By GEOFF MULVIHILL, Associated Press

A measure that would allow nearly any private citizen to sue out-of-state prescribers and others who send abortion pills into Texas has won first-round approval in the state House.

It would be the first law of its kind in the country and part of the ongoing effort by abortion opponents to fight the broad use of the pills, which are used in the majority of abortions in the U.S. — including in states where abortion is illegal.

The bill passed in the House on Thursday and could receive a final vote in the Republican-dominated state Senate next week. If that happens, it would be up to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, to decide whether to sign it into law.

Here are things to know about the Texas legislation and other legal challenges to abortion pills.

The Texas measure is a new approach to crack down on pills

Even before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed state abortion bans, pills — most often a combination of mifepristone and misoprostol — were the most common way to obtain abortion access.

Now, with Texas and 11 other states enforcing bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy, and four more that bar most of them after the first six weeks or so of gestation, the pills have become an even more essential way abortion is provided in the U.S.

“We believe that women need to be protected from the harms of chemical abortion drugs,” said Amy O’Donnell, a spokesperson for Texas Alliance for Life, which supports the bill. “They harm women and their intent is to harm unborn babies.”

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Under the bill, providers could be ordered to pay $100,000. But only the pregnant woman, the man who impregnated her or other close relatives could collect the entire amount. Anyone else who sues could receive only $10,000, with the remaining $90,000 going to charity.

The measure echoes a 2021 Texas law that uses the prospect of lawsuits from private citizens to enforce a ban on abortion once fetal activity can be detected — at about six weeks’ gestation. The state also has a ban on abortions at all stages of pregnancy.

The pill bill also contains provisions intended to keep those with a history of family violence from collecting and barring disclosure of women’s personal or medical information in court documents.

Anna Rupani, executive director of Fund Texas Choice, a group that helps women access abortion, including by traveling to other states for it, said the law is problematic.

“It establishes a bounty hunting system to enforce Texas’ laws beyond the state laws,” she said.

A law could open the door to further battles between states

While most Republican-controlled states have restricted or banned abortions in the last three years, most Democratic-controlled states have taken steps to protect access.

And at least eight states have laws that seek to protect prescribers who send abortion pills to women in states where abortion is banned.

There are already legal battles that could challenge those, both involving the same New York doctor.

Louisiana has brought criminal charges against Dr. Maggie Carpenter, accusing her of prescribing the pills to a pregnant minor. And a Texas judge has ordered her to pay a $100,000 penalty plus legal fees for violating that state’s ban on prescribing abortion medication by telemedicine. New York officials are refusing to extradite her to Louisiana or to enter the Texas civil judgement.

If the Texas law is adopted and use, it’s certain to trigger a new round of legal battles over whether laws from one state can be enforced in another.

“Its very different from what’s come before it,” said Greer Donley, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who studies the legal landscape of abortion.

Two key states seek to get into anti-mifepristone legal battle

Texas and Florida — the second and third most populous states in the country — asked a court last week to let them join a lawsuit filed last year by the Republican attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas and Missouri to make mifepristone harder to access.

Those states contend — as many abortion opponents do — that mifepristone is too risky to be prescribed via telehealth and that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration should roll back approvals and tighten access.

The U.S. Supreme Court last year unanimously rejected a case making similar arguments, saying the anti-abortion doctors behind it did lacked the legal standing to take up the case.

This week, more than 260 reproductive health researchers from across the nation submitted a letter to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration affirming the safety record of the abortion medication mifepristone. In the letter, the researchers urge the FDA not to impose new restrictions on the drug and to make decisions based on “gold-standard science.”

The FDA is also facing a lawsuit from a Hawaii doctor and heath care associations arguing that it restricts mifepristone too much

Associated Press Science Writer Laura Ungar contributed to this article.

By JACK BROOK, Associated Press/Report for America

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the U.S. Gulf Coast with catastrophic storm surge and flooding, New Orleans marked the storm’s anniversary Friday with solemn memorials, uplifting music and a parade that honored the dead, the displaced and the determined survivors who endured and rebuilt.

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Dignitaries and longtime residents gathered under gray skies at the memorial to Katrina’s victims in a New Orleans cemetery where dozens who perished in the storm but were never identified or claimed are interred.

“We do everything to keep the memory of these people alive,” said Orrin Duncan, who worked for the coroner when Katrina hit. He comes to the memorial every year, opening the cemetery gate and making sure the grass is cut.

A Category 3 hurricane when it made landfall in Louisiana on Aug. 29, 2005, Katrina inflicted staggering destruction. The storm killed nearly 1,400 people across five states and racked up an estimated $200 billion in damage, flattening homes on the coast and sending ruinous flooding into low-lying neighborhoods.

Two decades later, it remains the costliest U.S. hurricane on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The failure of New Orleans’ federal levee system inundated about 80% of the city in floodwaters that took weeks to drain. Thousands of people clung to rooftops to survive or waited for evacuation in the sweltering, under-provisioned Superdome football stadium.

Mayor says New Orleans came back ‘better and stronger’

At the cemetery memorial, revered jazz clarinetist Michael White played “When the Saints Go Marching In” as a procession carried several wreaths to lay beside mausoleums of the storm victims. Mayor LaToya Cantrell recalled the city’s sacrifices and projected optimism for its future.

“New Orleans is still here; New Orleans still stands,” Cantrell said. “New Orleans came back better and stronger than ever before.”

Another ceremony was planned in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward, a predominantly Black community where a levee breach led to devastating flooding that was exacerbated by a delayed government response. Organizers said they also intended to draw attention to the sinking city’s poor infrastructure, gentrification and vulnerability to climate change.

Jasminne Navarre hugs Constance Osum, left, during a wreath laying event to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, at the Hurricane Katrina Memorial in Charity Hospital Cemetery in New Orleans, Friday, Aug. 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

And thousands were expected to join a brass band parade known as a second line. The beloved New Orleans tradition has its roots in African American jazz funerals, in which grieving family members march with the deceased alongside a band and trailed by a second line of dancing friends and bystanders.

A parade has been staged on every Katrina anniversary since local artists organized it in 2006 to help neighbors heal and unite the community.

“Second line allows everybody to come together,” said the Rev. Lennox Yearwood of Hip Hop Caucus, an organizer of the anniversary events. “We’re still here, and despite the storm, people have been strong and very powerful and have come together each and every year to continue to be there for one another.”

City leaders are pushing for the anniversary to become a state holiday.

Katrina’s impact still felt

The population of New Orleans, nearly half a million before Katrina, is now 384,000 after displaced residents scattered across the nation. Many ended up in Atlanta, Dallas and Houston.

In the aftermath, the levee system was rebuilt, public schools were privatized, most public housing projects were demolished and a hospital was shuttered. About 134,000 housing units were damaged by Katrina, according to The Data Center, a nonprofit research agency.

The storm had a disproportionate impact on the city’s Black residents. While New Orleans remains a majority Black city, tens of thousands of Black residents were unable to return after Katrina. A botched and racially biased federal loan program for home rebuilding, coupled with a shortage of affordable housing, have made it harder for former residents to come back.

New Orleans resident Gary Wainwright said never misses the cemetery memorial service on Katrina’s anniversary. On Friday he wore a frayed red necktie, covered with the phrase “I love you.” He salvaged it from his battered home in the storm’s aftermath.

“It’s a little bit tattered, like the city,” Wainwright said. “But it’s still beautiful.” he said.

Brook is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

By ED WHITE and CHRISTOPHER L. KELLER, Associated Press

President Donald Trump has threatened to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, New York, Seattle, Baltimore, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, to fight what he says is runaway crime. Yet data shows most violent crime in those places and around the country has declined in recent years.

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Homicides through the first six months of 2025 were down significantly compared to the same period in 2024, continuing a post-pandemic trend across the U.S.

Trump, who has already taken federal control of police in Washington, D.C., has maligned the six Democratic-run cities that all are in states that opposed him in 2024. But he hasn’t threatened sending in the Guard to any major cities in Republican-leaning states.

John Roman, a data expert who directs the Center on Public Safety & Justice at the University of Chicago, acknowledged violence in some urban neighborhoods has persisted for generations. But he said there’s no U.S. city where there “is really a crisis.”

“We’re at a remarkable moment in crime in the United States,” he said.

Public sees things differently

Trump might be tapping somewhat into public perception when he describes cities such as Chicago as a “killing field.” The vast majority of Americans, 81%, see crime as a “major problem” in large cities, according to a survey released this week by The AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, though there is much less support, 32%, for federal control of police.

The public was reminded this week that shootings remain a frequent event in the U.S. In Minneapolis, which has seen homicides and most other crime fall, a shooter killed two children attending a Catholic school Mass Wednesday and wounded 17 a day after three people died in separate shootings elsewhere in the city.

Still, over time, the picture is encouraging, according to numbers from AH Datalytics, which tracks crimes across the country using law enforcement data for its Real-Time Crime Index.

Aggravated assaults — which includes nonfatal shootings — through June were down in Chicago, Portland, Seattle, Baltimore and San Francisco and were virtually unchanged in New York. Reports of rape were up in New York and Chicago during the first half of the year, but down in the other cities, including a 51% drop in San Francisco.

The crime index also showed that property crimes, such as theft, burglary and motor vehicle theft, were mostly down in those six cities in the first six months of 2025. Theft crimes rose from 2020 to 2024 in four of the six cities analyzed by AP.

Cities defend safety strategies

Trump exaggerated and misstated facts about crime in Washington when his administration took over the D.C. police department and flooded the capital with federal agents and the National Guard. He referred to Baltimore, 40 miles (64 kilometers) away, as a “hellhole” during a Cabinet meeting and has said he might “send in the ‘troops.’”

“I’m not walking in Baltimore right now,” Trump said.

Yet Baltimore has shown drops in major crime, according to the crime index. Homicides and rapes were down 25% or more in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. Homicides were down for three consecutive years through 2024 and were 35% lower when compared to 2018.

“Deploying the National Guard for municipal policing purposes is not sustainable, scalable, constitutional, or respectful,” Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, said on social media site X.

Baltimore has found ways to reduce violence by offering mentorship, social services and job opportunities to young people likely to commit crimes, said Michael Scott, director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing at Arizona State University and a former police chief in Florida.

“That approach has resulted in more significant reductions in shootings and homicides than any other strategy I’ve seen in the over 50 years I’ve been in the field,” Scott said.

Vice President JD Vance told a Wisconsin crowd on Thursday that governors and mayors should ask the Trump administration for help.

“The president of the United States is not going out there forcing this on anybody,” Vance said of using the National Guard, “though we do think that we have the legal right to clean up America’s streets if we want to.”

Tales of different cities

Trump doesn’t seem to disparage big cities in states that favor Republicans. Charlotte, North Carolina, had 105 homicides in 2024 compared to 88 in 2023. The rate of vehicle thefts per 100,000 people more than doubled there from 2020 through 2024. Indianapolis had a homicide rate of 19 per every 100,000 residents in 2024 — more than four times higher than New York’s.

Amy Holt, 48, who recently moved to Charlotte from a gated community in northern Virginia, said someone tried to steal her husband’s car in their new city. She also found bullets on the ground while walking with dogs.

There’s no discussion about sending the National Guard to Charlotte. Holt believes most cities should be trusted to be in charge of public safety, adding that troops in uniforms would be “alarming” and “scary.”

Democratic elected officials in cities targeted by Trump have publicly rejected suggestions that their residents need the National Guard. “Crime is at its lowest point in decades, visitors are coming back, and San Francisco is on the rise,” Mayor Daniel Lurie said.

Experts question just how effective the National Guard would be and where troops would be deployed in cities.

“It’s going to make residents think: Things must be much worse than I realize to have the military in my neighborhood. What’s going on?” Scott said. “It’s more likely to generate undue fear and apprehension than it will lead to perceptions of reassurance and safety.”

White reported from Detroit and Keller reported from Albuquerque, New Mexico. AP video journalist Erik Verduzco in Charlotte, North Carolina, contributed to this report.

More than a month after a cyberattack forced the city of St. Paul to shut down its computer systems, services are gradually coming back online.

In recent days, the city has restored its phone service, online water bill payments, and its Parks and Recreation payment systems, according to the mayor’s office. St. Paul Regional Water Services has said it won’t charge late fees for bills during the outage.

Library cataloging and checkout systems also have been restored, though as of Thursday, public internet terminals were still offline. Internally, network and shared drives have been restored as well, Mayor Melvin Carter’s spokesperson Jennifer Lor said in an email.

“We are now in recovery,” she wrote. “Our approach is deliberate, prioritized, and secure: systems are brought back only after testing and validation, with priority given to those essential for public safety, financial stability, and daily operations.”

City officials were confident by Aug. 20 that its Microsoft email and data storage were secure once again, according to the Office of Technology and Communications. Emergency services such as 911 were not interrupted by the cyberattack.

Reset nearly complete, lawmakers briefed

It’s not clear when city systems will be fully restored, though officials have signaled that the reset is nearly complete.

Carter and leaders of the city’s emergency response to the attack briefed members of Minnesota’s Legislative Commission on Cybersecurity at the state Capitol on Wednesday.

“This careful approach is allowing us to restore services with confidence, safely and securely,” said Jaime Wascalus, director of the Office of Technology and Communications for St. Paul. “We’re checking absolutely everything before we bring it online.”

Wascalus told state lawmakers that the city had a “trusted foundation” to rebuild its systems because it had clean data backups from July 25 that weren’t affected by the hack.

What is the cost?

Many questions remain about the July cyberattack, including how much it will cost the city.

Ransomware attacks on Baltimore and Atlanta in the late 2010s cost taxpayers more than $17 million, according to local news reports. In Atlanta, hackers demanded $51,000 in Bitcoin, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in 2018. Like St. Paul, the city of Atlanta refused.

Carter said the FBI and Minnesota National Guard advised against paying a ransom.

St. Paul officials still haven’t said how much the hackers demanded or described the exact nature of their threats, though they have confirmed the city was targeted by a ransomware variant known as “Interlock” and that the attack came from a “sophisticated” and “money-driven” group known for stealing and selling sensitive information from corporations, hospitals and governments.

The federal government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a warning about Interlock attacks on July 22. The ransomware variant was first identified in September 2024.

Attack caught early on

City officials also haven’t disclosed how hackers gained access to city systems or in which department the attack originated.

Officials seem confident they avoided any widespread problems by catching the hack very early on. Hackers posted about 43 gigabytes of city parks and rec department data after St. Paul refused to meet their demands, a minuscule fraction of the 153 terrabytes the city keeps.

Carter said he didn’t think the hackers obtained any sensitive or valuable information because they posted it for free online after the city refused to pay them.

City officials have said there’s no evidence that resident information like names, addresses and phone numbers was affected.

They say its because bill payment information, like credit card numbers, is generally handled by “cloud-based” applications and should not have been affected by the hack.

Timeline

The city detected the attack on July 25 and started working to contain the threat within its computer systems. On July 28, the city fully shut down its networks to prevent more damage.

One of the first big hurdles was for the city to pay employees on time. City human resources had to set up a makeshift office and manually build new spreadsheets to handle payroll. They were able to send out checks by the Aug. 8 payday.

After resetting credentials, St. Paul city employees checked with technology staff to ensure their devices are installed with security software in this area of the Roy Wilkins Auditorium basement, pictured Saturday, Aug. 9, 2025. (Alex Derosier / Pioneer Press)

Two weeks after the attack, the city had set up a sprawling operation in the basement of Roy Wilkins Auditorium at the RiverCentre in downtown St. Paul for more than 3,000 employees to report in person for new login credentials.

City employees started showing up on Sunday, Aug. 10, and the effort took several days. The center was open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. Officials dubbed it “Operation Secure St. Paul.”

St. Paul had to borrow computers from Bloomington, Eden Prairie, Elk River, Minneapolis and Sherburne County to run the reset operation, Wascalus said.

As Carter declared a state of local emergency, Gov. Tim Walz on July 29 activated the Minnesota National Guard’s 177th Cyber Protection Team to aid the city in the effort. They worked with the city from July 29 to Aug. 17.

Hackers posted data on Aug. 11, though Carter called the contents “varied and unsystematic.” Data came from a network drive used by the Parks and Recreation department where employees stored personal files and was not tied to core systems like payroll or licensing, the mayor said.

Files included images of employee identification cards submitted to human resources, work documents, or even “personal items like recipes,” according to the city.

Once the more than 3,000 employees were cleared, the city slowly started restoring services.

Ramsey County Manager Ling Becker told the Ramsey County board at a recent meeting that the county and St. Paul had restored their email connection on Aug. 25.

St. Paul was one of six government bodies in Minnesota attacked with ransomware in the last year, Carter said.

On Aug. 4, the city of North St. Paul said its police department had been targeted in a hack that may have compromised “some data.”

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