the work.\"\n\nNodding to part of the challenge ahead, she added, \"I'm excited to meet people and learn more about the nitty gritty local issues.\"\n\nWhile a segment of the new district's voters is in a more urban center south of Denver, the region stretches across Colorado's prairie east of the Rocky Mountains - where some folks' great-grandparents ate dinner beneath tablecloths during the Dust Bowl. A half-century ago, grandparents wrestled their calves out of blistering winter chills, just as their descendants were doing this week, and as their own children will do as long as things hold steady.\n\nThough Boebert might be escaping tough electoral odds, voters in the new district hold tight to the traditional values borne from that history - the same values that Boebert stepped on in the groping episode at a musical production of \"Beetlejuice\" in Denver.\n\nThat embarrassment was memorable enough to transcend district lines.\n\n\"I don't really care either way what she does, but she's definitely got to get some sh- together, getting thrown out of a theater,\" said Mark Moorman, a Republican who bid at auction on a bull the size and weight of a small car.\n\nBefore she switched districts, Boebert had apologized up and down Colorado's 3rd district as part of her last-ditch strategy against Frisch. She'd undertaken a local press tour and grassroots boot camps geared to emphasize her work on local issues.\n\nNow, on new turf, \"that's totally out the window,\" said Seth Masket, director of the Center on American Politics in Denver. \"She's the national politics candidate. That is her weakness; that is her strength. She kind of has no choice.\"\n\nIt's the difference between Republican voter Debbie Spear - \"She's going to have the same target on her back wherever she goes, here, there, Texas. We don't need that, what is she going to bring more than the candidates we have?\" - and the passerby at a ranching store nearby, who shouted out: \"The girl from Rifle? Hell, yeah.\""}
{"text": "# Alabama plans to carry out first nitrogen gas execution. How will it work and what are the risks?\nBy **KIM CHANDLER**  \nJanuary 21, 2024. 9:11 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP)** - Alabama is preparing to use a new method of execution: nitrogen gas.\n\nKenneth Eugene Smith, who survived the state's previous attempt to put him to death by lethal injection in 2022, is scheduled to be put to death Thursday by nitrogen hypoxia. If carried out, it would the first new method of execution since lethal injection was introduced in 1982.\n\nThe state maintains that nitrogen gas will cause unconsciousness quickly but critics have likened the never-used method of execution to human experimentation.\n\n## WHAT IS NITROGEN HYPOXIA?\nNitrogen hypoxia execution would cause death by forcing the inmate to breathe pure nitrogen, depriving him or her of the oxygen needed to maintain bodily functions.\n\n## HAS IT EVER BEEN USED?\nNo state has used nitrogen hypoxia to carry out a death sentence. In 2018, Alabama became the third state - along with Oklahoma and Mississippi - to authorize the use of nitrogen gas to execute prisoners.\n\nSome states are looking for new ways to execute inmates because the drugs used in lethal injections, the most common execution method in the United States, are increasingly difficult to find.\n\n## HOW IS IT SUPPOSED TO WORK?\nNitrogen, a colorless, odorless gas, makes up 78% of the air inhaled by humans and is harmless when breathed with proper levels of oxygen.\n\nThe theory behind nitrogen hypoxia is that changing the composition of the air to 100% nitrogen will cause Smith to lose consciousness and then die from lack of oxygen.\n\nMuch of what is recorded in medical journals about death from nitrogen exposure comes from industrial accidents - where nitrogen leaks or mix-ups have killed workers - and suicide attempts.\n\n## WHAT DOES THE STATE PLAN TO DO?\nAfter Smith is strapped to the gurney in the execution chamber, the state said in a court filing that it will place a \"NIOSH-approved Type-C full facepiece supplied air respirator\" - a type of mask typically used in industrial settings to deliver life-preserving oxygen - over Smith's face.\n\nThe warden will then read the death warrant and ask Smith if he has any last words before activating \"the nitrogen hypoxia system\" from another room. The nitrogen gas will be administered for at least 15 minutes or \"five minutes following a flatline indication on the EKG, whichever is longer,\" according to the state protocol.\n\nThe state heavily redacted sections of the protocol related to the storage and testing of the gas system.\n\nThe Alabama attorney general's office told a federal judge that the nitrogen gas will \"cause unconsciousness within seconds, and cause death within minutes.\"\n\n## WHAT ARE THE CRITICISMS?\nSmith's attorneys say the state is seeking to make him the \"test subject\" for a novel execution method.\n\nThey have argued that the mask the state plans to use is not air tight and oxygen seeping in could subject him to a prolonged execution, possibly leaving him in a vegetative state instead of killing him. A doctor testified on behalf of Smith that the low-oxygen environment could cause nausea, leaving Smith to choke to death on his own vomit.\n\nExperts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council earlier this month cautioned that, in their view, the execution method would violate the prohibition on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment.\n\nThe American Veterinary Medical Association wrote in 2020 euthanasia guidelines that nitrogen hypoxia can be an acceptable method of euthanasia under certain conditions for pigs but not for other mammals because it creates an \"anoxic environment that is distressing for some species.\"\n\n## IS THIS THE SAME AS THE GAS CHAMBER?\nNot exactly. Some states previously used hydrogen cyanide gas, a lethal gas, for executions. The last prisoner to be executed in a U.S. gas chamber was Walter LaGrand, the second of two German brothers sentenced to death for killing a bank manager in 1982 in southern Arizona. It took LaGrand 18 minutes to die in 1999.\n\n## WHO IS THE INMATE?\nSmith was one of two men convicted of the 1988 murder-for-hire of a preacher's wife. Prosecutors said Smith and the other man were each paid $1,000 to kill Elizabeth Sennett on behalf of her husband, who was deeply in debt and wanted to collect insurance money.\n\nAlabama attempted to execute Smith in 2022 by lethal injection. He was strapped to the gurney in the execution chamber being prepared for lethal injection, but the state called off the lethal injection when execution team members had difficulty connecting the second of two required intravenous lines to Smith's veins. Smith was strapped to the gurney for nearly four hours, according to his lawyers, as he waited to see if the execution would go forward.\n\n## ARE THERE LEGAL CHALLENGES?\nThe question of whether the execution can proceed will end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.\n\nThe 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments Friday in Smith's request to block the execution. After the court rules, either side could appeal.\n\nSmith has argued that the state's proposed procedures violate the ban on cruel and unusual punishment. He has also argued that Alabama violated his due process rights by scheduling the execution when he has pending appeals and that the face mask will interfere with is ability to pray.\n\nIn a separate case, Smith is arguing it would violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment for the state to make a second attempt to execute him after he already survived one execution attempt. Lawyers for Smith on Friday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the execution to consider that question.\n\n## WHAT IS POTENTIALLY AT STAKE?\nLethal injection is the most commonly used execution method in the United States, but death penalty states have struggled at times to obtain the needed drugs or encountered other problems in connecting intravenous lines.\n\nIf the Alabama execution goes forward, other states may seek to start to using nitrogen gas.\n\nIf the execution is blocked by the court or botched, it could halt or slow the pursuit of nitrogen gas as an alternative execution method."}
{"text": "# Texas man pleads guilty to kidnapping teen whose 'Help Me!' sign led to Southern California rescue\nJanuary 21, 2024. 11:41 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LOS ANGELES (AP)** - A Texas man has pleaded guilty to kidnapping a 13-year-old girl who was rescued in Southern California when a passerby saw her hold up a \"Help Me!\" sign in a parked car.\n\nA statement Friday from the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Central District of California said Steven Robert Sablan, 62, of Cleburne, Texas, admitted in a plea agreement that he sexually assaulted the victim while driving her from Texas to California.\n\nThe girl was rescued July 9 in Long Beach, south of Los Angeles, after a passerby called 911 to report seeing her hold up the piece of paper with the handwritten desperate plea for help.\n\nSablan, who has been in federal custody since July 2023, pleaded guilty to one count of kidnapping, prosecutors said.\n\nHis attorney, Deputy Federal Public Defender Nadine Hettle, declined to comment Saturday.\n\nIn July, Sablan was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of kidnapping and transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity.\n\nAn FBI agent wrote in an affidavit supporting the criminal complaint that the girl was walking down a street in San Antonio on July 6 when Sablan drove up, raised a black handgun and told her, \"If you don't get in the car with me, I am going to hurt you.\"\n\nA sentencing hearing was set for Oct. 25. Sablan will face a mandatory minimum of 20 years in federal prison and a maximum sentence of life."}
{"text": "# Strike kills Hezbollah official in Lebanon, amid apparent Israeli shift to targeted killings\nBy **MOHAMMED ZAATARI** and **ABBY SEWELL**  \nJanuary 21, 2024. 1:01 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SIDON, Lebanon (AP)** - An Israeli airstrike hit two vehicles near a Lebanese army checkpoint in south Lebanon on Sunday, killing a Hezbollah member and wounding several other people, including civilians, Lebanese state media and health officials reported.\n\nThe strike appeared to be part of a shift in Israeli strategy toward targeted killings in Lebanon after more than three months of near-daily clashes with Hezbollah militants on the border against the backdrop of the war in Gaza.\n\nHezbollah announced that one of its members, identified as Fadel Shaar, had been killed in the strike in the town of Kafra. Local civil defense and hospital officials said seven people were wounded, including two women, one of whom was in critical condition.\n\nVideo from the scene showed a passenger sedan in flames next to a small truck stopped in the middle of the road.\n\nThe Israeli military did not comment on the strike.\n\nSince the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7, Hezbollah forces have engaged in near-daily clashes with Israeli troops along the border.\n\nWhile the clashes had previously been limited mainly to a narrow strip within a few kilometers (miles) from the border, Israel in recent weeks appears to have moved to a strategy of targeted killings of figures from Hezbollah and allied groups, sometimes hitting in areas relatively far from the border, as was the case in Sunday's strike.\n\nOn Saturday, another strike near the Lebanese port city of Tyre killed two people in a car - one of them a Hezbollah commander - and two people in a nearby orchard. The commander, Ali Hudruj, was buried Sunday in south Lebanon. The other occupant of the car, tech sector businessman Mohammad Baqir Diab, was identified as a civilian and was buried in Beirut on Sunday.\n\nOn Jan. 2, a presumed Israeli airstrike killed a top Hamas official, Saleh Arouri, in a suburb of Beirut, the first such strike in Lebanon's capital since Israel and Hezbollah fought a brutal one-month war in 2006.\n\nSpeaking at Hudruj's funeral Sunday, Hezbollah Member of Parliament Hussein Jeshi said Israel had \"resorted to the method of assassinating some members of the resistance\" to compensate for being unable to reach a military victory against Hamas after more than 100 days of war in Gaza.\n\nThe Lebanese militant group said in a statement later Sunday that it had launched an attack against the town of Avivim in northern Israel in retaliation for a civilian woman killed in the Israeli strike in Kafra and for other \"attacks that targeted Lebanese villages and civilians.\"\n\nIt later modified the statement to remove the reference to the civilian death after hospital officials and family members said the woman was still alive.\n\nIsrael did not comment on the strike in Kafra but announced it had struck Hezbollah targets in several locations in Lebanon on Sunday. It later said that an anti-tank missile had hit a house in Avivim and no injuries were reported.\n\nWith dangers of a regional conflict flaring on multiple fronts, officials from the United States and Europe have engaged in a flurry of shuttle diplomacy in recent weeks between Israel and Lebanon, attempting to head off an escalation of the conflict into a full-on war on the Lebanese front."}
{"text": "# At least 27 people are reported killed in an attack on Donetsk in Russian-occupied Ukraine\nJanuary 21, 2024. 2:51 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**KYIV, Ukraine (AP)** - Moscow-installed officials said Ukrainian shelling killed at least 27 people and wounded 25 on Sunday at a market on the outskirts of Donetsk, a Russian-occupied city in the eastern part of the country.\n\nAmong the injured in the suburb of Tekstilshchik were two children, said Denis Pushilin, the local leader.\n\nUkrainian officials in Kyiv did not comment on the incident, and the claims could not be independently verified by The Associated Press. Both sides have increasingly relied on longer-range attacks this winter amid largely unchanged positions on the 1,500-kilometer (930-mile) front line in the nearly 2-year-old war.\n\nThe artillery shells that hit the area had been fired from the area of Kurakhove and Krasnohorivka to the west, Pushilin said, adding that emergency services responded to the scene.\n\nU.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres \"strongly condemns all attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure, including today's shelling of the city of Donetsk in Ukraine,\" according to a U.N. spokesperson, adding that all such attacks are prohibited under international humanitarian law.\n\nDonetsk is one of four regions in Ukraine that Russia annexed illegally in 2022, months after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion.\n\nRussia's Foreign Ministry also blamed Ukraine and described the strike as a \"terrorist attack.\"\n\nAlso on Sunday, a fire broke out at a chemical transport terminal at Russia's Ust-Luga port following two explosions, regional officials said. Local media said the Baltic Sea port, 165 kilometers (about 100 miles) southwest of St. Petersburg, had been attacked by Ukrainian drones, causing a gas tank to explode.\n\nThe blaze was at a site run by Russia's second-largest natural gas producer, Novatek.\n\nIn a statement to Russian media outlet RBC, the company blamed the fire on an \"external influence,\" saying operations at the port were paused.\n\nYuri Zapalatsky, the head of the Kingisepp district on the Gulf of Finland where the port is located, said there were no casualties but the area was on high alert.\n\nNews outlet Fontanka reported that two drones had been detected flying toward St. Petersburg on Sunday morning, but were redirected toward the Kingisepp district. AP could not independently verify the reports.\n\nRussia's Defense Ministry did not report any drone activity in the Kingisepp area in its daily briefing. It said that four Ukrainian drones had been downed in Russia's Smolensk region, and that two more were shot down in the Oryol and Tula regions.\n\nRussian officials previously confirmed a Ukrainian drone had been downed on the outskirts of St. Petersburg on Thursday.\n\nIn fighting on the front line, Russia's Defense Ministry said Moscow's forces had taken control of the village of Krokhmalne in Ukraine's Kharkiv region. Ukrainian forces confirmed the settlement had been occupied, but described its capture as temporary.\n\nUkrainian Ground Forces Command spokesman Volodymyr Fityo said Kyiv's troops had been pulled back to reserve positions from the village, which had a population of about 45 people before the start of the war.\n\n\"That's five houses, probably,\" he was quoted as saying by Ukrainian news outlet Hromadske. \"Our main goal is to save the lives of Ukraine's defenders.\"\n\nRecent Russian attacks have tried to find gaps in Ukraine's defenses by using large numbers of missiles and drones in an apparent effort to saturate air defense systems.\n\nThe massive barrages - more than 500 drones and missiles were fired between Dec. 29 and Jan. 2, according to officials in Kyiv - are also using up Ukraine's weapons stockpiles."}
{"text": "# Dirty rat! Culprit fills in Chicago neighborhood landmark known as the 'rat hole'\nJanuary 20, 2024. 3:14 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CHICAGO (AP)** - You dirty rat!\n\nIn a city infamous for its gangster past, some culprit filled in a Northside Chicago neighborhood landmark affectionately called by residents the \"rat hole.\"\n\nThe indentation in the pavement on West Roscoe Street resembles the outline of a rat, claws tail and all. It was reported Friday on social media that the \"rat hole\" had been filled with a substance resembling white plaster.\n\nTransportation and Streets and Sanitation officials told the Chicago Tribune that the city was not behind the fill-in - which one day may find itself part of Windy City tongue-in-cheek lore like Al Capone's vault and a coil of bronze faux feces on a fountain intended to remind people to pick up their dog poop.\n\nNeighbors gathered Friday afternoon using a brush and water to scrub the shallow hole in the sidewalk clean, restoring it to its \"ratfull\" place among the city's iconic - if not strange - attractions.\n\nTributes, including plastic flowers, a prayer candle, small toys, a pack of cigarettes and coins adorn what may have been the final resting place of \"Lil Stucky\" or \"Chimley,\" names given by some in the neighborhood to the creature that once lay there spreadeagled.\n\n\"Overall, people just appreciate that our wonderful block is getting attention - even if it's to look at a rat hole,\" Jeff VanDam told the Chicago Sun-Times for a story Friday. \"It's a small, quirky feature of a neighborhood where we get used to it, we care about it, and we want to protect it.\"\n\nChicago resident Winslow Dumaine learned about the \"rat hole\" from a friend and posted a photo earlier this month of it on X, formerly known as Twitter. The photo drew more than 5 million views, he said.\n\nPeople living nearby said the imprint had been there for nearly two decades and was made by a squirrel, according to Dumaine.\n\n\"I think at the end of the day, the rat hole is a silly thing, but the thing that made it so viral was the fact that thousands and thousands of people were in on a big, sweet, heartfelt joke,\" Dumaine told the Tribune.\n\n\"Chicago prides itself on all of the things that make Chicago difficult, and no matter how much Chicago hates rats, they love rats,\" he added. \"It's a part of our culture.\""}
{"text": "# Zelenskyy calls Trump's rhetoric about Ukraine's war with Russia 'very dangerous'\nBy **THE ASSOCIATED PRESS**  \nJanuary 20, 2024. 5:29 PM EST\n\n---\n\nUkrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he was worried at the prospect of Donald Trump returning to the White House, branding Trump's claim that he could stop Ukraine's war with Russia in 24 hours as \"very dangerous.\"\n\nIn an interview with the U.K.'s Channel 4 News that aired Friday, Zelenskyy invited the former president and front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination to visit Kyiv, but only if Trump delivers on his promise.\n\n\"Donald Trump, I invite you to Ukraine, to Kyiv. If you can stop the war during 24 hours, I think it will be enough to come,\" Zelenskyy said.\n\nTrump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung did not respond to a message seeking comment Saturday.\n\nThe Ukrainian leader also shared his concern about the U.S. taking unilateral action that failed to consider Ukraine's perspective, noting the dearth of details around Trump's \"peace plan.\"\n\nZelenskyy described the former president's rhetoric as \"very dangerous\" and appeared apprehensive that Trump's idea of a negotiated solution might involve Ukraine making major concessions to Russia.\n\n\"(Trump) is going to make decisions on his own, without ... I'm not even talking about Russia, but without both sides, without us,\" Zelenskyy said. \"If he says this publicly, that's a little scary. I've seen a lot, a lot of victims, but that's really making me a bit stressed.\"\n\nHe added: \"Because even if his idea (for ending the war) - that no one has heard yet - doesn't work for us, for our people, he will do anything to implement his idea anyway. And this worries me a little.\"\n\nTrump has repeatedly insisted that he is well-positioned to negotiate an end to the war that has raged for almost two years, saying he has a good relationship with both Russian and Ukrainian leaders. Throughout his political career, he has frequently lavished praise on Russian President Vladimir Putin, including after Moscow's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.\n\nAt a campaign rally in Georgia just days after Russian tanks moved into Ukraine, Trump described Putin as a \"smart\" political player and expressed admiration for Russia's swift takeover of a vast, \"great piece of land\" at the cost of what he suggested were relatively minor sanctions.\n\nThe U.S. House of Representatives impeached Trump when he was president, alleging he pressured Zelenskyy to pursue a politically motivated probe that might hurt Joe Biden's chance to win the 2020 presidential election while withholding $400 million in military aid that Congress approved to help Ukraine confront Russian-backed separatists in the country's east.\n\nThe Senate acquitted Trump of the impeachment charges.\n\nElsewhere, the head of the U.N. atomic watchdog on Saturday warned that mines had been re-planted around the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe's largest, just months after a team of international inspectors reported on their removal.\n\nInternational Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi cautioned that the presence of mines in the plant's buffer zone, between its internal and external fences, is \"inconsistent\" with the agency's safety standards, according to a readout published on the organization's website. The readout added that an IAEA team dispatched to monitor the plant's safety had previously identified mines in the same location, but that these were removed last November.\n\nThe head of Ukraine's state nuclear company on Saturday described the alleged planting of mines as \"another crime\" by Russian forces that have occupied the Zaporizhzhia plant since the early weeks of the war.\n\nIn a Telegram update, Petro Kotin of Energoatom said that the situation at the plant \"will remain fragile and dangerous as long as the Russians remain there.\"\n\nThe IAEA has repeatedly expressed concern that the war could cause a potential radiation leak from the facility, which is one of world's 10 biggest nuclear power stations. The plant's six reactors have been shut down for months, but it still needs power and qualified staff to operate crucial cooling systems and other safety features.\n\nAlso on Saturday, Russian forces shelled the southern Ukrainian town of Huliaipole, wounding a local resident as he stood in his yard, local Gov. Yuriy Malashko wrote on Telegram.\n\nEarlier that day, regional Ukrainian officials reported that one civilian was killed and three more suffered wounds as Russian forces on Friday and overnight shelled the southern Kherson region.\n\nIn southern Russia, close to the Ukrainian border, an exploding drone slammed into a gas pipeline on the outskirts of the city of Belgorod, regional Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov reported on Telegram. Gladkov said Ukraine was responsible for the attack, and added that no one was hurt."}
{"text": "# An explosive case of police violence in the Paris suburbs ends with the conviction of 3 officers\nJanuary 20, 2024. 10:04 AM EST\n\n**PARIS (AP)** - A French court convicted three police officers of \"voluntary violence\" towards a youth worker in a Paris suburb who suffered serious injuries to his rectum after being assaulted with a police baton during an identity check seven years ago.\n\nAll three officers received suspended prison sentences. The officer who used the baton to strike Théo Luhaka was given a suspended sentence of 12 months, while the other two present on the scene got three months each.\n\nLuhaka, a youth worker of African descent who was 22 years old at the time, filed a lawsuit accusing the officers of assaulting him during an identity check in February 2017 in Aulnay-sous-Bois, a working-class suburb northeast of Paris with a large immigrant population.\n\nRights defenders have long complained of French police abusing their powers during identity checks on people of color.\n\nThe court in the town of Bobigny, about 9 kilometers (5 miles) north-east of the French capital, dropped the charge of a \"permanent infirmity\" in its decision on Friday. A charge of rape was dropped earlier.\n\nDespite the light sentences, the verdict brought a sense of closure for Luhaka, the French press reported his lawyers as saying.\n\n\"It's a decision ... that we take as a victory,\" said Antoine Vey, Luhaka's lawyer, according to the daily Le Monde. Luhaka did not speak, but had said earlier that he would be relieved if the police were convicted.\n\nThe lawyer for Marc-Antoine Castelain, the officer who received the 12-month sentence, also welcomed the verdict.\n\n\"The first impression of our client is the immense relief that, for the first time, in the eyes of France, it has been established that ... he is not a criminal,\" Le Monde quoted Thibault de Montbrial as saying, adding that the court had set the record straight about his actions at the time.\n\nWidespread anger erupted after a video surfaced online apparently showing Luhaka's arrest on Feb. 2, 2017. The incident was followed by a week of protests in suburbs around Paris, many degenerating into violence.\n\nRioting has accompanied police ID checks gone awry in the past. Most recently, the shooting death of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old youth with Algerian roots, during a police ID check last June touched off days of rioting around France. The motorcycle police officer who fired into the stopped car driven by the young man has been charged with voluntary homicide but was released from detention during the investigation.\n\nIn the case of Théo Luhaka, Le Monde reported that Castelain, the officer who used the \"telescopic baton,\" was also banned from carrying a weapon or patrolling the streets for five years. The other two officers received similar bans for two years.\n\nAll three denied wrong-doing and said their reaction was justified because the young man was in \"rebellion.\""}
{"text": "# Russia will consider property confiscations for those convicted of discrediting the army\nBy **THE ASSOCIATED PRESS**  \nJanuary 20, 2024. 11:28 AM EST\n\n---\n\nRussia's parliament will consider a law allowing for the confiscation of money, valuables, and other property from those deemed to spread \"deliberately false information\" about Moscow's military actions, a senior lawmaker said Saturday.\n\nVyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the State Duma, wrote in a Telegram update that the measure would apply to those publicly inciting \"extremist activities\" or calling for the introduction of sanctions against Russia, as well as those \"discrediting\" the armed forces, a criminal offense under a law adopted as part of Moscow's crackdown on dissent after it sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022.\n\n\"Everyone who tries to destroy Russia, betrays it, must suffer the deserved punishment and compensate for the damage inflicted on the country, at the cost of their property,\" Volodin said. He added that under the law, those found guilty of \"discrediting\" the army also face being stripped of any honorary titles.\n\nVolodin said the bill would be brought to the Duma, Russia's lower parliamentary chamber, on Monday.\n\nThe existing law against \"discrediting\" the Russian military, which covers offenses such as \"justifying terrorism\" and spreading \"fake news\" about the armed forces, is regularly used to silence critics of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. Multiple activists, bloggers and ordinary Russians have received long jail terms.\n\nRussian state media reported last month that one of the country's bestselling novelists, known under the pen name Boris Akunin, had been charged under the law and added to the Russian register of \"extremists and terrorists.\" Another popular writer, Dmitry Glukhovsky, was handed an eight-year jail term in absentia after a Moscow court found him guilty in August of deliberately spreading false information about Russia's armed forces.\n\nIn November, a court in St. Petersburg jailed Sasha Skochilenko, an artist and musician, for seven years for swapping supermarket price tags with antiwar messages. The month before, Russian blogger Aleksandr Nozdrinov received a 8.5-year term for posting photos of destroyed buildings in Kyiv, along with a caption implying that Russian troops were responsible."}
{"text": "# Two British warships collided in a Middle East port. No one was injured but damage was sustained\nJanuary 20, 2024. 5:30 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - Two British warships collided in a harbor in Bahrain, causing damage to the vessels but no injuries, the Royal Navy said.\n\nThe HMS Chiddingfold appeared to reverse into the HMS Bangor as it was at a dock, according to video posted on social media.\n\n\"Why this happened is still to be established,\" said Rear Admiral Edward Ahlgren. \"We train our people to the highest standards and rigorously enforce machinery safety standards, but unfortunately incidents of this nature can still happen.\"\n\nAhlgren said an investigation is under way into what went wrong.\n\nThe two minehunters have been based in the Middle East to help protect merchant vessels.\n\nThe British military last week joined the U.S. in bombing more than a dozen sites used by the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen, whose relentless attacks on cargo vessels and warships in the Red Sea have disrupted global shipping."}
{"text": "# Storm Isha's rain and wind are expected to batter parts of the UK and Ireland\nJanuary 21, 2024. 12:38 PM EST\n\n---\n\nLONDON (AP) - Britain and Ireland braced Sunday as Storm Isha unleashed rain and potentially deadly winds that were expected to batter a wide swath of land and disrupt travel into the start of the work week.\n\nThe Met Office, the national weather service, issued an unusual blanket wind warning for nearly all of the U.K. Its prediction that gusts could reach 90 miles per hour (145 kilometers per hour) was realized in midafternoon in the mountainous Snowdonia region of Wales.\n\n\"There's the potential for danger-to-life and damaging winds potentially leading to some power cuts in places. Some large waves around coastal regions could bring some debris onto roads and trees could come down,\" meteorologist Tom Morgan said.\n\nParts of the U.K. have been hammered since fall by a series of gusty and wet storms that have toppled trees, knocked out power and led to flooding along river valleys. Isha is the ninth named storm since September.\n\nThe railway operator for Scotland halted train service Sunday night and into Monday's rush hour. Network Rail, which owns the railway infrastructure in England, Scotland and Wales, said it was placing speed limits on most lines to prevent engines from running into fallen trees and other debris, and trains would be affected into the morning commute.\n\nIn the west of Ireland, counties Donegal, Galway and Mayo were warned of extremely strong and possibly destructive gusts from Sunday afternoon into the morning. People were told to stay away from the coast."}
{"text": "# A British politician calling for a cease-fire in Gaza gets heckled by pro-Palestinian protesters\nJanuary 20, 2024. 2:02 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - A British politician who was making a speech calling for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip was interrupted Saturday by pro-Palestinian protesters.\n\nDavid Lammy, a member of Parliament from the center-left opposition Labour party, was briefly rushed backstage when a woman began shouting and walked up to the microphone where he had been standing and unfurled a Palestinian flag.\n\n\"When will you condemn the genocide? How many more children need to die?\" demonstrators shouted.\n\nAfter protesters were escorted away, Lammy was heckled by others from the audience as he resumed his speech.\n\n\"We all want to see a sustainable ceasefire in Gaza,\" he said. \"I want change through power, not through protest.\"\n\nThe Labour party, which is out of government but widely expected to return to power in an election later this year, has been divided over the war.\n\nIts leader, Keir Starmer, was criticized for refusing to call for a cease-fire early in the conflict and called for humanitarian pauses instead. He has called for a sustainable cease-fire more recently.\n\nThe Free Palestine Coalition said its activists had infiltrated the foreign policy conference put on by the Fabian Society, a socialist organization, at London's Guildhall.\n\n\"It is difficult to see how Lammy is upholding any commitment to human rights or international law as we enter into the 106th day of Israel's unrelenting assault on Gaza,\" the group said.\n\nIsrael launched its war against Hamas after the militant group's unprecedented Oct. 7 attack that killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in Israel and saw about 250 others taken hostage. Health authorities in Hamas-ruled Gaza say Israel's offensive has killed nearly 25,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children."}
{"text": "# Former Sinn Fein leader Adams faces a lawsuit in London over bombings during the 'Troubles'\nBy **BRIAN MELLEY**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 2:02 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - Former Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams faces a lawsuit by three people who were wounded in bombings attributed to the Irish Republican Army that date back more than 50 years, a judge said Friday.\n\nAdams can be sued as an individual but not as a representative of the IRA, Justice Michael Soole ruled. The judge also threw out a claim against the IRA, saying the group could not be sued because it was not a legal entity.\n\nAdams is one of the most influential figures of Northern Ireland's decades of conflict and led the IRA-linked party Sinn Fein between 1983 and 2018. He has always denied being an IRA member, though former colleagues have said he was one of its leaders.\n\nThe three claimants are seeking to prove Adams was responsible for bombings in England during \"the Troubles,\" referring to three decades of violence involving Irish republican and British loyalist militants and U.K. soldiers. Some 3,600 people were killed - most in Northern Ireland, though the IRA also set off bombs in England.\n\nThe three claimants are John Clark, a victim of the 1973 Old Bailey courthouse bombing in London, Jonathan Ganesh, a 1996 London Docklands bombing victim, and Barry Laycock, a victim of the 1996 Arndale shopping center bombing in Manchester. They allege Adams was a leading member of the IRA during those events and was on its decision-making Army Council.\n\nAdams \"acted together with others\" to \"bomb the British mainland\" and was \"directly responsible\" for decisions to place devices in 1973 and 1996, they said in court.\n\nIf they prevail, they are seeking only 1 pound ($1.27) \"for vindicatory purposes.\"\n\nThe case is likely to be the one of the final court efforts by victims of the Troubles to seek any type of justice in court after the controversial Legacy and Reconciliation Act set a cut off last May to file lawsuits.\n\nAttorneys for the victims said this case - filed in 2022 - was the last to make it.\n\nThe judge ruled that Adams cannot recover his lawyers' fees if he wins at trial, though he'd be on the hook for paying the victims' legal costs if he loses.\n\nAdams had challenged that protection to claimants in personal injury cases. The bombing victims had said the move was an effort to bully them into dropping the case.\n\n\"This is an unequivocal victory for all victims and survivors of IRA terrorism,\" attorney Matthew Jury said. \"Adams and his legal team's apparent attempt to intimidate them into withdrawing their claims has rightly failed and their case will continue.\"\n\nSeamus Collins, a lawyer for Adams, told the BBC that they would address the legal costs in court next week."}
{"text": "# Russian prosecutors seek lengthy prison terms for suspects in cases linked to the war in Ukraine\nBy **EMMA BURROWS** and **DASHA LITVINOVA**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 5:30 PM EST\n\n---\n\nA Russian court in Siberia on Friday sentenced a man to 19 years in prison for shooting a military enlistment officer, while prosecutors in St. Petersburg asked for a 28-year sentence for a woman charged in the bombing of a cafe last April that killed a prominent military blogger, reports said.\n\nBoth cases underscore the tensions in the Russian society heightened by President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine, with some of those opposing it turning to violent acts.\n\nIn the Siberian city of Irkutsk, 26-year-old timber truck driver Ruslan Zinin was sentenced Friday to 19 years after opening fire in September 2022 at the military enlistment office in Ust-Ilimsk, a town 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) north of Irkutsk, the state-run Tass news agency reported.\n\nThe shooting came a few days after Putin ordered a partial military mobilization to boost his forces fighting in Ukraine, sparking rare protests across Russia that were shut down, sometimes brutally. \n\nMen with no military experience or with previous exemptions to service were summoned and conscripted. Police rounded up men on the streets of Moscow and other cities, or raided hostels and warehouses to find men of fighting age.\n\nZinin reportedly walked into the enlistment office, saying that \"no one will go to fight\" and opened fire, seriously wounding an officer. The independent Telegram messaging channel Solidarity Zone said he wanted to prevent his younger brother from being conscripted.\n\nIn St. Petersburg, Tass said prosecutors on Friday asked for a 28-year sentence for Darya Trepova, 26, over the cafe bombing that killed Vladlen Tatarsky, a pro-war military blogger who regularly reported from the front lines in Ukraine.\n\nTrepova was arrested after being seen in a video presenting Tatarsky with a bust of himself, moments before the explosion at a riverside cafe where he was leading a discussion. The blast killed him and wounded 50 others.\n\nShe later claimed in court that she didn't know the bust contained a bomb, according to reports in Russian media, and said she was acting upon instructions from two men who told her there was a listening and tracking device inside.\n\nRussian authorities have blamed Ukrainian intelligence agencies for orchestrating the bombing. Kyiv has not directly responded to the accusation, but an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described the bombing as part of Russia's internal turmoil.\n\nRussia's Federal Security Service, the FSB, charged that a Ukrainian citizen identified as Yuriy Denysov had supplied Trepova with explosives through a courier service, acting on orders from the Ukrainian security services.\n\nTatarsky was the pen name of Maxim Fomin, who had hundreds of thousands of followers on his Telegram messaging app channel. He had joined separatists in eastern Ukraine after a Moscow-backed insurgency erupted there in 2014 and fought on the front lines for years before turning to blogging.\n\nMilitary bloggers have played an increasingly prominent role in Russia amid the fighting in Ukraine, supporting the Kremlin but often criticizing Russia's military leadership for perceived flaws. Unlike independent media or opposition figures, they have not faced punishment for that criticism.\n\nOn Thursday, another court in St. Petersburg sentenced a nurse, Maxim Asriyan, to eight years in prison on terror and treason charges for plotting to torch an army enlistment office in 2022, the Russian SotaVision Telegram channel said.\n\nThe prosecution had initially asked the court to sentence Asriyan to 14 years, even though he did not carry out the attack, the channel reported."}
{"text": "# Tens of thousands pack into a protest in Hamburg against Germany's far right\nJanuary 19, 2024. 1:30 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BERLIN (AP)** - Tens of thousands of people gathered Friday in Hamburg for a demonstration against the far right, and organizers said the protest was ended early because the mass of people led to safety concerns.\n\nThe event in Germany's second-biggest city appeared to be the biggest yet in a string of protests that has grown over the past week. They follow a report that extremists recently met to discuss the deportation of millions of immigrants, including some with German citizenship.\n\nMedia outlet Correctiv last week reported on the alleged far-right meeting in November, which it said was attended by figures from the extremist Identitarian Movement and from the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD. A prominent member of the Identitarian Movement, Austrian citizen Martin Sellner, presented his \"remigration\" vision for deportations.\n\nSome demonstrations in cities around Germany, including one in Cologne on Tuesday, already have drawn far more participants than initially expected.\n\nIn Hamburg, police said that some 50,000 gathered on a lakeside promenade Friday afternoon, while organizers put the figure at 80,000 and said many people weren't able to squeeze into the venue, German news agency dpa reported.\n\nKazim Abaci of Unternehmer ohne Grenzen (Businesspeople without Borders), a group that was one of the organizers, said that \"we have to end the demonstration early,\" citing safety concerns and saying that the fire service was unable to get through the crowd.\n\n\"The message to AfD and its right-wing networks is: We are the majority and we are strong because we are united and we are determined not to let our country and our democracy be destroyed for a second time after 1945,\" the year of Nazi Germany's defeat, Hamburg Mayor Peter Tschentscher told the crowd.\n\nAfD has sought to distance itself from the extremist meeting, saying it had no organizational or financial links to the event, that it wasn't responsible for what was discussed there and members who attended did so in a purely personal capacity. Still, one of AfD's co-leaders has parted company with an advisor who was there, while also decrying the reporting itself.\n\nNational polls currently show AfD in second place behind the main center-right opposition bloc and ahead of the parties in the unpopular government.\n\nMore demonstrations against the far right are planned in German cities over the weekend."}
{"text": "# An ally of Slovakia's populist prime minister is preparing a run for president\nJanuary 19, 2024. 11:17 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BRATISLAVA, Slovakia (AP)** - The speaker of Slovakia's Parliament, Peter Pellegrini, a close ally of populist Prime Minister Robert Fico, announced on Friday he will run for president.\n\nPellegrini, 48, is considered a favorite in the race for the largely ceremonial post, according to public polls. Zuzana Čaputová, the country's first female president, decided not to seek reelection.\n\nThe first round of the election is scheduled for March 23.\n\nPellegrini, who favors a strong role for the state in society, heads the left-wing Hlas (Voice) party that finished third in the Sept 30 parliamentary election. His party formed a ruling coalition with Fico's leftist Smer (Direction) party and the ultranationalist Slovak National Party.\n\nPellegrini, who was Fico's former deputy in Smer, became prime minister in 2018 after Fico was forced to resign following major anti-government street protests resulting from the 2018 killing of journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancee.\n\nPellegrini parted ways with Fico after the scandal-tainted Smer lost the previous election in 2020.\n\nHe previously served as deputy prime minister (2016-18) and education minister (2014) in Fico's previous governments and was speaker in the Slovak Parliament, also known as the National Council, in 2014-16.\n\nFormer Foreign Minister Ivan Korčok, a pro-Western career diplomat, is expected to be Pellegrini's main rival in the presidential vote.\n\nThe other notable candidates include another former foreign minister, Jan Kubiš; the head of the Slovak National Party, Andrej Danko; and far-right politician Marian Kotleba.\n\nČaputová has been a clear pro-Western voice in Slovak politics and a staunch supporter of Ukraine in its fight against Russia's full-scale invasion.\n\nBut Pellegrini's party is part of Fico's coalition that ended the country's military aid for Ukraine."}
{"text": "# Moldovan man arrested in Croatia after rushing a van with migrants through Zagreb to escape police\nJanuary 19, 2024. 10:32 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**ZAGREB, Croatia (AP)** - The Moldovan driver of a van packed with migrants was arrested in Croatia following a chase in the capital, Zagreb, early on Friday, police said.\n\nA police patrol tried to stop the van on the highway outside the city but the 31-year-old driver instead rushed through the pay toll ramp, said a statement.\n\nPolice called in reinforcements while following the van safely through Zagreb, they said. They set up a roadblock where the van eventually slammed into a police car and stopped.\n\nIt was not clear how long the chase lasted. The van was carrying 32 foreign nationals, two of whom were slightly injured in the accident, police said.\n\nMigrants from the Middle East, Africa or Asia come to Croatia while trying to reach Western Europe along the so-called Balkan land route that leads from Turkey to Greece or Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Serbia and Bosnia.\n\nOn their journeys, which often last for months or even years, migrants cross borders without authorization and often with the help of people smugglers."}
{"text": "# Protests by farmers and others in Germany underline deep frustration with the government\nBy **GEIR MOULSON**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 9:48 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BERLIN (AP)** - This week began and ended with the long road in front of Berlin's landmark Brandenburg Gate thronged by heavy vehicles tooting their horns in protest - farmers on Monday and truckers on Friday.\n\nSuch demonstrations underline deep frustration in Germany with Chancellor Olaf Scholz's government, which came to power just over two years ago with a progressive, modernizing agenda but has come to be viewed by many as dysfunctional and incapable.\n\nIt is struggling to juggle multiple crises and reconcile lofty aims, such as transforming Europe's biggest economy to meet climate targets and investing in neglected infrastructure while also meeting Germany's tight self-imposed rules on running up debt.\n\nScholz acknowledges concerns that go beyond cuts to tax breaks on farmers' diesel fuel.\n\n\"I think crises and conflicts are creating overall uncertainty,\" he said in a video message last weekend. \"Many worry: what will happen next? What will the future bring for me? All this is leading to some expressing this loudly.\"\n\nStill, the chancellor himself faces criticism for his management of an unwieldy three-party alliance and poor communication. While his government doesn't appear to be in danger at present and Germany's next parliamentary election isn't due until the fall of 2025, it isn't clear how it can turn around a slump in polls.\n\nThe government points to successes including preventing an energy crunch after Russia cut off its gas supplies to Germany.\n\nBut all too often, the combination of two center-left parties with a pro-business rival has angered Germans by bickering at length over poorly explained projects that sometimes raise fears of new costs - notably a plan to replace fossil-fuel heating systems with greener alternatives. On top of that comes frustration with inflation over the past two years.\n\nPolls show little faith in Scholz and his government and widespread sympathy for the farmers' protests against cuts to tax breaks on the diesel they use - which stem from the latest major woe to hit the embattled coalition.\n\nA November court ruling struck down a major pillar of the government's financing and left it scrambling to fill a big hole in this year's budget. It had sought to bypass Germany's debt rules by repurposing 60 billion euros ($65.3 billion) originally meant to cushion the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic for measures to help combat climate change and modernize the country.\n\nAs part of its plan to fill the gap, coalition leaders said the government would abolish a car tax exemption for farming vehicles and tax breaks on diesel used in agriculture. Amid pushback even from the agriculture minister, it watered that down, saying the car tax exemption would be retained and the cuts in the the tax breaks staggered over three years.\n\nThat didn't satisfy Germany's well-organized farmers, who pressed ahead with a week of protests that culminated in Berlin on Monday. And more appear likely.\n\n\"Our farmers are disappointed, they are disappointed that they haven't been listened to, and they can't understand why they should be further burdened in European competition,\" Joachim Rukwied, the head of the German Farmers' Association, said Friday.\n\nRukwied said his organization will attempt to win over lawmakers in talks over the next two weeks, but there will be still be smaller-scale \"actions\" by farmers to press their point.\n\nOther groups facing their own challenges have sympathized with or joined in some farmers' demonstrations. They have included road transport and hospitality associations, the latter facing a hike in value-added tax on eating out from the 7% rate it was reduced to during the pandemic to the full 19%.\n\nOrganizers of Friday's demonstration by truck drivers called for an increase in highway tolls for trucks to be reversed and protested against carbon pricing. Germany's levy on carbon dioxide emissions from fuel was increased by more than previously planned this month, another result of the budget crisis.\n\nCritics say Scholz, a self-confident but often taciturn leader, isn't helping with his style.\n\n\"Why the chancellor thinks he can convince people through dogged silence is not clear to me,\" former Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer remarked in an interview with the Augsburger Allgemeine daily, arguing that Scholz \"is damaging himself.\"\n\nOne beneficiary of the sour mood has been the far-right Alternative for Germany party, which has gained over the past year. It is currently second in national polls - behind the main center-right opposition bloc but ahead of the parties in Scholz's coalition. European Parliament elections are scheduled for June, and three state elections in September.\n\nThere has been some concern over the far right taking advantage of the demonstrations.\n\nThe far right itself has drawn a string of protests this week following a report that extremists recently met to discuss the deportation of millions of immigrants, including some with German citizenship.\n\n\"Everyone is called on now to take a clear stand for solidarity, for tolerance, for our democratic Germany,\" Scholz said Friday."}
{"text": "# EU official praises efforts by Poland's new government to restore the rule of law\nJanuary 19, 2024. 9:33 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WARSAW, Poland (AP)** - European Union Commissioner for Justice Didier Reynders on Friday praised efforts by Poland's new pro-EU government to restore the rule of law and said they may lead to the release of billions of euros in EU funds for the country that were frozen under the previous government.\n\nReynders was holding talks in Warsaw with new Justice Minister Adam Bodnar, the foreign and European affairs ministers and parliament speakers about the steps that Poland's month-old government is taking to reverse the controversial judicial policies of the previous administration that the EU had criticized as undemocratic.\n\nReynders said at a news conference that he was pleased by the determination of Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his Cabinet in restoring the rule of law, in line with Poland's Constitution and the requirements of the EU and the European Convention on Human Rights.\n\nHe said the European Commission, the executive arm of the 27-member bloc, was supporting the government's efforts.\n\nHe expressed hope that the steps would soon allow the approval of Poland's request for the release of about 7 billion euros ($7.6 billion) from the post-pandemic recovery funds earmarked for the country. The EU froze the money as a result of rule-of-law disputes with Poland's previous right-wing government of the Law and Justice party.\n\nAmong its key steps, Tusk's government has imprisoned two members of the previous government who were convicted of abuse of power and document forging and is making personnel changes in vital judicial bodies and some courts where rule-of-law principles had been questioned.\n\nBodnar's steps have been harshly criticized by the opposition which lost power in October elections, but he told the news conference that they were well thought-out and necessary."}
{"text": "# More than 1,000 rally in Russian region in continuing protests over activist's jailing\nBy **THE ASSOCIATED PRESS**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 9:10 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**MOSCOW (AP)** - More than 1,000 people rallied in the Russian region of Bashkortostan on Friday, continuing a series of protests triggered by the conviction and sentencing of a local activist and handing a new challenge to the Kremlin.\n\nPeople gathered in the main square of Ufa, the main city of Bashkortostan, a region spread between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains, dancing and singing folk songs. Police initially didn't intervene, but later rounded up about 10 participants as the crowd thinned in freezing temperatures, according to the independent Vyorstka and SOTAvision news outlets.\n\nProtesters shouting \"Shame!\" tried to block a police bus carrying the detainees in the city of 1.1 million about 1,150 kilometers (700 miles) east of Moscow.\n\nThe rally followed clashes on Wednesday in the town of Baymak in which hundreds of protesters faced off with police following the trial of Fail Alsynov, a local activist who was convicted of inciting hatred and sentenced to four years in prison. Police used batons, tear gas and stun grenades to disperse the protesters, who chanted \"Freedom!\" and \"Disgrace!\" and demanded the ouster of Bashkortostan's regional leader.\n\nAt least 17 people accused of involvement in the clashes were given jail terms ranging from 10 to 13 days.\n\nThe unrest was one of the largest reported demonstrations since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022, and raised the threat of instability in the region of 4 million.\n\nAsked whether the Kremlin was worried about the demonstrations in Bashkortostan, Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, downplayed their significance.\n\n\"I would disagree with the formulation 'mass riots' and 'mass demonstrations.' There are no mass riots and mass demonstrations there,\" Peskov said in a conference call with reporters, even though the country's top criminal investigation agency launched a probe into the clashes on charges of inciting mass riots.\n\nThe tensions in Bashkortostan come as Putin is seeking another six-year term in March's presidential election.\n\nIndigenous people, mostly Muslim Bashkirs, a Turkic ethnic group, make up just under a third of the region's population. Ethnic Russians account for about 38% and ethnic Tatars about 24%, with some smaller ethnic groups also present.\n\nThe region's Kremlin-appointed head, Radiy Khabirov, denounced the protests, alleging they had been instigated by a group of \"traitors,\" some living abroad, to call for the region's secession from the Russian Federation.\n\nBashkortostan, Tatarstan and other regions with a strong presence of indigenous ethnic groups enjoyed greater autonomy than other provinces during Soviet times. They won even broader rights after the 1991 Soviet collapse, fueling fears that the federal authority could weaken and the country could eventually break up along ethnic lines.\n\nPutin, who spearheaded a second war in Russia's region of Chechnya to crush its separatist bid in the early 2000s, has methodically curtailed the degree of independence in Russia's regions to strengthen the Kremlin's authority. He has repeatedly accused the West of trying to foment unrest in Russia.\n\nAlsynov, the convicted activist, was a leader of a group that advocated the preservation of the Bashkir language and culture and protested against limestone and gold mining operations in the region. The group, called Bashkort, was outlawed as extremist in 2020.\n\nThe authorities accused him of denigrating other ethnic groups in a speech he gave at a rally in April 2023, a charge he denied.\n\nPutin, 71, is able to run again after 24 years in power due to a constitutional amendment he orchestrated in 2020 to reset presidential term limits. His reelection appears all but assured after a relentless crackdown on the opposition and independent media."}
{"text": "# German parliament approves easing rules to get citizenship, dropping restrictions on dual passports\nBy **GEIR MOULSON**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 11:04 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BERLIN (AP)** - German lawmakers on Friday approved legislation easing the rules on gaining citizenship and ending restrictions on holding dual citizenship. The government argues the plan will bolster the integration of immigrants and help attract skilled workers.\n\nParliament voted 382-234 for the plan put forward by center-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz's socially liberal coalition, with 23 lawmakers abstaining. The main center-right opposition bloc criticized the project vehemently, arguing that it would cheapen German citizenship.\n\nThe legislation will make people eligible for citizenship after five years in Germany, or three in case of \"special integration accomplishments,\" rather than eight or six years at present. German-born children would automatically become citizens if one parent has been a legal resident for five years, down from eight years now.\n\nRestrictions on holding dual citizenship will also be dropped. In principle, most people from countries other than European Union members and Switzerland now have to give up their previous nationality when they gain German citizenship, though there are some exemptions.\n\nThe government says that 14% of the population - more than 12 million of the country's 84.4 million inhabitants - doesn't have German citizenship and that about 5.3 million of those have lived in Germany for at least a decade. It says that the naturalization rate in Germany is well below the EU average.\n\nIn 2022, about 168,500 people were granted German citizenship. That was the highest figure since 2002, boosted by a large increase in the number of Syrian citizens who had arrived in the past decade being naturalized, but still only a fraction of long-term residents.\n\nInterior Minister Nancy Faeser said the reform puts Germany in line with European neighbors such as France and pointed to its need to attract more skilled workers. \"We also must make qualified people from around the world an offer like the U.S., like Canada, of which acquiring German citizenship is a part,\" she told reporters ahead of the vote.\n\nThe legislation stipulates that people being naturalized must be able to support themselves and their relatives, though there are exemptions for people who came to West Germany as \"guest workers\" up to 1974 and for those who came to communist East Germany to work.\n\nThe existing law requires that would-be citizens be committed to the \"free democratic fundamental order,\" and the new version specifies that antisemitic and racist acts are incompatible with that.\n\nScholz said in a video message that, at a time of mounting concern over the far right's intentions toward immigrants, \"we are telling all those who often have lived and worked for decades in Germany, who keep to our laws: You belong in Germany.\"\n\nThe reform means that no one will have to \"deny his roots,\" he added.\n\nThe conservative opposition asserted that Germany is loosening citizenship requirements just as other countries are tightening theirs.\n\n\"This isn't a citizenship modernization bill - it is a citizenship devaluation bill,\" center-right Christian Democrat Alexander Throm told lawmakers.\n\nPeople who have been in Germany for five or three years haven't yet grown roots in the country, he said. And he argued that dropping restrictions on dual citizenship will \"bring political conflicts from abroad into our politics.\"\n\nThe citizenship law overhaul is one of a series of social reforms that Scholz's three-party coalition agreed to carry out when it took office in late 2021. Those also include plans to liberalize rules on the possession and sale of cannabis, and make it easier for transgender, intersex and nonbinary people to change their gender and name in official registers. Both still need parliamentary approval.\n\nIn recent months, the government - which has become deeply unpopular as a result of persistent infighting, economic weakness and most recently a home-made budget crisis that resulted in spending and subsidy cuts - also has sought to defuse migration by asylum-seekers as a political problem.\n\nThe citizenship reform was passed the day after lawmakers approved legislation that is intended to ease deportations of unsuccessful asylum-seekers."}
{"text": "# Sami rights activists in Norway charged over protests against wind farm affecting reindeer herding\nJanuary 19, 2024. 6:39 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP)*** - Some 20 activists have been charged after they blocked several entrances to Norwegian government offices over a wind farm that they say hinders the rights of the Sami Indigenous people to raise reindeer, their lawyer said Friday.\n\nThe exact charge was not known. The VG newspaper said they were charged because they did not accept the fines they had been given after having been forcefully removed by police. They face trial in March in Oslo.\n\nAt the center of the dispute are the 151 turbines of Europe's largest onshore wind farm, which is located in central Norway's Fosen district, about 450 kilometers (280 miles) north of the capital, Oslo.\n\nThe activists say a transition to green energy shouldn't come at the expense of the rights of Indigenous people.\n\nThey have demonstrated repeatedly against the wind farm's continued operation since the Supreme Court of Norway ruled in October 2021 that the construction of the turbines had violated the rights of the Sami, who have used the land for reindeer for centuries.\n\n\"Punishing the Sami youth and their supporters will be yet another violation of their human rights - violation of their freedom of speech and demonstration,\" lawyer Olaf Halvorsen Rønning said.\n\nElla Marie Hætta Isaksen, one of the activists, said \"it is the state that is responsible for the situation at Fosen, while the Fosen actions, by all accounts, have only contributed to solving it.\"\n\nIn October, activists - many dressed in traditional Sami garments - blocked the entrance to one of the main operators of a wind farm to prevent employees from entering.\n\nIn June, they protested outside Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre's office, and they occupied the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy for four days in February, and later blocked the entrances to 10 ministries.\n\nSami, who mostly live in the Arctic, came from neighboring Sweden and Finland to join the protest. Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg was among the protesters. It was unclear whether she was among those charged.\n\nGahr Støre has acknowledged \"ongoing human rights violations\" and the government has repeatedly apologized for failing to act despite the Supreme Court ruling. Energy Minister Terje Aasland has said that the demolition of all wind turbines at Fosen - as the protesters demand - is not being considered."}
{"text": "# A Ukrainian drone attack on an oil depot inside Russia causes a massive blaze, officials say\nBy **THE ASSOCIATED PRESS**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 8:09 AM EST\n\n---\n\nA Ukrainian drone struck an oil storage depot in western Russia on Friday, causing a massive blaze, officials said, as Kyiv's forces apparently extended their attacks on Russian soil ahead of the war's two-year anniversary.\n\nFour oil reservoirs with a total capacity of 6,000 cubic meters (1.6 million gallons) were set on fire when the drone reached Klintsy, a city of some 70,000 people located about 60 kilometers (40 miles) from the Ukrainian border, according to the local governor and state news agency Tass.\n\nThe strike apparently was the latest in a recently intensified effort by Ukraine to unnerve Russians and undermine President Vladimir Putin's claim that life in Russia is going on as normal before its March 17 presidential election.\n\nUkrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has vowed to hit more targets inside Russian border regions this year. Russia's air defenses are concentrated in occupied regions of Ukraine, Kyiv officials say, leaving more distant targets inside Russia more vulnerable as Ukrainian forces develop longer-range drones.\n\nThe Russian city of Belgorod, also near the Ukrainian border, canceled its traditional Orthodox Epiphany festivities on Friday due to the threat of Ukrainian drone strikes. It was the first time major public events were known to have been called off in Russia due to the drone threat.\n\nUkrainian national media, quoting an official in Ukraine's Intelligence Service, said Ukrainian drones on Friday also attacked a gunpowder mill in Tambov, about 600 kilometers (370 miles) south of Moscow.\n\nBut Tambov Gov. Maxim Yegorov said the plant was working normally, according to Russia's RBC news outlet. The Mash news outlet had earlier reported that a Ukrainian drone fell on the plant's premises Thursday but caused no damage.\n\nIn another strike fitting the pattern, the Russian Defense Ministry said a Ukrainian drone was downed on the outskirts of St. Petersburg on Thursday.\n\nThe drone wreckage fell on the premises of the St. Petersburg Oil Terminal on the city's southern edge, according to Vladimir Rogov, who is in charge of coordination of the Russian-annexed regions of Ukraine. Mikhail Skigin, the terminal co-owner, confirmed that the drone was targeting the terminal.\n\nSt. Petersburg, Russia's second-largest city, is about 900 kilometers (560 miles) north of the border with Ukraine.\n\nIn Klintsy, air defenses electronically jammed the drone but it dropped its explosive payload on the facility, Bryansk regional Gov. Alexander Bogomaz said. There were no casualties, he added.\n\nRussian telegram channels shared videos of what they said was the blaze at the depot, which sent thick black plumes of smoke into the air.\n\nThe fire is hard to put out and requires specialist equipment, Bogomaz said, adding that 32 people were evacuated from their homes near the depot.\n\nThe same depot was struck by a Ukrainian drone in May last year, but the damage apparently was less significant.\n\nMeanwhile, Russian shelling in Ukraine's northeastern Kharkiv region killed a 57-year-old woman and a land mine there killed a man, the Ukrainian president's office reported Friday."}
{"text": "# EU, AU, US say Sudan war and Somalia's tension with Ethiopia threaten Horn of Africa's stability\nBy **TOM ODULA**  \nJanuary 18, 2024. 8:14 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NAIROBI, Kenya (AP)** - The African Union, European Union, and United States called Thursday for an immediate cease-fire and constructive dialogue between warring factions in Sudan.\n\nThe groups also called for an end to tension between Somalia and Ethiopia over an agreement signed between Ethiopia and Somalia's breakaway region Somaliland.\n\nRepresentatives of the groups, who spoke in Kampala, Uganda, after the meeting of an East African regional bloc, said that the two crises are threatening regional stability in the Horn of Africa.\n\nSudan's armed forces and the rival Rapid Support Forces have been fighting for control of Sudan since April. Long-standing tensions erupted into street battles in the capital and other areas including the western Darfur region.\n\nThe AU, EU and U.S. and U.N noted that the fighting has displaced 7 million people and kept 19 million children out of school.\n\nMichael Hammer, U.S. special envoy for the Horn of Africa, called on Sudan's factions to adhere to their obligations under international humanitarian law and to fulfill recent commitments to stop fighting.\n\n\"It's time for them to take action consistent with their stated claims that they want to stop the fighting and meet the needs of the people,\" Hammer said.\n\nHe spoke after the regional bloc Intergovernmental Authority on Development, or IGAD, held an emergency meeting of heads of states in Kampala to discuss the Sudan war and rising tension between Somalia and Ethiopia.\n\nHammer said the leader of Sudan's army, Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, and the commander of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, who is known as Hemedti, must follow through on their promise at a Dec. 9 IGAD summit to reach an unconditional cease-fire.\n\n\"They will be responsible for the break up of Sudan if this conflict continues,\" Hammer said.\n\nThe first step is an enforceable cease-fire that can be closely monitored, said Ramtane Lamamra, the U.N. envoy for Sudan.\n\n\"Guns must be silenced,\" he said, adding that the war endangers \"stability of the entire region and beyond.\"\n\nOn Tuesday, the Sudanese government suspended ties with the east African regional bloc, accusing it of violating Sudan's sovereignty by inviting the paramilitary leader to a summit. Hemedti attended Thursday's summit in Kampala but did not speak.\n\nAmid the renewed calls for a ceasefire, the United Nations announced Thursday that the U.N. Fact-Finding Mission on Sudan, which is charged with investigating violations of human rights and international humanitarian law since April 15, began its work this week.\n\nMohamed Chande Othman, the fact-finding mission's chair, said investigations of alleged violations by the Sudanese Armed Forces, Rapid Support Forces and other warring parties are under way, and particular attention will be paid to sexual violence and other violations against women and children, according to U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric.\n\nThe Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council established the fact-finding mission in October 2023 with the aim of ensuring that those responsible for violations of human rights and international humanitarian law are brought to justice. Dujarric said the mission will present an oral report on its initial findings at the council's session that starts in June.\n\nRegarding Somalia, the AU, EU and U.S. said they recognize the country's sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity, including the breakaway region of Somaliland.\n\nTension has been rising after land-locked Ethiopia signed an agreement on Jan. 1 with Somaliland to give it access to the sea. Somaliland in return expects Ethiopia soon to recognize the region as an independent state, which angers Somalia.\n\nHammer said the U.S. is particularly concerned that the tensions could undermine international-backed efforts to combat al-Qaida-linked militants in Somalia.\n\nAnnette Weber, the EU special envoy for the Horn of Africa, said the two crises have a common link with Red Sea, which she called a critical waterway carrying 10 percent of global cargo.\n\nWeber also said there needs to be a collective response among Horn of Africa countries against attacks on ships by Yemen-based Houthi rebels."}
{"text": "# German parliament approves legislation easing deportations of rejected asylum seekers\nJanuary 18, 2024. 1:16 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**BERLIN (AP)** - The German parliament on Thursday approved legislation that is intended to ease deportations of unsuccessful asylum-seekers as Chancellor Olaf Scholz seeks to defuse migration as a political problem.\n\nThe legislation foresees increasing the maximum length of pre-deportation custody from 10 to 28 days and specifically facilitating the deportation of people who are members of a criminal organization.\n\nIt also authorizes residential searches for documentation that enables officials to firmly establish a person's identity, as well as remove authorities' obligation to give advance notice of deportations in some cases.\n\nGermany's shelters for migrants and refugees have been filling up in recent months as significant numbers of asylum-seekers add to more than 1 million Ukrainians who have arrived since the start of Russia's war in their homeland.\n\nThe majority of rejected asylum-seekers in Germany will still have at least temporary permission to stay for reasons that can include illness, a child with residency status or a lack of ID.\n\nIt remains to be seen how much difference the new rules will make. Deportations can fail for a variety of reasons, including those the legislation addresses but also a lack of cooperation by migrants' home countries. Germany is trying to strike agreements with various nations to address that problem while also creating opportunities for legal immigration.\n\nThe parliament's vote Thursday comes at a time when tens of thousands of people in Germany have protested against alleged far-right plans to deport millions of immigrants, including some with German citizenship, as reported by an investigative media outlet last week. Scholz sharply condemned the plot drawn at the meeting in November, which allegedly also included members of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party.\n\nThe German parliament is set to vote Friday on legislation that would ease citizenship rules - a project that the government contends will bolster the integration of immigrants and help an economy that is struggling with a shortage of skilled workers."}
{"text": "# Slovenia to set up temporary facilities for migrants at Croatia border, citing surge in arrivals\nJanuary 18, 2024. 12:53 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LJUBLJANA, Slovenia (AP)** - Slovenia will set up temporary facilities for handling migrant arrivals at the border with Croatia, citing a surge in arrivals, the government announced Thursday.\n\nAuthorities will put up a fence, two accommodation containers, tents and sanitary facilities at the former border crossing in Obrezje, state-owned STA news agency reported.\n\nThe official border checkpoint with Croatia was removed last year when Slovenia's eastern neighbor joined Europe's free-travel Schengen area. But some border control has been reintroduced because of increased migration through the region.\n\nSlovenia has reported a surge in crossings of migrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa looking for ways to reach Western Europe. Italy, Slovenia and Croatia have agreed to cooperate to curb migration through the three neighboring countries.\n\nSlovenia's government said the temporary facilities for migrants will be set up because local police stations in the area lack the capacity to deal with the influx of migrants.\n\nThe arrangement will last for no longer than three years, the government said.\n\nMigrants come to Slovenia from Croatia after passing along the so-called Balkan land route that leads from Turkey to Greece or Bulgaria and then on toward North Macedonia, Serbia and Bosnia."}
{"text": "# Belarus rights group calls on UN to push for proper treatment of cancer-stricken opposition prisoner\nJanuary 18, 2024. 12:06 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**TALLINN, Estonia (AP)** - The most prominent human rights group in Belarus is calling on the United Nations' special rapporteur for human rights in the repressive country to pressure officials to give adequate medical treatment to an imprisoned opposition leader suffering from severe cancer.\n\nThe appeal Wednesday by the Viasna group said Ryhor Kostusiou is being denied proper medical care in the prison where he is serving a 10-year sentence on a conviction of attempting to unlawfully seize power.\n\nKostusiou, head of the Belarusian Popular Front party, was arrested in 2021 as part of a harsh crackdown on opposition that began after mass protests shook the country following the 2020 presidential election. The election's disputed results gave another term to President Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in office since 1994 and suppressed opposition and independent news media.\n\nAbout 35,000 people were detained in and after the protests. More than 1,400 political prisoners remain behind bars, including Viasna founder Ales Bialiatski, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022.\n\nViasna said Monday that another political prisoner had died of pneumonia after authorities ignored his pleas for help.\n\nThe 67-year-old Kostusiou's \"health condition has seriously deteriorated,\" Viasna said in its appeal to special rapporteur Anais Marin. \"The conditions for serving a criminal sentence do not take into account his serious health condition, do not allow him to receive quality treatment and endanger his life.\"\n\nThe group asked the rapporteur to send \"an urgent appeal to the authorities asking them to provide Kostusiou with proper treatment.\""}
{"text": "# German far-right party assailed over report of extremist meeting\nJanuary 18, 2024. 11:47 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BERLIN (AP)** - Germany's governing parties assailed a resurgent far-right opposition party on Thursday over a report that extremists recently met to discuss the deportation of millions of immigrants, including some with German citizenship, which has led to a string of protests in recent days.\n\nMedia outlet Correctiv last week reported on the alleged far-right meeting in November, which it said was attended by figures from the extremist Identitarian Movement and from the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD. A prominent member of the Identitarian Movement, Austrian citizen Martin Sellner, presented his \"remigration\" vision for deportations.\n\nNational polls currently show AfD in second place with support of over 20% - behind the mainstream opposition center-right bloc, but ahead of the parties in Chancellor Olaf Scholz's unpopular center-left governing coalition. The party is even stronger in three regions in the formerly communist east that will hold state elections in September.\n\nAfD has sought to distance itself from the meeting, saying it had no organizational or financial links to the event, that it wasn't responsible for what was discussed there and members who attended did so in a purely personal capacity. Still, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel has parted company with an advisor, Roland Hartwig, who was there - while also decrying the reporting itself.\n\nIn recent days, \"we have heard fears and concerns; we have seen that, at kitchen tables in Germany, German citizens are discussing the question of whether they must flee their own country,\" Lars Klingbeil, the co-leader of Scholz's Social Democrats, told parliament on Thursday.\n\n\"You are a wolf in sheep's clothing, but I'm telling you that your facade is beginning to crumble,\" he told AfD lawmakers.\n\nKonstantin Kuhle, a senior lawmaker with the Free Democrats, one of Scholz's coalition partners, said the reported meeting showed that AfD is working to serve as \"civic proxies\" to right-wing extremists.\n\nThere have been repeated demonstrations against the far-right in German cities in recent days, including one in Cologne on Tuesday that attracted tens of thousands of participants.\n\nAfD chief whip Bernd Baumann complained that mainstream parties are \"falsifying our demands, particularly on the issue of 'remigration'\" and asserted that his party faces a \"devious campaign by politicians and journalists from the ruined left-green class.\"\n\n\"Little private debating clubs are being blown up into secret meetings that are a danger to the public,\" he said.\n\nThe furor has prompted calls for Germany to consider seeking to ban AfD, which has moved steadily to the right since its founding in 2013. Many of its opponents have spoken out against the idea, arguing that the process would be lengthy, success is highly uncertain and it could benefit the party by allowing it to portray itself as a victim."}
{"text": "# NATO holds its biggest exercises in decades next week, involving around 90,000 personnel\nJanuary 19, 2024. 5:08 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BRUSSELS (AP)** - NATO will launch its biggest military exercises in decades next week with around 90,000 personnel set to take part in months of drills aimed at showing the alliance can defend all of its territory up to its border with Russia, top officers said Thursday.\n\nThe exercises come as Russia's war on Ukraine bogs down. NATO as an organization is not directly involved in the conflict, except to supply Kyiv with non-lethal support, although many member countries send weapons and ammunition individually or in groups, and provide military training.\n\nIn the months before President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops into Ukraine in February 2022, NATO began beefing up security on its eastern flank with Russia and Ukraine. It's the alliance's biggest buildup since the Cold War. The war games are meant to deter Russia from targeting a member country.\n\nThe exercises - dubbed Steadfast Defender 24 - \"will show that NATO can conduct and sustain complex multi-domain operations over several months, across thousands of kilometers (miles), from the High North to Central and Eastern Europe, and in any condition,\" the 31-nation organization said.\n\nTroops will be moving to and through Europe until the end of May in what NATO describes as \"a simulated emerging conflict scenario with a near-peer adversary.\" Under NATO's new defense plans, its chief adversaries are Russia and terrorist organizations.\n\n\"The alliance will demonstrate its ability to reinforce the Euro-Atlantic area via transatlantic movement of forces from North America,\" NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, U.S. General Christopher Cavoli, told reporters.\n\nCavoli said it will demonstrate \"our unity, our strength, and our determination to protect each other.\"\n\nThe chair of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, said that it's \"a record number of troops that we can bring to bear and have an exercise within that size, across the alliance, across the ocean from the U.S. to Europe.\"\n\nBauer described it as \"a big change\" compared to troop numbers exercising just a year ago. Sweden, which is expected to join NATO this year, will also take part.\n\nU.K. Defense Secretary Grant Shapps has said that the government in London would send 20,000 troops backed by advanced fighter jets, surveillance planes, warships and submarines, with many being deployed in eastern Europe from February to June."}
{"text": "# Northern Ireland sees biggest strike in years as workers walk out over pay and political deadlock\nJanuary 19, 2024. 1:45 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BELFAST, Northern Ireland (AP)** - Tens of thousands of public sector workers walked off the job across Northern Ireland on Thursday to protest political deadlock that has left them without pay increases, and the region without a functioning government.\n\nSchools were closed, hospitals offered a skeleton service and authorities warned people not to travel unless it was essential as road-gritting crews joined the strike in the middle of a bitterly cold snap.\n\nThe 24-hour strike by about 150,000 teachers, nurses, bus drivers and others is the biggest walkout in years in Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom with its own regional government. That government has not functioned for almost two years since one of the two power-sharing parties walked out in a dispute over post-Brexit trade rules.\n\nThe Democratic Unionist Party has refused to return to government with Irish nationalists Sinn Fein. Under power-sharing rules established under Northern Ireland's peace process, the administration must include both British unionists and Irish nationalists.\n\nThousands of striking workers held a rallies in Belfast and other cities, calling for the DUP to return to government and for U.K. officials to give public sector workers in Northern Ireland the same pay raises that employees in other parts of the country have received.\n\nthe U.K.'s Northern Ireland Secretary, Chris Heaton-Harris, said the British government had agreed on a 3 billion pound ($3.8 billion) financial package, but that it could only be delivered if Northern Ireland's government was back up and running.\n\n\"This package has been on the table since before Christmas and will remain there, available on day one for an incoming Northern Ireland Executive,\" he said.\n\nWorkers said politicians in both Belfast and London were using them as political pawns.\n\nTeacher Linda Millar said she just wanted pay parity with the rest of the U.K.\n\n\"We are losing teachers left, right and center to Doha, Dubai, everywhere,\" she said. \"The education system is crumbling. Our buildings are crumbling.\""}
{"text": "# EU Parliament adopts resolution calling for permanent cease-fire in Gaza but Hamas must go\nJanuary 18, 2024. 9:48 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BRUSSELS (AP)** - European lawmakers on Thursday adopted a resolution calling for a permanent cease-fire in Israel's war against Hamas, on the condition that the Palestinian militant group in Gaza be dismantled and that all hostages it holds be released.\n\nThe conflict has divided European Union countries and political groups at the legislature, and reaching a consensus on the wording of the resolution was not an easy task.\n\nThe original text underlined the need for a permanent cease-fire. It was adopted after an amendment tabled by conservative lawmakers was passed, insisting that Hamas needed to be dismantled for a cease-fire to happen and calling for the immediate and unconditional release of all remaining hostages.\n\nThe resolution, which is non-binding and highly symbolical, was adopted by 312 votes in favor, 131 against and 72 abstentions. It was the first time the Parliament called for a cease-fire after lawmakers in October agreed on a call for a \"humanitarian pause.\"\n\nThe amendment insisted that all the hostages be \"immediately and unconditionally released and (that) the terrorist organization Hamas is dismantled.\"\n\nPalestinian militants are still putting up resistance across Gaza in the face of one of the deadliest military campaigns in recent history. More than 24,400 Palestinians have been killed. Some 85% of the narrow coastal territory's 2.3 million people have fled their homes, and the United Nations says a quarter of the population is starving.\n\nIsrael has vowed to dismantle Hamas to ensure it can never repeat an attack like the one on Oct. 7 that triggered the war. Militants burst through Israel's border defenses and stormed through several communities that day, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and capturing around 250, taking them back to Gaza as hostages.\n\nSince the attack, the bloc has struggled to strike a balance between condemning Hamas, supporting Israel's right to defend itself and ensuring that the rights of civilians on both sides are protected under international law.\n\nHamas is on the EU's list of terrorist groups.\n\nEuropean lawmakers also expressed their \"deep concern at the dire and rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip\" and asked for the moribund \"two-state solution\" between Israel and Palestinians to be revived, and for the end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories."}
{"text": "# European Union institutions gear up for a fight over Orbán's rule of law record, funds for Hungary\nBy **RAF CASERT**  \nJanuary 18, 2024. 9:12 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BRUSSELS (AP)** - The European Union's institutions are gearing up for a fight over Hungary and a contentious transfer of 10 billion euros (nearly $11 billion) in funds to Budapest.\n\nThe European Parliament decided to assess Thursday whether to take the bloc's executive branch, the European Commission, to court over allegations that it gave into blackmail from Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to get his approval to start membership talks with Ukraine.\n\nThe European Parliament made the decision in a 345-104 vote and tasked its legal department to prepare the groundwork for a possible challenge at the EU's highest court. It wants to see whether the European Commission took all measures \"to protect the EU's financial interests\" in its dealings with Orbán. They said that Hungary didn't meet the rule of law requirements to get the money.\n\nThe vote followed a bruising debate in the plenary during which legislators of major center-right and center-left groups all criticized European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for making sure the money was approved just before Orbán unexpectedly and crucially abstained from the Ukraine vote at a summit in December.\n\nThe funds were only supposed to be released if Hungary had shown enough effort to force through some rule of law reforms on judicial independence and political interference, and during Wednesday's plenary, von der Leyen said that the country had pushed through measures to earn the release of funds.\n\nShe said the European Commission had no option but to approve the funds and strongly denied the two issues were linked.\n\n\"These are the rules we have all agreed to,\" she said. \"We will follow them. This is what makes the rule of law stand out from arbitrary power.\n\nMany parliamentarians disagreed, however.\n\n\"Once again the Parliament is having to step in,\" said parliamentary rapporteur Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield of the Greens group, complaining that the European Commission and the member states \"seem happy to give a carte blanche to Viktor Orbán to continue his bullying tactics and attacks on the rule of law.\"\n\nThe EU is still blocking around 20 billion euros (nearly $22 billion) in funds over similar rule of law concerns, and the parliament doesn't want to see them fall prey to political brinkmanship. On Feb. 1, EU leaders will have another summit, hoping to approve 50 billion euros (nearly $55 billion) in much-needed financial aid to Ukraine, which Orbán did block at the last summit in December.\n\nIt wasn't the first time Orbán had derailed EU plans to provide funding to Ukraine. The nationalist leader is widely considered to be Russian President Vladimir Putin's closest ally in the EU, and has been accused by his critics of promoting Moscow's interests over those of his EU and NATO allies.\n\nOrbán has advocated for an immediate end to the fighting and pushed for peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv, though he hasn't detailed what such a step would entail for Ukraine's territorial integrity.\n\nOrbán has been at odds with his fellow EU leaders, top officials and legislators for years, ranging from fights over COVID-19 recovery money to his declining respect for the Western democratic principles that are the essence of the EU. Yet as the longest-serving EU leader, he knows the EU rules inside out and has been able to extract financial concessions time and again to shore up his struggling economy."}
{"text": "# A Russian border city cancels Orthodox Epiphany events due to the threat of Ukrainian attacks\nBy **THE ASSOCIATED PRESS**  \nJanuary 18, 2024. 10:57 AM EST\n\n---\n\nA Russian city near the Ukrainian border canceled its traditional Orthodox Epiphany festivities on Friday due to the threat of attacks as Kyiv's forces pursue a new strategy with the war approaching its two-year milestone.\n\nThe city of Belgorod has scrapped events in which the faithful plunge into ponds and pools through holes in the ice on the feast of Epiphany every Jan. 19, the state news agency Tass reported, citing the regional emergencies ministry. The annual celebrations are widespread in Russia.\n\nCross-border attacks have become increasingly frequent in recent weeks in Belgorod, the largest Russian city near the border with about 340,000 people, and can be reached by relatively simple and movable weapons such as multiple rocket launchers. It is about 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city.\n\nOn Dec. 30, shelling in the center of Belgorod killed 21 people and wounded 110, regional officials said, in what was one of the deadliest attacks on Russian soil since the start of Moscow's full-scale invasion of its neighbor.\n\nBorder villages have been targeted sporadically during the war by Ukrainian artillery fire, rockets, mortar shells and drones launched from dense forests, where they are hard to detect. But until Thursday, no major public events were known to have been called off.\n\nIn Moscow, meanwhile, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dismissed a U.S. proposal to resume a dialogue on nuclear arms control, saying it's impossible while Washington offers military support to Ukraine.\n\nSpeaking at an annual news conference, Lavrov accused the West of fueling global security risks by encouraging Ukraine to ramp up strikes on Russian territory and warned that Moscow will achieve its goals in the conflict despite Western assistance to Kyiv.\n\nUkrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has pledged to hit more targets inside Russian border regions this year. The goal is to disrupt life and unsettle Russians, especially ahead of a March 17 election in Russia when President Vladimir Putin is seeking another six years in power.\n\nTen rockets fired from Ukraine were shot down, with one woman injured by falling wreckage, Belgorod regional Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov said Thursday.\n\nLong-range cross-border missile, drone and artillery strikes have been a feature of the war, especially when fighting on the front line eases off during winter.\n\nRussian forces have repeatedly blasted civilian areas of Ukraine. On Thursday, a multistory building was hit in Kupiansk, in the eastern Kharkiv region, killing a 57-year-old woman and wounding two men, according to regional Gov. Oleh Syniehubov.\n\nNear Kupiansk, Russian troops also shelled the village of Maly Burluk, killing an elderly woman, Ukraine's presidential office said. A 10-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl were wounded, it said.\n\nIn the southern city of Kherson, shelling killed a driver in his car and a passerby on the street. Seven people were wounded in the region, including an 81-year-old woman, according to the presidential office.\n\nIt was not possible to independently verify either side's battlefield claims.\n\nUkraine's air force said it intercepted 22 out of 33 Shahed drones launched by Russia overnight. The Kremlin's forces also fired two S-300 missiles at the Kharkiv region for the second night in a row, officials said.\n\nUkraine has urged its Western allies to step up its weapon and ammunition supplies so it can keep up the battlefield pressure on Moscow.\n\nFrance on Thursday announced more planned deliveries of its Caesar artillery system to Ukraine and said it is speeding up weapons manufacturing as it seeks to avoid depleting its own military stocks while continuing to support Kyiv.\n\n\"The logic of ceding materiel taken from the armies' stocks is reaching its end,\" French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu told Le Parisien. \"From now on, the solution is to directly connect French defense industries with the Ukrainian army.\"\n\nFrance also launched a drive to fund the delivery of 78 Caesar self-propelled 155 mm howitzers to Ukraine this year. Ukraine has already paid for six of the guns itself and France will provide 50 million euros ($54 million) to deliver 12 more, Lecornu said separately in a speech. France is also seeking 280 million euros ($305 million) from other allies of Ukraine to pay for the 60 other Caesars, he said.\n\nUkrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov said Russian forces are firing five times more artillery shells - 10 times more in some places - than Kyiv's forces along the front lines, and stronger artillery \"is one of our key needs to win this war.\"\n\nRussian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, meanwhile, toured a plant near Moscow that designs and manufactures cruise missiles as part of an effort to bolster the Kremlin's long-range arsenal.\n\nShoigu told factory managers who reported increasing the range of one type of missile to 250 kilometers (150 miles) that it should be increased even more, according to the Defense Ministry.\n\nBoris Obnosov, the head of the state corporation overseeing the production of tactical missiles, said a new variant of the weapon has a range of 310 kilometers (190 miles).\n\n\"Now we need to make sure we have enough of such missiles,\" Shoigu said, according to the ministry. \"We spend them and score hits daily.\""}
{"text": "# British leader Sunak urges Parliament's upper house to swiftly pass Rwanda migration plan\nBy **PAN PYLAS**  \nJanuary 18, 2024. 8:25 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LONDON (AP)** - British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak laid out a challenge Thursday to members of Parliament's unelected upper chamber to swiftly pass his controversial plan to send some asylum-seekers on a one-way trip to Rwanda\n\nSunak said any attempt by the House of Lords to soften or delay the policy, which elected lawmakers in the House of Commons backed Wednesday, would \"frustrate the will of the people.\"\n\n\"There is now only one question,\" Sunak said at a news conference in his Downing Street headquarters. \"Will the opposition in the appointed House of Lords try and frustrate the will of the people as expressed by the elected House? Or will they get on board and do the right thing?\"\n\nSunak's governing Conservatives do not have a majority in the House of Lords, which is made up of representatives from political parties as well as non-aligned appointees. The Lords can delay and amend legislation but ultimately can't overrule the elected House of Commons.\n\nAlready, many members of the Lords have voiced concerns over the Rwanda plan, with one, Alex Carlile, describing it as \"a step towards totalitarianism.\"\n\nA long delay would jeopardize Sunak's ambition to have removal flights leaving by the spring, possibly timed to coincide with a general election.\n\nWith polls consistently showing the Conservatives trailing far behind the main Labour opposition, Sunak has made the controversial - and expensive - immigration policy central to his attempt to win an election later this year.\n\nThe Safety of Rwanda Bill, which was backed on Wednesday, is intended to overcome a U.K. Supreme Court block on the policy and give authorities the power to send migrants arriving in small boats to Rwanda rather than being allowed to seek asylum in Britain.\n\nMore than 29,000 people arrived in the U.K. in small boats across the Channel in 2023, down from 42,000 the year before.\n\nOn Wednesday, another 358 migrants made the treacherous journey, a week after five people died while trying to launch a boat from northern France in the dark and winter cold.\n\n\"I'm fighting every day to get the flights off to Rwanda,\" Sunak said. \"This is an urgent national priority.\"\n\nHowever, there is deep skepticism that the plan will work, both within Sunak's party and among political opponents. Labour Party leader Keir Starmer has described the policy as a \"gimmick\" and said he will reverse it if it comes into power.\n\nModerates in the Conservative Party worry the policy is too extreme, concerns underscored when the United Nations' refugee agency said this week the Rwanda plan \"is not compatible with international refugee law.\" However, many on the party's powerful right wing think the bill doesn't go far enough and will be vulnerable to court rulings.\n\nSunak won the vote comfortably on Wednesday. But the victory came only after scores of Conservative lawmakers rebelled on earlier votes to make the policy even tougher.\n\nDespite the clear divisions over the issue, Sunak insisted that his party was \"completely united.\""}
{"text": "# Russia's foreign minister rejects a US proposal to resume talks on nuclear arms control\nBy **VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV**  \nJanuary 18, 2024. 9:32 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**MOSCOW (AP)** - Russia's top diplomat on Thursday dismissed a U.S. proposal to resume a dialogue on nuclear arms control, saying it's impossible while Washington offers military support to Ukraine.\n\nSpeaking at his annual news conference, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the West of fueling global security risks by encouraging Ukraine to ramp up strikes on Russian territory and warned that Moscow will achieve its goals in the conflict despite Western assistance for Kyiv.\n\nCommenting on a U.S. proposal to resume contacts in the sphere of nuclear arms control, Lavrov described it as \"unacceptable,\" saying that Moscow has put forward its stance in a diplomatic letter last month. He argued that for such talks to be held, Washington first needs to revise its current hostile policy toward Russia.\n\nWhite House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said in June the Biden administration is ready to talk to Russia without conditions about a future nuclear arms control even as Russia-U.S. ties are at their lowest point since the Cold War, noting \"it is in neither of our countries' interest to embark on opening the competition in the strategic nuclear forces.\"\n\nBut Lavrov charged that Washington's push for the revival of nuclear talks has been driven by a desire to resume inspections of Russia's nuclear weapons sites. He described such U.S. demands as \"indecent\" and cynical in view of Ukraine's attacks on Russian nuclear-capable bomber bases during the conflict.\n\nHe mocked the U.S. offer to resume nuclear arms dialogue, arguing that Washington's position amounts to saying, \"we have declared you an enemy, but we're ready to talk about how we could look at your strategic nuclear arsenal again, that's something different.\"\n\nExtensive mutual inspections of nuclear weapons sites were envisaged by the New START treaty, which then-presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev signed in 2010. The inspections were halted in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and never resumed.\n\nIn February 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended Moscow's participation in the treaty, saying Russia could not allow U.S. inspections of its nuclear sites at a time when Washington and its NATO allies have openly declared Moscow's defeat in Ukraine as their goal. Moscow emphasized, however, that it wasn't withdrawing from the pact altogether and would continue to respect the caps on nuclear weapons the treaty set.\n\nThe New START, the last remaining nuclear arms control pact between Russia and the United States, limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers. It's set to expire in 2026, and the lack of dialogue on anchoring a successor deal has worried arms control advocates.\n\n\"Amid a 'hybrid war' waged by Washington against Russia, we aren't seeing any basis, not only for any additional joint measures in the sphere of arms control and reduction of strategic risks, but for any discussion of strategic stability issues with the U.S.,\" he said. \"We firmly link such possibility to the West fully renouncing its malicious course aimed at undermining Russia's security and interests.\"\n\nThe minister said Washington's push for restarting nuclear arms talks is rooted in a desire to \"try to establish control over our nuclear arsenal and minimize nuclear risks for itself,\" but added that \"those risks are emerging as a result of forceful pressure on our country.\"\n\nHe accused the West of blocking any talks on ending the conflict and inciting the ramping up of attacks on Russia.\n\n\"Such encouragement and the transfer of relevant weapons shows that the West doesn't want any constructive solution,\" Lavrov said. \"The West is pushing toward the escalation of the Ukrainian crisis, and that raises new strategic risks.\"\n\nAsked if tensions with the West over Ukraine could spiral into a showdown resembling the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis - when the U.S. and the Soviet Union found themselves on the edge of nuclear war - Lavrov sternly warned against encouraging Ukraine to strike targets in Russia.\n\nHe specifically accused Britain of inciting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to order such attacks, although he didn't offer any proof to back the claim.\n\n\"London is literally egging on Zelenskyy to bomb any facilities anywhere in Russia,\" Lavrov said.\n\nHe reaffirmed that Russia will pursue what it calls the \"special military operation\" regardless of Western pressure.\n\n\"We will consistently and persistently press the goals of the special military operation and we will achieve them,\" he said. \"They should have no hope that Russia could be defeated in any way. Those in the West who fantasize about it have failed to learn history lessons.\"\n\nOn other foreign policy issues, Lavrov talked at length about growing influence of the Global South and argued that Western sway in international affairs was waning.\n\nHe hailed Russia-China ties, saying they are going through their \"best period in history\" and are stronger than a conventional military union.\n\nLavrov reaffirmed Moscow's call for the creation of an independent Palestinian state, describing it as the only way to ensure security for both Palestinians and Israel. He also criticized the U.S.-led attacks on Yemen, saying that \"the more the Americans and the British bomb, the less desire to talk the Houthis have.\""}
{"text": "# AI is the buzz, the big opportunity and the risk to watch among the Davos glitterati\nBy **KELVIN CHAN** and **JAMEY KEATEN**  \nJanuary 18, 2024. 3:07 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DAVOS, Switzerland (AP)** - Artificial intelligence is easily the biggest buzzword for world leaders and corporate bosses diving into big ideas at the World Economic Forum's glitzy annual meeting in Davos. Breathtaking advances in generative AI stunned the world last year, and the elite crowd is angling to take advantage of its promise and minimize its risks.\n\nIn a sign of ChatGPT maker OpenAI's skyrocketing profile, CEO Sam Altman made his Davos debut to rock star crowds, with his benefactor, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, hot on his heels.\n\nIllustrating AI's geopolitical importance like few other technologies before it, the word was on the lips of world leaders from China to France. It was visible across the Swiss Alpine town and percolated through afterparties.\n\nHere's a look at the buzz: \n\n## OPENAI OPENING BIG AT DAVOS\nThe leadership drama at the AI world's much-ballyhooed chatbot maker followed Altman and Nadella to the swanky Swiss snows.\n\nAltman's sudden firing and swift rehiring last year cemented his position as the face of the generative AI revolution but questions about the boardroom bustup and OpenAI's governance lingered. He told a Bloomberg interviewer that he's focused on getting a \"great full board in place\" and deflected further questions.\n\nAt a Davos panel on technology and humanity Thursday, a question about what Altman learned from the upheaval came at the end.\n\n\"We had known that our board had gotten too small, and we knew that we didn't have a level of experience we needed,\" Altman said. \"But last year was such a wild year for us in so many ways that we sort of just neglected it.\"\n\nAltman added that for \"every one step we take closer to very powerful AI, everybody's character gets, like, plus 10 crazy points. It's a very stressful thing. And it should be because we're trying to be responsible about very high stakes.\"\n\n## WORLD LEADERS WANT TO LEAD THE WORLD ON AI\nFrom China to Europe, top officials staked their positions on AI as the world grapples with regulating the rapidly developing technology that has big implications for workplaces, elections and privacy.\n\nThe European Union has devised the world's first comprehensive AI rules ahead of a busy election year, with AI-powered misinformation and disinformation the biggest risk to the global economy as it threatens to erode democracy and polarize society, according to a World Economic Forum report released last week.\n\nChinese Premier Li Qiang called AI \"a double-edged sword.\"\n\n\"Human beings must control the machines instead of having the machines control us,\" he said in a speech Tuesday.\n\n\"AI must be guided in a direction that is conducive to the progress of humanity, so there should be a redline in AI development - a red line that must not be crossed,\" Li said, without elaborating.\n\nChina, one of the world's centers of AI development, wants to \"step up communication and cooperation with all parties\" on improving global AI governance, Li said.\n\nChina has released interim regulations for managing generative AI, but the EU broke ground with its AI Act, which won a hard-fought political deal last month and awaits final sign-off.\n\nEuropean Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said AI is \"a very significant opportunity, if used in a responsible way.\"\n\nShe said \"the global race is already on\" to develop and adopt AI, and touted the 27-nation EU's efforts, including the AI Act and a program pairing supercomputers with small and midsized businesses to train large AI models.\n\nFrench President Emmanuel Macron said he's a \"strong believer\" in AI and that his country is \"an attractive and competitive country\" for the industry. He played up France's role in helping coordinate regulation on deepfake images and videos created with AI as well as plans to host a follow-up summit on AI safety after an inaugural gathering in Britain in November. \n\n## IT'S ALL IN WHAT THE GLITTERATI SEES\nThe letters \"AI\" were omnipresent along the Davos Promenade, where consulting firms and tech giants are among the groups that swoop onto the main drag each year, renting out shops and revamping them into showcase pavilions.\n\nInside the main conference center, a giant digital wall emanated rolling images of AI art and computer-generated conceptions of wildlife and nature like exotic birds or tropical streams.\n\nDavos-goers who wanted to delve more deeply into the technical ins and outs of artificial intelligence could drop in to sessions at the AI House.\n\n## THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE\nGenerative AI systems like ChatGPT and Google's Bard captivated the world by rapidly spewing out new poems, images and computer code and are expected to have a sweeping impact on life and work.\n\nThe technology could help give a boost to the stagnating global economy, said Nadella, whose company is rolling out the technology in its products.\n\nThe Microsoft chief said he's \"very optimistic about AI being that general purpose technology that drives economic growth.\"\n\nBusiness leaders predicted AI will help automate mundane work tasks or make it easier for people to do advanced jobs, but they also warned that it would threaten workers who can't keep up.\n\nA survey of 4,700 CEOs in more than 100 countries by PwC, released at the start of the Davos meetings, said 14% think they'll have to lay off staff because of the rise of generative AI.\n\n\"There isn't an area, there isn't an industry that's not going to be impacted\" by AI, said Julie Sweet, CEO of consulting firm Accenture.\n\nFor those who can move with the change, AI promises to transform tasks like computer coding and customer relations and streamline business functions like invoicing, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said.\n\n\"If you embrace AI, you're going to make yourself a lot more productive,\" he said. \"If you do not ... you're going to find that you do not have a job.\"\n\n## ALSO, IT'S SEXY?\nDuring a session featuring Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, talk about risks and regulation led to the moderator's hypothetical example of \"infinitely conversant sexbots\" that could be built by anyone using open source technology.\n\nTaking the high road, LeCun replied that AI can't be dominated by a handful of Silicon Valley tech giants if it's going to serve people around the world with different languages, cultures and values.\n\n\"You do not want this to be under the control of a small number of private companies,\" he said."}
{"text": "# Hungary won't back down and change LGBTQ+ and asylum policies criticized by EU, minister says\nBy **JUSTIN SPIKE**  \nJanuary 18, 2024. 5:49 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP)** - Hungary's government will not change policies the European Union believes infringe on LGBTQ+ rights and those of asylum seekers, even if doing so would unfreeze billions in funding the bloc has withheld from Budapest, a government minister said Thursday.\n\nThe EU has frozen funding to Hungary over concerns its right-wing nationalist government has trampled on minority rights and academic freedoms, failed to rein in official corruption and undermined democratic values.\n\nThe release of those funds has been tied to Hungary carrying out reforms to bring it into line with the EU's democratic standards.\n\nGergely Gulyas, chief of staff to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, told a news conference on Thursday there were \"limits\" to reaching an agreement with the bloc's executive, since modifying policies on LGBTQ+ and asylum rights would contradict the will of Hungarian voters.\n\n\"The Hungarian government is willing to reach an agreement with the Commission, but in cases where people have expressed a clear opinion, it would be undemocratic and unacceptable,\" Gulyas said in Budapest, adding that there are \"red lines\" when it comes to reforms Hungary is willing to make.\n\n\"For Hungary, even despite the will of the European Commission, it is unacceptable to spread LGBTQ propaganda among children, and we also cannot abandon our position on migration issues,\" Gulyas said.\n\nThe EU takes issue with a Hungarian law passed in 2021, which forbids the display of homosexual content to minors in media, including television, films, advertisements and literature.\n\nThe law, which has been decried by rights groups and foreign governments as discriminatory, also prohibits the discussion of LGBTQ+ topics in school education programs and forbids public display of products depicting or promoting gender deviation.\n\nHungary's government has also implemented a policy of turning away asylum seekers at its borders and requiring them to begin their asylum process at Hungarian embassies in Serbia and Ukraine - a practice that was declared unlawful last year by the EU's top court.\n\nThe EU in December released more than 10 billion euros ($10.9 billion) to Hungary after it undertook reforms to ensure the independence of its judicial system, but more than 20 billion euros remain frozen pending further legal changes.\n\nOn Wednesday, European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said those funds \"will remain blocked until Hungary fulfills all the necessary conditions.\""}
{"text": "# France ramps up weapons production for Ukraine and says Russia is scrutinizing the West's mettle\nBy **JOHN LEICESTER**  \nJanuary 18, 2024. 7:48 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**PARIS (AP)** - France announced more planned deliveries of its Caesar artillery system to Ukraine on Thursday and accelerating weapons manufacturing as it seeks to avoid depleting its own military stocks while continuing to support the war effort against Russia's invasion.\n\n\"The logic of ceding materiel taken from the armies' stocks is reaching its end,\" the French defense minister, Sébastien Lecornu, said in an interview with Le Parisien. \"From now on, the solution is to directly connect French defense industries with the Ukrainian army.\"\n\nFrance also launched a drive to fund the delivery of 78 Caesar self-propelled 155 mm howitzers to Ukraine this year. Ukraine has already paid for six of the guns itself and France will provide 50 million euros (US$ 54 million) to deliver 12 more, Lecornu said separately in a speech. France is also seeking 280 million euros ($305 million) from other allies of Ukraine to pay for the 60 other Caesars, the minister said.\n\nUkrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, speaking by video link, said Russian forces are firing five times more artillery shells, even 10 times more in some places, than Ukrainian forces along the front lines and that stronger artillery \"is one of our key needs to win this war.\"\n\n\"Shortage of ammunition, shell hunger, is a very real and pressing problem,\" he said.\n\nLecornu said increased supplies of shells for Ukraine are on their way. From this month, France will supply 3,000 shells for 155 mm guns per month, up from 1,000 shells per month at the start of the war and 2,000 per month since last April, Lecornu said\n\nThe production of other hardware is also increasing.\n\nFrench manufacturer Nexter used to take 30 months to make one Caesar but now requires half that time, Lecornu told Le Parisien. Caesars are among an array of Western-supplied artillery systems that have given Ukrainian gun crews an edge, especially when paired with high-precision munitions, against Russian artillery batteries using older Soviet-designed systems.\n\nThales now takes six months - down from 18 months - to deliver one of its GM200 radars that have been provided to Ukraine for its air defenses, and MBDA's production time for the Mistral short-range air-defense missile has also been substantially reduced, the minister said.\n\nFollowing Russia's Feb. 24, 2022, invasion of Ukraine, France was among countries that quickly released weapons from its own armories to help shore up Ukrainian defenses. As well as Caesars, France has supplied light tanks, long-range cruise missiles, air defense systems and other hardware, support and military training. Combined, French aid is estimated to be worth billions of euros (dollars).\n\nLecornu said 49 previously delivered Caesars are in operation in Ukraine. Based on battlefield feedback, the system is being improved to enable Ukrainian gunners to better target Russian tanks, the minister said.\n\nMore deliveries are promised. French President Emmanuel Macron this week announced plans to supply about 40 additional long-range Storm Shadow missiles and \"several hundred bombs.\" He also announced his intention to travel again to Ukraine next month, saying, \"We cannot let Russia win.\"\n\nBut because of concerns about depleting their own defenses with Russia increasingly gearing up for protracted war, France and other backers of Ukraine are seeking other ways to continue supplying Kyiv's defense needs for the long haul.\n\n\"In this phase of the war, we need endurance in our military aid for Kyiv,\" Lecornu said. \"Russia is betting that time is on its side.\"\n\nHe said Russia, Iran and North Korea are scrutinizing the mettle of Ukraine's partners.\n\n\"Our capacity to show endurance and reliability is being watched in Moscow, and Pyongyang or Tehran for that matter,\" he said."}
{"text": "# Nearly two years after invasion, West still seeking a way to steer frozen Russian assets to Ukraine\nBy **FATIMA HUSSEIN**  \nJanuary 18, 2024. 12:07 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - It's been nearly two years since the United States and its allies froze hundreds of billions of dollars in Russian foreign holdings in retaliation for Moscow's invasion of Ukraine. That roughly $300 billion in Russian Central Bank money has been sitting untapped as the war grinds on, while officials from multiple countries have debated the legality of sending the money to Ukraine.\n\nThe idea of using Russia's frozen assets is gaining new traction lately as continued allied funding for Ukraine becomes more uncertain and the U.S. Congress is in a stalemate over providing more support. But there are tradeoffs since the weaponization of global finance could harm the U.S. dollar's standing as the world's dominant currency.\n\nAt this week's World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, Switzerland, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for a \"strong\" decision this year for the frozen assets in Western banks to \"be directed towards defense against the Russian war and for reconstruction\" of Ukraine.\n\n\"Putin loves money above all,\" he said. \"The more billions he and his oligarchs, friends and accomplices lose, the more likely he will regret starting this war.\"\n\nBiden administration officials who previously dismissed the idea as legally cumbersome are showing growing openness to the idea.\n\nPenny Pritzker, the U.S. special representative for Ukraine's economic recovery, said at the Davos forum that the U.S. and Group of Seven allies are still looking for an adequate legal framework to pursue the plan.\n\n\"Get all the lawyers and all the various governments and all the parties really to come together to sort that through,\" she said. \"It's hard, it's complicated, it's difficult, and we need to work.\"\n\nAdministration officials caution that even if a legal way can be found to transfer the frozen dollars to Ukraine, the war-torn nation has immediate needs for funds that must be met by other means since U.S. assistance to Ukraine's military has ground to a halt.\n\nBipartisan legislation circulating in Washington called the Rebuilding Economic Prosperity and Opportunity for Ukrainians Act would use assets confiscated from the Russian Central Bank and other sovereign assets for Ukraine.\n\nA senior official who spoke on condition of anonymity to relay internal discussions said the administration was generally supportive of legislation to give the U.S. more flexibility in making sure Russia pays for the damage it has caused and is in \"active conversations\" with allies on how best to do that.\n\nBut even if legislation were enacted, Nicholas Mulder, a sanctions expert at Cornell University, cautioned that seizing frozen assets could have the unintended effect of undermining efforts to ensure longer-term funding for Ukraine.\n\n\"Right now it is being advanced by Washington as a substitute rather than a complement to long-term Western support for Ukraine,\" he said. \"If the assets are transferred, these funds too will run out sooner or later. But by that time Western leaders will have ceased to make any political case for supporting Ukraine, and getting support back up will be much harder.\"\n\nThe U.S. announced at the start of Russia's invasion that America and its allies had blocked access to more than $600 billion that Russia held outside its borders - including roughly $300 billion in funds belonging to Russia's Central Bank. Since then, the U.S and its allies have continued to impose rounds of targeted sanctions against companies and the wealthy elite with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.\n\nThe World Bank's latest damage assessment of Ukraine, released in March 2023, estimates that costs for reconstruction and recovery of the nation stand at $411 billion over the next 10 years, which includes needs for public and private funds.\n\nSince the war began in February 2022, the United States has given Ukraine roughly $111 billion in weapons, equipment, humanitarian assistance and other aid. Other countries also have provided Ukraine with substantial support - the U.K. announced a $3 billion assistance package on Friday.\n\nAt the White House, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young this month told a group of reporters that while the possibility of seizing Russian assets is being studied, it would not have an immediate impact on Ukraine's financial needs.\n\n\"That does not absolve the need to provide funding now,\" Young said. \"That is a future benefit to Kyiv I think we should look at and take seriously.\"\n\nSergey Aleksashenko, a former Russian Central Banker who is now a member of the Russian Antiwar Committee with other dissidents, said that while he strongly believes Russia should be forced to compensate Ukraine, \"I do not believe that there is any way to confiscate assets of the Russian Central Bank without a court deciding on the matter.\"\n\n\"Because if there is no legal basis to confiscate Russian assets, and if it is done by the decision of the administration, that means that there is no rule of law in the U.S. and there is no protection of private property.\"\n\nHe said an administrative decision to confiscate Russia's assets could prompt nations like China - the biggest holder of U.S. Treasuries - to determine that it is not safe to keep its reserves in U.S. dollars.\n\nThere are some efforts under way to seize Russian funds and those of sanctioned oligarchs under limited circumstances. Last May, the Justice Department announced that it had transferred $5.4 million seized from Russian tycoon Konstantin Malofeyev to a State Department fund for rebuilding Ukraine.\n\nAnd in December, Germany's federal prosecutor filed a motion for asset forfeiture concerning more than 720 million euros ($789 million) deposited by a Russian financial institution in a Frankfurt bank account because of a suspected attempt to violate embargo regulations.\n\nBelgium, which is holding the rotating presidency of the European Union bloc for the next six months, is now leading the talks on whether to seize Russia's assets. Belgium is also the country where most frozen Russian assets under sanctions are being held.\n\nThe country is collecting taxes on the assets. Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said in October that 1.7 billion euros ($1.8 billion) in tax collections was already available and that the money would be used to buy military equipment, humanitarian aid and help with the rebuilding of the war-torn country.\n\nBut EU countries are worried that going further by confiscating the assets could pave the way for serious legal problems and could also destabilize the financial system.\n\nDe Croo said this week he is hearing \"a lot of prudence\" when the issue of seizing assets is raised.\n\n\"It's crucial that we stay within a legal framework,\" he said.\n\nMaria Snegovaya, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, cautioned that if Ukraine's immediate needs aren't met, \"no amount of seized Russian assets is unfortunately going to compensate for what may happen.\"\n\n\"And by then it is going to be very overwhelming.\""}
{"text": "# Egypt's leader el-Sissi slams Ethiopia-Somaliland coastline deal and vows support for Somalia\nBy **SAMY MAGDY**  \nJanuary 21, 2024. 2:02 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAIRO (AP)** - Egypt's leader said Sunday his country stands shoulder to shoulder with Somalia in its dispute with landlocked Ethiopia, which struck a deal with Somaliland to obtain access to the sea and establish a marine force base.\n\nPresident Abdel Fattah el-Sissi slammed Ethiopia's agreement with the breakaway region. He called on Ethiopia to seek benefits from seaports in Somalia and Djibouti \"through transitional means,\" rather than through attempts to \"control another (country's) territory.\"\n\n\"We will not allow anyone to threaten Somalia or infringe upon its territory,\" el-Sissi told a joint news conference in Cairo with Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mahmoud. \"No one should attempt to threaten Egypt's brothers, especially if our brothers asked us to stand with them.\"\n\nSomaliland, a region strategically located by the Gulf of Aden, broke away from Somalia in 1991 as the country collapsed into a warlord-led conflict. The region has maintained its own government despite its lack of international recognition.\n\nSomaliland leader Muse Bihi Abdi signed a memorandum of understanding with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed earlier this month to allow Ethiopia to lease a 20-kilometer (12.4-mile) stretch of coastline to establish a marine force base.\n\nSheikh Mohamud, the Somali president, rejected the deal as a violation of international law, saying: \"We will not stand idly by and watch our sovereignty being compromised.\"\n\nHe arrived in Egypt this weekend to rally support for his government. He met with the Arab League chief Ahmed Aboul Gheit and Al-Azhar mosque's Grand Imam, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb.\n\nEgypt is at odds with Ethiopia over a controversial hydroelectric dam Ethiopia has built on the Nile river's main tributary. The two countries - along with Sudan - have been trying for over a decade to reach a negotiated agreement on the filling and operation of the $4 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance dam.\n\nThe latest round of talks last month ended without a deal and Cairo and Addis Ababa traded blame for the failure.\n\nNegotiators have said key questions remain about how much water Ethiopia will release downstream if a multi-year drought occurs, and how the countries will resolve any future disputes. Ethiopia rejects binding arbitration at the final stage.\n\nThe dam is on the Blue Nile near the Sudan border and Egypt fears it will have a devastating effect on its water and irrigation supply downstream unless Ethiopia takes its needs into account.\n\nThe dam began producing power last year and Ethiopia said it had completed the final phase of filling the dam's reservoir in September."}
{"text": "# South African government says it wants to prevent an auction of historic Mandela artifacts\nBy **MOGOMOTSI MAGOME**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 1:16 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**JOHANNESBURG (AP)** - South Africa's government announced Friday it will challenge the auctioning of dozens of artifacts belonging to the nation's anti-apartheid stalwart Nelson Mandela, saying the items are of historical significance and should remain in the country.\n\nThe 75 artifacts belonging to Mandela, the country's first democratically elected president who spent 27 years in jail for his anti-apartheid struggle against the white minority government, are to go under the hammer on Feb. 22 in a deal between New York-based auctioneers Guernsey's and Mandela's family, mainly his daughter Dr. Makaziwe Mandela.\n\nThe items include Nelson Mandela's iconic Ray-Ban sunglasses and \"Madiba\" shirts, personal letters he wrote from prison, as well as a blanket gifted to him by former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle.\n\nA champagne cooler that was a present from former President Bill Clinton is also on the list, with bidding for it starting at $24,000. Also among the items is Mandela's ID \"book,\" his identification document following his 1993 release from prison.\n\nLast month, the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria gave the go-ahead for the auction after dismissing an interdict by the South African Heritage Resources Agency, which is responsible for the protection of the country's cultural heritage.\n\nThe government said Friday it will back an appeal by the agency.\n\nSouth African minister of arts and culture, Zizi Kodwa, said the government wants to \"preserve the legacy of former President Mandela and ensure that his life's work\" remains in the country.\n\nOn its website, Guernsey's says the auction \"will be nothing short of remarkable,\" and that proceeds will be used for the building of the Mandela Memorial Garden in Qunu, the village where he is buried.\n\n\"To imagine actually owning an artifact touched by this great leader is almost unthinkable,\" it says.\n\nIn an interview with the New York Times published Thursday, Makaziwe Mandela said her father wanted the former Transkei region where he was born and raised to benefit economically from tourism.\n\n\"I want other people in the world to have a piece of Nelson Mandela - and to remind them, especially in the current situation, of compassion, of kindness, of forgiveness,\" she told the Times.\n\nReports of the auction have sparked heated debates on social media platforms in South Africa, with many criticizing the auctioning of what they consider to be the nation's cultural heritage.\n\nThe planned auction comes as many African countries seek to have treasured African artworks and artifacts that were removed from the continent during colonial years returned to Africa.\n\nMost recently, Nigeria and Germany signed a deal for the return of hundreds of artifacts known as the Benin Bronzes. The deal followed French President Emmanuel Macron's decision in 2021 to sign over 26 pieces known as the Abomey Treasures, priceless artworks of the 19th century Dahomey kingdom in present-day Benin."}
{"text": "# Congo's President Felix Tshisekedi is sworn into office following his disputed reelection\nBy **JEAN-YVES KAMALE**  \nJanuary 20, 2024. 11:19 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**KINSHASA, Congo (AP)** - Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi was sworn in Saturday following a disputed December election, promising to unite the Central African country during his second five-year term and to protect lives in the conflict-hit eastern region.\n\n\"I am taking back the baton of command that you entrusted to me. We want a more united, stronger and prosperous Congo,\" Tshikedi, 60, said during the inauguration ceremony in Kinshasa attended by several heads of state. His first inauguration in 2019 marked Congo's first democratic transfer of power since the country's independence from Belgium in 1960.\n\nTshisekedi won reelection with more than 70% of the vote, according to the election commission. However, opposition candidates and their supporters questioned the validity of the election, which was mired in logistical problems.\n\nMany polling stations were late in opening or didn't open at all while some lacked materials. Voter turnout was 40%, the election commission said.\n\nCongo's constitutional court earlier this month rejected a petition by an opposition candidate to annul the election. The court ruled that malpractice allegations were unfounded and that Tshisekedi secured \"a majority of votes cast.\"\n\nOpposition candidates asked their supporters to protest the president's inauguration, though there were no signs of protests in the capital on Saturday.\n\nNone of the opposition candidates attended the inauguration ceremony at the Stade des Martyrs stadium as Tshisekedi appealed to them to work with his government for a \"more united, stronger and prosperous\" Congo.\n\n\"I have a challenge to overcome: unemployment, job creation, empowerment of women in Congolese society and people living with disabilities.\" the Congolese leader said.\n\nCongo, a country of more than 100 million people, is blessed with sprawling mineral resources, but economic and security challenges have stifled its developments. One in four citizens faces crisis or emergency levels of food insecurity, according to U.N. statistics.\n\nEastern Congo continues to be ravaged by more than 120 armed groups seeking a share of resources such as gold and trying to protect their communities, some of them quietly backed by Congo's neighbors. The violence, which has displaced nearly 7 million people, has included mass killings.\n\nAnalysts say peace and stability in eastern Congo is one of the country's most pressing needs. The U.N. peacekeeping mission in the country is ending after more than two decades. Troops from an East African regional force are also departing.\n\n\"We expect from President Félix Tshisekedi, during his second term, many changes, particularly in the east, where thousands of citizens are still dying, to improve the situation of people and the functions of the state, and above all to improve the well-being and better being of Congolese,\" Patrick Mbembe, 48, said in the capital.\n\nTshisekedi became president in 2019 after emerging from the shadow of his father, who was one of Congo's most population figures. The presidency eluded Etienne Tshisekedi, but his 2017 death helped catapult his son into the limelight.\n\nCritics say he failed to deliver on earlier promises of improving security, access to education and infrastructure. Political analyst Francis Loko said that during the president's second term, Tshisekedi should prioritize economic and security reforms to improve the quality of life for Congo's citizens, many of whom have not benefited from the country's rich resources.\n\nThe president must \"improve the living conditions of the Congolese in terms of creating jobs and peace in the east, and that Congo regains its place in the committee of nations,\" Loko said."}
{"text": "# The Non-Aligned Movement calls Israel's war in Gaza illegal and condemns attacks on Palestinians\nBy **RISDEL KASASIRA**  \nJanuary 20, 2024. 4:00 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**KAMPALA, Uganda (AP)** - Heads of states of the Non-Aligned Movement Saturday called Israel's military campaign in the Gaza Strip \"illegal\" and strongly condemned indiscriminate attacks against Palestinian civilians, civilian infrastructure and the forced displacement of the Palestinian population.\n\nWhile calling for a ceasefire desperately needed for humanitarian aid to access the Gaza Strip, the movement in a joint statement called for a two-state solution, on the basis of the borders before 1967, when Israel seized Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem in a brief war with neighboring Arab states.\n\nThe group also reiterated support for a Palestinian state to be admitted as a member of the United Nations to take its rightful place among the community of nations.\n\nThe Non-Aligned Movement, formed during the collapse of the colonial systems and at the height of the Cold War, has played a key part in decolonization processes, according to its website. Member countries aspire not to be formally aligned with or against any major power bloc.\n\nNinety representatives, including 30 heads of state, from the 120 countries that are members of NAM took part in the week-long conference in the Ugandan capital, Kampala. It culminated in a summit of heads of state on Friday and Saturday.\n\nGaza's Health Ministry says more than 24,400 Palestinians have died in the current war, and the United Nations says a quarter of the 2.3 million people trapped in Gaza are starving. In Israel, around 1,200 people were killed during the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that sparked the war and saw some 250 people taken hostage by militants.\n\nThe NAM statement said members were very concerned at the continued deterioration of the situation on ground and the humanitarian crisis. It condemned Israel's continuing settlement construction and expansion activities throughout the Palestinian territories, as well as in Syria's Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.\n\nThe group called for the attention of the international community, especially the U.N. Security Council.\n\n\"To this end, it is high time to end this abhorrent occupation, which continues to be imposed in flagrant violation of international law, and to ensure the implementation of the countless relevant General Assembly and Security Council resolutions,\" the statement said.\n\nUN Secretary General António Guterres told the summit that the refusal to accept the two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians, and the denial of the right to statehood for the Palestinian people, were unacceptable.\n\nHe supported the NAM's position calling for reform of the Security Council.\n\n\"Your Movement has long highlighted the Council's systemic shortcomings and the need for reforms to make it truly effective and representative. How can we accept that the African continent still lacks a single Permanent Member?\" he asked.\n\nGuterres said the killing of 152 UN staff in Gaza is disheartening adding that the Hamas attack on Israel and the destruction of Gaza by the Israel army in 110 days was totally unprecedented during his mandate as UN Secretary General."}
{"text": "# African leaders criticize Israel's military campaign in Gaza and call for an immediate cease-fire\nBy **RISDEL KASASIRA**  \nJanuary 19, 2024. 12:32 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**KAMPALA, Uganda (AP)** - African leaders on Friday criticized Israel for its military campaign in Gaza and called for an end to the fighting that continues take its toll on mostly civilians.\n\nThe African Union Commission Chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat described the war in Gaza as immoral and unacceptable. \"We demand an immediate end to this unjust war against Palestinians and implementation of the two-state solution,\" he said.\n\nGaza's Health Ministry says more than 24,400 Palestinians have died, and the United Nations says a quarter of the 2.3 million people trapped in Gaza are starving. In Israel, around 1,200 people were killed during the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that sparked the war and saw some 250 people taken hostage by militants.\n\nMahamat was speaking at a conference in Kampala of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a group of 120 states which aspire not to be formally aligned with or against any major power bloc.\n\nSpeaking during the meeting of heads of state at the week-long gathering, Mahamat asked the 120 member countries to demand international justice for the Palestinians.\n\nHis remarks were echoed by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who called for the release of all the hostages and \"the resumption of talks on a just solution that will end the suffering of the Palestinian people.\"\n\nRamaphosa further called for unhindered and expanded humanitarian access to allow for vital aid and basic services to meet the needs of everyone living in Gaza.\n\nSouth Africa has filed a case at the International Court of Justice against Israel for genocide and has asked the United Nations' top court to order an immediate halt to Israeli military operations in Gaza.\n\n\"This is necessary to protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people,\" Ramaphosa said.\n\nAt the start of the conference on Monday, the Palestinian ambassador to the U.N. called on the members of the Non-Aligned Movement to put pressure on Israel to implement a cease-fire in Gaza after 100 days of war with Hamas.\n\nIn his opening speech, Ambassador Rayid Mansour said despite resolutions by the U.N. General Assembly and the Security Council, a cease-fire remained elusive.\n\nThe Non-Aligned Movement, formed during the collapse of the colonial systems and at the height of the Cold War, has played a key part in decolonization processes, according to its website.\n\nMansour compared Israel's military assault on Gaza to apartheid, the system of white minority rule in South Africa which was finally abolished in 1994. Israel rejects such allegations."}
{"text": "# Namibian President Hage Geingob will start treatment for cancer, his office says\nJanuary 19, 2024. 11:38 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP)** - Namibian President Hage Geingob will start treatment for cancer after routine medical checkups and a follow-up biopsy led to the detection of cancerous cells, his office said Friday.\n\nThe Namibian Presidency said the 82-year-old had a colonoscopy and a gastroscopy on Jan. 8, followed by a biopsy. Geingob's office gave no more details on his diagnosis but said he would continue to carry out his duties.\n\nGeingob, who has been president of the southern African nation since 2015, is due to finish his second and final term in office this year. In 2014, he said he had survived prostate cancer.\n\n\"On the advice of the medical team, President Geingob will undertake appropriate medical treatment to deal with the cancerous cells,\" his office said in a statement.\n\nNamibia will hold elections to choose a new leader in November."}
{"text": "# 1 dead, at least 6 injured in post-election unrest in the Indian Ocean island nation of Comoros\nBy **NAZIR NAZI**  \nJanuary 18, 2024. 2:39 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MORONI, Comoros (AP)** - A second day of unrest in the Indian Ocean island nation of Comoros on Thursday left one person dead and at least six others injured, a health official said.\n\nThe protests came after incumbent President Azali Assoumani was declared the winner in an election held over the weekend that was denounced by the country's opposition parties as fraudulent.\n\nThe announcement late Tuesday that Assoumani had won a fourth term triggered violent protests that started Wednesday, when a government minister's house was set on fire and a car at the home of another minister was burned.\n\nPeople also vandalized a national food depot. Several roads in and around the capital, Moroni, were barricaded by protesters who burned tires. Riot police clashed with the demonstrators.\n\nThe government ordered a curfew on Wednesday night, until 6 a.m. Thursday.\n\nThe person who died was a young man, said Dr. Djabir Ibrahim, the head of the emergency department at the El-Maarouf Hospital in Moroni. He said that the man likely died of a gunshot wound. One of the injured was in a serious condition, he said.\n\nU.N. human rights chief Volker Türk appealed for calm and urged authorities to allow people to protest peacefully. His office said that it received reports of security forces firing tear gas at peaceful protesters, including on a march by a group of women earlier this week. Türk also said that he was concerned with repression in Comoros in recent years.\n\nOpposition parties have claimed that Sunday's vote was fraudulent and say the national electoral commission is biased toward Assoumani, a former military officer who first came to power in a 1999 coup. The opposition has called for the election results to be canceled.\n\nComoros has a population of around 800,000 spread over three islands and has had a series of coups since independence from France in 1975.\n\nAssoumani, 65, was reelected with 62.97% of the vote after changing the constitution in 2018 to allow him to sidestep term limits. He has been accused of cracking down on dissent and previously banned protests. He chairs the African Union, where his one-year largely ceremonial term will end next month.\n\nThe government said that a number of protesters were arrested, without offering specifics, and accused the opposition of finding \"it difficult to accept defeat\" and inciting the unrest.\n\n\"We know the instigators,\" government spokesperson Houmed Msaidie said. \"Some of them are in the hands of law enforcement. We will continue to look for them, because there is no question of the state giving way to violence.\"\n\nA coalition of opposition parties denied the accusations, saying the unrest shows that people are \"fed up\" with the government.\n\nWhen Assoumani changed the constitution in 2018, the move triggered mass demonstrations across the nation and an armed uprising on one of the islands that was quelled by the army.\n\nAfter taking power in a coup, Assoumani was first elected president in 2002. He stepped down in 2006, but returned to win a second term in 2016."}
{"text": "# Blinken's latest diplomatic trip will take him to Africa as crises continue to vex US foreign policy\nBy **MATTHEW LEE**  \nJanuary 18, 2024. 12:55 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Secretary of State Antony Blinken is planning to visit four African countries as the Biden administration tries to keep its eyes on all corners of the world while being consumed by crises in Ukraine, the Mideast and the Red Sea.\n\nThe State Department announced on Thursday that Blinken will go to Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Angola starting Sunday for talks focused on regional security, conflict prevention, democracy promotion and trade. Nigeria is West Africa's regional heavyweight and plays a major role in security issues, especially those involving Islamic extremist violence in the Sahel, the vast arid expanse south of the Sahara Desert.\n\nThe trip will be his third overseas mission in the new year. He returned from a Gaza-focused, weeklong 10-nation trip to the Middle East last Thursday and a three-day trip to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland on Wednesday.\n\nBlinken's Africa trip comes as the United States is increasingly nervous about its relationships on the continent, particularly after coups last year in Niger and Gabon, and escalating unrest in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.\n\nIn addition, the U.S. and China are in a battle for influence throughout Africa. That topic will likely top his the agenda in Angola, which China has targeted for significant investment.\n\nBlinken will highlight the administration's partnership with African nation on issues such as the climate, economic investment, food and health, department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement.\n\nWhile in Ivory Coast, Blinken may attend an Africa Cup of Nations soccer match between the host country and Equatorial Guinea."}
{"text": "# Senegal presidential candidate renounces French nationality to run for office\nBy **BABACAR DIONE**  \nJanuary 18, 2024. 11:55 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**DAKAR, Senegal (AP)** - Karim Wade, the son of a former president of Senegal and a strong political figure in the country, has renounced his French nationality to pave the way for him to run in next month's presidential election.\n\nWade said Wednesday in a statement on X formerly known as Twitter, that France's interior minister confirmed his renunciation. His dual French and Senegalese nationalities have been a subject of debate because Senegal's constitution says candidates can run only if they are exclusively Senegalese.\n\nThe announcement comes days ahead of when the final list of candidates will be announced and weeks ahead of Senegal's presidential elections scheduled for the end of February.\n\nAnother candidate, Thierno Alassane Sall, launched an appeal with the Constitutional Council to invalidate Wade's candidacy.\n\nWade, seen as one of the main contenders, is part of the Senegalese Democratic Party. The party, under his father, former President Abdoulaye Wade, ran the country between 2000 and 2012.\n\nIn 2013 the younger Wade was charged with corruption and served three years in jail before going into exile in Qatar."}
{"text": "# Harsh Israeli rhetoric against Palestinians becomes central to South Africa's genocide case\nBy **TIA GOLDENBERG**  \nJanuary 18, 2024. 5:55 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**TEL AVIV, Israel (AP)** - Fighting \"human animals.\" Making Gaza a \"slaughterhouse.\" \"Erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.\"\n\nSuch inflammatory rhetoric is a key component of South Africa's case accusing Israel of genocide at the U.N. world court, a charge that Israel denies. South Africa says the language - in comments by Israeli leaders, soldiers and entertainers about Palestinians in Gaza since Hamas' Oct. 7 attack sparked war - is proof of Israel's intent to commit genocide.\n\nIsraeli leaders have downplayed the comments, and some in Israel say they're a result of the trauma from Hamas' attack.\n\nRights groups and activists say they're an inevitable byproduct of Israel's decades-old, open-ended rule over the Palestinians and that they've intensified during the war. They say such language has been left unchecked, inciting violence and dehumanizing Palestinians.\n\n\"Words lead to deeds,\" said Michael Sfard, a prominent Israeli lawyer. \"Words that normalize or legitimize serious crimes against civilians create the social, political and moral basis for other people to do things like that.\"\n\nThe genocide case against Israel opened last week at the International Court of Justice at The Hague. South Africa is looking to prove that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and that Israel has specific intent to commit genocide. It is using the litany of harsh statements as part of the evidence in its case.\n\n## THE COMMENTS\nWith the ground offensive getting underway in late October, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cited the Bible in a televised address: \"You must remember what Amalek has done to you.\" Amalekites were persecutors of the biblical Israelites, and a biblical commandment says they must be destroyed.\n\nSouth Africa argued that the remarks showed Israel's intent to commit genocide against Palestinians. Netanyahu denied that this week and said he was referring to Amalek as a way to describe Hamas and its attack.\n\nTwo days after the Hamas attack, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was \"fighting human animals,\" in announcing a complete siege on Gaza.\n\nDeputy Knesset speaker Nissim Vaturi from the ruling Likud party wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that Israelis had one common goal, \"erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.\" Israeli Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu, from the far-right Jewish Power party, suggested that Israel drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza and said there were \"no uninvolved civilians\" in the territory.\n\nIsraeli soldiers caught on video made similar remarks as they sang and danced in the early days of Israel's ground offensive.\n\nOn Oct. 7, a journalist wrote on X that Gaza should become \"a slaughterhouse\" if the roughly 250 people taken hostage by Hamas were not returned.\n\nMilitary officials and two Israeli pop singers are also cited by South Africa for making inflammatory comments.\n\n\"The language of systemic dehumanization is evident here,\" lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi said for South Africa in remarks before the court. \"Genocidal utterances are therefore not out in the fringes. They are embodied in state policy.\"\n\nSouth Africa is asking for a series of legally binding rulings declaring that Israel is breaching \"its obligations under the Genocide Convention\" - a decision that could take years - and for a binding interim order that Israel cease hostilities, a ruling on which is expected in the coming weeks.\n\n## ISRAEL'S RESPONSE\nDefending Israel in court, lawyer Malcolm Shaw said the remarks were made mostly by officials with little role in determining Israeli policy, calling them \"random quotes\" that were misleading and had been in some cases repudiated by Netanyahu.\n\nBut Roy Schondorf, a former Israeli deputy attorney general, said in an interview that the statements still carried risk, even out of context: \"It would have been better if some of these remarks had not been said.\"\n\nIsrael argued that its justice system would take action against unacceptable speech. But critics say statements against Palestinians have gone unpunished or undenounced. Lawyer Sfard appealed to the country's attorney general earlier this month on behalf of a group of prominent Israeli figures, demanding to know why the rhetoric hasn't been reined in.\n\nIn a statement two days before the case launched at the world court, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara said calling for intentional harm to civilians could amount to a criminal offense and that Israeli authorities were examining several such cases, without elaborating. The comments appeared to be aimed at heading off the South African accusations.\n\nOverall, Israel vehemently denies the charges at the world court. Israel says it's fighting a war of self-defense against Hamas after it killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians.\n\nIsraeli officials say the country adheres to international law and does its utmost to protect civilians, blaming the high death toll on Hamas for embedding in civilian areas. More than 24,000 people have been killed in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza.\n\nIsrael also says it is Hamas that exhibited genocidal actions with its attack and genocidal intentions with its violent speech against Israelis, including promises to repeat the Oct. 7 assault and the group's commitment to Israel's destruction.\n\n## THE RHETORIC'S MOVE TO THE MAINSTREAM\nThe war is being fought under Israel's most hardline government ever, dominated by far-right Cabinet ministers with a long record of controversial remarks well before Oct. 7.\n\nFinance Minister Bezalel Smotrich once called for \"erasing\" a Palestinian West Bank town. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir talked of the supremacy of freedom of movement  for Jewish West Bank settlers over that same right for Palestinians.\n\nAnd since Oct. 7, such speech has moved further into the mainstream.\n\nIsraelis, like Palestinians, have been hardened by decades of deadly conflict and its sense of intractability. Some in Israel say the trauma of Hamas' unprecedented attack unleashed the current discourse.\n\n\"The intense collective trauma gave free rein to the expression of dark feelings of revenge that in the mainstream was less pleasant to utter until today,\" deputy editor-in-chief Noa Landau wrote in the daily Haaretz. She said the statements reflected \"the social zeitgeist.\"\n\nWhile little appears to have been done to confront violent rhetoric directed at Palestinians, Palestinian citizens of Israel who have shown empathy for people in Gaza are facing a crackdown, according to Adalah, a legal rights group. Police say the speech amounts to incitement, promotes violence or shows support for terror groups.\n\nAdalah says at least 270 Palestinian citizens of Israel have had some sort of interaction with law enforcement - arrests, investigations or warnings, with at least 86 charged for speech offenses. Some Jewish Israelis who expressed sympathy for Palestinians have also faced arrest or sanction by their employers.\n\nAeyal Gross, a professor of international law at Tel Aviv University, said that how Israel responds to the inflammatory rhetoric matters in the case with South Africa, because Israel, as a signatory to the Genocide Convention, is prohibited not only from committing genocide but also from inciting to genocide.\n\nGross said that it was probably too late for Israel to take steps that show it doesn't condone such speech. Punishing such remarks could have sent a message to the court as well as to Israeli society that the state doesn't tolerate incendiary rhetoric.\n\n\"It's important because it would have said, 'It's not our intent,'\" he said. \"But it's also important because it would have meant we are sending the soldiers on the ground a message not to act in this way.\""}
{"text": "# 2.7 million Zimbabweans need food aid as El Nino compounds a drought crisis, UN food program says\nBy **FARAI MUTSAKA**  \nJanuary 17, 2024. 12:30 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP)** - The U.N. World Food Program said Wednesday that it was working with Zimbabwe's government and aid agencies to provide food to 2.7 million rural people in the country as the El Nino weather phenomenon contributes to a drought crisis in southern Africa.\n\nFood shortages putting nearly 20% of Zimbabwe's population at risk of hunger have been caused by poor harvests in drought-ravaged areas where people rely on small-scale farming to eat. El Nino is expected to compound that by causing below-average rainfall again this year, said Francesca Erdelmann, WFP country director for Zimbabwe.\n\nEl Nino is a natural and recurring weather phenomenon that warms parts of the Pacific, affecting weather patterns around the world. It has different impacts in different regions.\n\nWhen rains fail or come late, it has a significant impact, Erdelmann told a news conference.\n\nJanuary to March is referred to as the lean season in Zimbabwe, when rural households run out of food while waiting for the next harvest.\n\nMore than 60% of Zimbabwe's 15 million people live in rural areas. Their life is increasingly affected by a cycle of drought and floods aggravated by climate change.\n\nDry spells are becoming longer and more severe. For decades, Zimbabwe's rainy season reliably ran from October to March. It has become erratic in recent years, sometimes starting only in December and ending sooner.\n\nOnce an exporter of food, Zimbabwe has relied heavily on assistance from donors to feed its people in recent years. Agricultural production also fell sharply after the seizures of white-owned farms under former President Robert Mugabe starting in 2000 but had begun to recover.\n\nThe United States Agency for International Development, the U.S. government's foreign aid agency, has estimated through its Famine Early Warning Systems Network that 20 million people in southern Africa will need food relief between January and March. Many people in the areas of highest concern such as Zimbabwe, southern Malawi, parts of Mozambique and southern Madagascar will be unable to feed themselves into early 2025 due to El Nino, USAID said.\n\nErdelmann said WFP had received a donation of $11 million from USAID.\n\nZimbabwe's government says the country has grain reserves to last until October, but it has acknowledged that many people who failed to harvest enough grain and are too poor to buy food from markets are in dire need of assistance.\n\nStaple food prices are spiking across the region, USAID said, further impacting people's ability to feed themselves.\n\nZimbabwe has already acknowledged feeling the effects of El Nino in other sectors after 100 elephants died in a drought-stricken wildlife park late last year."}
{"text": "# A cholera outbreak in Zambia has caused more than 400 deaths and infected 10,000\nBy **NOEL SICHALWE**  \nJanuary 17, 2024. 8:49 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LUSAKA, Zambia (AP)** - Zambia is reeling from a major cholera outbreak that has killed more than 400 people and infected more than 10,000, leading authorities to order schools across the country to remain shut after the end-of-year holidays.\n\nA large soccer stadium in the capital city has been converted into a treatment facility.\n\nThe Zambian government is embarking on a mass vaccination program and says it's providing clean water - 2.4 million liters a day - to communities that are affected across the southern African nation.\n\nThe national disaster management agency has been mobilized.\n\nCholera is an acute diarrhea infection caused by a bacteria that is typically spread via contaminated food or water. The disease is strongly linked to poverty and inadequate access to clean water.\n\nThe outbreak in Zambia began in October and 412 people have died and 10,413 cases have been recorded, according to the latest count on Wednesday from the Zambia Public Health Institute, the government body that deals with health emergencies.\n\nThe Health Ministry says cholera has been detected in nearly half of the country's districts and nine out of 10 provinces, and the nation of about 20 million people has been recording more than 400 cases a day.\n\n\"This outbreak continues to pose a threat to the health security of the nation,\" Health Minister Sylvia Masebo said, outlining it was a nationwide problem.\n\nThe United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF, called the fatality rate of around 4% in the three-month outbreak \"a devastatingly high number.\" When treated, cholera typically has a death rate of less than 1%.\n\nThere have been recent cholera outbreaks in other southern African nations including Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. More than 200,000 cases and over 3,000 deaths have been reported in southern Africa since the start of 2023, UNICEF said.\n\nMalawi had its worst cholera outbreak in decades in 2023. Last year, the World Health Organization reported that about 30 countries globally, also including Nigeria and Uganda in Africa, suffered serious outbreaks in the last few years.\n\nCholera barely affects countries in the developed world and can be easily treated but can be quickly fatal if not treated.\n\nMore than half - 229 - of the victims in the Zambian outbreak died before being admitted to a health facility, the public health institute said.\n\nZambia has had several major cholera outbreaks since the 1970s but this one is the worst for 20 years in terms of the caseload, according to Dr. Mazyanga Mazaba, the director of public health policy and communication at the public health institute.\n\nThe cholera bacteria can also survive longer in warmer weather and unusually heavy rains and storms in southern Africa have contributed to recent outbreaks, experts say.\n\nWHO said last year that while poverty and conflict remain the main drivers for cholera, climate change has contributed to the disease's upsurge in many places across the globe since 2021 by making storms wetter and more frequent. A cyclone sparked a spiraling cholera outbreak in Mozambique last year.\n\nHeavy rains and flash flooding in Zambia have converted some neighborhoods into soggy or waterlogged areas.\n\nThe Zambian government announced in early January that schools - which were meant to open for the year on Jan. 8 - will only open on Jan. 29. Parents and children were urged to make use of education programs on public TV and radio, a situation that had echoes of the COVID-19 pandemic.\n\nThe education minister ordered schools to be cleaned and inspected.\n\nZambia's Disaster Management and Mitigation Unit was mobilized and it was delivering large water tanks and trucking in clean water to some neighborhoods daily. Granulated chlorine to treat water was also being provided, it said.\n\nThe majority of cases are in the capital, Lusaka, where a 60,000-seat national soccer stadium has been converted into a treatment center and is dealing with around 500 patients at any one time, the health minister said.\n\nShe said Zambia had received around 1.4 million doses of the oral cholera vaccine from the WHO and expected more than 200,000 more to arrive soon. Zambian government officials, including Masebo, took a vaccine publicly to encourage others to also do so.\n\nHealth experts have previously warned that the numerous cholera outbreaks globally have strained the supply of vaccines, which are mostly distributed to poor countries through an international body run by the U.N. and partners. Vaccines alliance Gavi predicted that the vaccine shortage could last until 2025."}
{"text": "# Kenya doomsday cult leader, 30 others face charges of murdering 191 children. More charges to follow\nBy **TOM ODULA**  \nJanuary 17, 2024. 9:11 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NAIROBI, Kenya (AP)** - Doomsday cult leader Paul Mackenzie and 30 of his followers were presented in a Kenyan court in the coastal town of Malindi on Wednesday to face charges of murdering 191 children.\n\nMackenzie and the other suspects did not enter pleas because High Court Judge Mugure Thande granted a request from prosecutors that they undergo mental assessments and return to court on Feb. 6.\n\nThe remains of 180 of the 191 dead children have not been identified, according to the prosecution's charge sheet.\n\nMackenzie and some of his followers have been blamed for the deaths of 429 members of his Good News International Church, many of whom are believed to have starved themselves in the belief that by doing so they would meet Jesus Christ before the world ends.\n\nThe bodies were discovered in dozens of shallow graves on an 800-acre (320-hectare) ranch in a remote area known as Shakahola Forest in the coastal county of Kilifi. The graves were found after police rescued 15 emaciated church members who told investigators that Mackenzie had instructed them to fast to death before the world ends. Four of the 15 died after they were taken to a hospital.\n\nAutopsies on some of the bodies found in the graves showed they died from starvation, strangulation or suffocation.\n\nKenya's top prosecutor said on Monday that 95 people will be charged with murder, cruelty, child torture and other crimes.\n\nFor months since the arrest of the defendants last April, prosecutors have asked a court in Kilifi for permission to keep holding them while the investigation continues. But last week, Principal Magistrate Yousuf Shikanda declined their latest request to hold the suspects for an additional 60 days, saying the prosecutors had been given enough time to complete the investigation.\n\nMackenzie is serving a separate one-year prison sentence after being found guilty of operating a film studio and producing movies for his preaching without a valid license.\n\nMackenzie allegedly encouraged church members to move to Shakahola Forest to prepare for the end of the world.\n\nA Senate committee report said Mackenzie chose the area due to its remoteness.\n\n\"Once inside the villages established by Mackenzie, followers were not allowed to leave the area, nor interact within themselves,\" the report said.\n\n\"The followers were required to destroy vital documents, among them national identity cards, birth certificates, certificates of title to property, academic certificates and marriage certificates,\" creating problems in identifying the dead, the report said."}
{"text": "# 3 killed and 77 injured in a massive blast caused by explosives in a southern Nigerian city\nBy **CHINEDU ASADU**  \nJanuary 17, 2024. 10:58 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ABUJA, Nigeria (AP)** - Three people died and 77 others were injured overnight when an explosives rocked more than 20 buildings in one of Nigeria's largest cities, authorities said Wednesday, as rescue workers dug through the rubble in search of those feared trapped.\n\nResidents in the southwestern state of Oyo's densely populated Ibadan city heard a loud blast at about 7:45 p.m. Tuesday, causing panic as many fled their homes. By Wednesday morning, security forces cordoned off the area while medical personnel and ambulances were on standby as rescue efforts intensified.\n\nPreliminary investigations showed the blast was caused by explosives stored for use in illegal mining operations, Oyo Gov. Seyi Makinde told reporters after visiting the site in the Bodija area of Ibadan.\n\n\"We have already deployed first responders and all relevant agencies within Oyo state to carry out comprehensive search and rescue operations,\" Makinde said, describing the damage as \"devastating.\"\n\nRescue workers combing through the collapsed structures recovered an additional body on Wednesday morning, increasing the death toll to three, Saheed Akiode, coordinator of Nigeria's National Emergency Management Agency in the region, told The Associated Press.\n\nIt was not immediately clear who stored the explosives, and no arrest has been announced. \"The investigations are ongoing (and) all those found culpable for this will be brought to book,\" Gov. Makinde said.\n\nMost of the 77 injured had already been discharged, the governor said, promising to cover the medical bills of others still being admitted and to provide temporary accommodation for those whose houses were affected.\n\nDozens of residents trooped to the vicinity where some of the injured were being treated in ambulances. Surrounding the area are buildings covered in dust and either destroyed in whole or in part as a result of the blast, which left a massive crater.\n\nIllegal mining in mineral-rich Nigeria is common and has been a major concern for authorities. However, it is mostly done in remote areas where arrests are difficult and where safety procedures are rarely followed.\n\nThe use of explosives such as dynamite by miners close to residential areas is also common and poses health hazards to residents, according to Anthony Adejuwon, who leads the Urban Alert group that advocates for accountability in the mining industry.\n\nAdejuwon said explosive materials should be kept far away from where people live, but that \"the use of these explosives is not controlled and because they are not controlled, anybody that has easy access can keep it anywhere.\""}
{"text": "# Sudan suspends ties with east African bloc for inviting paramilitary leader to summit\nJanuary 16, 2024. 4:23 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAIRO (AP)** - The Sudanese government suspended ties Tuesday with the east African regional bloc trying to mediate between the country's army and a rival powerful paramilitary force, accusing the body of violating Sudan's sovereignty by inviting the paramilitary leader to an upcoming summit.\n\nThe army, headed by Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, and The Rapid Support Forces, commanded by Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, have been fighting for control of Sudan since April. Long standing tensions erupted into street battles concentrated in the capital but also in other areas including the western Darfur region.\n\nIn a statement, The Sudanese foreign ministry - which is aligned with the army - said the move is a response to IGAD for inviting Dagalo without previous consultation, which it said was a \"violation of Sudan's sovereignty.\" The 42nd IGAD summit is set to take place in Kampala, Uganda, on Thursday.\n\nIGAD did not immediately respond to the foreign ministry announcement. Dagalo confirmed last week on social media that he received an invitation from IGAD.\n\nThe eight-member bloc is part of mediation efforts to end the conflict, along with Saudi Arabia and the United States which facilitated rounds of unsuccessful, indirect talks between the warring parties as recently as early November. The two military leaders are yet to meet in person since the war broke out.\n\nTuesday's announcement comes one week after Dagalo finished a tour of Africa, where he met with government officials in Uganda, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa and Rwanda.\n\nOver the past two months, the RSF has appeared to take the upper hand in the conflict, with its fighters making advances eastwards and northwards across Sudan's central belt.\n\nThe United Nations says at least 12,000 have been killed in the conflict. Right groups have accused both sides of war crimes.\n\nThe countries that make up IGAD include Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda."}
{"text": "# Nigerian leader says 'massive education' of youth will help end kidnappings threatening the capital\nBy **CHINEDU ASADU** and **ABUJA**  \nJanuary 16, 2024. 2:45 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**Associated Press (AP)** - Nigeria's leader said Tuesday that his government will embark on \"massive education\" of youth as one way to tackle the increasing kidnappings for ransom now threatening the capital city along with the rest of the country's conflict-hit north.\n\nPresident Bola Tinubu won last year's election after promising to rid the West African nation of its security crisis. However, deadly attacks particularly in the north have persisted, with the capital of Abuja recording a spike in abductions along major roads and in homes in recent weeks.\n\nTinubu condemned the abductions as \"disturbing, ungodly and sinister\" and touted education as \"the antidote to the troubles agitating the nation,\" according to a statement from presidential spokesman Ajuri Ngelale.\n\n\"There is no weapon against poverty that is as potent as learning,\" the statement said. \"Security agencies are acting with dispatch to immediately address the current challenge (while) all required resources, policies and plans will be rolled out soon for the massive education of Nigerian youths.\"\n\nNigeria's security forces already are battling jihadi rebels in the northeast in addition to armed groups that often carry out mass killings and abductions in remote communities across the northwest and central regions.\n\nNow residents on the outskirts of the capital are beginning to relocate amid a surge in abductions for ransom suspected of being carried out by gunmen from volatile neighboring states.\n\nAnalysts said Tinubu has not done much to address the security crisis.\n\n\"Nigeria is drifting towards a failing state (with) non-state armed groups challenging the state authority,\" said Oluwole Ojewale, a West and Central Africa researcher with the Africa-focused Institute for Security Studies.\n\nAlthough Tinubu had promised that his government will \"mobilize the totality\" of Nigeria's assets to protect citizens, there has been \"no tangible improvement in (the) security situation yet,\" Ojewale said."}
{"text": "# Rwanda says it killed a Congolese soldier who crossed the border, heightening tensions\nBy **IGNATIUS SSUUNA**  \nJanuary 16, 2024. 7:10 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**KIGALI, Rwanda (AP)** - Rwanda's military on Tuesday said it had killed a Congolese soldier who crossed the border and allegedly fired at Rwandan army patrols, the latest incident in cross-border tensions between the neighbors.\n\nThe Rwanda Defense Force said in a statement it also arrested two Congolese soldiers who had been with the one killed. It said they crossed the border at Isangano village in Rubavu district, near the Congolese city of Goma in eastern Congo.\n\nA local farmer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisals, told The Associated Press the Congolese soldiers appeared to have crossed into Rwanda unknowingly, as some border markings can be difficult to see.\n\nCongo's military said in a statement that its soldiers were on patrol and inadvertently crossed into Rwandan territory, which is a common occurrence, but this time they were shot at instead of being repatriated.\n\nThe incident happened on the same day Rwandan President Paul Kagame met with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos and discussed how to ease tensions in eastern Congo.\n\n\"The Secretary reiterated the need for all actors to take concrete steps to resolve the situation,\" State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Tuesday in a statement.\n\nFor months, Congo's government has accused Rwanda of supporting the M23 armed rebel group that's been active in eastern Congo, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes. Rwanda has repeatedly denied the claim.\n\nIn March last year, the Rwandan army shot dead a soldier from Congo whom it alleged had crossed the border and shot at Rwanda Defense Force soldiers in Rubavu district. The incident led to an exchange of fire between soldiers from the two countries but no further casualties were reported, the force said.\n\nCongo's President Félix Tshisekedi, while campaigning for his reelection last month, alleged that Kagame was behaving like \"Hitler,\" which Rwanda's government described as \"a loud and clear threat.\"\n\nRelations between Rwanda and Congo have been fraught for decades. Rwanda alleges that Congo gave refuge to ethnic Hutus who carried out the 1994 Rwandan genocide that killed at least 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus. In the late 1990s, Rwanda twice sent its forces into Congo. The Rwandan forces were widely accused of hunting down and killing ethnic Hutu, even civilians. Rwanda denies it.\n\nTshisekedi has long accused Kagame and Rwanda of providing military support to M23, the latest iteration of Congolese Tutsi fighters to seize towns in parts of mineral-rich North Kivu. The U.N. and human rights groups accuse M23 of atrocities ranging from rape to mass killings and say it receives backing from Rwanda. Rwanda denies any ties with the rebels."}
{"text": "# Tanzania says Kenyan authorities bow to pressure and will allow Air Tanzania cargo flights\nJanuary 16, 2024. 11:05 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**NAIROBI, Kenya (AP)** - Kenyan authorities will allow cargo flights from Tanzania after its neighbor threatened to ban Kenya Airways passenger flights to Tanzania's commercial capital.\n\nThe Tanzania Civil Aviation Authority in a statement Tuesday said its Kenyan counterpart had given approval to operate cargo flights between the East African countries.\n\nThe issue around aviation restrictions between Kenya and Tanzania has been successfully resolved, Kenya's foreign affairs minister, Musalia Mudavadi, said in post on X, formerly Twitter.\n\nThe Tanzanian authority on Monday threatened to ban Kenya Airways passenger flights to Dar es Salaam beginning Jan. 22 over Kenya's lack of airline approvals. The Kenya Civil Aviation Authority did not say why it denied Air Tanzania the approval to operate cargo flights.\n\nKenya Airways has been suffering losses, and Kenya's government has injected millions of dollars into the national carrier to keep it afloat. A ban on the lucrative Tanzanian route would have been painful."}
{"text": "# Mauritius and Reunion assess damage from Indian Ocean cyclone that killed at least 4 people\nBy **GERALD IMRAY** and **LEWIS JOLY**  \nJanuary 16, 2024. 12:36 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SAINT-PAUL, Reunion (AP)** - Mauritius lifted its highest weather alert and eased a nationwide curfew Tuesday after a deadly cyclone battered the Indian Ocean island, causing heavy flooding and extensive damage in the capital and other parts of the country.\n\nThe nearby French island of Reunion was assessing the aftermath of Tropical Cyclone Belal. French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said two more bodies had been found, bringing the death toll there to three. One person died in Mauritius.\n\nBelal ripped through the region off the east coast of Africa on Monday and early Tuesday but was now heading further into the Indian Ocean, the Mauritius Meteorological Services said.\n\nThe Mauritius government said that the head of the meteorological services had stepped down after his institution was accused of not giving adequate warning about the storm's impact.\n\nRoads in the Mauritius capital, Port Louis, and elsewhere turned into raging rivers on Monday as Belal brought torrential rains and high winds. Some people climbed onto the roof of their cars and clung on, according to videos published by Mauritius' L'Express newspaper.\n\nThe person killed in Mauritius was a motorcyclist who died in an accident caused by the flooding, authorities said. The three who died in Reunion all appeared to be homeless people who had not taken cover in shelters.\n\nMauritius Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth and other members of his Cabinet visited areas that had been hardest hit, especially in the south. The government said that Belal had left \"a trail of damage over the country.\"\n\nMauritius has a population of about 1.2 million people and is a popular tourist destination.\n\nPolice were still mobilized across Mauritius, the government's National Emergency Operations Command said, but people could leave their homes. Schools and many businesses were to remain closed until at least Wednesday.\n\nMauritius had enforced a curfew until noon Tuesday, with everyone ordered to remain at home except emergency workers, some hospital workers and security forces.\n\nOn Reunion, residents emerged from their homes Tuesday to clean up. Men in shorts trudged through ankle-high waters down a street in the town of Saint-Paul as winds buffeted the palm trees. Emergency workers scooped up branches and other debris blocking roads.\n\nIn the nearby town of Saint-Gilles-les-Bains, trees had crashed onto quays and into the picturesque marina, and several boats were damaged. The winds hit hardest on the higher, inland areas, but roads to reach them remained impassable.\n\nSome 40% of Reunion's 860,000 people had no electricity and nearly half the island was without internet or cell phone service, the head of the local administration, Jerome Filippini, told a news conference. Schools will remain closed all week.\n\nThe French government sent some 150 rescuers and electrical workers from the mainland and the nearby French island of Mayotte to help, and Darmanin was expected on Reunion on Wednesday.\n\nCyclones are common between January and March in the Indian Ocean near southern Africa as seas in the southern hemisphere reach their warmest temperatures. The hotter water is fuel for cyclones.\n\nScientists say human-caused climate change has intensified extreme weather, making cyclones more frequent and rainier when they hit.\n\nIn 2019, Cyclone Idai ripped into Africa from the Indian Ocean, leaving more than 1,000 people dead in Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe and causing a humanitarian crisis. The United Nations said it was one of the deadliest storms on record in the southern hemisphere."}
{"text": "# Kenya embarks on its biggest rhino relocation project. A previous attempt was a disaster\nBy **BRIAN INGANGA** and **GERALD IMRAY**  \nJanuary 16, 2024. 12:59 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NAIROBI, Kenya (AP)** - Kenya has embarked on its biggest rhino relocation project and began the difficult work Tuesday of tracking, darting and moving 21 of the critically endangered beasts, which can each weigh over a ton, to a new home.\n\nA previous attempt at moving rhinos in the East African nation was a disaster in 2018 as all 11 of the animals died.\n\nThe latest project experienced early troubles. A rhino targeted for moving was successfully hit with a tranquilizer dart shot from a helicopter but ended up in a creek. Veterinarians and rangers held the rhino's head above water with a rope to save it while a tranquilizer reversal drug took effect, and the rhino was released.\n\nWildlife officials have stressed that the challenging project will take time, likely weeks.\n\nThe black rhinos are a mix of males and females and are being moved from three conservation parks to the private Loisaba Conservancy in central Kenya, the Kenya Wildlife Service said. They are being moved because there are too many in the three parks and they need more space to roam and, hopefully, to breed.\n\nRhinos are generally solitary animals and are at their happiest in large territories.\n\nKenya has had relative success in reviving its black rhino population, which dipped below 300 in the mid-1980s because of poaching, raising fears that the animals might be wiped out in a country famous for its wildlife.\n\nKenya now has nearly 1,000 black rhinos, according to the wildlife service. That's the third biggest black rhino population in the world behind South Africa and Namibia.\n\nThere are just 6,487 wild rhinos left in the world, according to rhino conservation charity Save The Rhino, all of them in Africa.\n\nKenyan authorities say they have relocated more than 150 rhinos in the last decade.\n\nSix years ago, Kenya relocated 11 rhinos from the capital, Nairobi, to another sanctuary in the south of the country. All died soon after arriving at the sanctuary. Ten of them died from stress, dehydration and starvation intensified by salt poisoning as they struggled to adjust to saltier water in their new home, investigations found. The other rhino was attacked by a lion.\n\nSome of the 21 rhinos in the latest relocation are being transferred from Nairobi National Park and will make a 300-kilometer (186-mile) trip in the back of a truck to Loisaba. Others will come from parks closer to Loisaba.\n\nThe moving of the rhinos to Loisaba is poignant given the region was once home to a healthy black rhino population before they were wiped out in that area 50 years ago, said Loisaba Conservancy CEO Tom Silvester.\n\nKenyan wildlife authorities say the country is aiming to grow its black rhino population to about 2,000, which they believe would be the ideal number considering the space available for them in national and private parks."}
{"text": "# Kenya doomsday cult pastor and others will face charges of murder, cruelty and more\nBy **TOM ODULA**  \nJanuary 16, 2024. 12:07 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NAIROBI, Kenya (AP)** - Kenya's top prosecutor on Tuesday ordered that 95 people from a doomsday cult be charged with murder, cruelty, child torture and other crimes in the deaths of 429 people believed to be members of the church.\n\nThe country's director of public prosecutions, Mulele Ingonga, was responding to pressure from a magistrate in the coastal county of Kilifi who told the prosecution to charge the suspects within two weeks or the court would release them.\n\nFor months since the arrests last April, prosecutors had asked the court for permission to keep holding church leader Paul Mackenzie and 28 others while they looked into the case that shocked Kenyans with the discovery of mass graves and allegations of starvation and strangulation.\n\nPrincipal Magistrate Yousuf Shikanda declined the latest request to hold the suspects for an additional 60 days, saying the prosecution had been given enough time to complete investigations.\n\nThe case emerged when police rescued 15 emaciated parishioners from Mackenzie's church in Kilifi county in Kenya's southeast. Four died after the group was taken to a hospital.\n\nSurvivors told investigators the pastor had instructed them to fast to death before the world ends so they could meet Jesus.\n\nA search of the remote, forested area found dozens of mass graves, authorities have said. Autopsies on some bodies showed starvation, strangulation or suffocation.\n\nOther charges that the suspects will face include manslaughter, radicalization, assault causing grievous bodily harm and engaging in organized criminal activity.\n\nMackenzie is serving a separate one-year prison sentence after being found guilty of operating a film studio and producing films without a valid license."}
{"text": "# Eight dead and an estimated 100 people missing after the latest Nigeria boat accident\nBy **CHINEDU ASADU**  \nJanuary 16, 2024. 7:13 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**ABUJA, Nigeria (AP)** - Eight passengers were confirmed dead and an estimated 100 were missing after their overloaded boat capsized in north-central Nigeria, the emergency services said Tuesday.\n\nIt is the latest in a series of deadly boat accidents that increasingly point to regulatory failures.\n\nThe passengers were being conveyed from Niger state's Borgu district to a market in the neighboring Kebbi state on Monday afternoon when the boat overturned in the Niger River, according to Niger State Emergency Management Agency spokesman Ibrahim Audu.\n\n\"The boat was overloaded so the strong wind affected them,\" Audu said.\n\nHe said the boat's capacity is 100 passengers but it was estimated to be carrying a much higher number, in addition to bags of grain, making it difficult to control when it began to sink.\n\nVillagers were helping local divers and emergency officials to search for the missing passengers, many of whom were women, Audu said. He could not say how many people had survived.\n\nBoat disasters have become rampant in remote communities across Nigeria, where locals desperate to get their farm products to market end up overcrowded in locally made boats in the absence of good and accessible roads.\n\nThere is no record of the total death toll in these accidents, though there have been at least five involving at least 100 passengers each in the past seven months.\n\nPast accidents have been blamed on overloading, the condition of the boat or a hindrance of the boat's movement along the water. And intervention measures announced in response by authorities - such as the provision of life jackets or enforcing of waterways regulations - are usually not carried out."}
{"text": "# Palestinian ambassador to UN calls on Non-Aligned Movement to pressure Israel to enforce cease-fire\nBy **RISDEL KASASIRA**  \nJanuary 15, 2024. 2:19 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**KAMPALA, Uganda (AP)** - The Palestinian ambassador to the U.N. called on the members of the Non-Aligned Movement in Kampala, Uganda, to put pressure on Israel to implement a cease-fire in Gaza after 100 days of war with militant Palestinian group Hamas.\n\nRayid Mansour addressed in his opening speech the 120 members, convening throughout this week, that despite the U.N. General Assembly and the Security Council's resolutions, a cease-fire remained elusive.\n\nThe Non-Aligned Movement, formed during the collapse of the colonial systems and at the height of the Cold War, has played a key part in decolonization processes, according to its website.\n\nMansour claimed that Israel was leading an apartheid of the Palestinians in the ongoing war that broke out on Oct.7 when Hamas suddenly attacked the south of Israel, killing some 1,200 people, and taking 250 others hostage. Israel retaliated by pounding the Gaza Strip, killing nearly 24,000 people and displacing about 80% of the population.\n\n\"We are still under this colonial occupation by Israel and we see genocide committed on our people, particularly in the Gaza Strip,\" he said.\n\nHe said the Palestinians were grateful to South Africa for launching a case against Israel at the International Court for Justice. \"We are the last kids around the block. All of you accomplished your national independence and you put an end to colonialism.\"\n\nPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has previously said Israel will pursue its war against Hamas until victory and will not be stopped by anyone, including the ICJ.\n\nIsrael adamantly denies allegations of genocide in Gaza, saying it makes every effort to avoid harming civilians, and rejects allegations of apartheid as an attack on its very legitimacy.\n\nAt least 30 of the movement's members are expected to attend the heads of states' meeting at the end of the weeklong deliberations. Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni will take over as president the Azerbaijan's Ilham Aliyev for the next three years."}
{"text": "# Indian Ocean island nation of Comoros votes for president in Africa's first election of 2024\nBy **GERALD IMRAY**  \nJanuary 14, 2024. 7:12 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP)** - The Indian Ocean island nation of Comoros voted Sunday for president in Africa's first national election of 2024.\n\nIncumbent President Azali Assoumani, a former military officer, is expected to win a fourth term despite criticism he has become increasingly authoritarian and cracked down on his opponents.\n\nFive opposition candidates stood against Assoumani while other opposition parties have called for a boycott, accusing the national electoral commission of bias. The commission denied the accusations. Provisional results are expected on Friday.\n\nThe country of around 800,000 people off East Africa has experienced a series of coups since it gained independence from France in 1975. The first coup came just a month after independence.\n\nAssoumani, 65, took charge himself in a coup in 1999, and was first elected president in 2002. He stepped down after one term but returned to reclaim the presidency in an election in 2016, and was reelected in 2019. Presidential terms are for five years.\n\nAssoumani succeeded in side-stepping term limits by changing the constitution in 2018. Previously, the presidency was rotated after a single term between Comoros' three main islands of Grand Comore, Anjouan, and Moheli.\n\nThe move to change the constitution caused mass protests against Assoumani and an armed uprising by rebels on the island of Anjouan, which the army quelled after days of fighting. Protests have been regularly banned since then.\n\nFormer President Ahmed Abdallah Sambi, a political rival of Assoumani, was sentenced to life in prison in 2022 on charges of high treason over the forgery and illegal selling of Comoros passports.\n\nThe Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a research institution within the U.S. Department of Defense that's funded by Congress, said Assoumani's latest presidential term has been \"marked by crackdowns on dissent.\"\n\nIt noted curtailments on press freedom and opposition leaders being threatened and detained by police and the army.\n\nAssoumani is coming to the end of a one-year term as chairperson of the African Union, a largely ceremonial role that moves around the continent.\n\nSunday's election in Comoros will be notable for France because of its island territory of Mayotte, which lies about 100 kilometers (62 miles) to the southeast. Mayotte has seen an influx of immigrants from Comoros.\n\nComoros is one of over 50 countries that go to the polls in 2024 to test democracy across the globe."}
{"text": "# Genocide case against Israel: Where does the rest of the world stand on the momentous allegations?\nBy **GERALD IMRAY**  \nJanuary 14, 2024. 7:15 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP)** - South Africa says more than 50 countries have expressed support for its case at the United Nations' top court accusing Israel of genocide against Palestinians in the war in Gaza.\n\nOthers, including the United States, have strongly rejected South Africa's allegation that Israel is violating the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Many more have remained silent.\n\nThe world's reaction to the landmark case that was heard Thursday and Friday at the International Court of Justice in The Hague shows a predictable global split when it comes to the inextricable, 75-year-old problem of Israel and the Palestinians. Sunday marks 100 days of their bloodiest ever conflict.\n\nThe majority of countries backing South Africa's case are from the Arab world and Africa. In Europe, only the Muslim nation of Turkey has publicly stated its support.\n\nNo Western country has declared support for South Africa's allegations against Israel. The U.S., a close Israel ally, has rejected them as unfounded, the U.K. has called them unjustified, and Germany said it \"explicitly rejects\" them.\n\nChina and Russia have said little about one of the most momentous cases to come before an international court. The European Union also hasn't commented.\n\n## US: 'MERITLESS' ALLEGATIONS\nU.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on a visit to Israel a day before the court proceedings began that South Africa's allegations are \"meritless\" and that the case \"distracts the world\" from efforts to find a lasting solution to the conflict. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said genocide is \"not a word that ought to be thrown around lightly, and we certainly don't believe that it applies here.\"\n\n\"We don't agree with what the South Africans are doing,\" U.K. Foreign Minister David Cameron said of the case.\n\nIsrael fiercely rejects the allegations of genocide and says it is defending its people. It says the offensive is aimed at eradicating the leaders of Hamas, the militant group that runs the territory and provoked the conflict by launching surprise attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and taking around 250 hostages.\n\nBlinken said a genocide case against Israel was \"particularly galling\" given that Hamas and other groups \"continue to openly call for the annihilation of Israel and the mass murder of Jews.\"\n\nThe U.S., the U.K., the EU and others classify Hamas as a terrorist organization.\n\nIsrael's military response in Gaza has killed more than 23,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's Health Ministry. The count doesn't distinguish between combatants and civilians. It says more than two-thirds of the dead are women and children. Much of northern Gaza has become an uninhabitable moonscape with entire neighborhoods erased by Israeli air strikes and tank fire.\n\nSouth Africa has also condemned Hamas' Oct. 7 attack but argues that it did not justify Israel's response.\n\n## GERMAN SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL\nGermany's announcement of support for Israel on Friday, the day the hearings closed, has symbolic significance given its history of the Holocaust, when the Nazis killed 6 million Jews in Europe. Israel was created after World War II as a haven for Jews in the shadow of those atrocities.\n\n\"Israel has been defending itself,\" German government spokesperson Steffen Hebestreit said. His statement also invoked the Holocaust, which in large part spurred the creation of the U.N. Genocide Convention in 1948.\n\n\"In view of Germany's history ... the Federal Government sees itself as particularly committed to the Convention against Genocide,\" he said. He called the allegations against Israel \"completely unfounded.\"\n\nGermany said it intends to intervene in the case on Israel's behalf.\n\nThe EU has only said that countries have a right to bring cases to the U.N. court. Most of its member states have refrained from taking a position.\n\nTurkey, which is in the process of joining the EU, was a lone voice in the region. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his country provided documents that were being used against Israel in the case.\n\n\"With these documents, Israel will be condemned,\" he said.\n\n## ARAB CONDEMNATION\nThe Organization of Islamic Cooperation was one of the first blocs to publicly back the case when South Africa filed it late last month. It said there was \"mass genocide being perpetrated by the Israeli defense forces\" and accused Israel of \"indiscriminate targeting\" of Gaza's civilian population.\n\nThe OIC is a bloc of 57 countries that includes Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt. Its headquarters are in Saudi Arabia. The Cairo-based Arab League, whose 22 member countries are almost all part of the OIC, also backed South Africa's case.\n\nSouth Africa drew some support from outside the Arab world. Namibia and Pakistan agreed with the case at a U.N. General Assembly session this week. Malaysia also expressed support.\n\n\"No peace-loving human being can ignore the carnage waged against Palestinians in Gaza,\" Namibian President Hage Geingob was quoted as saying in the southern African nation's The Namibian newspaper.\n\nMalaysia's Foreign Ministry demanded \"legal accountability for Israel's atrocities in Gaza.\"\n\n## CHINA AND RUSSIA: SILENCE\nChina, Russia - which is also facing allegations of genocide in the world court - and the emerging power of India have largely remained silent, seemingly aware that taking a stand in such an inflammatory case has little upside and could irreversibly upset their relationships in the region.\n\nIndia's foreign policy has historically supported the Palestinian cause, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi was one of the first global leaders to express solidarity with Israel and call the Hamas attack terrorism.\n\n## SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE\nA handful of South American countries have spoken up, including the continent's biggest economy, Brazil, whose Foreign Ministry said President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva backed South Africa's case. However, the ministry's comments did not directly accuse Israel of genocide but focused on the need for a cease-fire in Gaza.\n\nSouth Africa's case against Israel is two-fold: It wants the court to say Israel is committing genocide and to issue an interim ruling ordering an end to its military campaign in Gaza. The court said it would decide on an interim ruling soon but, reflecting the gravity of the case, it could take years for a final verdict on the genocide charge.\n\nBrazil said it hoped the case would get Israel to \"immediately cease all acts and measures that could constitute genocide.\"\n\nOther countries have stopped short of agreeing with South Africa. Ireland premier Leo Varadkar said the genocide case was \"far from clear cut\" but that he hoped the court would order a cease-fire in Gaza.\n\nIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said no one - including the world court - will stop Israel's war against Hamas. Russia didn't obey the court when it told it to halt its invasion of Ukraine nearly two years ago."}
{"text": "# At least 8 children among 22 hit by gunfire at end of Chiefs' Super Bowl parade; 1 person killed\nBy **HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH** and **NICK INGRAM**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 7:21 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP)** - Eight children were among 22 people hit by gunfire in a shooting at the end of Wednesday's parade to celebrate the Kansas City Chiefs' Super Bowl win, authorities said, as terrified fans ran for cover and yet another high-profile public event was marred by gun violence. One person was killed.\n\nKansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves detailed the shooting's toll at a news conference and said three people had been taken into custody. She said she has heard that fans may have been involved in apprehending a suspect but couldn't immediately confirm that.\n\n\"I'm angry at what happened today. The people who came to this celebration should expect a safe environment.\" Graves said. Police did not immediately release any details about the people taken into custody or about a possible motive for the shootings. She said firearms had been recovered, but not what kind of weapons were used.\n\n\"There's a lot of work ahead. This is just the beginning stages,\" she said. \"All of that is being actively investigated.\"\n\nIt is the latest sports celebration in the U.S. marred by gun violence, following a shooting that injured several people last year in downtown Denver after the Nuggets' NBA championship, and gunfire last year at a parking lot near the Texas Rangers' World Series championship parade.\n\nSocial media users posted shocking video of police running through a crowded scene as people hurriedly scrambled for cover and fled. One video showed someone apparently performing chest compressions on a shooting victim as another person, seemingly writhing in pain, lay on the ground nearby. People screamed in the background.\n\nAnother video showed two people chase and tackle a person, holding them down until two police officers arrived.\n\nWednesday's shooting outside Union Station happened despite more than 800 police officers who were in the building and around the area, including on top of nearby buildings, said Mayor Quinton Lucas, who attended with his wife and mother and had to run for cover when gunfire broke out.\n\n\"I think that's something that all of us who are parents, who are just regular people living each day, have to decide what we wish to do about,\" Lucas said. \"Parades, rallies, schools, movies. It seems like almost nothing is safe.\"\n\nKansas City has long struggled with gun violence, and in 2020 it was among nine cities targeted by the U.S. Justice Department in an effort to crack down on violent crime. In 2023 the city matched a record with 182 homicides, most of which involved guns.\n\nLucas has joined with mayors across the country in calling for new laws to reduce gun violence, including mandating universal background checks.\n\nLisa Money, a resident of the city, was trying to gather some confetti near the end of the parade when she heard somebody yell, \"Down, down, everybody down!\"\n\nAt first Money thought somebody might be joking until she saw the SWAT team jumping over the fence.\n\n\"I can't believe it really happened. Who in their right mind would do something like this? This is supposed to be a day of celebration for everybody in the city and the surrounding area. and then you've got some idiot that wants to come along and do something like this,\" she said.\n\nKevin Sanders, 53, of Lenexa, Kansas, said he heard what sounded like firecrackers and then people started running. After that initial flurry, calm returned, and he didn't think much of it. But 10 minutes later, ambulances started showing up.\n\n\"It sucks that someone had to ruin the celebration, but we are in a big city,\" Sanders said.\n\nUniversity Health spokeswoman Nancy Lewis said the hospital was treating eight gunshot victims. Two were in critical condition and six were in stable condition, she said. The hospital also was treating four people for other injuries resulting from the chaos after the shooting, Lewis said.\n\nLisa Augustine, spokesperson for Children's Mercy Kansas City, said the hospital was treating 12 patients from the rally, including 11 children, some of whom suffered gunshot wounds.\n\nSt. Luke's Hospital of Kansas City received one gunshot patient in critical condition and three walk-ins with injuries that were not life-threatening, spokesperson Laurel Gifford said.\n\n\"When you have this many casualties, it's going to get spread out among a lot of hospitals so that you don't overwhelm any single ER,\" she said.\n\nChiefs trainer Rick Burkholder said that he was with coach Andy Reid and other coaches and staff members at the time of the shooting, and that the team was on buses and returning to Arrowhead Stadium.\n\n\"We are truly saddened by the senseless act of violence that occurred outside of Union Station at the conclusion of today's parade and rally,\" the team said in a statement.\n\nMissouri's Republican Gov. Mike Parson and first lady Teresa Parson were at the parade during the gunfire but were unhurt. \"Thanks to the professionalism of our security officers and first responders, Teresa and I and our staff are safe and secure,\" Parson said in a statement.\n\nPresident Joe Biden was briefed on the shooting and will continue to receive updates, a White House spokesperson said. White House officials were in touch with state and local leaders, and federal law enforcement was on the scene supporting their local counterparts.\n\nAreas that had been filled with crowds were empty after the shooting, with police and firefighters standing and talking behind an area restricted by yellow tape.\n\nThrongs had lined the route earlier, with fans climbing trees and street poles or standing on rooftops for a better view. Players rolled through the crowd on double-decker buses, as DJs and drummers heralded their arrival. Owner Clark Hunt was on one of the buses, holding the Lombardi Trophy.\n\nThe city and the team each chipped in around $1 million for the event commemorating Travis Kelce, Mahomes and the Chiefs becoming the first team since Tom Brady and the New England Patriots two decades ago to defend their title.\n\nAfter decades without a championship, the city has gained experience with victory parades. Five seasons ago the Chiefs defeated the 49ers for the team's first Super Bowl championship in 50 years. That followed the Kansas City Royals winning the World Series in 2015, the city's first baseball championship in 30 years.\n\nThen last year the Chiefs defeated the Philadelphia Eagles 38-35 and prophetically vowed they would be back for more."}
{"text": "# Shooting after Chiefs' Super Bowl parade latest violence to mar sports celebrations\nBy **THE ASSOCIATED PRESS**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 6:21 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThe shooting after the Kansas City Chiefs' Super Bowl victory parade Wednesday was just the latest example of violence erupting during a championship celebration.\n\nHere are other shootings that have taken place over the last decade either the night a team won a league championship or during the ensuing parade or rally.\n\n## JUNE 2016: CLEVELAND CAVALIERS\nPolice said a person was shot twice in the leg and received injuries that weren't life-threatening during a parade and rally for the Cavaliers' NBA championship.\n\n## JUNE 2019: TORONTO RAPTORS\nFour people were shot and wounded at a downtown Toronto rally for the NBA champion Raptors. Police said others suffered minor injuries as they tried to get away from the shooting.\n\n## OCTOBER 2020: LOS ANGELES DODGERS\nTwo people were shot to death in Sylmar, California, the night the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series. Family members of Juan Carlos Guillen and Marco Antonio Vazquez said the two men were trying to stop people who were smashing car windows with baseball bats.\n\n## JULY 2021: MILWAUKEE BUCKS\nTwo shootings left three people wounded in downtown Milwaukee the night the Bucks won their first NBA title in 50 years. Police said the injuries weren't life-threatening. The shootings were across the Milwaukee River from Fiserv Forum, the Bucks' home arena.\n\n## JUNE 2022: DENVER NUGGETS\nAfter the Nuggets' championship parade last year, a shooting took place in downtown Denver that injured two people, though police said they didn't believe the incident was associated with the celebration.\n\n## OCTOBER 2022: TEXAS RANGERS\nAn argument resulted in shots being fired at a parking lot near the Rangers' World Series championship parade, though nobody was injured."}
{"text": "# Chiefs says all players, coaches and staffers are safe and accounted for after parade shooting\nFebruary 14, 2024. 6:53 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP)** - The Kansas City Chiefs said all their players, coaches and staffers and their families \"are safe and accounted for\" after a deadly shooting occurred Wednesday at the end of the Super Bowl championship parade.\n\n\"We are truly saddened by the senseless act of violence that occurred outside of Union Station at the conclusion of today's parade and rally,\" the Chiefs said in a statement. \"Our hearts go out to the victims, their families and all of Kansas City.\"\n\nPolice said one person was killed and more than 20 were injured in the shooting that occurred at the end of the parade to celebrate the Chiefs' Super Bowl victory.\n\nChiefs trainer Rick Burkholder said he was with coach Andy Reid and other coaches and staff members at the time of the shooting. Burkholder said the team was on buses returning to Arrowhead Stadium.\n\n\"At this time, we have confirmed that all of our players, coaches, staff and their families are safe and accounted for,\" the Chiefs said in their statement. \"We thank the local law enforcement officers and first responders who were on scene to assist.\"\n\nThe NFL issued its own statement saying it was \"deeply saddened\" and adding that its \"thoughts are with the victims and everyone affected.\"\n\nChiefs quarterback and Super Bowl MVP Patrick Mahomes said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, \"Praying for Kansas City.\" He included three emojis of hands in prayer.\n\nOffensive tackle Donovan Smith, defensive tackle Mike Pennel and safety Justin Reid were among the Chiefs players offering similar statements of support on social media.\n\n\"My thoughts and prayers are with everyone affected by today's incidents - a huge thank you to the first responders who ran towards the sound of danger,\" offensive guard Trey Smith posted on X. \"You're the ones who should be celebrated today.\"\n\nDefensive end Charles Omenihu called for a change in gun laws.\n\n\"Prayers for those affected at today's parade,\" Omenihu said in an X post. \"A time of celebration ends in tragedy. When are we going to fix these gun laws? How many more people have to die to say enough is enough? It's too easy for the wrong people to obtain guns in America and that's a FACT.\"\n\nThe parade was a celebration of the Chiefs' 25-22 overtime victory over the San Francisco 49ers that gave them their second straight Super Bowl title.\n\n\"Please join me in prayer for all the victims in this heinous act,\" Chiefs linebacker Drue Tranquill said in an X post. \"Pray that doctors & first responders would have steady hands & that all would experience full healing.\""}
{"text": "# Massive landslide on coastal bluff leaves Southern California mansion on the edge of a cliff\nFebruary 14, 2024. 4:00 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**DANA POINT, Calif. (AP)** - A massive landslide on a coastal bluff has left a Southern California mansion on the edge of a cliff, but authorities have determined that the ocean-view home and neighboring residences are not in immediate danger.\n\nThe slide occurred last week in the city of Dana Point after back-to-back drenching storms that also caused numerous mud and debris flows throughout the region.\n\nThe city's building inspector assessed the residential structures and a geotechnical engineer observed the slide site, the city said in a statement Wednesday.\n\n\"At this point, the City has deemed that no additional action is necessary, and out of an abundance of caution has recommended that the property owner contract for a professional engineering assessment of the property,\" the statement said.\n\n\"The house is fine, it's not threatened and it will not be red-tagged,\" the owner, Dr. Lewis Bruggeman, told KCAL-TV. \"The city agrees that there's no major structural issue with the house.\"\n\nMore rain is in the Southern California forecast, arriving by late Sunday night and possibly lasting into Wednesday."}
{"text": "# House Intelligence Committee chair delivers cryptic warning of a serious national security threat\nBy **ELLEN KNICKMEYER**, **MATTHEW LEE**, and **KEVIN FREKING**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 7:17 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - The Republican head of the House Intelligence Committee urged the Biden administration on Wednesday to declassify information about what he called a serious national security threat. A senior congressional aide speaking to The Associated Press pointed to concerns about Russian anti-satellite weapons.\n\nRep. Mike Turner gave no details about the nature of the threat, and the Biden administration also declined to address it. But several leading lawmakers, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, cautioned against being overly alarmed.\n\nThe congressional aide said he understood that the threat relates to a space-deployed Russian anti-satellite weapon. Such a weapon could pose a major danger to U.S. satellites that transmit billions of bytes of data each hour.\n\nThe aide, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, said it was not yet clear if the Russian weapon has nuclear capability, but said that is the fear.\n\nThe threat Turner raised concerns about is not an active capability, according to a U.S. official familiar with the intelligence. The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, added that intelligence officials consider the threat to be significant, but it should not cause panic.\n\nTurner issued a statement urging the administration to declassify the information so the U.S. and its allies can openly discuss how to respond.\n\nHe also sent an email to members of Congress saying his committee had \"identified an urgent matter with regard to a destabilizing foreign military capability\" that should be known to all congressional policy makers. He encouraged them to come to a SCIF, a secure area, to review the intelligence.\n\nTurner has been a voice for stronger U.S. national security, putting him at odds with some Republican colleagues who favor a more isolationist approach. He has called for the renewal of a key U.S. government surveillance tool while some fellow Republicans and liberal Democrats have raised privacy objections.\n\nAnd he supports continuing U.S. military aid for Ukraine in its war against Russia at a time that the funding remains uncertain because of opposition in the Republican-led House.\n\nJohnson said he was not at liberty to disclose the classified information. \"But we just want to assure everyone steady hands are at the wheel. We're working on it and there's no need for alarm,\" he told reporters at the Capitol.\n\nDemocratic Rep. Jim Himes, the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that the classified information is \"significant\" but \"not a cause for panic.\"\n\nThe Senate Intelligence Committee said it has been tracking the issue.\n\n\"We continue to take this matter seriously and are discussing an appropriate response with the administration,\" Sen. Mark Warner, the Democratic committee chairman, and Sen. Marco Rubio, the Republican vice chairman, said in a statement. \"In the meantime, we must be cautious about potentially disclosing sources and methods that may be key to preserving a range of options for U.S. action.\"\n\nThe rapidly evolving threat in space was one of the primary reasons that the U.S. Space Force was established in 2019. A lot of that threat has to do with new capabilities that China and Russia have already developed that can interfere with critical satellite-based U.S. communications, such as GPS and the ability to quickly detect missile launches.\n\nIn recent years the U.S. has seen both China and Russia pursue new ways to jam satellites, intercept their feeds, blind them, shoot them down and even potentially grab them with a robotic arm to pull them out of their programmed orbits. One of the key missions of the Space Force is to train troops skilled in detecting and defending against those threats.\n\nIn its 2020 Defense Space Strategy, the Pentagon said China and Russia presented the greatest strategic threat in space due to their aggressive development of counterspace abilities, and their military doctrine calling for extending conflict to space.\n\nThe White House and lawmakers expressed frustration at how Turner raised his concerns. His announcement appeared to catch the Biden administration off-guard.\n\nNational security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters at the White House that he already had been due to brief Turner and other senior congressional leaders on Thursday. Sullivan did not disclose the topic or provide any other details related to Turner's statement.\n\n\"I'm focused on going to see him, sit with him as well as the other House members of the Gang of Eight, tomorrow,\" Sullivan said. \"And I'm not in a position to say anything further from this podium at this time.\"\n\nHe acknowledged it was not standard practice to offer such a briefing.\n\n\"I'll just say that I personally reached out to the Gang of Eight. It is highly unusual, in fact, for the national security adviser to do that,\" Sullivan said. He said he had reached out earlier this week.\n\nJohnson said he sent a letter last month to the White House requesting a meeting with the president to discuss \"the serious national security issue that is classified.\" He said Sullivan's meeting was in response to his request."}
{"text": "# Conservative group tells judge it has no evidence to back its claims of Georgia ballot stuffing\nBy **RUSS BYNUM**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 4:06 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP)** - A conservative group has told a Georgia judge that it doesn't have evidence to support its claims of illegal ballot stuffing during the the 2020 general election and a runoff two months later.\n\nTexas-based True the Vote filed complaints with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in 2021, including one in which it said it had obtained \"a detailed account of coordinated efforts to collect and deposit ballots in drop boxes across metro Atlanta\" during the November 2020 election and a January 2021 runoff.\n\nA Fulton County Superior Court judge in Atlanta signed an order last year requiring True the Vote to provide evidence it had collected, including the names of people who were sources of information, to state elections officials who were frustrated by the group's refusal to share evidence with investigators.\n\nIn their written response, attorneys for True the Vote said the group had no names or other documentary evidence to share.\n\n\"Once again, True the Vote has proven itself untrustworthy and unable to provide a shred of evidence for a single one of their fairy-tale allegations,\" Raffensperger spokesman Mike Hassinger said Wednesday. \"Like all the lies about Georgia's 2020 election, their fabricated claims of ballot harvesting have been repeatedly debunked.\"\n\nTrue the Vote's assertions were relied upon heavily for \"2000 Mules,\" a widely debunked film by conservative pundit and filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza. A State Election Board investigation found that surveillance camera footage that the film claimed showed ballot stuffing actually showed people submitting ballots for themselves and family members who lived with them, which is allowed under Georgia law.\n\nThe election board subpoenaed True the Vote to provide evidence that would assist it in investigating the group's ballot trafficking allegations.\n\nTrue the Vote's complaint said its investigators \"spoke with several individuals regarding personal knowledge, methods, and organizations involved in ballot trafficking in Georgia.\" It said one person, referred to in the complaint only as John Doe, \"admitted to personally participating and provided specific information about the ballot trafficking process.\"\n\nFrustrated by the group's refusal to share evidence, Georgia officials took it to court last year. A judge ordered True the Vote to turn over names and contact information for anyone who had provided information, as well as any recordings, transcripts, witness statements or other documents supporting its allegations.\n\nThe group came up empty-handed despite having \"made every additional reasonable effort to locate responsive items,\" its attorneys David Oles and Michael Wynne wrote in a Dec. 11 legal filing first reported Wednesday by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.\n\nTrue the Vote's founder and president, Catherine Engelbrecht, didn't immediately respond to an Associated Press email seeking comment Wednesday. She and another member of the group were briefly jailed in 2022 for contempt for not complying with a court order to provide information in a defamation lawsuit. The suit accused True the Vote of falsely claiming that an election software provider stored the personal information of U.S. election workers on an unsecured server in China.\n\nPrior to the State Election Board's investigation, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation looked into True the Vote's assertion that it was able to use surveillance video and geospatial mobile device information to support its allegations. In a September 2021 letter, Vic Reynolds, who was then the GBI's director, said the evidence produced did not amount to proof of ballot harvesting.\n\nState elections officials opened their own investigation after receiving True the Vote's complaint two months later. When pressed to provide names of sources and other documentation, the group last year tried to withdraw its complaint. One of its attorneys wrote that a complete response would require True the Vote to identify people to whom it had promised confidentiality.\n\nThe State Election Board refused to shelve the complaint and went to court to force True the Vote to turn over information.\n\nIn addition to names, the judge ordered True the Vote to provide copies of any confidentiality agreements it had with sources.\n\nThe group's attorneys replied: \"TTV has no such documents in its possession, custody, or control.\""}
{"text": "# As Marvel reveals the new 'Fantastic Four' cast, here's a look back at all the past versions\nBy **LINDSEY BAHR**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 4:44 PM EST\n\n---\n\nPedro Pascal is jumping from Star Wars to Marvel. The \"Last of Us\" and \"Mandalorian\" actor is set to play Reed Richards (also known as Mister Fantastic) in the newest incarnation of \"The Fantastic Four,\" the studio announced Wednesday.\n\nThe rest of his squad was revealed, too, with Vanessa Kirby stepping up as Susan Storm (The Invisible Woman), Joseph Quinn of \"Stranger Things\" as Johnny Storm (The Human Torch), and Ebon Moss-Bachrach of \"The Bear\" as Ben Grimm (The Thing). In the announcement, the gang was depicted in a retro illustrated Valentine's Day card that had fans guessing this version takes place in the 1960s.\n\n\"The Fantastic Four\" is among Marvel's longest-running comics series and the titular crew is one of its most beloved groups. Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the scientists-turned-superheroes are relatable and wry in their interactions as a team - even when they aren't fighting supervillains. When it debuted in November 1961, it was a refreshing revelation that helped inform the Marvel voice and set a path for Iron Man and Spider-Man.\n\nBut the so-called first family of Marvel has not had the most distinguished transition to the big screen, with false starts and bad reviews often trailing. First came a $2 million Roger Corman production in 1994 that was never ultimately released, with Alex Hyde-White as Reed Richards, Rebecca Staab as Susan Storm, Jay Underwood as Johnny Storm and Michael Bailey Smith as Ben Grimm. The shoestring production was directed by Oley Sassone.\n\nJust a year after Corman's was shelved, 20th Century Fox acquired the rights to the characters and began developing what would become two films under director Tim Story, though that would take about 10 years and see several directors come and go (including Chris Columbus, Raja Gosnell and future \"Ant-Man\" helmer Peyton Reed). In 2005's \"Fantastic Four\" and its 2007 sequel \"Rise of the Silver Surfer,\" Ioan Gruffudd was Reed, Jessica Alba was Susan, Chris Evans was Johnny and Michael Chiklis was Ben.\n\nFox tried again, with Josh Trank at the helm, and a cast led by Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Bell. But the 2015 film was panned by critics and lost the studio over $80 million. Plans for a sequel were scuttled and a few years later, Disney acquired Fox - bringing the Marvel characters back under its corporate umbrella.\n\nThe new \"Fantastic Four\" will mark the first time the mutant misfits will be together as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, overseen by Kevin Feige ( John Krasinski played a version of Mister Fantastic in 2022's \"Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness\" ). The film is set to be directed by \"WandaVision\" veteran Matt Shakman, with a planned July 25, 2025, theatrical release."}
{"text": "# Protesters pour red powder on US Constitution enclosure, prompting evacuation of National Archives\nBy **ASHRAF KHALIL**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 5:28 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - The National Archives building and galleries were evacuated Wednesday afternoon after two protesters dumped red powder on the protective case around the U.S. Constitution.\n\nThe incident occurred around 2:30 p.m., according to the National Archives. There was no damage to the Constitution itself.\n\nA video posted on the X social media platform shows two men covered in reddish-pink powder standing in front of the equally splattered horizontal glass case that houses the Constitution.\n\n\"We are determined to foment a rebellion,\" one man says. \"We all deserve clean air, water, food and a livable climate.\"\n\nPolice then led the pair away.\n\n\"The National Archives Rotunda is the sanctuary for our nation's founding documents. They are here for all Americans to view and understand the principles of our nation,\" Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan said in a statement. \"We take such vandalism very seriously and we will insist that the perpetrators be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.\"\n\nThe building is expected to be open Thursday."}
{"text": "# Tinder, Hinge and other dating apps encourage 'compulsive' use, lawsuit claims\nBy **BARBARA ORTUTAY**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 5:17 PM EST\n\n---\n\nStuck in dating app loop with no date in sight? A lawsuit filed Wednesday against Match Group claims that is by design.\n\nTinder, Hinge and other Match dating apps are filled with addictive features that encourage \"compulsive\" use, the proposed class-action lawsuit claims.\n\nThe lawsuit filed in federal court in the Northern District of California on Wednesday - Valentine's Day - says Match intentionally designs its dating platforms with game-like features that \"lock users into a perpetual pay-to-play loop\" prioritizing profit over promises to help users find relationships.\n\nThis, the suit claims, turns users into \"addicts\" who purchase ever-more-expensive subscriptions to access special features that promise romance and matches.\n\n\"Match's business model depends on generating returns through the monopolization of users' attention, and Match has guaranteed its market success by fomenting dating app addiction that drives expensive subscriptions and perpetual use,\" the lawsuit says. It was filed by six dating app users and seeks class action status.\n\nRepresentatives for Dallas-based Match did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.\n\nThough it focuses on adults, the lawsuit comes as tech companies face increasing scrutiny over addictive features that harm young people's mental health. Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, for instance, faces a lawsuit by dozens of states accusing it of contributing to the youth mental health crisis by designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms.\n\nMatch's apps, according to the lawsuit against the company, \"employs recognized dopamine-manipulating product features\" to turn users into \"gamblers locked in a search for psychological rewards that Match makes elusive on purpose.\""}
{"text": "# House Homeland chairman announces retirement a day after leading Mayorkas' impeachment\nBy **KIMBERLEE KRUESI**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 7:03 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP)** - Tennessee Republican U.S. Rep. Mark Green on Wednesday announced that he won't run for a fourth term, pointing to the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas just the day before as among the reasons it is \"time for me to return home.\"\n\n\"Our country – and our Congress – is broken beyond most means of repair,\" Green said in a statement. \"I have come to realize our fight is not here within Washington, our fight is with Washington.\"\n\nAs chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, Green was a driving force behind the Mayorkas impeachment push over border security in a deeply partisan and highly unusual attack on a Cabinet official. His panel conducted a months-long investigation of Mayorkas, his policies and his management of the department, ultimately concluding Tuesday that his conduct in office amounted to \"high crimes and misdemeanors\" worthy of impeachment.\n\nGreen has served since 2019 in the 7th Congressional District, which was redrawn in 2022 to include a significant portion of Nashville. He previously served as an Army surgeon and in the state Senate and is from Montgomery County.\n\nGreen flirted running for governor in 2017, but suspended his campaign after he was nominated by former President Donald Trump to become the Army secretary. He later withdrew his nomination due to criticism over his remarks about Muslims and LGBTQ+ Americans, including saying that being transgender is a disease. He also urged that a stand be taken against \"the indoctrination of Islam\" in public schools and referred to a \"Muslim horde\" that invaded Constantinople hundreds of years ago.\n\nAfter winning the congressional seat in 2018, Green once again made headlines after hosting a town hall where he stated, without citing evidence, that vaccines cause autism. He later walked back his comments but not before state health officials described the Republican as a \" goofball.\"\n\n\"As I have done my entire life, I will continue serving this country -– but in a new capacity,\" Green said Wednesday, not disclosing if he will run again for governor in 2026, where the seat will up for grabs because Republican Gov. Bill Lee is prohibited from running under Tennessee's gubernatorial term limits.\n\nIn 2022, Green's middle Tennessee congressional seat was among seats that Republicans drastically carved up during redistricting. Those congressional maps are now facing a federal lawsuit, but that case isn't scheduled to go to trial until April 2025.\n\nSo far on the Republican side, Caleb Stack has pulled petitions to run for the now open congressional district. Former Nashville Mayor Megan Barry announced last year that she would run for the position as a Democrat.\n\n\"I expect candidates who agree with Mark Green or are even more extreme will announce campaigns, and I look forward to taking on whoever makes it through that primary,\" Barry said in a statement."}
{"text": "# Putin says Russia prefers Biden to Trump because he's 'more experienced and predictable'\nFebruary 14, 2024. 6:07 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**MOSCOW (AP)** - President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that Russia would prefer to see President Joe Biden win a second term, describing him as more experienced than Donald Trump.\n\nSpeaking in an interview with a correspondent of Russian state television, Putin declared that he will work with any U.S. leader who is elected, but noted unequivocally that he would prefer Biden's victory when asked who would be a better choice from the point of view of Russia.\n\n\"Biden, he's more experienced, more predictable, he's a politician of the old formation,\" Putin said. \"But we will work with any U.S. leader whom the American people trust.\"\n\nAsked about speculation on Biden's health issues, Putin responded that \"I'm not a doctor and I don't consider it proper to comment on that.\"\n\nBiden's team worked to alleviate Democratic concerns over alarms raised by a special counsel about Biden's age and memory. They came in a report determining that Biden would not be charged with any criminal activity for possessing classified documents after he left office.\n\nPutin noted that the talk about Biden's health comes as \"the election campaign is gaining speed in the U.S., and it's taking an increasingly sharp course.\"\n\nHe added that allegations of Biden's health problems were also circulating at the time when they met in Switzerland in June 2021, adding that he witnessed the contrary and saw the U.S. leader in a good shape.\n\n\"They talked about him being incapacitated, but I saw nothing of the kind,\" Putin said. \"Yes, he was peeking at his papers, to be honest, I was peeking at mine, not a big deal.\"\n\nAt the same time, Putin noted that he sees the Biden administration policy as wrong.\n\nRussia-West ties have plunged to their lowest levels since the Cold War era after Putin sent his troops into Ukraine in February 2022.\n\n\"I believe that the position of the current administration is badly flawed and wrong, and I have told President Biden about that,\" Putin said.\n\nPutin has claimed that he has sent troops into Ukraine to protect Russian speakers there and to prevent a threat to Russia's security posed by Ukraine's bid to join NATO. Ukraine and its Western allies have denounced Moscow's action as an unprovoked act of aggression.\n\nPutin argued that Moscow was forced to act after Ukraine and its allies refused to fulfill a 2015 agreement to grant more powers to separatist territories in eastern Ukraine, where Moscow-backed separatists launched a rebellion in 2014.\n\n\"We only can regret that we didn't act earlier, thinking that we are dealing with decent people,\" Putin said.\n\nAsked about Trump's statement on Saturday, in which he said he once warned he would allow Russia to do whatever it wants to NATO member nations that are \"delinquent\" in devoting 2% of their gross domestic product to defense, Putin responded that it's up to the U.S. to determine its role in the alliance.\n\nTrump's statement sharply contrasted with Biden's pledge \"to defend every inch of NATO territory,\" as the alliance commits all members to do in case of attack. It shocked many in Europe, drawing a pledge from Poland, France and Germany to bolster Europe's security and defense power.\n\nPutin noted that Trump's statement followed his policy during his first term when he prodded NATO allies in Europe to increase their defense spending.\n\n\"He has his own view on how relations with allies should develop,\" Putin said about Trump. \"From his point of view, there is some logic in this, while from the point of view of the Europeans, there is no logic at all, and they would like the U.S. to keep carrying out some functions they have fulfilled since the formation of NATO free of charge.\"\n\nHe described NATO as a \"U.S. foreign policy tool,\" adding that \"if the U.S. thinks that it no longer needs this tool it's up to it to decide.\"\n\nAsked about his impressions from his last week's interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Putin said he expected Carlson to be more aggressive. Putin used the interview to push his narrative on the fighting in Ukraine, urge Washington to recognize Moscow's interests and press Kyiv to sit down for talks.\n\n\"I expected him to be aggressive and ask the so-called tough questions, and I wasn't only ready for it but wanted it because it would have given me a chance to respond sharply,\" Putin said.\n\nCarlson didn't ask Putin about war crimes Russian troops have been accused of in Ukraine, or about his relentless crackdown on dissent.\n\n\"He didn't allow me to do what I was ready for,\" Putin said, describing Carlson as a \"dangerous man.\""}
{"text": "# Special counsel asks Supreme Court to let Trump's 2020 election case proceed to trial without delay\nBy **ERIC TUCKER**, **ALANNA DURKIN RICHER**, and **MARK SHERMAN**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 6:58 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Special counsel Jack Smith urged the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday to let former President Donald Trump's 2020 election interference case proceed to trial without further delay.\n\nProsecutors were responding to a Trump team request from earlier in the week asking for a continued pause in the case as the court considers whether to take up the question of whether the former president is immune from prosecution for official acts in the White House. Two lower courts have overwhelmingly rejected that position, prompting Trump to ask the high court to intervene.\n\nThe case - one of four criminal prosecutions confronting Trump - has reached a critical juncture, with the Supreme Court's next step capable of helping determine whether Trump stands trial this year in Washington or whether the proceedings are going to be postponed by weeks or months of additional arguments.\n\nThe trial date, already postponed once by Trump's immunity appeal, is of paramount importance to both sides. Prosecutors are looking to bring Trump to trial this year while defense lawyers have been seeking delays in his criminal cases. If Trump were to be elected with the case pending, he could presumably use his authority as head of the executive branch to order the Justice Department to dismiss it or could potentially seek to pardon himself.\n\nReflecting their desire to proceed quickly, prosecutors responded to Trump's appeal within two days even though the court had given them until next Tuesday.\n\nThough their filing does not explicitly mention the upcoming November election or Trump's status as the Republican primary front-runner, prosecutors described the case as having \"unique national importance\" and said that \"delay in the resolution of these charges threatens to frustrate the public interest in a speedy and fair verdict.\"\n\n\"The national interest in resolving those charges without further delay is compelling,\" they wrote.\n\nSmith's team charged Trump in August with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, including by participating in a scheme to disrupt the counting of electoral votes in the run-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, when his supporters stormed the building in a violent clash with police.\n\n\"The charged crimes strike at the heart of our democracy. A President's alleged criminal scheme to overturn an election and thwart the peaceful transfer of power to his successor should be the last place to recognize a novel form of absolute immunity from federal criminal law,\" they wrote.\n\nTrump's lawyers have argued that he is shielded from prosecution for acts that fell within his official duties as president - a legally untested argument since no other former president has been indicted.\n\nThe trial judge and then a federal appeals court rejected those arguments, with a three-judge appeals panel last week saying, \"We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter.\"\n\nThe proceedings have been effectively frozen by Trump's immunity appeal, with U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan canceling a March 4 trial date while the appeals court considered the matter. No new date has been set.\n\nTrump's appeal and request for the Supreme Court to get involved could cause further delays depending on what the justices decide. In December, Smith and his team had urged the justices to take up and decide the immunity issue, even before the appeals court weighed in. But the court declined.\n\nThe Supreme Court's options include rejecting the emergency appeal, which would enable Chutkan to restart the trial proceedings in Washington's federal court. The court also could extend the delay while it hears arguments on the immunity issue. In that event, the schedule the justices set could determine how soon a trial might begin, if indeed they agree with lower court rulings that Trump is not immune from prosecution.\n\nOn Wednesday, prosecutors urged the court to reject Trump's petition to hear the case, saying that lower court opinions rejecting immunity for the former president \"underscore how remote the possibility is that this Court will agree with his unprecedented legal position.\"\n\nBut if the court does wants to decide the matter, Smith said, the justices should hear arguments in March and issue a final ruling by late June.\n\nProsecutors also pushed back against Trump's argument that allowing the case to proceed could chill future presidents' actions for fear they could be criminally charged once they leave office and open the door to politically motivated cases against former commanders-in-chief.\n\n\"That dystopian vision runs contrary to the checks and balances built into our institutions and the framework of the Constitution,\" they wrote. \"Those guardrails ensure that the legal process for determining criminal liability will not be captive to 'political forces,' as applicant forecasts.\""}
{"text": "# Review: 'Bob Marley: One Love' doesn't stir\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nFebruary 8, 2024. 2:15 PM EST\n\n---\n\nBob Marley was born in 1945, the son of an 18-year-old mother and a much older white man who had nothing to do with his son. As a boy raised in poverty, he often slept on the cold ground. Five years after moving to Kingston's Trench Town, he made his first record, at 17. Not 20 years later, he was dead.\n\nBy then, Marley had become the face of not just reggae, Rastafarianism and Jamaica, but of revolution, resistance and peace. He left behind a body of work that has only grown more monumental with time. \"Redemption Song.\" \"No Woman No Cry.\" \"War.\" \"Trench Town Rock.\" \"Get Up Stand Up.\" \"Lively Up Yourself.\" \"One Love People Get Ready.\" The Beatles could argue they were bigger than Jesus but no one thought - like some did Marley - that they were actually the Second Coming.\n\nSo, yeah, it's a lot for a movie -- any movie. \"Bob Marley: One Love,\" directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, is a noble but uninspired attempt to capture some of the essence of Marley. Its lived-in textures and attention to Marley's political consciousness, just by themselves, are enough to make \"One Love\" something more substantial than many recent, glossier music biopics.\n\nBut the power and complexity of Marley is still out of reach for \"One Love,\" which takes a typical biopic framework in plotting itself around the run-up to an important concert with flashbacks mixed in. When footage of the real Marley inevitably plays over the credits, it's a painful comparison to the ruminative but inert movie that played before it.\n\nThe first thing you notice about the performance by Ben Kingsley-Adir, the talented British actor of \"One Night in Miami...\" and \"Barbie,\" is that he's got the voice. His Marley has the growl and lilt of the singer's resonant Jamaican accent. But what the performance is missing - an absence so clear when the real Marley turns up - is the physical dynamism and charismatic velocity of Marley.\n\nThe sheer vibrancy of Marley, who spent afternoons playing soccer and had at least 11 children in his short life, would undoubtedly be a tall order for most films. \"One Love,\" set in the aftermath of a 1976 shooting that wounded Marley, follows a more contemplative Marley in self-imposed exile in London - on tour in Europe, recording the 1977 album \"Exodus\" and ultimately receiving a diagnosis of cancer.\n\nMarley was by many accounts a more private person than often remembered, so the rendering here is surely a genuine aspect of a man rife with contradictions. \"One Love,\" which lists four screenwriters and was made with Marley's estate (Ziggy and Cedella Marley are producers), appears to have wrestled with finding a single portrait, and the movie's patchwork pacing occasionally shows signs of that struggle.\n\nBut just as he showed in \"King Richard,\" Green is skilled at finding intimacy in the lives of larger-than-life figures. Early in \"One Love,\" Marley and his band assemble in a smoke-filled living room to play \"I Shot the Sheriff,\" and it's moments like these that work far better than those in the public eye.\n\nThe performance that bookends the film is the One Love Peace Concert, which was put on in Jamaica in 1978 as a way to heal the divided, violent country. Marley, during \"Jammin',\" brought the rival party leaders Edward Seaga and Michael Manley on stage.\n\nThe turmoil in Jamaica weighs heavily on Marley throughout film; images of fields aflame run repeatedly as a reflection of his memories. Though largely set in Europe, the real through line of the film is Marley as consumed with the plight of his countrymen, and others in similar situations around the world. When white executives push back against touring in Africa due to its lack of infrastructure, he replies, \"So we build it.\" How all of this percolates in Marley and gets filtered into the music is, ultimately, what \"One Love\" is about.\n\n\"The music and the message are the same thing,\" Marley explains.\n\n\"One Love\" is attuned to the communal aspect of Marley's life - he rarely appears alone in the film - yet few other individuals come through vividly. The events of the film are years after the breakup of the Wailing Wailers so Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer are little seen. The most notable supporting roles go to Lashana Lynch as Rita Marley, his wife, and James Norton, as Island Records founder Chris Blackwell.\n\nThough \"One Love\" drifts into increasingly conventional biopic scenes, its spirit remains fairly true to Marley - enough, at least, that you overlook some of its faults. But what's harder to forgive is the lackluster music performances peppered throughout. Ben-Adir doesn't himself sing the songs but relies on Marley recordings - which is fine. Yet when Marley and company take the stage, Green sticks to largely drab coverage. Precisely when \"One Love\" should be, as Marley was, striving for transcendence, it feels like it's going through the motions. Come on, you want to plead, and stir it up.\n\n\"Bob Marley: One Love,\" a Paramount Pictures release is rated PG13 by the Motion Picture Association for marijuana use and smoking throughout, some violence and brief strong language. Running time: 107 minutes. Two stars out of four."}
{"text": "# Shaquille O'Neal's No. 32 jersey is the first to be retired by the Orlando Magic\nBy **TIM REYNOLDS**  \nFebruary 13, 2024. 11:16 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**ORLANDO, Fla. (AP)** - Shaquille O'Neal was Orlando's first in lots of ways. First No. 1 overall draft pick. First player to make an All-Star team in a Magic uniform. First rookie of the year. First All-NBA selection. And the first big-time superstar to leave the franchise.\n\nIt's that last part that he figured might cost him.\n\nO'Neal never thought that the Magic would raise his jersey to the rafters of their arena. But he was wrong, and on Tuesday night, Orlando retired O'Neal's No. 32 - another first for the team and its first star. Most fans stayed for the postgame ceremony, even after the Magic fell to Oklahoma City.\n\n\"You know, there's an old saying: Never forget where you come from,\" O'Neal said. \"And my professional career started here. I've been living here mostly all my life. The fans have been hospitable. The people have been very, very hospitable. I never thought this day would happen.\"\n\nThe Magic, who are celebrating their 35th season, drafted O'Neal No. 1 overall in 1992. They've never retired a number for a player, but decided their anniversary season was the right time. Many of O'Neal's former Orlando teammates were there Tuesday night, including Penny Hardaway, Dennis Scott and Nick Anderson. O'Neal brought Anderson to the lectern at one point in the ceremony, telling him he should have been the first to get the jersey retirement from the Magic.\n\n\"There's no one more deserving to be the first than Shaq,\" Magic CEO Alex Martins said. \"Shaq put the Orlando Magic on the map. And the foundation of his Hall of Fame career started right here in Orlando.\"\n\nO'Neal - who has No. 34 retired by the Los Angeles Lakers and No. 32 retired by the Miami Heat - is the third player to have his jersey retired by three franchises, joining Wilt Chamberlain and Pete Maravich.\n\nChamberlain's No. 13 has been retired by the Philadelphia 76ers, Golden State Warriors and the Lakers. Maravich had No. 44 retired by the Atlanta Hawks and No. 7 retired by the Utah Jazz and the New Orleans Pelicans - even though he never played for that franchise. His number is retired in New Orleans because he played there for the Jazz and went to LSU.\n\n\"It means that every franchise you played for, they enjoyed you,\" O'Neal said. \"The fans enjoyed you. The people enjoyed you. They appreciated your hard work.\"\n\nThere are 11 players - Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Clyde Drexler, Julius Erving, Elvin Hayes, Bob Lanier, Moses Malone, Earl Monroe, Dikembe Mutombo, Oscar Robertson, Nate Thurmond and Charles Barkley - to have jerseys retired by two franchises for whom they played. Barkley, like O'Neal, is part of the award-winning cast of Turner Sports' \"Inside The NBA\" program.\n\nMany other players have been honored by multiple teams or in multiple ways. Bill Russell's No. 6 is retired by Boston and, after the Hall of Famer's death, was retired leaguewide by Commissioner Adam Silver. Michael Jordan never played in Miami; his No. 23 is retired there. Kobe Bryant had both of his numbers, 8 and 24, retired by the Lakers.\n\nThe Magic were 70-176 in their first three seasons, then got O'Neal and went 41-41 in his rookie year, 50-32 with the team's first playoff appearance in his second season, 57-25 with a trip to the NBA Finals in 1994-95 and finally 60-22 - still the franchise record for wins - in his fourth and final season with Orlando.\n\nThe ceremony had O'Neal seated adjacent to center court on a throne, one big enough to make the 7-footer seem small. The stories flowed - the one about O'Neal arriving in the city known for Walt Disney World wearing Mickey Mouse ears seemed to delight the crowd - and O'Neal savored them all.\n\nThe banner was hoisted amid a display of fireworks in a darkened arena, roughly an hour after the game ended.\n\n\"There's no other place I would have wanted to start my career,\" said O'Neal, whose words were often drowned out by cheers. \"Orlando will always have a special place in my heart.\"\n\nO'Neal learned how to be a pro in Orlando. His first few months in the city, he said, were spent living in an airport hotel with his entire family. By the time Scott explained to him that he needed to buy a house, O'Neal said he had run up a $900,000 hotel bill.\n\nHe speaks with reverence about his time in Orlando, and now having gone through four jersey retirements - LSU also gave him the honor, along with the three NBA clubs - O'Neal made no secret of what this one meant.\n\n\"Truthfully speaking, this will probably be the most impressive one,\" O'Neal said.\n\nO'Neal left Orlando after the 1995-96 season for the Lakers, having played 295 regular-season games with the Magic. But he remains sixth on the team's all-time scoring list - four of the five players ahead of him played at least twice as many games for Orlando - and third all-time in rebounds for the Magic.\n\n\"This is where it all started,\" O'Neal said.\n\nAnd it's where his number will sway."}
{"text": "# Chocolates, flowers and procrastination. For many Americans, Valentine's Day is a last-minute affair\nBy **DEE-ANN DURBIN**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 6:41 AM EST\n\n---\n\nIn a classic \"Saturday Night Live\" sketch, a young man hands his girlfriend a Valentine's Day gift: a bear dressed in a bee costume that he picked up at the drugstore.\n\n\"When did you get this?\" she asks with a strained smile.\n\n\"One minute ago,\" he replies.\n\nIt has more than a ring of truth. For a day meant to celebrate romance and the depths of feeling we have for loved ones, a large portion of Valentine's shopping is done at the last minute.\n\nIn each of the past two years, nearly half of U.S. spending on Valentine's Day flowers, candy and cards occurred between Feb. 11 and Feb. 14, according to Numerator, a market research company. But sales do not peak until Valentine's Day itself.\n\nWalmart - which sells nearly 40 million red roses for the holiday - says around 75% of its Valentine's Day sales occur on Feb. 13 and 14. Those two days account for 80% of Kroger's sales during Valentine's week.\n\n\"Although stores begin pushing their Valentine's Day inventory weeks ahead of the day, before the holiday itself, most consumers save their shopping for the last minute,\" said Amanda Schoenbauer, an analyst with Numerator.\n\nFor last-minute shopping, Americans still tend to spend a lot. This year, they're expected to shell out a collective $25.8 billion, according to the National Retail Federation. Candy is the most popular gift; nearly 60% of Valentine's shoppers planning to buy some. Greeting cards are second.\n\nSome of that spending takes place well before the holiday. Target says consumers start snapping up Valentine's home décor soon after Christmas ends. Valentine's-themed potted plants were also popular this year, Target said, and many of those plants were bought early rather than closer to the holiday as is usually the case with cut flowers.\n\nYet procrastination seems to be part of the holiday tradition, according to data from Walgreens, which sold 44% of its Valentine's candy and 56% of its Valentine's cards on Feb. 13 and 14.\n\nDelivery companies help some consumers shave it even closer. Uber Eats says its flower orders peak on Valentine's Day between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. Uber Eats says it also appears to be a resource for forgetful lovers: Its flower orders are 60% higher than average on the day after Valentine's Day.\n\nProcrastinators can make it tough for businesses to keep customers satisfied.\n\nLinda Bryant grows many of the flowers she sells at Just Bouquets, her flower shop in Panama, Nebraska. Usually she delivers the flowers herself, but on Valentine's Day her husband helps.\n\n\"Valentine's would not be my favorite florist holiday just because it's stressful,\" she said. \"I don't go out. I'm too tired. But I love making people happy.\"\n\nBryant sympathizes with the people who call in orders on Valentine's Day. She spent a lot of time trying to figure out how many flowers to order for her shop this Valentine's Day. The decision was made last minute.\n\n\"The people who call on February 14 are usually desperate,\" she said. \"I try to be kind and remind them, it's always February 14. The date doesn't change.\"\n\nOne could argue that people order flowers at the last minute just to keep them fresh, but the procrastination trend extends beyond gifts that can wilt.\n\nIn 2023, 30% of OpenTable reservations for Valentine's Day were made the day before and 18% were made on the day of.\n\nFlowers and cards from the drugstore are one thing, but you're likely to miss out on a special date if you wait too long.\n\nMeadow Brook Hall, a historic estate in Rochester, Michigan, says the 115 tickets available for its annual Valentine's Day dinner sold out weeks ago. The venue gets requests all the way through Valentine's Day, says Katie Higgins, Meadow Brook's marketing and communications manager. The week before the dinner, 50 couples were on the wait list.\n\nJoseph Ferrari, a psychology professor at DePaul University in Chicago, says around 20% of men and women are chronic procrastinators. But in the case of Valentine's Day, there are other reasons consumers might put things off.\n\n\"There's a lot of fatigue. We just did Christmas, now you're hitting me up for this,\" he said. Others procrastinate because they fear failing or buying the wrong gift, he said.\n\nFerrari has some advice: Don't procrastinate when it comes to telling people you love them.\n\n\"We should be celebrating love all the time, not just once in a while,\" he said."}
{"text": "# Some worry California proposition to tackle homelessness would worsen the problem\nBy **TRÂN NGUYỄN**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 3:27 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**OROVILLE, Calif. (AP)** - Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom is urging voters to approve a ballot initiative that he says is needed to tackle the state's homelessness crisis, a change social providers say would threaten programs that keep people from becoming homeless in the first place.\n\nIn 2004, voters approved legislation that imposed a tax on millionaires to finance mental health services, generating $2 billion to $3 billion in revenue each year that has mostly gone to counties to fund mental health programs as they see fit under broad guidelines.\n\nNewsom wants to give the state more control over how that money is spent. Proposition 1, before voters on the March 5 ballot, would require counties to spend 60% of those funds on housing and programs for homeless people with serious mental illnesses or substance abuse problems.\n\nThe single formula would mean rural counties such as Butte, with a homeless population of fewer than 1,300 people, would be required to divert the same percentage of funds to housing as urban counties such as San Francisco, which has a homeless population six times bigger. San Francisco Mayor London Breed said she supports the measure. Butte County officials have expressed concerns.\n\nThe funding from the millionaire tax in Butte County has mostly gone to prevention services to combat high suicide and childhood trauma rates. Officials estimated they would have to divert at least 28% of current funding from existing programs toward housing. They say the change could cause cultural centers, peer-support programs, vocational services and even programs working with homeless people to lose funding.\n\nTiffany McCarter burst into tears when talking about how the African American Family & Cultural Center she runs in rural Oroville, a city in Butte County, might have to close its doors. The 14-year-old center with a mission of breaking the cycle of trauma in the Black community relies heavily on mental health funding from the county.\n\nThe center offers an after-school program, art and dance classes and anger management sessions - designed to steer young people away from the streets. McCarter said some have learning disabilities or parents who are incarcerated.\n\n\"I'd love to solve the homeless problem,\" McCarter, the center's executive director, said as the halls filled with laughter of children who ran around her to win her attention. \"But then which one of my kids are we going to leave behind?\"\n\nWith makeshift tents lining streets and disrupting businesses in communities across the state, homelessness has become one of the most frustrating issues in California and one sure to dog Newsom should he ever mount a national campaign. The Democratic governor has raised about $10 million to back the ballot measure and has appeared in television ads promoting it, indicating it's one of his top political priorities.\n\nAlready he has pushed for laws that make it easier to force people with behavioral health issues into treatment, and he touts the proposition as the final piece of the new approach.\n\n\"We are in a unique position to take what we have been promoting - these promises - and make them real, and finally address the issue that defines more stress and more frustrations than any other issue in this state,\" Newsom said at the proposition kickoff event.\n\nSacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, who authored the 2004 millionaire tax, said the funding is meant to serve homeless people with serious mental illnesses and that county officials and providers \"miss the big picture.\"\n\n\"While it has funded many good programs over 20 years, it has gotten away from the original purpose,\" Steinberg said. \"Nothing is more important than alleviating the unacceptable suffering of people living and dying on our streets.\"\n\nThe two-part measure would authorize the state to borrow $6.38 billion to build 4,350 housing units, half of which would be reserved for veterans. It also would add 6,800 mental health and addiction treatment beds.\n\nNewsom's administration already has spent at least $22 billion on various programs to address the crisis, including $3.5 billion to convert rundown motels into homeless housing. California is also giving out $2 billion in grants to build more treatment facilities.\n\nBut the crisis is worse than ever, many say.\n\nThe state accounts for nearly a third of the homeless population in the United States; roughly 181,000 Californians are in need of housing. A recent survey by the University of San Francisco's Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative found about two-thirds of homeless people in California have a mental health disorder, but only 18% had received recent treatment and only 6% had received any addiction treatment despite rampant abuse.\n\nThe state needs some 8,000 more beds to treat mental health and addiction issues, according to researchers who testified before state lawmakers last year.\n\nCalifornia has 5,500 beds, down from as many as 37,000 more than a half-century ago, the governor said.\n\nThe proposal could also add beds in locked psychiatric facilities, which advocates say could force more people into involuntary treatment. Newsom and state lawmakers haven't decided what types of facility would be built.\n\n\"From a humanitarian and civil rights perspective, we vehemently oppose Proposition 1,\" said Mark Salazar, executive director of Mental Health Association of San Francisco, which serves more than 15,000 people monthly. \"There are studies that show over and over that coercing treatment just doesn't end well for the individual.\"\n\nMark Cloutier, CEO of Caminar, which provides mental health services, employment placement and supportive housing to mostly young adults, believes the ballot measure is needed because the lack of housing and treatment beds means many people end up in jail or the emergency room.\n\nJoe Wilson, who runs Hospitality House in San Francisco, said more housing and beds are needed but not at the expense of other programs like his organization's two drop-in centers in the Tenderloin neighborhood and Sixth Street Corridor. Workers there, most of whom were once homeless, help navigate services for people, update resumes, and drive them to appointments.\n\n\"Everyone agrees that we need more resources for housing,\" he said. \"Is this the best way to do it? We don't believe so.\"\n\nOne of the center's workers, Anthony Hardnett, a San Francisco native who was homeless and suffered from addiction issues, said many people he has helped have become independent and productive by learning new skills and hobbies, like in the chess club he hosts. The group connected more than 30 people to jobs last month.\n\n\"You've got to show them something different to change their mindset,\" Hardnett said. \"We can't just give up on them.\"\n\nIn the Butte County city of Chico, about 165 miles (265 kilometers) north of San Francisco, providers say the city's only drop-in center for troubled youth is at risk. The 6th Street Center for Youth also offers rent assistance to college students, but workers do not believe that would protect it from having its budget cut.\n\nSolace Kalkowski, who uses the pronoun they, found themself sleeping in their truck after a breakup a few weeks ago and said the center kept them from ending up chronically homeless.\n\n\"It's a healthy outlet for me to come where people will listen and give you advice,\" Kalkowski said. \"I've been working on myself and being more productive. ... Me having this chance, I'm blown away.\""}
{"text": "# Detecting Russian 'carrots' and 'tea bags': Ukraine decodes enemy chatter to save lives\nBy **SAMYA KULLAB**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 7:32 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**SEREBRYANSKY FOREST, Ukraine (AP)** - As the radio crackles with enemy communications that are hard to decipher, one Russian command rings out clear: \"Brew five Chinese tea bags on 38 orange.\"\n\nA Ukrainian soldier known on the battlefield as Mikhass, who has spent months listening to and analyzing such chatter, is able to quickly decode the gibberish. It means: Prepare five Beijing-made artillery shells and fire them on a specific Ukrainian position in the Serebryansky Forest, which forms the front line in the country's restive northeast.\n\nHiding in the basement of an abandoned home 12 kilometers (7 miles) away, Mikhass immediately warns the commander of a unit embedded in that part of the forest, giving him crucial minutes to get his men into trenches, saving their lives.\n\nOn the defensive and critically short of ammunition and soldiers after two years of war, Ukrainian forces are increasingly resorting to an age-old tactic - intelligence gleaned from radio intercepts - in a desperate effort to preserve their most vital resources.\n\nThe painstaking work is part of a larger effort to beef up and refine electronic warfare capabilities so that soldiers can be warned earlier of impending attacks, while having the battlefield intelligence needed to make their own strikes more deadly. To prevent enemy drone attacks, signal-jamming is also on the rise.\n\nAfter months of near stalemate along the 1,000 kilometer (621 mile) front line, Ukraine expects fierce attacks in the year ahead from a Russian enemy determined to wear down its defenses to forge a breakthrough. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said there will be no peace until Russia achieves its goals, which include recapturing the entire Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, which it illegally annexed in 2022.\n\nThe commander elevated last week to lead Ukraine's army, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, has highlighted the importance of electronic warfare, and the country's defense ministry has increased spending on the people and technology behind it.\n\n## SAVING LIVES\nRussia, which controls about one-fifth of Ukraine, has the advantage of a more developed domestic weapons industry and it uses conscription and coercion to call up troops.\n\nFor Ukraine, ammunition shortages have forced brigades to use shells sparingly and only after locating precise targets. Difficulty in mobilizing troops means Ukrainian commanders must be extra protective of soldiers' lives as they try to fend off ferocious Russian attacks.\n\nIt is within this context that better surveillance, eavesdropping and jamming have become more urgent.\n\nSeveral kilometers south of where Mikhass is positioned, in the Donetsk region town of Konstantinivka, the 93rd Brigade's Electronic Warfare unit is using jammers to stave off attack drones, the main driver of injuries for soldiers in the region.\n\nThe platoon commander is alert, staring at a laptop that shows signals picked up by small antennas planted near the front line. When a Russian Lancet attack drone approaches their area of operation, his screen lights up with activity.\n\nThe commander, known on the battlefield as Oleksandr, flips a switch to activate the jammer which interferes with the drone's radar; it's the equivalent of shining a bright light in someone's eye to disorient them.\n\n\"It's a must,\" he says of their operation. \"A lot of guys are dying because of drones.\"\n\nRadio operators like Mikhass work in shifts around the clock.\n\nThe antennas he relies on to pick up Russian radio signals are camouflaged, jutting out of trees in the forest near Kreminna, close to Russian positions. From a quiet basement command center nearby, Mikhass and other soldiers chain smoke cigarettes and listen through headphones.\n\nA new and sophisticated signal-finding antenna, which resembles a carousel, uses triangulation to locate where the radio waves are emanating from.\n\nThey cross-reference what they hear against images they gather from reconnaissance drones and use detailed maps of their enemy's positions to slowly piece together what it all means.\n\nThey are part of a 50-man intelligence unit dubbed the Bunnies of Cherkess - the name inspired by the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, who advised warriors to feign weakness when one is strong.\n\n\"No one takes bunnies seriously, right?\" said Cherkess, the commander of the eponymous unit.\n\nRadio intercepts reveal that the Kremlin is determined to control the entire Serebryansky Forest, which divides Ukraine-controlled Lyman from Russian-occupied Kreminna. It's part of an effort to reach Torske, a village in Donetsk that is west of Kreminna. From Torske, Russia will be closer to recapturing the nearby hub of Lyman, which would be a devastating setback for Ukraine and disrupt its ability to move supplies to the front.\n\n## DECODING ORDERS\nCherkess and his men, most of whom are volunteers who signed up for the infantry, understand the stakes couldn't be higher, especially as signs grow that support from Western allies is less secure.\n\nAfter listening to hours and hours of Russian communications each day, much of it related to troop rotations, artillery fire and drone reconnaissance, they gradually build an understanding - with help from specialized computer software - of what it all means.\n\n\"Cucumbers\" are mortars, \"carrots\" are grenade launchers -- and locations are conveyed in a numerical code with a corresponding color. It took the unit months to decode these Russian orders.\n\nThe arrival of new combat equipment and ammunition - and especially infantrymen - signals a fresh attack is imminent.\n\n\"(A soldier) is not interested in what kind of radar Russians have, he needs information on if there will be an attack tonight, and who will come, if they will have tanks, if they have armored vehicles or if it's just infantry,\" said Cherkess.\n\n\"And we have to understand how long we have to prepare. A week? Two weeks? A month?\"\n\nAdvance word of enemy troops being rotated in and out is also useful to Ukrainian soldiers seeking to go on the offensive, he said. That is when they can exact maximum personnel losses.\n\nThe previous week, a Russian assault operation was carried out against a neighboring brigade. But the Ukrainian soldiers positioned there were prepared to greet them.\n\n## STAYING AHEAD\nThe importance of electronic surveillance can't be underestimated, said Yaroslav Kalinin, the CEO of Infozahyst, a company under contract with Ukraine's Defense Ministry.\n\nBefore the war, Infozahyst provided anti-wiretapping services for the offices of the president and prime minister. Once the war began, the company pivoted to help the army by manufacturing a versatile signal direction finding system, which is now in high demand.\n\nThe government recently doubled its contract with Infozahyst, according to Kalinin.\n\nThe buildup of surveillance capabilities is partly a recognition of the need to catch up to the Russians, who invested heavily in this technology long before it invaded Ukraine.\n\nKalinin believes that better and smaller devices that are easier to hide and move around will eventually give Ukraine an edge.\n\nThe Russians know they are being listened to and routinely try to deceive their enemy with bogus information. It is up to Mikhass and other radio operators to discern the signal from the noise.\n\n\"Their artillery helps us,\" he explained. \"They say where they will shoot, and then we check where the shells landed.\"\n\n\"38 orange,\" the location Mikhass recently heard about for an upcoming attack, is represented on a map by a small dot. And it is surrounded by hundreds of other dots that signify locations they have decoded.\n\n\"We need a lot of time to uncover these points,\" he said.\n\nAnd, as Russia steps up the pressure, the clock is ticking."}
{"text": "# Democrats cheer New York win as good omen for November. But is it enough to calm anxiety over Biden?\nBy **ANTHONY IZAGUIRRE** and **WILL WEISSERT**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 3:37 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Former U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi's winning back his Long Island House seat could provide a blueprint for Democrat Joe Biden 's reelection campaign heading into November, demonstrating his party's strength in competitive suburban territory that also happened to be where Donald Trump grew up.\n\nBut the good news followed several rough days for the White House, which watched House Republicans vote to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday. That followed a special counsel's conclusion that characterized Biden's memory as \"faulty,\" \"poor\" and having \"significant limitations,\" though also saying charges weren't warranted against the president for mishandling classified documents.\n\nSo how far Suozzi's win will go to calm Democrats' anxiety about the president's age and low approval ratings is hardly clear.\n\nThe Democratic former congressman's emphatic victory came in a special election where heavy snowfall may have affected turnout and with nearly nine months still to go in the presidential race. He made immigration a centerpiece of his campaign, playing political hardball with an issue that had helped the GOP win in previous cycles.\n\nHe also called Biden \"old.\"\n\nSuozzi easily topped Mazi Pilip to replace expelled former Republican New York Rep. George Santos, narrowing the GOP House majority to 219-213. The district backed Biden by 8 points in 2020 but voted for Santos during 2022's midterm election - when Republicans fared better across New York than expected by campaigning on getting tough on immigration and combating crime rates that had risen in some areas.\n\nAfter Santos' ouster, the special election to replace him was seen as a dead-heat - though Suozzi was the more familiar figure. He won the seat in 2016 and was reelected twice before retiring in 2020 and losing in the Democratic primary to incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul.\n\nA surge of migrants arriving to large, Democrat-run cities, including New York, has turned security along the U.S.-Mexico border into an especially tricky issue for Biden's party across the country. Queens is home to one of New York City's few large-scale tent housing facilities for migrants - and yet Suozzi took the issue head on.\n\n\"This is the template for Democrats everywhere because you could not imagine a district that could have been more hostile to what the stereotype of a Democrat is,\" said Lis Smith, a national Democratic strategist and advisor to Suozzi's campaign. \"You just need to go on offense and say, 'I'm the one who wants to secure the border. It's the Republicans who want chaos at the border.'\"\n\nThat's \"a very easy message that can be adopted by Democrats across the country,\" Smith said.\n\nDuring the campaign, Suozzi spoke often about strengthening immigration policy, and said he would support a temporary closure of the U.S.-Mexico border to slow the influx of migrants, echoing Biden's recent willingness to do the same. Last month, Suozzi rushed to Queens' tent migrant housing area for a rebuttal news conference directly after Pilip held an event there seeking to link him to federal immigration policy.\n\nSouzzi was a vocal supporter of a bipartisan Senate deal on immigration that Republicans turned against after Trump, the former president and current Republican presidential primary front-runner, urged them to do so. Souzzi even began his victory speech by scoffing at being attacked as \"the godfather of the migrant crisis\" and \"sanctuary Souzzi.\"\n\nThat resonated with Lois Clinco, 59, who said she voted for Suozzi because she hopes he can \"keep the migrants out, because we're overpopulated now.\"\n\nStill, Grant Reeher, a political science professor at Syracuse University, cautioned against extrapolating Suozzi's win, noting the snowstorm and a short runup to the special election which also had unique, Santos-related contours.\n\n\"If I were a Democratic consultant or strategist, I would be taking a huge grain of salt before I base my playbook on this election,\" Reeher said.\n\nBiden's reelection campaign noted that Democrats have racked up a series of special election and off-year legislative victories since he took office. It also said that more immigrants had arrived to Queens County in the last year than in all of Chicago - emphasizing how important the issue was to Suozzi's win.\n\nWhite House, spokesman Andrew Bates called Tuesday's result \"a devastating repudiation of congressional Republicans.\"\n\n\"Tom Suozzi put support for the bipartisan border legislation – and congressional Republicans' killing of it for politics – at the forefront of his case,\" Bates said in a statement. \"The results are unmistakable.\"\n\nDespite years of Trump stressing a law-and-order message, Republicans have seen their support slip in many suburban areas as the former president has solidified his hold on the national GOP. Still, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson shrugged off larger implications of Tuesday's race for his party.\n\n\"The result last night is not something, in my view, that Democrats should celebrate too much,\" Johnson told reporters Wednesday, adding that Suozzi \"ran like a Republican, he sounded like a Republican talking about border and immigration because that's the top issue on the hearts and minds of everybody.\"\n\nBut Suozzi also promoted defending abortion rights, echoing a message Democrats have used around the country since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. New York will have a referendum on the November ballot asking voters to bar discrimination based on \"pregnancy outcomes.\" Despite not explicitly guaranteeing the right to an abortion, supporters argue the measure will further protect access to the procedure, and Democrats see it as a way to drive turnout.\n\nSuozzi's victory could also be viewed as a personal slap for Trump since the former president's childhood home was in the Jamaica Estates section of Queens. Still, Trump advisors blamed Pilip's defeat on her not embracing the \"Make America Great Again\" movement more closely.\n\nNew York Republican chair Ed Cox said the party isn't abandoning its winning issues and would defeat Suozzi when he's up for reelection in November. That's when, he said, \"the campaign resets to focus on Joe Biden and Democrats' disastrous open-borders, soft-on-crime policies, rather than the specific circumstances that brought about this special election.\"\n\nBut Suozzi didn't exactly embrace Biden. He even said during a television interview, \"The bottom line is he's old.\" Suozzi also suggested that he didn't think it would be helpful to have Biden campaign alongside him for this race.\n\n\"If I were advising him,\" Reeher said of the president, \"I would have a big red headline on top that says 'consider this race with caution, there are a number of things here that may not apply to you.'\""}
{"text": "# Democrat Tom Suozzi flips George Santos' seat in Congress\nBy **ANTHONY IZAGUIRRE**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 4:17 AM EST\n\n---\n\nDemocrat Tom Suozzi won a special election for a U.S. House seat in New York on Tuesday, coming out on top in a politically mixed suburban district in a victory that could lift his party's hopes heading into a fiercely contested presidential election later this year.\n\nSuozzi defeated Republican Mazi Pilip to take the seat that was left vacant when George Santos, also a Republican, was expelled from Congress. The victory marks a return to Washington for Suozzi, who represented the district for three terms before giving it up to run, unsuccessfully, for governor.\n\nIt's unclear how long his next stint on Capitol Hill will last, as a redistricting process unfolds that could reshape the district. But for now the result narrows the already slim Republican majority in the House. And it provides Democrats a much-needed win in New York City's Long Island suburbs, where the GOP showed surprising strength in recent elections.\n\nSuozzi stressed his campaign trail theme of bipartisan cooperation in a victory speech that was briefly interrupted by protestors criticizing his support of Israel.\n\n\"There are divisions in our country where people can't even talk to each other. All they can do is yell and scream at each other,\" he said, acknowledging the demonstrators. \"That's not the answer to the problems we face in our country. The answer is to try and bring people together to try and find common ground.\"\n\n\"The way to make our country a better place is to try and find common ground. It is not easy to do. It is hard to do,\" Suozzi told supporters at his election night party in Woodbury.\n\nSuozzi's win will likely reassure Democrats that they can perform well in suburban communities across the nation, which will be critical to the party's efforts to retake control of the U.S. House and reelect President Joe Biden.\n\nStill, forecasting for November could be complicated given that turnout, already expected to be low given the abbreviated race, was potentially hampered by a storm that dumped several inches of snow on the district on election day. Both campaigns offered voters free rides to the polls as plows cleared wet slush from the roads.\n\nIn the short term, the result could be a factor in ultratight votes in the House, where Republicans hold just a 219-212 majority. In an example of how important one seat can be, House Republicans voted Tuesday night to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas by a single vote, punishing the Biden administration over its border policies.\n\nAt a polling place on Long Island earlier in the day, 59-year-old Eliezer Sarrias said he cast a ballot for Suozzi because the former congressman appeared more able to work with the opposing party to reach agreements and end congressional gridlock.\n\n\"The constituents elect our officials to perform a certain job, and we've really had a very stagnant congressional year,\" Sarrias said after voting at a middle school in Levittown. \"Even with the migrants now, we had bipartisan deal in Congress and suddenly it evaporated, like, why? Do we really need to wait for another president to come, or aren't the issues that are pressing to everyone important at the moment?\"\n\nOn the campaign trail, Suozzi, a political centrist, leaned into some of the same issues that Republicans have used to bash Democrats, calling for tougher U.S. border policies and a rollback of New York laws that made it tougher for judges to detain criminal suspects awaiting trial.\n\nThe unusual midwinter election became necessary after Santos was ousted by his colleagues in December, partway through his first term.\n\nSantos won office in what had been a reliably Democratic district partly by falsely portraying himself as an American success story - a son of working class immigrants who made himself into a wealthy Wall Street dealmaker. But many elements of Santos' life story were later exposed as fabrications, and he was indicted on multiple charges including allegations he stole money from Republican donors. He has pleaded not guilty.\n\nWith no time for a primary before the special election, Democrats nominated Suozzi, a political centrist well known to voters in the district.\n\nRepublican leaders turned to Pilip, a relatively unknown candidate with a unique personal backstory. Born in Ethiopia, she migrated to Israel as part of Operation Solomon and served in Israel's defense forces before eventually moving to the U.S. and winning a seat in Nassau County's legislature in 2021.\n\nPilip conceded the race and said she congratulated Suozzi in a phone call Tuesday night.\n\n\"Yes we lost, but it doesn't mean we are going to end here,\" Pilip told supporters at her election watch party.\n\nBiden's campaign manager was quick to link the victory to the upcoming presidential race: \"Donald Trump lost again tonight. When Republicans run on Trump's extreme agenda – even in a Republican-held seat - voters reject them,\" Julie Chavez Rodriguez said.\n\nTrump responded to the result in a post on his social media site Truth Social, calling Pilip a \"very foolish woman\" who was \"running in a race where she didn't endorse me and tried to 'straddle the fence,' when she would have easily WON if she understood anything about MODERN DAY politics in America.\"\n\nThe short campaign was dominated by issues - abortion, immigration and crime - that are expected to shape crucial suburban races nationwide in this year's battle for control of Congress.\n\nDespite being an international migrant once herself, Pilip hammered Suozzi over an influx of asylum-seekers into New York City, accusing Democrats and Biden of failing to secure the U.S. southern border.\n\nIn response, Suozzi spent much of the campaign talking about the need to strengthen border policy, pointing out times when he bucked his own party on the issue while in Congress. In the final stretch, Suozzi said he would support a temporary closure of the border to slow the number of arrivals, similar to comments that Biden has made.\n\nSuozzi counterattacked Pilip on abortion, saying she couldn't be trusted to protect abortion rights in places like New York where it remains legal.\n\nPilip said she is personally against abortion but wouldn't force her beliefs others and would oppose any attempt by Congress to impose a nationwide ban. She has also said mifepristone, an abortion medication, should be available nationally.\n\nBoth candidates expressed unwavering support for Israel in its conflict with Hamas, even appearing side-by-side in an unusual joint event intended to convey solidarity.\n\nDemocrats and Republicans will get a chance to fight over the congressional seat again in November's general election, though the battleground may look different.\n\nThat's because the state's congressional districts are set to be redrawn again in the next few months because of a court order. Democrats, who dominate state government, are widely expected to try to craft more favorable lines for their candidates.\n\nNew York is expected to play an outsize role in determining control of Congress this year, with competitive races in multiple contests in the suburban and exurban rings around New York City."}
{"text": "# Trump's pick to lead the RNC is facing skepticism from some Republicans\nBy **BRIAN SLODYSKO**  \nFebruary 13, 2024. 8:03 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - In pushing Michael Whatley as the next leader of the Republican National Committee, Donald Trump zeroed in on the North Carolina GOP chairman's dedication to \"election integrity,\" baselessly suggesting he would ensure the 2024 race \"can't be stolen.\"\n\nSome of Trump's most ardent supporters in Whatley's home state would, no doubt, like a word.\n\nWhatley has been accused by some Republicans of essentially manufacturing his win as state party chairman last year following a chaotic vote, which resulted in a legal challenge that offered evidence some ballots were improperly cast. While Whatley and his allies acknowledged that technical problems made voting with the party's mobile app difficult, they vehemently deny that the irregularities changed the outcome of the contest and note that the lawsuit was dismissed.\n\nBut for some conservatives, primed by years of Trump urging vigilance against voter fraud, the episode instilled a suspicion that the party contest was stolen by a Washington Beltway fixture whose work for the George W. Bush administration and as a lobbyist they viewed skeptically.\n\n\"I can only conclude two possibilities. One, he felt he needed to cheat to win. Two, he is completely incompetent. Both are disqualifying,\" said Whatley's challenger, John Kane Jr., who described himself as \"unquestionably\" the true \"MAGA candidate\" in the contest.\n\nThe controversy surrounding Whatley's election to the GOP's top political post in North Carolina is one of several emerging signals suggesting challenges ahead. Trump is aiming to wrest control of the RNC by muscling Whatley through in an orchestrated ouster of the organization's current chair, Ronna McDaniel. But in doing so, he's elevating someone with a relatively scant national profile and a gilded resume that includes links to establishment figures largely reviled by the hardline activists who are most vocal in supporting Trump.\n\nWhatley, 55, declined through a spokesman to comment for this story. The Trump campaign did not respond to a message.\n\nIf Whatley ultimately becomes RNC chair, he would be charged with leading the effort to defeat President Joe Biden at a time when the party is struggling to raise money and navigating a restless far-right flank. To his critics, Whatley represents more of the same at a time when they're seeking more dramatic change.\n\n## 'A complete overhaul'\n\"We need a complete overhaul of the RNC. Choosing, or anointing, someone that is the male version of Ronna is the exact opposite of what the RNC needs at this time,\" said Sigal Chattah, an RNC committeewoman for Nevada who is closely aligned with the group Turning Point, which advocated for McDaniel's ouster.\n\nWhatley's allies portray him as a steady hand and strategic thinker with decades of Republican political experience, stretching from the mountains of western North Carolina to the halls of Congress and the executive branch.\n\nA formative political experience came when Whatley was still a sophomore at Watauga High School. He volunteered for the 1984 reelection campaign of Jesse Helms, a hard-edged conservative senator whose crusades against civil rights, art and homosexuality presaged the GOP's embrace of grievance politics under Trump.\n\nYet for much of his professional life, Whatley's political sensibilities appeared to align far more closely with the party's mainstream and corporate establishment.\n\nHe spent much of his 20s as a student earning four degrees, including a law degree, as well as a master's in theology, from Notre Dame. Later, he clerked for a federal judge in North Carolina before departing for Washington as Bush campaigned for the presidency.\n\nOne early assignment dispatched him to Broward County, Florida, where he worked among a team of lawyers on Bush's behalf to dispute the outcome of the 2000 presidential contest.\n\n\"It was really the first time that Republicans got down into the trenches and fought,\" Whatley recalled during a 2021 appearance on an election integrity panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference. \"We knew if we were not there, they were going to steal it.\"\n\nAfter the Supreme Court ruled in Bush's favor, Whatley landed a job in the Department of Energy, which was he followed by a two-year stint working for Sen. Elizabeth Dole, the North Carolina Republican.\n\n## Oil and gas lobbying\nLobbying on behalf of oil and gas giants soon became his calling, however.\n\nHe launched his own firm, the Patriot Group, in 2005. But it wasn't until joining forces with two other oil and gas lobbyists in 2009 that his fortunes precipitously rose. Their firm, HBW Resources (the W stands for Whatley), became a political will-bending force.\n\nHBW became a key proponent of the Keystone XL pipeline. Whatley was also an architect of a federal and state-level campaign that played a pivotal role in stopping a bipartisan push to enact cleaner standards for oil used in the U.S.\n\nThe regulations would have drastically curtailed imports of crude extracted from the oil sands of Alberta, Canada - a labor-intensive process that requires so much energy usage that fuels derived from the region are considered among the world's dirtiest.\n\nBut the legislative push collapsed after the campaign amped up pressure in Congress as well as members' home states.\n\nTo advance their aims, Whatley's firm also established the Consumer Energy Alliance, a nonprofit organization that presented itself as nonpartisan. In reality, the group was supported by some of the world's biggest oil companies, including Chevron, ExxonMobil and British Petroleum, as well as major industrial energy users. The group has been accused of using deceitful tactics to generate support for their efforts, including allegations that they gathered petition signatures under misleading pretenses for local initiatives in Ohio, Wisconsin and South Carolina.\n\nAfter a major corruption scandal at the North Carolina Republican Party, which saw the party's former chairman convicted in a bribery scandal, Whatley ran to replace him and stepped down from the nonprofit after he won. He left the firm that he helped found in 2022. \n\n## Army of poll watchers\nHis focus soon turned to \"election integrity.\" As Trump railed against fraud ahead of the 2020 election, Whatley said he recruited hundreds of lawyers, as well as an army of poll watchers, to fan out across the state. After Trump won the state, he took credit for the effort, claiming that it stopped Democrats from cheating.\n\n\"They knew if this happens, we were going to scream bloody murder,\" Whatley said in 2021 . \"Because we put so much pressure on the system more than a year in advance, it really came down to being a pretty clean election.\"\n\nBut to Democrats, many of the North Carolina GOP's tactics are tantamount to voter intimidation or suppression, which they say is ironic in light of Whatley's own contested election last year, as state party chair.\n\n\"The next chair of the Republican Party is running on election integrity. His own election was called into question. And a lot of people in North Carolina don't think he was elected fair,\" said Anderson Clayton, chairwoman of the North Carolina Democratic Party.\n\nAs Whatley looks to take the reins of the RNC, which will require approval by the organization's 168 voting members, much of his success will turn on whether or not he can raise enough money to turn around the organization's dismal finances. The RNC has been significantly outraised in recent months by the Democratic National Committee, reporting cash reserves of just $8 million at the end of last year, while carrying $1 million in debt.\n\nArt Pope, a North Carolina businessman and major conservative donor, said Whatley was well-equipped to lead the organization. But he wasn't sure that the underlying dynamics would change.\n\n\"When the Republican National Committee was helping with Donald Trump's legal fees, a lot of people didn't want to give\" for that reason, said Pope. \"Anyone who has been, or will be, the Republican National Committee chairperson will have that challenge.\""}
{"text": "# Democrats and Republicans hold Black History Month celebrations with an eye on November's election\nBy **MATT BROWN**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 12:57 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Black History Month, often a time to recognize the contributions of African Americans in U.S. history, was marked in the nation's capital this week with a focus on present divides and the November election when Black turnout will be integral to the outcome.\n\nAt the White House, the Biden administration on Tuesday hosted more than two dozen family members of civil rights icons and major historical figures for a gala celebrating Black history. Vice President Kamala Harris made a surprise appearance where she praised the families and recounted the administration's commitment to Black communities.\n\nA few hours later, Republicans held a reception in Washington's U Street neighborhood, a key part of Black history in the city, to celebrate former GOP officials and activists who have engaged Black voters.\n\nThe White House has taken Black History Month as an opportunity to highlight the administration's efforts on priorities such as education, voting rights and jobs. Republicans see a chance to win more votes from a core Democratic constituency, noting President Joe Biden's lower popularity with Black adults and the criticism he has taken for inflation and his handling of the border.\n\nBiden's approval rating among Black adults was 42% in a January poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, a substantial drop from the first year of his presidency.\n\nDemocrats are spotlighting Biden's support with civil rights stalwarts and lambasting Republicans for enacting policies restricting how educators discuss race and history in the classroom.\n\n\"We know that those who don't remember their history are doomed to repeat it,\" said Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell, to the families assembled at the White House. Sewell represents Selma, Alabama, where white police beat Black civil rights marchers in 1965 on a day remembered today as \"Bloody Sunday.\"\n\n\"At a time when extremists seek to erase our history and roll back our progress, we should take a lesson from our foremothers and forefathers,\" she said.\n\nRepublicans held their own Black History Month celebration later that evening with about 100 people.\n\n\"As RNC Chair, I have made it a mission to reach out to communities and voters that we have ignored as a party,\" said Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel during Tuesday night's event. \"Black voters are going to make history this November because they're going to vote Republican at the highest level we've ever seen,\" McDaniel predicted to applause from the audience.\n\nThe RNC intends to expand its number of community outreach centers in Black communities after the GOP primary concludes. The party has been optimistic about its chances to improve its poor margins with Black voters since Republicans made slight inroads with them in the 2022 midterm elections.\n\nBut the party's current focus on issues like the teaching of race and history may risk mobilizing Black voters against the GOP. Republican officials in at least a dozen states have enacted policies that regulate how educators discuss topics including race, history and gender in the classroom.\n\n\"This moment in time is evidence that our history is unbannable, that teaching it is core to our progress, and that Black history is American history,\" Nevada Rep. Steve Horsford, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, told the White House crowd.\n\nThe Biden campaign dismissed GOP Black voter outreach as insincere and noted that former President Donald Trump, the current front-runner for the GOP nomination, had dinner in 2022 with Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust-denying white nationalist.\n\n\"In Donald Trump's Republican Party, celebrating Black History Month means teaching kids that slavery benefited Black people, papering over slavery as the cause of the Civil War and sharing well-done steaks doused in ketchup with white supremacists at Mar-a-Lago,\" said Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler. \"I'm sure they'll serve up plenty of the same at their little event.\"\n\nThe Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.\n\nOn Tuesday, the Biden campaign rolled out new ads targeting Black voters by highlighting the administration's investments in historically Black colleges and universities as well as the number of Black officeholders appointed by Biden, including Harris, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. And the Democratic National Committee on Wednesday unveiled digital ads targeting HBCUs in battleground states that touts Biden's record on student debt.\n\nDemocrats point to record-low Black unemployment, policies capping the cost of insulin and Biden's cancellation of about $137 billion in student loan debt as policies they hope will boost support among Black voters. And party officials and strategists stress that its emphasis on Black voters extends beyond a single month of events.\n\nBiden also moved to increase Black political power when he upended precedent to place South Carolina and its substantial Black population first in the party's primary calendar. South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, a veteran of the Civil Rights movement and a close Biden ally, co-chairs the president's reelection campaign.\n\nAccording to some of the assembled Republican activists on Tuesday night, many of whom are Black, the GOP simply lacked the sustained efforts needed to court more Black voters. Quenton Jordan, a Republican activist who won an award at the event, said that the GOP is now \"putting forth an effort to capture the Black vote where in previous years, that just wasn't the case.\"\n\n\"I remember when we had a greater pool,\" said Ken Blackwell, a former Ohio Republican secretary of state who received an award at the reception. \"That's why this is important. To reengage, to give our narrative and give them a choice. But first, we've got to show up.\""}
{"text": "# Republican Michigan elector testifies he never intended to make false public record\nBy **COREY WILLIAMS** and **JOEY CAPPELLETTI**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 4:51 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**LANSING, Mich. (AP)** - A Michigan Republican accused of participating in a fake elector plot after the 2020 presidential election testified Wednesday that he did not know how the electoral process worked and never intended to make a false public record.\n\n\"We were told this was an appropriate process,\" James Renner, 77, said during a preliminary hearing for a half-dozen other electors who face forgery and other charges.\n\nIf he had known any part of the process was illegal, Renner - who served with the state police during the 1970s - said he \"would have challenged it.\"\n\n\"My background was enforcing the law, not breaking the law,\" he testified under cross-examination by a defense attorney for one of the electors.\n\nAttorney General Dana Nessel has said Renner, of Lansing, was one of 16 Republicans who acted as false electors for then-President Donald Trump.\n\nCharges against Renner were dropped last year after he and the state attorney general's office reached a cooperation deal. He was called to testify Wednesday by the prosecution.\n\nRenner, who has served as a precinct delegate and volunteer with the Michigan Republican Party, said he and other electors attended a Dec. 14, 2020, meeting at the party's headquarters in Lansing. He was asked to replace an elector who canceled. They signed a form that authorized them to be electors. There was a companion sheet that purported that Trump had won the election, Renner testified.\n\nRenner added that his understanding was that the Republican electoral slate votes would be used if it later was deemed that Trump had won.\n\nFake electors in Michigan and six other battleground states sent certificates to Congress falsely declaring Trump the winner of the election in their state, despite confirmed results showing he had lost. Georgia and Nevada also have charged fake electors. Republicans who served as false electors in Wisconsin agreed to a legal settlement in which they conceded that Joe Biden won the election and that their efforts were part of an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 results.\n\nIn between witness testimony Wednesday, a defense attorney for one of the Republican Michigan electors discussed the 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in which Hawaii's Republican governor certified a Republican slate of electors after the initial count had Nixon winning the state by about 100 votes. But Democratic electors met anyway and insisted that Kennedy would win an ongoing recount.\n\nThe Democrats were right, and when it came time for Congress to consider which group of electors to count, it chose the Democratic one. It was Nixon himself, who was presiding over Congress as the outgoing vice president, who made the decision.\n\nKahla Crino, a Michigan assistant attorney general, said in court Wednesday that the 1960 Hawaii case became inspiration for multiples slates of fake electors in battleground states.\n\n\"Somehow, your honor, this became, and the people do not dispute, that this became inspiration for a multistate criminal conspiracy that was absolutely linked to the Trump campaign,\" Crino said.\n\nThe Associated Press on Wednesday reached out to the Trump campaign for comment.\n\nTrump-allied lawyer Kenneth Chesebro could be called as a defense witness when the Michigan hearing resumes, possibly in April. Chesebro pleaded guilty in October to one felony charge of conspiracy to commit filing false documents in the Georgia election interference case. He was sentenced to probation.\n\nProsecutors alleged Chesebro unlawfully conspired with Trump and lawyers associated with his campaign to have a group of Georgia Republicans sign a false elector certificate and to submit it to various federal authorities. He also communicated with Trump campaign lawyers and Republican leaders in other swing states won by Biden to get those states to submit false slates of electors as well, prosecutors alleged.\n\nDan Schwager, who served in 2020-2021 as general counsel to the secretary of the U.S. Senate, testified Tuesday in the Lansing courtroom that a fake Certificate of Votes from Michigan was submitted to the Senate after the 2020 election. But the purported Certificate of Votes didn't match an official document signed by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and feature the Michigan state seal, Schwager said.\n\nWhen announcing charges last July, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said the fake electors allegedly met Dec. 14, 2020, in the basement of the state's Republican Party headquarters \"and signed their names to multiple certificates stating they were the duly elected and qualified electors for president and vice president.\"\n\nCertificates of votes are opened by the vice president, and the votes counted by members of Congress.\n\nThe defendants have insisted that their actions were not illegal, even though Biden won Michigan by nearly 155,000 votes over Trump, a result confirmed by a GOP-led state Senate investigation in 2021.\n\nIn December, former Michigan GOP Communications Director Anthony Zammit testified that he believed an attorney for Trump's campaign \"took advantage\" of some of the 15 Republicans.\n\nPreliminary hearings don't involve a jury and are for the judge to determine if there is sufficient evidence to substantiate the charges.\n\nA seventh defendant, Kenneth Thompson, had his case postponed because his attorney didn't show up. The other eight defendants will have preliminary examinations at later dates."}
{"text": "# Democrats retain majority in the Pennsylvania House with a 102-100 partisan divide\nBy **BROOKE SCHULTZ**\nFebruary 13, 2024. 8:29 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP)** - Democrats retained their slim majority in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives on Tuesday after voters elected a former school board member to represent them in a Philadelphia suburb that has been trending more to the left.\n\nJim Prokopiak's election to the Bucks County seat will give Democrats a 102-100 majority in the House, which they have sought to defend in four special elections in the past year. A Republican lawmaker's resignation last week shifted the power back to Democrats, and Prokopiak's win kept it in place.\n\nHe defeated Republican challenger Candace Cabanas and will replace former state Rep. John Galloway, who resigned to serve as a magisterial judge. Cabanas has said previously she plans to run again during the general election.\n\n\"What I heard from voters is that Bucks County residents need help supporting their families, want control over their own bodies, and ensure they have the ability to chart their own paths in life,\" Prokopiak said in a statement. \"I'm committed to taking my conversations with voters to Harrisburg and making their dreams a reality.\"\n\nWhile campaigning, Prokopiak, 49, said his goals as a lawmaker aligned with the party's larger ambitions since they retook the chamber - more money for K-12 education, preserving access to abortions and a higher minimum wage.\n\n\"No one can afford to live on the federal minimum wage in this area,\" he said. \"If we're going to be talking about good-paying jobs and creating life-sustaining jobs, the first thing we have to do is raise the minimum wage because it's clear that is not sustaining anybody.\"\n\nDemocrats have kept all six seats that have gone up for special elections in the past year, in mostly reliably Democratic districts. Prokopiak will represent a seat that has favorably elected Democrats in past election cycles.\n\nGalloway's seat has trended Democratic, and Republicans have slowly been losing their grip on the county as a whole.\n\nThe race drew national attention from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which spent $50,000 to protect the party's majority in the chamber.\n\nIt was a first step for the committee, which has said it is planning to spend at least $60 million on statehouse races nationally this cycle, the group's largest-ever budget. It will feature special emphasis on erasing GOP majorities in Arizona and New Hampshire and in the Pennsylvania Senate while holding small Democratic majorities claimed in 2022 in Minnesota and Michigan.\n\n\"This victory is a promising sign for Democrats up and down the ballot this year – it's clear that momentum is on our side,\" Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee President Heather Williams said in a statement, adding that their focus will be on defending the House majority and flipping the state Senate.\n\nDemocrats in Pennsylvania have used their newfound power this year to advance a number of the caucus' priorities, and they have a philosophical ally in the governor's office with Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro. The Legislature remains politically divided with a firm Republican majority in the Senate.\n\n\"Over the last year I think, since the Democrats have been in the majority, they've pushed legislation that has helped the middle class,\" Prokopiak said previously. \"I want to do that.\""}
{"text": "# A Georgia judge is set to consider whether to remove Fani Willis from the election interference case\nBy **KATE BRUMBACK**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 9:27 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**ATLANTA (AP)** - A Georgia judge who is deciding whether to toss Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis off of the state's election interference case against former President Donald Trump has set a hearing for Thursday that is expected to focus on details of Willis' personal relationship with a special prosecutor she hired.\n\nAs soon as allegations of an inappropriate romantic relationship between Willis and attorney Nathan Wade surfaced last month, speculation about the future of the case began to swirl. Even if the prosecution isn't derailed, the upheaval has certainly created an unwanted distraction for Willis and her team and could undermine public confidence in the case.\n\nThe defense attorney who first exposed the relationship says it creates a conflict of interest and is asking the judge to dismiss the indictment and to prohibit Willis, Wade and their offices from further involvement in the case. In a response filed earlier this month, Willis acknowledged a \"personal relationship\" but said it has no bearing on the serious criminal charges she's pursuing and asked the judge to dismiss the motions seeking her disqualification without a hearing.\n\nThe law says \"disqualification can occur if evidence is produced demonstrating an actual conflict or the appearance of one,\" Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee said during a hearing Monday. Because he believes \"it's possible that the facts alleged by the defendant could result in a disqualification, I think an evidentiary hearing must occur to establish the record on those core allegations.\"\n\nThe highly anticipated hearing, like all courtroom proceedings in the case, will be streamed live on the judge's YouTube channel, as well as by news outlets. McAfee has said it could continue into Friday.\n\nAs he makes another run for the White House and faces three other criminal prosecutions, the former president has exploited the revelation of the relationship, repeatedly referring to Wade as Willis' \"lover\" or \"boyfriend\" to try to cast doubt on Willis' motivations and the legitimacy of the case. Other Republicans have piled on, using the claims to justify calls for investigations into or sanctions against Willis, an elected Democrat who's up for reelection this year.\n\nThe original motion was filed by former Trump campaign staffer and onetime White House aide Michael Roman, but Trump and several other co-defendants have joined with motions of their own.\n\nRoman's motion says Willis and Wade were romantically involved when she hired him in November 2021 to manage an investigation into whether Trump and others committed any crimes as they tried to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia. That investigation led to the indictment in August of Trump and 18 others who are accused of participating in a sprawling illegal scheme to keep Trump in office.\n\nFour of the people charged have already pleaded guilty after reaching deals with prosecutors. Trump and the remaining 14 have all pleaded not guilty.\n\nWillis has paid Wade more than $650,000 for his work and then, Roman alleges, profited personally when Wade used that money to take her on expensive vacations, including cruises in the Bahamas and trips to Aruba, Belize and Napa Valley. His filing also questions Wade's qualifications for the job, saying there's no evidence he had ever prosecuted a felony or handled a racketeering case.\n\nJust under a week after Roman's motion was filed, Willis used a speech at a historic Black church in Atlanta to forcefully defend Wade's qualifications and her own decision to hire him. She didn't address the allegations of a relationship in that speech, waiting nearly three more weeks to acknowledge a \"personal relationship\" in a court filing.\n\nAttached to that filing was a sworn statement from Wade saying that the pair began a personal relationship in 2022, after he was hired as a special prosecutor. His statement also said travel expenses for him and Willis were \"roughly divided equally between us\" and that Willis \"received no funds or personal financial gain\" from his position as a special prosecutor.\n\nMcAfee said Thursday's hearing needs to explore \"whether a relationship existed, whether that relationship was romantic or non-romantic in nature, when it formed and whether it continues.\" Those questions are only relevant, he said, \"in combination with the question of the existence and extent of any personal benefit conveyed as a result of the relationship.\"\n\nRoman's attorney, Ashleigh Merchant, has subpoenaed Willis, Wade, seven other employees of the district attorney's office and others, including Wade's former business partner, Terrence Bradley. Merchant told McAfee on Monday that Bradley would testify that Willis and Wade's romantic relationship began before Wade was hired as special counsel and that they had stayed together in homes where the county was paying for Willis to stay.\n\nWillis sought to quash those subpoenas. She argued Roman's attempts to subpoena people in her office \"suggests an eye toward public narrative as opposed to legal remedy\" and that anything Bradley knows is protected by attorney-client privilege as he once served as Wade's divorce attorney. McAfee declined on Monday to quash those subpoenas, but agreed to revisit that after Bradley testifies.\n\nAware of the personal nature of some of the details that could arise in Thursday's hearing, the judge said that if there's anything that amounts to \"harassment or undue embarrassment,\" he is \"not going to feel inhibited from stepping in, even without an objection from counsel, to move this along and keep it focused on the issues at hand.\"\n\nMcAfee also made clear that he does not believe arguments over Wade's qualifications are relevant, saying that as long as an attorney \"has a heartbeat and a bar card,\" it is within the district attorney's discretion to hire him."}
{"text": "# New York City schools went online instead of calling a snow day. It didn't go well\nBy **PHILIP MARCELO** and **ANNIE MA**  \nFebruary 13, 2024. 5:47 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - When New York City officials got wind of the major winter storm headed their way, they rewound the clock four years, reopened their coronavirus pandemic playbook, and announced that instead of canceling school, teachers and students would once again meet online. No snow day.\n\nMayor Eric Adams said it was important to give children enrolled in the nation's largest school system stability considering the massive upheaval to education the pandemic had caused throughout the country. Some school districts in other states have done the same since adopting the technology essential in 2020 to make virtual school days possible.\n\nUnfortunately for Adams, the plan didn't go so well: Many students, teachers and administrators were unable to log in to their accounts - a problem that city officials blamed on a technology contractor.\n\nNaveed Hasan, a Manhattan resident, said he struggled to get his 4-year-old daughter logged on because of the district's technical issues even though his 9-year-old son was able to gain access. He hoped to take both out for sledding later in the day.\n\n\"It honestly worked out for the best,\" Hasan said. \"I'd rather not have the youngest on a device all day anyways.\"\n\nSchools nationwide shuttered classrooms for the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, and some did not reopen fully for more than a year. Some children barely logged on, and many struggled with the social isolation.\n\nThe months spent with online education were marked by widespread learning losses. Young students often struggled with the technology, and some parents said online learning was a factor in their decision to delay enrolling their kids.\n\nIn a November 2020 survey conducted by the EdWeek Research Center, 39% of district leaders said they had converted snow days to remote learning. Another 32% said they would consider the change. But in recent years, some districts, including Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, have reverted to prepandemic snow day policies. School systems in Boston and Hartford, Connecticut, among many others, closed in response to Tuesday's storm.\n\nConnecticut does not allow remote learning on a snow day to count toward the minimum 180 learning days in the school calendar. The state weighed factors such as the challenges of setting up remote classrooms on short notice, and local officials also reported that parents and students wanted traditional snow days, said Irene Parizi, chief academic officer for the state Department of Education.\n\n\"Let them have their snow day and go sledding and have their hot chocolate and things like that,\" Parizi said.\n\nWith schools closed in Columbia, Connecticut, Susan Smith spent the day at home with her three children, ages 14, 11 and 8. She said she likes traditional snow days, but would also like to see remote learning on some bad weather days.\n\n\"I still remember being a kid and really looking forward to snow days, so I don't want to completely wipe that off the map with remote learning,\" Smith said.\n\nAdams defended the decision to have NYC schools operate virtually.\n\n\"Using this as a teaching moment to have our children learn how to continue the expansion of remote learning is so important,\" the mayor said in an interview on WPIX-TV Monday evening. \"We fell back in education because of COVID. We cannot afford our young people to miss school days.\"\n\nGina Cirrito, a parent on Manhattan's Lower East Side, said she appreciated the structure the remote classes provided for her three sons, even if Tuesday morning was a bit of rough sledding in her household.\n\n\"I know people around the country get really frustrated with the idea of these remote days and not just letting the kids have a day,\" she said. \"But I don't think the teachers are asking above and beyond and to be honest, they're so far behind. If there's a way to keep their (students') brains a little engaged, I'm all for it.\"\n\nCirrito said the family had to work through some early morning logistics, including making sure everyone had a functioning computer and a quiet spot in the apartment to work - only to run into the district's login issues.\n\nBy about 9:15 a.m. her sons - ages 10, 13 and 17 - had settled into the day's routine.\n\n\"For the kids, it's like riding a bike. Like, 'Here we go again,'\" Cirrito said.\n\nNew York City officials did not say how many students were prevented from accessing online classes but they blamed the problem on their technology contractor, IBM. While both teachers and students recently participated in simulations to prepare for remote instruction, IBM was not involved in those walk-throughs, officials said at a news conference.\n\n\"IBM was not ready for prime time. That's what happened here,\" said New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks.\n\nIn a statement, IBM said it had been \"working closely with New York City schools to address this situation as quickly as possible.\"\n\n\"The issues have been largely resolved, and we regret the inconvenience to students and parents across the city,\" the statement read.\n\nThe morning technical glitches only added to the stress for teachers already scrambling to pivot lessons and assignments to remote work, said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, which represents roughly 200,000 NYC public schools teachers and staff.\n\nBut Mulgrew said educators anticipated trouble after their experience with distance learning during the pandemic. He noted that by 12:30 p.m., 900,000 students and teachers were utilizing the district's remote learning system - a testament, he said, to how teachers were able to keep their classes engaged despite the morning challenges.\n\n\"It's also a good lesson for students,\" he said. \"This is what happens when things go wrong. You don't get frustrated or angry. You got to figure it out.\"\n\nMulgrew added that this year's school calendar only allows for one or so snow days, \"so you want to save that, just in case.\"\n\nStill, Hasan, a software developer, wondered whether students and teachers alike would have been better served with a snow day, even as he acknowledged Tuesday's accumulations in the city might not have warranted it in a bygone era.\n\n\"It's like a mental health day for kids to just go and play,\" he said. \"It's already enough of a challenge for parents to figure out how they are going to do their work.\""}
{"text": "# An Oregon resident was diagnosed with the plague. Here are a few things to know about the illness\nBy **REBECCA BOONE**  \nFebruary 13, 2024. 6:23 PM EST\n\n---\n\nOfficials in central Oregon this week reported a case of bubonic plague in a resident who likely got the disease from a sick pet cat.\n\nThe infected resident and the resident's close contacts have all been provided medication, public health officials say, and people in the community are not believed to be at risk. The cat was also treated but did not survive.\n\nPlague isn't common, but it also isn't unheard of in the western United States, where a handful of cases occur every year. It's different from Alaskapox, a rare, recently discovered disease that killed a man in Alaska last month.\n\nHere are a few things to know about what the plague is, who is at risk and how a disease that was once a harbinger of death became a treatable illness.\n\n## What is plague?\nPlague is an infectious disease that can affect mammals. It's caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which is carried by rodents and fleas. Sunlight and drying can kill plague bacteria on surfaces, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Humans and pets suspected to be sick with plague are typically treated with antibiotics, and sometimes with other medical measures.\n\nPlague symptoms can manifest in a few ways. Bubonic plague - the kind contracted by the Oregon resident - happens when the plague bacteria gets into the lymph nodes. It can cause fever, headache, weakness and painful, swollen lymph nodes. It usually happens from the bite of an infected flea, according to the CDC.\n\nSepticemic plague symptoms happen if the bacteria gets into the bloodstream. It can occur initially or after bubonic plague goes untreated. This form of plague causes the same fever, chills and weakness, as well as abdominal pain, shock and sometimes other symptoms like bleeding into the skin and blackened fingers, toes or the nose. The CDC says this form comes from flea bites or from handling an infected animal.\n\nPneumonic plague is the most serious form of the disease, and it occurs when the bacteria gets into the lungs. Pneumonic plague adds rapidly developing pneumonia to the list of plague symptoms. It is the only form of plague that can be spread from person to person by inhaling infectious droplets.\n\nAll forms of plague are treatable with common antibiotics, and people who seek treatment early have a better chance of a full recovery, according to the CDC.\n\n## Am I at risk of plague?\nIn the U.S., an average of 7 cases of human plague is reported each year, according to the CDC, and about 80% of them are the bubonic form of the disease. Most of those cases were in the rural western and southwestern U.S.\n\nA welder in central Oregon contracted it in 2012 when he pulled a rodent out of his choking cat's mouth in 2012 - he survived but lost his fingertips and toes to the disease. A Colorado teen contracted a fatal case while hunting in 2015, and Colorado officials confirmed at least two cases last year - one of them fatal.\n\nWorldwide, most human cases of plague in recent decades have occurred in people living in rural towns and villages in Africa, particularly in Madagascar and Congo, according to the Cleveland Clinic.\n\nPeople can reduce the risk of plague by keeping their homes and outdoor living areas less inviting for rodents by clearing brush and junk piles and keeping pet food inaccessible. Ground squirrels, chipmunks and wood rats can carry plague as well as other rodents, and so people with bird and squirrel feeders may want to consider the risks if they live in areas with a plague outbreak.\n\nThe CDC says repellent with DEET can also help protect people from rodent fleas when camping or working outdoors.\n\nFlea control products can help keep fleas from infecting household pets. If a pet gets sick, they should be taken to a vet as soon as possible, according to the CDC.\n\n## Isn't plague from the Middle Ages?\nThe Black Death in the 14th century was perhaps the most infamous plague epidemic, killing up to half of the population as it spread through Europe, the Middle East and northern Africa. It began devastating communities in the Middle East and Europe between 1347 and 1351, and significant outbreaks continued for roughly the next 400 years.\n\nAn earlier major plague pandemic, dubbed the Justinian plague, started in Rome around 541 and continued to erupt for the next couple hundred years.\n\nThe third major plague pandemic started in the Yunnan region of China in the mid-1800s and spread along trade routes, arriving in Hong Kong and Bombay about 40 years later. It eventually reached every continent except Antarctica, according to the Cleveland Clinic, and is estimated to have killed roughly 12 million people in China and India alone.\n\nIn the late 1800s, an effective treatment with an antiserum was developed. That treatment was later replaced by even more effective antibiotics a few decades later.\n\nThough plague remains a serious illness, antibiotic and supportive therapy is effective for even the most dangerous pneumonic form when patients are treated in time, according to the World Health Organization."}
{"text": "# Reluctant pastor's son to most-viewed preacher: Shooting puts new spotlight on Joel Osteen\nBy **BEN FINLEY**  \nFebruary 12, 2024. 8:05 PM EST\n\n---\n\nJoel Osteen is one of the most familiar faces in American religion.\n\nThe pastor who leads the Houston megachurch where a 5-year-old boy was critically wounded in a Sunday shooting that also hit a man in the hip - before the shooter was killed by off-duty police working security - is known for his megawatt smile, wavy hair and widely popular brand of Christianity.\n\nThe 60-year-old regularly preaches to about 45,000 people a week in a former basketball arena and he's known to millions more through his television sermons.\n\nOsteen inherited his calling from his father and increased the size of the congregation almost five-fold. His book, \"Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living Your Full Potential\" sold nearly 3 million copies. In the mid-2000s, Osteen was viewed by more people than any preacher in the United States, reaching 95 percent of all households, according to Nielsen Media Research.\n\nHis services over the years have drawn an almost equal mix of whites, Blacks and Hispanics - a diversity not seen in most churches across the nation.\n\nNicknamed the \"smiling preacher,\" Osteen told The Associated Press in 2004 that his message of hope and encouragement \"resonates with people.\"\n\nBut his laid-back preaching style has also drawn criticism for focusing on feel-good messaging over fiery sermons.\n\nOsteen follows a thread of evangelical Christianity called the Prosperity Gospel, which believes that following God brings rewards to followers who devote themselves to him, said Mark Ward Sr., a professor of communication at the University of Houston-Victoria who writes about evangelical mass media.\n\n\"Essentially, God wants to bless you. And if you have enough faith, he will,\" Ward told The Associated Press on Monday. \"You can prosper. And you can live your best life now. And that is a very appealing message to both white and Black evangelical audiences.\"\n\nAuthorities said the critically injured boy is the son of shooter Genesse Ivonne Moreno, 36, who authorities said had a history of mental illness, including being placed under emergency detention in 2016.\n\nThe weekend shooting at Joel Osteen's megachurch in Houston is not the first time gunfire has caused panic and tragedy at a Texas house of worship.\n\nOsteen told his 10 million followers on X, the social media platform, that his church community was \"devastated.\"\n\n\"In the face of such darkness, we must hold onto our faith and remember evil will not prevail,\" Osteen stated. \"God will guide us through the darkest of times. Together, we will rise above this tragedy and stand firm in our commitment to love and support one another.\"\n\nDecades before Sunday's shooting, Osteen said he never dreamed he would be a preacher and never imagined leading a flock so large.\n\nOsteen had never preached - and never had the desire, he has said - until the Sunday before his father died in 1999. John Osteen had founded the charismatic Christian Lakewood Church in an abandoned feed store in 1959.\n\nOsteen told The Associated Press in 2004 that as his father's church grew he preferred to be behind the scenes. He had left his studies at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla., in 1982 and joined his father's staff as a television producer.\n\nWhen the elder Osteen was hospitalized, the preacher's son reluctantly stepped to the pulpit. His dad listened to the sermon by telephone from his hospital bed.\n\n\"The nurses said they'd never seen him so happy, so proud,\" Osteen recalled in 2004. John Osteen died five days later, and his son \"just knew it down on the inside\" that God wanted him to preach.\n\nCritics have taken Osteen to task for downplaying the sinful nature of humanity and the need for repentance. But Osteen's mother, Dodie Osteen, told the AP in 2005: \"We don't preach the gospel sad, we preach it glad.\"\n\n\"To me, it's cotton-candy theology,\" Ole Anthony, president of Trinity, a Dallas-based religious watchdog group told the AP in 2004. \"There's no meat. They just make everybody feel good.\"\n\nOsteen is \"quite sincere,\" said William Martin, a professor of religion and public policy at Rice University who lives near the Houston church.\n\nHe said Osteen often opens his sermons with a joke and doesn't shout at his congregants.\n\n\"He's upbeat. Doesn't claim to be theologically or philosophically deep,\" Martin said.\n\nOsteen's father expanded Lakewood's already huge congregation at the perfect time: The American media landscape was rapidly changing with the rise of the internet and the deregulation of broadcast media, said Ward, the University of Houston-Victoria professor.\n\nTelevision preachers receiving a large number of donations from their congregations could buy airtime on large cable networks such as the Trinity Broadcasting Network instead of making a hodgepodge of deals with \"mom-and-pop\" TV stations.\n\n\"In order to be able to raise that kind of money, you have to have a message that is broadly appealing,\" Ward said. \"And so we have televangelists like Joel Osteen or T.D. Jakes, who have a broadly popular message.\"\n\nOsteen is not overtly political and megachurches like his provide a different experience than many others, Ward said.\n\n\"You get a feeling of transcendence that's not through vestments and creeds and organ playing but essentially multimedia,\" Ward said. \"The lights go down. You've got large screens with videos. You've got a praise band that's playing at rock-concert decibels.\"\n\nWard added: \"People who are watching are getting a sense of the transcendent through the televised spectacle.\"\n\nOsteen's leads his flock in the former home of the Houston Rockets, where they won two NBA titles in the 1990s and the Houston Comets of the WNBA when they won four.\n\nIt was also the site of Osteen's first date with his future bride, Victoria, when they went out to watch a Houston Rockets basketball game.\n\nTurning the former arena into a church took 15 months and about $75 million to complete. When it opened in 2005, it featured two waterfalls, three gargantuan television screens and a lighting system that rivals those found at rock concerts.\n\nTwo choir lofts with 12 rows of rich purple pews sat between the waterfalls, accented by live foliage.\n\nAbsent, however, was a cross, an image of God or Jesus Christ or any other traditional religious symbols. Osteen told the AP in 2005 that his father never displayed such symbols and he simply continued the tradition. Osteen speaks in front of a large golden-colored globe that rotates slowly.\n\nAlong with classrooms, the addition includes a chapel, a baptismal area, meeting space for young adults and an entire floor dedicated to the church's television broadcast efforts.\n\nOsteen told the AP in 2004 that he was providing something that people wanted.\n\n\"It's sort of like to me it's a good restaurant - if you've got good food, people will come,\" he said. \"So we know we've got to make our services good. They've got to uplift people. They've got to walk away saying, 'You know what, I feel better today.'\""}
{"text": "# What to know about a shooting at Joel Osteen's megachurch\nBy **JUAN A. LOZANO**  \nFebruary 12, 2024. 6:57 PM EST\n\n---\n\nHOUSTON (AP) - A shooter's motive for opening fire in celebrity pastor Joel Osteen's megachurch remained unclear Monday as authorities searched the suspect's home in suburban Houston and identified the weapon used in the attack as an AR-style rifle.\n\nThe house in Conroe, Texas, is more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of Lakewood Church, where Sunday's shooting in between busy services sent worshippers scrambling to find safety.\n\nThe shooter was identified as 36-year-old Genesse Ivonne Moreno, according to police. Police say Moreno was shot and killed by two off-duty officers working security at the church, one of the largest megachurches in the U.S.\n\nTwo other people were shot and wounded, including the shooter's young son, who entered the church with Moreno.\n\nHere's what to know about the shooting:\n\n## HOW DID THE SHOOTING UNFOLD?\nThe sound of gunshots inside the massive church, which was formerly the home of the NBA's Houston Rockets, startled worshippers just before 2 p.m. Sunday, around the time many people were getting ready to watch the Super Bowl later.\n\nHouston police Chief Troy Finner said Moreno entered the church wearing a trenchcoat and backpack and armed with a long rifle. Moreno began shooting and was confronted by two off-duty officers, a Houston police officer and an agent with the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission, who returned fire.\n\n\"They held their ground in the face of rifle fire at point blank range,\" said Kevin Lilly, chairman of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission.\n\nBefore being shot and killed, the suspect told officers that they had a bomb and were carrying \"a yellow in color rope and substances consistent with the manufacture of explosive devices, which appeared to be a detonation cord,\" according to the search warrant affidavit. Authorities said Monday that no explosives or hazardous material were found at the scene.\n\n## WHO ARE THE VICTIMS?\nMoreno's son, whom authorities described as a 7-year-old, was shot in the head and remained in critical condition Monday. The boy was initially described Sunday as a 5-year-old.\n\nIt remained unclear how the boy, who was taken to a Houston children's hospital, was struck by gunfire. Finner said he did not want to speculate but added: \"That suspect put that baby in danger.\"\n\nAuthorities described the other victim as a man in his 50s who was wounded in his hip.\n\n## WHAT IS KNOWN ABOUT THE SHOOTER?\nAuthorities said Moreno had a history of mental illness, including being placed under emergency detention in 2016, but provided no other details.\n\nHouston Police Commander Chris Hassig said Moreno sometimes used both male and female aliases, but he said investigators determined through interviews and past police reports that Moreno identified as female. Authorities said investigators were looking into a dispute involving Moreno and the family of Moreno's ex-husband.\n\nPolice said Moreno legally purchased in December the AR-15 style rifle that was used in the shooting. Moreno was also carrying a .22-caliber rifle.\n\nInvestigators also found antisemitic writings by the shooter, and Hassig noted Moreno's rifle had a \"Palestine\" sticker on the buttstock. He described Moreno as a \"lone wolf\" who was not acting as any part of a larger group.\n\n## HOW DID WORSHIPPERS INSIDE REACT?\nAlan Guity, whose family is from Honduras, has been a member of the church since 1998. He said he heard gunshots while resting inside the church's sanctuary as his mother was working as an usher.\n\n\"Boom, boom, boom, boom. And I yelled, 'Mom,'\" he said.\n\nGuity, 35, said he ran to his mother and they both lay flat on the floor as the gunfire continued. Guity said he and his mother prayed and stayed on the floor for about five minutes until someone told them it was safe to leave the building. As he was led outside, Guity could see people were crying and looking for loved ones.\n\n## WHO IS JOEL OSTEEN?\nOsteen, 60, took the helm of Lakewood Church after John Osteen, his father and the church's founding pastor, passed away in 1999. The church has grown dramatically under Joel Osteen and is regularly attended by 45,000 people weekly, making it the third-largest megachurch in the U.S., according to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.\n\nOsteen is a leader of what is known as the prosperity gospel, a belief that God wants his followers to be wealthy and healthy. He is the author of several best-selling books, including, \"Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential.\"\n\nHis televised services reach about 100 countries and renovating his church's arena cost nearly $100 million.\n\nAfter Hurricane Harvey flooded Houston in 2017, Osteen opened his church to those seeking shelter after social media critics slammed the televangelist for not offering to house people in need."}
{"text": "# Shooter entered Texas megachurch with young son and used AR-style rifle in the attack, police say\nBy **JUAN LOZANO**, **ACACIA CORONADO**, and **JIM VERTUNO**  \nFebruary 13, 2024. 10:04 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**HOUSTON (AP)** - The shooter at a Texas megachurch had a history of mental illness and brought their young son to the attack that was carried out using an AR-style rifle and ended in an exchange of gunfire with two off-duty officers, authorities said Monday.\n\nHouston police identified the shooter as Genesse Ivonne Moreno, 36, who they say wore a trenchcoat and carried a backpack Sunday upon entering Lakewood Church, which is led by the pastor Joel Osteen. Moreno used both male and female aliases, but investigators who looked at past police reports found that Moreno identified as female, Houston Police Commander Chris Hassig said.\n\nThe attack happened between services at the Houston megachurch - in a former NBA arena - and sent worshippers scrambling for safety.\n\nDuring the shooting, Moreno's 7-year-old son was shot in the head and remained in critical condition Monday, authorities said. Moreno, who was killed by the officers, was not a known member of Osteen's congregation, said church spokesman Don Iloff.\n\nPolice and FBI investigators said they had not established a motive for the shooting but were looking into a dispute involving Moreno and the family of Moreno's ex-husband. Hassig and others said Moreno had a history of mental illness, including being placed under emergency detention in 2016, but provided no additional details.\n\n## THE SHOOTER AND THE GUN PURCHASE\nInvestigators found antisemitic writings by the shooter, Hassig said, noting Moreno's former in-laws are Jewish. The rifle also had a \"Palestine\" sticker on the buttstock. Hassig described Moreno as a \"lone wolf\" who acted alone.\n\nPolice searched Moreno's residence in Conroe, a city more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of the church. Court records show that Moreno had prior arrests and was involved in a divorce and child custody battle in 2022, in which Moreno's ex-mother-in-law indicated she had sought advice from pastoral staff at Lakewood.\n\nThe court documents do not indicate which staff the woman contacted. Iloff said he had not found anyone familiar with the contact described in the legal filings.\n\nMoreno appeared to have legally purchased the rifle used in the attack in December, and investigators were looking into how Moreno obtained it, officials said. Moreno also carried a .22 caliber rifle into the church, police said.\n\n## DETAILS OF THE SHOOTING\nInvestigators said Moreno and the boy entered the church building shortly before the 2 p.m. Spanish service after Moreno pointed a gun at an unarmed security guard.\n\nMoreno began firing once inside, and the guards inside the building - off-duty Houston police officer Christopher Moreno and Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission Agent Adrian Herrera - returned fire and killed the shooter, investigators said. Christopher Moreno is not related to Genesse Moreno, Houston Police Chief Troy Finner said.\n\nAll the gunfire took place in a church hallway, and none of the violence spilled into the main sanctuary, Hassig said, describing the confrontation as a \"gun battle\" that lasted several minutes.\n\n\"They held their ground in the face of rifle fire at point blank range,\" Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission Chairman Kevin Lilly said of the security guards. \"They were a wall that existed between worshippers and terror.\"\n\nBoth officers fired their weapons, but investigators do not yet know if Moreno's son was accidentally shot by one of them, Finner said. Police said a 57-year-old man who was shot in the hip was discharged from the hospital.\n\nFinner said the shooter told officers after being shot that there was a bomb, but a search found no explosives.\n\n## THE SHOOTER'S RECORD\nRecords in Harris County, where Houston is located, showed that Moreno, under the names Jeffery Escalante-Moreno or Jeffery Escalante, was charged in six criminal cases from 2005 to 2011.\n\nThe charges ranged from forging a $100 bill, to stealing socks, hats and makeup, to assault for kicking a detention officer. The August 2009 assault conviction sent Moreno to jail for 180 days.\n\nIn a rambling 2022 application for a protective order against Moreno's ex-mother-in-law that Moreno wrote without help from an attorney, Moreno complained of being threatened and followed and claimed to have had received text messages from FBI Director Christopher Wray.\n\nIn a separate court filing seeking to be named conservator of Moreno's son, the ex-mother-in-law alleged that Moreno was mentally ill and that the child was being neglected and abused.\n\nTelephone messages seeking comment from members of Moreno's family were not returned Monday.\n\n## THE CHURCH\nLakewood is regularly attended by 45,000 people weekly, making it the third-largest megachurch in the U.S., according to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.\n\nOsteen said the violence could have been worse if the shooting had happened during the earlier and larger late Sunday morning service. Iloff said Osteen was inside the church but was on the first floor during the shooting, which happened on the second floor.\n\nThe gunfire terrified worshippers.\n\nAlan Guity has been a member of the church since 1998. He said he heard gunshots while resting inside the church's sanctuary as his mother was working as an usher.\n\n\"Boom, boom, boom, boom. And I yelled, 'Mom!'\" he said. Guity, 35, said he ran to his mother and they both laid flat on the floor as the gunfire continued.\n\nOsteen, 60, took the helm of Lakewood Church after John Osteen - his father and the church's founding pastor - passed away in 1999. The church has grown dramatically under his leadership.\n\nOsteen is a leading promoter of what is known as the prosperity gospel, a belief that God wants his followers to be wealthy and healthy. He is the author of several best-selling books, including \"Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential.\"\n\nHis televised services reach about 100 countries, and renovating his church's arena cost nearly $100 million."}
{"text": "# Woman killed after she opened fire in Joel Osteen's megachurch, boy with her shot, hospitalized\nBy **JUAN A. LOZANO**  \nFebruary 12, 2024. 1:04 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**HOUSTON (AP)** - A woman in a trenchcoat opened fire with a long gun Sunday inside celebrity pastor Joel Osteen's megachurch in Texas, sending worshippers rushing to find safety while two off-duty officers confronted and killed the shooter. Two other people were shot and injured, including a 5-year-old boy who was in critical condition.\n\nThe violence erupted shortly before the Houston church's 2 p.m. Spanish service was set to begin, just as the rest of the country was preparing for the Super Bowl. The woman entered the enormous Lakewood Church – a building with a 16,000-person capacity that was previously an arena for the NBA's Houston Rockets -- with the boy who was later hurt in the shootout with police. A man in his 50s was also wounded.\n\nDetails of the confrontation remain unclear in the hours after the tragedy, and police have not released the woman's identity or a possible motive. It's also unknown what relationship, if any, the woman had to the boy, and who actually shot him and the man.\n\n\"I will say this,\" Houston Police Chief Troy Finner told reporters during a news conference outside the church. \"That female, that suspect, put that baby in danger. I'm going to put that blame on her.\"\n\nThe boy was in critical condition at a children's hospital, while the man was stable at a different hospital with a hip wound.\n\nThe shooting happened between services at the megachurch that is regularly attended by 45,000 people every week, making it the third-largest megachurch in the U.S., according to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. Osteen said the violence could have been much worse if it had happened during the earlier, larger 11 a.m. service.\n\nWitnesses told reporters that they heard multiple gunshots. Christina Rodriguez, who was inside the church, told Houston television station KTRK that she \"started screaming, 'There's a shooter, there's a shooter,' \"and then she and others ran to the backside of a library inside the building, then stood in a stairway before they were told it was safe to leave.\n\nLongtime church member Alan Guity, whose family is from Honduras, said he was resting inside the church's sanctuary before the Spanish service as his mother was working as an usher when he heard gunshots.\n\n\"Boom, boom, boom, boom and I yelled, 'Mom,' \" he told The Associated Press.\n\nThe 35-year-old ran to his mother and they both laid flat on the floor and prayed as the gunfire continued. They remained there for about five minutes until someone told them it was safe to evacuate. Outside, Guity said, he and his mother tried to calm people down by worshiping and singing in Spanish, \"Move in me, move in me. Touch my mind and my heart. Move within me Holy Spirit.\"\n\nDespite the chaos, Finner said the tragedy \"could have been a lot worse\" if the two officers had not \"engaged\" the woman when she opened fire. They had been working security at the church on Sunday, and Finner praised them for their quick actions.\n\nThe officers work for the Houston Police Department and the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission, respectively. Both have been placed on protocol-mandated administrative duty.\n\nAfter she was shot, the woman told police that she had a bomb, but authorities said no explosives were found when her vehicle and backpack were searched. First responders continued to search the megachurch for hours afterwards.\n\nOsteen said Sunday that his congregation is \"devastated.\" He added that he would pray for the victims and for the woman who did the shooting and their families. It was not clear where he was at the time of the shooting.\n\n\"We're going to stay strong and we're going to continue to, to move forward,\" he said during the news conference with police. \"There are forces of evil, but the forces that are for us -- the forces of God -- are stronger than that. So we're going to keep going strong and just, you know, doing what God's called us to do: lift people up and give hope to the world.\"\n\nTexas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statement saying \"our hearts are with those impacted by today's tragic shooting and the entire Lakewood Church community in Houston. Places of worship are sacred.\"\n\nThe church has grown tremendously over the past 25 years since Joel Osteen took over after his father's death in 1999 and introduced an upbeat style of Christian televangelism that has captured a following of millions. His televised sermons reach about 100 countries. The elder Osteen founded the church in a converted feed store in 1959."}
{"text": "# Feel the need for speed? Late president's 75-mph speedboat is up for auction\nFebruary 12, 2024. 3:25 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine (AP)** - It seems former President George H.W. Bush felt the need for speed in the waters off Maine, where he kept a nearly 1,000 horsepower speedboat. And for the right price, someone else can experience its excitement.\n\nThe vessel is set to go up for auction on Thursday during the 2024 Presidential Salute auction in Houston, said Hutton Higgins, a spokesperson for the George & Barbara Bush Foundation.\n\nProceeds from selling the 38-foot (11.5-meter) speedboat \"Fidelity V\" will be used to expand offerings at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library & Museum and The Bush School of Government & Public Service at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.\n\nBush purchased the 2011-model Fountain 38CC after both he and his son, former President George W. Bush, had left office.\n\nThe watercraft is emblazoned with a presidential seal and boasts three Mercury outboard engines that can propel the vessel to 75 mph (120 kph). The boat was used in the North Atlantic waters off Kennebunkport, where the Texas family has a summer retreat on the Maine coast.\n\nIt's the fifth of George H.W. Bush's speedboats to bear the name Fidelity. The first is on display at the Bush library and museum, and the fourth is still in use in Kennebunkport, Higgins said."}
{"text": "# Flowers, chocolates and flash mobs: Valentine's Day celebrations around the world\nBy **THE ASSOCIATED PRESS**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 5:33 PM EST\n\n---\n\nFlowers, chocolates, handwritten cards - and flash mobs.\n\nPeople around the world expressed their love in myriad ways on Valentine's Day: hanging hundreds of paper hearts in the streets to honor a recently deceased \"Valentine's Day Bandit\" in Portland, Maine; vowing to cherish and obey democracy by casting votes in Valentine's Day-themed polling stations in Indonesia; and donning heart-shaped sunglasses at a victory rally for the Super Bowl-winning Kansas City Chiefs.\n\nImages captured by Associated Press photographers around the globe Wednesday showed love is a many-faceted emotion, employed not just to root for long-lasting romances but to fight for justice and counteract anger and hatred.\n\nIn Rome, activists wearing matching red-and-black T-shirts reading \"One Billion Rising\" created a flash mob at the famed Spanish Steps to call for an end to violence against women and girls. In Kenya's capital of Nairobi, women held candles and flowers during a \"Dark Valentine\" vigil to protest the deaths of at least 16 women police believe were killed by their partners this year.\n\nIn Washington, D.C., where the vitriol of politics usually reigns, giant fake candy hearts reading \"keep the faith,\" \"reach out\" and \"be kind\" sprouted from the White House Lawn, and pink-and-red paper valentine's greetings covered the walls of the East Landing. One enormous card from President Joe Biden's first lady read, \"Happy Valentine's Day 2024. Xoxo Jill.\"\n\nFor many, love means having a sense of humor, whether it's gathering to celebrate being \"married for one day\" and mounting life-size kissing skeletons at a \"'Til Death Do Us Part\" installation in Bucharest, Romania, or carving a dozen hearts and scrawling the message \"I love my wife\" in the dirt covering the back of a van after a nor'easter in Halifax, Nova Scotia.\n\nTradition also had its place. Couples embraced in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, viewed by many as the City of Love; posed for a selfie in front of a hotel in St. Petersburg, Russia, where windows were lit to form a heart; or bought heart-shaped balloons from vendors next to the Bosphorus in Istanbul.\n\nIn the ultimate gesture of Valentine's Day, Justin Shady proposed to his girlfriend, Nicolette Miller, with a giant, lit-up billboard during a Love in Times Square event in New York. She said \"yes,\" and amid floating streamers and clouds of confetti, the couple sealed the deal with a kiss."}
{"text": "# Black Catholic nuns: A compelling, long-overlooked history\nBy **DAVID CRARY**  \nApril 30, 2022. 12:46 PM EST\n\n---\n\nEven as a young adult, Shannen Dee Williams – who grew up Black and Catholic in Memphis, Tennessee – knew of only one Black nun, and a fake one at that: Sister Mary Clarence, as played by Whoopi Goldberg in the comic film \"Sister Act.\"\n\nAfter 14 years of tenacious research, Williams – a history professor at the University of Dayton -- arguably now knows more about America's Black nuns than anyone in the world. Her comprehensive and compelling history of them, \"Subversive Habits,\" will be published May 17.\n\nWilliams found that many Black nuns were modest about their achievements and reticent about sharing details of bad experiences, such as encountering racism and discrimination. Some acknowledged wrenching events only after Williams confronted them with details gleaned from other sources.\n\n\"For me, it was about recognizing the ways in which trauma silences people in ways they may not even be aware of,\" she said.\n\nThe story is told chronologically, yet always in the context of a theme Williams forcefully outlines in her preface: that the nearly 200-year history of these nuns in the U.S. has been overlooked or suppressed by those who resented or disrespected them.\n\n\"For far too long, scholars of the American, Catholic, and Black pasts have unconsciously or consciously declared -- by virtue of misrepresentation, marginalization, and outright erasure -- that the history of Black Catholic nuns does not matter,\" Williams writes, depicting her book as proof that their history \"has always mattered.\"\n\nThe book arrives as numerous American institutions, including religious groups, grapple with their racist pasts and shine a spotlight on their communities' overlooked Black pioneers.\n\nWilliams begins her narrative in the pre-Civil War era when some Black women – even in slave-holding states – found their way into Catholic sisterhood. Some entered previously whites-only orders, often in subservient roles, while a few trailblazing women succeeded in forming orders for Black nuns in Baltimore and New Orleans.\n\nEven as the number of American nuns – of all races – shrinks relentlessly, that Baltimore order founded in 1829 remains intact, continuing its mission to educate Black youths. Some current members of the Oblate Sisters of Providence help run Saint Frances Academy, a high school serving low-income Black neighborhoods.\n\nSome of the most detailed passages in \"Subversive Habits\" recount the Jim Crow era, extending from the 1870s through the 1950s, when Black nuns were not spared from the segregation and discrimination endured by many other African Americans.\n\nIn the 1960s, Williams writes, Black nuns were often discouraged or blocked by their white superiors from engaging in the civil rights struggle.\n\nYet one of them, Sister Mary Antona Ebo, was on the front lines of marchers who gathered in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 in support of Black voting rights and in protest of the violence of Bloody Sunday when white state troopers brutally dispersed peaceful Black demonstrators. An Associated Press photo of Ebo and other nuns in the march on March 10 - three days after Bloody Sunday - ran on the front pages of many newspapers.\n\nDuring two decades before Selma, Ebo faced repeated struggles to break down racial barriers. At one point she was denied admittance to Catholic nursing schools because of her race, and later endured segregation policies at the white-led order of sisters she joined in St. Louis in 1946, according to Williams.\n\nThe idea for \"Subversive Habits\" took shape in 2007, when Williams – then a graduate student at Rutgers University – was desperately seeking a compelling topic for a paper due in a seminar on African American history.\n\nAt the library, she searched through microfilm editions of Black-owned newspapers and came across a 1968 article in the Pittsburgh Courier about a group of Catholic nuns forming the National Black Sisters' Conference.\n\nThe accompanying photo, of four smiling Black nuns, \"literally stopped me in my tracks,\" she said. \"I was raised Catholic ... How did I not know that Black nuns existed?\"\n\nMesmerized by her discovery, she began devouring \"everything I could that had been published about Black Catholic history,\" while setting out to interview the founding members of the National Black Sisters' Conference.\n\nAmong the women Williams interviewed extensively was Patricia Grey, who was a nun in the Sisters of Mercy and a founder of the NBSC before leaving religious life in 1974.\n\nGrey shared with The Associated Press some painful memories from 1960, when – as an aspiring nurse – she was rejected for membership in a Catholic order because she was Black.\n\n\"I was so hurt and disappointed, I couldn't believe it,\" she said about reading that rejection letter. \"I remember crumbling it up and I didn't even want to look at it again or think about it again.\"\n\nGrey initially was reluctant to assist with \"Subversive Habits,\" but eventually shared her own story and her personal archives after urging Williams to write about \"the mostly unsung and under-researched history\" of America's Black nuns.\n\n\"If you can, try to tell all of our stories,\" Grey told her.\n\nWilliams set out to do just that – scouring overlooked archives, previously sealed church records and out-of-print books, while conducting more than 100 interviews.\n\n\"I bore witness to a profoundly unfamiliar history that disrupts and revises much of what has been said and written about the U.S. Catholic Church and the place of Black people within it,\" Williams writes. \"Because it is impossible to narrate Black sisters' journey in the United States -- accurately and honestly -- without confronting the Church's largely unacknowledged and unreconciled histories of colonialism, slavery, and segregation.\"\n\nHistorians have been unable to identify the nation's first Black Catholic nun, but Williams recounts some of the earliest moves to bring Black women into Catholic religious orders – in some cases on the expectation they would function as servants.\n\nOne of the oldest Black sisterhoods, the Sisters of the Holy Family, formed in New Orleans in 1842 because white sisterhoods in Louisiana, including the slave-holding Ursuline order, refused to accept African Americans.\n\nThe principal founder of that New Orleans order - Henriette Delille - and Oblate Sisters of Providence founder Mary Lange are among three Black nuns from the U.S. designated by Catholic officials as worthy of consideration for sainthood. The other is Sister Thea Bowman, a beloved educator, evangelist and singer who died in Mississippi in 1990 and is buried in Williams's hometown of Memphis.\n\nResearching less prominent nuns, Williams faced many challenges – for example tracking down Catholic sisters who were known to their contemporaries by their religious names but were listed in archives by their secular names.\n\nAmong the many pioneers is Sister Cora Marie Billings, who as a 17-year-old in 1956 became the first Black person admitted into the Sisters of Mercy in Philadelphia. Later, she was the first Black nun to teach in a Catholic high school in Philadelphia and was a co-founder of the National Black Sisters' Conference.\n\nIn 1990, Billings became the first Black woman in the U.S. to manage a Catholic parish when she was named pastoral coordinator for St. Elizabeth Catholic Church in Richmond, Virginia.\n\n\"I've gone through many situations of racism and oppression throughout my life,\" Billings told The Associated Press. \"But somehow or other, I've just dealt with it and then kept on going.\"\n\nAccording to recent figures from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, there are about 400 African American religious sisters, out of a total of roughly 40,000 nuns.\n\nThat overall figure is only one-fourth of the 160,000 nuns in 1970, according to statistics compiled by Catholic researchers at Georgetown University. Whatever their races, many of the remaining nuns are elderly, and the influx of youthful novices is sparse.\n\nThe Baltimore-based Oblate Sisters of Providence used to have more than 300 members, according to its superior general, Sister Rita Michelle Proctor, and now has less than 50 – most of them living at the motherhouse in Baltimore's outskirts.\n\n\"Though we're small, we are still about serving God and God's people.\" Proctor said. \"Most of us are elderly, but we still want to do so for as long as God is calling us to.\"\n\nEven with diminished ranks, the Oblate Sisters continue to operate Saint Frances Academy – founded in Baltimore by Mary Lange in 1828. The coed school is the country's oldest continually operating Black Catholic educational facility, with a mission prioritizing help for \"the poor and the neglected.\"\n\nWilliams, in an interview with the AP, said she was considering leaving the Catholic church – due partly to its handling of racial issues – at the time she started researching Black nuns. Hearing their histories, in their own voices, revitalized her faith, she said.\n\n\"As these women were telling me their stories, they were also preaching to me in a such a beautiful way,\" Williams said. \"It wasn't done in a way that reflected any anger -- they had already made their peace with it, despite the unholy discrimination they had faced.\"\n\nWhat keeps her in the church now, Williams said, is a commitment to these women who chose to share their stories.\n\n\"It took a lot for them to get it out,\" she said. \"I remain in awe of these women, of their faithfulness.\""}
{"text": "# Voices from the violent civil rights era see attacks on voting rights as part of ongoing struggle\nBy **Gary Fields**  \nJune 8, 2023. 12:05 PM EST\n\n---\n\nThey are part of a small, vanishing group who lived at the epicenter of the struggle for voting rights six decades ago, an era driven by segregation, violence and the yearning for equality that eventually led to laws bringing the U.S. closer to its promise of democracy for all its citizens.\n\nThey reflect on the times and their struggles, and why they are certain it all was worth it. On Thursday, a majority of the Supreme Court seemed to reinforce that view by siding with Black voters in a congressional redistricting case from Alabama.\n\nTen years ago this month, the court halted what many consider the heart of that landmark law - the ability of the Justice Department to enforce it in states and counties with a history of voter suppression.\n\nThe stories from those on the front lines of history recount tragedy, racism, oppression and ultimately hope in seeing a president sign into law a measure designed to ensure equal access to the ballot and fair representation in the halls of political power - from city councils to statehouses to Congress.\n\nStephen Schwerner lost a brother, murdered in Mississippi trying to register Black people to vote. Nearly 60 years after the Voting Rights Act was signed, he remains immensely proud of his brother, Mickey Schwerner, but with a great sense of loss: \"I don't think anybody in our family has ever gotten over it.\"\n\nAndrew Young walked with Martin Luther King Jr., on the long road to equality and was with him when he died in Memphis in 1968. Seeing the continued attempts to chip away at voting rights, he knows there are more battles to be fought: \"I never thought that the United States or anybody else would be perfect, but I thought we would be constantly getting better.\"\n\nLuci Johnson was a teenager when she witnessed \"one of the most historic occasions of the 20th century\" - her father, former President Lyndon Johnson, signing the law ensuring access to the ballot for people of color. If she could convey a message to Supreme Court justices as they consider another challenge to the Voting Rights Act, it would be for them to remember \"what a privilege they all have with access to the voting booth. I would tell them to do all that they can to make liberty and justice a right for all Americans.\"\n\nJoel Finkelstein was a young lawyer helping draft the document that became the Voting Rights Act of 1965, overwhelmed to be an accidental witness at the signing and yet unaware of the measure's magnitude. He remains hopeful, even as voting rights have been eroded over the past decade: \"Somehow this country digs out of these messes with people who you never would expect would be there. Go look at 1860. We got Abraham Lincoln, a country lawyer, self-educated out of Illinois, and he became our greatest president, one of the wisest men we would ever have hold public office.\"\n\nNorman Hill moved from the protests over civil rights to the organization and political clout of the labor movement, where he helped build a groundswell for voting rights. Now in his ninth decade, Hill said the fight must continue, \"not just today, not just tomorrow but as long as we live and breathe.\"\n\nDella Simpson Maynor was a teenager who pushed herself to the front of a protest in the small town of Marion, Alabama, and was terrified when police clubbed a pastor who was kneeling to pray. Police later struck her with a club as she tried to get away, and she would hear the gunshot from a state trooper that fatally wounded a young church deacon, Jimmie Lee Jackson. His death prompted a march starting in Selma, which would lead to one of the most violent days of the Civil Rights Movement, Bloody Sunday, when police beat protesters trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge: \"Without Bloody Sunday, there would have been no voting rights. But without Jimmie Lee Jackson, there would have been no Bloody Sunday.\"\n\nTheir voices echo across the past six decades, in searing debates over race, equal treatment and what it means to be an American citizen."}
{"text": "# The first Black woman in the Mississippi Legislature now has her portrait in the state Capitol\nBy **EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS**  \nFebruary 13, 2024. 7:10 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**JACKSON, Miss. (AP)** - Former Rep. Alyce Clarke was the first Black woman elected to the Mississippi Legislature, and now she is the first Black person - and first woman - to have a portrait on display in the state Capitol.\n\nShe smiled Tuesday as fellow lawmakers, friends and supporters honored her during a ceremony to unveil the oil painting, which has a prominent spot in the room where the House Education Committee meets.\n\nClarke, an 84-year-old Democrat from Jackson, served 39 years before deciding not to seek reelection in 2023.\n\n\"Thank God, I've had more good days than I've had bad days,\" she said during a ceremony. \"And I'd just like to thank everybody who's here. I'd like to help everybody who's helped me to get here because I did nothing by myself.\"\n\nOther portraits in the Mississippi Capitol are of former governors and former House speakers, who were all white men.\n\nThe artist, Ryan Mack, said he based the portrait on a photo of Clarke from the mid-1980s.\n\n\"I'm a true believer and witness of the good she has done,\" Mack said, citing her work on education and nutrition programs.\n\nThe first Black man to win a seat in the Mississippi Legislature in the 20th century was Robert Clark, no relation, a Democrat from Ebenezer who was elected to the House in 1967. He retired in December 2003, and a state government building in downtown Jackson was named for him the following year.\n\nAlyce Clarke won a March 1985 special election, and another Black woman, Democrat Alice Harden of Jackson, won a seat in the Mississippi Senate two years later.\n\nSeveral other Black women have since been elected to Mississippi's 122-member House and 52-member Senate, but women remain a small minority in both chambers.\n\nClarke pushed early in her legislative career to establish Born Free, a drug and alcohol treatment center for pregnant women. In the 1990s, she led an effort to establish Mississippi's first drug courts, which provide supervision, drug testing and treatment services to help keep people out of prison.\n\nShe was instrumental in establishing a state lottery. Clarke filed lottery bills for 19 years before legislators voted in 2018 to create a lottery to help pay for highways. The House and Senate named the legislation the Alyce G. Clarke Mississippi Lottery Law. When lottery tickets went on sale in 2019, Clarke bought the ceremonial first ticket at a Jackson convenience store.\n\nDemocratic Rep. Robert Johnson of Natchez said Tuesday that Clarke was persistent in seeking support for her alma mater, Alcorn State University. He recalled meeting with a legislative leader about university funding, and he knew Clarke would ask if he had advocated for the historically Black school.\n\n\"I opened the door and came out, and who is standing outside the door? Ms. Clarke,\" Johnson said. \"I'm going to tell you: The city of Jackson, the drug courts, the lottery and Alcorn State University - nobody had a better champion than Alyce Clarke.\""}
{"text": "# Ed Dwight was to be the first Black astronaut. At 90, he's finally getting his due\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nFebruary 9, 2024. 10:09 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Ed Dwight grew up in segregated 1930s Kansas on a farm on the edge of town. An airfield was within walking distance, and, as a boy, he'd often go to marvel at the planes and gawk at the pilots. Most were flying back from hunting trips and their cabins were messy with blood and empty beers cans on the floor.\n\n\"They'd say to me, 'Hey kid, would you clean my airplane? I'll give you a dime,'\" Dwight, 90, recalls. But when he was 8 or 9, Dwight asked for more than a dime. He wanted to fly.\n\n\"My first flight was the most exhilarating thing in the world,\" says Dwight, smiling. \"There were no streets or stop signs up there. You were free as a bird.\"\n\nIt would be years before Dwight entertained the idea of himself becoming a pilot. \"It was the white man's domain,\" he says. But while in college, he saw in a newspaper, above the fold, an image of a downed Black pilot in Korea.\n\n\"I said, 'Oh my God, they're letting Black people fly,'\" Dwight says. \"I went straight to the recruitment office and said, 'I want to fly.'\"\n\nWith that decision, Dwight set in motion a series of events that would very nearly lead to him being among the first astronauts. As Dwight progressed through the Air Force, he was handpicked by President John F. Kennedy's White House to join Chuck Yeager's test pilot program at Edwards Air Force Base in California's Mojave Desert.\n\nThat fabled astronaut breeding ground, site of \"The Right Stuff,\" might have turned Dwight into one of the most famous Americans and the first Black man in space. But at Edwards, Dwight was discriminated against even with Kennedy championing him. After Kennedy was assassinated, Dwight's path to NASA disappeared and he was never selected for the space program. Dwight departed for civilian life and largely receded from history.\n\nBut in recent years, Dwight is finally being celebrated. The new National Geographic documentary \"The Space Race,\" which premieres Monday on National Geographic Channels and streams Tuesday on Disney+ and Hulu, chronicles the stories of Black astronauts - and their first pioneer, Dwight.\n\n\"When I left, everyone said, 'Well, that's over. We got rid of that dude. He's off the map,'\" Dwight said in an interview by Zoom from his home in Denver. \"Now it comes back full force as one of these I-didn't-know stories. It's almost amusing to me that all this furor could come up. But I'm kind of glad it did because something happened here.\"\n\nIt wasn't until 1983 that the first African American, Guion Bluford, reached space. But two decades earlier, Dwight found himself at a fulcrum of 20th Century America, where the space race and the struggle for social justice converged.\n\nIn \"The Space Race,\" astronaut Bernard Harris, who became the first Black man to walk in space in 1995, contemplates what a difference it might have made if Dwight had become an astronaut in the tumultuous '60s.\n\n\"Space really allows us to realize the hope that's within all of us as human beings,\" Harris says. \"So to see a Black man in space during that period in time, it would have changed things.\"\n\n\"Ed is so important for everyone who's followed after, to recognize and embrace the shoulders they stand on,\" says Lisa Cortés, who directed the film with Diego Hurtado de Mendoza . \"There's the history we know and the history that's not had the opportunity to be highlighted.\"\n\nDwight had experience at a young age with that. His father, known as Eddie Dwight, played in the Negro Leagues for the Kansas City Monarchs. He remembers sitting on Satchel Paige's lap as a child - just one more connection to history running through Dwight's life.\n\nIn 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit, it jolted its Cold War rival into action; NASA was formed the following year. But Dwight still wasn't thinking about becoming an astronaut.\n\n\"Not in the slightest,\" he says. \"I thought these dudes going into space was the craziest thing I had ever heard in my life.\"\n\nBut as the U.S. began pursuing a space program, political leaders were conscious of the image its astronauts could project of American democracy. The first astronauts, the Mercury Seven, were all male and white. In September 1961, Edward R. Murrow, then Director of the U.S. Information Agency, wrote to NASA administrator James Webb.\n\n\"Why don't we put the first non-white man in space?\" wrote Murrow. \"If your boys were to enroll and train a qualified Negro and then fly him in whatever vehicle is available, we could retell our whole space effort to whole non-white world, which is most of it.\"\n\nWhen the Aerospace Research Pilot School was established that November, the White House urged the Air Force to select a Black officer. Only Dwight met the criteria, which included 1,500 hours of flying jet airplanes, a bachelor's degree in science or engineering (Dwight graduated with an aeronautical engineering degree from Arizona State University in 1957) and three consecutive \"outstanding\" ratings from military superiors.\n\nThat November, Dwight received a letter out of the blue inviting him to train to be an astronaut. Kennedy called his parents to congratulate them.\n\n\"And I thought, 'Hell no.' Why in the world would I ruin a wonderful, career to go and hang out with these guys didn't know what the hell they were doing at the beginning?\" says Dwight. \"NASA was only two-years-old and they were talking about putting a Black guy in space?\"\n\nBut he joined up. While at Edwards, Dwight was celebrated on the covers of Black magazines like Jet and Sepia. Hundred of letters hailing him as a hero poured in. But in training, he was treated with hostility by officers who resented his inclusion in the program and the White House's involvement.\n\n\"They were all instructed to give me the cold shoulder,\" Dwight says. \"Yeager had a meeting with the students and the staff in the auditorium and announced it - that Washington was trying to shove this N-word down our throats.\"\n\nDwight describes one incident when he was the only pilot sent out to fly when film producers, along with Jimmy Stewart, came to the base to film the officers. He recounts private sessions with Yaeger \"telling me how good the white guys were and how I shouldn't be there.\"\n\n\"All that kind of stuff didn't really bother me,\" Dwight says. \"The mission was the main thing. What people didn't know was that I was being handled out of the West Wing of the White House the whole time I was there. Either every day or every other day: 'How's it going? What's happening? What do you need?'\"\n\nYeager, who died in 2020, maintained Dwight simply wasn't as good as the other pilots. In his autobiography, Yeager wrote: \"From the moment we picked our first class, I was caught in a buzz saw of controversy involving a black student. The White House, Congress, and civil rights groups came at me with meat cleavers, and the only way I could save my head was to prove I wasn't a damned bigot.\"\n\nThe tensions were also described in Tom Wolfe's \"The Right Stuff.\"\n\n\"Every week, it seemed like, a detachment of Civil Rights Division lawyers would turn up from Washington, from the Justice Department, which was headed by the president's brother, Bobby,\" wrote Wolfe. \"The lawyers squinted in the desert sunlight and asked a great many questions about the progress and treatment of Ed Dwight and took notes.\"\n\nDwight was among the 26 potential astronauts recommended to NASA by the Air Force. But in 1963, he wasn't among the 14 selected. Dwight astronaut future took a more drastic turn when Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963.\n\n\"Everybody was wondering, 'What's going to happen with Dwight?'\" says Dwight. \"Everything changed.\"\n\nKennedy was killed on a Friday. By Monday, Dwight says, he had papers in his mailbox shipping him out to Germany. He quickly met with Bobby Kennedy in Washington, who had the Pentagon cancel those orders. A day after that, he had papers sending him to Canada.\n\nUltimately, Dwight was stationed at Wright-Patterson in Ohio in January of 1964. He graduated the program and totaled some 9,000 hours of air time, but never became an astronaut. He left the Air Force in 1966.\n\nAsked if he was bitter about his experience, Dwight exclaims, \"God no!\"\n\n\"Here you get a little 5-foot-four guy who flies airplanes and the next thing you know this guy is in the White House meeting all these senators and congressmen, standing in front of all these captains of industry and have them pat me on the back and shake my hand,\" Dwight says. \"Are you kidding me? What would I be bitter about? That opened the world to me.\"\n\nDwight initially landed at IBM, then he started a construction company. In 1977, he earned his Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the University of Denver. Much of his work is of great figures from Black history such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Barack Obama. Several of his sculptures have been flown into space, most recently one aboard the vessel Orion. NASA named an asteroid after him.\n\nTo the Black astronauts who followed in his footsteps, Dwight braved their path.\n\n\"When you talk to the other astronauts, it's never about them. They all want to make sure you understand that for them to do their job, they needed the people who came before and paved the way for them,\" says Hurtado de Mendoza. \"For them, it was really important to include Ed in the story. They all had a story of when they first met Ed Dwight or the first time they heard about Ed Dwight.\"\n\nDwight, with a little bemusement at how fate has worked out, acknowledges he's proud to be considered a pioneer for Black astronauts.\n\n\"It's good for them in that they didn't have to go through this crap that I went through. It was a goddamn distraction. It's like wanting to have eyes in the back of your head for all the stuff that was coming at you. I had to absorb that graciously,\" Dwight says. \"If I talked about it - 'Oh, crybaby! You couldn't do this and you couldn't do that.' That's what would have happened if I stepped up to the mic and complained.\"\n\nBut complaining wasn't Dwight's nature then, and it isn't now, either. He's not even mad at Yeager.\n\n\"This guy was being honest to what he was trained to do. The structure of his life, his culture, his personality, all were implanted in Chuck when he was a kid. He didn't know anything about social liberalism. It was foreign to this man,\" Dwight says. He adds: \"That doesn't make what they were doing right.\"\n\nInstead, Dwight is filled with gratitude. His one recommendation is that every congressman and senator be flown on a sub-orbital flight so they can see the Earth from above. Everyone, he thinks, would realize the absurdity of racism from that height.\n\n\"I'd advise everybody to go through what I went through, and then they'd have a different view of this country and how sacred it is,\" Dwight says. \"We're on this little ball flying around the galaxy.\""}
{"text": "# National Republican party sides with former Rep. Pete Hoekstra in battle over Michigan GOP chair\nBy **JOEY CAPPELLETTI**  \nFebruary 15, 2024. 9:50 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**LANSING, Mich. (AP)** - Former Congressman Pete Hoekstra has been officially recognized by the national Republican party as the Michigan GOP chairman in a vote that also affirmed that Kristina Karamo was properly removed from the position earlier this year.\n\nThe decision was made Wednesday following a unanimous vote by the executive committee of the Republican National Committee, or RNC, to recognize Hoekstra as chair and confirm his status as a voting member of the national party.\n\nSome members of the Michigan GOP had coalesced last month to vote Karamo out of the position, a result that she has refused to accept. Since then, dueling factions have claimed to control the state party.\n\nDonald Trump had endorsed Hoekstra for the position over Karamo, a once loyal supporter of the former president, whom he previously endorsed in 2022 for Michigan's secretary of state position. Karamo was elected last February to lead the Michigan Republican Party through the 2024 presidential election after losing her secretary of state race by over 14 percentage points.\n\nThe RNC's decision comes less than two weeks before the state holds its presidential primary and in a year where Michigan Republicans are desperate to win back some power after historic losses in 2022.\n\n\"We must put our nose to the grindstone over the next several months and focus on party unit to secure a red-wave victory in November,\" said Hoekstra in a statement following the RNC decision.\n\nHoekstra added that Karamo should \"end her misinformation campaign\" and \"join the fight to re-elect Donald Trump rather than dividing this Party.\"\n\nHoekstra served as a U.S. representative from 1993 until 2011 and acted as the United States ambassador to the Netherlands under Trump.\n\n\"Pete will make the Republican Party of Michigan great again and has my complete and total endorsement to be its chairman,\" Trump wrote on social media on Jan. 26.\n\nWhile the RNC's ruling gives Hoekstra some legitimacy to the position, a final ruling is expected to come in the courts. Karamo has repeatedly said that the RNC had no legal authority in the fight over the chair position and that she would not concede without a court ruling.\n\nKaramo did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment on the RNC's decision.\n\nSome of Karamo's critics have sued her and asked a judge to resolve the dispute. A hearing on Karamo's motion to dismiss the case is set for February 20.\n\nIn January, close to half of the Michigan GOP's voting members came together to vote Karamo out as chair, citing fundraising woes and months of infighting. Eight of the state party's 13 congressional district chairs had called on Karamo to resign and her co-chair, Malinda Pego, aided the effort to remove her.\n\nRepublicans in Michigan are hoping to win an open U.S. Senate seat this year in addition to multiple competitive House races. Control of the Michigan House, which is currently deadlocked at 54-54 after two seats were vacated by Democrats, will also be up for grabs this year."}
{"text": "# Cyberattacks on hospitals are likely to increase, putting lives at risk, experts warn\nBy **AMANDA SEITZ**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 11:44 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - Cybersecurity experts are warning that hospitals around the country are at risk for attacks like the one that is crippling operations at a premier Midwestern children's hospital, and that the U.S. government is doing too little prevent such breaches.\n\nHospitals in recent years have shifted their use of online technology to support everything from telehealth to medical devices to patient records. Today, they are a favorite target for internet thieves who hold systems' data and networks hostage for hefty ransoms, said John Riggi, the American Hospital Association's cybersecurity adviser.\n\n\"Unfortunately, the unintended consequence of the use of all this network and internet connected technology is it expanded our digital attack surface,\" Riggi said. \"So, many more opportunities for bad guys to penetrate our networks.\"\n\nThe assailants often operate from American adversaries such as Russia, North Korea and Iran, where they enjoy big payouts from their victims and face little prospect of ever being punished.\n\nIn November, a ransomware attack on a health care chain that operates 30 hospitals and 200 health facilities in the United States forced doctors to divert patients from emergency rooms and postpone elective surgeries. Meanwhile, a rural Illinois hospital announced it was permanently closing last year because it couldn't recover financially from a cyberattack. And hackers went as far as posting photos and patient information of breast cancer patients who were receiving treatment at a Pennsylvania health network after the system was hacked last year.\n\nNow, one of the top children's hospitals in the country, the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, has been forced to put its phone, email and medical record systems offline as it battles a cyberattack. The FBI has said it is investigating.\n\nBrett Callow, an analyst for the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft, counted 46 cyberattacks on hospitals last year, compared with 25 in 2022. The paydays for criminals have gotten bigger too, with the average payout jumping from $5,000 in 2018 to $1.5 million last year.\n\n\"Unless governments do something more meaningful, more significant than they have done to date, it's inevitable that it'll get worse,\" Callow said.\n\nCallow believes the government should ban cyberattack victims such as hospitals, local governments and schools from paying ransoms. \"There's so much money being paid into the ransomware system now there's no way the problem is going to simply go away on itself,\" he said.\n\nThe dramatic increase in these online raids has prompted the nation's top health agency to develop new rules for hospitals to protect themselves from cyber threats.\n\nThe Department of Health and Human Services said it will rewrite the rules for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act -– the federal law commonly called HIPPA that requires insurers and health systems to protect patient information – to include new provisions that address cybersecurity later this year.\n\nThe department is also considering new cybersecurity requirements attached to hospitals' Medicaid and Medicare funding.\n\n\"The more prepared we are the better,\" said Deputy Secretary Andrea Palm.\n\nBut, she added, some hospitals will struggle to protect themselves. She is worried about rural hospitals, for example, that may have difficulty cobbling together money to properly update their cybersecurity. HHS wants more money from Congress to tackle the issue, but Palm said the agency doesn't have a precise dollar amount its seeking.\n\n\"It's important to note that this has to come with resources,\" Palm said. \"We can't set the industry up not to be able to meet requirements.\"\n\nBecoming the victim of a cyberattack is costly, too. The attacks can put hospitals' networks offline for weeks or months, forcing hospitals to turn away patients.\n\nIn Chicago, Lurie hospital's network has been offline for two weeks. The hospital, which served more than 260,000 patients last year, has established a separate call center for patients' needs and resumed some care.\n\nOn Thursday, Lurie's surgeons operated on Jason Castillo's 7-month-old daughter mostly by hand, without some of the high-tech devices usually used.\n\nHis daughter's planned heart surgery was postponed on Jan. 31, when the hospital found itself under cyber siege. The surgeon talked to Castillo before his daughter was wheeled in for a six-hour surgery, promising that he felt confident he could do the procedure despite the ongoing cyberattack.\n\n\"She's doing fantastic,\" Castillo said of his daughter, who is now recovering at home. \"It feels like a huge cloud has been lifted from our household.\"\n\nEven once Lurie has restored their network, it'll likely take months of behind-the-scenes work for the hospital to fully rebound, Callow said.\n\n\"These incidents can affect everything from patient care to payroll,\" Callow said. \"Fully recovering can take months, it's not simply a matter of flicking a switch and everything comes back on.\""}
{"text": "# Biden allies, rivals both want transcript of his special counsel interview released. It could happen\nBy **COLLEEN LONG**, **ZEKE MILLER**, and **ERIC TUCKER**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 7:38 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - President Joe Biden avoided criminal charges around his handling of classified documents in part because of his answers during a lengthy interview with the special counsel investigating him. But the sit-down also opened Biden up to fresh scrutiny over his age and memory, and now the public release of a transcript of that discussion is being sought by both Biden allies and critics seeking political advantage.\n\nThe five-hour interview over two days, led by special counsel Robert Hur, helped establish that Biden didn't intend to retain most of the sensitive records from his vice presidency that were found at his home and personal office. But Hur's report also repeatedly impugned Biden's memory in a deeply personal way, suggesting, for example, the president couldn't remember when his own son had died.\n\nThe transcript, if released, could provide a fuller picture of the conversation.\n\nThe White House has the ultimate say over whether to make public the transcript or audio recording of the interview or to claim executive privilege and keep the interview private. There's precedent for documents related to White House investigations to ultimately become public - but also to be withheld.\n\nA transcript of President Bill Clinton's 1998 grand jury appearance related to allegations of a sexual relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky was included as part of Independent Counsel Ken Starr's massive report, which was delivered to the House and subsequently released to the public by Congress following a vote.\n\nThe Starr team debated extensively how much to disclose in the report, mindful of the graphic and sensitive nature of the findings, said Robert Bittman, who served as a Starr deputy during the investigation. Recognizing that it was ultimately up to the House to decide what to public public, the team gave \"all the information (to Congress) that we had so they can make their own decisions.\"\n\nPresident George W. Bush, on the other hand, invoked executive privilege to block Congress from seeing the FBI report of an interview with Vice President Dick Cheney and other records related to the administration's leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity in 2003. The move angered Congress.\n\nBittman said he did not think it was \"necessarily a good thing\" for investigative reports to be made public. But now that the Hur report has been disclosed, he said, it would be helpful to release the transcript of Biden's interview \"so that people can judge for themselves about whether Hur's opinions about what President Biden said and what he remembered and what he didn't remember is justified.\"\n\n\"If you see that the White House objects to it, it probably suggests that the transcripts are not good for the White House,\" Bittman said, \"and if they support release of it, then I suspect that that suggests the transcripts are good for the White House or President Biden.\"\n\nThe White House is weighing whether or not to release it.\n\nBiden's interview text and the audio recording are classified, because they include a discussion of highly sensitive documents. Any potential release could happen either by a decision of the White House or through the Justice Department working to comply with congressional oversight requests. Both would follow nearly identical procedures.\n\nOnce a decision to pursue release of the interview was made, the sensitive parts of the document would be sent to the intelligence community to assess what could be declassified and what would need to be redacted. A further review would be warranted to determine if anything discussed about the security of the president's home might impact protective measures.\n\nFinally, the White House would need to weigh in, with the advice of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, on whether to recommend that Biden invoke executive privilege over what others had cleared for publication.\n\nThough Biden didn't invoke executive privilege over the full report, the transcript could well be a different story. Among the documents found in Biden's home were records of deliberations over a potential U.S. troop surge during the Afghanistan war and other conversations within the White House - an area that presidents are particularly loath to have publicly discussed.\n\nThe interview with Biden was conducted over two days last October, right after Hamas' brutal attack on Israel.\n\nHur and his deputy, Marc Krickbaum, a former Trump-appointed U.S. attorney from Iowa, asked all of the questions. Biden was joined by White House Counsel Ed Siskel, the counsel's office investigations leader Richard Sauber and the president's personal lawyer Bob Bauer. Several other individuals from both sides were in the room as well, according to a person familiar with the interviews who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss them.\n\nSeparately, House Republicans have reached out to Hur and his representatives on the possibility of Hur testifying before Congress, and he has expressed a willingness to do so, according to two people who were not authorized to speak publicly about the request and spoke on condition of anonymity.\n\nRepublicans and Democrats alike are interested in more complete details about what went into the report. Biden and his allies say a full transcript would show the president is mentally sharp and will prove that Hur cherry-picked moments solely to make him seem feeble. Biden's attorneys raised their concerns to Attorney General Merrick Garland, who nonetheless decided to keep the report as is and made it public.\n\nBauer, speaking on CBS's \"Face the Nation\" over the weekend, offered an anecdote that didn't make it into the report but that would be in a transcript. He said Hur acknowledged that sometimes he asked imprecise questions - ones that Biden picked apart.\n\n\"Now, everybody in the room recognized that was the case, that showed the president was listening carefully and understood precisely what was wrong with those questions,\" Bauer said. \"I didn't come away from the special counsel's failure to ask precise questions and think to myself, 'he has mental acuity problems,' I just thought he was asking bad questions.\"\n\nRepublicans, meanwhile, have also requested that the audio of the interviews be made public and want to know more on why Hur chose not to prosecute Biden, particularly when they noted in their report that some evidence showed he held onto and shared with a ghostwriter highly classified information.\n\nHur said in his report that he did find evidence that Biden had willfully mishandled classified records but not enough evidence for a criminal prosecution like the one against former President Donald Trump.\n\nTrump, in addition to being charged with intentionally hoarding top-secret documents after he left office, is also accused of obstructing FBI efforts to get them back and of asking staff to conceal evidence from investigators.\n\nBiden and his team, by contrast, alerted law enforcement officials after locating classified records, willingly handed over documents to the government and cooperated with investigators by allowing the FBI to search his properties for any additional files.\n\nThose voluntary searches stand apart from the FBI's search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago property in 2022, which was done after the FBI got a warrant for the home when it determined that additional classified records were being hidden there. Trump has denied any wrongdoing."}
{"text": "# Palestinians living in US will be shielded from deportation, the White House says\nBy **COLLEEN LONG**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 5:41 PM EST\n\n---\n\n**WASHINGTON (AP)** - The White House on Wednesday announced that Palestinians living in the U.S. will be shielded from deportation as the Israel-Hamas war continues, citing \"significantly deteriorated\" conditions on the ground in Gaza.\n\nPalestinians will be covered under what's known as \"deferred enforced departure,\" an authority used at a president's discretion. The directive signed by President Joe Biden effectively allows Palestinian immigrants who would otherwise have to leave the United States to stay without the threat of deportation. That protection will last 18 months, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said, and will give Palestinians who qualify a \"temporary safe haven.\"\n\n\"While I remain focused on improving the humanitarian situation, many civilians remain in danger,\" Biden wrote in the memorandum that accompanied the announcement.\n\nBiden's decision comes after more than 100 Democratic lawmakers called on the White House to use either deferred enforced departure or a similar authority, called temporary protected status, to ensure that Palestinians currently in the United States would not be forced to return to dangerous conditions in Gaza.\n\n\"More than 28,000 Palestinians - including thousands of women and children - have been killed in the last four months in Gaza,\" Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who led the effort from congressional Democrats, said Wednesday. \"Today's decision by the Administration protects Palestinians in the United States from being forced to return to these clearly dangerous and deadly conditions.\"\n\nPalestinians who have been convicted of felonies or \"otherwise deemed to pose a public safety threat\" do not qualify, Sullivan said. Those who decide to voluntarily return home would also lose any protections from deportation.\n\nThe president is facing increasing backlash from Arab Americans and progressives for his full-throated support of Israel since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, although Biden has insisted he is trying to minimize civilian casualties.\n\nMore than 27,000 people, mostly women and minors, have been killed in Gaza since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory. Hamas killed more than 1,200 people and kidnapped about 250 more, mostly civilians, in its attack.\n\nIt's not immediately clear how many Palestinians would be affected by the deferred departure designation, but the number would be small. According to the November letter from lawmakers, there were roughly 7,241 nonimmigrant visas issued to Palestinians in 2022, the most recent year for which data was available, though that isn't an exact correlation to the number of people who would be eligible.\n\nThe designation is not a specific immigration status, but those covered under the policy aren't subject to deportation. Eligibility requirements are based on terms set by Biden. Others right now included under the same policy are people from Liberia and Hong Kong."}
{"text": "# Sean Wang made a home movie. Now, he and his grandmothers are going to the Oscars\nBy **JAKE COYLE**  \nFebruary 15, 2024. 7:27 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - Sean Wang's two grandmothers live together. They read the newspaper together. They dance together. They sleep in the same bed and complain about each other's farts. The older of the two, Yi Yan Fuei, is 96. The younger, Chang Li Hua, is 86. They're in-laws but they act more like sisters.\n\nWhen Wang, their 29-year-old grandson, was getting into filmmaking, one of the first he made was a short where Yi and Chang feed him blueberries. When Sean refuses, they kill him and bury him in the backyard.\n\nWang kept shooting them in their Bay Area home, especially after he moved back in with his nearby mom during the pandemic. They got accustomed to his camera being around. But they never thought it would lead to the Academy Awards.\n\n\"Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó,\" Wang's deeply charming portrait of his grandmothers, is nominated for best documentary short at the Academy Awards. In it, Wang films Yi and Chang going about their daily lives with bits of playfulness mixed in. They arm wrestle. They play dress-up. They watch \"Superbad.\" But mostly, \"Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó,\" which translates as maternal grandmother and paternal grandmother in Mandarin, captures the joy of two spirited ladies in older age as they occasionally chide their grandson's attempts to turn them into movie stars.\n\n\"When you first asked us to be movie stars, we were like, 'This must be a joke,'\" Chang says in an interview by Zoom alongside Yi, with Wang joining from Los Angeles. \"But now that we made this movie and it's going to the Oscars, we do kind of feel like movie stars. Now that this whole experience has happened, we do feel a little prettier.\"\n\nWhen Oscar nominations were announced last month, it wasn't Bradley Cooper's or Emma Stone's reactions that went viral. It was the celebration, caught on video, of Yi and Chang, with Wang, his mom and producer Sam Davis standing over them.\n\nIn the film, which is streaming on Disney+, Yi and Chang reflect on mortality and the essential things in life. \"As long as I have the newspaper, I can live,\" says Yi in the film, with magnifying glass in hand. Now, they're in the news, themselves.\n\n\"Every day I open the newspaper and if I got to see you, that'd be amazing,\" Yi tells Wang, who, after translating, shrugged: \"I don't think we've made it into the Taiwanese newspapers yet.\"\n\nA prominent news story a few years ago partly inspired Wang to make the movie. During the pandemic, when Asian and Asian-American hate crimes were escalating, he saw his grandmothers as a perfect antidote to the hateful stereotyping that followed COVID-19. At the same time, the short, which premiered last year at SXSW, was meant to essentially just be a simple home movie.\n\n\"That's kind of why we made this movie,\" Wang says. \"It's just so we could have this recollection, this time capsule that captures the essence of these two women. Long after they've passed away, we can have some sort of memento to remember what their lives were like.\"\n\nYi and Chang both grew up in poverty in wartime Taiwan. Their vivacious attitude (\"Doesn't matter if we know how to dance,\" Chang says in the film. \"We'll shake our hips.\") is a conscious reaction to hardship they've experienced. In the film, Chang notes that days spent sad pass the same as those spent happy. \"So I'm going to choose joy.\"\n\n\"There was so much pain in our childhoods,\" Chang says now, tearing up. \"Our late lives are so much more fortunate than what we experienced when we were young. And then to be surrounded by our family, there's so much more joy around us than when we were young.\"\n\nThat includes Wang who, when not brightening the days of his grandmothers, has emerged as one of the breakthrough filmmakers of the year. At the same time that \"Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó\" was landing its Oscar nomination, Wang's feature film directorial debut, \"Dìdi,\" was a sensation at the Sundance Film Festival.\n\nAt Sundance, \"Dìdi,\" a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age comedy about a teenage Taiwanese American skater kid growing up in Los Angeles, won the U.S Dramatic Audience Award and the special jury award for best ensemble cast – a cast that includes Chang as the mother-in-law. Focus acquired the film, the title of which can mean both \"little brother\" or a term of endearment for a family's youngest son in Mandarin.\n\n\"Surreal and bonkers,\" Wang says of the twin successes. \"To have these spotlights on global platforms for these stories that come from such a deep personal place is bonkers.\"\n\nA through line for Wang in his rapidly unfolding filmography is family. An earlier short of his, \"3,000 Miles,\" tenderly stitches together voicemails left by his mother while Wang was living in New York. It concludes sweetly in their reunion. To Wang, his role as a filmmaker is to consider his strongest emotions – and more often than not, those feelings are connected to family.\n\n\"Making films about my family helps me bridge the gap in my life as a human - seeing my mom not just as my mom or my grandmother not just as my grandmother but as people,\" Wang says. \"I'm still learning to bridge that gap.\"\n\nNow, Wang's family life will converge, of all places, at the Academy Awards.\n\n\"We're going to the Oscars and I'm going with my grandmas,\" Wang says, smiling. \"It's just, like, a sentence I never thought I would say.\"\n\nFor their part, Yi and Chang describe their feelings about attending the Oscars with their grandson in excited unison. \"Wonderful! Wonderful!\" they shout in English. Asked who they're looking forward to meeting, Chang considers for a moment.\n\n\"Will Ang Lee be there?\" she says.\n\nBut amid their disbelief, Chang and Yi think there's an important lesson to be found in the success of \"Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó\" that doesn't have to do with them, but in the grandson behind the camera. Even if the film concludes with Chang cursing Wang as a \"freakin' brat.\"\n\n\"I want people to realize, especially parents: Don't force your children to walk the path that you want them to walk,\" Yi says. \"Encourage them and support them in their interests, and be open to the paths that they're naturally gravitating towards. Try to water those seeds.\"\n\nYi and Chang have become famous enough that casting directors have reached out to Wang about other movies. Wang recently relayed an audition offer to Chang for a film shooting in New York. She said she'd have to read the script first.\n\nSays Wang: \"They're offer only.\""}
{"text": "# Franklin from 'Peanuts' gets to shine in the spotlight of a new animated Apple TV+ special\nBy **MARK KENNEDY**  \nFebruary 14, 2024. 9:47 AM EST\n\n---\n\n**NEW YORK (AP)** - The mild-mannered Franklin - the first Black character in the \"Peanuts\" comic strip - gets to shine in his own animated Apple TV+ special this month in a story about friendship.\n\nFranklin is a newcomer who bonds with Charlie Brown and is welcomed to the Peanuts universe in \"Snoopy Presents: Welcome Home, Franklin,\" which premieres on Friday.\n\nCo-writer Robb Armstrong, the cartoonist behind the \"Jump Start\" strip., says he's building on the blueprints that \"Peanuts\" creator Charles Schulz left. \"Whenever you start with good ingredients, you have to work hard to make a bad cake out of it,\" he says.\n\nRace is never explicitly mentioned but Armstrong and co-writer Scott Montgomery make a subtle nod when Franklin surveys the kids in his new town and remarks, \"One thing was for sure: There was a lack of variety in this place.\"\n\n\"I never wanted to come off preachy or anything, but it needed to be handled in the same way that I handled it in 'Jump Start,'\" says Armstrong. \"I don't come out and call people anything. I let the characters participate in a problem solving process.\"\n\nThe portrait of Franklin that emerges is of a boy who likes baseball and outer space, is good with his hands and listens to Stevie Wonder, Little Richard, James Brown and John Coltrane.\n\nWhen he arrives in town, he's tired of a life constantly moving, since his father's military job takes them from location to location. \"I have lived in lot of different places but none that I can call home,\" he says.\n\nBut his introduction to the \"Peanuts\" gang initially goes poorly. He mistakes Lucy's psychiatric booth for a lemonade stand and he freaks Linus out by picking a pumpkin from his patch. \"If I didn't know better, I'd swear I was in 'The Twilight Zone,'\" Franklin says.\n\n\"Every time he's moved, he's had to learn how to make friends quick and that meant that he didn't feel he could ever be his authentic self,\" said director and story editor Raymond S. Persi. \"So when he comes to this town, his normal tricks don't work because these are kind of weird kids.\"\n\nFranklin made his first appearance in the newspaper strip on July 31, 1968, prompted by a request from a school teacher for Schulz to integrate his comic strip world in the wake of the assassination of The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.\n\nSchulz introduced him by having Franklin return Charlie Brown's wayward beach ball one day by the sea. It was a historical meeting and a statement: Many public beaches, like other public facilities such as schools, swimming pools, theaters and restaurants, were segregated at the time.\n\nThe new Apple TV+ special recreates that first meeting, with Franklin returning Charlie Brown's errant beach ball and then the two building a sandcastle together.\n\n\"To have this very simple idea of two children who don't know about racism, having fun playing at the beach, building something together, I think was just so smart,\" said Persi.\n\nFranklin and Charlie Brown soon enter a soap box derby competition and their friendship is tested before a deep bond is forged. \"They're not perfect. I'm not perfect. But we can get through the rough spots together, as friends,\" Franklin says.\n\n\"What I really like about the special is you're getting a chance to see this friendship kind of grow in real time, in the way that real friendships do,\" says Persi, who has directed animated projects with \"The Simpsons,\" Mickey Mouse and the Minions.\n\nAs usual for a \"Peanuts\" show, music plays a key role. Original music by Jeff Morrow leans into sophisticated jazz and, in nods to Franklin, Berry's \"Johnny B. Goode,\" \"Nothing from Nothing\" by Billy Preston and some Coltrane playing on a jukebox.\n\nArmstrong has also used the special to correct some misperceptions about the 1973 classic \"A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.\" In that special, Franklin sits by himself on one side of the Thanksgiving table, leading some to suggest he's not been fully embraced. In the new special, Franklin is specifically asked to come sit with his new pals on their side during a pizza party celebration.\n\nArmstrong says he started with that scene and then had to figure out how the gang got there. The writers came up with a soap box derby. \"We needed something that was very highly action-oriented and packed with great risk. It had to be a competition,\" Armstrong says.\n\nThe special has plenty of lessons for kids and adults - winning isn't everything, friendships can be messy but rewarding and be your authentic self.\n\n\"What I'd like people to get out of it is that you don't have to be something different for other people. Being yourself is what's going to bring the right people into your lives,\" says Persi.\n\nArmstrong, who grew up revering Schulz, has a deep connection to Franklin. He became a cartoonist and a friend to Schulz. It was Schulz himself who asked the younger cartoonist if he would lend his last name to the character. So to have him years later spotlight Franklin in a TV special seems almost divine intervention.\n\n\"Sometimes a miracle happens,\" says Armstrong. \"If someone's got a better answer, I'd love to hear it. I'm just convinced that sometimes God gets involved. And this is that.\""}