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  • Court documents suggest reason for police raid of Kansas newspaper

    Court documents suggest reason for police raid of Kansas newspaper

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    The police chief who led the raid of a Kansas newspaper alleged in previously unreleased in court documents that a reporter either impersonated someone else or lied about her intentions when she obtained the driving records of a local business owner.

    But reporter Phyllis Zorn, Marion County Record Editor and Publisher Eric Meyer and the newspaper’s attorney said Sunday that no laws were broken when Zorn accessed a public state website for information on restaurant operator Kari Newell.

    The raid carried out Aug. 11 and led by Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody brought international attention to the small central Kansas town that now finds itself at the center of a debate over press freedoms. Police seized computers, personal cellphones and a router from the newspaper, but all items were released Wednesday after the county prosecutor concluded there wasn’t enough evidence to justify the action.

    Late Saturday, the Record’s attorney, Bernie Rhodes, provided copies of the affidavits used in the raid to The Associated Press and other news media. The documents that had previously not been released. They showed that Zorn’s obtaining of Newell’s driving record was the driving force behind the raid.

    The newspaper, acting on a tip, checked the public website of the Kansas Department of Revenue for the status of Newell’s driver’s license as it related to a 2008 conviction for drunk driving.

    Cody wrote in the affidavit that the Department or Revenue told him that those who downloaded the information were Record reporter Phyllis Zorn and someone using the name “Kari Newell.” Cody wrote that he contacted Newell who said “someone obviously stole her identity.”

    As a result, Cody wrote: “Downloading the document involved either impersonating the victim or lying about the reasons why the record was being sought.”

    The license records are normally confidential under state law, but can be accessed under certain circumstances, cited in the affidavit. The online user can request their own records but must provide a driver’s license number and date of birth.

    The records may also be provided in other instances, such as to lawyers for use in a legal matter; for insurance claim investigations; and for research projects about statistical reports with the caveat that the personal information won’t be disclosed.

    Meyer said Zorn actually contacted the Department of Revenue before her online search and was instructed how to search records. Zorn, asked to respond to the allegations that she used Newell’s name to obtain Newell’s personal information, said, “My response is I went to a Kansas Department of Revenue website and that’s where I got the information.”

    She added, “Not to my knowledge was anything illegal or wrong.”

    Rhodes, the newspaper’s attorney, said Zorn’s actions were legal under both state and federal laws. Using the subject’s name “is not identity theft,” Rhodes said. “That’s just the way of accessing that person’s record.”

    The newspaper had Newell’s driver’s license number and date of birth because a source provided it, unsolicited, Meyer said. Ultimately, the Record decided not to write about Newell’s record. But when she revealed at a subsequent City Council meeting that she had driven while her license was suspended, that was reported.

    The investigation into whether the newspaper broke state laws continues, now led by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. State Attorney General Kris Kobach has said he doesn’t see the KBI’s role as investigating the conduct of the police.

    Some legal experts believe the Aug. 11 raid violated a federal privacy law that protects journalists from having their newsrooms searched. Some also believe it violated a Kansas law that makes it more difficult to force reporters and editors to disclose their sources or unpublished material.

    Cody has not responded to several requests for comment, including an email request on Sunday. He defended the raid in a Facebook post soon after it happened, saying the federal law shielding journalists from newsroom searches makes an exception specifically for “when there is reason to believe the journalist is taking part in the underlying wrongdoing.”

    The Record received an outpouring of support from other news organizations and media groups after the raid. Meyer said it has picked up at least 4,000 additional subscribers, enough to double the size of its press run, though many of the new subscriptions are digital.

    Meyer blamed the stress from the raid for the Aug. 12 death of his 98-year-old mother, Joan Meyer, the paper’s co-owner. Her funeral services were Saturday.

    ___

    Salter reported from O’Fallon, Missouri.

    ___

    The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • AP, other news organizations develop standards for use of artificial intelligence in newsrooms

    AP, other news organizations develop standards for use of artificial intelligence in newsrooms

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    NEW YORK — The Associated Press has issued guidelines on artificial intelligence, saying the tool cannot be used to create publishable content and images for the news service while encouraging staff members to become familiar with the technology.

    AP is one of a handful of news organizations that have begun to set rules on how to integrate fast-developing tech tools like ChatGPT into their work. The service will couple this on Thursday with a chapter in its influential Stylebook that advises journalists how to cover the story, complete with a glossary of terminology.

    “Our goal is to give people a good way to understand how we can do a little experimentation but also be safe,” said Amanda Barrett, vice president of news standards and inclusion at AP.

    The journalism think tank Poynter Institute, saying it was a “transformational moment,” urged news organizations this spring to create standards for AI’s use, and share the policies with readers and viewers.

    Generative AI has the ability to create text, images, audio and video on command, but isn’t yet fully capable of distinguishing between fact and fiction

    As a result, AP said material produced by artificial intelligence should be vetted carefully, just like material from any other news source. Similarly, AP said a photo, video or audio segment generated by AI should not be used, unless the altered material is itself the subject of a story.

    That’s in line with the tech magazine Wired, which said it does not publish stories generated by AI, “except when the fact that it’s AI-generated is the point of the whole story.”

    “Your stories must be completely written by you,” Nicholas Carlson, Insider editor-in-chief, wrote in a note to employees that was shared with readers. “You are responsible for the accuracy, fairness, originality and quality of every word in your stories.”

    Highly-publicized cases of AI-generated “hallucinations,” or made-up facts, make it important that consumers know that standards are in place to “make sure the content they’re reading, watching and listening to is verified, credible and as fair as possible,” Poynter said in an editorial.

    News organizations have outlined ways that generative AI can be useful short of publishing. It can help editors at AP, for example, put together digests of stories in the works that are sent to its subscribers. It could help editors create headlines or generate story ideas, Wired said. Carlson said AI could be asked to suggest possible edits to make a story concise and more readable, or to come up with possible questions for an interview.

    AP has experimented with simpler forms of artificial intelligence for a decade, using it to create short news stories out of sports box scores or corporate earnings reports. That’s important experience, Barrett said, but “we still want to enter this new phase cautiously, making sure we protect our journalism and protect our credibility.”

    ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and The Associated Press last month announced a deal for the artificial intelligence company to license AP’s archive of news stories that it uses for training purposes.

    News organizations are concerned about their material being used by AI companies without permission or payment. The News Media Alliance, representing hundreds of publishers, issued a statement of principles designed to protect its members’ intellectual property rights.

    Some journalists have expressed worry that artificial intelligence could eventually replace jobs done by humans and is a matter of keen interest, for example, in contract talks between AP and its union, the News Media Guild. The guild hasn’t had the chance to fully analyze what they mean, said Vin Cherwoo, the union’s president.

    “We were encouraged by some provisions and have questions on others,” Cherwoo said.

    With safeguards in place, AP wants its journalists to become familiar with the technology, since they will need to report stories about it in coming years, Barrett said.

    AP’s Stylebook — a roadmap of journalistic practices and rules for use of terminology in stories — will explain in the chapter due to be released Thursday many of the factors that journalists should consider when writing about the technology.

    “The artificial intelligence story goes far beyond business and technology,” the AP says. “It is also about politics, entertainment, education, sports, human rights, the economy, equality and inequality, international law, and many other issues. Successful AI stories show how these tools are affecting many areas of our lives.”

    The chapter includes a glossary of terminology, including machine learning, training data, face recognition and algorithmic bias.

    Little of it should be considered the final word on the topic. A committee exploring guidance on the topic meets monthly, Barrett said.

    “I fully expect we’ll have to update the guidance every three months because the landscape is shifting,” she said.

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  • AP, other news organizations develop standards for use of artificial intelligence in newsrooms

    AP, other news organizations develop standards for use of artificial intelligence in newsrooms

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    NEW YORK — The Associated Press has issued guidelines on artificial intelligence, saying the tool cannot be used to create publishable content and images for the news service while encouraging staff members to become familiar with the technology.

    AP is one of a handful of news organizations that have begun to set rules on how to integrate fast-developing tech tools like ChatGPT into their work. The service will couple this on Thursday with a chapter in its influential Stylebook that advises journalists how to cover the story, complete with a glossary of terminology.

    “Our goal is to give people a good way to understand how we can do a little experimentation but also be safe,” said Amanda Barrett, vice president of news standards and inclusion at AP.

    The journalism think tank Poynter Institute, saying it was a “transformational moment,” urged news organizations this spring to create standards for AI’s use, and share the policies with readers and viewers.

    Generative AI has the ability to create text, images, audio and video on command, but isn’t yet fully capable of distinguishing between fact and fiction

    As a result, AP said material produced by artificial intelligence should be vetted carefully, just like material from any other news source. Similarly, AP said a photo, video or audio segment generated by AI should not be used, unless the altered material is itself the subject of a story.

    That’s in line with the tech magazine Wired, which said it does not publish stories generated by AI, “except when the fact that it’s AI-generated is the point of the whole story.”

    “Your stories must be completely written by you,” Nicholas Carlson, Insider editor-in-chief, wrote in a note to employees that was shared with readers. “You are responsible for the accuracy, fairness, originality and quality of every word in your stories.”

    Highly-publicized cases of AI-generated “hallucinations,” or made-up facts, make it important that consumers know that standards are in place to “make sure the content they’re reading, watching and listening to is verified, credible and as fair as possible,” Poynter said in an editorial.

    News organizations have outlined ways that generative AI can be useful short of publishing. It can help editors at AP, for example, put together digests of stories in the works that are sent to its subscribers. It could help editors create headlines or generate story ideas, Wired said. Carlson said AI could be asked to suggest possible edits to make a story concise and more readable, or to come up with possible questions for an interview.

    AP has experimented with simpler forms of artificial intelligence for a decade, using it to create short news stories out of sports box scores or corporate earnings reports. That’s important experience, Barrett said, but “we still want to enter this new phase cautiously, making sure we protect our journalism and protect our credibility.”

    ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and The Associated Press last month announced a deal for the artificial intelligence company to license AP’s archive of news stories that it uses for training purposes.

    News organizations are concerned about their material being used by AI companies without permission or payment. The News Media Alliance, representing hundreds of publishers, issued a statement of principles designed to protect its members’ intellectual property rights.

    Some journalists have expressed worry that artificial intelligence could eventually replace jobs done by humans and is a matter of keen interest, for example, in contract talks between AP and its union, the News Media Guild. The guild hasn’t had the chance to fully analyze what they mean, said Vin Cherwoo, the union’s president.

    “We were encouraged by some provisions and have questions on others,” Cherwoo said.

    With safeguards in place, AP wants its journalists to become familiar with the technology, since they will need to report stories about it in coming years, Barrett said.

    AP’s Stylebook — a roadmap of journalistic practices and rules for use of terminology in stories — will explain in the chapter due to be released Thursday many of the factors that journalists should consider when writing about the technology.

    “The artificial intelligence story goes far beyond business and technology,” the AP says. “It is also about politics, entertainment, education, sports, human rights, the economy, equality and inequality, international law, and many other issues. Successful AI stories show how these tools are affecting many areas of our lives.”

    The chapter includes a glossary of terminology, including machine learning, training data, face recognition and algorithmic bias.

    Little of it should be considered the final word on the topic. A committee exploring guidance on the topic meets monthly, Barrett said.

    “I fully expect we’ll have to update the guidance every three months because the landscape is shifting,” she said.

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  • OK, we can relax. The iPhone ‘hang up’ button might not be moving much after all

    OK, we can relax. The iPhone ‘hang up’ button might not be moving much after all

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    Almost a week after the Apple faithful collectively gasped at the first evidence that the iPhone’s “end call” button might soon be shifting upward and a column to the right, it looks like the whole thing might have been a false alarm

    ByDAVID HAMILTON AP Business Writer

    FILE – The line-up of the Apple iPhone 13 is displayed on their first day of sale, in New York, Friday, Sept. 24, 2021. The location of Apple’s red “end” button is set to slightly move with upcoming iOS 17 updates to the phone app. As iPhone users know, the “end” button currently sits prominently away from other call options, in a center position towards the bottom of the screen. But with iOS 17, which officially launches this fall 2023, the red icon will move the right — and other features will move down to join it. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

    The Associated Press

    SAN FRANCISCO — Almost a week after the Apple faithful collectively gasped at the first evidence that the iPhone’s red “end call” button might soon be vacating its center position to take up residence one column to the right, it looks like it might have been mostly a false alarm.

    The initial shock followed the release of last week’s test, or beta, version of iOS 17, the next major update of the iPhone’s operating software. That’s where users first saw the end-call button, which has traditionally lived in splendid isolation centered well below function buttons such as “mute,” “keypad” and “speaker,” instead joining its peers and taking a more assimilated position in the lower right-hand corner of a six-button block.

    Now, though, images of the latest iOS 17 beta shared by multiple media sites shows the red button right back in the center of the phone dialpad, pretty close to where it’s long staked out its territory. But it’s still not alone; now it’s in the second row, center seat of that six button block, where it appears to be daring you to try hanging up without also opening the keypad or accidentally adding another participant to your call.

    To be fair, it’s always difficult to draw firm conclusions from beta software releases, which are intended both to help engineers hunt down bugs and to gauge user reaction to changes large and small. So they’re a bit experimental by nature, and some experiments fare better than others.

    But we don’t have much choice but to speculate whether the end-call button’s wanderings have come to an end. Apple typically doesn’t comment on its design process — or much of anything else — and did not reply to a request for comment from The Associated Press.

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  • A central Kansas police force comes under constitutional criticism after raiding a newspaper

    A central Kansas police force comes under constitutional criticism after raiding a newspaper

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    MARION, Kan. — A small newspaper and a police department in Kansas are at the center of a dispute over freedom of speech that is being watched around the country after police raided the office of the local newspaper and the home of its owner and publisher.

    Officials with the Marion Police Department confiscated computers and cellphones from the publisher and staff of the Marion County Record in the Friday raid, prompting press freedom watchdogs to condemn the actions of local authorities as a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution’s protection for a free press. The police searches were apparently prompted by a complaint from a local restaurant owner, Kari Newell, who accused the newspaper of invading her privacy after it obtained copies of her driving record, which included a 2008 conviction for drunk driving.

    Newspaper publisher and co-owner Eric Meyer maintains that the newspaper’s aggressive coverage of local politics and Police Chief Gideon Cody’s record are the main reason for the raids. Newell says the newspaper targeted her after she ordered Meyer and a reporter out of her restaurant earlier this month during a political event.

    “This is the type of stuff that, you know, that Vladimir Putin does, that Third World dictators do,” Meyer said during an interview with The Associated Press in his office.

    Cody said Sunday that the raid was legal and tied to a criminal investigation.

    The raids occurred in a town of about 1,900 people, nestled among rolling prairie hills, about 150 miles (241 kilometers) southwest of Kansas City, making the small weekly newspaper the latest to find itself in the headlines and possibly targeted for its reporting.

    Last year in New Hampshire, the publisher of a weekly newspaper accused the state attorney general’s office of government overreach after she was arrested for allegedly publishing advertisements for local races without properly marking them as political advertising. In Las Vegas, former Democratic elected official Robert Telles is scheduled to face trial in November for allegedly fatally stabbing Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jeff German after German wrote articles critical of Telles and his managerial conduct.

    Meyer said one Record reporter hurt her finger when Cody wrested her cellphone out of her hand during the raid of the newspaper. The newspaper’s surveillance video showed officers reading that reporter her rights while Cody watched, though she wasn’t arrested or detained. Newspaper employees were hustled out of the building while the search continued for more than 90 minutes, according to the footage.

    Meanwhile, Meyer said, police simultaneously raided his home, seizing computers, his cellphone and the home’s internet router. He worked with his staff Sunday to reconstruct stories, ads and other materials for its next edition Wednesday.

    Both Meyer and Newell have said they’ve fielded messages — and some threats — from as far away as London in the aftermath of the raids.

    Newell said she threw Meyer and the reporter out of the event for Republican U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner at the request of others who are upset with the “toxic” newspaper. On the town’s main street, one storefront included a handmade “Support Marion PD” sign.”

    LaTurner’s office has not returned phone messages left since Sunday at his Washington and district offices seeking comment.

    While Newell accused the newspaper of unlawfully seeking information on the status of her driver’s license, the newspaper countered that it received that information unsolicited, which it verified through public online records. It eventually decided not to run a story because it wasn’t sure the source who supplied it had obtained it legally. But the newspaper did run a story on the city council meeting, in which Newell herself confirmed she’d had a DUI conviction and that she had continued to drive even after her license was suspended.

    A two-page search warrant, signed by a local judge, lists Newell as the victim of alleged crimes by the newspaper. When the newspaper asked for a copy of the probable cause affidavit required by law to issue a search warrant, the district court issued a signed statement saying no such affidavit was on file, the Record reported.

    Cody, the police chief, indicated that probable cause affidavits were used to get the search warrants. When asked for a copy, Cody replied in an email late Sunday that the affidavits would be available “once charges are filed.”

    Cody defended the raid on the newsroom, saying there is an exception to the federal requirement for a subpoena — not just a search warrant — to do so “when there is reason to believe the journalist is taking part in the underlying wrongdoing.”

    Cody, who was hired in late April as Marion’s police chief after serving 24 years in the Kansas City police, did not give details about what that alleged wrongdoing entailed and did not respond to questions about how police believe Newell was victimized.

    Press freedom and civil rights organizations have said that police overstepped their authority with the raids.

    Both Meyer and Newell are contemplating lawsuits — Newell against the newspaper and Meyer against the public officials who staged the raid.

    Meyer also blames the home raid for stressing his 98-year-old mother enough to cause her death on Saturday. Joan Meyer was the newspaper’s co-owner.

    As for the criticism of the raid as a violation of First Amendment rights, Newell said her privacy rights were violated, and they are “just as important as anybody else’s.”

    ——-

    Beck reported from Omaha, Nebraska.

    ___

    The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

    ___

    Follow John Hanna on Twitter: https://twitter.com/apjdhanna

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  • A central Kansas police force comes under constitutional criticism after raiding a newspaper

    A central Kansas police force comes under constitutional criticism after raiding a newspaper

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    MARION, Kan. — A small central Kansas police department is facing a torrent of criticism for raiding a local newspaper’s office and the home of its owner and publisher, seizing computers and cellphones, and, in the publisher’s view, stressing his 98-year-old mother enough to cause her weekend death.

    Several press freedom watchdogs condemned the Marion Police Department’s actions as a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution’s protection for a free press. The Marion County Record’s editor and publisher, Eric Meyer, worked with his staff Sunday to reconstruct stories, ads and other materials for its next edition Wednesday, even as he took time in the afternoon to provide a local funeral home with information about his mother, Joan, the paper’s co-owner.

    A search warrant tied Friday morning raids, led by Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody, to a dispute between the newspaper and a local restaurant owner, Kari Newell. She is accusing the newspaper of invading her privacy and illegally accessing information about her and her driving record and suggested that the newspaper targeted her after she threw Meyer and a reporter out of restaurant during a political event.

    While Meyer saw Newell’s complaints — which he said were untrue — as prompting the raids, he also believes the newspaper’s aggressive coverage of local politics and issues played a role. He said the newspaper was examining Cody’s past work with the Kansas City, Missouri, police as well.

    “This is the type of stuff that, you know, that Vladimir Putin does, that Third World dictators do,” Meyer said during an interview in his office. “This is Gestapo tactics from World War II.”

    Cody said Sunday that the raid was legal and tied to an investigation.

    The raids occurred in a town of about 1,900 people, nestled among rolling prairie hills, about 150 miles (241 kilometers) southwest of Kansas City, making the small weekly newspaper the latest to find itself in the headlines and possibly targeted for its reporting.

    Last year in New Hampshire, the publisher of a weekly newspaper accused the state attorney general’s office of government overreach after she was arrested for allegedly publishing advertisements for local races without properly marking them as political advertising. In Las Vegas, former Democratic elected official Robert Telles is scheduled to face trial in November for allegedly fatally stabbing Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jeff German after German wrote articles critical of Telles and his managerial conduct.

    Meyer said that on Friday, one Record reporter suffered an injury to a finger when Cody wrested her cellphone out of her hand, according to the report. The newspaper’s surveillance video showed officers reading that reporter her rights while Cody watched, though she wasn’t arrested or detained. Newspaper employees were hustled out of the building while the search continued for more than 90 minutes, according to the footage.

    Meanwhile, Meyer said, police simultaneously raided his home, seizing computers, his cellphone and the home’s internet router.

    But as Meyer fielded messages from reporters and editors as far away as London and reviewed footage from the newsroom’s surveillance camera, Newell was receiving death threats from as far away, she said. She said the Record engages in “tabloid trash reporting” and was trying to hush her up.

    “I fully believe that the intent was to do harm and merely tarnish my reputation, and I think if had it been left at that, I don’t think that it would have blown up as big as it was,” Newell said in a telephone interview.

    Newell said she threw Meyer and the Record reporter out of the event for Republican U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner at the request of others who are upset with the “toxic” newspaper. On the town’s main street, one storefront included a handmade “Support Marion PD” sign.”

    The police chief and other officials also attended and were acknowledged at the reception, and the Marion Police Department highlighted the event on its Facebook page.

    LaTurner’s office did not immediately return phone messages left Sunday at his Washington and district offices seeking comment.

    Newell said she believes the newspaper violated the law to get her personal information as it checked on the status of her driver’s license following a 2008 drunken driving conviction and other driving violations.

    The newspaper countered that it received that information unsolicited, which it verified through public online records. It eventually decided not to run a story because it wasn’t sure the source who supplied it had obtained it legally. But the newspaper did run a story on the city council meeting, in which Newell herself confirmed she’d had a DUI conviction and that she had continued to drive even after her license was suspended.

    A two-page search warrant, signed by a local judge, lists Newell as the victim of alleged crimes by the newspaper. When the newspaper asked for a copy of the probable cause affidavit required by law to issue a search warrant, the district court issued a signed statement saying no such affidavit was on file, the Record reported.

    Cody, the police chief, defended the raid on Sunday, saying in an email to The Associated Press that while federal law usually requires a subpoena — not just a search warrant — to raid a newsroom, there is an exception “when there is reason to believe the journalist is taking part in the underlying wrongdoing.”

    Cody did not give details about what that alleged wrongdoing entailed.

    Cody, who was hired in late April as Marion’s police chief after serving 24 years in the Kansas City police, did not respond to questions about whether police filed a probable cause affidavit for the search warrant. He also did not answer questions about how police believe Newell was victimized.

    Press freedom and civil rights organizations said that police, the local prosecutor’s office and the judge who signed off on the search warrant overstepped their authority.

    “It seems like one of the most aggressive police raids of a news organization or entity in quite some time,” said Sharon Brett, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, adding that it seemed “quite an alarming abuse of authority.”

    Seth Stern, director of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation, said in a statement that the raid appeared to have violated federal law, the First Amendment, “and basic human decency.”

    “The anti-press rhetoric that’s become so pervasive in this country has become more than just talk and is creating a dangerous environment for journalists trying to do their jobs,” Stern said.

    Meyer said he has been flooded with offers of help from press freedom groups and other news organizations. But he said what he and his staff need is more hours in the day to get their next edition put together.

    Both he and Newell are contemplating lawsuits — Newell against the newspaper and Meyer against the public officials who staged the raid.

    As for the criticism of the raid as a violation of First Amendment rights, Newell said her privacy rights were violated, and they are “just as important as anybody else’s.”

    ——-

    Beck reported from Omaha, Nebraska.

    ___

    The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

    ___

    Follow John Hanna on Twitter: https://twitter.com/apjdhanna

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  • Police face criticism over central Kansas newspaper raid in which computers, phones seized

    Police face criticism over central Kansas newspaper raid in which computers, phones seized

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    MARION, Kan. — A small central Kansas police department is facing a firestorm of criticism after it raided the offices of a local newspaper and the home of its publisher and owner — a move deemed by several press freedom watchdogs as a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution’s protection of a free press.

    The Marion County Record said in its own published reports that police raided the newspaper’s office on Friday, seizing the newspaper’s computers, phones and file server and the personal cellphones of staff, based on a search warrant. One Record reporter suffered an injury to a finger when Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody wrested her cellphone out of her hand, according to the report.

    Police simultaneously raided the home of Eric Meyer, the newspaper’s publisher and co-owner, seizing computers, his cellphone and the home’s internet router, Meyer said. Meyer’s 98-year-old mother — Record co-owner Joan Meyer, who lived in the home with her son — collapsed and died Saturday, Meyer said, blaming her death on the stress of the raid of her home.

    Meyer said he believes the raid was prompted by a story published last week about a local restaurant owner, Kari Newell. Newell had police remove Meyer and a newspaper reporter from her restaurant early this month, who were there to cover a public reception for U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, a Republican representing the area. The police chief and other officials also attended and were acknowledged at the reception, and the Marion Police Department highlighted the event on its Facebook page.

    LaTurner’s office did not immediately return phone messages left Sunday at his Washington and district offices seeking comment.

    The next week at a city council meeting, Newell publicly accused the newspaper of using illegal means to get information on the status of her driver’s license following a 2008 drunken driving conviction and other driving violations. The newspaper countered that it received that information unsolicited, which it verified through public online records. It eventually decided not to run a story, because it wasn’t sure the source who supplied it had obtained it legally. But the newspaper did run a story on the city council meeting, in which Newell herself confirmed she’d had a DUI conviction and that she had continued to drive even after her license was suspended.

    Meyer also noted that the newspaper was looking into the police chief’s background and why he left the Kansas City, Missouri, police department before being hired in April as chief.

    A two-page search warrant, signed by a local judge, lists Newell as the victim of alleged crimes by the newspaper. When the newspaper asked for a copy of the probable cause affidavit required by law to issue a search warrant, the district court issued a signed statement saying no such affidavit was on file, the Record reported.

    Newell declined to comment Sunday, saying she was too busy to speak. She said she would call back later Sunday to answer questions.

    Cody, the police chief, defended the raid on Sunday, saying in an email to The Associated Press that while federal law usually requires a subpoena — not just a search warrant — to raid a newsroom, there is an exception “when there is reason to believe the journalist is taking part in the underlying wrongdoing.”

    Cody did not give details about what that alleged wrongdoing entailed.

    Cody, who was hired in late April as Marion’s police chief after serving 24 years in the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department, did not respond to questions about whether police filed a probable cause affidavit for the search warrant. He also did not answer questions about how police believe Newell was victimized.

    Meyer said the newspaper plans to sue the police department and possibly others, calling the raid an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment’s free press guarantee.

    “This, the longer I think about it, is nothing short of an attempt to intimidate us, maybe to prevent us from publishing,” he said. “They didn’t have to go through this. They didn’t have to go through the drama.”

    Press freedom and civil rights organizations agreed that police, the local prosecutor’s office and the judge who signed off on the search warrant overstepped their authority.

    “It seems like one of the most aggressive police raids of a news organization or entity in quite some time,” said Sharon Brett, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas. The breadth of the raid and the aggressiveness in which it was carried out seems to be “quite an alarming abuse of authority from the local police department,” Brett said.

    Seth Stern, director of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation, said in a statement that the raid appeared to have violated federal law, the First Amendment, “and basic human decency.”

    “This looks like the latest example of American law enforcement officers treating the press in a manner previously associated with authoritarian regimes,” Stern said. “The anti-press rhetoric that’s become so pervasive in this country has become more than just talk and is creating a dangerous environment for journalists trying to do their jobs.”

    Meyer said the newspaper has been deluged with offers of help.

    ″We’ve had people volunteering to drive equipment up from Texas and from Indiana,” he said. “I just had the former county attorney say he would go and buy us computers and give them to us and drive them down from Kansas City.”

    ——-

    Beck reported from Omaha, Nebraska.

    ___

    The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Police questioned over legality of Kansas newspaper raid in which computers, phones seized

    Police questioned over legality of Kansas newspaper raid in which computers, phones seized

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    MARION, Kan. — A small central Kansas police department is facing a firestorm of criticism after it raided the offices of a local newspaper and the home of its publisher and owner — a move deemed by several press freedom watchdogs as a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution’s protection of a free press.

    The Marion County Record said in its own published reports that police raided the newspaper’s office on Friday, seizing the newspaper’s computers, phones and file server and the personal cellphones of staff, based on a search warrant. One Record reporter said one of her fingers was injured when Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody wrested her cellphone out of her hand, according to the report.

    Police simultaneously raided the home of Eric Meyer, the newspaper’s publisher and co-owner, seizing computers, his cellphone and the home’s internet router, Meyer said. Meyer’s 98-year-old mother — Record co-owner Joan Meyer who lived in the home with her son — collapsed and died Saturday, Meyer said, blaming her death on the stress of the raid of her home.

    Meyer said in his newspaper’s report that he believes the raid was prompted by a story published last week about a local restaurant owner, Kari Newell. Newell had police remove Meyer and a newspaper reporter from her restaurant early this month, who were there to cover a public reception for U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, a Republican representing the area. The police chief and other officials also attended and were acknowledged at the reception, and the Marion Police Department highlighted the event on its Facebook page.

    The next week at a city council meeting, Newell publicly accused the newspaper of using illegal means to get information on a drunk driving conviction against her. The newspaper countered that it received that information unsolicited, which it sought to verify through public online records. It eventually decided not to run a story on Newell’s DUI, but it did run a story on the city council meeting, in which Newell confirmed the 2008 DUI conviction herself.

    A two-page search warrant, signed by a local judge, lists Newell as the victim of alleged crimes by the newspaper. When the newspaper asked for a copy of the probable cause affidavit required by law to issue a search warrant, the district court issued a signed statement saying no such affidavit was on file, the Record reported.

    Newell declined to comment Sunday, saying she was too busy to speak. She said she would call back later Sunday to answer questions.

    Cody, the police chief, defended the raid on Sunday, saying in an email to The Associated Press that while federal law usually requires a subpoena — not just a search warrant — to raid a newsroom, there is an exception “when there is reason to believe the journalist is taking part in the underlying wrongdoing.”

    Cody did not give details about what that alleged wrongdoing entailed.

    Cody, who was hired in late April as Marion’s police chief after serving 24 years in the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department, did not respond to questions about whether police filed a probable cause affidavit for the search warrant. He also did not answer questions about how police believe Newell was victimized.

    Meyer said the newspaper plans to sue the police department and possibly others, calling the raid an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment’s free press guarantee.

    Press freedom and civil rights organizations agreed that police, the local prosecutor’s office and the judge who signed off on the search warrant overstepped their authority.

    “It seems like one of the most aggressive police raids of a news organization or entity in quite some time,” said Sharon Brett, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas. The breadth of the raid and the aggressiveness in which it was carried out seems to be “quite an alarming abuse of authority from the local police department,” Brett said.

    Seth Stern, director of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation, said in a statement that the raid appeared to have violated federal law, the First Amendment, “and basic human decency.”

    “This looks like the latest example of American law enforcement officers treating the press in a manner previously associated with authoritarian regimes,” Stern said. “The anti-press rhetoric that’s become so pervasive in this country has become more than just talk and is creating a dangerous environment for journalists trying to do their jobs.”

    ——-

    Beck reported from Omaha, Nebraska.

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  • As free press withers in El Salvador, pro-government social media influencers grow in power

    As free press withers in El Salvador, pro-government social media influencers grow in power

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    SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — Douglas Guzmán’s TikTok feed was dotted with workout routines and videos showcasing his favorite parts of his country.

    That changed about a year ago, as rights groups, civil society and even some officials criticized El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele for violating human rights in his crackdown on criminal gangs, and said that his unconstitutional bid for re-election would corrode the country’s democracy.

    Within days of Bukele announcing his bid for a second five-year term, Guzmán’s feed was plastered with videos describing Bukele as the “future liberator of Latin America” and slick montages of the leader’s “mega-prison” for accused gangsters.

    Views on the social media influencer’s videos skyrocketed. The 39-year-old member of Bukele’s party said he found a new mission: counteracting negative press from independent media about his populist president.

    “(Journalists) don’t know anything. All they do is sit at their desks and watch as President Bukele … makes a massive effort to save thousands of lives. But they don’t see that because they’ve never cared about the lives of Salvadorans,” Guzmán said. “That’s why we’re here. To show the true reality.”

    Guzmán is part of an expanding network of social media personalities acting as a megaphone for the millennial leader. At the same time Bukele has cracked down on the press, his government has embraced those influencers. As the president seeks to hold onto power, he has harnessed that flood of pro-Bukele content slowly turning his Central American nation into an informational echo chamber.

    “A news organization doing an investigation can’t compare to the sounding board that these influencers have because they flood your social media with the government’s narrative,” said Roberto Dubon, a communications strategist and congressional candidate for Bukele’s former party, FMLN. “What you have is an apparatus to spread their propaganda.”

    Bukele, a 42-year-old leader often donning a backwards baseball cap, worked years in political advertising before social media became a key to his rise to power five years ago. Since, his approval ratings have soared to 90%, according to a June CID Gallup poll. Bukele’s modern political messaging, charisma and brutal crackdown on the country’s gangs only continue to win him fans domestically and abroad even in the midst of controversy.

    By doing so, Bukele is using a playbook increasingly utilized by 21st century autocrats, said Seva Gunitsky, a political scientist at the University of Toronto.

    Social media was once hailed as the ultimate democratic tool to organize protests, even revolutions, across the world. Now, governments from Russia to Uganda are now using it to control the narrative.

    “They use this tool of liberation technology to actually prolong and strengthen their rule,” Gunitsky said. Such governments use influencers because their content “doesn’t look as much like propaganda and is more about shaping the narrative in more subtle ways.”

    Under Bukele, El Salvador constructed a sophisticated communications machine. It locked down access to information out of line with official messaging and hired teams of former journalists to produce blockbuster-quality videos showcasing security forces taking on the nation’s gangs. The government also mimicked Russia, building an army of tech-savvy contractors – or “trolls” – to create fake social media accounts, spread falsities and harass critics.

    At the same time his message of a strong-handed response to gang violence rippled across the region, gaining traction in other nations struggling with crime across Latin America and Caribbean.

    With it, an “entire industry” has been born as influencers latch onto the president’s image, said Oscar Picardo, director of investigations at El Salvador’s Universidad Francisco Gavidia.

    A study by Picardo’s university and local investigative outlet Factum examined 69 pro-Bukele YouTube accounts, which collectively have more followers than the population of El Salvador. They found many accounts – which make money through view and subscriber counts – can earn up to tens of thousands of dollars a month, far greater than El Salvador’s average salary. That content is devoured both within El Salvador, and by many of the 2.3 million Salvadorans living in the United States.

    The cluster of accounts pumped out nearly 32 hours of pro-Bukele content in a single day in May, the study found. Almost always mirroring government language, 90% of the videos analyzed contained false or misleading information.

    One account, Noticias Cuscatlecas, may earn much as $400,000 annually posting videos of violent attacks from alleged gang members layered over chilling music, UFG and Factum calculated.

    The channel often concludes videos with the same message: “(Bukele) devised a plan to exterminate this cancer from society, and the incredible thing is that he is succeeding. Now the people no longer live in fear.”

    On TikTok, one video declares “God chose Bukele as president of El Salvador.” On YouTube, personalities dressed as TV anchors attack human rights groups and journalists. They feature Bukele’s critics bursting into flames while claiming their channel “brings you the latest news”. Others sit down for an exclusive interview with the president.

    In April, the president of El Salvador’s congress Ernesto Castro announced he was opening the assembly to YouTubers and social media influencers to “inform with objectivity.”

    “The right to inform and be informed is a power not just in the hands of media companies,” Castro wrote on Twitter.

    Requests by the AP for interviews with Bukele and his cabinet throughout his more than four years in office have been declined or ignored. Two people with knowledge of the inner workings of Bukele’s media machine declined to speak to the AP out of fear of the government.

    For Guzmán and others, the access was empowering, enabling them to grow their audiences. Since, Guzmán has been offered access to other large events like the inauguration of Central American and Caribbean Games, something experts say Bukele used to show a friendly face to the world.

    Press credentials hung around the TikToker’s neck and he brimmed with pride in a government press box, standing among other selfie stick-wielding influencers.

    “Us being here, accredited, I feel like I am a part of this,” Guzmán said, eyes crinkling with a broad smile.

    Around him, others took turns interviewing each other and bragged about how many people were connected to their feeds. One man wearing a Hawaiian shirt leapt over rows of bleachers to get a better signal. When Bukele walked on stage to give a speech, Guzmán and others chanted “Re-election!”

    El Salvador’s government is not the first to open its doors to social media personalities, but researchers and critics says the atmosphere created in El Salvador marks a particular risk as other leaders in the region seek to mimic Bukele.

    Picardo, the UFG investigator, said such accounts post a deluge of content when the government is trying to publicize something, like the leader’s experiment with Bitcoin, its gang crackdown or the Games.

    The researcher warned their increasingly hostile tone acts as a harbinger for further deteriorating press freedoms, echoing State Department alarms of a “villainization” of journalists by Bukele.

    Oscar Martínez’s award-winning news organization El Faro is among those facing attacks and harassment for its intensive investigation of Bukele, including audio evidencing that Bukele’s administration negotiated with gangs in order to dip violence.

    The government opened a case against El Faro for tax evasion, something the news site called “ completely baseless.” Phones of dozens of journalists were hacked with Pegasus spyware, regularly used by governments to spy on opponents.

    In April, El Faro announced it would move its center of operations to Costa Rica due to escalating harassment.

    He worries their investigations is being drowned out by the flood of disinformation, and said if Bukele stays in power in the upcoming elections, it will put reporters in El Salvador “much more at risk.”

    “At that moment, Bukele is going to decide to get rid of any obstacle he has within the country, and the main obstacle he has right now is the free press,” Martínez said.

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  • As free press withers in El Salvador, pro-government social media influencers grow in power

    As free press withers in El Salvador, pro-government social media influencers grow in power

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    SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — Douglas Guzmán’s TikTok feed was dotted with workout routines and videos showcasing his favorite parts of his country.

    That changed about a year ago, as rights groups, civil society and even some officials criticized El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele for violating human rights in his crackdown on criminal gangs, and said that his unconstitutional bid for re-election would corrode the country’s democracy.

    Within days of Bukele announcing his bid for a second five-year term, Guzmán’s feed was plastered with videos describing Bukele as the “future liberator of Latin America” and slick montages of the leader’s “mega-prison” for accused gangsters.

    Views on the social media influencer’s videos skyrocketed. The 39-year-old member of Bukele’s party said he found a new mission: counteracting negative press from independent media about his populist president.

    “(Journalists) don’t know anything. All they do is sit at their desks and watch as President Bukele … makes a massive effort to save thousands of lives. But they don’t see that because they’ve never cared about the lives of Salvadorans,” Guzmán said. “That’s why we’re here. To show the true reality.”

    Guzmán is part of an expanding network of social media personalities acting as a megaphone for the millennial leader. At the same time Bukele has cracked down on the press, his government has embraced those influencers. As the president seeks to hold onto power, he has harnessed that flood of pro-Bukele content slowly turning his Central American nation into an informational echo chamber.

    “A news organization doing an investigation can’t compare to the sounding board that these influencers have because they flood your social media with the government’s narrative,” said Roberto Dubon, a communications strategist and congressional candidate for Bukele’s former party, FMLN. “What you have is an apparatus to spread their propaganda.”

    Bukele, a 42-year-old leader often donning a backwards baseball cap, worked years in political advertising before social media became a key to his rise to power five years ago. Since, his approval ratings have soared to 90%, according to a June CID Gallup poll. Bukele’s modern political messaging, charisma and brutal crackdown on the country’s gangs only continue to win him fans domestically and abroad even in the midst of controversy.

    By doing so, Bukele is using a playbook increasingly utilized by 21st century autocrats, said Seva Gunitsky, a political scientist at the University of Toronto.

    Social media was once hailed as the ultimate democratic tool to organize protests, even revolutions, across the world. Now, governments from Russia to Uganda are now using it to control the narrative.

    “They use this tool of liberation technology to actually prolong and strengthen their rule,” Gunitsky said. Such governments use influencers because their content “doesn’t look as much like propaganda and is more about shaping the narrative in more subtle ways.”

    Under Bukele, El Salvador constructed a sophisticated communications machine. It locked down access to information out of line with official messaging and hired teams of former journalists to produce blockbuster-quality videos showcasing security forces taking on the nation’s gangs. The government also mimicked Russia, building an army of tech-savvy contractors – or “trolls” – to create fake social media accounts, spread falsities and harass critics.

    At the same time his message of a strong-handed response to gang violence rippled across the region, gaining traction in other nations struggling with crime across Latin America and Caribbean.

    With it, an “entire industry” has been born as influencers latch onto the president’s image, said Oscar Picardo, director of investigations at El Salvador’s Universidad Francisco Gavidia.

    A study by Picardo’s university and local investigative outlet Factum examined 69 pro-Bukele YouTube accounts, which collectively have more followers than the population of El Salvador. They found many accounts – which make money through view and subscriber counts – can earn up to tens of thousands of dollars a month, far greater than El Salvador’s average salary. That content is devoured both within El Salvador, and by many of the 2.3 million Salvadorans living in the United States.

    The cluster of accounts pumped out nearly 32 hours of pro-Bukele content in a single day in May, the study found. Almost always mirroring government language, 90% of the videos analyzed contained false or misleading information.

    One account, Noticias Cuscatlecas, may earn much as $400,000 annually posting videos of violent attacks from alleged gang members layered over chilling music, UFG and Factum calculated.

    The channel often concludes videos with the same message: “(Bukele) devised a plan to exterminate this cancer from society, and the incredible thing is that he is succeeding. Now the people no longer live in fear.”

    On TikTok, one video declares “God chose Bukele as president of El Salvador.” On YouTube, personalities dressed as TV anchors attack human rights groups and journalists. They feature Bukele’s critics bursting into flames while claiming their channel “brings you the latest news”. Others sit down for an exclusive interview with the president.

    In April, the president of El Salvador’s congress Ernesto Castro announced he was opening the assembly to YouTubers and social media influencers to “inform with objectivity.”

    “The right to inform and be informed is a power not just in the hands of media companies,” Castro wrote on Twitter.

    Requests by the AP for interviews with Bukele and his cabinet throughout his more than four years in office have been declined or ignored. Two people with knowledge of the inner workings of Bukele’s media machine declined to speak to the AP out of fear of the government.

    For Guzmán and others, the access was empowering, enabling them to grow their audiences. Since, Guzmán has been offered access to other large events like the inauguration of Central American and Caribbean Games, something experts say Bukele used to show a friendly face to the world.

    Press credentials hung around the TikToker’s neck and he brimmed with pride in a government press box, standing among other selfie stick-wielding influencers.

    “Us being here, accredited, I feel like I am a part of this,” Guzmán said, eyes crinkling with a broad smile.

    Around him, others took turns interviewing each other and bragged about how many people were connected to their feeds. One man wearing a Hawaiian shirt leapt over rows of bleachers to get a better signal. When Bukele walked on stage to give a speech, Guzmán and others chanted “Re-election!”

    El Salvador’s government is not the first to open its doors to social media personalities, but researchers and critics says the atmosphere created in El Salvador marks a particular risk as other leaders in the region seek to mimic Bukele.

    Picardo, the UFG investigator, said such accounts post a deluge of content when the government is trying to publicize something, like the leader’s experiment with Bitcoin, its gang crackdown or the Games.

    The researcher warned their increasingly hostile tone acts as a harbinger for further deteriorating press freedoms, echoing State Department alarms of a “villainization” of journalists by Bukele.

    Oscar Martínez’s award-winning news organization El Faro is among those facing attacks and harassment for its intensive investigation of Bukele, including audio evidencing that Bukele’s administration negotiated with gangs in order to dip violence.

    The government opened a case against El Faro for tax evasion, something the news site called “ completely baseless.” Phones of dozens of journalists were hacked with Pegasus spyware, regularly used by governments to spy on opponents.

    In April, El Faro announced it would move its center of operations to Costa Rica due to escalating harassment.

    He worries their investigations is being drowned out by the flood of disinformation, and said if Bukele stays in power in the upcoming elections, it will put reporters in El Salvador “much more at risk.”

    “At that moment, Bukele is going to decide to get rid of any obstacle he has within the country, and the main obstacle he has right now is the free press,” Martínez said.

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  • Guest lineups for the Sunday news shows

    Guest lineups for the Sunday news shows

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    Guest lineups for the Sunday news shows

    WASHINGTON — ABC’s “This Week” — Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md.; former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican presidential candidate; Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer of the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.

    __

    NBC’s “Meet the Press” — Former Vice President Mike Pence, a Republican presidential candidate; Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn.

    __

    CBS’ “Face the Nation” — Reps. Jill Tokuda, D-Hawaii, and Mike Turner, R-Ohio; Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell; Robert A. Pape, professor of political science at the University of Chicago.

    __

    CNN’s “State of the Union” — Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii; Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y.; former Texas Rep. Will Hurd, a Republican presidential candidate.

    ___

    “Fox News Sunday” — Reps. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, and Adam Smith, D-Wash.

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  • Colombia prosecutors confirm arrest of father of 2 of the 4 children lost 40 days in Amazon jungle

    Colombia prosecutors confirm arrest of father of 2 of the 4 children lost 40 days in Amazon jungle

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    Colombian officials say they have arrested the father of two of the four Indigenous children who survived a plane crash that killed their mother and two other adults, then survived 40 days on their own in the Amazon jungle

    FILE – Manuel Ranoque, the father of two of the youngest Indigenous children who survived an Amazon plane crash, gives an interview in Bogota, Colombia, June 14, 2023. Colombian authorities confirmed on Friday, Aug. 11, 2023, he was detained. No information was provided on the reasons or the circumstances in which he was apprehended. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara, File)

    The Associated Press

    BOGOTÁ — The father of two of the four Indigenous children who survived a plane crash that killed their mother and two other adults, then survived 40 days on their own in the Amazon jungle was arrested Friday, Colombian authorities said.

    The Colombian Prosecutor’s Office confirmed in a message to Associated Press journalists that officials arrested Manuel Ranoque, who is the father of the 1- and 4-year-old boys in the crash and the stepfather of the two girls, ages 9 and 13.

    The statement gave no details on the reason, but media reports said the case involved allegations of abuse.

    Astrid Eliana Cáceres, director of the Colombian Institute for Family Welfare, said the state agency had been working with the authorities.

    “We learned of the capture of the father of two Mucutuy minor children and we believe that the prosecutor’s office has operated within the full framework of the law,” she said.

    Ranoque has been embroiled in a fight for custody of the children with their maternal grandparents. Their mother died four days after the crash, according to the oldest child, Lesly.

    The four siblings have remained in the custody of Colombia’s child protection agency since leaving the hospital after recovering from malnutrition and other ailments.

    Their maternal grandfather, Narciso Mucutuy, has accused Ranoque of beating their mother, Magdalena Mucutuy.

    Before authorites confirmed his arrest, Ranoque acknowledged to reporters that there had been problems at home, but he said he considered it a private family matter and not “gossip” for the rest of the world.

    When asked if he had assaulted his wife, Ranoque replied: “Verbally all of a sudden, yes. Physically, very little, because we did more fight of words.”

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  • Biden will tout long-sought Grand Canyon monument designation during Arizona visit

    Biden will tout long-sought Grand Canyon monument designation during Arizona visit

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    PHOENIX — President Joe Biden will announce a new national monument to preserve land around Grand Canyon National Park and limit it from mining, White House officials said Monday.

    White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi confirmed during a press gaggle aboard Air Force One that Biden will call for the designation during his visit to northern Arizona on Tuesday, making it his fifth national monument.

    A dozen tribes “stepped up” and asked for this monument, Zaidi added.

    Advocates for limiting mining around Grand Canyon National Park had expressed hope that this would be the reason behind the presidential visit.

    Biden ‘s new national monument designation would preserve about 1,562 square miles (4,046 square kilometers) for future generations.

    Representatives of various northern Arizona tribes have been invited to attend the president’s remarks. Among them are Yavapai-Apache Nation Chairwoman Tanya Lewis, Colorado River Indian Tribes Chairwoman Amelia Flores, Navajo President Buu Nygren and Havasupai Tribal Councilwoman Dianna Sue White Dove Uqualla. Uqualla is part of a group of tribal dancers who will perform a blessing.

    “It’s really the uranium we don’t want coming out of the ground because it’s going to affect everything around us — the trees, the land, the animals, the people,” said Uqualla. “It’s not going to stop.”

    Nygren is on board with the new monument if it means protecting land for Navajo and other tribes. Uranium mining in particular left a legacy of death and disease on the Navajo Nation, where more than 500 mines that supported Cold War weaponry were abandoned and haven’t been cleaned up.

    “I’m all for it because we’ve had such a bad experience with it, why would we try to entertain it again?” he told The Associated Press on Monday.

    The tribe to this day is still fighting for compensation for people who lived and worked in and around the mines, he added.

    Tribes in Arizona have been pushing Biden to use his authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to create a new national monument called Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni. “Baaj Nwaavjo” means “where tribes roam,” for the Havasupai people, while “I’tah Kukveni” translates to “our footprints,” for the Hopi tribe.

    Tribes and environmentalists for decades have been trying to safeguard the land north and south of Grand Canyon National Park, while Republican lawmakers and the mining industry tout the economic benefits and raise mining as a matter of national security.

    The Interior Department, reacting to concerns over the risk of contaminating water, enacted a 20-year moratorium on the filing of new mining claims around the national park in 2012. Democratic U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva repeatedly has introduced legislation to create a national monument.

    A U.S. Geological Survey in 2021 found most springs and wells in a vast region of northern Arizona known for its high-grade uranium ore meet federal drinking water standards despite decades of uranium mining.

    In 2017, Democratic President Barack Obama backed off a full-on monument designation. The idea faced a hostile reception from Arizona’s Republican governor and two senators. Then-Gov. Doug Ducey threatened legal action, saying Arizona already has enough national monuments.

    Opponents of establishing a monument have argued it won’t help combat a lingering drought and could prevent thinning of forests and stop hunters from keeping wildlife populations in check. Ranchers in Utah near the Arizona border say the monument designation would strip them of privately owned land.

    The landscape of Arizona’s political delegation has since changed considerably. Gov. Katie Hobbs, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an Independent, are all on board. Hobbs, a Democrat, has openly urged Biden to issue a designation. In a letter sent to Biden in May, Hobbs claimed that she heard from people across the political spectrum, including sporting groups and outdoor groups, in support of a monument.

    Mining companies and the areas that would benefit from their business have been vehemently opposed. Buster Johnson, a Mohave County supervisor, said the monument proposal feels solely politically driven and there should have been another hearing on the matter. He doesn’t see the point of not tapping into uranium and making the country less dependent on Russia.

    “We need uranium for the security of our country,” Johnson said. “We’re out of the game.”

    No uranium mines are operating in Arizona, although the Pinyon Plain Mine just south of Grand Canyon National Park has been under development for years. Other claims are grandfathered in. The federal government has said nearly a dozen mines within the area that has been withdrawn from new mining claims could still potentially open, even with the monument designation, because their claims were established before 2012.

    After Arizona, Biden will go on to Albuquerque on Wednesday, where he will talk about how fighting climate change has created new jobs. He’ll then visit Salt Lake City on Thursday to mark the first anniversary of the PACT Act, which provides new benefits to veterans who were exposed to toxic substances. He’ll also hold a reelection fundraiser in each city.

    ____ Associated Press reporters Chris Megerian aboard Air Force One, Darlene Superville in Arlington, Virginia, and Felicia Fonseca in Flagstaff, Arizona, contributed to this report.

    __

    An earlier version of this story attributed the confirmation of Biden’s plans to White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. Climate adviser Ali Zaidi was the speaker.

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  • Play It Again, Joe. Biden bets that repeating himself is smart politics

    Play It Again, Joe. Biden bets that repeating himself is smart politics

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    WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden has his zingers (“This is not your father’s Republican Party”). He’s got patriotism (“This is the United States of America, dammit”). He’s got a geometry-based explanation on how grow to the economy (“from the middle out and the bottom up”).

    Move over, Beyonce and Taylor Swift. Biden has his own greatest hits and he’s keeping them on repeat.

    If you’ve heard one of the president’s recent speeches, you’ve basically heard them all — and you’re sure to keep hearing the same refrains in the year-plus leading up to Election Day 2024. People in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah will get to sample the playlist starting Tuesday, when Biden makes a three-day swing through the Southwest.

    Biden knows where the country is in the arc of history (“at an inflection point”). He knows what the middle class needs (“a little bit of breathing room”). Did you know his wife, Jill, is from Philadelphia? Yep, he “married a Philly girl” and will be “sleeping alone” if he fails to root for Philadelphia sports teams.

    The repetition is a strategic choice — one with a scientific basis in a society that is loaded with distractions. People need to see his TV ads and speeches dozens of times before they truly absorb them, his campaign believes. The president has built a multi-decade political career on repeating the same stories in order to explain the principles behind his policies.

    “That’s communications 101 — developing a compelling message and repeating it again and again,” said White House communications director Ben LaBolt, who noted that marketing has a “rule of seven” in which a customer generally needs to see a message at least seven times before making a purchase.

    LaBolt noted that most voters are busy taking their kids to soccer, making breakfast or commuting to their jobs. ”They’re not consuming news like they’re sitting in the White House briefing room — you have to repeat a message over time so that people remember it,” he said, noting that this has become increasingly the case in a fractured media environment.

    The president has staked his reelection on convincing a wary public that the economy is rock solid because of his policies.

    That means Biden is putting his economic pitch on repeat, hoping to break through the daily clutter by delivering his message often enough that voters will recall it and accept it as truth. The White House thinking is that voters will turn out for him if they know that their new bridge, new factory or tax break for an electric vehicle came from his legislative accomplishments.

    He’s even repeated in speeches the importance of repetition.

    “We got to let people know what we’ve done and how we’ve done it and why we did it,” he recently told donors in Chicago after delivering a speech about “Bidenomics” — a term he has used at least 39 times during the past month in public remarks.

    Philly girl Jill Biden has her own estimates for how often her husband deploys one of his other favorite phrases about the economy.

    “It’s the future of our workforce, how we strengthen the economy from the bottom up and the middle out,” she said at a recent childcare event. “Joe has said that, I think, a million times.”

    Close readers of the president’s speeches will note that sometimes “middle out” and “bottom up” switch places. The first lady led with with “bottom up,” while her husband has lately been more of a “middle out” guy.

    Repetition has been a time-tested strategy for politicians of all stripes and throughout the ages.

    Donald Trump, the former president and current Republican frontrunner for 2024, promised over and over to “build the wall” at the Mexican border. He dubbed his 2016 opponent “Crooked Hillary” and pledged to “drain the swamp” like a mantra. He likes to recite the lyrics to the Al Wilson song “The Snake” like an encore at a concert.

    Bill Clinton signaled that he was a young Democrat with an eye to the future by frequently talking about building a “bridge to the 21st Century.” Republicans defined Democrats in the 1980s as “tax-and-spend liberals.” In his famed “I have a dream” speech, Martin Luther King Jr. used the word “dream” 11 times.

    Speaking in the Roman Senate more than 2,100 years ago, Cato the Elder famously ended his speeches with the well-worn line “Carthage must be destroyed.” (Roman forces did just that a few years later.)

    “Repetition increases retention,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania. “There is no hard and fast rule on number of reiterations needed to produce retention. Concise, vividly phrased messages that employ parallelism and alliteration are more readily remembered.”

    What Biden is trying to do is a bit more challenging: He’s using repetition to try to change voters’ decidedly negative views of the economy because cold hard data has not been enough. The low 3.6% unemployment rate and a decline in inflation over the past year to 3% annually has done little to boost his ratings.

    Only 24% of U.S. adults described the economy as good in a June survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs. Nearly two-thirds disapprove of how Biden has handled the economy.

    “It’s hard to get awareness levels up for policy accomplishments,” said John Anzalone, Biden’s 2020 pollster. holding out repetition as part of the solution. “At the end of the day, people are going to know a heck of a lot about the roads and water systems and broadband that are being put around America.”

    Officials at the White House and campaign know Biden’s standard stump speech isn’t likely to make national news, particularly as his domestic travels pick up along with the campaign. They’re more interested in getting local coverage that drives home the idea that his economic policies are having a tangible effect with voters on the ground.

    There are early signs that people are starting to feel better about the economy. The Conference Board said Tuesday that consumer confidence has leapt to a two-year high and a key indicator is no longer signaling a recession.

    But even with the best lines, repetition is not foolproof — and it can even tip over into annoyance if overdone.

    “The liking of the message tends to follow a bell curve,” said Juliana Fernandes, a communications professor at the University of Florida. “It’s tiredness and boredom actually. If I’m not learning anything new from the message, I’m going to at some point dislike it.”

    For members of the news media — who can recite many of the president’s lines verbatim — overexposure inevitably leads them to play down the very lines that Biden most wants to highlight.

    The president acknowledged as much at a June fundraiser in Chevy Chase, Maryland, when he prefaced one of his boilerplate stories by allowing, “I apologize to the press for hearing me say this so many times.”

    That apology? He’s repeated it many times over.

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  • Maine’s biggest newspaper group is now a nonprofit under the National Trust for Local News

    Maine’s biggest newspaper group is now a nonprofit under the National Trust for Local News

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    PORTLAND, Maine — With advertising shrinking and newspapers vanishing, Maine’s largest newspaper group became the latest to try a nonprofit model with the completion of the sale of more than 20 daily and weekly newspapers, including the Portland Press Herald.

    The National Trust for Local News, which already owns two dozen newspapers in Colorado, is expanding its portfolio through the purchase of five daily newspapers and 17 weekly newspapers that were part of Masthead Maine. Former Masthead owner Reade Brower retained ownership of several weeklies that weren’t part of the deal.

    The newspapers will now fall under the umbrella of the Maine Trust for Local News with the closing of the deal, announced Tuesday. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

    The deal, which covers all of the state’s daily newspapers except the Bangor Daily News, represents a trend toward a nonprofit business model as newspapers continue to struggle.

    “I wouldn’t say it’s sweeping the country but we’re seeing this trend. And it’s a healthy one. Commercial news organizations are struggling from loss of advertising revenue,” said Tim Franklin, senior associate dean and leader of the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

    The transformation from a commercial business to a nonprofit was a positive outcome compared to other alternatives including corporate ownership that could have been more focused on making making cuts to maximize profits, executives told Portland Press Herald employees at a meeting and celebration in South Portland.

    “Too many corporate news owners across the country have abandoned their missions in the name of short-term profits. That will not happen here,” Steve Greenlee, editor of the Portland Press Herald, told The Associated Press in a statement.

    Former Masthead Maine CEO Lisa DeSisto, who will continue her leadership role as CEO and publisher of the Maine Trust for Local News, called the deal “an incredible outcome for our employees, our readers and the state of Maine.”

    “I worked lots of days in the newspaper business — this was the best one,” DeSisto wrote in an email after briefing workers at meetings in South Portland, Augusta, Waterville and Brunswick.

    Local news is in crisis with the nation losing a quarter of its newspapers since 2005 and advertising revenue declining by as much as 80% over a decade, Franklin said.

    Reade Brower, the newspapers’ former owner, purchased MaineToday Media, the parent company of the Press Herald, the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel, in 2015 and added newspaper groups and newspapers over the next several years.

    He announced in March he was considering selling his media holdings and said he was open to different ideas, including operating the newspapers as a nonprofit.

    There is plentiful foundation and philanthropic money spent on digital startups and niche publications, so it’s encouraging to see them purchasing a traditional entity with credibility instead of chasing something that’s “shiny” and new, Franklin said.

    ___

    Follow David Sharp on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, @David_Sharp_AP

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  • French reporters end an unsuccessful strike against a new editor known as a far-right supporter

    French reporters end an unsuccessful strike against a new editor known as a far-right supporter

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    PARIS — Journalists at France’s emblematic Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche ended a 40-day strike Tuesday after unsuccessfully protesting the appointment of an editor-in-chief they denounce as far-right supporter.

    It was the longest journalists’ strike in France in decades. The newspaper, also known as the JDD, was absent from newsstands for the sixth week in a row Sunday. The newspaper’s owner, the Legardere group, said the printed version would resume publication in mid-August.

    The journalists had denounced the appointment of Geoffroy Lejeune, known for his far-right political views, which they say is putting the editorial independence of the newspaper at risk.

    Lejeune has openly supported far-right presidential candidate Eric Zemmour, a former TV pundit who run in France’s April 2022 election, drawing fervent audiences with his anti-Islam, anti-immigration invective. Zemmour lost in the first round with 7% of the votes.

    The newspaper’s journalists’ association (SDJ ) said in a statement Tuesday that of 94% of the staff decided to end the strike as the Lagardere group “remained deaf to our claims.” The journalists had almost unanimously supported the strike when it began on June 22.

    “We didn’t win,” they wrote in the statement. “Today, Geoffroy Lejeune is taking office. It’s in an empty newsroom he will step in. Dozens of journalists refuse to work with him and should leave the JDD.”

    Lagardere group said in a statement that the management reached an agreement with the journalists’ association and unions that provides that the JDD website will start releasing articles again from Tuesday on and that the newspaper will go back on newsstands from mid-August.

    The agreement also provides a financial package for journalists who want to leave the newspaper, the statement said.

    “The JDD will thus continue to offer quality information to all its readers,” Lagardere group said.

    The newspaper is known for its broad political interviews with French presidents, prime ministers, opposition leaders and other key political players from the right and the left. They often opened major debates on the country’s domestic issues.

    Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders media criticized Lejeune’s appointment as part of a broader move threatening the independence of the journalists. It noted that the appointment comes as French billionaire Vincent Bolloré, who already owns several major French media, is in the process of buying Lagardere group.

    In the past, the JDD has been criticized by left-wing politicians as being too close to conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy during his 2007-2012 term. In recent years, opponents said it was politically close to the government of centrist President Emmanuel Macron.

    The newspaper created in 1948 sells about 136,000 copies nationwide each week according to last year’s figures, down from sales in previous decades.

    ____

    AP journalist Youcef Bounab contributed to the story.

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  • His campaign forced Sinead O’Connor to scrap a 1997 Jerusalem concert. Now he is a Cabinet minister

    His campaign forced Sinead O’Connor to scrap a 1997 Jerusalem concert. Now he is a Cabinet minister

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    JERUSALEM — Death threats forced Irish pop singer Sinead O’Connor to call off a peace concert in Jerusalem in the summer of 1997. At the time, a young man named Itamar Ben-Gvir took credit for the campaign against her.

    Today, he is Israel’s national security minister.

    The transformation of Ben-Gvir from a fringe Israeli extremist trying to take down O’Connor’s coexistence-themed concert to a powerful minster overseeing the Israeli police force reflects the dramatic rise of Israel’s far-right.

    O’Connor, a spirited singer and frequent source of controversy who rocketed to fame in 1990, died on Wednesday in London. While most people remember the star for her hit cover of Prince’s ballad “Nothing Compares 2 U” or the uproar that followed her ripping up a photo of Pope John Paul II on live TV, many Israelis on Thursday recounted an open letter she wrote castigating Ben-Gvir.

    Incensed after hearing Ben-Gvir, who was then 21, boast in a radio interview that he had succeeded in scaring her away from Jerusalem, she sent the letter to The Associated Press and other news organizations.

    ″God does not reward those who bring terror to children of the world,″ O’Connor wrote in a message addressing Ben-Gvir. “So you have succeeded in nothing but your soul’s failure.”

    On June 17, 1997, O’Connor — worried for her safety and her children — backed out of the concert organized by Israeli and Palestinian women’s groups that had sought to promote Jerusalem as a capital for both people. Named “Sharing Jerusalem: Two Capitals for Two States,” the event was set to take place just a few years after the signing of the Oslo Accords, which created the foundation for the Mideast peace process.

    Peace in the Holy Land was as controversial then as it is now, and hard-liners like Ben-Gvir oppose any division of Jerusalem. The Palestinians claim east Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967, as their capital.

    Ahead of her summer concert, British and Irish embassies in Tel Aviv reported receiving death threats against O’Connor. After her cancellation, fans and fellow peace activists expressed anger, surprise and dismay — some sealing their lips with black tape and protesting in the streets against Ben-Gvir and his allies.

    Back in 1997, Ben-Gvir was an activist in the Ideological Front, an offshoot of the racist Kahanist movement. Rabbi Meir Kahane’s violent anti-Arab ideology was considered so repugnant in the 1980s that Israel banned him from parliament and the United States listed his party as a terrorist group.

    While Ben-Gvir did not take responsibility for threatening O’Connor, he told Israeli radio that his efforts had compelled her to drop out.

    “Due to us she is not arriving,″ he said at the time. ″We are calling the pressure we put on her not to arrive a success.”

    On Thursday, as Israeli media remembered Ben-Gvir’s campaign against O’Connor, his office denied that he had ever threatened her.

    “Indeed, Minister Ben-Gvir said he would protest against the show,” his office acknowledged. “The show was canceled due to the work of thousands of demonstrators.”

    Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government — in which Ben-Gvir is a leading member — is the most right-wing and religiously conservative in Israeli history.

    This week, the coalition passed the first part of its deeply contentious program to weaken the Supreme Court, a plan that has prompted mass street protests and plunged the country into its worst domestic crisis in years.

    On Thursday, Ben-Gvir visited Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site — a contested hilltop compound revered by both Jews and Muslims. The visit, while permitted under longstanding arrangements, was seen by Palestinians and Muslim countries as a provocation given Ben-Gvir’s history.

    Ben-Gvir, now 47, was convicted in his youth of inciting racism against Arabs and barred from serving in the Israeli army because he was considered too extremist. Until recently, he hung a portrait in his home of an Israeli gunman who killed 29 Palestinians in a West Bank mosque in 1994.

    As national security minister, Ben-Gvir has repeatedly sparked backlash over his anti-Arab rhetoric and stunts. He has pushed for the creation of a national guard that critics fear could endanger Israel’s Palestinian minority and ramped up Palestinian home demolitions in the contested capital, among other things.

    O’Connor’s relationship to Israel only become more fraught following the botched concert. She became as a supporter of the Palestinian-led campaign that calls for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israeli businesses, cultural institutions and universities. After the 2014 Gaza war, O’Connor heeded the campaign’s calls to pull out of a concert near Tel Aviv.

    Ben-Gvir’s office also noted that despite his criticism of O’Connor’s conversion to Islam and support for the BDS campaign, he would try to remember her “favorably because of the difficult life she lived.”

    But the cancellation of her 1997 Jerusalem concert was remembered the most in Israel — a country in turmoil as Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir press ahead with their divisive, far-right agenda.

    In her letter to Ben-Gvir, O’Connor described being haunted by televised images of Israelis and Palestinians beating each other in the streets of the holy city of Jerusalem.

    “I felt saddened and frightened,” she wrote. “I asked God then ‘How can there be peace anywhere on earth if there is not peace in Jerusalem?’”

    She then added: “I ask you that question now Mr. Ben Gvir.”

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  • His campaign forced Sinead O’Connor to scrap a 1997 Jerusalem concert. Now he is a Cabinet minister

    His campaign forced Sinead O’Connor to scrap a 1997 Jerusalem concert. Now he is a Cabinet minister

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    JERUSALEM — Death threats forced Irish pop singer Sinead O’Connor to call off a peace concert in Jerusalem in the summer of 1997. At the time, a young man named Itamar Ben-Gvir took credit for the campaign against her.

    Today, he is Israel’s national security minister.

    The transformation of Ben-Gvir from a fringe Israeli extremist trying to take down O’Connor’s coexistence-themed concert to a powerful minster overseeing the Israeli police force reflects the dramatic rise of Israel’s far-right.

    O’Connor, a spirited singer and frequent source of controversy who rocketed to fame in 1990, died on Wednesday in London. While most people remember the star for her hit cover of Prince’s ballad “Nothing Compares 2 U” or the uproar that followed her ripping up a photo of Pope John Paul II on live TV, many Israelis on Thursday recounted an open letter she wrote castigating Ben-Gvir.

    Incensed after hearing Ben-Gvir, who was then 21, boast in a radio interview that he had succeeded in scaring her away from Jerusalem, she sent the letter to The Associated Press and other news organizations.

    ″God does not reward those who bring terror to children of the world,″ O’Connor wrote in a message addressing Ben-Gvir. “So you have succeeded in nothing but your soul’s failure.”

    On June 17, 1997, O’Connor — worried for her safety and her children — backed out of the concert organized by Israeli and Palestinian women’s groups that had sought to promote Jerusalem as a capital for both people. Named “Sharing Jerusalem: Two Capitals for Two States,” the event was set to take place just a few years after the signing of the Oslo Accords, which created the foundation for the Mideast peace process.

    Peace in the Holy Land was as controversial then as it is now, and hard-liners like Ben-Gvir oppose any division of Jerusalem. The Palestinians claim east Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967, as their capital.

    Ahead of her summer concert, British and Irish embassies in Tel Aviv reported receiving death threats against O’Connor. After her cancellation, fans and fellow peace activists expressed anger, surprise and dismay — some sealing their lips with black tape and protesting in the streets against Ben-Gvir and his allies.

    Back in 1997, Ben-Gvir was an activist in the Ideological Front, an offshoot of the racist Kahanist movement. Rabbi Meir Kahane’s violent anti-Arab ideology was considered so repugnant in the 1980s that Israel banned him from parliament and the United States listed his party as a terrorist group.

    While Ben-Gvir did not take responsibility for threatening O’Connor, he told Israeli radio that his efforts had compelled her to drop out.

    “Due to us she is not arriving,″ he said at the time. ″We are calling the pressure we put on her not to arrive a success.”

    On Thursday, as Israeli media remembered Ben-Gvir’s campaign against O’Connor, his office denied that he had ever threatened her.

    “Indeed, Minister Ben-Gvir said he would protest against the show,” his office acknowledged. “The show was canceled due to the work of thousands of demonstrators.”

    Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government — in which Ben-Gvir is a leading member — is the most right-wing and religiously conservative in Israeli history.

    This week, the coalition passed the first part of its deeply contentious program to weaken the Supreme Court, a plan that has prompted mass street protests and plunged the country into its worst domestic crisis in years.

    On Thursday, Ben-Gvir visited Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site — a contested hilltop compound revered by both Jews and Muslims. The visit, while permitted under longstanding arrangements, was seen by Palestinians and Muslim countries as a provocation given Ben-Gvir’s history.

    Ben-Gvir, now 47, was convicted in his youth of inciting racism against Arabs and barred from serving in the Israeli army because he was considered too extremist. Until recently, he hung a portrait in his home of an Israeli gunman who killed 29 Palestinians in a West Bank mosque in 1994.

    As national security minister, Ben-Gvir has repeatedly sparked backlash over his anti-Arab rhetoric and stunts. He has pushed for the creation of a national guard that critics fear could endanger Israel’s Palestinian minority and ramped up Palestinian home demolitions in the contested capital, among other things.

    O’Connor’s relationship to Israel only become more fraught following the botched concert. She became as a supporter of the Palestinian-led campaign that calls for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israeli businesses, cultural institutions and universities. After the 2014 Gaza war, O’Connor heeded the campaign’s calls to pull out of a concert near Tel Aviv.

    Ben-Gvir’s office also noted that despite his criticism of O’Connor’s conversion to Islam and support for the BDS campaign, he would try to remember her “favorably because of the difficult life she lived.”

    But the cancellation of her 1997 Jerusalem concert was remembered the most in Israel — a country in turmoil as Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir press ahead with their divisive, far-right agenda.

    In her letter to Ben-Gvir, O’Connor described being haunted by televised images of Israelis and Palestinians beating each other in the streets of the holy city of Jerusalem.

    “I felt saddened and frightened,” she wrote. “I asked God then ‘How can there be peace anywhere on earth if there is not peace in Jerusalem?’”

    She then added: “I ask you that question now Mr. Ben Gvir.”

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  • Santa Barbara’s paper, one of California’s oldest, stops publishing after owner declares bankruptcy

    Santa Barbara’s paper, one of California’s oldest, stops publishing after owner declares bankruptcy

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    SAN FRANCISCO — The Pulitzer Prize-winning Santa Barbara News-Press, one of California’s oldest newspapers, has ceased publishing after its owner declared the 150-year-old publication bankrupt.

    The newspaper became an online-only publication in April. But its last digital edition was posted Friday when owner Wendy McCaw filed for bankruptcy.

    Managing editor Dave Mason broke the news to staff in an email Friday, according to NoozHawk, a digital publication whose executive editor, Tom Bolton, used to lead the News-Press.

    “They ran out of money to pay us. They will issue final paychecks when the bankruptcy is approved in court,” Mason wrote to staff.

    On Monday, the News-Press’ website was still online, with the most recent stories published Friday. There was no mention that it would cease publishing or that it has declared bankruptcy.

    A voicemail message left Monday by The Associated Press in the newsroom’s phone number was not immediately returned.

    The Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing by Ampersand Publishing, the parent company of the Santa Barbara News-Press, said it has assets of less than $50,000 and debts and estimated liabilities of between $1 million and $10 million, according to federal court records. A meeting of creditors, which number between 200 and 999, is scheduled for Sept. 7.

    Anthony Friedman, the lawyer listed for Ampersand Publishing in the bankruptcy filing, did not immediately return a phone call or email seeking comment. McCaw could not be reached.

    At its height, the newspaper founded in 1855, had a daily circulation of 45,000 and was published seven days a week, serving Santa Barbara, an upscale city of 90,000 people. Editorial writer Thomas M. Storke won a Pulitzer Prize in 1962 for a series of editorials about the John Birch Society.

    McCaw, then a billionaire local philanthropist active on environmental and animal rights issues, bought the daily from The New York Times Co. in October 2000 and a few months later appointed herself and her fiancé, Arthur von Weisenberger, as acting co-publishers.

    Six years later, Santa Barbara News-Press Editor Jerry Roberts quit the newspaper along with four other top editors and a columnist to protest moves by McCaw that they said undermined the paper’s credibility. The editors who quit cited the publishers’ meddling in stories, which they said compromised the paper’s ethics. In one example, the editors alleged McCaw was against publishing a story about one editor’s drunken driving arrest and later intervened to stop a second story.

    The editors who quit were also upset that McCaw had appointed the paper’s editorial page editor as the acting publisher.

    “On one hand you have someone writing editorials and on the other hand editing news stories. There is an inherent conflict,” Don Murphy, who quit as the paper’s managing editor, told the AP at the time.

    The paper’s closure “is not a big surprise,” Roberts said Monday. “The paper’s been on a downhill slide for a while.”

    “But the fact that the community has lost its only paper is unspeakably sad,” he added.

    Santa Barbara, which sits along the coast about 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles, is known for its stunning geography and wineries, attracting tourists and celebrities alike for its mild climate and beautiful views. The nearby town of Montecito was the site of deadly 2018 mudslides that killed 23 people.

    About half of registered voters in Santa Barbara County are Democrats while roughly a quarter are Republicans, statistics that mirror the rest of the state. Under McCaw’s leadership, the paper in 2016 was among the few to endorse Republican Donald Trump for president. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton won nearly twice as many votes in the county. McCaw personally wrote an editorial endorsing Trump again in 2020.

    The community still has a weekly newspaper, The Independent, as well as the digital site Noozhawk. The closest major daily newspapers, though, are now in San Luis Obispo to the north and Los Angeles to the south.

    The Press-News’ closure is the latest example of a struggling news media, said Tim Franklin, an expert in local news at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

    “We are losing on average two newspapers a week in the U.S.,” Franklin said. “We’re on pace to have lost about a third of all newspapers by 2025.”

    Media companies are having to compete with Google, Facebook and Amazon, which are soaking up much of the ad market, and have yet to figure out a profitable business model for local news, he said.

    “The local news crisis is happening in every corner of the country, including in affluent cities and suburbs,” he added.

    The Los Angeles Times recently announced layoffs and earlier this month sold The San Diego Union-Tribune to MediaNews Group, which owns hundreds of papers around the country.

    The Union-Tribune, which covers the second-largest city in California, is now owned by the same chain that owns a slew of Southern California newspapers. The parent company is Alden Global Capital, which has bought up newspapers across the country and faced criticism for slashing budgets and cutting jobs.

    In January, the Mail Tribune, one of Oregon’s oldest operating newspapers, shut down, saying declines in advertising spending and difficulty hiring staff precipitated the closure.

    The paper-based in Medford, Oregon, stopped producing a print edition in September but continued operating in a digital format until closing.

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  • Editorial cartoonists’ firings point to steady decline of opinion pages in newspapers

    Editorial cartoonists’ firings point to steady decline of opinion pages in newspapers

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    NEW YORK — Even during a year of sobering economic news for media companies, the layoffs of three Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonists on a single day hit like a gut punch.

    The firings of the cartoonists employed by the McClatchy newspaper chain last week were a stark reminder of how an influential art form is dying, part of a general trend away from opinion content in the struggling print industry.

    Losing their jobs were Jack Ohman of California’s Sacramento Bee, also president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists; Joel Pett of the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky and Kevin Siers of the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina. Ohman and Siers were full-time staffers, while Pett worked on a free-lance contract. The firings on Tuesday were first reported by The Daily Cartoonist blog.

    “I had no warning at all,” Ohman told The Associated Press. “I was stupefied.”

    McClatchy, which owns 30 U.S. newspapers, said it would no longer publish editorial cartoons. “We made this decision based on changing reader habits and our relentless focus on providing the communities we serve with local news and information they can’t get elsewhere,” the chain said in a statement.

    There’s a rich history of editorial cartooning, including Thomas Nast’s vivid takedowns of corrupt New York City politicians in the late 1800s and Herbert Block’s drawings of a sinister-looking Richard Nixon in The Washington Post.

    At the start of the 20th century, there were about 2,000 editorial cartoonists employed at newspapers, according to a report by the Herbert Block Foundation. Now, Ohman estimates there are fewer than 20.

    The last full-time editorial cartoonist to win a Pulitzer was Jim Morin of the Miami Herald in 2017. Since then, owing to the diminishing number of employed cartoonists, the Pulitzers have broadened the category in which they compete and renamed it “Illustrated Reporting and Commentary.”

    While written editorials can sometimes be ponderous and intimidate readers, the impact of a well-done cartoon is instantaneous, Pett said.

    “Usually when you look at an editorial cartoon, it’s (done by) some guy like you who is pissed who can draw,” he said. “It’s just relatable.”

    While economics is clearly a factor in an industry that has lost jobs so dramatically that many newspapers are mere ghosts of themselves, experts say timidity also explains the dwindling number of cartoonists. Readers are already disappearing, why give them a reason to be angry?

    Pett has been involved in a battle with Daniel Cameron, Kentucky’s attorney general and a Republican candidate for governor. Cameron, who is Black, has accused Pett of being a race-baiter in his cartoons and called for his firing at a news conference — not knowing that hours earlier, his wish had been granted, said Pett, a Pulitzer winner in 2000.

    His bosses never told him to avoid cartoons about Cameron, but gave him a series of guidelines, Pett said. For instance, he was told not to depict Cameron wearing a MAGA hat backward.

    “There’s a broader reluctance in this political environment to make people mad,” said Tim Nickens, retired editorial page editor at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. “By definition, a provocative editorial cartoonist is going to make somebody mad every day.”

    Pett agrees.

    “I could have looked at the guy who fired me and said, ‘I’ll do it for free,’ and they would have said no,” he said.

    McClatchy insists that local opinion journalism remains central to its mission. The Miami Herald, a McClatchy newspaper, won a Pulitzer this year for “Broken Promises,” a series of editorials about a failure to rebuild troubled areas in southern Florida.

    In the current atmosphere, however, opinion is less valued. Gannett, the nation’s largest chain with more than 200 newspapers, said last year the papers would only offer opinion pages a couple of days a week. Its executives reasoned that these pages were not heavily read, and surveys showed readers did not want to be lectured to.

    That also meant less room for cartoons.

    The reasoning is there are plenty of places to find opinion online, particularly on national issues. Political endorsements are more infrequent at newspapers. In 2020, only 54 of the nation’s top 100 newspapers endorsed a presidential candidate, down from 92 in 2008, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

    “When publications really don’t stand for anything in an editorial sense, that’s damaging, whether the pieces are widely read or not,” said Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at The Poynter Institute.

    While the idea may be to steer clear of polarizing national issues to concentrate on local concerns, the irony is that newspapers that still want to use cartoons will be forced to turn more to syndicated services, whose pieces primarily deal with national or international issues.

    That’s what Pett draws for his contract with the Tribune Media Co., not cartoons about Kentucky.

    “This isn’t a crisis of cartooning particularly,” said Mike Peterson, a blogger at The Daily Cartoonist. “This is a crisis of newspapers failing to connect with their community.”

    Like newspaper owners, some cartoonists themselves fear there is less taste now for political satire, and more for inoffensive, funny drawings of the type popular in the New Yorker magazine.

    “At the end of the day, I think people like cartoons,” said Ohman, who won his Pulitzer in 2016. “But it’s hard for a cartoon to be ecumenical.”

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