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

Patriotism, unease mix as Russia marks Victory Day in WWII

Red Soviet flags and orange-and-black striped military ribbons are on display in Russian cities and towns. Neighborhoods are staging holiday concerts. Flowers are being laid by veterans’ groups at monuments to the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is known in the country.

At first glance, preparations for Monday’s celebration of Victory Day, marking the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, seem to be the same as ever.

But the mood this year is very different, because Russian troops are fighting and dying again.

And this battle, now in its 11th week, is going on in neighboring Ukraine, against what the government has falsely called a campaign against “Nazis.”

The pride and patriotism usually associated with Russia’s most important holiday, marked by a huge parade of soldiers and military hardware through Red Square, is mixing with apprehension and unease over what this year’s Victory Day may bring.

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More than 60 feared dead in bombing of Ukrainian school

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine (AP) — More than 60 people were feared dead Sunday after a Russian bomb flattened a school being used as a shelter, Ukrainian officials said, while Moscow’s forces pressed their attack on defenders inside Mariupol’s steel plant in an apparent race to capture the city ahead of Russia’s Victory Day holiday.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was “appalled” by the reported school bombing Saturday in the eastern village of Bilohorivka and called it another reminder that “it is civilians that pay the highest price” in war.

Authorities said about 90 people were sheltering in the basement. Emergency crews found two bodies and rescued 30 people, but “most likely all 60 people who remain under the rubble are now dead,” Serhiy Haidai, governor of Luhansk province, wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

Russian shelling also killed two boys, ages 11 and 14, in the nearby town of Pryvillia, he said. Luhansk is part of the Donbas, the industrial heartland in the east that Russia’s forces are working to capture.

As Moscow prepared to celebrate the 1945 surrender of Nazi Germany with a Victory Day military parade on Monday, a lineup of Western leaders and celebrities made surprise visits to Ukraine in a show of support.

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Court leak is catnip for those who love a juicy DC whodunit

WASHINGTON (AP) — Washington loves a whodunit. And the latest one comes with the stunning plot twist of a leak from the famously buttoned-up Supreme Court.

The publication this past week of a draft opinion that said Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion in the United States, was wrong from the start and should be overruled, has set off sleuthing from every corner of the capital.

Who could possibly be behind such a glaring breach of trust? Why did that person choose to leak the draft? Why did that person choose a reporter from Politico? Who will investigate the matter? Will there be consequences? What will the court’s ultimate opinion say?

Washington, by nature, abhors a vacuum. So the two months before the court actually issues a final ruling will be filled with guesses, surmise, false starts — and maybe even the truth about who is behind the leak.

It’s an intrigue in the tradition of Watergate’s “Deep Throat” — one of Washington’s best-kept secrets for more than three decades; of Iran-Contra, with classified documents spirited out in a secretary’s undergarments; of “Primary Colors,” a roman à clef about a certain Southern governor.

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“Everything shook”: Last civilians leave Ukraine steel mill

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine (AP) — Pale and drawn, the last civilians sheltering in bunkers beneath a sprawling steel mill in the decimated Ukrainian port city of Mariupol arrived late Sunday night in Zaporizhzhia, the first major Ukrainian city beyond the frontlines.

The shattered survivors spoke of constant shelling, dwindling food, ubiquitous mold — and using hand sanitizer for cooking fuel.

Ten buses slowly pulled into Zaporizhzhia’s deserted streets under darkness, carrying 174 evacuees from the Mariupol area. They included more than 30 of the 51 civilians evacuated in the last day from the Azovstal steel mill, where an estimated 2,000 Ukrainian fighters are making what appears to be their last stand. Both Ukrainian and Russian officials have said these civilians are the last non-combatants from the industrial complex.

“It was terrible in the bunkers,” said 69-year-old Lyubov Andropova, who had been in Azovstal since March 10. “Water would run down from the ceilings. There was mold everywhere. We were worried for the children, for their lungs.”

The shelling was constant, and there was fear “that our bunker would collapse,” she said. “Everything shook, we didn’t go out.”

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Strong, swirling winds complicate New Mexico wildfire fight

LAS VEGAS, N.M. (AP) — Fast winds fanned the flames of wildfires burning across northeast New Mexico on Sunday, grounding firefighting aircraft and complicating work for firefighters as they sought to protect more communities from danger.

“It’s been a challenging day. The winds have picked up; they haven’t let up,” fire spokesperson Todd Abel said Sunday evening.

The rural area’s largest town — Las Vegas, New Mexico, population 13,000 — sits on the eastern edge of the fire area and appeared safe for now thanks to fire lines dug with bulldozers and other preparations over the past week. But the northern and southern edges of the blaze were still proving tricky for firefighters to contain, particularly given winds as fast as 50 miles per hour (80 kilometers per hour), Abel said.

The fire’s perimeter stretched more than 60 miles (96 kilometers) from Las Vegas, New Mexico, on the southeast flank to near Holbrook about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of the Colorado line. The National Interagency Fire Center said early Sunday that more than 20,000 structures remained threatened by the fire, which has destroyed about 300 residences over the last two weeks. The fire center said full containment wasn’t anticipated until the end of July.

The ferocious winds were expected to continue with little break Sunday night and at least into Monday. Strong, gusty winds are in many ways firefighters’ worst nightmare, especially in conditions so hot and dry as the crews in the Southwest have been battling since early April.

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Havana hotel death toll at 31 as dogs search for survivors

HAVANA (AP) — The death toll of a powerful explosion at a luxury hotel in Cuba’s capital increased to 31 Sunday evening as search crews with dogs hunted through the rubble of the iconic, 19th century building looking for people still missing.

The Hotel Saratoga, a five-star 96-room hotel in Old Havana, was preparing to reopen after being closed for two years when an apparent gas leak ignited, blowing the outer walls into the busy, midmorning streets just a block from the country’s Capitol building on Friday.

Several nearby structures also were damaged, including the historic Marti Theater and the Calvary Baptist Church, headquarters for the denomination in western Cuba. The church said on its Facebook page that the building suffered “significant structural damage, with several collapsed or cracked walls and columns (and) the ceiling partially collapsed,” though no church workers were hurt.

In releasing the names of those who were killed, the Health Ministry said the dead included four minors, a pregnant woman and a Spanish tourist, whose companion was seriously injured.

The ministry also said 54 people were injured, with 24 hospitalized. It previously reported 85 injured, but that tally turned out to include those killed by the explosion.

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Dictator’s son a front-runner as Filipinos elect next leader

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Filipinos were voting for a new president Monday, with the son of an ousted dictator and a champion of reforms and human rights as top contenders in a tenuous moment in a deeply divided Asian democracy.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son and namesake of the strongman ousted in a 1986 army-backed “People Power” uprising, has led pre-election surveys with a seemingly insurmountable lead. But his closest challenger, Vice President Leni Robredo, has tapped into shock and outrage over the prospect of another Marcos recapturing the seat of power and harnessed an army of campaign volunteers to underpin her candidacy.

Eight other candidates, including former boxing star Manny Pacquiao, Manila Mayor Isko Moreno and former national police chief Sen. Panfilo Lacson have lagged far behind in voter-preference surveys.

Long lines of voters turned up early across most of the country without any major incident. But in southern Maguindanao province, a security hotspot, unidentified men fired at least three grenades Sunday night in the vicinity of the Datu Unsay town hall compound, wounding nine villagers who traveled there in advance from far-flung villages to be able to vote Monday. Two other grenades exploded shortly after in nearby Shariff Aguak town but caused no injuries, police said.

The winner will take office on June 30 for a single, six-year term as leader of a Southeast Asian nation hit hard by two years of COVID-19 outbreaks and lockdowns.

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Pandemic pushes Oregon’s public defender system to the brink

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Oregon’s public defender system has shown cracks for years, but a post-pandemic glut of delayed cases has exposed shocking constitutional landmines impacting defendants and crime victims alike in a state with a national reputation for progressive social justice.

An acute shortage of public defenders means that at any given time at least several hundred low-income criminal defendants don’t have legal representation, sometimes in serious felony cases that could put them away for years. Judges have dismissed nearly four dozen cases in the Portland area alone — among them a domestic violence case with allegations of strangulation as well as other major felonies — and have threatened to hold the state public defenders office in contempt of court for failing to provide attorneys.

Oregon sends out a weekly list of unrepresented defendants to private attorneys begging for help. Some of the accused have been jailed without a lawyer for months on charges of rape, sodomy, child sexual abuse or attempted murder, records show. Meanwhile, court proceedings for those not in custody are repeatedly pushed back, leaving defendants in limbo and the courts spinning their wheels.

“We’re overwhelmed. The pandemic is exposing all the problems that we have, the under-resourcing and the underfunding, and it just hit a breaking point,” said Carl Macpherson, executive director of Metropolitan Public Defender, a large nonprofit public defender firm in Portland that temporarily stopped taking new cases when its attorneys couldn’t keep up.

“It just became abundantly clear that we are broken. You cannot do your job when you have 130 open felony cases per attorney,” Macpherson said.

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How climate scientists keep hope alive as damage worsens

In the course of a single year, University of Maine climate scientist Jacquelyn Gill lost both her mother and her stepfather. She struggled with infertility, then during research in the Arctic, she developed embolisms in both lungs, was transferred to an intensive care unit in Siberia and nearly died. She was airlifted back home and later had a hysterectomy. Then the pandemic hit.

Her trials and her perseverance, she said, seemed to make her a magnet for emails and direct messages on Twitter “asking me how to be hopeful, asking me, like, what keeps me going?”

Gill said she has accepted the idea that she is “everybody’s climate midwife” and coaches them to hope through action.

Hope and optimism often blossom in the experts toiling in the gloomy fields of global warming,COVID-19 and Alzheimer’s disease.

How climate scientists like Gill or emergency room doctors during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic cope with their depressing day-to-day work, yet remain hopeful, can offer help to ordinary people dealing with a world going off the rails, psychologists said.

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EXPLAINER: How 81-1 shot Rich Strike won the Kentucky Derby

This doesn’t happen. Horses at odds of nearly 81-1 don’t win the Kentucky Derby. Jockeys who have never won any big stakes race of any kind don’t win the Kentucky Derby. Owners with fewer than 10 career wins don’t win the Kentucky Derby.

Rich Strike and his connections disagree with those sentiments.

One of the biggest upsets in racing history happened Saturday in the Kentucky Derby, when Rich Strike shocked the establishment by running past everyone and winning the first leg of this year’s Triple Crown series.

Those who bet $2 to win on Rich Strike got $163.60 in return. Not bad for about two minutes of work. For jockey Sonny Leon, trainer Eric Reed and owner Rick Dawson, the result was life-changing. Leon was racing Friday at a little-known track in Cincinnati called Belterra Park. Reed’s biggest win before Saturday was with a filly called Satans Quick Chick in a Grade 2 race nearly 12 years ago. Dawson, a half-hour or so after the Derby, rhetorically asked a question to anyone within earshot.

“What planet is this?” Dawson said.