Category: News

The Oklahoma Legislature gave final approval on Thursday to a bill that prohibits nearly all abortions starting at fertilization, which would make it the nation’s strictest abortion law.

The bill is modeled on one that took effect in Texas in September, which has relied on civilian instead of criminal enforcement to work around court challenges. But it goes further than the Texas law, which bans abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy.

The bill subjects abortion providers and anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion to civil suits from private individuals. It would take effect immediately upon signature by Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican who has pledged to make his state the most anti-abortion in the nation.

The Republican-led Legislature has assisted him, passing ban upon ban in an attempt to outlaw abortion entirely. Together, they have put Oklahoma at the head of the pack of Republican-led states rushing to pass laws that restrict or prohibit abortion in anticipation that the Supreme Court is soon likely to overturn Roe v. Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion.

A leaked memo written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. — along with oral arguments in the case at hand, a Mississippi law that bans the procedure after 15 weeks of pregnancy — indicated that the court was prepared to do so.

If signed by the governor, the Oklahoma bill would cut off another option for Texas women who had been flooding across the state border to seek legal procedures, and it seeks to punish even those from out of state who assist Oklahoma women in getting abortions.

Oklahoma already has a trigger ban that would immediately ban abortion if the court overturns Roe, as well as a ban on abortion that has remained on the books since before the Roe decision in 1973. Two weeks ago, just after the leak of the memo, Mr. Stitt signed a six-week ban closely modeled on the Texas legislation. The previous month he had signed one that will take effect in late August, outlawing abortion entirely except to save the life of the mother.

The bill passed on Thursday attempts to combine two approaches: banning abortion entirely and using civilian enforcement. The U.S. Supreme Court and the Texas Supreme Court both declined to block the Texas law because it relies on civilian rather than the state enforcement.

The Oklahoma bill would allow civilian lawsuits against anyone who performs or induces an abortion as well as those who knowingly “aid or abet” a woman who gets an abortion. That includes those who help pay for them, which could implicate people across the country who have been donating to charitable organizations that help women in restrictive states get abortions elsewhere.

Those who sue successfully would be given awards of at least $10,000, and compensatory damages including for “emotional distress.” The bill exempts women who get abortions from lawsuits, which has been a red line that legislatures have been unwilling to cross. It does not apply to abortions necessary to “save the life of the unborn child” or the life of the mother “in a medical emergency.” It also allows abortion if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, as long as that crime has been reported to law enforcement.

It defines an unborn child as “a human fetus or embryo in any stage of gestation from fertilization until birth.” Anti-abortion groups, believing abortion to be murder, have tried unsuccessfully since the Roe decision to pass federal or state legislation defining life as beginning at fertilization. Abortion rights supporters have argued that this would effectively ban contraceptive methods that prevent implantation, such as an intrauterine device, but the Oklahoma bill specifies that it does not apply to contraception.

Asked on “Fox News Sunday” how he would help women who carried out their pregnancies despite financial or other challenges that would make it difficult to raise a child, Mr. Stitt blamed the “socialist democrat left” for attempting to abort poor children.

“We believe that God has a special plan for every single life and every single child, and we want everybody to have the same opportunities in Oklahoma, and aborting a child is not the right answer,” he said.

BUDAPEST — Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary has fiercely resisted a proposed European embargo of Russian oil, saying it would devastate his country’s economy. Another potential casualty of such a ban would be something close to his heart: a financial gravy train for culture warriors in Europe and in the United States that has been fueled by Hungary’s profits from Russian crude.

Gorged with cash thanks to cheap supplies of Russian oil and gas, the Hungarian energy conglomerate MOL — one of the Central European nation’s biggest and most profitable companies — last month announced it would pay dividends of $652 million to its shareholders.

More than $65 million of that will go to a privately managed education foundation that last year hosted the Fox News host Tucker Carlson at a festival of right-wing pundits in Hungary. It has also provided stipends and fellowships to conservative Americans and Europeans looking for a safe haven from what they bemoan as the spread of “cancel culture” back home.

Some of them featured this week at the first Hungarian edition of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, a gathering of the right wing of American politics. The event, attended by Mr. Orban, opened in Budapest on Thursday under the slogan “God, Homeland, Family.”

Hungary has for years served as a beacon for foreign conservatives who admire Mr. Orban’s hostility to immigrants, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, George Soros and liberals in general. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, however, has put severe strain on that role, stirring anger among some conservatives about Mr. Orban’s cozying up to the Kremlin.

It has also threatened to strain Mr. Orban’s pact with voters, who gave his Fidesz party a landslide victory in elections last month on the promise that, thanks to cheap energy from Russia, gas and utility prices would not skyrocket as has happened elsewhere in Europe.

A steady supply of Russian energy has become such a central part of Mr. Orban’s economic and political model that ending it “is a red line for him,” said Andras Biro-Nagy, founder and director of Policy Solutions, a Budapest research group. “Russian oil and gas are absolutely vital to his whole scheme.”

This dependence has alarmed even some of his foreign fans who have taken up paid positions at Mathias Corvinus Collegium, known as M.C.C., the education foundation that benefits from the Hungarian energy company’s business with Russia. The foundation holds a 10 percent stake in MOL, which relies heavily on deliveries of Russian oil to feed its main refinery southwest of Budapest and another one it owns in Slovakia.

“I am very unhappy about the Hungarian position vis-à-vis Russia broadly speaking, and specifically about energy,” said Daniel Pipes, a conservative American scholar awarded a paid “senior fellowship” by the foundation. “At the same time, I am very positive about the Hungarian stance on immigration,” he said. “So I’m ambivalent. I dislike the Russia policy and I do like the immigration policy.”

Also unhappy is Poland, whose governing party, Law and Justice, shares Mr. Orban’s hostility to liberals but has been infuriated by his dogged resistance to efforts by the European Union to ban Russian oil, his refusal to let arms destined for Ukraine pass through Hungary and his failure to condemn Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.

Worried that the Hungarian energy company is too beholden to Russia, the Polish Senate passed a resolution in March blocking a deal with Poland’s state-owned energy company that would have allowed MOL to acquire more than 400 Polish gas stations.

Bogdan Borusewicz, the opposition senator who initiated the move, said in an interview in Gdansk, the site of a big Polish refinery, that the war in Ukraine had made it dangerous to let a Hungarian company dependent on Russia into his country’s market.

“You could debate about this before the war,” he said, “but now it is impossible to have any illusions” about the loyalties of Mr. Orban, whom he described as “Putin’s most important ally in the E.U.” For the MOL conglomerate, he said, “cooperation with Russia is a crucial part of its business and even its survival.”

MOL declined interview requests but, in public statements, has stressed the difficulty and expense of shifting to non-Russian oil. Its Danube Refinery, south of Budapest, invested heavily over eight years to accommodate crude from other countries, which is generally more expensive, but it still depends on Russia for 65 percent of its needs.

Reporting a big jump in profits, the Hungarian company warned in its annual financial report this spring that it was exposed to Russia through a minority stake in a small Russian oil company, BaiTex, and by “the physical flow of crude oil through the transportation system in Russia and Ukraine.” That flow, it noted, had not “to date” been restricted.

Since then, the executive arm of the European Union has sought to cut it off entirely.

Doing that, said Tamas Pletser, an oil and gas analyst with Este Bank in Budapest, would be a severe blow. MOL, he said, has profited until now from a widening price difference between European Brent and the cheaper Russian crude.

“They make an additional $10 million per day on this current situation, which is based on the Russian supply and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Mr. Pletser said.

Many millions of dollars have gone to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium and two other nominally independent foundations, which together hold 30.49 percent of the energy company and are its biggest shareholders. The shares used to be held by the state, but Mr. Orban two years ago gifted them, along with other valuable assets, to the foundations as part of what he said was an effort to overhaul education but which critics called legalized theft. The chairman of M.C.C. is Balazs Orban, who is also the prime minister’s political director (though not a relation).

Zoltan Szalai, the foundation’s general director, acknowledged in an interview, “This year, MOL has been very good to us.” The dividend money M.C.C. received this year from MOL is more than double its annual budget.

Mr. Szalai said his foundation should be able to cope with a decline in energy company profits if Mr. Orban loses his fight to keep Russian crude flowing. “We are thinking in the long term, and MOL is a very good and serious company,” Mr. Szalai said.

When it comes to banning Russian oil, “it is not true that Hungary does not have a choice,” said Piotr Wozniak, Poland’s energy minister in a previous Law and Justice government and longtime energy executive. “It will not be cheap or easy but it is not impossible.”

But, he added, “The question is whether Hungary wants to make this choice.”

Making that choice particularly difficult is Mr. Orban’s vote-winning promise last month to keep energy prices in check through government-imposed price caps.

Shortly before the Ukraine invasion, Mr. Orban traveled to Moscow to meet Mr. Putin, securing assurances that Hungary could count on supplies of Russian natural gas.

Moscow last month abruptly cut off deliveries to Poland and Bulgaria but is still supplying Hungary. Any suspension, either by Russia or as a result of Western sanctions, would force Hungary to buy more expensive supplies on the market.

Giving the keynote address at CPAC on Thursday, Mr. Orban mentioned the war in Ukraine, calling Russia the aggressor, but mostly focused on advising conservatives how to succeed politically. “The first point,” he said, “is that we must play by our own rules.”

Mr. Carlson, the Fox News host who recently said that he was “rooting” for Russia in its war with Ukraine, sent a brief video message of support for the conference.

Most speakers avoided the issue of Ukraine, though one, Gavin Wax, a conservative commentator from New York, complained about tens of billions of dollars spent supporting Ukraine and “nonstop media propaganda pushing for World War III” with Russia.

The main organizer of the event is the Center for Fundamental Rights, a Hungarian outfit funded by the government that says it is fighting to repel the “relentless attack” on “Judeo-Christian culture, patriotism, sovereignty, the family, the created nature of man and woman and our commitment to life.”

The center initially said it was working on CPAC’s Budapest event with the Mathias Corvinus Collegium. The foundation, however, denied helping to organize CPAC, though it said it supported its aims.

Mr. Szalai, the M.C.C. general director, denied his foundation pushed any political agenda, saying in an interview that its mission was to promote “classic common sense.”

“To say we are far right is not fair,” he added.

Mr. Orban’s critics say that M.C.C. has established itself as what Mr. Biro-Nagy of Policy Solutions calls “one of the crown jewels of Orban’s mission to create a conservative, cultural hegemony.”

Among the foreign culture warriors listed by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium among the “guest instructors” this year was Rod Dreher, an American writer who has praised Hungary’s hard-line stance against Muslim immigrants.

Mr. Dreher said he was “not in the least bothered” that M.C.C. benefited from Russian oil. He said his own pay, however, came from another Hungarian government-funded entity.

“I deplore Russia’s invasion, and hope Ukraine prevails, but I don’t share this horror of Russia and ties to Russia that the ruling class in the U.S. and Western Europe do,” he said.

CUMMING, Ga. — In October 1912, after the raped and brutalized body of Mae Crow, a white 18-year-old, was laid to rest beside the Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, the white men of Forsyth County went on a rampage, driving its 1,098 Black citizens — about 10 percent of the population — from Forsyth’s borders.

They had already dragged 24-year-old Rob Edwards, a Black man, from a jail cell in the Cumming town square, beaten him with crowbars, riddled his corpse with bullets and hoisted him over a telephone pole yardarm. Two Black teens, Ernest Knox, 16, and Oscar Daniel, 18, would hang after the most specious of trials.

But the citizens of this county north of Atlanta were not done. For much of the 20th century, they would guard Forsyth’s borders as the city to the south encroached, through violence, intimidation and a menacing understanding in Greater Atlanta that this county was to remain for whites only.

The people who drove Forsyth’s Black residents from their homes and farms had no name for their hatred, no “Great Replacement” or “White Genocide” theories. But the notion that other races were plotting to “replace” the rightful inhabitants of the county took murderous form more than a century ago, said Patrick Phillips, whose attention-getting 2016 book “Blood at the Root” chronicled the racial cleansing of the county he grew up in — and his own awakening to the fact of his all-white childhood.

A small group of Black farmers were starting to prosper, acquire land and outdo some of their white neighbors, Mr. Phillips said.

They had to go.

If those who carried out mass shootings in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, El Paso and Christchurch, New Zealand, showed how deadly such beliefs could be in the hands of a single, well-armed killer, the Forsyth County of 1912 showed what a more organized operation of terror could accomplish.

But a century later, Forsyth County also refutes white supremacists who believe that, as Payton Gendron, the charged Buffalo gunman, put it: “Diversity is not a strength.” The county’s whites-only century was one of stagnation and isolation. Only after the sprawl of Greater Atlanta eventually overwhelmed Forsyth’s defenses in the late 1990s and 2000s did this county boom.

“It put a stigma on Forsyth County for many, many years, and for some, it still exists,” said Jason May, 48, the white owner of a real estate company just off the Cumming town square.

And booming it is.

Its population is now over 260,000 — up from 45,000 when the vestiges of all-white Forsyth began falling away. The Black population, at 2.2 percent in 2000, is still only 4.4 percent — Alpharetta, just over the Fulton County line, is 12 percent Black. But other demographic groups have grown substantially, including immigrants. Asians, particularly Indian Americans, represent 15.5 percent, and Hispanics 9.7 percent. Household median income, at $112,834, just surpassed Calvert County, Md., to become the 13th highest in the country. It was $44,162 in 1993, or $89,500 in current dollars.

“Diversity can never be bad in my book; I’m sorry,” said Barbra Curtiss, 71, a white businesswoman whose real estate company off the Cumming town square includes a banner welcoming her newest agent, Maria Zaragosa, along with “Spanglish” services. “Diversity — it’s just like death and taxes. You’re not going to be able to stop it, no matter what. No matter how much hate speech, how many mass shootings, it’s not going to stop.”

Ms. Curtiss, who moved to Forsyth County in 1984, knew of its whites-only status while living in the Atlanta suburb of Marietta, when her husband at the time — a “racist,” she said — wanted to move to an all-white county. Three years later, in 1987, a small group of local and Atlanta-based civil rights activists, led by Hosea Williams, boarded buses from Atlanta for Forsyth County to mark the 75th anniversary of the Black expulsion. They were met with confederate flags and signs proclaiming “Racial Purity is Forsyth’s Security” and “Forsyth Stays White.” And when they tried to march into Cumming, they were pelted with stones, bottles and bricks, until they retreated to their buses, back to Atlanta.

A few weeks later, this time with national media attention, helicopters overhead, and a phalanx of National Guardsmen clearing their path, the marchers returned in far larger numbers — this time with Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, Andrew Young and Oprah Winfrey, to name a few.

Among the marchers was Miguel Marcelli, a Black Atlanta firefighter, who in 1980 had made the mistake of joining his girlfriend’s company picnic on the Forsyth County banks of Lake Lanier, and nearly paid with his life after the couple was ambushed as they headed home. They were less than a mile from the grave of Mae Crow. In November 1986, five Hispanic construction workers were beaten and told they would be killed if they didn’t leave the county immediately.

Yet for all the publicity, Forsyth remained nearly all white. Ms. Curtiss recalled her first nonwhite customer, “a little Hispanic guy” in the early 2000s, who came to her after other real estate brokers refused their services.

“All I remember was that it was heart-wrenching, because he said nobody else would give him the time of day,” she said.

Tony Shivers, 72, remembers exactly when the first Black man was hired by the town of Cumming: It was 30 years ago, and he was that man. He was laying pipe for a contractor in Cumming; the city liked his work, and took him on at the water treatment plant. There was a sign outside the sheriff’s office, warning Black people — using a racial slur — that they had better not be caught by the dogcatcher in Forsyth County after dark.

His friends in Atlanta had told him he was crazy to go to Forsyth County, and he said he remembered incidents when he was told to go back where he belonged. But he had been in the Marines. He wasn’t going to be intimidated.

Many in the county do not know the its history. Ms. Zaragosa said she was unaware of the county’s past. Instead, she struck a note that many others here do: “Our main focus is on business,” she said, just two months into her job at the real estate agency, which, like others, advertises: “Se habla Español.”

For others, the stories are inescapable. The county has not tried to bury its history: A plaque on the Cumming town square tells the story of Mr. Edward’s lynching and the racial cleansing that followed.

“The loss of Black-owned property in order to flee arbitrary mob violence was common during this era, and Forsyth’s Black residents left behind their homes and farms to escape, taking with them only what they could carry,” it reads.

Indeed, much of Forsyth’s per capita wealth was generated by the vast run-up in value of properties that had sat in the possession of Forsyth’s old families for a century — much of that property taken from someone else.

Outside Cherians International Fresh Market, an Asian grocery store on Cumming’s outskirts, Avani Vallabhaneni spoke to the perseverance of Forsyth’s newcomers. When she and her husband arrived 12 years ago, she said, she heard neighbors stage-whispering behind her back that she should go back to where she came from. Her husband, who travels for work, once showed his business card to a knowing Georgian, who marveled that he lived in Cumming.

But she had her two children in Forsyth County, and the Indian population has grown so much, she said, that she does not hear those whispers anymore.

Others do still hear similar whispers today, however — though race is not necessarily the irritant.

Like the Rev. Bogdan Maruszak, the pastor of a small flock of immigrants. He started his Ukrainian Orthodox Church in a trailer, on a plot of land outside Cumming, in 2000, bringing together Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians and others, all of them white, to forbidding territory in North Georgia, where he made ends meet opening a body shop. He knew vaguely of Forsyth’s history.

“I was thinking about it, but I wasn’t nervous,” the Ukrainian-Polish immigrant said over iced tea and lemonade just over the Fulton County line in Johns Creek.

With the war in Ukraine heightening fears of genocide and the mass shooting in Buffalo focusing attention on “white replacement,” Rev. Maruszak said, it is incumbent on all of Forsyth County, not only its newcomers, to speak out, and to speak up for those who are threatened.

“We cannot be passively observing,” he said. “We can do something. We should react.”

That can’t be taken for granted, said Mr. Phillips, the author of “Blood at the Root.”

Forsyth’s progress and its remarkable prosperity may be proof that white supremacy is a hindrance, he said, but the county should not be credited with the epiphany. Atlanta’s sprawl spread steadily northward until the wave “finally broke over Forsyth County,” he said.

“What you would like to believe,” Mr. Phillips said, “is that there was some moral change, that people saw the error of their ways, and a light switch clicked.”

But that, he said, isn’t what happened.

TOKYO — Residents of a rural Japanese town were each looking forward to receiving a $775 payment last month as part of a coronavirus pandemic stimulus program.

But a municipal official mistakenly wired the town of Abu’s entire Covid relief budget, nearly $360,000, to a single recipient on the list of low-income households eligible to receive the money. After promising to return the accidental payment, the police said, the man gambled it away.

The man, Sho Taguchi, 24, told the police that he had lost the money in online casinos, a police official in Yamaguchi Prefecture said by phone on Thursday. The day before, the authorities arrested Mr. Taguchi, the official said. The charge: fraud.

Japan is not the only country where coronavirus relief money has been misappropriated. The fraud has been so widespread in the United States that the Justice Department recently appointed a prosecutor to go after it. People have been accused of buying a Pokémon card, a Lamborghini and other luxuries.

But Abu, population 2,952, may be the only town on earth where an entire Covid stimulus fund has vanished at the hands of an online gambler who received it through administrative error. The details of the case, and the rare attention from Japan’s national news media, have come as a shock to residents of the seaside town.

“I was surprised to hear the news and also amazed at how he spent the money,” said Yuriko Suekawa, 72, who has lived in Abu since she was born. “It’s truly unbelievable.”

The tale began on April 8, when an official in Abu mistakenly asked a local bank to wire Mr. Taguchi 46.3 million yen, or about $358,000, said Atsushi Nohara, a town official. Mr. Taguchi’s name had been at the top of the list of 463 households that were each eligible for 100,000 yen as part of a national stimulus package.

After Abu officials realized the mistake, they immediately visited Mr. Taguchi and asked for the money back, the town’s mayor, Norihiko Hanada, said in an address on the town’s YouTube channel.

Mr. Taguchi agreed to travel with the officials to his bank in a government car, but he refused to enter the building and later said that he planned to consult a lawyer, according to the public broadcaster NHK. Mr. Taguchi met with Abu’s deputy mayor on April 14, NHK reported, and his lawyer told the town the next day that his client would return the money.

“But he ultimately did not do so,” Mr. Hanada said on YouTube. He said Mr. Taguchi eventually told town officials that he had spent the 46.3 million yen, would not run away and planned to “atone for the sin.”

Mr. Hanada has apologized to residents on behalf of the town for losing “such a precious and a large amount of public funds.”

“The arrest will help us to get closer to knowing the truth,” he said on Thursday. “His testimony will give us a steppingstone to retrieving the money.”

Masaki Kamei, a prosecutor in the city of Osaka, said that Abu officials were to blame for allowing Mr. Taguchi to drain the town’s Covid relief fund.

“The town’s approach was not strict enough, and it allowed the case to develop to this point,” Mr. Kamei said. “Maybe their approach was based on a view of human nature as fundamentally good.”

Abu sits about 100 miles north of the nearest major city, Fukuoka, in an area of Yamaguchi Prefecture where agriculture, fishing and forestry drive the economy. Mr. Taguchi moved there about a year and a half ago as part of a program in which the local government offers subsidies to outsiders who move in and rent unoccupied homes, said Mr. Nohara, the town official.

After the error, town officials sent Covid relief payments to the local households, Mr. Nohara said, adding that the money had come from another municipal source. He did not elaborate.

Ms. Suekawa, the Abu resident, said the episode was a misfortune for a town that had successfully weathered the pandemic and hoped to attract visitors to its newly built seaside campground.

“I hope this negative image of the town will ease and that it will once again become a sunny and quiet place,” she said. “Anyone makes a mistake, so I don’t blame this man for that, but I would like him to admit his crime and give us our money back.”

In any event, Mr. Nohara said, Abu sued Mr. Taguchi last week for about 51 million yen, including legal fees.

Hisako Ueno reported from Tokyo, and Mike Ives from Seoul.