Pope apologizes for 'catastrophic' school policy in Canada
MASKWACIS, Alberta (AP) — Pope Francis issued a historic apology Monday for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with Canada’s “catastrophic” policy of Indigenous residential schools, saying the forced assimilation of Native peoples into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families and marginalized generations.
“I am deeply sorry,” Francis said to applause from school survivors and Indigenous community members gathered at a former residential school south of Edmonton, Alberta. He called the school policy a “disastrous error” that was incompatible with the Gospel and said further investigation and healing is needed.
“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” Francis said.
In the first event of his weeklong “penitential pilgrimage,” Francis traveled to the lands of four Cree nations to pray at a cemetery and then deliver the long-sought apology at nearby powwow ceremonial grounds. Four chiefs escorted the pontiff in a wheelchair to the site near the former Ermineskin Indian Residential School, and presented him with a feathered headdress after he spoke, making him an honorary leader of the community.
Francis' words went beyond his earlier apology for the “deplorable” abuses committed by missionaries and instead took institutional responsibility for the church’s cooperation with Canada’s “catastrophic” assimilation policy, which the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission said amounted to a “cultural genocide.”
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Indiana abortion debate draws protest crowds, vice president
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Thousands of people arguing the abortion issue surrounded the Indiana Statehouse and filled its corridors Monday as state lawmakers began consideration of a Republican proposal to ban nearly all abortions in the state and Vice President Kamala Harris denounced the effort during a meeting with Democratic legislators.
Harris said during a trip to Indianapolis that the abortion ban proposal reflects a health care crisis in the country. Despite the bill’s abortion ban language, anti-abortion activists lined up before a legislative committee to argue that the bill wasn’t strict enough and lacked enforcement teeth.
Indiana is one of the first Republican-run state legislatures to debate tighter abortion laws following the U.S. Supreme Court decision last month overturning Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court ruling is expected to lead to abortion bans in roughly half the states.
“Maybe some people need to actually learn how a woman’s body works,” Harris said Monday, eliciting murmurs and laughs from the Democratic legislators. “The parameters that are being proposed mean that for the vast majority of women, by the time she realizes she is pregnant, she will effectively be prohibited from having access to reproductive health care that will allow her to choose what happens to her body."
Confrontations erupted periodically between anti-abortion and abortion-rights demonstrators around the Indiana Statehouse. One person carrying a message on cardboard — “Forced Birth Is Violence” — followed a man, who carried a fake red fetus in a plastic bag over his shoulder, and tried to obscure his sign that read “Save Our Babies.”
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'The money is gone': Evacuated Ukrainians forced to return
POKROVSK, Ukraine (AP) — The missile's impact flung the young woman against the fence so hard it splintered. Her mother found her dying on the bench beneath the pear tree where she’d enjoyed the afternoon. By the time her father arrived, she was gone.
Anna Protsenko was killed two days after returning home. The 35-year-old had done what authorities wanted: She evacuated eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region as Russian forces move closer. But starting a new life elsewhere had been uncomfortable and expensive.
Like Protsenko, tens of thousands of people have returned to rural or industrial communities close to the region's front line at considerable risk because they can’t afford to live in safer places.
Protsenko had tried it for two months, then came home to take a job in the small city of Pokrovsk. On Monday, friends and family caressed her face and wept before her casket was hammered shut beside her grave.
“We cannot win. They don’t hire us elsewhere and you still have to pay rent,” said a friend and neighbor, Anastasia Rusanova. There’s nowhere to go, she said, but here in the Donetsk region, “everything is ours.”
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The tough words Trump never spoke: Jan. 6 panel's new video
WASHINGTON (AP) — An original script for Donald Trump’s speech the day after the Capitol insurrection included tough talk ordering the Justice Department to “ensure all lawbreakers are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law" and stating the rioters “do not represent me." But those words were crossed out with thick black lines, apparently by Trump, according to exhibits released by House investigators.
Virginia Rep. Elaine Luria, a Democratic member of the House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, tweeted out a short video Monday that included testimony from White House aides discussing Trump’s speech on Jan. 7 and a screenshot of the speech, with notes and with lines to be deleted. In one of the clips, Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, confirms to the panel the document “looks like a copy of a draft of the remarks for that day” and the writing “looks like my father’s handwriting.”
When the committee asked White House aide Jared Kushner, Ivanka’s husband, why Trump crossed out specific lines, he responded, twice: “I don’t know.”
The panel released the 3:40-minute video as a follow up to its final summer hearing last week, in which the investigators showed outtakes from Trump's videotaping of the speech. In the outtakes, Trump becomes frustrated and discusses the wording with the staff present, including Ivanka. At one point, he tells them “I don’t want to say the election is over.” Angry, he pounds his fist.
The committee is releasing the additional material in an effort to push out even more evidence after eight summer hearings laid out findings from more than 1,000 interviews in its yearlong investigation. Members of the committee say the investigation continues, and they will hold more hearings in the fall.
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AP source: Top aide to Pence testifies before 1/6 grand jury
WASHINGTON (AP) — The former chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence has testified before a federal grand jury investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, a person familiar with the matter said Monday.
Marc Short, a close aide to Pence, was at the Capitol on the day of the siege and was with the vice president as he fled his post presiding over the Senate and hid from rioters who had stormed the building and called for his hanging.
Short appeared before the grand jury after receiving a subpoena to do so, according to the person, who insisted on anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. The appearance was first reported by ABC News, which said it took place last week. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office did not immediately return a phone message and email seeking comment Monday.
On CNN Monday evening, Short confirmed the appearance, saying, “I did receive a subpoena for the federal grand jury and I complied with that subpoena.”
He said it was his “only appearance before the grand jury” but declined to speak further about the questioning.
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‘Goodfellas,’ ‘Law & Order’ actor Paul Sorvino dies at 83
Paul Sorvino, an imposing actor who specialized in playing crooks and cops like Paulie Cicero in “Goodfellas” and the NYPD sergeant Phil Cerreta on “Law & Order,” has died. He was 83.
His publicist Roger Neal said he died Monday morning of natural causes at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. Sorvino had dealt with health issues over the past few years.
Mira Sorvino, his daughter, wrote a tribute on Twitter: “My father the great Paul Sorvino has passed. My heart is rent asunder- a life of love and joy and wisdom with him is over. He was the most wonderful father. I love him so much. I’m sending you love in the stars, Dad, as you ascend.”
Many responded to Mira Sorvino’s tweet with condolences and sympathy. Jane Lynch wrote, “Your father sang ‘Danny Boy’ for my Aunt Marge at The Chicago Film Critics Awards in 2012. We all cried.” Rob Reiner, who appeared in one of his father’s films with Sorvino, said he was sending love. Lorraine Bracco tweeted two broken heart emojis.
In his over 50 years in the entertainment business, Sorvino was a mainstay in films and television, playing an Italian American communist in Warren Beatty’s “Reds,” Henry Kissinger in Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” and mob boss Eddie Valentine in “The Rocketeer.” He would often say that while he might be best known for playing gangsters (and his very good system for slicing garlic) his real passions were poetry, painting and opera.
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How an AP reporter broke the Tuskegee syphilis story
SOUTHPORT, N.C. (AP) — Jean Heller was toiling away on the floor of the Miami Beach Convention Center when an Associated Press colleague from the opposite end of the country walked into her workspace behind the event stage and handed her a thin manila envelope.
“I’m not an investigative reporter,” Edith Lederer told the 29-year-old Heller as competitors typed away beyond the thick grey hangings separating news outlets covering the 1972 Democratic National Convention. “But I think there might be something here.”
Inside were documents telling a tale that, even today, staggers the imagination: For four decades, the U.S. government had denied hundreds of poor, Black men treatment for syphilis so researchers could study its ravages on the human body.
The U.S. Public Health Service called it “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The world would soon come to know it simply as the “Tuskegee Study” — one of the biggest medical scandals in U.S. history, an atrocity that continues to fuel mistrust of government and health care among Black Americans.
“I thought, 'It couldn’t be,’” Heller recalls of that moment, 50 years ago. “The ghastliness of this.”
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Judge: Georgia probe prosecutor can't question state senator
ATLANTA (AP) — The prosecutor who's investigating whether former President Donald Trump and his allies illegally tried to interfere in the 2020 election in Georgia cannot question a lawmaker who signed a certificate falsely stating that Trump won the state, a judge ruled Monday.
Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney agreed with Republican state Sen. Burt Jones that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had a conflict of interest because she hosted a fundraiser last month for Jones' Democratic opponent in November’s election for lieutenant governor. McBurney said during a hearing last week that Willis' decision to host the fundraiser was “a ‘What are you thinking?’" moment with “horrible” optics.
Willis can still ask other witnesses about Jones, the judge said, but will not be able to bring charges against him. It is now up to the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, a nonpartisan association of Georgia district attorneys, to appoint another prosecutor to determine whether any charges should be brought against Jones, one of 16 Georgia Republicans who signed the certificate falsely asserting Trump won the state and claimed to be the state’s “duly elected and qualified” electors, McBurney wrote.
“Today’s ruling is a huge win for our campaign — but more importantly, for due process and the rule of law in Georgia,” Jones said in an emailed statement.
Willis’ office was still reviewing the order and didn’t have an immediate comment, spokesperson Jeff DiSantis said.
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US to plant 1 billion trees as climate change kills forests
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — The Biden administration on Monday said the government will plant more than one billion trees across millions of acres of burned and dead woodlands in the U.S. West, as officials struggle to counter the increasing toll on the nation's forests from wildfires, insects and other manifestations of climate change.
Destructive fires in recent years that burned too hot for forests to regrow naturally have far outpaced the government's capacity to plant new trees. That has created a backlog of 4.1 million acres (1.7 million hectares) in need of replanting, officials said.
The U.S. Agriculture Department said it will have to quadruple the number of tree seedlings produced by nurseries to get through the backlog and meet future needs. That comes after Congress last year passed bipartisan legislation directing the Forest Service to plant 1.2 billion trees over the next decade and after President Joe Biden in April ordered the agency to make the nation's forests more resilient as the globe gets hotter.
Much of the administration's broader agenda to tackle climate change remains stalled amid disagreement in Congress, where Democrats hold a razor-thin majority. That has left officials to pursue a more piecemeal approach with incremental measures such as Monday's announcement, while the administration considers whether to declare a climate emergency that could open the door to more aggressive executive branch actions.
To erase the backlog of decimated forest acreage, the Forest Service plans over the next couple years to scale up work from about 60,000 acres (24,000 hectares) replanted last year to about 400,000 acres (162,000 hectares) annually, officials said. Most of the work will be in western states where wildfires now occur year round and the need is most pressing, said David Lytle, the agency's director of forest management.
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Maxwell’s new digs: Fla. prison known for yoga, music, abuse
NEW YORK (AP) — Ghislaine Maxwell, the jet-setting socialite turned convicted sex trafficker, is off to Florida to serve a 20-year federal prison sentence for helping financier Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse underage girls — returning to the same state, but a far cry from the posh lifestyle, where she committed some of her crimes.
Maxwell, 60, was moved last week to FCI Tallahassee, a low-security federal prison in Florida’s capital, from the Brooklyn federal jail where she’d spent the last two years under close watch in light of Epstein’s 2019 jail suicide, the federal Bureau of Prisons said.
It wasn’t clear whether Maxwell would be held in restrictive housing or under other special precautions, given her notoriety and long-standing concerns about her well-being behind bars.
Maxwell, who was convicted last December in Manhattan and sentenced in June, repeatedly complained about her treatment at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, her home since her July 2020 arrest.
Maxwell and her lawyers complained that jail officers were flashing a light into her cell every 15 minutes, interrupting her sleep, and subjecting her to hundreds of searches and pat downs. She also claimed that a guard at the Brooklyn facility physically abused her and that she was punished for complaining about it.
The Associated Press
