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moscow — A Russian court Monday gave a life sentence to a man convicted in a car bombing that seriously wounded nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin.

Prosecutors said the May 2023 bombing in the Nizhny Novogorod region was conducted at the direction of Ukraine’s security services. Prilepin was seriously injured, and his driver died in the bombing.

The convicted defendant, Alexander Permyakov, is from Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region and once fought with the Russian-backed separatists there, news reports said. 

Prilepin was known for his vehement defense of both the Russia-backed eastern Ukraine rebels who rose up in 2014, and of Russia’s fighting in Ukraine that began in February 2022.

Since Russia sent troops into Ukraine, two prominent nationalist figures have been killed. Darya Dugina, a commentator on Russian TV channels and the daughter of Kremlin-linked ideologue Alexander Dugin, died in an August 2022 car bombing that investigators suspected was aimed at her father.

Vladlen Tatarsky, a well-known military blogger, died in April 2023, when a statue given to him at a party in St. Petersburg exploded. Russian political activist Darya Trepova was convicted in the case and sentenced to 27 years behind bars. She said she was following orders from a contact in Ukraine. 
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New York — The union representing U.S. dockworkers has signaled that 45,000 of its members will walk off the job at midnight, kicking off a strike likely to shut down ports across the East and Gulf coasts.

The coming work stoppage threatens to significantly snarl the nation’s supply chain, potentially leading to higher prices and delays in goods reaching households and businesses if it drags on for weeks. That’s because the strike by members of the International Longshoremen’s Association could cause 36 ports — which handle roughly half of the goods shipped into and out of the U.S. — to shutter operations.

ILA confirmed over the weekend that its members would hit the picket lines at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday. In a Monday update, the union blamed the United States Maritime Alliance, which represents the ports, for continuing to “to block the path” toward an agreement before the contract deadline. 

“The Ocean Carriers represented by USMX want to enjoy rich billion-dollar profits that they are making in 2024, while they offer ILA Longshore Workers an unacceptable wage package that we reject,” ILA said in a prepared statement. “ILA longshore workers deserve to be compensated for the important work they do keeping American commerce moving and growing.” 

ILA also accused the shippers of “gouging their customers” with sizeable price increases for containers over recent weeks. The union said that this will result in increased costs for American consumers. 

The Associated Press reached out to a USMX spokesperson for comment. 

If drawn out, the strike would force businesses to pay shippers for delays and cause some goods to arrive late for peak holiday shopping season — potentially impacting delivery of anything from toys or artificial Christmas trees, to cars, coffee and fruit. 

A strike could have an almost immediate impact on supplies of perishable imports like bananas, for example. The ports that could be affected by the strike handle 3.8 million metric tons of bananas each year, or 75% of the nation’s supply, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. 

Americans could also face higher prices as retailers feel the supply squeeze. 

“If the strikes go ahead, they will cause enormous delays across the supply chain, a ripple effect which will no doubt roll into 2025 and cause chaos across the industry,” noted Jay Dhokia, founder of supply chain management and logistics firm Pro3PL. 

Dhokia added that East Coast ports aren’t the only ones at risk for disruption, as concern leading up to the strike has already diverted many shipments out West, adding to route congestion and more pressure on demand. Impacts will also be felt internationally — particularly in places like the United Kingdom, he said, where the U.S. is its largest trading partner. 

ILA members are demanding higher wages and a total ban on the automation of cranes, gates and container-moving trucks used in the loading or unloading of freight. 

The coming strike by the ILA workers — set to impact ports from Maine to Texas — will be the first by the union since 1977. West Coast dockworkers belong to a different union and aren’t involved in the strike. 

If a strike were deemed a danger to U.S. economic health, President Joe Biden could, under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, seek a court order for an 80-day cooling-off period. That would suspend the strike. 

All eyes are on what, if any, action the administration might take — particularly just weeks ahead of a tight presidential election. But Biden has signaled that he will not exercise this power. 

During an exchange with reporters on Sunday, Biden said “no” when asked if he planned to intervene in the potential work stoppage. 

“Because it’s collective bargaining, I don’t believe in Taft-Hartley,” he said. 

At a briefing Monday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated that the administration had never invoked Taft-Hartley “to break a strike and are not considering doing so now.” She added that top officials were still urging both parties to return to the bargaining table and negotiate in good faith.
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Washington — On a quiet May morning, two months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the homepage of Kremlin-owned news website Lenta.ru was flooded with anti-war and anti-government articles. The articles disappeared from the webpage within the hour, but because of the effort of internet archivists, they can still be viewed separately today. 

This is one of many examples of the Russian government’s attacks on free media, one that activists and archivists hope to counter. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, almost all independent media has been banned or blocked, and journalists are frequently imprisoned over trumped-up charges, according to Reporters Without Borders.

To preserve over two decades of independent Russian journalism, exiled journalists and activists teamed up with PEN’s Freedom to Write Center to create the Russian Independent Media Archive, or RIMA.

“There is no freedom to write if there is no freedom to read,” Liesl Gerntholtz, director of PEN’s Freedom to Write Center, told VOA.

Currently, the website houses over 6 million documents from 98 outlets, starting from the year 2000 — when Russian President Vladmir Putin first came to power.

Co-founders Anna Nemzer, Ilia Veniavkin and Serob Khachatryan began the project around the time of the Ukraine invasion. The restrictive anti-war censorship laws that followed threatened press freedom and journalist safety in Russia, Nemzer told VOA.

More than 1,500 journalists fled the country after the invasion and 22 were imprisoned at the end of last year, according to data from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

“I remember thinking: how can we help these people?” Nemzer told VOA. “We couldn’t help them relocate; we couldn’t help them avoid prison if they stayed in Russia, but we thought the least we could do was save archives of their work.”

At the time of the invasion, Nemzer was on a business trip outside of her home in Moscow, and she remains exiled today.

Nemzer hopes the archive will protect work that is or might be “deliberately erased” by the government.

The main audience for the archive is journalists, academics and researchers who may not have access to relevant documents when they write about Russia. Gerntholtz of PEN sees this archive as the “first draft of history,” she told VOA.

But Nemzer also believes she is doing a service for the archived independent journalists, both in and outside Russia, by preserving their work.

PEN’s Freedom to Write Center agreed to help develop the project because of these shared views — the organization sees media archiving as a natural extension of protecting the reporters themselves, Gerntholtz told VOA.

Gerntholtz added that the organization is concerned about Russia’s “crackdown on free expression” that has only intensified after 2022.

“Free expression in Russia has been at risk for a really long time,” Gerntholtz told VOA. “We’ve seen more writers and artists who’ve been jailed for anti-war expression. We’ve seen civilian and professional journalists jailed for their activism journalism.”

She cited the April 2024 arrests of journalists Konstantin Gabov and Sergey Karelin as an example of the Russian government silencing anti-corruption reporting. They were arrested on extremism charges for their work for late Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.

Even before the invasion, a “huge attack” on journalists was already underway, Nemzer told VOA. She saw Russia’s government declare many independent media outlets as undesirable organizations and prosecute her peer journalists under foreign agent charges.

The Kremlin passed the undesirable-organization law in 2015, giving the government the power to shut down foreign and international organizations. However, critics say this law is a way to target government-critical news outlets. More than 175 organizations have been declared undesirable. 

Because of these crackdowns, Nemzer faced many hurdles in archiving decades of material. Mastering the technology to construct the archive to the scale it is today was especially challenging, and it is still a work in progress, she told VOA.

The co-founders collaborated with the world’s largest internet archive, the Wayback Machine, to use the technology to create a special archived collection.

The Wayback Machine archives over a billion URLs a day, according to its director, Mark Graham. RIMA has been able to access their collection efforts to preserve not just written articles, but also video and audio journalism.

“Material published on the web is not permanent or persistent,” Graham told VOA. “The reliability of the access to that information going into the future is uncertain.”

Among the millions of stories archived in RIMA, over 50,000 come from exiled independent news source The Moscow Times.

Since the Ukraine invasion, The Moscow Times and its staff have “faced nothing but challenges,” Alexander Gubsky, longtime publisher of the Times, told VOA. The staff had to relocate from Russia to Amsterdam within two weeks because of the Russian government’s hostile policies toward journalists, according to Gubsky.

“They want to shut us up,” Gubsky said. “We tell the truth, and they cannot allow the truth.”

Preserving the work of targeted individuals and outlets is one of the main reasons why Nemzer of RIMA helped create the archive, she told VOA.

However, Gubsky told VOA that the Times has an archive of their own work on their website, and prefers that curious readers turn their attention there.

He said that while RIMA is an “interesting project,” the Times owns the copyright for all their own articles, and their primary source of income is from licensing and syndication.

Graham of the Wayback Machine told VOA that the organization responds to legitimate requests from rights holders regarding the distribution of their material. He added that archiving public articles falls under fair use.

“RIMA is set up to facilitate a kind of exploration in a way that you simply can’t do if all you have is access to a few individual websites,” Graham said.

As RIMA continues to expand, Nemzer already has her sights set on the future. She hopes to take advantage of evolving artificial intelligence to help sort the archive.

Nemzer also aims to create similar projects for other countries with leadership that suppresses media and has already talked to journalists from Belarus, Afghanistan and Iran. 

“Writers play a particular role in challenging autocracy, in exposing human rights abuses and speaking truth to power,” Gerntholtz said. “And journalists are crucial to challenging powerful people and governments.” 
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west palm beach, florida — Ryan Routh, the 58-year-old man accused of plotting to kill Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at his Florida golf course, pleaded not guilty on Monday to several federal charges.

His lawyer Kristy Militello entered the not guilty plea during a brief arraignment in a West Palm Beach federal courthouse and requested a jury trial.

Wearing a beige prison uniform and shackles on his wrists and ankles, Routh answered “yes, your honor,” when the magistrate judge asked him if he was aware of the charges against him.

Routh was arrested on September 15 after a Secret Service agent saw the barrel of a rifle poking out from brush on the perimeter of the West Palm Beach golf course where Trump was playing a round.

The agent opened fire and Routh, who fled in a vehicle, was arrested shortly later.

He has been charged with attempted assassination of a major presidential candidate, assaulting a federal officer and firearms offenses.

A federal judge ruled last week that Routh, identified as a Hawaii resident, should remain in custody.

FBI analysis of Routh’s phone showed he had been in Florida since August 18, and his devices were located multiple times between that date and September 15 near Trump’s golf course and his Mar-a-Lago residence, according to prosecutors.

Before being spotted by the Secret Service agent, Routh spent nearly 12 hours in the vicinity of the Trump International Golf Club, according to his phone location data.

Court documents said Routh allegedly dropped off a box at an unidentified person’s home several months before the attempted assassination containing various letters.

One letter, addressed to “The World,” allegedly said: “This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I am so sorry I failed you.”

“I tried my best and gave it all the gumption I could muster,” it said. “It is up to you now to finish the job; and I will offer $150,000 to whomever can complete the job.”

It was the second assassination attempt on Trump this summer. The first took place on July 13 at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when a gunman opened fire on the former president, killing one person and wounding Trump in the ear.

The candidate was otherwise unharmed, and the gunman was killed at the scene.

The Routh case has been assigned at random to federal District Judge Aileen Cannon — a Trump appointee who dismissed criminal proceedings against the former president earlier this year over his retention of top-secret documents at his private residence.
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Washington — The U.S. is sending an additional “few thousand” troops to the Middle East to bolster security and to be prepared to defend Israel if necessary, the Pentagon said Monday.

The increased presence will come from multiple fighter jet squadrons, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters.

It follows recent strikes in Lebanon and the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, a significant escalation in the war in the Middle East, this time between Israel and Hezbollah.

The additional force includes squadrons of F-15E Strike Eagle, F-16, A-10 and F-22 fighter jets and the personnel needed to support them. The jets were supposed to rotate in and replace the squadrons already there. Instead, both the existing and new squadrons will remain in place to double the airpower on hand.

On Sunday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also announced that he was temporarily extending the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group and its associated squadrons in the region.

The jets are not there to assist in an evacuation, Singh said, “they are there for the protection of U.S. forces.”
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Budapest — Ukraine’s new foreign minister held a “frank” conversation with his Hungarian counterpart on “difficult issues” on Monday, against a backdrop of a frosty relationship between the neighboring countries.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been the only EU leader to maintain close ties with the Kremlin since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

He has repeatedly stalled efforts to punish Moscow and to aid war-torn Ukraine in its fight against the invading forces.

Budapest refuses to approve the release of more than $7.25 billion to Kyiv, complaining about discriminatory measures against Hungarian companies.

“We had a very frank one-on-one conversation discussing difficult issues, among other things,” Andriy Sybiga told reporters after a meeting with Hungary’s top diplomat, Peter Szijjarto, in Budapest.

The negotiations between the two ministers “lasted about an hour, twice as long as planned,” according to a statement from the Ukrainian ministry.

Speaking at a press conference, Sybiga welcomed Orban’s first visit to Kyiv at the beginning of July and called for “the development of bilateral relations,” saying he could “count on Budapest’s support” in its EU integration process.

“Our meeting today has convinced me that … there is a mutual and common will to develop neighborly relations,” Szijjarto added.

But Hungary’s foreign minister also urged Kyiv to refrain from “unilateral, sudden steps” that could “pose a challenge” to the central European country’s energy supply.

In July, Budapest accused Kyiv of threatening its energy security by barring Russian energy giant Lukoil from using the Ukrainian section of the Druzhba pipeline.

Earlier this month, Hungarian energy company MOL made a deal guaranteeing the supply of Russian oil.

The two ministers also agreed to accelerate efforts by an intergovernmental working group set up to address a long-running feud over minority rights in Transcarpathia, a western Ukrainian region home to an ethnic Hungarian community. 
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Since 2015, one of America’s oldest eye clinics, Wills Eye Hospital, has been helping
wounded Ukrainian soldiers with severe head or face injuries get their vision back. For one surgeon with Ukrainian roots, the work is personal. Iryna Solomko has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. VOA footage by Pavlo Terekhov.
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Atlanta, Georgia — When he returned to Plains, Georgia, in 1981, President Jimmy Carter was defeated — rejected by voters in a landslide election to Republican Ronald Reagan. The pouring rain at Carter’s welcome home reception reflected his gloomy mood and that of the country.

“In office, he was a political failure. He lost overwhelming[ly] to Ronald Reagan. But he was a substantive and visionary success,” says author and historian Jonathan Alter, who recognizes what many know Carter for today — humanitarian work with his Carter Center, “waging peace, fighting disease and building hope” around the world that led to Jimmy Carter receiving the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.

“He’s done terrific work supervising elections in more than 100 countries. But former presidents don’t have as much power as presidents, not nearly as much, and the list of his accomplishments as president that were ignored, minimized, or forgotten entirely was very long,” said Alter.

The Iran hostage crisis, rising inflation and oil embargoes of the 1970s doomed Carter’s White House tenure, casting a long shadow over his legacy. However, the onetime peanut farmer, Georgia governor, president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s 100th birthday milestone comes as authors and historians reevaluate his failures and accomplishments as a one-term U.S. president.

Alter’s biography, “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life,” is among several that conclude his four years in the White House were anything but a failure.

“Not just famously [the] Camp David accords and opening relations with China,” Alter told VOA in an interview in August at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, “but a long string of legislative accomplishments on the environment and many other issues that actually exceed the legislative accomplishments of both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.”

Carter signed the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act protecting more than 100 million acres — including land, national parks, refuges, monuments, forests and conservation areas — which Alter says is now considered one of the most important pieces of environmental legislation ever passed.

“The story I tell in my book is a surprising one,” says Alter. “It’s of somebody who worked hard in ways that actually bore fruit.”

“I think we’ll remember President Carter as a president who served in very enormously difficult times who had to deal with circumstances that were far beyond his control,” says Emory University’s first “Jimmy Carter Professor of History” Joseph Crespino. Carter routinely visited with Crespino and his students in Atlanta to discuss the good and bad decisions he made while president.

“Putting human rights front and center in American foreign policy — no president had done that in the way that Jimmy Carter had,” Crespino told VOA during a recent interview at his office on campus at Emory University. “It was important in shifting the balance of power in the Cold War, but it was also an important moment in the aftermath of the Vietnam War to reassert once again America’s moral responsibilities in the world.”

Crespino says some of Carter’s overlooked domestic accomplishments include reorganizing the federal government and deregulation of the airline, trucking and beer industries. “We oftentimes associate a kind of freeing up of the free enterprise economy with the conservative turn that came in with Ronald Reagan, when in fact Jimmy Carter before Reagan was already doing a lot of deregulatory work in his presidency in recognizing the kind of limits of government oversight of these private industries.”

Members of Carter’s Cabinet, including former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young, are grateful his long life has allowed him to witness the longer lens of history reflect more positively on his legacy.

“There’s no place in the world I know where people don’t have some good things to say about him,” Young told VOA as he spoke with reporters September 17 at Carter’s 100th birthday concert at the Fox theater in Atlanta. “Whether he succeeded or not … he gave it as good a try and came as far as the world would let him go.”

A world that continues to benefit from the Carter Center’s work, including fighting diseases including Guinea worm, which is down to a few cases in Africa and could become only the second disease ever eradicated.
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VIENNA — Picknicking with friends in the park after prayers at a Vienna mosque, Saima Arab, a 20-year-old pedicurist originally from Afghanistan, is thankful for her freedoms in Austria.

“We could never do this in Afghanistan, never cook, go out, just sit in public like this,” said Arab, who came to Austria in 2017. “Home is like a prison there.”

Many Austrians, however, are worried about their country’s ability to integrate migrants, especially Muslims, and their desire for stricter immigration laws was a key issue in Sunday’s election which gave victory to the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) for the first time.

Both the FPO and the runner-up, the ruling conservative Austrian People’s Party (OVP), ran on pledges to tighten asylum laws and crack down on illegal immigration.

The FPO victory added to critics’ concerns about the rise of the far right in Europe after electoral gains in recent months by the Alternative for Germany and the National Rally in France.

“Whatever the government looks like after the election, I’m certain it’ll work towards toughening up asylum and immigration law,” Professor Walter Obwexer, an adviser to the government on migration law, said before the vote.

Arab, who also spoke to Reuters in an interview conducted before the election, said she did not like to talk about politics but hoped she too would vote in Austria one day.

The number of people in Austria born abroad or whose parents were jumped by more than a third between 2015 and last year, and now account for around 27% of the population of about 9 million.

Together the FPO and the OVP won over 55% of the vote and one of the two is almost certain to lead the next government, feeding expectations that Austria, like neighboring Germany and Hungary, and France, will adopt tougher rules.

Opinion polls showed immigration and inflation were key voter concerns. Such is the worry that Austria is taking in migrants faster than it can integrate them that even some Austrians of Muslim origin feel Austria is stretched.

“I wonder if the system is close to collapse,” said Mehmet Ozay, a Turkish-born Austrian FPO supporter, arguing there were too many asylum seekers not contributing to state coffers.

Taylor Swift concert

The FPO has combined its tough talk on immigration with criticism of Islam.

The issue took center stage last month when police arrested a teenager with North Macedonian roots on suspicion of masterminding a failed Islamic State-inspired attack on a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna.

Running on the campaign slogan “Fortress Austria,” the FPO promoted “remigration,” including returning asylum seekers to their countries of origin, especially if they fail to integrate, and limiting asylum rights.

That has unsettled some who feel the party, which dropped some of its more polarizing slogans in the campaign, is demonizing foreigners.

The FPO, which did not reply to a request for comment, denies this. It says asylum seekers are a drain on state resources, and draws attention to crimes some of them commit.

“The FPO routinely talk about refugees and asylum seekers as rapists and thieves and drug dealers,” said Hedy, a social worker and Austrian citizen who arrived as a refugee from Afghanistan. He declined to give his last name.

“Something very similar happened to the Jews in Vienna before the Second World War,” he said, adding that the FPO, which wants to ban “political Islam,” would embolden xenophobes.

The FPO, whose first leader was a former Nazi lawmaker, has sought to distance itself from its past, and in 2019 helped pass a law allowing foreign descendants of Austrian victims of National Socialism to acquire Austrian citizenship.

This month FPO leader Herbert Kickl called Adolf Hitler the “biggest mass murderer in human history,” as he roundly denounced the Nazi dictator’s legacy in a television debate.

Still, Alon Ishay, head of the Austrian Association of Jewish Students, said he saw some parallels between targeting of Jews in the early Nazi era and attitudes to Muslims now.

“There are rhetorical similarities when you talk about deportation, when you talk about taking people’s citizenship away,” he said, also speaking before Sunday’s election.

FPO-backer Ozay disagreed, saying that Muslims such as himself were free to do as they liked in Austria.

“If there were daily attacks by FPO voters I would understand the fear that things would get even more extreme if Kickl came to power,” he said. “But that’s not how it is. It’s just fear stirred up by the other parties.”
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During any campaign, it is crucial that voters and candidates have a way to measure the state of public opinion. Polling — surveying representative samples of the electorate — allows everyone to understand and adapt to prevailing sentiments. But it has its flaws.
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Jimmy Carter is the first U.S. president to reach the age of 100. VOA’s Kane Farabaugh has more from Georgia on the historic milestone.
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HELSINKI — Norway may put a fence along part or all the 198-kilometer (123-mile) border it shares with Russia, a minister said, a move inspired by a similar project in its Nordic neighbor Finland.

“A border fence is very interesting, not only because it can act as a deterrent but also because it contains sensors and technology that allow you to detect if people are moving close to the border,” Justice Minister Emilie Enger Mehl said in an interview with the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK published late Saturday.

She said the Norwegian government is currently looking at “several measures” to beef up security on the border with Russia in the Arctic north, such as fencing, increasing the number of border staff or stepping up monitoring.

The Storskog border station, which has witnessed only a handful of illegal border crossing attempts in the past few years, is the only official crossing point into Norway from Russia.

Should the security situation in the delicate Arctic area worsen, the Norwegian government is ready to close the border on short notice, said Enger Mehl, who visited neighboring Finland this summer to learn about how the entire 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) Finnish-Russian land border was closed.

The Finnish government was prompted to close all crossing points from Russia to Finland in late 2023 after more than 1,300 third-country migrants without proper documentation or visas — an unusually high number — entered the country in three months, just months after the nation became a member of NATO.

To prevent Moscow using migrants in what the Finnish government calls Russia’s “hybrid warfare,” Helsinki is currently building fences with a total length of up to 200 kilometers (124 miles) in separate sections along the border zone that makes up part of NATO’s northern flank and serves as the European Union’s external border.

Finnish border officials say fences equipped with top-notch surveillance equipment — to be located mostly around crossing points — are needed to better monitor and control any migrants attempting to cross over from Russia and give officials time to react.

Inspired by Finland’s project, Enger Mehl said that such a fence could also be a good idea for Norway. According to NRK, her statement was supported by police chief Ellen Katrine Hætta in Norway’s northern Finnmark county.

“It’s a measure that may become relevant on all or part of the border” between Norway and Russia, Enger Mehl said.

The Storskog border station is currently surrounded by a 200-meter (660-foot) -long and 3.5-meter (12-foot) -high fence erected in 2016 after some 5,000 migrants and asylum-seekers had crossed over from Russia to Norway a year earlier.

Norway, a nation of 5.6 million, is a NATO member but isn’t part of the European Union. However, it belongs to the EU’s Schengen area, whose participants have abolished border controls at their mutual borders, guaranteeing free movement of citizens.
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Los Angeles — Kris Kristofferson, a Rhodes scholar with a deft writing style and rough charisma who became a country music superstar and A-list Hollywood actor, has died.

Kristofferson died at his home in Maui, Hawaii on Saturday, family spokesperson Ebie McFarland said in an email. He was 88.

McFarland said Kristofferson died peacefully, surrounded by his family. No cause was given. He was 88.

Starting in the late 1960s, the Brownsville, Texas native wrote such classics standards as “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” “For the Good Times” and “Me and Bobby McGee.” Kristofferson was a singer himself, but many of his songs were best known as performed by others, whether Ray Price crooning “For the Good Times” or Janis Joplin belting out “Me and Bobby McGee.”

Kristofferson, who could recite William Blake from memory, wove intricate folk music lyrics about loneliness and tender romance into popular country music. With his long hair and bell-bottomed slacks and counterculture songs influenced by Bob Dylan, he represented a new breed of country songwriters along with such peers as Willie Nelson, John Prine and Tom T. Hall.

“There’s no better songwriter alive than Kris Kristofferson,” Nelson said during a November 2009 award ceremony for Kristofferson held by BMI. “Everything he writes is a standard and we’re all just going to have to live with that.”

As an actor, he played the leading man opposite Barbara Streisand and Ellen Burstyn, but also had a fondness for shoot-out Westerns and cowboy dramas.

He was a Golden Gloves boxer and football player in college, received a master’s degree in English from Merton College at the University of Oxford in England and turned down an appointment to teach at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, to pursue songwriting in Nashville. Hoping to break into the industry, he worked as a part-time janitor at Columbia Records’ Music Row studio in 1966 when Dylan recorded tracks for the seminal “Blonde on Blonde” double album.

At times, the legend of Kristofferson was larger than real life. Johnny Cash liked to tell a mostly exaggerated story of how Kristofferson, a former U.S. Army pilot, landed a helicopter on Cash’s lawn to give him a tape of “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” with a beer in one hand. Over the years in interviews, Kristofferson said with all respect to Cash, while he did land a helicopter at Cash’s house, the ‘man in black’ wasn’t even home at the time, the demo tape was a song that no one ever actually cut, and he certainly couldn’t fly a helicopter holding a beer.

In a 2006 interview with The Associated Press, he said he might not have had a career without Cash.

“Shaking his hand when I was still in the Army backstage at the Grand Ole Opry was the moment I’d decided I’d come back,” Kristofferson said. “It was electric. He kind of took me under his wing before he cut any of my songs. He cut my first record that was record of the year. He put me on stage the first time.”

One of his most recorded songs, “Me and Bobby McGee,” was written based on a recommendation from Monument Records founder Fred Foster. Foster had a song title in his head called “Me and Bobby McKee,” named after a female secretary in his building. Kristofferson said in an interview in the magazine, Performing Songwriter, that he was inspired to write the lyrics about a man and woman on the road together after watching the Frederico Fellini film, “La Strada.”

Joplin, who had a close relationship with Kristofferson, changed the lyrics to make Bobby McGee a man and cut her version just days before she died in 1970 from a drug overdose. The recording became a posthumous No. 1 hit for Joplin.

Hits that Kristofferson recorded include “Why Me,” “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do),” “Watch Closely Now,” “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” “A Song I’d Like to Sing” and “Jesus Was a Capricorn.”

In 1973, he married fellow songwriter Rita Coolidge and together they had a successful duet career that earned them two Grammy awards. They divorced in 1980.
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Los Angeles — Vice President Kamala Harris is set to rally in Las Vegas on Sunday night as both she and Republican Donald Trump continue to make frequent trips to Nevada, looking to gain momentum in the swing state as Election Day nears.

The rally is part of Harris’ latest West Coast swing, which included making her first trip to the U.S.-Mexico border since taking over for President Joe Biden atop the Democratic presidential ticket. On Friday, the vice president walked alongside a towering, rust-colored border wall fitted with barbed wire in Douglas, Arizona, and met with federal authorities.

She attended a San Francisco fundraiser Saturday and had plans for a Sunday event in Los Angeles before heading to Nevada, with a return to Washington set for Monday night.

“This race is as close as it could possibly be,” she said Saturday to a raucous crowd of donors. “This is a margin-of-error race.”

Harris said even if there is enthusiasm, she’s running like an underdog. And she invited people to “join our team in battleground states” to help get voters to the polls — even if it’s Californians making calls from home.

On Sunday, former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake became the latest prominent Republican to endorse Harris and Walz. He credited them with a “fine character and love of country” and said he wants a president who does not treat political adversaries as enemies or try to subvert the will of voters.

Flake, a longtime critic of the former president, joins a list of anti-Trump Republicans who have said they will vote for the Democratic ticket, not just refrain from voting for Trump. Among them is Dick Cheney, the deeply conservative former vice president, and his daughter, Liz.

On Sunday, Maryland Senate candidate Larry Hogan, a former Republican governor and a sharp critic of Trump, said Harris has yet to earn his vote, though Trump won’t get it.

In Nevada, all voters automatically receive ballots by mail unless they opt out — a pandemic-era change that was set in state law. That means most ballots could start going out in a matter of weeks, well before Election Day on Nov. 5.

Harris plans to be back in Las Vegas on Oct. 10 for a town hall with Hispanic voters. Both she and Republican rival Donald Trump have campaigned frequently in the city, highlighting the critical role that Nevada, and its mere six votes in the Electoral College, could play in deciding an election expected to be exceedingly close.

Trump held his own Las Vegas rally on Sept. 13 at the Expo World Market Center, where Harris is speaking Sunday. Her campaign has frequently scheduled events in the same venue where her opponent previously spoke, including in Milwaukee, Atlanta and suburban Phoenix. During his Las Vegas event, the former president singled out people crossing into the U.S. illegally, saying Harris “would be the president of invasion.”

During a campaign stop in the city in June, Trump promised to eliminate taxes on tips received by waiters, hotel workers and thousands of other service industry employees. Harris used her own Las Vegas rally in August to make the same promise.

Fully doing away with federal taxes on tips would probably require an act from Congress. Still, Nevada’s Culinary Union, which represents 60,000 hospitality workers in Las Vegas and Reno, has endorsed Harris.

Ted Pappageorge, the culinary union’s secretary-treasurer, said the difference between the dueling no-taxes-on-tips proposals is that Harris has also pledged to tackle what his union calls “sub-minimum wage,” where employers pay service industry workers small salaries and meet minimum wage thresholds by expecting employees to supplement those with tips.

Harris has no public schedule for Tuesday, when her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, squares off against Republican Ohio Sen. JD Vance for the first and only vice presidential debate of the campaign. But Harris and Walz will campaign jointly on Wednesday, making a bus tour with various stops through central Pennsylvania.

The campaign says that during that swing, both will emphasize plans to energize U.S. manufacturing, including by using tax credits to encourage steel production and overhaul federal permitting systems to increase American construction.
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Moscow — Russia announced Sunday that Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin will meet Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in Tehran on Monday.

The announcement came as Russia has condemned Israel’s “political murder” of Iran-backed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut.

Mishustin will hold talks with Pezeshkian and First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref, the government statement said.

“It is planned to discuss the full range of Russian-Iranian cooperation in the trade and economic and cultural and humanitarian spheres,” Russia said.  

The talks will focus on “carrying out large joint projects in fields involving transport energy, industry and agriculture,” the statement added.  

Western governments have accused Iran of supplying both drones and missiles to Moscow for its war on Ukraine, a charge Tehran has repeatedly denied.

Pezeshkian is set to hold talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a visit to Russia next month to attend the BRICS summit.

After leaving Iran, Russian Prime Minister Mishustin will attend a meeting in Armenia on Tuesday of the Eurasian Economic Forum, the government said Sunday, referring to a body within the framework of a grouping of former Soviet states.

The statement said the meeting would discuss digitalization, market operations and cooperation within the Eurasian Economic Union, made up of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia.

Russia often presents the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) as an alternative to Western political and economic groupings.
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Lisbon — Thousands of protesters waving Portuguese flags and roaring the national anthem rallied in Lisbon on Sunday to express their anger at “illegal” and “uncontrolled” immigration.

The demonstrators marched behind banners demanding the “end of mass immigration” and the expulsion of immigrants guilty of crimes, at the protest called by the far-right Chega party, the country’s third-largest political force.

Immigration is “very good” but “rules are needed,” said Cecilia Guimaraes, a 66-year-old teacher whose parents emigrated to Canada. 

“We emigrated legally. That’s how it should happen in a developed country,” she told AFP, complaining of a rise in insecurity she fears is linked to foreign arrivals.

Chega lawmaker Rui Afonso said Portugal and other European countries were unable to control entries, which generated a “feeling of insecurity” because “we don’t know their past.”

Afonso added that European nations were ill-equipped to “decently” take in immigrants who were sometimes “forced to live on the street and fall into crime.”

Among the protesters was Chega leader Andre Ventura, whose party more than quadrupled its seats at this year’s election.

Tensions surfaced as the market approached working-class neighborhoods with large immigrant populations. Some protesters engaged in a standoff with pro-immigration activists in favor of a Portugal open to foreigners.

Posters reading “No Portugal without immigrants” also covered walls and bus stops along the route of the march.

The number of foreigners living in Portugal jumped by 33.6 percent last year to reach more than one million, about one-tenth of the total population, according to the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum.

The center-right government toughened migration policy in June. It scrapped a measure allowing immigrants to apply for regularization if they could prove they had been working for at least one year even if they had entered the country illegally. 
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Berlin — A man has been arrested after allegedly setting two fires in the western German city of Essen that left 30 people injured and driving a van into two shops, authorities said Sunday. 

Emergency services were alerted to two fires in residential buildings in quick succession shortly after 5 p.m. Saturday, police said. The injured people included eight children who were seriously hurt, and two of them were in a life-threatening condition after inhaling smoke. 

Shortly after the fires broke out, a van drove into two shops in the city, causing damage to property but no injuries. The suspect then allegedly threatened people with weapons, but several men managed to push him back with shovels and poles and hold him until police arrived. 

Police said the suspect was a 41-year-old Essen resident with Syrian citizenship. They said the man’s motive appeared to be that his wife had left him, and he targeted houses and shops where people who supported her lived. 

The fire service said that, when it arrived at the scene of the first blaze, smoke was billowing from the entrance of the building and people were calling for help from windows. Neighbors had put up ladders to help people escape, but they weren’t long enough to reach the upper floors. 

The suspect hasn’t commented so far on what happened Saturday but was previously known to authorities for threats and damage to property, police said. Prosecutors were seeking to have him kept in custody on suspicion of arson and attempted murder. 
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KYIV — More than 100 Ukrainian drones were shot down over Russia Sunday, officials said, sparking a wildfire and setting an apartment block alight in one of the largest barrages seen over Russian skies since Moscow invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Russia’s Ministry of Defense reported that it had shot down 125 drones overnight across seven regions. The southwestern region of Volgograd came under particularly heavy fire, with 67 Ukrainian drones reportedly downed by Russian air defenses.

Seventeen drones were also seen over Russia’s Voronezh region, where falling debris damaged an apartment block and a private home, said local governor Aleksandr Gusev. Images on social media showed flames rising from the windows of the top floor of a high-rise building. No casualties were reported.

A further 18 drones were reported over Russia’s Rostov region, where falling debris sparked a wildfire, said Gov. Vasily Golubev.

He said that the fire did not pose a threat to populated areas, but that emergency services were fighting to extinguish the blaze, which had engulfed 20 hectares (49.4 acres) of forest.

Meanwhile, 13 civilians were injured in an overnight barrage on the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia Sunday after Ukrainian military leaders warned that Moscow could be preparing for a new military offensive in the country’s south.

The city was targeted by Russian guide bombs in 10 separate attacks that damaged a high-rise building and several residential homes, regional governor Ivan Fedorov wrote on his official Telegram channel. More people could still be trapped beneath the rubble, he said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also said that the Zaporizhzhia attack had damaged the city’s transport links. “Today, Russia struck Zaporizhzhia with aerial bombs. Ordinary residential buildings were damaged and the entrance of one building was destroyed. The city’s infrastructure and railway were also damaged,” Zelenskyy said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

“In total, 13 people were injured, and two were rescued from under the rubble. I thank all the emergency services for their rapid response and providing necessary assistance. The rubble clearing is still ongoing.”

The attacks come after the Ukrainian military warned Saturday that Russian forces may be preparing for offensive operations in the wider Zaporizhzhia region. Vladyslav Voloshyn, spokesperson for Ukraine’s southern military command, said that Russia was amassing personnel in this direction.

Ukraine’s air force also reported that 22 Russian drones were launched over the country overnight. It said that 15 were shot down in Ukraine’s Sumy, Vinnytsia, Mykolaiv, and Odesa regions, and that five more were destroyed using electronic defenses. The fate of the remaining two drones was not specified.
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Washington — U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has authorized the military to reinforce its presence in the Middle East with “defensive” air-support capabilities and put other forces on a heightened readiness status, the Pentagon said on Sunday.

“(Austin) increased the readiness of additional U.S. forces to deploy, elevating our preparedness to respond to various contingencies,” Pentagon spokesman Air Force Major General Patrick Ryder said in a statement.  

The statement did not detail what new aircraft would be deploying to the region. 

“Secretary Austin made clear that should Iran, its partners, or its proxies use this moment to target American personnel or interests in the region, the United States will take every necessary measure to defend our people,” Ryder added. 
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Puerto de la Estaca, Spain — Rescue teams on Sunday resumed searching for at least 48 migrants who went messing the day before when their boat overturned just as it was being rescued off Spain’s Canary Islands, killing at least nine people.

Hopes of finding survivors were slim as sea rescue teams searched the waters off El Hierro, an island in the Atlantic archipelago.

It is the latest in a series of such disasters off the coast of Africa.

“The search operation is resuming,” Spain’s maritime rescue organisation told AFP.

The 48 are “presumed dead,” Canaries regional president Fernando Clavijo told journalists on Saturday night.

More bodies will likely appear “over the next two, three days,” washed up by the current, he added.

Twenty-seven migrants were rescued and nine bodies recovered after the boat, which had set out from Nouadhibou in Mauritania, some 800 kilometers (nearly 500 miles) away, overturned off El Hierro.

The tragedy hit when rescuers arrived to assist the migrants after they themselves called emergency services, Spanish officials said.

Migrants rushed to one side of the precarious boat, causing it to tip.

The migrants “had gone two days without food or water”, which may have fueled their panic, Anselmo Pestana, head of the Canary Islands prefecture, told journalists in the port of La Estaca.

Spanish government sources said the boat may have been carrying up to 90 people, instead of 84 as originally announced, which could put the number of missing at more than 50.

This disaster follows the death of 39 migrants in early September when their boat sank off Senegal while attempting a similar crossing to the Canaries, from where migrants hope to reach mainland Europe.

Thousands of migrants have died in recent years setting off from west Africa to reach Europe via the Atlantic aboard overcrowded and often dilapidated boats.

 
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