Shooting at Alabama birthday party kills 4 people, wounds 28

DADEVILLE, Ala. (AP) — Alabama law enforcement officers Sunday were imploring people to come forward with information about a shooting that killed four people and injured 28 others during a teenager’s birthday party.

Among those killed was a high school senior who planned to play college football and was celebrating his sister’s 16th birthday. The shooting erupted Saturday night at a dance studio in downtown Dadeville.

During two news conferences Sunday, Sgt. Jeremy Burkett of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency did not take questions. He did not say if a suspect was in custody or if investigators knew about any motivation. He did not provide the names of those killed.

“We’ve got to have information from the community,” Burkett said during a Sunday evening news conference.

Philstavious “Phil” Dowdell, a Dadeville High School senior who had committed to Jacksonville State University, was celebrating at his sister Alexis’ party before he was shot to death, his grandmother Annette Allen told the Montgomery Advertiser.

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Judge delays trial over Fox News and 2020 election lies

NEW YORK (AP) — Without citing a reason, the Delaware judge overseeing a voting machine company’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News announced late Sunday that he was delaying the start of the trial until Tuesday.

The trial, which has drawn international interest, had been scheduled to start Monday morning with jury selection and opening statements.

The case centers on whether Fox defamed Dominion Voting Systems by spreading false claims that the company rigged the 2020 presidential election to prevent former President Donald Trump’s reelection. Records produced as part of the lawsuit show that many of the network’s hosts and executives didn’t believe the allegations but aired them, anyway.

Claire Bischoff, a Dominion spokesperson, said the company would have no comment on the trial delay. Representatives for Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corp., the entities Dominion is suing, did not immediately return requests for comment. In his statement, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis said only that the trial, including jury selection, would be continued until Tuesday and that he would announce the delay in court on Monday.

That’s when Fox News executives and the network’s star hosts were scheduled to begin answering for their role in spreading doubt about the 2020 presidential election and creating the gaping wound that remains in America’s democracy.

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Deepfake porn could be a growing problem amid AI race

NEW YORK (AP) — Artificial intelligence imaging can be used to create art, try on clothes in virtual fitting rooms or help design advertising campaigns.

But experts fear the darker side of the easily accessible tools could worsen something that primarily harms women: nonconsensual deepfake pornography.

Deepfakes are videos and images that have been digitally created or altered with artificial intelligence or machine learning. Porn created using the technology first began spreading across the internet several years ago when a Reddit user shared clips that placed the faces of female celebrities on the shoulders of porn actors.

Since then, deepfake creators have disseminated similar videos and images targeting online influencers, journalists and others with a public profile. Thousands of videos exist across a plethora of websites. And some have been offering users the opportunity to create their own images — essentially allowing anyone to turn whoever they wish into sexual fantasies without their consent, or use the technology to harm former partners.

The problem, experts say, grew as it became easier to make sophisticated and visually compelling deepfakes. And they say it could get worse with the development of generative AI tools that are trained on billions of images from the internet and spit out novel content using existing data.

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S. Korea repels N. Korean patrol boat after sea intrusion

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea’s military says it fired warning shots to repel a North Korean patrol vessel that temporarily crossed the countries’ disputed western sea boundary while chasing a Chinese fishing boat.

The North Korean patrol boat crossed the so-called Northern Limit Line at around 11 a.m. Saturday while pursuing the Chinese boat in waters near South Korea’s Baekryeong island but immediately retreated after a South Korean naval vessel fired warning shots, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said Sunday.

While there were no exchanges of fire between the North and South Korean vessels, the South Korean high-speed vessel collided with the Chinese boat as it responded to the intrusion amid poor visibility, causing bruises and other minor injuries to some of the South Korean sailors.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff said the South Korean military is closely monitoring North Korean military activities while preparing for various possibilities of provocations.

South Korea’s navy has often fired warning shots to repel North Korean vessels crossing the countries’ poorly marked sea border, but there also have been some deadly clashes over the years. South Korea blamed North Korea for an attack on a South Korean warship that killed 46 sailors in 2010, but the North has denied responsibility.

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In Tennessee, expulsions echo a decades-old protest movement

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Squint a little as you take in the scene, or just close your eyes and listen to the voice, and 2023 stumbles back into another era. Another Memphis.

“You can’t expel hope!” the young man cries in his powerful voice, his message aimed at the Tennessee state legislators who had expelled him and another Black lawmaker a week earlier. “You can’t expel justice! You can’t expel our voice.”

Justin Pearson wears a dark suit in the county meeting room, a carefully knotted blue tie and glasses that bring Malcolm X to mind. He speaks in the rolling cadence of generations of Black preachers.

He ends by quoting a Bible verse beloved by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., vowing to fight “until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

Then he turns to his cheering supporters and thrusts his fist into the air.

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Pope slams ‘insinuations’ against John Paul II as baseless

ROME (AP) — Pope Francis on Sunday publicly defended St. John Paul II, condemning as “offensive and baseless” insinuations that recently surfaced about the late pontiff.

In remarks to tourists and pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square, Francis said he was aiming to interpret the feelings of the faithful worldwide by expressing gratitude to the Polish pontiff’s memory.

Days earlier, the Vatican’s media apparatus had described as “slanderous” an audiotape from a purported Roman mobster who insinuated that John Paul would go out looking for underage girls to molest.

The tape was played on an Italian TV program by Pietro Orlandi, brother of Emanuela Orlandi, the teenage daughter of a Vatican employee who lived at the Vatican. The disappearance of the 15-year-old in 1983 is an enduring mystery that has spawned countless theories and so far fruitless investigations in the decades since.

Francis noted that in Sunday’s crowd in the square were pilgrims and other faithful in town to pray at a sanctuary for divine mercy, a quality John Paul stressed often in his papacy, which spanned from 1978 to 2005.

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Lack of security for Japanese prime minister surprised many

WAKAYAMA, Japan (AP) — The fishermen who tackled the man suspected of the second attack on a Japanese political leader in less than a year were surprised by the lack of security for Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

Fisherman Tsutomu Konishi was watching Kishida at a campaign event at this fishing port when an object flew overhead and landed near the prime minister, Konishi said. A security officer covered the object with a bulletproof briefcase, Konishi said. The fishermen swarmed the attacker.

“I never thought a crime like this would happen in my hometown, which is a rather small fishing area,” Konishi, 41, said Sunday as he sipped a can of coffee at the port of Saikazaki. “I’m still shocked and stunned.”

The prime minister was unhurt but like many others in Japan, Konishi was mulling Sunday what the country should do to better protect public figures.

“At a time when Japan’s serving prime minister was visiting, perhaps we may have needed a metal detector,” Konishi said.

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New push on US-run free electronic tax-filing system for all

WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s that time of year when throngs of taxpayers are buckling down to file their income tax returns before Tuesday’s filing deadline. Many often pay to use software from private companies such as Intuit and H&R Block.

Almost one-quarter of Americans wait until the last minute to file their taxes.

There could be a new, free option in future years. The IRS has been tasked with looking into how to create a government-operated electronic free-file tax return system for all. But that doesn’t sit well with the big tax-prep companies.

The idea has been batted around and hotly debated for a long time. Congress now has directed the IRS to report in on how such a system might work.

The order came as part of the $80 billion infusion of money for the tax agency over the next 10 years under the Democrats’ flagship climate and health care measure, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, that President Joe Biden signed last summer. It gave the IRS nine months and $15 million to report in on how it might implement such a program and how much it would cost.

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Inmate stuck on US death row despite vacated death sentence

CHICAGO (AP) — When the U.S. prisons director visited the penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, this past week, she stopped by the federal death row where Bruce Webster is in a solitary, 12-by-7 foot cell, 23 hours a day.

Webster’s not supposed to be there. A federal judge in Indiana ruled in 2019 that the 49-year-old has an IQ in the range of severe intellectual disability and so cannot be put to death.

But four years on, the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Prisons haven’t moved him to a less restrictive unit or different prison.

Why? His own lawyer, who secured a rare legal win in persuading a court to vacate Webster’s 1996 death sentence in the kidnapping, rape and killing of a 16-year-old Texas girl, says she’s baffled.

“How can I not get this guy off death row?,” an exasperated Monica Foster said in a recent interview. “Well, I did get him off death row. But why can’t I physically get him off death row?”

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Muslims around the world consider climate during Ramadan

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — In the heart of Jakarta, the grand Istiqlal Mosque was built with a vision for it to stand for a thousand years.

The mosque was conceived by Soekarno, Indonesia’s founding father, and was designed as an impressive symbol for the country’s independence. Its seven gates — representing the seven heavens in Islam — welcome visitors from across the archipelago and the world into the mosque’s lofty interior.

But they don’t just see the light here. It fuels them.

A major renovation in 2019 installed upwards of 500 solar panels on the mosque’s expansive roof, now a major and clean source of Istiqlal’s electricity. And this Ramadan, the mosque has encouraged an energy waqf — a type of donation in Islam that continues to bear fruit over time — to grow its capacity to make renewable power.

Her Pramtama, deputy head of the Ri’ayah — or building management — division of Istiqlal Mosque, hopes that Islam’s holiest month, when the faithful flock to mosques in greater numbers, can provide momentum to Istiqlal’s solar project through donations.