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NEW YORK — The U.S. said on Tuesday it may ask a judge to force Alphabet’s Google to divest parts of its business, such as its Chrome browser and Android operating system, that it says are used to maintain an illegal monopoly in online search.

In a landmark case, a judge in August found that Google, which processes 90% of U.S. internet searches, had built an illegal monopoly. The Justice Department’s proposed remedies have the potential to reshape how Americans find information on the internet while shrinking Google’s revenues and giving its competitors more room to grow.

“Fully remedying these harms requires not only ending Google’s control of distribution today, but also ensuring Google cannot control the distribution of tomorrow,” the Justice Department said.

The proposed fixes will also aim to keep Google’s past dominance from extending to the burgeoning business of artificial intelligence, prosecutors said.

The Justice Department might also ask the court to end Google’s payments to have its search engine pre-installed or set as the default on new devices.

Google has made annual payments – $26.3 billion in 2021 – to companies including Apple and other device manufacturers to ensure that its search engine remained the default on smartphones and browsers, keeping its market share strong.

Google, which plans to appeal, said in a corporate blog post that the proposals were “radical” and said they “go far beyond the specific legal issues in this case.”

Google maintains that its search engine has won users with its quality, adding that it faces robust competition from Amazon and other sites, and that users can choose other search engines as their default.

The world’s fourth-largest company with a market capitalization of over $2 trillion, Alphabet is under mounting legal pressure from competitors and antitrust authorities.

A U.S. judge ruled on Monday in a separate case, that Google must open up its lucrative app store, Play, to greater competition, including making Android apps available from rival sources. Google is also fighting a Justice Department case that seeks the breakup of its web advertising business.

As part of its efforts to prevent Google’s dominance from extending into AI, the Justice Department said it may seek to make available to rivals the indexes, data and models it uses for Google search and AI-assisted search features.

Other orders prosecutors may seek include restricting Google from entering agreements that limit other AI competitors’ access to web content and letting websites opt out of Google using their content to train AI models.

Google said the AI-related proposals could stifle the sector.

“There are enormous risks to the government putting its thumb on the scale of this vital industry — skewing investment, distorting incentives, hobbling emerging business models — all at precisely the moment that we need to encourage investment,” Google said.

The Justice Department is expected to file a more detailed proposal with the court by Nov. 20. Google will have a chance to propose its own remedies by Dec. 20.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling in Washington was a major win for antitrust enforcers who have brought an ambitious set of cases against Big Tech companies over the past four years.

The U.S. has also sued Meta Platforms, Amazon.com and Apple claiming they illegally maintain monopolies.

Some of the ideas in the Justice Department’s proposals to break up Google had previously garnered support from Google’s smaller competitors such as reviews site Yelp and rival search engine company DuckDuckGo.

Yelp, which sued Google over search in August, says spinning off Google’s Chrome browser and AI services should be on the table. Yelp also wants Google to be prohibited from giving preference to Google’s local business pages in search results.
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Wisconsin, a Midwestern U.S. state known for its dairy farms and beer production, has emerged as a crucial battleground in the 2024 presidential election. With a history of extremely close races, Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes could determine who becomes the next president. The state’s unique mix of urban and rural voters, along with key issues like the economy and abortion rights, make it a microcosm of the nation’s political divide.
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washington — The FBI has arrested an Afghan man who officials say was inspired by the Islamic State militant organization and was plotting an Election Day attack targeting large crowds in the United States, the Justice Department said Tuesday.

Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, 27, of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, told investigators after his arrest Monday that he had planned his attack to coincide with Election Day next month and that he and a juvenile co-conspirator expected to die as martyrs, according to charging documents. 

Tawhedi, who entered the U.S. in 2021 on a special immigrant visa, had taken steps in recent weeks to advance his attack plans, including by ordering AK-47 rifles, liquidating his family’s assets, and buying one-way tickets for his wife and child to travel home to Afghanistan. 

“Terrorism is still the FBI’s number one priority, and we will use every resource to protect the American people,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement. 

After he was arrested, the Justice Department said, Tawhedi told investigators he had planned an attack for Election Day that would target large gatherings of people. 

Tawhedi was charged with conspiring and attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State group, which is designated by the U.S. as a foreign terrorist organization. 

It was not immediately clear if he had a lawyer who could speak on his behalf. 
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President Joe Biden postponed his trip to Germany and Angola Tuesday to oversee the response to Hurricane Milton, which is heading toward Florida just days after Hurricane Helene ravaged the southeastern United States. Patsy Widakuswara reports. Jose Pernalete contributed to this report.
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Washington — Then-president Donald Trump secretly sent COVID test kits to Vladimir Putin despite a U.S. shortage during the pandemic, and spoke multiple times with the Russian leader after leaving office, says an explosive new book by Bob Woodward. 

The upcoming opus, War, also chronicles some of President Joe Biden’s own acknowledged missteps and his struggle to prevent escalation of conflict in the Middle East, including exasperation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over futile efforts to get Israel and Hamas to reach a cease-fire. 

In excerpts published Tuesday by The Washington Post, where he is an associate editor, Woodward lays out damning details and actions by Trump, who the writer says has retained a personal relationship with Putin even as Trump campaigns for another presidential term and the Russian president conducts a war against Ukraine, a U.S. ally. 

With the coronavirus ravaging the world in 2020, Trump sent a batch of test kits to his counterpart in Moscow. Putin accepted the supplies but sought to avoid political fallout for Trump, urging that he not reveal the dispatch of medical equipment, this book says. 

According to Woodward, Putin told Trump: “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me.” 

Woodward also cites an unnamed Trump aide in the book who indicated the Republican flag bearer may have spoken to Putin up to seven times since leaving the White House in 2021.  

The Post, reporting Woodward’s account, said that at one point in early 2024, Trump ordered an aide out of his office in his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida so he could hold a private call with Putin. 

War is set for publication on Oct. 15, just three weeks before a critical U.S. election in which Trump is locked in a tight race against Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee. 

While Harris does make appearances in the book, she is seen in a supporting role to Biden “and hardly determining foreign policy herself,” the Post reported. 

Woodward has chronicled American presidencies for 50 years, and this is his fourth book since Trump’s upset victory in 2016. He began his presidential reportages with Richard Nixon, who was undone by the 1970s Watergate scandal exposed by Woodward and Post colleague Carl Bernstein. 

Woodward concluded that Trump’s interactions, detailed in the book, with an authoritarian president at war with a U.S. ally make him more unfit to be president than Nixon. 

“Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history and is demonstrating the very same character as a presidential candidate in 2024,” Woodward wrote. 

The Trump campaign blasted the book as “trash” and “made up stories.” 

They are “the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” campaign communications director Steven Cheung told AFP. 

According to CNN, which obtained a pre-release book copy, Woodward repeatedly quotes Biden dropping F bombs as he discusses his personal and political challenges. 

Biden called Putin “the epitome of evil,” blasted Netanyahu as a “liar” and said he “should never have picked” Merrick Garland as U.S. attorney general. 

According to the book, during an April phone call Biden turned testy with Netanyahu. 

“What’s your strategy, man?” Biden asked the Israeli leader, according to Woodward. 

“We have to go into Rafah,” Netanyahu said, referring to a city in southern Gaza. 

“Bibi, you’ve got no strategy,” Biden responded.
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State Department — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to visit Vientiane, Laos, later this week for meetings with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, where he is expected to engage directly with newly elected leaders from the Indo-Pacific.

Blinken will represent President Joe Biden at this year’s ASEAN-U.S. Summit and participate in the East Asia Summit, where leaders and senior officials from India, Japan, South Korea, and the People’s Republic of China are also expected to attend.

This week’s ASEAN summits will feature the debut of Paetongtarn Shinawatra, 38, who became Thailand’s prime minister in mid-August. She will make her first bilateral visit to Laos on Tuesday and will be the youngest Southeast Asian leader at the summit.

Singapore has also seen a generational shift with Lawrence Wong succeeding longtime Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in May.

Japan’s new Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba took office on October 1. He has pledged to strengthen his country’s alliance with the U.S. during a call with President Biden last Wednesday.

“I am grateful for the prime minister’s commitment to the U.S.-Japan Alliance and look forward to working with his government to reinforce the enduring partnership between our two nations,” Blinken said in a statement last week.

Ishiba is also in discussions with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol about holding a meeting on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit.

Regional security, development and trade — including the creation of resilient semiconductor supply chains — are expected to be top priorities on the U.S. agenda.

In 2023, total two-way merchandise trade between the United States and ASEAN reached $395.9 billion, making the U.S. the second-largest trading partner after China. Additionally, the U.S. is ASEAN’s largest source of foreign direct investment, which amounted to $74.3 billion last year.

Susannah Patton, director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Sydney-based think tank Lowy Institute, said that this year’s East Asia Summit must address contentious global issues such as the conflict in the Middle East and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The East Asia Summit comprises ASEAN’s 10 member countries and eight major dialogue partners, including the United States, China typically represented by Premier Li Qiang, and Russia represented by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

In a recent analysis published by the Lowy Institute, Patton noted that it is likely that the “ASEAN show will come to Laos and then roll on again,” adding that “concrete progress on pressing issues will be sorely lacking.”

“While the EAS is still likely to issue at least one jointly negotiated statement in 2024,” Patton wrote, “it is a reflection of global political polarization that ASEAN’s dialogue partners are no longer able to propose their own dueling statements to advance their preferred language on international issues.”
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STOCKHOLM — Two pioneers of artificial intelligence — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live but also creates new threats to humanity, one of the winners said.

Hinton, who is known as the “godfather of artificial intelligence,” is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto. Hopfield is an American working at Princeton.

“This year’s two Nobel Laureates in physics have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning,” the Nobel committee said in a press release.

Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the two laureates “used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets.”

She said that such networks have been used to advance research in physics and “have also become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation.”

Hinton predicted that AI will end up having a “huge influence” on civilization, bringing improvements in productivity and health care.

“It would be comparable with the Industrial Revolution,” he said in the open call with reporters and the officials from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

“Instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability. We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us. And it’s going to be wonderful in many respects,” Hinton said. “But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”

The Nobel committee that honored the science behind machine learning and AI also mentioned fears about its possible flipside. Moon said that while it has “enormous benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future. Collectively, humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way for the greatest benefit of humankind.”

Hinton shares those concerns. He quit a role at Google so he could more freely speak about the dangers of the technology he helped create.

On Tuesday, he said he was shocked at the honor.

“I’m flabbergasted. I had, no idea this would happen,” he said when reached by the Nobel committee on the phone.

There was no immediate reaction from Hopfield.

Hinton, now 76, in the 1980s helped develop a technique known as backpropagation that has been instrumental in training machines how to “learn.”

His team at the University of Toronto later wowed peers by using a neural network to win the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition in 2012. That win spawned a flurry of copycats, giving birth to the rise of modern AI.

Hopfield, 91, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Nobel committee said.

Hinton used Hopfield’s network as the foundation for a new network that uses a different method, known as the Boltzmann machine, that the committee said can learn to recognize characteristic elements in a given type of data.

Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize for their discovery of tiny bits of genetic material that serve as on and off switches inside cells that help control what the cells do and when they do it. If scientists can better understand how they work and how to manipulate them, it could one day lead to powerful treatments for diseases like cancer.

The physics prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

Nobel announcements continue with the chemistry physics prize on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.
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FORT MYERS BEACH, Fla. — Florida’s Gulf Coast braced Tuesday for the impact of Hurricane Milton’s near-record winds and expected massive storm surge, which could bring destruction to areas already reeling from Helene’s devastation 12 days ago and still recovering from Ian’s wrath two years ago.

Almost the entirety of Florida’s west coast was under a hurricane warning early Tuesday as the Category 5 storm and its 265 kph winds crept toward the state at 14 kph, sucking energy from the Gulf of Mexico’s warm water. The strongest Atlantic hurricane on record is 1980’s Allen, which reached wind speeds of 306 kph as it moved through the Caribbean and Gulf before striking Texas and Mexico.

Milton’s center could come ashore Wednesday in the Tampa Bay region, which has not endured a direct hit by a major hurricane in more than a century. Scientists expect the system to weaken slightly before landfall, though it could retain hurricane strength as it churns across central Florida toward the Atlantic Ocean. That would largely spare other states ravaged by Helene, which killed at least 230 people on its path from Florida to the Appalachian Mountains.

Tampa Bay has not been hit directly by a major hurricane since 1921, and authorities fear luck is about to run out for the region and its 3.3 million residents. President Joe Biden approved an emergency declaration for Florida, and U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor said 7,000 federal workers were mobilized to help in one of the largest mobilizations of federal personnel in history.

“This is the real deal here with Milton,” Tampa Mayor Jane Castor told a Monday news conference. “If you want to take on Mother Nature, she wins 100% of the time.”

The Tampa Bay area is still rebounding from Helene and its powerful surge — a wall of water up to 2.4 meters it created even though its eye was 160 kilometers offshore. Twelve people died there, with the worst damage along a string of barrier islands from St. Petersburg to Clearwater.

Forecasters warned that Milton could bring a possible 2.4- to 3.6-meter storm surge, leading to evacuation orders being issued for beach communities all along the Gulf coast. In Florida, that means anyone who stays is on their own and first responders are not expected to risk their lives to rescue them at the height of the storm.

Stragglers were a problem during Helene and 2022’s Ian. Many residents failed to heed ample warnings, saying they evacuated during previous storms only to have major surges not materialize. But there was evidence Monday that people were getting out before Milton arrives.

A steady stream of vehicles headed north toward the Florida Panhandle on Interstate 75, the main highway on the west side of the peninsula, as residents heeded evacuation orders. Traffic clogged the southbound lanes of the highway for miles as other residents headed for the relative safety of Fort Lauderdale and Miami on the other side of the state.

About 240 kilometers south of Tampa, Fort Myers Beach was nearly a ghost town by Monday afternoon as an evacuation order took effect. Ian devastated the 5,000-resident community two years ago, its 4.5-meter storm surge destroying or severely damaging 400 homes and businesses. Fourteen people died there as they tried to ride out the storm, and dozens had to be rescued.

On Monday, the few residents who could be found were racing against the clock to safeguard their buildings and belongings. None said they were staying.

The signs of Ian’s devastation remain visible everywhere. Rebuilt homes stand next to others in various states of construction. There are numerous vacant lots, which were once rare.

“This whole street used to be filled out with houses,” said Mike Sandell, owner of Pool-Rific Services. His workers were removing and storing pumps and heaters Monday from his clients’ pools so they wouldn’t get destroyed.

Home construction supplies like bricks, piping and even workers’ outhouses lined the streets, potential projectiles that could do further damage if a surge hits.

At the beach Monday afternoon, workers busily emptied the triple-wide trailer that houses The Goodz, a combined hardware, convenience, fishing supply, ice cream and beach goods store. Owner Graham Belger said he moved his “Your Island Everything Store” into the trailer after Ian destroyed his permanent building across the street.

“We’ll rebuild, but it is going to be bad,” he said.

Nearby, Don Girard and his son Dominic worked to batten down the family’s three-story combination rental and vacation home that’s about 30.5 meters from the water. It’s first-floor garage and entranceway were flooded by Helene last month, Hurricane Debby in August, and a tide brought by a recent supermoon.

Ian was by far the worst. Its waves crashed into the 14-year-old home’s second floor, destroying the flooring. Girard repaired the damage, and his aqua-blue and white home stands in contrast to the older, single-story house across the street. It was submerged by Ian, never repaired and remains vacant. Its once-off-white walls are now tinged with brown. Plywood covers the holes that once contained windows and doors.

Girard, who owns a banner and flag company in Texas, said that while his feelings about owning his home are mostly positive, they are becoming mixed. He said every December, his extended family gathers there for the holidays. At that time of year, temperatures in southwest Florida are usually in the low 20s Celsius with little rain or humidity. The area and its beaches fill with tourists.

“At Christmas, there is no better place in the world,” Girard said.

But flooding from Ian, the other storms and now Milton is leaving him frustrated.

“It’s been difficult, I’m not going to lie to you,” Girard said. “The last couple years have been pretty bad.”
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WASHINGTON — American voters are likely about to be swamped by a flood of misinformation and influence campaigns engineered by U.S. adversaries aiming, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials, to sway the results of the upcoming presidential election and cast doubt on the process itself.

The latest assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, issued Monday, comes just 29 days before the November 5 election that will see U.S. voters choose the country’s next president and cast ballots in hundreds of other state and local races. 

“We’ve continued to see actors ramp up their activities as we get closer to Election Day,” said a senior U.S. intelligence official, briefing reporters on the condition of anonymity.

“They recognize that individuals are already voting, and operations can have a greater impact as we get closer to Election Day,” the official said, noting that the election itself may just be a starting point.

“The intelligence community expects foreign influence actors to continue their campaigns by calling into question the validity of the election results after the polls close,” the official added.

A second U.S. intelligence official warned the pace of such influence efforts, especially those targeting specific races or political campaigns, has also picked up.

“We have had more than a threefold increase,” the official said, explaining that the number of private briefings to candidates and campaigns has likewise jumped.

Intelligence agencies also cautioned that U.S. adversaries will likely seize upon the damage done by Hurricane Helene and potential damage from Hurricane Milton as it strengthens off the U.S. coastline to further amplify and manufacture narratives meant to undermine confidence in the election results.

“It does take time for those types of narratives to be formed and put out into the wild, so to speak,” the first intelligence official said. “But we certainly expect foreign countries to take advantage of such situations and promote further divisive rhetoric.”

Monday’s assessment follows a series of earlier public warnings about foreign efforts to meddle in the U.S. election.

U.S. officials said Monday that Russia, Iran and China continue to be responsible for most of the influence efforts targeting U.S. voters.

And, they said, there have been no indications that any of those countries have changed their goals. 

Russia, they said, continues to run influence campaigns aimed at boosting the chances of former U.S. President and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, while seeking to hurt the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.

Iran’s efforts remain focused on helping Harris by hurting Trump, they said, pointing to the ongoing hack-and-leak operation against the Trump campaign, which has been traced to three operatives working for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Targeting state, local races

U.S. intelligence agencies assess that China has yet to wade into the U.S. presidential campaign, focusing instead on persuading American voters to reject state and local candidates perceived as detrimental to Beijing’s interests, especially those voicing support for Taiwan. 

But the latest public assessment pointed to some changes.

U.S. intelligence officials on Monday warned that Russia and Cuba have joined China, in targeting congressional, state and local races.

“Moscow is leveraging a wide range of influence actors in an effort to influence congressional races, particularly to encourage the U.S. public to oppose pro-Ukraine policies and politicians,” the intelligence official said.

“Havana almost certainly has considered influence efforts targeting some candidates,” the official added. “This is consistent with what they’ve done in past cycles.”

Russia, China and Iran have all rejected previous U.S. accusations of election meddling. Russia, Iran and Cuba have yet to respond to requests from VOA for comment on the latest U.S. findings.

China late Monday again dismissed the U.S. concerns.

“China is not interested in the U.S. congressional election, and we have no intention and will not interfere in it,” Liu Pengyu, the spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, told VOA in an email.

“Some U.S. congressmen stick to their wrong positions on the Taiwan question,” Liu added. “China firmly defends its national sovereignty and territorial integrity, but this does not lead to the conclusion that China has interfered in the congressional elections.”

But the U.S. intelligence assessments align with concerns voiced by some lawmakers and private technology companies.

“The 48 hours after the polls close, especially if we have as close an election as we anticipate, could be equally if not more significant in terms of spreading false information, disinformation and literally undermining the tenets of our democracy,” Mark Warner, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said during a hearing last month.

‘Vigorous activity’ 

Microsoft President Brad Smith, who has warned that the most perilous moments could come in the 48 hours before the U.S. election, separately said the increase in malign cyber efforts by Russia and Iran, especially, is undeniable.

“We’re seeing vigorous activity,” Smith told a cyber conference last month. “We’re seeing the Iranians really target the Republican Party in the Trump campaign,” he said. “We’re seeing the Russians target the Democratic Party and now the Harris campaign.”

And it is unclear what impact the U.S. has made with its attempts to counter the growing number of foreign influence efforts.

Last month, the U.S. Justice Department seized 32 internet domains used by companies linked to Moscow to spread disinformation. At the same time, the department indicted employees of the state-controlled media outlet RT in connection with a plot to launder Russian propaganda through a U.S.-based media company.

U.S. intelligence officials on Monday, however, said such tactics are no longer unique to the Kremlin. 

“Foreign influence actors are getting better at hiding their hand and using Americans to do it,” said one of the U.S. intelligence officials. “Foreign countries calculate that Americans are more likely to believe other Americans compared to content with clear signs of foreign propaganda.”

Arizona Democratic Senator Mark Kelly told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that social media is rife with fake personas generated by U.S. adversaries.

“If you’re looking at stuff on Twitter, on TikTok, on Facebook, on Instagram, and it’s political in nature … there is a very reasonable chance — I would put it in the 20 to 30% range — that the content you are seeing, the comments you are seeing, are coming from one of those three countries: Russia, Iran, China,” he said. “It’s not going to stop on November 5.”
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savannah, georgia — The Georgia Supreme Court on Monday halted a ruling striking down the state’s near-ban on abortions while it considers the state’s appeal.

The high court’s order came a week after a judge found that Georgia unconstitutionally prohibits abortions beyond about six weeks of pregnancy, often before women realize they’re pregnant. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ruled Sept. 30 that privacy rights under Georgia’s state constitution include the right to make personal health care decisions.

It was one of a wave of restrictive abortion laws passed in Republican-controlled states after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and ended a national right to abortion. It prohibited most abortions once a “detectable human heartbeat” was present. At around six weeks into a pregnancy, cardiac activity can be detected by ultrasound in an embryo’s cells that will eventually become the heart.

Republican Governor Brian Kemp signed it in 2019, but it didn’t take effect until Roe v. Wade fell.

McBurney wrote in his ruling that “liberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.”

“When a fetus growing inside a woman reaches viability, when society can assume care and responsibility for that separate life, then — and only then — may society intervene,” McBurney wrote.

The judge’s decision rolled back abortion limits in Georgia to a prior law allowing abortions until viability, roughly 22 to 24 weeks into a pregnancy.

“Once again, the will of Georgians and their representatives has been overruled by the personal beliefs of one judge,” Kemp said in a statement in response to McBurney’s decision. “Protecting the lives of the most vulnerable among us is one of our most sacred responsibilities, and Georgia will continue to be a place where we fight for the lives of the unborn.”

Abortion providers and advocates in Georgia had applauded McBurney’s ruling but expressed concern that it would soon be overturned.
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WASHINGTON — The United States on Monday imposed sanctions on an international Hamas fundraising network, accusing it of playing a critical role in external fundraising for the Palestinian militant group, in action marking the first anniversary of the Gaza war. 

The U.S. Treasury Department in a statement said it imposed sanctions on three people and what it called a “sham charity” that it accused of being prominent international financial supporters of Hamas, as well as on the Al-Intaj Bank in Gaza that it said was controlled by the group. 

Also targeted was a longstanding Hamas supporter, a Yemeni national living in Turkey, and nine of his businesses, Treasury said. 

“As we mark one year since Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack, Treasury will continue relentlessly degrading the ability of Hamas and other destabilizing Iranian proxies to finance their operations and carry out additional violent acts,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in the statement. 

“The Treasury Department will use all available tools at our disposal to hold Hamas and its enablers accountable, including those who seek to exploit the situation to secure additional sources of revenue.” 

In their rampage through Israeli towns and kibbutz villages near the Gaza border a year ago, Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli figures. 

The huge Israeli security lapse led to the single deadliest day for Jews since the Nazi Holocaust, shattered many citizens’ sense of security and sent their faith in its leaders to new lows. 

The Hamas assault unleashed an Israeli offensive on Gaza that has largely flattened the densely populated enclave and killed almost 42,000 people, Palestinian health authorities say. 

The Treasury on Monday said: “Hamas has exploited the suffering in Gaza to solicit funds through sham and front charities that falsely claim to help civilians in Gaza,” adding that as of early this year, the group may have received as much as $10 million a month through such donations. The Treasury said Hamas considers Europe to be a key source of fundraising. 

Monday’s action targeted an Italy-based Hamas member the Treasury said established the sham Charity Association of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, which it accused of helping bankroll Hamas’ military wing. 

Also targeted was a senior Hamas representative in Germany and a Hamas representative in charge of the group’s activity in Austria. 

Hamas is a U.S. designated terrorist group.
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On Mexico’s northern border, migrants awaiting entry to the United States have found an unexpected source of solace: cultivating their own food. In this report, narrated by Veronica Villafañe, César Contreras shows how a community garden in Ciudad Juárez is sowing seeds of hope.
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With less than a month to go until the U.S. presidential election, the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees have a busy week ahead. Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are both scheduled to continue rallying supporters in key states, amid warnings that the rhetoric is becoming more inflammatory. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias reports.
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Los Angeles — For more than two decades, the low rent on Marina Maalouf’s apartment in a blocky affordable housing development in Los Angeles’ Chinatown was a saving grace for her family, including a granddaughter who has autism.

But that grace had an expiration date. For Maalouf and her family it arrived in 2020.

The landlord, no longer legally obligated to keep the building affordable, hiked rent from $1,100 to $2,660 in 2021 — out of reach for Maalouf and her family. Maalouf’s nights are haunted by fears her yearslong eviction battle will end in sleeping bags on a friend’s floor or worse.

While Americans continue to struggle under unrelentingly high rents, as many as 223,0000 affordable housing units like Maalouf’s across the U.S. could be yanked out from under them in the next five years alone.

It leaves low-income tenants caught facing protracted eviction battles, scrambling to pay a two-fold rent increase or more, or shunted back into a housing market where costs can easily eat half a paycheck.

Those affordable housing units were built with the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, or LIHTC, a federal program established in 1986 that provides tax credits to developers in exchange for keeping rents low. It has pumped out 3.6 million units since then and boasts over half of all federally supported low-income housing nationwide.

“It’s the lifeblood of affordable housing development,” said Brian Rossbert, who runs Housing Colorado, an organization advocating for affordable homes.

That lifeblood isn’t strictly red or blue. By combining social benefits with tax breaks and private ownership, LIHTC has enjoyed bipartisan support. Its expansion is now central to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ housing plan to build 3 million new homes.

The catch? The buildings typically only need to be kept affordable for a minimum of 30 years. For the wave of LIHTC construction in the 1990s, those deadlines are arriving now, threatening to hemorrhage affordable housing supply when Americans need it most.

“If we are losing the homes that are currently affordable and available to households, then we’re losing ground on the crisis,” said Sarah Saadian, vice president of public policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

“It’s sort of like having a boat with a hole at the bottom,” she said.

Not all units that expire out of LIHTC become market rate. Some are kept affordable by other government subsidies, by merciful landlords or by states, including California, Colorado and New York, that have worked to keep them low-cost by relying on several levers.

Local governments and nonprofits can purchase expiring apartments, new tax credits can be applied that extend the affordability, or, as in Maalouf’s case, tenants can organize to try to force action from landlords and city officials.

Those options face challenges. While new tax credits can reup a lapsing LIHTC property, they are limited, doled out to states by the Internal Revenue Service based on population. It’s also a tall order for local governments and nonprofits to shell out enough money to purchase and keep expiring developments affordable. And there is little aggregated data on exactly when LIHTC units will lose their affordability, making it difficult for policymakers and activists to fully prepare.

There also is less of a political incentive to preserve the units.

“Politically, you’re rewarded for an announcement, a groundbreaking, a ribbon-cutting,” said Vicki Been, a New York University professor who previously was New York City’s deputy mayor for housing and economic development.

“You’re not rewarded for being a good manager of your assets and keeping track of everything and making sure that you’re not losing a single affordable housing unit,” she said.

Maalouf stood in her apartment courtyard on a recent warm day, chit-chatting and waving to neighbors, a bracelet with a photo of Che Guevarra dangling from her arm.

“Friendly,” is how Maalouf described her previous self, but not assertive. That is until the rent hikes pushed her in front of the Los Angeles City Council for the first time, sweat beading as she fought for her home.

Now an organizer with the LA Tenants’ Union, Maalouf isn’t afraid to speak up, but the angst over her home still keeps her up at night. Mornings she repeats a mantra: “We still here. We still here.” But fighting day after day to make it true is exhausting.

Maalouf’s apartment was built before California made LIHTC contracts last 55 years instead of 30 in 1996. About 5,700 LIHTC units built around the time of Maalouf’s are expiring in the next decade. In Texas, it’s 21,000 units.

When California Treasurer Fiona Ma assumed office in 2019, she steered the program toward developers committed to affordable housing and not what she called “churn and burn,” buying up LIHTC properties and flipping them onto the market as soon as possible.

In California, landlords must notify state and local governments and tenants before their building expires. Housing organizations, nonprofits, and state or local governments then have first shot at buying the property to keep it affordable. Expiring developments also are prioritized for new tax credits, and the state essentially requires that all LIHTC applicants have experience owning and managing affordable housing.

“It kind of weeded out people who weren’t interested in affordable housing long term,” said Marina Wiant, executive director of California’s tax credit allocation committee.

But unlike California, some states haven’t extended LIHTC agreements beyond 30 years, let alone taken other measures to keep expiring housing affordable.

Colorado, which has some 80,000 LIHTC units, passed a law this year giving local governments the right of first refusal in hopes of preserving 4,400 units set to lose affordability protections in the next six years. The law also requires landlords to give local and state governments a two-year heads-up before expiration.

Still, local governments or nonprofits scraping together the funds to buy sizeable apartment buildings is far from a guarantee.

Stories like Maalouf’s will keep playing out as LIHTC units turn over, threatening to send families with meager means back into the housing market. The median income of Americans living in these units was just $18,600 in 2021, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

“This is like a math problem,” said Rossbert of Housing Colorado. “As soon as one of these units expires and converts to market rate and a household is displaced, they become a part of the need that’s driving the need for new construction.”

“It’s hard to get out of that cycle,” he said.

Colorado’s housing agency works with groups across the state on preservation and has a fund to help. Still, it’s unclear how many LIHTC units can be saved, in Colorado or across the country.

It’s even hard to know how many units nationwide are expiring. An accurate accounting would require sorting through the constellation of municipal, state and federal subsidies, each with their own affordability requirements and end dates.

That can throw a wrench into policymakers’ and advocates’ ability to fully understand where and when many units will lose affordability, and then funnel resources to the right places, said Kelly McElwain, who manages and oversees the National Housing Preservation Database. It’s the most comprehensive aggregation of LIHTC data nationally, but with all the gaps, it remains a rough estimate.

There also are fears that if states publicize their expiring LIHTC units, for-profit buyers without an interest in keeping them affordable would pounce.

“It’s sort of this Catch-22 of trying to both understand the problem and not put out a big for-sale sign in front of a property right before its expiration,” Rossbert said.

Meanwhile, Maalouf’s tenant activism has helped move the needle in Los Angeles. The city has offered the landlord $15 million to keep her building affordable through 2034, but that deal wouldn’t get rid of over 30 eviction cases still proceeding, including Maalouf’s, or the $25,000 in back rent she owes.

In her courtyard, Maalouf’s granddaughter, Rubie Caceres, shuffled up with a glass of water. She is 5 years old, but with special needs, her speech is more disconnected words than sentences.

“That’s why I’ve been hoping everything becomes normal again, and she can be safe,” said Maalouf, her voice shaking with emotion. She has urged her son to start saving money for the worst.

“We’ll keep fighting,” she said, “but day by day it’s hard.”
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NEW YORK — For years, the Grammy Awards have been criticized over a lack of diversity — artists of color and women left out of top prizes; rap and contemporary R&B stars ignored — a reflection of the Recording Academy’s electorate. An evolving voting body, 66% of whom have joined in the last five years, is working to remedy that.

At last year’s awards, women dominated the major categories; every televised competitive Grammy went to at least one woman. It stems from a commitment the Recording Academy made five years ago: In 2019, the Academy announced it would add 2,500 women to its voting body by 2025. Under the Grammys’ new membership model, the Recording Academy has surpassed that figure ahead of the deadline: More than 3,000 female voting members have been added, it announced Thursday.

“It’s definitely something that we’re all very proud of,” Harvey Mason jr., academy president and CEO, told The Associated Press. “It tells me that we were severely underrepresented in that area.”

Reform at the Record Academy dates back to the creation of a task force focused on inclusion and diversity after a previous CEO, Neil Portnow, made comments belittling women at the height of the #MeToo movement.

Since 2019, approximately 8,700 new members have been added to the voting body. In total, there are now more than 16,000 members and more than 13,000 of them are voting members, up from about 14,000 in 2023 (11,000 of which were voting members). In that time, the academy has increased its number of members who identify as people of color by 63%.

“It’s not an all-new voting body,” Mason assures. “We’re very specific and intentional in who we asked to be a part of our academy by listening and learning from different genres and different groups that felt like they were being overlooked, or they weren’t being heard.”

Mason says that in the last five years, the Recording Academy has “requalified 100% of our members, which is a huge step.” There are voters who have let their membership lapse — and those who no longer qualify to be a voting member have been removed.

There have been renewal review processes in the past, but under the current model, becoming a voting member requires proof of a primary career in music, two recommendations from industry peers and 12 credits in a single creative profession, at least five of which must be from the last five years.

Comparisons might be made to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which announced in 2016 that it would restrict Oscars voting privileges to active members — ineligible parties included those who haven’t worked in three decades since joining the Academy, unless they themselves are nominated — as a response to #OscarsSoWhite criticisms of its lack of diversity. As a result, some members protested that the new measures unjustly scapegoated older academy members. The film academy has also grown its membership, adding more women and people from underrepresented racial and ethnic communities.

The Recording Academy sought to increase its voting body by reaching out to different, underrepresented communities, says Mason. “Let’s take the time to understand why those people aren’t engaging with us, figure out how we can fix that,” he said. “And once we fixed it, then let’s invite them or ask them if they would like to be a part of our organization. So, it was a multi-step process.”

Since 2019, the Recording Academy has also seen growth in voters across different racial backgrounds: 100% growth in AAPI voters, 90% growth in Black voters and 43% growth in Latino voters.

Still, Mason sees room to grow. Of the current voting membership, 66% are men, 49% are white and 66% are over the age of 40.

“Going forward, we’re going to continue the work. We’re going to continue to grow,” he says.

That might not look like a public commitment to a specific figure, but Mason promises “that our goals will be to be the most relevant, the most reflective, the most accurately representative of the music community that is humanly possible.” 
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