The Biden-Harris campaign released their 30-second ad — titled “Hope” — early Tuesday morning, slamming the former president over his stance on abortion and his role in the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

“In 2016, Donald Trump ran to overturn Roe v. Wade. Now, in 2024, he’s running to pass a national ban on a woman’s right to choose. I’m running to make Roe v. Wade the law of the land again. So women have a federal guarantee to the right to choose. Donald Trump doesn’t trust women. I do,” Biden says in his short ad, following a clip of Trump saying he is “proud” to have ended the nearly 50-year-old law.

Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign, meanwhile turned its attention to immigration, taking a full minute to showcase a series of violent crime victims allegedly harmed by a so-called illegal immigrant.

“Stop Biden’s border bloodbath,” the ad reads before a series of news clips, each describing a crime allegedly committed by a migrant. “Stop Biden’s border bloodbath,” it reads again.

Michiganders have felt the tragic consequences of Biden's Border Bloodbath.

President Trump will end it on Day One. pic.twitter.com/KHilsUnrz1

— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) April 2, 2024

Both campaigns hammered home their points with later statements.

Trump’s team shared a lengthy list of crime victims along with a short statement from the former president. Biden, the campaign said, “has launched an invasion of our country — resettling dangerous illegal aliens from all over the world into American communities to prey on our people and endanger our citizens.”

“Under Biden, we now have a new category of crime, it’s called Migrant Crime,” Trump said.

Biden’s campaign held a press call Tuesday afternoon to highlight a court ruling out of Florida which will allow a six-week abortion ban to go into effect next month. Trump, the Biden campaign said, is of the same mind.

“Make no mistake, Donald Trump will do everything in his power to try and enact a national abortion ban if he’s reelected. In the last few months alone, Trump has doubled down on his support for a national abortion ban – and his allies have plans for him to do it with or without the help of Congress,” Biden-Harris 2024 Campaign Manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said.

The suit filed Friday in federal court in upstate New York argues that the April 8 lockdown violates inmates’ constitutional rights to practice their faiths by preventing them from taking part in a religiously significant event.

The plaintiffs are six men with varying religious backgrounds who are incarcerated at the Woodbourne Correctional Facility in Woodbourne. They include a Baptist, a Muslim, a Seventh-Day Adventist and two practitioners of Santeria, as well as an atheist.

“A solar eclipse is a rare, natural phenomenon with great religious significance to many,” the complaint reads, noting that Bible passages describe an eclipse-like phenomenon during Jesus’ crucifixion while sacred Islamic works describes a similar event when the Prophet Muhammad’s son died.

The celestial event, which was last visible in the U.S. in 2017 and won’t be seen in the country again until 2044, “warrant gathering, celebration, worship, and prayer,” the complaint reads.

The lawsuit states that one of the named plaintiffs, an atheist, received special permission last month to view the eclipse using glasses that would be provided by the state, but that was before the system-wide lockdown was issued.

Four of the other plaintiffs subsequently sought permission but were denied by officials who ruled the solar eclipse is not listed as a holy day for their religions, the lawsuit states. The sixth inmate said he never received a response.

Thomas Mailey, a corrections department spokesperson, said the agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation, but takes all requests for religious accommodations under consideration. He said those related to viewing the eclipse are currently under review.

Daniel Martuscello III, the department’s acting commissioner, issued a memo March 11 announcing that all state correctional facilities will operate on a holiday schedule next Monday.

That means incarcerated individuals will remain in their housing units except for emergency situations from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., which are generally the normal hours for outdoor recreation in prisons, according to the lawsuit.

There will also be no visitation at nearly two dozen prisons in the path of totality next Monday, while visitation at other correctional facilities will end at 2 p.m.

Martuscello said the department will distribute solar eclipse safety glasses for staff and incarcerated individuals at prisons in the path of totality so they can view the eclipse from their assigned work location or housing units.

Communities in western and northern reaches of the state are expected to have the best viewing of the total eclipse, including Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Lake Placid and Plattsburgh.

The total eclipse is expected to be seen in those parts of New York around 3:15 p.m. and last mere minutes as the moon passes between the Earth and the sun, temporarily blocking the sun and turning day into night.

A number of private colleges — some considered elite and others middle-of-the-pack — have exceeded the $90,000 threshold for the first time this year as they set their annual costs for tuition, board, meals and other expenses. That means a wealthy family with three children could expect to shell out more than $1 million by the time their youngest child completes a four-year degree.

But the sticker price tells only part of the story. Many colleges with large endowments have become more focused in recent years on making college affordable for students who aren’t wealthy. Lower-income families may be required to pay just 10% of the advertised rate and, for some, attending a selective private college can turn out to be cheaper than a state institution.

“Ninety thousand dollars clearly is a lot of money, and it catches people’s attention, for sure,” said Phillip Levine, a professor of economics at Wellesley College. “But for most people, that is not how much they’re going to pay. The existence of a very generous financial aid system lowers that cost substantially.”

Wellesley is among the colleges where the costs for wealthy students will exceed $90,000 for the first time this fall, with an estimated price tag of $92,000. But the institution points out that nearly 60% of its students will receive financial aid, and the average amount of that aid is more than $62,000, reducing their costs by two-thirds.

But many prospective students this year are facing significant delays and anxiety in finding out how much aid they will be offered by colleges due to major problems with the rollout of a new U.S. Department of Education online form that was supposed to make applying for federal aid easier. Many colleges rely on information from the form for determining their own aid offers to students.

“The rollout has been pure chaos and an absolute disaster,” said Mark Kantrowitz, a financial aid expert.

Kantrowitz said that if the significant drop in people applying for aid under the new system persists, it could result in lower enrollments and even force some institutions to close.

Some of the other colleges with sticker prices of more than $90,000 this year include the University of Southern California at $95,000, Harvey Mudd College in California at $93,000, the University of Pennsylvania at $92,000, Brown University in Rhode Island at $92,000, Dartmouth College in New Hampshire at $91,000, and Boston University at $90,000.

Harvard University in Cambridge, puts its cost of attendance this fall at up to $91,000.

Six construction workers are thought to have perished after the Dali, a Singapore-flagged container ship, smashed into a key support column and sent the bridge and the roadway workers on it into the Patapsco River.

The night shift crew began working in the evening March 25, filling potholes on Interstate 695. After a mayday from the ship early the next morning, police officers successfully halted car traffic onto the bridge moments before it fell, but warnings didn’t make it to most of the workers in time.

A seventh member of the Brawner Builders crew was rescued and treated at a hospital. A bridge inspector also survived.

Baltimore’s Latino community is grieving the six lives lost as it rallies around the families. For some, the men’s deaths symbolize the sacrifices many Latin American immigrants make when they work dangerous jobs in the United States to improve their families’ futures.

The men who died came from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. The youngest were in their 20s, while the eldest was a 49-year-old grandfather.

Miguel Luna, 49

Luna, who was from the town of California in El Salvador, immigrated to the United States about 19 years ago, according to CASA, a nonprofit supporting immigrants of which Luna was a member.

He became a welder and lived in Glen Burnie. When he wasn’t working construction, he often cooked alongside his wife, who operates a food truck called Pupuseria Y Antojitos Carmencita Luna, based in Glen Burnie. Friends described Luna as a hardworking “family man,” who had three children, and also was a grandfather. One friend reminisced about their time playing professional soccer together in El Salvador as young men, adding that Luna was a skilled defender.

Miguel Luna, victim of Key Bridge collapse, was a kindhearted family man from El Salvador

Alejandro “Alex” Hernandez Fuentes, 35

Hernandez was the foreman of the crew working on the bridge that night. Former coworkers described him as a “fireball” who took his job seriously, and climbed the ranks at Brawner Builders, going from a laborer to driving a company truck.

Hernandez was a devout Christian, who often encouraged his coworkers to turn on religious radio stations as they drove from job to job. Hernandez, who was born in Mexico and lived in Essex, left behind a wife and four children. His body was found last week submerged in the Patapsco, in a red pickup truck. Hernandez’s brother-in-law Julio was part of the crew working on the bridge March 26 but survived the collapse, a former coworker said.

Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, foreman of crew killed in Key Bridge collapse, was devout father of four

Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval, 38

The youngest of eight siblings, Suazo Sandoval grew up in Azacualpa, Honduras. He immigrated to the United States more than 17 years ago, and often sent money back to his hometown, even sponsoring a soccer league. He had a wife and two children and lived in Owings Mills.

Skilled with machinery, he dreamed of starting his own business one day, according to CASA, of which Suazo Sandoval was a member. In his spare time, Suazo Sandoval loved visiting parks and beaches with his wife and young daughter, said his brother Carlos, who took to the Patapsco River Friday to observe the wreckage and sent videos to his family members.

Awaiting closure, Maynor Suazo Sandoval’s family remembers him as a happy provider

Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, 26

Born in Guatemala, Castillo Cabrera lived in the Baltimore area. Relatives living at a Dundalk address listed for him said they were not ready to speak to reporters. A friend named Melvin Ruiz, of Baltimore, told The Baltimore Sun that Castillo Cabrera was a kind person with a joyous sense of humor.

Castillo Cabrera routinely volunteered to drive fellow crew members to work and other members of Baltimore’s Latino community to the store or to various appointments as needed, Ruiz said.

“He was a genuinely selfless person,” Ruiz said.

Elba Yanez, who cut his hair at a Patapsco Avenue barber shop, described him as sweet. Castillo’s body was recovered last week in the submerged truck, alongside Alex Hernandez. He was originally from San Luis, Petén, according to the Consulate General of Guatemala in Maryland.

Jose Mynor Lopez, in his 30s

Lopez, described as a loving family man and an attentive father, emigrated to the United States 19 years ago from Guatemala in order to create better opportunities for his family.

He had four children, including a young daughter, his uncle Wilmer Raul Orellana said. His wife worked at Owls Corner Cafe in Dundalk, according to his friend and former coworker Melvin Ruiz. A co-owner of the cafe set up a GoFundMe to raise money for his family.

For much of his time in the U.S., Lopez worked in Virginia for Marksmen, a Baltimore bridge repair and marine construction company. Lopez had taken a job with Brawner and moved to the Baltimore about a year ago. He lived in Dundalk.

Carlos Hernandez

Other news outlets have identified Carlos Hernandez as one of the victims who died on the bridge. The Mexican embassy told The Sun that three Mexicans were working on the bridge when it collapsed, including the man who survived. The Mexican state of Michoacán told CNN that the three Mexican men — Carlos Hernandez, Alejandro Hernandez, and Julio — were related to one another.

Baltimore Sun reporter Jonathan M. Pitts contributed to this article.

Havana syndrome is still under investigation but includes a string of health problems dating back to 2016, when officials working at the U.S. Embassy in Havana reported sudden unexplained head pressure, head or ear pain, or dizziness.

The injuries to U.S. government personnel or their families were part of a “60 Minutes” report Sunday that suggested Russia is behind the incidents, one of which took place during the 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius.

“I can confirm that a senior DOD official experienced symptoms similar to those reported in anomalous health incidents,” deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters Monday. Singh referred questions on whether Russia had a role to the intelligence community, which is still investigating.

The official, who was not identified, was not part of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s official traveling delegation to Vilnius, Singh said, but was there “separately, attending meetings that were part of the NATO summit.”

Singh did not say whether the affected defense official had to seek further medical care, retire or cease performing duties, citing medical privacy.

In February the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in its 2024 threat assessment found that it was “unlikely” that a foreign adversary was responsible for causing the mysterious ailments but noted that U.S. intelligence agencies had varying levels of confidence in that assessment.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters on Monday the department has confidence in that assessment.

“It has been the broad conclusion of the intelligence community since March 2023 that is unlikely a foreign adversary is responsible for these anomalous health incidents,” Miller said.

“It’s something that the intelligence community has investigated extensively and continues to look at. We will look at new information as it comes in and make assessments inside the State Department and with our intelligence community.”

The foremost Cuba-based researcher of the incidents, Mitchell Valdés-Sosa, told The Associated Press that the “60 Minutes” report had failed to provide any scientific basis to substantiate the existence of the Havana syndrome. Valdés-Sosa, director of Cuba’s Center for Neuroscience, is the de facto spokesperson on the issue for the Cuban health ministry, which arranged the interview.

“I think that this journalistic investigation does not provide serious elements, especially that there is a new illness caused by a mysterious energy,” he said. “The symptoms are very varied: balance problems, sleep problems, dizziness, difficulties concentrating, and many diseases can cause them.”

The Herald reached out to Massachusetts Port Authority on Monday about whether Massport is seeing more, less, or delayed cargo due to the catastrophic bridge crash.

The largest port in Massachusetts has space right now, but a Massport spokesperson reported that ports closer to Baltimore would probably receive more ships and cargo due to the bridge collapse.

“Boston could certainly take more ships and cargo, but it is more likely that other major ports like Norfolk, VA and NY/ NJ will take the majority of the ships and cargo diverted away from Baltimore,” the Massport spokesperson said in a statement.

Baltimore is one of the largest ports along the East Coast and can handle much larger ships than Boston’s port.

“Shipping companies will try to do what’s most efficient and cost effective,” the Massport spokesperson added. “We won’t know for a while how long before ships will be able to access the Port of Baltimore.”

The Associated Press reported on Monday that the U.S. Coast Guard has opened a temporary, alternate channel for vessels involved in the clearing of debris at the site of the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge. It’s part of a phased approach to opening the main channel leading to the port.

Authorities believe that eight workers fell off the bridge during the collapse. Two workers survived, two bodies were found in a submerged pickup, and four more men are presumed dead. Weather conditions and the tangled debris underwater have made it too dangerous for divers to search for their bodies.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said at a Monday news conference that his top priority is recovering the four bodies, followed by reopening shipping channels to the port. He said he understands the urgency but that the risks are significant. He said crews have described the mangled steel of the fallen bridge as “chaotic wreckage.”

President Joe Biden will visit the collapse site Friday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre announced Monday. He will meet with state and local officials and get an “on-the-ground look” at federal response efforts, Jean-Pierre said.

Moore said he expects the president will leave with a better understanding of the task at hand.

“He’s going to see the fact that we have a ship that is almost the size of the Eiffel Tower, that weighs about as much as the Washington Monument, that’s in the middle of the Patapsco River,” Moore said. “He’s going to see a bridge that has been in existence since I was alive — I don’t know what that skyline looks like without the Key bridge — and he is going to come and he’s going to see it sitting on top of a ship.”

The Small Business Administration has opened two centers in the area to help companies get loans to assist them with losses caused by the disruption of the bridge collapse.

Yvette Jeffery, a spokesperson for the agency’s disaster recovery office, said affected businesses can receive loans for as much as $2 million. She said the effects could range from supply-chain challenges to decreased foot traffic in communities that depended heavily on the bridge.

The bridge fell as the crew of the cargo ship Dali lost power and control March 26. They called in a mayday, which allowed just enough time for police to stop vehicles from driving onto the bridge, but not enough time to get a crew of eight workers off the structure.

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The video shared by former President Donald Trump features horror movie music and footage of migrants purportedly entering the U.S. from countries including Cameroon, Afghanistan and China. Shots of men with tattoos and videos of violent crime are set against close-ups of people waving and wrapping themselves in American flags.

“They’re coming by the thousands,” Trump says in the video, posted on his social media site. “We will secure our borders. And we will restore sovereignty.”

In his speeches and online posts, Trump has ramped up anti-immigrant rhetoric as he seeks the White House a third time, casting migrants as dangerous criminals “poisoning the blood” of America. Hitting the nation’s deepest fault lines of race and national identity, his messaging often relies on falsehoods about migration. But it resonates with many of his core supporters going back a decade, to when “build the wall” chants began to ring out at his rallies.

President Joe Biden and his allies discuss the border very differently. The Democrat portrays the situation as a policy dispute that Congress can fix and hits Republicans in Washington for backing away from a border security deal after facing criticism from Trump.

But in a potentially worrying sign for Biden, Trump’s message appears to be resonating with key elements of the Democratic coalition that Biden will need to win over this November.

Roughly two-thirds of Americans now disapprove of how Biden is handling border security, including about 4 in 10 Democrats, 55% of Black adults and 73% of Hispanic adults, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in March.

A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 45% of Americans described the situation as a crisis, while another 32% said it was a major problem.

Vetress Boyce, a Chicago-based racial justice activist, was among those who expressed frustration with Biden’s immigration policies and the city’s approach as it tries to shelter newly arriving migrants. She argued Democrats should be focusing on economic investment in Black communities, not newcomers.

“They’re sending us people who are starving, the same way Blacks are starving in this country. They’re sending us people who want to escape the conditions and come here for a better lifestyle when the ones here are suffering and have been suffering for over 100 years,” Boyce said. “That recipe is a mixture for disaster. It’s a disaster just waiting to happen.”

Gracie Martinez is a 52-year-old Hispanic small business owner from Eagle Pass, Texas, the border town that Trump visited in February when he and Biden made same-day trips to the state. Martinez said she once voted for former President Barack Obama and is still a Democrat, but now backs Trump — mainly because of the border.

“It’s horrible,” she said. “It’s tons and tons of people and they’re giving them medical and money, phones,” she said, complaining those who went through the legal immigration system are treated worse.

Priscilla Hesles, 55, a teacher who lives in Eagle Pass, Texas, described the current situation as “almost an overtaking” that had changed the town.

“We don’t know where they’re hiding. We don’t know where they’ve infiltrated into and where are they going to come out of,” said Hesles, who said she used to take an evening walk to a local church, but stopped after she was shaken by an encounter with a group of men she alleged were migrants.

Immigration will almost certainly be one of the central issues in November’s election, with both sides spending the next six months trying to paint the other as wrong on border security.

The White House has also mulled a series of executive actions that could drastically tighten immigration restrictions, effectively going around Congress after it failed to pass the bipartisan deal Biden endorsed.

“Trump is a fraud who is only out for himself,” said Biden campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz. “We will make sure voters know that this November.”

Trump will campaign Tuesday in Wisconsin and Michigan this week, where he is expected to again tear into Biden on immigration. His campaign said his event in the western Michigan city of Grand Rapids will focus on what it alleged was “Biden’s Border Bloodbath.”

The former president calls recent record-high arrests for southwest border crossings an “invasion” orchestrated by Democrats to transform America’s very makeup. Trump accuses Biden of purposely allowing criminals and potential terrorists to enter the country unchecked, going so far as to claim the president is engaged in a “conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America.”

He also casts migrants — many of them women and children escaping poverty and violence — as “ poisoning the blood ” of America with drugs and disease and claimed some are “not people.” Experts who study extremism warn against using dehumanizing language in describing migrants.

There is no evidence that foreign governments are emptying their jails or mental asylums as Trump says. And while conservative news coverage has been dominated by several high-profile and heinous crimes allegedly committed by people in the country illegally, the latest FBI statistics show overall violent crime in the U.S. dropped again last year, continuing a downward trend after a pandemic-era spike.

Studies have also found that people living in the country illegally are far less likely than native-born Americans to have been arrested for violent, drug and property crimes.

“Certainly the last several months have demonstrated a clear shift in political support,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of the immigrant resettlement group Global Refuge and a former Obama administration and State Department official.

“I think that relates to the rhetoric of the past several years,” she said, “and just this dynamic of being outmatched by a loud, extreme of xenophobic rhetoric that hasn’t been countered with reality and the facts on the ground.”

Part of what has made the border such a salient issue is that its impact is being felt far from the border.

Trump allies, most notably Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, have used state-funded buses to send more than 100,000 migrants to Democratic-led cities like New York, Denver and Chicago, where Democrats will hold this summer’s convention. While the program was initially dismissed as a publicity stunt, the influx has strained city budgets and left local leaders scrambling to provide emergency housing and medical care for new groups of migrants.

Local news coverage, meanwhile, has often been negative. Viewers have seen migrants blamed for everything from a string of gang-related New Jersey robberies to burglary rings targeting retail stores in suburban Philadelphia to measles cases in parts of Arizona and Illinois.

Abbott has deployed the Texas National Guard to the border, placed concertina wire along parts of the Rio Grande in defiance of U.S. Supreme Court orders, and has argued his state should be able to enforce its own immigration laws.

Some far-right internet sites have begun pointing to Abbott’s actions as the first salvo in a coming civil war. And Russia has also helped spread and amplify misleading and incendiary content about U.S. immigration and border security as part of its broader efforts to polarize Americans. A recent analysis by the firm Logically, which tracks Russian disinformation, found online influencers and social media accounts linked to the Kremlin have seized on the idea of a new civil war and efforts by states like Texas to secede from the union.

Amy Cooter, who directs research at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, worries the current wave of civil war talk will only increase as the election nears. So far, it has generally been limited to far-right message boards. But immigration is enough of a concern generally that its political potency is intensified, Cooter said.

“Non-extremist Americans are worried about this, too,” she said. “It’s about culture and perceptions about who is an American.”

In the meantime, there are people like Rudy Menchaca, an Eagle Pass bar owner who also works for a company that imports Corona beer from Mexico and blamed the problems at the border for hurting business.

Menchaca is the kind of Hispanic voter Biden is counting on to back his reelection bid. The 27-year-old said he was never a fan of Trump’s rhetoric and how he portrayed Hispanics and Mexicans. “We’re not all like that,” he said.

But he also said he was warming to the idea of backing the former president because of the reality on the ground.

“I need those soldiers to be around if I have my business,” Menchaca said of Texas forces dispatched to the border. “The bad ones that come in could break in.”

Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writers David Klepper in Washington and Matt Brown in Chicago contributed to this report.

More than 20 migrant families have called Harborside Suites in South Yarmouth their home since last September, but the town’s Zoning Board of Appeals has declared the motel has violated a local bylaw that limits temporary stays to less than 30 days.

“We would move today if we could,” motel Attorney Mark Boudreau said during a meeting last week. “The migrants that are there, they are ready to move. A lot of them have work visas… They would like to get going so they can obtain work where they’re going to be.”

Building Commissioner Mark Grylls issued a violation notice to the motel – currently housing 27 families – last October, but he told the ZBA he had to have their blessing before he could start imposing fines.

Harborside Suites, on Route 28 in the popular summer vacation beach town, sought a reversal of the violation, pointing to state officials that had said that “emergency needs of migrant families supersede the occupancy requirements of local zoning.”

But ZBA Vice Chairman Sean Igoe countered that he’s not confident Gov. Maura Healey’s migrant state-of-emergency carries more weight than local ordinances.

In her declaration last August, Healey wrote: “To the cities and towns across the state, many of which have a rich history tied to waves of immigrants settling within their borders, I am encouraging their communities to keep welcoming those families who wish to resettle in all corners of Massachusetts.”

Igoe took exception to the governor’s wording before the ZBA voted to uphold Grylls’ violation notice. “She’s just urging the cities and towns, she’s not ordering us to do it,” he said.

The state Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities did not immediately respond to a Herald request for comment on Saturday.

In January, the ZBA approved Harborside Suites maintaining the migrants as Boudreau had told members that the motel heard from the state that the families would be moved to a “larger facility in the Foxboro area” that would “provide better opportunities for food and room.”

Motels that housed migrants in Bourne and Wareham, which Boudreau represents, have been “completely evacuated,” the attorney said. The future shelter for the Yarmouth migrant families, he added, is “within a 20-mile radius of Foxboro.”

“Unfortunately, the property did not pass inspection and had some code violations so they have not moved,” Boudreau said last Thursday. “Everyone is aware in the motel that they will be moving as soon as the property is ready.”

The exact date when the families will be moving out is unclear, but in previous violations of the Yarmouth motel-stay ordinance, the ZBA has given 45 to 90 days depending on the situation, Grylls said.

“I don’t believe we’ve had circumstances like this,” he said.

Harborside Suites is the latest motel or hotel to be thrust into the spotlight of the Massachusetts migrant crisis.

A 26-year-old Haitian national, living at a Rockland motel housing migrants, was charged with aggravated rape of a 15-year-old girl who police described in a report as “disabled,” on March 14. A Hingham judge found Cory Alvarez dangerous a week later and ordered him held without bail.

Taunton officials in February sued the owners of the Clarion Hotel housing migrant families in that city for providing living quarters to nearly 450 people, more than 350-person capacity. The suit seeks over $100,000 in overdue civil fines.

House Speaker Ron Mariano has suggested that broad budget cuts could be on the table when lawmakers sit down next year to draft the fiscal year 2026 budget, fueled by the historically high cost of running the state-run shelters.

With an expected $932 million tab this fiscal year and $915 million in the next to maintain shelters, associated services, and keep municipal reimbursements on track, Mariano projected that a range of other programs could be on the chopping block and put the blame on the feds and their lack of action in solving the migrant crisis.

In his fight with the Yarmouth ZBA, Boudreau highlighted the state’s “great expense” while arguing that the emergency declaration and right-to-shelter law –  homeless families and pregnant women must be provided housing in the Bay State – took precedence over local ordinance.

“To the extent that there is a question of safety and a question of the adequacy of the rooms,” Boudreau said, “the Commonwealth has at great expense provided food, shelter, education, medicine and medical care. They’ve arrived legally, and my client is simply trying to cooperate with the town and the state in getting them moved.”

Since migrant families arrived at Harborside Suites last fall, Yarmouth firefighters responded to a flooding at the motel in January, and a 6-month-old baby was rushed to Cape Cod Hospital the day after they took up residence, according to the hyperlocal Hyannis News. The baby had  “phlegm coming from her mouth, with blood-tinged sputum, according to radio transmissions,” the hyperlocal Hyannis News reported.

Town leaders assured residents last December that there were no active cases of tuberculosis at the motel after a brief scare, the Cape Cod Times reported.

Yarmouth resident Cheryl Ball told the Herald Saturday she is “very pleased” with the ZBA’s decision and hopes it creates a precedent across the state.

“It’s draining our resources,” Ball said of the impact the migrant families have had on the town. “They’re a burden on our education system because we have to pay extra tax dollars to support them in our schools. We have emergency services that we are providing to the hotel that comes out of our tax money.”

President Joe Biden’s Easter message was issued by the White House just after 9 a.m. Sunday.

“Jill and I send our warmest wishes to Christians around the world celebrating Easter Sunday. Easter reminds us of the power of hope and the promise of Christ’s Resurrection.

“As we gather with loved ones, we remember Jesus’ sacrifice. We pray for one another and cherish the blessing of the dawn of new possibilities. And with wars and conflict taking a toll on innocent lives around the world, we renew our commitment to work for peace, security, and dignity for all people. From our family to yours, happy Easter and may God bless you,” the president wrote.

Former President Donald Trump’s first message of the day was a reminder to his supporters to “never forget our cowards and weaklings.”

“Such a disgrace,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social media platform to go along with a Washington Examiner article on the departure of Wisconsin’s U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher.

“HAPPY EASTER,” he said in a post that came right after.

Several hours later the 45th President issued what might be called a standard-Trump holiday message, delivering an all-caps Easter missive heavy with attacks on his perceived enemies.

After wishing a “happy Easter to all” the former president went on to make clear he included “crooked and corrupt prosecutors and judges” and people that he “completely” and “totally” despises “because they want to destroy America, a now failing nation.” Trump then called out “deranged” Special Counsel Jack Smith, “sick” Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis, and “lazy” Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg directly. All three have brought criminal charges against the former president.

“Happy Easter everyone,” he wrote after.

No one has won the Powerball jackpot since New Year’s Day, when a Michigan ticket holder collected a $842.4 million prize. If won, the nearly $1 billion jackpot could be collected in an annuity paid out over 30 years or as a $471.7 million cash option, with both subject to state and federal taxes.

After Saturday, there have been 38 drawings with no winner, nearing the all-time record for winnerless Powerball drawings streaks. The current record was set in 2021 and 2022 at 41 consecutive drawings without a winner.

The Powerball jackpot has broken $1 billion only four times in the game’s history. The largest Powerball prize — and largest lottery prize ever won — was a $2.04 billion jackpot on Nov. 7, 2022, sold to a resident in California.

The Powerball jackpot would be the 10th largest lottery prize in U.S. history if a ticket holder gets lucky on Monday’s drawing.

The whopping Powerball prize continues to grow just days after a ticket sold in New Jersey won a $1.13 billion Mega Millions jackpot, the eighth largest prize in the country’s history.

The odds for Saturday’s Powerball drawing were were 1 in 292.2 million.

Powerball is played in 45 states plus Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Drawings are held on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays at 10:59 p.m., and tickets can be purchased for $2 Massachusetts lottery retailers up to two hours before each drawing.

“Today, we send a message to all transgender Americans: You are loved. You are heard. You are understood. You belong. You are America, and my entire Administration and I have your back,” Biden declared.

While the Transgender Day of Visibility is not new — the event has been held annually by international human rights advocates since 2009 — this year March 31 happened to coincide with Easter, and the timing of Biden’s proclamation was not entirely well received.

Karoline Leavitt, former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign press secretary, went so far as to call the president’s proclamation “blasphemous.”

“We call on Joe Biden’s failing campaign and White House to issue an apology to the millions of Catholics and Christians across America who believe tomorrow is for one celebration only — the resurrection of Jesus Christ,” she said in a statement.

Leavitt and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson also called out Biden over this year’s White House Easter Egg Roll event, claiming the president prohibited the use of religious symbols in egg design submissions, after a flier for the event put out by the American Egg Board requested only submissions that did not “include any questionable content, religious symbols, overtly religious themes, or partisan political statements.”

“The Biden White House has betrayed the central tenet of Easter — which is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Banning sacred truth and tradition—while at the same time proclaiming Easter Sunday as ‘Transgender Day’—is outrageous and abhorrent. The American people are taking note,” Johnson said via the social media app formerly known as Twitter.

The Biden White House has betrayed the central tenet of Easter — which is the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Banning sacred truth and tradition—while at the same time proclaiming Easter Sunday as “Transgender Day”—is outrageous and abhorrent. The American people are taking note. pic.twitter.com/ZCExyVkAVS

— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) March 30, 2024

“It is appalling and insulting that Joe Biden’s White House prohibited children from submitting religious egg designs for their Easter Art Event, and formally proclaimed Easter Sunday as ‘Trans Day of Visibility.’ Sadly, these are just two more examples of the Biden Administration’s years-long assault on the Christian faith,” Leavitt said.

Despite any blowback over the proclamation, the White House’s official social media accounts and those of both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were used to express support for the March 31 Transgender Day of Visibility, with both 2024 Democratic candidates declaring that “trans rights are human rights.”

On Transgender Day of Visibility, we celebrate transgender and nonbinary Americans. Their courage has given countless others strength, but no one should have to be brave just to be themselves.

We see you. We stand with you. We won’t stop fighting for you. pic.twitter.com/pVPLDolpjk

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) March 31, 2024

“Transgender Americans are part of the fabric of our nation. On Transgender Day of Visibility, our Administration honors the extraordinary courage of transgender Americans and reaffirms our commitment to forming a more perfect union – where all people are treated equally,” a post by the White House account read.

Transgender Americans are part of the fabric of our nation.

On Transgender Day of Visibility, our Administration honors the extraordinary courage of transgender Americans and reaffirms our commitment to forming a more perfect union – where all people are treated equally. pic.twitter.com/ElRf9l62Nk

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 31, 2024

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey also joined the conversation, posting her own message of support for the Bay State’s transgender community.

Our trans friends, family, and neighbors should feel seen, safe, and celebrated for being exactly who they are.

On Transgender Day of Visibility, and always, we’re committed to protecting your freedom to live fully and authentically.

— Maura Healey (@MassGovernor) March 31, 2024

“Our trans friends, family, and neighbors should feel seen, safe, and celebrated for being exactly who they are. On Transgender Day of Visibility, and always, we’re committed to protecting your freedom to live fully and authentically,” she wrote.

According to White House staff, uproar over the family-friendly Easter Egg Roll tradition is misplaced. The event has held the same non-denominational standard for submitted egg designs through all presidential administrations over the last several decades, including the four years of the Trump White House.

“Fyi on all the misleading swirl re White House and Easter: the American Egg Board flyer’s standard non-discrimination language requesting artwork has been used for the last 45 years, across all Dem & Republican Admins—for all WH Easter Egg Rolls —incl previous Administration’s,” deputy assistant to the president Elizabeth Alexander wrote on X.

Easter and Transgender Day of Visibility were not the only occasions marked this March 31, which was also National Farm Workers Day, Cesar Chavez Day, National Baked Ham with Pineapple Day, National Crayon Day, National Tater Day, Transfer Day (for residents of the U.S. Virgin Islands), and Eifel Tower Day.

Next year, Easter will fall on April 20th, a day associated with both marijuana slang and the birth Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, though it’s unlikely either event will receive a White House proclamation. It will again fall on March 31 in the year 2086.

Herald wire service contributed.

The agency informed the Herald this past week that the heavily redacted 15 installments of Whitey’s dirty dealings already dropped in their public records “Vault” will be the last we see. Forever!

That can’t be tolerated. The Herald has 90 days to file an “administrative appeal,” and we fully intend to do so.

As we reported, the files posted in dribs and drabs are mostly run-of-the-mill mobster fare, with talk of loan sharking, horse race fixing, and ruthless gang rule. What about the rest? The agency’s contract with this devil must be made public. If the past is truly prologue, members of law enforcement must learn from the agency’s mistakes in dealing with depraved career killers.

Today’s Department of Justice has a spotty record regarding transparency. On one hand, it exceeded expectations when it exposed Rachael Rollins’s politicization of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston.

Former U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling bravely launched a campaign against the ruthless MS-13 gang in New England, saving lives. But he didn’t prosecute former Gov. Charlie Baker’s son for allegedly groping a woman on a Boston-bound flight.

Now U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has a rare opportunity to overturn the FBI’s penchant for incestuous secrecy, overrule the G-men, and order the release of every memo on Bulger’s sordid life.

This is not a journalistic paper chase using the Freedom of Information Act for an academic exercise in the First Amendment. This won’t be made into a Hollywood flick with A-list actors pretending to be from Boston. This is all about the victims.

When the news broke this week that the FBI was dumping Bulger’s file in the trash, one of those loved ones left to grow old alone without her husband called the Herald to lament the end of this painful road.

“This makes me feel that anything new that might still come out won’t be shared with the victims,” said Mary Callahan, now in her 80s. “Maybe this means they don’t want to share that. It could be money we are owed. There’s 33 of us, when I last counted. I’m seeing this as the FBI telling all of us to ‘Go Away!'”

Mary’s accountant husband, John Callahan, was executed in South Florida on Bulger’s orders in 1982 — and the FBI played a central part.

John Callahan, the former president of World Jai Alai, was shot dead by John Martorano, one of Bulger’s hitmen. Martorano testified he was working for Bulger when he killed Callahan, who was also a friend of his. Bulger wanted Callahan dead because the Boston businessman could implicate them in a 1981 slaying of another World Jai Alai executive.

Disgraced ex-FBI agent John “Zip” Connolly was convicted of second-degree murder in 2008 for wearing his FBI-issued sidearm when he met with Bulger in Boston to warn him of what John Callahan knew. Zip is now home in Massachusetts on a “compassionate release” from his Florida prison cell as he battles cancer.

The corrupt rabbit hole goes deeper.

We filed a public records request for Bulger’s FBI file soon after he was murdered in a West Virginia prison in 2018. The first installment was posted on July 8, 2021. The last one dropped on Oct. 3, 2022.

If that’s all we see, shame on the FBI.

Maybe they’re not rising as fast as they had been, but average prices are still painfully above where they were three years ago. And they’re mostly heading higher still.

Consider a 2-liter bottle of soda: In February 2021, before inflation began heating up, it cost an average of $1.67 in supermarkets across America. Three years later? That bottle is going for $2.25 — a 35% increase.

Or egg prices. They soared in 2022, then fell back down. Yet they’re still 43% higher than they were three years ago.

Likewise, the average used-car price: It rocketed from roughly $23,000 in February 2021 to $31,000 in April 2022. By last month, the average was down to $26,752. But that’s still up 16% from February 2021.

Wouldn’t it be great if prices actually fell — what economists call deflation? Who wouldn’t want to fire up a time machine and return to the days before the economy rocketed out of the pandemic recession and sent prices soaring?

At least prices are now rising more slowly — what’s called disinflation. On Friday, for example, the government said a key price gauge rose 0.3% in February, down from a 0.4% gain in January. And compared with a year earlier, prices were up 2.5%, way down from a peak of 7.1% in mid-2022.

But those incremental improvements are hardly enough to please the public, whose discontent over prices poses a risk to President Joe Biden’s re-election bid.

“Most Americans are not just looking for disinflation,’’ Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, said last year. “They’re looking for deflation. They want these prices to be back where they were before the pandemic.’’

Many economists caution, though, that consumers should be careful what they wish for. Falling prices across the economy would actually be an unhealthy sign.

“There are,’’ the Bank of England warns, “more consequences from falling prices than meets the eye.’’

What could be so bad about lower prices?

What is deflation?

Deflation is a widespread and sustained drop in prices across the economy. Occasional month-to-month drops in consumer prices don’t count. The United States hasn’t seen genuine deflation since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Japan has experienced a much more recent bout of deflation. It is only now emerging from decades of falling prices that began with the collapse of its property and financial markets in the early 1990s.

What’s wrong with deflation?

“Although lower prices may seem like a good thing,’’ Banco de España, the Spanish central bank, says on its website, “deflation can in fact be highly damaging to the economy.’’

How so? Mainly because falling prices tend to discourage consumers from spending. Why buy now, after all, if you can purchase what you want — cars, furniture, appliances, vacations — at a lower price later?

The reality is that the economy’s health depends on steady consumer purchases. In the United States, household spending accounts for around 70% of the entire economy. If consumers were to pull back, en masse, to await lower prices, businesses would face intense pressure to cut prices even more to try to jump-start sales.

In the meantime, employers might have to lay off waves of employees or cut pay — or both. Unemployed people, of course, are even less likely to spend, so prices would likely keep falling. All of which risks triggering a “deflationary spiral’’ of price cuts, layoffs, more price cuts, more layoffs. And on and on. Another recession could follow.

It was to prevent that very kind of economic nastiness that explains why the Bank of Japan resorted to negative interest rates in 2016 and why the Fed kept U.S. rates near zero for seven straight years during and after the Great Recession of 2007-2009.

Deflation exerts another painful effect, too: It hurts borrowers by making their inflation-adjusted loans more expensive.

Are there any benefits of deflation?

It’s certainly true that Americans can make their paychecks go further when prices are falling. If food or gasoline prices were to tumble, households would surely find it less painful to afford groceries or their commutes to work — as long as they remained employed.

Some economists even question the notion that deflation poses a serious economic threat. In 2015, researchers at the Bank for International Settlements, a forum for the world’s central banks, reviewed 140 years of deflationary episodes in 38 economies and reached this conclusion: The correlation between falling prices and economic growth “is weak and derives mostly from the Great Depression.’’

But the exception was a doozy: From 1929-1933, U.S. economic output plummeted by a third, prices sank by a quarter and the unemployment rate shot up from 3% to a crushing 25%.

The bank’s researchers said the biggest economic risk came not from falling prices for goods and services but rather from a freefall in the price of assets — stocks, bonds and real estate. Those collapsing assets, in turn, can topple banks that hold crumbling investments or that made loans to struggling real estate developers and homebuyers.

The damaged banks may then cut off credit — the lifeblood of the broader economy.

The likely result? A painful recession.

The telecommunications giant said Saturday that a dataset found on the “dark web” contains information such as Social Security numbers for about 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and 65.4 million former account holders.

The company said it has already reset the passcodes of current users and will be communicating with account holders whose sensitive personal information was compromised.

It is not known if the data “originated from AT&T or one of its vendors,” the company said in a statement. The compromised data is from 2019 or earlier and does not appear to include financial information or call history, it said. In addition to passcodes and Social Security numbers, it may include email and mailing addresses, phone numbers and birth dates.

While the data surfaced on a hacking forum nearly two weeks ago, it closely resembles a similar data breach that surfaced in 2021 but which AT&T never acknowledged, said cybersecurity researcher Troy Hunt.

“If they assess this and they made the wrong call on it, and we’ve had a course of years pass without them being able to notify impacted customers,” then it’s likely the company will soon face class action lawsuits, said Hunt, founder of an Australia-based website for warning people when their personal information has been exposed.

An AT&T spokesperson didn’t immediately return a request for comment Saturday.

It is not the first crisis this year for the Dallas-based company. An outage in February temporarily knocked out cellphone service for thousands of U.S. users. AT&T at the time blamed the incident on a technical coding error, not a malicious attack.

“We learned about this discovery in the late spring of last year around the same time as the mastodon frenzy in the community,” said Executive Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History Felicia Van Stolk, referencing the mastodon tooth found in Aptos. “Our paleontology adviser Wayne Thompson was immediately so excited by this specimen, and when he gets excited about something, you know that it’s going to be good.”

According to Van Stolk, a group of kindergarteners and first-graders from Tara Redwood School were playing outside one fateful day on a field trip in the Santa Cruz Mountains when they stumbled upon the fossilized bone.

“One of the students pulled up this great big stick, except that it wasn’t a stick,” said Van Stolk. “There was this great debate among the kids about it. The kids then brought it to their classroom and were cleaning it off with paint brushes, pretending to be paleontologists.”

The bone remained in the classroom for a short time before the family of one of the young citizen scientists thought to bring it into the Museum of Natural History to get to the bottom of the strange fossil’s identity. Thompson and Van Stolk had their suspicions about what the log-like fossil could be from and when, but they had to do a bit of sleuthing before they knew for certain that it was part of an ancient sloth.

“We tapped into our resources and connections and had it confirmed it to be this very rare specimen,” said Van Stolk. “We were just over the moon.”

Thompson, principal paleontologist at Pacific Paleontology, has been steeped in the world of ancient creatures since he was a boy as his family were the original owners of the long-closed “Lost World” amusement park in Scotts Valley that had life-size replicas of dinosaurs. Thompson was also manning the front desk at the Museum of Natural History as a teenager when a community member brought in a mastodon skull that still resides near the main entrance of the museum.

At the museum Friday, Thompson told the Sentinel that the bone has been identified as the left radius bone of a Jefferson’s ground sloth, named after the Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, and is the first of its kind ever to be found in the county. However, the exact age of the specimen is still being determined.

“That data hasn’t yet come back to us from the testing facility,” said Thompson. “There are a number of ways to date fossils and the first one that we are trying relies on the presence of the biomolecule collagen, which is a protein. If there’s enough collagen in the bone, we can calculate its age up to about 50,000 years. If it’s older than that, we’ll have to use other methods using elements like uranium or thorium.”

Thompson explained that Jefferson’s ground sloths lived between about 300,000 years ago to about 11,700 years ago and remnants of their existence are rarely found in California.

“So far in my research, I’ve found that this is the biggest radius (bone) that’s been recorded,” said Thompson. “It is from an adult male. We know that because the ends of the bone are fused on, which means it had reached full maturity.”

Jefferson’s ground sloths lived near creeks and rivers and under canopy forests and were about as big as an ox and generally weighed more than a ton. When the massive, slow-moving herbivores weren’t camping out in caves, they would be roaming around, sometimes standing on their hind legs, using their three long claws to strip the leaves from branches of trees such as spruce and alderwood.

“Whereas the mammoths were more out in the grasslands and were grazers, these sloths were browsers,” said Thompson. “They would be about 6 feet tall on all fours and they’d be a good 8 to 9 feet tall when they stood up.”

Thompson said that the sloth fossil adds one more piece to the still incomplete puzzle of ancient Santa Cruz, which would have had a coastline that was miles out from its current location.

“It’s because of all the ice,” said Thompson. “Ice age Santa Cruz would have been bigger and we have found mammoth fossils in the bay.”

Thompson mentioned that he was stoked about the specimen not only because of its rarity and the fact that it was the first of its kind in the county, but also because it was discovered by a group of young kids. For those who are inspired by the find and want to venture out on a fossil-finding mission of their own, Thompson has some advice.

“The golden rule there is to know before you go,” said Thompson. “Do some background research and know the regulations of where you’re going. If you are on public land, it is illegal to take this kind of artifact unless it is in immediate danger of being destroyed. Always document with photographs and try to pin where it is and report any finds to a museum. Most of all, be excited. There is so much more that is out there yet to be discovered.”

The Jefferson’s ground sloth’s fossilized arm bone is on display with the museum’s current exhibition “The Art of Nature,” which runs until May 26 and features scientific illustrations from 40 local artists and includes depictions of extinct megafauna such as the Jefferson’s ground sloth and others.

For information, visit santacruzmuseum.org.

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — President Joe Biden has won North Dakota’s Democratic presidential primary.

The state party on Saturday announced the results of the mostly mail-in primary. The party began circulating ballots in February to voters who asked for them.

Biden’s victory was virtually assured, though seven other candidates were on the primary ballot.

Former President Donald Trump won the North Dakota Republican Party’s March 4 presidential caucuses, taking all 29 delegates.

Biden and Trump have already secured enough delegates for their parties’ nominations, lining up the first presidential rematch election since 1956.

Sen. Bernie Sanders won the North Dakota Democratic caucuses in 2016 and 2020.

Donald Trump should challenge Joe Biden to a round of golf instead, eighteen holes, head-to-head, match play, mano a mano, winner take all — or almost all.

There would still be an election, of course. But surely the winner of the golfing tournament, called the Presidential Save Democracy Open, would surely have an edge going down the stretch or fairway.

Or it could be called the Geezer Golf Open since Trump is 77 and Biden is 81.

Either way, the idea of the two elderly golfing presidents facing off against each other surfaced after Biden mocked Trump for bragging about winning two club championships at the International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, which Trump happens to own.

“I won both,” Trump trumpeted.

Biden snidely commented, “Congratulations, Donald. Quite the accomplishment.”

This led golfing critics to sarcastically ask, “If you can’t win playing at a golf club you own, where can you win?

What was left out of the story was that critics said that Trump won those club trophies playing by himself.

Trump, who plays golf all the time at one of the golf clubs he owns, is no duffer, though.

“Duffer,” a derogatory golf label, is a name he would reserve for Biden — like “Sleepy Joe” and “Crooked Joe.” Now Trump would call him “Duffer Joe.”

Besides, Biden does not play nearly enough golf as Trump, except when Hunter Biden needs him to fill out a foursome of business partners with no one around to shout “fore.”

Of course, there would have to be certain rules agreed upon, like the site of the match, before the event could be held.

The pair could play at the neutral and iconic Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Ga., where the Master’s Tournament is played annually.

Trump would be safe there since it is outside of Fulton County, where troubled District Attorney Fani Willis is trying to prosecute him on election interference charges.

However, given Willis’ bizarre testimony and unusual prosecutorial behavior, it is more likely that she will be standing trial before Trump does.

Another rule concerns the use of golf carts and who drives them. While professional golfers and their caddies walk the course, you cannot expect Trump and Biden to follow suit. Biden can barely make it to his helicopter.

The course, after all, hitting from the back tees is 7,475 yards or 4.25 miles long. It is shorter hitting from the ladies tees.

And while the older Biden could request to hit from the ladies’ tees, it is something that Trump would never agree with, let alone hit from them himself, despite risking the women’s vote. It is a macho thing.

Also, you cannot expect that Trump and Biden would agree to ride in the same golf cart, squabbling over who would do the driving. So, they would need separate carts, not only for themselves, but for the horde of Secret Service agents dressed as golfers who would provide security and fetch lost balls from the woods.

Since critics have accused both of cheating at the game, monitors would be on the lookout for “foot shots.” That is when a golfer uses his foot instead of a club to get the golf ball out of the rough and onto the fairway.

Golfing and political lore have it that it was the favorite shot of presidential golfers Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and no one dared call them out.

While Biden may appear to be at a disadvantage, it would be mistaken to sell him short. Golf is a mental as well as a physical game, and a golfer’s mental state and psychological outlook are as important as his putter.

All Biden has to do to rattle Trump is to show up at Augusta in his Whitey Bulger look-alike outfit.

The outfit has Biden decked out in an eerie-looking imitation of the late South Boston psychopath and killer Whitey Bulger, complete with a bomber jacket, aviator sunglasses, slicked hair, and menacing s look. Check the photos,

That would scare the bejesus out of anybody.

Peter Lucas is a veteran political reporter. Email him at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com

At the U.S. Supreme Court these days, judicial liberals don’t have much clout. The real fights mostly take place between the court’s far-right and its more traditional conservatives.

Tuesday’s argument over abortion pills provided a perfect example, and it highlighted the stakes the 2024 presidential election will have for the court. In particular, it illustrated one of the ways a second term for former President Trump could dramatically differ from his first, with huge consequences for abortion rights, among other topics.

Abortion endangers the GOP

The political backdrop to the high court’s argument is clear: The politics of abortion continue to bedevil Republicans.

The GOP achieved a long-standing goal in 2022 when the newly reinforced conservative majority on the court overturned Roe vs. Wade, the ruling that for nearly a half-century had guaranteed abortion rights nationwide. The court’s decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health tossed abortion policy back to the states, 15 of which now ban all or nearly all abortions, with six more imposing tight restrictions.

Those bans have not succeeded in reducing the number of abortions in the U.S., largely because of the wide availability of abortion pills. But they have generated a wave of anger among voters, especially women, that has sunk Republican candidates in swing districts and states.

The most recent example came a few hours after the high court argument, when a Democrat, Marilyn Lands, won a special election to fill a largely suburban state legislative district in northern Alabama. Lands had focused her campaign on reproductive rights.

Her landslide victory — a 25-point margin in a closely divided district — was the first test of voter sentiment since the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that frozen embryos created by in vitro fertilization should be considered children under state law, a decision that the state legislature hurriedly tried to overturn after furious voter reaction.

The conservative split

The lesson that many traditional conservatives have drawn from their election defeats is that the GOP should ease away from opposition on abortion. That may have influenced some of the Republican-appointed justices as they considered Tuesday’s challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s rules that allow widespread dispensing of mifepristone: They treated the case like an unwelcome guest — to be ushered out as rapidly as possible with a stern admonition not to return.

To the justices on the far right, it represented something else — a missed opportunity for now and a chance to set down markers for the future.

Representing the Biden administration, Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar argued that the antiabortion group seeking to overturn the rules lacked standing to bring the case.

Standing refers to the legal principle that to challenge a law or rule, you have to be affected by it — you can’t just have a generalized grievance.

The antiabortion doctors who brought the case claimed they were affected because at some point, one of them might be in an emergency room when a woman who had taken mifepristone would show up seeking treatment for heavy bleeding, which is an occasional effect of the drug. If that happened, they would be forced to choose between their conscientious objections to abortion and their duty to care for a patient, they argued.

Prelogar said those claims “rest on a long chain of remote contingencies” that didn’t come “within a hundred miles” of establishing standing.

Even if the doctors had standing, the proper remedy for their claim would be to say that they could not be required to participate in an abortion — a right they already have under federal law, said Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch agreed. The case was “a prime example of turning what could be a small lawsuit into a nationwide legislative assembly on an F.D.A. rule or any other federal government action,” he said. He didn’t mean that as a compliment.

Gorsuch, of course, was appointed to the court by Trump. Another Trump appointee, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, also appeared skeptical that the doctors had standing. The third Trump appointee, Justice Brett M. Kavanugh, said very little, but the one question he asked suggested that he, too, would likely side with the FDA.

How Trump could ban abortion pills

Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas were the only members of the court who seemed open to the arguments presented by Erin Hawley, the lawyer representing the antiabortion group.

In their questions, both also circled back to a related legal issue, the potential impact of an 1873 law known as the Comstock Act. That law, best known for banning “lewd” material from the mail, also bans any “article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use it or apply it for producing abortion.”

The law hasn’t been enforced in decades, but up through the 1930s, it was repeatedly used to prosecute people for mailing birth control devices or even medical texts about contraception.

In 2022, the Justice Department issued a formal ruling that the law wasn’t applicable to mifepristone because the drug has medical uses beyond abortion.

That ruling, however, could be reversed by a future administration. Antiabortion groups have made clear that if Trump wins another term, they’ll make the Comstock Act a high priority.

The Comstock law is “fairly broad, and it specifically covers drugs such as yours,” Thomas said at one point to Jessica Ellsworth, the lawyer representing Danco Laboratories, which makes mifepristone. His remark sounded like a warning.

Why two Bush justices, not Trump ones, make up the far right

The comments by Gorsuch and Barrett on the one side and Thomas and Alito on the other highlighted a paradoxical reality of the current court: The justices Trump named to the court aren’t the ones most likely to side with the MAGA movement’s priorities. Instead, the far-right members, Thomas and Alito, were appointed by two avatars of the pre-Trump GOP establishment — the Presidents Bush, father and son.

That doesn’t mean that the three Trump appointees are moderates. They’re solidly conservative. But they are establishment conservatives.

During Trump’s tenure, the process of picking and confirming Supreme Court justices was largely driven by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, working with Trump’s White House counsel, Don McGahn. Trump had relatively little to do with it beyond ratifying the ultimate selections.

McConnell and McGahn looked for justices in their ideological image, not Trump’s.

By contrast, George H.W. Bush chose Thomas without knowing much about him. He wanted a Black jurist to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall, and he didn’t have a lot of Black Republican judges to choose from. The full scope of the new justice’s ideology was unknown when he was named.

Alito was more of a known commodity when George W. Bush appointed him, but he wasn’t the president’s first choice. Bush had tried to put his counsel, Harriet Miers, on the court. But he had to withdraw Miers’ name after intense opposition from the right. The choice of Alito was an effort at political damage control.

But McConnell won’t be Senate Republican leader after this year — he’s already announced his plans to step down. And Trump isn’t likely to appoint anyone to the White House staff like McGahn, who repeatedly thwarted him on key issues.

Trump owes his political survival to the steadfast support of the right wing, especially conservative, evangelical Christians. Whatever constraints the former GOP establishment managed to impose on him before would be largely absent in a second term.

Hence the main lesson from Tuesday: The high court has moved sharply to the right already, but it could go a lot further if Trump gets another term.

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

MIAMI — A nondisclosure agreement crafted on behalf of Sean “Diddy” Combs is the newest clue illuminating a sordid world of alleged sex trafficking, abuse and illegal drug use surrounding the music mogul. It raised alarm bells for a lawyer who analyzed the document for the Miami Herald.

NDAs are standard for artists and celebrities with major popularity and influence, attorney Gavin Tudor Elliot said. Normally, they’re viewed as tools to protect an artist’s private life, but the scope and breadth of Diddy’s NDA, Elliot added, is far beyond the norm.

“This agreement may be the broadest non-disclosure agreement that I have ever seen,” said Elliot, who has done extensive corporate contract work, including NDAs, for more than 20 years. “The lack of clear definition as to who can and cannot be spoken about is terrifying.”

For Elliot, the agreement may have been drafted to create a “culture of silence” rather than to offer a simple barrier between Diddy and the public.

Why did Diddy hand out NDAs?

In a lawsuit filed last month, music producer Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones accused Diddy of being the leader of a criminal enterprise that could qualify as a “widespread and dangerous criminal sex trafficking organization.” A copy of the NDA was included in an updated complaint filed Wednesday.

The NDA was presented to people who were at a Hollywood recording studio when a shooting occurred on Sept. 12, 2022, Jones alleged. Some signed it; he did not.

In the 98-page filing, Jones states the friend of Diddy’s son Justin Combs was shot during a heated conversation with Diddy and Justin.

According to Jones, there was a “massive coverup” after the shooting. Diddy’s crew, he alleges, doctored the narrative that the man was shot outside the studio during a robbery. Police have yet to release any reports related to the shooting.

Jones, however, states that Diddy and his son took the unnamed man into a nearby restroom shortly before gunshots rang out. When the door finally open, the man was on the floor in the fetal position, bleeding from his torso.

Jones rushed to the aid of Justin’s friend and took him to an ambulance, according to the lawsuit. Since the shooting, he has mysteriously vanished.

The producer’s lawsuit isn’t the only time similar allegations have emerged in recent months. Diddy was accused of sexual assault in several other lawsuits filed by women.

The first involved R&B singer Cassandra “Cassie” Ventura, who alleged that Diddy abused her for years and forced her to have sex with male sex workers. He settled with her the day after it was filed in November, but Cassie’s legal action proved to be a catalyst for other potential victims to speak out — in turn creating a domino effect for the four lawsuits that followed.

It’s unclear who has seen or been told to sign the NDA — part of the agreement is that signers can’t disclose it.

Agreement weaponized for intimidation?

Elliot sees the agreement more as a dangerously broad legal document rather than a true NDA that would withstand legal challenges.

The document attempts to be a nondisclosure, nondisparagement, intellectual property rights and indemnification agreement all at once for Diddy and anyone affiliated with him, in any shape or form.

There are no specifics on what would make someone an associate of Diddy, nor does it have any constraints on what can and cannot be said about them, Elliot said.

The agreement strives to make everything involving or around him confidential, he said, but that’s not how the law works. Traditionally, most NDA’s allow signers to disclose any information that is part of the public domain or that is given to them by a third party.

“It is anybody’s guess who those people are because anyone affiliated with the artist in his professional or personal life counts,” he said. “I would never let a client sign this.”

The ambiguity created by the agreement’s terms is intentional, Elliot said. Any normal person with little legal knowledge would fear of the prospect of being sued by referring to someone or something that they did not know even involved Diddy.

“It’s not only designed and intended to create that culture of silence and intimidation, but any reasonable person reading this would think they would just need to shut up,” he said.

However, the NDA is not bulletproof, and Elliot added it would be unenforceable. A signor would be allowed to talk about Diddy and his associates if they were mandated to by a court, such as a subpoena or police investigation, and to seek legal counsel.

While those loopholes exist, Elliot thinks a normal person wouldn’t know. The fear alone would stop them from reporting a possible crime involving Diddy or his associates if they can’t prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

“The most likely response from people would be ‘I didn’t see anything’ or ‘I don’t know,’ if they would say anything at all,” Elliot said of signers who may have seen a crime committed.

When are NDAs needed?

A celebrity — or someone of high net worth — may request an NDA for people who work for them, including assistants and housemaids, to protect information they may not want publicly disclosed, said South Florida attorney Brad Cohen, who has represented celebrities like Drake, Lil Wayne and Kodak Black.

“When you’re dealing with people of high-net worth … the motivation to make things up, leak information, get paid for information increases,” Cohen said.

There’s a multitude of business reasons for having an NDA signed, Cohen said. If something happens at a location in which a prominent individual is affiliated, it could affect their business dealings. For musicians, they may want to protect their music from being prematurely released to the public.

“It’s more of a protection for the high net worth or popular person from, usually, nefarious individuals …” Cohen said.

Elliot believes it is more likely that the NDA offered to Jones and others was an emergency agreement, and Diddy’s team has a better-worded and less ambiguous document for other matters.

“This is speculation, but this [NDA] seems like the sort of one you have in your back pocket when something really bad goes down and you want to cover it up,” he said.

©2024 Miami Herald. Visit miamiherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

MIAMI — Days after federal agents raided Sean “Diddy” Combs’ multimillion-dollar compounds on both sides of the country, a music producer who sued the hip-hop megastar turned entrepreneur has come forward with another complaint that sheds light on more than a dozen pages of new accusations.

In a lawsuit filed last month, Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones accused the Bad Boys Records founder of being the leader of a criminal enterprise that could qualify as a “widespread and dangerous criminal sex trafficking organization.” For about a year, Jones worked with Diddy to produce several songs on his R&B album “The Love Album: Off the Grid.”

Jones on Monday amended the complaint, submitted in New York federal court, to name the actor Cuba Gooding Jr. as a co-defendant. Also listed as defendants are Diddy’s son Justin Combs, record label executives and members of the music mogul’s staff.

Jones’ complaint was again revised Wednesday, providing more details — and evidence — related to the alleged sex-fueled work environment that he was exposed to while working for Diddy on the Grammy-nominated “Love” album in 2023.

Mounting evidence levied against Diddy?

Here are some of the new allegations detailed in the amended civil complaint:

• Diddy paid rap sensation Yung Miami, Instagram model Jade Ramey and actress Daphne Joy a monthly fee to work as his sex workers.
• While crafting “The Love Album,” Diddy wanted to create a “love-making atmosphere.” In that quest, he forced employees, including Jones, to take shots of alcohol and engage in sex acts with sex workers.
• Diddy personally distributed guns from his Los Angeles and Miami Beach homes to local gang members.
• Brendon Paul, described as Diddy’s mule, transported guns to and from night clubs, strip clubs and other venues in the Miami area.
• Diddy’s employees smuggled drugs on commercial airlines through carry-on luggage.
• Chief of staff Kristina Khorram ordered drugs and forced Diddy’s entourage to carry them in black Prada pouches. She also solicited sex workers, negotiated their price and paid for them.
• While in Miami, neither Khorram nor Diddy allowed Jones to visit family for birthdays or holidays. They allegedly told him that if he left, he wouldn’t be allowed to return.
• At a July 2023 listening party in California, there were at least five girls under the age of 17. Jones reported feeling uncomfortable, yet Diddy took his car keys so that he couldn’t leave.
• In a group chat including Jones, Diddy would ask his confidants about their opinions of Jones — and if they thought the producer would remain loyal to him.
• Diddy hired a private investigator to dig up “dirt” on Jones, offering people money to speak poorly about the producer. Friends of the producer would then receive harassing messages from the private investigator.
• Jones alleges that there was a “massive coverup” related to the 2022 shooting of Justin Combs’ friend inside a Hollywood recording studio. Diddy’s crew, he says, doctored the narrative that the man was shot outside the studio during a robbery.
• Those who were present at the studio that day were also asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Jones refused to do so.
• Jones also maintains that Diddy was present inside the studio — and included a photo in the lawsuit of a bloody mess in a bathroom. The victim has since mysteriously vanished.

©2024 Miami Herald. Visit miamiherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

WASHINGTON (AP) — While eclipse watchers look to the skies, people who are blind or visually impaired will be able to hear and feel the celestial event.

Sound and touch devices will be available at public gatherings on April 8, when a total solar eclipse crosses North America, the moon blotting out the sun for a few minutes.

“Eclipses are very beautiful things, and everyone should be able to experience it once in their lifetime,” said Yuki Hatch, a high school senior in Austin, Texas.

Hatch is a visually impaired student and a space enthusiast who hopes to one day become a computer scientist for NASA. On eclipse day, she and her classmates at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired plan to sit outside in the school’s grassy quad and listen to a small device called a LightSound box that translates changing light into sounds.

When the sun is bright, there will be high, delicate flute notes. As the moon begins to cover the sun, the mid-range notes are those of a clarinet. Darkness is rendered by a low clicking sound.

“I’m looking forward to being able to actually hear the eclipse instead of seeing it,” said Hatch.

The LightSound device is the result of a collaboration between Wanda Díaz-Merced, an astronomer who is blind, and Harvard astronomer Allyson Bieryla. Díaz-Merced regularly translates her data into audio to analyze patterns for her research.

A prototype was first used during the 2017 total solar eclipse that crossed the U.S., and the handheld device has been used at other eclipses.

This year, they are working with other institutions with the goal of distributing at least 750 devices to locations hosting eclipse events in Mexico, the U.S., and Canada. They held workshops at universities and museums to construct the devices, and provide DIY instructions on the group’s website.

“The sky belongs to everyone. And if this event is available to the rest of the world, it has to be available for the blind, too,” said Díaz-Merced. “I want students to be able to hear the eclipse, to hear the stars.”

The Perkins Library — associated with the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts — plans to broadcast the changing tones of the LightSound device over Zoom for members to listen online and by telephone, said outreach manager Erin Fragola.

In addition to students, many of the library’s senior patrons have age-related vision loss, he said.

“We try to find ways to make things more accessible for everyone,” he said.

Others will experience the solar event through the sense of touch, with the Cadence tablet from Indiana’s Tactile Engineering. The tablet is about the size of a cellphone with rows of dots that pop up and down. It can be used for a variety of purposes: reading Braille, feeling graphics and movie clips, playing video games.

The Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired started incorporating the tablet into its curriculum last year. Some of the school’s students experienced last October’s “ring of fire” eclipse with the tablet.

Sophomore Jazmine Nelson is looking forward to joining the crowd expected at NASA’s big eclipse-watching event at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where the tablet will be available.

With the tablet, “You can feel like you’re a part of something,” she said.

Added her classmate Minerva Pineda-Allen, a junior. “This is a very rare opportunity, I might not get this opportunity again.”

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans are more worried about legal immigrants committing crimes in the U.S. than they were a few years ago, a change driven largely by increased concern among Republicans, while Democrats continue to see a broad range of benefits from immigration, a new poll shows.

The poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that substantial shares of U.S. adults believe that immigrants contribute to the country’s economic growth, and offer important contributions to American culture. But when it comes to legal immigrants, U.S. adults see fewer major benefits than they did in the past, and more major risks.

About 4 in 10 Americans say that when immigrants come to the U.S. legally, it’s a major benefit for American companies to get the expertise of skilled workers in fields like science and technology. A similar share (38%) also say that legal immigrants contribute a major benefit by enriching American culture and values.

Both those figures were down compared with 2017, when 59% of Americans said skilled immigrant workers who enter the country legally were a major benefit, and half said legal immigrants contribute a major benefit by enriching American culture.

Meanwhile, the share of Americans who say that there’s a major risk that legal immigrants will commit crimes in the U.S. has increased, going from 19% in 2017 to 32% in the new poll.

Republicans were more likely than Democrats to say that immigration is an important issue for them personally, and 41% now say it’s a major risk that legal immigrants will commit crimes in the U.S., up from 20% in 2017. Overall, Republicans are more likely to see major risks — and fewer benefits — from immigrants who enter the country legally and illegally, although they tend to be most concerned about people who come to the country illegally.

Bob Saunders is a 64-year-old independent from Voorhees, New Jersey. He disapproves of President Joe Biden’s performance when it comes to immigration and border security and is particularly worried about the number of immigrants coming to the southern border who are eventually released into the country. He stressed that there’s a difference between legal and illegal immigration. Saunders said it’s important to know the background of the immigrants coming to the U.S. and said legal immigration contributes to the economy. He also noted the immigrants in his own family.

“It’s not anti-immigration,” Saunders said. “It’s anti-illegal immigration.”

Many Republicans, 71%, say there’s a risk of people in the country illegally coming to the U.S. and committing crimes , although many studies have found immigrants are less drawn to violent crime than native-born citizens. Even more, 80%, think there’s a major risk that people in the country without permission will burden public service programs, while about 6 in 10 Republicans are concerned that there’s a major risk of them taking American jobs, that their population growth will weaken American identity or that they will vote illegally — although only a small number of noncitizen voters have been uncovered.

Amber Pierce, a 43-year-old Republican from Milam, Texas, says she understands that a lot of migrants are seeking a better life for their children, but she’s also concerned migrants will become a drain on government services.

“I believe that a lot of them come over here and get free health care and take away from the people who have worked here and are citizens,” Pierce said. “They get a free ride. I don’t think that’s fair.”

Democrats, on the other hand, are more likely to see benefits from immigration, although the poll did find that only half of Democrats now think that legal immigrants are making important contributions to American companies, a decrease of more than 20 percentage points from 2017. But they’re more likely than Republicans to say that the ability of people to come from other places in the world to escape violence or find economic opportunities is extremely or very important to the U.S’s identity as a nation.

“People who are coming, are coming for good reason. It’s how many of us got here,” said Amy Wozniak, a Democrat from Greenwood, Indiana. Wozniak said previous waves of immigrants came from European countries. Now immigrants are coming from different countries but that doesn’t meant they’re not fleeing for justifiable reasons, she said: “They’re not all drugs and thugs.”

U.S. adults — and especially Republicans — are more likely to say that the country has been significantly changed by immigrants in the past five years than they are to say that immigrants have changed their own community or their state. About 3 in 10 U.S. adults say immigrants have had a major impact on their local community while about 6 in 10 say they’ve had a major impact on the country as a whole. The gap between perceptions of community impact and effects on the country as a whole is particularly wide among Republicans.

There is some bipartisan agreement about how immigration at the border between the U.S. and Mexico should be addressed. The most popular option asked about is hiring more Border Patrol agents, which is supported by about 8 in 10 Republicans and about half of Democrats. Hiring more immigration judges and court personnel is also favored among majorities of both parties.

About half of Americans support reducing the number of immigrants who are allowed to seek asylum in the U.S. when they arrive at the border, but there’s a much bigger partisan divide there, with more Republicans than Democrats favoring this strategy. Building a wall — former President Donald Trump’s signature policy goal — is the least popular and most polarizing option of the four asked about. About 4 in 10 favor building a wall, including 77% of Republicans but just 12% of Democrats.

Donna Lyon is a Democratic-leaning independent from Cortland, New York. She believes a border wall would do little to stop migrants. But she supports hiring more Border Patrol agents and more immigration court judges to deal with the growing backlog of immigration court cases: “That would stop all the backup that we have.”

Congress just recently approved money to hire about 2,000 more Border Patrol agents but so far this year, there’s been no significant boost for funding for more immigration judges. Many on both sides of the aisle have said it takes much too long to decide asylum cases, meaning migrants stay in the country for years waiting for a decision, but the parties have failed to find consensus on how to address the issue.

The poll of 1,282 adults was conducted March 21-25, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

BRISTOL, Tenn. (AP) — It was in the den that Karen Goodwin most strongly felt her son’s presence: On the coffee table were his ashes, inside a clock with its hands forever frozen at 12:35 a.m., the moment that a doctor had pronounced him dead.

As Goodwin swept and dusted the room, she’d often find herself speaking to her son, a soothing one-way conversation that helped her keep his spirit alive. She’d tell him about his nephews and nieces shopping for backpacks for the new school year, or the latest from the Bristol Motor Speedway and her motorcycle ride along Highway 421, one of the most scenic routes in the state.

“I wish you had been there,” she’d say wistfully.

Austin Hunter Turner died in 2017, on a night that Goodwin has rewound and replayed again and again, trying to make sense of what happened. Something just didn’t add up. There was the race to his apartment, the panic of watching her “baby boy” struggle to breathe, the chaos of paramedics in the kitchen. Her feelings of helplessness as she prayed for him to live.

Her emotions have been painfully conflicting. There was the deep shame that Turner died of a drug overdose. The doubts when her own memory diverged with the official police narrative. More recently, anger and outrage. She now believes she has spent all these years living with a lie that has tested what was once a resolute faith in the police, paramedics and the legal system.

Goodwin’s son is among more than 1,000 people across the United States who died over a decade after police restrained them in ways that are not supposed to be fatal, according to an investigation by The Associated Press in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS) and the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism.

Turner’s case highlights a central finding of the AP investigation: In the aftermath of fatal police encounters involving the use of Tasers, brute force and other tactics, a lack of accountability permeates the justice system. From the police officers at the scene and their commanders to prosecutors and medical examiners, the system shields officers from scrutiny.

Goodwin and her family are examples of what can happen when police tactics go too far in such a system: The truth can be lost. Like the Goodwins, hundreds of families have been left to wrestle with incorrect or incomplete narratives that have recast the lives of the dead, and re-ordered the lives of those left behind.

The terrible night

Goodwin was in bed when her phone rang. It was her son’s girlfriend, Michelle Stowers. She was frantic. Turner had just collapsed on the kitchen floor.

“He’s not moving,” Stowers cried. “I don’t think he’s breathing. What should I do?”

The mother’s heart hammered.

“Call 911. I’m on my way,” Goodwin said, her mind racing through terrible possibilities.

Was her son alive? Dead? He’d had a few seizures, but they were nothing serious.

As she sped to Turner’s apartment on that warm humid night in August 2017, Goodwin called and alerted her husband, Brian, and older son, Dustin. She also dialed her sister but could only utter: “Pray for Hunter.”

When she arrived, Goodwin found her son gasping for breath on the linoleum of his kitchen floor. His eyes were vacant. His body shook. Foam spilled from his mouth.

The mother thought her son might die right then. A paramedic arrived, and Goodwin told him that Turner had suffered minor seizures before.

“Hunter, this is momma,” she said, kneeling, pressing an oxygen mask to his face.

The front door burst open, and police officers and firefighters swarmed into the tiny apartment. Medics had requested help restraining Turner to treat him. They thought Turner was resisting.

As the room filled with voices and equipment, Goodwin stepped away, relieved. She and her husband and children had always admired paramedics and police. They were heroes. And she knew they’d do everything in their power to save her son’s life.

Then an officer shouted: “Get up off the floor!” Goodwin heard another say, “You’re going to get tased if you keep it up.”

She felt bewildered. Her motherly instincts kicked in. “Please,” she implored them, “don’t hurt him more than you have to!”

The officers were pinning Turner facedown on a recliner. A few minutes later, he was strapped to a stretcher, again facedown.

Goodwin followed them to the waiting ambulance. She peered inside: Her son seemed like he was unconscious, with a strange sort of mask pulled over his head. His legs were bound.

Goodwin felt powerless. That was her son. She’d give her life for him.

‘My baby needs to rest now’

Goodwin followed the ambulance to the Bristol Regional Medical Center.

After a long wait, the emergency room doctor said that “for all intents and purposes” Turner was dead. “Your son is young and strong,” he said. “We’re going to continue working on him for that reason.”

He paused, before continuing: “We’ll take you back — if you think you can handle it.”

Steps away, she saw a team of doctors and nurses trying to get Turner’s heart pumping again. She stared at her son’s blank face when they used a defibrillator to try to shock him back to life.

Nothing worked.

“We can keep going,” the doctor said.

Goodwin waved her hand. She needed a moment. Her son wasn’t moving. He didn’t respond to her voice, or the life-saving measures. When she’d touched his chest, it felt like Jell-O, because the paramedics, nurses and doctors had crushed everything in there while trying to save him. Goodwin knew what she had to do.

“That’s enough,” she said. “My baby needs to rest now.”

As she sat in the sterile hospital waiting room, she wondered: Why her son? He’s such a gentle, kind soul, Goodwin thought. Everyone loved him.

He was boyishly handsome, with light brown hair and a small goatee and chinstrap of hair along his jawline. A few inches short of 6 feet, Turner had a strong, outdoorsy kind of look. He was outgoing, ready to chat even with strangers.

Turner had a passion for fast motorbikes and owned a maroon Suzuki SV650 that could fly along at 130 mph.

He’d hit the road with his mom and dad and buddies, racing up steep stretches of the Appalachian Mountains with hairpin turns. Sometimes, he’d turn so sharp and deep he’d scrape the knees of his jeans along the ground.

The 23-year-old Turner worked odd jobs to help make ends meet — lately it was refurbishing furniture.

“I have plenty of time to grow up,” he told his parents.

Now, as she sat there, she felt those words reverberating in her head.

An overdose?

At 4 a.m., Goodwin looked up and saw her husband rushing into the waiting room. She needed him now, more than ever.

Karen had met Brian in 1996 when he stopped to fill his tank at the gas station where she worked as a cashier. They were immediately attracted to each other. Karen was drawn to his big smile and sarcastic sense of humor, and Brian to the cashier’s sassy personality and long blonde hair. Karen and Brian were married within a year.

From the beginning, Karen loved how her husband treated her two boys from a previous marriage as his own, teaching them to hunt and fish, ride dirt bikes and motorcycles. An electrician who spent weeks on the road, he had sped the 200 miles south from West Virginia to Bristol in under three hours. Brian Goodwin, a burly tough guy who never cried, was having a hard time holding it together.

“What happened?” he asked.

Goodwin said she didn’t know. She said she’d overheard a Bristol police officer declare that Turner had died of a drug overdose.

The parents knew their son smoked marijuana. They also knew he got high using Suboxone, a drug used to wean people off opioids. But they didn’t think either drug could lead to an overdose.

It didn’t make sense to Goodwin. Why were police saying this, she wondered. They had learned from Turner’s girlfriend that he had seemed fine when she got home from her late shift at Walmart. He hadn’t acted stoned. He had collapsed out of the blue. How could this be an overdose?

Ashes

After a memorial service, the Goodwins and two dozen of Turner’s friends honored his memory with a procession of motorcycles that climbed the sharp hills of the Appalachians. When they returned to Bristol, the group said their goodbyes. That night, Goodwin felt an emptiness in her soul. It would be a long time before she felt anything else.

Brian went back to work after a month. Keeping busy helped him deal with his grief.

But Goodwin couldn’t find an outlet. The mother tattooed her left arm with an image of her son’s thumbprint, and a clock set at 12:35. The tattoo artist had mixed traces of Turner’s ashes into the ink.

Mother and son had enjoyed a special connection. He was a daredevil, a fun-loving kid. Whenever something went wrong — like the time he hurt himself jumping off a neighbor’s porch, or crashing her car into a utility pole as he tried to teach himself to drive a stick shift — he’d run straight to her. And she was always there to say, “It’s all right, Hunter. It’s all right.”

Her son had always been there for her, too. When she had been diagnosed with cancer in 2015 and surgeons had removed one of her lungs and part of the other, her son had been the one to cheer her up.

Every morning he’d sit next to his mother on the front porch, covering her with a blanket to keep her warm. Sometimes, he’d hold his mother’s trembling hands and whisper, “I love you. You’ll be OK, Mom. You’ll be OK.”

Now, Goodwin wrestled with existential questions. Why did she fight so hard to beat cancer only to have her son die before her?

As the years wore on, she found solace in the den, next to her son’s ashes. Sometimes, she’d think about the weeks and months following Turner’s death. When she obtained his autopsy report, it explained that he died of an overdose and repeated the official police version of events — that officers had gone to Turner’s apartment to help the young man, but he had been too stoned to cooperate. He fought them, and in the end, it had cost him his life.

During that period, she had heard from police that they had tried to save Turner but couldn’t because of the drugs and his heart.

A strong supporter of law enforcement, Goodwin desperately wanted to believe that police and paramedics had acted appropriately. But something was gnawing at her. Sometimes, she’d wake up in the middle of the night and hear the police officer threatening to fire his Taser.

She’d recall that her son seemed to be having a seizure, and police held him down as he struggled to breathe. She had a hard time squaring those actions with what she knew in her heart was a medical emergency.

But she just didn’t trust her recollection. She felt constantly at war — her memory pitted against her deep trust in the police.

And more times than not, she ended up pushing her doubts aside. Why would the police lie? She wanted to believe they had done everything they could to save her son.

The Hard Truth

On Aug. 14, she heard a knock on her door. When she opened it, she found two Associated Press reporters who asked if she wanted to know more about how her son had died. They had videos that the family had never seen.

It was not easy for Goodwin to take them up on the offer. She knew it would be painful to revisit the worst night of her life.

After a week of agonizing, she sat down at her kitchen table and stared at a laptop before hitting play on the videos captured by police body cameras. The house was quiet except for the ping of a wind chime.

The videos on her computer screen took Goodwin straight back. Body cameras worn by officers Eric Keller and Kevin Frederick had captured most of the interactions between police, paramedics and Turner.

At times, the figures were difficult to make out, but one thing was clear: From the first moment police arrived, Turner was treated as a suspect resisting arrest — not as a patient facing an emergency.

Goodwin watched in horror as police officers seemed to ignore the fact they had been dispatched to a medical call.

Paramedics tried to force Turner onto his feet. He managed to get to his knees and momentarily stand. He took a single step and toppled over.

Officers began screaming that Turner was resisting arrest, being combative and disobeying their commands. But the video seemed to show Turner was having a seizure.

During a seizure, the muscles of the arms, legs and face stiffen, then begin to jerk. The videos showed that Turner was not throwing punches. He wasn’t kicking.

When Keller bounded into the apartment, the video shows he yelled at the flailing Turner, who was pinned down in a recliner chair, “You’re going to get tased if you keep it up.”

Despite paramedics warning him to wait, about 10 seconds later Keller pulled the trigger. Goodwin flinched when she heard the weapon’s loud pop followed by her son’s painful cry, as electricity coursed through his body.

“You’re not going to win this battle,” another paramedic said.

Goodwin was aghast.

“Win what?” she thought. “This isn’t a contest. My son isn’t resisting. He’s dying!”

The force didn’t end there. A paramedic sprayed a sedative up Turner’s nose, but most of it ended up on the medic.

Police kept restraining Turner — even after he was handcuffed facedown on top of the recliner. They shackled his legs.

When police transferred Turner to a gurney, they again put him facedown and strapped him in place. As blood spilled from his mouth, they covered his head with a spit hood.

Once inside the ambulance, an officer sat on Turner’s body — even though he was still on his stomach. There was no rush to get him to the hospital. Instead, the body camera showed police officers and paramedics spent six minutes recounting the “battle.”

It was only then that a paramedic noticed that Turner wasn’t breathing. Attendants removed the restraints, flipped him over, and began CPR. After about 10 minutes a paramedic walked into the frame. For a moment, he studied his colleagues who were working feverishly to revive Turner. He looked puzzled.

“What the hell happened here?” he asked. “Did we cut his damn airway off?”

They said no. As medics continued to work on Turner, the quizzical paramedic asked, “Y’all ain’t recording are you?”

The officer turned off his body camera. Goodwin’s screen suddenly went blank.

‘A damn lie’

The Goodwins were livid. The videos raised disturbing questions. So, they decided to drill down into documents –- the police reports and autopsy –- to try to find answers.

They soon became convinced the Bristol law enforcement community had lied about what had happened.

Police didn’t include any statements in their reports from Karen Goodwin and her other son, Dustin, who had been in the apartment during the encounter. The events police described were a far cry from what Goodwin and her son had seen, or what was captured by the body cameras. They had made Turner out to be a villain.

In a report, Lt. Greg Brown said the paramedics told police the young man was reaching for a knife on the kitchen counter.

“A damn lie,” Goodwin thought. She’d seen a paramedic clear the counters before police arrived.

Keller said he fired his Taser to stop Turner from fighting the medical personnel.

Goodwin knew her son was dazed from the seizures. He wasn’t fighting back. They had no reason to stun him.

Brown wrote in a report that Turner was fighting with medics when he arrived at the apartment. Goodwin was there. She saw no such thing. The body camera showed the opposite.

Using buzzwords that painted the victim as the aggressor, Brown said Turner was “combative,” “agitated,” and had “ignored commands.” Brown noted that Turner had incredible strength like those under the influence of narcotics.

Sullivan County District Attorney Barry Staubus had asked the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to examine Turner’s death.

The investigator talked to witnesses and collected other details, Staubus said in an interview with AP. But after reviewing the TBI report and the body-camera footage, Staubus concluded that Turner died of a drug overdose. Nothing in the autopsy concluded the force and “restraint techniques” had caused or contributed to Turner’s death.

The Goodwins expressed reservations about the state’s investigation and the prosecutor’s decision to shield police from accountability. They noted that state investigators never reached out to two of the most important witnesses: Karen Goodwin and Dustin. The state investigator had sent messages to Turner’s girlfriend and a neighbor at the scene, asking if they’d talk. They said yes.

They never heard from the investigator again.

Tennessee law keeps confidential the state’s investigation files, including those that detail fatal police encounters – unless the death involves a shooting. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation declined to discuss Turner’s death.

Bristol’s chief of police would not answer questions when reached by the AP. Lt. Brown and officers Keller and Frederick did not reply to requests for comment, and neither did paramedics involved. The Bristol Fire Department did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The Goodwins were also perplexed by the autopsy report. Medical Examiner Eugene Scheuerman had declared Turner’s death an accident. He died of “Multiple Drug Toxicity” related to his use of the opioid in Suboxone and the psychoactive chemical in marijuana.

An analysis found a “therapeutic to lethal level” of Suboxone in Turner’s system. Scheuerman added that “dilated cardiomyopathy” — a condition that affects the heart’s ability to pump enough oxygen-rich blood — was a contributing factor to Turner’s death.

The autopsy report also repeated the police version of events.

He didn’t note that police officers had placed Turner facedown and applied their body weight, a tactic that has long been criticized by experts for restricting breathing.

The Goodwins wondered if the medical examiner had bothered to watch the police videos. Scheuerman has since died.

Three experts who reviewed the documents for AP related to the incident disagreed with the autopsy findings: they said Turner did not die of a drug overdose. Instead, they said the Bristol police made critical errors that contributed to Turner’s death, including placing him facedown in a way that could restrict his breathing.

“They didn’t understand the dangers of prolonged restraint and the pressure on his back,” said Jack Ryan, a police training expert and a former police officer and administrator.

Forever midnight

Karen and Brian Goodwin said they were still figuring out how to come to terms with the truth. They had blamed their son for his own demise and had felt incredibly guilty about that. They are now convinced he didn’t die from drugs — he was killed by police force.

What hurts so much is that many people in town believe Turner died of an overdose. The parents still can hear the whispers in grocery stores and restaurants: Their boy would still be alive if he hadn’t been a drug user.

“That’s the stigma that we’ve had to live with, ‘Your son was a dumbass.’ We’ve had to live with that as his legacy,” Brian said. “I want everyone to know the truth.”

What’s next? A lawsuit? Becoming advocates for holding police accountable in arrest-related deaths so another family doesn’t go through their pain? They wonder how they will react if police pull them over along the road. They still support the police. But will they be respectful?

Karen worries she may be running out of time. Her health, fragile from the cancer fight, has been flagging. She is glad she learned the truth, but she fears she won’t live long enough to do anything with it.

“My son didn’t do this to himself,” Karen said, fighting back tears. “He didn’t have to die … His death killed a part of us.”

She turned and studied the clock on the coffee table. Even with all the new information, the clock’s hands remain fixed, unmoving, stuck forever at 35 minutes past midnight.

___

AP reporter Reese Dunklin contributed to this report from Dallas.

This story is part of an ongoing investigation led by The Associated Press in collaboration with the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism programs and FRONTLINE (PBS). The investigation includes the Lethal Restraint interactive story, database and the documentary, “Documenting Police Use Of Force,” premiering April 30 on PBS.

The Associated Press receives support from the Public Welfare Foundation for reporting focused on criminal justice. This story also was supported by Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/

The owner of the ship that rammed into a Baltimore bridge could face hundreds of millions of dollars in damage claims after the accident sent vehicles plunging into the water and threw the eastern U.S. transportation network into chaos.

But legal experts said there is a path for reducing liability under an obscure 19th-century law once invoked by the owner of the Titanic to limit its payout for the 1912 sinking.

At the center of the legal fallout will be Singapore-based Grace Ocean, owner of the container ship Dali that crashed Tuesday into the Francis Scott Key Bridge at the start of a voyage chartered by the shipping giant Maersk.

Stationary objects

The company could face a bevy of lawsuits from multiple directions, including from the bridge’s owner and the families of six workers who were presumed dead after a search in the Patapsco River.

Damages claims are likely to fall on the ship owner and not the agency that operates the bridge, since stationary objects aren’t typically at fault if a moving vessel hits them, said Michael Sturley, a maritime law expert at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Law.

But an 1851 law could lower the exposure to tens of millions of dollars by capping the ship owner’s liability at how much the vessel is worth after the crash, plus any earnings it collected from carrying the freight on board, said Martin Davies, the director of Tulane University’s Maritime Law Center.

The law was passed initially to prevent shipping giants from suffering steep and insurmountable losses from disasters at sea. An eight-figure sum, while still hefty, would amount to “considerably less” than the full claims total, Davies said.

‘Very unusual’

“It’s a very unusual casualty in one respect, particularly because of this footage of the whole bridge falling down,” Davies said. “But in many ways, it’s not unusual, because ships collide and there’s damage and there’s injury all the time.”

Lawrence B. Brennan, an adjunct professor of law at Fordham University School of Law in New York and an expert on admiralty and maritime law, said he assumes the Dali’s operator will shortly begin a proceeding in the U.S. under the 1851 law, which was cited by the Titanic’s owner in a Supreme Court case more than a century ago.

The ship owner’s insurance would help the company through the legal risks. About 90% of the world’s ocean-bound cargo is insured by an arm of the International Group of Protection and Indemnity Clubs, which oversees the 12 major mutual insurance associations for ship owners.

That gives the policies related to the Dali a total insured limit of about $3 billion, a sizable sum but one that “would be very manageable for the global reinsurance market,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Matthew Palazola and Charles Graham said in a note.

“We are working closely with the ship manager and relevant authorities to establish the facts and to help ensure that this situation is dealt with quickly and professionally,” Britannia P&I said.

Bloomberg Intelligence also said Maersk may not be liable as the Danish company had no crew on board and the ship was operated by a charter company.

“Maritime insurance will likely cover some of the costs, yet uncertainty around the total liabilities and who will pay for them will likely weigh on Maersk’s spreads in the near term,” said Stephane Kovatchev, a credit analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence.

U.S. Constitution

While federal courts have jurisdiction over maritime disputes, any victims of the bridge strike could potentially seek damages under a clause of the U.S. Constitution that allows those injured in accidents at sea or who have property claims to pursue lawsuits in state court, said Charles A. Patrizia, who heads an American Bar Association committee on marine law.

In cases like these, businesses often sue for interruption, claiming economic losses. Those cases are rarely successful due to a law that largely limits the award of monetary damages to people who were physically injured, said Sturley, the UT Austin professor.

And what will become of the ship itself, which has been managed for Grace Ocean by Singapore-based Synergy Marine Group?

The ship’s owner may want to get it out of the U.S., but the Maryland Transportation Authority will likely seek to keep it under “arrest” while it pursues claims – and possibly until damages are resolved, said Brennan, the Fordham professor.

“The ship isn’t going anywhere for a while,” he said.

(With assistance from David Voreacos and Laura Benitez.)

©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Those challenging conditions are among the hurdles faced by divers working in the Patapsco River to recover the bodies of several construction workers presumed dead following the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. Authorities have been searching the waters where the bridge once stood since early Tuesday morning when a cargo ship crashed into the span, causing most of the 1.6-mile bridge to topple.

Late Tuesday, authorities announced they were shifting the operation from a rescue to a recovery mission, presuming the six people who remain unaccounted for following the collapse could not have withstood the sub-50 degree waters for the entire day.

Wednesday evening Maryland State Police announced they had recovered the bodies of two men, Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes and Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, found inside a pickup truck beneath the water. The remaining victims, trapped beneath the wreckage, must be extricated via a salvage operation, officials said.

Baltimore Fire Chief James Wallace said divers worked throughout the day Wednesday after a careful assessment of the debris field. Overseen by the U.S. Coast Guard, dive teams have come from numerous local departments including Baltimore City’s fire and police departments, Baltimore County’s police and fire departments, Maryland State Police, Maryland Natural Resources Police and crews from Prince George’s and Anne Arundel counties.

Scott Parrott, a Baltimore fire captain who has been working on the dive team, said divers have faced enormous challenges in the Patapsco’s murky, cold waters, chief among them visibility. When divers submerge themselves, they have 12-16 inches of visibility, Parrott said. When the bridge collapsed, however, the concrete and asphalt that covered its roadway turned to a fine silty dust. That silt is stirred when divers move around the water, he said, clouding their visibility to almost nothing.

Absent visibility, divers have been relying heavily on sonar imagery of the wreckage below the water. That sonar, which can detect vehicles and also human remains, located several vehicles beneath the surface, Wallace said. So far, the operation has been focused on five vehicles — three passenger vehicles; one construction vehicle, likely a tow-behind cement mixer; and one unidentified vehicle, he said. All have been found within 20-30 feet of where the roadway landed, despite the strong current, Wallace said.

Parrott said divers have approached each of the vehicles located by sonar and were able to search inside. Crews have also checked a 15-20 foot perimeter around each vehicle in case an occupant may have been able to escape.

Authorities have been aided by one of the survivors of the collapse, an unnamed Maryland highway inspector who was on a portion of the bridge that did not fall, Parrott said. That man was able to run to the end of the bridge and later gave the dive team information about the layout of the construction site, helping them estimate where vehicles and victims may have landed, Parrott said.

“Even though he’d been through a very traumatic experience, he was able to be an essential part of our initial response,” Parrott said. “I commend him because he was very shaken up. He almost died.”

There are still portions of the site that remain too unsafe for divers, Wallace and Parrott said. A wide berth has been given to the area around the ship itself. Some of the containers aboard are leaning precariously, creating a hazard, Wallace said.

“There’s a very strong possibility that they’re going to fall left off the ship,” he said.

As a safety measure, divers are also connected to lines that tether them to boats at the water’s surface, Parrott said. Those lines are wired for communication, so divers are in constant contact with the surface, Wallace added.

Parrott likened the sonar imagery divers are using to a flashlight in the woods. The light bounces back from trees, and there are dark spots behind them. If a body is hidden behind a metal object, it’s difficult to find, he said.

“They’re not seeing each other for the first time,” Wallace said. “As an incident commander, you always look for that level of continuity, and we certainly had it today.”

Parrott said he has trained previously in the area around the Key Bridge, although never in the shipping channel. Typically, Baltimore’s dive teams are searching for cars or people who have fallen into the harbor, sometimes capsized boats, he said. The scale of the wreckage crews are now navigating, however, is unthinkable, he said.

“This is a once-in-a-career situation,” Parrott said.

From Texas, Brashier turned his attention to the cargo — tires, dog food, home goods, cookware — packed into containers on ships headed to the Port of Baltimore and handled by his logistics company. At 3 a.m., after hearing about what ended up being a deadly collision, he rushed to wake up some clients and put contingency plans in place.

“Our largest concern once we saw that that bridge cut off the harbor for vessel traffic for containerized cargo, we started looking at possible diversion ports and what was going to happen to the freight and start working with clients,” said Brashier, a vice president at the Reno, Nevada-based ITS Logistics.

“That was the triage, and we’re going to be doing that here probably for the next five to seven days,” said Brashier, whose firm transports freight from ocean ports to distribution centers or stores in 56 markets, including Baltimore, one of its largest. The company also handles domestic trucking and brings cargo to ports for export.

With remains of the span that connects Interstate 695 blocking the only channel in and out of the port and vessel traffic suspended, operations have been disrupted or forever altered for the many businesses and workers who move goods and vehicles through the port and beyond. Many companies like ITS are scrambling to reroute cargo to places like Norfolk, Virginia; Savannah, Georgia; Charleston, South Carolina; New York and New Jersey.

On Wednesday, authorities continued collecting evidence and searching for six missing construction workers in the Patapsco River, while experts predicted a bridge rebuild could take as little as two years or as many as 15. And the National Transportation Safety Board said it is analyzing the ship’s onboard data.

Brashier, whose clients are retailers, manufacturers and the auto industry, said Wednesday the company has leaned heavily on its “visibility” technology, which allows clients to see almost in real time the location of their freight before it arrives in the U.S.

“It’s a great big focus right now as we’re waiting to see where all these containers that were going to go to Baltimore end up getting discharged on the East Coast,” he said.

By later Tuesday, the company had begun planning for its next phase of operations — the ability to reach normal container flow in the next two weeks — at ports that are new to clients. By early next week, the company expects to start longer-term planning, making decisions such as potentially moving some business to the West Coast.

Brashier said his company has infrastructure to handle customers whose freight is rerouted. But it may be more difficult for the shippers.

“If you’re used to bringing in all your freight into Baltimore and that goes to a local facility, now you’ve got freight that’s going to be hundreds or thousands of miles away from that original entry point, which means you’re going to have additional transportation costs,” he said.

Shippers also could be charged fees that are sometimes assessed for not removing containers quickly enough from a port. And they could face increased trucking costs to transport goods to end users.

“You’re going to see inflationary pressure to the end user, the consumer, just like we did post-Covid, probably not that bad, but there will be additional transportation costs,” Brashier said.  “We’re trying to insulate our clients as much as possible from additional charges and be a good steward. The hope is other folks, the ocean carriers and terminals, would do the same.”

Baltimore’s port, a major hub for importing and exporting cars, light trucks and bulk goods, will likely face a shutdown for at least three months, some in the industry believe. If supply chains begin to leave Baltimore out, the effects could linger many months longer, experts believe.

Another logistics company, C.H. Robinson, which handles shipping by ocean, air, truck and rail, said Wednesday it’s been making plans for containers on ships rerouted to places such as New York, New Jersey or Norfolk, Virginia.

“We’re already making alternative plans to pick up those containers and arrange for truck or rail transportation from the new ports,”  C. Matt Castle, vice president of global forwarding, said in an email. “For shipments that haven’t departed yet, we’re helping customers retrieve those containers from the Port of Baltimore and get them on their way.”

But with the Key Bridge gone, trucks will face delays, especially those traveling from the south and using I-95 or I-895 tunnels or navigating around the harbor, a detour that could add an hour to trips, he said.

“The good news for customers with containers that had already arrived at the port is that we can get drivers in to access their freight,” Castle said. And, though rail service to the port from places such as Chicago has been suspended, it’s likely to start up again this week, enabling cargo loaded onto trains to move inland.

Tinglong Dai, a professor at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School in the area of Operations Management and Business Analytics, said during a Wednesday panel at Hopkins that the shutdown will hurt Baltimore in the short run but is not expected to have a big impact on the global supply chain, which has become flexible and resilient.

Even at the port, the impact will vary, he said. Though the port plays a major role in automobile imports and exports, not all automakers at the port are impacted. BMW and Volkswagen each having terminals outside the area of the bridge collapse. But companies such as General Motors or Ford are affected.

“The impact is relatively local. It’s definitely not a national supply-chain crisis and won’t trigger a global supply-chain crisis. I don’t want to downplay the impact, but resilience has been built into global supply chains,” Tinglong Dai said.

Natalie M. Scala, an associate professor at Towson University who directs the graduate program in supply chain management, raised concerns about ships stuck at the port with no way to distribute products.

“The immediate impacts, in terms of a supply change component: it’s the port being clear and open,” Scala said. “The bridge, obviously, is important. But the economic impact in Baltimore and this region and the eastern seaboard is the actual product in and out of the port itself.”

Baltimore Sun reporters Maya Lora and Jonathan M. PItts contributed to this article.

Six members of the crew — fathers, husbands and at least one grandfather — did not return to their families in Baltimore, Dundalk, Owings Mills and Glen Burnie when the sun rose Tuesday over the wreckage of the collapsed Key Bridge.

On Wednesday, divers found the bodies of two men, identified as Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, 35, of Baltimore, and Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, 26, of Dundalk, inside a red pickup truck. Fuentes was from Mexico and Cabrera from Guatemala.

The Latino workers were on the bridge’s middle span when a container ship hit its support column and sent the expanse plummeting into the Patapsco River early Tuesday morning.

After a mayday from the ship, a Singapore-flagged vessel named Dali, police hurriedly closed off the bridge to traffic, but the construction crew from Hunt Valley-based Brawner, who were filling potholes on the roadway, couldn’t escape.

A Maryland state highway inspector and one construction worker survived, but four others who plunged into the chilly depths of the river haven’t been found as the recovery effort continued.

Three of the men were originally from Mexico, one of whom was rescued with injuries but has been released from the hospital, according to the Mexican embassy. The remaining workers were from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

Authorities have yet to officially name the other four victims, but CASA, a nonprofit supporting immigrants, said that two were members: Maynor Suazo Sandoval, who emigrated from Honduras 17 years ago, and Miguel Luna, who has lived in the U.S. for 19 years. Luna’s friends and neighbors in Glen Burnie described him as a sweet and hardworking grandfather who forged friendships despite language barriers.

“His brother describes Maynor as having a true virtue for all things machinery. Maynor dreamt of starting his own small business in the Baltimore area,” reads a Wednesday news release from CASA. “He was always so full of joy, and brought so much humor to our family.”

Suazo Sandoval was a husband and father of two. The family was gearing up for his birthday celebration on April 27, CASA said.

Latino Racial Justice Circle, a faith-based organization in the Baltimore area, set up a GoFundMe Wednesday morning to raise money for the families of the six missing workers. The online fundraiser quickly surpassed its initial goal of $18,000. After bringing in close to $98,000 in donations by about 6 p.m. Wednesday, the organization shut it down, Vice President Susana Barrios said. Donations can still be made through the Baltimore Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs.

“We raised so much money so fast, and because we’re volunteer-run, we are so small, we closed it down yesterday and then we passed it to the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs,” Barrios said Thursday morning.

“We know that the 6 victims were all Latino immigrants who were supporting partners and children in the Southeast Baltimore and Dundalk communities. As they move forward with their shock and grief, the families will need support with basic needs, such as rent, groceries, and utilities,” the fundraiser page says.

Jeffrey Pritzker, executive vice president of Brawner Builders said in a Wednesday interview at the company’s Hunt Valley headquarters that colleagues were taking the news hard. “We’re doing everything we can to assist the families, but you can’t bring somebody back when they’re gone,” Pritzker said.

Many people don’t realize how dangerous road construction can be for workers, he said. Between 2003 and 2020, more than 2,200 workers died at road construction sites, an average of 123 per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Brawner takes precautions to protect its workers from traffic and other hazards, Pritzker said, but the collapse was unexpected and catastrophic. “Who could ever have foreseen something like that happening?” he said.

Bobby Knutson Jr., a construction worker from Northern Virginia who worked at Brawner for about five years, said he and his crewmates sometimes worried about cars crossing the bridge while they were working, or falling from the span. But the massive container ships leaving the Port of Baltimore and traveling under the bridge were mostly exciting to behold, he said.

“The last thing we ever thought about was a boat hitting the bridge. It just blows my mind,” Knutson said.

Knutson said he knew several of the crew members who were on the bridge when it fell, including Luna and Alejandro “Alex” Hernandez, who was originally from Mexico, and rose through the ranks at Brawner to become a foreman.

“When I had met him, he was a laborer — didn’t have a company truck,” Knutson said. “And then by the time I left, he had the company truck and his own crew, which I thought was really cool.”

Hernandez was “attached at the hip” with his brother-in-law, Julio, who Knutson believes was rescued from the collapse and sent to R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center. He was released later in the day Tuesday.

Hernandez was a “fireball,” Knutson said. He was short in stature, but his big personality made it feel like he could be 7 feet tall, Knutson said.

“He was the nicest guy ever, but you didn’t want to get on his bad side because he took no crap from anybody,” Knutson said.

A 22-person Indian crew aboard the Dali, a hulking cargo ship involved in an accident in Belgian waters eight years earlier, prepared to set off on a 28-day voyage to Sri Lanka after it spent the weekend in Baltimore. Two Maryland pilots boarded the ship early Tuesday to navigate the 984-foot vessel out of the harbor. It departed the Port of Baltimore’s Seagirt Marine Terminal around 12:39 a.m.

Over the next 50 minutes it would experience power and mechanical failures until it smashed into a support column for the Francis Scott Key Bridge, sending most of the 1.6-mile structure crumbling into the Patapsco River. The bodies of two construction workers were recovered Wednesday; Luna and three other workers are presumed dead. Two people survived.

Dispatch audio, Coast Guard reports, a National Transportation Safety Board summary of data from the ship’s voyage data recorder and video of the disaster offer a minute-by-minute account of the moments before and after the bridge’s collapse:

12:51 a.m.: The Dali’s status is changed to “under way using engine” and its speed is recorded at about 3 knots on myshiptracking.com, a website that tracks ships’ locations via the Automatic Identification System, a technology used to avoid collisions.

1:09 a.m.: Two tugboats guiding the Dali leave once the ship turns to begin its departure out of the port waters.

1:18 a.m.: A port call for the departure of the Dali was recorded on myshiptracking.com. The ship was moving at a speed of 7 knots. Motorists traveling on Interstate 695, the Baltimore Beltway, cross the Key Bridge

1:24 a.m. to 1:26 a.m.: Dali appears to begin turning toward one of the vital bridge supports at a speed of around 8 knots, or about 9 mph.

1:24:59: The sounds of numerous alarms are recorded on the ship bridge’s audio. The ship’s power goes out, flickers partially back on a minute later, and goes out again by 1:26 a.m. Black smoke billows from the ship.

1:26:39: With the power outage likely impacting navigation, the pilot radios for a tug boat. A pilot association dispatcher, meanwhile, phones a Maryland Transportation Authority duty officer to report the ship’s loss of power.

1:27:04: The pilot orders the Dali to drop an anchor and issues steering commands. Cars and trucks continue to travel on the roadway.

1:27:05 a.m. to 1:29 a.m.: The pilot issues a mayday alert to the Coast Guard. Maryland Transportation Authority Police stop bridge traffic in both directions. A handful of vehicles cross the bridge as the Dali closes in on the bridge’s western steel support column.

“Hold all traffic on the Key Bridge. There’s a ship approaching that just lost their steering,” a dispatcher says.

An officer asks whether a construction crew is working on the bridge.

“Just make sure no one’s on the bridge right now. I’m not sure what — there’s a crew up there. You might want to notify whoever the foreman is, see if we can get them off the bridge temporarily,” a dispatcher responds.

A half minute later, an officer says he’ll grab the construction workers when backup arrives.

But there’s no time.

Traveling at a speed of just under 7 knots or about 8 mph, the ship rams into the bridge. The voyage data recorder captures what sounds like the collision at 1:29 a.m. The NTSB said Wednesday night that more analysis was needed to determine the precise time of impact.

An inspector contracted by the Maryland Transportation Authority who was standing on a section of the bridge that did not immediately collapse runs to safety at the end of the bridge.

Less than a minute after impact, the bridge shudders and folds. Six people, three passenger vehicles, one piece of construction equipment and one unidentified vehicle are thrown into the chilly water below. The pilot radios the Coast Guard about the collapse.

“The whole bridge just fell down,” a shocked transportation authority officer says. “Start … start whoever, everybody.”

1:40 a.m.: Baltimore City fire and emergency medical units are dispatched to the Key Bridge for a report of a possible vehicle in the water.

1:44 a.m.: A second report over fire dispatch reports 13 members of a construction crew potentially in the water. Authorities believe six people were thrown into the water.

1:45 a.m.: Baltimore City and County fire rescue boats and a dive team are dispatched to the scene to search for the missing men. The Coast Guard deploys four boats and a helicopter to aid in the search. Responders use sonar and underwater drones.

1:46 a.m.: Someone asks the dispatcher for a more specific location; the dispatcher says the Coast Guard called it in and said it was off Fort Armistead Park.

1:50 a.m.: A dispatcher says police are reporting the “middle section of the bridge collapsed into the water” and that there are “unknown amounts of people and/or vehicles in the water.” Beltway traffic is jammed.

1:51 a.m.: A boat launched from the Coast Guard’s Station Curtis Bay reaches the scene.

1:52 a.m.: Several police officers on eastbound 695 block traffic. A dispatcher says they will get as close to the bridge as possible.

“Be advised, the entire bridge, the entire Key Bridge is in the harbor,” a dispatcher says in disbelief.

2:30 a.m.: One of two survivors arrives at Shock Trauma and is released without being admitted. A second person rescued from the bridge declines medical treatment.

4 a.m.: Divers searching the 50-foot deep waters for vehicles or missing people are hindered by cold temperatures and murky water. The National Data Buoy Center reported water temperatures in that area to be about 49 degrees at 4 a.m. — a dangerously cold temperature.

12:30 p.m.: President Joe Biden gives a White House address on the Key Bridge disaster, pledging federal money to pay for its replacement.

“This is going to take some time,” Biden said. “But the people of Baltimore can count on us, though, to stick with it every step of the way until the port is reopened and the bridge is rebuilt.”

7:30 p.m.: Search-and-rescue efforts transition to recovery efforts, authorities announce at a news conference.

ATLANTA (AP) — The charges against Donald Trump in the Georgia election interference case seek to criminalize political speech and advocacy conduct that the First Amendment protects, a lawyer for the former president said Thursday as he argued that the indictment should be dismissed.

The hearing before Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee was on a filing from Trump and on two pretrial motions by co-defendant David Shafer and centered on technical legal arguments. It marked something of a return to normalcy after the case was rocked by allegations that District Attorney Fani Willis improperly benefited from her romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor hired for the case.

“There is nothing alleged factually against President Trump that is not political speech,” Trump’s lead lawyer, Steve Sadow, told the judge. Sadow said a sitting president expressing concerns about an election is “the height of political speech” and that is protected even if what was said ended up being false.

Prosecutor Donald Wakeford countered that Trump’s statements are not protected by the First Amendment because they were integral to criminal activity.

“It’s not just that they were false. It’s not that the defendant has been hauled into a courtroom because the prosecution doesn’t like what he said,” Wakeford said, adding that Trump is free to express his opinion and make legitimate protests. “What he is not allowed to do is to employ his speech and his expression and his statements as part of a criminal conspiracy to violate Georgia’s RICO statute, to impersonate public officers, to file false documents, to make false statements to the government.”

Wakeford pointed out that similar arguments were raised and rejected in the federal election interference case against Trump brought by Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote in a December ruling that “it is well established that the First Amendment does not protect speech that is used as an instrument of a crime.”

“Defendant is not being prosecuted simply for making false statements … but rather for knowingly making false statements in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy and obstructing the electoral process,” Chutkan wrote.

Willis used Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law, an expansive anti-racketeering statute, to charge Trump and 18 others with allegedly participating in a wide-ranging conspiracy to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.

Most of the charges against Shafer, a former state Republican Party chairman, have to do with his involvement in the casting of Electoral College votes for Trump by a group of Georgia Republicans even though the state’s election had been certified in favor of Democrat Joe Biden. The charges against Shafer include impersonating a public officer, forgery, false statements and writings, and attempting to file false documents.

His lawyer, Craig Gillen, argued that the activity Shafer engaged in was lawful at the time and that Schafer was acting in accordance with requirements of the Electoral Count Act. Because a legal challenge to the presidential election results was pending on Dec. 14, 2020, when it came time for electors to meet to cast Georgia’s electoral votes, Gillen said it was up to Congress to determine whether a Democratic or Republican slate of electors should be counted for the state. He said that means Shafer and the other Republicans who met to cast electoral votes were acting properly.

Gillen also asked that three phrases be struck from the indictment: “duly elected and qualified presidential electors,” “false Electoral College votes” and “lawful electoral votes.” He said those phrases are used to assert that the Democratic slate of electors was valid and the Republican slate was not. He said those are “prejudicial legal conclusions” about issues that should be decided by the judge or by the jury at trial.

Wooten opposed the move, saying “every allegation in an indictment is a legal conclusion.”

Trump and the others were indicted last year, accused of participating in a scheme to try to illegally overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, which the Republican incumbent narrowly lost to Biden.

All the defendants were charged with violating the anti-racketeering law, along with other alleged crimes. Four people charged in the case have pleaded guilty after reaching deals with prosecutors. Trump and the others have pleaded not guilty. No trial date has been set. Willis has asked that the trial begin in August.

The allegations that Willis engaged in an improper relationship were explored over several days in an evidentiary hearing last month that delved into intimate details of Willis’ and Wade’s personal lives. The judge rejected defense efforts to remove Willis and her office as long as Wade stepped aside. But McAfee did give the defendants permission to seek a review of his decision from the state Court of Appeals.

Also this month, the judge dismissed six of the 41 counts in the indictment, including three against Trump, finding that prosecutors failed to provide enough detail about the alleged crimes.

State healthcare officials have received notifications in connection with the proposed sale of Stewardship Health Inc. and the contracting Steward Health Care Network to OptumCare, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group.

Stewardship Health Inc. is the parent of Stewardship Health Medical Group Inc., which employs primary care physicians and other clinicians across nine states, according to the state Health Policy Commission.

U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss raised immediate concerns with the proposal, which he called “alarming,” in a statement Wednesday morning after the development came to light Tuesday evening.

“Steward’s physician-led practices provide critical medical care to Greater Fall River & Greater Taunton and should continue to operate,” Auchincloss said. “But the prospect of UnitedHealth Group purchasing Stewardship Health is alarming. UnitedHealth, a Fortune 5 leviathan already under federal antitrust investigation, has spent five decades corporatizing healthcare to the detriment of patients and physicians.

“My constituents in southeastern Massachusetts should not be next in line,” he added.

Steward’s disastrous financial status, which came to the forefront earlier this year, continues to wreak havoc on Massachusetts hospitals and patients, some of whom live in the Bay State’s poorest communities.

The Dallas-based company which operates the third largest hospital system in Massachusetts admitted to being millions in debt in rent, with unpaid contracts and other expenses in January. Medical Properties Trust, Inc. owns the Steward facilities.

UnitedHealth faces its own trouble. The Wall Street Journal reported late last month that the country’s largest private health insurer is being sued by a California-based nonprofit group of hospitals and doctors over allegedly using its market power to try and force them to agree not to compete for primary care physicians.

The Department of Justice has launched an investigation of the healthcare conglomerate over antitrust concerns.

U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, hosting a news conference at the John F. Kennedy Federal Building Wednesday afternoon, highlighted how there could be “big consequences” if Steward’s sale to UnitedHealth goes through.

Markey will be leading a hearing that will “investigate” the role of for-profit companies in the country’s healthcare system next Wednesday in Boston.

The sale could lead to “an increase in costs, a reduction in services, but it could also mean that Optum, UnitedHealthcare, as it comes in to purchase these physician networks also bids away physicians who now work at community health centers, further hollowing out the healthcare services that are provided for the poorest in our state,” Markey said.

Before the sale can be completed, the Health Policy Commission must review the proposal.

The commission doesn’t have the authority to block a transaction but can refer findings to the state Attorney General’s office, the Department of Public Health, or other Massachusetts agencies for possible further action.

Documents filed with the state did not include a cost for the transaction. Under the deal, Optum would acquire a Steward affiliate that includes the company’s primary care doctors and other clinicians in nine states.

Transactions involving the sale of Steward’s eight Massachusetts hospitals would also require review by the agency, and review by the Determination of Need program at the Department of Public Health.

“This is a significant proposed change involving two large medical providers, both in Massachusetts and nationally, with important implications for the delivery and cost of health care across Massachusetts,” HPC Director David Seltz said.

Once all required information has been provided about the sale, the HPC will have 30 days to assess potential impacts of the transaction, according to the agency. If the sale is anticipated to have a significant impact on health care costs and market functioning, the HPC can initiate a full Cost and Market Impact Review, an option that it has often not pursued in the past.

House Speaker Ron Mariano believes the tentative sale could “significantly impact the competitiveness of the health care market” and “cause further disruption during a period of acute instability.”

“The HPC’s statutory authority to review the health care impacts of this transaction should not delay state and federal antitrust authorities from doing their own rigorous review as we all seek to protect patient access and affordability, communities, employees, and the overall health care system,” Mariano said in a statement.

Herald wire services contributed to this report