By SOPHIE BATES

The barn in Mississippi where 14-year-old Emmett Till was tortured and killed will open to the public as a “sacred” memorial site by 2030, the new owner announced.

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The Emmett Till Interpretive Center disclosed late Sunday that it had purchased the barn located in a rural area outside the city of Drew, aided by a $1.5 million donation from television producer and writer Shonda Rhimes.

“We think that where the worst harms have happened, the most healing is possible,” ETIC Executive Director Patrick Weems said.

The center plans to open the barn as a memorial ahead of the 75th anniversary of Till’s lynching in 1955.

Two white men publicly confessed to the killing after being acquitted by an all-white jury in Mississippi later that year, but a Justice Department report released in 2021 said at least one more, unnamed person was involved in Till’s abduction. Experts who’ve studied the case believe others participated, from a half-dozen to more than 14.

Till was abducted from his great-uncle’s home on Aug. 28, 1955, after the Chicago teenager was accused of whistling at a white woman in a rural Mississippi grocery store. According to accounts, the men took Till to the barn, where they tortured and killed him. His body was later found in the Tallahatchie River.

At Till’s funeral, his mother insisted on an open casket so the public could see the state of her son’s battered body. It was a pivotal moment in the emerging Civil Rights movement.

Weems said he hopes opening the barn to the public will encourage people to ask questions about a dark chapter in American history.

“Have we done enough? Is there justice yet? Has our society moved in the direction of human rights so that this sort of thing never happens?” Weems said.

The center will have the barn under 24-hour surveillance, and the property will be equipped with floodlights and security cameras, Weems said, calling those measures precautionary.

A historical marker, erected where Till’s body was discovered, has been replaced three times after being vandalized. The first marker was stolen and thrown into the river in 2008. The second was shot more than 100 times by 2014. It was replaced in 2018, and shot another 35 times. Now the marker is the only bulletproof historical marker in the country, according to Weems.

Weems noted that Sunday, the day the barn was purchased, was the birthday of Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. Till’s mother was a civil rights activist in the aftermath of her son’s death and died in 2003.

BY FERNANDA FIGUEROA

As the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term comes to a close, two new polls from the Pew Research Center find that Hispanic adults are increasingly unhappy with the way his administration is handling the economy and immigration, issues that were key for voters during last year’s election.

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The surveys of more than 5,000 Hispanic adults in the U.S., conducted in October and September, found that a year after Trump eroded the Democrats’ traditional advantage with Latino voters, most Hispanic adults are feeling worse about their place in the country, and they’re more likely to be worried that they or someone close to them could be deported than they were earlier this year.

Declining approval of Trump

About two-thirds of Hispanic adults overall disapprove of the Trump administration’s approach to immigration, while 61% say his economic policies have made conditions worse.

Hispanic voters shifted toward Trump in the 2024 election, though a majority still backed Democrat Kamala Harris. According to AP VoteCast, 43% of Hispanic voters nationally supported Trump, up from 35% in the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

The vast majority of Hispanics who reported voting for Trump in 2024 — 81% — approve of the president’s job performance, although that’s declined from 93% at the start of his second term. Nearly all Hispanic Harris voters disapprove of Trump’s performance.

Pew’s findings echo an October survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which found that 25% of Hispanic adults have a “somewhat” or “very” favorable view of Trump, down from 44% in an AP-NORC poll conducted just before the Republican took office in January.

FILE – A sign is displayed at the Latino Americans for Trump office in Reading, Pa., June 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao, File)

The shift in opinion underscores how worried and dissatisfied many Hispanic adults feel. Although many Hispanic voters were motivated by economic concerns in last year’s election, recent polls indicate that Hispanic adults continue to feel higher financial stress than Americans overall.

Hispanic voters made up 10% of the electorate in 2024, according to AP VoteCast, and the number of eligible Hispanic voters has been growing rapidly in recent decades.

Rising anxiety about Hispanics’ place in the U.S.

About two-thirds of Hispanic adults say the situation for Hispanics in the U.S. is worse than it was a year ago. That’s higher than in 2019, during Trump’s first term, when 39% thought U.S. Hispanics’ situation had worsened over the past year.

Similarly, about 8 in 10 Hispanic adults say Trump’s policies harm more than help them. These views are more negative than in 2019, when about 7 in 10 said the first Trump administration’s policies were more harmful to Hispanics than helpful.

The Hispanics who are Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party overwhelmingly think U.S. Hispanics are worse off, as a group, than they were a year ago, but so do 43% of Hispanic Republicans and Republican-leaners.

Broad worries about immigration enforcement

Over the past few months, Hispanic communities have been a target of the president’s hard-line immigration tactics.

FILE – A bicyclist passes Definitive Selection clothing store, one of many businesses in the predominantly Latino neighborhood that has seen a slowdown in foot traffic since President Donald Trump’s threats of a federal law enforcement intervention, Sept. 5, 2025, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Mark Vancleave, File)

Today, 44% of Latinos adults are immigrants, numbering 21.1 million, according to a Pew analysis of U.S. Census Bureau estimates from the 2024 American Community Survey.

Amid the heightened enforcement, 52% of Hispanic adults say they worry “a lot” or “some” that they, a family member or a close friend could be deported. This is up from 42% in March.

The tough immigration environment has also affected the way some Hispanic adults live their everyday lives, with 19% saying they have recently changed their daily activities because they think they’ll be asked to prove their legal status, and 11% saying they carry documents proving their citizenship or immigration status more often than they normally would.

The Pew Research Center survey of 8,046 U.S. adults, including 4,923 Hispanics, was conducted Oct. 6-16 using samples drawn from the probability-based American Trends Panel and SSRS Opinion Panel. A second survey of 3,445 U.S. adults, including 629 Hispanics, was conducted Sept. 22 to 28, 2025 using samples drawn from the probability-based American Trends Panel.

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. (AP) — Udo Kier, the German actor whose icy gaze and strange, scene-stealing screen presence made him a favorite of filmmakers including Andy Warhol, Gus Van Sant and Lars von Trier, has died at 81.

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His partner, artist Delbert McBride, told Variety that Kier died on Sunday in Palm Springs, California.

A longtime arthouse favorite, Kier also had an unlikely run as a character actor in Hollywood blockbusters including “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” with Jim Carrey.

The most recent of Kier’s more than 200 credits in a nearly 60-year career was this year’s Brazilian political thriller “The Secret Agent,” which could vie for Oscars and other major awards in the coming season.

Kier had his breakout as the star of two films produced by Warhol and directed by Paul Morrissey: 1973’s “Flesh for Frankenstein” and 1974’s “Blood for Dracula.”

German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder put Kier in several films later in the decade, including “The Stationmaster’s Wife” and “The Third Generation.”

Kier was introduced to many American moviegoers through Van Sant’s 1991 film “My Own Private Idaho,” starring River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves. Madonna, a fan of that film, invited Kier to appear in photos for her 1992 culture-shaking book “Sex,” and in the video for her song “Deeper and Deeper.”

Kier credited Van Sant with getting him a U.S. work permit and a Screen Actors Guild card.

Those documents allowed him to bring his arresting presence to several Hollywood films of the 1990s, including “Armageddon,” “Blade,” “Barb Wire” and “Johnny Mnemonic.”

He was a constant collaborator with von Trier, starring in the Danish director’s television series “The Kingdom” and appearing in the films “Dancer in the Dark,” “Dogville” and “Melancholia.”

Kier was born Udo Kierspe in Cologne, Germany, in 1944, as Allied forces bombed the city during World War II.

He moved at age 18 to London, where he was discovered at a coffee bar by singer and future filmmaker Michael Sarne.

“I liked the attention, so I became an actor,” Kier told Variety last year.

People noticing him for his striking presence and approaching him became a lifelong pattern.

“I have never asked a director, ‘I would like to work with you,’” he said.

Kier had lived in the Palm Springs area since the early 1990s, and was a regular and frequent party host at its annual film festival.

By JULIE CARR SMYTH

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Vice President JD Vance’s memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” has a storied history as a New York Times bestseller, as the then-31-year-old’s introduction to the nation as a “Trump whisperer,” as a divisive subject among Appalachian scholars, and, eventually, as a Ron Howard-directed movie.

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Its latest role? Secretly transporting drugs into an Ohio prison.

The book was one of three items whose pages 30-year-old Austin Siebert, of Maumee southwest of Toledo, has been convicted of spraying with narcotics and then shipping to Grafton Correctional Institution disguised as Amazon orders. The others were a 2019 GRE Handbook and a separate piece of paper, according to court documents.

On Nov. 18, U.S. District Judge Donald C. Nugent sentenced Siebert to more than a decade in prison for his role in the drug trafficking scheme.

Siebert and an inmate at the prison were caught in a recorded conversation discussing the shipment. He either didn’t know or didn’t care that a central theme of “Hillbilly Elegy” is the impacts of narcotics addiction on Vance’s family and the broader culture.

“Is it Hillbilly?” the inmate asks.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Siebert replies, momentarily confused. Then, suddenly remembering, he says, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s the book, the book I’m reading. (Expletive) romance novel.”