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

Tennessee becomes new front in battle for American democracy

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Tennessee has become a new front in the battle for the future of American democracy after Republicans expelled two Black lawmakers from the state Legislature for their part in a protest urging passage of gun-control measures.

In separate votes on Thursday, the GOP supermajority expelled Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, a move leaving about 140,000 voters in primarily Black districts in Nashville and Memphis with no representation in the Tennessee House.

Kevin Webb, a 53-year-old teacher from Pearson’s district, said removing him “for such a small infraction” is “classic America.”

“There’s been bias against Black individuals in this country for 500 years,” Webb said. “What makes us think that it’s going to stop all of a sudden?”

Pearson and Jones were expelled in retaliation for their role in the protest, which unfolded in the aftermath of a school shooting in Nashville that killed six people, including three young students. A third Democrat was spared expulsion by a one-vote margin.

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Mobile home park residents form co-ops to save their homes

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — When Gadiel Galvez learned that the owner of his mobile home park south of Seattle was looking to sell, he and other residents worried their largely Latino community would be bulldozed to make way for another Amazon warehouse.

So, they decided to form a cooperative and buy their park in Lakewood, Washington. With help from a nonprofit that advises communities like theirs and helps them secure loans, they bought it for $5.25 million. Since becoming owners in September, everyone’s worked to make improvements.

“Everybody thought, ‘You know what? … I’m going to make this place the best that I can,’” said Galvez, 22, who is a co-op board member. “Some people painted their homes, some people remodeled their interiors and exteriors, and some are working on their roofs.”

With rents rising at mobile home parks nationwide, advocates tout the cooperative model as a way to preserve one of the last affordable housing options for people with low- or fixed-incomes and to give them a greater voice in managing their parks.

So far these resident-owned communities are proving to be a reliable option. None of the more than 300 in the network of nonprofit ROC USA have defaulted or closed. One decided to sell back to the county housing authority it originally purchased from.

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What does 1870s Comstock Act have to do with abortion pills?

WASHINGTON (AP) — A 19th century “anti-vice” law is at the center of a new court ruling that threatens access to the leading abortion drug in the U.S.

Dormant for a half-century, the Comstock Act has been revived by anti-abortion groups and conservative states seeking to block the mailing of mifepristone, the pill used in more than half of U.S. abortions.

On Friday, a federal judge in Texas sided with Christian conservatives in ruling that the Comstock Act prohibits sending the long-used drug through the mail.

Here’s a look at the case and the law:

WHAT HAPPENED?

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Texas gov. seeks to pardon Army sergeant convicted of murder

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Saturday that he is seeking to pardon a U.S. Army sergeant who was convicted of murder in the 2020 fatal shooting of an armed protester during nationwide protests against police violence and racial injustice.

Abbott tweeted that because the state constitution limits him to a pardon only on a recommendation by the state Board of Pardons and Paroles he is asking the board to recommend a pardon and to expedite his request in order to pardon Sgt. Daniel Perry.

“I look forward to approving the board’s pardon recommendation as soon as it hits my desk,” Abbott wrote.

Perry was convicted Friday by a Travis County jury of fatally shooting 28-year-old Garrett Foster during a protest in Austin. He faces up to life in prison when sentenced.

“Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney,” Abbott said.

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Israeli military: More rockets fired from Syria at Israel

JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israeli military said three more rockets were launched from Syria toward Israel early Sunday, raising to six the number of missiles fired within hours in a rare attack from Israel’s northeastern neighbor.

Israel’s army said it was retaliating with artillery strikes on the area in Syria from where the rockets were fired at Israel.

The rocket firings come after days of escalating violence on multiple fronts over tension in Jerusalem and an Israeli police raid on the city’s most sensitive holy site.

In the second barrage, two of the rockets crossed the border into Israel, with one being intercepted and the second landing in an open area, the military said. In the first attack, one rocket landed in a field in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights. Fragments of another destroyed missile fell into Jordanian territory near the Syrian border, Jordan’s military reported.

There were no reports of casualties.

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As tiger count grows, India’s Indigenous demand land rights

BENGALURU, India (AP) — Just hours away from several of India’s major tiger reserves in the southern city of Mysuru, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to announce Sunday how much the country’s tiger population has recovered since its flagship conservation program began 50 years ago.

Protesters, meanwhile, will tell their own stories of how they have been displaced by such wildlife conservation projects over the last half-century.

Project Tiger began in 1973 after a census of the big cats found India’s tigers were fast going extinct through habitat loss, unregulated sport hunting, increased poaching and retaliatory killing by people. Laws attempted to address those issues, but the conservation model centered around creating protected reserves where ecosystems can function undisturbed by people.

Several Indigenous groups say the conservation strategies, deeply influenced by American environmentalism, meant uprooting numerous communities that had lived in the forests for millennia.

Members of several Indigenous or Adivasi groups — as Indigenous people are known in the country — set up the Nagarahole Adivasi Forest Rights Establishment Committee to protest evictions from their ancestral lands and seek a voice in how the forests are managed.

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Ben Ferencz, last living Nuremberg prosecutor of Nazis, dies

Ben Ferencz, the last living prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, who tried Nazis for genocidal war crimes and was among the first outside witnesses to document the atrocities of Nazi labor and concentration camps, has died. He had just turned 103 in March.

Ferencz died Friday evening in Boynton Beach, Florida, according to St. John’s University law professor John Barrett, who runs a blog about the Nuremberg trials. The death also was confirmed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

“Today the world lost a leader in the quest for justice for victims of genocide and related crimes,” the museum tweeted.

Born in Transylvania in 1920, Ferencz immigrated as a very young boy with his parents to New York to escape rampant antisemitism. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Ferencz joined the U.S. Army in time to take part in the Normandy invasion during World War II. Using his legal background, he became an investigator of Nazi war crimes against U.S. soldiers as part of a new War Crimes Section of the Judge Advocate’s Office.

When U.S. intelligence reports described soldiers encountering large groups of starving people in Nazi camps watched over by SS guards, Ferencz followed up with visits, first at the Ohrdruf labor camp in Germany and then at the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp. At those camps and later others, he found bodies “piled up like cordwood” and “helpless skeletons with diarrhea, dysentery, typhus, TB, pneumonia, and other ailments, retching in their louse ridden bunks or on the ground with only their pathetic eyes pleading for help,” Ferencz wrote in an account of his life.

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Taiwan threat from China serious, House GOP chairman says

WASHINGTON (AP) — The chairman of the House Select Committee on China said Saturday the U.S. must take seriously the threat posed to Taiwan, as Beijing launched military drills around the island in the aftermath of the Taiwanese president’s meetings with American lawmakers.

Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., who attended the meeting with President Tsai Ing-wen in California last week, told The Associated Press that he plans to lead his committee in working to shore up the island government’s defenses, encouraging Congress to expedite military aid to Taiwan.

“I think it all just points to what is obvious,” Gallagher told the AP, arguing that Chinese President Xi Jinping is intent on reunifying Taiwan with the mainland.

“We need to be moving heaven and earth to enhance our deterrence and denial posture, so that Xi Jinping concludes that he just can’t do it,” Gallagher said.

China conducted drills with warships and dozens of fighter jets around Taiwan on Saturday, the Taiwanese government said, in what was viewed as retaliation for the meeting between the U.S. lawmakers and the president of the self-ruled island democracy claimed by Beijing as part of its territory.

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NBA set for final day, and West race will go to the wire

The NBA will get what it wanted — drama to end the regular season.

All 30 teams will play their 82nd game of the season on Sunday, with four matchups — New Orleans at Minnesota, Utah at the Los Angeles Lakers, Golden State at Portland and the Los Angeles Clippers at Phoenix — set to decide how the Western Conference playoff and play-in bracket will look.

There are 16 possible seeding scenarios, based on the outcomes of those four games. And they’ll all be starting at 3:30 p.m. Eastern, with no games scheduled to play later, meaning it’s possible that the final shot of the regular season might be the one that fills out the bracket.

For the defending NBA champion Warriors and the Clippers, the math is easy: Win Sunday, and they’re in the playoffs and about to get a week off to get ready for Round 1 matchups against either Sacramento or Phoenix. Lose Sunday, and the play-in tournament — which starts Tuesday — might be the daunting consolation prize.

“It’s the only thing that we can control,” Golden State coach Steve Kerr said. “There’s other games that can factor in, but it doesn’t matter to us as long as we win. That’s a great position to be in and we’ve got to go do something about it.”

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Report: Florida officials cut key data from vaccine study

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — An analysis that was the basis of a highly criticized recommendation from Florida’s surgeon general cautioning young men against getting the COVID-19 vaccine omitted information that showed catching the virus could increase the risk of a cardiac-related death much more than getting the mRNA shot, according to drafts of the analysis obtained by the Tampa Bay Times.

The nonbinding recommendation made by Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo last fall ran counter to the advice provided by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Ladapo, a Harvard-trained medical doctor who was appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2021 to head the Florida Department of Health, has drawn intense scrutiny over his shared resistance with the Republican governor to COVID-19 mandates for vaccines and masks and other health policies endorsed by the federal government.

The early drafts of the analysis obtained by the Times through a records request showed that catching COVID-19 could increase the chances of a cardiac-related death much more than getting the vaccine, but that information was missing from the final version put out by the Florida Department of Health last October.

Ladapo said that the risk of men ages 18 to 39 having cardiac complications outweighed the benefits of getting the mRNA vaccine.

Matt Hitchings, an infectious disease epidemiologist and professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida, told the Times that it seems that sections of the analysis were omitted because they did not fit the narrative the surgeon general wanted to push.