Uvalde Leader-News publisher speaks about covering tragic shooting one year later

Craig Garnett, the editor and publisher of the Uvalde Leader-News, shared his experience leading a community newspaper through tragedy Thursday to the Dow Jones News Fund multiplatform editing interns at the University of Texas at Austin.

Garnett, who’s been at the Uvalde Leader-News since 1982, highlighted the importance a community newspaper plays in recording the history of a town, as well as the challenges and benefits that come with national newspapers reporting in Uvalde — which happened after the shooting at Robb Elementary School in May 2022 that killed 21 students and teachers.
Here are the interns’ top takeaways from Garnett’s talk:

MATTHEW BROWN, UC Berkeley, San Francisco Chronicle

In this industry, the best way we can learn is learning from other journalists. Listening to Craig Garnett speak about the impact of his newsroom and their efforts to not only cover their community with justice, but with a unique approach to offer a supportive space for a grieving town is a lesson for all papers – big or small. Oftentimes as journalists, our commitment to telling other people’s stories can prevent us from remembering that we are humans as well, and if we separate that key part of ourselves then we can never truly approach this work with the sensitivity our communities deserve. Garnett’s talk was an extremely valuable and important reminder for us as we head off to such high impact newsrooms.
Garnett: “If we have something to say, we say it, and then we suffer the consequences.”

AARON HUGHES, Eastern Michigan University, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

[pullquote speaker=”Craig Garnett – Publisher, Editor of The Uvalde Leader-News” photo=”” align=”right” background=”off” background_color=”” border=”none” border_color=”#888888″ border_size=”1px” shadow=”off”]If we hadn’t been a family we wouldn’t have survived the last year.[/pullquote]

Garnett’s discussion on handling trauma in journalism was an insightful experience and conversation. His experience of covering the Uvalde mass shooting with such a small staff is inspiring and shocking. Hearing his story as a local journalist talk about an event like that is one of the best examples of true watchdog journalism that I’ve heard. Being able to reflect and cover the community the way he and his staff did is something that I want to take back to my local newspaper and something I hope to carry to my internship. It shows that local journalism is still fundamental.
Garnett: “If we hadn’t been a family we wouldn’t have survived the last year.”

SPENCER OTTE, Cal State Fullerton, Bay City News

Reporters who cover events like wars, terrorist attacks and school shootings can find themselves with lingering trauma after immersing themselves in the tragedy. Garnett said that he believed he and his staff suffered from PTSD after their coverage of the Uvalde shooting. He said they have not had professional therapy, but that the tight-knit staff acts as their own therapists.
“I think at one point, perhaps they’ll have to,” he said of the prospects of his staff getting professional help.
He spoke about the value of small community newspapers as local watchdogs. The staff and reporters on small local papers generally have a better idea of the needs of their communities and can adjust their coverage accordingly and bring attention to issues that might not get national play.

FRANCESCA BERMUDEZ, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles Times

Throughout Craig Garnett’s discussion, I was reminded of the journalistic principle of minimizing harm. The Uvalde Leader-News chose to wait two weeks after the Robb Elementary School shooting to reach out to families of victims. While this may be surprising, it was a choice the Leader-News staff made to respect the grieving community. Once the reporters began reaching out to sources, they approached the sources in a gentle and compassionate manner. It is important to consider the experiences of sources when they have been exposed to trauma-inducing events.
Garnett: “We hold up a mirror to the community.”

ISABEL FUNK, Northwestern University, San Francisco Chronicle

[pullquote speaker=”Craig Garnett – Publisher and Editor of The Uvalde Leader-News” photo=”” align=”right” background=”off” background_color=”” border=”none” border_color=”#888888″ border_size=”1px” shadow=”off”]We’re writing the history of the community each day.[/pullquote]

Craig Garnett’s newsroom showed incredible strength and unity in the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting. Although the reporters came into the newsroom and cried for weeks, they found a way through the reporting on their community alongside major national media outlets. Garnett said they took a different approach than other publications, allowing survivors and families of the victims space before reaching out. Empathy is key for trauma-informed reporting.
Garnett: “We’re writing the history of the community each day.”

ROBERT STEWART, University of Arkansas, Stars and Stripes

More often than not, it seems our society has become numb to mass shootings. It is hard to humanize them when they occur with such regularity, but hearing from the journalists who have to cover them adds so much perspective. The contrast between the approaches the Uvalde Leader-News and national media outlets took in covering the Robb Elementary School shooting was fascinating to me. The latter, with no strong connection to the community, wanted answers and quotes right away, whereas the former, a staple of Uvalde, took its time. No one knew the people of the small town better than the small newspaper staff that covered them, and it prioritized the wishes and the feelings of the bereaved above all.
Garnett: “If that doesn’t move the needle on gun control in our county, I don’t know what does.”

ETHAN THOMAS, University of Texas at El Paso, The Texas Tribune

Coming from a town that has unfortunately also experienced a tragedy, the value of hearing Craig Garnett’s perspective on covering Uvalde’s shooting is immeasurable. I feel community-based, trauma-informed journalism is becoming more and more important, which made the way Garnett and the Uvalde Leader-News covered the shooting so important, and impactful. The most important topic expressed during the talk, was the collaboration Uvalde Leader-News had with bigger, national outlets swarming to report on the event. Although Garnett also spoke on the shortcomings of this, explaining the reporters from the larger organizations went straight into interviewing victims’ families, and while some of the families preferred this, Garnett’s team opted to give the families time to heal.
The talk helped bring to light several points; collaborate with different journalists because they have a perspective you may not have thought of, and will encourage you to do better and be better. Listen to your community, they are the ones affected, and they need the reporting to accurately depict what is happening to a much broader audience. And remember that even at smaller papers, you will act as a watchdog. As much as you are an assayer, you will face times when you need to protect your community.
Garnett: “They wanted to give voice to the children.”

ANDREA TERES-MARTINEZ, Boise State University, The Wall Street Journal

Conversations like the ones given by Craig Garnett remind me that journalists, like their sources, are people first. Sometimes we feel the need to share stories of grief and disaster, and the way in which we do it matters. The role of a journalist is to provide information to an audience, but it’s equally as important to know when the timing of that information might cause more grief. Colors, words and images can make or break a reader’s trust. Sympathizing with a reader is one of the most profound experiences we can achieve as storytellers, which is why real stories deserve real people behind that byline. Through Garnett’s recounting of his newsroom’s coverage on the tragic shooting in Uvalde, I am reminded of that relationship between fact and truth.
Garnett: “The message comes before friendship.”

COLIN CRAWFORD, Northwestern University, The New York Times

I wasn’t sure what to expect when we began the moderated discussion because Uvalde so recently went through unspeakable tragedy. I am so glad I got to learn more about how the local paper covered this event and what it meant for them to be of service to their community. The town is a prime example of parachuting journalists who drop into grief-stricken communities and try to get stories so I was intrigued by Garnett saying that part of the community really needed that outlet to share their story in a public way. Garnett’s point about how an event like this can change your perspective on life really struck me as painful, yet powerful.
Garnett: “The level of destruction of human life and the soul of so many people makes you reconsider, much like our state representative did, ‘What are my values? What do I need to accomplish as a human being?’”

SOPHIE YOUNG, Kent State University, The New York Times

[pullquote speaker=”Craig Garnett – Publisher and Editor of The Uvalde Leader-News” photo=”” align=”right” background=”off” background_color=”” border=”none” border_color=”#888888″ border_size=”1px” shadow=”off”]In the midst of all this, our reporter who was sitting at her desk that morning lost her child. That really set us back a while… We cried for a while; we cried for three weeks.[/pullquote]

Garnett and his reporters were a part of the community they were reporting on, with a unique perspective they could use to cover the tragedy. One of his reporters lost her child in the shooting, a child she brought into the newsroom at five days old. They approached the other victim’s families with empathy, waiting two weeks to reach out and offering to listen when parents were ready. This approach was different from the national news outlets that parachuted in, providing valuable, although immediate, coverage. The small local staff pulled together as a “family” to survive a year reporting on an event that forever changed Uvalde.
Garnett: “In the midst of all this, our reporter who was sitting at her desk that morning lost her child. That really set us back a while… We cried for a while; we cried for three weeks.”

GRANT JOHNSON, James Madison University, The Washington Post

Quote from you: Coming into Garnett’s speech, I was especially interested in hearing about his approach to trauma-informed journalism. I couldn’t imagine how I’d react to covering a shooting of the magnitude the Uvalde Leader-News did in its hometown. And walking away from it, I’m inspired by Garnett’s approach leading a staff under such difficult circumstances: His staff suggested running an all-black cover the day after the Uvalde shooting — and Garnett not only listened but went through with their request, even though he said he wanted to run a more traditional cover. I’m honored to have heard him speak, and I’ll look to apply some of his lessons to my student newspaper at James Madison, The Breeze, and this summer at The Washington Post.
Garnett: “If we had not been a family, I don’t think we would’ve survived this past year.”

DORI GRAY, Ohio University, The New York Times

Quote from you: Craig Garnett provided a lot of wisdom. He shared how his newsroom prevailed through a tragedy that directly impacted them. I appreciate how the Uvalde Leader-News gave families affected by the school shooting time before requesting an interview, unlike the parachute journalists who prided themselves in jumping on the story. That is not the typical way of covering a school shooting. Garnett’s newsroom was empathetic and tried to avoid retraumatizing the families of the victims in the course of their coverage.
Garnett: “I don’t think we interviewed a family for at least two weeks. It’s just not our style.”

Dow Jones News Fund 2023 interns complete training; head to prestigious paid journalism internships (Video)

Fifteen college student journalists are headed to editing internships or returning to their newsrooms after completing 10 days of intensive preparation at the 26th Center for Editing Excellence at the University of Texas at Austin.
The participants have been placed in internships in multiplatform editing as part of the Dow Jones News Fund internship program.
The Associated Press allowed students to use the wire services for content and instructional material, and School Newspapers Online hosted the Southwest Journalist website.
Newspaper professionals, visiting faculty and UT journalism faculty moderated training sessions in the first half of the 25th residency program.
In the latter half of the pre-internship training, participants produced three issues of a model daily newspaper, the Southwest Journalist, as well as a companion online and social media product, swjournalist.com.
Grants from the Dow Jones News Fund and contributions from participating news organizations cover the cost of training. Participants spent more than eight hours each day on classroom instruction and production of the newspaper and website.
Bradley Wilson, an associate professor at Midwestern State University, served as director of the workshop with assistance from Liesbeth Demaer and Alice Rentz in the UT School of Journalism and Media. David Ryfe is the director of the UT School of Journalism.
Faculty included Beth Butler, retired faculty at Kent State University and freelance editor, Mark Grabowski, associate professor at Adelphi University, and Griff Singer, retired senior lecturer at the UT School of Journalism and Media and former director of the workshop.

The 2023 participants:

Guest speakers:

  • Craig Garnett, editor and publisher, Uvalde Leader
  • Philana Patterson, head of newsroom audio, Wall Street Journal
  • Ed Trayes, retired, professor, Temple University, former director DJNF editing program at Temple University

Special thanks to:

  • Shirley Carswell, executive director, Dow Jones News Fund
  • Heather Taylor, manager of digital media and programs, Dow Jones News Fund

Alex Murdaugh pleads not guilty to wire fraud, money laundering charges

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Alex Murdaugh was arraigned Wednesday on federal money laundering and wire fraud charges for indictments saying he stole money from his clients, and although he pleaded not guilty for now, his lawyer said that might change soon.

Murdaugh is already serving a life sentence in a South Carolina state prison for killing his wife and son, and the details of the 22 financial charges are not new. State prosecutors have indicted him on similar charges, saying he diverted money meant for clients and a wrongful death settlement for his family’s longtime housekeeper who fell at Murdaugh’s home to his own bank accounts.

Murdaugh’s lawyers said in a statement last week the former attorney has been cooperating with federal investigators, and they anticipated the latest charges would be “quickly resolved without a trial.”

A federal guilty plea to the charges that can mean decades in prison would guarantee a long time behind bars for Murdaugh even if his pending appeal of his double murder conviction was successful.

Murdaugh took the stand at his murder trial earlier this year to repeatedly deny shooting his son, Paul, 22, and wife, Maggie, 52, at their home. Prosecutors said he decided to kill them because his millions of dollars of theft were about to be discovered, and he was hoping their deaths would buy him sympathy and time to figure out a cover-up.

Murdaugh, who turned 55 in protective custody Saturday, also faces around 100 other state charges, including stealing from clients and his family’s law firm, insurance fraud and tax evasion.

Prosecutors, Murdaugh’s attorneys and state Judge Clifton Newman, who presided over the murder trial, are trying to find court time to try at least some of those charges before Newman has to retire because of his age Dec. 31.

In federal court, Murdaugh faces 14 counts of money laundering, five counts of wire fraud, one count of bank fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud.

Cory Fleming — an old college roommate and godfather to one of his sons — pleaded guilty last week to conspiracy to commit wire fraud for his part in helping Murdaugh steal more than $4 million in wrongful-death settlements with insurers meant for the family of his longtime housekeeper Gloria Satterfield.

The other allegations prosecutors detail in Murdaugh’s federal indictments already have been revealed in state legal papers.

Murdaugh and banker friend Russell Laffitte worked together to take settlement money out of clients’ accounts, prosecutors said. Laffitte was convicted of six wire and bank fraud charges in November.

Other federal indictments give detailed allegations of how Murdaugh created a bank account that had a similar name to a legitimate company that handled settlements to steal money from clients.

Pope opens investigation after Vatican priest moves $17 million

VATICAN CITY — The former monastery on a quiet residential street in Rome once sheltered Jews fearing deportation during World War II. Purchased by the Vatican in 2021 as a dormitory for foreign nuns studying at Rome’s pontifical universities, the building now stands empty, a collateral victim of the latest financial scandal to hit the Holy See.

Pope Francis has asked aides to get to the bottom of how at least $17 million, including money to refurbish the dorm, was transferred from the Vatican’s U.S.-based missionary fundraising coffers into an impact investing vehicle run by a priest. Two years later, the U.S. fundraiser says the money is gone, and the monastery is shuttered. Its renovation is tied up in bureaucratic red tape, while the nuns studying in Rome are still housed at a convent a 90-minute commute away.

The story of what happened to the money is one that has vexed Vatican officials on both sides of the Atlantic, all the more because the transfers appear entirely legal. But they have nevertheless prompted the new leadership of the Vatican’s missionary fundraising operation in the U.S., the Pontifical Mission Societies, to replace the staff and board of directors who approved them, and overhaul its bylaws and statutes, to make sure nothing like thishappens again.

And for now, the organization known as TPMS-US has written off $10.2 million of the total transferred as a loss since “there is no timeline and no guarantee of investment return,” according to its latest audited financial statement.

The money was transferred from TPMS-US into a New York-based non-profit, Missio Corp., and its private equity fund, MISIF LLC, both of which were created by Rev. Andrew Small while he was the national director of TPMS-US. Both financial vehicles aim to raise capital to provide low-interest loans and investments to church-run farming initiatives in Africa. MISIF LLC is known as an impact investing fund because it seeks to do social good as well as provide a financial return.

The Vatican is seeking clarity after the former director of its U.S. missionary fundraising office oversaw the transfer of at least $17 million of its donations into a new non-profit and private equity fund that he created. (ALESSANDRA TARANTINO / Associated Press)

The bulk of the money was transferred to Small’s new initiatives in 2021, right before Small ended his 10-year tenure at TPMS-US. Small, a British-born Oblate of the Mary Immaculate priest, remains CEO of Missio Corp., while now serving on a temporary basis as the No. 2 at the Vatican’s child protection advisory board.

In a series of emailed responses to AP questions, Small strongly defended the money transfers as fully approved and in the best interest of the church and TPMS-US. He provided letters from grateful bishops and nuns in Africa who have benefited from Missio Corp.’s low-interest loans, as well as letters from two Vatican cardinals expressing interest in his impact investing initiatives.

But the transfers have, at least temporarily, reduced the endowment fund of TPMS-US by a quarter and seemingly diverted money raised in the pope’s name away from Vatican-approved charities and works in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The loss is thus the latest financial headache for the Holy See, which for decades has been beset by episodes of loss-making investments, opaque accounting methods, porous budgets and conflicts of interest that have undermined its financial reputation.

“The Holy See is aware of the situation and is currently looking into the details of the events,” Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said in a statement to AP.

According to publicly available tax returns and financial statements, the moneys transferred included $7 million in expense “reimbursements,” undefined “contributions” and “support,” from TPMS-US to Missio Corp. from 2019-2021. The bulk of the transfers is a $10.2 million investment in MISIF LLC, $7.5 million of which came from a TPMS-US endowment fund.

That investment served as the sponsoring seed investment that persuaded the U.S. federal government’s International Development Finance Corp., to loan MISIF LLC $20 million to provide microloans to church-run agribusinesses and educational programs in 2021.

Because the TPMS-US board approved the transfers, any litigation to get it back is implausible.

But according to officials at TPMS-US, it remains unclear if the board was fully informed about the transfers and the Vatican’s view of them, especially concerns expressed by the then-prefect of the Vatican’s missionary office, Cardinal Fernando Filoni.

Rev. Robert Gahl, a moral theologian who runs a church administration and management program at the Catholic University of America, also said the evangelical thrust of TPMS-US donations — which mostly come via an annual Mass collection each October for the Vatican’s missionary activities — differs from MISIF’s more general development strategy of loans that must be repaid.

“How can donor intent be assured if the aims of the two are so different?” he asked. “Donor intent is defended in both civil and canon law,” he added.

Small strongly defended the transfers as consistent with both the mission of TPMS-US and his fiduciary duty to increase its funding, which he said had been steadily declining as donations dried up. He said he also tried crowdsourcing, where donors could see the direct outcome of their gifts, to raise money.

He said donors were increasingly unwilling to give to the Vatican via the typical structure, where Rome decides where donations are spent — a reference to donor distrust of the opaque finances of the Holy See in general and the Vatican’s missionary office in particular.

“A lot of it goes to bishops and nuncios with only a tiny fraction going to priests and sisters,” Small said. “Many millions of dollars of the US money help pay the expenses of operating nunciatures in mission countries, which seems anomalous with the messages sent to the faithful on Mission Sunday each year.”

Small said he developed Missio Corp., and its public-facing Missio Invest website, because he wanted to apply the principles of impact investing to the needs of the church in mission territory. It was an idea that had some support in the Vatican, which hosted three impact investing conferences in 2014, 2016 and 2018.

“The ultimate goal was to create a social impact fund that could provide low-interest loans to church-run enterprises in Africa so as to create a sustainable source income for the church and, presumably, make them less dependent on foreign annual donations which had shown themselves to be increasingly precarious,” Small said.

Small said the board of TPMS-US was informed of all developments and approved all the transfers, and that he made at least annual presentations to the Vatican’s missionary office.

After Small’s term ended in 2021, TPMS-US under the leadership of its new national director, Monsignor Kieran Harrington, hired a law firm to investigate. Small didn’t respond to the lawyers’ questions.

“The independent analysis concluded that the TPMS board approved the funds transfers in a way consistent with their powers and the TPMS bylaws,” TPMS-US told AP in a statement.

Harrington subsequently replaced the board with more high-ranking officials and Vatican oversight. It includes the pope’s ambassador to the United States, Archbishop Christophe Pierre, along with other senior U.S. cardinals and archbishops, including Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley, who is now Small’s boss as head of the Vatican’s child protection board.

“The new board is working to evaluate the governance structures of TPMS and will soon recommend new ecclesiastical statutes and vote upon the civil corporation bylaws,” TPMS-US told AP.

TPMS-US asked for the $10.2 million investment in MISIF back, but Missio Corp., “denied the request,” according to the TPMS-US audited financial statement.

“Management of the organization is diligently working to redeem the investment, however there is no timeline and no guarantee of investment return,” the statement says. TPMS-US now values the $10.2 million investment as a total loss.

Small criticized the write-off as “shortsighted,” saying there were no grounds for such a decision based on the fund’s performance. Small said the board knew well the minimum 10-year commitment of the investment, and that regardless the MISIF investing model considers the economic impact on local communities as part of the return for investors.

He said it was “unfortunate” that TPMS-US had such little confidence in the mission church’s ability to repay its loans.

“If we don’t believe in our missionary colleagues, how will banks and other capital markets?” he asked.

However, even Small’s own auditors for two years running have said they were unable to verify MISIF’s calculation of the fair value of its investment portfolio, which represents more than half of its assets. For both 2021 and 2022, the auditors declined to express an opinion on MISIF’s financial statements.

The fate of the Rome residence for nuns is now tied up in Italian bureaucracy and pandemic-related construction delays. The Vatican had purchased the building after TPMS-US sent $13 million from a fund it had established to support the education of religious sisters.

[pullquote speaker=”Rev. Andrew Smalls” photo=”” align=”left” background=”on” background_color=”” border=”all” border_color=”#888888″ border_size=”1px” shadow=”on”]If we don’t believe in our missionary colleagues, how will banks and other capital markets?[/pullquote]

The building has a rich history. During WWII, when it was owned by a Canadian order of nuns, it housed at least 80 Jews who were hiding from Rome’s Nazi occupiers, according to archival research published in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.

When the Vatican asked TPMS-US for more money to renovate the building in 2021, the education fund for religious sisters was empty. Small said the board had decided not to send the remaining $4.7 million to Rome but instead to his Missio Corp., to fund the training of sisters in Africa, which he said was consistent with its intended purpose.

The Vatican is believed to have found other funding, but the Rome residence today stands empty, a chain lock around its front gate. The nuns studying at the Pontifical Urbaniana University live at a campus in Castel Gandolfo, a 90-minute commute away.

“They lose so much time traveling,” said Sister Genowefa Kudlik, the Polish nun who runs the Castel Gandolfo campus. “The property was bought some years back, I believe. But I don’t think anything was done.”

North Korea spy satellite launch fails, rocket falls into sea (Gallery)

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea’s attempt to put its first spy satellite into space failed Wednesday, a setback to leader Kim Jong Un’s push to boost his military capabilities as tensions with the United States and South Korea rise.

After an unusually quick admission of failure, North Korea vowed to conduct a second launch after it learns what went wrong. It suggests Kim remains determined to expand his weapons arsenal and apply more pressure on Washington and Seoul while diplomacy is stalled.

South Korea and Japan briefly urged residents in some areas to take shelter after the launch.

The South Korean military said it was salvaging an object presumed to be part of the crashed North Korean rocket in waters 125 miles west of the southwestern island of Eocheongdo. Later, the Defense Ministry released photos of a white metal cylinder it described as a suspected rocket part.

A satellite launch by North Korea is a violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions that ban the country from conducting any launch based on ballistic technology. Observers say North Korea’s previous satellite launches helped improve its long-range missile technology. North Korean long-range missile tests in recent years demonstrated a potential to reach all of the continental U.S., but outside experts say the North still has some work to do to develop functioning nuclear missiles.

The newly developed Chollima-1 rocket was launched at 6:37 a.m. at the North’s Sohae Satellite Launching Ground in the northwest, carrying the Malligyong-1 satellite. The rocket crashed off the Korean Peninsula’s western coast after it lost thrust following the separation of its first and second stages, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said.

South Korea’s military said the rocket had “an abnormal flight” before it fell in the water. Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno told reporters that no object was believed to have reached space.

North Korean media said the country’s space agency will investigate what it calls “the serious defects revealed” by the launch and conduct a second launch as soon as possible.

“It is impressive when the North Korean regime actually admits failure, but it would be difficult to hide the fact of a satellite launch failure internationally, and the regime will likely offer a different narrative domestically,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul. “This outcome also suggests that Pyongyang may stage another provocation soon, in part to make up for today’s setback.”

Adam Hodge, a spokesperson at the U.S. National Security Council, said in a statement that Washington strongly condemns the North Korean launch because it used banned ballistic missile technology, raised tensions and risked destabilizing security in the region and beyond.

The U.N. imposed economic sanctions on North Korea over its previous satellite and ballistic missile launches but has not responded to recent tests because China and Russia, permanent Security Council members now locked in confrontations with the U.S., have blocked attempts to toughen the sanctions.

Seoul’s military said it boosted military readiness in coordination with the United States, and Japan said it was prepared to respond to any emergency. The U.S. said it will take all necessary measures to ensure the security of the American homeland and the defense of South Korea and Japan.

After the launch was detected, the South Korean government sent text messages urging residents of a front-line island off the west coast to move to safer places. Officials in Seoul issued similar phone messages to city residents, but the country’s Interior and Safety Ministry later said the Seoul alerts were sent in error. Seoul’s mayor apologized for causing public confusion.

Japan activated a missile warning system for Okinawa prefecture in southwestern Japan, in the rocket’s suspected path. “Please evacuate into buildings or underground,” the Japanese alert said.

Japanese Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada said Japan plans to keep missile defense systems deployed in its southern islands and in southwestern waters until June 11, the end of North Korea’s announced launch window.

KCNA didn’t provide details of the rocket or the satellite beyond their names. Experts earlier said North Korea would likely use a liquid-fueled rocket as most of its previously tested long-range rockets and missiles have.

Though it plans a fuller investigation, the North’s National Aerospace Development Administration attributed the failure to “the low reliability and stability of the new-type engine system applied to (the) carrier rocket” and “the unstable character of the fuel,” according to KCNA.


On Tuesday, Ri Pyong Chol, a top North Korean official, said the North needs a space-based reconnaissance system to counter escalating security threats from South Korea and the United States.

However, the spy satellite shown earlier in the country’s state-run media didn’t appear to be sophisticated enough to produce high-resolution imagery. Some outside experts said it may be able to detect troop movements and large targets such as warships and warplanes.

Recent commercial satellite imagery of the North’s Sohae launch center showed active construction, indicating North Korea plans to launch more than one satellite. In his Tuesday statement, Ri also said North Korea would test “various reconnaissance means” to monitor moves by the United States and its allies in real time.

With three to five spy satellites, North Korea could build a space-based surveillance system that allows it to monitor the Korean Peninsula in near real-time, according to Lee Choon Geun, an honorary research fellow at South Korea’s Science and Technology Policy Institute.

The satellite is one of several high-tech weapons systems that Kim has publicly vowed to introduce. Other weapons on his wish list include a multi-warhead missile, a nuclear submarine, a solid-propellant intercontinental ballistic missile and a hypersonic missile. In his visit to the space agency in mid-May, Kim emphasized the strategic significance of a spy satellite in North Korea’s standoff with the United States and South Korea.

Easley said Kim likely increased pressure on his scientists and engineers to launch the spy satellite after rival South Korea successfully launched its first commercial-grade satellite aboard its domestically built Nuri rocket earlier this month.

South Korea is expected to launch its first spy satellite later this year, and analysts say Kim likely wants his country to launch its spy satellite before the South to reinforce his military credentials at home.

After repeated failures, North Korea successfully put its first satellite into orbit in 2012 and a second one in 2016. The government said both are Earth observation satellites launched under its peaceful space development program, but many foreign experts believe both were developed to spy on rivals.

Observers say there has been no evidence that the satellites have ever transmitted imagery back to North Korea.

___

Associated Press writer Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.

Dozens of children die in Khartoum orphanage

CAIRO — At least 60 infants, toddlers and older children perished over the past six weeks while trapped in harrowing conditions in an orphanage in Sudan’s capital as fighting raged outside.

Most died from lack of food and from fever.

The extent of the children’s suffering emerged from interviews with more than a dozen doctors, volunteers, health officials and workers at the Al-Mayqoma orphanage.

Video taken by orphanage workers shows bodies of children tightly bundled in white sheets awaiting burial. In other footage, two dozen toddlers wearing diapers sit on the floor of a room, many of them wailing, as a woman carries two metal jugs of water. Another woman sits on the floor with her back to the camera, rocking back and forth and apparently cradling a child.

An orphanage worker later explained that the toddlers were moved to the large room after nearby shelling blanketed another part of the facility with heavy dust last week.

“It is a catastrophic situation,” Afkar Omar Moustafa, a volunteer at the orphanage, said in a phone interview. “This was something we expected from day one (of the fighting).”

Among the dead were babies as young as three months, according to death certificates as well as four orphanage officials and workers for charities now helping the facility.

The weekend was particularly deadly, with 14 children perishing on Friday and 12 on Saturday.

This raised alarm and outrage across social media, and a local charity was able to deliver food, medicine and baby formula to the orphanage on Sunday, with the help of the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Orphanage workers warned that more children could die, and called for their speedy evacuation out of war-torn Khartoum.

The battle for control of Sudan erupted April 15, pitting the Sudanese military, led by Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces commanded by Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.

The fighting has turned Khartoum and other urban areas into battlefields. Many houses and civilian infrastructure have been looted or were damaged by stray shells and bullets.

The fighting has inflicted a heavy toll on civilians, particularly children. More than 860 civilians, including at least 190 children, were killed and thousands of others were wounded since April 15, according to Sudan’s Doctor’s Syndicate which tracks civilian casualties. The tally is likely to be much higher.

More than 1.65 million people have fled to safer areas inside Sudan or crossed into neighboring countries. Others remain trapped inside their homes, unable to escape as food and water supplies dwindle. The clashes have also disrupted the work of humanitarian groups.

More than 13.6 million children are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance in Sudan, up from nearly nine million prior to the war, according to UNICEF.

As of Monday, there were at least 341 children at the orphanage, including 165 infants between the ages of one and six months and 48 ranging from seven to 12 months, according to data obtained by the AP. The remaining 128 children were between the ages of one and 13 years.

Among those at the orphanage were two dozen children who had been sent back from Khartoum hospitals after the outbreak of fighting. The hospitals, where the children received advanced treatment, had to shut down because of lack of power or nearby shelling, said Heba Abdalla, who joined the orphanage as a child and is now a nurse there.

Spokespeople for the military, the RSF, the health ministry and the social development ministry, which oversees the orphanage, didn’t answer requests for comment about the orphanage.

The situation was particularly harrowing in the first three weeks of the conflict when fighting was heaviest. At one point during this time, the children were moved to the first floor away from windows to avoid being hit by random fire or shrapnel, said another nurse, known as Sister Teresa.

“It looked like a prison … all of us were like prisoners unable to even look from the window. We were all trapped,” she said.

During this period, food, medicine, baby formula and other supplies dwindled because caretakers were unable to get out and seek help, Abdalla said.

“On many days, we couldn’t find anything (to) feed them,” Abdalla said. “They (the children) were crying all the time because they were hungry.”

As the facility became inaccessible, the number of nurses, nannies and other caretakers dropped. Many of the caretakers were refugees from Ethiopia, Eritrea or South Sudan who fled the fighting like hundreds of thousands of others, said Abdalla.

“We ended up (having) one nanny or two serving 20 children or more, including disabled children,” said Moustafa, the volunteer.

Children started to die. At first, there were between three to six deaths per week, then the toll increased rapidly, nurses said. The peak came Friday, with 14 deaths, followed by 12 on Saturday.

The AP obtained 11 death certificates for children at the orphanage, including eight dated Sunday and three dated Saturday. All certificates listed circulatory collapse as a cause of death, but also mentioned other contributing factors such as fever, dehydration, malnutrition and failure to thrive.

Even before the outbreak of fighting, the orphanage lacked proper infrastructure and equipment, said Moustafa. Twenty to 25 children were crammed into each room, many sleeping on the ground. Babies doubled up in pink metal cribs.

The orphanage was established in 1961. Though it gets funds from the government, it depends heavily on donations and assistance from local and international charities.

The orphanage made headlines in the past, most recently in February 2022 when at least 54 children were reported dead in less than three months. At the time, activists launched an online appeal for help, and the military sent food aid and other assistance.

The government-run facility is in a three-story building with a playground in the Daym area in central Khartoum. The area has experienced some of the fiercest fighting, with stray shells and bullets hitting nearby homes and other civilian infrastructure, according to workers and a freelance photographer working with the AP who lives close to the orphanage.

The news of the deaths caused public outcry, with activists appealing for help for the children.

Nazim Sirag, an activist who heads the local charity Hadhreen, has led efforts to provide volunteers and supplies to the orphanage.

Starting Sunday, food, medicine and baby formula reached the facility, he said. The charity also repaired the equipment, electricity lines and a backup generator.

Sirag said the situation remains difficult, and orphanage workers called for the children to be moved out of Khartoum. Otherwise, said Abdalla, “you don’t know what will happen tomorrow.”

Residents still missing after Iowa apartment collapse, rubble too dangerous to search (Gallery)

DAVENPORT, Iowa — Five residents of a six-story apartment building that partially collapsed in eastern Iowa remained unaccounted for Tuesday, and authorities feared at least two of them might be stuck inside rubble that was too dangerous to search.

The three other missing residents are not believed to have been in the building when it started collapsing Sunday evening, state Rep. Monica Kurth said. Mayor Mike Matson confirmed at a news conference that not all the residents were accounted for.

A group of protesters held signs and chanted near the building Tuesday morning, arguing the city was moving too quickly toward demolishing the 116-year-old brick and steel structure. Built as a hotel, it had more recently been used as apartments, and tenants had been allowed to remain even as bricks began falling from the building.

After the partial collapse, the city had announced plans to begin demolishing the unstable remains of the structure as early as Tuesday morning, but they delayed after a woman was found Monday evening.

Officials now say immediate demolition was never intended, but they did want to quickly stage the site for demolition. The woman’s rescue prompted officials to see if they could safely enter and ensure others were not inside, but that is extremely difficult when the building could collapse at any time, they said.

“This could be a place of rest for some of the unaccounted,” Matson said.

The city is trying to determine how to bring down what remains of the building while maintaining the dignity of people who may have been killed, he said.

Later Tuesday, there were no signs that authorities were conducting any sort of search. About 50 people had gathered outside a perimeter of fencing and police tape. Children drew hearts in chalk on the pavement, and a candlelight vigil included five minutes of silence in honor of the five people still missing.

Fire Marshal James Morris said explosives will not be used on the building, which is near other structures and is “unstable and continues to worsen.” Removing the debris that is propping up the rest of the building could cause further collapse, he said.

“We’re very sympathetic to the possibility that there’s two people” still left inside, Morris said, fighting back tears.

He said there will be an investigation into what caused the collapse but that it is unclear so far whether a criminal investigation is warranted.

City officials sought to explain why Fire Chief Michael Carlsten said Monday morning that “no known individuals are trapped.” They also had issued a statement that the owner was served with a demolition order and the process would begin Tuesday morning.

The discovery of another survivor Monday evening, rescued by ladder truck from a fourth-floor window, prompted the city to reevaluate, officials said Tuesday. The woman was pulled to safety only after popping out a window screen and waving to people gathered below.

“We had no indications from any of the responders that we had, any of the canines, any of the tools at the time” that there was anyone else left alive in the building, Morris said.

Patricia Brooks said her sister Lisa attempted to leave the building but rushed back to where she thought she could shelter most safely — in her bathtub. Brooks spoke with her sister when she was being evaluated at the hospital following rescue from a window on the side of the building that was still standing.

“It was just exhausting and a nightmare,” Chicago resident Patricia Brooks said of the roughly 24 hours before Lisa’s rescue.

The family begged with police and city officials to find Lisa in the apartment starting Sunday, daughter Porshia Brooks said.

“They allegedly did a sweep and said they didn’t find anybody,” Porshia Brooks of Moline, Illinois, said. “They’re trying to tear the building down without doing a proper sweep.”

On Tuesday, protesters held signs reading “Find Them First” and “Who is in the Rubble?” Some used a megaphone to shout residents’ names. The building had 53 tenants in about 80 units, the police chief said.

City officials said rescue crews escorted 12 people from the building shortly after a middle section collapsed around 5 p.m. Sunday and rescued several others, including one person who was taken to safety overnight Sunday.

“There was a lot of screams, a lot of cries, a lot of people saying ‘Help!’ when the building came down,” Tadd Mashovec, a building resident, told KCCI-TV. “But that did not last, and two or three minutes, and then the whole area was silent.”

It is unclear what caused the collapse, which left a gaping hole in the center of what was once the Davenport Hotel, a building listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. Built in 1907, the structure had been renovated into a mixed-use residential and commercial building.

The building was designed so the exterior brick and steel frame support each other, so the loss of exterior brick can threaten the building’s integrity, structural engineer Larry Sandhaas said.

Building workers had been completing interior and exterior repairs in recent months, city records show. Reports of falling bricks were part of that work, said Rich Oswald, the city’s director of development and neighborhood services.

The fire marshal said Tuesday that a structural engineer hired by the owner determined that the building was safe enough to remain occupied during the repairs.

Gov. Kim Reynolds issued a disaster proclamation activating assistance programs for the residents left homeless. After demolition was ordered, residents were prevented from going back inside for belongings due to the instability.

Davenport Hotel, LLC, owned by Andrew Wold, acquired the building in 2021 in a property deal worth $4.2 million, according to county records.

City officials declared the building a nuisance in May 2022 “due to numerous solid waste violations” involving its overflowing dumpster, court records show.

Wold did not contest the nuisance declaration, and inspectors noted similar problems 19 times between then and March 2023, records show. City officials took civil enforcement action, and a judge ordered Wold to pay a $4,500 penalty after he did not appear in court.

City officials filed a new enforcement action against Wold on Tuesday, saying he had failed to maintain the property “in a safe, sanitary, and structurally sound condition” before the collapse. The city is seeking a $300 fine.

City inspectors reviewed the ongoing repairs three days before the collapse, records show. Plans called for replacing 100 feet of brick to comply with city code starting May 25, and an interior cinder block wall with rebar and grout was partially installed as of last week, according to online inspection and permitting notes.

“Wall bracing will be installed per engineer’s design,” the notes said. “Engineer will stop over periodically to ensure work is being done per his design. City inspector will stop over periodically to see progress.”

An email sent to an attorney believed to be representing Wold was not immediately returned Tuesday night.

The collapse did not surprise former resident Schlaan Murray, who told The Associated Press that his one-year stay there was “a nightmare.”

Murray, 46, moved into his apartment in February 2022 and almost immediately had issues with heat, air conditioning and bathroom plumbing. Calls to the management company rarely got a response, and even if workers did stop by, “they didn’t fix stuff, they just patched it up,” he said.

He questions how the building, where he said he did not even want to bring his children, passed inspections. He moved out a month before his lease was up in March.

“It was horrible,” Murray said.

US, Europe working on voluntary AI code of conduct (Poll)

LONDON — The U.S. and Europe are drawing up a voluntary code of conduct for artificial intelligence, a top European Union official said Wednesday, as the developing technology triggers warnings about the risks it poses to humanity and growing calls for regulation.

The voluntary code would bridge the gap while the 27-nation EU works on groundbreaking AI rules that won’t take effect for up to three years, European Commission Vice President Margrethe Vestager said at a meeting of the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, which is jointly led by American and European officials.

“We need accountable artificial intelligence. Generative AI is a complete game changer,” Vestager said, adding that a draft of the code was expected within weeks.

At a press conference after the council’s meeting in Sweden, she said officials will seek feedback from industry players, invite parties to sign up and promised “very, very soon a final proposal for industry to commit to voluntarily.”

The council has “an important role to play in helping establish voluntary codes of conduct that would be open to all like-minded countries,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.

The breathtaking rise of generative AI systems such as ChatGPT has dazzled users with their capability to mimic human responses while stirring fears about the risks they pose, setting off a global debate about how to design guardrails for the technology.

Scientists and tech leaders warned that mitigating AI risks should be a global priority because it could lead to human extinction, according to a statement posted online Tuesday and signed by hundreds of experts.

Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, signed that statement and has suggested that AI should be regulated by a U.S. or international agency.

The EU is at the forefront of the global movement to regulate AI with its sweeping AI Act. The legislation is set for final negotiations, with political approval expected by year’s end.

But those rules won’t take effect for two to three years “in the best possible case,” while AI technology is developing “by the month,” Vestager said.

Foster care privatization rolls out slowly

Desperate for a fix, Texas lawmakers in 2017 ordered an overhaul of foster care services, kicking most of the state’s responsibilities of monitoring abused and neglected children to contractors.

Under the new community-based care model, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services divided the state into regions and must hire third-party contractors for each region. It’s then up to these third-party contractors to place foster care children in residential facilities or find foster parents.

But since 2017, the state’s rollout of community-based care has progressed at a snail’s pace. While it started to pick up steam in March when vendors signed on to act as the lead contractor in three new regions, it will take another six years before the responsibility of foster care placement is firmly in the vendors’ hands.

The model was designed to keep foster kids closer to their own hometowns. Supporters argued local groups knew the region better than a state agency headquartered in Austin, enabling them to place children in homes and connect them to services in the area.

But the rollout has been complicated, working to hire more contractors to take over what has always been a state task. Third-party vendors have entered and backed out of contracts, those that pushed through financial losses have publicly pressured the agency to be more flexible in its regulations, and agency caseworkers feel like they’ve been hung out to dry. Under the new model, state caseworkers are being asked to switch to nonprofit employers who cannot offer the same benefits, pay or stability.

Six years into the rollout, it’s unclear whether the model has helped the foster care system.

Still, lawmakers have continued to favor the community-based care model. This legislative session alone, the House and Senate have set aside at least $91.9 million.

“This decentralization to the community is, by many standards, struggling,” said state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, at an oversight committee meeting about the new model last year.

After the 2017 death of a 15-year-old girl staying at a Houston CPS office, momentum intensified around child welfare legislation. In the session’s final hours that year, lawmakers passed Senate Bill 11.

The eleventh-hour vote set into motion a complete overhaul of the state’s child welfare agency that would move the management of foster care child placements from DFPS to local vendors.

“We must leave the status quo behind,” state Rep. James Frank, a Wichita Falls Republican and the bill’s sponsor, said on the House floor at the time. Frank had the support of Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and then-House Speaker Joe Straus.

Some child welfare advocates were wary of the legislation. They expressed pointed to privatization efforts in Florida, which failed to produce better outcomes for kids.

“There are very few organizations that can do this,” Scott McCown, then the director of the Children’s Rights Clinic at the UT-Austin School of Law, warned lawmakers during public testimony in 2017.

Since 2017, it’s been a slow-footed rollout. Today, only a third of Texans have contractors managing foster care services in their area. State officials estimate all regions will have a local contractor in 2029, more than a decade since the model was created.

“I don’t know what we got to do to get the attention of the personnel involved in these agencies to implement what we say we need to do,” state Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, said last year.

One thing that has helped was the creation of a new state Office of Community-Based Care Transition. Established by lawmakers in 2021, the office reports acts as a middleman between contractors and the rest of DFPS and reports directly to the governor.

DFPS officials insist they’re committed to community-based care. The transition does require some extra-contractual and financial expertise, DFPS Commissioner Stephanie Muth told lawmakers earlier this year.

“We’re in two worlds,” Muth said. “We have the legacy world, we have the CBC [community-based care] world. We know how to operate the legacy world — that’s our comfort zone. But as you look at moving to community-based care, it’s very different skill sets that we need as an agency.”

In March, when DFPS signed contracts in three new regions, Muth promised the expansion would be a “turning point” for community-based care.

Not enough funding

Community-based care was presented as a cost-neutral solution for the state, but it hasn’t played out that way for contractors. The cost of services has exceeded state payments, forcing contractors to look externally for funding.

Providence Services Corporation, the contractor for a large swath of West Texas, called it quits after one year. Despite successfully running several foster care service programs in other states, Providence was losing money in Texas. Mike Fidgeon, Providence’s CEO, cited unanticipated transportation costs to care for children in the expansive, rural region where the company was working.

In Fort Worth, the organization Our Community Our Kids had to come up with millions from its own funds to meet the costs of managing services. Saint Francis Ministries was also short millions of dollars early in their role as lead contractor for the Panhandle because staffing costs exceeded reimbursement rates.

To come up with a formula on what to pay contractors, the state relied on decades-old data, which they say doesn’t accurately reflect the cost and staff time needed to provide care. The agency is in the process of changing the financial infrastructure of foster care, which would mean contractors would see new rates.

Still, reimbursement rates have made providers a little gun-shy about jumping into this new model. When DFPS tried to roll out the model in the Midland area, no providers wanted to become the lead contractor.

The nonprofit One Accord for Kids formed to prepare the Midland area to adopt the community-based care model. In the end, One Accord did not raise its hand to serve as the lead contractor in part because the amount being paid by the state was “pathetic,” said Brandon Logan, the organization’s executive director.

“Community-based care will always be more expensive, because you’re adding a mid- management layer that doesn’t exist currently. And (for) that level of regional administration, there’s costs related to that,” Logan said.

Lack of flexibility

Providers at first complained that policies set out for DFPS contractors were inflexible.

“We were being asked to do things pretty much the way that they had been done,” Logan said. “My observation of community-based care, even to this point, is that the department is really just privatizing and franchising itself. The system is not being transformed.”

For example, Saint Francis Ministries, the contractor in the Panhandle, asked the state agency to waive its requirements for its caretakers. When the state cannot immediately find foster families or licensed facilities for children, they are first placed in an unlicensed facility or shelter that contracts with the state.

Per DFPS policies, temporary caregivers at these facilities need to be licensed and trained.

But Saint Francis requested DFPS allow only one caregiver to be licensed and trained so long as the second caregiver was not alone in a room with the child and had asked the agency for permission to do so.

At a hearing last August, Cristian Garcia, the chief advancement officer at Saint Francis Ministries, told lawmakers that he hadn’t received a written response from the agency one year after submitting that waiver request.

In Fort Worth, ACH Child and Family Services CEO Wayne Carson described an inefficient process to comply with new training requirements. Staff have had to often repeat training so it is marked as completed in DFPS’s system.

“There doesn’t even seem to be a conversation about … can we do it differently?” Carson said. “Is there a different way to get what needs to happen, as opposed to just, ‘Everybody has to start completing this form; everybody has to complete this training?’”

In response to the criticism, DFPS implemented a streamlined process for policy waivers. Most submitted since 2019 have been granted. Garcia said the agency has been more flexible with waiver requests since the hearing last summer.

“Both DFPS and the Office of Community-Based Care (OCBCT) took those [flexibility concerns] seriously and acted,” DFPS spokesperson Patrick Crimmins wrote in a statement to the Tribune this month. “We are being more flexible and approving those that involve state policy. Those rejected involve federal regulations we cannot waive.”

Pushing out caseworkers

Outsourcing the child case management of foster care has put the jobs of DFPS caseworkers in limbo, along with the benefits that come with working for the state, such as a pension.

State caseworkers are being asked to switch their employer from the state agency to the lead contractor, known as a “single source continuum contractor,” or SSCC, in their region. That’s a big switch that not all caseworkers are willing to make.

“You’d be hard-pressed to find somebody that’s looking forward to go work at a SSCC,” said Myko Gedutis, an organizer with the Texas State Employees Union. “It’s nerve-wracking, if you’ve invested in the state pension system, to walk away from that. Even though it’s not the best pension in the world, it’s a pension.”

Sabrina Bedford has worked at the state child welfare agency in San Antonio for 16 years. For Bedford, a state pension means a secure retirement. She finds privatization a misdirection of state efforts and feels that DFPS should instead prioritize properly funding and staffing state employees.

“Put a stop to the privatization of the Texas foster care system and instead stabilize and rebuild,” Bedford said.

“Abdicating accountability”

Questions persist about how the state will take accountability if problems emerge with a contractor.

San Antonio saw the worst-case scenario for the implementation of community-based care, when case management services were kicked to a nonprofit that housed foster kids in potentially dangerous conditions.

Family Tapestry had been in a contract with the state for more than two years when reports surfaced of physical abuse, neglectful supervision and medical neglect at its emergency shelter, Whataburger Center. The emergency shelter was also cited 239 times for not meeting state minimum standards between 2016 and 2020. Family Tapestry decided to cancel its contract with the state weeks after the state ordered kids at the Whataburger Center be moved to a different facility.

After the break with Family Tapestry, the state agency increased training for contractors earlier in the transition and offered other support to contractors.

Some are still worried that the privatization model allows the state to just swap out a contractor if there are problems, making the state less accountable.

Peyton Stearns of Texas beats 2017 champ at French Open

PARIS (AP) — Like many kids, Peyton Stearns enjoyed participating in sports and tried her hand at plenty.

“Soccer, gymnastics, basketball, tennis, whatever,” the 21-year-old American said Wednesday at the French Open after eliminating 2017 champion Jelena Ostapenko 6-3, 1-6, 6-2 to reach the third round at a Grand Slam tournament for the first time.

Then Stearns paused, before adding with a chuckle: “Well, not so much tennis.”

By her own admission, she came to tennis relatively late for someone who would end up at its highest level, starting private lessons at age 8. It wasn’t until about three or four years later, the 2022 NCAA champion for the University of Texas explained, that she decided to focus on holding a racket.

“Gymnastics was very structured. I didn’t like that so much. I liked to do what I want when I wanted,” Stearns said. “I chose tennis because I loved that you can just hit the living daylights out of the ball.”

So that’s what she does, and did quite effectively against the 17th-seeded Ostapenko, outhitting a big hitter. Only one woman remains who has won the title at Roland Garros before: No. 1 Iga Swiatek, the 2020 and 2022 champion, who plays her second-round match Thursday. Barbora Krejcikova, the 2021 winner, lost in the first round.

“Sometimes I surprise myself with how lethal my ball comes off (the racket) sometimes for my opponents, and how it really puts them in trouble,” Stearns said. “Maybe I didn’t realize that earlier on, but playing against top players, I realize that it is true,”

Her victory over Ostapenko can be placed alongside a slew of other early upsets in Paris, where the sometimes-odd bounces off the red clay and the changing weather conditions can contribute to unexpected outcomes.

No. 5 seed Caroline Garcia of France was defeated by Anna Blinkova 4-6, 6-3, 7-5, and 18 of 32 seeded women were gone before the second round was finished. In the men’s bracket, No. 2 seed Daniil Medvedev bowed out Tuesday against a qualifier ranked 127nd.

“I feel like at Roland Garros, it’s tricky with the clay,” said No. 3 Jessica Pegula, who advanced Wednesday when her opponent, Camila Giorgi, stopped playing because of knee pain after dropping the first set. “You can see — to me, it feels like — a lot more upsets.”

Do not tell Stearns hers was a stunning result, even though she is ranked 69th in her first full season on tour and carried a 0-1 career Slam record into this week.

“I expected this out of myself. Maybe not this early in my career. … I’m ahead of what I projected myself doing,” she said, “but by no means cutting myself short.”

Stearns had her own crowd at Court 14; a group that included her mother, Denise, Stearns’ coach, her coach’s girlfriend and a friend, which helped.

So did Stearns’ boundless self-belief, which she said allowed her to settle down amid some feelings she described as “crazy, nerve-wracking, overwhelming — all the emotions into one.”

Her tennis idol growing up was Maria Sharapova, who won five Grand Slam titles and reached No. 1 in the WTA rankings.

Sharapova was a powerful ball-striker who found her initial success on faster surfaces such as grass courts, winning Wimbledon at age 17, and hard courts, her next major championships coming at the U.S. Open and Australian Open. But Sharapova eventually did collect two French Open titles later in her career.

That’s not why Stearns came to be a fan, though.

“My mom and I loved watching her because of her outfits,” Stearns said with a snicker. “My mom’s a big shopper.”

Niagara Falls tourist attraction Marineland charged black bear care

NIAGARA FALLS, Ontario — Ontario charged the Niagara Falls, Ontario, tourist attraction Marineland over the care of its black bears on Tuesday.

Brent Ross, a spokesperson for the Ministry of the Solicitor, said the charges have been laid under a section of the Provincial Animal Welfare Services Act that allows an inspector to issue an order to help animals that may be in distress. The facility must comply with the order or otherwise face charges.

The ministry declined to provide additional details. Marineland said it was working on providing a comment.

Marineland has previously said it treats all its animals well and exceeds the standards of care as prescribed under the law.

The park houses an unknown number of black bears that live together in an enclosure with dens and water. Visitors can feed the bears popcorn.

In 2016, when the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals enforced laws against animal cruelty, Marineland was charged with one count of failing to comply with the prescribed standards of care for about 35 American black bears, including failing to provide them adequate food and water.

The prosecution later dropped the charges, saying there was no reasonable chance for a conviction.

In 2013, OSPCA issued an order to Marineland to build separate habitats to protect bear cubs from being mauled and devoured by adult males. Marineland said it would develop a birth control program, which OSPCA agreed to. The park said it complied with the order.

Ban on trans healthcare drives trans youth out of state (Map)

ROUND ROCK — Topher Malone was sprinting through her final days of high school: On Friday, she led a Gender-Sexuality Alliance club meeting, then stood before a rapt audience of National Honors Society juniors eager to hear how Malone got in to Harvard.

Malone explained that her application’s strength came from sticking to a common theme throughout. Her essays told her story of queer activism and school leadership.

By every standard, Malone is a model of a successful young woman: She’s a straight-A student and class president at Round Rock Independent School District’s Early College High School, she attends national youth leadership conferences and she’s raised money to support the school group she leads.

Malone is also trans. Malone says having access to gender-affirming treatments before she turned 18 in May allowed her to embrace her true self and channel her energy into her advocacy for LGBTQ+ youth.

“I think she’s put so much effort into finding her identity but also using that to reach out to the community to actually make a difference,” said Julian Jones, one of Malone’s teachers who has known her for almost four years.

But young trans people like Malone who have blossomed with support from teachers, family members and medical professionals will soon be a relic of a bygone era in Texas. Senate Bill 14, which bans transgender youth from accessing puberty blockers and hormone therapy to address mental health issues associated with gender dysphoria, will go into effect in September unless Gov. Greg Abbott reverses his commitment to sign the legislation.

When SB 14 becomes law, Texas will join 18 other states across the country that have restrictions to transition-related care.


The bill’s passage marks the culmination of a yearslong political effort by conservative groups and state leaders that has painted gender-affirming care as “genital mutilation” of children and sought to limit access to such care.

Republicans pushing the legislation say that children have been rushed into gender-affirming treatments as part of a larger “social contagion” that has accompanied greater public visibility of transgender people.

Similar legislation failed to become law two years ago. Since then, Abbott has directed the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate parents of trans youth, and some families fled the state. When Attorney General Ken Paxton announced in early May that he was investigating Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin for providing gender-affirming care, patients of the clinic that provided that care lost access to their physicians.

Now the Legislature will prohibit physicians from administering the treatments to trans youth younger than 18, even though the state’s medical associations have said the available medical studies have shown such treatments are effective at treating mental health problems caused by gender dysphoria, a medical term for the distress someone experiences when their gender identity doesn’t match their body.

Under the new law, physicians who provide puberty blockers or hormone therapies to trans youth would lose their medical license.

[pullquote speaker="Topher Malone" photo="" align="left" background="off" background_color="" border="none" border_color="#ffffff" border_size="1px" shadow="off"]I’m absolutely ecstatic to leave and go to a state where everyone actually cares about me and cares about my identity as a trans person ... A lot of the queer people I know, they want to escape as quickly as possible.[/pullquote]

“It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach,” Texas Pediatric Society president Louis Appel told The Texas Tribune. “These are complicated issues that really are best dealt with in the context of the physician-patient-family relationship.”

For Malone, it’s not a political topic — it’s deeply personal. She said the animosity in her home state is driving her out.

“I’m absolutely ecstatic to leave and go to a state where everyone actually cares about me and cares about my identity as a trans person,” she said. “A lot of the queer people I know, they want to escape as quickly as possible.”

She plans to continue organizing and doing nonprofit work related to the LGBTQ+ population in Massachusetts, which is regarded as a refuge state for the trans community.

Malone said leaving the state is bittersweet because she believes Texans need to hear the voices of young Black trans people like herself.

“It does feel just a little bit like I’m kind of having to abandon everyone for my own good,” she said.

Malone wears her Rise Up 2022 T-shirt from her LGBTQ+ leadership conferences. (LEILA SAIDANE / Texas Tribune)

“I can’t stand it anymore”

In late March, after waiting more than 15 hours at the state Capitol with her mom, Malone got her turn to testify to a House committee against House Bill 1686, SB 14’s companion bill.

Malone told the lawmakers that she’d applied to colleges in Texas. But as soon as she received an offer from a college outside of Texas — Columbia University in New York, which came before her acceptance to Harvard — she had decided to leave the state.

“I don’t want to stay here for college anymore because of what this state government is doing to trans people like me, and I can’t stand it anymore,” Malone told the committee members.

“I’ve never had to go out and testify about why I deserve to live to legislators,” she said later.

The last major debate over SB 14 took place in the Texas House, where Democrats proposed 17 amendments to soften the bill’s impacts on LGBTQ+ youth. One proposed creating a state-run commission to study the suicide rate of children impacted by bill. Another would have required families to get two different physicians and two mental health professionals to diagnose their child with severe gender dysphoria before starting gender-affirming treatments.

All of those efforts failed.

“I hate that we didn’t have a legitimate public policy debate,” said state Rep. Ann Johnson, D-Houston, who proposed the amendment requiring multiple doctors to sign off on care. Johnson said she’d talked to families of trans youth, who agreed that creating significant barriers to getting care was better than eliminating it altogether.

State Rep. Tom Oliverson, the Cypress Republican who co-authored the legislation, said there wasn’t high-quality evidence to support the use of puberty blockers or hormone therapies for trans youth and insisted there was not a consensus in the medical community on this type of treatment.

“At the end of the day, the science is so inconsistent and of such low quality that I do not have confidence in these doctors’ ability to accurately diagnose serious gender dysphoria,” Oliverson said in opposing one of Johnson’s amendments.

Listening to the debate, Malone observed that the lawmakers seemed to pay a lot of attention to testimony from adults who “detransitioned” — those who transitioned away from their sex assigned at birth and then reversed that decision — and that most of them were from outside Texas.

One of them, Prisha Mosley, shared her experience about the lack of support from medical professionals after she detransitioned. She has testified in at least five other states as they considered similar legislation.

“They immediately decide that they’re going to negate the entirety of the 99% of people who transition,” Malone said of those who detransitioned and testified against the type of treatments she’s taking. “It goes back to that erasure, you’re erasing the experiences of people who have happily transitioned.”

[pullquote speaker="Michael Stefanowicz" photo="" align="left" background="off" background_color="" border="none" border_color="#ffffff" border_size="1px" shadow="off"]That’s where the bottom line is: After this legislation, more people will die.[/pullquote]

The debate over the legislation alone could negatively affect the mental health of LGBTQ+ youth, according a January report from the Trevor Project, a national LGBTQ+ youth suicide prevention organization. The report found that 86% of transgender youth reported mental health repercussions from the public debate and passage of bills like SB 14.

“It will definitely result in a growing and more concerning mental health crisis among trans and queer youth in the state,” said Landon Richie, a trans man and policy associate with the Transgender Education Network of Texas. “It’s robbing these young trans people the ability and opportunity to exist fully as themselves.”

Michael Stefanowicz, an Austin family doctor who has provided gender-affirming care to children and adults, said the bill’s passage will have life-altering consequences for trans youth.

Gender dysphoria that goes untreated, Stefanowicz said, can lead to suicide contemplation and suicide attempts, higher levels of substance abuse, high-risk sexual activities and homelessness.

“That’s where the bottom line is: After this legislation, more people will die,” Stefanowicz said.

Transitioning in high school

A few weeks after Malone testified to the House committee, she and some friends went shopping at Savers, a thrift store chain. She wore a shirt that read “Rise Up 2022,” a memento from her LGBTQ+ leadership conferences. She and her friends hunted for a perfect prom dress among rickety thrift store shopping carts and flickering fluorescents.

Malone said it was a relief to do something as simple as thrifting, something that made her feel affirmed in her gender, surrounded by supportive friends.

“We’re having fun,” she said. “We’re looking at different clothes. We’re finding things that just make us feel pretty.”

Malone was raised as a boy until the beginning of her junior year of high school, when she came out to her parents. Malone said it took her family some time to get accustomed to her new identity. When she began wearing women’s clothing, she said it immediately made her feel more confident and beautiful instead of unattractive and out of place.

After more than a year of socially transitioning beginning when she was 16, Malone eventually graduated from girls’ pants and shirts to skirts and dresses. It wasn’t a seamless process at school, but Malone said she never encountered outright bullying from her peers.

“It took a while, I guess, for everyone at my school to get used to the fact that I was trans now,” Malone said, using air quotes around “trans now.”

Malone and her family came to the decision to start hormone treatments in January, when she was 17.

The physical changes associated with feminizing hormone therapy, such as reduced facial and body hair and breast tissue development, take months to begin and years to complete, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Malone said she picked January to start the treatments because she wanted to begin her next chapter feeling comfortable in her body by the time school started in August, “so I can be all of what I want to be when I step on campus.”

At the same time, she began to feel that Topher didn’t feel representative of how she felt inside — feminine and Black — so she recently started using the name Safara, the word for “fire” in the Wolof language of western Africa. Malone used Topher for identification when sharing her experiences with the Tribune and agreed to use the name in this story, though she now goes by Safara.

Malone gives a presentation on college applications to fellow Early College High School students at the Austin Community College Round Rock campus. (LEILA SAIDANE / Texas Tribune)

From quiet freshman to class president

Jones, Malone’s teacher, said he met Malone when she was a student in his world geography class roughly four years ago. He said she seemed like another quiet freshman.

Since then, Malone has transformed into a vocal student leader who has earned the respect of her classmates at Early College High School, Jones said.

Malone said her high school experience shifted dramatically before and after she transitioned.

“Being closeted, I didn’t really have a lot of friends, I kinda was like a shell of a person, I didn’t really have a personality,” she said. “And that was sort of for the first year and a half of my high school.”

But when she began her junior year as a fully out trans teen, she developed new friendships. “That was amazing, because it means that they knew me as [girl] Topher,” she said.

Jones said students at the school are determined young people who forgo extracurricular activities like athletics or theater so they can earn college credits by attending classes at Austin Community College.

And Malone has become one of the leaders at school, serving as the president of the Gender-Sexuality Alliance and vice president of the Black student union. Students see her as a role model and someone who will advocate on their behalf, Jones said, which has shifted the entire school culture as it relates to LGBTQ+ people.

“The community just comes together at our school and we were so supportive of each other,” Jones said. The students in the GSA “end up being some of the happiest kids on campus,” he added.

Malone said goodbye to high school last Friday at graduation, when she received both a diploma and an associate degree from Austin Community College. The class of 2023 gathered in the auditorium, fussing with the tassels on their hats, each holding their diploma in hand.

All that was left was closing remarks from Malone, the class president.

She approached the podium in her graduate’s robe, with a rainbow of colored cords on her shoulders, one for each of her half-dozen extracurricular activities.

She told her classmates that each of them have the power to make revolutions by marching to the Capitol, meeting with politicians and taking leadership roles in their communities.

“We have the power to change our living history,” Malone told her classmates. “The question is, how?”

She ended her speech to a standing ovation.