HELENA, Mont. (AP) — BNSF Railway attorneys are expected to argue before jurors Friday that the railroad should not be held liable for the lung cancer deaths of two former residents of an asbestos-contaminated Montana town, one of the deadliest sites in the federal Superfund pollution program.

Attorneys for the Warren Buffett-owned company say the railroad’s corporate predecessors didn’t know the vermiculite it hauled over decades from a nearby mine was filled with hazardous microscopic asbestos fibers.

The case in federal civil court over the two deaths is the first of numerous lawsuits against the Texas-based railroad corporation to reach trial over its past operations in Libby, Montana. Current and former residents of the small town near the U.S.-Canada border want BNSF held accountable for its alleged role in asbestos exposure that health officials say has killed several hundred people and sickened thousands.

Looming over the proceedings is W.R. Grace & Co., a chemical company that operated a mountaintop vermiculite mine 7 miles (11 kilometers) outside of Libby until it was closed 1990. The Maryland-based company played a central role in Libby’s tragedy and has paid significant settlements to victims.

U.S. District Court Judge Brian Morris has referred to the mining company as “the elephant in the room” in the BNSF trial. He reminded jurors several times that the case was about the railroad’s conduct, not W.R. Grace’s separate liability.

Federal prosecutors in 2005 indicted W. R. Grace and executives from the company on criminal charges over the contamination in Libby. A jury acquitted them following a 2009 trial.

How much W.R. Grace revealed about the asbestos dangers to Texas-based BNSF and its corporate predecessors has been sharply disputed.

The railroad said it was obliged under law to ship the vermiculite, which was used in insulation and for other commercial purposes, and that W.R. Grace employees had concealed the health hazards from the railroad.

Former railroad workers said during testimony and in depositions that they knew nothing about the risks of asbestos. They said Grace employees were responsible for loading the hopper cars, plugging the holes of any cars leaking vermiculite and occasionally cleaned up material that spilled in the rail yard.

Former rail yard worker John Swing said in previously recorded testimony that he didn’t know asbestos was an issue in Libby until a 1999 newspaper story reporting deaths and illnesses among mine workers and their families.

Swing also said he didn’t think the rail yard was dusty. His testimony was at odds with people who grew up in Libby and recall dust getting kicked up whenever the wind blew or a train rolled through the yard.

The estates of the two deceased plaintiffs have argued that the W.R. Grace’s actions don’t absolve BNSF of its responsibility for knowingly exposing people to asbestos at its railyard in the heart of the community.

Their attorneys said BNSF should have known about the dangers because Grace put signs on rail cars carrying vermiculite warning of potential health risks. They showed jurors an image of a warning label allegedly attached to rail cars in the late 1970s that advised against inhaling the asbestos dust because it could cause bodily harm.

BNSF higher-ups also should have been aware of the dangers because they attended conferences that discussed dust diseases like asbestosis in the 1930s, attorneys for the plaintiffs argued.

The Environmental Protection Agency descended on Libby after the 1999 news reports. In 2009 it declared in Libby the nation’s first ever public health emergency under the federal Superfund cleanup program.

The pollution in Libby has been cleaned up, largely at public expense. Yet the long timeframe over which asbestos-related diseases can develop means people previously exposed are likely to continue getting sick and dying for years to come, health officials say.

Family members of Tom Wells and Joyce Walder testified that their lives ended soon after they were diagnosed with mesothelioma. The families said the dust blowing from the rail yard sickened and killed them.

In a March 2020 video of Wells played for jurors and recorded the day before he died, he lay in a home hospital bed, struggling to breathe.

“I’ve been placed in a horrible spot here, and the best chance I see at release — relief for everybody — is to just get it over with,” he said. “It’s just not something I want to try and play hero through because I don’t think that there’s a miracle waiting.”

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Brown reported from Billings, Mont.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — As the nation prepares for trillions of red-eyed bugs known as periodical cicadas to emerge, it’s worth noting that they’re not just annoying, noisy pests — if prepared properly, they can also be tasty to eat.

Blocks away from such French Quarter fine-dining stalwarts as Antoine’s and Brennan’s, the Audubon Insectarium in New Orleans has long served up an array of alternative, insect-based treats at its “Bug Appetit” cafe overlooking the Mississippi River. “Cinnamon Bug Crunch,” chili-fried waxworms, and crispy, cajun-spiced crickets are among the menu items.

Periodical cicadas stay buried for years, until they surface and take over a landscape. Depending on the variety, the emergence happens every 13 or 17 years. This year two groups are expected to emerge soon, averaging around 1 million per acre over hundreds of millions of acres across parts of 16 states in the Midwest and South.

They emerge when the ground warms to 64 degrees (17.8 degrees Celsius), which is happening earlier than it used to because of climate change, entomologists said. The bugs are brown at first but darken as they mature.

Recently, Zack Lemann, the Insectarium’s curator of animal collections, has been working up cicada dishes that may become part of the menu. He donned a chef’s smock this week to show a couple of them off, including a green salad with apple, almonds, blueberry vinaigrette — and roasted cicadas. Fried cicada nymphs were dressed on top with a warm mixture of creole mustard and soy sauce.

“I do dragonflies in a similar manner,” Lemann said as he used tweezers to plop nymphs into a container of flour before cooking them in hot oil.

Depending on the type and the way they are prepared, cooked cicadas taste similar to toasted seeds or nuts. The Insectarium isn’t the first to promote the idea of eating them. Over the years, they have appeared on a smattering of menus and in cookbooks, including titles like “Cicada-Licious” from the University of Maryland in 2004.

“Every culture has things that they love to eat and, maybe, things that are taboo or things that people just sort of, wrinkle their nose and frown their brow at,” Lemann said. “And there’s no reason to do that with insects when you look at the nutritional value, their quality on the plate, how they taste, the environmental benefits of harvesting insects instead of dealing with livestock.”

Lemann has been working to make sure the Bug Appetit cafe has legal clearance to serve wild-caught cicadas while he works on lining up sources for the bugs. He expects this spring’s unusual emergence of two huge broods of cicadas to heighten interest in insects in general, and in the Insectarium — even though the affected area doesn’t include southeast Louisiana.

“I can’t imagine, given the fact that periodical cicadas are national news, that we won’t have guests both local and from outside New Orleans, asking us about that,” said Lemann. “Which is another reason I hope to have enough to serve it at least a few times to people.”

CHICAGO (AP) — The closure of Wadsworth Elementary School in 2013 was a blow to residents of the majority-Black neighborhood it served, symbolizing a city indifferent to their interests.

So when the city reopened Wadsworth last year to shelter hundreds of migrants, without seeking community input, it added insult to injury. Across Chicago, Black residents are frustrated that long-standing needs are not being met while the city’s newly arrived are cared for with a sense of urgency, and with their tax dollars.

“Our voices are not valued nor heard,” says Genesis Young, a lifelong Chicagoan who lives near Wadsworth.

Chicago is one of several big American cities grappling with a surge of migrants. The Republican governor of Texas has been sending them by the busload to highlight his grievances with the Biden administration’s immigration policy.

To manage the influx, Chicago has already spent more than $300 million of city, state and federal funds to provide housing, health care, education and more to over 38,000 mostly South American migrants desperate for help. The speed with which these funds were marshaled has stirred widespread resentment among Black Chicagoans. But community leaders are trying to ease racial tensions and channel the public’s frustrations into agitating for the greater good.

The outcry over migrants in Chicago and other large Democrat-led cities is having wider implications in an election year: The Biden administration is now advocating a more restrictive approach to immigration in its negotiations with Republicans in Congress.

Since the Wadsworth building reopened as a shelter, Young has felt “extreme anxiety” because of the noise, loitering and around-the-clock police presence that came with it. More than anything, she and other neighbors say it is a reminder of problems that have been left unsolved for years, including high rates of crime, unemployment and homelessness.

“I definitely don’t want to seem insensitive to them and them wanting a better life. However, if you can all of a sudden come up with all these millions of dollars to address their housing, why didn’t you address the homeless issue here,” said Charlotte Jackson, the owner of a bakery and restaurant in the South Loop neighborhood.

“For so long we accepted that this is how things had to be in our communities,” said Chris Jackson, who co-founded the bakery with his wife. “This migrant crisis has made many people go: ‘Wait a minute, no it doesn’t.’”

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson declined to comment for this story.

The city received more than $200 million from the state and federal government to help care for migrants after Johnson appealed to Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and President Joe Biden. The president will be in Chicago in August to make his reelection pitch at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

Some Black Chicagoans are protesting the placement of shelters in their neighborhoods, but others aim to turn the adversity into an opportunity.

“Chicago is a microcosm to the rest of the nation,” said the Rev. Janette C. Wilson, national executive director of the civil rights group PUSH for Excellence. Black communities have faced discrimination and underinvestment for decades and are justifiably frustrated, Wilson said. The attention the migrants are receiving is deserved, she added, but it’s also a chance for cities to reflect on their responsibility to all underserved communities.

“There is a moral imperative to take care of everybody,” Wilson said.

After nearly two years of acrimony, the city has begun to curb some accommodations for migrants – which has caused its own backlash. The city last month started evicting migrants who overstayed a 60-day limit at shelters, prompting condemnation from immigrant rights groups and from residents worried about public safety.

Marlita Ingram, a school guidance counselor who lives in the South Shore neighborhood, said she is concerned about the resources being shared “equitably” between migrants and longtime residents. But she also believes “it doesn’t have to be a competition” and sympathizes with the nearly 6,000 migrant children now enrolled in Chicago’s public schools.

As the potential for racial strife rises, some activists are pointing to history as a cautionary tale.

Hundreds of thousands of Black southerners moved to Chicago in the early 20th century in search of greater freedoms and economic opportunities. White Chicagoans at the time accused them of receiving disproportionate resources from the city, and in 1919 tensions boiled over.

In a surge of racist attacks in cities across the U.S. that came to be known as “Red Summer,” white residents burned large swaths of Chicago’s Black neighborhoods and killed 38 Black people, including by lynching.

“Those white folks were, like, ‘Hell no, they’re coming here, they’re taking our jobs,’” said Richard Wallace, founder of Equity and Transformation, a majority-Black community group that co-hosted in a forum in March to improve dialogue between Black and Latino residents.

He hears echoes of that past bigotry — intentional or not — when Black Chicagoans complain about the help being given to migrants. “How did we become like the white folks who were resisting our people coming to the city of the Chicago?” he said.

Labor and immigrant rights organizers have worked for years to tamp down divisions between working class communities. But the migrant crisis has created tensions between the city’s large Mexican American community and recently arrived migrants, many of whom hail from Venezuela.

“If left unchecked, we all panic, we’re all scared, we’re going to retreat to our corners,” said Leone Jose Bicchieri, executive director of Working Family Solidarity, a majority-Hispanic labor rights group. “The truth is that this city wouldn’t work without Black and Latino people.”

Black Americans’ views on immigration and diversity are expansive. The Civil Rights Movement was instrumental in pushing the U.S. to adopt a more inclusive immigration policy.

About half of Black Americans say the United States’ diverse population makes the country strong, including 30% who say it makes the U.S. “much stronger,” according to a March poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Many leaders in Black neighborhoods in and around Chicago are trying to strike a balance between acknowledging the tensions without exacerbating them.

“Our church is divided on the migrant crisis,” said the Rev. Chauncey Brown, pastor of Second Baptist Church in Maywood, Illinois, a majority-Black suburb of Chicago where some migrants are living in shelters.

There has been a noticeable uptick of non-English speakers in the pews, many of whom have said they are migrants in need of food and other services, Brown said. Some church members cautioned him against speaking out in support of migrants or allotting more church resources to them. But he said the Bible’s teachings are clear on this issue.

“When a stranger enters your land, you are to care for them as if they are one of your own,” he said.

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Matt Brown is a member of the AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow him on social media.

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California pet owners struggling to find a rental that accepts their furry, four-legged family members could have an easier time leasing new housing under proposed state legislation that would ban blanket no-pets policies and prohibit landlords from charging additional fees for common companions like cats and dogs.

Backers of the bill, which recently cleared a key committee, say the lack of pet-friendly units is pushing renters to forgo housing or relinquish beloved pets to overcrowded shelters. They say the legislation also would allow more tenants with unapproved pets to come out of the shadows.

Sacramento renter Andrea Amavisca said she and her boyfriend searched for more than a month for a place that would accept their 2-year-old cattle dog mix. Options were few and prospective landlords would not return her calls after learning the couple had a dog.

They finally found a two-bedroom apartment after meeting with the landlord and putting down an extra $500 for the security deposit.

“It’s really awful that there are these restrictions you have to take into consideration when making a personal life choice,” she said.

But landlords are pushing back, saying they’re worried over the cost of repairs, liability over potential dog bites and nuisance issues that might drive away other tenants. They also want state lawmakers to allow higher security deposits — which legislators limited to one month’s rent last year — to scrub out possible urine and feces stains in carpets or repair damage to wood floors.

“There are bad people and there are bad dogs, and our job is to screen that and make sure that we’re providing a safe environment for everyone,” said Russell Lowery, executive director of the California Rental Housing Association.

The proposal authored by Assemblymember Matt Haney, a San Francisco Democrat and chair of the renters’ caucus, would not require all landlords to accept common household pets, such as cats and dogs.

But landlords would have to provide reasonable justifications, such as public health, for denying a pet. A landlord could not inquire of pets until after approving an applicant, and applicants would have to notify the landlord that they have a pet or plan to get one at least three days prior to signing a lease. Should the landlord deny the pet, the applicant would then decide whether to seek housing elsewhere.

The landlord also could not require additional rent or security deposit for a pet. The bill, if approved, would apply to new leases starting on or after Jan. 1.

Ivan Blackshear already rents to tenants with cats at his triplex in Chico, a small city north of Sacramento. But he says the question of pets and deposits should be left to the property owner and any agreement they reach with their tenants. It should not, he said, be mandated by politicians trying to curry favor with voters.

“Chasing mom and pop landlords like myself — small investors like myself — out of California is not going to solve the high price of rent; it actually is going to make it worse,” said Blackshear, who once had to replace the wood flooring in a rental due to a tenant with a cat.

Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, a Democrat who represents parts of Los Angeles, said he and his fiancée, an attorney, were shut out of renting several places just because of Darius, their well-behaved Great Dane.

“Darius is the sweetest dog,” said Bryan, who is vice chair of the legislative renters’ caucus. “And so it was shocking, and it showed that this simple barrier of having a companion animal could lead directly to housing insecurity and homelessness, if not addressed.”

Animal welfare groups are among those supporting the bill.

Ann Dunn, director of Oakland Animal Services, says the number of people giving up their pets has soared since the city of Oakland’s eviction moratorium ended last summer. In 2022, the shelter averaged nearly 240 dogs relinquished each month; now it is 350 a month.

“We’re seeing a huge spike in people who are saying they are newly homeless,” she said. “Or they’re choosing between being housed or being able to keep their pets.”

The bill is headed to the Assembly for a floor vote. If it passes, it would then go to the Senate for consideration.

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Har reported from San Francisco.

ATLANTA (AP) — Reality TV stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, who are in prison after being convicted on federal charges of bank fraud and tax evasion, are challenging aspects of their convictions and sentences in a federal appeals court.

The Chrisleys rose to fame with their show “Chrisley Knows Best,” which chronicled the exploits of their tight-knit family. But prosecutors said they engaged in an extensive bank fraud scheme and hid their earnings from tax authorities while showcasing their extravagant lifestyle.

Peter Tarantino, an accountant they hired, also is serving time in prison. He wants his conviction thrown out and to be granted a new trial.

Lawyers for all three, as well as federal prosecutors, are set to appear for arguments before the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta on Friday.

The Chrisleys initially were charged in August 2019. In June 2022, a jury found them guilty of conspiring to defraud community banks out of more than $30 million in fraudulent loans. They also were found guilty of tax evasion and conspiring to defraud the IRS, and Julie Chrisley was convicted of wire fraud and obstruction of justice.

Todd Chrisley, 56, is housed at a minimum security federal prison camp in Pensacola, Florida, with a release date in October 2032, while Julie Chrisley, 51, is at a facility in Lexington, Kentucky, with a release date in July 2028, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons website.

Tarantino, 61, was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud the United States and willfully filing false tax returns. He is being held in a minimum security federal prison camp in Montgomery, Alabama, with a release date in September of next year.

Prosecutors have said the Chrisleys submitted fake documents to banks and managed to secure more than $30 million in fraudulent loans. Once that scheme fell apart, they walked away from their responsibility to repay the loans when Todd Chrisley declared bankruptcy. While in bankruptcy, they started their reality show and “flaunted their wealth and lifestyle to the American public,” and then hid the millions they made from the show from the IRS, prosecutors said.

Lawyers for the Chrisleys contend that an IRS officer lied on the stand about the couple owing taxes for years when she knew no taxes were due and that prosecutors knowingly presented and failed to correct that false testimony.

They also argue the trial judge was wrong to allow certain evidence without requiring prosecutors to show it wasn’t obtained during an unlawful search. And they say prosecutors failed to provide enough evidence to convict the Chrisleys of tax evasion and conspiracy, showing only that they used a common entertainment industry practice to receive acting income.

They also argue prosecutors failed to produce any evidence that Julie Chrisley participated in bank fraud. They say the judge erred by ordering restitution and forfeiture of assets.

Todd Chrisley should be acquitted on the tax evasion and conspiracy counts and given a new trial on the remaining counts, his lawyers argue. Alternatively, the appeals court should send the case back to the trial court to hold a hearing on his claims that the IRS officer lied and evidence was improperly admitted.

Julie Chrisley should be acquitted on the five bank fraud charges, her lawyers argue. They also say her sentence on the remaining charges, including $17.2 million in restitution that she and her husband were ordered to pay, should be wiped away and she should be resentenced on those counts.

Prosecutors argue there was sufficient evidence at trial to support the charges and jury verdicts, and that the evidence was properly obtained and admitted. They said the judge was right to deny an evidentiary hearing or new trial on the Chrisleys’ assertions that the IRS agent lied, saying the agent testified to the best of her recollection.

A lawyer for Tarantino argued in a filing with the appeals court that his client was harmed by being tried with the Chrisleys and he urged the court to reverse Tarantino’s conviction and return his case to the lower court for a new trial.

While Tarantino did certain things that ended up facilitating the Chrisleys’ fraudulent conduct, there was no evidence he did anything intentionally to facilitate that conduct. Jurors ended up confused and biased, which caused them to convict all three defendants on all counts they faced, his lawyer wrote.

Prosecutors say there was substantial evidence demonstrating Tarantino’s personal involvement and he can’t demonstrate actual, compelling evidence that he was harmed by being tried along with the Chrisleys.

DENVER (AP) — The 12 students and one teacher killed in the Columbine High School shooting will be remembered Friday in a vigil on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the tragedy.

The gathering, set up by gun safety and other organizations, is the main public event marking the anniversary, which is more subdued than in previous milestone years.

Former Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who began campaigning for gun safety after she was nearly killed in a mass shooting, will be among those speaking at the vigil. So will Nathan Hochhalter, whose sister Anne Marie was paralyzed after she was shot at Columbine. Several months after the shooting, their mother, Carla Hochhalter, took her own life.

The organizers of the vigil, which will also honor all those impacted by the shooting, include Colorado Ceasefire, Brady United Against Gun Violence and Colorado Faith Communities United Against Gun Violence, but they say it will not be a political event.

Tom Mauser, whose son Daniel, a sophomore who excelled in math and science, was killed at Columbine, decided to set up the vigil after learning school officials did not plan to organize a large community event as they did on the 20th anniversary. Mauser, who became a gun safety advocate after the shooting, said he realizes that it takes a lot of volunteers and money to put together that kind of event but he wanted to give people a chance to gather and mark the passage of 25 years since the shooting, a significant number people can relate to.

“For those who do want to reflect on it, it is something for them,” said Mauser, who is on Colorado Ceasefire’s board and asked the group to help organize the event at a church near the state Capitol in Denver. It had been scheduled to be held on the steps of the Capitol but was moved indoors because of expected rain.

Mauser successfully led the campaign to pass a ballot measure requiring background checks for all firearm buyers at gun shows in 2000 after Colorado’s legislature failed to change the law. It was designed to close a loophole that helped a friend of the Columbine gunmen obtain three of the four firearms used in the attack.

A proposal requiring such checks nationally, inspired by Columbine, failed in Congress in 1999 after passing the Senate but dying in the House, said Robert Spitzer, professor emeritus at the State University of New York-Cortland and author of several books on gun politics.

Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore ran on a gun safety agenda against Republican George W. Bush the following year, but after his stance was mistakenly seen as a major reason for his defeat, Democrats largely abandoned the issue for the following decade, Spitzer said. But gun safety became a more prominent political issue again after the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, he said.

Without much action nationally on guns, Democrat-led and Republican-controlled states have taken divergent approaches to responding to mass shootings.

Those killed at Columbine included Dave Sanders, a teacher who was shot as he shepherded students to safety during the attack. He lay bleeding in a classroom for almost four hours before authorities reached him. The students killed included one who wanted to be a music executive like his father, a senior and captain of the girls’ varsity volleyball team, and a teen who enjoyed driving off-road in his beat-up Chevy pickup.

Sam Cole, another Colorado Ceasefire board member, said he hopes people will come out to remember the victims and not let the memory of them fade. The students killed would now be adults in the prime of their lives with families of their own, he said.

“It’s just sad to think that they are always going to be etched in our mind as teenagers,” he said.

NEW YORK (AP) — A third panel of potential jurors will be questioned Friday in Donald Trump’s hush money case, drawing jury selection a step closer to completion in the first criminal trial of a former U.S. president.

After a jury of 12 New Yorkers was seated Thursday, lawyers are now expected to turn their attention to picking remaining alternates who can vow to set aside their personal views and impartially judge the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Thursday’s court proceedings demonstrated unpredictability in the jury selection process of such a high-profile case, with two jurors who had been seated a day earlier being dismissed from the panel.

The judge has suggested that opening statements in the criminal trial could begin as early as Monday, before prosecutors begin laying out their case alleging a scheme to cover up negative stories Trump feared would hurt his 2016 presidential campaign.

The trial will place Trump in a Manhattan courtroom for weeks, forcing him to juggle his dual role as criminal defendant and political candidate against the backdrop of his hotly contested race against President Joe Biden. It will feature salacious and unflattering testimony his opponent will no doubt seize on to try to paint Trump as unfit to return as commander in chief.

Judge Juan M. Merchan is also expected to hold a hearing Friday to consider a request from prosecutors to bring up Trump’s prior legal entanglements if he takes the stand in the hush money case. Manhattan prosecutors have said they want to question Trump about his recent civil fraud trial that resulted in a $454 million judgment after a judge found Trump had lied about his wealth for years. He is appealing that verdict.

Trump says he did nothing wrong, and has cast himself as the victim of a politically motivated justice system bent on keeping him out of the White House. He has lashed out on social media about the judge, prosecutors and potential witnesses, prompting the district attorneys to seek sanctions for possible violations of a gag order in the criminal case.

After Thursday’s court proceedings, Trump complained to reporters that he should have been out campaigning but was in court instead for what he said was a “very unfair trial.”

“Everybody’s outraged by it,” he said. “You know the whole world’s watching this New York scam.”

The jury of Manhattanites includes a sales professional, a software engineer, a security engineer, an English teacher, a speech therapist, multiple lawyers, an investment banker and a retired wealth manager.

The trial centers on a $130,000 payment that Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and personal fixer, made to porn actor Stormy Daniels to prevent her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump from becoming public in the final days of the 2016 race.

Prosecutors say Trump obscured the true nature of the payments in internal records when his company reimbursed Cohen, who pleaded guilty to federal charges in 2018 and is expected to be a star witness for the prosecution.

Trump has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels, and his lawyers argue that the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal expenses.

Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He could get up to four years in prison if convicted, though it’s not clear that the judge would opt to put him behind bars. Trump would almost certainly appeal any conviction.

Trump faces four criminal cases, but it’s not clear that any others will reach trial before the November election. Appeals and legal wrangling have caused delays in the other three cases charging Trump with plotting to overturn the 2020 election results and with illegally hoarding classified documents.

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Richer reported from Washington.

WASHINGTON (AP) — One woman miscarried in the restroom lobby of a Texas emergency room as front desk staff refused to admit her. Another woman learned that her fetus had no heartbeat at a Florida hospital, the day after a security guard turned her away from the facility. And in North Carolina, a woman gave birth in a car after an emergency room couldn’t offer an ultrasound. The baby later died.

Complaints that pregnant women were turned away from U.S. emergency rooms spiked in 2022 after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, federal documents obtained by The Associated Press reveal.

The cases raise alarms about the state of emergency pregnancy care in the U.S., especially in states that enacted strict abortion laws and sparked confusion around the treatment doctors can provide.

“It is shocking, it’s absolutely shocking,” said Amelia Huntsberger, an OB/GYN in Oregon. “It is appalling that someone would show up to an emergency room and not receive care — this is inconceivable.”

It’s happened despite federal mandates that the women be treated.

Federal law requires emergency rooms to treat or stabilize patients who are in active labor and provide a medical transfer to another hospital if they don’t have the staff or resources to treat them. Medical facilities must comply with the law if they accept Medicare funding.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments Wednesday that could weaken those protections. The Biden administration has sued Idaho over its abortion ban, even in medical emergencies, arguing it conflicts with the federal law.

“No woman should be denied the care she needs,” Jennifer Klein, director of the White House Gender Policy Council, said in a statement. “All patients, including women who are experiencing pregnancy-related emergencies, should have access to emergency medical care required under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act.”

Pregnant patients have “become radioactive to emergency departments” in states with extreme abortion restrictions, said Sara Rosenbaum, a George Washington University health law and policy professor.

“They are so scared of a pregnant patient, that the emergency medicine staff won’t even look. They just want these people gone,” Rosenbaum said.

Consider what happened to a woman who was nine months pregnant and having contractions when she arrived at the Falls Community Hospital in Marlin, Texas, in July 2022, a week after the Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion. The doctor on duty refused to see her.

“The physician came to the triage desk and told the patient that we did not have obstetric services or capabilities,” hospital staff told federal investigators during interviews, according to documents. “The nursing staff informed the physician that we could test her for the presence of amniotic fluid. However, the physician adamantly recommended the patient drive to a Waco hospital.”

Investigators with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services concluded Falls Community Hospital broke the law.

Reached by phone, an administrator at the hospital declined to comment on the incident.

The investigation was one of dozens the AP obtained from a Freedom of Information Act request filed in February 2023 that sought all pregnancy-related EMTALA complaints the previous year. One year after submitting the request, the federal government agreed to release only some complaints and investigative documents filed across just 19 states. The names of patients, doctors and medical staff were redacted from the documents.

Federal investigators looked into just over a dozen pregnancy-related complaints in those states during the months leading up to the U.S. Supreme Court’s pivotal ruling on abortion in 2022. But more than two dozen complaints about emergency pregnancy care were lodged in the months after the decision was unveiled. It is not known how many complaints were filed last year as the records request only asked for 2022 complaints and the information is not publicly available otherwise.

The documents did not detail what happened to the patient turned away from the Falls Community Hospital.

Other pregnancies ended in catastrophe, the documents show.

At Sacred Heart Emergency Center in Houston, front desk staff refused to check in one woman after her husband asked for help delivering her baby that September. She miscarried in a restroom toilet in the emergency room lobby while her husband called 911 for help.

“She is bleeding a lot and had a miscarriage,” the husband told first responders in his call, which was transcribed from Spanish in federal documents. “I’m here at the hospital but they told us they can’t help us because we are not their client.”

Emergency crews, who arrived 20 minutes later and transferred the woman to a hospital, appeared confused over the staff’s refusal to help the woman, according to 911 call transcripts.

One first responder told federal investigators that when a Sacred Heart Emergency Center staffer was asked about the gestational age of the fetus, the staffer replied: “No, we can’t tell you, she is not our patient. That’s why you are here.”

A manager for Sacred Heart Emergency Center declined to comment. The facility is licensed in Texas as a freestanding emergency room, which means it is not physically connected to a hospital. State law requires those facilities to treat or stabilize patients, a spokeswoman for the Texas Health and Human Services agency said in an email to AP.

Sacred Heart Emergency’s website says that it no longer accepts Medicare, a change that was made sometime after the woman miscarried, according to publicly available archives of the center’s website.

Meanwhile, the staff at Person Memorial Hospital in Roxboro, North Carolina, told a pregnant woman, who was complaining of stomach pain, that they would not be able to provide her with an ultrasound. The staff failed to tell her how risky it could be for her to depart without being stabilized, according to federal investigators. While en route to another hospital 45 minutes away, the woman gave birth in a car to a baby who did not survive.

Person Memorial Hospital self-reported the incident. A spokeswoman said the hospital continues to “provide ongoing education for our staff and providers to ensure compliance.”

In Melbourne, Florida, a security guard at Holmes Regional Medical Center refused to let a pregnant woman into the triage area because she had brought a child with her. When the patient came back the next day, medical staff were unable to locate a fetal heartbeat. The center declined to comment on the case.

Emergency rooms are subject to hefty fines when they turn away patients, fail to stabilize them or transfer them to another hospital for treatment. Violations can also put hospitals’ Medicare funding at risk.

But it’s unclear what fines might be imposed on more than a dozen hospitals that the Biden administration says failed to properly treat pregnant patients in 2022.

It can take years for fines to be levied in these cases. The Health and Human Services agency, which enforces the law, declined to share if the hospitals have been referred to the agency’s Office of Inspector General for penalties.

For Huntsberger, the OB-GYN, EMTALA was one of the few ways she felt protected to treat pregnant patients in Idaho, despite the state’s abortion ban. She left Idaho last year to practice in Oregon because of the ban.

The threat of fines or loss of Medicare funding for violating EMTALA is a big deterrent that keeps hospitals from dumping patients, she said. Many couldn’t keep their doors open if they lost Medicare funding.

She has been waiting to see how HHS penalizes two hospitals in Missouri and Kansas that HHS announced last year it was investigating after a pregnant woman, who was in preterm labor at 17 weeks, was denied an abortion.

“A lot of these situations are not reported, but even the ones that are — like the cases out of the Midwest — they’re investigated but nothing really comes of it,” Huntsberger said. “People are just going to keep providing substandard care or not providing care. The only way that changes is things like this.”

President Joe Biden and top U.S. health official Xavier Becerra have both publicly vowed vigilance in enforcing the law.

Even as states have enacted strict abortion laws, the White House has argued that if hospitals receive Medicare funds they must provide stabilizing care, including abortions.

In a statement to THE AP, Becerra called it the “nation’s bedrock law protecting Americans’ right to life- and health-saving emergency medical care.”

“And doctors, not politicians, should determine what constitutes emergency care,” he added.

Idaho’s law does not allow abortions if a mother’s health is at risk. But the state’s attorney general has argued that its abortion ban is “consistent” with federal law, which calls for emergency rooms to protect an unborn child in medical emergencies.

“The Biden administration has no business rewriting federal law to override Idaho’s law and force doctors to perform abortions,” Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador said in a statement earlier this year.

Now, the Supreme Court will weigh in. The case could have implications in other states like Arizona, which is reinstating an 1864 law that bans all abortions, with an exception only if the mother’s life is at risk.

EMTALA was initially introduced decades ago because private hospitals would dump patients on county or state hospitals, often because they didn’t have insurance, said Alexa Kolbi-Molinas of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Some hospitals also refused to see pregnant women when they did not have an established relationship with physicians on staff. If the court nullifies or weakens those protections, it could result in more hospitals turning away patients without fear of penalty from the federal government, she said.

“The government knows there’s a problem and is investigating and is doing something about that,” Kolbi-Molinas said. “Without EMTALA, they wouldn’t be able to do that.”

NEW YORK (AP) — Sometime in the next few days or even hours, the “miners” who chisel bitcoins out of complex mathematics are going to take a 50% pay cut — effectively slicing new production of the world’s largest cryptocurrency in half.

That could have a lot of implications, from the price of the asset to the bitcoin miners themselves. And, as with everything in the volatile cryptoverse, the future is hard to predict.

Here’s what you need to know.

Bitcoin “halving,” a preprogrammed event that occurs roughly every four years, impacts the production of bitcoin. Miners use farms of noisy, specialized computers to solve convoluted math puzzles; and when they complete one, they get a fixed number of bitcoins as a reward.

Halving does exactly what it sounds like — it cuts that fixed income in half. And when the mining reward falls, so does the number of new bitcoins entering the market. That means the supply of coins available to satisfy demand grows more slowly.

Limited supply is one of bitcoin’s key features. Only 21 million bitcoins will ever exist, and more than 19.5 million of them have already been mined, leaving fewer than 1.5 million left to pull from.

So long as demand remains the same or climbs faster than supply, bitcoin prices should rise as halving limits output. Because of this, some argue that bitcoin can counteract inflation — still, experts stress that future gains are never guaranteed.

Per bitcoin’s code, halving occurs after the creation of every 210,000 “blocks” — where transactions are recorded — during the mining process.

No calendar dates are set in stone, but that divvies out to roughly once every four years. The latest estimates expect the next halving to occur sometime late Friday or early Saturday.

Only time will tell. Following each of the three previous halvings, the price of bitcoin was mixed in the first few months and wound up significantly higher one year later. But as investors well know, past performance is not an indicator of future results.

“I don’t know how significant we can say halving is just yet,” said Adam Morgan McCarthy, a research analyst at Kaiko. “The sample size of three (previous halvings) isn’t big enough to say ‘It’s going to go up 500% again,’ or something.”

At the time of the last halving in May 2020, for example, bitcoin’s price stood at around $8,602, according to CoinMarketCap — and climbed almost seven-fold to nearly $56,705 by May 2021. Bitcoin prices nearly quadrupled a year after July 2016’s halving and shot up by almost 80 times one year out from bitcoin’s first halving in November 2012. Experts like McCarthy stress that other bullish market conditions contributed to those returns.

This next halving also arrives after a year of steep increases for bitcoin. As of Thursday afternoon, bitcoin stood at just over $63,500 per CoinMarketCap. That’s down from the all-time-high of about $73,750 hit last month, but still double the asset’s price from a year ago.

Much of the credit for bitcoin’s recent rally is given to the early success of a new way to invest in the asset — spot bitcoin ETFs, which were only approved by U.S. regulators in January. A research report from crypto fund manager Bitwise found that these spot ETFs saw $12.1 billion in inflows during the first quarter.

Bitwise senior crypto research analyst Ryan Rasmussen said persistent or growing ETF demand, when paired with the “supply shock” resulting from the coming halving, could help propel bitcoin’s price further.

“We would expect the price of Bitcoin to have a strong performance over the next 12 months,” he said. Rasmussen notes that he’s seen some predict gains reaching as high as $400,000, but the more “consensus estimate” is closer to the $100,000-$175,000 range.

Other experts stress caution, pointing to the possibility the gains have already been realized.

In a Wednesday research note, JPMorgan analysts maintained that they don’t expect to see post-halving price increases because the event “has already been already priced in” — noting that the market is still in overbought conditions per their analysis of bitcoin futures.

Miners, meanwhile, will be challenged with compensating for the reduction in rewards while also keeping operating costs down.

“Even if there’s a slight increase in bitcoin price, (halving) can really impact a miner’s ability to pay bills,” Andrew W. Balthazor, a Miami-based attorney who specializes in digital assets at Holland & Knight, said. “You can’t assume that bitcoin is just going to go to the moon. As your business model, you have to plan for extreme volatility.”

Better-prepared miners have likely laid the groundwork ahead of time, perhaps by increasing energy efficiency or raising new capital. But cracks may arise for less-efficient, struggling firms.

One likely outcome: Consolidation. That’s become increasingly common in the bitcoin mining industry, particularly following a major crypto crash in 2022.

In its recent research report, Bitwise found that total miner revenue slumped one month after each of the three previous halvings. But those figures had rebounded significantly after a full year — thanks to spikes in the price of bitcoin as well as larger miners expanding their operations.

Time will tell how mining companies fare following this next looming halving. But Rasmussen is betting that big players will continue to expand and utilize the industry’s technology advances to make operations more efficient.

Pinpointing definitive data on the environmental impacts directly tied to bitcoin halving is still a bit of a question mark. But it’s no secret that crypto mining consumes a lot of energy — and operations relying on pollutive sources have drawn particular concern over the years.

Recent research published by the United Nations University and Earth’s Future journal found that the carbon footprint of 2020-2021 bitcoin mining across 76 nations was equivalent to emissions of burning 84 billion pounds of coal or running 190 natural gas-fired power plants. Coal satisfied the bulk of bitcoin’s electricity demands (45%), followed by natural gas (21%) and hydropower (16%).

Environmental impacts of bitcoin mining boil largely down to the energy source used. Industry analysts have maintained that pushes towards the use of more clean energy have increased in recent years, coinciding with rising calls for climate protections from regulators around the world.

Still, production pressures could result in miners turning to cheaper, less climate-friendly energy sources. And when looking towards the looming halving, JPMorgan cautioned that some bitcoin mining firms may also “look to diversify into low energy cost regions” to deploy inefficient mining rigs.

By Jarrett Renshaw

(Reuters) – The Biden administration’s threat to impose more tariffs on China is the latest election-year signal that frostier relations with China are likely to follow regardless of who wins the U.S. presidency.

U.S. President Joe Biden traveled to the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Wednesday to call for higher tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum products, and top administration officials have signaled those are unlikely to be his last salvo against China this election season.

The same day, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen signaled that tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles may be necessary to protect American workers from Beijing’s glut of overproduction.

This week, the administration also launched an investigation into what it said were China’s attempts to dominate the maritime, logistics and shipbuilding industries. Many experts now think the result of that probe and an ongoing multi-year review of Trump-era trade policies will be even more new tariffs on imports from China.

Liu Pengyu, spokesperson at the Chinese embassy in Washington, said U.S. tariffs embody unilateralism and protectionism.

“Many trading partners of the United States, including China, are strongly dissatisfied with the United States’ frequent use of national security, non-market behavior, overcapacity and other reasons to impose restrictions and politicize trade issues,” Pengyu said in a statement on Wednesday in response to the proposed steel tariffs.

The Biden administration’s decision to ramp up tariffs this week suggests a hawkish trade climate heading into the 2024 election as Biden and his Republican rival, Donald Trump, see a tough-on-China stance as a part of the road to victory, particularly in rust-belt states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Trump has proposed 10% across-the-board import tariffs if he were to return to the White House.

He also proposes phasing out Chinese imports of goods such as electronics, steel and pharmaceuticals over four years and wants to prohibit Chinese companies from owning U.S. infrastructure in the energy and tech sectors.

Forty-one percent of Americans named China as the greatest U.S. enemy in a Gallup poll released in March, making it the top perceived U.S. adversary for the fourth straight year, the polling group said.

“China is inevitably getting drawn into what’s likely to be a little bit of a chaotic cycle. And I think really, right now, we’re just seeing the beginnings of that,” said Allen Carlson, a Cornell University professor and expert on U.S.-China relations.

White House officials dismiss the idea that politics is at play, even as Biden trumpeted the proposed steel tariffs in an emotional anti-Trump speech at the United Steelworkers union headquarters in Pennsylvania.

Instead, administration officials say they fear a flood of low-cost exports from China is jeopardizing billions of dollars in tax incentives secured by Biden to anchor industries like solar, wind and electric vehicles in the United States.

China’s slow-growing economy is forcing manufacturers to double down on exports to offset weak domestic demand growth, causing China’s manufacturing trade surplus to surge to record levels, administration officials say.

Double sided-solar panels, known as bifacials, provide an example of the administration’s concerns. The administration granted an tariff exemption to China until 2026 to help promote solar power in the U.S., but now officials are expected to lift the ban and impose tariffs after cheap cells flooded the U.S. market, Reuters reported on Wednesday.

South Korea’s Hanwha Qcells asked the administration to lift the ban to protect a pledged $2.5 billion expansion of its U.S. solar manufacturing presence against competition from cheaper Asian-made products.

Biden aides said their administration’s policies differed from Trump’s in key respects, including being narrowly targeted to specific industries and products – which could lower the odds of strong retaliation by China and other foreign governments.

The steel and aluminum proposal, for instance, would only target $1 billion in goods versus the hundreds of billions implicated by Trump’s broader tariffs, a senior administration official said.

Strong U.S. policy against China is one of the rare issues that has strong bipartisan support across the country.

“Everybody’s anti-China these days and it’s reflected in public opinion,” said Bill Reinsch, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

(Reporting By Jarrett Renshaw; additional reporting by Jeff Mason; editing by Trevor Hunnicutt and Deepa Babington)