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

Report: Draft opinion suggests high court could overturn Roe

WASHINGTON (AP) — A draft opinion suggests the U.S. Supreme Court could be poised to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade case that legalized abortion nationwide, according to a Politico report released Monday.

A decision to overrule Roe would lead to abortion bans in roughly half the states and could have huge ramifications for this year’s elections. But it’s unclear if the draft represents the court’s final word on the matter — opinions often change in ways big and small in the drafting process.

Whatever the outcome, the Politico report represents an extremely rare breach of the court’s secretive deliberation process, and on a case of surpassing importance.

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” the draft opinion states. It was signed by Justice Samuel Alito, a member of the court’s 6-3 conservative majority who was appointed by former President George W. Bush.

The document was labeled a “1st Draft” of the “Opinion of the Court” in a case challenging Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks, a case known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

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Civilians rescued from Mariupol steel plant head for safety

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine (AP) — Russia resumed pulverizing the Mariupol steel mill that has become the last stronghold of resistance in the bombed-out city, Ukrainian fighters said Monday, after a brief cease-fire over the weekend allowed the first evacuation of civilians from the plant.

Meanwhile, a senior U.S. official warned that Russia is planning to annex large portions of eastern Ukraine this month and recognize the southern city of Kherson as an independent republic.

Michael Carpenter, U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said that those suspected actions are “straight out of the Kremlin’s playbook” and will not be recognized by the United States or its allies.

In Mariupol, more than 100 people — including elderly women and mothers with small children — left the rubble-strewn Azovstal steelworks on Sunday and set out in buses and ambulances for the Ukrainian-controlled city of Zaporizhzhia, about 140 miles (230 kilometers) to the northwest, according to authorities and video released by the two sides.

Mariupol Deputy Mayor Sergei Orlov told the BBC that the evacuees were making slow progress and would probably not arrive in Zaporizhzhia on Monday as hoped. Authorities gave no explanation for the delay.

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Death in Ukraine’s Kharkiv is everywhere, rarely explained

KHARKIV, Ukraine (AP) — The outskirts of Kharkiv have the feel of an open-air morgue, where the dead lie unclaimed and unexplained, sometimes for weeks on end, as Ukrainian and Russian forces fight for control of slivers of land.

There is the charred body of a man, unidentifiable, propped on an anti-tank barrier made of crossed I-beams outside a town that has been under the control of both sides in recent days. There are the dead soldiers, apparently Russian, four of them arranged in a Z like the military symbol found on Russian armored vehicles, visible to the Russian drones that continuously buzz overhead. The door to an apartment opens to three bodies inside.

Precisely how any of this happened will likely never be known.

Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, has been under sustained Russian attack since the beginning of the war in late February. With the Russian offensive intensifying in the east, the Russian onslaught has grown fiercer.

Considered a strategic and industrial prize, territory on the eastern city’s outskirts has gone back and forth between Russian and Ukrainian forces for weeks now as the fighting shifts from village to village. Many, but by no means all, of Kharkiv’s 1 million residents have fled.

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Met Gala live | Kim Kardashian dons $5M Marilyn Monroe dress

NEW YORK (AP) — Kim Kardashian shut down the Met Gala red carpet Monday in one of Marilyn Monroe’s most iconic dresses, a gold-beaded body hugger Monroe wore when she sexily sang happy birthday to President John F. Kennedy 60 years ago.

Kardashian had to lose 16 pounds to fit into the dress, designed by Jean Louis and purchased in 2016 by the Ripley’s Believe or Not! museum in Orlando, Florida, for a whopping $4.81 million.

“It was such a challenge,” she said. “I was determined to fit it.”

The dress originally cost $12,000. It was so tight Monroe had to be sewn into it when she purred “Happy birthday, Mr. president” on May 19, 1962, at a Madison Square Garden fundraiser. She died three months later. It has been known as the “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress ever since.

Kardashian, with boyfriend Pete Davidson at her side, paired the dress with Cartier white gold drop diamond earrings and a furry short white jacket she kept strategically low to cover her backside. Her hair was platinum and pulled tightly into a bun.

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Lawmakers seek police boss’ journals in Ronald Greene probe

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Lawmakers investigating the deadly arrest of Black motorist Ronald Greene are preparing to hold the former head of the Louisiana State Police in contempt for refusing to turn over his journals after talks broke down Monday in a dispute over an entry mentioning police brutality and Gov. John Bel Edwards.

The bipartisan committee will move “as soon as possible” to charge Kevin Reeves with contempt and begin legal proceedings to force him to turn over three handwritten journals he kept while leading the embattled agency, state Rep. Tanner Magee, who chairs the panel, told The Associated Press.

Holding the former head of the state’s premier law enforcement agency in contempt would mark a drastic escalation by the committee, which already has elicited explosive testimony from current police officials that they believe Greene’s 2019 death was covered up and that his beating by troopers after a high-speed chase amounted to “torture and murder.”

Reeves’ lawyer, Lewis Unglesby, said he had prepared photocopies of nearly a dozen journal entries to give to Magee during a meeting but the lawmaker “got excited and took off” without the materials.

“Col. Reeves isn’t in contempt of anything,” Unglesby told AP. “He has done nothing but be cooperative.”

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Fed to fight inflation with fastest rate hikes in decades

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve is poised this week to accelerate its most drastic steps in three decades to attack inflation by making it costlier to borrow — for a car, a home, a business deal, a credit card purchase — all of which will compound Americans’ financial strains and likely weaken the economy.

Yet with inflation having surged to a 40-year high, the Fed has come under extraordinary pressure to act aggressively to slow spending and curb the price spikes that are bedeviling households and companies.

After its latest rate-setting meeting ends Wednesday, the Fed will almost certainly announce that it’s raising its benchmark short-term interest rate by a half-percentage point — the sharpest rate hike since 2000. The Fed will likely carry out another half-point rate hike at its next meeting in June and possibly at the next one after that, in July. Economists foresee still further rate hikes in the months to follow.

What’s more, the Fed is also expected to announce Wednesday that it will begin quickly shrinking its vast stockpile of Treasury and mortgage bonds beginning in June — a move that will have the effect of further tightening credit.

Chair Jerome Powell and the Fed will take these steps largely in the dark. No one knows just how high the central bank’s short-term rate must go to slow the economy and restrain inflation. Nor do the officials know how much they can reduce the Fed’s unprecedented $9 trillion balance sheet before they risk destabilizing financial markets.

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As wildfire closes in, New Mexico residents prepare to flee

LAS VEGAS, N.M. (AP) — Wind-whipped flames raced across more of New Mexico’s pine-covered mountainsides on Monday, closing in on a town of 13,000 people where some residents hurried to pack their cars with belongings, others hustled to clear brush from around their homes, and police were called in to help evacuate the state’s psychiatric hospital.

Firefighting crews battled on several fronts to keep the fire, the largest burning in the U.S., from pushing into more populated areas as it fed on the state’s drought-parched landscape. The fire has charred more than 217 square miles (562 square kilometers) and flames could be seen from the small northeastern New Mexico city of Las Vegas just a couple miles away.

Fire officials said they were encouraged by a forecast for Tuesday of improving humidity and shifting winds. Still the blaze is expected to keep growing, putting it on track to possibly be one of the largest and most destructive in the state’s recorded history.

The sky above the city’s historic plaza, made famous as a backdrop in several movies and television series, was a sickly tinge of yellow and gray as thick smoke blotted out the sun. As ash fell around them, Chris Castillo and his cousins were cutting down trees and moving logs away from a family member’s home.

“We’re all family here. We’re trying to make a fire line,” he said

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Body in barrel exposed as level of Nevada’s Lake Mead drops

LAS VEGAS (AP) — A body inside a barrel was found over the weekend on the the newly exposed bottom of Nevada’s Lake Mead as drought depletes one of the largest U.S. reservoirs — and officials predicted the discovery could be just the first of more grim finds.

“I would say there is a very good chance as the water level drops that we are going to find additional human remains,” Las Vegas police Lt. Ray Spencer told KLAS-TV on Monday.

The lake’s level has dropped so much that the uppermost water intake at drought-stricken Lake Mead became visible last week. The reservoir on the Colorado River behind Hoover Dam has become so depleted that Las Vegas is now pumping water from deeper within Lake Mead, which also stretches into Arizona.

Personal items found inside the barrel indicated the person died more than 40 years ago in the 1980s, Spencer said.

He declined to discuss a cause of death and declined to describe the items found, saying the investigation is ongoing.

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Push to arm Ukraine putting strain on US weapons stockpile

WASHINGTON (AP) — The planes take off almost daily from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware — hulking C-17s loaded up with Javelins, Stingers, howitzers and other material being hustled to Eastern Europe to resupply Ukraine’s military in its fight against Russia.

The game-changing impact of those arms is exactly what President Joe Biden hopes to spotlight as he visits a Lockheed Martin plant in Alabama on Tuesday that builds the portable Javelin anti-tank weapons that have played a crucial role in Ukraine.

But Biden’s visit is also drawing attention to a growing concern as the war drags on: Can the U.S. sustain the cadence of shipping vast amounts of arms to Ukraine while maintaining the healthy stockpile it may need if a new conflict erupts with North Korea, Iran or elsewhere?

The U.S. already has provided about 7,000 Javelins, including some that were delivered during the Trump administration, about one-third of its stockpile, to Ukraine, according to an analysis by Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies international security program. The Biden administration says it has committed to sending about 5,500 to Ukraine since the Russian invasion more than two months ago.

Analysts also estimate that the United States has sent about one-quarter of its stockpile of shoulder-fired Stinger missiles to Ukraine. Raytheon Technologies CEO Greg Hayes told investors last week during a quarterly call that his company, which makes the weapons system, wouldn’t be able to ramp up production until next year due to parts shortages.

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Amazon tribes turn the tables on intruders with social media

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — It was dusk on April 14 when Francisco Kuruaya heard a boat approaching along the river near his village in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. He assumed it was the regular delivery boat bringing gasoline for generators and outboard motors to remote settlements like his. Instead, what Kuruaya found was a barge dredging his people’s pristine river in search of gold.

Kuruaya had never seen a dredge operating in this area of the Xipaia people’s territory, let alone one this massive; it resembled a floating factory.

Kuruaya, 47, motored out to the barge, boarded it and confronted the gold miners. They responded in harsh voices and he retreated for fear they were armed. But so was he — with a phone — the first he’d ever had. Back in his village Karimaa, his son Thaylewa Xipaia forwarded the photos of the mining boat to the tribe’s WhatsApp chat groups.

“Guys, this is urgent!” he said to fellow members of his tribe in an audio message The Associated Press has reviewed. “There’s a barge here at Pigeons Island. It’s huge and it’s destroying the whole island. My dad just went there and they almost took his phone.”

Several days’ voyage away, in the nearest city of Altamira, Kuruaya’s daugher Juma Xipaia received the frantic messages. She recorded her own video with choked voice and watery eyes, warning that armed conflict was imminent — then uploaded it to social media.