17 states weigh adopting California’s electric car mandate
By STEVE KARNOWSKI

September 3, 2022

A Chevrolet Volt hybrid car is seen charging at a ChargePoint charging station at a parking garage in Los Angeles, Oct. 17, 2018. Sixteen states across the country that have tied their vehicle emission standards to California's now face weighty decisions on whether to follow that state's strictest-in-the nation new rules and require that all new cars, pickups and SUVs be electric or hydrogen powered by 2035. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel, File)

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Seventeen states with vehicle emission standards tied to rules established in California face weighty decisions on whether to follow that state’s strictest-in-the nation new rules that require all new cars, pickups and SUVs to be electric or hydrogen powered by 2035.

Under the Clean Air Act, states must abide by the federal government’s standard vehicle emissions standards unless they at least partially opt to follow California’s stricter requirements.

Among them, Washington, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon and Vermont are expected to adopt California’s ban on new gasoline-fueled vehicles. Colorado and Pennsylvania are among the states that probably won’t. The legal ground is a bit murkier in Minnesota, where the state’s “Clean Cars” rule has been a political minefield and the subject of a legal fight. Meanwhile, Republicans are rebelling in Virginia.

The Minnesota Auto Dealers Association says its reading of state and federal law is that the new California rules kick in automatically in the state, and it’s making that case in court as it tries to block them.

“The technology is such that the vehicles just don’t perform that well in cold weather,” said Scott Lambert, the trade group’s president. “We don’t all live in southern California.”

Minnesota Pollution Control Agency officials say the state would have to launch an entirely new rulemaking process to adopt California’s changes. And in court filings and legislative hearings, they’ve said they are not planning to do that now.

“We are not California. Minnesota has its own plan,” Gov. Tim Walz said in a statement. He called Minnesota’s program “a smart way to increase, rather than decrease, options for consumers. Our priority is to lower costs and increase choices so Minnesotans can drive whatever vehicle suits them.”

Oregon regulators are taking public comments through Sept. 7 on whether to adopt the new California standards. Colorado regulators, who adopted California’s older rules, won’t follow California’s new ones, the administration of Democratic Gov. Jared Polis said.

“While the governor shares the goal of rapidly moving towards electric vehicles, he is skeptical about requiring 100% of cars sold to be electric by a certain date as technology is rapidly changing,” the Colorado Energy Office said in a statement.

Regulators in Pennsylvania, which only partially adopted California’s older standards, said they won’t automatically follow its new rules. Under Democratic Governor Tom Wolf, Pennsylvania started the regulatory process last year to fully conform with California’s rules, but abandoned it.

Virginia had been on a path to adopting California’s rules under legislation that passed last year when Democrats were in full control of Virginia’s government. But Republicans who control the House of Delegates and GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin say they’ll push to unlink their state.

Minnesota’s auto dealers are trying to make their state’s current rules — and the possibility that they could tighten to incorporate California’s new restrictions — an issue for the fall elections. Control of the Legislature and governor’s office are up for grabs, and the dealers hope to persuade the 2023 Legislature to roll back the regulations unless they win in court first, Lambert said.

The MPCA, with Walz’s support, adopted California’s existing standards through administrative rulemaking last year amid a bitter fight with Republican lawmakers who were upset that the Legislature was cut out of the decision. Legislators even tried unsuccessfully to withhold funding from Minnesota’s environmental agencies. One casualty was Laura Bishop, who resigned as MPCA commissioner after it became apparent that she lacked the votes in the GOP-controlled Senate to win confirmation.

Walz and his administration have framed Minnesota’s Clean Cars rule as a fairly painless way to increase the availability of electric vehicles and help the state meet its greenhouse gas reduction goals. The rule seeks to increase the offerings of battery-powered and hybrid vehicles starting with the 2025 model year by requiring manufacturers to comply with California standards currently in force for low- and zero-emission vehicles.

Lambert said the state’s auto dealers don’t oppose electric vehicles. They currently make up 2.3% of new vehicle sales in Minnesota and he expects consumer interest to continue to grow. But the reduced range of battery-powered vehicles in cold weather makes them less attractive in northern tier states, he said. Minnesota’s rules already threaten to saddle dealers with more electric vehicles than their customers will buy, he said, and adopting the California ban would make things worse.

Under federal law, by Lambert’s reading, states have to either adopt California’s rules in full or follow less stringent federal emission standards. He said they can’t pick and choose from parts of each. And that effectively means there’s a “ban on the books” in Minnesota for sales of new conventionally fueled vehicles starting with the 2035 model year, he said.

Lambert’s association was already fighting Minnesota’s existing Clean Car rules in the Minnesota Court of Appeals, and its petition foresaw that California would make the changes it announced late last month. A key issue in whether “any future amendments to the incorporated California regulations automatically become part of Minnesota rules,” as the dealers argue.

The MPCA’s attorneys assert that they don’t, and have asked the court to dismiss the challenge. MPCA Commissioner Katrina Kessler has made similar arguments for months, including before a skeptical state Senate committee last March.

Aaron Klemz, chief strategy officer for the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, which will be filing its own arguments against the dealers in court, acknowledged that the legal landscape is confusing. And he said it’s not clear whether his group will eventually call for Minnesota to follow California’s new ban.

“We haven’t done enough analysis of the California rule to know if we’re going to push for its adoption in Minnesota,” Klemz said. He noted that other issues are coming into play, including incentives for electric vehicles in the Inflation Reduction Act that President Joe Biden recently signed, and the stated intentions by some of the major automakers to go all-electric.

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Associated Press reporters Jim Anderson in Denver; Gillian Flaccus in Portland, Oregon; and Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, contributed to this story.

 

U$A
Fight over future of library that sparked civil rights ideas
By TRAVIS LOLLER

September 3, 2022

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In this undated photo provided by the Nashville Banner Archives, Nashville Public Library, Special Collections, Rosa Parks, center, and Myles Horton, right, meet at the Highlander Library in Monteagle, Tenn. The library building where Rosa Parks, John Lewis and other civil rights leaders forged strategies that would change the world is mired in controversy over who gets to tell its story.

 (Nashville Banner Archives, Nashville Public Library, Special Collections via AP)


A library where Rosa Parks, John Lewis and other civil rights leaders forged strategies that would change the world is mired in controversy over who gets to tell its story.

On one side are preservationists who want to turn the Highlander Folk School library into a historic site. On the other, political organizers say Highlander never stopped pursuing social justice and should recover the building as a stolen part of its legacy.

Enraged by race-mixing at the Highlander Folk School in the 1950s, Tennessee officials confiscated the property and auctioned it off in pieces in a vain attempt at stifling the civil rights movement. The library is one of the few remaining campus buildings.

But Highlander as an institution never really closed — it just moved locations. It lives on today as the Highlander Research and Education Center, whose leaders are rallying opposition to listing the library in the National Register of Historic Places, saying they were frozen out of the process.

David Currey, a board member at the Tennessee Preservation Trust, has managed the library’s restoration since the trust bought the site in 2014, saving it from redevelopment. He said his goal has always been to preserve the site so that visitors can learn about the momentous events that happened there in the first half of the 20th Century. There would be few books or movies if stories could only be told by those directly involved, he said, and “Nobody owns the past.”

“It’s a myth that they are best suited to tell our history,” said Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, Highlander’s first Black co-director. “People who made that history are still alive.”

A letter Highlander sent to the historic registry says the Trust is not fit to serve as stewards, stoking racial tension over a place that promoted a shared struggle for interracial harmony.

“Approving the nomination of the Highlander Folk School Library in its current form will allow an elite, white-led institution to coopt and control the historical narrative of a site most significant for its work with Black, multiracial, poor and working-class communities,” states the letter, which also accuses trust members of having glorified the Confederacy.

Currey, who is white, frames the issue much differently. He says the trust stepped in to preserve the property when no one else would, and plans to celebrate Highlander’s past accomplishments.

“Our cause from the start has been an honorable endeavor to recognize and pay tribute to the history and legacy of the early 20th century’s social justice movements in Tennessee, including labor struggles and Civil Rights, and its leaders,” Currey wrote in an email to the AP.

Founded in the 1930s as a center for union organizing, the school in Monteagle, Tenn., counted first lady Eleanor Roosevelt among its early supporters. Protest music was integral to its work, with Woody Guthrie leading singalongs to inspire future demonstrations, and Pete Seeger workshopping “We Shall Overcome” into an anthem sung by activists ever since.

Highlander’s co-founder and longtime leader, Myles Horton, a white man, created a space almost unique in the Jim Crow South, where activists white and Black could build and strengthen alliances.

Parks attended a Highlander workshop a few months before refusing to move to the back of a segregated city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. “It was one of the few times in my life up to that point when I did not feel hostility from white people,” she wrote in her autobiography.

Lewis had a similar experience, long before he became a civil rights icon and congressman. Highlander “was the first time in my life that I saw black people and white people not just sitting down together at long tables for shared meals, but also cleaning up together afterward, doing the dishes together, gathering together late into the night in deep discussion,” he wrote in a memoir.

The school’s success made it a target — labeled communist, investigated by the FBI and raided by the state of Tennessee, which eventually revoked its charter. Original buildings were destroyed. The library was converted to a single-family home.

But Highlander didn’t disappear — it just moved three hours northeast to New Market, Tenn., near Knoxville.

“The property was stolen from us because it was bringing Black and white people together to preserve democracy,” Henderson said. “The land should be repatriated, back to the Highlander Folk School, which is now the Highlander Research and Education Center.”

The trust has spent seven years restoring the library to its original form. Local Grundy County donors contributed most of the funding, but Currey said he’s also spent thousands of his own dollars. His vision is to spin off a nonprofit, separate from the trust, that would own and operate the library as both a historic site and community resource, and Highlander could run a program explaining its ongoing justice and education work.

Henderson said she’s grateful the trust stepped in when the center couldn’t afford to, but she doesn’t see the old Folk School as separate from Highlander now, which is celebrating 90 years of organizing with a homecoming later this month. She said the center recently offered to buy the library from the trust, but got no definitive answer.

“If there’s going to be a transfer, why wouldn’t it be to Highlander?” Co-director Allyn Maxfield-Steele asked. If Highlander controlled the building, it would develop a plan for its use together with “folks on the ground in Grundy County,” he said.

Currey still hopes the trust and center can work together to promote the legacy of a building both organizations see as incredibly important.

Getting listed in the National Registry would open up new sources of funding in a state that doesn’t provide tax incentives for historic preservation, Currey said. He worries that the controversy over Highlander will make preservationists less likely to take on a similar project in the future.

“It’s already so difficult in Tennessee to save some of our historic resources,” Currey said. “This may be one of the most high-profile civil rights sites — as John Lewis told me — in the nation.”

Flashbacks: Charred California town no stranger to wildfire
By ADAM BEAM

September 3, 2022

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Properties destroyed by the Mill Fire are seen in Weed, Calif., Saturday, Sept. 3, 2022. (Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)


WEED, Calif. (AP) — Her home destroyed, dog missing, and 10-year relationship with her boyfriend recently ended – all Naomi Vogelsang could do on Saturday was sit outside of a Northern California wildfire evacuation center with $20 in her pocket, waiting for a ride to the casino.

“It can’t be any worse,” she said.

Vogelsang is one of thousands of people displaced this week by California’s latest inferno, this time in the small community of Weed about 280 miles (451 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco. Most visitors know this town as a novelty, a place to stop while traveling on Interstate 5 and buy an ironic T-shirt.

But for the people who live here, the past few years have introduced another worry in a world full of them: Dark skies, swirling ash and flames that race so quickly they leave little time for escape.

This time it was a blaze known as the Mill Fire. Flames raced from Roseburg Forest Products, which makes wood products, into the Lincoln Heights neighborhood where a significant number of homes burned and residents had to flee for their lives on Friday afternoon. The blaze spread to more than 6.6 square miles (17 square kilometers) by Saturday evening and was 25% contained.

After fleeing the blaze, 63-year-old Judy Christenson remembered a similar escape 40 years ago when, as a young parent, she had to rush her children out of a burning home. Last summer, a wildfire forced her to evacuate and leave her pets behind. Now, Christenson says she leaves harnesses on her pets all the time so she can grab them at a moment’s notice and leave.

“Whenever this happens, I get really bad,” Christenson said from the front seat of a car at an evacuation center in Yreka as Felix, her orange cat, napped in the backseat. “I can’t think straight.”

Nestled in the shadow of Mt. Shasta — a 14,000-foot (4,267.2-meter) volcano that is the second-highest peak in the Cascade Range — Weed is no stranger to wildfires.

Strong winds in the area that fan flames drew the town’s founder for a very different reason. Abner Weed, a Civil War soldier who is said to have witnessed the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender before moving to California, chose to put a sawmill there because the wind would dry out the timber, according to Bob West, a lifelong resident who co-owns Ellie’s Espresso and Bakery, a coffee and sandwich shop that contains some historical items of the town’s past.

The winds make Weed and the surrounding area a perilous place for wildfires, whipping small flames into a frenzy. Weed has seen three major fires since 2014, a period of extreme drought that has prompted the largest and most destructive fires in California history.

That drought persists as California heads into what traditionally is the worst of the fire season. Scientists say climate change has made the West warmer and drier over the last three decades and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive.

Dominique Mathes, 37, said he’s had some close calls with wildfires since he has lived in Weed. But he’s not interested in leaving.

“It’s a beautiful place,” he said. “Everybody has risks everywhere, like Florida’s got hurricanes and floods, Louisiana has got tornadoes and all that stuff. So, it happens everywhere. Unfortunately here, it’s fires.”

Evacuation orders were quickly put in effect Friday for 7,500 people – including West, who is 53 and has lived in Weed since he was a 1-year-old. He had never had to evacuate for a fire, but now he’s had to do it twice.

“It’s way worse than it used to be,” he said. “It affects our community because people leave because they don’t want to rebuild.”

Cal Fire Siskiyou Unit Chief Phil Anzo said crews worked all day and night to protect structures in Weed and in a subdivision to the east known as Carrick Addition. He said about 100 structures were destroyed.

Two people were brought to Mercy Medical Center Mount Shasta. One was in stable condition and the other was transferred to UC Davis Medical Center, which has a burn unit.

“There’s a lot at stake on that Mill Fire,” Anzo said. “There’s a lot of communities, a lot of homes there.”

Evacuees and firefighters quickly filled up local hotels while others rushed to stay with family and friends outside of the evacuation zone.

Vogelsang was not as fortunate. She said she slept on a bench in Weed until she could get a ride to the evacuation center. She said she’s spent most of the time crying about Bella, her 10-year-old English bulldog who — despite her best efforts — would not follow her out of the fire and is lost.

“My dog was my everything,” she said. “I just feel like I lost everything that mattered.”

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Associated Press journalist Stefanie Dazio contributed from Los Angeles.

DACA
No longer young, ‘dreamers’ uneasily watch a legal challenge

By AMANCAI BIRABEN and ADRIAN SAINZ

September 3, 2022

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Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, 36, a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program recipient who moved to the U.S. from Brazil when she was 14, poses for a portrait, Friday, Sept. 2, 2022, outside her apartment in Washington. Immigrants who signed up for an Obama-era program shielding them from deportation, long a symbol of youth, are increasingly easing into middle age. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)


LOS ANGELES (AP) — When Juliana Macedo do Nascimento signed up for an Obama-era program to shield immigrants who came to the country as young children from deportation, she enrolled at California State University, Los Angeles, transitioning from jobs in housekeeping, child care, auto repair and a construction company.

Now, a decade later at age 36, graduate studies at Princeton University are behind her and she works in Washington as deputy director of advocacy for United We Dream, a national group.

“Dreamers” like Macedo do Nascimento, long a symbol of immigrant youth, are increasingly easing into middle age as eligibility requirements have been frozen since 2012, when the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was introduced.

The oldest recipients were in their early 30s when DACA began and are in their early 40s today. At the same time, fewer people turning 16 can meet a requirement to have been in the United States continuously since June 2007.

The average age of a DACA recipient was 28.2 years in March, up from 23.8 in September 2017, according to the Migration Policy Institute. About 40% are 30 or older, according to fwd.us, a group that supports DACA.

As fewer are eligible and new enrollments have been closed since July 2021 under court order, the number of DACA recipients fell to just above 600,000 at the end of March, according to government figures.

Beneficiaries have become homeowners and married. Many have U.S. citizen children.

“DACA is not for young people,” Macedo do Nascimento said. “They’re not even eligible for it anymore. We are well into middle age.”

Born out of President Barack Obama’s frustration with Congress’ failure to reach an agreement on immigration reform, DACA was meant to be a temporary solution and many saw it as imperfect from the start. Immigration advocates were disappointed the policy didn’t include a pathway to citizenship and warned the program’s need to be renewed every two years would leave many feeling in limbo. Opponents, including many Republicans, saw the policy a legal overreach on Obama’s part and criticized it as rewarding people who hadn’t followed immigration law.

In a move intended to insulate DACA from legal challenge, the Biden administration released a 453-page rule on Aug. 24 that sticks closely to DACA as it was introduced in 2012. It codified DACA as a regulation by subjecting it to potential changes after extensive public comment.

DACA advocates welcomed the regulation but were disappointed that age eligibility was unchanged.

The rule was “a missed opportunity,” said Karen Tumlin, an attorney and director of Justice Action Center. DACA, she said, was “locked in time, like a fossil preserved in amber.”

The administration weighed expanding age eligibility but decided against it, said Ur Jaddou, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which administers the program.

“The president told us, ‘How do we preserve and fortify DACA? How do we ensure the security of the program and how best to do that?’ and this was the determination that was made after a lot of thought and careful consideration,” Jaddou said Monday in Los Angeles.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is considering a challenge to DACA from Texas and eight other states, asked both sides to explain how the new rule affects the program’s legal standing.

Texas, in a court filing Thursday, said the rule can’t save DACA. The states conceded that it’s similar to the 2012 memo that created the program but that they “share many of the same defects.”

The executive branch has “neither the authority to decide the major questions that DACA addresses, nor the power to confer substantive immigration benefits,” the states wrote.

The Justice Department argued the new rule — “substantively identical” to the original program — renders moot the argument that the administration failed to follow federal rule-making procedures.

DACA has been closed to new enrollees since July 2021 while the case winds its way through the New Orleans-bsed appeals court but two-year renewals are allowed.

Uncertainty surrounding DACA has caused anxiety and frustration among aging recipients.

Pamela Chomba, 32, arrived with her family from Peru at age 11 and settled in New Jersey. She worries about losing her job and missing mortgage payments if DACA is ruled illegal. She put off becoming a mother because she doesn’t know if she can stay in the U.S. and doesn’t want to be a “burden” on her children.

“We’re people with lives and plans, and we really just want to make sure that we can feel safe,” said Chomba, director of state immigration campaigns for fwd.us.

Macedo do Nascimento was 14 when she arrived with her family from Brazil in 2001. She has not seen a brother who returned to Brazil just before DACA was announced in 10 years. International travel under DACA is highly restricted.

Like Biden and many DACA advocates, she believes legislation is the answer.

“Congress is the ultimate solution here,” she said. “(Both parties) keep passing the ball between each other.

The uncertainty has affected her, the eldest of three siblings.

“The fear of being deported has come back,” Macedo do Nascimento said, because “you never know when this policy is going to end.”

___

Sainz reported from Memphis, Tennessee.

Teacher shortages grow worrisome in Poland and Hungary

By VANESSA GERA and JUSTIN SPIKE

September 3, 2022

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Students attend the beginning of a new school year at the Limanowski High School in Warsaw, Poland, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2022. The public schools in Poland are facing a shortage of teachers, a problem that is growing increasingly serious each year as people leave the profession over low wages and policies of a government which they fear does not value them. A teachers union and teachers say the situation threatens the education of the country's youth, though the government insists that they are exaggerating the scale of the problem. (AP Photo/Michal Dyjuk)


WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Ewa Jaworska has been a teacher since 2008 and loves working with young people. But the low pay is leaving her demoralized. She even has to buy her own teaching materials sometimes, and is disheartened by the government using schools to promote conservative ideas which she sees as backward.

Like many other Polish teachers she is considering a career change.

“I keep hoping that the situation might still change,” said the 44-year-old, who teaches in a Warsaw high school. “But unfortunately it is changing for the worse, so only time will tell if this year will be my last.”

Problems are mounting in schools in Poland, with a teacher shortage growing worse and many educators and parents fearing that the educational system is being used to indoctrinate young people into the ruling party’s conservative and nationalistic vision.

It’s very much the same in Hungary. Black-clad teachers in Budapest carried black umbrellas to protest stagnant wages and heavy workloads on the first day of school Thursday. Teachers’ union PSZ said young teachers earn a “humiliating” monthly after-tax salary of just 500 euros (dollars) that has prompted many to walk away.

Thousands of people marched in solidarity with teachers on Friday in Budapest, voicing the view that the teachers’ low compensation is linked to the authoritarian direction of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government.

“Free country, free education!” they shouted,

Teacher shortages could hardly come at a worse time, with both countries trying to integrate Ukrainian refugees. It’s particularly challenging for Poland, where hundreds of thousands of school-aged Ukrainian refugees now live.

Nearly 200,000 Ukrainian students, most of whom do not speak Polish, already entered Polish schools after the war began on Feb. 24. The education minister has said the overall number of Ukrainian students could triple this coming school year, depending on how the war unfolds.

Andrzej Wyrozembski, the principal of the high school in Warsaw’s Zoliborz district where Jaworska works, has set up two classes for 50 Ukrainians in his school. He said his Ukrainian students who arrived in the spring are quickly learning Polish, a related Slavic language. The real difficulty is finding teachers, particularly for physics, chemistry, computer science, and even for Polish.

Across central Europe, government wages haven’t kept pace with the private sector, leaving teachers, nurses and others with far less purchasing power.

The situation is expected to grow worse as many teachers near retirement and ever fewer young people choose the poorly paid profession, especially when inflation has exploded to 16% in Poland and nearly 14% in Hungary.

According to the Polish teachers’ union, schools in the country are short 20,000 teachers. Hungary, with a much smaller population, has a 16,000-teacher shortage.

“We don’t have young teachers,” said Slawomir Broniarz, the president of the Polish Teachers’ Trade Union, or ZNP, citing the starting salary of 3,400 zlotys ($720) pre-tax as the key reason.

Polish Education Minister Przemyslaw Czarnek has disputed the figures, saying teacher vacancies were closer to 13,000, adding it isn’t a huge number in proportion to the 700,000 teachers nationwide. He accuses the union and political opposition of exaggerating the problem.

Many educators strongly oppose the conservative ideology of the nationalist government and Czarnek himself, viewing him as a Catholic fundamentalist. His appointment in 2020 sparked protests because he had said LGBTQ people aren’t equal to “normal people” and that a woman’s main role is to have children.

Criticism has recently focused on a new school textbook on contemporary history. It has a section on ideologies that presents liberalism and feminism alongside Nazism. A section interpreted as denouncing in-vitro fertilization was so controversial that it was removed.

In Hungary, Erzsebet Nagy, a committee member of the Democratic Union of Hungarian Teachers, said teachers have been leaving the profession “in droves.”

“Young people aren’t coming into the profession, and very few of those who earn a teaching certificate from high school or university go on to teach,” said Nagy. “Even if they do, most of them leave within two years.”

Hungarian unions have also complained about the centralization of the country’s education system. Curriculums, textbooks and all decision-making are controlled by a central body formed in 2012 by Hungary’s nationalist government.

“Our professional autonomy is continually being eliminated,” said Nagy. “We have no freedom to choose textbooks. There are only two to choose from in each subject and both are of terrible quality. They’ve blocked the possibility for a free intellectual life.”

Worried about their children’s futures, families are rejecting the public schools. New private schools are opening but they still can’t meet the demand.

Polish architect Piotr Polatynski was ready to take a second job just to pay private school tuition for his fourth-grade daughter. But as a new school year began this week, a lack of places in private schools forced him and his wife to send her back to a public neighborhood school, which they feel isn’t providing the kind of education his daughter deserves.

He still hopes a spot might still open up somewhere as he fumes over the state of the education system.

“We don’t believe that the current government is capable of making changes that would encourage young people to enter the teaching profession and bring any kind of meaningful energy to this whole system,” he said.

___

Spike reported from Budapest. Bela Szandelszky contributed from Budapest.

New congressional maps dilute Black power, critics say

By SARA CLINE

September 4, 2022

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Press Robinson poses for a photo at his home in Baton Rouge, La., Wednesday, Aug. 24, 2022. When he registered to vote in 1963 he was handed a copy of the U.S. Constitution, told to read it aloud and interpret it. Robinson and activists say that Black voter voices and access to fair representation are once-again being restrained — this time, in the form of political boundaries fashioned by mainly white and Republican-dominated legislatures. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)


BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — When Press Robinson registered to vote in South Carolina in 1963, he was handed a copy of the U.S. Constitution and told to read it aloud and interpret it.

Robinson, then a college sophomore, wasn’t surprised. He heard stories from others in the South’s Black community who faced Jim Crow-era methods to suppress Black votes – from literacy tests to poll taxes to the infamous “jellybean test” that required prospective voters to guess how many of the small candies were in a jar.

As Robinson began reading, he thought about the woman behind him who was also registering to vote for the first time: his 43-year-old mother, who had never fulfilled her constitutional right, partly out of fear that she would encounter this exact situation.

In 1965, the Voting Rights Act outlawed the discriminatory voting practices of many states in the South, where Jim Crow laws also restricted how and where Black people could live, work, eat and study.

Yet, nearly 60 years later, Robinson and civil rights activists say those gains are being eroded. In Alabama, Florida and Louisiana, new congressional maps that some judges have ruled dilute the power of Black voters are being used in upcoming elections.

Civil rights leaders worry the maps could diminish minority representation on Capitol Hill. The issue is especially contentious this year, when Democrats — traditionally favored by minority voters — are fighting to hang on to slim majorities in Congress in midterms that tend to reward the party not in the White House.

“I’m hurt. I’m shocked. I’m disappointed,” an 85-year-old Robinson said. “I’m also a little afraid, because I don’t know where all this is heading.”

Every 10 years, state lawmakers, armed with new U.S. Census Bureau information, redraw political maps for seats in the U.S. House, state Senate and state House. It is typically an extraordinarily partisan process, with each major party trying to scoop up enough of its voters to guarantee wins in the largest number of districts. The boundaries determine which political parties will make decisions that have a profound impact on people’s lives, such as abortion, gun control and how billions of tax dollars are spent.

Under the Voting Rights Act, mapmakers are required to draw districts with a plurality or majority of African Americans or other minority groups if they live in a relatively compact area with a white population that votes starkly differently from them.

Republican legislators have often used this to their advantage by packing one district with Democratic-leaning African American voters, leaving the remaining seats whiter and more Republican.

Both Alabama’s and Louisiana’s Republican-dominated legislatures produced such maps after receiving the latest numbers from the 2020 U.S. census. In both cases, Democrats and civil rights groups sued, and courts ordered new maps drawn.

In Alabama, the U.S. Supreme Court put the lower court’s ruling on hold, essentially saying there wasn’t enough time to redraw maps ahead of the election and that it would take up arguments in the fall. The court also delayed a ruling that would have allowed the creation of a second majority-Black district in Louisiana, until it can hear arguments in the Alabama case. Any ruling is unlikely to come before 2023.

In Florida, the GOP-led legislature approved — and an appeals court upheld — a map created by Republican governor and potential 2024 presidential contender Ron DeSantis that would dismantle at least one district where Blacks have a strong say at the polls.

“What this ultimately means is that (Black voters) will not have as big of a voice as they should if the districts were drawn more fairly,” said Robert Hogan, a professor and chair of Louisiana State University’s political science department.

In Alabama, GOP lawmakers packed most Black voters into only one of seven congressional districts, even though Blacks make up 27% of the state’s population.

In Louisiana, where nearly one-third of the state’s population is Black, GOP lawmakers approved a map containing five majority-white districts, all of which favor Republican incumbents. The 2nd Congressional District, held by Democratic U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, is the sole Black-majority district. It stretches from the New Orleans area along the Mississippi River up to the capital city of Baton Rouge.

Democrats and Black activists want two Black-majority districts instead of just the one.

“We want our seat at the table,” Louisiana state Rep. Denise Marcelle, a Democrat and Black caucus member, said during a recent legislative session. “It’s real simple. ... Give us an opportunity to elect another Black seat so that we can fight for the issues that we believe our people want us to fight for.”

But Republican leaders say placing the state’s widely dispersed Black population in two districts would actually result in very narrow Black majorities that could diminish Black voter power.

There is also another reason why the GOP generally opposes — and Democrats support — additional majority-Black districts. For decades, Black voters have overwhelmingly voted Democratic. Adding Black-majority districts could boost the party’s representation in the House.

“(Republicans) want to use the Voting Rights Act to the extent that it helps put all the African Americans in one district and it creates very noncompetitive, heavily Republican districts around it,” Hogan said. “But, when you take the Voting Rights Act out too far and try to create a second district ... you’re taking away from the Republicans.”

The way Robinson sees it, though, it’s not about more Democratic seats and fewer Republican ones; it’s about fundamental rights for which Blacks have fought too long and hard to let slip away.

“This is 2022. I thought that once we got past those initial hurdles in the ’60s that things would really just move forward and that we would be treated as regular Americans,” Robinson said. “But we are not.”

GOP escalates fight against citizen-led ballot initiatives

By DAVID A. LIEB

September 3, 2022

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Members of the Michigan Board of State Canvassers, from left, Richard Houskamp, Anthony Daunt and Mary Ellen Gurewitz listen to attorneys Olivia Flower and Steve Liedel during a hearing, Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2022, in Lansing, Mich. Republican-dominated courts and legislatures have been pushing back against citizen-led ballot initiatives to keep them off the ballot, in what critics say is a partisan attack on direct democracy. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File)

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of people signed petitions this year backing proposed ballot initiatives to expand voting access, ensure abortion rights and legalize recreational marijuana in Arizona, Arkansas and Michigan.

Yet voters might not get a say because Republican officials or judges have blocked the proposals from the November elections, citing flawed wording, procedural shortcomings or insufficient petition signatures.

At the same time, Republican lawmakers in Arkansas and Arizona have placed constitutional amendments on the ballot proposing to make it harder to approve citizen initiatives in the future.

The Republican pushback against the initiative process is part of a several-year trend that gained steam as Democratic-aligned groups have increasingly used petitions to force public votes on issues that Republican-led legislatures have opposed. In reliably Republican Missouri, for example, voters have approved initiatives to expand Medicaid, raise the minimum wage and legalize medical marijuana. An initiative seeking to allow recreational pot is facing a court challenge from an anti-drug activist aiming to knock it off the November ballot.

Some Democrats contend Republicans are subverting the will of the people by making the ballot initiative process more difficult.

“What is happening now is just a web of technicalities to thwart the process in states where voters are using the people’s tool to make an immediate positive change in their lives,” said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which has worked with progressive groups sponsoring the blocked initiatives.

“That is not the way our democracy should work,” she added

Republicans who have thrown up hurdles to initiative petitions contend they are protecting the integrity of the lawmaking process against well-funded interest groups trying to bend state policies in their favor.

“I think the Legislature is a much purer way to get things done and it represents the people much better, rather than having this jungle where you just throw it on the ballot,” said South Dakota state Rep. Tim Goodwin, who has perennially targeted the initiative process with restrictions.

About half the states allow citizen initiatives, in which petition signers can bypass a legislature to place proposed laws or constitutional changes directly before voters. But executive or judicial officials often still have some role in the process, typically by certifying that the ballot wording is clear and accurate and that petition circulators gathered enough valid signatures of registered voters.

In Michigan this past week, two Republican members of the bipartisan Board of State Canvassers blocked initiatives to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution and expand opportunities for voting. Each measure had significantly more than the required 425,000 signatures. But GOP board members said the voting measure had unclear wording and the abortion measure was flawed because of spacing problems that scrunched some words together.

Supporters have appealed both decisions to the Michigan Supreme Court, which consists of a majority of Democratic-appointed judges.

The Arkansas Supreme Court, whose justices run in nonpartisan elections, is weighing an appeal of an August decision blocking an initiative that would legalize recreational marijuana for adults.

The State Board of Election Commissioners, which has just one Democrat among its many Republicans, determined that the ballot title was misleading because it failed to mention it would repeal potency limits in an existing medical marijuana provision. Because the deadline has passed to certify initiative titles, the Supreme Court has allowed the measure on the general election ballot while it decides whether the votes will be counted.

A lawsuit by initiative supporters contends a 2019 law passed by the Republican-led Legislature violates the Arkansas Constitution by allowing the board to reject ballot titles.

“The (initiative) process in Arkansas has gotten consistently harder each cycle, as the Legislature adds more and more requirements,” said Steve Lancaster, a lawyer for Responsible Growth Arkansas, which is sponsoring the marijuana amendment.

It would get even harder if voters support a legislatively referred amendment on the November ballot that would require a 60% vote to approve citizen-initiated ballot measures or future constitutional amendments.

In Arizona, the primarily Republican-appointed Supreme Court recently blocked a proposed constitutional amendment that would have extended early voting and limited lobbyist gifts to lawmakers. The measure also would have specifically prohibited the Legislature from overturning the results of presidential elections, which some Republicans had explored after then- President Donald Trump’s loss in 2020.

After a lower court initially ruled the measure could appear on the November ballot, Arizona’s high court instructed the judge to reconsider. Then it upheld a subsequent ruling throwing out enough petition signatures to prevent the initiative from qualifying for the ballot.

Still on the ballot are several other amendments referred by Arizona’s Republican-led Legislature. Those measures would limit initiatives to a single subject, require a 60% supermajority to approve tax proposals and expand the Legislature’s authority to change voter-approved initiatives.

Those proposals come after Arizona Republicans have spent the past decade enacting laws making it more difficult to get citizen initiatives on the ballot. State laws now require petition sheets to be precisely printed and ban the use of a copy machine to create new ones. Other laws require paid circulators to include their registration number on each petition sheet, get it notarized and check a box saying they were paid.

“The effect is to make it much harder, much more expensive to get the signatures to put one of these propositions on the ballot,” said Terry Goddard, a Democrat who served as the state’s attorney general from 2003 through 2011.

After years of trying, Goddard finally succeeded this year in getting an initiative on the ballot that would require nonprofit groups that spend large amounts on elections to reveal their donors.

Earlier this summer, South Dakota voters defeated a measure that would have made it harder to pass initiatives on taxes and spending. The proposal from the Republican-led Legislature would have required a 60% vote to raise taxes or spend over a certain amount of money. Voters rejected the measure by 67%.

“This just seems like a way to suppress voters. honestly,” Joshua Matzner, a Democrat, said after voting against it.

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Associated Press writers Bob Christie in Phoenix and Stephen Groves in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, contributed to this report.

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Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter, https://twitter.com/ap_politics

Pakistan appeals for more aid for 33M affected by flooding

By ZARAR KHAN

September 3, 2022

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People use cot to salvage belongings from their nearby flooded home caused by heavy rain in Jaffarabad, a district of Pakistan's southwestern Baluchistan province, Saturday, Sep. 3, 2022. The homeless people affected by monsoon rains triggered devastating floods in Pakistan get enhancing international attention amid growing numbers of fatalities and homeless families across the country as the federal planning minister appealed the international community for immense humanitarian response for 33 million people. (AP Photo/Fareed Khan)


ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistan appealed Saturday to the international community for an “immense humanitarian response” to unprecedented flooding that has left at least 1,265 people dead. The request came even as planes carried supplies to the impoverished country across a humanitarian air bridge.

Federal planning minister Ahsan Iqbal called for an “immense humanitarian response for 33 million people” affected by monsoon rains that triggered devastating floods. International attention to Pakistan’s plight has increased as the number of fatalities and homeless have risen. According to initial government estimates, the rain and flooding have caused $10 billion in damage.

“The scale of devastation is massive and requires an immense humanitarian response for 33 million people. For this I appeal to my fellow Pakistanis, Pakistan expatriates and the international community to help Pakistan in this hour of need,” he said at a news conference.

Multiple officials and experts have blamed the unusual monsoon rains and flooding on climate change, including U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who earlier this week called on the world to stop “sleepwalking” through the deadly crisis. He will visit Pakistan on Sept. 9 to tour flood-hit areas and meet with officials.

Earlier this week, the United Nations and Pakistan jointly issued an appeal for $160 million in emergency funding to help the millions of people affected by the floods, which have damaged over 1 million homes.

Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority in its latest report Saturday counted 57 more deaths from flood-affected areas. That brought the total death toll since monsoon rains began in mid-June to 1,265, including 441 children.

Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s earlier appeal for aid got a quick response from the international community, which sent planes loaded with relief goods. A French aircraft carrying relief goods landed in Islamabad on Saturday and was received by Minister for National Health Services Abdul Qadir Patel.

That French plane’s arrival followed the ninth flight from the United Arab Emirates and the first from Uzbekistan. Those flights were the latest to land in Islamabad overnight.

Patel said the relief goods sent by France included medicine and large dewatering pumps to reduce water levels. He said France has also sent a team of doctors and experts.

Pakistan has established a National Flood Response and Coordination Center to distribute the arriving aid among the affected population. Iqbal is supervising the army-led center.

The minister said rains this monsoon season have lashed most areas of Baluchistan and Sindh provinces as well as parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab provinces. The Gilgit-Baltistan territory was also affected. The torrential rains and subsequent flash floods caused massive damage to infrastructure, roads, electricity and communications networks.

Iqbal said the government is working to bring normalcy back to the country as soon as possible but that the Pakistani government can’t do it alone.

Maj. Gen Zafar Iqbal, head of the flood response center and no relation to the planning minister, said in the news conference that over the last four days, 29 planes loaded with relief goods arrived in Pakistan from Turkey, the UAE, China, Qatar, Uzbekistan, Jordan, Turkmenistan and other countries.

Military spokesman Maj. Gen Iftikhar Babar said rescuers supported by the military were continuing rescue and relief operations. He said army aviation, air force and navy troops were using boats and helicopters to evacuate people from remote regions and to deliver aid.

Babar said the army has established 147 relief camps sheltering and feeding more than 50,000 displaced people while 250 medical camps have provided help to 83,000 people so far.

Health officials have expressed concern about the spread of water borne diseases among the homeless people living in relief camps and in tents alongside roads.

Lt. Gen. Akhtar Nawaz, head of the disaster management authority, said areas of the country expected to receive 15% to 20% additional rains this year actually received in excess of 400% more. Collectively, the country has seen 190% more rain this monsoon season.

The U.S. military’s Central Command has said it will send an assessment team to Islamabad to see what support it can provide. The United States announced $30 million worth of aid for the flood victims earlier this week.

Two members Congress, Sheila Jackson and Tom Suzy, were expected to arrive in Pakistan on Sunday to visit the flood affected areas and meet officials.

3 rescued dolphins swim free from Indonesia sanctuary

By YURI KAGEYAMA

today

In this photo released by DolphinProject.com, Rocky with GPS tag attached swims at the Umah Lumba Rehabilitation, Release and Retirement Center in Banyuwedang Bay, West Bali, Indonesia Saturday, Sept. 3, 2022. Three bottlenose dolphins were released into the open sea in Indonesia Saturday after years of being confined for the amusement of tourists who would touch and swim with them. (DolphinProject.com via AP)

TOKYO (AP) — Three bottlenose dolphins were released into the open sea in Indonesia Saturday after years of being confined for the amusement of tourists who would touch and swim with them.

As red and white Indonesian flags fluttered, underwater gates opened off the island of Bali to allow Johnny, Rocky and Rambo to swim free.

The trio were rescued three years ago from their tiny pool in a resort hotel to which they had been sold after spending years performing in a traveling circus.

They regained their health and strength at the Bali sanctuary , a floating pen in a bay that provided a gentler, more natural environment.

Lincoln O’Barry, who worked with the Indonesian government to set up the Umah Lumba Rehabilitation, Release and Retirement Center, said dolphins are wild animals that should live free.

“It was an incredibly emotional experience to see them go,” O’Barrry said.

The center was initiated in 2019 by the Bali Forestry Department and the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry. “Umah lumba” means “dolphin” in Indonesian.

For some time after the gates opened, the dolphins looked at the opening, uncertain of their next move. But after about an hour, they were on their way, sometimes jumping over choppy waves.

The Associated Press watched their release through an online livestream. O’Barry is documenting the release with drones and underwater footage for a film.

The Indonesian government supported the dolphins’ rescue, working with Dolphin Project, founded by Lincoln’s father Ric O’Barry, who was also at the release.

Ric O’Barry had been the dolphin trainer for the 1960s TV show “Flipper,” but later came to see the toll exacted on the animals. He has since devoted his life to returning dolphins to the wild.

Center workers clapped as the dolphins swam out. Wahyu Lestari, rehabilitation coordinator at the center, said she was a bit sad to see them go.

“I’m happy they are free, and they are going back to their family,” she said. “They should be in the wild because they are born in the wild.”

The freed dolphins will be monitored out at sea with GPS tracking for a year. They can return for visits to the sanctuary, although it’s unclear what they will do. They may join another pod, stay together, or go their separate ways.



Dolphins in captivity are carted from town to town, kept in chlorinated water, held in isolation or forced to interact with tourists, often leading to injuries.

Johnny, the oldest dolphin, had teeth that were worn down to below the gum line when he was rescued in 2019. Earlier this year, dentists provided him with dolphin-style dental crowns so that he can now clamp down on live fish.

Johnny was the first of the three dolphins to swim out to sea.

Ric and Lincoln O’Barry have spent half a century working on saving dolphins from captivity in locations from Brazil to South Korea and the U.S. Saturday’s release was their first in Indonesia.

The Indonesian government’s decision to rescue the dolphins followed a decade-long public education campaign that included billboards, artwork, school programs and a drive asking people not to buy tickets to dolphin shows.

A government minister was at hand to raise the gate at the sanctuary Saturday.

Lincoln O’Barry said the Indonesian sanctuary will continue to be used for other captive dolphins. Similar sanctuaries are in the works in North America and Europe, as more dolphin shows close. With virtual reality and other technology, appreciation of nature doesn’t have to involve a zoo or a dolphin show, he said.

Yet dolphin shows are still popular in China, the Middle East and Japan.

In Japan, the father and son have drawn attention to the dolphin hunt in the town of Taiji, documented in the 2010 Oscar-winning film “The Cove.” Every year, fishermen frighten and corral dolphins into a cove, capture some to sell to dolphin shows and kill others for food.

Whale and dolphin meat is considered a delicacy in Japanese culinary tradition. But Taiji has prompted protests by conservationists for years, including some Japanese.

The three dolphins released in Indonesia were soon miles (kilometers) away in the waters. But before their departure, they circled around the sanctuary.

“They turned back around and came back to us one more time, almost to say thank you and good-bye. And then they headed straight out to open ocean and disappeared,” Lincoln O’Barry said.

“Where they head next, we don’t know. But we wish them a good long life.”

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Yuri Kageyama is on Twitter https://twitter.com/yurikageyama

Mississippi capital’s Black business owners decry water woes

By MICHAEL GOLDBERG

yesterday

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Maati Jone Primm looks down at her notes in her store Marshall's Music and Bookstore in Farish Street Historic District, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2022 in Jackson, Miss.

 She said white flight is at the root of Jackson's water woes.

(AP Photo/Michael Goldberg)

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — When John Tierre launched his restaurant in Jackson’s neglected Farish Street Historic District, he was drawn by the neighborhood’s past as an economically independent cultural hub for Black Mississippians, and the prospect of helping usher in an era of renewed prosperity.

This week he sat on the empty, sun-drenched patio of Johnny T’s Bistro and Blues and lamented all the business he has lost as tainted water flows through his pipes — just like other users in the majority Black city of 150,000, if they were lucky enough to have any pressure at all. The revival he and others envisioned seems very much in doubt.

“The numbers are very low for lunch,” Tierre told The Associated Press. “They’re probably taking their business to the outskirts where they don’t have water woes.”

Torrential rains and flooding of the Pearl River in late August exacerbated problems at one of Jackson’s two treatment plants, leading to a drop in pressure throughout the city, where residents were already under a boil-water order due to poor quality.

Officials said Sunday that most of Jackson should have running water, though residents are still advised not to drink straight from the tap. The city remains under a boil water notice. Officials also said future repairs leave potential for fluctuations in water pressure.

The water crisis has compounded the financial strain caused by an ongoing labor shortage and high inflation. And the flow of consumer dollars from Jackson and its crumbling infrastructure to the city’s outskirts hits Black-owned businesses hardest, the owners say.

Another Black entrepreneur who has taken a hit is Bobbie Fairley, 59, who has lived in Jackson her entire life and owns Magic Hands Hair Design on the city’s south side.

She canceled five appointments Wednesday because she needs high water pressure to rinse her clients’ hair of treatment chemicals. She also has had to purchase water to shampoo hair to try fit and in whatever appointments she can. When customers aren’t coming in, she’s losing money.

“That’s a big burden,” she said. “I can’t afford that. I can’t afford that at all.”

Jackson can’t afford to fix its water problems. The tax base has eroded over the past few decades as the population decreased, the result of primarily white flight to suburbs that began about a decade after public schools integrated in 1970. Today the city is more than 80% black, and 25% of its residents live in poverty.

Some say the uncertainty facing Black businesses fits into a pattern of adversity stemming from both natural disasters and policy decisions.

“It’s punishment for Jackson because it was open to the idea that people should be able to attend public schools and that people should have access to public areas without abuse,” said Maati Jone Primm, who owns Marshall’s Music and Bookstore up the block from Johnny T’s. “As a result of that, we have people who ran away to the suburbs.”

Primm thinks Jackson’s longstanding water woes — which some trace to the 1970s when federal spending on water utilities peaked, according to a 2018 Congressional Budget Office report — have been made worse by inaction from Mississippi’s mostly white, conservative-dominated Legislature.

“For decades this has been a malignant attack, not benign. And it’s been purposeful,” Primm said.

Political leaders have not always been on the same page. Jackson’s Democratic mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, has blamed the water problems on decades of deferred maintenance, while Republican Gov. Tate Reeves has said they stem from mismanagement at the city level.

Last Monday the governor held a news conference about the crisis, and the mayor was not invited. Another was held later in the week where they both appeared, but Primm said it’s clear that the two are not in concert.

“The lack of cooperation speaks to the continued punishment that Jackson must endure,” she said.

Under normal circumstances, Labor Day weekend is a bustling time at Johnny T’s. The college football season brings out devoted Jackson State fans who watch away games on the bistro’s TVs or mosey over from the stadium after home games. But this weekend many regulars were busy stocking up on bottled water to drink or boiling tap water to cook.

Even as revenue plummeted, Tierre’s expenses increased. He has been spending $300 to $500 per day on ice and bottled water, not to mention canned soft drinks, tonic water and everything else that would typically be served out of a soda gun. He brings staff in a few hours earlier than usual so they can get a head start on boiling water to wash dishes and stacking the extra soda cans.

In total, Tierre estimated, he’s forking over an added $3,500 per week. Customers pay the price.

“You have to pass some of this off to the consumer,” Tierre said. “Now your Coke is $3, and there are no refills.”

At a water distribution site in south Jackson this week, area resident Lisa Jones brought empty paint buckets to fill up so her family could bathe. In a city with crumbling infrastructure, Jones said she felt trapped.

“Everybody can’t move right now. Everyone can’t go to Madison, Flowood, Canton and all these other places,” she said, naming three more affluent suburbs. “If we could, trust me, it would be a dark sight: Houses would be boarded up street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood.”

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Michael Goldberg is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/mikergoldberg.