Evacuations under way in Mariupol; Pelosi visits Ukraine
ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine (AP) — A long-awaited evacuation of civilians from a besieged steel plant in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol was under way Sunday, as U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi revealed that she visited Ukraine's president to show unflinching American support for the country's defense against Russia's invasion.
Video posted online by Ukrainian forces showed elderly women and mothers with small children bundled in winter clothing being helped as they climbed a steep pile of debris from the sprawling Azovstal steel plant’s rubble, and then eventually boarded a bus.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said more than 100 civilians, primarily women and children, were expected to arrive in the Ukrainian-controlled city of Zaporizhzhia on Monday.
“Today, for the first time in all the days of the war, this vitally needed (humanitarian) corridor has started working,” he said in a pre-recorded address published on his Telegram messaging app channel.
The Mariupol City Council said on Telegram that the evacuation of civilians from other parts of the city would begin Monday morning. People fleeing Russian-occupied areas in the past have described their vehicles being fired on, and Ukrainian officials have repeatedly accused Russian forces of shelling evacuation routes on which the two sides had agreed.
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Evidence mounts of GOP involvement in Trump election schemes
WASHINGTON (AP) — Rioters who smashed their way into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, succeeded — at least temporarily — in delaying the certification of Joe Biden’s election to the White House.
Hours before, Rep. Jim Jordan had been trying to achieve the same thing.
Texting with then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, a close ally and friend, at nearly midnight on Jan. 5, Jordan offered a legal rationale for what President Donald Trump was publicly demanding — that Vice President Mike Pence, in his ceremonial role presiding over the electoral count, somehow assert the authority to reject electors from Biden-won states.
Pence “should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all,” Jordan wrote.
"I have pushed for this," Meadows replied. “Not sure it is going to happen.”
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Combat death puts spotlight on Americans fighting in Ukraine
Harrison Jozefowicz quit his job as a Chicago police officer and headed overseas soon after Russia invaded Ukraine. An Army veteran, he said he couldn't help but join American volunteers seeking to help Ukrainians in their fight.
Jozefowicz now heads a group called Task Force Yankee, which he said has placed more than 190 volunteers in combat slots and other roles while delivering nearly 15,000 first aid kits, helping relocate more than 80 families and helping deliver dozens of pallets of food and medical supplies to the southern and eastern fronts of the war.
It's difficult, dangerous work. But Jozefowicz said he felt helpless watching from the United States last year during the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan, particularly after a close friend, Staff Sgt. Ryan Knauss, died in a suicide bombing at Kabul.
"So, I’m just trying to do everything I can to make sure I can help others not go through what I went through,” he said Saturday during an interview conducted through a messaging platform.
A former U.S. Marine who died last week was believed to be the first American citizen killed while fighting in Ukraine. Willy Joseph Cancel, 22, died Monday while working for a military contracting company that sent him to Ukraine, his mother, Rebecca Cabrera, told CNN.
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Elon Musk's big plans for Twitter: What we know so far
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Tesla CEO Elon Musk has laid out some bold, if still vague, plans for transforming Twitter into a place of “maximum fun” once he buys the social media platform for $44 billion and takes it private.
But enacting what at the moment are little more than a mix of vague principles and technical details could be considerably more complicated than he suggests.
Here's what might happen if Musk follows through on his ideas about free speech, fighting spam and opening up the “black box” of artificial intelligence tools that amplify social media trends.
FREE SPEECH TOWN SQUARE
Musk's feistiest priority — but also the one with the vaguest roadmap — is to make Twitter a “politically neutral” digital town square for the world's discourse that allows as much free speech as each country's laws allow.
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Black doctors say they face discrimination based on race
ATLANTA (AP) — Dr. Dare Adewumi was thrilled when he was hired to lead the neurosurgery practice at an Atlanta-area hospital near where he grew up. But he says he quickly faced racial discrimination that ultimately led to his firing and has prevented him from getting permanent work elsewhere.
His lawyers and other advocates say he's not alone, that Black doctors across the country commonly experience discrimination, ranging from microaggressions to career-threatening disciplinary actions. Biases, conscious or not, can become magnified in the fiercely competitive hospital environment, they say, and the underrepresentation of Black doctors can discourage them from speaking up.
“Too many of us are worried about retaliation, what happens when you say something," said Dr. Rachel Villanueva, president of the National Medical Association, which represents Black doctors. “We have scores of doctors that are sending us letters about these same discriminatory practices all the time and seeking our help as an association in fighting that.”
According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, Black doctors made up just 5% of active physicians in the U.S. in 2018, the most recent data available. People who identify as Black alone represent 12.4% of the total U.S. population, according to the 2020 U.S. census. For the 2021-2022 academic year, 8.1% of students enrolled in medical schools identified as Black alone. The medical school association and the National Medical Association in 2020 announced an initiative to address the scarcity of Black men in medicine — they made up only 2.9% of 2019-2020 enrolled students.
The American Medical Association, the country’s largest, most influential doctors’ group, is also trying to attract Black students to medicine, working with historically Black colleges and universities and helping secure scholarships, president Dr. Gerald Harmon said.
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Biden calls former VP Mondale 'giant' of political history
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — President Joe Biden saluted his “friend of five decades" Walter Mondale on Sunday, traveling to the University of Minnesota to remember the former vice president and Democratic Party elder whose memorial service was delayed for a year due to the pandemic.
Mondale died in April 2021 at age 93. He is credited with transforming the office of the vice presidency — which Biden himself held for eight years under President Barack Obama — expanding its responsibilities and making himself a key adviser to President Jimmy Carter.
Mondale “was a giant in American political history,” Biden said of Mondale, known to friends as “Fritz.” He added that Mondale was one of the “toughest, smartest men I've ever worked with” both as Senate colleagues and as a mentor when Biden was Obama’s No. 2 and then later as president.
Biden emphasized Mondale’s empathy, recalling his own promise during the 2020 presidential campaign to unite the country. That's something the president has strayed from a bit in recent weeks, as he seeks to draw a starker contrast between his administration and congressional Republicans who have opposed it on nearly every major issue.
“It was Fritz who lit the way.” Biden said. “Everybody is to be treated with dignity. Everybody.”
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The Judds, Ray Charles join the Country Music Hall of Fame
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Ray Charles and The Judds joined the Country Music Hall of Fame on Sunday in a ceremony filled with tears, music and laughter, just a day after Naomi Judd died unexpectedly.
The loss of Naomi Judd altered the normally celebratory ceremony, but the music played on, as the genre's singers and musicians mourned the country legend while also celebrating the four inductees: The Judds, Ray Charles, Eddie Bayers and Pete Drake. Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood, Vince Gill and many more performed their hit songs.
Naomi and Wynonna Judd were among the most popular duos of the 1980s, scoring 14 No. 1 hits during their nearly three-decade career. On the eve of her induction, the family said in a statement to The Associated Press that Naomi Judd died at the age of 76 due to “the disease of mental illness.”
Daughters Wynonna and Ashley Judd accepted the induction amid tears, holding onto each other and reciting a Bible verse together.
“I’m sorry that she couldn’t hang on until today,” Ashley Judd said of her mother to the crowd while crying. Wynonna Judd talked about the family gathering as they said goodbye to her and she and Ashley Judd recited Psalm 23.
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ESSAY: For a gay country boy, Naomi Judd did build a bridge
Somewhere in Michigan in the early 1990s, a teenage farm boy clings to a chain-link fence at the edge of the county fairgrounds. He is angling for a distant, and free, glimpse of Naomi and Wynonna Judd.
They step into view briefly, gliding on high heels to the edge of the grandstand stage. From this distance, illuminated by a spotlight, they are a blur of sparkling sequins and red hair. Naomi, the mother of the duo and the de facto emcee, says something, but even amplified, her words float away in the hot August night.
Soon, though, a gentle strumming and Wynonna’s throaty voice carry to him: “I would whisper love so loudly, every heart could understand that love and only love can join the tribes of man.”
Then, his mother calls to him: “Jeff, get in the car! It’s time to go.”
I’m not sure what it was, but for me and for most people, the chemistry between Naomi and Wynonna and the feelings they stirred inside the listener were almost tangible. My first (and only) sighting of them is forever etched in my mind.
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Mower, co-inventor of implantable defibrillator, dies at 89
BALTIMORE (AP) — Dr. Morton Mower, a former Maryland-based cardiologist who helped invent an automatic implantable defibrillator that has helped countless heart patients live longer and healthier, has died at age 89.
Funeral services were held Wednesday for Mower, who died two days earlier of cancer at Porter Adventist Hospital in Denver, The Baltimore Sun reported. The Maryland native had moved to Colorado about a decade ago.
Mower and Dr. Michel Mirowski, both colleagues at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, began working in 1969 on developing a miniature defibrillator that could be implanted into a patient. The device would correct a patient’s over-rapid or inefficient heartbeat with an electric shock to resume its regular rhythm.
“It was the talk of the whole hospital that these two crazy guys are going to put in an automatic defibrillator,” Mower said in a 2015 interview with The Lancet medical journal. “If something had gone awry, we would have never lived it down. We were these two crazy guys who wanted to put a time bomb in people’s chests, so to speak.”
The physicians had, in a matter of months, a model of an automatic implantable cardioverter defibrillator for demonstration. But it wasn’t until 1980 that the device was implanted into a human at Johns Hopkins Hospital, the newspaper reported.
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Marshals: Reward for info on escaped inmate, missing officer
FLORENCE, Ala. (AP) — The U.S. Marshals Service said Sunday that it is offering up to $10,000 for information about an escaped inmate and a “missing and endangered” correctional officer who disappeared Friday after the two left a jail in north Alabama.
Casey Cole White, 38, had been jailed on a capital murder charge in the Lauderdale County Detention Center in Florence, Alabama, about 75 miles (121 kilometers) west of Huntsville.
The inmate and assistant director of corrections Vicky White, 56, left the Lauderdale County Detention Center on Friday morning to go to a nearby courthouse, the sheriff's office said in a Facebook post Saturday. Investigators said the two are not related.
“Casey White is believed to be a serious threat to the corrections officer and the public,” the U.S. marshal for northern Alabama, Marty Keely, said in a statement Sunday.
While in state prison for other crimes in 2020, Casey confessed to the 2015 stabbing death of Connie Ridgeway, WHNT-TV reported.
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