By GLENN GAMBOA, AP Business Writer

NASHVILLE (AP) — Richard Casper shakes his head as he touches one of the boarded-up windows in the once-abandoned church he plans to transform into a new 24-hour arts center for veterans.

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The U.S. Marine Corps veteran and Purple Heart recipient said he was an arm’s length away from military officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, at Marine Barracks Washington when he learned the former church his nonprofit CreatiVets just purchased had been vandalized.

The physical damage to the building and its stained glass windows saddened Casper. But what worried him more was that the church had remained empty since 2017 without damage. That vandalism came just weeks after CreatiVets bought it, suggesting that maybe he and the veterans in his program were not welcome.

“I almost just left,” Casper said. “It put me in a weird headspace.”

However, Casper, 40, a CNN Heroes winner and Elevate Prize winner, needed more support for the center — “a place to go when the PTSD hits.” Like so many veterans, he said his PTSD, caused by seeing a close friend die on patrol in Iraq, would generally come in the middle of the night, when the only places open are bars and other spaces that can be ”destructive.”

He figured a 24-hour center where veterans could engage in music, painting, sculpture, theater and other arts could help. It could “turn all that pain into something beautiful.” The artistic element factored in when Casper, who suffered a traumatic brain injury while serving in Iraq, returned home and found it hard to be in public — unless he was listening to live music.

So he completed his mission that night in Washington, introducing new people to CreatiVets’ work. Then, Casper returned to Nashville to practice what he has preached to hundreds of veterans since his nonprofit opened in 2013. He asked for help.

And help came.

Within weeks, CreatiVets’ Art Director Tim Brown was teaching a roomful of volunteers how to create stained glass pieces to replace those that were vandalized. Brown said the volunteers wanted to give back to the organization, “but also because of the impact that these activities have had on them.”

Gary Sinise believes in art’s impact

Gary Sinise values that impact. The actor, musician and philanthropist had already signed on to donate $1 million through his foundation to help CreatiVets purchase the building. Sinise’s involvement encouraged two other donors to help finalize the purchase.

The “CSI: NY” star said he believed in CreatiVets’ work and had already seen a similar program in his hometown of Chicago help veterans process their wartime experiences.

“In the military, you’re trained to do serious work to protect our country, right?” Sinise said. “If you’re in the infantry, you’re being trained to kill. You’re being trained to contain any emotion and be strong.”

Those skills are important when fighting the enemy, but they also take a toll, especially when veterans aren’t taught how to discuss their feelings once the war is over.

“Quite often, our veterans don’t want any help,” Sinise said. “But through art – and with theater as well – acting out what they are going through can be very, very beneficial.”

David Booth says he is living proof of how CreatiVets can help. And the retired master sergeant, who served 20 years in the U.S. Army as a medic and a counterintelligence agent, wishes he participated in the program sooner.

“For me, this was more important than the last year and a half of counseling that I’ve gone through,” said Booth. “It has been so therapeutic.”

After years of being asked, Booth, 53, finally joined CreatiVets’ songwriting program in September. He traveled from his home in The Villages, Florida, to the historic Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, to meet with two successful songwriters – Brian White, who co-wrote Jason Aldean’s “Blame It on You,” and Craig Campbell, of “Outskirts of Heaven” fame – to help him write a song about his life.

Booth told them about his service, including his injury in Iraq in 2006 when the vehicle he was in struck an improvised explosive device and detonated it.

He suffered a traumatic brain injury in the explosion, and it took months of rehab before he could walk again. His entire cervical spine is fused. He still gets epidurals to relieve the nerve pain. And he still suffers from nightmares and PTSD.

In Iraq, Booth’s unit was once surrounded by kids because American soldiers used to give them Jolly Rancher candies. Snipers shot the children in hopes the soldiers would become easier targets when they tried to help.

“Things like that stick in my head,” Booth said. “How do you get them out?”

He also told them about his desire for a positive message and Combat Veterans to Careers, the veteran support nonprofit he founded. Those experiences became the song “What’s Next.”

Booth hopes “What’s Next” becomes available on music streaming services so others can hear his story. CreatiVets has released compilations of its veterans’ songs since 2020 in cooperation with Big Machine Label Group, Taylor Swift’s first record label. This year’s collection was released Friday.

“It’s almost like they could feel what I was feeling and put it into the lyrics,” said Booth, after hearing the finished version. “It was pretty surreal and pretty awesome.”

Why Lt. Dan from ‘Forrest Gump’ launched a nonprofit

Sinise has seen the unexpected impact of art throughout his career. His Oscar-nominated role as wounded Vietnam veteran Lt. Dan Taylor in “Forrest Gump” in 1994 deepened his connection to veterans. His music with the Lt. Dan Band expanded it. In 2011, he launched the Gary Sinise Foundation to broadly serve veterans, first responders and their families.

“I think citizens have a responsibility to take care of their defenders,” he said. “There are opportunities out there for all of us to do that and one of the ways to do it is through multiple nonprofits that are out there.”

Sinise immediately connected with CreatiVets’ mission. When the idea came to dedicate the performance space at the new center to his late son Mac, who died last year after a long battle with cancer, Sinise saw it as “a perfect synergy.”

“Mac was a great artist,” he said. “And he was a humble, kind of quiet, creative force… If Mac would have survived and not gone through what he went through, he’d be one of our young leaders here at the foundation. He would be composing music and he’d be helping veterans.”

Mac Sinise is still helping veterans, as proceeds of his album “Resurrection & Revival” and its sequel completed after his death, are going to the Gary Sinise Foundation. And Gary Sinise said he discovered more compositions from his son that he plans to record later this year for a third album.

After the new center was vandalized, Casper said he was heartbroken, but also inspired knowing part of the center was destined to become the Mac Sinise Auditorium. He decided to take pieces of the broken stained glass windows and transform them into new artwork inspired by Mac Sinise’s music.

“I told you we’re going to go above and beyond to make sure everyone knows Mac lived,” Casper told Sinise as he handed him stained glass panes inspired by Mac Sinise’s songs “Arctic Circles” and “Penguin Dance,” “not that he died, but that he lived.”

Sinise fought back tears as he said, “My gosh, that’s beautiful.”

As he examined the pieces more closely, Sinise added, “I’m honored that we’re going to have this place over there and that Mac is going to be supporting Richard and helping veterans.”

Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

By KATE PAYNE, Associated Press/Report for America

A Christian missionary father and his daughter were killed when a small plane bound for a hurricane relief mission in Jamaica crashed in a South Florida neighborhood.

Christian ministry organization Ignite the Fire identified the two victims of the Monday morning crash as the group’s founder, Alexander Wurm, 53, and his daughter Serena Wurm, 22.

The pair were bringing humanitarian aid to Jamaica, according to the organization, when the Beechcraft King Air plane they were flying in crashed into a pond in a residential area of the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Coral Springs, narrowly missing homes. As of Tuesday morning, investigators had not reported any other victims.

Ignite the Fire is “dedicated to empowering youth through missions and evangelism across the Caribbean,” according to the organization’s website. A statement on the group’s social media described the Wurm family as passionate about humanitarian work and their Christian faith.

“Together, their final journey embodied selflessness and courage, reminding us of the power of service and love,” the statement reads, adding, “Rest in peace, Alexander and Serena — your light endures in all whose lives you changed.”

The turboprop plane went down shortly after taking off from Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport at approximately 10:14 a.m. on Monday, authorities said, with police and fire rescue responding to the crash site just five minutes later.

According to Federal Aviation Administration records, the plane was manufactured in 1976 and its registered owner is listed as International Air Services, a company that markets itself as specializing in providing trust agreements to non-U.S. citizens that enable them to register their aircraft with the FAA. A person who answered the company’s phone Monday afternoon declined to answer questions from a reporter, stating “no comment” and ending the phone call.

Posts by Alexander Wurm on social media in recent days suggested the evangelist had recently acquired the plane to further his missionary work across the Caribbean, describing the aircraft as “an older King Air with brand new engines,” and “perfect” to ferry his organization’s deliveries of generators, batteries and building materials to Jamaica.

“I’ve been a pilot since 2005 and I felt that the Ignite ministry should have a missions airplane if it wanted to effectively bless the Caribbean!” Wurm wrote in a social media post on Nov. 2.

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“Perfect for the mission to bring relief goods into Montego Bay and the plane is ready just in time!” he added.

Photos and videos on social media show Wurm posing for a picture in the plane’s cockpit and unloading boxes of supplies from the packed aircraft with teams of volunteers.

The flight tracking website FlightAware shows the plane made four other trips to or from Jamaica in the past week, traveling between George Town in the Cayman Islands and Montego Bay and Negril in Jamaica, before landing in Fort Lauderdale on Friday.

Broward County, where the plane took off from and where the crash occurred, is home to a vibrant Caribbean American community that sprang into action to collect relief supplies following Hurricane Melissa, which left a path of destruction in the Caribbean.

A powerful Category 5 storm, Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica on Oct. 28 and tied for the strongest landfalling Atlantic hurricane in history. The storm also caused devastation in Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic and prompted relief organizations to mobilize.

Kate Payne 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.

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks are drifting in mixed trading on Tuesday, a slowdown after swinging from their first losing week in four to Monday’s roar back.

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The S&P 500 slipped 0.2% in early trading. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 78 points, or 0.2%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.4% lower. All three are still near their all-time highs, but they’ve been shaky recently.

Much of the focus was on Nvidia and other winners of the artificial-intelligence frenzy, as usual. Their sensational growth has been a major reason the U.S. stock market has set records despite a slowing job market and still-high inflation. But their prices have shot so high that critics say they look too expensive and are reminiscent of the 2000 dot-com bubble that ultimately burst nearly halved the S&P 500.

Nvidia sank 2.1% after SoftBank, a Japanese technology giant that had been a major investor, said it had sold its entire stake last month for $5.83 billion in the AI chip company. SoftBank is not giving up on AI. It’s still focusing on OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

Because Nvidia is the largest company on Wall Street by value, it was the heaviest single weight dragging the S&P 500 lower. Oftentimes, it alone can dictate the movement of S&P 500 index funds, which sit at the heart of many 401(k) accounts. A day earlier, Nvidia’s rally of nearly 6% was the biggest reason the S&P 500 nearly erased all its loss from last week.

CoreWeave, whose cloud platform helps customers running artificial-intelligence workloads, fell 11.8% even though it reported a smaller loss for the latest quarter than analysts expected. Its revenue also topped expectations, and financial analysts praised its momentum. But investors seemed to focus instead on supply-chain issues that are delaying a data center and pushing some of its revenue further into the future.

On the winning side of Wall Street, BigBear.ai jumped 16.9% after reporting better results for the latest quarter than analysts expected. It also said it would buy AskSage a generative AI platform built for national-security agencies and other highly regulated areas, for $250 million.

Outside of AI, Paramount Skydance climbed 9.4%, even as the entertainment giant fell short of Wall Street’s revenue and profit targets. It was the company’s first earnings report since Skydance closed its acquisition of Paramount in early August, and investors were apparently encouraged that it raised its 2026 cost-cutting goal to $3 billion from the previous $2 billion.

In stock markets abroad, indexes rose in Europe following a mixed finish in Asia.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 slipped 0.1% even though SoftBank climbed 2%. Besides the sale of its Nvidia stake, the tech giant also reported a much better profit than analysts expected.

The U.S. bond market is closed for the Veterans Day holiday.

AP Business Writers Chan Ho-Him and Matt Ott contributed.

By TIFFANY STANLEY, Associated Press

The United States’ Catholic bishops will elect their next president and vice president on Tuesday in Baltimore. The vote acts as a barometer for the bishops’ priorities, hinging on whether they choose an outspoken culture warrior as their next leader.

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The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops as a whole was often at odds with the approach of Pope Francis. His successor, Pope Leo XIV, is continuing a similar pastoral emphasis on marginalized people, poverty and the environment.

Half the 10 candidates on the ballot come from the conservative wing of the conference. The difference is more in style than substance. Most U.S. Catholic bishops are reliably conservative on social issues, but some place more emphasis on opposing abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.

“The slate of 10 candidates perfectly reflects the dynamics of the American hierarchy in that it’s split down the middle,” said David Gibson, director of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture.

There is no clear front-runner. The candidates were nominated by their fellow bishops, and the winner will succeed outgoing leader, Military Services Archbishop Timothy Broglio, for a three-year term. The current vice president, Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, is too close to the mandatory retirement age of 75 to assume the top post.

Among conservatives up for leadership, Oklahoma City Archbishop Paul Coakley is seen as a strong contender, having already been elected in 2022 to serve as secretary, the No. 3 conference official.

Coakley serves as adviser to the Napa Institute, an association for conservative Catholic powerbrokers. In 2018, he publicly supported an ardent critic of Pope Francis, Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who was later excommunicated for schism.

A well-known name on the ballot is Bishop Robert Barron of Minnesota’s Winona-Rochester diocese, whose popular Word on Fire ministry has made him a Catholic media star. He serves on President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, along with another candidate, Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana.

Some Catholic insiders are hoping for a leader who could help unify U.S. bishops and work well with the Vatican. They point to contenders like Archbishop Charles Thompson of Indianapolis and Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas.

Parishioners pray during a Sunday Mass at the Shrine of the Sacred Heart Catholic church in Washington, Oct. 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)

As Latinos, Flores and another candidate, Archbishop Nelson Perez of Philadelphia, represent a growing segment of the U.S. Catholic Church. Flores has also been the U.S. bishops’ leader in the Vatican’s synod process to modernize the church.

“Certainly, the two names that get talked about the most are Flores and Coakley,” said Steven Millies, a professor of public theology at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

Flores has an “ideologically unusual perspective,” according to Millies. From his diocese along the U.S.-Mexico border, he is traditional on sexual ethics and outspoken in defending migrants.

The bishops plan to discuss immigration during the meeting. On many issues, they appear as divided and polarized as their country, but on immigration, even the most conservative Catholic leaders stand on the side of migrants.

The question is how strongly the whole body plans to speak about the Trump administration’s harsh immigration tactics.

Fear of immigration enforcement has suppressed Mass attendance at some parishes. Local clerics are fighting to administer sacraments to detained immigrants. U.S. Catholic bishops have already shuttered their longstanding refugee resettlement program after the Trump administration halted federal funding for resettlement aid.

Pope Leo recently called for “deep reflection” in the United States about the treatment of migrants held in detention, saying that “many people who have lived for years and years and years, never causing problems, have been deeply affected by what is going on right now.”

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.