PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — A gang rampaged through the Cite Soleil slum, killing and raping and setting fire to hundreds of wood-and-tin homes. Forced out of the neighborhood, one family of four lived on the streets of Port-au-Prince until they were struck by a truck as they slept.
Two brothers, 2 and 9, died in the November accident. Jean-Kere Almicar opened his home to their distraught parents, then another family, then another, until there were nearly 200 people camped out in his front yard and nearby.
They are among more than 165,000 Haitians who have fled their homes amid a surge in gang violence, with nowhere to turn in this capital of nearly 3 million people.
Almicar, who once lived in Scranton, Pennsylvania but moved back to Haiti in 2007, uses his own money.
“There was nothing I could do except tell them to come in,” Almicar said. “Their home doesn’t exist anymore. If they go back, they’re going to be killed.”
Some 79,000 people are temporarily staying with friends or family, but another 48,000 have crowded into dozens of makeshift shelters like Almicar’s or sought refuge in parks, churches, schools and abandoned buildings in Port-au-Prince and beyond. The situation is overwhelming nonprofits and non-governmental organizations.
AP video by Pierre Luxama
“The government is not relocating anyone,” said Joseph Wilfred, one of several volunteers in charge of an abandoned government building in Port-au-Prince that houses nearly 1,000 people, including him and his family.
Tens of thousands of Haitians have languished in these makeshift shelters for almost a year. They sleep on the hard floor or on flattened cardboard boxes. Belongings are stuffed into big rice bags pushed up against the walls of packed rooms. The gangs that chased them out of their homes and control up to 80% of the capital, by most estimates, are now recruiting children as young as 8 at shelters.
One woman staying at Almicar’s place, Lenlen Désir Fondala, said someone snatched her 5-year-old son while they were living in an outdoors park in November. Her face crinkled and she began to cry, whispering that she still dreams of him.
Rapes also are common at the shelters and in the neighborhoods that gangs are razing.
Lovely Benjamin, 26, has scars on her torso and arm after being shot by gangs and attacked with a machete. Her 4-year-old son bears a machete scar on his head. They are homeless, and Benjamin struggles to find work. The gangs torched the items that she used to sell, including rice and oil, and she doesn’t have the money to buy more. She and her little boy survived the attack but gang members killed her partner and set his body on fire.
“Everybody was running,” she recalled. “The gangs burst into everyone’s home.”
Benjamin and her son now live in Almicar’s front yard along with other neighbors from Cite Soleil. On a recent morning, they crowded together, surrounded by heaps of clothes soaked by recent floods. The rocky floor where they sit and sleep also serves as a makeshift kitchen, with some cooking beans or vegetables on tiny, charcoal-fired stoves.
Those living alongside Benjamin include Januèlle Dafka and her 15-year-old daughter, Titi Paul, who were both raped and impregnated by gang members. Another neighbor, Rose Dupont, confided that she was nine months pregnant when four gang members shot her in the shoulder then beat and raped her, causing her to miscarry. The Associated Press does not identify people who say they are the victims of sexual assault unless they agree to be named, as Dafka, Paul and Dupont did.
The women carry envelopes with detailed medical records of the horrors they endured and hope that someone will help them find a safe place to live.
For now, they take refuge in the yard of Almicar, who is known as “Big Papa.”
“He has been investing his time, his money, not to mention his strength to keep us safe,” said Dovenald Cetoute, 33, who lives there.
But few are benevolent like Almicar. Police have been evicting people from makeshift shelters, and neighbors have threatened to kick out people left homeless because of fears that gang members might be hiding among them.
The United Nations’ International Organization for Migration has helped more than 3,400 people find homes in safer areas and gives families some $350 to cover one year of rent. But a growing number of those families are returning to shelters as gangs continue to invade communities once considered safe. Even makeshift shelters are closing and moving elsewhere because of the ongoing violence, said Philippe Branchat, head of the IOM in Haiti.
“We are hearing these terrible stories very often,” Branchat said, adding that the agency doesn’t have access to about half of the makeshift shelters because of gang violence. “The situation is really, really bad.”
People at the shelters sometimes can only afford to eat one mango a day. Many young children are malnourished.
On a recent morning at the abandoned government building that Wilfred helps manage as a makeshift shelter, a woman wailed against the wall as the tiny body of her 1-year-old goddaughter lay on the floor, wrapped in a towel. She had died just hours ago of suspected cholera.
The night before, a 6-year-old boy died under similar circumstances, with health workers who visited the next morning suspecting cholera.
Hours later, an ambulance came by to pick up two other children fighting cholera. The bacteria, which sickens people who swallow contaminated food or water, has been spreading at the shelter that has no power or running water, and just two makeshift holes in the ground that serve as a bathroom for nearly 1,000 people.
The worsening situation is a regular topic at the biweekly meetings that leaders of the shelter hold for those living there.
Sony Pierre, a spokesman for the committee that runs the shelter where he lives, said he is greatly concerned about the living conditions.
“Look at this catastrophe,” Pierre said as he waved his arms at the scene behind him, where flies buzzed around aggressively in the oppressive heat. “This is an emergency … We are looking for help to live with dignity.”
MECHELEN, Belgium (AP) — The confessionals where generations of Belgians admitted their sins stood stacked in a corner of what was once Sacred Heart Church, proof the stalls — as well as the Roman Catholic house of worship — had outlived their purpose.
The building is to close down for two years while a cafe and concert stage are added, with plans to turn the church into “a new cultural hot spot in the heart of Mechelen,” almost within earshot of where Belgium’s archbishop lives. Around the corner, a former Franciscan church is now a luxury hotel where music star Stromae spent his wedding night amid the stained-glass windows.
Across Europe, the continent that nurtured Christianity for most of two millennia, churches, convents and chapels stand empty and increasingly derelict as faith and church attendance shriveled over the past half century.
“That is painful. I will not hide it. On the other hand, there is no return to the past possible,” Mgr. Johan Bonny, bishop of Antwerp, told the Associated Press. Something needs to be done and now, ever more of the once sacred structures are repurposed for anything from clothes shops and climbing walls to night clubs.
It is a phenomenon seen over much of Europe’s Christian heartland from Germany to Italy and many nations in between. It really stands out in Flanders, in northern Belgium, which has some of the greatest cathedrals on the continent and the finest art to fill them. If only it had enough faithful. A 2018 study from the PEW research group showed, in Belgium, that of the 83% that say they were raised Christian, only 55% still consider themselves so. Only 10% of Belgians still attended church regularly.
Nowadays, visiting international choirs may find that their singers outnumber the congregation.
On average, every one of the 300 towns in Flanders has about six churches and often not enough faithful to fill a single one. Some become eyesores in city centers, their maintenance a constant drain on finances.
Mechelen, a town of 85,000 just north of Brussels is the Roman Catholic center of Belgium. It has two dozen churches, several huddled close to St. Rumbold’s cathedral with its UNESCO World Heritage belfry tower. Mayor Bart Somers has been working for years to give many of the buildings a different purpose.
“In my city we have a brewery in a church, we have a hotel in a church, we have a cultural center in a church, we have a library in a church. So we have a lot of new destinations for the churches,” said Somers, who as Flemish regional minister is also involved in repurposing some 350 churches spread across the densely populated region of 6.7 million.
A landmark repurposing project in Belgium was Martin’s Patershof hotel in Mechelen, where the interior of the church was gutted to create rooms where the beds have headboards resembling organ pipes and a breakfast room next to the altar where wafers of gold leaf hover overhead. “We often hear that people come here to relax and enjoy the silence of its former identity,” said hotel manager Emilie De Preter.
With its understated luxury, it offers contemplation, and more.
“In the hotel, people sleep in a church, maybe have sex in a church. So you could say: ethically, is it a good idea to have a hotel in a church? I don’t have so many hesitations,” said Somers. “I am more concerned about the actual architectural value.”
The design value is especially clear at St. Anthony of Padua church in Brussels, also known as Maniak Padoue climbing club these days, where the multicolored hand and footholds on the wall now compete with the stained glass as the prime multicolored attraction.
“The stained glass brings a real shimmering and warm light to the venue when the sun goes through it, so we can really feel the presence of the remains of the church,” said Kyril Wittouck, the co-founder of the club. “The altar is still in place, so we are surrounded by remains and it reminds us where we actually are.”
Also in Brussels, the Spirito night club has taken over a deconsecrated Anglican church and has a drawing of a priest kissing a nun as its logo.
It is not exactly what Bishop Bonny had in mind.
Even if Roman Catholic religion is on the wane, a sense of the sacral or a need for reflection is also still present in society, whether one is religious, agnostic or atheist. And the aura of tranquility emanating from a church is hard to match. So for Bonny, there is no reason to turn churches into supermarkets or discos.
“Those are places for contemplation. And is that not exactly that the care of the church should be about?” he said. Bonny thinks the most successful and gratifying repurposing has been the handing over to other Christian communities, be they Coptic or Eastern European.
At his office, though, he can get weary just looking at the procession of suitors for empty Roman Catholic buildings. His heart is heavy when a real estate agent shows up. “They see possibilities. And you cannot believe, suddenly, how pious they can become when a financial opportunity presents itself. Suddenly they are more devout than a nun.”
Knowing the winding history of Christianity over centuries, Bonny takes the long view, since the near future does not look bright. “Every 300 years we nearly had to start again,” he said. “Something new, I’m sure, will happen. But it takes time.”
At the Martin’s Patershof, there is even is a condition that the church can reclaim the building if it is needed again, said De Preter. The hotel elements were built on steel beams and could be totally disassembled and taken out again. “If the church, at a certain point, wants the building back — which holds a very small chance, probably — it is possible.”
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The sun is shining, the beach is calling, and school is out: It’s time to prepare the song of the summer.
Often, there’s a clear champion: In 2017, Lusi Fonsi, Daddy Yankee, and Justin Bieber’s “Despacito” was unavoidable. In 2019, Lil Nas X’s ubiquitous “Old Town Road” foretold future superstardom. Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License” did the same in 2021. But that’s not always the case.
Was Harry Styles’ “As It Was” the go-to jam of the 2022 season? Who claimed the title during the summer-that-barely-was in 2020? When all the world’s music is available on streaming platforms, can genre-loyal listeners agree on a single song of the summer?
What if they didn’t have to? Well, here are AP’s 2023 song(s) of the summer predictions — and holders of each crown from past years:
Rapper Latto’s combative, no-nonsense flow atop a hot, minimalist beat on “Put It On Da Floor” makes it a club-ready contender for song of the summer. It also doubles as a seasonal mantra: “I’m sexy dancin’ in the house/I feel like Britney Spears,” guest Cardi B spits.
Past champion: “Break My Soul” by Beyoncé (2022)
Song of the summer that inexplicably came out in January: “Boy’s a Liar PT. 2” by PinkPantheress, Ice Spice
The dream duo of PinkPantheress hyperpop-punk and lackadaisical rapper Ice Spice created “Boy’s a Liar PT. 2”, a treatise on modern dating with an undeniable hook, and a very creative pronunciation of the word “Liar.” (That boy’s a … Leo?) Few songs have six-plus months worth of staying power, but few songs have challenged what a pop hook can sound like: space-y and, at times, charmingly self-effacing. Like the Capricorn it is.
Past champion: So nice, it must be mentioned twice — “Drivers License” by Olivia Rodrigo (2021)
The post-ironic, TikTok-heavy, too online, micro-hit song of the summer: “The Margarita Song” by That Chick Angel, Casa Di & Steve Terrell
What do you get when you take a confrontational evangelical sermon on “slut-shaming” given by a woman who calls herself Sister Candy on college campuses, remix it and give it a trap beat? A hit, thanks to comedian/rapper Angel Laketa Moore and artists Carl Dixon and Steve Terrell.
Past champion: “Birthday Suit” by Cosmo Sheldrake (2019)
Hot (divorced) girl (song of the) summer: “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus
Those waiting for a Texas-sized country anthem from Miley Cyrus will continue to do just that, but in the meantime: “Flowers” is an ’80s synth-rock for those brokenhearted — and getting over it. For Cyrus, its a song about life after divorce, but for her fans, it is a celebration in finding partnership within yourself.
Past champion: “Next Girl” by Carly Pearce (2020)
Song of the summer … this week: “Padam Padam” by Kylie Minogue
Like a summer fling, Kylie Minogue’s disco heartbeat “Padam Padam” is crush-worthy pop music for those who like their songs to burn bright, fast, and hard.
Past champion: “Work From Home” by Fifth Harmony (2016)
Biggest song of the year, and therefore the default song of the summer: “Last Night” by Morgan Wallen
The reign of Morgan Wallen continues into the summer, with his country pop-rock breakup record “Last Night” dominating terrestrial radio — and, likely, the headphones of the person next to you.
Past champion: “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye, Kimbra (2011)
Song of the summer that’s actually a cover: “Fast Car” by Luke Combs
The country star takes the Tracy Chapman classic and turns it into a North Carolina campfire tune. Perfect for driving in your car, speed so fast.
Past champion: “Fast Car” by Jonas Blue, Dakota (2015) — or really any another cover of “Fast Car,” past and present
Song for the Swifties’ summer: “Karma” by Taylor Swift
In a phrase: Karma is my boyfriend, Karma is a god, “Karma” is everywhere this season … just like Taylor Swift, as her Eras Tour continues.
Past champion: “Red” by Taylor Swift (2013)
Song for people who always live like it’s summer: “WHERE SHE GOES” by Bad Bunny
With a title like “WHERE SHE GOES,” it might seem like the Puerto Rican reggaetonero Bad Bunny was preparing to release a crossover hit recorded in English. But that’s not his style. Instead, Benito (as he’s lovingly dubbed by fans) marries the world of dembow and drill, still sung in Spanish — perfect for a late-night party or the early morning at the beach that follows.
Past champion: “Mi Gente” by J Balvin, Willy William (2017)
SZA’s genre-ambivalent soulful pop reaches new levels of self-actualization in this revenge fantasy. “I might kill my ex,” she croons, a soft exorcism of her worst impulses. “Not the best idea.”
Past champion: “Where My Girls At” by 702 (1999)
Song for singles ready to mingle this summer: “Ella Baila Sola” by Eslabon Armado x Peso Pluma
Is there a greater success story than the sierreño hit “Ella Baila Sola” from Eslabon Armado and Peso Pluma? Regional Mexican music has entered the American mainstream — horns and all — and this flirty track about a woman dancing on her own is proof.
Past champion: “Buy You A Drank (Shawty Snappin’)” by T-Pain, Yung Joc (2007)
Song of the summer romance: “Calm Down” by Rema, Selena Gomez
The inescapable Afrobeats track from Nigerian singer Rema and pop star Selena Gomez isn’t slowing down this season. Expect to hear it at an oceanside hang and inside your local grocery store in equal measure, but mostly, playing quietly during a backyard make out session.
Past champion: “I Swear” by All-4-One (1994)
Empowering song of the summer: “All My Life” by Lil Durk ft. J. Cole
A children’s choir, a trap beat, and an inspirational hook make “All My Life” the feel-good track of the summer, a reminder that positive attitude is a potent medicine.
Past champion: “Born This Way” by Lady Gaga (2011)
Bangers come and go, but ballads live inside the soul. Rapper Toosii’s “Favorite Song” is for those hoping to have a romantic summer spent inside with a loved one.
Past champion: “If Your Girl Only Knew” by Aaliyah (1996)
Song of the summer for sad girls: “Cupid” by Fifty Fifty
Apologies to all fans of the indie-adjacent pop group Boygenius (Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker), but the sad girl song of the summer comes courtesy the K-pop girl group Fifty Fifty. The harmonies on their lovelorn bubblegum pop song “Cupid” are sweet like candy, ripe for rolling the windows down and scream-singing along.
Past champion: “Summertime Sadness” by Lana Del Rey (2012)
MECHELEN, Belgium (AP) — The confessionals where generations of Belgians admitted their sins stood stacked in a corner of what was once Sacred Heart Church, proof the stalls — as well as the Roman Catholic house of worship — had outlived their purpose.
The building is to close down for two years while a cafe and concert stage are added, with plans to turn the church into “a new cultural hot spot in the heart of Mechelen,” almost within earshot of where Belgium’s archbishop lives. Around the corner, a former Franciscan church is now a luxury hotel where music star Stromae spent his wedding night amid the stained-glass windows.
Across Europe, the continent that nurtured Christianity for most of two millennia, churches, convents and chapels stand empty and increasingly derelict as faith and church attendance shriveled over the past half century.
“That is painful. I will not hide it. On the other hand, there is no return to the past possible,” Mgr. Johan Bonny, bishop of Antwerp, told the Associated Press. Something needs to be done and now, ever more of the once sacred structures are repurposed for anything from clothes shops and climbing walls to night clubs.
It is a phenomenon seen over much of Europe’s Christian heartland from Germany to Italy and many nations in between. It really stands out in Flanders, in northern Belgium, which has some of the greatest cathedrals on the continent and the finest art to fill them. If only it had enough faithful. A 2018 study from the PEW research group showed, in Belgium, that of the 83% that say they were raised Christian, only 55% still consider themselves so. Only 10% of Belgians still attended church regularly.
Nowadays, visiting international choirs may find that their singers outnumber the congregation.
On average, every one of the 300 towns in Flanders has about six churches and often not enough faithful to fill a single one. Some become eyesores in city centers, their maintenance a constant drain on finances.
Mechelen, a town of 85,000 just north of Brussels is the Roman Catholic center of Belgium. It has two dozen churches, several huddled close to St. Rumbold’s cathedral with its UNESCO World Heritage belfry tower. Mayor Bart Somers has been working for years to give many of the buildings a different purpose.
“In my city we have a brewery in a church, we have a hotel in a church, we have a cultural center in a church, we have a library in a church. So we have a lot of new destinations for the churches,” said Somers, who as Flemish regional minister is also involved in repurposing some 350 churches spread across the densely populated region of 6.7 million.
A landmark repurposing project in Belgium was Martin’s Patershof hotel in Mechelen, where the interior of the church was gutted to create rooms where the beds have headboards resembling organ pipes and a breakfast room next to the altar where wafers of gold leaf hover overhead. “We often hear that people come here to relax and enjoy the silence of its former identity,” said hotel manager Emilie De Preter.
With its understated luxury, it offers contemplation, and more.
“In the hotel, people sleep in a church, maybe have sex in a church. So you could say: ethically, is it a good idea to have a hotel in a church? I don’t have so many hesitations,” said Somers. “I am more concerned about the actual architectural value.”
The design value is especially clear at St. Anthony of Padua church in Brussels, also known as Maniak Padoue climbing club these days, where the multicolored hand and footholds on the wall now compete with the stained glass as the prime multicolored attraction.
“The stained glass brings a real shimmering and warm light to the venue when the sun goes through it, so we can really feel the presence of the remains of the church,” said Kyril Wittouck, the co-founder of the club. “The altar is still in place, so we are surrounded by remains and it reminds us where we actually are.”
Also in Brussels, the Spirito night club has taken over a deconsecrated Anglican church and has a drawing of a priest kissing a nun as its logo.
It is not exactly what Bishop Bonny had in mind.
Even if Roman Catholic religion is on the wane, a sense of the sacral or a need for reflection is also still present in society, whether one is religious, agnostic or atheist. And the aura of tranquility emanating from a church is hard to match. So for Bonny, there is no reason to turn churches into supermarkets or discos.
“Those are places for contemplation. And is that not exactly that the care of the church should be about?” he said. Bonny thinks the most successful and gratifying repurposing has been the handing over to other Christian communities, be they Coptic or Eastern European.
At his office, though, he can get weary just looking at the procession of suitors for empty Roman Catholic buildings. His heart is heavy when a real estate agent shows up. “They see possibilities. And you cannot believe, suddenly, how pious they can become when a financial opportunity presents itself. Suddenly they are more devout than a nun.”
Knowing the winding history of Christianity over centuries, Bonny takes the long view, since the near future does not look bright. “Every 300 years we nearly had to start again,” he said. “Something new, I’m sure, will happen. But it takes time.”
At the Martin’s Patershof, there is even is a condition that the church can reclaim the building if it is needed again, said De Preter. The hotel elements were built on steel beams and could be totally disassembled and taken out again. “If the church, at a certain point, wants the building back — which holds a very small chance, probably — it is possible.”
When I told friends and family I was reporting on the first chicken meat grown from animal cells, their first comment was “Eww.” Their second comment was: “How does it taste?”
The short answer (you’ve probably heard this sentence before in other contexts): Tastes like chicken.
The longer answer, which folds in the “Eww” response, is more nuanced. Yes, it’s strange to think of eating a totally new kind of meat — chicken that doesn’t come from a chicken, meat that will be sold as “cell-cultivated” chicken after the U.S. Agriculture Department on Wednesday gave the green light to two California firms, Upside Foods and Good Meat.
But it’s also interesting (and exciting!) to taste test the first offerings of a new era in meat production, which aims to eliminate harm to billions of animals slaughtered for food — and to dramatically reduce the environmental effects of grazing, growing feed for those animals and dealing with their animal waste.
FACING UP TO THE ‘MEAT PARADOX’
I’m a lifelong meat eater. I’m also a victim of the “meat paradox,” a term scientists use to describe the psychological conflict that occurs in people who like to eat meat but don’t like to contemplate the animals that died providing it.
As someone who has reported on food-borne illness outbreaks and slaughterhouse safety, I’m keenly aware that the chicken on my dinner plate probably suffered to get there. And that fact makes me uneasy if I dwell on it too much.
So I was open to trying a different kind of meat — and also curious to see if it would taste like the real thing.
I’ve tried plant-based options like the Beyond Meat sausage and the Impossible Burger and liked them, even though I didn’t think they were perfect substitutes. To be honest, the Beyond Meat sausage tasted good, but a little mealy. And the Impossible Burger was dry, although I may have cooked it too long. In both cases, I enjoyed the taste of the products but was still aware that I wasn’t actually eating pork or beef.
What about the artificiality of it all? It didn’t bother me that this new cultivated meat is made from cells that grow to epic proportions in big steel vats, only to be shaped and formed — “extruded” is the somewhat unfortunate verb that came to mind — into familiar cutlets, filets and nuggets that would look right at home on the dinner table.
But as with all food, in the end it would come down to taste. And in this case, to the larger question behind it: Is this new material in fact chicken, or is it an impostor?
TIME FOR THE ALL-IMPORTANT MOUTH TEST
In January, I traveled to the Upside Foods manufacturing plant in Emeryville, California. There, chef Jess Weaver sauteed a cultivated chicken breast in a white wine butter sauce with tomatoes, capers and green onions.
The aroma was enticing, just like any filet cooked in butter would be. And the taste was light and delicate with a tender texture, just like any chicken breast I’d make at home – if, that is, I were a chef trained at the Culinary Institute of America.
Last week, I visited the Alameda, California, plant where Good Meat is poised to begin production of its chicken products. Chef Zach Tyndall was ready with a smoked chicken salad with mayonnaise, golden raisins and walnuts. He followed it with a chicken “thigh” dish — darker meat served on a bed of potato puree with a mushroom-vegetable demi-glace, golden beets and tiny purple cauliflower florets.
The taste was richer than a chicken breast, more like the dark meat of a thigh. And the texture was both tender and chewy, like a well-cooked chicken thigh should be.
That, says Tyndall, is the whole point.
“It needs to be as lifelike as possible for it to catch on,” he said.
While “lifelike” is an interesting word, from my side of the fork I think this will catch on. There are still huge hurdles — how to scale up manufacturing and pare back costs, experts say, and the lingering question of whether chicken without the bird is, in fact, chicken — but if you’re basing it on authentic taste, I’ll leave you with this:
Please pass the “chicken.”
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Follow Associated Press journalist JoNel Aleccia on Twitter at http://twitter.com/JoNel_Aleccia
NEW YORK (AP) — There’s nothing that can keep Christian Cooper from enjoying his “happy place,” the bird-friendly Ramble of Central Park — not even his tense, viral video encounter three years ago with a woman walking her dog off leash in his refuge.
Cooper is a lifelong birder, and Black, a relative rarity for the pastime. The dog owner is Amy Cooper, who is white and no relation. His video of her pleading with a 911 operator to “send the cops” because, she falsely claimed, an African American man was threatening her life has been viewed more than 45 million times on social media.
He scored a memoir, out this week, and has his own series on Nat Geo Wild, traveling the U.S. doing what he loves most: birding. “Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper” premieres Saturday.
Something else happened the day the two Coopers clashed. Just hours later, George Floyd was killed under the knee of a white police officer more than 1,000 miles away in Minneapolis. They had no way of knowing that, of course, but Christian Cooper told The Associated Press in a recent interview he had another Black man, Philando Castile, on his mind when he flipped his phone camera to record.
Castile was fatally shot in the Minneapolis area in 2016 by an officer who wrongly thought the 32-year-old was reaching for a gun during a traffic stop. Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, had the presence of mind to hit record on her phone, and her livestream on Facebook touched off protests around the country. (The officer who shot Castile was acquitted by a jury.)
Christian Cooper’s decision to record was personal but routine for birders trying to convince park officials to do something about dogs off leashes where signs clearly prohibited it to protect plantings in The Ramble and leave the birds undisturbed. He was polite but firm as he spoke off-camera while Amy Cooper raged.
“I thought to myself, you know what? They’re going to shoot us dead no matter what we do. And if that’s the case, I’m going out with my dignity intact,” he told the AP.
For a second, he added, “I was like, oh, yeah, when a white woman accuses a Black man, I know what that means. I know what trouble that can mean in my life. Maybe I should just stop recording and maybe this will all go away in a split second. Then I thought, nah, I’m not going to be complicit in my own dehumanization.”
Amy Cooper never apologized directly to him, though she issued a statement of regret. And since then, Christian Cooper has done some soul-searching on what it must be like, at least sometimes, for women to feel unsafe in public outdoor spaces.
“I would hate to think that I would go through a situation like that and not learn something myself. And so I try to keep in mind now that, yes, I’m perfectly comfortable in The Ramble. It’s my happy place. But that’s not necessarily true of everyone,” he said.
Amy Cooper demanded he stop recording, upset when he offered her cocker spaniel, Henry, a dog treat. It’s a tactic controversial among birders frustrated by unleashed dogs in The Ramble. “It’s a very in-your-face move. You know, no bones about that. I haven’t done it since,” he said.
He declined to cooperate with prosecutors in the criminal case against Amy Cooper. It was an election cycle, he said, so it felt performative. But also, he felt, she had been punished enough through public disgrace.
“I decided I kind of have to err on the side of mercy, particularly weighing with that a sense of proportionality because I had not been harmed. I had not been thrown to the ground by the police or, God forbid, worse. I had never even had to interact with the police. I’m sure my opinion would be different if I had,” he said.
How birding helped him connect to the world as a closeted gay child in his predominantly white Long Island hometown. How all things Star Trek, science fiction and Marvel Comics have sustained him to this day, at age 60.
“The cure to my outsider status was to go outside, outside of myself, outside of my own head, outside into nature. Because you can’t go looking for birds without really focusing on what you’re doing, and focusing on the natural world around you,” he said.
“And when you do that, you can’t be preoccupied anymore about, ‘Oh my God, I feel so horrible.’”
As a longtime board member of the New York City Audubon Society, Cooper has seen the ranks of Black birders increase, and he has participated in a movement among National Audubon Society chapters to cast off the name of John James Audubon. The 19th-century artist and naturalist known for his paintings of North American bird species was an anti-abolitionist who owned, purchased and sold enslaved people.
Cooper’s chapter of the society is in the process of coming up with a new name, though the parent organization declined to do the same.
With his book, Cooper said, “I hope to reach a whole mass of people who have never really thought about birds or maybe haven’t engaged with nature on that level. If I can communicate some of my passion for birding, for birds, and get them to sort of open their awareness just a little bit more to these creatures around them, because they are spectacular, then the book will have achieved its goal.”
On Nat Geo (the series hits Disney+ on June 21), Cooper serves as host and was a consulting producer. He’s a kid in a wonderful, winged candy shop.
The six episodes have him scaling a Manhattan bridge tagging peregrine falcon chicks, navigating volcanic terrain in Hawaii in search of elusive honeycreepers, and trekking rainforests in Puerto Rico to check on fertility issues among parrots. He also shot in Palm Springs, California, and Washington, D.C., as well as Selma, Alabama, where members of his father’s family once lived.
Cooper has spent time in public schools teaching kids about birding. He wants to reach even more with the fame he earned the hard way.
“I’m hopeful that a lot of young Black kids will see maybe one of the first big birding shows on TV with a black host leading the show and think, ‘Oh, maybe that’s something I can do, too.’ That would be awesome.”
LONDON (AP) — Lawmakers in Europe signed off Wednesday on the world’s first set of comprehensive rules for artificial intelligence, clearing a key hurdle as authorities across the globe race to rein in AI.
The European Parliament vote is one of the last steps before the rules become law, which could act as a model for other places working on similar regulations.
Here’s a look at the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act:
HOW DO THE RULES WORK?
The measure, first proposed in 2021, will govern any product or service that uses an artificial intelligence system. The act will classify AI systems according to four levels of risk, from minimal to unacceptable.
Riskier applications, such as for hiring or tech targeted to children, will face tougher requirements, including being more transparent and using accurate data.
It will be up to the EU’s 27 member states to enforce the rules. Regulators could force companies to withdraw their apps from the market.
In extreme cases, violations could draw fines of up to 40 million euros ($43 million) or 7% of a company’s annual global revenue, which in the case of tech companies like Google and Microsoft could amount to billions.
WHAT ARE THE RISKS?
One of the EU’s main goals is to guard against any AI threats to health and safety and protect fundamental rights and values.
That means some AI uses are an absolute no-no, such as “social scoring” systems that judge people based on their behavior.
Also forbidden is AI that exploits vulnerable people, including children, or uses subliminal manipulation that can result in harm, for example, an interactive talking toy that encourages dangerous behavior.
Lawmakers beefed up the original proposal from the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, by widening the ban on real-time remote facial recognition and biometric identification in public. The technology scans passers-by and uses AI to match their faces or other physical traits to a database.
A contentious amendment to allow law enforcement exceptions such as finding missing children or preventing terrorist threats did not pass.
AI systems used in categories like employment and education, which would affect the course of a person’s life, face tough requirements such as being transparent with users and taking steps to assess and reduce risks of bias from algorithms.
Most AI systems, such as video games or spam filters, fall into the low- or no-risk category, the commission says.
WHAT ABOUT CHATGPT?
The original measure barely mentioned chatbots, mainly by requiring them to be labeled so users know they’re interacting with a machine. Negotiators later added provisions to cover general purpose AI like ChatGPT after it exploded in popularity, subjecting that technology to some of the same requirements as high-risk systems.
One key addition is a requirement to thoroughly document any copyright material used to teach AI systems how to generate text, images, video and music that resemble human work.
That would let content creators know if their blog posts, digital books, scientific articles or songs have been used to train algorithms that power systems like ChatGPT. Then they could decide whether their work has been copied and seek redress.
WHY ARE THE EU RULES SO IMPORTANT?
The European Union isn’t a big player in cutting-edge AI development. That role is taken by the U.S. and China. But Brussels often plays a trend-setting role with regulations that tend to become de facto global standards and has become a pioneer in efforts to target the power of large tech companies.
The sheer size of the EU’s single market, with 450 million consumers, makes it easier for companies to comply than develop different products for different regions, experts say.
But it’s not just a crackdown. By laying down common rules for AI, Brussels is also trying to develop the market by instilling confidence among users.
“The fact this is regulation that can be enforced and companies will be held liable is significant” because other places like the United States, Singapore and Britain have merely offered “guidance and recommendations,” said Kris Shrishak, a technologist and senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.
Businesses and industry groups warn that Europe needs to strike the right balance.
“The EU is set to become a leader in regulating artificial intelligence, but whether it will lead on AI innovation still remains to be seen,” said Boniface de Champris, a policy manager for the Computer and Communications Industry Association, a lobbying group for tech companies.
“Europe’s new AI rules need to effectively address clearly defined risks, while leaving enough flexibility for developers to deliver useful AI applications to the benefit of all Europeans,” he said.
Others are playing catch up on AI rules. Britain, which left the EU in 2020, is jockeying for a position in AI leadership. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak plans to host a world summit on AI safety this fall.
“I want to make the U.K. not just the intellectual home but the geographical home of global AI safety regulation,” Sunak said at a tech conference this week.
WHAT’S NEXT?
It could be years before the rules fully take effect. The next step is three-way negotiations involving member countries, the Parliament and the European Commission, possibly facing more changes as they try to agree on the wording.
Final approval is expected by the end of this year, followed by a grace period for companies and organizations to adapt, often around two years.
Brando Benifei, an Italian member of the European Parliament who is co-leading its work on the AI Act, said they would push for quicker adoption of the rules for fast-evolving technologies like generative AI.
To fill the gap before the legislation takes effect, Europe and the U.S. are drawing up a voluntary code of conduct that officials promised at the end of May would be drafted within weeks and could be expanded to other “like-minded countries.”
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This story has been corrected to show that Kris Shrishak’s last name was misspelled.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Much of the theft was brazen, even simple.
Fraudsters used the Social Security numbers of dead people and federal prisoners to get unemployment checks. Cheaters collected those benefits in multiple states. And federal loan applicants weren’t cross-checked against a Treasury Department database that would have raised red flags about sketchy borrowers.
Criminals and gangs grabbed the money. But so did a U.S. soldier in Georgia, the pastors of a defunct church in Texas, a former state lawmaker in Missouri and a roofing contractor in Montana.
An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.
That number is certain to grow as investigators dig deeper into thousands of potential schemes.
How could so much be stolen? Investigators and outside experts say the government, in seeking to quickly spend trillions in relief aid, conducted too little oversight during the pandemic’s early stages and instituted too few restrictions on applicants. In short, they say, the grift was just way too easy.
“Here was this sort of endless pot of money that anyone could access,” said Dan Fruchter, chief of the fraud and white-collar crime unit at the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Washington. “Folks kind of fooled themselves into thinking that it was a socially acceptable thing to do, even though it wasn’t legal.”
The U.S. government has charged more than 2,230 defendants with pandemic-related fraud crimes and is conducting thousands of investigations.
Most of the looted money was swiped from three large pandemic-relief initiatives launched during the Trump administration and inherited by President Joe Biden. Those programs were designed to help small businesses and unemployed workers survive the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic.
The pilfering was wide but not always as deep as the eye-catching headlines about cases involving many millions of dollars. But all of the theft, big and small, illustrates an epidemic of scams and swindles at a time America was grappling with overrun hospitals, school closures and shuttered businesses. Since the pandemic began in early 2020, more than 1.13 million people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Michael Horowitz, the U.S. Justice Department inspector general who chairs the federal Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, told Congress the fraud is “clearly in the tens of billions of dollars” and may eventually exceed $100 billion.
Horowitz told the AP he was sticking with that estimate, but won’t be certain about the number until he gets more solid data.
“I’m hesitant to get too far out on how much it is,” he said. “But clearly it’s substantial and the final accounting is still at least a couple of years away.”
Mike Galdo, the U.S. Justice Department’s acting director for COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement, said, “It is an unprecedented amount of fraud.”
Before leaving office, former President Donald Trump approved emergency aid measures totaling $3.2 trillion, according to figures from the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan authorized the spending of another $1.9 trillion. About a fifth of the $5.2 trillion has yet to be paid out, according to the committee’s most recent accounting.
Never has so much federal emergency aid been injected into the U.S. economy so quickly. “The largest rescue package in American history,” U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro told Congress.
The enormous scale of that package has obscured multibillion-dollar mistakes.
An $837 billion IRS program, for example, succeeded 99% of the time in getting economic stimulus checks to the proper taxpayers, according to the tax agency. Nevertheless, that 1% failure rate translated into nearly $8 billion going to “ineligible individuals,” a Treasury Department inspector general told AP.
An IRS spokesman said the agency does not agree with all the figures cited by the watchdog and noted that, even if correct, the loss represented a tiny fraction of the program’s budget.
The health crisis thrust the Small Business Administration, an agency that typically gets little attention, into an unprecedented role. In the seven decades before the pandemic struck, for example, the SBA had doled out $67 billion in disaster loans.
When the pandemic struck, the agency was assigned to manage two massive relief efforts — the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan and Paycheck Protection programs, which would swell to more than a trillion dollars. SBA’s workforce had to get money out the door, fast, to help struggling businesses and their employees. COVID-19 pushed SBA’s pace from a walk to an Olympic sprint. Between March 2020 and the end of July 2020, the agency granted 3.2 million COVID-19 economic injury disaster loans totaling $169 billion, according to an SBA inspector general’s report, while at the same time implementing the huge new Paycheck Protection Program.
In the haste, guardrails to protect federal money were dropped. Prospective borrowers were allowed to “self-certify” that their loan applications were true. The CARES Act also barred SBA from looking at tax return transcripts that could have weeded out shady or undeserving applicants, a decision eventually reversed at the end of 2020.
“If you open up the bank window and say, give me your application and just promise me you really are who you say you are, you attract a lot of fraudsters and that’s what happened here,” Horowitz said.
The SBA inspector general’s office has estimated fraud in the COVID-19 economic injury disaster loan program at $86 billion and the Paycheck Protection program at $20 billion. The watchdog is expected in coming weeks to release revised loss figures that are likely to be much higher.
In an interview, SBA Inspector General Hannibal “Mike” Ware declined to say what the new fraud estimate for both programs will be.
“It will be a figure that is fair, that is 1,000% defensible by my office, fully backed by our significant criminal investigative activity that is taking place in this space,” Ware said.
Ware and his staff are overwhelmed with pandemic-related audits and investigations. The office has a backlog of more than 80,000 actionable leads, close to a 100 years’ worth of work.
“Death by a thousand cuts might be death by 80,000 cuts for them,” Horowitz said of Ware’s workload. “It’s just the magnitude of it, the enormity of it.”
A 2022 study from the University of Texas at Austin found almost five times as many suspicious Paycheck Protection loans as the $20 billion SBA’s inspector general has reported so far. The research, led by finance professor John Griffin, found as much as $117 billion in questionable and possibly fraudulent loans, citing indicators such as non-registered businesses and multiple loans to the same address.
Horowitz, the pandemic watchdog chairman, criticized the government’s failure early on to use the “Do Not Pay” Treasury Department database, designed to keep government money from going to debarred contractors, fugitives, felons or people convicted of tax fraud. Those reviews, he said, could have been done quickly.
“It’s a false narrative that has been set out, that there are only two choices,” Horowitz said. “One choice is, get the money out right away. And that the only other choice was to spend weeks and months trying to figure out who was entitled to it.”
In less than a few days, a week at most, Horowitz said, SBA might have discovered thousands of ineligible applicants.
“24 hours? 48 hours? Would that really have upended the program?” Horowitz said. “I don’t think it would have. And it was data sitting there. It didn’t get checked.”
The Biden administration put in place stricter rules to stem pandemic fraud, including use of the “Do Not Pay” database. Biden also recently proposed a $1.6 billion plan to boost law enforcement efforts to go after pandemic relief fraudsters.
“I think the bottom line is regardless of what the number is, it emanates overwhelmingly from three programs that were designed and originated in 2020 with too many large holes that opened the door to criminal fraud,” Gene Sperling, the White House American Rescue Plan coordinator, said in an interview.
“We came into office when the largest amounts of fraud were already out of the barn,” Sperling added.
In a statement, an SBA spokesperson declined to say whether the agency agrees with the figures issued by Ware’s office, saying the federal government has not developed an accepted system for assessing fraud in government programs. Previous analyses have pointed to “potential fraud” or “fraud indicators” in a manner that conveys those numbers as a true fraud estimate when they are not, according to the statement.
Han Nguyen, a spokesman for the SBA, said Monday that “the vast majority of the likely fraud originated in the first nine months of the pandemic programs, under the Trump administration.” For the COVID-19 economic injury disaster loan program, Nguyen said, SBA’s “working estimate” found $28 billion in likely fraud.
The coronavirus pandemic plunged the U.S. economy into a short but devastating recession. Jobless rates soared into double digits and Washington sent hundreds of billions of dollars to states to help the suddenly unemployed.
For crooks, it was like tossing chum into the sea to lure fish. Many of these state unemployment agencies used antiquated computer systems or had too few staff to stop bogus claims from being paid.
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<p>AP correspondent Donna Warder reports on Pandemic Aid Great Grift; the plundering of billions of dollars during the worst pandemic in a century.</p>
“Yes, the states were overwhelmed in terms of demand,” said Brent Parton, acting assistant secretary of the U.S. Labor Department’s Employment and Training Administration. “We had not seen a spike like this ever in a global event like a pandemic. The systems were underfunded. They were not resilient. And I would say, more importantly, were vulnerable to sophisticated attacks by fraudsters.”
Fraud in pandemic unemployment assistance programs stands at $76 billion, according to congressional testimony from Labor Department Inspector General Larry Turner. That’s a conservative estimate. Another $115 billion mistakenly went to people who should not have received the benefits, according to his testimony.
Turner declined AP’s request for an interview.
Turner’s task in identifying all of the pandemic unemployment insurance fraud has been complicated by a lack of cooperation from the federal Bureau of Prisons, according to a September “alert memo” issued by his office. Scam artists used Social Security numbers of federal prisoners to steal millions of dollars in benefits.
His office still doesn’t know exactly how much was swiped that way. The prison bureau had declined to provide current data about federal prisoners. The AP reached out to the bureau several times for comment, starting June 2. Bureau spokesperson Emery Nelson said on Monday the agency had provided in February and March “all the necessary data” to the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. Turner is a member of the committee.
Ohio State Auditor Keith Faber saw trouble coming when safeguards to ensure the unemployment aid only went to people who legitimately qualified were lowered, making conditions ripe for fraud and waste. The state’s unemployment agency “took controls down because on the one hand, they literally were drinking from a firehose,” Faber said. “They had a year’s worth of claims in a couple of weeks. The second part of the problem was the (federal government) directed them to get the money out the door as quickly as possible and worry less about security. They took that to heart. I think that was a mistake.”
Ohio’s Department of Job and Family Services reported in February $1 billion in fraudulent pandemic unemployment claims and another $4.8 billion in overpayments.
The ubiquitous masks that became a symbol of the COVID-19 pandemic are seen on fewer and fewer faces. Hospitalizations for the virus have steadily declined, according to CDC data, and Biden in April ended the national emergency to respond to the pandemic.
But on politically divided Capitol Hill, lawmakers have not put the pandemic behind them and are engaged in a fierce debate over the success of the relief spending and who’s to blame for the theft.
Too much government money, Republicans argue, breeds fraud, waste and inflation. Democrats have countered that all the financial muscle from Washington saved lives, businesses and jobs.
The GOP-led House Oversight and Accountability Committee is investigating pandemic relief spending. “We must identify where this money went, how much ended up in the hands of fraudsters or ineligible participants, and what should be done to ensure it never happens again,” the panel’s chairman, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, said in a statement Tuesday.
Republicans and Democrats did, however, find common ground last year on bills to give the federal government more time to catch fraudsters. Biden in August signed legislation to increase the statute of limitations from five to 10 years on crimes involving the two major programs managed by the SBA.
The extra time will help federal prosecutors untangle pandemic fraud cases, which often involve identity theft and crooks overseas. But there’s no guarantee they’ll catch everyone who jumped at the chance for an easy payday. They’re busy, too, with crimes unrelated to pandemic relief funds.
“Do we have enough cases and leads that we could be doing them in 2030? We absolutely could,” said Fruchter, the federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Washington. “But my experience tells me that likely there will be other priorities that will come up and will need to be addressed. And unfortunately, in our office, we don’t have a dedicated pandemic fraud unit.”
Congress has not yet passed a measure that would give prosecutors the additional five years to go after unemployment fraudsters. That worries Turner, the Labor Department watchdog. Without the extension, he told Congress in a late May report, people who stole the benefits may escape justice.
Sperling, the White House official, said any future crisis that requires government intervention doesn’t have to be a choice between helping people in need and stopping fraudsters.
“The prevention strategy going forward is that in a crisis, you can focus on fast delivery to people in desperate situations without feeling that you can only get that speed by taking down commonsense anti-fraud guardrails,” he said.
DEPTFORD, N.J. (AP) — Back in Mudville, when mighty Casey took an unheeded pitch for a strike, there went up a muffled roar: “`Kill him! Kill the umpire!′ shouted someone on the stand.”
Even in 1888, well before pitch clocks, $17 beers and instant replay, a common thread for the fans in baseball’s most epic poem was how much they loved to threaten umpires.
These days, 135 or so years after writer Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s renowned verse, one Little League in New Jersey is taking a hands-on approach. Its target: those watching 10- and 11-year-olds play baseball who curse at the volunteers behind the plate.
You want some of this? they’re saying. Well, come get some. In Deptford, the umpire recruiting slogan sign may as well read: If you can’t berate them, join them.
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The April Facebook post hardly seemed like national news at the time for league president Don Bozzuffi. He’d lost patience when two umpires resigned after persistent spectator abuse. So he wrote an updated code of conduct.
It specified: Any spectator deemed in violation would be banned from the complex until three umpiring assignments were completed. If not, the person would be barred from any Deptford youth sports facilities for a year.
In G-rated terms (unlike the ones that will get you tossed), the mandate just wants helicopter parents to calm the heck down. No 9-year-old will remember, as an adult, being safe or out on a bang-bang play at first. But how deep would be the cut of watching dad get tossed out of the game and banished for bad behavior?
The league doesn’t want to find out. “So far, it’s working like I’d hoped and just been a deterrent,” the 68-year-old Bozzuffi said.
The problem, though, isn’t limited to Deptford and its handful of unruly parents.
Outbursts of bad behavior at sporting events for young people have had frightening consequences for officials at all youth levels. Pick a town, any town, and there are adults assaulting referees or chasing umpires into parking lots looking for a fight, all available on the social feed of your choice.
The videos pop up almost weekly: inane instances of aggressive behavior toward officials. Like in January, when a Florida basketball referee was punched in the face after one game. Or last month, when an enraged youth baseball coach stormed a baseball field in Alabama and wrestled an umpire to the ground. Other adults and kids tried to break up the melee that took place in a game — at an 11-and-under tournament.
Jim McDevitt has worked as a volunteer Deptford umpire for 20 years. But he turns 66 this month and won’t call games much longer. He wonders where the next generation of officials will come from, especially when the job description includes little pay and lots of crap.
Youth officiating is in crisis. According to a 2017 survey of by the National Association of Sports Officials, nearly 17,500 referees surveyed said parents caused the most problems with sportsmanship at 39%. Coaches came in at 29% and fans at 18%.
Barry Mano founded the association four decades ago to advocate for youth officials. Mano, whose brother Mark was an NBA referee, has watched fan conduct become “far worse” than he could have imagined.
“Sports is simply life with the volume turned up,” Mano says. “We’ve become louder and brasher. We always want a second opinion on things. That’s where the culture has gone. I don’t think we’re as civil as we used to be toward each other, and it plays out in the sporting venues.”
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In Deptford, things seem to be working — at least in attracting non-mandatory umps. Bozzuffi says that since his rule grabbed national headlines, three umpires have joined the league. More volunteers want to be trained.
And those who might get sentenced to umping? McDevitt puts it less delicately. “We’ll see how their sphincter feels when they have to make a tight call and the parents are all screaming and hollering at them.”
The Deptford Little League playoffs, a time when tensions rise, are under way, and Bozzuffi has urged his umps to show restraint. Bozzuffi, who has served as league president for 14 years and been connected to the league for 40, doesn’t want any fan to get ejected. He just wants to get them thinking.
Because in a culture where violence visits schools, churches, movie theaters, clubs and many social gathering spots, the irate fan pressed against the fence spewing four-lettered tirades at the ump could easily escalate.
“People are just a little bit more sensitive to it,” said Sherrie Spencer, a lifelong Deptford resident who had two sons and grandsons play. She has noticed an uptick in abusive language to umpires through the years. “Now,” she says, “you have things that are going on in our world that people are more fearful when you see someone getting upset like that.”
Part of the problem is this: Thanks to technological advances, perfection in baseball can sometimes seem more attainable than ever.
In the major leagues, computers and their precision have become a vital part of baseball’s fabric. Gone are the days when a manager like Billy Martin or Earl Weaver would burst out of the dugout and kick up a cloud of dirt, curse a blue streak and maybe even walk away with a base or chuck one into the outfield over a missed call.
Blow one now? The manager barely reacts, asking for a replay review while a command center makes the dispassionate final call. Oh, and robo umps are coming. They’re already calling the shots in the minor leagues, with computerized strike zones that leave no room for argument. Where’s the messiness, the fallibility, the human emotion steeped in baseball tradition? Where’s the fun of baseball in umpire perfection?
That’s not the way some parents see it. For many, every “safe!” when the tag is missed, every called strike on a pitch below the knees is another reason to blow a fuse in a youth sports culture full of hefty fees and travel teams that have already heightened financial and emotional attachment and encouraged a sense of parents as constituents who have a right to be heeded.
That’s why Deptford is experimenting with its attempt at preventative medicine. This is interdicting the parents before the kids get older. This is, at its core, potential assault prevention.
It’s getting attention all the way up the youth baseball chain. Little League President Stephen D. Keener had this to say: “We applaud the volunteers at Deptford Township Little League for coming up with a creative, fun solution to shine a light on the importance of treating everyone with respect, on and off the Little League field.”
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OK. But here’s the fine print.
Beyond the headlines that suggest Fuming Father No. 1 is going to get the call from the bleachers and suddenly start ringing up strike three, there’s this: It’s too much effort. The risks! The potential safety problems! The insurance!
Bozzuffi and the town’s mayor teach a three-hour safety certification class each offender must complete before receiving an assignment. Rookie umps must pass a background check and complete an online concussion course. After all that, a qualified umpire would be stationed next to the replacement ump to ensure accuracy and fairness.
It hasn’t happened — yet.
“The first person that we have to do this to, nobody is else is going to challenge this,” Bozzuffi said. “Nobody wants to go through all this.”
So for now, at least on a recent weeknight in Deptford, parents, grandparents and friends, were on their best behavior. They cheered. They clapped. They caught up with neighbors.
They groused a bit, too. While other Little League officials across America reached out to Bozzuffi for input into their own policies, some fans in Deptford are sick of the perception that’s it’s a town full of baseball bullies.
One fan waved off an interview request because he “didn’t want to hear anymore about how bad we all are.” Parent Dawn Nacke found it unfair that the town was labeled as “obnoxious parents when we’re just caring about our kids.”
“We know that they ump for free,” she said, “but sometimes bad calls are made and they cost us the game.”
Has she ever been guilty of popping off too much?
“Mouthy, yes. But we all have to bite our tongues over here because of the new rule,” she said. “I just have to keep my mouth shut more. Scared me straight. I’m more angry that they call us obnoxious parents. That really upset me when I read it in the news. But this is their rule and I’m going to follow it.”
Just the way Deptford drew it up.
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Follow Philadelphia-based AP Sports Writer Dan Gelston on Twitter at http://twitter.com/apgelston
WASHINGTON (AP) — Much of the theft was brazen, even simple.
Fraudsters used the Social Security numbers of dead people and federal prisoners to get unemployment checks. Cheaters collected those benefits in multiple states. And federal loan applicants weren’t cross-checked against a Treasury Department database that would have raised red flags about sketchy borrowers.
Criminals and gangs grabbed the money. But so did a U.S. soldier in Georgia, the pastors of a defunct church in Texas, a former state lawmaker in Missouri and a roofing contractor in Montana.
An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.
That number is certain to grow as investigators dig deeper into thousands of potential schemes.
How could so much be stolen? Investigators and outside experts say the government, in seeking to quickly spend trillions in relief aid, conducted too little oversight during the pandemic’s early stages and instituted too few restrictions on applicants. In short, they say, the grift was just way too easy.
“Here was this sort of endless pot of money that anyone could access,” said Dan Fruchter, chief of the fraud and white-collar crime unit at the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Washington. “Folks kind of fooled themselves into thinking that it was a socially acceptable thing to do, even though it wasn’t legal.”
The U.S. government has charged more than 2,230 defendants with pandemic-related fraud crimes and is conducting thousands of investigations.
Most of the looted money was swiped from three large pandemic-relief initiatives launched during the Trump administration and inherited by President Joe Biden. Those programs were designed to help small businesses and unemployed workers survive the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic.
The pilfering was wide but not always as deep as the eye-catching headlines about cases involving many millions of dollars. But all of the theft, big and small, illustrates an epidemic of scams and swindles at a time America was grappling with overrun hospitals, school closures and shuttered businesses. Since the pandemic began in early 2020, more than 1.13 million people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Michael Horowitz, the U.S. Justice Department inspector general who chairs the federal Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, told Congress the fraud is “clearly in the tens of billions of dollars” and may eventually exceed $100 billion.
Horowitz told the AP he was sticking with that estimate, but won’t be certain about the number until he gets more solid data.
“I’m hesitant to get too far out on how much it is,” he said. “But clearly it’s substantial and the final accounting is still at least a couple of years away.”
Mike Galdo, the U.S. Justice Department’s acting director for COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement, said, “It is an unprecedented amount of fraud.”
Before leaving office, former President Donald Trump approved emergency aid measures totaling $3.2 trillion, according to figures from the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan authorized the spending of another $1.9 trillion. About a fifth of the $5.2 trillion has yet to be paid out, according to the committee’s most recent accounting.
Never has so much federal emergency aid been injected into the U.S. economy so quickly. “The largest rescue package in American history,” U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro told Congress.
The enormous scale of that package has obscured multibillion-dollar mistakes.
An $837 billion IRS program, for example, succeeded 99% of the time in getting economic stimulus checks to the proper taxpayers, according to the tax agency. Nevertheless, that 1% failure rate translated into nearly $8 billion going to “ineligible individuals,” a Treasury Department inspector general told AP.
An IRS spokesman said the agency does not agree with all the figures cited by the watchdog and noted that, even if correct, the loss represented a tiny fraction of the program’s budget.
The health crisis thrust the Small Business Administration, an agency that typically gets little attention, into an unprecedented role. In the seven decades before the pandemic struck, for example, the SBA had doled out $67 billion in disaster loans.
When the pandemic struck, the agency was assigned to manage two massive relief efforts — the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan and Paycheck Protection programs, which would swell to more than a trillion dollars. SBA’s workforce had to get money out the door, fast, to help struggling businesses and their employees. COVID-19 pushed SBA’s pace from a walk to an Olympic sprint. Between March 2020 and the end of July 2020, the agency granted 3.2 million COVID-19 economic injury disaster loans totaling $169 billion, according to an SBA inspector general’s report, while at the same time implementing the huge new Paycheck Protection Program.
In the haste, guardrails to protect federal money were dropped. Prospective borrowers were allowed to “self-certify” that their loan applications were true. The CARES Act also barred SBA from looking at tax return transcripts that could have weeded out shady or undeserving applicants, a decision eventually reversed at the end of 2020.
“If you open up the bank window and say, give me your application and just promise me you really are who you say you are, you attract a lot of fraudsters and that’s what happened here,” Horowitz said.
The SBA inspector general’s office has estimated fraud in the COVID-19 economic injury disaster loan program at $86 billion and the Paycheck Protection program at $20 billion. The watchdog is expected in coming weeks to release revised loss figures that are likely to be much higher.
In an interview, SBA Inspector General Hannibal “Mike” Ware declined to say what the new fraud estimate for both programs will be.
“It will be a figure that is fair, that is 1,000% defensible by my office, fully backed by our significant criminal investigative activity that is taking place in this space,” Ware said.
Ware and his staff are overwhelmed with pandemic-related audits and investigations. The office has a backlog of more than 80,000 actionable leads, close to a 100 years’ worth of work.
“Death by a thousand cuts might be death by 80,000 cuts for them,” Horowitz said of Ware’s workload. “It’s just the magnitude of it, the enormity of it.”
A 2022 study from the University of Texas at Austin found almost five times as many suspicious Paycheck Protection loans as the $20 billion SBA’s inspector general has reported so far. The research, led by finance professor John Griffin, found as much as $117 billion in questionable and possibly fraudulent loans, citing indicators such as non-registered businesses and multiple loans to the same address.
Horowitz, the pandemic watchdog chairman, criticized the government’s failure early on to use the “Do Not Pay” Treasury Department database, designed to keep government money from going to debarred contractors, fugitives, felons or people convicted of tax fraud. Those reviews, he said, could have been done quickly.
“It’s a false narrative that has been set out, that there are only two choices,” Horowitz said. “One choice is, get the money out right away. And that the only other choice was to spend weeks and months trying to figure out who was entitled to it.”
In less than a few days, a week at most, Horowitz said, SBA might have discovered thousands of ineligible applicants.
“24 hours? 48 hours? Would that really have upended the program?” Horowitz said. “I don’t think it would have. And it was data sitting there. It didn’t get checked.”
The Biden administration put in place stricter rules to stem pandemic fraud, including use of the “Do Not Pay” database. Biden also recently proposed a $1.6 billion plan to boost law enforcement efforts to go after pandemic relief fraudsters.
“I think the bottom line is regardless of what the number is, it emanates overwhelmingly from three programs that were designed and originated in 2020 with too many large holes that opened the door to criminal fraud,” Gene Sperling, the White House American Rescue Plan coordinator, said in an interview.
“We came into office when the largest amounts of fraud were already out of the barn,” Sperling added.
In a statement, an SBA spokesperson declined to say whether the agency agrees with the figures issued by Ware’s office, saying the federal government has not developed an accepted system for assessing fraud in government programs. Previous analyses have pointed to “potential fraud” or “fraud indicators” in a manner that conveys those numbers as a true fraud estimate when they are not, according to the statement.
Han Nguyen, a spokesman for the SBA, said Monday that “the vast majority of the likely fraud originated in the first nine months of the pandemic programs, under the Trump administration.” For the COVID-19 economic injury disaster loan program, Nguyen said, SBA’s “working estimate” found $28 billion in likely fraud.
The coronavirus pandemic plunged the U.S. economy into a short but devastating recession. Jobless rates soared into double digits and Washington sent hundreds of billions of dollars to states to help the suddenly unemployed.
For crooks, it was like tossing chum into the sea to lure fish. Many of these state unemployment agencies used antiquated computer systems or had too few staff to stop bogus claims from being paid.
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<p>AP correspondent Donna Warder reports on Pandemic Aid Great Grift; the plundering of billions of dollars during the worst pandemic in a century.</p>
“Yes, the states were overwhelmed in terms of demand,” said Brent Parton, acting assistant secretary of the U.S. Labor Department’s Employment and Training Administration. “We had not seen a spike like this ever in a global event like a pandemic. The systems were underfunded. They were not resilient. And I would say, more importantly, were vulnerable to sophisticated attacks by fraudsters.”
Fraud in pandemic unemployment assistance programs stands at $76 billion, according to congressional testimony from Labor Department Inspector General Larry Turner. That’s a conservative estimate. Another $115 billion mistakenly went to people who should not have received the benefits, according to his testimony.
Turner declined AP’s request for an interview.
Turner’s task in identifying all of the pandemic unemployment insurance fraud has been complicated by a lack of cooperation from the federal Bureau of Prisons, according to a September “alert memo” issued by his office. Scam artists used Social Security numbers of federal prisoners to steal millions of dollars in benefits.
His office still doesn’t know exactly how much was swiped that way. The prison bureau had declined to provide current data about federal prisoners. The AP reached out to the bureau several times for comment, starting June 2. Bureau spokesperson Emery Nelson said on Monday the agency had provided in February and March “all the necessary data” to the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. Turner is a member of the committee.
Ohio State Auditor Keith Faber saw trouble coming when safeguards to ensure the unemployment aid only went to people who legitimately qualified were lowered, making conditions ripe for fraud and waste. The state’s unemployment agency “took controls down because on the one hand, they literally were drinking from a firehose,” Faber said. “They had a year’s worth of claims in a couple of weeks. The second part of the problem was the (federal government) directed them to get the money out the door as quickly as possible and worry less about security. They took that to heart. I think that was a mistake.”
Ohio’s Department of Job and Family Services reported in February $1 billion in fraudulent pandemic unemployment claims and another $4.8 billion in overpayments.
The ubiquitous masks that became a symbol of the COVID-19 pandemic are seen on fewer and fewer faces. Hospitalizations for the virus have steadily declined, according to CDC data, and Biden in April ended the national emergency to respond to the pandemic.
But on politically divided Capitol Hill, lawmakers have not put the pandemic behind them and are engaged in a fierce debate over the success of the relief spending and who’s to blame for the theft.
Too much government money, Republicans argue, breeds fraud, waste and inflation. Democrats have countered that all the financial muscle from Washington saved lives, businesses and jobs.
The GOP-led House Oversight and Accountability Committee is investigating pandemic relief spending. “We must identify where this money went, how much ended up in the hands of fraudsters or ineligible participants, and what should be done to ensure it never happens again,” the panel’s chairman, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, said in a statement Tuesday.
Republicans and Democrats did, however, find common ground last year on bills to give the federal government more time to catch fraudsters. Biden in August signed legislation to increase the statute of limitations from five to 10 years on crimes involving the two major programs managed by the SBA.
The extra time will help federal prosecutors untangle pandemic fraud cases, which often involve identity theft and crooks overseas. But there’s no guarantee they’ll catch everyone who jumped at the chance for an easy payday. They’re busy, too, with crimes unrelated to pandemic relief funds.
“Do we have enough cases and leads that we could be doing them in 2030? We absolutely could,” said Fruchter, the federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Washington. “But my experience tells me that likely there will be other priorities that will come up and will need to be addressed. And unfortunately, in our office, we don’t have a dedicated pandemic fraud unit.”
Congress has not yet passed a measure that would give prosecutors the additional five years to go after unemployment fraudsters. That worries Turner, the Labor Department watchdog. Without the extension, he told Congress in a late May report, people who stole the benefits may escape justice.
Sperling, the White House official, said any future crisis that requires government intervention doesn’t have to be a choice between helping people in need and stopping fraudsters.
“The prevention strategy going forward is that in a crisis, you can focus on fast delivery to people in desperate situations without feeling that you can only get that speed by taking down commonsense anti-fraud guardrails,” he said.
QOM, Iran (AP) — It’s rare these days for a turbaned cleric in Iran to attract a large following of adoring young fans on Instagram, but Sayed Mahdi Tabatabaei has done it by rescuing street dogs in defiance of a local taboo.
Tabatabaei posts regularly — to his more than 80,000 followers — heartbreaking stories of abused and neglected dogs that he has treated in his shelter. His young fans ask for updates on the rescues and send well wishes in the hundreds of comments he receives on almost every post.
In some parts of the Muslim world, dogs are considered unclean, driven away with shouting, sticks and stones, and sometimes even shot by city workers in failed attempts to control the feral population.
Iran’s ruling theocracy views keeping dogs as pets as a sign of Western decadence, and hard-liners have been pushing for laws that would prohibit walking them in public.
But that hasn’t stopped Tabatabaei from opening a shelter in the city of Qom — home to several major religious schools and shrines — where he takes in street dogs and strays and nurses them back to health. He has become an unlikely advocate for animal rights in a society deeply divided over the role of religion in public life.
Islam prohibits animal cruelty and promotes feeding those in need. Across the Middle East, people put out food and water for stray cats, often seen safely wandering in and out of public buildings. But in Iran and other countries, dogs are shunned by many and local authorities periodically shoot and poison them.
Iran’s clerical establishment, which has ruled the country since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, proclaimed dogs to be “unclean” and advocates against keeping them as pets. Many younger Iranians ignore such calls, as they do other religious edicts.
Tabatabaei, an animal lover who wears the Shiite black turban signifying he is a descendant of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, seeks to bridge the divide.
“It’s pretty interesting and kind of weird for them to witness a religious figure doing this stuff,” he said. “My videos seem to leave a good impression on people too. They say they feel a wave of kindness, peace, and friendship coming through those videos.”
It’s gotten him into trouble with fellow clerics. When pictures surfaced of him tending to dogs while wearing his clerical robes, a religious court ordered him to be defrocked in 2021. The ruling was later suspended, but he remains cautious. These days Tabatabaei wears ordinary clothes while tending to the dogs and cleaning their kennels at Bamak Paradise, the shelter he established two years ago.
“We take in dogs with disabilities that cannot survive in the wild and have a hard time finding adoptive homes,” he said. “Many of them are dogs I’ve personally nursed back to health. They stay here until they fully recover and regain their strength.”
He relies on donations from animal lovers in Iran and abroad. He says the funds available for such pursuits have dried up in recent years as the United States has ramped up economic sanctions over Iran’s disputed nuclear program. The country’s banking system is almost completely cut off from the outside world, making it extremely difficult to transfer funds.
Within Iran, the economy has cratered, with the local currency plunging to a record low over the past year. With many Iranians struggling to get by, there is little left over for the cleric’s furry friends.
“I appeal to Western governments, particularly the U.S. government and others capable of influencing the lifting of sanctions, to consider making exceptions for organizations like ours that engage in humanitarian and peaceful endeavors,” he said.
“By allowing us to establish bank accounts and verifying our identities, we would be able to receive assistance from individuals and charities outside of Iran without them breaching the sanctions and risking legal complications,” he added.
He also hopes for change within Iran — specifically, a lifting of the ban on dog-walking in parks.
“Pet owners must take their dogs and other pets out for walks,” he said. “Sadly, we still don’t have laws to protect animal rights, and there are no regulations in place to prevent animal cruelty.”
Many Iranians, especially young people, have expressed frustration with clerical rule over the years, in waves of protests and in smaller acts of defiance. During nationwide protests last fall, following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in custody of the country’s morality police, Iranians posted videos online showing young men sneaking up behind clerics and batting their turbans off their heads.
But despite the recent tensions, Tabatabaei remains a beloved figure for many.
Zahra Hojabri recently found a puppy dying on the side of the road. The gentle cleric was the first person she thought of to help the tiny canine. “I think he is an angel, more than a human. I can’t put it into words,” she said.
It’s no secret that Christopher Nolan made “Oppenheimer” to be seen on the big screen. But not all big screens are created equal.
That’s part of the reason why Universal Pictures has made “Oppenheimer” tickets available early for over a thousand “premium large format” (or PLF) screens, with options including IMAX 70mm, 70mm, IMAX digital, 35mm, Dolby Cinema and more.
Knowing that even those words can get overwhelming and technical, Nolan went a step further: In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, he offered a guide to his favorite formats, explaining why it matters and even where he likes to sit so that audiences don’t feel like they need a film school degree (or one in theoretical physics) before settling on a theater.
“You rarely get the chance to really talk to moviegoers directly about why you love a particular format and why if they can find an IMAX screen to see the film on that’s great,” Nolan said. “We put a lot of effort into shooting the film in a way that we can get it out on these large format screens. It really is just a great way of giving people an experience that they can’t possibly get in the home.”
In a film about about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who oversaw the development of first atomic bomb during World War II, this will be especially pivotal in viewing the Trinity Test, the first detonation of a nuclear weapon. Nolan and his effects teams recreated the blast, with all its blinding brilliance.
“We knew that this had to be the showstopper,” Nolan said. “We’re able to do things with picture now that before we were really only able to do with sound in terms of an oversize impact for the audience—an almost physical sense of response to the film.”
“Oppenheimer” was shot using some of the highest resolution film cameras that exist. Like “ Dunkirk ” and “ Tenet,” “Oppenheimer” was filmed entirely on large format film stock, meaning a combination of IMAX 65mm and Panavision 65mm (think David Lean/“Lawrence of Arabia”), that’s then projected in 70mm.
“The sharpness and the clarity and the depth of the image is unparalleled,” Nolan said. “The headline, for me, is by shooting on IMAX 70mm film, you’re really letting the screen disappear. You’re getting a feeling of 3D without the glasses. You’ve got a huge screen and you’re filling the peripheral vision of the audience. You’re immersing them in the world of the film.”
Nolan has been shooting with IMAX cameras since “The Dark Knight.” Audiences would regularly gasp at seeing its first shot projected in IMAX 70mm. Though it’s “just a helicopter shot” of some buildings in Chicago, it helps explain the ineffable power of the format.
On a technical level, the IMAX film resolution is almost 10 times more than a 35mm projector and each frame has some 18,000 pixels of resolution versus a home HD screen that has 1,920 pixels.
WHY IS IT SHOT ON 65MM AND PROJECTED IN 70MM?
The 5mm difference goes back to when that extra space on the film had to be reserved for the soundtrack. With digital sound, that’s unnecessary and it is “purely a visual enhancement,” Nolan explained.
DO THE DIFFERENT FORMATS IMPACT HOW THE FILM IS SHOT?
“We have to plan very carefully because by shooting an IMAX film, you capture a lot of information,” he said. “Your movie is going to translate very well to all the formats because you’re getting the ultimate amount of visual information. But there are different shapes to the screen — what we call aspect ratios. What you have to plan is how you then frame your imagery so that it can be presented in different theaters with equal success.”
Starting with “The Dark Knight,” they developed a system that they call “center punching the action” so that nothing is lost.
Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema is also always aware of the “frame lines for the different theaters” when looking through the camera.
On the biggest presentations, IMAX 1.43:1 (the massive square screen) the screen essentially disappears for the audience. For other formats like 35mm, the top and the bottom get cropped.
But, Nolan said, “from a creative point of view, what we’ve found over the years is that there’s no compromise to composition.”
WHY NOT MAKE AN ENTIRE MOVIE IN IMAX?
The IMAX cameras are just too loud for dialogue heavy scenes, but Nolan is optimistic about the new cameras being developed.
WHAT’S THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BLACK AND WHITE SEQUENCES?
Some of “Oppenheimer” is presented in black and white for a very specific story reason.
“I knew that I had two timelines that we were running in the film,” Nolan said. “One is in color, and that’s Oppenheimer’s subjective experience. That’s the bulk of the film. Then the other is a black and white timeline. It’s a more objective view of his story from a different character’s point of view.”
Nolan’s desire for the black and white portions to be of equal image quality to the rest of the film led to the development of the first ever black and white IMAX film stock, which Kodak made and Fotokem developed.
“We shot a lot of our hair and makeup tests using black and white. And then we would go to the IMAX film projector at CityWalk and project it there,” he said. “I’ve just never seen anything like it. To see such a massive black and white film image? It’s just a wonderful thing.”
NOLAN’S FAVORITE THEATRICAL FORMATS
For Nolan, the “best possible experience” to view “Oppenheimer” in theaters is the IMAX 70mm film presentations. These are also among the rarest, currently set for 25 locations in North America including the AMC Universal CityWalk in Los Angeles, the AMC Lincoln Square in New York, the Cinemark Dallas, the Regal King of Prussia near Philadelphia and the AutoNation IMAX in Fort Lauderdale.
The prints span over 11 miles of film stock, weigh some 600 pounds and run through film projectors horizontally.
There will also be over one hundred 70mm prints (“a fabulous presentation,” Nolan said) sent to theaters around the world, with over 77 (and more to come) on sale in North America at major chains and many independent locations like the Music Box in Chicago and the AFI Silver in Washington D.C.
“The two formats are sort of different and I love them both,” he said.
The sequences projected in IMAX 70mm really “come to life” on those screens, and vice versa for the 70mm sequences on those specific projectors. In IMAX theaters, for example, things shot with IMAX film cameras will expand vertically to fill the entire screen.
IMAX DIGITAL, LASER AND EXHIBITOR PLF OPTIONS
The vast majority of moviegoers in North America will have easier access to digital presentations. These include IMAX digital, which can sometimes mean a laser projected image and other times involves a retro formatted screen, and what’s called “exhibitor PLF,” meaning large format screen and projection systems developed by individual theater chains (like Regal RPX, Cinemark XD and Cineplex UltraAVX). When in doubt, look for an “X” in the name.
But don’t dismay: It’ll still look great, according to Nolan, whose team has worked for six months to digitize the original film for other formats to ensure the best experience on every screen.
“This is the exciting thing about shooting an IMAX film: When you scan it for the digital format, you’re working with the absolute best possible image that you could acquire, and that translates wonderfully to the new projector formats like the laser projectors,” he said.
Nolan said the “IMAX impact” over the last 20 to 30 years has resulted in more theaters paying more attention to presentation, from projection to sound, which has been “great for filmmakers.”
WHERE ARE THE BEST SEATS?
Well, that comes down to personal preference but here’s where Nolan likes to sit.
“When I’m in a theater that’s Cinemascope ratio, I like to be right near the front, middle of the third row,” he said. “When I’m in a stadium, IMAX 1.43:1, then I actually like to be a little behind the center line right up at the middle. So, a little further back.”
LOS ANGELES (AP) — “The Eric Andre Show” is ostensibly not a series that lends itself to longevity. Its titular star, who plays a version of himself and satirizes talk shows by putting unsuspecting celebrity guests through hellish interviews, has become considerably more famous since the series first aired over a decade ago.
But through a combination of disguises and an artfully deceptive booking team, Andre is gearing up for the premiere of the sixth season this Sunday on Adult Swim, boasting a star-studded list of guests in the episodes to come, including Lil Nas X, Natasha Lyonne and Jon Hamm.
“We used to worry about, like, ‘Oh, am I going to be more recognizable?’” Andre said of his increasing fame, eventually realizing it doesn’t take much to fool people. “I disguised myself a lot this season. I rocked the ponytail and the glasses, and I would wear COVID masks sometimes.”
There is a kind of poetic, albeit sadistic, justice that comes from watching the cult show make the most envied in society the butt of its joke, including high-profile names over the years like Seth Rogen, Demi Lovato, Dennis Rodman and Judy Greer.
A few — including Lauren Conrad and T.I. — have walked off in disgust or indignation. But that number is surprisingly low given that Andre often keeps guests in emotional and physical discomfort for an hour or more, only to edit interviews down to mere minutes.
“I’m in character,” Andre explained. “I’m trying to just be the most absurd and incompetent talk show host of all time.”
Once celebrities are brought on the “talk show,” their egos are subjected to all kinds of abasements, both through Andre’s absurd line of questioning and through physical pranks — some unbeknownst to viewers and only revealed later by former guests.
“It’s a break from the kind of fictitious propaganda of traditional press, I think,” he theorized, mocking actors and the stories they share on actual late-night talk shows. “They’re like, ‘Hey, you know, on set, George Clooney played a prank on me,’ or whatever. They have some anecdote from set. It feels — people can smell it’s a little inauthentic.”
Part of what makes the pranks so impressive is Andre’s ability to pull them off, even when guests become visibly angry and sometimes threatening toward him.
“I’m calculating every next step,” the comedian said of what goes through his mind during the interviews. “I don’t want to laugh. I’ve done so much work and so much prep has gone into bringing that prank into production that I don’t want to be the one that blows it.”
Despite the fact that even he is not particularly comfortable with it, Andre’s antics often at some point involve nudity — either by him or the show’s infamous “naked PA” — a move that frequently pushes guests over the edge.
“You gotta do what it takes,” Andre, ever the showman, explained. “There’s not a lot of things that are like completely jaw-dropping shocking. So, nudity is just kind of like a guaranteed reaction.”
Although he denies outright lying to get people on the show, he concedes he and the bookers frequently “bend the truth,” and then come up with elaborate schemes to prevent publicists from seeing the torturous pranks they unknowingly walked their clients into.
“We don’t let publicists into where the stage is and we’ll show them like fake monitor feeds and stuff,” he explained, adding they are sometimes sent on a “wild goose chase” when they get an inkling of what is going on.
He recalled having actor Robin Givens on the show last season, saying her publicist at one point demanded the interview be stopped. In an effort to buy Andre more time, the show’s assistant director allegedly led the publicist down a series of wrong turns throughout the building.
“Outside, back in, pretending he didn’t know where we were,” Andre said, bursting into laughter.
His stunts might lead some to believe that Andre is a simple clown. But the comedian, who studied upright bass at the Berklee College of Music, will often give glimpses into the more learned corners of his brain, inexplicably dropping commentary on things like capitalism or militarism amid the chaos of his interviews.
“What can I say, man? Patriotism is the conviction that your country is superior to all others because you were born in it,” he says abruptly in one interview with NBA player Blake Griffin last season.
The fact that Andre keeps coming back for more has been of late a pleasant surprise for fans, given that he at times seems ready to move on from the show, as well as his recent involvement in other projects.
He fittingly stars in a sort of spoof on reality competition shows called “The Prank Panel” alongside his “Jackass Forever” co-star Johnny Knoxville and Gabourey Sidibe.
And in 2021, after years of delays and back and forth with different studios, Netflix finally released “Bad Trip,” a narrative film with pranks on real people that stars Andre, Tiffany Haddish and Lil Rel Howery.
“I was going to end the show after five seasons and then I didn’t make any money on ‘Bad Trip,’” he laughed, though he acknowledged his motivations for coming back to “The Eric Andre Show” were not just financial.
“Why permanently close the door on a show where I have full creative freedom?” he said, hinting that door is still open for more after this season.
Despite Andre’s claim that “Bad Trip” didn’t make him any money, the film’s success once it hit Netflix seems to have engendered future opportunities for the comedian, though he is reluctant to say more about what those projects are.
“It’s not even my corporate overlords. It’s superstition. So, I’ll tell you when the time is right,” he teased.
WASHINGTON (AP) — It was advice that Mitch McConnell had offered to Joe Biden once already: To resolve the debt limit standoff, he needed to strike a deal with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — and McCarthy alone. But after the first meeting of the top four congressional leaders with the president in early May, the Senate minority leader felt the need to reemphasize his counsel.
After returning from the White House that day, McConnell called the president to privately urge him to “shrink the room” – meaning no direct involvement in the talks for himself, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
A week later, Biden and McCarthy essentially adopted that path, tapping a handful of trusted emissaries to negotiate a deal that would lift the debt limit. It was a turning point in an impasse that, until then, seemed intractable.
More on the debt limit deal
Having lived through the debacle of a 2011 debt limit fight, Biden would not entertain any concessions for a task that he viewed as Congress’ fundamental responsibility. But McCarthy, prodded by conservatives insisting on sweeping changes to federal spending, was intent on using the nation’s borrowing authority as leverage even if it edged the U.S. closer to default.
The scramble that ensued showed how two of the most powerful figures in Washington — who share a belief in the power of personal relationships, despite not having much of one between themselves — jointly staved off an unprecedented default that could have ravaged the economy and held unknown political consequences. It’s a tale of an underestimated House speaker determined to defy expectations that he couldn’t address a complex debt limit fight, and a president who tuned out the noise from his own party to ensure a default would not happen on his watch.
But it was also a standoff largely instigated by Republicans who argued they needed to use the debt limit threat as a cudgel to rein in federal spending. And even with a resounding 314-117 House vote — followed by a 63-36 Senate vote — the episode is testing the durability of McCarthy’s speakership and his ability to tame a restive hard-right flank.
He reflected back on his election as speaker after the House passed the debt limit package, referring to his long battle to claim the gavel in January. “Every question you gave me (was), what could we survive, what could we even do? I told you then, it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.”
This account of the weeks-long saga of how Washington defused the debt limit crisis is based on interviews with lawmakers, senior White House officials and top congressional aides, some who requested anonymity to discuss details of private negotiations.
Perhaps most critical to clearing the blockades were Biden and McCarthy’s five negotiators who came to the discussions armed with policy gravitas and empowered by their principals. Particularly comforting to Republicans was the presence of presidential counselor Steve Ricchetti, who speaks on behalf of Biden like no one else, and Shalanda Young, now the director of the Office and Management and Budget, who cut her teeth as a beloved senior congressional aide managing the complex annual appropriations process.
Young and Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, one of McCarthy’s negotiators, grew so close that they checked in each morning by phone as they did their respective day care drop-offs. Meanwhile, she and the other GOP negotiator, Rep. Garret Graves, who represents the south central part of Louisiana where Young hails from, ribbed each other over who had the better gumbo recipe and squeezed in debt limit talks during a White House celebration for the national champion Louisiana State University women’s basketball team.
The five negotiators — Graves, McHenry, Ricchetti, Young and legislative affairs director Louisa Terrell — met daily in a stately office on the first floor of the Capitol, under frescoes painted by the 19th century muralist Constantino Brumidi. Inside, they would home in with seriousness on priorities and red lines to figure out how they could reach a deal.
THE PAUSE BUTTON AND A ‘REGRESSIVE’ OFFER
By May 19, the negotiations were getting shaky.
Republicans were losing patience as the White House didn’t appear to be budging on curbing federal spending. For the GOP, anything short of that was a nonstarter.
During a morning meeting that Friday, White House officials pushed McHenry and Graves to put a formal offer on the table, but by that point, the frustrated Republicans decided to take it all public.
Republicans told reporters the talks had momentarily stopped. Graves, in a ball cap and blue button-up shirt that looked more apt for a fishing trip than high-stakes deal-making, said as he walked briskly through the Capitol: “We decided to press pause because it’s just not productive,”
“We were not going to play games here,” Graves recounted later of his and McHenry’s frustrations.
The friction wasn’t about to ease. When the negotiations reconvened that night, McHenry and Graves put forward a fresh proposal to administration officials: It not only revived more of the rejected provisions in the GOP’s debt limit bill, but also included the House Republicans’ border-security bill for good measure.
One White House official called the offer “regressive.”
The White House went public with its own frustrations as the negotiations seemed to be going awry, first with a lengthy statement from communications director Ben LaBolt and then from Biden himself at a news conference in Hiroshima, Japan, where he was attending a summit of the world’s leading democracies.
“Now it’s time for the other side to move their extreme positions,” the president said. “Because much of what they’ve already proposed is simply, quite frankly, unacceptable.”
OPTIMISM, LATE NIGHTS AND GUMMY WORMS
Even as the public rhetoric sharpened, there were signs that the talks were starting to take a better turn.
As Biden left Japan, he called McCarthy from Air Force One, and the speaker emerged appearing more optimistic than he had in days. Sustained by coffee, gummy worms and burritos, the negotiators worked grueling hours, mostly at the Capitol but once at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where they noshed on Call Your Mother bagel sandwiches sent over by Jeff Zients, the White House chief of staff.
One session lasted until 2:30 a.m. Graves, at another time, showed reporters an app on his phone that tracked his sleep, which showed he was averaging three hours a night during the final stretch.
Still, McCarthy sent lawmakers home over the Memorial Day weekend, which McHenry said helped.
“The tone of the White House negotiators became much more serious and much more grounded in the realities they were going to have to accept,” McHenry said.
The night before the vote, McCarthy gathered House Republicans in the basement of the Capitol, wheeled in pizza and walked lawmakers through the bill, while daring the Freedom Caucus members to use the same confrontational language they used at a news conference earlier in the day. By the time the meeting ended, it was clear McCarthy had subdued the revolt.
Meanwhile, the White House had work of its own to mollify rank-and-file Democrats.
Biden and McCarthy were a study in contrasting styles. The speaker chatted about the debt limit talks at every turn throughout the negotiations to frame the debate on his terms; the president stayed silent by design, leery of fouling anything up before the deal was finalized.
Even as the deal was coming together, Biden had been privately trying to assuage his party’s concerns. After the Congressional Progressive Caucus publicly eviscerated the few details that they knew of, particularly about toughening requirements for federal safety-net programs, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., got a call that night.
It was Biden. He assured her that his negotiators were working hard to minimize Republican-drafted changes to programs that offer food stamps and cash assistance.
“I do believe that had we not done that, this would have been much worse than what I heard,” Jayapal said.
After the deal was finalized, through phone calls and virtual briefings, White House officials answered questions, explained the agreement’s intricacies and fielded complaints from lawmakers about their communications strategy. As of Thursday, senior White House officials had called more than 130 lawmakers personally.
Biden himself got on the phone. On one call, he spoke with Rep. Annie Kuster, D-N.H., the leader of the center-left New Democrats Coalition, and thanked her for the group’s efforts to ensure the deal would pass.
“I appreciate that he knows this institution so well, and that he understands what it takes to deliver these votes to get us across the line and to uphold the full faith and credit of the United States of America,” Kuster said. “We all took an oath.”
Late Wednesday night, as the House voted its approval with significant bipartisan support, Biden watched from the Cheyenne Mountain Resort in Colorado Springs, where he had traveled to for a commencement address at the Air Force Academy. On the phone with Biden throughout were Ricchetti and Terrell, who were listening in from the West Wing with other legislative aides, munching on more pizza.
In a statement after the vote, Biden sounded thankful — and relieved.
“Tonight, the House took a critical step forward to prevent a first-ever default and protect our country’s hard-earned and historic economic recovery,” he said. “This budget agreement is a bipartisan compromise. Neither side got everything it wanted. That’s the responsibility of governing.”
Then the Senate labored toward its own vote. It passed the bill Thursday night.
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AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro and AP White House Correspondent Zeke Miller contributed to this report.
In the year since the Supreme Court struck down the nationwide right to abortion, America’s religious leaders and denominations have responded in strikingly diverse ways — some celebrating the state-level bans that have ensued, others angered that a conservative Christian cause has changed the law of the land in ways they consider oppressive.
The divisions are epitomized in the country’s largest denomination — the Catholic Church. National polls repeatedly show that a majority of U.S. Catholics believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases, yet the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops supports sweeping bans.
Among Protestants, a solid majority of white evangelicals favor outlawing abortion. But most mainline Protestants support the right to abortion, and several of their top leaders have decried the year-old Supreme Court ruling that undermined that right by reversing the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973.
For example, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, said he was “deeply grieved” by that ruling.
The decision “institutionalizes inequality because women with access to resources will be able to exercise their moral judgment in ways that women without the same resources will not,” Curry said.
Some religious Americans have gone beyond expressions of dismay, filing lawsuits contending that new abortion bans infringed on their own religious beliefs. Jewish women played roles in such lawsuits in Indiana and Kentucky; in Florida, a synagogue in Boynton Beach — Congregation L’Dor Va-Dor — contended in a lawsuit that a state abortion ban violated Jewish teachings.
Dr. Sara Imershein, who performs first-trimester abortions in northern Virginia, said her Reform Judaism beliefs informed her decision to choose that path.
“I looked more at the liturgy of Judaism and found that it really supported my work,” she said. “I studied with my local rabbi.”
Imershein was in college when abortion was legalized nationwide. Now, at 69, she has seen Roe’s demise.
“Laws that restrict abortion … ignore our Jewish teachings that are very old, and they stomp on our religious freedom,” she said.
In Buddhism, Islam and Sikhism, there also is widespread acceptance of abortion in some circumstances. Most U.S. Hindus are “very much in support of choice,” said Dheepa Sundaram, assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Denver; she cited the concept of karma which holds that each person has the liberty to act and face the consequences of their actions — good or bad.
Randall Balmer, a professor of American religious history at Dartmouth College, says the abortion debate is so intractable in part because believers in the opposing camps view the Bible — which doesn’t include the word “abortion” — as supporting their side.
“It shows the pliability of Scripture — the way that each group tries to marshal arguments on its behalf,” he said. “The Bible can be manipulated.”
“What strikes me about both sides is there’s no humility in their position,” Balmer added. “They stake out what they believe is God’s will, and everybody else is a heretic.”
Even within individual churches, divisions over abortion can flare. Bishop Timothy Clarke, pastor of First Church of God in Columbus, Ohio, frequently exhorts his predominantly African American congregation to respect those with opposing views.
Clarke describes himself as “biblically pro-life,” yet he criticizes the stringent abortion bans enacted in numerous Republican-led states as “excessive and extreme.”
Referring to laws that would criminalize abortion-providing doctors and deny abortion to victims of rape, he said many people in his church “are saying this is going too far. It’s beyond the pale.”
There is similar sentiment among some U.S. Catholics, says Kathleen Sprows Cummings, a professor of American studies and history at the University of Notre Dame and director of its Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism.
“There are some horrific stories coming out of pregnant women with severe issues who are being denied health care,” she said, referring to the consequences of some state abortion bans.
“We have to have a more human approach,” she said. “I think we’ll see more Catholics saying, ‘I’m not pro-abortion. But I want mercy. I want health care.’”
As a group, Catholic bishops are unwavering, as conveyed in a statement earlier this year from their conference’s president, Archbishop Timothy Broglio.
“The Catholic bishops of the United States are united in our commitment to life and will continue to work as one body in Christ to make abortion unthinkable,” he said.
A poll last year from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed a clear gap between the prevalent views of U.S. Catholics, and the anti-abortion positions of the bishops. According to the poll, 63% of Catholic adults said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and 68% opposed Roe v. Wade’s reversal.
“On every issue having to do with sexuality or reproductive health, there’s a huge gap between the way lay Catholics think and what the hierarchy is teaching,” said Jamie Manson, president of Catholics for Choice.
“What’s challenging,” she said, “is that even though most Catholics believe abortion should be legal, they don’t speak about it publicly because of the taboo … the fear of being ostracized by their community.”
Manson noted that a 2014 survey by the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights, found that nearly one-fourth of U.S. abortion patients identify as Catholic.
“There’s an all-male hierarchy telling them they’re complicit in murder,” Manson said. “I wish what bishops and priests would do is listen to these women, listen to their stories of why they choose abortion.”
Among mainline Protestant denominations, there have been official statements acknowledging that abortion is a complex issue, but prevailing sentiment is that last year’s Supreme Court ruling was an injustice to women, particularly those already facing economic hardships and racial discrimination.
“This decision further complicates the struggle and creates division, anger, and chaos in an already divided and conflicted country,” wrote Bishop Thomas Bickerton, president of the United Methodist Church’s Council of Bishops.
Some Protestant pastors have emerged as outspoken advocates of abortion rights; among them is Jacqui Lewis, the first African American and first woman to serve as a senior minister in New York City’s historic Middle Collegiate Church.
She evoked the fear and heartache felt by many of the women affected by the new abortion bans.
“These are the poorest of us, the most disenfranchised and they’re struggling more because some portion of Christianity feels they have the right to decide for other people what is moral,” Lewis said. “It breaks my soul to see religion weaponized this way … it’s the opposite of what religion should be.”
Among the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, by far the largest evangelical denomination, there’s unified opposition to abortion. However, there has been sharp disagreement over whether to impose criminal penalties on women who get abortions.
The SBC’s president, Bart Barber, opposes criminalization of women in such cases and has sparred verbally with Baptist pastors who argue that such women. in some instances, should be considered murderers.
“I think it is unjust, unnecessary, and unwise to include in abortion laws the prosecution of women who seek or obtain an abortion,” Barber writes in a lengthy article. “The abortionist is the murderer, and any law banning abortion should identify the abortionist uniquely as such.”
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AP reporters Tiffany Stanley in Washington and Deepa Bharath in Southern California contributed.
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — As Elizabeth Holmes prepares to report to prison next week, the criminal case that laid bare the blood-testing scam at the heart of her Theranos startup is entering its final phase.
The 11-year sentence represents a comeuppance for the wide-eyed woman who broke through “tech bro” culture to become one of Silicon Valley’s most celebrated entrepreneurs, only to be exposed as a fraud. Along the way, Holmes became a symbol of the shameless hyperbole that often saturates startup culture.
But questions still linger about her true intentions — so many that even the federal judge who presided over her trial seemed mystified. And Holmes’ defenders continue to ask whether the punishment fits the crime.
At 39, she seems most likely to be remembered as Silicon Valley’s Icarus — a high-flying entrepreneur burning with reckless ambition whose odyssey culminated in convictions for fraud and conspiracy.
Her motives are still somewhat mysterious, and some supporters say federal prosecutors targeted her unfairly in their zeal to bring down one of the most prominent practitioners of fake-it-til-you-make-it — the tech sector’s brand of self-promotion that sometimes veers into exaggeration and blatant lies to raise money.
Holmes will begin to pay the price for her deceit on May 30 when she is scheduled begin the sentence that will separate her from her two children — a son whose July 2021 birth delayed the start of her trial and a 3-month-old daughter conceived after her conviction.
She is expected to be incarcerated in Bryan, Texas, about 100 miles (160 km) northwest of her hometown of Houston. The prison was recommended by the judge who sentenced Holmes, but authorities have not publicly disclosed where she will be held.
Her many detractors contend she deserves to be in prison for peddling a technology that she repeatedly boasted would quickly scan for hundreds of diseases and other health problems with a few drops of blood taken with a finger prick.
The technology never worked as promised. Instead, Theranos tests produced wildly unreliable results that could have endangered patients’ lives — one of the most frequently cited reasons why she deserved to be prosecuted.
Before those lies were uncovered in a series of explosive articles in The Wall Street Journal beginning in October 2015, Holmes raised nearly $1 billion from a list of savvy investors including Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and media mogul Rupert Murdoch. It was the duping of those investors that led to her prison sentence and a $452 million restitution bill.
Holmes’ stake in Theranos at one point catapulted her paper wealth to $4.5 billion. She never sold any of her stock in the company, though trial evidence left no doubt she reveled in the trappings of fame and fortune — so much so that she and the father of her children, William “Billy” Evans, lived on a palatial Silicon Valley estate during the trial.
The theory that Holmes was running an elaborate scam was buttressed by trial evidence documenting her efforts to prevent the Journal’s investigation from being published. That campaign compelled John Carreyrou — the reporter responsible for those bombshell stories — to attend court and position himself in Holmes’ line of vision when she took the witness stand.
Holmes also signed off on surveillance aimed at intimidating Theranos employees who helped uncover the flaws with the blood-testing technology. The whistleblowers included Tyler Shultz, the grandson of former Secretary of State George Shultz, whom Holmes befriended and persuaded to join the Theranos board.
Tyler Shultz became so unnerved by Holmes’ efforts to shut him up that he began sleeping with a knife under his pillow, according to a wrenching statement delivered by his father, Alex, at her sentencing.
Holmes’ supporters still contend she always had good intentions and was unfairly scapegoated by the Justice Department. They insist she simply deployed the same over-the-top promotion tactics as many other tech executives, including Elon Musk, who has repeatedly made misleading statements about the capabilities of Tesla’s self-driving cars.
According to those supporters, Holmes was singled out because she was a woman who briefly eclipsed the men who customarily bask in Silicon Valley’s spotlight, and the trial turned her into a latter-day version of Hester Prynne — the protagonist in the 1850 novel “The Scarlet Letter.”
Holmes steadfastly maintained her innocence during seven often-riveting days of testimony in her own defense — a spectacle that caused people to line up shortly after midnight to secure one of the few dozen seats available in the San Jose courtroom.
On one memorable day, Holmes recounted how she had never gotten over the trauma of being raped while enrolled at Stanford University. She then described being subjected to a long-running pattern of emotional and sexual abuse by her former lover and Theranos conspirator, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, and suggested his stifling control blurred her thinking.
Balwani’s lawyer, Jeffrey Coopersmith, denied those allegations during the trial. In Balwani’s subsequent trial, Coopersmith unsuccessfully tried to depict his client as Holmes’ pawn.
When it came time to sentence the then-pregnant Holmes in November, U.S. District Judge Edward Davila seemed as puzzled as anyone about why she did what she did.
”This is a fraud case where an exciting venture went forward with great expectations and hope, only to be dashed by untruth, misrepresentations, hubris and plain lies,” Davila lamented while Holmes stood before him. “I suppose we step back and we look at this, and we think what is the pathology of fraud?”
The judge also hearkened back to the days that Silicon Valley consisted mostly of orchards farmed by immigrants. That was before the land was ceded to the tech boom beginning in 1939 when William Hewlett and David Packard founded a company bearing their surnames in a one-car garage in Palo Alto — the same city where Theranos was based.
“You’ll recall the wonderful innovation of those two individuals in that small garage,” Davila reminded everyone in the rapt courtroom. “No exotic automobiles or lavish lifestyle, just a desire to create for society’s benefit through honest hard work. And that, I would hope, would be the continuing story, the legacy and practice of Silicon Valley.”
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Michael Liedtke has been covering Silicon Valley for The Associated Press for 23 years.
TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) — The day that President Joe Biden’s administration ended a public health measure blocking many asylum-seekers at the Mexican border during the coronavirus pandemic, Teodoso Vargas was ready to show U.S. officials his scars and photos of his bullet-riddled body.
Instead, he stood frozen with his pregnant wife and 5-year-old son at a Tijuana crossing, feet from U.S. soil.
He was unsure of the new rules rolled out with the change and whether taking the next few steps to approach U.S. officials to ask for asylum in person could force a return to his native Honduras.
“I can’t go back to my country,” said Vargas, a long scar snaking down his neck from surgery after being shot nine times in his homeland during a robbery. “Fear is why I don’t want to return. If I can just show the proof I have, I believe the U.S. will let me in.”
Asylum-seekers say joy over the end of the public health restriction known as Title 42 this month is turning into anguish with the uncertainty about how the Biden administration’s new rules affect them.
Though the government opened some new avenues for immigration, the fate of many people is largely left to a U.S. government app only used for scheduling an appointment at a port of entry and unable to decipher human suffering or weigh the vulnerability of applicants.
The CBP One app is a key tool in creating a more efficient and orderly system at the border “while cutting out unscrupulous smugglers who profit from vulnerable migrants,” the Department of Homeland Security said in an email to The Associated Press.
As a Honduran man, Vargas does not qualify for many of the legal pathways the Biden administration has introduced. One program gives up to 30,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans a month a shot at humanitarian parole if they apply online, have a financial sponsor in the U.S. and arrive by air. Minors traveling alone also are exempt from the rules.
Migrants who do not follow the rules, the government has said, could be deported back to their homelands and barred from seeking asylum for five years.
Vargas said he decided not to risk it. He has been logging onto the app each day at 9 a.m. for the past three months from his rented room in a crime-riddled Tijuana neighborhood.
His experience is shared by tens of thousands of other asylum-seekers in Mexican border towns.
Immigration lawyer Blaine Bookey said for many on the border “there seems to be no option right now for people to ask for asylum if they don’t have an appointment through the CBP app.”
The government said it doesn’t turn away asylum-seekers but prioritizes people who use the app.
Bookey’s group, Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, is one of the lead plaintiffs, along with the American Civil Liberties Union, challenging some of the new rules in federal court in San Francisco, including a requirement that people first apply for asylum in a country they crossed on the way to the U.S. They are asking the court to allow an asylum request by anyone on U.S. soil.
Texas Republican lawmakers also have sued. Among other things, they argue the CBP One app encourages illegal immigration by dispensing appointments without properly vetting whether applicants have a legal basis to stay.
More than 79,000 people were admitted under CBP One from its Jan. 12 launch through the end of April. From May 12 to May 19, an average of 1,070 people per day presented themselves at the ports of entry after securing an appointment on the app, the government stated. It did not provide updated figures but said the numbers should grow as the initiative is scaled up.
The administration also has highlighted improvements made in recent weeks. The app can prioritize those who have been trying the longest. Appointments are opened online throughout the day to avoid system overload. People with acute medical conditions or facing imminent threats of murder, rape, kidnapping or other “exceptionally compelling circumstances” can request priority status, but only in person at a port of entry. The app does not allow input of case details.
Still, some asylum-seekers claim to have been turned away at crossings while making requests, lawyers say.
Koral Rivera, who is from Mexico and eight months pregnant, said she has been trying to obtain an appointment through the app for two months. She recently went to a Texas crossing to present her case to U.S. officials, but said Mexican immigration agents in Matamoros blocked her and her husband.
“They tell us to try to get an appointment through the app,” said Rivera, whose family has been threatened by drug cartel members.
Priscilla Orta, an immigration attorney with Lawyers for Good Government in Brownsville, Texas, said one Honduran woman in the Mexican border city of Reynosa said a man whom she accuses of raping her tracked her down though her phone, which she was using to secure an appointment.
The woman was raped again, said Orta, who has not been able to reach her since.
“That is harrowing to realize that you’re just going to have to put up with the abuses in Mexico and just kind of continue to take it because if you don’t, then you could forever hurt yourself in the long term,” the lawyer said.
Orta said she previously could ask U.S. border officials at crossings to prioritize children with cancer, victims of torture and members of the LGBTQ community, and usually they would schedule a meeting. But local officials informed her they no longer have guidance from Washington.
“They do not know what to do with these most extremely vulnerable people,” Orta said, adding that migrants face tough questions. “Do you risk never qualifying for asylum? Or do you try to wait for an appointment despite the danger?”
Vargas, a farmer, has no doubt he could prove he and his family fled Honduras out of fear, the first requirement for U.S. entry to start the yearslong legal process for safe refuge. His iPhone is filled with photos of him lying in a hospital bed, tubes snaking out, his swollen face covered in bandages. He has knots of scar tissue on each side of his head from a bullet passing through his right check and exiting the left side of his head. Similar scar tissue dots his back and side.
His spirits were up after Title 42 expired and fellow asylum-seekers at a Tijuana shelter left with appointments. Two weeks later, he was dismayed.
“I can’t find enough work here. I’m either going to have to return to Honduras, but I’ll likely be killed, or I don’t know,” he said. “I feel so hopeless.”
On a Panamanian beach long after dark, a group of undergraduate students dug into the sand to excavate a sea turtle nest, their lamps casting a soft red glow as they studied eggs, inventoried the success of the hatch and checked for any surviving hatchlings stuck at the bottom of the nest. Nearby, armed members of the National Border Service stood watch for protection in an area known for drug trafficking.
The students worked under the guidance of Callie Veelenturf, who founded a group that works to protect leatherback turtles and pushed for a new law in Panama that guarantees sea turtles the legal right to live and have free passage in a healthy environment.
The new law “will allow any Panamanian citizen to be the voice of sea turtles and defend them legally,” Veelenturf said in a text message as she boarded a plane to Panama City after her group’s work near Armila. “We will be able to hold governments, corporations, and public citizens legally accountable for violations of the rights of sea turtles.”
When Panama’s president signed the law in March, it was a victory for people who have long argued that wild animals should have so-called rights of nature that recognize their legal right to exist and to flourish, and allow for lawsuits if those rights are violated. Experts hope it’s part of an evolution that will see other countries take similar steps to protect species under threat.
“Business as usual laws aren’t doing enough to protect against the extinction crisis and climate change,” said Erica Lyman, a clinical law professor and director of the Global Law Alliance for Animals and the Environment at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon. “This is an attempt at a new kind of framing that offers hope.”
Wildlife protection laws typically are passed because of some perceived benefit to humans, Lyman said. Panama’s law instead considers what sea turtles need and the fact that humans should curb their behavior to meet those needs, she said.
The law gives sea turtles the right to an environment free of pollution and other human impacts that cause physical or health damage, like climate change, incidental capture, coastal development and unregulated tourism.
What makes the law remarkable is that it explicitly says sea turtles, as living creatures, have rights, and with enough specificity that those rights can be enforced, added Nicholas Fromherz, an adjunct law professor and director of the alliance’s Latin American Program.
Panama’s new law came after Ecuador’s highest court in 2022 ruled in a case about a monkey kept in a private home that wild animals are rights-holders under the constitutional provisions for rights of nature. That was an important step in evolving the definition of nature from a site-specific or place-based concept, to include individual wild animals, Lyman said.
Both Lyman and Fromherz saw Panama’s law and recent judicial rulings as evidence of a trend toward safeguarding the legal rights of animals. Besides the Ecuador case, a Pakistan court in 2020 — ruling on a case that included an elephant’s captivity in a zoo — held that animals have natural rights that should be recognized. That decision sharply criticized humanity’s treatment of wild animals and drew on religious doctrine.
“There’s energy there,” Fromherz said.
And the movement is broader than animals. In Minnesota, for example, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe passed a tribal law granting legal rights to wild rice, then made it a plaintiff in a tribal court lawsuit in 2020 seeking to stop an oil pipeline. That lawsuit was eventually dismissed on jurisdictional grounds.
Whether the thinking behind Panama’s law spreads more widely or not, it’s critical help for sea turtles in that country, which has some of the most important nesting spots in the world for leatherback sea turtles and hawksbill sea turtles. One beach area has about 3,000 hawksbill nests per year.
The Sea Turtle Conservancy is already citing the new law to call for Panama’s police and natural resource managers to intervene at one critical leatherback turtle nesting site that faces intense pressure from illegal egg hunters.
When the pandemic halted ecotourism, people who lost their main source of income began harvesting sea turtle eggs and some nesting turtles to sell for meat and their shells, said David Godfrey, executive director of the Florida-based conservancy. It became a crisis — at one beach, up to 90% of leatherback eggs were being taken, he said.
It was already illegal under Panamanian law to take sea turtles and their eggs from national parks and protected marine areas, Godfrey said, but it was unclear whether doing so was prohibited outside of those places and the law was sparsely enforced. Turtle protection groups, including the conservancy, lobbied for legislation that would offer clear protection for sea turtles, better monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, including financial penalties.
Panama’s law is explicit about the implications for irresponsible developers, tourism operators and others who disrupt sea turtle habitats, instructing agencies to cancel operating permits, Fromherz said. It clearly prohibits all domestic and international commerce in sea turtles, parts and eggs, with a narrow exception for subsistence use by select traditional communities, he added.
A committee is overseeing the full implementation of the law, including research, monitoring and efforts to raise awareness and promote ecotourism as an alternative to harvesting sea turtles and their eggs.
Laws like this are needed because recognizing that animals have legal rights opens up a pathway to safeguarding those rights and protections in court, said Christopher Berry, a managing attorney at the Animal Legal Defense Fund.
“Making sure there is a way to actually enforce a violation of these rights when a violation happens is really an incredibly important animal law issue that doesn’t get enough attention,” he said.
Despite ecotourism returning, Godfrey said people are still taking nesting sea turtles and eggs at greater levels than before the pandemic to sell for extra income. He expects the conservancy will try to get other countries throughout the Atlantic and Caribbean to adopt similar legislation, assuming it’s as effective as they hope.
“These animals have a right to exist, whether or not they benefit us. They do happen to benefit us in many ways. But they have a right to exist, even if they don’t,” Godfrey said. “And it’s refreshing to see a nation take that stance.”
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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, global companies were quick to respond, some announcing they would get out of Russia immediately, others curtailing imports or new investment. Billions of dollars’ worth of factories, energy holdings and power plants were written off or put up for sale, accompanied by fierce condemnation of the war and expressions of solidarity with Ukraine.
Increasingly, Russia has put hurdles in the way of companies that want out, requiring approval by a government commission and in some cases from President Vladimir Putin himself, while imposing painful discounts and taxes on sale prices.
Though companies’ stories vary, a common theme is having to thread an obstacle course between Western sanctions and outraged public opinion on one side and Russia’s efforts to discourage and penalize departures on the other. Some international brands such as Coke and Apple are trickling in informally through third countries despite a decision to exit.
Many companies are simply staying put, sometimes citing responsibility to shareholders or employees or legal obligations to local franchisees or partners. Others argue that they’re providing essentials like food, farm supplies or medicine. Some say nothing.
One is Italian fashion chain Benetton, whose store at Moscow’s now ironically named Evropeisky Mall — meaning “European” in Russian — was busy on a recent weekday evening, with customers browsing and workers tidying piles of brightly colored clothing. At Italian lingerie retailer Calzedonia, shoppers looked through socks and swimwear. Neither company responded to emailed questions.
For consumers in Moscow, what they can buy hasn’t changed much. While baby products store Mothercare became Mother Bear under new local ownership, most of the items in the Evropeisky Mall shop still bear the Mothercare brand.
That’s also what student Alik Petrosyan saw as he shopped at Maag, which now owns Zara’s former flagship clothing store in Moscow.
“The quality hasn’t changed at all, everything has stayed the same,” he said. “The prices haven’t changed much, taking into account the inflation and the economic scenarios that happened last year.”
“Overall Zara — Maag — had competitors,” Petrosyan said, correcting himself, “but I wouldn’t say that there are any now with whom they could compete equally. Because the competitors who stayed are in a higher price segment, but the quality doesn’t match up.”
The initial exodus from Russia was led by big automakers, oil, tech and professional services companies, with BP, Shell, ExxonMobil and Equinor ending joint ventures or writing off stakes worth billions. McDonald’s sold its 850 restaurants to a local franchisee, while France’s Renault took a symbolic single ruble for its majority stake in Avtovaz, Russia’s largest carmaker.
Since the initial wave of departures, new categories have emerged: companies that are biding their time, those struggling to shed assets and others attempting business as usual. Over 1,000 international companies have publicly said they are voluntarily curtailing Russian business beyond what’s required by sanctions, according to a database by Yale University.
But the Kremlin keeps adding requirements, recently a “voluntary” 10% departure tax directly to the government, plus an understanding that companies would sell at a 50% discount.
Danish brewer Carlsberg announced its intention to divest its Russia business — one of Russia’s largest brewing operations — in March 2022 but faced complications clarifying the impact of sanctions and finding suitable buyers.
“This is a complex process, and it has taken longer than we originally hoped for” but now is “almost completed,” said Tanja Frederiksen, global head of external communications.
She called the Russia business a deeply integrated part of Carlsberg. Separating it has involved all parts of the company and more than 100 million Danish kroner ($14.8 million) in investment in new brewing equipment and IT infrastructure, Frederiksen said.
Another beer giant, Anheuser-Busch InBev, is trying to sell a stake in a Russian joint venture to Turkey-based partner Anadolu Efes and has forgone revenue from it.
Companies are lost in “a Bermuda Triangle between EU sanctions, U.S. sanctions and Russia sanctions,” said Michael Harms, executive director of the German Eastern Business Association.
They must find a partner not sanctioned by the West. In Russia, major business figures are often people who are “well connected with the government,” Harms said. “For one thing, they have to sell at a large discount or almost give assets away, and then they go to people whom politically we don’t like — people who are close to the regime.”
The 10% exit tax mandated by Russia is particularly tricky. American companies would have to get permission from the Treasury Department to pay it or run afoul of U.S. sanctions, said Maria Shagina, a sanctions expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Berlin.
Hundreds of companies quietly decided not to leave.
In a rare, frank explanation, Steffen Greubel, CEO of German cash and carry firm Metro AG, said at this year’s shareholder meeting that the company condemns the war “without any ifs, ands or buts.”
However, the decision to stay was motivated by a responsibility for 10,000 local employees and is “also in the interest of preserving the value of this company for its shareholders,” he said.
Metro gets around 10% of its annual sales from Russia — more than 2.9 billion euros ($3.1 billion).
Meanwhile, shelves are just as full as before the war at Globus superstores, a Germany-based chain with some 20 locations operating in Moscow.
A closer look reveals that most Western beer brands have vanished, and many cosmetic brands have jumped in price by some 50% to 70%. There are more vegetables from Russia and Belarus, which cost less. Procter & Gamble products are abundant even after the company said it would narrow its product range to essentials.
Globus says it has “drastically” cut new investment but kept its stores open to ensure food supply for people, noting that food has not been sanctioned and citing “the threat of confiscation of considerable asset value through a forced nationalization as well as severe consequences in criminal law for our local management.”
Similarly, Germany’s Bayer AG, which supplies medicine, agricultural chemicals and seeds, argues that doing some business in Russia is the right move.
“Withholding essential healthcare and agriculture products from the civilian populations — like cancer or cardiovascular treatments, health products for pregnant women and children as well as seeds to grow food — would only multiply the war’s ongoing toll on human life,” the company said in a statement.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, head of the Yale database, said leaving was the only valid business decision, citing research showing company share prices rising afterward.
“The companies that have pulled out have been rewarded for pulling out,” he said. “It is not good for shareholders to be associated with Putin’s war machine.”
Marianna Fotaki, professor of business ethics at Warwick Business School, says business is “not just about the bottom line. … You don’t want to be an accomplice to what is a criminal regime.”
Even if competitors stay, she said, “following the race to the bottom” is not the answer.
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This story has been corrected to show that the name of the head of the Yale database was misspelled. He’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, not Jeffrey Sonnenberger.
LONDON (AP) — A London judge rejected Prince Harry’s bid to pay for his own police protection Tuesday, denying the royal’s request to challenge the U.K. government in court.
The British government stopped providing security after Harry, the younger son of King Charles III, and his wife, the former actress Meghan Markle, quit their royal duties and moved to California in 2020. It then rejected his offer to pay for protection when he visits home.
A lawyer for the government argued in court that it was not appropriate to allow hiring “police officers as private bodyguards for the wealthy.”
Justice Martin Chamberlain said there was nothing “incoherent or illogical” in the government’s reasoning to deny the Duke of Sussex’s request to hire police bodyguards at his own expense. He said providing private protection for an individual was different from paying police as security at sporting and other events.
Further, he said it could strain police resources, set a precedent and be seen as unfair.
“If privately funded protective security were permitted, a less wealthy individual would feel unfairly treated, the availability of a limited specialist resource would be reduced and a precedent would have been set which it would be difficult to contain,” Chamberlain wrote.
Harry has said he doesn’t feel safe visiting Britain with his young children, and has cited aggressive press photographers that chased him after an event in 2021.
The case was argued last week on the same day Harry and Meghan sought cover from paparazzi in a New York police station after a spokesperson said they had been involved in a “near catastrophic car chase” with photographers after a gala event.
No one was injured and no citations given, but police said photographers made it challenging for the couple to get where they were going.
The couple have said they fund their own security. Former President Donald Trump said the U.S. government wouldn’t pay to protect them.
While Harry lost the case to pay police to protect him in the U.K., he could end up with a bigger prize. Another judge allowed his case to proceed challenging the decision to deny him government-paid security.
The prince has four other active legal cases in London courts, all of them against British tabloid publishers over allegations of phone hacking or libel.
Harry is due to testify next month in an ongoing trial against the publisher of the Daily Mirror over allegations it used illegal means to gather material for dozens of articles about the duke, dating back as far as the 1990s.
Judges are currently weighing whether two other phone hacking cases can go to trial against the publishers of the Daily Mail and The Sun.
Lawyers for the newspapers have argued the claims were brought well beyond a six-year time limit. Harry’s lawyer has argued that an exception should be granted because the publishers were deceptive about the hacking and other unlawful information gathering so he couldn’t discover it soon enough.
A judge is also considering whether to toss out Harry’s libel lawsuit against the Mail on Sunday over an article alleging he tried to hush up his challenge to pay for police security.
The newspaper has claimed it was expressing an “honest opinion,” but a judge in a preliminary ruling found it defamatory.
