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  • Harry’s claim he killed 25 in Afghanistan draws anger, worry

    Harry’s claim he killed 25 in Afghanistan draws anger, worry

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    LONDON (AP) — In a book full of startling revelations, Prince Harry’s assertion that he killed 25 people in Afghanistan is one of the most striking — and has drawn criticism from both enemies and allies.

    In his memoir, “Spare,” Harry says he killed more than two dozen Taliban militants while serving as an Apache helicopter copilot gunner in Afghanistan in 2012-2013. He writes that he feels neither satisfaction nor shame about his actions, and in the heat of battle regarded enemy combatants as pieces being removed from a chessboard, “Baddies eliminated before they could kill Goodies.”

    Harry has talked before about his combat experience, saying near the end of his tour in 2013 that “if there’s people trying to do bad stuff to our guys, then we’ll take them out of the game.”

    But his decision to put a number on those he killed, and the comparison to chess pieces, drew outrage from the Taliban, and concern from British veterans.

    “Mr. Harry! The ones you killed were not chess pieces, they were humans; they had families who were waiting for their return,” prominent Taliban member Anas Haqqani wrote Friday on Twitter.

    The Taliban, who adhere to a strict interpretation of Islam, returned to power when Western troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. Afghan Foreign Ministry spokesperson Abdul Qahar Balkhi said Harry’s comments “are a microcosm of the trauma experienced by Afghans at the hands of occupation forces who murdered innocents without any accountability.”

    In Britain, some veterans and military leaders said publishing a head count violated an unspoken military code.

    Col. Tim Collins, who led a British battalion during the Iraq war, told Forces News that the statement was “not how you behave in the Army; it’s not how we think.” Retired Royal Navy officer Rear Adm. Chris Parry called the claim “distasteful.”

    Some questioned whether Harry could be sure of the toll, but Harry said he reviewed video of his missions, and “in the era of Apaches and laptops,” technology let him know exactly how many enemy combatants he had killed.

    Others said Harry’s words could increase the security risk for him and for British forces around the world.

    “I don’t think it is wise that he said that out loud,” Royal Marines veteran Ben McBean, who knows Harry from their military days, told Sky News. “He’s already got a target on his back, more so than anyone else.”

    Retired Army Col. Richard Kemp told the BBC the claim was “an error of judgment” that would be “potentially valuable to those people who wish the British forces and British government harm.”

    Harry lost his publicly funded U.K. police protection when he and his wife Meghan quit royal duties in 2020. Harry is suing the British government over its refusal to let him pay personally for police security when he comes to Britain.

    Tens of thousands of British troops served in Afghanistan, and more than 450 died, between the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 and the end of U.K. combat operations in 2014.

    Harry spent a decade in the British Army, serving twice in Afghanistan. He spent 10 weeks as a forward air controller in 2007-2008 until a media leak cut short his tour.

    He retrained as a helicopter pilot with the British Army Air Corps so he could have the chance to return to the front line. He was part of a two-man crew whose duties ranged from supporting ground troops in firefights to accompanying helicopters as they evacuated wounded soldiers.

    Harry has described his time in the army as the happiest of his life because it let him be “one of the guys” rather than a prince. After leaving the military in 2015 he founded the Invictus Games, an international sports competition for sick and injured veterans.

    Harry’s memoir is due to be published around the world on Tuesday. The Associated Press obtained an early Spanish-language copy.

    ___

    Riazat Butt contributed to this story from Kabul, Afghanistan.

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  • Study: Two-thirds of glaciers on track to disappear by 2100

    Study: Two-thirds of glaciers on track to disappear by 2100

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    The world’s glaciers are shrinking and disappearing faster than scientists thought, with two-thirds of them projected to melt out of existence by the end of the century at current climate change trends, according to a new study.

    But if the world can limit future warming to just a few more tenths of a degree and fulfill international goals — technically possible but unlikely according to many scientists — then slightly less than half the globe’s glaciers will disappear, said the same study. Mostly small but well-known glaciers are marching to extinction, study authors said.

    In an also unlikely worst-case scenario of several degrees of warming, 83% of the world’s glaciers would likely disappear by the year 2100, study authors said.

    More on shrinking Glaciers:

    The study in Thursday’s journal Science examined all of the globe’s 215,000 land-based glaciers — not counting those on ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica — in a more comprehensive way than past studies. Scientists then used computer simulations to calculate, using different levels of warming, how many glaciers would disappear, how many trillions of tons of ice would melt, and how much it would contribute to sea level rise.

    The world is now on track for a 2.7-degree Celsius (4.9 degrees Fahrenheit) temperature rise since pre-industrial times, which by the year 2100 means losing 32% of the world’s glacier mass, or 48.5 trillion metric tons of ice as well as 68% of the glaciers disappearing. That would increase sea level rise by 4.5 inches (115 millimeters) in addition to seas already getting larger from melting ice sheets and warmer water, said study lead author David Rounce.

    “No matter what, we’re going to lose a lot of the glaciers,” Rounce, a glaciologist and engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said. “But we have the ability to make a difference by limiting how many glaciers we lose.”

    “For many small glaciers it is too late,” said study co-author Regine Hock, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of Oslo in Norway. “However, globally our results clearly show that every degree of global temperature matters to keep as much ice as possible locked up in the glaciers.”

    Projected ice loss by 2100 ranges from 38.7 trillion metric tons to 64.4 trillion tons, depending on how much the globe warms and how much coal, oil and gas is burned, according to the study.

    The study calculates that all that melting ice will add anywhere from 3.5 inches (90 millimeters) in the best case to 6.5 inches (166 millimeters) in the worst case to the world’s sea level, 4% to 14% more than previous projections.

    That 4.5 inches of sea level rise from glaciers would mean more than 10 million people around the world — and more than 100,000 people in the United States — would be living below the high tide line, who otherwise would be above it, said sea level rise researcher Ben Strauss, CEO of Climate Central. Twentieth-century sea level rise from climate change added about 4 inches to the surge from 2012 Superstorm Sandy costing about $8 billion in damage just in itself, he said.

    Scientists say future sea level rise will be driven more by melting ice sheets than glaciers.

    But the loss of glaciers is about more than rising seas. It means shrinking water supplies for a big chunk of the world’s population, more risk from flood events from melting glaciers and about losing historic ice-covered spots from Alaska to the Alps to even near Mount Everest’s base camp, several scientists told The Associated Press.

    “For places like the Alps or Iceland… glaciers are part of what makes these landscapes so special,” said National Snow and Ice Data Center Director Mark Serreze, who wasn’t part of the study but praised it. “As they lose their ice in a sense they also lose their soul.”

    Hock pointed to Vernagtferner glacier in the Austrian Alps, which is one of the best-studied glaciers in the world, but said “the glacier will be gone.”

    The Columbia Glacier in Alaska had 216 billion tons of ice in 2015, but with just a few more tenths of a degree of warming, Rounce calculated it will be half that size. If there’s 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times, an unlikely worst-case scenario, it will lose two-thirds of its mass, he said.

    “It’s definitely a hard one to look at and not drop your jaw at,” Rounce said.

    Glaciers are crucial to people’s lives in much of the world, said National Snow and Ice Center Deputy Lead Scientist Twila Moon, who wasn’t part of the study.

    “Glaciers provide drinking water, agricultural water, hydropower, and other services that support billions (yes, billions!) of people,” Moon said in an email.

    Moon said the study “represents significant advances in projecting how the world’s glaciers may change over the next 80 years due to human-created climate change.”

    That’s because the study includes factors in glacier changes that previous studies didn’t and is more detailed, said Ruth Mottram and Martin Stendel, climate scientists at the Danish Meteorological Institute who weren’t part of the research.

    This new study better factors in how the glaciers’ ice melts not just from warmer air, but water both below and at the edges of glaciers and how debris can slow melt, Stendel and Mottram said. Previous studies concentrated on large glaciers and made regional estimates instead of calculations for each individual glacier.

    In most cases, the estimated loss figures Rounce’s team came up with are slightly more dire than earlier estimates.

    If the world can somehow limit warming to the global goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times — the world is already at 1.1 degrees (2 degrees Fahrenheit) — Earth will likely lose 26% of total glacial mass by the end of the century, which is 38.7 trillion metric tons of ice melting. Previous best estimates had that level of warming melting translating to only 18% of total mass loss.

    “I have worked on glaciers in the Alps and Norway which are really rapidly disappearing,” Mottram said in an email. “It’s kind of devastating to see.”

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    Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

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    Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @ borenbears

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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.

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  • Cubans crossing into US stunned to hear of new asylum limits

    Cubans crossing into US stunned to hear of new asylum limits

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    YUMA, Ariz. (AP) — Migrants who entered the U.S. illegally under moonlit skies and waist-deep cold water Friday were devastated to learn they may be sent back to Mexico under expanded limits on the pursuit of asylum.

    About 200 migrants who walked in the dark for about an hour to surrender to Border Patrol agents in Yuma, Arizona, included many Cubans — who were stunned to hear that a ban on asylum that previously fell largely on other nationalities now applies just as much to them. Several were political dissidents of the Cuban government who were driven to leave by longstanding fears of incarceration and persecution and a new sense of economic desperation.

    President Joe Biden announced Thursday that Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and Venezuelans will be expelled to Mexico if they enter the U.S. illegally, effective immediately. At the same time, he offered humanitarian parole for up to 30,000 people a month from those four countries if they apply online, pay for their airfare and find a financial sponsor.

    Mario Enrique Perez, 32, said he would rather be incarcerated in the U.S. than be returned to Mexico, where, he said, he and his wife endured many slights and poor treatment during a two-month journey across the country. They frequently had to get off buses to avoid shakedowns at government checkpoints, slowing their pace.

    The vast majority of Cubans reach the U.S. by flying to Nicaragua as tourists and make their way to the U.S. border with Mexico. Perez said they trade information “like ants” about which routes are safest and easiest, which is why he picked Yuma.

    Nelliy Jimenez, 50, said she rode horses on her three-month journey through Mexico to avoid shakedowns at government checkpoints. Her son, whom she described as an active dissident, fled to Spain years ago. She held out in Cuba despite links to her son — even getting jailed during the July 2021 protests — but held out until economic desperation forced her to sell her convenience store in the city of Cienfuegos to finance her trip to the United States.

    She hopes to settle with relatives in Nebraska.

    “I did not see this coming,” Jimenez said of the new limits on asylum.

    Niurka Avila, 53, said the Cuban government surveils her and her husband, who are known dissidents. She spoke with disgust of Cuban officials, saying she couldn’t bring herself to wear traditional guayabera dress because they do. They “appropriated” it, she said.

    Avila, a nurse in Cuba, said that Mexico was not an attractive option and that she and her husband hope to join family in Florida.

    “(Mexico) is a violent place, and our family is here,” she said.

    The new rules expand on an existing effort to stop Venezuelans attempting to enter the U.S., which began in October and led to a dramatic drop in Venezuelans coming to the southern border. Together, they represent a major change to immigration rules that will stand even if the Supreme Court ends a Trump-era public health law that allows U.S. authorities to turn away asylum-seekers.

    “Do not, do not just show up at the border,” Biden said as he announced the changes, even as he acknowledged the hardships that lead many families to make the dangerous journey north.

    “Stay where you are and apply legally from there,” he advised.

    Biden made the announcement just days before a planned visit to El Paso, Texas, on Sunday for his first trip to the southern border as president. From there, he will travel on to Mexico City to meet with North American leaders on Monday and Tuesday.

    At the U.S.-Mexico border, migrants have been denied a chance to seek asylum 2.5 million times since March 2020 under Title 42 restrictions, introduced as an emergency health measure by former President Donald Trump to prevent the spread of COVID-19. But there always has been criticism that the restrictions were used as a pretext by the Republican to seal off the border.

    Biden moved to end the Title 42 restrictions, and Republicans sued to keep them. The U.S. Supreme Court has kept the rules in place for now. White House officials say they still believe the restrictions should end, but they maintain they can continue to turn away migrants under immigration law.

    On Friday, spokesperson Boris Cheshirkov of UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency, welcomed the expansion of safe and regular pathways that will now be available to an “unprecedented number” of people trying to enter the United States, but said the agency also wants more details about how the new process will be implemented.

    “These are quite significant and multifaceted announcements,” he told reporters in Geneva at a regular U.N. briefing. “We’re analyzing what has been announced and especially the impact that these measures may have — including on the situation and the thousands of people that are already on the move.”

    Cheshirkov reiterated the U.N. agency’s long-running concerns about the use of Title 42 because of the risk that many people may get sent back to Mexico “without considerations of the dangers that they fled and the risks and hardships that many of them may then face.”

    “What we’re reiterating is that this is not in line with the refugee law standards,” he added. “Seeking asylum is a fundamental human right.”

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    Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Jamey Keaten in Geneva; Colleen Long, Zeke Miller and Rebecca Santana in Washington; and Gisela Salomon in Miami.

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  • The white sedan: How police found suspect in Idaho slayings

    The white sedan: How police found suspect in Idaho slayings

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    MOSCOW, Idaho (AP) — The white sedan cruised past the gray, three-story rental home on a dead-end street in Moscow, Idaho. Then again. And again.

    It was unusual behavior in the residential, hillside neighborhood in the quiet hours before dawn. And according to a police affidavit released Thursday, surveillance videos showing the vehicle that November night were key to unraveling the gruesome mystery of who killed four University of Idaho students inside the house.

    With little else to go on as a panicked community demanded answers, investigators canvassed security footage from the neighborhood — including one recording of the car speeding away after the slayings — to get a sense of the killer’s possible movements, the affidavit said.

    Eventually, the document said, police were able to narrow down what was at first known only vaguely as a white sedan to a 2015 Hyundai Elantra registered to Bryan Kohberger, a 28-year-old doctoral student in criminology at Washington State University, just across the border in Pullman, Washington. Further investigation matched Kohberger to DNA at the crime scene, it said.

    Kohberger made an initial appearance in an Idaho courtroom Thursday following his extradition from Pennsylvania, where he was arrested last week. His attorney didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, though a public defender who represented him in Pennsylvania, Jason LaBar, has said he is eager to be exonerated and should not be tried “in the court of public opinion.”

    “Tracking movements in public is an important technique when you haven’t identified any suspects,” said Mary D. Fan, a criminal law professor at the University of Washington. “You can see movements in public even if you don’t have probable cause to get a warrant. We live in a time of ubiquitous cameras. This is a remarkable account of what piecing together that audiovisual data can do.”

    The car’s first pass by the home was recorded at 3:29 a.m. on Nov. 13 — less than an hour before Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin were stabbed to death in their rooms, Moscow Police Cpl. Brett Payne wrote in the affidavit.

    The vehicle drove by twice more and was recorded a fourth time at 4:04 a.m., Payne wrote. It wasn’t seen on the footage again until it sped away 16 minutes later.

    “This is a residential neighborhood with a very limited number of vehicles that travel in the area during the early morning hours,” Payne wrote. “Upon review of the video there are only a few cars that enter and exit this area during this time frame.”

    A forensic examiner with the FBI determined the car to likely be a 2011-13 Hyundai Elantra, though subsequently said it could be a model as late as 2016, according to the affidavit.

    Surveillance footage from the Washington State University campus offered further tantalizing information: A similar vehicle headed out of town just before 3 a.m. on the day of the killings and reappeared on cameras in Pullman just before 5:30 a.m., the affidavit said.

    On Nov. 25, the Moscow Police Department asked regional law enforcement to look for a white Elantra. Three nights later, a WSU police officer ran a query for any white Elantras on campus.

    One came back as having a Pennsylvania license plate and being registered to Kohberger. Within half an hour, another campus officer located the vehicle parked at Kohberger’s apartment complex. It came back as having Washington state tags. Five days after the killings, Kohberger had switched the registration from Pennsylvania, his home state, to Washington, the affidavit said.

    Investigators now had a name to go on, and further investigation yielded more clues. Kohberger’s driver’s license described him as 6 feet tall and 185 pounds, and his license photo showed him to have bushy eyebrows — all details consistent with a description of the attacker given by a surviving roommate, the affidavit said.

    More research revealed that Kohberger had been pulled over by a Latah County, Idaho, sheriff’s deputy in August while driving the Elantra. He gave the deputy a cellphone number.

    Armed with that number, Payne obtained search warrants for the phone’s historical data. The location data showed the phone was near his home in Pullman until about 2:42 a.m. on the morning of the killings. Five minutes later, the phone started using cellular resources located southeast of the home — consistent with Kohberger traveling south, the affidavit said.

    There was no other location data available from the phone until 4:48 a.m., suggesting Kohberger may have turned it off during the attack in an effort to avoid detection, the affidavit said. At that point, the phone began taking a roundabout route back to Pullman, traveling south to Genesee, Idaho, then west to Uniontown, Washington, and north to Pullman just before 5:30 a.m. — around the same time the white sedan showed back up on surveillance cameras in town.

    It remains unclear why the victims were targeted.

    Kohberger opened the account for the phone on June 23, the affidavit said, and location data showed that he had traveled to the neighborhood where the victims were killed at least a dozen times before the attacks. Those visits all came late in the evening or early in the morning, the affidavit said, and it was on one of those trips that he was pulled over by the sheriff’s deputy on Aug. 21.

    The cellphone data also included another chilling detail, the affidavit said: The phone returned to the victims’ neighborhood hours after the attack, around 9 a.m. But even though one of the surviving housemates had seen a strange man inside and heard crying after 4 a.m., the killings were not reported to police until later that day, and there was no police response at the scene by 9.

    Though Kohberger, with his 2015 Elantra, had first come to the attention of WSU police by Nov. 29, it’s not clear how soon that information was relayed to the Moscow Police Department, which issued a news release on Dec. 7 asking for the public’s help in finding a white 2011-13 Elantra. The release suggested such a vehicle had been near the home early on Nov. 13 and that any occupants “may have critical information to share regarding this case.”

    Law enforcement agencies sometimes use such public statements to throw off suspects and keep them from learning they are under suspicion. Tips poured in and investigators soon announced they were sifting through a pool of around 20,000 potential vehicles.

    “I think they got a lot of flack for keeping their cards tight to their chest … so I was pretty elated when they caught this guy and all this evidence was revealed,” said Telisa Swan, a Moscow resident who put a sign thanking the police outside her business.

    Kohberger apparently remained at WSU until mid-December, when he drove to his parents’ house in Pennsylvania, accompanied by his father, in the Elantra. While driving through Indiana, Kohberger was pulled over twice on the same day for tailgating.

    On Dec. 27, police in Pennsylvania recovered trash from the Kohberger family home and sent DNA evidence to Idaho, the affidavit said. The evidence matched the DNA found on the button snap of a knife sheath recovered at the crime scene, it said.

    Kohberger is charged with four counts of first-degree murder and felony burglary. A status hearing in the case is set for Jan. 12.

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    Associated Press Correspondent Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, contributed.

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  • EXPLAINER: 2023 tax credits for EVs will boost their appeal

    EXPLAINER: 2023 tax credits for EVs will boost their appeal

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — Starting Jan. 1, many Americans will qualify for a tax credit of up to $7,500 for buying an electric vehicle. The credit, part of changes enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act, is designed to spur EV sales and reduce greenhouse emissions.

    But a complex web of requirements, including where vehicles and batteries must be manufactured to qualify, is casting some doubt on whether anyone can receive the full $7,500 credit next year.

    The Treasury Department is rolling out more information on which vehicles qualify and how individuals and businesses can access credit beginning in 2023. One big loophole that allows tax credits for EVs purchased for “commercial” use, such as leasing or ride-share, even if they are foreign-made is drawing the ire of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who says it could circumvent the intent of the law to favor American manufacturing.

    For at least the first two months of 2023, though, a delay in some of Treasury’s rules will likely make the full credit temporarily available to consumers who meet certain income and price limits.

    The new law also provides a smaller credit for people who buy a used EV.

    Certain EV brands that were eligible for a separate tax credit that began in 2010 and that will end this year may not be eligible for the new credit. Several EV models made by Kia, Hyundai and Audi, for example, won’t qualify because they are manufactured outside North America.

    The new tax credit, which lasts until 2032, is intended to make zero-emission vehicles affordable to more people. Here is a closer look at it.

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    WHAT’S NEW FOR 2023?

    The credit of up to $7,500 will be offered to people who buy certain new electric vehicles as well as some plug-in gas-electric hybrids and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. For people who buy a used vehicle that runs on battery power, a $4,000 credit will be available.

    But the question of which vehicles and buyers will qualify for the credits is complicated and will remain uncertain until Treasury issues the proposed rules in March.

    What’s known so far is that to qualify for the credit, new EVs must be made in North America. In addition, caps on vehicle prices and buyer incomes are intended to disqualify wealthier buyers.

    Starting in March, complex provisions will also govern battery components. Forty percent of battery minerals will have to come from North America or a country with a U.S. free trade agreement or be recycled in North America. (That threshold will eventually go to 80%.)

    And 50% of the battery parts will have to be made or assembled in North America, eventually rising to 100%.

    Starting in 2025, battery minerals cannot come from a “foreign entity of concern,” mainly China and Russia. Battery parts cannot be sourced in those countries starting in 2024 — a troublesome obstacle for the auto industry because numerous EV metals and parts now come from China.

    There also are battery-size requirements.

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    WHICH VEHICLES ARE ELIGIBLE?

    Because of the many remaining uncertainties, that’s not entirely clear. However, the Treasury Department released an initial list of vehicles that meet the requirements to claim the new clean vehicle tax credit beginning Jan. 1, including models from Chrysler, Ford, Jeep, Lincoln, Nissan and Rivian. More vehicles will be added to the list in the weeks and months to come.

    The Energy Department also maintains a list of qualifying EVs.

    General Motors and Tesla have the most EVs assembled in North America. Each also makes batteries in the U.S. But because of the requirements for where batteries, minerals and parts must be manufactured, it’s likely that buyers of those vehicles would initially receive only half the tax credit, $3,750. GM says its eligible EVs should qualify for the $3,750 credit by March, with the full credit available in 2025.

    Until Treasury issues its rules, though, the requirements governing where minerals and parts must be sourced will be waived. This will allow eligible buyers to receive the full $7,500 tax incentive for qualifying models early in 2023.

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    WHAT ABOUT PRICE?

    To qualify, new electric sedans cannot have a sticker price above $55,000. Pickup trucks, SUVs and vans can’t be over $80,000. This will disqualify two higher-priced Tesla models. Though Tesla’s top sellers, the models 3 and Y, will be eligible, with options, those vehicles might exceed the price limits.

    Kelley Blue Book says the average EV now costs over $65,000, though lower-priced models are coming.

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    WILL I QUALIFY FOR THE CREDITS?

    It depends on your income. For new EVs, buyers cannot have an adjusted gross income above $150,000 if single, $300,000 if filing jointly and $225,000 if head of a household.

    For used EVs, buyers cannot earn more than $75,000 if single, $150,000 if filing jointly and $112,500 if head of household.

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    HOW WILL THE CREDIT BE PAID?

    At first, it will be applied to your 2023 tax return, which you file in 2024. Starting in 2024, consumers can transfer the credit to a dealership to lower the vehicle price at purchase.

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    WILL THE CREDITS BOOST EV SALES?

    Yes, but it probably will take a few years, says Mike Fiske, associate director for S&P Global Mobility. The credit may cause a bump in sales early next year because of Treasury’s delay in issuing the stricter requirements. But most automakers are now selling all the EVs they build and cannot make more because of shortages of parts, including computer chips.

    And automakers may have trouble certifying the sources of battery minerals and parts, a requirement for buyers to receive the full credit. Automakers have been scrambling to move more EV supply chains to the U.S.

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    HOW DOES THE USED-EV CREDIT WORK?

    Consumers can receive tax credits of up to $4,000 — or 30% of the vehicle price, whichever is less — for buying EVs that are at least two years old. But the used EV must cost less than $25,000 — a tall order given the starting prices for most EVs on the market. A search on Autotrader.com shows that the Chevy Bolt, the Nissan Leaf and other relatively economical used EVs are listed at $26,000 or more for models dating back to 2019.

    On the other hand, used EVs need not be made in North America or comply with the battery-sourcing requirements. That means that, for instance, a 2022 Kia EV6 that’s ineligible for the new-vehicle credit because it’s made in South Korea can qualify for a used-car credit if its price falls below $25,000.

    “The real effects where these tax credits will have a big impact will be in the 2026-to-2032 period — a few years into the future — as automakers gear up and volumes increase,” said Chris Harto, a senior policy analyst for Consumer Reports magazine.

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    WHY IS THE GOVERNMENT OFFERING THE CREDITS?

    The credits are part of roughly $370 billion in spending on clean energy — America’s largest investment to fight climate change — that was signed into law in August by President Joe Biden. EVs now make up about 5% of U.S. new-vehicle sales; Biden has set a goal of 50% by 2030.

    Sales of EVs have been climbing, particularly as California and other states have moved to phase out gas-powered cars. The rise of lower-cost competitors to Tesla, such as the Chevy Equinox, with an expected base price of around $30,000, are expected to broaden the EVs’ reach to middle-class households. S&P Global Mobility expects EVs’ share of auto sales to reach 8% next year, 15% by 2025 and 37% by 2030.

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    COULD REQUIREMENTS BE EASED TO MAKE MORE EVs ELIGIBLE?

    It appears that may happen. Some U.S. allies are upset over North American manufacturing requirements that disqualify EVs made in Europe or South Korea.

    The requirements knock Hyundai and Kia out of the credits, at least in the short term. They plan to build new EV and battery plants in Georgia, but those won’t open until 2025. European Union countries fear that the tax credits could make their automakers move factories to the U.S.

    There is a loophole, however. The law appears to exempt commercial vehicles from the North America assembly and domestic battery mineral and parts requirements. That means that rental car and leasing companies with huge fleets as well as EVs used fuller-time for ride-share such as Uber and Lyft could be eligible for up to $7,500 in tax credits even for foreign-made EVs. A fact sheet released by Treasury on Thursday affirms it would allow exemptions for commercial vehicles, which the department says it must do based on the wording of the law.

    That move drew the anger of Manchin, a key vote in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, who on Thursday accused the Biden administration of bending to the desires of foreign countries. He said the exemptions undermine the law’s intent to “bring our energy and manufacturing supply chains onshore to protect our national security, reduce our dependence on foreign adversaries and create jobs right here in the United States.”

    Manchin said he would introduce legislation in the coming weeks that “prevents this dangerous interpretation from Treasury from moving forward.”

    ___

    ARE THERE CREDITS FOR CHARGING STATIONS?

    If you install an EV charger at home, credits may be available. The new law revives a federal tax credit that had expired in 2021; it provides 30% of the cost of hardware and installation, up to $1,000. It adds a requirement that the charger must be in a low-income or non-urban area. Businesses that install new EV chargers in those areas can receive tax credits of as much as 30% — up to $100,000 per charger.

    Residential EV chargers can range in cost from $200 to $1,000; installation can add several more hundred dollars.

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    SO SHOULD I BUY NOW OR WAIT?

    That’s entirely a personal decision.

    If you’ve grown tired of volatile gasoline prices and are considering an EV, you might want to go ahead. Buying a qualifying EV in January or February could net you the full $7,500 tax break before more stringent requirements take effect in March. Additional state credits also may be available.

    But if you’re still on the fence, there’s no urgency. Consumers who rush to buy now, when relatively few qualifying EVs are available, may face dealer price markups. Within a few years, technology will improve, and more EVs will qualify for full credits.

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    WHERE CAN I FIND MORE INFORMATION?

    The Treasury Department on Thursday released several frequently asked questions documents for individual and commercial customers on the clean vehicle tax credits meant to help them understand how to access the various tax incentives.

    The department also released a white paper explaining the anticipated direction that it is taking ahead of the proposed rule rollout.

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    Krisher reported from Detroit. Associated Press writer Fatima Hussein contributed to this report.

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  • New year expected to bring more changes to state voting laws

    New year expected to bring more changes to state voting laws

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    State lawmakers around the country introduced thousands of bills to change the way elections are run after former President Donald Trump falsely blamed his 2020 loss on voter fraud. Hundreds became law.

    Even with proponents of Trump’s election lies roundly defeated during this year’s midterms, advocates on both sides of the voting debate are bracing for another round of election-related legislation. Republicans are eager to tighten election rules further while Democrats, who took control of two additional statehouses, will seek to make it easier to cast a ballot.

    Minnesota’s newly reelected Democratic secretary of state, Steve Simon, said he had spoken to several secretaries of state who are eager to push for changes in voting. Losses by election-denier candidates in top races have emboldened some Democrats to champion expansions of voting rights.

    “Voters spoke loudly and clearly about what they wanted and didn’t want, both in regards to this office and all these other issues,” said Simon, who defeated a Republican challenger who parroted some of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.

    Democrats won majorities in both houses of the Minnesota Legislature in November, giving Simon a good shot at enacting changes. He expects to urge lawmakers to adopt automatic voter registration and allow high school students to pre-register.

    States routinely make adjustments in their voting laws — some subtle, some dramatic. But experts have never seen an explosion of legislation like that which followed the 2020 presidential election, when more than 3,600 election bills were introduced, according to the Voting Rights Lab, which tracks the legislation.

    Liz Avore, senior adviser to the group, said 22 states in the last couple of years expanded access to the ballot, 10 created new restrictions and five expanded access in some ways while creating new barriers in others. This, she said, has created a divide in the U.S. in which “your ZIP code determines your access to our democracy.”

    That divide seems likely to grow next year. Legislatures won’t convene until January at the earliest, so it’s unclear how many bills are being drafted and on which subjects. But Texas, where the Legislature meets only once every two years and lawmakers can “pre-file” drafts of legislation for the upcoming session, offers a preview.

    The Associated Press has identified nearly 100 election-related legislative proposals already filed in the state, both to increase access to the ballot box and to further restrict it. This includes one that would allow the state’s top lawyer to assign a prosecutor focused on election crimes, testing the boundaries of a court ruling earlier this year that said the attorney general did not have the authority to prosecute election crimes.

    Another would assign a group of peace officers to serve as election marshals who investigate claims of election-related missteps. That would follow the lead of Florida, where officers in a special unit assigned to elections have already made a handful of arrests — including of people who mistakenly thought they were eligible to vote under a 2018 constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to some felons. Critics have labeled the unit a political tool of the governor.

    Matt Simpson, a senior attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said current election legislation proposed in the state, such as increasing criminal penalties for election crimes and creating election marshals, is “extreme” and “very intimidating” for voters. He said these approaches are primarily political and don’t solve actual voting-related issues, such as high rejection rates of mail ballots and ballot applications due to widespread confusion on the identification numbers necessary.

    “It is certainly the case that Texas elections do not have widespread fraud,” Simpson said. “These bills, these concerns that are raised, are solutions in search of a problem.”

    The reliability of Texas’ elections was underscored by the release earlier this month of an audit by the secretary of state’s office. The 359-page audit of the 2020 election in the state’s two largest Democratic counties and two largest Republican ones found some “irregularities,” but they were largely related to holding an election during a pandemic.

    “In most cases, the audit found that the counties followed their procedures and clearly documented their activities,” the audit says.

    Ohio is another Republican-controlled state where lawmakers continue to push for restrictions.

    The state is likely to draw national attention next year after Republicans indicated they might try again to place on the May ballot a measure requiring a 60% majority for any future constitutional amendments to pass. That provision could limit the ability of Ohio voters to rein in GOP gerrymandering or otherwise counter the majority-Republican Legislature, such as by codifying the right to an abortion.

    Republicans failed to muster enough votes during December’s lame-duck session to place the higher threshold for passing amendments on the ballot, but they did pass a sweeping election law overhaul. The bill adds a photo ID requirement for voters and provides them for free, codifies a directive requiring one ballot drop box per county and eliminates early voting on the Monday before Election Day — county officials had said it interfered with their final preparations. The legislation also shrinks the window for receiving mail-in ballots after the election from 10 days to four.

    Republican state Sen. Theresa Gavarone said taking steps to tighten access to the voting booth and speed vote counting are aimed at improving the “perception, confidence and integrity” in elections.

    “Folks, perception matters,” Gavarone said. “Whether you want to believe it or not, the goal should not just be to secure our elections, but it’s imperative that we give people doubting the results of our elections reason to participate in them.”

    Voting rights advocates were outraged.

    “This legislation will make voting unnecessarily harder for seniors, students, rural Ohioans, active-duty military and other eligible Ohioans,” said Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters Ohio.

    The office of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said he was reviewing the legislation.

    Democrats are readying their own pushes, especially in two states where they won control of the legislatures and retained the governorship — Michigan and Minnesota.

    Michigan voters not only gave Democrats control of the state Legislature, they also passed Proposal 2, a sweeping ballot initiative that expanded early and mail voting. Democrats already are preparing to strengthen the measure in the legislative session.

    “There will need to be quite a bit of implementation legislation next term, and I look forward to working with the Legislature and the governor’s office to enact this,” Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum, a Democrat, said in an interview.

    Jake Rollow, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of State, said Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson will likely ask lawmakers to allocate $100 million annually for local election offices and propose new measures against circulating election misinformation. A Democratic state lawmaker also proposed imposing penalties for people who pressure election workers, a key cause of Democrats in state legislatures after conspiracy theorists targeted voting officials after the 2020 presidential election.

    In Minnesota, Simon said he also wants to increase penalties against threatening or interfering with election workers. He said he’ll push a range of other reforms, including pre-registering high schoolers so they can quickly join the voting rolls upon turning 18. Younger voters lean Democratic, but Simon said he’s not trying to promote his party.

    He said he merely wants to make the electorate more reflective of the population, a goal he also pushed when the statehouse was split between Republicans and Democrats.

    “These are reforms that will benefit everyone,” he said.

    ___

    Associated Press writers Joey Cappelletti in Lansing, Michigan, and Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

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  • Jan. 6 takeaways: Final revelations from investigation

    Jan. 6 takeaways: Final revelations from investigation

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — Destroyed documents. Suggestions of pardoning violent rioters. Quiet talks among cabinet officials about whether then-President Donald Trump should be removed from office.

    Interview transcripts released by House investigators in recent days — more than 100 so far — give further insight into the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and the weeks leading up to it, as Trump tried to overturn his defeat in the presidential election. The nine-member committee conducted more than 1,000 interviews, and the lawmakers are gradually releasing hundreds of transcripts after issuing a final report last week. The panel will dissolve on Tuesday when the new Republican-led House is sworn in.

    While some of the witnesses were more forthcoming than others, the interviews altogether tell the full story of Trump’s unprecedented scheming, the bloody chaos of the attack on the Capitol and the fears of lawmakers and the Republican former president’s own aides as he tried to upend democracy and the popular will.

    Some highlights from the interview transcripts released so far:

    WHITE HOUSE AIDE TELLS ALL

    Previously little-known White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson drew national attention when she testified in a surprise hearing this summer about Trump’s words and actions around the Jan. 6 attack — his rage after security thwarted his efforts to go to the Capitol that day with his supporters and how he knew that some of his supporters were armed.

    The committee has so far released four of her closed-door interviews, revealing new details about what she said she observed in her time as an aide to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Among other revelations, Hutchinson told the committee she had seen Meadows burning documents in his office fireplace “roughly a dozen times” after the 2020 election.

    She said she didn’t know what the documents were or whether they were items that legally should have been preserved. A spokesman for Meadows declined to comment.

    Hutchinson also spoke at length about her moral struggles as she decided how much to disclose — even doing research on Watergate figures who similarly testified about working in President Richard Nixon’s White House.

    “My character and my integrity mean more to me than anything,” Hutchinson says she decided, returning to the committee with a new lawyer in June after three previous interviews.

    PARDONS FOR EVERYONE?

    After the insurrection, Trump floated the idea of a blanket pardon for all participants, but the White House counsel at the time, Pat Cipollone, discouraged the idea, according to testimony from Johnny McEntee, an aide who served as director of the presidential personnel office and was interviewed by the panel in March.

    Trump then asked about limiting pardons to only those people who entered the Capitol but who did not engage in violence, but that idea was also met with some pushback, McEntee recalled. He said Trump appeared persuaded by the advice and said he was not aware that the idea ever came up again.

    Separately, McEntee said that Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., told him he was seeking a preemptive pardon from Trump as he faced a federal child sex trafficking investigation. Gaetz did not receive such a pardon and has not faced any charges in connection to the probe.

    Hutchinson testified that Meadows’ office became so inundated with pardon requests at the end of Trump’s term that some turned to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to help facilitate.

    THE 25TH AMENDMENT

    The panel interviewed several of Trump’s Cabinet secretaries about discussions of invoking Section 4 of the 25th Amendment — the forceful removal of Trump from power by his own Cabinet. While some acknowledged it had been discussed, it appears that it was never a likely scenario.

    Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says he spoke fleetingly with then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about the idea after the insurrection.

    “It came up very briefly in our conversation,” Mnuchin testified in July. “We both believed that the best outcome was a normal transition of power, which was working, and neither one of us contemplated in any serious format the 25th Amendment.”

    Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the committee he witnessed a brief conversation between the two Cabinet secretaries in the White House and heard the phrase “25th Amendment.” His transcript has not yet been released, but investigators quoted Milley’s interview to both Pompeo and Mnuchin in their interviews.

    Pompeo told the committee he didn’t recall the conversation. “I would have viewed someone speaking about the potential of invoking the 25th Amendment as just absolutely preposterous,” he said.

    Vice President Mike Pence later dismissed the idea in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., saying the mechanism should be reserved for when a president is medically or mentally incapacitated.

    Pence chief of staff Marc Short told the panel he thought the talk was “a political game.” The process would have taken weeks to play out, he said, and Democrat Joe Biden was set to be inaugurated Jan. 20.

    TRUMP FAMILY TESTIFIES

    The committee interviewed two of the former president’s children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, about their conversations with their father during the Jan. 6 attack and in the days before and after.

    Trump Jr. did not answer many of the committee’s questions, frequently saying he did not recall events or conversations. He did explain why he texted Meadows the afternoon of Jan. 6, as the attack was unfolding, to say that his father needed to “condemn this s—” immediately and that Trump’s tweets had not been strong enough. “My father doesn’t text,” Trump Jr. said.

    Ivanka Trump, who was in the White House with her father on Jan. 6, was also vague in many of her answers. She spoke with the committee about working with her father to write his tweets that day, encouraging him to make a strong statement as the rioters broke into the Capitol. And she testified that she heard Trump’s side of a “heated” phone call with Pence that morning as her father tried to encourage Pence to object to the congressional certification that day. Pence refused to do so.

    She also testified that she received a call and a text from Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who was in the Capitol as it was under siege. Collins told her that “the president needs to put out a very strong tweet telling people to go home and to stop the violence now.”

    ‘GIVE ME FIVE DEAD VOTERS’

    Trump lawyer Christina Bobb testified that Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a top ally of Trump, asked some of the former president’s advisers for evidence of fraud so he could “champion” it after the election. Trump falsely claimed there had been widespread fraud, despite court rulings and election officials in all 50 states who said otherwise.

    Graham told lawyers he would love to support the cause.

    “Don’t tell me everything because it’s too overwhelming,” Bobb quotes Graham as saying. “Just give me five dead voters; give me, you know, an example of illegals voting. Just give me a very small snapshot that I can take and champion.”

    He did nothing with the information he was given, Bobb said. Graham voted on Jan. 6 to certify Biden’s presidential election win.

    NATIONAL GUARD FRUSTRATION

    The mob that stormed the Capitol would have faced a much harsher law enforcement response had it been comprised mostly of African Americans, testified retired Army Maj. Gen. William Walker, who led the D.C. National Guard at the time. Walker is now the House sergeant at arms.

    “I’m African American. Child of the sixties,” Walker testified. “I think it would have been a vastly different response if those were African Americans trying to breach the Capitol. As a career law enforcement officer, part-time soldier … the law enforcement response would have been different.”

    The National Guard didn’t arrive at the Capitol for several hours, leaving overwhelmed police officers at the mercy of the violent mob as Pentagon officials said they were sorting out the necessary approvals. More than 100 officers were injured, many seriously, as Trump’s supporters beat them and ran over them to get inside.

    Walker expressed deep frustration with the delays and says he even considered breaking the chain of command and sending the troops with authorization. Lawyers advised him strongly not to do so, he said.

    He said he didn’t think the holdup was because the insurrectionists were mostly white.

    “I don’t think race was part of the military’s decision paralysis,” he said in his April interview, adding, “I think they just didn’t want to do it.”

    EXTREMIST GROUP LEADERS

    Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio asserted his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination in response to some questions, with his attorney at times telling investigators his client did not belong to the extremist group, whose associates are now facing rare sedition charges in a federal case prosecuted by the Justice Department. But Tarrio himself told investigators he took the title of chairman.

    Tarrio, who had been released from jail on the eve of the insurrection, wasn’t present for the attack. But prosecutors claim he kept command over the Proud Boys who attacked Congress and cheered them on from afar. Proud Boys were some of the first rioters to break through the Capitol perimeter.

    He told the panel that the first degree of membership in the Proud Boys is “that you are a Western chauvinist” and that you “refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.”

    Tarrio met Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the extremist group Oath Keepers, in a garage the night of Jan. 5, ahead of the attack. “I still don’t like Stewart Rhodes,” Tarrio said.

    Rhodes, who was also interviewed by the panel, was convicted in November of seditious conspiracy for what prosecutors said was a plot for an armed rebellion to stop the transfer of presidential power. They said Rhodes rallied his followers to fight to defend Trump and discussed the prospect of a “bloody” civil war.

    In his February testimony to the panel, Rhodes spoke at length about his views of the world but declined to answer any questions about his involvement on Jan. 6 and amassing weapons. He said he feels like a political prisoner.

    “I feel like a Jew in Germany, frankly,” Rhodes told the committee.

    ___

    Associated Press writers Nomaan Merchant, Farnoush Amiri, Lisa Mascaro and Michael Balsamo contributed to this report.

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  • Holiday procrastinators are back in force. Blame inflation.

    Holiday procrastinators are back in force. Blame inflation.

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    NEW YORK (AP) — Last year, Lucila Gomez and her husband started their holiday shopping around Thanksgiving and wrapped it up a week before Christmas, spending $750 on tablets and clothing for their three children and relatives.

    This year? Gomez is waiting until she gets her annual bonus on Friday to get started — and she’s limiting her spending to $200, sticking to World Cup themed jerseys for her 10-year-old twins and a 6-year-old.

    “Last year, we were confident. We were like, ‘Get them whatever they want,’” said the 49-year-old Buckeye, Arizona resident, an hourly worker in the billing department of a health company. “This year, we’re waiting until we both get paid. We want to go into the New Year not owing anything.”

    Last minute holiday shoppers are back in force — and inflation is partly to blame.

    For the first two years of the pandemic, many were buying earlier in the season, afraid of not getting what they wanted because of shortages of products or delays in deliveries. They also had more money to spend thanks to government stimulus checks and child care credits.

    But this year, supply chain snags have eased and shoppers aren’t as worried about availability as they are about higher prices on everything from rent to food, causing them to postpone their buying until the last minute.

    Gomez, for instance, said that even though she and her husband, an electrician, each got a raise, it still wasn’t enough to offset their rising expenses. In fact, she said her family moved in with her parents after their monthly rent jumped from $1,500 to $2,000 earlier this year. She’d hoped to save for a house, but mortgage rates keep going up.

    Last minute shopping is also being encouraged by a quirk in this year’s calendar, according to Brian Field, global leader of Sensormatic Solutions, which tracks store traffic. With Christmas falling on Sunday, consumers have all week to shop.

    Retailers are relying on the last minute spending rush to help meet their holiday sales goals after a weaker-than-expected November.

    Americans cut back sharply on retail spending last month as the holiday shopping season began with high prices and rising interest rates taking their toll on households, particularly lower-income families.

    Retail sales fell 0.6% from October to November after a sharp 1.3% rise the previous month, the government said last week. Sales fell at furniture, electronics, and home and garden stores.

    Americans’ spending has been intact ever since inflation first spiked almost 18 months ago, but the ability of shoppers to keep spending in a period of high inflation may be beginning to ease. Inflation has retreated from the four-decade high it reached this summer but remains elevated, enough to sap the spending power of consumers.

    Still, overall holiday sales should be decent, though holiday sales growth is expected to dramatically slow down from a year ago.

    The National Retail Federation, the nation’s largest retail trade group, is slated to release the actual results for the combined November and December period next month. The group expects holiday sales growth will slow to a range of 6% to 8%, compared with the blistering 13.5% growth of a year ago.

    The last stretch of the holiday season is critical.

    On average, the top 10 busiest shopping days in the U.S. — which includes Wednesday, Thursday, Friday of this week and Monday of next week — account for roughly 40% of all holiday retail traffic, according to Sensormatic. However, retailers might expect even larger numbers this year as high gas prices force consumers to consolidate their shopping trips and everyone converges over the next few days, Sensormatic said.

    For those holding out for bigger discounts right before Christmas, they may be disappointed. Retailers in general have maintained the same discounts they’ve been offering since Black Friday. There could be some deals, however, in areas like home and furniture, according to DataWeave, which tracks prices for hundreds of thousands of items across roughly three dozen retailers, including Walmart, Target and Amazon.

    DataWeave’s recent data shows the average prices for furniture were discounted 23% during the second week of December, compared with 12.8% during Black Friday week. In home furnishings, average price cuts were 17.2% compared with 11.2% for Black Friday week.

    Krish Thyagarajan, president and chief operating officer at DataWeave, believes that discounts for electronics are ticking up from Black Friday levels in the last few days before Christmas, but price cuts for clothing should remain a little over 20%, more generous than the average 16% discount last year around this time.

    Inflation or not, there will always be the perennial procrastinators like Evelyn T. Peregrin, who last year used COVID-19 as an excuse to delay her holiday buying since several relatives had the virus so she didn’t have to buy or deliver gifts until after Christmas.

    Now it’s her travel expenses of about $700 that are eating into her budget. The 28-year-old moved to Puerto Rico from New Jersey with her husband earlier this year, forcing her to scale back her holiday spending to about $150 from last year’s $250.

    “I will order probably a few things online and then end up having to go to a store last minute,” she said.

    ______

    Follow Anne D’Innocenzio: http://twitter.com/ADInnocenzio

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  • Sex-abuse video victimizes child long after abuser is gone

    Sex-abuse video victimizes child long after abuser is gone

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    By MICHAEL REZENDES and HELEN WIEFFERING

    December 23, 2022 GMT

    The video of a man raping his 9-year-old daughter was discovered in New Zealand in 2016 and triggered a global search for the little girl.

    Investigators contacted Interpol and the pursuit eventually included the FBI, the U.S. State Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Months later, investigators raided the Bisbee, Arizona, home of Paul Adams, arrested him and rescued the girl in the video along with her five siblings.

    While Adams can no longer physically hurt his daughter — he died by suicide in custody — the videos live on, downloaded and uploaded by child pornographers across the U.S. and around the globe, growing ever more popular even as as police, prosecutors and internet companies chase behind in a futile effort to remove the images.

    The number of times the Adams video has been seen soared from fewer than 100 in 2017 to 4,500 in 2021, according to data provided to The Associated Press with the permission of the girl and her adoptive mother, Nancy Salminen. The tally was produced by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a nonprofit that tracks child pornography on the internet and works with law enforcement agencies throughout the world.

    “That’s the horrendous part about it,” Salminen said. “You can’t just say that’s in the past and shut the door and move on. She will never be able to turn her back on what’s happened.”

    The ongoing victimization of the child could have been avoided.

    Six years before the video surfaced in Auckland, Adams, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon church, confessed to his bishop that he abused his daughter, identified by the AP as MJ.

    But a prominent church lawyer told the bishop to keep the abuse secret. And as a result, MJ was brutalized for seven more years. Today, she continues to be victimized almost daily in a different way, as the video, and others Adams took, circulate on the internet. Details of the Mormon officials’ cover-up of the Adams rapes were reported in an AP investigation in August.

    The data provided to the AP also shows that police in the U.S. referred the Adams video, or portions of it, to NCMEC for identification 1,850 times since it was discovered, contributing to nearly 800 arrests on federal child pornography charges last year alone.

    Those arrested comprise a coast-to-coast catalog of men — women rarely traffic in child pornography, the data shows — that defies economic or geographic boundaries. A random sampling includes:

    — Kurt Sheldon, 31, a librarian in Putnam County, Florida, was arrested in September 2020 for possession of child pornography and using Snapchat to solicit pornography from a 12-year-oid girl. Sheldon was sentenced to nearly 22 years in federal prison.

    — Joseph Mollick, 58, a physician affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center was arrested in October 2021. Federal officials charged him with using the social media application Kik to upload 2,000 child pornography videos and images. Mollick pleaded not guilty.

    — Jared Faircloth, 24, a U.S. Air Force airman, was arrested in October 2021 in Cream Ridge, New Jersey, for downloading more than 2,800 child sex abuse videos and images through the BitTorrent network. Faircloth pleaded guilty to federal charges and is awaiting sentencing.

    — Harold “HL” Moody, Jr., 39, a former communications director for the Arkansas Democratic party, was arrested in November 2018 for distributing child pornography in online chatrooms. The Little Rock resident pleaded guilty to federal charges and is awaiting sentencing.

    LIMITS OF COMPUTER SLEUTHING

    The seeming immortality of the Adams video underscores the limits of computer sleuthing by a global network of investigators racing to stop internet child pornography, and it reveals how advances in data storage and video technology have outpaced efforts to stop it.

    Permanently removing the images from the open internet is nearly impossible, child sex abuse experts say, because pornographers throughout the world are constantly downloading the images, storing them and reposting them.

    “That’s what makes the whole crime type so abhorrent,” said Simon Peterson, the New Zealand customs agent who discovered the Adams video, during an interview with the AP. Victims of online child pornography, he said, “have to wake up every morning knowing that there’s imagery of those terrible times in their lives still out there, and that people are accessing it for their own gratification.”

    The Adams case has also highlighted a glaring loophole in state child sex abuse reporting laws. Adams, a member of the Mormon church, confessed he was abusing his daughter to his Bishop, John Herrod, in 2010. In Arizona, clergy are among the professionals required to report child sexual abuse to police or child welfare officials.

    But when the bishop called the church’s “help line” for advice, Merrill Nelson, a lawyer representing the church, directed him to withhold the information from police and child welfare officials.

    According to legal documents, Nelson, who was also a Utah legislator, pointed to an exception in the state’s mandatory child sex abuse reporting law that allows clergy to keep information revealed during a confession to themselves. The so-called clergy-penitent privilege is on the books in 33 states, the AP found.

    Behind this veil of church secrecy, Adams continued molesting MJ and, five years later, started raping her younger sister as well, beginning when she was just 6 weeks old. He was also taking videos and photographs of the abuse and posting them to the internet, including the nine-minute video that was eventually his undoing.

    A WORLDWIDE QUEST

    It was November 2016 when Peterson and his team of agents in Auckland raided the home of a 47-year-old farm worker whom they’d been watching online for months.

    “He knew what we were there for,” Peterson recalled. “And by the end of the morning we’d arrested him, interviewed him and charged him for exporting and possessing child sexual abuse material.”

    For weeks the investigators pored over the computers and cell phones they had seized in the raid, and shortly before Christmas, Peterson found the Adams video, which the farmworker had downloaded from an internet site based in Russia.

    Agents who chase child pornographers often see the same images over and over. But Peterson said the Adams video was different. After running it through a New Zealand database of seized child pornography, and a second database maintained by Interpol, the organization that helps law enforcement agencies work across countries, Peterson suspected the video might be new, and the child depicted might still be in danger.

    He could also see obvious clues that could help identify the rapist and his victim.

    “We could see both their faces for a start,” Peterson said. “And they were talking throughout it, as well. We could tell from the accent if it wasn’t Canadian, it was American. So we could narrow it down pretty quickly.”

    Interpol sent the video to NCMEC, which acts as a clearinghouse for agencies investigating child pornography throughout the world. Computer analysts there isolated several images of Adams’ face and sent them to Homeland Security Investigations, which in turn sent them to the FBI, where analysts tried unsuccessfully to identify them with facial recognition technology, according to summaries of the case compiled by the U.S. Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security.

    The FBI’s Operation Rescue Me then turned to the State Department to compare the images to those in a database of visa and passport photos and found eight potential matches. Investigators finally zeroed in on Adams and his daughter through his wife’s Facebook page. They were also able to determine that the video was made on June 20, 2015, and that Adams was a U.S. Border Patrol employee who had that day off, so he was free to create the video at home.

    On Feb. 8, 2017, about six weeks after Peterson discovered the video in New Zealand, Homeland Security agents arrested Adams on the job at the Naco, Arizona, border crossing while federal agents raided his home, seized electronic devices and rescued his six children.

    “It was quite emotional,” Peterson said. “We don’t get success often.”

    A GLOBAL GLUT OF CHILD PORN

    Over the last several years, sightings of child sexual abuse material on the internet have skyrocketed.

    Under federal law, every internet platform based in the United States is required to report discoveries of child pornography on their social media pages to NCMEC’s Cyber Tipline. Last year, the organization received 29 million reports, up from 21 million in 2020, and 18 million in 2019 — a 61% increase over just two years.

    The vast majority of these reports stem from child pornography posted on the open internet and do not account for additional child porn posted to the dark web, where producers and consumers of child sexual abuse material — or CSAM — operate with near complete anonymity.

    “It’s nearly impossible to fully estimate and scope how much CSAM is on the internet, whether that’s open web, P2P (peer-to-peer) file sharing or the dark net,” said John Shehan, vice president of NCMEC’s Exploited Children Division.

    But investigators agree that the surge in reports by companies with open internet platforms such as Facebook indicates an enormous increase in the volume of child sexual abuse material on the internet. These investigators attribute the increase to advances in technology that have made it easier and less expensive for amateurs to take pornographic videos with their cellphones and to store vast amounts child pornography at minimal cost on remote servers or external hard drives.

    Erin Burke, the Homeland Security section chief for the agency’s Cyber Crimes Center, said it’s common for investigators to find child pornographers with “terabytes of files.” A single terabyte is enough space to hold hundreds of hours of video and can be stored on a remote server for as little as $25 a month, or on an external hard drive that can cost less than $100.

    Investigators also attribute the sharp rise in internet child pornography to the worldwide travel restrictions imposed during the coronavirus pandemic.

    Unable to visit countries where child prostitution proliferates, some pornographers resorted to a practice known as “sextortion,” in which an online perpetrator lures a child into sending compromising selfies. If the child later refuses to produce more explicit images, the perpetrator threatens to post the selfies the child initially created to the child’s social media contacts, which typically include family members.

    “That’s one of the bad outcomes of COVID,” Burke said. “It was bound to happen anyway but it just kind of sped up that process.”

    On Monday, the U.S. Justice Department issued an alert on a related scheme in which young sextortion victims are also extorted for money, citing more than 3,000 victims and multiple suicides this year.

    Another chilling outcome of the pandemic, Burke said, is the advent of live streaming of child sexual abuse for audiences ranging from a handful to thousands. On platforms that offer live video chats and end-to-end encryption, viewers who pay minimal, untraceable fees may choose from a menu of child victims of varying ages, including infants, and request to see specific sex acts.

    Burke said Homeland Security investigators have found that much of the live streaming originates in the Philippines and is performed for U.S. and Western European audiences. English is commonly spoken in the Southeast Asian nation and high-quality internet service is available, she said. At the same time, harsh economic conditions provide an incentive for families to participate.

    “They’re mostly abusing family members,” Burke said. “It’s not grabbing kids off the street.”

    As the volume of internet child sexual abuse material has soared, so too have the number of agencies working to stop it. Homeland Security and the FBI both have special units dedicated to tracking down child pornographers. Along with NCMEC, they work closely with more than 60 local branches of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Program, with units spread throughout the U.S.

    Internationally, Homeland Security and NCMEC work with investigators at Interpol and law enforcement agencies throughout the world, including those in the other “Five Eyes” countries — Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand — which cooperate in a range of intelligence activities.

    RESTITUTION

    In the six years following the discovery of the nine-minute Adams video, law enforcement agencies in the U.S. have seized thousands of images of MJ’s abuse and have referred the material to NCMEC for positive identification. In turn, NCMEC has cataloged the identities of those arrested who may have possessed or trafficked the images and given the information to MJ’s lawyers, who can sue each perpetrator for up to $150,000 in restitution under federal civil law, in addition to restitution that may be available through criminal proceedings.

    Lynne Cadigan, one of several attorneys representing three of the Adams children, said MJ will seek compensation from the child pornographers.

    But she and Salminen, the girl’s adoptive mother, lay most of the blame for the sexual abuse on officials of the Mormon church, who knew Adams molested MJ as early as 2010 and did nothing to stop it.

    “She went to church with people who didn’t help her and as a result thousands of people are looking at the video and there’s nothing she can do about it,” Cadigan said.

    Two years ago, the three Adams children filed a lawsuit that accuses the church, two bishops and a third Mormon official of conspiring to keep the years of abuse by their father out of the hands of civil authorities.

    As part of the lawsuit, the Arizona Court of Appeals on Dec. 15 ruled that the church does not have to turn over disciplinary records for Adams, who was excommunicated in 2013. The court also ruled that a church official who attended a disciplinary hearing could refuse to answer questions from the plaintiffs’ attorneys during pretrial testimony, based on the clergy-penitent privilege. Lawyers for the three Adams children said they plan to appeal.

    Attorneys for the church say the bishops who knew that Adams abused his daughter — John Herrod and Robert “Kim” Mauzy — did nothing wrong by taking a lawyer’s advice and withholding the information because Adams told Herrod about the abuse during a spiritual confession, triggering the privilege.

    In a statement to the AP, the church said it had no knowledge Adams was recording himself abusing his two daughters and posting the material on the internet until 2017. “The Church had no idea that these videos were being created or circulated until after Paul Adams was arrested,” the statement read. “The church supports all efforts to prosecute anyone who possesses or distributes these heinous and disturbing videos.”

    Adams might never have stopped raping his two daughters if Peterson hadn’t discovered the nine-minute video in New Zealand. But unlike Adams, the video may never be stopped.

    “They’re living with it for the rest of their lives,” Peterson said. “It’s on the internet. It’s not going anywhere.”

    ——

    AP investigative reporter Jason Dearen, video journalist Jesse Wardarski and data journalist Justin Myers contributed to this story.

    ——

    To contact AP’s investigations team, email investigative@ap.org

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  • What Trump promised, Biden seeks to deliver in his own way

    What Trump promised, Biden seeks to deliver in his own way

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump pledged to fix U.S. infrastructure as president. He vowed to take on China and bulk up American manufacturing. He said he would reduce the budget deficit and make the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes.

    Yet after two years as president, it’s Joe Biden who is acting on those promises. He jokes that he’s created an “infrastructure decade” after Trump merely managed a near parody of “infrastructure weeks.” His legislative victories are not winning him votes from Trump loyalists or boosting his overall approval ratings. But they reflect a major pivot in how the government interacts with the economy at a time when many Americans fear a recession and broader national decline.

    Gone are blanket tax cuts. No more unfettered faith in free trade with non-democracies. The Biden White House has committed more than $1.7 trillion to the belief that a mix of government aid, focused policies and bureaucratic expertise can deliver long-term growth that lifts up the middle class. This reverses the past administration’s view that cutting regulations and taxes boosted investments by businesses that flowed downward to workers.

    With new laws in place, Biden is taking the gamble that the federal bureaucracy can successfully implement and deliver on his promises, including after he leaves office.

    That is a tricky spot, as Trump himself learned that global crises such as a pandemic can quickly ruin the foundations of an economic agenda, causing businesses and voters to shift priorities. There are few guarantees that the economy behaves over 10 years as government forecasts expect, while Biden’s policies will likely be challenged by the new Republican majority in the House.

    Biden and his team say Americans are already seeing the upside with announcements for new computer chip plants and some 6,000 infrastructure projects under way.

    “There’s an industrial strategy that actually uses public investments to drive more private capital and more innovation in the historical tradition of everybody from Alexander Hamilton to Abraham Lincoln to John F. Kennedy,” said Brian Deese, director of the White House National Economic Council. “The outcomes speak for themselves.”

    Trump’s supporters see little overlap with Biden, even though the funding for infrastructure, computer chip production and scientific research was passed along bipartisan lines.

    “The Biden administration agenda is 180 degrees different,” said James Carter, a policy director at the America First Policy Institute. “More regulation, higher taxes, no border control and a war on fossil fuels. It’s two different administrations with two different approaches. One is free market, the other is big government.”

    The current and former president seem almost bound together in the public arena. On the August eve of Biden signing into law $280 billion for semiconductors and research, FBI agents raided Trump’s home to retrieve classified documents, overshadowing the White House event. Similarly, Biden called out Trump as a threat to democracy ahead of November midterm elections, while Republicans campaigned by hammering the president for troubling levels of inflation.

    Biden aides are quick to say that the president is fulfilling his own campaign promises, rather than honoring pledges made by Trump. But one of Biden’s first moves as president in 2021 was to provide $1,400 in direct payments to Americans as part of his coronavirus relief package. Along with the $600 in payments in a pre-Biden relief package, the sum matched the $2,000 that Trump called for in the twilight of his presidency, though he could not get it through Congress.

    “I would want to avoid the premise that somehow what Joe Biden has done was take Donald Trump’s ideas and enact them into law,” Deese said. “What President Biden has done is taken the campaign agenda that he campaigned on and actually delivered on it.”

    For all of that, Americans are giving Biden low marks on the economy. Inflation has come down from a 40-year peak this summer, but consumer prices are still 7.1% higher from a year ago. The Federal Reserve is raising its benchmark interest rate to lower inflation, something that its own projections show will cause unemployment to rise in the next year.

    Three in four Americans describe the economy as poor, with nearly the same percentage saying the U.S. is on the wrong track, according to a new poll by The Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

    Biden is asking for patience.

    “I know it’s been a rough few years for hardworking Americans and for small businesses as well,” Biden said in Tuesday remarks about inflation. “But there are bright spots all across America where we’re beginning to see the impact of our economic strategy, and we’re just getting started.”

    Trump supporters blame Biden’s separate $1.9 trillion in coronavirus relief for sparking the inflation, although it contained roughly $400 billion worth of the direct payments that former president said Americans should receive. They argue that the U.S. economy would be stronger if Biden took steps such as allowing all businesses to fully expense their investments in new equipment, instead of providing targeted support to the technology and clean energy sectors.

    But even excluding the recession induced by the pandemic, Trump’s economic record was far from sterling as the promised growth never materialized. Manufacturers began to slash jobs in 2019 before the coronavirus spread, instead of the steady resurgence promised by Trump. Annual budget deficits worsened under Trump, but they have improved under Biden as pandemic aid has wound down.

    Biden is telling Americans that his policies will strengthen the U.S. economy over the next decade. His $52 billion for computer chip production has led to a series of factory groundbreakings in Arizona, Idaho, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas that will take years to complete. The idea is that government aid reduces risk and makes it easier for these companies to invest in areas where global demand exceed available supplies.

    Chris Miller, a Tufts University professor and author of the book “Chip War,” said the incentives are only a fraction of the cost of building the plants. Miller said the benefits of the investments will spill over to the companies that sell raw materials to chipmakers as well as possibly for the makers of autos, electronics and household appliances that increasingly rely on chips.

    “The chips funding makes clear that there will be meaningfully more fab construction and chip output in the U.S.,” he said, “so for suppliers to the chip industry, they have more clarity that demand for their products will be larger than it otherwise would have been, incentivizing them to invest too.”

    For all the economic concerns, manufacturing has improved under Biden as factory employment totals 12.9 million jobs, the most since December 2008. Just as Biden has boosted domestic investment, he also expanded the Trump administration’s efforts to compete with China and kept his predecessor’s tariffs.

    The Biden administration has restricted the export of advanced computer chips and semiconductor equipment, arguing on national security grounds that China is using this technology for surveillance and hypersonic missiles. It’s also formed deeper partnerships with Australia, Japan, South Korea and several European countries to counter China’s rising influence.

    Kurt Campbell, Biden’s “Asian tsar” on the White House National Security Council, said that many of the initiatives pursued by Trump’s State Department on China have been “followed on” during Biden’s presidency, saying at an April panel that “in many respects, that’s the highest tribute” to the previous administration.

    But Steve Yates, a senior fellow at the America First Policy Institute and former president of Radio Free Asia, said that Biden has not shown that he’s placed the same emphasis on China as Trump.

    Yates cited as evidence that Biden’s national security strategy identifies the U.S. as having a shared interest with China in addressing climate change. He said that China will exploit that priority to their advantage as Biden’s willingness to cooperate on climate change will prevent him from confronting Beijing as Trump did.

    “We just have a weakened hand,” Yates said.

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  • Company holiday parties are back — but with some restraint

    Company holiday parties are back — but with some restraint

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    NEW YORK (AP) — Say goodbye to virtual wine tastings, and bust out the karaoke. Love them or hate them, company holiday parties are back — in a toned-down kind of way.

    After more than two years of working in pajama bottoms and clinking glasses over Zoom, many office workers seem to be yearning for a bit of glamour. The same is true for some front-line workers who saw festivities canceled even as they showed up to work every day during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    “It just always makes me feel special,” said Shobha Surya, who missed treating herself to a new dress every year for the dinner and karaoke party thrown by Ajinomoto Health and Nutrition North America, a Japanese-owned company based in the Chicago area. She was so excited the party was back for the first time in two years that she picked out her black-and-white cocktail dress two months in advance.

    “Everybody let loose,” she said, smiling the Monday after the party, where she accepted a recognition award for 15 years at the company. “It gets you into the holiday season.”

    More than 57% of companies are planning in-person holiday celebrations this year, according to a survey of 252 U.S.-based companies conducted by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a hiring firm. While that’s still notably fewer than the 75% that threw parties in 2019, it’s a big leap from 26% in 2021 and 5% in 2020.

    Still, not everyone is ready to party like it’s 2019.

    Many parties will be more intimate, as companies try to accommodate workers who are increasingly remote and far-flung. Some businesses are opting for spas, juggling shows and even private movie theater showings to lure out employees who have relished working from home. And a few are sticking to the bonuses or extra time off that they offered instead of parties during the pandemic.

    Cari Snavely’s team of 20 opted for an afternoon of pickleball when her Boston-based software company gave them a budget to decide on their own how to celebrate.

    It’s a far cry from the giant bashes she remembers from her days just a few years ago working at Coca-Cola Co. in Atlanta, but Snavely said it’s a better way to break the ice for people who haven’t worked together in person much. Besides, she said, many of her teammates wanted the chance to leave work and get home early.

    “We really wanted to make sure that as many people as possible could go,” said Snavely, who works in finance. “People have home commitments, kids.”

    Quickbase has 700 employees but many of them are remote — and as far away as Bulgaria — so it didn’t make sense to have a big party at headquarters, said Chief People Officer Sherri Kottmann. Instead, the company left it to individual teams to organize their own fun. Even in Boston, she said only 30% to 40% of employees come to the office in the middle of the week, when it’s busiest.

    But one thing seems sure: People are fed up with getting on screens for cocktail mixing or secret Santa exchanges. Fewer than 2% of companies are hosting virtual celebrations this year, compared to 7% last year and 17% in 2020, Challenger’s survey found.

    Jeff Consoletti, founder of Los Angeles event production company JJLA, said he has received zero requests this year for the gift boxes and cheese-and-wine pairing kits that helped keep his business afloat for the past two years. Instead, he has seen a 100% increase in bookings for in-person events, though they are much smaller than the 5,000-person revelries he often staged before the pandemic.

    Ksenia Kulynych, director of operations at Monarch Rooftop & Indoor Lounge in New York, said she’s seen a more than 30% increase in small group reservations this year — and often, a drastic undercount or overcount of guests as planners struggle to gauge how deep the enthusiasm for parties goes. Lunches are surprisingly popular, and Fridays are out.

    “We will pitch away on Fridays and the response is always, ‘no one’s in the office. It’s too hard to get anyone to come into the office. No one’s going to come into the city on a Friday,’” Kulynych said.

    Even before the remote work revolution, some people were pushing back at the idea of “forced fun” at work, particularly in corporate cultures where heavy drinking is intertwined with networking.

    Shwetha Pai, who works from home in Cincinnati for a small workplace analytics firm, said big holiday parties stir up memories of her early career days in investment banking, when her guard was always up at male-dominated nights out, and she often used her commute home as an excuse to leave early.

    “People make bad decisions in those situations. They just do,” said Pai, 41, head of operations and marketing at Worklytics. “There is definitely this expectation that you take part in all of it because that’s part of ‘team bonding.’ But in fact, for women, it’s really fraught with a lot of challenges and risk.”

    Bill MacQueen, 46, is far removed from big city nightlife as assistant director of commercialization at Ajinomoto’s manufacturing plant in Eddyville, Iowa. And he doesn’t drink.

    But count him in for bingo.

    MacQueen said his heart gave a “leap for joy that we were back to pre-COVID” when he got his bingo card at the entrance of Ajinomoto’s dinner party for its plant workers, an event he has cherished since he started working there 28 years ago, two days after graduating high school.

    “It was just so nice to hear everyone in that hall talking and laughing, and people teasing each other,” MacQueen said. “And sounding cheesy, it was just kind of like a family reunion.”

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  • Easter Island rebounds from wildfire that singed its statues

    Easter Island rebounds from wildfire that singed its statues

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    By MARÍA TERESA HERNÁNDEZ

    December 16, 2022 GMT

    RAPA NUI, Chile (AP) — The hillside of Rano Raraku volcano on Rapa Nui feels like a place that froze in time.

    Embedded in grass and volcanic rock, almost 400 moai – the monolithic human figures carved centuries ago by this remote Pacific island’s Rapanui people — remained untouched until recently. Some are buried from the neck down, the heads seemingly observing their surroundings from the underground.

    Around them, there has been a pervasive smell of smoke from still-smoldering vegetation – the vestige of a wildfire that broke out in early October. More than 100 moai were damaged by the flames, many of them blackened by soot, though the impact on the stone remains undetermined. UNESCO recently allocated nearly $100,000 for assessment and repair plans.

    In this Polynesian territory that now belongs to Chile and is widely known as Easter Island, the loss of any moai would be a blow to ancient cultural and religious traditions. Each of the moai – the nearly 400 on the volcano and more than 500 others elsewhere on the island — represents an ancestor. A creator of words and music. A protector.

    The president of Rapa Nui’s council of elders, Carlos Edmunds, recalled his emotions when he first heard about the fire.

    “Oh, I started crying,” he said. “It was like my grandparents were burned.”

    __

    It takes a close look at a map of the Pacific to find Rapa Nui, a tiny triangle covering about 63 square miles (164 square kilometers). Home to about 7,700 people – about half of them with Rapanui ancestry — it’s one of the world’s most isolated inhabited islands. The quickest way to get there is a six-hour flight from Santiago, Chile, covering 2,340 miles (3,766 kilometers). Much farther away, to the northwest, are the more populous islands of Polynesia.

    The remoteness has shaped the community’s view of the world, its spirituality and culture. Its small size also plays a part: it seems everyone knows one other.

    Rapa Nui was formed at least 750,000 years ago by volcanic eruptions. Its first inhabitants were sailors from Central Polynesia who gradually created their own culture. The moai were carved between the years 1000 and 1600.

    The first Europeans arrived in 1722, soon followed by missionaries. Current religious activities mix ancestral and Catholic beliefs.

    The arrival of outsiders had grim effects: Hundreds of Rapanui were enslaved by Peruvian raiders in 1862 and taken to South America, where many died in cruel conditions.

    In 1888 Chile annexed the island and leased it to a sheep company. Only by the 20th century did the islanders begin to recover their autonomy, though there were no written Rapanui annals to recount their early history.

    Without such books to preserve their legacy, the Rapanui have imprinted their people’s memory in activities and traditions passed from generation to generation. The hand of the fisherman who casts a hook carries the wisdom of his ancestors. The women’s hairstyle evokes the pukao, a hat made of reddish stone placed on the heads of the moai.

    (AP Video/Mauricio Cuevas)

    Even music is not merely music.

    “You write books; we write songs,” said Jean Pakarati, head adviser of Ma’u Henua indigenous community. “Dancing is an expression and that expression is history.”

    Pakarati’s duties include helping administer Rapa Nui National Park; she was shaken by the damage to moai within the park’s boundaries.

    “Everything that affects archaeology, as you call it, is so important,” she told The Associated Press. “It is part of us.”

    At 2 in the morning on Oct. 4, when the fire was finally controlled, those risking their safety around the burning crater were untrained volunteers using shovels and rocks, cutting down trees and branches.

    “Family, friends and Rapanui came,” Pakarati said. “What are you going to tell people when they are in such anguish, when they know that their volcano, where the moai were built, is burning?”

    The fire covered 254 hectares (about one square mile). It originated away from the volcano, on a cattle ranch, but the wind brought flames to Rano Raraku. Some residents say they know who started the fire, but don’t expect any punishment due to a cultural reluctance to file a complaint against fellow Rapanui.

    Each moai preserves precious information about its tribe. When an important Rapanui died — a grandfather, a tribal chief — some of his bones were placed under the ceremonial platform called an ahu and his spirit had the possibility of rebirth after a craftsman carved a moai in his likeness. Thus every moai is unique, bearing a name of its own.

    When the moai were carved, the island was divided according to its clans, but most of the statues were created in Rano Raraku. The ahu were built near the sea.

    It is not certain how the moai – which average 13 feet (four meters) in height and weigh many tons — were transported to their ahu. One theory is that they were moved as if they were standing, dragged with small turns as one would do with a refrigerator.

    Rapa Nui’s council of elders, headed by Carlos Edmunds, brings together the leaders whose predecessors were born in Rapanui tribes. Among other responsibilities, Edmunds, 69, fights for the island’s autonomy, preventing land from being sold to foreigners, insisting that certain areas are regulated only by Rapanui, ensuring that tourists prove that after a visit they will not stay to become residents.

    Edmunds’ mother tongue is Rapanui, the only language he spoke until he turned 18 and left for South America to study.

    His ancestors were born in Anakena, site of a beach with white sand and transparent waters where King Hotu Matua is believed to have landed 1,000 years ago, bringing the first inhabitants of Rapa Nui with him.

    When Chile leased the island, the foreigners who took over stripped all Rapanui tribes of their property, though several ahu and moai can still be seen on land they used to control.

    Edmunds recently visited the moai in Anakena that were carved by his ancestors; he says the protection of his loved ones never abandons him. “For us, the spirits continue to live.”

    In his house, he keeps a small moai that an artisan carved for him. Pointing to his neck, where Catholics often wear a cross, he said: “I can’t wear moai because it’s very heavy, but I have moai in there. Made of stone, of wood, these figures protect me.”

    Moai were not meant to be eternal. When they fell apart or needed replacement, their remains were used to erect a new one in the same location.

    Between the arrival of Europeans and the mid-19th century, all the moai erected on platforms had been toppled, perhaps due to environmental factors or neglect. Major restoration projects and new archaeological surveys, led by foreign experts, commenced in the 1960s and ’70s.

    At that time, said Rapanui historian Christian Moreno, many of the islanders didn’t understand why foreigners were so fascinated by the statues, which no longer served a specific religious or cultural role.

    Gradually, Moreno said, the community began to delve into its collective memory, talking to elders and – bit by bit — retrieving the history of the moai.

    “Then the Rapanui once again understood that the moai represent the ancestors who walked through the same land that we do, who breathed the same air as us, who saw this very ocean,” Moreno said.

    Now, in Rapa Nui, people can trace a family history just by knowing their last name and where the moai named after their ancestors were placed.

    The moai have a place in a history class at the Eugenio Eyraud high school. When teacher Konturi Atán finished drawing one on the blackboard on a recent day, the students laughed. It looked more like a bishop on a chessboard.

    Atán, 36, joined the laughter as he began the day’s lesson: “Compare ancient civilizations with Rapa Nui.”

    “What about the moai? Were they related to religion or to politics?” he asked. “It’s quite complicated, right?”

    Atán said he constantly tries to incorporate Rapanui culture into the curriculum guidelines designed by Chilean authorities. He has taught about the island’s relation to the ocean, and led field trips to sites where moai are positioned.

    “Local schools are structured theoretically, politically and technically from the continent (Chile),” he said “What we do is provide the skills and, from there, the history of the island, the culture, the link with the community.”

    Among the deep-rooted Rapanui traditions is the umu – a traditional feast. It’s offered to tourists at the Te Ra’ai restaurant, where meat covered with banana leaves is cooked in a pit over wood and volcanic stones.

    Through 18 years of operation, Te Ra’ai has welcomed up to 120 foreigners per day, but from March 2020 to last August there were none. To protect the community from COVID-19, the mayor banned foreigners from entering the island, whose economy depends 80% on tourism.

    The mayor of Rapa Nui is Pedro Edmunds, the brother of Carlos Edmunds. Unlike other mayors eager to plunge into new projects, he does not even add streetlights without first consulting the community’s ancestors.

    “Incorporating heavy machinery on an ancestral territory is a violation of the protective spirit of the place,” he explained.

    Before making renovations anywhere on the island, or even moving a rock from one place to another, the spirits of the dead are summoned. In some cases, the new project will be celebrated with an umu; in more delicate cases, such as how to deal with pandemic-related restrictions, the ancestors have been asked to advise on ancient Rapanui principles.

    Among these is “umanga” — a concept of collective responsibility for passing on knowledge and skills.

    “It is beautiful because those who are empowered with knowledge help those who do not have it and together we multiply it,” said Edmunds. “We, as Rapanui, have taken care of ourselves. We lost care when the state stepped in and applied foreign rules on our ancestral codes.”

    Edmunds, the mayor for 25 years, worries about the future but also has hope.

    “Our daughters and sons have not lost the essence of being Rapanui and that guarantees that this culture will have a future,” he said. “We are a society that respects its environment and is tremendously protective of its culture”.

    That culture includes the Rapanui language, which has only 14 letters. Yet a single word can incorporate metaphor, parable and philosophy simultaneously. A single name can express who you are, what you do, what you love.

    “I’ve asked many times to people from other countries: who are you? And they all tell me their names,” said Jean Pakarati. “When someone asks me that question, my answer is: ‘I am Rapanui.’”

    ___

    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.

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  • India’s visa temples attract devotees aspiring to go abroad

    India’s visa temples attract devotees aspiring to go abroad

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    CHENNAI, India (AP) — Arjun Viswanathan stood on the street, his hands folded, eyes fixed on the idol of the Hindu deity Ganesh.

    On a humid morning, the information technology professional was waiting outside the temple, the size of a small closet – barely enough room for the lone priest to stand and perform puja or rituals for the beloved elephant-headed deity, believed to be the remover of obstacles.

    Viswanathan was among about a dozen visitors, most of them there for the same purpose: To offer prayers so their U.S. visa interviews would go smoothly and successfully. Viswanathan came the day before his interview for an employment visa.

    “I came here to pray for my brother’s U.K. visa 10 years ago and for my wife’s U.S. visa two years ago,” he said. “They were both successful. So I have faith.”

    The Sri Lakshmi Visa Ganapathy Temple is a few miles north of the airport in Chennai (formerly Madras), a bustling metropolis on the Coromandel Coast in southeast India — known for its iconic cuisine, ancient temples and churches, silk saris, classical music, dance and sculptures.

    This “visa temple” has surged in popularity among U.S. visa seekers over the past decade; they can be found in almost any Indian city with a U.S. consulate. They typically gain a following through word of mouth or social media.

    A mile away from the Ganesh temple is the Sri Lakshmi Narasimha Navaneetha Krishnan Temple, where an idol of Hanuman – a deity who has a human body and the face of a monkey — is believed to possess the power to secure visas. Also known as “Anjaneya,” this god stands for strength, wisdom and devotion. In this temple, he has earned the monikers “America Anjaneya” and “Visa Anjaneya.”

    The temple’s longtime secretary, G.C. Srinivasan, said it wasn’t until 2016 that this temple became a “visa temple.”

    “It was around that time that a few people who prayed for a visa spread the word around that they were successful, and it’s continued,” he said.

    A month ago, Srinivasan said he met someone who got news of his visa approval even as as he was circumambulating the Anjaneya idol — a common Hindu practice of walking around a sacred object or site.

    On a recent Saturday night, devotees decorated the idol with garlands made of betel leaves. S. Pradeep, who placed a garland on the deity, said he was not there to pray for a visa, but believes in the god’s unique power.

    “He is my favorite god,” he said. “If you genuinely pray – not just for visa – it will come true.”

    At the Ganesh temple, some devotees had success stories to share. Jyothi Bontha said her visa interview at the U.S. Consulate in Chennai went without a hitch, and that she had returned to offer thanks.

    “They barely asked me a couple of questions,” she said. “I was pleasantly surprised.”

    Bontha’s friend, Phani Veeranki, stood nearby, nervously clutching an envelope containing her visa application and supporting documents. Bontha and Veeranki, both computer science students from the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh and childhood friends, are headed to Ohio.

    Both learned about the visa temple on the social media platform Telegram.

    Veeranki said she was anxious because she had a lot riding on her upcoming visa interview.

    “I’m the first person in my family to go the United States,” she said. “My mother is afraid to send me. But I’m excited for the opportunities I’ll have in America.”

    Veeranki then handed over the envelope to the temple’s priest for him to place at the foot of the idol for a blessing.

    “We’ve been hearing about applications being rejected,” she said, her hands still folded in prayer. “I’m really hoping mine gets approved.”

    If she and Bontha make it to Ohio, they want to take a trip to Niagara Falls.

    “I’ve always wanted to see it,” Bontha said.

    Mohanbabu Jagannathan and his wife, Sangeetha, run the temple, which Jagannathan’s grandfather built in 1987. Their house is on a cul-de-sac, which is considered bad luck in several Asian cultures. In Chennai, it is common to find a Ganesh temple outside cul-de-sac homes due to the belief that the deity has the power to ward off evil. At first, only neighbors came to the temple, Jagannathan said.

    “But over the years it started earning a quirky reputation,” he said. “A lot of visa applicants who came to the temple spread the word that they found success after praying here.”

    In 2009, his father, Jagannathan Radhakrishnan, reconstructed the temple and added the word “visa” to the temple’s name. Jagannathan said the success stories are heartwarming; visitors sometimes stop by his home to thank his family for keeping the temple open.

    “I’ve never been bothered by it,” Jagannathan said. “We offer this as a service to the public. It’s a joy to see how happy people are when they come back and tell us they got their visa.”

    His wife said she was touched by the story of a man who came all the way from New Delhi to pray for a visa to see his grandchild after eight years apart. She remembers another time when a woman called her in tears, saying her visa application was rejected.

    “Sure, some don’t get it,” she said. “God only knows why.”

    Padma Kannan brought her daughter, Monisha, who is preparing to pursue a master’s degree in marketing analytics in Clark University. Kannan believes her daughter got her visa because of this powerful deity.

    “I found this temple on Google,” she said. “I was so nervous for her, and so I prayed here.”

    Monisha Kannan said she is not so sure she got her visa because of this temple, but she said she came to support her mom.

    “I’m skeptical,” she said. “I’m just someone who goes with the flow.”

    Her mother takes a more philosophical stance.

    “We pray for our children and things happen easily for them,” she said. “I think when they go through the rigors of life themselves, they will start believing in the power of prayer.”

    Viswanathan said he is not someone “who usually believes in such things.” When his brother got his British visa a decade ago after offering prayers here, Viswanathan chalked it up to coincidence. He became a believer when his wife got her U.S. visa two years ago, he said.

    The day after he visited the temple this time, Viswanathan’s employment visa was approved. He’ll head to New Hampshire in a few months.

    “It’s all about faith,” he said. “If you believe it will happen, it will happen.”

    ___

    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.

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  • In Dallas suburbs, Friday Night Lights make way for cricket

    In Dallas suburbs, Friday Night Lights make way for cricket

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    FRISCO, Texas (AP) — With the ornate spires of the Karya Siddhi Hanuman Temple anchoring the skyline behind them, a cricket batsman and bowler eyed each other across a brown grass field. Amid gusty winds, players waiting to bat watched intently from nearby bleachers.

    No, this is not a scene in India, where cricket became a national obsession after arriving on the wings of British colonialism. Try North Texas, where Friday Night Lights have made way for weekend afternoons on the pitch.

    Welcome to the new Lone Star State, where cricket matches, a Hindu temple and Indian grocery stores co-exist with Christian churches, cattle ranches and Jerry Jones’ Dallas Cowboys empire. More than a decade of expansion has given the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex the largest Asian growth rate of any major U.S. metro area, in the nation’s fastest growing state. According to U.S. Census Bureau figures, Indians account for more than half the region’s Asian population boom, with the Dallas suburb of Frisco alone experiencing growth to rival Seattle and Chicago.

    While some Texans still bleed football, these days a growing number bleed cricket.

    “In ’98, I came to the U.S. Then I stopped playing cricket because I didn’t have any availability here. Down the road four or five years later, I saw somebody playing cricket in Plano,” said Kalyan “K.J.” Jarajapu, a temple volunteer watching the Frisco-sponsored cricket league match. “I never imagined that there would be cricket for sure or there would be a cricket world like I saw back home in India here in (metro) Dallas.”

    The share of Asians among the foreign-born in the U.S. has risen recently, from 30.1% during the 2012-to-2016 period to 31.2% in the 2017-to-2021 period, as the share of immigrants from Latin America and Europe has fallen, according to the American Community Survey.

    Immigrants from South Asia believe they’ve found the best of East meets West in Frisco and other Dallas suburbs. They’re living a new and improved American dream, with access to their preferred houses of worship, authentic food and a community radio station. But the dream also comes with painful realities about racism, pressure to balance two cultures and the mental health challenges of finding your way in an unfamiliar world.

    Named in 1904 after the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway, Frisco, 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of downtown Dallas, started as a train stop and an agricultural hub. Today, it’s a global technology force. Companies including Toyota, FedEx and Goldman Sachs have drawn job seekers from afar, including a pipeline of IT workers from the tech hub of Hyderabad, India.

    Combine good jobs with reputable schools, affordable housing and warm weather, and the formula for growth is set.

    Texas-based disciples of Sri Ganapathy Sachchidananda Swamiji came together in 2008 to purchase a 10-acre (4-hectare) plot in Frisco and build a modest Hindu temple. Within three years, it was hosting hundreds of worshippers.

    Jayesh Thakker, a temple trustee and joint treasurer for the India Association of North Texas, said they raised enough money to build a 33,000-square-foot (3,065-square-meter) temple in 2015. Nearly 30 artisan workers came on special visas to ensure every detail honored Indian Hindu architecture.

    “They built it first as an American structure and then they ‘Indianized’ it,” Thakker said.

    New housing and schools soon followed. Laxmi Tummala, trustee and temple secretary, is also a realtor. Many of her clients settle for less just to live nearby.

    ″‘All that other stuff I wanted, it doesn’t matter if it’s going to put me 25 minutes or 30 minutes away. I want my kids to have this exposure,’” Tummala said.

    Immigrants aren’t the only newcomers. Between 2015 and 2019, more than 17,000 people flocked to Frisco and surrounding Collin County from Dallas County and more than 8,000 from nearby Denton County, according to the Census Bureau.

    Outside Texas, the biggest sources of new Collin County residents were Los Angeles and Orange counties in California, with 1,600 residents and 1,000 residents respectively.

    But almost 6,000 new residents in the area came from Asia.

    The Islamic Center of Frisco has benefited, too. Its board is planning to more than double the size of the 18,000-square-foot (1,672-square-meter) mosque by 2024. With more than 3,500 people attending prayers and 460 children attending Sunday School, the board moved to acquire more space in 2019.

    Azfar Saeed, the center’s president, remembers that nearly two decades ago only 15 people came to pray in a 400-square-foot (37-square-meter) shopping center suite on any given day.

    “At that time, nobody knew Frisco. People were like, ‘Where are you going?’” said Saeed, who was born in Pakistan. By 2010, “people just started moving right and left here.”

    The pandemic brought another shift. Suddenly, people from California or Chicago were able to work remotely but live elsewhere. Houston saw a tremendous influx of Asians in the last decade, with the second-highest growth rate after Dallas among major U.S. metros.

    “The moment people went remote it felt like people were like, ’OK, I have a tiny house in California for $800,000 and I can buy a mansion here in Texas. Let’s go,’” Saeed said, chuckling.

    Where there is a large Asian population in the U.S., anti-Asian hate seems inevitable. In August, a woman’s racist rant against four Indian American women in Plano was caught on video. The unprovoked attack escalated as she hit and threatened to shoot them. She was later arrested.

    The incident caught the attention of people in India thanks to social media. South Asian groups here attended meetings with local law enforcement.

    “It was very sad and it was surprising,” said Tummala, the temple’s secretary. “But we definitely don’t take that and say ‘OK, everybody in Texas is like that.’”

    Some have found outlets for talking about their struggles, including on the region’s only South Asian radio station.

    The app-based Radio Azad, in Irving, was started by Azad Khan in 2011, five years after he immigrated from Pakistan. The station broadcasts music and current affairs. Multiple languages are represented, including Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, Farsi and Telugu.

    As the area population has grown, so has Radio Azad’s listenership, which numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

    The anonymity of call-in radio shows on Azad — which means freedom in Hindi and Urdu — has allowed for difficult questions. Nearly three years ago, CEO Ayesha Shafi started monthly mental health segments, and listeners embraced them. They’ve tackled assimilation, bipolar disorder and domestic abuse.

    “You can talk about issues that you’re facing and actually hear somebody who’s like you, who understands where you’re coming from and will actually listen,” Shafi said.

    Depression rose to the forefront after the murder-suicide of a Bangladeshi family in April 2021 in Allen, roughly 10 miles (16 kilometers) east of Frisco. Two adult brothers fatally shot their parents, sister and grandmother before taking their own lives. One brother had written on Instagram of dealing with depression since 2016.

    “As parents, we find that anxiety has become so common and it’s not happening to just anybody’s kids,” Shafi said. “As we created awareness, as we shared our shows … they would realize, ‘Omigod, this is happening to our kids.’”

    Reena Yalamanchili dealt with the feeling of not belonging as a child, despite being born in the U.S. The 17-year-old, whose family lives in nearby Coppell and attends the Frisco temple, remembers kids making fun of the lunch her mother made.

    “It kind of made me feel embarrassed about my mom’s cooking, or like Indian food or my culture in general,” Yalamanchili said. “Obviously, I don’t feel like that anymore.”

    She thinks most children grow out of those attitudes, and there is strength in numbers.

    “There’s a lot of people in the same boat as me,” she said. “There’s a lot of shared traditions.”

    Everywhere you look, South Asian cultures are merging into the Texas zeitgeist. The movie theater in Frisco shows films in Telegu, Tamil and Hindi, while at Tikka Taco in Irving, diners can get tacos stuffed with tandoori chicken, lamb or paneer tikka.

    Sometimes Indian politics spill into the Dallas suburbs. Scores of people joined protests this week outside Frisco’s City Hall on behalf of Christians in India who claim a Frisco-based group supports Hindu nationalists threatening their churches.

    On a more festive front, Hanuman Temple now collaborates with the City of Frisco for Holi, an annual Hindu festival also known as the Festival of Colors. Celebrants daub each other with vividly colored powders. The temple also organizes food donations, health fairs and other community services.

    “We don’t want to just be here and be isolated,” Tummala said.

    You can find a Diwali celebration in several Dallas suburbs around October or November. The biggest holiday of the year in India, the commemoration of light over darkness was celebrated by more than 15,000 people in Southlake’s town square. Police even wrote a script for officers doing security to explain its significance if anyone asked.

    “Five years ago, they wouldn’t have known what it was at all,” Shafi said.

    Southlake Mayor John Huffman, who spoke at the event dressed in traditional Indian clothing, believes close to a fifth of the crowd were non-Asians. He credits its success to the Southlake Foundation, a nonprofit started in 2019 by Kush Rao, who immigrated from India. The organization oversees cultural events and community service activities such as trash clean-up and free lunches for city staff.

    “I feel like they’re setting the bar in a lot of ways and saying, ‘We’re going to give back to the Public Works Department not because we’re getting anything in return but because we appreciate what they do for the city,’” Huffman said. “They have been very intentional about telling their fellow South Asians to get out and engage in the community.”

    Back in Frisco during Diwali, blocks of homes near Hanuman Temple twinkled with lights through the pouring rain. Hanuman Temple’s majestic pyramidal gateway glowed red. And dozens of families didn’t let the wet weather stop them from worshipping and chanting mantras to deities.

    Cricket fan Jarajapu, directing cars in the water-logged parking lot, wasn’t surprised so many came.

    “I have seen the transformation of Frisco city,” Jarajapu said. “It has become very vibrant with diversity, culture and especially a lot of Asians. I’m very proud to be living in Frisco.”

    ___

    Associated Press video journalist Noreen Nasir contributed to this story.

    ___

    Terry Tang is a member of The Associated Press’ Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her on Twitter: @ttangAP

    ___

    Schneider reported from Orlando, Florida. Follow Mike Schneider on Twitter: @ MikeSchneiderAP

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  • 2 cities pursued more school for kids. Only 1 pulled it off.

    2 cities pursued more school for kids. Only 1 pulled it off.

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    By BIANCA VÁZQUEZ TONESS

    December 16, 2022 GMT

    RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Jonathan Oliva is in third grade, but struggles to read and write.

    “His teacher said he’s like a kindergartner. He doesn’t know anything. And she can’t help because her class is too big,” his mother, Veronica Lucas, said in Spanish, standing in the parking lot outside his elementary school.

    Jonathan, his older sister and cousins watched from the backseat as Lucas shook her head. So many obstacles stand between Jonathan and reading fluently. Much of his short academic career was spent online.

    “We can only help him so much,” said Lucas, who came to the U.S. from Guatemala when she was 13 and has limited experience with school herself. “He needs more time in school.”

    Lucas doesn’t know the man in charge of Richmond’s schools tried — not once, but twice — to give students just that.

    Superintendent Jason Kamras tried to remake one of the most untouchable aspects of school — the academic calendar — to give kids more time with teachers. It’s the kind of drastic intervention some experts say is needed to help students recover after two-and-a-half years of interrupted schooling.

    While Richmond school board members said it would be too expensive and disruptive, school officials 20 miles away, in Hopewell, pushed forward. In 2021, theirs became the first Virginia district to adopt year-round schooling systemwide.

    Why was one city able to do the seemingly impossible, while another failed?

    Richmond’s superintendent met opposition from teachers and parents, particularly among more affluent families. Hopewell’s much smaller size, and teachers that backed the change, made it easier to build support in the community.

    Nationwide, a small number of districts have extended the academic year or changed to year-round school to address concerns about pandemic setbacks. The state of Washington is urging schools there to consider doing the same. If educators use the extra time to reinforce learning, adding school days is one of several strategies that could give kids the best chance of catching up, researchers say.

    Both Virginia school systems continue to face challenges helping children recover. Hopewell has struggled to enroll students to attend optional extra school days — especially those who need help the most.

    Back when Hopewell schools followed a traditional calendar, 10-year-old Gi’Shiya Broggin remembers sleeping late, swimming and visiting family during summers away at her father’s house. After returning to Hopewell and her mother’s home in a public housing development near a coal-fired power plant, she would feel like she “didn’t know anything” — especially in math.

    Math still vexes the talkative fourth grader with glasses and cornrows. “I need help with subtraction,” said Gi’Shiya. “If the bigger number is not on top, I get really confused.”

    Several years before the COVID-19 pandemic, Hopewell had begun studying year-round school as a way to boost lackluster performance in the 4,000-student district, where 91% of students are economically disadvantaged and 60% are Black. Only one school was fully accredited by the state.

    Most teachers supported the change, according to district documents. The state had been pushing districts to extend the school year after a review showed benefits especially for Black students.

    The need for intervention became acute after kids spent 16 months outside of school buildings. Test scores show Hopewell students lost the equivalent of more than two years of learning in math, one of the worst outcomes among thousands of school districts in a recent study.

    In the summer of 2021, students began the new calendar. Summer vacation was reduced to four weeks in June and July. The school also added three new breaks, or intersessions, when students can opt in for additional classes. Each lasts two weeks.

    Gi’Shiya’s mother, Quinn Branch, hoped the change would help her kids retain more information and skills. “This will be good for my children,” she remembers thinking.

    Now in its second year, it’s hard to know how much the change has helped. Chronic absenteeism remains high — 53% of high school students have missed at least 10% of school days, compared with 16% before the pandemic. However, teacher turnover is lower than it has been in years, Superintendent Melody Hackney said.

    For some teachers, the schedule is an improvement over the traditional August-to-June marathon. “I always feel a break is coming up, and that’s a relief,” said high school teacher John Johnson, who’s active in the teachers union.

    The intersessions are meant to give students an opportunity to try new subjects and more time to work on math and reading, but the courses are not required. Teachers must teach at least one intersession course a year.

    This year, only 20% to 25% of students participated in at least one intersession class. Hackney attributes the low turnout to the program’s newness. Some students just want to sleep in, she said. Hopewell is now considering making the intersession programs mandatory for students who are furthest behind.

    “The kids that are struggling to be successful in school are those that I would most especially want to see take advantage of these experiences,” said Hackney.

    The experience of Gi’Shiya’s family suggests some may not be aware of the need.

    Branch struck out trying to sign up her twins for their top choices — gymnastics and cooking for Gi’Shiya and sign language for Gi’Shaun. The courses filled up so quickly she gave up and sent her kids to visit their father during the three-week breaks.

    But Branch did not know her twins were receiving help because they are behind in math and reading until contacted by a reporter. Had she known, she would have tried harder to get them into the intersession programs, she said.

    In Richmond, Superintendent Kamras initially resisted suggestions to extend the school year.

    Then the pandemic hit, and the school board voted to shutter schools for the 2020-2021 academic year. Kamras saw online learning and social isolation devastate children’s emotional lives and academic motivation.

    “I was all in then,” he said. “I just felt this enormous sense of urgency.”

    Tests have since shown Richmond’s average student lost the equivalent of nearly two years in math learning.

    In the spring of 2021, the school board agreed to add days for the 2022-2023 school year. Kamras proposed either extending the school year by 10 days, or keeping the 180-day schedule and adding three, one-week intersessions to help the neediest students. By the next fall, however, several board members were skeptical.

    “The timing is not appropriate,” said board member Kenya Gibson. She said the changes would put too much strain on teachers and students.

    “Family time is sacred,” she said. “We must be incredibly cautious when we talk about social-emotional learning and we are taking away critical family time from our kids.”

    Gibson, a Black, Yale-educated architect, represents one of the more affluent areas of the city. She was elected on a platform advocating for teachers and is one of two board members who have received campaign money from Richmond’s teachers union.

    “We need to find a way to make the time we have work better,” Gibson said in an interview. She said she remains concerned that schools are understaffed, and she likely wouldn’t support adding extra required time until schools hire more teachers and administrators.

    Gibson asked Kamras to consider another option — maintaining the schedule as it was.

    Kamras, who answers to the board, complied. In a survey issued to staff and families, teachers overwhelmingly chose the option closest to the status quo.

    It was a huge defeat for Kamras.

    “It feels like the mantra is: ‘Fix everything, but don’t change anything,’” he said. But Kamras said he also understands where teachers and parents are coming from.

    “It’s a huge change. I still believe in many ways the pandemic is the exact right time to make a change,” said Kamras. “But I also understand and empathize with folks who said, ‘Actually, the last thing I want right now is more change.’”

    Most teachers responded to the online survey, but students’ and parents’ voices were largely missing. In a district of more than 20,000 students, only 539 students responded, and 2,285 families. Most respondents were among the minority of families in the district who have higher incomes and do not qualify for government benefits such as food stamps or Medicaid.

    Richmond struggled to adopt year-round school because wealthier parents couldn’t see any benefit of more class time for their children, said Taikein Cooper, executive director of Virginia Excels, a statewide education advocacy organization.

    “Parents who had resources were complaining that it would mess up their annual vacations,” he said. “But a lot of students who really need year-round school don’t take an annual vacation.”

    In Hopewell, by contrast, all students were more or less in the same boat, so the district had an easier time selling the change, he said.

    The small number of low-income Richmond parents who did respond to Kamras’ survey said they preferred fewer school days, not more. Had the district reached more parents, however, Kamras might have found parents more receptive to change.

    On the city’s south side, where enrollment is growing thanks to an influx of Latino immigrants, Kamras would have found an eager, if unrepresented, audience. A quarter of Richmond students are Latino, but there is no Latino member on the school board. More than half of Latino high school students in the class of 2022 dropped out before graduation.

    On a recent afternoon, dozens of mothers waited in their cars in the pick-up line outside Cardinal Elementary School. Ranchera music drifted from one car, Spanish-language talk radio from another.

    None of five mothers interviewed as they waited for their children knew about the attempts to extend the school year. Each of them would have jumped at the chance to get more time in school.

    “It’s good to have vacation, but it’s too long,” Leticia Mazariegos said in Spanish. Her 9-year-old son speaks English very timidly, and she said more school would help his confidence. “Why don’t they do that?”

    Veronica Lucas would like more time in school for her son Jonathan. Richmond schools have trained teachers in phonics to improve reading instruction, but he still needs more help. “I can’t afford to hire him a tutor,” Lucas said.

    There may be another chance for Jonathan.

    Kamras is making a third attempt at year-round school, this time calling it a pilot for interested schools. In his proposal, five schools would add 20 required days to the school calendar next year. As before, approval rests with the school board.

    ____

    The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Fight to curb food waste increasingly turns to science

    Fight to curb food waste increasingly turns to science

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    Hate mealy apples and soggy french fries? Science can help.

    Restaurants, grocers, farmers and food companies are increasingly turning to chemistry and physics to tackle the problem of food waste.

    Some are testing spray-on peels or chemically enhanced sachets that can slow the ripening process in fruit. Others are developing digital sensors that can tell — more precisely than a label — when meat is safe to consume. And packets affixed to the top of a takeout box use thermodynamics to keep fries crispy.

    Experts say growing awareness of food waste and its incredible cost — both in dollars and in environmental impact — has led to an uptick in efforts to mitigate it. U.S. food waste startups raised $4.8 billion in 2021, 30% more than they raised in 2020, according to ReFed, a group that studies food waste.

    “This has suddenly become a big interest,” said Elizabeth Mitchum, director of the Postharvest Technology Center at the University of California, Davis, who has worked in the field for three decades. “Even companies that have been around for a while are now talking about what they do through that lens.”

    In 2019, around 35% of the 229 million tons of food available in the U.S. — worth around $418 billion — went unsold or uneaten, according to ReFed. Food waste is the largest category of material placed in municipal landfills, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which notes that rotting food releases methane, a problematic greenhouse gas.

    ReFed estimates 500,000 pounds (225,000 kilograms) of food could be diverted from landfills annually with high-tech packaging.

    Among the products in development are a sensor by Stockholm-based Innoscentia that can determine whether meat is safe depending on the buildup of microbes in its packaging. And Ryp Labs, based in the U.S. and Belgium, is working on a produce sticker that would release a vapor to slow ripening.

    SavrPak was founded in 2020 by Bill Birgen, an aerospace engineer who was tired of the soggy food in his lunchbox. He developed a plant-based packet — made with food-safe materials approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — that can fit inside a takeout container and absorb condensation, helping keep the food inside hotter and crispier.

    Nashville, Tennessee-based hot-chicken chain Hattie B’s was skeptical. But after testing SavrPaks using humidity sensors, it now uses the packs when it’s catering fried foods and is working with SavrPak to integrate the packs into regular takeout containers.

    Brian Morris, Hattie B’s vice president of culinary learning and development, said each SavrPak costs the company less than $1 but ensures a better meal.

    “When it comes to fried chicken, we kind of lose control from the point when it leaves our place,” Morris said. “We don’t want the experience to go down the drain.”

    But cost can still be a barrier for some companies and consumers. Kroger, the nation’s largest grocery chain, ended its multiyear partnership with Goleta, California-based Apeel Sciences this year because it found consumers weren’t willing to pay more for produce brushed or sprayed with Apeel’s edible coating to keep moisture in and oxygen out, thus extending the time that produce stays fresh.

    Apeel says treated avocados can last a few extra days, while citrus fruit lasts for several weeks. The coating is made of purified mono- and diglycerides, emulsifiers that are common food additives.

    Kroger wouldn’t say how much more Apeel products cost. Apeel also wouldn’t reveal the average price premium for produce treated with its coating since it varies by food distributor and grocer. But Apeel says its research shows customers are willing to pay more for produce that lasts longer. Apeel also says it continues to talk to Kroger about other future technology.

    There is another big hurdle to coming up with innovations to preserve food: Every food product has its own biological makeup and handling requirements.

    “There is no one major change that can improve the situation,” said Randy Beaudry, a professor in the horticulture department at Michigan State University’s school of agriculture.

    Beaudry said the complexity has caused some projects to fail. He remembers working with one large packaging company on a container designed to prevent fungus in tomatoes. For the science to work, the tomatoes had to be screened for size and then oriented stem-up in each container. Eventually the project was scrapped.

    Beaudry said it’s also hard to sort out which technology works best, since startups don’t always share data or formulations with outside researchers.

    Some companies find it better to rely on proven technology — but in new ways. Chicago-based Hazel Technologies, which was founded in 2015, sells 1-methylcyclopropene, or 1-MCP, a gas that has been used for decades to delay the ripening process in fruit. The compound — considered non-toxic by the EPA — is typically pumped into sealed storage rooms to inhibit the production of ethylene, a plant hormone.

    But Hazel’s real breakthrough is a sachet the size of a sugar packet that can slowly release 1-MCP into a box of produce.

    Mike Mazie, the facilities and storage manager at BelleHarvest, a large apple packing facility in Belding, Michigan, ordered around 3,000 sachets this year. He used them for surplus bins that couldn’t fit into the sealed rooms required for gas.

    “If you can get another week out of a bushel of apples, why wouldn’t you?” he said. “It absolutely makes a difference.”

    The science is promising but it’s only part of the solution, said Yvette Cabrera, the director of food waste for the Natural Resources Defense Council. Most food waste happens at the residential level, she said; lowering portion sizes, buying smaller quantities of food at a time or improving the accuracy of date labels could have even more impact than technology.

    “Overall as a society, we don’t value food as it should be valued,” Cabrera said.

    ___

    AP National Writer and Visual Journalist Martha Irvine contributed from Belding, Michigan.

    __

    This story has been corrected to show that food waste startups raised $4.8 billion in 2021, 30% more than they raised in 2020, not $300 billion in 2021, double the amount raised in 2020.

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  • How senators ‘defied political gravity’ on same-sex marriage

    How senators ‘defied political gravity’ on same-sex marriage

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin was on the Senate floor, but her mind was on the other side of the Capitol.

    The House was voting that July afternoon on Democratic legislation to protect same-sex and interracial marriages in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the federal right to an abortion. And it was suddenly winning more Republican votes than Baldwin — or anyone else — had expected.

    Baldwin, who became the first openly gay senator when she was elected a decade ago, said she was “overjoyed” as she saw the votes coming in. She excitedly walked over to Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, who was also on the Senate floor and had been one of the first Republican senators to come out in favor of same-sex marriage.

    “Did you see this?” Baldwin asked, showing Portman a list of Republicans who had voted for the House bill — almost four dozen.

    Portman, who had worked with her on the issue in the past, was immediately on board. “Count me in,” he told her.

    Along with Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who eventually led the bipartisan effort with Baldwin, the senators teamed up with Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Thom Tillis, R-N.C., to try to find the additional Republican votes necessary to pass the Senate.

    It was a monthslong effort, building on a decadeslong push, in which they implored their colleagues senator to senator, tweaked the bill to make it more appealing — without changing what it would do — and enlisted key outside allies to help. They convinced skeptical Republicans that it was a personal, not political, effort for the Democrats and that “the sky is not going to fall,” Baldwin said.

    Collins, who has a long record of working on gay rights issues, said the GOP support in the House was a turning point. “It both surprised and heartened me,” she said, “because it suggested we could get the bill through both the House and the Senate and signed before the end of the year.”

    In the end, they “defied political gravity,” as Baldwin puts it, and passed the Respect for Marriage Act through the Senate. When the final vote was called, they had 12 Republican supporters — two more than they needed to break the filibuster in the 50-50 Senate and pass the bill. The House gave it final passage on Thursday and sent the bill to President Joe Biden for his signature.

    Along the way, the five senators — Democrats Baldwin and Sinema and Republicans Collins, Portman and Tillis — found that attitudes have changed in the decade since most Republicans were openly campaigning against gay marriage. Not only because of the 2015 Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, but because increasing numbers of people — daughters, sons, friends, staffers — were openly gay and in relationships and marriages.

    “If you look at the arc of visibility around the LGBTQ community, there’s more and more people who are married to a same-sex partner and maybe raising a family with their same-sex partner,” said Baldwin, who has been working on gay rights issues since she entered politics almost 40 years ago. “And in some ways, you don’t want to do harm, right? And recognize how important the certainty is for these families. And I think that made a huge difference in our ability to get to a super-majority in the Senate.”

    Still, most Republicans weren’t inclined to vote for the bill. Supporters had to find at least seven more Republicans to get to yes.

    In the first weeks after the House vote, the five senators went to work to find those votes. Baldwin, who had advised House lawmakers to keep the bill simple and straightforward, says “the ink wasn’t even dry on the ledger yet” when she took the list of House supporters and started to talk to members from those same states, noting that their home-state colleagues across the Capitol had supported the bill and could give them “political cover,” she says.

    But in talking to Republicans, they quickly found that the biggest concern was religious liberty, and whether the bill would penalize private institutions or groups that did not want to perform same-sex marriages or provide services to same-sex couples. So they started crafting an amendment to address it.

    “As we talked to senators we found a real openness to the bill, but concerns about religious liberty and consciousness protections,” Collins said. She said they started reaching out to some religious groups, asking what they would like to see in the bill if they were going to support it.

    A main concern was that a church or organization could have its tax-exempt status revoked if it didn’t perform a same-sex marriage. “That was a huge issue,” Collins said.

    The bill, which requires states to legally recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, would not have done that. But Collins said the senators “wanted to make sure it was crystal clear” in the amendment that churches would not be in any way penalized or required to perform marriages. So they added language affirming the rights of religious institutions and groups while keeping the original language in the bill intact.

    By November, dozens of religious groups supported the bill, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

    Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, a member of the Latter-day Saints church and one of the 12 senators who eventually supported the legislation, was involved in those early talks.

    “I would not have been able to support the bill were it not for the religious liberty provisions that were added, and I pointed that out to them as they were looking to collect 11 or 12 votes,” Romney said after the Senate vote.

    According to Portman, Romney also pushed for a series of findings at the beginning of the bill that stated that “beliefs about the role of gender in marriage are held by reasonable and sincere people based on decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises.”

    Tim Schultz, the president of the advocacy group 1st Amendment Partnership, directed a coalition of religious groups supporting the bill. He says that it was clear after the first House vote that the senators and progressive advocacy groups were serious about addressing the concerns and getting the bill done, and not using it as a political wedge issue. “They didn’t want a show vote in the Senate,” Schultz says.

    As the senators organized inside, groups of influential Republicans who were supportive organized on the outside. Key to that effort were Ken Mehlman, a former Republican National Committee chairman and campaign manager for former President George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign, and a group that he is funding, Centerline.

    Focusing on senators in nine states, the group conducted state polls, drove local press coverage, organized telephone campaigns and put together more than 70 meetings with senators and staff. The group circulated a list of 430 prominent Republicans and conservatives who supported the legislation, including former senators and Cabinet officials.

    Mehlman says the campaign was based on data and polling showing an increasing support for gay marriage. More than two-thirds of the public now supports the unions.

    “Center-right voters are supportive of the freedom to marry, and those numbers have increased in recent years,” Mehlman says. “Voters are supportive and often ahead of politicians on these questions.”

    But even as the supporters mobilized, it wasn’t clear if the senators had the votes. Baldwin says that many Republicans she was talking to were skeptical of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s motivations so close to the midterm elections.

    So Baldwin and the other senators met with Schumer in mid-September and told him they needed to delay a vote until after the election. It was “disappointing,” she says, and she knew she and Schumer would get pushback from groups that wanted them to force the question on the floor. But she argued it was the right thing to do, and Schumer agreed. “I’m trusting your counts,” she says he told her.

    When the Senate returned after the election, with Senate Democrats having won a majority, Schumer announced they would hold an immediate vote on the marriage bill. By then, Baldwin and the others felt more sure of a win — and on Nov. 16, twelve Republicans voted yes in a key procedural vote to move forward.

    In addition to Collins, Romney, Portman and Tillis, Republicans supporting the legislation were Richard Burr of North Carolina, Todd Young of Indiana, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Roy Blunt of Missouri, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming and Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan of Alaska.

    After that vote, as the Senate left town for Thanksgiving, some conservative groups mobilized against the bill. On Nov. 23, the Heritage Foundation announced a new $1.3 million ad campaign.

    “Liberals are hurrying to cram in their far left agenda, and a few Republican senators are helping them,” the ad said.

    But supporters held firm despite the pressure, and the bill passed the Senate on Nov. 30. As the roll was called, Baldwin teared up, hugging Schumer and others.

    “The thing that gets me so choked up is all the times somebody comes up and says this matters to me,” Baldwin said afterward, through tears.

    Looking back on her four decades of advocacy — she was elected to local office in the mid-1980s, after she had already come out as gay — she says she always thought she would live to see marriage equality.

    “I’m not surprised that we won that in the courts,” she says. “But protecting it in the legislative body is a big deal.”

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  • Griner swap reveals dilemma US faces in freeing detainees

    Griner swap reveals dilemma US faces in freeing detainees

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — A Taliban drug lord convicted in a vast heroin trafficking conspiracy. A Russian pilot imprisoned for a scheme to distribute cocaine across the world. And a Russian arms dealer so infamous that he earned the nickname “Merchant of Death.”

    Those are just some of the convicted felons the United States government has agreed to release in the last year in exchange for securing the release of Americans detained abroad. It’s long been conventional wisdom that the U.S. risks incentivizing additional hostage taking by negotiating with adversarial nations and militant groups for the release of American citizens. But the succession of swaps has made clear the Biden administration’s willingness to free a convicted criminal once seen as a threat to society if that’s what it takes to bring home a U.S. citizen.

    The latest swap occurred Thursday when WNBA star Brittney Griner, a two-time Olympic gold medalist who played pro basketball in Russia and was easily the most prominent American to be held overseas, was freed in exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.

    The exchange drew some criticism, including from Republican lawmakers, and raised concerns that Bout, who was tried and convicted in American courts, was being traded for someone the U.S regarded as a wrongful detainee convicted in Russia of a relatively minor offense. Administration officials acknowledged that such deals carry a heavy price and cautioned against the perception that they are the new norm, but the reality is that they’ve been a tool of administrations of both political parties.

    The Trump administration, seen as more willing to flout convention in hostage affairs, brought home Navy veteran Michael White in 2020 in an agreement that freed an Iranian American doctor and permitted him to return to Iran.

    The Obama administration pardoned or dropped charges against seven Iranians in a prisoner exchange tied to the nuclear deal with Tehran. Three jailed Cubans were sent home in 2014 as Havana released American Alan Gross after five years’ imprisonment.

    Jon Franks, who’s long advised families of American hostages and detainees, said it’s not true that the U.S. can just throw its might around and get people released.

    “The maximum pressure mantra just doesn’t work — and, by the way, I don’t think prisoner trades undercut maximum pressure,” said Franks, the spokesman for the Bring Our Families Home Campaign.

    Griner was arrested at a Moscow airport in February after customs agents said she was carrying vape canisters with cannabis oil. Bout, who was arrested in 2008, was sentenced in 2012 to 25 years in prison on charges that he conspired to sell tens of millions of dollars in weapons that U.S officials said were to be used against Americans.

    The trade highlights a trend in recent years of Americans being detained abroad and held hostage not by terrorist groups but by countries looking to gain leverage over America, said Dani Gilbert, a fellow in U.S. foreign policy and international security at Dartmouth College.

    Gilbert said the idea that the U.S. doesn’t negotiate for hostages is a “misnomer.” She said that really only applies when an American is being held by a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, but otherwise the U.S. has historically done whatever is necessary to bring Americans home.

    What is different, she said, is over roughly the last decade there’s been a trend of foreign governments as opposed to terrorist groups detaining Americans abroad, often on trumped-up charges. She noted that in July the U.S. introduced a new risk indicator on its travel advisories — a “D” — for countries that tend to wrongfully detain people.

    “Currently there are about four dozen Americans who are considered wrongfully detained, which puts them in this category essentially of being held wrongfully or unlawfully by a foreign government, perhaps for leverage,” she said. “Those cases have really been on the rise in recent years.”

    Gilbert said she was nervous that trades like the Griner-Bout deal would encourage other authoritarian leaders to use similar tactics.

    During a ceremony Thursday celebrating Griner’s release, President Joe Biden urged Americans to take precautions before traveling overseas.

    “We also want to prevent any more American families from suffering this pain and separation,” he said.

    Bout earned the nickname “Merchant of Death” for supposedly supplying weapons for civil wars in South America, the Middle East and Africa.

    But Shira A. Scheindlin, the former federal judge who sentenced Bout, said while he had a history as an international arms dealer selling weapons to unsavory characters, at the time of his arrest in a U.S. sting operation he appeared to be largely out of the business.

    “We’re not talking about someone who at that point in his career was actively dealing arms to terrorists,” she said.

    Scheindlin said during an interview after Bout was released that she thought that the time he had spent behind bars was adequate punishment. She said she always thought Bout’s sentence was too long and she would have given him a lesser one if she hadn’t been confined by statutory mandatory minimums.

    The attention paid to Griner’s case has raised questions about whether her celebrity and the public pressure it generated pushed the Biden administration to make a deal where it hasn’t in other cases. Left out of the deal was Paul Whelan, a Michigan corporate security executive who had regularly traveled to Russia until he was arrested in December 2018 in Moscow and convicted of what the U.S. government says are baseless espionage charges.

    Jared Genser, a Washington lawyer who represents the family of Siamak Namazi, who has been held in Iran since 2015, said Griner’s celebrity undoubtedly gave her supporters access to the highest levels of American power in a way that few others get. That also showed Vladimir Putin how “desperately the president wanted to get” Griner out, Genser said.

    Elsewhere in the world, American citizens have been detained for years.

    Saudi dissident Ali al-Ahmed, who runs the Washington-based Gulf Institute, has a cousin who was detained in Saudi Arabia in 2019 and was released earlier this year but still can’t leave the country. Al-Ahmed works to help other families with loved ones held in the oil-rich Gulf kingdom. He said detainees like his cousin don’t have the celebrity of someone like Griner, and he feels not enough attention is being paid by the U.S. government to them.

    “They should not favor Americans of certain background over another American,” he said. “There has not been equality here.”

    The family of another prominent American held overseas — Austin Tice — also expressed frustration in a statement Thursday. While they said they were happy that Griner had been released, they were “extremely disappointed” in the U.S. government’s lack of progress in Tice’s case. Tice went missing in Syria in 2012; Washington maintains Tice is being held by Syrian authorities, which the Syrians deny.

    “If the U.S. government can work with Russia, there is no excuse for not directly engaging Syria,” the statement read. “God willing, Austin will not spend another Christmas alone in captivity.”

    __

    Associated Press reporter Matthew Lee contributed to this report.

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  • Making ‘indie’ video games gets trickier as industry evolves

    Making ‘indie’ video games gets trickier as industry evolves

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    Video game developer Ben Esposito’s first big break was a quirky game called Donut County starring a raccoon who dropped small objects and then entire neighborhoods into an ever-growing hole in the ground.

    His latest, Neon White, is a campy twist on the first-person shooter genre that involves careening across heaven at breakneck speeds to stop a demon invasion. Drawn in an anime style and with a romantic subplot, it’s nominated for “Best Indie” and “Best Action” game at Thursday’s Game Awards, an Oscars-like event for the video game industry.

    Every year, some tiny and independent video game developer studios like Esposito’s Angel Matrix hold their own with the big leagues by making hit games that achieve commercial success or at least critical acclaim. Even one of the world’s most popular games, Minecraft, was started by an independent game developer in Sweden who later sold his studio to Microsoft for $2.5 billion.

    “I have really odd taste,” said Esposito, 33. “When I’m picking stuff, it’s about trying to come up with that rare intersection of something that is offbeat and interesting to me, but if presented the right way, it could be financially successful.”

    How long these “indie” studios can flourish is up for debate as the gaming industry undergoes increasing consolidation – symbolized by Xbox-maker Microsoft’s pending $69 billion takeover of giant game publisher Activision Blizzard that awaits approval from U.S. and European regulators.

    Esposito, the game’s co-creator and director, and his wife, co-creator Geneva Hodgson, worked out of their home near Los Angeles to lead development of Neon White over the past three years. At the height of production, about five people worked full time on the game. Add friends, contractors and freelancers and it was still fewer than 20 people who touched the product, Esposito said.

    And while there’s no one formula for transforming an offbeat idea into a blockbuster hit found on computers, phones or a family’s PlayStation, Xbox or Nintendo Switch, there are plenty of indie studios that have managed to build an audience for their games.

    Thursday’s Game Awards event in Los Angeles is showcasing several. Those include the French-made summer hit Stray, about a cute cat navigating the alleyways of a post-apocalyptic city; another game about a cult led by a possessed lamb; and the retro-looking Vampire Survivors that pits its hero against a constant stream of monsters.

    But as the industry keeps consolidating, some developers including Esposito worry that a golden age for high-quality indie games could be threatened as a smaller group of distributors makes choices about what gets funded.

    “When it comes to bigger budgets, it’s a challenge because the industry feels like it’s contracting a bit,” he said. “Studios get bought up. Talent gets concentrated into certain areas and then budgets change.”

    Games that Esposito describes as having middle-tier budgets in the $2 million range — neither cheap to make, nor as expensive as the major studio franchises — could get sidelined.

    “I think we’re seeing that kind of mid-budget game start to disappear,” he said. “I think that’s really sad because that’s the kind of budget that I think can produce really interesting, odd, risky but well- realized projects and I think Neon White’s one of those.”

    Both Stray and Neon White benefited from the support of arthouse publisher Annapurna Interactive, the games division of the film studio behind movies like “Her” and “American Hustle.” In the case of Neon White, that allowed Esposito’s team to enhance the game by hiring professional voice actors.

    “It’s always a very risky endeavor to make an independent video game,” said Stray producer Swann Martin-Raget. The tools to make games are becoming more accessible, and so many studios are making them that it can be “really hard to get people’s attention,” he said.

    Stray captured plenty of people’s attention this summer with its cinematic visuals of a realistic-looking tabby cat scampering around a city menaced by robots and other hazards. Its maker was BlueTwelve Studio, a small team of developers in the southern French city of Montpellier, some of whom previously worked at the nearby office of big game-maker Ubisoft.

    As a sign of its upstart success, Stray is competing against big-budget blockbusters like Bandai Namco’s Elden Ring and Sony’s God of War Ragnarök for Thursday’s prestigious “Game of the Year” award.

    Games analyst Steve Bailey at London-based market research firm Omdia said it’s hard to define what classifies a game as indie.

    It used to mean “you have a small team, they do everything themselves and they release it without a publisher and they do not care about success. That was part of the original kind of indie spirit.” Now it sometimes describes anything that doesn’t come out of big studios making the highest-profile games.

    “So it could even be somebody who has a publisher, some quite large studios actually, and budgets that might run into tens of millions of dollars that still get classed as indie,” Bailey said.

    Bailey said there’s no question that players today have a rich and diverse collection of games to choose from on consoles, and from popular web-based game platforms such as Steam or Epic.

    “There’s this interesting balancing act that’s taking place that the opportunities now are greater than they’ve ever been” for independent developers, Bailey said. “But the competition itself is absolutely massive.”

    In the short term, the consolidation could be good for independent developers as companies like Microsoft strive to offer the widest possible array of games to get people hooked on buying a monthly subscription-based service such as Xbox Game Pass.

    In the longer term, there’s more uncertainty if the game market starts to look more like streaming movie services like Netflix that can apportion budgets and contracts based on past viewership, Bailey said.

    “In the future, when Xbox is focusing on profitability instead of expansion and acquisition, there might be a change of power,” he said. “It might be harder for indies to get traction on subscription platforms. It’s great for the people who are on there who get to be part of that wave, but the ones who are off, things might get harder.”

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  • Sharpton says film debuts at ‘critical point’ in US politics

    Sharpton says film debuts at ‘critical point’ in US politics

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    NEW YORK (AP) — The Rev. Al Sharpton has been called a lot of names in his public life: a hustler, a racist, an opportunist, a fraud, a rat, a jester.

    He embraces at least one of the intended insults, a name often hurled by his critics on the right and the left: “Loudmouth.” That’s also the title of a two-hour documentary about the national civil rights leader debuting at theaters in 50 cities Friday.

    Sharpton’s brash and combative styles, deployed in his advocacy for victims and families seeking accountability over police brutality and racial injustices, are on full display as filmmakers trace his evolution from Brooklyn rabble-rouser to sought-after figure in the U.S. political arena. Sharpton said he hopes the film inspires up-and-coming generations of loudmouths to join movements against injustices in their own communities.

    “You had to be loud because you were not invited to address the public,” he says in the documentary framed around a wide-ranging, sit-down interview.

    The lean physique Sharpton sat for the interview dressed in a three-piece, tailored suit and tie — a noticeable contrast to the rotund, chain and medallion wearing young man in a track suit, who many older Americans may remember.

    The documentary opens with the civil rights leader’s 2019 birthday party, which was attended by A-list celebrities and top New York elected officials. The film concludes with a tearful Sharpton leading a prayer in 2021 after a jury convicted a white, former Minneapolis police officer for the murder of George Floyd. In between those bookends, viewers see an in-depth exploration of Sharpton’s upbringing by his mother, Ada Richards Sharpton, mentorship by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and soul music icon James Brown, as well as his headline-grabbing activism in New York in the 1980s.

    It’s arguably the most nuanced look at the leader to date.

    Directed by Josh Alexander and executive produced by singer-songwriter John Legend, “Loudmouth” has already screened at the Tribeca, Chicago, Philadelphia, Martha’s Vineyard and Denver film festivals. Its nationwide release comes at a “critical point” in U.S. politics, when divided government via the Republican-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate could mean intensified activism around a civil rights agenda, Sharpton said.

    “I think it’s more needed now than ever,” he told The Associated Press, “the kind of direct action and work on the ground that create the climate for protest. It’s going to double our efforts.”

    As he wraps up 2022, Sharpton reflected on what has been a mixed, yet consequential stretch in progressive politics. On one hand, the midterm elections showed larger than expected engagement among a younger generation of voters, which blunted a predicted “red wave” in state and federal offices. By that, Sharpton said he is encouraged.

    On the other hand, violence via mass shootings this year, including the massacre of Black shoppers by a white supremacist gunman at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, woke many up to how intractable politics on guns and racial justice can be.

    “I think that the shooting showed that we were not nearly as far as we thought we were going to go after George Floyd,” Sharpton said. “From the shootings in Buffalo, to the synagogue attacks, to the LGBTQ attack (in Colorado Springs), there’s widespread violent hate out there.”

    “We’re going to have to have strong, hard enforcement legislation,” he added.

    Alexander, the director, said whether viewers come out of the film loving or hating Sharpton, they will go away understanding what the leader was up against.

    “If he’s saying the same things now that he’s been saying for decades, but now he’s celebrated and back then he was castigated, what does that tell us not about him but about the media ecosystem at the time?” Alexander told the AP.

    Sharpton, 68, has been a go-to advocate for grieving Black American families seeking justice for nearly countless incidents that highlight systemic racism. Democratic politicians see him as a necessary ally for shoring up their credentials on racial justice issues.

    It took Sharpton more than two decades to get there. Born in 1954 in Brooklyn, he showed promise as a preacher at age 4 and was ordained as a minister by age 10. At 13, Jackson appointed Sharpton as youth director of New York’s Operation Breadbasket, an anti-poverty project of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

    By the ’80s, a young adult Sharpton constantly courted controversy for using inflammatory language against his opponents. His most fiery rhetoric was reserved for the elected officials from whom he demanded action on cases of racial violence and police brutality.

    “Loudmouth” relies heavily on footage from that period. The documentary highlights Sharpton’s activism in the cases of Michael Griffith, a 23-year-old Black man killed in 1986 by white men outside a pizza parlor in the then-predominantly white Queens neighborhood of Howard Beach; Yusuf Hawkins, a Black teenager fatally shot in 1989 after being confronted by a mob of white youths in the historically Italian American neighborhood of Bensonhurst in Brooklyn; and most controversially, Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old Black girl who in 1987 accused six white men, including police officers, of assault and rape in upstate New York.

    A grand jury later found evidence that Brawley had fabricated the story. Although Sharpton was hardly the only prominent New York figure who believed Brawley’s story, many of Sharpton’s critics still bring up the case to discredit him.

    “Later in life, I became more conscious,” Sharpton says in reflection in the documentary. “I saw Tawana, in many ways, like the Black mother I had that was fighting for kids. … I saw in her a Black woman that Black men wouldn’t stand up for, and I wasn’t going to be the one to walk away from her. No matter how hot it got, I just wasn’t going to do it.”

    Sharpton told the AP that the documentary does a good job of dispelling the narrative that racism was largely a problem of the U.S. South.

    “Racism was not just a Southern thing, it was a Northern thing,” he said. “But it was manicured racism, until we got out there and marched.”

    ___

    Aaron Morrison is a New York-based national writer on the AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow him on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/aaronlmorrison.

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