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NEW YORK (AP) — When smoke bombs and bullets were unleashed on a subway full of morning commuters as it crawled toward a stop in Brooklyn, the train’s driver, David Artis, couldn’t hear the shots.

His first indication something was wrong was when passengers crowded near the door to his operator’s compartment to report chaos, one car back.

Artis said after a moment of shock, his thoughts quickly shifted from, “Oh my God!” to concern for his passengers. He leaned on his emergency training.

“Then it kicked in. Get them out,” he said Friday after he and fellow transit workers were honored by the mayor for their response to Tuesday’s shooting.

In a few minutes of lightning-quick decisions, Artis and train conductor Raven Haynes radioed in the attack, threw open the train doors and evacuated all of the passengers to another train on the same platform, then began getting aid to the wounded.

Photos and video taken by passengers captured the pair calmly but authoritatively herding stunned commuters onto the other train, which sped away.

“This week New York City showed the entire globe what our city has always been about, courage, heroism, quick thinking and decisive action,” Mayor Eric Adams said.

Adams, who appeared at the City Hall ceremony virtually because he is isolating after having tested positive for COVID-19, had the workers presented Friday with proclamations to honor them for their heroism.

The ceremony came a day after the man authorities say was responsible for the carnage, Frank James, made an initial court appearance in a federal courthouse a few stops up the line from where the attack took place.

Prosecutors say he dressed as a construction worker and set off smoke grenades then pulled a handgun and fired 33 times, reloading once before his gun jammed.

The subway workers said that amidst the chaos, they didn’t see the gunman in the crowd and were just focused on getting people out.

“I was shouting to the people, ‘Get on the train! Get on the train! Get on the train!” Artis said.

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Haynes, the conductor, said she didn’t feel any fear, having worked at an airport before joining the Metropolitan Transportation Authority several years ago and was already used to reacting to unpredictable situations.

“I can’t stress enough the importance of having a stoic attitude in a moment of chaos. You calm demeanor helps your passengers become calm, which helps them get out as safely and quickly as possible,” she said.

The shooting victims ranged in age from 16 to 60. Most of the wounds were to the legs, back and buttocks. A 16-year-old boy was shot in the hand. They are all expected to survive.

As the wounded passengers limped on to the platform, several knelt to assist the injured. One took off a shirt to create a tourniquet for someone shot in the leg.

Artis said that when he checked the subway car to ensure it was empty, he found blood on the floor, luggage the gunman left behind and bullet casings, which he said he immediately reported to the transit operators so police could be called.

Haynes described the moment she took in the scene, just after directing the passengers to escape.

“I finally looked down toward the front of the train and I saw the whole entire second car engulfed in smoke, along with the whole north side of the platform,” she said.

Investigators said that in the confusion, James slipped away on the rescue train with the other passengers, exiting one station down having ditched his construction worker outfit and helmet.

He was arrested a day later in Manhattan after a citywide manhunt that ended shortly after he called a police tip line and gave his location.

At a brief court appearance Thursday, Assistant US Attorney Sara K. Winik said James’ premeditated, carefully planned attack “caused terror among the victims and our entire city.”

James was ordered jailed without bail. At the request of James’ lawyers, Magistrate Roanne Mann said she would ask for James to get “psychiatric attention.”

Hourari Benkada, a passenger who was shot in the leg, told The Associated Press in an interview that he was just feet away from the gunman.

Benkada said he was listening to music on his headphones when smoke began filling the car and he thought it was a small fire.

But the smoke “kept escalating to black, black smoke like 9/11,” he said, “and the whole train was pitch-black.”

Benkada said heard gunshots and screams and he tried to shield a pregnant woman from getting hit during the mayhem, and as people pushed forward, a gunshot tore into his knee.

Investigators were scouring dozens of videos that James posted on social media as they work to determine a motive for the shooting. The videos include profanity-filled diatribes about racism, society’s treatment of Black people, homelessness and violence.

James, a New York City native, also discussed his history of psychiatric treatment and complained about how New York’s mayor is dealing with homeless people on subways and with gun violence. He also talked about shooting people, prosecutors noted in court papers.

Investigators say James, who recently left Milwaukee and was living at a short-term rental in Philadelphia, rented a U-Haul van in Philadelphia and drove it to New York City hours before the shooting.

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Associated Press writers Michael R. Sisak, Karen Matthews and Bobby Caina Calvan contributed to this report.

The US Department of State says regional officials will attend a two-day conference on ‘safe, orderly, and humane migration’.

A delegation of United States officials led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Panama next week to attend a conference of regional foreign ministers on migration, the Department of State has said.

In a statement on Friday, the department said Blinken will meet with Panamanian President Laurentino Cortizo Cohen and Foreign Minister Erika Mouynes on his two-day visit. US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas will also be on the trip.

During the conference, scheduled to begin on Tuesday, officials will discuss economic recovery, migration, protection for refugees, asylum seekers, anti-corruption efforts, and support for civil society, the statement said.

“Secretary Blinken and representatives of regional governments participating in the Ministerial will discuss collaboration on safe, orderly, and humane migration throughout our hemisphere,” according to the statement.

The US continues to lead efforts towards more orderly and humane migration. @SecBlinken Travels to Panama April 19–20 for a Ministerial Conference on Migration and to host civil society & government leaders for transparency & anti-corruption discussions. https://t.co/FIKveqddb0

— Ned Price (@StateDeptSpox) April 15, 2022

The conference comes after the Biden administration this month announced that on May 23, it will lift a policy along the US-Mexico border that has allowed American officials to rapidly expel most asylum seekers, without giving them a chance to apply for protection in the US .

Ending the use of the pandemic-era restriction, known as “Title 42”, is expected to lead to a rise in arrivals at the border. DHS has said it is preparing for the surge by deploying additional resources and personnel.

But in recent years, the US has sought the cooperation of transit countries in the Americas region to help stem the flow of people heading towards the US.

In March, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas met officials in Mexico and Costa Rica.

The majority of asylum seekers arriving at the US’s southern border are from the so-called “Northern Triangle”: Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. But people from Haiti, as well as countries in South America, have been making their way to the US border, as well.

Most migrants heading towards the US cross through Panama’s southern border with Colombia, trekking through the Darien Gap, a notoriously dangerous jungle area controlled by groups known for acts of criminal violence, including sexual abuse and robbery.

In October, the presidents of Panama, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic asked for US assistance in stemming the flow of thousands of migrants crossing the Darien Gap.

The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) said in March that 8,456 people had made the treacherous journey in January and February of this year – nearly triple the number compared with the same period in 2021.

The prospects of large numbers of people streaming to the southern US border is a crucial political issue for US President Joe Biden before the midterm elections in November.

His Republican rivals have seized on the record-high numbers of arrivals to attack Biden. They have blamed the increase on his reversal of several of former President Donald Trump’s restrictive anti-immigration policies.

President Macron has defended the existing ban on headscarves in schools while election opponent Marine Le Pen seeks to outlaw coverings outright.

Muslim headscarves took center stage in France’s presidential campaign amid far-right candidate Marine Le Pen’s push to entirely ban them in the country with western Europe’s largest Muslim population.

Both Le Pen and rival Emmanuel Macron, facing a tightly contested April 24 runoff vote, wereed by women in headscarves on Friday who asked why their clothing choices should be caught up in politics.

Macron said he would not ban religious clothing, but he has overseen the closure of several mosques and Islamic groups. And many Muslims in France feel the presidential campaign has unfairly stigmatised their faith.

At a farmers’ market in the southern town of Pertuis, a woman in a blue-and-white head covering approached Le Pen as the candidate weaved past fishmongers and vendors to greet supporters.

“What is the headscarf doing in politics?” the woman asked.

Le Pen defended her position calling the headscarf a “uniform imposed over time by people who have a radical vision of Islam”.

“That’s not true,” countered the woman. “I started to wear the veil when I was an older woman… For me it is a sign of being a grandmother.” The woman noted her father served in the French military for 15 years.

Speaking to RTL radio on Thursday, Le Pen explained how her pledge to ban the headscarf in all public spaces would be implemented, saying it would be enforced by police in the same way as seatbelt-wearing in cars.

“People will be given a fine in the same way that it is illegal to not wear your seat belt. It seems to me that the police are very much able to enforce this measure,” she said.

Le Pen’s opposition to the headscarf has encapsulated what her critics say makes her dangerous to French unity by stigmatizing millions of French Muslims. If she becomes president, Le Pen said she would also slash immigration and wants to outlaw ritual slaughter, which would restrict French Muslims’ and Jews’ access to kosher and halal meat.

Macron, too, debated a woman in a Muslim headscarf on Friday in a lively exchange on broadcaster France-Info. He sought to distance himself from Le Pen by saying he would not change any laws, but defended an existing ban on headscarves in schools as part of France’s secular principles.

The woman, Sara el-Attar, said she felt insulted by previous comments by Macron when he suggested headscarves destabilise relations between men and women.

French women “have been castigated these recent years for a simple scarf, without any leader deigning to denounce this injustice”, she said.

‘Not an obsession’

El-Attar repeated the argument many veiled women in France make: people mistakenly think they are veiled not through personal choice, but because men make them wear headscarves.

Macron sought to defend his record. “For me personally, the question of the headscarf is not an obsession,” Macron said.

But critics say his government stoked prejudice against Muslims by cracking down on what it has claimed are efforts by some Muslims to carve out spaces in France for stricter interpretations of Islam. The government has gone after some schools, mosques and Islamic associations.

Le Pen, 53, has toned down her anti-immigration rhetoric during campaigning this year and has focused instead on household spending, putting her closer than ever to power, opinion polls indicate.

ROME (AP) — The war in Ukraine loomed over the traditional Good Friday Colosseum procession in Rome, after the Vatican’s choice of a Russian woman to be among the cross-bearers angered Ukrainians.

For the first time since before the pandemic, the solemn torchlit process at the ancient arena in Rome was to resume on Friday night. Thousands of pilgrims and tourists flocked to the site hours earlier, in hope of catching a glimpse of Pope Francis, who presides over the service from an elevated point near the Roman Forum.

Earlier this week, Ukraine’s ambassador to the Holy See and the archbishop of Kyiv deounced the Vatican’s plan to have a Ukrainian woman and a Russian woman carry the cross together during the procession. They objected to projecting what they saw as the idea of ​​reconciliation while Ukraine is ravaged by war unleashed by Russia.

The Vatican didn’t respond to the protest or announce any program changes.

While Francis has denounced the Feb. 24 invasion and attacks on Ukraine as a “sacrilege,” he has refrained from naming Russia as the aggressor, although his references to Russian Vladimir Putin have been clear. The pope is pressing for negotiations to cease the fighting and bring peace, and has offered to go to Ukraine if his presence could further the cause of peace.

But other faithful in the world applauded the decision to pair the two women, who work together at a Rome hospital and are friends, to carry the cross during part of the procession, which recalls Jesus’ suffering as he was being brought to his crucifixion and death.

In Paris, hundreds of Catholics gathered for Good Friday prayers on the forecourt of Notre Dame cathedral, and followed its rector on a procession around the island on the Seine River that houses the medieval landmark.

“Well, you know today the pope has a woman from Ukraine and a woman from Russia holding the cross together at one of the Stations of the Cross,” Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec told The AP at Notre Dame. She called that a “very moving and meaningful symbol.” She added: “I think that real people in the real world are concerned about peace. We want peace, we don’t want war,” which brings suffering and pain. That is “not the message of the Christ on the cross.”

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The faithful were not allowed inside the Paris cathedral, since it is still under reconstruction after a 2019 blaze collapsed its spire and destroyed its roof. French President Emmanuel Macron was visiting the cathedral Friday to mark the third anniversary of the fire.

In St. Peter’s Basilica, hours ahead of the Colosseum event, Pope Francis, wearing red vestments to symbolize the blood of Jesus, limped up the central aisle to take his place for an early evening prayer service. Francis, 85, has been suffering from a knee ligament problem.

Usually at the Good Friday basilica service at the Vatican, the pontiff would prostrate himself in prayer. But this time Francis, hobbled by pain for weeks, didn’t do so.

Francis dispatched his official almsgiver, Polish Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, to Kyiv to lead a Good Friday procession in the capital city of war-ravaged Ukraine. Italian Rai state TV said Krajewski on Friday visited two of Ukraine’s hardest-hit locations, Bucha and Borodyanka, both in ruins. At one point, Krajewski prayed over some of the bodies and leaned over to touch one, partially covered, body.

Throughout his papacy, Francis has repeatedly denominated armaments accumulated by nations as unjustified. In an interview broadcast on Italian state TV on Friday, the pope elaborated on his view.

“I understand those governments that buy arms, I understand them. I do not justify them, but I understand them, because we have to defend ourselves,” Francis said. But, he added: “If there were a pattern of peace, this would not be necessary. But we live with this diabolical pattern of killing one another out of the desire for power, the desire for security, the desire for many things.”

Good Friday is one of the main days for Christians during Holy Week, which culminates in Easter, on Sunday.

In Jerusalem, where tens of thousands of faithful traditionally converge on the Israeli city’s Old City to visit sacred sites during Holy Week, Palestinians on Friday clashed with Israeli mosque police at the Al-Aqsa. The site is sacred to Jews and Muslims. This year, Ramadan coincides with Passover, as well as Holy Week.

Medics in Jerusalem said that more than 150 Palestinians were injured, in the most serious violence at the site in nearly a year.

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John Leicester and Oleg Cetinic contributed from Paris.

DETROIT (AP) — Two years after the pandemic tore through the economy, America’s auto market looks something like this: Prices are drastically up. Supply is drastically down. And gasoline costs drastically more.

The result? A widening disparity between the richest buyers and everyone else.

The most affluent buyers keep plunking down big money for new vehicles, including the least fuel-efficient among them — trucks, SUVS, large sedans.

As for the rest of America, millions are feeling priced out of the new-vehicle market. They are competing instead for a shrunken supply of used autos, especially smaller, less expensive ones that consume less fuel. The jump in pump prices since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has only intensified their urge to keep costs down.

They are people like Natalia Ponce De Leon of North Palm Beach, Florida. She had been leasing a Toyota Tacoma pickup she acquired as new four years ago and had been using for her custom drapery business. When it was time to replace it recently, she didn’t even consider a new vehicle.

Instead, she settled on a 9-year-old vehicle with 14,000 miles on it — a Toyota RAV4, a small SUV, that she bought at Earl Stewart Toyota in North Palm Beach. Though it cost her $23,000 to buy the SUV and pay off the remainder of her lease, Ponce De Leon is happy with her decision. For just under $400 a month for six years, she said, she has a vehicle that’s easier to drive than her old pickup yet spacious enough to carry a 6-foot ladder for her business.

Best of all, with gasoline having scaled $4 a gallon nationally, she’s enjoying superior fuel efficiency.

“I’m thinking I’m going to save, per month, between $100 and $200,” Ponce De Leon said — money that she plans to spend for online marketing to help grow her business.

The new-vehicle market is another story entirely. Among all purchases of new autos last month, nearly 79% were trucks and SUVs. A decade ago, that proportion was just 52%.

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And that’s despite a whopping 22% jump in the average price of a new car since the pandemic struck two years ago — to more than $46,000, as of December.

Based on March prices and interest rates, the monthly payment on an average new vehicle would be $691 — far beyond the reach of what a household with a median gross income of $65,732 should spend, according to calculations by Cox Automotive and Moody’s.

Not so for many of the wealthier-than-average buyers who now dominate the new-vehicle market.

“Those that can afford it are still buying what they want,” said Jeff Schuster, president of global forecasting for LMC Automotive, a consulting firm.

Ivan Drury, a senior manager at the Edmunds.com auto site, has been surprised by the demand among affluent buyers for high-priced new vehicles.

“I can’t imagine a situation in which we’ve had so many people willing to spend so much money,” Drury said. “It’s just abnormal for someone to go out and spend (sticker price) or above. I can’t think of any other time period unless it was on specific models. And this is every car on the road.”

Left largely out of that pool, buyers of more modest means have been vying for the most fuel-efficient used vehicles — and forcing up their prices. At auctions where dealers buy many of their vehicles, the average price of a 2-to-8-year-old compact car rose 1.1% during the past three weeks to an average of $12,560. That’s an annual rate of nearly 20%. The price of older cars is up even more, according to data compiled by Black Book, which monitors such prices.

By contrast, over the same period, the average for a full-size 2-8-year-old SUV actually fell 2.3%, to $32,700.

“The demand is pushing dealers to buy smaller, more efficient, and older vehicles,” said Alex Yurchenko, chief data officer for Black Book.

Behind that trend lies an economic reality: Americans as a whole have less cash to spend. Although America’s job market is robust and many people have received pay raises in recent months, the acceleration of inflation has more than wiped out those gains in most cases.

Consumer prices have skyrocketed 8.5% over the past year, the fastest such pace in four decades. In addition, stimulus checks and other federal aid that most households received after the pandemic have long since expired.

In many cases, too, households have drawn down much of the cash they had stockpiled during the pandemic. In response, Americans as a whole are going deeper into debt to pay their expenses.

“People in the lower price range are just jammed up,” Drury noted. “It’s weird to have so many people with so much money, and we have this other swath of consumers that say, ‘I’m tapped out.’ ”

Further stressing the lower-priced market is the shrinking availability of leasing, which had long allowed ordinary households to keep monthly payments low. Leasing has nearly dried up because automakers are no longer offering attractive deals.

“They don’t have to,” said Jonathan Smoke, chief economist of Cox Automotive, “because (auto) supplies are low.”

Even among higher-income households, the run-up in gas prices has left more buyers focused on fuel efficiency. In particular, many have been snapping up electric vehicles, whose sales jumped 66% over the past year, Edmunds.com says. Even so, the EV share of the overall auto market remains only about 4%.

In the meantime, prices for both new and used vehicles have begun to fall or level off. From February to March, average prices for used cars and trucks actually fell nearly 4%. That may suggest, Drury said, that people have had it and won’t keep paying inflated prices. Automakers have even begun raise discounts on pickup trucks.

“They might have tapped out of consumers that pay any price to get what they want,” Drury said.

Idlib province, Syria – The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) is reducing life-saving food assistance to northwestern Syria from next month, and families say they fear going hungry.

The UN agency has been forced to reduce items in its monthly emergency food basket due to funding constraints and skyrocketing food prices, which have been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine and economic crisis in Syria.

“For Syria northwest this means, starting May 2022, the [food] basket will reduce from 1,300 to 1,170 [kilocalories] per person,” a WFP spokesperson, who asked that their name not be used, told Al Jazeera.

A local aid organization in the northwest also confirmed to Al Jazeera that the WFP had notified them of the food assistance cuts by email on April 8. The organization asked to remain unnamed as it was not authorized to comment on the status of UN programmes.

The reduction means that needy families will receive the same amount of vegetable oil, wheat flour, salt, and sugar from the UN agency, but monthly quantities of lentils, chickpeas, rice, and bulgur wheat will be cut back. WFP had previously reduced the monthly food basket in September 2021.

Since the onset of the war in Ukraine, the price of vegetable oil has increased in Syria by 39 percent and wheat flour is up by 10 percent.

“If they eventually stop providing food baskets, we will die of starvation with our children,” said 35-year-old Wassel al-Ghajar, a father of four who is expecting his fifth child next month.

“The food basket would help us get by for much of the month,” he told Al Jazeera.

WFP said in February that 12 million people, 55 percent of the total population, are facing acute food insecurity in Syria, and in January the agency dispatched food and nutrition assistance to an estimated 5.5 million people across all its activities in the country.

About 1.35 million people in northwest Syria benefit from the WFP’s food basket programme.

‘May God help us’

Khaled Abdulrahman has a family of nine and the WFP basket of food assistance provided for most of their food needs for half the month.

As his children played near their makeshift home in the Ahl al-Tah camp for internally displaced people in northern Idlib, Abdulrahman considered ways to provide for his family now that their food supply faces cutbacks.

Collecting scrap is probably the only option, he said.

“To make up for the loss, I guess we will have to go to the dump and pick up aluminum and plastic, or lumber wood,” he told Al Jazeera.

An estimated 97 percent of the four million people in northwest Syria live in poverty. More than half are internally displaced.

Compounding multiple hardships, even buying food has become a luxury for most in this opposition enclave.

After the Turkish lira was adopted as the currency of use almost two years ago, the economic crisis that shook Ankara last November has spilled over, sparking fuel and food inflation here in Idlib.

The economic effect of the war in Ukraine has exacerbated the situation.

Many families in Idlib are relying on charity meals this Ramadan to feed their families.

Inside Bilal Alwan’s bakery in Idlib, all appears calm.

But the baker is anxious for his business, and for the families who rely on his bread as costs continue to rise.

The price of bread has doubled, Alwan tells Al Jazeera, explaining that he relies on wheat imported from Turkey, and the price of a tonne of flour has risen from $380 to about $500 since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.

“May God help us,” he says.

We don’t have alternatives [to Turkey]and we don’t produce enough wheat locally.”

Families are already struggling to cope with the hardships.

The WFP told Al Jazeera that almost two-thirds of families in the northwest have cut down on their food intake. Almost half the children have dropped out of school to start work, and a quarter of residents have relied on early marriage to reduce their family size.

“We won’t be able to afford the food to make up for this loss,” said Fteim Al-Rahmoun, who lives with her children and her son’s family. More than 20 people in this large household had benefitted from the WFP’s monthly food basket.

Nervously weighing the food supplies in her pantry in anticipation of next month’s reduced basket, Fteim Al-Rahmoun said she had very little hope for the future.

“We might as well just die,” she told Al Jazeera.

Ali Haj Suleiman reported from Idlib, Syria. Kareem Chehayeb reported from Beirut, Lebanon.

Good morning, Chicago.

Russian President Vladimir Putin committed a major “strategic error” in believing his invasion of Ukraine would fragment Western democracies, the British foreign minister for Europe and North America said in Chicago this week. Instead, Foreign Office Minister James Cleverly said, Putin saw the NATO alliance and allied countries unite against Russian aggression in a sign of democracy’s resilience.

“Democracy is messy. Democracy is untidy, and to an autocratic leader like Putin, it probably always looks as if it’s on the verge of collapse,” Cleverly, the British equivalent of US secretary of state, said in an interview in Chicago with the Tribune.

In Ukraine, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, a guided-missile cruiser that became a potent target of Ukrainian defiance in the opening days of the war, sank after it was heavily damaged in the latest setback for Moscow’s invasion.

Here are the top stories you need to know to start your day.

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FBI acquires transcript of Michael Madigan deposition and the ex-speaker answering questions under oath in civil case

The FBI has acquired sworn depositions that indicted ex-Speaker Michael Madigan and his former chief of staff gave more than three years ago in a lawsuit accusing Madigan’s campaign organization of propping up sham candidates.

The move represents a new development in the sweeping federal racketeering case federal authorities filed last month against Madigan. Federal authorities made the request for the transcripts last month, attorney Anthony Peraica said, only days after the Chicago Tribune posted a video of the Madigan deposition, the only one Madigan said he ever gave.

Hundreds of birds found dead, likely from avian flu, at Baker’s Lake near Barrington

Avian flu has likely killed hundreds of double-crested cormorants nesting at Baker’s Lake near Barrington. Wildlife biologist Chris Anchor said this is the largest outbreak of disease in wild birds he’s seen in Cook County.

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“I’ve never seen anything like this since I started working here 41 years ago,” said Anchor, of the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. “Chances are this is happening in other places, and we’re not aware of it because no one is looking.”

Flashback: Chicago remains a ‘city of skyscrapers,’ but two early examples may be nearing a date with the wrecking ball

Should a wrecking ball strike the Century Building at 202 S. State St., the Tribune’s Ron Grossman writes, there will be a bittersweet moment when modern architecture’s debt to Chicago is starkly revealed.

The falling bricks will expose the underlying structure of the 16-story, Holabird and Roche-designed building: a lacework of steel beams and columns. The masonry was only tasked with screening the occupants from summer’s heat and rain, winter’s cold and snow.

That combination of a metal framework and curtain walls has produced myriad skyscrapers worldwide — after being developed and elaborated upon in Chicago’s drafting rooms. Nineteenth-century Chicagoans were fiercely proud of that.

NBA playoffs: 3 keys for the Bulls against the Bucks, including slowing Giannis Antetokounmpo

Knocking off the reigning NBA champions is never a simple task. The Chicago Bulls, don’t have an easy road to a first-round playoff win against the Milwaukee Bucks. After going 0-4 in the season series, the Bulls are hoping to reverse the pattern in the postseason.

Here are three keys for the Bulls as they prepare for Game 1 on Sunday in Milwaukee.

A gorilla at Lincoln Park Zoo is getting too much screen time

Lincoln Park Zoo officials say male gorilla Amare, 16, like many human teenagers, has been getting too much screen time. Not on his phone, of course; he’s obsessed with visitors’ phones through the glass of his enclosure at the Regenstein Center for African Apes.

Here’s how zoo officials are encouraging Amare to spend more time with his fellow apes.

Back in December 2020, the Independent reported that Chris Philp – the then UK parliament under secretary of state and minister for immigration compliance and justice – had “refused to rule out sending asylum seekers to a remote island or disused oil platforms, or creating a ‘ giant wave machine’” to repel migrant-bearing dinghies in the English Channel.

Now, Britain’s Conservatives have devised an even better solution to the migrant issue, whereby the United Kingdom will simply send asylum seekers to the African nation of Rwanda, about 6,500km (4,000 miles) away. And the new plan is already making waves. As John Washington, author of The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexican Border and Beyond, remarked on Twitter: “How much more darkly bonkers the global border regime will yet become terrifying.”

The refugee-outsourcing arrangement was formalised on April 14 during a descent upon the Rwandan capital of Kigali by British Home Secretary Priti Patel, who tweeted a video explaining what this “world-first migration partnership” will mean. Not only will it “set a new standard for managing migration” and “break the business model of people-smuggling gangs”, but it will also “help fix the broken asylum system” by having Rwanda “process asylum claims of those making dangerous, illegal or unnecessary journeys to the UK”.

Apparently, asylum seekers ultimately decide by Rwanda to have legitimately journeyed dangerously, or unnecessarily to the UK will then be allowed to live in, um illegal, Rwanda – where, as the BBC points out, the UK has “demanded investigations into alleged killings, disappearances and torture” while also expressing concern over the overall “human rights record” of the current Rwandan government and President Paul Kagame. How is that for a “business model”?

And while the global asylum system is certainly “broken”, the way to fix it is not by dismantling the very concept of asylum or offshoring migrant abuse in contravention of international law.

Nor is the UK-Rwandan “world-first migration partnership” as entirely groundbreaking as it purports to be, having been openly inspired by contemporary Australian offshore detention activities on the island nation of Nauru as well as Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island – which have served as Petri dishes for migrant, self-harm, and general suffering. Human Rights Watch furthermore notes the “exorbitant” expense that has attended Australian state brutality: “Detaining a single asylum seeker on Papua New Guinea or Nauru cost around AUD $3.4 million (£1.8 million) annually”.

To be sure, this figure would seem to rather neatly obliterate the official UK argument that the whole Rwanda operation will somehow save British taxpayers’ money. But, hey, there is nothing like a good Migrant Menace to distract from domestic embarrassments like the busting of Prime Minister Boris Johnson for coronavirus lockdown violations, otherwise known as the “Partygate” scandal – speaking of things “dangerous, illegal or unnecessary”.

Meanwhile, the United States has also offered plenty of asylum-eviscerating precedents – as in the case of the Trump administration’s so-called “safe third country agreement” with Guatemala, which enabled the US to deport asylum seekers to a country that was itself not at all safe and a significant source of refugees in the first place. Then there is the Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) programme, reactivated by Joe Biden, which basically of forcing vulnerable migrants to risk their lives waiting in Mexico – another prominent source of refugees – for their asylum claims to be processed in the US.

Rwanda, of course, has produced its own fair share of refugees – and yet expelling tens of thousands of asylum seekers to the landlocked country is, according to Prime Minister Johnson, “the morally right thing to do and the humane and compassionate thing to do ”, because it will disrupt the enterprising efforts of “vile people smugglers” who have converted the ocean into a “watery graveyard”.

Never mind that the ocean has only achieved graveyard status thanks to the criminalisation of migration wrought by the world’s enterprisingly xenophobic powers that be – or that the UK has contributed in no small part to converting much of the world beyond the ocean into a graveyard, while also cultivating the landscapes of persecution and tyranny that cause people to migrate.

History and reality notwithstanding, Home Secretary Patel proclaimed in Kigali that “our New Plan for Immigration will improve support for those directly fleeing dictatorship, persecution and tyranny”. She also insisted that “access to the UK’s asylum system must be based on need, not on the ability to pay people smugglers” – as though the two scenarios are mutually exclusive, and as though someone who sells everything they own in order to scrape together enough money to flee a country in the direction of perceived safety is somehow not in “need”.

For his part, Secretary of State for Wales Simon Hart is quoted in the Guardian describing the Rwanda deal as aiming to “improve the chances for people who have crossed half the world at huge emotional and personal and financial expense”. And what better way to improve those chances than by making them cross half the world again? “We pride ourselves on this ‘nation of sanctuary’ label”, Hart declared in reference to the UK – because obviously nothing says “nation of sanctuary” as thousands of people into another oppressive state 4,000 miles away.

And while Johnson contends that he is seeking to combat the “barbaric trade in human misery” being waged by human smugglers in the English Channel, the UK is guilty of the same and much more – and it is all getting ever more darkly bonkers.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

State media say the attack occurred shortly before midnight, adding that some Israeli missiles were shot down by Syrian air defenses.

Israel fired several missiles towards Syrian military positions near Damascus, causing material damage, Syria’s military has said.

State media quoted an unnamed military official on Friday as saying that the attack took place shortly before midnight on Thursday, adding that some of the Israeli missiles were shot down by Syrian air defences.

The United Kingdom-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, said the missiles hit positions of Iran-backed fighters southwest of the capital, near the suburb of Qatana.

There was no comment from the Israeli military.

Israel has staged hundreds of attacks on targets in Syria over the years, but rarely acknowledged or discussed such operations.

It has acknowledged, however, that it targets the bases of Iran-allied militias, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah group that has fighters in Syria. It says it attacks arms shipments believed to be bound for the militias.

Israel justifies its attacks on facilities and weapons in Syria saying the Iranian presence on its northern frontier is a red line.

Between Texas Gov. Greg Abbott letting the state power grid collapse while he’s busing migrants to DC to get himself on Fox News, Jared Kushner getting $2 billion from the Saudis, and Donald Trump bragging to Sean Hannity about how well he knows Vladimir Putin, there’s no end to the fuckery.

But the focus on The New Abnormal this week is on Donald Trump Jr., as CNN reporter Zachary Cohen breaks down his reporting on the namesake’s post-election text messages to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows scheming on how to steal the election: “ We either have a vote WE control and WE win OR it gets kicked to Congress 6 January 2021.”

That, Cohen tells co-host Molly Jong-Fast, “shows that even in those earliest days, while the election votes were still being counted, there were high-level people, very close to the former president, including his chief of staff and His namesake oldest son, talking through the details about what would happen over the next two months in the lead up to Jan. 6, as far as the strategy to overturn the election. It really puts an important timestamp on when this strategy was being drawn up—even as the votes were still being counted.”

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“What’s interesting about Donald Trump Junior’s text messages,” Cohen explains, is that they refer to multiple paths that we control. “There was an eye to Jan. 6 as sort of the backup plan where Junior alludes to a scenario where the House of Representatives can essentially vote to install Donald Trump as president, rather than Joe Biden. So Junior’s lawyer told us, ‘Look, this was given the date that this was sent.’ And, uh, he was, looks like he was forwarding along someone else’s ideas, but we’ve also learned about a text that came immediately before that from Donald Trump, Jr. that says, Look, this is what we need to do. Please read it, please get it to everyone. We need to do it because I’m not sure we’re doing it. So he is clearly putting a stamp of approval on” things.

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Plus University of California Law professor Rick Hasen, the co-director of the university’s Fair Elections and Free Speech Center and the author of Cheap Speech: How to Disinformation Poisons Our Politics—and How to Cure It, explains how “if we had the same polarized politics of today, but the technology of the 1950s, we likely wouldn’t have had Jan. 6 and the insurrection and millions of people believing the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.”

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