The Supreme Court is deciding whether women will face restrictions in getting a drug used in the most common method of abortion in the United States, while a lawsuit continues.

The justices are expected to issue an order on Wednesday in a fast-moving case from Texas in which abortion opponents are seeking to roll back Food and Drug Administration approval of the drug, mifepristone.

The drug first won FDA approval in 2000, and conditions on its use have been loosened in recent years, including making it available by mail in states that allow access.

The Biden administration and New York-based Danco Laboratories, the maker of the drug, want the nation’s highest court to reject limits on mifepristone’s use imposed by lower courts, at least as long as the legal case makes it way through the courts. They say women who want the drug and providers who dispense it will face chaos if limits on the drug take effect. Depending on what the justices decide, that could include requiring women to take a higher dosage of the drug than the FDA says is necessary.

Alliance Defending Freedom, representing anti-abortion doctors and medical groups in a challenge to the drug, is defending the rulings in calling on the Supreme Court to let the restrictions take effect now.

The legal fight over abortion comes less than a year after conservative justices reversed Roe v. Wade and allowed more than a dozen states to effectively ban abortion outright.

Even as the abortion landscape changed dramatically in several states, abortion opponents set their sights on medication abortions, which make up more than half of all abortions in the United States.

The abortion opponents filed suit in November in Amarillo, Texas. The legal challenge quickly reached the Supreme Court after a federal judge issued a ruling on April 7 that would revoke FDA approval of mifepristone, one of two drugs used in medication abortions.

Less than a week later, a federal appeals court modified the ruling so that mifepristone would remain available while the case continues, but with limits. The appeals court said that the drug can’t be mailed or dispensed as a generic and that patients who seek it need to make three in-person visits with a doctor, among other things.

The generic version of mifepristone makes up two-thirds of the supply in the United States, its manufacturer, Las Vegas-based GenBioPro Inc., wrote in a court filing that underscored the perils of allowing the restrictions to be put into effect.

The court also said the drug should only be approved through seven weeks of pregnancy for now, even though the FDA since 2016 has endorsed its use through 10 weeks of pregnancy.

Complicating the situation, a federal judge in Washington has ordered the FDA to preserve access to mifepristone under the current rules in 17 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia that filed a separate lawsuit.

The Biden administration has said the rulings conflict and create an untenable situation for the FDA.

In an order issued last Friday by Justice Samuel Alito, the court put the restrictions on hold through Wednesday to give the court time to consider the emergency appeal.

If the justices aren’t inclined to block the ruling from taking effect for now, the Democratic administration and Danco have a fallback argument, asking the court to take up the challenge to mifepristone, hear arguments and decide the case by early summer.

The court only rarely takes such a step before at least one appeals court has thoroughly examined the legal issues involved.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans already has ordered an accelerated schedule for hearing the case, with arguments set for May 17.

Mifepristone has been available for use in medication abortions in the United States since the FDA granted approval in 2000. Since then, more than 5 million women have used it, along with another drug, misoprostol, to induce abortions.
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The truth about American cities: Despite popular belief, they are much less violent than they were just a couple of years ago.

Violence has dropped across dozens of cities after a surge of shootings, murders and burglaries triggered by the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic.

Consider New York, the nation’s largest city and something of a gauge for crime trends in other big cities.

The city witnessed a staggering 50% increase in homicides in 2020 and 2021. But last year, they fell by 11% to 433, and so far this year, they’ve dropped another 7% to 113, according to city police data.

Although the city’s murder rate remains above its pre-pandemic level, it is far lower than the early 1990s when it recorded more than 2,200 murder victims, said David Kennedy, a criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

“The popular perception that New York City is distinctively dangerous is simply not correct,” Kennedy said in an interview. “It’s far safer than many, many, many other places in the United States.”

Yet most people don’t take a long view of crime trends, noted Eddie Garcia, chief of the Dallas Police Department and president of the Major Cities Chiefs Association. 

“They don’t care where we were 25 to 30 years ago,” Garcia said. “They care where we are today. And certainly, violence has been rising for the last three to five years.”

Tapping into that fear, House Republicans traveled to New York on Monday for a hearing focused on “violent crime and lawlessness in the city.”

Accusing Manhattan’s top prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, of letting criminals off the hook, Jim Jordan, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, cited 2022 data showing rising felony assaults, robberies, burglaries and auto thefts.

“Imagine that — you leave criminals on the street, you get more crime,” Jordan said.

Left unmentioned were homicides, which have fallen in New York over the past year, making it one of the safest big cities in the country.

“It is simply a fact that New York City is dramatically safer than it used to be,” Kennedy said.

New York’s fewer homicides reflects a national trend.

Consulting firm AH Datalytics reports a nearly 10% fall in homicides in more than 70 cities this year.

The list includes cities that have struggled with violent crime in recent years: Baltimore, Houston, Los Angeles and Philadelphia.

Even Chicago, the nation’s “murder capital” last year, has slashed homicides by 17% through April 9.

But some cities buck the trend. Homicides are up in 25 cities tracked by AH Datalytics, such as Washington, Dallas and Kansas City.

“There is no single story about all major U.S. cities,” Kennedy said. “Except in the broadest terms, individual cities are often on very separate tracks.”

Garcia acknowledged that gun crime remains a challenge in his city, where homicides have spiked by 20% this year after a decline in 2022.

But gun-related aggravated assault, a better gauge of violent crime, is down in Dallas, Garcia said.

“Although one life is too many — we don’t want to lose lives — what would worry me would be if our gun-related aggravated assaults were rising,” Garcia said in an interview with VOA.

Under Garcia, Dallas has launched a new, data-driven crime plan focused on reducing violent incidents.

The plan is paying dividends, he said.

“We’ve had the least amount of violent incidents in the city of Dallas, more than we’ve had in five years,” he said.

Why crime falls in one city but not another is often hard to pin down with precision. But over the long run, most cities converge on a national trend, said Richard Rosenfeld, an emeritus professor of criminology at the University of Missouri.

That has fueled hope among some criminologists that U.S. cities may have turned a corner and may resume a decades-long downtrend in crime rates.

But Rosenfeld cautioned that the country is not out of the woods yet. Most U.S. cities still have higher homicide rates than before the pandemic, he said.

The pandemic delivered a shock to homicide rates by changing conditions in every sector of society, he said.

“But the undoing of the conditions of the pandemic has taken a far longer period of time than the abrupt changes that occurred when the pandemic first took place,” Rosenfeld said.

Among other disruptions, the pandemic unleashed a wave of unemployment and record inflation that wreaked havoc on society.

“Assuming that those conditions continue to … moderate, we should not see big spikes and homicide in the immediate future,” Rosenfeld said.

But crime ravages poor, mostly Black neighborhoods. And even if the overall violent crime rates drop, it will mean nothing to the people most vulnerable: young Black men.

“And the focus should be on that reality and not trying to read tea leaves about what’s going to happen in the next six months,” Kennedy said.

Republicans meeting in Manhattan on Monday blasted the city’s top prosecutor, saying he was coddling criminals instead of protecting victims.

Garcia said he agreed that “the lack of accountability has played a role in violence in this country.”

“I can tell you there have been irresponsible decisions made by judges allowing individuals back out on the street after they’ve admitted gun crime,” Garcia said.

“We don’t get to say we’re serious about gun crime in this country when I have men and women who sacrificed their lives to take criminal elements off the street … only to see those individuals back out on the street in a matter of days or weeks,” he said.
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During Ramadan, an Islamic community in California is raising awareness about domestic violence. For VOA, Genia Dulot brings us the story of a domestic violence shelter for Muslim immigrants in San Diego.
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A leaked U.S. military assessment says the Chinese military may soon deploy a high-altitude spy drone that travels at least three times the speed of sound, the Washington Post reported late on Tuesday. 

The newspaper cited a secret document from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. 

The document, which Reuters could not confirm or verify independently, features satellite imagery dated August 9 that shows two WZ-8 rocket-propelled reconnaissance drones at an air base in eastern China, about 350 miles (560km) inland from Shanghai, according to the newspaper. 

The U.S. assessment said China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had “almost certainly” established its first unmanned aerial vehicle unit at the base, which falls under the Eastern Theater Command, the branch of the Chinese military responsible for enforcing Chinese sovereignty claims over Taiwan, the newspaper reported. 

The U.S. Defense Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Chinese government could not immediately be reached for comment. 

The Washington Post said it obtained the assessment of the program from a trove of images of classified files posted on the Discord messaging app, allegedly by a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, who was arrested last week. 

The FBI on Thursday arrested Jack Douglas Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the U.S. Air National Guard, over the leaks online of classified documents that embarrassed Washington with allies around the world. 

The leaks first became widely known earlier this month, setting Washington on edge about the damage they may have caused. The episode embarrassed the U.S. by revealing its spying on allies and purported Ukrainian military vulnerabilities. 

Taiwan president Tsai Ing-wen’s recent meeting with U.S. House of Representative Kevin McCarthy had upset Beijing. China, which claims democratically ruled Taiwan is one of its provinces, says Taiwan is the single most important and sensitive issue in its relations with the United States. 

Taiwan’s government rejects Beijing’s sovereignty claims. 
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During the Muslim holy month of Ramadan this year, a small town in Virginia, with only a handful of Muslim residents, offered them a rare opportunity to hear the Adhan, or call to prayer. VOA’s Saqib Ul Islam has more from Occoquan, Virginia.
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A Russian court has refused to release U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich from jail while he awaits trial on accusations that he spied on Russia while on a reporting assignment last month. VOA’s Senior Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine reports.
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The United Nations has lodged a formal complaint with the United States over reports that Washington spied on Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and other senior U.N. officials.

“We have now officially expressed to the host country our concern regarding the recent reports that the communications of the secretary-general and other senior U.N. officials have been the subject of surveillance and interference by the U.S. government,” U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters Tuesday.

The reports related to Guterres and the U.N. emerged as part of a trove of highly classified U.S. documents that were leaked and circulated on social media sites for weeks. They included sensitive information about Russia’s war in Ukraine as well as information about U.S. allies, including Israel, Turkey and South Korea.

Dujarric said the U.N. sent a letter Monday evening via the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. He said no reply had been received by Tuesday afternoon.

“We have made it clear that such actions are inconsistent with the obligations of the United States as enumerated in the Charter of the United Nations and the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations,” Dujarric said.

The U.S. government has not commented on the substance of the leaked documents. However, on April 13, Jack Teixeira, the Air National Guard member suspected of leaking the documents, was arrested in connection to the case. He faces two criminal charges: unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information, and unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents.

The BBC first reported last week that Guterres may have been spied on, including his private conversations with Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed. The leaked documents also contained Washington’s concerns that Guterres was too accommodating to Moscow.

The U.N. chief has been working to keep alive a nine-month-old grain deal that allows Ukraine to export its food products through the Black Sea. Moscow has repeatedly complained that benefits it was supposed to receive in exchange have not materialized and is threatening to leave the deal. But Guterres has been very vocal from the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that it is a violation of the U.N. Charter and international law.

“The secretary-general has been at his job for quite some time,” Dujarric said on April 13 when asked about those reports. “He’s been in politics and a public figure for quite some time. So, he’s not surprised, I think, by the fact that people are spying on him and listening on his private conversations. Unfortunately, either for various reasons, it allows such private conversations to be distorted and made public.”

The latest report, published Monday by The Washington Post, recounts Guterres’ anger over a letter from Ethiopia’s foreign minister rejecting the U.N. chief’s plan to visit northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region during a February 2023 trip to Ethiopia to attend the African Union Summit. Guterres did visit Addis Ababa on the trip but did not go to northern Ethiopia.
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China revealed on Tuesday new details of sanctions it previously announced against two U.S. weapons manufacturers, including a ban on Chinese companies doing business with them.

China imposed trade and investment sanctions in February on Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Missiles & Defense, a division of Raytheon Technologies Corp., for supplying weapons to Taiwan, the self-governed island claimed by China.

China’s Ministry of Commerce said in a statement late Tuesday that the sanctions include a ban on exports and imports by the two companies from and to China “to prevent Chinese products from being used in their military business.”

It added that Chinese companies should “strengthen their due diligence and compliance system construction to verify transaction information” and should not knowingly conduct business with the two companies while importing, exporting or transporting products.

It wasn’t clear what immediate impact the penalties might have, but the restrictions on imports and exports could hurt the two companies. The United States bars most sales of weapons-related technology to China, but some military contractors also have civilian businesses in aerospace and other markets.

Last September, Raytheon Missiles and Defense was awarded a $412 million contract to upgrade Taiwanese military radar as part of a $1.1 billion package of U.S. arms sales to the island.

Taiwan buys most of its weapons from the U.S., which is its biggest unofficial ally. In recent years, China has frequently sent fighter jets and warships toward the island, surrounding it at different times in a campaign of military pressure and intimidation.

The sanctions also prohibit the senior executives of both companies from traveling to China or working there. They listed Lockheed Martin CEO James Donald Taiclet, COO Frank Andrew St. John and CFO Jesus Malave, and from Raytheon Missiles & Defense, President Wesley D. Kremer and Vice Presidents Agnes Soeder and Chander Nijhon.
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Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt is calling for the resignation of four state officials after a local newspaper released a secret audio recording in which they appeared to discuss killing journalists and lynching Black people.

“I am both appalled and disheartened to hear of the horrid comments made by officials in McCurtain County,” Stitt said in a statement. “There is no place for such hateful rhetoric in the state of Oklahoma, especially by those that serve to represent the community through their respective office.”

Stitt has called for the immediate resignation of McCurtain County Sheriff Kevin Clardy, District 2 Commissioner Mark Jennings, Investigator Alicia Manning and Jail Administrator Larry Hendrix.

The recording was first detailed by the McCurtain Gazette-News after its publisher left a voice-activated recorder inside the room after a March 6 county commissioner’s meeting.

The journalist was cited in reports saying he did this because he believed the group was continuing to conduct county business after the meeting had ended, which is a violation of the state’s Open Meeting Act.

In the recording, the officials appear to discuss killing journalists and complain about no longer being able to lynch Black people.

“I know where two big deep holes are here if you ever need them,” Jennings said. “I’ve known two or three hit men. They’re very quiet guys,” Jennings later said in the conversation. “And would cut no [expletive] mercy.”

VOA could not independently verify the authenticity of the recording.

The McCurtain County sheriff department told VOA it had no comment.

In the recording, Jennings also appears to complain about not being able to hang Black people, saying, “They got more rights than we got.”

“It’s frightening any time we see those kinds of comments come to light. At the same time, this is just an occasion where they’ve come to light. I don’t think it’s the only time they occur,” said Ted Streuli, executive director of the investigative journalism nonprofit Oklahoma Watch. “It’s critical, in this situation and others, that the perpetrators be held to account.”

Oklahoma City’s KFOR-TV, Channel 4 reported that about 100 McCurtain County residents gathered outside the county commissioners’ office Monday morning to protest the officials’ comments.

At a March 6 commissioners’ meeting, Bruce Willingham, the publisher of the McCurtain Gazette-News, secretly recorded the officials allegedly discussing the killing and burying of reporters, including his son, Chris Willingham.

Earlier this year, Chris Willingham filed a defamation claim against the county and has written multiple stories examining the sheriff’s department’s conduct, according to an article published last weekend in the McCurtain Gazette-News.

Joey Senat, a journalism professor at Oklahoma State University, told the AP the recording would be legal under the state’s law if it were obtained in a place where the officials being recorded did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

“I talked on two different occasions to our attorneys to make sure I wasn’t doing anything illegal,” Bruce Willingham said.

The publisher told AP he believes the local officials were upset about critical stories the newspaper had recently published, including about the death of Bobby Barrick, an Oklahoma man who died at a hospital in March 2022 after McCurtain County deputies shot him with a stun gun.

The newspaper has filed a lawsuit against the sheriff’s office seeking body camera footage and other records related to Barrick’s death.

Mark Thomas, executive vice president of the Oklahoma Press Association, told The Journal Record, a daily Oklahoma newspaper, that these threats underscore how dangerous journalism can be.

“These are serious things that should not be ignored,” Thomas told The Journal Record. “Speaking truth to power has always been dangerous, and you have to always be prepared.”

This conversation comes amid an unusually deadly period for reporters in the United States.

Las Vegas investigative reporter Jeff German was stabbed to death outside his home last September. A former county official is on trial, accused of the killing of German in retaliation for critical coverage. And in February this year, Dylan Lyons, a journalist for Florida’s Spectrum News 13 station, was shot dead while on assignment.

The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker – a database of press freedom incidents in the United States – has also recorded more than 40 chilling statements made against journalists and news outlets since it started in 2017, including from state officials.o Streuli, the implications of this incident extend beyond McCurtain County.

“It’s incredibly disturbing to hear public officials fantasize about killing journalists, not to mention all the other abhorrent remarks they made,” the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s advocacy director, Seth Stern, told VOA. “Although their comments are extreme, they raise questions about how many other public officials across the United States hold similar contempt for the press and how those sentiments influence their actions and policies.”

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists has said it is “disgusted and disturbed” by the audio recordings.

“It is encouraging that authorities are looking into these recordings, and we hope their investigations are swift and transparent. Journalists should never face death threats over their work,” CPJ’s U.S. program coordinator, Katherine Jacobsen, said in a statement.

To Streuli, the implications of this incident extend beyond McCurtain County.

“The thing that bothers me the most about it is the press is the only industry protected by the Constitution,” Streuli said. “And when we see something like this, where we have employees of our government, who are sworn to uphold the Constitution, revealing such hatred toward the press for doing their jobs, I think what’s frightening about that goes well beyond the individual reporters involved.”

Some information in this report came from the AP.
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Billionaire Elon Musk said on Monday he will launch an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that he calls “TruthGPT” to challenge the offerings from Microsoft and Google.

He criticized Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the firm behind chatbot sensation ChatGPT, of “training the AI to lie” and said OpenAI has now become a “closed source,” “for-profit” organization “closely allied with Microsoft.”

He also accused Larry Page, co-founder of Google, of not taking AI safety seriously.

“I’m going to start something which I call ‘TruthGPT’, or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” Musk said in an interview with Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson aired on Monday.

He said TruthGPT “might be the best path to safety” that would be “unlikely to annihilate humans.”

“It’s simply starting late. But I will try to create a third option,” Musk said.

Musk, OpenAI, Microsoft and Page did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

Musk has been poaching AI researchers from Alphabet Inc’s Google to launch a startup to rival OpenAI, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Musk last month registered a firm named X.AI Corp, incorporated in Nevada, according to a state filing. The firm listed Musk as the sole director and Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk’s family office, as a secretary.

‘Civilizational destruction’

The move came even after Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives called for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-4, citing potential risks to society.

Musk also reiterated his warnings about AI during the interview with Carlson, saying “AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production” according to the excerpts.

“It has the potential of civilizational destruction,” he said.

He said, for example, that a super intelligent AI can write incredibly well and potentially manipulate public opinions.

He tweeted over the weekend that he had met with former U.S. President Barack Obama when he was president and told him that Washington needed to “encourage AI regulation.”

Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but he stepped down from the company’s board in 2018. In 2019, he tweeted that he left OpenAI because he had to focus on Tesla and SpaceX.

He also tweeted at that time that other reasons for his departure from OpenAI were, “Tesla was competing for some of the same people as OpenAI & I didn’t agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do.”

Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has also become CEO of Twitter, a social media platform he bought for $44 billion last year.

In the interview with Fox News, Musk said he recently valued Twitter at “less than half” of the acquisition price.

In January, Microsoft Corp announced a further multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, intensifying competition with rival Google and fueling the race to attract AI funding in Silicon Valley.
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The share of Americans who volunteer their time to help charities build houses, serve food, do environmental cleanup, and much else has been on the decline nationwide but nowhere as sharply as in Florida, where only 16% of residents donate their free hours to local organizations, according to the latest available statistics.

That’s a drop from the nearly 23% of residents who volunteered in 2017.

Florida’s volunteer rate slumped in large part because of the pandemic, which made it especially risky for older Americans — who are among the most loyal and regular part of the volunteer population in Florida and elsewhere — to interact in public settings.

The loss of those volunteers is painful for many nonprofits, which are stretched to provide needed services and programs because they face a tight job market for paid workers and increased demands for help.

“What’s happening now is actually the staff is wearing multiple hats, as many nonprofit staff members do, to make up for the gap of volunteers,” says Sabeen Perwaiz Syed, CEO of the Florida Nonprofit Alliance, which represents charitable organizations across the state.

Meanwhile, Wyoming was the only state in the country to chalk up an increase in volunteering. Nearly 40% of residents volunteer, according to the latest figures available, compared with slightly less than 33% in 2017. The growth is in part because its open spaces made it easier for volunteers to keep working safely during the pandemic, and now nonprofits are seeking to capitalize on people’s growing interest in giving their time.

Those figures are part of an AmeriCorps analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data for 2017, 2019, and 2021, the latest year available.

The challenge of finding ways to attract and keep volunteers is not a new issue facing nonprofits, although it has been worsened by the pandemic.

Nathan Dietz, a researcher at the University of Maryland’s Do Good Institute, says charities that didn’t focus on retaining volunteers during the pandemic may find it difficult to get them back.

“There were some organizations who, during the pandemic, they just said, ‘We don’t know how we’re going to do volunteer management or volunteer engagement, and we don’t really have time to figure it out because we have bigger problems,'” Dietz said. “When people disengage from that kind of regular activity, it’s hard to re-engage them even if you’re trying to actively do that.”

Wyoming, known for wide-open spaces, including Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, had fewer restrictions and closings than many states throughout Covid-19. That kept more volunteer opportunities open and minimized disruptions to volunteers’ routines.

The Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation, a conservation nonprofit near Grand Teton National Park, relies on volunteers to collect local wildlife data and remove fencing that’s harmful to animals. The organization says more people wanted to volunteer during the pandemic than in past years.

Steve Morriss, a longtime volunteer with the foundation and other local nonprofits, says volunteer work in the outdoors was especially appealing for retirees like him during the pandemic because it allowed them to socially distance but still interact with others and do good.

The Heart of Wyoming Habitat for Humanity chapter, which relies on volunteers to build homes in Natrona County, saw an uptick in volunteering interest after re-opening its construction sites during the pandemic. Companies that previously provided financial support, in particular, began to give their employees time off to volunteer at Habitat.

The Wyoming Community Development Authority, a housing lender, is one financial supporter whose employees spent two days last year working on a Habitat construction site.

“Now it was no longer enough to make a gift, which we very much appreciate,” says Tess Mittelstadt, the nonprofit’s executive director. “But they wanted to see what that gift meant, and they wanted to see what that meant for people in our community.”

Jody Shields of the Wyoming Nonprofit Network says since the pandemic, she’s noticed increased interest from companies looking for volunteer opportunities because they allow employees both to bond with one another and to support local causes.

Mittelstadt says the organization is seeking to keep volunteerism high by providing volunteers with information about the specific families they’re helping by building houses. Habitat also invites volunteers to events celebrating completed homes.

Data suggests all the effort is paying off. Volunteers spent 57% more hours building new homes during the nonprofit’s last fiscal year compared with the previous year, according to Mittelstadt.

“Everybody knows somebody in our community, and everybody’s willing to lend that helping hand,” she says.

Even as the pandemic has receded, volunteerism is not rebounding in Florida, says Perwaiz Syed of the Florida Nonprofit Alliance.

“Nonprofits have had a lot of volunteers stop,” she says. “They have not returned. Many of them are seniors. They’re putting their health first and have not re-engaged in person.”

A study of 2,300 nonprofits by the alliance found that 40% of nonprofits reported they needed more volunteers and 25% of nonprofit employees said they were feeling overworked as they took on tasks previously done by volunteers.

The Manatee Literacy Council, which provides adult literacy tutoring, employs three part-time staff members and has 60 volunteer tutors, mostly retirees, available year-round. It lost 75% of its volunteers during the height of the pandemic. The program was able to move some of its work online, but it still can’t meet demand. The center currently has a waiting list of 100 people in need of tutoring.

To recruit more volunteers, the group sends representatives to community events to talk about its work, says Michelle Deveaux McLean, the council’s CEO.

She also says she is working hard to keep volunteers returning by organizing monthly meet-ups and creating a supportive environment. It continues to be a struggle.

“I’m lucky if I have five volunteers every month. We’re just perpetually upside down,” McLean says.

Other Florida nonprofits are turning more to online volunteering and enlisting companies to urge employees to volunteer.

For instance, Office Depot, based in South Florida, includes volunteerism as part of its professional development for employees. Since 2017, the company has sent workers to help charities do landscaping, paint murals, prepare meals for youths in Florida, and more.

Even as nonprofits work on a variety of ways to try to expand the number of volunteers, doing so may take time.

“I do think that Florida’s numbers will increase over time as we stabilize a bit from the pandemic,” Perwaiz Syed says. “I don’t think you’re going to see us in the top 10 because that’s just not possible to go that far that quickly. But I do think it will increase a little bit.”
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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has called the leaders of Sudan’s two warring factions and urged them to agree to a ceasefire as the death toll nears 200.

The U.S. State Department issued a statement late Monday saying Blinken had spoken separately with General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, commander of the country’s armed forces, and General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the head of the Rapid Support Forces. He urged them to end the fighting to permit delivery of humanitarian assistance to those affected by the conflict and allow the reunification of Sudanese families.

The statement said Blinken urged Burhan and Dagalo to allow the international community in Khartoum “to make sure its presence is secure,” and stressed the responsibility of the two generals “to ensure the safety and wellbeing of civilians, diplomatic personnel, and humanitarian workers.”

Secretary Blinken’s call to the two Sudanese rivals was one of many from the international community urging peace in the north African country. A communique issued Tuesday from the G-7 foreign ministers’ meeting in Karuizawa, Japan condemned the fighting, which they said, “threatens the security and safety of Sudanese civilians and undermines efforts to restore Sudan’s democratic transition.”

“We urge the parties to end hostilities immediately without pre-conditions. We call on all actors to renounce violence, return to negotiations, and take active steps to reduce tensions and ensure the safety of all civilians, including diplomatic and humanitarian personnel,” the communique continued.

Both military factions fighting for control in Sudan claimed to have made gains Monday, as the death toll from the violence exceeded 180 amid calls from Washington, multiple international bodies and capitals around the world for an immediate cease-fire.

Residents in Khartoum reported hearing fighter jets and anti-aircraft fire after night fell Monday as the violence between Sudan’s military and a paramilitary force raged through a third day.

Volker Perthes, the United Nations special representative to Sudan, told reporters by video link from Khartoum Monday that at least 185 people had been killed and more than 1,800 wounded since fighting erupted Saturday.

The number of casualties from the fighting is likely to rise, with many of the wounded unable to reach hospitals for treatment. A Sudanese doctors’ group said the fighting had also “heavily damaged” multiple hospitals around the capital.

Large portions of the capital were without electricity and water. The violence also affected Khartoum’s adjoining sister cities of Omdurman and Bahri, with bridges linking the cities blocked by armored vehicles.

U.N. chief Antonio Guterres on Monday again condemned the outbreak of fighting and appealed to the leaders of Sudan’s military and the RSF paramilitary group “to immediately cease hostilities, restore calm and begin a dialogue to resolve the crisis.”

“I urge all those with influence over the situation to use it in the cause of peace,” he said, adding that “the humanitarian situation in Sudan was already precarious and is now catastrophic.”

The two military factions battling for control of Sudan had shared power during a shaky political transition. The clashes are part of a power struggle between General Burhan, who also heads the transitional council, and General Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, the deputy head of the transitional council.

John Kirby, coordinator for strategic communications at the National Security Council, told reporters on Monday that U.S. officials had “been in direct contact” with both generals “to urge them to end the hostilities immediately.” He added that U.S. officials were also working closely with the African Union, the Arab League and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, an East African bloc.

“We call for an immediate cease-fire, without conditions, between the Sudanese armed forces and the Rapid Support Forces,” he said. “As Secretary Blinken mentioned this morning, the fighting is killing civilians and threatens the Sudanese nation as well as stability in the region.”

But when asked by VOA what specific leverage the U.S. has to influence the warring parties, Kirby said, “I’m not going to speak to specific diplomatic leverage.”

He added that all U.S. personnel in the north African nation were accounted for and are sheltering in place. He said there are no plans to evacuate them at this time.

The RSF claimed Monday it had captured an airport and military bases. The military claimed it regained control of the main television station and said it was in control of its headquarters after brief fighting there.

The fighting in Khartoum has forced most people to stay inside. Offices, schools and gas stations are closed.

In the Al-Kalakla neighborhood south of Khartoum, the situation seemed to be relatively calm, as people ventured out to get basic supplies.

Wisal Mohammed, a mother of three, told VOA this is the first time in three days that she’s come out to get food for her children. She said she does not have electricity or water and that she would not be able to travel if there was an emergency.

Al Muiz Hassan, a grocer in the Abu Adam neighborhood south of Khartoum, told VOA he is worried about being robbed and has only partially opened his shop as a precaution.

“The fighting has affected all the shops, not only mine,” he said.

Residents of Khartoum said there has been no police presence on the city’s streets since the military clashes began.

The European Union said its envoy to Sudan was assaulted in his own residence on Monday, but it did not give further details.

Blinken confirmed that a U.S. diplomatic convoy came under fire Monday, adding that initial reports indicated the attack was by forces linked to the Rapid Support Forces.

Calls to end the fighting have come from around the world and within Africa, including the African Union, the Arab League and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD).

IGAD said Kenyan President William Ruto, South Sudanese President Salva Kiir and Djibouti President Omar Guelleh will go to Khartoum to broker an immediate cease-fire.

“President Salva Kiir has already been in touch with both General Burhan and General Hemedti to convey the message of the summit. … Now, preparations are on the way to undertake this mission,” Nuur Mohamud Sheekh, a spokesperson for IGAD’s executive secretary, told VOA.

Sudan’s two top generals, however, have yet to express a willingness to negotiate and each has demanded the other’s surrender.

Dagalo said Monday on Twitter that he was defending democracy in Sudan and called Burhan a “radical Islamist.” Dagalo’s forces emerged out of the notorious Janjaweed militias in Sudan’s Darfur region and have been accused of carrying out atrocities in the region.

The two generals are former allies who together orchestrated an October 2021 military coup that derailed a transition to civilian rule following the 2019 ouster of longtime leader Omar al-Bashir.

Tensions between the generals have been growing over disagreements about how the RSF should be integrated in the army and who should oversee that process. The restructuring of the military was part of an effort to restore the country to civilian rule and end the political crisis sparked by the 2021 military coup.

“It’s another example of the generals feeling threatened by a transition that might have diminished their powers, might have diminished the monopoly that they control,” said Jeffrey Feltman, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and former special envoy to the Horn of Africa at the U.S. State Department.

“What we have now is a fight for power. It’s a lust for power — who is going to prevail among these two generals,” Feltman told VOA.

Pro-democracy activists have accused both generals of being involved in human rights abuses.

In addition to the fighting around Khartoum, violence has also broken out in Sudan’s western Darfur region, threatening to renew a decades-old conflict that killed hundreds of thousands of people.

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) announced Monday it has halted much of its operations in Sudan because of the fighting.

In a statement, IRC regional Vice President Kurt Tjossem said, “Conflict has disrupted humanitarian action where over a third of the population, an estimated 15 million people, including refugees, are experiencing acute food insecurity. Humanitarian actors have limited ability to enter and operate in areas with ongoing war.”

The World Food Program also suspended its operations in the country after the deaths of three of its staff members.

The African Union’s Peace and Security Council held an emergency meeting on Sunday in Nairobi to discuss the situation in Sudan. Participants appealed to the Sudanese military and RSF leaders to de-escalate conflict and restore stability.

Carol Van Dam Falk, Mariama Diallo, Margaret Besheer, Antia Powell and Nike Ching contributed to this report. Some information for this article came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
…

A very wet winter has left California’s reservoirs looking healthier than they have for years, as near-record rainfall put a big dent in a lengthy drought.   

A series of atmospheric rivers — high altitude ribbons of moisture — chugged into the western United States, dousing a landscape that had been baked dry by years of below-average rain.   

The state’s 40 million residents had chafed under repeated warnings to save water, with restrictions on irrigating gardens that left lawns dead or dying.   

Vegetation dried up, with hillsides a parched brown, and ripe for wildfires.   

Reservoirs held just a fraction of their capacity, with shorelines retreating to reveal dust, rocks and the remains of sunken boats.   

But then the winter of 2022-23 roared into action, and trillions of gallons of water fell from the skies.   

Rivers and creeks that had slowed to a trickle or even vanished entirely sprang to life.   

SEE ALSO: A related video by VOA’s Laurel Bowman:

Lake Tulare, in the Central Valley, which had dried up 80 years earlier, began to re-emerge, as all that rain had to find somewhere to go.   

Mountains were buried under hundreds of inches (many meters) of snow, and the state’s ski resorts began talking about a bumper season that could last all the way into July.   

Official statistics from the U.S. Drought Monitor released last week show around two-thirds of California is completely out of the drought.   

Less than 10% of the state is still technically in a drought, with the remainder classed as “abnormally dry.”

A year ago, the entire state was in a drought.   

California’s Department of Water Resources says major reservoirs are overtopping their average capacity.  

Lake Oroville, one of the most important bodies of water in the state, is now around 88% full, storing almost twice the amount of water as it did a year ago.   

AFP photographs show the once shriveled reservoir looking much closer to its original shoreline.   

Pictures taken almost exactly a year apart show a marked contrast — in April 2022, a puny stream trickles through a valley, but this year the valley is full of water.   

A photograph taken in September last year shows a boat ramp hanging uselessly, high above the water line, while the same boat ramp seen in a picture taken Sunday has water lapping halfway up.   

The Enterprise Bridge now spans a body of water, where last year its footings stood starkly in the dusty bank, with just a small creek passing underneath.  

Wet winters are not new in California, but scientists say human-cause climate change is exacerbating the so-called “weather whiplash” that sees very hot and dry periods give way to extremely soggy months.   

And water managers caution that while there is a lot of wet around at the moment, Californians cannot afford to waste water.   

Adel Hagekhalil of the Metropolitan Water District that serves Southern California told Spectrum News 1 that people should still conserve their supplies.   

“We need to save and build the savings… so when we have another dry year, and hot days and dry days, we can respond,” he said. 
…

More than half of North America’s bat species are likely to diminish significantly as climate change, disease and habitat loss take their toll, scientists warned Monday. 

A report by experts from the U.S., Canada and Mexico said 81 of the continent’s 154 known bat types “are at risk of severe population decline” in the next 15 years. 

The “state of the bats” report was published by the North American Bat Conservation Alliance, a consortium of government agencies and private organizations. 

“They need our help to survive,” said Winifred Frick, chief scientist at Bat Conservation International, one of the participating groups. “We face a biodiversity crisis globally and bats play a very important role in healthy ecosystems needed to protect our planet.” 

Bats give U.S. agriculture a $3.7 billion annual boost by gobbling crop-destroying insects, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Some are plant pollinators. Bats also serve as prey for other animals, including hawks, owls and weasels. 

Millions have died since 2006 from a fungal disease called white-nose syndrome, which attacks bats when hibernating and creates fuzzy spots on their muzzles and wings. It causes them to wake early from hibernation and sometimes fly outside. They can burn up winter fat stores and eventually starve. 

Eight U.S. bat species are listed as endangered, or on the brink of extinction. 

The federal Fish and Wildlife Service designated the northern long-eared bat as endangered last year and has proposed listing for the tricolored bat. The little brown bat is being evaluated for potential listing. White-nose syndrome is the primary killer for each of the species. 

More than 150 agencies, nonprofits and universities are collaborating in the fight against the disease, said Jeremy Coleman, a wildlife biologist who coordinates the service’s participation and a co-author of the report. 

Among methods under development are vaccines, anti-fungal sprays and ultraviolet light treatments for hibernation spots. 

“We have a number of tools that are showing great promise,” Coleman said. “There are very few precedents for managing a wildlife disease, particularly one so devastating and pervasive.” 

The report said the bats also are imperiled by forest fragmentation — logging and urban sprawl in Canada, wildfire suppression in the U.S. and livestock ranching in Mexico. Many bats live in older trees during summer. 

People sometimes disturb hibernating bats in winter by exploring caves and abandoned mines. 

Climate change is expected to intensify the challenges, causing more extreme storms and temperature swings. The report said 82% of the continent’s species are at risk from global warming’s effects. 

More than 1,500 bats were rescued in December after going into hypothermic shock during a sudden freeze in Houston, where they lost their grip and fell from roosting spots beneath bridges. 

Drought and increasingly arid conditions will leave bats with less drinking water, killing some and preventing others from reproducing, the report said. As surface waters dry up, there are fewer places to fly over in search of aquatic insects. 

Ironically, wind turbines — a leading source of renewable energy that can help slow climate change — pose another problem for bats. An estimated 500,000, representing 45 species, die each year in collisions with the structures, the report said. 

But those figures were based on 2021 calculations, said Frick, an associate research professor in ecology at the University of California at Santa Cruz in addition to her position with Bat Conservation International. So many turbines have been constructed since then that the latest estimate is 880,000 deaths. 

Her organization is collaborating with manufacturers and others in searching for solutions, including acoustic devices that would cause bats to steer clear of turbines. Reducing blade rotation speeds — particularly during fall mating season, when bats are particularly active — would help, Frick said. 

Cori Lausen, director of bat conservation with Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, who did not participate in compiling the report, said it provided a solid overview of North American bats’ plight. But some types it described as “apparently secure” based on their current status have grim prospects, she said. 

“The government process is a slow one, deciding when to list a species and when not to. If anything, this report is a little conservative,” Lausen said. “Many of these bats should not be listed as OK.” 
…

The United States, South Korea and Japan conducted a joint missile defense exercise Monday aimed at countering North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenal, as a top North Korean army official warned the U.S. that it risks “a clearer security crisis and insurmountable threats.”

Last week, North Korea conducted one of its most provocative weapons demonstrations in years by flight-testing for the first time an intercontinental ballistic missile powered by solid fuel. It is considered a more mobile, harder-to-detect weapon and could directly target the continental United States.

South Korea’s navy said Monday’s three-way drills took place in international waters off the country’s eastern coast and focused on mastering procedures for detecting, tracking and sharing information on incoming North Korean ballistic missiles. The one-day naval exercise involved an Aegis destroyer from each country.

“The drills’ goal is to improve our response capabilities against ballistic missiles and strengthen our ability to conduct joint operations as North Korea’s nuclear and missile threats continue to escalate,” Jang Do-young, a spokesperson for South Korea’s navy, said at a news briefing.

The United States and South Korea also launched separate bilateral drills Monday involving some 110 warplanes, including advanced F-35 fighter jets, that will continue through April 28.

The two sets of exercises could trigger a belligerent response from North Korea, which views the United States’ military drills with its Asian allies as invasion rehearsals. North Korea has used such drills as a pretext to accelerate its own weapons development, creating a tit-for-tat cycle that has raised tensions in recent months.

Later Monday, Ri Pyong Chol, a North Korean army marshal and close associate of leader Kim Jong Un, warned that the United States should “stop at once its political and military provocations getting on the nerves of [North Korea].”

“If the U.S. persists in the acts of endangering the security environment on the Korean Peninsula in disregard of the repeated warnings by [North Korea], the latter will take necessary actions to expose the former to a clearer security crisis and insurmountable threats,” Ri said in a statement carried by state media.

Without mentioning the drills that began Monday, Ri accused the U.S. and South Korea of having staged a series of large-scale joint military exercises simulating a preemptive nuclear strike and all-out war against North Korea. He also criticized the U.S. for calling for a meeting of the U.N. Security Council to discuss North Korea’s solid-fuel ICBM launch, saying his country was exercising its right to self-defense.

Security Council resolutions ban North Korea from engaging in any ballistic activities. But the council has failed to impose new sanctions on North Korea despite its series of ballistic missile tests since early last year because of the opposition of China and Russia, which are both veto-wielding members.

North Korea’s unprecedented run of weapons tests has so far involved more than 100 missiles of various ranges fired into the sea since the start of 2022 as it attempts to build a nuclear arsenal that could threaten its rival neighbors and the United States.

Experts say Kim wants to pressure the United States into accepting North Korea as a legitimate nuclear power and hopes to negotiate an easing of sanctions from a position of strength.

North Korea’s growing nuclear threat has also led South Korea and Japan to increase their security cooperation and mend ties that were strained by history and trade disputes. On Monday, South Korea and Japan held their first security meeting of senior diplomats and defense officials following a five-year hiatus. During the meeting, Seoul and Tokyo discussed North Korea’s nuclear program and trilateral cooperation with the United States, according to Seoul’s Defense Ministry.

Japan’s Joint Staff in a statement stressed the need to strengthen trilateral cooperation as the “security environment surrounding Japan increasingly becomes severe” because of North Korea’s missile activities.
…

The U.S. Justice Department says it has arrested two New York City residents and charged 44 Chinese security officers in connection with China’s efforts to target dissidents in the United States and around the world. 

Federal law enforcement officials announced the charges related to three separate “transnational repression” schemes at a news conference in New York City Monday.

In the first scheme, “Harry” Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping – both residents of New York City – are accused of opening and operating an illegal overseas police station in lower Manhattan for China’s Ministry of Public Security. The ministry acts as China’s national police. 

The two men were arrested early Monday morning and scheduled to make their initial court appearances in the afternoon.

The existence of the police station, one of more than 100 China allegedly operates around the world, came to light last year, and FBI Director Christopher Wray vowed to put a stop to the illegal activity. 

The police station, which allegedly operated out of an office building in New York City’s Chinatown, closed in the fall of 2022 after those running it became aware of the FBI investigation, officials said. 

The two other criminal complaints unsealed Monday charge 44 defendants with various crimes related to efforts by the Chinese national police to harass Chinese nationals in New York City and elsewhere in the United Stations. 

The defendants include 40 MPS officers and two officials in the Cyberspace Administration of China, the Justice Department said.

According to the charging documents, the defendants used fake social media accounts to “harass and intimidate” overseas Chinese dissidents.  

In addition, they’re accused of “suppressing” the Chinese dissidents’ free speech on a U.S. technology platform. 

“These cases demonstrate the lengths the PRC government will go to [to] silence and harass U.S. persons who exercise their fundamental rights to speak out against PRC oppression, including by unlawfully exploiting a U.S.-based technology company,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen said in a statement. “These actions violate our laws and are an affront to our democratic values and basic human rights.”

All 44 defendants remain at large.
…

U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy pledged Monday that the narrow Republican majority in the House of Representatives will vote to raise the country’s debt ceiling to avert a default on the government’s financial obligations in the coming months, but will also stipulate that future spending increases be capped at 1%.

The White House strongly criticized the announcement.

McCarthy, in a speech at the New York Stock Exchange, called the country’s nearly $31.7 trillion debt a “ticking time bomb” and assailed Democratic President Joe Biden as “missing in action” in resolving the contentious issue before the government runs out of money to pay its bills, which could be as soon as June.

Any resulting default on the government’s financial obligations would be a U.S. first and could roil the world economy, plunge stock values and force widespread layoffs.

Biden and White House officials have called on Congress to approve a debt ceiling increase without conditions, as has often been done in the past, including during Republican administrations. But McCarthy said, “Since the president continues to hide, House Republicans will take action.”

McCarthy, who has had trouble in getting his 222-seat majority in the 435-member House to agree on a package of spending cuts to present to Biden, nonetheless told Wall Street leaders that the Republican caucus would pass legislation that would raise the debt ceiling for one year, pushing the issue next year into the midst of the 2024 presidential election campaign.

In addition, McCarthy said Republicans would roll back federal spending to fiscal 2022 levels and curb future spending boosts to no more than 1%. Republicans are also hoping to cut federal spending for social safety net programs for poorer Americans.

The White House, in a statement, said that McCarthy was breaking with the politically bipartisan norm in approving a debt ceiling increase without conditions, as happened twice during former President Donald Trump’s tenure. Biden has said he is willing to discuss future spending separately, aside from increasing the debt ceiling to authorize government borrowing to pay debts already incurred.

The White House said the Republican House leader “again failed to clearly outline what House Republicans are proposing and will vote on.” The White House contended Republicans would “increase costs for hard-working families, take food assistance and health care away from millions of Americans, and yet would enlarge the deficit when combined with House Republican proposals for tax giveaways skewed to the super-rich, special interests, and profitable companies.”

Biden and McCarthy met in early February about the debt ceiling but not since.
…

Elon Musk’s SpaceX on Monday called off a highly anticipated launch of its powerful new Starship rocket, delaying the first uncrewed test flight of the vehicle into space.

The two-stage rocketship, standing taller than the Statue of Liberty at 394 feet (120 m) high, originally was scheduled for blast-off from the SpaceX facility at Boca Chica, Texas, during a two-hour launch window that began at 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT).

But the California-based space company announced in a live webcast during the final minutes of the countdown that it was scrubbing the flight attempt for at least 48 hours, citing a pressurization issue in the lower-stage rocket booster.

Musk, the company’s billionaire founder and chief executive, told a private Twitter audience on Sunday night that the mission stood a better chance of being scrubbed than proceeding to launch on Monday.

Getting the vehicle to space for the first time would represent a key milestone in SpaceX’s ambition of sending humans back to the moon and ultimately to Mars – at least initially as part of NASA’s newly inaugurated human spaceflight program, Artemis.

A successful debut flight would also instantly rank the Starship system as the most powerful launch vehicle on Earth.

Both the lower-stage Super Heavy booster rocket and the upper-stage Starship cruise vessel it will carry to space are designed as reusable components, capable of flying back to Earth for soft landings – a maneuver that has become routine for SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 9 rocket.

But neither stage would be recovered for the expendable first test flight to space, expected to last no more than 90 minutes.

Prototypes of the Starship cruise vessel have made five sub-space flights up to 6 miles (10 km) above Earth in recent years, but the Super Heavy booster has never left the ground.

In February, SpaceX did a test-firing of the booster, igniting 31 of its 33 Raptor engines for roughly 10 seconds with the rocket bolted in place vertically atop a platform.

The Federal Aviation Administration just last Friday granted a license for what would be the first test flight of the fully stacked rocket system, clearing a final regulatory hurdle for the long-awaited launch.

If all goes as planned for the next launch bid, all 33 Raptor engines will ignite simultaneously to loft the Starship on a flight that nearly completes a full orbit of the Earth before it re-enters the atmosphere and free-falls into the Pacific at supersonic speed about 60 miles (97 km) off the coast of the northern Hawaiian islands.

After separating from the Starship, the Super Heavy booster is expected to execute the beginnings of a controlled return flight before plunging into the Gulf of Mexico.

As designed, the Starship rocket is nearly two times more powerful than NASA’s own Space Launch System (SLS), which made its debut uncrewed flight to orbit in November, sending a NASA cruise vessel called Orion on a 10-day voyage around the moon and back.
…

A lot was happening in March 1965 in the bungalow in Selma, Alabama, that then-4-year-old Jawana Jackson called home, and much of it involved her “Uncle Martin.”

There were late-night visitors, phone calls and meetings at the house that was a safe haven for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders as they planned the Selma to Montgomery marches calling for Black voting rights.

The role the Jackson House played was integral to the Civil Rights Movement, so Jackson contacted the The Henry Ford Museum near Detroit about a year ago to ask if it would take over the preservation of the Jackson House and its legacy.

“It became increasingly clearer to me that the house belonged to the world, and quite frankly, The Henry Ford was the place that I always felt in my heart that it needed to be,” she told The Associated Press last week from her home in Pensacola, Florida.

Starting this year, the Jackson House will be dismantled piece-by-piece and trucked the more than 800 miles (1,280 kilometers) north to Dearborn, Michigan, where it will eventually be open to the public as part of the history museum. The project is expected to take up to three years.

Owned by dentist Sullivan Jackson and his wife, Richie Jean, the 3,000-square-foot (28-square-meter) home was where King and others strategized the three marches against racist Jim Crow laws that prevented Black people from voting in the Deep South.

King was inside the home when President Lyndon Johnson announced a bill that would become the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“There was a synergy going on in that house during those critical times,” Jawana Jackson said. “Whether that was when Uncle Martin was praying the morning of the Selma to Montgomery march or whether he was talking to President Johnson (by phone) in the little bedroom of that home, I always got a sense of energy and a sense of hope for the future.”

The house and artifacts, including King’s neckties and pajamas, and the chair where he sat while watching Johnson’s televised announcement, will be part of the acquisition by The Henry Ford. The purchase price is confidential.

Named after Ford Motor Co. founder and American industrialist Henry Ford, the museum sits on 250 acres (100 hectares) and also features Greenfield Village where more than 80 historic structures are displayed and maintained. The Jackson House will be rebuilt there, joining the courthouse where Abraham Lincoln first practiced law, the laboratory where Thomas Edison perfected the light bulb, and the home and workshop where Orville and Wilbur Wright invented their first airplane.

Also among the collection’s artifacts are the Montgomery city bus whose seat Rosa Parks refused to give up to a white man in 1955 and the chair that Lincoln was sitting on in 1865 when he was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington.

Visitors to Greenfield Village will be able to walk through the Jackson House, according to Patricia Mooradian, The Henry Ford’s president and chief executive.

“This house is the envelope, but the real importance is what happened inside,” Mooradian said. “We want people to immerse themselves in that history … to feel and experience what may have gone on in that home. What were the conversations? What were the decisions that were being made around the dining room table?”

Built in 1912, the home served as a guest house for Black authors W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington who held “fireside chats” regarding education, religion, the arts, community building and economic sustainability, according to the Alabama African American Civil Rights Heritage Sites Consortium.

It took on a greater importance following the fatal shooting of a young Black man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, by an Alabama trooper.

On March 7, 1965, weeks after that slaying, about 600 people participated in a peaceful protest. The late Georgia U.S. Rep. John Lewis was one of the leaders of the planned 54-mile (86-kilometer) march to the state Capitol, which was part of the larger effort to register Black voters. But police beat protesters as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in what is now known as “Bloody Sunday.”

Television and newspaper reports seared images of that confrontation into the nation’s consciousness. Days later, King led what became known as the “Turnaround Tuesday” march, in which marchers approached police at the bridge and prayed before turning back.

Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act of 1965 eight days after “Bloody Sunday.” On March 21, King began a third march, under federal protection, that grew to thousands of people by the time it arrived at the state Capitol. Five months later, Johnson signed the bill into law.

The Jackson House brings a new dimension to understanding the role Black Americans played in defeating Jim Crow, according to historian Gretchen Sullivan Sorin.

“The Jacksons are unsung heroes,” Sorin said. “Their generosity and courage shows us how we, as ordinary Americans, can stand up against injustice.”

Jackson said her parents felt the risks were worth taking.

“For them, it was all about the future for me and millions of other children that were going to grow up,” she said. “They felt that everyone deserved a peaceful and more democratic society to grow up in.”
…

The U.S. military said it likely killed a senior Islamic State leader in a helicopter raid Monday in northern Syria.

A U.S. Central Command statement did not identify the militant, nor give a precise location of the raid, but said “two other armed individuals were killed.”

CENTCOM added that no U.S. troops were hurt during the raid and that it assessed no civilians were hurt or killed.

The operation is the latest targeting Islamic State leaders in Syria.

Earlier this month, CENTCOM said U.S. forces captured an Islamic State operative in eastern Syria and an airstrike killed one of the group’s senior leaders.
…

The start of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation trial against Fox has been pushed back by a day, the judge said Sunday, with a source familiar with the matter saying the media giant was pursuing settlement talks. 

The source, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told Reuters that Fox was seeking a possible settlement. The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal also reported that Fox was pursuing settlement talks, citing sources. 

Dominion is suing Fox Corp and Fox News in a defamation lawsuit over the network’s coverage of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. 

“The Court has decided to continue the start of the trial, including jury selection, until Tuesday, April 18, 2023 at 9:00 a.m. (1300 GMT),” Judge Eric Davis said in a statement, without providing a reason for the delay. “I will make such an announcement tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. in Courtroom 7E,” he added. 

Davis had said on Thursday he expected to conclude jury selection Monday and to proceed to opening statements. 

Dominion and Fox declined to comment on the delay. 

Davis Wednesday sanctioned Fox News, handing Dominion a fresh chance to gather evidence after Fox withheld records until the eve of the trial. 

The evidence includes recordings of Rudy Giuliani, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s lawyer, saying in pre-taped Fox appearances that he did not have any evidence to back up the false allegations of election rigging by Dominion in the 2020 race that are at the heart of the lawsuit. 

The recordings were made by a former Fox employee who is currently suing the network. 

Davis said he would also very likely tap an outside investigator to probe Fox’s late disclosure of the evidence and take whatever steps necessary to remedy the situation, which he described as troubling. 

Fox said in a statement on Wednesday that it “produced the supplemental information” to Dominion “when we first learned it.”  

Closely watched 

The trial is one of the most closely watched U.S. defamation cases in years, involving a leading cable news outlet with numerous conservative commentators. 

Murdoch is set to testify, along with a parade of Fox executives and on-air hosts, including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro. 

The trial is considered a test of whether Fox’s coverage crossed the line between ethical journalism and the pursuit of ratings, as Dominion alleges and Fox denies. 

Dominion has accused Fox of ruining its reputation by airing baseless claims that its machines secretly changed votes in favor of Democrat Joe Biden, who defeated then-President Trump, a Republican, in the 2020 presidential election. 

Dominion is asking for $1.6 billion in damages, a figure Fox has said is unrealistic and based on flawed economic modeling. 

An expert report commissioned by Dominion attributed scores of lost contracts to Fox’s coverage, though much of the report remains under seal.   

Fox Corp reported nearly $14 billion in annual revenue last year. 

Dominion has said Fox’s conduct was damaging to American democracy and that the network must be held accountable, while Fox said on Friday that Dominion’s lawsuit was a threat to press freedom. 

“While Dominion has pushed irrelevant and misleading information to generate headlines, Fox News remains steadfast in protecting the rights of a free press,” Fox said in a statement. 

The primary question for jurors is whether Fox knowingly spread false information or recklessly disregarded the truth, the standard of “actual malice” that Dominion must show to prevail in a defamation case. 

Dominion says defamatory statements were aired on Fox shows including “Sunday Morning Futures,” “Lou Dobbs Tonight” and “Justice with Judge Jeanine.” 

Dominion alleges that Fox staff, ranging from members of the newsroom to the board of directors, knew the statements were false but continued to air them to avoid losing viewers to far-right outlets. 

Dominion also cites evidence that some hosts and producers thought the guests spreading the false statements, including former Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, could not back up their allegations. 

Fox had argued that coverage of the vote-rigging claims was inherently newsworthy and protected by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of press freedom. 

Davis rejected that argument in a ruling last month on both parties’ competing motions for summary judgment. 

Fox has also said that Dominion cannot pin actual malice on the individuals whom Dominion says were responsible for the defamatory statements. 

Fox has said Dominion must prove that a “superior officer” at the network or its parent company “ordered, participated in, or ratified” wrongdoing. The network has argued that doubts about the claims among certain individuals cannot be attributed to the organization as a whole. 
…

The U.S. warship USS Milius sailed through the Taiwan Strait on Sunday, in what the U.S. Navy described on Monday as a “routine” transit, just days after China ended its latest war games around the island. 

China, which views Taiwan as its own territory, officially ended its three days of exercises around Taiwan last Monday where it practiced precision strikes and blockading the island. 

It staged the drills to express anger at Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen’s meeting with U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy, viewing it as an interference in China’s internal affairs and U.S. support for Taiwan’s separate identity from China. 

The U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet said the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Milius conducted a “routine Taiwan Strait transit” through waters “where high-seas freedoms of navigation and overflight apply in accordance with international law.” 

The ship’s transit demonstrates the United States’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific, it added. 

The U.S. Navy sails warships through the strait around once a month, and also regularly conducts similar freedom of navigation missions in the disputed South China Sea. 

Last week, the USS Milius sailed near one of the most important man-made and Chinese controlled islands in the South China Sea, Mischief Reef. Beijing denounced it as illegal. 

China has continued its military activities around Taiwan since the drills ended, though on a reduced scale. 

On Monday morning, Taiwan’s defense ministry said it had spotted 18 Chinese military aircraft and four naval vessels operating around Taiwan in the previous 24-hour period. 

China has never renounced the use of force to bring democratically governed Taiwan under its control. 

Taiwan’s government rejects China’s territorial claims and says only the island’s people can decide their future. 
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The final curtain came down Sunday on New York’s production of “The Phantom of the Opera,” ending Broadway’s longest-running show with thunderous standing ovations, champagne toasts and gold and silver confetti bursting from its famous chandelier. 

It was show No. 13,981 at the Majestic Theatre and it ended with a reprise of “The Music of the Night” performed by the current cast, previous actors in the show — including original star Sarah Brightman — and crew members in street clothes. 

Andrew Lloyd Webber took to the stage last in a black suit and black tie and dedicated the final show to his son, Nick, who died last month after a protracted battle with gastric cancer and pneumonia. He was 43. 

“When he was a little boy, he heard some of this music,” Lloyd Webber said. Brightman, holding his hand, agreed: “When Andrew was writing it, he was right there. So his son is with us. Nick, we love you very much.”  

Producer Cameron Mackintosh gave some in the crowd hope they would see the Phantom again, and perhaps sooner than they think. 

“The one question I keep getting asked again and again — will the Phantom return? Having been a producer for over 55 years, I’ve seen all the great musicals return, and ‘Phantom’ is one of the greatest,” he said. “So it’s only a matter of time.” 

The musical — a fixture on Broadway since opening on January 26, 1988 — has weathered recessions, war, terrorism and cultural shifts. But the prolonged pandemic may have been the last straw: It’s a costly musical to sustain, with elaborate sets and costumes as well as a large cast and orchestra. The curtain call Sunday showed how out of step “Phantom” is with the rest of Broadway but also how glorious a big, splashy musical can be.  

“If there ever was a bang, we’re going out with a bang. It’s going to be a great night,” said John Riddle just before dashing inside to play Raoul for the final time.  

Based on a novel by Gaston Leroux, “Phantom” tells the story of a deformed composer who haunts the Paris Opera House and falls madly in love with an innocent young soprano, Christine. Webber’s lavish songs include “Masquerade,” ″Angel of Music” and ″All I Ask of You.” 

In addition to Riddle, the New York production said goodbye with Emilie Kouatchou as Christine and Laird Mackintosh stepping in for Ben Crawford as the Phantom. Crawford was unable to sing because of a bacterial infection but was cheered at the curtain call, stepping to the side of the stage. The Phantom waved him over to stand beside him, Riddle and Kouatchou. 

There was a video presentation of many of the actors who had played key roles in the show over the years, and the orchestra seats were crowded with Christines, Raouls and Phantoms. The late director Hal Prince, choreographer Gillian Lynne and set and costume designer Maria Björnson were also honored. 

Lin-Manuel Miranda attended, as did Glenn Close, who performed in two separate Broadway productions of Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard.” Free champagne was offered at intermission and flutes of it were handed out onstage at the curtain call. 

Riddle first saw “The Phantom of the Opera” in Toronto as a 4-year-old child. “It was the first musical I ever saw. I didn’t know what a musical was,” he said. “Now, 30-some odd years later, I’m closing the show on Broadway. So it’s incredible.”  

Kouatchou, who became the first Black woman in the role in New York, didn’t think the show would ever stop. “I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to do my run, ‘Phantom’ is going to continue on and they’ll be more Christines of color,’” she said. “But this is it.”  

The first production opened in London in 1986 and since then the show has been seen by more than 145 million people in 183 cities and performed in 17 languages over 70,000 performances. On Broadway alone, it has grossed more than $1.3 billion. 

When “Phantom” opened in New York, “Die Hard” was in movie theaters, Adele was born, and floppy discs were at the cutting edge of technology. A postage stamp cost 25 cents, and the year’s most popular songs were “Roll With It” by Steve Winwood, “Faith” by George Michael and Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” 

Critics were positive, with the New York Post calling it “a piece of impeccably crafted musical theater,” the Daily News describing it as “spectacular entertainment,” and The New York Times saying it “wants nothing more than to shower the audience with fantasy and fun.” 

Lloyd Webber’s other musicals include “Cats,” “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “Evita,” “Sunset Boulevard” and “School of Rock.” The closing of “Phantom” means the composer is left with one show on Broadway, the critically mauled “Bad Cinderella.” 

The closing of “Phantom,” originally scheduled for February, was pushed to mid-April after a flood of revived interest and ticket sales that pushed weekly grosses past $3 million. The closing means the longest-running show crown now goes to “Chicago,” which started in 1996. “The Lion King” is next, having begun performances in 1997.  

Broadway took a pounding during the pandemic, with all theaters closed for more than 18 months. Some of the most popular shows — “Hamilton,” “The Lion King” and “Wicked” — rebounded well, but other shows have struggled. 

Breaking even usually requires a steady stream of tourists, especially for “Phantom,” and visitors to the city haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. The pandemic also pushed up expenses for all shows, including routine COVID-19 testing and safety officers on staff. The Phantom became a poster boy for Broadway’s return — after all, he is partially masked. 

Fans can always catch the Phantom elsewhere. The flagship London production celebrated its 36th anniversary in October, and there are productions in Japan, Greece, Australia, Sweden, Italy, South Korea and the Czech Republic. One is about to open in Bucharest, and another will open in Vienna in 2024. 

Kouatchou, who walked the red carpet before the final show in a hot pink clinging gown with a sweetheart neckline and a cut out, said the bitterness was undercut by the big send-off. Most Broadway shows that close slink into the darkness uncelebrated. 

“It kind of sweetens it, right?” she said. “We get to celebrate at the end of this. We get to all come together and drink and laugh and talk about the show and all the highs and lows. It’s ending on a big note.” 
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