AP News in Brief at 11:04 p.m. EDT

Expelled Black lawmaker Pearson to return to Tennessee House

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — The second of two Black Democrats expelled from the Republican-led Tennessee House will return to the Legislature after a Memphis commission voted to reinstate him Wednesday, nearly a week after his banishment for supporting gun control protesters propelled him into the national spotlight.

Hundreds of supporters marched Justin Pearson through Memphis to the Shelby County Board of Commissioners meeting, chanting and cheering before entering the commission chambers, where officials quickly voted 7-0 to restore him to his position.

“The message for all the people in Nashville who decided to expel us: You can’t expel hope. You can’t expel justice,” Pearson said at the meeting, his voice rising as he spoke. ”You can’t expel our voice. And you sure can’t expel our fight.”

The House’s vote last Thursday to remove Pearson and Rep. Justin Jones but keep white Rep. Gloria Johnson drew accusations of racism. Johnson survived by one vote. The Republican leadership denied that race was a factor.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and four other senators sent a letter Wednesday asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether the expulsions violated the Constitution or federal civil rights laws and “to take all steps necessary to uphold the democratic integrity of our nation’s legislative bodies.”

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Adrift in the Atlantic, a boat of death and lost dreams

BELLE GARDEN, Tobago (AP) — Around 6:30 a.m. on May 28, 2021, a couple of miles from Belle Garden Beach on the Caribbean island of Tobago, a narrow white-and-blue boat drifted onto the horizon. As it wobbled back and forth, fish gathered, feeding on the barnacles that had grown below the surface.

From a distance, it seemed no one was aboard. But as fishermen approached, they smelled death.

Inside were the decomposing bodies of more than a dozen Black men. No one knew where they were from, what brought them there, why they were aboard — and how or why they died. No one knew their names.

What is clear now, but wasn’t then, is this: 135 days earlier, 43 people were believed to have left a port city across the ocean in Africa. They were trying to reach Spain’s Canary Islands, off Africa’s northwest coast.

They never arrived. Instead, they ended up here, on the other side of the Atlantic.

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911 calls show chaotic moments during Kentucky bank shooting

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Frantic calls from witnesses reporting a mass shooting at a Louisville bank were released Wednesday by police — including from a woman who was on a virtual meeting and saw the shooter, as well as one from the man’s mother, who told a 911 operator that her son “currently has a gun and is heading toward” the bank.

“I need your help. He’s never hurt anyone, he’s a good kid,” said the woman, who identified herself as the gunman’s mother. It turned out that at the time of her call, the gunman was already at the bank. The emergency dispatcher informed the woman that other calls were coming in about the shooting.

None of the callers are identified by name and other information is edited out of the calls, but the first call that came in was from a woman who was on a video call inside the bank. She screams and cries throughout the four-minute call and says there is an active shooter at the downtown branch of the bank.

“I just watched it on a Teams meeting,” she says. “We were having a board meeting. With our commercial (lending) team.”

“We heard multiple shots and everybody started saying, ’Oh my God and then he came into the board room.”

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Ukraine’s outrage grows over video seeming to show beheading

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine launched an investigation Wednesday into a gruesome video that purportedly shows the beheading of a Ukrainian soldier, in the latest accusation of atrocities said to have been committed by Russia since it invaded in February 2022.

The video spread quickly online and drew outrage from officials in Kyiv, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as well as international organizations. The Kremlin called the footage “horrible” but said it needed to be verified.

The Associated Press was not able to independently verify the authenticity of the video or the circumstances of where and when it was shot. The AP is not distributing the video or using frame grabs due to its extremely graphic nature.

Meanwhile, a Russian defense official claimed that fighters from Russia’s paramilitary Wagner group have seized three districts of Bakhmut, the embattled city that for months has been the focus of Moscow’s grinding campaign in the east.

The video circulating online appears to show a man in green fatigues wearing a yellow armband, typically donned by Ukrainian fighters. His screams are heard before another man in camouflage uses a knife to decapitate him.

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Florida executes ‘ninja killer’ for couple’s 1989 death

STARKE, Fla. (AP) — Florida executed a man known as the “ninja killer” on Wednesday for the 1989 slayings of a couple visiting the state from New Jersey.

Louis Bernard Gaskin, 56, was pronounced dead at 6:15 p.m. after receiving a lethal injection, the governor’s office said. He was convicted of killing Robert Sturmfels, 56, and Georgette Sturmfels, 55, on Dec. 20, 1989, in their Flagler County winter home on Florida’s northeastern coast.

Gaskin woke up at 4:45 a.m. Wednesday and had his last meal at 9:45 a.m., Department of Corrections spokesperson Kayla McLaughlin Smith said during a news conference. The meal included BBQ pork ribs, pork and turkey neck, Buffalo wings, shrimp fried rice, french fries and water.

Gaskin was visited by his sister Wednesday, but he did not meet with a spiritual adviser, McLaughlin Smith said. No relatives of the victims had arranged to be in the witness room during the execution, which was scheduled for 6 p.m. and started without delay.

When asked if he had any final statement, Gaskin said: “Justice is not about the crime. It’s not about the criminal. It’s about the law.”

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US, Ukraine say many war secrets safe from intel leaks

WASHINGTON (AP) — Ukraine’s leaders say they don’t see a major U.S. intelligence leak as gravely damaging future offensives. A key reason: They have long held back on sharing their most sensitive operational information, doubting Washington’s ability to keep their secrets safe.

Ukrainian and U.S. officials said this week that only Ukrainians know some battle plans and other operational information, not the Americans, their most important ally. That means the leak of secret military documents, including some assessing Ukraine’s battlefield strengths and weaknesses against Russia, may not have been enough — so far — to change the course of the war.

“If military operations are planned, then only a very narrow circle of people know about the planning of the special operation,” Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said Wednesday on Ukrainian television. “The risk of leaks is very minimal” for the most important war matters.

Still, the U.S. sees the leaks as grave. The documents include previously unreported sensitive disclosures about Ukraine, South Korea, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and others. Senior Biden administration officials are working to stop the flow of classified information onto social media and websites and head off any lasting damage to relationships with allies and strategic partners.

And more damaging material could still surface. Leaked documents are continuing to appear online, and future revelations may be more detrimental to Ukraine than the ones that have been publicized so far.

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States confront medical debt that’s bankrupting millions

DENVER (AP) — Cindy Powers was driven into bankruptcy by 19 life-saving abdominal operations. Medical debt started stacking up for Lindsey Vance after she crashed her skateboard and had to get nine stitches in her chin. And for Misty Castaneda, open heart surgery for a disease she’d had since birth saddled her with $200,000 in bills.

These are three of an estimated 100 million Americans who have amassed nearly $200 billion in collective medical debt — almost the size of Greece’s economy — according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Now lawmakers in at least a dozen states and the U.S. Congress have pushed legislation to curtail the financial burden that’s pushed many into untenable situations: forgoing needed care for fear of added debt, taking a second mortgage to pay for cancer treatment or slashing grocery budgets to keep up with payments.

Some of the bills would create medical debt relief programs or protect personal property from collections, while others would lower interest rates, keep medical debt from tanking credit scores or require greater transparency in the costs of care.

In Colorado, House lawmakers approved a measure Wednesday that would lower the maximum interest rate for medical debt to 3%, require greater transparency in costs of treatment and prohibit debt collection during an appeals process.

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After calls to resign, Feinstein seeks Judiciary replacement

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Recuperating U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California asked Wednesday to be temporarily replaced on the Judiciary Committee, shortly after two House Democrats called on her to resign after her extended absence from Washington.

In a statement, the long-serving Democratic senator said her recovery from a case of shingles she disclosed in early March had been delayed because of complications. She provided no date for her return to the Senate and said she had asked Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to ask the Senate to allow another Democratic senator to serve in her committee seat until she was able to return.

“I intend to return as soon as possible once my medical team advises that it’s safe for me to travel,” Feinstein said. “In the meantime, I remain committed to the job and will continue to work from home in San Francisco.”

Feinstein’s decision to seek a committee stand-in during her recovery comes amid increasing anxiety within her party that her lengthy absence has damaged Democratic efforts to confirm President Joe Biden’s nominees for federal courts in a narrowly divided chamber.

She is the oldest member of Congress, at 89.

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NPR quits Elon Musk’s Twitter over ‘government-funded’ label

National Public Radio is quitting Twitter after the social media platform owned by Elon Musk stamped NPR’s account with labels the news organization says are intended to undermine its credibility.

Twitter labeled NPR’s main account last week as “state-affiliated media, ” a term also used to identify media outlets controlled or heavily influenced by authoritarian governments, such as Russia and China. Twitter later changed the label to “government-funded media,” but to NPR — which relies on the government for a tiny fraction of its funding — it’s still misleading.

NPR said in a statement Wednesday that it “will no longer be active on Twitter because the platform is taking actions that undermine our credibility by falsely implying that we are not editorially independent.”

“Defund @NPR,” was Musk’s tweeted response. His latest tiff with a news organization reflects a gamble for the social media platform he bought last year.

Twitter, more than any of its rivals, has said its users come to it to keep track of current events. That made it an attractive place for news outlets to share their stories and reinforced Twitter’s moves to combat the spread of misinformation. But Musk has long expressed disdain for professional journalists and said he wants to elevate the views and expertise of the “average citizen.”

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New streaming app to ‘Max’ programming from HBO, Discovery

Warner Bros. Discovery unveiled a streaming service Wednesday combining iconic HBO programming such as “The Sopranos” with a mix of unscripted TV series in a push to reap more subscribers from what so far has been a muddled media merger.

The $16-per-month service, called Max, will be released May 23 in the U.S. and automatically replace the company’s existing HBO Max service in what is being promised as a seamless transition. Max will gradually become available in the rest of the world, with Latin America next up on the slate.

The existing Discovery Plus app featuring reality and unscripted series such as “Fixer Upper” and “Naked and Afraid” from a collection of TV networks will continue to be offered. That’s even as all that programming is made available within the new Max app, which will be marketed with the tagline “The One To Watch.”

The transition comes a year after the completion of a roughly $43 billion deal that spun off the AT&T’s WarnerMedia Division that includes HBO, CNN and TBS into Discovery, whose stable includes the TLC, HGTV, Magnolia and Food networks.

When the deal was announced in 2021, Warner Bros. Discover CEO David Zaslav envisioned it creating “the best media company in the world” backed by a vast library of movies, TV series, documentaries and children’s programming. The goal was to stand out among an array of streaming options competing for subscribers at a time many households are trimming discretionary spending amid stubbornly high inflation.

The Associated Press